IN MEMORIAM: Robert Fagles, 1933-2008

Bob Fagles died on Wednesday, March 26. He was the founder of the Comp Lit Dept. from which I got my degree and was its only chairman until several years ago. Shortly after I got to Princeton, Fagles published his translation of the Iliad in 1990. In 1996 came the Odyssey. The Aeneid appeared in 2006. It's daunting to think he managed to do all that in so short a time. But I remember talking to him about his work habits: in the office every day, hours before the university began its operations, so that he could do his translating for the day before the office work began. Then, during any lulls that might occur, or even while taking calls and meetings, no doubt, he would turn over in his mind the choices he’d made for rendering whatever passage he’d been working on. Then, last thing before bed, he’d check over the passage and make sure he was still convinced by it.

I was pleased, while at Princeton, to think that the head of our department was a poet and translator rather than yet another literary critic or historian. And I was greatly pleased when he showed up at a reading I gave of my own poems while a grad student and stayed to offer a few kind words at the end. Fagles was “old school,” cut from that cloth that I associate with Auerbach and Curtius: the champions of that great canon of Western classics that stand -- apart from whatever ideologies the ideologues of the day find in them -- for rare achievements of human spirit, creativity, ingenuity, and, yes, genius. For Fagles the tradition was always vital and to recreate Homer and Vergil after his own fashion, in a muscular, brawny idiom that recalls cinematic effects of action and focus, was the kind of service that a poet / translator / scholar such as himself should be prepared to undertake. In other words, he had the moxie and the ability to look for the means to render these classics for an age rather less literary than when Robert Fitzgerald produced his version of the epic hat-trick.

When I told him I was reading his new translation of the Iliad aloud to my daughter, Fagles inscribed the book “to a comparatist and a friend who likes to read aloud -- the only way Homer should be read.” So let me close with Achilles’ greeting to Odysseus in the underworld, as rendered by Fagles:

Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, man of tactics,
reckless friend, what next?
What greater feat can that cunning head contrive?

THE CDS: 33.3

It was 2000. You could still smoke in bars in CT. I was at the drinking person's establishment of downtown New Haven, Rudy's, to hear 33.3. My introduction to their music had been a few years previous when they were one of the many local bands opening for Yo La Tengo's concert in the courtyard of Pierson College. I don't remember who else played that day, but a band with an electric guitar (Brian Alfred), a drum kit (Steven Walls), a double bass (William Noland) and a cello (Dominique Davison) was the sort of the thing that would get my attention. It was a lovely afternoon that first time I heard them and the memory of it was enough to get me to Rudy's, for the first time ever. Subsequently Rudy's would become the site of post-Pynchon seminar drinks on three occasions, and in a sense 33.3 inaugurated that too. Ah, local bands. There are precious few in my CD collection, so it pleases me to be able to start this account of the latter with a few words about this music.

I have two discs by the band: 33.3 and 33.3 Plays Music. The second, for which the Rudy's show was a CD release party, includes a trumpet/trombone player (Joseph Grimm) as well. All the better: percussion, strings, brass, each with its distinct voice offered so melodic and pristine. On CD the tracks blend with one another so well it's hard to keep them straight; it's perfect coffee-shop background music: unobtrusive but inflected with the kind of rhythms and graceful transitions that stimulate forms of internal attention, like reading, writing, spacing out.

It's not spacey music though — I suppose if I had to characterize it I'd call it "architectural garden music." It makes me think of comfortable urban spaces -- plazas maybe, with landscaping and interesting styling in the stone and wood surfaces. It could also be perfect soundtrack music for that contemplative train ride the heroine of your alternative film takes somewhere in the third act. The song on right now, "The Odds," communicates, when the horn starts that clipped staccato sound at the end, the arrival after a long journey. And then it segues into one of my favorites, "An Open Letter to Buckminster Fuller," where the guitar and the cello complement each other so well, creating this lovely floating texture that then gets stirred a bit by the trombone . . . a feeling as of an incipient encounter just around the corner because those guitar lines are so perky, so clearly up for something, but still mellow, y'know, not at all desperate or distracted. At times I pick up traces of a sound I associate with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass -- as on the fifth track, "Oval Cast as a Circle," where the tempo is just a little bit cha-cha and the horns, while never "hot," have some spice.

Probably my favorite is the concluding track: "An Evening in Park Slope." It's a slow crawl at first, tentative and still getting the lay of the land, but when the strings come in we feel an elegiac tension. It could say a lot about the light on brownstones perhaps, but it also says something about that kind of trip around the block in which the flow of a prolonged thought ebbs away like ripples in a pond, till you barely hear the instruments in their long fade.

In person, 33.3 was more dynamic. There was a lot more tension in the music, it seemed to grope more and to crescendo (drums in Rudy's make a big noise), not with abandon, but with the energy of a packed room the size of a double garage. I don't know if the band is still together, but I imagine that wherever I go and whatever I do, this music will stand for turn of the century New Haven on a November night. I'll drink to that.

RACING TO THE WHITE HOUSE

It’s thirty years since the campaign of 1968, the year the Democratic Party lost the ability to command the presidency, pretty much regularly, but for two anomalies: the switch to Carter in ‘76 -- because of the backlash to Nixon’s mis-doings and Ford’s ineffectual leadership (a backlash that wasn’t sustained for more than a term), and the election of Clinton in ‘92, in part a backlash to Bush I’s misguided leadership, but more properly seen as a surge of interest in an exciting new candidate, where the key to the popular vote was a larger number of voters of the Baby Boomer generation choosing to vote for one of their own. I think it also didn’t hurt that Clinton was not a Washington insider, that his so-called “inexperience” included inexperience with the business-as-usual Beltway pros who had come to dominate politics in the ‘80s. I’m not saying Clinton actually lived up to that perception, and part of the disinclination with the former First Lady is with the degree to which a “Clinton machine” aims not simply to elect its candidate but seeks to become synonymous with the best interests of the Democratic Party.

If that were true, the Democrats would have to accept Hillary Clinton as the only candidate possibly able to defeat the Republican candidate. In other words, they would have to rest on the assumption that the Clinton machine together with the historic candidacy of a female presidential nominee would entail enough strength to best whatever the Republicans came up with. And since you can usually judge a Party’s strength by the strength of their candidate in any given year, things would bode well for a Clinton election: McCain is not the kind of candidate that will command the unquestioning support of his Party; as such he’s a candidate much closer to some of the lackadaisical candidates the Democrats came up with when they had to run against Nixon’s re-election, Reagan’s re-election, or the first Bush’s candidacy. Actually, I think McCain has a better chance with the general public than McGovern, Mondale or Dukakis did, but, even so, he, like them, is a candidate unlikely to galvanize his Party like Reagan did or Clinton did for the Democrats.

What Barack Obama brings to that scenario is closer to the excitement of Bill Clinton’s initial candidacy, but he also is able to present an intelligent and convincing distance from the kind of hack political machinery that the Clintons have become synonymous with. And it’s that political machinery which was the undoing of the Democrats in 1968.

What is significant about that year is that it’s the year when the forces in the Democratic Party that were against the war in Vietnam as the primary policy in need of change, vied for a voice in the Party that had itself started that war -- and which could not officially renounce it. What many in the Party, and not just the young, were looking for was a leadership that could say “we were wrong, let’s do something about it.” That tension pulled the Democrats apart and created a large-scale disillusion with the Party -- when the endorsement of Humphrey was perceived as an endorsement of Johnson’s policies and thus a “stay the course” mentality about the war. I don’t get the sense that the Republican party today is suffering anything like the internal dissension and soul-searching of the Democrats of that year, but to the degree that there is any dissension at all, it weakens the united front of party politics. On the Democrats side, this year, the war isn’t “their” war (to make that clear Obama perhaps stresses Senator Clinton’s vote for the war more than is strictly necessary, but it does help to focus the reason why the war should be distanced from the Democrats -- to allow them the role of cleaning up the other team’s mess as Nixon claimed to be able to do). And this adds to the strength of the Party seeking the presidency rather than the one already holding it, as it did in ‘68.

But to me the significant lesson of ‘68 is how ineffectual the Democrats can become when they allow themselves to be dominated by the dissensions in their Party. Some films I saw recently about the ‘68 election -- one on Gene McCarthy, the other on Nixon -- demonstrated, in juxtaposition, the dramatic difference in the two Parties’ view of the country and of their relation to their constituency. McCarthy was part of the soul-searching, criticizing a sitting Democratic president, attempting to articulate a new groundswell within the Party; Nixon was speaking as the candidate for law and order who would be able to end the war “with honor,” but whose main task was to turn the country away from its vocal and attention-getting radical minority. It worked. The Republicans, if bland and vaguely authoritarian, promoting the self-interest of the powerful in their Party, are generally successful at the united front, the sense that their ideological message is born of a kind of common sense populism that has always been the backbone of successful politics in this country. The Democrats never have that: the Democrats have to try to articulate a “common vision” that can include a disparate collectivity of special groups, interests, and diversity. Their strength is that they seem to welcome so many different voices into the discussion, their weakness is that it’s very hard to effectively represent those views -- to walk the political line that can negotiate the minefield of the political tensions of the day.

And the effort to do that is what often makes the Democrats seem so inefficient, confused, contradictory. The Republican candidate can often stand strong on a platform that essentially equates with “not a Democrat” -- which means not “weak,” not “liberal,” not “bleeding-heart,” not a racial, ethnic mix, not insufficiently manly, etc, etc. But this time those last two qualities might be key to the defeat of the Republican’s manly white-bread old school candidate. And that’s why Obama’s recent speech about race was necessary. Because the Democrats, unlike their counterparts, have always recognized race as an issue, as something that the dominant white politics of the Republican Party has never effectively dealt with since the untimely death of Abraham Lincoln. And what Obama was able to articulate -- for the first time by any elected official, let alone one seeking a more powerful, important office -- was the bigotry on both sides of the black-white divide, the grudges, the uneasiness, the -- to use the word that has come to have a psychological rather than political tinge -- issues.

It’s fitting, certainly. If there is going to be a black man in the White House, then he should have something to say about race -- a point of view that neither McCain nor Clinton (for all her standing on her husband’s record) can articulate. Whether or not Obama becomes president, he has at least contributed a level of lucidity to one of the underlying problems with the Democratic Party -- how united can that “rainbow coalition” ever truly be? -- and has put it on the table as a rallying point rather than a nagging, skeptical doubt. I’d like to think the Democratic Party will be stronger for that, and that they won’t, as they did in ‘68, let the party-hack machinery decide the outcome of the Convention. Humphrey had a “faultless” record on civil rights too, and he backed the war, and he won the nomination in the name of business as usual, to the distress of many who then abandoned the Party . . . to the Republicans’ gain.

LESSER LESSING

Finally made it through recent Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing’s Love, Again (1996), not a read I’d particularly recommend. I find myself wondering why the novel isn’t better than it is. I haven’t read a great deal of Lessing -- and of course they can’t all be The Golden Notebook (1962), her masterpiece -- but this one seemed lackluster in several ways. And it’s not as if the topic wasn’t interesting: a woman in her 60s suddenly finding herself in love with a married man considerably younger. In fact, I read it in hopes that a major female novelist would be able to get at the heart of the phenomenon known as the May-December romance, but this time from a point of view rather different than its usual version, i.e., May, female -- December, male.

There is effort expended to give us a feel for what love -- not unrequited but unconsummated -- can do to people old enough to know better, and also old enough to know this is the last time such desires and emotional disruptions are likely to happen in a lifetime:

"By early summer Sarah’s anguish had lessened to the point that she would say it had gone. [. . . ] She stood in a landscape like that before the sun comes up, one suffused with a quiet, flat, truthful light where people, buildings, trees, stand about waiting to become defined by shadow and by sunlight. This is the landscape recommended for adults. Over the horizon, somewhere else, was a place, a world, of tenderness and trust, and she was removed from it not by distance but because it was in another dimension. This was right, was as things should be . . . but the parallel line continued, of feeling. For if she was removed from grief, she was removed too (her emotions insisted) from that intimacy which is like putting your hand into another hand, while currents of love flow between them."

But there just isn’t enough effort to make the far too teeming cast truly interesting or involving. In part because it seems that Lessing wasn’t satisfied with simply taking on the logistics of the disparate romance per se, but wanted to combine it with observation of the folk who dedicate themselves to local theater groups and who make up the troupes, and of the differences between upperclass English and provincial French, where putting on plays is concerned, as well as of problems with marriage -- when you marry a woman not for love and she ends up taking on a female lover -- and with raising children -- when your brother and his wife can’t manage their kid and you end up having to look after her, sort of.

In other words, the novel is busy, busy, busy but it often seems like busywork. As if Lessing wasn’t convinced her heroine Sarah, if only left to her ineffectual longing, would be enough to sustain a novel. But, in my view, the only reason she doesn’t is that Lessing doesn’t invest all that much emotional resonance in Sarah or any of the plights she’s faced with -- over men, over that brother’s kid, Joyce, or over the fact that the play her group -- The Green Bird -- is dedicated to, gets revamped in a more commercial and less artistically satisfying version. Then there’s all the effort expended in the novel’s opening sequences to create interest in the heroine of that play, a composer named Julie Vairon -- even going so far as to make an initial investor, Stephen, the tragic figure of the novel, suffer a kind of unconsummated love in his longing for a woman dead before he was alive. But that plot element becomes rather empty because we only experience Stephen’s longing through Sarah’s take on it, which is to say it seems like someone else’s private obsession and not something we have a lot of basis for empathy with, or, which is fatal for this kind of novel, much intimacy with. Far too often in this novel, particularly in the final third, we’re just reading about situations, not inhabiting them.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MUSIC?

It seems my resolution to write about albums, pairing 1968 and 1978 -- 40 and 30 years ago, respectively -- has fallen by the wayside. I'm not sure why, but neither of those two years is forming a big draw on my imagination at the moment. As it is I don't really want to be reminded of May '68, as will no doubt happen a few months from now, nor do I want to reminisce about the fiasco of the '68 Democratic Convention as that always somehow disappointing political party grinds toward the conclusion of Campaign 2008. 

And '78? Whatever that year meant to me personally has been more or less told -- in distorted fictional fashion -- in Between Days. So why belabor the music of that year when in fact the music that mattered most to me at the time, with rare exceptions, was released in the '67 to '75 window? But, excuses aside, I still feel a lack on this here blog. Talking books and films is one thing, but there should be some acknowledgment, at least monthly, of the art form that has provided the glue of my very being, that put the "elf" in myself, or something. So I think I'm going to take a cue from my blogging friend who has been writing up his entire collection of 45s and devise a scheme for cataloging, commenting as I go. No, hold on, I'm not going to start commenting on every damn album I own -- my record player's not functioning properly anyway, so vinyl is temporarily off-limits -- nor every CD. But it strikes me as possible to just go down the list of bands I own CDs by, indulging in that oddly autobiographical and confessional mode that seems to spring to the fore whenever we start talking about the music we buy and listen to. It's even more revealing than sordid tales of our lovers, y'know, because passing few of us (I suspect) are as promiscuous in our choice of bed partners as we are in our choice of what we stick in our CD players and in our ears. 

Some people might find similar thrills of self-exposure in writing about their diet, or their ailments, or their family members (no pun intended), but for me -- make mine music! It's the only way to attest to the truth of that line in the film Hi-Fidelity which I assume is also in the novel: "Fetish properties are not unlike porn." Amen. I was in a CD store this past Sunday, on the first day of Daylight Savings, and that's what it was like, some profane combination of church confessional and adult video booth. We were all peeking into a world that might get us off, might redeem us, might offer temptation or salvation. 

Which makes me think -- not fortuitously, since I've got to re-commence the stalled Pynchon critical commentary apparatus or else (else what? interesting question, whatever whatever nevermind, as someone said) -- of this passage from The Crying of Lot 49, set in a radio studio and depicting Mucho Maas looking through the soundproof glass at one of his colleagues with a headset clamped on and cueing the next record with movements stylized as the handling of chrism, censer, chalice might be for a holy man, yet really tuned in to the voices, voices, the music, its message, surrounded by it, digging it, as were all the faithful it went out to . . . Yeeeeah. 

And this one goes out to the one I love, and the message is the medium. In any case, I'm just gonna listen to a CD by whoever is next on the alphabetical list and comment accordingly, at whatever intervals I deem suitable. And in this way shall the days and months pass, and thus shall the museum tour / montage / parade transpire. And, where applicable, I'll give credit to whoever was responsible for getting me to listen to a particular artist or definitive album as a way of tipping the phantom Panama to the tastes that have abetted the formation of mine. Sounds like a plan, a way to register one's passing attention to what's past, and passing, and to come, as we go sailing to Byzantium...

CINEMATIC SUBLIME

Last Friday night the WHC featured the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, an avant-garde filmmaker whose career began in 1964. The four films I saw comprise a series that Dorsky made from 1996 to 2001, collectively entitled “Cinematic Songs”: Triste, Variations, Arbor Vitae, Love’s Refrain. All four, shot in 16mm and shown at 18fps rather than the 24fps of sound film, follow much the same format: silent, no soundtrack, comprised of discrete shots or brief clips that have no direct continuity with one another. Watching the films is at times like watching a slide show in which the subjects of the individual slides move and the slides vary in their duration and during which the camera can move. And of course the switch from shot to shot creates juxtapositions, “sequences” of a sort. But there is no narrative, no logical connection between scenes.

The images themselves are fascinating, beautiful, compelling: a plastic bag blowing at random over a space of sidewalk, buildings dissolving in the penumbra of tree branches shaking in gusts of wind, rain on surfaces, on windows, light, of all kinds in all places, animals appearing suddenly in their gestalt purity, cars moving in slow motion or, in one lovely, estranging sequence, shown in negative crossing a bridge, street scenes, street crossings, umbrellas, trains, an almost dreamlike sequence in which one contemplates the shadow of an overhead train as it passes over a network of girders below -- one shot particularly striking is from above some people on an ocean overlook while a long, beautifully formed wave streams into the scene converting the water’s surface to foam: it’s not simply that the wave does its job well and is wonderfully picturesque; the foreground of lights and darks where a few figures look over the wall or walk along the walkway glows with late daylight and the angle of the shot is such that the wave extends beyond the frame above and the wall below. There are any number of moments like this. Time and again Dorsky shows himself a master of framing, of depth of field. Another favorite was an insect crawling along a garden hose that is running. The shot is in closeup and the hose and the water seem to form an unbroken continuity except that one part is solid and one part is in motion, emptying to the right of the screen. Enter the insect from the left, crawling, as we watch fascinated, toward the tip of the hose only to stop just at the threshold between solid and liquid.

The visual poetry of these films is like nothing I’ve ever seen in movies, to this extent, and the sheer visual pleasure they afford struck me in two ways: in the first place, it made me think of my own engagement with the visual properties of the world. I found myself contemplating how one first experienced light on water, shadows on surfaces, rain, insects, birds in flight or walking, cars and other shiny objects as reflective surfaces; the films seemed to bring to mind the mind of a child, simply fascinated by what he sees because he is seeing. There needs no explanation or excuse for looking, for watching light change, or, as it were, grass grow. The level of fascination one finds in the images Dorsky records I think has to do with one’s ability to recall those initial moments of wonder in the face of the world’s variety of color, movement, shape, illumination.

Then there’s the second thought that occupied me at various times: why is it that cinema, as it is generally practiced, is so incapable of such contemplative moments of pure imagery, of just letting the camera run to catch the light of day, the signs of the weather, the actual flora and fauna of the setting -- those things that poets attest to the sublimity of time and again, and which was once the province of the brush of the representational painter, willing to make the viewer stand in a certain place and see a view of the world? Why are our images so often at the service of story?

As one who was always able to stand long and rapt before amazing handling of paint as a rendering of light, and who was disappointed by cameras that never seemed able to render the subtlety the eye is capable of, and who has always appreciated random moments and shots in narrative films that serve no particular purpose but simply give us something memorable to look at, I am grateful to Dorsky for these films, and to the Film Study Program at WHC for showing them.

Elle est retouvée!
-- Quoi? -- l’Eternité.
C’est la mer mêlée
Au soleil.
–Rimbaud

“SOME CHICKLITS...?”*

I suppose my recent foray into male-centered Western sagas of bonding, agon and identity must have propelled me to the other end of the pendulum-swing: to female-centered urban sagas of bonding, agon and identity -- in this case Alison Lurie’s novel The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988). The novel follows the experiences of Polly Alter as she attempts to research a biography of enigmatic painter Lorin Jones, née Laura Zimmern, a task that she expects to give her grounds for an exposure of the patriarchial art establishment (due to her subject’s unearned neglect and bad handling), but which leads her to grasp (gasp!) that things are more complicated than that.

Beginning as a crusader for Lorin, Polly comes to find the painter not wholly to her liking, and, this is the point again and again, foolish hetero-female that she is, she can’t help sympathizing with the males she meets who were close to the taciturn, difficult, withdrawn, neurotic and self-centered Jones. But males are supposed to be the enemy -- at least that’s what Polly’s closest friend, a sympathetic but ultimately self-centered lesbian named Jeanne says -- and poor Polly just can’t seem to toe the correct ideological line. That, such as it is, is the comic premise of this good-natured riff on the gender wars of those quaintly assertive and oh-so-politically correctional 80s. Though, truth be told, the setting seems much more late 70s to me. No matter, Jones died in 1969 and this is about twenty-years later; no need to check your zeitgeist, alas, for Lurie does nothing to make the different eras live as anything more than dates on a registry of events. No effort is made to bring art as an occurrence with distinct periods and premises into focus either.

I’m not sure the novel qualifies as “chick lit,” which I believe is an appellation it predates, but the prose reminded me of nothing so much as all those Ramona books by Beverly Cleary that I dutifully read and re-read to my daughter in the mid-80s. Perhaps, since Lurie teaches children’s literature as well as writing, this resemblance is not coincidental. My sense is that Lurie set out to give us a more adult version of the experience of reading Ramona books. The point of comparison? The way that Cleary was able to delight young readers by creating a feisty heroine who didn’t always know what was what. The pleasure of figuring something out before Ramona did and then watching her realize the truth and deal with it was what made her a good vicarious figure.

I can’t say the same for Polly, for she’s too pro forma for her own good. Lurie can’t stop giving her internal “reaction shots” to virtually everything anyone says or does. It gets tedious in the extreme. And the other characters she deals with remind me of the sorts of figures one encounters in second-rate mystery stories: believable enough as “types,” but never anything more. This might work well enough if Lurie’s novel were a mystery -- it sorta is, but only sorta. In other words, there is, it is hinted, a “truth” about Jones to be discovered, but it amounts to nothing more than the fact that everyone who knows a person “owns” a different version of that person -- and none of those portraits are wholly coherent with one another. The Truth reads like a made-for-TV version of the kind of novel Nabokov liked to write, in which a protagonist -- often a narrator -- comes to grips (or not) with the fact that the narrated world can only behave like the mind of the protagonist. But that remark gives this novel too much credit.

So why did I read it? Well, I wasn’t feeling well, and this novel struck me as a kind of breezy, easy read that would be the literary equivalent of the kinds of films my wife likes to watch, e.g. The Devil Wears Prada, Miss Potter. Which is to say, I guess, that I was indeed looking for a ‘chick-lit experience.’ And, certainly, Lurie provides some of that: a female protagonist led by gusts of emotion, coming to the hard realization that she doesn’t really want to resist a certain guy, but would rather give in, even as she discovers that women -- yes, even lesbians -- can live up to the bad press women get from men, and that men, while always self-serving and assertive where women are concerned, can still be surprisingly sympathetic because they are, after all, men (and here I have to say I’m too inured by marriage to jaundiced comments on males who assume themselves to be more attractive, intelligent, interesting, and successful than they actually are to find much sting in Polly’s caustic inner-bitch comments, and have been “awareness-raised” enough to find her easy capitulations maddening). Even more disappointing was the fact that Lurie’s version of “the art world” is wayyyy thinner than academia chez David Lodge and seems to exist in some TV sitcom world -- the influential art critic Garrett Jones to whom Lorin had been married kinda reminded me of Thurston Howell for some reason.

Which brings up my last thought: had this been a film, it could’ve been way more palatable. First of all it would’ve taken 90-100 minutes to watch, rather than the greater part of the day to read, and second of all, a few well-chosen character actors could’ve animated these stiffs and made them, if not interesting, at least charming. Ah, Hollywood, come back, all is forgiven. Oh well, like Rimbaud always sez: “j’ai vu l’enfer des femmes là-bas.”

*If you, hypocrite lecteur, can identify the film my title is sorta lifted from, then, well, I’m not saying I’m going to PayPal beacoup de bucks on yer ass, but, you get the Gold Star from Hell, or something. No fair googlin’.