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.

Greatest Sentence Ever

From Ray Bradbury's short story "Heavy-Set":

"Some nights he pressed himself up and down on the ground with his arms and some nights he played a game of basketball with himself and scored himself, team against team, black against white, in the backyard. Some nights he stood around like this and then suddenly vanished and you saw him way out in the ocean swimming long and strong and quiet as a seal under the full moon or you could not see him those nights the moon was gone and only the stars lay over the water but you heard him there, on occasion, a faint splash as he went under and stayed under a long time and came up, or he went out some times with his surfboard as smooth as a girl's cheeks, sandpapered to a softness, and came riding in, huge and alone on a white and ghastly wave that creamed along the shore and touched the sands with the surfboard as he stepped off like a visitor from another world and stood for a long while holding the soft smooth surfboard in the moonlight, a quiet man and a vast tombstone-shaped thing held there with no writing on it."

I mean, DAMN, Bradbury. That is hot. Like, Faulkner-hot.

Things I Have Decided

1. Meat should thaw faster when you take it out of the freezer

2. Creativity would not be sustainable without substance abuse [caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine especially]

3. Ray Bradbury has joined my list of best short story writers ever [after Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver but before William Trevor and possibly even Nabokov, who is really a better novelist, I think]

4. I want to re-read Under The Volcano

5. I am going to start submitting work to places again and log my rejection notices on this blog

6. I should maybe reconsider my irrational hatred of Robert Frost

These are all things that I just now decided, and I will probably renege on at least half of them. Numbers 1, 4, and 6 will probably not happen.

Reason Number One Million I Should Not Be Given Money

is that I always spend it on books. ALWAYS. Hello, my socks have holes in them all over and I need a new jacket and I'm not even really making enough to pay my bills right now, but the minute I get my hands on money it goes straight into the bookcase.

At least I had some excuse this time. It was a gift card, so it's not like I could actually SAVE the money. And anyway, I'm back on a reading kick. I've been neglecting my reading & writing for a while now, what with the holidays and stress over graduate school applications. And there's nothing like buying new books to reinvigorate the "I want to read and write forever!" part of my mind.

Just cracked open my new copy of Bradbury Stories, a compilation of 100 of Ray Bradbury's best short stories. Am completely in love so far. The only other Ray Bradbury I've ever read was Fahrenheit 451, and I only read that because I had to in order to pass 10th grade English. So I couldn't really count myself as a Bradbury fan. A friend of mine (whose literary taste I tend to agree with) is in love with him, though, and ever since moving out to L.A. he's been put back on my literary map, so when I saw this volume of short stories I immediately got excited for it. In his introduction, he says that the way he writes is to "jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down." I'm very bad at that. I tend to want to build the wings first, and then I'm stuck at the top of the cliff putting these wings together for days and days, and the more I look at the wings the more I think they're really not QUITE good enough, and even after they become acceptably functional I tend to want to perfect the look of the feathers and the color that they take when the light glances off of them, and then before you know it it's dark outside and I decide I'll have to wait for the morning to actually jump, and of course I never do.

The whole process is a little easier when writing poetry, which is probably why it's the only genre of writing that I've successfully written in. I mean, I've written a few short stories, but nothing that I'd feel comfortable actually showing to people. Perhaps I need to be more Ray Bradbury about my writing if I want to get into fiction.

Reboot

Today I became one of Tao Lin's interns.

Today I also tried to finish reading one of my New Yorkers left over from October. The attempt was unsuccessful. I keep thinking that I can catch up, but I don't think it's possible. I think the people at The New Yorker secretly want you to never be able to catch up in your reading of The New Yorker, so that you're always feeling a little less elite than you think you ought to be. And they also know that if you give up and relinquish your subscription altogether, you will be admitting that you are a failure, which no one, especially no one who subscribes to The New Yorker, really wants to do. So they will always win. And people like me will always be sitting in their living rooms after work, attempting to read a 25-page article about a vice president of a large financial institution in Uzbekistan from four months ago which by now is completely worthless reading material because the vice president has been assassinated by guerrilla forces and the financial institution has been bought out by a hedge fund and in any case you will never read anything else about these people EVER because no sane news source will report on it.

I think I am going to watch Project Runway and eat some soup.