A novelist's inner eye

I'm reading Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders," his own favorite and, at least for the first half I've read, a terrific novel even in comparison with his better-known classics. I love Hardy generally, and this book isn't letting me down in the least. I just ran across a passage that seems a perfect example of the kind of observation of the inner workings of human behaviour and emotion that for me is the height of the novel writer's art. Local Dr. Fitzpiers has just "made love" verbally to Grace Melbury.

"At moments there was something theatrical in the delivery of Fitzpiers's effusion; yet it would have been inexact to say that it was intrinsically theatrical. It often happens that in situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth, with the evil consequence, if perceived, that the substance is estimated by the superficies, and the whole rejected."

When I read that passage, I had once again that treasured sensation: "ah-hah, I've felt that and now I am reminded of it for the first time." It seems to me that when I "made love" in this way, and caught myself, and thought "well, this is fake and overblown, but I believe I mean it," I thought too that this was a unique, personal experience. At some level I know that I have no unique types of emotional experience, that the human experience is a universal one and the "personal language," in the language-philosophical sense, does not exist. But I fool myself enough into believing such an experience is personal that I drop it in the wrong bin of memory and lose the chance to use it in my own writing - Hardy and the other great novelists call up these fine convolutions of human emotional experience, describe them and wow readers like me.

It is easy, it is common, to be satisfied with mockery in a situation like this, to caricature the man who speaks in hyperboles and poetry, to register an ironic distance between the love he describes and the feelings he actually possesses. It takes more, much more, the superhuman empathy and compassion of a Hardy or an Eliot, to look beyond that snarkery and see the poor man whose tongue runs away with him in part because his feelings are genuinely too much to easily fit into words.

The picture is Hardy at 16.

Don't say it!

I am a free speech absolutist, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize that words can hurt. On the contrary. But as the video says, it's perfectly okay to use whatever language you choose, if you mean it. If you don't mean it, be prepared to suffer the consequences.

N Word for the White Guy - watch more funny videos

The expressive voice

Here's a great example of the expressive power of a perfectly-trained and naturally super-gifted voice. A very simple song by Schumann, rendered full of twists and turns by Bryn Terfel's talent and gift.



Notice also how almost unwatchable all the mugging is. But a stoneface is hardly any better. I believe there is a great problem here that goes unacknowledged by the lovers of lieder: There simply isn't a good way to perform it. I like performing from the piano, as it allows me to enter into the song in what feels like a more authentic way, inhabiting it rather than presenting it. But of course that's not a solution for the vast, vast majority of singers.

Baloney sunset

I recommend The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, which was just about as feel-good as a film about a man with locked-in syndrome (normal thought processes, nearly complete physical paralysis) could be without being saccharine. The narrative was not what I expected - actually considerably more straightforward and realist than I thought it would be. Its lasting impression will be, for me, the thought that if a man who dictates one letter at a time with his eyelids can write and publish a book, WTF am I doing? It certainly challenges those of us who complain about too little time or writer's block or the lack of a room of one's own. I'm sure our hero wouldn't have minded trading for any or all of those little impediments.

Here's one of the hero's therapists, looking down on me:



By the way, this actress has the best scene in the film. In one of their therapy sessions, the hero says he wishes for death. She lashes out fiercely, with a "How dare you," calling his statement "obscene" and "selfish." Moving for the viewer and, one is convinced, moving and attitude-adjusting for the recipient of the tongue-lashing.

I also enjoyed Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, though I didn't know when I was getting into it that it was one of his four "Catholic" novels (I'd read and adored the other three). The style and timing of his narratives make them such pleasures to read. But I must say I didn't like the way the novel ended, getting almost preachy and non-realistic through the introduction of magical elements (miracles). Then, what do you know, I find this on the Internet, from none other than Graham Greene himself:

"I realized too late how I had been cheating the reader... The incident of the atheist Smythe's strawberry mark (apparently cured by Sarah after her death) should have had no place in the book; every so-called miracle, like the curing of Parkis's boy, ought to have had a completely natural explanation. The coincidences should have continued over the years, battering the mind of Bendrix, forcing on him a reluctant doubt of his own atheism."

I don't know quite what to make of the fact that I was so much of one mind with the author's self-criticism. It pets my pride a bit and really enhances the sense of fellow-feeling I often have with authors I admire. I feel I have so much literature to get through that I never go back to reread novels, but I'm feeling that maybe I should reread the other Catholic novels, which I last read (I think?) in college. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn't be reading at all, just writing.

Graham Greene apparently didn't make an interesting photo subject. The best I could do is a W.C. Fields-looking Greene pouring a drink:

Long road

I occasionally search archives for a picture I'm told existed in print of my father walking down a snowy road during World War II. No luck yet, but I've found a new potential source in the LIFE picture archive. It's worth a trip in any case. Most of the pictures in the archive were never printed.



Some lucky family has a treasure in this photo. This and all pics in this post are from the Battle of the Bulge, the source of most of my father's war stories. These were morbidly gruesome and spare of detail. One, which clearly weighed on him, was about how he had assisted a medic in the field conducting some unknown number of euthenasias by morphine.



Another, meant to instill some message about not being a complainer, involved sitting on half-frozen corpses at mealtime to avoid the wet ground.



Which isn't, with my ironic tone, to downplay what my father went through. The hardships these soldiers faced, mental and physical, do indeed put any complaining on my part to shame. The eccentric old crab I never once considered calling by his first name was, at the time, Wally, 23, some unimaginably youthful, immature version of the former. What did he want out of life?

Delightful laughter

I hope this video somehow survives its tumble through the vasty oceans of information to come and becomes the historical artifact it deserves to be. One can imagine or read about self-satisfied fatcats living in their castles in the sky in the 1920s, but one has no opportunity, so far as I know, to hear them. The laughter and sighing adorning these interviews with one of the best-known bears of the past couple of years will tell our grandchildren more than any words about the pompous idiocy of our high capitalist culture.



The point, of course, is not merely that the object of derision was right. Plenty of bears have been wrong, and hindsight is 20/20. It is not even that so many bulls were so wrong about the economy. This goes beyond the particular subject matter to give us a novelistic insight into the shining, ringing confidence people can build upon their own ignorance. I love the ones who say "I have no idea where you're getting this from" or "I don't know what numbers you're looking at." I find it hilarious that these same people are probably going to continue to work as analysts, when we have here what could fairly be called proof that they were not just wrong in their judgment but ignorant of the possibility that they were wrong, which seems pretty damning of their expertise.

Parenting

Every now and again our eldest is determined to communicate with my wife when the latter is nursing a sleeping baby and therefore unable to engage in speech. This creates pathetic artifacts like this:



And, the verso of the same card:


It is sometimes a lonely house, I suppose.

Now hear this

Big recommendation for Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, a history of 20th century classical music. I enjoyed the first 2/3rds of it immensely. It did a lot to revise my formerly sloppy references to things like "atonal" or "12-tone" music. I know much better now what is and what ain't. It even did something to get me excited about the idea of composition, something I've never thought about with interest before. I've been thinking about going back to school to study music, and it's become clear that I'd probably have to learn a lot of theory to get into graduate school, so I've been thinking about trying to do that - and now, with the idea that maybe I'd write some music, learning theory doesn't seem that awful.

The best aspect of the book is its biographical portraits. It's great fun to read about the wars between what you might call the musical idealists and the musical realists - those who insist there need to be absolute laws governing the composition of music, and those who basically say they know good music when they hear it. It's great to see a whole spectrum, from one extreme to the other, among the great composers of the century.

I was touched by the story of Shostakovich, whose string quartets I've come to love over the last couple of years. He's quite a tragic figure, living a life of apparent terror, suffering innumerable humiliations, and vilified by right-thinking people, effectively for choosing humiliation rather than torture and death, or the same for his family. But then I've got Lenin and Stalin on the brain after reading Koba the Dread (Martin Amis), and after thinking of our country's own active torture chambers.

A Shostakovich string quarter movement:



Two problems with the book: First and foremost, it leaves out the audience, or at least buys in, to some degree, to a snide attitude toward it. Many 20th century composers, particularly once they discovered no one wanted to listen, insisted that they didn't care if people listened, or would even rather they didn't. But I don't see why Ross should play along with this being even vaguely acceptable. I think it's rather horrid. It seems to me that as radically as music changed in this century, the audience changed just as radically, and that's of central importance to the story of music. It seems to be an aside for Ross, and I think that gives listeners short shrift. Without the listener, one must ask, Who Cares? If Stockhausen and Boulez diddle themselves to the end of time, who cares? I can find auto-diddlers in just about every adolescent bedroom in the country, and none of the diddlers' fantasies, I think, deserve my attention. Without a willing ear, music is just air, shaking.

I should repeat, Ross does mention these tensions around the audience, but ultimately he lets it drop, particularly in the last part of the book, when he makes a headlong rush through the European avant-garde and experimentalists. It seems to me every sentence should end with, "and no one heard it," or "and it was performed once for 12 people." Not true of all of the avant-garde works, I know, but not that far off either. Instead, we play along with the pose of seriousness when Stockhausen tells his players to reverberate with the universe, or whatever.

One example of the negative effect of Ross' casual treatment of the audience factor is the way that Darmstadt, the Mecca of the atonalists, is given the same sort of treatment as Paris or Berlin is earlier in the book. It was and is a place where self-pleasing composers go to play their music for other self-pleasing composers. It is a club. It is a conference. Paris is not a club. Berlin is not a conference. They are not these things because they are not just meeting places for composers - they are meeting places for composers and audiences. And after all, isn't it the audience Ross is writing the book for? I want to know, always, what's in it for me?

That's getting a bit confused - at any rate, the second complaint: The biographical fun peters out around 1960. The last third of the book is pretty dry at times.

One odd thing about the book: serious overload on Britten. Ross seems totally fascinated by the guy and by his man-boy love. He takes us on a complete step-by-step tour through three entire Britten operas. Maybe it is my imagination, but his treatment of Britten seems to be the longest of any treatment in the book. I guess I need to listen to Britten, but meanwhile, I get the impression Ross wants to write about homosexuality and 20th century music, and it sounds like he'd have a lot of interesting things to say about it.

Funny thing

It seems coverage of the recent VP debate got rickrolled.



It's not the first time somebody's held up a funny sign for the camera during an ostensibly serious news event. Perhaps, then, it's not an historic moment, but it does seem potentially to be an historically memorable expression of the Zeitgeist. It seems to say something important about what Generation Y thinks is funny, which is a funny thing, or what they think is serious, which is a serious matter.

I recently read an interview with Woody Allen in which he noted that today's smart kids appear to have the same taste as today's dumb kids, preferring the lowest forms of humor to anything approaching art, bored by Bergman and in raptures over one idiot kicking another idiot in the nards on Jackass. I say he "noted" it, rather than "complained," because the man's smart enough to know that what's past is past - no vehemence of nostalgia can recapture a dead era. One commenter on the interview, while misunderstanding this latter distinction, had an interesting reply: You, Mr. Allen, don't understand our humor today - everything is ironic, so part of the fun of watching someone getting kicked in the nards is the fact that we know that's a stupid thing to find funny. Well okay, but isn't that rather miserably fin de siecle? If we have nothing genuinely funny or engaging or interesting today, the distinction between funny or engaging or interesting and ironically funny or engaging or interesting is bound to be lost on the next generation. This is exactly what decadence, in its proper historical sense, looks like. It is irony so universal as to become cynicism.

That said, I don't mean to imply that the sign-holders behind Chris Matthews were missing the real importance of the moment. It is impossible to disentangle the serious from the entertaining in our contemporary media politics. Certainly the VP debate was, in some genuine and important ways, fake and unimportant. It was a joke, and America was the butt. In short, I can't argue that we aren't in fact at the end of the Enlightenment Era. It is the end of an era, the decadence of something grand, and perhaps that's funny, in a way.

Art and youth

I have felt for a while that the Dionysiac wildness I felt in my college years would never return to me, whether because it was put on, because it was a product of hormones or naivete, or because it was a product of a profound unhappiness I never expect to feel again.

But reading Rilke's selected poems lately made me think twice. Rilke was an "artist" to the hilt, creating, in Germany, during and after World War I, completely fantastic poetry, reaching for the eternal verities. Thoroughly sincere "art for art's sake" in such a time and place amazes me. He did this mostly over the course of a decade, during which he never showed signs of considering what he was doing ridiculous, as I realized some might. As I realized I did! Not in his case. The value of what he did is clear enough. But I realized I had decided at some point that my own artistic aspirations were ridiculous, that it was all childishness and intellectual masturbation. It was THAT, I think, that put out the fire in me. Never consciously or all at once, I had slowly put more and more distance between myself and my art, increasingly calling the seriousness I had once wished to bring to it artifice and self-indulgence.

So perhaps I don't want that which I have lamented before as impossible - the return of youth. I thought that only with a return of youth could I return to art. But that was wrong, wasn't it? What I must do is not return to art obliquely, but grasp it by the throat, cover it in kisses, slap it, pet it. I have been the wallflower of art, hiding my yearning under feigned disinterest, calling it names, abusing my love for it in order to soften the blow of my loss. I went from thinking I wasn't good enough to art to telling myself it wasn't good enough for me.

But reading Rilke reminded me that it can be good enough. Rilke's poetry was the first new thing I've read in many years that attempted to achieve high art and, to my reading, made it. I've read a lot of great novels in the past couple years, but they didn't have the same artistic ambition, being at least equally concerned with entertainment. Ulysses had the ambition, of course, but seemed insincere to me, a bunch of stunts. And it is that artistic type - the fraud - that has seemed to predominate in my personal experience and tends to dominate this cynic's imagination of the typical artist. At some point I suppose I came to doubt there were anything but frauds. But Rilke - and he's not my favorite poet, though I see his greatness - is not a fraud. I'm also reading Flaubert's letters - also not a fraud. These men loved and lusted after something real - lets call it the Muse, for lack of a better term. Now I'm coming for her.

The apotheosis of political correctness

One insufficiently noted aspect of the current presidential election is the historic apotheosis of "political correctness." By this I mean attacks on the opponent based on convenient principles asserting that certain statements are not to be allowed because they might offend.

One of the problems with political correctness, as it was originally conceived, was that it was often unclear whether anyone was in fact offended by a given statement, or how strongly felt that offense might be. This problem is magnified in the current environment, in which it has become clear that there have been many cases in which no one at all was offended by a statement, but the opposing party took up the statement as a cudgel on the theoretical basis that it could offend - "lipstick on a pig," for instance. This is meant only partly to inspire a sense of offense in those the theory asserts should be offended; it is more powerfully intended to undercut the moral authority of the opponent by offending the moral righteousness of those many millions (in some cases the entire population) who could never be personally offended by the statement per se.

What interests me about this is that it seems to be trumping every other kind of argument. Civilized behavior seems to have become confused with some sort of fictive, perfect political correctness, which judges everything from candidate's families to their level of honesty to be unmentionable by the opponent. The candidates - mostly the Republican side, but the Obama people are playing too - seem to to be mainly concerned with staking out the highest territory on Mount Outrage. Promises from both sides to shun negative campaigning have not until recently been dropped in favor of traditional negative campaigning, but nevertheless have long been dropped - in favor of negative attacks claiming outrage at the negativity of the opponent's campaign.

So it seems to me the chickens are coming home to roost for liberals who thought it was a good idea to declare various kinds of speech out of bounds. It turns out the enemy can play that game just as well, with the inevitable consequence - escalation. The outrage arms race is banning more and more innocent statements, leaving no content but the feigned outrage itself. We free speechers told you so.

Smiles of a Summer Night

-Why have I never been a young lover? Can you tell me that?

-My dear little girl… console yourself. There are only a few young lovers in the world. You could almost count them. Love has befallen them as a gift and a punishment.

-And the rest of us?

-The rest of us…

-What becomes of us?

-We invoke love, call it, beg for it, cry for it, try to mimic it… We think that we own it, we lie about it…

-But we don’t have it.

-No, my sugar pie. We are denied the love of loving. We don’t have the gift.

-Nor the punishment

-Nor the punishment.

Embarrassing...

I'm embarrassed by how much That 70s Show continues to affect me. No, I'm afraid this isn't a joke. I suppose it means so much to me because I never fell out of love with young love, so the wounds never totally healed. This show brings up feelings that I never feel otherwise, feelings of loss. That I lost something that wasn't real turns out to be irrelevant.

Let me say first that I'm basically content with the kind of love I now enjoy with my wife and kids. And I fully understand that once young love is lost it is completely irretrievable, as irretrievable as youth itself.



But I don't like to say it is lost as naivete or innocence is lost. I don't believe young lovers are all wrong. I think they are placing a bet with horrible, horrible odds, convinced that it's a sure thing because they have a pure faith in what they share with their lover. But I don't see what's inherently impossible about young love surviving, and with it a young lover's belief in the power of love to make order and sense of life and the universe.

For me young love was a vision and a remapping of the world. It was the birth of my soul and, for all it may have been the beginning of some illusions, it was the death of many more. For a time I thought love itself - not the security of a caring relationship, though that seemed part and parcel - love itself was the most important thing in life. The only important thing. I don't believe it any more, but thinking that way certainly helped shake out a lot of bad ideas about what might be important.

But at the same time as this ideal was flashing into existence, its most sordid refutation was waiting to pounce in the form of betrayal, lies and humiliation. My tastes of young love unsullied were bitterly short. It will take me much longer to view the Eric and Donna story arc in That 70s Show than it took me to travel from the first birth of love to its first horrible insult. Perhaps it is partly the speed of it all when I watch the show in the marathon DVD format that pricks my memory so painfully, recalling in my gut the wild, head-on plunges into heartbreak.

I'm afraid there's much, much more I could write. It's a bit crazy, I think, not just embarrassing but crazy how real the show seems to me, how desperate I was, for instance, to see Eric and Donna get back together in the finale of the series. It really meant something to me and impacted my state of mind for several days. I lost track at some point uncertain of the fact that the two characters are not two people, that they have only a fictive reality. I thought it seriously important that the two "live happily ever after," when I know they do not live, cannot therefore be happy, and do not exist even fictionally in any "after."

I know becoming absorbed by fictional characters is not unusual or dangerous per se, but this was more than the usual because, as I said, it was summoning up all sorts of feelings and memories I don't regularly confront. And it's rather humbling and a bit depressing to realize that the past I'm thinking of, now a dozen years past, will always be right there under my skin. If it's this fresh and real now, it will be this fresh and real when I'm an old man. Sometimes I imagine I shed possible lives as I move forward through life and choose my path. But at times like this it seems more like I am carrying all the castings in a rucksack.

Thinking about the work

"The work" can be a rather loaded phrase, particularly in the performing arts, where one has to be reminded by teachers to do "the work" in order to do "the art," the two being rather more distinct than in, say, writing. Of course, writing can involve research work separate from the work of commiting new words to paper - in fact, it generally does, these days. It was kind of a disappointment - yet a relief - for me to realize that the erudition of some writers was not as off-the-cuff as it appears on the page, but was the product of focused study.

I mention this because I somehow got it into my head that I'd like to write about Enrico Caruso. Not a fictionalized biography or something involving Caruso as a character, but something more like Flaubert's Parrot, talking around the various meanings and incarnations of Caruso in a variety of ways. To that end, I started reading biographies of the man, and have so far finished about 1.5 of them. It began to be rather difficult to face going over the same events multiple times, though I feel now that writing about it here is clearing the cobwebs and I may jump back in. The biggest difficulty is that while Flaubert's Parrot could reproduce some of the most seductive elements of Flaubert exactly as they appear in the (translated) original, the essence of Caruso to contemporary people - the recorded voice - cannot be transformed into words in English or any other language. I can talk about it, and if I am gifted I can talk about it in a moving and insightful way. But I can't offer, as Flaubert's Parrot could, the essence of the genius of the man. It has certainly had me thinking about how much better such a book could be in an appropriate electronic form. Perhaps the platform to create a saleable version of this book is not yet available, though I suppose there are plenty of ways to give away such a hybrid entity.

I recently finished "Born Standing Up," a book more directly about "the work;" in this case, the work of becoming a star standup comedian (aka Steve Martin). There wasn't much striking or revelatory about this book, which never delves into any serious emotional reality beyond Martin's cold relationship with his father. The one thing that struck me was the way that, particularly early in the book, he described his stage act in a sort of and then... and then... and then... style. For instance, he writes about how he would put a prop rubber hand on the edge of a curtain and then walk away from it, and writes something like: "The audience would think my arm was stretching." There's something delightful yet almost distressingly naive in the way he describes the joke's elements like steps in a magic trick (Martin talks about the connection he sees between highly controlled movement of a magic trick and that of a gag, but I don't think even he detects how similarly he imagines the choreography). And his description of the audience is so blank - they don't think it's silly or corny, they don't think it's hilarious or dull, they just think it is so - his arm is stretching. Very curious way of describing it.

After that I read "Letters to a young activist," by Todd Gitlin. I think Gitlin is drop dead brilliant, and I'm never disappointed by how far he's looked into things or how seriously he takes his ethical responsibilities. Emerging from America's last age of idealism, he is the ultimate realist of the left, debunking every one of the countless poses of the progressive movement without every giving up the cause or resorting, as so many such books do, to tired impossibilities when he begins to discuss next steps. He and I are on exactly the same page. I'm going to read his oeuvre, and have already begun The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Good title, no?

Toward the less goodies

Continuing the post below...

Nabokov: finished Pnin, and was just plain inspired by it. The prose is intimidatingly masterful. Here's a beautiful sample:

From a smaller boulder than the one upon which Chateau was perched, Pnin gingerly stepped down into the brown and blue water. He noticed he still had his wrist watch - removed it and left it inside one of his rubbers. Slowly swinging his tanned shoulders, Pnin waded forth, the loopy shadows of leaves shivering and slipping down his broad back. He stopped and breaking the glitter and shade around him, moistened his inclined head, rubbed his nape with wet hands, soused in turn each armpit, and then, joining both palms, glided into the water, his dignified breast stroke sending off ripples on either side. Around the natural basin, Pnin swam in state. He swam with a rhythmical splutter - half gurgle, half puff. Rhythmically he opened his legs and widened them out at the knees while flexing and straightening out his arms like a giant frog. After two minutes of this, he waded out and sat on the boulder to dry. Then he put on his cross, his wrist watch, his rubbers, and his bathrobe.

Simple, right? Just an intimating ease. You know, while Nabokov was a famous egotist, I sense in Pnin a deep sympathy for all the rest of us who lack Nabokov's magical facility with English. He is less sympathetic toward those who mock poor Pnin simply because he never quite masters the language. There is tragedy in his inability to communicate in any significant way to the non-Russian-speakers around him his complexities and beauty as a human being.

Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 - here we start to get into the writers I have much less feeling for. I knocked out this short novel to see whether I'd want to read the longer ones, and I'll have to take a pass. I just don't care what happens to people in unreal worlds. I don't see the drama of an anything-can-happen situation. Which isn't to say I didn't see some fun in this novel. But I can't say it's more than fun, and I can't say I'll dedicate the weeks it would take me to plow through one of his longer novels simply for fun. That's not what brings me to the novel reading business. When he begins to be deep or philosophical or metaphysical or whatever, I completely check out. It's hard enough for me to buy into that sort of stuff in a realistic novel (see Humboldt's Gift), but in a fantastic novel you're just trying to build a castle on sand.

I've been attempting to read books from the New York Times' 10-best lists from 2006 and 2007. So far, I've made three efforts, and all have failed. I'm not consciously trying to not like these books, and I certainly give them less of a chance than others might because I'm a slow reader and have to decide early whether I'm going to commit myself to a lengthy novel. One of the three was a book of short stories, and to give it its due, I just don't like short stories. I'll get into why some other time. But here are the novels:

Absurdistan: Read 20 or 30 pages of this, but two things really turned me off.

First, the central character and narrator is obese. He talks about his obesity and his desire for food in cartoonish ways that convey a twin feeling of hilarity and disturbed repulsion. I can understand why the trim author thinks being fat is both hilarious and repulsive. But I cannot imagine a fat person thinking of himself in both these ways at once. BTW, Martin Amis' Money also features a fat person (though at one point it is revealed he weighs in the area of 210 pounds, which may be bizarrely obese to reed-thin Amis but is not really particularly fat), and I was similarly put off by Amis' nauseous dislike of overweight.

Second, the novel features unfunny white rapping and an unfunny "girl from da hood" talking like a "girl from da hood." Oh sigh. The author should consider writing what he knows.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: I didn't read more than 10 page of what is truly a terribly written book. Here's a sample:

It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's Cockney accent.
I was wrong.

Do you get the impression the author stopped for about 5 seconds to come up with this timeless metaphor? What on earth is it supposed to mean? And the Dunh!Dunh!Dunh! sentence, "I was wrong?" Come on, that's something a 12-year-old would write. (And she did it twice in the handful of pages I read) But maybe I'm wrong. Let me try you on another gem of a metaphor:

And scars didn't necessarily mean one couldn't be, say, more Katharine Hepburn than Captain Queeg when it came to overall outlook and demeanor, a little more Sandra Dee than Scrooge.

Doesn't that parallelism imply that Katharine Hepburn and Sandra Dee are alike in "overall outlook and demeanor?" Am I the only one who has a problem with that? Again, the novel seems to have been written in one sitting.

I remember some gossip when the book came out about how the author, Marisha Pessl, is a devastatingly attractive young woman, and how the publisher was playing this up. As I recall, the stories I read tended to either not pass judgment on the book or praise it. Are people just blind to terrible writing? What the fuck is going on here? I'm baffled and kind of upset that a book written in this way was deemed one of the 10 best in the English language for its publication year in the NYT. That just can't be right.

Oldies are rather goodies

I'm so far having much better luck with dead novelists than I am with active ones. Here's the recent rundown, from deadest to least dead:

Nabokov: Pale Fire was a terrific read. I read Lolita years ago and have occasionally struggled, always unsuccessfully, with Ada for probably a decade. I'd fogotten what pure pleasure Nabokov's easy, confident prose can be, mired as I became in the tiresomely continuous efforts at brilliance in Ada. Pale Fire was authentically funny and ingenious and created a remarkable character in Kinbote. I'm now thoroughly enjoying Pnin, which is even less pretentious.

Bellow: Humboldt's Gift was a combination of a book I thoroughly enjoyed and a book I found a thorough chore. The one was a story of people and relationships (Heliogabulus likee that). The other was thoroughly unconvincing, tedious ruminations on metaphysical BS (Helio no likee). Where the two met, I found myself waiting impatiently for the characters who made fun of anthroposophy to be proved right. But no, the reader is apparently supposed to take this nonsense seriously, even to be moved by it. That's way beyond the powers of my imagination.

That said, Bellow's prose is absolutely wonderful. I had great pleasure (more, in fact) in reading Bellow's essays (in a volume called, I believe, It All Adds Up). Fascinating too, as a writer, to see how many of the minor characters and minor opinions in the novels can be found in the essays as people Bellow met and thoughts he thunk. I knew his novels were very autobiographical in their story lines, but seeing the same oddball people in his essay "reality" and his novel fantasy gave me a compelling sense of occupying the mind of the man.

Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot was fun and inspired me, as I'm sure it did many, to read more Flaubert. I've started on the letters, which some rightly call his masterpiece. I also started Salammbo, but its lack of realistic characters put it a bit beyond my attention span. As for FP, I thought the "novel" element was forced in, as if JB himself was embarassed by his obsessive interest in Flaubert and had to put it on a fictional character. Otherwise, a quick and enjoyable read.

Won't someone stop them?

I mean the people who say "troublesome" for "troubling." This is a very serious gaffe, given how immoral it usually is to dismiss something truly troubling as merely troublesome. What to the rest of us is troubling in Iraq is troublesome to the Bush administration, for instance. If they said it is troublesome, they'd mean it. But time and again I hear perfectly well-meaning people who mean "troubling" pick the wrong word. Please stop these people.

I also beg you to stop the people who say "unchartered territory" for "uncharted territory." I was actually kind of shocked to hear such a boneheaded malapropism in an oil company goodwill ad (Exxon?). How many millions is it giving to the advertising firm that turns out this bizarrely wrong copy? But you hear this one all the time.

I bring these up in part because I usually find lots of other grammar police whining about other such errors when I google them, but these two have hardly been touched. The first one, as I said, is more serious because it is actually usually unethical to make this mistake.

Please stop them.

A couple more

Adam Bede and Ethan Frome.

I'll start with Ethan Frome, which is the first thing I've read by Edith Wharton. This was certainly worth the quick read for the intensity of the late middle section, which read very much like an excellent modern drama. A wonderful, quick leap into this intense conflict of feelings which had much of the discomfiting thrill of the real experience. Things start to fall apart in the unbelievable suicide-pact moment. If they're willing to die for one another, then why not run away regardless of their lack of money, either living on love or starving, but in either case extending their time together? The "gotcha," twist ending felt utterly cheap and forced, unworthy of the moment-by-moment intensity of the earlier section. Who are these people? How did they become what they are? I'm not happy as a reader to have to figure this out myself.

Also, by the way, I was almost scared off the book by its wholly unnecessary and ineffective framing, which is something along the lines of, a couple of people told me a couple of things and I intuited the rest. Fascinating.

I enjoyed Adam Bede a good deal. It is certainly a younger brother to Middlemarch, lacking the scope and breadth in its characters, storylines and ethics. But there were many flashes of genius; I actually liked Adam's character the most, because though he was so nearly idealized he was ultimately convincingly humanized by his fits of anger. Dolly the Methodist, on the other hand, was just over the top with her little miss perfect routine. She was also too prim to possibly be any fun, in the sack or elsewhere, and I admit I like the heroine to be someone I myself might find attractive. All that said, and despite my allergy to things religious, I cried at the scene in which Dolly offers Hetty the comfort of Christ while the lost girl is waiting to be hanged. But then I also cried when Keanu Reeves made those bullets float. Something about a miracle, I suppose.

Not that I'm looking to defend myself, but I came upon an essay (collected in 1963) on Joyce by the English critic Cyril Connolly, who's a personal favorite of mine, and I noted that he and I made some of the same arguments about Ulysses. He's more willing to praise the book, but partly as a "young man's novel." Indeed, I would have found much in the book more titillating, shocking and revelatory when I was 20 than I do now. But here's Connolly:

"I feel that so much of Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, even when the obscurity has been penetrated, is fundamentally uninteresting that there must be some failure of conception or execution or both."

Connolly joins other critics in blaming Joyce's "frozen in 1906" viewpoint for these failures.

"I am trying to suggest that he fed his queen bee of a mind with inferior jelly and that from such subject matter it could not produce the sublime or even the comic effects which were intended. He asks too much of his ideal reader. This is perhaps an English heresy and may account for the way we lag behind America in our appreciation of Joyce (or is it our lack of subsidized theses?); and perhaps I am the only person to find the plans and keys and clues and commentaries on Joyce's books more exhilarating than the originals. Is there an immaturity in his mind and humor or a blind spot in mine?"

A bit more on Modernism

One observation that I ruminated over several times whilst plodding my way through Ulysses is that the Modernist idea has had a heck of a lot more success in visual art than in literature. The supreme importance of novelty and the creative power of the observer over the work of art itself seemed to utterly win the field in the visual arts, while in literature they were nothing more than a fad lasting perhaps 30 or 40 years. Not that there aren't new and different styles, occasionally, in literature, but they are never radical departures, and their newness per se is not counted as a major point in their favor.

I developed a bit of a theory about this, which in part takes what I'm here calling Modernism seriously and partly treats it as a hoodwinking of a class of willing dupes. I don't think I have to commit to either interpretation to say that people are clearly more willing to subject themselves to art that they don't enjoy but wish to praise if the experience is short rather than long. Even a long viewing of a piece of visual art (excluding films) is unlikely to go beyond, say, half an hour. And that half hour would certainly not be a period of continual attention to the piece. A book, though, even a novella, is likely to take several hours. A "difficult" book, a Modernist experiment, is likely to take much, much longer. So I think it's much more difficult to fool ourselves about Modernist literature. One can very easily look briefly at all sorts of visual garbage and believe each piece is inspiring deep thoughts. Or, to put a friendlier light on it, it is easy to "look away," literally or not, from a visual artwork, and form an intriguing web of personal associations. The same is not true of a book.

It is mechanically, physically awkward to stop and linger over every word or every sentence.
It can also be exhausting, and that is the core issue with something like Ulysses, in which, for a man of my age and weight, so many of the references are almost meaningless. To try to get out of this work what appears to have gone into it is hopelessly wearying.

And Ulysses brings up another good point. It is relatively easy for a visual artwork to be a unitary object, because it is delimited in space. Even if it fails to meet any traditional standards of symmetry, it clearly has a physical boundary. Even if it is a pastiche of seemingly unrelated parts, they ultimately all fit into a whole. But for a novel to attack structure and symmetry is a different matter. Over the course of the maybe two dozen hours I spent reading Ulysses, I confronted a discontinuous patchwork which never satisfyingly added up to anything. That in theory it might, that parsing it for several months or years would show the thematic resonances etc., is no recompense for this unhappy experience.

One more point I wanted to make along these lines: It's interesting to think of music as an intermediary point between literature and visual art in terms of the success of Modernist efforts. Unlike Modernist literature, Modernist music is still appreciated with pleasure outside the academy, though not by many. The experience of a piece of music generally takes longer than one with a piece of visual art, but not nearly as long as one with literature. It is easier to "skim" music than literature - nonsense music just drifts away into the ether at its own pace, while nonsense words can quickly become a discouraging morrass.

Another way to look at these things is economically. A work of visual art is generally experienced as one of many at a gallery or a museum. The viewer does not expect any one work to be "worth the price of admission." A piece of music is also generally not presented alone, but the dozen or fewer pieces in a concert are often less than the number of works one would see in a gallery or museum. The pieces are expected to "pay off" a bit more - hence the tendency to pad Modernist music with more familiar and readily likeable fare. Finally, a novel has to stand on its own and has to be entirely worth its cover value. If the reader is disappointed, he can avoid Modernist novels altogether by not buying them.

I note the similarity of the time and cost arguments. Just as devoting less money to any one piece of art makes the appreciator more willing to be disappointed, devoting less time to any one piece of art has the same effect.

The greatest novel ever!

Not!
That would be, I suppose, the perfect example of the kind of apparently unsophisticated reaction I've heard complained of lately by those who say the book reviews that appear online should at best be called "book reviews" - in quotes - particularly in the current case, when I am referring to that holy of holies, Ulysses.

The offended ones say that the reactions we read online have none of the quality or significance of those we might read in the more admired journals of opinion because they don't emerge from deep knowledge of literature. There are too many things wrong with this argument for me to keep from vomiting a little, but what most deeply concerns me is that it rules out the possibility that the judgment of the cogniscenti is completely wrong. To examine the sources or even to question the ethical bona fides of Ulysses is perfectly acceptible, but to dislike it is, depending on who you ask, infantile or irrelevant.

I refuse, based on the combination of my self-respect and my sheepskins, to consider my reaction to any work of art infantile. As to whether liking or not liking a work of art is relevant or not to the discussion, time has been and will continue to be unkind to art that is highly respected by society in general but unpleasant in actual personal experience. But I don't want to get deep into this argument at the moment. I'll just deliver my infantile, irrelevant take on Ulysses.

The connection to the Odyssey is so loose as to be completely impossible of correct interpretation without Joyce's key. Therefore it fails to be a meaningful element of this work. I think descriptions of the book that say it is "based on the Odyssey" or that it parallels that work were written by people who have not read one or the other or both.

The parade of 18 different narrative styles comes off as artificial and juvenile. Rather unsurprisingly, the newness of new forms has in itself no zest 80 years later. Some of the forms, particularly that of the second-to-last section, are antithetical to pleasant reading and seem like nothing less than an insult to the reader, a joke at his expense. Who is the reader out there that gets any kind of pleasure from reading a page of legal boilerplate simply becuase it was perhaps oh so tres moderne 80 years ago to think of putting that in a novel?

Joyce is the only ideal reader for this work. I think it is reasonable to write a literary work completely accessible only to those of great learning. But that's not what Joyce did. He wrote a work completely accessible only to someone of his exact, peculiar learning. Simply everything Joyce knows or has looked up. This creates a work that no one can enjoy as much as Joyce, and in that I think it's a failure. It reminds me of Pound's Cantos. Once you learn all the allusions and such, the Cantos do something kind of neat, but to feel those allusions in anything like their real significance you have to read all the books Pound read - which is not some perfect compendium of world literature, but his own, peculiar, eccentric selection from it. With only one life to live, I can't dedicate my reading to reproducing Pounds' just so I can take as much pleasure from the Cantos as he did. The same goes for Joyce.

I barely skimmed the 600-page Notes for Joyce as I was reading Ulysses, because I found that simply knowing the bare facts of any one reference didn't make the reading come to life or become more meaningful. Perhaps reading all the original sources Joyce read would do this. But frankly, I was not inspired to care. Ultimately, going to a reference to understand the references is the same as having someone explain a joke (particularly in the cases where Joyce is being "humorous," but really in every case where I'm supposed to be struck with any kind of emotion or resonance by a reference I don't know).

Along the same lines, I found nothing the slightest bit funny in Ulysses, and I love to laugh. I loooooooooooooove to laugh. I'm ready to laugh. I get humor. And Ulysses is not funny. I suppose I could tell at times that things were supposed to be funny, sometimes in a just plain sad punning way, sometimes in a Shakespearian kind of way, sometimes in a satirical way. But it wasn't, any more than puns, Shakespeare or satire is funny. People who genuinely think these things are funny have no sense of humor. But I think most people who say Ulysses is funny are just ridiculous people who are full of themselves. I've heard the math majors laugh at math jokes. I know all about this kind of insider "humor." It is, pure and simple, a celebration of the fact that you know something other people don't and you're therefore better than them. I like to compare people calling this funny to people laughing out loud at musical "jokes" like the Surprise Symphony. Now come on. Be serious. That shit is not funny. And if it's witty, I apparently do not like wit.

Were there a couple of moments I genuinely enjoyed? Sure. I won't go so far as to say it was a total wash. But if I hadn't felt obligated by society (Society!) to read the fucking thing, I would have a abandoned ship a hundred times.

I would call this a work of almost purely historical interest. I would not recommend it to anyone. But such a recommendation would have been meaningless to me, and all others who feel similarly obligated, so take it for what you will.