DEATHBED DIATRIBE

While on the Metro North going into and out of NYC last Monday, I read the entirety of Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (2000), a great inhalation of a book. It streams into the mind as one long continuous text -- 129 pages with no paragraphing -- so much so that I would have liked the ride into Grand Central to be a little longer so I could’ve finished it at one sitting.

It’s not that the text couldn’t be broken up into paragraphs, or even into chapters, but the conceit that the entire text is disgorged in reminiscence by Father Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean Jesuit priest on his deathbed, is best served by the sense of continuous present the format creates. One memory leads to another, and no situation completely concludes since there is already another thought coming on the heels of what has just been narrated. There are many engaging incidents, narrated with the brio of a set-piece, that stand out from the flow, such as a party at the estate of the literary critic called Farewell, at which Pablo Neruda is a guest, or the tale Don Salvador tells of meeting Ernst Jünger at the studio of a painter wasting away in poverty, or the story of how Father Lacroix was recruited to teach the rudiments of Marxism to the likes of General Pinochet and General Mendoza.

Yet no particular incident is given dramatic or cumulative effect, rather they flow together with something of the stream of plausible but vaguely surreal circumstance that I associate with Garcia Márquez -- the tour of the churches of a series of European countries to encounter each head priest’s prized falcon, trained to kill the pigeons whose shit is causing the churches to deteriorate, is the kind of repetitive pattern of endless variation that delights the likes of Borges or Beckett or Nabokov.

The grip of Bolaño’s first-person narrative keeps the sense of revisiting the past from the view of the present at bay; for the most part, it feels more immediate than retrospect. But in the end it becomes evident how the past seals the doom of the present (the present in which Lacroix is dying in bed). It’s at the end that we get the final visit to Mariá Canales, a would-be writer who had been married to a North American gangster type called Jimmy, and who had created a rather self-serving literary salon in the very house in which brutal tortures for the Chilean secret police were taking place in the basement. The retrospective clarity – and sadness – of this final meeting creates a feeling of reminiscence that the novella had largely avoided. It suddenly seems as though the endless flow of time has come to a halt, that things which have been will be seen for what they are: not simply one person’s experiences, however unlikely or whimsical or malevolent, but a kind of gradual realization of inner necessity.

The narrator, haunted from the start by the image of “the wizened youth,” a figure who seems to be his confessor, tells us, near the end:

“The wizened youth has been quiet for a long time now. He has given up railing against me and writers generally. Is there a solution? That is how literature is made, that is how the great works of Western literature are made. You better get used to it, I tell him. The wizened youth, or what is left of him, moves his lips, mouthing an inaudible no. The power of my thought has stopped him. Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history. The wizened youth has always been alone, and I have always been on history’s side.”

This admission is as close as Fr. Lacroix comes to admitting that his role has always been one of lackey, instrument of a history of duplicity, condemned by “the wizened youth” who stands for all the hopes betrayed, the sense – in youth – that things could be otherwise than they are, or were, combined with the inevitable cynicism of age which knows that things could not be otherwise because what we are derives from what has been.

THE INDIVIDUAL WILL

I'll end this little trilogy of film commentaries by blogging about two films I saw last Sunday, both of which are nominated for Oscars: Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, both 2007. Schnabel won the Golden Globe for director and the film is nominated for direction and for adapted screenplay; Anderson's film is up for Best Picture and his adapted script and his direction are also nominated. The film is up for a total of 7 awards.

Both of these directors impressed me mightily in the past. In his film Basquiat (1996), about the outsider artist who became the toast of the town in '80s NY, Schnabel presented Basquiat, played by Jeffrey Wright, as an enigmatic, likeable fellow driven to be simply himself, no matter what. Anderson I mainly think of for two films, Magnolia (1999) and Boogie Nights (1997), both overlong and too meandering in their scripts, but both boasting truly arresting scenes, generally based on the director's ability to scrutinize his characters, to keep them on camera until they actually reveal something about themselves. In these two new films, the theme of individuality, of will, is a dominant concern, so much so that seeing the two on the same day made for some points of comparison that I hope won't appear too facile.

One thing that struck me was an immediate contrast: in Blood, women are an afterthought in this all male world; there isn't a single significant female character -- the girl H.W. meets when they're children and eventually marries is barely on screen. Diving Bell, on the other hand, features Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a protagonist almost drowning in the attention of women: the mother of his children, his girlfriend, his speech therapist, the nurse who develops the system by which "Jean-Do," completely paralyzed but for his left eye, can blink out dictation for the book the film is based on, and the stenographer who patiently, valiantly takes down his words, one letter at a time. There are significant male characters as well -- not least being Bauby's father, played by Max Von Sydow (not a little of the film's grandeur comes from having the incomparable Max on screen).

But what this contrast means, in effect, is that we end with two radically different but comparable visions of the male will, which is something that both films present as the core of what matters in each. In Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview is a figure one would call heroic; he has what could be called an indomitable will. He is as relentless and unsparing toward himself as he is toward everyone he comes in contact with. One of the best scenes in the movie is when he finally opens up a little; thinking he has been found by his half-brother, he seems even more ready than the other man to claim kin. As he says, "I don't know how much longer I can keep on, dealing with these . . . people." And the word is accompanied by such a hearty laugh of exasperation and even surprise at his own ability to speak the word so conspiratorially, as in an "us" against a "them," that it's a perfect example of how Anderson lets his characters get comfortable in front of the camera, lets them become people we know, whether we like them or not.

It's hard to say whether Plainview is someone we could ever like, or even fully understand, but he is the film and so he engages us from start to last as a force of nature, as a living emblem of that will to succeed and to mine the resources of the land, to do it no matter what happens to "people," so much so that he makes us understand a bit better what was meant by "manifest destiny." And, lest we forget that there was always an implicit will of God in that phrase, Plainview's alter-ego is Eli Sunday, a young ecstatic who wants to build his own church and whose will crosses Plainview's several times, ultimately to Eli's undoing.

That final scene, which lasts a good while, plays a bit as though Mephisto and Faust finally decided to have it out; or is it Satan and Michael? The problem with those comparisons is that in both cases we know who "the evil one" is. In this case, both are. Anderson's point might be said to be that both forms of supreme will -- in service to commerce and "progress" over all, or in service to "the Word of God" -- are America's twin delusions, the devil in our ear urging us into every form of folly and vanity. The film's final line: "I'm finished" resonates beyond the story -- who or what is finished? -- but also seemed to me for a moment to be a line from the filmmaker himself: "you can go now, sermon over, I'm finished." The image that accompanies that pronouncement, then, might speak volumes about what Anderson wants to say. I confess that my own reading has much to do with a certain acceptance of the character of Plainview, bearing in mind for some reason Robert Lowell's line about Mussolini: "he was one of us only, pure prose."

Bauby is one of "them," the well-heeled, well-to-do, staggeringly successful beautiful people (he was editor of Elle magazine) and his various muse figures are all lovely and winsome -- and not a few have intense identifications with la Vierge, the Madonna. That element might be enough to offer contrast between the male will of "Jean-Do" and the otherworldliness of these women that echoes with the matter of fact brawn of Plainview and the yearning for beatitude of Eli. Whether Eli is genuine in his belief or not is ultimately up to any viewer to decide; the sincerity of the women in Diving Bell is more definitely manifest and so the contrast works against Bauby (easy to conflate with "baby"). In other words, I find it hard to take Eli's side, whether he's genuine or not, and though it's not easy to accept the women's view either it's easier to grant them their ideal. Particularly as that ideal foists upon "Jean-Do" the kind of necessary sympathy and company that make his unimaginably solitary ordeal bearable. The women dote upon him, as he sits there with his one working eye staring like some kind of exposed mollusk at whatever goes on around him, the rest of his body unresponsive, a fully grown fetus that will never again be animated by the man within even though his presence in any scene is manifestly that of a man with a certain incontrovertible dignity and pathos. He is, in a word, irresistible to these madonnas, each enacting a pietà in their every interaction with him.

Watching the film, which features many, many shots of faces encroaching into the viewer's "personal space" as they receive the eye's focus, brings back memories of any number of benign adults -- females particularly -- as they bent down to make contact with oneself as a child. Even if such memories don't float easily on the surface of one's consciousness, the experience of watching the film keeps one almost floating in an amniotic fluid of support. In contrast to Plainview, we see in Diving Bell a man who needs women, but ultimately we also see an indomitable will to achieve something manifesting itself in the book Bauby writes. He dies ten days after its publication, having lived to hear the reviews read to him. His first statement of dictation is "je veux mourir" -- I want to die. Between that statement and the end there is, it seems, only pure prose.

(It just occurred to me that Daniel Day-Lewis, who deserves the best actor Oscar this year, won it before for playing Christy Brown, in My Left Foot (1989), a man born with cerebral palsy who learned to write and paint with the only limb he could control: his left foot.)

DANSE MACABRE

In NYC on Monday I attended a revival screening of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961). It’s probably only the second or third time I’ve seen the film in a theater, though I’ve watched it on tape at least once and on DVD once. My uncertainty as to how many times I’ve viewed it seems related thematically to the film itself and to the fact that the world it depicts may or may not be happening, or may or may not have already happened, or may or may not be about to happen. There’s no film that so effectively suspends one’s sense of the determinate sequence of a story; not even those films that play with alternate versions of the present or alternative constructions of the past – films like Mulholland Drive and Memento come to mind – convey as relentlessly the sense of not knowing where or when we are. And this is in part because, to my mind, Resnais and the scriptwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet never quite let us settle on watching the story unfold; they never let the characters – as people – overcome our sense of the characters as “figures,” chesspieces, perhaps, moving statues, perhaps, talking pictures, certainly.

Following that idea, we could say that the film meditates on film itself – on our willingness to surrender to the dream of movies which has supplanted the willingness to surrender to narratives, whether written or oral – and delivers to us not only the fact of how our experience of what we see is controlled by conventions that the knowing filmmaker can distort to a variety of effects, but also the fact that, psychologically, we are always to some extent spectators of our own psyches as though at the movies, that the world of our dreams includes us and excludes us simultaneously because the “us” we find there is a composite, a story in the conditional, an “as if” or “what if” of “our” own making. Marienbad delivers that sense of the dream /film that at first only vaguely implicates us, even as it seems to be following a kind of inexorable logic that it offers us to follow or interpret. As we do begin to play its game, as we do allow ourselves to respond to the formal rigor of “this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel” as setting, to the beauty of the waspish Delphine Seyrig as the woman, to the distraught insistence of the man (Giorgio Albertazzi), to the unsettling horror movie organ tones, to the fluid tracking shots, to the trompe l’oeils of backgrounds and foregrounds and shadows or their lack, to the snatches of conversation that comment on the action as though spoken by movie-goers, to the alterations in white and black in the woman’s bedroom, to the cadaverous expression of the woman’s current male companion and his uncanny ability to win the matchstick game every time, to the distortions of film treatment, we are drawn into the dream, we begin to have memories of the previous repetition that are impacted by the new version. We are sleuths in search of the "evidence": the image or sequence that will register for each of us uniquely as "key."

Long ago a friend characterized the film as “like being in purgatory,” and that’s not simply a fortuitous comparison. The film enacts purgatory as a space in which figures who seem vaguely to know one another, to share a past or the possibility of a future, meet in a series of scenes that are nonlinear, propelled by – as is generally the case in Robbe-Grillet’s fiction – a restless sense that the elimination of possible permutations will at some point necessarily veer off into the truth, or that the accumulation of versions will exhaust all possible permutations, leaving us with a story that is fully, finally told, if never resolved. My sense watching the film this time was that the husband or companion of the woman, who suspects that his wife is desired by and perhaps desirous of the man, was in many scenes a death figure, his presence suggesting the extent to which the inhabitants of this hotel were present there for all eternity with “no exit.”

But that sense mainly comes through in the first half of the movie when the relationships are less clear; once the movie begins to opt for some version of the infidelity plot it begins to be more reasonable, less a reverie, but even so the idea that the woman and the man are finally leaving together, that she has responded to his importuning and accepted that they really did meet and have an affair “last year at Marienbad,” is suspended in that final shot of the darkened hotel which seems to offer itself as the only place where the couple can exist, corresponding to a certain area of one’s own mind or memory where a strong sense of what could have been or should have been remains to burn on, even after death -- peut-être, as the woman would say.

GOTTA DANCE!

The WHC Film Series kicked off the new semester Friday with a screening of Singin' in the Rain (1952), one of the most celebrated films of all time -- at least by those for whom motion pictures are, at some level, synonymous with entertainment. It's often remarked that the Oscars favor drama and "serious" films, and that comedies and musicals get less respect. That's so, as a general rule, but then it's rare for a comedy or musical really to transcend the limitations of the genre. What limitations? Well, for one, the tendency to be silly or cartoonish or parodic. Singin' is all those things, but it still shines because it wears its limitations with utter insouciance. It can afford to because it bases its appeal on the old idea of talent being its own reward, but it also presents talent as the only commodity that ultimately matters in show biz. As such it's a show biz parable that never ceases to be applicable -- yes, it's the standard "a star is born" scenario, but, the film insists, being a star is not a question of means (how to work the system) but a question of ends (how to give the people what they want when what they want is genuine talent).

The appeal of Hollywood in the '20s is that it has no traditions yet. So it's the place where those with show-biz talent can land when vaudeville and Broadway become dead-ends. Hollywood is depicted as silly and benign -- it's a '50s view of the '20s, able to appreciate its energy and style while able to smirk at its pretensions and quaintness. And for happy-go-lucky smirking there's no one better than Gene Kelly. As our hero he exudes charm, vulnerability, brio, and a kind of guy next door normality that goes a long way to make him believable as the dancing Everyman, the kind who makes it all look easy as breathing. And for comic exuberance there's no one like Donald O'Connor who mugs gleefully and walks up walls and wrestles with dummies and delivers fast comebacks with Groucho-esque timing. Which leaves Debbie Reynolds as the gal who's practically one of the guys, gifted with the ability to blend perfectly with the one-two punch of Kelly and O'Connor. The feel-good numbers "Good Mornin'" and "Singin' in the Rain" work (i.e., you actually feel good) -- and what's more the whole notion of "Singin' in the Rain" comes more and more to seem emblematic of a devil-may-care optimism that seems uniquely American -- no matter what kind of shit-storm is going on or how far DOW plunges.

The plot of the star whose voice is a travesty of her romantic image was true to some careers that couldn't weather the transition to "talkies," but the character gets a bit tiresome, as do some of the romantic numbers. But the opportunity to have fun at the movies in such a relentlessly wholesome way is rare, and the glimpse of a quaint older era's take -- in terms of gender and romance and what to poke fun at -- on a quaint era even older seems to become more priceless, more worthy of preservation the further we go from that post-WWII, pre-Vietnam era. It's a time when adults could enjoy movies that made them feel young without having to feel that youth had its own ax to grind or its own arcane sense of what was 'cool' or 'hip' or 'real.'

One of the perks of seeing the film with a packed house of mostly undergrads is that the enthusiastic applause after Donald O'Connor's numbers and when the film ended added a kind of reassuring promotion of the film's credo: physical legerdemain to music exerts an almost timeless fascination, the more so because the dancing is only occasionally choreographed as arty or expressive. Primarily it's presented as pure spectacle -- something which you have to turn to animation to find in films these days. The '50s were hardly the Golden Age of cinema, but the period did produce a few notable entertainments "for the whole family": the kind of film Ozzie and Harriet could see with the Nelson boys, or her TV parents with Gidget. Everyone's a clown, everyone can sing (except that evil glamour queen), and everyone can dance!

C’EST LA VIE VIRTUELLE

The first week of the new semester is over. The fun and thrills of shopping-period has begun to die down. The week before that was busy with flurries of excitement from the campaign trail as numerous pundits debated whether or not Hillary Clinton was truly “likeable” and whether Barack Obama, whom Clinton herself called “very likeable,” was now less likeable for having told Clinton she’s “likeable enough.” It seems to me that, as with much of what he says, Obama was being honest, if perhaps too positive. But no matter, he’s been losing ever since Clinton appealed to the pathos of what it would feel like to be an aging woman married to Bill Clinton and not win her party’s nomination (sob!).

Another thing that got my attention (thanks to my friend Barry’s facebook posting of it) was Tom Hodgkinson’s “outing” of the libertarian, quasi-fascist, proto-Big Brother manipulators behind facebook. TH, whose mag The Idler seems to decry our abandonment of books and chatting over dominoes in the town square in favor of online virtual relationships and email, maintains a blog (complete with banner ads), but inveighs against what he sees as a willful surrender of one’s pertinent personal information so as to be targeted unto death by cyber hucksters of all stripes. So far I can’t say that Big Brother seems particularly interested in my list of favorite movies and books, but the day banner ads zero in on my preferences and start hawking Ulysses (“the one book you can’t die without having read!” “eggheads the world-over agree, ‘it’s really long, but worth it’”) and Rimbaud (“the original punk!”), well, it will seem like an improvement, I think. In any case, the essay did put a spotlight on a simple fact of our interconnected world: we buy things and use things and interact with others via things that place us in debt to people we’d rather not benefit. But when, except in some utopian space of collectives and communes, has it ever been otherwise? So why is facebook part of the evil empire? Because it makes people spend more time on their computers and y’know just because you share cyber space together that doesn’t make you friends.

Another sally against the online world that interested me I only came upon through a response it garnered from a “letter to the editor” at n+1. Apparently, the journal (a paper copy of which I thank my friend Rob for sending me) had featured some coverage, by Marco Roth, of blogs, which concluded “so much typing, so little communication.” The reader response, from Garth Risk Hallberg, was one I was basically in sympathy with: “Serious literary bloggers see themselves precisely as an antidote to a vertically integrated media sector and a closed-circuit publishing industry.” But I have to admit that Hallberg sounds a bit stridently defensive, his blog’s seriousness impugned and that damned “media sector” not recognizing his purposiveness, dammit! Mainly I was interested to see that Roth bemoaned the fact that “People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think or say. They could have posted 5,000-word critiques of their favorite books or records. . . . But those things didn’t happen, at least not often enough….” C’est la vie! People could’ve used their phones to reveal their innermost thoughts, people could’ve used television to broadcast live improvisational theater, people could’ve used cinema to move beyond traditional stage and print-bound strictures of storytelling, the radio to maintain a constant flow of music never heard before . . . Why bad mouth the blogosphere for failing where every creative technology fails. We’re frivolous people, people, and most of us like it that way!

But all’s not dark yet (even if it’s getting there). After all, it was thanks to my friend Andrew’s blog that I happened upon “Twilight of the Books,” a piece from the New Yorker by Caleb Crain that looked at the drop-off in numbers of people who admit to reading books (how 19th century!), and came up with this: “In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002.” As Crain notes: “But if the change is permanent, and especially if the slide continues, the world will feel different, even to those who still read.” Amen to that, the world as presented by television has never made sense to me, so the fact that the world will continue to feel more alienating is something downright comforting at this point.

The article made me feel I should read more, so I spent most of the day Saturday doing just that. I’m still making headway through Tony Judt’s Postwar – I got through the ‘60s which he underplays mightily, clearly he’s not “a fan.” But it's clear that the only thing historians do is tell you what happened, they don't have to think about what what happened might mean. Still, I’m looking forward to his coverage of the period of my adulthood, if only to relive my "angry young man" days. I also got through half of Peter Cowie’s account of the ‘60s cinema, particularly European, which is mostly reminiscence about how grand it was to be involved in movies then. If the book doesn’t make you want to become an auteur, nothing will. Speaking of auteurs, I’ve recently gotten on this kick to learn more about the late, great (possibly greatest of them all), Ingmar Bergman, and started Cowie's "critical biography" of the man. It’s gratifying, at the start of this “background check” (as it were) to hear many a post-nouvelle vague notable cite The Seventh Seal as the film that performed the great ‘ah ha’ (not least of such being Godard himself, whose À bout de souffle Cowie adds to The Rites of Spring and Ulysses (and I guess, latterly, Dylan going electric?) in that list of provocative epiphanies of what “now” is possible).

People might have continued to make films like the ‘60s auteurs did, and people might have flocked by the thousands to view them at the quality theaters (instead of arthouse dives)showing them, or, worse, instead of having to watch them on the worse of the two video technologies developed . . . might have . . . might have . . .

Speaking of cinema . . . well, more next time . . .

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”—George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

READING WRIGHT

Some poets just get better. I haven't read Charles Wright since Black Zodiac in the late '90s and I remember first hearing of him through a poem from Zone Journals published in the New Yorker in the '80s. So while not a regular reader of his poems, I have long admired his ability to do three things in almost all his poems: 1) demonstrate an amazing facility for the sound of words while exercising his tonalities in lines that are tautly rhythmic, but which never move too far from the cadences of speech:

Red-winged blackbird balancing back and forth on pond reed,
Back and forth then off then back again,
What is it he's after,
                      wing-hinge yellow and orange,
What is it he needs down there
In snipe country, marsh-muddled,
                                 rinsed in long-day sunlight?

2) describe the natural world with a depth and detail that is mesmerizing (the more so for being exact and precise rather than excessive):

Sunlight is blowing westward across the unshadowed meadow,
Night, in its shallow puddles,
                              still liquid and loose in the trees

3) speak thoughts, often with a simplicity reminiscent of the Chinese or ancient Greek texts he draws upon, that seem to evolve naturally from the meditative nature of his poems:

Landscape was never a subject matter, it was a technique,
A method of measure,
                    a scaffold for structuring,
I stole its silences, I stepped to its hue and cry.

To put it simply: for his ability to be musical, descriptive, and philosophical all at once. What he is less successful at doing, telling stories or recreating events, he tries to do more of in Scar Tissue than in other books of his I've looked at. The fact that he is still "less successful" at that aspect of poetry becomes one of the more pressing themes of the volume because what Wright (who will be 73 this year) is working with here, often, is the inability to make memory do as we wish, causing the poems to face the fact of loss more baldly and more boldly than is usual.

It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we've done
Is unremembered and unforgiven...

In other words, nature is still a kind of consolation for Wright but he's ready now to admit that it was only the music of it that really mattered to him and that, in essence, when he's gone, so is that music -- at least as far as he's concerned.

Beginning of June. No light on leaf,
No wind in the evergreens, no bow in the still-blonde grasses.
The world in its dark grace.
                             I have tried to record it.

What makes the poems so effective is that on every page he demonstrates that the music he has given us is as painstakingly adequate to its inspiration as any words could be, so that his loss is our loss.

Hard to imagine that no one counts,
                                   that only things endure.
Unlike the seasons, our shirts don't shed,
Whatever we see does not see us,
                                however hard we look,
The rain in its silver earrings against the oak trunks,
The rain in its second skin.

Pity the people, Lord, pity their going forth and their coming back,
Pity their sumptuous barricades
                                against the dark.
Show them the way the dirt works.
Show them its sift, the aftermath and the in-between.

That line "Show them the way the dirt works" is as good an example as I can find of what kept me rapt with attention while reading these poems: the simple imperative in a graceful cadence, the alliteration (Wright uses alliteration more than most and, to my mind, gets away with it) of way and works, and the assonance of dirt and works. His music is precise, generous, but never -- or rarely -- mannered. At times there are great playful strides of sound: "Sunlight like Vaseline in the trees, / smear and shine, smear and shine." "The sound of the lilac upsurge rings bells for the bees." Now and then there are figures evoked for the spice of a bathetic charge: "The slit wrists of sundown / tincture the western sky wall..."

More than a few poems become prayers from a "God-fearing agnostic" who knows, as it grows late, that the "urge toward form is the urge toward God." The natural world, for Wright, is the form he has striven to make us -- and the angels -- hear. Scar Tissue, like some of the poems of late Stevens, attests to the truth that a poet through his method -- his own particular folly -- becomes wise.

DOCTOROW REPORTING

"I believe nothing of any beauty or truth comes of a piece of writing without the author's thinking he has sinned against something -- propriety, custom, faith, privacy, tradition, political orthodoxy, historical fact, literary convention, or indeed, all the prevailing community standards together. And that the work will not be realized without the liberation that comes to the writer from his feeling of having transgressed, broken the rules, played a forbidden game -- without his understanding or even fearing his work as a possibly unforgivable transgression."
--E. L. Doctorow, "Childhood of a Writer" in Reporting the Universe (2003)

"The truth of the matter is that the creative act doesn't fulfill the ego but changes its nature. As you write you are less the person you ordinarily are -- the situation confers strength. You learn to trust what comes to you unbidden. You learn to trust the act of writing itself. An idea, an image, a voice, comes to you as a discovery, and you don't possess what you write any more than the mountain climber possesses the mountain."
--E. L. Doctorow, "First Novel" in Reporting the Universe

What I like about the first quotation is that it gives a strong sense of the transgressive audacity that comes with writing personally, with one's own voice and imagination -- not only transgressing the commonality of all those people who don't write and who can't much conceive of its use, but also transgressing against all those greats who have written with such unsurpassable authority, from the sacred texts to the near deities of the canon. And what I like about the second quotation is that it suggests that taking this task upon oneself -- writing as a creative act -- is a process of discovery, of finding or making a path in a space that all those "somethings" in the previous quotation are in no need of.

And what I like about the two quotations together is that they can be said to describe what I find to be the most transgressive aspect of writing: the transgression of one 's own ego. In the first quotation one could say that a kind of demonic or egotistical pride could be the driving point of playing a forbidden game, of sinning against custom and orthodoxy and convention and so on. This would make writing either an ego assertion or, given the metaphor of sin, a kind of pact with the devil -- a romantic, Luciferian or at least Faustian self-conception I am not unfamiliar with, its power -- should we say its temptation -- having captured the imaginations of not a few writers I admire. But the second quotation -- when Doctorow begins to move from a childhood self-conception to the more humble and humbling task of writing a first novel -- suggests that writing, conceived in less heroic terms, transgresses against "the person you ordinarily are" and is a diminishment of the self (both the public and the private self) for the sake of . . . the story, or the art, or the truth of what must be said. Which is not to say, given the mountain-climbing metaphor, that this task is low and mean. Doctorow also asserts what might be considered the hubris of fiction-making, but which is also its raison d'être:

"I believe so completely in fiction that I regard it as a mega-discipline, one that incorporates all others, blurs the genres, whips together fact and imagination, and at its best reasserts the authority of the single unaffiliated mind to render the world."
--"Texts That Are Sacred, Texts That Are Not" in Reporting the Universe

The key word here would seem to be "unaffiliated." Again I detect a whiff of Joyce's Stephen's non serviam -- with the possible affiliations extending beyond church, country and family into what are generally referred to as "walks of life." I think of altering Lear's line to "here you behold sheer unaffiliated man" to perhaps indicate what condition such a thing might be said to consist of, trusted home. But it seems enough for Doctorow to assert that combining all disciplines is not to belong to any one. Good enough for that amorphous creature known as "a novelist."

BETWEEN DAYS

It's winter recess in New Haven, and it's cold out there. But there's something consoling about the cold, or is that only because I associate it with what I think of as "between days": that little trough of time after one thing is over and before the next thing begins. In this case, it's the interim between semesters, but the phrase carries a lot of association for me -- because "days" can even be "years" -- in other words, a space of time of no fixed duration.

There's a temptation to think of "between days" as elastic, as a period of bliss and flow, cut off from the dreary specificity of the past and the future. Like that summer when you got out of high school, or that year after college, or that space between the girlfriend who dumped you and the next one that . . . well, you fill in the blank. It could be that period between jobs, between pregnancies, or when you were still choosing between that one, or that other one. It's that sense of the present as not fixed, as not defined by what you were just doing or what you're supposed to be preparing for.

It doesn't last long enough. In fact, "between" should be seen as almost wholly illusory. Whatever was just happening hasn't ended, whatever is about to happen has already begun. That sense of not being either here or there is one of those lovely illusions that our temporal sense gives us. Like the time between breaths or heartbeats: you know it's there but you'd rather not think about inhabiting that space . . . time . . . indefinitely.

I like to think of it as "limbo" because limbo -- or, for the Catholics, purgatory -- was the only version of the afterlife that had a terminus. It started when you died and it ended -- sometime later. The saved and the damned were what they were for all eternity, but those folks in purgatory knew one thing: there would be a change, eventually. Those are the lucky ones, I think. Of course, limbo, without a purgatorial sense, is simply something other than punishment or bliss -- a locus poenitentiae perhaps, a place to think about what went wrong and -- you can't change it -- try to decide how to think about it so that you no longer need suffer from it. In other words, limbo is the place where you overcome the past. However long that takes. It may take as long as it took to write the goddamn Recherche, but it's bound to end sometime.

I like to call Connecticut Purgatory. I joke that I must remain here till I atone for my sins -- I never thought I had so many! Ha ha. Joke's on me, I guess. But it strikes me that the real truth of the jest is that I must remain until I overcome the past. That's the purpose of limbo, and that's what this is more like.

Regardless of what you call it, when I was walking through those wintery almost entirely empty streets watching the bronze light fading off those faux Gothic buildings and creeping along Hillhouse and up Prospect I felt good about it: I imagined that some day I'll be somewhere else and I wondered if I would remember these days when winter where I am finds me, would I feel the pressure of these days the way I for a moment today felt the pressure of a long line of winter days stretching back to those years -- when were they, how long ago? -- when it first felt good to be out in the cold. Who knows? It's here, it's now -- it's winter in New Haven.

NEW YEAR, OLD YEAR

To mark the new year, I thought I'd make some resolutions for blogging. Mainly it comes down to topics, areas covered. I'd like each month to contain a commentary on a book of poetry, and on a novel read that month, as well as at least one "music through the years" entry for either 1968 or 1978, or possibly both, as in a comparison of notable albums in each year for that month. Assuming that the WHC film series has worthwhile offerings in the new semester, I'll continue to comment on what I see. In fact, I'm instituting three new lists in sidebars: 2008: Read -- to record any book I've read this year; 2008: Acquired -- to mark any music acquired this year; 2008: Viewed -- to note any film or DVD viewed. Anything listed is potentially a topic for comment.

What I call "observations" is a bit more haphazard. I think of it as "topical," though the topics aren't necessarily newsworthy. I would like to resolve to write at least once a month on something that is "of general interest" (whatever that might mean), but I also think of "observation" as applying to any more extended discussion of almost anything -- the blog itself, for instance, as in this entry, or, ideally, if I can ever go so far, commentary that is not specific to a particular example. Like, y'know, theory? Critique? Something like that.

Events, as a category, will be as events go -- I don't attend things just to have something to write about, and I don't write about everything I attend. I like writing as a witness or audience to some gathering, but I make no resolution to do so every month.

Somewhere along the way recently I read a horoscope that said I should tell stories more than give opinions. So in that spirit, I hope to give a bit more space to "a day in the life" -- which I don't promise will be exciting, or even interesting, but which should be more narrative-like. I draw the line at keeping a "public" diary, but I've come across blogs I find oddly compelling in their immediacy. I can't promise it will happen, but I might try a bit more.

So that's what's ahead in the new year, in so far as I have any say in it. What the new year will offer as occasions for comment I can't begin to say. Which is why I'm skeptical about resolutions in general. "Who knows what tomorrow may bring" is my basic outlook, though I tend to be a rather inert status quo type in my general disposition. That, and the fact that I tend toward retrospect, means that this blog will never exactly be 'ground-breaking.' I'm more interested in telling "the way it was" than "the way it is." And on that note, here's the first line of each month for the year that was, 2007:

January (I leave out the entry about the blog for the past year): Today I received a rejection of my essay on Molly Bloom. ("Getting Serious / Having Fun" 1/5)

February: This past week the Finnegans Wake reading group recommenced its labors with the first half of "Anna Livia Plurabelle." ("The Use of Joyce" 2/2)

March: This week's tasks in Daily Themes had to do with the creation of characters. ("Characters" 3/2)

April: The Indigent Ministers' 1967 release, Camp Scratch, is out of print and hard to find, lamentably. ("Music Through The Years, 13" 4/1)

May: Saturday I attended a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, presented by the Yale School of Music, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, the Yale Glee Club, and featuring the Philharmonic Orchestra of Yale. ("Music of the Fears" 5/1)

June: A few weeks ago a friend asked what the last word of my novel is. ("Home" 6/19)

July: Of the writers I consider the most influential on myself -- the ones I can't imagine NOT having read -- Proust came last. ("Mighty Marcel" 7/10)

August: Summer now dwindles to its close. ("Summering, 2" 8/26)

September: It's the anniversary of the start of Blogocentrism and as fate or some other abstract entity would have it I recently read two different accounts of the internet world . . . ("It's the End of the World as We Know It" 9/1)

October: The novel for class last week was H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay (1909), a long, rambling tale of rise and fall . . . ("Romance as Spectacle" 10/4)

November: I recently saw two films at WHC that complimented each other well, though they weren't shown together: Killer of Sheep (1977) by Charles Burnett and Pather Panchali (1955) by Satyajit Ray. ("Friday Night Films" 11/4)

December: This weekend I saw Todd Haynes' much ballyhooed I'm Not There -- an attempt to render homage to the Dylan mystique at plus two hours length. ("What a Drag It Is to See You" 12/3)

Other reflections on the year that was? I saw online a New Year's questionnaire (about the old year). Here's a few:

1. What did you do in 2007 that you’d never done before? saw the Vermeer and the Rembrandt in the Frick museum

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Two chapters on Pynchon's fiction

9. What was your biggest failure? Not finishing at least the 3rd chapter

11. What was the best thing you bought? Probably the laptop I just got (though actually my wife bought it). So, I guess my new watch.

16. What song will always remind you of 2007? "Wolf Like Me" by TV on the Radio

18. What do you wish you'd done more of? writing

26. What was the best book you read? re-read of The Good Soldier

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? that I could listen to a mix CD made by a twentysomething and like most of it

30. What was your favorite film of this year? The Darjeeling Limited

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007? they don't pay me enough to dress up for class

34. What kept you sane? the conversation of people who actually seem interested in what I say

36. What political issue stirred you the most? who the hell is going to replace W and what can be done about the sad state of things, in general

37. Who do you miss? anyone I've just spent some quality time with

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
oh and we carried it all so well
as if we got a new position
oh and I'll laugh all the way to hell
saying "yes this is a fine promotion"
oh and I'll laugh all the way to hell

of course everyone goes crazy over such and such and such
we made ourselves a pillar but we just used it as a crutch
we were certainly uncertain at least I'm pretty sure I am
well we didn't need the water we just built that good goddamn

oh and I know this of myself
and I assume as much for other people
oh and I know this of myself
we've listened more to life's end gong
than to the sound of life's sweet bells
--Modest Mouse, "Missed the Boat"