CRANKY YANKEES

Over break I knocked off John Gardner's October Light (1976) -- part of my ongoing effort to read as much American fiction from the '50s through '70s as I can manage.

A friend had recommended this particular novel after whetting my interest by lending me Gardner's The King's Indian (1974). In that volume of stories, there were easily readable realist narrators side by side with Poelike spinners of the fantastic and fabulists of a kind of medieval allegorical mode, with, in the long title story, a crazy blending of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe -- and Coleridge's Ancient Mariner -- that behaved both as deliberate homage and raucous pastiche, and that boiled down to some oddly cryptic ideas of Gardner's own about imagination and the magic transformations of storytelling.

In October Light both sides of Gardner -- the realist and fantasist -- are still in evidence (the latter featured in set-pieces of the novel one character is reading), but it's the painstaking evocations of a cranky, elderly brother and sister in Vermont that resonate most. The townsfolk, all deftly drawn, aren't particularly effective except as stand-ins for "issues" (racism, by way of a Mexican priest in their white midst; hip, or at least progressive, clericalism; attenuated gestures of liberalism on the part of Democrat sister Sally; entrenched conservatism gradually softening on the part of Republican brother James). What comes through most is Gardner's affectionate grasp of the All-American crank, the backwoodsman, the self-reliant farmer, the truculent, morose and diligent ideal of Emersonian individualism.

The rejection of the '70s, as the inevitable encroachment of the insipid culture we take for granted, is dramatized by James shooting out Sally's TV, the start of the contretemps (as Dylan said, "sometimes you just gotta do like Elvis did and shoot the damn thing out") the novel dwells on. Central to the patching up of that conflict is coming to terms with ghosts -- the death of Sally's beloved Horace (who makes me think of a benign, old American poet -- like Robert Frost's PR) and the suicide of James' eldest son.

Against this familiar family saga terrain, Gardner, for some reason, sets a "lurid" tale of drug-running boats and orgies and electrocuted black brigands and a suicidal protagonist and a wheelchair-bound Roderick Usheresque "evil genius" and Pearl, a black maid with a story of the streets. If it were written in the slap and dazzle of, say, Tom Robbins, or even the ersatz hipness of Maileresque maundering, it might work as an entertaining riposte to the "novel of today" in its junk culture search of pop apotheosis (it seems that a flying saucer actually does appear -- Sally at that point chucks the book, only to pick it up again), but only the fact that Sally remains shut in her room motivates her to keep reading it. Its "readableness" is never particularly beguiling and is at times gratuitous.

But something about the use of that novel is indicative: it's not a parody, it's not really a commentary (in another mode) on the main action. Both possibilities present themselves, but Gardner seems not engaged enough by the novel within the novel to want to make it do any real work. It's more like he just wants to take little holidays from the main business: the eventual grudging reconciliation of a stubborn old woman and her tyrannical brother, a tale that has more than enough to commend it, but which could benefit from more elaboration (particularly in terms of back story) than it gets.

There is a sense though that the pulp novel is meant to show the transformative powers of fiction, in another register. At one point Sally entertains notions of sexual activity that she hasn't ever given thought to in quite that way. So, any fiction that can make "the blood to mutine in a matron's bones" must have some saving grace? Maybe so.

Shooting out the set leads to reading and, as Van Morrison sings, getting "down to what is really wrong," the moral, I suppose of the whole thing, and the thing about Gardner (which still makes me keep him at arm's length) is that some kind of moral is at work in his fiction in ways that suggest to me that his target audience is still able to be "scandalized" by certain kinds of fictional freedom, that he himself is still coming to grips with the kind of "yarn" you can't air in prime time around the family hearth. In other words, he meets that supreme challenge offered by Austen's fiction: he knows his characters. But I'm not so sure he knows his audience.

SLINGS AND ARROWS

Most of the reviews I've seen of Against the Day have not been favorable. Some of the criticisms, such as the following from Michiko Kakutani, can be easily ignored because they seem to parade a disdain for what Pynchon's novels do, coupled with a notion ("psychological depth") that is generally in short supply in published fiction anyway. Asking Pynchon to do what he has no intention of doing is a lot like asking Ashbery to write a poem on a definite topic: a funeral, a party, some other poet's loves or letters, etc.

"Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning Mason & Dixon, demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in Against the Day are little more than stick figure cartoons."

Cartoons are what we expect from TP, damn it! And he has his reasons.

Other crits against Against the Day that strike me as more damning are the following from Mich Kak:

"Thomas Pynchon's new novel, AtD, reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex."

(The quaaludes comment is actually pretty snarky since an early reviewer of GR assumed it was written entirely on coke.)

and the following from Tom Leclair:

"GR is the most important novel I've ever read. I've taught nearly all of Pynchon's novels to unwilling undergrads and grads. . . . That is to say, I'm not James Wood, waiting to gouge anything by Pynchon . . . But AtD lacks the ferocity and fear of GR, the long-developed characters of M&D."

Leclair's comment, coming from an avowed Pynchon admirer, is more debilitating, though, if he's so informed, why does he not mention that the Traverse family -- the subject of AtD -- are the ancestors of one of the families in Vineland? (Well, he did say "nearly all"). I suspect that Leclair, like many of the reviewers of Vineland, are letting comparisons to GR occlude what the novel might actually be offering. It's not GR, it's not M&D -- gee, aren't we glad we've got such perspicacious reviewers around? A-and I'm not James Wood -- but that little aside says much about the aura such an undertaking as Pynchon's can expect in our current climate. And what about those "unwilling" undergrads and grads. Jeeze, TP isn't something I'd want to force down anyone's throat . . .

Then we have the thoughts of a reviewer in Philadelphia (a city to which I remain partial, despite everything):

"AtD raises more questions about the American novel in 2006 than any recent entry in the genre. For instance: Does a great novel still require a shape that makes total sense? Or are its beginning and ending arbitrary, like the times we live in?"

Not exactly new ideas, if anyone bothers to read novels from the '70s. The review, while generally positive and written with amused admiration for TP, spends too much time on TP's credits (those prizes his early fiction won, for instance, as though the prizes were what earned the reputation and not vice versa) and too little time convincing the reader that the reviewer knows what he's talking about. But the above comment is much to the point, I'd say (without having read AtD yet): what is it we want from a novel? What would "success" for a novelist like Pynchon consist of? That we love it? That we be irked or amused? That we "care about the characters"? That we, as one critic suggested, find in it a fictional correlative for some moral state we supposedly all share (particularly New Yorkers) "post" 9/11?

I'm not sure what I want from AtD, except that it be like nothing else I can think of. I accept that these reviewers are not convinced they need to be reading this. Much as I wasn't when reading The Recognitions recently. But I can't help feeling that this late entry to the Pynchon corpus might in some ways be all the more necessary the more vexed.

AIN'T BLOGGIN'

Since I'm hitting the road south again today to the old haunts and will be observing blog silence, it seems fitting to post some lines from Bob Dylan's "Ain't Talkin'"-- the song on Modern Times that most resonates with me, particularly as this section features some very unmellow thoughts that accord with my mood.

They say prayer has the power to heal
So pray for me mother
In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell
I am a-tryin' to love my neighbor and do good unto others
But oh, mother, things ain't going well

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
I'll burn that bridge before you can cross
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
There'll be no mercy for you once you've lost

Now I'm all worn down by weeping
My eyes are filled with tears, my lips are dry
If I catch my opponents ever sleeping
I'll just slaughter 'em where they lie

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Through the world mysterious and vague
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Walkin' through the cities of the plague.

Well, the whole world is filled with speculation
The whole wide world which people say is round
They will tear your mind away from contemplation
They will jump on your misfortune when you're down

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Eatin' hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town.
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Some day you'll be glad to have me around.

They will crush you with wealth and power
Every waking moment you could crack
I'll make the most of one last extra hour
I'll avenge my father's death then I'll step back

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
Hand me down my walkin' cane.
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Got to get you out of my miserable brain.

All my loyal and my much-loved companions
They approve of me and share my code
I practice a faith that's been long abandoned
Ain't no altars on this long and lonesome road

Ain't talkin', just walkin'
My mule is sick, my horse is blind.
Heart burnin', still yearnin'
Thinkin' 'bout that gal I left behind.

Enjoy "the Day" -- oh, and Thanksgiving Day too.

CRANKS AND HACKS

Thinking more on my remarks, from yesterday, about Cranks and Hacks as the predominant terms descriptive of American authors . . . and in part responding to Andrew Shields' comment about "mellowing" cranks becoming hacks...

I think my idea goes back in part to my blog on Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return and his sense of "bohemia" as, in some sense, composed of cranks -- which translated in his terms into the distinction between those who eschewed the mainstream in favor of their idiosyncratic aesthetic avenues -- as against the mainstream of "hacks," which is to say those who made their living through the accepted organs of discourse. This seems to me to not have changed much, except, as I mentioned in my blog, that the academy also became a site of "hackwork," but that it also is a forum for cranky self-fashionings that provoke response.

My point about the handful of "greats" I mentioned is that they seemed to me, by and large, to maintain their crankdom, though of course that can be gainsaid by Faulkner's later novels, by Fitzgerald in Hollywood, by Hemingway's desperate effort to repeat early Hemingway, and certainly by whatever relation post-80s Pynchon bears to pre-80s Pynchon, etc. So is it simply a truism that even our best, most gifted cranks end up by becoming mainstream hacks? This could be, except that it's never so easy to write-off the work of a thorough-going crank (which is why I don't write-off post-80s Pynchon).

And indeed there are those who see the career as a learning curve: from a position on the outside (as a crank) to a position where that very idiosyncrasy inspires its readers and followers to adopt the crank as a new ideal or wonder, to the point where the crank him or herself, now lionized and praised, has a hard time determining where the work should go next. Preaching always to the converted doesn't exactly keep one sharp.

En academe, it's even easier to fall into a mainstream acceptance of what everyone agrees upon, because, in a sense, the point of view of the classroom is based on consensus, on the state of affairs as determined by the best commentators or scholars. If to uphold "the crank's outlook" isn't easy, neither is it easy to accommodate the crank's creations. Sometimes it works (the way so many modernists have become the basis of their own academic industries), but sometimes it's best "to keep the dog far hence," so to speak. One of the reasons for the "avant-garde" argument is that it justifies including certain outsiders as ahead of the mainstream, rather than as failing to achieve the mainstream.

In the end, what are the criteria for these different levels? mainstream: having major resources of promotion and distribution at one's disposal, as well as the good will, more or less, of major reviewers and commentators, who pick the winners of major prizes; avant-garde: having a dedicated coterie following of those who eschew the mainstream in favor of "innovation" (generally in its aesthetic form); alternative: having a dedicated subcultural following who have strong identifications with the content of the work (generally depicts a "marginalized" group or region); hacks: those driven by, and succeeding in terms of, what the mainstream permits and provides, usually with no particular allegiance to any cause, group, aesthetic, except "what sells"; cranks: those who couldn't be mainstream if they tried, and who also, for their own idiosyncratic reasons, find it hard to adjust to coterie logics of "l'art pour l'art" or "Us against Them," or "the personal is political," etc, in other words, those whom it is hard for a coterie or subculture to rally 'round, though that's not to say it won't happen.

As usual with such categories: no one's work really falls only or always into one. Well, maybe there are "pure hacks," but everyone else flounders around in the playing field, now hot, now not, now a complete unknown, now a cause célèbre, now trying to do what's already been done, now trying to do something that can't be done.

MISCELLANEOUS

Mr. Mello

Call me Mr. Mello / I live on fruit and Jell-o -- Rick Moore, 1974

Last weekend I suggested that I might be mellowing -- I was able to watch a Godard movie without wanting to trash its pretensions. This seems to indicate a trend that finds me listening to The Beach Boys rather than wanting to trash their sophomoric geekiness. Is this the start of that long amber twilight in which I will forgive my enemies and love my fellow man in all his insufferable idiocy, no longer stridently displaying my misanthrope credentials? Probably not.

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Waiting for My Man

Tuesday Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon's first novel since Mason & Dixon (1997) hits the shelves. It's going to be a tangled, long strange trip I've no doubt, but the question on any Pynchon-reader's mind has to be: has he pulled it off? I'm dubious, but elated all the same. I have the feeling, judging by the '90s publications of the man from Oyster Bay, that the fine madness that inhabited and inspired the scribe of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) vanished like the guy who tried to make Smile, like the guy who founded Pink Floyd, like the guy who put The Hawks through their paces in Europe '66, like... In other words, another case of Mr. Mello, of becoming a more accessible crank, the kind that will amuse us, but won't really take us around the bend. In any case, I'll be reading it soon enough and I'm bound to post comments as I go . . . Why not? It's either that or read Richard Powers I guess . . .

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Of Cranks and Hacks

My pondering of American letters (something I tried to avoid doing for the better part of my existence, yet for some reason -- I suppose it has to do with that poor homeless waif of a book of mine -- I have been a-ponderin' it here and there in the last ½ decade) has produced the following staggering insight of heartbreaking clarity: American writers are either cranks or hacks. Cranks are almost all the good ones you can name (Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Pound, Stevens, Faulkner,West, Pynchon . . .), the Hacks are pretty much everybody else -- I don't mean, everybody except the handful I just named, but everybody who isn't a crank, which is to say everyone who produces their standard issue fiction with astonishing regularity (I think you know the kind I mean) and reaps the benefits of being talked up by talk show hosts sweet'r'n molasses.

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Images from Home

In re-formatting this page -- it's a beta blog now, whatever that means -- I thought it might be cool to have a pic that would change as the mood strikes. So, stay tuned for ongoing image changes from my personal cache of scanned pics.

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Musical Markers

It struck me as fun to add some more images to the blog -- so why not albums at 10 year intervals? In choosing to add images of albums, a few things occurred to me: the reason I feel a satisfaction in posting album covers as markers of time passing is that album covers stay the same. Unlike book jackets. It would be a real hunt to find original artwork for a book, as it looked when it was released. But albums in that sense have covers "for all time." This creates that immediate recognition which is part of the "time capsule" idea. The other thing: I don't know what to call the music I listen to, so I labelled it "musical" -- pop, rock, folk, country, glam, prog, alternative, new wave, punk, goth, art, college, r&b . . . all such labels designate some elements of it, but not all, not even for a single artist.

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Books I Own, Unread

Since I like to drop into Book Trader frequently, it's easy to pick-up books on the spur of the moment and then never get around to reading them. This is a list of "recent" acquisitions, some used, some not; the point of any list like this, of course, is to wittle 'em down, even as others get added.

GET HERE AND WE'LL DO THE REST

I believe you Mr. Wilson
I believe you anyway
And I'm always thinking of you
When I hear your music play
--John Cale, "Mr. Wilson," 1975

Not long ago a friend and former student of mine gave me a copy of The Beach Boys Love You, with a host of bonus tracks, and after perceiving that a warped sensibility was at work, I picked up Sunflower and Surf's Up.

Let's put this in perspective: in my youth I simply couldn't listen to The BB because clean-cut pop stars were OUT once the Moptops arrived. And not only were The BB clean cut, they all were kind of goofy-looking. Then those cloying harmonies, and, then, worst of all, they epitomized California, and not the California of The Doors or Steely Dan, versions of the West that somehow made it past my Easterner artillery to impress themselves on me (as perhaps two different versions of the psychotic or at least neurotic undercurrents of Happyland), but instead the California of some kind of endlessly effervescent middle-school, smacking of the recycled smiles on those Burbank-born sitcoms that inundate the airwaves. Sure, I could even accept the "kind king light of mind," feel-good revels of the Dead-Headers (though always with a wry grin), but you have to draw the line somewhere...

What I've come to see, listening now, is The Beach Boys were waaaayyyy freakier than I ever in my oblivious "surfer girl / little deuce coupe / I get around" associations could ever have conceived. They strike me as a combination of two other Californian musical entities of that era: The Byrds and Frank Zappa. The Byrds because of those precious harmonies, Zappa because those harmonies often swerve toward the borderline dementia of Flo and Eddie in FZ's heyday, and because of things like "Johnny Carson" (wonderfully absurd and featuring that fearless acceptance of the obvious rhyme that I associate with FZ), "Rollerskating Child" ("oh me oh my oh gosh oh gee/ she really sends chills inside of me") and "I Wanna Pick You Up" -- only in Zappa-world, I had assumed, could you find a song about putting your kid to bed that features "pat pat pat her on the butt" and at times even suggests that rock'n'rolling with your little tyke is a kind of high, but whereas Zappa would be winking at things that might make us uncomfortable -- because he knows our sick culture expects the double entendre -- The BB play it straight. And Wilson gets away with it, but only because we were all kids once, awed by the "Solar System" -- "brings us wisdom" -- and were middle-schoolers tickled by things like the knowing high-schooler wink of "takin' it one little inch at a time now/ till we're feelin' fine now/ I guess I've got a way with girls."

Which is why I have to alter my charge of "effervescent middle-schoolers": I used to think The BB just played at "willful naivete" as the way to maintain some kind of undying allegiance to the sock-hop, that they insisted, musically, that middle-schoolers were all pure-minded romantics happy to hold hands and say "keen" together in a certain way, but no: in many of the songs, Brian's in particular, The BB are grown men with kids who have realized that kidness is where it's at. So do these tunes come along, "trailing clouds of glory...." That too would be easy to ridicule -- especially since Love You was released in '77 (77!!, era of Punk, Disco, and the decline and fall of '60s dominance in music) -- because it smacks of all those hippy-dippy parents of the '60s, whacked-out on pscilocybin and groovin' on how "beautiful" their little urchins are as they run about naked smearing each other with body-paint, or cavort in that giant sand-box that Mr. Wilson set his pianos up in.

Yes, whenever I start "California Dreamin'" some such image comes to mind -- the only place on earth where Deleuze/Guattari's schizo could really flourish, I suppose, for awhile. Maybe so, and maybe that's a good thing. And maybe the schizo's name is Brian Wilson and not Syd Barrett, if for no other reason than that British folk, filtered through blues and psychedelia just can't get you there. Where? To the beatific vision, of course.

Surf's up
Aboard a tidal wave
Come about hard and join
The young and often spring you gave
I heard the word
Wonderful thing
A children's song

A child is the father of the man.
--Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks, 1971

BUT...IS IT RELEVANT?

Tuesday night I went to see Bert Jansch perform at Southpaw in Park Slope. When introducing the last song of the set, Jansch said: it's an old protest song, but it seems still relevant. A voice called out, "Not relevant -- appropriate! Always, appropriate" (not the voice of a '60s survivor, I'd hazard, just a '60s revisionist). Jansch replied, "No...I think, 'relevant.'"

Jansch is an accomplished guitarist whom Neil Young has called a Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar and his favorite. He's the kind of guitar-artist that predates Richard Thompson and Greg Brown but whose music reminds me of them, in its moodiness and its willingness to let elegant guitar lines predominate. I don't know much of his stuff -- my daughter does -- but when he started the set with one I knew -- "It Don't Bother Me" -- I immediately wanted to hear the song of his that I consider my favorite. Turns out it's not his -- it was written by Jackson C. Frank and has been covered by Nick Drake, Paul Simon and Counting Crows. When Jansch played it, it made my night. It was worth the pilgrimage to Brooklyn to hear him. (This song might be downloadable online, but if you listen to music online you're more of a computer jockey than I am, so you can find the link yourself).

The Blues Run the Game
(written by Jackson C. Frank, as sung by Bert Jansch)

Catch a boat to England, darling,
Maybe to Spain.
Wherever I have gone,
Wherever I've been and gone,
Wherever I have gone,
The blues, yeah they run the game.

Send out for whisky
Send out for gin.
Me and room service,
Me and room service, baby,
Me and room service, darling,
We're living a life of sin.

Living is a gamble
Loving's much the same.
Wherever I've played,
Wherever I've been and gone,
Wherever I've gone,
The blues, they've run the game.

Living is a gamble
Loving's much the same.
Wherever I've played,
Wherever I've thrown them dice,
Wherever I've played,
The blues, they run the game.

Maybe tomorrow,
Somewheres down the line,
I'll wake up older,
So much older, babe,
I'll wake up older,
And maybe stop all my crying.

Catch a boat to England, darling,
Maybe to Spain.
Wherever I've been,
Wherever I've been and gone,
Wherever I've gone,
The blues, they run the game.

MY GOOD OLD DESK

My friend Andrew posted a blog detailing what's on his desk (following on C. Dale Young's blog on the same); both queried: "what's on your desk?" Which seems to echo an advertising campaign--"what's in your wallet"?--but since not much is in my wallet, I'd rather catalogue what's on my desk, in keeping with that great description of Lt. Tyrone Slothrop's desktop in Gravity's Rainbow. Mine:

Left to right: defunct IBM Aptiva tower and, in front, a ceramic tile decorated with an egret painted by my friend's 11 year old daughter Madeleine Scuderi; in front of that, my cordless phone in its charger, surrounded by a host of receipts and post-it lists, plus some stray computer discs and an empty Advil container; next, a mug (from U of DE with handle broken) containing pens, a shortstack of books (mostly Jameson it seems--from summer reading), papers having to do with class on top of them, and stamps on top of those (two of which are Baseball Sluggers); between IBM 1 (white) and IBM 2 (black) are some picture discs and a speaker for the computer; in front of Tower 2: a plastic replica of Space Ghost's 2nd banana Zorak at his keyboard console, ever-glaring at me (a gift from my youngest brother Eric), in front of him are three white-out bottles, one standing, two prone, and next to them a dusty box containing old mini-floppies, which supports a circular plastic case of dwindling burnable CDs . . . there seem to be some stray chords (my mic?), my current syllabus, a New Haven parking ticket, a calculator, more receipts and post-its, a Sharpie, a pencil, my cool Italian desklamp; then, at the back again, comes the computer itself, my keyboard (topped by a Pocket Dragon with an empty coffee cup, a present from my sister), in front of that is me (my elbows and the keyboard rest on a vinyl-like mat covering the desk's wood), then, between me and keyboard, a black Pfeltzengraf mug atop a rattan coaster; to the right of the monitor is my cheapie Brother printer, and in front of that the mouse on a pad from my wife, featuring Native American designs from Oregon, then several of those labels for cassettes that come in Maxell tapes, then some more books, most of these on T.S. Eliot for that essay I'm supposed to be writing, and Anti-Oedipus, also stray pens (none of which I bear any affection for), at least one list of things to do, and my white Sennheiser headphones connected to a 18 ft. extension cord.

My old desk
does an arabesque
in the morning when I first arrive.
It’s a pleasure to see
it's waiting there for me
to keep my hopes alive.
Such a comfort to know
it’s got no place to go,
it’s always there.
It’s the one thing I’ve got,
a huge success,
my good old desk.
--Nilsson, 1968

UN WEEKEND EN ENFER, 2

Ohh, I'm wicked and I'm lazy
Ohh-oh, don't you want to save me
--David Byrne, "Lazy," 2004

Today, to follow up my viewing of Godard's Week end, I watched one of those '60s multiple director films, The Seven Deadly Sins, with each director taking a sin. Godard covered "Sloth" (La paresse -- and I'd like to note that several years ago Pynchon covered that particular sin when the NYTimes Book Review had writers comment on their favorite or most baleful sin -- see "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee"). In the film, the hero is too lazy to tie his own shoelace and tries to offer a couple people 10,000 francs to do it for him; he's also too slothful to want to have sex with the Jean Seberg-type who jumps in his car and is waiting for him to jump in her bed ("getting dressed afterwards is too much trouble," he remarks). I was amused by all this, of course, because I recognize that Sloth is probably the sin I'm most prone to too. But then (while actually washing dishes -- talk about chores I'd pay someone to do for me!), I reflected:

Sloth keeps me from writing because writing is both fun and work -- and if work is to be avoided, fun is also something you avoid for the sake of work, which you are trying to avoid. But Sloth also prevents me from sending work out -- because it's like "getting dressed afterwards." But then, because I accomplish nothing, I feel Envy for those who do accomplish things, which is likely to make me fantasize, which leads to thoughts about having sex (Lust) or having money to spend (Greed) -- of course, "spending" applies to both. And of course my lack of prospects for getting anything like enough sex or money can lead to Anger. And to work that off, I go get a snack (Gluttony) -- preferably crunchy so I can enjoy biting.

Clever of the Catholics, isn't it, to come up with such a mutually supportive set of vices to show how fallible and fallen we all are? But I'm leaving one out -- and of course that one has to do with the narcissistic Pride that causes me to assert all this in the first place. Pride in our failings? You betcha. Modern man in a nutshell, or what JJ calls "a notshall." And of course Pride is the sin of Lucifer, which leads to the reflection that, yes, I'm already in hell, recalling Robert Lowell's lines from "Skunk Hour' (riffing off Milton's Satan):

I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

UN WEEKEND EN ENFER

Last night the WHC screened Jean-Luc Godard's influential 1967 pièce de la résistance Week End. I should say that Godard has always been a whipping-boy of mine, the perfect example of over-rated god of a certain kind of cinéaste, of the whole trendy subcultural high that drives art in its postmodern period, an excuse for cutting-edge French rhetoric whereby signs and signifiers cascade in a torrent freed from the tedious signifié in all its bourgeois predictability and outmoded humanist specificity. My dislike of Godard has always been hard to maintain if only because I tend to be drawn to comparable postmodern performances, some of which draw directly on his work -- whether in parody or homage hardly matters. Indeed, those who clearly follow Godard are often more to my liking because, unlike the master, they have more respect for the general viewer. I think it's Godard's contempt for the viewer that has earned my contempt. A feeling that Godardians seem to avoid by simply siding with the director and claiming that they never really thought the point of film was to be dramatic or comic or pleasing or meaningful, but rather that it's "no longer" relevant or "possible" to use cinematic conventions for the sake of storytelling -- because of all the crimes of capitalism, or because of Algeria or Vietnam, Soweto, Watts, Kent State . . . or because "it's all been said," or because of something Brecht argued about the theater, or Artaud, or...

Anyway, I just want to say that I got more delight from this viewing of a Godard film than I ever have before. I've seen a few of his films on screen, but not this one. But even when I watched it on VHS some years ago, bored as I was ultimately, I felt that it was onto something, though that "something" had already become familiar through the work of people like Robert Altman, Monty Python, and Lindsay Anderson. And I preferred those latter iconoclasts because I was, after all, only a child in the '60s and much of the film's success depends on its being "new." And all those lengthy voice-overs of text being read aren't exactly nimble and are hardly confrontational now though maybe at some point they were. No, it gets pretty sledge-hammer unsubtle as it goes, as we feel Godard's imagination strain to come up with something that will really put the audience in its place (or drive them from the theater). But since the place we're in is somehow a space he helped create, the film simply spirals into the ennui that bourgeois subjects like ourselves are so familiar with.

I admit I did find "the way of Lewis Carroll" more amusing this time around. In fact, the first hour or so was actually entertaining -- the confrontation in the parking lot, the infamous traffic jam, and Jean-Pierre Léaud so incredibly amusing as, first, Rousseau declaiming in the wilderness and then as the Porsche-owner singing an insipid lovesong in the phone booth. Even the pornographic recital by the main female character as ominous music swells and ebbs in inept counterpoint to her dialogue amused me more this time, as did set-pieces like the car-jacking and the girl in boots and miniskirt berating the farm worker whose tractor occasioned the death of her James Dean-looking, sportscar-driving boy friend. Once we get to the guerrillas the problem is that they are nothing more than clichés and, as is usually the case, the beastly bourgeoisie proves to be much more fun to watch.

How make a revolutionary film that will make us stop watching film? How make a film that ends cinema when you have a career as a film-maker? And if to some those problems are simply arch and ironic and not to be taken seriously, to others it seems bad faith to continue with the charade. In a way that putting pen to paper never is, though God knows publishing is another matter entirely. Then again, Rimbaud's refusal has always been for me a gesture of defiance, not despair.

I must be mellowing: I can now admit that continuing to make the kinds of films that Godard made can be defiance too. And this time I was surprised to find, in the midst of the nonsense, the cant, the in-your-face absurdity, the longueurs, the comic hi-jinx, the guts to greet beauty.

Cela s'est passé. Je sais aujourd'hui saluer la beauté.--Rimbaud

PUBLIC READINGS

Yesterday I attended a reading by British novelist Ian McEwan whose fiction, since Amsterdam and especially since Atonement, has had lots of visibility on these shores; this evening it was a reading by Jeffrey Harrison, a prize-winning poet whose most recent book Incomplete Knowledge is hot off the press. I enjoyed both these readings much more than I had any reason to expect I would -- in McEwan's case, I've only read Atonement and, though there were some wonderfully vivid passages and remarkably controlled and clear writing, the overall plotting and point of the book annoyed me a great deal; in Harrison's case, I knew nothing about his poetry at all and I went mainly to be supportive of a few grad students I know who read as the opening act.

What is it I like about literary readings and why do I generally go whenever I can? On the one hand, you get to see someone who has "made it" perform, to see how they come off in public. Generally a writer's presence is good PR for the writing -- I liked Michael Ondaatjee and Margaret Atwood much more after hearing them read (not that they turned me into dedicated readers of their works). McEwan too came off very well, the kind of writer I can admire -- i.e., more concerned about reading and what he was reading than to be a "personality." He read from a book due out in June, about a wedding night in 1962, in the days of, as he put it, considerable ignorance and terror about the "first time" of sex. The selection was excruciating in its extended focus on the couple's nervous efforts to understand the signals each is receiving from his or her spouse -- while extremely funny, it never went after cheap laughs or slapstick or farce. It was deeply comical in the sense of a humor derived from how horribly discomfiting life can be.

I'm still not sure that McEwan is a profound novelist. I don't know that he has anything to tell us that's going to give us a new or different view of human life and how its lived. Indeed, I heard him compared to Updike three times that night, twice as praise, once as disparagement, and I tend to side with the latter. Put another way: I'm prepared to like McEwan better than I like Updike if only because the milieu of McEwan is not so familiar to me. I may have to read more of him before he grates on me. Updike grates on me right off the bat. Then too McEwan, in the flesh, seemed in no way smug or self-serving -- qualities I associate with Updike in abundance, though I've never heard him read. Perhaps he could woo me too. I mean, I don't go to readings to resist seductive writing -- I'm quite willing to be blown away, it's just that it rarely happens. McEwan's reading was spellbinding and deft. Good storytelling.

Jeffrey Harrison's reading featured two poems that amused me greatly. One, "God's Penis," was a bit of slapstick set in a seminar on Jewish mysticism and, like all good comedy, depends very much on timing to achieve its best laughs. The other, "The Fork," about "the worst teacher I ever had" presents a satisfying example of academic satire -- in this case, the heartless, self-absorbed writing teacher (who, Harrison told me afterwards, was a composite creation). Harrison's poetry, on the page, strikes me as the kind of personal narrative poetry that I generally don't read -- there's a good deal of formal skill on view as well, but in general he's speaking in a prosaic manner about everyday things. And for some reason I'm always looking for poetry that does more than that. However, at a reading, such poems as he writes are never a chore to sit through; they gain considerably by having their everydayness enlarged by our own everydayness as we sit there. We're glad we can share a laugh with those around us. Even the painful poems he read about his brother's suicide were so careful and exact in what they would and wouldn't say, they nimbly skirted the bathetic pit that might have swallowed them up while making us long to exit.

As an act, sitting in an audience is open, democratic, generous. Which leads me to conclude that solitary, silent reading isn't. It's selective, exclusive, critical. In person, it's easy to be the accessible audience to accessible readers reading accessible works. In private, one wants to be lead alone to somewhere new, to ponder, to brood. This may be too what makes communal reading of books so attractive to me these days. Each week I meet with an ad hoc group of academics to read aloud from and discuss Finnegans Wake. For all my private, individual work with the book, it's a social "night out" to sit with a group of people willing to kick it around and make what sense of it we can.

As a reader, and certainly as a writer, I've too much pursued the private nature of the experience. The classroom, the public reading, the reading group, even the blog all strike me as efforts to be less obsessed with my personal investment with the written word -- the danger, though, is always the problem of personalities, of being swayed or seduced by a likeable presence, of being put-off by whoever is off-putting, or of simply losing, in the swirl of sociability, one's accustomed rigor.

The Soul's Superior instants

Occur to Her -- alone --

When friend -- and Earth's occasion
Have infinite withdrawn
--Emily Dickinson, #306

WAKE FOR THE OCCASION

Humph is in his doge. Words weigh no no more to him than raindrips to Rethfernhim. Which we all like. Rain. When we sleep. Drops. But wait until our sleeping. Drain. Sdops.
--Finnegans Wake, 74

THAT TIME OF YEAR, 2

We're into the new month of November and those unfortunate enough to have TVs turned on regularly know this time as the pre-election glut. An endless parade of smug, finger-pointing pronouncements on unworthy opponents, a hall of shame, a barrage of bs -- call it what you will, it gives this lovely time of year the bad odor of spoiled fish, of something rotten in the state.

Around here, the other noticeable bad odor comes from the onslaught of bs that has to be committed to paper for the sake of the annual academic job market, an opportunity to dream a host of "what ifs" and "what I'd teach"s that will prove more evanescent than what the kids were for Halloween -- the claims fade away as masks tried on, robes assumed for the space of an afternoon when the beguiling position seemed tangible as a realizable future.

All of which is devoutly to be mourned, as this season is the best of them all, for my money, and shouldn't be traduced with such a litany of bad faith and presumptuous assertions. No, it's a time for savoring that late sun, for looking at the twinges of color in a stand of trees showing finely etched branches in a light that glows more than shines, for registering the shadows of bare branches cast long and scrawling on pavements swept with driven leaves. It's a time for cognac, for strong coffee, for full-bodied reds, for a lingering affection for, to use Yeats' ringing phrase, "whatever is begotten, born, and dies."

"It is the blight man was born for/ It is Margaret you mourn for," Hopkins told little Margaret when she cried over fallen leaves, and hearing an old friend reflect that at 50something he might only have 30 or so more falls to count certainly gives resonance to Hopkins' insight. Of course, the thought of how many more job markets or elections one must endure could indeed invite a thought of Hamlet's words to Horatio: "in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,/ To tell my story." Stretched on the rack of darkening days, knowing the seed of death is in them, but still thinking there's time yet for whatever we want to fill it with: a story that will redeem the suffering of inarticulate pangs. It's the promise of fall which, as I age, seems to speak less and less of final resting places but rather, stealing spring's rightful voice of renewal, intones a warm earth sound, a loam-knowing, an abiding time, of roots more than of branches.

I think it has to do with the love of time, of what "the fall" has always meant as the come-down, the return to realities, the ebb of summer's flood, the "long, withdrawing roar" of whatever revel the long, heated nights seemed to call for. Maybe I've always loved it, or maybe it has to do with the succession of "times" when I recall the fall -- living near the Delaware River in New Castle, near the Schuylkill in Philadelphia, near Lake Carnegie and the Raritan canal in Princeton, crossing and re-crossing the Hudson on the Tappan Zee since the '90s -- as a chain of ripened days, a harvest yield, the squirrel's full granary. "November has tied me to an old dead tree/ Get word to April to rescue me," Tom Waits sings, and I give much credit to the sentiment, but for now I want songs celebrating the dark season, the clouds, the sere, the frost.

Do you remember only happy days
Full of flaming Junes and summer holidays
Or do you remember those stormy Novembers
When we walked in the wind and the rain?
--Ray Davies, 1975

SAMHAIN

And you, in love with what
your life could become, days planned
to afford the best results, sit still
and take no action, drifting
like water-logged wood on a rippling tide
too weak to cast you up on land or carry you
out to sea. Misfits from the apartments,
holding out promises of violent ends
and eccentric gifts, pass in the night,
seeking someone who saw them do something
once upon a time. They are our dead,
returned to work us mischief, calling
our nicknames into drains penetrating hills
to route the run-off away from lawns
in which no one, not even a pet,
is ever buried. Death is always elsewhere
in the suburbs, and we gather at the grave
to mourn an older way of life
becoming legendary, a time when life
was judged by what was done by its end
and credit extended into infinity
was all but unheard of. At least among our set.

Samhain was awash with heavy rains.
Staying inside was deemed salubrious
even if it meant neglecting to rake the leaves
or take out the garbage. Distant hammering
could be heard, the way bonfires could
sometimes be glimpsed on hillsides you climbed,
blazes changing location as you moved
higher and higher to reach the clearing
or secret cemetery. Will-o-the-wisps,
now here, now gone, suggestive of all the glimpses
that once seemed to offer knowledge, ripe fruit,
full honeycombs, dart ahead around the bend
of years and miles and selves. We see
how out of season love can be,
how inauthentic our pretensions to peace of mind
and smiling accord among all the onlookers,
each content to be only himself, herself
forever. Be wary of rituals, kid,
even though you can't live without them,
and, in effect, your participation
was assumed before you drew your first breath,
shaved your chin or legs, put on make-up or cologne.

In the teeth of the wind there is only rain
and even that is tainted by the long sigh of parting
or meeting since, either way, you must focus
on time and what it means to you, how you lose it
whether you use it or not -- as robins
might reflect after returning to find the tree
that once housed so fine a nest struck by lightning.

In that galvanic flash can be seen
all we could ever hope to know about loss
and the strength needed to bear it. Otherwise,
there would be no place for the dead, no memory,
and the strolling players would find no shelter
among us, but must risk the elements
on the bare hillside amidst stumps and ashen husks.

Meet me, please, at the covered bridge next Halloween,
wearing the death mask of your favorite poet.
--DB, 1997