The Adventures of Mabel

The Adventures of Mabel By Harry Thurston Peck: ""

I've been on the street, canvasing in South Philly for Obama and find I've just too little time for a Sunday Salon post this weekend.

What I will do is leave you a link to Harry Thurston Peck's The Adventures of Mabel. First published in 1896, I have a somewhat later version that belonged to my grandmother. This was a favorite when I was four --before I learned to read.

The original illustrations truly catch the spirit of this little gem of a children's book. The last time I did a search for it, there was no sign of it on the web. Now there's a Wikipedia article--and this on-line reproduction.
I loved this book as a child. I still have the 1916 edition with the Harry Roundtree illustrations that my aunt read it to me over and over. The Kirkus reviewer seems to have forgotten what is like to be a child when magical thinking comes to the aid of the fledgling ego in a dangerous world where one is utterly dependent on adults who (like the Kirkus reviewer) seem to have forgotten their childhood. Mabel, with her animal friends, turns the tables on adults (and boys), coming to their rescue--not by assuming adult powers, but as a little girl with the mind and sensibility of a child. The style is that of a bedside story teller. All those 'weak' words the reviewer finds so tiresome, belong to the voice of the well intentioned but condescending adult--the voice of those little Mabel shows up story after story. As a child listening to these tales I didn't identify with that voice, but with Mabel--and remember the delicious sense of irony that came precisely from the power of being 'little' ...and knowing they didn't get it.

Sixty-five years later, I still sometimes wish I had some of that wonderful Brownie jelly to spread on my morning toast...

Aesthetics of Process

I've been perplexed by the problem of how to write a review, the kind of review I want to write, the kind of review I would like to read. I have something in mind, but I don't know what it is. I launch an effort to write about a piece of fiction and come to a dead end before I've filled a page. There are reviews I greatly admire--but at the same time, I hear myself say as I read them--this is very good, but it isn't it. This isn't what I'm looking for. Clavdia Chauchat's recent post on Letters from a Librarian, Notes on Valéry's Aesthetics, touches on a matter central to my problem: the difficulty of articulating an aesthetics of process--the difficulty of writing about those slippery choices that go into the making of any work of art, choices that have been erased by other choices, and which are themselves erased in turn, until the making comes to an apparent conclusion and nothing remains of the making itself. And yet, I'm convinced, that the very thing that engages us is what we don't see or hear, and yet calls us back into that invisible process when we confront the work.

I wonder if that part of the response to a work of art that takes place below or outside the threshold of reason isn't made of something like a reversal of the process of the making, that that shimmering illusion of inevitability sets off a chain of endless, alternatives, driven by a need to restore to the work its lost possibilities, restoring the potentiality which the completed work appears to deny.

A critical response that addressed process would ask, why this word and not another? Why this scene described from one point of view and not a another, or another, or another? The completed work confronts the viewer or reader as though from a state of high entropy which is anything but a state of rest-- as far from finality as the universe was as a singularity before the Big Bang. An aesthetics of process would explode the Platonic singularity into an infinite universe of expanding elements, all traceable back to their origin... the work itself, beyond which we cannot penetrate.

Old Age Unending

Christa Boyles Photography

Journal entry
March 23, 2008
Turning pages in the London Review of books, An ad quickly scanned.

Intelligent dying.

I paused to look. A book on euthanasia?

No... misread.

Intelligent dating

This would not have happened when I was 25.

Stories of old age should not have "endings." Counter-intuitive, but only at first glance. I mean, aesthetic endings--"closure." There is no closure in age. Only an endless going back, and going on, and then it...

... like Bach's Art of the fugue

I would like to write a collection of stories on old age that ended like that... or rather, didn't...

The Literary Character of the Obama Campaign

Once more, on the literary character of Obama's campaign: Jonathan Raban gets it right in this powerful essay from the London Review of Books.
HERE

Some thoughts on Faulkner and McCarthy.

By the calendar it's spring and the sun captures the panorama of the of the street in a flash as though spring were more than a promise, sunflash and shadow---shadow made all the deeper by light bursting from passing clouds, retreating again to leave us in winter light, sunflash and shadow--the essence of March.

Another six weeks and it will be spring verging on summer, six weeks of accelerated time, two more books to cover, the magnolias come and gone, papers to grade, azalea and dogwood in bloom, final exams to prepare, trees in full leaf--the world from brown and gray to blue and green green green.

Too little time to read on my own. I wanted very much to write about a favorite Primo Levi story, Man's Friend, from a 1990 New Yorker. I have a dozen or so issues set aside with stories I treasure--like Shirley Hazzard's In These Islands--another one from 1990--but Man's Friend has gone missing. I searched and searched, and the more I searched the more I was set on this one story, and when I couldn't find it, not my printed copy, not on the web (New Yorker archives from that far back are available only on a CD of New Yorkers going back to Adam ha-rishon) ... I didn't have the heart for anything else. Like a two year old child, who, once set on chocolate, prefers misery and tantrums to ice cream of any other flavor.

I have to finish AS I LAY DYING before class on Tuesday (haven't taught it in several years). After at least five complete readings of the Faulkner and much scanning and note taking in preparation for classes, delighted at how fresh it still is, and struck by just how thoroughly steeped in Faulkner the early Cormac McCarthy--SUTREE in particular, and how he has distilled and concentrated his style over the years, with dialog the major instrument of change. The flowing, darkly ecstatic visionary voice has retreated, sorted itself out, disengaged from his characters--until that third person narrator has faded to a background voice-over in THE ROAD, and dialog itself carries the narrative. Faulkner's characters are always haunted by some larger voice, as though they carry it within them as a presence that swells and breaks, like the prophets seized by the spirit. This to me is the essence of Faulkner--what seems to be what he is always working toward, searching for--language breaking into Being, a becoming of a third presence--over the characters, over the voice of the author--taking hold, taking charge of the work.

Read again this passage from the first chapter in Vardaman's voice. The child, having been present at the death of his mother, runs from the house crying in confusion, believing Peabody, the doctor attending Addie Bundrun has killed her. He strikes out in a furious assault at Peabody's team, of horses, driving them away. Retreating into the the barn, he tries to calm himself when he sees his brother, Cash, approaching. The language up to this point has been that of a profoundly ignorant, possibly deranged or retarded child, spoken words in quotation marks, followed by internal monolog. He is speaking of the smells and sounds of the barn, the presence of the horse he has been abusing. The internal monolog suddenly breaks loose and soars in rhetoric and vocabulary to nothing that could possibly come out of a child, as though possessed by some greater power.

It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components--snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve--legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames--and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape--fetlock, hip, shoulder and head; smell and sound. I am not afraid.

(and then, referring to the fish he has caught and cleaned...a return to the mind of the child)

"Cooked and et. Cooked and et"

Transformation--anticipating what can hardly be taken as anything less than transubstantiation... My mother is a fish. My mother is a fish.

Books for Places...

An interesting idea for a new blog...

The Heiroglyphic Streets

... the literature of Place and Time

King Lear, Obama, Political Discourse

I have been thinking about Cordelia, unahappy Cordelia, whose love is more ponderous than her tongue, who cannot heave her heart into her mouth to save her life. It's too easy to attribute her reticence to character alone, a mere refusal to indulge in flattery; I cannot help but sense that there is more to this than an over scrupulous fidelity to naked truth. This is more than a complaint, a confession that she has no way with words: Love and be silent, she says, a plain imperative belying incapacity--and when she does speak, her words, unadorned, have more force, both of affect and of reason, than the polished speeches of her two sisters, which she exposes with a few quick strokes for the lies that they are.

... But to no avail.

Is that the answer? Does Cordelia alone (with the Fool--who handles the problem by different means) see the fault in language itself? --the inadequacy of speech to represent the truth, while words lend themselves perfectly to the machinations of the lie? How much of this play we could interpret following that line of thought: Edmund lying to Gloucester by speaking the truth in his false defense of Edgar. Kent, who takes on a false identity to serve his King, and thus remain true to himself--and to a greater truth. I thought this a good take--and let it play a part in the discussions with my students, and then, listening to Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia, I realized I'd missed something important in that first scene.

It was the sense of shock that woke me to the neglected element--that I was listening to a political speech, a formal presentation--that sounded like nothing I'd heard in that context for so long that I'd forgotten such speech was possible. Yes, this was political rhetoric--fashioned to accomplish a calculated end--but at the same time, it was more and other. There were places in that speech where calculation overcame the other, but they did not dominate the whole.

I'm at a loss to accurately account for what it was that raised this address to a level so beyond what we've been accustomed to accept as the norm. It has to do, I think, with a certain tension that I felt between, on the one hand, the calculated means taken to succeed in the end Obama wanted to accomplish, and--not merely the "expression" of ... but the creation of... in the very act of speaking... of a presence, and a deeper purpose--of being true to that presence before others. Both were there.

Reflecting back on that first scene in Lear, I recognized what I'd missed, and its importance. Lear is speaking in courtly mode, ceremonial speech, dividing his kingdom, requesting in return, a ceremonial confirmation of filial piety and love. That is what Cordelia resists. It is not that language in itself is false--as though words were incapable of representing or expressing truth,--but that Lear had requested something that belongs to him--not as King, but as father--and not merely requested, but demanded--be delivered in purely ceremonial guise, and in this, he has corrupted the fundament of both social and personal order.

I think of how we have suffered from the corruption of public speech, and now it comes to me why I so chaffed at George Lakoff's "framing" arguments... as though all liberals had to do to counter the Reagon/Rovian corruption of political discourse was to imitate its methods, but justified by "purer ends!" The manipulation of the manipulated by the manipulators... to the end of time.

It's not a speech that makes the difference, dissect it how you will. If there is, in reality, cause for "hope," wherein does it lie, if not in being reminded what we have all but forgotten.... that speech, which through setting itself the task of imagining the reality of the other, brings into being at the same time, the reality of the speaker... in the act of being true to himself? The speech act.. as Hannah Arendt understood it, as every responsive action in the public sphere, releases unanticipated consequences.... not the sort of plans run aground by insufficient planning... but of a kind that are the ground and source of freedom itself... and of hope.

I am too old to ever again place my hopes in any individual. There is no one I've admired, I've not been equally disappointed by. It's not about Barack Obama, but to something he seems, more than any politician in memory, to have pledged himself to... in speech. About speech. About the possibilities of language to overcome its corrupters. I can only hope he will remain true to that. But he has renewed my trust--not in the person, in any person... but the power we have been given through language... and the power of speech to reunite the ceremonial, the ritual, the calculated... with that something more deeply interfused that we know, but cannot name, to be the ground of our being and of our hope.

Political Speech

When Lincoln gave his Cooper-Union speech he was an unlikely prospect to run, let alone run successfully, for president. Only a few hundred people heard him. But that speech transformed him from an obscure congressman from Illinois to a national figure. Without TV or radio or the internet--it was the broadsides, the printed copies of that speech reproduced and spread from person to person that carried his message... that spread the word.

I thought the days of great, and effective political speeches were over. Martin Luther King, perhaps the last master of the spoken word in this form. There was Reagan with his canned bromides read from the teleprompter. A smooth narcoleptic propaganda, all in the voice and delivery, soothing to minds reluctant to have their received notions challenged, a kind of verbal Muzak, that when you looked at the words and tried to make sense of them, meaning evaporated into polarized vapors. There was the occasional crowd pleaser--a Ted Kennedy or Al Sharpton at a Democratic convention, but they changed nothing because they challenged nothing, least of all--critical thought.

Now we have this strange unexpected phenomenon--a presidential candidate who can move beyond the stump speech, who responds to a political crisis, not with the techniques of the spinmeisters--but with a speech. A real political speech. A speech that examines and analyzes--that resists and rejects the simplifications that have been the stock and trade of political discourse for half a century.

I don't suppose there were many more in attendance at the Constitution Center here in Philadelphia yesterday than were present to hear Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper-Union in New York City. Instead of broadsides and printed copies, we have the internet, people emailing links to the text and video of Obama's address. And we have the what passes as journalism today--endless sound bites devoted to digesting and regurgitating speech back into verbal Muzak. Here is a real test--a contest... the power of speech, of real speech, to overcome the technical homogenization of our Corporate Commissariats of Enlightenment.

Who can tell what will come of this?

The Political Speech as a literary genre?

Political speeches of historical merit arise from and address specific historical situations, and in doing so, rise above the usual level of generalities, naming the elements of conflict, crisis and aspiration that mark that generation and that moment, highlighting the problems, not hiding them--or from them: I think this speech does that--and may prove to be one of the great political addresses in the American experience.

The weakest point: the reference to Israel as our staunch ally and--countering Rev. Wright--identifying radical Islam as the source of the attack on the trade towers. Better he'd left this out altogether--the one purely politically contrived piece in the speech... better left out, because a more truthful response would have required another comparable address--explaining how U. S. policy has used and corrupted Israeli politics, turning a once vibrant democracy into a right wing puppet of American bought-and-paid for interests in the Middle East: Israel as surrogate military outpost... but how much can you do in one speech?

HERE'S the text...

Homer Simpson... IS Oedipus Rex!!!! (Late Sunday Salon)

I have long believed that the only possible way to take Titus Andronicus seriously, would be to treat it as high farce. For that matter, I think an Anime animation of Paradise Lost would be a great improvement... Picture it! Those angelic beings heaving mountains at one another... the likely content of GWBush's dream life... if only he knew enough to enough to laugh.

But now we have
Fadi Abou-Rihan of The Psychoanalytic Field, asking the question: "Was the classical Athenian theatregoer any more resistant to the temptations of laughter and hooting than the modern day viewer of television talk shows and situation comedies?"

Look out for the noble and upright king who, because of his pierced ankles, has to hobble his way across the stage. Make sure not to miss our hero’s hyperboles for everything about his words and deeds is in line with the basic structure of humour as exaggerated non-sense. Note the sympathy you feel for him as he heaps his misdeeds and confusions one upon the other, à la Lucy Ricardo, desperate for the clear-minded and practical interventions of a Creon, his Ricky. (Might there be a psychoanalytic import to the implicit homosocial contract between king and brother-in-law here?) Keep track of our hero’s familial lines as they progressively blur beyond recognition: his children are his siblings; his brother-in-law is his uncle; his daughter will soon plan to marry the man who is both his nephew and cousin; many of Jerry Springer’s most outlandish of scenarios could only dream of such twists and complications. Last but not least, do not overlook Jocasta, Antigone, and Euridyce’s final suicidal gestures, sacrificial and redemptive only from the point of view of a modernity that has been thoroughly Christianized; to their original, almost exclusively male, audiences, they remained pitiable and laughable.

This is from the second of three (so far) on his Oedipus Rex series... what an extraordinarily liberating reading!

By all means, do pay this site a visit! HERE for the first and top post:

HERE for the most recent to date.

Freud's Debt to Literature: Sunday Salon

It's hard to imagine anyone arriving at insights like those in the passage from Civilization and its Discontents, quoted in my previous post, solely from clinical observation--not coming from a mind, like Freud's, widely conversant with literature from antiquity to his own day. Unless we limit ourselves to purely formal or linguistic considerations, we read narrative in terms of reconciling present action and reaction with causes rooted in the past. When we look at dramatic or narrative representation of fate and free will, for example, what else do we mean by freedom, if not action that arises sui generus out of relationships entirely of the present, unbound by any chain of consequences originating in the past? The opposite of freedom: action governed by the past--or by forces unbound by time as mortals are--which amounts to the same thing. Human action is rendered meaningless at both extremes. If we are left no other place for free will, we must at the very least believe that we have the freedom to affirm what the gods or the rules of nature have chosen for us: amor fati. At the other extreme--existence purely in the present tense is equally absurd. In the the world of Becket, or Ionesco, the two poles come together and are indistinguishable. How do you tell the difference between the purely arbitrary and the purely determined? Our ideas on the vicissitudes of the human condition change over time and vary according to whatever theory we use to frame and define them; this is as true of Freud's psychoanalytic ideas as any other. What endures in Freud's thought, and on the most general level, is perhaps a source of their power to regenerate in new manifestations, is their insistence on the multi-variant, inherently dialectical tension between synchronic and diachronic forces which determine human action, a concern which is in turn, one of the universal foundations of literary and dramatic narrative.

Why Freud is worth the effort...

I've put the Interpretation of Dreams aside for Michel Tournier's The Ogre. Freud in the raw at this late date makes for difficult reading. How do you handle the contradictions? Postponing the second half, not putting it away. A post on Larval Subjects: a critique of synchronous explanations--not at all confined to the structuralists. There's a long quote from Civilizations and Its Discontents--a good example of why reading Freud is worth the effort.

"When we look at an object or at another person we necessarily apprehend them in space. There they stand before us, alongside other things, in three-dimensional space. This phenomenological presentation of persons and objects thus gives the impression that those things are in space together, that they are side by side in space, but also, under the order of temporality, that they are simultaneous. Before my apprehending gaze I encounter the entities there, together, as being “at the same time”. Perhaps this would be one of the basic premises of structural approaches to social formations, for the structuralist tells us to approach the social formation in its "synchonicity, as a set of interdependent relations that are simultaneous with one another." Perhaps the problem with this view is that social formations are accompanied by archives, whether in the form of texts or in stories, such that they do not follow a trajectory of simultaneity, but rather are punctuated, like staves of a musical score, at a variety of different temporal levels, interacting in highly complex ways. Here it is worthwhile to recall Freud’s famous description of the topology of the mind in Civilization and Its Discontents. There Freud writes,

Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past– an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beaitufl statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand– without the Palazzo having to be removed –the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we would find not only the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.

For the latest in this series HERE

For the latest, Larval Subjects

"Give up youthful passion, Make friends with death."

A marble composition book lies open on my desk. This is my journal. Page 5587, dating back to 1988. The handwriting varies, season to season, day to day, but is more often tight and small--two written lines per space--two pages a day for most of this time, well over a million words. But in recent months entries have fallen off. I carry the current volume everywhere--or used to. I wrote on the el, waiting for the bus, in bars late at night. There were years when I filled the margins with sketches, caricatures, doodles.

Not anymore.

I had a dream a week or so ago. One of those dreams that follow you through the day, that nag at your heals like a tune you can't stop humming. The sort of dream that won't give you peace until you give it time, time enough to get a sense of where it came from. I wanted to write this in my journal--but I can't. I have the words in mind. I've run them through my head before drifting into sleep. Rehearsed the lines, revised and edited in my head. But I can't. I can't do it.

The journals are not a literary effort. Something apart from my poetry, my fiction. I don't pretend to make them into "literature." And yet they serve a purpose to that end. Like a blotter, they absorb the leakage of my life--and leave me free to move beyond it in my other writing.

I understand why. Why I can't make these entries. The dream was a realization--an end to a certain fantasy, a hope, that was the subject of these journals for most of the last ten years. Personal matters. A loss, a deep personal loss...

give up youthful passions, make friends with death...

and yet, strangely enough, it's not in my life, but in these blank pages that I most feel the loss... as though, all along--in all my life... when I courted love, it was never for love's sake, but only for the words that love set loose.

What in old age is left--but to court loss itself as Love? The Poetics of Renunciation... Amor Fati!

You have been a sham forever... laugh, and embrace it! Our inauthenticity--the one thing that distinguishes us from our fellow beasts. It's in our denial that we are driven to violence, a mad and futile passion to eliminate a truth we are not prepared to face.

Galatea meets iCub

The protagonist of Richard Power's Galatea 2.2, working with a misanthropic programing wonk, teaches an AI computer language by having it read great works of literature. Powers, as in all his books, knows his subject: language acquisition, lingusitic theory, programing, AI theory. A post at Conscious Entities reports on what researchers hope might be a real-world Galatea. Here's an exert.

More about babies - of a sort. You may have seen reports that Plymouth University, with support from many other institutions, has won the opportunity to teach a baby robot to speak. The robot in question is the iCub, and the project is part of Italk, funded by the EU under its Seventh Framework Programme, to the tune of £4.7 million (you can’t help wondering whether it wouldn’t have been value for money to have slipped Steve Grand half a million while they were at it…).
The gist of it seems to be that next year the people at Plymouth will get the iCub to engage in various dull activities like block-stacking (a perennial with both babies and AI) and try to introduce speech communication about the tasks. It is meant to be learning in a way far closer to the typical human experience than anything attempted before. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any clear statement of how they expect the language skills to work, though there is quite a lot of technical detail available about the iCub.

Go to Conscioius Entities for the rest.

Gilson, on The Arts of the Beautiful

See Letters from a Librarian: On Philistinism

The Interprettion of Dreams

The Tragedy of King Lear
Woodcut: Claire Van Vliet

I've been re-reading The Interpretation of Dreams. More than a century after the publication of Die Traumdeutung in 1899, it is simply impossible to imagine the impression this book must have made on its first readers. Freud's ideas have so assimilated themselves into our culture, have been taken up, rejected and reimagined on so many levels by so many movements that everyone thinks they know something about Freudian theory, especially if they've never read anything he wrote. The Interpretation of Dreams is a multi-faceted work: a record of the early development of psychoanalytic theory, a fascinating glimpse of late 19th Century Viennese middle class culture and intellectual life, a study in the transformation of traditions from their diverse contexts of origin: mythological, aesthetic, classical--recasting them within a new, over-arching ideological framework. One could draw a parallel between this process on the broader, more general level of ideological transitions to that of the clinical theories: the tracing of etiologies from origin to symptom to re-vision. Indeed, the method of dream interpretation, broken down to its basic elements, is a model for this process on both levels. Take the dream apart, identify and name the constituent elements, trace these to their immediate sources--a two-fold deconstruction, removing each from its larger context, and so preparing the way for the final step, the bricolage of putting them together again in a new package, the latent, and of course, truer meaning. Not unlike, I think, how we have invented the idea of "art," though perhaps, as a psychological phenomenon, one that works in reverse.

We view, say, a Benin bronze--a fetish object--but now, a piece of sculpture in a museum. The label informs us of its place in the culture of origin, not to bring us to an imaginative appreciation of that place, but by intellectualizing it, freeing it from its original significance, allowing us to break it down into a newly named set of components: composition, harmony and tension, and by the terms we use to recreate it as an aesthetic object--grant it a new existence as a work of art.

I am struck on this reading by how often Freud turns to literature, how profoundly important these literary sources are for the formation of his ideas, how--unlike his treatment of scholarly and scientific predecessors--literature stands for Freud as ready confirmation of his theories, as examples (properly interpreted, of course), of latent meanings made manifest. Even when he strikingly over-determines his analysis, say, of Lear in the Three Caskets, there is something of his treatment that releases it from claims of ownership, that, paradoxically--in the very act of making the Lear of his essay so entirely his own, he leaves us the Lear that remained beyond him, the Lear that came from the mind of its mysterious and unknowable creator. What more could you ask from a critic? Through the concentrated power of a strictly limited interpretation, reveal the unlimited depths that remain beyond those limits. No wonder, then, the fecundity of Freud's writing on literature and critical theory.
---

Jonathan Lear compares the recent Oxford University Press translation of The Interpretation of Dreams to the Strachey Standard Edition (the one used in the Avon paper back) HERE. Fadi abou-Rihan has also posted on the problem of translations of Freud on The Psychoanalytic Field

Book News in the News News!

Can't pass an opportunity to post a link to this Christian Science Monitor story on ABCnews.com: Homeless shelter book club