без фанатизма

I wonder why it took so long.

Also, this residue of the Russian language, most of which I barely knew and now have largely forgotten, allows for such a ghostly perception.  I'm trying to remember if it's like that brief stage in childhood, when. although you can sound out words, their meanings remain quite opaque.  As if something were being witheld so that what you're doing is not quite reading, is too mechanical to really qualify as reading.

I suppose it is like that.  It just seems different because I'm different.

без фанатизма, indeed.

Back in Dellacrosse, the dining was divided into “casual,” which meant that you ate it standing up or took it away, and the high end, which was called “sit-down dining.” At the Wie Haus Family Restaurant, where we went for sit-down, the seats were red leatherette and the walls were gemütlich and panelled, decorated with framed deep kitsch—wide-eyed shepherdesses and jesters. The breakfast menus said “Guten Morgen.” Sauces were called “gravy.” And the dinner menu featured cheese-curd meat loaf and steak “cooked to your likeness.” On Fridays, there were fish fries or boils, at which they served “lawyers” (burbot or eelpout), so called because their hearts were in their butts. On Sundays, there was not only marshmallow-and-maraschino-cherry salad and something called Grandma Jell-O but “prime rib with au jus,” a precise knowledge of French—or English or even food coloring—not being the restaurant’s strong suit. “À la carte” meant soup or salad; “dinner” meant soup and salad. The Roquefort on the salad was called by the waitstaff “Rockford dressing.” The house wines—red, white, or pink—bore the requisite bouquets of rose, soap, and graphite, a whiff of hay, a hint of Hooterville, though the menu remained mute about all this, sticking to straightforward declarations of hue. Light ale and dunkel were served. For dessert, there was usually a Glückschmerz pie, with the fluffy look and heft of a small snowbank. After any meal, sleepiness ensued.

 

A poem called "Twin Cities" that leaves me nonplussed

It all makes me remember that period of time, when the years of actually being from the Upper Midwest but not in it began to accumulate, and I felt some kind of obligation to capitalize, in my fiction writing, on the now relative exoticism of my hick background.  I don't think it was anything I ever did very successfully, and I'm trying to think exactly why that was. 

For most of adolescence, my relationship to the entire part of the country where we lived was that of the child who grows up believing that her real parents are much better and shinier than the poor substitutes she's been stuck with.  (Never having lived outside the Midwest, I of course didn't realize how much of the Upper Midwest's trappings had become my own - and remain so.  I think that in the sort of predictable gesture of writing about trying to transcend these trappings, I only succeed in solidifying them.  That is, isn't there something provincial and tired about talking a lot about trying to escape your provincial roots?  But for a long time, I think that was the relationship with these roots of which I was most conscious.  I can remember a pathetic version of myself, home for an Xmas not so long after college, on the basement floor of a high school boyfriend's parents' ranch style home, how the most important thing I needed to ask him was whether I was different from everybody else.  Effectively asking him to confirm that I wasn't really from there.)

But in the stories that I wrote during that time, during that time that I was from but not in, I tried very hard to assume a kind of salt-of-the-earth know-how about the Upper Midwest.  I wrote about the kind of clichés that I assumed phantom readers expected to hear about, decking myself in a coarse Scandinavian heritage that had never belonged to me and studding my prose with colloquialisms I had never actually used.  (All the while, of course, unaware of the subtler provincialisms that inhabited my very syntax, and which I couldn't then write about.)  I was trying to animate a cliché from an enduring position of contempt disguised as pastoralism, and it never sounded much like anything but.  I think this was, in part, because I was suddenly trying to cash in on something that I'd previously rigidly distained or, at least, ignored.  The sorts of Midwest experiences I was trying to write about, that I felt like I was supposed to write about, weren't really the ones I'd ever had.  That much, now, is clear. 

Reading Franzen's and Moore's versions of the Upper Midwest, I'm trying to figure out exactly what sort of experience I did have.  The culture of jello molds and fish fries and hot dishes - the Praire Home Companion version - was something I observed but didn't experience from the vantage of a self-designated out-of-towner who didn't want to soil or tear the ticket out of town she was always clutching.  I don't have any interest in writing about the Praire Home Companion version that was never mine, and of which there's no need at all for more.  Was my version the cliché of white-knuckled resistance to being in instead of from?  Last summer, at my parents', I reread Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" and, for months afterward, cringed when I could perceive the very provincialism of contempt creeping into my voice, hulking and sullen.  A realization much harder to bear when you're in and not from again. 

 

 

The writer’s and reader’s mutual yearning for each other’s presence becomes the absorbing consolation for the failure to transcend the limits of the text.  If language fails to name or command, it still has the power of what anthropologists call ‘phatic communion,’ the power to create social bonds through meaningless gestures.  The reader must know that the poet has nothing to tell him, but know at the same time that he is communicating with him.  Writing becomes a way of perpetuating the writer’s contact with other lives, and thus preserving his own. (514)

                                      --"John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader,” Bonnie Costello (Contemporary Literature, 1982)

...even if I don't want to give up on the rhetoric of At-home.

 

"It won't do you much good," said the cook, "it'll be dark in five minutes.  Sunsets in the desert seem like they'll never end, until suddenly, before you know it, they're done.  It's like someone just turned out the lights," said the cook.

 

 

"What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

**Lots of it, if you're in the right mood, can support or suffer the Lynch comparison.  (Another brief instance, which is citable because it's localizable, as opposed to the entire landscape of that ambience that you can feel if you're inclined to: "Don't you want something else to eat before you go?  he heard the cook say.  He didn't answer.  The desert began to disapper.")  But Iove the instance where that Lynchian heritage is explicitly invoked, and then also performed by means of a logical disconnect that's a big part of Lynch's method:
 

The card for the Santa Teresa cybercafe was a deepred, so red that it was hard to read what was printed on it. On the back, in a lighter red, was a map that showed exactly where the cafe was located. He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me.

"It sounds like the title of a David Lynch film," said Fate.

The clerk shrugged and said that all of Mexico was a collage of diverse and wide-ranging homages.

"Every single thing in this country is an homage to everything in the world, even thing that haven't happened yet," he said.

[BUT THEN!]

After he told Fate how to get to the cybercafe, they talked for a while about Lynch's films.  The clerk had seen all of them.  Fate had only seen three or four.
 

Fate, having seen only a handful of Lynch's films, notices the reference.  The clerk shrugs it off, though, like maybe it is, maybe it isn't - and then we find out, only a few lines later, that he's seen all of Lynch's films.  Which disconnect has bunch of implications, but one seems to have to do with the kind of--not indifference--but equivalence that comes of excess.

 

I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.

...

They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words.

...

The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community.

...

...to account for how sentences by writers I admire have arisen from the alphabet.

--Gary Lutz, "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," The Believer , 1/09
 

 

Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counsellor, Laertes a generic young man.  Hamlet pulls them all into death.
 

I haven't read Kerrigan's book, so I don't know whether he intends any irony at all in the first condition, but what a colossal bracketing that is!   Aside from its suggestion that the murder can be neatly swept behind an arras without its being symptomatic of any larger problem, as a summary, it's weirdly illogical: Kerrigan/Knight begins by asking us to imagine the play without its most significant death, and then blames Hamlet for returning us to that death.

And then, too, there's just the insidiousness of such a bland and blind reading: as if these character's words (and for that matter, real people's) words could be neatly extricated from the creeping rot of Denmark.  It's almost like assigning someone who's an extremely poor judge of character to be a parole officer for a convicted killer: [blinking] "Putting aside the murder, he seems like such a nice boy."
 

To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.