Category: Literature

Actors, called upon the stage, put on a mask so that we cannot see the blush on their faces. So, as I am about to mount the stage of the world where I have been a spectator so far, I advance masked.

In my youth, when I was shown ingenious discoveries, I used to ask myself whether I could not invent them myself even without reading the author. In this way, I gradually came to notice that I was using determinate rules.

Descartes, Preliminaries and Observations (1619)

Raymon noticed The Uses of Invention. The tagline “The novelist and Nobel laureate VS Naipaul has said that fiction is dead, vanquished by our need for facts. But, argues Jay McInerney, imaginative storytelling has the power to reveal underlying truths in a turbulent world” is chillingly familiar.

Continue reading “Fiction” →

Fitful Dreams

I had such a horrible time sleeping last night. I’m reasonably certain it was the book I was reading: The Matrix of Modernism by Sanford Schwartz. A person likes to feel that they know who their friends are. I’ve made such a career of demonizing Eliot and Pound— and now I find myself sympathetic. I’m so confused.

Russell Murphy, editor of the Yeats Eliot Review recommended it to me years ago. He knew how much I loved Yeats and detested Eliot. I suspect he also knew that this book would strike at my weak spot— philosophy. I’m starting to find things to admire about the well-thought out nature of Pound and Eliot’s philosophical take on representation, and this is hard for me. Even if I still don’t care for their poems, I can’t think of them as total assholes anymore. That sucks. I’ll need new straw men to beat up on.

The other thing that sucks is complicating my view of metaphor right before I need to lecture on it. Gestating in my head is a new way to look at Walker Evans and James Agee— it seems like Evans overlaps a great deal with Pound, philosophically, and Agee overlaps with Eliot in the strangest ways. They form an interesting matrix of representation, which hopefully I can try to write out sometime soon. The world doesn’t really need another treatise on Evans, but the paradoxical nature of Pound and the paradoxical nature of Evans fit too damn well. It warrants at least a mention. Eliot’s “objective correlative” also fits with Agee’s endless inventories of household objects, and tension over his own subjectivity. My head’s a mess just thinking about it.

I’m beginning to narrow the focus of my thesis to captioning practices in the photographic books of the 1930s. It’s a small piece of the larger puzzle which might be more easily completed in the next year. Simply stated, it has to do with how photographs work as units of meaning in the format of the book. Evan’s rejection of the caption has much to do with his ideas of how reality, and photographs should be read. Though other books before Let Us Now Praise Famous Men refrained from captioning, the reason why Evans was resistant to captioning was far different. Strange to find even greater depth and complexity to that choice in a book which explores the theories of Nietzsche, Bergson, Hulme, and William James compared to the poetics of Pound and Eliot, but whatever works I suppose.

I suppose I should get used to having my world view altered radically by books I read every few weeks, but I never do. It’s a shock to the system. Damn, the last thing I really wanted to do is start liking Eliot!

A Milton Flashback

I was going through some old mail and stumbled on a link to an article in the NY Times decrying teaching Milton’s Samson Agonistes— Is Teaching Milton Unsafe at Any Speed? The core argument is that the poem celebrates terrorism, or rather, that Stanley Fish’s reading of Milton accentuates the fundamentalism involved. According to the Times:

Liberals, he [Fish] says, believe in objectivity, disinterested consideration of evidence, procedural safeguards for justice and above all in the primacy of rationality. “Milton,” he argues, “believes none of those things.”

On September 11, 2001 I was preparing my notes for a seminar on Milton on the twelfth. I was supposed to teach “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy. “Lycidas” is a flexing of his poetic muscles that neatly avoids the problem of fame by passing judgment on the worthiness of fame not to men, but to God. Its strategy of deferral is interesting, because Milton compares the fallen poet he laments (who he barely knew) to Orpheus. Though Orpheus could charm a stone through his rhetoric, it still didn’t keep him from being torn apart by the Maenads. I feel sorry for poor Milton.

Presenting an elegy on that day seemed so right. And it is a powerful elegy at that, one of the finest in my opinion. A few weeks later, oddly enough, I presented Samson Agonistes. Thoroughout the poem Milton undercuts Samson for his past deeds, and he is in torment that parallels that of Job. In the end, he tears down the temple based on the voice of the lord that he alone hears. Of course, Milton no doubt chose this subject because he was involved in defending Cromwell, and felt himself in a similarly embattled position. To teach a play that involves such single minded devotion to a God seemed really important in the light of September 11th. Right or wrong, who can really say. I haven’t had any conversations with God lately to judge by. Strike the poem from the canon? It seems as likely that we might neatly snip out the story from the Bible.

Milton consistently defers authority to God. I wonder if that might be the firmest lesson involved. Personally, I can’t see following any god that commands you to slaughter innocents. Obviously, Milton’s God condoned that sort of behavior— and he wasn’t Islamic. Does that mean I ask myself “What would Milton Do” just because I read and love his poems? Now that’s a really stupid question. Milton never claims any authority for himself, only for his God— and it really turned out badly both for him and the innocent victims. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

I was only sitting in on this seminar. I felt like I had missed something in my undergraduate career by not spending more time with Milton. I was glad I did, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. What better way to understand the actions of some outraged fundamentalists than by reading another fundamentalist?

Archie’s Letters

I got distracted this evening looking at some letters by Archibald MacLeish. There’s a letter from February 1930 that I suspect must have been written to Hemingway while he was residing in Piggott, Arkansas:

Dear Pappy:

Thanks for the warning about the mosquitos. Its a damn shame. I had wanted Ada to be near you and Pauline. But I can still take advantage of her father’s generous offer to put her up at Daytona and she’ll have the sun there if she doesn’t have anything else.

Met Dotty Parker Saturday night and think she’s swell. I have always been afraid of her because I thought she was the kind who would be affectionate to you with her right hand and murder you with her left. But she was so fine in talking about the Murphys and you and all her friends and so damn wise and intelligent about people that she took me in about eight minutes. She may be serving me up cold at the minute for all I know but I doubt it and if she is it doesn’t matter anyway . . .

The mosquito is the Arkansas state bird, and Hemingway spent a lot of time shuttling between here and Florida from 1929-32. Nice to hear that “Dotty” Parker is swell too. But that’s not really what I was up to here. I wanted to note a couple of MacLeish’s thoughts on Conquistador for Loren, in case he doesn’t have the letters lying about. In a letter to Robert Linscott in October of 1931, he was stinging over the failure of an earlier book, New Found Land to sell:

. . . I can’t help feeling that had New Found Land appeared in a regular edition and had been pushed it would have sold extremely well. What reviews I saw were favorable & the book was a book of short poems. As a matter of fact, if Hart Crane is not misleading me, the Bridge sold in the same year very very much better. Comparisons are ridiculous but what else is there in the world?

. . . After all, books of verse have been advertised in America— have been pushed. You know & God (if it isn’t an anti-climax) that I loathe blurbs & have no desire to see my name like Edna Millays with “Immortal Poetry” over it. But there are things that a publisher can decently do for a book which a poet can’t do— unless the poet is Amy Lowell & as rich as Amy & as gifted in self-publicizing. And those things H.M. [Houghton Mifflin] have never done for my books. Because you lose money on a book of verse anyway, you will say. But isn’t that a vicious circle?

But this is futile. I certainly can’t, & don’t wish to teach H.M. their business. But I have worked on Conquistador for many years. I believe it is going to be a really good poem— but certainly not a popular one. And I want to see it well treated by a publisher— not just issued with an item in trade paper & allowed to sell itself if it can. . . .

Mentions of Conquistador appear for years before this— MacLeish wrote everyone he knew asking if anyone else had ever done a long poem on the topic. He wanted it to be original. Evidently, Pound criticized it severely (but in good spirits). There’s more to be quoted from there, if I get the time. My favorite phrase about Pound from the letters was: “Pound is a unicorn who turns into an ass every time you look at him too closely.” I was curious about how MacLeish thought of the poem, because it is not nearly as “accessible” as most of his poems. I found the answer in a letter written to his mother, on the occasion of the death of John Hillard— a meditation on death written in February of 1930 which quotes approximately the opening line of Conquistador:

What I must do is step aside into the quiet & think. By thinking one begins to see. It is strange. Only by ceasing to see can I see. Myself I do not love but unless I behold myself once in these windows. I am nothing & never lived & the roar of the wheels will roll over me. Over us all. Over us all. And all that was young & lovely in the world. I am not afraid of death. But I pity it. I pity its silence. I sat for a long time in the vault of poor Harry Crosby. He had shot himself. He lay on a narrow couch under a dark red cloth. He had made a great noise with his death. But already I could hardly see his face. I had to turn back to see him.

I am hurting you with these words. Forgive me. Believe me. I am not what you think. I am an evil person. I take no happiness in anything on earth but the sonorous sounds of certain words. It is a very wrong thing. Poetry is not always in me & sometimes coming out. I go to it as a man goes to what he loves & is ashamed of. I go to it out of my life. I come back ashamed. You do not understand. Do not try to. “How do the winds follow unfortune”— I write that & my heart is smooth. What at all have I written? Well, I am a poet. I do not describe myself by this word. I do not speak it. No one speaks it to me. But I am that thing. And it is agony. It is not wisdom like a quiet light in the brain, nor wisdom in the ankles of the body. It is no wisdom. It is thirst. Only with this wine— And only I can make this liquor. Out of what? Out of— Oh be still, be still. I do not write letters such as this. I am not to speak so. Never answer it.

I once said things much like this when I was working fervently as a photographer. I never felt like it was a good thing either. It just was.

Infographic

If anyone should wonder what I’ve been doing today, well, here it is. Exciting, no? I thought it would be interesting to any other bizarre individuals curious about the reading habits of the late eighteenth century.

The History Channel could have made a killing in Bristol at this time. Six of the top ten books were multi-volume histories; of course, the complete works of Fielding and Tristram Shandy were up there too.

Lying

I haven’t read a great many of Friedrich Nietzsche’s books, but something has been bugging me. Perhaps it’s pondering that built within any exertion of power is a comparable resistance. I’m wondering if that’s why the same man could write these lines. While I’m all for sexual power, it really bothers me when it comes in the form of assertions like this:

The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.

Black dress and a silent part   make every woman appear— smart.

If I believe the first assertion, the second (and many others) lead me to believe that this philosopher has a very poor spirit. Rather than a pinnacle, he’s in negative territory and digging to China. Of course, I have to watch myself from going too far in the other direction. I constantly suppress the urge to think that every woman I meet is much smarter than I am. I think it has something to do with the lack of understanding I feel I suffer from; it’s mysterious territory for me. I have discovered that besides whatever rhetorical or artistic skills I might have, I have an uncanny ability to piss women off. If that’s a gift, I’d like to give it back.

However, I am drawn to this passage from Nietzsche. I suspect it is truer than most people would admit. We’re all artists, in an important respect:

Just as little as a reader of today reads all of the individual words (let alone the syllables) on a page— rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and “guesses” at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words— just as little as we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is very so much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of these experience and can scarcely not be forced to contemplate some event as its “inventors.” All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are— accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.

I have absolutely no clue why dressing in black and remaining silent is a prerequisite for women appearing smart to Nietzsche. I read all the words. They still make no sense. Maybe it’s meant to be taken as a lie— I hope so.