One of the delights of the digital world is convenient access to poets whining that no one pays attention to poetry, which constitutes a virtual sub-species of poetry blog. A reader has pointed out a site operated by a putative poet who extols the people of Iran for their voracious poetic appetites, then asks:
“Can you imagine protesters in Florida after the 2000 [sic -- clambake? presidential election?] carrying placards with quotes from Mary Oliver? Billy Collins? John Ashbery?”
One hopes the people of Florida (home of poet-critic William Logan) have better taste than that in poetry. Now on to more gratifying poetic matters: Kay Ryan, our poet laureate, appeared at the National Book Festival last week, and the Washington Post reports some of her remarks. How fortunate we are to have Ryan occupying a chair formerly held by Rita Dove, Ted Kooser and -- not again! -- Billy Collins. With good humor and good sense, without pretense or politics, she champions the art:
“I sort poetry by the feel it gives my brain. It has nothing to do with gender. I would put Emily Dickinson at the very top of the list, however... People appreciate poetry for many reasons other than poetry. Like, they like the fact that it talks about God, or that it talks about flowers, or that it talks about horses. Or they like it because it's written by women, or by Portuguese people... But I'm interested in--I don't even know what to call it--the essential feel element that doesn't have anything to do with gender.”
Poetry, in other words, supplies us with a poetic experience, “the feel it gives my brain,” “the essential feel element,” as does Ryan's “Ideal Audience” (from The Niagara River, 2005):
“Not scattered legions,
not a dozen from
a single region
for whom accent
matters, not a seven-
member coven,
not five shirttail
cousins; just
one free citizen –
maybe not alive
now even – who
will know with
exquisite gloom
that only we two
ever found this room.”
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
`A Sense of Tranquility and Privacy'
“I am essentially a painter of the kind of still-life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.”
These are the sentiments of an artist who lived precisely as he speaks, despite the fidgety distractedness of the age -- Giorgio Morandi, in a 1958 interview with Edouard Roditi (collected in Dialogues on Art, Horizon Press, 1961). Morandi was born in Bologna in 1890 and lived there all of his life, for much of the time with his mother and three sisters, and died there in 1964. Three times he left his native Italy, only to visit Switzerland. He taught etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He never married. He painted. His journeys were long but strictly aesthetic. He might have echoed Thoreau’s boast: “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.”
Morandi’s art appears superficially narrow. In his maturity, he painted still-lifes consisting of bottles, jars and boxes arranged on a table. What might suggest a cul-de-sac to most artists was for Morandi a microscope he converted into a telescope. He saw much and far in the near-at-hand. In Giorgio Morandi, Karen Wilkin notes that the artist had worked out his themes and style by the age of 30:
“For the rest of his life as an artist, he remained committed to exploring a deliberately limited territory, in a nearly obsessive investigation of perception that produced images at once remarkable for their repetitiveness and for their subtle variation. But for all the conscious narrowing of his field of inquiry, for all the rigorousness of his self-imposed restrictions, he had no single way of making a picture. It often seems as though he were testing the limits of representation, now vigorously modeling and separating forms and setting alike into broad, uninflected passages of paint. It even appears that each new picture, each new set of visual phenomena, no matter how familiar, elicits from him a different touch, a different way of orchestrating color. In fact, the more closely we look at Morandi's art, the more images we examine, the more individual each picture seems.”
Morandi’s aesthetic, as Wilkin describes it, is deeply attractive, one any artist could learn from. It seems almost Japanese in its attentive to details and subtle changes in their deployment. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale was six years younger than Morandi. In The Second Life of Art, Montale makes a single glancing reference to his great contemporary, describing his work as “tonal,” but I hear traces of kinship in his poems. In “The Lemon Trees,” Montale writes (translated by Lee Gerlach):
“You realize that in silences
Things yield and almost betray
Their ultimate secrets.”
Both artists embody a benign hermeticism. Both listen to the silences between things. In the interview with Roditi, Morandi says:
“I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we can know that a cup is a cup, a tree is a tree.”
Here is the final stanza of “Don’t Ask Us for the Word,” in Jonathan Galassi’s translation:
“Don’t ask us for the phrase that can open worlds,
just a few gnarled syllables, dry like a branch.
This, today, is all that we can tell you:
what we are not, what we do not want.”
These are the sentiments of an artist who lived precisely as he speaks, despite the fidgety distractedness of the age -- Giorgio Morandi, in a 1958 interview with Edouard Roditi (collected in Dialogues on Art, Horizon Press, 1961). Morandi was born in Bologna in 1890 and lived there all of his life, for much of the time with his mother and three sisters, and died there in 1964. Three times he left his native Italy, only to visit Switzerland. He taught etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He never married. He painted. His journeys were long but strictly aesthetic. He might have echoed Thoreau’s boast: “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.”
Morandi’s art appears superficially narrow. In his maturity, he painted still-lifes consisting of bottles, jars and boxes arranged on a table. What might suggest a cul-de-sac to most artists was for Morandi a microscope he converted into a telescope. He saw much and far in the near-at-hand. In Giorgio Morandi, Karen Wilkin notes that the artist had worked out his themes and style by the age of 30:
“For the rest of his life as an artist, he remained committed to exploring a deliberately limited territory, in a nearly obsessive investigation of perception that produced images at once remarkable for their repetitiveness and for their subtle variation. But for all the conscious narrowing of his field of inquiry, for all the rigorousness of his self-imposed restrictions, he had no single way of making a picture. It often seems as though he were testing the limits of representation, now vigorously modeling and separating forms and setting alike into broad, uninflected passages of paint. It even appears that each new picture, each new set of visual phenomena, no matter how familiar, elicits from him a different touch, a different way of orchestrating color. In fact, the more closely we look at Morandi's art, the more images we examine, the more individual each picture seems.”
Morandi’s aesthetic, as Wilkin describes it, is deeply attractive, one any artist could learn from. It seems almost Japanese in its attentive to details and subtle changes in their deployment. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale was six years younger than Morandi. In The Second Life of Art, Montale makes a single glancing reference to his great contemporary, describing his work as “tonal,” but I hear traces of kinship in his poems. In “The Lemon Trees,” Montale writes (translated by Lee Gerlach):
“You realize that in silences
Things yield and almost betray
Their ultimate secrets.”
Both artists embody a benign hermeticism. Both listen to the silences between things. In the interview with Roditi, Morandi says:
“I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we can know that a cup is a cup, a tree is a tree.”
Here is the final stanza of “Don’t Ask Us for the Word,” in Jonathan Galassi’s translation:
“Don’t ask us for the phrase that can open worlds,
just a few gnarled syllables, dry like a branch.
This, today, is all that we can tell you:
what we are not, what we do not want.”
Monday, September 28, 2009
`A Genial Imagination'
Last week my brother made three pictures, each based on a poem by Zbigniew Herbert – “Our Fear,” “In the Studio” and “Mona Lisa.” He was particularly struck by this stanza from the first poem (translated by Alissa Valles):
“our fear
is a scrap of paper
found in a pocket
`warn Wójcik
the place on Długa Street is hot’”
In their paranoia and fragmentation, the lines are a fitting epitaph for the 20th century. Like Beckett, a kindred artist, Herbert was hounded by the Gestapo, and the Pole was later shadowed by the KGB. In his notes my brother writes of his picture based on “Our Fear”:
“5x7 inches -- black ink, black pencil, watercolor and applied paper on same paper as above [“Arches 100 lb. paper”]. On the right side looms what on closer inspection reveals the side of a bleak house. On the left side rising from off plane a shape not unlike the top of a Lombardy poplar drawn in a squiggly hand sits waiting. Suspended between the two masses is a large potato shaped rock stained with iron and moss.”
“In the Studio” and “Mona Lisa” are among Herbert’s many poems devoted to artists and works of art, though the abattoir of the 20th century isn’t far away -- as in these lines from the first stanza of “Mona Lisa”:
“Through seven mountain frontiers
barbed wire of rivers
and executed forests
and hanged bridges
I kept coming –”
Ken writes:
“Black ink and watercolor. 9 x 7 inches on Arches 100 lb. paper, the same firm that produced 70 tons of paper to print the works of Voltaire. It is a series of curvilinear grids mingled with circles of various diameters with all of the defined areas colored in varying shades of cerulean blue cadmium yellow and Indian red.”
“In the Studio” is a vision of the artist-as-representative-human, one of Herbert’s greatest poems:
“With a light step
he moves
from spot to spot
from fruit to fruit
“the good gardener
props a flower with a stick
a human being with joy
the sun with deep blue
“then
nudges his glasses
puts on a tea kettle
mumbles to himself
strokes the cat
“When God built the world
he wrinkled his forehead
calculated and calculated
hence the world in perfect
and impossible to live in
“on the other hand
a painter’s world
is good
and full of error
the eye strolls
from spot to spot
from fruit to fruit
“the eye purrs
the eye smiles
the eye remembers
the eye says you’ll last
if you manage to enter
right into that center
where the painter was
he who has no wings
wears floppy slippers
he who has no Virgil
with a cat in a pocket
a genial imagination
an unconscious hand
correcting the world”
A world of divine perfection is inhuman, uninhabitable. We were not made to dwell in utopia – whether Eden or a Worker’s Paradise. In contrast, “a painter’s world / is good / and full of error.” Ken writes:
“13x7 inches. Black ink and watercolor on the same paper as above. Two arcs begin their ascent from the bottom corners. The left arc reaches apogee at the top and melds into the edge. Arc two rises from the opposing corner and abruptly veers left and collides with arc number one creating a rectilinear space with left side being arced. 2 inches from bottom right a chisel shaped armature juts into the picture. all painted in warm bleeding yellows and reds with the exception of the curvilinear rectangle which is pale wedgewood blue.”
Ken answered to something in these lines:
“a genial imagination
an unconscious hand
correcting the world”
“our fear
is a scrap of paper
found in a pocket
`warn Wójcik
the place on Długa Street is hot’”
In their paranoia and fragmentation, the lines are a fitting epitaph for the 20th century. Like Beckett, a kindred artist, Herbert was hounded by the Gestapo, and the Pole was later shadowed by the KGB. In his notes my brother writes of his picture based on “Our Fear”:
“5x7 inches -- black ink, black pencil, watercolor and applied paper on same paper as above [“Arches 100 lb. paper”]. On the right side looms what on closer inspection reveals the side of a bleak house. On the left side rising from off plane a shape not unlike the top of a Lombardy poplar drawn in a squiggly hand sits waiting. Suspended between the two masses is a large potato shaped rock stained with iron and moss.”
“In the Studio” and “Mona Lisa” are among Herbert’s many poems devoted to artists and works of art, though the abattoir of the 20th century isn’t far away -- as in these lines from the first stanza of “Mona Lisa”:
“Through seven mountain frontiers
barbed wire of rivers
and executed forests
and hanged bridges
I kept coming –”
Ken writes:
“Black ink and watercolor. 9 x 7 inches on Arches 100 lb. paper, the same firm that produced 70 tons of paper to print the works of Voltaire. It is a series of curvilinear grids mingled with circles of various diameters with all of the defined areas colored in varying shades of cerulean blue cadmium yellow and Indian red.”
“In the Studio” is a vision of the artist-as-representative-human, one of Herbert’s greatest poems:
“With a light step
he moves
from spot to spot
from fruit to fruit
“the good gardener
props a flower with a stick
a human being with joy
the sun with deep blue
“then
nudges his glasses
puts on a tea kettle
mumbles to himself
strokes the cat
“When God built the world
he wrinkled his forehead
calculated and calculated
hence the world in perfect
and impossible to live in
“on the other hand
a painter’s world
is good
and full of error
the eye strolls
from spot to spot
from fruit to fruit
“the eye purrs
the eye smiles
the eye remembers
the eye says you’ll last
if you manage to enter
right into that center
where the painter was
he who has no wings
wears floppy slippers
he who has no Virgil
with a cat in a pocket
a genial imagination
an unconscious hand
correcting the world”
A world of divine perfection is inhuman, uninhabitable. We were not made to dwell in utopia – whether Eden or a Worker’s Paradise. In contrast, “a painter’s world / is good / and full of error.” Ken writes:
“13x7 inches. Black ink and watercolor on the same paper as above. Two arcs begin their ascent from the bottom corners. The left arc reaches apogee at the top and melds into the edge. Arc two rises from the opposing corner and abruptly veers left and collides with arc number one creating a rectilinear space with left side being arced. 2 inches from bottom right a chisel shaped armature juts into the picture. all painted in warm bleeding yellows and reds with the exception of the curvilinear rectangle which is pale wedgewood blue.”
Ken answered to something in these lines:
“a genial imagination
an unconscious hand
correcting the world”
Sunday, September 27, 2009
`Halve This Matter Amicably'
The subtitle of the first of Stevie Smith’s three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), is “Or Work It Out for Yourself,” which she adapts from the book’s third paragraph:
“Read on, Reader, read on and work it out for yourself.”
That’s it, in toto. I like the cockiness of the voice and the assumption of intimacy between narrator (Pompey Casmilus, a mutated species of Smith) and reader – the sort of intimacy that permits and even encourages soft bullying. A fine poet, Smith is among my favorite writers of fiction, one whose example would be fatal if slavishly imitated. She is so much herself, so intractably idiosyncratic (from the Greek idios, “one’s own,” the same root as “idiot”), her example can be fatal to another writer. Second-hand coyness and cuteness are always fatal, or should be.
I first read Tristram Shandy, much admired by Smith, as a sophomore in college. My professor was an eighteenth-century specialist who adored Sterne and Swift. She loved satire and the play of ideas but more importantly she loved to laugh (her laughter, rare among females in my experience, was raucous and Rabelaisian but not irritating), and Tristram Shandy is laugh-out-loud funny.
At the desk beside me sat an intense, ascetic-looking fellow with long hair and a high forehead who seldom spoke. He was reputed to be writing a novel and was judged heroic, even noble, by most of us. One day, as the professor stood beside me, talking about Sterne, the rumored writer spoke up. The novel he was working on, he said, was written in a Shandean mode and was very long. I suppose we were polite and I was certainly intimidated. Later the professor said to me, quite seriously, “That will be a disaster, if he ever finishes it. You can’t successfully imitate Sterne.”
I’ve contemplated her observation for almost 40 years and accept its rightness. A fiction writer can imitate Chekhov and possibly get away with it – the plain voice, sympathetic objectivity, muted comedy. But the artful artificiality of Sterne’s voice – so ingratiating in the original -- invites cheap effects like whoopee cushions and bad impressions of Richard Nixon. At best, we can learn a graceful style and conversational artifice, but the puns, the whimsy, the sexual business, are best left to the master. Sterne suggests something similar at the start of Chapter XI in the second volume of Tristram Shandy:
“Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; -- so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.”
“Read on, Reader, read on and work it out for yourself.”
That’s it, in toto. I like the cockiness of the voice and the assumption of intimacy between narrator (Pompey Casmilus, a mutated species of Smith) and reader – the sort of intimacy that permits and even encourages soft bullying. A fine poet, Smith is among my favorite writers of fiction, one whose example would be fatal if slavishly imitated. She is so much herself, so intractably idiosyncratic (from the Greek idios, “one’s own,” the same root as “idiot”), her example can be fatal to another writer. Second-hand coyness and cuteness are always fatal, or should be.
I first read Tristram Shandy, much admired by Smith, as a sophomore in college. My professor was an eighteenth-century specialist who adored Sterne and Swift. She loved satire and the play of ideas but more importantly she loved to laugh (her laughter, rare among females in my experience, was raucous and Rabelaisian but not irritating), and Tristram Shandy is laugh-out-loud funny.
At the desk beside me sat an intense, ascetic-looking fellow with long hair and a high forehead who seldom spoke. He was reputed to be writing a novel and was judged heroic, even noble, by most of us. One day, as the professor stood beside me, talking about Sterne, the rumored writer spoke up. The novel he was working on, he said, was written in a Shandean mode and was very long. I suppose we were polite and I was certainly intimidated. Later the professor said to me, quite seriously, “That will be a disaster, if he ever finishes it. You can’t successfully imitate Sterne.”
I’ve contemplated her observation for almost 40 years and accept its rightness. A fiction writer can imitate Chekhov and possibly get away with it – the plain voice, sympathetic objectivity, muted comedy. But the artful artificiality of Sterne’s voice – so ingratiating in the original -- invites cheap effects like whoopee cushions and bad impressions of Richard Nixon. At best, we can learn a graceful style and conversational artifice, but the puns, the whimsy, the sexual business, are best left to the master. Sterne suggests something similar at the start of Chapter XI in the second volume of Tristram Shandy:
“Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; -- so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.”
Saturday, September 26, 2009
`Autumn Enjoys Itself'
“Naturally, there are those who enjoy autumn, but they’re generally the more contemplative types, who consider `loving spring’ child’s play, something for beginners, comparable to `loving dogs.’ It’s easy to love something that loves you, but as seasoned cat-lovers know, nothing beats love which – totally randomly – may or may not be reciprocated. I wouldn’t be surprised if studies showed that autumn-lovers were to be found mostly among cat-lovers.”
So writes the Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers in The Way of All Flesh (2000), an entertaining anatomy of dust, aging and decomposition. Farmers and life-scientists tend to be realists, I’ve observed, when it comes to the nitrogen cycle, and I recognize myself in Dekker’s description of the autumnal personality. Humans can be divided between those whose notion of paradise is an endless party at the beach, and those for whom that vision approximates hell. For those of us among the latter, September and October can represent the aesthetic and emotional zenith of the year. Dekker writes:
“For nature, autumn is the king of all seasons. There’s no other time of year when so many goals are achieved, so many expectations met. At last, the trees and shrubs are filled with berries and nuts. The complex time-consuming process of budding, germinating, pollinating and fertilizing is finally over.”
In Dekkers’ counterintuitive view – and mine -- spring and summer are times of labor. With fall, the season of bounty, comes anticipation of rest and reward. A reader asks if I know “Lament for the Makaris” (also known as “Lament for the Makers” and “Lament for the Makars”) by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1460 – c. 1520), and adds, “I hear a church bell chime in it.” “Chime” seems too bright a word for Dunbar’s stately lament, though Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo (with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band), dating from 1923, was on “Chimes Blues” – a title that nicely expresses the oxymoronic nature of Dunbar’s danse macabre. The poem consists of 25 quatrains, each concluding with “Timor mortis conturbat me” -- “The fear of death troubles me”:
“Sein for the deid remeid is none,
Best is that we for dede dispone,
Eftir our deid that live may we;
Timor mortis conturbat me.”
Dekkers acknowledges fear but suggests the “contemplative types” might consider the example of the fallen leaves:
“Even on the ground, autumn enjoys itself. What we see with our human eyes as a layer of rotting and decay is, in reality, a banquet in which millions of moulds and bacteria are having the time of their life with the now-superfluous leaves and other organs. In autumn, nature harvests itself. After that, it can finally go to sleep – until it has to wake up again the following spring.”
So writes the Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers in The Way of All Flesh (2000), an entertaining anatomy of dust, aging and decomposition. Farmers and life-scientists tend to be realists, I’ve observed, when it comes to the nitrogen cycle, and I recognize myself in Dekker’s description of the autumnal personality. Humans can be divided between those whose notion of paradise is an endless party at the beach, and those for whom that vision approximates hell. For those of us among the latter, September and October can represent the aesthetic and emotional zenith of the year. Dekker writes:
“For nature, autumn is the king of all seasons. There’s no other time of year when so many goals are achieved, so many expectations met. At last, the trees and shrubs are filled with berries and nuts. The complex time-consuming process of budding, germinating, pollinating and fertilizing is finally over.”
In Dekkers’ counterintuitive view – and mine -- spring and summer are times of labor. With fall, the season of bounty, comes anticipation of rest and reward. A reader asks if I know “Lament for the Makaris” (also known as “Lament for the Makers” and “Lament for the Makars”) by the Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1460 – c. 1520), and adds, “I hear a church bell chime in it.” “Chime” seems too bright a word for Dunbar’s stately lament, though Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo (with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band), dating from 1923, was on “Chimes Blues” – a title that nicely expresses the oxymoronic nature of Dunbar’s danse macabre. The poem consists of 25 quatrains, each concluding with “Timor mortis conturbat me” -- “The fear of death troubles me”:
“Sein for the deid remeid is none,
Best is that we for dede dispone,
Eftir our deid that live may we;
Timor mortis conturbat me.”
Dekkers acknowledges fear but suggests the “contemplative types” might consider the example of the fallen leaves:
“Even on the ground, autumn enjoys itself. What we see with our human eyes as a layer of rotting and decay is, in reality, a banquet in which millions of moulds and bacteria are having the time of their life with the now-superfluous leaves and other organs. In autumn, nature harvests itself. After that, it can finally go to sleep – until it has to wake up again the following spring.”
Friday, September 25, 2009
`Absolutely to the Point'
“France lay very much in our path, our path to almost everything that could beckon us forth from our base – and there were very few things in the world or places on the globe that didn’t beckon us; according to which she helped us along on our expansive course a good deal more, doubtless, than either she or we always knew.”
So wrote Henry James in 1915, less than a year before his death, of a country I love and one which appears to have had a salutary effect on Nige and Nigeness. In his first post since returning from France, Nige recounts his first visit to Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres and works in a reference to Geoffrey Hill and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy. Nige might like to know that Zbigniew Herbert, too, paid a first visit to Chartres and wrote about it in “The Stone from the Cathedral” (Barbarian in the Garden):
“Perhaps instead of writing about stained glass modulating light as Gregorian chant modulates silence, about mysterious chimeras meditating above the abyss of time, one should ruminate on how these stones were hoisted, about bricklayers, stonemasons and architects – their materials, tools, tricks and wages – forfeiting what possessed their souls when they erected this cathedral. A simple goal, an accountant’s view of the Gothic, but the Middle Ages also teach modesty.”
On Tuesday, Nige wrote about V.S. Pritchett’s Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, which I remember reading while sick with the flu in the fall of 1988. I recall it as a fever dream. Nige writes:
“The book is clearly a product of deep, long reading of Chekhov and an equally deep understanding and sympathy. It is, in fact, the kind of book - short, wise, beautifully but unshowily written, and absolutely to the point - that is increasingly rare in a world of stupefying doorstep biographies and unreadable, unilluminating criticism. And Pritchett published it in his 88th year!”
On Thursday, Nige used a wondrous archeological discovery in England to work in another Geoffrey Hill reference, this one from Mercian Hymns, my favorite among his books. Here’s Section XXV, which juxtaposes Ruskin’s compulsively readable Fors Clavigera and Hill’s grandmother:
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.
“The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust --
“not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.”
By sharing his enthusiasms, whether butterflies or the novels of William Maxwell, Nige rouses us from our diurnal slumbers. Many thanks, Nige.
[Henry James, by the way, wrote the essay “France” during World War I for inclusion in The Book of France in Aid of the French Parliamentary Committee’s Fund for the Relief of the Invaded Departments. James first visited that country at the age of six months, in October 1843. In 1915, the year The Book of France was published, James became a naturalized citizen of Great Britain as a wartime act of solidarity.]
So wrote Henry James in 1915, less than a year before his death, of a country I love and one which appears to have had a salutary effect on Nige and Nigeness. In his first post since returning from France, Nige recounts his first visit to Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres and works in a reference to Geoffrey Hill and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy. Nige might like to know that Zbigniew Herbert, too, paid a first visit to Chartres and wrote about it in “The Stone from the Cathedral” (Barbarian in the Garden):
“Perhaps instead of writing about stained glass modulating light as Gregorian chant modulates silence, about mysterious chimeras meditating above the abyss of time, one should ruminate on how these stones were hoisted, about bricklayers, stonemasons and architects – their materials, tools, tricks and wages – forfeiting what possessed their souls when they erected this cathedral. A simple goal, an accountant’s view of the Gothic, but the Middle Ages also teach modesty.”
On Tuesday, Nige wrote about V.S. Pritchett’s Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, which I remember reading while sick with the flu in the fall of 1988. I recall it as a fever dream. Nige writes:
“The book is clearly a product of deep, long reading of Chekhov and an equally deep understanding and sympathy. It is, in fact, the kind of book - short, wise, beautifully but unshowily written, and absolutely to the point - that is increasingly rare in a world of stupefying doorstep biographies and unreadable, unilluminating criticism. And Pritchett published it in his 88th year!”
On Thursday, Nige used a wondrous archeological discovery in England to work in another Geoffrey Hill reference, this one from Mercian Hymns, my favorite among his books. Here’s Section XXV, which juxtaposes Ruskin’s compulsively readable Fors Clavigera and Hill’s grandmother:
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.
“The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust --
“not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.
“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.”
By sharing his enthusiasms, whether butterflies or the novels of William Maxwell, Nige rouses us from our diurnal slumbers. Many thanks, Nige.
[Henry James, by the way, wrote the essay “France” during World War I for inclusion in The Book of France in Aid of the French Parliamentary Committee’s Fund for the Relief of the Invaded Departments. James first visited that country at the age of six months, in October 1843. In 1915, the year The Book of France was published, James became a naturalized citizen of Great Britain as a wartime act of solidarity.]
Thursday, September 24, 2009
`Fitting Language to His Thought'
In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks describes his 13-year-old self entering an English private school:
“Poetry became important in a new, personal way. We had `done’ Milton and Pope at school, but now I started to discover them for myself. There were lines in Pope of an overwhelming tenderness -- `Die of a rose in aromatic pain’ – which I would whisper to myself again and again, until they transported me to another world.”
My experience at the same age was similar but more furtive, conducted outside the classroom, without my parents’ knowledge. Secrecy was part of the romance. I found my way to Whitman and Eliot, around the time of the latter’s death, and set about memorizing favorite lines and poems. I discovered the pleasingly plump anthologies edited by Oscar Williams, including A Little Treasury of British Poetry: The Chief Poets from 1500 to 1950. These I read smorgasbord fashion, sampling everything, rejecting some (Robert Burns, Vernon Watkins), savoring others -- in particular, Coleridge:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…”
It was music not message that hypnotized me – a susceptibility that endures. The vowels and consonants are still pleasing on the tongue and lips, and, like Sacks, I have often whispered these words to myself like a soothing mantra. Williams includes a passage from Pope’s Essay on Man (“Know then thyself…”), though not the line in which Sacks heard “overwhelming tenderness.” I remained immune to Pope’s charms for several more years, but I loved Tennyson’s orchestra:
“Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea…”
And this:
“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.”
In the high school where I’ve been working, we take kids almost every day to the library to dust shelves and clean book covers. Between tasks I’ve noticed several favorites -- The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Randall Jarrell, and War Music, part of Christopher Logue’s idiosyncratic reworking of The Illiad. And Wednesday morning I found a depressingly mint-condition copy of A Little Treasury of British Poetry. Its compact heft in my hands stirred old, vivid memories. Leafing through it was like looking at an album of familiar photos from childhood – “Danny Deever,” “Thirty Bob a Week,” “A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “As I Came Through the Desert.” All of them are poems I haven’t read in years but once found interesting and even memorable. I used to sing “Danny Deever” to myself. And here, too, is “Sonnet to My Mother,” in which George Barker describes his Mum as “Irresistible as Rabelais.” What a gal.
I see that what attracted me more than 40 years ago was strong music, form, emotion and some degree of intellectual wit – more than mere cleverness, though I liked that too. Lately I’ve been rereading Thom Gunn, who wrote a sort of elegy for J.V. Cunningham after that great poet’s death in 1985. In “JVC,” Gunn expresses some of what I go on loving about good poetry:
“He concentrated, as he ought,
On fitting language to his thought
And getting all the rhymes correct,
Thus exercising intellect
In such a space, in such as fashion,
He concentrated into passion.”
“Poetry became important in a new, personal way. We had `done’ Milton and Pope at school, but now I started to discover them for myself. There were lines in Pope of an overwhelming tenderness -- `Die of a rose in aromatic pain’ – which I would whisper to myself again and again, until they transported me to another world.”
My experience at the same age was similar but more furtive, conducted outside the classroom, without my parents’ knowledge. Secrecy was part of the romance. I found my way to Whitman and Eliot, around the time of the latter’s death, and set about memorizing favorite lines and poems. I discovered the pleasingly plump anthologies edited by Oscar Williams, including A Little Treasury of British Poetry: The Chief Poets from 1500 to 1950. These I read smorgasbord fashion, sampling everything, rejecting some (Robert Burns, Vernon Watkins), savoring others -- in particular, Coleridge:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…”
It was music not message that hypnotized me – a susceptibility that endures. The vowels and consonants are still pleasing on the tongue and lips, and, like Sacks, I have often whispered these words to myself like a soothing mantra. Williams includes a passage from Pope’s Essay on Man (“Know then thyself…”), though not the line in which Sacks heard “overwhelming tenderness.” I remained immune to Pope’s charms for several more years, but I loved Tennyson’s orchestra:
“Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea…”
And this:
“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.”
In the high school where I’ve been working, we take kids almost every day to the library to dust shelves and clean book covers. Between tasks I’ve noticed several favorites -- The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Randall Jarrell, and War Music, part of Christopher Logue’s idiosyncratic reworking of The Illiad. And Wednesday morning I found a depressingly mint-condition copy of A Little Treasury of British Poetry. Its compact heft in my hands stirred old, vivid memories. Leafing through it was like looking at an album of familiar photos from childhood – “Danny Deever,” “Thirty Bob a Week,” “A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age,” “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “As I Came Through the Desert.” All of them are poems I haven’t read in years but once found interesting and even memorable. I used to sing “Danny Deever” to myself. And here, too, is “Sonnet to My Mother,” in which George Barker describes his Mum as “Irresistible as Rabelais.” What a gal.
I see that what attracted me more than 40 years ago was strong music, form, emotion and some degree of intellectual wit – more than mere cleverness, though I liked that too. Lately I’ve been rereading Thom Gunn, who wrote a sort of elegy for J.V. Cunningham after that great poet’s death in 1985. In “JVC,” Gunn expresses some of what I go on loving about good poetry:
“He concentrated, as he ought,
On fitting language to his thought
And getting all the rhymes correct,
Thus exercising intellect
In such a space, in such as fashion,
He concentrated into passion.”
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
`Emptiness; Uncertainty; Inanity'
I worked with an editorial writer who had few interests in life outside his own vociferously expressed opinions. He was intelligent, articulate, provocative and well suited to his job but made for difficult company. One day at lunch in a Chinese restaurant he started an argument over Martin Van Buren. I hadn’t known it was possible to feel so strongly about the eighth president of the United States.
Holding vehement opinions usually is coupled with a desire to have others share them. Call it persuasion, bullying or proselytizing, it ranks among the most tiresome of character defects and implies a gnawing sense of insecurity. In his latest column, “Santayana and tragic grandeur,” Frank Wilson says this about such matters:
“I have no interest in convincing anyone to see things as I do — in this matter, or in any others. The only authentic conclusions are those you arrive at by thinking matters through on your own. But there is some value in recounting what one thinks and why one thinks it.”
“Authentic” implies honestly arrived at, not verifiably true. When we express conclusions, we have no control over their reception. An opinion is not a quasi-divine utterance and is open to rejection or modification by others, a work-in-progress. A friend writes from Houston:
“I'm still thinking about that Herbert post. I'd been pondering the general topic since I sat near a group of women in a Starbucks one day a couple of weeks ago and was forced to listen to them discuss why the Catholic church was moronic for not ordaining women. Not being Catholic myself, I didn't have much stake in the argument but I was astonished by their blithe assumption that the tradition of the Church was utterly without value and further, that their own opinions deserved equal weight with those of, say, Augustine of Hippo or Aquinas. I wish I could have recorded it, so I could play it back for anyone who doubts that we're awash in narcissism. It was jaw-dropping. Maybe this is what comes of too much democracy.”
With the right to an opinion comes the obligation to express it, no matter how ill-informed or ridiculous. The lexicographer defined the urge as “Emptiness; uncertainty; inanity.”
Holding vehement opinions usually is coupled with a desire to have others share them. Call it persuasion, bullying or proselytizing, it ranks among the most tiresome of character defects and implies a gnawing sense of insecurity. In his latest column, “Santayana and tragic grandeur,” Frank Wilson says this about such matters:
“I have no interest in convincing anyone to see things as I do — in this matter, or in any others. The only authentic conclusions are those you arrive at by thinking matters through on your own. But there is some value in recounting what one thinks and why one thinks it.”
“Authentic” implies honestly arrived at, not verifiably true. When we express conclusions, we have no control over their reception. An opinion is not a quasi-divine utterance and is open to rejection or modification by others, a work-in-progress. A friend writes from Houston:
“I'm still thinking about that Herbert post. I'd been pondering the general topic since I sat near a group of women in a Starbucks one day a couple of weeks ago and was forced to listen to them discuss why the Catholic church was moronic for not ordaining women. Not being Catholic myself, I didn't have much stake in the argument but I was astonished by their blithe assumption that the tradition of the Church was utterly without value and further, that their own opinions deserved equal weight with those of, say, Augustine of Hippo or Aquinas. I wish I could have recorded it, so I could play it back for anyone who doubts that we're awash in narcissism. It was jaw-dropping. Maybe this is what comes of too much democracy.”
With the right to an opinion comes the obligation to express it, no matter how ill-informed or ridiculous. The lexicographer defined the urge as “Emptiness; uncertainty; inanity.”
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
`The Fatal Trap of Abstinence'
We celebrated the birthday of a girl in the special-education class with cupcakes and an earnestly discordant “Happy Birthday.” She looks five or six years younger than her age and I don’t think she understood any of it. The cupcakes were thick with pink frosting and the parents had sent too many with her to school – 30 or more for a class that never tops 10. Had we let them, the kids would have gorged. One girl ate two cupcakes and stuck her fingers in a third. Their faces and fingers were smeared with icing, like sloppy lipstick, and one girl rubbed it in her hair. I thought of Don, the kid with Down’s syndrome in Thom Gunn’s “Sweet Things”:
“He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step
outside the laundromat,
mongoloid Don turns his crewcut head
and spies me coming down the street.
`Hi!’ He says it with the mannered
enthusiasm of a fraternity brother.”
That final observation about “mannered / enthusiasm” is rooted in precise observation. I see it in Down’s kids all the time but also in the general school population – the elaborately ritualized and empty hugs, greetings and hand gestures.
Read the rest of Gunn’s poem and you’ll see he’s meditating on the democratic nature of appetite – call it desire, gustatory or amatory. In the staff room at lunch, if the conversation is not about last night’s television show, it’s devoted to what people are eating or not eating or wish they were eating – endless laments and acts of public penance. Food is not pleasure or even sustenance but an occasion of secular sin. I wish I could have brought the extra cupcakes and watched the stampede and the subsequent displays of self-flagellation. How healthy-minded, in contrast, A.J. Liebling sounds, how like a kid with a platter of pink-frosted cupcakes. Consider one of his typical Parisian lunches in Between Meals:
“…raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne.”
And note the mock-elegiac tone Liebling employs in a passage describing his old friend Yves Mirande, actor, screenwriter and fellow gastronome, whose health begins to fail when he commences a diet:
“When, in his kindly effort to please me, he challenged the escargots en pots de chambre, he was like an old fighter who tries a comeback without training for it. That, however, was only the revelation of the rot that had already taken place. What always happens happened. The damage was done, but it could so easily have been averted had he been warned against the fatal trap of abstinence.”
“He licks the last chocolate ice cream
from the scabbed corners of his mouth.
Sitting in the sun on a step
outside the laundromat,
mongoloid Don turns his crewcut head
and spies me coming down the street.
`Hi!’ He says it with the mannered
enthusiasm of a fraternity brother.”
That final observation about “mannered / enthusiasm” is rooted in precise observation. I see it in Down’s kids all the time but also in the general school population – the elaborately ritualized and empty hugs, greetings and hand gestures.
Read the rest of Gunn’s poem and you’ll see he’s meditating on the democratic nature of appetite – call it desire, gustatory or amatory. In the staff room at lunch, if the conversation is not about last night’s television show, it’s devoted to what people are eating or not eating or wish they were eating – endless laments and acts of public penance. Food is not pleasure or even sustenance but an occasion of secular sin. I wish I could have brought the extra cupcakes and watched the stampede and the subsequent displays of self-flagellation. How healthy-minded, in contrast, A.J. Liebling sounds, how like a kid with a platter of pink-frosted cupcakes. Consider one of his typical Parisian lunches in Between Meals:
“…raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne.”
And note the mock-elegiac tone Liebling employs in a passage describing his old friend Yves Mirande, actor, screenwriter and fellow gastronome, whose health begins to fail when he commences a diet:
“When, in his kindly effort to please me, he challenged the escargots en pots de chambre, he was like an old fighter who tries a comeback without training for it. That, however, was only the revelation of the rot that had already taken place. What always happens happened. The damage was done, but it could so easily have been averted had he been warned against the fatal trap of abstinence.”
Monday, September 21, 2009
`The Sudden Migration of Greenness'
“Hey, Dad! I found a dead, intact dragonfly!”
The operative word in my 9-year-old’s exclamation was “intact.” We see insect parts all the time – butterfly wings, beetle husks -- and ignore them. This specimen looks like jewelry, still shimmering with dew and life, wings spread flat as though already mounted and pinned. Michael found it on the grass in the front yard, beside a brown mushroom, and of course wanted to keep him. We stowed the perfect form in a plastic sandwich bag and Michael has resolved to watch the course of decomposition.
We feel an urgency about staying outdoors, enjoying the sunshine while it lasts. The leaves on the big-leaf maple are turning yellow. Geese flew in a ragged V-formation over the neighborhood. In a park Sunday morning I found a perfect red maple leaf on the sidewalk and pressed it in the book I was reading while the kids played: Elegy for the Departure by Zbigniew Herbert (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter). In “Farewell” he writes:
“The moment has come we have to say farewell
after the migration of birds the sudden migration of greenness
the end of summer – a banal subject for solo guitar”
Not so banal, though. Wistful, yes. A time for counting blessings, assessing one’s preparedness, repenting, waiting for winter. Thoreau writes in the Sunday section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:
“Happy we who can bask in this warm September sun, which illumines all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude…”
The operative word in my 9-year-old’s exclamation was “intact.” We see insect parts all the time – butterfly wings, beetle husks -- and ignore them. This specimen looks like jewelry, still shimmering with dew and life, wings spread flat as though already mounted and pinned. Michael found it on the grass in the front yard, beside a brown mushroom, and of course wanted to keep him. We stowed the perfect form in a plastic sandwich bag and Michael has resolved to watch the course of decomposition.
We feel an urgency about staying outdoors, enjoying the sunshine while it lasts. The leaves on the big-leaf maple are turning yellow. Geese flew in a ragged V-formation over the neighborhood. In a park Sunday morning I found a perfect red maple leaf on the sidewalk and pressed it in the book I was reading while the kids played: Elegy for the Departure by Zbigniew Herbert (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter). In “Farewell” he writes:
“The moment has come we have to say farewell
after the migration of birds the sudden migration of greenness
the end of summer – a banal subject for solo guitar”
Not so banal, though. Wistful, yes. A time for counting blessings, assessing one’s preparedness, repenting, waiting for winter. Thoreau writes in the Sunday section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:
“Happy we who can bask in this warm September sun, which illumines all creatures, as well when they rest as when they toil, not without a feeling of gratitude…”
Sunday, September 20, 2009
`We All Have Something'
We were seated at the kitchen table, eating the vegetable-barley soup my wife had just made, when she complained of difficulty focusing her eyes. Calmly, she described seeing “floaters,” phantom images she knew to be illusory but disturbingly real. They appeared angular and spiky, in the middle of her field of vision, and I remembered the pictures drawn by Dr. Oliver Sacks’ patients and included in his first book, Migraine. And I thought of the exchange between Hamlet and his mother when the prince sees the ghost:
Hamlet: “Do you see nothing there?”
Gertrude: “Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.”
My wife called her eye doctor’s office and the receptionist, obviously wanting to leave promptly at noon on a Saturday, tried to talk her out of it. “Are you a doctor?” my wife asked. The doctor called back and told her to report to the office immediately. I drove, dropped her off and took the boys to the library. We feared a detached retina but after a brief exam the doctor made a more benign diagnosis: ocular or ophthalmic migraine, without headache. Something to do with blood flow in the brain. Symptoms disappeared in 30 minutes and may never reappear, or she may have the same experience periodically. Not the worst prognosis in the world, particularly after one has already contemplated certain blindness.
According to this recent interview, Oliver Sacks is at work on a new book tentatively titled The Mind’s Eye, about vision and hallucinations. The project gains poignancy with the neurologist’s loss of vision in his right eye as the result of a tumor. Sacks says:
“…I worked in a migraine clinic, I saw more than a thousand people with migraine. I’ve had migraine myself since I was three or four. (I had visual migraine, which is another reason I’m interested in all things visual.) A lot of understanding develops when one first sees a patient. They stumble, they don’t know what’s relevant, they tell a story, you fill in other stories and between you, you begin to arrive at something. At that time I began to read a whole lot of technical pieces about migraine, and I read something that inspired me. It was a late 19th century book called Megrim which was the old word from the 1860s, and that book had every sort of dimension -- sociological, physiological, human. And I thought, it’s a century later, but we still need a book like this. And I thought, it’s the 1960s, but we still need a book like this. I’m very attracted to the full, almost novelistic descriptions we had in the 19th century. I think doctors and scientists naturally work well with this sort of format.”
“So I wrote my first book, Migraine, in this sort of vein. And when it was published, it got equally noticed by scientific readers and by popular readers. I think migraine turns out to be unexpectedly interesting--but then I think everything turns out to be very interesting, relevant to the human condition. You may not actually have migraine, but we all have something, and it’s perhaps about having something, living with something and dealing with something.”
Sacks’ friend W.H. Auden dedicated a poem to him in 1971, two years before the poet’s death. In “Talking to Myself,” the speaker addresses his body as “You”:
“Seldom have You been a bother. For many years
You were, I admit, a martyr to horn-colic
(it did no good to tell You – But I’m not in love!):
How stoutly, though, You’ve repelled all germ invasions,
But never chastised my tantrums with a megrim.”
Hamlet: “Do you see nothing there?”
Gertrude: “Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.”
My wife called her eye doctor’s office and the receptionist, obviously wanting to leave promptly at noon on a Saturday, tried to talk her out of it. “Are you a doctor?” my wife asked. The doctor called back and told her to report to the office immediately. I drove, dropped her off and took the boys to the library. We feared a detached retina but after a brief exam the doctor made a more benign diagnosis: ocular or ophthalmic migraine, without headache. Something to do with blood flow in the brain. Symptoms disappeared in 30 minutes and may never reappear, or she may have the same experience periodically. Not the worst prognosis in the world, particularly after one has already contemplated certain blindness.
According to this recent interview, Oliver Sacks is at work on a new book tentatively titled The Mind’s Eye, about vision and hallucinations. The project gains poignancy with the neurologist’s loss of vision in his right eye as the result of a tumor. Sacks says:
“…I worked in a migraine clinic, I saw more than a thousand people with migraine. I’ve had migraine myself since I was three or four. (I had visual migraine, which is another reason I’m interested in all things visual.) A lot of understanding develops when one first sees a patient. They stumble, they don’t know what’s relevant, they tell a story, you fill in other stories and between you, you begin to arrive at something. At that time I began to read a whole lot of technical pieces about migraine, and I read something that inspired me. It was a late 19th century book called Megrim which was the old word from the 1860s, and that book had every sort of dimension -- sociological, physiological, human. And I thought, it’s a century later, but we still need a book like this. And I thought, it’s the 1960s, but we still need a book like this. I’m very attracted to the full, almost novelistic descriptions we had in the 19th century. I think doctors and scientists naturally work well with this sort of format.”
“So I wrote my first book, Migraine, in this sort of vein. And when it was published, it got equally noticed by scientific readers and by popular readers. I think migraine turns out to be unexpectedly interesting--but then I think everything turns out to be very interesting, relevant to the human condition. You may not actually have migraine, but we all have something, and it’s perhaps about having something, living with something and dealing with something.”
Sacks’ friend W.H. Auden dedicated a poem to him in 1971, two years before the poet’s death. In “Talking to Myself,” the speaker addresses his body as “You”:
“Seldom have You been a bother. For many years
You were, I admit, a martyr to horn-colic
(it did no good to tell You – But I’m not in love!):
How stoutly, though, You’ve repelled all germ invasions,
But never chastised my tantrums with a megrim.”
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Compatible Quotes
“Whether the Shakespeares were recusants, Protestant, or `church papists,’ who conformed outwardly to the Anglican church while remaining Catholics in their hearts, the balance of probability is that William Shakespeare’s own instincts and inheritance were cautious, traditional, respectable, suspicious of change. We may as well say conservative.”
–-Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, page 66
“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.”
–-Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative”
–-Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, page 66
“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.”
–-Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative”
`There's Fennel for You'
I recognized fennel from a distance as we hiked the shore of Lake Washington – a watercolor wash of yellow and pale green. It’s an understatement among wildflowers, trailing much history, natural and human. A few days later I read this:
“Ophelia’s flowers: it is clear that rosemary is for remembrance and pansies for thoughts, because Ophelia says so (pansies are from French pensées). But the signification of her other flowers is left for the audience to supply. Scholars usually assume that rue is for the queen, fennel and columbine for the king, but some commentators propose vice versa on the grounds that fennel signifies flattery and is also associated with wanton and dissembling women, while the horned shape of the columbine suggests cuckoldry (a joke in Love’s Labour’s Lost turns on this association). Rue is for repentance, which is what Claudius has been trying unsuccessfully to engage in.”
This is from Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (Random House, 2009). Bate is glossing Ophelia’s speech from Act IV, Scene 5:
“There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference! There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither'd all when my father died. They say he made a good end. [Sings] For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.”
Ophelia is sly in her madness. Her use of traditional herbal lore is complicated, as Bate’s acknowledges. Fennel derives from the Latin fenum, “hay,” and its scent recalls the smell of new-mown hay. The Greeks knew it as marathon, from which the scene of the battle in 490 B.C.E. derives its name (“place of fennel”). Bate doesn’t mention it but fennel also shows up in Henry IV, Part 2, (Act II, Scene 4) – as does his surname. The speaker is Falstaff:
“Because their legs are both of a bigness, and 'a quoits well, and eats conger and fennel, and drinks off ends for flap-dragons, and rides the wild mare with the boys, jumps upon join'd-stools, and swears with a good grace, and his boots very smooth, like unto the sign of the Leg, and no bate with telling of discreet stories; and such other faculties 'a has, that show a weak mind and an able body, for which the Prince admits him. For the Prince himself is such another; the weight of a hair will turn the scales between avoirdupois.”
“Bate” here means to reduce, to lessen in intensity (as in abate). The word survives thanks to the phrase “bated breath,” first used in 1596 –by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice.
My favorite use of fennel (not counting as a seasoning with pasta and mussels) is in Thom Gunn’s “Fennel.” A quintessential urban poet (he wrote San Francisco), Gunn returns occasionally to the countryside and celebrates it with wit and learning:
“High fog, white sky
Above me on the bouldered hill
Where I
Stumble between head-high
And scattered clumps of weed
--Fennel, of which I once thought seed
Made you invisible.
Each forms a light green mist
--Feathery auras, though the look deceives
For looked at closely they consist
Of tiny leading into tinier leaves
In which each fork in sharply separate.
Yet tender, touched: I pinch a sprig and sniff,
And it reminds me of
The other times I have pinched fennel sprigs
For this fierce poignancy.
I stand here as if lost,
As if invisible on this broken cliff,
Invisible sky above.
And for a second I float free
Of personality, and die
Into my senses, into the unglossed
Unglossable
Sweet and transporting yet attaching smell
--The very agent that releases me
Holding me here as well.”
With “tiny leading into tinier leaves,” Gunn might be illustrating fractal geometry. Lovely: “this fierce poignancy.” Also: “unglossed / Unglossable.” The scent of fennel triggers a psychedelic – or Proustian -- experience. Are other readers reminded by Gunn’s invisibility/"broken cliff” juxtaposition of Edgar and blind Gloucester at the Dover cliffs?
“Ophelia’s flowers: it is clear that rosemary is for remembrance and pansies for thoughts, because Ophelia says so (pansies are from French pensées). But the signification of her other flowers is left for the audience to supply. Scholars usually assume that rue is for the queen, fennel and columbine for the king, but some commentators propose vice versa on the grounds that fennel signifies flattery and is also associated with wanton and dissembling women, while the horned shape of the columbine suggests cuckoldry (a joke in Love’s Labour’s Lost turns on this association). Rue is for repentance, which is what Claudius has been trying unsuccessfully to engage in.”
This is from Jonathan Bate’s Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (Random House, 2009). Bate is glossing Ophelia’s speech from Act IV, Scene 5:
“There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference! There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither'd all when my father died. They say he made a good end. [Sings] For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.”
Ophelia is sly in her madness. Her use of traditional herbal lore is complicated, as Bate’s acknowledges. Fennel derives from the Latin fenum, “hay,” and its scent recalls the smell of new-mown hay. The Greeks knew it as marathon, from which the scene of the battle in 490 B.C.E. derives its name (“place of fennel”). Bate doesn’t mention it but fennel also shows up in Henry IV, Part 2, (Act II, Scene 4) – as does his surname. The speaker is Falstaff:
“Because their legs are both of a bigness, and 'a quoits well, and eats conger and fennel, and drinks off ends for flap-dragons, and rides the wild mare with the boys, jumps upon join'd-stools, and swears with a good grace, and his boots very smooth, like unto the sign of the Leg, and no bate with telling of discreet stories; and such other faculties 'a has, that show a weak mind and an able body, for which the Prince admits him. For the Prince himself is such another; the weight of a hair will turn the scales between avoirdupois.”
“Bate” here means to reduce, to lessen in intensity (as in abate). The word survives thanks to the phrase “bated breath,” first used in 1596 –by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice.
My favorite use of fennel (not counting as a seasoning with pasta and mussels) is in Thom Gunn’s “Fennel.” A quintessential urban poet (he wrote San Francisco), Gunn returns occasionally to the countryside and celebrates it with wit and learning:
“High fog, white sky
Above me on the bouldered hill
Where I
Stumble between head-high
And scattered clumps of weed
--Fennel, of which I once thought seed
Made you invisible.
Each forms a light green mist
--Feathery auras, though the look deceives
For looked at closely they consist
Of tiny leading into tinier leaves
In which each fork in sharply separate.
Yet tender, touched: I pinch a sprig and sniff,
And it reminds me of
The other times I have pinched fennel sprigs
For this fierce poignancy.
I stand here as if lost,
As if invisible on this broken cliff,
Invisible sky above.
And for a second I float free
Of personality, and die
Into my senses, into the unglossed
Unglossable
Sweet and transporting yet attaching smell
--The very agent that releases me
Holding me here as well.”
With “tiny leading into tinier leaves,” Gunn might be illustrating fractal geometry. Lovely: “this fierce poignancy.” Also: “unglossed / Unglossable.” The scent of fennel triggers a psychedelic – or Proustian -- experience. Are other readers reminded by Gunn’s invisibility/"broken cliff” juxtaposition of Edgar and blind Gloucester at the Dover cliffs?
Friday, September 18, 2009
`With This I Will Try to Be Content'
A postcard arrived this week with an aerial view of Hampton Court Palace in Middlesex on the front. I knew immediately it was from a reader in Dallas perfectly capable of writing e-mails but who enjoys the old-fashioned pleasure of writing, mailing and savoring his addressee’s anticipated receipt of a hand-written greeting in the mailbox. He writes:
“You’ve only got a few days to prepare for Samuel Johnson’s 300th birthday. If I could find a grassy slope nearby that I knew to be uninfested with fire ants, I’d roll down in his honour.
“Hampton Court, I know, is nowhere near Lichfield [Johnson’s birthplace], but it’s the closest place depicted on any postcard in my possession.”
He reminds us of Johnson’s fondness for the seemingly un-Johnsonian lark of rolling down hills, described here. Today we celebrate the birthday of this assumption-defying man, but let’s not permit the man to eclipse the writer of “peerless prose / with its lapidary dominoes / augustly toppling, clause after clause," as the poet Ben Downing writes in “On First Looking into Bate’s Life of Johnson” (collected in The Calligraphy Shop). Downing proceeds to recognize Johnson’s “fine solicitudes,” though I can’t think of another writer, except perhaps Chekhov, whose life vies so fiercely and justifiably with his work for our attention.
Downing goes on to describe Johnson as “Half slob, half saint” – in other words, a man whose genius and goodness we can almost imagine emulating. The appropriate way to celebrate Johnson’s tercentenary is to read his words, beginning with a passage from a letter he wrote to his friend Hester Thrale in 1773:
“Boswell, with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family, and reminded me that the eighteenth of September is my birthday. The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent, or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted. With this I will try to be content.”
Let’s count the ways in which this brief excerpt is exceptionally good, and good in a way quintessentially Johnson’s own: “troublesome kindness” (readily decodeable, if we’ve read Boswell’s diaries and Life); the unconsummated dalliance with self-pity; “a life diversified by misery”; “the sluggishness of penury”; and after lament, redemption: “But perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted.” Note, too, the length of the sentences: 22 words; 25; 45; 16; eight. Plot it as a bell curve of rising and falling emotion.
The final sentence turns on “try.” Two quietly emphatic iambs follow. Another great critic, Christopher Ricks, rightly makes much of Johnson’s linguistic/moral finesse (from “Samuel Johnson: Dead Metaphors and `Impending Death’” in The Force of Poetry):
“There is, as is natural in a great writer, a congruence of life and literature, so that the phrasing which Johnson uses when speaking of our sense of mortality applies as truly to our sense of language: `This conviction, however forcible at every new impression, is every moment fading from the mind’ (The Idler No. 103, 5 April 1760). So too with `the great art of piety,’ which resembles the art of literature, and consists in `the perpetual renovation of the motions of virtue’ (The Rambler No. 7, 10 April 1750).”
In Johnson’s hands, prose is a well-calibrated instrument of thought and feeling. He is us, if only we were more compassionate and fierce, learned and humble, and always more articulate. When Johnson writes, “With this I will try to be content,” I think of Eliot in “East Coker”: “For us, there is only the trying.”
“You’ve only got a few days to prepare for Samuel Johnson’s 300th birthday. If I could find a grassy slope nearby that I knew to be uninfested with fire ants, I’d roll down in his honour.
“Hampton Court, I know, is nowhere near Lichfield [Johnson’s birthplace], but it’s the closest place depicted on any postcard in my possession.”
He reminds us of Johnson’s fondness for the seemingly un-Johnsonian lark of rolling down hills, described here. Today we celebrate the birthday of this assumption-defying man, but let’s not permit the man to eclipse the writer of “peerless prose / with its lapidary dominoes / augustly toppling, clause after clause," as the poet Ben Downing writes in “On First Looking into Bate’s Life of Johnson” (collected in The Calligraphy Shop). Downing proceeds to recognize Johnson’s “fine solicitudes,” though I can’t think of another writer, except perhaps Chekhov, whose life vies so fiercely and justifiably with his work for our attention.
Downing goes on to describe Johnson as “Half slob, half saint” – in other words, a man whose genius and goodness we can almost imagine emulating. The appropriate way to celebrate Johnson’s tercentenary is to read his words, beginning with a passage from a letter he wrote to his friend Hester Thrale in 1773:
“Boswell, with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family, and reminded me that the eighteenth of September is my birthday. The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent, or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted. With this I will try to be content.”
Let’s count the ways in which this brief excerpt is exceptionally good, and good in a way quintessentially Johnson’s own: “troublesome kindness” (readily decodeable, if we’ve read Boswell’s diaries and Life); the unconsummated dalliance with self-pity; “a life diversified by misery”; “the sluggishness of penury”; and after lament, redemption: “But perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted.” Note, too, the length of the sentences: 22 words; 25; 45; 16; eight. Plot it as a bell curve of rising and falling emotion.
The final sentence turns on “try.” Two quietly emphatic iambs follow. Another great critic, Christopher Ricks, rightly makes much of Johnson’s linguistic/moral finesse (from “Samuel Johnson: Dead Metaphors and `Impending Death’” in The Force of Poetry):
“There is, as is natural in a great writer, a congruence of life and literature, so that the phrasing which Johnson uses when speaking of our sense of mortality applies as truly to our sense of language: `This conviction, however forcible at every new impression, is every moment fading from the mind’ (The Idler No. 103, 5 April 1760). So too with `the great art of piety,’ which resembles the art of literature, and consists in `the perpetual renovation of the motions of virtue’ (The Rambler No. 7, 10 April 1750).”
In Johnson’s hands, prose is a well-calibrated instrument of thought and feeling. He is us, if only we were more compassionate and fierce, learned and humble, and always more articulate. When Johnson writes, “With this I will try to be content,” I think of Eliot in “East Coker”: “For us, there is only the trying.”
Thursday, September 17, 2009
`The Carpenter of Destruction'
Steve Allen had a routine in which he invited members of the audience on stage and asked each to strike a key on his piano. Allen would take the cluster of random notes, make it a theme and improvise a song around it. As a kid I thought this was magic, and I still do, though I know a thousand jazz musicians around the world are doing the same thing as I write.
There’s no human ability I so envy as musical composition and performance, and I suspect the same is true for many writers. We settle for second-best, mere words. Music, for this unmusical non-musician, suggests supernatural gifts.
In Monrovia Mon Amour, his account of a visit to Liberia in 1991, in the wake of that country’s civil war, Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) describes a visit to Centennial Hall in Monrovia, where the nation’s presidents were inaugurated. In the wreckage, he writes,
“I came across something that took me aback more powerfully than almost anything I had yet seen. Lying on the ground, casually as it were, was a Steinway grand piano (the only one in the country, as I correctly guessed), its legs sawn off. The body of the piano, still gleaming black and in perfect condition, was in direct contact with the floor, while the three sawn legs were strewn about.”
Daniels finds himself uncharacteristically speechless, as is the photographer who accompanies him. He continues:
“This was not mere vandalism, in the commonly accepted sense. I imagined how, if I were a vandal, I should go about my business with a piano: I should lay into it (perhaps impotently, for pianos are tough) with a heavy instrument, a mallet for example, and I should go for the keyboard and the mechanism with as much force as I could muster: never for an instant should I think of calmly sawing off the legs. But here the legs were, sawn off with the precision and neatness of a surgeon amputating the hand of a thief in a land of Islamic punishments: he had done his work well, the carpenter of destruction, with skill and devotion.”
The analogy with the Muslim surgeon is amusing, precise and suggestive. Vandals, of musical instruments or human beings, are transgressors against civilized existence. Daniels and the photographer speculate about the vandals’ motives but give up in frustration. He then proposes the thought that occurred to me as I first read the passage:
“How long, I thought, before some post-modernist composer has a pianist not play the instrument but, in front of the audience, saw off its legs, to the craven applause of critics afraid to be thought stupid or reactionary?”
I thought of Duchamp and Cage and a century of imitators trying to spoil the fun of others who just want, as Frost writes, to “get some color and music out of life.” Their adolescent intent is to garner attention with pretentious pranks and deny others the pleasures they deem bourgeois. Allen’s piano routine was at least as old as vaudeville and it still makes me happy. So do Art Tatum, Bill Evans and Glenn Gould. Vandals hate that kind of magic.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for passing this along: "...the musician refused to make any kind of plan until the very last minute; he cooked elaborate dishes without the aid of a recipe book by simply throwing different ingredients together and tasting."
There’s no human ability I so envy as musical composition and performance, and I suspect the same is true for many writers. We settle for second-best, mere words. Music, for this unmusical non-musician, suggests supernatural gifts.
In Monrovia Mon Amour, his account of a visit to Liberia in 1991, in the wake of that country’s civil war, Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) describes a visit to Centennial Hall in Monrovia, where the nation’s presidents were inaugurated. In the wreckage, he writes,
“I came across something that took me aback more powerfully than almost anything I had yet seen. Lying on the ground, casually as it were, was a Steinway grand piano (the only one in the country, as I correctly guessed), its legs sawn off. The body of the piano, still gleaming black and in perfect condition, was in direct contact with the floor, while the three sawn legs were strewn about.”
Daniels finds himself uncharacteristically speechless, as is the photographer who accompanies him. He continues:
“This was not mere vandalism, in the commonly accepted sense. I imagined how, if I were a vandal, I should go about my business with a piano: I should lay into it (perhaps impotently, for pianos are tough) with a heavy instrument, a mallet for example, and I should go for the keyboard and the mechanism with as much force as I could muster: never for an instant should I think of calmly sawing off the legs. But here the legs were, sawn off with the precision and neatness of a surgeon amputating the hand of a thief in a land of Islamic punishments: he had done his work well, the carpenter of destruction, with skill and devotion.”
The analogy with the Muslim surgeon is amusing, precise and suggestive. Vandals, of musical instruments or human beings, are transgressors against civilized existence. Daniels and the photographer speculate about the vandals’ motives but give up in frustration. He then proposes the thought that occurred to me as I first read the passage:
“How long, I thought, before some post-modernist composer has a pianist not play the instrument but, in front of the audience, saw off its legs, to the craven applause of critics afraid to be thought stupid or reactionary?”
I thought of Duchamp and Cage and a century of imitators trying to spoil the fun of others who just want, as Frost writes, to “get some color and music out of life.” Their adolescent intent is to garner attention with pretentious pranks and deny others the pleasures they deem bourgeois. Allen’s piano routine was at least as old as vaudeville and it still makes me happy. So do Art Tatum, Bill Evans and Glenn Gould. Vandals hate that kind of magic.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Dave Lull for passing this along: "...the musician refused to make any kind of plan until the very last minute; he cooked elaborate dishes without the aid of a recipe book by simply throwing different ingredients together and tasting."
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
`The Water That We Swim In'
“I was staggered by the Herbert quote today. It's so beautiful, and one of the truest things I've read in a long time. I can't recall if we ever talked about religion, but I'm Orthodox (what most Americans call Greek Orthodox, although the parish we attend is overwhelmingly Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian) and reverence towards tradition is the water that we swim in. Small surprise I fit in nowhere else!”
So writes a former colleague at Rice University. For almost two years we met periodically for lunch – brown bag, in the chapel or on a patio under the live oaks -- and never spoke of religion. Without giving it much thought I assumed she was an observant believer, probably in one of the mainline Protestant churches. How did I sense this? Moral seriousness, devotion to family, discontent with the general drift of things – and respect for tradition. By training she’s a historian. The modern era is nothing special. Not the worst – probably – but nowhere near the best. Her e-mail continues:
“I just finished reading The Man Who Loved Children. Ye gods. I couldn't rip my eyes away, though. Also, I've started learning Greek. I started off trying to learn classical Greek, but quickly discovered that the best teaching materials are all for koine Greek. Why so? Because every dimwitted seminarian has to learn it! I'm really enjoying it, I have to say. It's surprisingly easy and I wish I'd started years ago. I use Laudator Temporis Acti for practice, which only deepens my appreciation for it all.”
I’m pleased she finds Michael Gilleland’s blog, one of the best, so useful. The Horatian tag means “praiser of past things,” which makes Mike, like my friend in Texas, like any thoughtful or bookish person, a respecter of tradition. Like Herbert, too, as he writes in “Lascaux,” his essay about the Paleolithic cave painting in France (in Barbarian in the Garden):
“I returned from Lascaux by the same road I arrived. Though I had stared into the `abyss’ of history, I did not emerge from an alien world. Never before had I felt a stronger or more reassuring conviction: I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity.”
So writes a former colleague at Rice University. For almost two years we met periodically for lunch – brown bag, in the chapel or on a patio under the live oaks -- and never spoke of religion. Without giving it much thought I assumed she was an observant believer, probably in one of the mainline Protestant churches. How did I sense this? Moral seriousness, devotion to family, discontent with the general drift of things – and respect for tradition. By training she’s a historian. The modern era is nothing special. Not the worst – probably – but nowhere near the best. Her e-mail continues:
“I just finished reading The Man Who Loved Children. Ye gods. I couldn't rip my eyes away, though. Also, I've started learning Greek. I started off trying to learn classical Greek, but quickly discovered that the best teaching materials are all for koine Greek. Why so? Because every dimwitted seminarian has to learn it! I'm really enjoying it, I have to say. It's surprisingly easy and I wish I'd started years ago. I use Laudator Temporis Acti for practice, which only deepens my appreciation for it all.”
I’m pleased she finds Michael Gilleland’s blog, one of the best, so useful. The Horatian tag means “praiser of past things,” which makes Mike, like my friend in Texas, like any thoughtful or bookish person, a respecter of tradition. Like Herbert, too, as he writes in “Lascaux,” his essay about the Paleolithic cave painting in France (in Barbarian in the Garden):
“I returned from Lascaux by the same road I arrived. Though I had stared into the `abyss’ of history, I did not emerge from an alien world. Never before had I felt a stronger or more reassuring conviction: I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity.”
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
`Serenity, Dignity and Cool Radiance'
I’ve discovered a digital scrapbook created by an anonymous English-language admirer of Zbigniew Herbert, which collects photographs, drawings from the poet’s sketch book, translations of Herbert’s best-known poems, and testimonials from his peers Milosz, Brodsky and Heaney. Herbert the man (1924-1998) remains a phantom to readers in the West. He inhabits the ghostly category Poet from Eastern Europe (dubbed “Western Asia” by Josef Brodsky), so any evidence of his earthly existence is welcome.
Included in this touchingly awkward assemblage is an excerpt from “The Little Soul,” an essay in The Labyrinth on the Sea, the posthumous prose collection published in Warsaw in 2000. An English translation is yet to appear though a volume of his collected prose is rumored to be in the works. This passage is welcome news to Herbert’s non-Polish-speaking readers:
“One of the deadly sins of contemporary culture is that it pettily avoids a frontal confrontation with the highest values. Also the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the abandoned little soul.
“There exists a false view to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy, which you inherit mechanically, without effort, and that’s why those who object to inheritance and unearned privileges are against tradition. But in fact every contact with the past requires an effort, a labor, and a difficult and thankless labor to boot, for our little `I’ whines and balks at it.
“I have always wished that I would never lose the belief that great works of the spirit are more objective than we are. And they will judge us. Someone very rightly said that not only do we read Homer, look at frescoes of Giotto, listen to Mozart, but Homer, Giotto and Mozart steal looks at us, eavesdrop on us and ascertain our vanity and stupidity. Poor utopians, debutants of history, museum arsonists, liquidators of the past, are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity and cool radiance.”
The most civilized of poets, the author of “Why the Classics,” Herbert captures the fashionable arrogance of those who encourage illiteracy and cultural vandalism, the “liquidators of the past.” Earlier in the day I started reading Monrovia Mon Amour (1992) by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), a chronicle of the doctor’s 1991 visit to Liberia during its civil war. In Monrovia he visits the sacked remains of the University of Liberia, the country’s only university, and because he’s a bookish man Daniels seeks the school library:
“The library had been the largest in the country (no larger, in fact, than an average municipal library at home), but was now in disarray. The chief librarian’s office looked as though a jealous spouse had gone on the rampage through it, exacting retribution for a recently discovered love-affair. On a desk was a small paperback, its front cover burnt. I opened it to see what it was: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. What would Ivan Sergeyevich, a man who valued civilization above all else, have made of this savagery? Would he have recognized the book-burners of the world the lineal descendants of Bazarov himself? I do not think so; there was something more elemental, less cerebral, than his character Bazarov’s nihilism at work here – a visceral hatred of the library and all it stood for, the revenge of the unschooled for all the slights and humiliations they had received at the hands, and tongues, of the schooled. And the impulse to destroy what you cannot understand is always a powerful one, waiting to be acted upon once the normal restraints of law and order are removed.”
In Herbert’s words, the savages who plundered the Liberian library “are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity and cool radiance.” Daniels concludes his chapter like this:
“I left the university, repeatedly glancing over my shoulder at the devastation and the desertion, and I – who was not a Liberian – suddenly felt that unnameable but deep emotion that great music and great art evokes.”
Included in this touchingly awkward assemblage is an excerpt from “The Little Soul,” an essay in The Labyrinth on the Sea, the posthumous prose collection published in Warsaw in 2000. An English translation is yet to appear though a volume of his collected prose is rumored to be in the works. This passage is welcome news to Herbert’s non-Polish-speaking readers:
“One of the deadly sins of contemporary culture is that it pettily avoids a frontal confrontation with the highest values. Also the arrogant conviction that we can do without models (both aesthetic and moral), because our place in the world is supposedly so exceptional and can’t be compared with anything. That’s why we reject the aid of tradition and stumble around in our solitude, digging around in the dark corners of the abandoned little soul.
“There exists a false view to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy, which you inherit mechanically, without effort, and that’s why those who object to inheritance and unearned privileges are against tradition. But in fact every contact with the past requires an effort, a labor, and a difficult and thankless labor to boot, for our little `I’ whines and balks at it.
“I have always wished that I would never lose the belief that great works of the spirit are more objective than we are. And they will judge us. Someone very rightly said that not only do we read Homer, look at frescoes of Giotto, listen to Mozart, but Homer, Giotto and Mozart steal looks at us, eavesdrop on us and ascertain our vanity and stupidity. Poor utopians, debutants of history, museum arsonists, liquidators of the past, are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity and cool radiance.”
The most civilized of poets, the author of “Why the Classics,” Herbert captures the fashionable arrogance of those who encourage illiteracy and cultural vandalism, the “liquidators of the past.” Earlier in the day I started reading Monrovia Mon Amour (1992) by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple), a chronicle of the doctor’s 1991 visit to Liberia during its civil war. In Monrovia he visits the sacked remains of the University of Liberia, the country’s only university, and because he’s a bookish man Daniels seeks the school library:
“The library had been the largest in the country (no larger, in fact, than an average municipal library at home), but was now in disarray. The chief librarian’s office looked as though a jealous spouse had gone on the rampage through it, exacting retribution for a recently discovered love-affair. On a desk was a small paperback, its front cover burnt. I opened it to see what it was: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. What would Ivan Sergeyevich, a man who valued civilization above all else, have made of this savagery? Would he have recognized the book-burners of the world the lineal descendants of Bazarov himself? I do not think so; there was something more elemental, less cerebral, than his character Bazarov’s nihilism at work here – a visceral hatred of the library and all it stood for, the revenge of the unschooled for all the slights and humiliations they had received at the hands, and tongues, of the schooled. And the impulse to destroy what you cannot understand is always a powerful one, waiting to be acted upon once the normal restraints of law and order are removed.”
In Herbert’s words, the savages who plundered the Liberian library “are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity and cool radiance.” Daniels concludes his chapter like this:
“I left the university, repeatedly glancing over my shoulder at the devastation and the desertion, and I – who was not a Liberian – suddenly felt that unnameable but deep emotion that great music and great art evokes.”
Monday, September 14, 2009
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 14
The 14th and final installment of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, by D.G. Myers, proprietor of A Commonplace Blog and my co-conspirator in organizing of this symposium, is posted.
`What Others Know About the Same Thing'
The most common and conspicuous wildflower in the neighborhood superficially resembles a dandelion. The stem is long and spindly but strong, like green wire. The flower is yellow and attractively ragged. Like the dandelion it thrives in concrete and drought, and its leaves are simple and basal with the familiar toothy edges (dent de lion). On a crisp brown lawn or growing from a crack in the asphalt, it’s a micro-oasis, but the identity of this tough little weed remained a mystery I only half-heartedly pursued.
In bed Saturday night I was reading Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest (Timber Press, 2006) by Mark Turner and Phyllis Gustafson. The book is intelligently organized, first by color, then by number of petals, family, genus and species. I browsed in the yellow section of the family Asteraceae (asters, daisies, sunflowers), the second-largest family of flowering plants (1,600 genera, 21,000 species).
A certain sameness was setting in – Hieracium cynoglossoides, Hieracium gracile, Hieracium scouleri – until I came upon a familiar face. There it was: the not-dandelion, a perfectly framed color photo of the flower growing 10 feet away from me on the front lawn. Turner (photographer) and Gustafson (writer) had solved my nagging little mystery: Hypochaeris radicata, the rough cat’s-ear or hairy cat’s-ear. Gustafson’s précis is precise:
“Flowers entirely yellow, staying open in sunny or cloudy weather. An abundant weed found in lawns, roadsides, disturbed places, from coast to open woods, at low elevations. Sometimes confused with common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, when growing as a lawn weed, especially when not in bloom.”
I felt like the Adam of the plant kingdom (Genesis 2:20). Naming something, fitting an object to a body of knowledge, is an invigorating sensation. Without even trying, I had chipped away at my ignorance and found something useful I hadn’t even been looking for – a familiar experience on the internet.
I’ve been in the company of birders arguing savagely over the identity of a tuft of feathers in the underbrush. It turned into another fight over ego-turf, and I permanently swore off collective birding. Thoreau understood the pleasures and importance of naming. For him it signified knowledge and the possibility of communicating it. In his journal for Aug. 29, 1858, he writes:
“How hard one must work in order to acquire his language, -- words by which to express himself! I have known a particular rush, for instance, for at least twenty years, but have ever been prevented from describing some [of] its peculiarities, because I did not know its name nor anyone in the neighborhood who could tell me it. With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing….My knowledge was cramped and confined before, and grew rusty because not used, -- for it could not be used. My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication. I can now learn what others know about the same thing.”
In bed Saturday night I was reading Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest (Timber Press, 2006) by Mark Turner and Phyllis Gustafson. The book is intelligently organized, first by color, then by number of petals, family, genus and species. I browsed in the yellow section of the family Asteraceae (asters, daisies, sunflowers), the second-largest family of flowering plants (1,600 genera, 21,000 species).
A certain sameness was setting in – Hieracium cynoglossoides, Hieracium gracile, Hieracium scouleri – until I came upon a familiar face. There it was: the not-dandelion, a perfectly framed color photo of the flower growing 10 feet away from me on the front lawn. Turner (photographer) and Gustafson (writer) had solved my nagging little mystery: Hypochaeris radicata, the rough cat’s-ear or hairy cat’s-ear. Gustafson’s précis is precise:
“Flowers entirely yellow, staying open in sunny or cloudy weather. An abundant weed found in lawns, roadsides, disturbed places, from coast to open woods, at low elevations. Sometimes confused with common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, when growing as a lawn weed, especially when not in bloom.”
I felt like the Adam of the plant kingdom (Genesis 2:20). Naming something, fitting an object to a body of knowledge, is an invigorating sensation. Without even trying, I had chipped away at my ignorance and found something useful I hadn’t even been looking for – a familiar experience on the internet.
I’ve been in the company of birders arguing savagely over the identity of a tuft of feathers in the underbrush. It turned into another fight over ego-turf, and I permanently swore off collective birding. Thoreau understood the pleasures and importance of naming. For him it signified knowledge and the possibility of communicating it. In his journal for Aug. 29, 1858, he writes:
“How hard one must work in order to acquire his language, -- words by which to express himself! I have known a particular rush, for instance, for at least twenty years, but have ever been prevented from describing some [of] its peculiarities, because I did not know its name nor anyone in the neighborhood who could tell me it. With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing….My knowledge was cramped and confined before, and grew rusty because not used, -- for it could not be used. My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication. I can now learn what others know about the same thing.”
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 13
by Patrick Kurp
Anecdotal Evidence
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
Essays, reviews, feuilletons, maxims, commonplace books, journals, letters, bull sessions, reveries, mental rambles. Some of us were born bloggers and waited for the technology to catch up. Posts are digital editions of words and thoughts that would otherwise evaporate, and the internet permits us to inflict them on others.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
Good writers of any sort, even if they write only one good sentence or phrase. I claim a modest place in a tradition of irregulars that starts with Montaigne and includes Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Henry David Thoreau (his journals), Hubert Butler, A.J. Liebling, Zbigniew Herbert, Whitney Balliett, Cynthia Ozick, Guy Davenport and Theodore Dalrymple.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
It doesn’t, necessarily. Look at Ron Slate, a poet and one of the best bloggers around, whose posts consist almost exclusively of reviews. A book blogger, however, need not be a critic or reviewer. I know: I’m neither in any dedicated sense, though you could argue that attention paid to any text is an implicit act of criticism. I make things clear on the masthead: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” Some of the most memorable blog posts I've read describe a reader’s experience with or memory of a book. Evaluation is implicit.
How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
It would be easy to get defensive about this question (I did, and I wrote it). Some of us take blogging seriously but must be reminded not to take ourselves seriously. David Ferry writes in his poem “Rereading Old Writing,” “writing / Is a way of being happy.” Remember too that “hobby,” meaning a small horse, entered the language in the 13th century. In less than three centuries it morphed into a child’s toy horse. By the 17th century it meant a pastime or avocation, the connection being that both signify activities going nowhere.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
I’ve spent 30 years writing professionally, mostly for newspapers. This has instilled a fairly strict work ethic: meet deadlines, don’t wait for “inspiration,” write tight, humor editors but don’t encourage them, value clarity and precision, don’t mistake quantity for quality (and vice versa). When I reread early posts they seem wordy and vague. Blogging has moved me to reapply my own standards more rigorously. A blogger is a writer and a writer’s only obligation is to write well.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
Some of us never leave kindergarten. Others never make it that far. It’s remarkable how unbookish – in the sense of inarticulate and immature – some readers behave, but as Terry Teachout reminds us, “If you can’t stand the flames, log off.”
Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?
There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: “You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.” To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
I’ll leave this one to Liebling, who writes in The Honest Rainmaker: “The Colonel has always believed that fortune swims, not with the main stream of letters, but in the shallows where the suckers moon.”
Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?
I have no interest in politics and hope Anecdotal Evidence reflects that, but I recognize that the number of comments surges when I address a subject that someone, somewhere judges to be political. I wish readers became as fierce when the matter at hand was literature, an infinitely more interesting subject.
Anecdotal Evidence
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
Essays, reviews, feuilletons, maxims, commonplace books, journals, letters, bull sessions, reveries, mental rambles. Some of us were born bloggers and waited for the technology to catch up. Posts are digital editions of words and thoughts that would otherwise evaporate, and the internet permits us to inflict them on others.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
Good writers of any sort, even if they write only one good sentence or phrase. I claim a modest place in a tradition of irregulars that starts with Montaigne and includes Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Henry David Thoreau (his journals), Hubert Butler, A.J. Liebling, Zbigniew Herbert, Whitney Balliett, Cynthia Ozick, Guy Davenport and Theodore Dalrymple.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
It doesn’t, necessarily. Look at Ron Slate, a poet and one of the best bloggers around, whose posts consist almost exclusively of reviews. A book blogger, however, need not be a critic or reviewer. I know: I’m neither in any dedicated sense, though you could argue that attention paid to any text is an implicit act of criticism. I make things clear on the masthead: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” Some of the most memorable blog posts I've read describe a reader’s experience with or memory of a book. Evaluation is implicit.
How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
It would be easy to get defensive about this question (I did, and I wrote it). Some of us take blogging seriously but must be reminded not to take ourselves seriously. David Ferry writes in his poem “Rereading Old Writing,” “writing / Is a way of being happy.” Remember too that “hobby,” meaning a small horse, entered the language in the 13th century. In less than three centuries it morphed into a child’s toy horse. By the 17th century it meant a pastime or avocation, the connection being that both signify activities going nowhere.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
I’ve spent 30 years writing professionally, mostly for newspapers. This has instilled a fairly strict work ethic: meet deadlines, don’t wait for “inspiration,” write tight, humor editors but don’t encourage them, value clarity and precision, don’t mistake quantity for quality (and vice versa). When I reread early posts they seem wordy and vague. Blogging has moved me to reapply my own standards more rigorously. A blogger is a writer and a writer’s only obligation is to write well.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
Some of us never leave kindergarten. Others never make it that far. It’s remarkable how unbookish – in the sense of inarticulate and immature – some readers behave, but as Terry Teachout reminds us, “If you can’t stand the flames, log off.”
Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?
There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: “You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.” To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
I’ll leave this one to Liebling, who writes in The Honest Rainmaker: “The Colonel has always believed that fortune swims, not with the main stream of letters, but in the shallows where the suckers moon.”
Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?
I have no interest in politics and hope Anecdotal Evidence reflects that, but I recognize that the number of comments surges when I address a subject that someone, somewhere judges to be political. I wish readers became as fierce when the matter at hand was literature, an infinitely more interesting subject.
`The Rich Fume of Autumn'
A warm dry late-summer afternoon. We tramped around Luther Burbank Park on Mercer Island, on the shore of Lake Washington. Burbank the botanist and proto-bioengineer was once as famous and revered as his friends Edison and Ford, and his industry was heroic. Between 1873 and 1925, Burbank grafted, hybridized and cross-fertilized more than 800 new varieties of fruits, vegetables, flowers, nuts and grains. His legacy lives on in Luther Burbank Park: Acres of it are covered with dense thickets of Himalaya blackberry, hybridized by Burbank in 1885. Some of the thorny stalks measure 12 feet or longer. Most of the berries have shriveled but I picked and ate a handful.
A fallen cottonwood lay in the water, and out of the exposed roots grew a patch of Aster chilense – the Pacific aster with delicate flowers of pale lavender, a harbinger of autumn. I picked a blossom and tucked it in my wallet. Many times in the middle of winter I’ve found a flattened flower among the IDs and credit cards – a dried-out memory of summer. I picked the spiky fruit of the sweetgum, a Southern import. Some of its leaves have turned tomato-red. Many of the park’s trees are invasive species – European hawthorn, horse chestnut, European mountain ash. The Alaska cedars, however, look impressively tall and shaggy. I saw one butterfly – a common cabbage white, still flitting despite the chilly nights. David Ferry’s “An Autumn Afternoon” captures the in-betweenness of the season:
“The rich fume of autumn rises from the ground
In light and odor as the leaves rot marvelously
“In the hot autumn sun in the brilliant afternoon.
What was green is turning to light before my eyes.
“The hawthorn leaves have not yet fallen away.
The squirrels are fat. The winter is coming soon.
“There’s something frantic in birdflight. The shadows of wings
Print and unprint erratically on the little
“Porch roof that I look out on from my window,
As if to keep taking back what has just been said.”
Ferry often turns scenes, human and natural, into pages. We read the autumnal world as we read a poem, as a hybrid.
A fallen cottonwood lay in the water, and out of the exposed roots grew a patch of Aster chilense – the Pacific aster with delicate flowers of pale lavender, a harbinger of autumn. I picked a blossom and tucked it in my wallet. Many times in the middle of winter I’ve found a flattened flower among the IDs and credit cards – a dried-out memory of summer. I picked the spiky fruit of the sweetgum, a Southern import. Some of its leaves have turned tomato-red. Many of the park’s trees are invasive species – European hawthorn, horse chestnut, European mountain ash. The Alaska cedars, however, look impressively tall and shaggy. I saw one butterfly – a common cabbage white, still flitting despite the chilly nights. David Ferry’s “An Autumn Afternoon” captures the in-betweenness of the season:
“The rich fume of autumn rises from the ground
In light and odor as the leaves rot marvelously
“In the hot autumn sun in the brilliant afternoon.
What was green is turning to light before my eyes.
“The hawthorn leaves have not yet fallen away.
The squirrels are fat. The winter is coming soon.
“There’s something frantic in birdflight. The shadows of wings
Print and unprint erratically on the little
“Porch roof that I look out on from my window,
As if to keep taking back what has just been said.”
Ferry often turns scenes, human and natural, into pages. We read the autumnal world as we read a poem, as a hybrid.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
`He Still Walks About My Mind'
Charles E. Pierce Jr. has a fine appreciation of Samuel Johnson, in particular his moral fable Rasselas, in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s a sample:
“I was introduced to Johnson—and read `Rasselas’ for the first time—almost 50 years ago in an undergraduate course at Harvard taught by Walter Jackson Bate, the great Johnson scholar. I was moved by the struggles of Johnson's personal life, especially his fears of madness and death, and I was fascinated by his moral thought. A year after I took this course, I was walking to class one day and saw a billboard on the top of the Cambridge Trust Company that read `Life is very uncertain; let us spend it as well as we can.’ And it was signed `Samuel Johnson.’ I smiled to myself as I wondered what the directors of the bank meant by "spend" and what Johnson meant. I shall never know, and it scarcely matters. What does matter, as I continue my own journey, is that I encountered the moral example of Johnson many years ago and that he still walks about my mind.”
“I was introduced to Johnson—and read `Rasselas’ for the first time—almost 50 years ago in an undergraduate course at Harvard taught by Walter Jackson Bate, the great Johnson scholar. I was moved by the struggles of Johnson's personal life, especially his fears of madness and death, and I was fascinated by his moral thought. A year after I took this course, I was walking to class one day and saw a billboard on the top of the Cambridge Trust Company that read `Life is very uncertain; let us spend it as well as we can.’ And it was signed `Samuel Johnson.’ I smiled to myself as I wondered what the directors of the bank meant by "spend" and what Johnson meant. I shall never know, and it scarcely matters. What does matter, as I continue my own journey, is that I encountered the moral example of Johnson many years ago and that he still walks about my mind.”
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 12
The twelfth installment of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, by James Marcus of House of Mirth, is posted at A Commonplace Blog.
`The Stars in Secret Influence Comment'
That pleasure can precede understanding in matters of art (and life) ought to be a truism, though judging by much of what passes for criticism it is not. I enjoy the work of Wallace Stevens despite finding some of his poems obstinately opaque after more than 40 years of acquaintance. One way to define a bad poem is that it yields neither pleasure nor understanding, even with time.
David Ferry has a new poem, “Street Scene,” in the fall issue of The Threepenny Review. Typically for him, it involves an observer and a scene, an audience and a stage. The speaker looks out his window and watches the mundane happenings across the street – a man, a dog. There follows a free-floating, italicized fragment:
“That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows”
A red truck joins the man and dog, so the italicized line seems to relate to these subsequent lines:
“… all three of them have
Become, in common, elements of the scene
That I’m observing and so all three of them seem
To understand that they have a common purpose.”
On the side of the truck is the suggestive word “CHARETTE” – French for “cart,” and in English a surge of collaborative effort on a design project, as the speaker seems to be collaborating with the scene outside his window in an effort to find understanding. A blue truck appears – perhaps the red truck with a new color, he thinks. The speaker suspects a purpose, a plot in these random, unimportant events – “they have a common purpose,” “So giving no information about its purpose,” and this:
“Magic. A trick of magic performed by me,
Something that I performed because I saw it.
Or the trick was performed by the unseen hand of the world.”
One thinks of the mad annotator Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire. There’s a second italicized fragment:
“Whereon the stars in secret influence comment”
The italicized lines are, respectively, the third and fourth lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15:
“When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment.
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky:
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory.
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay,
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.”
As best I can tell, Shakespeare’s and Ferry’s themes share little overlap. Poets are opportunists. Ferry found the selected lines useful in a new context. His concern is epistemology and his speaker may be quite mad. He may be a solipsist, a psychotic or a radical idealist. His powers of perception are Godlike:
“And what became of Mr. Wrenn and his dog?
Hurled down to the Underworld, twisting and turning,
The two of them falling, the dog’s leash fluttering
In the eerie light down there through which they fall.”
That which is no longer perceived is consigned to the Hell of nonexistence. Ferry writes poems built to live with, poems that don’t yield meaning like toothpaste squeezed from a tube.
David Ferry has a new poem, “Street Scene,” in the fall issue of The Threepenny Review. Typically for him, it involves an observer and a scene, an audience and a stage. The speaker looks out his window and watches the mundane happenings across the street – a man, a dog. There follows a free-floating, italicized fragment:
“That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows”
A red truck joins the man and dog, so the italicized line seems to relate to these subsequent lines:
“… all three of them have
Become, in common, elements of the scene
That I’m observing and so all three of them seem
To understand that they have a common purpose.”
On the side of the truck is the suggestive word “CHARETTE” – French for “cart,” and in English a surge of collaborative effort on a design project, as the speaker seems to be collaborating with the scene outside his window in an effort to find understanding. A blue truck appears – perhaps the red truck with a new color, he thinks. The speaker suspects a purpose, a plot in these random, unimportant events – “they have a common purpose,” “So giving no information about its purpose,” and this:
“Magic. A trick of magic performed by me,
Something that I performed because I saw it.
Or the trick was performed by the unseen hand of the world.”
One thinks of the mad annotator Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire. There’s a second italicized fragment:
“Whereon the stars in secret influence comment”
The italicized lines are, respectively, the third and fourth lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15:
“When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment.
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky:
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory.
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay,
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.”
As best I can tell, Shakespeare’s and Ferry’s themes share little overlap. Poets are opportunists. Ferry found the selected lines useful in a new context. His concern is epistemology and his speaker may be quite mad. He may be a solipsist, a psychotic or a radical idealist. His powers of perception are Godlike:
“And what became of Mr. Wrenn and his dog?
Hurled down to the Underworld, twisting and turning,
The two of them falling, the dog’s leash fluttering
In the eerie light down there through which they fall.”
That which is no longer perceived is consigned to the Hell of nonexistence. Ferry writes poems built to live with, poems that don’t yield meaning like toothpaste squeezed from a tube.
Friday, September 11, 2009
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 11
Levi Stahl
I’vebeenreadinglately
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
I suppose they go back to the jobbing writers of the eighteenth century, folks like Johnson and Hazlitt, writing on various topics at various lengths on tight deadlines; throw in the more meditative, personal style of Montaigne, and you’ve probably got the start of a good basic lineage.
As for my own precursors, well, when I started blogging about books, I explained that I was starting a blog so that I would stop reading aloud at parties. I was only half joking: what I was looking for in blogging was exactly that opportunity, but without the social awkwardness: the chance to share books—and passages from books—that I thought friends would enjoy. It’s a relic of my enjoyment of hand-selling in my days as a bookseller, that relatively rare chance to pass on your deep-rooted enthusiasm about an author or a work.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
When I started, my models, to the extent that I had any, weren’t bloggers—I wasn’t keyed in to the world of book blogs at that point. Rather, they were book reviewers who wrote from a position of appreciation, among them Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly, Michael Dirda, and, in their own ways, Borges and Calvino. Powell in particular, my favorite novelist and one of my favorite critics, was important, the way he moved easily among anecdote, biography, and criticism displaying a facility to which I still aspire.
I also admired talented keepers of commonplace books, like Andre Bernard and D. J. Enright, and this seemed like a medium that would accommodate work in that form as well.
Now, four years on, I have so many more models: I’ve read far more of Dr. Johnson than I had then, and what can a conscientious writer do but take him, humbly, as a model? And I follow and admire many of my fellow bloggers, who in their dedication and sheer variety inspire me every day—and, I hope, help me to keep out of ruts.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
One thing that unites all the writers I cited as models—while simultaneously setting them apart from the generic concept of “book review,” however many of those they may have written—is the aforementioned enthusiasm. All approach books as lovers of books: they’re critical, but they never forget why we bother being critical in the first place. They are entertained, amused, impressed, moved by books; they live and breathe them. That’s my life, and, at the risk of painting with too broad a brush, I’d say that’s a characteristic that’s largely missing from mainstream book review coverage, which suffers from the twin problems of institutional voice and preoccupation with the new. If blogging has taught me nothing else, it’s been to write as me, with my loves and admirations fully on display. That’s what will encourage readers to take a flyer on books I write about; that’s what might convince them that an author is worth their time.
The blog also offers a structural freedom that formal book reviewing can’t. Rather than being oppressed by the constant flow of new books, my writing can reflect much more the way people actually read: backwards and forwards in time, new and old intermingled, obsessing about an author or a period for a few weeks, then veering off in a completely new direction. And the malleability of the form is a constant pleasure, too: I don’t have to write as if each post is the ultimate judgment on a book; rather, each post can find its own length, tone, and style. A relatively detailed look at Anthony Powell’s prose can be followed the next day by a vicious quotation from Ivy Compton-Burnett, with my contribution reduced to little but admiration.
How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
Well, we seem to live in a culture that divides everything into work and not-work, and this is definitely not work—both because no one is offering to pay me to do it and because it never feels like work.
To be honest, blogging occupies a similar place in my life to running, as activities I very much enjoy that also happen to be good for me, keeping me feeling calm and fit and even-keeled. At the start of every week, I look ahead and make plans to ensure I can manage both every other day; if I can’t, I get antsy.
The difference—and this is no small thing—is that while running is entirely solitary, blogging has pleasantly surprised me by introducing me to a true community of serious readers. When I started I thought I was writing for myself and friends; that was true, but the friends soon included many people I’d not yet met. What began as a hobby has become a conversation, one in which I get back far more—from people with more knowledge and experience than I have—than I ever give.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
Another of my models was Harry Mathews, whose book Twenty Lines a Day records his attempt to force himself to write at least twenty good lines per day. When I started the blog, I wasn’t writing at all, and I missed it; having an obligation to myself to write regularly and well seemed like a good way to get back into the habit.
Four years later, I find that I’m a much, much more capable writer: I organize my thoughts better, draw connections more clearly, and am no longer stymied by the blank page. I know now, as I didn’t then, that if I can just dive into working on a piece, I’ll be able to sort it out eventually, and that confidence is of incalculable value. I’m also simultaneously more confident in my judgments and less worried about openly admitting to all the things I don’t know—one of the glories of the Internet, like your first year of college, being to remind you of those vast areas of knowledge you’ve not come close to exploring yet.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
Maybe it’s my tone, or maybe it’s just my relatively low readership, but I rarely encounter this problem. Even the few authors whose books I’ve strongly criticized who’ve gotten in touch have been remarkably pleasant, probably more so than I deserved.
Ultimately I’m just not someone who’s interested in fighting in public. I grew up in a family with a very strong live-and-let-live approach, and in the presence of the fired-up, intense, or possibly crazy, we’re fundamentally inclined to nod and smile—if necessary raising an eyebrow at something particularly egregious—as we sidle towards the door. And online, the door is always right there.
Honestly, my experience of online life has been almost exactly the opposite. People are incredibly generous: I can’t count the number of complete strangers who’ve written to me or left comments on my blog pointing me to authors, writings, and resources that I didn’t know, and who’ve taken the time to do so simply because they thought I’d be interested. In a mild sense, that distinction between friend and stranger has broken down, and I think nothing these days of sending a note to someone—however high-profile—whom I know only through their writing. The Internet is ever-changing, but it was built on sharing, and that ethos still seems to hold pleasantly strong.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
Sure I would love to have a bigger audience. What blogger, putting in hours every week, wouldn’t? But ultimately, god knows, I’m not doing this for fame or fortune: I blog because I enjoy it. And, as Anthony Powell reminds us in A Dance to the Music of Time, the portion of the public to whom books matter has always been vanishingly small; it’s surely naïve to hope for more. Perhaps it’s my aforementioned memories of hand-selling, but I am always very pleased when I learn that my efforts have sold even a single book: when I think of the value of certain books in my life—the way in which I return to them again and again, as touchstones, references, guides—I feel I’ve done my part any time I introduce such potential to the life of someone who was hitherto a stranger.
I’vebeenreadinglately
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
I suppose they go back to the jobbing writers of the eighteenth century, folks like Johnson and Hazlitt, writing on various topics at various lengths on tight deadlines; throw in the more meditative, personal style of Montaigne, and you’ve probably got the start of a good basic lineage.
As for my own precursors, well, when I started blogging about books, I explained that I was starting a blog so that I would stop reading aloud at parties. I was only half joking: what I was looking for in blogging was exactly that opportunity, but without the social awkwardness: the chance to share books—and passages from books—that I thought friends would enjoy. It’s a relic of my enjoyment of hand-selling in my days as a bookseller, that relatively rare chance to pass on your deep-rooted enthusiasm about an author or a work.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
When I started, my models, to the extent that I had any, weren’t bloggers—I wasn’t keyed in to the world of book blogs at that point. Rather, they were book reviewers who wrote from a position of appreciation, among them Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly, Michael Dirda, and, in their own ways, Borges and Calvino. Powell in particular, my favorite novelist and one of my favorite critics, was important, the way he moved easily among anecdote, biography, and criticism displaying a facility to which I still aspire.
I also admired talented keepers of commonplace books, like Andre Bernard and D. J. Enright, and this seemed like a medium that would accommodate work in that form as well.
Now, four years on, I have so many more models: I’ve read far more of Dr. Johnson than I had then, and what can a conscientious writer do but take him, humbly, as a model? And I follow and admire many of my fellow bloggers, who in their dedication and sheer variety inspire me every day—and, I hope, help me to keep out of ruts.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
One thing that unites all the writers I cited as models—while simultaneously setting them apart from the generic concept of “book review,” however many of those they may have written—is the aforementioned enthusiasm. All approach books as lovers of books: they’re critical, but they never forget why we bother being critical in the first place. They are entertained, amused, impressed, moved by books; they live and breathe them. That’s my life, and, at the risk of painting with too broad a brush, I’d say that’s a characteristic that’s largely missing from mainstream book review coverage, which suffers from the twin problems of institutional voice and preoccupation with the new. If blogging has taught me nothing else, it’s been to write as me, with my loves and admirations fully on display. That’s what will encourage readers to take a flyer on books I write about; that’s what might convince them that an author is worth their time.
The blog also offers a structural freedom that formal book reviewing can’t. Rather than being oppressed by the constant flow of new books, my writing can reflect much more the way people actually read: backwards and forwards in time, new and old intermingled, obsessing about an author or a period for a few weeks, then veering off in a completely new direction. And the malleability of the form is a constant pleasure, too: I don’t have to write as if each post is the ultimate judgment on a book; rather, each post can find its own length, tone, and style. A relatively detailed look at Anthony Powell’s prose can be followed the next day by a vicious quotation from Ivy Compton-Burnett, with my contribution reduced to little but admiration.
How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
Well, we seem to live in a culture that divides everything into work and not-work, and this is definitely not work—both because no one is offering to pay me to do it and because it never feels like work.
To be honest, blogging occupies a similar place in my life to running, as activities I very much enjoy that also happen to be good for me, keeping me feeling calm and fit and even-keeled. At the start of every week, I look ahead and make plans to ensure I can manage both every other day; if I can’t, I get antsy.
The difference—and this is no small thing—is that while running is entirely solitary, blogging has pleasantly surprised me by introducing me to a true community of serious readers. When I started I thought I was writing for myself and friends; that was true, but the friends soon included many people I’d not yet met. What began as a hobby has become a conversation, one in which I get back far more—from people with more knowledge and experience than I have—than I ever give.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
Another of my models was Harry Mathews, whose book Twenty Lines a Day records his attempt to force himself to write at least twenty good lines per day. When I started the blog, I wasn’t writing at all, and I missed it; having an obligation to myself to write regularly and well seemed like a good way to get back into the habit.
Four years later, I find that I’m a much, much more capable writer: I organize my thoughts better, draw connections more clearly, and am no longer stymied by the blank page. I know now, as I didn’t then, that if I can just dive into working on a piece, I’ll be able to sort it out eventually, and that confidence is of incalculable value. I’m also simultaneously more confident in my judgments and less worried about openly admitting to all the things I don’t know—one of the glories of the Internet, like your first year of college, being to remind you of those vast areas of knowledge you’ve not come close to exploring yet.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
Maybe it’s my tone, or maybe it’s just my relatively low readership, but I rarely encounter this problem. Even the few authors whose books I’ve strongly criticized who’ve gotten in touch have been remarkably pleasant, probably more so than I deserved.
Ultimately I’m just not someone who’s interested in fighting in public. I grew up in a family with a very strong live-and-let-live approach, and in the presence of the fired-up, intense, or possibly crazy, we’re fundamentally inclined to nod and smile—if necessary raising an eyebrow at something particularly egregious—as we sidle towards the door. And online, the door is always right there.
Honestly, my experience of online life has been almost exactly the opposite. People are incredibly generous: I can’t count the number of complete strangers who’ve written to me or left comments on my blog pointing me to authors, writings, and resources that I didn’t know, and who’ve taken the time to do so simply because they thought I’d be interested. In a mild sense, that distinction between friend and stranger has broken down, and I think nothing these days of sending a note to someone—however high-profile—whom I know only through their writing. The Internet is ever-changing, but it was built on sharing, and that ethos still seems to hold pleasantly strong.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
Sure I would love to have a bigger audience. What blogger, putting in hours every week, wouldn’t? But ultimately, god knows, I’m not doing this for fame or fortune: I blog because I enjoy it. And, as Anthony Powell reminds us in A Dance to the Music of Time, the portion of the public to whom books matter has always been vanishingly small; it’s surely naïve to hope for more. Perhaps it’s my aforementioned memories of hand-selling, but I am always very pleased when I learn that my efforts have sold even a single book: when I think of the value of certain books in my life—the way in which I return to them again and again, as touchstones, references, guides—I feel I’ve done my part any time I introduce such potential to the life of someone who was hitherto a stranger.
`The Habitual Tact of Age'
Several times a day at school I cross paths with a woman 20 years my senior who does the job I do with better grace and efficiency. She’s been at it longer and is pleased to share what she knows. Her lessons are devoted to words and tones not technical knowhow or theory, which isn’t of much use with these kids. She’s a reader and English is her third language, acquired in the last 20 years. This week she’s working on a psychology textbook and Our Mutual Friend, my favorite Dickens, but she’s not taking classes and says, a little deflectingly, that she reads because she doesn’t like to waste time watching television. She reminds me of the poet Edgar Bowers, who wrote this in 1999, the year he turned 75, in a letter to 30-year-old poet Joshua Mehigan:
“Last term I was in a class on David Hume that was not at all Jesuit but wonderfully taught by a young man from Harvard and U Mass, a class that was very exciting to me, for, among other things, I thought to perceive in Hume’s despair of reason many of the sources of the world of rhetoric and purposeless iconoclasm that seems general, and the accompanying evaluation of emotion over intelligence (intelligence by now reduced to a very feeble state, not the nous of Aristotle) there being no public truth to appeal to. Amusingly enough, when I was in Rome later in the spring, I thought to find quite Humean the propagandistic practices of the Augustan empire and its imitation by the early Jesuits. You see to what undisciplined speculation being an amateur philosopher can lead.”
Read the rest of Mehigan’s remembrance of Bowers here. Nothing reassures like an old person – a “senior,” that patronizing pigeonhole – hungry for the life of the mind. We all know people who stopped learning in high school or earlier, but then we can reassure ourselves with Geoffrey Hill writing his best verse in his eighth decade; William Maxwell, age 91, rereading War and Peace in the final months of his life; I.F. Stone learning Greek in his seventies. The old woman I know at school is modeled along these lines – lucid, cool, unresigned to entropy.
In his first book, The Optimist (2004), Mehigan dedicates “Introduction to Poetry” to Bowers. It describes a brief, late-blooming friendship pleasing to both “the young man and the great and dying man.” Even the oak boughs are “bowed with the habitual tact of age.” Here’s a heartbreaking passage, but please read the entire poem:
“Young man delivers his imperfect part
to old man, who must also hear the sound
of his own shoes on a back road at dusk,
the involuntary interest in the new
cells in his blood carrying his mind past dusk.”
“Last term I was in a class on David Hume that was not at all Jesuit but wonderfully taught by a young man from Harvard and U Mass, a class that was very exciting to me, for, among other things, I thought to perceive in Hume’s despair of reason many of the sources of the world of rhetoric and purposeless iconoclasm that seems general, and the accompanying evaluation of emotion over intelligence (intelligence by now reduced to a very feeble state, not the nous of Aristotle) there being no public truth to appeal to. Amusingly enough, when I was in Rome later in the spring, I thought to find quite Humean the propagandistic practices of the Augustan empire and its imitation by the early Jesuits. You see to what undisciplined speculation being an amateur philosopher can lead.”
Read the rest of Mehigan’s remembrance of Bowers here. Nothing reassures like an old person – a “senior,” that patronizing pigeonhole – hungry for the life of the mind. We all know people who stopped learning in high school or earlier, but then we can reassure ourselves with Geoffrey Hill writing his best verse in his eighth decade; William Maxwell, age 91, rereading War and Peace in the final months of his life; I.F. Stone learning Greek in his seventies. The old woman I know at school is modeled along these lines – lucid, cool, unresigned to entropy.
In his first book, The Optimist (2004), Mehigan dedicates “Introduction to Poetry” to Bowers. It describes a brief, late-blooming friendship pleasing to both “the young man and the great and dying man.” Even the oak boughs are “bowed with the habitual tact of age.” Here’s a heartbreaking passage, but please read the entire poem:
“Young man delivers his imperfect part
to old man, who must also hear the sound
of his own shoes on a back road at dusk,
the involuntary interest in the new
cells in his blood carrying his mind past dusk.”
Thursday, September 10, 2009
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 10
The 10th installment of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, by Nigel Beale of Nota Bene Books, is posted at A Commonplace Blog.
`Earnests of Youth Renewed'
In the staff room at lunch I’m the invisible man and mostly I like it that way. As a 56-year-old substitute para-educator I’m triply alien. Some of the regular teachers are half my age or younger. They come to eat and to socialize and flirt with colleagues, and to complain about students. All of that is commendable. I’m there for lunch but mostly to read and leave the din behind for 30 minutes. My lunch companion was The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited 40 years ago by the late Thom Gunn, and I’ve owned it for most of those 40 years.
The staff room was filling. A female teacher, a veritable crone of 40, excused herself and asked if she could share my table. She was chatty and each course of her lunch was sealed in separate Tupperware. She packed a cloth napkin. Eventually she asked, “So, what are you reading? Anything good?” I showed her the cover and said he was an English poet born 10 years before Shakespeare. “Do you always read paperbacks?” she asked. Hoping she wasn’t an English teacher, I said, well, no, it depends. It was a book I had owned for a long time by a writer I loved, and it carried many memories which added to its preciousness, despite merely being a beaten-up paperback.
Jan Morris, the English historian and travel writer, published in 1989 a curious book devoted to her favorite things, Pleasures of a Tangled Life. In the chapter “On Books,” she describes her love of book smells (“Sometimes I take them down from their shelves just for a sniff…”) and the sense of intimacy she feels with books that have grown older with her:
“Not that this is a melancholy feeling. One can hardly be melancholy in a library of one’s own. The sensation that [H.L. Mencken’s] The American Language and I are growing old together strikes me as touchingly enjoyable, while the brand-new, cocksure volumes which appear each week bar-coded on my shelves are like earnests of youth renewed.”
I feel no melancholy in the company of my Greville, the Holy Bible (the RSV given to me in 1960), Moby-Dick, Collected Stories of Isaac Babel and Ulysses – all of which have been in my library for at least 37 years. On the contrary, I feel reassured, like a sick child who’s told everything will be just fine. At home, I had an e-mail from a reader who splits his time between New York City and the Hill Country of Texas. He writes:
“Would Chekhov be an autumnal writer? I've been reading Rayfield's biography, Karlinsky’s epistolary vehicle and the Penguin life in letters published earlier this decade (claims to be the first edition of uncensored letters). I read the bio and then read up to that point in the letters. We've just moved to Moscow in preparation for medical school. His first two decades astounded me. For someone later to be described as the freest man in the world, he had many chains to break.”
I love “We’ve just moved to Moscow…” The oldest Chekhov in my library – the volume I’ve owned the longest – is The Selected Letters of Anthon Chekhov, edited by the odious Lillian Hellman, and acquired by me in 1975. I find that I own 43 books by or about the Russian, including the three my reader mentions.
The staff room was filling. A female teacher, a veritable crone of 40, excused herself and asked if she could share my table. She was chatty and each course of her lunch was sealed in separate Tupperware. She packed a cloth napkin. Eventually she asked, “So, what are you reading? Anything good?” I showed her the cover and said he was an English poet born 10 years before Shakespeare. “Do you always read paperbacks?” she asked. Hoping she wasn’t an English teacher, I said, well, no, it depends. It was a book I had owned for a long time by a writer I loved, and it carried many memories which added to its preciousness, despite merely being a beaten-up paperback.
Jan Morris, the English historian and travel writer, published in 1989 a curious book devoted to her favorite things, Pleasures of a Tangled Life. In the chapter “On Books,” she describes her love of book smells (“Sometimes I take them down from their shelves just for a sniff…”) and the sense of intimacy she feels with books that have grown older with her:
“Not that this is a melancholy feeling. One can hardly be melancholy in a library of one’s own. The sensation that [H.L. Mencken’s] The American Language and I are growing old together strikes me as touchingly enjoyable, while the brand-new, cocksure volumes which appear each week bar-coded on my shelves are like earnests of youth renewed.”
I feel no melancholy in the company of my Greville, the Holy Bible (the RSV given to me in 1960), Moby-Dick, Collected Stories of Isaac Babel and Ulysses – all of which have been in my library for at least 37 years. On the contrary, I feel reassured, like a sick child who’s told everything will be just fine. At home, I had an e-mail from a reader who splits his time between New York City and the Hill Country of Texas. He writes:
“Would Chekhov be an autumnal writer? I've been reading Rayfield's biography, Karlinsky’s epistolary vehicle and the Penguin life in letters published earlier this decade (claims to be the first edition of uncensored letters). I read the bio and then read up to that point in the letters. We've just moved to Moscow in preparation for medical school. His first two decades astounded me. For someone later to be described as the freest man in the world, he had many chains to break.”
I love “We’ve just moved to Moscow…” The oldest Chekhov in my library – the volume I’ve owned the longest – is The Selected Letters of Anthon Chekhov, edited by the odious Lillian Hellman, and acquired by me in 1975. I find that I own 43 books by or about the Russian, including the three my reader mentions.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 9
by Ron Slate
On the Seawall
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
Conversations in coffee houses, cafeterias, cafes. Lectures and talks at churches, community centers, meetings of civic groups, book clubs, local colleges and schools. Partisan or avid book commentary in little magazines. Courtroom and governmental testimony on banned books.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
A broad range of critics and essayists. A few names as examples: John Berger, Randall Jarrell, Walter Kaufmann, Eliot Weinberger, L.E. Sissman, V.S. Pritchett.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
Book blogging is more various in its objectives and interests, and includes book reviewing. It tends to be more reflective, conversational, and often ephemeral or vaporous. Blogging usually involves or interacts with its audience, its online community, and frequently reflects or promotes specific values or shared identities.
How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
Blogging is a, or is meant to trigger, social action, thus antithetical to the passion of the solitary hobbyist. I played senior league hockey until my 53rd birthday. Blogging is like hockey in its social aspects.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
The experience of blogging has changed the way I blog, but has had no effect on my poetry or fiction.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
Auden said a critic must differentiate between taste and judgment: I can know something is trash and still have a taste for it, and I can know something is well-made and not have a taste for it. Generally, attacks are perpetrated by nitwits who can’t tell the difference or who haven’t had a good breakfast.
Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?
Fame isn’t the gauge of anything occurring in the present moment. Blogs, like little magazines, come and go. William Logan says we live in the age of tin. Maybe he’s got something there.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
Malone’s comment seems to pertain more to political or entertainment bloggers than to book bloggers. The audience for literary blogging is very small compared to that for politics. On the other hand, I think his point about attracting and keeping readers is self-evident.
Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?
There are literary bloggers like Philip Metres (http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/) who are both committed to a political point of view and write extremely well. So he doesn’t “include” political commentary; his politics are fully integrated with his literary consciousness.
On the Seawall
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
Conversations in coffee houses, cafeterias, cafes. Lectures and talks at churches, community centers, meetings of civic groups, book clubs, local colleges and schools. Partisan or avid book commentary in little magazines. Courtroom and governmental testimony on banned books.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
A broad range of critics and essayists. A few names as examples: John Berger, Randall Jarrell, Walter Kaufmann, Eliot Weinberger, L.E. Sissman, V.S. Pritchett.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
Book blogging is more various in its objectives and interests, and includes book reviewing. It tends to be more reflective, conversational, and often ephemeral or vaporous. Blogging usually involves or interacts with its audience, its online community, and frequently reflects or promotes specific values or shared identities.
How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
Blogging is a, or is meant to trigger, social action, thus antithetical to the passion of the solitary hobbyist. I played senior league hockey until my 53rd birthday. Blogging is like hockey in its social aspects.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
The experience of blogging has changed the way I blog, but has had no effect on my poetry or fiction.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
Auden said a critic must differentiate between taste and judgment: I can know something is trash and still have a taste for it, and I can know something is well-made and not have a taste for it. Generally, attacks are perpetrated by nitwits who can’t tell the difference or who haven’t had a good breakfast.
Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?
Fame isn’t the gauge of anything occurring in the present moment. Blogs, like little magazines, come and go. William Logan says we live in the age of tin. Maybe he’s got something there.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
Malone’s comment seems to pertain more to political or entertainment bloggers than to book bloggers. The audience for literary blogging is very small compared to that for politics. On the other hand, I think his point about attracting and keeping readers is self-evident.
Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?
There are literary bloggers like Philip Metres (http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com/) who are both committed to a political point of view and write extremely well. So he doesn’t “include” political commentary; his politics are fully integrated with his literary consciousness.
`Crepuscular Half-Being'
In The Age of Wonders, in the chapter devoted to William Herschel, the self-taught astronomer and telescope builder who discovered the planet Uranus, Richard Holmes devotes a lengthy footnote to Coleridge’s fascination with the moon. He cites “To the Autumnal Moon” (a sonnet written when the poet was 16), “Frost at Midnight,” “Dejection” and “Limbo.” From the last poem he quotes:
“He gazes still -- his eyeless face all eye –
As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light !”
“Limbo” dramatizes a transmuted version of Coleridge as a blind (“a statue hath such eyes”) old man in a garden at night. Holmes says “he can still sense the moonlight pouring down on him like a benediction.” The great biographer of Coleridge says of the three quoted lines:
“These seem to me three of the most mysterious, moonstruck lines that Coleridge ever wrote. Perhaps he was imagining himself transformed into a sort of human telescope.”
One of Holmes’ accomplishments in the new book is his easy command of both the science and literature of the Romantic Era in England and the rest of Europe. It helps, of course, that the poets and chemists of the day often knew and admired each other, and that Coleridge performed chemistry experiments and the chemist Humphry Davy wrote poetry (admittedly, bad poetry). Specialization in the modern sense was blessedly unknown. Most impressive is Holmes’ placement of “Limbo” in the context of astronomy, elucidating the poem without diluting its mysteriousness.
“Limbo” is rooted in the poet’s drug-tormented life. He wrote while exiled to Hammersmith in 1811. In Dark Reflections (1998), the second volume of his Coleridge biography, Holmes writes:
“…sometimes those summer nights seemed endless, a purgatorial place of continuous twilight, in which his whole life seemed suspended outside time. He turned for consolation to his old friend the Moon, and it was now he began one of his most haunting and enigmatic of all his later poems, which he eventually entitled `Limbo’.”
The poem begins with the wraith-like spirits of Time and Space – conventional figures in Limbo -- “not a Place, / Yet name it so” – but Holmes notes “they also carry a metaphysical weight, being the two Kantian categories by which the human mind normally structures reality.” In “Limbo,” as in much of Coleridge’s best work, the terrible and sublime coexist, a Gothic balance rooted in his Herculean consumption of laudanum, an alcohol-and-opium-derivative cocktail. The travails of narcotic addiction and withdrawal include sleeplessness, hallucinations, anxiety and depression. Limbo is an apt metaphor for a life lived in the region between euphoria and misery. In Coleridge’s schema, Time and Space, “Fettered from flight, with nightmare sense of fleeing, / Strive for their last crepuscular half-being.”
The final phrase recalls the later fiction of Samuel Beckett and its desolate, limbo landscapes. In The Lost Ones, Beckett describes a dim, cylindrical world 16 meters high and 16 in diameter. It inhabitants sit “for the most part against the wall in the attitude which wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles.”
“He gazes still -- his eyeless face all eye –
As 'twere an organ full of silent sight,
His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light !”
“Limbo” dramatizes a transmuted version of Coleridge as a blind (“a statue hath such eyes”) old man in a garden at night. Holmes says “he can still sense the moonlight pouring down on him like a benediction.” The great biographer of Coleridge says of the three quoted lines:
“These seem to me three of the most mysterious, moonstruck lines that Coleridge ever wrote. Perhaps he was imagining himself transformed into a sort of human telescope.”
One of Holmes’ accomplishments in the new book is his easy command of both the science and literature of the Romantic Era in England and the rest of Europe. It helps, of course, that the poets and chemists of the day often knew and admired each other, and that Coleridge performed chemistry experiments and the chemist Humphry Davy wrote poetry (admittedly, bad poetry). Specialization in the modern sense was blessedly unknown. Most impressive is Holmes’ placement of “Limbo” in the context of astronomy, elucidating the poem without diluting its mysteriousness.
“Limbo” is rooted in the poet’s drug-tormented life. He wrote while exiled to Hammersmith in 1811. In Dark Reflections (1998), the second volume of his Coleridge biography, Holmes writes:
“…sometimes those summer nights seemed endless, a purgatorial place of continuous twilight, in which his whole life seemed suspended outside time. He turned for consolation to his old friend the Moon, and it was now he began one of his most haunting and enigmatic of all his later poems, which he eventually entitled `Limbo’.”
The poem begins with the wraith-like spirits of Time and Space – conventional figures in Limbo -- “not a Place, / Yet name it so” – but Holmes notes “they also carry a metaphysical weight, being the two Kantian categories by which the human mind normally structures reality.” In “Limbo,” as in much of Coleridge’s best work, the terrible and sublime coexist, a Gothic balance rooted in his Herculean consumption of laudanum, an alcohol-and-opium-derivative cocktail. The travails of narcotic addiction and withdrawal include sleeplessness, hallucinations, anxiety and depression. Limbo is an apt metaphor for a life lived in the region between euphoria and misery. In Coleridge’s schema, Time and Space, “Fettered from flight, with nightmare sense of fleeing, / Strive for their last crepuscular half-being.”
The final phrase recalls the later fiction of Samuel Beckett and its desolate, limbo landscapes. In The Lost Ones, Beckett describes a dim, cylindrical world 16 meters high and 16 in diameter. It inhabitants sit “for the most part against the wall in the attitude which wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles.”
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 8
The eighth installment of The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, by Brad Bigelow of The Neglected Books Page, is posted at A Commonplace Blog.
`Learned Amateurs'
In his prologue to The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes, after describing a disappointing chemistry class at age 14, tells us approvingly that “years later I learned the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in Verba -- `Nothing upon Another’s Word.’” The Society’s web site translates Horace’s Latin more colloquially as “Take nobody’s word for it,” and elsewhere I’ve seen “On the words of no one” and “Nothing in words.” In other words, trust experimentation, not authority.
To American ears this resonates with Missouri’s unofficial nickname as proclaimed on its license plates: the “Show Me State.” In my private mythology, that echoes with the voices of native sons Mark Twain and Harry Truman. According to the Missouri Secretary of State’s Office it suggests “the stalwart, conservative, noncredulous character of Missourians” -- admirable qualities all.
Seasoned readers will recognize the pleasing sensation of learning a new name or phrase only to soon see it again in another text. This happened over the weekend while I was reading Henry Hitchings’ entertainingly digressive The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). In his ninth chapter, “Onslaught,” dedicated to the seventeenth century and the growth of modern science, Hitchings writes:
“The scope of English as a scientific language was topical. The founding of the Royal Society in 1660 created an institutional standard for scientific writing. Its motto, `Nullius in verba’ (literally, `On the words of no one’), was a necessary defence against verbal wranglings of sectarianism, but it highlighted a philosophical creed that put actions before words: experiments counted for more than theories.”
This too sounds quintessentially American, rooted in old-fashioned folk distrust of experts and authorities, bureaucrats and politicians: “Show me.” Hitchings goes on to relate the Royal Society’s motto to its taste in prose:
“Where prose was needed, it was to be lean. The stylistic economy preached by the Society’s historian, Thomas Sprat, was the antithesis of the sort of learned amateurism practiced by Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne. (Sprat, like his nursery rhyme namesake, could take no fat; Browne no lean.) Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy affords first sightings of meteorologist, feral, hirsute and literati, while the colourful Browne, who had studied at Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, was a prolific coiner of new words, responsible for electricity, therapeutic and literary as well as for the altogether more odd-looking but self-explanatory retrocopulation and masculo-feminine.”
I like the sound of “learned amateurs,” intrepid autodidacts. It describes the better class of independent bloggers, those who live by Nullius in Verba.
To American ears this resonates with Missouri’s unofficial nickname as proclaimed on its license plates: the “Show Me State.” In my private mythology, that echoes with the voices of native sons Mark Twain and Harry Truman. According to the Missouri Secretary of State’s Office it suggests “the stalwart, conservative, noncredulous character of Missourians” -- admirable qualities all.
Seasoned readers will recognize the pleasing sensation of learning a new name or phrase only to soon see it again in another text. This happened over the weekend while I was reading Henry Hitchings’ entertainingly digressive The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). In his ninth chapter, “Onslaught,” dedicated to the seventeenth century and the growth of modern science, Hitchings writes:
“The scope of English as a scientific language was topical. The founding of the Royal Society in 1660 created an institutional standard for scientific writing. Its motto, `Nullius in verba’ (literally, `On the words of no one’), was a necessary defence against verbal wranglings of sectarianism, but it highlighted a philosophical creed that put actions before words: experiments counted for more than theories.”
This too sounds quintessentially American, rooted in old-fashioned folk distrust of experts and authorities, bureaucrats and politicians: “Show me.” Hitchings goes on to relate the Royal Society’s motto to its taste in prose:
“Where prose was needed, it was to be lean. The stylistic economy preached by the Society’s historian, Thomas Sprat, was the antithesis of the sort of learned amateurism practiced by Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne. (Sprat, like his nursery rhyme namesake, could take no fat; Browne no lean.) Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy affords first sightings of meteorologist, feral, hirsute and literati, while the colourful Browne, who had studied at Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, was a prolific coiner of new words, responsible for electricity, therapeutic and literary as well as for the altogether more odd-looking but self-explanatory retrocopulation and masculo-feminine.”
I like the sound of “learned amateurs,” intrepid autodidacts. It describes the better class of independent bloggers, those who live by Nullius in Verba.
Monday, September 07, 2009
`Selected Poems'
My review of Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems has been published in issue 17 of The Quarterly Conversation.
The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, 7
by Terry Teachout
About Last Night
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
Diaries, letters, commonplace books, periodical essays. I think of blogging as introspection made public.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
No one. I’ve been blogging for six years—much longer than most artbloggers—and it stands to reason that I should have a pretty clear idea by now of what I want to do and how I want to do it.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
For me, the only difference (other than the absence of a paycheck) is brevity and the constraints it imposes. I write the same way everywhere.
How do you respond to this statement?—Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
It depends on how you blog—and how you define “hobby.” I’d say it’s more like painting for pleasure, or playing chamber music in the home. If you think those are hobbies, then so is book blogging.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
I think it’s probably reinforced my tendency to write in a conversational style—but, then, I’ve always tried to write the way I talk.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?—the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
To blog is to become a public figure. Ad hominem attacks go with the territory. If you can’t stand the flames, log off.
Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?
Er, who are all those “famous” book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have “earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not,” because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers “to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better.” Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
I think this is true, but I also think it’s irrelevant to book blogging, for the reasons specified above. No book blogger will ever earn a huge audience, unless he limits himself to commentary on the novels of Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling.
Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?
It depends on whether you identify wisdom with traffic. I’m much less likely to pay attention to any critic of the arts who sees the world through politics-colored glasses—whatever their shade—but I suspect that the average reader feels differently.
About Last Night
What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?
Diaries, letters, commonplace books, periodical essays. I think of blogging as introspection made public.
Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?
No one. I’ve been blogging for six years—much longer than most artbloggers—and it stands to reason that I should have a pretty clear idea by now of what I want to do and how I want to do it.
How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?
For me, the only difference (other than the absence of a paycheck) is brevity and the constraints it imposes. I write the same way everywhere.
How do you respond to this statement?—Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.
It depends on how you blog—and how you define “hobby.” I’d say it’s more like painting for pleasure, or playing chamber music in the home. If you think those are hobbies, then so is book blogging.
How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?
I think it’s probably reinforced my tendency to write in a conversational style—but, then, I’ve always tried to write the way I talk.
What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?—the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.
To blog is to become a public figure. Ad hominem attacks go with the territory. If you can’t stand the flames, log off.
Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?
Er, who are all those “famous” book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.
In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have “earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not,” because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers “to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better.” Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?
I think this is true, but I also think it’s irrelevant to book blogging, for the reasons specified above. No book blogger will ever earn a huge audience, unless he limits himself to commentary on the novels of Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling.
Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?
It depends on whether you identify wisdom with traffic. I’m much less likely to pay attention to any critic of the arts who sees the world through politics-colored glasses—whatever their shade—but I suspect that the average reader feels differently.
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