Cosmopoetica

“Krafft-Ebing—she had never of that author before. All the same she opened the battered old book, then she looked more closely, for there on its margins were notes in her father’s small, scholarly hand and she saw that her own name appeared in those notes. She began to read, sitting down rather abruptly…”

–Radclyffe Hall
from The Well of Loneliness

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“…noise is not only incidental, but essential to communication. … If, for example, a letter is written in careless or illegible script, there is interference in the reading process, which is to say that noise slows down communication.”

–Marjorie Perloff
from Radical Artifice

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“When people praise a poem that I can’t understand I always think they’re lying.”

[Boy do I understand this suspicion]

–Stephen Dunn

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Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” is structurally interesting— consider Little Chandler and Gallaher as parallel to Corley and Lenehan—and were I back in school writing post-structuralist criticism of the kind understandable only to a small inner-circle of other students of post-structuralist criticism, I could write a good 20 pages on the title alone.

I suspect most readers will find Little Chandler more than a little pathetic. I do too… in part. Chandler’s full of excuses for his failure to follow his ambitions. In the course of the story we can see his own rationalizations for that failure evolve as he tries to temper his jealousy of, and admiration for, Gallaher.

But where this story resonated with me was how much of myself I saw in the character of Little Chandler. I’ve wondered and doubted my poetic aspirations in ways very similar to Chandler:

He wondered whether he could write a poem to express his idea. Perhaps Gallaher might be able to get it into some London paper for him. Could he write something original? He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope.

[...]

There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.

I had children when I was young. It’s not an excuse for my lack of accomplishment, but it is a very relevant part of the context of my own failures. I could wholly identify with the “burden” of obligations entailed by family and children. When Chandler reaches the peak of frustration, I thought to myself “I’ve been there.”

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger

To my enduring shame, I’ve lashed out at my own children in just this way. But I’ve tried to do different. I’ve tried to do better.

Chandler’s internal monologue caused me to think of one of my favorite essays, “Fires” by Ray Carver, where we can see (in retrospect) the existence of a different path, a path that Chandler might still be able to walk. A path that might redeem his pathos. In the essay Carver tells the story of trying to do laundry at a laundromat with his children. He’s waiting and waiting for a dryer to become available, he’s already late, and when one finally does a woman swoops in and takes it. Carver goes on:

…I remember thinking at that moment, amid the feelings of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing—and brother, I mean nothing—that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere as close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children. And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.

I’m talking about real influence now. I’m talking about the moon and the tide. But like that it came to me. Like a sharp breeze when the window is thrown open. Up to that point in my life I’d gone along thinking, what exactly, I don’t know, but that things would work out somehow—that everything in my life I’d hoped for or wanted to do, was possible. But at that moment, in the laundromat, I realized that this simply was not true. I realized—what had I been thinking before?—that my life was a small-change thing for the most part, chaotic, and without much light showing through. At that moment I felt—I knew—that the life I was in was vastly different from the lives of the writers I most admired.

The difference between a Chandler and a Carver comes finally in what they do with the voice(s) in their head telling them what they cannot do and what they cannot be. I don’t think Chandler is irredeemable. I sense that he has, obscured by frustration and envy and weariness, the heart of an artist, not just the pretention of being one. When Chandler thinks about his books of poetry, he does so in a way that shows a real love of poetry… and some understanding of one of the most intimate acts possible between two people, directly sharing a work of art one loves:

He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness had always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves. At times he repeated lines to himself and this consoled him.

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They call Mrs. Mooney, rather ambiguously, “The Madam.” A term of respect for making something of her shambolic circumstances, but also a none-too-subtle allusion to the fact that she is essentially prostituting her daughter. Polly wants a new life through marriage but is likely actively choosing the same kind of stultifying, empty existence that Eveline chooses through inaction. Unless she is as vapid as Joyce hints at toward the end of story, whether naturally or through being the subject of her mother’s manipulation for so long that she just doesn’t know how to think for herself.

The kind of love at the heart of “Araby” is nowhere in evidence here. Mr. Doran doesn’t seem a bad person, just one who can’t rationalize an enduring affection for Polly, for whom even his physical desire is already waning.

What a bleak picture Joyce has so far painted of relationships of every kind…

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“Two Gallants” didn’t do much for me… feels like a series of symbols in search of a story. So here’s a metrically challenged limerick (seemed like the appropriate form) in honor of the “The Two Gallants” and the two gallants:

In Dublin there wandered two gents
Who’d do anything for a few cents.
With the heat of their loins
They procured a few coins…
Let the symbolic readings commence

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I know this comment was a compliment… yet it illustrates the fundamental divide in the person I once was (and want to be again) and the person I’ve become, despite my efforts. No poetry.

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There are a few things that strike me about this story, but I’m going to talk about just two.

First, the punny title. Yes, there’s a race. But isn’t Joyce also commenting on the Irish people and how they always seem to come in last?

Second, money, money, money… and all that comes from having, or more importantly not having, it. The myopia when it comes to your own potential. The constant tension of possible humiliation in the simplest transactions. The envy. The risks that come with the simplest activities that no one else sees.

I’m reminded of the scene in the generally horrible movie The Pursuit of Happyness when the rich CEO, in a hurry and without any cash on his person, asks the main character to borrow $5. To the CEO it’s a simple courtesy. To the person he’s borrowing from it’s his last $5. And more than that, the lender giving up the $5 knows it’s such a trivial sum to the CEO that he’ll likely never think to actually pay it back. So not only does he lose the $5 he desperately needs, but faces the humiliation of having to ask for repayment.

I’m reminded of an editorial I once read (I’m composing this offline so can’t find a link, but Google should reveal all) that was composed entirely in the form of a litany in the form of “being poor is” statements. Things like:

Being poor is hoping your toothache just goes away

Being poor is making excuses to go to the bathroom so your friends won’t hear you ask for the free lunch… or might not notice you aren’t eating at all

Being poor is being angry at your kids when they ask for all the things they see on TV

Being poor is having sheets for curtains

I can add one: being poor is feeling that moment of panic every time you go to the parking lot and for a moment don’t remember where you parked your car… because you know what it’s like to have your car repossessed and even many years later and for no rational reason you fear it’s happened again every single time.

The strain of living with the fear and constantly wearing a disguise lights a fire in some people, spurring them to greater achievement (the romantic and cinematic view), but it breaks most.

This is Jimmy’s existence. Living a life of pretense. Literally gambling away everything he had saved to make even a feeble attempt to break through the barriers of class and poverty… to the very group he wants so desperately to be part of.

At the end of the story: daybreak! But one whose light will reveal, once again and harshly, very different lives for the (foreign) well-to-do and poor, Irish Jimmy.

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A “creature” “burning with anguish and anger.” Wearing a straitjacket. “Passive, like a helpless animal.” Paralysis.

Eveline looks to God for an answer to what shouldn’t be any kind of dilemma but finds none. No surprise, this being Joyce. In fact, religious faith, often characterized by those who possess it as a distinction that elevates man as more than beast, has quite the opposite effect on Eveline:

“She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”

Faith is the ultimate lever-and-pellet system: be faithful and receive the ultimate reward. Eventually. Eveline’s frantic pressing of the lever provides nothing except, perhaps, the hope that she’ll go to that reward someday.

Eveline is disappearing. She’s buried herself. Even when she’s trying to make this once-in-a-lifetime decision she wonders if she can turn back “despite all that Frank’s done for her.” Eveline doesn’t frame the question as one of what she can or should do for herself because she exists increasingly only in the eyes of others and in the work she does for them.

We possess an endless ability to rationalize decisions like Eveline’s. We stay together for the sake of the children. We bury ourselves in smothering relationships because we “made a commitment,” regardless of changes in context and ourselves. We accept financial stability over emotional health and rationalize the sacrifice of ourselves and our potential as a kind of mundane martyrdom. We make decisions in service of the fictions that are our lives, telling our story, which should be the most important story we make, as if it belongs to someone else, as if we are bit players. Until we disappear, ghosts haunting our own ongoing lives. Wraiths.

I don’t know how many opportunities like Eveline’s we get. More often we are left the even harder work of creating such opportunities for ourselves… if we dare. How many times have we passed on these opportunities, perhaps in less dramatic fashion (that’s part of Joyce’s genius, bringing forth the drama of the interior of the mind making this kind choice), perhaps less obvious even to ourselves?

Eveline. The diminutive of Eve. The evil she is tempted by is one of self-erasure and rationalization. Enabling her abusive father and passing the same traits on to her children. Stunted fruit from a withered tree.

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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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This is big news for poetry readers… Jacket magazine is being retired, to be succeeded by Jacket2, in coordination with PennSound:

Dear friends:

We are writing with news of a transition we both deem very exciting.

By the end of 2010, John Tranter and Pam Brown will have put out 40 issues of Jacket. It began in what John recalls as “a rash moment” in 1997 — an early all-online magazine, one of the earliest in the world of poetry and poetics, and quite rare for its consistency over the years. “The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental.” (So said The Guardian.)

After issue 40, John will retire from thirteen years of intense every-single-day involvement with Jacket, and the entire archive of thousands of web pages will move intact to servers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where it will of course be available on the internet to everyone, for free, as always. But the magazine is not ceasing publication: quite the opposite.

Starting with the first issue in 2011, Jacket will have a new home, extra staff and a vigorous future as Jacket2. Jacket and its continuation, Jacket2, will be hosted by the Kelly Writers House and PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania.

The connection with PennSound, a vast and growing archive of audio recordings of poetry performance, discussion and criticism, is seen as a valuable additional facet of the new magazine, as is the relationship with busy Kelly Writers House, a lively venue for day-to-day poetic interchange of all kinds. The synergy in this three-way relationship has great potential.

Al will become Publisher and Jessica Lowenthal, Director of the Writers House, will be Associate Publisher. The new Editor will be Michael S. Hennessey (currently Managing Editor of PennSound) and the new Managing Editor will be Julia Bloch. John will be available as Founding Editor, and Pam will continue as Associate Editor.

More news about Jacket2 in the weeks and months to come. Meantime, the Jacket2 folks extend gratitude — as many in the world of poetics do — to John and to Pam Brown for the extraordinary work they’ve done. And John, for his part, is mightily pleased that Jacket will be preserved and will continue and grow in a somewhat new mode but with a continuous mission and approach.

— John Tranter and Al Filreis

Informative links:

• The University of Pennsylvania & PennSound
• Al Filreis
• Kelly Writers House
• Kelly Writers House Director: Jessica Lowenthal
• Michael S. Hennessey
• Julia Bloch
• Pam Brown
• John Tranter

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The language! On his deathbed, Jack Spicer’s last words were “My vocabulary did this to me!” I think Spicer meant vocabulary in the broadest sense, the way that those who possess (and obsess) over language are inhabited by it, the way it makes us radiant and burns us, the way language is always incommensurate with our ability to wholly make sense of the whole enterprise of experiencing and creating it. Language is the world… we make it and it does us in.

The third paragraph of “Araby” is a perfect exemplar of what I love about Joyce’s facility with the language (and one of the best paragraphs of any short story ever written):

“When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.”

This paragraph has it all—the poetry, the elegance, the burgeoning impact of each bodily sense—heightened all the more in contrasts with the bleak opening paragraph with the “brown imperturbable faces” on the “blind” street. I would sacrifice just about anything to be capable of paragraphs like that… and that’s a truth that fills me with excitement and despair.

Joyce writes “…her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” Is this any less true of language for devoted readers and writers?

***

“Araby” is a prototypical story of epiphany, an adolescent boy experiencing the sharp and blunt edges of love and, through that experience, the same qualities of “the world.” I feel this story. I’ve bled this story. Hasn’t everyone, at least when it comes to experiencing love? We each live our stories most keenly… one-upsmanship of experience is a fool’s game. But I wonder if someone who’s never experienced serious poverty can appreciate the awe and humiliation that the boy in “Araby” feels to quite the same degree as someone who has?

I ask because, to me, the epiphany here isn’t as much one of the feelings and reality of love, but that the outside world—even where its representatives are capable of understanding– really doesn’t care. It’s the narrator’s first significant experience of the phenomenon that he and his inner world are just a tiny—mostly un- or mis-perceived by others—part of the world in which he must find his way. It’s heartbreaking to discover this in the form of misunderstood or unrequited or impossible love, but it adds a whole new dimension to the experience when its wrapped up with the degradation and humiliation of poverty.

***

Religious symbolism (and confusion) run through this story like a spreading cancer. The boy lives in the house where Father Flynn died, a house still musty and littered with the priest’s papers.  Mangan’s Sister and the object of the boy’s intense affections is in a convent and thus essentially belongs to God. The boy desires the girl in suitably physical way, but he also feels adoration for her that is the thing of religious adulation and angels.

And, of course, the rather heavy-handed symbolism of the crusade or the quest, as manifested in another dream sequence, trying to safely convey a chalice through “a throng of foes,” which fits in perfectly with the title and theme of “Araby,” a name evoking a romantic land of myth. The boy’s attempt to find a suitable gift is itself a quest that is nearly stymied by religion when his attempt to get to the bazaar is nearly thwarted by the necessities of “this night of our Lord.”

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Joyce apparently said many times that Dubliners is meant to be more like a novel than a collection of individual stories. At the same time, he also spoke to the process of writing Dubliners as one of gnomon, which Wikipedia summarizes as “the whole of a person revealed by a single part” but which also refers to a parallelogram with two segments (aka a corner) removed. A curious conflict given that the former is about representation and the latter, arguably, about erasure, or what is held back.

This feels different to me than deliberate (or otherwise) ambiguity, even if the resulting effect on trying to “interpret” such stories is very similar. There’s a very clear instance of this erasure in “The Encounter” when the older man walks away after their initial meeting:

“… I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

–I say! Look at what he’s doing!

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes, Mahony exclaimed again:

–I say… He’s a queer old josser!

I don’t need previous experience reading Ulysses to guess that the erasure here is the older man masturbating. This is not just a prudent elision given the time and context of publication, but also leaves open to question the narrator’s understanding. Does he know what’s happening and chooses to ignore it, is he simply otherwise preoccupied, or is he in some way protecting himself because of past experience?

As one part of a larger puzzle, “An Encounter” is significantly more complex than it might be in another context. We have to consider not just the events of the story, but how the story fits into the larger picture Joyce is painting. The most salient question: should we allow the obvious perversion of the older man in the story to color our interpretation of “The Sisters?” There’s ample potential evidence of a story of molestation in the first story, but too many ways to view how it might (or might not) be connected to the second. Joyce could be painting any of a variety of pictures, signaling to the reader to reconsider the first story or making it clear that he can very easily convey such events clearly if he wishes to.

If anything, the boy’s lack of reaction to the man in “An Encounter” makes me think that retrospectively assigning sinister meaning to the first story is a mistake…

***

Joyce gets into the darker heart of obsession and monomania. The way the man spoke as if “magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind … slowly circling round and round in the same orbit.” This is a condition I know. I’ve felt it. Anyone who suffers from chronic depression or bi-polar disorder certainly has.

Such obsessions can focus on many things. In this case, the older man is supremely creepy. The simple line “every boy has a little sweetheart” made me shiver. But there were two moments in “An Encounter” that really shook me, and one of them is tied to the man’s erotic preoccupation. It comes when Joyce so clearly lays out the older man’s obsession:

“… He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world…”

Chilling… yet the “unfolding of an elaborate” mystery precisely describes some of my most important experiences and engagements with the things that matter most to me.

***

The other shivery moment is the end of the story. Regardless of how much experience or knowledge of pedophilia we attribute to the narrator, he knows something is very, very wrong with the older man. The boy may not be mature enough to be a analytical about the aspects of Mahony he dislikes (in the weird world of Joycean narration, in which sometimes the characters sound like themselves and sometimes like some vastly older and more mature version of themselves—and this isn’t in any way limited to just the central character(s) we take to be representative of Joyce himself), but there’s no question in my mind that he not only feels the temptation to abandon Mahony, but actually does. Only belatedly calling out to him.

It’s a kind of immature (I assume, for most people, but not for me) attempt to both do a relatively wicked thing and absolve oneself of responsibility at nearly the same time. He doesn’t wholly leave Mahony to the older man, but neither does he go to him and escape the situation directly either. He leaves Mahony’s fate, for a few minutes at least, in the hands of fate… and than savors the feelings of penitence when fate is, apparently, on the same side as he:

“And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.”

***

I know almost nothing about Joyce as a person. Which is a distinct weakness when conversation turns—as it naturally does with a collection like Dubliners—to questions about autobiographical elements. Lanny raises some interesting questions about Joyce’s own personality, such as how Joyce’s own “bookishness” might have contributed to an anger at institutions that allowed, if not condoned, negative behavior toward him.

This is perfectly reasonable. The problem is I have no idea how autobiographical Dubliners is meant to be, nor which particular elements might be more so than others. Fresh Air broadcast an interesting interview with Woody Allen last year in which he talked about his childhood. Turns out Allen was, in fact, quite an athlete in multiple sports (track & field and baseball), was pretty happy at school, and was usually among the first picked for games. What is commonly attributed as autobiographical, his nerdy bookishness (and his sexual compensation, but that’s another thread altogether) and being such an outsider, isn’t true after all. Or at least not as reliably and predictably as it is usually treated.

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I have to remind myself that Dubliners was intended, as I understand it, to be closer to a novel than a collection of individual stories. It was certainly written to be read as a whole, which can make it problematic to discuss any single story in isolation. Not a lot happens in “The Sisters” in the same way not a lot happens when you hold a key in your hand… but it’s a necessary start to unlocking a door (or a treasure chest) and sometimes a key has interest in and of itself.

***

“The Sisters” isn’t just a setting of the stage, establishing the theme of paralysis, but one of the effects of paralysis: incompleteness. The boy’s education is incomplete as is most of the conversation between old Mr. Cotter and the boy’s uncle… not to mention that as a boy he is himself necessarily incomplete. Reverend Flynn’s faith is incomplete (and insufficient). The sisters’ lives, without the Reverend to take care of, are incomplete.

***

Barbara notes that an early draft of “The Sisters” was actually a poem. I didn’t know that. But the simple clarity and beauty of Joyce’s language—when he chooses to employ it that way!—is one of the aspects of his writing I enjoy most. Listen to Barbara’s reading of the first paragraph. Do you hear the muscular music of Joyce’s prose? Even with the mundane parenthetical aside (“it was vacation time”), the whole paragraph sings, but the latter third is most striking:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

This kind of music is hard to explain. I run into the same kind of trouble I find myself in when trying to explain Jack Gilbert’s poetry, and often end up just thinking (and sometimes saying): I guess you either hear it or you don’t. Or, as Dick Hugo liked to put it, “I’m just lucky I guess.”

***

Joyce is a wellspring from which a wide variety of writers drink. You can trace Joyce’s stylistic DNA through writers as diverse as Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway, and Carver.

***

What to make of the religious aspects of the story? As a representative of the Catholic church—of which Joyce was, to put it kindly, not a big fan—Reverend Flynn figures in the story mostly as a grotesque figure in his habits, in his possibly syphilitic demise, and finally in the form of his body, the morbid centerpiece of the story (despite the title).

Mr. Cotter insinuates there might have been more wrong with the Reverend than a simple nervous breakdown or even a loss of faith, but it’s never made clear what wrongs Cotter has in mind. I tend to think it’s merely the suspicions and cynicism of an old man when confronted by the precocious and preternaturally studious and serious young man, a common character for Joyce… but it’s easy to make a case otherwise considering the vision the boy has of Flynn attempting a kind of confession to him and the image of Flynn’s tongue lying on his lower lip. And once going down that path all kinds of hay can be made with things like the ambiguous story of the broken chalice (“…it was the beginning of it … it was the boy’s fault”), the fact that the boy is quite young yet the priest seems to have spent some time schooling him in minutiae of operations of the church and various kinds of sin, and Freudian objects like the “velvet curtains” and “swinging lamps.”

***

Am I the only one who figures Joyce’s opening line to be purposefully allusive to Dante’s Inferno (“Abandon hope ye who enter here”). On the other hand, perhaps speculation about potential priestly pederasty has started to warp my perception.

***

“No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse.”

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[CC licensed image by reillyandrew] 

Today begins a motley reading of James Joyce’s Dubliners by a shaggy collective connective group network. Its easy for to join in the fun if you’d like!

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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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[CC licensed image by Stephen Poff] 

"… Donald Barthelme wrote that "the combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered." Is there a better one-sentence defense and explanation and manifesto of art? It is combinatorial agility– not just of words, but of sentences, paragraphs, images, objects, events, concepts, and characters- that generates, startles, and reveals.

I’m thinking here of Daisy crying stormily over the shirts that Gatsby tosses onto a table into a soft rich heap. These are shirts, Nick tells us, with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. "They’re such beautiful shirts," Daisy says, sobbing into their thick folds. "It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such– such beautiful shirts before. "The scene connects a rich guy’s wardrobe and turbulent emotion– beauty and sadness– in a surprising (but not inexplicable or mysterious) causal relationship. Like most literary surprises, Daisy’s reaction to what Nick calls the many-colored disarray seems correct, even inevitable. If Gatsby’s shirts made Daisy speak in tongues or punch Carraway in the gut, we would be surprised, all right, but not convinced or moved.

Or consider Isaac Babel’s "First Love," a story that conjoins delirious desire and genocide, and that contains this sentence: "For five of my ten years I had dreamed with all the fervor of my soul about having doves, and then, when I finally managed to buy them, Makarenko the cripple smashed the doves against the side of my face." Bird and face, peace and violence, passion and pogrom– juxtaposed, smashed, improbably but credibly.

Surprises are, in their effect and regardless of content, instruments of wonder and spirit. A surprise lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside. There are many reasons to read literature, of course. One very good reason to read literature is to be surprised. In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise."

–Chris Bachelder
found in The Believer, v8 n1 (January 2010)

Posted in: Commonplace Book No Comments »

"Groups squabble about literature because they have other than literary uses for the literary. The schools, which are busy finding ways to get the answers to the Test of Time smuggled to their chosen favoritism as coaches slip answers to their players so they may pass the latest examination, will now and then speak of Art and claim a disinterested purity. And there are an unorganized few (the unhappy few whom I should like to represent, "the immense minority," as Juan Ramón Jiménez so significantly puts it) who sincerely love the arts. There are those for whom reading, for example, can be an act of love, and lead to a revelation, not of truth, moral or otherwise, but of lucidity, order, rightness of relation, the experience of a world fully felt and furnished and worked out in the head, the head where the heart is also to be found, and all the other vital organs.

[...]

Inside the Academy, at the Symphony, within Museum walls, each warring faction will boast that God is on their side, and claim transcendence for their values and opinions. This is done by trying to ensure that only their ideas, and works correctly expressing them, get put before the public in the future, and by reanalyzing the past as far back as the library catalog has cards (a deliberately out-of-date metaphor) in order to show, as I previously characterized their internecine struggles, that "it has ever been thus," whatever it is that they say it is now.

Outside, in the vendors” streets, there is nothing but temporary tents. The lasting, the universal, are despised (except by those who are still peddling the classics to old fogies). But who really wants reruns of already winded warhorses? Well, only those arrogant and rapacious revivalists who set Rigoletto in the Bronx and who want Dido and Aeneas to sing about their love while costumed as colonials. Their pitiful originalities would have once brought them to the gibbet or the stake.

The ideal cultural product can come powerfully packaged, creates a mighty stir, can be devoured with both delight and a sense of life-shaking revelation, provides an easy topic for talk, is guaranteed to be without real salt or any actual fat– contains no substance of any substantial kind– so that after you have eaten it, for days you will shit only air."

–William Gass
from "The Test of Time"
found in The Test of Time: Essays (2003)

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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?

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics, reading log 5 Comments »