Thursday, May 20, 2010

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.

Monday, May 3, 2010

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!

Saturday, May 1, 2010

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.