Josh Bolton on Poetry is Not a Project

Josh Bolton has nice piece of velvet up for Dorothea Lasky's, Poetry is Not a Project. I think Bolton gets it right in focusing on the element of play—the heart of this wonderful little essay. ‘Essay’ as Montaigne meant the word, a try -out of an idea, playing with a thought. When I’m asked when I started writing, I stumble, fishing for how to answer. I know they mean: when did I begin to write seriously, to take it seriously, and it’s the serious part that takes me back. Not the word—but how we tend to limit it to exclude play, whimsy, playful work. Anyone who has observed children at play should understand that there is nothing in life we will ever do that is more serious.

There was a time for me when poetry become a serious pursuit—but it was a seriousness of letting go, of letting it take me where it would, not making of it a ‘project,’ why I love that little pamphlet with the blue cover… and the child embossed on the cover…playing, daydreaming. I don’t tuck it away in my bookshelf. It really have a place of its own, but without thinking about… I’ve left it always somewhere in plain sight. It drifts from my desk, to a counter top, gets covered with glitter in the tray where I keep things I use for the cover of the Poem Tree chapbook. In play—serious play—the gates of the Garden of Love, those heavy iron gates, begin to creak open, the black letters of Thou Shalt Not begin to crumble away… turn to confetti… glitter to tangle the hair of the Newt Grinches of the world.

For a child, the most serious part of play involves testing the real, learning the great skill of life—imagining the Real. So many see the importance in this, the building of walls between the one and the other, the Imaginary and the Real… they get the distinction, but not transformative act… what Blake called Energy, where Imagination reaches out, probes and tests the limits of the Real… that is, the social and mental constructions of the Real, the bricks of rules and iron laws… in a search for what they hide… for… if I’m tempted to finish that sentence, to look for an idea or metaphor that would name what that is, for what is hidden, But that would put an end to play, slam closed again the gates to the Garden of Love.

Review: Thaddeus Rutkowski, HAYWIRE

Haywire, a novel by Thaddeus Rutkowski
Review from uncorrected proofs
Starcherone Books
Buffalo, NY

"Composed of 49 flash stories narrated by the son of a Polish-American artist father and a Chinese mother"

Part 1
IN CARS

"My brother and sister and I were riding in the car while our father drove. "

Our Father...

Who drives the fragments of narrative in Rutkowski's coming of age novel, drives them like nails into the narrator's textual consciousness.

Our Father ...

Who gives incomprehensible orders out of which compulsive sexual fetishes naturally follow--natural, that is, in that they share with the Father a robust textual force while remaining themselves, opaque, inexplicable--habits acquired or inherited or inflicted, whose beginnings are sometimes noted, but whose psychic genesis is neither explored nor revealed. Yet in the aporia of the perpetually absent presence of the Father we find their hidden coordinates precisely in that state of being hidden, the unwritten text which, in another novel, a different kind of narrative, might offer clues of motive, offer possible explanations for the symptoms, for what becomes of the fetishes of sexual bondage (the dominate features of the middle sections of the book) after the narrator's marriage and the birth of his daughter. They seem to have been tied and left dangling heels over head, bent like question marks without answers.

Rutkowski likes to employ non sequiturs to move the reader forward, as in the following example. The narrator has rather confused, but persistent writerly ambitions. He attends a residential workshop or writer's retreat. He amuses himself burning pages of his bad writing. ".. I couldn't incinerate the pages in my room," he says, "So I took my embarrassing printouts down the road to a clearing, put them on the ground and touched a lit match to them. While I was burning my papers, a resident writer happened to walk by. He must have seen the smoke, but he didn’t' ask about it. All he said was, 'This road we're on in a good route for biking."

This is an effective device. Things are always just 'happening' like this. It's how his father works in the opening chapters. Keep in mind, a child doesn't experience a parent's actions as random--inexplicable, yes, but not random. The meaning must be there. Somewhere. Everything in a child's world (as in our dreams) is overdetermined. Overdetermined and utterly mysterious. I found this a strong point in Rutkowski's style. He withholds interpretation. That takes admirable disciple. Dream-like sequences are interwoven at several points in the memory narratives, also without explanation, and with no bridge, no passages of transition. The associative power of the negation is a real power, far more than any explanation, no matter how canny, how wise. We are left with a chimera of unread, and unreadable possibilities hovering over... or under, the text.

He suffers from schoolyard bullies and bigots, who single him out for his Asian features. His mother--her character, her image--is left largely undeveloped--but the roughest sketch. This is true of all the characters. We have brief encounters--the stoner brother, some of the narrator's early lovers, but only the father rises out of the text, and then--as a kind of ghost memory who he fumbles to make real for his daughter when she asks what he was like--long after his death. Fumbles and fails... summoning no story, no incident (though the first third of the book is filled with incidents that might do--but how could he? How could he impose this Father on her... whose hope resides in being free of him?) Does he realize that in declining the challenge, he is risking doing exactly that? ... by conjuring the mystery? The undeciphered parental text that is the source of all ghosts?

Haywire is written in three main parts, each consisting of short, titled chapters, some of which might stand alone as independent fragments. The prose is spare and functional, well suited to the dream-like accounts of memory and exposition. I wonder if it might gain in power by further condensation. It seemed a bit long at almost 300 pages, but I was not unhappy at having read it. While a reviewer might easily point out imperfections, I see no reason to do so, as they are of a kind that go hand in hand with testing out certain limits. What Rutkowski has attemped here is worth the risks he took. May this lead to more, and still more accomplished work in the future.

Review: Cooperative Village, Frances Madeson

Frances Madeson, Cooperative Village

     There is a thread, dark skirting on despair, underlying the humor of this wonderfully disturbing book. The word 'hysterical' comes to mind, cropping up in all its several semantic fields. The Frances of the narrative is driven by a desperation so acute that seeing a corpse through an entire wash-and-dry cycle in the cooperative Laundromat passes for a rational response to life in the Village: life conditioned by a level of obligatory artifice suffocatingly upbeat and right-minded--a thoroughly dehumanized 'liberalism.'

This is a deeply political book, but it's a politics that engages the disembodied cultures of what Joe Bageant has called the American Hologram, and cuts across the anachronistic distinctions of left and right, liberal conservative, progressive reactionary, an urban parallel to the literature of deconstructed suburbia, or perhaps, what  happens when that same suburban misappropriation of the pursuit of happiness invades, infects and perverts the city with what is euphemistically termed, ‘gentrification:’ the construction of sterile islands, pale ghosts of the gated communities to which the real masters have retreated,  suspended above the soil of earthly existence and embodied human life and community by threads, cables chains and shackles of convention everyone agrees to pretend are invisible.

Cooperative Village is an account of how Frances, by every choice she makes, conscious or unconscious, goes about cutting her way out of the web. How perfectly appropriate, that  in the end—in the view from the web… she vanishes from existence… or non-existence.  This reader wishes her well, that beyond the automatic gates and doors of the Cooperative Village—she may find there is still the possibility of real life on this good earth.

Poetics: 5 Reviews and More

Joshua Ware has some informative reviews that read like expanded abstracts. Five most recent titles reviewed:

Torres, Edwin. The PoPedology of an Ambient Language. Berkeley, CA: Atelos Press, 2007.

Perloff, Marjorie. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2002.

Göransson, Johannes. A New Quarantine Will Take My Place. Apostrophe Books, 2007.

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.

Sikelianos, Eleni. Body Clock. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008.

Dorothea Lasky on Stevie NIcks

HERE

Ron Silliman Reviews A City Real and Imagined

Really pleased to see this great review of CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock's City Real and Imagined
HERE

Benjamin Kunkel on Fredric Jameson

As Tweeted by Stephen Mitchelmore, Benjamin Kunkel reviews
Fredric Jameson's

Valences of the Dialectic in the London Review of Books

... could spend a leisurly afternoon on this one...

On Sontag's Against Interpretation

Text "Against Interpretation"
Interpretation, for Sontag, is grounded in the distinction between form and content, which she traces back to the Greek idea of art as an imitation of reality, and to Plato’s theory of ideas, which explained even material things as an imitation of a transcendent reality, reducing art to an imitation of an imitation. This places art in need of a defense.
Its truth value fatally compromised (imitation of an imitation), Aristotle looks for justification in use—as therapy: the purgation of unhealthy emotions. One doesn’t have to search far for upticks on this old chestnut.

The problem begins with the idea of mimesis—art as representation, which persists (for Sontag) even with non-representational art in the form of the distinction between form and content. Abstract expressionist painting posed a direct challenge to this; denying ‘content’ to its critics, limiting them to describing form—and thus acknowledging the work of art as it “is,” without reduction or translation to a meaning external to itself. Nonetheless, while a work of art

“… may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is . . . ,” “What X is trying to say is . . .,” “What X said is . . .”

thus, locating the ‘meaning’ outside the work. Leaving us, as she says, “stuck with the task of defending art,” such that “We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense.” From there—a conclusion I applaud, but attained by a logical elipsis that leaves me near breathless:

Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice. This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism

For me, that’s the heart of this essay—it’s whole point, but left on a foundation in serious need of additional support.
The problem, as I understand it, lies in her accepting—or at least, not challenging Plato’s idea of representation. She ignores it, while accepting the grounds for the troubling distinction between form and content—not Plato’s ideal forms, but the notion that there is a ‘reality’ that constitutes the world outside the work of art, in which interpretation wrongly wants to ground the ‘meaning’ of the work. In this case, a more naïve take on ‘reality’ by far than Plato’s.
What she would hope for, is a less impoverished take on this world, that “… we [may] again experience more immediately what we have.”
Now I have to interject—interrupt with my own thoughts. No one experiences a ‘world,’ that is, a semi-coherent, cohering pattern made up of the kaleidoscopic fragments of particular perceptual encounters. The coherence is already mediated, already an interpretation. The ‘meaning’ relocated by interpretive translation from the work of art… from the text… is then some sort of reification, using the text (art work) to establish the authority of conventionally accepted (narrative) patterns. The fault of Sontag’s analysis is in locating the “content” of the response ‘in’ the texts (granted, as a misreading or projection)… but then failing to identify what generated that ‘content’ and the purpose it served.
Here the analysis become seriously muddled. She wants to claim that

Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn’t simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation.

Why? Let me quote an earlier passage.

The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning - the latent content - beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art) - all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.

Do you begin to see the problem? What were the texts Marx and Freud claimed to be interpreting? And here, I would say Marx was more independent of actual previous texts than Freud—having rendered their contents more rigorously to discrete elements of data which he then re-ordered, than Freud—who was far more an interpreter of acual texts than of direct observations than he would ever acknowledge.
Sontag charges the artist with the task of disarming the interpreter—by implication, blaming the victim for his/her exploitation. The work should aim to a pure formality that vitiates the possibility of interpretation—that is, reductive translation to a ‘meaning’ outside itself.

cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?


What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary - a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary - for forms.

So far so good… but then

Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.
Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

… hence, the artist is responsible for denying the possibility of assimilating work into thought
Marx and Freud treated (or claimed to) perceived/received reality as manifest content in need of explanation, exposure. Sontag (in this essay, conflates what they were attempting with interpretations of art—looking for latent ‘meaning’ in the manifest content. She ignores the extraordinary irony of treating the ‘reality’ (assumed subject for Freud and Marx) with the subject texts of her interpreters… how did this ‘reality’ become a text? On this, she has nothing to say.
The problem as I see it (after Marx and Freud), is that what needs interpreting is the hologram of ‘reality’… all the ways we put the parts together to construct alternative views/narratives of the ‘real.’
Let me cut to the chase… apply the ‘problem’ of interpretation in reverse—what needs interpreting, what needs exposure—manifest to latent content—is received reality. The hermeneutics of interpretation apply, not to literary texts, but to the ‘cultural texts’ we use to make sense of the world. “Reality” is the artifice that needs to be interpreted, the artifice that pretends to be the world. Yes, learn to read the text as form… that we may learn, not lessons about content about the real world, but about how to dismantle the hologram and anchor every particle of the constructed world in actual experience.
As suggested in my previous post, what I need to add is the idea of the 'encounter,' and the grounding of authoritative texts  in myths of origin. That's another post ...

Litlove does Thornbirds

Vintage Litlove on The Thornbirds.

... essentially, Meggie’s story is one of suffering, interrupted by a brief interlude of forbidden love, which in turn must be ‘paid for’ with grief. This is Catholicism acting like a mafia loan shark; happiness comes on credit and must be settled by excessive interest payments.

Thank you, Litlove, for writing delicious reviews of books I will never ever be tempted to read myself.

Comments on Edmond Caldwell's Return to the Chateau

On Harp & Alter

The hill on which the hotel stood was like an island, except instead of the sea it was surrounded by tarmac. There was the little tarmac of the motorways and the big tarmac of the runways of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, and like the sea there was hissing and roaring, audible from this distance, among the hotels on the hill. If he shut the window he couldn’t hear the hissing and roaring because the windows were treble-paned, probably for just this purpose, he reasoned. The small hotel room felt entirely self-contained, like a pressurized cabin.

As it begins so it continues. Notice the meticulous attention to physical detail, the mediating and disassociative use of comparative similes ("like an island, except instead of the sea..."), and the minimal, repeated phrase "he reasoned" used to reference the surrogate POV channeled by the observer/narrator (who is rendered more visible later in the piece). Three elements, which Stephen Augustine aptly compares to thematic jazz riffs or contrapuntal voices of a fugue, their shifting relationship and interdependence being the essential subject rather than the things described or the action of the narrative.

For the past few months I've been preoccupied with similar concerns--ideas which have become central to my recent poems. As in the March 18 poem HERE, I will begin with a direct observation--in this case,  the rooftops... immediately altered in mind to a geometric figure of parallel lines receding toward their vanishing point, and from there, the recollection of Plato's description of Socrates drawing a geometric figure in sand to illustrate a point about the relationship between an Idea and its manifestation (though his toe replaced the stick he's said to have used because of other references to his habit of going barefoot); the generative force here being the tension created by an effort to stick to the physical--description of 'things,' and the intrusion of mind--as in Caldwell's story, in the form of suggested comparisons, which begin as spontaneous associations ("like an island"), and are then developed ('reasoned') into figurative conceits (from island to sea to the sounds of the sea to the sounds of traffic), and 'reason' as the compulsion to 'explain' what one has observed. In my poem, this latter reasoning is confined to a single line... a conjecture as to why the sparrows have broken their winter silence. Caldwell's story holds both figuration and reasoning to a disciplined subjection to physical detail, where my poem loses it... drifting off into chains of daydreaming associations. In each case, the controlling aesthetic idea takes the impossibility of unmediated perception as a given, and goes about generating structures around the interwoven elements: perceived object/action, associative context, and explanation.

Reading Notes: The Kindly Ones (1-4)

Reading Notes: The Kindly Ones (1)
Progress slow on The Kindly Ones. Haven't had enough reading time. Read for about 3 hours last night. The scene with the ancient Jewish scholar lifted the narrative to a new level for me. That almost mythical and nakedly fictive element transformed the astonishing abundance of seeming historical detail that surrounds it--in that long period between actions--from what some reviewers have read as the realia of a genre historical novel--to different plane. A touch of genius not to be missed: the world, the fictive Weltanshauung is not that of the self-absorbed bureaucratic narrator but the uncanny reality he's unable to account for even as he recognizes it at a distance... in snatches of Bach, the beauty of the natural world, his view of the Caucasus from the chosen burial site of the Ancient One, and no less, and far more ominous--in the senseless slaughter of which is in no way the mere 'observer' he describes to others... what a marvelous play on vision in that scene, Aue entranced by the scene of the distant mountains--now, for the reader, thanks to those long discursive lectures on linguistics and history fading into legend from Vos, haunted by the shadows of countless waves of occupiers and settlers... again, blending into a mythical past, while the Ancient Jew sees everything Aue is blind to. From these 50-100 pages alone I'd would question Daniel Green's reservations on Littell's use of the Orestes cycle (in his wonderful review HERE (see also Daniel Mendelshon's excellent REVIEW in the NYRB)
Seems to me this is a useful guide to how this book should be read. I was made to think of Arjuna in the Bagavadgita here, Krishna's reconciling Arjuna to the horrors of war. I've begun to think that those reviewers who were appalled at what they took as an overly sympathetic view of the Nazi atrocities were right in their being dead wrong--or wrong in their being right. The field of action viewed through the peephole of Aue's consciousness is governed by a far more capacious consciousness... if one can even call it 'consciousness.' The Erinyes come to be called (with no little irony, the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, only through the intervention of Apollo as he defends Orestes for the murder of Clytomnestra... "Kindly" because some restoration of civil order (however unstable... as Aeschylus' audience must have keenly felt), over the eruption of ancient blood feud notions of 'justice.' The 'blessing' of the Bhagavadgita is, indeed, a terrible one. It does not save Arjuna or humankind from the horrors of war--rather, it lifts Arjuna into a vision beyond the human, a blessed indifference. Is this where Aue is heading, and where the arch narrator is taking the reader? To a god's eye view beyond all questions of agency and judgment? As Ghandi understood the Gita, this 'beyondness' does not relieve the visionary from responsibility, no more than Buddah's enlightenment relieved him from service and compassion. Aue is no latent buddisatva, but the terrifying vision being laid out in Littell's novel--a vision of the worst of human atrocities as though from a vantage so removed from questions of judgment and agency-- is akin to the paradoxical blessing of the Gita, and the nature of the peace restored by Apollo at the end of the Oresteian cycle. The Kindly Ones does not offer religious consolation; that is not in the power of novelist or artist to give; instead we must content ourselves with an aesthetic vision... and now and then, we are given one that still shimmers with a remnant of the old power of the gods we had thought to have left behind.

Comments:
verbivore said... I'm really interested in this book, but I haven't had the guts to read it. I'm curious about it, as a writer, and wary of it as a reader. If I can reconcile those two feelings, I'll get a copy and dig in. Your thoughts here are useful, I'm assuming there is alot going on in terms of intertextuality...
February 11, 2010 8:42 AM Steven Augustine said... That scene (including the detail of the philtrum-less lip) is, indeed, a mystico-literary wonder, Comrade Jacob
February 12, 2010 3:45 AM

Reading Notes: The Kindly Ones: (2)
I wanted to raise one question to the comment I left above on Dan Green's Review (those comments quoted below, with some additions). I'm only a little more than half through, so can't say more yet, but the character of Thomas deserves attention. He plays a role at times as something close to a doppelgänger, an enabling shadow figure who again and again rescues Aue, while chiding him for his nativity--as someone who, for all his considerable powers of observation and intelligence, is not entirely of this world. When Aue arrives in Stalingrad, Thomas reminds him that he has warned him before to be careful about his relations--his homosexual encounters--though Aue has not reported that he's confessed to Thomas on these matters. Thomas seems, not only to have an uncanny ability to show up at critical moments, but seems to know more about Aue than can be readily accounted for in their reported conversations. I'm not sure how to read the hallucination of Thomas' death: was Aue hallucinating Thomas' mortal injury--or is Thomas himself the hallucination? What happened to the scarf Aue gave Thomas to bind his wound? Then there is the speech Aue attends where he sees Hitler in a tallit with tiffilin and even the fringes of a tallit katan, this after a fantasised memory when, as a youth, her first saw Hitler, and imagines (had he lived) his father beside him--or even in place of Hitler himself. The vision is repeated when watches the speech in a theater and wonders if a "third eye" has open since his wound. Again, I have the impression of Aue's POV as through a pin point aperture casting an image in a camera obscura (an image Littell used much earlier in the novel), while behind or over him, a dimly perceived parallel world that seems to be guiding his fate. Again, we are not reading anything close to 'realist historical fiction' with this novel. More like a monstrous fable--the darkest of tales from the brothers Grimm, one that is not a representation of historical reality, but an endlessly suggestive fictive parallel.

I think one could make a case for the arch-narrator putting Aue through his paces being just that: a seceond-level narrative consciousness, a fictive consciousness, without having to leap out of the novel and see in this the naked voice of the author. The Oresteian mythical overlay is the vehicle for that consciousness, one that Aue himself evokes. Maybe consciousness is the wrong word... as from Aue, it looms more as an Uberweltenschauung vitiating his political beliefs, while at the same time, depriving him of the possibility of imagining anything else, confirming his fatalism and leaving him unable to respond, time after time, with anything but anger and aesthetic disgust to what he clearly recognizes as injustice.

Dan, in the reviews you've read, has anyone commented on his injury? The oddity of his post-war life as an industrial lace maker( and married!) fits this pattern well: that this whole narrative is being told by someone with severe brain damage surely deserves some attention! The character Aue is remembering before he was shot seems rather less robotic in his reactions to the horrors around him... and he takes considerable pains to avoid taking direct action whenever he has a choice--reported without the least hint of self-justification, but I don't see importance of the injury in Aue using it to explain his later actions, which smacks of self-justification that he otherwise avoids--so much as profoundly influencing the whole narrative. Because it's all presented as recollection, this injury is present from the beginning.


Reading Notes: The Kindly Ones (3)

This will be short. I see the advantage of making these notes while one is still reading. No matter how wildly off the mark, ignorance of what is to come will provide sufficient cover for one's embarrassment. Enter Blanchot. This is the third time I've been tempted to stop, go back, and start reading from the beginning. This happened last while reading Proust ... and The Man Without Qualities.
That visit with Una bodes no good for where Max is heading...
Comments


Frances Madeson said...

Oh brother, good luck! If Daniel Green answers you, the next magnum of Shiraz is on me! Anyway, I adore you for giving him the monstrous opportunity to publicly ignore you on your own blog. I believe it's a true deprivation for him not to engage with you in just these kinds of discussions, which would be so fascinating and fulfilling for him. I imagine he holds similar conversations in his head even as he keeps upping the ante of his Satyagraha. With all my heart I believe in him, in his prevailing, and the momentary respite from questioning that will bring.
February 13, 2010 10:07 AM
Jacob Russell said...
This post has been removed by the author.
February 13, 2010 11:01 AM

Jacob Russell said...
Not sure how a question becomes a contest where one does or does not prevail. That part of the post quoted from a comment I left to Green's review on the Reading Experience.
February 13, 2010 11:02 AM
Frances Madeson said...

Don't be coy, Jacob. He's unbaitable. I've wagered a big bottle of wine on just that. One that I'd happily lose.
February 13, 2010 11:38 AM
Jacob Russell said...

I don't understand why you think I'm "baiting" him. I'm not being coy at all... just asking a straightforward question. I immediately thought of Phineas Gage when Aue was shot--not the meager substantiated information, but the swirl of alternate lives that have been attributed to him.

Or do you mean my thoughts about the Orestes substrata? Associations mid-read, not an argument with Daniel or anyone else. Talking to myself out loud. Stuff to keep in mind as I progress. I see the prospect of a different take on this but I'd hardly be advancing these ideas as arguments for debate when I've got another 400 pages before me!

So far, the most disturbing scenes have been the conversations about ideology--especially his Paris reunion and discussion with the circle of French intellectuals... where the ideas are themselves, violence, the womb of violence... profoundly disturbing in a way I wasn't prepared for... caught me off guard, entered my dreams. The stuff you hear now coming from the idiot right was already frightening enough--layered by those conversations about National Socialism they have my hair standing on end. I fear for the future my sons are likely to see.
February 13, 2010 12:05 PM
Jacob Russell said...

Black Lawrence Press was not interested in publishing.. running out of places to send it.
February 13, 2010 12:08 PM
Frances Madeson said...

Ask away, darling. I hope you get an exceptional answer. FYI on violence, I saw this about dogs and bunnies and thought of you.

“An old keeper told me that the guys who rent out the rabbit shooting for dog trials soak potatoes in diesel and throw them down the holes a few days before they’re going to work the ground, the smell is meant to drive the rabbits out and they get more flushes for the dogs. I don’t think this method would make them bolt straight away though? :hmm:Princes Haiku said...

Thank you for posting the Youtube link to your poetry reading, Jacob. It's just wonderful; the sensibility of your poem and your beautiful reading voice. I know how the poem, "lost" feels and it moved me to tears.
February 23, 2010 11:41 PM
Jacob Russell said...

Thank you.. I love what you do on your blog. It's always good to hear kind words from you.
February 24, 2010 1:10 AM
Princess Haiku said...

Frances Madesonsaid...
Jacob,
What phrase are you thinking you coined? I didn't catch it. And that's not like me.
February 25, 2010 1:41 PM
Jacob Russell said...

Google "fog of history" & comes up with 988,000 hits.
February 25, 2010 1:48 PM said...

Jacob,
What phrase are you thinking you coined? I didn't catch it. And that's not like me.
February 25, 2010 1:41 PM
Google "fog of history" comes up with 988,000 hits.
February 25, 2010 1:48 PM


The Kindly Ones: (4) Weltanshauung of Kitsch: Ersatz of the Imagination, the Ontology of Evil 
More and more I sense that I'm reading two books woven into one. Littell invests the historical personalities with all the conventionally approved operations: believable dialog and motives, individuates them, makes them conventionally "well rounded," and yet, compared to the fictive characters, they come across as less and less 'real.' This is most pronounced in the conversations with Aue, an effect that Littell must have been aware of. The research has been so meticulous, so in-your-face--historical details piling up like well sorted mounds of confiscated clothing of the dead--that it all but labels in bold face the fact that what they say to the imaginary characters is something else, different in kind--which has the uncanny effect of giving the fictional characters the impression of being more powerfully real, and the more strange and improbable they are (Clemons and Wesser, Mandelbrod), the more they overshadow the Himmlers and Eichmans et al--creating an aesthetic tension I find hypnotic. Littell has pitted the powers of imagination against the worst nightmares of history and let them fight it out--a conflict that can have no victors: no matter how powerful the aesthetic transformation, history does not vanish, but remains to haunt us with a reality that cannot be assimilated, that defies sublimation into art, nor can all the horror and banality of history succeed in erasing the visionary capacity to see beyond what 'is.'

What remains most disturbing is the cross contamination--the Weltanshauung of the National Socialists is no less an aesthetic vision--as has often been pointed out, an aesthetics of evil, kitsch: Ersatz, I think, would be a better term--more than the false play of appearance, but a lie against Being, the ontology of evil.
----
Question of Thomas ?

What is your take on Thomas. I don't recall anyone spending much time on this character. He remains an enigma to me, but one that tugs at my sleeve... something that begs to be acknowledged. Aue and Thomas are opposites of the sort that suggest identity--the more so, given the Jungian slant of TKL's psycho-mythology.  I smell a tripartite identity here--two of them in open conflict within Aue himself--the erotic and the rational, made grotesque by lack of mediating ego--all libido and intellect, while Thomas is the dissociated third: an empty cypher--sex without attachment, self-serving without conscience or any motive beyond self-preservation--an emptiness that corresponds to Aue's, only Aue... until he murders Thomas, at least in recollection, contrary to his frequent denials, displays both remorse and guilt, but is incapable of integrating those feelings with his distorted ideas, his "world-view," or even acknowledging the contradictions. That he is aware of this, at least subconsciously, we see in the conversations with Vos. 

Aue doesn't murder Thomas, he murders himself and become the puppet of Thomas' ghost.

The Kindly Ones

At some point late in the morning I was certain that I'd gotten notice that a Thomas Bernhard novel I'd ordered had arrived at my local library branch... I couldn't find the notice. Was I remembering a dream? I went to the library anyway, and there at the reserve shelf--a librarian with a book in hand, sheet of paper taped to the back with my name. It wasn't Bernhard, and the copy had just arrived so they hadn't yet sent out a notice.

An interesting way to find Jonathan Littell's, The Kindly Ones in my hand.

I can't imagine I will have anything to add to Dan Green, in way of a review, but the first page alone got me thinking about writing a reader's journal, (pay attention, the narrator warns. I am not writing this for your benefit. What you get out it will up to you.

I like the challenge.

I'll have a good chunk of reading time tomorrow, thanks to an order to report for jury duty.

Library books no longer have those stamped cards on the inside cover so you can't tell how often it's been checked. This appeared to be a virgin copy... confirmed by several still uncut pages.

I wonder what it might have in common with Michel Tournier's, 1970 Prix Concourt novel, The Ogre (Roi des Ulnes.. the title itself a French translation of Goethe's Der Erlkönig, The Erl-King). Also a 1996 Volker Schlöndorff film with John Malkovich. which I've not seen.



Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Shubert Der Erl-Koenig

English translation of The Earl King ... turn off the sound... really obnoxious

Steven Fama ( and Helen Vendler) on Ashbery's Plenisphere

Steven Fama, of glade of theoric ornithic hermetica on John Ashberry's most recent book of poetry.

A “planisphere” in its primary definition is “a map of half or more of the celestial sphere with a device for indicating the part of a given location visible at a given time.” I like this as a kind of stand-in Ashbery’s work. The poems singly or together present matters and ideas – representative of the actual – in focus at that point, while much else always remains hidden. This of course is just how a planisphere works: it shows the stars and other celestial bodies visible that would be seen at a particular place and time if you were to look at the actual sky. Read a few more lines of an Ashbery poem, or turn the page to a new one (as one would rotate the “wheel” of the planisphere), and there’s, you might say, a whole new universe in view.

+(+)+

So what can be seen, if only momentarily and then shifting towards something else, in Ashbery’s Planisphere? Well, there are poems in which meaning materializes, or almost. Most explicitly there are every so often lines that can be lifted from the page and used to suggest a sort of Ashbery-ian philosophy. This has always been true in his poems, I think, but maybe these days, in this book, the outlines are a bit clearer within the purposeful or unavoidable ambiguity.

Read Steven's review HERE

Add to that, Helen Vendler in the NYT Review of Books (cribbed from the ever vigilant and ever wary BLKDGRD.

I've read those whose dismiss Vendler.... for whatever reasons, as a sterile apologist for academic poetry, the School of Quietude... whatever... I find her always refreshing, stimulating... and in no way stuffy or backward looking in the poetry she selects. She also pays attention to poets as thinkers, and that is always going to be close to what I hope to find in poetry.

Notes on a Poetry Reading

“How’d you like it?” I’m asked when the reading is over.

I don’t know what to say. It's poetry. I could say, "I enjoyed it," which I had. But poetry deserves more. I might like it, enjoy the reading… yet still have serious questions about the poetry, the poet’s delivery and voice. Can’t answer those kinds of questions on the way out the door, and if you haven’t read the work or are only minimally familiar with the poet’s writing (assuming this is not spoken word, where the written page is to the reading what a musical score is to a performance), there’s no way to fairly judge or understand it. What’s left to say?

I was thinking about this last night after the Philadelphia New Poets reading at Fergie’s Pub with Marion Bell, Laura Sims and Joseph Massey. I was broke and didn’t want to hang around watching other people drinking beer, so put on my coat when the reading was over and began to sidle my through the crowd toward the door. Greeted Frank Sherlock as I passed…

What'd you think? he asked.

Would have been enough to say I’d enjoyed it—which I did, but something about Joe Massey’s poems—and his reading—that had troubled me, and I foundered for words, some way to sum up my reaction—but hadn’t had time to think about it, and there was Joe coming up behind Frank and I felt like an ass cause I was afraid that whatever would have come out was going to sound too personal, too dismissive. Just wasn’t the place. If I was going to say anything less than “really liked your stuff,” he had more than earned the right to hear something with a measure of thought behind it—which was more than I could come with on the spot.

Maybe if I’d had time to relax, have a glass of wine, talk about this and that—the words and thoughts would have come together, maybe not. As I sat on the Broad Street subway, the question began to take shape—about how the think about the reading itself—any reading.

Hearing a poet whose work I’ve read and thought about presents no problem. I’ve internalized some of my response; the spoken reading, with poets who are at least moderately competent at voicing their work, offers a new way to hear and interpret it, something to compare and inform my thinking and judgment. How did the performance help or detract from the poems? But with a previously unknown poet, or one whose work is only passingly familiar to me, it gets more complicated. Since that’s mostly the case for me; I go to readings as much to discover new voices, to hear poets I’ve not had the chance to read, perhaps never heard of--as I do to add levels of appreciation for those I know, .

Complicated, because poetry worth the time demands more than a single reading, and when you hear a poem without experiencing it on the page, the visual arrangement of lines and spaces, without the voice of the poem coming alive in your own mind—there’s only so much you can say with any justice or sense of fairness to the poet.

All that said, some readings are better than others. Maybe it’s worth having a go at a review, keeping in mind, always—that without a deep relationship to the poetry in question, one’s response is going to be personal, mostly subjective, and can't pretend to offer anything like a considered critical judgment of the poems themselves. Here then, are some notes I wrote in my journal when I got home—far briefer than this preamble. And dear poets—it’s my profound conviction that the true merit of your work likely far exceeds any too quickly conjured opinion offered here!

For additional general thoughts on vocal readings, Inhabiting a Poem
Marion Bell: has a way of pausing, turning her head to the left, taking a quick shallow breath—making me wonder if she is responding to something on the page that I can’t see—a part of the poem, or is this a minor personal tic? Either way, it becomes part of the reading—part of its spoken rhythm, noticeable without being distracting. The text of the backlit pages appears to be printed in blocks—like a prose poem. But this is not prose, nor prosaic. Chiasmic structures, internally and at beginning and end—marking a sound equivalent of stanzas (as do the pauses, though they seem to come mid-‘stanza’.. an effect like a mid-line caesura). Uses repetition—relocating words phrases in changing contexts, demanding continual reinterpretation and layering of associations. I found myself very interested in the what and how of her poems and look forward to reading her work for myself.

Laura Sims: … need to see and read on page. Dense and layered associations, flowed past more quickly than could follow as I listened. Her reading voice is clear and precise—closely following the lines and typographical rhythms. Strong aural quality. Employs repetition as musical element, in places reducing words to pure sound and rhythm

In a body
In a body
Ina body
Ina body
Ina body

…ina

The last, coming more as breath than spoken word. Called to mind how Ursula Rucker uses vocalized breath, like a chant, like a black preacher on a roll, like percussion, to punctuate, link and propel phrases from one unit to the next.

Ina field
Ina field
Ina field
Ina field

… ina

Her poems demand reading on a page. When I have the chance to see them, her vocalization will remain with me.

Joe Massey: Finely crafted poems. Employs—with great skill—traditional devices: alliteration, internal and slant rhymes. Visions of semi-urban landscapes, intersections of natural and human scenes. Images… brought to mind a book of black and white photographs: empty lots, vacant buildings, leafless winter trees under winter skies. Close ups. Miniatures. Each a kind of outdoor still life. Vocabulary, exquisitely precise. Diction—relaxed, not quite colloquial. Everything under control. Physicallity of things. If there were direct representation of human presence, I missed it. Deserted, as though post-apocalyptic. I found his vocalization painful… a kind of unvarying monotone… monochromatic. Is this what brought to mind black and white photos? Uncomfortable too with the very precision and control—a too impressive control of language which, too my ear, left no room for doubt, no rent in the semblance, no point of entry to question the seeming transparency, identity of sign and referent… “this is really how it is. How it was. How it looks,” they seemed to say. “Believe this!”

My own preferences, my tastes--a deep mistrust of words impelled me to resist. The invitation was there--to dissect and examine the artifice—but closed to questioning the implied representative transparency. This is what I was fumbling to say to Frank as I left, and to Debrah Morkun outside on the sidewalk as I passed.

I will read Joe’s poems, and trust when I do, I will find that my doubts were groundless.

*Marion... I couldn't find a web page to link to your name. If you have one, let me know and I'll add it.
You can find links to  MP3 recordings of the readings at Gregory Bems, The Stale  (warning --no fault of the STALE, the sound quality is not good)
For another post on the reading voice:Dreaded Poet Voice

MC Hyland

READING collage poems assembled from The New Yorker.

Three Poems on Slant Thanks to Rachel Mallino for posting this on FaceBook.

From an interview on Apostrohe Cast News

4.) How do you feel about politics and poetry hanging out together?

I think they absolutely should hang out together–maybe it’s kind of ’70s feminist “the personal is political” of me, but I really think all human activity is inherently political, and ought to admit to being such. That said, I think that it’s important that poetry–art in general–not be a form of sloganeering. The point of art is to reflect and magnify complexity; to cause us to see additional alternatives and points of view.

5.) Is it bad to laugh at propaganda? Good? Insensitive and bourgeois? Intellectual and proactive?

The problem is that propaganda is, once you’re out of the context from which its power derives, often quite funny. At least, on a discourse level: for all the pretty colors and happy children, what Maoist propaganda says is still: “You might as well like this system, because you have no other choice.” It’s not a message you can ever actually succeed in getting across, is it?

Rat Beach, Willian Styron

From The New Yorker, July 20, 2009, William Styron's RAT BEACH

It is hardly possible to overestimate the importance for Western literature of the Iliad's demonstration that the fall of an enemy, no less than of a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic. With the Iliad, once and for all, an objective and disinterested element enters into the poet's vision of human life. Without this element, poetry is merely instrumental to various social aims, to propaganda, to amusement, to devotion, to instruction: with it, it acquires authority that since the Iliad it has never lost, an authority based, like the authority of science, on the vision of nature as an impersonal order.

  Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1971. 319

I recalled this passage after reading William Styron's Rat Beach; published in the July 20 issue of The New Yorker, the story is from a collection of short fiction, "The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps," to be published in October. What I remembered was the observation at the beginning of that paragraph: "that the fall of an enemy, no less than that of a friend or leader, is tragic and not comic," but what struck me when I looked it up in Anatomy of Criticism, and what may have been the deeper association, was Fry's observation that in Homer, literature had found an authority "on the vision of nature as an impersonal order." This goes well beyond the capacity to imagine the humanity of the enemy, suggesting a vision which, not only rises above tribal identity, but is no longer anthropocentric: nothing less, in fact, than an imaginative striving for the real that aspires to the ontological. An astonishing idea.

My own discontent with what is generally accepted as 'realist fiction' is grounded in what I sense to be a profound failure to address or acknowledge, even implicitly, the problem of treating the appearance--the various guises (and disguises) of reality--as though they were, if not identical with the real, reasonably suggestive representatives. I've thought of this before in terms of unacknowledged artifice. This leads one to the idea that what we need is the application of an artful dose of metafiction, a skillful foregrounding of the artifice, an ironic confession of authorial deceit; but that only acknowledges the problem--it doesn't solve it. Rather, it moves the aesthetic question to another plane: literature as a form of inauthentic play.

Inauthentic? How am I going to justify such a retrograde, if not downright reactionary essentialist term? How does one measure 'authenticity?' One doesn't, at least, not as an aesthetic quality. This has to do first, with play, and with its role in creative work. Think about it. For children, play is serious business. It's more than entertainment; it's an imaginative engagement with the world, with reality, an engagement with no boundaries between the categories of knowledge. Whatever works: received ideas, narratives, experiences, memory, reason--and such hard evidence-based knowledge as they have gained though age and education--all come together to create what is, contrary to those adult infantilized notions responsible for Disneylands and the American Christmas--not at all child-centered, but an imaginative vision that leads out of childhood and toward a mature encounter with reality. There is a smooth transition from child's play to the work of a cosmologist or particle physicist. Each is grounded in a search for the real, for a reality that exists beyond the limits of the subjective, the tribal--or the anthropocentric.

I see that my complaint about commercial realist fiction is not that it disguises its artifice, but that it is too preoccupied with playing with conventions of the real to seriously play at encountering reality itself. I could make the same complaint about some metafiction or 'experimental' literature: two ways of evading the problem.

Rat Beach at first read is a fairly straight forward war story: the interlude before the battle: a first person reminiscence told at some unspecified time. I could see this as a slightly revisionist John Wayne movie or one of those sophisticated comic books: illustrated dreams, descriptions of individual heroics, stock characters (a clueless Admiral with a meerschaum pipe who all the Marines hate, a Colonel Timothy Halloran, "Happy Halloran" they call him... without irony--John Wayne would play Colonel Halloran... maybe without the handlebar mustache). "When I was seventeen," the narrator tells us in the first sentence, "bravado, mingled with what must have been a death wish, made me enlist in the officer-training program of the Marine Corps" There is a strong hint in the last paragraph that the mention of this death wish is like the revolver produced in the first scene of a play.

The narrator was too young to be an effective leader and was sent by the Navy Department "for a year or two of physical and mental growth." Had he and his classmates been a year or so older, they would likely have been sent as replacements for the Marine Corps second lieutenants, who were killed or wounded as quickly as they arrived. Instead, he was a part of a diversionary force meant "to draw the Japs off balance." While the other divisions went ashore, they "steamed back to the safety, the calm, the virtual Stateside coziness of the island of Saipan, where we began to prepare for the invasion of Japan, and where I had ample time to reflect on both what I’d barely missed on Okinawa and Iwo Jima and what I was likely to encounter when I helped storm the fortress beaches of the mainland." This is the setting of the story. He is torn between a part of himself that regrets having missed the action of Okinawa, and greatly relieved that he had. The time in Saipan, which had been taken the year before, is given to an increasingly debilitating battle with fear and loss of self-esteem. Though he assumes his companions must share his feelings, , for all the joking and black humor about what is to come, this is not something they talk about. A dedicated aesthete before his enlistment, he sees in his two bunk mates--again stock movie characters: strong, athletic, agile--everything he is not. He finds Stiles beautiful--a hint perhaps of repressed homoerotic attraction contributing to his growing discomfort and self-reproach.

The evocation of fear, the atmosphere of the island, is effectively rendered.

I was so fucking scared, there on Saipan. The beach was still littered with the jagged metal junk from the American assault the previous summer, although you could always, with caution, pussyfooting among the rocks and debris, find a decent enough spot for swimming. The tents of our company bivouac were laid out alongside a dusty road that the Seabees had bulldozed through the coral after the Marine and Army troops had wrested the island from the Japs, months before we replacements arrived. A thousand miles northwest lay Okinawa, and the wounded from that battle were being transferred from huge floating infirmaries with names like Comfort and Mercy to the naval hospital not far down the coast from our encampment. Along the road, night and day, a stream of ambulances came with their freight: the gravely hurt, the paralyzed, the amputees, the head-trauma cases, and the other wreckage from what had turned out to be a mammoth land battle.

After long hours of training for battle they would lie in their tents and listen to those ambulances passing, one after another, making their way from the shore to the base hospital, reminders of what awaits them. The contrast he imagines to exist between himself and his fellow platoon leaders, and more so, between Colonel Halloran, a proven war hero whose natural leadership everyone acknowledges, makes him doubt not only his physical courage, but his ability to lead. When the stream of ambulances begins to let up they understand this as a sign that their time is growing near. One afternoon, they receive notice that everyone isto gather for a meeting. No reason is given, but they can guess. A date for the invasion has been set, but it must be kept secret. The beaches where they are to land have been selected, but they cannot release this information. A brigadier general speaks from the podium:

his gravelly voice boomed over the loudspeakers. “Gentlemen, we are faced with a difficult paradox. It would be reassuring if, after the destruction wrought upon the Japanese Army at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it could be reported that the morale of their troops had been shattered, and their resources undermined, making the coming invasion easier on us. But the plain truth is—and our intelligence reports are clear on this matter—the Jap forces are, more than ever before, prepared to die for the Emperor, to fight to the last man.” He droned on. “More fucking blather,” I heard Colonel Halloran say. “Everybody knows the fucking Jap cocksuckers are a bunch of suicidal apes.”

Something in the language at this point caught my attention. I turned back to read again the passage where the name of the beach is explained.

I’d been there many times before and thus was familiar with the droll monstrosity on a giant poster that an engineer outfit had stuck up on a stanchion—a creation executed by some marine who had been a cartoonist in civilian life. It was a bespectacled squinty-eyed Jap soldier portrayed as a dementedly grinning rat. “Know Your Enemy” was the legend beneath the profoundly repulsive effigy, complete with shitty-looking cap, buckteeth, whiskers, pink watery eyes, a coiling pink tail, and—drawn with such subtlety that one didn’t immediately notice it—an elongated pink cock gripped in a hairy paw. It was this last detail, usually eliciting a slow double take, that got at everyone’s funny bone, especially the old-timers who’d been through the meat grinders on Guadalcanal and Tarawa and here on Saipan, and whose hatred for the Japs was like an ongoing lust. In keeping with the Marine Corps’s habit of uglifying, whenever possible, the names of the natural splendors it encroached upon, the poster had caused this portion of the shoreline to be called Rat Beach

 It isn't just the words. I remember watching cartoons during the war: the images--like the buck-toothed rat. And I remember overhearing conversations, and later, in school, some of my teachers (one in particular, a veteran of European campaigns, taught history in 8th grade and was later high school Vice Principal); he had no more love of Germans than the Island hopping Marines had for the Japanese: yes, German's were Krauts... but then there were always these codas: notes of respect for German discipline, intelligence, capacity for organization. They were not sub-human.

I'm not accusing Styron of racism. I assume his intentions were honorable: he's bringing us back to the experience of those Marines in their own time, something we ought not to forget. No. There's nothing there that should be changed. What was bothering me, I think, was the subsumation of that war-time depiction of the enemy into a point-of-view larger than that of the characters... or should I say... no larger than that of the characters. Keep this in mind.

The last to speak is the Admiral with the meerschaum pipe. "I'll be a son of a bitch if it isn't Good news Crews," Halloran says, "the fucking windbag, he's going to feed us the same load of garbage." The Admiral describes the armada that will assemble to support the assault, the days of barrage from 16 inch gun, the waves of air strikes, the bombs, the Navy frogmen who will clear the beaches. None of this, they understand, will save them from the bloodbath. When the assembly breaks up, Happy Halloran, to relieve the tension, leads the battalion officers, platoon leaders, company commanders "and a major named Wilhoite" on a run over the sands of Rat Beach in a driving storm. They run, chocking on the rain, until they are exhausted and the clouds break and they fall on the sand under the light of a blazing full moon. Here is where Halloran (as John Wayne) gives the real dirt about what is going to happen to them. Lest we not recall King Harry at Agincourt, the narrator conveniently does, and reminds us. The greatest battle the Marines have ever faced, but they are the best trained, best prepared battalion in history, and though many will not return... etc.

What Styron doesn't have to remind the reader of, is the atomic bomb. Even without the roar of the super fortresses passing daily overhead on their way to Tokyo, the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would hang over this story, darken its every scene, until they become, in the absence of their mention, its true and deeply problematic subject.
The whole story is in past tense. In the beginning, we assume that this a memoir is told long after the war, but Styron uses the ending to dislocate the narration in time. They hve returned after the run on the beach. The narrator cannot sleep. He lies in bed drenched in sweat, heart pounding, imagining his last moments. But he is not thinking about the Japanese mainland:

Until this moment, I hadn’t allowed myself to rehearse the first detail of the plan that would lead me into the jungle. But now I let my arm fall to the side of my cot, and I touched with my fingers the cold metal of the carbine cradled in its rack above the flooring. Beneath my hand, the barrel of the weapon was oily and slick, and I caressed its surface for long minutes as if touch in itself were reassurance and consolation. Then I drew back my arm. The thought of that night filled my mind like an ecstatic heartbeat. What night it would be I didn’t know; I knew only that there would be such a night for certain, and soon—the night when at last I stole out of the tent and into the cricketing darkness, and there amid the hibiscus and the flame trees destroyed my fear forever.

Are we to understand this as irony, this story, ending in a dream of suicide only days before the war would end? I'm not sure. There is no closure, more a kind of closing in, an invagination of the point of view, a sealing off from time and history--whether biographical or social.

What does that ending tell us? Building on the anticipated horrors that would surely await those who went ashore, Hiroshima has one meaning, and only one: it was the alternative to suicide.
Through the prism of this story, it is not possible to think in any other way, in any other context. The 145,000 dead: men, women, children, animals... they do not exist in the same reality as that fearful man fingering his weapon on a sleepless night in Saipan, or in that of his companions preparing themselves for what can only been seen as suicide by other means.


Where is Homer's objective and disinterested element, without which "poetry is merely instrumental to various social aims, to propaganda, to amusement, to devotion, to instruction?" Where is the vision that releases us from the subjective, the tribal, the anthropocentric to a "vision of nature as an impersonal order?" Such a vision arises, not out of the point of view manifest in the narrative itself or of its characters: it is the vision of the larger contest, the vision that emerges from the author's imaginative play... stretching toward a reality which is always just beyond the content, the subject matter, beyond everything directly represented, a vision which comes into being through the reader--in our encounter with the work, our participation in that authentic play.

That is what I found missing in Rat Beach. Instead of an opening out into a greater reality, the story ensnares mind and imagination in a vision as narrow and limiting as propaganda. What is the nature of the fear that led to suicide? Reduced to a plea to belive in the neccesity of Hiroshima.
Not fear of death... but of inadequacy. And I cannot help but equate that with an aesthetic inadequacy. A failure that illustrates the limits of a too narrow reliance on the conventions of realism. Is that why Styron kept these stories from publication in his lifetime?

WAR DANCES: Sherman Alexie

WAR DANCES
Sherman Alexie
The New Yorker
August 10 & 17, 2009

Sherman Alexie is most at home as story teller, and in War Dances he's at his best. The narrator (who we have no doubt is the voice of the author... but hold on to that thought) wakes up to find himself deaf in his right ear. Between accounts of clinic and hospital visits, MRI's that lead to an initial diagnosis of menngioma, he interleaves a second story about the death of his father (and a third about his WWII vet grandfather).
The associations are natural: anxiety concerning his own prognosis (is it benign? Is it cancer? ) reminding him of his father's last days. It turns out that the mennigioma is likely related to childhood hydrocephalus, which conveniently widens the range of the story to encompass the whole course of a life, from birth to death, transforming War Dances into a kind of meditation: the way a good comedian will use narrative and humor to lightly touch on matters easily crushed by more serious treatment. We don't need to have it pounded into our heads that a brain tumor is scary, that a child will carry in perpetual mourning the memory of a father destroyed by poverty, prejudice and alcohol; the reality will speak for itself.

The humor takes several forms. Self-conscious, self-deprecating, as in a conversation in the hospital while looking for a blanket for his father.

And then I saw him, another Native man, leaning against a wall near the gift shop. Well, maybe he was Asian--lots of those in Seattle. [...] Maybe he was Mexican, which is really kind of Indian, too, but not the kind that I needed. It's hard to tell sometimes what people are. Even brown people guess at the identity of other brown people.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," the other man said.
"You Indian?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"What tribe?
"Lummi."
"I'm Spokane."
"My first wife was Spokane. I hated her."
"My first wife was Lummi. She hated me."
We laughed at the new jokes that instantly sounded old.

... or nervous black humor, as in a phone conversation with his doctor after waiting for the results of the MRI:

Alone and haunted, I wandered the mall, tried on clothes, and waited for my cell phone to right.
Two hours later, I wanted to murder everything, so I drove south to a coffee joint, a spotless place called Dirty Joe's. Yes, I was silly enough to think that I'd be calmer with a caffeinated drink.
As I sat outside in a wooden chair and sipped my coffee, I cursed the vague, rumbling, ringing noise in my ear. And yet when my cell phone rant I again held it to my deaf ear.
"Hello. Hello," I said and wondered if it was a prank call, then remembered and switched the phone to my left ear.
"Hello," my doctor said. "Are you there?"
"Yes," I said. "So what's going on?"
"There are irregularities in your head."
My head's always been irregular."
"It's good to have a sense of humor," the doctor said. "You have a small tumor that is called a meningioma. They grow in the meninges membranes that lie between your brain and your skull."
"Shit," I said. "I have cancer."
"Well," he said. "These kinds of tumors are usually non-cancerous. And they grow very slowly, so in six months or so we'll do another MRI. Don't worry. You're going to be O.K."
What about my hearing?" I asked.
"We don't know what is causing the hearing loss, but you should start a course of prednisone, a steroid, just to go with the odds. Your deafness might lessen if left alone, but we've had success with the steroids in bring back hearing. There are side effects, like insomnia, weight gain, night sweats, and depression."
"Oh boy," I said. "Those side effects might make up most of personality already. Will the 'roids also make me quick to pass judgement?  I've always wished I had a dozen more skin tags and moles."
The doctor chuckled. "You're a funny man."

  Three times in these passages the narrator points out the joke: defensive humor, but conscious, mindful, double edged. I really like this, the way Alexie turns the wit around--so the wit is there but less than the main point, never an end in itself. Irony de-fanged, like Woody Allen of Manhattan or Annie Hall.
  The story develops by episodes: short entitled scenes. MY KAFKA BAGGAGE, where he finds a dead cockroach in his luggage. SYMPTOMS: hearing loss, which reminds him of a story of a man who had cockroaches extracted from his ears. BLANKETS: ...for his father after his foot was amputated, shivering from cold in a hospital corridor.

DOCTOR's OFFICE
HYDROCEPHALUS
CONVERSATION
WOLD PHONE CONVERSATION, 3 AM
VALEDICTION
BATTLE FATIGUE
OPHANS
COFFEE-SHOP NEWS
MENINGIOMA
DRUGSTORE INDIAN
EXIT INTERVIEWE FOR MY FATHER
REUNION.

These marked divisions allow for some deviations from straight story telling. EXIT INTERVIEW takes the form of an imaginary Q and A, son to father. It begins with what amount to one or two line jokes:

* True or False: When a reservation-raised Native American dies of alcoholism, it should be considered death by natural causes [...]
* Is it true that the only literary term hat has any real meaning in the Native American world is "road movie"?

.
These become increasingly personal and emotionally resonant.

* Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent you broke your children's hearts, collectively and individually, six hundred and twelve times, and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been?
* Without using the words "man" or "good," can you please define what it means to be a good man?

In the middle of EXIT INTERVIEW, Alexie has inserted a poem and follow-up commentary.

· Your son wrote this poem to explain one of the most significant nights in his life:

Mutually Assured Destruction

When I was nine, my father sliced his knee
With a chainsaw. But he let himself bleed
And finished cutting down one more tree
Before his boss drove him TO EMERGENCY.

Late that night, stoned on morphine and beer,
My father needed my help to steer
His pickup into the woods. “Watch for deer,”
My father said. “Those things just appear

Like magic.” It was an Indian summer
And we drove through warm rain and thunder,
Until we found that chainsaw, lying under
The fallen pine. Then I watched, with wonder,

As my father, shotgun-rich and impulse-poor,
Blasted that chainsaw dead. “What was that for?”
I asked. “Son,” my father said. “Here’s the score.
Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”


· Well, first of all, as you know, you did cut your knee with a chainsaw, but in direct contradiction to your son’s poem:

(a) You immediately went to the emergency room.

(b) Your boss called your wife, who drove you to the emergency room.

(c) You were given morphine, but even you were not stupid enough to drink alcohol while on serious narcotics.

(d) You and your son did not get into the pickup that night.

(e) And, even if you had driven the pickup, you were not injured seriously enough to need your son’s help with the pedals and/or the steering wheel.

(f) You never in your life used the word “appear,” and you certainly never used the phrase “like magic.”

(g) You think that “Indian summer” is a questionable seasonal reference for an Indian poet to use.

(h) What the fuck is “warm rain and thunder”? Well, everybody knows what “warm rain” is, but what the fuck is “warm thunder”?

(i) You never went looking for that chainsaw, because it belonged to the Spokane Tribe of Indians, and what kind of freak would want to reclaim the chainsaw that had just cut the shit out of his knee?

(j) You also agree that the entire third stanza of this poem sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song, and not necessarily one of the great ones.

(k) And yet “shotgun-rich and impulse-poor” is one of the greatest descriptions your son has ever written and probably redeems the entire poem.

(l) You never owned a shotgun. You did own a few rifles in your youth, but did not own so much as a pellet gun during the last thirty years of your life.

(m) You never said, in any context, “Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”

(n) But, as you read it, you know that is absolutely true and does indeed sound suspiciously like your entire life philosophy.

This is good to keep in mind when we're tempted to too narrowly identify the narrator with the author. What we are reading is not a memoir, not a representation of remembered events, but a writer's response to them, a reconfiguration pointing, not back into the past replayed, but into life beyond nostogia; an artful betrayal of naked reality that frees us from it--to live and breath in the present, prepared again to step forward into a still unconditioned future.

Ziggurat: New Yorker Story

What is the maze in Stephen O'Connor's New Yorker story, Ziggurat?

What is the Minotaur?

I resist asking for the same reasons I resist asking 'what is M Moreau in A Sentimental Education? (substitute for 'M Moreau,' any character or object in any work of Realist Fiction.) Not that the question is inappropriate. Few questions one might ask of a literary work could be more important. But everything depends on the quality--and direction--of the resistance.

In O'Connor's story there is a Minotaur. He sleeps on a pool table in what seems to be a sort of rec-room in the maze. He eats people. And dogs. Tears them into pieces and gnaws the meat from their bones. He is a very messy eater. The only other character (the only other character who doesn't become food before they have a chance to earn the distinction) is the New Girl. We don't know her name. For that matter, we don't know the Minotaur's name. Only the games the New Girl plays on the rec-room console have names: Ziggarat being the Main One.

To the Minotaur, humanity consisted of loud noises and a series of cowardly and craven acts. Running, etc. Curses, self-soiling. It was not uncommon for one human being to push another into his path, or even to slay that human being and stretch the cadaver out on the ground as an offering... None of this made any difference, of course. Wham! Crunch. Splurt. Hmm. Hmm. Tasty.

The New Girl knows this. She is aware that the Minotaur sees her as lunch. But she is too absorbed in her game. "Her shoulders shook. Her fingers twitched on the computer keys, making noises like munching rodents." Her eyes "were separated by two wrinkles that said to the Minotaur, Go away! I'm too busy for you!"

Oh, no!" the new girl said. "Oh, shit." Her smell filled his sinuses and engendered slobber. At one point, he brought his lips so close to her shoulder that he could feel his breath bounce back off her skin. Why not? he thought. Why not right now? There's not a reason in the world. But he didn't.

And there is the story. Why didn't he?

He likes the way she smells. Is confused and intrigued by her indifference. Almost like love. He follows her through the maze. She follows him through the maze. He loses track of her. Years pass. Centuries. She returns. She sleeps beside him, sleeps in his arms. He loses her again. Builds a Ziggarat (like in the game), breaks through the ceiling of the maze and finds himself in the rec-room with the pool table where it all began. He somehow finds his way to the sea, grows smaller ever smaller climbing and descending the dunes. The End.

Unlike characters in mainstream realist fiction, one can't stop here: describing the plot, the mind and motives of the characters. The story creates blanks one is impelled to fill in. What is this Minotaur? What is the Maze? Realist fiction does too, but it's easier to ignore them. Because a Minotaur is a member of the Null Set--does not exist in the real world, we think his signifigance lies elsewhere--in what he represents, something outside the Null Set. In the case of Realist Fiction, sign and signifier are pasted one over the other, as though they were the same thing. Resistance has to come from the opposite direction. It creates a maze of illusion where we wander, indifferent to the Minotaur stalking us. Interesting, I thought when I finished this story. Opposites illuminate by their difference. But where is the light here, what is its nature and what does it illuminate?

I thought about Chekhov. Gusev's body sinking into the sea and the sky with colors without names. And how could anyone think of Gusev without remembering Billy Bud? Or the White Whale? Or Judge Holden? Or... a vast range of literary production... you don't have to turn to Kafka... for the blank that needs filling, that will not let us rest without engaging our resistance to answer the question... what is the Minotaur?

And there it is, I thought... what's wrong--not with realist fiction--but with its apologists, who want to use literature and art to point back to what they already believe--when everything that matters in art pushes us beyond, out of the maze... the endless game... vanishing into the unknown.
A link to another O'Conner Story: I'm Happier Now, originally published in ThreePenny Review, 2008.
and from The New England Review, TROUBLE

"A Tiny Feast" Chris Adrian. New Yorker Story

Chris Adrian. "A Tiny Feast". New Yorker, April 20, 2009

There are places in the world--too many places--for too many of this planet's temporary inhabitants, where death does not come as a surprise or interruption, but camps like an unwelcome guest, squatting on the doorstep, sharing the family compound, sleeping beside them in the box or the sheet of aluminum that shelters them from sun or rain (when rain remembers to come); a guest who has been there as long as even the oldest can remember, stealing, as soon as one's back is turned, or in plain sight, from the cupboard of life, the very breath they thought had been hidden away, for whose sake they had gone through the motions of masking from his vision with charms and prayers--long after there remains not the least reason to believe in the power of charms or prayers to save--but for those of us privileged to live what we like to think of as normal lives, even those who understand and accept the terms of our limited contract on this earth, when death comes to claim those we love, it comes as something uncanny, a mystery, incomprehensible, for which, not even our previous losses can prepare us.

Chris Adrian's "A Tiny Feast" is an almost miraculous realization of the mystery of death, of the power of its visitation, of how it astonishes us into recognition of love--how is it possible for anything to be at once, "so awesome and so utterly powerless?"
Oh, and how do we account for the strange ways of medicine and therapeutic care, the magic of which is not love... but indifference?


This story is a Faery tale. The parents of the dying child are none other than Oberon and Tatiana. The caretakers don't recognize them for what or who they are--for the absolutely unique and unanticipated loss they are experiencing. Cut off, as we all are in their place, at least for a time, from the human community: what the Jewish tradition of mourning recognizes in the etiquette of sitting shiva. Guests enter the house of the mourners, but in silence. They may speak, but only if the mourners initiate the conversation. It's understood that death and mourning cuts us off from the community and we re-enter only in stages over time. Seven days of Shiva. Thirty days without the artificial pleasures of music and wine. Eleven months and the end of the obligation to recite Kaddish. Yahrzeit commemorating the day of loss after a year. A light ignited year by year for life.

For life...

They are faeries. They are immortal... as are we all in our imagination. What do you do with Death, when you are immortal?

... but offer to the dying ... a little feast?

Chris Adrian's story... is just that: a little feast. To all of us... mortals, who live under the hill ... and always have, and always will.

Language Poetry and Anglo-American Empiricism?

A question that's been Tweeting my mind...

A review HERE of Rae Armantrout's recently released Versed ... this is Silliman to make you a believer--there is nothing vague or impressionistic when he writes about poetry, like an Ansel Adams photo--sharp focus in bright light, surgical precision--and in this post, writing about one his oldest friends, deeply moving... a review to print out a,d save... and savor. Whatever Language Poetry is or was, can see here that there are no simple catagorical answers you can apply to pin down its most accomplished practitioners.
Still... the question persists... is what they share(d) no more than an indefinite zeitqeist? I can't help but notice a relationship, and at the same time,  be relieved to see that some of the poets who represented the movement from the beginning have moved out of the grip of its strangulated nominalism... if they were ever really in its hold.