Magnificent Sludge

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, who is a seriously awesome writer of horror and weird fiction (plus a shamefully talented poet) and (as if things weren’t unfair enough already) an excellent bass player, has a new band that has recorded some awesome shit. The second I heard raw bass + drum instrumental versions of the new songs a few weeks (months?) back, I was blown away. I am humbled to know this man and his work. Check out the finished demo tracks below. Share them. Rejoyce.

Say Hi

Christmas Presents

(click to enlarge)

“And it is the same evil.”

Following up this post, here is a poem by Kenneth Rexroth (via):

Kenneth Rexroth: The Bad Old Days

The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.
The first thing I did was to take
A streetcar to the stockyards.
In the winter afternoon
Gritty and fetid, I walked
Through the filthy snow, through the
Squalid streets, looking shyly
Into the people’s faces,
Those who were home in the daytime.
Debauched and exhausted faces,
Starved and looted brains, faces
Like the faces in the senile
And insane wards of charity
Hospitals. Predatory
Faces of little children.
Then as the soiled twilight darkened,
Under the green gas lamps, and the
Sputtering purple arc lamps,
The faces of the men coming
Home from work, some still alive with
The last pulse of hope or courage,
Some sly and bitter, some smart and
Silly, most of them already
Broken and empty, no life,
Only blinding tiredness, worse
Than any tired animal.
The sour smells of a thousand
Suppers of fried potatoes and
Fried cabbage bled into the street.
I was giddy and sick, and out
Of my misery I felt rising
A terrible anger and out
Of the anger, an absolute vow.
Today the evil is clean
And prosperous, but it is
Everywhere, you don’t have to
Take a streetcar to find it,
And it is the same evil.
And the misery, and the
Anger, and the vow are the same.

Mark Doty reading

The great poet Mark Doty reads his poem, “A Display of Mackerel.” Click here for the video. I strongly recommend you get Doty’s ‘new and selected poems’ volume Fire to Fire. Here is the poem read in the video just linked.

Mark Doty: A Display of Mackerel

They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,
which divide the scales’
radiant sections

like seams of lead
in a Tiffany window.
Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other
—nothing about them
of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions
of the one soul,
each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,
mackerel essence. As if,
after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s
made uncountable examples,
each as intricate

in its oily fabulation
as the one before
Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
all, all for all,

the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.

“I had never felt loved by anyone”

Sam Hamill writes a wonderful piece on Kenneth Rexroth here

I didn’t get a lot of Rexroth and needed a dictionary and sometimes an encyclopedia or a library, but he drew me in like no one had before. I knew there was a world in those poems, a vitally expansive world that invited me into it. I loved his anger and his tenderness and weary longing. Some poems reflected on what seemed to me to be an almost eternal life. Who was the “Marthe” for whom he sorrowed so deeply? Lost love? I’d had no love to lose, but I felt, however naively, that I felt his sorrow, his longing. I had never felt loved by anyone and I would live and die in my orphan’s loneliness, I was certain. Rexroth’s poetry often expressed for me what I could not say myself.

Speaking truthfully

I understood then (or I would have understood later) what I should have understood years before, even before I first tried to write fiction: the simple fact that people speaking to one another or looking towards one another are thinking how they might sound or appear in a work of fiction. I could never claim that any freckled woman had spoken truthfully to me about a real world. There was only one situation in which such a woman could be taken as speaking truthfully. If I were to write a work of fiction with a freckled woman as a character in it, then I, in the person of the narrator, might insert in the fiction, such words as ‘she answered truthfully, at last, …’

from the first story in Gerald Murnane’s collection Landscape with Landscape, a stupendously amazing book which I started reading earlier today

Incredible Light

Not owning the Collected Poems edited by Michael Davidson, I rely on bits and pieces scrounged online for my fix of Oppen, such as this here.

George Oppen: The Forms of Love

Parked in the fields
All night
So many years ago,
We saw
A lake beside us
When the moon rose.
I remember

Leaving that ancient car
Together. I remember
Standing in the white grass
Beside it. We groped
Our way together
Downhill in the bright
Incredible light

Beginning to wonder
Whether it could be lake
Or fog
We saw, our heads
Ringing under the stars we walked
To where it would have wet our feet
Had it been water

They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs.

In a dark time, I reach sometimes into my shelves for Wright and poems like this

James Wright: A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

“Where is Jason Molina”

As a long time devotee to his work, I can’t believe I hadn’t heard this:

Many of you have inquired as to Jason’s whereabouts and well-being since he canceled his tours with Will Johnson in 2009. Over the last two years Jason has been in and out of rehab facilities and hospitals in England, Chicago, Indianapolis, and New Orleans. It has been a very trying time for Jason, his friends, and his family. Although no one can be sure what the future holds, we feel very encouraged by the recent steps Jason has taken on the road towards becoming healthy and productive once again. Unfortunately, because he has no medical insurance, he has accrued substantial medical bills. We are asking all friends of Jason’s music to come together with a showing of financial support for him.

I am tired, Beloved

As I was ordering the Selected Poems as published by the Library of America, edited by Honor Moore, I was moved to quote this poem

Amy Lowell: The Letter

Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncertain window and the bare floor

Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

Because I am a fanboy (2)

The great Robert von Hallberg (in the middle) and Steven Gould Axelrod (right)

Because I am a fanboy (1)

Pomona College, for obvious reasons. Click on photo to enlarge, and yes, photo is crooked, sorry. The night before I took the picture was one of the more horrible ones in my life so far.

Love craved and despised and necessary

This, from Bidart’s fantastic 2008 collection Watching the Spring Festival, which, like all of Bidart’s work, I cannot recommend highly enough.

Frank Bidart: Valentine

How those now dead used the word love bewildered
and disgusted the boy who resolved he

would not reassure the world he felt
love until he understood love

Resolve that too soon crumbled when he found
within his chest

something intolerable for which the word
because no other word was right

must be love
must be love

Love craved and despised and necessary
the Great American Songbook said explained our fate

my bereft grandmother bereft
father bereft mother their wild regret

How those now dead used love to explain
wild regret

Butt in the Chair

Ayelet Waldman interviewed by Meg Pokrass for Fictionaut.

I have four children and am thus so absurdly busy that I don’t have time for writers block. If I waited for inspiration, I’d never write anything else as long as I live. I have one rule: butt in the chair. I try to sit down to work five days a week, from about 10:30 AM to 3 PM, with a short break for lunch. When I’m feeling crabby, I remind myself that that is about as UN-onerous a schedule as a person could ask for, and I have no business whining about it.

and on being married to Michael Chabon

I have the world’s best in house editor. And more importantly, I am allowed to edit one of the best American writers of this century (or any, frankly). How cool is that?

Our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness

Below, the entries for 22nd-25th March from Cesare Pavese‘s diaries, published in English as The Business of Living (I would like to offer you a translator but incredibly, my edition, put out by Transaction Publishers, doesn’t say who translated the book, which originally appeared as Il mestiere di vivere after the author’s death. My edition has an introduction by John Taylor but since he refers to this edition as “welcome”, I doubt he translated it. Any suggestions, folks? It’s a shame to whoever translated this magnificent book). I have owned the German equivalent in different translations for a while and while it’s not without its flaws (such as a strand of low-key misogyny that is threaded through it), it’s always been in many ways an important book for me.

22nd March
There are many things I have not told her. Deep down my terror at the thought of losing her now is not a longing for “possession,” but the feat that I shall never more be able to tell her those things. What they may be I do not now know, but they would pour out like a torrent if I were with her. That is creation. Oh God, make me find her again.

23rd March
Love is truly the great manifesto; the urge to be, to count for something, and, if death must come, to die valiantly, with acclamation – in short, to remain a memory. Yet my desire to die, to disappear, is still bound up with her: perhaps because she is so magnificently alive that, if my being could blend with hers, my life would have more meaning than before.

25th March
One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love -any love- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

“I’m in love”

I am awhirl with the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes which I hadn’t discovered before today. The following is vaguely unrepresentative of her work, as far as I can see, but I like it nonetheless. it’s from her first collection Emplumada (1989), which I recommend highly, from what I’ve seen so far. It may be the fact that I talked about Rita Dove’s career today, but this book seems to me to do what Dove’s early poetry does, but less obviously veiled by workshop craftsmanship. The poems dealing with the Chicano experience are stronger than the tender love poems of which I quote one, so don’t be misled by my choice.

Lorna Dee Cervantes: The Body as Braille

He tells me “your back
is so beautiful.” He traces
my spine with his hand.

I’m burning like the white ring
around the moon. “A witch’s moon,”
dijo mi abuela. The schools call it

“a reflection of ice crystals.”
It’s a storm brewing in the cauldron
of the sky. I’m in love

but won’t tell him
if it’s omens
or ice.

Your name was not in my language

I am currently nursing, let’s say, an obsession, with Frank Bidart’s slim but excellent work. This is from his first collection, Golden State, which can be found in In The Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90, which I recommend highly.

Frank Bidart: To My Father
I walked into the room.
There were objects in the room. I thought I needed nothing
from them. They began to speak,
but the words were unintelligible, a painful cacophony…
Then I realized they were saying the name

of the man who had chosen them, owned them,
ordered, arranged them, their deceased cause,
the secret pattern that made these things order.
I strained to hear: but
the sound remained unintelligible…
senselessly getting louder, urgent, deafening.

Hands over my ears, at last I knew they would remain
inarticulate; your name was not in my language.

As if there were someone / to dream of

I am new to the work of John Wieners, so here goes, uncommented, from the so far interesting Selected Poems, published by Black Sparrow Press that seem worth a recommendation.

John Wieners: Realization

Where has that old spark gone
this sickness could come on?
What use in pretending
our dream of love undone

Old farms await to take us in
to their disease
under rotting apple trees

Going from one drugstore to the next
in snow, as if there were someone
to dream of, these things not so,

but left alone, with mother
that is always lonely, to deny all dreams -
the penance of middle age.

“I lost my poems.”

There was a horrendous moment for me a while ago, and I was reminded of one of my favorite poems, this untitled poem by Ingeborg Bachmann. You can find it in Ich weiß keine bessere Welt, a gorgeous posthumous collection of poems and drafts, selections of which should be part of any English selection of Bachmann’s work.

Meine Gedichte sind mir abhanden gekommen.
Ich suche sie in allen Zimmerwinkeln.
Weiß vor Schmerz nicht, wie man einen Schmerz
aufschreibt, weiß überhaupt nichts mehr.

Weiß, daß man so nicht daherreden kann,
es muß würziger sein, eine gepfefferte Metapher
müßte einem einfallen. Aber mit dem Messer im Rücken.

Parlo e tacio, parlo, flüchte mich in ein Idiom,
in dem sogar Spanishes vorkommt, los toros y
las planetas, auf einer alten gestohlenen Platte
vielleicht noch zu hören. Mit etwas französischem
geht es auch, tu es mon amour depuis si longtemps.

Adieu, ihr schönen Worte, mit euren Verheißungen.
Warum habt ihr mich verlassen. War euch nicht wohl?
Ich habe euch hinterlegt bei einem Herzen aus Stein.
Tut dort für mich, Haltet dort aus, tut dort für mich ein Werk.

A Cultural Flag

Comment on Frank Miller’s most recent mad, racist graphic novel on wired.com.

The tragedy is that Miller is no hack. Throughout his 35-year career, he’s been one of comics’ few undisputed geniuses. Check the resume: from Daredevil to Ronin to Sin City, Miller excels at exploring the dark side of humanity without reducing his characters to simplistic killing machines. His Dark Knight Returns was one of the game-changing comics of the 1980s, the greatest Batman story ever told, a book that rivals Watchmen in its ability to prove that comics are literature. As an artist, Miller’s forte is in stark black-and-white color schemes, yet he creates worlds where the morality is a subtle gray.

He is also at the height of his cultural influence. The film adaptations of Sin City and 300 were so successful that Hollywood actually let him direct The Spirit. Christopher Nolan’s rebooted Batman trilogy would be unthinkable if Miller had never created The Dark Knight Returns. Word is that the upcoming Daredevil movie reboot will be based on Miller’s “Born Again” storyline.

That means it’s a mistake to write off Holy Terror as unimportant or a stumble in an otherwise great career. It’s a cultural flag, planted to serve as a “reminder that we’re in the midst of a long war,” Miller told Comic-Con International this year, against an enemy that’s “pernicious, deceptive and merciless and wants nothing less than total destruction.”

Kleist

Today is the 200th anniversary of Heinrich von Kleist‘s death. Below is a letter he wrote to a friend November 11, 1811.

[I]ch schwöre Dir, es ist mir ganz unmöglich länger zu leben; meine Seele ist so wund, daß mir, ich möchte fast sagen, wenn ich die Nase aus dem Fenster stecke, das Tageslicht wehe tut, das mir darauf schimmert. Das wird mancher für Krankheit und überspannt halten; nicht aber Du, die fähig ist, die Welt auch aus andern Standpunkten zu betrachten als aus dem Deinigen. Dadurch daß ich mit Schönheit und Sitte, seit meiner frühsten Jugend an, in meinen Gedanken und Schreibereien, unaufhörlichen Umgang gepflogen, bin ich so empfindlich geworden, daß mich die kleinsten Angriffe, denen das Gefühl jedes Menschen nach dem Lauf der Dinge hienieden ausgesetzt ist, doppelt und dreifach schmerzen. So versichre ich Dich, wollte ich doch lieber zehnmal den Tod erleiden, als noch einmal wieder erleben, was ich das letztemal in Frankfurt an der Mittagstafel zwischen meinen beiden Schwestern, besonders als die alte Wackern dazukam, empfunden habe; laß es Dir nur einmal gelegentlich von Ulriken erzählen. Ich habe meine Geschwister immer, zum Teil wegen ihrer gutgearteten Persönlichkeiten, zum Teil wegen der Freundschaft, die sie für mich hatten, von Herzen lieb gehabt; so wenig ich davon gesprochen habe, so gewiß ist es, daß es einer meiner herzlichsten und innigsten Wünsche war, ihnen einmal, durch meine Arbeiten und Werke, recht viel Freude und Ehre zu machen. Nun ist es zwar wahr, es war in den letzten Zeiten, von mancher Seite her, gefährlich, sich mit mir einzulassen, und ich klage sie desto weniger an, sich von mir zurückgezogen zu haben, je mehr ich die Not des Ganzen bedenke, die zum Teil auch auf ihren Schultern ruhte; aber der Gedanke, das Verdienst, das ich doch zuletzt, es sei nun groß oder klein, habe, gar nicht anerkannt zu sehn, und mich von ihnen als ein ganz nichtsnutziges Glied der menschlichen Gesellschaft, das keiner Teilnahme mehr wert sei, betrachtet zu sehn, ist mir überaus schmerzhaft, wahrhaftig, es raubt mir nicht nur die Freuden, die ich von der Zukunft hoffte, sondern es vergiftet mir auch die Vergangenheit.

(from the Collected Works and Letters in one Volume, published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag)

A short travel note on two trips.

As I sit down to write this, I am looking through a large window, high above Hamburg, onto the darkening city below. Last week, I was in Bucharest, which is a magnificent kind of city. There is chaos almost everywhere one looks, houses barely standing. Architectural and stylistic periods are jumbled so badly that sometimes the city feels as if someone playing dice has had a hand in planning its streets and arrangements. The older, more beautiful buildings are often decaying, the sidewalks are rotting with A/C fluid, urine and spit. I want to say that this city has a certain charm, but that doesn’t begin to describe it. I think that this city is positively bewitching (click here for some pictures of the trip to Bucharest) I don’t know that I would want to live there, deal with its odd problems on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t seem a very good city to have to depend on in your everyday life. As a visitor, however, this city overwhelmed me. Walk down any street and you will find something astonishing or surprising. The first day in Bucharest, I walked down its streets with my mouth open with delighted intrigue, and for the whole week that I was there, it didn’t really change. And at the heart of it all, it seemed to me, were Bucharests insane amounts of churches of various denominations. All the churches I entered were deeply, terribly impressive. These are churches built for people who are actually afraid of God, people who accord God a central place in their lives. To see people kneeling on the ground, wailing, holding their hands to various altars and prayer books, it was one of the most aesthetically amazing things I’ve ever seen. In this light, visiting a church on my first afternoon in Hamburg wasn’t maybe the brightest idea. While churches in Bucharest are frequently darkened places, Hamburg’s churches are always light and vast. People sit down in their churches with an unbent back, staring at their prayer book as if daring it to stare back. While in Bucharest, children partook of the rituals without visibly or audibly complaining, the few praying children in Hamburg twitched with impatience. When bad things happen in our churches, people leave the church altogether, as if it was a book club or an internet forum, or something similarly silly. There is nothing at stake for our faithful in church. God is important, true, but we look him in the eye. I don’t think I’ve been so disappointed in my whole life (well…). After Bucharest, I came here with a newly discovered interest in faith and churches. I had at least one good discussion about it there, but the one person I talked to here, a short man slightly soaked by the torrential Hamburg rain, was defiant and aloof. And the more time I spend in this city, the more I come to feel that this is quite typical of the city itself. I haven’t been to the outer districts yet, but the central parts of Hamburg (after all, I only saw the central parts of Bucharest either. Hamburg becomes more interesting when you leave the center. Parts of the town like Altona, and Eimsbüttel are more interesting and surprising) are made to impress outsiders. Surfaces are gleaming with prettiness. After a fire ravaged the city in 1842, the whole city was rebuilt, in parts mimicking older epochs, in parts reflecting late 19th century styles. And after the city was destroyed a second time in the second world war, when Germany’s crimes returned to haunt the Germans, the city was rebuilt a second time, and this time it was partly restored, partly rebuilt with modern architecture. You can see wild mixtures of epochs here, as well, but they are, as most of central Hamburg is, uniformly dull. Hamburg, in contrast to Bucharest, is a pretty city, well built, well constructed, well maintained. I was itching to take some photographs but I was almost constantly bored by what I saw (see some of the pictures I did take). There seems to be nothing necessary in the way that central Hamburg goes about its business, nothing terribly exciting. It’s there to show us the cleverness and taste of the people living in it and ruling it. Earlier this year, Hamburg elected a new mayor (who is also kinda the state governor), and journalists wrote about how low the public interest in this election was, and how few people actually went and voted. After this week in the shining kingdom of dullness, I can understand this very well. Even Cologne is preferable to this. Thankfully, I have the memories of a week spent in a frighteningly beautiful city to tide me over this disappointment, as well as two dozen pages with notes and drafts. I will be in Hamburg for another two days, hoping for an epiphany. You never know. I love big cities. They tend to surprise you when you least expect them to.

Hamburg

As some of you may know, I am currently in Hamburg. It is my fourth time here, and that may be part of the reason why Hamburg seems an infinitely more dull city than Bucharest. Here is the main reason why. Below, a photo of yours truly (click to enlarge (admit it, it’s a pretty awesome photo!), and if you follow this link, you’ll find some more random photos (including two more of yours truly) from Hamburg, far fewer ones than the Bucharest photos.

“Whose streets? Our streets.”

Shops and police cars burning in Tottenham.

“It wasn’t like this before,” said one woman standing close to one of the two burned-out police cars. “It started out as a peaceful demonstration. The police shot a guy here last week and they lied about what happened. They said he pulled a gun but he wouldn’t have done that with armed police. They shot him so badly that his mother could not recognise him.”

(…)

Most of the crowd consisted of onlookers, who jeered at police vans as they arrived. There were chants of “we want answers” and “whose streets? Our streets”.

What is Epic Fantasy?

“26 authors—13 women and 13 men—as well as an editor and a literary agent”, including the likes of David Anthony Durham, Steven Erikson, Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson, attempt to answer the questions posed by Clarkesworld Magazine: What is at the heart of Epic Fantasy? and Why do you write Epic fantasy? From Durham’s answer to the second question, this bit, which also explains why his work, despite its massive, massive flaws, is still so attractive

I love the unlimited creative possibilities of fantasy. I’d written three historical novels before starting the Acacia series. The third, Pride of Carthage, was about Hannibal’s war with Rome. It was a massive conflict with amazing events and twists of fortune and inspired leadership. It was epic. Leaving that novel, I wanted another epic. The world building I’d done for the ancient world got me craving writing in an imagined world where I had more freedom to mash things together that were never mashed together in actual human history. How could I write a novel that mixed opium addiction with the Atlantic slave trade in a pre-industrial world that includes Nordic, African, European and Asian inspired cultures in the same empire, and introduce a foreign invasion that endangers them all, despite their differences? If I was writing straight history that wouldn’t be possible. A lot of historical writers would probably never want to do something like that. I did, though. Fantasy was the obvious choice of genre that would allow me to recast all those things in one big package.

“No Man Frightens Me.”

A friend, who’s quite a talented poet himself, asked me about great contemporary British poetry and I was frankly a bit at a loss. I welcome suggestions, but among living British poets significantly younger than Hill and Harrison, both of whom were born in the 1930s (and both of whose work I love greatly), I can’t find any that really capture or hold my interest. Here is a poem by celebrated poet Jo Shapcott, which reminds me strongly of several older poets (some lines of it read like a straight Plath pastiche, for example). Mind you, it’s not bad, but, you know?

The version below is taken from www.thepoem.co.uk. On my tumblr, I also posted a video of Shapcott reading the poem (click here), a version that differs slightly from the one I am posting here.

Jo Shapcott: Thetis

No man frightens me. Watch as I stretch
my limbs for the transformation, I’m laughing
to feel the surge of the other shapes beneath my skin.
It’s like this: here comes the full thrill of my art
as the picture of a variegated
lizard insinuates itself into my mind.
I extend my neck, lengthen fingers, push
down toes to find the form. My back begins
to undulate, the skin to gleam. I think
my soul has slithered with me into this
shape as real as the little, long tongue in my mouth,
as the sun on my back, as the skill in absolute stillness.
My name is Thetis Creatrix and you,
voyeur, if you looked a little closer, would see
the next ripples spread up my bloody tail, to bloom
through my spine as the bark begins to harden
over my trunk. Already I’m so much of the oak
I lean everything towards the black oxygen
in the black air, I process delicious gases
through my personal chemistry, suck moisture
from the earth to a pulse so slow you can’t detect it.
Next tigress. Low tremendous purrs start at the pit
of my stomach, I’m curving through long grass,
all sinew, in a body where tension
is the special joy and where the half-second
before a leap tells it all. Put out a paw
to dab a stone, an ant, a dead lamb. Life,
my life, is all play even up to the moment
when I’m tripped up, thrown down, bound,
raped until I bleed from my eyes,
beaten out of shape and forced to bring forth War.

“A Golden Age for Poetry”

Bad news from California:

One of the country’s most prominent poetry series, New California Poetry, from the University of California Press, is to be suspended. The pause in publishing, after next year’s three spring titles, likely will become long-term or permanent unless an angel steps forward to provide substantial assistance.

The series, founded in 2000, has published 33 titles by 25 poets, with three more in the pipeline. (…) Alison Mudditt, who took over as UC Press director early this year, said today, via e-mail: “Like all university presses, we are currently facing increasing financial pressures, partly as we continue to feel the impact of the global economic recession and partly as we reshape our publishing program and our organizational structure to ensure our continued success in the digital age.”

She acknowledged what the editors of the series and many poets say of the series, that it “has included many extraordinary and memorable collections” and “is both prestigious and award-winning.” In 2009, for example, Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won the National Book Award, while Fanny Howe’s Selected Poems received an Academy of American Poets prize for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000.

But the press’s action does not signal a crisis in the publication of American poetry, [Brenda Hillman, a professor of English at St. Mary’s College of California, said by e-mail]: “I feel hopeful about poetry publishing in general.” Many other university presses are “doing amazing things,” she said. “It is really a golden age for poetry, I believe; we need it more than ever.”

Short note on J.D. McClatchy

Two or three days ago, I raved to a friend about two poets I admire greatly, Richard Wilbur and J.D. McClatchy. It was easy picking a few excellent canonical poems by Wilbur as samples of his work. But McClatchy? He doesn’t appear to receive the attention and praise that his work deserves. I happen to believe that McClatchy is one of the last great poet-critics that we have. His essays on poets and poetry are always insightful and on point. I specifically recommend his 1998 collection Twenty Questions. He’s done impressive work as an editor (among many other things, he edited the Library of America selection of Longfellow’s work). And he’s a poet in the tradition of the great ones like James Merrill to whom his voice seems especially indebted. Below, a poem from Hazmat, a sometimes uneven but really excellent collection of poems published 2004. I took the poem from the excerpts offered by Random House. I strongly recommend this book, and its predecessor Ten Commandments (1999). McClatchy, like Merrill, writes brilliantly on love and loss, on desire and the allure of beauty. Well, as I said, I admire McClatchy greatly. What about you?

J.D. McClatchy: Pibroch

But now that I am used to pain,
Its knuckles in my mouth the same
Today as yesterday, the cause
As clear-obscure as who’s to blame,

A fascination with the flaws
Sets in-the plundered heart, the pause
Between those earnest, oversold
Liberties that took like laws.

What should have been I never told,
Afraid of outbursts you’d withhold.
Why are desires something to share?
I’m shivering, though it isn’t cold.

Beneath your window, I stand and stare.
The planets turn. The trees are bare.
I’ll toss a pebble at the pane,
But softly, knowing you are not there.

Enthusiasms and me (monologue)

I have, throughout the past year, received various complaints about my review style, and while I can’t do anything about my English or the length of individual reviews, I can at least explain why I seem to bubble with enthusiasm about books so much, unless I am absolutely negative about them, like I tend to be in respect to Paul Auster’s books. There is a shared perception among some readers that there is no middle path with me. I would disagree, pointing to reviews like the one I wrote of Ander Monson’s Other Electricities, but why not concede the point for now. The fact of the matter is not that I try to be as positive as possible about a book, it’s that I am a person chiefly governed by enthusiasms, or that’s how I like to see myself. It is probably the one thing I really like about myself and I appreciate it in others, as well. I get shouty, excited and even a tad stuttery over things I love (in some Bookbabble episodes you can hear me getting excited). It doesn’t matter whether it is my considered opinion that these things are, in fact excellent, and indeed, I frequently do not hold the same exalted opinion of some of these books or writers any longer, but that’s not important. I think genuine excitement over books or music or the sun coming up at 5 in the morning, it’s so valuable, and in writing about books I decided against curbing this instinct of mine to praise excessively. Because art is worth exalting, worth praising. So am I misleading what readers I have? I don’t think so. I think my reviews hold up reasonably well (all things and limitations considered), even of books that I would have a more negative opinion now, because I think the basic descriptions of the books are sound, or as sound as I can manage them to be. This is a secondary concern to me though. I stand by what I said earlier: enthusiasms are important to me. I am easily enthused. I found an old Odetta record today that I haven’t listened to for years and then the mailman brought a mangled used copy of Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Commonwealth, as well as a clean copy of the Charles Olson/Frances Boldereff correspondence and I was giddy half the evening. With women or men I fall suddenly intensely in love and just as suddenly out of it (usually at the point when I seem most ‘in it’). That’s just the way it is. I love people, books and art. There’s a supremely gifted friend of mine who’s an astonishing artist, currently traveling through Europe, and if I could, I would rave about her art everyday to everyone on the interwebs who would listen. The same is true for a fantastically good writer of (mainly) horror fiction, who I am also lucky to call a friend. I like to think I’m a very enthusiastic person whenever I can manage to be. So often, I am not, silent, quiet, hollow. Enthusiasm is preferable. Books are great things to be enthusiastic about. I love books. I write this in my study, which is a room lined with books, there are books everywhere here. Poke me and I will talk about all kinds of books all day. I study books, writing my Ph.D. about poetry, and I admire booksellers like few other professions on this planet (see also this recent post). Look at a good book, not a great book, just a good book. See what a marvel it is. How it is made, how it works, how its words fit it just right. And great books…they are something else. Next to my computer right now is my copy of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Clarel. I don’t have the words to describe the love I have for books like this. There is so much shit in the world. But here there are books. And outside there are people, each of them a marvel, too. And elsewhere are works of art. Take a moment to look up the work of Lucien Freud who died today. Take a pause. Look at it. It’s night here. In two hours, the sun will rise. There are so many things to love, so much to feel enthusiastic about. So what if I don’t feel the same excitement about Hilde Domin’s poetry, Notwist’s music or that girl’s smile that I used to have. How could I have known at the time. At the time, I was giddy with excitement, rosy with delight and glowing with enthusiasm. This will happen again and again. As it should. Stop complaining.

Que pourrais-je répondre à cette âme pieuse?

Reading Lowell today, some of his poems reminded me of Baudelaire, and specifically, his excellent early-ish poem Mother Marie Therese, which put me in mind of this Baudelaire poem. Clicking on this link, you can find various translations of it (including one by Lowell), which all have their faults but, together, will give you a decent sense of the poem, if you can’t read French. And now enjoy:

Charles Baudelaire: La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse

La servante au grand coeur dont vous étiez jalouse,
Et qui dort son sommeil sous une humble pelouse,
Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs.
Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs,
Et quand Octobre souffle, émondeur des vieux arbres,
Son vent mélancolique à l’entour de leurs marbres,
Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats,
À dormir, comme ils font, chaudement dans leurs draps,
Tandis que, dévorés de noires songeries,
Sans compagnon de lit, sans bonnes causeries,
Vieux squelettes gelés travaillés par le ver,
Ils sentent s’égoutter les neiges de l’hiver
Et le siècle couler, sans qu’amis ni famille
Remplacent les lambeaux qui pendent à leur grille.
Lorsque la bûche siffle et chante, si le soir
Calme, dans le fauteuil je la voyais s’asseoir,
Si, par une nuit bleue et froide de décembre,
Je la trouvais tapie en un coin de ma chambre,
Grave, et venant du fond de son lit éternel
Couver l’enfant grandi de son oeil maternel,
Que pourrais-je répondre à cette âme pieuse,
Voyant tomber des pleurs de sa paupière creuse?

“How did they ever have hanky panky?”

Novelist Deeanne Gist demonstrates the difficulties of using Victorian underwear in this short piece by Alexandra Alter at the wsj (there’s a video too. ).

“How did they ever have hanky panky?” asked novelist Annie Solomon.

With great effort, it turns out. Women wore blouses under their corsets—making actual bodice ripping fairly pointless. Corsets fastened in front and laced up the back and couldn’t be undone in a single passionate gesture. “You’ll see pictures of corsets on bare skin. That’s completely historically inaccurate,” Ms. Gist told her audience.

(via)

Man hands on misery to man.

So this is a well known poem, almost a cliché, but I might do something tomorrow that might make me very unhappy for pretty fucked up reasons, and had a discussion with my sister about it tonight, and although we’re different in so many ways, and 8 years apart in age, we have the same fucked up instincts when it comes to other people. Well, I’ll rethink it tomorrow. But this evening, this poem sounds pretty on point. If you live in or near Bonn, Germany, I’m inviting you to a cup of coffee tomorrow or the day after How’s that. Coffee and a Philip Larkin poem.

Philip Larkin – This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Pascal’s infinite, perfect, fearful sphere

From Lowell’s Notebook 1967-68, which I am trying to finish a paper on, this poem

Robert Lowell: Mania: 1958

Remember standing with me in the dark,
Ann Adden? In the wild house? Everything -
I mad, you mad for me? And brought my ring,
that twelve-carat lunk of gold there . . . my Joan of Arc,
undeviating then from the true mark -
robust, ah taciturn! Remember our playing
Marian Anderson in Mozart’s Shepherd King,
Il Re Pastore there? O Hammerheaded Shark,
the Rainbow Salmon of the World, your hand
a rose – not there, a week earlier! We stand. . . .
We ski-walked the eggshell at the Mittersill,
Pascal’s infinite, perfect, fearful sphere -
the border nowhere, your center everywhere. . . .
And if I forget you, Ann, may my right hand . . .

Delight in lives that were not human

From W. S. Merwin’s essay The House and Garden: The Emergence of a Dream, published in the Kenyon Review (click for the full text here):

No story, though, begins at the beginning. The beginning does not belong to knowledge. I have been asked fairly often how I came to care about living things that are not human — for all that is commonly referred to as “nature.” There is a suggestion, sometimes, that a sympathy of that kind is somehow eccentric. Such use of the word “nature” seems to refer to something apart from “us.” Yet the sympathy seems to me natural, even if the overt first impulse of living organisms is rarely generous. I cannot remember a time when I did not feel that attraction, that delight in lives that were not human. I have a vivid recollection of one moment of it when I must have been hardly more than two years old. I was walking with my mother along the sidewalk on New York Avenue outside our house in Union City, New Jersey. Sidewalks then were commonly made of flagstones. Right outside our own picket fence I saw, between two flagstones, tender new shoots of grass so young that the light passed through them. It must have been spring. I bent down to look, and I asked my mother where the grass was coming from. I remember my happiness, the sense of reassurance I felt when she told me that the earth was right under there.

(via)

What is perfect love

Poem 9 from J.V. Cunningham’s collection To What Strangers, What Welcome. I quote from the fantastically edited The Poems of J. V. Cunningham, with a great introduction and great notes, all done by Timothy Steele. Read this. Read this.

(9)

Innocent to innocent,
One asked, What is perfect love?
Not knowing it is not love,
Which is imperfect–some kind
Of love or other, some kind
Of interchange with wanting,
There when all else is wanting,
Something by which we make do.

So impaired, uninnocent,
If I love you–as I do–
To the very perfection
Of perfect imperfection,
It’s that I care more for you
Than for my feeling for you.

“If it’s all about money, there’s just better things to sell”

Two weeks ago, I mailed a book of poetry to a friend; it was a book I had owned for many years, but I wasn’t sure how long exactly, which is why I looked inside, and saw the notation of a book shop in Heidelberg, which used to be a fantastic place to buy English books. They sold new books and used ones, it was a tiny bookshop with a huge collection of poetry, and its owner cared deeply about literature (rather than revenue); I owe much of my early reading in English to the owner and sales clerks in that bookshop, who always somehow managed to suggest the right kind of book for me. Like many smaller bookshops in Heidelberg, this one closed down many years ago. When I saw that a Facebook friend had posted the video below, about a man selling books out of his apartment, on his page, I was reminded of the small Heidelberg bookshops that introduced me to literature. Bookshops are not regular businesses, are they? In my case, they were places where you learned about a vast literary world, which could well change your life. It was from bookshops that I learned to love poetry, and I can still go to my shelves and pull out books of poetry that were important for my understanding of art and life, and see, in the front or the back, a small sticker, a stamp or the carefully scribbled numbers that evoke to me, to this day, the smells, sounds and words from each of these book shops. Another dear (French) friend of mine wants to open, against all odds, a bookshop within the next year or two, and I have no words to express how much I admire her attempt to do it.

Zora Neale Hurston on Zombies

In her classic Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica and (unless I misremember) her really very readable autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston mentions voodoo rituals involving zombies. Here is an interview clip from 1943, where she explains it.

“we don’t have any bananas”

Kai von Fintel‘s inaugural post at LanguageLog. Click here for the full post.

The Supreme Court’s doctrine therefore seems to be that “any” like other quantifiers can be contextually restricted, that what the restrictions are depends on the intentions of the speaker (here: Congress), and that one can infer the intentions by seeing what interpretations make sense in the context of other utterances in the same text. What makes “any” so interesting in this context is that there is a tension between the natural tendency of quantifiers to be contextually restricted and the peculiar properties of “any”. (…) Nirit Kadmon and Fred Landman argue that what “any” contributes is a widening of the meaning a sentence might otherwise have. They suggest that the difference between “we don’t have bananas” and “we don’t have any bananas” is that in the latter case we claim to not even have questionable bananas. Justice Breyer argues in his decision, quite plausibly, that this widening effect has its limits. “Any court” can mean “any court in the US” without being interpreted as widely as “any court anywhere in the world”.

(via. And yes, I’ve been reading the Log so infrequently that I needed outside prompting to see this post)

“Your mouth / and the sea will taste of each other”

One of my favorite love poems. It fits this Friday. Then again, it doesn’t. Well, it’s complicated (isn’t always). If you haven’t read Hacker now, please do so. An excellent poet. A good place to start would be the Selected Poems 1965-1990, a slim but magnificent volume.

Marilyn Hacker: Somewhere In A Turret

Somewhere in a turret in time,
castled and catacombed in but
still on a tan street that
ends with a blue-and-white gingerbread house,
those rooms are still filled
with our pictures and books. On the sill
our black-and-white cat hums after a fly.
It is getting light. When we come in,
no one will ask you to leave, no one will send me away.

Nobody lives in the present, time
has textures past and future that
tongues taste at, fingers feel for.
The present happens in rooms
I am not in; past rooms
are only momentarily
empty, if I knew how
to turn around, I would cross the threshold smiling.
No one would ask me to leave, no one would send me away.

Don’t think I’m trying to ignore the time
I piled my things into a cab and left
a note for you and one for the dinner guests.
Those rooms have new tenants. You and I
may never share a closet or a towel-rack
again. We contrived it. I am still
surprised waking up without you every morning.
But I can’t camp out in your house or you in mine.
Peoplse would ask me to leave. People would send you away.

Still, I am an optimist. Sometime
we may be sitting, maybe near the ocean
on a cliff, and under the blown spray
get tangled in each other’s fingers and hair;
and in that arbitrary future, your mouth
and the sea will taste of each other.
It is so easy to make things happen
like a freeze shot ending a movie
so you don’t leave, and I don’t go away.

But you know about words. You have had time
to figure out that hardly anyone
came back to bed because of a poem.
Poems praise and protect us from
our lovers. While I write this
I am not having heartburn
about your indifference. We could walk
into any room.
You wouldn’t ask me to leave. I wouldn’t send you away.

“To Know That You Are Living in This World”

As promised, here is a translated version of Russian poet’s Anatoly Steiger’s untitled poem I posted earlier in Russian. The translation is literally-minded, not poetical, but this style oddly fits the poem itself. There is fairly little in English on the web about Steiger. A short essay, but that’s pretty much it.

What follows is a translation by Meropi Papagheorghe, a Romanian friend and translator.

Here, surely, it is not the bed that matters
And as a guarantee, I never dream about your body,
Your body’s not the only goal
One cannot speak of this – but suffer it.

I wouldn’t take your hand now
Stubbornly, I wouldn’t seek your touch
Your hair, your shoulders and your cheeks –
As if all these, by chance, were not invaluable to me.

I’ve long turned sadder and more modest…
For me, it is enough to know that you are living in this world
And tenderness and all that lies within it, underneath
Has grown accustomed to expect nothing – over the years…

How little does it take to love
The more you give, the more deeply and strongly
I pray, day and night, for one thing alone – that you live
Where and for whom, you already know better.

“знать, что ты живешь на свете”

Voilà, a poem by Анатолий Штейгер, a poet I enjoy greatly.

Здесь главное конечно не постель
Порука – никогда не снится твое тело,
И значит не оно единственная цель
Об этом говорить нельзя – но наболело.

Я бы не брал теперь твоей руки…
Упорно не искал твоих прикосновений,
Как будто невзначай волос, плеча, щеки -
Не это для меня всего бесценней.

Я стал давно грустнее и скромней…
С меня довольно знать, что ты живешь на свете,
А нежность и все то что в ней и что под ней,
Привыкла ничего ждать – за годы эти…

Как мало все же нужно для любви
Чем больше отдаешь, тем глубже и сильнее
Лишь об одном молю и день, и ночь – живи
А где и для кого – тебе уже виднее.

Is this what love is?

from an interview with Sarah Rose Etter

What inspired Men Glass? How long were you working on it?

Chewing. Listening to a man sit next to me and chew carrots. I don’t know what happened – it was such a loud chewing that I saw the edge of madness. It made me so crazy I could feel my eyes dilate with murderlust. I just thought: “This is not how a woman can live a life. Is this what love is? Listening to someone’s gross sounds forever?”

(I’d like to answer: yes, that is part of what love is. And yes, I want to listen to Her gross sounds forever.)

When in Rome

Nicole in Rome, January 2011. As always, click to enlarge.

Astérix, Obélix and Neurosurgery

An actual study in the peer-reviewed Acta Neurochirurgica, called “Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books”. Click here for the paper. Cracked me up.

This is the summary

Background
The goal of the present study was to analyze the epidemiology and specific risk factors of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the Asterix illustrated comic books. Among the illustrated literature, TBI is a predominating injury pattern.
Methods
A retrospective analysis of TBI in all 34 Asterix comic books was performed by examining the initial neurological status and signs of TBI. Clinical data were correlated to information regarding the trauma mechanism, the sociocultural background of victims and offenders, and the circumstances of the traumata, to identify specific risk factors.
Results
Seven hundred and four TBIs were identified. The majority of persons involved were adult and male. The major cause of trauma was assault (98.8%). Traumata were classified to be severe in over 50% (GCS 3–8). Different neurological deficits and signs of basal skull fractures were identified. Although over half of head-injury victims had a severe initial impairment of consciousness, no case of death or permanent neurological deficit was found. The largest group of head-injured characters was constituted by Romans (63.9%), while Gauls caused nearly 90% of the TBIs. A helmet had been worn by 70.5% of victims but had been lost in the vast majority of cases (87.7%). In 83% of cases, TBIs were caused under the influence of a doping agent called “the magic potion”.
Conclusions
Although over half of patients had an initially severe impairment of consciousness after TBI, no permanent deficit could be found. Roman nationality, hypoglossal paresis, lost helmet, and ingestion of the magic potion were significantly correlated with severe initial impairment of consciousness (p ≤ 0.05).

Backfire

Just stolen from Mark Frauenfelder’s twitter: “The Backfire Effect” on youarenotsosmart.com.

The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.

The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.

(…)

Geoffrey Munro at the University of California and Peter Ditto at Kent State University concocted a series of fake scientific studies in 1997. One set of studies said homosexuality was probably a mental illness. The other set suggested homosexuality was normal and natural. They then separated subjects into two groups; one group said they believed homosexuality was a mental illness and one did not. Each group then read the fake studies full of pretend facts and figures suggesting their worldview was wrong. On either side of the issue, after reading studies which did not support their beliefs, most people didn’t report an epiphany, a realization they’ve been wrong all these years. Instead, they said the issue was something science couldn’t understand. When asked about other topics later on, like spanking or astrology, these same people said they no longer trusted research to determine the truth. Rather than shed their belief and face facts, they rejected science altogether.

Enlightened White Dudes

Ta-Nehisi Coates comments on the new X-Men movie First Class

But as “First Class” roars to its final climatic scene, it appeals to an insidious suspension of disbelief; the heroic mutants of America, bravely opposing bigotry and fear, are revealed as not so much a spectrum of humankind, but as Eagle Scouts from Mayfield. Thus, “First Class” proves itself not merely an incredible film, but an incredible work of American historical fiction. Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes. (…) When we left the theater, my son and I knew we had experienced the most thrilling movie of the summer. “First Class” is narratively lean, beautifully acted and, at all the right moments, visually stunning. But I had experienced something else. My son is 10 and a romantic, as all 10-year-olds surely have the right to be. How then do I speak to him of this world’s masterminds who render you a supporting actor in your own story? How do I speak of the Sentinels whose eyes melt history, until the world forgets that in 1962, the quintessential mutants of America were black?

I chanced another world to meet

After having capped an excursus into the work of Walcott last week, I am back on my Metaphysical Poets-trip. Today, the great Thomas Traherne.

Thomas Traherne: Shadows in the Water

In unexperienced infancy
Many a sweet mistake doth lie:
Mistake though false, intending true;
A seeming somewhat more than view;
That doth instruct the mind
In things that lie behind,
And many secrets to us show
Which afterwards we come to know.

Thus did I by the water’s brink
Another world beneath me think;
And while the lofty spacious skies
Reversèd there, abused mine eyes,
I fancied other feet
Came mine to touch or meet;
As by some puddle I did play
Another world within it lay.

Beneath the water people drowned,
Yet with another heaven crowned,
In spacious regions seemed to go
As freely moving to and fro:
In bright and open space
I saw their very face;
Eyes, hands, and feet they had like mine;
Another sun did with them shine.

‘Twas strange that people there should walk,
And yet I could not hear them talk:
That through a little watery chink,
Which one dry ox or horse might drink,
We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold.

I called them oft, but called in vain;
No speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other world, to please my mind.
I plainly saw by these
A new antipodes,
Whom, though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between.

By walking men’s reversèd feet
I chanced another world to meet;
Though it did not to view exceed
A phantom, ’tis a world indeed;
Where skies beneath us shine,
And earth by art divine
Another face presents below,
Where people’s feet against ours go.

Within the regions of the air,
Compassed about with heavens fair,
Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.

O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you another me.
They seemèd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.

Look how far off those lower skies
Extend themselves! scarce with mine eyes
I can them reach. O ye my friends,
What secret borders on those ends?
Are lofty heavens hurled
‘Bout your inferior world?
Are yet the representatives
Of other peoples’ distant lives?

Of all the playmates which I knew
That here I do the image view
In other selves, what can it mean?
But that below the purling stream
Some unknown joys there be
Laid up in store for me;
To which I shall, when that thin skin
Is broken, be admitted in.

“bang em up”

Mary Beard, classics professor at Cambridge, briefly blogs about “the modern obsession with imprisonment”.

That’s where the “bang em up” mentality seems hopelessly misguided. Most websites today have deplored the idea that a rapist should be let out in under 2 years. WOT 15 months for rape?

No-one stopped to say.. well 15 months in the nick, that means total loss of job, probable mess of any family relationship, disintegration of family itself (ie punishment for them), plus the conversion of a wrongdoer into a hardened criminal (that’s what prisons do). Well done judicial system. Cant we think of something more humane and better and more designed to stop them doing it again? Isnt there something we can do better for the victim as well as the perpetrator? …

[O]verall it has been a bad week for those of us who worry about the modern obsession with imprisonment. The Today Programme also revealed that the maximum penalty for passing off penalty points for speeding onto someone else was life imprisonment (it’s perverting the course of justice).

Have we all lost our marbles?

Inka Parei: The Shadow-Boxing Woman

Parei, Inka (2011), The Shadow-Boxing Woman, Seagull Books
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
ISBN 9781906497958

Parei, Inka (2011), Die Schattenboxerin, Fischer
ISBN 3-596-14869-3

Last week, at a conference I spoke at, I spent two days with two roomfuls of translators and of people academically and privately interested in translation. It reminded me of the fact of how embattled a field the arena of literary translation is. Translators get paid terribly little, and they often get less respect. At the conference, half of them were German, and in Germany, at least we have an enormous amount of translations coming out each month. In the US, only three percent (an almost proverbial number, by now) of overall publications are translations. What’s worse, for every Every Man Dies Alone, i.e. translations that sell reasonably well, and are read and reviewed seemingly everywhere, there appear to be ten worthy novels that are translated only to vanish again into obscurity. Although it’s quite tragic when it happens to fantastic masterpieces like Beautiful Days by Franz Innerhofer, which was translated by Anselm Hollo and seems to have disappeared almost instantly. The same happened to Katharina Hacker’s The Have-Nots (see my review here), translated by Helen Atkins, which appears to be in print, yet has not been broadly reviewed, not has it sold particularly well, and this despite the fact that Hacker is indisputably one of the major German novelists. It’s tragic when it happens to the heavyweights, but it’s worse when it happens to a younger writer. Innerhofer is bound to be picked up again, if only by NYRB’s excellent imprint, Hacker might well win a major prize again. But yloung writers might fall into a hole and never crawl out. So let’s hope Inka Parei’s debut novel The Shadow-Boxing Woman, originally published in 2000, does well. The translation has been undertaken by Katy Derbyshire, translator and blogger at Love German Books, and it was published by the University of Chicago Press this February and Seagull Press this May. The Shadow-Boxing Woman, called Die Schattenboxerin in German, is an excellent debut. It may suffer from small flaws typical of debuts, but overall, it’s a marvelously executed novel about a young woman in 1990s Berlin, who is trying to get her bearings in a disintegrating, malevolent city. The book tells a harsh story, yet it is never downright depressing, a balance which is due to Parei’s clever structure and to the distinctive voice of her wary protagonist, the Shadow-Boxing Woman of the title. In its imagery and use of the cityscape, the book draws on a tradition that includes Alfred Döblin’s Berlin novels and Gottfried Benn’s early poetry. It is firmly placed in a thorough sense of history as it’s ingrained in the everyday lives of Berlin’s inhabitants. It also draws on the rhythms and anxieties of crime writing, producing a novel that is suspenseful, dark, funny and bleakly elegant. If you can get your hands on this book, read it. Parei, who’s currently writing her third novel, is surely one of the better writers of her generation. A German critic called this book a “promise” and what a beautiful promise it is. It is also a damn good novel, and thanks to Katy Derbyshire, you can all read it now. So please do. You will find one of the better books published this past decade, a book that won’t leave you cold. Here is the amazon link.

Initially, the book appears to be a mystery with noir stylings. Hell, as the the book’s protagonist is called, notices that her neighbor has gone missing, and takes it upon herself to investigate. Before the book is over, we’ll have found out that it is in fact, a mystery, and that, in fact, a crime has occurred, but the crime and the victim are different ones than we thought. With a wondrous sleight of hand, Parei manages to tell a story that is both tightly knit, and mysteriously loose and baggy. At exactly the right points in the story she manages to hold on to details and events so much that we feel the gray soil and the gray bricks of Berlin and the gray breath of her characters as we ourselves had found ourself stranded in the same dirty streets and among the same hard-up characters. At other points, she steps away from events, not attempting to explain, to fill us in or her heroine. I think that it’s this rhythm of clarity and nightmarish obscurity that makes the whole novel work, because this rhythm is tied directly to the disorderly mind of Hell. Small objects cause Hell to remember episodes from her past, with a sharp, hurtful clarity that is not the clarity of Proust’s mémoire involontaire, but the clarity and sharpness of trauma. The change between present-day reality and past memories can be disorienting at first, because the whole novel is narrated in the present tense, no matter what period of Hell’s life the episodes are set in. The more we read on, the more we notice that the memories, like the present-day events, follow one particular story, but the two stories are differently structured. The present-day story starts to develop according to the genre rules of mystery. We learn that someone has vanished, and then we start accumulating clues. We find a mysterious stranger in the missing person’s apartment, and he tags along in our attempt to make sense of it all. It is not until late in the story that it all unravels, as first improbable things happen and events as diverse as a mysterious fire and a bank robbery start cluttering a heretofore clear and clean storyline. The story starts to go completely off the rails as the past, remembered in short intense flashes, starts to bleed into the present.

The remembered story works exactly the opposite way. The first few times the past intrudes on the present-day story, we are slightly confused, because the past events do not fit precisely; they are small shards of a larger mosaic, although they are largely arranged in chronological order. While the present-day story works its way towards a climax, the cataclysmic events in the past, the ones that traumatized the hell out of Hell, they come pretty early in the sequence of memories. Her memories, arranged chronologically, are nevertheless broken into small bits, and the most destructive, central event is the most horribly broken part. Something has been broken, and in a way, these memories are like an attempt to mend that which has been so thoughtlessly, so awfully carelessly destroyed, but like a beautiful vase that has been thrown from a high place, there are still bits and pieces missing, no matter how much care you invest towards making the vase whole again. And there is another thing we notice. The more we read on, the clearer we see that her whole life after what happened in the past is an attempt to deal with that past, or at least all of her current life that we are told about. After all, we can’t forget that it’s the narrator framing the story, telling us of both past and present events and creating a narrative link between them. And as the book draws to a close, both story lines run into one another and we see how skilfully we were led there. The Shadow-Boxing Woman is a small book, both in terms of size and in terms of scope, but at the end, after the climax, after the whole novel’s structure has collapsed, the book suddenly opens up as its heroine takes a deep breath, allowing us to breathe, as well. Paradoxically, in the one moment when darkness literally and figuratively enters the frame again, the novel feels most replete with light and relief. If I seemed to repeat myself these past few lines, it’s because the book is very adept at using its structure to be both very exact and very imprecise. The moment, where the book’s events make the most sense, the moment where we see how everything, past and present, fits, is also the moment when we most realize how unreliable the narrator is, when we see to what extent this book is a literary artifact, a literary creation. This is something that both the constant use of the present tense, as well as the naturalistic-seeming descriptions of the environment have suggested to us.

The novel is full of an obvious and a less obvious symbolism. The obvious symbolism is so direct and upfront that it paradoxically does not detract from the naturalistic impression. In fact, this obvious brand of symbolism, which Parei seems to have an attachment to, is probably the novel’s biggest flaw, and it is one we are apprised of early on. I’ll be honest, I almost stopped reading the book, because I was slightly annoyed by it, as by the book’s other flaw, Parei’s handling of the present tense, but I am glad I didn’t, and I suggest you persevere, as well, should you feel a slight irritation at the way the novel is written or at the book’s intense use of a set of very transparent-seeming symbols and allegorical scenes. It is part of the book’s excellency that, upon finishing it, we are considerably less sure we can see through the novel’s oh so obvious signifying. This begins with naming things. The book’s protagonist is called, as I said, “Hell”, which is German for “light” and her neighbor, the one who goes missing, is called “Dunkel”, i.e. ‘dark’. Mind you, the allocation of properties to symbolically named person is not straightforward, in fact, Parei is rather clever in her use of two sets of morals, one complex and intractable, the other strong and more or less Manichean. Impressive, too, is how insistently everything in Parei’s book is rooted in the embodied reality of Berlin and her protagonist. We are not asked to believe in or subscribe to something based on abstract ideas. Parei grounds everything in a set of experiences, some of them incredibly painful. On the other hand, the web of symbolic references is undeniable. As I said in my first paragraph, there is a strong tradition in Berlin for this kind of writing. The novel’s closest literary relatives are the 19th century plays by Gerhart Hauptmann and the 20th century novels by Alfred Döblin. Hauptmann’s relationship to this book is largely established through his plays Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889) and Die Ratten (1911) dark, naturalistic portraits of a society both coming together, growing into a new century, a new millennium, into modernity, and at the same time, these part portraits of society falling apart at the hands of its greedy, poor, desperate individuals. There are few manifestations of literary realism as densely accomplished as these plays by Gerhart Hauptmann, a towering writer who is surely among the most deserving winners in the 111 year history of the Nobel prize.

In German literature, it’s mainly Hauptmann who has taught us how menacing and desolate Berlin can be, and how the city can visit horrors on its inhabitants wholly absentmindedly. Within his best plays, there is no moral instance, no salvation, no hope. Things just happen, people are just allowed to be themselves, as we look on in helpless terror. Döblin added something else. Coming from the tradition of modernist surrealism, his most famous novel Berlin Alexanderplatz shows us a human being falling through the gaps, seemingly abandoned by the Moloch Berlin like Hauptmann’s unbearable pitiful protagonists, but the book is at the same time a whirlwind of insanity, of strange events, prayers and otherworldly experiences. Döblin’s mistreated protagonist Franz Biberkopf is briefly saved by his fellow human beings again and again, but tragedy (and his own odd head) keeps dragging him into the maelstrom of life, murdering him on the spokes of modernity. I am very insistent on the debts owed to these writers and books, but the similarities are not as obvious as all that. The texture of the atmosphere, the apartment building and the way Parei paints her characters, all this is highly reminiscent of Hauptmann-style naturalism, and on the other hand, the stranger, less straightforwardly realistic moments that veer off into trauma and an odd kind of distortion, these reminded me personally of Döblin. All of this is held together by the place, dirty, scruffy, lovable, horrendous Berlin. Parei has set her novel in a decaying Berlin, a Berlin falling apart. If you look at the cover of the German edition, you can see the facade of a house that looks empty and abandoned, windows smashed, walls crumbling. Mysterious Hell takes it upon herself to live, well, almost squat in such a house, creating a no-man’s land of sorts for herself, as the other tenants do. Far from the bourgeois chic that Auster evokes in a similar scenario in his most recent novel, in Parei’s book the decrepitude of the house, the outsider status of the squatters in the house and the helpless souls of its inhabitants complement one another. If I have to repeat myself, I’ll do so gladly. This is an absolutely stunning and original book, well made, well crafted, well imagined. And the book is so much better than I have made it sound, additionally to all the things I mentioned, the book is set in the period directly after the wall came down, and one could write at least as long an essay as this review about the historical dimensions and intricacies of this fantastic novel. There’s just not enough time and space.

Finally, a few words on the translation. As I read German books in German, I am not usually able to comment on the translation. In this case, I am, because seagull books published an excerpt from the book on its site. I was very nervous reading the translation, because Parei’s style, however simple it appears to be, can’t be easy to translate. Parei opts for a simple syntax, and simple descriptions, and yet every other sentence contains an interesting word or turn of phrase. It’s a constantly intriguing delight to read this book, without ever becoming challenging. It’s both absorbing, and drafted with a calculating pen. From the excerpt, the translation manages to recreate the a very similar impression, while managing to sound more elegant and readable than Parei, who seems awkward sometimes. The present tense is not always easy to maintain in a novel, and Parei sometimes struggles a bit. From what I’ve seen of the translation, this cannot be said for Katy Derbyshire’s excellent translation. I’m intrigued to find out how she solved the Hell/Dunkel names thing, though. Readers, buy this book, and then run and tell me.

Looking, Smiling

Macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht

Wir haben Fehler gemacht, wir legen ein volles Geständnis ab …Wir sind sachlich gewesen, wir sind gehorsam gewesen, wir sind wirklich unerträglich gewesen… Wir haben uns den Immatrikulationsbestimmungen unterworfen. Wir haben Formulare ausgefüllt, die auszufüllen eine Zumutung war…. Wir haben uns durch schlechte Noten kleinkriegen lassen, wir haben uns durch gute Noten wieder aufmöbeln lassen, wir haben es mit uns machen lassen…. Wir haben in aller Sachlichkeit über den Krieg in Vietnam informiert, obwohl wir erlebt haben, daß wir die unvorstellbarsten Einzelheiten über die amerikanische Politik in Vietnam zitieren können, ohne daß die Phantasie unserer Nachbarn in Gang gekommen wäre, aber daß wir nur einen Rasen betreten zu brauchen, dessen Betreten verboten ist, um ehrliches, allgemeines und nachhaltiges Grauen zu erregen… Da sind wir auf den Gedanken gekommen, daß wir erst den Rasen zerstören müssen, bevor wir die Lügen über Vietnam zerstören können, daß wir erst die Marschrichtung ändern müssen, bevor wir etwas an den Notstandsgesetzen ändern können, daß wir erst die Hausordnung brechen müssen, bevor wir die Universitätsordnung brechen können. Da haben wir den Einfall gehabt, daß das Betretungsverbot des Rasens, das Änderungsverbot der Marschrichtung, das Veranstaltungsverbot der Baupolizei genau die Verbote sind, mit denen die Herrschenden dafür sorgen, daß die Empörung über die Verbrechen in Vietnam, über die Notstandspsychose, über die vergreiste Universitätsverfassung schön ruhig und wirkungslos bleibt.

Peter Schneider am 5. Mai 1967

via

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Duns Scotus’s Oxford

Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped & poisèd powers;

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural, rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.

“Could They Beat Up China Miéville?”

This is a blog called “Could they beat up China Miéville”, and true to form, it recounts imaginary fights between China Miéville and many other people, such as Alain De Botton, Martin Amis and a dozen Elvis impersonators. The basis for the bloggers’ speculation appears to be this

Let’s make one thing clear: China Miéville is way too ripped for his chosen profession. Being the new demigod of speculative/weird English fiction, he should by rights be some kind of hunch-backed, bespectacled, bowl-haircut paradigm of nerd. Instead he’s an Adonis, a Hercules, a shaven-headed Atlas – standing out among his many accolades is the coveted “best guns in literature” award*; a title he seems unlikely to yield anytime soon.

Stylistically, it seems that the bloggers owe a very obvious debt to the cult online game Kingdom of Loathing (KoL). So how does Miéville do? So far, he’s been in 13 fights and won them all.

Psychotropic Drugs & Beatings

This is an “account of life in Special Management Unit at SCI-Fayette in Pennsylvania [which] comes to us via the Human Rights Coalition”. A juvenile lifer (the unbelievable stupidity of putting kids behind bars for life) talks about his experiences.

I have been on Phase 4 for a month now and during that time I have witnessed several mentally ill RHU prisoners threaten to commit suicide. I have observed how RHU prison officials eagerly geared up in black Star-Wars helmet, body pads, shields, pepper spray and stun guns and were just itch’n to use their new toys against mentally ill RHU prisoners during cell extractions. I have witnessed the SMU/RHU counselor and unit manager come on the pod and leave just as quick as they came, without even as much interviewing and evaluating the psyche of the prisoners, let alone addressing their concerns. The Psychologist does the exact same thing. What occurs is that the mentally ill RHU prisoners’ minds deteriorate even worse to the point of insanity from the years of total isolation in solitary, forced cell extractions, beatings, restraint chairs, stripped cells, semi-starvation on food loafs, constant harassment by guards, and psychotic drugs.

Georges Simenon, Romancier

Fantastic interview with the great Simenon, prolific writer of genius.

(via)

Slutwalk: how not to deal with oppression

rubbleofempires has a very persuasive case for the political ineffectiveness of projects like the Slutwalk and other attempts to ‘reclaim’ slurs. I’m not entirely sure I agree but he has a point about how oppressors deal with this, and about how much, consequently, violence remains part of these discourses and practices.

Fictionaut

You can find me in, seriously, too many places on the Internet. One of the more respectable ones is Fictionaut. I am lucky enough to be a member of that fine community, and once in a blue moon I post a text there. Here is the most recent one. But visiting Fictionaut is a good idea even if my crap is there. A great reason would be fantastic prose like Sam Rasnake writes it (click here for a recent story), or Meg Pokrass. Take a look. Click here.

Angels are undoubtedly hermaphrodites.

I’m currently reading William T. Vollmann’s excellent story collection The Atlas. You can find several of its stories on the Internet, like this one, called “The Prophet of the Road”, printed by the L.A. Times. Excerpt below.

I was drinking from my canteen (which I’d filled at a gas station in Portland) when another hitchhiker came thumping down the road toward me. He was like a prophet from the old times. He wore a long robe and carried a great wooden staff that he slammed down at every step. He was not so old, and yet his beard was long and gray (possibly from dust), and his gray hair fell to his shoulders and his eyes were wild like a bull’s. His face was caked with dust. He licked his lips as he came near me, and his eyes were on mine unwaveringly, so I offered him water and he came closer and closer, continuing to stare into my eyes, and then he shook his head sternly and walked on. I did not live up to his ideals. There was another hitchhiker I’d met in Washington state who’d been crazy and called himself the Angel Michael and whispered to me that he didn’t know anymore whether he was a boy or a girl and I believed him because he was so angelic: In the same way, I believed in the prophet wholly. I could not but admire him for rejecting me.

Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it.

If you’re wondering why there are so few new reviews here, this is what I’m currently writing about. If you have good suggestions as to what books to read, I’m always open for further suggestions. It’s the tale of the Prodigal Son which you can find in Luke 15:11-32, and it qualifies for my “poem of the day” tag, because it’s the King James Bible version, which is sublime as always. There is really no other text like the King James Bible. Get a copy, they are cheap and ubiquitous. Or use a link like this. Trust me. Read this as poetry. It’s deeply, thoroughly astonishing.

11 And he said, A certain man had two sons:

12 And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

13 And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

14 And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

15 And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

16 And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

17 And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

19 And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

20 And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

21 And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

22 But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

23 And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

25 Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

26 And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.

27 And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

28 And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.

29 And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:

30 But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.

31 And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

32 It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

“Are you late?”

A commercial for unplanned pregnancy and abortion advisory services that was aired last year in the UK. Apparently the first of its kind and its airing kicked up quite a bit of dust (for an impression of the (misplaced) outrage, click here)

There’s one comment below this video, by AmusedChild, which I’d like to highlight, because it’s important

I was late…and I was never pregnant. I was not properly shedding the uterine buildup (because as it turned out I was not ovulating at all). I needed to see a doctor. Thank goodness there were not scores of lunatics outside of my clinic screaming at me for having what was never an “abortion.” Let there be more commercials like this.

The noodles were only “meh”

While I’m drafting another review of my own, here’s a bit from a soup review.

I wasn’t a big fan of the noodles. Kumamoto is famous for its rather thick, almost Udon-like noodles, which is so different to the super-thin noodles mostly used in South-Western Japan.
Keika’s noodles were kind of in the middle, which would be alright in another soup, but not in this rich pork-soup.
While the noodles were only “meh”, I had a big problem with all the cabbage in the soup. Cabbage is not really a usual ingredients in Ramen and now I know why.. Just doesn’t go well with the rest, in my taste.

Are there soup review blogs? Christoph must have cornered the market on this. Here is another of his reviews.

“Walking is a form of reading”

From an interview with Iain Sinclair, who’s probably one of the UK’s best prose writers:

The way to explore London’s territory initially was walking, which involved a burden of other people’s knowledge. So the rucksack represents this unread mass of material. Not just fictions, but testaments, documentation, statistics, obliterated council papers, adverts – more than you could manage. Working and walking and reading became completely interwoven. Walking is a form of reading, in the same way you can read a painting, or landscape. Therefore a journey is a form of turning the city into a film, or a book.

Raving about Conan

Vincent D’Onofrio in his role as Robert E. Howard raves about his character Conan in the fabulous movie The Whole Wide World, which, incidentally, is highly recommended.

Hunter S. Thompson: Hell’s Angels

Thompson, Hunter S. (2009), Hell’s Angels, Penguin
ISBN 978-0-141-04187-2

Hell’s Angels, originally published in 1966, holds up remarkably well these days. It’s a wonderfully readable piece of journalism, exhibiting a singular literary voice finding its bearings and its author, Hunter S. Thompson, stands today as one of the most astonishing American literary figures of this past century. His vast work is yet to be collected and properly editorially assessed, but at least it’s out there, in many great editions, and almost annually something new is added. The most recent publication was a selection of his interviews, published as Ancient Gonzo Wisdom (highly recommended), and in 2012 the third and last volume of his letters, which has been delayed for a few years now, will hopefully be published. His work is political, it is both loud and tender, the work of a sensitive literary talent driven to the brink by a disintegrating country and the oppressive forces of the ‘silent majority’. Within less than ten years after seriously taking up journalism Thompson exploded onto the literary scene and evolved more and more into the brash, whiskey-swilling, gun-toting madman known the world over. Thompson traveled through his own and other countries, trying to assess the madness, the violence and hate that seemed to crop up everywhere; as a reaction to that he developed his signature style, ‘Gonzo Journalism’, or, as he called it “Total Subjectivity, as opposed to the bogus demand of Objectivity”. He is often carelessly lumped in with Mailer, Wolfe and Talese and the rest of the reactionary ‘New Journalism’ pack, when, in fact, his brand of genius is completely, unmistakably different. Thompson belongs to distinct literary tradition that includes writers like those of 19th century German romanticism. He does it, however, with an added strong dose of resentment and, well, loathing. Additionally, Thompson was, at least for a sizable portion of his literary career, an incredibly sharp and sober observer of the world around him, and a valuable commentator on culture and politics.

His best books are probably Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. In these two books he honed both his observations and his mastery of language and registers to a fine point. These are extraordinary achievements, among the finest achievements in journalistic writing in the 20th century, written with urgency, clarity and fantastic stylistic instincts. However, Thompson’s madcap persona with all its idiosyncrasies (immortalized as Uncle Duke by Garry Trudeau), the drugs, girls, and the later pressure of having to be the oddball, drinking whiskey, shooting his dozens of guns and making mad statements, all this fell back on his work and harmed its precision and even the urgent tone of much of it. The rest of his work, although it contains standout masterpieces like The Curse of Lono (1983) and Kingdom of Fear (2003), is less consistent, less overall fantastic. It really is those ten years between 1965 and 1975 that Thompson was at the top of his game, producing work that has entered the American literary canon long since. Hell’s Angels, his first book in that decade, is clearly the work of a writer still learning to use his voice, but it’s still a hell of a read, worth reading and rereading, worth thinking about and discussing. There’s a reason why this book keeps being reprinted in dozens of editions, and it’s not (or not only) its sensationalist subject matter. The book finds Thompson mingling with the infamous motorcycle gang, accompanying them on runs, following them to one of Ken Kesey’s legendary parties, hanging with them at bars. The central epiphanies, the turning points of the book are all buttressed or informed or even prompted by events witnessed by Thompson, although he has not participated in most described events in a book that is as more a history of the Hell’s Angels as it is a first hand account of their dealings. That said, Thompson’s use of his own experience is strategically placed to provide a sound, personal foundation to a slightly meandering narrative.

Hell’s Angels consists of four chapters and a postscript. The first chapter and the postscript are introductions and conclusions to the story of Thompson’s encounter with the gang. Technically speaking, the first chapter in particular is wonderfully done, conveying at once a general impression of the men on their bikes, their particular impression on Thompson and in his life, and a sense of cultural context. This first, short chapter, titled “Roll em, boys” contains in nuce much of the structural complexities and themes of the book to come; it feels like a finished, painstakingly crafted text. This, incidentally, is true for the entire book. It wasn’t until around 1972 that Thompson abandoned his careful drafting. This book is amazingly well wrought, merging disparate elements like newspaper articles, experiences and historical excurses into a rollicking, coherent narrative. If you come to this book looking for the slightly mad Thompson of his later work, you’re not going to find him here. The author of this work is a thoughtful, ambitious and thoroughly talented young man walking a thin line between outrageous experiences and sober research. There is no element here that feels accidental, nothing out of place; every description and every phrase is purposeful and effective. There is something excessive about Thompson’s post-1972 work, which is part of an attempt to provide a non-reductive view of the world, a reporting that contains all the chaos within the limits of an essay or a whole book. That is not yet the case in this book. The author of Hell’s Angels clearly worked from the assumption that you can impose a frame and a narrative on something like “[t]he Menace, […], like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with fiery anus”. The language is impassioned, literary and sober, depending on the section or chapter. Except for the postscript, every chapter is a mixture of lived events and cultural and historical criticism. The two-page postscript describes the event that put an end to Thompson’s close association with the gang (this is expounded upon in this unforgettable TV interview). The longest of the chapters in between first chapter and postscript, “The Hoodlum Circus and The Statutory Rape of Bass Lake” is the most impressive and has remained the most controversial section of the whole book.

It’s the most impressive because, 100 pages into the book, this is the first extended description of Thompson’s year with the biker gang. At its center is the annual 4th of July run, a “run” being a mass outing of one or more motorcycle gang on a particular weekend of boozing, playing and fighting. The impression of a horde of bearded, black-clad motorcycle enthusiasts descending on some small Midwest town is fearsome, and in 1964, when the 4th of July run takes place that Thompson took part in, the locals in Bass Lake, where that year’s destination was, are forewarned, and were armed to the teeth. The run allows Thompson to explain the group mechanisms active in the Hell’s Angels and also to show how at that time regular people, cops and the gang members interacted. As everywhere else in the book, this chapter is only roughly linear, jumping to different events that happened before and after the run, explaining cultural backgrounds and specific prejudice. One of those explanations, and probably the most extensive one, as well as the one that made the book controversial, is centered on the topic of sex and rape. The Hell’s Angels are portrayed as insatiable purveyors of sex in various forms. They are casually sexual in contact with one another, but what’s an issue is that they regularly gang rape women. It is uncomfortable to read through a long, repeated account of abuse directed at women, and to have to listen to the Angels’ ridiculous self-important defensive explanations. What’s worse is that in many cases, Thompson appears to be standing close by, his tape recorder turned on, his journalist’s ears twitching, doing nothing. The book itself also contains no condemnation of this sexual practice. All this is difficult to read, but it is somewhat cushioned by the general air of disapproval that swathes the whole book. Thompson makes it clear that he does not agree with the vaguely right wing, misogynist, violent attitude that defines much of what the Hell’s Angels stand for. But he doesn’t condemn them except in some strategic instances, because they are not the (only) enemy in his sights.

Unlike a lot of his later work, and despite the impression that the past two paragraphs might have conveyed, the participation of the author in the events described in the book is actually much less central. At its heart, Hell’s Angels is arguably less about the havoc wrought by the bearded, carelessly violent gang members, than it is about the narrative, the evolving legend of the Hell’s Angels, engineered by lazy and bigoted journalists and lazy and bigoted local politicians. This is not to say that Thompson approves of the methods of the gang he observes. He does not. But the intellectual focus of the book is still on the distortion created by the national and local press, and the effect this has on local communities and the Hell’s Angels themselves. At one point, late in the book, he writes

I was not surprised that the eight articles gave eight different viewpoints on the riot, because no reporter can be on every scene and they get their information from different people. But it would have been reassuring to find a majority agreement on something as basic as the number of arrests; it would have made the rest of the information easier to live with.

This passage, and others like it, displays a disappointment with his colleagues that provided fertile grounds for the journalistic cynicism that completely pervades his book about the 1972 presidential campaign, wherein he gleefully recounts facts and rumors he made up and spread through the newsroom. By contrast, Hell’s Angels is conscientious in its use of facts and numbers, and frequently compares public and journalistic rhetoric with the facts on file, a concern that was front and center in his work as early as 1965, when he published a newspaper article in The Nation (read part of it here) about the gang and their alleged exploits. In his book, Thompson quotes Kierkegaard, who said that “[t]he daily press is the evil principle of the modern world“, and yet the book itself is a masterpiece of journalism; this is not a contradiction. The attack on the ‘daily press’ is of course not an attack on all journalistic endeavors, but an attack on the outrage machinery that is fueled by politicians and journalists alike, a machine that enforces a strict (and sometimes irrational) moral code on everyone by steering public opinion in the right direction. Thompson shows how politicians and journalists support each other in building a narrative that has surprisingly little connection to the world of facts and figures. This is impressive, and always well done. But he doesn’t stop there.

It’s the peculiar nature of the Hell’s Angels that allows him to show how these narratives then influence the world outside, not just by turning the population against the invading motorcyclists. They also affect the Hell’s Angels themselves. In an early chapter, Thompson points out to what extent the Hell’s Angels were a product both of scaremongering journalism and of popular culture. Apart from the influence that films like Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels had, a veteran gang member is quoted as saying “We were all Marlon Brando”, describing the effect of the 1953 film The Wild One on early 1950s motorcycle groups. That film itself is based on the so-called Hollister riots, a 1947 motorcycle rally that got out of control. The Hollister riots were greatly exaggerated by the press, in particular Life magazine, and were thus turned into material befitting a sensationalist movie. But here is where Thompson’s definition of his own work and of journalism enters the picture. Journalists like the ones working for Life, who pretend to present a sober account of the facts, can and should be held up to these standards. After all, there’s a whole poetics of journalism writing based around the use of tenses and phrases that create just that impression of objectivity. Thompson’s take on this has two aspects. On the one hand he points out how so much of mainstream journalism supports political narratives, pursuing a narrow agenda, instead of being ‘objective’. On the other hand, he rejects the basic idea of journalistic objectivity e vestigio and instead pursues a very subjective kind of journalism, one that is open and honest about the place of the writer within his narrative and the wider framework of truth and objectivity. Something that he would manage more seamlessly in his later work is still a very obvious affair in this book: he takes pains showing us not just where he was in events he describes. He also turns the use of sources into a narrative, discussing his tapes, his research and talks with outlaws. There is no information in this book that isn’t accounted for and completely tied to its author. There is no pretense of an objectivity beyond what limits the author has.

And yet, this is no weakness. The example of The Wild One is instrumental here. In the same section that I just mentioned, he closes by saying that the movie,

despite an admittedly fictional treatment, was an inspired piece of film journalism. Instead of institutionalizing common knowledge (…), it told a story that was only beginning to happen and which was inevitably influenced by the film.

In all of Thompson’s written output, there is really no better summary of his poetics than this. It well describes what he was to focus on from then on: telling a story that is bigger than the event actually described, a story that tells a larger truth, and a story that does not just repeat the same old mendacious narratives. The exaggeration that he often uses is not a deviation from truth, but it serves to put what’s really true into sharp focus, which probably reminds most of us of Adorno’s claims in his classic “Kulturindustrie” essay. Within the searing pages of Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson isn’t yet the genius writer that he would turn into a few years later, but he’s damn close. The book is a fantastic read of course, written and constructed by one of the biggest and smartest literary talents of his time. But it also shows the direction that his and others’ work would be taking soon. It contains the beginning of an age in its beautiful and clear pages. There are so many reasons to read this book. Pick one. Read it.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee

A friend sent me a link to this poem today, and it reminded me of the fact of how fantastic a piece of poetry the King James Bible is. Enjoy.

Psalm 139

1 O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.
2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising;

thou understandest my thought afar off.
3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down,

and art acquainted with all my ways.
4 For there is not a word in my tongue,

but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.
5 Thou hast beset me behind and before,

and laid thine hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;

it is high, I cannot attain unto it.
7 Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:

if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning,

and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
10 even there shall thy hand lead me,

and thy right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me;

even the night shall be light about me.
12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee;

but the night shineth as the day:
the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
13 For thou hast possessed my reins:

thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.
14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:

marvelous are thy works;
and that my soul knoweth right well.
15 My substance was not hid from thee

when I was made in secret,
and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect;

and in thy book all my members were written,
which in continuance were fashioned,
when as yet there was none of them.
17 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God!

How great is the sum of them!
18 If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand:

when I awake, I am still with thee.
19 Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God:

depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.
20 For they speak against thee wickedly,

and thine enemies take thy name in vain.
21 Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?

And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
22 I hate them with perfect hatred:

I count them mine enemies.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart:

try me, and know my thoughts:
24 and see if there be any wicked way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.

Prevent my need, Someone

I have declaimed a few Berryman sonnets tonight, all from the delightful Sonnets to Chris. Below a particularly nice one, one of my favorites, for obvious reasons, a late one, too, Sonnet 115.

[#115]

As usual I am up before the sun
begins to warm this intolerable place
and I have stared all night into your face
but am not wiser thereby. Everyone
rattles his weakness or his thing undone,
I shake you like a rat. Open disgrace
yawns all before me: have I left a trace,
a spoor? Clouding it over, I look for my gun.

She’s hidden it. I won’t sing on of that.
Whiskey is bracing. Failures are my speed,
I thrive on ends, the dog is at my door
in heat, the neighborhood is male except one cat
and they thresh on my stoop. Prevent my need,
Someone, and come & find me on the floor.

If he can’t keep up, who can?

Stephen Burt worries about keeping up with poetry

If I can’t keep up, who can? And if nobody can keep up with all of it, how does anyone decide what slice, what segment, what section, to follow instead? I think I can keep up with books, more or less, which are countable, finite sets of things (especially since they do come in the mail): but if the proliferating, ramifying, exciting discourse about poetry now takes place in a million web journals, at all hours of the day and night, I’m not sure I can keep up with them. I’m not sure that I could have kept up with them when I was 20, or 25, or 29

Struggle for reciprocity or equality

Our films may be understood as parables of a phase of the development of consciousness at which the struggle is for reciprocity or equality of consciousness between a woman and a man, a study of the conditions under which this fight for recognition (as Hegel put it) or demand for acknowledgment (as I have put it) is a struggle for mutual freedom, especially of the views each holds of the other. This gives the films of our genre a Utopian cast. They harbor a vision which they know cannot fully be domesticated, inhabited, in the world we know. They are romances. Showing us our fantasies, they express the inner agenda of a nation that conceives Utopian longings and commitments for itself.”

from Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. I’m currently reading a lot of Cavell for a paper, this is a slight work, but makes for great reading.

The Pale King, complete in its incompleteness

From Hari Kunzru’s excellent new review of The Pale King. Note esp. the last sentence.

Wallace, in life a shy, considered, and considerate man (or so he seemed to me when we met at a mutual friend’s New York reading) would most probably have been embarrassed by the drama in which he is currently starring. He would also have tried to understand it, to give it his full attention, even, or perhaps especially, when he found it boring. The rapidity of his canonisation feels startling, even though it’s deserved. There are already grumblings online about the emergence of a “David Foster Wallace industry”, and the publication of The Pale King will only take this to the next level, but the truth is that Wallace’s new level of posthumous celebrity isn’t the work of some corporate publicity department. It has proceeded from the ground up as fans have unearthed uncollected texts, written criticism and organised conferences. Wallace’s reputation will only grow, and like one of the broken columns beloved of Romantic painters, The Pale King will stand, complete in its incompleteness, as his most substantial fictional achievement.

Donal Óg

An anonymous eighth-century Irish poem translated by Lady Gregory:

Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (trans.): Donal Óg

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

You promised me a thing that was hard for you,
a ship of gold under a silver mast;
twelve towns with a market in all of them,
and a fine white court by the side of the sea.

You promised me a thing that is not possible,
that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;
that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;
and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness,
I sit down and I go through my trouble;
when I see the world and do not see my boy,
he that has an amber shade in his hair.

It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you;
the Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday.
And myself on my knees reading the Passion;
and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,
or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;
it was a bad time she took for telling me that;
it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith’s forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you that put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

Nonsmokers

From the Guardian:

And besides, really,” [A.C. Grayling] adds with a withering little laugh, “how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don’t collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It’s like sleeping furiously.”

No, silly. It’s like militant non-smokers. That‘s what it comes down to, and that is the whole problem (well, part of it, anyway). Oh, I’m tired already. Let’s move on.

“Twenty-five. Celibate.”

Reposted (from 1984), on the NYRB page, this fine poem by James Merrill. Enjoy.

James Merrill: Casual Wear
Your average tourist: Fifty. 2.3
Times married. Dressed, this year, in Ferdi Plinthbower
Originals. Odds 1 to 910
Against her strolling past the Embassy

Today at noon. Your average terrorist:
Twenty-five. Celibate. No use for trends,
At least in clothing. Mark, though, where it ends.
People have come forth made of colored mist

Unsmiling on one hundred million screens
To tell of his prompt phone call to the station,
“Claiming responsibility”—devastation
Signed with a flourish, like the dead wife’s jeans

“There is nothing more to say”

Taking notes today on Delmore Schwartz and trying to find out where Weldon Kees’ papers are located, I was reminded of this unjustly neglected American poet. Below one of his best known poems.

Edwin Arlington Robinson: The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

“The condition that nourishes poetry”

Below, the fantastic conclusion of a fantastic very short essay by John Ashbery on Rimbaud’s Illuminations. The occasion? The publication of a new translation of that divine prose poem, by John Ashbery himself. Given that he might be the best American poet at work today, it’s hard not to recommend this work sight unseen.

We tend to forget that “modern poetry” is a venerable institution. Prose poetry (Rimbaud’s own term for what he was writing in Illuminations) had already been produced by Lautréamont and Baudelaire; Rimbaud mentioned to a friend the influence of the latter’s work in the genre. Free verse, today ubiquitous, was used by Rimbaud in two of the Illuminations. Yet, more essentially, absolute modernity was for him the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second. The self is obsolete: In Rimbaud’s famous formulation, “I is someone else” (“Je est un autre”). In the twentieth century, the coexisting, conflictingviews of objects that the Cubist painters cultivated, the equalizing deployment of all notes of the scale in serial music, and the unhierarchical progressions of bodies in motion in the ballets of Merce Cunningham are three examples among many of this fertile destabilization. Somewhere at the root of this, the crystalline jumble of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, like a disordered collection of magic lantern slides, each an “intense and rapid dream,” in his words, is still emitting pulses. If we are absolutely modern—and we are—it’s because Rimbaud commanded us to be.—ja

Robert Lowell reading Skunk Hour

Robert Lowell reading his excellent poem “Skunk Hour”

Waiting for Miéville

As I am waiting for the latest novel by China Miéville to be published, here is a link to the publisher’s page where you can have a gander at the introduction. Below is the novel’s cover

The wood, the weed, the wag

One of the great English sonnets.

Walter Raleigh: Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;
And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that which makes the gallow tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag;
The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee.
Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

Wall me up alive / in my own body

Although I greatly enjoy Margaret Atwood’s novels and especially her essays, I am of two minds about her poetry. What do you think? Below one of her best known poems:

Margaret Atwood: Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

The world is full of women
who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they’d say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I’ve a choice
of how, and I’ll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it’s all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything’s for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can’t. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape’s been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there’s only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it’s the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretence
that I can’t hear them.
And I can’t, because I’m after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don’t let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I’ll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That’s what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They’d like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look–my feet don’t hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn.

Fairness, finally?

Richard Goldstone, co-author of the infamous Goldstone report (google it, I won’t link to it), is finally starting to back off some of his claims. Read this brief piece in the Washington Post.

We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

(via)

It was not sex

I feel that Thom Gunn is an underrated poet these days, certainly he doesn’t seem to receive the attention that his excellent work deserves (but there is an excellent new book on Gunn’s poetry out by Joshua Weiner, which I highly, highly recommend). Get the Collected Poems, published by FSG. Trust me. They are worth your money and time. Below a poem I enjoy a lot.

Thom Gunn: The Hug

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who’d showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

Cormac McCarthy: No Country for Old Men

McCarthy, Cormac (2005), No Country for Old Men, Picador
ISBN 0-330-44030-6

This is just it: a novelist who has produced several incontestable masterpieces, who is generally regarded as being one of the foremost artists of his craft and his generation, that novelist is bound to be subjected to a less forgiving critical glare than the overall mediocre writer. Cormac McCarthy is one of the former, a writer regularly named in discussions of possible Nobel Prize candidates, a writer who, in Blood Meridian and Suttree, has produced two of the best novels of his age. After his last major achievement, the “Border” trilogy, which ended with the beautifully elegiac Cities of the Plain (1998), he waited for almost a decade before publishing his ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, which is so dull and mediocre that it almost seems a different writer’s pale imitation of McCarthy’s celebrated style and tone. Less like an inspired and inspiring work of art, this genre hybrid is more of a routine exercise in a style that McCarthy can pull off by now with comparable ease. As in the somewhat operatic late novels of other old novelists like Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass or John Updike, this novel leaves us sure of the author’s competence, his basic ability to fuse knowledge and insight into a reasonably original prose artifact; as in those cases, we leave the book largely unmoved, witnesses to an author’s languid self-examination. But however little I liked books like Exit Ghost or Indignation, they still shone with stylistic polish, written in the dazzling prose that these writers have become famous for. There’s precious little of that in No Country for Old Men. On the contrary, the novel makes painfully clear on every single page why McCarthy’s great novels are as great as they are: because everything fits perfectly. In his books, the writing doesn’t enhance the structure or characters or the plot, it is inextricably connected to these elements, and in his ninth novel we realize almost instantly that as soon as something is out of place in McCarthy’s wondrous literary architecture, the whole building collapses into a malformed heap. This is not to say that No Country for Old Men is a bad novel. It’s not. For most other writers, it would certainly be regarded as a great success. The finicky complexities of structure and ideas, the ambiguous moral landscape, and the nimble way he fuses several genres and modes of writing would be admirable in many other writers, but his name on the cover of the book mostly highlights the flaws of his (so far) penultimate novel. As a reader, I can’t help but see these flaws on its every page, so it’s hard for me to recommend it. Nevertheless, whatever its deficiencies, No Country for Old Men is, at the very least, an entertaining romp through a modern day western, part reality, part allegory. If you enjoy humorous, well-paced and atmospheric crime novels, you’re likely to enjoy it. Just try to forget that this is the same man who brought us Blood Meridian and Suttree.

No Country for Old Men is a crime novel/western hybrid, set in modern day Texas. It consists of three different kinds of short chapters. The first kind of chapter (and the first chapter of the book) is reserved for Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who is the most dominant of the book’s three protagonists. His chapters are printed in italics and are narrated by Bell himself, in the first person. Thus, the very first sentence of the novel we hear is one spoken by Bell: “I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville” and the last sentence is also his: “And then I woke up.” One would assume that he is, in fact, the narrator of the story, but he’s not, or anyway not in any obvious way. He does, however, frame the story in several ways. His chapters (or section if you like) are both part of the story and outside of it. As a man involved in the action, we can follow him through the story and learn more about what happens. On the other hand, as a grizzled old sheriff, with decades of experience at this game, he infuses his sections with two kinds of outside commentary. One is his memory of his years and years of work. Through Bell’s voice, we see the unfolding events in a historical context, and we quickly get a good idea of how the cultural landscape is connected to the violent and desperate individuals playing a game of cat and mouse in it. McCarthy’s sense of history is always very strong in his prose, but this time it’s more heavy-handed as we listen to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell ramble about the past and the present. Although ‘ramble’ may be too negative: the choice of words, the phrasing, syntax, everything in Bell’s chapters is endowed with the cadences of the wise old storyteller. McCarthy places accentual deviations from grammatical rules judiciously. As with the other factors, too, this is done in as heavy-handed a manner as possible. This is not oral speech taken down, thus lacking the refinements of writing, despite the dropped ‘g’s in gerunds and participles. Instead it is speech carefully crafted to resemble oral speech, most obviously by the fact that the apostrophe in words like ‘won’t’ and ‘didn’t’ is usually left out. Now, this deviation cannot be heard, it’s nothing but a signal to the reader: listen up, this is traditional storytelling. I go on about this at length because for whatever reason, McCarthy, in this late period of his work, starts to rely on crutches overmuch. The dropped apostrophes are one aspect. Many more follow in the pages to come (The Road, only marginally better than No Country for Old Men, is similarly full of them). McCarthy needs these sections to be clearly identifiable as oral, however, since he expects the reader to extend the local historical tradition that Bell outlines and read the whole book in connection with a local literary tradition, the tale told in the evening at the campfire or on the back porch.

As I pointed out in this review, the oral storyteller often has a moral and epistemological authority, and it is this authority that the novel wants, no, needs to invoke here. As the novel progresses, so do Sheriff Bell’s culturally and historically based pessimistic murmurings. This is the other kind of outside commentary, and it’s worth distinguishing it from the first one; in part certainly because one is backwards oriented (assessing the past, establishing a historical landscape wherein the novel’s events can be situated) whereas the other is looking forward, in the sense that Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” is, which lent McCarthy’s novel its title. Both poem and novel end on a vision, but while Yeats’ poem ends on a phantasmagorical vision of “the holy city of Byzantium”, McCarthy’s ends on a symbol of the past that has slipped away, a past that has been replaced by shootouts and drug deals in the desert. In this sense, the novel isn’t, as I claimed earlier, a crime novel/western hybrid. It’s a Western that’s been taken over by the mechanized, brutal reality of our time. The basic elements, given enough abstraction, are still there, the landscape is still the same, and the Texan drawl of Sheriff Bell that frames the whole thing is also still there. Within all that, however, a new story takes place, and we are to feel the loss that it represents to the world Bell used to know. Now, the novel’s grasp of reality and of a dependable moral compass is a bit tenuous since Bell’s sections are so clearly marked as objects. There is no inherent support for these sections within the novel; on the contrary, the very first sentence of the novel could be said to undermine Bell’s sections completely, since according to Jim Willett, the director of the Texas Prison Museum, the state of Texas has never executed anyone in a gas chamber. This inaccuracy, placed prominently at the very beginning of the story, is an important sign post if we look for instructions as to how to read Sheriff Bell’s chapters. The other two kinds of chapters are written from the (third person) perspective of two other central characters, most frequently from that of Llewelyn Moss, Vietnam veteran, and professional welder. It is he who kicks off the novel’s plot when he comes across what’s left of a shootout in the desert: three vehicles, filled with dead (and almost dead) men, as well as several million dollars in cash. After a brief deliberation, he decides to take the money, since, after all, no-one appears to be still alive to lay claim to this particular pot of gold. This is where things get a bit dicey. The money has owners, who send killers in to get it, but more dangerous is a freelance killer, who’s also the third protagonist. Of these three characters, Moss is the most accessible one, he’s an everyman, caught in the crosshairs of bad luck, trying to first save the money and later on just his life, from the relentless pursuit of the professionals in hot pursuit of him.

Moss is unlucky, but he’s also remarkably stupid, making a few crucial mistakes that lead to his having to flee across the Mexican border and back. We become so invested in his story (although he’s only a cardboard character, really) that after a while, we may consider him the protagonist, but the last third of the novel quickly disabuses us of such illusions, if we ever held them. In fact, as it turns out, Moss is merely the human interest meat in an allegory sandwich, although he and his chapters do take up more space within the novel than the other two. Of the two, I already discussed Sheriff Bell, a stand-in for the history of the landscape, for the oral storyteller and an ambiguous moral authority. The other one is the aforementioned freelance killer, Anton Chigurh (which adventurous surname is pronounced similar to ‘sugar’). Chigurh’s chapters take up the least amount of space and yet his importance in the overall structure of the novel is equal to that of Bell. Where Bell provides a framework and perspective, Chigurh is the evil ghost in the machine. He is a cold-hearted murderer, but like Bell, he likes order, and his killings can be seen as a way to restore order. Like Bell, he has a rigid moral and ethical code that governs his actions. In many ways, he is the modern day counterpart of McCarthy’s earlier creation Judge Holden, the main villain of Blood Meridian and one of the best and most harrowing villains in recent literary history. To readers of that earlier book, it’s probably clear that Holden is representative of a more archaic, ancient evil. He isn’t merely a wrongdoer or a bad person, he’s evil, in the full sense of that word. The same, almost otherworldly, impression is left by Anton Chigurh, but while Judge Holden, a historical figure, was anchored to his time and place, this isn’t quite true for Chigurh, except in one sense: technology. McCarthy’s use of weapons in No Country for Old Men is close to fetish, the way he caresses names and processes, the way he offers to us a precise and accurate idea of every weapon used, and of the uses of these weapons. In many ways, I believe one could read Chigurh and the use of violence and weapons as a warped, disjointed, patriarchal take on theories like Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. The book never qualifies this take on technology, it doesn’t offer a position on the progress of modernity outside of the flawed stances of its protagonists. But the fact that the sections that seem most normative are undercut by Chigurh and by the author himself leaves the novel as a whole in a state of uncertainty. McCarthy, as in his good and best books, reaches towards myth and tradition, but the novel itself collapses at the end. There is unfinished business in No Country for Old Men but McCarthy is no longer able or willing to take care of it. It is this twilight of two modern narratives that is the most brilliant thing about McCarthy’s overall unsatisfactory novel. But too much of this is obnvious, too much of this is presented in broad daylight, as an empty gesture to an empty stage. What’s left is murder and suspense, and a taciturn narrative about violence and modernity that could have been worse. It could have been better though.

Here at the edge of darkness

Here’s a poem by Rita Dove

Rita Dove: Adolescence II

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
“Can you feel it yet?” they whisper.
I don’t know what to say, again. They chuckle,

Patting their sleek bodies with their hands.
“Well, maybe next time.” And they rise,
Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight,

And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes
They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.
Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

That’s the problem with reality

Yes, I think, any minute now [...] the insight will come. Clarity. [...]. Of course it never happens. Years of therapy and it never happens. [...]That’s the problem with reality, that’s the fallacy of therapy: [...] It assumes that insight alone is a transformative force. But the truth is, it doesn’t work that way. [...] In all likelihood you’re going to keep on doing the same old things. You’ll be the same old person. [...] I want an angel to swoop down on me and talk me out of suicide. because at this point, that’s what it’s going to take.

From a book I found while digging through a crate of books behind my desk, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. Oh the books I own. I can’t recommend it or anything since I don’t remember it. Not a good sign, isn’t it. In my head I can’t distinguish it from Coover’s Gerald’s Party. No idea why. Very different books aren’t they. This passage is nice though. Here’s another one, from the same book:

And his upbeat mood, rather than having the contagious effect he’d probably hoped for, made me resist him, made me more defiant in my depression. I hated him for not being depressed. He seemed a fool – everyone who didn’t feel like me was a fool. I alone knew the truth about life, knew, that it all was a miserable downward spiral that you could either admit or ignore, but sooner or later we were all going to die.

Cette cosmogonie ancienne et nouvelle

Exploration d’une oeuvre à la fois monumentale et intime qui se fait le témoin d’un questionnement perpétuel embrassant tous les territoires de l’âme et de la conscience, la visite de cette exposition est bouleversante. Anselm Kiefer nous associe à son travail de deuil mais aussi de connaissance; l’absence presque totale de représentations humaines (excepté l’artiste lui-même dans ses Heroische Sinnbilder et des personnages de la mythologie) n’exclut pas l’humanité, à laquelle se substitue le spectateur – qui devient acteur. Extérieur à la toile, il se trouve cependant placé à son point d’origine, ce qui l’engage immanquablement dans une réflexion personnelle. Kiefer ne souhaite pas imposer une interprétation, c’est au visiteur de trouver son chemin dans cette cosmogonie ancienne et nouvelle.

from a rather excellent review of an Anselm Kiefer exhibition at De Seuil en Seuil.

You’re the one for me, Fatty (2)

My new favorite fat book

Berryman on Pound

If Browning makes the fastest verse in English, Pound makes the slowest, the most discrete and suave. He once said of a story in Dubliners that it was something better than a story, it was “a vivid waiting,” and the phrase yields much of his own quality. There is restlessness, but the art of the poet places itself, above all, immediately and mysteriously at the service of the passive and the elegiac, the nostalgic. The true ascendancy of this personality over any other is suggested by a singular fact: the degree in which the mantic character is absent from his poetry. He looks ahead indeed, looks ahead eagerly, but he does not feel ahead; he feels back. (…) It is the poetry of a late craftsman; of an expatriate of a failing culture

from John Berryman’s essay “The Poetry of Ezra Pound”, collected in Berryman’s indispensable The Freedom of the Poet.

I wondered ever too what my fate would be

John Berryman: The Search

I wondered ever too what my fate would be,
woman & after-fame become quite unavailable,
or at best unimportant. For a tooth-extraction
gassed once, by a Russian woman in Detroit,

I dreamed a dream to end dreams, even my dreams:
I had died – no problem: but a mighty hand
was after my works, too, feeling here & there,
& finding them, bit by bit.
At last he found the final of all one, & pulled it away, & said ‘There!’

I began the historical study of the Gospel
indebted above all to Guignebert
& Goguel & McNeile
& Bultmann even & later Archbishop Carrington.

The Miracles were a stumbling block;
until I read Karl Heim, trained in natural science;
until I had sufficiently attended to
The Transfiguration & The Ecstasy.

I was weak on the Fourth Gospel. I still am,
in places; I plan to amend that.
Wellisch on Isaac & Oedipus
supplements for me Kierkegaard.

Luther on Galatians (his grand joy)
I laid aside until I was older & wiser.
Bishop Andrewes’ account of the Resurrection-appearances
in 1609 seemed to me, seems to me, it.

I studied Titian’s remarks on The Tribute-Money.
Bishop Westcott’s analysis (it took him 25 years)
of the first eighteen verses of St. John
struck me as of a cunning like Odysseus’.

And other systems, high and primitive,
ancient & surviving, did I not neglect,
sky-gods & trickster-gods, gods impotent,
the malice & force of the dead.

When at twelve Einstein lost belief in God
he said to himself at once (as he put it later)
‘Similarly motivated men, both of the past & of the present,
together with their achieved insights,
waren die unverlierbaren Freunde’ – the unloseable friends.

Siri Hustvedt: The Summer Without Men

Hustvedt, Siri (2011), The Summer Without Men, Picador
ISBN 978-0-312-57060-6

Here is something that is said far too rarely: Siri Hustvedt is undoubtedly one of the best novelists of her generation. In the past decade she has slowly built a body of work that has become more impressive with each new novel. Her fourth novel, The Sorrow of an American, may be a her crowning achievement so far, a perfectly sculpted examination of loss and memory, of identity and history. In less than 400 pages, Hustvedt offered us an intellectual novel that was considered, careful and driven by the urgency of the born novelist. It felt necessary, it was moving, and thanks to Hustvedt’s stunningly nimble pen, it was written with a precise and effective yet poetic style. Although she writes intellectual prose, her work does not resemble the ones of the likes of Paul Auster, Michael Cunningham, Haruki Murakami or Richard Powers, and not only because of her superior style. No, it’s the fact that Hustvedt’s work always seems necessary, well-rounded and complete. The point is especially obvious if we compare The Sorrow of an American with any novel by Richard Powers, for example The Echo Maker. Powers, a writer of gaps, of jumps and associations, has always put ideas before style; in his work, this has often meant relying on cliché plots and simple characters, reaching for a simple emotionality that is at odds with the sophisticated nature of the scientific and philosophical background of his work. Even his prose betrays his preferences, by slipping by turns into stock phrases and a slouching writerly gait on the one hand (as in The Echo Maker), or into a style marked by a sophisticated vocabulary crammed into a simple (sometimes even awkward) syntax, which makes for an unpleasantly bloated style (as in novels like The Goldbug Variations). However, there is a visionary air to the best of his books, and a highly insistent handling of the subject matter that keeps us reading, and that is responsible for the lavish critical praise he’s received over the past decades.

Hustvedt’s books are ostensibly more private, small-scale affairs, but no less visionary and a great deal more accomplished as literary works of art. She writes small dramas, employing her considerable insights into philosophy and science only as and when they are necessary for the story at hand. That, and the incredibly readable style of her novels might have obscured the fact of how extraordinary a writer she’s become, besting many of the male writers frequently regarded as ‘major’ writers of our age. There is bound to be a certain frustration with these matters, with this critical glass ceiling that many excellent female writers face who do not (or nor predominantly) write about the plight of their female characters. Most of Hustvedt’s characters are male, and her novels lack the shrill cry of canonical importance. As if we needed any further example, it was recently pointed out that Jonathan Franzen,yon bright beacon of self-satisfied canonized mediocrity, is reaping laurels writing the kind of domestic drama that female writers were always marginalized for doing. As I said, this state of matters is bound to create a certain degree of frustration, and I think that part of the astonishing energy driving Hustvedt’s slender, but magnificently dense new novel The Summer without Men is due to just that kind of frustration.

Of course, it’s easy for me to claim this since the book contains a plethora of rants and bitter and hilarious exhortations that touch on just these kinds of subjects. Indeed, The Summer without Men contains surprisingly little in the way of plot or characterization, especially when compared to Hustvedt’s other novels. The book takes off when Hustvedt’s protagonist, Mia Fredrickson, rents an apartment near where her mother lives after her husband Boris has left her for a French woman “with limp but shiny hair” and she suffers from a temporary psychological breakdown, which leads to a short hospitalization. The book doesn’t dwell much on the temporary insanity that gripped Mia, and dwells even less on her husband’s decision to call it quits after 30 years of marriage (although the novel does contain memories of happier times in their marriage). The rental she moves into is at the edge of town, and although there is no reason why it couldn’t be crawling with men, we perceive the area as a kind of female community, since those are the people that Mia keeps in touch with, both privately and professionally. Privately, she gets to know her mother’s circle of friends, a group of women who have made both happy and unhappy experiences in the company of men, and have drawn different lessons from it. The focal point of the group for Mia is the ninety-four year old Abigail, who has lived a life hiding in the embroidered folds of propriety. Literally. In her vast repertoire of embroidered objects, she has hidden images that would have clashed with the idea of what was proper for a woman of her time. Gleefully, she unveils her secrets one object at a time to a rapt Mia, who, talking to Abigail, her mother and the other older women, regains a firm sense of self. Her professional contacts mainly include a class of girls she starts to teach.

That class of girls starts to pick on one of their own, making her an outsider, a process that eventually leads to bloody tissue on the teacher’s desk, tears in the class room, and an extended exercise in writing intended to raise the self-awareness of everyone concerned. Even if we the readers had not been told of the extensive similarities that connects this group of girls with the group of girls surrounding Mia when she was their age, we would see that this is the obvious literary function of this part of the plot. In Mia, the old women and the mean girls in class, Hustvedt presents us with three generations of female experience. This is complemented by essayistic elements that discuss art, culture and science in almost acidic tones; this is done plainly, clearly and obviously. No attempt has been made to assimilate the various the plot strands, rants, comments, reminiscences and poems. They cohere only when we look at the whole of the novel as a long, coherent work. This is strikingly different from her earlier work which was always written in one voice, aperçus, remarks and various plot elements smoothed into one story. While her other novels are frequently novels of idea clothed in the sheep’s wool of a rich and engaging story, her most recent work is a much more obvious affair. Its story is more an excuse to develop a series of ideas about science, gender and relationships, and the author doesn’t attempt to hide the fact.

Although The Summer without Men is written from the perspective of her distraught and temporarily confused protagonist, the novel always keeps us at a remove from her by introducing a shelf-bending amount of other writers and thinkers by way of references and explicit quotes. Discussions of Emily Dickinson, behavioral psychologists and gender issues are woven into what is basically a long stream of thought that contains outside events as well as the the slow gestation of thoughts in the protagonist’s mind. Mind you, The Summer without Men is not a nonfiction essay merged with a novel, although the essayist fragments that swirl around in it are frequently brilliant. The book it most closely resembles is Nicholson Baker’s recent masterpiece The Anthologist, a meandering essay on modern poetry as channeled through the mind of its third rate poet/critic protagonist. Baker’s book is obsessed with its protagonist, molding the comments on poetic form and poetic tradition to fit his slightly unhinged mind. The effect would have been claustrophobic, if not for Baker’s light style; a book turned inward, its logic starting and ending with the limits and limitations of the eponymous assembler of anthologies. There is a similar web of connections that spans from Hustvedt’s protagonist to her elaborate musings on art and culture and finally even to characters and events that turn up in the novel. The effect is not at all claustrophobic, however, since Hustvedt’s novel looks outward, scans the ridges and valleys of culture and presents a woman protagonist who suffers both from a specific, individual fate, as well as from being part of a society that still fosters misogynist myths and stories.

This seems to be a somewhat common kind of narrative, but unlike canonical works of feminist literature (like Margaret Atwood’s scintillating, similarly slim masterpiece Surfacing), Hustvedt eschews essentialist symbolism. Her focus is not on the body and symbolism, or on locating ‘the feminine’ within loci and narratives thought of as male. Instead she hands us a story that could have been written by one of many mediocre postmodern novelists, but infused with a self-reflective awareness of how her protagonist is held and changed by her place in various discourses of power. It serves as a corrective mechanism to an American literary canon, where male narratives like Baker’s are perceived and read as universal. Books like Hustvedt’s point out how many things within such novels change if the gender of the protagonist, and the attendant contexts, change. If her earlier novel has easily bested those of Richard Powers at their own game, then this one takes on, and makes mince meat of, a different canon. This canon is led by writers like Paul Auster, whose work increasingly resembles that of the aging Philip Roth in that both contain sentimental plots that are garnished with a reasonably erudite discussion of literary and cultural contexts, all of which come to bear, in one way or another, on the sentimental education of his/their (male) protagonists. Women jump in and out of the books, mere foils for the protagonists to project their desires on. The sad climax of this development can be found in the lesbian fantasies in Roth’s The Humbling (2008, cf. my review here) and the pedophiliac fantasies in Auster’s Sunset Park (2010, cf. my review for details).

Hustvedt counters these stories with a doubting heroine, an angry, questioning woman stranded on what might as well be a planet without men, where women discuss and exhibit the problems incurred by living in a world where casual (and not so casual) sexism pervades science, criticism and everyday relationships. But her main hobby horse is literature. And it’s not just some odd obsession of Mia’s. One only needs to read one of the many put-downs of NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani’s writing; the tone and vocabulary of most of these petty criticisms (regardless of their overall accuracy) is frighteningly revealing as to the degree of misogyny of the writer of the negative assessment in question. One also might want to follow discussions of Jane Austen’s work, or read reviews of female poets. Whereas male poets are often just ‘poets’, female poets are ‘female poets’, more likely to be compared to other female poets, however close they may be to their male contemporaries. Mia Fredrickson is a poet and a teacher of literature, and acutely aware of these kinds of biases; what’s more, she’s aware of them in other areas, as well, pointing out again and again that the cultural and social center of gravity is predominantly male. So much so that, in fact, the “summer without men” is really a summer that contains a lot of men in absentia. Despite the female community and the female protagonist and the feminist topics, Hustvedt’s heroine doesn’t try to reclaim (as Atwood tried) a strong, separate female identity. These have, like all vaguely essentialist theories, weak points, reproducing identical biases, with the positions merely reversed.

In her brilliantly precise story, Hustvedt tells a story of a female experience that’s female not because of inherent biological factors, but because this sort of experience is forced on Mia and some of the women of her circle by the way society around them works. Lacking her exquisite precision, I find it difficult to pinpoint how fine a point Hustvedt and Mia put on this. In a discussion towards the end of the book, Mia argues for the primacy of experience over theory, but the whole of the novel is governed by a very clear view of the philosophical and theoretical foundations upon which the novel’s structure, from the individual events that happen, to the way the novel is assembled, is founded. There is none of the murky slough of despond like the one that takes center stage in the novels of the aforementioned aging Americans. Instead, Hustvedt’s book is driven by an almost crystalline clarity, which could also be seen as its main weakness. To some readers it may seem emotionally remote, an effect that derives from the fact that the novel depicts a mind thinking. Mia’s mind is working its way through various sets of knowledge; sets of things she knows and cares about: poems, lists of writers, stray memories. In the process of making sense of a radically changed emotional environment, even other people and events have to fulfill the role of objects about to be cataloged. The overall effect is mesmerizing, and The Summer without Men, while not Hustvedt’s best, is a powerful achievement. One hopes that she’s eventually accorded the place in the canon of major contemporary American novelists she deserves.

A ball game and a juggling game

I mean, you can do it two ways in philosophy: You can talk about one book or one chapter or one page and pride yourself on never getting past the questions raised by that, or you can just throw a library at kids and force them to go through it. And I believe in both pedagogically. It’s always a ball game and a juggling game.

The incredible Stanley Cavell, in an interview with Bookforum

The early bees are assaulting the flowers

This poet I only recently discovered through an excellent essay by John Berryman on anglophone post-WWII poetry. His work is remarkably slim, but stunningly excellent. This is probably his most well known, most anthologized poem (the last line of each stanza is indented. Click here for a correctly spaced version of the poem):

Henry Reed: Lessons of the War

To Alan Michell

Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine gloria

I. NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

Pop Music

Below an excerpt from a pretty famous essay called “Hated it!” by Neil Tennant, originally published in the July 1992 issue of Details Magazine. Both of the Pet Shop Boys are eminently worth listening to, and they are obviously gorgeous musicians, but this essay is particularly excellent. I’m still rifling through my magazines hunting for a particularly great essay on Pop Music, but meanwhile, this’ll have to do.

Of course, these days it’s more fashionable to be positive. I hate positivity. The problem with positivity is that it’s an attitude that’s decidedly about lying back, getting screwed, and accepting it. Happily. It’s totally apolitical. It’s very, very personal and one-on-one. It’s not about changing society, it’s about caring about yourself. In fact, it’s totally about ignoring one’s economic role in society, and so it works in favor of the system. Just look at work years of personal consciousness theories have given us: those icons of the status quo, George Bush and John Major. Positivity is fundamentally middle-class. It’s about having the time, the space and the money to sort out where your head is at. Therapy is just another side of positivity. It’s a leisure activity, a luxury for people who don’t have any real cares. It’s new age selfishness, the new way of saying that charity begins at home.

(…)

Luckily, I’ve never been a very relaxed person. When I look at pop music, I immediately hate things. I look at singers who say they are taking two years off to work for charity when, in fact, they’ll spend two years working on their album, and I hate them. Right now I really hate performers who make a big deal out of playing benefits and donating the proceeds from the sales of their records to charities. They could give plenty of money to charities and not tell anyone, but instead, they cash in on the fact. That’s not charity, it’s marketing. It’s about selling albums under the guise of a moral imperative. They say they’re trying to raise consciousness, as if being a celebrity gives them power and endows them with the answers to the world’s problems. But really they just want to be seen as heroes. I think it’s breathtakingly cynical and I hate it.

Another thing I hate, and another inspiration for what the Pet Shop Boys do, is the way people misunderstand pop culture. It annoys me that after more than twenty-five years, Top of the Pops, Britain’s most important pop-music TV program, changed the rules so that you have to sing live. Why? Because the people in control are the kind of conservatives who think that in the ‘60s, everything was much more talented than they are now. It’s all about Rolling Stone rock culture, which is essentially a fear of the new. Rolling Stone’s idea of a musician is Jerry Garcia, from the 60s. Look at all the ‘new’ artists – Curtis Stigers, Michael Bolton, Lenny Kravitz – all of them living in the past. I think you have to live in the future. Or at least in the present.

(…)

“Does it turn into Tolstoy at page 205?”

This quote below is from an absolutely delightful radio talk with Richard Littlejohn and the always amazing Will Self. Here is the edited transcript.

LITTLEJOHN: But you haven’t read the book in its totality and you have to read the book in its totality.

SELF: Why?

LITTLEJOHN: In order to understand it.

SELF: Does it turn into Tolstoy at page 205?

LITTLEJOHN: No it doesn’t turn into Tolstoy. I don’t set out to be Tolstoy. It is a much more complex book than that.

SELF:Than Tolstoy?

(via)

Art & Entertainment

The differences between entertainment and art have less to do with the audience and the writer’s immediate intention than with his whole fundamental attitude toward doing what he does at all. Inverting the common notion, art for the artist we might oddly regard as a means, entertainment for the entertainer an end. (…) [T]he notion of art is “a self-discipline rather than a self-expression,” as Auden has put it.

from John Berryman’s essay “The Case of Ring Lardner”, collected in The Freedom of the Poet.

So grundwiderlich

Hier, in Deutschland, scheint es immer nur die eine Wahl zu geben zwischen dem faschistischen Mob und dem anständig-bürgerlichen Ressentiment gegen die Revolution, das diese mit jenem identifiziert. Dies ist, sozusagen, Regierungspolitik in jeder Hinsicht. Nicht ohne Grund ist der Name selbst dieses Landes auch sein adäquatestes Schimpfwort. Slime hatten recht. Hier kann nichts werden, ohne dass erstmal gründlich abgeräumt würde. Deutschland ist so grundwiderlich, dass man es am besten „Deutschland“ schimpft. Aber es muss zuerst etwas werden; und wer soll abräumen? Wo ist die Faktion, die aus dieser Situation ausbricht? Vielleicht ist sie, nunmehr, wirklich nur als Import denkbar.

“A.K.” bei indymedia über die Diskussion zu Der Kommende Aufstand. Sehr lesenswerter Essay.

Cologne Carnival (3)

Following this post of my own costume, and this picture from a so-called Veedelszog, here is a picture of one of the huge doors of the Cologne Cathedral, taken last Thursday, at the onset of the festivities. Photograph again by Azatoth.

Cologne Carnival (2)

Following this post of my own costume, here’s a picture from a so-called Veedelszog, a carnival procession restricted to a particular urban district. This is Köln-Longerich. Photograph by Azatoth.

Cologne Carnival (1)

It’s the Cologne Carnival again, and this year I’m dressed up

No theory

As I am drafting a literary theoretical essay, I was reminded of this short but fantastic poem by the criminally underrated David Ignatow.

David Ignatow: No Theory

No theory will stand up to a chicken’s guts
being cleaned out, a hand rammed up
to pull out the wriggling entrails,
the green bile and the bloody liver;
no theory that does not grow sick
at the odor escaping.

Thinking about Merrill

Here is the conclusion of my odd dusty old manuscript on Merrill. Have a ball.

James Merrill’s work contains many places; we have, in the past pages, mentioned a few of them. I could well have picked other poems, those I picked, however, offered enough diversity, in terms of publishing date, length and content, that the findings cannot be blamed on a cluster of any of those factors. They could indeed be blamed on selective choosing of poems yet I am confident that as the paper progressed my findings became more and more evident and plausible since I would argue that the general approach works for every poem of place in Merrill’s work. We also discussed how these places are portrayed or used in the poetry; from our discussion we developed, step by step, an understanding of the mechanism and developed our own terms to describe that mechanism.

In this conclusion we will take a final look at that mechanism and its range and limits. The first thing to notice is that we multiplied the number of places since we claimed that memories and dreams are treated in the poetry as if they were separate places. This is in no way a proposition about some actual place or something comparable. This proposition is only concerned with the workings of the poetry, where memory is, indeed, a sort of place, as is dream. There is one major difference between these sort of virtual places and actual places: With actual places we discussed the possibility of them being home or a home, we graded them on a scale from very far away from home, such as Japan in the “Prose of Departure”, to very close to home, such as New York. Memories and dreams are left out, since one cannot live in dreams or memories, much as one would like to do it.

Memories are places constructed by the remembering mind, which recollects a few salient objects. The same applies to dreams. This is rather similar to writing, which makes it especially important in a poet such as James Merrill. Merrill is a poet of detail: an abundance of puns, rhymes, meter, as well as countless allusions and numerous details are defining properties of his writing. The mechanism which creates the memory and dream places is thus one that is at the heart of James Merrill’s poetry. This is the first meaning of the title of the thesis. The second, and arguably more important one is concerned with ‘real’ places. We put “real” in inverted commas not because we adhere to a skepticist postmodern idea of reality, but because we found out quickly that real places and the cultural layer through which we perceive them, are virtually indistinguishable.

The speaker of Merrill’s poems casts this cultural layer over his descriptions, it is like tinted glass, without knowledge of the exact colors in the glass. The indistinguishable quality is mostly derived from selection and cannot be checked afterwards. Objects, persons and events that have fallen by the wayside are irretrievable, since our undertaking here is literary criticism and not biography. All we have, to cite that old chestnut, is the text, which presents the preselected, preformed version of reality. The cultural layer, insofar as it can be gleaned from the text, is not only a hindrance. It is also a key to understanding the speaker since it speaks volumes about his background. The important thing here is to step away from calling the cultural layer, as I have admittedly just done, a hindrance. Instead it is a special way of framing places.

Places in James Merrill’s poetry are a conglomerate of different factors. Roughly speaking they consist of real place plus the speaker’s perception of the place. We already noted that this perception is affected by what we called the cultural layer. This is, however, but half the story. In our discussion of poems like “The Thousand and Second Night” as well as “An Urban Convalescence”, we pointed to a second factor: the speaker’s body. Between the body of Merrill’s travelers and the place they visit strange relationships develop. The sickness of a city may translate into a immobilizing sickness of the speaker and the speaker’s convalescence may find a mirror in the city’s parallel process of convalescence. Again, the caveat: this is not about actual causality, but about the inner workings of Merrill’s poems. And there we find that the speakers, while perceiving places cerebrally through the cultural layer, also often perceive them viscerally, via their bodies. This dependence upon bodily travel is remarkable and noteworthy in as literary and abstract, even, a poetical language as Merrill’s. If we recall our chapter on Sandover, we find that the visceral, bodily kind of perception is also the one most directly involved in receiving the spirits at the Ouija board, where the reception takes place in the “RED CELLS”.

Thus, to iterate, places in Merrill’s poetry are real places plus the culturally or bodily mediated experience of them. This leads to a few points of interest which, due to length and focus of this thesis, we have not been able to address, yet are sure could and should be addressed at length in later studies of Merrill and his work. The first is the question of performativity. Merrill, as has been pointed out almost ad nauseam in secondary literature creates rooms within his poetry (cf. for instance Lundquist). They are not places in our understanding of the word, not if we want to keep the word meaningful and not a catch-all term. However, I did mention how close the process of mentally creating a place and the process of creating a poem is, especially since all we have is the created poem, which mimicks the mental process. Recollection is a gesture, a function of Merrill’s poetry. Performativity also, however, refers to questions of identity, which, whether it touches upon questions of gender or sexual preference, is highly interesting as a topic in Merrill’s poetry. Secondary literature on Merrill has focused too much on direct intentionality, which we owe to the fact that the leading scholars on Merrill, Kalstone, McClatchy and Yenser, have all been friends with the poet, and their understanding of the poet has developed in key with their communication with him, so that the two elements have become inseparable, which is, as I mentioned in the introduction the reason why I used so few secondary sources to argue my readings of the poems.

This leads us to the next large issue that I have not been able to touch upon yet which
seems to be a fecund issue to explore in more detail: language and communication. First the actual language used in the poems: James Merrill’s poetry is written in American English, sometimes it contains, for example, pieces of French, when expressing aspects of his speaker’s cultural layer, and sometimes it contains pieces of, for example, Greek, when focusing upon the local cultural layer. The second aspect is the way that language is molded in poems like Sandover: the spirits often deviate from common usage. Questions are turned into “?s”, for example, divinely inspired work is called “V work” and for a while, Mirabell prefaces each metaphor with a bracketed ‘m’. Also, the orthography is sloppy. This is so interesting because it raises questions of voice and questions about the boundary between the written and the spoken word. After all, Sandover is a dialogue, only one side never utters an audible word. Instead it makes a cup move upon a wooden board, letter by letter. This is remarkable. What seems like quick, effortless dialogue has been dictated letter by letter. Even if done at the utmost speed, taking such a dictation must take quite a while.

The last large issue is connected to the two already raised: unquestionably Merrill writes from a position of privilege. How is this reflected in his work? Secondary literature tends to either attack him for inhuman arrogance in Sandover or snobbish ignorance in his other work, or it completely exonerates him. I have yet to see either position cogently argued. Both positions are usually written like preachings to the choir. Here, again, much of the focus would rest upon Sandover, where a complex web of discourses about authority, racism, power, identity, has been woven, and people misrepresent it usually.

Merrill is, however, a writer easily misrepresented. The complexity of his work, both on the level of allusions, on the formal level and on the plain level of content assures that even a thorough study will pass some points by. By concentrating on a series of close readings I hope to have found a way to cope with the issue as good as possible. My intent was to demonstrate how places, be it cities or countries, are represented in James Merrill’s poetry and to argue that places are central to that poetry. The mechanics we uncovered/invented are useful instruments to tackle all poems by Merrill, because the tension between self and the environment, which is debated time and again in the poetry, is Merrill’s constant theme. Merrill’s is a poetry of places: it is a poetry about places, where the reader is transported all around the world. And it is a poetry where places play a formative role. Merrill’s speakers all have bodies, they are somewhere, they have had corporeal experience. If this sounds trite, please reconsider: Merrill uses, like few other poems of his caliber, his speaker’s bodies as a constant way of grounding them, while developing one of the most conceptually daring poetries of his time. His ability to reconcile these two extremes rests on his treatment of places.