And but so. I have spent most of the last two months, in which I have not been blogging, being nervous. I have spent hours and hours in front of the ESPN network's Baseball Tonight program, not paying attention to them and instead focusing, with Great Mindfulness, on the pains in my stomach and wondering how much of them were psychic and how much somatic. It was, I began to notice, an almost wholly situation-independent case of nerves; no matter how pleasant or un- things would seem to be, I would become maximum level nervous, and dream up reasons to be so. It made me nervous that I hadn't gotten into any schools, for a while; then it made me really nervous that I had gotten into NYU. It made me nervous that the one of the dogs we live with developed a cough. It made me nervous that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were revealed to have taken steroids in 2003. Anything made me nervous. It was a nervous few months.
I started to notice that there were a few homey things that soothed my nerves to total satisfaction. One was going to the supermarket; one was listening to John Sterling call Yankees games. And a big, generic, booky thing, that I learned from the Summer of Nerves, was the incredible therapeutic power of the Fat Book of Short Stories. The particular Fat Book of Short Stories that I have been seeking solace in is the Early Stories of John Updike, but based on some dabbling in Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, I think that others can work as well. Novels (most novels, anyway; not, say, Proust, on whom more soon) can be tempestuous relationships; they are capitalist little monsters, committed to dynamism. Things should have changed greatly from one chapter to the next in the novel. Take, say, Mansfield Park, a great book by Jane Austen, that makes enormous changes in both tone and pace. At the time in life in which I read Mansfield Park, I read a lot at a Starbucks while I waited for my brother Pete to finish his driving lessons. And it sort of jerks around: Fanny always seems at the point of being denied the life she wants, and the narrative takes some time off for class satire. Or, things are speeding along, and then we get the very long, very excellent, but very disruptive focus on the play that Fanny's cousins put on. Not quite a soothing element.
The Fat Books of Short Stories, however, are little pieces of stasis. Very little happens, and it happens beautifully, exquisitely. The well-formed short story tends to have one action, one Thing That This is the Story About; and the action is surrounded by a murmur of beautifully pitched observation, framing our action and delighting us. Especially in a writer like Updike, whose capaciousness allows for infinite gradations of tone, or one like O'Connor, whose singleness of purpose provides the same, we can return, story after story, to our Fat Book and find ourselves right where we were, and, provided that this is an author we like, we find ourselves just where we want to be. My nervous summer began with me reading 2666 on a beach, with its swooping plot and jagged contours; and hopefully, the nervous part of that summer will end here, with Updike and his fat book of beautifully considered, beautifully same moments.
Incidentally, I am only about a third of the way through my Updike book, which only goes about two fifths through Updike's career, but my favorite stories, for those of you wanting to get a toe (soothingly) wet, are: Pigeon Feathers, which has a magnificent final sentence; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth; A Trillion Feet of Gas; and Twin Beds in Rome. So, for all of you who wondering what my favorite Updikes from about before 1960 were: there you are.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Me on Denby on Snark
OK, David Denby. I wanted his indictment of snark to be good. I read a screed -- an "agony", if you please -- against quirk that ran in the Atlantic about two years ago, and I thought it was good, which is to say well-argued, and it made me kind of mad because I loved all of the things that it was slightly dismissive of (Royal Tenenbaums, Flight of the Conchords, Ira Glass). I thought that it was all wrong, but I liked that it formulated intelligently a position that I viewed as incorrect. It thought that there was too much quirk, that quirk was overdeployed, &c. I thought that all it was really doing was lumping some common things together that were, for their own reasons, bad, and announcing them as a bad form of quirk while salvaging the things they liked. As such, it was ultimately unsatisfying on its own, but at least it articulated a position that made my own, pro-quirk position more easily defensible.
Snark does the same sort of thing -- it rattles off about forty things that annoy David Denby, says that they are making everyone mean, and then says that they ought to stop. His problem is a harder one, though, to tackle than the Great Quirk Issue of Aught Seven, because snark is wider ranging and more insidious than quirk, which, when it is bad, is just kind of annoying. It's an evasion of art, is bad quirk, while snark suffocates art. Indeed, according to David Denby, "contemporary art is post-aesthetic." The snarkers don't make art; he seems to suggest that they are artistically impotent; all they do is make wisecracks. And of course, that is true of some of the scenarios that Denby describes. He mentions Penn Jillette saying that, during the 2008 presidential primaries, Obama outperformed Hillary Clinton in February, that being Black History Month, and that Clinton should do better in March beause that is "White Bitch Month". All of the volume of Denby's pique against Snark ought to be directed at such stupid things as that. But this is where, again, his scope outpaces the Quirk issue, and goes too far. He wants to say that all vicious bitchiness is of a piece with that shockingly unfunny thing that Penn Jillette. And of course, other named snarkers, including betes noires like gawker, wonkette, and Spy Magazine, do nothing of the kind.
Denby is particularly insistent about two issues. First, he is constantly invoking his love of the Colbert Report as evidence that he appreciates vituperation when it is properly aimed. And secondly, he is constantly calling upon a notion of "knowingness" as the element of snark that is particularly galling. Neither of these points, unfortunately, make any sense when stacked against his actual complaints. The kinds of nasty humor to which Denby pays lip service as valuable public goods are, of course, as dependent on knowingness as anything put up in the dreaded blogosphere, only the knowledge to which they appeal is largely to be found in the New York Times. The knowledge to which snark appeals is apparently unacceptable for its being found elsewhere, in all sorts of low culture media. And the biggest mistake that Denby makes here is his assumption that the sort of knowingness he derides is sought, that it is something that the snickering snarkers have gone out of their way to achieve. It is in fact quite the opposite.
What Denby spectacularly fails to consider is that everyone today can be appealed to as in a position of knowingness, because everyone is told things constantly, and all of the time. The things that he decries as snark (besides the obvious straw men like that Penn Jillette quote, which I guess he thinks trades on knowing that March is women's history month) are almost always commentary about commentary, more information about how much damn information we are always having thrown at us. I know way more than I want to about all of the actors, writers, athletes about whom I care, and the supposedly destructive snark is not a gleefully wicked celebration of that fact, but a lament. Snark is so sick of supposedly earnest information that, even as it itself presents more information, it rails against the whole damn thing. And that's what Denby, somewhat surprisingly, fails to see: this form of communication that so outrages him is itself a form of outrage, an exhaustion itself rather than an exhilaration.
Snark does the same sort of thing -- it rattles off about forty things that annoy David Denby, says that they are making everyone mean, and then says that they ought to stop. His problem is a harder one, though, to tackle than the Great Quirk Issue of Aught Seven, because snark is wider ranging and more insidious than quirk, which, when it is bad, is just kind of annoying. It's an evasion of art, is bad quirk, while snark suffocates art. Indeed, according to David Denby, "contemporary art is post-aesthetic." The snarkers don't make art; he seems to suggest that they are artistically impotent; all they do is make wisecracks. And of course, that is true of some of the scenarios that Denby describes. He mentions Penn Jillette saying that, during the 2008 presidential primaries, Obama outperformed Hillary Clinton in February, that being Black History Month, and that Clinton should do better in March beause that is "White Bitch Month". All of the volume of Denby's pique against Snark ought to be directed at such stupid things as that. But this is where, again, his scope outpaces the Quirk issue, and goes too far. He wants to say that all vicious bitchiness is of a piece with that shockingly unfunny thing that Penn Jillette. And of course, other named snarkers, including betes noires like gawker, wonkette, and Spy Magazine, do nothing of the kind.
Denby is particularly insistent about two issues. First, he is constantly invoking his love of the Colbert Report as evidence that he appreciates vituperation when it is properly aimed. And secondly, he is constantly calling upon a notion of "knowingness" as the element of snark that is particularly galling. Neither of these points, unfortunately, make any sense when stacked against his actual complaints. The kinds of nasty humor to which Denby pays lip service as valuable public goods are, of course, as dependent on knowingness as anything put up in the dreaded blogosphere, only the knowledge to which they appeal is largely to be found in the New York Times. The knowledge to which snark appeals is apparently unacceptable for its being found elsewhere, in all sorts of low culture media. And the biggest mistake that Denby makes here is his assumption that the sort of knowingness he derides is sought, that it is something that the snickering snarkers have gone out of their way to achieve. It is in fact quite the opposite.
What Denby spectacularly fails to consider is that everyone today can be appealed to as in a position of knowingness, because everyone is told things constantly, and all of the time. The things that he decries as snark (besides the obvious straw men like that Penn Jillette quote, which I guess he thinks trades on knowing that March is women's history month) are almost always commentary about commentary, more information about how much damn information we are always having thrown at us. I know way more than I want to about all of the actors, writers, athletes about whom I care, and the supposedly destructive snark is not a gleefully wicked celebration of that fact, but a lament. Snark is so sick of supposedly earnest information that, even as it itself presents more information, it rails against the whole damn thing. And that's what Denby, somewhat surprisingly, fails to see: this form of communication that so outrages him is itself a form of outrage, an exhaustion itself rather than an exhilaration.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Have You Heard of That Kindle Thing?
So, sometimes the Book Review -- my old friend -- and I get tired of each other. We are not the perfect fit that say, this blog and its two readers are. Sometimes, the NYTBR gets a little BookTV for me. I always think that I should like BookTV, but then I always find myself watching the third Josh Elliott/Hannah Storm Sportscenter in a row. The problem is mutual -- sometimes, I want more depth then the Book Review is set up to provide (no spoilers and all), and sometimes, I am just cold more of a book nerd than whatever other kind of nerd they are catering to on BookTV. Like, they will have a guy on talking about the CIA, for CIA nerds, and I will be more curious about whether or not there is anything in the book as frustrating to think about as the fact that David Addington brought his own gazpacho to lunch everyday.
The place to go for way more depth is, of course, "scholarly articles", which are fine to read and to talk about if you can get past the fact that everyone will stop wanting to talk to you when you say things like "Great article in Milton Quarterly last quarter, you should check it out." For the other kind of thing that I like -- pure book nerdiness -- you have to just wait for the Times to deliver, and boy did they deliver today.
The title is already great -- "With Kindle, Can You Tell It's Proust?" -- and then imagine my delight when, after some scene setting about Kindle and the usual oohing and aahing over the putatively great Kindle techne (boring) we get this, the crux of the piece: "Please, they’re [that is, they who worry about Kindle's effects on the economics of reading are] overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?" The effects of anything on literary snobbism are, of course, the first effects I think about. I also found myself nodding happily when I read some of the testimonials later in the article: "When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person" (although minus points to that guy for showing off that he sees movies at MOMA); "I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading Ulysses." Judging and hoping to be judged by books? Done and done. It's not even two pm and I've done both of those already today. The problem with the Kindle, as assessed here, is that this makes this hard. If I were Kindling Ulysses instead of carrying it around, well, for all we know you're just Kindling, oh, I don't know, something easy and non-impressive to read. (Something un-Prousty, say.)
This reminded me of the article, discussed here last year, about whether or not there were books that represented deal-breakers in relationships, and The Furious Debate that that engendered. Except, of course, there was no Furious Debate at all. There as here, the only thing that we really come away with is mild snark against popular books (this year, He's Just Not Into You, last year, Marley and Me) and the sense that, the fantasies of all book nerds (myself included) notwithstanding, there's really no eluctable way in which the sum of the things you read, or want to read, or endorse, constitute the person you are.
That is kind of a bummer. The part of me that looks forward to nothing more than this kind of article -- not a book review, not a scholarly article, but a sheer slice of nerd fantasy sociology -- also wants to believe that the way you make friends is to find people who like the same books as you, preferably just by walking around with your book like a badge, and then skip to making snarky jokes about Marley and Me together. But really, you have to actually act like a whole person instead of a syllabus, which, as iterated, is difficult. That's the sort of sadness of things like this Kindle article: if the world was built by book nerds, the Kindle would be an intolerable instrument of opacity; in the world as we have it, it's no big.
This is all true, and is all the sort of thing one knows, as one knows that the world is round. But it's not at all the case that one has to act as such. You can bet that, the next time I see a girl in a coffeeshop reading the Sun Also Rises or whatever, I will, however briefly, envision her as the future Mrs. Schratz. Isn't it pretty to think so?
The place to go for way more depth is, of course, "scholarly articles", which are fine to read and to talk about if you can get past the fact that everyone will stop wanting to talk to you when you say things like "Great article in Milton Quarterly last quarter, you should check it out." For the other kind of thing that I like -- pure book nerdiness -- you have to just wait for the Times to deliver, and boy did they deliver today.
The title is already great -- "With Kindle, Can You Tell It's Proust?" -- and then imagine my delight when, after some scene setting about Kindle and the usual oohing and aahing over the putatively great Kindle techne (boring) we get this, the crux of the piece: "Please, they’re [that is, they who worry about Kindle's effects on the economics of reading are] overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?" The effects of anything on literary snobbism are, of course, the first effects I think about. I also found myself nodding happily when I read some of the testimonials later in the article: "When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person" (although minus points to that guy for showing off that he sees movies at MOMA); "I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading Ulysses." Judging and hoping to be judged by books? Done and done. It's not even two pm and I've done both of those already today. The problem with the Kindle, as assessed here, is that this makes this hard. If I were Kindling Ulysses instead of carrying it around, well, for all we know you're just Kindling, oh, I don't know, something easy and non-impressive to read. (Something un-Prousty, say.)
This reminded me of the article, discussed here last year, about whether or not there were books that represented deal-breakers in relationships, and The Furious Debate that that engendered. Except, of course, there was no Furious Debate at all. There as here, the only thing that we really come away with is mild snark against popular books (this year, He's Just Not Into You, last year, Marley and Me) and the sense that, the fantasies of all book nerds (myself included) notwithstanding, there's really no eluctable way in which the sum of the things you read, or want to read, or endorse, constitute the person you are.
That is kind of a bummer. The part of me that looks forward to nothing more than this kind of article -- not a book review, not a scholarly article, but a sheer slice of nerd fantasy sociology -- also wants to believe that the way you make friends is to find people who like the same books as you, preferably just by walking around with your book like a badge, and then skip to making snarky jokes about Marley and Me together. But really, you have to actually act like a whole person instead of a syllabus, which, as iterated, is difficult. That's the sort of sadness of things like this Kindle article: if the world was built by book nerds, the Kindle would be an intolerable instrument of opacity; in the world as we have it, it's no big.
This is all true, and is all the sort of thing one knows, as one knows that the world is round. But it's not at all the case that one has to act as such. You can bet that, the next time I see a girl in a coffeeshop reading the Sun Also Rises or whatever, I will, however briefly, envision her as the future Mrs. Schratz. Isn't it pretty to think so?
Ostranenie
So, bad job by me, both at celebrating National Poetry Month and its resorbed, smaller twin, National Poem in Your Pocket Day. I actually did celebrate each somewhat, but I only wrote about two (2) poems on this "weblog", down from four (4) last year. And, worst of all, I did not post anything at all on National P. in Your P. day itself. I meant to, but ha! as usual, things ganged way the hell agley once again.
I did manage to walk around with poems in my pocket yesterday, although again down from four to two. Last year, I spent the whole day basking in the glorious Williamstown, MA sun, handing out poems like it was my job. This year, I had to a) proctor a test and b) drive ten hours, round trip, to a courthouse in Fulton, New York, to contest a speeding ticket. On my way to the former, I realized that oh crap, I had been talking up National Poem in Your Pocket Day for over a month at the school where I sometimes subsitute teach, and that I had gotten as far as the donut store on my morning routine with zero (0) poems. So I wrote on napkins the two poems that I felt like I had the least chance of screwing up: Sion, by Cesarea Tinajero, and The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. You will, I've no doubt, remember Sion, the three-lines (not three-line; it's actually 0 words, three lines, and three squares) poem that is all that remains of the poetess Tinajero's work in the Savage Detectives. No one that I showed that one to seemed impressed.
The other one, I showed to my mother and asked her what she thought was the most important word in the poem. She voted for wheelbarrow, which does get top billing and is probably right and made me feel a little silly for asking the question in the first place, because my dissenting vote is that the most important word in the poem is "glazed". That is because every other word I have probably said in the last three days without thinking about it. From very cursory reading -- like, four pages in Eagleton's introduction to Literary Theory -- I am learnt that there are Russian formalists, and that they came up with an emphasis on a thing called "ostranenie", or defamiliarization. Said Shklovsky, consonant-endowed ringleader of the R. Formalists: "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known...art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." Now, beyond the enigmatic sense conveyed by the first stanza of Williams's poem (depends for whom?), all of the energy is focused on the artfulness of that wheelbarrow -- and I contend that that energy has its crux in the word "glazed", the defamiliarizer. Read the poem with a workaday word like "wet" or even "soaked" for "glazed", and I think it fails to live up to its own first stanza. But as it stands, the poem is breathtaking: the one little syllable of ostranenie makes an entire scene into a piece of art.
Anyway, armed (or pocketed) with my two poems, I drove all the way out to Fulton, on the Thruway, through Rochester and Geneva and Syracuse and Utica, flipping through NPR stations as their signals faded; and my ticket was dismissed (hooray!); and I drove home along Route 5, listening to the Yankees win and to the Celtics lose, and I drove behind a west-moving, intermittent rainstorm. I had never driven all the way home on Route 5 before (it takes a really long time, but there is no toll), but most of Route 5 looks like most of Route everything else -- lots of box stores and fast food places and farms -- except that, I am not kidding, because of the storm I followed, absolutely everything was glazed/with rain water. For six hours of intermittent rain and a universal, unrelenting glaze, with my poem in my pocket, I was treated to two hundred miles of New York State Highway as an object of artfulness. It damn near made up for the Celtics losing.
So au revoir, National Poetry Month. Coming up: I am still plugging away at Proust, life-changingly, so more on him; much-belated final thoughts on Ms. Tinajero's book (so you all can post your final thoughts, too!); and the possibility of a National Short Story Month (get on it, Congress). Stay tuned!
I did manage to walk around with poems in my pocket yesterday, although again down from four to two. Last year, I spent the whole day basking in the glorious Williamstown, MA sun, handing out poems like it was my job. This year, I had to a) proctor a test and b) drive ten hours, round trip, to a courthouse in Fulton, New York, to contest a speeding ticket. On my way to the former, I realized that oh crap, I had been talking up National Poem in Your Pocket Day for over a month at the school where I sometimes subsitute teach, and that I had gotten as far as the donut store on my morning routine with zero (0) poems. So I wrote on napkins the two poems that I felt like I had the least chance of screwing up: Sion, by Cesarea Tinajero, and The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. You will, I've no doubt, remember Sion, the three-lines (not three-line; it's actually 0 words, three lines, and three squares) poem that is all that remains of the poetess Tinajero's work in the Savage Detectives. No one that I showed that one to seemed impressed.
The other one, I showed to my mother and asked her what she thought was the most important word in the poem. She voted for wheelbarrow, which does get top billing and is probably right and made me feel a little silly for asking the question in the first place, because my dissenting vote is that the most important word in the poem is "glazed". That is because every other word I have probably said in the last three days without thinking about it. From very cursory reading -- like, four pages in Eagleton's introduction to Literary Theory -- I am learnt that there are Russian formalists, and that they came up with an emphasis on a thing called "ostranenie", or defamiliarization. Said Shklovsky, consonant-endowed ringleader of the R. Formalists: "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known...art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." Now, beyond the enigmatic sense conveyed by the first stanza of Williams's poem (depends for whom?), all of the energy is focused on the artfulness of that wheelbarrow -- and I contend that that energy has its crux in the word "glazed", the defamiliarizer. Read the poem with a workaday word like "wet" or even "soaked" for "glazed", and I think it fails to live up to its own first stanza. But as it stands, the poem is breathtaking: the one little syllable of ostranenie makes an entire scene into a piece of art.
Anyway, armed (or pocketed) with my two poems, I drove all the way out to Fulton, on the Thruway, through Rochester and Geneva and Syracuse and Utica, flipping through NPR stations as their signals faded; and my ticket was dismissed (hooray!); and I drove home along Route 5, listening to the Yankees win and to the Celtics lose, and I drove behind a west-moving, intermittent rainstorm. I had never driven all the way home on Route 5 before (it takes a really long time, but there is no toll), but most of Route 5 looks like most of Route everything else -- lots of box stores and fast food places and farms -- except that, I am not kidding, because of the storm I followed, absolutely everything was glazed/with rain water. For six hours of intermittent rain and a universal, unrelenting glaze, with my poem in my pocket, I was treated to two hundred miles of New York State Highway as an object of artfulness. It damn near made up for the Celtics losing.
So au revoir, National Poetry Month. Coming up: I am still plugging away at Proust, life-changingly, so more on him; much-belated final thoughts on Ms. Tinajero's book (so you all can post your final thoughts, too!); and the possibility of a National Short Story Month (get on it, Congress). Stay tuned!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Happy Shakespeare's Birthday!
Happy Shakespeare's Birthday, everyone! One of the seventh-graders whom I was substitute teaching today asked, when I had written that on the chalkboard, shouldn't I have written Happy Birthday, Shakespeare. Well, no, because he is dead and anyway it's a happy occasion for us, not just for him. Not even for him, now that he is dead. Anyway here is a Birthday Listicle for my man Shakespeare, of the top four quotes that I think celebrate the big 4-4-5.
Oh, also, I think "Talk Like Shakespeare" day is kind of silly unless you take it WAY EXTREME and start using real, pre-vowel shift, clipped jabbering instead of just saying "sirrah" and "neither a borrower nor a lender be". I don't think that part of "talking like Shakespeare" is the same as "quoting unnecessarily and stupidly". We'll save that for talk like Polonius day.
4)"Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
Thou know'st, when we first smell the air
We wawl and cry..........................
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools." -- King Lear
So, right of the bat, a downer. Someone, I think Cavell, points out that, uh, Shakespeare, that's not really why we cry when we're born. But still. On your birthday, you can feel that way. I used to refuse to celebrate my birthday, because if you made up a ledger with all of my woes on it, I was doing a lot better pre-birth than post-birth, and didn't want to celebrate just the start of all my troubles. But with the right inflection, you can be a good stoic on your birthday by reminding yourself that indeed, we came crying hither.
3)"And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones." -- King Henry V
This one is a little testy, too, and I'm not totally sure that the tennis balls that the Dauphin sends Henry (for laffs) are a birthday present (in fact, I'm almost positive they're not). But this is a useful one for the Shakespeare-birthday quote arsenal, to trot out if anyone's gag gift incites you to invade their country while claiming the benefit of Salic law.
2) The First Twelve Lines of Sonnet XXX
I like this one -- it's the "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past" one -- not just because it's a little Prousty (a lot Prousty for anglophones), but also because it has the kind of grim account taking that I imagine one does on one's birthday. The last lines, though, I feel are a little soppy. This one's kind of a downer, too, like the first one; but like I said, with the woe-ledger, I generally get down (sad down, not boogie-down) about birthdays.
1) "When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! it blows up a man like a bladder."--Falstaff
So, sad about anyone's birthday? Nothing will cheer you up out of that faster than Falstaff. After all the mopery of the proceeding, I laughed several times reading the post-Gad's Hill robbery scene, the one whence this quote. One of the best things available to us on our birthdays -- other than the impulse to pwn your Salic enemies -- is to look back and reward ourselves not just with the "fore-bemoaned moan" from the sonnet, but also with, what the hell, a vision of your life as you'd have liked it to be. Falstaff is an expert at that, and on Shakespeare's birthday and our own birthdays, we can choose to remember the times that we could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring, because why not.
Oh, also, I think "Talk Like Shakespeare" day is kind of silly unless you take it WAY EXTREME and start using real, pre-vowel shift, clipped jabbering instead of just saying "sirrah" and "neither a borrower nor a lender be". I don't think that part of "talking like Shakespeare" is the same as "quoting unnecessarily and stupidly". We'll save that for talk like Polonius day.
4)"Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
Thou know'st, when we first smell the air
We wawl and cry..........................
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools." -- King Lear
So, right of the bat, a downer. Someone, I think Cavell, points out that, uh, Shakespeare, that's not really why we cry when we're born. But still. On your birthday, you can feel that way. I used to refuse to celebrate my birthday, because if you made up a ledger with all of my woes on it, I was doing a lot better pre-birth than post-birth, and didn't want to celebrate just the start of all my troubles. But with the right inflection, you can be a good stoic on your birthday by reminding yourself that indeed, we came crying hither.
3)"And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones." -- King Henry V
This one is a little testy, too, and I'm not totally sure that the tennis balls that the Dauphin sends Henry (for laffs) are a birthday present (in fact, I'm almost positive they're not). But this is a useful one for the Shakespeare-birthday quote arsenal, to trot out if anyone's gag gift incites you to invade their country while claiming the benefit of Salic law.
2) The First Twelve Lines of Sonnet XXX
I like this one -- it's the "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past" one -- not just because it's a little Prousty (a lot Prousty for anglophones), but also because it has the kind of grim account taking that I imagine one does on one's birthday. The last lines, though, I feel are a little soppy. This one's kind of a downer, too, like the first one; but like I said, with the woe-ledger, I generally get down (sad down, not boogie-down) about birthdays.
1) "When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! it blows up a man like a bladder."--Falstaff
So, sad about anyone's birthday? Nothing will cheer you up out of that faster than Falstaff. After all the mopery of the proceeding, I laughed several times reading the post-Gad's Hill robbery scene, the one whence this quote. One of the best things available to us on our birthdays -- other than the impulse to pwn your Salic enemies -- is to look back and reward ourselves not just with the "fore-bemoaned moan" from the sonnet, but also with, what the hell, a vision of your life as you'd have liked it to be. Falstaff is an expert at that, and on Shakespeare's birthday and our own birthdays, we can choose to remember the times that we could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring, because why not.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wild Surmise
Here are some thoughts on poem two of a long National Poetry Month; let's see if we can knock down poems a little more quickly from here on in. This poem is about looking into old poetry, because what else is this month about? This poem was re-brought to my mind by a friend of mine who lives in Darien (but not the one mentioned in the poem) and who vacations in Smyrna (but not the one from the famous Hemingway supershort story On the Quai at Smyrna), making her, I guess, a sort of ersatz literary celebrity. Anyway, the poet is Keats (big poet Keats) and the poem is "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer".
This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".
I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.
This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".
I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Charmed with Smiles and Soap
This post is about snark, or rather, The Snark, the quarry of Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark". It is not about David Denby's book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, which I will talk about soon. Rather, my reading some of Denby's book (which Miles mentioned in a comment a little ways back, and which seems in general the kind of Hip Zeitgesity Thing I tend to write about a few months late) has inspired me to look into the etymological provenance of Snark, and that place is Carroll's poem. And! It is National Poetry Month! So, count this as the festivities beginning.
What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:
"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."
This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.
Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.
What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.
Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.
What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:
"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."
This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.
Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.
What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.
Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.
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