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.