Of Pigeons and Lightning

I had been sunk in short story/poetry land for so long that I forgot how glorious it is to read a novel. It's strange how it could take me a month to read a 250-page book of short stories, but I can read a 250-page novel in two days.

Just finished The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt. Three days of pretty intense reading sessions. I usually don't read hardbacks (since I'm cheap), but I got this as a free review copy from my dubious job as a book reviewer, so I was all too happy to eat it up. Perhaps I was partly so enthralled by it because of my new obsession with science ... but the characters were also very compelling. I want to read all about Nikola Tesla now. I think that's what good fiction does for you - makes you more interested in real life.

Favorite quotes:

A thought Tesla has about humans - "I've forgotten the way their emotions leak out of them, muddying the air with sorrow, anger, joy."

"Love does destroy, over and over again. So it is always the greatest surprise to find how stubborn hope can be."

There was also a lot about Tristram Shandy, which I found interesting, and this reflection on the most famous aspect of that book: "Yes, I know there are many years in between then and now. But they were bad ones. I thought, if you have to, you could record the years that followed by simply inserting a black page, a solid black square of ink. It would be the best way to describe the darkness that came next - a page of black ink, printed on both sides."

Yes, I liked this book. I have to write something coherent about it at some point.

Things With Which Ray Bradbury Is Obsessed*

*Determined by reaching p. 458 in the massive red book of his stories.

1) Sneakers/tennis shoes
2) Laurel & Hardy
3) Wind
4) Ireland
5) Charles Dickens
6) Men who go kind of crazy and shoot people
7) Boys with active imaginations

Question

Jesus, why am I so absolutely terrible at keeping a blog?

If this were Fail Dogs, I know what would be written across my picture right now.

Old Men and New Discoveries

So I was trying, yet again, to like Yeats (I do this almost every year, and always come away frustrated with myself for not having the reaction to his work that I know I ought to) when I came across "Sailing to Byzantium" (which I may have read before and just not remembered, or, more likely, skipped over because I assumed I had already read it). The first stanza stopped me dead in my tracks:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Hello, Cormac McCarthy! Now, before I go on, I have to confess to not having actually read McCarthy's No Country For Old Men. I read Blood Meridian, and I don't know what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn't expecting THAT, and wasn't really sure what to make of the whole experience, which felt sort of like picking up what you think is a sweet, juicy grape and biting into it and discovering it's actually an olive. And it's not that you don't LIKE olives, it's just that - well, you weren't expecting one, so it just tastes all wrong to you, and frankly a little repulsive. I want to read Blood Meridian again, because it deserves another try with a more-prepared mindset. But anyway, the point of all this is that I got temporarily scared of Cormac McCarthy and haven't ventured any further into his oeuvre.

But I did see the movie. So all of my thoughts about why Cormac went to Yeats for his title are solely Hollywood-based. I feel like I would have much more cogent thoughts about it if I had actually read the book; the Random House website blurb for the book notes that Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones' character) serves as the book's "moral center," and that he sees in the books' events "a breakdown in the social order of apocalyptic proportions." His "reflections on the changing world around him, on his values, his family, and his own past give the novel its distinctive richness and moral weight." Looking back on the movie, I can see that about Jones' character, but I'm sure that concept is much more developed in the book.

Back to Yeats. It's sort of ironic that in Yeats' poem the world surrounding the aging speaker is vital and full of life - neglecting the old - whereas in McCarthy's work the world surrounding the "speaker" (if we think of Sheriff Bell as the speaker) is violent, terrifying and rapidly spiraling out of control. The poem shows an old man wishing for an eternal life in the form of art - he wants to be preserved in the "hammered gold and gold enamelling" of the city of Byzantium, forever to "sing/To lords and ladies of Byzantium/Of what is past, or passing, or to come." In McCarthy's work, the desire to be preserved in gold is quite literal, and the wish for the type of eternal life money can offer you comes not out of a need to escape a world that no longer sees you, but out of the need to escape a world that sees you too much.

One last thought - in Yeats' last stanza, he says "Once out of nature I shall never take/My bodily form from any natural thing." Though this is supposed to express a transcendent experience within the poem, that idea takes on another meaning when viewed through the lens of McCarthy's No Country For Old Men. In McCarthy's world, nearly all of the main characters have already fallen out of nature, and their subsequent cloaking with gold is dangerous and demonic. The hearts of McCarthy's men truly are fastened to "dying animal[s]." The artifice of eternity is abysmal and artificial in a very false and misleading sense.

All of this makes me want to read McCarthy. So, even though I still don't particularly like Yeats, at least he's given me my interesting literary thought for the day!

Singing of Myself

So I got the big Poetry Speaks: Expanded book for Christmas, which is thorough and fascinating and full of good stuff, even for people who think they've already had a pretty good introduction to the poets included in it. The thing that makes it the most awesome, obviously, is the ability to listen to the poets themselves read some of their poems, which is invaluable in a medium that's so sound-dependent.

But I've been enjoying the book even for the poets for which the recordings aren't really that valuable (the earliest ones, where all you can really hear is a muffled voice - like the adults on "Muppet Babies" used to sound like, come to think of it). For example, Walt Whitman. His recording is disputed because it's not 100% definite that's it's actually him speaking, so there's only so much stock you can put in that. But no matter how many times I read Whitman, there's always more I can get out of it. I mean, I taught a whole unit on him to my 11th graders for two years in a row, but I still get chills when I read parts of his poems.

I was especially taken in by Galway Kinnel's introduction to Whitman in Poetry Speaks - it's always refreshing to hear writers talking about their inspirations. Kinnell says:

"Meanings are deeply embedded in Whitman's words. It is as if each word had been pressed while still wet upon a part of reality, and then taken into a poem bearing its contours."

What a beautiful way to think about how Whitman weaves his word-spell over you. I love the accumulations of his lines, the way the length and breath of them piles up and piles up and piles up until they are spilling over the rims of cups, running onto the floor with no regard for the way they are ruining your space. His exuberance leaves you out of breath -

Translucent mould of me it shall be you,
Shaded ledges and rests, firm masculine coulter, it shall be you,
Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you,
You my rich blood, your milky stream pale strippings of my life,
Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you,
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions,
Root of washed sweet-flag, timorous pond-snipe, nest of guarded duplicate eggs, it shall be you,
Mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn it shall be you,
Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you,
Sun so generous it shall be you ...

How can you not fall in love with someone who can write like that?

Sean O'Brien

just hit an unprecedented double while at bat for poetry in the UK.

Yeah, I know, that was my first response, too - Sean who? It frightens me that I am as plugged-in to the world of poetry (or, if not quite a world, then at least a terrarium) as I am and yet I hadn't really heard of O'Brien before now. You can complain all you want about the fact that no one reads poetry any more, but like it or not, a lot of the reason no one reads it is that it's completely off the radar in terms of having any sort of a media presence. I mean, for God's sake, ALL FIVE of the NBCC finalists in the poetry category were published by small or independent presses! That's awesome in some senses, and depressing in others.

Back to O'Brien, though. I really liked some of the things he was quoted as saying in this article in the Times Online - especially this:

"Writing poetry is often frustrating, while not writing it can be intolerable. Poetry is a vocation – it possesses you."

So very true. Do you think any of us would write poetry if we had a choice? It's probably the least practical thing you could do. I will MAYBE grant it a tie with "philosopher," but I think it's got to be in either the number 1 or number 2 slot of "least effective things to do with your time."

Anyway, having said that, I think I'm going to go read some Sean O'Brien. Judging from what was said in the Times Online article and from the poem posted there ("Blue night"), he seems sort of Emily Dickinson-esque to me. (Short lines, strong rhymes, a sort of odd wit, and what appears to be a penchant for capitalization). I'll read more & get back on whether that theory holds up or not.

Genius or Crazy Person?

I've always been convinced that the line separating genius from just plain batshit crazy was blurry, at best. Perhaps virtually nonexistent. And yes, that bothers me (because I'd like to think I'm not crazy, so my hopes for ever being thought of as a creative genius are slim to none). But it also just makes sense. You can't be mind-blowingly talented at something without being fairly mentally unbalanced.

I'm thinking about this again because I just read the Adam Gopnik article from TNY's October Arts Issue about "abridgment, enrichment, and the nature of art." He talks about the Orion abridged editions of classics like Moby-Dick and Anna Karenina and basically decides that, while perhaps "better" books from an objective critical standpoint, the abridged versions lose that unbalanced edge that make them masterpieces. When you cut out the shit from a novel, sometimes you cut out the very weirdness that made it great. I think he sums this idea up best by saying:

"The real lesson of the compact editions is not that vandals shouldn't be let loose on masterpieces but that masterpieces are inherently a little loony. They run on the engine of their own accumulated habits and weirdnesses and self-indulgent excesses ... What makes writing matter is not a story, cleanly told, but a voice, however odd or ordinary, and a point of view, however strange or sentimental."

I like this. Very much. It gives me hope for my own writing process. Time to stop trying to make everything objectively "perfect" and just focus on what I want to say, whether or not an editor would approve.