A Few Thoughts on Blood Meridian

I finished Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian yesterday, having followed Harold Bloom’s supremely enthusiastic appraisal (‘It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying’); and, overall, I thought it withstood the high-set expectations. McCarthy's descriptive density was impressive, beautiful, and tense: it charged the apparently rudderless narrative with a goading drive. I thought there were some repetitions of metaphors that were likely intentional but not always effective; or, maybe some relief from that lyric vice might have sharpened those more gorgeously sculpted passages and kept the narrative motifs fresh.

Like so many others before me, I’m puzzled by the final fate of The Kid, in the best possible way. I tend to agree with Kitson’s [?] position that ‘The point about Blood Meridian is that we do not know and we cannot know.’ However, I can’t help but think of Edmund Wilson’s reflections on “The Turn of the Screw,” that our minds leap to images of sexual acts despite that they are never mentioned or described explicitly. It may be there, implicit throughout, like a byzantine Rube Goldberg machine.

What struck me most about the ending was it’s stylistic relationship to The Road. In both books, the narrative is full of overwhelming brutality and end in semi- or quasi-spiritual images: the Judge who dances and will ‘never die’; the boy who is taken into the safe heart of the Earth with the stranger and his family. Neither images, I feel, are as straightforward as they are presented. Being the only two of McCarthy’s works I’ve read, I wonder whether this is particular to these books or to his writing.

Clearly there is an element of — the best term is probably either response or revision — between Meridian and Moby Dick; but then, if neither of those two terms fit, then let’s say the books have a fondness of imagination, and that Meridian owes much of it’s bald alabaster Judge to Melville’s whale. I’m wary of claiming too direct a thematic interplay: McCarthy is building upon Melville’s now-archetypal leviathan rather than clarifying or re-staging the tale of Moby Dick. The Judge is the very force of nature, unswayed and unbound by morality as the beast is — beyond that, I'm not sure.

Blood Meridian struck me as being not only a critique of America’s expansionism and relationship to violence, but of American political attitudes as well. The Judge clearly lays out a world-view in which morality and ethics are secondary to the historical movements as expressed in the ability to dominate others — morality / ethics is a realm which exists because force allows it the room to do so, and that if the moral are allowed to rule then the ‘dance’ means nothing. It expresses, to my mind, a common unspoken American opinion of the political realm: that ethical imperatives are fine as long as force and domination come first, as long as ethics don’t interfere with the operations of dominating power.

On Poetry

At The Guardian, Stuart Evers, in describing his recent re-discovery of poetry: 'The dominance of the novel and the expectations it has engendered, [Michael Symmons Roberts] argued, have left a large readership unable to view a poem with the care, diligence and patience it requires. Like music, he went on, poetry gains from repeated experience and it has more in common with songs than novels. I appreciate this is hardly breaking news, but it did crystallise for me where I'd been going wrong in my approach to poetry. [. . . ] Poetry's image, I think, is its great barrier. Poetry means hard work, school and possibly university, time — what it isn't is the easy option. For this reason it's tempting to leave it to those who write it, to those who wish to be known as poets. Essentially this is how contemporary poetry has managed to survive into the 21st century — it's become a self-sufficient industry that requires no one from outside its borders to keep it going.'

I'd been trying to think of an appropriate way to phrase exactly what Evers writes here, without offending too many of my poetry colleagues. We're pretty much just talking to each other, folks. And the authority we give to echo-chamber theorists like Ron Silliman aren't opening it up to the general reader. Plenty of verse is fun, funny, enjoyable, etc. It doesn't have to contain a master's thesis or a world-changing affectation. Yet, reading enjoyable poetry for the sake of amusement has a serious stigma about it: how many times has a table of poets scoffed at Billy Collins, or judged someone foolish for loving Mary Oliver? It's time to get down off the high horse, I think. We wildly undervalue enjoyment in poetry.

That being said, I still assert that a good collection of poetry can and ought to be as varied and variously moving as any prose novel, memoir, essay, or story (I laughed, I cried; that old song and dance). One of my all-time favorite poems, 'Crusoe in England', by Elizabeth Bishop, has a liveliness to it, and tones that run the gambit from outright silliness to lonesome mourning. It might not be the best poem of all time (although I think it a very very good poem), but I enjoy reading it time and again; and at the heart of my love for difficult and challenging poetry lies the foundation of that affection in simple, unadorned enjoyment.

Save Insurance Comapny Profit

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Beantown Bound Again

Back from my too-quick foray into the middle-west of America. Initial thoughts: deep dish is just exquisite; the urban architecture in Chicago is amazing and unparalleled by any place I've ever been; midwestern niceness seems to be mythical; the city's use of and commitment to green space ought to be seen as an urban model; and, wedding television is nutso ('whore cards'). Busy at work, here are a few tidbits.

• In The New York Times this week, Daisy Fried reviews the new collection from Franz Wright: 'Franz Wright’s frank self-­absorption, combined with his ­poems’ structural vivacity and oddball precisions, may make readerly response to his poems dependent on readerly mood. Those who believe constant self-reference is the wrong procedure for poetry — those who are strenuously traditional or strenuously hipster — won’t cotton to “Wheeling Motel.” [. . .] Wright is uningratiating, bumptiously witty, inexhaustibly joyless and routinely surprising. Individual moments — this line break, that bit of syntax — fascinate even when individual poems fail to assert themselves as memorable. But Wright’s dark epiphanies, surging sincerities and ironic outbursts build incrementally from poem to poem.' The review seems to me to be a fair, if perhaps generous assessment of Wright's style in broad strokes; it also quotes at length from the title at hand, though often only to show the indicative qualities therein. Not much ground-breaking, but a generally good piece on a well-established poet.

• Very, very funny; from the Quarterly Conversation: 'Notoriously lengthy, difficult, and full of bizarre digressions, Moby-Dick practically invites abridgement. It was no surprise then when Orion Books did just that, offering readers Moby-Dick in Half the Time, a book that chopped Melville’s public domain masterpiece into a far tamer psychological novel. Enter author and translator Damion Searls, who decided to create a text composed of everything cut from the Orion edition of Moby-Dick. The resulting text was published as ; or The Whale in the Summer issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (exceprts available here).' Ha! Hilarious.

• Also at The New York Times, word of a lost visionary book by Carl Jung: 'This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say Liber Novus, which is Latin for New Book. Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.' I have always had a soft spot for Jung's humanistic insights into patterns of myths and symbols across cultures — I'm very curious to see this new volume.

Packed & Loaded: Chi-Towne

TBG and I are packed and heading off to Chicago for the weekend. We'll be attending a Chicago Fire match versus the Columbus Crew, which should be a good one; visiting the Art Institute of Chicago; taking a tour of the Newberry Library; doing an architectural tour of the city; and partaking of a mystery fun day that's been arranged entirely by our wonderful hostess. It's my first visit: I'm real excited.

• This excerpt at Conversational Reading, taken from the comments section of The Valve, are infuriating. Particularly frustrating in the Valve comments was aging hipster Zak Smith arguing, 'If you’re in college and your first reactions are still “knee-jerk reactions to the unfamiliar or misunderstood” then you are, frankly, so natively close-minded as to be forever hopeless with art (and life), even if a dedicated teacher is capable of temporarily or locally helping him or her not be quite so hopeless,' and that those people should be 'branded on the forehead so that no-one ever listens to them again.' Consider yourself branded, Zak.

Critics, all sorts, need to be good thinkers first — rigorous, open, well-read, adventurous; and then, if they also happen to be good writers, it's gravy. Being human, every critic will fail in some respect — obscure, obtuse, obvious, orientalist: some flaw. To take an example from the thread, I wish that George Orwell had been a more rigorous thinker, as the clarity of his prose is very often reflected in the simplified generality of his critiques. David Foster Wallace, who is cited several times as the model essayist, was admittedly both insightful and artful; yet he was aimlessly 'clever' at times, too ready to believe in the generational mores of his era, and too easily slips (as in his Harper's Kafka piece) into American exceptionalism: that Kafka is funny in a way most Americans can't appreciate is a pretty banal observation, and Wallace's brief illustrations of that point seem to circumnavigate the simplest and most essential difference of historical moment. Critics are their best when thought of as a community of thinkers pooling knowledge and critical discourse for a future generation.

• Jonathan Chait and I both dislike Ayn Rand. I reject the fundamental idea that the production of wealth and ownership of wealth are, or reflect, moral values, and reject that logic is the only tool for human progress. Rand has licenced the worst aspects of our nature: greed, hubris, vanity. Chait writes, 'Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence. Rand’s movement devolved into a corrupt and cruel parody of itself.' Fitting, since her ideology began with corrupt and cruel ideas.

• Jimmy Carter has more ganas in his retirement than he seemed to have during his Presidency. Recently lambasting the Teabaggers for their sublimated racism, The Root's Kai Wright reports, 'Jimmy Carter is a son of the South. Not the New South of relocated corporate headquarters and (foreclosed) McMansions, but Jim Crow’s South. So we’ll all have to excuse his refusal to act like he doesn’t hear Glenn Beck’s vicious dog whistle. He knows too well the coded language of political racism because he witnessed its writing.' CNN has failed to do justice to this issue in particular — their reporting only illustrates that the people whose careers are on the line refuse to address or give credence to the racist tones of the attacks. I'm not a true believer myself. Beck is just a hack trying to make a few bucks and be the center of attention. Racism is certainly there in the ranting and the protests (regarding the outburst, I cannot help but recall another proud scoundrel from South Carolina, Preston Brooks), but the majority of those protesters are just scared, broke, and not very bright — yet, racism is in there: in their tone, in the caricatures and cartoons, in thinly-veiled euphemisms; and it might well be the steering force of all that disenfranchised angst.

Full of Something

And it smells like Truthiness. TIME Magazine reports, 'Last year, shortly after the election, Beck spoke with TIME's Kate Pickert, and he didn't sound very scared back then. Of Obama's early personnel decisions, he said, "I think so far he's chosen wisely." Of his feelings about the President: "I am not an Obama fan, but I am a fan of our country . . . He is my President, and we must have him succeed. If he fails, we all fail." Of the Democratic Party: "I don't know personally a single Democrat who is a dope-smoking hippie that wants to turn us into Soviet Russia." Of the civic duty to trust: "We've got to pull together, because we are facing dark, dark times. I don't trust a single weasel in Washington. I don't care what party they're from. But unless we trust each other, we're not going to make it." How can we trust each other, though, when the integrated economy of ranters and their delighted-to-be-outraged critics are such a model of profitability? A microphone, a camera and a polarizing host are all it takes to get the money moving.'

I had a guess that Beck was nothing but some hack vaudeville grifter; like whoever runs the blog Contra James Wood. They'll cure what ails ya with this or that potion, a panacea sure to thin you out grow back hair fix a toothache and clear up the clap — and everybody, everybody, everybody is dead wrong but you. Damn fools.

• Scott Esposito (of Critical Flame fame) reviews Fugue State, a collection of short stories by Brian Evenson, at Conversational Reading. He writes, 'Fugue State, by its sixteenth story, "Alfons Kuylers," has wormed inside its own meat so far the meat is gone. The air of what a book is, layer by layer, has been peeled back from the core, as where in each story up to this one we have been encased inside a circling mind inside a circling mind inside a . . . We've reached the center of the center and its blank, we've wormed through the blank, too, and come out the other side. So now we must come out the other side of the other side.'

• At The Barnes & Noble Review, Daniel Menaker writes about his days as a chief editor at Random House. A few points were very interesting to me as a young publishing professional, and make me glad that I do not work at 'the center of the publishing world', as he puts it. Because I work at a small house (particularly because I have, until recently, been lent me the title of interm Sales Manager) I am fairly well inoculated now from the malady Menaker describes here: 'If you work in the Editorial department of a publisher, you usually don't know much about what goes on in Sales.' This explains much. However, I am very much afflicted by this: 'Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors. And it should be — at least when it is unaccompanied by a broader, more popular sensibility it should be.' Well, so be it, I suppose.

I very much agree, through my own judgment and by experience, when Menaker writes that 'review coverage means far less than it used to,' and I hope that small free online journals such as my own might help to change that trend. I wrote once before and still believe that the continuance of a public cultural conversation — in longer format; with more sustained insight; by reasonable and informed writers who respect the broad intellect of their audience — is a key component to a vitally-necessary lifelong education, and to a free society. As John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education, 'The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education . . . [and] the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.' The country needs more people of powerful, broad, and open mind right now.

Like a master meal with a fine wine, Menaker's piece also pairs well with Richard Nash's essay on The Late Age of Print at The Critical Flame.

Monday Bits

It's yet another Monday. This weekend was not long enough. Again. Excited for a trip to Chicago this weekend though.

* Adam Kirsch has an interesting article reviewing two new books on John Rawls at City Journal, entitled 'Justice and its Critics'. I've never been completely comfortable with Rawls' approach to ethics. It forgets or denies, in some regard, that we are not logical animals, and his interpretation of justice as a variety of fairness seems unequal to the prior centuries of philosophical discussion on the matter (but then, I have no superior definition to put forth); or, as Kirsch paraphrases from one book, 'The self, Sandel concludes, is thicker and less free than Rawls allows.'

That being said, it is hard to argue with the society that Rawls' theory is intended to produce, one with which an reasonable person could be content: '[Rawls] recognizes that inequality of wealth and status might be the necessary, if undesirable, price of overall prosperity and even of liberty. What he offers instead bears a close resemblance to New Deal–style welfare capitalism, or social democracy: a system that permits competition but also restrains it, that rewards the rich but also cares for the poor.' There is a looming question mark behind that 'might be necessary'.

* C. Dale Young has a little tribute to John Ashbery's watershed long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. A work for the ages, methinks.

CF :: Inherent Vice

There have been a lot of big reviews of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Inherent Vice. Both Walter Kirn and Michiko Kakutami at the New York Times covered it, as did Michael Dirda at the Washington Post; Carolyn Kelogg at the L.A. Times; and Louis Menand at The New Yorker. Just to name a few.

That is not to forget, of course, Salvatore Ruggiero's epic piece at The Critical Flame. Just saying, it's a great review of a labyrinthine, ironical, self-conscious novel.

September 11, 2009

It is that day of the year in which national memory induces private sorrow and public display. I think of Geoffrey Hill's moving and elegaic poem September Song, in which he wrote (in a completely different historical context):

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

George Kalogeris on C.P. Cavafy

I really can't say enough complimentary things about George Kalogeris' essay in The Critical Flame on the power, style, and beauty of C.P. Cavafy's poetry (and, claro que sí, of Mendalstam's translation thereof):

'Medelsohn’s translation of the final phrase of the last line [of the poem "Caesarion"] is a provocative one. In nearly every version of which I am aware, translators have used “too many Caesars” or “one too many Caesars”, both of which are faithful to the literal meaning of the Greek (polykaisarih). The slightly raised, stiltedly sophisticated pitch of “surfeit” harkens back to the beginning of the poem, and the highly artificial, propagandistic language the official histories use to stuff their hagiographies (“The unstinting laudations and flatteries”). History is rife with “atrocities of the tongue”, as Geoffrey Hill reminds us, and “Surfeit of Caesars” smacks of its fluent, ineluctably sensual appetite for violence. (Although Mendelsohn’s term does not mirror the demotic register of the original, the commonplace expression “too many cooks spoil the stew” is more fully available to it.) The full horror and brutality of what happened to Caesarion is there in the glibly rising and falling rhythms of Mendelsohn’s phrase, in the sneeringly petulant disgust that’s there in the way its sibilance spits itself out, and in the way this culminating phrase erotically savors the juice of its eloquent locution. (“Surfeit-gorged, and reeking from the stews” snorts Dryden’s Juvenal.) Here, instead of trying to fit together, or superimpose, the “high / low” pieces of the diction puzzle too neatly (and thereby calling attention to the fundamental incongruities of the two languages), Mendelsohn’s ear is fully alive to the full musical score of the poem.'

Boston Literary Press Fair: Monday, October 12

Mindful the Urban Plan

At Slate, there is a fascinating piece by Daniel Brook on the urban planning doctoral thesis of Mohammad Atta — one of the 9/11 pilots. Brook writes, 'For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. "The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected," Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to "engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind," which he sees as "out of place in Islamic society."

The subtitle of the thesis is Neighborhood Development in an Islamic-Oriental City, and the use of that anachronistic term — Islamic-Oriental city — is telling. The term denotes a concept rooted in 19th-century European Orientalism, according to which Islamic civilization and Western civilization are entirely distinct and opposite: The dynamic, rational West gallops toward the future while the backward East remains cut off from foreign influence, exclusively defined by Islam, and frozen in time. In his academic work, Atta takes the Orientalist conceit of two distinct civilizations, one superior, the other inferior, and simply flips the chauvinism from pro-Western to pro-Muslim.'

The Critical Flame :: Issue 3, September / October

Ladies and Gentlemen, the editors of The Critical Flame are proud to present Issue 3. In it, publishing guru and former Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash considers the future of print in his review of Ted Striphas' The Late Age of Print; poet and translator George Kalogeris turns his brilliant critical eye towards the new Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy; and emerging critic Andrew Seal tries to make some sense of Stephen Burt's collection of essays, Close Calls With Nonsense.

As we turn from summer toward the reading season, I'm looking forward to the comfortable pleasure of a good book on a cold New England morning — to my mind, there's nothing better.

T.S. Eliot + the Slush Pile @ Faber & Faber

Proud Quincy Heritage

From the Boston Globe, 'The philosophical conflict embodied in Labor Day dates to the earliest days of the nation’s history. In 1625, just five years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, a rival settlement called Merry Mount was founded at the site of present-day Quincy. The inhabitants of Merry Mount shunned Puritanical injunctions and embraced the pleasures of the flesh. They drank great amounts of whiskey and beer and shamelessly fornicated. At the beginning of each May they erected a maypole, a pagan invention that had become the symbol of fun in villages across England, and danced around it with libidinal abandon.

Merry Mount’s population of hedonists grew faster than the godly brethren of the Puritan settlements, threatening to create a new land that looked less like the Puritans’ vision of a pure society and more like their version of hell. So in 1628 the elders in nearby Plymouth Colony sent Captain Myles Standish and a force of men armed with muskets and swords to wipe their competitors from the earth. The Puritan army quickly conquered Merry Mount, arrested its leaders, and chopped down the maypole.'

5 Questionable Lessons from Mediocre Films

HIDALGO: America's natives are better than your natives.

CAROUSEL: You beat your wife, you go to heaven.

KNOCKED UP: Unsafe anonymous sex leads to hilarity & life lessons.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND: Mental illness can be overcome by logic and force of will.

ROCKY IV: I can change, and you can change, ergo human nature is mutable. (Sub-lesson: a man can outrun a car in the snow.)

Boston Mayoral Debates: Round 1

I'm always skeptical of televised debates. Debates, like campaign speeches, are planned to play on the emotions of the audience, bypassing intellect for gut partisanship — they work on group psychology and, often, hysteria and misapprehension. My emotions run away with me easily, especially in debating matters civil and social. As a result, I've taken to not watching the debates and instead reading the follow-up and transcriptions the next day. It helps me distance myself and be a little more reasonable about the issues.

From all accounts, it seems like this election will pit incumbent Mayor Menino against City Councilor Sam Yoon, but that doesn't mean that there is a clearly valid candidate other than Menino. Yoon appears to be a reasonable, intelligent administrator who is clearly invested in the improvement of the city. However, his responses don't seem to elaborate any of the somewhat platitudinal assertions available on his website. He wants better schools and more government accountability, but doesn't provide alternative institutional models. He wants less mayoral control in general and especially over the Boston Redevelopment Authority, although such a change would not necessarily be beneficial to the city (right now, projects get done faster with less red tape and the city overall has seen a dramatic improvement since Menino took over); Yoon is focused on the questionable ethics of which contractors get projects, while citizens only care whether these developments make their neighborhoods a better place to live.

There are valid criticisms to make of the way this city runs and of the current mayor. The criticisms, however, are the easy part — proposing, and showing the clout able to impose, better systems of governance are a vastly more difficult prospect. Vague ideological criticisms mean nothing without concrete evidence and an articulated plan.

Let's take what is likely the biggest failing of Menino's tenure: public education. This Boston Globe graph shows that spending and scores have both increased twofold between 1995–2005, but BPS reports show that the graduation rate remains at a disappointing 60%. Graduate rates are strongest for Asian students (roughly a 80% rate, at 9% of the student population), and they are lowest for Hispanic students (50% rate, 30% of the population); and, all graduation rates remain fairly consistent. This is clearly a systemic and cultural problem. I sympathize with dark horse Kevin McCrea, who boldly complained, 'Charter schools are the latest buzzword for these politicians to pretend they care about what goes on in the Boston public schools.' Charter Schools do not affect the system, they fix individual schools. What is needed is a better school system overall, a system that will renew itself over time: every student should be able to receive a quality education from any public school in the city, and not languish in near-failure until a charter is put in place. We fail generations of citizens in that process, and it's unacceptable.

Yoon is campaigning for an elected school committee with greater control, and to remove the limit to the number of students at charter schools (which seems immediately impractical) — it sounds very much like passing the buck. Menino really has no new ideas himself, although he has recently shown a willingness to bypass the teacher's union and try out charters. Neither are sure to produce positive results. Either way, it's an opportunity to put forward a more radical alternative to the status quo, which no candidate is grabbing. The city could certainly use someone as data-oriented and analytical as Sam Yoon, but, until he can formulate valid alternatives to counter Menino's living record, the going looks rough.

Two Notes in the Key of Condescension

* At the Onion AV Club, comic, author, and cultural critic of sorts David Cross discusses his own condescending attitude, 'I have a very good friend, we’re very close, and 80 percent of what we believe in politically, and about culture and society, is completely opposite. He’s very well-informed, well-read, and we argue constantly. We try to be very civil about it, but I can hear myself being really condescending. It’s out of impatience sometimes. As much as I would probably start off trying not to be condescending if I were talking to somebody who had just come out of a town-hall meeting about health care, and were spouting the five or six emotional talking points that the insurance companies want you to say so that we don’t have a public option… I would very quickly become condescending, I think. And I don’t know where I was going with that, but I decided to end that sentence right then and there.' Took the words out of my mouth. Seriously.

* At The New York Times, Dwight Garner discusses the legacy of Paul Bowles — who Gertrude Stein called a 'most spoiled, insensitive and self-indulgent young man' — and his early masterpiece The Sheltering Sky. Garner writes, 'Rereading “The Sheltering Sky” today is to be reminded of its dark, largely sublimated power; from its first pages the novel is like a pile of kindling to which a match is about to be applied. Bowles’s sun-baked prose, while never showy, is consistently and ruthlessly evocative. North African vegetation is described as “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred.” His characters may be, to some degree, indistinct, but they are tough and savvy and true to themselves. It was audacious of Bowles to kill off Moresby long before the story’s end. The book’s drawbacks are readily apparent. He turns the characters he doesn’t admire into grotesque caricatures, and the world he creates can be both pretentious and portentous, devoid of humor. “The Sheltering Sky” is as alive today, however, as it was in 1949.'