"Literature"... is Saying What You Mean by Not Saying What You Mean

I've been reading The Europeans. After Musil, quite a wonderful contrast. Not for better or worse, but for how language works. This is early-middle James. More early than middle. 1878. Same years as Daisy Miller--which points in a whole different direction. Or maybe not so different. James just hasn't made the integration yet between what he could do in Daisy Miller, and what he will be able to do on a much higher level when he's learned to perfect the language he needs to do it.

Miller's concession to the market--and he did very well by it on that score... but in The Europeans, he's resisting the temptation to please the audience. No happy marriage for Eugenia. I feel Robert Acton standing in to those expectations. He doesn't meet the test. Better to be disappointed in love and true to what you are, what you are meant to do.

But this post was to be about language... how wonderfully repression enriches the possibilities of style! And by contrast, how difficult, how resistant to aesthetic manipulation, is so-called "plain speech." Saying (ahem) "just what you mean."

Of course, no one ever says quite what they mean. Not all of it. And the challenge in a time that pretends to believe that all things are permissible--unless they're political, or racial, or almost anything but sexual, is to find a way to include what isn't being said in that anti-puritanical (which is only the mirror image and imitation of what it would appear to reject), "directness."

James shows what can be done with indirection--and in this novel, and in The Americans--just where he's learned it. The Europeans are up on these Emersonian New Englanders, not by being more direct, but knowing it, by being more conscious of it, and knowing how, and using it to their great advantage. He was going to do this book over and over... The Americans, The Bostonians... until What Maisie Knew. There's where James found his voice.

By far my favorite. Like the difference between the early impressionists Barnes collected and the later workings and reworkings you find in the Annenberg collection--after they'd become quite collectable. James found himself in Maisie. A bold stylistic experiment (he's had to have learned something here from Flaubert)--a narrative that spins itself out, not on what happens, but on this child's ever maturing discoveries of stuff that's mostly already happened. And he pulls it off. And in doing so, gets himself out of the "Americans/Europeans etc rut, back on track with what he'd found in Portrait of a Lady--but now he's got the voice, the language... that will turn out the late masterpieces, The Golden Bowl, Wings of a Dove. Those long, ever digressing imbricated (Cynthia Ozick's word for them) periodic sentences.. that shimmer like fish scales in changing light.

There's a lesson to be learned here, though I may not be the one to know how to formulate it. A knife that cuts two ways. Against those who believe too naively in the power of mimesis--of the realists--literature as imitation of "life," and those who would give up what has always been the greatest strength of the so-called "realists:" their way of avoiding too direct an expression of what they wanted to represent, and so finding, in that necessary indirection, a way back into the power of language.

Opening the Critical Agenda

Clavida, of Letters from a Librarian, responds to Morgan Meis...

I was also reminded of what this web-world is about -- a particular closeness -- the choice to remain inward and look deep and to perhaps trace out one or two lines -- to help with reading and with responding. What is beautiful is that as these particular affinities pile up, the ones that shine with a truer and clearer understanding -- with a greater effort and a well-informed understanding, those become treasures not just to the blog-readers who share in an affinity, but also to those people who may not have ever responded to a particular work of art. They open up communication (how long have we been saying that) -- but it's not necessarily the communication of web-person to web-person, it's the communication of reader to story, the realized possibility of a response that otherwise may have never been.
We must always be on the watch for too much haste, too little thought, too overbearing of an agenda -- but between the large well-trod flagstones that make up this web-world of readers and responders there have accumulated lovely intricate villages -- like the mosses and gravel and little ant-hills that line the patio -- woven together from disparate elements but still introducing, inspiring and responding.

Read the whole post HERE

Molly Russakoff's party...

Molly is moving beyond poetry, or maybe not. Maybe into poetry in a new and better way--a way untold, unpredictable; the young men and women she is inviting into her space... for that's what they are, young men and women, however we are want to dismiss them by the names we give them. Though it may not be poetry--or anything like it; their lives will open into their very own unforeseen becoming.

What could be more like poetry?

A bookstore is an education for explorers. When explorers are few, and discouraged if not despised in the usual venues--the public schools, purposefully mismanaged and underfunded to insure the perpetuation of compliant ignorance, and their capitalist alternatives designed to turn out cooperative, relatively better remunerated slaves... what is a poet to do?

But open her store to the store of freely available knowledge?

And so she has begun to do.

A party tonight to kick it off... vintage South Philly. Wine, cold cuts, good conversation... a near look-alike of Penelope Cruz... (well, that's not everyday South Philly... then... what is?) probably her much smarter sister. But nice to look at out the corner of my eye.

Who, other than Ron Silliman, has read even a fraction of poets published in the last 50 years. How to keep up? I am hopelessly behind. But that sometimes leads to a private discovery--for me, tonight (the commercial and pragmatic purpose of this party was to exchange books for cash for the next venture) was in finding in the sack of books I took home, a name I probably should be, but was not aware of... Donald Finkel.

I may not like much else (I bought 3 of his books, so should soon know) but the epitaph in his What Manner of Beast, "There is no abyss between man and animals; the two domains are separated by a tiny rivulet which a baby could step over." REMY DE GOURMONT, The Natural Philosophy of Love ... for one like me... with profound animal friendships... this looked promising.

Here's the poem I opened to, from The Detachable Man.

OUR WOUNDS

The mongrel licks his thorn-torn forepaw
doggedly, a dithyramb of licking.
an epic of cleansing.
His wound glistens, naked as water,
as unashamed.

We let our wounds skin over,
a crust of desiccated gestures,
old grimaces stiffening into masks
while we look away.

Then we worry them with our thumbnails,
working relentlessly inward from the edges
till at last they bleed.

... an echo of Kafka's ax...

Images: La génération perdue

Photos and illustrations of Hemingway's Paris

The second video works... complete with South Philly Mummer's music... and they misspell E.H's name in the credits.

Storm Stalking

Bertha teases Bermuda

A new storm forms mid-Atlantic.

I am a storm stalker... I cannot help myself

I want to figure out how to write poetry without words. Without language.

Carved in silence.

But visible. Audible.
I want to figure out how to write poetry....

without words.

without language.

People passing on the street before my door will have to stop... look up at the sky ... or down at their feet... where did that come from? they will say to themselves.

And I will sit here, shirt off in the heat, rocking back in my chair. I might even manage a smile (as long as they aren't looking my way).

They'll think it's the helicopter passing far to the west. Or the firecrackers a few blocks away... weeks after the 4th... think no more of it and go on with whatever they were doing and never once in their lives remember this moment--which might have been the most important moment in their lives... and mine.

But I'll remember. I will remember. Each and every one of them--their passing, their passing me by... the way I remember, even when sometimes I forget their names, the women I've entered and left... drawing out of them what I am, what I have become, what I will leave behind when I am no more.

Like the names of the storms... the one's that did not merit immortality, but are named again and again and again... returning until they have learned to do the one thing that will earn them their place in history

Molly's Books Becomes Project 360: Big Sale!

For my visitors from Philly: Molly's Books in the Italian Market (1010 S. 9th) will be closing to make room for Project360, alternative education for teens. All the books (and bookshelves) have to go.

Eat, drink, buy books and learn about what's in store this Tuesday evening. More info on PhillySound

South Philly Flicker

To acknowledge 10,000 visits since I made JRBD public last summer...

South Philly Photos

Inovation, Percolation, Reaction

Silliman has some interesting ideas in this essay on change in poetry and the arts, motivated and unmotivated.

HERE

The American Suburb: "The greatest misallocation of wealth in the history of the world"

A documentary not to miss...
HERE

Reading Causes Global Warming!

The answer to climate change? Stay stupid!

From corporate interest groups to journalists looking to sensationalize a story, to political ideologues, scientific writing is fair game: treat it, not for what it is, but as a form of rhetoric--a naive rhetoric that makes no effort to embed its statements in defensive ambiguity, and so, the victim of all the grown-up versions of playground bullies.

Evolution and climate science have been the prize targets of late. Recent posts on RealClimate HERE and HERE give you an idea of how this works, and what demands it places on scientists who take seriously their responsibility to inform the general public.

Why for me, the contributors to RealClimate--and Cosmic Variance, among others, are the heroes of our time. The service they provide to the general public in taking time from their real work is invaluable.

There's a parallel here: we complain about the coverage of literature and the arts, but compared to how the established media treats science--thoroughly corrupted in equal parts by politics and the drive to "entertain," literature comes off pretty well... only because, I suppose, for those with their claws on the levers of power, it matters so much less.

In reading a series of comments on This Space, I was struck by how we are assaulted, in a similar way, by those who launch rhetorical challenges and attacks that are impossible to answer. The most difficult (my illustration here).. are from those who have a degree of intelligence, education... but mistake engagement for confrontation... (or is it, confrontation for engagement?) impossible to know how or what to say to them.

No, science is not the model for aesthetics or critical thought--the analogy to science is just that... a richly ambiguous metaphor. What we should take seriously, is how--the different ways--that theories change. In science, the idea is that that each change leads us closer, to a more all embracing understanding. In aesthetics, no such ultimate goal is possible... or meaningful. We need to free ourselves, not of past errors, as in science, but of the past itself. Which is of course, impossible. So it isn't the past we need to break away from, but a present viewed and understood exclusively in the terms and ideas of the past, without acknowledging how much we--and our way of seeing, feeling, thinking... has changed, and so altered the "reality" we would, as writers, as "artists" represent.

And yet, in this critical debate... conflict... whatever you want to call it, I am at a loss to know how, or with whom, to engage on those elements that matter most to me, as a thinker (such as I manage to be), as a writer, as a reader.

I very much wanted to add a comment to that exchange on This Space--but when another exchange only tightens the jaws of the rhetorical bear trap... what is one to do?

Politics and Peter Handke

When a situation that is extraordinarily ugly and equally complicated meets an outraged sense of injustice, the need to simplify, to assign clear demarcations of blame and demonize anyone who refuses to applaud the conventional morality play as it passes may be as close as we can come to a collective universal. Even when the conventional view may be more right than wrong, for all it leaves out, the model of action and reaction is disturbing: If you doubt just how disturbing--look at its application in the American action and reaction in the seven years following the attack on the World Trade Center.

For those following the surreal political drama that's been following Peter Hadke and his alleged defense of Milosevic, Steve Mitchelmore has a new post on THIS SPACE
with some interesting comments and links--one by Handke translators, Scott Abbot and Zarko Radakvic

Musil on the Novel: The Break from Realist Fiction

Here is Musil on the novel and realist narrative. Its ending note, an invitation to reach beyond 19th Century conventions of time and causality. In the network of human interaction there is not one, but countless butterflies, each beat of a wing sets in motion and alters the course of new migrations, wars, the generation redistribution and destruction of wealth and power, the vicissitudes of love, the shape of family life, the fate alike of individuals and generations. The novelist who sets out to find language for this, this relationship to reality, is compelled to move beyond the 19th Century tropes and their endless reiteration in establishment realist fiction.

From Volume I, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 1, Vintage International. Translation by Sophie Wilkins. Chapter 122, Going Home. pp 708-709.

...And in one of those apparently random and abstract thoughts that so often assumed importance in his life, it struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: "First this happened and then that happened..." It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say "when," "before," and "after"! Terrible things may have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as contented as if the sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artificially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway in pouring rain or crouching through snow and ice at tem below zero, the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried=and=true "foreshortening of the mind's perspective," were not already part and parcel of life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional "because" or "in order that" gets knotted into the thread of life, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that, they love, the ordinary sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impression that their life has a "course is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even thought everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.

Text Editor for Writers: JDarkRoom

I've been looking for a text editor since having to give up WordPerfect 5.0 for Dos... I hate MS-Word. It's a business application--not for writers. Certainly not for writers of very long documents. Add to that, how cluttered the Windows screen environment is. When the words are slow in coming, it too easy to be distracted--

CLICK, and I'm playing a game chess. CLICK and I'm checking the progress of Tropical Storm Bertha, CLICK and I'm seeking how many new visitors have been on my blog...

JDarkRoom is a simple full screen text editor. I mean, full screen. Even the bottom panel with the clock and Start and tiny icons--gone. Black screen. Green text (you can change fonts and font colors).

Nothing there but the words. And the dark screen is much easier on the eyes. A blessing for anyone with even a touch of ADD.

Takes 5 minutes to figure out the commands. (F5 gets you a help menu).


F1 for a new document

F6 change color/font

F7 or Ctrl-F for search

F9 - set margins.

Ctrl-L word/line count

Ctrl-S Save

And if you need to get to your browser, Alt-Tab will switch you to the Windows screen.

That's it. You can use your mouse scroll to cruse the document.

And it's free. (donation requested). Uses Java so works on all platforms: Mac, Windows, Linnex.

Have to save your file as .txt. But once the document is written you can open it in Word and format--since almost everyone insists you submit work as Word docs. Even simpler: Ctrl-c to copy your last session or days work, and paste it into Word.

Robert Musil's Analytic Metaphors

I've been struck by the richness of figurative language in The Man Without Qualities. Musil comes up with a seemingly endless variety of metaphors and similes, unexpected, often humorous, often slightly off balance, hitting their target at oblique angles, yet perfect. Think of Twyla Tharp--how her dancers will land off center, choreographed stutter steps, flinging themselves at one another and missing, and how absolutely right it feels.

I wish I'd begun to mark them from the beginning--to take notes. For more than 600 pages I've been trying to understand how he uses metaphor, what it is that marks his style. Then on p. 634 there's a paragraph about metaphors, the points here are repeated in the next chapter, which is a prolonged essay on metaphors (Musil uses the word essay in Montaigne's sense; his protagonist, Ulrich, wants to make his life an essay, a trying out, an experiment as-you-go). Now I can account for the cerebral quality of these comparisons--the metaphor is for Musil the equivalent of a scientific instrument, an analytic tool he uses to take apart things (language, ideas, beliefs, illusions) and recombine them to see what happens. Ulrich himself is a meta-metaphor, a thing of language always in process--why he has no "qualities."

Let me quote Musil. First, toward the end of chapter 115, The Tip of Your Breast is Like a Poppy Leaf:

Now he experienced a moment of that special lucidity that lights up everything going on behind the scenes of oneself, though one may be far from being able to express it. He understood the relationship between a dream and what it expresses,which is no more than analogy, a metaphor, something he often thought about. A metaphor holds a truth and an untruth, felt as inextricably bound up with each other. If one takes it as it is and gives it some sensual form, in the shape of reality, one gets dreams and art; but between these two and real, full-scale life there is a glass partition. If one analyzes it for its rational content and separates the unverifiable from the verifiable, one gets truth and knowledge but kills the feeling. Like certain kinds of bacteria that split an organic substance into two parts, mankind splits the original living body of the metaphor into the firm substance of reality and truth, and the glassy unreality of intuition, faith, and artifact. There seems to be nothing in between; and yet how often a vaguely conceived undertaking does succeed, if only one goes ahead without worrying it too much. Ulrich felt that he had at last emerged from the tangle of streets through which his thoughts and moods had so often taken him, into the central square where all streets had their beginning.

Here you have ideas, several at once, really--developed through a succession of metaphorical analogies, but not at all in the way the "conceit" --a single extended metaphor (he does this on occasion, but not often, and then, to wrap up a set of ideas he's been working through)--but each one independent in itself, each called on to break down for analysis a different aspect of the idea being examined.

A few pages later (637) in chapter 116: The Two Trees of Life and a Proposal To Establish A General Secretariat for Precision and Soul., we find a variation of this idea, only explored from different side. This is Count Leinsdorf speaking.

An Austrian Year or a World Year of Austria is a splendid idea, of course, but I must say that every symbol must in due course turn into something real; that is to say, I can let myself be deeply moved by a symbol without necessarily understanding it, but after a while I am bound to turn away from the rirror of my heart and get something else done, something I have meanwhile found needs doing.

Then on pp. 644-5:

In such a world it was absurd to think in terms of metaphors and the vague borderline shapes life might possibly, or impossibly, assume. Ulrich felt that there was nothing amiss with his perception of life as a crude and needy condition where it was better not to worry too much about tomorrow because it was hard enough to get through today. How could one fail to see that the human world is no hovering, insubstantial thing but craves the most concentrated solidity, for fear that anything out of the way might make it go utterly to pieces? Or, to take it a step further, how could a sound observer fail to recognize that this living compound of anxieties, instincts, and ideas, such as it is, thought it uses ideas at most in order to justify itself, or as stimulants, gives those ideas their form and coherence, whatever defines them and set them in motion? We may press the wine from the grapes but how much more beautiful than a pool of wine is the sloping vineyard with its inedible rough soil and its endless rows of shining wooden stakes. In short, he reflected, the cosmos was generated not by a theory but--he was about to say "by violence," but a word he had not expected leapt to mind and so he finished by thinking: but by violence and love, and the usual linkage between these two is wrong.

The violence here is like that which sunders the parts of the metaphor to better understand it--while rendering it impotent to lend meaning to what such understanding as we've won from it.

p. 647=8

These two basic strategies, the figurative and the unequivocal, have been distinguishable ever since the beginnings of humanity. Single-mindedness is the law of all waking thought and action, as much present in a compelling logical conclusion as in the mind of the blackmailer who enforces his will on his victim step by step, and it arises from the exigencies of life where only the single-minded control of circumstances can avert disaster. Metaphor, by contrast, is like the image that fuses several meanings in a dream; it is the gliding logic of the soul, corresponding to the way things relate to each other in the intuitions of art and religion. [...] No doubt what is called the higher humanism is only the effort to fuse together these two great halves of life, metaphor and truth, once they have been carefully distinguished from each other. But once one has distinguished everything in a metaphor that might be true from what is mere froth, one usually has gained a little truth, but at the cost of destroying the whole value of the metaphor. The extraction of the truth...has had the same effect of boiling down a liquid to thicken it, while the really vital juices and elements escape in a cloud of steam. It is often hard, nowadays, to avoid the impression that the concepts and rules of the moral life are only metaphors that have been boield to death, with the revolting greasy kitchen vapors of humanism billowing around the corpses.

The Man Without Qualities: The Movie!

Staring!

Groucho Marx as Ulrich!
Margarete Dumont as.... Diotima!

Maybe Groucho's a bit of stretch, but for all the many times she's described as a great beauty (a large, tall, plump beauty, we should note) I cannot erase from my mind, in every scene where she appears, Margarete Dumont as the perfect incarnation of Diotima.

Is Bonadea meant to sound like a French pun? What does one call the invention of a nymphomaniac who won't leave your protagonist alone... if not a good idea!

Something about Musil's humor--so broad and generous, with this wonderfully restrained, yet almost Vaudevillian undercurrent. Maybe Groucho isn't such a stretch...

... only with humor, do we rise to the truly sublime.

An Old Man Writing ... Poetry?

Maybe it's reading George Oppen, though I think it's a direction I've been heading for a long time. In poetry. Concentration, cutting excess--fighting to cut loose from the straight-jacket of the 'sentence-poem.' From the 'personal-postcard' poem... see my recent blog post on the Purple Gorilla.

Yesterday I only wrote 750 words--this was on my current novel. Didn't spend more than 15 minutes actually typing. Did that in two quick spurts. A short chapter.

The rest of the time... you know the routine: making tea, inspect the garden ... la la la... but because I was writing, I couldn't apply myself to anything else--could read, some... but no more than a few pages, but nothing else: lots of tasks at hand to keep me going: transcribing journals, studying, reading... useless.

And then the second part came to me. I knew what I had to do and ten minutes later, it was all typed up.

Today was like that, but I got no new words... I was searching. And then I came across that analysis of politics and critical theory on The Valve, and there it was--the next chapter. So tomorrow, I'm set.

I really, really want to write this novel to an end in the next month. There will be lots of revising and editing, I can work that into a schedule--do on demand.

New words aren't like that. You have to ...that is, I have to, devote a gross excess of time for this. The real writing is...digression, and then you type.

I want so much to leave myself at least a month for poetry... reading and composing. I have a spiral notebook--take notes, scraps, lines... and if I keep going over them, thinking about them, scratching out and starting over, a new kind of poem (for me) begins to emerge.

Have a few recent ones I'm almost satisfied with.

I wrote my first poem when I was 12. In the sand on the beach, the western shore of Lake Michigan. And then I went back to my grandparents cottage and wrote it down... is there a metaphor in that?

I'm 67, and still trying to figure out how to do it...

And when a few lines come out right... it doesn't make me 12 years old again (thank Fred) ... but I feel the same rush...even with nothing but a chaste future to contemplate.

---

Actually, the first poem I attempted, was in second grade. We were to write sentences. I started off... had this image before my mind's eye. I wanted to put it in words. Something about a farmer at sunset coming back from a days work... only a shadow of himself. I flunked the assignment because I didn't finish.. I still have it... The teacher sent it home as one more example of how I wasted all my "considerable potential" daydreaming... it wasn't daydreaming. I got stuck on the word 'silhouette.' It was the word I wanted. It was what I saw. But I could not for the life of me figure out how to spell it. And I wouldn't accept a substitute.

Goddamned French spelling... worse than English!

I'm thinking about that rush. At 12--those pre- and early adolescent attempts at poetry: it's transfiguration of pleasures you know you can't get.

In old age... sort of the same thing. But there's a dawning understanding... no matter how unpleasent, how one might want to resist, to deny... that that rush... so many years ago... has never been surpassed.

And that's having had some--shall we say, some damn good sex. Sexual Healing. The kind that awakens you to your bodily life and melts mind and body into a cosmic fusion... and yet?

That child--no longer a child--that rush on a deserted beach, writing words in sand--and knowing you were no more substantial than those scratched out figures waiting for the tide.

The Eternal Return...

Politics, Literature, Critical Theory

Here are the opening paragraphs of a long and welcome exploration of the relationship between (a simplification to be sure) politics and critical theory, in the form of a review and analysis of Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s essay “Do You Believe in Magic?“

Sunday, June 29, 2008
'The Shape of Things To Come: On ‘Literary Thinking and the New Left’

Posted by Joseph Kugelmass on 06/29/08 at 03:28 PM
on The Valve

X-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes

What follows may appear to be a discussion of the 1960s in America; it is not. Reading through Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s indispensable essay “Do You Believe in Magic?“, cited and quoted by Scott Kaufman here and here (with follow-up in the comments by Sean), it is clear that more than the Sixties, McCann and Szalay are out to expose “a cherished and ultimately comforting folklore” that still commands respect today: the idea that “the analysis of [symbolic or cultural] forms itself constitutes significant political action, or that the ability to affect culture is, independent of other means, also therefore politically efficacious,” and that “to provide, as [C. Wright] Mills put it, ‘alternative definitions of reality’ could itself be the most radically political of acts.” McCann and Szalay identify this idea with almost the entire canon of postmodern thought, from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to Jean-Francois Lyotard and Susan Sontag.

McCann and Szalay’s essay splits down the middle. On the one hand, it is a legitimate attack on currents of fuzzy thinking and complacent libertarianism within the New Left and academia. On the other, it is part of a contemporary movement that seeks to deride what the Sixties accomplished, which was reviving society-wide conversation about the relationship of politics to the rest of life.

For my own part, this is the right occasion to explain what I believe “the analysis of symbolic or cultural forms” can accomplish, including through the academic work of scholars and teachers of literature. I hope it will become clear how I understand the political implications of what McCann and Szalay call “self-realization”—deliberately (and justly) echoing the wretched tide of self-help manuals—but which one might also call “self-fashioning.” I also hope to clarify the charges of defeatism that I leveled in my post “Look Back In Anger,” and to explore what alternatives exist: the shape of things to come.

The Purple Gorilla

A poem in the New Yorker (May 5. I'm way behind). Matthew Dickman. GRIEF.

Why a purple gorilla? A postcard from a life. If from someone I knew, I would savor it. From a stranger, the same--but as a poem? Strip away the poet talking to me here--sending me this message, talking about himself... and what's left?

Why have I grown so dissatisfied? With poems? With short fiction? My own short stories, certainly the first dozen, conventional enough. It was a work out--trying on different voices, different styles. I can't claim much for them. Of those I think my best, only Theology of Anorexia published--though I'm not unhappy with Godzilla's Eye. Why not Ezekiel Rising? At least for its humor--closer to my novels in that (did I say: 1115 new words today? ) ... or Lottie's Wheel, though I suppose it's the Midwestern roots thing--something personal... a sublimated memory of my father.

Back to the poem... remember Edgar Guest? You'd have to be old. Dreadful poems. I mean, awful. New one every day for years and years in the papers--back when the papers still published poems, at least, the dreadful ones. Dickman isn't Edgar Guest. The poem was good in its way, but the association sticks. Accomplished more or less the same thing, answering more or less the same need for its readers--but Dickman's readers are "sophisticated." His postcards more subtle--or at least, more layered... though the layers are altogether predictable.

And why a purple gorilla? Is it to show a touch of humor? Irony? To let us know he isn't near as much in thrall of his gorilla as Schwartz was of that Heavy Bear--animal stand-in for some basic human drive or experience?

Purple... stolen sentiment?

Wow... now there's self-deprecating irony for you.. a purple gorilla. So why did he have to call this poem, GRIEF? Why not...

The Purple Gorilla ?

Poetry in Wood

Craftsmanship to inspire any worthy cook: handcrafted cutting boards--beautiful work.

If you haven't seen this on Pas Au-Delà, click
HERE.

Right Brain Left Brain

Thoughts on Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight

But what about animals...

Who has done brain scans of animals in different moods? Which hemisphere rules when the cat is hunting? When he lies at rest in a pool of sunlight? When she carries her kittens to safety by the scruff of the neck?

Right brain would be
a Zen monk,
Francis--conversing with the birds

Left--a fearsome Jesuit, yeshiva bocher parsing
pil-pul, Sean Carroll in another
Universe!

Right brain
sips tea
levitates, tastes
the coming storm and smiles.

Left brain wants to know
the Right to be

Left asks, Where?
we came from, what we are--
desires...

Right drifts left
Left drifts right... gathering

memories, resentments, enemies
like zebra muscles on a sunken hull

Jacob Russell, 6/24, 2008

The Impossibility of Art

From chapter 84 of The Man Without Qualities.

Ulrich went on: "Every great book breaths this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was."

Thoughts I've often played with: how art and religion are ideas for which there is no corresponding reality, but only instances. Not as in particular to general: there is no "general." Like traces of radiation in a cloud chamber from shattered particles that no longer exist. Inclusive definitions of either religion or art are not possible because we ourselves exist only in that same fragmented state and cannot conceive of any whole of which they might be, or have been a part. That is, religion and art are chips broken from something no longer there--and perhaps. never was there. They tempt us with a common and deadly malady--to enter into them as though they were everything. Nothing is more poisonous to life (this is easier to see in religion: the moment we embrace any one of the numberless realizable instances as though it were the whole, we are set off against all the other possible instances; and are sure to generate out of the friction countless new instances: why else are there so many "religions?"). Art seems less dangerous, but only because, thank god, we are less inclined to take it so seriously. The chief danger in regard to art, is politics (and sometimes, religion), where it may enter into a symbiotic relationship that is sure to pervert both partners. The impossibility of art: one of the themes of my novel, The Magic Slate as in the chapter of that same name, HERE

Workspace, Suburbia and Establishment Literary Fiction

I read on Nigel Beale's Note Bene HERE that Bud Parr has dedicated a Flicker group for photos of writer's workspaces.

... It seems I'm still Flicker-challenged. Couldn't figure out how to upload a photo to the right collection. Until I get this right, here's my desk--two moves ago. Still South Philly.

Doesn't look a lot different now, 'cept I have a new LCD monitor and twice as much space. This was a single room in a shared house, not much more than 10x12 feet. I slept on a blanket roll. No room for a bed. Submarine efficiency required. Now I have an Army cot!

The desk was on sale: $13. Holding up pretty well.

My Sheng Fooey Literary Idea: Maximum in the minimum. Pack it in. And so do I like to live. I have few "things" ... other than books. Let them surround me, as much as possible, within reach of the desk where I work.

Like my neighborhood. Can walk everywhere I have need. If you need a car for what you need to live: by my definition: uncivilized. We live surrounded by Mechanical Barbarians, despoiling the countryside, which is better left to fallow space and raising food. Cities are for people.

The modern American suburb, with its lawns--erasure of natural environment, of sense of place, its covert apartheid politics, its fascistic minute-by-minute control of childhood (which, like the American Christmas: a denial of the reality of childhood ... suburbia--the better part of what has gone wrong in the world, and for sure in the USA, can be traced to the cumulative decisions that have led to the creation of the modern American suburb.

You think this has nothing to do with literature? What is ELF? but a soothing drug of choice for suburban middlebrow America? ...
that is, for the few who still have managed to free themselves a few hours a day from indentured servitude.

Poetry: Short Notice

Silliman's recommendations don't always appeal to me, but from the excerpts on Silliman's Blog, Joseph Lease's Broken World is a book of poetry I plan to buy and read.

What Do Scientists Want (from art)?

From my favorite science blog, Sean Carroll on Hidden Structures. Almost touchingly naive... but gets to the heart of how we talk about judgement in art and literature, what it's possible to say, and what it's not--is there hope of finding a common language?

When it comes to art (considered broadly, so as to include literature and various kinds of performance, not to mention a good bottle of wine) I am a radical subjectivist. If you like it, great; if you don’t, that’s your prerogative. There is no such thing as being “right” or “wrong” in one’s opinion about a work of art; what’s important is the relationship between the work and the person experiencing it.

Nevertheless, there’s no question that one’s attitude toward a work of art can be radically changed by outside information or experiences. You might come to understand it better, or conversely you might be overexposed to it and just get bored.

Scientists, in particular, love it when they discover that some boring old art thing that they had previously perceived as undifferentiated and uninteresting actually possesses some hidden structure. If you were ever caught in the unfortunate situation of teaching an art- or film-appreciation class to scientists, the right strategy would be to reveal, insofar as possible, the underlying theories by which the work in question is constructed. And if you think there are no such theories, you’re just not looking hard enough.

Read the rest
HERE

New Ideas on Literary Readings and Networking

Also linked on Chekhov's Mistress, Bryan Miltenberg offers some thoughts on finding new venues for readings and literary networking on The Millions.

Leaving the Bedside: Creating a DIY Literary Scene
Bryan Miltenberg is 22 and he lives in Brooklyn.

On occasional Friday and Saturday nights, my otherwise highly domestic living space (couches, TV, dining room table) is transformed, with the help of roommates and friends, into an impromptu artspace/music hall. For anywhere between five and zero dollars, anyone can come in and enjoy the show. And as with any regular apartment gathering, there are no age restrictions, and attendees are free to bring their own preferred methods of bacchanalia.

Read the rest HERE

Marzipan sings La Traviata!

State of the world got you down? Try a bite of this!

On
Lily et ses livres

On Being Born...

I'm taking care of my son's dog for a few days while he's on some island off New England. I've known this dog almost since he was a pup.

Almost 17 years old. Aged well up to about a year and half ago... so sad. Arthritic, haunches and ribs bone thin. This is hard for me. I have to ask myself--why? This is a dog. This is not one of my species. An animal. I eat other animals... though not that often.

Two thoughts come to mind. The first: how emotions don't have neat borders. It isn't just this dog...it's all the other losses in my life--an aunt I was very close to, withered away for 17 years from MS, my parents... thoughts of what will become of me--all these experiences channeled, concentrated. Then there's the purity of the emotional bond with a domestic animal. Human relationships are so goddamned complicated--to preserve them you have to keep a lid on the emotions to a certain degree--just because you almost never know what it is those feelings are actually about--and when they're the strongest, it's almost always about something else!

With Zeke, I mostly do understand--to see his Joie de Chien burnt down to a barely discernible ember--holding that against a memory of a few years back, a greeting at the door, the tail going and the barks and the doggy kisses... he doesn't bark anymore. I look at him and want to burst into tears. Foolishly, I know.. but it just wrings my gut. I loved this dog--like a dog. Well disciplined and cared for. Not a Disneyfied anthropomorphic projection.

Just for what he was.

A dog.

And there it is. So uncomplicated compared to my human relationships...

All this, a lead on to a post on being born by Richard Crary--channeling Lloyd Mintern.
HERE

Real Work Is Play... the rest is labor...

From The Psychoanalytic Field. This is part of a series on work and play--a post too good not to quote in full. I take this as another opportunity to call for a new reading of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition.

The method of free association was Freud’s response to one of the most challenging tasks with which psychoanalysis has had to grapple over its history: the elaboration of a system of contact, traversal, and translation between the primary and secondary processes as two ways of thinking, and hence as two ways of being, that are radically alien to one another.
In their elaborations of the unconscious, Lacanism and Ego Psychology seem to stand on the opposite ends of a conceptual scale that pits the ineluctable foreignness of the symbolic against the domesticity of development. One recognizes the effects of such theorizing in the tone of the texts as well: from the turgidly undecipherable to the rigidly banal. What a shame it is to have reduced the workings of the unconscious to the structures of language or the chronologies of development, and to have colonized the former with the disciplines and strategies of either of the latter.
While relying heavily on Klein’s notion of unconscious “phantasy,” Winnicott articulates the fact of an in-between that facilitates and organizes the passages between subjective and objective, self and other. Neither a hallucination nor a concretization, the “transitional” object is the site of infantile illusion and, by extension, adult creativity. It is neither simply given nor autocratically created; it is a found object in the sense that, while belonging to an external reality, it is invested with the qualities that suit the momentary psychodynamic purposes of the individual that “finds” it. It becomes “transitional” at the very moment of its finding.
Of all the principal figures in the psychoanalytic pantheon, and in spite of the ideological restrictions of his parental metaphors, Winnicott is perhaps one of the most faithful of Freudians. Rather than upon the uncovering of history, the enunciation of truth, the resolution of conflict, or the mastery over anxiety, it is upon the capacity to “find” and re-deploy creatively one’s own objects, in other words to play, that Winnicott bases his principal mark of health. Instead of merely a tool for analytic inquiry, the capacity to associate freely has now been clearly identified as the goal of that inquiry and, ultimately, as a necessary strategy for “healthy” living. (I think there is a bridge here between Winnicottian play and Deleuzo-Guattarian bricolage.)
This makes a lot of sense to me. And yet, rare indeed are those that undertake an analysis because they want to “play.”

My year or so in therapy was brought on by a crisis, and though I wouldn't have stated it that way, there was never any question but that what marked the end of my need, was a restoration of my capacity for play... something my therapist fully recognized.

The Anti-Golden Mean

More from Musil:

This one, as the Quakers say... speaks to my condition:

Psychiatry calls great elation "a hypomanic disturbance," which is like calling it a hilarious distress, and regards all heightened states, whether of chastity or sensuality, scrupulosity or carelessness, cruelty or compassion, as pathologically suspect--how little would a healthy life mean if its only goal were a middle condition between two extremes! How drab it would be if its ideal were really no more than the denial of the exaggeration of its ideals!

Heated thoughts: Musil, weather historical ... whatever...

Being somewhat enervated by the heat (I have an intense dislike of air conditioning: after a winter of being sealed up I want my windows open to the sounds of the birds, the hiss of tires on the street, sirens, the tink-de-diddle ee dum dee-dee of the Mr. Softee truck, passing drunks... the works. It strikes me as a kind of crime against the season to pull the windows shut, draw the blinds to keep out the sun... and then there's the drone, which, unlike the soft hum of my box fan, doesn't mask my tinnitus but seems rather to amplify it) ... where was I going with this?

Ah yes..

... an excuse for not reporting on my reading of The Man Without Qualities. There's hardly a page I couldn't find something to quote. My copy has sprouted dozens of red and blue sticky markers. I'm impressed by how timely, or should I say, timeless, Musil's observations. Joyce's language in Ulysses breaks new ground, but the people and social conventions belong to an another era. Musil has found something in pre-WWI Austria so central, something so much at the generative core of the modern mindset that the particular features of the Austrio-Hungarian bureaucracy and class structures in this book feel anachronistic--as though this were really a book written in and about, not the early 20th, but the the early 21st Century, but--for some inexplicable reason written like one of those "historical novels" at some arbitrarily chosen date in the past.

I've only read 300 or so pages, so am far from being able to grasp the whole of this never-completed novel... but realizing, page by page--as it began to come to me in my attempt to "review" New Yorker short stories--that I am not, and never will be, a "reviewer." Those books and stories and poems my thoughts turn to, and turn... like a plow in fertile soil, over and over, and return to, over and over--are never the books or stories or poems I've most recently read, but those that come back to me on their own. Why I prefer to buy books, rather than borrow from the library.

There will be times, late at night, I'll remember--vaguely--a passage, an episode--in a book I read a year or two or three ago. I turn on the light. I take the volume from the shelf... and the whole book will come back to me. If I were to write reviews--it would have to be like that, books I'd read years before--long after the "market" had pulled up it's shutters.

This is not to say that I don't know what's good when I see it. Not ten pages into Svevo's Zeno's Consciousness, I knew this was a book that would alter my mind, change my sense of what I liked and what I wanted next to read--forever. But I couldn't have explained it then... couldn't have explained why.

A trivial quote--but to make a point: how timeless--not in the usual idealist mode--but timeless: in as, how little we have changed since then, and timeless, in how a relentlessly subversive attention (Simone Weil's sense of what that word implies (Attente de Dieu) to our surroundings can mean.

The thesis that the huge quantities of soap sold testify to our great cleanliness need not apply to the moral life, where the more recent principle seems more accureate, that a strong compulsion to wash suggests a dubious state of inner hygiene.

A personal obsession

More tornadoes

National Weather Service: Severe Storm Prediction

Lost in the Wilderness: II. Realist Fiction etc

MAITRESSE wrote in a comment to Lost in the Wilderness :

"If you set out to tell a story you quickly find that you cannot go just anywhere."

But that's the art of it-- finding freedom in the constraints, keeping the imagination wide open even as the words multiply on the page.

... I was thinking of something else, really--not the matter of defining limits, the aesthetics of form. Rather, something closer to the grammar of narrative, if you will. If you write 'which' or 'how' or 'when' at the beginning of a sentence, those words won't be relative pronouns. They'll be interrogative pronouns, and the sentence that follows will be a question. If you begin a story with a certain tone, style, voice, the narrative that unfolds will have to 'fit' that tone, style, voice. Changing it midstream will be jarring. If there is a dramatic change in the personality of a character, you will be expected to demonstrate cause. Nothing remarkable about this observation: pointing out the obvious--until you start to think about how this affects your subject--the subject that is more than words, more than language, the subject present before you began to write, that impelled you to begin to write. It's what you want the words to be true to--even if that 'something' is not a thing, but a process, a record of a conversation. If you're a "realist," you think in terms of representation, mimesis. You imagine you are guided by the laws that govern in the real world--but that's the joker in the deck: Reality is not made of rules and laws--certainly not as they function in a story; in fiction, these rules are simply conventions we use. Writer's of "realist' fiction follow them because that is what readers expect.

The moment you begin to write (and I think writing is different than speech... though we sometimes speak as though we were writing)... the moment you begin to write, conventional expectations threaten to take over, to high-jack the subject, the "real" subject (forgive me... I don't know what else to call it at this point). I think this is what makes endings so often problematic. The writer gives up--surrenders to the conventions, resigns authorial responsibility. This is related to what I was thinking about in my post on ads and propaganda.

I realize I'm babbling... these are the kind of thoughts that run through my mind when I go to bed, that keep me awake wondering what it is that's gone wrong this time in my novel, wonder how I'm going to rescue it from looming disaster.

Blog Connections: A reality check

Thursday night I saw a report on the news of a tornado in Kearney, Nebraska. A double grabber for me: tornadoes (see HERE ), and books... Kearney was the site of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker.

I average around 30-35 visits a day. Now and then, 50-60. Once--72. That night, I had more than 200 visits in the next two hours. Next day: 270.

Easy to be impressed by such numbers. How many people do you see or talk to in any given day? Over a relatively short span of time--visits from hundreds of cities spanning the