Cosmopoetica

I’ve had The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my shelf since it was first released (a spontaneous purchase courtesy of a significant sale price and a prominent floor display). I’d tried to get into it at least three times before, but always stalled early and moved onto different things.

I only got around to finishing it because I listed “International Mystery” as a category in my 10*10*10 Reading project… proof the reading project works because it really is a pretty good read that I may never have otherwise experienced.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a kind of open-air, closed-room, cold-case murder mystery involving a girl who goes missing from a small island while the only road in is blocked by an impassable traffic accident. After forty years of obsessive investigation into the case the girl’s grandfather and scion of one of the last of the family owned national companies in the country hires Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced financial journalist, ostensibly to write a family history about his complicated, bickering, conniving family but secretly to look into his granddaughter’s disappearance. Mikael comes to be assisted by Lisbeth Salander, an anti-social, punk-inspired hacker who possibly suffers from Asperger Syndrome—the girl with the dragon tattoo—who was first hired to investigate him.

Stieg Larsson, a journalist himself, was clearly comfortable with technology, leading to an odd dichotomy in the book: it’s a rare case of fiction that actually (and accurately) uses specific names of technology and software (including links to web sites in a few cases), but the technical wizardry displayed by Salander goes beyond the unbelievable and into the realm of the impossible. Being decidedly unfamiliar with Swedish politics, I can’t tell if Larsson’s characterization of them is similarly stretched. It’s certainly believable that the country’s financial system is as warped and corrupt as Larsson makes it out to be, but unlike the technical fantasies, I have no way of knowing. In life, Larsson was a well-known left-wing activist. Take from that what you will.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is entertaining. It strikes me as a product of its time, with a lineage that owes as much to television, movies and the Internet as it does the mystery fiction that Mikael Blomkvist reads and refers to throughout. It’s not, as a whole, particularly realistic, existing instead in the space of the cinematically unreal, where real pieces and parts are combined to create something no one would mistake for our reality. I’m not saying this to knock the book—I don’t demand true realism from mystery fiction—just to try to place it into context.

Though I still don’t quite have all the family connections and relationships figured out (even with the help of the family tree provided as part of the book’s front matter), that didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the simple pleasures of a well-crafted, thrilling story set in a foreign locale. I’ll certainly read the other two novels in the trilogy at some point…

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Matter, the latest novel in Iain M. Banks’s speculative fiction series (loosely defined) set in the far-future, inter-galactic world of the “Culture” is a glorious mess.

On the glorious side are all the things I’ve liked—and sometimes loved—about the other two Culture novels I’ve read: amazing, grand ideas of technology and culture set in a far future in which civilizations—human and machine–at various levels of advancement, from the primitive to the “sublimed” who essentially exist in pure information space, interact (control, manipulate, monitor, ignore)… sometimes within different levels of the same world.

On the messy side I would include: the too-leisurely pacing of the first half of the book, an on-going issue with characters who become cliches in their own stories (in this case, the central “bad guy” (Tyl Lausp) is as thin as they come), and an irritating manner of giving practically every character an irritating name. While Banks is a step above many sci-fi authors when it comes to creating fully-realized characters, it’s curious to me that his AI characters are often more entertaining than the “living” people and aliens that play such prominent roles in the story…

If you’re looking for Dostoevsky or Faulkner, the messiness might be a significant problem. But not for me. If you like speculative fiction rife with big ideas and a sprawling, complex conception of future worlds, a detailed outline of this novel would probably be more satisfying than a dozen of the run-of-the-mill sci-fi novels you’ll find browsing the shelves at your nearest bookstore.

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Thanks to the one serious flaw in the 3-volume set of Grene and Lattimore’s Greek Tragedies—they have Oedipus the King and Antigone in the first volume, but not Oedipus at Colonus– I read the “Oedipus Cycle” out of chronological order. I didn’t even read them in the order they were composed. So I ended up confusing myself.

Jim Gourley’s insightful comments have helped me immensely in starting to make sense of the parallels between Creon and Oedipus as well as historical background that informs the composition. I really need to read more on the latter!

In Oedipus at Colonus, Creon gets his come-uppance for morphing into a defiant butthead. Oedipus goes to his reward(s). And the stage is set for Antigone’s defiant and/or petulant and/or commendable and/or moving sacrifice for the doomed Polyneices.

I have to agree with Jim that the parallels between Creon and Oedipus are striking. I’m not quite so sure how much greater Creon’s punishment is. It’s unclear to me how long Oedipus wandered before reaching Colonus (which is why the time-frame involved matters a little to me), but no matter how long it might have been, Creon is apparently doomed to not just living with failure, but doing so with no redemption or succor at his end as Oedipus found. On the other hand, Oedipus had to live with not only being a defiant, hubristic ass, but in the process killing his father, marrying his mother, and siring his own sibling children. Creon simply has to rue his hard-headedness with the attendant comforts of remaining the King…

I’m going to consider the Oedipus cycle as a whole in a different post. I can say this: the whole cycle should be required adult reading.

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No Happy Ending was one of those fortuitous discoveries made while browsing the used book shelves when I should’ve been working. Previously unknown to me, Paco Ignacio Taibo II appears to be one of Latin America’s most renowned authors. Reading this novel, I can see why. No Happy Ending is both a lyrical hard-boiled detective novel and a socially responsible and—as far as I can determine such things—realistic novel of Mexico City and its political history… with a touch of magical realism thrown in. It’s a spare and beautiful and, for this too-parochial American, sometimes deeply strange novel.

I enjoyed Taibo’s melding of hard-boiled prose, humorous irony, and philosophical musings. For instance, this passage occurs early on in the book after the taciturn Shayne has discovered the body in the bathroom next to his office (a body dressed up as an ancient Roman, no less) and spent the day wandering the city in nearly complete silence:

He was becoming quite a talker. He preferred his old style, the taciturn and enigmatic Belascoarán Shayne. The other face of the clueless, uneasy, perennially surprised Belascoarán Shayne. The public face. Because, when all is said and done, a man is a hunter after images. After his own image. Sometimes he’s successful in the hunt and comes with something consistent, warm, something close to reality. Other times he spends all night pursuing an illusion, clinging to shadows. And sometimes the shadow turns around and comes after him, and everything goes to hell. His only chance for survival was to accept the chaos and quietly become one with it. Take yourself lightly, but take the city seriously, the city, that inscrutable porcupine bristling with quills and soft wrinkles. Shit, he was in love with Mexico City. Another impossible love on his list. A city to love, to love with abandon. Passionately, wildly.

Héctor’s mind fed on all this and more (the cold air, the ranchera music drifting up from the record store, the roofs of buses passing before his eyes without really registering) as he watched the street from the roof of his office building, where he’d gone to smoke a cigarette, to pursue the night, watching from above, keeping his distance.

The best thing was to wait. The killers would show their faces sooner or later. He tossed his cigarette over the edge and watched the tiny spark’s descent with pleasure, a dot of light slowly dropping seven floors to the street.

Beside the unabashedly activist, political and historical aspects of the novel, and setting aside the style, what makes this mystery so different from others is that throughout the narrative the police and the government aren’t just understood to be corrupt sometimes, but assumed to be corrupt all the time. Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the one-eyed private detective protagonist of the novel, is truly a man against the world who nevertheless operates wholly in service of his world. There are no sympathetic detectives in this novel, no policemen who recognize Shayne’s essential rightness and help him out from time to time. Shayne operates in a fundamentally corrupt environment rife with ghosts and dreams and hints of the waking dead.

No Happy Ending is a formally inventive novel as well. Each section takes on a different tone, voice and point of view, reminding me of Bolano’s 2666, but on a vastly reduced scale.

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Antigone is a compelling play. Reading it again as an adult I’m struck by themes (and questions) that I never noted before… or that were given to me by a teacher and promptly forgotten.

For instance, why does Antigone go back to the body? She’s buried Polynieces—or at least performed the rites sufficient to allow him passage to Hades—so her work is done. Antigone is a play of (relative) subtlety and complexity—I think Antigone’s action has to be more than a simple necessity of plot. Is it a reflection of Sophocles’ low estimation of women? Is Antigone as suicidal as she seems at certain times? Does she return to the scene out of the same twisted logic and compulsion that compels criminals in contemporary crime dramas to return to the scene of the crime, a secondary story Sophocles’ recognized but chose not to tell? Or am I over-thinking what could just be Yet Another Example of the Work of Fate?

It’s no wonder that Antigone and Lysistrata have so often been invoked and reshaped in modernist times through a feminist glass (in very different ways, of course). Antigone is a complex character—embodying more than any other woman the complex and contradictory aspects of being human. She’s pious, manipulative, impulsive, thoughtful, vengeful, wistful… and in her end she is an instrument of the gods.

And what happened to Creon, so wise and measured in his responses in Oedipus the King? Even given the constant support of the oddly one-sided chorus it felt like such a radical change, though in keeping with the Oedipal theme of pride resulting in blindness, literal or metaphorically.

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Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (aka Oedipus Rex) is second only to Hamlet in my personal canon of touchstone plays, works that are so "big"– of such archetypal and architectonic importance to my aesthetic apparatus– that it’s hard to write about them at all. I feel wholly inadequate to the task and can’t turn down the volume of the voice that reminds me there’s probably nothing I can say that someone else hasn’t already said… and said better.

What struck me most re-reading Oedipus the King (which I last read in high school, using that little knowledge to skip it when it was required in college) is the language. I doubt David Grene’s wonderful translation was the one we used in school all those years ago, and that probably has something to do with the feeling of discovery. But so far I’ve found a greater, unexpected beauty in all the ancient plays I’ve re-read. Much of the change in perception probably has to do with being older and (arguably) a tiny bit wiser. Teiresias, in particular, is razor sharp. He first prophesizes eloquently but directly, with the force of a broadsword:

Teiresias
Since you have taunted me with being blind,
here is my word for you.
You have your eyes but see not where you are
in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.
Do you know who your parents are? Unknowing,
you are an enemy to kith and kin
in death, beneath the earth, and in this life.
A deadly footed, double striking curse,
from father and mother both, shall drive you forth
out of this land, with darkness on your eyes,
that now have such straight vision. Shall there be
a place will not be harbour to your cries,
a corner of Cithaeron will not ring
in echo to your cries, soon, soon,–
when you shall learn the secret of your marriage
which steered you to a haven in this house,–
haven no haven, after lucky voyage?
And of the multitude of other evils
establishing a grim equality
between you and your children, you know nothing.
So, muddy with contempt my words and Creon’s!
Misery shall grind no man as it will you.

and when rebuffed, brings out a rapier:

Oedipus
I did not know then you would talk like a fool–
or it would have been long before I called you.

Teiresias
I am a fool then, as it seems to you–
but to the parents who have bred you, wise.

Oedipus
What parents? Stop! Who are they of all the world?

Teiresias
This day will show your birth and will destroy you.

Oedipus
How needlessly your riddles darken everything.

Teiresias
But it’s in riddle answering you are strongest.

And finally takes his leave with twisted wordplay that befits the contortions of the prophecy that is soon to consume Oedipus:

Teiresias
I tell you, king, this man, this murderer
(whom you have long declared you are in search of,
indicting him in threatening proclamation
as murderer of Laius)– he is here.
In name he is a stranger among citizens
but soon he will be shown to be a citizen
true native Theban, and he’ll have no joy
of the discovery: blindness for sight
and beggary for riches his exchange,
he shall go journeying to a foreign country
tapping his way before him with a stick.
He shall be proved father and brother both
to his own children in his house; to her
that gave him birth, a son and husband both;
a fellow sower in his father’s bed
with that same father that he murdered.

An obvious problem with reading dramatic works is the fact that, as readers, we are missing a good part of the power of a play: the physical production and the interpretation of the actors. While this is a generalized problem with reading plays, I think it’s magnified when the readers are high school, or even college, age. With life experience comes the ability to go beyond the dramatic plot and consider the more subtle aspects of language and, of course, the existential quandary of fate, which is barely discerned– if at all– by someone in their teens. But it’s easy to be distracted by the simple, powerful drama of Oedipus the King:

Oedipus
… Light of the sun, let me
look upon you no more after today!
I who first saw the light bred of a match
accursed, and accursed in my living,
with them I lived with, cursed in my killing.

[...]

Second Messenger
… He [Oedipus] tore the brooches–
the gold chased brooches fastening her robe–
away from her and lifting them up high
dashed them on his own eyeballs, shrieking out
such thing as: they will never see the crime
I have committed or had done upon me!
Dark eyes, now in the days to come look on
forbidden faces, do not recognize
those whom you long for– with such imprecations
he struck his eyes again and yet again
with the brooches. And the bleeding eyeballs gushed
and stained his bear– no sluggish oozing drops
but a black rain and a bloody hail poured down.

and forget that the classic questions raised in Oedipus the King about fate and destiny are classic questions for a reason… they remain as relevant today as they were 2500 years ago, though they come now in different guises and inform ideologies that would, in custom and gown, be unrecognizable to Sophocles.

I, of course, have no answers to this central existential dilemma. But I know I perceive the problem more fully and keenly than ever, and plays like this may mean many of the same things they meant to me when I read them as a teen, but in radically intensified fashion. In a recent comment my friend Jared asked about works we should return to regularly. I’m not sure the most correct answer isn’t "all of them." But since we can’t possibly do so, whatever answer I may come up with later will certainly include works like Oedipus the King among them.

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Bloom is a tale of nanotech gone wild. Seemingly insatiable nanotech spores of unknown and accidental origin– the Mycora– have taken over Earth and the inner solar system, consuming most of humanity and creating what the humans eking out an existence on Jupiter’s moons and in the asteroid belt call the Mycorum. A few million human beings have survived by fleeing to the outer planets. The central story in the novel is that of an exploratory mission to penetrate the Mycorum and see what’s become of the Earth and Mars, simultaneously investigate the Mycora and testing a new hull material that might resist their appetite.

The obvious comparison for this kind of take is Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Bloom acquits itself quite well. McCarthy, like Bear, isn’t just an "idea" writer, but one who explores those ideas through realistic characters. And there are plenty of interesting technological ideas introduced as the crew pursues its odyssey to Earth, encountering various form of nanotechnology and trying to work out the implications in parallel with heir own work using simulations to create virtual world models based on a much more complex version of Conway’s game of life.

In addition, McCarthy explores the cultural angles rather adeptly. We meet those who see the Mycora as a militaristic enemy and those who worship it as a new kind of god. We see how two different groups of refugees from Earth have evolved: the Immunity, which has taken residence on a few of Jupiter’s moons and embraced a rigid culture living with a pervasive fear of technology, and the Gladholders, who reside in the asteroid belt and espouse a kind of Hippy 60s lifestyle with an exuberance that contrasts sharply with the sober members of the Immunity. And the narrator of the story is a pro-am journalist in a media culture that is very clearly derived from our current world of citizen journalists, blogs, and social networks, giving McCarthy plenty of room to speculate in the areas of news, entertainment and communication.

It’s in this area of delving into the culture of the tale that much scifi falls flat, and while I definitely recommend Bloom to anyone interested in contemporary "hard" scifi and/or nanotechnology– and it’s a cut above many scifi novels in this area– it’s a solid step or two below something like Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. But so are most novels.

My only truly significant disappointment in Bloom is that the most important element of the denouement is obvious– and for most readers will likely have been obvious for a hundred pages or more, well before the ship and crew enter the Mycorum. There’s plenty left here to support a follow-up novel (or three)! And for all I know, McCarthy has… Bloom was written in 1998 and I’d never heard of McCarthy until I stumbled across this book.

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[CC Licensed image by Sebastià Giralt]

Hippolytus (another work I’d, to my shame, not read before now) is a strange play, at once obviously overt in its "lessons" and quite beautiful. And there are many lessons: worship as many gods as you can (aka don’t piss the gods off), being too devoted to one’s ideals can be deadly (for very different reasons), hasty judgment yields regret, wisdom is determined by success more than choice, the gods have rules too, etc.

[CC licensed image by Marvin (PA)]

It’s no surprise that Theseus would act impetuously in condemning his own son… he is, after all, even by standards of Greek myth a "man’s man" who is famous for a whole bunch of (admittedly righteous) kills. But Hippolytus was a surprising character, a devoted virgin who thinks constantly about sex (like a typical teen though I’ve no idea how old he is intended to be), and a practically insufferable snob who seals his own fate with some gusto, and finally a terribly tragic hero… a role he appears to evolve into in the span of about two hours.

[public domain image from Wikimedia Commons] 

And even given the times and the general attitude toward women, the judgments in this play–overt and implicit– are particularly harsh. All the good of Phaedra’s attempts to overcome the love Aphrodite has unfairly bestowed upon her is rendered irrelevant by her suicidal betrayal. And Euripides takes great pains to reinforce this aspect:

Hippolytus
Women! This coin which men find counterfeit!
Why, why, Lord Zeus, did you put them in the world,
in the light of the sun? If you were so determined
to breed the race of man, the source of it
should not have been women. Men might have dedicated
in your own temples images of gold,
silver, or weight of bronze, and to each been given
his worth of sons…

[...]

In this we have proof of how great a curse is woman.
For the father begets her, rears her up,
must add a dowry gift to pack her off
to another’s house and thus be rid of the load.
And he again that takes the cursed creature
rejoices and enriches his heart’s jewel
with dear adornment, beauty heaped on vileness.
With lovely clothes the poor wretch tricks her out
spending the wealth that underprops his house.

[...]

I hate a clever woman–God forbid
that I should ever have a wife at home
with more than woman’s wits! Lust breeds mischief
in the clever ones. The limits of their minds
deny the stupid lecherous delights.
We should not suffer servants to approach them,
but give them as companions voiceless beasts

[...]

I’ll hate you women, hate and hate and hate you,
and never have enough of hating…
Some say that I talk of this eternally,
yes, but eternal, too, is woman’s wickedness.

Most moving, though, are the descriptions of love, the ravisher and destroyer of man and god alike:

Nurse
So you will die for love! And all the others,
who love, and who will love, must they die too?
How will that profit them? The tide of love,
at its full surge, is not withstandable.
Upon the yielding spirit she comes gently,
but to the proud and the fanatic heart
she is a torturer with a brand of shame.
She wings her way through the air; she is in the sea,
in its foaming billows; from her everything,
that is, is born. For she engenders us
and sows the seeds of desire whereof we’re born,
all we her children, living on the earth.
He who has read the writings of the ancients
and has lived much in books, he knows
that Zeus once loved the lovely Semele;
he knows that Dawn, the bright light of the world,
once ravished Cephalus hence to the God’s company
for love’s sake. Yet all these dwell in heaven.
They are content, I am sure, to be subdued
by the stroke of love.

But the Nurse’s wisdom has limits (obviously) and the love that cheers the gods destroys too many humans, as explained by the chorus:

Strophe
Love distills desire upon the eyes,
love brings bewitching grace into the heart
of those he would destroy.
I pray that love may never come to me
with murderous intent,
in rhythms measureless and wild.
Not fire nor stars have stronger bolts
than those of Aphrodite sent
by the hand of Eros, Zeus’s child.

Antistrophe
In vain by Alpheus’ stream,
in vain in the halls of Phoebus’ Pythian shrine
the land of Greece increases sacrifice.
But Love the King of Men they honor not,
although he keeps the keys
of the temple of desire,
although he goes destroying through the world,
author of dread calamities
and ruin when he enters human hearts.

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[CC licensed image by Camus Live Art]

Tough time of the year to find time to write, so my notes are even less cohesive than usual…

Prometheus Bound is one of many Ancient Greek plays I should have read long before now. The Prometheus of Prometheus Bound doesn’t much resemble the version I’d read about in myths and stories before. This Prometheus is far from being a jester who gave humans fire but whose tricks caused much human suffering, but instead is a hero who rescued the human race from “shattering destruction” at the hands of Zeus, who intended to “blot out the race.”

And this Prometheus didn’t just rescue the “mindless” humans from oblivion, giving us minds and making them “master of their wits,” he also taught us to mark and live in harmony with the seasons, to count and number, to use an alphabet, to observe the constellations, to yoke beasts and harness horses, to build ships, and to prophesy through encounter and augury. And he was responsible for each age of bronze, iron, silver and gold. As he says:

In one short sentence understand it all
every art of mankind comes from Prometheus

This Zeus, too, is changed. In Aeschylus’s version Zeus is obviously an irredeemable tyrant who will, Prometheus prophesies, finally fall victim to “his own light-witted counsel.” The Zeus of Prometheus Bound is petty, vindictive and treacherous… as Prometheus tells it, he played a key role in Zeus’s ascension, only to be cast away when his usefulness had come to an end.

[CC licensed image by Jaime.Silva]

In addition to diverging greatly from the standard mythology as I’d learned it, Prometheus Bound also possesses great beauty and power in its language. In the opening of the play, Hephaestus speaks to Prometheus before he binds him (this opening section is presented prose):

Here you shall hear no voice of mortal. You shall be grilled by the sun’s bright fire and change the fair bloom of your skin. You shall be glad when Night comes with her mantle of stars and hides the sun’s light; but the sun shall scatter the hoar-frost again at dawn. Always the grievous burden of your torture will be there to wear you down; for he that shall cause it to cease has yet to be born.

And in one of the chorus’s antistrophes, they speak of the depth of feeling and sympathy for Prometheus (who will have none of it):

The wave cries out as it breaks into surf;
the depth cries out, lamenting you; the dark
Hades, the hollow underneath the world,
sullenly groans below; the springs
of sacred flowing rivers all lament
the pain and pity of your suffering.

Nor is the play empty of wit, as when Prometheus pauses in his prophesying to Io and notes:

If anything of this is still obscure
or difficult as me again and learn
clearly: I have more leisure than I wish

or sarcasm, as when, toward the end of the play, Prometheus tears Hermes, sent by Zeus to force an apology, a new one:

Prometheus
Your speech is pompous sounding, full of pride,
as fits the lackey of the Gods.
…
Do you think I will crouch before your Gods,
–so new– and tremble? I am far from that.
Hasten away, back on the road you came.
You shall learn nothing that you ask of me.

Hermes
Just such the obstinacy that brought you here,
to this self-willed calamitous anchorage.

Prometheus
Be sure of this: when I set my misfortune
Against your slavery, I would not change.

Hermes
It is better, I suppose, to be a slave
to this rock, than Zeus’s trusted messenger.

Prometheus
Thus must the insolent show their insolence!

And there is a lot of sound advice in Prometheus Bound, such as when he puts the chorus in its place:

Prometheus
It is an easy thing for one whose foot
is on the outside of calamity
to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer

or makes one of his many astute observations about power and politics:

This is a sickness rooted and inherent
in the nature of a tyranny:
that he that holds it does not trust his friends.

It’s interesting that Pandora, originally fashioned as a bride for Prometheus, is wholly absent from the account but for (what I take to be) one powerful reference:

Chorus
Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?

Prometheus
Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.

Chorus
What cure did you discover for that sickness?

Prometheus
I sowed in them blind hopes.

[CC licensed image by Whistling in the Dark]

I was also intrigued by the setting (and thus the staging) of the play. All of the action takes place on a single promontory and Prometheus, the main character is bound and nailed to a rock, practically immobile (a part I was born to play, incidentally). There’s very little meaningful stage direction. It made perfect sense in my head, but I wondered how it was presented to audiences… and what it might look like to do so now…

Side Note 1: Have you ever heard of The Prometheus Society?

Side Note 2: Have you seen the Prometheus Collage?

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While perusing the (only) local used bookstore I came across The Oxford Murders) by Guillermo Martínez, which fit nicely into my 10*10*10 Challenge (in "international mysteries"). Only when searching for the Wikipedia link I just used did I discover it was recently made into a film starring Elijah Wood & John Hurt).

Unfortunately, the serendipitous discovery was almost the best thing about my experience with the book, which isn’t very well written. Some of this could be due to being a translation, but the formulaic phrasing, odd pacing, and stereotypical characterization don’t bode well. As a Planeta Prize winner, it certainly supports the contention that the award is a self-aggrandizing and political, rather than literary, prize…

The only really interesting thing about the book are the mathematical clues sprinkled throughout. One, in particular, is left as an exercise for the reader and I’ve not been able to solve it: what comes next in the sequence "2, 4, 8, …" The obvious answer is 16, but in the novel Martínez writes (as part of the general idea that almost any sequence can be justified) that it could just as well be 10 or 2007. But how?

[side note: a very interesting, tangentially related mathematical puzzle for which I do know the answer is: how can you support 31 as the next in the sequence: 2, 4, 8, 16 ...]

I’ll trade the answer for my puzzle for either answer to that posed in the novel. I have a feeling the ‘10′ is going to make me smack myself on the forehead and think "of course!"

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[CC licensed photo by Ell Brown]

Writing anything about Hamlet is to be a decided amateur, a devoted duffer. The hopelessly amateur golfer likely loves the game, knows the course(s) he plays inside and out, immerses herself in the world and lore of the sport, and knows that there’s nothing he can do that hasn’t been done before and better by those before… but he loves the hell out of it all anyway. I know I’ll never be the equal of Hamlet– or the critics who have written so much about it– but I feel compelled to write anyway.

I need some kind of full-page-size highlighter or underlining device when reading Hamlet. There’s hardly a page (a half-page in the edition I’ve been reading) that doesn’t have a passage worth noting. The blue veins of my underlining throughout the text indicate a dense circulatory system of creativity and brilliance. I don’t have the superlatives needed to describe how mind-blowingly good Hamlet was this time around, though I was re-reading it for the umpteenth time. I give a lot of credit to the excellent annotations of the Arden edition of the text which put a bright light on many subtleties and allusions I’d previously missed. The verbal riches of this play alone are absurd.

I wouldn’t say Hamlet is wasted on the young, but it’s a play that deserves to be read slowly and attentively as an older adult. What I appreciate about Hamlet can be likened to an expanding set of concentric circles… what I liked about it in high school, then what I understood in college, what moved me so much in my mid-20s, and the amazing importance it has assumed for me in my late 30s. There are so many layers of wordplay, so many levels of humor and wisdom, and so many mysteries and ambiguities in the nature of the characters (some intentional, some perhaps not) that I doubt I will ever come close to unraveling and getting a fix on even a simple majority of them. So, if these notes are a bit scattered, so be it. It’s my blog; I’ll ramble if I want to.

This time around, I’ve been rethinking my thoughts about the character of Hamlet… and I’m going to write a bit about that despite the danger of becoming disconnected from the play and/or immersed in myself, both of which I think someone whose name I can’t remember had in mind when they wrote:

"Hamlet without Hamlet has been thought about all too much."

I’ve never been comfortable with the common notion that Hamlet represents the inability to act that comes from excessive contemplation. Since my first reading I’ve felt Hamlet wasn’t conflicted about what to do nor was "to be or not to be" a reflection on any simple decision(s) such as suicide, taking action against Claudius, or being responsible to one’s core beliefs. My idea has been that Hamlet was "broken," not in the traditional sense of madness (unless one engages in a kind of regression ad absurdum, asserting that Hamlet’s madness must be real because his feigned madness is so effective, and so on), but in having somehow gone through to the other side of anger and frustration into that realm of pure angry clarity, where taking action is probably best left a temptation, and consideration of that action a kind of succor. Doesn’t this better explain how the "indecisive" Hamlet can maintain his act of madness, down to the winking asides, while so capably skewering Polonius– verbally and then literally– and so easily take action when he must? If we consider that Hamlet kills Polonius not out of (just) anger at Polonius’ close ties to Claudius (from Hamlet’s perspective, and mine, Polonius must suspect Polonius of, at best, willful ignorance regarding Claudius’s treachery) but because Gertrude cries out for help and implies that she could be in mortal danger, and how deftly and quickly he outmaneuvers and puts in place a counter plot to foil the foils in the form of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it seems to me that Hamlet is decisive when he needs to be.

And that’s the key– there’s no indecision in Hamlet when he needs it. So why is he seen as indecisive and ineffectual? Because that’s one way of interpreting the long-pauses and self-talking soliloquies. Another way would be that Hamlet is waiting, an act of great rationality and prudence. Claudius must act. Hamlet will wait for him to do so in order to ensure that when he strikes, he does so most decisively. If anything, Hamlet is showing great restraint in taking action through such a circuitous route.

But, serendipitously, I’ve been reading Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and he has a take on Hamlet’s position that encompasses and exceeds my own. He writes:

The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its obliteration of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Because of this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the world of Dionysian reality separate from each other. But as soon as that daily reality comes back again into consciousness, one feels it as something disgusting. The fruit of that state is an ascetic condition, in which one denies the power of the will. In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet: both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it disgusts them to act, for their action can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that they are expected to set right again a world which is out of joint. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion—that is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, because of an excess of possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No!—the true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect any more. His longing goes out over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or in an immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, the man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.

"Absurdity" was the missing, important aspect of my own conception. Shakespeare spends a lot of time establishing just how smart Hamlet is. Perhaps Hamlet is too smart and, because of this, he perceives an existential absurdity that would only be explicated directly hundreds of years later by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre, etc (and that essentially created modernism, and that I can trace with even my meager knowledge of dram as a line from Hamlet through Waiting for Godot to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). It is a terrible clarity, but one with much deeper roots than the anger I’d always attributed it to.

And to take it just a bit further, this has completely– and unwittingly– informed my own thinking about existence and suicide, inclinations toward the latter of which are surely part of the reason I (and probably many others like me) glommed on to Hamlet so readily. If one looks around and truly feels that there’s nothing that he or she can change, that the world rolls on regardless, that only a most famous handful will have any existence even in memory– and even that ethereal reflection of existence owes as much to happenstance and/or tragedy than any action on their own parts– then any action feels ineffectual and one’s position absurd. In the face of that, when the easiest action is to, in effect, give up and swallow the bromides of self-help or just lay back and let the waves carry you where they may, wrapped up in television, sports, Facebook, and the like, isn’t suicide in some sense a most courageous act? Not the most courageous– that respect I reserve to those who maintain that there is some intrinsic value in a certain kind of action, the people who for no reason other than that they’ve reached a point of being comfortable with actions-in-themselves, maintain their manners even while the plane they are on is going down– but an act nevertheless as likely borne of heart as cowardice?

And I think my feeling that Hamlet has inhabited this kind of exceptional clarity is further supported by his final words:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time–as this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest–O, I could tell you–
But let it be.

Isn’t it likely that what he could have told Horatio was the secret of existence as a theater of the absurd no more or less rational than the very theater (and the theater within the theater) that was his– and every one else’s life?

This is the kind of stuff that tempts me toward serious literary investigation and criticism despite knowing how poisonous such pursuits can be for me if I’m not extremely careful…

I find myself rethinking other characters as well. Polonius is often played for laughs with his overwrought language and excessive deference. But I wonder if he isn’t quite a bit sharper than we would suppose. Though Hamlet gets the best of him in their verbal jousting, who would not? It seems clear to me that the deferential way in which Polonius approaches Claudius is quite different from the way he approaches Hamlet. In the former he is exercising prudence; in the second he is administering a test.

Polonius doesn’t get a lot of time to make a case for himself. Our perception– as with most of the play– is really that of Hamlet. The parallel between Hamlet’s verbal humiliation of Polonius and his similar goring of Osric, when the two victims are poles apart in even the least charitable reading, has to call Hamlet’s assessment of Polonius into question. Further, in one of the few scenes in the play in which Polonius can speak freely, he acquits himself rather well, explicitly apologizing to Ophelia for being wrong about the cause of Hamlet’s madness:

I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not quoted him: I fear’d he did but trifle,
And meant to wreck thee; but, beshrew my jealousy!
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion. Come, go we to the king:
This must be known; which, being kept close, might move
More grief to hide than hate to utter love.

This can be played for more laughs, but it seems a bit of a stretch to me. Polonius still doesn’t understand what is afflicting Hamlet, but thats hardly a serious knock against him, all things considered!

Finally, I also feel I’m coming to a clearer understanding of the role of Horatio as more than mere foil. Horatio’s background, like some other "simple" details in the play, is muddled (just how old is he anyway?)– at one point he is cast as relatively new to Denmark, at another he’s explaining Denmark’s internal politics with some authority, but he’s clearly Hamlet’s best friend. Or does he become so as the play progresses and partly as a function of Rosencrantz and Guildensterns’ unwitting betrayal?

And again, presaging an implication of Nietzsche’s argument (which I read only after jotting this down in my notebook), is Horatio’s willingness to sacrifice his own life at the end of the play a simple matter of being bonded to a best friend or is he performing for us the role of an audience member to the tragic finale, one who is– as we are meant to be– moved at the dramatic height of the action into forgetting his self in true Dionysian fashion?

I could go on at much greater length, but I’ve exhausted my time (and energy) for the moment. Perhaps I’ll throw in some additional thoughts along with my commonplace book entries.

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It’s hard not to include the adjectives phlegmatic, tired, and brilliant to describe Inspector Martin Beck, the main character in Roseanna, the first of 10 Swedish detective novels written in the late 60s and early 70s. I get tired and fearful of catching yet another cold or flu just reading about him! But Beck– and the milieu of small-town Sweden– is intriguing enough that I plan to read more in the series.

The plot of Roseanna is simple: a dead woman is found in a lake in rural Sweden prompting a long, exhausting investigation led by Inspector Beck. The case proceeds over a long period of time– it takes months for the team to discover the victim’s identity and then, because she was an American visiting on a cruise, there are more than 80 potential suspects to consider, most of whom have long since returned to their distant homes– and is almost entirely without "drama."

The setting is a bit anachronistic, but the shape of the novel is familiar. Roseanna isn’t a whodunit– for a long time no one involved has any idea who the killer is and then suddenly it’s pretty clear– but a police procedural centered on the methods of investigation rather than, as has become so popular today, the technology used in that pursuit. The tools used are of some interest: the murder victim is an American killed while on a cruise in Sweden, so we as modern readers get a taste of the slow and pace (within a plot that is already intentionally slow) of communication, and the difficulties of simply sifting through– and sharing– evidence before the age of databases, digital photographs and email.

My understanding is that further novels in the series delve into the politics of the time, which I look forward to discovering.

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Picked this Japanese sci-fi novel up on a whim, inspired by the front-cover blurb that included the words and phrases: “poetic first contact,” “alien peril,” and “think Arthur C. Clarke meets Haruki Murakami.” Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is one of my favorite sci-fi books… and Murakami intrigues me. Sadly, Usurper of the Sun comes nowhere close to fulfilling the promise of the blurb. All of the elements are there, including a relatively original story of first contact and nanotechnology, but the writing is atrocious. Granted, the translation could be a serious factor (the novel did win the 2003 Seiun Award, a high honor), but the prose is pale and robotic.

I can forgive the poor prose for great ideas, but when the time comes to actually meet the alien beings, Nojiri let me down. The novel was on track to be one that might actually fulfill some of the promise of an encounter with truly alien beings—I was particularly intrigued with the idea that the contact might mean nothing to the aliens, who might just pass through our system and/or snuff us out without a hint of communication, but Nojiri seems to want to have it both ways, telling us how alien this life is but letting his story show us something else.

So much potential; so disappointing.

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I "finished" "reading" Umberto Eco’s fantabulous essay/anthology The Infinity of Lists. The scare quotes are necessary because Eco’s 400+ page volume is two books in one: an extended essay on the idea and example of lists in art and literature and an accompanying anthology od excerpts and hundreds of color plates illustrating his points. I read (and in a few areas re-read) and marked up the essay but only read perhaps 1/4 of the anthology. I’ve read some of the work before… and trying to read all of the examples is just too much. I’ll be returning to the book many times!

The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book. It’s well designed and produced on quality paper. It features scores of full-page color plates in addition to at least twice as many smaller ones. The selections of art and writing encompass both the familiar and the unfamiliar– Eco strikes a nice balance between examples that readers will expect, which are nice to have close to hand, and examples that are sure to be new to even bibliophiles and visual art connoisseurs.

The fundamental premise of the book is to examine various ideas of the "list" as they play themselves out in art and literature. Taking on the topic of lists in visual art– and assuming one wishes to go beyond the obvious kinds of list in literature– presents a daunting task. As Eco notes in the Introduction:

…I had never set myself the task of making a meticulous record of the infinite cases in which the history of literature (from Homer to Joyce to the present day) offers examples of lists (though names such as Perec, Prévert, Whitman, and Borges all come to mind right away). The result of this hunt was prodigious, enough to make your head spin, and I already know that a great number of people will write to me asking why this or that author is not mentioned in this book. The fact is that not only am I not omniscient and do not know a multitude of texts in which lists appear, but even if I had wished to include all the lists I gradually encountered in the course of my exploration, this book would be at least one thousand pages long, and maybe even more.

Then there is the problem of deciding what a figurative lists may be. The few books on the poetics of lists prudently limit themselves to verbal lists because of the difficulty in explaining how a picture can present things and yet suggest an "etcetera," as if to admit that the limits of the frame oblige the picture to say nothing about an immense number of other things.

Among the kinds of list Eco describes are: referential & practical lists, poetic lists, assemblages, Vunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, curations, repertories, metaphorical alignments, chaotic enumerations, and lists of vertigos.

Eco first explores the contrast between referential lists (the non-infinite kind) which enumerate– or attempt to enumerate– everything in a domain, and infinite lists. A simple example of a referential list is a telephone book, which lists all phone numbers in an area at a particular point in time. The discussion gets more complex (speaking analogously: what of new and unlisted numbers, what of the series of lists exemplified by such directories, etc), but it anchors one end of the discussion.

The second kind of list is the infinite kind, the one created when the creator can’t possible enumerate all members of the set, but instead "proposes a list as a specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest." Needless to say, "the rest" must be important enough that the reader wishes to– and can productively– imagine more. This kind of list explores the "topos of ineffability" (a phrase, I must say, I love).

I couldn’t help but think how apt the list is as a form and framing device and motif for writing in and with this now-newish media and platform of blogging. Many of my favorite examples in the medium demonstrate the richness of the list in a variety of forms, sometimes a stream of consciousness by an individual or this or that group; sometimes a curation; sometimes a new-media rich commonplace book. The constant flow of memes, almost all of which are lists of a distributed kind, has become closer to a living thing than it ever could in another medium. The ability to flow, reflow, browse and meander with tags, categories, search and link make for living, breathing lists.

I’m sure I’ll post some excerpts from The Infinity of Lists to my own commonplace book, but it’s really a book one needs to experience– as a well-illustrated essay, as an anthology, a fascinating "art book" or all three.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 2 Comments »

[CC licensed photo by Assbach] 

After talking with some friends about the 10*10*10 reading project (in short: read and blog about 10 books in 10 categories in the year 2010), I’ve decided on the following 10 topic areas for my reading:

1. Books (chapbooks, collections) by authors who participate in the Cafe-Blue mailing list

2. Books (chapbooks, collections) by authors who participate in the NewPoetry mailing list

3. Shakespeare plays

4. Hard-SciFi and space opera

5. International mysteries
   Roseanna (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö)

6. Young Adult novels
   The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)

7. Ancient drama

8. Philosophy & Aesthetics
   The Infinity of Lists (Umberto Eco)

9. Poetry collections by authors new to me

10. Fiction in Translation
    Every Man Dies Alone (Hans Fallada)
    Usurper of the Sun (Housuke Nojiri)

The rules are pretty relaxed:

• Read the books
• Blog about each book, one way or another
• A single book can fill in multiple categories according to my whim
• All definitions (such as what: young adult, international, creative nonfiction, philosophy, aesthetics, and being "new to me" mean) are determined by me and subject to change without notice
• Regardless of the above rules I can do what I want

I’ll update this page with links to each book as I go, or you can browse the 10*10*10 Challenge tag…

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[CC licensed images by Leo Reynolds]

Despite not quite reaching the final goal in my 999 challenge– I did read quite a few more volumes than I got around to noting here, but not quite all– I’m considering trying a 10*10*10 version this year: read and blog about 10 books in 10 categories in 2010.

This time around I’m going to relax my own rule and allow individual books to be listed in multiple categories (within reason, reason being defined by me at the time) and be a tad bit less ambitious in my categories. For example, given that I refuse to get too programmatic about it and thus "challenge reading" is only a part of my reading load, "Big Fat Novels" was a category that should have counted for 2-3!

So, this time around I’m contemplating a list that mixes shorter and/or easier reads with the heavyweights and one that poses some challenges but also recognizes reading for pure, sometimes disposable, pleasure. I’ll have to whittle it down to 10, but here are candidates for categories… and there may be more before I make my "final" decision this weekend:

1. "Young Adult" Novels
2. Hard Sci-Fi and Space Opera
3. "International" (Non-US/Canada/Brit) Mysteries
4. Robert B. Parker "Spenser" Novels
5. Ancient Drama
6. Shakespeare Plays
7. Books about Books, Reading, or Language
8. The Brain & Cognitive Science
9. Poetry Collections by Authors that are New to Me
10. Graphic Novels
11. Collections of Personal Essays/Creative Non-Fiction
12. Fiction in Translation
13. Award Winners
14. Myth & Folklore
15. Ancient Greek & Roman History
16. Philosophy "Proper"

Suggestions for interesting categories and/or good reads that would fit within any of these categories are welcome!

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You know all those adjectives people like to use in book blurbs, things like: tender, moving, poignant, and laugh-out-loud-funny? They actually apply to Sherman Alexie’s hilarious and powerful novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Here’s my blurb:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is not just a great "young adult" novel, but a great novel, in which Sherman Alexie combines the wit & timing of the best kind of stand-up comedian, the sensibility of language of a poet, and the captivating skills of a world-class storyteller.

I’ve long been a fan of Alexie’s fiction and poetry. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven will be found in any of my short lists of short fiction, and I eagerly await releases of Alexie’s all-too-infrequent collections of poetry. In the form of a diary kept by Arnold Spirit Jr.– aka just "Junior"– a young Spokane Indian who chooses to attend a nearby white high school (off "the rez"), The Absolutely True Diary captures everything I like about Alexie’s writing. I laughed out loud, with and at Junior. I cried… for Junior and for myself and for my dead father. I marveled at how true many of Junior’s experiences were to my own, both in the city and in small-town Bush Alaska (which shares much with the reservation), and both common and fantastic.

Junior is a cartoonist and I’d be doing a great disservice if I didn’t mention the pefectly-pitched cartoons that pepper the book, created by Ellen Forney. These are an indispensable part of Alexie’s creation, illuminating and expanding upon elements of the story, such as Junior trying to hide his poverty or remembering his estranged best friend.

Find this book. Read it. You’ll finish it in a day, but Junior and his spirit will resonate for a long time after.

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Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone crashed into my reading life like a bolt from the blue. I came across the book while randomly browsing through the thin selection of “literature” at our only locally owned bookstore (specified not to praise my local shopping emphasis, which is nearly non-existent, but to explain the odds of coming across the book in the first place). The title tinkled faint bells in my memory, confirmed by an entry in my wishlist. I don’t remember how Fallada’s final novel made its way onto my long list of books to read in the first place.

What a revelation! At the heart of Fallada’s novel are Otto and Anna Quangel, an older couple who have lost their only child on the German front lines, fighting what increasingly feels like a hopeless, useless war. Disillusioned but introverted– neither are the sort to join an active underground– the Quangels mount a quiet resistance to the irrational Nazi regime in one of the simplest ways possible: by anonymously dropping postcards with anti-Nazi and anti-Hitler messages all over Berlin. They drop hundreds of cards over a three year period from 1941-1943. The Quangels’ story is based on the story of Otto and Elise Hampel… reproductions of some of the cards they left– and the Gestapo files on them– are included in the book.

Intertwined within and around the story of the Quangels are stories of many other characters. There’s Inspector Escherich, assigned the task of tracking down the anonymous postcard author, who he’s nicknamed “the hobgoblin” and, through him, the entire, twisted mechanism of the Gestapo. In the Quangels’ own apartment building there’s another quiet resister, Judge Fromm, and the Persickes, a brutal family of Nazis, and Frau Rosenthal, one of the few remaining Jews, essentially trapped in her apartment with the remains of her former life. And there’s an assortment of petty thugs, postal workers, shop keepers, and factory workers, some good, some not. All of these together are the real main character in Fallada’s book– the character of a people in the midst of a brutal and increasingly irrational war, living together in a society of fear where anyone could be, and probably is, an informant, and where every bit of the baser nature of people who would in other circumstances be unremarkable have been drawn from them by the pressure of the totalitarian regime and the paranoia it instills in everyone.

Part of what’s fascinating about Every Man Dies Alone is what it is not. It’s not a story of Jews and Nazis, but of “normal” German citizens. Setting aside the philosophical import (or not) of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil,” Fallada’s novel inevitably brings it to mind. But the actions of Otto and Anna Quangel– particularly as they are implicitly contrasted with the limited view of an ineffectual and confused active resistance– equally inspire thoughts of a “banality of good.” Much has been written about the question of ordinary German people being warped by the war, and they are amply represented here, but in Fallada’s novel we see ordinary people who are elevated in small ways by their circumstance without becoming heroes in any ordinary sense.

Every Man Dies Alone, reportedly written in a “white heat” and completed in just 24 days, isn’t flawless. In attempting to distill a byzantine and bewildering structure of events and array of people into a single novel (dozens of novels could be written based on just the significant characters and events brought into play), Fallada chooses to intertwine and connect them in ways that defy belief. There are times when the story is dulled a bit by Fallada’s brief philosophical interjections. There were times Fallada’s serial changes in tense and point-of-view confused me. A few scenes are melodramatic in the manner of bestselling thrillers or soap operas. But taken together these are inconsequential flaws in a terribly important novel.

SPOILERS BELOW – SERIOUSLY

(more…)

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