Some Fun With Goethe

"What is this bullshit??"

In the spirit of Monday's thing at U Penn (for those who were there), a little something regarding translation.

So, today I was reading Robert Hass' book "Time and Materials" and came across this piece:

"After Goethe"

In all the mountains,
Stillness;
In the treetops
Not a breath of wind.
The birds are silent in the woods.
Just wait: soon enough
You will be quiet too.

-tr. Robert Hass

I had to smile because I recognized this as a pretty faithful translation of a short Goethe poem I'd taken a stab at translating myself about a year ago. After some searching I found the notebook I'd written it down in and was pleased to find that my two attempts were fairly close to Hass', although perhaps leaning a bit more towards literal accuracy or poetic license in either direction.

The more literal first gloss:

"Wanderer's Night Song"

Over all summits
is peace,
in every treetop
you sense
scarcely a breath.
The little birds are silent in the forest.
But wait, soon
you too will rest.

Second try:

"Traveler's Night Song"

All summits stand
in silence,
the sense of stillness
in every breathless treetop.
The little birds are silent in the forest.
Wait a moment- soon
you too will be at rest.

And here's the original:

"Wandrer's Nachtlied"

Uber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spurest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

As you can see there's a lovely ABAB CDDC rhyme scheme in the original that is lost. Also notice the phrase "Spurest du Kaum einen Hauch." Spuren denotes a kind of active sensory awareness that isn't quite "feels" and isn't quite "senses" and isn't quite "intuits." It's a great word that loses something in the act of translation.

So there's my little foray into some of the issues we heard about earlier this week. I guess my point is that even at a largely amateur level, or in a rather casual attempt at even a poem as short and sweet as this one, you find yourself grappling with pretty sticky issues of meaning and form. 

Are any of the translations "good"? Well, that depends. As far as I'm concerned, all three give a fairly close account of the surface meaning of Goethe's original poem. None of them claim, for example, that "silence lay all around the townhall" or that the little squirrels of the wood were all silent. Do they exist as "good" poems, then? Insofar as all three hue closely to Goethe's fairly simple and stark language, it isn't a stretch to say that each also retains some of the power of his imagery. While obviously of the three Hass' is the most accomplished stylistically, each manages to escape the long traverse of language with some imagistic integrity intact. 

As much as any poem can derive weight and virtue from what it's "about" then it must be fair to say that each of these translations is roughly (very roughly) as good as Goethe's. But that, of course, is absurd, if you just end it there. Poetry exists as sound as well as text (well, yeah) and in that sense all three translations are clumsy, piecemeal attempts to catch up to something organic and liberated. Even if you don't know any German, try reading Goethe's original out loud. The cadence flows and halts, starts at a sharp sound and resumes motion with trepidation-- it capitulates the movement of a traveler moving through an unsettlingly silent wilderness at night even without the benefit of the reader knowing what each word means. 

I can't speak for prose-- we've all heard, I guess, how much Dostoyevsky for example benefits from translation-- but in poetry, a translation can be effective, it can be smart, it can even be beautiful, but it is ultimately and necessarily a losing game. 

Kicking Against the Tricks: Reading Cervantes' Duchess and the Duke

I guess it's one of those little commonplace "fun facts" about literature that Nabokov wasn't a big fan of Don Quixote. His lectures on the book are uncharacteristically nit-picky and pedantic, with a kind of catty undertone that usually only comes out in personal interviews. However, there's one point that he strikes on that other critics tend to skirt around, or dress up in equivocations:

"Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia or cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic."

Maybe this goes a little ways in illuminating Nabokov's distaste, for who, in the 20th century, comes so close to matching Cervantes' theatrical cruelty? I think its fair to say that Nabokov approached fiction like a grandmaster; all of his novels set up the pieces and maneuver them into position for a killing stroke. His cruelty is controlled and, sometimes, cold. 

Don Quixote on the other hand maintains a definite warmth for the big D and Sancho despite putting them through the wringer. The narrative voice throughout is curious; its easy at the start to read its praise of the characters as ironic, but as the novel progresses, particularly in the second part, its hard not to feel that the sardonic irony of the narrator is splitting, with the world becoming crueller and the characters becoming less ridiculous and more sublime. And, remarkably, the reader shifts from being complicit in the universe's tricks against Quixote to being almost another dupe at points. 

The key incident here is the episode of Sancho Panza's governorship. How can you not feel a little elated, about halfway through Part Two, when the duke finally bestows an insula on the long-suffering squire? All these fantasies and deceptions and everybody getting the shit knocked out of them and now, man, at last he gets what he wants. 

Except, of course he doesn't. Everything that's been promised in the novel so far has been false; everything the duke and the duchess, in particular, have shown has been an elaborate prank on the novel's two heros. Why should this be any different? Soon we're even told that the population of the village is in on the scheme, that everything has been set up in advance. Still, incredibly, the reader insists on a bit of optimism that Cervantes obligingly stokes. This entire sequence of events, when the certainty that Sancho's reward isn't genuine struggles against the hope that it is, constitutes for me some of the most heartbreaking tension in the history of the novel. 

"We need to hold in mind as we read Don Quixote that we cannot condescend to the Knight and Sancho, since together they know more than we do," writes Harold Bloom. The funny thing is, for 900-odd pages the narrator does just that-- the entire novel is the process of coming to rebel against the narrator, and by extension the audience of the first part of the novel who make up most of the second part's cast. Because at the root of it, the duke and the duchess are the reader, or at least the image of what the reader once was, a few hundred pages ago-- they read Don Quixote as a funny adventure story, and they view Quixote himself as inherently ridiculous. And let's be fair, for almost 500 pages he is, before Cervantes pulls the rug out from under himself.

When the reader crosses that strange border of empathy and comes to hold the duchess and the duke in contempt, what he's really doing is looking a few hundred pages back at himself. This is Cervantes' miracle, his benediction where Nabokov would be springing his trap. Don Quixote is a novel that teaches us how to read it in showing us ourselves as readers. Laughing, we're all the fucking awful duchess and duke; fooled by affection into hoping for a happy resolution, we're all Quixote. 

"#ode @GrecianUrn": New Media Micro-poems For July

So every month this year, I've been setting little goals for myself-- sort of a way to break the traditional ominous monolithic New Years Resolution into reasonable chunks. Anyway, it doesn't matter what I did these previous months, but for July I've decided to try to post, every day, a 140-character or less prose poem on popular micro-blogging website Twitter (if you still don't know what that is you can ask your mom or your dad and they can maybe help you set one up). 

This is an idea I've kicked around for awhile, and if I was still an undergrad I think I would've liked to have done another Summer Fellows project based around it, but, ah well, I guess I'm just doing it for fun. Ideally, this will not only be a neat exercise in working around fairly strict formal constraints, but an experiment with how poetry functions in relationship to new social media (and an opportunity to thaw out my prose poetry chops).

Of course this isn't an entirely new idea; short fiction in particular has been getting shorter and shorter over the past few decades, and poets have been churning out epigrams since before Martial. Still, the idea of ultimate conciseness and economy is something that grabs every writer at some point, and holds an undeniable allure. Italo Calvino, in writing about Quickness as a literary ideal in Six Memos for the Next Millenium, writes

I would like to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I haven't found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso: "Cuando desparto, el dinosauro todavia estaba alli" (When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there).

(and of course, how much of Stein's Tender Buttons could easily fit into Twitter's narrow text-boxes?)

Anyway, if you'd like to see what I come up with, I invite you to follow my experiment here  (new account so I don't bug people who don't give a shit about poems). I'll be right up front and say there's a perhaps 75% chance this will be a trainwreck, but hopefully it will at least be an interesting one.

Guest-Article on "The Devil's Accountant"

In lieu of a for-reals update, have a look at a guest-article I wrote for Paul Oliver's terrific lit-blog The Devil's Accountant. Oliver used to be the co-owner of my all-time favorite bookstore, Wolfgang Books in Phoenixville, and he's been doing a great job of turning the spotlight on some obscure gems. 

This month has been singled out in particular as "Lost Books Month," looking at the unjustly obscure, untranslated, and out-of-print, so I contributed a piece on Iain Sinclair's gorgeous and hallucinogenic poem/essay Lud Heat. Read it here  and dig into the archives while you're at it.

"Cool Toys From Outer Space": Is Christian Bok a mad genius or an anti-poet?

Here's Christian Bok, interviewed in the latest Believer about his upcoming project:

 The Xenotext Project is responding to the millenial science of genetics. I'm trying to write a book of poetry in which I translate a single poem, through a process of encipherment, into a sequence of genetic nucleotides, and then, with the assistance of scientists, I plan to build this genetic sequence in a laboratory so that I can implant the gene into a bacterium, replacing a portion of its genome with my text. The bacterium would, in effect, be the poem.

 I've selected an organism that is widely regarded to be the most unkillable bacterium on the planet, an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans. [...] The microbe is basically so durable that, if I were to store a poem in the matrix of this organism, I would effectively be creating a literary artifact that (except perhaps for the Pioneer probes and the Voyager probes) would be one of the few objects so far created by humans to outlast terrestrial civilization itself. I am hoping, in effect, to write a book that would still be on the planet Earth when the sun explodes. I guess that this project is a kind of ambitious attempt to think about art, quite literally, as an eternal endeavor.

 I think the idea is fascinatingly weird and pretty beautiful on the conceptual level. However, this also strikes me as one of those ideas that's a lot more fulfilling to think about than to actually experience. 

 For example, Bok's most famous collection Eunoia, has a similarly high concept conceit-- each of the book's parts relies on one noun. Its the kind of baldly Oulipean poetic escape-artistry that makes writers like myself who still use their hands to count out iambs whistle through our teeth and sweat about the brow in sympathy. Here's the thing though-- Eunoia impresses because of the difficulty involved in writing it, not for the writing itself. Here's a sample from Chapter I:

 Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks-- impish hijinx which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing schtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz-- griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplistic thinking, in which phillipic wit is still illicit.

 I admire the acrobatics required to get that far, but I come away feeling like he hit the nail on the head in the excerpt's self-lacerating first part. "Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic?" he writes, and I have to say that's where it seems to end as well. It's a kind of stunt poetry.

 Of course none of this is new. You can look at the dada poets drawing words at random out of a hat and contextualizing the result as poetry, or Perec's A Void, a novel which excluded the letter E, or Queneau's Exercises in Style, or Tsepeneg's Vain Art of the Fugue and so on up to recent mainstream successes such as Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Let's even throw in hypertextual experiments like Pale Fire, Dictionary of the Kazhars, and Hopscotch.

 All of the above books I would call successful, more or less, at what they set out to do-- or at least I can say that upon finishing them I felt a pleasure and contentment that more than matched the preliminary excitement/amusement at their respective "trifling gimmicks" (to borrow Bok's phrasing). So what's the distinction, setting aside the rather brutal and pointless-to-argue discussion of fundamental authorial merits? 

I kind of want to look at it as a question of longevity-- a gauge of the work's ability to know just how long to draw itself out, when to stop doing tricks and either end or become something deeper. 

 In the first case, you have the dadas, who moved onto something new whenever audiences (or themselves) became comfortable with a spectacle. After all, if you expect it, it's barely a spectacle. It was all about transience, about keeping in a constant state of agitated "revolution" (or novelty, whatever)-- if they were diligent about anything it was about not letting a schtick live long enough to become stale. I'd also group the Oulipeans here, whose experiments are mostly play for the sake of play, completely ludic and unassuming. Queaneau's book is a lot of fun, but not much more than that, and it doesn't pretend to anything more than that, which is fine. P&P&Z, similarly, is a good joke that, while maybe not worth 14 bucks, is content with being read and laughed at and then forgotten about. Think of Artaud's quote, "Written poetry is worth reading once, then should be destroyed," or Bolano's Ramierz Hoffman writing poems in airplane-exhaust-- the obsalesance is not only forgivable but integral. Of course, speaking of Bolano, you also have the trick he and Borges pull off so well of sketching out a particular idea for a narrative or a literary movement in the context of a fictional bibliographic universe-- I love reading about Menard's Quixote but I don't know if I'd want to read Menard's Quixote itself.

 The other option, of course, is to give the reader a reason to give a shit beyond the initial oohs and ahhs of formal contortion. Pale Fire is a great, great novel, and not just because of the whole foot-note conceit. Same with Vain Art of the Fugue, which takes Queaneau's pleasantly glib idea (variations on "man walks onto a bus and..." and turns it into an existential love story. Then there are cases where the virtuosity is less tied up with the integrity of the narrative, but is sort of icing on the cake of a good story. Meno's novel gets some great ironic moments out of its Encyclopedia Brown trappings, but it would still be a good read without the decoder ring and cake recipes. 

 Its this latter category of books, the Nabokov and Calvino masterpieces, that I admire the most-- experiments are great, but without an emotional anchor it begins to feel cold and empty after a little while, overly clever at best and downright masturbatory at worst. I think this is where Bok and I most fundamentally disagree. In the same interview I quoted above, he says:

 To write a poem nowadays is tantamount to visiting a pioneer village, where you watch someone hammer out a horseshoe. To write a poem is to knit a doily for a candy dish. [...] I definitely want to make discoveries about language, and I think that poets are like the technicians at Area 51, reverse-engineering alien tools for use in the human world. I doubt that I'm going to get to play with cool toys from outer space if I do nothing more than write emotive, lyrical poems about my intimate, personal life. I think that poets need to be more ambitious.

 I think he's missing the point-- I think the kind of poem he dismisses there is precisely the most ambitious. It opens up the most guarded workings of another human life to the reader, it creates a relationship between reader, text, and author that is deeply humanizing. I admire his ambition (I guess), but it's the attempt to engage the living world through language that makes a great poet, not an attempt to engage language qua language  through language. What's his end goal?

 I'll end with another quote about technical innovation in poetry, from the opposite side of the spectrum. From the Preface to Paradise Lost:

 The measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched meter and lame meter; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have explained them.

 What good is a formal constraint if it isn't for the greater benefit of the poem? When the technical limitations of your project prevent you from expressing what you've actually set out to say, there's no reason to hold onto it. I'm still impressed by the idea behind Bok's biological poem, but I hope that that starting motive isn't the end of his investment in it. I think a bad, hollow poem outliving the human race might be worse than no poem at all. 

 

 

 

Ammons' Ommatium

 A.R. Ammons isn't what I'd normally describe as a "visionary" in the way you'd call Blake or Whitman visionary-- the term has a connotation of almost delirious freedom to it, a sense of the poet's work belonging totally to itself, as independent from context as a plateau or a grizzly bear or whatever. A naive formulation of the idea, I guess, but it's the sense that I get reading those two poets, while Ammons (sort of like Gary Snyder) brings a zen-like control and restraint to his poetry. If Whitman is being bowled over by the waterfall, then Ammons is the focused appreciation of a lone drop. "The Story," for example, in its entirety from Brink Road:

"Oblivion keeps the caterpillar bright."

It has a haiku-like economy that's really striking, and even in his longer works there's the sense that every single syllable has a real heft to it.

Recently I read Norton's 2006 reprinting of ommateum with Doxology, Ammons' first collection, out of print since 1955. There's vintage Ammons right off the bat, mixing dictions, in this case theological and taxonomical: a Doxology is a kind of praise song, and an ommateum is the kind of compound eye some insects have. It's an apt title (as well as one that's fun to say and makes you feel like a real fancy brilliant guy), as the collection is most striking when it diverges from what you'd expected from Ammons, mixing in generous parts Whitman and Blake, a Whitmanesque song of praise to the natural world focused through a perspective as gorgeously alien and inscrutable as Blake's densest material. 

According to the introduction, Ammons wrote it hot on the heels of a Whitman binge, and it shows-- there's a broader scope and feeling of surrender (or not? More of an offering up of the speaker, maybe) to nature ("The grass miracles have kept me down all autumn," or , as well as a use of prophetic, mystic-ish diction that does sort of remind me of Blake in its inscrutable and yet somehow complete-feeling esoteric cosmology. Here are the 16th and then the very first sections of "Doxology," which show-case both of these features nicely:

"Coming to Sumer and the tamarisks on the river

I Ezra with unsettling love

rifled the mud and wattle huts

for recent mournings

with gold leaves

and lapis lazuli beads

in the neat braids loosening from the skull

Looking through the wattles to the sun

I said

It has rained some here in this place

unless snow falls heavily in the hills

to do this

The floor was smooth with silt

and river weeds hanging grey

on the bent reeds spoke saying

Everything is here as you can see

Firing the huts

I abandoned the unprofitable poor

unequal even in the bone

to disrespect

and casual with certainty

watched an eagle wing as I went

to kind and priest."

"So I said I am Ezra

and the wind whipped my throat

gaming for the sounds of my voice

I listened to the wind

go over my head and up into the night

Turning to the sea I said

I am Ezra

but there were no echoes from the waves

The words were swallowed up

in the voice of the surf

or leaping over the swells

lost themselves oceanward

Over the bleached and broken fields

I moved my feet and turning from the wind

that ripped sheets of sand

from the beach and threw them

like seamists across the dunes

swayed as if the wind were taking me away

and said

I am Ezra

As a word too much repeated

falls out of being

so I Ezra went out into the night

like a drift of sand

and splashed among the windy oats

that clutch the dunes

of unremembered seas"

The voice here strikes me as so different from the Ammons I was familiar-- it was really a pleasant shock to read this collection. You can see that his control over diction and line is already pretty much aces here-- occasionally he'll go for a slightly over-the-top flourish ("Oh I said in the mistral of bleached/ and naked thought/ blood like a catalyst is evil's baptismal need"... well ok), and you'll be reminded that this is definitely the work of a young guy.

However, over all its a strikingly unexpected and fresh side of Ammon, a wilder, more wild-eyed side, that he remained proud of despite it's long unavailability. 

P.S. The introduction also notes how unfamiliar with the contemporary poetry scene of the time Ammons was, and goes so far as to describe the collection as "outsider art". I don't know about that, but it definitely feels somehow outside of its period (calling up Blake again), with a corresponding sense of barren loneliness to it. I guess if I wanted to be corny (I sort of do) I'd say that if Whitman wrote about Emerson's America, Ammons here writes about Leone's or perhaps McCarthy's, a deceptively blank and harsh landscape, a dry and enervating beauty (Ammons conflates, at times, the landscapes of New Mexico and the ancient Middle East in disconcerting and wonderful ways). If spaghetti Western poetry could be a thing, this would be it.

From Our Hearts to Our Necessities: A Little Bit About the Void in Roberto Bolano's Poetry

 

Read any given article about Roberto Bolano written since 2666's English debut, and you'll probably notice two points laid out again and again:

 1) Bolano's ouevre is massively intertextual, a kind of compact Philip Jose Farmer cosmology-- out of 2666's hundreds of characters, for instance, we see children from his novellas turned into hard-nosed border cops, recurring novels, off-hand references to menage-a-trois with old protagonists. Even the narrator, as Bolano had remarked in his working notes, is in fact the hero of an earlier work. Just as each of 2666's five parts read fine as individual novellas but are vastly enriched as a whole, Bolano's entire body of writing infuses and reinforces itself.

2) 2666 revolves around the problem of an absent center, or a "false" center (the novels of Benno von Archimboldi, the city of Santa Teresa) and a mysterious "secret" center Bolano leaves ambiguous.

With that out of the way, I've been surprised to see how little attention is paid to The Romantic Dogs, the only English collection of Bolano's poetry. Bolano famously considered himself more of a novelist than a poet, but his poems still demonstrate a distinct if abstract narrative bent. And, surprise surprise, it isn't any kind of stretch to read his poetry as both a vital segment of Bolano's overall meta-masterpiece, and as a definite expression of Bolano's fascination with false, missing, or hidden centers-- spiritual and narrative voids.

Most of the elements laced through 2666 are just as frequent and stressed in The Romantic Dogs-- we see the perverse Hegelian relationship between Mexico City, the U.S., and the towns along the Mexican border, a kind of pressure system that turns that strip of land into a kind of worst-case synthesis thunderhead of American and Mexican culture. In, for example, The Donkey:

...and with that Mario Santiago and I

Leave Mexico City, which is the extension

Of so many dreams, the materialization of so many

Nightmares, and retake our positions

Always headed north, always on the road 

Of coyotes,...

As well as his concept of the Latin American ethos as one intrinsically self-destructive, informed by a violence turned catastrophically inward:

Thousands of guys like me, baby-faced

or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,

brushing cheeks with death.

Travel, in these poems, is never fulfilling, the traditions of Latin American literature is never fulfilling, both of these as well as sex, friendship, history, are false centers, Bolano's poetry suggests-- heavy with the suggesting of meaning, but ultimately as flimsy and transient as any other symbolic anchor. 

...a spit in Religion's face,

A silk stab in the back of Happiness,

Sustenence of Morals and Ethics, the forward escape...

As the hunch-backed speaker of My Life in the Tubes of Survival puts it.

These two themes come together most powerful in a long poem titled The Worm, about a grotesque and potentially murderous figure making his through through Mexico:

I saw him with my own eyes: he looked like a worm with a 

straw hat

and an assassin's glare

and he traveled through the towns of Northern Mexico

as if wandering lost, evicted from the mind,

evicted from the grand dream, everyone's dream,

and his words were, madre mia, terrifying.

This traveller neatly sums up the same dynamic Bolano dug into in Part III of 2666, the idea of violence and cultural self-loathing as a kind of eidolon, a weary point of pride. At points the traveller exhorts the speaker to embrace poverty, embrace violence, even acknowledging the pointlessness of it-- suggesting images of Santa Teresa's chief of police shooting at wild dogs in a junk-yard.

 However, whereas the cynical Bolano of 2666 seems to have little hope for art as a redeeming force (consider how many artists and poets turn up in insane asylums, how the only instance in which the critics really act freely is in beating a defenseless cab-driver, and the self-destructive metaphor of the artist who cuts his hand off), Bolano the poet is a bit more optimistic. The Outsider Ape seems to scoff at the possibility of a painting inspiring real emotion, but at least acknowledges its heroic grasping at reality (shades of Ansky and his obsession with "semblences"). Twilight in Barcelona features a similar ambiguity-- what's more beautiful, the painting of Satie or the landscape that evokes its memory? Here's that conflict between apparent and hidden centers again-- representation is a seduction or a threshold-- whether the real signified by art is accessed through it or prohibited by it is up to the viewer. 

Poetry is his exception; free from the obligations of representation (I guess?), Bolano seems to see poetry as a kind of artistic collagen, binding impressions and moments together, making them stronger against obfuscation and despair. Ironically, in the same poems where Bolano rails against the romanticizing of cruelty, he makes poetry out to be a little too courageously transversive. Still, it's hard not to want to cheer him on in lines like these, again from The Worm:

I saw him and told him get out of my tracks, you prick,

poetry is braver than anyone,

the soils watered with blood can suck my dick, the 

evicted Mind

hardly rattles my senses.

From these nightmares I'll retain only

these poor houses,

these wind-swept streets,

and not your assassin's glare

Yeah, fuck you Baudelaire! The figure in The Worm is described as both dragging his despair behind him, and devouring it, a concise representation of the kind of masochism so much "realistic" art thrives on (and which, in my opinion, Bolano is sometimes guilty of himself).

A final example is in a suite of five poems; Dirty, Poorly Dressed, The Detectives, The Lost Detectives, The Frozen Detectives and Fragments. The immediate thought is of his second longest novel, The Savage Detectives. And sure enough, just as in his novels, these poems deal with a simultaneous stumbling after a hazily defined goal (what crime are these detectives trying to solve? I like to think maybe the Santa Teresa murders...) and struggle to escape an ad-hoc urban labyrinth. The search for truth is futile, and recursive, and pretty shabby, and ultimately a psychological issue more than anything: the speaker comes across his heart in the middle of the road, being eaten by red and black ants, while the detectives sit catatonic in pools of blood, afraid to disturb the crime scene. Images repeat themselves in slightly modified phrasings throughout these pieces, circular and circumspect.

 We are, in the end, left without much of a clue about the crimes, the detective, the speaker, or what it all means, despite covering the same ground over and over, in tighter and tighter loops. As in 2666 we circle around what looks like a center but never get any closer to meaning-- because meaning is elsewhere, or under our noses, or totally gone. Bolano doles out clues, but doesn't give away the ending-- this isn't Agatha Christie, where murder and blackmail have their place in a neat, morally tidy universe in which the man with the prim moustache always sets things straight. The reader is left lingering, hands overflowing with both beauty and ugliness, poetry and banality, all of the clues, some of the questions, and none of the answers.

More Literary Losers

Mark Servas of The Elegant Variation recently posted an article on BookForum detailing some of his favorite literary losers—those unlucky protagonists too dopey and inept to even qualify as antiheroes. It features some expected choices, like Lucky Jim’s Jim Dixon, Nabokov’s Pnin, and Graham Greene’s Quiet American, but also some pleasant surprises such as Arthur Dent and Ticknor’s eponymous hero.

It's a fun little article, but it left out some of my favorite fuck-ups-- so here they are, in all their pied beauty.

A Confederacy of Dunces, John F. Kennedy Toole

 Ignatius J. Reilly is an obese shut-in medievalist who lives with his mother, self-absorbed, misogynistic, and disgusting. Walker Percy described the character as a “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one,” which is a fair enough description, if a bit generous. Toole’s account of Reilly’s attempts to get his shit together and land a steady job is one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and one of the greatest descriptions of New Orleans ever put to paper. Oh, he also masturbates to memories of his dead dog. Well.

 Kepler, John Banville

 In the history of science, Johannes Kepler is one of the greats, a pioneer of modern astronomy and one of the greatest early proponents of a heliocentric system. In Banville’s novel though, he’s a neurotic, flakey, and hysterically peevish man, an ur-Woody Allan born, tragically, 400 years before the therapist and the orthopedic shoe. A funny, expansive, and ultimately sympathetic look at the foibles of genius, the novel is worth picking up for the scenes with the Rabellaisian Tycho Brahe alone.

 At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien

 The unnamed protagonist of O’Brien’s metafictional masterpiece hits a little close to home for—an unemployed liberal arts student living off his relatives while trying, unsuccessfully, to write his masterpiece. At least I can proudly say that I hold my liquor better than O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical character, who spends a disquieting amount of the novel throwing up in various locales throughout Dublin.

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

In a Pynchon novel, you can safely assume that most if not all of the characters are off in some way, but none are more poignantly (and ickily) human in their depravity than Gravity's Rainbow's Dr. Pointsman. The stereotypical science dweeb, Pointsman makes women uncomfortable, men annoyed, and Pavlovian octopii homicidal. When he rhapsodizes about his masturbation fantasies, involving beautiful women and the Nobel Prize committee, it's difficult not to be grossed out-- and, to a certain extent, sympathetic. In a novel populated by larger than life characters, Pointsman is refreshingly banal, and although we don't want to see him prevail over the novel's heroes, we're at least a little relieved when he finally gets laid.

 Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino

 Although he’s better known for his more experimental fiction, Calvino’s short stories about a poor rural worker transplanted into an unnamed industrial city in Northern Italy are some of my favorites. Marcovaldo is something like a warmer, gentler precursor to Homer Simpson—an inept family man working a demeaning job, whose attempts to find a little happiness each day usually end up hospitalizing him in one way or another. Still, the twenty stories making up the story of Marcovaldo were written over the course of 15 years, and by the end Calvino tends to cut his protagonist a little slack. The very last story, “Santa’s Children,” is representative of the tone of the later pieces—charming, whistful, and a little bit haunting.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

 Poor Prufrock has no luck with the ladies, and can hardly even work up the nerve to open his mouth. On top of all that, he’s balding. Sometimes when I read this poem, Eliot’s virtuoso language sort of obscures the fact that at the heart of it, Prufrock is a total dweeb.

 L’ecume des Jours, Boris Vian

 Boris Vian’s hilarious, heartbreaking, incredibly strange novel (translated as Froth on the Daydream or Foam of the Daze or Chloe or Spray of the Days or…) has a lot of head-scratching bits in it, but few more peculiar than the main character’s best friend Chick, an amiable loser whose constant borrowing eventually drives the novel into tragedy. What’s he need all that money for? Simple—buying reams of books, discarded tissues, and hair clippings of the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, a bizarre parody of Sartre. Chick ultimately proves that when you live in a surrealist wonderland like Vian’s Paris, fiscal insolvency doesn’t pay—at the end of the novel his heart is plucked out by the police for not paying his taxes.

 The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

When we first meet Oscar, he’s a fat, lonely kid whose only pleasures are comic books and fantasy novels—in a subversion of the usual bildungsroman expectations, he remains fat, lonely, and nerdy through most of the novel, despite the efforts of various characters. In the end, he’s dead. Brief & Wondrous indeed, I guess—but at least he got a Pulitzer out of it. 

On Hazlitt, Proposition 8, and the Will of the People

Hey, this first post is going to be unusually political-- it is just what got me writing first. In the future expect more talk about lit and music and less "Mister Schaeffer Goes to Washington" I guess.

Today is not a banner day for democracy in action—I’m talking, of course, about the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8’s ban on same-sex marriages, a decision that is doubly appalling in that it not only demonstrates a  disregard for basic civil rights, but is an active step away from progressive and compassionate politics, an instance of the people not clinging to the reactionary and old-fashioned out of comfort or familiarity but actually calling out for it in protest of a more broad-minded status quo.

 Its one of the ugly realities of democracy that when the people speak, sometimes they speak incorrectly. One part of me, the part that reacts viscerally to oppression and bigotry, is pretty much down with all of the voices I’ve encountered on blogs, in the news, and in conversation denouncing the entire state of California as a bunch of inbred morons, loony fundamentalists, base homophobes. Come friendly earthquakes and fall on Frisco, as it were. However, there’s also a meek voice of dissent at the back of my mind reminding me that if you’re going to put the democratic process on a pedestal, you can’t break out the chisel and wrecking ball when things don’t go your way. You can speak out, sure, you can work within the system to enact some sort of change (as the drafters of Prop. 8 itself, unfortunately, decided to do) but you can’t have a republic without admitting the right of the population to occasionally fuck things up, right?

 In other words, as a matter of social and moral justice, Prop. 8 is a black and white deal—no amount of arguing will ever convince me that the love between a man and a man or a woman and a woman is any less emotionally, socially, or legally valid than that between a man and a woman, just as the inverse is true for those against gay marriage—but as an issue of civics, of the political process, I’m more troubled and ambiguous. How do you go about loving the democratic system when it churns out this kind of thing? What do you make of a government designed to protect the liberties and rights of its citizens, when those citizens use that government to turn on each other?  I yield the floor to a dead white guy:

 William Hazlitt, the 19^th century British critic, is one of my favorite political essayists—although, like Orwell, he was much better at pin-pointing society’s flaws than at proposing workable solutions, he was so damn good at it that I tend to give him the pass. In particular, I can’t think of another writer who dug his hands as deep as Hazlitt into the messy contradictions inherent in the liberal ideal. I’m talking gore up to the elbows. Hazlitt’s political thought hinges on two basic ideas, as I see it. First, that any power emanating from outside of the people is necessarily against the people, against virtue, and is wrong (“the love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves”), and that only the people have the right to govern themselves. Second,  that the people are a bunch of superstitious goofballs who can’t go a hundred years without signing away their integrities to whatever happens to come along. If these notions seem familiar to you, you might be a progressive living in America—congrats. These two notions don’t necessarily contradict each other—Hazlitt seemed quite confident that if given the opportunity to exercise power as a people, as a unified mass looking out for itself as a whole, even the most credulous subjects of a given monarchy could get their acts together. From “Who is the People?”:

“The people is the hand, heart, and head of the whole community acting to one purpose, and with a mutual and thorough consent. The hand of the people so employed to execute what the heart feels, and the head thinks, must be employed more beneficially for the cause of the people, than in executing any measures which the cold hearts, and contriving heads of any faction, with distinct privileges and interests, may dictate to betray their cause. The will of the people necessarily tends to the general good as its end; and it must attain that end, and can only attain it, in proportion as it is guided—First, by popular feeling, as arising out of the immediate wants and wishes of the great mass of the people, --secondly, by public opinion, as arising out of the impartial reason and enlightened intellect of the community. What is it that determines the opinion of any number of persons in things they actually feel in their practical and home results? Their common interest. What is it that determines their opinions in things of general inquiry, beyond their immediate experience or interest? Abstract reason. In matters of feeling and common sense, of which each individual is the best judge, the majority are in the right; in things requiring a greater strength of mind to comprehend them, the greatest power of understanding will prevail, if it but has fair play. These two, taken together, as the test of the practical measures or general principles of Government, must be right, cannot be wrong.”

 Ok, so far so good, right? The voice of the people, in this model, is basically a self-correcting, self-regulating system. Taking our theoretical “people” as rational actors, as Hazlitt does, common sense and reason will prevail through a mixture of enlightened self-interest and engagement with a vigorous and open intellectual debate. Where in California did this fall apart? Hazlitt trusts his model citizen with two basic cognitive feats—the ability to recognize what’s best for himself, and the ability to recognize and distinguish between rational and irrational arguments in the public discourse. These are deceptively simple-sounding responsibilities, ones on which even the well-educated and clear-headed can easily fall short. In California, both the “head” and the “heart” failed to carry out their civic duties with the compassion and reason that Hazlitt counted on. Not only is Proposition 8 morally repellent, it is judicially irresponsible, economically inconvenient, and theologically trivial. It is in no one’s best interest, and isn’t supported by any kind of logic. In the ideal democratic machine, it wouldn’t have happened. And yet it did—and wonky decisions like it have been made before, and will be made again, because, like any machine, democracy can’t possibly be 100% efficient. The best you can do as a concerned observer (although let’s not bullshit ourselves—we’re also all participants) is shake the machine around, look inside and poke about and try to fix what’s wrong. So again—what went wrong?*

 Here, Hazlitt is his own best critic—“Prejudice is the child of ignorance”. Remember “Milk”? One of the late politician’s greatest achievements was pushing more and more of the gay community to come out to their friends and families, replacing the broad strokes of public perception with specific experience. Not surprisingly, people found it easier to accept and respect homosexuality in a sibling, a parent, or a friend than in the stereotypical representations of mass media and rumor. As Hazlitt wrote in “On Prejudice”:

“As our actual knowledge falls short of our desire to know, or curiosity and interest in the world about us, so must we be tempted to decide upon a greater number of things at a venture; and having no check from reason or inquiry, we shall grow more obstinate and bigoted in our conclusions, according as we have been rash and presumptuous. The absence of proof, instead of suspending our judgment, only gives us an opportunity of making things out according to our wishes and fancies; mere ignorance is a blank canvas, on which we lay what colours we please, and paint objects black or white, as angels or devils, magnify or diminish them at our option; and in the vacuum either of facts or arguments, the weight of prejudice and passion falls with double force, and bears down everything before it. If we enlarge the circle of our previous knowledge ever so little, we may meet with something to create doubt and difficulty; but as long as we remain confined to the cell of our native ignorance, while we know nothing beyond the routine of sense and custom, we shall refer everything to that standard, or make it out as we would have it to be, like spoiled children who have never been from home, and expect to find nothing in the world that does not accord with their wishes and notions. It is evident that the fewer things we know, the more ready we shall be to pronounce upon and condemn, what is new and strange to us.”

 How many Californians in favor of Proposition 8, do you suppose, could count a member of GLBT community as a loved one? How many do you think had one as a relatively solid friend? As an acquaintance? How many would proudly say they’d never ever met a homosexual in their life? A look at CNN exit polls from last November is revealing; most of those who voted in favor of Prop. 8 were Republican, belonged to a historically conservative church, and fell firmly in the middle class—just the demographics in which homosexuality is most strongly frowned on, bastions of entitlement and resentment in which hostility towards anything transgressive is the norm. Ads in favor of Prop. 8 released in 2008 showed San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom stating in regards to same-sex marriage, “This door’s wide-open now—it’s going to happen, whether you like it or not.” Gay marriage is framed not as a step towards civic equality but as an ominous rumbling, as if California’s gay community was an army of barbarians clamoring at the gates. Online ads on the Proposition’s website similarly rely heavily on an “us vs. them” rhetoric, a tone of imposition and invasion—“what it means when gay marriage conflicts with our religions freedoms,” “it was forced on us,” “voting yes on Proposition 8 restores traditional marriage”. The intention, I guess, being to make heterosexual voters see themselves as embattled, to make middle-class demographics view gay marriage as a threat to their comfortable status quo (did anybody ever honestly think “traditional marriage” was going anywhere?). The most disturbing moment of these online ads shows a mother sitting cozily with her daughter—“What it means (sic?) when our children are taught about it at school?” Even the prospect of a society in which homosexuality is free to be discussed and recognized, the ad hints, is menacing. A vote against Prop. 8, it seems to say, is a vote for some kind of unwholesome knowledge.

 Hazlitt’s model government relied on a healthy cooperation between the head and the heart of the people. He acknowledged the importance of moral outrage and gut feelings—“those evils that inflame the imagination and  make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head cool”—but this visceral reaction, if it is to be put into action responsibly, has to be tied to a rational discourse, in which participants can argue on a level playing field where the best, most solid arguments can rise to the top. If this is perhaps a  little bit idealistic, it’s still closer to what we should hope for than the crude anti-intellectualism espoused by pro-Proposition 8 propoganda. In these ads, in the discourse created by the anti-gay marriage power bloc (heavily, heavily funded by Utah’s Church of Latter Day Saints) knowledge isn’t just used misleadingly; knowledge is set up as a threat, as something poisonous to the good old image of white picket fences and waving flags. It is a discourse insidiously resistant to any kind of argument or compromise, since compromise and argument are anathema to it. “Logic should enrich and invigorate its decisions,” writes Hazlitt, “by the use of imagination; as rhetoric should be governed in its application, and guarded from abuse by the checks of the understanding. Neither, I apprehend, is sufficient alone.” There’s the problem—today’s decision represents a failure of these subtle checks and balance and a victory for unabashed rhetoric. The vote could have been on anything—gay marriage, desegregation, a heliocentric universe, whatever; when we let our discourse slip into this kind of ugly bluntness, in which rhetoric completely outweighs reason, in which easy exaggerations and crude caricaturing are more prominent and influential than thoughtfulness, sympathy and responsibility, is it any surprise that we find people voting in favor of whatever interest group is shouting the loudest and running the slickest commercials? 

Hazlitt wrote that “the spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence of principle of hostility.” Could there be any better description of America’s current climate, in which we can collectively shudder at the memory of Matthew Shepard’s death while blithely voting against a universal suffrage of marriage? Although we’re all entitled to a period of balling up our fists and tweeting indignantly about how, well, how completely fucked up this situation is, what’s more important is taking steps to prevent something like it from happening again, by fostering a broader respect for humanity in our families and friends, by exposing them to artists like James Merrill or Proust, who speak with vast beauty to human universals through a homosexual lens, by gradually making our communities more open and understanding in whatever ways we can. "The boundary of our sympathy is a circle which enlarges itself  according to its propulsion from the center-- the heart."

 While we may not have been able to influence the California supreme court, or vote against Prop. 8 last year, the power to shape our national discourse is one we share a responsibility in. If the “head” of the people is ever going to keep the heart and the hand in check, it will be young, intelligent citizens that put it there. So throw up your hands at the system, get angry and fantasize about kicking Roger Mahoney in the nuts—“men act from passion”—but don’t stop there.  Today, we’ve been reminded, painfully, about how fucked up democracy can be. The machine is broken—but in whatever tiny ways we can, with our words and our actions and even, I don’t know, our little online noodlings around, we can step up, borrow a wrench or even just a dust-rag, and start fixing it.

 *And as tempting as it is to be glib and just say “religion”, its simply too easy. Even if you want to take the position that religion is fundamentally inimical to rational decision-making, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum—people still adopt it as a result of social forces, psychological or social needs, or any number of other things;