The Alchemist

I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh--
Not the mind's avid substance--still
Passionate beyond the will.

~ Louise Bogan, born on this day in 1897

wood s lot has more poems and things in honor of the occasion, including Kathleen Norris' "Thinking About Louise Bogan."

Henry's scrawl

Oh, this is fun.

Can you read Thoreau's handwriting?

(Complete with helpful hints and magnifying glass!)

"the hand-writing of your letter is so miserable, that I am not sure I have made it out. If I have it seems to me you are the same old sixpence you used to be, rather rusty, but a genuine piece."

~ Letter, William Ellery Channing to Thoreau, 5 March 1845

Pared down

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quick-sands and thousandand-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.

~ Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Walden

In the thick of the third academic bimester, I see how more suited I am to life here than there. I have no car, telephone, microwave, tv, or hot water--and never miss them. There's something to be said for losing layers of details that used to take up so much time and having a dream vacation consist of visits to bookstores and coffee shops. Of course, my situation is by no means austere--I have an ocean out my window and broadband at my fingertips. But I somehow feel closer to the stack of books and sheets of blank, unlined paper on this rickety wooden table...

from The Variorum Edition

Night settles briskly as with feather duster
and rag under arm, determined to be not too civilized.
It seems the sky left us
hanging, long ago, and now wants us undetermined,
untried sheep nosing out of the mist.
Be thankful for all you haven't been, and could be
in a warier situation. For desk values. The shoehorn.

Our lives ebbing always toward the center,
the unframed portrait.

~ John Ashbery

Jorge Luis Borges, P.I.

Thanks to the Rake, I found out about a mysterious little book called Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo. I was immediately intrigued (and the Botero cover helped). The premise alone is worth the price of admission:

Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the center of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee's theory of the "Eternal Orangutan," which, given all the time in the world, would end up writing all the known books in the cosmos. Verissimo's small masterpiece is at once a literary tour de force and a brilliant mystery novel.

I was lucky enough to find a copy at Borders when I was up north on vacation. At just over 130 pages, it was easy to read in one sitting, which I promptly did.

I wasn't disappointed. The specific narrative structure of the misremembered symbols made by the position of the body in front of the hotel room mirror serves as an engaging form in which to contemplate subsequent implications. Academic pride, idol worship (of the fanboy variety), and mysticism figure prominently. The labrynthine paths of thought taken by Borges and Vogelstein function to both enlighten and distract at once. Most obviously, the sheer wish-fulfillment nature of the story is quite dazzling to behold. (For what could one possibly have to say to Jorge Luis Borges?)

But what I wound up with was a finely-crafted mystery: the clues were there all along.

Kentucky River Junction

to Ken Kesey & Ken Babbs

Clumsy at first, fitting together
the years we have been apart,
and the ways.

But as the night
passed and the day came, the first
fine morning of April,

it came clear:
the world that has tried us
and showed us its joy

was our bond
when we said nothing.
And we allowed it to be

with us, the new green
shining.

*

Our lives, half gone,
stay full of laughter.

Free-hearted men
have the world for words.

Though we have been
apart, we have been together.

*

Trying to sleep, I cannot
take my mind away.
The bright day

shines in my head
like a coin
on the bed of a stream.

*

You left
your welcome.

~ Wendell Berry, born on this day in 1934

XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a "new economy", but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.

~ "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear"

Short-circuiting the Other

From "Plastic Surgery for the Other" by Jean Baudrillard:

Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation is not to be dispossessed by the other but to be dispossessed of the other, that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence, and thus to be continuously referred back to oneself and to one's image. If we are today condemned to our own image (condemned to cultivate our body, our look, our identity, and our desire), this is not because of an alienation, but because of the end of alienation and because of the virtual disappearance of the other, which is a much worse fatality. In fact, the paradoxical limit of alienation is to take oneself as a focal point [comme point de mire], as an object of care, of desire, of suffering, and of communication. This final short-circuiting of the other opens up an era of transparency. Plastic surgery [la chirurgie esthetique] becomes universal. That surgery of the faces and bodies is only the symptom of a more radical one: that of otherness and destiny.

What is the solution? Well, there is none to this erotic movement of an entire culture, none to such a fascination, to such an abyss of denial of the other, of denial of strangeness and negativity. There is none to that foreclosing of evil and to that reconciliation around the Same and his proliferated expressions: incest, autism, twinning, cloning. We can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the strangeness of the Other. We must not be reconciled with our own bodies or with our selves. We must not be reconciled with the Other. We must not be reconciled with nature. We must not be reconciled with femininity (and that goes for women too). The secret to a strange attraction lies here.

With thanks to wood s lot

(I feel like Meg Murry: "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!")

Inception of The Saturday Evening Post

(This was to have gone up yesterday.)

Today in Literature discusses the background of the famous periodical (and my former employer):

On this day in 1821, the first issue of The Saturday Evening Post appeared. This was the first use of the new name, coined by new owners, but the weekly was begun in 1729, by twenty-two-year-old Benjamin Franklin. His Pennsylvania Gazette was one of five regular publications in the colonies, and itself a purchase from a previous publisher who had struggled on for ten months under the title, The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette. The Post inherited Franklin's type, and was first published in the same print shop Franklin used, where a jingle written by Franklin still hung over the door: "All ye who come this curious art to see, / To handle anything must cautious be....

Heh. He wasn't kidding. Although the piece mentions some of the illustrious contributors of the past, it says nothing about its current incarnation or editorial statement. The magazine that once published William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and even early Peanuts has headed in an entirely different direction.

Then again, there are many similarities between the aims of the early Post and what it's up to today. As TiL relates,

[T]he literary mandate did not always or easily square with the magazine's other mandate, that of being the voice and guardian of Middle America. In one issue near the end of 1899, new editor George Lorimer announced that the newly expanded Post would continue "to present the best and worthiest of contemporaneous literature," and then went on in the next sentence to give his own caution:

"There is nothing worthy or permanent in life that is not clean, and in its plans and purposes the new Saturday Evening Post preaches and practices the gospel of cleanliness. It appeals to the great mass of intelligent people who make homes and love them, who choose good lives and live them, who seek friends and cherish them, who select the best recreations and enjoy them."

Fondest thoughts and wishes to the intelligent, long-suffering individuals who continue to keep the dear old place afloat. Everything worth reading within these pages is entirely to your credit.

Harriet Monroe's would've been, How to Run a Literary Magazine While Keeping the Poets Fed and Surviving Editorial Advice from Ezra Pound

I swiped this from Bud. Still chuckling...

From Poetry Magazine's "News Notes" section in the July humor issue:

The program has been released for next year's AWP Conference in Celebration, Florida. Featured Speakers and topics include:


John Ashbery: Getting Over the Hump: The Four Hundredth Book

Louis Glück: Glück, Glück, Glück: It's an Umlaut, You Stupid Fucks

William Logan: Kill Your Inner Child: Reviewing as Therapy

Geoffrey Hill: Squeezing the Telos: Why I watch “The bachelor”

Billy Collins: How to Write a Book of Poems While Playing Golf

Jorie Graham: Toward a Long View of Art, or This Will All Make Sense When You're Dead

Eavan Boland: Women and Ireland and Poetry and Ireland and Women and Poetry and Women and Poetry and Ireland and Women and Ireland and Poetry!!!

Adrienne Rich: Jiving Into the Wreck: Shakin' the Groove Thang in Your Golden Years

Sharon Olds: Licking the Eggplant: Staying Creative in the Kitchen

Robert Pinsky: Why I should be Chairman of the Divine Endowment of All Art of All Kinds Everywhere in the World Amen

Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

~ Theodore Roethke

Birth of Melville

~ Rockwell Kent's illustrated version of Moby-Dick

Quixote's Quest for Unity

[cross-posted from 400 Windmills]

In This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life, Carlos Fuentes unequivocally designates "Q" for "Quixote":

In the figure of Don Quixote, Michel Foucalt sees a symbol of the modern divorce between the word and the object. An emissary of the past, Don Quixote desperately searches for the place where the two may meet, as in the medieval order of things. The Quixotic pilgrimage is a search for similarities, and Foucault observes how Don Quixote rapidly recruits the weakest analogies: for him, everything is a latent sign that must be awakened to speak and to demonstrate the identity of words and objects: stocky peasant women are princesses, windmills are giants, inns are castles because such are the identities that words ascribe to objects in the books of Don Quixote.

But seeing as how flocks of sheep are really flocks of sheep and not armies, Don Quixote, orphan of the universe where words and objects no longer correspond, travels alone, the incarnation of the eternal dilemma of the modern novel that he inaugurates with his tale: How to achieve unity without sacrificing diversity? How to maintain the analogy damaged by impertinent humanistic curiosity as well as the difference threatened by the hunger for restored unity? How to fill the deep abyss between words and things through the divorce between analogy and difference?

Don Quixote contains both the question and the answer: the divorce between objects and words that previously corresponded cannot be fixed by a new setting or "placement" but rather by displacement. Set in his place by the static world of the knight errant, Don Quixote wants to destroy the paradox of an immobile adventure, prisoner to the old books in his library in the immutable village of La Mancha, and displace himself--that is, enter into movement. And that, in the age of antiquity, was how men distinguished themselves from gods: they displaced themselves. They moved. Don Quixote believes that he is traveling so that he may reestablish the unity of man and the faith that is his certainty, though in reality he travels only to find himself in a new physical space where everything has become a problem, beginning with the novel that Don Quixote inhabits.

I find it fascinating that amid this quest to actualize myth--which he believes to be the factual past--Don Quixote becomes his own self-fulfilling prophecy. The exploits (or mishaps) of Part I find their way into novels that precede him wherever he goes in Part II. His mad acts have prompted the writing of books (Part I and the fake Part II) where his ideals of chivalry figure prominently, and he is recognized by those he meets as a knight errant (albeit one of questionable sanity). Yet Don Quixote is happiest not in being recognized or (seemingly) proven right, but in finding himself on the brink of a new adventure. He is never content to simply win victories or be an honored guest in a luxurious room in a castle with a maiden madly in love with him. In other words, the typical chivalric "outcome" is not enough. The "truth" of his courtly ideals is more important than the "fact" of their realization. For as Fuentes later states, "When Quixote's dreams become reality, Quixote can no longer imagine" as he proves that "all lasting reality is based firmly on the imagination."

Perhaps the "unity" (or harmony) he seeks is to be found precisely in his "displacement"--in being on the verge of actualization rather than attaining the actualization itself. In this sense, Cervantes' work transcends the mere notion of the tragic "lost illusion" and offers hope to those of us struggling with our multilayered dislocation in the modern world and all its uncertainty.

Subverting violence

Scott McLemee's latest column is a brief introduction to the work of René Girard:

For the most part, we are blind to the mediated nature of desire. But the great writers, according to Girard, are more lucid about this. They reveal the inner logic of desire, including its tendency to spread — and, in spreading, to generate conflict. When several hands reach for the same object, some of them are bound to end up making fists. So begins a cycle of terror and retaliation; for violence, too, is mimetic.

By the 1970s, Girard had turned all of this into a grand theory of human culture. He described a process in which the contagion-like spread of mimetic desire and violence leads to the threat of utter social disintegration. At which point, something important happens: the scapegoat emerges. All of the free-floating violence is discharged in an act of murder against an innocent person or group which is treated (amidst the delirium of impending collapse) as the source of the conflict.

A kind of order takes shape around this moment of sacrificial violence. Myths and rituals are part of the commemoration of the act by which mimetic desire and its terrible consequences were subdued. But they aren’t subdued forever. The potential for a return of this contagion is built into the very core of what makes us human.

As McLemee correctly observes, "It isn’t necessary to share Girard’s creed to find his work of interest" (I find it helpful to consider him a "literary theorist"). What I found fascinating about The Scapegoat is his examination of the Gospels as literary text in light of other mythologies. His theories work on a textual level, without the necessity of shared common assumptions regarding the Christian faith.

Here is a portion of the interview to which the article refers:

In mythology, a furious mob mobilizes against scapegoats held responsible for some huge crisis. The sacrifice of the guilty victim through collective violence ends the crisis and founds a new order ordained by the divine. Violence and scapegoating are always present in the mythological definition of the divine itself.

It is true that the structure of the Gospels is similar to that of mythology in which a crisis is resolved through a single victim who unites everybody against him, thus reconciling the community. As the Greeks thought, the shock of death of the victim brings about a catharsis that reconciles. It extinguishes the appetite for violence. For the Greeks, the tragic death of the hero enabled ordinary people to go back to their peaceful lives.

However, in this case, the victim is innocent and the victimizers are guilty. Collective violence against the scapegoat as a sacred, founding act is revealed as a lie. Christ redeems the victimizers through enduring his suffering, imploring God to "forgive them for they know not what they do." He refuses to plead to God to avenge his victimhood with reciprocal violence. Rather, he turns the other cheek.

The victory of the Cross is a victory of love against the scapegoating cycle of violence. It punctures the idea that hatred is a sacred duty.

Because it was bound to come up

I've stumbled upon three excellent discussions of Half-Blood Prince at Michael Bérubé Online, Easily Distracted, and In Medias Res. (Don't read them until you've read the book--spoilers galore!)

Wow. If only George Lucas had had one-tenth of Rowling's storytelling capabilities while writing Episodes I-III!


Incidentally, today is JKR's birthday, as well as Harry's (as evidenced by the calendar and glass of champagne on her desk). Many happy returns!

Living spaces

The house of Ellen Nussey--Charlotte Brontë's closest friend--has gone on the market for £365,000.

"Brookroyd House plays a significant part in the history of Britain's most famous literary family.

"We look forward to meeting potential buyers with interest."

Andy (over at Maud's place) has a great write-up of this unintentionally funny article.

I "appreciate its strong literary connections"! Anyone willing to loan me half a million dollars?

Art

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--Art.

~ Herman Melville

"The wildest things, in the most natural way"

The Virginia Quarterly Review has a newly-translated 1977 interview with Gabriel García Márquez. I'd love to post the entire thing right here, it's so good--but here are a couple glimpses:

As far as literature was concerned, the Caribbean coast didn’t exist. When literature gets separated from life and seals itself off in closed circles, then a gap appears and it’s filled by the provincials . . . They save literature when it’s become rhetoric.

At age twenty I already had a literary background that was enough for me to write everything I’ve written . . . I don’t know how I discovered the novel. I thought that what interested me was poetry . . . I don’t know . . . I can’t remember when it was I realized that the novel was what I needed to express myself . . . You guys can’t imagine what it meant for a scholarship kid from the Coast enrolled at the Liceo de Zipaquirá to have access to books .. Probably Kafka’s The Metamorphosis” was a revelation . . . It was in 1947 . . . I was nineteen . . . I was doing my first year of law school . . . I remember the opening sentences, it reads exactly thus: “As Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” . . . Holy shit! When I read that I said to myself, “This isn’t right! . . . Nobody had told me this could be done! . . . Because it really can be done! . . . So then I can! . . . Holy shit! . . . That’s how my grandmother told stories . . . The wildest things, in the most natural way.”

And next day I set out, just like that, next day at eight o’clock in the morning, to try to find out what the hell had been done in the novel from the beginnings of humanity up to myself. So I latched onto the novel in rigorous order, let’s say from the Bible up to what was being written at that time. Beginning then, for six years, I didn’t do literature by myself, I stopped studying and dropped out of everything. I started writing a series of stories that were completely intellectual. They were my first stories, published in El Espectador. The chief problem I had when I began writing those stories was that of other writers: what to write about.

But after the April 9 riots in Bogotá, when I had nothing left except the clothes on my back, I left for the Coast and started work there, at a newspaper. And then the subjects started to invade me. I started encountering an entire reality I’d left behind, on the Coast, which I couldn’t interpret because of a lack of literary grounding. That was the first invasion, to such an extent that I’d write as if in a fever.

I’ve a great deal of affection for Leaf Storm. Even lots of compassion for that guy who wrote it. I can see him perfectly. A 22- or 23-year-old kid who feels he’s not going to write anything else in life, feels it’s his only chance, and he tries to throw in everything he remembers, everything he’s learned about literary technique and sophistication from every author he’s seen. At that time I was catching up, I was into the English and North American novelists. And when the critics start finding my influences in Faulkner and Hemingway, what they find—it’s not that they’re not right, but in some other way—is that when I’m confronted with that whole reality on the Coast, and I start connecting with my experiences literarily . . . the best way to tell it, I realize, isn’t Kafka’s . . . I realize the method is precisely that of the American novelists. What I find in Faulkner is that he’s interpreting and expressing a reality that looks a lot like Aracataca’s, like the banana zone’s. What they give me is the instrument . . .

When I re-examine Leaf Storm, I find exactly the readings that went into that work . . . I mean just like that! . . . It’s when I leave behind all those intellectual stories, when I realize that it was in my hands, in everyday life, in the brothels, the towns, the music . . . Precisely, I rediscover the vallenato songs. That’s when I met Escalona, you know. We started working together, we took one hell of a trip through La Guajira, where there were experiences I can now rediscover with the utmost naturalness. There’s a journey by Eréndira that is the journey I took through La Guajira with Escalona . . . There’s not a single line in any of my books that I can’t tell you which experience from reality it corresponds to. Always, there’s a reference to a concrete reality. Not a single book! And someday, with more time, we could verify that, we could start playing this game, to wit: this corresponds to such-and-such, that to another, and I can remember the day and all, exactly . . .

And,

I remember perfectly when I was in Mexico, writing, describing Remedios the Beauty’s ascent to heaven. It was one of those paragraphs. I was aware, first, that without poetry she couldn’t rise. I’d say: she’s got to rise to poetry—and yet, with poetry and all she wouldn’t rise either. I was getting desperate because it was a reality within the book. I couldn’t dispense with it because it was a reality within the guidelines I’d imposed on myself. Because arbitrariness has rigid laws. And once I impose them on myself I can’t break them. I can’t say the rook moves this way and then, when it suits me, make it move another way. If I established how the rook and the knight move, I was screwed! . . . Because whatever I may do they’ve got to continue that way. Otherwise, it all turns into a holy mess. Within the reality of the book, Remedios the Beauty rose to heaven, but she wouldn’t rise even with poetry. I remember being desperate one day, ‘cause I was all caught up and stuck in it. I went out to the patio, where there was a big and beautiful black woman who did the housework, who was trying to hang the sheets with one of those clothes pins . . . And there was wind . . . And so if she hung the sheet this side, the wind blew it off that side . . . And she was completely crazy with those sheets . . . until she couldn’t take it any more and Aaaaahhhh! Aaaahhhh! . . . She cried out desperately! . . . Wrapped up in the sheets! . . . And up she went . . . And that’s how it was with everything.

(Via Tingle Alley)

Heat

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

~ H.D.


(This is what I'm always silently begging for in this seaside town...)

I feel like I've just tumbled out of a locked room. After regaining web access late last week, it went out again on Sunday and I've been unable to reconnect until today. There's been this strange sense of suffocation, especially since I don't have a phone. But on the upside, I have now reached p. 713 of Don Quixote (where the current adventure involves bearded women) and have high hopes of ending my long neglect of 400 Windmills by this weekend.

I also plan on posting a few informal words on some of the reading I did on break. Keep your fingers crossed!

At Last the Secret Is Out

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.

~ W.H. Auden

Memo

Just a quick note to test fixes to my ravaged little blog...

It is summer. Travels have gone well (so far so good) and I'm treasuring the time spent with Cervantes, Eco, Atkinson, Fernando Verissimo, Pérez-Reverte, Gaiman, Fforde, and Chopin. Also, I'm about to get to know a bit of Nick Tosches.

I wish I could take all these fireflies back with me. The night air is teeming with them...

Hope to speak again soon,

La vagabunda del verano

A path to knowing

Tony Kushner on Arthur Miller:

American playwrights have most to learn from the sound of Arthur Miller's voice: Humility, decency, generosity are its trademarks. Turn down the braying of ego, it says to us, turn down the chatter of entertainment, the whine of pornographic sensuality and prurience, abandon the practice of rendering judgment as an expression of isolation, superstition and terror, and reach for a deeper judgment, the kind of judgment that pulls a person beyond his expected reach toward something more than any single human animal ought to be capable of--toward something shared, communal, maybe even toward something universal, maybe even toward God. It's a path to knowing that is the birthright of dramatists and "genuine writers." It seems to me difficult because it's a lonely path, and Jewish in its demanding interiority. It's Jewish also in its faith that words have an awesome, almost sacred, power, force, weight. God, or the world, is listening, Arthur Miller reminds us, and when you speak, when you write, God, or the world, is also speaking and writing. "A great drama is a great jurisprudence," Arthur wrote. "Balance is all. It will evade us until we can once again see man as a whole, until sensitivity and power, justice and necessity are utterly face to face, until authority's justifications and rebellion's too are tracked even to those heights where the breath fails, where--because the largest point of view as well as the smaller has spoken--truly, the rest is silence."

(Via A&L Daily)

I'm off...

Happy Fathers' Day, everyone.

Postcard from Santa Marta

Well wishes to those of you in cyberland. The second bimester has come to a close and I'm off to "the travels of summer ahead" for the next few weeks. Blogging might not be too consistent, but it will happen. I'm looking forward to time spent in bookstores and coffee shops, collecting my thoughts and checking out the myriad recommendations floating about the litblogosphere. And, of course, journeying through Part II of the Quixote!

My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.

~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was born on this day in 1917. Her first book of poetry, The Streets of Bronzeville, published in 1945, was based on life in South Side Chicago, and published on the recommendation of Richard Wright, who thought the poems captured "the pathos of petty destinies, the whimper of the wounded, the tiny incidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of common prejudice...."

Wright himself was more militant. His explosive bestseller Black Boy was also published in 1945, and on this day in 1941 he published "Not My People’s War," which argued that the U.S. should worry less about saving the world by joining WWII and more about saving places like Bronzeville through racial reform.

Wright soon left the U.S. for good. Brooks stayed in Chicago all her life, and became a lot more militant. Looking back in her 1972 autobiography, she clearly felt that her early poetic snapshots of discrimination were tame and naïve:

"Of course, in that time, it was believed, still, that the society could be prettied, quieted, cradled, sweetened, if only people talked enough, glared at each other yearningly enough, waited enough."

(Via [I think I should do PR for] Today in Literature)

Happy Bloomsday!

From (who else?) Today in Literature:

On this day in 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had their first date, thus giving Joyce the day upon which he would base Ulysses, and giving the rest of us "Bloomsday." Had Nora not stood Joyce up on their scheduled first date, this most famous of literary days would have been June 14; had that first date not happened at all, there very well may never have been any Bloomsday, or any Ulysses. The ways in which Nora Barnacle is and is not Molly Bloom continue to be discussed -- in Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography Nora: The Real Molly Bloom, for example, and the 1999 film based upon it -- but it seems agreed that she was Joyce's only irreplaceable relationship. And we do know that she was the only one allowed to call him Jim.

When they first met on the streets of Dublin, Joyce was a bright-talking and hard-drinking 22 year-old, already with something of a name for himself in the local pubs and poetry circles. Not that Nora would have known: she was a 20 year-old chambermaid from Galway, just arrived in the big city. Still, it was Nora that made the biggest impression on their date -- a walk along the River Liffey, during which she seems to have taught the know-it-all Joyce a few things that he didn't know after all. Within four months they were back at the harbor, sailing for Europe. When Joyce's father was told that his favorite son had run off with an unknown Galway girl, he responded with typical family wit: "Barnacle? She'll never leave him."

Nora was no-nonsense -- she included Ulysses in the nonsense category, and refused to read it -- and not the 'quiet helpmeet' type, but through decades of poverty, rootlessness, drunkenness, literary rejection, Joyce's failing eyes, their son's alcohol problems and their daughter's insanity, she remained the stable center of Joyce's eccentric, expatriate life.

Also, head on over to wood s lot for A Gallery of Bloomsday Cards, as well as several other delightful links and images.

Tales of a librarian

Bad Librarian strikes again:

Another important issue, and one that is true of books as well as the web, though the latter much more so, is, of those 39,000 [Google] references to "Take On Me, lyrics", how many are actually providing the correct lyrics? I would venture a charitable guess at maybe 100. So how then does one go about filtering through that massive amount of data for accurate information? (My example here loses some steam, but try finding conclusive, non-contradictory information about say… genital warts for example… yeah…) The answer is by cross-referencing and multiple sourcing, a librarian's bread and butter.

Learning to decipher information — particularly in our current proto-fascist universe of fake news — is just as important as finding it. With the amount of information accumulating each day in both the virtual and physical realm, our task, as consumers and purveyors of information, becomes less about finding the data and more about filtering it, as responsibly and unobtrusively as possible. I am continually surprised how many intelligent people will take something for truth on the web without even thinking about where the information is coming from, without even checking who supports the website. [...]

As the digitization of the information universe moves along, sorting the wheat and chaff will become even more complicated, and having people around who are trained in just that kind of sifting — that is, librarians — will certainly be handy. The profession will certainly have to grow as the search for information becomes more technical. Programming may become as necessary of a skill as knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System (though that probably won't be necessary much longer), but the need for librarians, or really, human search engines, will increase as technology's capacity for information storage rockets along.

In short, yes, the internet has challenged the role of the librarian. If anything, it's just made it a more interesting job. Anyway, somebody's got to be around to say "SSSSHHHHHH!!!"

(Via Bookdwarf)

Erik Wennermark's first column: "Beware What Americans Are Not Reading."

Elusive allusions

Tooling around The Modern Word (now that the electricity's back on), I found their link to The Queen Loana Annotation Project--"an attempt to use Wiki technology to create a thorough and accurate set of annotations to Umberto Eco's latest novel." There's also a Spanish version of the project (which is at an earlier stage of development, but seems to have a couple things that the English one doesn't).

Fun fact:

Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) Bodoni, the quintessential Italian font, is widely used to this day. Bodoni himself was born in Piedmont, where Eco hales from, and Eco's grandfather was a typographer.

There's even a sample of what it looks like (scroll down to "Page 8").

I love this sort of thing. I once listed possible literary allusions in all of the songs of a favorite band of mine.

I'll be keeping tabs on this endeavor.

Disquiet

Along with Yeats and Dorothy Sayers, today is the birthday of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. To read The Book of Disquiet is to go on a strangely liberating journey...

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

Elsewhere,

It's not love but love's outskirts that are worth knowing...

The repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it. Virginity can be a key to profound understanding. Action has its rewards but brings confusion. To possess is to be possessed, and therefore to lose oneself. Only the idea can fathom reality without getting ruined.

And ultimately,

To feel today what one felt yesterday isn't to feel - it's to remember today what was felt yesterday, to be today's living corpse of what yesterday was lived and lost.

If you're unfamiliar with his work, Pessoa's Trunk seems like a good place to start. And if you're ever in Lisbon...Casa Fernando Pessoa .

The empress of ice-cream

You are Wallace Stevens. You love everything,
especially the sound of things. Too bad you
are so obscure that at times even you don't
understand what the hell you have written.


Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla (Via Ed)


Nice one! But he's always made perfect sense to me...


The High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Running meme

So The Count tossed me a little homemade meme involving running songs (or songs you listen to while running).

Unfortunately, I must admit that my intelligence is heretofore not guaranteed, for--alas and alack--I am not a runner. But if I were...

"Don't Drag Me Down" ~ Social Distortion
"A Place Called Home"~ PJ Harvey
"I Drive a Lot" ~ Starflyer 59

(The last two are just links to where you can hear clips of the songs. I'm not tech savvy enough to upload music... Maybe if I took up running?)

And the baton goes to Stuart, Molly, and the TA.

By the way, the latter pointed me to this...and I am eternally grateful.

Now this I've got to read

In this month's Believer, Rick Moody discusses The Danielson Famile in "How to Be a Christian Artist." Looks like it could be a full-fledged interview...

FROM WITHIN A HOMEMADE TEXTILE TREE, THE DANIELSON FAMILE MAKES ROCK MUSIC WITH ALL THE AWKWARDNESS, DIFFICULTY, AND FERVOR OF CONTEMPORARY FAITH.

DISCUSSED: Franny and Zooey, Vince Guaraldi, Record Clubs, Caterwauling, Spiritual Frailty, Aretha Franklin, The Rev. Al Green, Improvised Testifying, Medical Garb, Kramer, Churchgoing Intellectuals, Psychedelia, I-IV Progression, Cock-Rock Posturing, Dante, Early B-52s, Overdubbed Exhalations, Doubt

One more item for my "stateside vacation to-do" list.

Solzhenitsyn speaks

In his first interview in the past three years with the Vesti Nedeli TV program on Russia's Channel Two, Solzhenitsyn, 88, said Russia was not a democratic country yet.

"We have had no democracy. I said it many times that we have nothing remotely similar to democracy," he said.

According to Solzhenitsyn, "many speakers play with the word 'democracy' in our country, declining it and hastily bringing to light its separate features, instead of democracy itself." He said there is freedom of expression and the press in Russia, "but it is only one of democratic signs," said Solzhenitsyn. "One sign does not mean democracy," the writer said.

He said the key to democratic success in Western countries was organizing the work of local self-government. "We are so impressed with Western democracies because their local self-government is very efficient," said Solzhenitsyn.

He stressed that "democracy cannot be imposed from above, by clever laws or wise politicians."

"It [democracy] must not be forced [upon people] like a cap. Democracy can only grow upwards, like a plant. Democracy must begin at the local level, within the local self-government. Only then can it develop further," said the writer.

Read the rest here. (Via Maud Newton)

Chasing light

A glimpse of what Sabrina's been working on can be found here...The True and the Questions...slated for a December release.

Meanwhile, I need to get my report cards finished. I've had a lovely, breezy day of grace. I got ready for work this morning and ambled downstairs, only to discover that it was a holiday.

Who knew that you could have two three-day weekends in a row?

An interesting proposition

Jesse Kornbluth at HeadButler thinks Oprah could've done better by Faulkner:

Late last week, Oprah's Book Club chose three novels by William Faulkner for the summer months: "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August."

These are great novels. I know. I haven't just read them, I've studied them. All of them --- at Harvard, my English tutorial one term was nothing but Faulkner. With a bourbon in one hand and a pencil in another, I spent the weeknights of several months plowing through a dozen Faulkner novels and a ream of Faulkner criticism. And while I am the better person for the experience --- and a lifelong admirer of Faulkner's achievement --- what I mostly remember is what a tough slog it was. What work it was. How certain I was that I'd never want to read most of these novels --- these great American classics --- ever again.

When Oprah speaks, America listens, so the three-volume set of the novels Oprah picked -- 1,152 pages of Faulkner, a bargain on Amazon.com at $17.97 --- has leapt to #2 on the Amazon bestseller list. That means houses across the country which only have "The Da Vinci Code" and "Tuesdays with Morrie" on their bookshelves will now greet books by a novelist who would have been lionized by the symbolist writers of 19th century France. That's thrilling.

But I have no illusions about this summer reading project --- I'll be stunned if 10% of Oprah's devotees reach page 100 of any of these novels.

The tragedy in Oprah's summer reading list? There are three books by Faulkner much better suited to her purposes. She just picked the wrong Faulkner.

The right Faulkner for Oprah fans? Three novels that Faulkner conceived as a trilogy: "The Hamlet," "The Town" and "The Mansion." Compared to other Faulkner novels, these 1,088 pages ($17.61 at Amazon.com) read like pulp fiction --- the plot is lurid, the motivations of the characters couldn't be more contemporary, and the style breaks no new ground. [...]

"The Hamlet" is the story of Flem Snopes, all grown up and just about as unethical as his father, and of Flem's effect on the small, unsuspecting village of Frenchman's Bend. Flem's impotent --- but only below the belt. He doesn't plan to die a lowly worker. So when he discovers that Will Varner's daughter Eula is pregnant without a husband, he steps forward and offers to help Will out. That makes Flem the son-in-law of one of the town's leading landowners --- and neatly positioned to start taking over the hamlet. (This book was adapted into a film called "The Long Hot Summer," starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury.)

Eula is a sensual woman, with a body that turns any man's thoughts to just one thing. In "The Town," Flem seems not to notice. He's too busy getting promoted --- first to chief of the power plant, then to vice president of the bank. Can the presidency of the bank be denied him? And, along the way, can he get his revenge on the man who's been having an eighteen-year affair with Eula?

In the final volume, justice finally comes Flem's way. But not before Frenchman's Bend has been transformed --- eaten alive, really --- by the kind of man never before seen in these parts. That is because Flem represents the unethical, unrestrained capitalism that only could flourish in the South after the Civil War had stripped it of its codes of honor. Flem has only one goal and one emotion --- power, and the love of it. In our time, we know this kind of man well. And, as often as not, we live in "communities" where people used to be like family to their neighbors and now barely recognize them to wave.

Rapacious capitalism. The loss of our sense of "home." Men who use women to advance their master plans. These are themes that the women in Oprah's nationwide book club could really get into.

Or they could do --- could try to do, anyway --- the reading Oprah's assigned them.

Good luck, ladies. "As I Lay Dying" has multiple narrators who favor the stream-of-conscious style. The first section of "The Sound and the Fury" is narrated by an idiot who slips in and out of the present with only italics to guide you. "Light in August" is a comparatively straightforward "traditional" novel, but it's 528 pages.

It's too bad. William Faulkner is probably the greatest literary novelist our country ever produced. The way into his writing is through books that are pleasurable --- great stories, unforgettable characters. For me, those books are "The Hamlet," "The Mansion" and "The Town." Maybe after Oprah's fans have struck out with the brainbusters, they'll give these books a chance.

Hm. He may be on to something. I haven't read these three, although I have a lot of love for ones she picked. Although they are complicated, innovative, rich novels, I didn't find them incomprehensible. And I would reread them again in a heartbeat.

But then again, I was a lit major. What do I know?


UPDATE: Kornbluth experienced some backlash for the above and gave additional thoughts yesterday.

Advent of vorticism

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough."

On this day in 1913 Ezra Pound published "In a Station of the Metro."

In his account of the poem's genesis, Pound describes seeing the fleeting faces in a Paris subway one morning and thinking that he might need to "found a new school of painting" in order to capture the experience.

He first wrote a 30-line poem, then a 15-line poem and then, a year-and-a-half after the event, the handful of words that would become the poster-poem of "imagism."

"The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX...."

Pound coined the name of "vorticism," though it was Wydham Lewis who made it famous. Above, a 1920 Lewis sketch of Pound.

(Via Today in Literature)

State of the blog

If you haven't already, head over to Return of the Reluctant, Chekhov's Mistress, The Elegant Variation, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, GalleyCat, and Beatrice for great coverage of this weekend's BookExpo America held in New York. On the whole, very amusing takes on the ("not grotesque") "book business".

Such committed blogging underscores the modest aspirations of this current going concern, but it's a credit of the litblogosphere that small cyberspaces for favorite things (such as yours truly) can coexist with the more professional affairs. It's a privilege to be part of the unending conversation about literature.

Meanwhile, over at ReadySteadyBlog, Mark Thwaite speaks up for the British litblogs. Hear, hear!

And for good measure, Ms. Croc reviews various films screened at the Seattle International Film Festival.

Wild Thing

Over at NPR there are two wonderful audio clips of a recent interview with Maurice Sendak.

His favorite subject? "Scaring children."

His most treasured possessions? Mickey Mouse memorabilia.

His best buddy? A boisterous German Shepherd named for Herman Melville.

But there are many insightful and wry moments in this conversation with one of the greatest authors around. Hear his thoughts on George Eliot and why "writing for children" doesn't mean thinking about what children would like.

incarnate gaps in Time & Space

Reading Allen Ginsberg's "Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs or Independence Day Manifesto" (via wood s lot), I'm compelled to post some of the most moving lines of Howl.

When will compassion become innate reflex?

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time--

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Recommended reading

Maud points us to Terry Teachout's essay on "Culture in the Age of Blogging":

One thing of which I am sure is that the common culture of my youth is gone for good. It was hollowed out by the rise of ethnic “identity politics,” then splintered beyond hope of repair by the emergence of the web-based technologies that so maximized and facilitated cultural choice as to make the broad-based offerings of the old mass media look bland and unchallenging by comparison. For all the nostalgia with which I look back on the days of the Top 40, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and The Ed Sullivan Show, I prefer to make my own cultural decisions, and I welcome the ease with which the new media permit me to do so.

At the same time, however, I still feel the need for a common space in which Americans can come together to talk about the things that matter to us all. And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies, will evolve over time into just such a space. No doubt there will always be shouting in the blogosphere, but it need not all be past each other. When the history of blogging is written a half-century from now, its chroniclers may yet record that the highest achievement of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, turned out to be its unprecedented ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.

A cartoonist or an astronaut

From Bill Watterson's introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes:

I’ve loved comic strips as long as I can remember. As a kid, I knew I wanted to be either a cartoonist or an astronaut. The latter was never much of a possibility, as I don’t even like riding in elevators. I kept my options open until seventh grade, but when I stopped understanding math and science, my choice was made. There is great personal satisfaction in attending to detail and quality, and I remain very proud of the standards the strip met day after day. I also liked the responsibility of knowing that, succeed or fail, it was all my own doing. This approach kept the strip very honest and personal--everything having to do with Calvin and Hobbes expressed my own ideas, my own values, my own way. I wrote every word, drew every line, and painted every color. It’s a rare gift to find such fulfilling work and I tried to show my appreciation by giving the strip everything I had to offer.

Milo takes a trip

The Count has a lovely selection of passages out of The Phantom Tollbooth ("the best book in the world"):

'Haven't we met before? I'm the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, and I'm sure I know your friend the bug.' And then he leaned all the way forward and gave a terrible knowing smile.

The Humbug, who was too big to hide and too frightened to move, denied everything.

'Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?' asked Milo.

'Much worse,' he said longingly. 'But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context.'

'Don't you think you should be getting back?' suggested the bug, holding one arm up in front of him.

'What a horrible thought.' The bird shuddered. 'It's such an unpleasant place that I spend almost all my time out of it...'

Also, check out Jules Feiffer's site. There's a lot of great stuff there. (My other brush with greatness is that he's the great-uncle of a friend of mine. Imagine being able to say "Uncle Jules"! Apparently, he's quite the character.)

On Hopkins

Ms. Bookish's recent post on Gerard Manley Hopkins links to a lecture by Hugh Kenner. In examining The Wreck of the Deutschland, Kenner makes some interesting observations of Hopkins' use of Swinburne:

Save for the arresting fact that on 25th August 1868, when Gerard was 24, the family dog had the sense to bite Robert Bridges, his domestic circumstances have little to tell us. A more fruitful field to investigate would be the Victorian passion for Comparative Linguistics, which helps explain his study of a language as exotic as Welsh. Another would be the overarching rhythmic presence of a poet not then respectable at all: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Swinburne's remedy for what had become the deadly and deadening iambic was wholesale imitation of what, by iambic standards, seemed to be Greek rhythms. Intoxicated by such rhythms, the stories have it, Oxford undergraduates would circle the quadrangle, chanting: ... For winters rains and ruins are over, And all the season of snows and sins ... (Atalanta in Calydor@'212)

The power of assonance and alliteration joins words in pairs and triplets; force yourself to linger for sense, and you have to construct a scenario. There is no unlikelihood for which the mind cannot construct a scenario; Conan Doyle might have invented Sherlock Holmes solely to demonstrate that. Winter's rains and ruins - Easy. English winters are rainy, with a greyness that can make ruins look more ruinous. Season of snows and sins - Winter and snow: no problem. But sins? Well, snow forces people to stay inside, where they make up for the bleakness by rituals of fornication. But we're being ingenious; what links season and snows and sins is primarily the driving rhythm, that insistent alliteration. Thus the verse's authority stamps what the mind can make shift to unravel. In that light, examine the surge and sway of The Wreck of the Deutschland (28):

Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou has bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing.. and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

[...] Hopkins is subverting Swinburne as fast as he's using him. Underneath that breath and bread, which sounds so Swinburnian, is a stable orthodox structure, if we can just slow down enough to see it. [...]

and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

God incarnate felt the finger of Doubting Thomas, an archetype of us all. But these lines seem to say that Thomas, made in God's image, was reenacting a frequent gesture of God. As God's finger--that's a potent trope. His finger inscribed the Law on the stone tablets. Jesus said (Luke 11.20) that he cast out devils with the finger of God. He wrote with His finger words upon the ground (John 8:6). And Hopkins hinds finger into his alliterative sequence: fasten, flesh, afresh, feel, finger, find. That hints at a formula for Resurrection.

The 35 stanzas of The Wreck of the Deutschland embody two main devices. One--learned from Swinburne--is the binding assonance, which seems to be producing the words as the rhythm moves forward. The other is a cool awareness of depths of history embedded in those English words: something Hopkins derived from inward-ness with the culture that was moving toward a New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, of which the first fascicle was published five years before he died.

One could spend decades studying his work.

In a related note, Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission has put one of Hopkins' poems to music. "No Storms Come" is a lovely, spare adaptation of "Heaven-Haven."

Callooh! Callay!

I received a book in the mail! And a very interesting one at that...

A Higher Form of Cannibalism?: Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography by Carl Rollyson

According to Amazon's description, "This book explores the nexus between scholarship and biography, and demonstrates how the similarities of method between Leon Edel and Kitty Kelly outweigh the differences. Viewed through the prism of biography, the scholarly and the popular may not be as clearly separated as people suppose."

Flipping through it, I get the sense that Rollyson must be quite the character (a shameless rascal?). And a quick glance at the index shows me that Lucasta Miller, Ian Hamilton, and Janet Malcom are discussed. I forsee a quick read...

(Heaps of thanks, TK!!)

I'm thinking of a song or two

It's been almost too hot to read. I've been alternately sweating my skin off and finding relief by getting lost in Morning Becomes Eclectic's archives. It helps to fill these empty spaces with moments of ineffable beauty...

Aimee Mann, "Little Bombs"
Cat Power, "Maybe Not"
Eels, "Girl from the North Country"
Iron & Wine, "Upward Over the Mountains"
Belle & Sebastian, "Women's Realm"
Wilco, "When the Roses Bloom Again"
Jesse Sykes and Phil Wandscher, "Troubled Soul"
Tori Amos, "Carbon"
Joseph Arthur, "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out"

An afternoon with Eco

Nigel Farndale at the Telegraph has an enlightening conversation with Umberto Eco:

His second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, took eight years to write. It was about three editors at a Milan publishing house trying to link every conspiracy theory in history, including that now famous one about the medieval Knights Templar and the secret of the Holy Grail.

'I know, I know,' he says with a laugh. 'My book included the plot for The Da Vinci Code. But I was not being a prophet. It was old occult material. It was already all there. I treated it in a more sceptical way than Dan Brown did. He had the excellent idea of treating it as if it were true. Millions of people believed him. They took it seriously, but it was all a hoax.'

Elsewhere:

'I would describe myself as an insecure optimist who is sensitive to criticism. I always fear to be wrong. Those who are always certain of their own work risk being idiots. Insecurity is a great force, apropos of teaching. The moment I start a new class I feel panic. If you don't feel panic, you cannot succeed.'

They also discuss The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, his formerly fascist youth, and his family.

(Via Bookslut)

Beyond negative irony

In Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, Brian Boyd comes to some very interesting conclusions regarding the seemingly inexplicable cohesion between the poem ("Pale Fire") and the commentary. It's a fascinating piece of close reading, and although I still have some reservations as to his evidence (which probably says more about my comprehension of his detailed account), I can't argue with his main point:

The confidence that through one's art one can understand the design hidden behind life and death might be completely misplaced, or true in a richer way than one could possibly imagine. Nabokov admits that his own confidence, even more robust than Shade's, could be as misplaced as Shade's appears to be at the moment he is killed. Yet the very possibility of design as concealed, as complex and as confounding as all that he packs into the small compass of Pale Fire suggests it might well be possible that there is deliberate design behind our world that we cannot yet see.

Some readers still read Nabokov only as far as his negative irony, his trenchant ability to deflate, to register disappointments, humiliations and horrors, the kind of thing that they think demonstrates his scorn and Schadenfreude. As his Hermanns and his Humberts and his Paduks and his Graduses indicate, Nabokov is anything but blind to the darkness in life. But readers who stop there, and think that he stops there, in modernist irony or in a postmodernist abîme, miss altogether his positive irony, his attempt to encompass all the negatives, as he suspects life itself does, and reverse their direction in the mirror of death. The search for that possibility is what makes Nabokov different, and what makes him write.

Bud at Chekhov's Mistress has some great info on the upcoming Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (which includes Brian Boyd's "Nabokov as storyteller"). There's even a PDF of the "introductory chapter that summarizes each of the essays."