Origin Stories
He took up the problem yet again, four years later, in “The Only Possible Basis of Proof for a Demonstration of God’s Existence” (Einzig möglichen Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes), in order to present his view of teleology, in both the positive and negative senses, systematically and exhaustively, and to give it a foundation. Here he finds the proof for the existence of the divine being, customarily drawn from the purposive arrangement of the world, largely proportioned “alike to the worth as to the weakness of the human understanding.” But this latter point he raises more acutely than before, and points out the fundamental defect clinging to the whole methodology of physico-teleology. The conviction that flows from it may be “exceedingly sensory and hence very lively and gripping and both accessible and comprehensible to the most ordinary understanding,” but at no point can it stand up to the strict requirements of conceptual knowledge. For even supposing it were proved that order arose from disorder, a “cosmos” from “chaos,” by specific divine actions, that primordial being which ought to be thought as infinite and all-sufficient will precisely thereby labor under a basic limitation laid on it from outside. If crude matter is the opponent which this being has to overcome and it displays its goodness and wisdom only in that victory, then if the proof is not to lose all its meaning and effectiveness this matter has to be recognized as something in itself, as a given stuff with which the purposeful power must occupy itself. Hence this procedure can only serve “to prove an originator of the connections and artful composition of the world, but not of matter itself and the creation of the elements of the universe.” God will by this route always be shown only as master craftsman, not as creator of the world; the order and formation of matter appears as the work attributable to Him, but not its generation.
In this way the very idea of purposiveness of the world which is supposed to be establshed is put in extreme jeopardy. For there now enters into the world a basic dualism which, no matter how hard one may try to conceal it, is ultimately ineradicable. The shaping of the sheer stuff of being by intentional will is never absolute, but always something relative and conditioned: there is, in this mode of intuition, at least a definite substrate of being which as such does not carry the form of reason in itself but rather is opposed to it. The gap in the physico-theological proof is at this point clearly visible; it can be plugged only if we succeed in showing that what we have assumed to be the real and independent “essence” of matter and from which we can deduce its universal laws of motion is not alien to reason’s regulation but rather is an expression and a particular manifestation of these very rules.
Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought
Washed up on a bank, high enough that I can’t see the river going by. The sun.
J. has her academic work, with dates attached. So we both have paths that are supposed to branch into other paths, though it all seems a bit trackless at times—if the road on the map turns into an unpaved dirt road, does that make it false? What if the dirt road is only an abstraction drawn over a landscape of sand?
Another map of the interior in here. I do know how to draw maps of other things, but most of them are going into the fiction. There’s a certain kind of gaze on the wider world that is alien to me right now: to insist, this is the literature of the present, these are the politics of the present, this is the emblem of the present. For some reason it’s important to be contemporary. As if disappointing books disappoint because their forms don’t reflect the present, and not because their execution is just plain boring. The books that are self-conscious about the present are the worst of all. And then the theories of the present: someone says, the culture is sick in this way, someone else says, you’re ignoring the other way in which the culture is sick, and so back and forth, a doctors’ squabble in the ER while the patient croaks. I will say both that there is no saving the patient, and that fatalism is easy and no help.
If I’m not for cures, or snake oil labeled as a cure, then I must be for elegies—as I think I’ve said before. Elegies are no help either. Then they differ from fatalism how? It might be like the difference between a) a simple materialism, and b) asserting that this world is the only world, but wanting to address it as one addresses God. This is deep water now, but of course no one asked for my help anyway. If you want to help, you could donate to Pakistan, like Manan says.
So, now that you’re done molding the minds of today’s youth do we get the normal URL back?
I am a coward! I fear Google! The normal URL isn’t as high in my search results as it used to be—it seems to be overshot, hilariously, by autogenerated MP3 aggregators that say things like “P__ K__ is a famous star!”—but it’s still hanging around, and I am pusillanimous about hanging the laundry back out while I’m trying to be a businessman.
This is how I try: when I’m not writing my opus I tend to sit at home and learn about software by making idiot coding mistakes, but occasionally I will get on the speaker phone with people who could be described as “directors of major corporations,” though they’re pretty minor major corporations so far, and we confirm that everyone is doing great today, and then we yell proposals and counterproposals into the speaker phone, and we send them to each other for review, and everyone makes noises like their heads are about to pop off with delight. So fucking bizarre. Everyone talks as if there are great orchards of money trees out there waiting for harvest. And money is somewhere, in someone’s hands; and now and then a small, ripe leaf detaches from the tree and wafts down to me, and I stick it in my greedy pocket and look around for more. It is always just about to become a living wage. It is always just possible to believe that there must be a living wage somewhere around here, because the money is somewhere around here, I’ve seen it, only it’s behind my back where I can’t reach; and then I make another coding mistake, and I get back on the phone.
I have a new novel going, with commercial ambitions. You can guess what that means. For the present I’ll call it a potboiler set in the nineteenth century. Word count at left.
Ecocriticism
—I somehow can’t imagine lime trees growing in England. I guess there must have been some, though. 'Within Germanic languages, English lithe, German lind
("lenient, yielding") are from the same root.' does this go for german romantics too??
Sometimes it was the suffering itself that found expression:
Fleas, lice,
Nomi shirami (Fleas lice)
Here Bashō was on his best-known pilgrimage—recorded in The Narrow Way Within (Oku no Hosomichi)—at the northernmost turn of his travels. In a mountainous region, about to pass the barrier between two provinces, he was obliged by bad weather to spend three days at the home of a barrier guard. He counted himself lucky to have any accommodation at all, in such a remote place, but the comforts were meager.
Most translators of this haiku interpolate some feeling of disgust. Donald Keene, who usually can be trusted to translate dispassionately, renders the verse:
Plagued by fleas and lice
This is not what Bashō said or meant at all, for he was using that suffering; he was not used by it. Not a single syllable in his original words reflects self-pity. It was just nip! Ouch! Pshhh!
[...]
The virtue itself shines forth with incisive spirit that drives through the darkness. The pain itself is just that pain.
—Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave: Bashō’s Haiku and Zen
Comala 2010
We had one gentleman who came in as bones, but around his
wrist there was a bracelet from a Mexican hospital that had his picture.
Naptime is over. We ran out of money again. Even when wine is a bargain by the bottle—
I was thinking about Benjamin and his distracted spectator, because I associate distraction with the need to make money, and therefore with my enemies—well, what are Benjamin’s examples? Architecture and film. The building where you work and the show you catch after work. You don’t need to cognize a building to be affected by a building, I get that, buildings are large and they get in your way even with your mind underwater, but what a wallop to discover you’ve been walking around submerged for months. Occasionally the scales drop from my eyes and I feel I am inhabiting this proper animal form with its directions and aversions; the rest of the time I loll around with bad grace. As for the movies, they give me trouble. I can’t put them on in the background, but if I try to orient to them then I want to go somewhere else after five minutes, attention and distraction don’t balance in the right way. Or is distraction even part of it now? They don’t seem to expect that you’ll wander in during one reel and wander out during the next. They take their time.
Anyhow this week I am consulting with my ass in a chair and did all the work already and am on my second day of trying to look attentive while lolling, and it is a hindrance, kids. Bad grace.
Glücklichkeit.... könnte man die, in Palo Alto, finden—?
Finishing the move is like waking up from a nonsense dream. Now I don’t have much work but maybe don’t need much, not yet—and when I do have to go to an office, I am very proud of writing my novel on the Caltrain. Through J. I have a Stanford library card again after ten years, already getting more use than ever before. I ride my bike to campus and back, I buy fresh broccolini, the peace doesn’t even seem plausible, I thought this restful no-time was what bookish people got after they died.
June will go out as a lost month, one of these months whose labor wasn’t productive enough to deserve an eclogue and will drop
right out of the calendar. Erschöpft, uncreated or created-out, as they might say: emptied of power. Around the twentieth day of
boxing,
unboxing, painting and scouring, hauling around odious heaps of trash, you contract a great envy for the donkey harnessed to the mill, who, to the extent it understands that its circle is always the same circle, doesn’t occupy itself in wondering where it will stop, and doesn’t torment itself by imagining a different journey that would move in a straight line. At moments you briefly become the envied donkey. At other moments you find the place where the ascetic impulse intersects Beckett’s love for Belacqua, disgust with life as the arena of motion and labor, all desire superseded by the wish for stasis and rest.
Some old sutra: was it wishing for the destruction of desire, or desiring the destruction of wishing...?
Or the story J. tells about her coworker who was a nun, passing her one day in the hall:
Drove the 880 two nights in a row, had taken care to avoid freeways at night for a long time and forgot how the pupils dilate as a stress
response, creating ghostly cones around all the passing lights, white and red.... Fog above us on the last night, heraldic billows: you’re leaving, leaving. Next morning back up on the train to see if the city has finally taken away the 81 cubic feet of trash we’re permitted to shove at them: we had a fatally huge basement where all kinds of things got dumped, mattresses, styrofoam, broken appliances, the surplus inventory of records I’d made, in boxes that at some point became a giant nest for ants, though the ants have now vanished, leaving only dirt and empty tunnels honeycombing the cardboard. My Imamura moment for the year. But J. said it’s all right, it is nature after all. Everything has been on the curb for days and the citizens of Berkeley showed a lot of interest, dumping the bags all over the sidewalk, until J. wrote a long open letter asking them to stop. Two days after the city was supposed to collect it, it’s still out there: I get on the phone and yell at someone in customer service, which is a thing I do very rarely. I receive assurances. Whatever that means. So it’s not my problem now, I’ve repainted the rooms and give my keys back to the landlady, finis.
Getting to know my new material conditions, pacing out the new flat neighborhoods: brick houses, I think, looks like Reno, or else: wide bright street, like the dusty downtown end of Tucson. The new kitchen will be a delight, finally enough room to turn around in; already gotten used to the cozy small bedroom. It will take more time to tolerate the sound of people tramping around upstairs. Whatever, they’ll have to deal with my guitars, assuming I get to pick up my guitars again, assuming life resumes. On my way out from Berkeley I sold two last boxes of CDs at Amoeba and got just enough cash for a baker’s dozen of wine at Oddlots. As it ought to be: fuck the rhetoric of investment, let’s hear it for the ephemeral pleasures you don’t have to carry around your whole damn life.
Xronos
For instance: the steering wheel bucks under your hand, refusing you, and the road starts to whip like a ribbon in the wind. The screaming animal in you looks out through the wide windscreen at a movie you’ve never seen, though you’ve been told about it since childhood: really, this? The steering wheel bucks under your hand. Like this? So strange to see the road whip, to feel the car’s new drift. But stranger than the new movie is that the old movie is over. The screaming animal looks out through the windscreen. You held a hundred threads in your hand, spring was wet and summer was to be dry, Friday was cruel and Saturday was to soothe you. The road starts to whip like a ribbon in the wind. The hundred threads are out of your hand. The staircase you half climbed spins into air above you; no one will ever know half of what was in your head. Really, like this? So strange to feel the new drift. All you lived was prologue, the curtain hadn’t lifted. The screaming animal looks out through the windscreen, dropped into a movie you’ve never seen. You held a hundred threads in your hand, and the road starts to whip like a ribbon in the wind. Really? Spring was wet, the staircase spins into air. The steering wheel bucks under your hand. You were told about it since childhood. Like this? The old movie? All you lived was prologue. Summer and Friday, the wide screen. Halves and threads. Threads.
Dear diary, I can’t do anything but lie in bed and make phrases. What a donkey. At the bottom of the well there is nothing but the romance of being at the bottom of the well. That is, a stage costume you’ve put on too many times, all wisps and threads. Used to be sweeter.
But if it is the bottom of a well, there must be water; and if one waits, the water will rise, and up you go like a buoy.
get up, donkey, you know how to swim!
working thu, god this stuff is comllicated
I know! I just drove a car back from Kansas. Weakness, garbage trucks going by, everything pushing its way through molasses—
Doors close, doors open. J. caused Craigslist to submit to her and found us a sunny apartment next to Stanford, with garden space and room for all of the books and guitars: I’d been entertaining such shameful fears of losing the books and guitars. It’s ours as of tomorrow: we just have to get everything moved, which will have its own mythos and peripeteiai. Prior to that going to Kansas, acquiring a car, driving it across the western half of America; I am an old hand at this, will bring the cows back safe. Greetings for Colorado and Utah. Y’all I remember.
I’ve had my uneasy twinges about Palo Alto, its wealth and flatness, its unconsciousness of itself; but you could be excused for calling these minor differences of shade in the great wash of yellow ochre that covers all California. The sun was brilliant as we stood around waiting for the apartment manager to come back; next door’s porch had two caged cockatoos carrying on. There are lemons, and things that look like cherries, growing in back of the property. Stucco walls, I remember from childhood, are good for keeping the heat out.
Anyway, now I have an address where my Ph.D. diploma can be sent, since the university promises me that it’s official. The startup launched its product, signed and delivered on its first contract, I finally built it a real website: more legitimate all the time, for whoever’s watching. And at last I finished my manuscript of nine short pieces, apparently not publishable in periodicals great or small. They were experiments in the fullest sense, and I know not everything works, but there’s much in there I’m proud of. Four or five years ago, at a writers’ meetup in Austin, Marlowe asked me how I felt about the prospect of not being appreciated in my own time. Hi, Marlowe! I feel all right!
Shirley (1)
‘Caroline,’ demanded Miss Keeldar abruptly, ‘don’t you wish you had a profession - a trade?’
Live From Winnemucca
—First of all, it’s legalized socialism - Boy, they're gonna be sad when they get to that Pacific
island and find it overrun with lizards.
More From Mammon
I have to find a job. J. helpfully sends an announcement from the German Studies Association:
and comments: “Applicants urgently sought. Experience with vi a plus.”
Eyes on the Prize
Act Two! This is where we clean the splatter off the drapes. Don’t forget to tip the cocktail waitresses, ladies and gents, they work awful hard for you.
Alert reader J.F. points out that robins do not really DROP DEAD EVERY AUTUMN OUT OF MORBID DEPRESSION and sends commentary:
They had pictures hung on the walls--mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes,
and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called “Signing the
Declaration.” There was some that they called crayons, which one of the
daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen
years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before
--blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress,
belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle
of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil,
and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black
slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on
her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down
her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the
picture it said “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.” Another one was a
young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head,
and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was
crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her
other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said “I Shall
Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.” There was one where a young
lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her
cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax
showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to
it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said “And Art Thou
Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas.” These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but
I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a
little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died,
because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body
could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that
with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. She
was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took
sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to
live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a
picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a
bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and
looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had
two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front,
and two more reaching up towards the moon--and the idea was to see which
pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I
was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now they kept
this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her
birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a
little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice
sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery,
seemed to me.
The question is put at the end of Elizabeth Costello: why Kafka again? Why is it always Kafka?
Stay in bed, get embalmed by early summer, become a husk visited by bees. That seems nice. This is all headed in some terrible Robert Lowell direction, isn’t it.
Like marching in several different funeral processions at once. Which one is playing the music? Are they all headed to the same grounds?
I was back to driving around Nevada, earning money for who knows what end, and re-met the most frightening quatrain in the American songbook:
Did you ever see a robin weep
If this were a Henry James novel, I would be telling people that I am morally tired. But no matter how far you stretch the pathetic fallacy, caged animals don’t stop eating for moral reasons.
Soledad, Destierro, Crimen
1.
For her exam J. was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude and put the question to the floor: what is this Spanish or Spanish-American concept of solitude? Does everyone have it? What would a life without solitude look like? I find it alien, she said, because my thoughts of solitude are all positive; and that turned out to be the answer, that in North America we have Emerson’s self-reliance, the voluntary rejection of the world in favor of one’s private kingdom, but in Spanish America you have soledad, the world’s sign that it has rejected you. It’s a rural condition, bound to a landscape which is itself an unhealed historical wound. Massachusetts has Walden, and Mexico has Juan Rulfo’s Comala (phantom village, hell’s doorstep); Spain has Juan Benet’s Región (waste battlefield of the Guerra Civil, guarded by murderous shepherd-king); Colombia has Macondo (edge of the map, once thought falsely to be an island—rodeado de agua por todas partes—finally plunged incestuously into itself and annihilated). History has happened, or is happening, elsewhere, and for you it has but one perceptible gift: dead land, walled cell.
Where does soledad start? Luis de Góngora lived under Philips Two through Four and got to see the Spanish monarchy in several distinct stages of nightmare buffoonery; was shuttled between Church and state appointments in Madrid, Córdoba, Salamanca; was hated—really hated—by a powerful rival who in the face of the Inquisition called him a homosexual, a converted Jew, and toward the end of his ailing life got him kicked out of his house. In 1609, at the end of one unhappy stay in Madrid, Góngora wrote an extraordinary kiss-off which began ¡Malhaya el que en señores idolatra!—woe to him who worships the great—and went on for a hundred bilious lines. He refuses to join the court’s sierpe prodigiosa, its conga line of lackeys, and instead declares allegiance to the lonely countryside:
¡Oh Soledad, de la quietud divina
This is the sweet solitude of pastoral—gardens, pools, songbirds—and what’s more, it really existed. Outside his native Córdoba Góngora had rented an orchard from the local authorities, and he retired there after wrapping up his affairs at court. Yet after a few years he went back to the capital; though documentary evidence is slight, there seem to have been lawsuits involving family members, as well as the promise of further prestige (in 1617 he became, briefly, Philip III’s honorary chaplain). It seems doubtful that his years in the orchard were free of cares or ambitions. But he wrote his greatest poems in that time, including the unfinished Soledades.
Like most words in Góngora, this soledad can mean various things: it seems to be geographical, describing an unpeopled area, but also to mean solitude as a state of soul. There were to be four soledades: a soledad of the fields, a soledad of the rivers, a soledad of the forests, a soledad of the wasteland. Only the first and part of the second were written, and given Góngora’s style, their incompletion makes it difficult to say just what has happened. A peregrino, shipwrecked pilgrim, is washed up on a remote coast and encounters shepherds; his clothes and bearing are aristocratic, but he reveals almost nothing of his origin. In one passage he apostrophizes the ocean over which he has wandered for years; it seems that he has suffered obscure misfortunes at home, including unrequited love, and is now in a state of exile, destierro, having lost his land. We thus have a number of conventions obscurely layered: the political exile fleeing disgrace at home, the knight errant wandering far from his mistress, the pilgrim seeking his spiritual homeland in God. The poem is structured so that the ocean can hear him:
No es sordo el mar (la erudición engaña),
The sea is not deaf (on this point the authorities deceive us), though in
its rage it may refuse to hear the pilot, or reply in anger; when calm,
its secret ears number more than the sweet complaints that the stranger,
melodious earthworker, sowed in its undulating field. Like a sponge it
mutely drank his tear-strewn cries of recognition, of whose sweetnesses
the wind stole not a few, by two drafts of the invisible pen forged by its two wings; Echo, in the guise of a rock’s concavity, begged out of curiosity, then jealously kept back the sweetest (if not the least clear) syllable, just as the sight of the cottages put an end to the song.
Elaborated description follows of the sea and shoreline; comprehension is
regularly strained; and it is some time before we return to our pilgrim.
We learn no more of his plight. But this short passage serves as well as
any to show why the place is a soledad, geographically and
spiritually, despite being packed with an apparently quite active
shepherd society. Personification is everywhere, piling trope on trope;
the familiar angry sea is only the first in a series of moves that will
bring us the mute sponge, the thieving wind (with its invisible pen that
apparently writes bad checks), and finally the nymph Echo bucking her
nature and refusing to send back the words she catches. The corollary to this is that the poem’s human figures are just as much landscape, and no matter how many bucolic banquets and courtships we read through, they will all retain the structure of the ocean passage: a wanderer addresses a landscape, and the landscape alters in reply. And of course the land is a mirror to the wanderer, as the poem’s title insists that he and it are one: he feels soledad, and soledad is where he has come. The old pastoral conventions have found a weird new function, to animate nature in such a way as to constantly signal an expulsion from the human world, though they lack a structure which would allow the expulsion even to be described, much less resolved. In the poem’s dedication Góngora freely equates himself and his peregrino, and one has to think of the poet in his orchard, having built himself a place outside the forcefield of state power yet sensing already that, from compulsion or from choice, he won’t be able to keep away.
2.
In 1927 Góngora had been dead three hundred years and the trecentennial date, as is famous, gave its name to the first great
constellation of Spanish poetry since the Baroque: not just García Lorca but Dámaso Alonso, the scholar-poet who wrote classic commentaries to the great works, Rafael Alberti who tried to extend them with a Soledad tercera, Pedro Salinas the poet of secular love, Aleixandre and Diego and Guillén with their hymns of earthly praise. They hung out with Dalí and Buñuel and took surrealism seriously, because they saw that it renewed the possibility of doing what Góngora had done: to merge the human and inhuman, to discern the latent universe in each thing and give it life. Lorca, in the lecture at El Ateneo in Seville which was his contribution to the trecentennial, did his best to make the links explicit. He said that the Academicians had failed to break one finger off the impeccable marble statue that was don Luis, but that the surrealist moon had cracked the Hebraic tip of his nose. He said that Mallarmé, who hardly knew Góngora, was nonethless his best disciple: they loved the same swans, mirrors, harsh moons, women’s hairstyles, and shared the Baroque’s rigid tremor. He said that Góngora required the elements to be conscious; he denies that the sea is deaf because he hates deafness, hates dark forces without limits. Yet Lorca closes this talk on pure poetry and the joy of metaphor with the figure of don Luis in old age, as a broken man, returning to Córdoba, la cuidad más melancólica de Andalucía... ya es una ruina. The city is like an old fountain [fuente] that has lost the key to its spout [surtidor]. Where are we? It is as if the dying Góngora has stumbled into the twentieth century, as if we have just seen Primo de Rivera announce “a brief parenthesis in the constitutional life of Spain,” start his war in Morocco and outlaw the Catalan language. No poet had an imagination dark enough to predict the sort of poetry that everyone would be writing a few years forward, but Lorca’s broken spout (which I picture as parched and rusted, filmed over with dust) does come back after the Guerra Civil, and very much in the context of solitude.
There was another Andalusian in the Generation of ‘27, from Málaga, one of the youngest in the bunch, who came to Madrid as
a university student and had his first taste of exile at age 21, when a lung disease sent him to Mann’s magic mountain, the Waldsanatorium in Switzerland, for a year of secluded reading. In photographs he has an elongated, fragile-looking head and owlish circular spectacles; his name, Emilio Prados, must have given him a foredoomed sense of identity with the landscape. (Prado: meadowland, the public walk in Madrid.) In 1936 Andalusia discovers Lorca on a lonely road and kills him; Prados, one last time, repeats the old move from the country to the capital. That fall he reads on the radio his Ciudad sitiada—besieged city— a poem in which he sees himself among cañones, moves between cañones (canyons, or cannons); where does the city begin, or it that his body is the city—o es, Madrid, que eres mi cuerpo? In 1938 he and his comrades in the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas are forced back to Barcelona. In 1939 he departs for Mexico.
His first years of exile are spent in publishing houses. He lives in a tiny Mexico City apartment, wears secondhand clothes, depends on friends for his medicine. He writes to his brother, on company letterhead: here where I am neither needed nor happy, I work as an oficinista, a poor corrector of test prints from the press, without independence, nor soledad, nor silence... it is now a month and a half that they haven’t paid me. Like Góngora he craves soledad, even imposes it on himself. At the same time soledad is a condition he can’t escape. For the rest of his life family and friends will entreat him to come back to Málaga, but he always refuses. The siege has not been lifted. His poetic recourse is to make declarations of soledad: he writes them at night, many of them, better poems than ever before. In 1946 they are published as Jardín cerrado, a shut garden which—the poet explicitly tells us—is also his own body, the soul’s closed camp.
Oliva, olivar, olivo:
Olivo, oliva, olivar:
¡Olivo!
Olive fruit, olive grove, olive tree; let the day come (and the river sleeps...). Olive tree, olive grove, olive fruit; let the river come (and the day sleeps...). These combinatorics gradually release the implied verb olvidar, to forget: my forgetfulness, forgets the forgetting...
Olive tree!
That is the whole of the poem, and that is, in general, how these poems work. Their elements are few, chosen from the things of the garden: poplar and jasmine, oleander and myrtle, moon and bright star. The garden is Andalusian, made of running water: the fuente and the surtido from Lorca’s lecture are here, also estanque, pond, and acequia, irrigation canal. The legacy of surrealism meets the logic of Góngora’s pilgrim in the live landscape; there are voices in the poems, asking and answering, but no human figures as such. Rather the things of the garden are given the Spanish emotional vocabulary: they possess hearts, blood, tears. The surtidor laments, the poet will pull a spine from it; the butterfly, the fairest tree, the soul itself lie at the bottom of the pond. The jardín cerrado is also a jardín perdido, both the place of the poet’s exile and the place he is exiled from. He is shut in and shut out.
Todos vienen a darme consejo.
Everyone comes to give me advice. I am sleeping next to a well. This poem is unusual in that other figures approach, but they are kept on the borders. Probably there are no more o sounds than in any paragraph of Spanish, but they somehow knit the lines into a murmur of weariness and indifference—a murmur which, I must say, has been often in my mind over the last year.
Todos se acercan y me dicen:
Say the others: life is departing from you, your heart bleeds drop by drop upon your dream, like the violet that dies in the hidden corner of the garden, and you sleep on the grass, you see only the trembling star, hear only the murmur of water. The poet is being asked to open his shut garden. But soledad is not broached so easily, and the poet gives his conditions:
Sólo, si algún amigo
Only if some friend approaches, without a question, and gives me his embrace among the shadows: I lead him, together we reach the border of the abyss, in its deep waters we see the weeping moon and its reflection, which must sink like a golden stone under the cold autumn of death.
This is not the response the advising voices wanted. Nor does it describe any condition whose fulfillment the poet expects: not while he labors in a foreign land, and certainly not back home in a Málaga that returns Franco’s salute. That is the point of treating the lost country, and the lost self, as empty gardens. It is usurpers who live there now. They have no place in the poem.
3.
Exile is the wound from injuries done by a people against a land. Injury has been on my mind this week, since I have my own desert garden a mile or two from the house where I grew up, with gravel paths running between the different kinds of prickly pear; staghorn cholla, barrel and fishhook cactus; mesquite, ironwood, catclaw acacia; foothill and blue palo verde. At dusk you see quail run through the brush, and the woodpeckers become loud, shouting their way from perch to perch; you recognize the phainopepla by the white underwing that flashes against its black body. There are ramadas shaded with saguaro ribs. In the center is a tiled fountain and a pond with tiny fish. My mother was married here.
What is happening in Arizona is not foreign to America as a whole; it’s only the amplification effect of the desert. Yet those hypothetical questions from your high-school history of the twentieth century—what would you do if your homeland passed a race law?—gain no clarity when they become actual. This week I’ve gone looking for I don’t know what kind of explanation, and ended up at comment threads dripping a kind of poison that I haven’t seen since high school. I’d forgotten it was there, and am somehow surprised to find it has gone on without me; it’s a long time since I had to think about all those stupid and cruel boys, already set on the path, I suppose, that will one day turn them into J.D. Hayworth, our nativist talk-show bully who is now running for high office from Phoenix and has nothing to fear from the new bill proposing that candidates be required to flourish their birth certificates, since he knows that he is American, and that his claim to the landscape is as good as mine. Kafka once wondered if the past, one’s heritage, wasn’t the hardest of all things to earn. This is how easily it goes; a ghoul steps between you and your childhood, and takes the garden away.
Soledad: enemies come unbidden. What should we be doing for friends?
Kaplan, a company that once employed me, has decorated its Berkeley office
with posters of teenagers making virtuous and determined faces, as if
America’s Last Best Hope, alongside copy such as, “My name is
Scott.
I’m going to be an engineer. And that’s not negotiable.”
And if no one is willing to negotiate? There’s the same
determination in the robin that scuttles around ten feet in front of me.
It disturbs the dead leaves, pecks what it finds there, lifts its head and
warbles. It watches me, of course, but doesn’t believe in my power
to threaten it. Probably they do make good companions, as Audubon told
it:
“The gentle and lively disposition of the Robin when raised in the cage, and the simplicity of his song, of which he is very lavish in confinement, render him a special favourite in the Middle Districts, where he is as generally kept as the Mocking-bird is in the Southern States. It feeds on bread soaked in either milk or water, and on all kinds of fruit. Being equally fond of insects, it seizes on all that enter its prison. It will follow its owner, and come to his call, peck at his finger, or kiss his mouth, with seeming pleasure.”
My startup’s product is launching and from this point will have to be managed by telemetry. My dissertation is collecting signatures like some kind of misguided ballot initiative, so that it can go to rest in its vault, and I am very near sealing up a collection of eight short pieces. I started another record but have to delay it because of some weakness in my right hand, which needs to be investigated: anyway things are all right, they are clicking shut.
Romulus (3 of 3)
VII
Romulus (2 of 3)
IV
Romulus (1)
I ORBIS TERRARUM FUXOR ROMVLVS
George Seferis, A Levant Journal
24 July 1942
The Dead Sea is another story. The mountains that enclose it in the distance are pale blue. As you approach, looking across at them, it’s like entering a spa bath. We stopped at the hotel, a modern contrivance. We were very thirsty. Further down was a harbor for sea-planes. The first thing you notice about the Dead Sea is the silence. Its water is almost the color of lead, it repels the human in you. Still, I decided to try it. I undressed in a bathing-cabin. On my way down, I could feel the dry salt on the boardwalk, thick and sharp. When you try swimming, you feel as though you’re not in water but in a different element that obstructs you and pushes your body upwards towards the surface. Only your head is at liberty to sink. But then, when you let it, your eyes, nostrils and palate are seared by the salt, your hair feels as though it’s clogged with glue. It has a bitter taste, this liquid. But what makes the greatest impression of all, an impression almost of horror, is the total absence of any living thing around you. Not only are there no fish or water-insects, but no seaweed either, not the slightest fuzz of green on the pebbles at the bottom. You feel yourself to be a grotesque exception, a living being, in the midst of this liquid death.
At the Monastery of the Forty Days, they showed us the rock where Christ had been sitting, when he was visited by Satan. A tiny church was built over the rock, and on the wall, to the left, was hung a notice with the relevant passage from the Gospel, in English, and beneath it, in block capitals, also in English:
THIS IS THE PLACE GENTLEMEN
This “gentlemen,” that you’ve gotten used to seeing on notices in other places in England, and to hearing in other circumstances, came as a slap in the face. A symbol, too, of the impenetrable mess we’re living through now: a prank of the crudest kind.
At the Law Office
—Fuck this meeting. I don’t even know why I’m going to it. I guess I have to. don't use the "f" word! Tell my colleague. potty mouths didn't he, though? Coincidentally, "Fucking Kafka" is the most beautiful phrase in the English language, considered as pure prosody. There is also the transformation “Mussing Samsa.”
An awful machine outdoors won’t quit beeping. I didn’t always understand the phrase “wave of exhaustion,” but in this chair with my eyes shut the wave crests and breaks, my hearing fills up and the machine goes away, then after a few seconds it comes back. Will it be permitted to go on for days and nights? Why build a thing that does this?
Carrion items are limited to one carrion plus one smaller personal item such as a backpack or purse.
Winnemucca, Nevada: as featured in the Johnny Cash number “I’ve Been Everywhere.” So have I. Empty head, too slack to get thoughts down, even my hand around the pen isn’t quite strong enough for proper handwriting. Read Abe on the plane, made me think of Lutosławski. Why? Old structures with new tools. Better put: structures with new materials, as sturdy as the old. They pass the stress test. A page does as much as an entire nouveau roman.
Enormous enchilada plate. Everyone around me talks with a twang. Fellow my age tells his phone: “for years di’n’t have nowhere to live cept with my parents.” So say we all, bud. If you have to dine alone: bring a notebook and the restaurant will think you’re reviewing them. Is it true? I think I got the tip from Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy. Expense-account margarita for aperitif, Negra Modelo for digestif, dark and bitter to cut through all this cheese. When I get back to California I’ll eat nothing but celery and rainbow chard for a year. But when they bring the bill it’s half what I expected. Because of high prices at home? No: because I’m not used to eating alone.
Had a Thursday that felt very late in history, as if its lateness were not just a perspective trick but something inherent and steady. Over the the hills strands of white cloud and the daytime moon, an ice-drop of the same stuff. Thought about Shakespeare and the simple English noun. About being tired.
That was Thursday last week, after I had handed in the dissertation. It won’t let me go yet because I need to wrangle an eleventh-hour committee change, useless ceremony for my useless doctorate. It was a bad week for ten reasons; all I can say is that it’s over.
Nommer une dissertation, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance
Readers, circle and sphere: your assistance? I’ve dotted the last MLA-stipulated ‘i’ in the last footnote to my dissertation, and it now has everything but a name. I’ve made things difficult by refusing to employ the colon, foreclosing the usual Hand-Waving Phrase: X Trope or Quality in Y Body of Literature. But I still need something that more or less conveys what the thing is about and contains some scrap of poetry. Since M.H. Abrams is one presiding spirit, I had thought of doing a derivative title, until J. pointed out that a phrase like “The Mirrors and Lamps of Modernist Fiction” could be taken all too literally.
As a best shot toward what the thing is about, I’ve copied some introductory material below. I am ambivalent about it and glad I don’t have to publish it. If any phrases cross your mind, no sally is too feeble. Mit tiefer Dankbarkeit.
What follow are some notes on the modernist novel in English. In sequence they tell a kind of story. In assembling this story I have had to ask myself the same narrative questions that confronted the figures who are its subjects: where to start, where to stop, what balance to give empirical detail and imaginative pattern, how to draw a shape which both reflects facts as they are and displays intelligible form. If my answers are not always the best, I hope they cast some light on the answers the modernists found.
I conceive the modernist novel as arising from a problem in genre. The end
of the nineteenth century had left English literature with a rich
tradition of narrative prose describing the social and material world. At
the same time, its aesthetic discourse was dominated by a Romantic poetics
which described artworks as staging an opposition between spirit and
matter, nature and freedom; and which placed lyric poetry, as an
expression of spirit rather than a mimesis of nature, uppermost in its
ranking of genres. The difficulties in reconciling this aesthetic to novelistic form account for the strangeness of the modernist novel, whose language aspires to the condition of lyric at the same time that its plot stages the failure of such an aspiration, the inability of Romanticism to imagine its own fulfillment. I begin with Henry James as a transitional figure; continue with William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf as exemplars of a Romantic-lyric poetics; and conclude with James Joyce, whose fictional forms resemble those of his contemporaries but ultimately reject many of their Romantic commitments. While I am conscious that these experiments took place in particular historical moments, I have chosen not to structure this as a historicist study. For better or for worse, it is best classed with Charles Tansley’s dissertation in To the Lighthouse as being about the influence of something upon somebody.
My working method has been to assume that literary forms carry within them
philosophical commitments about language and its relation to other areas
of human experience, and that criticism can do the work of elucidating
these commitments, even—or especially—if the commitments prove
incoherent. My own views on philosophical questions of language and
knowledge have been influenced
by
modern
philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, John McDowell, and Cora Diamond. Here and there I make reference to these philosophers, and over the course of my narrative it will become apparent that I see Joyce’s fictional forms as providing an especially close fit to the views I have taken from them. It should go without saying that this concordance does not imply a critical judgment for Joyce and against others. To treat philosophy, including the subset of philosophy known as “theory,” as an orthodoxy for the evaluation of literature is to obscure all literary interest. Nor would anything be at stake in such a judgment, since we are fortunate to occupy a historical moment in which a question like Lukács’s “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” does not make sense. A view that is incoherent as philosophical doctrine can become a productive tension in literature; at least I have assumed so.
"For better or for worse": being about the influence of
something upon somebody in To the Lighthouse (Note to librarians, this
dissertation is best classed with Charles Tansley's dissertation)
This is humblingly well written.
And the winner is ....?
Following a useful tip from josh blog, proprietor, on
the lyric trope of the voice, I’m working with “The Modernist
Novel Speaks Its Mind,” which is at least easy to remember and not
pompous. J. points out that the trope of the voice is actually one of the
things I complain about all the time, but there it is: just serving back
up what school fed me. Thanks!
I recommend: “notes on the modernist novel” I love
“NOTES ON” - manan
“Impressions of Modernism Viewed by a 21st Century
Flâneur”
Where’s my tortoise? Do you think the flâneurs named their
tortoises?
“Eh bien, je vais aller me promener avec Cicéron.”
i meant flaneur in a positive way -- an observer, a part of yet apart from
the crowd, noticing and experiencing life for the purpose of immortalizing
it in an art form, not in the negative way of being an idle person which i
know you are not! but either way i suppose you could have a tortoise :-)
Thanks for the kindness! But if you can
tell the difference, you're doing better than I am....
hey let's not insult the idle among us
Thank you for writing your dissertation in English in actual English.
“Diminished Digits Prove Too Titillating for Frisky Frumps”
I resemble that!
This defection of two top Communist leaders had an electrifying effect on Japanese who were in police custody, and it was followed by what can only be called a mass apostasy. Within a month 45 percent of those not yet convicted (614 out of 1,370) and 34 percent (133 out of 393) of those who had been convicted of radical thought or activities followed suit and defected. Within three years 74 percent (324 out of 438) of those convicted of subversion were ready to announce that they, too, had returned to the fold.
These defections were of great interest for psychology and for theory. Although coercion in various forms was undoubtedly exercised, interrogators were warned to avoid the resistance that argument or duress would provoke. The radicals, most of them still young, were, after all, better educated than most of the police. Instead every effort was made to get them to “return” to the values of home and hearth that had now been threatened by the clouds of war and crisis. A workbook prepared for interrogators recommended that they begin by providing a bowl of chicken and egg on rice (oyako dombori, lit. “parent-child” bowl) which would remind the prisoner of the parental bond. The policemen should say nothing about ideology, but offer a reproachful reminder that “your mother is worried about you.” He should by all means avoid mention of the father, as that might trigger defiance of authority.
Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan
ἔτι τὸ κινοῦν το ἄπειρον τί ἐστιν; εἰ μὲν γὰρ αὐτὸ ἑαυτό, ἔμψυχον ἔσται. τοῦτο δὲ πῶς δυνατόν, ἄπειρον εἶναι ζῷον;
What moreover is it which moves the infinite? If it moves itself, it must be alive. Yet how could this be possible, that there should be an infinite animal?
Aristotle, On the Heavens 1.7.
said it was moving forwards
H
O
P
E
With Friends Like These
From my underground vantage, it seems suspiciously neat that the
“ethical turn” sweeps the humanities just as the humanities
are inducted into a losing battle to justify their existence. We’ve
come a long way from when I got on the train, and the old canon-war
arguments about the construction of syllabi seem positively Arcadian against arguments about who’s got the nickel to photocopy the syllabus sheet. Regular readers of academic insider rags (perhaps of the trade press generally) will recognize the Defense of the Humanities as an upstart genre of polemic, pitched to a wider audience than the ethical-crit tomes but tripping on the same fallacies, since it’s been given the same losing case to plead: show, against all evidence, that encounters with the creative imagination will make us better. What could be worse, except the argument’s facile flipside making a virtue of uselessness: Oscar Wilde with none of the charm, tickled a complacent pink over his gifts from the gods?
On aesthetics, Kant and Bourdieu have already divided the world between them, but I do have the temerity to think that “the generosity of ‘Take what I make... or not.’” is exactly right, and that artworks are gifts. I would even follow the Levinas-Derrida line far enough to admit that gifts are puzzling, though this isn’t to say that they come out of the ether, or that they’re especially virtuous. Gifts can be given cynically, to seduce, to propitiate kings or gods, to salve bad consciences; they can be in horrid taste, causing the recipient great embarrassment (must I swallow what’s been prepared for me?); they can be rejected, causing hurt feelings all around; opportunities abound for pettiness, cattiness, showoffery, spite. What binds these cases to each other, and to happier ones, is only that they occur outside economies—which is to say, in the language of rational choice theory, that they’re undertaken for no good reason. (That certain artists and scholars have done very well in certain economies is an epiphenomenon that I’m delighted to ignore.) The absence of rational self-interest receives lofty names in the philosophical tradition: Freiheit of course, and the more plausibly technical Autonomie. But one would expect a gift to make sense only in social contexts with established etiquettes of gift-giving: love poetry, court poetry, coteries. Outside these warm zones, one ends up with gifts given only to oneself (the Billy Budd manuscript, left in a tin breadbox) or with Romantic/modernist bluster about giving gifts to the world, which is probably the same thing. The uncreated conscience of the race is a more comfortable thought than the created conscience; the unacknowledged legislators of the world, if ever acknowledged, would make the U.S. Congress look like Solon.
I don’t have the longevity to say whether universities, or anyone else, used to take gift-giving more seriously than they do now. I do know that thousands in my generation are willing and excellently prepared to give, and that for lack of an etiquette, they will be thrown back on an economy. That is to say: for lack of life’s needs they will fail. The value of these lost gifts, as with any gift, is a matter that etiquette forbids prying into. If the gift is congenial, it is good to receive, and if the soul is receptive, it can be good to see how others have given. On whether and how to give oneself, one could do worse than Jesus in a rare moment of tact: enter into thy closet, and do not sound a trumpet before thee.
Have you read The Gift, by Lewis Hyde? It explores some of this territory.
Great book.
Why I have not!
The Culture That Made Avatar
Praise or blame don’t attach to the makers of blockbusters; they dip their cups into the wells of our dreams and give us just what we deserve. Our dreams of the primitive are bandages for the wounds we’ve inflicted on ourselves. Of the wounds we’ve inflicted on others, they say nothing. But if the bandages don’t take, if they chafe, if we peel them off and find the wounds still pulsing, then resentment is easy.
A lot of smart people worked hard to make a sellable dream, and it would be easy to say that they only wanted sales. But of course they
wanted to be priests and confessors in the bargain. We know that the sublime in nature is a happy surrender, and where
Avatar’s technology puts on the mask of nature, surrender feels good; when is it not good to be surpassed by the inhuman
world, to know that man is an ant? And it ought to end there, since in or out of the movies it makes no sense to be told that ants are
stronger than they know, that in the aggregate, over decades, through the wholly unspectacular medium of a colorless gas, they are
pulling the world apart. This fact is so offensive and incomprehensible to the heart that we’d give anything to find it untrue, and
if the beasts of the wild were to rise up, as in Avatar, to destroy us for our sins, we would welcome it—at least in play.
Why point out that it’s a lie to show it happening? Why point out all the other lies: that primitives are holy children, that empires can be made to walk away from money, that we haven’t already lost the world we know, though it will take a lifetime to be taken from us? Why did I want to weep behind my 3-D glasses? Only because I was in a climate-controlled theater in the heart of the city, plugged into the municipal power grid, and outdoors the mindless lights kept shining, the engines kept cycling, the wastewater tunnels drained out to the acid ocean. It wasn’t the expense of the show. It was the cheapness of the lie.
Welcome to the Occupation
On Wednesday I turned in two more chapters of the horrid treatise, and the weight slid so quickly from my soul that my soul lost its calibration, floated up to the ceiling, was buffeted by the heating vents and I had to bail on a pizza party and run home through the dark winter. Now I get my first real Saturday in months, coffee and slippers while the floodwaters rise outside; ants crop up at gaps in the baseboards and go running across the laptop keyboard, the way ID-checking police have cropped back up in my university building. I couldn’t go to work yesterday. In the meantime other elements are taking torches to the chancellor’s house; well, we don’t want that. They arrested two students and six unstudents. The movement slops over.
What else? I learned how to write a Perl search engine, a couple of Objective-C methods that didn’t crash; data structures anchor your right to live in California. Twelve or thirteen new songs have pulled together in the arena of the mind and are trying on different outfits. The two canned novel-germs in the basement will need to be aerated in time, or the botulism will have us all; but patience, I’m not even a doctor yet.
damn it, paul, you're an artist, not a doctor! congrats on the treatise :) sorry about the ants, ugh, if you find their entry point you may be able to stem that tide, but i guess the interstices will always crawl This morning there was a huge influx and I screamed, “this is the last straw, we have to leave Berkeley” — but then I kept on and exercised aretē with the caulk gun—
—If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least another cigarette. I don’t care about it. I don’t even care about women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You can’t get me one.
You might fool yourself but you can't fool me. You ALWAYS cared about women! I need a goddamn job. I need a goddamn job. I need a goddamn job. I need a goddamn job. God damn it. God damn it. God damn. Ive me the hypothenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles!
Video
Here.
Outside, Inside
Disobedience
They done occupied the building!
An undetermined number of protesters barricaded themselves at about 6 a.m. inside Wheeler Hall, which houses the English department.
Several demonstrators wearing bandannas opened a window, displayed a sign reading “32% Hike, 900 layoffs” with the word “Class” crossed out in red. They used a bullhorn to denounce the regents’ decision and to rally support from a group of students chanting outside.
University and Berkeley police cordoned off the building, located just north of Sather Gate, with yellow police tape.
Authority sent us an email:
The campus police are working to resolve a protest action that is occurring in Wheeler Hall. Staff, faculty and students who would normally be working in Wheeler Hall are asked to remain out of the building until further notice. Employees who can contact their supervisors should talk to them if possible to determine whether telecommuting or relocation to another work area is an option. Those in the building right now are advised to leave until the situation has been resolved.
Can’t trust those kids with bullhorns!
Boswell for J.
“The sense I get from the strike at Berkeley is that everyone is incredibly depressed about it. Stanford at least has no illusions about being a business, and a temple to the idea of business.... their alumni magazine article about financial troubles reads like everyone is thrilled to implement the cuts, like people are joyfully racing across the campus to offer up a hand or a foot. Our topflight scientists at the medical center will make you new hands and feet faster than you can say, ‘Ow, motherfucker! That hurt!’”
How can you get too old to write about deserts?
There was a bit from Goethe in Italy that rang the alarm bells:
T??glich wird mir’s deutlicher, da?? ich eigentlich zur Dichtkunst geboren bin, und da?? ich die n??chsten zehen Jahre, die ich h??chstens noch arbeiten darf, dieses Talent exkolieren und noch etwas Gutes machen sollte, da mir das Feuer der Jugend manches ohne gro??es Studium gelingen lie??.
This is the W.H. Auden/Elizabeth Mayer translation:
I realize more clearly every day that I was really born to be a poet, and that in the next ten year, which are all, at most, that I shall be allowed to work in, I must cultivate this talent and produce something good. The time when the fire of youth enabled me to accomplish things without much study is now over.
And here is the newer translation by Robert R. Heitner:
It becomes clearer to me daily that I was really born for literature, and that for the next ten years, which is as long as I still expect to work, I should develop this talent and still produce something good, inasmuch as, thanks to the fire of youth, I once had some success even without great effort.
Explaining that fire of youth hinges in part on rendering the compact German da. Heitner bloats it out to “inasmuch as” and suggests that Goethe sees future work as some kind of recompense for his early success; Auden and Mayer lose the subordinate construction and make explicit Goethe’s implication that the time of easy accomplishment is over. He’s wrong on the timeline—he’ll have forty-four more years to work—but what’s on his mind?
He’s thirty-eight years old. Prior to leaving for Italy he’s spent eleven years working for the Duke of Weimar and gotten cash and prestige out of it; he’s also seen the fount of inspiration stopped up. He can do a lot of things and he’s being paid for the wrong ones. The fire of youth is what allowed him to dash off Werther between workdays at the Imperial Chamber Court; he doesn’t have that any more. He can’t do so many things at once. He gets tired, he loses the thread. A complicated life is built around him and he can’t hold it at arms’ length. On his birthday he vaguely asks his boss for an indefinite leave, slips away in the middle of the night and doesn’t come back for two years. To avoid discovery he pretends, ludicrously, that his name is “Filippo Miller.”
I didn’t conduct my twenties with foresight, and I suppose if I’d gone early enough to work for a duke I too could be retired in style. But that isn’t the usual way of things, where you get no terminus and the reward for doing five things at once is a list of five other things to do. I used to handle it better. Now I feel tired and slow; the devil wants me to put the drafts away, have a glass of wine and go to bed. The fire is probably steadier these days, but it needs tending, and I don’t trust the lackey I’ve hired to watch it while I’m away.
“I didn???t conduct my twenties with foresight” is a nice piece of poetry, though...
Deserts
I was a kid when I first read The Waste Land, and I was living in a waste land, and it can still surprise me to recall that Eliot wasn’t, that he wrote his poem between Switzerland lakes and London fog. His beating sun and dry rock come from the Hebrew prophets. His empty cisterns and exhausted wells thirst for something other than common water. It’s an advantage, I think, that I met actual sun and crickets and trees every time I stepped outdoors; as a kid you want a correspondence between world and soul.
Borders can be helpful, and so can language barriers; because at the same time Eliot was becoming stifling high culture in Anglo-America, he was turning into a tutelary spirit elsewhere. We blink and scratch our heads at his idea of a Christian society, but that wasn’t what mattered in the real waste lands of Greece and Spain, the desert corners where fascism was allowed to linger while the rest of the world wrote morality plays about driving a stake through its heart in 1945. Here is Yannis Ritsos in 1947, a few years after seeing his work publicly burned at the foot of the Acropolis and shortly before starting five years’ service in a prison camp:
This landscape is as harsh as silence,
Trees, rivers, and voices have turned to stone in the sun’s quicklime.
This is Eliot’s landscape, but now someone lives here. He knows what kind of plants grow at the roadside, and he’s seen what the sun does to the earth between dawn and dusk. Here is Salvador Espriu in 1958, writing in what is nearly a banned language:
Burning mouths have drunk,
Rain-water in scattered gardens,
The language of thirst keeps
His job is to tell us that this land remains real, that someone is still walking the dry shores of the Hebrew prophets and someone else is still sitting in Pharaoh’s and Nebuchadnezzar’s and Caesar’s chair, putting his face on the currency and directing the migration of captives with his finger. There are tyrants in forests and massacres in jungles, but the desert has always offered this particular exercise of focusing the moral vision, projecting the clearest possible background on which to draw a diagram of insufficiency. I’ve written things with deserts in them, but I haven’t written about deserts in this way, and I have to do it before I get too old.
Here is Mahmoud Darwish in 2008:
A river was here
Means of Production
”NewNovelist seems to be one of the more popular creative writing software titles available on the PC. I’m not a big fan of it myself... although it keeps a list of your documents over on the left and allows you to create the text and edit on the right, it is very rigid and formulaic. It forces you to divide your writing into twelve parts, which are based (through various annoying onscreen prompts) on Christopher Vogler’s twelve-step interpretation of Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey. So if you want to write anything that doesn’t fit that particular structure, you are out of luck.”
I walked away from the wretched dissertation for a minute and when I came back the stuffed coyote had been placed at the laptop and made to opine:
Woolf’s argument against Arnold Bennett seeks to wring the neck of a specific kind of eloquence: the easy conventionalities of the Edwardian novel OF COYOTES AND OTHER CANIDS WHICH DEFUSED THE PARTICULAR DANGER AND UNPREDICTABILITY OF THE ANIMALS INTO A SERIES OF DRAWING ROOM NICETIES RRARRARRRWWR VIRGINIA WOOLF DID NOT LIKE THAT VERY MUCH AND NEITHER DOES ANUUUBIS
i want a copy of THAT dissertation! it IS fascinating how the universe lets the right one in, innit? working title: "i like my dissertation and my dissertation likes me." - J.
Autumn comes to Nevada as a scatter plot - after a hundred miles of sage, you’ll cross water and a moment’s patch of trees sprouting ochre. I remembered that Interstate 50 passed some alkali flats that would be excellent for shooting a music video, but this time I couldn’t find them, or not in the configuration I remembered.
Continental breakfast at the Best Western in Eureka. Tiny containers of chilled milk branded “Cream o’ Weber.” I can’t stop giggling. Cream o’ Weber, it’s skimmed off your labor! Later I meet the Nevada license plate “CLASSIE,” with gilt trim. Arf! What’s that, Classie? Arf arf! Timmy’s trapped in the workforce??!
Everyone’s talking up the new Mexican place in Eureka - now the town has two restaurants! - but no one’s there to meet me except a sign: “we will be close for fire safety.” So it’s back once more to the Owl Club. Server brings me a menu, server’s husband (the proprietor?) looks at me, bellows “What’s he doing in my seat?”, then sits down and shakes my hand. He goes to Reno every couple of weeks, he says; it’s the closest place to shop. The parking lot at Sam’s Club downtown is too crowded, he likes the other Sam’s Club. He got a great deal at the car wash I hadn’t heard of. After looking at the menu, I ask if there’s any way I can just get a grilled cheese, a salad and a beer. Of course I can. “Cheap date!” howls the proprietor.
The men’s rooms on the Berkeley campus deal with homosexual panic by scrawling a cock and balls on every available surface; at the Owl Club’s facilities things are more decorous. There’s one small-scale attempt at the female form, and someone has written “Frands you can kiss” as a release for who knows what longing. The acrostic “One Big Ass Mistake America” is proposed; someone counters with a joke about Rush Limbaugh’s prescription drug habit. “Fuck my life” offers itself in a looped adolescent scrawl, and now we have found a native informant on being a teen in Eureka.
A lot of the mining claims I work with are owned by local arms of huge Canadian companies, but sometimes you get more interesting properties that were staked by old-timers in the thirties or forties. The annual filing requirements on mining claims originate with the federal government and are thus obnoxious to the Western mind; in the files you find a lot of handwritten notes that may or may not comply with the rules. A special fee waiver exists for small miners who own ten or fewer claims, so many of the old-timers, today’s included, decide to pull a Lear and divide their kingdom among their daughters. This is legally questionable, especially if you have people living in the same household, and my report ends up spinning a full page of legal prose from the ramifications.
There are more things in heaven and earth, and surprise, I am becoming part of a startup. Spirit of ’99! says J. A bit of venture capital landed on us (in 2009! someone knew someone!) so I am getting at least a month’s wages and a small new computer out of it, and maybe more. There is a tiny office behind a frosted glass door six stories up from Market Street; the buses and cable cars squeak by out the window and I am in a Bogart film, though it’s not Bogart who has my speaking part. I stay up late with green tea, trying to learn MySQL syntax at age 31 like a displaced person forced abroad. It’s interesting, as most things are interesting, though the moment of final rest with pipe, slippers, fireplace has fallen off the horizon for good.
That I’m still a registered graduate student, and still have a lot of literary criticism left to write, is a weird joke perpetrated by one of those poker-faced Euro directors whose humor you can’t always follow.
Everything is easier than writing fiction. The rock is at the bottom of the hill and I can’t spare a finger to nudge it up. Between functions I pick up a guitar: chords, mere chords, sound better all time.
Οὐδεὶς δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν ἢ γὰρ τὸν ἕνα μισήσει καὶ τὸν ἕτερον ἀγαπήσει ἢ ἕνος ἀνθέξεται καὶ τοῦ ἑτέρου καταφρονήσει. οὐ δύνασθε θεῷ δουλεύειν καὶ μαμωνᾷ.
The question of serving Mammon supposes that Mammon wants your service, but I have anecdotal evidence that it doesn’t. Mammon factored in your quantity a long time ago and hasn’t had to think about you since. If you end up wearing its livery, you do so by accident.
God doesn’t want you either, and he certainly hasn’t laid up any treasure for you, but neither will he turn you away. That’s the consolation in serving him—no matter how bad the service, it won’t be spurned—but you aren’t told how to do it.
If you have layers, if the lower layers are calciferous grottoes, then you have to follow the water as it moves or you’ll upset the whole structure.
What moves the water.
I was reading Goethe’s Italian Journey, in part as background for a secret new novel, in the somewhat new English translation from Princeton University Press; then a friend asked me at dinner whether I was reading it in English or German, and I suddenly felt surprised at having to say English, what with the big game I talk all the time, and what with the big box of pretty Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag paperbacks right over in the next room; so I switched over, and damn if it isn’t better, even though I have to keep the Princeton volume around on account of all the words I don’t know.
Quodlibet > potpourri
I am well in body and soul, Goethe keeps writing to his friends back home; I am always industrious, I am always trying to improve myself, I am always standing at the threshold and receiving sudden intuitions of what I might be able to accomplish in the future.
I’ve also been working my way through Pierre et Jean with a dictionary, because at thirty-one I’m better than ever at stealing time from God and the Devil alike. I hadn’t read Maupassant since college, really liked him back then; so I’ve had the pleasure of vindicating one of those teenage opinions that are wild guesses half the time. More to the point, it’s made me feel like my own prose is compounded of too many cheap tricks; see how good it can be:
Mais le p??re Roland cria: ??Tenez, voici le Prince-Albert qui nous rattrape.?? Et tout le monde regarda. Long, bas, avec ses deux chemin??es inclin??es en arri??re et ses deux tambours jaunes, ronds comme des joues, le bateau de Southampton arrivait ?? toute vapeur, charg?? de passagers et d’ombrelles ouvertes. Ses roues rapides, bruyantes, battant l’eau qui retombait en ??cume, lui donnaient un air de h??te, un air de courrier press??; et l’avant
tout droit coupait la mer en soulevant deux lames minces et transparentes qui glissaient le long des bords.
Quand il fut tout pr??s de la Perle, le p??re Roland leva son chapeau, les deux femmes agit??rent leurs mouchoirs, et une demi-douzaine d’ombrelles r??pondirent ?? ces saluts en se balan??ant vivement sur le paquebot qui
s’??loigna, laissant derri??re lui, sur la surface paisible et luisante de la mer, quelques lentes ondulations.
Et on voyait d’autres navires, coiff??s aussi de fum??e, accourant de tous les points de l’horizon vers la jet??e courte et blanche qui les avalait comme une bouche, l’un apr??s l’autre. Et les barques de p??che et les grands voiliers aux m??tures l??g??res glissant sur le ciel, tra??n??s par d’imperceptibles remorqueurs,
arrivaient tous, vite ou lentement, vers cet ogre d??vorant, qui de temps en temps, semblait repu, et rejetait vers la pleine mer une autre flotte de paquebots, de bricks, de go??lettes, de trois-m??ts charg??s de ramures emm??l??es.
Les steamers h??tifs s’enfuyaient ?? droite, ?? gauche, sur le ventre plat de l’Oc??an, tandis que les b??timents ?? voile, abandonn??s par les mouches qui les avaient haies, demeuraient immobiles, tout en s’habillant, de la grande hune au petit perroquet, de toile blanche ou de toile brune qui semblait rouge au soleil
couchant.
birthday guitar
brth th th th th th d
bdy
gr
i know you’re probably abroad, but i’m going to bug you about content anyway. content!
Rome is too hot in August! Be wary! It tempts you with pizza and textured orange walls, and then you fall over and desiccate—
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: masterpieces HOLY FUCK MASTERPIECES at the Borghese gallery, where a pointlessly nasty lady doesn’t let you check your suitcase and encourages you to drag your suitcase halfway across Rome—this is the kind of thing St. Paul complains about in his letters—but the marital relation is a useful card to play when arguing with people, J. can say “my husband” just dragged the suitcase halfway across Rome at your suggestion and it brought no profit and now he has to wait outside with the suitcase in the heat, and they will arrange a ticket exchange—
Berlin: a million kinds of seed-bread, snazzy bicolored crows, books, punks, speakers of Turkish. Sudanese falafel (it comes with peanut sauce). A bas-relief of Luther translating the Bible; hands down the most awesome depiction ever of the act of translation—
I read Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum all by my own damn self; we are climbing up this hill, though I still speak the language like a caveman who happens to know a lot of philosophical concepts—
Berliner Philharmoniker: saw the performance of Symphonie
Fantastique that I’d been waiting for since I was sixteen and
thought Berlioz was the sublimest shit; premiere of a great new Kaija
Saariaho piece, the composer in attendance wearing a bright red dress;
with last year’s Gubaidulina premiere in SF and the
various John Adams events I’ve now seen most of
my favorite living composers clapping and bowing and receiving flowers, still makes me giddy—
just had a “griechische Omelette”—feta and rosemary and honey on the wine-dark sea. J. is 30 today. We salute her!
but then Rome gifts you with a cool fountain and a wet hat! Go Rome!
Pay For It
Friends, in these awful times for the University of California I can’t point you anywhere better than “The Death of Socrates” by Thomas M. Disch. The munificent Andrew Carnegie-bot will let you read the first few pages here, and the broke-ass UCB library even has a copy.
The comparative literature conference back in March introduced me to Thomas Lehr, who hasn’t been translated; I’ve been reading his Frühling and need a capacious dictionary. The conceit—last thirty-odd seconds of a man’s life—a stream of prose that I suppose you’d call para-consciousness. Something like Beckett syntax, but it comes out differently in German. Worth doing. Such rhetorical splendor for any old dude keeling over on the sidewalk; modernism at its most generous.
Still there’s the question of what content to give that form, and as always the answer is memory. I think we’ve had too much of it. The moderns drew that map, Beckett burned the fat off and now it’s lost its power as an organizing principle. Rereading Kafka, I’ve been struck by how his people never remember anything: it’s not a permitted move.
The almost-genre of coma-as-framing-story -- an escape hatch? The Third
Policeman probably best known, but I should make a list.
I’d like to see that list—but is The Third Policeman
about a coma? I thought it was about hell.
do you think there might be a connection to broch's 'death of vergil'?
Lehr must have thought about it. But I thought
Virgil’s consciousness was a major justification for the rhetoric in
that book, on account of he’s Virgil? (I have to confess, J.
disliked The Death of Vergil enough that I haven’t tried it.)
Mining conference in San Francisco: it can happen here. I am Sherlock Holmes and can tell by everyone’s watches that they’ve flown in from Mountain time. Someone reads the address on my nametag and asks, shocked: “Are you a conservative in Berkeley?” What a jolly laugh I have for him! But later I get tired of people giving me shit about Obama’s health plan.
Chairs set up in the ballroom under the modernist chandelier, which hangs as an inverted ziggurat of translucent plastic segments. Praise it. Look at my adult self: sport coat, wedding ring, subtle argyle weave in my black socks, fresh-printed business cards I’ve been tossing around like it’s Christmas. The air is filtered deliciously, sweet and dry—every sip of coffee seems to bring the shining ziggurat closer—I’m exhausted, finished with everything, rising to heaven.
The existence on rolling chairs, it lacks the human, so at dusk I run my
carcass up the suburban hill. Face off against the dark. Antares and a
plane.
The plane goes on, Antares can’t, it’s stuck in the atmosphere quivering and changing color, if it could only hold still.
Großer Bär, komm herab zottige Nacht,
Fürchtet euch oder fürchtet euch nicht!
And Scorpio up there means that the sun is passing into Leo and I’ll notch up another year soon. Look at the star, look at the star, look at the star, why can’t I ever go home.
so, is home Antares or Scorpio?
I mean, they’re the same by synecdoche. But clearly one way to
preempt Henry Adams’s complaint of living in the wrong century is
to complain of living in the wrong solar system.
ahhhhhhhhhh! I get it!
A clean job in the slag factory [...
...] the unfinished map of maps
Well, we get tetchy a lot. It’s a “formal feature.”
If you want to get out of the musty corner, you can go to doubtfull.org, where I migrated the old Vox blog of book notes and where I’m posting some translations now.
Or recall the sun, should you live anywhere with decorous sun—
My shit list has gotten long enough to bite its own tail.
What, O bhikkus, are the hells of the wandering narrator? The hells of the wandering narrator are: sense of entitlement; self-importance; self-pity; pride as wound; wound as pride; solipsism; inconstancy; ungenerosity; Maker’s Mark; adjuncting. Truly, such are the hells of the wandering narrator.
Is there deliverance, O bhikkus? There is deliverance. Is there hope, O bhikkus? There is not hope.
drop the imaginary axis
The last dream I had about the bomb was sad more than scary; the cloud puffed up and I had a second to think, there it goes, I guess it had to, how could those things hang around unused forever. And who knows, maybe it would be like that. Disappointment is visceral as anything.
Marriage is very fine and I like being a husband, but now more than ever I wonder about all the narrative structures that were designed to stop here, given that it’s so clearly a beginning; and that confusion must itself be an old thing, the new bride picking up her copy of Twelfth Night and not knowing how to take it past the back cover.
At the Mine
Up at dawn, onto a bus; two and a half hours to Winnemucca; onto another
bus which winds up a back road of sunbleached asphalt to the edge of the
Black Rock Desert, where every year they burn the man. A catered lunch
waits on every seat. I project the ambiguous aura of a man who
doesn’t want to be sat next to, no one sits next to me, I eat the pasta salad out of my own bag and my absent neighbor’s, then take the ham out of my roll and make a pickle sandwich. Now I can read my copy of Lermontov, which is wonderful, sliced and diced Stendhal with a demonic Cary Grant playing the lead. The Nabokovs translate marvelously, that is to say invisibly, their stated intentions in the preface notwithstanding; only a few words jump out which Nabokov père must have been unable to resist—”infolded,” “asperge,” a “bicephalous” mountain. The protagonist says he’s incapable of true friendship and only has “pals,” a weird word that recurs several times; I must know, if anyone in my circle of friends’ friends has read this in Russian, what word it’s standing in for....
Everyone around me is swapping war stories from the mining business;
everyone’s history intersects everyone else’s. Nevada is a
big state and its demography is starting to fill up, but
measured by my
parents’ generation it’s a small town. By my grandparents’ generation it’s a city block.
It’s pointless to labor over descriptions of mountains, says Lermontov—exclamations that convey no meaning, word-pictures that convey no image—anyhow, deep in the desert we find the mine and get off the bus. I’m used to it as a spreadsheet of 2500 individual claims and a sheaf of survey maps; here it sits on a dozen square miles of hills crisscrossed by roads, with open pits layering their way downward. The earth’s bones come out in amazing colors: rust, ochre, powder white, a chalky sulfurous green. A faint brimstone smell hangs over everything—that’s what they mined here in the seventies, before someone discovered the gold deposit by chance. My balance is still not good, in the middle of all this sunny space I want to hold on to something, the eye does not grasp distance in the pits. Down on the floor three trucks rove around like busy beetles, dumping dirt into each other, and only when they’re joined by a mite-like pickup do I see that they’re monstrous Titan-trucks just like the one in front of the equipment shop, mounted on wheels twice my height. In the foreground a drill rig goes about its own business, readying the next blast phase.
At the shop building they’ve readied for display a special gold bar that actually looks golden, not black with tarnished silver as most will be. Everyone takes turns lifting it and having their picture taken: it’s worth three hundred thousand dollars, says everyone to everyone else, this is three hundred thousand dollars I’m holding. They take my picture too, then I go walking past the aerial photos and crushed samples of auriferous rock.
The refinery building is set up like an outdoor garage, not as large as you’d think, with a cubical blast furnace partially curtained off at one end like the Ark of the Covenant. It roars. Orange light spurts out of its apertures like a cheap optical effect in a fifties film: indescribable, no one gets within ten yards of it. A man points some equipment in its direction and makes finger-signs to his colleague: two, four, two. Is that the Centigrade temperature? One-tenth the temperature? I don’t know anything. The cyanide solution used to leach out the ore rests outside in shallow Olympic-size pools. The wind throws up blue-green ripples, perversely inviting, I want to swim and drink.
Two men put on reflective silver suits and approach the ark. One of them
starts working a lever and the whole thing tilts forward until light
begins to flow out: a rivulet twisted like tapwater, glowing like neon,
splashes onto a stair-step assembly and runs down into the waiting mold.
Stray drops hit the concrete and turn to cinders. A scorch rises.
Overflowin’ with gold! shouts one of the shareholders, ha ha!
Everyone laughs and applauds. That’s new wealth, my stepfather tells
me, real new wealth, none of that Bernie Madoff bullshit. They
hand out commemorative medallions.
Late-period Highsmith also misused “pals”; perhaps a since-lost aspect of Anglo-inflected American English?
Natural Enemies of the Monitor Reindeer
“Baldy Sour”
Mining Claim Name of the Day
“Monitor Reindeer”
Very slow & deliberate reindeer of tropical islands
I. 2-3 = four stars
Thoreau, Life Without Principle
(Happy Bloomsday 105; tomorrow I’m going to the grand opening of
the company gold mine)
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual’s musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it?
[...]
The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that gets his living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it. Even Mahomet knew that God did not make this world in jest. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them. The world’s raffle! A subsistence in the domains of Nature a thing to be raffled for! What a comment, what a satire, on our institutions! The conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And have all the precepts in all the Bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable invention of the human race only an improved muck-rake? Is this the ground on which Orientals and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted, — and He would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold?
[...]
Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: “He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ‘the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.’ At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out.” I think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. Howitt adds, “He is a hopelessly ruined man.” But he is a type of the class. They are all fast men. Hear some of the names of the places where they dig: “Jackass Flat,” — “Sheep’s-Head Gully,” — “Murderer’s Bar,” etc. Is there no satire in these names? Let them carry their ill-gotten wealth where they will, I am thinking it will still be “Jackass Flat,” if not “Murderer’s Bar,” where they live.
Chaff
This afternoon had one of those confrontational conversations I usually manage to avoid: a neighbor upset about the disposition of certain items on the property, got bellicose and made threats of questionable enforceability to shut down my wedding reception for lack of proper permits. After I made a concession he calmed down and became friendly, in an aggressive sort of way.
The stupidity of conversations you end up replaying in your head for hours: all you want is to stop them. Lucky I had to make a three-hour drive over the mountains anyway and could crank my new cheap speakers. When you’re upset you’re thrown back on your spiritual resources, and apparently my spiritual resources are still: dharma, dharma, dharma: mind precedes all things, dominates all things, creates all things. Anyway that’s what came up. Sometimes you forget.
It had been a disappointing day anyway, because I spent most of it writing a long blog post on The Program Era and American publishing which left me feeling worse than when I’d started. Oh the tedium: I’ll never write a litblog.
maybe you should write a letter instead.
Ripley Under Ground
any thoughts on louis menand’s new yorker article on mfa programs?
Any old asshole with a guitar. Any old asshole with a laptop. Singing to the mirror, writing for the bottom drawer—
“Vanity projects.” Vanity is a very bad word in America.
The myth of the big break. It’s not that breaks don’t happen; it’s that the criteria don’t make sense. The terrible person who perpetrated the keyboard cat on YouTube? The bar band that’s been touring California for fifteen years? The nature photographer’s gallery shows? If not why not? Money changes the nature of some things, but not this; nor does it change after some threshold of mentions in whatever burg killed and ate Williamsburg to take on its power. It’s not that dialogic.
But the shame is real. Do it at night, with the curtains closed.
Without a trusted source of patronage there’s only the market, and prestige structures homologous to markets. Vanity remains vanity until enough people are convinced that investing their attention will yield returns in cultural literacy. No one wants a system of state censorship, but censorship projects did historically have to stop somewhere—they couldn’t colonize you all the way in.
Louis Menand is doing his job as a New Yorker critic-at-large, which is to write breezily about someone else’s argument. I’m not done with Mark McGurl, though. I’ll get back to him inside another vanity project, after nightfall.
Still More Songs of Experience
The company coffee is not good, and the company fridge ran out of Diet Coke, so I am attempting a Tab. They still make Tab but don’t advertise it—I’ve never tried it before. Turns out to taste something like regular Coke, with even more of that abrasive mouth-wrinkling effect and an unpleasant metallic finish.
Instead of sweets, his ample palate took
A chain of events I’d rather not go into led me last night to accidentally shave a bull’s-eye pattern into the back of my head with electric clippers. I think it will grow out before the wedding. In a spacious office it’s pretty easy to keep people from seeing the back of your head.
i can shave mine in solidarity if you like. obfuscate!
Vanity Plates Are Cheap in Nevada
SASSI. Yet timid about right turns. Be bold, Sassi.
SUXESS. The mot juste for today’s fast-paced, disappointing environment. Nothing sux like suxess!
FAVEGMA. Why, why make Grandma rhyme with an awful thing?
A forgotten suburb paved in old, pale asphalt; unaccustomed sunglasses tinting the brightness; a drive through 1972, when everything was a different color.
Reading a poem (by Schelling? by Schleiermacher? one of those guys) in English translation.
The word I am looking for is civet. No.
I love it. I show it to J. She loves it. I wake up.
Roughing It
My summer job is in an office park on the south end of Reno. There’s
nothing but space on the south end of Reno, space and median strips and
T.G.I. Friday’s, so I get an office to myself with a flotilla of
rolling chairs and a huge window pointing at the other end of the park.
Shade trees, rock bluffs. Seen from outside, the window turns out to be a
one-way mirror: keep the sun out. The ceilings are raised to pharaonic
heights; in the bathroom I feel like I’m at the bottom of a jar. A
bright kitchen is stocked with coffee, all the diet soda you can
drink, a calendar with nothing marked for May except a note on yesterday’s date: “Paul here.”
The company’s land manager recently died of pancreatic cancer, a sad end for a really fine old Western gentleman who always reminded me of my dad’s dad. This seems to have wiped out all the company’s institutional memory of its own properties. Fortunately I’ve worked on most of the properties in the past and still have the data kicking around inside my computer. I start up the Windows application I wrote, it generates a spreadsheet about the gold mine: everyone is amazed.
With gold up past 900 dollars an ounce, it’s a good time to be in charge of a producing mine. All the hallways and offices have aerial photos of the site hung up. This is cheap decoration because they’re required to order the photographs anyway, but they aren’t skimping on much else. Someone in the next office says into the telephone, “We’re going to want to do another transaction—yeah, two million. Yeah, two million U.S.” Every two weeks they’ll cut me a check with a number that is not two million, but for purposes of incongruity might as well be. The executive assistant recommends to me a list of lunch places including Café de Thai, which in my world is one of the Reno restaurants where I can’t afford to eat dinner. On my first day we break at three and go to a bar because the younger of the company accountants just got his bachelor’s degree. They hand him a card stuffed with bills and pick up the check for everyone’s beer. I talk with my new supervisor, the company geologist, about books. He loves Sinclair Lewis, is iffy about Updike, is very pleased to have discovered a consistency error in a Faulkner novel. You ought to try Bernard Malamud, I say.
At home it takes a while to ease away from the numbers I’ve been
crunching all day. My stepfather gets home, we jack up the car that got me
over the mountains and change the oil and filter. Wrestling with objects
carries my stepfather to rare heights of invective: why do those
sons of bitches
at the auto shop overtighten these goddamn things with their goddamn air wrenches, retards, reprobates, cocksuckers, this hand wrench is a fifty-year-old tool, it was pristine until I had to loosen one of these these fucking overtightened gaskets, why the hell’d they put the filter back here under the fuel injection, have to be a midget to repair it. Then he wipes off the oil pan with a torn bit of pajama flannel and says in his Bullwinkle J. Moose voice, “A clean car is a happy car.” The quail on the roof laugh at us. They take off, flying low to the ground with wings buzzing so fast for such fat little birds; they look like huge bees. The sun has sunk under the mountains but still lights the duple contrails of the jet moving far up over this weird brown land, Nevada, gold and squalor, half my home.
nice images...your stepfather sounds like my soulmate...have you no
mother?
Mother was last seen in Tucson behind a giant margarita glass; until
Thursday, she's having a better time than I.
—Oh, but they aren’t really lime trees in that poem. It’s an archaic name for a linden tree.
—Oh! That makes sense.
—I mean, you probably could grow a small lime tree in England if you wanted to.
—No, that makes sense. I always thought, “Come on, Coleridge, it’s not so bad being stuck. Have a lime!”
—I know! Lie back and have a Corona, or a mojito—
—Laudanumito.
a horse pissing
by my bed.
uma no nyō suru (horse’s pissing)
makuramoto (bedside)
I hear a horse stalling
What a place to sleep!
- How can I extinguish desire?
- You can’t! This is the realm of desire!
‘I wish it fifty times a day. As it is, I often wonder what I came into the world for. I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and to occupy my thoughts.’
‘Can labour alone make a human being happy?’
‘No; but it can give varieties of pain, and prevent us from breaking our hearts with a single tyrant master-torture. Besides, successful labour has its recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none.’
—Well, it is.
—It’s legalized socialism, and they’re ordering you - they’re ordering me to pay eight hundred dollars a month for me and my family, for nothing.
—That’s right.
—I don’t need it. I took my kids to the doctor twice last year and paid a hell of a lot less than that. They’re ordering me to pay ninety-six hundred a year, all so the insurance companies can get rich doing nothing. So that little fricking lizard on TV -
—That’s not health insurance.
—What’s that?
—The lizard doesn’t do health insurance.
—Isn’t it -
—GEICO. GEICO is - auto.
—Well, that’s just the same thing. They’re ordering you to pay for auto insurance, too. I tell you, that island in the Pacific is looking better and better.
—That’s right.
—There’s thousands of them out there. No one knows where they are.
—That’s right.
When leaves began to die?
That means he’s lost the will to live
I’m so lonesome I could cry
dulce prenda, aunque muda, ciudadana
del campo, y de sus Ecos convecina!
bien que tal vez, sañudo,
no oya al piloto, o le responda fiero:
sereno, disimula más orejas
que sembró dulces quejas,
canoro labrador, el forastero
en su undosa campaña.
Espongïoso pues se bebió y mudo
el lagrimoso reconocimiento,
de cuyos dulces números no poca
concentüosa suma,
en los dos giros de invisible pluma
que fingen sus dos alas, hurtó el viento;
Eco, vestida una cavada roca,
solicitó curiosa y guardó avara
la más dulce, si no la menos clara
sílaba, siendo en tanto
la vista de las chozas fin del canto.
¡que viene el día!
(Y duerme el río...)
Olivo, olivar, oliva:
¡que viene el río!
(Y duerme el día...)
mi olvido, olvida olvidar...
Yo estoy dormido junto a un pozo.
—La vida se te va,
y tú te tiendes en la yerba,
bajo la luz más tenue del crepúsculo,
atento solamente
a mirar cómo nace
el temblor del lucero
o el pequeño rumor
del agua, entre los árboles.
[...]
Todos se acercan para decirme:
—Tú duermes en la tierra
y tu corazón sangra
y sangra, gota a gota,
ya sin dolor, encima de tu sueño,
como en lo más oculto
del jardín, en la noche,
ya sin olor, se muere la violeta.
Todos vienen a darme consejo.
Yo estoy dormido junto a un pozo.
se acerca, y sin pregunta,
me da su abrazo entre las sombras:
lo llevo hasta asomarnos
al borde, juntos, del abismo,
y, en sus profundas aguas,
ver llorar a la luna y su reflejo,
que más tarde ha de hundirse
como piedra de oro,
bajo el otoño friío de la muerte.
Rape and murder have their hour,
but it is best when they are ended;
best when they fold under Romulus like a cloak,
smoothed to regalia and tame.
Ten curiae per tribum, ten gentes per curiam.
A hundred-year truce binds the Etruscans of Veii.
Three thousand infantry to each legion.
Three hundred horse in the guard.
The Aventine Hill, lost city of Remus,
shrinks in its new-built wall.
The boys toss javelins in the forum.
The Sabine women are happy at their looms.
VIII
He has dressed in Scarlet with a purple-bordered Robe!
He gives Audience on a Couch of State!
There go before him others with Staves and leather Thongs,
to bind on the moment whomever he commands!
INSIGNIBVS VIRTVTIBVS EORVM DOMI FORISQVE S P Q R
Romulus makes sacrifice at the temple of Vulcan
(man most religious, he has decreed lustrations,
sacred fires)
and the Senate of Rome murmurs at his back:
neither are the Patricians any longer admitted to State affairs
only is the Name and Title left them
they convene in Council rather for Fashion’s sake than Advice
they hear in silence the King’s commands, and so depart
he of his own accord has parted among his Soldiers
what Lands were acquired by War
and restored the Veientes their Hostages
Midday of white stones at the hill?s foot.
To appease the fire
(let Rome not burn)
Romulus tosses live fish into the iron hearth. Then pivots in state,
finds the Senate of Rome risen around him
stares and knives
He turned, they say, as in foreknowledge
that the wind was to rise,
and the sun to darken like blood.
He laughed in their faces. Him it convened
to be made a god.
yea, it pleases the gods
—not myself, the gods—
that I be taken upward
IX
VIVET ROMVLVS
in the unbodied air, the magnetic lines of earth
each jot of force a kinglet
the walls disperse but are not unmade
new masons raise higher old marbles
reshape blood and bone of Romulus
VIVET HONOS LATIVS SEMPERQVE VOCABITVR VNO
NOMINE ROMANVM IMPERIVM
the sky his skull, the sea his ichor
in paths of birds his dark will
all roads conduce to his core
in pulsed harmony of milestones
the wandering tribes his wandering children
of mundivorous mind
X
IVPITER OMNIPOTENS
victor’s laurels
AVDACIBVS ANNVE COEPTIS
our burden
glory of Mary and the martyrs
you owe to Romulus dome and altar
flying cross of Andrew and George
the arm of Romulus holds the scourge
SAECLORVM NASCITVR ORDO
Aeneas and his gunboats
new Carthage, new Troy
children of plains and temperate waters
boots of Romulus keep your borders
ANNVIT COEPTIS
heaven’s broad hand
ANNVIT COEPTIS
and a curse on that poet
whose words Romulus’ arm prolongs
ANNVIT COEPTIS
a curse on that poet
who speaks but with mouth and tongue of Romulus
From something’s belly sprung a prodigy.
Two heads and four legs.
Infants tell nothing, they are pure seed: but these!
As if men of deeds were mirrored in the babes,
as if mirrors turned on deeds to come
cast backward in unnatural eyes
of unnatural thick-thewed infants.
A vine has sprouted.
Cut it.
V
Romulus self-engenders:
DICITVR
“The river flowed over into which we were cast.
Time’s torrent held us and did not devour.
Washed up at the fig tree,
we lay on our backs, and our infant sexes pointed nowhere in the breeze.
A lupa, common whore, bowed over us,
shaded us with her hair,
dangled her teats in our faces.
Birds left us food.”
VI
In this wise (says the scholiast)
the earth acquires its king.
We mark his coming and the division of time:
first the eternity of kingless earth, fallow in its sun,
then the commencement of war and aqueducts.
Remus troubles us. Two-headed birth
we understand, but the prodigy in later life,
after the king splits himself and slays himself,
is vexatious.
The stories branch without confluence and comfort not.
How many eagles over the Palatine Hill?
And if they were vultures?
And if an aberrant shovel, and no one’s intention,
cracked Remus in the head?
The outlines, brilliant without depth, cannot be judged,
yet each may believe in his heart that the darker half,
the slain shadow, would have been the better king.
The city that wasn’t! Specter in the alley,
lantern?s inversion! Pavor nocturnus! Remus!
Lemurs! Larvae! Rise in dread at midnight,
cast bean-pods over your shoulder
HAEC EGO MITTO
HIS (inquit) REDIMO MEQVE MEOSQVE FABIS
NASCITVR ROMVLVS in anno of his own making
self-engendering
creates his circumstance:
II
“I must be preceded so—
lore of Aeneas and his line,
lust for what is set apart,
adumbrations of the divine.
Give me a virgin with suitable pudor.
Give me prophecy and a god in the corner.”
III
It is attested that from the hearth of the king issued an apparition of arms
and a virile form,
which remained some days in the household.
Honor to the king! He proposed coupling between his daughter
and the virile form,
be it accomplished
FIAT
(unless the daughter refused and they had to bring in a maid)
FIAT
“There shall be no waste of apparitions;
their lusts and ours must flow in one channel.
Something consummate the virile form—”
EXIT MARS
—It’s like in Kafka: “I do this only to keep you from thinking that you have left something undone.”
—Fucking Kafka. That guy had it all figured out.
but I can see it going backwards
so I think you must be cowards
when the train is going backwards
don’t you tell me that it’s forwards
it hugs to its breath the scorching stones,
clasps in the light its orphaned olive trees and vineyards,
clenches its teeth. There is no water. Light only.
Roads vanish in light and the shadow of the sheepfold is made of iron.
Roots trip on marble. Dust-laden lentisk shrubs.
Mules and rocks. All panting. There is no water.
All are parched. For years now. All chew a morsel of sky to choke down their bitterness.
Nostalgic for water in streaming jugs.
Murmur of a fountain now silenced.
Licking at this mockery, this treacherous belief
That there is moisture deep down in a hell of salt.
and it had two banks
and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds
A small river moving slowly
descending from the mountain peaks
visiting villages and tents like a charming lively guest
bringing oleander trees and date palms to the valley
and laughing to the nocturnal revellers on its banks:
‘Drink the milk of the clouds
and water the horses
and fly to Jerusalem and Damascus’
Sometimes it sang heroically
at others passionately
It was a river with two banks
and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds
But they kidnapped its mother
so it ran short of water
and died, slowly, of thirst.
Sonnenweiser > gnomon
gtr gt gt gr
chg chg chchchchchgtaar
Wolkenpelztier mit den alten Augen,
Sternenaugen....
...] the open curve, your sign [...
from eight hours till evening.
The axe hasn’t fallen, isn’t falling.
The policemen have no one to beat.
get to where the facts is
“Bloody Butcher”
“Bull Whacker”
“Duck Fraction”
constantly flicks its tongue
to detect good grazing
with its Jacobi’s organ
if Santa hitches it to his sleigh
the elves & children cry
Savour of poisonous brass and metal sick:
TAB TAB TAB TAB EOF
The word I am looking for is coelum[?]. No.
It is connected with the desire to live,
and with the desire to die violently.
...] climbs temple steps[?] [...] pulse[?] of blood [...
...] yellow marl[?] [...
The word I am looking for is ocelot.