Cosmopoetica

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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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.

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics, reading log 1 Comment »

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 »

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

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[Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis]

Alcestis tells the story of King Admetus who, thanks to Apollo (who worked for Admetus while in exile from Olympus), has been granted life beyond his time to die. In exchange, Admetus must find someone who will replace him in death. After Admetus’s parents refuse to die so that he should live, his wife, Queen Alcestis, agrees to do so. When she dies, Admetus’s good friend Heracles, who happens to arrive the same day, swears that he will bring Alcestis back from the dead.

Alcestis is often referred to as a tragi-comic play. The tragic is obvious. First, Alcestis’ long (relatively speaking) death, including words from Death himself, who rebuffs Apollo’s protests:

Death

Much talk. Talking will win you nothing. All the same,
the woman goes with me to Hades’ house. I go
to take her now, and dedicate her with my sword,
for all whose hair is cut in consecration
by this blade’s edge are devoted to the gods below.

And Admetus becoming unreasonably angry with–and thus estranged from–his father (who refused the offer to sacrifice himself for Admetus).

The comic is part farce, part irony. When Heracles arrives on the scene, Admetus doesn’t wish to turn him away and so misleads him into thinking that someone else has died in a kind of Abbott and Costello routine:

Heracles

What is the matter? Why is there mourning and cut hair?

Admetus

There is one dead here whom I must bury today.

Heracles

Not one of your children! I pray God shield them from that.

Admetus

Not they. My children are well and living in their house.

Heracles

If it is your father who is gone, his time was ripe.

Admetus

No, he is still there, Heracles. My mother, too.

Heracles

Surely you have not lost your wife, Alcestis.

Admetus

Yes and No. There are two ways that I could answer that.

Heracles

Did you say that she is dead or that she is still alive?

Admetus

She is, but she is gone away. It troubles me.

Heracles

I still do not know what you mean. You are being obscure.

Admetus

You know about her and what must happen, do you not?

Heracles

I know that she has undertaken to die for you.

Admetus

How can she really live then, when she has promised that?

Heracles

Ah, do not mourn her before she dies. Wait for the time.

Admetus

The point of death is death, and the dead are lost and gone.

Heracles

Being and nonbeing are considered different things.

Admetus

That is your opinion, Heracles. It is not mine.

Heracles

Well, but whose is the mourning now? Is it in the family?

Admetus

A woman. We were speaking of a woman, were we not?

Heracles

Was she a blood relative or someone from outside?

Admetus

No relation by blood, but she meant much to us.

Heracles

How does it happen that she died here in your house?

Admetus

She lost her father and came here to live with us.

Heracles, not knowing Alcestis has died, proceeds to revel:

[Heracles] took a cup with ivy on it in both hands
and drank the wine of our dark mother, straight, until
the flame of the wine went all through him, and heated him,
and then he wreathed branches of myrtle on his head
and howled, off key.

Until an exasperated servant berates him and they realize Admetus has tricked him.

The timeline of the play from this point on is a bit jarring. Heracles speaks with Admetus, swears to rescue Alcestis from death and then, with only a brief interlude from the chorus, has returned from his quest and without much further ado, the play is over.

Alcestis is a rich play, given its age and brevity. It’s interesting to me that the play is called Alcestis, but in fact it is really the story of Admetus. Alcestis’ character is pretty clear from the beginning. Admetus’ actions are (and remain) more ambiguous. Is he a coward for accepting the bargain that extended his life? Does it make it better that he, at least, recognizes himself as such now… when it is too late to change anything? Is he right to berate his father for not sacrificing himself after a long, happy life? And then, when he takes the veiled woman’s hand at the end, is he guilty of intending to betray Alcestis’ dying wish—that he assented to—that he take up with no one else after she is gone?

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[isbn: 9781400102518]

Not a book I would have picked up on my own, Three Cups of Tea tells the inspiring story of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber  rescued by Pakistani villagers after a near-fatal failed attempt to climb K2 who then devotes his life to building public, co-ed schools in remote villages throughout Pakistan and, eventually, Afghanistan. Mortenson is, as they say, a "character"– the best moments in the book deal with how a 6′ 4" American so successfully "becomes" an honorary villager by living the life and "walking the walk" and learns to work in the complicated (and sometimes dangerous) environment of tribal warlords, religious mullahs, corrupt and inept government, and war. But he is equally a man on a mission and through immense determination, some serendipity, and a willing humility he’s managed– at first individually and now through the Central Asia Institute he founded– to build and maintain close to 70 schools educating girls and boys alike in remote regions where education of any kind is scarce and generally limited to a select few males.

The stories of Mortenson’s adventures are fun, and sometimes harrowing, to read. Mortenson himself isn’t spared… despite his great charisma he can clearly be frustrating to deal with thanks to his constant disorganization and total lack of regard for punctualty. But what I came away from the book was a richer and more admiring view of the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The title of the book refers to tribal tradition of drinking tea with someone: during the first cup you are a stranger, after the second a friend, and after the third a part of the family who they will protect with their lives and do business with. And this turns out to be literally true as tribal people and leaders risk their lives to protect Mortenson, guide him through everything from the ways of doing business to challenging (twice) fatwas brought against him by religious leaders who resent that his schools require that girls be allowed to attend, carrying building materials on their backs many miles through impassable roads, and then building the schools themselves.

Mortenson’s life also challenges the stereotypical views of Muslim culture. While there are fundamentalist elements that do not approve of his mission, for the most part we see villages filled with people who are supportive of their sons and daughters going to school, and who are friendly and fiercely protective of many foreigners who take the time to get to know them and treat them as people rather than primitives. One of the prominent Mullahs of the region comes to support Mortenson and his efforts recognizing that while he is still an "infidel" he is doing good things for the people without guile or political agenda. The book persuasively makes the point that efforts like this, providing open, moderate education, are a feasible way to provide an alternative to the madrassas that have become a haven for fundamentalists or whose limited curriculum and scope provide a natural pathway to resentment, violence, and terrorist activity.

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[isbn: 0375425306]

Referring to stories as ‘clever’ is often shorthand for "interesting but ultimately shallow," while ‘inventive’ often means "very creative, but not a great piece of art." In both cases the admirable qualities are undercut by a lack of dimension and richness when considering the work as a whole and alongside others like it. But sometimes a book comes along that isn’t just clever and inventive but also vital and fully realized. Kevin Brockmeier’s The View From the Seventh Layer is a good example.

A few of Brockmeier’s stories are formally inventive– "The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device" is presented in a "choose your adventure" format, which isn’t unheard of, but it also tells a complete, moving, beautiful story, which I’ve never experienced in that format before– but almost all are thematically inventive and clever in the best, non-reductive sense of the terms. Despite their undeniable freshness, Brockmeier’s stories involve the classic stuff of fiction: characters ranging from a preacher who discovers a compromising muse to a philosophy student who discovers through unexpected means why some great philosophers gave up on philosophy and an Afghani tribal woman immortalized by a western photographer, each wrestling with their constantly changing lives, their vocations (and avocations), the things they try to love, and the things they hope love them back.

Four of the stories are explicitly called fables. One of the most lyrical, "A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets," is also one of the best, telling the Steven Millhauser-ish story of a mute man living in a city where everyone communicates through song raises a flock of parakeets that gradually learn to sing the sounds of his life, even after his life is over. In another ("A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets") a man chances to buy "God’s overcoat" only to discover that the pockets are continually filled with peoples’ plaintive prayers.

There’s a deep power propelling each story forwards, but Brockmeier doesn’t sound just the same single serious note. "The Lady with the Pet Tribble" cleverly fuses Chekhov’s famous story "The Lady with the Pet Dog" with the milieu of that other famous Chekhov… the Star Trek universe while "Home Videos" takes place behind the scenes of a funniest home videos television show.

The View from the Seventh Layer is one of the best contemporary collections of short fiction I’ve ever read. It’s compellingly modern without  posturing, fragile without being pretentious, delightful without pandering. I’ve already ordered Brockmeier’s earlier collection and his novel. If they’re half as interesting as this latest collection they will be well worth it.

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A while back I posed a question about “literate genre fiction” to a list I belong to, specifically in the areas of mystery/suspense and scifi/speculative fiction and one of the people who responded said they “weren’t sure how literate they were, but the mystery stories of Dorothy Sayers sure are fun!” That’s a pretty accurate assessment of this collection of these short morsels. All but a few of the stories feature one of two detectives– the accustomed to fine things but not quite pretentious, Sherlock-like Lord Peter Wimsey, or Montague Egg, highly observant travelling salesman of fine wines who is always sharing maxims– usually rhyming– from The Salesman’s Handbook. For example: “Don’t trust to luck but be exact, and certify the smallest fact.” As long as you overlook the “Murder She Wrote problem– the fact that death seems to follow these characters everywhere they go and they are always in a unique position to solve them– the stories are charming and clever. And far more satisfying than many of the bloated, overwritten, bloody wrecks that fill the popular mystery shelves today.

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Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf is a fascinating exploration of the evolution of the form of books and the way that we handle and store them. Much of the history of what eventually became the books we know (scrolls, codices, illuminated books, etc) was familiar to me, but Petroski has a knack for bringing to light interesting everyday details that early readers and bibliophiles encountered. While situating the book in historical context, Petroski uses a wide variety of historical resources to study the way books have been stored (as logical as it seems today, the common method of “filing” books next to each other and spine-out took an amazingly long time to evolve). While some of the engineering details of shelves was skimming-material, the amount of thought that goes into the architecture of libraries and other areas that house large quantities of books– particularly before the advent of ubiquitous artificial lighting– is stagging. Petroski’s eye for detail in examining period woodcuts and engravings, his acute deduction and synthesis from a wide variety of details, and a long list of interesting behind-the-scenes details from closed library stacks and private book collections all over the world make this a treat for book lovers and avid readers.

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I picked Black Cross up in the airport bookstore thinking the the author, Greg Iles, was someone else. There’s nothing horribly wrong with this World War II thriller of covert action behind enemy lines– it just seems interchangeable with a hundred other action-packed tales of derring-do, replete with larger-than-life heroic characters performing amazing feats in service of humanity. The reticence of one of the main characters was a shrewd choice, but the irritating framing device and sappy ending of the same counteracts that positive aspect with great vigor.

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Like many who have studied philosophy, Socrates has long had an established place in my intellectual pantheon. How could the man who essentially created Western philosophy occupy any lesser place?

After reading I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates I am left shaken. How could I have read so many works and listened to so many lectures about or involving Socrates without this devastating assessment being mentioned even once? Stone makes a very strong case that Socrates was far from the martyred philosopher, finally executed for standing up for principles that endure today. Instead, Socrates is a brilliant, obsessed, egomaniacal, rabble-rousing flake… more the crazy person ranting in the coffee shop to whoever will listen than the object of the philosophical conversations held in those shops.

Socrates stood firmly and directly against democracy and in favor of a totalitarian, divinely-supported monarchy even after two bloody revolutions that saw the Athenian democracy destroyed by his students. He preached a negative dialectic, delighting in poking holes in the positions of people at every level of Athenian society regardless of their political position. Finally he committed suicide by mocking a jury inclined to let him go with a reasonable fine, practically forcing them to sentence him to death and then staunchly resisting every possible avenue of escaping that sentence legitimately or through escape.

At every turn when the Socrates I believed in had a chance to prove otherwise he chose either silence or mockery. Stone has returned to the source texts and outlines with laser-like detail and precision how historians from Ancient times until today have glossed over almost all of this evidence to hold onto a cherished story supported only by the most contradictory sources and the most charitable (and in most cases obviously wrong) interpretations.

Socrates shouldn’t have been put to death– he wasn’t harmless, by an means, but the Athenian ideal should have found a way to put up with him. But it’s easy to see why an angry and scared group would see it done. In fact, it’s hard to understand why it didn’t happen sooner.

The picture of Socrates I have after reading this (pragmatic, entertaining, often funny and always highly readable) account is of a man tortured by his own, still unsolved questions. A brilliant thinker, Socrates sought absolute definitions, believing that only from that base could a coherent understanding of the world be formed… and in the grip of that obsession– over questions that we continue to argue about almost 2500 years later– he was essentially a broken man. Choosing suicide, which he couldn’t bring himself to do by his own hand, but which he believed to be the only way to fully transcend the earthly limitations of his own logic, doesn’t seem so surprising.

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I read two different versions of Beowulf, another on my long-neglected list. The first was an old Norton critical edition with a prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, the second also a Norton edition, but this time a verse translation by Seamus Heaney.

The Donaldson translation is good. I’m no expert, but it felt more ‘authentic’ in the sense of the language being epic in feel, inclusion of many terms in their original form, and a sentence structure that reflected its roots. It was enjoyable and, perhaps because I was reading a lot slower than the first time, much more moving and powerful than I remember.

The Seamus Heaney translation, however, is great. Heaney just understands the music of words and performs at a level in a different category from most poets. I was intrigued at how Heaney, like Donaldson, doesn’t dumb the text down. He not only leaves in terms that will provoke most users to look closely at the footnotes, but he isn’t afraid to user Irish and Gaelic words where they make sound-sense. Again, I’m not an expert, but Heaney doesn’t seem to translate as much as breathe hot poetic breath into the story, bringing it to life in a new way. Highly recommended.

And just because I feel like it, here’s a poem of Heaney’s I just discovered, also with ancient roots. The way he overlaps multiple devices in the last two stanzas is incredible.

Anything Can Happen
After Horace, Odes, I, 34

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleading on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

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I revisited the Oedipus plays because I’d never read Oedipus at Colonus and the others were read first when I was too young and then as part of a University death-march through Ancient literature.

I was surprised how powerful the plays were in both mythological conception and language. I missed so much the first and second time around. If you’ve never read them– or only read them as required reading at some point, treat yourself and try them again. I recommend the Fagles or Fitzgerald translations… but good enough versions are freely available online.

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