SUMMERING

A few capsule comments on things I've been spending my time on of late.

Sea-reading. This year my "beach reading" (not on the actual beach but in a beachfront place) was, first, John Banville's The Sea which I'll always recall reading while a cold day's nor'easter beat rain on the balcony and against the screendoor. Set near the sea in England, the story is kind of a fast-paced Proust with its reliance on an older narrator's recall of days of youth long gone when as a lower class boy he got to rub shoulders -- and on one memorable day more than that -- with an upper class sister and brother. Engagingly written, sharply observed, fraught with a kind of melancholy that would like the past to explain itself. The melancholy also derives from a painful recent past, namely the decline and death of the narrator's wife which is told with great fidelity to the feeling of the aftermath of a lifelong relationship. Good writing; I'll read more by Banville sometime.

The other novel I read was Laurence Durrell's Justine, the first of the Alexandria Quartet. Though published in the late '50s, the feel to me is of the Fitzgerald / Hemingway nexus of modern prose fiction. Which is to say that the novel feels a bit "dated," even in its own time, but because the time it recalls is a high point of prose fiction in this century, the narrative has a compelling "reality" to it that I sometimes find lacking in more contemporary, overtly postmodernist stuff. It made me think again of the '50s as a time when the impetus seemed to be an improvement over post-WWI aestheticism -- in other words, a view able to do justice to what the world had learned of its sorry self in the Depression and in WWII. It has something to do as well, I expect, with trying to formulate some kind of readerly, accessible art of writing to counteract the mass -- and even educated classes' -- defection to film and other more accessible avenues of fiction. Anyone trying to write fiction after the '40s -- remember where Fitzgerald and Faulkner ended up -- must simply believe in the necessity of writing. And must convince the reader of the "use value" of the writing, so to speak.

Not so shore. "Time is an ocean, but it ends at the shore / you may not see me tomorrow," Bobby D. sings on "O Sister." Well, if that's true, the ocean of time is threatening to overwhelm whatever the shore represents in that metaphor, and we may not see the beach, of Ocean City, MD, anyway, "tomorrow." I've never seen such high waters in June, which actually means I've never seen so little beach. Early in the first week there was the hard-packed wide sands of my youth -- for a few days -- but it was soon made short work of.

The greatest film actor who ever lived. At the beach I also watched several DVDs of Brando films. Not great films (except, I suppose, Waterfront), but in every performance Brando does something that is astounding: he becomes the character he's portraying. I don't think anyone else -- very few before him and few after him (Nicholson and especially De Niro and Streep) -- has the ability to inhabit a character from the inside. Brando doesn't simply "act like" whoever the character is supposed to be, he manifestly thinks like that character. In his eyes are the actual thought processes of the character, something that isn't in the script. I mean, on film, the difference between a real actor and a hack is that the real actor knows how to act when not speaking, but watch some of your favorites and see how often that acting is actually a repertoire of mannerisms (that's true of everyone I've just mentioned too, but their repertoire is more finely tuned than most). To say Brando 'transcends the material' is putting the wrong spin on it. Brando gives all possible weight to the material. No matter how indifferent the film, when he's on screen the story concerns a real person, a real presence. And his choices of behavior are always audacious, never simply glamorous or heroic or -- the failing of the majority of screen people -- cute. When Hamlet says of actors he's seen, "I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably" he sets the bar. Most actors can only imitate the appearance, rarely can they manifest "that within which passeth show." Of course, it's a paradox -- how manifest what can't be shown? If anyone figured out how to do it, it's Marlon.

I know foucault about it. Finally finished The Order of Things by Michel Foucault on my return. I was reading it because of my conviction that his discussion of the shift in episteme from the Classical (i.e., Renaissance to Enlightenment outlook) to the modern (i.e. nineteenth century and after) would help me to illuminate Oedipa's situation in The Crying of Lot 49, the Pynchon novel I'm currently writing about. I believe it did. What made reading Foucault kind of fun was the fact that he adheres to triads in his thinking even more than I do. And that's saying something, though I'm not quite sure what. I've been known to tell students it's not "either/or," there are always three things to consider. For Foucault, it's the tripartite division of the world of human activity into "life, labor and language." Which is to say biology, production, and speech/thought. One can see at once that what he's describing is what happens to humanism in the period he's addressing. But he's on the way to opening, theoretically, the space that does away with human meaning as the basis for knowledge -- and that's where TP's going to.

stelliferous Meaning. I'm trying to knock-off the "end" of the Lot 49 chapter this weekend. It's going pretty well if I do say so myself, which means that I've actually committed myself "on paper" to saying what the slippery little sucker is "about." I'm both excited and daunted by the prospect of doing the same for Gravity's Rainbow, up next, because I've been reading the fucking thing forever and haven't ever been so prosaic as to write about it. But as Rilke always sez: sprich und bekann.

FALLING DON

Falling Man is Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel. In most cases, I'm skeptical of novels that treat of real-life events, particularly real-life events that happened less than ten years ago. Fiction is about time, particularly where historical events are concerned. Otherwise we're dealing with something closer to a kind of low-watt creative non-fiction -- and who needs that? In other words, whatever it is fiction can bring to something that actually occurred it brings it through its power of reimagining what is no longer current, another time and place, some angle that the journalists missed because all they have is facts, which is never the story that anyone lives.

But, more than any novelist I can think of, I trust DeLillo to do a credible job in fictionalizing such events, and the world we live in generally. After all, look what he did with the story of Lee Harvey Oswald (albeit twenty-five years after the JFK assassination) in Libra (1988), and think of the kind of clarity he was able to bring to the contemporary world in White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991). He's also the only novelist who rose to the challenge of giving us a novel, Underworld (1997), that addressed the end of the twentieth century, a kind of fictional summation of life in the Cold War.

In the twenty-first century, his novels have been short and very controlled, even more than before. Compressed. No wasted motion, no excess. The odd thing about a 9/11 DeLillo novel is that the situation, though we all know what it is at once, could have been a DeLillo invention (e.g., the Mao II terrorists cause White Noise's "airborne toxic event"). It's as if he could've written a novel about an event like the World Trade disaster even if such a thing had never happened. But it did happen, and DeLillo is probably the best possible novelist to capture the shocked loss of affect in the aftermath. Because his novels seem to dwell now in a world of lost affect any way. From The Names (1982) to Underworld, DeLillo was on a rise, with each novel making some new discovery about what his prose could show us. Now it's as if the heroic phase is over, and it's gotten very late.

It's a peculiar quality of DeLillo's fiction, that it is so driven by our contemporary world. Look at the author's photograph on the flyleaf. That stricken, searching look. It reads back to us the cost that, as a writer, this fiction extracts from him. As if to say, this is the world you make me write about. No other novelist gives a similar sense that what they write about is to some degree "dictated" by the times they are living through. DeLillo chooses of course the situations and the characters -- that Keith should be a poker player, that his wife's mother's lover should be a German art dealer, that a performance artist -- known as Falling Man -- should be a secondary character (observed, never met). But with DeLillo there is a nagging sense that the mode of depiction is the way it has to be. It's not a restricted palette, it's the only colors available. It's us, not him, that's doing this.

I have a similar feeling reading good Fitzgerald or Hemingway -- the sense that the characters and scenes depicted can only be made accessible, could only understand themselves, in the terms given by the author. It's not that New Yorkers post-9/11 -- or any of the rest of us -- live wholly or solely with the kind of tone DeLillo creates, but something -- some aura -- in the well-chosen certainty of what he gives us speaks with the sense that there's no more to be said. It's eerie and numbing and suggestive and convincing, even if the story itself has no great insights to bring. In fact what seems to be missing -- even more so than in The Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003) -- is the wicked humor in how DeLillo generally employs language and delineates his characters' obsessions. In Falling Man, DeLillo's narrative is even more "detached" than usual -- it's detached even from itself. Pervading the novel is a sense that no one is enjoying this, or much of anything, any more.

MISSING PIECES, 2

The other date was June 1st, the 40th anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In Between Days, a character expatiates about hearing the album when it first came out (also his first acid trip):

"Peter began to describe how the period ushered in by Sgt. Pepper marked him for life, his memories so vividly entwined with the music: how he saw each image in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” finely etched in his mind, colored like a high Renaissance comic, the night he first tripped. “She’s Leaving Home”: there it was in a nutshell -- leaving the family womb, looking for fun, a life on one’s own -- sketched by those weird, weepy strings that made their first appearance on “Eleanor Rigby” and provided an unnerving presence in the Yellow Submarine film. “Mr. Kite,” with its eerie carnival atmosphere, as if the events described were normal occurrences in the lunatic circus tent of the psyche. “Within You, Without You,” its sitar creating a sense of transcendence in odd counterpoint to its ironic lyrics -- and to this day “Fixing a Hole” conveyed to Peter everything best about the detached bliss of drugs."

Peter speaking: “'Tod came east for our graduation and brought the acid with him, just in time for the release of Sgt. Pepper. He told us how David Crosby had played a demo of the album in an apartment house near Berkeley and blew everyone’s minds, all the neighbors grooving on what was clearly the most brilliant album ever made. The Beatles destroyed all previous assumptions about what pop music could be. And for the first time the older generation tried to grasp the attraction of this music, beginning to see rock’n’roll as a cultural form rather than simply a get-rich formula, a way of selling fads to kids.

'Funny that it should be that record -- because the hipsters knew that Sgt. Pepper was the drug culture turned commercial, a testament to the common currency of the chemical revolution. As Tod insisted: to understand where the world was going, the squares had best drop a few hits of acid and climb deep into their own skulls. That was the challenge, the test of one’s inclusion in the Movement. And Pepper was the perfect album for the first ‘experience.''"

The story Peter tells is the story of the album in its time, as I've heard it told. My own involvement with the album dates from ten years after its release. I like other albums by The Beatles better -- in fact I prefer most of the songs on Magical Mystery Tour, which is heresy because MMT isn't really an album at all but a collection of singles and a British EP, made into "an album" for U.S. release. Purists will object. Whatever. I never bought Sgt. Pepper as some kind of "concept album" anyway. The idea of doing a kind of autobiographical record, supposedly suggested by McCartney and producing the two greatest tracks of this era of Beatlesdom, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane," was eventually dropped. With CDs, it's fun to arrange a program of all the tracks from Pepper and MMT together and get something like the epic of the era. The main thing about Pepper is that The Beatles were mainly a singles (or song by song) band, but this album, even more than its predecessor Revolver, has a great feel for transitions between songs.

I do attest to the album's centrality for the legacy of The Beatles. Listening to it in my teens, high, I liked all the sinister aspects of the album, amused by the fact that The Beatles were never simply about childlike innocence. The fact that we all listened to them as children sometimes causes us to forget that. Even a song as straightforwardly sunny as "When I'm Sixty-four" has that hanging line sung with a tinge of wavering sanity, "you'll be older too..." And great lyrical touches like "It really doesn't matter if I'm wrong/ I'm right / Where I belong / I'm right / Where I belong" -- which is to say I'm correct in the correct place -- offer fine aporias. Like the double entendre of "Life goes on within you and without you." I agree with Peter that the album is "a trip." Few albums really are. And since kids are pretty much tripping all the time anyway, well, it goes altogether now.

It's getting better all the time (it couldn't get much worse)
--John Lennon / Paul McCartney, "Getting Better" (1967)

MISSING PIECES, I

I was away in June and wasn't able to post on two significant dates. Most recently: June 16th, Bloomsday. What to say? I don't put all that much stress on the day itself, other than using the date as the setting for Between Days. On his blog, my friend Andrew simply quoted a passage from the book. That seems best, so here's a favorite passage:

--Co-me, thou lost one!
Co-me, thou dear one!
Alone. One love. One hope. One comfort me. Martha, chest-note, return.
--Come!
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness . . .
--To me!
Siopold!
Consumed.
Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to her, you too, me, us.

HOME

A few weeks ago a friend asked what the last word of my novel is. The answer is "home." I thought about that recently when leaving Ocean City, MD, after a two week stay, passing through DE, PA, and NJ, states I've lived in, on my way "home" to CT. I've lived in CT for 13 years, eight at the same address in New Haven (which is the longest I've lived at one address as an adult), but I've visited Ocean City most Junes since 1968 -- almost 40 years. And my mother's house in DE is the same one I grew up in, though I only lived there 19 years. I was reminded of that old Neil Diamond lyric: "L.A.'s fine but it ain't home / New York's home, but it ain't mine no more."

Granted I can't claim to be nomadic and I haven't managed to live outside of the first five colonies to become states, but even so I also don't really know where "home" is. Oddly, I had to admit that by the end of my beach stay I was missing New Haven not for any great intrinsic attractions but because, for better or worse, it's become "home." And that surprises me because, psychologically, I feel myself to be here temporarily. Of course, we're all "here" only temporarily -- but I don't live in CT with any sense of being settled in.

I suppose I always imagined that "home" would be wherever I buy property, but that might never happen. And the reason it might never happen is that, if it did happen, it would mean I had found a "home" or had "come home." Or something. Maybe there won't really be a "home" until they put me in a home. Which of course is the antithesis of home as I conceive it. I suppose the easy answer is that the quad-state area of DE, MD, PA, and NJ is "the homeland," even if not home. But those aren't places, for the most part, I imagine settling in. Too much "been there, done that" for me. Still, any place I might finally settle in, assuming I do, won't be "home" the way that area is.

I got a home on high / Ain't nothin' but a stranger in this world
--Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks" (1968)