Translation, Teaching, Reading--passive and engaged

I've been struggling with the problem of how to relieve my students of the habit of passive reading. Keep in mind--I'm teaching college freshman, almost all of them business majors in one form or another. Few of them read for pleasure. They're extra-curricular scholastic experience did not include theater. When they read aloud, they do so self-consciously, without expression. In their mouths, Lear's "Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i'the cage..." comes out no different than were they reading instructions from a computer manual. The words as they read them have no burrs, no points or hooks, no Velcroed edges to catch a thought, a heartbeat or a tear as they pass through. The problem is getting them to slow down, and most importantly, when they read on their own--getting them to recognize when they don't get it, to understand when lines pass through with no effect, as little more than white noise, that it isn't supposed to be that way. No matter how apparently successful the sessions of close reading in class, they invariably revert to form. What to do?

I've heard others tell me they had some success having students write paraphrases, an idea I don't find at all to my liking, but Friday morning I was in a quandary trying to come up with a plan for my afternoon class. We'd done some close reading with Lear, and as usual, it wasn't making any lasting impression. In desperation, I was almost ready to work up an exercise in paraphrase, and then I stopped... how does paraphrase differ from translation, I asked myself? What if I asked them, not to paraphrase, but to translate from Elizabethan to contemporary English? Unlike paraphrase, they would not be able to generalize. What was concrete in the original would have to be concrete in the translation. When Lear compares his situation to a man fleeing a bear and faced with a roaring sea, there would have to be a bear and a roaring sea in the translation.


You don't delete the bear by turning it into a symbol, or worse... a generalized explanation. They would not be able to say or write, as they are wont to do: "He seems, like, you know... there's two different kinds of danger?" This is not a translation of

...Thou'dst shun a bear,
But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea
Thou'dst meet the bear i'th' mouth.

In a paraphrase, you need pay no attention to levels of diction. In paraphrase, the elevated speech of a nobleman and the crude patois of peasant can be rendered in the same style. Not so translation. In translation you would want to find a way to represent the difference. Not describe it--represent it, show it. To translate, you have to pay attention to detail, and hasn't that always been the most difficult idea to get across?

Testing this out, I sat down and began to translate from Act 3. Wow, I thought... this is not easy! But everything that made it difficult pointed precisely to what I hoped they might learn in the process, learn from the trying--that what they had thought of before as reading was but a pale semblance of what happens when you are engaged with the text. I imagined, filled with hope at the possibility--my students suddenly looking up--after struggling with a few lines, overwhelmed with the revelation that up to that point, they hadn't been reading at all! ... one does not teach freshman if one is not given to such fantasies. And who knows... this one just might work!

------

My intention when I started this post was to introduce a piece I stumbled on surfing for articles on translation: Eliot Weinberger's long and thoughtful essay in Issue One of Fascicle.

ANONYMOUS SOURCES: A TALK ON TRANSLATORS & TRANSLATION

Here, from the final paragraphs and postscript. Worth printing out the whole and keeping on file.

... In July of 1991, the Italian translator of The Satanic Verses, Ettore Caprioli, was stabbed in his apartment in Milan, but survived. Days later, the Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, an Islamic scholar, was stabbed to death in his office at Tsukuba University in Tokyo.


As far as I know, Rushdie has never made any extended comment on Hitoshi Igarashi. It would take another kind of novelist– Dostoyevsky perhaps– to untangle the psychological, moral, and spiritual meanings and effects of the story of these two: the man who became the most famous writer in the world at the price of what seemed until recently to be life imprisonment, and the anonymous man who died for a faithful translation of an old mistranslation, paying for the writer's mistake.


Translation is the most anonymous of professions, yet people die for it. It is an obvious necessity that is considered a problem. (There are never conferences on the "pleasures of translation.") Yet it is a problem that only arises in the interstices when one is not casually referring to some translated bit of literature: the Bible, Homer, Kafka, Proust. . . Could it possibly be that translation essentially has no problems at all? That it only has successes and failures? There is no text that cannot be translated; there are only texts that have not yet found their translators. A translation is not inferior to the original; it is only inferior to other translations, written or not yet written. There is no definitive translation because a translation always appears in the context of its contemporary literature, and the realm of the possible in any contemporary literature is in constant flux– often, it should be emphasized, altered by the translations that have entered into it. Everything worth translating should be translated as many times as possible, even by the same translator, for you can never step into the same original twice. Poetry is that which is worth translating, and translation is what keeps literature alive. Translation is change and motion; literature dies when it stays the same, when it has no place to go.

Time out. Politics Matters. We cannot exempt ourselves from our human responsibilities...

I did like Edwards. I liked the rhetoric. His taking on the Corporatocracy that has stolen the country from the people. But you can have the best ideas going and it means nothing if you don't know how to work the system. If you don't hold the right cards.

The difference between Kennedy and Johnson--I hated Johnson, such a sleaze, but he was a suburb inside operator. He was able to get Kennedy's programs though congress. All that fal da rah about Kennedy's mystique and charisma is more than half nostalgia. I mean, he barely beat Nixon! Freaking NIXON! That should give you a good reality check on how far "charisma" can take you.

Yeah, Kennedy was a good speaker. He knew how to rally his own natural base, but he did not bring that many new people into politics, and half the country hated him. To be effective, his charisma wasn't going to do him much good; he would have to wheel and deal, work with what was there--a reality that reduced his "charisma" to politics-as-usual in his time.

I say this because of the comparisons being tossed around: Obama to Kennedy. The reality is, Kennedy never approached the kind of response that Obama has generated. So what we have in the Democratic primary race now, on one side, is a Clinton who has learned from a master and is almost as shrewd an operator as the Big Dog himself. Clinton as president would know how to work the system--she could be as effective as the limitations of the current distribution of political power and popular sentiment allow... which is to say, she might even match the Big Dog... but by this time we ought to know... that's not enough.

Bill was good. He knew how to play the cards he was dealt, but he couldn't change the deal he was working with, and there's the problem.

That's where Obama comes in. There's no question about it; the man is a popular political phenomenon. I don't listen to his speeches to learn what his policies will be. He's generally on the right side of most issues, but I don't see that as being what matters. Not in this election.

We're involved in one of those generational transition elections--and one like none I can remember in almost 50 years of following politics. There's a part of me that hesitates to come out and take a stand... a lot of reasons to distrust people who have the kind of gift Obama has. He whips up irrational energy... so much depends--not on how he plans to reform medical care--but on how he responds to, how he uses that collective fever he releases in the crowd.

I think of Martin Luther King, an example of someone who had that same gift--and how careful he was, how conscious he was of how he used it. That's really what the non-violent philosophy was about... as much as it was a tactic of mass actions, it served as a natural limit to the doors of power that might have tempted him--and in that era, a pretty effective reality check.

So what I watch when I listen to Obama is the expression on his face--what happens to him when the waves of the crowd wash over him. And I see two things. First, a turning inward, this look of focused resolution--a look of recognition. He knows what is happening. It neither surprises him, nor moves him over much. He withdraws slightly at the very peak of the response... does not push it beyond a certain point, does not seek to drive the crowd any closer to where individual identity is abandoned to the mass. Nor does he show any signs of needing this--he enjoys it, takes it in, but it's as though you can see a look of satisfaction that precedes that moment, a confidence he brings to the crowd, rather than seeking it from them... he has not come to ask the crowd for personal confirmation... which is precisely the source of his power, of his charisma. He remains, somehow, outside of what is happening around him, and so, in perfect control.

So I see in Obama, as he awakens a whole new political constituency, a new political reality taking shape.

Yes, effective power will always depend on the kind of insider skills at which the Clintons (and Lyndon Johnson) were past masters, and Obama as president will be no more effective than Kennedy, for all his charisma, if he doesn't surround himself with the right people, if he doesn't learn how to use the power he releases... but this doesn't worry me.

He's a fine poker player. A skill he used as a newcomer to Illinois state politics. He seems to have as sharp an instinct for the details of power as he does for shaping the big picture, so the real advantage of Obama over Clinton, the real choice, is between Clinton's proven ability to work, and work within, a broken system. Politics as the art of the possible, the art of producing, as we have come to expect... the lesser of several evils, while Obama, by raising up a whole new popular political constituency to appeal to, to back him up, stands not only to change the deal with a new set of cards, but to change the game.

I see I've used that word twice... change... which may, for all its rhetorical redundancy, not be as hollow as it sounds.

Given my likely choices... voting or not voting--since I'm not quite ready to give up my belief in the idea of democracy--of government by the consent of the governed (and if anything is clear at this point, a vote for a Republican would amount to abandoning that belief) ... I am inclined, baring further developments to the contrary, to say that I'm am prepared to vote... and with no small measure of hope for what it might mean... for Barack Obama for President.

Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Day, Ebenezer Baptist Church

Manil Suri at the Free Library: Part 2 of 2.

Having been shut out of the last three readings, I showed up two hours early. It's a library. I brought paper, a book to read--what's a two hour wait in a library?

It was closed. Steel gates locked. I could see two women at the foot of the stairs stacking books on a table under the bronzed eye of Dr. Pepper

Dr. William Pepper, Founder, Free Library of Philadelphia - (who--in statue form--plays an important role, as does the library, in my novel, The Magic Slate

Of course, he didn't look that big from the front door, at the far end of the great hall...



Keep in mind, too, that I was peering through the criss-cross grid of a steel gate. At least I knew I wasn't there on the wrong day. That table--just where they always set up when they have a reading, the author's books stacked up to sell, the author, after the reading, one table down signing copies for those who go in for that sort of thing.

The reading itself takes place in a small auditorium downstairs. Seats 387 people. For the "Celebrity Authors" (such as we have these days), chairs are set up in the great hall with a large screen blocking everyone's view of Dr. Pepper. Late comers get to see the projected image of the author, and hear his projected voice. Even less to my liking than expecting authors to scrawl flattering lies to perfect strangers on the inside covers of their books. As if what you have to go through to write and get published isn't humiliation enough.

I paced back and forth, watched the rush hour traffic on the parkway, the homeless men lined up behind a van waiting for the cup of soup and plate of food being dished out by three women racking up points for the sake of heaven; listened to the flags of the world flapping in the wind. Then I remembered--it was early enough, not much past 5:30, that the library bookstore would still be open. Yes! ...and I had just withdrawn money at an ATM. What better use of a conscientious citizen, a recession looming, than, like those women feeding the homeless, rack up points for the sake of heaven by going shopping!

Information for bibliovores. If you're in Philly and doing the rounds of bookstores, you won't want to miss this one. The Free Library is on the Parkway between 18th and 19th. Walk past the library to 19th, take a right and behind the library on the corner--large collection with hidden treasures, great buys]

I wandered back to the front doors, $40 lighter in the wallet, what felt like as many pounds heavier in my canvas (Cats, Books.... Life is Good!) book bag. Still locked. Okay, I missed John Updike. Wasn't that disappointed. More like duty that I went at all. Missed Sherman Alexie. Sherman is so at ease in front of an audience, witty, unpretentious. More like a visit with a good conversationalist than a "performance," so I was irked to miss that. Can't even remember who the other Celeb was. For them, the doors were open three hours before the reading. Manil Suri's stars, evidently, don't shine as brightly. There's something to ponder, I muttered to myself, pacing the sidewalk, waiting for the doors to open.


At last, after a forty-five minute wait that seemed much longer, a guard came to the door, unlocked and slid the steel gate aside, and I made my made my way to the auditorium--stopping to buy a copy of Suri's new novel.

Reviews from Publisher's Weekly at Powells

My Mind on Books and

Jabberwock

Add $26.75 to $40. Add "don't go to readings in or near bookstores with cash in your pocket" to the rule about shopping in a supermarket on an empty stomach.

The lectern is set up at the center of a proscenium stage, backdrop of red velvet curtains. The stage is raised no more that two feet above the level of the auditorium, so from my front row seat, I would be about eight feet from the speaker. A young woman in plaid skirt, librarian blouse and brown boots offered the usual introduction, after an appeal for donations for the proposed new Moshe Safdie addition. Like my students (but only the women), she ended all her sentences with a rising inflection, as though asking a question. That's only a part of it. Young women have developed this tonal dialect on their own, quite apart from the equally incomprehensible young male mumble, a form of proto-speech produced with moth partially open, neither jaws nor lips moving (like someone with a sinus problem, or talking in their sleep--which may, in fact, be the case. I suspect this may be a dialect developed and reserved for classroom delivery); the women, on the other hand, use their patois all the time, pretending to understand one another perfectly well, but the consequence of this New Speak for me, is that, in the one case, the stress is so out of sync with the meaning, and in the other, vowels so blur into an indistinguishable porridge, that should I find myself listening to anyone under 35, I'm reduced to blinking in stupefied incomprehension. I never fail to be relieved at the beginning of a term to see several foreign students in my class. Thank god, there'll be someone in the room whose English I will understand!

This is where the mind goes when you have time on your hands. But at last, the introductions over, the author appeared from the wings and took his stand behind the lectern. Suri has an easy, relaxed manner (he looks a lot like Barack Obama--handsomer, without the big ears, tall, thin--an interior quality that projects a sense of effortless presence. The reading, I discovered, you can see and hear for yourself. It's on YouTube. Different location, but essentially the same event, so I won't say more about that, though I want to mention what he said after the reading about his design for this book in relation to The Death of Vishnu, and the third book he plans for the series. This should not be thought of as a trilogy, he explained, where the same characters are taken up in each book, in different situations and stages of life. Better to think of it as a triptych, each book related thematically with India as a background in different stages of its development since independence. In the Death of Vishnu, the near-homeless man who lives on the stairwell of an apartment, serves, like the god whose name he carries, as a kind of caretaker watching over (though with little power to intervene), the lives of the tenants. The setting is contemporary--India as it has come to be in the present. In the second book, he wanted to go back in time--not long after independence--to relate something of the story of how a post-colonial state, accepting the challenge of modernity, but without imitating the west, began to work through its own rich traditions to evolve an identity and place in the world that would be its own. Shiva, as a god defined by absence, serves in telling the story of Meera--a love story--maternal, filial and sexual, as she finds herself through the loss and absence of the objects of her love. Shiva is also the god of destruction, preparing the way for Brahma, the emblematic god of the next book--who recreates the world, beginning a new cycle of creation and destruction. Suri, then is engaged in creating a form of aesthetic national myth-making, not unlike that of English literature from the Arthurian legends though Spenser and Blake, but played out on a most intimate and human level. I look forward to reading The Age of Shiva--and to the third book in his triptych.

Manil Suri's webpage

Manil Suri at the Free Library/ Peggy Clark's Water Colors

Portland Rainy Morning: Watercolor, Peggy Clark

Manil Suri will be at the Free Library on the Parkway this evening. Last three times I tried to attend, the auditorium was filled. Seating only in the main lobby under the bronzed gaze of Dr. Pepper--watching on a giant TV.

Not for me. Turned around and went home.
[post reading: Suri impressive. Too tired to string words together last night, but will follow up after classes0

I'm not much for book signings, but I like to hear the authors read. Last time I managed to get there on time--a few years ago now--Richard Powers and Ken Kalfus. Powers read from The Year of Our Singing, and Kalfus from The Commissariat of Enlightenment. A memorable occasion/

I haven't read Suri's lastest, but The Death of Vishnu was one of my favorite reads in 2002. If I make it on time, I'll write about it when I get home.

Meanwhile, here's an image one of my sister's watercolors.
I'll add a list of West Coast galleries that carry her work when she sends them. She's one gutsy woman. All of 90 pounds, if that--in her forth month of chemo, post surgery for ovarian cancer: still painting and doing exhibitions.

A Rose, a Yellow Forsythia... we are responsible for everything we most deeply feel...or feel we know...

Photo by Lefty


A post on: Black Mirror brought back a memory... not of a rose...

... for me it was the forsythia… dripping with rain, a break in the clouds, the sun turning each drop into a prism. Twelve years old, coming from an art class at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

“You are responsible for this…. ”

I didn’t have those words, but the meaning was there… overwhelming.
That what I felt, what I saw in that moment… I would be a thief to hold to myself. That if I failed to pass this on… and I clearly understood this to mean.. that to die without giving it form, to what had happened to me in that moment, and all such moments I might experience in the future… that if I failed to make them real to others… then I might as well have never lived at all.

That whatever I knew of beauty in the world… I was responsible for. That I experienced it as a debt to be paid, as something that I owed… for my very life.
The gift of the sublime is not free… we are responsible for every passing glance that takes it in. It doesn’t matter whether I’m remembered or forgotten… others have surpassed anything I’m likely to do, and if my work is forgotten, it will be because others have surpassed me in my own time. What matters, is that I never forget that day, the forsythia drenched with rain, and what I learned in that moment. What matters, is that I not forget… that I not forget

Collective Creativity?

Somehow in the preceding posts and the conversation that followed I lost track of the question that set the series in motion. This had to do with Carver and Lish. Does the fact that the published versions of the early stories were a cooperative effort diminish their value? Are they somehow aesthetically compromised?

If so, why? How? (who wrote the Bagavid Gita? The Epic of Gilgamesh? Do we know the names of the authors of the Icelandic Sagas? ... know that they were not the work of many authors over the course of several generations? What difference does it make? (I ask that as a real question)

If none, or little, or a difference we can not identify or describe--what does that imply about how we are to understand the creative process, with the assumption, held by many, that the individual is the seat of creativity? This is why I mentioned Walter Benjamin; I see this, though I'm not sure I could spell it out now, as related to the problem of reproduction, a parallel: the problem of origin, as companion to the problem of originality.

Creativity and the Individual

Steven Augustine wrote in a comment to my previous post:

Jacob, I'd have to say that this question is as colored by personal value (the word "fetish" isn't a neutral one, in this context) as the comments. Then again, what of it? What opinion, on any matter, *isn't* highly inflected?

The question isn't whether or not our interpretations are "inflected," the question is, how? In what way? How does any particular set of these unexamined assumptions shape our perceptions?

I mean "fetish" in a psychoanalytic sense, not as a negative buzz word. Your defense of the right for economic return on your labor-something never challenged in my brief post, not even by suggestion--is itself evidence of the need to take a closer look at what's involved here.

To the degree that our belief in the individual source of creativity rests, not on an understanding of either the product, or the generative process, but through and in terms of what we believe about something else (economic ideology), then those beliefs will have been not merely colored by the secondary field, but replaced by it, such that we can never be sure, when we think we're talking about art, that we're not really talking about something else--which seems to be what happened in your response.

My question then breaks down into two parts: what are the assumptions that lead us to replace the real subject; and the subject itself (the individual and creativity).

The idea of the individual subject, standing outside and free of context, is itself a fetishistic notion. When you write, the language, which you did not create, is creating with you; you write in consort with everyone who has written and spoken in that language. You can say that what you write would not have come into being without you, but it does not come into being through you alone, no more than we become individuals other than in relationship to others. The consequences of ignoring these distinctions are not trivial--they affect our ability to recognize the disguises worn by the defining ideologies of our time, leaving us increasingly vulnerable to the manipulations of those most privileged by the dominant ideologies.

Authorial Voice: Carver, Nabokov... Where is Walter Benjamin when we need him?

Dan Green has initiated two discussions on the Reading Experience: a piece on Tess Gallagher's announced intention to publish early versions (BGL-- Before Gordon Lish) of Raymond Carver's stories: HERE and on Vladimir Nabokov's request that his final unfinished manuscript be destroyed: HERE.

To date, there've been 41 comments to these posts. I would like to add a question. To what degree are all the opinions expressed in these comments (my own included): on postpartum authorial rights, the integrity of the individual voice, the limits of the editorial prerogative, not merely colored, but virtually pre-defined by a largely unexamined fetish of the Individual Creator?

The difficulty of extracting the aesthetic and existential questions from those of marketing rights makes the question all the more interesting.

My Name Is Red/ The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme

Going back a few years, but one you might have missed: a good review of Oran Pamuk's, My Name Is Red, from Chandrahas Choudhury's

The Middle Stage

I recently finished Andrei Makine's, The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme, and had intended to write a post on this book, but find that Chaudhury's 2005 San Francisco Chronicle REVIEW echoes my own thoughts closely enough, that I'll link to that review as well.

One thought I would add: in the scene early in the book where the narrator takes a manuscript of his first novel to an editor, who rejects it when he tells her the story of the flier was real ("Insufficiently fictionalized," she says, and sends him on his way): I had the impression that the book that resulted, with the story of Jacques Dorme excised, was Dreams of My Russian Summer. The scene with the editor didn't quite belong--as though pointing to something outside this novel, begging for speculation about the author's intentions. The general plan of the narrative, so much a reprieve of Dreams, seemed to confirm that suspicion.

Review: Robert Olen Butler, Severance

Robert Olen Butler, SEVERANCE. Chronicle Books, San Francisco

After careful study and due deliberation it is my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation.
--Dr. Dassy D'Estaing, 1883

In a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute
Dr. Emily Reasoner, A Sourcebook of Speech, 1975

So reads the epigraph to Robert Olen Butler's, Severance, a book of 62 decapitations, each 240 words in length. The idea came to him, he tells us in the dedication, while standing before the guillotine at the War Crimes Museum in Saigon

Like a sonnet, this formal limitation shapes the content and development of each piece. Aside from an occasional Em-dash or coma, and italics where quotes might be expected, there is no punctuation; otherwise, printed without breaks in a single block, continuous streams of thought, reflection, reminiscence and observation, they are more prose poems than stories. Narrative elements are compressed; and such stories as they might generate, with a few exceptions (like that of Gooseneck, court jester to Duke Eberhard the Bearded, 1494 or the nameless Chicken, beheaded in Alabama for Sunday dinner, 1958--narrative jokes, one black, one bad) more often than not remain hidden, or merely suggested.

A few are, as you might expect from the epigraph, last thoughts, post decapitation; most are not. Butler has allowed himself wide imaginative freedom, a choice which both compliments the formal limitations, and saves his book from becoming a parade of the macabre and grotesque.

I was a young man, hardly more than an adolescent, when I first reflected on a curious inconsistency in the ways I thought about death. On the one hand, stated as a fact, an item of knowledge, that we are all going to die, myself included; how was it possible that I could state this fact--given the existential enormity of the subject----alone or in company...with complete indifference? Why should this idea have so little affective resonance? We have no knowledge of death, no experiential knowledge, I told myself. In that light, there was no reason that an idea, absent of content--a mere word, in effect, should make one anxious. What then, I had to ask, was I to make of those brief moments of absolute terror: waking at night to an absence, a black hole that seemed to have replaced the world, and was, perhaps, it's true reality?

Looking in the mirror and seeing the skull beneath the face--brief, passing waves of feeling, always coming unannounced, by surprise... no way to reproduce, to will those moments. What was I to make of this?

If this was not knowledge of death, then it was surely knowledge of a deeper kind. Not about death, I thought, which remains always beyond experience or comprehension, but something else--a wiping of the slate--a bright light, and this was how I explained it--a light so intense it makes transparent--no, invisible, all the idols we've made and allowed ourselves to worship. Those moments of terror--nothing but the stripping away of our illusions, all those things, beliefs, attachments we thought we needed. Whatever remains, whatever we can hold to, believe in, cherish--in those moments of perfect dread--whatever remains solid, withstands, reflects back the light--that alone is real. The ultimate test.

Because I had expected the subject of these stories... poems... to be the bleeding away of consciousness, first to last, it struck me from the first entry (MUD, man, beheaded by saber-toothed tiger, circa 40,000 b.c.), that this was not the case. It puzzled me, briefly... as I tried to fit the stream of consciousness depicted here into that last headless dream. But then I saw, and found confirmed in the other pieces, that it was something much like how I had explained--and reconciled myself to those episodic moments of death-dread; that each piece is not about death (how could they be?, but about life, each of the lives named in these 62 poems, ranging from the prehistoric MUD to William Olen Butler himself, each one as seen in that same penetrating and revealing light, each of them... of us, a presence standing in the face of an absence we cannot comprehend, and only in our incomprehension... do we come to understand what matters.

Taking Risks?

Advice to writers. "You have to be willing to take risks," someone says.


Like political rhetoric. HERE One is lost to explain what it means. Advice I would venture you will hear most often from the most risk adverse sources: articles in Writer's Digest and its clones. But not only there. It works its way up, this idea of "risk."

But what is the risk? I mean, first of all, before you define the sort of risk you are supposed to take.. what is at stake?


Who knows.

It goes undefined, unexplained.

What do I "risk" when I write? I know what I risk when I cross the street. One doesn't soon forget six months in a wheel chair.

But for a writer? Sitting at a desk? Or in a Starbucks, sipping a latte and tapping out words on a laptop?

Failure? Is that it? If you don't take "risks," you will fail?

Makes no sense. If you have to "take risks" to avoid failure, than the risk-taking is something that reduces the possibility of failure, which, without taking risks, is apparently guaranteed.

When I cross the street, I risk my life. When I play poker, I risk the money I bet.

If there is no more to this than semantics, rhetorical white noise, it wouldn't bother me. But it does. Every time I hear or read the word "risk" in advice of this sort, or in reviews... I cringe, I grind my teeth.

I've been going over this all day. In those interludes when the mind is otherwise cast adrift. Riding the subway. Walking home. Preparing my evening meal. Why does this irritate me so? And I can't come up with a coherent explanation. One that doesn't sound as contrived, as clichéd as the implied and unexamined assumptions that have me cursing and talking to myself as I ride--or mince and chop and steam...

I remember how long it took me to call up a girl I was attracted to... more than 50 years ago. I wanted to ask her to go to a dance--to be my "date." How it turned me in knots... what I wanted, and what I feared. Nothing less (looking back at it now) than my sense of myself... those most essential delusions one needs... simply to function... or so I thought. That I could not imagine how, given failure, ... could not imagine existing.--should she turn me down...

Facing the abyss.

A failure, to be sure, of imagination. Of understanding how we construct our sense of "self" and self-worth out of received notions... illusions. A trivial example.

But it wasn't trivial to the 14 year old I was then.

My problem here, is that I don't know how to connect that association with the risk, I in fact, do experience, at the most critical junctures in my writing. Not about failing... no. Not at all. It's about exposure. And not even to others. To myself.

To say... that is, to write, what I feel impelled to write, exposes me to myself. Exposes the delusions most essential to my feeling--no... to my belief in my self worth...as illusions.

This "I" so important to me... where is it to be found? And if it is not... then why do I fear its loss? Death, where is thy sting?

It sounds like a cliché... but there, again and again, at those passages where I have to push past the wall... the risk I feel, is nothing less than loss of self.


Either or. I live.

Or I write.

You tell me what that means. I don't know...

Literary Links: welcome, Blog Lilly

I've recently deleted a few links, and added few new ones. I've been thinking about this... about who I want to link to and why.

Like who I would want to invite to a dinner party--with music and talk late into the night after. People who I have a sense I could converse with... whether or not we will agree... better that we don't! Otherwise, how boring!

So when I add a link, I should offer a word of welcome. And when I delete one, add a word of explanation.

In this case, I welcome Blog Lilly, who I found through "Litlove's" Tales from the Reading Room.

I want you to know that you are more than a "link" here. You are a welcome part of a conversation I hope you will join.

And that goes for every blog I've linked here. I would be more than happy to invite you to any party I might throw... (had I more than a one room efficiency!)... and I would be.. .and am... honored to join in conversation and dialog with each of you.


Blog Lilly

Another New Yorker Story--another world: E. L. Doctorow, Wakefield

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/01/14/080114fi_fiction_doctorow

A perfect compliment to the Updike story in the January 14 New Yorker. I wish I had time to do this justice, but there are classes to prepare for, laundry to do. Ah Duty...

E. L. Doctorow's Wakefield, a wonderfully strange evocation, moving in stages through the impossibility of a return to nature, into a semi-fantastical realization of the dream of dying and returning to spy on the familiar world we've left behind. It's funny and heart breaking and leaves you with nothing whatsoever resolved, your imagination reeling, having taken up the most ordinary daydream subjects and recharging them with a new sense of wonder. This story succeeds exactly at the point where Updike's fell short... Doctorow never loses the initial impulse--doesn't lose courage when he skirts the edge of the convention. The voice of the narrator imprints itself in your mind--this is not rote representation, but a glimpse of the world through a mind you would never have know but for the mystery of language.

The Novel and the Book

Posted on Spurious...

Stamelman
here seems to have in mind the "novel" the modernists challenged... seeking to replace it with the "book" ...

The novel [Jabès] explains [...] is the very opposite of the book. While the novelist exercises control over the writing, while he or she turns the space of the text into the space of the story to be retold, the writer of the book allows the writing to dominate. The book 'recounts' or, more precisely, activates not a story but the movement of writing.
The novelist masters his or her writing in order to put it at the service of the characters. By imposing on the novel a word that is manifestly exterior to the writing, the novelist assassinates the book. Ignorant of the rhythm and respiration puncturing the book's circular and enigmatic writing, the novelist is word-deaf. He or she does not know, as does the writer of the book, how to listen to the page and to the reverberations of its whiteness and silence.
The true writer, who is not a creator but a listener, is sensitive to the book's orality, to its freedom as uninterrupted language, to the void and silence that hide within it, to its rejection of closure, and, above all, to the invisible, forgotten, absent, always virtual book it shelters.
Richard Stamelman

yes... yes... yes...

I am so glad that both Laval Subjects and Spurious are posting again, after a too long winter break!

Elmore Leonard's Rules of Writing

From Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBooks:

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Elizabeth A. Brown reviews Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Good Writing over at
csmonitor.com
Brown says, Leonard wants the writer to be invisible: "Good writing is not about the writer (and the way he sounds or the size of her vocabulary), but about the story."

Not for me.

For me, good writing is precisely about the writer and their struggle to write what they are writing (for sure, I'm not interested in the size of anyone's vocabulary!) Otherwise it is merely a story ... and I'm not that interested in stories. Or -- better -- I am interested in stories, but my interest is second to my interest in why this particular writer thinks that this particular story is important enough for them to write and me to read. A self-consciousness about the act of writing and reading needs to be folded into the writing for the writing in front of me to become more than merely a vehicle to carry a plot. Only with that self-consciousness -- adroitly brought about and not merely some clever postmodern intervention where the writer tells you (s)he is writing -- can I be sure that the novelist hasn't simple taken the general shape of your typical literary fiction novel for granted and merely filled in the gaps. If that is the case, the novel becomes artless, empty, and I quickly lose interest in ... yet another story. No matter how accomplished, a novel that simply tells me a story also tells me that the novelist hasn't thought enough about exactly what they are doing when and as they write.

Mark continues with a brief review of Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe HERE

John Updike: the Limits of Realist Narrative: Outage

Where precisely does John Updike's recent story in the New Yorker, Outage, go wrong? HERE


It would be too easy to generalize: the mildly titillating well past middle age sexual fantasy, the well worn territory--New England or Middle States middle class ennui... but why bother? Failure is all too common, and pointing it out even more so. It's not failure in itself that deserves attention. What does, is falling short. And what matters, is not the failure, but what it suggests, and fails to realize.

Updike is a consummate stylist. For pure "Sentence Lovers," he delivers. Like Cynthia Ozick. Though Ozick, perhaps, drawing from a deeper level of Jewish angst, tries harder--not necessarily with greater success. But there's more there, as a few of his earlier stories show. As Outrage hints at, and misses.

Again, where precisely, does it miss?

Brad Morris is working at home. By computer. His wife is in Boston, where she manages a boutique. Brad is not impressed by the news reports of an approaching storm. Rain as come and gone, and come again.

The worst seemed to be over, when, in midafternoon, his computer died under his eyes. The financial figures he had been painstakingly assembling swooned as a group, sucked into the dead blank screen like glittering water pulled down a drain. Around him, the house seemed to sigh, as all its lights and little engines, its computerized timers and indicators, simultaneously shut down. The sound of wind and rain lashing the trees outside infiltrated the silence. A beam creaked. A loose shutter banged. The drip from a plugged gutter tapped heavily, like a bully nagging for attention, on the wooden cover of a cellar-window well.

Here is the promise. More than finely crafted description. A contrast, multileveled, compressed--nature and our technologically conditioned projection of reality, repressed memory of an unmediated sensual perception.

He opened the refrigerator and was surprised by its failure to greet him with a welcoming inner light. The fireplace in the den emitted a sour scent of damp wood ash. Wind whistled in crevices he had not known existed, under the eaves and at the edges of the storm windows.

He drives into town (surprised that his car still starts). A list of the businesses... all gone dark. A world both new... and old.
... and there it is. The possibility to penetrate the veil of conditioned notions of what is "real"... an awakening. Even if it be an awakening beyond the consciousness of Brad Morris... or the narrator--an awakening like that of Edna Pontellier. Keep it within the fictional universe Updike is competent to deal with. Let the awakening be ironic? Metaphorical? But let it be for the reader, a lucid dream!

But no. There's no escape in this story from the middlebrow American delusions; the only awakening--from a middle-age wet dream, and here is the deepest betrayal, an awakening he tells us, to "reality."

That's it. Updike leaves us the choice: our masturbatory delusions, or their repressive denial.

Not only the limitation of our choice, but of "reality" itself. A fictive universe no larger than the fantasy of what a man would like to have done to his penis, and the necessity of foregoing that illicit pleasure... for the sake of "reality."

As though that were an "insight." As though that were enough to justify the failed promise...

Three posts on Critical Narrative analysis
  One
Two
Three

For Those of us who keep Journals

Vol. 44:
Friday
1/11/08
After 5576 pages (since 1987... earlier volumes destroyed), nothing could be clearer. My journal in no way aspires to "literature." And never has. Another enterprise. As though the words come from different universes.

To be sure, there are moments--caught up in passing enthusiasms--whole volumes when plain insanity has worn the mask of "art" --but day after day, page after page, what I've compiled is nothing more (or less) than a verbal equivalent of the middlebrow albums of snapshots my family used to keep.

Moving pictures.

Like reels and reels of 16 mm family movies--long since lost. Moments, images, brief visual narratives I hope to return to--and save from the ever changing sequences of organic memory. Something external, I tell myself. Like a photograph. Like those lost silent movies. No less subjectively framed, so no closer to "truth", but at least--external. Free of alteration.

Vane hope. Every reader, and every reading... rewrites what is read. But at least, I tell myself, the words remain. There. In their original sequential order.

So many pages, so many words--an embarrassment of false memory, a presence that begins to weigh on my life (is that why I've burned ten-year segments--twice?... since my earliest entries... 50 years ago?)

Memory serves us to our advantage--only to the degree that we retain the power to transform it.
Anything less, is slavery.

If this is so for us as individuals... how much more is humanity burdened by the false memory of history?

And yet, as Adam in the morning... we would only have to do it all over again.

Not Qute Here, but Yet at Hand

In Hermann Broch's novel, The Death of Virgil, the dying poet and the Emperor Augustus enter a prolonged dialog, an argument on statecraft and poetry, on duty, and--what is ultimately at stake here, the survival of the Aeneid. Their discussion turns on Virgil's claim to the right to his own work, the right even to destroy if it does not fulfill what he believes to be his more profound duty to it, to the duty of art.

There is a mild earthquake in progress...

Without comment:

Caesar paced back and forth over the swaying floor; with every dip of the wave he turned round so that he was always walking up-hill; but now he must have reached the top for he stopped--yet maybe he did feel the Poseidonian movement--and held on to the candelabrum: "Again you speak of things that cannot be proved."

"In art we are everywhere imitating the Greek forms, in the conduct of the state you are forging a new path. You are fulfilling the task of your time, not I."

"That proves nothing; the newness of my path may be argued, but eternal form remains eternal forms."

"Aye, Augustus, you simply do not want to see, you do not want it to be true, that the poetical task no longer exists."

"No longer exists? No longer? You sound as though we were standing at the end of something..."

"Perhaps it would be better to say, not yet! for we may assume that a time for artistic tasks will dawn again."

"No longer and not yet," --Caesar, much dismayed, was weighing these words--"and between them yawns an empty space."

Yes, no longer and not yet; that is how it sounded, how it had to sound, lost in nothingness, the lost, passed-away inter-realm of dream...

... isn't this where we always find ourselves ?

Realist Narrative/ Political Propaganda

In an additional comment on the Shakespeherian Rag, I wrote:

I would stretch Dan Green's idea here... that I think it is precisely the motive to represent reality with precision and honesty, that is the greatest driving force pushing artists to move beyond established conventions.

It's an open question as to what has contributed to the confusion since the innovations of the Modernists, and their more insistent inclusion of the artifice as part of the reality. After all, this is far from new... think of Stern, Cervantes, Shakespeare.

Somehow this has been cast as a quest for the new. I think critics of the visual arts have contributed more to this impression than literary critics. My idea here, is that this misrepresents a deeper and more telling impulse. We do want to represent reality--but reality eludes us. Again and again, we discover that all our attempts have fallen short--mere conventions mirroring, not "reality," but the projections of the age.
There's a weak analogy here to scientific theories, with a difference that makes the difference--and this would be my main point: that the representations of art are self-deconstructing, in that they INCLUDE the artifice in the presentation itself, they do not hide it. The naive view of "realist" or "naturalistic" narrative is a reactionary misreading, ignoring the foregrounded structure... like ignoring that the pleasure of trompe d'oeil painting resides in our very awareness that the fly on the rose petal is made of paint!

The triumph of a Flaubert set piece--the wedding in Mdm Bovary, or Zola's race scene in Nana, resides, not in our making ourself stupid enough to believe it's real, but in knowing, even while we physically and emotionally respond to its evocation, that it's made of words!

The reactionary response pretends the artifice doesn't exist--or is only there to make us forget it (the so called, "suspension of disbelief")... not at all unlike the rhetoric of reactionary politicians.

Story telling that demands the suspension of mindfulness is not innocent entertainment. It is the fundament of propaganda, its necessary precondition. Those who write in this mode are the servants of the tyrants of our age.

Paglia on Religion and Art

Camilla Paglia holds a special place in my heart and mind, if for nothing else, for turning me on to the Faerie Queen. I confess, that after Sexual Persona, she lost me. But here's a piece I can warm up to.

I have no supernatural inclinations, do not even get what it means to "believe" in the gods.. or God, but religion has always fascinated me. I majored in comparative religion as an undergrad. Assigned to Martin Buber (without his consent or participation) the job of guiding me from adolescence to intellectual maturity. I loved the J narratives in the Hebrew bible enough to teach myself Classical Hebrew--even did a few years graduate work on Rabbinic texts, where I proved myself more fecund in imagination than scholarly acumen. Religion is the font of the arts. There's no way around it, and Paglia, I think, gets it mostly right in this piece from Arion.

Here's an excerpt:

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

Read the rest HERE This is a long piece, but worth downloading and reading at leisure.

Enjoying the Story Without Losing Our Minds

A mistunderstanding: Realism/ Story Telling

Steven Beattie, in a recent post on That Shakespeherian Rag sees in my (and Dan Green's) reflections on narrative realism, a "dogmatic reaction against realism as a legitimate--or, indeed, interesting--literary mode;" a significant misunderstanding, certainly of my own thoughts, and I would assume, of Dan Green's as well.

I responded in a comment to the post linked above:

My complaint is not at all that "realism" (however defined) is not or cannot be an interesting literary mode. My point is--that realism isn't, and that it is profoundly important to acknowledge this and incorporate our awareness into the work. It's not the use of older conventions that troubles me, it's the absence of mindfullnes, the pretense without attending to what it means that we feel the need to pretend a work is real to enjoy it, the need to suspend disbelief (in the common misunderstanding of Coleridge's idea)--as though this were an essential and necessary aesthetic element.

Story telling gives us what we think we need. Story telling weaves the illusion of understanding, hushing our critical impulses, silencing our questions, or robbing them of their sting. Story telling that aspires to art gives us a story we can enjoy without losing our minds.

What is Real? ... yet again. Who has it right for our time?

It goes on and on... This Space

Cut to the chase, what's it all about?

Since the Renaissance artists have sought to represent reality. With a few "art for art's sake" diversionary slights of hand, conventional shifts have rested on the same defense: that new discoveries had made the old conventions obsolete. Modernists had begun to realize, and their Postmodernist successors confirmed this in spades, that it was all convention.

Good! said the middlebrow reading public and their marketing pimps. What's new? Fiction is stuff we make up. Wow! What a revelation! So let's enjoy it, eh?... and make some money while we're at it!

But "fiction" ... at least since Cervantes... has never, not for those who wrote it, not for the artists and dramatists, been nothing more than bread and circuses... it was always an attempt to ... how do we say this now? evoke? represent? To break past the conventions we've seen through and used up, and offer something closer to the world as we experience it.

The analogy with science is not frivolous... writers, artists, poets.. are no less concerned with the "real" than sub-particle physicists. This is a tradition that goes back to the beginning of everything we now recognize as art and literature.

Science and its discoveries pose problems for us, for established constructions of our habitable world, and artists, in foregrounding the conflicts between old and new ideas, are not defenders of the old, but REALISTS, even when, as individuals, they might want to return to an earlier age (I'm thinking of Dostoevsky). This is what we have to confront!

We seem to have retreated into a profoundly conservative--nay, reactionary age.

Reviewers and critics in the popular realm don't ask: what does this tell us about our altered assumptions of what is "real?" They compare literary representation with their own, conservative, received, unexamined notions of reality...and find that what they read doesn't match!

Lo and behold! It must be the writer... who doesn't know how to construct a nice conservative, make-me-feel-good sentence, who is at fault.

Never does the question occur: is what I'm reading representing a reality I would rather not acknowledge?

As a writer... reality is my chief concern. It's why I write.

In a sense, I think ALL writers, all artists, are "realists." The question is, then... who has it right for our time?

Narrative Voice and Character

In surfing through Reading Experience, I came across Dan Green's post from last May on Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body.

I vowed (weakly), to bring no books into my house this year until I've done some significant chipping away at the babbling tower of next-to-be-read-volumes swaying precariously on top of my dresser. Ah well, we are weak and sinful creatures... I want to get my hands on this one.

This style reminds me of something Shirley Hazzard does at her best (Transit of Venus, and stories like "In these Islands)... and of Dickinson. A pause before the thought is quite complete, and then a sudden alteration, a new thought or image that emerges, both perfectly commensurate with its generative phrase, and yet startling in its power to transform.

In the sentence, "She likes the windows, large and filled with trees," it's all in the placement of the comma. The pause--just enough to let our eyes turn toward the windows--then, fill the space before we've completed the image, and fill it with what is more than image alone, but a projection of pure desire comingled with its figurative complement.

Here, I thought, is another example of what's missing in Myers proscriptive injunction against the authorial Voice trumping character. HERE . Style that fully embodies a distinct authorial Voice can forego mere psychologizing and its externalized correlatives, approximating individuation for the reader by plunging us into the psychic tension of a character in context. This is characterization of a particular moment, not anything we can reconstruct as psychological profile, giving us a far more fluid (and more "realistic") representation of Self than the ventriloquist's puppet show Myers would have us prefer.

Andy Rants at the Movies

Here's a couple of nutshell movie reviews from Andy Rants

There's a whole string of them. Take a load off and check 'em out.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill 8.5 Stars

No, Polly quite definitely does not want a cracker, thank you very much. This is a delightful documentary about parrots, and, like all good documentary films, it is also, by extension, about everything else in the universe not covered under the rubric of “parrot,” which is quite a lot, actually. It’s about love and life and death and the soul of the cosmos and the ineffable but undeniable truth that is everywhere and . . . ok, maybe I’m over-interpreting. It’s mostly about parrots.

Grizzly Man 8 Stars

Exit, pursued by a bear. Shakespeare scholars will get that joke. The rest of you can look it up. This is a documentary film about a guy who thinks wild grizzly bears are his big fuzzy wuzzy friends. Does this make him much crazier than the guy who befriends the parrots? Yes. Much, much crazier. Because parrots don’t weigh 1000 pounds, possess 6-inch long razor sharp claws, and eat documentary filmmakers for lunch. It’s very entertaining though, watching the soon-to-be-bear-lunch do his crazy thing. Note to those who like to emulate what they see in films: Parrots are really cool.