Archives for July 2007

During my long absence from the internet, as you might imagine, I amassed a small fortune in linkable blog posts. Here are a few highlights:

• Carrie of Tingle Alley reads Milton, here and here, as only Carrie of Tingle Alley can read Milton.
• James Marcus riffs on discovering his allergy to grass in a diverting post that begins with one acute parenthetical observation–“A couple of weeks ago, I got a phone message from my doctor: I’m allergic to grass. Since I live in Manhattan, this won’t change my life in any substantial way (luckily it wasn’t concrete or carbon monoxide or untrammeled ambition.)”–and ends with another: “Every hour wounds, the last kills–but at least [Cyril Connolly’s] The Condemned Playground is still available in paperback. (By the way, if you seek it out on Amazon, you’ll find the following listed as a Statistically Improbable Phrase: “elegiac couplet.” What is this world coming to?).” The middle is good, too!
• Alex Ross posts a short essay by Carl Nielsen that’s brimming over with aperçus. For example: “Nothing in all art is as painful as unsuccessful originality. It is like the twisted grimaces of vanity. We see the spirit everywhere. Some of us know it, but have no word for it; we exchange looks and shudder, like children at the sight of a skeleton.”
• Here’s where your cup runneth over: not just a post but an entire blog, Where the Stress Falls is the new site of M.S. Smith, whose previous venture CultureSpace was a longtime ALN favorite. I’ve been remiss in not mentioning Smith’s new home sooner–but then, I’ve been simply remiss.
• Michael gives the Blowhard treatment to the next DVD in my Netflix queue, Criterion’s fresh release of Chris Marker’s films La Jetée and Sans Soleil, two mesmerizing films that come around to the cinemas only once a blue moon, even in a fairly cinema-stocked city such as Chicago.
• Kate of Kate’s Book Blog discovers that a favorite book of mine, and one of which I’d fairly fancied myself the only reader of my generation, is actually again in print: Elaine Dundy’s follow-up to The Dud Avocado, The Old Man and Me–and, by the way, unless you wish to have the latter ruined for you, I would studiously avoid reading the plot synopses that appear on the Virago page and the Amazon page, both of which essentially give the game away, Amazon in an astonishingly efficient single sentence. That said, Kate has some interesting observations on how Dundy’s representation of sexual mores in the 1950s contrasts with a more recent treatment of similar issues in the same decade, Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Good stuff.

More where these came from soon. In the meantime, happy haunting.

“Some people–and I am one of them–hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (courtesy of The Rat)

On first looking into Chapman’s Homer
 
MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific–and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
—John Keats
Henry James at the Pacific
— Coronado Beach, California, March, 1905
In a hotel room by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster,
Only a sort of freshness being lost —
Or should he go on calling it Innocence?
The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;
Wall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense
Novel in all this waiting to be done.
But not, not — sadly enough — by him. His talents,
Such as they may be, want a different theme,
Rather more civilized than this, on balance.
For him now always the recurring dream
Is just the mild, dear light of Lamb House falling
Beautifully down the pages of his calling.
—Donald Justice
I stumbled on the second of these sonnets this weekend and thought right away of the first, another poem weaving together literary and geographical discovery. Keats’s poem has to have been Justice’s model, don’t you think?
Not in a simple way, Justice’s poem on James inverts the themes and emotional timbre of Keats’s on Homer. Keats’s heady discovery of new literary terrain becomes James’s elegiac sense of having outlived the world he was born to write about. In the penultimate lines, “wild” becomes “mild.” In each case the book invoked at the caesura around lines 7-8 is unreal in a different regard–for Keats it’s a real thing rendered abstract by being the object of such insistent metaphor-making, and in James’s case it’s an unrealizable vision. While Keats’s writing career gets a jump-start from his discovery of Homer in English translation, James’s vision of a novel he can’t write signals the passage of his career beyond its twilight. Read together, these accounts of the opening and closing of literary possibility are, I think, all the more moving.

O.K., I’m not that tired, but I’ve been pretty damn busy seeing shows, writing pieces, and tearing around New England. In between extended stretches of working like a lunatic, I had lunch in Connecticut with my cool new friend the jewelry designer, then spent a tranquil night in a lakeside cottage in deepest Rhode Island. If you’re into birdsong, Blueberry Pointe is a feast of sound. Curious as to whether the avian residents would recognize a human tribute to one of their own, I played a recording of Olivier Messiaen’s Le merle noir as I sat on the deck at dusk. Sure enough, a bird responded on cue. (Go here if you want to see and hear the difference between Messiaen’s blackbird and the real thing.)
Was my visit to Blueberry Pointe restorative? Miraculously so–but, then, I had a lot to restore. In fact, the combination of travel, deadlines, performances, excessive blogging, and general overwork has gotten the best of me, psychologically speaking, so I’m handing the keys to Our Girl and going up the spout for a week. I’ll be posting the usual almanac and theater-related entries, but otherwise you won’t be hearing from me again until next Monday…on which day OGIC and I will unveil a great big surprise.
Curious? I’d be.
See you next week. Happy Fourth of July!

“Look, mister, I’m so tired you’d be doin’ me a big favor if you’d blow my head off.”
Samuel Fuller, screenplay for Pickup on South Street