I didn't want to do this. You had been through enough, really, what with all the dithering about the ancient art of poetry. Stick to the book club! you said. These strictures were imposed to curtail just this sort of Wordsworth fawning! you said. What was the book we were reading again! you said. Well, guilty on all counts. But there are changes further.
I am now about a fifth of the way through Author Author and, like its main character, it's been a little thin up top. Hopefully, it will remain true to its mimeomorphism and be a little substantial around the middle as well. However, until then, a few events have conspired to lead me, for the first time in this book club's storied history, to table the current selection and install a new one in its place.
This was not a decision taken lightly. The New Pick was first suggested by the namesake of this guy, who is not to be screwed with. "Author Author?" he said. "I thought we were doing Pnin!" So he did think, and so he did threaten to make his family-friendly community into a second Avignon. To avoid this, and because my good friend and thesis advisor Prof. Fix suggested that there is more to Nabokov's Pnin than my description of it as "kind of a one-off" hinted at, we shall make it the fourth official selection of the Unpacking My Library book club. Now, since I have read Pnin before -- briefly, and not in the best of places -- I may have to hang some fire and post here on whatever else I am reading incidentally. So, catch up quickly, and democracy will return. And don't worry! Henry James will be back at some point. There is, after all, only so much democracy to go around here.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Winter Kept Us Warm (Part Two!)
Last night I screwed up and instead of considering poetry, I ended up considering some Corona Extra and Kate Bush, and being accused of living my life in accordance with the principles of The Secret. Not the best of times, but yet the epoch of incredulity. I have rebounded and am before you here to tell you the other two of my current Top Four Poems and expound on them, all in celebration of National Poetry Month.
Incidentally, The Millions Blog has announced what is news to me, that there is a National Poem in Your Pocket Day coming up (Thursday the 17th) which should be fun, and The Nation has an interesting article by Ange Mlinko (who is less enthusiastic about Poem in Your Pocket Day) about the status of poetry and its month, stacking the monthlong celebration against other pure products of America.
Anyway, the next poem is “Caliban Upon Setebos” by Robert Browning. In my chauvinistically pro-narrative days, I thought that one of the few ways in which poetry could be as effective as a novel or short story was to function like a joke – to have some delayed “aha!” punchline moment, and my idea of this par excellence was Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. (I thought the same thing about painting, especially Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” which, it turns out, made a good poem). Dumb, dumb. “Caliban Upon Setebos” is a poem that has no narrative, no punchlines, and works very well at something valuable that prose won’t do. This is Caliban, of The Tempest fame, holding forth on the god, Setebos, whom he and his mother Sycorax worship. Incidentally, he is also apparently so scared of Setebos hearing his ideas that he refers to himself in the third person, to throw off the omniscient. Throughout, he uses a sort of self-critique to analogize how Setebos must operate. Here is at one point:
Himself peeped late, eyed as Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, ‘stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words,
Has peeled a wand and calls it by a name
Like Wordsworth discussed previously, Caliban has slowed down to think in a uniquely poetic way (this poem, “Lines”, and “Leda and the Swan” discussed below, are all good foster children of silence and slow time). I find this poem additionally striking in its ability to tap into a narrative (the Tempest) and perform the good psychology of the play or novel at the tranquilly restored pace of the poem: airlifting the plot of the Tempest into the roomy space of Caliban’s printed thought can help us (me anyway) to slow similarly down.
Yeats is a huge fan of the plot airlift himself, especially keen on tapping into the legends surrounding Troy. My fourth poem on my current Top Four Poems is “Leda and the Swan”. It is a much shorter poem than any of the preceding, and it combines the slowness of Wordsworth and Browning’s Caliban with a compact quality that crops up often in Yeats and the Modernists with whom he crewed. Here’s the end of “Leda and the Swan”:
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Leaving aside the insight this affords into Zeus’s questionable sexual politics, we look at this as a model for reading (what else?). This is, once again, thought slowed to a crawl; and to boot, what is probably the most important event in Western letters is put into two and a half lines. That shudder in the loins becomes perhaps the act most larded over with meaning that one can imagine. And if poems can continue to, every once in a while, stack so much meaning into so few lines, the opposition mentioned in Mlinko’s article will remain ones that, if not baseless, can at least be countered. There is nothing “bland or morally ‘positive’” in this poem. After stunningly putting the Trojan War, and one of its most unwitting causes (Helen’s conception) into two and a half lines, Yeats ends the poem with a question of epistemology. Not the kind of question you’d answer, but it is the kind of thing that demands to be thought about. Poetry has an almost unique ability to pressurize language until its meaning explodes back out in readerly activity. Good poetry doesn’t just teach you how to think at a different pace; it demands it. And it is anything but cooked meat. And, it is the poem with which, on a 3x5 card, I will proudly stroll down Thursday, in my pocket.
Incidentally, The Millions Blog has announced what is news to me, that there is a National Poem in Your Pocket Day coming up (Thursday the 17th) which should be fun, and The Nation has an interesting article by Ange Mlinko (who is less enthusiastic about Poem in Your Pocket Day) about the status of poetry and its month, stacking the monthlong celebration against other pure products of America.
Anyway, the next poem is “Caliban Upon Setebos” by Robert Browning. In my chauvinistically pro-narrative days, I thought that one of the few ways in which poetry could be as effective as a novel or short story was to function like a joke – to have some delayed “aha!” punchline moment, and my idea of this par excellence was Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. (I thought the same thing about painting, especially Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” which, it turns out, made a good poem). Dumb, dumb. “Caliban Upon Setebos” is a poem that has no narrative, no punchlines, and works very well at something valuable that prose won’t do. This is Caliban, of The Tempest fame, holding forth on the god, Setebos, whom he and his mother Sycorax worship. Incidentally, he is also apparently so scared of Setebos hearing his ideas that he refers to himself in the third person, to throw off the omniscient. Throughout, he uses a sort of self-critique to analogize how Setebos must operate. Here is at one point:
Himself peeped late, eyed as Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, ‘stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words,
Has peeled a wand and calls it by a name
Like Wordsworth discussed previously, Caliban has slowed down to think in a uniquely poetic way (this poem, “Lines”, and “Leda and the Swan” discussed below, are all good foster children of silence and slow time). I find this poem additionally striking in its ability to tap into a narrative (the Tempest) and perform the good psychology of the play or novel at the tranquilly restored pace of the poem: airlifting the plot of the Tempest into the roomy space of Caliban’s printed thought can help us (me anyway) to slow similarly down.
Yeats is a huge fan of the plot airlift himself, especially keen on tapping into the legends surrounding Troy. My fourth poem on my current Top Four Poems is “Leda and the Swan”. It is a much shorter poem than any of the preceding, and it combines the slowness of Wordsworth and Browning’s Caliban with a compact quality that crops up often in Yeats and the Modernists with whom he crewed. Here’s the end of “Leda and the Swan”:
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Leaving aside the insight this affords into Zeus’s questionable sexual politics, we look at this as a model for reading (what else?). This is, once again, thought slowed to a crawl; and to boot, what is probably the most important event in Western letters is put into two and a half lines. That shudder in the loins becomes perhaps the act most larded over with meaning that one can imagine. And if poems can continue to, every once in a while, stack so much meaning into so few lines, the opposition mentioned in Mlinko’s article will remain ones that, if not baseless, can at least be countered. There is nothing “bland or morally ‘positive’” in this poem. After stunningly putting the Trojan War, and one of its most unwitting causes (Helen’s conception) into two and a half lines, Yeats ends the poem with a question of epistemology. Not the kind of question you’d answer, but it is the kind of thing that demands to be thought about. Poetry has an almost unique ability to pressurize language until its meaning explodes back out in readerly activity. Good poetry doesn’t just teach you how to think at a different pace; it demands it. And it is anything but cooked meat. And, it is the poem with which, on a 3x5 card, I will proudly stroll down Thursday, in my pocket.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land (Part One!)
April, the cruelest month (ha!) is also National Poetry Month. This means that it is time for me to tell you what I think about poetry, and to, in theory, hear what you think thereon. My thoughts about poetry, I should say going in, are even more confused than my thoughts about novels or my thoughts about the role of literature in modern American intellectual life, if you can imagine such a thing. But here are some poems I like and a little on why, and hopefully you can use these as a goad to celebrate the month properly until we get to New Zealand Music Month (no joke!).
First up: “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” by Robert Herrick. Before we get to him though, since NZMM is fast approaching, here’s Murray Hewitt:
“I’m not, you know, embarrassed to admit this, but I can’t really put my emotions into words, so I’ve decided to use lyrics.”
Writing lyrics when you haven’t got any music to put them on top of is kind of like giving yourself leave to write terrible poetry. If things slow up, through a few “ooohs” in. Or allow people to imagine that caterwauled it will do better. Or bring up your dead budgie to bring up emotions. Anyway, this Herrick poem seems to be the opposite. This poem seems to me to be among the best at doing what songs ought to do. Its stanzas bounce back and forth between long and short lines, as the speaker gets himself more and more excited about going a-maying with Corinna. He basically provides a swift-moving list, Dr. Seuss style, of things that the other kids are already out doing – “Some have dispatched their cakes and cream/Before that we have left to dream”. And, jubilantly songlike, Herrick sustains his one mood of relatively (compared to say, Marvell) innocent ebullience just until the last stanza when his almost de rigeur, for his century, remarks on the ubiquity of death show up for some gravity. It has been nice out in Massachusetts the last few days, and I have gotten much use out of “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.”
The remaining poems are nothing like that at all.
Here’s another one on nature, but this time Nature catapulted into thought and Proper Noundom, by Wordsworth, in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern blah blah”, which I boycotted in High School but have come to love. My favorite part of this kind of broody but hopeful poem is this:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration
That chunk is the second thing I think poems can do so well (after reverse the damage done by crappy, songless, non-word lyrics), especially broody poems like this, is put enough verbiage around a thought to arrest it and make it available for study. I think that most people have done what Wordsworth is doing here – basically, being nostalgic – but not most people have paid so much attention to what they are doing. A poem like “Lines blah blah” – and even more so Wordsworth’s Prelude, which I am still a little terrified of and have yet to finish reading – slows cognition down, forcing you to take account of exactly the words that are constitutive of that experience. The unpacking just to be done in Wordsworth’s last phrase – tranquil restoration – is a solid and rewarding exercise. This is, in a different way from lyrical doggerel, another opposite of Herrick’s poem, in which words sped themselves up in joy; Wordsworth slows us down in contemplation.
This is getting long, and for only like the second time since I had to show up at Commencement, I have important business tomorrow. I do have two more poems, and some Northrop Frye, that I want to tell you about, so, meet me here tomorrow night? For Browning and Yeats? Kthanxbai.
First up: “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” by Robert Herrick. Before we get to him though, since NZMM is fast approaching, here’s Murray Hewitt:
“I’m not, you know, embarrassed to admit this, but I can’t really put my emotions into words, so I’ve decided to use lyrics.”
Writing lyrics when you haven’t got any music to put them on top of is kind of like giving yourself leave to write terrible poetry. If things slow up, through a few “ooohs” in. Or allow people to imagine that caterwauled it will do better. Or bring up your dead budgie to bring up emotions. Anyway, this Herrick poem seems to be the opposite. This poem seems to me to be among the best at doing what songs ought to do. Its stanzas bounce back and forth between long and short lines, as the speaker gets himself more and more excited about going a-maying with Corinna. He basically provides a swift-moving list, Dr. Seuss style, of things that the other kids are already out doing – “Some have dispatched their cakes and cream/Before that we have left to dream”. And, jubilantly songlike, Herrick sustains his one mood of relatively (compared to say, Marvell) innocent ebullience just until the last stanza when his almost de rigeur, for his century, remarks on the ubiquity of death show up for some gravity. It has been nice out in Massachusetts the last few days, and I have gotten much use out of “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.”
The remaining poems are nothing like that at all.
Here’s another one on nature, but this time Nature catapulted into thought and Proper Noundom, by Wordsworth, in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern blah blah”, which I boycotted in High School but have come to love. My favorite part of this kind of broody but hopeful poem is this:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration
That chunk is the second thing I think poems can do so well (after reverse the damage done by crappy, songless, non-word lyrics), especially broody poems like this, is put enough verbiage around a thought to arrest it and make it available for study. I think that most people have done what Wordsworth is doing here – basically, being nostalgic – but not most people have paid so much attention to what they are doing. A poem like “Lines blah blah” – and even more so Wordsworth’s Prelude, which I am still a little terrified of and have yet to finish reading – slows cognition down, forcing you to take account of exactly the words that are constitutive of that experience. The unpacking just to be done in Wordsworth’s last phrase – tranquil restoration – is a solid and rewarding exercise. This is, in a different way from lyrical doggerel, another opposite of Herrick’s poem, in which words sped themselves up in joy; Wordsworth slows us down in contemplation.
This is getting long, and for only like the second time since I had to show up at Commencement, I have important business tomorrow. I do have two more poems, and some Northrop Frye, that I want to tell you about, so, meet me here tomorrow night? For Browning and Yeats? Kthanxbai.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Listening. Learning. Leading.
I think this is ok because they have already published this test. What I am about to share with you comes from the practice GRE in English Literature currently available from ETS, which I took this morning, and which, when not-yet-published, is protected by draconian, but usually understandable, security measures. When you see this question, you will think, along with me, that this kind of crackdown is unwarranted if it is going to deny the masses access to things like this. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Anyway, the highlight of the ETS's practice GRE:
Q. "'Are you not happy in Hertfordshire, Mr. Raskolnikov?' asked Elizabeth. 'Would you be happy,' he replied, 'if you had killed a miserable pawnbroker?' 'How easily may a bad habit be formed!' cried Elizabeth. and with this in mind, though she hoped he was not in earnest, she very soon afterwards took leave of him."
Which of the following titles would be most appropriate for a work containing this passage?
(a) Murder at Thirteen Rue de Toot
(b) Elizabeth and Anna Kremlina
(c) The Importance of Being Elizabeth
(d) Pride and Punishment
(e) The Golden Fawn
The Crow, a psychology major, guessed E.
Anyway, the highlight of the ETS's practice GRE:
Q. "'Are you not happy in Hertfordshire, Mr. Raskolnikov?' asked Elizabeth. 'Would you be happy,' he replied, 'if you had killed a miserable pawnbroker?' 'How easily may a bad habit be formed!' cried Elizabeth. and with this in mind, though she hoped he was not in earnest, she very soon afterwards took leave of him."
Which of the following titles would be most appropriate for a work containing this passage?
(a) Murder at Thirteen Rue de Toot
(b) Elizabeth and Anna Kremlina
(c) The Importance of Being Elizabeth
(d) Pride and Punishment
(e) The Golden Fawn
The Crow, a psychology major, guessed E.
The Companionship of the Long Distance Critic
This has become, by now, older than old news, and its position on the mighty Most E-Mailed List at the Times has of course been overtaken and overtaken again. Regardless, a promise is a promise, and here are: my polled, wildly unscientific, rhapsodic observations on the New York Times essay entitled, “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books.”
This essay begins with an anecdote, and then zooms out with the claim “We’ve all been there.” Where we’ve all been, supposedly, is the chilling moment when one realizes that his or her putative inamorato/a has atrocious taste in literature. This seems, though, to be something of a straw man. Virtually no one asked in my wildly unscientific poll had “been there”, and even the people in the Times piece seemed largely to think that shared literary taste wasn’t such a big deal. Love could often conquer all. Even people who seemed to think that books played a role in determining compatibility, such as the psychiatrist Anna Fels quoted in the piece, thought they did so mainly as a Rorschach test, as an index of what sort of person we are dealing with (viz., people who read Proust for fun are just different from people who read James Patterson for fun, or who don’t read at all).
What I thought was interesting about the article (apart from the Jessa Crispin quote, which was, I thought, by far the bright spot) was that everyone seemed to be in accord that there are fundamental persons leading bright romantic lives here, and that those fundamental persons would be cheapened somehow if their books they were to be judged. It is as if approving someone’s love of Richard Powers is similar to approving someone’s perfect hairline, or shying away from an Ayn Rand fan is like denying the possibility of the Ayn Rand fan’s inner beauty. The delicate self is somewhere, like an ear of corn, ensconced in a husk of tastes which we are to overlook. What is meant to be important, I suppose, is the corn.
And so it is. Notice that the only people toward whom those interviewed in the article tend to deny their sympathy to are the ones that are either totally helpless (the ones who liked Ayn Rand or Marley and Me) or the ones who try too hard to telegraph whatever it is that they’ve been reading. Here’s Northrop Frye:
“The original experience [of literature] is like the direct vision of color, or the direct sensation of heat or cold, that physics ‘explains’ in what, from the point of view of the experience itself, is a quite irrelevant way.” (Anatomy of Criticism, 27)
What we object to in this discussion is the idea that literature has been press-ganged into some advertising function, and we are as loath to be such advertisers as we are to be caught doing it ourselves. The original experience is to be left alone, such that talking about books is either left off or achieves the attitude less of shared experience than of work. The Old Crow was wise enough to clue me into this work attitude given to some literary discussion; the Shadow Correspondent informs me that while books must remain essentially private, inviolate, movies can take their place as shared cultural currency for romantics. (The Crow also points out that shared film tastes are important for tactical, if not strategic reasons).
I believe, then, that the reason people do not want to have their literary tastes used as a Rorschach test, by which others may judge their sensitivity or seriousness or whatever, is that they want to hold onto their own idiosyncratic readings as the way in which they assess their own selves. To make the preceding corn metaphor ridiculous, it is as the corn is happy to present its husk however it wishes, but needs literature to maintain its own understanding, of itself, as its own ear of corn. We ask that our commitments to literature be judged superficially (and receive those who do not do so as showboaters) when we fear the reckoning that we would have to give ourselves of those commitments. Or, I do anyway. Literature itself, and dealing with literature itself, is a lonely business, just as looking at vibrant flowers or sunsets, or feeling pleasant in front of a fire is an essentially lonely business. Deep down, what-it-is-like-to-read is an epiphenomenon, one available only to the person experiencing it, and shared only with the book itself.
This idiosyncratic power of literature seems to explain also the common reaction that people have of just hoping that their potential romantic quarry has read at all; it is as far as you can go toward shared literary experience to insist that someone has been in similar conditions (ie, read a book for fun). A person can’t know whether someone else has been alone with a book in the same way as they have, so the best they can do is to hope that that other person also knows how to be alone properly. As the Times notes, this can lead to infelicitous pairings; they cite the (alleged) possibility of one half of a couple identifying with Gilbert Osmond and one half with Isabel Archer which, I mean, have you read Portrait of a Lady? Someone who identifies with Gilbert Osmond is going to have bigger troubles than his taste in early James.
Criticism, incidentally, can speak for itself in a way in which literature cannot. That will be the object of my next wildly unscientific survey. Can your relationship survive competing commitments to Paul de Man and William Empson? Find out next time, on unpacking my library.
This essay begins with an anecdote, and then zooms out with the claim “We’ve all been there.” Where we’ve all been, supposedly, is the chilling moment when one realizes that his or her putative inamorato/a has atrocious taste in literature. This seems, though, to be something of a straw man. Virtually no one asked in my wildly unscientific poll had “been there”, and even the people in the Times piece seemed largely to think that shared literary taste wasn’t such a big deal. Love could often conquer all. Even people who seemed to think that books played a role in determining compatibility, such as the psychiatrist Anna Fels quoted in the piece, thought they did so mainly as a Rorschach test, as an index of what sort of person we are dealing with (viz., people who read Proust for fun are just different from people who read James Patterson for fun, or who don’t read at all).
What I thought was interesting about the article (apart from the Jessa Crispin quote, which was, I thought, by far the bright spot) was that everyone seemed to be in accord that there are fundamental persons leading bright romantic lives here, and that those fundamental persons would be cheapened somehow if their books they were to be judged. It is as if approving someone’s love of Richard Powers is similar to approving someone’s perfect hairline, or shying away from an Ayn Rand fan is like denying the possibility of the Ayn Rand fan’s inner beauty. The delicate self is somewhere, like an ear of corn, ensconced in a husk of tastes which we are to overlook. What is meant to be important, I suppose, is the corn.
And so it is. Notice that the only people toward whom those interviewed in the article tend to deny their sympathy to are the ones that are either totally helpless (the ones who liked Ayn Rand or Marley and Me) or the ones who try too hard to telegraph whatever it is that they’ve been reading. Here’s Northrop Frye:
“The original experience [of literature] is like the direct vision of color, or the direct sensation of heat or cold, that physics ‘explains’ in what, from the point of view of the experience itself, is a quite irrelevant way.” (Anatomy of Criticism, 27)
What we object to in this discussion is the idea that literature has been press-ganged into some advertising function, and we are as loath to be such advertisers as we are to be caught doing it ourselves. The original experience is to be left alone, such that talking about books is either left off or achieves the attitude less of shared experience than of work. The Old Crow was wise enough to clue me into this work attitude given to some literary discussion; the Shadow Correspondent informs me that while books must remain essentially private, inviolate, movies can take their place as shared cultural currency for romantics. (The Crow also points out that shared film tastes are important for tactical, if not strategic reasons).
I believe, then, that the reason people do not want to have their literary tastes used as a Rorschach test, by which others may judge their sensitivity or seriousness or whatever, is that they want to hold onto their own idiosyncratic readings as the way in which they assess their own selves. To make the preceding corn metaphor ridiculous, it is as the corn is happy to present its husk however it wishes, but needs literature to maintain its own understanding, of itself, as its own ear of corn. We ask that our commitments to literature be judged superficially (and receive those who do not do so as showboaters) when we fear the reckoning that we would have to give ourselves of those commitments. Or, I do anyway. Literature itself, and dealing with literature itself, is a lonely business, just as looking at vibrant flowers or sunsets, or feeling pleasant in front of a fire is an essentially lonely business. Deep down, what-it-is-like-to-read is an epiphenomenon, one available only to the person experiencing it, and shared only with the book itself.
This idiosyncratic power of literature seems to explain also the common reaction that people have of just hoping that their potential romantic quarry has read at all; it is as far as you can go toward shared literary experience to insist that someone has been in similar conditions (ie, read a book for fun). A person can’t know whether someone else has been alone with a book in the same way as they have, so the best they can do is to hope that that other person also knows how to be alone properly. As the Times notes, this can lead to infelicitous pairings; they cite the (alleged) possibility of one half of a couple identifying with Gilbert Osmond and one half with Isabel Archer which, I mean, have you read Portrait of a Lady? Someone who identifies with Gilbert Osmond is going to have bigger troubles than his taste in early James.
Criticism, incidentally, can speak for itself in a way in which literature cannot. That will be the object of my next wildly unscientific survey. Can your relationship survive competing commitments to Paul de Man and William Empson? Find out next time, on unpacking my library.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Friends and Pronouns
Last night I wound up staying up until three o’clock in the morning to read the last hundred and eighty pages of a book I had been reading for a week or so. That book is called Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. The decision to stay up and read was a good one for three reasons.
1. The book was tremendous.
2. At one point, the man who once cost our softball team the championship with four errors in one inning IM’d me to tell me his new favorite song is by Miley Cyrus, and
3. Our Friend Blake IM’d me to tell me some of the rhymes he’s been working on, including a gem about exposing prose and staying poetic.
All in all, good decision by me to stay up. And since few books have ever made me stay up to the bitter end like this, and probably none with a similar distance to the goal line starting out (wait, one) – I figured I’d toss a recommendation/review out there on the airwaves.
So: the book is called Then We Came to the End, and it comes outfitted with one of those gimmicks that gets talked about but then isn’t really gimmicky in the book. This one’s is that it is told almost entirely in the first person plural (the first line is “We were fractious and overpaid”). At no point is there a single narrative persona chiseled out: the “we” speaks for the dozen or so employees at a Chicago ad agency during the economic downturn that took up the first couple quarters of fiscal 2001. There is downsizing; there are relatively mundane subplots; and there is commentary, which is snarkily funny and endearingly small. Most reviews I’ve seen of this novel mention one or two examples of these antipodes of office conversation; my personal favorite is that the office’s loser, a guy who calls his trips to the men’s room “a visit with Mr. B.”, gets tasked with an ad project for breast cancer awareness and gets some help from his father.
“Jim Jackers spent his lunch hour in the waiting room of the oncology ward at Rush-Presbyterian surrounded by some very sick people…Jim’s father sold medical equipment, and when Jim told him of his recent project, he contacted an oncologist on his son’s behalf and told Jim that the doctor was willing to speak with him. Jim wanted to talk to the doctor in the hopes of gaining the insight necessary to arrive at the winning concept for the fund-raiser, but at that particular hour the doctor proved too busy to spare any time, so Jim thanked the nurse and returned to his office.” (Ferris, 164)
We would all do well to remember that even these, the least of even our literary brethren, have fathers doing more than they can to give their sons more than they deserve.
That passage is dead on in its capture of what exactly it sounds like to be told a story, and the entire novel (almost) works that way. It’s been noted that it is difficult to really root against first-person narrators, even skeezoids like Humbert Humbert and Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Hearing them talk right to you can make you feel like a co-conspirator. Ferris’s “we” strategy goes one further: these people seem like your friends. Coworkers are more like book characters than, say, your parents are, so it is a good fit. It is also a task totally within the powers of the novel, to make us know these imaginary men and women as much as we know our coworkers. A while ago, I said some stuff about Emmas, and looking back, I don’t super know what I was talking about. However: one of the points I think I was trying to make there seem to be some novels that take a certain thing as their point of inquiry, and others that seem to have more high-concept or supposedly artistic points to make (Nabokov called Madame Bovary “prose doing what poetry is supposed to do”). Then We Came to the End is a “certain-thing” sort of novel: it throws life in an office under its merry observation apparatus and provides an unsentimental appreciation, a thing that I think is rare but to be valued. This is kind of vague; I do not want to talk about what the (almost) end of the novel is like, when it presents its sort of summing-up of what it has appreciated, because I think that would ruin the slow realization, at the end of the book, of just what end we’ve come to, and that by itself is worth the reading of the book.
Twice up there I said “(almost)”, because not quite all the book is told like a water cooler story, and there is a kind of epilogue after the stunning and beautiful close to the book proper. As if this book, providing me with imaginary friends at three in the morning, needed more for me to love it: the epilogue features the book’s nerdy writer character having achieved success and giving a reading…of the one non-water-cooler-story part of the book, which we have read about a hundred and fifty pages ago. Talk about my wheelhouse! That was mostly just a cherry on top, but I thought it warranted mentioning.
This book was on my radar as part of my plan to read all ten of the Times’s picks for best books of 2007, but it was also recommended by my ex-boss at the bookstore where I work. Since I have declared a cap on pages of unread book allowed in my house, finishing it clears up some room with which I am going to pick up The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud, a book that is also about like in These Postmillennial United States, and which was recommended by an ex-professor of mine at the college where I studied. If you don’t think I am trying to come up with some kind of Recommendation Bracket to make noise about for the coming months, well then, have we actually met?
Up (possibly tomorrow): a belated forum on Papercuts, romance, and teh litz.
1. The book was tremendous.
2. At one point, the man who once cost our softball team the championship with four errors in one inning IM’d me to tell me his new favorite song is by Miley Cyrus, and
3. Our Friend Blake IM’d me to tell me some of the rhymes he’s been working on, including a gem about exposing prose and staying poetic.
All in all, good decision by me to stay up. And since few books have ever made me stay up to the bitter end like this, and probably none with a similar distance to the goal line starting out (wait, one) – I figured I’d toss a recommendation/review out there on the airwaves.
So: the book is called Then We Came to the End, and it comes outfitted with one of those gimmicks that gets talked about but then isn’t really gimmicky in the book. This one’s is that it is told almost entirely in the first person plural (the first line is “We were fractious and overpaid”). At no point is there a single narrative persona chiseled out: the “we” speaks for the dozen or so employees at a Chicago ad agency during the economic downturn that took up the first couple quarters of fiscal 2001. There is downsizing; there are relatively mundane subplots; and there is commentary, which is snarkily funny and endearingly small. Most reviews I’ve seen of this novel mention one or two examples of these antipodes of office conversation; my personal favorite is that the office’s loser, a guy who calls his trips to the men’s room “a visit with Mr. B.”, gets tasked with an ad project for breast cancer awareness and gets some help from his father.
“Jim Jackers spent his lunch hour in the waiting room of the oncology ward at Rush-Presbyterian surrounded by some very sick people…Jim’s father sold medical equipment, and when Jim told him of his recent project, he contacted an oncologist on his son’s behalf and told Jim that the doctor was willing to speak with him. Jim wanted to talk to the doctor in the hopes of gaining the insight necessary to arrive at the winning concept for the fund-raiser, but at that particular hour the doctor proved too busy to spare any time, so Jim thanked the nurse and returned to his office.” (Ferris, 164)
We would all do well to remember that even these, the least of even our literary brethren, have fathers doing more than they can to give their sons more than they deserve.
That passage is dead on in its capture of what exactly it sounds like to be told a story, and the entire novel (almost) works that way. It’s been noted that it is difficult to really root against first-person narrators, even skeezoids like Humbert Humbert and Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Hearing them talk right to you can make you feel like a co-conspirator. Ferris’s “we” strategy goes one further: these people seem like your friends. Coworkers are more like book characters than, say, your parents are, so it is a good fit. It is also a task totally within the powers of the novel, to make us know these imaginary men and women as much as we know our coworkers. A while ago, I said some stuff about Emmas, and looking back, I don’t super know what I was talking about. However: one of the points I think I was trying to make there seem to be some novels that take a certain thing as their point of inquiry, and others that seem to have more high-concept or supposedly artistic points to make (Nabokov called Madame Bovary “prose doing what poetry is supposed to do”). Then We Came to the End is a “certain-thing” sort of novel: it throws life in an office under its merry observation apparatus and provides an unsentimental appreciation, a thing that I think is rare but to be valued. This is kind of vague; I do not want to talk about what the (almost) end of the novel is like, when it presents its sort of summing-up of what it has appreciated, because I think that would ruin the slow realization, at the end of the book, of just what end we’ve come to, and that by itself is worth the reading of the book.
Twice up there I said “(almost)”, because not quite all the book is told like a water cooler story, and there is a kind of epilogue after the stunning and beautiful close to the book proper. As if this book, providing me with imaginary friends at three in the morning, needed more for me to love it: the epilogue features the book’s nerdy writer character having achieved success and giving a reading…of the one non-water-cooler-story part of the book, which we have read about a hundred and fifty pages ago. Talk about my wheelhouse! That was mostly just a cherry on top, but I thought it warranted mentioning.
This book was on my radar as part of my plan to read all ten of the Times’s picks for best books of 2007, but it was also recommended by my ex-boss at the bookstore where I work. Since I have declared a cap on pages of unread book allowed in my house, finishing it clears up some room with which I am going to pick up The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud, a book that is also about like in These Postmillennial United States, and which was recommended by an ex-professor of mine at the college where I studied. If you don’t think I am trying to come up with some kind of Recommendation Bracket to make noise about for the coming months, well then, have we actually met?
Up (possibly tomorrow): a belated forum on Papercuts, romance, and teh litz.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Poor Ty Cobb's Had an Accident -- So Might You All
Baseball has started for real and for earnest now, and today was an off day for my new team (sorry, Molly and John). However, NESN has my back, and I am watching my old team as we speak. The literary benefits and connections of baseball are ancient and storied, and attract both those you'd expect (George Will) and those who, not so much (transgressive women's blog Jezebel.com). This blog, as the two of you who read it know, loves baseball. Here are some thoughts on baseball as it has resurged to its proper place in my life, and the (of course) bookish implications of baseball season.
My uncle's stepdad Wes told us the other day that he had seen a BBC telecast of Wimbledon back in the day, and that it was astonishing for its quietness -- they just shut up and let the tennis players play tennis. While it's true that there is a lot of commentator noise in all sports presentations, baseball is a special one for the amount of talking (rather than reporting) it generates (as that Jezebel post notes, "conversation is not only possible but encouraged"). Since the game isn't timed, you have lots of time to just sit around and talk about it. My soccer-loving friend Nils claims some statistic about how the ball is actually in play for about six minutes of the two and a half hours needed for a baseball game proper. Nils bemoaned this because he is from South Africa and only ever thinks about soccer, when the ball is in play for however many minutes they feel like should constitute that soccer game. However, all that down time means that there is plenty of time for talk -- and, just from watching the last few days, it is the chunks of language that bounce around baseball games that have the most comfortable familiarity to them, the things that make me most satisfied that the best time of the year has really showed up once again.
Someday, I will write on here what I think of the Major League Baseball Rulebook. I wanted to make the MLB Rulebook an entry in the Book Club, but people said that no one else would ever read it, that that was silly. Luckily, I have been eased of such responsibilities by the fact that no one reads the books except for me. So someday, probably in June, I will announce the Rulebook as the book club pick and those of you who don't like it may resign and get all your dues money back. Whatever I say about the stylistic pyromania and majesty on display in the MLB Rulebook, bear this in mind: it is the total opposite of what I'm about to say about baseball words. A batter "works a count". A team has "double-barreled action" in the bullpen. A starter has "done everything they've asked him to do". "Free baseball" for extra innings. In the real world, this is cant. It is stuff that gets said so often it doesn't really mean anything, and in the real world it is obnoxious. But in baseball, as teams change (they're not even the Devil Rays anymore!) and players are revealed to be more and more embarrassing as athletes and human beings, the cant -- the dreck -- is what shines on. I grinned four or five times watching two teams I didn't care about at all, because Jon Miller and Joe Morgan kept saying things like "depth of the rotation" and "save situation". The words were the same, so this made me happy enough for then.
This makes people like Roger Angell think about the business of caring. It made me think aboutGrendel (remember Grendel? this is a song about Grendel). Grendel wouldn't have liked Roger Angell at all, and he wouldn't like me, based on what I said about baseball, either. (That's ok, because I'm not so hot on him either; the person who's derived by far the most enjoyment from my copy of the book is my cousin Kelly, who thinks the Grendel on the cover is a bear and roars at it every time she sees him). Grendel might've liked Dr. Johnson, might've been happy to clear his mind of cant. That's what he hates about the Shaper, and what the Shaper lets Hrothgar think about himself. In his freewheeling nihilism, Grendel thinks that damn near everything is cant:
"Not only ancient history--the mythical age of the brothers' feud--but my own history one second ago, has vanished utterly, dropped out of existence. King Scyld's great deeds do not exist 'back there' in Time. 'Back there in Time' is an allusion of language."
That is some pungent, Joe Cruz-style epistemology. Grendel is grumped out about tricks like Unferth and the Shaper's constructing pleasant narratives for themselves because they seem false to experience. Calling the specially designed area in which overpaid relievers practice a bullpen is probably false to experience too, but I'm sticking with it. Grendel's blunt crankiness with everything he sees -- from his opening rage at a goat to his final nastiness toward some other woodland denizens -- seems like a kind of truth that I'd rather not stick around for. But I find myself more and more drawn to the character of Grendel, wondering what he would think about things: in a way, his powerful self, for all its ugly rawness, is attractive, or at least commands serious attention and remembrance. As a scourge, Grendel matters to us in a way that is directly opposite to the way in which baseball's comfortable signifiers matter to us, but he will matter to us nevertheless. Ah, Grendel! Ah, monstrosity!
If anyone didn't guess, the "sweet line" mentioned in the Emma post was that last one. And to settle everyone's office pools once and for all, the next book of the Unpacking My Library book club is....Author Author by David Lodge! And, in a doubtless fascinating colloquium on fake Henry Jameses, it will be followed up by Colm Toibin's The Master. So, get ready for some exciting months of writing about Henry James. Old Crow! Buy a copy! Ryann! Expect one from me next time I visit. Everyone else! As you were. And don't worry, I promise to write about whatever other books I think of, whether club-related or not, as I continue, for you, to unpack my library.
(That was a sweet signoff, I may use it more often).
My uncle's stepdad Wes told us the other day that he had seen a BBC telecast of Wimbledon back in the day, and that it was astonishing for its quietness -- they just shut up and let the tennis players play tennis. While it's true that there is a lot of commentator noise in all sports presentations, baseball is a special one for the amount of talking (rather than reporting) it generates (as that Jezebel post notes, "conversation is not only possible but encouraged"). Since the game isn't timed, you have lots of time to just sit around and talk about it. My soccer-loving friend Nils claims some statistic about how the ball is actually in play for about six minutes of the two and a half hours needed for a baseball game proper. Nils bemoaned this because he is from South Africa and only ever thinks about soccer, when the ball is in play for however many minutes they feel like should constitute that soccer game. However, all that down time means that there is plenty of time for talk -- and, just from watching the last few days, it is the chunks of language that bounce around baseball games that have the most comfortable familiarity to them, the things that make me most satisfied that the best time of the year has really showed up once again.
Someday, I will write on here what I think of the Major League Baseball Rulebook. I wanted to make the MLB Rulebook an entry in the Book Club, but people said that no one else would ever read it, that that was silly. Luckily, I have been eased of such responsibilities by the fact that no one reads the books except for me. So someday, probably in June, I will announce the Rulebook as the book club pick and those of you who don't like it may resign and get all your dues money back. Whatever I say about the stylistic pyromania and majesty on display in the MLB Rulebook, bear this in mind: it is the total opposite of what I'm about to say about baseball words. A batter "works a count". A team has "double-barreled action" in the bullpen. A starter has "done everything they've asked him to do". "Free baseball" for extra innings. In the real world, this is cant. It is stuff that gets said so often it doesn't really mean anything, and in the real world it is obnoxious. But in baseball, as teams change (they're not even the Devil Rays anymore!) and players are revealed to be more and more embarrassing as athletes and human beings, the cant -- the dreck -- is what shines on. I grinned four or five times watching two teams I didn't care about at all, because Jon Miller and Joe Morgan kept saying things like "depth of the rotation" and "save situation". The words were the same, so this made me happy enough for then.
This makes people like Roger Angell think about the business of caring. It made me think aboutGrendel (remember Grendel? this is a song about Grendel). Grendel wouldn't have liked Roger Angell at all, and he wouldn't like me, based on what I said about baseball, either. (That's ok, because I'm not so hot on him either; the person who's derived by far the most enjoyment from my copy of the book is my cousin Kelly, who thinks the Grendel on the cover is a bear and roars at it every time she sees him). Grendel might've liked Dr. Johnson, might've been happy to clear his mind of cant. That's what he hates about the Shaper, and what the Shaper lets Hrothgar think about himself. In his freewheeling nihilism, Grendel thinks that damn near everything is cant:
"Not only ancient history--the mythical age of the brothers' feud--but my own history one second ago, has vanished utterly, dropped out of existence. King Scyld's great deeds do not exist 'back there' in Time. 'Back there in Time' is an allusion of language."
That is some pungent, Joe Cruz-style epistemology. Grendel is grumped out about tricks like Unferth and the Shaper's constructing pleasant narratives for themselves because they seem false to experience. Calling the specially designed area in which overpaid relievers practice a bullpen is probably false to experience too, but I'm sticking with it. Grendel's blunt crankiness with everything he sees -- from his opening rage at a goat to his final nastiness toward some other woodland denizens -- seems like a kind of truth that I'd rather not stick around for. But I find myself more and more drawn to the character of Grendel, wondering what he would think about things: in a way, his powerful self, for all its ugly rawness, is attractive, or at least commands serious attention and remembrance. As a scourge, Grendel matters to us in a way that is directly opposite to the way in which baseball's comfortable signifiers matter to us, but he will matter to us nevertheless. Ah, Grendel! Ah, monstrosity!
If anyone didn't guess, the "sweet line" mentioned in the Emma post was that last one. And to settle everyone's office pools once and for all, the next book of the Unpacking My Library book club is....Author Author by David Lodge! And, in a doubtless fascinating colloquium on fake Henry Jameses, it will be followed up by Colm Toibin's The Master. So, get ready for some exciting months of writing about Henry James. Old Crow! Buy a copy! Ryann! Expect one from me next time I visit. Everyone else! As you were. And don't worry, I promise to write about whatever other books I think of, whether club-related or not, as I continue, for you, to unpack my library.
(That was a sweet signoff, I may use it more often).
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