Some February Catch-Up

So did I read anything else in February, or were viking comic books enough reading for me thanks a lot? Well as it turns out, I did read a lot more stuff. Here it is. Christ.

9. The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn.

This is one of those books that pops up in brief mention in lots of other books, acknowledged but not necessarily trumpeted. Its made appearances in books I've recently read in authors as diverse as Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, and Guy Debord, each giving it a respectful nod but moving on. It sits in a strange place, in terms of its importance-- it influenced a ton of people, but hasn't quite reached that echelon of "must read." In fact, it seems to have been out of print for quite awhile until very, very recently.

Part of this might be due to Cohn taking the position he does on the subject he does during the time that he did. Guy Debord puts it best when he discusses how Cohn seems to exert tremendous effort in steering his book away from its natural conclusions. Look-- the whole point of the book is about how religiously motivated movements have empowered the lower classes in Christian societies to rise up and struggle for catharsis or autonomy, and how these movements are inevitably squashed. It doesn't take a lot of mental cavorting and leaping to realize that this might sorta, kinda lend itself to a Marxist reading. Yet, Cohn goes out of his way, especially at the end as his story creeps towards recognizably modern mentalities, to hand-wave away any similarities to later proletariat revolutions, and even suggests that any continuity between medieval religious uprisings and more secular revolts from the 18th century onwards.

Ok. I can't go back in time and tell the guy how to write his book. I'm just not convinced. Everything else in here though is basically sterling, really fascinating material that deserves to find an audience in these troubled times when any asshole can poop out a book about "Templar" "secrets" and retire. The appendix material about the Ranters in 17th century England was a stand-out to me. I would follow that Abiezer Coppe on Twitter.

10. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower

I came into this having read a few of the pieces already, I guess mostly those that had shown up in McSweeney's. I was mostly drawn to this, Tower's first collection of short stories, from the positive buzz surrounding it, and the striking cover (yeah, ok). Also I heard there was a viking story.

Sure enough, there was a viking story. The title story, it is a stand-out in a collection of first-rate fiction of the strongly "University of Iowa" flavor, for better or worse. Tower's protagonists are assorted fuck-ups and assholes loafing around a pungently unsatisfying America, unable to find any kind of workable alternative. What separates Tower from the whole drooling pack of Carver-ites is a distinct touch of loftiness, a slight and often ironic tonic of Emerson shot into the veins of his world of spoiled meat, carnies, and genial ephebophiles.

I bought this as a Valentine's Day present, which was perhaps kind of inappropriate in hindsight. I don't know though, if getting a really solid book of new short fiction (and who today can be counted on to reliably write good short fiction) isn't nice, then I don't even know who you are anymore.

11. Slantwise, Betty Adcock.

Uh, ok, here's the thing. I don't actually remember too much about reading this. Betty Adcock-- she's a poet. She doesn't have much of a formal education. I gather she's quite the popular lady. Uhh eheheh. Thanks for your time everybody.

No, alright: what I recall most strongly about this collection is this. 1) Sitting in Artisan's Cafe in Phoenixville, balancing the book on one knee and a bowl of tomato soup on the other and a rapidly cooling and astonishingly bitter cup of coffee on a little stool. A guy came in and sat down and stared at me, read the paper, and left. 2) Talking about it afterwards, sheepishly admitting I didn't like it very much, and finding out that everyone else who'd read it agreed.

To be fair, some of the conceits Adcock comes up with are astonishing, and bear with me if I'm vague, I read a lent copy. One poem opens with an epigraph explaining how as snowflakes fall through water they emit a shrieking sound that can shock and even deafen dolphins. Really? Holy cow, Betty, that's incredible. It's almost as if that small brick of information is capable of standing on its own, residing on the page fully-formed as, Christ, I don't know, poetic data. It would write itself, almost, if it had any need to. Unfortunately the poem Adcock actually does spin out of this promising genesis is a little bit of a let-down, kind of a soggy pulp of nature-y images and old lady spitfire.

Kind of the typical dynamic she works with here. At the very core of many of her poems I could sense an idea capable of knocking me over, of slapping me around, taking my wallet as Larry Levis' eponymous poem "Poem" does to him. However, there's just too much going on that doesn't need to be. Her poems drown under their own weight. How's this for an over-wrought and unnecessary metaphor-- they're like rocket ships taking off, that never bother jettisoning their ballast or whatever. Alright, that didn't even make sense.

12. Wittgenstein's Poker, David Edmonds & John Eidinow. I enjoyed another of their books, the one about Rousseau and Hume, so decided to give this a shot. I've always admired what I could understand of Wittgenstein (not much), and Popper has always exerted a kind of fascination as a guy I find very elegantly and exquisitely wrong-headed. As in there other book, Edmonds and Eidinow spin a hell of a story about what could be told as a very dry anecdote. They come off as much like boxing announcers as much as anything else, pumping up the mythological stature of the contenders and raising the tension as high as it can go before finally setting their subjects loose on each other. Sure, ok, pop philosophy, scoff scoff laugh laugh. But they do as good a job as anyone I can think of right now at making the praxis stakes underlying philosophical conflicts take on real dramatic weight. You can read this kind of business like you would a novel-- they give ideology a story. And you know, that probably isn't the most rigorous way to teach the subject. Fine. I still came out smarter than I did going in.

13. Camera, Jean-Phillippe Toussaint. I have some things I'd actually like to say about this book, so I'm going to put it off for right now. Expect something about Toussaint and Tao Lin in a little while.

14. The Possessed, Elif Batuman. You might recognize Elif Batuman as the young columnist currently tearing it up across n+1, The Believer, the New Yorker, and other publications. This is her first book, a pleasant melange of light literary criticism, biography, and memoir, focused on her academic and emotional involvement with the great Russian authors.

I tend to be pretty skeptical of memoir. I think its a genre that can too easily slide into melodrama and narcissism. Oh yeah, and lying. What do Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris have to tell me about being an unpleasant little white male piece of shit that I don't already know from first hand experience? Right, the stuff they made up. This isn't to say I hate all memoir, and I definitely don't extend this perhaps snobbish disinclination towards all the areas of creative nonfiction, but it remains a hurdle I have to either leap or go "whatever" at when I pick up a book that turns out to be even mildly memoir-esque.

Batuman succeeded in charming me from early on, despite a little skipping around to hit my personal authorial faves before coming back around to the travel-memoir business and the section on Isaac Babel. She isn't going on about her own problems for their own sake, no. They're simply the lens with which she approaches the works of art she describes so lucidly and energetically. They're eye-glasses, not the mirror, the means, not the end. Above all the book is about literature, about loving it and struggling with it and making your life around its creaky scaffolding. I'm going to sound like an asshole if I come out and call it a classic in the making, but who cares, I am going to. People will be reading this book years from now. It is great.

15. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Baez. A fascinating premise-- kind of self-explanatory, but basically a survey of the motives and methods of the destruction of literature throughout global history-- kind of shackled by its scope. Baez packs a lot into less than 400 pages, and I really admire the range of cases he looks at. Like the grisly middle of 2666, sometimes the long scroll of names of lost authors, ruined libraries, abolished classics, assumes the power of a litany on its own. However, at other times I kind of wanted more than a list. I wanted context, elaboration. Unfortunately, this book often didn't provide all that. A terrific idea crammed into too small a scale. Still captivating, and often extraordinarily depressing, but I mope about the missed potential.

Incidentally, this was the fourth book of the month to mention Lindisfarne getting fucked up repeatedly. Popular place.


More to come, I don't know, maybe tomorrow:
A SHITTY TRANSLATION OF LAO TZU!
A COMIC BOOK!
EUGENE ONEGIN!
POEMS!
A COMIC BOOK ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S FURRY PENIS!
T-T-T-TAO LIN!

What I Read in February, Part 1

Wow, February went by quickly. I guess at some point I forgot that it only had 28 days, so that I felt comfortable with not sending in any of my bills until the very last moment. Hopefully that's all ok, but if I disappear a la The Trial remember that I did it all for my art.

Anyway, I'm going to split this month's books into three parts, for several reasons. First of all, if you'll look back to January's roll-call you'll notice that I got burnt out about five books in, and started to write basically nothing or good-for-nothing stuff. Second of all, my boss finds in imperative that I fuck around with a lot of spreadsheets today, so I can't sit around blogging like a beautiful opium dream. Ok, alright.

1. City People, Will Eisner.

I always feel somewhat conflicted about counting comic books as, you know, books. I know I shouldn't. Things like Asterios Polyp, Black Hole, Shortcomings
, etc., I have no problem with counting as "real literature." But let's be real, I read a lot of terrible bullshit too. And while I feel more comfortable shelving R. Crumb or Eisner as real authors than, I don't know, X-Men Present: Murder Mystery on Mutant Mountain, that implies a value judgement I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. Is it less valid as art just because I find it silly and juvenile? What the fuck do I know, who am I to judge? Anyway what I'm trying to say is I'm never going to mention Wolverine on this blog, ever.

City People is a Will Eisner sketch-book about his perennial subject, New York City. It's mostly made up of short vignettes grouped by their sensory imperative, for example, a section of smell and the city, a section on the relationship between the city and sound. Some of them are very clever, and show that even when he was just sketching around Eisner was a master-- working the kind of sensory detail difficult to pin down even in poetry or prose (who can really write well about smell, or taste?) into his overwhelmingly visual medium. Of course, when you deal with Eisner these days you have to be prepared for some frankly pretty embarrassing sexual and racial stereotypes, and I felt particularly appalled by some of his gags in this one. Still, definitely worthy of a look for anyone already familiar with Eisner's more meaty works. Working in this milieu he occasionally takes on a lightness and flexibility of line that reminds me of Harvey Kurtzman, and is really cool to see.


2. The Magus of the North, Isaiah Berlin.

(The version I'm writing about is an earlier edition, published on its own-- I'm not sure if the above version is the full text of what I'm talking about.)
I think I already talked about this last month, for some reason. That's not right, this was definitely read in February. Anyway, this was a relatively brief essay on the Counter-Enlightenment writer and polemicist Johann Georg Hamann, who I'd never heard of and probably neither have you. Fascinating though, in that although the two were friends, Hamann comes out as a sort of Bizarro Kant, taking Hume's skepticism of causality and warping into a balls-to-the-wall attack on rationalism and logic. "I look on proofs," Hamann wrote, "as a well bred girl looks at a love letter"; that is to say, with contemptuous fondness but absolute suspicion.

Berlin does an excellent job of cramming into less than 200 pages a brisk assessment of Hamann's broad and obscurantist bibliography while tracing the lines of his influence through Herder and Goethe up to the populist and anti-intellectual roots of 20th century fascism. Hamann, as a kind of ur-Romantic and mystic, is a kind of frightening figure in that despite the obvious flaws in his arguments and the terrifying intensity of his loathing for reason, everything he says has a compelling aesthetic weight. Its easy to hate the militant philosophy of Mussolini or Hitler, but being forced to confront their more benign great-grandfather is a good excuse to re-assess your assumptions. Unfortunately this book doesn't seem to be in print anymore, but I think you can find it in some specific Berlin anthology. I don't know, I'll look into it.


***~~I'd just like to interject here that I just found out on the New Yorker book blog that the guys who did Logicomix are doing a GN on Levi-Strauss and structuralism, AWWWW YEAHHHHHH SO PSYCHED~~***

3. The Earliest English Poems, Michael Alexander (trans., ed.)

Alright, anyway. I picked this up at my favorite bookstore in Phoenixville (ok, basically the only game in town, but still an amazing place) on the $2.00 shelf, possibly to offset a friend of mine buying two used and soiled Tarot decks and possibly because I'd been eying the newer edition of this title for a little.

I had some initial skepticism about Michael Alexander's translations-- apparently those Anglo-Saxons had quite a thing for late-period William Carlos Williams-- but the book won me over eventually. Alexander, while acknowledging his debt to Ezra Pound in some areas, succeeds in rendering these poems as products of an almost totally alien culture that at the same time stands at the foot of everything we've done since then.

I was particularly moved by the poem "Deor," the monologue of an exiled bard without anything much left for him. The refrain "That went by; this may too." lends an eerily familiar Stoic flavor to the piece, and the last stanza is as softly chilling as Stanley Kunitz's "Old Cracked Tune":

"Of myself in this regard I shall say this only:
that in the hall of the Heodenings I held long the makarship,
lived dear to my prince, Deor my name;
many winters I held this happy place
and my lord was kind. Then came Heorrenda,
whose lays were skillful; the lord of fighting-men
settled on him the estate bestowed once on me.

That went by; this may too."

The anxieties of obsolescence and insignificance occupy an ominous spot in the mind of every writer I know, and every writer I've ever really loved-- Proust writes my favorite summing up of it in Swann's Way; "At those times it seemed to me that I existed the same way other men did, that I would grow old, that I would die like them, and that among them I was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing" -- so to hear those sentiments arising out of that remote universe was poignant and scary and beautiful.

Michael Alexander's notes and introduction are equally valuable, combining a nice Oxfordy erudition with just the right note of the fanatic's idiosyncrasy (his advice to the reader to bellow, not just recite, the poems aloud I demurred from out of respect for the downstairs neighbors). A solid introduction to a fragmentary and elusive literature.

Anyway I hope you guys like reading about Vikings because for some reason, this is only the beginning. February was Unofficial Viking-Fest 2010.

4. Novels in Three Lines, Felix Feneon.



5. The Tower, W.B. Yeats. I read this out loud while getting my hair cut, getting really into it at parts, so much so that I'd start to slip down in the shitty office chair we'd dragged into the kitchen. "Stop squirming around," Abby kept saying, "you're getting hair all over the place, and you know, you make all of your food in this room." WHATEVER WOMAN THIS IS YEATS.

I've always really enjoyed The Tower, and will insist to my death-bed (maybe) that "Among Schoolchildren" and "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are among Yeats' most perfect poems, and of course they're in there rubbing elbows with power-houses like "Leda and the Swan" and "Sailing to Byzantium." It's a lot of poetry for a slim and unassuming little book. As always it rewarded a reread, this time completely killing me with "A Man Young and Old," which I'd somehow failed to appreciate on any meaningful level before. Holy fuck everybody, I don't even know.

6, 7, 8. Northlands, Brian Wood.




So here's where my ambiguity about comics crops up again. I like Brian Wood, I thought Demo and Local were really... acceptable. But I just don't really know. After reading the aforementioned Old English poems I began a three or four day infatuation with that culture that resulted in a lot of boring bullshit being added to my Amazon wishlist (if I ever actually order the "Domesday Book" please kill me, I don't need to be reading any 11th century censuses) and culminated in marathoning the first three volumes of Wood's Northlands , a series taking a Wells Tower-esque aesthetic to various times and places in the "Viking Age." I can respect his obvious pleasure in jamming together genres and contexts to see what works (the first volume is a fairly straightforward revenge story about the Orkney Island in 980, the third is a "Fugitive" style manhunt story set during the occupation of Ireland, and the second a series of shorter pieces) but the material is wildly uneven.

Part of this can be reproach or praise laid on the shoulders of the artists. Davide Gianfelice draws a nice sword fight but his characters have all the expressiveness of a Saturday morning cartoon, while Vasilis Lolos lends the sparse one-issue "The Viking Art of Single Combat" a kind of kinetic poetry. Ryan Kelly as usual earns his paycheck, giving a gritty, punch-drunk patina to the longer form "The Cross & The Hammer," rendering its protagonist as simultaneously admirably tenacious and kind of fucking scary in the Toshiro Mifune or Lee Marvin mold.

Thinking on it some more, I don't feel too bad about listing these slim TPBs here. Brian Wood is obviously cramming a lot of passion and love into these stories, and is pushing himself to areas untapped in his earlier, more satirical or realistic stories. I don't love it as much as I did his Local, which I'd still hold up as a prime example of the capacity of graphic storytelling as a vehicle for contemporary short fiction, but every page sings with his enthusiasm for the project, which I definitely have to give props to.

Later this week, hopefully Wednesday, I'll get the second third out of the way, from Norman Cohn on bloodthirsty Anabaptists to Elif Batuman on all kinds of good things.

PS: Book Linking

I'd also like to mention that the more I think about it, the worse I feel about linking to Amazon with book titles. If there's any really good independent online bookstore to send traffic (haha, yeah, ok) to instead, I'd love to hear about them. For the time being I'm just going to start going with Powell's, I guess.

The Body is a Thousand Arrows Pointing at Itself: Catie Rosemurgy's Exquisite Body-Horror Poetics

The Stranger Manual, Catie Rosemurgy. Graywolf Press, 2010. $15.00 (95 pp)


"The sense of being crushed will once again be the source of the erotic in the story"


Slate magazine’s Chris Wilson recently called out the New Yorker for the solipsistic cliquiness of its poetry, finding, apparently, that over a quarter of the pieces printed in the weekly since 2008 are in some ways concerned with poetry itself. It’s easy to find something somewhat sad in that, a sense of people playing around in Plato’s cave, if Plato’s cave was stocked with Ogden Nash and Updike.

Or, as Catie Rosemurgy puts it in “A Poem About Poetry by Miss Peach, Hobo/Provacateur,” “Poems about poetry are like bowls of sequined fake fruit—you can’t eat ‘em and you don’t want to, but they symbolize abundance on an affordable table in your home.” Rosemurgy’s second collection, The Stranger Manual is from the complete opposite kind of the tracks, the wrong side, the side where misshapen women play Marx Brothers games with language and beauty and truth. There’s no room in it for even glancing at the local library.

Rosemurgy’s poems are sordid and intensely visceral, constantly reminding the reader of the body’s essential temporality in a way best described as “icky.” The word, maybe, being “fleshy.” Her guide through the fictional town of Gold River, Miss Peach, is like a cartoon character sketched by John Waters or Cronenberg, a shambling shape plagued by outrageous health issues. In one poem we learn that she “…presents with an alternating overabundance/ and absence of bone,” and is “3’4” biscuit-shaped, powdery/ but incredibly adept at climbing trees.”

Elsewhere, a neighbor opines “Someday I’ll find words for the dripping. Like rain mixed with teeth.” Rosemurgy’s eye fixates on the too-close, the uncomfortably naked—cuts of meat, warped bodies, objects dripping wet or viscous, “runny mixture”. The body becomes a strange and intimidating thing, foregrounding “the insanity expressed in the mechanics of the knee./ The winged desperation of the pelvis.” Sex is transformed into a kind of messy heap you’d want to politely nudge away with the toe of your shoe, “the love I needed massaged/ into my hamburger meat,” or “the sound of a cat unable to deliver her backlog of kittens/ because of the design failure of her own body.” Physical embodiment is taken on critically as a slapdash fix to some sort of engineering problem, and not a particularly successful one.

For all that, the poems are light on their feet and often very funny. The point isn’t to look at the display set before us and recoil in disgust, but simply to recognize it as something discreet from our intellectual and social conceptions of the self. Miss Peach, almost monstrous in the poems narrated by neighbors, an object of skeeved out pity to her doctors, at times approaches the heroic, an absurd hero taking up arms against every molecule of freaky stuff going on under the skin: “I’ve got all these/ organs inside me and I can’t resist teasing them/ to see if they’ll go away.”

The great work of alchemy in the collection, the element that swings it from amusing and disconcerting “American Grotesque” to something numinous in the strangeness of its truth, is exactly Miss Peach’s plurality of selves. She’s disgusting, sweaty, toothless, possibly with live animals living inside of her, but also a sexualizing if not quite sexualized figure, a master of her body and an impassioned gourmand of others’. Even more intriguing, she fulfills the role of town revolutionary, kicking down barriers of gender and aesthetic normality with a deft mutant foot. An early poem shows us Miss Peach at the mall seeking “a rosier nipple, a new front tooth,/ some pseudo bruises” and other accessories to ugliness. But beyond that, she’s dignified entirely by her lack of dignity, her peeling back of polite and beautiful curtains. Rosemurgy highlights the deep function of the appalling and the blasphemous as a sanctified role: “We thank our monsters for letting us invent them. They let us feel dignified/ and unsutured by comparison.”

This asymmetry ends up linked to the whole gamut of organic and generative powers, eating, fighting, growing, blooming—eating in particular is dealt with as an unsightly but important pact between mouth and mush.

Rosemurgy engages with the unspoken and unspeakable bond between our pretences and the natural world with a lot more dirt under her fingernails than Wordsworth or Heine or even a relatively “earthy” poet like Gary Snyder. Her poems seem to say fuck the flowers and the fields, nature is what’s going on wrong in my intestines and in my brain, and what’s going right. It’s every sub-cellular process that tyrannizes causality and lets us sleep with werewolves, if we so choose, as Miss Peach does. It’s what we’ve got, ugly as it is. Oh well. “The sense of being crushed will, once again,/ be the source of the erotic in the story,” she writes. And elsewhere, “we’re all so damn beautiful.” It’s a heavy theme, but Rosemurgy attacks it with the light touch of the completely natural, and an unerring sense for tossing out perfect aphorisms. The Stranger Manual is a strange book of poetry, with wild swings in tone and more weight in its mouth than it can safely chew, but it is electric with wit and conviction and humanity. As Miss Peach is to Gold River, Rosemurgy sets herself as to the contemporary poetry scene; iconoclastic, vulgar, and an anarchically brilliant challenge.

Nabokov's Genital Cabinet

Recently, on Nick Hanford's interesting and sexy new blog, he raised some questions about the meaning of "value" in art:

"But value? It seems to have a completely different feel. It’s not a fluid word or even really malleable. The only way it changes is if one is looking at the physical or the emotional. But the word still can be traced directly back to “worth.” The word has this tactile attachment that one can feel and know. There’s something inherent in the word “value” that is traced back to worth. Something that has value must have worth. It doesn’t always have to be a monetary worth, but maybe a sentimental or emotional worth.

"So what would they shift the meaning of this word to? I can’t even wrap my head around what value would mean if it didn’t have a direct tie to worth. Maybe they are simply talking of a shift from the main monetary definition of value to that of a more emotional attachment. Get away from the spectacle of value, if that makes any sense."

This got me to thinking about the precise value of beauty, or rather, what intrinsic qualities authors look for when they go out spelunking for Keats' elusive siamese twins Beauty & Truth. First of all, looked at in the typical sense, as a pair of intertwined and codependent eidos or whatever you want to call them, it seems to me that they fall apart into abstraction. We're not Catholic priests here, we can take a teeny little step back from the mystic angle and try to puzzle out what the exact relationship is-- at which point the polite Romantic applause stops and people start getting angry.

Is beauty a quality of truth? Is something beautiful because it conforms to the pattern of the universe, because it reflects the mysterious symmetry and sublime of objective reality? I think Carl Sagan would agree, and any person with an operating heart has to admit that even a cursory browse of NASA's picture of the day gallery yields some truly breath-taking images.



But where does that leave art, where does that leave us? Is our role as critical and aesthetic and feeling audience important in some way, as Kant might say after I don't know, I guess like 6,000 pages? And if that's the case, doesn't that make truth subordinate to beauty instead of the other way around?

These are the kinds of questions that tend to bring any kind of engaging conversation to a halt because let's be real, they rarely ever lead anywhere. People get irritated, or more likely, they get bored, and the subject gets dropped. Discussed in a vacuum, things get boring or pedantic fast. However, when a writer or thinker of any kind sits down and starts to approach either of those two poles, it seems to me that some kind of commitment has to be made. In other words, whether that definition is articulated consciously or not, some meaning of "value" is hazarded. Beneath the surface of all art of pursuit of truth, the dialogue is going on.



What interests me, in particular, is the danger of dogmatism that accompanies the writer who is unwilling to work within a tentative and sinuous framework of truth and beauty. Translation, something I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog before, is a good testing ground for sussing out an author's stance, and lately I've been kind of hung up on the unique risks in translating "Eugene Onegin." Onegin, as a verse novel, and a formal verse novel at that, has a weightier commitment to sense and style then somebody like, I don't know, Basho, who has seen fit to be squashed and stretched and wrestled into procrustean syllable arrangements ever since sickly white people started noticing Japan, which in my amateur estimation was roughly around the time Pokemon came out (1863? 1864?).

Anyway, if you don't know, "Eugene Onegin" is two things. One, its an incredibly tightly plotted and cleverly meta-narrative story about intrigue and duels and being a poseur and/or a poet, complete with dream sequences and Laurence Sterne-esque tricks. Two, its a series of hundreds of exquisitely crafted sonnets following, with a few exceptions, the fascinating AbAbCCddEffEgg (the capital letters being masculine rhymes, the lower cases feminine). To the immense credit of the handful of guys who've tried their hands at the piece, including Charles Johnston, James Falen, Stanley Mitchell (my favorite) and the tireless Douglas Hoftstadter, most translations manage to stick fairly faithfully to the stanza-by-stanza road-map of content and plot, while preserving Pushkin's meter and rhyme.

Personally, I think that's impressive, and I think it can be pretty fun to admire the verbal acrobatics required at various points to get our stodgy language to where it needs to go, as well as to scoff at some of the lamer reaches (in Mitchell, for example, "It's only by the by I'm saying/ That once a slander gets expressed/ By some foul liar in a garret/ To whom the monde awards a carrot," and "Tatiana" ends up rhyming with "manner" way too many times, and...). I guess in that respect I think preserving the beauty of the language at the expense of the literal truth of what Pushkin's words signified is ok.

Nabokov disagreed.



Now I don't know if you've ever gone on YouTube or whatever and looked up some of his old TV interviews, or read the essay collection "Strong Opinions," but it seems like the dude more or less made a second career out of having, well, strong opinions, but his argument against these creative translations of Onegin was on a totally different level. Fed up with the existing Arndt translation, he took it upon himself to produce a new version, as literal as possible. If the rhyme and strict meter wound up as stylistic casualties, that was fine by him; the substance would remain, in blank verse as opposed to the classic Pushkin sonnet, as it turned out.

From here, opinions differ: some people will tell you that his translation, including in its four volumes a facsimile of the first Russian edition and a huge fuckton of notes, is the crowning achievement of his scholarly career. Others will tell you that it was a huge waste of his talents, and beyond that, a pretty wretched translation. Not even a particularly accurate one, as accused in Edmund Wilson's legendary take down of the project in the pages of the NYRB.

Setting aside whether a really REALLY strict translation of anything is even possible, from both a practical perspective and an, I don't know, Wittgeinsteinny linguistic/logical perspective, my own primary impression of the project is the scale of it, and the tragicomic grandeur of its failure. Nabokov took a verse novel weighing in at less than 200 pages and somehow extracted, at my estimate, around 1,600 pages. The language, faithful or not, lacks the lightness, the quickness, the at least spiritual exactitude of even the most loose translations. Despite the universally lauded quality and depth of his footnotes and the increasing popularity of blank and free verse in American poetry, is it mere coincidence that you can just roll into a bookstore and leave with one of several strictly rhymed and metrical Onegins while Nabokov's rough beast has been out of print for fuck, who knows, decades?

Could it be that in taking a stand for "truth" over "beauty," Nabokov missed that maybe Keats was right, jesus christ, maybe the two are indissoluble, that the capital T Truth, the "value" in Pushkin's masterpiece lays less in whether you say a horse "sniffed" or "snorted" or "sensed at" the snow (depending, obv., on which Russian dictionary you're consulting) and more in the spirit of agility, irony and rapture captured in the book's intimidating network of rules and the deftness with which the translator moves among them? Could it be that all writers should just get Calvino's "Six Memos for the Next Millenium" just fucking welded to their chests at birth for constant reference?

I think Nabokov's admirable weakness in sticking to his epistemological guns is summed up in a story focusing on his more scientific side, that is his second life as a lepidopterist. He was a butterfly ace, as you probably know already, with a whole genus named after him. But just like in the literary world his reactionary tendencies were just as pronounced as his prodigious talents. Until the end of his life he was a hard-liner for the "good old ways" of lepidoptery. What this meant in practical terms was that in the face of mounting evidence he refused to concede the value of new ways of identifying different breeds, such as chromosome counting or genetic comparisons.

For Vlady, when he went to find out what kind of butterfly he was looking at exactly, he went for the classics-- severing the genitalia and examining them under a microscope. If you go to the Harvard Museum of Natural History's comparative zoology wing you can still see his "genitalia cabinet," stocked with a morbid selection of tiny blue butterfly sex organs.

I think that the implication here is heavy-handed enough without any kind of embellishment. Nabokov's aesthetic infatuation with butterflies and moths led to both beauty-- his gorgeous sketches and paintings of various specimens-- as well as truth, in the meticulous accuracy of those same portraits as well as the fidelity of his specimens themselves. However, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, it seems like in this microcosm either truth must be sacrificed to beauty or vice versa. You can look at a butterfly, see the light play off its wings, watch it duck and weave over the flowers like a boxer, and never be sure of its genus or species. Or, you can catch it, jar it, pin those sapphire wings to cardboard and with steady hands clip the literal seat of its creative powers-- for beauty's sake, in other words, you are invited to destroy beauty. Observation collapses the wave. I don't know.

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen."

Ok, or:

To express the truth in beauty, perhaps, you occasionally need to castrate what you can't express.

Some Quotes

Here are some good passages from what I've been reading lately. Hope they're of some interest.

"Out of writing soon came the need for an ancillary object, the book. Borges says:

'Of all man's instruments, the most astonishing is, without any doubt, the book. The others are extensions of the body. The microscope, the the telescope, are extensions of his eyes; the telephone an extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of his arm. But the book is something else: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.'

The book gives substance to human memory. The book, despite being portable, objectifies memory: it is a rational unity that uses audiovisual, printed, or electronic means to represent mnemonic and linguistic will. In the revolutionary stop from orality to writing and, above all, in that significant process where the book triumphs as a cult object, what really takes center stage is a more certain model of permanence that codifies sensibility and translates it into uniform, legitimate states. The book is, then, a proposition that seeks to configure everything in terms of reason and not in terms of chaos. The idea that the book is something more than a physical structure that supports collective or individual memory has generated powerful metaphors.

The book as talisman: Saint John Chrysostome recounts that in fourth-century Antioch, people hung codices around their necks to ward off the powers of evil.
The book of life: Belief in a divine book that contains the names of those who will be saved in the Last Judgement, as Saint John testifies.
The book as nature: Plotinus speaks of the stars as if they were letters eternally written in the heavens.
The book of the world. It makes of the universe a bibliographic cosmos.
The world exists only to become a book: This was the belief of the poet Stephane Mallarme.
The book as person: As Walt Whitman proposes in his "Songs of Farewell."
The book as shared dream."

-Fernando Baez, "A Universal History of the Destruction of Books"

“…for to express is to use symbols, and symbols limit, abstract, cut reality into arbitrary slices, destroy it for the sake of trying to communicate the incommunicable.”

(describing the anti-systematic aesthetic of Johann Georg Hamann)

“Hamann’s new aesthetics—here too he showed originality of a higher order—is founded on the proposition that the language and the form of art and indissolubly one with the art itself, as against the dominant aesthetic theorists—Boileau or Batteux or Gottsched and their disciples—who maintained that rules existed for the purpose of rendering an identical “content” into the best or most appropriate “vehicle” or medium, and so distinguished content, form, style, language, as independent and manipulable constituens of a compound substance—something for Hamann was one indissoluble “organic” entity."

(more about Hamann-- doesn't this sound like a close precursor to McLuhan's "the medium is the message?")

-Isaiah Berlin, "The Magus of the North"

Reading in January '10: Or, I Can't Believe I Haven't Been Fired Yet

Ok, so I promised some people that I'd throw up a little recap of what I've read this month. I was about as surprised as you might be to find that I've read around 25 things this month. I don't remember working very much, but presumably I found time to squeeze all of that into my life as well.

I'm pretty happy with the balance between fiction, poetry, and true-facts elucidation I managed to strike this month. Sure, there might be too many comic books (or "graphical" "novels" if you're full of deserved shame), but I can look back at this month of reading and say it probably hasn't made me a worse person.

1. Gilead- Marilynne Robinson. For a few years I had written this off as something that, despite almost universal acclaim, I would never read and never want to read. It sounded, essentially, like Christian apologetics in a folksy Garrison Keiller-type small-town setting, which to me is more or less like proffering up a bag full of vomit with a Pulitzer sticker attached to it.

I can now look back and say I was being a totally self-righteous and small-minded jerk. Gilead is a great book. Robinson delves into the religious psychology with an unexpected tenderness and nuance, showing her protagonist John Ames as, far from the fanatic I expected, a man living in a small world dignifying himself with the encompassing consolation of an idea. The third-act tension between Ames and prodigal-son-cum-unbeliever Jack Boughton also avoids slipping into the kind of dialectic where the author inevitably is forced into showing some kind of agenda. No-- their eventual "confrontation" is a masterpiece of generosity and authorial largesse.

2. The Revival- James Sturm. A short piece-- let's call it a graphic novella-- about the late 18th century revival movement in America. Sturm is heavy on the atmosphere, with lots of tightly framed shots of bare tree limbs and impoverished, desperate faces, rendered in thick, scratchy black and white. He doesn't give his characters much room to breathe or flex, but he isn't interested in a character piece. The story moves like a Nerval piece, a teetering pile of unsettling omens leading to a psychological collapse.

It was interesting to read this right on the back of Gilead, which provided a much more accommodating view of the American religious life. Telling, maybe, that Robinson's book takes place in the endless vistas of the Mid-West while Sturm's is almost entirely cloistered in forest, his action packed into claustrophobia.

3. Dictation- Cynthia Ozick. I'd been meaning to read some Ozick for awhile, and found this quartet of novellas in the Phoenixville library. The title story, about the dictationists of Joseph Conrad and Henry James, seems to have gotten the most nods from the critical community, but I found it relatively slight and showy. I was much more interested in the other three, which also show off Ozick's urbane but cozy elegance but are less afraid to dip into ambiguity.

"Actors" is a kind of Jewish ghost-story dealing with Yiddish theatre, method acting, and the guilt of Sephardic integration. Whether it functions as tragedy or farce may depend entirely on the reader's mood upon reaching the last three or four pages, which I have no problem with.

"At Fumicaro" is less adept and occasionally starts to look like an over-written rehash of "Death in Venice," but the sweltering prose fits the tropical and sexual luridness. Basically, Catholic journalist comes to Italy, sees the sights, seduces adolescent maid, fucks up hugely. The story is slight and the writing often over-the-top but as a psychological study akin to Nabokov on PCP, its fun and it has its moments.

"What Happened to the Baby" was the stand-out story of the collection, a bleak fable about what language does to us. It wasn't until this, tucked away at the end of the book, that I really came to appreciate Ozick's grasp of pacing and the allotment of crucial information.

4. The Golem's Mighty Swing- James Sturm. Sturm again with a look at Jewishness and baseball at the turn of the last century. I'm always fascinated by late 19th/early 20th century baseball, so I appreciated the care he takes in getting the details of traveling league life, and the room he gives the game to expand and enact itself. The Jewish material was a little less masterful-- it never really seemed to come into its own. If anything, he seemed to have more to say about black players of the time than Jewish ones.

5. failure- Philip Schultz. Schultz has some really gorgeous and bitter poetry here. I guess "long poem about 9/11" is just about the most tedious thing to here about these days, but Schultz pulls it off with a 50+ page rhapsody on dog-walking, New York, race, and, well, failure.

6. Fear and Trembling- Soren Kierkegaard. Special K has a great rhetorical touch and its fascinating to look at the very religious roots of existentialism, but Christ if some of his points seemed to just slog under too many conceits. I have no idea what he was talking about with that whole "merman" story.

7. Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography- Chris Bachelder. Bachelder is a novelist who may have slipped under your radar. He has two novels you might stumble upon in a used bookstore (I think they're out of print), "U.S.!" and "Bear v. Shark" which are both quite funny, and occasionally will have an essay in The Believer. Its a shame, because he's one of the sharpest satirists working today. This one is available as an ebook via McSweeney's, and takes the form of an obsequiously second-person manual to the eponymous virtual tour photography. The social commentary is a little flatter in this novel, perhaps because he sticks to what have become fairly safe targets, but his characters are, god forbid, a little richer and fuller. Its free so whatever, go look at it.

8. Codex Seraphnianus- Luigi Serafini

9. Transparent Things- Vladimir Nabokov.

10. Eating Animals- Jonathan Safron-Foer. Ok, so I came into this pretty committed to not eating animals, and pretty committed to not liking Jonathan Safron-Foer. So, a guy I don't like telling me things I already know. Believe it or not, I enjoyed this. JSF recognizes that he's a storyteller, not a philosopher or sociologist, so he gets right into the gristle (pun?), dredging up the more visceral appeals to emotion and good taste that more "thinky" thinkers like Singer sometimes shy away from. He occasionally gives a shot at dietary bi-partisanship by giving voice to some of the more ethical people in the farming or slaughter industries, but against the wall of evidence here and elsewhere it feels a bit pointless. Better than I expected by far.

11. Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror- John Ashbery. Ashbery. Ashbery Ashbery. What to say. I sat down to discuss this collection with what I would consider a pretty fucking sharp group of people and mostly we were all equally baffled. The poems are beautiful but they seem to violently resist explication or even simple commentary. So, what's left to say? I liked them. They were good. Ok.

12. Evening Man- Frederick Seidel. My introduction to the sordid poetic universe of Frederick Seidel, where everyone is either an old white billionaire, or a beautiful 20-something desperate to fuck an old white billionaire, or a motorcycle being ridden across the planet by an old white billionaire. For all of that, I liked it alot. He makes himself out to be such a loathsome old piece of shit that I'm certain he's engaging in some sort of meta-persona, and his relationship with language reminds me of nothing so much as his often cited patron saint, Fred Astaire. Elegant, urbane, rotten to the core.

13. Antipoetry: How to Look Better & Feel Good- Nicanor Parra

14. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time- Marie Howe

15. The World Doesn't End- Charles Simic

16. The New Kings of Non-Fiction- Ira Glass (editor)

17. Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture- Daniel Radosh

18. Blood Dazzler- Patricia Smith

19. this emotion was a little e-book- Tao Lin

20. The Savage Detectives- Roberto Bolano

21. Ooga-Booga- Frederick Seidel

22. Distant Star- Roberto Bolano

23. The Last Interview- Roberto Bolano

24. And So- Joel Brouwer

25. Fagin the Jew- Will Eisner

26. The Dreamer- Will Eisner

27. Life on Another Planet- Will Eisner

28. City People- Will Eisner

29. The Magus of the North- Isaiah Berlin. A riveting novel about the elf-master's sacred girdle. No, not really, but that is a pretty atrocious title. This is actually a short study on a German counter-Enlightenment thinker named Johann Georg Hamman. Berlin makes a pretty sound case for the guy as one of the forefathers of the Romantic movement as well as the potent blend of anti-intellectualism and populism that eventually fermented into fascism. He keeps it snappy despite being tasked with summing up an extremely obscurantist and fragmentary writer's whole conception of language, knowledge, and creative genius in about 120 pages, without falling into pop-philosophy gloss. Recommended if you have an interest in de Maistre or Vico or those guys, or just a general curiosity about what else was going on amidst the fine commotion of Hume and Kant and all those fancy fellas.