Le sang païen revient!
Well Rimbaud, if you say so, then.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
A Poem For The Establishment
Half-breed, link up all you want,
Be read as often as you please,
But remember, until you have the right clout,
You'll never have praise like bread.
Be read as often as you please,
But remember, until you have the right clout,
You'll never have praise like bread.
A Poem For Redwoods (On A Theme Of Sweet Betsy From Pike)
Those brownies burnin', as sweet as caught salmon,
A tall Shanghai rooster and an old yellow dog.
Ole Frisco porch, has Rainer deflowered fog,
They reached California spite of hell and high water.
Jack Kerouac's whoopee, like Wawp Whipwhim Yosemite,
And fought off the Injuns with musket and ball.
If you'd do the dishes, a soldiers' marinade for the camping,
And showed her bare bum to the whole wagon train.
A big breast too sloppy to have unsnapped at a draw,
Looked rather suspicious, but it was all on the square.
With Chinatown alley, the Big Sur unlikely,
As she travelled along with his arm round her waist.
With famous retorts, a Mount Vernon privateer,
Saying, 'Betsy, my darlin', I'm a made millioneer.'
Blonde on blonde is like canned tuna fish in the bay,
But don't dance me so hard, do you wanna know why?
Weather report suite, has no woman no smile?
'I've six good men waitin' within a half a mile.'
A tall Shanghai rooster and an old yellow dog.
Ole Frisco porch, has Rainer deflowered fog,
They reached California spite of hell and high water.
Jack Kerouac's whoopee, like Wawp Whipwhim Yosemite,
And fought off the Injuns with musket and ball.
If you'd do the dishes, a soldiers' marinade for the camping,
And showed her bare bum to the whole wagon train.
A big breast too sloppy to have unsnapped at a draw,
Looked rather suspicious, but it was all on the square.
With Chinatown alley, the Big Sur unlikely,
As she travelled along with his arm round her waist.
With famous retorts, a Mount Vernon privateer,
Saying, 'Betsy, my darlin', I'm a made millioneer.'
Blonde on blonde is like canned tuna fish in the bay,
But don't dance me so hard, do you wanna know why?
Weather report suite, has no woman no smile?
'I've six good men waitin' within a half a mile.'
Stendhal Takes Paris
I wish my French was good enough to see if Stendhal reads as hilariously in French as he does in English. A few more examples from Charterhouse,
"The Marchese professed a vigorous hatred of enlightment. 'It is ideas,' he would say, 'that have been the ruin of Italy.' He did not know quite how to reconcile this holy horror of learning with his desire to see his son Fabrizio perfect the education so brilliantly begun with the Jesuits."
"Two or three times a year Fabrizio, dauntless and hotheaded in pursuit of pleasure, would come very near to drowning himself in the lake."
"Throughout the thirteen years from 1800 to 1813, (The Marchese del Dongo) constantly and firmly believed that Napoleon would be overthrown before six months had passed. Judge then of his rapture when, at the beginning of 1813, he learnt of the disasters of the Beresina! The taking of Paris and the fall of Napoleon almost sent him right off his head; he then allowed himself to make the most outrageous remarks to his wife and his sister. At last, after fourteen years of waiting, he had the inexpressible joy of seeing the Austrian troops re-enter Milan."
"(The Marchese) had one consolation. After the fall of Napoleon, certain powerful personages in Milan had arranged for Conte Prina, a former minister of the King of Italy, and a man of the highest merit, to be brutally assaulted in the street. Conte Pietranera risked his own life to save the minister's, who died from blows received from umbrellas, after an agony of five hours' duration."
A love letter, which reads,
"Will you for once act like an intelligent being? Pray imagine that you have never known me.
I am, with perhaps a little trace of contempt, your very humble servant.
GINA PIETRANERA
After reading this note, Limercati set off for one of his country seats; his love rose to frenzy, he became quite mad and talked of blowing out his brains, a thing unheard of in countries where people believe in hell."
Can't wait to see where this ironic touch ends up. One of the most bizarre things Hitchens ever said was his challenge to the public to find one worthy, quotable line from then candidate Obama's Philadelphia speech on race, as if the complete absence of a Kennedy phrase or two is equatable to a rhetorical deficiency. Persuasive power doesn't require quotability; that should have been obvious to someone who has made a career fighting back fascism, especially where it doesn't exist, like in the Clintons' bedroom. It's much more impressive to me that a historical, ironic power which Stendhal displays here, carried out consistently while telling the simplest of tales (so far, about a boy who is born into a historical moment and grows up into it), can even exist.
"The Marchese professed a vigorous hatred of enlightment. 'It is ideas,' he would say, 'that have been the ruin of Italy.' He did not know quite how to reconcile this holy horror of learning with his desire to see his son Fabrizio perfect the education so brilliantly begun with the Jesuits."
"Two or three times a year Fabrizio, dauntless and hotheaded in pursuit of pleasure, would come very near to drowning himself in the lake."
"Throughout the thirteen years from 1800 to 1813, (The Marchese del Dongo) constantly and firmly believed that Napoleon would be overthrown before six months had passed. Judge then of his rapture when, at the beginning of 1813, he learnt of the disasters of the Beresina! The taking of Paris and the fall of Napoleon almost sent him right off his head; he then allowed himself to make the most outrageous remarks to his wife and his sister. At last, after fourteen years of waiting, he had the inexpressible joy of seeing the Austrian troops re-enter Milan."
"(The Marchese) had one consolation. After the fall of Napoleon, certain powerful personages in Milan had arranged for Conte Prina, a former minister of the King of Italy, and a man of the highest merit, to be brutally assaulted in the street. Conte Pietranera risked his own life to save the minister's, who died from blows received from umbrellas, after an agony of five hours' duration."
A love letter, which reads,
"Will you for once act like an intelligent being? Pray imagine that you have never known me.
I am, with perhaps a little trace of contempt, your very humble servant.
GINA PIETRANERA
After reading this note, Limercati set off for one of his country seats; his love rose to frenzy, he became quite mad and talked of blowing out his brains, a thing unheard of in countries where people believe in hell."
Can't wait to see where this ironic touch ends up. One of the most bizarre things Hitchens ever said was his challenge to the public to find one worthy, quotable line from then candidate Obama's Philadelphia speech on race, as if the complete absence of a Kennedy phrase or two is equatable to a rhetorical deficiency. Persuasive power doesn't require quotability; that should have been obvious to someone who has made a career fighting back fascism, especially where it doesn't exist, like in the Clintons' bedroom. It's much more impressive to me that a historical, ironic power which Stendhal displays here, carried out consistently while telling the simplest of tales (so far, about a boy who is born into a historical moment and grows up into it), can even exist.
James Joyce The Traveler
Never thought of him this way. More like an alchemist, staving off verbal poverty, the material kind too, until the thing is done. But here's Richard Ellman describing him as one, beginning the chapter 1904-1905,
'Poets,' Henri Michaux has written, 'love trips.' Joyce was a traveler by nature as well as necessity. When he had sufficiently complicated his life in one place, he preferred, instead of unraveling it, to move on to another, so that he piled involvement upon involvement. One of the several reasons for his high spirits on leaving Dublin was that he felt he had been forced into doing what he liked.
'Poets,' Henri Michaux has written, 'love trips.' Joyce was a traveler by nature as well as necessity. When he had sufficiently complicated his life in one place, he preferred, instead of unraveling it, to move on to another, so that he piled involvement upon involvement. One of the several reasons for his high spirits on leaving Dublin was that he felt he had been forced into doing what he liked.
That Livid Dublin Evening Light On The Shallows
Samuel Beckett to Tom McGreevy, 25 January 1931,
"Today I am alone until 1 or 2 tomorrow morning, phrase-hunting in St. Augustine and ekeing out the last of my coal, assoupi (meaning 'drowsy')."
Phrase-hunting in St. Augustine? What could that possibly mean? In the same letter we find him reading Malraux, and also saying, "You know I can't write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture. I wish we could meet & talk - before I become inarticulate or eloquently suave." How is it, I wonder, that style alone has become so dissatisfying to him? At some point every artist has to let go of the fear of inadequacy to recognize we're no gods, especially aided by the kind of acclaim publishing or a gallery show would bring, which at least Beckett appears to recognize as being no boon unto itself.
"Today I am alone until 1 or 2 tomorrow morning, phrase-hunting in St. Augustine and ekeing out the last of my coal, assoupi (meaning 'drowsy')."
Phrase-hunting in St. Augustine? What could that possibly mean? In the same letter we find him reading Malraux, and also saying, "You know I can't write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture. I wish we could meet & talk - before I become inarticulate or eloquently suave." How is it, I wonder, that style alone has become so dissatisfying to him? At some point every artist has to let go of the fear of inadequacy to recognize we're no gods, especially aided by the kind of acclaim publishing or a gallery show would bring, which at least Beckett appears to recognize as being no boon unto itself.
A Thought On The Minority Taste Of Literature
I prefer it that the poetic is becoming a segment of a dying breed (supposedly). Purity turns me on more than popularity does. I don't need to feel less alone. I don't need to bridge no awful gap, unless, of course, it's more money and more status I need. I have beautiful women in mind. If an attrition rate has already settled in with literature, I say good, let the trend seekers go fuck themselves.
A Note On Pascal's Universal Justice
Pascal says, "Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is." To that I'd say, and fashion a matter of charm without justice.
Pascal looked at the eternity that came before him, the eternity that will succeed him, and asks these questions, "Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?" These are natural questions to ask. A more durable response, however, would be to ask them, and then to ask, under what jurisdiction am I asking? And to consider, what kind of a lunatic would expect an eternal response, let alone a global one? A King?
In reading philosophy, I've come across the term "a priori" at least a thousand times now, each time further confusing what I had thought it meant, to the point of the idea's oblivion. Finally I can take a step back with Gilles Deleuze, in his lecture on Kant. "A priori" simply means "independent of experience". "A posteriori" means "given or givable in experience".
Because of our capitalist world, where the will to proceed to progress has shifted to the seat of the individual, the perceptual eye has followed. Is it possible to do what Emerson believed, to sit before the universe and receive an intuition about it whole?
Yesterday I saw a remarkable phenomenon I had never seen before. Sitting on the seawall of the Intercoastal Waterway, which sits about a quarter of a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, I was reading thoughts on justice like these from Pascal. I have a place I like to sit underneath a tree. No coconut has bopped me on the head yet. The yachts and speedboats occasionally come by left and right. I was watching a couple of yahoos on a smaller boat speed much faster than the speed limit, then slow down as they approached the Atlantic causeway bridge. There was no chance for the wake to have made it to my position by the seawall yet. And yet on the surface of the placid water, about five feet away from the barnacled cement, a circle broke on the surface like a smoke ring. And then another just beyond the rim of the circle. And then another, approaching the seat where I sat. The physical motion of the puffsmoke-like circling reminded me of a Slinky, where the coils gather energy and then proceed. I thought it might be a manatee breaking the surface of the water for some smelly breaths. But no, just an underwater water phenomenon, probably from the boat. And then the waves from the wake of the boat began breaking against the seawall, eliminating the rings.
Zhou Luyun's (Irene Chou's) painting called 長壽 (Longevity).
And here's Deleuze on his lecture on Kant, about the possibility of the totality of experience at any given moment,
"To the question: does the whole of possible experience mean something? No meaning at all if we remain in an a posteriori approach, because in an a posteriori approach I am led to make an addition: the roses, the flowers other than roses, the plants which are not flowers, the animals, etc.... I could go to infinity like that and nothing tells me that I have a whole of possible experience. On the contrary, experience is fundamentally fragmented, it is opposed to a totalisation. If Kant launches this very very new notion of a totality of possible experience it is because he is in a position to define, to say: yes, there is a level where the whole of possible experience takes on a sense, it is precisely because there are universal predicates which are attributed to all things, which is to say are attributed to any object whatever. Thus it is a priori that the notion of the totality of possible experience will be founded."
Obviously there is a totality of experience. It's now; it's there. Everyone is creating it. Everyone is contributing to it. But can it be researched? Can it be caught in a flash? Can the individual mind meditate on it in totality? And if not, do you then take a lowest common denominator approach, with the simplicity of a pop tart? Or try and take the pierce of a poet to heart? There is no such thing as a purely stoical approach. Actions are observed and we act. It would be nice not to have a creative instinct and just enjoy life for what it is, especially if we're all contributing to the totality in our own, silent ways. Unfortunately for some of us, this is a completely dissatisfying approach to life. I love art too much to ignore it.
At another point in the lecture, Deleuze makes a funny aside about how Kant is always breaking things down into threes. Maybe not so funny, because at the time Kant was writing at the end of the 18th century, democracy was taking shape, breaking justice down into Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches. At some point I'm going to have to take another look at Kant's What Is Enlightenment? (published one year after the close of the "American Revolution" and five years before the French one began) because I swear his obsession is with an awareness of the loss of privacy, not with the "faculties" of the mind. Emerson read Kant badly, thinking that "transcendent" equated with "universal".
Pascal looked at the eternity that came before him, the eternity that will succeed him, and asks these questions, "Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?" These are natural questions to ask. A more durable response, however, would be to ask them, and then to ask, under what jurisdiction am I asking? And to consider, what kind of a lunatic would expect an eternal response, let alone a global one? A King?
In reading philosophy, I've come across the term "a priori" at least a thousand times now, each time further confusing what I had thought it meant, to the point of the idea's oblivion. Finally I can take a step back with Gilles Deleuze, in his lecture on Kant. "A priori" simply means "independent of experience". "A posteriori" means "given or givable in experience".
Because of our capitalist world, where the will to proceed to progress has shifted to the seat of the individual, the perceptual eye has followed. Is it possible to do what Emerson believed, to sit before the universe and receive an intuition about it whole?
Yesterday I saw a remarkable phenomenon I had never seen before. Sitting on the seawall of the Intercoastal Waterway, which sits about a quarter of a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, I was reading thoughts on justice like these from Pascal. I have a place I like to sit underneath a tree. No coconut has bopped me on the head yet. The yachts and speedboats occasionally come by left and right. I was watching a couple of yahoos on a smaller boat speed much faster than the speed limit, then slow down as they approached the Atlantic causeway bridge. There was no chance for the wake to have made it to my position by the seawall yet. And yet on the surface of the placid water, about five feet away from the barnacled cement, a circle broke on the surface like a smoke ring. And then another just beyond the rim of the circle. And then another, approaching the seat where I sat. The physical motion of the puffsmoke-like circling reminded me of a Slinky, where the coils gather energy and then proceed. I thought it might be a manatee breaking the surface of the water for some smelly breaths. But no, just an underwater water phenomenon, probably from the boat. And then the waves from the wake of the boat began breaking against the seawall, eliminating the rings.
Zhou Luyun's (Irene Chou's) painting called 長壽 (Longevity).
"To the question: does the whole of possible experience mean something? No meaning at all if we remain in an a posteriori approach, because in an a posteriori approach I am led to make an addition: the roses, the flowers other than roses, the plants which are not flowers, the animals, etc.... I could go to infinity like that and nothing tells me that I have a whole of possible experience. On the contrary, experience is fundamentally fragmented, it is opposed to a totalisation. If Kant launches this very very new notion of a totality of possible experience it is because he is in a position to define, to say: yes, there is a level where the whole of possible experience takes on a sense, it is precisely because there are universal predicates which are attributed to all things, which is to say are attributed to any object whatever. Thus it is a priori that the notion of the totality of possible experience will be founded."
Obviously there is a totality of experience. It's now; it's there. Everyone is creating it. Everyone is contributing to it. But can it be researched? Can it be caught in a flash? Can the individual mind meditate on it in totality? And if not, do you then take a lowest common denominator approach, with the simplicity of a pop tart? Or try and take the pierce of a poet to heart? There is no such thing as a purely stoical approach. Actions are observed and we act. It would be nice not to have a creative instinct and just enjoy life for what it is, especially if we're all contributing to the totality in our own, silent ways. Unfortunately for some of us, this is a completely dissatisfying approach to life. I love art too much to ignore it.
At another point in the lecture, Deleuze makes a funny aside about how Kant is always breaking things down into threes. Maybe not so funny, because at the time Kant was writing at the end of the 18th century, democracy was taking shape, breaking justice down into Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches. At some point I'm going to have to take another look at Kant's What Is Enlightenment? (published one year after the close of the "American Revolution" and five years before the French one began) because I swear his obsession is with an awareness of the loss of privacy, not with the "faculties" of the mind. Emerson read Kant badly, thinking that "transcendent" equated with "universal".
Review - The Girl Who Became A Beatle
 |
| THE GIRL WHO BECAME A BEATLE Greg Taylor |
Plot: 08/10
Characters: 06/10
Relationships: 07/10
Setting: 08/10
Themes: 07/10
Voice: 07/10
Ending: 07/10
Recommendability: 07/10
Fangirling: 07/10
---------------------------------------
73/100 = C
Regina Bloomsbury's one wish is to be a successful musician, but when her band, The Caverns, breaks up, she makes a different sort of wish. She wishes that The Caverns were as famous as The Beatles and it happens -- just not the way she imagined. Instead of being as famous as the fab four, Regina's band has replaced them. They sing all the old songs (written, in this crazy wish-world, by Regina) and even have the same album covers. In this new world Regina has one week to make a decision -- to replace The Beatles forever and live in this wish-world, or go back to her ordinary life.
I'm a sucker for books with a strong Beatles influence, but this one didn't live up to its incredible premise. Though the story is centered around Regina and her band we don't really get a chance to know her bandmates -- not even the one she has a crush on. I realize that these people were important to Regina and that she shared a huge part of her life with them, but there were so few scenes with them that it's hard to really see their relationship or personalities. And despite a good plot, I found it hard to enjoy a book where the rules of Regina's wish-world weren't clearly defined. Was it magic? Was it a dream? Was it real? We aren't given answers to any of these questions and while that might not be a problem for some readers, it definitely bothered me. As for Regina herself, she seems to get caught up in the madness of fame pretty easily for someone who's supposed to be calm, cool, and in control... and for someone who knows this isn't her real life.
There are plenty of variations on the ordinary-girl-becomes-super-famous theme in YA these past few years and in order to stand out a book really has to have a unique spin on the concept. With the Beatles-mania going on here, this book is definitely different, but it's not enough to distract from the dull characters and predictability. On the whole, this was an easily forgettable book with a fun, easy plot and plenty of Beatles references. But beyond that it didn't have much to offer and I don't think it's one I'll be rereading.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
On Éric Rohmer's Women
The essence of French or Japanese beauty is predicated on the idea that those who actually contain it aren't initially, exceedingly attractive. You won't find the kind of demand made on character, audience, surroundings, as you would Shakespeare's Cleopatra, saying with her very first words, "If it be love indeed, tell me how much." Without the irony implied, however, you have Shakespeare anticipating the bourgeois theater - modern film - training its curious lens on Katherine Heigl's every facial pore, for instance, for the source of a peculiarly faddish material beauty.
This is from the interview I referred to yesterday regarding Isabelle Huppert. She's being interviewed by a young man, "one of fashion's fiercest, most fascinating talents," the magazine has it,
INTERVIEWER Excuse me for saying so but I think - and it isn't just in film but fashion as well - all this craziness in order to walk on the red carpet for fifteen minutes. I don't know.
HUPPERT And finally to the detriment of people's personalities!
INTERVIEWER Is this essentially an American phenomenon?
HUPPERT I suppose so. Let's say international, but mostly American.
And,
INTERVIEWER I find that unfortunately there are some American actresses who do not know how to dress at all. We feel that they are well 'surrounded' but that's not very interesting -
HUPPERT I agree. (Laughing)
Even before Rohmer's women receive a consideration, in Anglo-American criticism, a few commonplaces about Rohmer the man, Rohmer the artist, and Rohmer the filmmaker are in order. First of all the poetry of his landscapes must be ignored. Second of all, there must be a scratching of the head why Rohmer's characters aren't so full of the kinds of psychological acuities to be found in Ingmar Bergman's characters.
We all know what those are like: pointing out the true psychological core of our intimates, during conversation, a kind of expressed brutality foisted upon a passive's generosity and necessary patience, as they withhold theirs, a barely suppressed series of emotional eruptions, as a result, all in a claustrophobic, overwrought atmosphere where the nature appears dark, the city surreal, the society nowhere. Strange how alternatives and options don't arise for these characters with money. Rohmer's characters are aware there are amorous, sensual options, none the least within the imagination. With Bergman's conception, which appears like a world on the brink of a complete absence of faith, an individual must take the intense pressure of psychological-acuity-as-truth with intelligence, otherwise the sense of an impending, disastrous loss of social status might appear earned. A consideration of Rohmer never fails to mention his Catholicism. A consideration of Bergman assumes he's primarily a secular artist. But it should be obvious, after watching Persona or Scenes from a Marriage, that the Inquisitor is now within our hands.
What W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, and Éric Rohmer all have in common, as artists, is a long gestation period where they went, for all intents and purposes, largely silent. Each hit upon their stride in their forties. The truth they discovered is global. An attenuation of an abundance of affectations meets the passivity of every moment where the poetic selects fruition out for use. This blending of gestation and momentary fruition, which is to be found in Sebald's poems on eyes, Carson, generally speaking, in her religious skepticism, is what is the subject of Frank O'Hara's poem, the one which soberly begins, "The only way to be quiet is to be quick..."
Any religion worth considering is based on the tyranny of selection: when you choose one image, one soul, one way, one path, another will go ignored. Rohmer's most compelling characters, men and women alike, are very much aware of this fact. That's why it would appear he has an obsession with characters in their twenties and thirties. That's when the tyranny of selection is at its most intense; that's when it forms you. Any individual that emerges from this intense tyranny of selection period with the poetics of ambiguity in tact has the makings of an erotic poet.
You don't need artistic, creative intentions, but it helps. The natural, attractive glamour of men and women requires time. An intensity of purpose would ruin on a natural glamour. A "male gaze" would bother only those who have never really been subjected to it, or if they have, don't really know what to do when objectified. As if Rohmer filming, picking out actresses and returning to preferred ones over time isn't objectifying. It is, because his films are already in the past. The poetic environment he has established defeats a timely sensation, superceding each one. Whereas Shakespeare had to disburse actual speech into a tapestry of poetic effects to convey his global vision, Rohmer simply inverted the process by harnessing the visual to an assumed verbal tapestry.
An example of the way Rohmer's poetry works can be found in the opening moments of La Collectionneuse. Two women, one man, are sitting outdoors. Immediately you hear the man in the background saying, "Perhaps style is more important than beauty..."
One of the two women present isn't convinced. "We love someone because we find him handsome," she says directly to the other woman, not the man, who is clearly handsome. "For me, an ugly man has no charm. Nothing's possible. It's over immediately."
Setting aside the psychological circumstances that requires her views being made explicit, which the impact is made immediate, by Rohmer, we're made curious about the implicit of this woman's views; but what primarily emerges, at the end of the discussion, is the sound of the arbor being amplified with the music of birds, what will outlast these particular views, any particular view, as two lovers are seen heading off on a stroll.
Personally these views of the woman excite me to no end. I would love to be objectified by a woman, but only by one that's not a feminine moron. For instance, one who would use "male beauty" as no more than a substitute for the promise of economic security, or what status she can't very well create for herself; or has it, for crissakes, but continues to be confused about what's at the root of it, a series of compromises, for instance, that have forwarded her front and center. Similarly, a convincing, credible appreciation for male beauty is what drew me into Anne Carson's world when I first read her in the late nineties, when she writes, amusingly,
"Loyal to nothing my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age and the divorce decree came in the mail? Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. As I would again if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible. Beauty makes sex sex. You if anyone grasp this - hush, let's pass."
A sure fire barometer on whether the viewer or critic understands Rohmer's poetic conception can be measured by how he or she views the Marie Rivière of Le Rayon Vert and La Femme de l'aviateur. Invariably the Anglo-American reception finds her a self-absorbed nuisance who doesn't know how to make up her mind. That response is as foregone as Hollywood production values. Not too many other works of art I can think of render more beautifully and sacred a young woman's intelligent resistance to the tyranny of selection. As for the very last moment of Le Rayon Vert, many find it momentarily redemptive. I wish I could see it that way, but like the Japanese poets I only see beauty as a temporary phenomenon. Still, that scene is incredibly moving, but not as moving as the moment in the train station when Rivière finally recognizes the opportunity to speak, as she would ordinarily do with herself.
It's impossible to choose one of Rohmer's women over the others through which to turn the prism and see his conception whole. Rohmer's conception is such that he teaches you to appreciate those women you would ordinarily be inclined to dislike intensely, which for me is the Charlotte Véry of Conte d'Hiver. Now there's someone who is truly self-absorbed; but with Rohmer being as generous as he is, he populates her world with people who accept her dreadful, bourgeois limitations for what they are, a man who loves her despite these faults, an outstanding mother whose wisdom appears to have gone lost on the offspring. That I feel a touch of tenderness for Véry at the end of the film, which in other hands I would resist with all my imaginative might, is a large part of what makes Rohmer for me one of only a handful of supreme artists. The same goes with Rohmer's Arielle Dombasle. I am inclined to ignore everything about her but her body, but even here he broadens the range.
The Zouzou of L'Amour l'après-midi, of course, is completely captivating, the 1970s Dorothy Hamill hairstyle bringing back so many awful little grammar school memories notwithstanding. With her you have one of Rohmer's outstanding devices: a character who would appear a main one appearing, rather, like a dream, a peripheral consideration to the actual main character, mainly because we never get to see that character in a private world separate from the main narrative thrust, which in this case is Bernard Verley's ongoing doubts about marriage imported into one, despite an unambiguous affection for his wife. The last scene in this film mirrors the one of Le Rayon Vert, equally one of the most affecting in all of film, yet like that, equally ambiguous (the Anglo-American, bourgeois response naturally has it as the affirmation of marriage, rather than as a reaffirmation of one only).
I wish there had been more of Aurora Cornu, she of a withering, fatigued, unyielding, yet passive intelligence that has settled beautifully around the eyes. Another supreme device of Rohmer's can be seen through her in Le Genou de Claire. Occasionally those alternative narratives taking place which we can't see, for the sake of a film's coherence, erupts into the world of a glance. With Cornu it's done brilliantly in a scene where she describes the pursuit of, and the attainment of, physically attractive young men, mainly for the purpose of populating her novels with psychological plausibility. As a character, throughout the film, she's possessed of a very seductive, yet detached sense of sexual and intellecual poise. When it's as poised as this, either in film or life, I wouldn't believe it for a moment; the role of women in society may have been revolutionized, but the need for at least a touch of tenderness, I don't see that ever changing as long as we remain, as a species, within this evolutionary phase.
There's a moment in the film where, completely out of character, we receive - it's given - a glimpse of Cornu's cleavage. I find this one of the most erotic moments in all of Rohmer's oeuvre. As for the scene with the novelist's lack of plausibility, it begins when we hear her say of men, "Since I can't have them all I prefer to do without any." Any woman that would actually believe this, good on to her, though I would find it hardly believable, especially with any character as intelligent and sensitive as Cornu's.
The outstanding Jean-Claude Brialy - a piece of male beauty Cornu uses throughout the film - responds to this piece of bluster with, "That's quite unnatural, and quite immoral." She responds to his disbelief, a defense of a momentary lapse of plausibility, really, by way of explaining there's no way she'd ever take the first clown that comes along her way. And as the camera frames her like a confessional chamber, we hear of her pursuit of young men. A vulnerability breaks through, which suggests that, in addition to her implausibility, we're now receiving the inauthenticity of the tale; the vulnerable woman, which is broached but shall remain inviolate, is one of the finest moments in the oeuvre too.
It's very subtly done, and I think only males who know how not to press on the vulnerability would be able to notice it. A lot of Anglo-American critics find Brialy's character a cretinous one, but in between the quality of relations between mature adults and the hazardous one between maturity and innocence is the loss of virginity. Young individuals can be involved in sexual relationships and still be in need of the sexually charged, psychologically mature phase, which most young men are just too dumb to offer. The film's charge is on that tease between maturity and innocence those of us who are honest, especially those of us who have been teachers, would recognize as a worthy temptation, to be that kind of instructor, outside of the national curriculum, a young beauty would never forget.
With the outstanding Béatrice Romand, I've actually seen her development within the Rohmerian conception backwards, from maturity to innocence, beginning with Conte d'automne to Le Rayon Vert to Le Beau Mariage to the young woman we see in Le Genou de Claire, so much so has the mature woman settled in my mind that as I scan the young shape of her body in a bikini from head to toe, in the earliest film, it's a kind of violation I can't say I can live with. There's something remarkably stupid about young female flesh; I shouldn't have been so hungry for the details. I wouldn't care a jot about Claire's knee unless there was that psychological component involved, tempter to temptee, irrelevant as to who would be considered the one seducing in a court of law.
Rohmer's global conception, then, is poetic and philosophical, sensual and imaginative, a set of images working upon the interior like Mallarmé's great book would. Rohmer's visual "world" seems like the real world but it isn't.
A few weeks ago I was waiting to pick someone up at the airport. While waiting in front of the gate I was observing a strawberry blonde to my left. The cascading hair was seductive, so were the hazel eyes, so was the cream colored blouse; what wasn't seductive was the army fatigues she wore, a lack of comportment nowhere to be found in Rohmer's world. But most specifically, the hunger with which she wolfed down a frosted covered danish, assuming no one was observing her, so much so that the sugar frosting had gathered on the far corners of her lips. Nowhere in any corner of Rohmer's imaginative universe would a detail like this ever be allowed to intrude. If you would see this superficially, it would appear a form of discrimination; if you would see this within the poetic imagination, it would appear just.
On a personal note, I hold a special affection for Marie Rivière. I won't explain why, only to say that I plan on writing a few poems with her in mind. The stuttering ambivalence she displays when she's given the opportunity to speak reminds me a lot of myself, for one thing, and the way ambivalence creates an environment ripe for over-interpretation, for oneself, for those listening and observing, as well. Like with the Aurora Cornu character, most of my relationships have been treated propositionally, even experimentally, if we wish to be scientific about it. But what can't be denied is that whether the ambivalence is French or Japanese, if it sounds as sweet to me as does Rivière's French, a certain respectful distance is absolutely necessary, such as in the way we see Brialy and Cornu treat each other. While the credits are rolling at the very end of Conte d'Automne the mature Rivière displays a look of doubt. It's my undying hope that this added touch isn't gratuitous.
This is from the interview I referred to yesterday regarding Isabelle Huppert. She's being interviewed by a young man, "one of fashion's fiercest, most fascinating talents," the magazine has it,
INTERVIEWER Excuse me for saying so but I think - and it isn't just in film but fashion as well - all this craziness in order to walk on the red carpet for fifteen minutes. I don't know.
HUPPERT And finally to the detriment of people's personalities!
INTERVIEWER Is this essentially an American phenomenon?
HUPPERT I suppose so. Let's say international, but mostly American.
And,
INTERVIEWER I find that unfortunately there are some American actresses who do not know how to dress at all. We feel that they are well 'surrounded' but that's not very interesting -
HUPPERT I agree. (Laughing)
Even before Rohmer's women receive a consideration, in Anglo-American criticism, a few commonplaces about Rohmer the man, Rohmer the artist, and Rohmer the filmmaker are in order. First of all the poetry of his landscapes must be ignored. Second of all, there must be a scratching of the head why Rohmer's characters aren't so full of the kinds of psychological acuities to be found in Ingmar Bergman's characters.
We all know what those are like: pointing out the true psychological core of our intimates, during conversation, a kind of expressed brutality foisted upon a passive's generosity and necessary patience, as they withhold theirs, a barely suppressed series of emotional eruptions, as a result, all in a claustrophobic, overwrought atmosphere where the nature appears dark, the city surreal, the society nowhere. Strange how alternatives and options don't arise for these characters with money. Rohmer's characters are aware there are amorous, sensual options, none the least within the imagination. With Bergman's conception, which appears like a world on the brink of a complete absence of faith, an individual must take the intense pressure of psychological-acuity-as-truth with intelligence, otherwise the sense of an impending, disastrous loss of social status might appear earned. A consideration of Rohmer never fails to mention his Catholicism. A consideration of Bergman assumes he's primarily a secular artist. But it should be obvious, after watching Persona or Scenes from a Marriage, that the Inquisitor is now within our hands.
What W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, and Éric Rohmer all have in common, as artists, is a long gestation period where they went, for all intents and purposes, largely silent. Each hit upon their stride in their forties. The truth they discovered is global. An attenuation of an abundance of affectations meets the passivity of every moment where the poetic selects fruition out for use. This blending of gestation and momentary fruition, which is to be found in Sebald's poems on eyes, Carson, generally speaking, in her religious skepticism, is what is the subject of Frank O'Hara's poem, the one which soberly begins, "The only way to be quiet is to be quick..."
Any religion worth considering is based on the tyranny of selection: when you choose one image, one soul, one way, one path, another will go ignored. Rohmer's most compelling characters, men and women alike, are very much aware of this fact. That's why it would appear he has an obsession with characters in their twenties and thirties. That's when the tyranny of selection is at its most intense; that's when it forms you. Any individual that emerges from this intense tyranny of selection period with the poetics of ambiguity in tact has the makings of an erotic poet.
You don't need artistic, creative intentions, but it helps. The natural, attractive glamour of men and women requires time. An intensity of purpose would ruin on a natural glamour. A "male gaze" would bother only those who have never really been subjected to it, or if they have, don't really know what to do when objectified. As if Rohmer filming, picking out actresses and returning to preferred ones over time isn't objectifying. It is, because his films are already in the past. The poetic environment he has established defeats a timely sensation, superceding each one. Whereas Shakespeare had to disburse actual speech into a tapestry of poetic effects to convey his global vision, Rohmer simply inverted the process by harnessing the visual to an assumed verbal tapestry.
An example of the way Rohmer's poetry works can be found in the opening moments of La Collectionneuse. Two women, one man, are sitting outdoors. Immediately you hear the man in the background saying, "Perhaps style is more important than beauty..."
One of the two women present isn't convinced. "We love someone because we find him handsome," she says directly to the other woman, not the man, who is clearly handsome. "For me, an ugly man has no charm. Nothing's possible. It's over immediately."
Setting aside the psychological circumstances that requires her views being made explicit, which the impact is made immediate, by Rohmer, we're made curious about the implicit of this woman's views; but what primarily emerges, at the end of the discussion, is the sound of the arbor being amplified with the music of birds, what will outlast these particular views, any particular view, as two lovers are seen heading off on a stroll.
Personally these views of the woman excite me to no end. I would love to be objectified by a woman, but only by one that's not a feminine moron. For instance, one who would use "male beauty" as no more than a substitute for the promise of economic security, or what status she can't very well create for herself; or has it, for crissakes, but continues to be confused about what's at the root of it, a series of compromises, for instance, that have forwarded her front and center. Similarly, a convincing, credible appreciation for male beauty is what drew me into Anne Carson's world when I first read her in the late nineties, when she writes, amusingly,
"Loyal to nothing my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age and the divorce decree came in the mail? Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. As I would again if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible. Beauty makes sex sex. You if anyone grasp this - hush, let's pass."
A sure fire barometer on whether the viewer or critic understands Rohmer's poetic conception can be measured by how he or she views the Marie Rivière of Le Rayon Vert and La Femme de l'aviateur. Invariably the Anglo-American reception finds her a self-absorbed nuisance who doesn't know how to make up her mind. That response is as foregone as Hollywood production values. Not too many other works of art I can think of render more beautifully and sacred a young woman's intelligent resistance to the tyranny of selection. As for the very last moment of Le Rayon Vert, many find it momentarily redemptive. I wish I could see it that way, but like the Japanese poets I only see beauty as a temporary phenomenon. Still, that scene is incredibly moving, but not as moving as the moment in the train station when Rivière finally recognizes the opportunity to speak, as she would ordinarily do with herself.
It's impossible to choose one of Rohmer's women over the others through which to turn the prism and see his conception whole. Rohmer's conception is such that he teaches you to appreciate those women you would ordinarily be inclined to dislike intensely, which for me is the Charlotte Véry of Conte d'Hiver. Now there's someone who is truly self-absorbed; but with Rohmer being as generous as he is, he populates her world with people who accept her dreadful, bourgeois limitations for what they are, a man who loves her despite these faults, an outstanding mother whose wisdom appears to have gone lost on the offspring. That I feel a touch of tenderness for Véry at the end of the film, which in other hands I would resist with all my imaginative might, is a large part of what makes Rohmer for me one of only a handful of supreme artists. The same goes with Rohmer's Arielle Dombasle. I am inclined to ignore everything about her but her body, but even here he broadens the range.
The Zouzou of L'Amour l'après-midi, of course, is completely captivating, the 1970s Dorothy Hamill hairstyle bringing back so many awful little grammar school memories notwithstanding. With her you have one of Rohmer's outstanding devices: a character who would appear a main one appearing, rather, like a dream, a peripheral consideration to the actual main character, mainly because we never get to see that character in a private world separate from the main narrative thrust, which in this case is Bernard Verley's ongoing doubts about marriage imported into one, despite an unambiguous affection for his wife. The last scene in this film mirrors the one of Le Rayon Vert, equally one of the most affecting in all of film, yet like that, equally ambiguous (the Anglo-American, bourgeois response naturally has it as the affirmation of marriage, rather than as a reaffirmation of one only).
I wish there had been more of Aurora Cornu, she of a withering, fatigued, unyielding, yet passive intelligence that has settled beautifully around the eyes. Another supreme device of Rohmer's can be seen through her in Le Genou de Claire. Occasionally those alternative narratives taking place which we can't see, for the sake of a film's coherence, erupts into the world of a glance. With Cornu it's done brilliantly in a scene where she describes the pursuit of, and the attainment of, physically attractive young men, mainly for the purpose of populating her novels with psychological plausibility. As a character, throughout the film, she's possessed of a very seductive, yet detached sense of sexual and intellecual poise. When it's as poised as this, either in film or life, I wouldn't believe it for a moment; the role of women in society may have been revolutionized, but the need for at least a touch of tenderness, I don't see that ever changing as long as we remain, as a species, within this evolutionary phase.
There's a moment in the film where, completely out of character, we receive - it's given - a glimpse of Cornu's cleavage. I find this one of the most erotic moments in all of Rohmer's oeuvre. As for the scene with the novelist's lack of plausibility, it begins when we hear her say of men, "Since I can't have them all I prefer to do without any." Any woman that would actually believe this, good on to her, though I would find it hardly believable, especially with any character as intelligent and sensitive as Cornu's.
The outstanding Jean-Claude Brialy - a piece of male beauty Cornu uses throughout the film - responds to this piece of bluster with, "That's quite unnatural, and quite immoral." She responds to his disbelief, a defense of a momentary lapse of plausibility, really, by way of explaining there's no way she'd ever take the first clown that comes along her way. And as the camera frames her like a confessional chamber, we hear of her pursuit of young men. A vulnerability breaks through, which suggests that, in addition to her implausibility, we're now receiving the inauthenticity of the tale; the vulnerable woman, which is broached but shall remain inviolate, is one of the finest moments in the oeuvre too.
It's very subtly done, and I think only males who know how not to press on the vulnerability would be able to notice it. A lot of Anglo-American critics find Brialy's character a cretinous one, but in between the quality of relations between mature adults and the hazardous one between maturity and innocence is the loss of virginity. Young individuals can be involved in sexual relationships and still be in need of the sexually charged, psychologically mature phase, which most young men are just too dumb to offer. The film's charge is on that tease between maturity and innocence those of us who are honest, especially those of us who have been teachers, would recognize as a worthy temptation, to be that kind of instructor, outside of the national curriculum, a young beauty would never forget.
With the outstanding Béatrice Romand, I've actually seen her development within the Rohmerian conception backwards, from maturity to innocence, beginning with Conte d'automne to Le Rayon Vert to Le Beau Mariage to the young woman we see in Le Genou de Claire, so much so has the mature woman settled in my mind that as I scan the young shape of her body in a bikini from head to toe, in the earliest film, it's a kind of violation I can't say I can live with. There's something remarkably stupid about young female flesh; I shouldn't have been so hungry for the details. I wouldn't care a jot about Claire's knee unless there was that psychological component involved, tempter to temptee, irrelevant as to who would be considered the one seducing in a court of law.
Rohmer's global conception, then, is poetic and philosophical, sensual and imaginative, a set of images working upon the interior like Mallarmé's great book would. Rohmer's visual "world" seems like the real world but it isn't.
A few weeks ago I was waiting to pick someone up at the airport. While waiting in front of the gate I was observing a strawberry blonde to my left. The cascading hair was seductive, so were the hazel eyes, so was the cream colored blouse; what wasn't seductive was the army fatigues she wore, a lack of comportment nowhere to be found in Rohmer's world. But most specifically, the hunger with which she wolfed down a frosted covered danish, assuming no one was observing her, so much so that the sugar frosting had gathered on the far corners of her lips. Nowhere in any corner of Rohmer's imaginative universe would a detail like this ever be allowed to intrude. If you would see this superficially, it would appear a form of discrimination; if you would see this within the poetic imagination, it would appear just.
On a personal note, I hold a special affection for Marie Rivière. I won't explain why, only to say that I plan on writing a few poems with her in mind. The stuttering ambivalence she displays when she's given the opportunity to speak reminds me a lot of myself, for one thing, and the way ambivalence creates an environment ripe for over-interpretation, for oneself, for those listening and observing, as well. Like with the Aurora Cornu character, most of my relationships have been treated propositionally, even experimentally, if we wish to be scientific about it. But what can't be denied is that whether the ambivalence is French or Japanese, if it sounds as sweet to me as does Rivière's French, a certain respectful distance is absolutely necessary, such as in the way we see Brialy and Cornu treat each other. While the credits are rolling at the very end of Conte d'Automne the mature Rivière displays a look of doubt. It's my undying hope that this added touch isn't gratuitous.
Guest Blog - Sports Movies (Keri Mikulski) & Giveaway
In honor of the blog tour for her new book, Head Games, I asked Keri Mikulski to share with us some of her favorite sports movies. Here's what she had to say...
My Top Three Favorite Sporty Movies
1. Love and Basketball
The best sports movie of all time! A little bit of Vision Quest, but with a female lead, basketball action, and plenty of romance!
2. Vision Quest
A perfect mix of an underdog sports story and romance. Check out the Matthew Modine jumping rope scene -- yum! :)
3. A League of Their Own
Total classic! Best line ever -- "there's no crying in baseball."
Honorable Mentions:
Bend It Like Beckham,
The Natural,
Blue Crush,
Cutting Edge,
Whip It,
and Gracie.
Upcoming:
I cannot wait to check out the new Reese Witherspoon movie, How Do You Know? Witherspoon plays an ex-Olympic softball player.
Thanks so much for sharing your list with us, Keri! Also, to go along with the theme of this post, Keri is giving a $10 Blockbuster gift card to one lucky commenter on this post. You have until Jan. 25th to comment & enter.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
On The Hunt For Elfriede Jelinek
That dream sent me out in search of her fiction. Something like, "Aesthetic purity or a matter of taste," I wonder, "either would be OK just as long as it's not fit for print in The New York Times," as I turned left onto M.L. King Dr. "Rainy day, dream away, lay back and groove on a rainy day..." Or even better, Jimi singing "Tire tracks all across your back I can see you had your fun." It must be tough being a recognized literary critic having to fend off the barbarians at the gate with their preferred book recommendations.
This one stretch of road in Pompano Beach, M.L. King Dr., it's the one area here that actually makes me feel like I'm in the South, not Southern Florida. The heat is up, it's shorts weather again. Just past the turn, at around 20 MPH there's the street sign for the avenue named after Esther Rolle. Hi Florida! The crates are turned over in front of the "Food and Meat" convenience store, and the men are playing chess in the shade. With the windows in the car down I can smell the barbeque smell from the cement sided store with "Beef and Pork BBQ" handpainted over its white washed wall.
But that's all later on. Along the pleasant slow crawl of a road, out on a walk this early in the day, it's pretty obvious who the whores are. For one thing, they're white, and are in the extreme minority along the lack of a hurry. For another, there's something undeniably gross about them, even though some of them aren't all that bad looking, despite what's probably a heartbreaking narrative in store for the patient-minded. For a third, when I give them a good lookover they wave me back. There are a few Baptist Churches. When I ask the ladies at the supermarket how they're doing today, they say, "I'm blessed, thank you, couldn't be better," something you'd never hear anyone in Boston saying out loud. Just beyond the Haitian church a group of men were waiting for the public transportation. One who couldn't possibly know where he's headed, with his graying hair, almost greenish eyes, had his stumpy pud pulled out of his vinyl tracksuit and was urinating a steady yellow stream smack on in the direction of the oncoming traffic.
It's midday, and that feeling of intimacy holding Isabelle Huppert in my arms is as strong in the imagination as when I dreamt it. I'm not even that big of a fan, having seen only one of her movies the name of which I can't recall. But captivated by an interview and photo shoot from a magazine I had purchased while in Sapporo, Japan, the magazine actually made it back, even while I felt I had to leave behind much more personal treasure, the souvenirs handed out from those who had once told me, "Please don't forget me."
There was a time beginning from around eight years old I'd think about a pathetic crush intensely, teacher or student, one or the other, for at least an hour before going to sleep in the hope they'd appear just like Isabelle Huppert did last night. These things just can't be forced; they arrive when they do, which is more interesting to me than what dreams might actually mean. Admitting this poem, dream, and after-shock online, I know I'm opening myself up to all kinds of psychological interpretation. I've read them all too.
At the library I renewed Sylvia Plath's journals, which I'm just about ready to give up. I took out The Piano Teacher, which will now read as Huppert as instructor. This won't diminish Jelinek the writer; I believe in the collaboration of the arts more than I do books. I need Frank O'Hara again, so I took out Poems Retrieved. I've decided to give Ellman's James Joyce another try. And for those times when the internet makes me want to hate myself, Heidegger's Early Greek Thinking.
The library is attached to a college and the students have returned. At the half-assed college I went to out in Western Massachusetts, from Day One administration wished to emphasize that ours, unlike the other ones, is a friendly campus; everyone says Hello to each other on campus, and for four years that's what I did, say Hello to everyone passing by each other on the campus. I tried that out this morning and received about an 18% response rate. I did look like a bum though, as I haven't showered and shaved for a few days now.
A few days ago I did a post on Anne Carson and Matsuo Basho, about those eternal returns that come back like an autumnal breeze. Something like that was at work returning to the car. There's a canal at the back of homes, near the library. The urban design, the strip malls, the cul-de-sacs of this Southern Florida region isn't just material for cultural commentary; it's real to me, and it feels like death. But in this small shaded canal, with the tropical greenery Vietnamese lush, with a group of white birds with long, curved, orange beaks pecking at the thick grass, the families of ducks emerging from under the tropical trees, with a turtle climbing a rock and then falling back in with a slip, it all came back to me, Ms. Le's home on the Mekong Delta, back to some beautiful days I'll never forget. I ought to be looking to the future more, as it feels like I'm now stuck in a vacuum of a seat writing, but I feel like I've already lived enough of a kind of experience many will never see.
This one stretch of road in Pompano Beach, M.L. King Dr., it's the one area here that actually makes me feel like I'm in the South, not Southern Florida. The heat is up, it's shorts weather again. Just past the turn, at around 20 MPH there's the street sign for the avenue named after Esther Rolle. Hi Florida! The crates are turned over in front of the "Food and Meat" convenience store, and the men are playing chess in the shade. With the windows in the car down I can smell the barbeque smell from the cement sided store with "Beef and Pork BBQ" handpainted over its white washed wall.
But that's all later on. Along the pleasant slow crawl of a road, out on a walk this early in the day, it's pretty obvious who the whores are. For one thing, they're white, and are in the extreme minority along the lack of a hurry. For another, there's something undeniably gross about them, even though some of them aren't all that bad looking, despite what's probably a heartbreaking narrative in store for the patient-minded. For a third, when I give them a good lookover they wave me back. There are a few Baptist Churches. When I ask the ladies at the supermarket how they're doing today, they say, "I'm blessed, thank you, couldn't be better," something you'd never hear anyone in Boston saying out loud. Just beyond the Haitian church a group of men were waiting for the public transportation. One who couldn't possibly know where he's headed, with his graying hair, almost greenish eyes, had his stumpy pud pulled out of his vinyl tracksuit and was urinating a steady yellow stream smack on in the direction of the oncoming traffic.
It's midday, and that feeling of intimacy holding Isabelle Huppert in my arms is as strong in the imagination as when I dreamt it. I'm not even that big of a fan, having seen only one of her movies the name of which I can't recall. But captivated by an interview and photo shoot from a magazine I had purchased while in Sapporo, Japan, the magazine actually made it back, even while I felt I had to leave behind much more personal treasure, the souvenirs handed out from those who had once told me, "Please don't forget me."
There was a time beginning from around eight years old I'd think about a pathetic crush intensely, teacher or student, one or the other, for at least an hour before going to sleep in the hope they'd appear just like Isabelle Huppert did last night. These things just can't be forced; they arrive when they do, which is more interesting to me than what dreams might actually mean. Admitting this poem, dream, and after-shock online, I know I'm opening myself up to all kinds of psychological interpretation. I've read them all too.
At the library I renewed Sylvia Plath's journals, which I'm just about ready to give up. I took out The Piano Teacher, which will now read as Huppert as instructor. This won't diminish Jelinek the writer; I believe in the collaboration of the arts more than I do books. I need Frank O'Hara again, so I took out Poems Retrieved. I've decided to give Ellman's James Joyce another try. And for those times when the internet makes me want to hate myself, Heidegger's Early Greek Thinking.
The library is attached to a college and the students have returned. At the half-assed college I went to out in Western Massachusetts, from Day One administration wished to emphasize that ours, unlike the other ones, is a friendly campus; everyone says Hello to each other on campus, and for four years that's what I did, say Hello to everyone passing by each other on the campus. I tried that out this morning and received about an 18% response rate. I did look like a bum though, as I haven't showered and shaved for a few days now.
A few days ago I did a post on Anne Carson and Matsuo Basho, about those eternal returns that come back like an autumnal breeze. Something like that was at work returning to the car. There's a canal at the back of homes, near the library. The urban design, the strip malls, the cul-de-sacs of this Southern Florida region isn't just material for cultural commentary; it's real to me, and it feels like death. But in this small shaded canal, with the tropical greenery Vietnamese lush, with a group of white birds with long, curved, orange beaks pecking at the thick grass, the families of ducks emerging from under the tropical trees, with a turtle climbing a rock and then falling back in with a slip, it all came back to me, Ms. Le's home on the Mekong Delta, back to some beautiful days I'll never forget. I ought to be looking to the future more, as it feels like I'm now stuck in a vacuum of a seat writing, but I feel like I've already lived enough of a kind of experience many will never see.
Why I SHOULD Believe In Psychoanalysis
Thanks to the poem I wrote last night, I had a wonderful warm bath of a dream which involved Isabelle Huppert (her body reminds me of someone I once knew). At a public function she broke away to indicate she was mine, which involved an enrapturing embrace. She had to return to rehearsals. While I was trying to figure out her computer, of an assignment she required of me, I felt horribly out of place. But think about that moment she'll return!
However, Coach Rex Ryan of the New York Jets entered the scene, asking me questions about the laptop. Such as, do you think you could send off a few words of encouragement to guys on the team on that thing? I told him it can wait.
However, Coach Rex Ryan of the New York Jets entered the scene, asking me questions about the laptop. Such as, do you think you could send off a few words of encouragement to guys on the team on that thing? I told him it can wait.
Review - Head Games
 |
| HEAD GAMES Keri Mikulski |
Plot: 7/10
Characters: 7/10
Relationships: 7/10
Setting: 8/10
Themes: 7/10
Voice: 8/10
Ending: 8/10
Recommendability: 7/10
Fangirling: 7/10
--------------------------------------
73/100 = C
Taylor Thomas is the tallest girl in her high school (six. feet.) and a basketball phenomenon, but off the court she's Miss Nice Girl. She tutors all her teammates at the expense of her own grades, agrees to model in her best friend's fashion show even though she's terrified of the whole idea, and is generally nice, polite... and utterly forgettable. But that changes when her longtime crush breaks up with his girlfriend (a teammate of Taylor's) and - with some nudging from her best friend - Taylor finally goes after him.
The plot here - involving Taylor's boy troubles, basketball aspirations, and journey to stand up for herself more - is entertaining but almost seems like there's just too much. The central plot about Taylor's quasi-relationship with the ex-boyfriend of a teammate would have been interesting and captivating enough on its own, but instead of focusing primarily on that, the book adds in many other storylines that seem to distract rather than add to the overall story, with a few of them only really coming into the spotlight in the last few chapters.
The characters in this book seem to suffer from the same lack of cohesiveness as the plot does. While Taylor's said again and again to be "too nice," she also manages to start dating a teammate's ex-boyfriend just days after their breakup, causing all sorts of friend- and team-drama that should have easily been avoided. Her best friend, while encouraging Taylor to stand up for herself, also signs her up to model in a fashion show without so much as asking first. There are a lot of contradictions in the way these characters treat one another and the choices they make, which not only hindered the impact of this book but also my enjoyment of it. Though the theme of standing up for yourself and not letting others push you around came through loud and clear, the messy contradictions of Taylor's character made the theme fall a little flat, as if there was a lot of lip service, but not much to back it up.
Despite my issues with the rest of the book, the basketball/sports culture here came though really well and anchored the story. Taylor's drive and love for the game is apparent from page one and though I'm the furthest thing from a basketball fan I really appreciated this. It made her and those around her seem more real.
On the whole, this was a quick and entertaining but not altogether satisfying read. There were moments when the story really shined, but they weren't often enough to make up for the lack of focus.
Monday, January 17, 2011
A Poem For Isabelle Huppert
A cerebral appeal, ignorance holds back the grave,
With rude permission, a cold look in audition,
Not from anything discrete but mysterious disguise,
Your English on the side the French frankly denies.
I welcome your lips in doses, the beautiful envelopes,
That trains each minute upon the camisole folds,
And pointing to each fashionable relationship,
From blouse to trousers, a bold daring which holds,
And art, excessive femininity is no costume designer,
A master tomboy to embarrass the American gossip,
I saw flowers of evil are dispersed commonly enough,
A constant star that links amorous stars to the bluff?
Ha! Any rank demand for a chignon worn too tight,
Is our production of beauty who killed off the night.
With rude permission, a cold look in audition,
Not from anything discrete but mysterious disguise,
Your English on the side the French frankly denies.
I welcome your lips in doses, the beautiful envelopes,
That trains each minute upon the camisole folds,
And pointing to each fashionable relationship,
From blouse to trousers, a bold daring which holds,
And art, excessive femininity is no costume designer,
A master tomboy to embarrass the American gossip,
I saw flowers of evil are dispersed commonly enough,
A constant star that links amorous stars to the bluff?
Ha! Any rank demand for a chignon worn too tight,
Is our production of beauty who killed off the night.
Helen Vendler's Terrible Swift Sword
Aha, so I haven't been reading more into Dickinson's "Northern Lights" simply for trying to one up the eminent Ms. Vendler. This morning I was led to take a look at Herman Melville's poems, and looking over the corpus online, discovered he treats the Aurora Borealis too,
Aurora-Borealis
commemorative of the dissolution of armies at the peace
(May, 1965)
What power disbands the Northern Lights
After their steely play?
The lonely watcher feels an awe
Of Nature's sway,
As when appearing,
He marked their flashed uprearing
In the cold gloom -
Retreatings and advancings,
(Like dallyings of doom),
Transitions and enhancings,
And bloody ray.
Now here the "Northern Lights" used as a metaphor for the Civil War couldn't be any more obvious. Here in 2011 we appear to be approaching the end of the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as the domestic culture wars chug along. If any foundation would offer me a grant, I think I could come up with a neat paper on why Emily Dickinson's Northern Lights were necessarily ambiguous, while Herman Melville could treat them commemoratively.
Aurora-Borealis
commemorative of the dissolution of armies at the peace
(May, 1965)
What power disbands the Northern Lights
After their steely play?
The lonely watcher feels an awe
Of Nature's sway,
As when appearing,
He marked their flashed uprearing
In the cold gloom -
Retreatings and advancings,
(Like dallyings of doom),
Transitions and enhancings,
And bloody ray.
Now here the "Northern Lights" used as a metaphor for the Civil War couldn't be any more obvious. Here in 2011 we appear to be approaching the end of the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as the domestic culture wars chug along. If any foundation would offer me a grant, I think I could come up with a neat paper on why Emily Dickinson's Northern Lights were necessarily ambiguous, while Herman Melville could treat them commemoratively.
On The Power And Poetics Of Ambiguity
According to my Japanese-English dictionary, "ambiguous" is defined as,
1) having more than one meaning, so that it is not clear which meaning is intended
2) difficult to understand, or not certain
Poetry without ambiguity is simply fractured prose. When this is successfully done, the seduction is more an invitation to the identity of the "poet" rather than the poetry. For instance, a "You" we're reading in the poem has just taken part in a one-night stand. Our loins go on fire too. And then after that settles down and we return to the poetry, you can't help but wondering who is the "you" of the romp and the one proclaiming the right to write up a "You" for the occasion in the first place.
The seduction game extends to literature, and personally I don't see that as a literary fault. Like any sensible male with an appreciation for feminine beauty, I'm inclined to want to know more about Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith for this quality they have as much as any other. Jhumpa's characters all have a familiar enough spectrum. At this point, it appears it's simply going to be storytime with her from here on out. How she has been able to take a good look at both literature and American society and turn it into a pleasing, non-threatening style is an astonishing feat, though not exactly a seductive one. Zadie continues to be a more compelling artist, because it's fairly obvious she has the quick irritability of your average arbiter of cultural values any decent artist needs, and if it weren't for that extraordinary knack she has for building novels, she'd be forced into finding some other vehicle for suppressing what ought to be anyone's sensible anger.
I now have a theory in mind - which I plan on adhering to for a while - that the source of power to be found in the ambiguous poet isn't shaped by a revolt against self and society, but against the tyranny of pronouns. Now that I've established it well enough in mind what Shakespeare and Basho, Dickinson and Mallarmé, Yosano and Emerson are doing, with their poetics of ambiguity, I see in each the hunger for a larger world that proper names limit.
Up until this weekend, I've avoided reading Dickinson's letters for fear it might indicate too much about the poetry. Impatient, I went ahead and dipped in these past few days, and on January 29, 1850, I see she's doing the same thing with herself, her fictional "I", "Him" and "him", as she does in her poetry, namely conflating, blending, perfecting them for the power of suggestion. Together with Mallarmé, and at the same historical moment, they discovered what a transference of power it is, forsaking your private morality all for the public one of culture, to claim your personal "I". At that historical moment it was a revolutionary discovery. The accompanying religious terror has now been mitigated, but the terror of the option of ambiguity still thrives.
By itself, the application of the ambiguous, however, is not transcendent alone. At times I do see that what distinguishes poetry from a solitary, emotional outpouring is simply that limitation, an expression of style alone within the ambiguous.
Translating on this blog Basho's "The Narrow Road to the Far Interior" has been a revelation. So far, through the first four chapters, I see that Basho has not used the "I" once, and yet in English translation, the "I" has constantly been imposed upon his narrative (you can see here nine variations of the opening chapter).
The "I" is ideological, which the great poets over four hundred years across the globe have resisted. Instead, what you see Basho doing, is simply leaving the personal pronoun out. He refers to his traveling companion Sora by name, but not anything resembling "You." That's why I have decided to translate Basho's journey more like an internal, poetic monologue, and not as a series of diary entries or a lyrical essay. In fact when Basho does mention Sora he adds the prefix 同行 to his name. Together the two characters would read "accompanying" in English, but separately, "the same", along with "go; in the direction of", which could ultimately then be read as "of the same direction".
1) having more than one meaning, so that it is not clear which meaning is intended
2) difficult to understand, or not certain
Poetry without ambiguity is simply fractured prose. When this is successfully done, the seduction is more an invitation to the identity of the "poet" rather than the poetry. For instance, a "You" we're reading in the poem has just taken part in a one-night stand. Our loins go on fire too. And then after that settles down and we return to the poetry, you can't help but wondering who is the "you" of the romp and the one proclaiming the right to write up a "You" for the occasion in the first place.
The seduction game extends to literature, and personally I don't see that as a literary fault. Like any sensible male with an appreciation for feminine beauty, I'm inclined to want to know more about Jhumpa Lahiri and Zadie Smith for this quality they have as much as any other. Jhumpa's characters all have a familiar enough spectrum. At this point, it appears it's simply going to be storytime with her from here on out. How she has been able to take a good look at both literature and American society and turn it into a pleasing, non-threatening style is an astonishing feat, though not exactly a seductive one. Zadie continues to be a more compelling artist, because it's fairly obvious she has the quick irritability of your average arbiter of cultural values any decent artist needs, and if it weren't for that extraordinary knack she has for building novels, she'd be forced into finding some other vehicle for suppressing what ought to be anyone's sensible anger.
I now have a theory in mind - which I plan on adhering to for a while - that the source of power to be found in the ambiguous poet isn't shaped by a revolt against self and society, but against the tyranny of pronouns. Now that I've established it well enough in mind what Shakespeare and Basho, Dickinson and Mallarmé, Yosano and Emerson are doing, with their poetics of ambiguity, I see in each the hunger for a larger world that proper names limit.
Up until this weekend, I've avoided reading Dickinson's letters for fear it might indicate too much about the poetry. Impatient, I went ahead and dipped in these past few days, and on January 29, 1850, I see she's doing the same thing with herself, her fictional "I", "Him" and "him", as she does in her poetry, namely conflating, blending, perfecting them for the power of suggestion. Together with Mallarmé, and at the same historical moment, they discovered what a transference of power it is, forsaking your private morality all for the public one of culture, to claim your personal "I". At that historical moment it was a revolutionary discovery. The accompanying religious terror has now been mitigated, but the terror of the option of ambiguity still thrives.
By itself, the application of the ambiguous, however, is not transcendent alone. At times I do see that what distinguishes poetry from a solitary, emotional outpouring is simply that limitation, an expression of style alone within the ambiguous.
Translating on this blog Basho's "The Narrow Road to the Far Interior" has been a revelation. So far, through the first four chapters, I see that Basho has not used the "I" once, and yet in English translation, the "I" has constantly been imposed upon his narrative (you can see here nine variations of the opening chapter).
The "I" is ideological, which the great poets over four hundred years across the globe have resisted. Instead, what you see Basho doing, is simply leaving the personal pronoun out. He refers to his traveling companion Sora by name, but not anything resembling "You." That's why I have decided to translate Basho's journey more like an internal, poetic monologue, and not as a series of diary entries or a lyrical essay. In fact when Basho does mention Sora he adds the prefix 同行 to his name. Together the two characters would read "accompanying" in English, but separately, "the same", along with "go; in the direction of", which could ultimately then be read as "of the same direction".
A Word Of Warning From Frank O'Hara
Just a note: All those wishing to affect Frank O'Hara's freedom of style, especially his fecundity that would appear too blasé for literature, beware that the homosexual sensibility, historically defined and authentic, is not easy to imitate if you don't have one. That's why there's so much critical apparati aimed at "The City Poet" that is not Frank O'Hara. Not too many American individuals are equipped to aim his or her intellect at the crosshairs of Catholicism and homosexuality and emerge from it without appearing embarrassingly superfluous. Devotionally speaking, a look at the artistic depictions of Saint Sebastian through the ages produces either an instant familiarity or camp of the highest order.
A Poem For The Jersey Shore
We're at seaside bitch,
An I-talian hovers over the symbol,
No Holy Host is ever so venerable,
The Situation buries an itch.
An I-talian hovers over the symbol,
No Holy Host is ever so venerable,
The Situation buries an itch.
Writing - Querytime!?
First things first! A huge thanks to Ella Press for the blog's new look (if you're reading in some sort of feed reader you should definitely click over to see it). I'm totally loving the title font.
Next!
So it looks like I'm jumping back into Queryland. Prepare yourselves for Querytime. The query letter has gotten good reactions from the few people I've shown it to and I now have a list of agents to query. I'll definitely be talking about this on Twitter, but I'm not exactly going to chronicle the journey of querying on my blog because, quite frankly, that could get depressing. Or boring. OR BOTH!!
But I am excited. It's been a long time since I've queried and I think I'm ready (again) for the waiting and rejections and all that comes along with putting my work out there
Next!
(via weheartit)
So it looks like I'm jumping back into Queryland. Prepare yourselves for Querytime. The query letter has gotten good reactions from the few people I've shown it to and I now have a list of agents to query. I'll definitely be talking about this on Twitter, but I'm not exactly going to chronicle the journey of querying on my blog because, quite frankly, that could get depressing. Or boring. OR BOTH!!
But I am excited. It's been a long time since I've queried and I think I'm ready (again) for the waiting and rejections and all that comes along with putting my work out there
Sunday, January 16, 2011
A Poem For Virginia Woolf's Biographer
A parody of something I've never felt,
Each page expounding me night and day,
Documents draped over childhood, restored,
And with minutes like futures showing the way.
Whose hope is it to become a mass of detail,
Or an amorphous grant granting time,
A liberating, lusty coil of popular opinion,
An army of hope one can never define.
Each page expounding me night and day,
Documents draped over childhood, restored,
And with minutes like futures showing the way.
Whose hope is it to become a mass of detail,
Or an amorphous grant granting time,
A liberating, lusty coil of popular opinion,
An army of hope one can never define.
A Poem For Sunday Morning
No salvation outside the church,
The folk has lost its shape.
Then enclave by enclave he knew,
A whole in the measure is one.
Motes of communion, a flunkey at sea,
Her hyphenate altering immortality.
At last a piece of bread for the nauseous,
Absolute certainty for the superior.
Who killed who, a scent of sea at last,
A fasting broke silence with Greek.
A wine in the cup and a murmur in hue,
This incense which made her faint.
I salute you, master, with an homage,
A book shot upon an epistle.
They razed stained glass in the alley,
And built nudes upon our Museum of Art.
The folk has lost its shape.
Then enclave by enclave he knew,
A whole in the measure is one.
Motes of communion, a flunkey at sea,
Her hyphenate altering immortality.
At last a piece of bread for the nauseous,
Absolute certainty for the superior.
Who killed who, a scent of sea at last,
A fasting broke silence with Greek.
A wine in the cup and a murmur in hue,
This incense which made her faint.
I salute you, master, with an homage,
A book shot upon an epistle.
They razed stained glass in the alley,
And built nudes upon our Museum of Art.
In My Mailbox - The ALA Post
Because I know not everyone cares to hear about all the ARCs I got at ALA I'm posting the list after the jump for anyone who's interested.
Ones in purple bold are ones I'm really really EXTRA EXCITED about and ones in red are MG titles. There's one memoir in there, too. (The Long Goodbye). Also, I took this picture with my phone so it's not the best, but you get the general idea.
Unknown
Glow -- Amy Kathleen Ryan
Heaven to Betsy and Betsy In Spite of Herself -- Maud Hart Lovelace
Emily of Deep Valley -- Maud Hart Lovelace
Dec '10 Releases (they had display copies for sale the last day)
Bitter Melon -- Cara Chow
Anna & the French Kiss -- Stephanie Perkins
January
The Running Dream -- Wendelin Van Draanan
The Girl Who Became A Beatle -- Greg Taylor
Other Words for Love -- Lorraine Zago Rosenthal
Flirt Club -- Cathleen Daly
February
Where I Belong -- Gwendolyn Heasley
Delirium -- Lauren Oliver
Jenna & Jonah's Fauxmance -- Emily Franklin and Brendan Halpin
Exposed -- Kimberly Marcus
Chasing Alliecat -- Rebecca Fjelland Davis
Leverage -- Joshua C. Cohen
Four Seasons -- Jane Breskin Zalben
March
Playing Hurt -- Holly Schindler
Between Shades of Gray -- Ruta Sepetys
Sean Griswold's Head -- Lindsey Levitt
Those That Wake -- Jesse Karp
Inside Out & Back Again -- Thana Lai
Jersey Tomatoes are the Best -- Maria Padian
Amelia Lost -- Candace Fleming
The Popularity Papers 2 -- Amy Ignatow
Purple Daze -- Sherry Shahan
Human .4 -- Mike A. Lancaster
Rival -- Sara Bennett Wealer
Strings Attached -- Judy Blundell
Wither -- Lauren DeStefano
Like Mandarin -- Kirsten Hubbard
How Lamar's Bad Prank Won A Bubba-Sized Trophy -- Crystal Allen
April
Back When You Were Easier to Love -- Emily Win Smith
Bird in A Box -- Andrea Davis Pinkney
Taking Off -- Jenny Moss
Invincible Summer -- Hannah Moskowitz
Where She Went -- Gayle Forman
In the Shadow of the Lamp -- Susanne Dunlap
The Long Goodbye -- Meghan O'Rourke
May
Dreamland Social Club -- Tara Altebrando
What Happened to Goodbye -- Sarah Dessen
Empire State -- Jason Shiga
The Last Little Blue Envelope -- Maureen Johnson
I'll Be There -- Holly Goldberg Sloan
Popular -- Alissa Grosso
The Sweetest Thing -- Christina Mandelski
My Life, the Theater, and Other Tragedies -- Allen Zadoff
A & L Do Summer -- Jan Blazanin
Bitter End -- Jennifer Brown
Flawless -- Lara Chapman
Girl Wonder -- Alexa Martin
The Lucky Kind -- Alyssa B. Sheinmel
Truth & Dare -- edited by Liz Miles
Beauty Queens -- Libba Bray
June
Imaginary Girls -- Nova Ren Suma
Crossing Lines -- Paul Volponi
Mission (Un)Popular -- Anna Humphrey
My Life Undecided -- Jessica Brody
Paper Covers Rock -- Jenny Hubbard
July
Sass & Serendipity -- Jennifer Ziegler
Falling for Hamlet -- Michelle Ray
The Detention Club -- David Yoo
My Favorite Band Does Not Exist -- Robert T. Jeschonek
August
Hooked -- Catherine Greenman
Populazzi -- Elise Allen
Saturday, January 15, 2011
David Bromwich's Note On The Sonnet
There was that depressing several day period when we heard we'd lost Tony Judt and that Hitchens had cancer. For crissakes, I thought, who's going to be providing us now an un-owned, insider's perspective from the Left, Peter Beinart?! Do I really have to spend so many chatty hours visiting the Huffington Post to get the global view, the one that sort of peeks outside of the confines of the baroness's empire now and then? But that worry is over. It sounds like he doesn't want any glorified role, but David Bromwich is now the man. At least here's one of those old stalwarts around, the kind of intellectual who has more of an interest in culture than who holds the power and what they're doing with it.
There have been many excellent intellectuals commenting on the American scene these past twenty years, including those like the lovely Peggy Noonan who likes to talk about "those intellectuals over there", even though she is an outstanding one herself. Few, however, appear to have worked out an aesthetic philosophy on experience first. An anti-intellectual in American life isn't someone who is deaf and dumb to conceptual ideas, just that very sensible person who doesn't see the point in following historical currents outside of its temporary shiftings of power. I can't say that's a fault or an affliction; after all, that's what moves democracies, who's in and who's out. Of course I'm interested in that too, but I hope to God that's not what primarily moves my brain.
Tony Judt's authority rests on his work as a historian. Unusually for one working in America he appears to have gone through a period of time where literature was as much an aim as learning the rules of a discipline. The morality that's unambiguously readable in his sentences are a large part of his persuasive power. Unlike the intimacy found in his often entertaining essays, Postwar, however, can be a plod of a read. A few reviews of it have felt the need to make the point it can just as easily be regarded as a reference work.
Judt's sentences need to account for the extraordinary amount of research behind each one. Occasionally we receive glimpses of the opinionated contemporary mind, in the clause, and want more of it. The intimacy carries over through a few paragraphs. And then we return to the encyclopedic aspect of an extraordinary complex, large span of European history. It seems to me Judt never did work out an aesthetic philosophy, or at least not conclusively, not to the extent you find in his mentor, the great French historian François Furet, whose every clause is not only packed with information, but an unusual amount of poetic and philosophical consideration, and even more breathtakingly, a kind of morality that moves fluidly, so much so that by the end of any one of his pieces of writing, you feel like you've just read a story, not simply the necessities of peer review and obligation.
I see little evidence that Hitchens ever tried to work out an aesthetic philosophy, or has been able to engage with poetry on its own terms, outside of mining it for quotable material for the cocktail parties. At least there's that, which makes him appear quite the unusual animal in American political circles. Elsewhere in my post on Barthes and haiku, I stated my sense that I believe Susan Sontag had a lifelong instinct for the Japanese aesthetic, and was on her way to writing a book based on it before fucking cancer took her away too. I see her in her essays thinking through the ideas that poetry produces, but not necessarily the poetic conception that creates them.
With that in mind, I think right now my favorite book of hers is actually not one of her own, but the one called Conversations with Susan Sontag, strictly for the way it displays the astonishing amount of cultural discussion she was able to command at any one moment. I'm in awe of that quality, as I don't have that kind of mind, in the same way that reading any transcript of Gilles Deleuze, you can see a man effortlessly combing back and forth libraries of material on the history of philosophy, and without even uttering a single "um". A recent biography shows him reading Sartre's existential bricks for the sheer pleasure of it, like any other mortal would do a novel.
And so enter David Bromwich. Enough has already been pointed out about how badly poetry criticism sucks, and to that, I have little to add, as the argument for/against seems to mimic the same joys/aggravations of democracy itself. At its worst, it is constantly referring to meanings outside the poetic conception as a means of creating meanings simply for discussions to occur around it, which is a bit too arbitrary, for my tastes. Unlike that, Bromwich actually writes from within the poetic conception. You don't find him ecstatically pointing outside the poetic field toward that illuminating gleam on the outside, which invariably turns out to be just some piece of wind-blown tinsel caught on a branch.
All week I've been thinking about his essay "The Invention of Literature" from A Choice of Inheritance. It's occupied me enough, I believe, that a batch of poems has felt compelled to respond to it. I was going to put the following line at the head of one of the poems, but something very disapproving told me it would have been silly to do so, "In art as in science, discovery easily passes into refinement, and refinement into sophistication, among those who talk habitually of things that were once unfamiliar."
Here's his "A Note on the Sonnet" from an anthology he edited,
"The sonnet was perfected by Petrarch, in fourteenth-century Italy; its first subject matter was sexual love. The great English sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare enlarged the Italian tradition by mingling the actual and imaginative experiences of the poet with the idealisms of love. Milton and Donne in the seventeenth century further widened its range to encompass admiration for acts of public virtue and the utterance of prayer in verse. Yet the Renaissance hierarchy and separation of genres had a long afterlife, so that a modern like Yeats in 'Leda and the Swan' - a sonnet that mixes the pagan theology, a description of a rape, and the prophecy of an impending catastrophe - could still shock readers whose taste had been partly formed on classical models. Since the Romantic period, however, the sonnet has claimed a unique aesthetic prestige. It is a field of exercise for concentrated virtuosity, an invitation to soar and only touch the ground when speech has magically rounded itself, a pattern so resonant that a poet can scarcely write a poem of fourteen lines without courting the genre or somehow alluding to its past. Displacement or suggestive suppression of rhyme may make as true an homage as any overt echo. Whether divided into sections of eight lines six (octave and sestet), three quatrains and a closing couplet, twelve lines and a couplet, or fourteen at once, the sonnet is a place for intense avowal or meditation, the fixing of a compact and memorable record where the subject is found, held, and framed as if in a single pulse of thought and feeling."
That critical act is as eloquent as anything poetry might ever write.
There have been many excellent intellectuals commenting on the American scene these past twenty years, including those like the lovely Peggy Noonan who likes to talk about "those intellectuals over there", even though she is an outstanding one herself. Few, however, appear to have worked out an aesthetic philosophy on experience first. An anti-intellectual in American life isn't someone who is deaf and dumb to conceptual ideas, just that very sensible person who doesn't see the point in following historical currents outside of its temporary shiftings of power. I can't say that's a fault or an affliction; after all, that's what moves democracies, who's in and who's out. Of course I'm interested in that too, but I hope to God that's not what primarily moves my brain.
Tony Judt's authority rests on his work as a historian. Unusually for one working in America he appears to have gone through a period of time where literature was as much an aim as learning the rules of a discipline. The morality that's unambiguously readable in his sentences are a large part of his persuasive power. Unlike the intimacy found in his often entertaining essays, Postwar, however, can be a plod of a read. A few reviews of it have felt the need to make the point it can just as easily be regarded as a reference work.
Judt's sentences need to account for the extraordinary amount of research behind each one. Occasionally we receive glimpses of the opinionated contemporary mind, in the clause, and want more of it. The intimacy carries over through a few paragraphs. And then we return to the encyclopedic aspect of an extraordinary complex, large span of European history. It seems to me Judt never did work out an aesthetic philosophy, or at least not conclusively, not to the extent you find in his mentor, the great French historian François Furet, whose every clause is not only packed with information, but an unusual amount of poetic and philosophical consideration, and even more breathtakingly, a kind of morality that moves fluidly, so much so that by the end of any one of his pieces of writing, you feel like you've just read a story, not simply the necessities of peer review and obligation.
I see little evidence that Hitchens ever tried to work out an aesthetic philosophy, or has been able to engage with poetry on its own terms, outside of mining it for quotable material for the cocktail parties. At least there's that, which makes him appear quite the unusual animal in American political circles. Elsewhere in my post on Barthes and haiku, I stated my sense that I believe Susan Sontag had a lifelong instinct for the Japanese aesthetic, and was on her way to writing a book based on it before fucking cancer took her away too. I see her in her essays thinking through the ideas that poetry produces, but not necessarily the poetic conception that creates them.
With that in mind, I think right now my favorite book of hers is actually not one of her own, but the one called Conversations with Susan Sontag, strictly for the way it displays the astonishing amount of cultural discussion she was able to command at any one moment. I'm in awe of that quality, as I don't have that kind of mind, in the same way that reading any transcript of Gilles Deleuze, you can see a man effortlessly combing back and forth libraries of material on the history of philosophy, and without even uttering a single "um". A recent biography shows him reading Sartre's existential bricks for the sheer pleasure of it, like any other mortal would do a novel.
And so enter David Bromwich. Enough has already been pointed out about how badly poetry criticism sucks, and to that, I have little to add, as the argument for/against seems to mimic the same joys/aggravations of democracy itself. At its worst, it is constantly referring to meanings outside the poetic conception as a means of creating meanings simply for discussions to occur around it, which is a bit too arbitrary, for my tastes. Unlike that, Bromwich actually writes from within the poetic conception. You don't find him ecstatically pointing outside the poetic field toward that illuminating gleam on the outside, which invariably turns out to be just some piece of wind-blown tinsel caught on a branch.
All week I've been thinking about his essay "The Invention of Literature" from A Choice of Inheritance. It's occupied me enough, I believe, that a batch of poems has felt compelled to respond to it. I was going to put the following line at the head of one of the poems, but something very disapproving told me it would have been silly to do so, "In art as in science, discovery easily passes into refinement, and refinement into sophistication, among those who talk habitually of things that were once unfamiliar."
Here's his "A Note on the Sonnet" from an anthology he edited,
"The sonnet was perfected by Petrarch, in fourteenth-century Italy; its first subject matter was sexual love. The great English sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare enlarged the Italian tradition by mingling the actual and imaginative experiences of the poet with the idealisms of love. Milton and Donne in the seventeenth century further widened its range to encompass admiration for acts of public virtue and the utterance of prayer in verse. Yet the Renaissance hierarchy and separation of genres had a long afterlife, so that a modern like Yeats in 'Leda and the Swan' - a sonnet that mixes the pagan theology, a description of a rape, and the prophecy of an impending catastrophe - could still shock readers whose taste had been partly formed on classical models. Since the Romantic period, however, the sonnet has claimed a unique aesthetic prestige. It is a field of exercise for concentrated virtuosity, an invitation to soar and only touch the ground when speech has magically rounded itself, a pattern so resonant that a poet can scarcely write a poem of fourteen lines without courting the genre or somehow alluding to its past. Displacement or suggestive suppression of rhyme may make as true an homage as any overt echo. Whether divided into sections of eight lines six (octave and sestet), three quatrains and a closing couplet, twelve lines and a couplet, or fourteen at once, the sonnet is a place for intense avowal or meditation, the fixing of a compact and memorable record where the subject is found, held, and framed as if in a single pulse of thought and feeling."
That critical act is as eloquent as anything poetry might ever write.
Why I Love Contemporary
I love it because there's nothing that special about the heroes of realistic, contemporary fiction. They don't have superpowers or curses or magic or any of that. They're human. Which means that when they succeed it's because of some inner strength - because they want it enough or they work hard enough or they're lucky enough. Or a combination of everything.
I love realistic stories because reading is like looking in a mirror. It's seeing yourself a little clearer, a little better, finding a piece of yourself in a story that someone else has written. And sure, this happens in other genres, but nowhere is it as widespread as contemporary/realistic.
I don't often talk about what I'm reading right now on the blog, but today I have Wendelin Van Draanen's latest, The Running Dream, sitting next to me. It's about a 16 year old runner who loses her leg in an accident. Who has to learn to live as an amputee.
I don't know anything about losing a limb, but the hospital scenes are almost painful to read. They're real. The horror of seeing yourself in a mirror that first time after being in a hospital bed for days, the food you can't hardly eat and the longing for real food. The complicated and confusing emotions that come with all the "get well" wishes and cards and flowers.
She hit the nail on the head and I love it because, even though I'm not a runner, I can relate to the protagonist. And I know that when she gets through this -- when she makes it to the end of this journey, it won't be because of magic or spells or supernatural creatures. It will be because of her. And because of the people around her. The very human, very fallible people around her.
And that's the kind of strength I love seeing in characters. Real strength. Human strength. I can relate to that.
Why do you love contemporary? Or whatever genre it is that's your favorite -- what makes you adore it so much? Also: I've been doing a few of these more personal reading posts lately; what do you think of them?
Friday, January 14, 2011
Henri Marie Beyle And The Numb State
Wasn't expecting Stendhal to be this amusing. Like Houellebecq he appears unabashed in a willingness to build a narrative based on the blind stupidity of public opinion, all so matter-of-factly, resolutely marching onward. From my Penguin Charterhouse,
"(Fabrizio) had just taken the trouble to be born at the moment when the French were driven out, and found himself, by accident of birth, the second son of that Marchese del Dongo, who was so great a lord, and with whose fat, pasty face, false smile, and boundless hatred for the new ideas you are already acquainted. The whole of the family fortune was entailed upon the elder son, Ascanio del Dongo, the worthy image of his father. He was eight years old, and Fabrizio two, when all of a sudden that General Bonaparte, whom everyone of good family understood to have been hanged a long time since, swooped down from the Mont Saint-Bernard. He entered Milan: that moment is still unique in history; imagine a whole populace madly in love! A few days later, Napoleon won the battle of Marengo. It is needless to say any more. The frenzied excitement of the Milanese was at its height; but this time it was mingled with thoughts of vengeance: these kindly people had been taught to hate."
Moving the narrative along, Stendhal writes shortly after, "We pass rapidly over ten years of progress and happiness, from 1800 to 1810." Oh yeah, those years historians of a generalizing stripe like to call the Napoleonic Wars.
Deciding to look up Germaine de Staël's Considerations On The Principal Events of The French Revolution (1818), I see that Stendhal's little history of the Napoleonic sweep appears to be accounted for by so many salon conversations,
"Yet nothing was so brilliant as the rapid conquest of Italy. Doubtless, the desire which the enlightened Italians have always felt to unite themselves into one state, and thus to possess so much national strength as to have nothing either to fear or to hope from strangers, contributed much to favor the progress of General Bonaparte. It was with the cry of Italy forever that he passed the bridge of Lodi; and it was to the hope of independence that he owed his reception among the Italians. But the victories which subjected to France countries beyond her natural limits, far from favoring liberty, exposed it to the danger of military government."
Freedom imposed abroad, Germaine, you don't say. J. Christopher Herold's biography of Madame de Staël Mistress to an Age spends much too little time on her intellectual development - because when he does decide to treat it he treats it very well - reading more like a morally aggrieved biographer discovering he now has a novel on his hands, and as such, is required to bring the thing to its foregone conclusion, namely the death of its subject. Nevertheless, the exasperation does produce some amusing scenes, such as that time at the estate when Benjamin Constant, in one of his romantic fits, decides to try and kill himself yet again,
"It was midnight, and the guests at Mézery had retired to their rooms; suddenly the house was filled by screams and moans, which, upon investigation, were found to emanate from Benjamin's quarters. An empty bottle of opium stood on his bedside table; he was dying, but he wanted to say a last farewell to the hostess. Madame Rilliet-Huber ran off in quest of Germaine while one of the guests irrupted into Mathieu's room, to inform him of the tragedy. Monsieur de Montmorency was in his dressing gown, calmly reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine. 'Throw that man,' he cried, 'out of the window. All he does is disturb the peace of this house and bring dishonor on it by a suicide.'"
In tone, reminiscent of Quilty retiring to the master bedroom "with a burst of royal purple where his ear had been," saying, "Get out, get out of here," coughing and spitting and in a nightmare of wonder. It's so wonderful seeing the irony shine through the older you get.
(Added the next morning: Reading over the quotes again, I can't decide which is more hilarious, Stendhal's "had just taken the time to be born" or Herold's "to inform him of the tragedy.")
"(Fabrizio) had just taken the trouble to be born at the moment when the French were driven out, and found himself, by accident of birth, the second son of that Marchese del Dongo, who was so great a lord, and with whose fat, pasty face, false smile, and boundless hatred for the new ideas you are already acquainted. The whole of the family fortune was entailed upon the elder son, Ascanio del Dongo, the worthy image of his father. He was eight years old, and Fabrizio two, when all of a sudden that General Bonaparte, whom everyone of good family understood to have been hanged a long time since, swooped down from the Mont Saint-Bernard. He entered Milan: that moment is still unique in history; imagine a whole populace madly in love! A few days later, Napoleon won the battle of Marengo. It is needless to say any more. The frenzied excitement of the Milanese was at its height; but this time it was mingled with thoughts of vengeance: these kindly people had been taught to hate."
Moving the narrative along, Stendhal writes shortly after, "We pass rapidly over ten years of progress and happiness, from 1800 to 1810." Oh yeah, those years historians of a generalizing stripe like to call the Napoleonic Wars.
Deciding to look up Germaine de Staël's Considerations On The Principal Events of The French Revolution (1818), I see that Stendhal's little history of the Napoleonic sweep appears to be accounted for by so many salon conversations,
"Yet nothing was so brilliant as the rapid conquest of Italy. Doubtless, the desire which the enlightened Italians have always felt to unite themselves into one state, and thus to possess so much national strength as to have nothing either to fear or to hope from strangers, contributed much to favor the progress of General Bonaparte. It was with the cry of Italy forever that he passed the bridge of Lodi; and it was to the hope of independence that he owed his reception among the Italians. But the victories which subjected to France countries beyond her natural limits, far from favoring liberty, exposed it to the danger of military government."
Freedom imposed abroad, Germaine, you don't say. J. Christopher Herold's biography of Madame de Staël Mistress to an Age spends much too little time on her intellectual development - because when he does decide to treat it he treats it very well - reading more like a morally aggrieved biographer discovering he now has a novel on his hands, and as such, is required to bring the thing to its foregone conclusion, namely the death of its subject. Nevertheless, the exasperation does produce some amusing scenes, such as that time at the estate when Benjamin Constant, in one of his romantic fits, decides to try and kill himself yet again,
"It was midnight, and the guests at Mézery had retired to their rooms; suddenly the house was filled by screams and moans, which, upon investigation, were found to emanate from Benjamin's quarters. An empty bottle of opium stood on his bedside table; he was dying, but he wanted to say a last farewell to the hostess. Madame Rilliet-Huber ran off in quest of Germaine while one of the guests irrupted into Mathieu's room, to inform him of the tragedy. Monsieur de Montmorency was in his dressing gown, calmly reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine. 'Throw that man,' he cried, 'out of the window. All he does is disturb the peace of this house and bring dishonor on it by a suicide.'"
In tone, reminiscent of Quilty retiring to the master bedroom "with a burst of royal purple where his ear had been," saying, "Get out, get out of here," coughing and spitting and in a nightmare of wonder. It's so wonderful seeing the irony shine through the older you get.
(Added the next morning: Reading over the quotes again, I can't decide which is more hilarious, Stendhal's "had just taken the time to be born" or Herold's "to inform him of the tragedy.")
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