The Critical Flame | January-February 2012

Daniel E. Pritchard on James Baldwin's The Cross of Redemption 
"The Cross of Redemption is not a starting point. If you have not read James Baldwin already, I urge you to procure a copy of Notes of a Native Son and Go Tell it on the Mountain. They are canonical American texts. Stop what you're doing. Read them, right now."

Henry Gould on Ben Mazer and John Beer 
"Ben Mazer and John Beer reveal a substantial debt to Ashbery — combined with the influence of an earlier poet, lurking behind both as he does behind Ashbery: that is, yes, Eliot, old Possum himself."

Katherine Evans Pritchard on David Szalay's Spring 
"Szalay's great achievement in Spring is his portrayal of the awkward, reticent, regretful, silent moments of human relationships. As Katherine and her estranged husband part ways, Szalay is able to express the sense of loss and emptiness in his portrayal of the very silence between them"

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Speechless: Beckett's Trilogy

My wife has a cool job, and because of her job I was at a dinner where I had the chance to hear critic Christopher Ricks and poet J Allyn Rosser debate Beckett's trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Of course then I had to go read them, and got the nice Grove Press volume for Christmas. My friend the poet and editor Stephen Sturgeon holds the same view of Beckett criticism as Derrida; namely, that almost all criticism of Beckett, and particularly of The Trilogy, is woefully insufficient. Certainly this blog post isn't going to fill that void.

I still have 75 pages of The Unnamable to finish. The Trilogy begs for a response though, and I want to write up my thoughts now, in case I lose them or I don't ever finish (it's possible). Enjoy, or don't enjoy, hate even, as you will. In the third book, the unnamed speaker says:

All these Murphys, Malloys, and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone… I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it.

This cannot be read except as being written in the authorial voice, or at least as being intentionally formulated as the authorial voice. Critics are very good at finding the echo of Beckett's life in his writing—the death of his mother, his depression, etc. This third volume appears to be a blending of direct autobiographical confession with fictional pretense, revising the meaning and interpretation of the first two volumes fairly drastically. These novels are not hermetic. They are contiguous with the author and the world. Are they even novels in that case?

Beckett obsessed / struggled with the idea of language constructing the self—here, Beckett appears to have formulated a process of grief within the confines of that paradigm of language-constructed identity.

The speech he wants to silence is pain. Perhaps it is memory—each central character in the Trilogy seems to combat their own memories. No matter what the cause might be (his mother's death is often cited). He writes that he should have been talking about "me alone", as in his own solitude rather than of just himself and not others; but silence seems to require witness as well, objectification through speech-construction. Beckett desires the silence of pain, but only speech can transform his grief. He is groping blindly for the correct formulation. We see the same formulation in Molloy, where Moran is sent out to seek Molloy. He's not sure what will happen, not sure of Molloy's description, not sure that the mission is real, and ultimately frustrated.

Beckett seems to use frustration—uncertainty in speech—to formulate silence. Beckett once said, “All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence.” What is unsaid but implied, and essentially unknowable, is as close to an actual form of silence as one can produce in literature. But in the passage above we see the author frustrated. The proxies aren't enough. The silence he makes in their works is not enough. And I have a feeling that the rest of The Unnamable ultimately won't be enough either, but we'll see about that.

Damn the Man: Fotoshop, by Adobé

"Living" at $7 / Hour

Faulkner's Hot Toddy Recipe

“Pappy”

Take one heavy glass tumbler. Fill approximately half full with Heaven Hill bourbon (the Jack Daniel’s was reserved for Pappy’s ailments).

Add one tablespoon of sugar. Squeeze 1/2 lemon and drop into glass. Stir until sugar dissolves. Fill glass with boiling water. Serve with potholder to protect patient’s hands from the hot glass.

Pappy always made a small ceremony out of serving his Hot Toddy, bringing it upstairs on a silver tray and admonishing his patient to drink it quickly, before it cooled off. It never failed.


(Courtesy of Maud Newton)

Reviving the Wampanoag Language

A very cool Boston Review interview with documentary filmmaker Anne Makepeace on her new film about the revivial of the Wampanoag language:

Jessie told me recently that she discovered that the word used to translate graves, as in graves where coffins go, literally translates as ‘the place that enables you to travel.’ I just thought that was astonishing. And for example, the word for hell, and those Wampanoag translating the Bible into Wampanoag would be scratching their heads because they didn’t have a concept for hell. “How can we create a word that describes it?” And the word that they did create literally translates as “the house of people with empty heads,” because the Wampanoag believed that the soul resided in the head. What could be more hellish than a house full of soulless people? One of these revelations that’s in the film is the word for “to lose your land,” nupanasham, which literally means “to fall down off your feet.”

Defending the Bookstore: Knockout Blow

You should be reading Scott Esposito's blog Conversational Reading. He's been on fire pointing out great authors and stories about the literary world. But right now I'd like to direct you to Chad Post's defense of the bookstore against a recent Slate article by Farhad Manjoo that, as Chad writes, “has seemingly pissed off everyone I know.”

Manjoo essentially believes that brick-and-mortar stores are inefficient and, therefore, not worth the effort of saving. I disagree. You're undoubtedly shocked to hear that. It's more than just the unquantifiably important element of culture-building. The benefit of Amazon's discount pricing is also not at all clear. I don't think Amazon saves most consumers any money. Let's use an example to compare.

I'd like to buy Nobel Prize–winner Tomas Transtromer's The Great Enigma (New Directions). The list price, the price I would pay in most bookstores, is $17.95. Amazon offers a discount of 32%, listing the book at $12.21. Now I have to pay shipping. Part and parcel of online shopping. I want the book as soon as I can get it (we're talking efficiency here). The earliest I can receive this book from Amazon is two days, a wait of two days longer than walking into my local bookstore. Surely, you'll say, the savings are still worth the wait. (Don't call me Shirley.) For the privilege of waiting those two extra days, I pay $17.98 in shipping, which brings the total to $30.19 at Amazon.

At The Harvard Bookstore, alternately, the book just costs $17.95 if I go pick it up today. Shipping is optional. But let's look at delivery options, to be fair. The Harvard Bookstore will deliver any book that's in stock to my house the very same day for $5.00, or send it by mail (1-2 days) for $3.50. If the book isn't in stock, the store will order it to arrive the next day for free. That brings my total to $22.95 at most, with shipping, at the “inefficient” brick-and-mortar store.

So I get the book more quickly and more cheaply from my local bookstore than from Amazon. Where is all that much-touted efficiency? Real-live community, literary events, in-person recommendations, and the bookstore saved me $7.24 plus 1-2 days of waiting. Manjoo's argument gets a whammy.

Sorry Farhad!

Empathy, Mediocrity, and Race

At The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to a recent piece at Forbes in which the author claims that, given the burdens of poverty and racism, they would have gotten out. Coates sort of shakes his head at the guy:

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this — You are not extraordinary. It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't and then ask “Why?”

This isn't limited to race, though it may be the most imposing barrier to understanding. The need for heroic empathy extends to all facets of life. It takes no amount of character to demonize the poor, the sick, the unlucky, and dismiss them out of hand by declaring I would have done better. If you can so easily pass judgement, it's a sign that you do not understand.

We are not so different from each other. People fear and judge alike, are propped up or undone by chance, believe things that others say of them, misunderstand themselves, run short of energy or will. People do all they can to succeed and have is snatched away from them; for some there are more opportunities to come, for others there are not, and that is the gamble of being born.

Those who hastily dismiss these truths want control, which is human too. Not just free will. They want to tic the boxes, fill the requirements, work hard and sacrifice, and be rewarded. Feel that recompense is fair and right, and convince themselves that it's also the truth. Refuse to admit. Prefer not to.

Amazon and the Economics of National Failure

At The Atlantic, yet another account of Amazon's insides. It's not pretty. This sort of thing is standard practice across all industries though. It's the devaluation of the American economy. They cut costs by cutting worker pay to offer lower prices and increase profit margins and, particularly, market share. In reality though, companies are creating their own worst competition in the form of downward pricing pressures by firing workers and cutting worker pay, thus lowering consumer demand. We're in a downward spiral, and here's how on Seattle Amazon worker explains it:

In Nevada, warehouse workers were getting $5.15 an hour and people had to work 12-hour shifts, five days a week. Mandated overtime pay didn't start until after 40 hours of a workweek. So when production lulled people were sent home or told not to come in the following day to shave costs. These were the new models. This was the future. 

Shaving overtime by sending people home mid-shift, or giving them "the next few days off," was the practice in Seattle too, but in Nevada there was no velvet glove, no nod to personal identity. Workers there were herded through long security lines and body searched on their way in and out before they could clock in. The ventilation was terrible and they got fired for the slightest complaint-at least these were the reports. 

Some managers who had been sent out to these warehouses and had expressed concerns were fired. So were the managers who cast doubt on Bezos' plan for mechanization. A few of them wrote a heartfelt letter to Jeff one night, and that was the end. 

Everywhere we saw the movement of a new plan, something I was told Bezos and his upper echelon developed sequestered away in a wooded camp. Bezos apparently had a weakness for coded project names and, according to several of the longtime workers this one was originally, "Project Fargo." But some of Bezos' closest team had seen problems and voiced them. They, too, were fired.

When in doubt, eliminate anyone with a conscience. Consumer demand is the problem today, and it's not being addressed in the private sector at all. You just cannot increase consumer demand by lowering consumer wages and firing people.

Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson

Happy Birthday today to Emily Dickinson. One of my favorite poets, a radical Christian skeptic who converted church hymns to devastating, introspective poems. 

The Boston Police cleared out Dewey Square last night (no injuries reported, 46 arrested) putting the movement on the verge of something major—dissipation or metamorphosis—whether they're ready or not. In the revolutionary era, people of all classes came together for regular general assemblies at the Old South Meeting House. These meetings built a diverse community around an idea. The occupations created a similar community, across class and ideology, and the strength of community is what makes OWS formidable. Can it thrive without the camps? With the physical spaces removed, can the citizenry still regain control of this democracy?

My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me  

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Why I like poet John Kinsella

The Guardian reports:

TS Eliot himself worked for Lloyds Bank, but John Kinsella has now become the second poet to withdraw from the prize set up in Eliot’s name in protest at its sponsorship by an investment firm.

Kinsella, winner of a host of poetry awards in his native Australia and author of more than 30 books, said this morning that he supported the British poet Alice Oswald in her decision to pull out of the TS Eliot prize over its newly-brokered sponsorship by investment management firm Aurum Funds. He has informed the Poetry Book Society, which administers the prize, that he is withdrawing his collection Armour from the running for the £15,000 award.

“I am grateful to Alice Oswald for bringing the sponsorship of the TS Eliot Prize to my attention,” said Kinsella in a statement released by his publisher. “I regret that I must do this at a particularly difficult time for the Poetry Book Society but the business of Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics. I am grateful to everyone at the PBS for all they have done to promote my work and that of poetry in general.”