The day after the day after tomorrow is certainly the last day of the year, and, according to most, the last day of the decade. Because it is fun, this has got people to wonder what the Best (Book/Movie/TV Program/Album) of the arbitrary period of time has been. And, in just before the gate closes, it's time to do just that here at unpacking my library.
First, the best book of the year was, I have no idea. I have read I think two and a half books published this year, and they were fine. I think that the larger commitment of time and mental energies that books demand results in their being less plausible than movies and music to being the accoutrements of a particular year. Everybody listened to Funeral by Arcade Fire in 2004, because that's when it came out; but everybody read the Time Traveler's Wife when it came out, or when it came out in paperback, or when it was optioned for a movie or after they saw the movie or when they had time to kill at Logan Airport on Christmas Eve 2007. It's just a more drawn-out thing. The only book I can at all remember associating with a particular time is The Corrections (on which more below!), which was a Big Deal in pre-September 2001, and even that was more to do with a television hoopla than with the book itself. So the best book of the year is best talked about not the way we pick a Best Picture, but more as a sort of suggestion: the best thing that I happened to have read this year rather than another year. For me, that was probably the Sound and the Fury. Boring, but oh well.
Decades, on the other hand, are long and slow enough to let books be the kind of thing that, retrospectively at least. It makes sense to try to order how we understand the past by awarding some books The Book of the Decade status. Infinite Jest, for example, jumps out as The Book of the Nineties; maybe On the Road or the Catcher in the Rye for The Book of the Fifties? The Dudebrodogman has even suggested that books can be The Book of a Decade without even being published in that decade, in which case his vote for American Psycho would beat out mine for Bright Lights Big City as The Book of the Eighties. So maybe the Book of the Aughts won't get written for another five years or so; but until then, who are our contenders? Here are my ideas, in no particular order.
1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- this got the vote of New York Magazine, and one can see why. Of the books I've thought about, it has the form best suited to a claim of representing, somehow, the millennial attitude toward the presentation of information.
2) The Corrections -- this one was the best book of the Aughts according to themillions, and, again, it has a lot of prestige and such. I personally was underwhelmed by the whole thing, but am willing to hear arguments contra.
3) The Road -- this is one of the two Gloom and Doom contenders, because really, the decade was pretty gloomy and more than a little doomy. It's a spare kind of g&d, as many of you know, since it was our ill-advised first pick for Book of the Book Club.
4) 2666 -- and here's some of the other kind of Gloom and Doom. I actually think this would be a better Book of the Aughts than the Road, because its sense of vaguely defined menace also has the decade's particular style of overinformation and overdetermined connections that's on display in the less apocalyptic Oscar Wao.
5) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- and one for the optimists. I think that this could make its case for being the Book of the Aughts the same way in which Gravity's Rainbow could make a case for being the Book of the Seventies. They both use raw matter from actual history, refashioned in their own time.
6) The Tipping Point -- this is probably really the Book of the Aughts, because the most people read it, and it gets taught in seminars and such and isn't fiction. I guess I spent too little time reading non-fiction in the past ten years; I guess I'll have to shape up.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
On the Giving and Receiving of Books
I always give people books at Christmas; I almost never get books from other people on Christmas. This is fine with me; I get enough books, however they're got, that I don't especially have to count on Christmas for any kind of influx. That I have become expected as a giver of books, too, is fine with me. It is rare, I suppose, and I am lucky, I suppose, to have any sort of gift-giving nature that coincides so nicely with my larger nature; it makes a man feel nicely fixed in the universe. My brother likes dance as much as I like books, and it is not as though that translates nicely into his gift-giving life.
There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.
Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.
Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.
So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.
There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.
Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.
Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.
So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Mall and the Bookstore
Today I went Christmas shopping at the mall, even though I went to the same mall -- and, more importantly, the bike shop and the bookstore -- yesterday and bought all of the gifts that I am going to buy for anyone. So I suppose that it is not right to say that I went Christmas shopping at the mall, but rather that I went to the mall in the company of people who were Christmas shopping. I don't know exactly what it was that I was doing, then.
The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.
Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.
The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.
Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Short Story Mixtape
Before I heard about the subject of this piece from the Guardian UK, I had already thought of it, for the first time that I especially remember in a bar in Buffalo: when a girl whom I was talking to refused my offer of a mix cd because she already had enough mix cds, I told her that that was ok because I don't pay enough attention to new music these days to offer what I feel like counts as an engaged mix cd anyway, and what (shifting here to the contemplative register) I would really like to do was offer people a Short Story Mixtape, a book of short stories that I had personally curated for someone's linear enjoyment. Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides had done it; why not bring their fun to the masses? The girl at the bar told me that she didn't like short stories, saying that if something was going to be short it should just be a poem and if it were going to be long it should just grow a pair and be a novel. But! The people who brought us the Kindle are now bringing us the download-alone short story, which means that my idea (and really, it's an obvious idea, I don't want to sound like those people in the Windows 7 commercials) could be a reality.
The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.
Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster
Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov
Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?
The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.
Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster
Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov
Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?
Monday, December 14, 2009
What Does Charles Kinbote Look Like?
Yesterday I was watching Mad Men, and because there are damn buses driving past my window all night, and because Mad Men is an Important Drama with Frequent Nearly Inaudible Speeches, I could not figure out what was going on on the show, and my mind wandered. And what it wandered to was that I don't know what Charles Kinbote looks like. I thought about it some more: I don't know what Tyrone Slothrop looks like, I don't know what Don Gately looks like, I don't know what Kilgore Trout looks like. And these are people whom I've spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about, imagining in actual situations and doing actual things. I have thought long and hard about Kinbote puttering up to Shade's house and being told that he's not there by Mrs. Shade; I just kind of imagine the abstract idea of hopefulness, in one old body, puttering up to an abstract idea of disdain. I am having trouble even talking about what it is I can't do, because if you asked me, well, you understand, do you not, that a man is driving over to another man's house and encountering his wife, I would of course say yes. But I keep imagining different Kinbotes -- different old people reconstructing into the deposed old king -- and none of them stick. This is even true of people whom I met first in books whom I later saw in movies; Gilbert Osmond will never ever have quite the same features as John Malkovich, especially not in the way that Osborne Cox will always have exactly the same features as a particular John Malkovich.
When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?
When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?
Friday, December 11, 2009
In Praise of the Book Table Guy
It is too cold for the book table guy, apparently, because I wanted to go buy a book from him and he's not there. The book table guy -- or, I might say, my book table guy, because there are others -- is a guy with a van who sets up several tables of books along West 4th Street, near the NYU library, and sells them to you for smallish amounts of cash. I don't totally understand his operation; there are five tables, and some of them seem to have their own dedicated workers: I do not know whether these men are his underlings or his competition. And his level of knowledge of his wares is uncertain: sometimes he seems very excited to sell me books (he knew an awful lot about the Man in the High Castle) and other times it appears to be just another transaction, commodities for dollars.
There are certain things for which I can rely upon my book table guy: he always has a bunch of cheapie Wodehouse mass markets, he always has at least two copies of the Second Sex, and he always has several things edited by Marshall McLuhan. I don't know where he gets his Wodehouse and de Beauvoir and McLuhan, but he's always got them. And it wasn't until I met the book table guy that I decided that I don't like e-readers. Up to now, the arguments against the e-reader, and for the e-reader, have been all academic for me. I don't particularly want one, but to each her own. But thinking about the book table guy, and the trunks of old books that his van wouldn't hold if all of his wholesalers or donors had bought electronic files instead, made me feel at least slightly philosophically opposed to them. (I know that I have blogged earlier about the failure of e-readers to show off how recondite my personal reading is, but that was more a vanity statement than a philosophical one.) The book table guy (when it is warm out, anyway) reminds you that the book as a thing that sits on its shelf is something that sits, which is to say it is something that is. It can do things you don't intend. When one buys her shiny new copy of the Code of the Woosters, she does not imagine that someday that copy, yellow and with is back cover mysteriously flaking away, will delight someone she's never met while he flies home for Thanksgiving in the relatively distant future. And that is something about books to go all swoony over.
Our namesake essayist writes about knowing the history of one's books from the point of view of a collector, and his namesake essay suggests a man who takes pride in knowing whence the physical objects that make up his unpacked library. What I like so much about the books I've got from the book table guy isn't their history so much as their futures; as these books, lumps of paper and glue, have come to me, so might they get dumped off from me to people I've never known. And the truncation of those futures is, to me, the first frightening thing about the advent of the e-readers that I've ever felt at all viscerally.
There are certain things for which I can rely upon my book table guy: he always has a bunch of cheapie Wodehouse mass markets, he always has at least two copies of the Second Sex, and he always has several things edited by Marshall McLuhan. I don't know where he gets his Wodehouse and de Beauvoir and McLuhan, but he's always got them. And it wasn't until I met the book table guy that I decided that I don't like e-readers. Up to now, the arguments against the e-reader, and for the e-reader, have been all academic for me. I don't particularly want one, but to each her own. But thinking about the book table guy, and the trunks of old books that his van wouldn't hold if all of his wholesalers or donors had bought electronic files instead, made me feel at least slightly philosophically opposed to them. (I know that I have blogged earlier about the failure of e-readers to show off how recondite my personal reading is, but that was more a vanity statement than a philosophical one.) The book table guy (when it is warm out, anyway) reminds you that the book as a thing that sits on its shelf is something that sits, which is to say it is something that is. It can do things you don't intend. When one buys her shiny new copy of the Code of the Woosters, she does not imagine that someday that copy, yellow and with is back cover mysteriously flaking away, will delight someone she's never met while he flies home for Thanksgiving in the relatively distant future. And that is something about books to go all swoony over.
Our namesake essayist writes about knowing the history of one's books from the point of view of a collector, and his namesake essay suggests a man who takes pride in knowing whence the physical objects that make up his unpacked library. What I like so much about the books I've got from the book table guy isn't their history so much as their futures; as these books, lumps of paper and glue, have come to me, so might they get dumped off from me to people I've never known. And the truncation of those futures is, to me, the first frightening thing about the advent of the e-readers that I've ever felt at all viscerally.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Life Sentences
The other day a friend of mine called me and told me that she had a list of fifteen great opening sentences from novels, and then she named them, and I correctly identified the books that twelve of them opened. I don't think that this speaks to my outstanding knowledge of things, so much as the general fame of first sentences, last sentences, and cool sentences in general. I seem to recall reading somewhere lately that the sentence is the basic unit of any kind of meaning. This is given a relatively loose reading of the sentence (a sample of this kind of "sentence" was a weather report claiming that Tuesday's High would be 34 degrees Fahrenheit and Low 36 degrees Fahrenheit), but I think it makes sense. The reason for that is because there are dozens and dozens of sentences with which I am infatuated, and a negligent number of phrases about which I feel the same way. Even the ones that do -- James's "a second and even a more extravagant umbrella", Shakespeare's "so musical a discord" -- I actually like synecdochally, as parts representing their sentence wholes which I like even more.
I was given the task in school of writing a perfect sentence, in accordance with Donald Barthelme's perfect writing assignment that he used to give his students. The perfect sentence is one that is i) surprising, ii) in some sense true, iii) beautiful, and iv) possessed of a metaphysical dimension. His example of a sentence fulfilling only condition i, and of a sentence fulfilling only conditions one and two, are both fantastic: the former is "It has always been my desire to sleep with -- that is, to have sexual intercourse with -- the New York Review of Books." and the latter is "The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.". His example of a perfect sentence, one that meets all four criteria, is from Kafka and goes like this: "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand, and becomes part of the ceremony.". That is a great Kafka sentence, to be sure. Our professor in this class provided us with a selection of sentences that he had culled for their perfection, and a lot of them were good, but none of them were as good as that Kafka sentence, and I think the reason why is that the sentences culled from their homes are, while indeed building blocks of meaning, building blocks more like Legos than anything else.
When I was young, it bothered me that if I built a wall out of Legos, the top level of the wall still had rising out of it the studs that all of the blocks making up the lower strata of the wall had as well. Each block in the lower strata called out for a capping level of blocks, and each was satisfied; but those on the top level were not. It should come as no surprise that I spent a huge amount of my childhood by myself, with childish things and a furrowed brow. It should come as no further surprise that I spend a huge amount of my time currently by myself with a furrowed brow, although now I do it surrounded by words instead of Legos. Sentences, however gorgeous, if yanked from their places of residence, seem yanked: they want to be prepared for, and to work at preparing for something else (hence the mania, I suppose, for first and last sentences, which are half saturated). And so I wonder what it would be like to make a craft of just sentences. One such is Kafka's sentence-story about the leopards and the chalices, which is not yanked from anywhere, but designed simply to stand as a magnificent sentence. That sentence seems less to me like a Lego, and more like an ice cube: complete, glistening, inscrutable (ice cubes are inscrutable, right?) Somewhere, there is a sentence-smith waiting to just churn out little igloos of perfect sentences, and I cannot wait.
By the dubs, I had to actually write two sentences that attempted to meet Barthelme's criteria, and I am going to post them in the comments -- where you should too!
I was given the task in school of writing a perfect sentence, in accordance with Donald Barthelme's perfect writing assignment that he used to give his students. The perfect sentence is one that is i) surprising, ii) in some sense true, iii) beautiful, and iv) possessed of a metaphysical dimension. His example of a sentence fulfilling only condition i, and of a sentence fulfilling only conditions one and two, are both fantastic: the former is "It has always been my desire to sleep with -- that is, to have sexual intercourse with -- the New York Review of Books." and the latter is "The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.". His example of a perfect sentence, one that meets all four criteria, is from Kafka and goes like this: "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand, and becomes part of the ceremony.". That is a great Kafka sentence, to be sure. Our professor in this class provided us with a selection of sentences that he had culled for their perfection, and a lot of them were good, but none of them were as good as that Kafka sentence, and I think the reason why is that the sentences culled from their homes are, while indeed building blocks of meaning, building blocks more like Legos than anything else.
When I was young, it bothered me that if I built a wall out of Legos, the top level of the wall still had rising out of it the studs that all of the blocks making up the lower strata of the wall had as well. Each block in the lower strata called out for a capping level of blocks, and each was satisfied; but those on the top level were not. It should come as no surprise that I spent a huge amount of my childhood by myself, with childish things and a furrowed brow. It should come as no further surprise that I spend a huge amount of my time currently by myself with a furrowed brow, although now I do it surrounded by words instead of Legos. Sentences, however gorgeous, if yanked from their places of residence, seem yanked: they want to be prepared for, and to work at preparing for something else (hence the mania, I suppose, for first and last sentences, which are half saturated). And so I wonder what it would be like to make a craft of just sentences. One such is Kafka's sentence-story about the leopards and the chalices, which is not yanked from anywhere, but designed simply to stand as a magnificent sentence. That sentence seems less to me like a Lego, and more like an ice cube: complete, glistening, inscrutable (ice cubes are inscrutable, right?) Somewhere, there is a sentence-smith waiting to just churn out little igloos of perfect sentences, and I cannot wait.
By the dubs, I had to actually write two sentences that attempted to meet Barthelme's criteria, and I am going to post them in the comments -- where you should too!
Monday, November 30, 2009
Unpacking My Starship
It has been a long time since I have posted on here. But that is going to change, with the Announcement of a New Book Club Book and a bit of explanation, occasioned, in a stroke of luck perfect for explanatory essays, by two different things: one being that I read too much, which is to say I unpacked too much of my library all at once; and the other being that I went "home", sort of, or failing that, that I went back to my biggest and favorite pile of books, the one in Lockport that my father and I built with second-hand lumber and which takes up an entire wall.
The obvious way in which one could read too much would be a crisis of content. It has been hypothesized (by others, not by me) that my personal, usual practice of reading two or more novels "at the same time" would result in some kind of intertextual freeforall, in which, in the first instance I remember hearing cited, Pip Pirrip would for some reason be in my mind imagined as rubbing elbows with Sissy Hankshaw, since I read Great Expectations and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues "at the same time", the simultaneity here consisting in reading the former for about an hour in the van on the way to a ski trip, and the latter while on the lifts, on the same day. I would experiment, sometimes, with the shortest acceptable unit that I could read from two books I was trying to read "at the same time" -- is it a sentence? A paragraph? What would it mean to read, say the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and the Early Stories of John Updike with interpellated sentences? Would you have read either of them? Would, in fact, your understanding of Tarbox, MA come to be infiltrated with charming Russians with hilariously poor English vocabulary? At any rate, I should say, I never broached whatever line there is, and this crisis of content never happened to me. My crisis in reading too much took on a wholly different form.
If you read all the time, you'd better do it quickly. And if you own countless (actually strike that; I have them counted, in an Excel spreadsheet, on this very computer) pages and pages of unread book, you had better read quicklier still. I moved to Manhattan four months ago, exulted in my little closet in which to live with an internet and books and no cable, and set about the important business of Reading. And I read quickly. I read swaths of the internet by day, then I got onto the subway with a Train book and off of the subway with a Park book, and read and read. While commuting, I read the subway map and thought about other places to go; while dining, I read the menu and imagined other food to eat; and eventually, while reading, I thought principally about other books to read. I became a parasitic reader; I ignored the beam in whatever book it happened to be, and thought only about the motes in other books' eyes. It was a goddamn mess is all. I read everything like it was the subway map, and here is the thing about reading the subway map for no reason, over and over: I have done it for months, and I can not successfully tell you how to get anywhere except for certain intersections in Manhattan, between 135th and Bleecker Streets (which is to say, the gridded part, or, the part in which one does not need a map).
And so for a few months my goal was to read my books more strongly than I read the map on the subway. It was hard. I don’t know if I pulled it off. But for a while, I didn’t read anything that wasn’t on a syllabus, and then I had a flight to Buffalo, so I decided to relax my rule a little bit and I bought a book off of a table in the park, by Wodehouse to read on the flight, which was fun enough.
And then I got to my library, my actual library, in a mess around the reject lumber that my father and I built into shelves. My books. Not all of the shelves were saturated; there was a Target-sized bookshelf’s worth of books missing, which are in my apartment in Harlem. My bed, which used to sit across the room from the bookshelves was gone (it’s in my apartment, too). So I grabbed one of the books that I had made a note of looking at when I got home – Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar – and sat in the corner and read. And I don’t know why, but I felt like I read it the right way. I felt like I felt reading on the subway before I had had my brains had been overread. This was fantastic.
And it has carried on. I wish I had something more epiphanic to tell you about what I thought of, or some more specific set of phenomena that I could detail about how my reading is different, but I am afraid I cannot: all I can tell is that I was positive there that the time had come to get the band back together, that it was time for me to begin reading off of both my syllabi and my library, and that this book club is once again operational. We have a new cast of commenters; we have a new set of commitments; and we have a new book, which book being Haruki Murakami’s book of short stories Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. So here we are: time to read like we are not reading a subway map.
The obvious way in which one could read too much would be a crisis of content. It has been hypothesized (by others, not by me) that my personal, usual practice of reading two or more novels "at the same time" would result in some kind of intertextual freeforall, in which, in the first instance I remember hearing cited, Pip Pirrip would for some reason be in my mind imagined as rubbing elbows with Sissy Hankshaw, since I read Great Expectations and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues "at the same time", the simultaneity here consisting in reading the former for about an hour in the van on the way to a ski trip, and the latter while on the lifts, on the same day. I would experiment, sometimes, with the shortest acceptable unit that I could read from two books I was trying to read "at the same time" -- is it a sentence? A paragraph? What would it mean to read, say the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and the Early Stories of John Updike with interpellated sentences? Would you have read either of them? Would, in fact, your understanding of Tarbox, MA come to be infiltrated with charming Russians with hilariously poor English vocabulary? At any rate, I should say, I never broached whatever line there is, and this crisis of content never happened to me. My crisis in reading too much took on a wholly different form.
If you read all the time, you'd better do it quickly. And if you own countless (actually strike that; I have them counted, in an Excel spreadsheet, on this very computer) pages and pages of unread book, you had better read quicklier still. I moved to Manhattan four months ago, exulted in my little closet in which to live with an internet and books and no cable, and set about the important business of Reading. And I read quickly. I read swaths of the internet by day, then I got onto the subway with a Train book and off of the subway with a Park book, and read and read. While commuting, I read the subway map and thought about other places to go; while dining, I read the menu and imagined other food to eat; and eventually, while reading, I thought principally about other books to read. I became a parasitic reader; I ignored the beam in whatever book it happened to be, and thought only about the motes in other books' eyes. It was a goddamn mess is all. I read everything like it was the subway map, and here is the thing about reading the subway map for no reason, over and over: I have done it for months, and I can not successfully tell you how to get anywhere except for certain intersections in Manhattan, between 135th and Bleecker Streets (which is to say, the gridded part, or, the part in which one does not need a map).
And so for a few months my goal was to read my books more strongly than I read the map on the subway. It was hard. I don’t know if I pulled it off. But for a while, I didn’t read anything that wasn’t on a syllabus, and then I had a flight to Buffalo, so I decided to relax my rule a little bit and I bought a book off of a table in the park, by Wodehouse to read on the flight, which was fun enough.
And then I got to my library, my actual library, in a mess around the reject lumber that my father and I built into shelves. My books. Not all of the shelves were saturated; there was a Target-sized bookshelf’s worth of books missing, which are in my apartment in Harlem. My bed, which used to sit across the room from the bookshelves was gone (it’s in my apartment, too). So I grabbed one of the books that I had made a note of looking at when I got home – Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar – and sat in the corner and read. And I don’t know why, but I felt like I read it the right way. I felt like I felt reading on the subway before I had had my brains had been overread. This was fantastic.
And it has carried on. I wish I had something more epiphanic to tell you about what I thought of, or some more specific set of phenomena that I could detail about how my reading is different, but I am afraid I cannot: all I can tell is that I was positive there that the time had come to get the band back together, that it was time for me to begin reading off of both my syllabi and my library, and that this book club is once again operational. We have a new cast of commenters; we have a new set of commitments; and we have a new book, which book being Haruki Murakami’s book of short stories Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. So here we are: time to read like we are not reading a subway map.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Pedagogy
I have one, and really only one, piece of evidence that suggests that man may be corrigible. When I was little and fat and bumming rides from my teachers, I once shanghaied one of those teachers into driving me into the Wal(star)Mart out on Niagara Falls Boulevard past the 290 so that I could buy the Wall, in exchange for store credit that I got from two unopened Britney Spears cds that my dad had won at a silent auction. My evidence of corrigibility? It's that although on the day and for some weeks (months?) after, I viewed this as a potentially momentous day -- "THE DAY I HAD MY EYES OPENED BY THE WALL" -- I now have come around to think that the Wall is a very very stupid record. Sonically, sure, it's fine, but it has some of the most ridiculous pseudo-profound lyrics on record. I once sat around and thought about how "Mother" was a song that REALLY GOT ME. Yikes.
Anyway, I bring this up because I wanted to write a post about bad and almost-bad teachers in the world of literature and I was going to title this post a quote from "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" but all of the quotes from it were just totally stupid. So now, boring title, interest anecdote and message of hope about how there is hope for all of us. And I bring up teachers not just because I will have some again soon, but also because I am reading the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a book about a woman who is rather a bad teacher, which makes for quite a good book. I can't imagine a really really good book about someone who is a really really putatively good teacher, because it would a) probably be inspirational and b) be by someone the teacher had inspired and c) thus be uninteresting to really everyone who wasn't there. Good teachers are like weird dreams: you have to be there for either adjective to really be important. So here are my favorite bad teachers, in no particular order, and presented as generic types:
The Wackford Squeers: Wackford Squeers, master of Dotheboys Hall from Nicholas Nickelby, is in practice really the worst kind of teacher possible. He's an idiot (his lessons are hilariously inaccurate); he is a cheat, both ripping people off and, when that seems like too much work, enabling other terrible people acting in loco parentis to rip their wards off; and, like so many teachers in fiction, he hates children. In fact, like his most apt pupil, the Trunchbull from Matilda, he hates children more than anyone in the book in which he lives. The best you can say about him is that he tries to do right by his family; but even then, he did name his son Wackford, though he must know full well, from experience, that being named Wackford sucks. He (and the Trunchbull) fall most obviously on the "bad person" end of the bad teacher spectrum.
The Deasy: Lord, do I hate Deasy, from the Nestor chapter of Ulysses. Like Squeers, he fails to meet what one would think are the basic qualifications for being a teacher (know something; don't hate children); and, worse, he's a blustery anti-semite. His methods are not as outlandish and cartoony as Squeers's, so he slides a little ahead on the list. But. What an ass. The two big coffee-mug quotes that Stephen gives us in the Telemachiad part of Ulysses -- "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and "God is a shout in the street" -- seem to me prescient about half the time and stupid the other half. When I feel the former, I blame Deasy for not appreciating his assistant, and when I feel the latter, I blame Deasy for not telling him to shut up. The guy's just a dick.
The Jean Brodie: The other people I have on this spot are Henry Burlingame, from the Sot-Weed Factor, and Hannah Schneider, from Special Topics in Calamity Physics. These people are the renegade teachers, the anti-authority, stick-it-to-the-man ones, and the reason that they -- of the hundreds of such fictional teachers -- made the list, is that they are the three I can think of whose books suggest that they are actually kind of silly. Miss Jean Brodie, who will not shut up about her prime, really introduces her charges into the fine points of objectivist philosophy, and also really likes Mussolini. She is not unlikeable; she is just a bad teacher. No matter how dumb you think forcing ten-year-old girls to get through their primers is, it is probably not a better idea to tell them all about the Great Loves of Your Life on school time instead. Likewise, Hannah Schneider seems a little too enamored with the idea of herself as The Cool Teacher at Private School (she has on her walls Italian posters for American movies, sheesh), and Burlingame manages to endorse every possible position in his tutelage of Ebenezer Cooke, so at least about half of them must be bad. These teachers get closer to the "bad teacher" (or bad influence, as opposed to bad human) end of the bad teacher spectrum.
The Pnin: And here's Pnin, that terrible teacher of Russian, whom I really really like, and in whose care I would really really not want to entrust my children's education in any language, Russian or otherwise. Pnin stalks around fighting insane fights about library books and being secretly heartbroken over and over again, at the hands of his horrible narrator, and for this I find him totally lovable; but still, you can't get away from the fact that his course appears to consist of bad puns and unexplained opinions about Russian writers.
Anyway, I bring this up because I wanted to write a post about bad and almost-bad teachers in the world of literature and I was going to title this post a quote from "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" but all of the quotes from it were just totally stupid. So now, boring title, interest anecdote and message of hope about how there is hope for all of us. And I bring up teachers not just because I will have some again soon, but also because I am reading the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a book about a woman who is rather a bad teacher, which makes for quite a good book. I can't imagine a really really good book about someone who is a really really putatively good teacher, because it would a) probably be inspirational and b) be by someone the teacher had inspired and c) thus be uninteresting to really everyone who wasn't there. Good teachers are like weird dreams: you have to be there for either adjective to really be important. So here are my favorite bad teachers, in no particular order, and presented as generic types:
The Wackford Squeers: Wackford Squeers, master of Dotheboys Hall from Nicholas Nickelby, is in practice really the worst kind of teacher possible. He's an idiot (his lessons are hilariously inaccurate); he is a cheat, both ripping people off and, when that seems like too much work, enabling other terrible people acting in loco parentis to rip their wards off; and, like so many teachers in fiction, he hates children. In fact, like his most apt pupil, the Trunchbull from Matilda, he hates children more than anyone in the book in which he lives. The best you can say about him is that he tries to do right by his family; but even then, he did name his son Wackford, though he must know full well, from experience, that being named Wackford sucks. He (and the Trunchbull) fall most obviously on the "bad person" end of the bad teacher spectrum.
The Deasy: Lord, do I hate Deasy, from the Nestor chapter of Ulysses. Like Squeers, he fails to meet what one would think are the basic qualifications for being a teacher (know something; don't hate children); and, worse, he's a blustery anti-semite. His methods are not as outlandish and cartoony as Squeers's, so he slides a little ahead on the list. But. What an ass. The two big coffee-mug quotes that Stephen gives us in the Telemachiad part of Ulysses -- "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and "God is a shout in the street" -- seem to me prescient about half the time and stupid the other half. When I feel the former, I blame Deasy for not appreciating his assistant, and when I feel the latter, I blame Deasy for not telling him to shut up. The guy's just a dick.
The Jean Brodie: The other people I have on this spot are Henry Burlingame, from the Sot-Weed Factor, and Hannah Schneider, from Special Topics in Calamity Physics. These people are the renegade teachers, the anti-authority, stick-it-to-the-man ones, and the reason that they -- of the hundreds of such fictional teachers -- made the list, is that they are the three I can think of whose books suggest that they are actually kind of silly. Miss Jean Brodie, who will not shut up about her prime, really introduces her charges into the fine points of objectivist philosophy, and also really likes Mussolini. She is not unlikeable; she is just a bad teacher. No matter how dumb you think forcing ten-year-old girls to get through their primers is, it is probably not a better idea to tell them all about the Great Loves of Your Life on school time instead. Likewise, Hannah Schneider seems a little too enamored with the idea of herself as The Cool Teacher at Private School (she has on her walls Italian posters for American movies, sheesh), and Burlingame manages to endorse every possible position in his tutelage of Ebenezer Cooke, so at least about half of them must be bad. These teachers get closer to the "bad teacher" (or bad influence, as opposed to bad human) end of the bad teacher spectrum.
The Pnin: And here's Pnin, that terrible teacher of Russian, whom I really really like, and in whose care I would really really not want to entrust my children's education in any language, Russian or otherwise. Pnin stalks around fighting insane fights about library books and being secretly heartbroken over and over again, at the hands of his horrible narrator, and for this I find him totally lovable; but still, you can't get away from the fact that his course appears to consist of bad puns and unexplained opinions about Russian writers.
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Big Move
I live in Manhattan now. The biggest, most immediate improvements:
1) the subway -- I don't have to drive anywhere, so instead I take the subway around and listen to Coffee Break French, a program where two Scots teach you how to conduct rudimentary conversations in French
2) the Local Interest Section at the Barnes and Noble around here has stuff like Bright Lights, Big City and The Collected Stories of Damon Runyan, instead of this stuff.
3) there are parks to read in -- I realize that this is true of most places I used to live, but these parks have other reading people in them. A crucial improvement.
In fact, there are people reading all over the place, and, most importantly, anonymous people. It is one thing -- it is quite a nice thing, actually -- to sit around in rooms with other people who are reading and whom you know. I do it all the time. But it is actually even a nicer thing to sit around in Starbuckses or in parks with people who are reading and reading wholly apart from you. They're reading a book they call loneliness, but it's better than reading alone, William Joel would say. Everyone sits and reads their books, and no one talks about it, but in the massed quiet of readers, is comfort. I've read considerably more since I have moved out here, even before classes have started: I read a bunch more of Updike's short stories, I read Benjamin and Moretti on cities, I read a lot of Mason and Dixon (my and my brother's book to read over vacation) that I didn't finish over vacation. When I used to sit in my hot hot house and look at my books, as I did for most of this last summer, sweating and miserable, they seemed more than anything like a bunch of things I had to work through, methodically; like they were a pile of pages I had to solitarily mark as read, like so many TPS reports. I don't know that it speaks especially well of me that it took such a drastic relocation to reappreciate my library, but I am glad that it happened.
1) the subway -- I don't have to drive anywhere, so instead I take the subway around and listen to Coffee Break French, a program where two Scots teach you how to conduct rudimentary conversations in French
2) the Local Interest Section at the Barnes and Noble around here has stuff like Bright Lights, Big City and The Collected Stories of Damon Runyan, instead of this stuff.
3) there are parks to read in -- I realize that this is true of most places I used to live, but these parks have other reading people in them. A crucial improvement.
In fact, there are people reading all over the place, and, most importantly, anonymous people. It is one thing -- it is quite a nice thing, actually -- to sit around in rooms with other people who are reading and whom you know. I do it all the time. But it is actually even a nicer thing to sit around in Starbuckses or in parks with people who are reading and reading wholly apart from you. They're reading a book they call loneliness, but it's better than reading alone, William Joel would say. Everyone sits and reads their books, and no one talks about it, but in the massed quiet of readers, is comfort. I've read considerably more since I have moved out here, even before classes have started: I read a bunch more of Updike's short stories, I read Benjamin and Moretti on cities, I read a lot of Mason and Dixon (my and my brother's book to read over vacation) that I didn't finish over vacation. When I used to sit in my hot hot house and look at my books, as I did for most of this last summer, sweating and miserable, they seemed more than anything like a bunch of things I had to work through, methodically; like they were a pile of pages I had to solitarily mark as read, like so many TPS reports. I don't know that it speaks especially well of me that it took such a drastic relocation to reappreciate my library, but I am glad that it happened.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Zeppo
Today I read jack squat. I painted the side of my house, I drove into town for lunch, I staked out the ice cream man, I went to the gym and almost fell off the treadmill, and I went out into the ocean and tried to catch some fish barehand. But I didn't really read anything. And then, just before I went to bed, we decided to watch the Marx Brother's fourth movie, Horse Feathers. This was their penultimate movie for Paramount and, more critically, the penultimate movie to feature Zeppo Marx, in my opinion the best and greatest of the Four Brothers.
Zeppo's importance, I am told by wikipedia, has been of late the subject of some scholarly study. The revisionist history on him seems to be something like, he is a gateway figure, or our representative in the anarchic world of the three older, more obviously lunatic brothers. Charlotte Chandler, in a book I now really want to read called Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, says this about Zeppo:
Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type.
This is fascinating stuff, especially her suggestion that Allan Jones, whom I find to be loathsome, is some sort of Zeppo failure. However, I find Zeppo's allure to go beyond his likeness to us; it is not just his unavoidable Marxiness that connects him to his brothers in a way that we fail to. I don't read Zeppo as an entree into the world of the maniacal brothers; instead, I see him as a lesson in how to adapt their ways into the world of our own.
Now, plotwise, he often is such an entree. In Horse Feathers, as Groucho's son, he offers some insight, gleaned from the home, into the possible policies of Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (yammering on about how Dad will hound them). As Horatio W. Jamison, the field secretary of Capt. Spaulding in Animal Crackers, Zeppo sings reverently about how the Captain is a moral man before retreating for the middle two thirds of the movie, and in Duck Soup, as a secretary this time called Bob Roland, he bounces in a little too quickly to announce that the boss is making an appearance just when the clock on the wall strikes ten. In all of these circumstances, his presence is one that, above all, reassures us as to Groucho's connection to a world outside of Groucho: that is, Zeppo knows this guy, and appears to be vouching for him. He lets us know what's coming, just before Groucho -- the ostensible star of the show -- arrives.
The problem with this is that he is, in each instance above, spectacularly wrong. Prof. Wagstaff's single coherent action in Horse Feathers is hounding out the wrong man (that is, his other brother Chico instead of the legitimate football ringers); Capt. Spaulding's first big scene after his introduction is a halfhearted attempt to commit bigamy; and, of course, Rufus T. Firefly does not show up at ten to be sworn in (or introduced or whatever) as the ruler of Freedonia. As our entryway into the world of the lunatic Marx Brothers, Zeppo as an explainer is useless or worse. Yet he never appears to be upset, or betrayed, by any of this; he doesn't really care. So why tell us these bizarre things? I think that one particular scene from the films illustrate what Zeppo is really all about. These is one of the scenes I most often point to when I have to defend my Zeppo above all policy to incredulous family and friends.
In Duck Soup, Zeppo has been silent since the first scene (he has had one scene, Groucho's meeting with his cabinet, in which he makes, to my way of thinking, several absolutely hilarious faces) when he pops into the boss's office after the latter has met with Harpo and Chico and got nothing done. He walks in purposefully, as always, and, as a good citizen, goes to take his hat off and place it on the hatrack in Groucho's office. There is no side to the hat on his head; he is wearing half of a hat. Briefly, Zeppo is nonplused, and this is important: Zeppo is almost never nonplused. That is a state for college professors, society doyennes, cabinet officials, that is, people who are wholly outside of the Marx dominion, and if Zeppo were to voice his confusion ("Your excellency, I've lost half a hat!"), he would stake himself as a similar outsider. But he does not; he just plunges in, throws his hat away, and gets down to telling Groucho, for reasons that I have never really been able to place, that Freedonia needs to goad Sylvania into war. At no other point that I know of in Marxdom does someone have such a moment of decision -- and opt in. Here, he is most like our guide into Marx Brothers lunacy: like us, he has decided for some reason that these are people who merit his time, such as it is.
But then he begins to push for war with Sylvania, and becomes, somehow, the only free man in the entire world of the Marx Brothers. To prove that Trentino, the Sylvanian ambassador, is sensitive enough to be goaded easily into war, Bob Roland tells Firefly that he once told Vera Marquel (the gorgeous dancer and apparent hanger-on at the Freedonian court) something -- I find it compelling to believe that this "something" is either a joke or a joke-like thing -- in Trentino's presence once, and that Trentino slapped his face. Firefly, when he hears this joke whispered to him, slaps Bob Roland's face as well (and, as he says, should've slapped Mrs. Teasdale's face when she told it to him). This moment is another remarkable moment in Zeppodom: I did not realize, until he makes reference to his having done it off screen, that Zeppo is a Marx Brother free of the manic compulsions that drive his brothers: the drive to joke, and the drive to chase pretty women. Chico and Groucho will solemnly sacrifice any bit of sense to jokes, even bad jokes -- look at the self-disgust in the exchange of sewer and manhole jokes in Animal Crackers -- and Harpo's distracting pursuit of women is evident. Harpo, Chico, and Groucho seem madcap and free, but theirs is only negative freedom, the freedom to reject the demands of normal persons. Zeppo can move exactly as he pleases. Zeppo alone, exists in and of all of this, and simultaneously in and for himself. He is not just a stand-in for us, who watch passively as these dramas play out, but he is a freer man than we are. Inscrutable, self-assured (all that striding into rooms!), perfectly possessed: our Zeppo, the most perfect agent of positive freedom in the most anarchically free movies of all time.
Zeppo's importance, I am told by wikipedia, has been of late the subject of some scholarly study. The revisionist history on him seems to be something like, he is a gateway figure, or our representative in the anarchic world of the three older, more obviously lunatic brothers. Charlotte Chandler, in a book I now really want to read called Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, says this about Zeppo:
Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type.
This is fascinating stuff, especially her suggestion that Allan Jones, whom I find to be loathsome, is some sort of Zeppo failure. However, I find Zeppo's allure to go beyond his likeness to us; it is not just his unavoidable Marxiness that connects him to his brothers in a way that we fail to. I don't read Zeppo as an entree into the world of the maniacal brothers; instead, I see him as a lesson in how to adapt their ways into the world of our own.
Now, plotwise, he often is such an entree. In Horse Feathers, as Groucho's son, he offers some insight, gleaned from the home, into the possible policies of Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (yammering on about how Dad will hound them). As Horatio W. Jamison, the field secretary of Capt. Spaulding in Animal Crackers, Zeppo sings reverently about how the Captain is a moral man before retreating for the middle two thirds of the movie, and in Duck Soup, as a secretary this time called Bob Roland, he bounces in a little too quickly to announce that the boss is making an appearance just when the clock on the wall strikes ten. In all of these circumstances, his presence is one that, above all, reassures us as to Groucho's connection to a world outside of Groucho: that is, Zeppo knows this guy, and appears to be vouching for him. He lets us know what's coming, just before Groucho -- the ostensible star of the show -- arrives.
The problem with this is that he is, in each instance above, spectacularly wrong. Prof. Wagstaff's single coherent action in Horse Feathers is hounding out the wrong man (that is, his other brother Chico instead of the legitimate football ringers); Capt. Spaulding's first big scene after his introduction is a halfhearted attempt to commit bigamy; and, of course, Rufus T. Firefly does not show up at ten to be sworn in (or introduced or whatever) as the ruler of Freedonia. As our entryway into the world of the lunatic Marx Brothers, Zeppo as an explainer is useless or worse. Yet he never appears to be upset, or betrayed, by any of this; he doesn't really care. So why tell us these bizarre things? I think that one particular scene from the films illustrate what Zeppo is really all about. These is one of the scenes I most often point to when I have to defend my Zeppo above all policy to incredulous family and friends.
In Duck Soup, Zeppo has been silent since the first scene (he has had one scene, Groucho's meeting with his cabinet, in which he makes, to my way of thinking, several absolutely hilarious faces) when he pops into the boss's office after the latter has met with Harpo and Chico and got nothing done. He walks in purposefully, as always, and, as a good citizen, goes to take his hat off and place it on the hatrack in Groucho's office. There is no side to the hat on his head; he is wearing half of a hat. Briefly, Zeppo is nonplused, and this is important: Zeppo is almost never nonplused. That is a state for college professors, society doyennes, cabinet officials, that is, people who are wholly outside of the Marx dominion, and if Zeppo were to voice his confusion ("Your excellency, I've lost half a hat!"), he would stake himself as a similar outsider. But he does not; he just plunges in, throws his hat away, and gets down to telling Groucho, for reasons that I have never really been able to place, that Freedonia needs to goad Sylvania into war. At no other point that I know of in Marxdom does someone have such a moment of decision -- and opt in. Here, he is most like our guide into Marx Brothers lunacy: like us, he has decided for some reason that these are people who merit his time, such as it is.
But then he begins to push for war with Sylvania, and becomes, somehow, the only free man in the entire world of the Marx Brothers. To prove that Trentino, the Sylvanian ambassador, is sensitive enough to be goaded easily into war, Bob Roland tells Firefly that he once told Vera Marquel (the gorgeous dancer and apparent hanger-on at the Freedonian court) something -- I find it compelling to believe that this "something" is either a joke or a joke-like thing -- in Trentino's presence once, and that Trentino slapped his face. Firefly, when he hears this joke whispered to him, slaps Bob Roland's face as well (and, as he says, should've slapped Mrs. Teasdale's face when she told it to him). This moment is another remarkable moment in Zeppodom: I did not realize, until he makes reference to his having done it off screen, that Zeppo is a Marx Brother free of the manic compulsions that drive his brothers: the drive to joke, and the drive to chase pretty women. Chico and Groucho will solemnly sacrifice any bit of sense to jokes, even bad jokes -- look at the self-disgust in the exchange of sewer and manhole jokes in Animal Crackers -- and Harpo's distracting pursuit of women is evident. Harpo, Chico, and Groucho seem madcap and free, but theirs is only negative freedom, the freedom to reject the demands of normal persons. Zeppo can move exactly as he pleases. Zeppo alone, exists in and of all of this, and simultaneously in and for himself. He is not just a stand-in for us, who watch passively as these dramas play out, but he is a freer man than we are. Inscrutable, self-assured (all that striding into rooms!), perfectly possessed: our Zeppo, the most perfect agent of positive freedom in the most anarchically free movies of all time.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Analysis Yet Again
Another week, another reason to drag my favorite two-word Henry James phrase into things, that quote being "remorseless analysis." (Narrowly beating out "extravagant umbrella", "hang fire", and "sacred rage"). And the reason today is that my mother tells me, daily, and the other people who live in our house confirm, daily, that what my problem is ("I have just one problem?" -- Hal Incandenza) is that I overanalyze everything. She rarely uses the word "remorseless", but there it is: the problem: overanalysis. Now, this may be a bit of killing to cure, but, as the fact that I can't get through an entire sentence here without a variety of embedded clauses and parentheses might have tipped you off, my first instinct is in most circumstances, indeed, to analyze things. But is it over-such? Can one overanalyze, and do I? Let us overanalyze.
When Strether, in the Ambassadors, invokes that beautiful phrase, he is sad; he is disappointed that his friend Waymarsh will never remorselessly analyze him. It's as though he is jealous that his powers of analysis -- which seem to be involuntary and, we learn throughout the novel, not terribly keen -- will never be turned on himself. A friend of mine once told me that she was disappointed after making a certain song the music that others heard while her phone was ringing; because she did that, she was the person she knew who heard the song the list. I myself often consider it a cruel trick of fate that, while everyone else sees it all the time they get to listen to me, I only see my perfectly straight hairline on the occasion that I visit a mirror. So maybe remorseless analysis is like that. But probably not -- it doesn't seem as though being the object of it is enviable (I mean really, think about it). Nor does it seem as though overanalysis is exposing some ugly truths through which the rest of the world slumbers, because it is, after all, not just called enoughanalysis.
Rather, I think that what my mother pinpoints when she calls overanalyzing my problem is that overanalysis is exactly what makes something into art; and art is exactly useless. I read a story this morning -- a deeply weird story -- by Nabokov, about a dragon, called The Dragon. It wonders what it be like if a dragon flew into a little town in Germany, and comes up with: it would get papered with advertisements for a tobacco company, it would be attacked by a circus performer dressed as a knight and in the service of a rival tobacco company, and as a result of this, flies up to his cave, embarrassed, and dies of shame. Which doesn't sound really wrong, as far as dragons in 1930s Germany go. And I don't mean to suggest here that my babbled observations with which I annoy my mother (or whomever's ear is the one closest to my right {which, I notice, is the side to which I most often darkly mutter snark}) is of a quality similar to a Nabokov short story, even a weird Nabokov short story. Rather, that same stream of muttering is something that, as a person who reads and probably reads too much, I have come to take for just the noise of the world; and, of course, the real world is much more often just quite. Just enoughanalyzed. I am subjecting my poor family to that roar that lies on the other side of silence.
Now, I don't super know what to do about this. It is probably the most insidious thing I have ever noticed about my career as a reader, and, luckily, it is not all that insidious. It is one of those lucky problems whose solution is the not talking about it. I tried to defend my constant, remorseless overanalysis to my mother by telling her that it was compulsory, and I don't really know which of the two of us was correct. But obviously, broadcasting whatever Deep Analysis I think of is not compulsory. It's just the fruit of reading too many stories that really work through what the tobacco companies would do to dragons.
When Strether, in the Ambassadors, invokes that beautiful phrase, he is sad; he is disappointed that his friend Waymarsh will never remorselessly analyze him. It's as though he is jealous that his powers of analysis -- which seem to be involuntary and, we learn throughout the novel, not terribly keen -- will never be turned on himself. A friend of mine once told me that she was disappointed after making a certain song the music that others heard while her phone was ringing; because she did that, she was the person she knew who heard the song the list. I myself often consider it a cruel trick of fate that, while everyone else sees it all the time they get to listen to me, I only see my perfectly straight hairline on the occasion that I visit a mirror. So maybe remorseless analysis is like that. But probably not -- it doesn't seem as though being the object of it is enviable (I mean really, think about it). Nor does it seem as though overanalysis is exposing some ugly truths through which the rest of the world slumbers, because it is, after all, not just called enoughanalysis.
Rather, I think that what my mother pinpoints when she calls overanalyzing my problem is that overanalysis is exactly what makes something into art; and art is exactly useless. I read a story this morning -- a deeply weird story -- by Nabokov, about a dragon, called The Dragon. It wonders what it be like if a dragon flew into a little town in Germany, and comes up with: it would get papered with advertisements for a tobacco company, it would be attacked by a circus performer dressed as a knight and in the service of a rival tobacco company, and as a result of this, flies up to his cave, embarrassed, and dies of shame. Which doesn't sound really wrong, as far as dragons in 1930s Germany go. And I don't mean to suggest here that my babbled observations with which I annoy my mother (or whomever's ear is the one closest to my right {which, I notice, is the side to which I most often darkly mutter snark}) is of a quality similar to a Nabokov short story, even a weird Nabokov short story. Rather, that same stream of muttering is something that, as a person who reads and probably reads too much, I have come to take for just the noise of the world; and, of course, the real world is much more often just quite. Just enoughanalyzed. I am subjecting my poor family to that roar that lies on the other side of silence.
Now, I don't super know what to do about this. It is probably the most insidious thing I have ever noticed about my career as a reader, and, luckily, it is not all that insidious. It is one of those lucky problems whose solution is the not talking about it. I tried to defend my constant, remorseless overanalysis to my mother by telling her that it was compulsory, and I don't really know which of the two of us was correct. But obviously, broadcasting whatever Deep Analysis I think of is not compulsory. It's just the fruit of reading too many stories that really work through what the tobacco companies would do to dragons.
Friday, August 7, 2009
More on Rock Bands
Today is Friday, here's a list.
TOP FIVE BANDS/MUSICAL ACTS FROM BOOKS WHOM I WISH WERE REAL
5) The Weird Sisters, from Harry Potter -- Ok, I know they already kind of real, by virtue of being played in the fourth Harry Potter movie by half of Pulp and 2/5 of Radiohead. But that has to be recommendation enough to get them on a list of imaginary bands, right? And, the Do the Hippogriff song is good. It's sounds like it's by Jarvis Cocker, which it is, and that is sufficient for my imaginary band purposes, at least. They are described as "extremely hairy and dressed in black robes that had been artfully ripped and torn" and apparently have names like Heathcote Barbary and Orsino Thruston and Gideon Crumb (which last plays the bagpipes). So yeah, I would have had a 10" by 20" poster of these guys, if they were real.
4) Ormus Cama and Vina Aspara -- These ones are on here largely because of curiosity as to all the people they wouldn't be. Ormus Cama is one third John Lennon, one third Elvis, and one third Freddie Mercury, but he lives in a world in which Elvis has somehow ripped off the music that he has been hearing psychically. It's kind of confusing. And Vina is his muse, so she'd have to come too. One of the most interesting thing's we'd learn from these people, if they were real, is what fem-Lou Reed is like, because in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Lou Reed is a woman: when his ghost twin Gayomart tells him about how weird the other world he's visited is, it's ours, and one of the things about which he is shocked is that Lou's a dude here. Fascinating.
3) Mary Bennet -- Poor Mary. All she does in Pride and Prejudice is bum everyone out, by being plain and wanting to talk about god. However, she is apparently quite gifted at the piano. She could be like a frumpier Glenn Gould! And I always feel bad for her, so she gets on the list.
2) Ok so for this one, I was going to put on Bucky Wunderlick, the pseudo-Bob Dylan from Great Jones Street, but do you know what? I didn't really like Great Jones Street. And anyway, Bob Dylan is barely real anyway, so I'll just throw him on the list his own personal self. From Chronicles, Vol. 1.
1) the Paranoids -- It had to be them, right? The goofball, fake-British invasion house band from Paranoid Mess The Crying of Lot 49 are awesome. They party at least as hard as any band in fiction, or probably real life, and they say funnier cryptically literate things than any band in real life except maybe Radiohead. They seem to sound like the Kinks when the Kinks were only loud, and their lyrics bounce around between sounding like they're by Jack Kerouac and like they're by John Donne. Just the best of both worlds, with this guys. I have an Axis: Bold as Love t-shirt that I wear and always feel self-conscious about, because I feel as if I don't know Jimi Hendrix's work well enough to justify it. And that is exactly the situation I can imagine myself in with regard to the Paranoids.
TOP FIVE BANDS/MUSICAL ACTS FROM BOOKS WHOM I WISH WERE REAL
5) The Weird Sisters, from Harry Potter -- Ok, I know they already kind of real, by virtue of being played in the fourth Harry Potter movie by half of Pulp and 2/5 of Radiohead. But that has to be recommendation enough to get them on a list of imaginary bands, right? And, the Do the Hippogriff song is good. It's sounds like it's by Jarvis Cocker, which it is, and that is sufficient for my imaginary band purposes, at least. They are described as "extremely hairy and dressed in black robes that had been artfully ripped and torn" and apparently have names like Heathcote Barbary and Orsino Thruston and Gideon Crumb (which last plays the bagpipes). So yeah, I would have had a 10" by 20" poster of these guys, if they were real.
4) Ormus Cama and Vina Aspara -- These ones are on here largely because of curiosity as to all the people they wouldn't be. Ormus Cama is one third John Lennon, one third Elvis, and one third Freddie Mercury, but he lives in a world in which Elvis has somehow ripped off the music that he has been hearing psychically. It's kind of confusing. And Vina is his muse, so she'd have to come too. One of the most interesting thing's we'd learn from these people, if they were real, is what fem-Lou Reed is like, because in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Lou Reed is a woman: when his ghost twin Gayomart tells him about how weird the other world he's visited is, it's ours, and one of the things about which he is shocked is that Lou's a dude here. Fascinating.
3) Mary Bennet -- Poor Mary. All she does in Pride and Prejudice is bum everyone out, by being plain and wanting to talk about god. However, she is apparently quite gifted at the piano. She could be like a frumpier Glenn Gould! And I always feel bad for her, so she gets on the list.
2) Ok so for this one, I was going to put on Bucky Wunderlick, the pseudo-Bob Dylan from Great Jones Street, but do you know what? I didn't really like Great Jones Street. And anyway, Bob Dylan is barely real anyway, so I'll just throw him on the list his own personal self. From Chronicles, Vol. 1.
1) the Paranoids -- It had to be them, right? The goofball, fake-British invasion house band from Paranoid Mess The Crying of Lot 49 are awesome. They party at least as hard as any band in fiction, or probably real life, and they say funnier cryptically literate things than any band in real life except maybe Radiohead. They seem to sound like the Kinks when the Kinks were only loud, and their lyrics bounce around between sounding like they're by Jack Kerouac and like they're by John Donne. Just the best of both worlds, with this guys. I have an Axis: Bold as Love t-shirt that I wear and always feel self-conscious about, because I feel as if I don't know Jimi Hendrix's work well enough to justify it. And that is exactly the situation I can imagine myself in with regard to the Paranoids.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
For Those About to Rock Band, We Salute You
I decided the other day that one of the ways I had scaled back my big dreams was, that I had previously imagined being in a band, and now I just imagine impressing a group of people with my prowess at the game Rock Band. Really. Like, before, while dangerously closing my eyes and air guitaring in the car to When You Were Young by the Killers, I would see myself on a stage with like minded hipsters in thrift store clothes, belting away. Now, instead of that, I listen to the same songs and imagine myself impressing instead maybe eight or nine people in thrift store clothes at a party. Sometimes it gets so bad that I end up thinking explicitly about that scene at the end of the episode of Gossip Girl where Serena and Vanessa decide to become friends via Guitar Hero. Terrible.
There are more than enough, probably, books about famous singers; the two I can think of off of my head are Great Jones Street and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I would count Ulysses as a book that's at least a little about famous singers because of Blazes Boylan, I imagine that there are a lot books about aspirant singers, too, though I am sorry to say I cannot think of any of them that I have read. I think the new Jonathan Lethem one was about that? I don't know. But at any rate, I am willing to bet, and cannot imagine, a book about someone's quest to become great at Rock Band. No one wants to see Rock Band on television or in a movie or in a book. Even that thirty second scene in Gossip Girl, with Guitar Hero, seemed as though it were wasting its and our time. The only way that could possibly be deployed would like to mark the would-be Rock Star hero as a dork.
It is as if the kind of fame simulacra is unjustifiable in a fictional character, or at least it is unjustifiable for now. It is as if we expect that if a character is going to be given some dreams, they can at least be bigger dreams than we ourselves could get for one hundred and fifty dollars at WalMart. It would be like reading about someone whose big goal was to break into Twitter, or someone who wanted to get their photos accepted by facebook. Those are not things about which people ought not to care; they are not even things about which particular persons ought not to care a great deal, or to the exclusion of caring about making it as a tambourinist or a writer. But, and because everything seems like an excuse to me to think one more thing about books, it seems worth appreciating that characters -- those fictitious entities whose race written people are the most representative of, for their pure created-ness (viz., there is not even a real person confusing things by portraying them) -- for the fact that no matter how mundane my dreams and goals get, theirs, if I'm going to care about them, will remain big. No matter how many times I start dreaming about five oncoming neon rectangles as the notes I'm banging out instead of guitar tabs, there will still be fictions dreaming the biggest dreams dreamable, like their ancestor, tilting at windmills.
There are more than enough, probably, books about famous singers; the two I can think of off of my head are Great Jones Street and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I would count Ulysses as a book that's at least a little about famous singers because of Blazes Boylan, I imagine that there are a lot books about aspirant singers, too, though I am sorry to say I cannot think of any of them that I have read. I think the new Jonathan Lethem one was about that? I don't know. But at any rate, I am willing to bet, and cannot imagine, a book about someone's quest to become great at Rock Band. No one wants to see Rock Band on television or in a movie or in a book. Even that thirty second scene in Gossip Girl, with Guitar Hero, seemed as though it were wasting its and our time. The only way that could possibly be deployed would like to mark the would-be Rock Star hero as a dork.
It is as if the kind of fame simulacra is unjustifiable in a fictional character, or at least it is unjustifiable for now. It is as if we expect that if a character is going to be given some dreams, they can at least be bigger dreams than we ourselves could get for one hundred and fifty dollars at WalMart. It would be like reading about someone whose big goal was to break into Twitter, or someone who wanted to get their photos accepted by facebook. Those are not things about which people ought not to care; they are not even things about which particular persons ought not to care a great deal, or to the exclusion of caring about making it as a tambourinist or a writer. But, and because everything seems like an excuse to me to think one more thing about books, it seems worth appreciating that characters -- those fictitious entities whose race written people are the most representative of, for their pure created-ness (viz., there is not even a real person confusing things by portraying them) -- for the fact that no matter how mundane my dreams and goals get, theirs, if I'm going to care about them, will remain big. No matter how many times I start dreaming about five oncoming neon rectangles as the notes I'm banging out instead of guitar tabs, there will still be fictions dreaming the biggest dreams dreamable, like their ancestor, tilting at windmills.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The False Azure of the Windowpane
Today I went for a run, and remembered that another reason I, as a literary nerd, like our house here: not our street, or the one next to it, but the one next to that is called Waxwing Lane, which is only a small, pluralizing sibilant away from being waxwing slain, and we all know what poem I have a crush on has that phrase in it's first line. Anyway, that made me think about a book issue that I often try to engage my family on, to their long-suffering: how much do you think about books when you're not reading them? Or actually, I guess the question is more: how much do you use books to think about other things?
Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.
That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.
Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.
That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Vacation, All I Ever Wanted
So, today is the first day of my vacation. Since about June, I have not been doing much of anything other than being nervous and earning my keep around the house, so this trip to North Carolina is sort of a vacation from already being on vacation. That said, I am excited: the annual Schratz family trip down here is SUMMER READING TIME, even though my reading time at home has been largely unimpeded and summer is about two thirds over. There are several reasons why going to our house in North Carolina represents ideal reading time, and that show what an ideal reading situation has on offer.
ONE: Chairs. The chairs here are better than the chairs at our house in Lockport for reading, hands down. I don't think we have any chairs in our house in Lockport, actually, except at the dining room table. It turns out that I can read for like 20-25 more minutes per sit-down of reading, when I can put both of my arms on an armrest at once. This is a critical improvement over our couches. Beyond that, we also have like a hammock swing-chair apparatus, which begs to be read upon. The more utilitarian chairs one might take for granted. When you see a hammock swing-chair apparatus, you know that it has to be sit on; and what better thing to do while so sitting, than read your book? So, lesson: Get yourself a chair you can appreciate, and appreciate it.
TWO: A relative paucity of books. I own too many books. I have to read Benjamin's Unpacking My Library essay constantly, to reassure myself that it is ok to have as many freaking books as I have. In that essay, Benjamin recounts an admirer of Anatole France's asking him (France) if he had read all of the books in his library, to which France said, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?" Point, Anatole. Anyway, I don't know if my unread books make as bad a portion as 90% of my book volume, but whatever they make, it ain't great. They take up five-ish shelves, and I stare at them. Often. Half of my unread books have bookmarks on page 3 or 4, from where I decided to start reading the book after staring at their spines before returning, like a chastened philanderer, to the books I was already on pages 50 and 300 of. In North Carolina, I've only got ten books, so way fewer opportunities to spread myself too thin. It's like committing, for two weeks, to use your Sevres china and use the hell out of it, until it is properly appreciated. Lesson here: it may be necessary to take physical measures to curtail the reader's wandering eye.
THREE: A massive body of water. This is more of a societal issue than a me-issue, but it is surprising to me how much people are more willing to let you go sit and read all day if you do it in front of an ocean or a river or a lake or whatever. Thousands of times, I have huffily told my brothers that I am BUSY READING; the only times that they have retreated with dignity in the face of this huff has been with their backs to bodies of water. I tried this once at home at the Erie Canal, but that didn't really work. There is not a lot soothing about the Erie Canal. This isn't much of a lesson; it's hard to find somebody who will really sell you on being against the contemplation of oceans.
So those are three of the reasons why I am excited for my little vacation I'm on. The books themselves, obviously, are exciting too: I've got more Proust (Proust forever), Mason and Dixon by Pynchon, The Spoils of Poynton, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a few more. So GET AMPED to be bloggified (and now tweeted! @CaptainSchratz) in the coming days. The reading chair is a good blogging chair, as well.
ONE: Chairs. The chairs here are better than the chairs at our house in Lockport for reading, hands down. I don't think we have any chairs in our house in Lockport, actually, except at the dining room table. It turns out that I can read for like 20-25 more minutes per sit-down of reading, when I can put both of my arms on an armrest at once. This is a critical improvement over our couches. Beyond that, we also have like a hammock swing-chair apparatus, which begs to be read upon. The more utilitarian chairs one might take for granted. When you see a hammock swing-chair apparatus, you know that it has to be sit on; and what better thing to do while so sitting, than read your book? So, lesson: Get yourself a chair you can appreciate, and appreciate it.
TWO: A relative paucity of books. I own too many books. I have to read Benjamin's Unpacking My Library essay constantly, to reassure myself that it is ok to have as many freaking books as I have. In that essay, Benjamin recounts an admirer of Anatole France's asking him (France) if he had read all of the books in his library, to which France said, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?" Point, Anatole. Anyway, I don't know if my unread books make as bad a portion as 90% of my book volume, but whatever they make, it ain't great. They take up five-ish shelves, and I stare at them. Often. Half of my unread books have bookmarks on page 3 or 4, from where I decided to start reading the book after staring at their spines before returning, like a chastened philanderer, to the books I was already on pages 50 and 300 of. In North Carolina, I've only got ten books, so way fewer opportunities to spread myself too thin. It's like committing, for two weeks, to use your Sevres china and use the hell out of it, until it is properly appreciated. Lesson here: it may be necessary to take physical measures to curtail the reader's wandering eye.
THREE: A massive body of water. This is more of a societal issue than a me-issue, but it is surprising to me how much people are more willing to let you go sit and read all day if you do it in front of an ocean or a river or a lake or whatever. Thousands of times, I have huffily told my brothers that I am BUSY READING; the only times that they have retreated with dignity in the face of this huff has been with their backs to bodies of water. I tried this once at home at the Erie Canal, but that didn't really work. There is not a lot soothing about the Erie Canal. This isn't much of a lesson; it's hard to find somebody who will really sell you on being against the contemplation of oceans.
So those are three of the reasons why I am excited for my little vacation I'm on. The books themselves, obviously, are exciting too: I've got more Proust (Proust forever), Mason and Dixon by Pynchon, The Spoils of Poynton, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a few more. So GET AMPED to be bloggified (and now tweeted! @CaptainSchratz) in the coming days. The reading chair is a good blogging chair, as well.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Nervous Summer
And but so. I have spent most of the last two months, in which I have not been blogging, being nervous. I have spent hours and hours in front of the ESPN network's Baseball Tonight program, not paying attention to them and instead focusing, with Great Mindfulness, on the pains in my stomach and wondering how much of them were psychic and how much somatic. It was, I began to notice, an almost wholly situation-independent case of nerves; no matter how pleasant or un- things would seem to be, I would become maximum level nervous, and dream up reasons to be so. It made me nervous that I hadn't gotten into any schools, for a while; then it made me really nervous that I had gotten into NYU. It made me nervous that the one of the dogs we live with developed a cough. It made me nervous that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were revealed to have taken steroids in 2003. Anything made me nervous. It was a nervous few months.
I started to notice that there were a few homey things that soothed my nerves to total satisfaction. One was going to the supermarket; one was listening to John Sterling call Yankees games. And a big, generic, booky thing, that I learned from the Summer of Nerves, was the incredible therapeutic power of the Fat Book of Short Stories. The particular Fat Book of Short Stories that I have been seeking solace in is the Early Stories of John Updike, but based on some dabbling in Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, I think that others can work as well. Novels (most novels, anyway; not, say, Proust, on whom more soon) can be tempestuous relationships; they are capitalist little monsters, committed to dynamism. Things should have changed greatly from one chapter to the next in the novel. Take, say, Mansfield Park, a great book by Jane Austen, that makes enormous changes in both tone and pace. At the time in life in which I read Mansfield Park, I read a lot at a Starbucks while I waited for my brother Pete to finish his driving lessons. And it sort of jerks around: Fanny always seems at the point of being denied the life she wants, and the narrative takes some time off for class satire. Or, things are speeding along, and then we get the very long, very excellent, but very disruptive focus on the play that Fanny's cousins put on. Not quite a soothing element.
The Fat Books of Short Stories, however, are little pieces of stasis. Very little happens, and it happens beautifully, exquisitely. The well-formed short story tends to have one action, one Thing That This is the Story About; and the action is surrounded by a murmur of beautifully pitched observation, framing our action and delighting us. Especially in a writer like Updike, whose capaciousness allows for infinite gradations of tone, or one like O'Connor, whose singleness of purpose provides the same, we can return, story after story, to our Fat Book and find ourselves right where we were, and, provided that this is an author we like, we find ourselves just where we want to be. My nervous summer began with me reading 2666 on a beach, with its swooping plot and jagged contours; and hopefully, the nervous part of that summer will end here, with Updike and his fat book of beautifully considered, beautifully same moments.
Incidentally, I am only about a third of the way through my Updike book, which only goes about two fifths through Updike's career, but my favorite stories, for those of you wanting to get a toe (soothingly) wet, are: Pigeon Feathers, which has a magnificent final sentence; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth; A Trillion Feet of Gas; and Twin Beds in Rome. So, for all of you who wondering what my favorite Updikes from about before 1960 were: there you are.
I started to notice that there were a few homey things that soothed my nerves to total satisfaction. One was going to the supermarket; one was listening to John Sterling call Yankees games. And a big, generic, booky thing, that I learned from the Summer of Nerves, was the incredible therapeutic power of the Fat Book of Short Stories. The particular Fat Book of Short Stories that I have been seeking solace in is the Early Stories of John Updike, but based on some dabbling in Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, I think that others can work as well. Novels (most novels, anyway; not, say, Proust, on whom more soon) can be tempestuous relationships; they are capitalist little monsters, committed to dynamism. Things should have changed greatly from one chapter to the next in the novel. Take, say, Mansfield Park, a great book by Jane Austen, that makes enormous changes in both tone and pace. At the time in life in which I read Mansfield Park, I read a lot at a Starbucks while I waited for my brother Pete to finish his driving lessons. And it sort of jerks around: Fanny always seems at the point of being denied the life she wants, and the narrative takes some time off for class satire. Or, things are speeding along, and then we get the very long, very excellent, but very disruptive focus on the play that Fanny's cousins put on. Not quite a soothing element.
The Fat Books of Short Stories, however, are little pieces of stasis. Very little happens, and it happens beautifully, exquisitely. The well-formed short story tends to have one action, one Thing That This is the Story About; and the action is surrounded by a murmur of beautifully pitched observation, framing our action and delighting us. Especially in a writer like Updike, whose capaciousness allows for infinite gradations of tone, or one like O'Connor, whose singleness of purpose provides the same, we can return, story after story, to our Fat Book and find ourselves right where we were, and, provided that this is an author we like, we find ourselves just where we want to be. My nervous summer began with me reading 2666 on a beach, with its swooping plot and jagged contours; and hopefully, the nervous part of that summer will end here, with Updike and his fat book of beautifully considered, beautifully same moments.
Incidentally, I am only about a third of the way through my Updike book, which only goes about two fifths through Updike's career, but my favorite stories, for those of you wanting to get a toe (soothingly) wet, are: Pigeon Feathers, which has a magnificent final sentence; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth; A Trillion Feet of Gas; and Twin Beds in Rome. So, for all of you who wondering what my favorite Updikes from about before 1960 were: there you are.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Me on Denby on Snark
OK, David Denby. I wanted his indictment of snark to be good. I read a screed -- an "agony", if you please -- against quirk that ran in the Atlantic about two years ago, and I thought it was good, which is to say well-argued, and it made me kind of mad because I loved all of the things that it was slightly dismissive of (Royal Tenenbaums, Flight of the Conchords, Ira Glass). I thought that it was all wrong, but I liked that it formulated intelligently a position that I viewed as incorrect. It thought that there was too much quirk, that quirk was overdeployed, &c. I thought that all it was really doing was lumping some common things together that were, for their own reasons, bad, and announcing them as a bad form of quirk while salvaging the things they liked. As such, it was ultimately unsatisfying on its own, but at least it articulated a position that made my own, pro-quirk position more easily defensible.
Snark does the same sort of thing -- it rattles off about forty things that annoy David Denby, says that they are making everyone mean, and then says that they ought to stop. His problem is a harder one, though, to tackle than the Great Quirk Issue of Aught Seven, because snark is wider ranging and more insidious than quirk, which, when it is bad, is just kind of annoying. It's an evasion of art, is bad quirk, while snark suffocates art. Indeed, according to David Denby, "contemporary art is post-aesthetic." The snarkers don't make art; he seems to suggest that they are artistically impotent; all they do is make wisecracks. And of course, that is true of some of the scenarios that Denby describes. He mentions Penn Jillette saying that, during the 2008 presidential primaries, Obama outperformed Hillary Clinton in February, that being Black History Month, and that Clinton should do better in March beause that is "White Bitch Month". All of the volume of Denby's pique against Snark ought to be directed at such stupid things as that. But this is where, again, his scope outpaces the Quirk issue, and goes too far. He wants to say that all vicious bitchiness is of a piece with that shockingly unfunny thing that Penn Jillette. And of course, other named snarkers, including betes noires like gawker, wonkette, and Spy Magazine, do nothing of the kind.
Denby is particularly insistent about two issues. First, he is constantly invoking his love of the Colbert Report as evidence that he appreciates vituperation when it is properly aimed. And secondly, he is constantly calling upon a notion of "knowingness" as the element of snark that is particularly galling. Neither of these points, unfortunately, make any sense when stacked against his actual complaints. The kinds of nasty humor to which Denby pays lip service as valuable public goods are, of course, as dependent on knowingness as anything put up in the dreaded blogosphere, only the knowledge to which they appeal is largely to be found in the New York Times. The knowledge to which snark appeals is apparently unacceptable for its being found elsewhere, in all sorts of low culture media. And the biggest mistake that Denby makes here is his assumption that the sort of knowingness he derides is sought, that it is something that the snickering snarkers have gone out of their way to achieve. It is in fact quite the opposite.
What Denby spectacularly fails to consider is that everyone today can be appealed to as in a position of knowingness, because everyone is told things constantly, and all of the time. The things that he decries as snark (besides the obvious straw men like that Penn Jillette quote, which I guess he thinks trades on knowing that March is women's history month) are almost always commentary about commentary, more information about how much damn information we are always having thrown at us. I know way more than I want to about all of the actors, writers, athletes about whom I care, and the supposedly destructive snark is not a gleefully wicked celebration of that fact, but a lament. Snark is so sick of supposedly earnest information that, even as it itself presents more information, it rails against the whole damn thing. And that's what Denby, somewhat surprisingly, fails to see: this form of communication that so outrages him is itself a form of outrage, an exhaustion itself rather than an exhilaration.
Snark does the same sort of thing -- it rattles off about forty things that annoy David Denby, says that they are making everyone mean, and then says that they ought to stop. His problem is a harder one, though, to tackle than the Great Quirk Issue of Aught Seven, because snark is wider ranging and more insidious than quirk, which, when it is bad, is just kind of annoying. It's an evasion of art, is bad quirk, while snark suffocates art. Indeed, according to David Denby, "contemporary art is post-aesthetic." The snarkers don't make art; he seems to suggest that they are artistically impotent; all they do is make wisecracks. And of course, that is true of some of the scenarios that Denby describes. He mentions Penn Jillette saying that, during the 2008 presidential primaries, Obama outperformed Hillary Clinton in February, that being Black History Month, and that Clinton should do better in March beause that is "White Bitch Month". All of the volume of Denby's pique against Snark ought to be directed at such stupid things as that. But this is where, again, his scope outpaces the Quirk issue, and goes too far. He wants to say that all vicious bitchiness is of a piece with that shockingly unfunny thing that Penn Jillette. And of course, other named snarkers, including betes noires like gawker, wonkette, and Spy Magazine, do nothing of the kind.
Denby is particularly insistent about two issues. First, he is constantly invoking his love of the Colbert Report as evidence that he appreciates vituperation when it is properly aimed. And secondly, he is constantly calling upon a notion of "knowingness" as the element of snark that is particularly galling. Neither of these points, unfortunately, make any sense when stacked against his actual complaints. The kinds of nasty humor to which Denby pays lip service as valuable public goods are, of course, as dependent on knowingness as anything put up in the dreaded blogosphere, only the knowledge to which they appeal is largely to be found in the New York Times. The knowledge to which snark appeals is apparently unacceptable for its being found elsewhere, in all sorts of low culture media. And the biggest mistake that Denby makes here is his assumption that the sort of knowingness he derides is sought, that it is something that the snickering snarkers have gone out of their way to achieve. It is in fact quite the opposite.
What Denby spectacularly fails to consider is that everyone today can be appealed to as in a position of knowingness, because everyone is told things constantly, and all of the time. The things that he decries as snark (besides the obvious straw men like that Penn Jillette quote, which I guess he thinks trades on knowing that March is women's history month) are almost always commentary about commentary, more information about how much damn information we are always having thrown at us. I know way more than I want to about all of the actors, writers, athletes about whom I care, and the supposedly destructive snark is not a gleefully wicked celebration of that fact, but a lament. Snark is so sick of supposedly earnest information that, even as it itself presents more information, it rails against the whole damn thing. And that's what Denby, somewhat surprisingly, fails to see: this form of communication that so outrages him is itself a form of outrage, an exhaustion itself rather than an exhilaration.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Have You Heard of That Kindle Thing?
So, sometimes the Book Review -- my old friend -- and I get tired of each other. We are not the perfect fit that say, this blog and its two readers are. Sometimes, the NYTBR gets a little BookTV for me. I always think that I should like BookTV, but then I always find myself watching the third Josh Elliott/Hannah Storm Sportscenter in a row. The problem is mutual -- sometimes, I want more depth then the Book Review is set up to provide (no spoilers and all), and sometimes, I am just cold more of a book nerd than whatever other kind of nerd they are catering to on BookTV. Like, they will have a guy on talking about the CIA, for CIA nerds, and I will be more curious about whether or not there is anything in the book as frustrating to think about as the fact that David Addington brought his own gazpacho to lunch everyday.
The place to go for way more depth is, of course, "scholarly articles", which are fine to read and to talk about if you can get past the fact that everyone will stop wanting to talk to you when you say things like "Great article in Milton Quarterly last quarter, you should check it out." For the other kind of thing that I like -- pure book nerdiness -- you have to just wait for the Times to deliver, and boy did they deliver today.
The title is already great -- "With Kindle, Can You Tell It's Proust?" -- and then imagine my delight when, after some scene setting about Kindle and the usual oohing and aahing over the putatively great Kindle techne (boring) we get this, the crux of the piece: "Please, they’re [that is, they who worry about Kindle's effects on the economics of reading are] overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?" The effects of anything on literary snobbism are, of course, the first effects I think about. I also found myself nodding happily when I read some of the testimonials later in the article: "When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person" (although minus points to that guy for showing off that he sees movies at MOMA); "I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading Ulysses." Judging and hoping to be judged by books? Done and done. It's not even two pm and I've done both of those already today. The problem with the Kindle, as assessed here, is that this makes this hard. If I were Kindling Ulysses instead of carrying it around, well, for all we know you're just Kindling, oh, I don't know, something easy and non-impressive to read. (Something un-Prousty, say.)
This reminded me of the article, discussed here last year, about whether or not there were books that represented deal-breakers in relationships, and The Furious Debate that that engendered. Except, of course, there was no Furious Debate at all. There as here, the only thing that we really come away with is mild snark against popular books (this year, He's Just Not Into You, last year, Marley and Me) and the sense that, the fantasies of all book nerds (myself included) notwithstanding, there's really no eluctable way in which the sum of the things you read, or want to read, or endorse, constitute the person you are.
That is kind of a bummer. The part of me that looks forward to nothing more than this kind of article -- not a book review, not a scholarly article, but a sheer slice of nerd fantasy sociology -- also wants to believe that the way you make friends is to find people who like the same books as you, preferably just by walking around with your book like a badge, and then skip to making snarky jokes about Marley and Me together. But really, you have to actually act like a whole person instead of a syllabus, which, as iterated, is difficult. That's the sort of sadness of things like this Kindle article: if the world was built by book nerds, the Kindle would be an intolerable instrument of opacity; in the world as we have it, it's no big.
This is all true, and is all the sort of thing one knows, as one knows that the world is round. But it's not at all the case that one has to act as such. You can bet that, the next time I see a girl in a coffeeshop reading the Sun Also Rises or whatever, I will, however briefly, envision her as the future Mrs. Schratz. Isn't it pretty to think so?
The place to go for way more depth is, of course, "scholarly articles", which are fine to read and to talk about if you can get past the fact that everyone will stop wanting to talk to you when you say things like "Great article in Milton Quarterly last quarter, you should check it out." For the other kind of thing that I like -- pure book nerdiness -- you have to just wait for the Times to deliver, and boy did they deliver today.
The title is already great -- "With Kindle, Can You Tell It's Proust?" -- and then imagine my delight when, after some scene setting about Kindle and the usual oohing and aahing over the putatively great Kindle techne (boring) we get this, the crux of the piece: "Please, they’re [that is, they who worry about Kindle's effects on the economics of reading are] overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?" The effects of anything on literary snobbism are, of course, the first effects I think about. I also found myself nodding happily when I read some of the testimonials later in the article: "When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person" (although minus points to that guy for showing off that he sees movies at MOMA); "I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading Ulysses." Judging and hoping to be judged by books? Done and done. It's not even two pm and I've done both of those already today. The problem with the Kindle, as assessed here, is that this makes this hard. If I were Kindling Ulysses instead of carrying it around, well, for all we know you're just Kindling, oh, I don't know, something easy and non-impressive to read. (Something un-Prousty, say.)
This reminded me of the article, discussed here last year, about whether or not there were books that represented deal-breakers in relationships, and The Furious Debate that that engendered. Except, of course, there was no Furious Debate at all. There as here, the only thing that we really come away with is mild snark against popular books (this year, He's Just Not Into You, last year, Marley and Me) and the sense that, the fantasies of all book nerds (myself included) notwithstanding, there's really no eluctable way in which the sum of the things you read, or want to read, or endorse, constitute the person you are.
That is kind of a bummer. The part of me that looks forward to nothing more than this kind of article -- not a book review, not a scholarly article, but a sheer slice of nerd fantasy sociology -- also wants to believe that the way you make friends is to find people who like the same books as you, preferably just by walking around with your book like a badge, and then skip to making snarky jokes about Marley and Me together. But really, you have to actually act like a whole person instead of a syllabus, which, as iterated, is difficult. That's the sort of sadness of things like this Kindle article: if the world was built by book nerds, the Kindle would be an intolerable instrument of opacity; in the world as we have it, it's no big.
This is all true, and is all the sort of thing one knows, as one knows that the world is round. But it's not at all the case that one has to act as such. You can bet that, the next time I see a girl in a coffeeshop reading the Sun Also Rises or whatever, I will, however briefly, envision her as the future Mrs. Schratz. Isn't it pretty to think so?
Ostranenie
So, bad job by me, both at celebrating National Poetry Month and its resorbed, smaller twin, National Poem in Your Pocket Day. I actually did celebrate each somewhat, but I only wrote about two (2) poems on this "weblog", down from four (4) last year. And, worst of all, I did not post anything at all on National P. in Your P. day itself. I meant to, but ha! as usual, things ganged way the hell agley once again.
I did manage to walk around with poems in my pocket yesterday, although again down from four to two. Last year, I spent the whole day basking in the glorious Williamstown, MA sun, handing out poems like it was my job. This year, I had to a) proctor a test and b) drive ten hours, round trip, to a courthouse in Fulton, New York, to contest a speeding ticket. On my way to the former, I realized that oh crap, I had been talking up National Poem in Your Pocket Day for over a month at the school where I sometimes subsitute teach, and that I had gotten as far as the donut store on my morning routine with zero (0) poems. So I wrote on napkins the two poems that I felt like I had the least chance of screwing up: Sion, by Cesarea Tinajero, and The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. You will, I've no doubt, remember Sion, the three-lines (not three-line; it's actually 0 words, three lines, and three squares) poem that is all that remains of the poetess Tinajero's work in the Savage Detectives. No one that I showed that one to seemed impressed.
The other one, I showed to my mother and asked her what she thought was the most important word in the poem. She voted for wheelbarrow, which does get top billing and is probably right and made me feel a little silly for asking the question in the first place, because my dissenting vote is that the most important word in the poem is "glazed". That is because every other word I have probably said in the last three days without thinking about it. From very cursory reading -- like, four pages in Eagleton's introduction to Literary Theory -- I am learnt that there are Russian formalists, and that they came up with an emphasis on a thing called "ostranenie", or defamiliarization. Said Shklovsky, consonant-endowed ringleader of the R. Formalists: "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known...art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." Now, beyond the enigmatic sense conveyed by the first stanza of Williams's poem (depends for whom?), all of the energy is focused on the artfulness of that wheelbarrow -- and I contend that that energy has its crux in the word "glazed", the defamiliarizer. Read the poem with a workaday word like "wet" or even "soaked" for "glazed", and I think it fails to live up to its own first stanza. But as it stands, the poem is breathtaking: the one little syllable of ostranenie makes an entire scene into a piece of art.
Anyway, armed (or pocketed) with my two poems, I drove all the way out to Fulton, on the Thruway, through Rochester and Geneva and Syracuse and Utica, flipping through NPR stations as their signals faded; and my ticket was dismissed (hooray!); and I drove home along Route 5, listening to the Yankees win and to the Celtics lose, and I drove behind a west-moving, intermittent rainstorm. I had never driven all the way home on Route 5 before (it takes a really long time, but there is no toll), but most of Route 5 looks like most of Route everything else -- lots of box stores and fast food places and farms -- except that, I am not kidding, because of the storm I followed, absolutely everything was glazed/with rain water. For six hours of intermittent rain and a universal, unrelenting glaze, with my poem in my pocket, I was treated to two hundred miles of New York State Highway as an object of artfulness. It damn near made up for the Celtics losing.
So au revoir, National Poetry Month. Coming up: I am still plugging away at Proust, life-changingly, so more on him; much-belated final thoughts on Ms. Tinajero's book (so you all can post your final thoughts, too!); and the possibility of a National Short Story Month (get on it, Congress). Stay tuned!
I did manage to walk around with poems in my pocket yesterday, although again down from four to two. Last year, I spent the whole day basking in the glorious Williamstown, MA sun, handing out poems like it was my job. This year, I had to a) proctor a test and b) drive ten hours, round trip, to a courthouse in Fulton, New York, to contest a speeding ticket. On my way to the former, I realized that oh crap, I had been talking up National Poem in Your Pocket Day for over a month at the school where I sometimes subsitute teach, and that I had gotten as far as the donut store on my morning routine with zero (0) poems. So I wrote on napkins the two poems that I felt like I had the least chance of screwing up: Sion, by Cesarea Tinajero, and The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. You will, I've no doubt, remember Sion, the three-lines (not three-line; it's actually 0 words, three lines, and three squares) poem that is all that remains of the poetess Tinajero's work in the Savage Detectives. No one that I showed that one to seemed impressed.
The other one, I showed to my mother and asked her what she thought was the most important word in the poem. She voted for wheelbarrow, which does get top billing and is probably right and made me feel a little silly for asking the question in the first place, because my dissenting vote is that the most important word in the poem is "glazed". That is because every other word I have probably said in the last three days without thinking about it. From very cursory reading -- like, four pages in Eagleton's introduction to Literary Theory -- I am learnt that there are Russian formalists, and that they came up with an emphasis on a thing called "ostranenie", or defamiliarization. Said Shklovsky, consonant-endowed ringleader of the R. Formalists: "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known...art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." Now, beyond the enigmatic sense conveyed by the first stanza of Williams's poem (depends for whom?), all of the energy is focused on the artfulness of that wheelbarrow -- and I contend that that energy has its crux in the word "glazed", the defamiliarizer. Read the poem with a workaday word like "wet" or even "soaked" for "glazed", and I think it fails to live up to its own first stanza. But as it stands, the poem is breathtaking: the one little syllable of ostranenie makes an entire scene into a piece of art.
Anyway, armed (or pocketed) with my two poems, I drove all the way out to Fulton, on the Thruway, through Rochester and Geneva and Syracuse and Utica, flipping through NPR stations as their signals faded; and my ticket was dismissed (hooray!); and I drove home along Route 5, listening to the Yankees win and to the Celtics lose, and I drove behind a west-moving, intermittent rainstorm. I had never driven all the way home on Route 5 before (it takes a really long time, but there is no toll), but most of Route 5 looks like most of Route everything else -- lots of box stores and fast food places and farms -- except that, I am not kidding, because of the storm I followed, absolutely everything was glazed/with rain water. For six hours of intermittent rain and a universal, unrelenting glaze, with my poem in my pocket, I was treated to two hundred miles of New York State Highway as an object of artfulness. It damn near made up for the Celtics losing.
So au revoir, National Poetry Month. Coming up: I am still plugging away at Proust, life-changingly, so more on him; much-belated final thoughts on Ms. Tinajero's book (so you all can post your final thoughts, too!); and the possibility of a National Short Story Month (get on it, Congress). Stay tuned!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Happy Shakespeare's Birthday!
Happy Shakespeare's Birthday, everyone! One of the seventh-graders whom I was substitute teaching today asked, when I had written that on the chalkboard, shouldn't I have written Happy Birthday, Shakespeare. Well, no, because he is dead and anyway it's a happy occasion for us, not just for him. Not even for him, now that he is dead. Anyway here is a Birthday Listicle for my man Shakespeare, of the top four quotes that I think celebrate the big 4-4-5.
Oh, also, I think "Talk Like Shakespeare" day is kind of silly unless you take it WAY EXTREME and start using real, pre-vowel shift, clipped jabbering instead of just saying "sirrah" and "neither a borrower nor a lender be". I don't think that part of "talking like Shakespeare" is the same as "quoting unnecessarily and stupidly". We'll save that for talk like Polonius day.
4)"Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
Thou know'st, when we first smell the air
We wawl and cry..........................
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools." -- King Lear
So, right of the bat, a downer. Someone, I think Cavell, points out that, uh, Shakespeare, that's not really why we cry when we're born. But still. On your birthday, you can feel that way. I used to refuse to celebrate my birthday, because if you made up a ledger with all of my woes on it, I was doing a lot better pre-birth than post-birth, and didn't want to celebrate just the start of all my troubles. But with the right inflection, you can be a good stoic on your birthday by reminding yourself that indeed, we came crying hither.
3)"And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones." -- King Henry V
This one is a little testy, too, and I'm not totally sure that the tennis balls that the Dauphin sends Henry (for laffs) are a birthday present (in fact, I'm almost positive they're not). But this is a useful one for the Shakespeare-birthday quote arsenal, to trot out if anyone's gag gift incites you to invade their country while claiming the benefit of Salic law.
2) The First Twelve Lines of Sonnet XXX
I like this one -- it's the "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past" one -- not just because it's a little Prousty (a lot Prousty for anglophones), but also because it has the kind of grim account taking that I imagine one does on one's birthday. The last lines, though, I feel are a little soppy. This one's kind of a downer, too, like the first one; but like I said, with the woe-ledger, I generally get down (sad down, not boogie-down) about birthdays.
1) "When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! it blows up a man like a bladder."--Falstaff
So, sad about anyone's birthday? Nothing will cheer you up out of that faster than Falstaff. After all the mopery of the proceeding, I laughed several times reading the post-Gad's Hill robbery scene, the one whence this quote. One of the best things available to us on our birthdays -- other than the impulse to pwn your Salic enemies -- is to look back and reward ourselves not just with the "fore-bemoaned moan" from the sonnet, but also with, what the hell, a vision of your life as you'd have liked it to be. Falstaff is an expert at that, and on Shakespeare's birthday and our own birthdays, we can choose to remember the times that we could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring, because why not.
Oh, also, I think "Talk Like Shakespeare" day is kind of silly unless you take it WAY EXTREME and start using real, pre-vowel shift, clipped jabbering instead of just saying "sirrah" and "neither a borrower nor a lender be". I don't think that part of "talking like Shakespeare" is the same as "quoting unnecessarily and stupidly". We'll save that for talk like Polonius day.
4)"Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
Thou know'st, when we first smell the air
We wawl and cry..........................
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools." -- King Lear
So, right of the bat, a downer. Someone, I think Cavell, points out that, uh, Shakespeare, that's not really why we cry when we're born. But still. On your birthday, you can feel that way. I used to refuse to celebrate my birthday, because if you made up a ledger with all of my woes on it, I was doing a lot better pre-birth than post-birth, and didn't want to celebrate just the start of all my troubles. But with the right inflection, you can be a good stoic on your birthday by reminding yourself that indeed, we came crying hither.
3)"And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones." -- King Henry V
This one is a little testy, too, and I'm not totally sure that the tennis balls that the Dauphin sends Henry (for laffs) are a birthday present (in fact, I'm almost positive they're not). But this is a useful one for the Shakespeare-birthday quote arsenal, to trot out if anyone's gag gift incites you to invade their country while claiming the benefit of Salic law.
2) The First Twelve Lines of Sonnet XXX
I like this one -- it's the "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past" one -- not just because it's a little Prousty (a lot Prousty for anglophones), but also because it has the kind of grim account taking that I imagine one does on one's birthday. The last lines, though, I feel are a little soppy. This one's kind of a downer, too, like the first one; but like I said, with the woe-ledger, I generally get down (sad down, not boogie-down) about birthdays.
1) "When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! it blows up a man like a bladder."--Falstaff
So, sad about anyone's birthday? Nothing will cheer you up out of that faster than Falstaff. After all the mopery of the proceeding, I laughed several times reading the post-Gad's Hill robbery scene, the one whence this quote. One of the best things available to us on our birthdays -- other than the impulse to pwn your Salic enemies -- is to look back and reward ourselves not just with the "fore-bemoaned moan" from the sonnet, but also with, what the hell, a vision of your life as you'd have liked it to be. Falstaff is an expert at that, and on Shakespeare's birthday and our own birthdays, we can choose to remember the times that we could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring, because why not.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wild Surmise
Here are some thoughts on poem two of a long National Poetry Month; let's see if we can knock down poems a little more quickly from here on in. This poem is about looking into old poetry, because what else is this month about? This poem was re-brought to my mind by a friend of mine who lives in Darien (but not the one mentioned in the poem) and who vacations in Smyrna (but not the one from the famous Hemingway supershort story On the Quai at Smyrna), making her, I guess, a sort of ersatz literary celebrity. Anyway, the poet is Keats (big poet Keats) and the poem is "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer".
This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".
I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.
This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".
I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Charmed with Smiles and Soap
This post is about snark, or rather, The Snark, the quarry of Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark". It is not about David Denby's book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, which I will talk about soon. Rather, my reading some of Denby's book (which Miles mentioned in a comment a little ways back, and which seems in general the kind of Hip Zeitgesity Thing I tend to write about a few months late) has inspired me to look into the etymological provenance of Snark, and that place is Carroll's poem. And! It is National Poetry Month! So, count this as the festivities beginning.
What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:
"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."
This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.
Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.
What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.
Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.
What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:
"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."
This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.
Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.
What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.
Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
How How Proust Can Change Your Life Can Change Your Life
Connor and I went to New Orleans last week. As soon as we got to our hotel, we went out to a series of touristy bars, at which we drank away most of our money (Pat O'Brien's Hurricanes, Spring Break!), so we spent the rest of the time looking at cemeteries (often closed), eating ice for dinner, and going to bookstores in order to read the magazines there without buying them. The one that held my interest the longest was the current issue of Mental Floss, which has a book with the coils that you see on those big fat square batteries on the top of it, to herald a list: The 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years. I had only read eight (weak), but all of them seemed like reasonable choices. The ones I didn't read seemed, from their blurbs, reasonable as well, and there were no books that I could think of that seemed more Powerful from the last 25 years, although I think part of that is I feel like I am not really qualified to gauge what is and is not powerful about books, since I cried at the end of Pnin and clearly overvalue the power of books in the first place. Anyway, number 17 was How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, and I am choosing it as the newest book club selection, because hey, you should all have your lives changed by Proust as well.
You all know Proust, yes? He is the fellow who tasted madeleines, dipped in tea, and remembered his life for the next three thousand pages or so. Proust can change your life, I think, insofar as someone who like me has only got to know him in translation can vouch. C.S. Lewis, in a quote that I once floated as an epigram for Our Beloved Blog, said that "We read, to know that we are not alone." This is a quote that I have a number of problems with, as I've mentioned; one of the things I said was that maybe essays, much more than fiction, could remind you that you're not alone. My favorite thing about Proust, which shows up in the de Botton book and which I am gleaning (halfway through Within a Budding Grove) in reading it myself, is that he has torqued his novel into something like an endless essay; it's like those little, once-every-ten-paragraphs generalizing mini-essays that George Eliot gave us have taken over the entire show. Proust loves to tell you not what people are like, but what sort of people people are like. "Swann was one of those men," he tells us, "who, having lived for a long time among the illusions of love have seen the blessings they have brought to innumerable women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness toward their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will allow them to survive after their death." Reading along, one might not think a lot of it. "Of course, one of those men." But really? Do you know anyone who does that? I don't, and I certainly wouldn't, if I met one, call him "one of those men". But the fantasy that Proust offers is one of infinite generalizability: if there is a person out there, he or she is one of those persons, and if there is a church that young Marcel visits, it is one of those churches. I find this inordinately appealing, maybe even...life changing?
In the Mental Floss blurb, they call How Proust Can Change Your Life "The Book that Helped People to Stop Helping Themselves", and they have de Botton saying, "What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense...I find a certain kind of pessimism consoling and helpful. Part of fulfillment might be recognizing how awful life is." Sounds good. So, check out the book; check out the actual Proust book if you also care to (I plan on finishing Within a Budding Grove and starting the Guermantes Way tomorrow while I'm supposed to be doing chores).
You all know Proust, yes? He is the fellow who tasted madeleines, dipped in tea, and remembered his life for the next three thousand pages or so. Proust can change your life, I think, insofar as someone who like me has only got to know him in translation can vouch. C.S. Lewis, in a quote that I once floated as an epigram for Our Beloved Blog, said that "We read, to know that we are not alone." This is a quote that I have a number of problems with, as I've mentioned; one of the things I said was that maybe essays, much more than fiction, could remind you that you're not alone. My favorite thing about Proust, which shows up in the de Botton book and which I am gleaning (halfway through Within a Budding Grove) in reading it myself, is that he has torqued his novel into something like an endless essay; it's like those little, once-every-ten-paragraphs generalizing mini-essays that George Eliot gave us have taken over the entire show. Proust loves to tell you not what people are like, but what sort of people people are like. "Swann was one of those men," he tells us, "who, having lived for a long time among the illusions of love have seen the blessings they have brought to innumerable women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness toward their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will allow them to survive after their death." Reading along, one might not think a lot of it. "Of course, one of those men." But really? Do you know anyone who does that? I don't, and I certainly wouldn't, if I met one, call him "one of those men". But the fantasy that Proust offers is one of infinite generalizability: if there is a person out there, he or she is one of those persons, and if there is a church that young Marcel visits, it is one of those churches. I find this inordinately appealing, maybe even...life changing?
In the Mental Floss blurb, they call How Proust Can Change Your Life "The Book that Helped People to Stop Helping Themselves", and they have de Botton saying, "What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense...I find a certain kind of pessimism consoling and helpful. Part of fulfillment might be recognizing how awful life is." Sounds good. So, check out the book; check out the actual Proust book if you also care to (I plan on finishing Within a Budding Grove and starting the Guermantes Way tomorrow while I'm supposed to be doing chores).
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