blogging at will

current mood: writing

2023-09-10T08:24:53Z

AO3 is so cool, and peer-to-peer posting spaces in general, because you can find stuff and share stuff that isn't professional-grade but still has its own thing going for it - if everything had to be professional-grade to be seen then we'd all be missing out on a lot, both as readers and writers!

So yes, I spent like three decades dreaming of writing professionally and never even really writing at all, partly because the terror of expectation killed all desire to learn, and do by learning, and learn by doing. To kick off that expectation and just write for the sheer love of the story and characters and readers and prose is the way to make it happen!!

I'm having these revelations now like it's, I don't know, the turn of the millennium or something. Better late than never??

tl; dr writing is currently happening and I'm so happy!

comments

Murder ballad

2022-10-28T05:01:43Z

There's a pair of murder ballads by The Secret Sisters, Iuka and Mississippi. They're very beautiful; I got a prompt to write a poem based on a song and this is what I came up with, lyrics to the tune of Mississippi.

DALLAB REDRUM
the other way around

( Content warning: incest )

comments

Quotes

2022-04-30T18:09:48Z

I have a thing for pairing quotes together, here are three pairs featuring the late, great Toni Morrison:

1. Parallelism

Two hot, close rooms thus became my world; and a crippled old woman, my mistress, my friend, my all. Her service was my duty—her pain, my suffering—her relief, my hope—her anger, my punishment—her regard, my reward.
—Charlotte Brontë, Villette

And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved.
—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

2. Blood

Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

The instinct of kings was always to slay the messenger, and they were right. A real messenger, a worthy one, is corrupted by the message he brings. And if he is noble then he should accept that corruption.
—Toni Morrison, Tar Baby

3. Gaze

This was a man who moved like the gods were watching; every gesture he made was upright and correct.
—Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

No one is looking at him, but he behaves as though there is. That's the way. Carry yourself the way you would if you were always under the reviewing gaze of an impressionable but casual acquaintance.
—Toni Morrison, Jazz

comments

Rooms as narrative anchors

2022-04-28T23:48:18Z

I have two examples of this. One, there is a passage in The Price of Salt, a beautiful, unusual transition from a character's thought of a thing to its materialization in the room:

“Terry, you’re an angel,” Richard’s deep voice said, and she thought of Carol saying the same thing.

She watched him pick up his little glass from the floor and set it with the bottle into the closet. She felt immensely superior to him suddenly, to all the people below stairs. She was happier than any of them. Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out—

“Pretty?” Richard said.

Therese sat up. “It’s a beauty!”

“I finished it last night. I thought if it was a good day, we’d go to the park and fly it.” Richard grinned like a boy, proud of his handiwork. “Look at the back.”

It was a Russian kite, rectangular and bowed like a shield, its slim frame notched and tied at the corners. On the front, Richard had painted a cathedral with whirling domes and a red sky behind it.

“Let’s go fly it now,” Therese said.

Two, there is a scene in Busman's Honeymoon on which I took a note. The note reads:

Interrogation of Crutchley
Starts from Harriet's point of view
She leaves the room
Omniscient third, some dipping into Peter's head, some into Kirk's
Then Peter leaves
Scene continues

I.e., the narration stays in the room, is focalized through the room. So cool!

It is cool, isn't it?

comments

#SorryNotSorry

2021-04-26T18:42:09Z

SUMMER CRUSH; or, EARWORM
To the tune of Moves Like Jagger

GIRL #1

I failed every class
Spring semester
At school I’m just ass
A bad tester

My SAT blank
My GPA tanked
My parents are cranks

They’re making me take
Summer session
Well maybe I’ll shake
This depression

The first day of class
I saw your fine ass
Depression is past

Don’t know who I am
A girl who’s too scared to approach you
Or the type to think she can coach you
Will I swoon or swagger
Will I swoon or swagger
Will I swoon and moon this afternoon in June or swagger

I can’t dare myself to approach you
Can’t act like I think I could coach you
Guess I’ll swoon not swagger
Guess I’ll swoon not swagger
Guess I’ll swoon and moon this afternoon in June not swagger

I sit at the back
Of the classroom
You like to wear black
But you still bloom

The prettiest rose
My crush only grows
(The teacher he knows 😬)

Today is the day
I’ve decided
That I’m gonna say
What’s in my head

Catch you after class
And I’ll make a pass
But I’m such an ass

Don’t know who I am
A girl who’s too scared to approach you
Or the type to think she can coach you
Will I swoon or swagger
Will I swoon or swagger
Will I swoon and moon this afternoon in June or swagger

I should dare myself to approach you
And act like I think I could coach you
I won’t swoon but swagger
I won’t swoon but swagger
I won’t swoon and moon this afternoon in June but swagger

GIRL #2

I see you blush
When you look my way
You’ve got a crush
And I’m also gay

I think you’re super cute too
So come on make a move, you
(Surprise the teacher who knew)

You got a touch
Of bad attitude
But not too much
I know you won’t be crude

You ain’t got nothing to prove
So come on make a move, you
(Let’s shock the teacher who knew)

GIRL #1

Don’t know who I am
A girl who’s too scared to approach you
Or the type to think she can coach you
Will I swoon or swagger
Will I swoon or swagger
Will I swoon and moon this afternoon in June or swagger

Gonna make the choice to approach you
Not act like I think I could coach you
Neither swoon nor swagger
Neither swoon nor swagger
Neither swoon and moon this afternoon in June nor swagger 🙌

comments

Terza rima

2021-04-25T20:50:50Z

See Shelley's Ode to the West Wind.

ODE TO ANGER

I.

Apostrophizing odes are out of fashion.
Unstirred by glories in the natural world,
I summon not the west wind but the passion

Roused when we sense that’s not right. Once I hurled
A book against the wall (it’s by a man)
When anger finally choked decorum: furled

Rage let to fly then saw its crimson span
The sky! There’s not much in the universe
I’m sure of, but I’m sure of this: rage can

Be righteous—cleansing—turning us not worse
But better. Anger is the only right
Reaction to misogyny. I nurse

My rage because, flaming, it lights my sight.
My rage is what moves me to fight the night.

II.

Our first and visceral reaction—fear—
Is hardly wrong: misogyny can kill.
This happened: Armed with knives and guns and sheer

Conviction—ready to die on that hill—
This is revenge because he can’t get laid—
A man murdered six people. Incels thrill

To his fulfillment of their shared crusade,
Of which rape culture is both root and fruit.
It stands to more than reason we’re afraid:

It stands to things the way they are. As brute
Reality daily legitimates
Our fear, we take precautions: it’s astute.

The way things are: Take care. Don’t tempt the fates.
The way things are: This rhetoric? It grates.

III.

It’s used to justify the way things are
By those who also say “Boys will be boys.”
Sexual harassment and assault? Just par

For the course set by evolution! Ploys
Like these to vindicate the status quo
Treat it as fixed—a natural equipoise—

The best society can do. To show
This reasoning up isn’t the point—it’s not
As if the people using it don’t know

Of their bad faith. Instead, let’s keep the thought
Burning that things the way they are demand
Both change and rage. It’s only battles fought

That can be won, and it’s our anger fanned
To white heat that drives—and revives—our stand.

IV.

Because despair is always ready. Hope
Tries to sustain itself: as violence makes
Advances, more and more falls in its scope—

Misogyny is just one form hate takes,
And sexism is only one among
The axes of oppression. What awakes

A given person’s conscience? What words sung
In what tongue penetrate one’s consciousness?
Whatever does it, consciousness once stung

To conscience grows, until we see and stress
The intertwinement of oppressions. Thrash
Them all: communities must coalesce.

—Let hope take heart as we unite! Refashion
The way things are—says anger—and compassion.

V.

Emotions fire the push for social change—
Community relights the passing torch
Between its bearers singly tired—the range

To be traversed is vast—and gives us porch
And perch—both shelter and high ground—where we
Set education to its work. The scorch-

And-salt approach is just one strategy,
One mindset, one tool in the ample box.
To learn and teach and research is to see

Always further and better—conscience knocks
On the more doors the more our work gains traction.
That verse can do this work—can swell our flocks—

That writing poems reifies abstraction—
I learned from you—whose Ode inspired this action.

comments

Sestina

2021-04-17T21:16:36Z

It was love at first sight: his name was John.
We met over diamonds at Tiffany’s,
Where he was looking for a gift. His wife
Never knew what she missed. The pendant hit
My neck at just the spot to most become
The line and arc and hollow of my throat.

The marquise diamonds gleaming at my throat
Composed a star. “As you’re a star,” said John,
“Lighting my night so brightly it’s become
“The day.” I left the job at Tiffany’s:
The carrot was the latest Broadway hit.
Hoteliers knew to treat me as his wife.

At times, I thought about her, his real wife.
At times, my fingers idling at my throat
Would graze the pendant, and the guilt would hit:
I’d stolen more than diamonds from her. John
Called me the brightest jewel at Tiffany’s.
And for love of him, that’s what I’d become.

I told him, or tried: “I think we become
“What we love the most.” He laughed. “Then my wife
“Would be me. My shopgirl from Tiffany’s
“Would then leave me and go to her.” My throat
Closed up at that. “I’ll never leave you, John.”
If he meant it to hurt, he scored a hit.

But that was once, and I sustained the hit.
We traveled less. I asked. “Yes, she’s become
“Suspicious,” he said, too casually. “John—”
“Hush. Jessica may be my jealous wife
“But you’re my star. Come on.” He touched my throat.
“Let’s get you something new at Tiffany’s.”

This time he bought me pearls at Tiffany’s.
On the way out, he started, as if hit.
I knew her right away. Hand at her throat,
She studied me. “Well, those pearls do become
“You more than they would me. I’m just the wife.”
He stepped between us. “Jessica—“ “Stop, John.

“I’ve cast the john, the whore—and now the wife.
“Your lovely-throated girl from Tiffany’s
“Will make my film—‘Becoming Me’—a hit.”

comments

Blank verse

2021-04-15T20:04:50Z

I dreamed God made the world. He had no choice:
Creation is the overflow of his
Perfection. I dreamed Lucifer of all
The angels had the finest eyes, the most
Exquisite sensibility, and so
In all creation it was he who loved
God best. When God became enamored of
The tiny, fallible creatures on Earth
He broke Lucifer’s heart: perfection proved
Itself the opposite. And this is why
The Lightbringer, the Morningstar, moment
By moment chooses Hell—which—I dreamed—is
No more, no less, than the absence of God.

comments

What happened when I tried to write echo verse

2021-04-15T20:02:49Z

CAPITALISM SPEAKS

Aestheticize
Size.

Knead
Need.

Profit
Off it.

For the rich
Taxes
Ax.

For the poor
Spending
"Pending."

comments

Tanka

2021-04-12T09:20:45Z

Luxuriant leaves
Purple and grace the plum tree.
They wave to the breeze.
I love them through my window,
But I mourn the short-lived blooms.

comments

Alliteration and a three-beat meter

2021-04-12T09:16:15Z

Galumphing alongside a limberer lad,
I encountered a cat on my careless trajectory.
Feet met feline with unfortunate force:
I fell with a “fuck!” and I felt so embarrassed.
But more was to matter than mortification
(Wounds and wailing and woe were waiting):
The cat had been crouched (or had couched?) at the top
Of a flight of some forty or fifty steep steps.
And so, downward, while damning the dastardly builder,
I fell and I fell and I fell and I fell and
Externally tumbling, internally grumbling
At cats, accursed whether couching or crouching—
At governing gravity grounding my mass—
At Newton who knew than nothing escapes
The centripetal triumph of trusty old G—
Not the stars in the sky nor the stars in the movies.
But no Hollywood hero so handsome and tall ever
Found himself falling till he flopped to a stop.
When I landed at last up I looked, and I saw
That the limberer lad was laughing and pointing.
I gingerly gestured🖕🏻but just for the form,
Philosophically setting aside all my suffering.
Cats are cute! Gravity is great!

comments

After "My Last Duchess"

2021-04-12T08:50:54Z

BROWNING

That’s my ex-boyfriend’s work you’re looking at.
He liked to make digital art; this tat-
Too—all my ink, in fact—began as files
On his computer. Bet they’d stretch for miles
If laid out end to end, all his designs.
Oh yes, they’re finely rendered, these few lines—
But never mind the tracery on my skin.
Tell me about yourself. Like, what’s your sin
Of choice? One’s vices mold one’s character,
I think, into such curious shapes. Incur
A few like mine then, since you claim you’ve none.
The worst of them? It’s jealousy: the sun
At midday burns no brighter than my rage
When I suspect a partner’s false. A sage
Guess, that, but no, this boyfriend didn’t cheat
On me; that’s not why we broke up. A treat
It might have been though, to have caught him out:
I rather like to rage and scream and shout.
Instead, I found myself fending off “I
Love you’s” till, to forestall more puppy eye-
S, I finally said it back: “I love you too—
So much I can’t quite bear it.” Right on cue
He kissed me like the world was burning up.
And then he set to with a will: my cup
Ran over many times that night, to put
The matter biblically. Ouch! That’s my foot.
Don’t worry, we’re all klutzes in a crowd.
Ha! Since you ask, yes, he was well-endowed.
Yes, very smart. His parents? Well, had we
Got married I’d have been spared in-laws; he
Was orphaned at thirteen. A car crash, yes,
You guessed it. No, thank God, he got the mess
Out of his system long before we met
And never fussed about his loss. What, debt?
No way. Impeccable, his finances.
He did read, yes. That poem about Cortez,
Or was it Homer—right, by Keats. His fav-
Orite, or one of them. Yes, you bet he gave
Great gifts (and head). No, I don’t mind at all,
Ask anything, however big or small.
Ah, that’s the million-dollar question. Truth
Is, I left him. — Oh hey, look, there’s a booth
Just opened up, let’s grab it. — Anyway,
Do stop apologizing, it’s okay:
You made the natural assumption. I’m
Not impressive, so how’d I catch this prime
Guy—just to dump him? I can’t speak to what
He saw in me: I’m pretty, kind of, but
I’d call myself a seven, tops. My ex,
Though, broke the scale. Just—one of those perplex-
Ing people standards don’t apply to, who
Don’t even know it, much less care—imbue-
D with excellences they’re as heedless of
As fish of water—yeah, you gotta love
The type, right? They should form a club and shine
Among themselves sequestered. Then—more wine?
You’re very welcome—we mere groundlings might
Pretend to quality. And yet, despite
My ex’s membership in that elite—
Or rather, different from the rest replete
With gifts—he didn’t make you feel compelled
To catalog your failings. He dispelled
Your insecurities—the opposite
Effect. Imperatives like being wit-
Ty, pretty, perfect, best, which motivate
Our daily doings—these just dissipat-
Ed in his presence. Alex—yes, his name—
Just was. Around him you forgot the game.
He radiated wholeness, centeredness,
And just by being gave you worthiness.
—I’m waxing over-eloquent, forgive
Me. But—exactly!! It’s one thing to live
A light, another to live with that light.
It blinded me. It burned me. With no night
To rest my sight, no blight however slight,
I, hollow-eyed, began to crave a fight.
I went big, that’s my style. I lied and said
I cheated. I concocted, stirred, and fed
Him quite the tale. He believed every word.
He took it calmly. Yes, I’d have preferred
Hysterics, anyone would, but I knew
Better than to expect a grand debut
Of temper even then and there. He asked
If he might borrow my car. “For air.” I masked
My irritation—Jaguars aren’t the best
Beginners’ car—said yes to his request—
Undressed and got in bed. Suffice to say,
I never saw that car again. Obey-
Ing traffic laws, apparently, is hard
To do when freshly broken up with. Charred,
Completely totaled, that poor car. Alex?
Wasn’t it clear? He died. Ha, the apex
Of my career as storyteller’s not
Tonight: the misdelivered punchline’s shot.
You guessed his parents’ crash, why not his own?
I see. Yes, movies give us plotlines sewn
Up neatly with a bow. We don’t expect
The same of life. In this case, the direct
Parallel between son’s and parents’ death
Arrests our sense that life’s not art. — Hey! Seth!
—I beg your pardon: that’s the friend I was
Early to meet. Like who? My God, he does!
A dead ringer, you’re right. Well, Cary Grant’s
Clone texted me to join him by those plants.
It’s been so lovely talking with you. Oh,
Sure! Have another look. It’s a tableau:
The angel sleeping, devils gather round.
The deity presides, aloof and crowned.

comments

Six Variations on a Theme by Kilgour

2020-09-06T04:48:56Z

Ahhhh y'all I have a short paper! :D :D :D

*

Six Variations on a Theme by Kilgour

I would like to examine the relation that I believe plays an important role in the conceptualization of all antitheses, that of inside and outside, which Derrida also sees as the foundation of all binary oppositions.
—Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism (4)

Kilgour’s claim fascinates me. For all the diffuseness of its expression here, the claim itself is very bold; yet for all its totalizing quality, it creates a space for endless discussion. Endless, that is, if antitheses are countless—on the other hand, one counterexample would do. As it happens, I’m no more interested in hunting one down than Kilgour is in proving there are none. I too, however, would like to examine the inside/outside antithesis—not in relation to other binary oppositions but in the context of six literary texts. The assignment that inspired this project was open-ended: to provide a synthesis of any six works on my reading list in nineteenth-century British literature. “Synthesis” is a mighty word. I might rather think of my project as an arrangement: Kilgour’s theme for six voices, if you will. Or, perhaps, six variations on a theme by Kilgour. The idea is to find the inside/outside antithesis at work in my six texts, and the gimmick is that I’ve chosen them for their titles rather than any internal affinities. The end composition, then, will indeed be an arrangement—a linear presentation of my separate discussions.

First on my list is Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which presents an antithesis in its title and structure. How might Blake’s “innocence” and “experience” relate to the inside/outside opposition I’m examining? A ready observation is that “experience” and “outside” seem aligned: what is experience if not experience of the outside world? This remark reifies by contrast the idea of the “inside” self, which is then, in the presence of the term “experience,” easily envisioned as a blank slate onto which “experience” is inscribed. At this point, the blankness of the slate is associated with the “innocence” of the baby, and the circle is complete.

We might forestall this rapid chain of associations if we ground ourselves on the page. Speaking of babies, let’s look at “Infant Joy” (plate 25) from Songs of Innocence and “Infant Sorrow” (plate 48) from Songs of Experience. The poems clearly differ across the innocence/experience divide. “Infant Joy” portrays the baby in a state of pure joy, living in the moment, expressing itself simply and directly: “I happy am.” In “Infant Sorrow,” on the other hand, the baby perceives time and space, and makes choices and comparisons. It also knows mother from father, groaning from weeping—and inside from outside: “Into the dangerous world I leapt.” This formulation—Into the dangerous world I leapt—turns the womb inside out: the baby is not expelled out of its mother’s body but rather leaps into the world. This baby is not a blank slate but a tabula rasa; it has erased the trauma of birth and rewritten the experience as a leap into adventure. And, having done so, it can repose in innocence, and name itself Joy: “I happy am.”

“Inside” and “outside,” then, are reversible in Blake’s poetic universe, and the infant writes its own story. The characters in Jane Austen’s novelistic worlds, on the other hand, are quite at the mercy of their author. Fortunately for them, Austen seems a beneficent despot whose main concern is to get them all happily married. And in the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, it turns out that much of the course of true love runs along the boundary between “inside” and “outside.”

Austen as much as traces this line in ink when she names the novel Pride and Prejudice. To prejudge something means to make a judgment about it before having all the facts, and in practice this usually shows up as judging people based on their appearance. Darcy, drawing the least generous conclusion possible from the fact that Elizabeth is sitting rather than dancing, dismisses her at a glance: “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men” (chapter 3). To be sure, it is more properly pride than prejudice which is at work here; and indeed a simple reading of the novel’s title would assign pride to Darcy and prejudice to Elizabeth, who has every reason, after overhearing that comment, to have quite made up her mind against him. Yet it is more to the point that pride and prejudice form something of a vicious cycle, one it is Austen’s business to arrest and transform into the most virtuous of virtuous cycles—true love!

I hope that exclamation mark did its job, which was to mark a spot of irony—not mine but rather Austen’s, or so I imagine. “True love” belongs to the tradition she satirizes in Northanger Abbey. This isn’t to say that Mr. Darcy isn’t “a man violently in love,” but it is to point out that Austen never actually says he is: “he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do” (chapter 58), she writes. That is, having just swept away every vestige of misunderstanding between Darcy and Elizabeth, in the midst of the very first scene in which they speak with complete openness, Austen draws attention to the space between seeming and being. This space—or, to call it by another name, this boundary between outside and inside—is exactly what gave rise in the first place to the misunderstandings which kept the lovers apart for the bulk of the novel, and the unraveling of which is exactly the mechanism by which the plot moves from pride and prejudice to marriage.

The love story in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South follows the same arc; writing about the novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer refers to “its Pride and Prejudice plot structure” (53). Within this structure, however, Gaskell is also telling an industrial story, so to speak. When Marjorie Garson calls North and South “a notoriously problematic text,” the problematic she has in mind is Gaskell’s linking of the two stories—of “the private love story with the public issue of industrialization” (37). Such a distinction between “private” and “public” depends on the opposition between “inside” and “outside”; in this case the boundary separating the two is the boundary of the home. Yet it is possible, in thinking about North and South vis-à-vis the inside/outside antithesis, to draw the boundary along another line. J. A. V. Chapple draws it along the edges of Margaret Hale’s subjectivity, arguing that it is her “process of enlightenment” and “inner progress” that constitute the novel’s “subject” and “main movement” (464, 472). As it happens, Gaskell might well have agreed: her original title for this love-story-cum-industrial-story was Margaret Hale.

If we feel, however, that Charles Dickens was definitely onto something when he renamed Gaskell’s work North and South, and if we feel too that Chapple misses half the point of the novel when he relegates Gaskell’s industrial story to its sidelines—then we may also feel, turning to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, that Arnold is missing more than half an argument. Underlying these sentiments would be a sense of practical fact. Arnold is voluble, and I think quite wonderful, on the values he extols: “culture,” “perfection,” “sweetness and light.” He is equally voluble on the subject of England’s ills, to which “culture” is prescribed as the panacea. But he is silent on the specifics of how this panacea is to be administered. Catherine Gallagher interprets this silence as deliberate refusal: “In the name of culture, Arnold refuses to identify specific remedies for the spiritual and social ills he describes. The exclusive concentration on ‘machinery,’ he claims, is England’s problem and thus cannot be its cure” (228). I wonder if Arnold’s silence is not rather due to an inability to express specifics. His values are so lofty, his terms so exalted, his rhetoric so high-flown (well, except when he is throwing darts at his critics), that I am not sure they accommodate the expression of practical thinking. The difference between Gallagher’s and my interpretations of Arnold’s silence on practical, specific solutions comes down, I think, to a matter of inside and outside. Where I see Arnold operating within the limits of his rhetoric, Gallagher sees him employing his terms on a meta level. His refusal to be specific, she writes, is enacted “in the name of culture.” In this formulation, Arnold has an outside perspective on his argument, extracts from it the terms “culture” and “machinery,” and then invokes these terms to defend a major omission from that argument. To my mind, on the other hand, Arnold is feeling and feeding his rapturous rhetoric from the inside; and rapture has no head for specifics or vocabulary for practicalities.

Rapture is a mood that pervades much of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, though it’s not quite traceable in “Spring and Fall,” a short lyric which strikes the notes rather of melancholy and worldly wisdom. I find the poem both gorgeous and frustrating. The beauty of the phrases describing woods and foliage—“Goldengrove unleaving,” “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”—elevate both Margaret and her grief. That is, the child is the more exquisite for grieving—and the grief itself is the more piercing and fine—the more beautiful are the woods now shedding their leaves for winter; and woods evoked in words so beautiful are beautiful indeed. But the poem’s ending robs the child of the exquisiteness bestowed on her at the poem’s start: her glorious sensitivity to beauty shrinks to an ignoble fear of mortality. At the beginning of the poem, she thrilled to the world, however painful was the thrill; at the poem’s end, she is attuned only to herself. Her tears are not a response to so much beauty outside but an expression of the great sadness inside. In general, “man,” “born for” the “blight” of death, sees its face and his fate everywhere he looks: inner fear has swallowed the outer world.

I find the egotism of all this repellently small-minded, but my reading, perhaps, is just as petty for being so ungenerous. Let me put the case another way: the poet is not illustrating the ego’s centripetal pull but rather illuminating the oneness of creation, the continuity between the human condition on the one hand and nature on the other; to grieve for the one is to mourn for the other. Better, isn’t it? As it happens, Robert Louis Stevenson assumes a version of this continuity in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A gothic tale, this long story employs a staple of the genre: events in the human sphere are mirrored in the skies, which turn lowering as needed to signal horrors encroaching or to register horrors discovered. Fog, in particular, does some work in Stevenson’s story, descending and dispersing in turn to complement the mood of the moment. Just as weather reflects mood in this story, so too does a man’s outer appearance reflect his inner character. Dr. Jekyll is handsome, and good, while Mr. Hyde, the embodiment of evil, is ugly as sin. This epithet—“the embodiment of evil”—captures yet another, and quite extraordinary, way in which Stevenson’s story marries “inside” and “outside.” The marriage hinges on the double valence of the word “embodiment.” If Hyde is the embodiment of evil in Stevenson’s moral fable, he is also the embodiment of evil in Jekyll’s scientific experiment. That is, Stevenson’s metaphorical vehicle and Jekyll’s literal creation are one and the same—the body of Mr. Hyde—and extradiegetic author and intradiegetic protagonist coincide at the point of their mutual creation.

If this meeting isn’t quite the marriage I promised, I hope I may be forgiven for the bait-and-switch. I might try to make amends by overdelivering on an earlier promise—whose toothless phrasing, I can now admit, was adopted with this moment in mind. I committed only to a linear presentation of my separate discussions, but I think they do form variations on a theme: the self is not free. Whether blank slate or tabula rasa, Blake’s infant must lug the thing around; it’s trapped in its helpless body. Elizabeth Bennet remains at two removes from the man she loves, separated not only by “supposed,” in the fragment I quoted, but also by “expressed.” When Chapple encloses Gaskell’s Margaret within her subjectivity, he’s just doing what all of our skulls do to all of us. Our writing may persist when our bodies are dust, but Arnold can’t throw darts at his critics today; and Hopkins reminds us that we’re all going to die. In the meantime, as Stevenson points out, we’re all stuck with ourselves, including the parts of ourselves we don’t like. In these six instances, the self inside is pictured vis-à-vis an antithetical term outside, be that the body, the world, or the other. My theme, then, turns out itself to be a variation on Kilgour’s: though I’m not speaking to all binary oppositions, it’s clear to me that those of mind/body, self/world, and self/other are founded on the inside/outside antithesis. To say that the self isn’t free is to say that it’s trapped inside—yet my authors collectively point a way out. Kilgour lists voice/writing as one binary pair that has been critically studied (3), and indeed, language is the medium in which we reach beyond the body, communicate with others, and become a presence in the world. Let me reverse two clauses above, then, and place the emphasis where it belongs: Arnold can’t throw darts at his critics today—but our writing persists when our bodies are dust.

( Works Cited )

comments

20th-c. American writing assignment

2020-04-25T20:15:57Z

I'd chosen the quote collage option but I think I'm going to switch to the short paper option. The current idea is to write on my poets vis-à-vis Sontag's insistence on form and possibly (I need to read it first!) also Cleanth Brooks's idea of "the heresy of paraphrase." What I've read so far: I liked Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville, loved Frost's New Hampshire and Bishop's Questions of Travel, and disliked Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. What I plan to read going forward: Wallace Stevens's The Palm at the End of the Mind, the rest of Frost, the rest of Bishop, and Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets. I expect to like Stevens and I know I'll like Millay ("Thou art not lovelier than lilacs" is a dear favorite <3 and how could I not like "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare"), and one way to structure the short paper would be to talk about poise (Brooks, Frost, Bishop, presumably Stevens) vs. passion (Millay, who uses the tight structure of a sonnet to contain her emotion; Ginsberg, who...doesn't), about irony (very much present in Frost and Bishop, I don't know about the others - and a question is whether you can be ironic when you are, as Ginsberg is, wracked by pain])...

comments

Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" (1964)

2020-04-24T00:29:57Z

I like this piece a lot! And now I know it's the source of Sontag's famous definition of intelligence: "Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas."

Anyway, "Notes on Camp" comprises numbered "jottings" (fifty-eight of them, dedicated to Oscar Wilde and interspersed with various of his maxims), rather than laying out an argument, because Camp is a sensibility, Sontag says, not an idea susceptible of system and proof, and to capture a sensibility in words "one must be tentative and nimble."

A selection of points selectively arranged:

Camp sees everything in quotation marks.
Camp is a mode of aestheticism, a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, whose particular terms are artifice and stylization. In addition to being a way of seeing, Camp is also a quality of certain objects and behaviors: there are campy movies, campy clothes, campy buildings, campy people. Nothing in nature is campy, however, because Camp embodies artifice; and, because Camp emphasizes style, it slights content in the general, is neutral to content in the particular, and is therefore apolitical. Means of its artifice include exaggeration, travesty, impersonation, theatricality; qualities of its style include glamorousness and extravagance. Because its terms are artifice and style, "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman.' To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater."

Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.
If life is theater, then we are both always and never sincere. Camp sets the term sincerity not only [implicitly] against theatricality, as here, but more to the point [explicitly] against style, as well. In terms of style, sincerity is equivalent to content, or a commitment to content, and is therefore slighted: "One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that 'sincerity' is not enough." So much is true of the sensibility of Camp; the artist of Camp, on the other hand, is absolutely sincere--completely serious. "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.'" There is such a thing as deliberate Camp, or "camping," which knows and means itself to be Camp and to be funny. Genuine camp doesn't mean to be either. "The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious." But they end up funny and so fail in their seriousness. The sensibility of Camp appreciates this failed seriousness: the art has reached admirably high even if only to fall and fail.

The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.
Yet what Camp appreciates is less the effort and intent than the failure and fall. It's not a matter of poignancy, it's that some failures achieve a greatness in their badness. Lists of "The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen" make the case. The ultimate Camp statement reverses the (often true) statement "It's too good to be Camp": "it's good because it's awful."

Camp is a tender feeling.
And because it's good, it's enjoyable. "Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation--not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy." "Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature." "Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as 'a camp,' they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling." "Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles." "What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures."

Some quotes and bullets:

Camp and the image of the androgyne
"The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility."

Camp and the homosexual vanguard
"homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard--and the most articulate audience--of Camp."

Camp and affluence
Camp "is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence."

These Notes also provide:

examples of entries in the canon of Camp (including Tiffany lamps, Swan Lake, and the old Flash Gordon comics)
a "pocket history of Camp" (Camp dates back to the late 17th and early 18th century because of that period's taste for artifice and surface and symmetry)
a case for Camp as "the modern dandyism" (Camp, like the 19th-century dandy, perceives itself as an elite in matters of taste and culture)
a breakdown of the three "great creative sensibilities" (1. high culture, 2. the sensibility of extreme feeling marked by anguish, cruelty, derangement [think of Kafka], and 3. Camp)

Camp and detachment

In terms of comedy: "Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment."

In terms of time: "This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It’s not a love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment--or arouses a necessary sympathy."

In relation to irony: "The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness--irony, satire--seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality."

comments

Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation" (1964)

2020-04-22T22:18:30Z

From the 1966 volume, a collection of essays, entitled the same. I'm planning to read a couple of the others but I wanted to start with my impressions of this leading essay.

Key quotes

"Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism."

"What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation."

"In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone."

"What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art."

"What is needed is a vocabulary--a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary--for forms."

"Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all."

"The function of criticism should be to show [of the work of art] how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means."

"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."
[This is the essay's last sentence, paragraph, and section.]

A map

I made a table to map Sontag's associations. Note that Sontag is skeptical that "has content" and "says something" are really things one can say of a work of art--she's simply ventriloquizing the position she's arguing against.

the work of art
has content	is form
says something	is something

the work of the critic
focus on content	aliveness to form
interpretation	description
intellect	energy
what the work of art means	how and/or that the work of art is what it is
a hermeneutics of art	an erotics of art

My impressions

Being more a formalist and a style/language nerd than a paraphraser (I know this latter label is simplistic), I love Sontag's push for form over content. But I don't like the term "erotics" because it rings of pleasure and the body. There is nothing wrong with pleasure and the body, heaven forbid I come across as puritanical because I'm not! But my own experience of great art feels neither pleasurable nor bodily. It doesn't feel like a fulfillment but rather a longing? Honestly it feels like obliteration. And it's absolutely not an experience of the senses, it's an experience of the mind. What I feel in the body--the constriction of the breath, the stopping of the heartbeat, and the like--is a consequence of the experience, not the site of the experience. But I'm quite sure this has everything to do with the fact that all I do is read, while Sontag is a cross-medium critic: quite a few essays in this collection are on film, and she has many references to music and painting.

I distinguished form from style and language at the beginning of my paragraph above; I've been finding myself increasingly confused about their interrelationship recently. I do know the opposite of both for me is content, and I do feel that style and language are elements of form, another element is structure, but ... I'm just confused. You can absolutely talk about language and structure separately... I think the key to resolving this confusion might be what Sontag says about vocabulary. You need words and the categories they both create and capture, to be able to describe.

Anyway, Sontag herself separates form from style--"Against Interpretation" is a polemic for form and the next essay is called "On Style." Onward to reading it now!

comments

T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)

2020-04-21T04:15:01Z

Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, moved to England in 1914 when he was twenty-five, became a British subject in 1927, and subsequently renounced his American citizenship. Which is to say, our (at least my department's) classification of The Waste Land (1922) and "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) as American literature is based on a technicality.

If the essay is itself any indication, its author certainly thought of himself as British. Eliot's first sentence makes it clear he's centering himself in the English mind: "In English writing we seldom speak of tradition," he begins. His second paragraph makes it even clearer, distinguishing the English mind from the French: "We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are 'more critical' than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous." That parenthesis! I'm so English that not only do I know our national character from the inside, I also dare to name our national faults. And in this pseudo tut-tutting manner, in a paternalistic parenthesis, at that. It's great.

In a previous post I mentioned that Eliot wrote the introduction to Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and I said of Nightwood that it's concerned with categories of "race" and "racial" character. Eliot is too, here, briefly: the sentence before the one I quoted above begins, "Every nation, every race, has not only its creative, but its own critical turn of mind...." I don't think that now in 2020 we're much less prone to generalization, or less likely to act in the vein of a national character, i.e., to act like our neighbors. But "race" is a fighting word for us these days in a way it wasn't, a hundred years ago, for these two technically American but really European writers.

As far as I can tell, Eliot's "tradition" is what we now call the canon. Also a fighting word these days, in its way. The artistic tradition comprises monuments, those great works of art which continually inspire, and is both ever-existent and perfect as is and ever-changing to accommodate the introduction of new monuments, each of which adds its own part to the tradition's already-perfect but now newly-perfect perfection:

what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

The artist--the poet, really, is Eliot's focus--writing in this tradition must therefore have "the historical sense":

the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

Oh, just that, then. No pressure, right? But that's Eliot's point: the pressure is real. When you have the historical sense, when you understand the greatness of the tradition you wish your poetry to participate in, you see how small you are in relation. To the artist who has the historical sense,

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

I'll come back to this idea of self-sacrifice, or rather the essay will. It's soon clear in what follows that Eliot is really arguing against the Romantic poets, which goes to show how much they influenced his poetics: you are not free when you are passionate, either for or against. Eliot wouldn't like being called passionate--it was the Romantics who were passionate, who set such store on emotion, and in that way they went wrong--and indeed his tone is perfectly cool. The coolness with which he shreds Wordsworth's phrase describing the origin of poetry, "emotion recollected in tranquillity," is a case in point. Let's not call Eliot passionate then, but he is bound, for one by the felt imperative to shred Wordsworth's phrase at all: coolly done or not, it is done, and coolly done doesn't mean casually done.

I'll also come back to this idea of Eliot's being bound to the Romantic poets. In the meantime, if the Romantics went wrong cultivating sensibility, they also went wrong cultivating genius, thinking of poetic genius as the source of their poetry. Their idea of the creative genius is I think what Eliot means by personality. He calls the alternative theory he is putting forth in this essay an "Impersonal theory of poetry," and sums it up in a sentence that comes after the allusion to Wordsworth:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

Fighting words. Because let me be accurate: I just called this sentence a summary, but it's also an escalation. The summary is in the two parts of the sentence defining what poetry is not; the escalation is in the positive statements of what poetry is: an escape. Eliot is being provocative vis-à-vis the Romantics. Yet at the same time, he is also being vulnerable before them. He's admitting himself bound--not to them, but to the very two things they saw as the source of their poetry. You don't have to "escape" something unless it's holding you back. Yet again, however, at the same same time, Eliot claims the means of escape--poetry which really belongs in the tradition--and he is not, after all, truly bound.

You know where I'm going next: nope, despite his rhetorical acrobatics, Eliot still is bound, to the very Romantics he's (implicitly) denying a place in the tradition. Here's why he's bound, there are two reasons. First, defining what poetry is in terms of escape is really to talk further about what it is not. It's the difference between escaping from and escaping to. In the former case you're still talking the captors' language; only in the latter case do you have positive terms of your own. The second reason is related to the first and will bring me (finally!) to my next point: Eliot has spent half and more of his essay presenting a case against the Romantics--against emotion and personality--rather than making a case of his own.

Eliot's own case is not about poetic provenance but about poetic process--which is really more interesting, because it's analyzable, actionable, learnable. Theoretically, that is. With all of tradition thrumming in your bones and staring you in the face it might be hard to analyze, act, learn, or do anything other than what Eliot says you should do--give up your personality--and toss your pen along with it. If you manage not to despair, though, it might be useful to know that, according to Eliot, writing poetry is a matter of synthesis and integration; of "combination," "fusion," "transmutation," "concentration." The poet's mind is a kind of crucible--

a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

--and the composition of poetry a kind of alchemy. I'm just happening to use a medieval model, it's what occurred to me, but Eliot's choice of analogy is taken from modern chemistry: the poet's mind is the filament of platinum catalyzing the chemical transformation of oxygen and sulphur dioxide into sulphuric acid. Poetry as acid--I don't know whether I love it or hate it! The poet's mind as a sliver of precious metal is nice though?

Anyway, the rest of what I have to say is just the oft-said, that Eliot's essay heavily influenced the American New Criticism of the mid century. "To divert interest from the poet to the poetry," Eliot writes, "is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad." The critic's focus should be on the poem, not the poet. Furthermore, in my understanding of New Criticism--which I expect will be developed further when I read The Well Wrought Urn--some of its key words were paradox, irony, balance; the poem was conceptualized as an artifact which resolved the first by the use of the second to achieve the third (to be super schematic about it). I saw something of this adumbrated in Eliot's brief analysis of a passage from The Revenger's Tragedy:

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

I don't know what Eliot means by "a new art emotion" here, nor do I quite understand the distinction he makes elsewhere in the essay between "emotions" and "feelings." I do though very much like his idea of tradition--unfashionable though I believe it is to admit such a thing--and have pressed the point of his indebtedness to the Romantics--which I understand everyone does now. So that balances me out, between fashion and unfashion? In any case, and in conclusion, I feel the need to apologize for this behemoth of a post. Hopefully I'll not write one so long again!

comments

On syntax and style

2020-04-20T00:39:54Z

I know what the problem is youall, it's not a matter of blogging per text versus per day, it's that this week I've been trying too hard to be syntactically precise (hence no posts). This comes of a desire to be syntactically unassailable. A common feeling, I think--well maybe not applied to syntax, to writing, but don't we all know the feeling of wanting to be criticism-proof? judgment-proof? If my sentences are precise and every antecedent is clear and sentence lengths and rhythms vary in an artful way etc. etc. etc. then that's one count fewer anyone reading can dismiss me on.

I don't know why I have this enemy mentality. No one's judging me nearly as harshly as I judge myself. At any rate, it's got to go, this insistence on strictness. It's keeping me from writing hence posting hence processing hence progressing. There's also a way in which tight syntax is brittle syntax. So--expect messy writing in future posts! If I haven't been messy already, come to think of it! I think it helps that I've met youall and now have not quite faces but usernames to attach to possible readers. :)

comments

Reorientation

2020-04-19T00:49:52Z

I need to rethink my study process and reformulate my idea of this exam. It's to be a short exam (scheduled for mid July), 90 minutes total but 20 reserved for deliberation, so I'll be talking with each examiner for only 35 minutes! They'll both be testing me on connections and trends and patterns and themes; as the graduate coordinator of my MA lit program put it, I'll not be called upon to provide an exegesis of any one text. It's really the shape of each field I need to have a sense of, and the ways my texts relate to each other and fit into the whole.

This isn't to say I needn't know each text well. In terms of writing up my impressions though I should go back to my original idea of a freewrite a day. I don't quite know why I switched to blogging each text instead, and in the labored way I was doing it! Freewriting was more efficient and, I'm sure going forward, will be more effective.

Provisional plan: freewrite by one pm, read for twelve pomodoros, go to sleep, get up, rinse, repeat. We'll see how this goes--stay tuned!

comments

Welcome!

2020-04-17T20:39:46Z

Hi new friends, so nice to meet youall. I started this journal to track my exam studying but realized it'd be a shame not to make use of Dreamwidth's social features! So now I'll be posting lighter and livelier entries too which won't be All Literature All the Time. With the same aim in view--levity and liveliness--I filled out the interests section of my profile page and had heaps of fun doing so. Check out the short list of non-interests in my mini bio as well: it's there to put off those who would be put off by it.

That's it for now--looking forward to conversation and connection! ^_^

comments

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956)

2020-04-14T02:12:17Z

"Howl" is well named. I wonder what impression it would have made on me if I'd heard it performed rather than read it?

At any rate, I read it. It's is in three parts and in free verse. By way of preamble, I don't understand what free verse is. I think I understand that a writer might choose it with the aim in mind of conveying how people really speak. But I don't understand what free verse is, as a thing in itself, not just a thing defined negatively as verse that doesn't rhyme and doesn't have a regular meter. There are however two comments I've read on free verse that make sense to me. One was in Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form and the other was in Denis Donoghue's On Eloquence. I didn't write down Fussell's comment, but it was essentially that free verse is appropriate to catalog and enumeration. This makes sense because verse that jettisons rhyme and meter needs something else to give it a spine and a skeleton, and enumeration provides such a structure. I did write down Donoghue's comment but not what text he was remarking on: "The verse is free, in the sense that one line is related to the next not by a count of syllables or spoken stresses but by affiliations of breath and cadence." This makes sense too, at least the breath part, because if your lineation is determined by the length of a breath--however literally or liberally you're defining a breath--then that breath is what gives your verse structure. I suppose your lines might also be organized as units of thought--which is really another kind of breath.

"Howl" does enumeration, using anaphora and parallel syntax. Its syntax doesn't parse, Ginsberg means it not to; the syntactical confusion mirrors the drug haze, etc. I'll quote three lines at the end of part I, the last three lines (one of them differs between my source and the version linked above) but three. Note the phrases I've bolded:

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

These lines describe elements of the poem they're part of: the enumeration I mentioned above, the startling juxtapositions of images and verbs and other words, the aim to capture and reflect the syntax and rhythm of prose and thought.

By way of summary, part I of "Howl" starts "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," and goes on to describe different things these best minds did and were; part II asks "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls [the best minds'] and ate up their brains and imagination?" and answers "Moloch!"; part III is addressed to "Carl Solomon!" and alternates between repetitions of the line "I'm with you in Rockland" and indented lines that start "where you [did this or were that]". That's "Howl." "Footnote to Howl" lists things that are "Holy!" In "A Supermarket in California" the poet addresses his forebear Walt Whitman; in "America" he addresses America; in "Sunflower Sutra" he addresses a sunflower. "Transcription of Organ Music" is an ironic title for the quotidian scene it describes. "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound" is an appropriate title for the locale it describes. The collection ends with four "Earlier Poems," which are short and short-lined and very unlike "Howl."

comments

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (1965)

2020-04-13T06:24:03Z

Poetry Foundation has the first and last poems in this collection: "Arrival in Santos" opens part one of book's two (I read an ebook), "Brazil," and "Visits to St. Elizabeths" closes part two, "Elsewhere." The poems are really great. They're also really different. Overall "Brazil" and "Elsewhere" feel very different, and the poems within "Elsewhere" feel quite different from each other too. "Elsewhere" actually opens with a short story, between which and the amazing "Sestina" I do see a connection. Anyway, these seeming seams are all cleverly accommodated by the book's organizing conceit ("Elsewhere" might be anywhere, and be different anywheres), so all is well. Poetry Foundation also has "The Armadillo" ("for Robert Lowell") from "Brazil," but I'll focus in this post on the bookending poems.

"Arrival in Santos" asks the first of the book's questions of travel, two poems before the title poem appears and asks a bunch more. The port of Santos, the first glimpse of Brazil, is unimpressive, and the unimpressed poet asks:

... Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?

She asks the question wryly, a bit abashed at feeling unimpressed, and she asks it of herself--specifically of herself in her capacity as a tourist, taking care to make a distinction between the tourist in her and the real person who wouldn't have had such embarrassingly "immodest" expectations of the coast. The question is also carefully not directed right at Brazil. Asking it directly of Brazil would be both presumptuous and antagonistic, and she's feeling too un-surefooted to dare to appear to be either. Anyway, she has the sense of proportion and the sense of humor to know that the trouble here rests in her the tourist, not in Brazil the country. And the trouble once acknowledged and laughed at is gotten over. So when she sees the "strange and brilliant rag" blowing in the wind she can say to herself,

... So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen. ...

If the ironic tone she adopts in these lines reveals a sense of superiority, it isn't over the flag or the money or the country but over the "tourist" she was a stanza ago. She knows better now--but how will she be tripped up next? That, like the coins and paper money, remains to be seen.

Which is all to say, I feel like Bishop the poet is always open to the possibility of being tripped up, and that's where her irony, which every reader notes, lies. I feel like she's not ever in this moment, but always waiting for the next one because she wants to be ready for it. The last line and a half of "Arrival at Santos"--

... We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.

--is pitch-perfect. The punctilious semicolon just kills me.

In "Visits to St. Elizabeths" the seeming gimmick isn't a gimmick, it's essential. Each stanza break is a furlough between visits; each visit adds a line, because it adds an observation, to the stanza before it; each adjective before the "man / that lies in the house of Bedlam" is different because the man is a different kind of crazy each visit or because it's a different man each visit. But are you compartmentalizing your visits this way just to survive witnessing insanity?

I should say! The paragraph above describes the reading it does because it wasn't till I clicked on the link to the poem, while previewing this post right before writing the bulk of paragraph, to check if the link worked that I saw the plural in "Visits." I'd been reading it up till then as "Visit"! The 's' changed everything and I chucked everything I had been going to say. If a semicolon can be punctilious, so can an 's' change more than just the word it's attached to. It can change a whole paragraph--and more!

comments

Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923)

2020-04-12T20:52:05Z

I'm giddy with delight! this collection is so good. Charming and graceful, and funny and poignant, and just. so good. ♥

It's available at Project Gutenberg, the whole and lovely thing (dedicated "To Vermont and Michigan"), though I read it in a Vintage Classics paperback edition. New Hampshire's delightful conceit of a structure is indicated in the collection's subtitle, "A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes." The long poem "New Hampshire" opens the book and is annotated! with footnotes directing the reader to respective poems in the following "Notes" section. The book's third and last part comprises the promised "Grace Notes," which include three of Frost's most famous poems--"Fire and Ice," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"--and the last of which, and of the book, "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," is set in italics--why? In summation? In conclusion? In farewell?

At any rate, it might be "New Hampshire" I love the most of all the poems in New Hampshire. Here's the first page of it, as laid out in my paperback, three stanzas and a footnote:

I met a lady from the South who said
(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it):
“None of my family ever worked, or had
A thing to sell.” I don’t suppose the work
Much matters. You may work for all of me.
I’ve seen the time I’ve had to work myself.
The having anything to sell 1 is what
Is the disgrace in man or state or nation.

I met a traveller from Arkansas
Who boasted of his state as beautiful
For diamonds and apples. “Diamonds
And apples in commercial quantities?”
I asked him, on my guard. “Oh yes,” he answered,
Off his. The time was evening in the Pullman.
“I see the porter’s made your bed,” I told him.

I met a Californian who would
Talk California — a state so blessed,
He said, in climate none had ever died there
A natural death, and Vigilance Committees
Had had to organize to stock the graveyards
And vindicate the state’s humanity.
“Just the way Steffanson runs on,” I murmured,
“About the British Arctic. That’s what comes
Of being in the market with a climate.”

1 Cf. page 37, "The Axe-helve."

For the record, nobody sells anything in "The Axe-helve," rather something is given away. But here, having quoted the above I really should quote the next two stanzas too, they all five make a unit:

I met a poet from another state,
A zealot full of fluid inspiration,
Who in the name of fluid inspiration,
But in the best style of bad salesmanship,
Angrily tried to make me write a protest
(In verse I think) against the Volstead Act.
He didn’t even offer me a drink
Until I asked for one to steady him.
This is called having an idea to sell.

It could never have happened in New Hampshire.

Nothing needs to be said, really, does it? You just want to keep reading. Though I'm glad I looked up the Volstead Act. Anyway, I called this collection charming and graceful but as these stanzas attest to those aren't the right words, they're too delicate. They're precious, even, which I didn't know those words could ever be, to me, till I read this book. What have you done, Robert Frost?

Relatedly, I should admit that when I first started reading I felt a little put out because left out. I mean, New Hampshire, can you get any whiter, plus farms and birdsong and the rest, and knowing this tree from that one and loving the outdoors, are not part of my experience. I don't even love the blue sky. But yup, they drew me in, the poems, and rid me of my pesky ego. That's always the loveliest feeling, and lovelier to me than the bluest blue sky.

Also relatedly--well, sort of, if you replace What have you done, Robert Frost? (to me) with Sorry for what we've done (me included) to you! Heaven save Frost from high school English already--from questions like what does this poem mean, what do the woods symbolize. I don't think I've ever seen poems that call out more to be read for just what they say. I have a note on this, it reads: "p72 – all the meaning is all the face – so in the face of allegorizers and their worse." Page 72 is the last page of "A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears and Some Books," but the conviction my note articulated had been building for a while. Page 72 is just when I wrote it down.

Page 73, though. "I Will Sing You One-O" starts on page 73, and it almost allegorizes itself. It's the last of the "Notes" but isn't referenced in any of the long poem's footnotes. Turning to fancy, inasmuch as it does, "I Will Sing You One-O" sets up the fancies, when they are fancies, in the "Grace Notes" that follow. Yet the tenth of these Grace Notes is "For Once, Then, Something." Let me quote it in full:

FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths — and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

That's a pretty clear statement against looking for allegory. You have to accept this poem as being in part such a statement in order for that word "Truth?" not to strike you as all, even ruinously, wrong.

I haven't named Frost's irony, but you can see it in what I've quoted. "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" ends with such irony, and I think this irony might be the point of the italics I mentioned above.

THE NEED OF BEING VERSED IN COUNTRY THINGS

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Not to believe the phoebes wept. Not! It's as if the whole poem is italicized so as not to pander to the reader by italicizing just the word Not. It is only those people not versed in country things who commit the pathetic fallacy, who attribute sorrow to the birds. Those who are versed in country things know better than to imagine nature weeps for the burnt wreck of a burnt house. Thus the italics are summative too, and conclusive, and a farewell, as well.

comments

A view from a fifth: on capitalism! and more

2020-04-11T01:01:07Z

Not of liquor, let me be clear. A fifth of my thirty-item 20th-c. American reading list, the six texts I've started metabolizing being The Souls of Black Folk, A Street in Bronzeville, The Waste Land, The Crying of Lot 49, The Great Gatsby, and Nightwood.

An unwieldy subset of an unwieldy list! I'm not sure I can make much of it so far in terms of capitalism, or much of capitalism in terms of my subset, but I should explain why I'm talking about capitalism at all. My examiner directed me to approach my reading list with themes already in mind: the idea is to start with certain themes and let them inform my reading, rather than to look for patterns after reading the list through. We brainstormed some themes by Zoom last week: capitalism and labor (conditions), representations of gender and race, aesthetics and theories of art (realism, naturalism, modernism), representations of "the folk" and uses of folklore (urban, traditional), regionalism and customs and beliefs, intellectual projects and aims, and finally representations of reality--these can be descriptive or prescriptive, they can be reflective on the one hand or, on the other, hint at amelioration, proposing ways to change the problems we face as a society.

Anyway, capitalism stood out to me. Representations of reality too: the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive approaches really strikes me. You might think of this distinction vis-à-vis another one, between optimism and pessimism. You might take the descriptive approach because you're in love with the way things are, but description may also be your mode if you are depressed by the way things are. If you are angry at the way things are you might take the prescriptive approach, but--crucially--that wouldn't necessarily mean you're pessimistic. If anything it means the opposite: would you be prescribing change and proposing ways toward it if you didn't believe it possible?

Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (though not, I've read, later in his life) believes change possible. Du Bois on Booker T. Washington is also Du Bois on capitalism, to some extent. I'm not sure A Street in Bronzeville is very citable in terms of capitalism; I have no idea what to make of The Waste Land in relation to capitalism--though the perfunctory sexual exchange between the typist and the young man carbuncular comes to mind, maybe because it's urban; The Crying of Lot 49 satirizes urban and suburban California and has a (dead) real estate mogul who amassed impossible wealth (though if I'm thinking about capitalism, one point is that under capitalism it's not impossible to amass enormous wealth); The Great Gatsby has Jay Gatsby's enormous wealth though seems overall more concerned with the class stratification capitalism exacerbates than with capitalism per se? At any rate it does have this passage, at one of Gatsby's parties:

I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry, and all talking in low, earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were at least agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.

Across the Atlantic are not only more Englishmen but also the Old World. Djuna Barnes was born and died in America but spent much of the twenties in Paris, and Nightwood though set partly in America is an Old World book, I think, but what exactly that has to do with capitalism or representations of reality is beyond me at the moment.

If I were the (drinking) type now might be a good time to seek out a fifth? My list is unwieldy and my themes are far bigger than my head. Anyway, I suppose the real point of making this post was just to lay out them out. So at least that's done!

comments

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

2020-04-10T06:42:56Z

I have a 2016 New Directions paperback; it has Jeanette Winterson's 2006 preface, T. S. Eliot's introduction to the first American edition (by Harcourt, Brace in 1937), and Eliot's 1949 note to the second edition. This is how Winterson starts her preface:

Certain texts work in homeopathic dilutions; that is, nano amounts effect significant change over long periods of time.

Nightwood is a nano-text.

And a little ways down the page: "reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined."

I think so. I also think these are lovelier ways of saying that there is no reading Nightwood all in one go, for any value of "reading" but the literal. You can sit there and turn its pages and run your eyes down them till you've read the last. But for you to do justice to Nightwood--which is to say, for it to do justice to you too--you need Winterson's long periods of time.

Anyway, I scheduled one day and took three and have thoughts. Nightwood is interesting for its explorations of gender(fluidity) and sexuality, for its "racial" categories and explications, for its high modernism. The first and the third are what they are, the second fascinates me. "Racial" is Barnes's word, "race." Here is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor speaking:

We wash away our sense of sin, and what does that bath secure us? Sin, shining bright and hard. In what does a Latin bathe? True dust. We have made the literal error. We have used water, we are thus too sharply reminded. A European gets out of bed with a disorder that holds the balance. The layers of his deed can be traced back to the last leaf and the good slug he found creeping. ... Each race to its wrestling! ... The French are dishevelled and wise; the American tries to approximate it with drink. It is his only clue to himself. He takes it when his soap has washed him too clean for identification. The Anglo-Saxon has made the literal error; using water, he has washed away his page. ...

Such as the bolded are Nightwood's "races," distinct, overlapping; Jew, Gentile, Christian are some others. The book thinks in and elaborates on these categories, and: "Each race to its wrestling!"

Let me actually say something about, or around, the third thing I listed above, the novel's high modernism. When I think of high modernism I don't think of high emotion, being raised in me or being felt on the part of the author making the work, both of us are too much in our heads. Yet that avatar of high modernism, T. S. Eliot, writes in his introduction to Nightwood that its characters "became alive" for him, and behind his claim that the characters are vivid you can see something he doesn't quite say: he cares about them. The one among them who caught me off guard was Felix, who wants a son--"'Why is there no child? Wo ist das Kind? Warum? Warum?'"--gets a son--"Mentally deficient and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face"--and, accepting his son, demolishes his own life: "He knew that Guido was not like other children, that he would always be too estranged to be argued with; in accepting his son the Baron saw that he must accept a demolition of his own life." I cared, youall, I cried. I was surprised.

Another point tangential to Eliot. I complained about the tubers in The Waste Land. Nightwood too is earthy, like! (in another sense!) tubers. Take this--

There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations. For if pigeons flew out of his bum, or castles sprang out of his ears, man would be troubled to know which was his fate, a house, a bird or a man.

--and this--

Am I the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom, the Greek who said it with the other cheek? No, I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pad.

--both courtesy again of the good doctor. But the difference between "tubers" on the one hand and "bum" and "fart" on the other is that there is no belligerence in the choice of the latter words. I struggle with those tubers, obviously! and the poor things aren't standing the weight I'm making them bear! because I see a belligerence in their placement, a purposeful deflation, a smirk, that puts me off. I don't get that sense with Nightwood even when it's scatological. Instead, I get the sense that the all-seeing eye and the all-encompassing pen are registering all the world, from its saints to its dung.

But this is disingenuous. Barnes is not registering a world, she is creating one; there's a lot more poiesis going on here than mimesis. This is a theme I'll expand on in future posts, but in this case the creation is happening not just in scenes--as in the long conversation between Nora and the doctor, in his filthy room--but on the level of sentences, even of phrases. Barnes is putting words together in a new way--new even in 2020.

Shall I leave you with a funny quote? I think I shall leave you with a funny quote. This is the doctor again (saying more than the funny thing, which appears toward the end):

"Make birds' nests with your teeth; that would be better," he said angrily, "like my English girl friend. The birds liked them so well that they stopped making their own (does that sound like any nest you have made for any bird, and so broken it of its fate?). In the spring they form a queue by her bedroom window and stand waiting their turn, holding on to their eggs as hard as they can until she gets around to them, strutting up and down on the ledge, the eyes in their feathers a quick shine and sting, whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet for someone inside who had decided to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And then think of Robin who never could provide for her life except in you. Oh, well," he said under his breath, "'happy are they whom privacy makes innocent.'"

I had to finish the paragraph, past the punchline. But the Decline and Fall! Read in/on a toilet! To quote the good doctor one last time: "Glittering God"!

comments