Cosmopoetica

[CC licensed image by darkpatator]

Eighteen months ago– a day after his suicide– I packed up every David Foster Wallace authored book, every journal, magazine, and photocopied piece of ephemera he appeared in, and everything else I could find with his byline and hid it all in a closet.

A few days ago– on what would have been Wallace’s 48th birthday– I told a friend how I still hadn’t been able to re-read anything Wallace had written. “Open that box. Like, now,” she said. And since I trust this friend, I did. I went back to the first words of Wallace’s I ever read, the short story “Everything is Green.” I immediately noticed the coincidence of the narrator’s age:

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[image by almomody] 

I’ve recently enjoyed Steven D. Schroeder’s “mini-anthologies” of Weldon Kees and Alan Dugan. What a great project… a simple idea, but one that sits right in the sweet spot of what the “read/write web” can be: a place for personal, contemplative curation. Many people are creating de facto anthologies in their blogs through accretion, which have their own charms but lack the cohesion that, ideally, provides meaningful context. And of course there are a variety of web magazines, journals and reviews out there–ranging from inexplicable to excellent–but I know from my own stints editing such beasts that the moment you assume the role of editor for a “publication,” no matter how personally connected you are to it, your perspective necessarily changes and becomes less personal and more diffused. This isn’t a bad thing, any more than changing from a telephoto to a wide-angle lens is a bad thing. But what we need more of are snapshots taken through macro- and fish-eye lenses, close examinations of a single poet or theme that bear down and, possibly through that focused attention, open up a new field… while remaining personal projects motivated by strong emotions and attachment. What better way to share, teach and honor work you enjoy?

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Something you don’t see every day: portraits of literary icons made of toast. Pictured are Yeats, Wilde, and Beckett.

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[photo by Pascal B]

Sad news… poet Deborah Digges has (apparently) committed suicide. A poem of Deborah’s:

“The Leaves”

I can bless a death this human, this leaf
the size of my hand. From the life-line spreads

a sapped, distended jaundice
toward the edges, still green.

I’ve seen the sick starve out beyond
the grip of their disease.

They sleep for days, their stomachs gone,
the bones in their hands

seeming to rise to the hour
that will receive them.

Sometimes on their last evening, they sit up
and ask for food,

their faces bloodless, almost golden,
they inquire about the future.

*

One August I drove the back roads,
the dust wheeling behind me.

I wandered through the ruins of sharecrop farms
and saw the weeds in the sun frames

opening the floorboards.
Once behind what must have been an outhouse

the way wild yellow roses bunched and climbed
the sweaty walls, I found a pile of letters,

fire-scarred, urinous.
All afternoon the sun brought the field to me.

The insects hushed as I approached.
I read how the world had failed who ever lived behind

the page, behind the misquoted Bible verses,
that awkward backhand trying to explain deliverance.

*

The morning Keats left Guys Hospital’s cadaver rooms
for the last time, he said he was afraid.

This was the future, this corning down a stairway
under the elms’ summer green,

passing the barber shops along the avenue that still
performed the surgeries, still dumped

blood caught in sand from porcelain washtubs
into the road-side sewer. From those windows,

from a distance, he could have been anyone
taking in the trees, mistaking the muse for this new

warmth around his heart—the first symptom
of his illness—that so swelled the look of things,

it made leaves into poems, though he’d write later
he had not grieved, not loved enough to claim them.

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[Ben Folds pic by deovolenti]

Through a chain of circumstances too complicated to recount, I discovered a Paper Cuts Blog playlist by Nick Hornby, perpetual resident on my “reliable favorite authors” shortlist, in which he alluded to collaborating with a favorite musician of mine: Ben Folds:

4) Jen and Justin, Ben Folds. You can’t hear this song at the moment, and I’m hoping you never will. … One of my side-projects this year (and it’s been more fun than I want to admit) is to attempt lyrics for Ben Folds’s next album, and even if nothing comes of it, I have learned more about the craft of songwriting from the e-mails I’ve been getting than from just about anything I’ve ever read. Most of the time I’ve been sending over words that he’s going to try to set to music; occasionally we’re working the other way around, and I’ll try to fit a lyric to an existing melody. This tune has one of Folds’s most heart-melting choruses, which, considering his melodic gifts, means it’s as pretty as a pop song can be.

I do hope to hear some of these songs. A bit of searching and I ended up at Hornby’s blog (I had no idea he had one!), where he confirmed that the collaboration continued:

…I’m writing the lyrics for a Ben Folds album, which he’s recording in Dublin in December. I wasn’t going to mention this, on the presumption that it will never happen, but my writing partner seems confident enough to have talked about it already, and if he thinks something will come of it, then (deep breath) so do I.

Hornby goes on to answer those who might wonder why Folds wants anyone to write lyrics for his next album:

Ben, as you may know, is quite capable of writing his own lyrics, but I think he fancied a rest, and anyway he, like me, wants to have as much fun as he can in his chosen medium while there’s still fun to be had. Ben got in touch after I’d written about Smoke in 31 Songs/Songbook, which is how I ended up contributing a song to ‘Has Been’, the mad and great William Shatner album he produced.

I’ve never heard of Songbook, but after a quick perusal it went right on my “must get ASAP” list– Hornby writing from the heart on music is second only to Hornby writing about books (am I the only one who read The Believer primarily for Hornby’s– and the Polysyllabic Spree’s– “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column?).

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image “borrowed” from stlog

Donald Finkel is one of those poets I’ve yet to get around to seriously reading but whose poems stand out enough that I actually remember them long after serendipitously discovering them in journals such as The Paris Review and The Chicago Review. Finkel’s name also comes up regularly in conversations and interviews with poets, courtesy of his reputation as a fine, fine teacher and his long-term association with Washington University.

Recordings (Part 1 and Part 2) of a tribute to Finkel are fun to listen to and give you a glimpse at the high esteem in which Finkel was held. Also of interest are profiles of Finkel in STLtoday and the St. Louis Beacon.

Here are a few of his poems:

“Burden”

Nouns were the first to slip away.
Was it because they were easier to forget,
or the most dispensable?
Funerals back then were milling
with nouns whose names he’d forgotten,
if he’d ever met them.
Evidently, somewhere out there
a swarm of improper nouns
had prospered and multiplied.
Odd nouns came knocking every day
looking for work, till the old bard
left off answering the door.
Verbs were beasts of another persuasion.
For a while some stayed behind,
pacing the halls or curled on the living room sofa.
But they had to be fed. Some nights
they sank their claws in his thigh
when they were hungry.
As the last syllable crept away,
he felt a peculiar lightness,
like the wisp that rises,
from a smoldering wick—
as if words were the burden
he’d been bearing, all his life.

–Donald Finkel
From: Cortland Review

“The Invention of Meaning”

In the beginning was the hand
and the poem of the hand,
a breathless trope, a floating hieroglyph,
seamless as water.

Then the hand spoke, and the hand said
“Let there be meaning,” and the meaning sang:
“Let there be love,” and the hand
shaped itself another hand of clay.

Now, where there had been
but one meaning, there were two.
So the hands wrestled all night
till they saw it was pointless.

So together they shaped themselves
a cunning tongue, to arbitrate.
Now, where there had been two meanings,
there were three.

And the hands wrung one another,
abashed, and the tongue took over.

–Donald Finkel
From: Natural Bridge

 

“The Ape Who Painted”

Toward the end of his painting career, Congo was
producing excellent circles, but nearly always filled them
in immediately.
     –Alexander Alland, Jr., The Artistic Animal

from time to time he would pause
to examine an apple, turning it
in his long, sensitive fingers, or fish
a dust-mouse gently from under his bed
not a hair displaced
or moon for hours, sprawled on his favorite tire
praying to his thumb
how fortunate we are to have captured on film
this miraculous thumb, in full career
sweeping in a great assured acc from left to right
trailing a gleaming Indian Red parabola
counterclockwise, following its own law
tailing up again, toward its beginning
deftly dividing out from in
then filling carefully the bowl of zero
with precious red, horizon to horizon
toward the end, the painter’s cage was strewn
with fallen suns, great bloody periods
pages from some cosmic calendar
while he grew more taciturn than ever.

–Donald Finkel
From: What Manner of Beast

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[1955 cover from WikiMedia Commons]

Dolores Haze– the “nymphet” of Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest novel (rightfully found in many lists of best novels)– would be 62 this year… in America at least, where Lolita wasn’t published until 1958.

[photo via David Zellaby]

What would Dolores/Lolita be like today? Would she be a brassy, hyper-sexualized doyenne? A dolorous, quiet victim of years of Freudian psychotherapy? Would she have a Lolita of her own? The careful reader knows this is fiction on top of fiction, as Dolores, a.k.a. Lolita, a.k.a. “Mrs. Richard F. Schiller,” died giving birth to a stillborn girl on Christmas Day, 1952… not even a month after Humbert Humbert died in prison. How twisted is that fiction squared, the child giving birth to a dead girl child of her own and dying in the process? Emptiness come of emptiness.

[photo by Pink Ponk]

Like many American men my age, my first experience with Lolita was as a young teen hoping for sex scenes that would justify the deeply forbidden atmosphere surrounding the book. I smuggled it out of the library and waited impatiently until everyone in the house was asleep before daring to retrieve the book from my book bag. My disappointment was immediate.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap,
at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

What? I searched in vain for the keywords that had proved so rewarding in my worn copy of Clan of the Cave Bear. Nothing. Sure, Humbert recounts his first tryst with a girlfriend when he was young, but even– or perhaps especially– then, phrases like “I have her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion” resulted in disappointment. Whatever Lolita was, it wasn’t pornography.

[still by litmuse]

Of course I returned to it years later, as many do. I’ve read it twice. Each time in awe at Nabokov’s ability to get inside the head of Humber Humbert, the creepy, conflicted, all-too-human narrator I always thought of as an old man was only 36 or 37– as of a few days ago younger than I am now! Exquisitely creepy, I tried to maintain the rational critical distance but couldn’t help but wonder about Nabokov. He must have thought about– and as– Humbert for a long, long time. How much of himself was in there? How much must writing that novel have twisted him?

[photo by Francisca Brava]

Humbert Humbert, never tried but emphatically convicted. Victim of giving in to the fantasies we would label lurid but for that they are the stuff of everyman’s mind, recognized by and projected onto our culture but rarely admitted, much less discussed. The reality is, Humbert raises the spectre of guilty thoughts many men share to varying degrees. Had Lolita been a close relative, the disgust and dismissal would be easy. But the statutory dividing line of sexual legitimacy is a legal fiction not a biological or emotional reality. I’m not arguing against the idea of pedophilia, only pointing out that social mores change over time and the line that we draw has a Dolores Haze-y fringe.

[photo by Duet G]

Nabokov wisely made Lolita 12 years old, a child enough to provoke disgust but still at the higher end of the 10-13 year old age of consent that was the norm in Western countries as late as the mid-1800s. But even considering the reality of adult attraction to teens is verboten, the stuff of pornography sites none-too-subtle advertising. We are instead given to believe that recognizing the sexual attraction of an 18 year old is unwise, but recognizing that of the same girl a day before her 18th birthday is both unwise and unlawful. One day you would be a pedophile, the next day just an average consumer. Nabokov doesn’t need to be explicit in his descriptions; he doesn’t need to paint Humbert as an evil man… it is enough just to raise the queasy questions at all.  

[still by David Zellaby]

And as young as she is, Lolita is no “innocent.” She’s ultimately an empty set of acquired gestures, as much a victim of her mother’s jealousy as Humbert’s effete violence. She embodies the cruel attention coupled with a blithe lack of awareness that makes child beauty pageants a modern grotesque and demands that we irrationally attempt to legislate desire. Humbert isn’t just speaking of Lolita as a player, but as a woman, when he watches her play tennis:

Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality.

The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis–without any utilitarian results.

Is it any surprise that nothing in the brief lives of either Lolita or Humbert are destined to turn out well?

[photo by orangeacid]

Yet in the end, the importance and power of Lolita is located beyond all of this, in a palace of super-charged, precise, fantastic language. As Humbert must admit:

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

 Lolita the novel is important, not Lolita the character or symbol or moral lesson. It’s philosophically and psychologically interesting to see how Nabokov predicted the contemporary fetishization of adolescent girls but the continued relevance of the novel extends well past such contemporary concerns, Humbert’s obsession with “Lolita”– which is just a word– mirroring Nabokov’s obsession with words, delving deep into the heart of language at its most refined as aped by a human animal at its most primitive.

[photo by Sebi]

[Note: you might be interested in some thoughts about (and excerpts from) the collected correspondence of Nabokov and E. O. Wilson I posted a few years ago.]

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Author of perhaps the only great novel that actually begins “it was a dark and stormy night,” Madeleine L’Engle has died. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that I owe a significant portion of the good things in my life– and a number of lifelong obsessions– to the cornerstone experience of reading A Wrinkle in Time.

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Hey, how often does a new t-shirt come out that includes Shakespeare and The Ladies? Ahh, to be young again…

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Via First Draft a snippet from Mark Taw’s This I Believe entry:

I could say that I believe in America because it rewarded my family’s hard work to overcome poverty. I could say that I believe in holding on to rituals and traditions because they helped us flourish in a new country. But these concepts are more concretely expressed this way: I believe in feeding monkeys on my birthday — something I’ve done without fail for 35 years.

You could do worse on your birthday…

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Another good one gone.

Like many, I met Kurt Vonnegut through his much anthologized story, Harrison Bergeron. I was at the perfect age to read it: old enough to understand that this was a different kind of story– one of philosophy and moral and dark humor– but young enough not to be so jaded as to lack appreciation for them. I then went on a Vonnegut binge from Slaughterhouse Five to Player Piano and everything he’s written since then including the should-have-been-burned-in-manuscript Timequake.

If some of his work remains a guilty, partly secret pleasure– admitted only after drinking a bit and often in tandem with confessions involving Ayn Rand and Derrida– it in no way lowers my estimation of Vonnegut. Few pierced the easy facade of life– particularly American and now “Western” life, supported by the wampeters, foma and granfalloons as enjoyably and memorably as he did.

And amongst much good advice for writing and living alike, I’ll always remember this (one of his eight rules):

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

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I’m just about done with Yellow Dog and really don’t understand all the poor reviews. It’s funny, merciless, and like most of Amis’ work almost off-handedly brilliant. Every other paragraph (and sometimes every other sentence) reveals some kind of little spark of genius… the result is a fire. I know I’m gushing here, which I don’t normally do, but damn the man can write. There are many great books out there. Most of them of the sort that one can, if they are willing to admit to it in their deepest dreams, imagine having written themselves. I never feel that way about Amis… his observations and verbal fireworks are the kind of thing that no one else can do. Which isn’t to say that none rival him, only that he is in a very elite group.

Apparently Amis doesn’t care much for the poor reviews either, as he notes in a brief, incisive Guardian profile (which includes a number of reader emails) when asked which of his books was his favorite:

Your novels are like your children, and you try not to have favourites. But you tend to favour the one that has had the hardest time of it, so I will go for Yellow Dog (and, to repeat, Tibor Fischer [the reviewer who wrote "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder ... It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating] is a creep and a wretch. Oh yeah: and a fat-arse). I had a soft spot for it anyway, but when I saw it being scragged in the playground …

Later in the same article he is asked about his own “snobbery”:

I think snobbery ought to make a comeback. Not the old “class” shit but mental and verbal snobbery. Sometimes snobbery is forced upon you. So let’s have a period of exaggerated respect for rationality; and let’s look down on people who use the words everybody else uses.

He also covers toics as diverse as a naked Kirk Douglas, horrorism, US toilet paper, misogyny, motivation, and the Middle East situation…

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Richard Powers on why he never touches a keyboard unless he has to, speech recognition, and the power and utility of the human voice.

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I’m about 1/3 of the way through Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer and I’m already comfortable recommending it. The subtitle “A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” is apt– you don’t have to be (or wish to be) a writer to get a lot out of Prose’s enjoyable (ahem) prose.

In essence, the book is an argument for– and a guide in how to undertake– close reading. Not in the warped lit-theory school sense with all of its attendant philosophy and politics, but in the more immediate and obvious sense of reading very closely and paying attention to what is being read. Prose starts with a chapter on words, then one on sentences, then paragraphs and so on, using a steady stream of real-world excerpts and her readings of them. For readers it can be eye-opening to watch over an astute reader’s shoulder and see what they see and where they see it. For writers, this kind of rewarding reading– the kind that goes beyond the casual, if voracious, habits of many book “consumers” in our era of bigger, better, faster, more– is also an invaluable skill.

I don’t have a problem with such things, but this is decidedly not a mystical, Zen approach to being “present” as a reader. This is, as Prose, refers to it, “reading carnivorously.” She acknowledges the difficulty of aesthetics and the fact that not all readers will agree with all of her assessments, but recognizing what others see even while disagreeing with it is an essential part of close reading. Instead of focusing on the spiritual, the genius, and the talents which arguably can’t be taught, Prose follows the explicit contours of reading practice, the contradictions of mechanics and grammar, and above all sharing her take on some incredibly well chosen pieces of writing.

Even the advanced, experienced reader (or reading writer) should enjoy this book. Prose doesn’t shy away from the “deeper” authors (or questions), but she recognizes that many of these questions have to be answered for oneself– she can only provide her example. While many of the ideas will already be familiar, the reinforcement and analysis provided will be fresh… and refreshing.

So far this book is one I have both been wanting to write myself for years and desperately seeking to confirm that I am not alone in feeling that attentive reading, with all of its rewards, is not just a possibly vanishing useful skill, but perhaps the best kind of instruction any writer can hope to have.

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Jack Shafer has it just about completely right in his article calling Ian McEwan to task for his plagiarism of Lucilla Andrews’ memoir No Time for Romance. It’s simple: McEwan stole significant pieces of Andrews’ creation and used them in his acclaimed book Atonement. It isn’t “fair use” because it is not within the conventions laid out for that privilege. It isn’t “acceptable” because it’s art and “artists build one one another’s work.” It remains unacceptable even in McEwan’s fictional work, despite claims that there “can’t be theft in fiction.” It doesn’t matter if McEwan “expresses his gratitude at readings and in an Author’s Note” because he didn’t get permission in the first place and the authors note is non-specific (and absent from some editions of the book).

All of the quotations above synopsize the position taken by various pieces defending McEwan (and other plagiarists like Doris Kearns Goodwin) as just doing what “artists” do. And they’re all so much horse-puckey.

The whole thing is a lot simpler than McEwan’s defenders would like us to think. (more…)

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