Where Sarah Palin Meets Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is everywhere. That sentence is everywhere. Andy’s fame has lasted longer than his predicted 15 minutes of world-wide fame for all of us. But one place he’s currently not to be found is on the New York Times bestseller list, which is full of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, already topping the million mark, according to the CSM’s tomatoes and books review.

What is fame? These days fame appears to be some light travelling in a motor home coach across the malls of America. The ubiquitous mall is where we might all go to “look for America,” as Simon and Garfunkel sang.

But a book purchased is not always a book read, as a review of our own bookcase shows. There sits Nabokov’s Ada, added to the stack decades ago and still not cracked, and McEwan’s Atonement, a paperback picked up at a garage sale last summer, the first few pages read a few times. Still, most do show signs of reading’s wear and tear. Our 1966 Love’s Body is falling apart – we’ll need to replace it soon.

We would like to think that the teens with their moms in lines at the malls to get Sarah’s book autographed will actually read it, but as Flannery O’Connor said: “I would be most happy if you had already read it, happier still if you knew it well, but since experience has taught me to keep my expectations along these lines modest, I’ll tell you that this is the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida, gets wiped out by…” some misfit’s ill-tossed tomato. For “Words can be overlooked,” P. G. Wodehouse said; “But tomatoes cannot.”

The word value, often abused, as in “family values,” or “good, old fashioned ‘Good Country People’ values,” means nothing but what we desire, what we want. And what we want, as individuals and as communities, isn’t always what’s good for us.

Reading is good for us, but we doubt that many of the millions who have purchased Sarah’s book want reading. It takes longer than 15 minutes to read a book. Still, we hope they do read the book. We wish the book well, for in the midst of the Reading Crisis, it’s a rose in winter. We don’t want to read Sarah’s book; but we hope that the millions of shoppers who did buy it do read it – such is our faith in reading.

Written after a visit to Language Log

We look forward to our daily dose of Language Log. Language has undone so many. This morning there’s a post on the mateless orange, for she can’t be rhymed, yet she’s not alone. 

          The Mateless Orange

The shelves are bare of rhymes for orange.

Not only that, but my dish is empty of porridge.

You’ve heard that girl before, right?

Orange is popular, purple not,

not even for Steven Earle.

For it’s rindlessness that’s comic.

But let me ask you something:

What the heck is this all about?

If you stop and think about it,

your head is jam-packed

with oranges,

with the curious result

that there are those who will find this an insult:

a banana is not yellow,

and the mateless orange rinds.

“Off with their heads!” Rhetorical Images of Heads of States

Mao: Another head in a different time and place.

“Off with their heads!” shouts Carroll’s Queen in Wonderland. Just so, Platon has beheaded them all in “Portraits of Power,” in the December 7 New Yorker.

The head of state is not a whole person, but a symbol, but of what?

“The king is an erection of the body politic,” Norman O. Brown says in Love’s Body. “The king personifies the pomp and pleasure of the community; but must also bear the burden of royalty, and, as scapegoat, take away the sins.” Yet the head retaliates with tyranny over the body.

The head of state is a figure, a doll, a clown, a puppet. But the heads glower like lead. The flash of the moment turns the head to metal. Platon’s photographs are like statues, busts; the heads in the color photos are surrounded with an eerie blue halo, as from a welder’s torch, echoed in Mugabe’s photo with a blue glow around his face, and a thin blue glow around his otherwise dark eyes.

England’s Gordon Brown, left eye slightly askew, appears to be saying, like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, “What, me worry?” While across the Irish Sea, Brian Cowen looks like a Roddy Doyle character just informed Ireland has made it to the World Cup finals, eyes disbelieving, mouth ready for the celebratory pint.

But not all the heads are smiling to be beheaded, nor are they all quite beheaded; two of the three women are spared, along with Qaddafi, who sports a paisley shirt that could have been worn by Sly Stone in There’s a Riot Goin On. 

Some of the heads shed an animal sense: Ahmadinejad a fox, Mesic an old dog. Some smile like they just ate the opposition (South Africa’s Zuma), or mischievously, like the Imp of the Perverse (Italy’s Berlusconi).

The electronic version of the portfolio contains a few more photos than the print version, and a couple of those are classics: Estonia’s Tooma Ilves, bespectacled with bowtie; and Lithuania’s Dalia Grybauskaite, looking very much like a Baltic Hillary. It’s not clear why these did not make the hard copy cut. The online recorded commentary by Platon on each head is remarkable for its detail and accessibilty to an otherwise “behind the wall” process that readers of the print version alone don’t have. Platon’s comments are devoid of political content, focus on the passion he has for his craft; he has time to barely brush against these men and women who surely have seen so much, and his task is to capture all that they have seen in a flash and convert it to metal, which he does with alchemical art. 

And Obama? Give this man his body back; the photo is from a previous sitting – it was decided he would not sit for a photo like the others at this time and place.

In Twosome Twiminds: News from the Stroke Club – “Who Are We?”

During our stroke, we picked up the Takemine to test our left hand, self-diagnosing our condition. We noticed our left hand with interest; it formed the shape of the chord we had asked for, but not on the frets and strings we wanted. The result was discord, the guitar sounding badly out of tune. We moved to the Telecaster. The sound was distorted, the guitar either badly out of tune, the amplifier’s speaker blown, or our hand forming some new nonsense chord. Yet, “It sounds fine,” Susan said. “It sounds like it always does.”

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recreates the experience of a stroke: “…and now, forsooth, you have become of twosome twiminds…” (188).

From 12-1-09 Open Culture: “Jill Bolte Taylor’s ‘Stroke of Insight’ talk reaches the top of many lists. What happens when a neuroanatomist experiences a massive stroke and feels all the brain functions she has studied (speech, movement, understanding, etc) suddenly start to slip away? And how do these losses fundamentally change who we are? You’ll find out in a crisp (and at times emotional) 18 minutes and 40 seconds. You can also read her book that elaborates on her life-altering experience. See My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.”

Join the Stoke Club by finding a quiet 20 minutes to watch Taylor’s talk on  video.

The Myth of Syllabus

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus says, in The Myth of Sisyphus.

So too, one imagines a happy student, book in hand, pushing the syllabus up another class – happy because in the push he writes his own syllabus, for, as Rene Char said, “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.”

“Expression begins where thought ends,” Camus says, reminding us then of Wallace Stevens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”:

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,

And say of what you see in the dark…

The blue guitar surprises you.

caMels, whEN to caPITalize, & concrEte POEMS

Over at Steamboats, Caleb Crain has lately expressed a concern over the use of camel case letters.

We are not opposed to the use of camel case in a corporate logo, particularly where Concrete poetry might find a place in commerce.

We went to An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Emmett Williams, ed., 1967, Something Else Press), remembering some camel casing there, but spacing is a more prevalent tool. Remember that most of the old Concrete poems were chiseled out on manual typewriters.

The John J. Sharkey poem, “Schoenberg” (1963), is shown in the Anthology in two versions. The first (left) was rejected “…because the publisher does not use upper-case letters in his graphic production style.”

The second version was “interpreted typographically by Simon Lord…,” and Sharkey apparently liked it less than his original.

There’s often a reason for things like spacing, capitalization, reading silently - and then the reason becomes the rule, and remains the rule, even after we’ve forgotten the reason; then we might invent a new reason to support what we now don’t want to change.

Note: The title to this post is a Concrete poem, created with camels:

MEN PIT & Ete POEMS.

Rap Phonics Rhapsody: Eating the Alphabet and Spitting it Out

If the vowels decide to strike, we can probably keep the machines running, but if we lose the consonants, we’ll have to shut down.

How should we learn to read? The beginning reader, trying to make soundsense from the smell of ink of the “…miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops an wriggles and justaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed” (Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 118) soon understands that “When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit” (19).

Today’s beginning reader (and teacher) sit at the bottom of a tower of babble constructed of politics made necessary by how education is funded and a grant industry, partisan learning theories (in which the neuroscientists are now investing a huge down payment), and good, old-fashioned my way is better than your way faculty room argument.

“It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall” (117).

Over at The Frontal Cortex, the reading discussion was lively but short, and our hungry mind wanted more. So once again we picked up Joyce and reread a few favorite passages (aloud, the better to taste and hear the words, to slurp and listen as the vowels (like Alice’s EAT ME cake) made us bigger and the consonants smaller), and then we perused a few articles.

Nicholas Lehman reported in a 1997 Atlantic article that “The dispute operates at three levels, which is one reason why it is so pervasive. It concerns how people learn, what schools should be for, and the essential nature of a good society.” This came three years after Art Levine reported in an Atlantic article that “In education no question has produced so much bitter debate for so long as this one: What is the best way to teach children to read?”

The debate continues worldwide, with no sign of abatement, and the political influences continue, as shown in a 2006 Guardian article featuring Oxford’s Kathy Sylva, in which she discusses legislative interests. Also in 2006, Sylva brought attention to the issue of learning reading in a teaching expertise interview; here we find her discussing neurons, signaling that as debate continues, it is now infused with new ethos borrowed from neuroscience.

Should the words go from the page directly into the brain through the eyes, or should the words be eaten first (eat your p’s), rolled around on the tongue, felt, then spat out into the ears to worm their way into the brain? 

We don’t value fast food reading; we want the old-fashioned, sit down meal. Words have substance: they are smooth or rough, loud or quiet, ticklish or jolting. Words leave bruises that other words salve.  Words rap and rip their way into our consciousness as we tear them apart with our teeth. Syllables slide like bumpy water. We want to eat the alphabet and spit out the seeds – now that’s reading.

A Different Brain: Reinventing Neuroscience from the Bottom Down

We saw Robert B. Laughlin lecture in Portland in 2005. It was Eric’s idea. He was taking a high school physics class, and there was a free ticket and extra credit in the wings, so we tagged along, always interested in what the physicists are up to.

The hall was packed. On the stage was a podium and an overhead projector. We had expected high tech Excel files pasted into a slick PowerPoint. Instead, we got a speaker and cartoon drawings on the overhead. And it was brilliant (in the Roddy Doyle sense of the word). Laughlin was funny, accessible, engaging (a Q&A followed the lecture), humble, generous, challenging. Then the Nobel prize winning physicist sat in the lobby selling and signing his book: A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.

Our brain, an old dog versed in verse, struggled a bit in parts of the lecture, wanted to chase a Frisbee in the park, get out and smell some dirt, so we looked forward to sharing the book with Eric and learning more about the universe. Eric had Laughlin sign the book; his signature looks like a nebula.

What can science tell us about life? In his preface to the book, Laughlin says, “Seeing our understanding of nature as a mathematical construction has fundamentally different implications from seeing it as an empirical synthesis. One view identifies us as masters of the universe; the other identifies the universe as the master of us…At its core the matter is not scientific at all but concerns one’s sense of self and place in the world.” One of these views he explains with a reference to John Horgan’s The End of Science, “in which he [Horgan] argues that all fundamental things are now known and there is nothing left for us to do but fill in details.”

That is the view of the brain taken by some of today’s neuroscientists, a view that has the seemingly infallible protection of the scientific method. Yet Laughlin moves on to describe a different view, “that all physical law we know about has collective origins, not just some of it. In other words, the distinction between fundamental laws and the laws descending from them is a myth, as is the idea of mastery of the universe through mathematics alone.” This is an untamed elephant in the science lab. And we’re only in the preface.

Emergence is Laughlin’s theme: “…human behavior resembles nature because it is part of nature and ruled by the same laws as everything else…we resemble primitive things because we are made of them – not because we have humanized them or controlled them with our minds. The parallels between organization of a life and organization of electrons are not an accident or a delusion, but physics” (201).

Laughlin likes quotes; they help him move his conversation forward. This one opens his book: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine” (Sir Arthur Eddington). This one opens the last chapter of the book: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects” (R. A. Heinlein).

Juxtaposition to synthesize varying points of view casts things in new light. In the chapter “Picnic Table in the Sun,” Laughlin, describing some physicists’ conversation, says, “At any rate, by noon nobody’s brain would hold any more…,” and they move off to an outdoor lunch.

We find the physicists’ full brains hopeful; it suggests the need to digest, sleep, and let go – a need we all feel, regardless of the relative size of our brain. Here in this particular spot in the universe it’s morning, and we are thinking of some scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. Then we’ll take a walk in the sun, and if we’re lucky, our brain will forget about itself, becoming just another part of us, no more, no less, another part of the universe.

Neuroscepticism: Exploring the Dark Matter of the Brain

The neuroscientists exploring the brain are like the physicists exploring the universe. We are reminded of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle: no cat, lots of string.

We enjoyed The Frontal Cortex’s answer to our question on the distinction between brain and mind: “The mind is really just a piece of meat.” Still, that’s more than some physicists think of the universe.

The neuroscientists now appear in danger similar to that of the physicists, of generating both politics and mythologies. What amounts to a case study argument has recently developed at the New Humanist Blog, with Raymond Tallis trashing, literally, in his article titled “Neurotrash,” the neuroscientists as social engineers, and Matt Grist responding in his article titled “Neuroscience can help tame the elephant” (caution: metaphors on the loose), offering the neuroscientist as the savior of juvenile delinquents: says Grist, “We are now properly understanding human behaviour (if only in outline) in the holistic setting of our actual dwelling, rather than in terms of the abstractions of Platonic philosophy. And the lesson seems to be that being a rational, creative, happy and well-behaved human being is a social achievement that takes time, dedication and certain kinds of environments.”

At this point, readers might be hearing the radio in their brains switched on; it’s the West Side Story song, “Gee, Officer Krupke,” where once again we find the poets beating the scientists to the punch.

To Tallis’s point, the neuroscientists (like some of the physicists) have yet to explain emergence, where the whole is more than not equal to the sum of the parts, but where the individual part does not even predict the whole. To Grist’s point, the neuroscientists are not alone but have joined with the other social sciences to better build a holistic view of human behavior.

But we are concerned with Grist’s warrants and the toll they appear to take on freedom. Just what, exactly, is a “well-behaved human being,” and why is it, whatever it is, a “social achievement”? Who will be selected, using what rubric, to become well-behaved?

Certainly there are environments that produce predictable results, where predictable results are what we are looking for, but in the brain, as in space, so far our explorations suggest that nothing is predictable – such is our freedom, which we seem to share with the universe. There’s a lot of dark matter yet to digest. Perhaps what the neruoscientists need is an iconoclast like Garrett Lisi, whose “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” rocked the physics world a couple of years ago. Then again, the neuroscientists already seem to have their exceptionally simple theory of the mind: “…just a piece of meat.” Fries with that? For if the mind is just a piece of meat, who decides, and how is the decision made – who says how it should be seasoned, prepared, cooked, and eaten? The specialist? The neuroscientist? Perhaps Grist thinks Swift was not joking. “Taming the elephant”: we won’t soon forget that metaphor, for what becomes of a tamed elephant?

Where Pascal metaphorically wagering meets Borges bird-watching

Imagine that as a young person you once had a conversation with a close friend in which you made a wager on God’s existence. One of you argued for God’s existence, the other against. The wager went like this: one of you is to live his life as if God exists; the other is to live his life as if God does not exist. The two of you would meet regularly over the course of time to compare notes, but the wager could only be decided if you both lived into old age, at which point the winner of the wager, you both agreed, would be obvious. 

This is the sort of proposition that sometimes informs novels. Pascal handles the matter more briefly, in one of his thoughts (Pensees, #233), in the form of a dialog. It is an either or proposition, one that we are existentially bound to, and it may very well be our freedom that is being wagered; yet Pascal says we have nothing to lose.

Borges, in his essay “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,” suggests that for Pascal, uncertainty produced anxiety, and that he found no solace in his thought that “Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges brings to our attention an alternative translation based on Pascal’s notes. Apparently, Pascal had started to write “Nature is a fearful sphere….” Borges points out that Pascal’s sphere is a metaphor, and that “It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.” 

In Borges’s “Argumentum Ornithologicum,” he argues for the existence of God. Closing his eyes, he envisions a small flock of birds, around ten birds in number, but they quickly disappear, and he’s uncertain exactly how many birds he saw in his vision. To him, the exact number “is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.” The exact number of birds that Borges saw is known to God. 

Pascal was a mathematician, a logician, clearly interested in the existential predicament of man; Borges was a poet. They both tested the existence of God by living their lives as if He existed. It may matter not God’s existence if His existence is not evident to us; it does matter how we live our lives, for which there is existential evidence, if none other, and who is able to prove this, wins the wager.

This Is Your Brain On Books

Over at the Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer has posted his review of a new book about the effects of the brain on reading: Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain. Lehrer says that the “moral of Dehaene’s book is that our cultural forms reflect the biological form of the brain; the details of language are largely a biological accident.” We’ve not read Dehaene’s book yet, but Lehrer’s summary seems to suggest a symbiotic relationship between the brain and the brain’s environment.

To understand the effects of reading on the brain, one must go to non-literate cultures, and study, as Marshall McLuhan researched, the changes that occur in both the brain and the culture as reading is learned. “The most obvious character of print is repetition,” McLuhan said, “just as the obvious effect of repetition is hypnosis or obsession” (p. 47). It’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture, and non-literacy has its advantages.

When we read, we are hypnotized, the eye becomes master of the sensorium, the remaining four senses impressed into eye-service. The hypnosis blinks when the eye sees an unfamiliar word, and the tongue and ear have to help out: “we’re forced to decipher the sound of the word before we can make a guess about its definition, which requires a second or two of conscious effort” (Lehrer). This means that the new reader must mouth his words as he reads (since all the words are unfamiliar to the new reader); he must hear them first. This is why, according to McLuhan, “the medieval monks’ reading carrel was indeed a singing booth” (p. 115). They had not yet learned to read silently. They had to say the word and hear it; the words entered the brain through their ears, not through their eyes. (This supports using a phonics method to teach reading.)

Lehrer says that Dehaene “also speculates that, while ‘learning to read induces massive cognitive gains,’ it also comes with a hidden mental cost: because so much of our visual cortex is now devoted to literacy, we’re less able to ‘read’ the details of natural world.” Again, this ground was covered by McLuhan in The Guttenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.

“Literacy,” McLuhan argued, “affects the physiology as well as the psychic life” (p. 45). McLuhan said that “every technology contrived and ‘outered’ by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization” (p. 187). And this is the ground that Nicholas Carr has been sifting though with regard to the effects of the internet on reading and on the brain.

It’s curious to hear Lehrer, not quite a neuroscientist (which is one reason we like him; he’s a non-specialist), say that “the brain is much more than the seat of the soul…,” curious in that he resorts to both metaphor and the metaphysical in a single phrase. “The seat of the soul”: surely that’s your brain on books.

Eric Sevareid, Italo Calvino, and NASA’s Watery Disappointment

We’re not in a hurry to get to the moon; there doesn’t appear to be a lot to do there – great view of Earth, of course, and the air is clean. Up close, though, the moon looks like an ancient Egyptian golf course. The moon was probably once covered with lush greens and lovely azaleas surrounding freshwater hazards, but the groundsmen disappeared long ago, around the time the gamekeepers were laid off.

Now, NASA tells us there is water on the moon, lots of it, but not enough to get the surfboard out.

Italo Calvino, in “The Distance of the Moon,” tells us of a time when the moon was much closer to the Earth, and could be reached by climbing a ladder: “…from the top of the ladder, standing erect on the last rung, you could just touch the Moon if you held your arms up.”

William S. Marshall, a staff scientist and dowser at the NASA Ames Research Center, recently contributed a woeful Op-Ed piece to the Times describing NASA’s disappointment in the public’s waned response to its recent divining-wand blast: “Almost as surprising as NASA’s announcement [of water in the moon] is the lack of attention it has received. Thirty years ago, a development like this would have been heralded as one of humanity’s greatest discoveries.”

But what was the response decades ago to NASA’s climbing the ladder to the moon? To find out, we looked up our old friend Eric Sevareid, who, in a short opinion piece titled “The Dark of the Moon” (1958), a radio piece written when NASA was created to erect a lunar ladder, said, “It is exciting talk, indeed, the talk of man’s advance toward space. But one little step in man’s advance toward man – that, we think, would be truly exciting.”

Alas, they may have found water on the moon, but here on Earth, we are still thirsty.

Becker-Posner: fodder for rhetoric foragers

The shallow depth of the unstated warrants at the Becker-Posner blog makes for good fodder for rhetoric foragers. Consider this, from Posner’s half of their 15 Nov 09 post: “Should the U.S. economy grow more rapidly than the public debt, we’ll be okay. But the government’s focus appears to be not on economic growth, but on redistribution (the major goal of health reform) and on creating at least an aura of prosperity, at whatever cost in deficit spending and future inflation, in time for the November 2010 congressional elections.”

Redistribution may be an effect of health care reform, but there’s no evidence that it’s a goal; at the same time, distribution, and redistribution, is always a goal or effect or both of most legislative programs, so why mention it? Because redistribution is always viewed as a negative value (something one doesn’t want), particularly for those who do value the current distribution.

Posner’s claim is that the “major goal of health [care] reform” is “redistribution.” In Posner’s view, wealth should not be redistributed to achieve health care reform (redistribution by definition is a wrong).

Yet it’s impossible to have meaningful health care reform without some form of redistribution, so Posner’s unstated warrants here include that we should not have health care reform, that redistribution is a wrong, an economic wrong, and that he values this wrong over the health care uninsured – and over the inflated costs being paid by those who do have health insurance. Posner values the wealth of a minority over the physical and economic health of the majority, and the support for this is found in his cynical reference to yet another assumption – that any legislation that involves redistribution has as its root cause an upcoming election. It’s no wonder we never get anything accomplished.

Posner’s claim is that the government should not take something from someone who has and give it to someone who has not. Redistribution is a trigger word intended to attract those that have with its click. It’s quick draw rhetoric. Posner’s use of “government’s focus” also serves as a trigger, for the word government in this context is meaningless, or can only mean one thing – that entity constantly at work to take something from one and give it to someone else – it’s the government of Huck Finn’s father.

There are many entities at work on health care reform, including doctors and hospitals. For a thorough discussion of health care costs and what’s at stake in trying to lower those costs while insuring everyone, see Atul Gawande’s article “The Cost Conundrum,” in the June 1, 2009 issue of the New Yorker.

APA Caution: Metaphor Crossing

We don’t find E. B. White adhering to APA guidelines. It’s more palatable monkeying with rats if one denies them human characteristics.

One rule that hasn’t changed in the new 6^th edition APA manual concerns a warning against the use of metaphor, specifically anthropomorphic connotations (p. 69). One may not use metaphor; the question is, can one not.

Camus avoided metaphor in The Stranger, creating an anti-man. For McLuhan, technology is metaphor, extensions of the senses. For Norman O. Brown, in Love’s Body, language is metaphor; to avoid metaphor is to avoid language: “Metaphor is mistake or impropriety; a faux pas, or slip of the tongue; a little madness; petit mal; a little seizure or inspiration” (p. 244). It’s easy to see why the APA wants to avoid it. On the other hand, “Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense” (p. 244), in short, jazz. But metaphor is ambiguous, and that’s what we must avoid: “Psychoanalysis, symbolic consciousness, leads from disguised to patent nonsense – Wittgenstein, surrealism, Finnegans Wake” (p. 245). In “VII” of Love’s Body, titled “Head,” Brown lights out for the territory, ahead of all the rest: “Psychoanalysis shows the sexual organization of the body physical to be a political organization; the body is a body politic…a political arrangement arrived at after stormy upheavals in the house of Oedipus…a well-organized tyranny” (pp. 126-127). And if one wants to avoid sex, of course, one may go in for the corporate body, where the head sits at the top, and gets dibs on the first parking space.

Metaphor begins with sound, and poetry begins with being tricked by sound: “…cuckoo(’s)fool, maid(en, mate, the Wryneck, which arrives at or about the same time as the cuckoo” (OED, mate).

So, in the 6^th edition of the APA manual, we find this: “Correct: Pairs of rats (cage mates) were allowed to forage together. Incorrect: Rat couples (cage mates) were allowed to forage together” (p. 69). But, first, pair is no better than couple. Since the 13^th Century, at least, the OED gives us, pair has been used to describe a married couple; indeed, the denotative meaning of pair is couple. Second, the offensive word in the passage (taking the APA view of metaphor as something to be avoided), is not pairs or couples, but mates, for a mate is one of a pair, a partner in marriage, a lover. The denotative meaning of mate, from the OED, is “A companion, fellow, comrade, friend; a fellow worker or business partner,” and only an E. B. White can handle a rat as all of these.

The poor rats, coupled in their cage, denied by the APA their very coupling, for, again, as the OED gives us, couple means “That which unites two. 1. a. A brace or leash for holding two hounds together.” Alone, together; together, but separate: like humans, a condition that can only exist in some cage, in cagey logic.

And what of cage? From the OED: “I. Generally and non-technically. 1. A box or place of confinement for birds and other animals (or, in barbarous times, for human beings), made wholly or partly of wire, or with bars of metal or wood, so as to admit air and light, while preventing the creature’s escape.”

Note “in barbarous times” suggests time past, but no longer: we wish, for language is our cage, a pair of gloves with a missing mate, a decoupling of experience.

If we want to avoid metaphor in the APA example given on page 69, we suggest: Rats were allowed to forage together, in cages, separated two by two. Lovely, isn’t it? Then again, were the rats allowed out of their cages to forage? Can one forage in a cage? Perhaps rats can, but still, an even greater problem than pair, couple, or cage is found with the word forage, for a forager is a messenger, though one may forage for oneself. Do rats “plunder, pillage, ravage” (OED, for forage)? No, only humans forage, as we have done here, within the cage of our blog.

Good night, my some-corpus one

We’ve been enjoying a discussion over at Language Log on the difference between the words someone and somebody.

Maybe Meredith Willson’s Marian the librarian’s song “Good Night, My Someone,” from the musical The Music Man, illustrates a point that might be made for the ear making the distinctive decision, a vote for tone:

“Good night, my someone, good night, my love…”

Of course, you have to hear the song, not merely read it, but “good night, my somebody” somehow doesn’t sound the same, carries a different tone, and suits the romantic intent far less, introducing as it does, indeed, the corpus, which, from a grammar of romance, should not come into play too early in someone’s love song.

Caleb Crain and Becker-Posner Print Their Blogs

As we watch the coming of the end of books and the disappearance of newspapers, we note an increase in electronic self-publishing, blogs the obvious pedestrian example, but then, in an interesting twist, we see blogs subsequently published in more traditional print copy format. Two recent and noteworthy examples illustrate: Caleb Crain’s The Wreck of the Henry Clay (Lulu, 438 pages, $14.95), selections from his blog Steamboats are Ruining Everything, covering blog years 2003-2009, and Uncommon Sense: Economic Insights, from Marriage to Terrorism, a “best of” The Becker-Posner Blog (University of Chicago Press, 384 pages, $29.00).

Caleb Crain is a 19^th century scholar and freelance writer with degrees from Columbia and Harvard who has written scholarly papers, a book, American Sympathy, and a novella, Sweet Grafton, as well as general interest articles and book reviews for the New Yorker and other prestigious publications. Richard Posner is a federal judge, Becker a Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago. The ethos that Crain and Becker-Posner bring to their blogs adds validity to what some consider to be an environment rife with charlatanism and chicanery – the world of the blog. But their blogs improve the potential of the art of blogging by setting a high standard of quality and quantity, by elevating and advancing the long-term potential of self-publishing, and by engaging readers in the possibility for a democratic, egalitarian, and interactive conversation that is not available elsewhere to general readers, students, or others whose interest in the discussion of ideas may go beyond skimming the mosaic of the daily newspaper or the weekly magazine.

Crain and Becker-Posner have long lists of traditional publication credits. They don’t have to blog, nor do they have to self-publish. Crain’s blog performs a service to the reading community, so call it pro bono publico. Of particular interest are those posts that follow the print publication of his longer articles and that discuss his research; these posts have value for both the general reader and students. The links he provides are purposeful and meaningful, interesting and useful. Crain’s blog often generates civil comments and discussion, unlike some blogs that seem to foister the awry warrant. The Becker-Posner blog no longer accepts comments. Readers may miss the discussion, but the more popular a blog becomes, the less likely its founding readers will be able to follow the discussion – the traffic and the drive-by comments may become too distracting, the volley of retorts from the obsessive commenter tiresome.

Blogs like Crain’s and Becker-Posner’s are not without criticism from within their professional writing communities (it took the n+1 blog six months to finally review Crain’s blogbook). Why would a professional writer blog, thereby giving away content, setting a bad precedent? But no writer’s every word is going to see print, and the ones that come closest, the syndicated, the featured, the columnists, frequently suffer from a paucity of ideas, quality, and freshness (consider George Will and Stanley Fish). Bloggers are under no compunction to blog daily or weekly, but blog regularly enough to maintain a loyal readership, blog when they actually have something to say and the energy to say it.

Becker-Posner introduced their blog in December of 2004. In their first post, they said “Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge…The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.” Five years later, the Becker-Posner blog posted a notice announcing their blog’s print publication.

Crain, on his blog, explains that his blogbook comes with “six years of essays, which many of you will already have read, about dogs, torture, etymology, American history, gay marriage, political rhetoric, movies, tree climbing, indie rock, Mars, peak oil, anarchism, and literary criticism.” Crain’s blog is more personal and eclectic than the Becker-Posner blog, and the general interest reader may prefer it.

While some writers may wonder why some bloggers give away content, readers may wonder, now that the blogs are available in print form, why they would purchase a blogbook when the content is available free on-line. The answer is simple: because the general interest readers who follow blogs like Crain’s and Becker-Posner’s for any length of time value books. Books are what they want. But it’s that book interest that sparks the interest in the blog – following such a blog allows a reader to watch a professional writer writing a book, and more, to participate in that writing by interactively watching the work develop. The last time this happened was when magazines still serialized books in progress (Dickens, for example; or the New Yorker’s serialization of Capote or John McPhee, or its publication of Hersey’s Hiroshima – these were all followed by books). The difference is the initial self-publishing aspect of the blog. While the Becker-Posner blog is an example of self-publishing, their blogbook is not, while Crain’s blog and book are both self-published. Either way, the loyal reader will look forward to sitting down with a hard copy, like spending time with an old friend, reminiscing.

Kierkegaard: A Good Self is Hard to Find

We enjoyed Gordon Marino’s recent piece in the Times, “Kierkegaard on the Couch,” about a distinction between despair and depression, the former, according to Marino, a kind of disrespect for one’s self, not accepting who one is, the latter a disease; the former our existential condition (for which Kafka said there is no cure), the latter treatable with medication and counseling.

We were reminded of John Cage: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” (“Lecture on Nothing,” Silence, p. 119).

Perhaps the opposite of Marino’s despair and depression distinction is found in joy and happiness. A certain kind of acceptance allows for joy, which is not quite the same as happiness. Joy, like grace, lives only in the moment; occurs regardless of where we are located; and appears like the epiphany, satori, the kick in the eye. Happiness is a kind of candy that wears off, leaving us depressed. Despair is the corollary of joy, depression the corollary of happiness.

Joy Hopewell comes to mind, a Flannery O’Connor character (“Good Country People”) who changes her name from Joy to Hulga, such is her despair. A good self is hard to find.

Free Parking at the Library of Congress

We try to imagine a world without cars. Given our experience, it’s difficult: our MOS was wheeled and track vehicle mechanic; we parked cars at the old LA International while working our way through college; we underwrote autos for a time. Our first car was a 1956 Chevy, purchased for $75 from our friend Gary leaving for Vietnam – he never returned. Our second car was a 1949 Ford pickup truck, called the “Peace Truck” for a small peace sign decal we put in the center of the rear window – we used the truck for surf trips. Then we went through a series of old Volkswagens, mostly bugs, but we did have a VW van for a time – it blew a rod one night on way home from a Jimmy Hendrix concert. We try to imagine Kerouac’s On the Road without cars: impossible.

We try to imagine a parking space at the very spot and time we need one. We’ve always talked to our cars, but parking spaces don’t listen. We remember our first time parking in the Columbia Tower in Seattle: the entrance to the underground parking garage is a concrete circle that descends quickly around and around and around for seven stories below the building, the massive concrete beams just inches overhead – not a place for the claustrophobic, almost as bad as the MRI machine, another circle of hell. Dante would love it, were he in Seattle with a car to park. After parking, one must take four separate elevators to get to even the 33^rd floor.

John Grisham’s A Painted House contains a theme related to cars: it’s 1952 and the characters are struggling to survive on small cotton farms in rural Arkansas; some leave for the north, where they find jobs in the automobile industry, in Flint, and they travel back in their big new automobiles to visit and show off. The irony in the end of the story, underdeveloped, is that as the main characters finally give up the dream of making the farm work and follow the exodus to Flint, today’s reader knows they’ll be back – imagine cities full of hollow parking garages, empty parking lots.

What in the world brought on this reverie of the car? A road trip? A particularly gruesome commute? No. This, a post at the Inside Adams blog at the Library of Congress site: “Long Live the Parking Garage.” There will be free parking as soon as we get rid of the cars; meantime, we should caution you that if you are susceptible to following links you may never find your way out of the parking garage post.

The Retiring and Re-tiering Posner

The claim Posner seems to be making (a claim of value) is that federal taxes should not be used to support economically non-productive groups – the retired elderly is his example. If we accept his claim of value as something we should all want, then we should include all non-productive groups, which would include the disabled (including veterans), the imprisoned, children, the mentally ill, and the unemployed. It would also follow logically that federal aid should be distributed in proportion to the level of economic productivity of groups. Thus those in the service industry, for example, should receive the least benefit (if any) from federal taxes. A stratified hierarchy is thus created.

We encourage Becker and Posner to tune in to Professor Wolff’s (UCL Philosophy) discussion here. From his summary: “…those who leave school early are more likely to end up in physically demanding work, and may well develop physical health problems during the course of his or her working life. Accordingly, retirement, when it eventually comes, may be lived in poor health and for a much shorter period than those who start later in less physically demanding jobs. It may also be, then, that our current retirement policies contribute to the social gradient in health and life expectancy.”

Note: The Becker-Posner Blog comment function appears to be disabled.

AIG, APA and the Crashing of Institutions

The frequency and severity of institutional crashes lately keep ringing in our ears. What becomes of credibility and reliability when the actuarial body politic, responsible for making the rules, tracking the results, and revising accordingly, errors in judgment, planning, execution, and follow-up? First AIG, now APA. 

A few weeks ago, we dripped a bit of our mild satire on APA’s capricious decision to switch back to the double space following a period at the end of a sentence. At the same time, we made note of a one-off blog tracking the changes and mild hysteria following the publication of the APA 6th edition, back in July. The APA style site has now posted an apology, an eight page list of corrections, and corrected APA sample papers; the first printing of the APA 6^th edition, it’s now fully disclosed, is rife with errors. It’s an OCD disaster.

The APA note of apology reads like a Wall Street firm lobbying for a bail out. From that note:

“The aggregate of these noted pages may look significant, but in the majority of cases, the noted change is relatively minor…Corrections to the first printing of the manual have been organized into four categories in an effort to group like changes together: Errors in APA Style Rules, Errors in Examples, Clarifications, and Nonsignificant [sic] Typos.”

When does a number of minor problems reach a level equal to a major problem? What is needed is a repeal of the McCarran-Ferguson Act as it relates to the federal regulation of style manuals – to centralize control, avoid styled obsolescence, and bail out confused students. The silliness of the obsessive distinctions is made manifest by the unnecessary and arbitrary revisions, the Tower of Babel like edifice that has crashed into a Confusion of Tongues, and the failure of even the experts to remember or to follow the rules.

Scratch that last paragraph. Terrible idea. A confusion of tongues is exactly what’s needed. Specialization leads to extinction. And we do intend to invoke the opt-out provision on the double space following the period.

On the water writing

There’s nothing better than being on the water. Another blog we’ve been following recently, Transparent Sea, is chronicling an open ocean paddle following the migration path of whales off the coast of Australia, and features some close-in photos and videos of whales, dolphins, and surfers.

We are reminded of Joshua Slocum’s classic, Sailing Alone Around the World. Slocum could not swim, yet he spent just over three years and 46,000 miles alone on the water. 

Writing sometimes feels like being alone on the water, unable to swim.

Hemingway surfing and writing

at Leo Carillo, 1969.

We’ve been enjoying the El Porto Fridays blog. We can still feel the El Porto sand beneath our feet, the foam rushing over our board, the morning glass, the afternoon chop, the evening glass-off. We surfed there in the 60’s and 70’s, before heading out, like Huck Finns, for the territory, ahead of all the rest; well, ahead of some, behind others. The El Porto Fridays blog recently put up a post titled “5 Ways to Improve Your Surfing.” It had us thinking of Shaun Tomson’s Surfer’s Code, and of Hemingway and writing. 

A sentence is like a wave, as Hemingway often illustrated; Hemingway didn’t surf, but he does have Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises body surfing, and this famous sentence from the short story “Cross Country Snow” illustrates what could be a surfer on a wave:

“George was coming down in telemark position, kneeling; one leg forward and bent, the other trailing; his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow as they touched the surface and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.”

Double Shot, Hold the Book

The end of books is closer than we thought. A short article in today’s Christian Science Monitor discusses a private high school that has replaced the books in its library with a $12,000 espresso machine, three sports bar like TVs, Kindles with e-books, and laptops.

Apparently, the old, hard copy books were not being checked out and read, anyway. Though the article does not mention Google, we look forward to a riposte from Carr. He thinks Google’s giving us the jitters now; imagine adding a little espresso to the formula.

While we’re on the subject of books disappearing, another related piece in today’s mail threatens to amuse, from the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, a review of cartoonist Bruce McCall’s new book, Fifty Things to do with a Book (Now that Reading is Dead).

And our brief survey and latest Reading Crisis entry would not be complete if we didn’t remind readers of our own past post, “What we will miss when newspapers disappear.”  

But doesn’t the espresso disturb their nap time?

New Outbreak of Grammar Influenza

We’ve only just noticed someone else coming to the aid of the mistreated E. B. White – Jennifer Balderama, in a Times review of Mark Garvey’s Stylized. We find Simon & Shuster’s description of Elements and its influence hyperbolic, but they’re trying to sell a book, not grammar, while it does sound like Garvey misses neither the point of Elements nor that of the grammarians. Get your grammar shot; school’s back in session.

Rolling Stone’s 50 Reasons to Watch TV

The cover story of the September 17 issue of Rolling Stone gives us the best reasons to watch television. It’s all about content, of course – not a word about form.

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, gives us the real best reasons for watching TV.

“With TV, the viewer is the screen,” McLuhan says (p. 272), and he foreshadows the same arguments that currently occupy Nicholas Carr and others. “The introspective life of long, long thoughts and distant goals…cannot coexist with the mosaic form of the TV image that commands immediate participation in depth and admits of no delays” (McLuhan, p. 283).

Carr recently blamed the end of book culture on internet habits. McLuhan was writing before the invention of the personal computer, but Carr’s focus still repeats McLuhan’s claim: “The phenomenon of the paperback, the book in ‘cool’ version, can head this list of TV mandates, because the transformation of book culture into something else is manifested at that point” (McLuhan, p. 283). But then Carr goes off track. Carr thinks print culture is about deep thinking, but it’s about living on the railroad, and has little to do with all of Carr’s deep sea metaphors, as McLuhan explains: “The American since TV has lost his inhibitions and his innocence about depth culture” (p. 283).

McLuhan illustrates that it’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture. It’s not yet clear what this might mean placed into the socially ubiquitous phenomenon of PC literacy. E. L. Mayo gives us a clue perhaps with his political (and perhaps the best yet) reason for watching TV in his short poem “The Coming of the Toads,” where TV, while perhaps the ugliest medium a book cultured person can fathom, flattens social stratification.

Robert Frost and the LHC

We’re happy to hear the great collider is up and running again. The BBC informs us the LHC is “…one of the coldest places in the Universe.” And it’s right in our backyard, Universe speaking. “Colder than deep space,” the BBC says, like our downstair’s bathroom in the morning in late Fall before we finally give in and kick on the furnace. Colder than hell, we might add; we’re reminded of the Frost poem, “Fire and Ice,” first published in Harper’s Magazine, in 1920:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

The physicists working the LHC hope to gather evidence of the state of things immediately following the Big Bang, when Fire married Ice.

Bio-Lego-Land: Building a Better Body thru Metaphor

In the September 28, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, we meet synthetic bio-Lego-boys Drew Endy and Rob Carlson: “Some of my best work has come together in my mind’s eye accompanied by what I swear was an audible click, ” Carlson tells New Yorker’s Michael Specter, who says Endy has never forgotten “…the secret of Legos – they work because you can take any single part and attach it to any other – in 2005 Endy and colleagues…started BioBricks Foundation…to register and develop standard parts for assembling DNA” (61).

What if Norman O. Brown had grown up playing with Legos? Would he have named Love’s Body, Lego’s Body? In Chapter XV, “Freedom,” Brown says that “Metaphor is mistake or impropriety…a little madness…a little seizure or inspiration” (244). 

“The glory of God is to conceal a thing, but the glory of the king is to find it out…,” Brown quotes Bacon in McLuhan (Gutenberg Galaxy, 190).

“Feet off the ground. Freedom is instability; the destruction of attachments; the ropes, the fixtures, fixations, that tie us down” (Brown, 260). 

William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, drew the modern man: “The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.” Let’s hope the synthetic biologists mix their metaphors mercifully, for “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” Blake said; nor the same Lego, for that matter.

More on the genome of metaphor.

Styled Obsolescence: New Editions for APA and MLA

Students often wonder aloud at the minutiae of publication manuals. New editions of both the APA and MLA classics were announced this summer. The APA sixth edition, trimmed to 272 pages, at least promises to lighten the backpack when compared to the heavyweight fifth edition, which weighed in at 439 pages – still no match though for our 1977 first edition, first printing copy of the MLA Handbook, a trim 163 pages. The new, 7^th edition MLA Handbook is 292 pages. 

One looks for motive. MLA now suggests one space after a period ending a sentence, but one of the changes in the new APA manual returns us to two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence (pp. 87-88). 

There are of course other styles, but APA and MLA still appear to be the heavyweights, so when they announce a rematch, we want to be ringside. 

We learn to march in cadence; if what we want is a style of our own, one pervious to whimsy, we can always try poetry, the perfect antidote to the poison of style.

Yevtushenko Vinyl and the Freedom of Discernment

Again at PCC, thirty years ago…. Several Russian students began dropping by my ABE workshop on a regular basis, for English lessons, and one day I brought a couple of record albums to class to play on our record player, a small cardboard box with a simple needle (the arm weighted down with a penny held on by a rubber band) that scratched across the grooves, spitting sound through a single tinny speaker. The albums were poetry readings. One of the records included Yevgeny Yevtushenko reading his poem “Babi Yar” with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The other album was Poetry Readings in the Cellar, with the Cellar Jazz Quintet, featuring Kenneth Rexroth and Ferlinghetti.

I played the Yevtushenko, and during the “Babi Yar” poem, nine minutes long on the album, I noticed that one of the Russian students was crying. Later, I apologized, concerned that the poetry had suggested some bad memories. But that wasn’t the reason for his crying at all, he told me. It was the fact that we could listen to this record in our classroom without feeling any kind of fear. “What a country I have come to,” he said. “We can play this record in our classroom and no one even cares.”

It seems too cryptic to end this post there, yet there was no ambiguity in his meaning, but now, thirty years later, how does one care? At the risk of falling into a nostalgic fallacy, one does care; the current reading crisis, informed in part by changing technology, which in turn seems to be changing values (what we want), may soon have us yearning for a time when we had the freedom to read and write, and to talk and listen, and we tried to exercise that freedom with discernment.

Precursor to Garrison Keillor

Imagine my surprise when Susan hands me this morning’s Oregonian, nonchalantly telling me Garrison Keillor has plagiarized my stroke article. As it turns out, it’s just another example of great writers thinking alike, or older folks sharing experiences – I guess; as I said, my ER doctor told me “we see them all the time.”

My article ran in the Oregonian’s Aug. 29th print edition (it ran the day before on the Oregonian web site), and Garrison had his stroke on Labor Day, Sept. 7. His article ran in today’s Salon, and is of course picked up by any number of papers through syndication, including today’s, Sept. 16th, Oregonian (B7).

In any case, I assured Susan that while some writers will take risks to get stories, I don’t think Garrison had a stroke just to write an article. I know I didn’t.

I’m glad to hear that Garrison is doing well. I enjoyed his article, and of course agree with his conclusion – “We are all in the same boat….”

Stanley Fish, Full of Ethos

Few bloggers are as full of ethos as Stanley Fish – as he frequently reminds us. He’s lately been waxing on the teaching of writing. He’s simply trying to challenge his community.

We like that Fish recently invoked Francis Christensen’s generative rhetoric (though he doesn’t mention Erskine). And Fish didn’t trash E. B. White, though he did question our ability to annotate him meaningfully for the modern student who knows no terms, and he seems to have skipped over White’s dictum to “omit needless words.”

Stanley’s wrestling with the protean snake of the sentence strikes us as heroic, a last stand against the philistines who would text, twitter, and roll rather than read to the floor of the ocean, write cursively, on paper, and stroll.

Speaking of music: if one aspires to be a musician – classical, jazz, rock, zydeco – one listens; one listens to the music of the discipline. Why would it not be just so with one who aspires to be a writer? An aspiring writer should read, just as an aspiring musician listens.

Jane Kramer tosses a toad to Montaigne

Jane Kramer tosses a lit toad into Montaigne’s lap – sitting in his tower, surrounded by his books, like nothing else in Tennessee: “He would have loved Google” (p. 40).

Would Montaigne have loved Google, which, according to Nicholas Carr, is making us stupid? Certainly, Montaigne was a blogger, his “hits” count initially limited by the fact that only ten percent of the French were literate (p. 34). Perhaps that explains why he said he wrote for himself, painting with his pen his self-portrait.

Kramer, J. (Sep. 7, 2009). Me, myself, and I. New Yorker, pp. 34-41.

Health Care: Bringing It All Back Home

My health care piece, “An object lesson in health and happiness,” appeared in the Saturday, August 29, 2009 print edition of The Oregonian (p. B5). (Click to see on-line version.)

Seen here: Oregonian coffee cup on Saturday’s paper, and photo of Susan on the Big Sur River, circa 1969.

Baseball Breaks Sound Barrier

Not only is the globe growing warmer – it’s getting noisier, too. Deniers of these facts were not at the Triple-A Portland Beaver baseball game last night. Nicholas Carr, in his influential Atlantic essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” argues persuasively that frequent Internet use, chasing links like shagging balls in an increasingly remote outfield, disallows drinking deeply from the Pierian Spring. As Pope discussed in his “An Essay on Criticism,”

“A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.”

But Carr’s argument is that we’re losing the ability to drink deep, what he calls “deep reading.” We agree, and not only that, but try concentrating at a baseball game these days. Ballparks have been getting noisier, and the noise louder, and the activity increasingly distracting, for some time. Why?

At the Beaver game last night, a balmy summer evening, the temperature at artificial turf field level a hot 90 degrees at game time, we settled into our seats behind home plate. The onslaught began, and we don’t mean on the field.

If the pitcher is not in his windup, the music, the canned noise, the unintelligible mumble of the ballpark announcer, the electronic sound bite gadgets, all fill the air, the pervasive noise preventing any kind of thought, shallow or deep; and count out the small talk between innings, a running discussion of the game’s progress, or any play by play commentary. There must not be a single moment of relative quite at the modern ballgame.

We recall an old Twilight Zone segment. A mid-nineteenth century cowboy is transported to modern day New York City. Never mind the many inventions that might startle him; it is the noise that proves fatal.

The quietest moment of last night’s ballgame came during the singing of the Star Spangled Banner, a moment of peace as all rose and quiet fell on the field and the first purples tinged with pinks crept up in the sky over the left field seats – the song a lovely, unaccompanied and traditional rendition by a local vocalist. The rest was noise.

Back to the Futurism – What’s new in Poetryland: Flarf, Conceptual Writing, and Concrete Poetry

We cross the border into Poetryland. At the crossing the guards confiscate our miner’s helmet and swim fins, and ask the purpose of our visit. On holiday, sightseeing, see what’s new, we reply. 

We head to the old haunts, and what do we find? Flarf, a portmanteau word that identifies a poem created from electronic detritus, a collage of bits of the web, a kind of Webarf, and Conceptual Writing, a back to the Futurism replay of Concrete Poetry.

While neither new form appears all that new, the infusion of humor, anti-seriousness, and wordplay are welcome (we wish a Poem Painting or two had been included). But we’re not sure if Flarf is a poetry of the Web, if the Web has found its poetic form, “…poetry that is native to that environment, written with the intention of being read there” (Crain, 17 June 2008). 

A fickle subscriber for some years, our renewed subscription just arrived, and we were delighted to learn of Flarf and Conceptual poetry (July/August 2009). 

Welcome back! Where have you been? the waitress at the Refugio Café asks. At the point the tide is out and the waves shoulder into the cove. 

 Williams, E. (Ed.). (1967). An Anthology of Concrete Poetry. Something Else Press: New York.

Small Wave Riders 2009 annual surf trip video

El Porto waves, circa 1969, riding a modified Jacobs.

Gregg Noll, the first of the modern big wave surfers, never lost sight of the fun to be found in small waves. In the early-60s, still in the original Gregg Noll surfboard shop, in Hermosa, when asked if he found small waves boring after having surfed the giants, he replied not at all, he would always have fun in the South Bay slop. I know that because I was there, a local kid dreaming of a new board, and I asked him.

Having fun in small surf is the sentiment that fuels Small Wave Riders. There are other reasons – as we get older, paddling out gets harder. And there is the pulling archetype of the surf trip (on the west coast, this means a long cruise on Highways 1 and 101, and Pacific Coast Highway, and Highland Ave., checking out the surf spots along the way); and community, always local, throwing off the work clothes (if necessary) for jeans, t shirt, and sandals – trunks and a surfboard (for “Jesus was a [surfer] when he walked upon the water,” sang Leonard Cohen, or might have sang, had he been a surfer; he sang “…sailor…only drowning men could see him”) – living out of the surf rig, a tent, the occasional old friend’s place up from the beach, eating out of bags, or at the best (discovered word of mouth) local dives, body sticky with sand, wax, and salt; and the blue green grey lure of the ocean, of men going down to the sea.

Of course, over time, conditions change. Jesus now wears a wet suit, including booties, hands, and hood, and every spot is crowded, even the spots where the waves are so small they can hardly be called waves. The locals are even more protective of their spots, so the surfer on safari is sometimes well-advised to select a less crowded spot, even if it means yet smaller waves. But “just get in [the water]” is brother John Linker’s mantra. Once in, once the glass is broken, there’s no closer union with nature, physically and mentally. One doesn’t think on waves, not in the normal sense of thinking; once in, one is guided almost by pure instinct, and the Cartesian split is temporarily taped.

So we were delighted to receive in the mail this past week the 2009 Small Wave Riders annual surf trip video, this year titled 5 Point 5. The film technology continues to improve, as does the technique. The sound track is blended with the waves and action, and the sequences of driving, stopping to check out a spot, paddling out, catching waves, then kicking back after the set, create a structure that feels natural, allowing for hightened viewer engagement. Some of the technique is reminiscent of the best of the old surf films, the ones we used to see in the Hermosa Beach High School auditorium, the independent, locally filmed surf movies, and there are also reminders of the great, original Endless Summer. Of course, these days, the summers get shorter, not longer, let alone endless, and the trip comes to an end, again in the old surf film manner, too soon, after only 35 minutes of small wave surfing. But it’s enough. Our appetite for a wave is soaking wet.

Emily Post’s Rhetorical Garden: A Field of Claims, Evidence, and Warrants

It’s too bad Emily Post was not a literary critic, for she was a whiz at rhetoric.

This is as close as she comes to lit-crit, but who can disagree? “There is no better way to cultivate taste in words, than by constantly reading the best English. None of the words and expressions which are taboo in good society will be found in books of proved literary standing. But it must not be forgotten that there can be a vast difference between literary standing and popularity, and that many of the ‘best sellers’ have no literary merit whatsoever” (chap. 8, para. 7).

Unfortunately, she does not give away the titles in her library, but her assumptions can be deadly: “It is difficult to explain why well-bred people avoid certain words and expressions that are admitted by etymology and grammar. So it must be merely stated that they have and undoubtedly always will avoid them. Moreover, this choice of expression is not set forth in any printed guide or book on English, though it is followed in all literature” (chap. 8, para 1).

If you are looking for an exercise to practice identifying claims, evidence, and warrants (and who is not?), take a look at Emily Post’s original Etiquette (1922). Get ready to frolic in a field of assumptions.

“Every house has an outward appearance to be made as presentable as possible, an interior continually to be set in order, and incessantly to be cleaned. And for those that dwell within it there are meals to be prepared and served; linen to be laundered and mended; personal garments to be brushed and pressed; and perhaps children to be cared for. There is also a door-bell to be answered in which manners as well as appearance come into play” (chap. 12, para. 1). And don’t we know it?

“But the ‘mansion’ of bastard architecture and crude paint, with its brass indifferently clean, with coarse lace behind the plate glass of its golden-oak door, and the bell answered at eleven in the morning by a butler in an ill-fitting dress suit and wearing a mustache, might as well be placarded: ‘Here lives a vulgarian who has never had an opportunity to acquire cultivation’” (chap 12, para 4). We’ve a rule in our place that offending mustaches must be swept clean by eleven every morning (save Saturday).

“Who does not dislike a ‘boneless’ hand extended as though it were a spray of sea-weed, or a miniature boiled pudding? It is equally annoying to have one’s hand clutched aloft in grotesque affectation and shaken violently sideways, as though it were being used to clean a spot out of the atmosphere. What woman does not wince at the viselike grasp that cuts her rings into her flesh and temporarily paralyzes every finger?” (chap. 3, para. 14).

It becomes increasingly clear why Emily Post did not go into literary criticism. As George Bernard Shaw said, ”Those who can, do; those who can’t, study etiquette, or rhetoric, or grammar, or some such thing.” And Emily’s Etiquette is a work of fiction, and she is a stunning, literary star. Had she placed her cartoonish characters into any kind of plot, she could have been as good as P. G. Wodehouse.

How Do Professors Think? More Crisis in the Humanities

At the bottom of her n+1 review of Michele Lamont’s How Professors Think, Amanda Claybaugh laments that Lamont “fails” to answer the promise of her book’s title. Claybaugh appears to buy into the title’s assumption, that professors think differently than others. But why would professors think any differently than anyone else? Indeed, from the professor quotes offered in the review, they appear to think exactly like everyone else: “so sick [of hearing]”; “it’s hard to articulate”; “nothing is perfect”; “just still didn’t get it”; and the ubiquitous “[don’t] be an asshole.” 

Claybaugh reads in the field of English; Lamont, sociology. It’s assumed one’s discipline amounts to a special pair of spectacles, and only through the lenses of the discipline can one fully appreciate, or aspire to, or do at all. Specialty is the extreme license: “…disciplines make a strong case for themselves when they unify around a shared method….” And to the extent that “English is seen as having no method of its own,” it also has no discipline, and its “…proposals …are seen as wandering into territory claimed by other disciplines.” Blame it on the essay, on Montaigne, all that wandering, those long trials. One English professor advances that close reading is a method, but in an apparent lack of self-confidence worries “…whether historians might not ‘know how to do this better’ after all.” Too bad; she might have mentioned Louis Menand and his American Studies or his The Metaphysical Club, or Caleb Crain’s American Sympathy, examples of English folks wandering afield successfully.

Consider the end of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Montag, on the run and under the influence of the former English professor Faber, joins the radicals living outside the city, memorizing books. They become the book they digest, the ultimate specialist. That’s a cool ending, but for a professor, why wouldn’t, as Buckminster Fuller gives us, specialization lead to extinction?

In his preface to Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution, Ihab Hassan asserts the professors have climbed out of their boxes: “The discomforts of the academy are already too much in the public eye. Yet how many see, I wonder, that we now strike past the college administration and campus guard, past the curriculum, past scholarship itself, at an older idea of man? The famous drawing of Leonardo, arms spread and legs apart, giving the human measure to circle, square, and universe, no longer takes our breath away. A post-humanism is in the making. What will be its shape?” Alas, that was 1971; the revolution is now in crisis.

“For if the lingo gasped between kicksheets, however basically English, were to be preached from the mouths of wickerchurchwardens and metaphysicians in the row and advokaatoes, allvoyous, demivoyelles, languoaths, lesbiels, dentelles, gutterhowls and furtz, where would their practice be or where the human race itself were the Pythagorean sesquipedalia of the panepistemion, however apically Volapucky, grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habakuk, opanoff, uggamyg, hapaxle, gomenon, ppppfff, over country stiles, behind slated dwellinghouses, down blind lanes, or, when all the fruit fails, under some sacking left on a coarse cart?” (Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p. 116).

Where, indeed.

Where jazz and literature get encaged

The 2009 Believer music issue (July/August 09) arrived yesterday, and there’s a perceptive interview with jazz guitarist Pat Martino:

“BLVR: What do you think jazz’s place in American culture is today?”

“PM: The only thing I can be definitive with is an example. Take the students of jazz in our conservatories and universities. They’re studying harmony and theory, which is not jazz, that’s music. Number two, they’re studying and transcribing artists of the past – past cultures, or stages of our culture, and that is not the reality of today. So it [jazz] is not alive the way it used to be. And they’re studying something that is encaged, and they’re analyzing it to participate in something that no longer exists” (p. 73).

I was reminded of Louis Menand’s recent piece in the New Yorker (June 8 & 15, 2009), on creative writing programs: “Academic creative-writing programs are, as McGurl puts it, examples of ‘the institutionalization of anti-institutionality.’ That’s why institutions love them. They are the outside contained on the inside” (p. 108).

And John Cage: “A newspaperman wrote asking me to send’im my philosophy in a nutshell. Get out of whatever cage you happen to be in” (M, Writings ’67 – ’72, p. 212).

From Iran: “Don’t send me no more letters no,” not unless you Twitter them.

On 7 December 2006, the informative and engaging blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything posted on scholarly journal offprints and stamps. I recently read the post in a book version of the blog titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay: Posts and Essays, 2003-2009, published by the blog’s author, Caleb Crain, and which I recently purchased at Lulu (now a regular reader of the blog, I didn’t discover it until sometime in 2007). Part of Caleb’s 2006 post reminded me of my own stamp collection, which I had not looked at in some time.

I am not a philatelist. I saved the stamps more than collected them; they were given to me, each a small gift, by my students at the time, English as a foreign language students in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The saving of stamps began when a couple of students asked me to help them with translations of letters – they wanted to reply in English, or to gain more English by translating letters from home into English – and I commented on the stamps I was seeing. A rumor seemed to circulate that I collected stamps, and before long indeed I did, my students, for the most part dispossessed, disarrayed, and sometimes disappeared, happy for an opportunity to easily give their teacher something in return (though what I gained from my students, stamps or no, was more than anything I gave to them).

A number of my stamps are from Iran around the time of the fall of the Shah, and several were given me by Zahra, an Iranian doctor who stayed briefly in the US after one of her sons was killed in the revolution. When I first met her, another of her sons introducing us, she reached out, looking deeply into my eyes, and held my face in her hands, to her son’s embarrassment, though I did not mind, and she said that I looked like and reminded her of her lost son. Later I learned that she had spent days looking for him, wandering around Tehran, searching through stacks of body bags in freezers. Zahra returned to Iran and wrote to me of the war on the Iraq front, where she had gone to doctor the injured. She talked of the age of the soldiers, the waves of certain casualties as the boys ran hopelessly across the desert battlefield (but I can’t find this letter; it’s possible my memory fails here, and that this impression is from another Iranian student from whom I probably asked for news of Zahra).

But I have other letters from Zahra. In one, she wrote that rumors of shortages were unfounded. In February of 1981, she wrote: “Joe I didn’t write letter as an american or an iranian this is an outlaw letter, it is just as I feel like to write….” She asked that I “please write me letter in print with typewriter.” I grew reticent though, fearful the letters might put her at some kind of risk, and our correspondence ended. Her last letter to me closed with “…I miss you and I am looking forward to have letter from you and hear some thing about you.” She had written, “I think the people of Iran are big they’r tolerant and patient people. They can get along with all situation NO NO Joe all people are the same and all are in situation as iranian.” (I have copied from Zahra’s letters exactly as she wrote them, though she always asked me to send them back to her with corrections.)

Now of course, the revolution, a dormant volcano, erupts again, but Twitter and other e-tools may make stamps and letters, like Caleb’s offprints, obsolete.

Where Marilyn Monroe meets Helmut Schmidt in a field of Mellow Yellow

Few enterprises must ring more sentimental than the naming of roses, as a trip this week to the Portland Rose Garden illustrated. There was “Falstaff,” the floppy blooms droopy from the persistent showers, and “Jude the Obscure,” no blooms at all, and “09R207,” waiting to be named like a waggling puppy at the pound (we would name him “Clumsy Pink”). The “Ingrid Bergman” gave no scent. “Opening Night” yielded velvet, dark red petals. “Mellow Yellow” brought back that woeful Donovan tune. And “Helmut Schmidt” seemed peacefully at ease in its smoky yellow, inviting conversation. We passed easily by “Easy Does It,” and came to “Marilyn Monroe,” our favorite of the day, its reddish-berry pinks unfolding into ice-creamy-yellow pastels.

By then we were fast at the game of anticipating any rose’s name, almost always surprised, though, if not disappointed, as in the case of the rose which surely should have been named “Peppermint Ice-cream,” its random, maroon stripes rippling through vanilla-white spoonfuls, but it was instead called “Sentimental.”

“A Grammar of Love”

My poem “A Grammar of Love,” which appeared in the May 24, 2009 print edition of The Christian Science Monitor, and which you might enjoy, is now posted on the CSM website.

Ruth Reichl Comforts with Apples, Beckett with Words

“How’s the carrot?” Vladimir asks. “It’s a carrot,” Estragon replies….“That’s what annoys me….I’ll never forget this carrot.”

If a food writer describes an ice cream cone with such description that we can taste it – ah, but that’s just the problem, we can’t taste words. Words have shape, perhaps even texture. They fill our mouths, or used to, when we read like the monks, but words don’t have flavor. This is the existential predicament of the restaurant and food critic.

Perhaps it explains the poetic license of their exaggerations. Reichl, explaining her resorting to fiction to enliven a restaurant review, explains to her editor at the LA Times, “Haven’t you noticed that food all by itself is really boring to read about?…It’s everything around the food that makes it interesting. The sociology. The politics. The history” (p. 250). Nevertheless, “…this won’t do,” her editor replies. “In journalism you have to tell the truth” (p. 250). She then goes on to describe the historic Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where “…the houses were decrepit…” (p. 251). It’s been awhile since we’ve driven through Hancock Park, but surely only a food critic could describe the dwellings and lawns there as bedraggled.

But then the perspective is from one for whom meals last five hours, and where “For great balsamico, the process takes an entire lifetime, the vinegar becoming more concentrated as it progresses through subsequent barrels of oak, chestnut, mulberry, and juniper” (p. 59). She can comfort with words, and the words do, for the most part, describe food.

“Crritic!” says Estragon, “(with finality).”

Reichl, R. (2001). Comfort me with apples [with recipes]. New York: Random House.

Kicking E. B. White When He’s Down

To a neighborly inquiry, yes, we saw the vicious attack on the venerable E. B. White, first in the Chronicle, then, with several bystanders jumping on for a kick or two, in the Times. We first became aware of Pullum at Emdashes, where, we thought, Martin Schneider – omitting needless words – handled the matter clearly and concisely and to a close, but we like following links, so from Emdashes, we followed a link to Levi Stahl’s discussion; without explaining too much, he dismisses the academic Pullum to move on to a more tasteful topic, E. B. White’s letters.

We are aware of the shortcomings of Elements, having on our own often tried to tackle the issue of what’s correct when. Pullum posts his own follow-up, fed up with the commenters (we have added his blog to our feeds). In his follow-up, he heads off going to his book, but it seems fair to ask if not White then what. Pullum’s book is a descriptive grammar, so it “…will not…make recommendations about how you should speak or write” (p. 3). It should come as no surprise to anyone that there are disagreements and conflicting opinions. For example, and as we’ve pointed out, White said to write with nouns and verbs; Erskine said to write with modifiers. Of course, the answer is to write with words, and good luck choosing the right ones, putting them in the right order, and separating them with the right punctuation.

In the June 28, 2004 New Yorker, we enjoyed Menand’s dissing of Truss, and he helps explain why we prefer White to the standard grammar text. Menand (like White before him) writes as a generalist, not a specialist. Menand argues, and we agree, and we think that White also agreed, that the rules don’t really have much to do with effective writing. If they did, most academic writing would not be nearly so anemic. Pullum complains in his Chronicle piece that “Some of the recommendations are vapid, like ‘Be clear’ (how could one disagree?).” Yet much academic writing would improve if the writer would only make some attempt at following this obvious, White tenet. In Menand’s piece, titled “Bad Comma,” he has something more to say than corrections of Truss. We don’t find that Pullum has much more to say, at least not on the evidence of the two pieces we see here.

We’ll ask White to help us with a close, from the March 4, 1944, New Yorker: “A good deal depends on the aims of a publication. The more devious the motives of his employer, the more difficult for a writer to write as he pleases. As far as we have been able to discover, the keepers of this house have two aims: the first is to make money, the second is to make sense”; two aims that academic writers are not usually saddled with. 

None of which directly answers Pullum’s argument. Pullum has two points: one, that Elements is flawed; two, that the flaws have afflicted generations of students who as a result of their immersion in Elements cannot now write. Pullum provides support for his first point; his second is insupportable. There might be scores of students unable to write, but it doesn’t follow that it’s the fault of Elements. But what about our point that the argument is somehow embroiled in academic versus commercial ends, that Pullum’s secret thesis is the advancement of the purpose of his text – a poor advertisement if he wants to compete with the incredible ethos surrounding White, an ethos based not on Elements, but on his actual writing success. That point is irrelevant to Pullum’s argument. But we have two claims too: first, students can’t write because they’ve been taught writing from grammar handbooks and textbooks, wrong from the start; second, that the textbooks are unnecessarily academic and rarely involve the kinds of reading experience necessary for students to improve their writing skills (the textbook industry’s commercial success is driven in large part from forced new editions, captive student readers, and exorbitant pricing). 

At the same time, there are academic efforts that have made both money and sense: for example, Zinsser’s On Writing Well; Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams (whose “The Phenomenology of Error” is must reading for anyone seriously interested in this argument); and Notes Toward a New Rhetoric, by Francis Christensen. We never said Elements was the only book to read, just that it is a worthwhile book to read and carry. And we are grateful to Mr. Pullum for updating its errors – his analysis will add fuel to the discussion of the choices suggested in Elements.

E. O. Wilson’s Happy Ant in Mary Midgley’s Primate Picnic

Human freedom creates morality, for to exercise our freedom we are held in a cage of motive. The stuff of motive is found in literature, and we thought we might there experience freedom unrestrained by complicity, and our awareness of others’ actions might be total. Through literature we would enjoy our freedom without ourselves being questioned as to our motives.

Those are the sorts of things I found myself jotting down in my notebook while reading Midgley’s book. Why was I reading Mary Midgley? I’d been meaning to read some Midgley ever since her interview last year in The Believer – which she consented to only after being assured it was not a religious magazine.

Midgley takes on E. O. Wilson, who viewed humanity as a dysfunctional ant colony, saw the potential for individual happiness from a sociobiologist’s viewpoint, the neurobiologist the queen of the ant hill. The Humanities work best when non-specialized, and acknowledging a plurality of motives, looking behind the Main Street facades, but enjoying the stroll. But when the Humanities also buy into reductive thinking, and fragment, capabilities are lost, for, as Buckminster Fuller showed, specialization leads to extinction – when the organism loses its ability to adapt. Midgley’s term of Wilson’s progress is “bilogicised,” where he excludes “amateur thinking,” and the “merely wise,” as if there is such a thing as an amateur human, people who live just as a hobby. But looking at today’s superhighways one wonders if Wilson wasn’t on to something with his ants. But do ants cry? Laugh? Stray from the scented path? Take irrational risks? Celebrate birthdays? Humans are not ants, even if they both do like to picnic. 

Midgley explains that moral judgments are not only possible, but necessary, and not only necessary but mandatory, compelling, and binding: mandatory in that to be human is to be moral; compelling in that our moral judgments forge our path through the otherwise inhospitable jungle of the universe; binding in that we must live the results of our judgments – we can’t escape our own judgments.

If we are in the universe, and we have a moral purpose, how can the universe not have a moral purpose? For why is there something? Why is there simply not something, but nothing? Does not this fact of something trump the possibility of nothing, and suggest a moral to the story? Perhaps we are short-lived, but if we are short-lived why have we evolved to a moral purpose, that moral purpose evolving consistent with our evolving consciousness? Perhaps we are the universe’s only chance at a moral purpose, of realizing a moral purpose for itself.

If the human is denied a moral purpose, we lose our freedom, are literally “demoralized,” and we are our own cage, a bag of genes. 

Specialization leads to extinction, which explains why the specialists practice reduction of their competitors, wanting to “cannibalize” every threat to the dominance of their singular point of view, and thus lose the ability to adapt. The cannibalization takes the form of propaganda, a disguised values’ trap, where one is led to miscalculate the future results of one’s current actions.

Sung to the tune of Teddy Bears’ Picnic: If you go out in the woods today you’re in for a big surprise, for today’s the day the primates have their picnic.

Midgley, M. (1994). The ethical primate: Humans, freedom and morality. New York: Routledge.

Where Crossan’s historical meets Beckett’s hysterical Jesus

Crossan finds Jesus living on the wrong side of the tracks – among the politically oppressed and the socially shamed, low class cynics roaming homeless camps.

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins with a gospel attestation analysis by Vladimir:

Vladimir: One out of four. Of the other three two don’t mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him….But one of the four says that one of the two was saved….But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others? (p. 9).

As Crossan shows, they were not all there. Very few, if any, were there. The problem then, for Crossan, is one of attestation, correlation, cross referencing the varied and disparate stories for credibility and reliability, explaining the running editions, the omissions, the additions, the different emphases – the “theological damage control” of later traditions (p. 232). Crossan’s book begins with a remarkable story, taken from ancient Egyptian papyrus, about a common family, illustrating basic household transactions, including everyday hopes and disappointments. His research reveals the social, political, and religious landscape of the Mediterranean world, and discusses the survival skills practiced by ordinary households – the concessions, the breaking points, the sacrifices, the everyday hopes and fears.

Out of this anthropological view emerges a Jesus walking a landscape consistent with Beckett’s typical stage directions – for Godot: Act I, “A country road. A tree. Evening”; Act II, “Next day. Same time. Same place.”

“He was neither broker nor mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the brokerless kingdom of God” (Crossan, p. 422).

Jesus was an existentialist; there is no Godot.

 

Beckett, S. (1954). Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Press.

Crossan, J. (1992). The historical Jesus: The life of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant. New York: HarperCollins.

From bookface to facebook

Why facebook? Why not faceweb? The web is not a book. Then again, what is a book? What is a web? The web is like an illuminated manuscript.

 

We used to call prolific readers bookworms, their faces buried in books. Bookworm is a misnomer; worms are quite social, as my compost pile reveals. But the bookworm does prefer the warmth of an open, airy book, lives within the book. The bookworm feeds on the book, a moist book, an organic book, destroying the book in the process of reading it, a deconstructionist.

 

…facebook, face + book, already a metaphor, specialized. Books are sequential, linear; facebook is mosaic, multidirectional: The face as book, borrowing book as ethos for the face that is prepared, so a face with credibility, reliability, with a fixed point of view. Really? Eye contact; I contact, enter-face. “Manuscript culture is conversational if only because the writer and his audience are physically related by the form of publication as performance” (McLuhan, [The Gutenberg Galaxy], 1962, p. 105). Webworm.

From the Gutenberg to a Gatesian Galaxy

Madison Avenue was first to show interest in McLuhan’s ideas. What were those ideas? He did not argue an aesthetic, as Nicholas Carr seems to want. McLuhan would certainly miss books, if change came to that. Every new technology alters the sensorium. Is Google making us stupid? Who’s us? What is stupid? Google’s effects are more political than aesthetical: Blessed are the dull for they shall watch television; blessed are the sharp, for they also shall watch television. Blessed are the stupid, for they shall google.

And what of the internet? McLuhan would argue that the internet has not yet invented its content. Every new technology fills with the content of the old; Google’s book project is the reductio ad absurdum of this McLuhan tenet. If the printing press resulted in nationalism, marginal man, individualism, privacy, what will the effects of the internet be? Certainly to reinforce the concept of individualism, but without the privacy (facebook, blogging) – truly a global village, a political effect.

When we think, we are already googling. Every technology is an extension of our senses or body, as McLuhan said and showed, and he would have argued that the internet is an extension of our central nervous system. Sitting at the internet, we are watching the reflection of our central nervous system at work. What do we think of that, and how does that make us stupid?

Jesus and the Jazz of Being Existential

There is no place to hide in the existentialism of Sartre and Beauvoir, but one does not go there to hide, but to realize. Jesus was the first existentialist (as Kierkegaard showed), and the early Christians lived by choice, reborn in an existential rejection of a status quo existence, rejecting their birth rights (and wrongs), if they had any, their birth situation, for a choice that gave meaning to their lives. The early Christians chose choice; they chose freedom, and the choice was all encompassing.

 

Beauvoir is far more devastating than Sartre in criticizing roles, lifestyle as identity, faces prepared to meet faces. She obliterates the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man.

 

Jazz is the music of the existentialist. The jazz musician takes up his instrument, develops a musical attitude. His tone reveals his attitude toward the piece, an attitude that must change with each playing. The music is constantly being reborn, the jazz musician improvising, every measure a rebirth, every performance one of doubt – otherwise, why play it yet again, yet again differently?

 

Where is the religion that might do for Christianity what jazz has done for music?  “To will oneself free is also to will others free” (Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity).

Eca de Queiros and a Metaphysical Googlelarity

We know technology changes us, rearranges the sensorium; the printing press, for example, gave the eye dominance over the ear, as McCluhan explained. But is technological change bad for us? What do we value? What do we want? We survive by our abilities to adapt; change is irrelevant. The question shouldn’t be “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” but, is Google making us happy?

In Eca de Queiros’s The City and the Mountains (1895, new Margaret Jull Costa translation from New Directions, 2008) civilization is defined and confined by its “machines and instruments” (p. 50): “Defeated, my Prince slouched into his study and did the rounds of all those machines intended to complete or facilitate Life – the Telegraph, the Telephone, the Phonograph, the Radiometer, the Graphophone, the Microphone, the Writing Machine, the Adding Machine, the Electric Press, the Magnetic Press, all his tools and tubes and wires…” (p. 120).

There’s even a link, 1895 version: “Then, desperately, he linked No. 202 up with the telegraphic wires of The Times, so that his study, like a heart, would pulsate with the whole Social Life of Europe” (p. 114-115).

But the ruling class isn’t happy, and getting on their machines does nothing to improve their foolishness: “Like some icy, melancholy sun, the Electricity blazed down on the silence and on the pensive immobility of all those backs and all those décolletages. From each attentive ear, cupped by a hand, hung a black wire, like a piece of intestine…superior, civilized beings devoutly and silently drinking in the obscenities Gilberte was bleating down the line at them from beneath the soil of Paris, through wires buried in the gutters, close by the sewers…” (p. 62-63). They are all logged on, severally, to the “Theaterphone.”

The problem is the city, civilization, machines that lack the ability to bestow grace: “But the City has its most deleterious effects on Man’s Intelligence, which it either imprisons in banality or drives into wild extravagance” (p. 93). The city lights do not illuminate most of its inhabitants: “If the illusion of the City could at the very least make all the people who maintained it happy, but it patently fails!” (p. 94). And so they leave for the mountains of the title, taking only a small part of the “super-civilized Prince’s sumptuous collection” with them.

Were it 2009, would they be taking their laptops, which, like Stevens’s jar in “Anecdote of the Jar,” would likely jar the nature of the mountains and their own alike, like nothing else in Portugal? We find out in the second half of The City and the Mountains.

John Cage, Cowboy Surf Shop, and Garage Jazz

John Cage was the first garage musician, freeing music at once from the academy, from high culture, from ubiquitous radios, from naturalism – from preconceived notions of what sounds should sound like. Cage valued sounds; he desired sounds, required sounds. Cage captured sounds he found in his environment and remixed them in his garage, creating a philosophy of music that encouraged listeners to experiment, restoring sound to primeval element. Cage’s music is not devoid of sentimentality, and heralds both warnings and callings – electronic blasts to the chest, bees dancing in the labyrinths of our ears.

 

We are anxious to hear the sounds we make, our own voice, which we hear in unison, subverting our self-consciousness. The echo, reverb, was the first natural recording. Garage Band allows us to extend the range of our voice, format, and get loopy – all Cageian values. We’ve been listening for a long, long time; how much training do we require?

 

John Linker’s Cowboy Surf Shop employs his various interests – folk, alternative, literature, surfing, and playing guitar as something to do with your hands. In one piece, “Rock ‘n Roll Eden,” a Lou Reed cover, we hear a voice reading from Jack London (Jack’s ranch, in the Valley of the Moon, is not too far from John’s place). A diversion from teaching duties, John’s project is a demo, a rough draft, experimenting with loops, voice-overs, a variety of instruments (sans drums – bass picks up both rhythm and percussion), and improvisation on covers and originals.

 

When in the Army in the late 60’s we used to hang around the motor pool after hours playing guitar. Spec. 4 Martin, who had worked at Fender, offered this criticism: “You never play the same thing the same way.” As we’ve discussed, Cage was not a jazz fan, but what we require now is garage jazz, inviting thought: what is garage; what is jazz.

 

Distance of First Person Plural

For some time we’ve been thinking of addressing the blog’s use of the first person plural. Are we a group blog, or command central for some multiple personality? Are we looking for safety in number?

At St. Anthony’s in the early sixties we lined up outdoors in front of our classrooms following recess, shortest in the front to tallest in the rear, boys stage left, girls stage right. Reverend Mother called out “Distance: 1, 2, 3.” On 1, we placed our left hand, extending our arm, on the left shoulder of the student in front of us; on 2, we extended our right arm, the line pressing backward and up the hill as we distanced ourselves from each other, so the tallest in the back became taller still, and a kind of order overcame and stilled the playground. The unruly mob dissipated; the shouts on the street diminished. And on 3 we dropped our arms to our sides and stood silently at attention, individuals now, each responsible for I. We disappeared from view. Deviations deserved detention; no one wanted to be a you. All was still, until a whistle blew, and we marched into the classrooms.

Readers familiar with The New Yorker may recall the editorial “we” of the early “Notes and Comment” section of that magazine, to which E. B. White often contributed, writing, against his intuition, in the first person plural, the required editorial voice of the section. White apparently thought the practice silly; nevertheless, we recommend you try writing in the first person plural as a writing exercise.

You might enjoy the distance of the joke, a kind of detachment that comes from not taking yourself too seriously, though some suggest that’s just non-committal. You can get trapped in we, and that’s not good. But losing yourself in we might make for a good writing experience, might even improve your writing. The assumption that most academic writing of course should stay out of it altogether, whence the “one” of the formal academic style, as in “one wonders what this is all about,” ignores the results – often directionless and unfriendly prose. One wonders who this one is too, and if there might be a more clear and concise way to identify oneself and one’s view. It’s a question of distance.

Flannery O’Connor and the Coen Brothers

The mixture of violence with comedy in Flannery O’Connor’s stories offers up an absurd exaggeration of the ordinary. The Coen brothers must be fans, and Flannery a precursor to their film style. Flannery’s ritual, taken from the church and put out on the street, in the fields, or confined to crowded houses, yet still proudly clad in the absurd array of ecclesiastical colors, seems to undermine any serious attempt at self-discovery, yet speaks to where we come from, who we are, where we might be going, and who might be watching.  

Susan Sontag and a Valentine for Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor’s stories stir a natural absurd mix of violence and comedy. Characters argue and alienate themselves from one another. They have difficulty communicating, and they torment one another. Yet, throughout the stories, we find humor – comedy in situation, language, and setting. What better day to read a Flannery story than Valentine Day?

In O’Connor’s short story “Parker’s Back,” Parker, having experienced the epiphany at the scene of the tractor crash, drives straight to the tattoo parlor, where he’s a frequent visitor, yet the tattooist at first doesn’t recognize Parker, and there’s humor in their brief exchange, Parker calling out that surely the tattooist must know him. “You must have been in jail” the tattooist says. “Married,” Parker answers.

That “The world of the absurd delighted her” (Sally Fitzgerald) is clear in any reading of Flannery’s stories. Albert Camus also delighted in the absurd. But it’s Susan Sontag who best illuminates “Parker’s Back.” Borrowing Sontag’s terms, from her essay on Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, Parker is body, and Sarah, his wife – well, is not body, but what is she?

Sarah dislikes color, and color, for Flannery, is sacramental raiment; her stories create a collage of peacock feathers. “Christian asceticism,” O. Brown writes, “can carry punishment of the fallen body to heights inconceivable to Plato, but Christian hope is for the redemption of that fallen body.” Sarah, who is “saved,” rejects Parker’s vestmented body. “…by putting his ideas in the framework of Christian eschatology,” Sontag tells us, “…Brown’s analysis, by allying itself with some of the submerged promises of Christian eschatology, opens up the possibility of a psychoanalytic theory of history which does not simply reduce cultural history to the psychology of individuals.”

Of course, Sontag also gave us this – from “Against Interpretation”: “…interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art…it is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’” Happy Valentine Day, Flannery.

Albert Camus on the Economic Collapse

An old friend from our South Santa Monica Bay days writes, “Did I hear that right? 5 day forecast for around here is in the upper 80’s.  Visibility for miles.  Air quality is wonderful. But, this is January.”

In the mornings we went surfing, and in the afternoons we played whiffle ball in the yard or in the street. Maybe we walked to the five and dime for a pack of baseball cards, but if there were no good cards in the pack there was still the bubblegum, the smell like a perfume. Summers we camped on the beach at Refugio and for days wore nothing but our swim-trunks. 

We are reminded again of Camus’s “The Sea Close By”: “I grew up with the sea and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable” (p. 172). And this, from “Return to Tipasa”: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer” (p. 169).

Camus, Albert. (1970). Lyrical and critical essays. Vintage Books: New York.

E. B. White and the plumber

In December of 1930, E. B. White wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the garbageman. “They have the town by the tail and they know it,” White concluded, after a brief study of the can collector’s habits. We like to watch the trashman too, the descendants of White’s subjects, wrestling now with new regulations, recycling, knowledge of toxic waste, but still masters of noise and dust, their barking trucks heard for blocks, avalanches of glass announcing last call for trash. But while today’s garbageman may still have the city by the tail, surely it’s the plumber has it by the nose.

 

My father was a plumber, and asked us to join him in the trade; shucks, I wanted to continue school. But I worked with him summers and accompanied him on enough evening calls to achieve a kind of apprentice status. A neighbor would knock, a friend would call, a parishioner, a friend of a friend – a brief diagnosis on the phone and I was told which tools to grab from the garage and we were off, a doctor making a house call. Dad almost never accepted money for these evening jobs. He would accept a beer, sit, and talk.

 

No job was too awful, foul, or hard. With his bare hands he swept away monstrous crawl space spiders, reached into cold plugged up toilet bowls, chiseled oakum into cast iron joints – which I sometimes got to pour the molten lead into with the long handled ladle from the boiling pot. Our antagonists were usually stripped threads, worn washers, busted pipes, and all manner of backened slop. Dad did not relish repair work; by day he was a new construction plumber, working with new parts, not used. What he did relish was the opportunity to get out of the house and talk to people. He was the James Joyce of the plumbing trade. He could talk to anyone, for he had them, and he knew it, by the nose.

 

Time passing and enter George, the veteran plumber we now call when wet to the knees and elbows but I still can’t fix it. We called George recently to help us with a pipe cracked during the big freeze and snows. After the job we sat with George in the living room; he did most of the talking, and we listened. Before the pipe broke, I had been reading E. B. White, but after George left, I let E. B. sit, and I paused to think of my father, the plumber, and my decision to continue school.

A word of one’s own

Comfortably ensconced in our reading lair, hidden behind the arras of the Dec. 8 New Yorker, perusing the cartoons, time passing easily, and find our Eric has been at work on his French, annotating the Mankoff cartoon caption “A la Recherche des Cheveux Perdus” (p. 68) with the translation “Remember Hair Lost.”

What is past is lost, but still we recall – writing is a lure; reading, a way of walking.

Menand, Jan. 5: “Feiffer’s strips are about borrowed ways of talking, about the lack of fit between people and words, about the way that clichés take over” (p. 43).

Blake: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell”).

Nabokov: “…minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise” (Lectures on Literature, “Good Writers and Good Readers,” p. 2).

In Nabokov’s teaching copies, his annotations include his own translations; in his copy of  “The Metamorphosis,” for example, he substitutes the Muirs’s “uneasy dreams” with “a troubled dream,” and “a gigantic insect” with “a monstrous insect” (p. 250). Monstrous means marvelous and strange, and Nabokov starts his students off with a different view of Gregor, beginning with Kafka’s first sentence.

Woody Allen: “Honey, there’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick” (Annie Hall).

For Nabokov, reading meant rereading in excruciating detail, never straying from the text, bringing to exact light and color the watermarks of the text, like working a coloring book.

As for the uneasy, or troubled, dreams, Kafka reveals in the second paragraph that “It was no dream.”

But one’s own words? Where does one find them? Sometimes a word of one’s own seems no more possible than a room of one’s own. For some answers, we might turn again to E. B. White’s Elements of Style, where we are warned to “Write in a way that comes naturally”; “Avoid fancy words”; and “Avoid foreign languages” (Chapter V).

As for using words of one’s own to find lost time, Nabokov says: “…to recreate the past something other than the operation of memory must happen: there must be a combination of a present sensation (especially taste, smell, touch, sound) with a recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past” (p. 249). It took Proust 1.5 million words to illustrate that we are “…not free…to choose memories from the past for scrutiny” (Nabokov, p. 248).

Walt Whitman and a Letter of Ourself

Thirty-nine years ago this month, we sat on a bunk in a barracks in Fort Bliss, Texas, writing letters. This week, one came back. We wrote dozens of letters during our stay at Fort Bliss; alas, all are lost – to time’s sometimes worrisome and weary but always wealthy passing and tossing. But no, wait, here’s one returned, to tell a tale.

The letter came wrapped in a Christmas card sent by our oldest niece, whose mother, our oldest sister, passed away a few years ago. “I’m going through boxes of pictures, albums and letters & cards of my parents,” our niece wrote, “and thought it would be fun to return to the sender.”

Today’s Fort Bliss soldiers are no doubt writing emails home. The Internet intoxicates, and perhaps the future return of an email forty years old will be as remarkable as the forgotten letter is now. But later today we’ll walk down to the Bipartisan Café and sit at a window and write some letters, on paper, with pen and ink.

Walt Whitman said, in “Song of Myself,”

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes….the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

It’s difficult to think of Whitman composing Leaves of Grass on his computer. We can save emails with a click, without much thought or sentiment, but saving letters requires something more, a deeper commitment, perhaps, a foreshadowing of snow and love, of blank beaches and empty waves.

Our 2008 Believer Book Award Choices

The 2008 Believer Book Award Reader Survey postcard came this year in the Fifty-Eighth issue: “Aroma Prom,” an art issue (including a somewhat cantankerous interview with Frank Stella; an engaging interview with cartoonist Keith Knight; Weschler interesting on Hockney and Irwin; very much enjoyed the “This is Corporate America” article).

Our postcard choices this year (following the postcard instructions to name “three works of fiction, each published in 2008, to be the finest of the year. By ‘finest’ I mean the most affecting and the best-written”) are as follows:

The City and the Mountains by Eca de Queiros: A break from high tech city wealth of 1895 to the mountains of Portugal.

On A Day Like This by Peter Stamm: A sense of self-impending doom that begins and ends in the enormity of the ordinary.

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz: The numerator is 530.

We have this year again added a bit of drawing to the poor featureless face of the mid-60’s student on the cover of the postcard (this year, using acrylic paints, giving her a sailboat face).

Reading Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero on Line 15

What would Roland Barthes have said about the snippets of poetry published among the ad displays, public service announcements, and caution notes headlining the interior of local bus Line 15?

 

The poetry placards please riders through a program called, somewhat fancifully, Poetry in Motion, though the poems move relative only to someone off the bus. For the rider/reader, the poems move at the same speed as everything else on the bus, with the exception of the rider just boarding, stumbling down the aisle in the opposite direction of the bus lurching forward. It’s a good idea to wait until seated before trying to read the poetry. In any case, why not call the poems, simply, “Bus Poems”?   

 

But what’s remarkable is the number of riders and therefore potential readers of the poetry, “reaching an estimated 15 million daily [countrywide],” according to the Tri-Met site. Poetry never had it so good.

 

Readers can listen to Johnny Tillotson sing his 1961 hit song “Poetry in Motion” on YouTube. The refrain of Tillotson’s song seems particularly apt to the riders on Line 15:

 

…For all the world to see.

a-woe woe woe woe woe woe

a-woe woe woe woe woe woe

a-woe woe woe woe woe woe

a-woe

 

Find out more about Poetry in Motion at the Poetry Society, or at the Tri-Met site: Selections for 2007, or check out the British original Poems on the Underground, including Autumn/Winter 2008 selections, which celebrate the 1918 Armistice.

 

A random search adds to the randomness of the entire enterprise with this from Charles Bukowski, the bard of beer, on poetry and motion– locomotively, as Bukowski is seen displaying his full critical license (not for the poetically squeamish). We’ve not seen any Bukowski poems on the bus – though there are times on the bus when we feel we are in his company.

 

Which brings us back to Barthes, who found deconstructing poetry difficult, since the pieces already cover the floor in various stages of disassembly: “…what is attempted [in modern poetry] is to eliminate the intention to establish relationships and to produce instead an explosion of words…since…modern poetry…destroys the spontaneously functional nature of language, and leaves standing only its lexical basis” (p. 46). This sounds like a bus ride. “The Hunger of the Word, common to the whole of modern poetry, makes poetic speech terrible and inhuman. It initiates a discourse full of gaps and full of lights, filled with absences and over-nourishing signs, without foresight or stability of intention, and thereby so opposed to the social function of language…” (p. 48). “…modern poetry destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things” (p. 49). Maybe that’s why they decided to put some on the buses.

 

The audience on the Line 15 bus shifts slightly at every stop, and every bus ride is already a poem in motion, riders hopping on, hopping off, each a word, or a line, some a full verse, the bus curtsying occasionally, its caution bell bleeping, as it leans down to pick up a rider unable to hop, poems and riders waiting patiently motionless, the big scurrilous bus a measure of notes transpiring.

 

 

"On the Road," a Bus Poem by Ted Kooser on Line 15

Gaston Bachelard’s book as shell

In Gaston Bachelard’s the Poetics of Space, a philosophical study of the spaces we inhabit, open, and close, our houses, chests, nests, and more, in the chapter titled “Shells,” we find this quote from Gaston Puel:

           

“This morning I shall tell the simple happiness of a man

 stretched out in the hollow of a boat.

The oblong shell of a skiff has closed over him.

He is sleeping. An almond. The boat, like a bed, espouses sleep.”

 

But we are reminded of Hamlet’s “Oh, God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams” (Act II, sc. ii).

 

Reflecting on the “capacity of shells” to both protect and trap, Bachelard arrives at a “suitable moral” to the habits of the inhabitants of shells, found in da Vinci’s Notebooks: “Like the mouth that, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of an indiscreet listener.”

 

Hamlet, in the space and bad dreams line, is talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a pair of hermit crabs, old friends “sent for” by the king to sneak into and inhabit Hamlet’s shell, but it will not be easy to crack the nut of Hamlet’s loneliness.

Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why

Harold Bloom prefers his literature neat, and not served with a twist. Adverse to literary criticism that substitutes a doctrinaire reading for the actual text, Bloom’s approach to reading is summed up in his epigraph, from the Wallace Stevens poem “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm”: “The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.” 

Bloom’s book on reading consists of a short introduction, which sets the stage for the kind of reading he prefers, followed by sections devoted to short stories, poems, novels, plays, more novels, and an epilogue.

Bloom’s favorite writers are Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. But it’s Francis Bacon who provides the prose equivalent for Stevens’s poem: “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”

Bloom augments Bacon: “I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

Bloom hopes to inspire an “authentic reader.” Yet, “It is not the function of reading to cheer us up, or to console us prematurely.” 

“You are more than an ideology,” Bloom says.

“Chekhov and Beckett were the kindest human beings,” Bloom says. Reading Bloom, here and elsewhere, one wants to add his name to the list of the kindest readers, writers, and teachers.

Bloom, H. (2000). How to read and why. New York: Scribner.

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life

Maybe Higgins wanting to read aloud is explained by Annie Dillard’s claim that “The written word is weak” (p. 17). Yet for Dillard writing is a trade, like carpentry, or plumbing, hard work. The writer is a day laborer, digging a ditch, head down, not looking at anything, the ditch caving in, dirt falling back in with every shovelful pulled out. Dillard’s book is more lyrical than the books on writing by Higgins and Stegner, figurative, full of metaphorical explanations. But she affirms that writing is hard work. Here’s an example that illustrates how hard, in her figurative style: “Half naked, with your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence’s head while its tail tries to knock you over” (p. 75).

“Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time,” Roger Angell tells us in the foreword to the fourth edition of The Elements of Style, the E. B. White classic. Stegner politely offered that writing is hard work; Higgins gave the sentiment a powerful place in his book. 

And Annie Dillard agrees: ”It takes years to write a book – between two and ten years” (p. 13). She points out a few exceptions, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: “…in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor” (p. 13). We get the point; Faulkner embodied the idea of the exception. But like Higgins, Annie doesn’t want us paddling out short of wax, so she repeats and clarifies: “Writing a book, full time, takes between two and ten years…On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away” (p. 14).

But hard how? “Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark” (p. 26). We see Annie in some of her writing hideaways, and while the locations look like vacation spots, she convinces us that writing is hard mainly because of the isolation, the solitude, the boring act of sitting. “I write this in the most recent of my many studies – a pine shed on Cape Cod. The pine lumber is unfinished inside the study…” an 8 by 10 shed, “Like a plane’s cockpit…” (p. 25). The plane motif introduced here foreshadows the last chapter, devoted to a stunt flying ace Annie met and went up with but who later crashes – and flying solo in a small plane performing tricks above the heads of an audience becomes an extended metaphor for writing. Then she’s in another cabin, this time on Haro Strait, in Puget Sound, where “The cabin was a single small room near the water” (p. 41). 

In fact, “It should surprise no one that the life of the writer – such as it is – is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world” (p. 44). No doubt, yet it’s still somehow difficult to square this writing is hard, lonely work business with “During some of the long, empty months at work on the book, I was living in a one-room log cabin on an empty beach” (48). Add a little sun and a few waves and what’s the problem? Of course, we wouldn’t get much writing down.  

Dillard knew “a joyful painter” who became a painter because “He said, ‘I liked the smell of the paint’” (p. 70). It’s apparently not as easy to like the smell of sentences, and this also makes writing hard work: “…I said I hated to write. I said I would rather do anything else” (p. 53). But, “It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick” (p. 71). 

Dillard, A. (1989). The writing life. New York: Harper & Row. (111 pages)

George V. Higgins’s On Writing

Unlike Stegner’s, Higgins’s On Writing is unexpected, full of convoluted sentences (the kind lawyers reputedly cast) and five dollar vocabulary. Higgins values readers, but they are a dime a dozen, and critics, penny each, and, as it turns out, editors are the true friends of Eddie Coyle.

Higgins emphasizes repeatedly what he considers his most sage advice for writers: “…read good prose aloud” (p. 8), and, to stick the point in your gut, inserts samples of some of his favorite writers, in some cases entire stories, and asks you to read them aloud. So you get to read, interspersed throughout the chapters, the prose of Dickens, Hemingway, Gay Talese, William Manchester, Irwin Shaw, John O’Hara, James Thurber. Then Higgins explains how their writing works, from a street level viewpoint, and that’s the value in this book. 

Not a bad idea, the inserts; takes the attention off of Higgins for a spell. Higgins opens his book calling Edmund Wilson, the august critic of most of the 20th Century (see his Twenties; Thirties; Forties; Fifties; and Sixties), a professional torturer (p. 1). Speaking of torture, try this Higgins sentence on for fit: “Conformably to that presumption, this manual includes numerous selections by writers whose work I consider exemplary” (p. 9).

Like Stegner, and others, Higgins thinks “Writing is hard work” (p. 6). In part, perhaps, that’s because you may “Never tell your reader what your story is about” (p. 82).

George V. Higgins’s On Writing is worth reading, for its prose personality, and for how he shows how writing works. 

Higgins, G. V. (1990). On writing: Advice for those who write to publish (or would like to). New York: Henry Holt.

Wallace Stegner’s On Teaching and Writing Fiction

Picked up this Wallace Stegner book at a local used bookstore, and what a treat it turned out to be. For readers who value clarity and linear writing, humor amid serious topics, sound advice for writers, readers, and teachers, delivered with challenging claims in aphoristic style, Stegner’s your man. Published posthumously, this short book of 121 pages collects all of Stegner’s writings on writing, proportionately small compared to his total output, some pieces previously unpublished.

So what’s he have to say?

“It is a common misconception that an image invariably involves a figure of speech” (p. 19)…. “…comparison is a sort of judgment” (p. 20).

“In spite of the exercise books and the negative approach of our schools, language stays alive; it is often more alive in the mouths of truck drivers than in the correct mouths of people who feel that there is a single proper or correct way to say everything” (p. 24).

“…a playful way with language is always better than a solemn one” (p. 27).

“The words that fit are the words to choose, and it does not matter whether they come to us from the Greeks or from a singing commercial” (p. 28).

“Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing” (p. 34).

“…good writing is an end in itself…” (p. 35).

“…many people don’t know their own potential…some misread their potential…different kinds of writers display very different stigmata of gift” (p. 36).

“Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to…Any experience, looked at steadily, is likely to be strange enough for fiction or poetry” (p. 41).

“Writers teach other writers how to see and hear” (p. 43).

“It is fairly easy for teachers of writing to become ex-writers” (p. 51).

“Fiction always moves toward one or another of its poles, toward drama at one end or philosophy at the other” (p. 76).

“They [critics] tend to run in packs…we ought to have pluralist literature and pluralist literary criticism” (p. 88).

“…reality is not fully reality until it has been fictionized” (p. 98).

The little book closes with a short story illustrating Stegner’s values: “…I believe in fiction, not only in its do-ability but in its importance. For the writer, whose life is as often as not a mess, it can clean up a murky and littered mind as snails clean up a fish tank” (p. 97).

Stegner, W. (2002). On teaching and writing fiction. New York: Penguin Books. Edited and with a foreword by Lynn Stegner.

Every day is moving day on the Internet streets

In Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown places the origins and evolution of thought in and from the body. Everything outside the body, in the social world created by humans, is metaphor, the secondary term an externalization of the body. Brown resurrects the dead metaphors to illustrate his thesis, “The fall is into language” (p. 257). Brown worked on Love’s Body from 1958 to 1965, so there is no discussion of how the Internet might be changing our thinking.

Gaston Bachelard, in his The Poetics of Space (1958), did for the house what Brown did for the body: “…the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (p. 6). “A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (p. 17).

Bachelard, writing in the late 1950’s, does not discuss the Internet, yet says, “In this activity of poetic spatiality that goes from deep intimacy to infinite extent, united in an identical expansion, one feels grandeur welling up. As Rilke said: ‘Through every human being, unique space, intimate space, opens up to the world…’” (p. 202).

On the Internet streets, one is essentially homeless, houseless, curiously wired yet wireless, and every day is moving day.   

Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space. (Maria Jolas, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Foreword by Etienne Gilson. First published in French under the title La poetiquie de l’espace, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958.

Strangers to the future

When Nicholas Carr tries to walk a straight line in the web, he’s a different kind of stranger in a strange land. Google’s goal is not to make us smart, but rich, a goal it has surpassed. What passes for smart in the land of Carr is linear and vertical, long and deep, but what is it? Here’s a clue: deep dives like War and Peace can’t be comfortably experienced on the web, where readers value clarity, conciseness, and the ability to jump around with the speed of a photon.

Carr complains about blogging and bloggers, but his real lament may be for the adulteration of the professional writer’s medium, for the paid writer is accustomed to being compensated a spot in the box, but now has to sit in the general admission seats behind the center field fence with the blue-collar fans.

 

McLuhan said each new medium fills with the content of the old (e.g. vaudeville > radio > TV), before it develops its own content, and that every technology is an extension of the senses. He thought electronic media an extension of our central nervous system; no wonder we feel wired and jittery sitting at the computer surfing the web. And we prefer our posts short, with a picture or two; for what’s a book without pictures and conversations? Go ask Alice.

 

Blogs are not usually filled with essays. When they are they surely get skimmed by surfer-readers, one of Carr’s complaints; but isn’t that the way we read newspapers (mosaics) and most periodicals (mosaic-hybrid-newspapers)?

 

Carr claims that internet reading distracts us from linear and deep thinking, thus making us dumb. Linearity and “deep-reading,” the ability to read in a straight line for a long time, holding one’s intellectual breath long enough to absorb the view deep down, are capabilities Carr values, but he can’t prove that without them we grow stupid. Moreover, he’s filling the new medium with old content, which can only last temporarily, according to McLuhan. 

 

McLuhan, paraphrasing David Hume, said in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “…there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change. So the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant” (p. 27). In choosing War and Peace to reason his claim, Carr signifies his value, for why didn’t he choose Finnegans Wake? “In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, ‘The medium is the message’ quite naturally” (p. 28).

 

It’s not clear that Carr wants people to think as much as he wants them to think like him, not what he thinks, necessarily, but the way he thinks. The issue in controversy asks if the internet is changing the way we think (of course it is), and then asks a question related to the quality of thinking, but a different way of thinking is not automatically a worse way of thinking. The brain adapting yet again is not proven a bad change. Carr’s argument, that internet reading is making us stupid, suggests we were smart, but there’s unfortunately inadequate evidence to support that claim also. In any event, by the time we can determine if the change was for the better or worse, it’s likely that the written word as we now enjoy it will be a relic or fossil of some earlier culture. We are all strangers to the future.

Theory of nothing, something, and everything in between

Then we saw Wallace-Wells’s “Surfing the Universe,” in the July 21 issue, and we quickly skipped to this Annals of Science piece; for since seeing the Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert B. Laughlin lecture locally, our old curiosity to know if the physicists will ever solve their “Theory of Everything” has been expanding. 

There’s apparently enough string theory going around that if the physicists studying it were Christo they could wrap the universe. We like Lisi’s new idea for a Theory of Everything because while it exposes string theory for the cat’s cradle it is, it also makes use of something called E8, at once suggesting an error on a guitar chart (he must mean E7, or E9 – what’s an E8 shaped like?), and our old drill sergeant at Fort Bliss (an E8), Fall 1969, who also toyed around with a theory of everything.

We had our own theory of everything nearly completed, but it contained no math, actuarially speaking, though it was based on the number system we developed to illuminate the guitar fretboard. Like many of our great ideas, it was written on one of our Joe Mitchell note sheets, got left in a back pocket of a pair of jeans, and went out with the wash.

Criticizing string theory in his book A Different Universe, Laughlin says “A measurement that cannot be done accurately, or that cannot be reproduced even if it is accurate, can never be divorced from politics and must therefore generate mythologies” (p. 215). In lecture, Laughlin was a card. Expecting a mega-PowerPoint, instead we got cartoons from an overhead. ”Just look around you…Even this room is teeming with things we do not understand” (p. 218).

Anyone lucky enough to have surfed, that is, surfed in the water, salt water, in real waves, may not understand physics, but certainly comprehends that, as Laughlin says, “there is much, much more yet to come” (p. 218).

The cover’s title

Both the July 7 & 14 (double issue) and the July 21 issues arrived today. For those curious still about the July 21 cover controversy, already of course fizzling out, Emdashes provides a clearing house. We were still curious only with regard to the cover’s title, having not seen mention of it, and seeing it (“The Politics of Fear”), were reminded of Gary Snyder’s essay touching on the subject in Earth Household (pp. 90-93), written during the Cold War, but still pertinent, but settled, finally, on this to share, which says even more about contemporary politics:

There is a Zen saying that “while studying koans you should not relax even in the bath,” but this one is never heeded. (p. 52)

Joyce’s “allforabit”

If at first glance we can’t figure out what Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is all about we might at least recognize one of its themes as the alphabet. Beckett told us Wake is about normal things in the usual sense: “Literary criticism is not book-keeping.” Explaining Vico, Beckett said, “When language consisted of gesture, the spoken and the written were identical.” Later, “Convenience only begins to assert itself at a far more advanced stage of civilization, in the form of alphabetism.” Beckett argues that Wake is ”direct expression,” in a pre-alphabet way. “They (words) are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear…His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” 

Turning to Finnegans Wake itself, directly (never-minding the book-keepers), we find the alphabet itself. “(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curious signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thous had it out already) its world?” (p. 18).

Finnegans Wake, like most of Joyce’s work, is, in fact, memorable; its auditory impact sticks long after its photographic memory fades. For example, we continue to hear “When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit” (pp. 18-19) long after we read it.

Wolfram von Eschenbach notwithstanding: “I don’t know a single letter of the alphabet” (last paragraph Book II, Parzival, translated and with an introduction by Helen M. Mustard & Charles E. Passage. Vintage Books Edition, March 1961).

Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress, first published as New Directions Paperbook 331 in 1972.

Cage bop Monk lit

John Cage, as we’ve mentioned, seemed to have little tolerance for jazz, suggesting that if musicians want to have a conversation they should use words, and we’ve always found this attitude surprising coming from an otherwise tolerant and peaceful composer – but who named one of his own books Silence, which contains, among many innovative works, our favorite, his “Lecture on Nothing.”

“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry,” Cage said, as he is often quoted, but incompletely, for the third column (measure) in that line is “as I need it.” Two lines up we find three empty measures. The fourth measure of that line starts the sentence “I have nothing to say.” The first measure of the next line is empty. The second measure reads “and I am saying it.” The third measure is empty. The fourth measure says “and that is.” The first measure of the next line contains “poetry,” the next measure is empty, the next contains “as I need it,” and the final measure contains the period to the sentence. You begin to see why we have always liked John Cage, and find ourselves coming back to him again and again, to read and to listen. 

To round out the discussion, it’s worth mentioning, perhaps, that Silence also contains Cage’s “Lecture on Something,” suggesting a compare and contrast essay just itching to be written.

For some reason we’ve always paired John Cage with Thelonius Monk, thinking, for one thing, maybe Monk did for jazz what Cage did for classical, which is to say, in short, put some fresh wax on the board, unafraid to paddle out solo. Then again, we’ve always thought much of Cage’s music closer to jazz than to classical, for he admitted random access to sounds, in notation and performance. What bothered him about words was probably the many connotations, too many to contain, to orchestrate, or that words distract from sound with meaning. For Cage, the tree falling in the forest with no one listening certainly makes noise; the question is, what sounds does it make, the sounds no one hears?

Monk’s song titles provide clues to his intentions, “Rhythm-a-ning,” for example. Monk’s titles often convey what he has to say, his audience and purpose, if not his strategy. Monk had something to say, and said it, but, with the exception of the song titles, without words, and that is jazz, as he needed it.

In response to a request for a statement on music, Cage wrote “…nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music…” Or, Cage continued, “…by hearing…playing a piece of music} our ears are now in excellent condition.” What’s more, in the opening of this statement, he writes “instantaneous and unpredictable.” That seems to describe Monk, and isn’t that jazz, as we all need it?

Leisurely reading habits

A sense of something missed appears during the reading lull of the New Yorker double issues, for they don’t take two weeks to read. This far west, practically in the water, it’s not unusual for the posts to run late, and sometimes not at all, which brings on another sense, of not knowing what day it is, let alone what day to reasonably expect the next issue. And the missing of the weekly post brings an additional reminder of the amicable anticipations that used to accompany the now extinct, longer, serialized stories and articles that used to span several weeks. But it must be admitted, forced to read every page or go hungry, certain valuable discoveries appear, opera reviews, for example. Not that opera has supplanted jazz, but there was no way of knowing how enjoyable “Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle” was going to be, or that it would lead, improbably, to “Schultze gets the blues.”

Bereft, then, of fresh cartoons and talks, having wandered and watered the salsa garden, following a spell in the morning shade with a bowl of fresh blueberries and raspberries with a bit of shredded wheat, washed down with a cup of French pressed Roast, we find the musty shelves now press, and out comes, of all things, The Rise of Silas Lapham, which originally appeared, we are reminded by George Arms in his introduction to the Rinehart Edition (intro. copyrighted 1949; the paperback edition n.d.), “serially in the Century Magazine, where, in keeping with the leisurely reading habits of the time, it came out in ten monthly installments (November, 1884, to August, 1885).” Arms said William Dean Howells’s novel was popular on the installment plan, but it apparently lost favor with the critics once published in book form – then, as now, apparently, critics having little affinity for realism. One wonders, though, what it was like to read in that “leisurely reading” time, when, Arms said, ”The Bostonians and parts of Huckleberry Finn were serialized in the Century at the same time as The Rise of Silas Lapham.”

Some clues are given, and some similarities between the times grow apparent: “Well,” said Corey, “you architects and the musicians are the true and only artistic creators” (p. 206). And then there’s the matter of the library. “If we have a library, we have got to have books in it. Pen says it’s perfectly ridiculous having one. But papa thinks whatever the architect says is right” (p. 121). 

Our list for today does include a trip to the local library. We’ll probably stop by the new edition of Nick’s after the library. Hopefully, the new New Yorker will come before we head out.

Writer’s block

Writer’s block is an affliction that may occasionally affect any writer, and perhaps does strike all writers, from time to time, excepting, perhaps, writers like Vollmann, but who knows, even the graphomaniac may come down with a cold pen now and then, and how much worse must it feel for a Beckett, who can’t imagine without words, than a Salinger, who, apparently, can. Other writers, or would be writers, develop graphophobia, reduced to wanting in effect to know where it comes from - presumably the same place any other phobia comes from, but that knowledge alone won’t remove the writer’s block.

Writer’s block is like a hitless streak, the batter walking to the plate three or four times night after night and going hitless, walking head down back to the bench, bat in hand, each hitless at-bat adding to the streak. He resorts to superstition (wears the same pair of socks he was wearing when he got his last hit – inside out); changes bat size, alters batting stance; takes twice the number of pitches in batting practice before the game. But he grows silent, moves to the end of the bench, sulks. He runs out of distracting witticisms with which to amuse the sportswriter, rushes to the shower to avoid the radio interview. He’s given a night off, a night on the bench, and the batter who takes his place goes three for four and scores a run. The hit-blocked batter is living in a drought, and his muse likes water.

The cure for writer’s block is the same as the cure for a hitting slump. Return to basics: shut out the crowd; keep your eye on the ball; swing purposefully; and don’t try to pulverize the ball – just meet the ball, swing through the ball, and, above all, relax, take it easy, stay loose. It’s just a game.

Max Shulman’s “Love is a Fallacy”

Fallacies are fun. Errors in logic, deceptive, deliberate or accidental, fallacies accompany studies in critical reading and thinking, and provide us humble feelings of fallibility, for as A. N. Whitehead asserted in his ”Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary,” human consciousness cannot contain, or express through language, all the knowledge of its own experience.

If that’s a bit heady, consider Max Shulman’s “Love is a Fallacy.” Shulman was a novelist, screenwriter, and TV script writer, most famous probably for his character Dobie Gillis. “Love is a Fallacy” is a short story set in old school days, involving raccoon coats and the traps and vicissitudes of courtship. Of course it’s dated; no one wears raccoon coats anymore, and fallacies have found their way, for the most part, from Latin into English versions. But it’s a short enjoyable read and makes for a fun introduction to fallacies.

Cold frame for improvisation

Jazz musicians have long made handy use of so-called fake books. The best fake books condense a musical piece to one page. Full of popular songs and jazz standards, the fake books (and their now legitimate progeny, The Real Book series and other versions) allow the musician to gather the key, chords, melody, and lyrics at a glance to cover the piece close enough for recognition and loose enough to improvise and produce something new – new each time, for the cover sheets are cold frames for improvisation. Don’t be fooled by the word fake in the title; musical knowledge and familiarity with an instrument are prerequisites to successful fake book playing. But regular fake book playing improves a musician’s comprehension and capabilities.

Kenneth Koch might have had fake books in mind when he came up with the idea that eventually became his books Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and Rose, where did you get that red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children. In the introduction to Rose, Koch said he “taught reading poetry and writing poetry as one subject. I brought them together by means of ‘poetry ideas,’ which were suggestions I would give to the children for writing poems of their own in some way like the poems they were studying” (pp. 3-4). So we get the question for the rose from close readings of William Blake’s “The Tyger” and “The Sick Rose.”

 

There are no fake books for writers. Still, writing is learned while writing, and a good writer is a good reader. Reading and writing brought together as one subject form frames for improvisation.

Writer’s list

We write lists. For example: need coffee; water salsa garden; work out Monk’s “Blue Monk” on the Tele; write post. We use our Joe Mitchell reporter’s sheet. But sometimes we write in a hurry, and, later, find our list barely discernible – what did we mean by “eh”? But a list just might be a prelude to a masterpiece. One never knows. Often we find old ones in the pockets of a fresh pair of jeans, the folded pieces stuck together, the writing lost to the wash.

We wonder what the lists of some of our favorite writers might have looked like:

            Jack London: pick up six-pack; finish John Barleycorn.

            Samuel Becket: take trash can to curb; finish Endgame.

            Ernest Hemingway: tie new flies; finish “Hills Like White Elephants.”

            J. D. Salinger: finish Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; buy shredder.

            Georges Simenon: finish book; start new book; finish it; start another one.

            Li Po: note to Tu Fu – good night for wine and barbecue.

A writer has to start somewhere. Make a list.

El Porto Waltz

We found ourselves last night dancing at the ballroom again. We lost interest in the lesson quickly though, and chose to sit down, though our partner danced on, promenading around the dance floor, celebrating the dance community’s values. We thought of E. B. White’s dictum “Omit needless words.” Adapted for dance, it reads “Omit needless steps.” The lesson last night featured the waltz. We liked the country-western waltzes best: “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Waltz across Texas,” “Zydeco Waltz.”

We had used too many steps to express our personal El Porto Waltz, and sat at a corner table, nursing a cup of coffee, thinking of a post, writing notes on our handy pocket card with ball point pen, our favorite, the BIC Ultra, blue, glides like Danny Kaye (in our hand) across the worn tongue and groove, waxed maple floor of our imagination. But alas, without a reader for a partner, we are a single on that dance floor, a sometimes-discouraging feeling.

How is dancing like writing? Consider the forms, or styles. Dancing and writing both employ basic steps necessary for the partner-reader to recognize the form. The writer must learn to lead the reader, and not step on the reader’s toes, and, ultimately, discover the right combination of moves that allows grace to descend. One can improvise, but one improvises on the theme; drift too far, and the improvisation loosens anarchy upon the dance floor. The reader-partner must at least have some encouragement to follow the writer’s lead. Without that encouragement, one dances across paper solo.

Reading at a masquerade ball

Reading, one sometimes feels like a wallflower at a masquerade ball. Who are all these characters wearing masks and costumes hiding their true identities? They introduce themselves with some action or voice and the reader wonders if their claims are credible and reliable. And perhaps the author, the inventor of these identities, has also assumed a figmental identity. The author may slip into this new identity unintentionally, or as some sunken impulse surfaces, or intentionally, drawing the new personality with care, proofreading, editing, and revising. Perhaps these authors are unsure of themselves, so they adopt a mask; or maybe they want to forget themselves, and seek a renewal, a makeover; or maybe, for some unknown, paranoid, or disingenuous reason, they simply don’t want to reveal their true identity to their reader, whose identity, after all, they may be equally unsure of. Maybe they’re afraid of critics, and use the pen name as a shield; but critics also house mixed identities. Yeats experimented with masks. Literature is one gargantuan masquerade ball.

Readers aware of the nature of the ball may ask if an author’s opinions resonate with tuning fork frequency, if the tone of a character’s voice reveals real experience, if the happiness or suffering of the protagonist is real or contrived, if the author is a real person or an invention, planned or improvised. An author’s pen name might be employed as self-promotion, a marketing device used to attract a new readership, or to avoid having to talk again to an old reader with fixed expectations. Herman Melville wrote a book about fidelity called The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Melville didn’t use a pen name for his book. He didn’t need to. The once popular writer was already forgotten. The prolific and still popular Joyce Carol Oates has written with a pen name, and, under her real name, wrote an essay titled “Pseudonymous Selves.”

Browsing an old copy of The Believer last night, and re-reading the Greil Marcus and Don DeLillo discussion on Bob Dylan, we found an instructive paragraph on the subject of identity. Attempting an explanation of the various makeovers in Dylan’s career, Marcus says: “…there is a challenge for any artist – particularly a popular artist…to test himself or herself against an audience that he or she doesn’t know, that isn’t familiar. The question comes up whether or not you can speak in your language and be understood, and listen to the language of people who are responding to you and understand them” (p. 72).

Or perhaps what triggers a makeover is as simple as T. S. Eliot’s mannered, parlor room reasoning: “There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;” Or is there another clue, one that comes just before those lines: “And indeed there will be time / For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, / Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;” Do you see the cat in the image? It’s the cat that was introduced in the previous stanza. But Eliot never calls it a cat; the image of a cat emerges from the description of the fog. The cat is dressed in a costume of fog.

Global warming in The Great Gatsby

We’ve changed, in the space of a few days, from fleece to cotton, now dragging the hose, straw-hatted, out to the salsa garden, where it suddenly looks like the tomatoes and hot peppers will get a fair chance. And while this weather event of the season was transpiring, we were reading F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

The credible and reliable narrator, Nick Carraway, tells the story in the space of a summer spent in a “commuting town” on Long Island. Moving to and fro by rail and parallel road from the outlying “eggs” to “town,” by which they mean Manhattan, the characters, rich as they are, lack air conditioning, and the weather heavily influences the events of the summer. Nick shows us the foibles and vicissitudes of simple and complex minds rooted in the land from which is built the simple and complex landscapes of personal economy, family, and, ultimately, personal history, for what any of it is worth.

Simple minds, Carraway explains, are easily confused. It remains somewhat ambiguous who he has in mind when he thinks this, so we’re not sure if he’s thinking of Tom Buchanan when Tom says, drinking a gin rickey one particularly hot, late summer afternoon: “I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom genially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun – or wait a minute – it’s just the opposite – the sun’s getting colder every year.” Fitzgerald’s writing is clearly influenced, as the events of the story unfold, by the heat, and it’s equally clear, by the end, that, as Nick says, while the story has taken place in the “East,” it has been “…a story of “the West, after all…”

We grew up on the Pacific coast, close to the beach, and our mental landscape is informed by that simple fact. We still live near the coast, but farther north, and have for some years now experienced both the expansive heat of summer and the shrinking cold of winter. We hold then, with Robert Frost, who said in his little poem “Fire and Ice”: “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. / From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire. / But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”

But The Great Gatsby could not have taken place over the course of three winter months. It had to be summer. Thinking back though to Nick’s opening lines, when he quotes his father: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had,” one wonders what advantages today’s heat is likely to bring home.

small wave riders

Our brother John has started a blog. Called small wave riders, it will chart, in the spirit of Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, a surf trip moving south from Sonoma County, California, stopping to catch waves at favorite spots – Santa Cruz, Refugio, Leo Carillo, El Porto – making the turn in San Diego, then returning north.

A small wave is a lyric poem compared to the epic novels made famous by surfers like Greg Noll and Laird Hamilton. Hearing about the new blog and the surf trip coming up, we asked ourselves how surfing is like writing. The answer came immediately; surfing is not at all like writing. Writing is sedentary, and if physically exhausting, only because sitting in one position for extended periods is unnatural. Surfing is constant motion; even while sitting on the board waiting for a wave the surfer is watching the swells, paddling about, jockeying for position. We then asked ourselves why we are planning to spend the summer writing when we could be surfing. The answer came immediately; to misquote Robert Frost, we “have promises to keep, and miles to go before we surf.”

El Porto, Sep, 1969

Lord I’m 500 words away from home

Burkhard Bilger points us toward a definition of folk music: “Before 1945, Ledbetter liked to say, you could tell which side of a ridge a banjo player was from; after 1945, most just played like Earl Scruggs” (New Yorker, April 28, p. 56). Beyond that pointing, what’s folk remains unclear. Bilger argues that folk evolves to a distilled purity that is the defining characteristic (p. 55). When the music in the isolated communities where folk originates becomes watered down with outside influences, that defining characteristic of purity is lost.

Yet variation is characteristic of folk. The author of folk music is not anonymous as much as communal. Folk songs are created by a community, passed down and sent away, and come to rest in other places, changing shape to suit local needs. A key characteristic of folk music therefore includes improvisation. A contemporary example is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the lyrics augmented and modified in many covers. This is why Bob Dylan rarely sings his own songs the same way twice. When folk passes from the community to the individual, its defining characteristic of variation is lost.

“900 Miles” morphs into “500 Miles.” It’s a train song, a folk shape, and the folk musician understands the form can be filled with any number of miles, train rides, destinations, lonely whistles. Keys change to suit voice and instrument; words change to update the form to contemporary, local needs. We find examples of this morphing in literature: Huckleberry Finn turns up in Holden Caulfield; Melville’s Ishmael gets a nod from Vonnegut’s Jonah; Romeo and Juliet sing Maria and Tony in West Side Story; the Henry of Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage meets Hemingway’s in A Farewell to Arms. The origins of literature are found in the origins of folk music. The individual relocates traditions. At the end of the cycle, the individual disappears back into the folk community, the folk song re-emerging as something new.

Dancing with really real stars

We went dancing last night, the star we danced with was really real, and we are happy to reply to Joan Acocella that we do have a ballroom in our neighborhood.

How well we danced is another question. Had there been a contest, we certainly would have been among the first dancers cast out. Couples drew complex sentences on the floor, a way of thinking we were unable to follow. Still, we danced some, and enjoyed the live and lively sound of the Pranksters, an 18-piece swing band that filled the stage with horns, rhythm, and vocalists. We had arrived an hour early to take advantage of a dancing class, learning just enough about triple-step swing to watch the dancers with increased interest. Our favorite couple, a lanky fellow and his sparse partner, flitted and flirted about the floor like two mosquitoes bouncing against the ceiling on a sultry night in August; by the end of the evening, a tie of sweat dripped down his shirt.

The crowd was diverse, and though the event was open to all ages, mostly probably older folks, the women with their malmy hair measured, the best men dancers wearing cowboy boots. A few couples entertained with period costume, but no Vegas-wear. A few young couples hopped about unceremoniously, the try-anything-once spirit alive and well. The evening seemed a come as you are and dance how you will affair. We took a few notes, thinking of a post, thinking about the difficulties of both dancing and writing.

Buckley and the hard work of writing

William F. Buckley, Jr. now occupies, we hope, a seat in the bleachers to the right of Home Plate. We’ve been looking through his Buckley: The Right Word. We were not surprised to find him weighing in on the reading crisis. This, from 1980: “The good news is that there are people around who are trying to discover why it is that American youth, year after year, are having greater and greater difficulty in expressing themselves. There are a lot of wisecracks readily available (“they have nothing to say”), but one tires quickly of them, and then genuine worry sets in” (p. 131). And having nothing to say did not dissuade John Cage, who said, in his “Lecture on Nothing,” “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it” (Silence, p. 109). Buckley finds fault with TV: “You can’t simultaneously spend four hours watching television and four hours reading good prose.” But he also acknowledges that any suspected blame does not seem to apply universally.

If any one fault can be ascribed, perhaps the sheer physical difficulty of writing, and writing correctly, must be to blame. We are looking for cause and effect, but can not find even correlation. The effete and elite are each stricken equally, as the case of the Harvard student, passing placement exams but sitting in Expos unable to write a sentence, demonstrates. Buckley is then thrown off base by the Dick Cavett caveat, “Why does it matter?” Then comes this thunderbolt: Buckley relates that William Shawn, his editor at the New Yorker, once told him, “I am afraid, Mr. Buckley, that you do not really know the proper use of the comma.” Buckley’s response: “If St. Peter had declared me unfit to enter the Kingdom of God, I could not have felt more searingly the reproach…” (p. 306). Things are as bad as they ever were because nothing has made things any easier.

Thinking about writing, and actually sitting down and doing the writing, are two different occupations. We can always start a book with a few chapters and claim a work in progress, even if we never pick it up again; but who benefits from this kind of deception? Buckley points to the hard work of writing: “Working on a novel, I like to write every day….On the other hand, don’t ever devote the entire day to doing just that….I’d like to see more novels not written by people who have all the time in the world to write them” (p. 285).

But if writing is hard work, “But how would the reader know?” Buckley asks. The answer to that question Toulmin gives us, arguing that the work the writer does not put in, the reader must. But in spite of the hard work, Buckley assures us there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing. “Writing, if it’s done at all, has got to yield net satisfaction….I’m simply saying that writing is terribly hard work.” So he allows for distractions, change of pace and location, ancillary pursuits. He listened to music while writing: “Yes, I have the record player on most of the time.…I don’t play jazz when I write. I don’t know why but I just plain don’t. But I do when I paint” (pp. 290-291).

We do listen to jazz when we write, almost exclusively, but usually instrumental, no vocals, which can be too distracting. But what’s the one significant takeaway we want to emphasize with regard to the hard practice of writing? What do we want from writing? What do we expect? We must write most days to develop answers to these and other questions about writing and reading. Posts may be warm up exercises to the real work.

Buckley, W. F., Jr. (1996). Buckley: The right word (Harvest Book edition, 1998). New York: Harcourt Brace &  Company.

The weightlessness of existentialism

Early yesterday, reading Nick Paumgarten on “The lives of elevators” (New Yorker, April 21), about a person stuck in one for forty-one hours, we were reminded of the weightlessness of reading and writing. The video, from the Kafkaesque security tape, is a work of art Warhol could have made; or Becket might have written a one-act play, but would have omitted the piano score, though the tempo is perfectly counterpointed to the Chaplinesque speed of the fast forwarded film. Of course, we also thought of John Cage: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” (“Lecture on Nothing,” Silence, p. 119).

Later, at the Triple-A baseball game in a cold, near empty ballpark, a woman in the row in front of us turned around and asked if we had a pen. She seemed surprised when we said yes, and pulled the pen out of our jacket pocket, handing it out to her. She was a few seats away, down the row in front of us. There was no one else around. She was bundled up for the cold day of the game, in wool cap, and she had brought a full pack of incidentals to the game, to help pass the time, the way some people do at a ballgame, but no pen. She got up and walked over, smiling, and took the pen.

The person stuck alone in the elevator is essentially weightless, can neither rise nor fall, cannot change seats. There is no exit. He pries open the doors to find a cement wall. He is a character in Sartre’s No Exit, sans the other people.  

Take a piece of blank typing paper. Fold it in half, then in thirds. Place the folded paper in a pocket with a pen. You never know when you might get stuck – in a station at the metro, waiting anywhere – and it will not be nearly so irritating thinking you might like to be somewhere else. Pen and paper provide one with a play against the angst of any existential waiting game.

Our Believer book award choices

Still reading the March/April 08 issue of the Believer, the “Film Issue.” Slavoj Zizek DVD included; have watched just the first part of it – a few ugly scenes from some lousy old horror films came too early in the DVD and we had to turn it off. That just means we are not fully committed to the values of the film community, which we knew – doesn’t say anything about Zizek.

We were reminded that Zizek was interviewed in the Believer July 04 issue, where we found his comments on Christianity interesting. The Mary Midgley interview in the February 08 issue was interesting on moral philosophy and imagination (anyone who can wrestle Dawkins down and pin him to the mat in seconds deserves more attention), so now we have a couple more books on our reading list. But the list is already so long, not sure when we’ll get to them. But we’re moving Mary up; we’ve just decided.

Anyway, the current issue includes the annual “…short readers’ survey” postcard, allowing one to “…participate in the forthcoming Believer Book Awards,” now in its fourth year, but only the second year they’ve invited readers to participate. We sent in our postcard. Here are our picks for fiction published in 2007 (three slots only): The Deportees, by Roddy Doyle (more reality of experience forged in the smithy of an Irish soul ); Inglorious, by Joanna Kavenna (don’t remember what brought this our way, an advance reader’s edition – but remarkable effort, probably does not achieve all of its goals, but very funny, sad, and deeper than most readers deserve); and No One Belongs Here More than You, by Miranda July (written in part while walking and watching locally – which most of us don’t take time for).

What’s the point, of the Believer awards? Don’t know, but not too concerned with that question. We took the opportunity to take stock of what we read last year, fiction and non-fiction and journals and magazines and blogs and eZines and papers, and to look at the reading year ahead, continuing the long journey, getting on a train, leaving one city of books, and reading to another.

Where weather and writing merge

In Joan Didion’s essay “The Santa Ana,” our psyches succumb to exotic weather, an atavistic vestige from when we lived outdoors. The Santa Ana blows dry and hot across the Los Angeles basin, purposefully, a theme exploring a thesis, exhaust flowing west out the boulevards, across the strands and beaches and into the waves, and out to the ends of the jetties and piers, and then across the flat salt water stretches of Santa Monica Bay. The smog sludges along with the wind out to the horizon where it obscures the setting sun, collecting in clouds like becalmed ships hovering, smoking, drifting off the edge.

When we lived in Santa Ana country, our interest in the wind was limited to its effects on surfing conditions. The offshore winds blow into the waves, holding them up, keeping them glassy. Surfers, young, living outdoors, we welcomed the Santa Ana winds. Where we live now the atavistic sense is stirred by the East Wind that blows on clear winter days out of the Gorge and across town. Sometimes in the summer the East Wind blows hot, but winter gets the longest swells, the winds so thin and cold they floss your bones. Locals say, simply, “The East Wind is coming,” and dress for wind chill factor, wrap their outdoor pipes, secure things out in the yard, looking up into their trees expectantly. The local news people tried one year to name the East Wind, but the name they came up with did not stick with the locals. The East Wind is still called the East Wind.

“The Santa Ana” was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, whose readers apparently appreciated when weather and writing merged. The less obvious thesis of Didion’s essay is that our psyches succumb to writing and reading too, and, if not, we’re probably not reading what we need, what we should. We write to stir the Santa Ana within us, and we read for the same reason, to feel the East Wind blow within. We write and read to stir the Santa Ana in the basin of our brain, where our own angels lounge; we write and read to call the East Wind through the gorge of our complacency. If we don’t feel some extreme weather building within, something is missing. Joan Didion’s essay is the Santa Ana. When she writes, “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension,” we know that the writing will be equally uneasy, unnaturally still, and tense.

Didion, J. (1979). Los Angeles notebook. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem (pp. 217-221). New York: Simon and Schuster.

What we will miss when newspapers disappear

Watching “Irma La Douce” last night, after reading “Out of Print,” Eric Alterman’s New Yorker piece, on newspapers dying, we realized that Eric omitted what we will miss when discarded newspaper can no longer be found lying around the house.

 

In “Irma La Douce,” Jack Lemmon, playing Nestor, the defrocked, now homeless policeman, spending the night with Irma, hangs curtains, improvised from newspaper, across her bare windows to shield her from the possibility of being seen from the Paris street below. He has already described to Irma how he often inserted a folded newspaper under his uniform jacket to help keep warm on rainy beats. Dramatizing the practical uses of newspaper, Nestor reminded us of Red Skelton’s sleeping on the park bench skits, under and on blankets and mattresses of newspaper.

 

What else is throwaway newspaper good for? Wrapping for fish, and rolled newspapers, soaked in a tub of water, then dried, make efficient fireplace logs. The logs burn slowly and evenly with minimal smoke, stack and store neatly, and pack easily for camping trips. When we were kids, we copied the colorful Sunday comics onto pancakes of Silly Putty. Nowadays, we post our favorite comics, cut from the newspaper, onto the icebox. We rely on newspaper for kitty and puppy mishaps, bird cage lining, and party spills. Newspaper is an effective window wipe, for car and house, makes good fly swatters and fans, and comes in handy for arts and crafts, and for masking and painting jobs. We had an uncle who taught us how to make pirate hats from newspaper. Our spouse makes sensible use of newspaper coupons. The Op-Ed page, slipped unceremoniously under the commode door - bereft in a TP shortage, one wouldn’t treat even a week old New Yorker like that. In elementary school we used newspaper to cover our text books. Gone too, after newspapers die, the paper drive fundraiser.

 

Finally, we will miss the frap of the morning paper tossed onto the front porch, a reliable alarm clock, or sometimes we hear the paper sliding across the pavement of the drive, announcing rain (splat) or sun (long, dry skid). No doubt, others can add to our list of what will be missed with the dying of the newspaper, more mere memories added to the detritus of 20^th century anthropological curiosities.

 

But newspaper is organic. It can be added to the compost bin, and after breaking down can be used as mulch to spread around the Web garden.  

 

Baseball and the parts of speech

Opening day of baseball should be declared a national holiday. Today’s the big day. In our area we’ve experienced snow flurries, rhubarbs of hail, and sleet, wind, and everyday rain this past week. But now the sun is supposed to make an appearance. Yet we know everything remains imperfect. We know the sun will not shine on every game. And we’ll let Malcolm Gladwell worry about baseball and drugs. We’re concerned about baseball and the parts of speech.  

E. B. White encourages us to write with nouns and verbs: “The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place” (p. 71). William Zinsser agrees, admonishing, “Most adverbs are unnecessary” (p. 69); and “Most adjectives are also unnecessary” (p. 70). But sage advice can mislead. Francis Christensen, in his book “Notes Toward a New Rhetoric,” views the game differently, quoting from John Erskine’s “The Craft of Writing”: “‘When you write, you make a point, not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding.’ We have all been told that the formula for good writing is the concrete noun and the active verb. Yet Erskine says, ‘What you say is found not in the noun but in what you add to qualify the noun…The noun, the verb, and the main clause serve merely as the base on which meaning will rise…The modifier is the essential part of any sentence’“ (p. 4). 

We may not catch the parts of speech as they fly over our head or roll between our legs, yet they are always visibly in play. From most seats, a fan can’t tell if a pitch, upon delivery, is a fastball, a curve, a slider, a splitter, a cutter, a knuckler, a screwball, or a changeup, not until we see what the batter does with it, and even then we’re often unsure. Yet knowing the pitches and observing how the pitcher-catcher battery mixes them up against the batter is the best way to watch a game. Pitches are like words. There’s hardly time for a sentence from the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand to crossing the plate, but from windup to swing is a complete thought.  

We had the opportunity a couple of years ago to speak with Dave Niehaus, the voice of the Mariners. We wondered how he was able to call each pitch: “Freddy taking his time, now ready, shakes off a sign from Wilson, reads another, gets set, and here’s the pitch – fastball on the outside corner for call strike one.” Or it could have been a slider, or any of the other eight basic pitches of baseball. Niehaus delivered his answer in an anecdote: when he was broadcasting with the Angels, he said, owner Gene Autry came into the box one night after the game. “You called a great game tonight, Dave,” Gene Autry said; “I’m just not sure it was the same game that I saw.” 

Another time we were invited to watch an inning up in the broadcast booth. We sat next to Ron Fairly, LA Dodger first baseman of the 1960’s, who was keeping box score with a pencil, in a thick, oversized scorebook. There was a laptop in the booth, and a stats expert who worked it, feeding Niehaus and his sidekick Rick Rizzs notes and numbers they might fit into their commentary, but Fairly was keeping score the old-fashioned way, one pitch at a time, marking essentially the effects of each pitch. The broadcast booth framed a particular view of the game. The open window framed the field like a camera, directly behind and up from home plate, omitting the fans down the first and third base lines, thus forcing a sharpened focus onto the field of play. The broadcast booth afforded an enhanced view of the field, a very different view from any other seat we’ve occupied in the ballpark. 

We write for an audience, even if imaginary, but if you are going to call a game, you must block out the game the fans are watching, and call your own. Some coaches encourage pitchers to stick to the fastball and curve. Others admonish avoiding screwballs and changeups. Most pitchers specialize in only a few pitches they use repeatedly, mixing the rotation so the ball comes at the batter with surprise, and modifying with location and speed, depending on the age and condition of their arm – fastballs often lose their pizzazz as the arm ages.  

In the 1960s, in Los Angeles, roofed in blue, Dodgers fans often took their transistor radios to games to listen to the play by play by Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett. One learned some of the tricks of the game. A homerun flies quickly out of a ballpark. “Homerun” adequately describes the hit, in the time it takes the ball to clear the fence, yet Vin Scully knew, as Christensen and Erskine did, that writing is “essentially a process of addition” (p. 4). For Vin Scully could be heard on the radio still talking about a long fly ball to deep right center field, Mays going back, way back, to the wall, it’s gone! - the ball having flown over the fence some time ago, the slugging Dodger already rounding second base. So it goes with writing as with baseball. There are tricks built into the skills. But now it’s time to call it quits for the day, quit writing, that is, because there’s a whiffle ball game starting up out on the block, and we don’t want to miss the first cut – it’s opening day!    

The smell of print culture

Believer readers have commented recently on the monthly magazine’s odor. Redolent of what is the question, for we too succumb every month, sticking our nose deep between the pages for a potent snort or two. We find the Believer’s suggested explanation spurious: “…foil stamp on the cover. That’s probably what it was” (Dear the Believer, March/April 08, p. 2). Surely, some Lotus Eater is at work here. 

But we’ve always stuck our nose into books, savoring the ink and pages, a happy habit started no doubt in one of Sister Maryquill’s classes, when we got to work the mimeograph machine, producing those luscious handouts smeared with wet blue ink, the students all smelling the pages up close, blue tipped noses betraying the practice like ashes on the forehead.

But of course the blue ink dried and faded, leaving one with the dull task of completing the worksheet. The Believer pages also seem to lose their odor over time. We conducted an experiment: March 05, slight humus smell still in the pages, though this copy was at the bottom of a stack, so maybe it wasn’t breathing properly; April 06, slightly stronger, faint taste of compost; June/July 07 (the music issue), stronger still, a bedroom in the morning, windows closed; March/April 08 (the film issue), potent, redolent of the mimeograph machine and the pages it produced.

There you have it. The experiment suggests something organic, some herbal ingredient either in the ink or in the pages, which decays over time. The Believer pages are thick and rough, like old coloring book pages, thicker and rougher than glossy magazine pages – some of those, we’ve noticed lately, are tinged with perfume advertisements, an obvious attempt to address reader attrition by simulating the mimeograph effect. The Believer pages are alive. 

Whatever permeates the Believer’s pages, one thing is certain: to our sense, eBooks carry no odor, fair or foul, and that we find distressful; but readers here might smell something funny in this post.

Into the valley of rejection rode the 850

Having read Dana Goodyear’s “The Moneyed Muse” (New Yorker, February 19 & 26, 2007), we were surprised to hear that the Willesden Herald received only 850 entries in this year’s annual short story contest, then again surprised at the outcome, for into the valley of rejection rode the 850.

The follow up on the Willesden Herald site, including finalist judge Zadie Smith’s letter of explanation, is the interesting part of this story. The judges decided there will be no prize this year, all 850 of the entries failing the requisite “make it good.” Zadie says, “…we didn’t receive enough,” after the editors have already described an overdose reading experience. From Goodyear’s article, readers might recall: “At last count, several years ago, Poetry, which prints some three hundred poems a year, had to choose from among ninety thousand submissions.” One wonders how even a fraction of those get read – and how do they select which ones to read?

But Willesden Herald’s total rejection may have been a response informed by a pre-determined argument rather than a reader confronting any actual story. From Zadie’s letter: “Just like everybody, we at The Willesden Herald are concerned about the state of contemporary literature. We are depressed by the cookie-cutter process of contemporary publishing, the lack of truly challenging and original writing, and the small selection of pseudo-literary fictio-tainment that dominates our chain bookstores.” Does that describe the stories they received? We don’t know. And is there ample evidence to support that “everybody” is concerned? The number of those concerned is probably closer to nobody than to everybody.

It’s apparently no fun being a judge: “…by the start of November, all three short-listing judges started having to give up between 12 and 20 hours every week of their time to reading. Eventually, the volunteer that opened the envelopes and did the initial data entry was swamped and at one point, while keeping the entrants’ names secret to all the judges, SM had to help out with tedious data entry by staring at a spreadsheet through the night.” Perhaps a fresh crop of volunteer readers might have read things differently.

“No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions,” Rene Char said, nor read in one, no doubt. While we have been struggling in the current reading crisis to identify a common reader, here is evidence of a common writer. How is it possible that the publication these writers are reading received not a single entry that matched the quality of what they publish, or would like to publish? How can the number of writers be growing while the number of readers is declining? Was the quality of writing really the issue, or is there a warrant in the Herald’s justification, an attempt not to devalue as much as revalue? What does the common reader (in this sentence defined as a reader who is not also a writer or a would be writer) want to read? What if next year they get 90,000 submissions; how will they handle that?

Good is that which suits its purpose. A good story is one that achieves its goals, even if we happen to dislike those goals. We don’t like horror films, but we’ve no doubt there are good ones. We go to Edmund Wilson, speaking of Flaubert and Baudelaire, who “exerted, in dealing with the materials supplied them by their imagination, a rigorous will to refrain; that their work might thus fortify their readers as well as entertain them…” Further, Wilson maintains, “…fine workmanship itself always contains an implicit moral… experimentation is necessary: one must allow a good deal of apparently gratuitous, and even empty or ridiculous work, if one wants to get masterpieces.” And, finally, Wilson: “…they may not be good for anything, but, on the other hand, they may be valuable – one has to wait and see what comes of them, what other writers may get out of them.”  

Perhaps the Herald should have spent the prize money to publish all 850 stories, thereby letting their readers decide. Or we may leave literature and go into social science, where we will find that a preference for a particular story is the result of class privilege, for taste is not a virtue; it is distilled.

Edmund Wilson quotes above taken from “Notes on Babbitt and More,” from Edmund Wilson, A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950, Doubleday Anchor Books.

Joyce’s agenbite of books and boots

The slowly falling Mr. Dedalus, Stephen’s father, gives his daughter Dilly two pennies: “Get a glass of milk for yourself and a bun or a something. I’ll be home shortly” (p. 239). Dilly’s on her own now her mother’s passed, and needs money for food for herself and her siblings still at home. She knows her father’s habits. “Did you get any money?” (p. 237). But a few pages later Dilly surprises Stephen at an outdoor “slanted bookcart.” Stephen recalls a time Dilly’s face had “…glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots” (243):

-What have you there? Stephen asked.

-I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing nervously.

…-Mind Maggy doesn’t pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone.

-Some, Dilly said. We had to.

Earlier at the bookcart Stephen considered, “I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes” (p. 242).

Of this scene Frank Budgen said, “Stephen has a strong sense of family solidarity…But who would save drowning people must first be a good swimmer” (p. 132), forgiving the resourceful Joyce for abandoning his family for a life of books they would have to burn to keep warm. But here’s Dilly, hungry in frayed clothes and broken boots, willing to spend one of but two pennies on a used book.

One thing’s certain, we won’t keep warm with eBooks. But maybe Budgen’s point was that Stephen was not a good swimmer. (Joyce was afraid of water.) 

Of books and boots, and their life-span, two “leathern vessels,” a term found in OED:

[ME. bote, a. OF. bote (mod.F. botte), corresp. to Pr., Sp., Pg. bota, med.L. botta, bota, of uncertain origin. Identified by Diez, Littré, etc. with F. boute (also, in mod.F., botte) butt, cask, leathern vessel; but ‘the phonology of the two words in OF. shows that they are quite distinct’ (P. Meyer). In med.L. also butta ‘butt’ and botta ‘boot’ are never confounded, though bota is frequent as a by-form of both, which has probably misled etymologists.]

Henry Miller: more on reading influences and touching again on the reading crisis

One can almost never go wrong with a New Directions Book. We’ve a stack on the shelves, including, among our favorites, Williams Carlos Williams’s “Selected Poems,” (NDP131); Ferlinghetti’s “A Coney Island of the Mind (NDB74); Pound’s “Selected Poems,” (NDP66); Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood,” (NDP98); Borges’s “Labyrinths,” (NDP186);  Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust,” (NDP125).

One NDB we haven’t look at in some time but that came to mind when thinking of reading influences is Henry Miller’s “The Books in My Life,” (NDP280). The subject isn’t books though as much as it is Henry Miller, which is fine with us. He makes this clear early in his preface: “The purpose of this book…is to round out the story of my life. It deals with books as vital experience. It is not a critical study nor does it contain a program for self-education” (pg. 11).

In other words, a book about books for the common reader? Well, maybe, but Miller leads with a double challenge: “One of the results of this self-examination…is the confirmed belief that one should read less and less, not more and more. I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the ‘well-educated’ man – yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good. Only one out of five in America, it is said, are readers of ‘books.’ But even this small number read far too much. Scarcely any one lives wisely or fully” (pg. 11).

Henry Miller is a talker, a conversationalist, so easy reading, but this book is dated and full of obscure references with signs we may not understand pointing down back roads that look like dead ends. There are funny passages, including, we thought, the very title of Appendix III, a long list of “Friends who supplied me with books,” and we were suddenly reminded that a friend gave us our copy, years ago, with the comment, “It’s notable for how bad it is.”

Our friend had marked this passage, on page 29, characteristically surprising coming from Henry Miller: “The writer is, of course, the best of all readers, for in writing, or “creating,” as it is called, he is but reading and transcribing the great message of creation which the Creator in his goodness has made manifest to him.” Miller may be the least of common writers, if there is such a thing as a common writer, but he’s a perfect match for Woolf’s common reader. He sways back and forth, moving forward in much the same way that Woolf suggests in her definition of a common reader, without regard for anything other than what seems to suit his own needs.

Reading influences

“He judged on one question: influences. -Who’re your influences?” He is Jimmy Rabbitte, protagonist of Roddy Doyle’s first published book, the first novel in what would become his Barrytown Trilogy, “The Commitments.”

He’s put an ad in the paper, Jimmy has: “Jimmy spent twenty minutes looking at his ad in Hot Press the next Thursday. He touched the print. (-J. Rabbitte.) He grinned” (p. 20). It’s 1987, or earlier; no tellin’ what Jimmy’d done with a blog had he one – Doyle initially self-published “The Commitments.”

“When I’m writing I just think there’s only the page and me and nobody else” (Roddy Doyle, interview in Salon, Oct, 1999).

So there’s no reader, not an audience yet, looking over his shoulder. But sure the music’s on, and all the books you’ve ever read stacked clumsily all around, falling off the bookshelves you’ve built by hand in your mind, and there’s all these voices you’ve heard over the years, rattling around in your head, echoing off the walls, a confusion of some sort, like a ruckus going on outside, only it’s inside, and not only that but the sound’s stuck, stuck like a needle in a vinyl groove going round and round but not getting anywhere, not advancing toward some sort of completion, rest, respite, pause.

So, who are your influences? But it’s a question to ask yourself. And it’s a question that matters, and must be resolved.     

Jazzskin

Words are sounds, first; then what do we do to them, to the sounds? Jung thought grief gave human voice to sound. This is the meaning of Norman O. Brown’s “The fall is into language” (Love’s Body, p. 256), though it seems equally plausible that joy, close friend to grief, might also be capable of producing a word or two. Dostoevsky contributes to the modern discussion in “Notes from Underground” with his often quoted “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.” If so, the first words uttered by conscious man must have been sounds of pain: Ouch! If you prefer cartoons, a caveman accidentally rolling the stone wheel across his big toe. Joyce spelled it:

The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)

(Finnegans Wake, p. 3).

Norman O. Brown: “How to be silent. In a dialectical view: silence and speech, these two, are one. Apollonius of Tyana said silence also is a logos. And words do not spoil the silence for those who have ears to hear what is left unsaid” (p. 256). Listen to Ella Fitzgerald scat singing. Instruments reproduce the human voice, first (another reason Cage objected to jazz – and worked with sounds apart from voice). Louis Armstrong thought his trumpet an extension of his voice, and he sings as he plays. What we do to words is similar to what Cage thought we do to sounds in making music (anthropomorphizing sounds we hear in nature). Words give conscious order to sound, allowing for the reproduction of sounds with fidelity, creating self-consciousness through language.

Here’s something recently dug out that might illustrate in a playful way:

JAZZSKIN was published in the fall 1973, issue 3, of silent quicksand, a magazine published by students of El Camino College.

Jazzcage

“Music as discourse (jazz) doesn’t work,” John Cage said, in his “DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) 1965,” the first text in his collection “A Year From Monday.” “If you’re going to have a discussion, have it and use words” (p. 12). David Revill, in “The Roaring Silence,” his biography of Cage, discusses “the puzzling attitude he [Cage] develops toward jazz” (p. 9). “He [Cage] says simply, ‘I love sounds, and I actually like them more than what we’ve done to them’ (p. 121 – Revill’s source notes don’t indicate where he got this Cage quote, and in a quick skim of my Cage books I’m unable to find it).

I’ve always found Cage’s “…(jazz) doesn’t work” statement surprising, given how he integrates chance into his structures. Cage often sets up a rigorously defined structure only to let chance determine what comes next. For example, from his preface to “Diary:…” “I used twelve different type faces, letting chance operations determine which face would be used for which statement” (p. 3). Isn’t that jazz?

I think Cage’s classical training explains his attitude toward jazz. Classical players don’t improvise. Composers improvise, as Bach probably did, but the classical musician has to play the thing as written. Jazz’s frequent use of popular songs as sources for improvisation probably also annoyed Cage, since he was more interested in sound than sentiment.

Let’s substitute “words” for “sounds” in Cage’s statement that begins “I love sounds”: This gives us “I love words, and I actually like them more than what we’ve done to them.” And we might make the reverse substitution in the opening quote above, which would give us: “If you’re going to have a discussion, have it and use sounds.” Is it possible to enjoy words but not writing or reading? Cage appears to have preferred raw sounds to music that refines those sounds in an attempt to communicate something, even if that communication is an attempt to mimic nature.

But we are nature, and the guitar sounds like a train coming down the line, and the drummer’s brushes sound like salt water receding over smooth stones. All sounds carry some meaning. Besides, Cage’s “Diary” follows with “(Dialogue is another matter.)” What? Another matter (discussion, music, discourse?) wherein jazz does work?

The amateur spirit in writing

We do not have the New Yorker DVD library (though we do have in the basement a stack of paper copies we regularly prune for mold), but we do have E. B. White’s “Writings from the New Yorker, 1927-1976, edited by Rebecca M. Dale (HarperPerennial paperback edition published 1991).

The “Talk of the Town” pieces these days only occasionally reach White’s wit or brevity. He often captures a moment of his own time while gazing into some distance, foretelling. A case in point, his May 11, 1929 piece, where he writes: “’Writing is not an occupation,’ writes Sherwood Anderson. ‘When it becomes an occupation a certain amateur spirit is gone out of it. Who wants to lose that?’ Nobody does, replies this semi-pro, sitting here straining at his typewriter.”

Yet today, as the reading crisis spreads its tangential wings to include newspapers pruning peripheral departments, some semi-pro and pro writers are forced back into an amateur spirit.

Where will they go? Continued White: “Nobody does, yet few writers have the courage to buy a country newspaper, or even to quit a city writing job for anything at all. What Mr. Anderson says is pretty true. Some of the best writings of writers, it seems to us, were done before they actually thought of themselves as engaged in producing literature.”

Or before, in other words, they thought of themselves as real writers at all. One blogs in the hopes the amateur spirit will prevail, painfully aware that blogging also makes it easier, as White later said, “for persons who are not artists and writers to continue the happy pretence” (May 21, 1938).

But it’s not only to gain even amateur status that we might entertain the doubtful purposes of writing – for self or for others; it’s because even though we know full well we’ll never play right field for the Dodgers, we still enjoy shagging balls in the back-yard; we will still ride a skateboard down the hill, though of course we are no Tony Hawk, as our spouse reminds us, shouting she’s not taking us to emergency when we fall; and though we could never follow ”Da Bull” into the big waves, when we’re back in El Porto, we’ll always paddle out for a small one.

Whatever happens to the pros, this amateur writing spirit hopefully encouraged and evidenced in the best blogging, whether pretence or preface, may enable those who agree that writing is learned while writing, and in no other way, to find a subject, knowing that subjects often reveal themselves only once we’ve made the commitment marked by a few hundred words.

Hank Williams sings Huck Finn

“At the center of liberal education,” Northrop Frye gives us in “Ethical Criticism,” the second essay in “Anatomy of Criticism,” an attempt to create a science of literary theory, “something surely ought to get liberated” (p. 93). So what gets liberated?

“Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels,” Frye says. “Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally: the forms of literature can no more exist outside literature than the forms of sonata and fugue and rondo can exist outside music” (p. 97). The writer is not alone, after all. In fact, “the real difference between the original and the imitative poet is simply that the former is more profoundly imitative” (p. 97).

Not being alone means belonging to a community. Frye calls this “social aspect” of poetry archetype, by which he means “a typical or recurring image…which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience. And as the archetype is the communicable symbol, archetypal criticism is primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication. By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit poems into the body of poetry as a whole” (p. 99).

 We find a working example of Frye’s subject in “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” a hit song by Hank Williams, written in 1949, and since covered by numerous musicians across the musical spectrum, the original lyrics often amplified, or augmented, (the great jazz guitarist Bill Frisell has recorded instrumental versions on “Bill Frisell, Ron Carter, and Paul Motian”; and “Ghost Town”).

But what has all this got to do with Huckleberry Finn? In chapter I of Mark Twain’s novel, we find Huck, worn out by the parlor room evening with the widow and Miss Watson, alone in his room, trying “to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die, and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me.”   

Hank removes Huck’s superstition and softens the tone, but the sentiment remains:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill

He sounds too blue to fly

The midnight train is whining low

I’m so lonesome I could cry 

 

I’ve never seen a night so long

When time goes crawling by

The moon just went behind a cloud

To hide its face and cry 

 

Did you ever see a robin weep

When leaves begin to die?

That means he’s lost the will to live

I’m so lonesome I could cry 

 

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky

As I wonder where you are

I’m so lonesome I could cry 

 

So what’s so liberating? The knowledge that you are not alone, for one thing. We are encouraged by Borges, in his essay “Kafka and his Precursors,” to suggest both that Huck is a precursor to Hank, and that Hank changes our reading of Huck: “…the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; …not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. …The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future” (Labyrinths, p.201).

Virginia Woolf’s uncommon reader

Virginia Woolf was not a common reader, not a common woman, not a common person at all. Yet we like her description of a common reader, defining as it does the utility player-fan, driven by “common sense,” and “uncorrupted by literary prejudices,” and so “differs from the critic and the scholar,” in that “he reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.” Thus free from the confines of convention, he approaches reading with “affection, laughter, and argument,” and if he is “hasty, inaccurate, and superficial,” that is because he moves on “without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure.”

Woolf was a common reader within her circle, her community, but her experience does not define a common reader nowadays.

The discussion brings us now to the downside of reading, the “Martin Eden” experience, the Jack London experience, the blue-collar kid who discovers reading, books, adventures of the vicarious. But he will never feel comfortable in a Bloomsbury circle, made up, after all, of a non-working class. So he tries to drop back into the group waiting for waves at 42^nd Street, for he has read, not too much, but too well, as Bloom says of Hamlet’s thinking. Of course, our common reader is no Hamlet, no T. S. Eliot, nor was meant to be, an attendant, perhaps, waiting, as Beckett said, which brings us, “commodius vicus,” to the reading crisis:

     Is there a crisis if new readers are reading not so much as so well?

     Is there a reading crisis among common readers? 

     But who, nowadays or ever, is or was this common reader?

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.

A common reader

Throughout his “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” Harold Bloom riffs on the falling from academic favor his aesthetic critical view. The riffs underscore his concerns for the deterioration of education. Yet he insists there’s still a common reader out there who cares: “Common readers, and thankfully we still possess them, rarely can read Dante; yet they can read and attend Shakespeare” (p. 3).

Who is this common reader? Is he the same reader Salinger dedicated “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters…” to: “…an amateur reader still left in the world – or anybody who just reads and runs…”?

But we love hearing the great Bloom blowing like Lear against the storm, against the “institutional purveyor of literature… happily proclaiming its death” (p. xviii), who lives in “our self-defiled academies” (p. 3), promoting an “arbitrary and ideologically imposed contextualization… – those critics who value theory over the literature itself” (p. 9), Bloom hoping against hope that Shakespeare will survive “the current debasement of our teaching institutions” (p.17), hope based on the “common reader [who] continues to regard Shakespeare’s persons as being more natural than those of all other authors” (p. 52).

Who is this common reader, who has now read not only Shakespeare, but all other authors (excepting Dante), and can compare? Is Bloom’s common reader Bourdieu’s working class, given a cultural transfusion, turning into “petty bourgeois subscribing to the Bolshoi” (An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, p. 82)?

“Anything goes in the current scholarly criticism of Shakespeare” (Bloom, p. 78), but does the common reader also read current scholarly criticism? To whom is Bloom writing, “since deep reading is in decline, and Shakespeare… now vanishes from the schools…” (p.715)? Indeed, in any case, “It is no longer possible for anyone to read everything of some interest and value that has been published on Shakespeare,” but we have Bloom, who does not “…mistake political and academic fashions for ideas” (p. 716).

And where did Harold Bloom ever run into a common reader? On the Yale campus? Never mind. A common reader still has a chance to meet Harold Bloom, and for that, we are grateful.

The Eloi and the Morlock

Reading Pierre Bourdieu last night, after looking thru ”The Time Machine” and “Fahrenheit 451″ yesterday.

“In the case of artists and writers, we find that the literary field is contained within the field of power where it occupies a dominated position. (In common and much less adequate parlance: artists and writers, or intellectuals more generally, are a ‘dominated fraction of the dominant class.’)” Bourdieu, Pierre. (1992). ”An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology” (p.104).

Wells ends ”The Time Machine” with a pessimistic vision of the future, more optimistic though than he probably considered: “And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man” (p. 141), for “The Eloi, like the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility” (p. 89).

In “On Television,” we were struck by this Bourdieu thought: “There is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness” (p. 21). Certainly not when you’ve got less than a minute to convey. Bradbury summarized in fiction the same power and effects of television that Bourdieu discusses in “On Television,” toward the end of Fahrenheit 451, in the scene where the police, unable to find the real Montag in the attention-span-time-requirement of the evening news, settle for an innocent, unknown citizen, and the television reports they’ve got Montag, while the real Montag is now uselessly free.