Today I went for a run, and remembered that another reason I, as a literary nerd, like our house here: not our street, or the one next to it, but the one next to that is called Waxwing Lane, which is only a small, pluralizing sibilant away from being waxwing slain, and we all know what poem I have a crush on has that phrase in it's first line. Anyway, that made me think about a book issue that I often try to engage my family on, to their long-suffering: how much do you think about books when you're not reading them? Or actually, I guess the question is more: how much do you use books to think about other things?
Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.
That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Vacation, All I Ever Wanted
So, today is the first day of my vacation. Since about June, I have not been doing much of anything other than being nervous and earning my keep around the house, so this trip to North Carolina is sort of a vacation from already being on vacation. That said, I am excited: the annual Schratz family trip down here is SUMMER READING TIME, even though my reading time at home has been largely unimpeded and summer is about two thirds over. There are several reasons why going to our house in North Carolina represents ideal reading time, and that show what an ideal reading situation has on offer.
ONE: Chairs. The chairs here are better than the chairs at our house in Lockport for reading, hands down. I don't think we have any chairs in our house in Lockport, actually, except at the dining room table. It turns out that I can read for like 20-25 more minutes per sit-down of reading, when I can put both of my arms on an armrest at once. This is a critical improvement over our couches. Beyond that, we also have like a hammock swing-chair apparatus, which begs to be read upon. The more utilitarian chairs one might take for granted. When you see a hammock swing-chair apparatus, you know that it has to be sit on; and what better thing to do while so sitting, than read your book? So, lesson: Get yourself a chair you can appreciate, and appreciate it.
TWO: A relative paucity of books. I own too many books. I have to read Benjamin's Unpacking My Library essay constantly, to reassure myself that it is ok to have as many freaking books as I have. In that essay, Benjamin recounts an admirer of Anatole France's asking him (France) if he had read all of the books in his library, to which France said, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?" Point, Anatole. Anyway, I don't know if my unread books make as bad a portion as 90% of my book volume, but whatever they make, it ain't great. They take up five-ish shelves, and I stare at them. Often. Half of my unread books have bookmarks on page 3 or 4, from where I decided to start reading the book after staring at their spines before returning, like a chastened philanderer, to the books I was already on pages 50 and 300 of. In North Carolina, I've only got ten books, so way fewer opportunities to spread myself too thin. It's like committing, for two weeks, to use your Sevres china and use the hell out of it, until it is properly appreciated. Lesson here: it may be necessary to take physical measures to curtail the reader's wandering eye.
THREE: A massive body of water. This is more of a societal issue than a me-issue, but it is surprising to me how much people are more willing to let you go sit and read all day if you do it in front of an ocean or a river or a lake or whatever. Thousands of times, I have huffily told my brothers that I am BUSY READING; the only times that they have retreated with dignity in the face of this huff has been with their backs to bodies of water. I tried this once at home at the Erie Canal, but that didn't really work. There is not a lot soothing about the Erie Canal. This isn't much of a lesson; it's hard to find somebody who will really sell you on being against the contemplation of oceans.
So those are three of the reasons why I am excited for my little vacation I'm on. The books themselves, obviously, are exciting too: I've got more Proust (Proust forever), Mason and Dixon by Pynchon, The Spoils of Poynton, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a few more. So GET AMPED to be bloggified (and now tweeted! @CaptainSchratz) in the coming days. The reading chair is a good blogging chair, as well.
ONE: Chairs. The chairs here are better than the chairs at our house in Lockport for reading, hands down. I don't think we have any chairs in our house in Lockport, actually, except at the dining room table. It turns out that I can read for like 20-25 more minutes per sit-down of reading, when I can put both of my arms on an armrest at once. This is a critical improvement over our couches. Beyond that, we also have like a hammock swing-chair apparatus, which begs to be read upon. The more utilitarian chairs one might take for granted. When you see a hammock swing-chair apparatus, you know that it has to be sit on; and what better thing to do while so sitting, than read your book? So, lesson: Get yourself a chair you can appreciate, and appreciate it.
TWO: A relative paucity of books. I own too many books. I have to read Benjamin's Unpacking My Library essay constantly, to reassure myself that it is ok to have as many freaking books as I have. In that essay, Benjamin recounts an admirer of Anatole France's asking him (France) if he had read all of the books in his library, to which France said, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?" Point, Anatole. Anyway, I don't know if my unread books make as bad a portion as 90% of my book volume, but whatever they make, it ain't great. They take up five-ish shelves, and I stare at them. Often. Half of my unread books have bookmarks on page 3 or 4, from where I decided to start reading the book after staring at their spines before returning, like a chastened philanderer, to the books I was already on pages 50 and 300 of. In North Carolina, I've only got ten books, so way fewer opportunities to spread myself too thin. It's like committing, for two weeks, to use your Sevres china and use the hell out of it, until it is properly appreciated. Lesson here: it may be necessary to take physical measures to curtail the reader's wandering eye.
THREE: A massive body of water. This is more of a societal issue than a me-issue, but it is surprising to me how much people are more willing to let you go sit and read all day if you do it in front of an ocean or a river or a lake or whatever. Thousands of times, I have huffily told my brothers that I am BUSY READING; the only times that they have retreated with dignity in the face of this huff has been with their backs to bodies of water. I tried this once at home at the Erie Canal, but that didn't really work. There is not a lot soothing about the Erie Canal. This isn't much of a lesson; it's hard to find somebody who will really sell you on being against the contemplation of oceans.
So those are three of the reasons why I am excited for my little vacation I'm on. The books themselves, obviously, are exciting too: I've got more Proust (Proust forever), Mason and Dixon by Pynchon, The Spoils of Poynton, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a few more. So GET AMPED to be bloggified (and now tweeted! @CaptainSchratz) in the coming days. The reading chair is a good blogging chair, as well.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Nervous Summer
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.
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.
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.
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