"...non ce qu'ils voulaient dire, mais la manière dont ils le disaient"

speaking of villains

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:01:16 GMT

The cultural instruction booklet seems to contain an early chapter on how villains reveal their evil plans via soliloquy. Eleventh-graders (but I sense the ninth-graders know this, too) know this, and they do not question it. It's as if, for them, the thing that really pegs Iago as the villain is the plain fact that he's always divulging the ornate details of his plans to engender monstrous stuff and enmesh people in nets of exploited goodness.

I can only remember encountering this cliché in cartoons and parodies. I should ask them where they've seen it. Very probably just in cartoons and parodies. But clearly, the villainous soliloquy is an old, old thing. I am interested in how far back it goes, but what I'm far more curious about is why it's stuck. Sure, there's a dramatic aspect involved: the crowd likes to anticipate, to witness the hatching of a dastardly plan and bite their nails in its offing. But the persistent (often wincingly cliché) voice-over in Dexter, which is so much less about hatching dastardly plans and so much more about rendering the otherwise patently opaque Dexter legible to us, makes me wonder about the endurance of the villain's soliloquy (is there a special term of art for this?). I suppose I wonder about it in Dexter because the whole point of the show is its protagonist's inability to intuit most typical human emotion. It's as if he needs a special translator. The only self he can instinctively inhabit is precisely the self that's not socially acceptable; supposedly, its perceptions and reactions are anathema to, incomprehensible to, the rest of us. And so we need the voice-over, we need a special translator - we need the villainous soliloquy. Only with Dexter, the villain's soliloquy is not about evil plans and clever schemes; it's the mind we supposedly can't fathom laid bare.

Is that what the villain's soliloquy implies: that what's contained within the deranged mind can't be intuited and isn't legible to us because it's so foreign to us? If we could intuit it, we'd be implicated?

Plus ça change...

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:04:51 GMT

"Were the ones whose brains looked anxious on the M.R.I. scans actually experiencing the sensation of being anxious? This is a question the scientists struggle with, hampered as they are by peoples’ inability to report their own feelings accurately." --"Understanding the Anxious Mind," The New York Times

"...je m'apercevais que pour exprimer ces impressions pour écrire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand écrivain n'a pas dans le sens courant à l'inventer puisque il existe déjà en chacun de nous, mais à le traduire. Le devoir et la tâche d'un écrivain sont ceux d'un traducteur. – Le temps retrouvé

The balance sways!

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:17:52 GMT

Unheard of: I have a job teaching actual, honest-to-goodness literature to smart students; the head of the English department has encouraged me to add a collection of Stevens' poetry to my syllabus; and I get paid way more than twice than I've ever made in my life, plus benefits?

There will be catches, of course. But for the moment, god it's nice to bask.

If pool balls can be forced to succumb to their destiny, so can people.

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:50:31 GMT

Can someone explain to me why a slightly skewed angle can't still amount to a significant alteration of future events?

Novikov's theorem can feel somewhat unsatisfying. As Kip Thorne writes, "something has to stay your hand as you try to kill your grandmother. What? How? The answer (if there is one) is far from obvious, since it entails the free will of human beings." The concept may be easier to grasp if you think about it in terms of inanimate objects: Imagine you shot a pool ball into a time machine and it emerged a moment before you made the shot. Now suppose that you aimed the shot just right, so the outgoing ball (your ball, a second earlier) would block the original shot and prevent it from going into the time machine. This paradox, proposed by Joe Polchinski, then at the University of Texas,* turns out to be the same as the grandfather paradox, albeit with less profound implications.

Kip Thorne and his students worked out what looks like a compromise solution for the impossible pool shot. They argue that you'd line up your shot exactly, but as your ball headed toward the time machine, another one would fly out at a slight angle and graze its side. The first ball would still travel into the time machine but at a slightly different angle than you'd intended. Then it would come back out of the machine, a moment earlier, at the same barely skewed angle—and the Terminator-style loop would be complete.

(From an otherwise entertaining article on getting fictionalized time travel right.)

PSA (seven years late, but still)

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:11:01 GMT

Slings and Arrows is fantastic! (wolodymyr ! Stop torturing yourself with True Blood, and take comfort in the way more innovative storytelling going on here.)

my incorrigibly claustrophobic syntax

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:58:35 GMT

A friend of mine whose verse surprised me with its erudition and imagery, whose fiction effortlessly falls into story, lodged in my inbox a line-by-line overhaul of some of my prose.

"It's so tight as to be almost claustrophobic."

And later: "the words are inexorable. They don't stop."

And that what's good "gets lost in the stream of other words."''

And: "things are so articulated that the story is just being related and not being discovered by the reader."

And then he backs it up, re-arranging my sentences, deleting entire lines, adding a phrase here or there, in a way that allows no real generalizations to be made (because here he's deleted verb phrases and modifiers, there he's added), or maybe I'm missing the finer pattern.

The thing is, I don't really disagree with him. And I could hardly be angry with his minute analysis. (He was drinking, I'm guessing, when he wrote the email. Observation #1 is too many unconscious shades of King Lear.) But the thing is, I'm not sure that I'm reformable. Or rather, I told him, the process of loosening the petrified, claustrophobic quality of my prose would amount to psychotherapy. I realize that when I write seriously, I'm grasping for phrases as if they were Platonic forms that I just had to locate. (I'm thinking of this description from VN's Sebastian Knight: "the thought which only seemed naked was but pleading for the clothes it wore to become visible, while the words lurking afar were not empty shells as they seemed, but were only waiting for the thought they already concealed to set them aflame and in motion.") And clearly, I don't usually succeed, but the point is that the way I do it feels, at this age, like an instinct. The plotting out of stories, which I may at some point give up, requires a kind of thought that mostly feels unnatural to me. But the searching for words feels like polishing or whittling. Maybe ten or even five years ago, his advice would have prompted me to conscientiously realign my syntax, neurotically forcing my words into unnatural patterns. The thing is, I can't do that now. My prose and my personality feel inextricably bound in their claustrophobic syntax. (This might also, I think, be called "a disease of adjectives"?) Writing any other way, at this point, would just feel like blind fumbling. If my personality mellows over time, then maybe the prose will. I don't think it can until then.

Aside from hiring D as my editor, I don't think I can reform myself.

another memorable line

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:48:21 GMT

My new passport just arrived. It expires in 2019, which seems like such an impossibly futuristic date, to the point of being science fiction. As if I really won't be recognizable as this self then, because of the barely imaginable effects of all the prostheses and supplements and, of course, jet packs, that we'll have then. Yet it's just ten years away. It has to be, in part, because of the existence of a title like 2001 that, even after we've arrived at them so gradually (that is, just one year after another - no real time travel), any years after 2000 still seem barely credible. (At an alumni thing last fall, I was continually moved to say to the 2008 graduates, "but you aren't alumni; you're, like, from the future.") I was too young at the turning of 1984 to have heard of 1984 - but more than likely, having spent the larger part of my conscious life, at that point, in the 1980s, I couldn't see 1984 as futuristic.

Still, it's not just years after 2001. I distinctly remember sitting up in bed in my parents' house, home for Xmas while in college, and noting the new year: It scares me to see the years getting so high in number, I remember writing in my journal. I remember sitting there in the bareness of one of those very deep winter nights, suddenly feeling how uncontrollably and absurdly time moved. It wasn't something I thought about a lot, although I know that I worried about it in some form, at least as early as high school. But that was one of those moments when it really hit me, like the reality of everything else that's out of our hands and barely glimpsed. And now, I realize, that whenever I see a year in the future, I hear in my mind that awkward, frightened little line.

díaz and wilde and eliot

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:03:34 GMT

Good interview with Junot Díaz

"In The Wizard of Oz, a narrative comes to you from behind a mask. We’re happy recipients of the narrative, but we don’t look behind the mask to see where it came from. Most of what we call third-person narration creates an unchallenged sense that, oh, a narrative comes out of nowhere and we’ll just enjoy it. But a narrative always has a point and a motive. Part of what’s interesting about unmasking a narrator is that the rupture perhaps prompts a reader to think about what masks a narrator wears and why.

I think that Yunior goes out of his way to make clear that there’s a tyranny in narration. We just accept that a voice out of nowhere is going to start telling us a story. That’s a given. We don’t question our narratives and where they come from, especially if we like them."

I like that he brings up the whole masks-of-narrative thing in the context of Oscar Wao without feeling the need to explicitly mention Wilde.

And, then, I'm such a sucker for visions of this kind, because it's such an ideal:

"This [his novel], in some ways, is the book that expresses best my deep love for reading and what I’ve read. It’s a book where, on every page, there is a paean to some text, to some writer or another. It is a rough-hewn genealogy of who I am as a writer and who made me a writer."

memorable lines

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:10:08 GMT

Is there a special term for a highly associative memory that returns as a complete sentence, like a line from a drama you once acted in? I’ve decided to begin a little catalogue of actual sentences that consistently—inevitably, in fact—surface when I encounter some particular object or action. The latter act as nearly unswerving prompts, as if they were both stage props and prompters for spoken lines. Or the chotchkies inside a memory palace. I can’t not hear the sentences they cue – the neural pathway from one to the other must be incredibly well trodden and nearly weedless. (Sometimes when I stop to think about them, about what incredibly resilient little verbal tags they are, I think of the best part (the whole point, really) of that Tobias Wolff short story, “Bullet in the Brain,” in which the dying man remembers the sound of one sentence. Still, that’s not what I’m talking about.)

The jade plant that sits on the windowsill behind my desk: They thrive on neglect, is what the woman at the greenhouse said, to me or my mother, or to both of us at once – I can’t remember which. I just remember the sentence, although the way that I remember the inflection may be completely off. In the way I remember it, there’s something very decadent about how she’s saying it, as if she’s endorsing some kind of debauchery. And the word thrive is always italicized, like it would be if Salinger had written the sentence for one of his characters. I can’t decide how often to water the jade plant. Frankly, its succulent petals look a little sere. But every time I do water it, I wonder if I’m not neglecting it enough.

Putting on shoes and socks, most usually my running shoes and socks: We were trying to figure out if it was faster to go ‘sock, shoe; sock, shoe’ or to go ‘sock, sock; shoe, shoe.’ I remember Mandy A. (who would later, I understood, insist on being called Amanda), probably at a high school cross country meet or practice, recounting a conversation she’d had with someone else about which was the most efficient method. I usually go sock, shoe; sock, shoe, because then one only has to address each foot once. But I never can prevent myself from wondering if I really should go sock, sock; shoe, shoe – if it’s more efficient, really, to repeat the same motions all at once, like a very abbreviated assembly line.

Swallowing pills: …or how you swallow pills in the wrong order. T, listing what he knew about me, one night – on, I am sure, that stained, secondhand mattress that was supposed to be an improvement over the old futon that I’d inherited from B. B, who was a chemist, and very methodical, imparted to me his method of swallowing pills, which is to sip a little water and hold it in your mouth before dropping the pill(s) down your gullet. This way you don’t taste the bitterness of the pill on your tongue. Even though I always think of this alone, from the rest of the list that I mostly can’t remember (I think I remember this because I was startled and charmed that T had noticed such a small habit), I’m still convinced it is the better way to swallow my pills.

…and flossing teeth: why would anyone floss their teeth after brushing? T said this to my mother upon first meeting her (I can remember us all sort of awkwardly trying to walk together from the B&N in Union Square, where we met, to the Zen Palate for lunch). I think it was apropos of something not so far off from the list above, but catered to parents, although now I can’t really recall. I only remember my mother not thinking it strange at all, and responding in that flat, conversation-killing way that she does, and T pointing to the incident later, as half-hearted example of how he’d tried to make small talk with my parents. As it happens, I now floss before I brush my teeth which is on account of T, who somehow influenced my teeth flossing but not my pill swallowing. Again, I always reconsider the logic of the order whenever I begin, but go on in the way I’ve become accustomed to.

Tying a necktie: P was saying how he’d like to teach someone how to kiss, because, that way, the girl you taught would think of you whenever she kissed someone – like the way you think of the person who taught you to tie a necktie whenever you have to tie one. I remember my high school friend S saying this to me in the basement of his parents’ split level home, where I went when P was away – not because I liked it there, but because S was so closely associated with P. I remember S recounting this idea of P’s (although I feel like the necktie idea is something they’d snagged from a popular movie), but I remember feeling cheated by the way he’d introduced it. He had asked me first, almost as if poised to diagnose something about me, whether P was the first person I’d kissed. He was, in fact, and he did indeed have to teach me how to kiss, but I remember wanting to seem more nonchalant and worldly to S, and so I’d lied. Then, when he’d followed up his question with a shrug and the potential mnemonic of kissing from P, I wished that I could tell him the truth.

P was wrong about the kissing, because memory’s not always predictable. But he was still half-right – whenever I see a tie being tied, I hear S’s voice recounting P’s theory.

The old saw of Pascal’s – “Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.” Or, as I more often come across it: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”: You're petitioning to your feelings with rationalizations. Feelings don't always sign legibly, though: beware the forged names. I really just remember the middle part, but I always remember it: Feelings don't always sign legibly. This, from an email from SR, advising me some years ago on matters of the heart. When I related it to T, he observed very passionately, “This is why we like S so much: every so often, she’ll do something like paraphrase Pascal in her own idiom to make it completely relevant to us.” Or something like that. I only clearly remember the middle part of what SR wrote, but I always do.

You mean rhetoric is the artificer of persuasion???

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:24:44 GMT

This NYRB article on pre-Code Hollywood cinema suggests some interesting things about narrative rhetoric, things that I think about everyday, every time I return to how much it really matters to me how (idiom, inflection, timing) a thing is said.

After the Code…Hollywood movies elaborated something like a parallel world purged of a great many common human situations and motives, a world of such foreordained moral clarity that few endings could surprise.

To make that post-Code world believable required the lavishing of increasingly sophisticated techniques of persuasion, and Hollywood filmmaking marshaled ever more subtly enchanting visual and aural effects to hold the spectator spellbound. In consequence, the earlier, pre-Code movies can seem antiquated or at least disturbingly irregular to spectators who have internalized the more smoothed-out norms of a later era.

…the longer you look at pre-Code movies the more you become aware of the expertise with which, in later films, spectator response is massaged, microsecond by microsecond. In some early 1930s movies one comes to appreciate certain moments of relaxation, and the resulting sense of breathing room—even in movies that otherwise models of tense, ferociously clipped storytelling.

Pre-Code movies can be distinguished as much by matters of form as by matters of content. [They’re shorter – no more than seventy-seven minutes in length.] Into that span they cram enough material for a much longer film, material that may lurch without warning from ribald farce to heart-clutching melodrama, from scenes of brutal domestic violence to frivolous panoramas of sophisticated society. To anyone brought up on the later products of Hollywood’s so-called golden age, they can seem almost freakishly unpredictable—‘oddly cadenced’ or ‘off-balance’ or ‘structurally flawed’—as if their makers had simply not yet learned the proper way to tell a story or develop a character.

The early talkies revel in a certain baldness of exposition. At times there is an impression of Brecht’s Alienation Effect arrived at by accident, as in those moments when characters declaim defiant protests or personal credos as if directly addressing the audience. Pre-Code characters…had freer scope in venting their rages and desires.

The regularizing of morals [demanded by the Production Code] turned out to be inseparable from the regularizing of aesthetics. In its tidying up of loose ends, the Code encouraged a cookie-cutter approach to structure and character that is with us yet, to which the anarchic unpredictability of the early 1930s offers a bracing corrective.

…the years when the Code ruled were…years when a certain anodyne predictability seeped deep into filmmaking, often masquerading under rubrics like ‘story logic.’

There’s a kind of equation of inauthentic content (moral clarity) with standardized form. I think the most interesting sentence is: “To make that post-Code world believable required the lavishing of increasingly sophisticated techniques of persuasion.” Here, O’Brien brings up the use of music and visuals, but he’s also still talking about the structure of the story. I regret that he doesn’t really give examples or go into detail, but I like thinking about the ways that different rhetorics of storytelling can make the contents of different stories more or less credible. This could amount to only the oft-repeated idea that effective fiction is the creation of “imaginary gardens with real toads,” that the conveyance of made-up or dubious stuff must itself be fabricated of realistic detail. But O’Brien seems to be talking equally about structure. In addition to emotionally manipulative musical scores and emphatic shots, how exactly did the sequencing of a story make its inauthentic content believable? Does it amount to a kind of moralistic symmetry, so that even if the message that stuff like greed and adultery will always be punished and good deeds will be rewarded isn’t realistic, the rhythm, the storytelling physics of equal-and-opposite reaction, feels almost like a natural law?

It also makes me wonder whether these pre-Code movies allow the viewer fewer opportunities for the pleasure of hackneyed dramatic irony (maybe I mean that dramatic irony is only hackneyed when it results from an acknowledgement of predictability). I’m thinking, here, about the idea that the ending of a story endows if not reframes all that precedes it with a kind of poetic logic, indulging our wish to believe that everything happens for a reason, is a means to a specific end (Hamlet: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends”). Undoubtedly, that’s an idea that far precedes post-Code Hollywood, but I’m just wondering (and this is almost wholly speculative, because what pre-Code movies have I seen?) whether the “structurally flawed” quality that O’Brien refers to results in more elements that are less easily explained or justified by the ending, or at least with less ease than post-Code logic demands. I’m wondering if it comes down to the way that, in really good narratives, details are more likely to be organic to the primary preoccupations of their story – whereas the cookie cutter “story logic” that O’Brien decries might call for a predictable outcome that’s still thematically inorganic.

And, instead of just making wild generalizations, I should totally put some pre-Code movies in my netflix queue. O’Brien makes Midnight Mary, Frisco Jenny, and lots of Dietrich and Harlow and Shearer movies sound good.

*I also love the part where O’Brien talks about the language in these early talkies of the pre-Code era:

All of a sudden movies needed words, lots of them, and they got them wherever they could find them: on the street, on the radio, in comic strips, in pulp detective stories and romance novels, in plays sophisticated or socially conscious in their bent, in the lyrics of jazz songs…in generations of vaudeville bits finally brought to the screen, in the telegraphic argot of Walter Winchell…and the newly frank sexual advice of lonely hearts columnists. Taken all in all the pre-Code movies constitute an overflowing repository of American speech and vernacular American writing—a sort of literary treasure, actually, largely unnoticed because scarcely transcribed—captured on the run, flung about at will, handled at times with musical fluency.

The image of rapid-fire cross-pollination of vernaculars is terrific.

Language may have had as much to do with the imposition of the Code as the glorification of vice and the sheer silk negligees of Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer. It was language that emanated from urban centers—the language overheard by the people who wrote the movies—and some of it was too fast and too modern for audiences in middle America. “We need more effortless entertainment,’ complained a theater owner in Kansas City, “and less of the type that makes intellectual demand on our patrons…Words are too smart.” The high-speed repartee of movies like Blessed Event, Five Star Final, and Twentieth Century—language drunk movies whose characters live to talk—may have left many in their original audiences behind.

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:35:11 GMT

There's something I love about the end of this dialogue: it's so perfect and yet so close to slapstick (maybe cos the words stop working). I feel like it could be the transcript from when Beckett guest-starred on The Muppet Show.

B- The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

D- But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat.

B-

D- Perhaps that is enough for today.

From Three Dialogues. with Georges Duthuit. I. Tal Coat

My first non-Roman alphabet spam!

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:18:07 GMT

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.

accidents

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:42:09 GMT

mmmhh.

You could open to belong together:

The descriptions they gave differed in a cork-lined room.

I needed some happy accidents.

I've always been one of those world's worst drivers. Driving years accumulating in some parallel world a vault of mangled auto bodies, coffins of myself. So many times I should have totaled the vehicle, and was left instead with just a moment's after-adrenaline. Then, this year, it seems like, the rain checks I was always allotted, the phantom stunt doubles I was lent, let up: last summer's U-Haul skidded off the road in canyon land. And yesterday, most baffling, so squarely opposite my intent, the foot on the gas thinking break, break--and hitting the gas again.

I thought I'd try to reverse the effect: intentionally summon the unintentional. Something had reminded me of the old amusement of the LJ-Markov random text generator, which conjures great free verse. But twice, in the process of copy-paste, I shut and erased and lost the happy accidental poetry. All I recovered were the two much less fantastic fortunes above. (But side note: when the generator's set on default mode, it mainly juxtaposes recognizable phrases, which annoyed me at first (not unexpected enough). After a few rounds, though, I came to like the greater nuance of my decontextualized phrasings, newly juxtaposed.)

And: both "happy accident" and "unhappy accident" are and aren't pleonasms, depending on the context.

architectural anatomy

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:17:03 GMT

Last weekend, on a walking tour of historic homes, I was reminded how much I've always liked functionally obsolete architectural features: the widow's walk, the porte cochère. I like them much in the same way I like the idea of functionally obsolete anatomy, like the appendix and male nipples. To really consider them, one has to consider how they would have been used, a way of life when they were common. And now they remain, like slightly mysterious monuments - not entirely obsolete, just functionally so.

And then this correspondence, the anatomical with the architectural, made me wonder that there aren't more architectural terms taken from human anatomy. There are fewer than one might think, but more than I knew of: eyebrow window, bellied balconet, hipped gable, ear (?), knee brace.

Which made me recall the conversation in which I was told that balcon was French slang for bustline, which wasn't and isn't anyting that I'd ever heard. I recall him (this was no one really important, but his moments of crudeness, which might have been just amusing in most other people, came from being just slightly an octave off, which made it seem more violent than funny) smiling smugly, saying, titty is to torso as balcon is to maison. Which made me think of The Rape.

saturation point

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:01:42 GMT

You do reach a point in your life, when every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

This, I always thought, was the best part of how Miss Marple solved mysteries.

fictional provincialisms

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:30:55 GMT

Lately, the New Yorker has been going nuts with the Midwest in letters:

Jonathan Franzen's satirical portrait of Saint Paul's Ramsey Hill neighborhood

Lorrie Moore's typical fare

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.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:31:32 GMT

Verges on contradictory, kind of, but I still like it:

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.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:59:27 GMT

My little penchant for re-creative repetition, again:

"...in reading or speaking Shakespeare one should read a line and, when one comes to its end, take a brief moment as if one were thinking up the next line. In that evanescent moment, Edelstein believes, the actor "finds" the next line, and the "springboard" of inventing it gives the words a renewed energy."
--Ron Rosenabum, writing over at Slate about Barry Edelstein's Thinking Shakespeare.

стол, ключ

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:28:14 GMT

"Arms  akimbo,  I  stood for a moment quite still and self-composed, surveying from the threshold the
raped  little  table with its open drawer, a key hanging from the lock, four other household keys on the table top."

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny."
--Lera Boroditsky, "How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?" Edge

concentration

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:42:13 GMT

"All told, we keep about 2.3 million adults behind bars: if the entire prison population were treated as a single city, it would be the fourth-largest in the United States, just behind Chicago and just ahead of Houston."
--"Behind Bars...Sort of," New York Times

Equivalents like these always make me think of an alternate universe - the one where the third of our lives spent asleep is experienced in one twenty-seven year chunk, the nth of our lives spent sitting in traffic or commuting lived in another continuous chunk, etc. Sort of like circles of Hell, I think - in that it makes me think of Sisyphus and Tantalus.

Enduring Bolaño

Sun, 17 May 2009 15:27:53 GMT

I made it sound as if I weren't going to return to Bolaño's bleakly intricate landscapes* for a long time to come, but I succumbed to a kind of compulsive curiosity one day when, wandering the stacks, only in the Romance language neighborhood, not intentionally strolling down hispanophone highways or byways, the reflective red gleam of a vertical 2666 caught me right between the eyes. And even though my arms were full, the numbered spine kept glowering in my peripheral vision, and it was just right there - didn't require any waiting in lines or filling out forms of reserve or recall - so I just took it, hefted it into my already bowed arms, which seemed like a weighty enough gesture in itself, and set it beside the bedside table. Not on it - just beside it.

Well, I've liked it so far, for reasons I'm still trying to understand - because I've disliked so much of the other, so I'm half-wondering if it's he who's doing something different, or I. And I've also half been thinking about what makes the reader endure, in a novel where we're not quite sure what's supposed to happen but we keep getting the impression that something's supposed to happen; it seems to me that it's the latter, delivered in that incidentally ominous way - often Lynchian** that makes a reader (makes me, at least) endure.

But, speaking of endurance (or, really, speaking only because of the question of endurance): I've just reached "The Part About the Crimes." I'm thinking about stopping. Regardless of how necessary it is to the whole excessive, terrifying, monstrous enterprise of the book, I can't, right now, find myself in the frame of mind to read 300 pages of (as I understand it) descriptions of raped and murdered women. I think I will stop, at least for now.

But, those of you (like, for instance) who've read it: how awful and how necessary did that section seem?

*Here's what seems like one of the many self reflexive descriptions of his writing:

"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.

Oh, and, of course, the part where Amalfitano reflects on the differrence between each great writer's version of, say, A Christmas Carol and his bigger, baggier, monstrous novels:

"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.

Just about every metaphor for words on a page I ever wanted:

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:30:30 GMT

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

methods

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:42:03 GMT

I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I?
--Charlotte Mandell, interviewed

It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions.
--Jim Holt, "The Case for Memorizing Poetry"

Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote--that looked to Menard less challenging (and somehow less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.

'Not for nothing having three hundred years elapsed, freighted with the most complex events. Among those events, to mention but one, is the Quixote itself.'
--Borges, trans. Hurley

small things

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:58:21 GMT

The other night, standing up slowly in that dim approximation of a bistro and turning to survey the room entire, in all its wide, broad, bare coarseness, I had one of those moments of perfect clarity, where diverse pieces of thought all at once collide as if to form a perfect equation. "It's just your own horror vacui," I thought, realizing how suddenly glum I was at all that bare, generic space. But just as suddenly, as I contemplated how I might take comfort in some kind of ornamentation or design upon which my eye could actually alight, within which it could rest, it occurred to me just how, but of course, God is in the details.

ether bookmark

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:21:21 GMT

Because it encapsulates some of my enduring doubts about realisms in general (and, more immediately, that A.O. Scott article): "About Neo-Neo-Realism".