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.

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.

How How Proust Can Change Your Life Can Change Your Life

Connor and I went to New Orleans last week. As soon as we got to our hotel, we went out to a series of touristy bars, at which we drank away most of our money (Pat O'Brien's Hurricanes, Spring Break!), so we spent the rest of the time looking at cemeteries (often closed), eating ice for dinner, and going to bookstores in order to read the magazines there without buying them. The one that held my interest the longest was the current issue of Mental Floss, which has a book with the coils that you see on those big fat square batteries on the top of it, to herald a list: The 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years. I had only read eight (weak), but all of them seemed like reasonable choices. The ones I didn't read seemed, from their blurbs, reasonable as well, and there were no books that I could think of that seemed more Powerful from the last 25 years, although I think part of that is I feel like I am not really qualified to gauge what is and is not powerful about books, since I cried at the end of Pnin and clearly overvalue the power of books in the first place. Anyway, number 17 was How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, and I am choosing it as the newest book club selection, because hey, you should all have your lives changed by Proust as well.

You all know Proust, yes? He is the fellow who tasted madeleines, dipped in tea, and remembered his life for the next three thousand pages or so. Proust can change your life, I think, insofar as someone who like me has only got to know him in translation can vouch. C.S. Lewis, in a quote that I once floated as an epigram for Our Beloved Blog, said that "We read, to know that we are not alone." This is a quote that I have a number of problems with, as I've mentioned; one of the things I said was that maybe essays, much more than fiction, could remind you that you're not alone. My favorite thing about Proust, which shows up in the de Botton book and which I am gleaning (halfway through Within a Budding Grove) in reading it myself, is that he has torqued his novel into something like an endless essay; it's like those little, once-every-ten-paragraphs generalizing mini-essays that George Eliot gave us have taken over the entire show. Proust loves to tell you not what people are like, but what sort of people people are like. "Swann was one of those men," he tells us, "who, having lived for a long time among the illusions of love have seen the blessings they have brought to innumerable women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness toward their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will allow them to survive after their death." Reading along, one might not think a lot of it. "Of course, one of those men." But really? Do you know anyone who does that? I don't, and I certainly wouldn't, if I met one, call him "one of those men". But the fantasy that Proust offers is one of infinite generalizability: if there is a person out there, he or she is one of those persons, and if there is a church that young Marcel visits, it is one of those churches. I find this inordinately appealing, maybe even...life changing?

In the Mental Floss blurb, they call How Proust Can Change Your Life "The Book that Helped People to Stop Helping Themselves", and they have de Botton saying, "What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense...I find a certain kind of pessimism consoling and helpful. Part of fulfillment might be recognizing how awful life is." Sounds good. So, check out the book; check out the actual Proust book if you also care to (I plan on finishing Within a Budding Grove and starting the Guermantes Way tomorrow while I'm supposed to be doing chores).

Cool Ideas

This is going to be a post against cool ideas. Now, in general, I am for cool ideas. They are often cool. A cartoon song about George Washington? That's a cool idea. Puppies at halftime during the super bowl is a cool idea. These are also both clearly the fruit of someone thinking "you know what would be cool?" and then making their cartoon or their halftime show. So, in most walks of life, cool ideas do good work. But not novels. I mean, novels are the one place, really, where just wanted to have a cool idea set forth just isn't going to cut it.

I started writing this post without really knowing why this was going to be true, but knowing that I was going to end up coming down on Downtown Owl for failing as a novel by being rather obviously a string of written episodes clearly inspired in their author by a series of cool ideas. Related but non-interlocking stories is a cool idea, and sets up early for a big convergent ending, which is a cool idea. Nicknames are a cool idea, and novels offer unchecked nicknaming range (it's almost only in novels that we find those guys with nicknames whose working is dependent on a nickname-last name hookup [I say that as a gut thing, especially since the only such nickname I can think off the top of my head is from a movie {Randall "Pink" Floyd}]). But none of these nicknames sound like anything that real humans would make up, and, more importantly, none of them seem especially revelatory about the characters whom they nickname. One guy is called the Dog Lover because he, uh, loves his dog; but at no point does his dog-loving stand in poignant counterpoint, or even poignant point to anything else that goes on in the novel. One guy -- one of our main guys-- is named Mitch Hrlicka, and is called Vanna, because his football coach thought his name needed more vowels. That is clever enough -- except it seems like cleverness cheaply bought, because, of course, the same author who made up the nickname actually made up the nickedname, too.

I think that one of the opposites of this is the sublimely ridiculous Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer, where Mailer talks at huge length about his own involvement in a march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. He keeps yammering about Mailer's long suffering, and the Huge Historical Importance of everything he does. On paper, it is irredeemably lame: writing a novel more or less explicitly to justify a certain thing you've done is like the anti-cool idea. But Mailer has two things that I think are at the core of what good novels need: he has an undeniably magnificent sense of literary style, and he has an unswerving sense of commitment to writing these things down with that style, a sort of ineffable sense that he, Mailer, is absolutely compelled to write this book (this sense of compulsion is something that I keep invoking to defend Bolaño's so thinly veiling the version of himself [Belano] who stars in the Savage Detectives). What Downtown Owl ends up suffering from is a decent but not overwhelming style -- a style that's really most at home with observational stand-up comedians and a pre-backlash Malcolm Gladwell-- and an overarching sense not of compulsion, but of coolness.

This may not be a thing that causes concern for everyone, I have just thought; but to me, what makes these two shortcomings (and shortcomings may be putting it strongly; cool ideas and hey-what's-the-deal-with-this style make some brilliant essays, for sure) so galling to me is that they seem to come short of justifying the invention of the world of Downtown Owl. Why this might not concern everyone, is that I am well aware that I more than most put heavy stock in fictional people. I care about them deeply, and want to care about them almost as autocratic beings. When the characters in a book like this -- and a book that, in its final third, is clearly set up to inspire some kind of cosmic pathos -- seem to have been born not out of a compulsion to create people on the behalf of their author, but out of a desire to serve cool ideas, it ends up making me feel disappointed.

So that's that. According to the BS report with Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman's next book will be essays; I will almost definitely buy it in hardcover. And leave my highly exacting needs for novels to somebody else. Somebody called maybe, Bolaño? More on him tomorrow.

Green Eyed Monster

So, this isn't super surprising, probs, but I am often jealous of fictional people. I am much more often jealous of fictional people than I am of actual people, because, whatever actual people, do your own thing. But people on television and in books, I am often envious of. This is probably not the way most normal people confront the universe. But it's what I've got. So anyway, I have been barnstorming through our soon-to-be Book Club Book Emeritus, the Savage Detectives, and it got me to wondering in a particular way about these jealousies, to wit: I started to wonder whether the oblique way in which Belano and Ulises Lima exist has eclipsed the occasional way in which television characters exist, as the mode of going about life of which I am most (and most unrealistically) jealous.

I should say that, ever since I started waking up to watch the 3am to 5am block of Nick at Nite programming (Dick Van Dyke, the Lucille Ball Show, and maybe F Troop?) when I was in fifth grade, I have felt as if living in a television program would have been the best way to do it. In my own, actual life, I would say I generate enough activity of interest (to hold my own interest, I mean) for maybe an hour or two, with, which skillful editing, could be brought down to about forty-eight minutes, a week. So I could be an HBO show or something. The rest of my actual time I spend doing things that even I think would be better left off camera -- sitting around, waiting for things, updating my cache of quotes that are clever enough to text to people. I used to think that what would really be the best, would be if I could have to pay attention to what I was doing for those forty-eight minutes -- with music and montages -- and spend the rest of the week, I don't know, doing something else. This happens to me especially when I drive home from work, having had a successful night of playing Trivia Whiz on the Megatouch at the bar in Lockport, and a song I really like comes on the radio while I pull into my driveway. This, I think to myself, ought to be the end of this episode, and it seems like a big anticlimax that I actually have to get out of the car and brush my teeth and all of that.

Anyway, those montages are great and all, but now, more and more, I find myself wishing that the best way for my life to be talked about wouldn't even be in episodes, but in peripheral interlopes into other people talking about what they were up to when I ran into them. This morning I wore pajama pants and a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah t-shirt to go buy an air freshener and a frozen pizza at the grocery store, and the whole time I thought about how fantastic it would be if instead of something like this blog post, my trip to the grocery store was chronicled in somebody else's story about how they were picking up a sandwich tray and saw some guy in a CYHSY shirt ambling towards the aisle with scented candles and incense and such. And, say, that's how you'd know I spent a year here outside Buffalo. Just like Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, I wish to be hovering around whatever narrative arc that I'm currently propelling, in the muddled way that I'm propelling myself. Is that a strange thing to want? Periphery? And what do you guys think is better, that one, or episodes? Please, let somebody write that they too are jealous of the invented. Please?

The Book Review Review

So, yikes, a whole week with no posts. I am sure that you are all wondering what I could have been doing during all that time. Well, what I was doing was mostly sitting in my kitchen, drinking scotch, eating cereal, and reading gawker. So, really, I have no excuse for myself. I did read a little -- I finished Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman (on which more later in the week), I read a bunch of the Savage Detectives (on which more a little later in the week when I finish the book), I continued my adventures without underlining. Mainly, though, it was cereal, scotch, and the Book Review!

The big essay in the Book Review this week was about Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's bon vivant who would be turning eighty this year. He is also the star of one of the very few books that I own that are tie-ins to movies or tv shows. Here is the whole list: Fight Club, the Talented Mr Ripley, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Les Miserables, and Different Seasons by Stephen King (which is a tie-in for Apt Pupil, one of the stories in the book; I bought it for a different would-be tie-in, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), and the copy of Gossip Girl that I stole from my sister. I don't think that that list has any sort of cohesion, frankly. I managed to get in just under the wire with both the Road and with Atonement, my copies of which have their original paperback covers, but a little sticker that says "Soon a Major Motion Picture!", and I fought hard to get a copy of The Haunting of Hill House that had not been repackaged as just the Haunting. I don't know why i have this constant battles against movie tie-ins, especially because I so often determine to read books just so I'll be ready to watch the movies that they make of them. Like most of the things about my books that have more to do with objectness than bookiness, I think I do it for the benefit of people who will look at my books someday, even though pretty much no one ever looks at my books. Someday, though, I will be able to say: "Oh, yeah, Everything is Illuminated, I read that a while before it came out."

Ahem. Tom Ripley, I should know, would've probably made a point of discouraging any movie tie-ins among his books at Belle Ombre. He was stylish to the point of madness, according to the end of this Book Review essay: "the madness of perfect manners, of impeccable taste, of watertight civility." Now, because the rest of the Book Review was long, and because of all the scotch and cereal, the only other book review I read was the prequel somebody wrote for the Maltese Falcon (looks interesting!). Other than that, all weekend, all I did was watch Gossip Girl. Now all I do is watch Gossip Girl. I keep having to go buy myself dinner so that I will be reading, at least, instead of watching Gossip Girl. Anyway, that is my lame excuse and apology for slagging off my blog. More tomorrow!

The Book Review Review

Book Review this week: eh. The most interesting thing to me, naturally, was the double review of those two new Johnson biographies. Now, I'm sure that many of you have been waiting for literally weeks! for me to make some kind of noise about these new biographies of Johnson, ever since Adam Gopnik wrote up and down about the bizarre sex life of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale in his summing up of these new books. Gopnik says stuff like this: "Johnson’s piety is more impressive if we imagine it up against the keen daily edge of erotic appetite, rather than simply a long-term bulwark against imagined insanity." I guess it is? Whenever Johnson's undoubtedly bizarre life is brought up again for reconsideration, besides token deference to Boswell, the thing people always mention is that Johnson did biography too, as if that we reason enough to put him under the microscope again. But I'm not convinced that any reimagining of a grumpier Johnson or a more sexually frustrated Johnson is especially warranted, and I hardly think that that's what Johnson did to those whom he biographied. He complained about Milton's politics, as most note; but I think the sort of legend-making that he preferred, and that he got from Boswell, is more like what he puts forth in the Life of Savage, or even in the Life of Swift where, for all his nastiness toward Swift, he refuses to mention why Swift's food was pre-cut at the end of his life (he had tried to stab himself with his fork). Boswell, for all his flaws, did something that his further biographers seem to either not wish, or not be able to do; which is to make him a great character. It may be that Boswell poisoned the well; that the character of Johnson is such that it's now impossible to create a great nonfiction character out of him to contend with Boswell's more literary creation, the way that, say, Joe Gould, from Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould's Secret is a great nonfiction character. Anyway. The review of these two new books (like most reviews of them I've read, this post has coupled them and had a lot more to say about Johnson than the books themselves) ends by pointing out that though neither of these books will be wished longer than they are, Johnson would've appreciated their being written for the tercentenary of his birth. Maybe. I will try to get a hold of library copies of these and let you know. Or maybe I'll just reread a hundred pages of Boswell or so, instead.