Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Welcome Back
Hope you all had a good weekend. I'd like to remind you of an event this week: A round table discussion on the state of poetry and its criticism with Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, Maureen N. McLane, and Robert N. Casper, at the Thompson Room, Barker Center, Harvard University, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge (Red Line: Harvard Square). Should be a good one.
Also, have you seen the new nifty Wooden Spoon Google Calendar of events?
* At The Poetry Foundation, Matthew Zapruder writes on the current state of criticism (or, really, critical reviews): 'Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader.' Really one of the best essays I've seen on this issue yet.
* Thanks to Scott for letting us know that the Spring issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction will be Georges Perec–themed: some much-needed critical attention on an outstanding author.
Also, have you seen the new nifty Wooden Spoon Google Calendar of events?
* At The Poetry Foundation, Matthew Zapruder writes on the current state of criticism (or, really, critical reviews): 'Critics can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to insist that something is good, or bad, and rely on the force of personality or reputation to convince people. The second is to write, with focus and clarity, about how the piece of art works, what choices the artist has made, and how that might affect a reader.' Really one of the best essays I've seen on this issue yet.
* Thanks to Scott for letting us know that the Spring issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction will be Georges Perec–themed: some much-needed critical attention on an outstanding author.
Friday, March 27, 2009
The End, Beautiful Friends (comic meditation in 3 parts)
* It was standing (and floor-sitting) room only for last night's Paul Muldoon reading at Suffolk University here in downtown Boston. They have a beautiful but under-sized facility in their unassuming library building for such events, and the room's capacity could have been awkward or frustrating — Muldoon, though, holds a master's degree in disarmament. With the mic hooked to his collar and his birds-nest of dark gray nettled hair, he wandered from the podium at will, leaning resignedly against the wall to read (striking a figure like a mis-shapen Donald Sutherland biting the apple in Animal House) and chattering with the audience that literally surrounded him. He even through a few finger guns out there, to my great amusement. He read the poem 'Anseo', which I enjoyed quite a bit, along with several light comic 'near-nonsense' pieces. It was the most entertaining readings I've attended in ages, and a much needed evening of relief from what has been a difficult week.
Muldoon has a great sense of comedic control and purpose, which is its own special talent in either verse or prose. Even in his more sombre-themed work, there is a slight absurdist tension in the end-rhymes or the form, or sometimes in an element as imperceptibly constructed as the poem's tone. It's like a ginger rub on meat — a tartness that can be sickening if overdone, but, balanced just right, enhances the other flavors.
* My beautiful friends, Travis Nichols at Harriet wants to know: is this the end? Of poetry, mind you, not le existence. The NEA reports, apparently, 'In 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months . . . . That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years.' Not a shock, not to me at least. In a small but telling sample, most interns at Godine are poetry morons (as one intern put it); of course, it isn't necessarily their fault — they've never been taught contemporary poetry; some not at all, some without any real intellectual vigour.
Nichols asks, 'Is it because contemporary poetry is exceptionally bad? Is it because advocacy organizations aren't doing their jobs? Is it because critics aren't doing theirs? Is it because the public just doesn't get it? Is it because teachers haven't read their Kenneth Koch?' He does not, however, ask the question that I feel strongly is at the heart of this trend: are today's teachers teaching poetry? Why do students read 1/10th the amount of poetry than they do prose? Why do they read so little contemporary poetry? Our interns ( rather horrifyingly, and not to pick on them but it's most on my mind) come from many different schools and regions, and often have never even read Famous Seamus, or Ashbery, or Collins, never mind the likes of Geoffrey Hill.
Why aren't we reading poetry today? Well, first: people are unaccustomed to poetry; they aren't taught enough poetry in school to feel comfortable grappling with it on their own. Second, and more importantly I think, it's ok to specifically not read poetry, to ignore it, to flat-out say 'I don't get it' or 'I'm not a poetry person', regardless of how 'literary' the person claims to otherwise be. It's flagrant ignorance, petulant stupidity — it's ignorance or laziness masked as preference, and it continues to be acceptable, even increasingly so.
* The Beautiful Girl and I boarded the B-Line of the MBTA today as we do each morning. We're far enough out on the line that seats are readily available and everyone boards the front door of the train — at busier stops they open all the doors, and monthly pas holders can enter through the rear (I've even penned an r&b lyric based on the morning T announcements: 'cash fairs in the front, baby; passes in the rear — nuh-nah, nuh-nah'). We sat in the middle of the train, between an older woman with a cold and a bald MBTA official who was chatting with two other riders. I was tired, she was tired. We contemplated another week in the books.
When we pulled into Washington Street, the first really busy stop, many people entered through the rear (nuh-nah, nuh-nah) as usual, following the driver's instructions to do so if you have a monthly pass. The T official got up, as we expected, but then so did the two other people in jeans and sweatshirts — who were both apparently undercover MBTA police, complete with Die Hard-esq badass badge-necklaces! The three then began inspecting people's Charlie Cards and tickets who boarded in the rear (nuh-nah, nuh-nah). One guy was busted, poor sad case, for a $15 appealable ticket, and tried to argue his way out of it. Which, as anyone in Mass will tell you, is a really excellent idea: nothing gets you on a cop's good side like arguing a citation. There is no possible way the T is making its money back on $15 citations while paying for two cops and an MBTA employee. Still, a word of warning: you better watch out, bad boys; Hill Street Blues: MBTA is live. Nuh-nah, nuh-nah.
Muldoon has a great sense of comedic control and purpose, which is its own special talent in either verse or prose. Even in his more sombre-themed work, there is a slight absurdist tension in the end-rhymes or the form, or sometimes in an element as imperceptibly constructed as the poem's tone. It's like a ginger rub on meat — a tartness that can be sickening if overdone, but, balanced just right, enhances the other flavors.
* My beautiful friends, Travis Nichols at Harriet wants to know: is this the end? Of poetry, mind you, not le existence. The NEA reports, apparently, 'In 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months . . . . That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years.' Not a shock, not to me at least. In a small but telling sample, most interns at Godine are poetry morons (as one intern put it); of course, it isn't necessarily their fault — they've never been taught contemporary poetry; some not at all, some without any real intellectual vigour.
Nichols asks, 'Is it because contemporary poetry is exceptionally bad? Is it because advocacy organizations aren't doing their jobs? Is it because critics aren't doing theirs? Is it because the public just doesn't get it? Is it because teachers haven't read their Kenneth Koch?' He does not, however, ask the question that I feel strongly is at the heart of this trend: are today's teachers teaching poetry? Why do students read 1/10th the amount of poetry than they do prose? Why do they read so little contemporary poetry? Our interns ( rather horrifyingly, and not to pick on them but it's most on my mind) come from many different schools and regions, and often have never even read Famous Seamus, or Ashbery, or Collins, never mind the likes of Geoffrey Hill.
Why aren't we reading poetry today? Well, first: people are unaccustomed to poetry; they aren't taught enough poetry in school to feel comfortable grappling with it on their own. Second, and more importantly I think, it's ok to specifically not read poetry, to ignore it, to flat-out say 'I don't get it' or 'I'm not a poetry person', regardless of how 'literary' the person claims to otherwise be. It's flagrant ignorance, petulant stupidity — it's ignorance or laziness masked as preference, and it continues to be acceptable, even increasingly so.
* The Beautiful Girl and I boarded the B-Line of the MBTA today as we do each morning. We're far enough out on the line that seats are readily available and everyone boards the front door of the train — at busier stops they open all the doors, and monthly pas holders can enter through the rear (I've even penned an r&b lyric based on the morning T announcements: 'cash fairs in the front, baby; passes in the rear — nuh-nah, nuh-nah'). We sat in the middle of the train, between an older woman with a cold and a bald MBTA official who was chatting with two other riders. I was tired, she was tired. We contemplated another week in the books.
When we pulled into Washington Street, the first really busy stop, many people entered through the rear (nuh-nah, nuh-nah) as usual, following the driver's instructions to do so if you have a monthly pass. The T official got up, as we expected, but then so did the two other people in jeans and sweatshirts — who were both apparently undercover MBTA police, complete with Die Hard-esq badass badge-necklaces! The three then began inspecting people's Charlie Cards and tickets who boarded in the rear (nuh-nah, nuh-nah). One guy was busted, poor sad case, for a $15 appealable ticket, and tried to argue his way out of it. Which, as anyone in Mass will tell you, is a really excellent idea: nothing gets you on a cop's good side like arguing a citation. There is no possible way the T is making its money back on $15 citations while paying for two cops and an MBTA employee. Still, a word of warning: you better watch out, bad boys; Hill Street Blues: MBTA is live. Nuh-nah, nuh-nah.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
The New Novel
Over at The Reading Experience, Dan Green does a good job laying out the New Novel project begun, in large part, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Dan writes, 'Robbe-Grillet believed himself to be a realist and his attempts at advancing a "new novel" an effort to preserve the possibility of realism in fiction against the insistence of some critics that the novel remain encased in its pre-modern form. "The discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms," Robbe Grillet writes. "Unless we suppose that the world is henceforth entirely discovered (and, in that case, the wisest thing would be to stop writing altogether), we can only attempt to go farther. It is not a question of 'doing better,' but of advancing in ways as yet unknown, in which a new kind of writing becomes necessary." This "new kind of writing" is necessary for realism's sake.'
It was a highly conceptualized project, one based more in certain ideas about the person and the modern world than the mundane realities of the way that people interact with the world at hand. Or with the text in codex format. In that way, the New Novel movement is a bit like Futurism: both asserted that they expressed a radical shift in humanity and the world that was irreperable. Both seemed to seek a Marxism-level world revolution, and each sputtered out or was absorbed. All of the tradition that existed before both movements persists; all that both Futurism and the New Novel attempted to overthrow has been certainly altered, but there's been no revolution.
I wonder about the efficacy of such attempts to enforce dubious epiphanies about art and literature. As I said, Green does well by Grillet, writing of his novel Jealousy that, 'The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer's determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.' This accurately portrays what the New Novel, as done by Grillet, was about (it seems to me): breaking down the traditional character / plot / point-of-view (not unlike some of Modernism) — and the work holds up, artistically and conceptually; or it holds up conceptually until Green's final assertion that the well-wrought and imagined scene is 'thus also wholly real.' There's a whopping logical leap there: it's no more or less real than the novel in its 'pre-modern form.'
The novel in both 'New' and 'pre-modern' forms remains no more real than words and images and shared meanings and the stretching of intelligibility and the passage of time conveyed by the completion of page after page by the reader. In certain respects, pride projects delusions and allows us to believe that the world has been made new and we, too, are new — like no other humans before us; but it's nothing more than pride. Like a case of the measels. And Grillet knew this himself, really — that what he was doing was as much out of boredom as it was for the sake of a concept: 'there is always something new.' I find that kind of disdain for one's self endearing. It was evident in many of the more interesting thinkers of the twentieth century, and, sadly, completely lacking in many of their accolytes.
It was a highly conceptualized project, one based more in certain ideas about the person and the modern world than the mundane realities of the way that people interact with the world at hand. Or with the text in codex format. In that way, the New Novel movement is a bit like Futurism: both asserted that they expressed a radical shift in humanity and the world that was irreperable. Both seemed to seek a Marxism-level world revolution, and each sputtered out or was absorbed. All of the tradition that existed before both movements persists; all that both Futurism and the New Novel attempted to overthrow has been certainly altered, but there's been no revolution.
I wonder about the efficacy of such attempts to enforce dubious epiphanies about art and literature. As I said, Green does well by Grillet, writing of his novel Jealousy that, 'The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer's determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.' This accurately portrays what the New Novel, as done by Grillet, was about (it seems to me): breaking down the traditional character / plot / point-of-view (not unlike some of Modernism) — and the work holds up, artistically and conceptually; or it holds up conceptually until Green's final assertion that the well-wrought and imagined scene is 'thus also wholly real.' There's a whopping logical leap there: it's no more or less real than the novel in its 'pre-modern form.'
The novel in both 'New' and 'pre-modern' forms remains no more real than words and images and shared meanings and the stretching of intelligibility and the passage of time conveyed by the completion of page after page by the reader. In certain respects, pride projects delusions and allows us to believe that the world has been made new and we, too, are new — like no other humans before us; but it's nothing more than pride. Like a case of the measels. And Grillet knew this himself, really — that what he was doing was as much out of boredom as it was for the sake of a concept: 'there is always something new.' I find that kind of disdain for one's self endearing. It was evident in many of the more interesting thinkers of the twentieth century, and, sadly, completely lacking in many of their accolytes.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Hoping to Fail?
CNN reports today that recently, Republican Governor Piyush "Bobby" Jindal argued that it is acceptable for his party members to desire — and, presumably, act in order to manifest — the failure of President Obama. His justification for this is the old tired rap that they 'will not kowtow to [the Democrat's political] correctness.' (I would add that they seem unable to kowtow to correctness of any sort — kidding, kidding.)
Now, I was never a supporter of the policies of George Bush and the religious right who were his political base. I felt that many of his anti-science, dissolution of church / state division, sexist, and unilateral actions were not only antithetical to the principles of the nation but were actually harmful; I argued against them, voted against them, and supported candidates who shared my views. However, I can legitimately say that also never wished GW Bush to fail.
Even in opposing the war in Iraq, my argument was that the case for war was built on mis-intelligence (still an issue for many Americans), and that nation-building was too risky an endeavor to engage. My one caveat was that, if we did enter a war with Iraq, we needed to be willing to do what was reasonably necessary to ensure not only that a democracy took root, but that it was a pro-American liberal democracy. If I was, in hindsight, wrong to oppose the war in Iraq, then I was wrong. Iraq has finally begun to see improvements in infastructure and national optimism, but whether they'll eventually fall under the curtain of Iran and begin funding terrorism is a matter for post-troop-removal (an issue on which I am not at all decided). I also remain concerned that Iran, Venezuela, China, and Russia, will point to our invasion as international justification to do the same: in fact, Russia did just that in Georgia.
There is, however, no rational way to hope the President fails without also hoping for harm to come to the nation. One might disagree with policies (as I certianly did, believing that they would fail to benefit the nation), but also hope that, if they do pass, they succeed in making the country safer, more free, with more opportunities — but to hope that President Obama's efforts to cure diseases such as cancer through stem-cell research fails is simply unconsciencable; similarly, to hope that his economic policies fail is to hope that the nation receeds further into depression. I wonder, what is the point of this public defense of flatly idiotic opinions?
Freedom of speech allows for us to make our case and speak our mind without the fear of government punishment or intervention; it does not mean that when something is said that is unacceptable, the community can not find exception with it. A hope the the President will fail is a hope seated not in the desire for our nation and society to become a better place for its citizens, but in the desire to be right beyond all else.
Now, I was never a supporter of the policies of George Bush and the religious right who were his political base. I felt that many of his anti-science, dissolution of church / state division, sexist, and unilateral actions were not only antithetical to the principles of the nation but were actually harmful; I argued against them, voted against them, and supported candidates who shared my views. However, I can legitimately say that also never wished GW Bush to fail.
Even in opposing the war in Iraq, my argument was that the case for war was built on mis-intelligence (still an issue for many Americans), and that nation-building was too risky an endeavor to engage. My one caveat was that, if we did enter a war with Iraq, we needed to be willing to do what was reasonably necessary to ensure not only that a democracy took root, but that it was a pro-American liberal democracy. If I was, in hindsight, wrong to oppose the war in Iraq, then I was wrong. Iraq has finally begun to see improvements in infastructure and national optimism, but whether they'll eventually fall under the curtain of Iran and begin funding terrorism is a matter for post-troop-removal (an issue on which I am not at all decided). I also remain concerned that Iran, Venezuela, China, and Russia, will point to our invasion as international justification to do the same: in fact, Russia did just that in Georgia.
There is, however, no rational way to hope the President fails without also hoping for harm to come to the nation. One might disagree with policies (as I certianly did, believing that they would fail to benefit the nation), but also hope that, if they do pass, they succeed in making the country safer, more free, with more opportunities — but to hope that President Obama's efforts to cure diseases such as cancer through stem-cell research fails is simply unconsciencable; similarly, to hope that his economic policies fail is to hope that the nation receeds further into depression. I wonder, what is the point of this public defense of flatly idiotic opinions?
Freedom of speech allows for us to make our case and speak our mind without the fear of government punishment or intervention; it does not mean that when something is said that is unacceptable, the community can not find exception with it. A hope the the President will fail is a hope seated not in the desire for our nation and society to become a better place for its citizens, but in the desire to be right beyond all else.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
On Web Advertising
Beneath the most recent post on my blog, you will find a banner ad placed by Google, matching this blog's content with advertisers' banners. Right now, it's pushing ForEx, an internet trading site, since the economy has come up several times in the last month here. Now, I've been a Google AdSense member for more than a year now, and over that year I have made $7.75 from the web ads on my blog. So that galla trip to Wendy's for me and TBG is just around the corner.
At TechCrunch, Eric Clemons writes about the problem of web advertising: 'Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them. Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.'
Clemons argues that instead of taking advice from the talking box, the boob tube, the billboard, the magazine ad, or the flashing image on the web banner, 'we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.' I think this is exactly right. Information used to come at a price — to know about a product, you had to buy it; spend your money and cross the Rubicon. Unless a friend could recommend it, or a rare product review appeared in some magazine, the only guide to most goods was advertising that conveyed product information and recommendations (specious or otherwise).
But the model couldn't last forever, and the internet in this respect did change everything. Information is freely available on nearly every product, though as always with varying degrees of veracity. Trust is built over time, slowly, and growth is relatively slow for most sites. There are not many trusted websites out there. The markets are also suddenly international. Where, before the web, companies and especially publications only had to compete locally or regionally to influence consumers, web-sites compete on a much larger scale: better and more regular content is required for any modicum of success in this environment. Shouting into the void will not influence customers' purchasing decisions any longer.
Although one-way advertising is mostly dead (I think in the case of events announcements it still works), everything that's done in blogs is a model for new advertising — I recommend an author or book, explaining why, giving examples; you might go out and buy the book because you trust my judgment. The information I delivered was instrumental in the purchase of a good, even though my recommendation is based not on financial benefit but on the quality of the writing. For established companies and publications, adapting to the internet and, really, surviving in the new economy will mean letting go of outdated truisms and making bold changes to the philosophy of product information dissemination.
At TechCrunch, Eric Clemons writes about the problem of web advertising: 'Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them. Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.'
Clemons argues that instead of taking advice from the talking box, the boob tube, the billboard, the magazine ad, or the flashing image on the web banner, 'we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.' I think this is exactly right. Information used to come at a price — to know about a product, you had to buy it; spend your money and cross the Rubicon. Unless a friend could recommend it, or a rare product review appeared in some magazine, the only guide to most goods was advertising that conveyed product information and recommendations (specious or otherwise).
But the model couldn't last forever, and the internet in this respect did change everything. Information is freely available on nearly every product, though as always with varying degrees of veracity. Trust is built over time, slowly, and growth is relatively slow for most sites. There are not many trusted websites out there. The markets are also suddenly international. Where, before the web, companies and especially publications only had to compete locally or regionally to influence consumers, web-sites compete on a much larger scale: better and more regular content is required for any modicum of success in this environment. Shouting into the void will not influence customers' purchasing decisions any longer.
Although one-way advertising is mostly dead (I think in the case of events announcements it still works), everything that's done in blogs is a model for new advertising — I recommend an author or book, explaining why, giving examples; you might go out and buy the book because you trust my judgment. The information I delivered was instrumental in the purchase of a good, even though my recommendation is based not on financial benefit but on the quality of the writing. For established companies and publications, adapting to the internet and, really, surviving in the new economy will mean letting go of outdated truisms and making bold changes to the philosophy of product information dissemination.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Monday March 23, in Case You Needed to Know
We got home at an awful hour last night, and it was right to bed — but the trip was good, got to visit Joseph Beth bookstore in Cincinnati and see an old friend, along with spending time with TBG's parents and little brother. Hello to Alex. Hello as well to his English teacher, to whom I exhort, after a look over their current reading assignment: choose better books to teach these poor bored boys.
* At The New Yorker, James Wood begins his review of Lowboy declaratively, decisively: 'Fiction is at once real and imaginary. Not real at one moment and flickeringly illusory the next, like the fading pulse of a dying man, but both at once, as if a ghost had a pulse. Fiction is one giant pseudo-statement, a fact-checker’s nightmare. Like one of our own lies, it can be completely “wrong” about the world and yet completely revelatory — completely “right” — about the psychology of the person issuing the error. Thus, one of fiction’s most natural areas of inquiry, from Cervantes to Murakami, concerns states of confusion, error, or madness, in which a character’s crazy fictions become intertwined with the novel’s calmer fictions, and the reader’s purchase on the reliable world becomes intermittently tenuous. Think of Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” which opens with a young man writing a letter to his old friend, who has gone to live in St. Petersburg, only to end a few pages later by putting in doubt whether such a friend exists at all.' Certainly one type of fiction, and certainly at the origins of the genre. Too much of Wood writing up his own examples, for my taste; does it seem like he's bored to you?
* No good news for newspapers: CNN reports, 'At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008.' It isn't exactly dire straits for the country — most of what's being lost is local news — places like Slate, Salon, the Huff Post, and other nationally-minded online news organs are picking up some slack — and there is no reason the truly local papers can't persist in some form or another. Losing the journalists themselves, though, especially the ones who work hard for a well-informed story, is the real loss.
* In an extract from her new book at Poets.org, Rosana Warren refers to Frank Bidart and Louise Glück as markedly unlike both the 'Language Poets, with a self-announcing theory of abstraction and avant-garde pedigree, often of soft-Marxist derivation, and on the other a much less organized tribe of anecdotal poets.' Language poetry is a thing of the now-distant past, really, and Glück, even for being more informed and craft-minded than most anecdotal poets, is still very, very much a part of that. Bidart is, as well, if vastly more eclectic and, at times, experimental.
At the end of the day, one could refer to both FB and LG as Freudian poets more than anything else — disarmed as Siggy may be in psychological cirlces, he remains well-engrained (perhaps too well) with the literary mind of America (even the 'post-avant' evoke the subconscious). When Bidart sees the use of myths as filling 'pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed,' he really is expressing a deeply psychoanalytic approach to archetypes and mythological motifs.
* At the LA Times, a poet-joke by Fred Seigel goes over two writers' heads: 'While in the zoo, looking at the seals, Seidel says, "I once wrote a poem about a girl I was in love with. I compared her to a seal. . . . It was a poetic problem," he explains, "to connect the two — the girl and the seal — because it's really almost preposterous." This is perhaps the least preposterous comparison to be found in Seidel's work.' Yes, mmm, indeed — but I think that preposterous poetic problem of comparing one thing to an unlike other might just be him slagging you off with the definition of metaphor.
* At The New Yorker, James Wood begins his review of Lowboy declaratively, decisively: 'Fiction is at once real and imaginary. Not real at one moment and flickeringly illusory the next, like the fading pulse of a dying man, but both at once, as if a ghost had a pulse. Fiction is one giant pseudo-statement, a fact-checker’s nightmare. Like one of our own lies, it can be completely “wrong” about the world and yet completely revelatory — completely “right” — about the psychology of the person issuing the error. Thus, one of fiction’s most natural areas of inquiry, from Cervantes to Murakami, concerns states of confusion, error, or madness, in which a character’s crazy fictions become intertwined with the novel’s calmer fictions, and the reader’s purchase on the reliable world becomes intermittently tenuous. Think of Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” which opens with a young man writing a letter to his old friend, who has gone to live in St. Petersburg, only to end a few pages later by putting in doubt whether such a friend exists at all.' Certainly one type of fiction, and certainly at the origins of the genre. Too much of Wood writing up his own examples, for my taste; does it seem like he's bored to you?
* No good news for newspapers: CNN reports, 'At least 120 newspapers in the U.S. have shut down since January 2008.' It isn't exactly dire straits for the country — most of what's being lost is local news — places like Slate, Salon, the Huff Post, and other nationally-minded online news organs are picking up some slack — and there is no reason the truly local papers can't persist in some form or another. Losing the journalists themselves, though, especially the ones who work hard for a well-informed story, is the real loss.
* In an extract from her new book at Poets.org, Rosana Warren refers to Frank Bidart and Louise Glück as markedly unlike both the 'Language Poets, with a self-announcing theory of abstraction and avant-garde pedigree, often of soft-Marxist derivation, and on the other a much less organized tribe of anecdotal poets.' Language poetry is a thing of the now-distant past, really, and Glück, even for being more informed and craft-minded than most anecdotal poets, is still very, very much a part of that. Bidart is, as well, if vastly more eclectic and, at times, experimental.
At the end of the day, one could refer to both FB and LG as Freudian poets more than anything else — disarmed as Siggy may be in psychological cirlces, he remains well-engrained (perhaps too well) with the literary mind of America (even the 'post-avant' evoke the subconscious). When Bidart sees the use of myths as filling 'pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed,' he really is expressing a deeply psychoanalytic approach to archetypes and mythological motifs.
* At the LA Times, a poet-joke by Fred Seigel goes over two writers' heads: 'While in the zoo, looking at the seals, Seidel says, "I once wrote a poem about a girl I was in love with. I compared her to a seal. . . . It was a poetic problem," he explains, "to connect the two — the girl and the seal — because it's really almost preposterous." This is perhaps the least preposterous comparison to be found in Seidel's work.' Yes, mmm, indeed — but I think that preposterous poetic problem of comparing one thing to an unlike other might just be him slagging you off with the definition of metaphor.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Much-Needed Espresso
I'm feeling ill and going to Cincinnati tomorrow to visit The Beautiful Girl's family. It's been a long while since I did a long post or a review — sorry about that: busy life intrudes upon internet community. I also want to give my sincere congratulations to Martin Brodeur, the New Jersey Devils goalie who took his place at the top of the all-time wins column, a feat unmatched in any other sport for its indication of real genius, complete dedication, and honest hard work.
* GalleyCat reports that the Sony eReader has struck a deal with Google Books to make 500,000 titles in the public domain available for free. That's half a million titles for $300. I have to believe this now puts Sony ahead of Amazon in terms of sheer value. What's the catch? The eReader is Microsoft-only compatible — what a pain in the ass. Good quote from the director of Hachet on preferring Sony's device to that of Amazon.
* kottke.org presents: How to build a sentence like David Foster Wallace. Between steps six and seven, ' STOP HERE IF YOU ARE A MINIMALIST, WRITING COACH, OR JAMES WOOD'. Ha!
* Bookseller.com reports that Seamus Heaney has won the David Cohen prize for lifetime achievement in poetry. Godine author, sitting British poet laureate, and President of the Ron Silliman Fan Club, Andrew Motion, announced the prize, saying, 'The self-renewing force of his writing, and the sheer scale of his achievement make the award of the Cohen Prize an absolutely right and proper act of recognition.'
* This video is funny: they have the ability to recreate a 1970's infomercial aesthetic and yet these machines remain completely impractical.
* GalleyCat reports that the Sony eReader has struck a deal with Google Books to make 500,000 titles in the public domain available for free. That's half a million titles for $300. I have to believe this now puts Sony ahead of Amazon in terms of sheer value. What's the catch? The eReader is Microsoft-only compatible — what a pain in the ass. Good quote from the director of Hachet on preferring Sony's device to that of Amazon.
* kottke.org presents: How to build a sentence like David Foster Wallace. Between steps six and seven, ' STOP HERE IF YOU ARE A MINIMALIST, WRITING COACH, OR JAMES WOOD'. Ha!
* Bookseller.com reports that Seamus Heaney has won the David Cohen prize for lifetime achievement in poetry. Godine author, sitting British poet laureate, and President of the Ron Silliman Fan Club, Andrew Motion, announced the prize, saying, 'The self-renewing force of his writing, and the sheer scale of his achievement make the award of the Cohen Prize an absolutely right and proper act of recognition.'
* This video is funny: they have the ability to recreate a 1970's infomercial aesthetic and yet these machines remain completely impractical.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The Hangover Roundup
I, for one, did not take even a drop of libation last evening — I am probably the only one. But I imagine many of you out there are leaning cheek-in-palm into the screen wondering why on earth you ever did that last night and swearing never again.
* At Slate, a particularly good classic from Robert Pinsky, who begins a discussion of section 56 from Fulke Greville's 1633 poem Caelica. 'A ferocious playfulness and self-mockery characterizes the poem, supersaturating its incantational language: the meaning of "die" as orgasm, here bizarrely linked to a prelude of prayer; the tradition of preaching at the execution place; compact apothegms like "Wonder hinders love and hate" or "Hope went on the wheel of lust." Greville ultimately seems to relish letting his "conceit" go wild, then reining it in with terse moral formulas. That internal, psychological drama heightens the external drama of a sexual encounter that doesn't quite happen.'
* What's sad about this Telegraph article is that there is never any actual justification given for the study of poetry beyond some self-indulgent mumbo-jumbo 'when you memorize a poem you make a friend' nonsense. The stereotype of a Tory is supposed to be Lieutenant George from Blackadder Goes Forth (right?), and methinks it suits. Lots of words come out, and that's about it. So here's my two cents on the value of poetry in education: the greatest advancement of human development is language, which makes possible all other complexities of thought; the most complex and nuanced formulation of language is to be found in poetry, specifically because the best poetry emphasizes what is most important in language — meaning as unfixed and various; tone as a key element to communication and meaning; structure and craft in language as elements of power and persuasion. The comprehension of poetry (and the development of one's memory) are possibly the single best exercise for training the young and old mind alike.
* Two tidbits from CNN: first, O'Bama has a bit of the Irish in him; second, a historian calls out the GOP for being full of blarney when it comes to the small talk.
* At Slate, a particularly good classic from Robert Pinsky, who begins a discussion of section 56 from Fulke Greville's 1633 poem Caelica. 'A ferocious playfulness and self-mockery characterizes the poem, supersaturating its incantational language: the meaning of "die" as orgasm, here bizarrely linked to a prelude of prayer; the tradition of preaching at the execution place; compact apothegms like "Wonder hinders love and hate" or "Hope went on the wheel of lust." Greville ultimately seems to relish letting his "conceit" go wild, then reining it in with terse moral formulas. That internal, psychological drama heightens the external drama of a sexual encounter that doesn't quite happen.'
* What's sad about this Telegraph article is that there is never any actual justification given for the study of poetry beyond some self-indulgent mumbo-jumbo 'when you memorize a poem you make a friend' nonsense. The stereotype of a Tory is supposed to be Lieutenant George from Blackadder Goes Forth (right?), and methinks it suits. Lots of words come out, and that's about it. So here's my two cents on the value of poetry in education: the greatest advancement of human development is language, which makes possible all other complexities of thought; the most complex and nuanced formulation of language is to be found in poetry, specifically because the best poetry emphasizes what is most important in language — meaning as unfixed and various; tone as a key element to communication and meaning; structure and craft in language as elements of power and persuasion. The comprehension of poetry (and the development of one's memory) are possibly the single best exercise for training the young and old mind alike.
* Two tidbits from CNN: first, O'Bama has a bit of the Irish in him; second, a historian calls out the GOP for being full of blarney when it comes to the small talk.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
My Birthday
Dia is Padraig duit! Today is a great day. Not is it the anniversary of the day George Washington captured Dorchester Hill and forced the retreat of British forces out of Boston (under the aim of their own cannons), making it the first American city free from imperial rule; it is also St. Patrick's Day, and it's my birthday as well. And the New York Times gives a bit of good business news as well: book sales in Europe are on the rise, echoing a trend of past economic downturns — hopefully their habits will cross the pond a bit.
Monday, March 16, 2009
A Good Idea?
From The New Yorker, an idea so good everyone thinks it's crazy: 'If the economic crisis necessitates a second stimulus—and it probably will—then a payroll-tax holiday deserves a look. But it’s only half a good idea. A whole good idea would be to make a payroll-tax holiday the first step in an orderly transition to scrapping the payroll tax altogether and replacing the lost revenue with a package of levies on things that, unlike jobs, we want less rather than more of—things like pollution, carbon emissions, oil imports, inefficient use of energy and natural resources, and excessive consumption. The net tax burden on the economy would be unchanged, but the shift in relative price signals would nudge investment from resource-intensive enterprises toward labor-intensive ones. This wouldn’t be just a tax adjustment. It would be an environmental program, an anti-global-warming program, a youth-employment (and anti-crime) program, and an energy program.' Now we're thinking.
Friday, March 13, 2009
ConText & the Internet
When you live in a city that isn't nation-state-sized, and I do, the scenes of any given interest tend to become dominated by a relatively exclusive group, whether by merit, money, or philandering. In Boston, one of those people for the literary scene is Sven Birkerts, editor of AGNI and author of the once-notable, now somewhat outdated, Gutenberg Elegies. He organizes readings, moderates round-tables, etc. — the sort of thing people do.
He also writes book reviews and essays on an occasional basis (I don't think he has a regular column anywhere?), which vary in quality. I find that Birkerts has a certain penchant for hysteria and exaggeration, both in his analyses and his language. Scott at Conversational Reading points out that, since the Elegies appeared, Birkerts 'has been saying the same thing in this debate for years. It wasn't totally new then, and by now it's well past its expiration date.'
The basic argument, as put forth by Birkerts in this Atlantic article, is that the reading of books is part of a cultural structure, 'evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.' He has now raised the black flag on computers, blogs, and e-books for breaking apart this key human system.
I'm not even willing to accept this argument, though. Not even in theory, as Scott does, because this theory is nothing more than an assertion dressed up to resemble metaphysics: 'to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly' sounds profoundly meaningful, but is really lacking in any content; it manipulates the reader, whether intentionally or not, by implying the phrase 'losing touch' and specifically ignores — one could even say censors — the fact that there were forms of advanced human culture long before the advent of the codex. (Plato, one of our cultural cornerstones, very likely pre-dates the format, as does Homer certainly.)
The system of technology that allows human beings to organize cultural information in books is not a 'map' at all, even allegorically; a map is something to be used to retrace steps correctly and arrive at one point from another. It implies a goal. The system to which Birkerts refers only highlights what has actually been developed, and not what must have been developed, nor what must be, in order for our culture to exist and flourish. One can not confuse what was with what must have been.
The vaunted loss of context is not even a particularly digital-age issue, but a postmodern one: without an agreed-upon canon or a recognized criteria to judge the merit of a work or system of thought, our contemporary context is limitless (or ad hominem) and therefore identical, practically speaking, to nil. The fact of there being context does not predicate a knowledge of it, or access to it. Teachers and mentors are still the only real guides, surpassing even dewey decimal and the codex format. Perhaps the access that this digital age grants will allow for more rapid contact with cultural contextualizers available to the generation most adapted to use the internet — it is at least as valid a theory as that of Birkerts, maybe much more.
This all being said, I love books, and believe they'll last. They persist, physically — the only necessity in order to convey content — despite file format changes, bankruptcies, loss of power, death of battery, outbreak of war, world-altering catastrophe, etc; and the making of books are an art form, one steeped so well in practical concern that it is often overlooked. What Birkerts and those like him seem to fear is not the loss of culture, values, or humanity; it is the fear of being left behind, of being forgotten, of obsolescence. Fair enough.
He also writes book reviews and essays on an occasional basis (I don't think he has a regular column anywhere?), which vary in quality. I find that Birkerts has a certain penchant for hysteria and exaggeration, both in his analyses and his language. Scott at Conversational Reading points out that, since the Elegies appeared, Birkerts 'has been saying the same thing in this debate for years. It wasn't totally new then, and by now it's well past its expiration date.'
The basic argument, as put forth by Birkerts in this Atlantic article, is that the reading of books is part of a cultural structure, 'evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.' He has now raised the black flag on computers, blogs, and e-books for breaking apart this key human system.
I'm not even willing to accept this argument, though. Not even in theory, as Scott does, because this theory is nothing more than an assertion dressed up to resemble metaphysics: 'to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly' sounds profoundly meaningful, but is really lacking in any content; it manipulates the reader, whether intentionally or not, by implying the phrase 'losing touch' and specifically ignores — one could even say censors — the fact that there were forms of advanced human culture long before the advent of the codex. (Plato, one of our cultural cornerstones, very likely pre-dates the format, as does Homer certainly.)
The system of technology that allows human beings to organize cultural information in books is not a 'map' at all, even allegorically; a map is something to be used to retrace steps correctly and arrive at one point from another. It implies a goal. The system to which Birkerts refers only highlights what has actually been developed, and not what must have been developed, nor what must be, in order for our culture to exist and flourish. One can not confuse what was with what must have been.
The vaunted loss of context is not even a particularly digital-age issue, but a postmodern one: without an agreed-upon canon or a recognized criteria to judge the merit of a work or system of thought, our contemporary context is limitless (or ad hominem) and therefore identical, practically speaking, to nil. The fact of there being context does not predicate a knowledge of it, or access to it. Teachers and mentors are still the only real guides, surpassing even dewey decimal and the codex format. Perhaps the access that this digital age grants will allow for more rapid contact with cultural contextualizers available to the generation most adapted to use the internet — it is at least as valid a theory as that of Birkerts, maybe much more.
This all being said, I love books, and believe they'll last. They persist, physically — the only necessity in order to convey content — despite file format changes, bankruptcies, loss of power, death of battery, outbreak of war, world-altering catastrophe, etc; and the making of books are an art form, one steeped so well in practical concern that it is often overlooked. What Birkerts and those like him seem to fear is not the loss of culture, values, or humanity; it is the fear of being left behind, of being forgotten, of obsolescence. Fair enough.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Thursday Bits
Event Update: A Tribute to Reginald Shepherd | Thursday, March 12th at 7:00 pm | Poets House, New York City — Wish that I could make it, go if you can.
* At the Times Literary Supplement, Paul Gifford reviews the new 1300 page biography of Paul Valery, writing, 'The splendid account given of his subject’s interaction with the public events of his time illustrates what is perhaps the most significant achievement of the book: its ability to generate fruitful continuities.' Now, PV is one of those major authors with whom I am totally and entirely ignorant, besides his continually being referenced as a symbolist, especially in regards to Modernism. Can anyone recommend a text to begin? I found 'The Graveyard by the Sea' online.
* CNN is running a piece on Children's book classics — I'm sure this will thrill several of my readers. My favorite book as a kid, as could be told, was Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic, followed closely by a book of scary stories.
* And at Slate, another review of the John Cheever biography, which has received almost unbearably high praise. I might have to get it. Nathan Heller writes, 'exile is the subject of Blake Bailey's masterful Cheever: A Life, published in tandem with the Library of America's new collection of Cheever's work and two decades after the first biography. Until now, Cheever's life came in two flavors: sweet and sour. The sweet version (originating largely with Cheever himself) describes the zestful "squire of Westchester," a Brooks Bros.-clad paterfamilias who peppered his New Yorker stories with jaunty banter, gentle melancholy, and what one reader supposedly called a "childlike sense of wonder." The sour version appeared later, thanks to posthumous publication of Cheever's journal and letters. It lays bare a broken man — a self-centered depressive and secret bisexual who struggled, drunk and lonely, though adulthood. Both versions are true. Bailey's challenge is to show how they fit together in someone who also wrote some of the era's most layered and surprising fiction.'
* At the Times Literary Supplement, Paul Gifford reviews the new 1300 page biography of Paul Valery, writing, 'The splendid account given of his subject’s interaction with the public events of his time illustrates what is perhaps the most significant achievement of the book: its ability to generate fruitful continuities.' Now, PV is one of those major authors with whom I am totally and entirely ignorant, besides his continually being referenced as a symbolist, especially in regards to Modernism. Can anyone recommend a text to begin? I found 'The Graveyard by the Sea' online.
* CNN is running a piece on Children's book classics — I'm sure this will thrill several of my readers. My favorite book as a kid, as could be told, was Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic, followed closely by a book of scary stories.
* And at Slate, another review of the John Cheever biography, which has received almost unbearably high praise. I might have to get it. Nathan Heller writes, 'exile is the subject of Blake Bailey's masterful Cheever: A Life, published in tandem with the Library of America's new collection of Cheever's work and two decades after the first biography. Until now, Cheever's life came in two flavors: sweet and sour. The sweet version (originating largely with Cheever himself) describes the zestful "squire of Westchester," a Brooks Bros.-clad paterfamilias who peppered his New Yorker stories with jaunty banter, gentle melancholy, and what one reader supposedly called a "childlike sense of wonder." The sour version appeared later, thanks to posthumous publication of Cheever's journal and letters. It lays bare a broken man — a self-centered depressive and secret bisexual who struggled, drunk and lonely, though adulthood. Both versions are true. Bailey's challenge is to show how they fit together in someone who also wrote some of the era's most layered and surprising fiction.'
Monday, March 9, 2009
Watchmen (film) Review
Imagine, if you will, a spectator who has never read the comic — ahem, graphic novel — before going to see the film. I know. Among people my age the book is foundational, for those a bit older it was revolutionary. I'm looked down upon, somewhat, by some, for having had no knowledge of the story, characters, or point, before the movie hoopla. Who knows what the reason is for that. No older siblings? Sure. Late-developed sense or irony? Maybe. Still, my friends and I sat in the theater Saturday, equally hesitant, skeptical, hopeful: movie tickets are damn expensive and we're missing a rare warm March day in Boston for this.Before going, I read up on the revolutionary aspects of the novel: how and why it was important to comics as a genre, what was so great about the packaging, the subplots, the parody and high-irony, the stock background characters that were suddenly given breadth. It sounded, as has been said like a Homeric epithet, unfilmable. Not because of the story — a good director adapts, matches the pacing tonally, makes it his own vision truer to the original than a mindless copy – but because it would have to be a huge expensive sfx movie and to keep all the interesting aspect would mean alienating a huge swath of the general audience. No studio would pony up for such a work of high-concept irony deconstructing their own best cash-cow.
I was right. Three-odd hours later, it was dusk and I wanted my chance at a walk through the gardens and up Newbury back. Not that the movie was bad, mind you. It had some good points, most of them visual, and I'm told that the most enjoyable aspect for fans of the book was the payoff of seeing the storyboard moving onscreen. (My friend Zak, for instance, laughed when Ozymandias catches a bullet in his hand, because in the book the character thinks 'I wasn't sure if that would work.' That self-conscious humor was lost onscreen.) The movie seems to be best thought of as an arm of the book, a piece of ephemera that enhances if you know the story, but if not, is only neat. And, at some points, terrible.
The musical selection had to be a joke. It had to have been. Except that it didn't seem to be a joke. Not intentionally. I got the impression that all the music was chosen by someone who had never seen a movie before, had never heard the word shmaltz, and was only given the barest of scene descriptions. (We need something for a funeral. How about 'Sound of Silence'! Ooh, I love that song.) If it was meant to be ironic, nothing tipped us off. The violence, I thought, was too superhuman. It created distance for the audience in the supposedly-humanizing or horrifying scenes, especially the attempted rape, and it stripped back some of the dark irony. More could have been made of the charaters' neuroses — these are borderline (if that) psychopaths who dress up in leather and beat up 'bad guys', and that was, from what I've read, a key aspect of the book.
As a piece of entertaining cinema, the movie was fine. Enjoyable story, colorful characters, nice to look at, humor and action, etc. But as a work that is meant to — by the author, at least — change the mass conception of the superhero, it is a total failure. If anything, the film only reinforced the now-popular idea that psychological conflict redeems the absurdity of the superhero premise. Last night, Batman Begins was on AMC: not once did it feel surreal, not once did I laugh at some part of the movie that was lampooned by Watchmen, not once did I yearn to upend this sick too-popular model of justice. Batman was conflicted, dealt with some demons, eventually triumphed over the forces of evil, and in the end we all learned a lesson. The Watchmen failed, Batman survives. All the worse for us.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Sunday & All That
Just a few pieces of note for the holiest day of the book-world's week.
* The LA Times reports that a 'lost' Mark Twain short story will finally be published in The Strand Magazine, a mystery quarterly, and Who Is Mark Twain?, the complete unpublished work, will come out next month from, it seems, HarperStudio. I don't think much could be done to harm his reputation at this point, but still, I hope the unpublished work holds up.
* In a recent entry to his personal blog, the former SoftSkull publisher Richard Nash writes, 'The book isn’t in trouble, it’s that everyone who takes some of the money that a consumer pays for an author’s content need to re-justify their share and not assume that because they used to get that % they still in fact deserve that %. And I sense too many people hiding behind the notion that this has something to do with grandiose cultural notions about the life and death of the book rather than more quotidien [sic] concerns about the vision and competence of individuals populating this business. . . . Focus on connect writers and readers and you won’t have to ask for whom the bell is tolling. ' Here, here!
* The LA Times reports that a 'lost' Mark Twain short story will finally be published in The Strand Magazine, a mystery quarterly, and Who Is Mark Twain?, the complete unpublished work, will come out next month from, it seems, HarperStudio. I don't think much could be done to harm his reputation at this point, but still, I hope the unpublished work holds up.
* In a recent entry to his personal blog, the former SoftSkull publisher Richard Nash writes, 'The book isn’t in trouble, it’s that everyone who takes some of the money that a consumer pays for an author’s content need to re-justify their share and not assume that because they used to get that % they still in fact deserve that %. And I sense too many people hiding behind the notion that this has something to do with grandiose cultural notions about the life and death of the book rather than more quotidien [sic] concerns about the vision and competence of individuals populating this business. . . . Focus on connect writers and readers and you won’t have to ask for whom the bell is tolling. ' Here, here!
Friday, March 6, 2009
Beckett or Setett Free
One could have presumed that Samuel Beckett was a letter-writer, as his work is known best for its elegant and sometimes viscous wit and those minds tend to desire the constant contact with other minds, but not the difficulty of social graces, planning, etc. Volume One of his new Selected Letters is 800 pages deep, and full of contextualizing notes (although he asked for no commentary, and I wonder about those notes, some of which, we hear, are longer than the printed letter).
At The New York Times, Dwight Garner writes, 'Some of the best material here is Beckett’s dyspeptic book talk. He calls Darwin’s “Origin of Species” “badly written catlap.” Some of Proust’s work is “a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly.” Lawrence is “a tedious kindling of damp.” Always a champion of underdogs, he wrote in one letter: “Miss Costello said to me: ‘You haven’t a good word to say for anyone but the failures.’ I thought it was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time.”' The question asked by Oscar Wilde raises its quaffed head once more: are all good writers bad people, and vice versa?
When I watch this all I can think is: What's the matter with you then?
At The New York Times, Dwight Garner writes, 'Some of the best material here is Beckett’s dyspeptic book talk. He calls Darwin’s “Origin of Species” “badly written catlap.” Some of Proust’s work is “a maudlin false teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly.” Lawrence is “a tedious kindling of damp.” Always a champion of underdogs, he wrote in one letter: “Miss Costello said to me: ‘You haven’t a good word to say for anyone but the failures.’ I thought it was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time.”' The question asked by Oscar Wilde raises its quaffed head once more: are all good writers bad people, and vice versa?
When I watch this all I can think is: What's the matter with you then?
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Here, There, and Back from Newport
I was in Newport, RI, over the weekend with The Beautiful Girl, on a vacation she planned as my Christmas present. We stayed at a little bed and breakfast called The Brattle House Inn. It snowed; we had a fireplace in the room. We ate out, ate well, visited the mansions and the tennis hall of fame, walked around, and read leisurely. Altogether excellent.
* Hometown boy makes good! The New Criterion has an essay on John Cheever (born in Quincy, MA) by Stefan Beck. He writes, 'Cheever’s terrain—Manhattan, Connecticut, Westchester, and New England — is frequently and rather tediously compared to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. (We could complicate things and include Italy in that list.) Cheever is called the “Chekhov of the suburbs,” as though the suburbs are so forgettable that we should be amazed they ever found their chronicler. People live in the suburbs, too, and wherever two or more are gathered under Cheever’s byline, one finds the whole panoply of human feelings and failures. The surprising thing is how nearly unique he was in giving this landscape the attention it deserves.'
* I'm just pretty proud of this article on my place of employment, from Publishers Weekly: 'For those who follow Godine's list, it's not surprising that it should contain award winners. He's been among the first to publish the early works of writers like John Banville, who went on to receive the Man Booker. “These things keep popping up on his list,” says Carole Horne, general manager of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. “Nobel winners, Booker Prize winners. I think David's wonderful, and his books are stunningly beautiful.” She's not alone. Both Paul Yamazaki, head buyer at City Lights in San Francisco, and Jack Cella, general manager of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, in Chicago, consider Godine to be a “great” publisher. “He has very strong ideas on what he should publish and how it should look,” notes Cella.' Nice.
* I agree with this definition completely, from Corey Doctorow at Locus: 'The best definition I've heard of "publishing" comes from my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who says, "publishing is making a work public." That is, identifying a work and an audience, and taking whatever steps are necessary to get the two together (you'll note that by this definition, Google is a fantastic publisher). Publishing is not printing, or marketing, or editorial, or copy-editing, or typesetting. It may comprise some or all of these things, but you could have the world's best-edited, most beautiful, well-bound book in the world, and without a strategy for getting it into the hands of readers, all it's good for is insulating the attic. (This is the unfortunate discovery made by many customers of vanity publishers.)' Too many authors & publishers feel that throwing books into the void is enough, and that the good ones magically stick — you have to get and stay behind a book, make it known, almost will it into being known.
* In writing a biography of Milton — no matter how historically-minded it might be — , to ignore a weighty analysis of Paradise Lost, in which Milton attempts to explain the ways of God to man, seems a serious flaw. The Times Literary Supplement has an essay on the new John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, in which 'The authors do not consider it part of their brief to reflect on the inheritance of Virgil, Ovid and Spenser, on Milton’s initial plan to write an Arthuriad, or on the choice of blank verse – though an informative paragraph on Dryden’s versified dramatization The State of Innocence reveals that they would have been capable of doing so.' They draw only what they can apply to the historical moment, and ignore what such a work might say about the man and his tradition.
* Hometown boy makes good! The New Criterion has an essay on John Cheever (born in Quincy, MA) by Stefan Beck. He writes, 'Cheever’s terrain—Manhattan, Connecticut, Westchester, and New England — is frequently and rather tediously compared to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. (We could complicate things and include Italy in that list.) Cheever is called the “Chekhov of the suburbs,” as though the suburbs are so forgettable that we should be amazed they ever found their chronicler. People live in the suburbs, too, and wherever two or more are gathered under Cheever’s byline, one finds the whole panoply of human feelings and failures. The surprising thing is how nearly unique he was in giving this landscape the attention it deserves.'
* I'm just pretty proud of this article on my place of employment, from Publishers Weekly: 'For those who follow Godine's list, it's not surprising that it should contain award winners. He's been among the first to publish the early works of writers like John Banville, who went on to receive the Man Booker. “These things keep popping up on his list,” says Carole Horne, general manager of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. “Nobel winners, Booker Prize winners. I think David's wonderful, and his books are stunningly beautiful.” She's not alone. Both Paul Yamazaki, head buyer at City Lights in San Francisco, and Jack Cella, general manager of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, in Chicago, consider Godine to be a “great” publisher. “He has very strong ideas on what he should publish and how it should look,” notes Cella.' Nice.
* I agree with this definition completely, from Corey Doctorow at Locus: 'The best definition I've heard of "publishing" comes from my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who says, "publishing is making a work public." That is, identifying a work and an audience, and taking whatever steps are necessary to get the two together (you'll note that by this definition, Google is a fantastic publisher). Publishing is not printing, or marketing, or editorial, or copy-editing, or typesetting. It may comprise some or all of these things, but you could have the world's best-edited, most beautiful, well-bound book in the world, and without a strategy for getting it into the hands of readers, all it's good for is insulating the attic. (This is the unfortunate discovery made by many customers of vanity publishers.)' Too many authors & publishers feel that throwing books into the void is enough, and that the good ones magically stick — you have to get and stay behind a book, make it known, almost will it into being known.
* In writing a biography of Milton — no matter how historically-minded it might be — , to ignore a weighty analysis of Paradise Lost, in which Milton attempts to explain the ways of God to man, seems a serious flaw. The Times Literary Supplement has an essay on the new John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, in which 'The authors do not consider it part of their brief to reflect on the inheritance of Virgil, Ovid and Spenser, on Milton’s initial plan to write an Arthuriad, or on the choice of blank verse – though an informative paragraph on Dryden’s versified dramatization The State of Innocence reveals that they would have been capable of doing so.' They draw only what they can apply to the historical moment, and ignore what such a work might say about the man and his tradition.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Twenty Books
Picking up a talking point from Ron Silliman today, I decided to think — quickly enough to be just of this moment — of twenty books of poetry that have 'made me love poetry,' or as I'd have it, that were fundamental in my understanding and love of poetry as an art form and an human endeavor. After putting this list together, I find it surprising only in how obvious so many of the books are — but I can honestly say that these books moved me at the time when I encountered them. Here is my off-the-cuff list, and a bit on each book.
* A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein
My dad gave me this book — one of the few tokens I have from him, absent as he was — and the rhymes sunk in and became a part of me, as did their rebellious attitude I think.
* The Selected Poems of Edgar Allen Poe
I've written about this before, here, that Poe was the first 'serious' poet I read that made me realize that something about poetry's effect was special to itself, although I had no idea what that thing was.
* Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Not the first poem I'd written, but the first one I wrote for any public setting; it was a personal adaptation of this epic of the self.
* Twenty Love Poems & A Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda
My first translation was one of these poems, but I read and re-read the book in English (and tried, failed, tried, etc. in Spanish) over and over.
* The Wasteland, by TS Eliot
* The Four Quartets, by TS Eliot
In my standard high school English class we read 'Prufrock' and The Waste Land, and I read the Quartets on my own. So much of him has sunk into my way of thinking about poetry I can hardly begin to say.
* Howl & Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg
Of course — it presents vivacity and American exceptionalism in the voice of a downcast, outcast, rebel, loser, saint: Shel all grown up, but not really 'grown up', and with kabbala.
* Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams
From this: that free-verse is a form. Before, it seemed arbitrary, off-the-cuff, untamed words and lines cut at random. After, chosen with a kind of attention I did not know existed.
* Love is a Dog from Hell, by Charles Bukowski
I still love Bukowski's posture as poor, broken, unfixable, broken by the world because the world works and its working is his broken-ness; his diffident sarcasm; his hints of surrealism.
* Life Studies & For the Union Dead, by Robert Lowell
From Williams I only saw that the free line was a form; but from Lowell I saw how the form came into being by the weight of the subject literally tearing apart those classic models.
* Selected Poetry of Rilke
Lowell opened my mind to the possibility of the sonnet form, of rhyme not as the stale 19th century would present it; Rilke's poems are formal and wildly contained yet still, I think, vividly modern.
* Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Once one overcomes the chic dismissal of formal verse, why not close-read a master? I took a Milton class, only to be forced into this project I'd never have had the courage to begin alone — I still re-read it. All brilliance and power.
* The Collected Poems of Derek Walcott
His one poem on childhood, 'and I who have made but one choice, find my boyhood has gone over' — or something like that — forced me to re-read the poem a dozen times over to get at how he brought me there simply, directly, forcefully.
* The Oomph of Quicksilver, by Michael Davitt
* Homecoming, by Cathal O Searcaigh
These two go together in a language-lump: modern Irish-language poets. Changed the way I approached audience and the problems of tradition, the implications of history.
* The Collected Poems of WH Auden
Serious humor, witty insight, turns of phrase as craft, masterful techniques, matters large and miniscule: the whole world is poetry.
* The Selected WB Yeats
It took me a long time to get over some petty hangups with Yeats, and I came in from the back door by reading critics and hearing trusted poets on him, but his is a rhetorical mastery that is nearly unparalleled since.
* Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
My favorite poet, I think. Such a common thing to say now — and I'm glad for it. 'Crusoe in England' though, just marvelous. Maybe perfect.
* The Georgics, by Virgil (trans. by David Ferry)
Ferry's translation gets at the heart of what Virgil seems to have been doing, and as a city boy I completely relate to the sense of mysterious nature; I love DF's sense for the line.
* New & Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill
Is currently blowing me away. More on that later.
* A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein
My dad gave me this book — one of the few tokens I have from him, absent as he was — and the rhymes sunk in and became a part of me, as did their rebellious attitude I think.
* The Selected Poems of Edgar Allen Poe
I've written about this before, here, that Poe was the first 'serious' poet I read that made me realize that something about poetry's effect was special to itself, although I had no idea what that thing was.
* Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Not the first poem I'd written, but the first one I wrote for any public setting; it was a personal adaptation of this epic of the self.
* Twenty Love Poems & A Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda
My first translation was one of these poems, but I read and re-read the book in English (and tried, failed, tried, etc. in Spanish) over and over.
* The Wasteland, by TS Eliot
* The Four Quartets, by TS Eliot
In my standard high school English class we read 'Prufrock' and The Waste Land, and I read the Quartets on my own. So much of him has sunk into my way of thinking about poetry I can hardly begin to say.
* Howl & Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg
Of course — it presents vivacity and American exceptionalism in the voice of a downcast, outcast, rebel, loser, saint: Shel all grown up, but not really 'grown up', and with kabbala.
* Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams
From this: that free-verse is a form. Before, it seemed arbitrary, off-the-cuff, untamed words and lines cut at random. After, chosen with a kind of attention I did not know existed.
* Love is a Dog from Hell, by Charles Bukowski
I still love Bukowski's posture as poor, broken, unfixable, broken by the world because the world works and its working is his broken-ness; his diffident sarcasm; his hints of surrealism.
* Life Studies & For the Union Dead, by Robert Lowell
From Williams I only saw that the free line was a form; but from Lowell I saw how the form came into being by the weight of the subject literally tearing apart those classic models.
* Selected Poetry of Rilke
Lowell opened my mind to the possibility of the sonnet form, of rhyme not as the stale 19th century would present it; Rilke's poems are formal and wildly contained yet still, I think, vividly modern.
* Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Once one overcomes the chic dismissal of formal verse, why not close-read a master? I took a Milton class, only to be forced into this project I'd never have had the courage to begin alone — I still re-read it. All brilliance and power.
* The Collected Poems of Derek Walcott
His one poem on childhood, 'and I who have made but one choice, find my boyhood has gone over' — or something like that — forced me to re-read the poem a dozen times over to get at how he brought me there simply, directly, forcefully.
* The Oomph of Quicksilver, by Michael Davitt
* Homecoming, by Cathal O Searcaigh
These two go together in a language-lump: modern Irish-language poets. Changed the way I approached audience and the problems of tradition, the implications of history.
* The Collected Poems of WH Auden
Serious humor, witty insight, turns of phrase as craft, masterful techniques, matters large and miniscule: the whole world is poetry.
* The Selected WB Yeats
It took me a long time to get over some petty hangups with Yeats, and I came in from the back door by reading critics and hearing trusted poets on him, but his is a rhetorical mastery that is nearly unparalleled since.
* Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
My favorite poet, I think. Such a common thing to say now — and I'm glad for it. 'Crusoe in England' though, just marvelous. Maybe perfect.
* The Georgics, by Virgil (trans. by David Ferry)
Ferry's translation gets at the heart of what Virgil seems to have been doing, and as a city boy I completely relate to the sense of mysterious nature; I love DF's sense for the line.
* New & Collected Poems, by Geoffrey Hill
Is currently blowing me away. More on that later.
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