Joss and Sally

"And then, so true is it that one thing leads to another and that you can try a good man just so high, he suddenly found that she was in his arms. After that, he hardly knew what he was doing. Chibnall, however, could have told him. Chibnall, with his intimate knowledge of the Nosegay Novelette series, would have recognized the procedure immediately. He was clasping Sally to his bosom and showering burning kisses on her upturned face." -- P.G. Wodehouse, in Quick Service

Chibnall, in this scene, is a butler, and he loves novelettes; his fiancee, Miss Pym, is a barmaid who loves detective stories. The beginning of the passage that I have quoted is distinctively Wodehouse (the twinned bits of cant in the first sentence; the subtle ordering of the scene in calling what's happening "the procedure"). The very end is an example of something that pops up in Wodehouse a lot, distinctively his by distinctively not belonging to him: just as later, with a lot of gangster talk, he will weave in bits of Miss Pym's detective stories, we are getting a little undigested prose from one of the Nosegay Novelettes. We have already figured out, probably by the second sentence, what the he is doing to the her; and it is a fun and funny little reward when the romance novel's language arrives so exactly. Joss (the he) is kissing Sally (the her): that's the plot, and all of the fun in the sentence is the running from the Wodehouse to the Nosegay register.

"You need kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how" -- Rhett Butler
"For 'kissed', substitute the word you're thinking of." -- Roger Ebert

Wodehouse can move with ease between these two registers because politeness and lust had teamed up, over a few hundred years, to make sure that writing about kissing was often carried out in a fairly regimented way. The kisses are often hot, or accompanied by hot tears, and are often showered or otherwise discretely dispensed. My favorite part of the passage from Wodehouse is that they are all falling on Sally Fairmile's upturned face. Upturned face is the best, the most clearly romance-literary chunk of the passage. It perfectly and asexually reminds us about these two bodies, angled toward each other, Joss showering burning kisses on Sally, in the most rewarding position that they can be, in chaste Wodehouse or in chaste Nosegay novelettes.

"Moreover, the kiss, one particular contact of this kind, between the mucous membrane of the lips of the two people concerned, is held in high sexual esteem among many nations (including the most highly civilized ones) in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract." -- Sigmund Freud, from "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"

Shortly after the procedure described above, Joss and Sally are interrupted by Sally's fiance, Lord Holbeton, who says, "I say!" (Wodehouse describes this as not quite the thing that Othello would've said). Shortly after that, Joss begins applying mascara to his face, as a mustache, and writing on the mirror of the room (his employer's) with lipstick. I don't know why he does this; it's not quite gone into. However, it coming right on the heels of the kissing put me in mind of the marvelous above sentence, from Freud, his fascinating bewilderment at the act of kissing, which seems just as ungovernable, as unliterary and unchaste and just plain unusual, as the mascara mustache or the lipstick writing. Freud gets a bad knock, I think, for being obsessed with sex, or with attributing too much to various sex drives or such. Instead, I think that what Freud insists upon is the deep weirdness of every single in the world. Everything is filtered through sex drives for Freud because sex drives are weird, and so is everything else: form, digestive tracts, kisses.

Yes. Isn't It Nice to Think So?

I'm reading a (ahem) rather scholarly book about Nabokov's fake scholium on a fake poem Pale Fire, which is called Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. It is by the apparently very well regarded (and why shouldn't he be?) Brian Boyd, and apparently it caused something of a scandal when it was unleashed upon the world, as in it, Boyd renounces his position as a leader of the Shadeans (people who think that John Shade, the fake person who in the novel Pale Fire is credited with writing the poem, actually invented Charles Kinbote, the fake person who writes a misguided commentary about the poem) and returns to the position that KInbote and Shade each wrote the sections that the text says they wrote. Everything is what it is and not another thing. However, Boyd goes onto say that both Kinbote and Shade are influenced by the ghost of Hazel Shade, and that, post-his-own-mortem, Shade joins his daughter in suggesting things to Kinbote that make the most compelling parts of his commentary compelling. Boyd does a lot of work to tease out hidden connections: Kinbote's grandfather's mistress, Iris Acht, is one of Hazel's avatars because her name is an eye-part, and because Hazel's name is a color that refers almost exclusively to that eye-part.

Frankly, I don't have any idea what to make of any of this. It is difficult enough to talk about Pale Fire to anyone who hasn't read it (really: try explaining it to your mother and see if you make it past "999 line poem in heroic couplets), and it's difficult enough to talk to anyone who has read it without just enjoying yourself in the comic and tragic luxuriances of its prose. I honestly can't figure out how the idea that dead Hazel has, like Sibyl Vane, started communicating through Nabokov's words unbeknownst to anybody would affect the way I feel about the novel. It's a weird lack of involvement after reading nearly three hundred pages about a novel I love. I've written on here before about the quondam king of Zembla, namely to write about how, while watching Mad Men one night, I realized that I don't know what he looks like. Knowing me, I probably came to the conclusion that it was best to just keep him vague. Is it good to keep oneself in the dark (shaded) about whether or not a prominent character in a book is, as a ghost, dictating the thematic of the book?

Earlier, when I said that everything is what it is and not another thing, I thought I was quoting Bishop Berkeley, the idealist British philosopher. Wrong! It turns out that I was quoting a different bishop, Bishop Joseph Butler. I now know exactly two things about Bishop Butler, which is one, that he said that, and two, that he shares his name with a musician from the Lovin' Spoonful. And while I'm onto them: I was positive that one) there was some kind of major connection (like, shared members) between the Lovin' Spoonful and Herman's Hermits, and two) that at least one, and possibly both, of these bands featured one of the four guys who would go on to be Crosby Stills Nash and Young. I don't have any fucking idea why, as of fifteen minutes ago, I thought all of that. It will be very difficult to get around to not thinking it. But now I know it's wrong.

Do you remember that move Socrates was always doing? Socrates had this move where he'd ask forty questions, and eventually someone would say that a bold man is better than a just man, but that justice was better than boldness, and then Socrates would say, "Oh, no, Hippomarchus or whomever, we've gotten ourselves into a scrape!" and then Hippomarchus or whomever would make hesitant noises, and probably go home. That's Socrates for you: the bulldog of the law of the excluded middle. I always feel bad for all of those Hippomarchus and whomsever. Excluding the middle is alright for gadflies and saints but seems like a terrible place to eat. Tomorrow I am going to consider the evidence about Hazel Shade and not change how I feel about Pale Fire. Also, if I think about the Lovin' Spoonful, I will also think about Herman's Hermits and about at least Graham Nash. I'll believe in anything. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.

With Me, It's All or Nothing

I'm reading a book by Brian Rotman called Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, and one of the things he talks about is the Greco-Christian opposition to the idea of nothing: it was a scandalous idea, a terrifying idea, an idea that attacked everything that made sense, it was intolerable. And that's just what it was to the Greeks. To the Christians, it was even worse, because it seemed situated, in every important scale, across the table completely from the Godhead, which was a plenum: a site of fullness. Zero and nothingness, especially to, say, Saint Augustine, are the ultimate privation, the most complete sense of difference from God, whose majesty lies entirely in His completedness: hence Augustine's conception of the God before time, outside of time, et cetera.

Naturally, those of us who have to wake up in the morning don't exist in any plenums, or even near any. Do you all remember the episode of Futurama called The Why of Fry? No? Well, in that episode, a bunch of sentient cerebrums (cerebra?) called the Brainspawn decide that they are damned close to an epistemological plenum -- that they, as a race of sentient brains, have come to know everything -- and that they ought to destroy the universe in order to close the set of potentially knowable things, so that they will not have to come to know anything else. The knowable but unknown foreclosed, fullness achieved. Luckily -- luckily! -- the plan of the Brainspawn is foiled by Futurama's protagonist, delivery boy Philip J. Fry, in a series of events that you should all familiarize yourselves with by watching this and every other episode of Futurama. But the plan of the Brainspawn is an interesting, if high-concept, rejoinder to the horror vacuii that Augustine responded to with his exaltation of the plenum. It's one thing to think of the fullness of God as something a spiritual analogue to pre-Oedipal life in Freud, or to any other condition of pristineness (each pray'r accepted and each wish resign'd), but the thing about the fullness is that the fullness is DONE.

The quotidian ballast to this high thought balloon came about in my life today when, bored at work, I made a list of books that I will soon be able to X off of my list of Books Bought and Unread, among them Brian Rotman's Signifying Nothing. There's a way in which the entities that make up that list could be fulfilled, obviously, which is that I could actually finish reading all of those damn books and eventually my library would be a wall of accomplishments (such as they are) rather than aspirations (ditto). It is more likely that the constitution of my Books Bought and Unread will never really achieve a plenum, that they will be less like the Labors of Heracles (check, check, check) and more like the people of the Earth, interred and replenished as need and desire strike. The list -- refillable until the Big Crunch or not -- is itself a weird space where it's unclear to me what sides fullness and nothingness take. Finishing each book, moving it off of my current truncated bookshelf and onto the now three (progress!) piles of Books Read, next to the fan and behind my box of sweaters -- should that represent an increase in fullness (Now my Read Books are fuller) or in the nothing (the list, after all, is getting smaller)?

There's an allure to the middle state of incompleteness, the participation in a going concern. It's like people who don't want to have watched every episode of a television show they like, because then there's nothing left to watch. I did a similar thing, or at least committed to a similar thing, when I was sixteen and fell in love with Slaughterhouse-Five, and vowed that I would never read the entire Vonnegut oeuvre, lest there be no oeuvre left. But I fucked up, and had read all of the available Vonnegut before I was twenty. So it goes. Of course, the books I might read is crucially different from the books that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in that one is practically inexhaustible and the other one I exhausted. But the feeling, the sliding from incompleteness to fullness to nothing, is there when I watch the list contract and expand. Make a list, feel the presence of the plenum, and then, even faintly, nothing.

Kicks Against Solipsism

"If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years less six months and four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" -- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

"Then producing smartly a hammer from an inner pocket he dealt himself, right in the middle of his ancient wounds, so violent a blow that he fell down backwards, or should I say forwards. But the part he struck most readily, with his hammer, was the head, and that is understandable, for it too is a bony part, and sensitive, and difficult to miss, and the seat of all the shit and misery, so you rain blows upon it, with more pleasure than on the leg for example, which never did you any harm, it's only human." -- Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

The first sentence contains two instances of the same adjective, which is dressed up for some reason as an adverb. The second sentence contains a bunch of adjectives, but of more worthy of notice is the way in which it slides up and down the pronoun persons, like the Olympic podium -- third, then first, then second. Both are from novels in which the narrator is rather difficult to follow, and both are things that I have underlined recently, less because I thought they were totally crucial to the work as a whole, but more because I thought they were good candidates to go into my collection of sentences.

I conceptualize my collection of sentences as being something like a mason jar that one would toss sentences into, and then I guess shake the biggest sentences out for use on laundry day. I've gone on at great length previously about my love of the sentence as a unit, mostly I think because I tend to get overwhelmed by larger units (paragraphs, stories, novels, ouevres) and there's only so much one can say in praise of individual words. These two additions to the sentence jar are especially indicative of the evocative power of sentences on their own, because the narrators are themselves constantly confused, or confusing, or in some manner not the final arbiters of what's really going on. People who are not the final arbiters of what's going on are of course well known to us; they are most of the people whom we meet, and their sentences, like the sentences of Dowell and Malone are free to break out and do whatever they please. It's entirely possible that in years to come, I will be swimming through my piles of money like Scrooge McDuck and I will, unbidden, think of John Dowell and that all that I will be able to remember is that he has something to do with goodly apples, or that the only thing I will remember about Malone (because even his titular dying isn't as knee-weakening as that sweet sliding sentence) is that little tidbit about the horrifying guard Lemuel. They aren't Pip Pirrip; they aren't in charge; I can remember of them whatever I please. Them and anybody I might see on the subway or talk to at work or at dinner parties. Ha, ha, everybody.

The claim of the power of sentences, naturally, isn't going to shake the world, any more than the claim of the power of words or the claim of the power of much else verbalized these days. But those two sentences I love, the former of which I knew about years before I encountered it in its natural habitat, and the latter of which snuck up on me unawares. The staunch defiance -- with or without context -- of the goodly apple sentence, with its aching bookkeeping; the bitter spit of those sentences against the bony and sensitive and difficult to miss head; look at 'em go! Do these sentences have anything in common, apart from their fierce motion to be free of their speakers? They each reach out to their readers, their hearers: Dowell's (Ford's) by virtue of its being a question and Malone's (Beckett's) by virtue of its slick move into the second person. Words kick against solitude; every word has its hearer, even those shouted into a hole by Midas's barber. The indelibility of these sentences stays on, I think; they remind us, in their weirdly similar ways, of our unaloneness, even when uttered by their deeply idiosyncratic speakers.

The Goldfish Pile

I went to Buffalo, and from there to Lockport, the ancestral manse, to look at my bookshelves. And after about thirty-six hours, I put a bunch of the books from my bookshelf into a bag and got on a bus and just before seven this morning, put the books in a pile on my bed. I don't know when I will read any of these books; none of them are books that I, say, had urgent needs to get my hands on. Now I am sitting on my bed, and the books that I got off my giant wall-sized bookshelf have been moved to the floor. Although the bag in which I moved them across New York state (and probably part of New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; I fell asleep after Syracuse) also had some clothes and some other books (ones I had read/read from on the way to Lockport), the new recruits to my little room in Brooklyn are now sitting by themselves, in a pile next to the cardboard box that I use for a desk. I felt like it was necessary to do, like how when you buy a goldfish you put it in the fishtank still in its plastic bag for a while.

When I got home, finally, from my overnight trip, and before I had even got the books out of my baggage and into their new goldfish pile I thought about whether or not to go to sleep, and listened to a podcast of Baseball Today from last Thursday, and eventually decided to sleep, from maybe nine to noon. While I was asleep, I had a dream that, while I was on a lunch break from my current job at a Barnes and Noble, only it was the dream version of the Barnes and Noble where I work (it has appeared on previous dreams; it is somehow still at Lincoln Center, but also in a wooded environment). I was running late, in the dream, to get back to work, so I recruited some of my friends, all of whom were about fourteen, to pick up my Honda CR-V and carry it over the turnstile into the subway. "Too late to drive!" dream-me must have thought. "C'mon, my young friends, let us get our Honda onto the uptown 2!" This resulted in trouble of a nondescript variety; when I woke up, the thing that I thought of was that what I was remembering -- the manifest dream content, as I quickly realized -- was in fact the plot of an episode of the Wire. I cannot for the life of me account for why that is what I thought of first, but it is. I thought about that for a few minutes, and thought that 1) although I have seen every episode of the Wire, I was not familiar with the events of the dream; 2) none of the episodes of the Wire take place in New York and most saliently, 3) I was prominently involved in the dream content, and I was not featured even a little in any of the episodes of the Wire.

I can remember literally nothing about what I thought or did for the three hours in between when I deduced that the episode of "Putting Jeff Schratz's Honda CR-V on the 2 Train to Get to a Sylvan Version of Barnes and Noble Store 2628" was not an episode of the Wire and when I actual got to the non-bucolic BNS2628 at around three. I must have showered and ironed my clothes and taken the subway, and I must have put the books that are new to my room in their current new goldfish pile next to my cardboard desk. That makes the books of my room into three segregated groups: on the maimed Target bookshelf, decapitated in the U-Haul when we moved here, are the books I haven't read but that have been here since I moved to New York. In two piles by the wall next to my fan are are all of the books that I have read at some point during my New York life. I keep imagining that they will get lent to people, but no one comes by to see them. And then there is the goldfish pile.

Not only is the bucolic version of the uberurban place where I work bucolic, it also appears to be in a cross between the Hundred Acre Wood and Lockport, New York, where my ancestral manse and my wonderful wall-sized bookshelf are. And not only was the Honda CR-V that my young wards and I were muscling onto the 2 a Honda, but it appears to have been the very same maroon 2005 CR-V that my father drives in the winter and my brother the Duck in the summer, and of which, one year on the night before Christmas Eve, I flattened the tire driving home at two in the morning. All but one of the lug nuts came off easily enough, but one of them needed a special Honda lug nut device which was, though I did not know it, in the glove compartment. When I prevailed upon my poor father to come to my aid, he did not know it either, so he came and we kicked at the tire in the snow in the parking lot of a donut store for ten minutes before we went home, wet and tired and befuddled.

I haven't decided yet whether to know for very long that the books in the goldfish pile have unique status, or that they are in some way brothers. I can't decide whether it is inane or thoughtful to keep in mind their biobibiliographies, to associate Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth just as much with Kafka's the Castle, which is now on top of it, as with Goodbye Columbus and American Pastoral. More than likely, it will not be up to me to decide to know; I will just know it, and every time I think about either of them or Four Plays by Henrik Ibsen or the Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks or the Checklist Manifesto, I will think too about the assimilatory quality of plastic bags, about shoving one favorite means for getting about your home into another with the help of young faceless dream-strangers, about being two places at once.

Doesn't/Isn't

Socrates is a philosopher who never wrote down any philosophy. Stanley Cavell once asked if it were possible for this trick to be plied in other fields -- a novelist who didn't write any novels, a poet who didn't write any poems. The idea, I guess, is that someone who fit the bill would just BE those things; agrammic poet X would be a poem, would make his life into a poem in some important way. This is deeply stupid, insofar as what I've guessed the idea to be is the idea; a life is not a poem, or a novel, because in life you keep having to eat dinner and be bored and so on. I have addressed these temporal concerns elsewhere and elsewhen, if I am not mistaken. The idea that a person, by means of not writing, just IS (by the way, all of these conjugations of to be connecting a person to the poem or novel that is her life sound, in my head, to be capitalized, but I'm going to stop doing it from here on because it's typographically annoying) their work is a category mistake. Johnson wrote that you should avoid meeting the authors of works you've liked, because it is like poking a very pretty soap bubble. And persons are not soap bubbles. It can seem here, I think, as if I am being overliteral or picking on a straw man or something, which is a danger of which I am cognizant. But what I'm thinking about is a set of ideas that has come from, among other things, my long and habitual lapses of activity, times in which I am a blogger who doesn't blog. So it's possible that a sturdier-than-straw man, a stick man, maybe, could be built on the figure of a poet who didn't rely on being a poem, but a poet or novelist who had just an endless stack of poem starts or disconnected chapters. What's that work worth? And what's that work worth if the poet or novelist or blogger, as a part of real life, thought constantly about their poem or novel or blog post that seemed, for a critical reason, that it ought to remain unfinished, that there were something beyond laziness keeping the work from getting done?

It certainly seems like a form of entitled laziness to do this sort of thing: it's a bit like, in Johnson's metaphor, to want credit for making a beautiful soap bubble by buying soap, then never mixing it with water, but constantly imagining what you're going to do with your soap once you open it up. The only benefit of no soap bubble over a soap bubble is that you can't poke it and ruin it; and I am a person saying this who played with soap bubbles three days ago. That too, beyond entitled laziness, is the benefit of undone poems and novels and even blog posts that have been sitting unwritten; they can't be fairly poked, or ruined, because they are already ruins. You can't live as a poem or a novel, but everyone who tries to be a poet with no poems or a novelist with no novel is living in a house made out of planned and unborn poems and novels, and that is a thing you can do.

Here's another way of talking about this. I think that the only way to live in anything approaching reasoned comfort is only to live within your nonpublic failures, especially insofar as they are failures of words (poems, novels, blog posts). Something finished, whatever its quality, is in some perfect as itself; but you can't live in a soap bubble house. The ineffable -- because, again, I'm refusing to allow that mere human laziness is preventing these endeavors, and consigning part of their incompleteness to the ineffable -- keeps things from finishes, keeps mere good sense from owning and ordering. Here, we go to Johnson again, this time from the life of Pope:

But good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy. Pope had likewise genius; a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do.

Of course, we writers who can't write don't have Pope's genius to give supremacy to our safety; but there's something to be said for endeavouring more than you can do, and especially (this is where Johnson is most perfect, I think) imagining something greater -- not than one can accomplish, but than one knows, even if it's as small in scope as going to work in the morning, rather than writing the Essay on Man. Or even the Essay on Criticism.

Revelation of the Mysteries

The first time I read Flannery O'Connor was in the very bad old days, when I didn't know anything. I had gone online and found NPR's list of the 100 best characters in fiction since 1900, and decided to get to know as many of them as I could (I'm up to 68, by the way). That summer, the summer of 2002, I read four books based entirely on the recommendation of this list -- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, the Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. The last of these I read first on a plane that went from Buffalo to Cleveland, and then on a plane that went from Cleveland to Boston, for the purpose ostensibly of investigating colleges and actually of hanging out with my aunts. There was a weird picture of Hazel Motes, the character who had made the list, on the cover of the copy I had from the Lockport Public Library, wearing his glasses that he acquires toward the end of the novel.

The next time that I got my hands on a Flannery O'Connor book was five years later, when my Uncle Dan sent me, on the occasion of my graduating from college, a copy of her collected works along with Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and a note that said that these books would help me adjust from college to Real Life. Now, I don't know whether Uncle Dan's real, non-collegiate life is full of women without the requisite number of legs or corrupt Bible salesmen or gigantic talking cats, or whether there were some other point he was trying to make, but there it was: I now had all four Flannery O'Connor books, a selection of her letters, and her uncollected stories and occasional writing. It was time for me, now in the not so bad old days, to get into Flannery O'Connor.

But it still took me a long time to get back to it-- I read Wise Blood again on a plane from New Orleans to JFK last year, I just recently read Everything that Rises Must Converge in and around New York, and I read A Good Man is Hard to Find sometime in between (it's one of the rare books on my "read" side of the ledger whose circumstances of reading I can't quite recall). Now I have read all of the collected Flannery O'Connor stories and one of the novels and my Flannery O'Connor arsenal can be said to not be doing so bad. What's strange is, the relationship that the ideas I never stopped having -- never, since I first ran into Hazel Motes and the legend of his maker on that list -- to the ideas I have about her work now.

There's a thing you can do, if you are a writer of short stories especially, I think, where you get really good at doing a particular thing over and over and you obtain a kind of geographically limited mastery. T. Coraghessan Boyle said once that Flannery O'Connor had achieved that kind of thing by creating a series of cartoon universes that managed to be suddenly poignant, and I think that he's absolutely right and that this is what makes her stories, in particular, of such lasting value. The characters in her stories begin life as cartoons -- the preposterously illustrated Parker in "Parker's Back", the comically behatted mother in "Everything that Rises Must Converge", the creepy yet insupportable intellectualism of Asbury in "The Enduring Chill" -- and somehow take on the set of overtones that one associates mostly with the Bible. This kind of creation of stakes is not easy to do, and it is especially not easy to do in a short story, where you have neither the naturally evocative mode of a poem nor the girth of a novel, and it is insanely difficult to do in a short story that also has the room for the kinds of silliness noted above. See the revelation of Mrs. Turpin, the protagonist of "Revelation" who has been called a wart hog from hell:

Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.

The kind of opaque, "abysmal life=giving knowledge" that Mrs. Turpin seems to find at the end of this story is mirrored throughout all of O'Connor's stories: there is some towering, invoked, unseen mystique at the heart of these grotesqueries that is in some way keyed into the core of significance, of signification itself. And it's mirrored again in the role that, to me at least, "Flannery O'Connor" the writer has, that unchanging signification that is felt without being totally understood. In a different way from the whodunits, O'Connor might be called a mystery writer; she is unique, and unwavering, in leaving the mystery of meaning unsolved.

Ventriloquists

Comes a time in a man's life when he has to take a good long hard look in the mirror and think about what he's doing. In fact, comes that time more often that one would hope. In further fact, maybe the frequency of that time a-comin' is one of those things that need be faced in the mirror. Ahem. So, look, I'm going to level with you: I love to write on this blog about the bad attitude and bad decisions made by Young Fat Schratz. He is always doing dumb things, and I am always able to sit and think about what a clever fellow I am now that I have wised up past him. Well, the reason that I have had to give the mirror good long hard looks and all, is that I got all excited to write, in this post, a Young Fat Schratz story, when I realized that the version of me protagonisting in the story is not all that much younger and not all that much fatter than the me as currently operating. The main guy in this story (which is still forthcoming), has much more in common with the me writing this in 2010 than he does with the YFS we've come to know and love, the one who hit on girls at the library with Greek-root puns and who failed to appreciate Wise Blood and who did all of those other things I had supposedly Risen Above. Nevertheless, I will face my shame and tell the story, and then keep talking. Which is, I hope, no less than you'd expect.

Not So Very Young and Not So Very Fat Schratz was once on an airplane flying from Boston to Buffalo, reading The Emperor's Children and thinking about what a grand success the previous National Poem in Your Pocket Day had been. In particular, I was thinking of a girl with whom I was soppily in love, and how the previous N.P. in your P. Day I had been the lucky recipient of hearing her read several of the poems that I and my hangers on had had in their pockets. What a voice! I thought. What poems! I thought. And, like an idiot, once I got bored with The Emperor's Children, high in the sky on my way back to my native land, I decided to write a poem, on the back of a receipt from the Logan Airport Hudson News.

For almost as long as I can remember, I have been soppily in love with a succession of girls who did nothing to deserve it. My grandfather once told us a mildly offensive piece of doggerel, and when we asked him where he picked it up, he told us that they said it all the time in the Service. When we asked him why, he said, "Well, we had to do something" which I think also explains my decades-long free-floating soppiness. And given that it has spanned the decades, it is something of a marvel that I have been able to restrain myself to writing as few soppy poems as I have. And yet this poem I was writing on the back of that receipt, if I still knew where it was, might strike me now as one of the soppiest. I believe it was built on the kind of conceit that would shame Abraham Cowley, with a bunch of guff about how when I read Shakespeare I imagine Kenneth Branagh's voice reading the parts, and when I read Dr. Johnson I imagine Professor Fix, who taught my Samuel Johnson class, reading it aloud, and how I, the poet, could think of few things in this vale of tears nicer than making her the default voice for poems in my head. Like I said, none of these women deserved all this sop, and I am sorry for it. But it's what I did.

And I've been thinking a lot about that poem I wrote half of and lost because I have been listening to stories in voices like never before. Since I have moved to Brooklyn, I have had no television, and since I have frittered away my loan money, I have had no netflix account, and so I have been exulting in the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (which is the occasioning event for this post and which makes its appearance here, I believe, burying the lede). The way that podcast works is famous writer X reads a story published at any point in history by Famous Writer Y and then talks about it with Deborah Triesman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker. All of which is good clean fun, but it is making me think things like that every story by Donald Barthelme sounds like it's read by Donald Antrim, or that every story by John Updike is read by Roger Angell (the only writer on the podcast so far who has remained like unvoiced, when I read him later, is Nabokov, who's been read on the podcast twice). And check out this nutty piece of syllogism: I now think that Joshua Ferris sounds best like Monica Ali, that George Saunders sounds best like Joshua Ferris, and that Isaac Babel sounds best like George Saunders. That's right: now when I read Babel, I imagine it read with George Saunder's great Chicago accent flattening out all of those translated vowels.

It's a typical response at this point, when I go through these things in my head, to wonder who cares at all. Babel may sound like George Saunders, but it's not like this is making me think that Makhno's Boys took place near Lake Superior. But, after all, the problem of voicing once got me to write a poem on the back of a receipt, so maybe it means something. Voice can't be unimportant; once, it was all that stories had (and I'm not even going to get STARTED on the things I've thought of regarding this and Derrida's wonky take on voicing writing in Signature Event Context, because I thought about that once and it kept me up all night). The iterability (ok, just a little Derrida) isn't even the issue here, because whatever Famous Writer X sounds like is STUCK as what Famous Writer Y now sounds like to me. Like everything else, I think that what it comes down to is a defense against loneliness: it may be dire when it's just me and Don Delillo, but if Don Delillo sounds like Chang-Rae Lee, then, it's me and Don Delillo and Chang-rae Lee, and that makes a difference, I guess. It hurts your head sometimes reading, that you're alone with your gods, and it helps to have someone (and the promise of intelligent discussion with that someone and Deborah Triesman minutes away).

It occurs to me, as I finish it, that it is perhaps germane to this discussion that, when I imagine myself speaking, I imagine neither my actual voice (blech) nor my head voice (too clever by half!), but the impression that my brother Connor does of me, usually when he is making fun of me for being a mope. In fact, a lot like the way he would say it if he were talking about me writing those soppy poems.

Here and Now and Time and Space

I'm reading a book of essays by Susan Sontag, called Against Interpretation and Other Essays, and I'm watching Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch. Dead Man is a movie about the Old West, created in the mid-90s; Against Interpretation and c. is a book of essays about other books, movies, plays, from the Sixties or the time immediately pre-Sixties, and presumably meant to be read in the Sixties or the time immediately post-Sixties. I'm agnostic I guess as to whether or not Dead Man was meant to be watched specifically in the mid-nineties (as a person who was alive and reading and caring in parts of the nineties, I have trouble thinking of it just yet as a Capitalized Decade; so much so, and is this strange?, that when I think of the capital-N Nineties I imagine the Gay Eighteen Nineties. That probably is strange). Whatever Jarmusch wanted, I am watching his movie and reading Sontag's essays in the very early twenty-tens or the very late twenty-oughts, depending on your numerology. And like you couldn't but do, doing these particular things, I am thinking about time and place.

When I was young and went to school in the mountains, I wrote a sixty-five page English paper about people trying to extend past their own particular time and place. Specifically, it was about the efforts of certain writers to shove the time and place to which they were relevant further into the future. Pale Fire, I wanted to say, did this in a way in which David Copperfield was not, and especially in a way that an essay by Susan Sontag about the lamentable lack of Georg Lukacs's work in English is not. That paper was about success: who had shoved their lives, or their relevances, or whatever, further than anyone else (Nabokov won on a judges' decision). Today I am wondering less about success (who got the most points in forty-eight minutes) and more about reasons (why bother getting nine other guys together and throwing that ball at a net?). Are people really trying to shove outward their time and place, and why do something like that?

Last night I drank a bunch of beer with my brother, and on the subway ride home I did a piece of furious underlining on the Q train: I underlined a sentence from one of those Susan Sontag essays about the then-current state of literature, because it was a claim about the then-current state of literature that I quite liked. And today I got full of nostalgia and compared one of my college friends to the Dude from the Big Lebowski -- he was just the man for his time and place. One of the facile pleasures of reading -- one of the ones easy to observe, I mean -- is that you can check in other times/places, like Sontag as the pulse of the Sixties.

I guess the thing that I'm thinking or worrying about now is: what is so great about now and here, among all the other times and places? In its way, it seems like those are the worst two coordinates to have: it's not as if one could be coherent and claim that someone was the man for his time and place RIGHT NOW. On the other hand, what the fuck other time are people angling toward? When Sontag expresses reservations that her book is a signpost of some mythic thing called the Sixties, surely she what concerns her is that consignment to the Sixties is consignment to irrelevance Right Now. This is probably something like a concern that the only way to make sense out of anything is to do it retrospectively (remember Hegel's Minerva's owl's flying only at dusk), which is I guess an old concern. But why do people push ahead to other right heres and nows?

And more importantly, if that goddamn owl is only flying when it's dark, what are we supposed to do in the daytime?

Judgment of Paris

You've had a big responsibility suck lately, because you went from having your school books that other people need to read to read, and now you just have the books you've endorsed (by buying) to read, for yourself, to justify to you that you bought them for a reason. Soon you will have to get a job, which is a whole terrifying glob of responsibility that is about to rain down on you, but you are deciding that for like what, a week, a few days, you will put that off, because you pulled two all-nighters and one all-dayer to write your final papers and they are not bad. So you schedule your days to have certain far away things to do this week, and you always take the local to these things, because it has been too rainy for the park and you think that the next best place to the park, reading-wise, is the subway. For a while, you read the school books you skimped on, and get a lot of tail ends of arguments from post-structuralists. You get bored with that and feel the feeling you've had for a long time that you need more fiction in your life, like that if you get back into those cavalcades of sentences you think you've always been in love with, so you look at your shelves of books and you feel like you should start reading all of them at once, which is not totally feasible.

You think about reading and writing about the book club book, which you have doubts that anyone else you know is reading but your poor mother, who is probably weirded out by it, and you read some more of it on a bus and get the nagging feeling that for Flannery O'Connor, there is little to do but just quote her so that everyone can see her for themselves. You buy a PG Wodehouse novel, but that lasts about three Brooklyn-to-Harlem local subway rides. So you yank like ten books off of your shelve and do that dopey thing you do where you make a list of books to finish in May and then in June and then in July and you know that maybe like ten per cent of them, you'll have finished by August. But there is a more pressing issue at hand, at that is that you want to have a good thing, probably preferably fiction, to have your hooks into on all of those subway rides. So you look at the stack next to your bed, and you think about it.

You have yourself narrowed down to Johnson's selected essays, a book of short stories by Cortazar, the Spoils of Poynton, the Good Soldier, the Animal that Therefore I Am, and Paradise Lost, which is, looking at it, a lot less fiction and way fewer novels than you would've thought. Hm. A thing these have in common is that you bought them all for no reason. You keep thinking about the seas of sentences you thought you would be looking forward to so much, which you guess makes either James or Ford the frontrunner. And you read them for a while and you have this terrible feeling that the sentences are, what, not doing it for you? That you can't delight in sentences with the ease with which you once did? And you think that maybe this is like the whole reading-books-as-if-they-were-subway-maps ordeal that you had months ago, but it's different from that. Instead you get this sort of mortifying gut thing that you've fucked up, that like no way will you ever read again the right way, that you've failed to ask the Fisher King how he was wounded and now you need some book to be, what, an Awakening. You wonder whether there is any one book that does this.

A thing you think about just now is your Failsafe Song, which is Everyone by Van Morrison, and which is the only song that you will not listen to when you are miserable and need pop music to cheer you up. The reason you won't do that is that you are afraid that one day you will listen to the song and it will fail to cheer you up and then where will you be? And now you sit in front of your bookshelf and wonder whether or not whatever you pick up next will be the sort of failsafe book, the book you will need to restore the Fisher King, and your two shelves of book look bigger than other and you're just even confused about whether you've got to the Failsafe Book, and yet you've got to read something and there they are. So, decide.

Up and Down

Here are some sentences, from public information outlet wikipedia, about the Disney Channel Original Movie Read It and Weep:

After the prom, which was ocean-themed, Jamie invites everyone to eat at her parents' pizza parlor. When Lenny rushes into the kitchens to help cook the pizza, his jacket, which was covered in seaweed from the prom, accidentally lands on some of the pizzas, covering them in seaweed. They do not know this, but when the pizza is delivered to the customers, they discover it is delicious, and Jamie's father finally figures out the secret of how to save their business, ending the film on a happy note.

And here are some sentences from our friend Flannery O'Connor, who wrote the book that we're reading this (month-ish):

It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

I, for my part, really really like all seven of these sentences. But it's good to see how they do what they are doing differently so that we can start to think about what Flannery O'Connor is up to (we will spend less time thinking about what whoever wrote the wikipedia entry for Read It and Weep is up to, I am sorry to say).

The first two of the wikipedia entry's three long sentences have "which" clauses in them, which serve to fill us in on information withheld in the preceding account of the movie and which get us crucial information to understand the third sentence, where we get our happy ending. They barrel along. The only adjectives in them are "ocean-themed" and "delicious", which I think is delightful. They are like subway cars, these sentences, on their one level and on their track and getting the job done. Getting the job done, though, is not what we want out of short stories. We want something else, and we get it from the title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge.

There is something about the sentences from people like Flannery O'Connor that makes them different from the kind of popcorn sentences that we read through at prodigious clips per minute. What I think one of the pleasures of those sentences is -- what I think makes the sentences I quoted upstairs from Ms. O'Connor different from the sentences I quoted above from wikipedia -- is their sense of moving not just forward, but up and down. A little bit earlier, describing the character Julian's reaction to his mothers less comical than jaunty and pathetic hat, and the prospect of taking his mother out in public generally, Julian is described as "waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to start piercing him". A long simile, but a delightful one. O'Connor does her work so delightfully by moving not just forward but up and down, in so many delightful registers. Is that an obvious thing to note? I think that the way in which O'Connor manages to flit between registers while maintaining the momentum we see in the wikipedia passage is one of the things, but only one of the things, that makes her so worth our reading. Read up and down and read slower.

That is what I took, anyway, out of the magnificence of the sentences in this our first Flannery O'Connor story. There will be more!

No One To Witness And Adjust, No One to Drive the Car

There are few times, in your life, I think, when you are entitled to a sense of your own momentousness. I've only felt momentous three times, I think, and would not be terribly surprised if I never felt momentous again. There's a reason that the kind of desperation that most lives are led in is quiet. Even the three times I have felt momentous, I have retroactively decided against it. "Not so momentous after all," I write on the Life Event Review. Momentousness is a weird thing, anyway; I think the reason so many people are keyed in to getting to something momentous already is because they watch television. I have talked about this before, I think: one of the major ways in which deal with other human persons is like this:

A SERIES OF EVENTS --> A BIT OF MYSTERIOUS MOMENTOUSNESS --> and then the screen goes black and says LOST or whatever, and you don't deal with things until next week. But really, you've got to brush your teeth and wake up tomorrow.

Anyway, the three times that I felt like there was some momentousness approaching were the three times I graduated from anything (yes, my catholic grammar school made a big deal about moving up from eighth grade, and called it graduation, and had a commencement speaker and a valedictorian, and such). You would think that after the eighth grade and high school graduations had proved themselves to be not quite the unassimilable ends of old forms of life I'd thought, I'd have learned my lesson. But I didn't, and in May 2007, I went to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to do Nothing and to feel momentous for a while before going back to Massachusetts to graduate from college. And one of the only Things That I Did while I was there was read "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens, to help one of my friends, back north, write a paper about it.

"The Emperor of Ice Cream" is about a kind of thwarted momentousness. It begins with an invocation, to call in the roller of big cigars. The first time that I read this poem was in seventh grade, back in Lockport, for a guy called Mr. Brown who made us read stuff that seems a little heavy in retrospect for seventh-graders; in addition to this and "The Cask of Amontillado" and a couple stories by H.P. Lovecraft, he had us read the "Snowden" chapter of Catch-22, about which both holy shit and, come on, Mr. Brown, give us a spoiler alert. Anyway, I remember even Fat Young Dumb Schratz figured out that what this poem is all about is the movement from the title's having an Emperor in it and the calling of the roller of big cigars into the mundanity of the wenches dawdling in such clothes as they are used to wear. The poem is all about the crashing of two languages, the language of emperors and the language of ice cream. And something interesting happens.

Being momentous in Hilton Head, I spent a lot of time drinking beer and buying carne asada at the taqueria down the street and making plans while drinking beer to buy more carne asada. I read part of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and went to the beach with my sneakers on, which is something I do whatever beach I go to. What no one did, me least of all, was verbalize anything like "Well, this is it" or "So ends college, chums" or "Of what great moment is this week!" and out of a sense of ruining anything, but out of the sense that it would've been stupid. That any kind of language of Momentousness would've been dumb because there were still things going on. And there are always things still going on. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" helps to teach us that there are always things still going on, that even at the death of the poor woman whose horny feet protrude, there is only an emperor of ice cream.

It is a point of actual fact that the poem that my friend was writing about was not "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens, but "To Elsie, or The Pure Products of America Go Crazy" by William Carlos Williams, which is a very good poem but doesn't have a lot to do, that I could figure out, with momentousness and Hilton Head. My brother the Duck suggested using Stevens instead.

It's the day after National Poetry Month; National Poetry Month 2010 is done, embalmed, put in its monument. I missed out on writing about it from a combination of laziness and actual busy-ness. I even missed out on National Poem in Your Pocket Day. April 2010, the Month I Let National Poetry Month Down is now in the same book as that week in May 2007, the Week I Went to Hilton Head with the Rest of My Graduating Class. They're momentous events; they are the kind of things my brother Connor would make fun of me for calling "famous"; call the roller of big cigars. But me, I'm not in the book; I'm just outside of it, still here. The only emperor is the emperor of Ice Cream.

There is No End to Williamstown

I went on vacation last weekend. Here is the schedule of things that I was under an obligation to do in the week immediately leading into last weekend:

Class: Monday, 630-830 (CANCELED)
Class: Tuesday, 620-820
Class: Wednesday, 330-530

So you might think it's idiotic that I should decide to take a vacation, and I might say: you are right. But I went on vacation anyway: I took a bus, on Friday morning, northwest to Williamstown Massachusetts, a place that I have been at least a little in love with since I went there as a side trip once in the late 1990s, on a family vacation to Boston, and my father took us to Colonial's Pizza which (prepare to have your mindgrapes squashed, Williams alumni) was at the time on Spring Street. I think it's important -- and important as a bookish person, no less -- to describe Williamstown as a place I have been at least a little in love with since the second Clinton administration because it is also the only place in the history of the world that I have found whose architecture and whose nature I found especially conducive to capital R Reading and capital W Writing.

"It would be no small advantage," Thoreau said, "if every college were thus situated at the base of a mountain." This is the ice-breaker of Williams commencement speakers from time immemorial (or at least time back to Thoreau, which, face it, is not memorialized properly). I have no idea if this is true, and I know of no possible way to test whether it is true; I find it even harder than this to determine whether finding out if it were true in any measurable sense is worth a damn. Would it be so great if we proved that it were less of an advantage to be located in smaller hills? Or on plains? I doubt it. But I can't care about that. At some level -- and I hate people who leave it at "some level", so let me offer the unpalatable but factual counterclaim, "my level" -- at my level, it is absolutely an advantage to have your college at the base of a mountain, because it is my mountain. When I realize that the bus that I'm on is going up -- not just west or north, but UP -- my heart, as silly as it sounds, goes up. The mountains, the mountains, yeah, I greet them with a song.

My big plan for my ersatz vacation was to go to the mountains and sit there reading a whole hell of a lot of Judith Butler, who writes on things like indefinite detention and precarious life, and Jacques Derrida on metaphors, and I read a fair bit from them, for my classes, for what I'm doing just right now. But I also brought, as a sort of off-hours plan -- a vacation plan -- Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, to read for fun. And because I am, I guess, perversely more committed to anything I'm doing for nominal fun over anything I'm doing for nominal work, the only one of the many books that I brought (mostly for work) that I finished was A Moveable Feast. That book is a book a person living with very little money in Paris in the 1920s, but more universally it is a book about a person who is a writer, and why he wrote at a particular time in his life, and the circumstances surrounding him as he did so. And of course, this is the part with which I fell in something like love. Bolstered and given breath by his place, Hemingway bets and eats and discusses, but more than anything else he WRITES. The thing he comes up with is The Sun Also Rises. Which is pretty damn good. Pretty incredible, really.

The work that anyone has to do is the work they have to do, and there are going to be people sitting around wondering whether or not the work has got done. There are people -- people whom I quite like -- who had a very vested interest in determining whether or not I had got through all of my Butler, or all of my Derrida. The work in front of you is going to sit there and get done or undone forever, and the accidents of your life are going to adjust themselves exactly as they should, relative to this sort of thing. But there is, of course, a thing that is not an accident; there is a thing that you can make into your work that no one is going to look at, and that is what you can WRITE. So write when you see your mountains that you've loved for all of your life that matters a damn; write when you see flatness that is all you've ever come to expect; write when you've got nothing else to do to situate yourself between the buildings that make up your landscape. But you've got something in front of you, or that you can get in front of you that, for Christ's sake, you can write about. Write it down. Make words out of the accidents you've got. It's what they are there for. And Williamstown is a moveable feast.

Yes, You

The day after Valentine's Day, I went to the bookstore, because I go to the bookstore like every day. I don't have enough money to buy books every day, and I don't have enough time to read through a book every day, but I go anyway. Just look at the books and such. Anyway, I went to the Strand, and then I went across Union Square to the giant Barnes and Noble, and I started looking at the poetry books. As you know, it is never too early to start getting excited for National Poetry Month, and every year, around this time (or rather, that time, the day after Valentine's Day and continuing up to and through now), I decide to start revving up the poetry engine. So I stood in the little section and read two poems by Frank O'Hara and one by Anna Akhmatova and one by Ted Hughes. Then I realized that I couldn't remember the first line of the ee cummings poem that I had used as one of my Poems in my Pocket for Poem in Your Pocket Day 2008, and started flipping through one of the ee cummings Collected Poem books.

I eventually found the one that I was looking for -- "somewhere i have never traveled gladly beyond" -- but before that, the book fell open to a different poem, which is called "since feeling is first". The reason that the book fell open to that poem, is because the book had stuck in it at that page, as a sort of bookmark, a red construction paper heart, with "You are loved" written on the obverse, and "Yes, you" written on the reverse. This was strange.

The poem is very good -- it's about the textiness of life versus the feeling of life, the latter of which is represented by kissing and the former of which is represented by what's called, in the third line, "the syntax of things". The last line of the poem, which makes a bold claim along this axis (and which was the only line of the poem I remembered, and by which I just found it on google) is "And death i think is no parenthesis." Good stuff, romantic stuff. So what on earth did it mean that the book had a red construction paper heart, with that double message on it, next to this poem? I developed two sorts of theories.

A) On the first theory, the construction paper heart was stuck into the book while it was in private ownership, and then it was returned to the giant Barnes and Noble on 17th Street. This is actually a galaxy of mini-theories. Maybe someone gave it to their beloved, as a gift, and the beloved returned it. Maybe the beloved returned it because they failed to reciprocate the love of the lover. Maybe they returned it because they wanted a different book instead. Maybe someone prepared the book with the construction paper heart, realized that the beloved already owned the collected work of ee cummings, and took it back him- or herself. These theories, especially imagining the book as a Valentine's Day gift already repatriated the day after Valentine's Day, take their appropriate places across a spectrum of more or less sadness.

B) The other theory is weirder, and of course suggests the alternative explanation that the construction paper heart was neither forgotten nor unnoticed, but put into a book that had been, and remained, the property of Barnes and Noble. This is strange. Even I think that leaving messages in bookstore books is strange, and I once drafted (though wimped out of delivering) a note to whomever had checked out the first volume of In Search of Lost Time from the Lockport Public Library (my brilliant plan was to leave the note in Volume II, so that the person would have to prove her commitment before being invited into my Proust Appreciation Society). Maybe the person who left the heart loves everybody, or maybe the person just loves everyone who would read ee cummings. But why stick a message of love that is nothing more than syntax next to a poem all about the syntax-defeating power of kissing?

I didn't buy the book; I hope that someone has, and I hope they got something out of the construction paper heart, with its oddly insistent message, and that they enjoyed the poem next to it to believe and disbelieve the construction paper heart at the same time. Osculum vincit omnia. It's a strange thing to meet just words that tell you emphatically that you are loved: after all, life is not a paragraph. But I guess that the intervention wasn't just words, either: it was also a heart made out of red construction paper.

Late Capitalist Cartoons

"Cartoons and stunt films were once exponents of fantasy against rationalism. They allowed justice to be done to the animals and things electrified by their technology, by granting the mutilated beings a second life. Today they merely confirm the victory of technological reason over truth." -- Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"

"Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators will become accustomed to theirs." -- ibid.

And so, choices. Horkheimer and Adorno seem not to consider them choices, actually, but of two occurrences on a closed social order. They bear the relation not of choices, but of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or something: we used to have one, and now we have the other. But it has never been demonstrated to me that you are obliged to keep your bios in the same century as the one wear you keep your zoe, and, so, choices. Or a choice, between the second life of mutilated beings, and beatings to which the spectators have become, qua spectators, accustomed. The difference between the choices is not obvious; Horkheimer and Adorno evidently favor the former, allying it with truth over technological reason. But really, would not the granting of second lives to mutilated beings simply accustom one to the beatings that mutilate in the first life? Shouldn't the relative equanimity of Daffy Duck, his beak blown to the back of his head by rifle fire yet again, inure us to rifles? The history of cartoons, since their inception, is the history of backbreaking fallings down with backs rendered unbroken in the next installment. What else would accustom one to his beatings?

The interior logic of the cartoon is what changes; what accustoms is what makes sense. To grant of a second life to a mutilated being is to operate according to the special sort of justice that has nothing to do with reason, especially not technological reason: which is to say, justice outside of the Law. It is a grant that produces justice and truth. Technological reason gives Donald Duck and the unfortunate victim and the spectators all of the accustomed beatings that are reasonable, once one has taken on the premises that are offered by the Late Capitalist Cartoons. So, choices. Hidden is the justice in grants, the justice without premises, of truth without technological reason. Find it, I guess, and give your mutilated beings second lives.

Be Kind to Your Fictional Beings

So, I know I wrote empty promises last week about my triumphant return to reading fiction, but then I didn't read any fiction except for Kafka, which is glum and written in enormous oppressive paragraphs (he has the world's most annoying refusal, which is a double one: he refuses to make his characters speak distinctly, and then refuses to give each line of their dialogue a new paragraph). Now, please don't get me wrong, I love Kafka; but given that the flavor of fiction I was lamenting last week was Kingsley Amis, you can see how he wouldn't really address my needs. But the other thing I've been doing that may be some sort of fiction sop, is writing fiction. This is a little like knitting someone else a sweater because you're cold, but whatever. It is what I did.

And doing it, I have noticed one of the Worst Things in the World of Fiction, which is a particular problem of voice. I know it is the worst, because I do it all the time when I try to write fiction, and Young Fat Schratz did it ALL THE TIME even when he was writing nonfiction, and now there are certain sentences that I created that haunt me like Erinyes, reminding me not just that I used to be dumb but that I used to, in my dumbness, imagine myself clever. Anyway, the problem is something like "representing thoughts that no one would ever consciously form, as conscious thoughts". I went looking around for examples, and found a quite good one and a quite bad one, in the same chapter of Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

As for robbing the caisse, in which Bond himself was not personally concerned, but only interested, he reflected that it would take ten good men, that they would certainly kill two or three employees, and that anyway you probably couldn't find ten non-squeal killers in France, or in any other country for the matter of that.

Great reflecting, Bond! Here we have Bond thinking about something he actually would think about (logistics) and that revealing facts about the mission (it's complicated and dangerous), cheery Francophobia (no non-squeal killers in France) and an even cheerier weltschmerz (it's a world problem, not just a France problem). You can imagine how, say, the penultimate attribute could've been gone into badly, if it hadn't had the concept of men who can reliably kill as a lead-in: "Bond checked into the caisse. France, he thought, how pathetically devoid of non-squeal killers!" Or something like that.

Or something like this, again from Casino Royale:

Some of this background...passed through Bond's mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little.

Gah! Who would think such a thing? Away from his therapist? This is the problem, of course, with free indirect discourse especially and with the head-on obligation to represent another human being that every fiction writer (most fiction writers) takes on: to say things that someone else would say, while knowing all that you, the writer, know about her. Ian Fleming is even more psychologically astute than James Bond, so he is in a position to talk about feather-bedding. I am fairly positive that I, as a thinking thing, have never had the sensation "I rather like this" pass through my mind about anything except food, and even then not often. It's an autodiagnosis that no one makes, but it's exactly the kind of diagnosis that smart writers find easiest to make on fictional beings, including their own. And it drives me nuts, both when I see it and when I do it. So please, fiction writers. Be kind to your fictional beings. Do not force them to say impossible things. They and I will appreciate it.

p.s.

my SU box is 2935

why let schratz have all the fun

well to be honest i am posting in order to receive a free book (why has no one else yet taken advantage?), but since i devote such a great portion of my brain to constant literary rumination, i may very well end up saying something relevant by the end. i spent winter study in china after convincing peter murphy and chris pye (piece of cake) that either a) i would work on my thesis every day or b) i didn't really need to work on my thesis at all. whichever story i told them, it worked, and i bet you can all figure out how much work i got done. but thats ok. i did get some reading done- most of "the birth of tragedy", henry james' "the altar of the dead", some murakami of course. as for the latter, i think he's pretty good. not much to say else. i don't have any gripes with him yet, and that says alot. oh and a few stories from a book called "dangerous laughter", i forget who it's by, far inferior to murakami.

what i have been thinking about these days is james joyce. i have a carrel on the 2nd floor of sawyer, tucked away in the northeast corner, facing the bold front of stetson and otherwise promoting scholasticism by the extent of its detachment. yet every time i walk around the corner to go to the bathroom i have to first walk directly towards joyce's claim in the stacks, and the spines of dozens of books with "ulysses this" or "ulysses that" or some stupidly clever thing like "a portrait of the artist in exile". A portrait of the exiled chamber music of ulysses finnegan as a young dubliner. so its virtually impossible that i go very long without being prompted to think about joyce, excepting rare cases of sustained dehydration. and now i am taking a break from reading some essay on JSTOR about the aeneid and the waste land. it's kind of convincing -- all i've read so far is a list of reasonably direct allusions -- but it's still equally plausible to me that Dante stands as an un-ignorable (help, schratz, i am always looking for a real word to say "un-ignorable" that is more accurate than undeniable or incontestible) middle man between the two. that is to say, i am not so far convinced that one is in error who continues to categorize bleeding trees in the waste land as a dantean, and not a virgilian, homage. but then again i still have to finish the essay.

what a strange relationship i have, and have had, with these two modernist poster children. i suppose i grew disillusioned with eliot at least a year or two ago, though i fear his personal influence will never truly leave my brain, eager though i am to move beyond his clutches. regardless, i don't think i have anything really new to say about him, other than i refuse to hold in too high esteem any critic who so vehemently attempts to disguise himself as a poet. and no, it is not the other way around. yet my thoughts on joyce i feel still need development. by the end of taking the ulysses class with tifft i thought i had made a huge breakthrough by recognizing that stephen is the true odyssean figure of the novel, lest we concede to acknowledging that all bloom had to do to consummate the odyssey's vastly important homecoming is, well, come home. so stephen's leaving the bloom house (and it is his heroic capacity to leave just as much as his mere presence which finally re-qualifies molly's sexuality) is some greater and more symbolic kind of homecoming. for example joyce's leaving ireland as the step by which he "returns" to some kind of real, pure, or worthwhile literature. which is really anti-modern, in contrast to the pride with which eliot seems to want to portray boring people and consider those portrayals as successful literary endeavors.

i mean, i guess i still agree with myself that all those things are interesting and perhaps true as long as one feels tied down to homer, but i am starting to feel, and gladly so, less and less of a real desire to think of homer at all. after all, it's not like i will ever really be able to absolve myself of a homeric consciousness, no more than literature itself will. but i feel its the mature thing to do at this point. but damn! it's still so hard to commit to any of these postures with someone you know is trying to trick you all the time. once you realize that joyce is so mischevious, it's like you say, "oh! i get it! he was just fucking with us the whole time" and you feel like you've got him figured out. but then after such a fleeting moment of self-satisfaction you begin to wonder, "but wait- what exactly is the trick he's playing on us?" there is a large pool to choose from there. i guess that's why it's such a good book. or why it's such a bad book. and in what senses do i mean "good" and "bad" here? i guess "good" if you like thinking alot. or if you just think he puts words together favorably. "bad" if you have some devoted concern with the sanctity of literature- which, if it is in fact threatened, i still feel we must attribute less to joyce himself than to the door he helped open.

A Team of Reggie Jacksons

I haven't read anything from Canonically Accepted English Literature Properly So Called in like a week, and I am starting to suffer a form of withdrawal, I think. Since I finished Lucky Jim on the Q train Super Bowl Sunday (good work, Saints, btw), and lovingly bumped it off of my Books Unread list, I have been reading, thanks to the vagaries of syllabi and just what at the time I happened to feel like reading -- a whole crapload of theory books, and also Better by Atul Gawande which is so clear and well argued that one hardly feels like getting what he has to say into one's brain represents any literary work.

It's been all steak knives and no steak, I suppose I want to say, or all straws and no drink, or something like that. (And thinking of the most famous use of the straw/drink metaphor, it is funny to imagine the authors whom I have been lugging around -- Horkheimer, Adorno, Marx, Deleuze, and Atul Gawande -- as a team full of Reggie Jacksons). All that nonfiction hurts my head. I remember one summer I decided that I was going to read nonfiction all summer, to rectify what I believed was a serious nonfiction deficiency in my diet, and boy, Did That Not Work. I've talked in various ways about this before, particularly the gap between real people, who are unknowable, and fake people, who aren't, and who is thus more available to counteract loneliness (this all being one of my famously vaunted concerns). But, eating ice cream and watching the best Desmond-Penny episodes of Lost on Valentine's Day, I thought, rather forcefully, of that vaunted concern in particular, and thought to write about it, and I guess to issue a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do: don't stop reading your fiction books! You'll never get enough from just Gilles Deleuze. I am now going to take a dose of my own medicine, and you will be hearing from me on I'jaam tomorrow.

The Overdetermination of Everything

It was a slow day reading today, for me. I went to Battery Park to read from the Freud Reader, because where else would you go to read Freud, and what else would you read at Battery Park? Then I went to Grand Central Station and sat in the Dining Concourse without buying anything, and read from the Marx-Engels Reader. The name of today was, evidently, Philosophers of Suspicion Day Among the Tourists. One of the things that I saw while I walked around Battery Park was the Battery Grill. The Battery Grill looks like it should be famous, in the way that particular restaurants look like they should be famous. Tavern on the Green, that one place that is blue and orange in Bryant Park...places in parks, I guess. Anyway, I saw the Battery Grill and thought, "that looks famous", and then I went home. Home, I continued reading of my philosophers of suspicion and watching the Food Network, as is my habit. And what should come up on the Food Network but the show Chopped, one of whose contestants was the executive chef of the....Battery Grill! Spit take! And, spoiler, he won. But there it was, right on the television, the place where I had been earlier in the day. What a crazy coincidence!

That's true, but whatever: the point is that, despite more or less everything I did today fitting into a pretty trim nomological account, really what I did was dick around all day, while floating in enough pieces of meaning that I could construct a trim nomological account of what I'd done. Read enough, watch enough television, go to enough places with names, and when you are called upon by yourself to give an account of what Things You Did, it looks like you did something that makes sense. The world is overdetermined with meaning; everything you do (by which I mean, of course, everything I do) is, to borrow Richard Poirier's description of Pynchon's V., "preposterously coherent". Life is preposterously coherent if you look at it the right way.

This reminds me, eventually, of Murakami: is he preposterously coherent? Certainly, coherence -- especially preposterous coherence -- is a different kettle of fish from ultimately making sense; otherwise no one would have ever said it about V. One of Murakmi's stories -- the story that I had in mind when I started to write this summing-up-of-Murakami post -- is all about this kind of preposterous coherence, the overdetermination of meaning that suggests meaninglessness. "Chance Traveler" is rife with overdetermined coincidences: the little local coincidence, that the piano tuner and the woman are drinking in the same cafe; the stranger coincidence that they are both into Dickens; the huge, huge coincidence that the woman and the piano tuner's estranged sister both have breast cancer; and even the slightly peculiar circumstance that, of all the triads of coincidence that there are in the world, this one, coincidentally, was presented, by his piano tuner to the Japanese short story writer Haruki Murakami. That, anyway, is the gabble of coincidence that makes up "Chance Traveler", and the kind of gabble that makes up, say, my days that I spend reading philosophers of suspicion at tourist places.

But it's easy to get overdetermined. What I think, in the last analysis (this being my last analysis for now, here, anyway), makes Murakami special -- why I think we should read him -- are those things that, rather than content themselves with finding meaning in the overdetermined gabble that anybody could've found, the literally quotidian meaning that I find in as dull a work of art as my own life, knock a damn hole in meaning and everything else. Better than coincidence, the ghost surfer that maybe appears in "Hanalei Bay"; better than a day that seems, eerily to make sense, the haunting private detective (working for free!) in "Where I'm Likely to Find It"; and, more splendid than damn near anything, the appearance and revelation of the title primate in "A Shinagawa Monkey". To be cleverer than either writer deserves: if Pynchon is preposterously coherent, Murakami, at his best, is coherently preposterous.

So that closes the digital book on Murakami, for us. I will write him down on the syllabus, for when the syllabus is again in need of a dusting-off (2013, probably). OUR NEXT BOOK: will be I'jaam, by Sinan Antoon. It is supposed to be quite good; it is an Iraqi prison narrative, written by a gentleman currently teaching at NYU; it was recently featured in the New Yorker's roundup of recent Arabic literature in English translation, and I am starting it tomorrow. Happy reading!

The Grown-Up

It's unthinkable, to me, what will happen when I run out of books that are on my bookshelf. The Matthew Schratz Pages to Read number is like the national debt: I know, in theory, what it is, but it is inconceivable in practice. For the last year or so, it has fluctuated around 65,000 or 70,000 pages; I don't know how different that number is, bigger or smaller, from the number when I started the list, or the number from a year ago. Today I finished reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and the number of pages to read that I own went down by two hundred and fifty one. That represents, liberally, one third of one percent of the pages left on my bookshelf in the "To Read" section, a section built by overzealous purchasing, gift giving, and the (very) occasional reassignment of a book that I've already read and already too much forgotten. That is a lot of pages. It took me about a week to read Lucky Jim; assuming that all of the pages remaining are as easily read (they aren't) and that the number will only decrease (it won't), that means that I will have conquered my library in three hundred weeks, or about six years.

To have read all of one's books: not all of the books one wants to read, or needs to read, or ought to read, but all of the books one has on his bookshelf: that is the prospect I see before me, in six years. In six years I will be thirty years old, which means I will be inescapably a grown-up. And to have finished reading all of my books, in the narrow way I mean, is what I have to look at as a number that makes more sense as the number to tick down until I am a grown-up. I own a copy of A Tale of a Tub that I bought, from amazon.com, in 2002, obsessed with getting as much Swift as I could get my hands on after I read A Modest Proposal in high school. I own a copy of Thoreau's selected essays that I bought at the now long-defunct Waldenbooks in the Lockport Mall. And I own a copy of Decline and Fall that I bought at a used book store in Massachusetts, with long term aims of impressing with my knowledge of it a girl whom I knew, at the time, to be enjoying the Loved One, also by Evelyn Waugh. The point about these books, and many others of their near neighbors, is that I cannot possibly imagine ever self-identifying as a grown-up while they sit there, unread. Like Investing, or Quitting Smoking, Reading All of My Books seems like a task impossibly grown-up, like a thing I couldn't possibly currently do.

And yet, and yet, I finished Lucky Jim today on the Q train, around eleven thirty tonight. So there it went. And I currently want a cigarette about as badly as I can remember, and yet I took off my shoes and brushed my teeth instead of going to the bodega. So there that goes. I will whittle my pages down. Man never is, always to be, blest.

Foreword is Forewarned

Today I went to see a talk by a performance artist named Deke Weaver, who is a very interesting and talented man. He told a story about a polar bear that was just magnificent, and then he screened a portion of his performance called Monkey that he had put on in I think Illinois. You should check out his website.

I went to this talk partly because it was sponsored by one of my professors, and has some concerns in come with the class I am currently taking with that professor, but I also went because, like all such small events given by American universities, they had FREE FOOD. I was so excited! They had sandwiches, they had enormous pickles, chips, salad, and for dessert, cookies. I happily loaded up a plate with turkey/brie/bacon sandwich, chips, pickle and salad, and sat down to listen to the first segment of the talk. When I had finished my food, I thought, "I can't wait to get more food at the next break!" But then, in the time while watching the performance, I became seized with a deep panic. Frequent readers of this blog know that I get into a deep panic about thinks like turning off my light too early or hurting the feelings of my books I've owned since high school, so this should not be a surprise. What was I in a panic about, you ask? I was in a panic about this: I could not sort out whether or not I should get another pickle and bag of chips, or get a cookie. This was a horrible dilemma. Do I risk getting too full on the pickle and chips, and having to forgo the cookie? Or do I eat the cookie, feel un-full, and go the entire rest of the day feeling one pickle short? I often feel this way about desserts and the closure they offer: how do we know it is time to put the capstone on things?

You'd think it would be easy to know when to put the capstone on a book you're reading: figure the capstone is the last tenth of the book, or whatever fraction, and then read the tenth that comes last, last. But it isn't, because books -- especially Important Books -- have decided to fuck with you by inventing the Foreword. The Foreword is actually the dessert of the book, even though it comes first. It's a big time aberration. Here come some spoilers, too, so if you care about Major Plot Developments in Crime and Punishment, then beat it. This is good news because it means now you all have an excuse not to read a post. Go with god, people who want to avoid spoilers!

Now, down to business. The allure of the foreword is twofold: one, it is fun because the people who get called upon to write forewords are usually writing about something they quite enjoy, but do not have a huge stake in (you bought the book, it's not as if they are breaking their balls to sell you on it), so the writing itself is usually lively and fun. Two, it is fun because it's not like you have to super pay attention. Just read it! If you zone out while reading Moby Dick, maybe you miss out on part of the Great American Novel. No one is going to wish they had paid just a little more attention to the Great American Editor's Introduction. They are high in sugar and low in nutritional value, the cookie of the Parts of the Book. But caveat lector, because they are cookies that sometimes have, I don't know, steak cubes or something else in them; stuff that would be fine as part of the entree, but that are just disastrous and appetite killing if they come in the cookie eaten too soon. And those steak cubes or whatever, are Critical Plot Points.

Nothing ruins the good dessert feeling of reading a foreword like those. The first time I was exposed to this was when I was in tenth grade, and my friend's mother was giving us a ride home from school but had to stop at Office Max for printer ink on the way home. This was a disaster for me on par with being unable to determine how full I am. I was terribly fat and shy in high school, and I had a catastrophic bowl cut, and the two kids also getting a ride home were a year ahead of me and thin and probably knew girls. So, like Mizaru, I elected not to look at anything but a book, so that these Two Cool Guys would not try to talk to me, or make fun of my Looney Tunes tie, or whatever. Now, it would never do to read a book I was actually supposed to be paying attention to, because my chubby heart was pounding away in fear, and I couldn't focus; so instead I read the Foreword to the Signet Classic Edition of Crime and Punishment, which comes with a handy little map of St. Petersburg, marking key events like the bridge where Svidrigailov commits suicide, which happens on like page 500. What the hell, map? At least he shoots himself on the bridge, rather than jumping into the river, saving a little bit of surprise. I was disappointed. I could taste the steak cube in my cookie. I turned green, slightly, the chalky greenness of those who have had their future surprises ruined, and of those who have miscalculated their appetites by one bag of chips and one giant pickle, and foreclosed them with a cookie. And those kids made fun of me for turning an unnatural pastel color while reading, despite my brilliant strategy of not looking at them. I guess I should've been more like Kikazaru, instead.

So the moral of the story is: Forewords, delicious and enjoyable, but for god's sake only partake when you're sure you have already had enough book to eat. That, and check out Deke Weaver.

A Long Green Flattening

It's sports season; I am watching, and discussing in civilian life even more than usual, sporting events; according to Steve Almond (and I think he's right), the troubling recent political events out of Massachusetts can be called The Sports Talk Radio Election; and soon we, even the parts of we who don't give a shit about sports, will watch the 44th running of the American Football Super Bowl, an event so important, and an event that works as such a metaphor of importance, that every time I've been up for more than forty hours working on a paper, at some point I will begin thinking, over and over, "All right, Schratz, this paper is our Super Bowl". It's like a Waterloo that doesn't necessarily end you, which I guess means it's like the real Waterloo.

And so imagine my delight when the protagonist of the book currently serving as my roman de gare, Jonathan Lethem's the Fortress of Solitude, watches Super Bowl IX with his friend and the friend's father. He thinks this about the tilt, between the Minnesota Vikings and the Pittsburgh Steelers:

The game itself...turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan's interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were.

Later, Dylan, the protagonist, is given a ring that enables him to fly, so, that shows you how unlikely things in fiction (rather than sports) can stay. But no matter: there it is, a masterful evocation of The Sports. An arrangement of failures. The most crushing thing about sports -- and, I suppose, a thing that can crush us in fictions about which we care, as well, is the total lack of a) appellate processes, and b) corrigibility. No matter how much you care about the Buffalo Bills (and I do), or how much you think they ought to have won, based on talent, a particular game, they will a) never get the decision reversed, and b) never get to play quite that game again. And no matter how much you want Othello to wait ten minutes or whatever and listen to what Desdemona has to say, he is a) never not going to suffocate her, and b) never not going to kill himself later that scene. No appeals, no corrections. A proving how unlikely most things are.

Of course, unlikely things do happen, no matter how proven their unlikelihood. That is why I am announcing here, as the Official Super Bowl XLIV recipient of the support of the Unpacking My Library book blog, the previously un-Super Bowl'd New Orleans Saints. I hope that this works out better for them than the time we, as a blog, threw our support behind the Cleveland Indians. We'll find out in two weeks!

Paris Before the War

Proust, why not, I'm tired:

Moreover, the name Guermantes existed for me in many forms. If the form which my memory had merely noted down as in an address book was not accompanied by any poetry, older forms, those which dated from the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to renew themselves in me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the glaring light of the person with human features did not quench the mysterious radiance of the name. THen once again I began to think of Mme de Guermantes's dwelling as of something that was beyond the bounds of reality, in the same way as I began to think again of the misty Balbec of my early day-dreams as though I had not since then made that journey, or of the 1.22 train as though I had never taken it....Then the idea of reality returned as I entered the Duchess's hall. But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real intersection between reality and dream.

It's a sign that you are reading a book so long that you have less read it than lived parts of it that I actually felt the way he feels about the name Guermantes, the 1.22 train, Balbec, before I even did the usual readerly solipsistic work of thinking about things that work for me that way. I don't have to think of women I knew of and then knew to feel the way Proust does about the duchess; I just have to think of Oriane de Guermantes, and I get enough of the sense of lost mystique to feel with him.

What is Oriane de Guermantes before we knew her, when all she was was a set of phonemes blobbed together that reminded us of a lantern projecting figures of long-dead nobility on the wall? Nothing, I suppose, the same way in which the people that we haven't met yet are, for us, nothing now. Young Proust, thinking of her at Combray, can't think of anything about her that he can say: this is what the Duchesse de Guermantes is. But there is nothing that he can say she isn't, and so she gets to be, as a name, free-for-him. The name Guermantes is for young Proust freedom, freedom as the condition of uncollapsedness. No possibility in her, in Balbec, in the 1.22 train, has collapsed into its own not-actually-having-been. What that is, I think, is the fullest form of freedom: not the negative freedom, that, say, Kant condemns (the freedom to do whatever one pleases), nor the positive-but-in-practice-soulless freedom that Kant really likes (the freedom to act noumenally in accordance with laws and so verbosely on). Both of those freedoms are actionable senses of freedom -- they sit open to action, and as such, they sit with their collapsability into an accomplished fact -- an unfree fait accompli -- as their most salient feature.

The downside to the fullest freedom we can feel -- Oriane before we knew her, Paris before the War, Williams College just before I graduated-- is that, of course, it can only be recognized after we know Oriane, after the War makes our bullfights and our lives in the brasseries seem so open and wonderful, after I graduate. The Duchesse de Guermantes whom we actually know -- incredibly stylish, sharp witted, more than a little superficial -- is a saturated object of knowing (to slightly alter topographical metaphors), a collection of possibilities filled in, closed off. And so with every damn thing: know more, wonder less, long for the haunting that those names had for us once, that little haunting that is the one proleptic taste of fullest freedom we can get our hands on. And to long for that haunting -- to be full of a yearning for the sensuous notion of the uncollapsability of everything that has gone before -- that is just what it is to be tired.