The Indifferent Times

Caravaggio's Judith

2011-12-28T18:59:00.000-08:00

Judith is a beautiful but troubled young woman. She is engaged in something rather nasty, but God approves, more or less: the light says so.

The subject of this painting proves an excellent study for Caravaggio: the gory extremes suited his emergent mature style. Judith Beheading Holofernes is dated, according to my art book, at 1598, and the figures in the painting present in greater detail than those from some of Caravaggio's earlier works, the features more precisely rendered. The sensual boys of earlier paintings boasted little in the way of wrinkles, their frowns more pouty than anything else, their signature look one of indolence and the ennui that is born of it. Judith is lush, no doubt, and just as sensual, but what makes her alive--more so to me than the musicians of the earlier works--is the frown, the wrinkle of worry that troubles her brow, the upper lip slightly pulled back in distaste. These temporary blemishes in an otherwise blandly perfect face reveal a different kind of study: a figure engaged in process. Something is happening here.

The Sick Bacchus presents a touchstone for the study of Judith. The Sick Bacchus speaks of earthly discomfort, a clear sense of unease emanating from his expression, but he is posed, almost self-consciously so. Judith, by contrast, is in the midst of action. This Bacchus holds the bunch of grapes as though he does not know what to do with them, almost as though Caravaggio were trying to capture not Bacchus himself but rather the model posed as Bacchus--it's almost a meta-painting, from this perspective. What on earth do you expect me to do with these grapes? The question seems to weigh on the Bacchus model like an existential burden. The displeasure in the Bacchus model's expression seems as though it were a response to the situation he finds himself in: I'm sick of you, Caravaggio, and your relentless looking at me, and I just want you to leave me alone. The fact that some scholars believe the Sick Bacchus to be a self-portrait complicates but does not fully undermine this reading of the painting. Who can say that Caravaggio himself -- a licentious, easily provoked brawler with a sensitive heart, it would seem -- was not sick of himself?

Judith Beheading Holofernes takes the unease that defines the Sick Bacchus and adds further dimensions to it. If Sick Bacchus is autobiographical, Judith represents the exploration of the consciousness of the other. Judith, engaged in some dirty work, is in recoil, distancing herself from the action that her hands are accomplishing. In the midst of her righteous killing, the heroine grips her sword with a kind of awkwardness similar to that with which Bacchus holds his grapes. Judith holds the sword in her right hand, at the furthest remove from her body, as though she were merely in the act of dropping something repulsive and not as though she were in the midst of using this weapon to remove the head of a man who is still somehow (with half his head sawed off) fully alive, twisting his body around in the final moment before that vitality is extinguished. Judith is, despite the intensity of Holofernes' writhing, the clear subject of the painting: to her belongs the key action, the key movement. In the left hand, she holds the half-severed head at arm's length as well, though she does not seem nearly as uncomfortable with the head as she does with the sword.

Even at a glance, it is easy to see that the physics of motion do not seem to agree here; the details do not match up. We may never have witnessed a beheading ourselves, but we can extrapolate from our experiences of the physical world, and something does not seem right. It does not seem possible that the gentle sawing motion we seem to be seeing with the sword, like slicing into a roast chicken, could result in a beheading. Nor does the expression on Judith's face seem to possess the resolve, the fortitude, the emotional intensity required for her to commit such an act as the one she is presumably dedicating herself, body and soul, to committing. Perhaps Caravaggio--famous for pulling his models in off the streets, his Madonnas famously identified as real-life common prostitutes--took a kitchen girl for his model; it is as though he captured her in the act of pulling a drowned mouse from a pan of dirty dishwater. Imagine such a moment, and you have the look on Judith's face.

There are other things at work here--most noteably, most disconcertingly, and most bafflingly--the erotic undertone of the painting. Despite the look of distaste, of concern, on Judith's face, her nipples are unmistakeably erect beneath her thin, white blouse. Before you accuse me of perversion, take a look at the painting: even with a casual glance, the truth of what I say is clear as day. Even with a frown and her hair pulled back (she is in action mode, after all), Judith is not only a figure of beauty but also one with a clear sexual charge. Her beauty is not of the radiant, otherworldly kind, but of the here and now. Is Caravaggio trying to relay some kind of message about gender roles and sexuality? If so, that message is uncertain, and I don't think any other Caravaggios clarify the matter any. Maybe the idea is to establish a connection between violence and sex, two extremes of passionate action--but then again, the look on Judith's face is hardly one of passion. Rather, it is one of fulfilling a nasty obligation.

In case we doubt the kind of beauty Judith personifies, though, we have the old crone who stands beside her. Her ugliness is, beyond the effects of age, a true ugliness, born of the grotesque; it is just as physical, just as sensual (along the lines of evoking the sensory experience of the body) as Judith's beauty. The old woman stands rigid beside Judith, a bag in hand, ready to take the head of Holofernes before it drops. The contrast is not merely between youth and age, between the beautiful and the grotesque, but primarily between two opposing attitudes to what takes place in this scene: the old woman is eager, hard-eyed: that son-of-a-bitch has been a long time deserving his come-uppance. She is ready to take the head, although Judith is reluctant (but willing) to oblige in the preliminary beheading that is necessary for that to happen. Perhaps this is part of the definition of a hero, Caravaggio is saying: a hero (or heroine) engages in violence reluctantly, out of necessity, but a hero does what a hero has to do; the commoner searching roughly for justice just wants to take heads. Caravaggio himself, it seems, based on the police reports, tended toward the latter mode of behavior.

In short, there is much here that complicates Judith's act of heroism, such a mingling of various elements that they cannot be resolved. This painting is definitively imperfect, then, because of the awkwardness of these unresolved dimensions of meaning, but such imperfection seems to be precisely the point when it comes to Caravaggio, who painted human beings as he saw them, dirty fingernails and all. Somehow, though, despite the incongruity of Judith's expression and other near absurdities, this painting is as compelling as anything I have ever seen. Every time I open the art book, it is the scene that I end up resting on after flipping through many other pages, and it is the image to which I compare other works. To me, there is art before this painting, and there is art after this painting. I don't exactly know what the painter was up to, and I don't exactly want to know. There are, after all, some matters that even the light of truth leaves willfully obscure.

On the Late Christopher Hitchens' Atheism

2011-12-18T19:23:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I have read his articles with both admiration and outrage, usually depending on the subject, but I have to admit that the admiration won out in the end. Of all the defenders of recent political policies that I have vehemently disagreed with, he is perhaps the only one I respect.

I expected plenty of appreciations to appear upon Christopher Hitchens' death, but it is with some incredulousness that I read Ross Douthat's piece on Hitchens in today's New York Times. It's not the fact that Douthat wrote such an appreciation -- it was almost expected -- but rather the audacity and anti-Hitchensian quality of what he had to say, which appeared in the guise of a tribute.

Douthat is in many ways the anti-Hitchens. Hitchens' cynicism was hard purchased over the years. Douthat's cynicism seems to serve one purpose only, which is to further his conservative agenda. Hitchens was not afraid to break with the party line--he saw what he saw. Douthat always seems to see what he wants to see in a case. I have little respect for him as a writer or as a thinker.

Douthat's column on Hitchens explores the affinity that, according to Douthat, so many religious believers had for the devout atheist and self-declared Enemy of God. Without propounding any counter-theories of my own, I will say that it appears that Douthat is trying to claim Hitchens as one of his own, to make a holy pagan out of him, like Aquinas did with Aristotle -- a "Believer's Atheist," as the title of the column suggests.

Hitchens is reputed to be the kind of gregarious fellow who would sit down to a drink with his worst enemy, Mother Theresa, for instance. I don't know how he would feel at being labelled a "Believer's Atheist," but I suspect that the man who so adamantly and publicly refused requests from religious-minded individuals for a deathbed conversion during his long and public struggle with cancer might have taken issue with the epithet. What Douthat ends up claiming is a misreading of atheism -- Hitchensonian as well as the other varieties. Here's what he said at the end of his piece:

When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

Atheist intellectuals of the Hitchens variety rarely talk about atheism as a font of despair. They are generally at peace with the world, with the universe, when they talk about their beliefs. The "wasting shadow" here is not Hitchens' or any other contemporary atheist intellectual's, for that matter -- it is Douthat's, because he is too limited in his worldview to appreciate the fact that people can lead fulfilling lives, even lives absent of despair and existential angst, without a belief in the afterlife. Thus, to say that Hitchens was not the kind of man to give in to despair is not to say that he was a man whose beliefs were all that similar to those of the believers. What we see here is Douthat's inflexible inability to inhabit the perspective of someone like Hitchens -- of someone with beliefs counter to his own.

Agnostics, also, such as this writer, can live content with mystery and uncertainty. I don't know what to expect after I die. I don't expect much, but I will be satisfied with whatever I get, and in the meantime I will focus on doing what little good I can in this world and trying the best I can to extract meaning from my experiences and from others'. As for the "Marxist fairy tales" and "techno-utopian happy talk," I can only conjecture as to what Douthat might mean. I suspect he's just getting a stab at some enemies while he has the chance.

Douthat ends his column thusly, imediately following the previous quotation:

My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.

That "why" is why it's "completely wrong to give in to despair." Can there be no other reason besides God and the afterlife? Is a belief in humankind, the universe, and electro-magnetism not enough?

As we have seen before, when Hitchens first publicly announced that he had terminal cancer, we see here the believer's desperate hopes for the non-believer. It's a nice sentiment, I suppose, but it misses the mark because it refuses to demonstrate a decent respect for the non-believers' beliefs.

Claudius Reconsidered

2011-10-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

Taking a cue from Harold Bloom, I'd always thought of Claudius as a weak villain. It's true that Claudius is certainly no Iago, but it's not Iago that this play needs.* Claudius' gift as a villain is his wit and, as Hamlet points out in 1.5, his charm: "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." Hamlet, of course, can see through the false charm, the false mourning of Claudius' opening speech in 1.2, but the rest of Denmark does not -- and Hamlet's mother does not. As such, Claudius is a perfectly fitting villain to oppose Hamlet. Claudius boasts the power to manipulate language, to make falseness seem genuine, while Hamlet himself has "that within which passeth show." False words, false personas: these are antithetical to Hamlet.

My turn-around in assessing Claudius is inspired by Marjorie Garber, who, in her Hamlet chapter in Shakespeare After All, says of Claudius that "he is in control of language, making it jump through hoops, cease to mean what it should," citing his initial speech in 1.2 as evidence. Garber makes Claudius' use of language analogous to his use of poison: "the dangerous poison of words, words, words." The serial poisoner uses guile, secrecy, charm, and wit to work his vile purposes, and it is fitting that in the end he is done in, in part at least, by poison.

Hamlet may see right through Claudius, but that does not mean that Hamlet can easily and handily dispatch the villain without consequences. It is true, ultimately, that Hamlet is far more clever and more skilled than Claudius is, but to kill a king, even a false one, is no simple task, and Claudius' particular strength, his underhanded control of appearances, is to Hamlet what Kryptonite is to Superman. And certainly Hamlet does have his own issues to work out before he can rid the world of his foe.
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* One might wonder what a Hamlet v. Iago showdown might look like. I'd lay my money on Hamlet, who seems unlikely to fall prey to the kind of schemes that laid Othello low. Hamlet, for instance, knows how to discern a true friend (Horatio) from false ones (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).

Ten Years Ago

2011-09-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

I went to bed on the night of September 10, 2001, with Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad on my bedside table, and all night long the idea of 40,000 dead on the first day of the city's bombardment rattled around inside my head.

My wife woke up in the morning from a terrible dream. Something really bad was happening, she said, but in the car, listening to the radio on our commute to work, we found out that nothing bad was happening yet.

I didn't have class that morning, so I sat at a table at Cafe le France in Bristol, Rhode Island, grading papers. I overheard someone nearby saying that a plane had smashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that one of the more extreme types I had worked with at the natural foods co-op a few years ago had become completely unhinged and, enraged with capitalist exploitation, rammed a little Cessna into the epicenter of world finance. Before long, I found out I was wrong.

I sat in the car all the rest of the morning, listening to the news as, step by step, events unfolded and were reported. New York was 195 miles away by highway, closer as the crow flies. It seemed very close. Classes were cancelled, and we drove home, glued ourselves to the television. In days to come, I would talk with students who had family and friends in Manhattan or at the Pentagon. One student's brother worked in the World Trade Center. He survived the assault, but spent the next few days wandering the city in a daze. It was several days before he checked in with his family. They all thought he was dead.

I remember driving past New York on the way to DC, later in the month, at night, seeing lights shining all over the site. I don't know if we could legitimately see smoke and dust from I-95, but it seemed like we could, and I remember it that way, see it in my mind's eye that way. On subsequent visits to the city over the next couple of years, we stayed away from the site. We felt that we had studied it enough via television, radio, the papers.

Washington, DC, was full of helicopters. We were planning a move there and visited often. The morning after we moved into our apartment on Columbia Road, in June of 2002, was a Sunday morning that started off quietly enough. I was in the shower when screaming and shouting erupted outside. I ran to the window dressed in a towel, looked down to see hordes of soccer fans out on the streets waving the Brazilian flag. Brazil had just won the World Cup, I found out later that morning. Thankfully, it was the closest I came to being a victim of terrorism. It was much later, 2003, I think, when I noticed one day that the helicopters that had been ubiquitous were gone. They had been a part of life for a while, but then they went away.

I still think about Stalingrad, and I think about that morning when everything changed, but then it didn't.

More on Macbeth

2011-07-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

Having seen the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival's production of Macbeth the other night, I have a few points to hash out, or perhaps rehash, as the case may be.

*For a production of Macbeth to work, the audience must have sufficient points of access to Macbeth's character -- and to Lady Macbeth's. That is, first of all, we must develop an understanding of Macbeth's prowess as a warrior, his courage, and his seeming-steadfast loyalty (which quickly dissipates in the wake of the witches' prophecies). All of this is established in Act I, through the Captain's report ("doubtful it stood ...") and then through the explicit contrast (primarily in Duncan's speech) between Macbeth and the traitor Macdonwald. Macbeth, like Othello, is the story of a fall from grace, of a good man gone bad because of the weaknesses in his character, whereby his strengths become perverted. The tragic arc of the story is rendered insensible if we do not at the start see Macbeth as the valiant, noble, and, indeed, loyal thane.

For the rest of the play, beyond Act I, to work, we need to see a suffering Macbeth, not merely a merciless tyrant (though he is, certainly, that, too--or he becomes it by the middle of Act IV). We need to see a Macbeth who is devoted to his wife, who does what he does in no small measure out of love for her. We need to see a falling hero who is tormented by phantasmagorical images, who recoils with horror at his own deeds, who feels powerless to stop the procession of bloody deeds that he himself enacts, until he becomes largely numb to them, or even embraces them, until Macbeth concludes that he has supped so much on horror that it frights him no longer. (Of course, he realizes that he is wrong, and therein we find the most complete, the most powerful expression of humanity in the play -- that no matter how bloody, how awful the tyrant, he is still capable of grief, depths of sadness.) When Macbeth envisions the bloody dagger, we have to understand the horrific charge of this hallucination: the dagger is covered in blood--not the blood of his own impending fate (could he meet any other fate, given the processional of bloody deeds that begins the play?), but the blood of the innocents he will murder. As penalty, Macbeth will "sleep no more," and his wife will achieve only a sleep without rest, one tormented by somnambulatory recreations of her guilt. Once Macbeth's sense of humanity has been utterly drained, as it is after he expends his last heartfelt sentiments at the news of his wife's demise, it is time for him to enter fully the identity of the heartless villain, and thus it is time for him to pay for his crimes with his very life.

In the meantime, the Macbeths suffer greatly, are racked (in the Early Modern sense of "rack") by guilt, and the effect on us as audience is that we feel their guilt, their suffering, their horror, the fruitlessness of their ambitions, their powerlessness to stop the procession of bloody deeds once they begin. The guilt that they feel is the stuff of our own nightmares, our worst twinges of conscience, only amplified. You walk away thinking that there is something, just a hint, perhaps, of yourself in Macbeth or in Lady Macbeth, and thus the play offers one of the most powerful experiences of catharsis of any Shakespearean play.

*Regarding the theme of sleep, Macbeth provides a nightmarish Jacobean counterpoint to the far gentler Elizabethan sleep-comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sleep and dreams -- "to sleep, perchance to dream" -- are clearly significant thematic elements in Shakespeare.

*The issue of agency is perhaps the most perplexing issue in Macbeth, presenting a problem without an answer: to what extent is Macbeth himself responsible for his own deeds? Is he a victim of "supernatural soliciting" via the witches and the shadowy master with whom they communicate via their cauldron? Or do the witches' words merely unloose the "vaulting ambition" that is latent in Macbeth? Beyond these questions, is the outcome of the play merely a function of the innate character Macbeth possesses, or does he create this character through words and deeds that are deliberative?

This is the great ambiguity of the play that makes it another poignant iteration of what is perhaps he greatest theme of the Shakespearean canon: the nature of character and identity. Character is destiny in Shakespeare, but how much of character is our own?

Faced with a set of conditions -- an opportunity for advancement, a murder to be avenged, slings and arrows, etc. -- what do you do? Shakespeare's characters are at once classical and modern, with one foot in the past, the other in a present that is hurtling toward the future. Macbeth himself is either a testament to the enduring mystery of fate or he is one who forges his own fate in the existential void of the untethered self. Hamlet is, of course, the greatest monument to self in Shakespeare, but others -- Othello, Prospero, Brutus, and, Harold Bloom would say, Falstaff -- bear the same burden of character.

*I was impressed the other night with a sense of the great importance of Macduff in the play, partly as a contrast to Macbeth but also as a warrior with great similarity to Macbeth. Both are formidable practitioners of the art of war, but -- partly through chance and circumstance -- Macduff is the vehicle of good and the achiever of a Pyrrhic victory, and Macbeth ultimately the defeated villain.

The emotional anchor of Act IV is Macduff's response to the news that Macbeth has slain his family. The situation prompts all manner of questions. Why did Macduff leave his family unprotected? Was it a matter of loyalty to the state versus loyalty to family -- protecting the common interest versus protecting one's own? Or was it simply a failure on Macduff's part to thoughtfully anticipate the outcome of his actions, which his wife subsequently interprets as an act of desertion? Macduff is none too great a thinker, it seems, and he operates at his best when fueled by raw emotion. And the emotion of Macduff's response is precisely the issue: he must "dispute it like a man." I have a lot more to say about this scene, which does a lot with gender themes and the nature of true manhood, but that is perhaps a matter for another time.

Macduff's wife brands him a traitor, and though Macbeth is certainly the greater traitor of the two by far, it invites comparison and contrast between the two warriors. When Macbeth battles Macduff, he is, essentially, battling his own best self of his former life. The two are in many ways more alike than they are different.

*Macbeth is, in all, I think, the most efficient play Shakespeare wrote, word for word. It's an impressive achievement, prompted by a desire to please a patron, no doubt -- King James, whose reputed short attention span explains in part the efficiency of the play -- but there's hardly a wasted line in the entirety of its five acts. This is not to say that Macbeth is necessarily Shakespeare's "best" play, but it is one that never fails to yield rich new meanings with each experience of it, and that, I believe, is what keeps us coming back to Shakespeare again and again.

Problems In All's Well

2011-07-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

Whether we classify All's Well That Ends Well as a "problem play" or not, it's certainly a play with problems. Rather, there is one central problem, and his name is Bertram.

On the page, Bertram is as unlovable a love interest as you might find anywhere. On stage, he has to be extremely handsome. That's the best way to explain why such a virtuous--but poor, and also very determined, very clever--maid such as Helen would fall so hard for him. She doesn't seem to be in it for the title or for the money; if she is, Shakespeare doesn't seem to hint at it. And though it's true that you can't choose with whom you fall in love, there has to be some draw. So, it would have to be looks.

Let's take a glance at Bertram's character.

1. He allows himself to fall under the sway of his utterly irredeemable companion, Parolles. As Lafew aptly puts it, "the soul of this man is his clothes." That Bertram would choose such a fellow as his bosom friend reflects very poorly on him. Your parents were right: the friends you choose do say a lot about you.

Bertram cannot be excused on the grounds of having been deceived by a seeming-worthy friend, as Othello can be to some extent. There is simply no valid reason for Bertram to choose Parolles for his chief hanger-on. Parolles merely panders to Bertram's own hedonism and depravity. Bertram only rejects Parolles when his peers make Parolles the object of their derisive scheme to make this foppish dandy's true nature public. At that point, to stick with Parolles would be to suffer like indignity through association.

In this regard, Bertram is a wanton youth who needs to be molded. His social equals kindly give him direction rather than making him, too, the object of their scorn. Perhaps they see potential in him. His wife will do them one better.

2. Bertram enters the King's court then foolishly balks at fulfilling the King's request to marry Helen. That Helen is beneath Bertram is certainly true, and the consideration of rank is admittedly a major issue for anyone of the time. But the King's promise to make good the difference through his graces is hard to ignore. Bertram is a fool to spurn the King's favor as he does first by denying Helen. A legitimate reluctance to follow a king is, in Shakespeare, often worthy of admiration. There is no hint here, however, at anything other than goodness in the King, and Bertram's minor rebellions seem like nothing but petulance and brattiness.

3. Most significantly, Bertram is an out and out cad. He tries to seduce an innocent young maiden--while his unconsummated bride presumably awaits him at home. Further, he seeks his own pleasure at what would be great cost to Diana were she to accept his advances--not uncommon masculine behavior, but still not excusable, and not behavior worthy of other Shakespearean lovers.

4. Bertram, however, proves himself admirably well in battle, which greatly complicates our view of him as a figure completely lacking in virtue. If Bertram were a coward, then the portrait would be complete. We would simply have a more nobly born, less audacious Parolles. Now we have inconsistency, and this poses a problem for understanding the true nature of Bertram's character. Bertram's one good grace makes it hard to understand the other, lesser qualities he boasts. His character is as inconstant as his desire to adhere to his wedding vows. This problem of character suggests the possibility that Shakespeare was lax in presenting Bertram's character, that he did not have a complete and consistent notion of who this man is supposed to be.

5. When granted a chance to even things out in Act 5, Bertram tries to lie his way out of the situation, only to dig himself deeper into the trap that his wife lays for him. Essentially, Helen arrives on the scene to save Bertram's neck -- literally, at this point, since the King has accused him of murdering his wife.

6. Bertram has been so dishonest in Act 5 that we are tempted to doubt his sincerity when he finally succumbs to his wife's scheme and declares his devotion to her. But Helen's plan has been so meticulously and so ingeniously executed that it is not implausible that his affirmation of his fidelity to her is genuine--he knows he doesn't stand a chance against her. She's got him beat, to put it bluntly. She has redeemed him, in a technical sense, at least, and he owes her his life in the same way that the King does. He might as well give in at this point.

Despite these points, the issue of Helen's love for Bertram can still be explained away as the vagaries of love. Helen invokes the power of the stars in this play, and such stars could certainly drive not only her fortune in life but in love as well.

As clear as it is that this play participates to no little extent in sharing its creator's genius, it is also clear here as elsewhere that Shakespeare's plays are not perfect creations. They were composed with great rapidity to meet a demanding performance schedule. Shakespeare likely concerned himself most with the audience's reaction to what they saw on stage. It could be taken as a given that a young woman of gentle but otherwise indistinctive birth would be susceptible to the charms of a man superior to her in station, that there is some unmistakeable aura of attraction to Bertram. Unwise such a love may be on Helen's part, but not improbable. This would be enough to give the crowd what they wanted, down to the pennystinkers. But on the page, we expect more from our characters.

This leaves us with two possibilities: First, that Shakespeare did not satisfactorily develop the character of Bertram because he did not think that to do so would be a worthy investment of his time and energy. Second, that Shakespeare left Bertram underdeveloped deliberately in order to emphasize Helen's character and, in particular, to highlight her plucky resolve, her bravado in capturing a man who is unworthy of her in all but his title, but whom she loves. Love is a strange and fickle beast--here and elsewhere in Shakespeare. Why does Helena love Demetrius and Demetrius Hermia? Why shouldn't Titania love an ass?

Picture Bertram with a wide, flashy smile and great hair. He looks good in tights. Sometimes, for love, that's enough.

Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas, and the "Habit of Reflection"

2011-07-03T20:30:00.000-07:00

Off and on for several years, I have taught Richard Wright's auotbiography, Black Boy, which is a book that an English teacher can easily grow to love: it's about the power of words, thoughts, language, ideas--the ability of these things to bring a human being up out of the misery and squalor that life presents to him and give him a sense of self. Feeling the need for a change, though, I decided to teach Native Son instead this year. As much as I love Black Boy, I don't think I'll be going back to it soon.

In Black Boy, Wright at one point refers to having developed the "habit of reflection"--I have often indicated to my students that I think this one phrase can almost in itself explain how Wright rises above the limitations placed on him. The habit of reflection ultimately gives him an understanding not only of himself but of the society that he lives in. It gives him a measure of control over his life. If there is anything like free will in our lives, it comes from this habit: from our ability, our power, to think deliberately about our own lives.

Native Son presents something different. There are glimpses of Bigger Thomas in Wright himself -- when he feels violent impulses welling up in him, when he bangs up against the limitations of the world he is in, when he writes that he knows he has to get out of the South because if he stays there he knows he will end up dead. But Wright, through the habit of reflection, escapes. Bigger does not. Wright's life story is bittersweet, poignant; Bigger's is shocking, incomprehensible. Wright finds the community he has always sought with the Communists he meets in Chicago and then is expelled from their midst, but Bigger never even gets that far, alien and alone. What strikes me most now about Native Son is the misery of Bigger's utter aloneness. It is parallel to the feelings Wright holds after his falling out with the Communists in Chicago, but the outcomes are vastly different: we are amazed that Wright manages not only to survive but to rise above the squalor of his environment, but it's no surprise that Bigger sinks to the depths.

"It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and the Death of the Train Song

2011-07-03T17:02:00.001-07:00

No doubt anyone reading this can instantly conjure up the mental image--sound effects and all--of a steam train leaving the station: the heavy sideways barrel of the big iron engine, the thick black smoke coiling out of the stack, the churning of the wheels, the sound of the whole massive device as it picks up speed, slowly at first, then steady, even, steel grinding steel. Though the steam engine was common over most of the world, this is an archetypal American image, at least for those of us who grew up in the U.S. within proximity of a television set. The chugging of the train is the very soundtrack of Manifest Destiny, the rude chorus of American mythology. I'm racking my brain, trying to determine if I've ever actually seen a real live steam-powered train in action. I can't say for sure that I have, but the image is so natural to me that it seems as though I must have seen it a thousand times, not just on TV.

Before television--and even after it, for some time--we had the train song. In the popular tradition, folk songs about trains go back to long before the concept of authorship mattered in songwriting. Among scores of others, the list includes "The Wreck of the Old 97," "The FFV," "Rock Island Line," and even "In the Pines," with its image of "the longest train I ever saw" that carried away the only girl that the speaker ever loved. I think especially, though, of Johnny Cash's version of "Orange Blossom Special," not only because of its use of a chugging acoustic guitar and snare drum rhythm that approximates the sound of a train in motion but also because it features the harmonica instead of the fiddle, which dominates most other versions of the song. There is something about the sound of the harmonica that goes with train songs, that mimics the sound of the speeding object itself.

In 1965, Bob Dylan unofficially heralded what I like to call the Death of Folk Music. Symbolically, the moment of this announcement might be considered Dylan's performance at the Newpoert Folk Festival on July 25, when he appeared on stage with an electric guitar and an electrified backing band. Dylan himself may not have intended any grand pronouncement at the time on the viability of folk music; indeed, the following year, Dylan stated in an interview for Playboy that folk songs "are not going to die." The songs themselves may never die, but the people who sing them do, unfortunately, and the ranks of those who qualify as authentic folk musicians have grown thinner and thinner from one decade to the next.

In its purest form, folk music might be defined as music that emerges spontaneously from among the populace--generally from non-professionals--and is by and large free of the influences of the commercial recording media. It could be argued whether "folk" music that does not fit these criteria is even folk music at all. To be recorded, folk musicians generally have to be sought out by ethnomusicologists. If such a thing as pure folk music still exists in the U.S., it does so in miniscule pockets isolated throughout rural regions of the country. Of course, there are traditions in music--blues (especially Delta blues), country, and bluegrass--that have very strong, close ties to folk music, but the terms of these idioms are decidedly different because of the influence commercial interstests have had on them.

By 1960, the existence of pure folk had become quite perilous because of the pervasive influence of commercial recording and because of broad-scale changes in society that meant that few people lived outside of such influence. That year, Bob Dylan set out to New York (of all places) to become a folk singer. He failed to do so, in a way, because the very act of aspiring to become a professional folk singer is an impossibility, or at least a contradiction in terms (Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie, notwithstanding), and I think that it was Dylan's increasing awareness of this situation--whether consciously or below the surface of his thought--that caused him in 1965 to radically alter his approach to writing and performing his music. The more blatant change in his music was in the transition to the electric guitar (which, it must be noted, did not entirely push out the acoustic guitar, especially on rhythm tracks). The other change--less noticeable at first, but ultimately perhaps more profound--was in the lyrics, which were more abstract and dreamlike on 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's first album that featured the electric guitar (which was dominant on all but the last four tracks on the album), but pervaded increasingly by irony, even cynicism, on the follow-up album, Highway 61 Revisited, which also appeared in 1965. Dylan had begun increasingly to hide himself behind the veneer of irony in both his lyrics and in interviews--to the point that the irony that had at first seemed persona had become part of his identity, it seemed.

If Highway 61 Revisited is part of the Death of Folk Music, Dylan's version of the train song that appears on this album, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," is nothing less than the Death of the Train Song. It's a meta-train song that borrows some floaters from songs gone by, but it is also, to some extent, a song about the inability to write a true and authentic train song. The train song is a kind of song that's impossible to write now, at least not with the same genuine sense of earnestness that pervaded those earlier takes.

As I write this, I can hear the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It's a diesel engine, of course, but the whistle, I think, must sound the same. I can't imagine it taking my baby away, it's not the soundtrack to my own sorrows, but it is, as Hank Williams and so many others had it, lonesome indeed.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet/Mattherhorn

2011-07-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

I had to write some book reviews for a couple of titles that I contributed to an auction. Despite the pervasive use of blurb-speak here, I thought it might be worthwhile to preserve these reviews here for posterity ....

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell

David Mitchell is known for delivering intricate and very clever tales rendered in sometimes dizzying postmodern fashion. His novels turn themselves inside out, move forwards and backwards at the same time, and at the end you are likely left wondering exactly what happened. With his most recent novel, however, Mitchell opts for a more straightforward narrative style—but without losing his masterful command of technique. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is Mitchell’s most accessible novel yet and perhaps his strongest. The story Mitchell tells here is that of Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk in the Dutch East India Company circa 1799. De Zoet finds himself stationed on the artificial island of Dejima, built in Nagasaki harbor as a trading center because the Japanese Shogunate does not allow Westerners to set foot on Japanese soil. Mitchell has chosen an utterly fascinating historical time and place in which to set de Zoet’s story.

The Westerners bring with them new developments in science and medicine, as well as a rapidly emerging capitalist ethos, but the gate remains quite literally closed to them. Stranded in the harbor, de Zoet finds himself involved in a struggle for power and wealth as different factions among the Dutch spar for advantage with the reluctant and very cautious Japanese. Things get more complicated when de Zoet finds himself falling in love with a Japanese woman eager to learn more about Western medicine. Though the global hotspots may have changed, the clash of cultures that ensues seems eerily relevant today, and readers are reminded that the origins of globalism go back centuries. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet offers a love story as well as a study of culture and character, and as the plot evolves you will find this novel to offer as compelling a story of adventure and intrigue as you are likely to find anywhere.

Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes

Matterhorn is, quite simply, the best war novel I have ever read. It certainly ranks favorably beside such classics as A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Things They Carried. Matterhorn takes place in Vietnam during what is known there as the American War, and from the very first page the reader is thrust into a military, political, and personal quagmire that is reflected in nearly every aspect of the experiences of the novel’s protagonist, Lt. Waino Mellas, an Ivy League graduate who finds himself in Vietnam without truly knowing why he is there. Matterhorn is gripping, compelling, gritty, and sometimes grisly, and there is hardly a wasted syllable in the novel’s 690 pages. The narrative style is sharp, taut, and yet richly detailed. There is no lack of realism here, and the themes that emerge related to the camaraderie of warriors resonate as utterly genuine, never jingoistic or merely sentimental. Mellas and his fellow Marines battle hunger, thirst, leeches, and malaria, not to mention the North Vietnamese Army; they live and die in the muck of the jungle and even somehow ultimately find their humanity in the midst of its twisted vines and its promises of death. Matterhorn is not a political novel; this is a novel worth reading regardless of your perspective on the war, and it is told in such a way that only a combat veteran could tell it. Published in 2010, Mattherhorn is, in fact, Marlantes’ first novel, and he has literally been working on it ever since he was discharged from the Marine Corps after his stint in Vietnam. For the readers of this novel, it is well worth every moment of that nearly forty-year wait. Marlantes has delivered a true classic of the genre, and though it sounds like hyperbole, it would not be out of place in a spot next to Homer on the bookshelf.

Bloom on Satan and Hamlet

2011-07-03T17:01:00.001-07:00

Harold Bloom hinted at this in his Shakespeare book, and it's hard not to see the point here, which he has elaborated on in his new book:

"It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not .... Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor ...."

--from The Anatomy of Influence, as quoted in the New York Times Book Review

What Bloom might add here is that Montaigne is the to some extent the real-life antecedent to both of these characters.

It is easy, perhaps, to dismiss Bloom as pompous and bombastic, but it is not easy to dismiss the pull of his ideas, and I cannot help but feel that more often than not there is the ring of something valid in what he has to say.

Trappings and Suits of Woe

2011-07-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

There's a moment--in poetry, in culture--when melancholy, the traditional form of sadness, gives way to depression of a more modern and clinical sort. It wasn't Freud, really, but the aftermath of Freud, something in the ever more specialized post-war culture, that signified the shift. Freud was still grounded enough in the classics--he wasn't really a social scientist--and there is something relentlessly romantic about the notion that one's psychological suffering can be identified by its classification via mythology. To see your own anguish in terms of that of Oedipus or Electra is to give a certain dignity and gravity to it that would defy the effects of prescription medication. This is psychological afflication as fate. The shift from sadness as melancholy (grounded either in fate or in a Galenic humor, to be treated historically by bleeding, then by Freud through a cure that is verbal if not essentially literary) to sadness as clinical depression (to be treated--ineffectively, as it most often turns out to the poet--by therapy) occurs with the confessional poets, and at this point I wonder if one could ever go back to the way things were. (We have since made the shift from therapy to drugs, but that is not relevant to the poets I am thinking of--Plath, Sexton, Berryman--who succumbed in the pre-drug era.)

Melancholy is primarily, though not exclusively, a British phenomenon in English-language poetry. We Yankees have been too busy carving out a home in the wilderness--or to wrought in our siamese-twin national obsessions, religion and capitalism--to feel the weight of our sadnesses, and neither Hawthorne's frequent gloominess nor Poe's rabid mania qualify as melancholy. Consider, by contrast, the moodiness of Hamlet, which either stems from a temporary imbalance of the humors (that is, it is situational, resulting from his father's untimely death) or emerges naturally as an innate aspect of his character (which is also his fate, the two terms being nearly synonymous, most of the time, for Shakespeare*). Cranky old Coleridge was not unfamiliar with melancholy, and of course Keats, staring his own mortality in the eyes, knew it intimately. Byron's bravado bears a trace of it. W. H. Auden might be said to be a 20th century inheritor of it, but then he had those religious longings that sidetracked him. Going back, though, even the Beowulf poet, with his grim fatalism, knew it: with every monster defeated, another one sprang up with bloody claws in its wake, and then what do you have? Thus the meadhalls full of warriors sad in their cups, and the keaning laments of the women that so pervade the poem.

As for Americans, we can take as an example of the pre-clinical culture of sadness Robert Frost, a poet whose sober, earthy groundedness sometimes (when he is at his best, I think) gives way to melancholy of a traditional sort. "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" is perhaps the best instance of Frost's melancholy. Reading this poem as a sort of thinly veiled death wish does, I believe, overshoot the mark. It is not death per se that the speaker is longing for as much as it is a communion with nature that he can only have through death. The speaker is the inheritor not of the British tradition of melancholy (though he possesses melancholy, which we might define as a pervasive sadness, or sadness as a state of being) but rather of an opposite tradition: New England Transcendentalism. His melancholy presents itself in spite of this inheritance, but also because of it. It is worth noting that the Romantic poets in England exulted in nature but were stung by the ephemeral qualities of human experience, by the passage of time and by the inevitability of death. American Romantics--the Transcendentalists--gave us "Thanatopsis" instead--the triumph over death through a communion with nature. Frost is a displaced Thoreau, really, who took a different path in that yellow wood, and in this poem the speaker seems to be lamenting the fact that he cannot be Thoreau in practice. Melancholy then emanates from the poem because it describes a condition of being that cannot be resolved favorably and a pervasive disappointment that results. It also describes--"miles to go before I sleep"--the speaker's resolution to endure this state of being, and this, too, is essential to melancholy. The speaker is not suicidal; he knows how to endure a disappointment, and that is perhaps the very definition of melancholy.

Lowell, Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Bishop--theirs is the poetry of a more modern depressive state. Despite their best efforts to fight it, their sadnesses (and their manic dispositions) drove them mad. The suicide rate alone for the five poets above tells a story: 60%. What kept Lowell and Bishop from joining the others is a tale for someone who knows them better than I do. Perhaps they were better at self-medication. The difference between the melancholics and the depressives clearly emerges from a cultural disposition, not just in the way we treat the sad see themselves or how we treat the sad in our midst but in how we define attitudes toward life. Life, we take it for granted now, is something to be enjoyed. Life in the past was so often something to be guarded or perhaps simply endured: tuberculosis, plague, high infant mortality rates, malnutrition, chimney sweeps who rarely made it to the age of ten. There was plenty to be unhappy about it in the past, but here and now in the land of plenty we feel that if we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. In a modern, industrialized nation, we often feel that there is nothing to separate us from our own unhappiness except for ourselves.

What most separates confessional poetry, though, from its antecedents is the intense awareness on the part of these poets that what they are facing is a clinical condition--and the accompanying notion that poetry itself just might be the therapy they need. This is most clearly the case for Sexton, who literally began writing poetry as therapy. Then there was the realization, for Plath and Sexton at least, that poetry couldn't do it--it couldn't save their lives--and their subsequent suicides.

Consider, by contrast, Keats' treatment of melancholy in his Ode to it. There is joy in life, but it is ephemeral, and its satisfactions leave you dissatisfied with what ensues. A cheap summary of the poem, no doubt, but it gets the central point across: that melancholy is something to be endured. That suicidal despression may be impossible to endure is the subject of another time and another poet.

------------------------------------------
* Incidentally, from a modern, deterministic perspective, we could also see character as fate today--product of a biological, genetic, or psychological determination, rather than something astrological, but fate nonetheless.

Hamlet and Identity

2010-11-19T20:02:00.000-08:00

Hamlet is one or more of the following:

A university-trained scholar.

A scientific rationalist.

A follower of stoic philosophy.

Montaignean skeptic.

Clinically depressed son/son-in-law/nephew.

A paltry lover.

Actor/dramaturge.

A Christian prince.

A pagan warrior.

Machiavellian killer.

A tricky fool, more fit to be son of the late king's jester than son of the late king himself.

"To thine own self be true": to which of these selves ought he be true? All of them, apparently, at one point or another.

Hamlet tries out the different roles until he finds the one that is most dramatically expedient. The play is like a maze, a game that Hamlet plays until he finds his way out--which is to say that he finds his fate, which is death.

The identity Hamlet creates for himself in Act 5 is a result of his experiences in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Act 5, Scene 1: the only two scenes in the play that take place outside of Elsinore. Hamlet has to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, observe Fortinbras, and dig about in the dirt a little to figure out his motivation. The graveyard scene is perhaps most apt: Hamlet fears death; he muses on the fate of the body, and then he viacariously encounters that fate in the most direct of fashions. He even ends up inside of a grave for a while, wrestling with Laertes. Finally, death is no longer a thought but a reality. Hamlet learns something from the gravedigger as well: that death is something one can grow accustomed to in such a way that the jokes can lose their sting. What is death to the gravedigger? A business opportunity, and that is all.

It is the intersection of all of the above identities that Hamlet stands upon in Act 5, Scene 2. Hamlet's allusion to scripture, his belief in the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," is less a full-fledged Christian precept than it is a representation of the intersection of Christianity and stoicism, where the two modes of living arc together on the Venn diagram. Hamlet summarizes his acceptance of fate in two words: "Let be." He knows the role he is supposed to play, and he plays it. And in doing so, he robs death of its glory, which is and always has been merely the fear of it.

Hamlet and Montaigne

2010-11-19T19:21:00.000-08:00

Montaigne establishes one of his essays upon a quotation from Cicero: "To Philosophie is no other thing, than for a man to prepare himself for death."

Shakespeare knew Cicero. Shakespeare also certainly read Montaigne, or at least some Montaigne, later in his career; we have passages from The Tempest that mimic Montaigne's "Of the Caniballes" as proof. Shakespeare was reportedly a friend of John Florio, Montaigne's first English translator, and may have read early translations before they were published in 1603.

Hamlet was written some two or three years before the publication of Montaigne's essays in English, but it is thrilling to think that there may be some link between the two. Certainly, there is a likeness in sensibility. Hamlet seems an enactment of a principle asserted by Montaigne:

So have I learned this custome or lesson, to have alwaies death, not only in my imagination but continually in my mouth. And there is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than of the death of men; that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they shew at their death. (Book I, XIX)

Montaigne writes: "You have seene many who have found good in death, ending thereby many many miseries" (Book I, XIX). This is the very lesson Hamlet seems to have learned by Act V.

Hamlet represents a revolution in drama, a new mode not only for Shakespeare but for all literature. The intense inwardness of the title character was previously unknown to the stage, to poetry, even. The soliloquys are unprecedented in their depth of expression, in their complexity. Rank biographical speculation bears little fruit, I believe, but here is a plum: what if Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne prompted this revolution?--prompted Hamlet?

We can never know the extent to which Montaigne influenced Shakespeare. Regardless, the two operate so much in parallel that they are rightly acknowledged as co-founders of the modern sensibility, giving us, among other things, the vision of the fragmented self and a modern attitude toward death that, despite the real or supposed Christianity of both authors, is founded ultimately upon a secular humanist attitude, one borne of much reflective thought.

Wherefore Hamlet?

2010-11-09T19:52:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges of reading Hamlet is to figure out what the fuss is all about.

To wit, Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be ..." Some of the most famous lines in the English language.

Why? Most of us do not walk around in a suicidal depression on a day to day basis.

But we do possess an awareness of our own mortality, and Hamlet dealt with that awareness on a level more profound than anyone before and perhaps since. And we do, each of us, have to find a way to live in this world, which is to endure the suffering that it presents to us. And in the modern world, with a multiplicity of viewpoints beyond the received truth of the medieval church, this challenge takes on further complications.

Hamlet wanted to know the meaning of death. He questioned it bluntly and boldly and with a degree of thoughtfulness previously impossible. A by-product of the Reformation, Hamlet inhabits a world that is not fully Catholic or Protestant; he is in a sense the first post-Christian figure in literature because conventional religious sensibility is insufficient to him in answering questions about death. This does not necessarily make Hamlet an atheist, but it does make him agnostic or at least a doubter. No one could have gotten away with a public expression of doubt in those old Church of England days except for a character on stage; the law wouldn't have allowed it. But certainly people were thinking it: with Catholics and Protestant splitting each other to bits all across Europe, it might lead a sensible person to doubt the validity of the enterprise altogether. But one couldn't say so except on a stage.

Then there's the matter of two value systems in conflict: the Christian one that forbids suicide as a mortal sin and the classical-stoical one that condones it under certain circumstances. Hamlet grapples with stoical precepts throughout the play, but he cannot free himself from his passions, from his own depth of feeling. If stoicism is about the denial of feeling in order to endure the "slings and arrows" that come automatically with living in this world, then Hamlet is not a stoic, because Hamlet is nothing if not two things: thoughtful and full of feeling. It is above all his capacity for emotional depth and not his critical thinking skills that make him admirable. And it is depth of feeling that an audience expects to see when they see Hamlet.

Hamlet and Meaning

2010-11-03T20:28:00.000-07:00

I.
Either meaning is transcendentally signified, or it is not. In Hamlet, it is not. Thus Hamlet's predicament: there are no set principles upon which to act, so he must define them himself. No mean task, that.

A. D. Nuttall uses the word "vertiginous" to describe Hamlet's famous line "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Indeed, the entire play could be described as vertiginous. Hamlet's vertigo, then, is the consequence of understanding that things are only what you define them to be, that you are only what your mind defines yourself to be. Here is the power of mind, which is both a creative force and a destructive force at once. Out of it, Hamlet must invent a self. He has less than four acts left to do it. How?

II.
Polonius offers us the stoic commonplace, so often quoted out of context, "to thine own self be true." To determine the utility of this advice, we must not only look at the character who speaks these words (at best, a doddering fool; at worst, right-hand to a fratricidal murderer) but also consider how they might apply to Hamlet himself were the advice given to him: to what self ought he to be true? Hamlet begins the play a mopey undergrad and ends as something entirely different, not quite a warrior, but someone who can play the role of the warrior to good effect. In between (that is, for the vast bulk of the play), he is nebulously defined. Vertigo is his only identity.

Hamlet is merely an amalgam of words, always shifting, disappearing. He wishes the body to "resolve itself into a dew," but it is only identity that proves itself vaporous, not the body for which Hamlet has so much disdain. Either he possesses no self to which to be true or the self to which he ought be true is no self that's going to get him anywhere he wants to be. Hamlet is a modern character because he faces the same predicament we face in the modern world: he must invent the idea of that self that he hopes to become, and he must then struggle to become it. Easier said than done, even for a character whose only existence is words on a page (or drifting to the heavens from the stage).

III.
Thus Hamlet's preoccupation with drama, which is also Prospero's preoccupation with drama, which also must certainly be Shakespeare's obsession with drama. It is through drama that Hamlet hopes to discover truth. One philosophy of Polonius that is actionable: "by indirections find directions out." Reality--that is, certainty--can be mined by sifting carefully the grains of illusion.

It has been observed that Hamlet is out of place in his own play, a tricksy fool miscast in the part of the prince. Hamlet needs to learn his part, and once he does the actions will define him.

IV.
Harold Bloom says that Hamlet is no more obsessed with death than any other Shakespeare play, but that can't be right. A play that not only contemplates life and death but hinges on suicidal impulse must be said to explore the meaning of death from a singular perspective. The core of the play is the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and in this speech Hamlet identifies the uncertainty of death--"the undiscovered country"--as that which "puzzles the will." Hamlet does not know if death is something he ought to embrace or something he ought to flee from. He accuses himself of cowardice, but if this is so it is a cowardice in need of qualification: a metaphysical cowardice--looking over the edge of the abyss and not knowing where to place your foot--and no mere knocking of the knees with fright. Hamlet confronts the uncertainty of death until he finds certainty: and the certainty is that of the grave. This knowledge becomes bedrock for him in Act 5.

V.
The experience upon which Hamlet forges an identity--the experience upon which he rights himself and overcomes his vertigo--is the direct confrontation with death. More than Fortinbras, more then the gravedigger or even Yorick, it is the soil itself--the desolate patch of ground that Fortinbras sends an army to its potential doom to gain, the muck of Yorick's grave, the fresh dirt of Ophelia's--the soil that he will relentlessly become, that gives Hamlet certain knowledge of death. Once he knows it--once he has prepped for his part, practiced the method--then he knows he can play the part. "The readiness is all": Hamlet decides to determine his being through his actions and not through his death. He decides to accept his fate and not to defy it. He will face the uncertainty, which has become a certainty: that the "quintessence of dust" is indeed just that, just so many skulls in the dirt.

VI.
Ultimately, Hamlet goes beyond good and evil, beyond God, beyond character as it is traditionally understood, to a secular mode of being that is on its own level, framed in the mind. There is a relativism at work here, both ethical and epistemological, and it is true that Hamlet--like every other Shakespeare play--offers no moral truths. In fact, it is predicated on the assumption that there are no hard and fast moral truths.

One cannot disavow relativism simply because it bears the potential to present unpleasant consequences. Hamlet gives us those unpleasant consequences--and, in its final act, a way to get past them. It is the power of the mind that causes trouble for Hamlet--more so than his uncle, a middling sort of villain for Shakespeare--and it is the power of the mind that renders to Hamlet a sense of self, forged from experience.

A Soul at the White Heat

2010-10-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

Brenda Wineapple's White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson is, if nothing else, worthwhile for one great feat that it accomplishes: to rescue the reputation of Higginson from that of being a mere sidenote in the story of how Emily Dickinson's poetry was first published to the masses. In Wineapple's presentation, Higginson is not so much the bumbling editor who nearly demolishes Dickinson's accomplishments in the process of preparing her poems for posthumous publication, or the product of the then-fading era of Transcendentalism who cannot recognize The New when he really sees it, as he is a man on the cusp of two movements, a man on the verge of the modern but not wholly of it, who has the sensitivity to recognize Dickinson's genius without the capacity to fully understand it. In fact, no one in Dickinson's time understood her poetry; Higginson at least realized that the future would understand her. And Dickinson realized that she had an ally in Higginson, someone who would at the least be receptive to the possibility of her genius at a time when no one else was willing to entertain the thought of it. What Dickinson sought from Higginson, despite all the talk of "precepter" and "pupil" in her letters, was sympathy, it seems.

Higginson is (and was even in his day) less of interest for his own literary efforts than he was for the way in which he captured the ethos of his time. If Emerson was the great armchair Transcendentalist who enjoyed nature best from the comfort of his study and Thoreau the man of deed who translated the attitude of the movement into action through his experimental living in Emerson's back forty, Higginson is somewhere between the two but closer to Thoreau, though more politically involved. In addition to writing essays, novels, a few poems, and yet more essays, Higginson received a saber cut while storming the gates of the federal courthouse in Boston in an attempt to free the captured slave Anthony Burns, he ran guns to free-staters in Kansas, and he--not Robert Gould Shaw--was in fact the first to lead a regiment of black soldiers during the Civil War. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, as well. For years, he was a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the medium through which he first sparked the interest of Miss Dickinson. Though his writing is not without some moments of eloquence (Wineapple cites some of the finer passages), he is not remembered as a major writer of his era for a reason. Rather, it is fullness of his life story that prompts our attention today--that and his relationship with Dickinson.

Like most biographies of this sort, White Heat sometimes veers a little too close to rank speculation. Did Higginson harbor romantic feelings toward Dickinson? The books suggests that maybe he did ... then pulls back on that assumption, because if he did he certainly did not tell anyone in any direct manner. Wineapple wisely lets most of the speculations on Dickinson's sexual behavior resonate on their own. Was Dickinson in love with her sister-in-law, Sue Dickinson? The two were close in an odd sort of way, but Wineapple stops short of drawing any conclusions. That Dickinson fell in love with Judge Otis Lord is not to be doubted; what is uncertain, however, is the precise nature of their love affair and whether it was ever consummated in full-blown fashion. Lord, the very epitome of crusty, conservative cranks, seems a truly odd choice for the feisty and spirited Dickinson, but this relationship merely furthers the point that Dickinson's private life, including the precise nature of her feelings for Higginson, whom she did meet several times before she died, will forever be fraught with unknowns.

Which bring us to the poetry itself. Any literary biography is primarily of interest in its capacity to bring greater depth and meaning to a writer's work. And in this case, our appreciation of Dickinson's poetry is enhanced by a greater understanding of how her contemporaries received it--and in particular how Higginson perceived it. Wineapple points to Mabel Loomis Todd, Higginson's co-editor in preparing Dickinson's poems for publication, as the one with the heavy hand in the editing process. The examples she presents do indicate that some blunt and savage editing work was done by Todd, though Higginson was indeed guilty of altering the poems to make them more presentable to a mainstream literary audience of the 1890s. Regardless, the poems in their current "restored" form (first published as such in 1955) still have the power to captivate a contemporary audience with their startling sensibility, and they remain the most unique and idiosyncratic body of verse in American literature--a challenge, certainly, for any editor.

Cambridge Journal

2010-07-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

I.
I came here with new glasses, and I'm still getting used to them, so that when I climb a stairway I look down at the steps and they appear to me to be curved. I keep looking down at my feet, wondering how they got to be all the way down there, wondering how I got to be so tall. My eyes haven't learned yet how to navigate the depths of what they take in. My left eye is the good one -- better than 20/20, the optometrist said. The right one is weak. I can close my right eye and read the label on an electric fan from ten feet away with my left. With my left eye closed, everything is a blur in the right.

II.
Harvard Yard: six in the morning on a Sunday, the Fourth of July. I forgot to wear my glasses, but even through the blurred edges that form the shapes of things around me I can tell that we are the only ones about, Ben and me. Ben is unusually quiet in his stroller. I wonder what he sees, how he is learning to process it. He is just learning his colors, and we are practicing with the things we see on our walk, especially the blue of the hydrangeas, which look as though someone had spray painted them: it doesn't seem like they could be real. To me, without my glasses, they look like cotton candy on a stick, something out of Dr. Seuss.

We cut between buildings, through alleys of brick, through the silence of Divinity Avenue this early in the morning. Automatic sprinkler systems are shooting water deep into the green of green grass. There's enough brick here to build a castle in four dimensions, enough wrought iron to build an ocean liner. Wonder how all that iron railing made it through the war without being commandeered by the government, but then again this is Harvard. We don't quite belong here, feel a bit like intruders, but this early on a Sunday morning any place is yours if you are walking through it quietly enough: on tippy toes.

The moon is still up in the sky, fragmentary, pouring out of a cup you might make with your left hand. Ben points it out to me. Signs: It's natural ... Organic Landscaping; All Pets Must Be On A Leash, stick man walking stick dog. Commemorative plaques, various and sundry in nature. The words are ragged around the edges, but I can still read. The difference between what's there and what I see is only a little less pronounced than it ever is, even with glasses. I'll never know what it is that a bird sees, what stick man walking stick dog sees. Through the gate by Canady Hall and up on top of the building there to the left, a hawk screams from a high perch. Not a warning to the little birds below but a summons to some other hawk somewhere else, a hypothetical bird that might be in the vicinity: a call to all hawks, if anyone out there is listening.

Still no one else. Then we see a jogger, and the gig is all up. We're no longer the sole inhabitants of the grounds of America's oldest university.

Past the statue of John Harvard: once I walked by here, years ago, and he had a pigeon on his head. It seemed apt, somehow, a humbling message: that we all might end up splattered with pigeon shit someday. There are more people now, a couple standing at the top of a set of monument-worthy stairs: Widener Library, repository of knowledge. It's late night for the lovers, I can tell. They are oblivious to anything, lost in their embrace. Summer school students who found each other more truly and more strange, it seems. One wonders where they are off to next, if they'll see each other again when summer's over. Either way, it couldn't matter to them now: they are embedded in the moment.

A covered passage through the middle of Wigglesworth Hall and into Harvard Square. Rampant commercialism tamed, at rest on a Sunday morning. That is, nothing's open. We pause at the bookstore, look over the titles, the names of visiting authors posted on the calendars, used books for sale. I tell Ben about the books I'd like to get, but he doesn't seem much interested. He quietly waits it out. The couple walks by, down from their vertiginous perch and among the walking and fully awakened once more. Hand in hand, delighted still at each other's company, and who would ever begrudge them that? The world is newly created for them and they the only couple. Just don't set foot ouside of the garden, I want to tell them. Stay here forever. If you can.

And then we wander through the residential areas below and to the east of campus. A good place to live, no doubt, with brick sidewalks and gardens well maintained in the side yards. They're New England gardens: the hydrangeas are tall and upright from the long New England spring and the mild summer, bright blue from the acidity of the soil. Onward and around, I'm looking up and squinting at street signs, registering the names and cataloguing landmarks for future navigations.

I pride myself on my sense of direction. I refer to it as innate, a natural product of the midwestern sensibility, but it's not. I claim that it comes from a childhood spent lying flat next to my brother in the bed of our dad's pickup truck, looking up at the blank of a blue sky as we crossed over the line from Johnson County into Wyandotte, guessing where we were and taking occasional glances over the edge of the truck bed to see if we were right. But more likely it comes from my willingness to learn the ground the old-fashioned way, on foot, finding a few landmarks and fixing them in my mind: an apartment building on Kirkland that I can recognize from any direction, a patch of sidewalk under construction, a walkway that I discovered that leads you out of a dead end street. Keeping track of your turns and always knowing which way is north.

Soon I've navigated our way through slums of hydrangea and clematis and brick sidewalks and back to our street, Francis Avenue, wondering about the prices, what it would cost to live here instead of just staying here for a month. The phrase "prohibitively expensive" comes to mind. Then we are on the grounds of the Divinity School. Is everything holy here? What about the infidels, the non-believers -- like us? What does it take to believe in things you can't see when you're not even sure about the things you do see?

These questions don't matter much to Ben: he's ready to get out of the stroller by now and go inside for a cool drink of water.

III.
My daughter wakes late, still terrified of the redcoats. The patriots, too, for that matter: anyone with a gun. The re-enactors are out in force this weekend. Yesterday she had a bad run-in with the redcoats on Boston Common; cannons were involved. Fourth of July on a Sunday, the cradle of liberty: that's what you get. There's the particular and peculiarly fervant brand of patriotism espoused by New Englanders. The revolutionary era is their heritage. They bring out cannons to every major park around and fire them off at fifteen minute intervals. No live rounds, of course, or at least we assume.

This is arguably the best place in the country to be on July Fourth, but Edie will have none of it. My wife explained to her that the redcoats were the bad guys, the others (white shirts, mostly, it seems, coarse cloth) are fighting for freedom. More or less. I'm about to side with the redcoats myself, thinking that maybe we should have just shut up and paid our taxes, then we wouldn't be dealing with cannons going off right next to the playground. I might openly declare myself a Tory. Edie goes about with her fingers in her ears, asking questions -- the answers to which she can't hear because her ears are covered. She can't figure out why anyone would ever want to go to war. We tell her that guns aren't allowed on campus, that she's safe here. No one is ever allowed to bring a gun on campus, and certainly not a cannon. Not in the residential areas, either. (I explain to her what a residential area is: it's a place where people live, and they don't want to be bothered. There are playgrounds in these residential areas that we can visit. No cannon, no musket, no grape shot.) She's very sensitive about noise, despite the fact that on any given parcel of land where she might find herself she is usually the loudest thing there -- no volume control yet. She had bad dreams last night about the redcoats.

Just outside the range of the cannons, though, we find ourselves in a little utopian socialist enclave, also known as the playground at Cambridge Commons. Wood bricks and plastic buckets are all held in common. Children work together to send water through a stainless steel aqueduct. It's an inversion of the instinct of mine at work here: no such thing as private property, and that takes the kids a bit of getting used to, but it's a good thing. The redcoats are forgotten, for the time being, at least. Boston may or may not be the hub of the universe, still, but it boasts the best playgrounds I've ever seen, anywhere.

IV.
Later in the morning, we are all walking together through Harvard Square. I stop into a cafe for coffee to go, and when I come out my wife is gesturing wildly at a figure just crossing the street. I turn to look and I know who he is instantly, and after the initial shock of recognition the entire mystery of his character suddenly makes sense.

Even from half a block away, he is easily distinguished by the particular qualities of his gait, the guitar that he carries with him everywhere in a hard shell case. I have my glasses on, but the pattern of his movements is so distinct that I think I would recognize him even without them on. He wears a rumpled suit, a white shirt with no tie, and his white hair is combed back, down almost to his collar: this is the same ensemble, the same look that I have associated with this fellow for almost twenty years. His face is red, weathered from walking so much, but at the same time you don't get the sense that he lives out of doors. He's a walker, a wanderer, no stranger to public transportation. Shabby but dignified. He comes from a cultured background. For twenty years, he was a fixture of Lawrence, Kansas, the town where Amy and I live, but here he is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as I said it all somehow makes sense.

The man with the guitar is named John. For years, Amy and I seemed to see him wherever we went. He could often be found sitting quietly at a coffee shop, staring at nothing in particular. He played guitar -- expertly -- during Sunday brunch at a restaurant where I worked. We track him down. He has a head start, and the walk signals are against us, but Amy catches up with him when he stops at a newsstand. He is happy to see us. He recognizes me, or he pretends to -- it's hard to know. He has a soft, refined voice, and he is very courteous. He grew up here, he says, and after twenty years of living in Lawrence he has just moved back. He plays every Monday night for the dinner crowd at such-and-such restaurant here in Cambridge, and he encourages us to come see him, and we agree to do so even though we know that it's not likely, given the fact of the young children who seem somehow to follow us around wherever we go.

A small world, I say, as we prepare to part ways, but even as I say it I know it's not true. The world is big and wide, and Boston, sadly, is no longer its hub, and there is much to see throughout the world's expanse. It's not a small world, you just keep running into the same crowd everywhere you go, like these children who keep following us around. We go our own ways. I have no doubt that we will run in to him again: he's the kind of person you keep running in to. Nevertheless, for some reason, we are all indescribably happy to see each other, even though if pressed on it none of us would be able to explain in the least why, except that we have these two places in common, here in the whole wide world.

V.
The kids go to bed around eight o'clock on the Fourth of July. Ben is too young to get much out of fireworks, we assume, or at least we don't want to navigate the crowds with him in tow, and Edie is still terrified of loud noises, explosions, and it's their bedtime, anyway. So here we are, the best place in the world to experience Independence Day, and it's lights off at eight-thirty. I set my glasses aside for the evening; I don't need them now. Amy and I stay up reading until she falls asleep. I turn off the light, then go into the bathroom so as not to keep her up and sit on the edge of the tub reading: about why we need wolves in the wilderness today, about an underappreciated Danish painter whose paintings radiate with an inborne light, about new translations of old scriptures -- what do the words mean, and where did they come from? The extreme degree to which Christianity depends upon translation -- translations of translations, even, of works by a person or persons unknown. All of which is to say that we do indeed see darkly through the glass. Advertisements for books, ridiculous personals: Uninhibited telephone exploration of your sexual fantasies. Call Julia. Dating/Intimacy Coach: Manhattan, Upper East Side location. The hand-in-hand couple are far, far away from this now.

I crinkle the magazine shut, then I, too, head for the mattress. It's a heat wave, and there's no air conditioning in our apartment. We've got four fans running. We had hoped to escape the heat by coming here, but the heat came with us and settled in, at least for a few days, at which point the winds off the ocean will push it back to where it came.

I lie in bed for a long time, awake, waiting to get settled in to the darkness, but I know that when I do sleep I will sleep until dawn. We're not so different from John, the man with the guitar. We're different from the hawk. You might remember things (scenes, images) but you don't know what it's like anymore to be young, to be very young. I see now what I see when my eyes are awake.

Hunger

2010-06-28T20:21:00.000-07:00

All through the book, we wait for the big moment: when the narrator finally makes it as a writer, when the money comes in -- a hundred kroner, say -- that lifts him up out of poverty and obscurity and allows him a decent place to live and a steady diet -- and a modicum of respect, to boot. It doesn't have to be a fortune, even: just enough to get by, to get his waistcoat out of hock, enough for him to claim with accuracy that he makes a living by his pen.

Of course, the moment never comes -- not in the pages of this book, at least. The writer in question, the quasi-autobiographical narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, gives the perfect picture of the motive to write, but the means are at a loss. We have to extrapolate from the novel's conclusion: when the unnamed speaker takes to the seas, a habitat hostile to the craft (but, apparently, if Melville is to be considered, not hostile to the formation of the proper temperament). It is then and only then -- in the last page and a half of the novel -- that we figure out how the narrator got out of the mess he was in -- starvation-grade poverty -- and made it to the point at which he could actually pull together the wits required to tell his own tale. It isn't so much the sea, though, that catalyzes this writer's pursuance of his craft; rather, in keeping with the point of the book, it's the fact that he finally has the benefit of a steady diet. Forget five hundred dollars and a room of your own -- it's daily bread that a writer needs above all.

And without that daily bread, how good a writer can this character be? We know better than to assume that the masterpieces he believes himself to be crafting in the midst of his poverty are genuine. It's clear from his inane ramblings -- and the sympathetic but sensible rejections he repeatedly receives -- that whatever he is trying to write in the midst of maintaining his unwonted hunger diet is not material on par with the final product -- the novel we are reading, written in the style of a memoir. It's only after the fact, with the benefit of looking back from a very different vantage point, that the narrator can present this kind of experience with any kind of clarity or artfulness. The narrator himself is not so much unreliable as much as he is reliably capturing an unreliable state that he inhabited in the past; alternating between complete arrogance and a supreme self-loathing, he himself realizes as much when he is in the latter mode. The voice of this novel has a perfect immediacy, but at the same time we can recognize a certain distinct distance. The experience has passed, but it has remained with him.

Hunger reads like a leaner, more taught Crime and Punishment, only there is no murder -- no galvanizing, irrevocable act -- to force the young would-be man of consequence into the crucible of his fate. The narrator of Hunger does, however, give Raskolnikov a run for his money when it comes to alienation. The alternating currents of self-doubt (a hazardous and even self-destructive sense of pride) and delusions of grandeur are common to both. Both are crazed and alienated by the dire poverty of their situations. Both are prompted equally by impulses of dire cruelty and seemingly random impulses toward utter kindness; if impulses toward kindness could be said to reach a hysterical pitch, they do so with both of these fellows. Both of them reside within the very midst and broil of the city yet are separated from everyone around them. Both talk to themselves aloud, oblivious as they wander the streets. Yet Raskolnikov commits his irrevocable act based on logic -- to prove a theory, to put thoughts into action. Hamsun's narrator, by contrast, doesn't seem capable of sticking with a particular train of thought long enough to see it through to the name of action; he is too sicklied over with a cast of thought that is not only pale but fractured as well. Laughing at himself, jumping on his hat, weeping his way through the streets, throwing what little money he has to near-perfect strangers, selling off his near-worthless possessions one by one to pawnbrokers ... In that sense, Hamsun's narrator matches Raskolnikov almost deed for deed. But the case could still be made: without any ability to hold a thought together long enough to act upon it, Hamsun delivers in a certain unmistakable way the crazier of the two. This we recognize as a kind of modern paralysis, bearing with it the sting of a psychological acuity that is Freudian in nature. The voice of the novel is the crucial element here, what allows this insanity to be rendered with such relentless precision.

Given the limitations of the mental state of the narrator at the time of the events he recounts, it's a bold move to use first-person here. But the use of first-person is also exactly what makes Hunger work. What it sacrifices in terms of clarity, though, it makes up for in expressiveness. The real feature that separates Hunger from Crime and Punishment -- what, in fact, makes it not only a leaner novel but a more realistic and more modern novel -- is Hamsun's trenchant use of voice, the psychological depth that is conveyed not only by the story but by the language of the story. Hunger reaches beyond the psychological depravity of Poe, for instance, because it deals with a more realistic and less sensational fringe. The voice carries this book. It is, one might argue, the most modern of 19th century novels, one that is full thirty years ahead of its time, and in addition it deserves to be lauded for not doing what we might expect it to do: to give us the story of how and why a writer became a writer. In that sense, Hunger keeps good company: neither The Bell Jar nor This Boy's Life tells us directly how the person speaking came to be the person writing; we have to extrapolate from the data provided. John Fante's Ask the Dust runs most nearly parallel to Hunger. We can see the drive, the examples that prove, over and over, the capacity for verbal fluency and the will to pursue the writer's life. What goes into the formation of a writer, though, is perhaps ultimately something very hard to know, even for the writers themselves. What Hunger proves, though, is that the writer's life begins with hunger and only reaches fruition when there is food to be had.

The Crow Census

2010-06-05T23:05:00.000-07:00

Common American Crow by John James Audubon

Certainly, they are common enough, these birds that so often when we look up are there, bracketing the sky with their uneven wingbeats. If we consider the crow as a punctuation mark, it's an ambiguously rendered one, one that means whatever you want it to mean. I was surprised to find out that people in some cultures consider the crow a symbol of harmony, but I can certainly see it. The meaning of the crow depends on context, mood. Like Walt Whitman, your average crow contains multitudes.

Of course, many people consider the crow a nuisance; you don't need a license to kill a crow, and there's no bag limit in the United States between August and March. And many people consider it an omen, like its slightly bigger, rougher, more scraggly cousin, the raven, and just about any other black bird, for that matter. Anything that eats carrion and trash tends to get a bad rap, but undeservedly so, I would say. Such scavengers merely take out the trash we ourselves don't want to deal with.

Regardless, the crow is a survivor. It has been around for a long, long time, and it can adapt to just about any climate. The crow is universal, world-wide. Crows are smart birds; they can be taught to speak. Legends abound about their intelligence. Aesop was rather fond of them. Crows are raucous, noisy, selfish, social, gregarious. But to see a congress of them -- what's called, in a somewhat unjustifiable maligning, a "murder" -- is to become aware of something crucial about the world we inhabit, and that is that they are much more at home in this place than we are. It belongs to them as much as or more than it belongs to anyone or anything else. When we clear out of here, I have a suspicion that they will still be around.

The etymology of "crow" is somewhat telling. Suddenly one day I was struck when it occurred to me that the Scottish word "corbie" and the Latin word "corvus" and the English word "crow" are all related. This suggests that there has been a lot of talk about crows for many years: the words that span multiple languages are often the words that have been around for a while.

Crows can supposedly recognize distinct features among human beings, but we are unable to recognize any defining differences between one crow and the next. I wonder: can a crow really tell himself apart from any other crow? Where does one crow end and the next one begin?

Each time I visit the Rocky Mountains, the crows there -- in much stronger numbers than anywhere else I have been -- remind me that they are the dominant feature of the landscape: more so than than the pines, even, which merely sway in the wind while the crows circle about them. Their cries call all through the wind as though the birds were themselves putting it into motion themselves with their calls, their breaths, their wingbeats.

I don't know that anyone would ever be able to perform a census. The king of crows himself couldn't pull it off. Maybe that's what they're up to, though, what they're attempting -- all that cawing and cakling about in the trees, on fence posts, atop dumpsters -- they're taking their own count, sounding off, checking names to see who's there. But every time they start to finalize the roster, confusion sets in: they can't tell who has been counted and who hasn't, and by that time there are that many more of them and they lose count. They scatter, break and combine, they multiply -- and the count starts again.

Catalpa

2010-06-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

With their big, broad, rubbery leaves and their seed pods that hang down all ragged and stringy, catalpa trees seem to me as though they belong in a swamp, in the South, somewhere very humid. They seem to have been designed precisely to fit into a William Faulkner novel. The trunk of a well-grown catalpa is massy and round, but then the branches droop and tangle themselves all around, tending to dip back down toward the ground. What makes this tree my favorite, though, is the flower. I found this image on the Oklahoma University website:

You don't expect a catalpa to have such a pretty flower, and you can't quite believe it until you actually look at it up close. The catalpa flower has an orchid-like quality to it, a long tongue and a fine spray of purple coming out of the bell, the yellow splotches on either side, the ruffled white skirts. I don't know enough about botany to know what any of it is for except that it is all essential to the process of making more catalpa trees. The flower seems like it ought to be delicate, but there are thousands of these things all over a tree that seems otherwise to be quite sturdy. If I were a bee, I would spend time here. The fragrance of the flowers is sweet and drowsy, not as powerful as honeysuckle but still maintaining a definite presense when you are in proximity of the tree. The fact that these trees grow around here -- that they flourish, even -- never ceases to surprise me. I'm glad for that.

Sucking in the 70s

2010-05-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Disco still sucks, but awful as it was it may also have been the best thing ever to happen to rock and roll. Two things happened. First, it gave further impetus to the emerging punk movement, which was powered by its blatant rejection not only of disco but also of the bloated, radio-ready behemoths of sound that would ultimately be boxed up and sold as "classic rock." The second thing that happened, though, was in a way a more curious triumph: rock music co-opted elements of disco and added these features to the existing mix. Rock was already a polyglot musical style, a mixed-up bastard of older, more traditional sound styles and new innovations such that the more obvious influences on the genre (country, blues) only served to obscure the less obvious ones (pop ballads and the range of genre-defying novelty songs that seemed to be ubiquitous in the middle decades of the twentieth century). Disco entered something new into the equation.

Sometimes these two phenomena overlapped: consider the end of The Clash's "Stay Free" (1978), when Mick Jones' slashing guitar lines build up an anthemic instrumental coda in the wake of Paul Simonon's bouncing disco bass line. But the second effect of disco on rock music is also clear in the best mainstream rock of the period: to wit, numerous tracks by The Rolling Stones and Blondie. In the case of Blondie, we have a band that married a disco beat to the attitude of punk rock, not just here and there but rather as a defining quality of their sound. The guitars don't rend and tear like they do in The Clash or The Buzzcocks, but the idea of punk is still there, and it was clearly with the band when it first formed. With the Stones, you hear disco in "Miss You" and other tracks from the Some Girls era. In this case, the disco synthesis helped to extend the relevance of a band that could by all means have descended into the formulaic shadow-of-their-former-selves that other 60s bands that were still around had relegated themselves to. The Rolling Stones were among the very few commercially successful rock artists of the 1960s who were really able to maintain their sense of vitality--and that was because they did not merely follow the changes going on around them but rather innovated as they went along; they absorbed what was going on around them, but ultimately they were their own catalysts.

All of which is to say that rock music is a strange beast, one that continually takes on new shapes, new dimensions. And, in the end, who would really have it any other way?

Sylvia Plath Reconsidered

2010-04-13T19:35:00.000-07:00

Despite her enduring popularity, it is easy for some to dismiss her. Her airing of her own personal afflictions seems self-indulgent, and at times -- as in "Daddy" -- bombastic and overblown. Her voice is perennially immature, her work a phase for artistically-temperamented teenage girls to go through and then outgrow. How dare she, middle class white girl with a fine education and a Fulbright Scholarship, compare her own trite domestic suffering to that of the Jews in World War II? Self-indulgent and overblown it is, but "Daddy" is also a viscerally powerful poem; despite the anger, self-righteousness, and general emotional drag of it, there is also a thrill to its awful daring. There is no denying the impact of her words, the blunt force of this poem: the language is startling, even after repeated readings. I wonder sometimes about daddy's side of things, what he himself might have said, but ultimately his perspective is irrelevant: Sylvia Plath's poems are all about the speaker's perspective, what goes on in her mind, and the interior of that mind is inevitably a dark but fascinating place.

"The Moon and the Yew Tree" is, to me, the most compelling vision of the interior of that mind. The poem begins:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

A light that is distant and devoid of warmth is a light that is drained of all the good that we commonly associate with "light" when we encounter the word in a work of literature; this is the light by which the speaker sees. What kind of mindset must you suffer such that the very grass itself is a "prickling" burden? How despressed do you even have to be for the grass to possess "griefs" to be unloaded? One cannot but help to think of Whitman here, how he loved the grass, the freedom and democracy of it, and how different an attitude we are treating here. The "Fumy, spiritous mists" and the "row of headstones" in this stanza (picture the set from "Night of the Living Dead," a washed palette, cheaply rendered) are none too cheery, but what really chills, what strikes the note of despair, is the speaker's assertion in the final line of this stanza that she cannot see any way out of this walking nightmare. At this point, we believe her. We are willing already to acknowledge that this despair is bred of more than mere self-indulgence. It resonates from the core of the speaker's consciousness.

The second stanza of the poem displays Plath's trademark shifts in imagery:

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky——
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

These abrupt transitions are disorienting by design, startling. We go from a "door" to a "face" to a "knuckle" and then -- "terribly upset" -- presumably back to the face, the expression on it. The door is noted by its absence -- again, no way out. The moon is a fist instead, revealed in the next line to be committing a crime: a satellite body has killed the sea and is dragging off the corpse. The face comes back, expression intact: its "O-gape of complete despair." In context, "complete despair" is startling for its nakedly abstract emotional content. The assertion again, no way out: "I live here." Here is where nature itself is a murderous thug. Whither now, Walt Whitman?

The middle of the second stanza introduces a set of contrasts between the moon as goddess and the Virgin Mary: this doomed, dismal paganism and a Christianity that promises but fails to provide any kind of redemption or resurrection. Here, the moon is also sinister: without any explicit reference to Shakespeare, the speaker aligns herself with Edmund the Bastard. This moon-vs.-virgin motif continues in the following stanzas:

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness——
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.

The key line, perhaps, is the speaker's weary, hopeless claim: "How I would like to believe in tenderness." She would like to embrace Mary, mild and gentle, but she cannot. The concluding words of the poem -- "blackness—blackness and silence" -- indicate a stunned resignation, a sense of finality: no hope of any change.

The core mechanism of this poem is the speaker's sense of sight, her faculty of seeing, and everything the speaker sees is distorted, drained of its usual color. The moon is perhaps less the cause of the speaker's despair than it is the object of her own despairing vision: "The moon sees nothing of this." If the moon does have a hand in shaping the darkness of the speaker's vision, it is not deliberate but rather elemental, like the speaker's depression -- like everything else in the universe a by-product, ultimately, of gravity and electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Nothing is on purpose here. The moon itself is necessarily evocative of perspective: we see it from earth, it tells us where we are by telling us where we are not. Those of us not beset by the burden of despair look at it and wonder. The ancients were right to believe that it has a power on us, a power that Plath evokes in the structure of this poem: four stanzas of seven lines each, representing the lunar cycle: four weeks of seven days each, the bare essence of a month and also roughly equivalent to the cycle of a woman who menstruates. The antonym of Plath's speaker here is the speaker of Wallace Stevens' "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon": both poems are about the power of the mind, the power of the imagination, but in Stevens' poem the mind (through its positive ability to see more than what the eye neutrally sees) frees the self to find itself "more truly and more strange." In Plath's poem, the mind (through its negative ability to color darkly what the eye neutrally sees) sets limits on the self, confines it. "I simply cannot see where there is to get to."

Not all of Plath's poetry is so dim, though, as the dimmest of it. My favorite Plath poem is "Morning Song"; the tone of it is both like and unlike the tones we see at work in other poems. There is a temptation to read into "Morning Song" the voice of that same despair that we find elsewhere, but to limit the poem to that one tone is to sell it short. The prevailing tone is not so much one of despair as it is one of distance, detachment, and bewilderment -- a bafflement that at times borders on wonder, but far away wonder. The speaker sees her child as a distant object; when it cries "a far sea moves in my ear." With the child's first breaths, its "bald cry / Took its place among the elements." "Love" is identified as the ultimate cause of this child's being, but it merely "sets [the child] going like a fat gold watch": mechanical, impersonal, not something embodied, not as though the speaker were intimately involved in the process.

As anyone who has ever lived with a newborn knows, the experience is exhausting and disorienting. You don't sleep much; you stagger through inspired by the knowledge that the child depends on you for survival. In the case of this speaker, she rises from bed in the middle of the night, "cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown." Here we find the modern scholar turned into an animal, a dairy cow, and thrown straight back into the century preceding her, one in which the obligation of dutiful motherhood was in most cases the primary obligation -- the confining obligation -- of her life.

The most startling stanza of "Morning Song" is its third:

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

The image here is that of a wisp of breath condensing on the surface of a mirror, then disappearing completely, as though it had never been. Or perhaps the image is of a sky-cloud dissolving in some metaphorical mirror. Either way, it's a jarring claim of the distance between mother and child, a denial of a relationship that we take as a given. It's not an angry statement nor a mean-spirited one, nor is it full of despair. It is, rather, simply matter-of-fact. It's the statement of a mother who feels that she has no influence, no binding tie to her child. "Love" set the child going, and now we watch it tick. The child is its own thing, and that's not necessarily bad.

Still, this vision of motherhood is a far cry from that espoused by today's culture writ large. A posthumous diagnosis of post-partum despression seems to be in order, but at the same time that diagnosis sells short the poetic vision of this poem. Are we not allowed to question the conventional wisdom of the mother-child relationship?

The title and the last line of the poem bear potential for both ironic and sincere readings. The song of the title is that of the child crying, hardly a joy to hear at two o'clock in the morning, especially when you've barely slept for days, but at the same time that cry is the animating principle of the child, the sign that it is alive and that air is filling its lungs, that it is viable outside of the womb. This is the child's only form of self-expression, as valid in its way as the poet's is. The "clear vowels [that] rise like balloons" in the last line present an image that can only be described as bittersweet: the celebratory nature of balloons, the fact that they are rising, escaping, out of hand for good.

Some of Plath's poetry is indeed sweet and touching, in moments at least. In "Nick and the Candlestick," in the midst of some otherwise characteristically gloomy cave-darkness imagery, we encounter the line "O love, how did you get here?" The fact is that there is love as well as despair in Plath's vision, and sometimes that love offers the possibility of holding the despair in check. In a script for a BBC broadcast, Plath noted of "Nick and the Candlestick": "a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ill, does redeem her share of it." Another poem, "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," notes the presence of the odd miracle now and then: "Miracles occur, / If you care to call those spasmodic / Tricks of radiance miracles." It's a highly qualified hopefulness she posits here, but it counts for something. Too bad the odd miracle could not save the poet herself.

In all, the darkness that typified Plath's vision is well-matched by the power of her lexicon. Had it not been so, her poetry would not be worth reading. As it is, there is an undeniable force to her words, and she presents compelling insights into the life of a kind of mind that none of us would desire to call our own, a mind that breathed poetry in and out but could not in the end be sustained by it.

A final issue that any reader of Plath's poetry must contend with is that of poet versus persona. The temptation abides, especially in supposed "confessional" poetry, to conflate the two. But to do so in the work of any poet is to place unduly strict confines on interpretation. To say that Plath herself is the speaker of one of her poems limits the meaning of the poem to the details of Plath's biography, and there is then no legitimate way to argue that the poem might mean anything out of the context of that life. Under this rubric of interpretation, there is no room for interpretation; to every question, there is a right answer -- one related to the poet's life -- that the reader needs to discover. A poem becomes an equation with a tightly defined solution -- not that there is anything wrong with an equation, but poetry is not mathematics.

Such an approach cannot do justice to a poem. Poets write with ambiguity in mind. The language of metaphor is not a language of right answers; it's a language of fuzziness and deliberate imprecision, one that states forthrightly that things are what they are not. The animating principle of a poem is to render an idea so that it produces an aura of potential meaning, a vague outline that is, paradoxically, created by sharply-defined detail. All this is not to say that a poet's biography is irrelevant, but we have to consider interpretations beyond the biographical in reading any poem. Even when Walt Whitman identifies himself as the speaker of Song of Myself, he becomes himself a metaphor. The speaker of Song of Myself, large and multitude-containing as he is, goes way beyond what any mortal being can literally be or do. The same is true with Plath's poetry. Clearly, she was inspired by her own thoughts and feelings, but to assume that the poems give a complete autobiographical account of the life is to mistake the purpose and power of poetry. As any good poet would, Plath knew this herself. Consider: "a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight." Here and elsewhere in the BBC scripts, Plath clearly delineates the speaker of the poem as potentially someone other than herself.

Of course, these poems are the product of the life she lived. But we can be thankful that the poems themselves have a life beyond that of the poet.

Man Is Wolf to Man: Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More

2010-03-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

In Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the resident genius of King Henry VIII's court is the novel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell. Mantel's genius is in choosing to tell the story of the English Reformation and its attendant personal and political turmoils through Cromwell's perspective. Does Mantel's view of Cromwell reflect accurately the reality of Cromwell's character? It's impossible to say with certainty, but the portrait she displays here is nonetheless convincing, and in it we see Cromwell as the central figure who takes England from its backward-looking feudal past and propels it headlong toward its future. Through Mantel's novel, we see what exactly is at stake here, and though religion is the mechanism of the social and political change at work, religion is ultimately only a part of what's going on at this historical moment. Wolf Hall presents nothing less than the story of the formation of the modern world: Cromwell is a self-made man, a prototype of the modern man, and his work is ingeniously devoted to breaking the stranglehold of authoritarian tradition. It takes a little bit of authoritarianism, of course, to do such a thing, and Cromwell is ready just for that.

What Mantel does--and what Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Richard Bolt's A Man for All Seasons do not do--is to present Cromwell as a fully realized human being. Cromwell, a prodigiously talented linguist, financier, and power broker, is a sharp and at times Machiavellian critical thinker, a pragmatist who is at times ruthless. He can both endure beatings and give them out, but he is also a man with heart--one who takes in urchins in need of a home, one who cares deeply for his family and grieves mightily but quietly at their loss, one who is sympathetic to heretics whose only crime is that they want the people to be able to read the Gospels in their native tongue. Cromwell has a heart, but it does not malign his character to say that at times he has to override his feelings to serve his duty. Mantel has based her depiction of Cromwell on historical research, but more importantly there is an idea underlying her development of his character, an idea that is illustrated in the conflict between Cromwell and Thomas More.

Many accounts of this era in British history paint Thomas More as the icon of conscience, as the moral exemplar in a time of great corruption. Mantel, however, will have nothing to do with such notions. She pits Cromwell and More against each other, but they are not so diametrically opposed here that they don't have some room to move around; though enemies, they seem to realize that the paths they tread are parallel, though moving in opposite directions. To define these antagonists more fully, Mantel plays up the background of the two figures: Cromwell the son of a notoriously violent and crude blacksmith/brewer, More the educated child of some status and privilege whose humanism stops shy of admitting the actual masses of humanity who surround him. Cromwell is of the people, More above them. In Mantel's fiction, Cromwell remembers a childhood encounter with his future nemesis, and this event sets a pattern for future interaction between the two: when young Cromwell works as a serving boy in the house where More takes his studies, the young scholar refuses to discuss with his future rival the contents of a book he is reading. It is telling as well that Cromwell remembers the incident very clearly, More not at all.

Beyond class and background, though, More is set here as a man of conscience, certainly, but the novel raises the question--in such a way that the reader will never forget it--what good is conscience if the thing that it defends is crooked, outmoded, or merely false? It's hard not to think of the certainty that propels our modern day religious extremists--Islamic terrorists, the Texas Board of Education--when thinking of how More is portrayed here. Mantel captures the sum of More's character through Cromwell's thoughts after an encounter with More early in the novel:

Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. (32)

Cromwell lays it all out in plain, nearly undeniable terms in a later encounter with More:

Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. (463)

Cromwell himself presents with a slippery conscience--not a weak one, but one that is accustomed to ambiguity. It's not that the ends justify the means for Cromwell, but rather that ends and means are sometimes hard to separate. All of which is to say that Cromwell inhabits a moral world that is shot through with uncertainty, with gray areas. Cromwell's moral world looks familiar to us. As such, Wolf Hall continually suggests itself as a parable of modern politics. It could replace All the King's Men in that regard.

And what of the king that Cromwell serves? (It is worth remembering that he is the same king that More served until religious matters got in the way; had Pope Clement decided otherwise on Henry's request for an annulment to his marriage, More might never have gone to the chopping block.) No doubt, Henry is true to the notions we already have of him: he is vain, self-important, lustful. But he is also tender at times and charismatic. More importantly, Cromwell the pragmatist says,

If he were oppressive, if he were to override Parliament, if he were to pay no heed to the Commons and govern only for himself ... But he does not ... so I cannot concern myself with how he behaves to his women. (366)

Of course, how Henry behaves to his women becomes a matter of national and even international importance, but Cromwell seems to see beyond the personal and find the political here: Why should England answer to Rome? It's true that the break with Rome will keep funds that were in the past headed toward the Vatican at home instead, which serves Henry's greed but also serves the overall good of the state. What Cromwell understands, what we of the fully modern world do not, is that at this era in history the good of the people is indeed to some extent necessarily reliant upon the good of the king. It's no secret as well that the Catholic Church was notoriously corrupt at the time; why should the wealth of the English people go to support corruption abroad?

Cromwell eventually comes to serve not only as the king's political advisor but as his conscience as well: "If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong," he says to the king, who responds: "It seems I prefer to hear it from you" (419). After Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, Cromwell considers the child of Henry and Anne's union "the guarantee of no more civil war ... the beginning, the start of something, the promise of another country" (367). That child--though not the boy Henry and Anne hoped for, but a girl, the Princess Elizabeth--would eventually be the monarch that brings England together for good. As Mantel has it, Henry and Anne conceive the child, Cromwell the nation. The Reformation--in England as elsewhere--was a bloody, remorseless process, but the solution was perhaps inevitable from the start: the formation of the secular state--the world we live in now.

More and Cromwell lived in a time that was caught between past and future. As Cromwell says in the novel: "It's England against Rome ... The living against the dead" (521). Mantel's approach to this material is riveting. You can't help but admire Cromwell after reading this novel, even if the compromises he makes threaten to tear him apart--literally as well as figuratively, given the punishments of the day--punisments that Cromwell evetually succumbs to himself. Knowingly, we wait for the moral and personal tragedy that is to be Cromwell's downfall and demise, but it doesn't come--not yet, not in Mantel's pages, which end with King Henry's second marriage in decline but not at the bottom. As Joan Acocella wrote in her review of Wolf Hall in the New Yorker, "Mantel should be congratulated for creating suspense about matters whose outcome we’ve known since high school. What’s going to happen to Anne Boleyn? we think." To anyone who has ever endured sighingly an episode of The Tudors or winced at the pat moral satisfaction of A Man for All Seasons, Wolf Hall is a revelation.

The Puritans in America

2010-01-02T19:24:00.001-08:00

There are two basic ways of looking at the British expatriates whose New England adventures form the core of what is remembered of America's pre-revolutionary founding.

One perspective, that of the Pilgrims as the steeple-crowned progenitors of our national founding myth, Thanksgiving, has lost a lot of ground in our culture, and for good cause: there's little that is historically or culturally accurate about this popular perception of these so-called "freedom men" (as the perennially twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan once referred to the Puritan John Winthrop) who knew they really had it made once they got their hungry mitts on what (according to Benjamin Franklin) should have been our national bird. This myth was begun innocently enough, in a way, by Abraham Lincoln as a way of boosting the nation's spirits in the midst of the Civil War, but the story seems to have taken on a life of its own, as myths are so often wont to do.

The second perspective, established, oddly enough, a few decades before the Civil War, has a more solid grounding in historical fact and is borne out, more or less, by the voluminous written legacy the Puritans left behind in the form or their sermons, journals, captivity narratives, letters, and histories. This is the notion of our pre-founding fathers as dour, grim-visaged killjoys who (counter to the Thanksgiving myth's claim that they came here seeking "religious freedom") were so narrowly and single-mindedly devoted to their retro-Old Testament God that any aberration in the theory or method of worship could be grounds for banishment. These are the Puritans (e.g., Cotton Mather) who referred to the burning of witches at the stake as "miracles," the Puritans (Mather again) who expressed delight when an earthquake struck Jamaica and killed lots of people there, those people being, from the Puritan perspective, iniquitous and therefore fully deserving of their own tragic demise. These people also branded Hester Prynne with a red-hot letter A on the front of her otherwise dun-colored smock for committing an offense that would, in a more sensible era, the narrator points out, be merely the subject of derision, not of legal action.

Or so the story goes. If Lincoln was the founder of the Thanksgiving myth, Nathaniel Hawthorne is the one who has done the most to popularize the opposite perspective. And though the 19th century Dark Romantic view of the Puritans can withstand a lot of scrutiny, it too needs to be qualified. A little bit, at least.

Think of all of the millions of American high school students (past and present) who have read The Scarlet Letter. Think of the millions more who were supposed to have read it and who, thanks to Cliff's Notes or SparkNotes, scraped by (just barely) on the unit test over the novel. The Scarlet Letter is, of course, greatly admired by students for its intricate prose style, which boasts such gems as this one, from the first chapter of the narrative proper: "Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand." This is, for Hawthorne, a short sentence, but it still manages to get its point across: even on a good day, these are clearly the most anal-retentive people in history. Hawthorne's narrator in The Scarlet Letter (who also happens to be named Nathaniel Hawthorne) takes every opportunity he can to point out how narrow-minded and somber these people are. Even the Puritan children are stiff and joyless, their insults hurled at Hester's daughter, Pearl, being marked by the stilted formality of children who aren't really children at all, having had anything that might resemble child-like joy sapped out of them by the dry stern-ness of their parental units. This Hawthornian perspective was in the 20th century the beneficiary of a supplemental booster thanks to Arthur Miller's The Crucible, read or supposedly read by a few million more students. The result is that there are more people who have read 19th and 20th century perspectives on the Puritans than there are people who have actually read the Puritan literature itself.

Clearly, the Hawthornian view does have much to go on: the banishments of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Englishmen's land grab and the near-genocide of the Pequot Indians, the witch trials, and pretty much every sour word Cotton Mather ever committed to paper. Of particular bearing to Hawthorne was the role that his own great-ancestor played in the witch trials -- and Hawthorne's own subsequnt feelings of inherited guilt. These things have to be balanced out, though, with a broader sense of historical context. Back in Europe, Protestants and Catholics were still killing each other at every convenient opportunity, and the violence there makes Williams' and Hutchinson's banishments seem progressive by comparison. As far as the witch trials, we can compare the dozens of witch executions in 17th century America with hundreds or even thousands in Europe. The land grab was brutal, but it was no different from what Europeans were doing in every other corner of the globe, so is it fair to single the Puritans out for the common crime of the era? Should we expect them to be any different from their contemporaries elsewhere? Perhaps we should, because they claimed to be creating a "city upon a hill" here--a model Christian community for all the world to follow, populated by practitioners of mercy and goodness. We would have to be pretty historically naive, though, to assume that they ought to have succeeded without spilling blood.

All of which is to say that the English who gradually came to dominate New England in the 17th century were pretty typical Europeans of their day. They were not Americans; the concept of an American identity did not exist yet and wouldn't really for another hundred years.

What good can we say of these people? Despite the fact that they were religious zealots, they were also rationalists. They were thinking people, and they were highly literate, and they brought the art of self-reflection to a new level. That's why we remember them (and not those Virginians to the south) as the founders of American culture: the Puritans wrote obsessively both of the otherworldliness of divine truth and of the minutiae of the everyday. Sometimes the two worlds intersected when Divine Providence saw fit to suffer a sign bespeaking the nature of His will. For a people who believed in predestination but had no other way of assessing what God had in store for them, these omens became the currency of their spiritual lives. Max Weber understood as much when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Many Puritan women, even, were educated, such as the most charming and sly Puritan writer of them all, Ann Bradstreet, America's founding poetess. As an exercise in comparison, consider Ann Bradstreet's "Contemplations" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature side-by-side. Doctrines aside, both documents make the same point about nature as evidence of God's greatness (Bradstreet) or of the greatness of the "Universal Being" (Emerson). For evidence of Bradstreet's aforementioned slyness and charm, see "The Prologue" or Bradstreet's poem dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.

The Puritans were also proto-democratic in their own way, although they would certainly not have identified themselves as such. They were sticklers for the rule of law, as all Englishmen not wearing a crown have tended to be. They were robust mercantilists. All that was necessary to add to the mix at that point was a healthy dash of Enlightenment-era belief in the inherent freedom of humankind, a tonic (or antidote, perhaps) to assuage the presumed guilt of original sin, and you could really go somewhere with that formula. As soon as the pendulum swings a little to the godless proto-scientific rationalist side, you have the necessary preconditions for the kind of ideas endorsed by the founding fathers of our political heritage. Much of American Enlightenment thought is reactionary to Puritan and Great Awakening theology, but there is also much in the American Enlightenment that draws on foundations established by the Puritans.

Though in many ways the bearers of a typically European worldview, the Puritans did have a couple of things that distinguished them, especially their willingness to risk life and fortune for the right to pursue their own collective (and narrowly defined) religious beliefs. And though they were not directly the founders of our nation politically, we are right to look to them as originators of so many qualities, good and bad, that still define America today.

Books I Read in 2009

2010-01-02T18:59:00.001-08:00

Othello, William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
"Master Harold" ... and the boys, Athol Fugard
Netherland, Joseph O'Neill
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allen Poe
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petersen
The Street, Ann Petry
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
Native Son, Richard Wright
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carre
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
Dispatches, Michael Herr
Going After Cacciato, Tim O' Brien
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Saturday, Ian McEwan

Of these 34 books, I had already read 18 of them at least once.

Poor Players

2009-10-18T18:59:00.000-07:00

The production of Macbeth that I saw performed recently at the University of Kansas was noteworthy for a couple of things: the over-the-top Disney witch quality of the Lady Macbeth performance and the curious absence of anything resembling even a modestly gory spectacle. And what is Macbeth -- perhaps the first horror story of the modern era -- without a little spectacle? The Lady Macbeth bit might have worked with a little more blood, more brains and guts and "gory locks."

There was one moment, though, that made the audience gasp -- the moment in Act 5 when Macbeth responds to the news of Lady Macbeth's death: "She should have died hereafter." So sharp and callous was the tone of delivery that everyone present -- mostly high school students, some of them my own -- could feel the sting of it.

Though there was a certain power to it, this delivery is not consistent with the way I read Macbeth. The Folger edition of the play glosses the line so: "she would inevitably have died sometime; or, perhaps, she ought to have died later." It's impossible to know exactly what Shakespeare intended; the context could lead to either interpretation. I have always preferred the latter reading, though, in part because it corresponds with my understanding of Macbeth's character (and of his relationship with Lady Macbeth) and partly because of the dramatic heft that this reading adds to the play's finale. Seen the latter way, this moment carries with it a crushing irony that finally and completely devastates Macbeth's spirit shortly before his own demise.

Immediately preceding the announcement of this tragic bit of news, Macbeth muses to himself: "I have almost forgot the taste of fears. ... Direness ... Cannot once start me." The lines that follow, then, can serve one of two purposes: to reinforce the notion that Macbeth is utterly dead at heart, that nothing can provoke him -- and thus he responds with coldness to his wife's death; or to set the stage for an ironic reversal: Macbeth has enough humanity buried within him to feel this last and ultimate blow. Hemmed in by enemy forces, harried by the knowledge that he has no heir, deprived of any rest or comfort, Macbeth can only keenly be aware of the fact that all that he has done -- what he knows will result in the eternal forfeiture of his soul -- he has done for his childless wife. He has bloodied his hands at her bidding. Either he sees her here for the masterful manipulator that she is and thus repudiates her or the love that he bears for her -- a doomed, even tormented love -- achieves its apex and terminus here: the last scrap of meaning that the world could have for Macbeth is now gone forever.

We have already by this point seen Malcolm and Donalbain's grief (truncated by the necessity of circumstance) at their father's murder, and we have seen Macduff's near-paralyzing grief at the announcement of the murder of his wife and children. In the Shakespearean mode of extensive parallelism in language, event, and theme, it is fitting then that the architect of these griefs would himself be the recipient of such bad news of his own. If Macbeth does convey a sense of near-overwhelming grief here, the emotive dynamic of the play's final act is thus enhanced through this irony: the reaver's own bereavement. Thus this moment becomes the core structural-thematic antithesis of the play.

There can be no definitive reading of Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech and the two lines that lead to it, but we can say a few things with certainty. First, this speech -- Macbeth's most famous -- is certainly provoked by Lady Macbeth's death. That fact is momentous in itself; whether he is immune even to the horror of his wife's death or whether he is nearly blown down by it, whether she should have died later or would have died anyway, Macbeth is at this moment confronted with a visitation of mortality that affects him more than any other in the play (barring his own pending death). Thus, second, the announcement directly provokes the most profoundly nihilistic speech in Shakespeare -- indeed, it is hard to find its equal for nihilistic vision in the history of our language. Third, from this moment on Macbeth truly has no further capacity for emotion: it's all been spent on this speech. Shortly after this moment, he compares himself to the bear at the stake: the only thing driving him at this point is the base animal instinct to survive. He has no personal motive to prick him on by this point: his kingdom is certainly lost, his queen dead, his throne never to be graced by heir of his own.

Our alternatives, then, are to read a flat trajectory into Act 5 or to convey a sense of the complex dynamics of character and event. One thing we can say about Shakespeare is that he rarely gives us a simple, unambiguous character, good or bad. Macbeth is a tragic figure, and to feel the tragedy of his undoing we need to see what makes him human. His love for Lady Macbeth is precisely that mark of the human that we need to see in him.

The Bottom of Things

2009-10-06T19:31:00.000-07:00

Bottom is a key figure in Shakespeare because the generosity of Shakespeare's humanism is what is at stake in the reading of his character.

Is the synesthesia in the passage commonly referred to as "Bottom's Dream" simply the mark of an idiot? Or is it an imperfect but endearing expression of the vision of one whose senses have been overwhelmed--positively--by the richness of his experience, the experience that life has to offer even the meanest of us?

Shakespeare rarely extends his humanist vision to the lowly among his creations, and there's nothing in the text of the play that directly suggests that Bottom's dream should be an ennobling one--Bottom becomes an ass even in fancy. But I have seen actors perform the speech with an utterly convincing sense of wonder and self-expression befitting much better words than the jumble that falls out of the character's mouth, and each time I have been touched by the vision presented. Which is the true, the genuine reading?

Shakespeare won't tell, and I'm sure that he would have been incredulous could he have known that people would be talking this over nearly four hundred years after his death.

"By Divers Meanes Men Come Unto a Like End"

2009-09-14T20:11:00.000-07:00

"Surely, man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers, and wavering subject: it is very hard to ground any directly-constant and uniforme judgement upon him."

--Montaigne

No Country for Old Men

2009-07-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

One thing is apparent from the start of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men: the pace of the book is rapid-fire, and it won't take long to burn through it. There is certainly an entertainment value to No Country for Old Men that is undeniable, even if the novel is not without its flaws.

McCarthy is our nation's foremost living chronicler of the violence and depravity of the American West. Set in 1980, No Country for Old Men draws on the themes from McCarthy's Old West novels but animates them with a more contemporary crime-drama aesthetic. The disregard for human life that accompanied the westward expansion has become in this novel the disregard for human life that accompanies the drug trade from Mexico, and the action of the novel recounts Llewelynn Moss's tragic attempt to get away with a briefcase full of somebody else's money. (Who exactly the money, orphaned after a drug deal gone awry, belongs to is a question that cannot be answered in any simple terms.) As Moss's unstoppable pursuer, Anton Chigurh is another embodiment of McCarthy's The Judge, from 1985's Blood Meridian, still McCarthy's best (and most disturbing) novel. Chigurh is perhaps more human than the quasi-mystical Judge, but both characters relentlessly pursue an ethic of violence that McCarthy uses to convey an Old Testament message that is central to his work: that violence is one of the mechanisms that animates the world, that no matter how civilized we may become the specter of it will always pursue us.

Ultimately, what is most appealing about the novel is the off-center dynamic between the characters. Moss may be at the center of the action here, but what really gives the novel shape is the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who stands at the periphery of events throughout the novel, but who is rattled by them as surely as the reader is. In this way, McCarthy uses Bell as a stand-in for the reader. Just as we bear witness to this story of harrowing bloodshed, so does Bell, whose faith in simple goodness is sorely abused by what he sees. McCarthy might be suggesting that we are as powerless to stop the violence of the world as Bell is to stop the violence that takes place in his Texas border county. There is a certain conservatism, perhaps apolitical in nature, that pervades McCarthy's work. In McCarthy's view of the universe, nothing ever really changes. We're still taking scalps; we just don't put them on display anymore.

Most poignantly, Bell, a representative of law, order, and civilization, comes to realize that the only reason he makes it out of this situation alive is that he is utterly ineffectual to stop any of this violence. He doesn't register even as a blip on the bad guys' radar screen. The life and death drama might as well take place out of the law's jurisdiction; the citizens Bell is elected and paid to protect die on his watch. McCarthy presents Bell to us as the pinnacle of what we might call "decency" -- honesty, simplicity, earnestness, fortitude -- but he is ineffectual in the wake of this evil. Thus the title phrase, lifted from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," takes on new meaning in the context of Bell's internal crisis. Is there any country anywhere that can serve as a fit and proper home for a man who hopes to cling to a vision of decency that he suddenly realizes is obsolete? Obsolete perhaps because it was only an illusion to begin with.

There's much to admire in this novel, but there are also some moments that are cringe-worthy. The prose in the third-person narrative segments is strong: the images are leaner than those of other McCarthy novels, the action more streamlined, the dialogue more fluent much of the time, but as the novel progresses some of the dialogue becomes too heavily freighted with the kind of pseudo-philosophical rambling that bogged down No Country's predecessors, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The third-person chapters in the novel are punctuated by shorter italicized first-person segments, told from Bell's perspective. Some of Bell's passages devolve into a kind of aw-shucks cornpone that clashes jarringly with the rest of the narrative. Many of these segments could have been excised, the result being a stronger novel.

As is, No Country for Old Men is a good novel, but cutting a few dozen pages would have made it great.

The Life of Marcus Antonius

2009-06-26T11:34:00.000-07:00

He's a puzzling character, Mark Antony, but I've got at least one thing figured out: he's a general, not a politician. Sure, he ends up in control of a third of the Roman empire -- and he has, for a moment at least, a shot at the whole thing, though it seems doubtful that he would know what to do with it or even want it if he had gotten it. What can we say with certainty about Antony?

First of all, Antony has a great capacity for loyalty, though his own sense of allegiance may not always correspond directly with his sworn word. He stays loyal to Julius Caesar, even after Caesar's murder, when it seems that the conspirators clearly have the upper hand and there could be no advantage in remaining loyal to Caesar. He stays loyal to Cleopatra, even though he is married to another woman at the time -- the true bond is to his mistress, not to his wife. Along similar lines, he pledges himself to Octavius Caesar, then without delay breaks his word because he desires to go back to Cleopatra. His loyalty to her trumps his loyalty to Octavius Caesar.

Second, Antony uses rhetoric to advance his cause after Caesar's assassination, this cause being not so much to develop his own claim to power (he makes no such claim) but to undermine the claim to power of the conspirators.

Third, Antony bears a fondness -- a weakness, perhaps -- for revelry (referred to but not seen in Julius Caesar, but playing a stronger role in Antony and Cleopatra). He is a man of war -- a leader of men, certainly -- but a solider, not a statesman. When on the battlefield, he commands; when off the battlefield, he succumbs to simple pleasures.

Fourth, Antony is not a man without feeling, witnessed in his reaction to Julius Caesar's assassination and in his love for Cleopatra, which is fully in keeping with pre-modern/classical notions of romantic love as an all-consuming passion.

Finally, for all of these reasons Antony is out of place as a triumvir. It is the sum of these qualities -- not merely his love for Cleopatra -- that is the true cause of his eventual downfall.

It seems almost, at first, that the Antony of Julius Caesar is not the same as that of Antony and Cleopatra, that Shakespeare might have intended the two plays to stand independent of each other, but before too long it becomes clear that we are dealing with the same character in both plays. The Antony of JC responds to one set of circumstances that he faces, and the Antony of A&C -- a little older, a little more wearied of politics -- responds to another set of them.

In summarizing Antony's character, it's hard not to think of Brando as the perfect embodiment of him. It's been a few years since I've seen that 1950s version of Julius Caesar, and truth be told I can't remember how well Brando portrayed Antony, but the idea of Brando is right for it: tough, muscular (as Brando was at the time), instinctive but also calculating, brutish but also intelligent, masculine yet not without sensitivity. In short, Antony is a typically compelling Shakespearean figure, complex and ambiguous, sometimes self-contradictory, but altogether human. The fact that he bows out of his own tragedy in Act IV and leaves it to Cleopatra to carry on is a stroke of genius on Shakespeare's part: we come to understand in Act V the spirit of the Queen, the spirit that moves Antony to love her, and through her defiance of Octavius Caesar she becomes one of the strongest woman characters to ever carry a fifth act.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

2009-06-13T07:29:00.000-07:00

Dathan Hooper plays the title role in the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival's version of Macbeth. Note the witches in the background.

Everybody knows that the famous speech at the end of Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's finest moments. Nobody seems to know, however, what to do with it on the stage.

The delivery of this speech--tossed off altogether too casually, as though Macbeth, preparing for battle, were merely noting with a mildly bemused cynicism the irony of his wife's death--is one of the few flaws from an otherwise very strong version of Macbeth that I saw at the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. Why is it that no one gets this speech right?

The irony here ought to be of crushing intensity. The Macbeths suffer greatly for their ambitions; they become victims of their own terror, suffering from sleeplessness, hysteria, racking pangs of guilt, and a paranoia so pervasive that it unhinges Lady Macbeth entirely, severs her from reality and casts her into a sort of hell on earth that proves to the audience that she has suffered all the torments she need suffer for her sins. All of the bloodshed and horror that Macbeth endures he endures less for himself than for his wife, to satisfy her, to win her love and admiration, to comfort her, perhaps, for the loss of a child or for their inability to conceive. ("I have given suck," Lady Macbeth claims, but we have no evidence of a living child who might further the Macbeths' family line.) When Macbeth is told that his queen has ended her torments by taking her own life, the misbegotten usurper king comes to a sudden stinging realization of the futility of everything he has done. The extent of his nihilism is profound. The passage itself transitions from stunned sorrow to explosive rage to a few final syllables of fizzled-out purposelessness. The compression here is remarkable; Macbeth goes through several stages of grief in an instant, but never makes it to acceptance. The first six lines are meditative, thoughtful, even if Macbeth must stagger through them; what follows is shot-through with a bitterness of particular intensity:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The alliteration of "dusty death" has a grinding effect, especially given the way the phrase falls with the meter. It does not encourage the kind of bouncing along that alliteration often does but rather effects a slowing down to accomodate the two stressed d's. The tone of the passage turns fully upon the word "death." The full stop that follows it further emphasizes the sense of death's finality, and with the break in iambs the rhythm goes completely askew. "Out, out"--the only sensible reading I can hear is to stress both iterations of "out." The repetition creates a sense of mounting frustration as the news of Lady Macbeth's death works its way through Macbeth's psyche, and the prolonged initial vowels of both "outs" subject themselves readily to a tortured reading. There is no allowance for subtlety in these two words or in what remains, not until the final two words of the speech. The actor Nicholos Cage is something of a one-trick pony, but the one trick he knows well is a comsuming, punching-the-wall kind of rage, and I often think of him when I read from "Out, out" to "sound and fury."

By the time he gets to "Signifying nothing," though, Macbeth has expended all of his fury. The stresses are reversed here, the iambs that had begun to recover with "Life's but a walking shadow ..." suddenly finding themselves inverted. The last syllable of "nothing" can only trail off weakly.

This final word is followed by the acknowledgement of a messenger, who presumably stands mute as Macbeth finishes his blow-out speech. Recovering, Macbeth, who is gasping and resigned, prompts him: "Thou comest to use thy tongue; thy story quickly." The messenger is perplexed as well because he has no words to do justice to his message, which is that Birnam Wood itself appears to be marching on the castle. The messenger, attempting to speak the impossible, is nothing less than "a idiot" telling his tale, and it's impossible to imagine that Shakespeare didn't have this in mind when he wrote the speechless messenger's part. The sense of futility is thus further amplified.

In any case, the audience has got to know the magnitude of Macbeth's reaction to the news of his wife's death. Suddenly, nothing in life can hold meaning to Macbeth anymore. In the very moment before he receives the fatal news, Macbeth muses on the fact that he has grown immune to horrors. The speech that follows the announcement proves that he still has emotion within him to entertain one more horror before his own candle goes out. Not long after this speech, Macbeth compares himself to a bear tied to the stake, a reference to the bloodsport of bearbaiting. (In fact, King James was himself a fan of bearbaiting and had it performed in Whitehall. It is worth considering that bearbaiting might have been part of the evening's entertainment when the King's Men first presented the play to their liege in his palace.) At this point, Macbeth has only his animal instinct for survival, nothing else. Unlike the bear, who was presumably the usual victor in the sport that so abused him, Macbeth does not emerge with life intact.

To understand the profound nihilism of Macbeth's speech, we also must note the love that Macbeth bears for Lady Macbeth, which is somewhat easy to forget because we have not seen interaction between the two for many scenes. Throughout the play, the two vacillate between goading each other and comforting each other, but there is never any doubt that they need each other. The balance of responsibility for the evil they bring about swings from one to the other until it rests most heavily on Macbeth himself, and not on the lady who urged him forward so stridently. Shakespeare is sure, though, to show us what we need to see in an earlier scene that shows the Macbeths alone, trying to no avail to comfort each other. "Dearest chuck," Macbeth calls his wife, using the kind of term of endearment that we are embarrassed to use in public and reserve only for the privacy of the home. They urge the balm of sleep on each other but can find no rest. The Macbeths are like love-struck junkies who, strung out and inexorably tracking out their own demise, recall that they started using together, that it was a toxic act of their own love that brought them to this point. Macbeth finds in Act V that he had lived so long apart from that love that he had nearly forgotten it, and it only comes back to sting him at the end.

The pervasive presence of the witches in the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival performance enforces the notion of demonic possession that overtakes the Macbeths. The actors playing the witches are doubled or even trebled in the play, also popping up (still in their sleek, goth-punk witch costumes) throughout the play whenever extras are called for and skulking about as themselves -- spying on the action -- even when there is no stage direction indicating their presence. In effect, the witches rarely leave the stage, and the only change in their appearance, regardless of which character the actor might be portraying at the time, is the addition or subtraction of the red skull-face masks that indicate their identities as withces. When Lady Macbeth invokes the spirits "that tend on mortal thoughts," the witches writhe about her (unseen by her) as though to enter into her and take control of her--which they clearly do, but only with her permission. There is substantial evidence that Shakespeare deliberately suggests demonic possession in the play. Such stuff was a favorite interest of his patron, King James, who authored a book (Demonology) devoted to the subject. The chronic inability to find restful sleep was, according to King James, a sign of possession. When the witches themselves refer to Macbeth as "wicked" (a stunning instance of pot-kettle-black), the roots of the word provide an indication of Shakespeare's intent: "wicked" in its original meaning was seemingly a participial gerund referring to someone who had been made witch-like by the giving over of the soul to demons. We come to understand that, though the Macbeths are never for an instant absolved of their utter accountability for the foul deeds they have perpetrated, they are also the victims of nefarious supernatural forces. They allow their own demonic possession, but they get more than they could ever have anticipated in the moral demands it places upon them. This may not directly encourage sympathy for the Macbeths, but it certainly complicates our judgment of them.

It is a testament to Shakespeare's art that he can evoke any sympathy for his misbegotten king and queen in this play, and yet he does. For Lady Macbeth, this sympathy is evoked when we see the doctor and Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman--both of them aware of the nature of Lady Macbeth's awful crimes--sorrow over her pitiful condition as she continually reenacts the scene of her guilt in the midst of her restless sleep. For Macbeth, it comes in his deep and eloquent expression of grief for his lost love. Her death has stripped the world of any meaning it once possessed.

Regarding the original point--the difficulty of performing the "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech--it may simply be that the words here bear too much weight to be done right on stage. They are unperformable because they are so fraught with meaning that no one around can do them justice. I've never heard a "to be or not to be" that I liked, either. Shakespeare wrote for the stage, but here are two instances in which the words might simply have transcended the medium for which they were composed.

Comparing Thee to a Summer's Day

2009-05-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

A writer named Clinton Heylin was on NPR the other day discussing his new book, So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Despite Heylin's best efforts, however, the untold story referred to here is not one that anyone can ever tell with any degree of certainty. Absent any biographical detail directly related to the composition of the sonnets, anything one might say about their relevance to the poet's personal life is purely speculative.

Heylin is likely correct in suggesting that the sonnets published in 1609 were bootlegs, their printing not authorized by Shakespeaere himself but rather by someone who came into possession of the poems and, the enforcement of copywright law at the time being about as effective as Canal Street crackdowns on pirated DVDs, had them printed simply to make a few bucks for himself. The sonnets had been around for awhile, having been praised in writing by Shakespeare's contemporaries as early as 1598, and with public demand for Shakespeare's work very robust they must have sold well.

Heylin's explanation for why Shakespeare did not publish the sonnets himself is suspect, though, and his ideas hinge upon the assumption that these poems are of an intensely personal nature. As many others have speculated, Heylin finds in the sonnets evidence of the poet's presumed homosexuality. Anti-homosexual sentiment in the Early Modern era makes Proposition 8 seem kindly by comparison (but only by comparison!), so it is natural that if the sonnets were private poems detailing Shakespeare's love for another man he would want to keep them private.

A great number of the sonnets are addressed to a "fair youth," a young man who is praised extensively for his beauty and for whom the poet vociferously declares his love. I would say "profound and abiding" love, except that the love expressed here often bears with it a strained sense of hyperbolic exaggeration--that kind of excessive flattery reflective of what we might call brown-nosery today. In other words, I find many of these sonnets unconvincing as works of art, and the theory that Shakespeare wrote them as an attempt to secure patronage is as sensible an explanation as any--at least as sensible as the assumption that Shakespeare wrote the sonnets for the purpose of expressing his genuine feelings toward the fair youth. The fair youth in question here may well have been Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, a handsome enough fellow, to judge by his portrait.

Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (both book-length poems) to Wriothesley, and many scholars have reasonably suggested that Shakespeare relied on Wriothesley's patronage at a time when London theatres were closed due to an outbreak of the plague. Because many of the sonnets concern themselves with attempting to persuade the fair youth to marry and thus make copies of himself, it is also possible that Shakespeaere may have been hired out by the young man's family members, who presumably wanted the very narcissistic Wriothesley to marry and who were willing to resort to employing a hired poetic gun in their attempts to persuade the young Earl to not be so stuck on himself. The notion, as expressed in the sonnets, is that the fair youth has such intense beauty that it were mere selfishness to keep it to himself and not share it with all the world by producing significantly beautiful offpsring that bear his very own features.

Is this the argument of a gay lover, or even of a would-be gay lover? It is possible, but if so we are dealing with a defeated lover here, one who knows that the odds are not good. Add to this the fact that a sizeable portion of the sonnets are addressed to a "dark lady" and involve a high degree of complex (but often crude) male-female sexual imagery, and the responsible reader can, in sum, come to only one conclusion: we simply cannot rely on the sonnets in our attempts to paint a single, clear, and consistent portrait revealing who Shakespeare really was. If these poems are personal and not persona-driven or written in hopes of securing patronage, we have no power to prove it today. We have to look elsewhere to find out about Shakespeare himself, but the trouble with doing so is that there is nowhere else to look. Shakespeare, for all of his many pretty words, is a cipher to us. Is this necessarily a bad thing? It forces us to look very carefully at those words themselves because the author himself gives few clues as to what they mean.

If the sonnets are works of genuine self-expression on Shakespeare's part, they are clumsily so. One comment made by a scholar during a program I attended at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, has stuck with me over the last several years: if these poems had been written by anyone other than Shakespeare, we would not be reading and discussing them today, or, if so, we would consider them the work of a minor poet. Despite a few utterly brilliant moments in this lengthy collection of poems, the sonnets are not Shakespeare's best work.

Aside from the somewhat unconvincing emotional content of many of the sonnets, Heylin's claims are further complicated by another key aspect of the sonnets' context: namely that, despite the pervasive anti-homosexual sentiment of the time, men in Shakespeare's era could express love for their male friends without generating anything like a scandal. Renaissance society was not strictly "homophobic" in the sense that we understand the term; homophobia requires a consciousness of homosexuality and its presence in society, whereas homosexuality simply did not seem to be on the cultural radar screens of Early Modern. Men at this time could and did refer to their male friends as "lovers" without evoking suspicions of behavior that was at the time legally punishable by death. We forget that living in an age of relative openness regarding sexuality has changed the way people talk to each other about love; the downside of this new openness is that expressions of other kinds of love can be confused for expressions of romantic love, and, given that expressions of male-male closeness are often derisely labaled as gay behavior, this has diminished the options for male emotional expressiveness. A pervasive homophobia has been part of our culture for so long that the Elizabethan context of male relationships does not make sense to those of us who are conditioned to assume that only gay men would ever express love for each other. We cannot apply modern-day sensibilities to four-hundred-year-old texts and come up with valid readings, yet Heylin's argument seems to depend upon doing exactly this.

Furthermore, the fact that Shakespeaere did not authorize the publication of the sonnets is not so especially compelling in context. Shakespeare seems to have had no interest in publishing anything that he wrote, and Heylin's explanation that Shakespeare did not publish the sonnets because he had something to hide loses some momentum with this consideration. Other playwrights and poets of the era (cf. Shakespeare's university-trained, academically minded competitors, the "university wits") did desire to see their work in print. Their motives perhaps included the prestige of publication, the highest payoff in the social milieu of academics. Shakespeare was a businessman and a professional who likely never spent a day at the university except to put on a performance there, and publications of his work during his lifetime were almost entirely bootlegs. In withholding his works from publication, Shakespeare probably wanted to protect his work and to keep his words away from rival theatre companies, who could use them to stage their own productions of Shakespeare's plays and thus draw revenues away from the Globe. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, once a writer's words got printed, they were easy prey for a host of shameless opportunists, such as Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of the sonnets. Shakespeare might have had other motives to suppress the publication of his own works. Ultimately, though, any theory on why Shakespeare did not want his sonnets published is, like so many contextual details of Shakespeare's life and work, speculative.

I do not mean to suggest here that we should rule out Heylin's argument as an impossibility. It's quite possible that Shakespeare was gay, but if he was we will never know. Stephen Booth, the UC Berkely professor who edited the Yale edition of the sonnets (1977), remarks with acerbic wit in his appendix that "William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter." Booth also reasonably suggests that the sonnets "probably reflect a lot that is true about their author, but I do not know what that is." This I consider to be responsible scholarship. Once we get all of that business out of the way, we can go on to readings the poems and the plays, concentrating on what they have to say. Although I'm not a big fan of the Death of the Author approach to literature, I do have to say that this situation highlights the limitations of relying too much on the author's intentions in interpreting literary texts. In Shakespeare's case, we have no ideas what his intentions were. We have to look primarily at the texts, making reasoned observations based on what is there and based on what we know to be influences that led to the production of the words printed on the page.

It is a suspect enterprise to determine readings of the text based on rank guesswork, and yet there is a whole industry devoted to this kind of thing these days. Really, we just don't know, but addicts that we are of Shaekspeareana we cannot stop ourselves from hashing over the latest theories in a centuries-long tradition of making up stories about the man. Witness the recent to-do over the unveiling of a portrait that may--or may not--be the only portrait done of Shakespeare during his lifetime. The evidence for the man in the portrait being Shakespeare himself is so slim, so coincidental as to be almost ludicrous, and yet the portrait garnered a vast array of headlines when it hit the press. Regardless, I suspect that most people will continue to hold dear to the Martin Droeshout engraving that adorns the title page of the First Folio, the famous bald-topped gent whose detached-seeming head hovers (like one of the witches' apparitions in Macbeth) over a starchy Elizabethan collar.

And there we have him, the mysterious figure in the Droeshout portrait (itself a document of questionable validity!--a theme emerges ...) who, like Mona Lisa's cousin, bears a hint of a smirk on his face. What was the man thinking? Read the sonnets; see if you can figure it out yourself.

A Handful of Dust

2009-04-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

The consensus seems to be that Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's best novel, but I simply cannot figure that one out. Waugh was at his best as a satirist--and the more acidic and pervasive his cynicism, the sharper and more humorous his satire was. He never wrote satire more finely pointed and more wickedly barbed than he did in A Handful of Dust.

This novel also bears with it a cultural relevance that surpasses that of Waugh's other novels. Given its affinities with (and numerous allusions to) T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, A Handful of Dust is the most modern of Waugh's novels. In fact, the title is taken from the first section of The Waste Land, and bears with it echoes of Biblical significance: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The yearning for genuine spiritual meaning--and the profound absence of it in modern culture--is the grounding idea of both works. We see this spiritual lack in all aspects of the British society depicted in A Handful of Dust, but to most direct (and most humorous) effect in the portrait of the vicar of Hetton, who has been recycling sermons since his days as a garrison chaplain in India. With his dated references to Queen Victoria and the golden age of British imperialism, his Christmas-time references to the unceasing heat, and his frequent mention of camels and tigers, his sermons are utterly irrelevant to his parishioners--and yet he "had a noble and sonorous voice and was reckoned the best preacher for many miles around." At one point, Tony Last, the novel's aptly-named protagonist, thinks of renovating the bathrooms in his Gothic mansion during the vicar's sermon.

And yet Tony (with the exception of his smart-alecky but endearing young son) is just about the most sympathetic thing going in this novel. He is hapless and bumbling, but at least he quests for something. It may be a fool's errand he sends himself on, but he at least realizes that something is missing, even if he cannot himself restore it to the world he lives in. At many points, the novel verges on mean-spirited; Waugh does some awful things to his characters. But this mean-spiritedness may simply be an essential element of satire, which to some extent requires grotesquerie and violence in order to make its point. Satire that does not sting is merely humor, like a late-night talk-show host who makes fun of whoever is in office because it is part of the job description. In the most famous satire of all time, Swift told us to eat babies. Waugh does not go quite that far, but there is some untowardly violence here. He makes his point.

Middle Cyclone

2009-04-11T18:50:00.000-07:00

The first impression made by Middle Cyclone, Neko Case's new album, is a little misleading. There are enough mid-tempo numbers, enough lilting melodies with finger-picked guitar, that the songs seem at first to bear a limited variety. Unlike previous Neko Case albums, Middle Cyclone boasts few moments at which one instrument or another (usually an electric guitar) stands out in a spotlight-stealing way. Sure, there are plenty of top-notch musicians at work in these songs, but never before has it sounded so much as though the axes-for-hire are playing entirely to support her. The end result is that after a few listens you come to the realization of what this album is all about. It's about the voice--and it's a good thing that it is so.

It seems odd, at first, that a voice like Case's would benefit from such intensive musical support, but it makes sense in the end. Everywhere you look (The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Pitchfork), writers are calling Case's voice a "force of nature." That it is, and it is especially apt here, given the nature-themed songs that populate this album. But Case, whose ear for sound design is as precisely tuned as her voice, understands that if her voice unadorned is a force of nature, it will sound otherworldly--positively celestial--given the right accompaniment. That accompaniment comes not only from all those great guitarists (just to list the guitar players on her last few albums: Dallas and Travis Good of The Sadies, Joey Burns of Calexico, M. Ward, and the often understated but very talented Paul Rigby of Case's touring band) but also from piano and keyboards played by Garth Hudson of The Band and Howe Gelb of Giant Sand and background vocals by Kelly Hogan and a host of others (including Case's own overdubbed harmonies). In addition, Case, who has co-produced her recent albums, wields spring reverb like a weapon; in her studio recordings, it has become an instrument of its own--not quite the complete washing that it sometimes is on My Morning Jacket albums, but generously present, enough to vault things up into the stratosphere.

A good way to put Case's sound in perspective is to watch the stripped-down readings of several songs from Middle Cyclone via a recent podcast on The Interface. Accompanied only by Paul Rigby playing six-string acoustic guitar and Kelly Hogan singing harmonies, Case sounds spectacular. Here is her voice with minimal adornment, and it leaves you no doubt of its natural power. You also get a sense, however, of how much the full-band sound and the studio treatment add to these songs. Case did not write and arrange them for solo troubadour performance. Case's voice has a natural luster and lushness, and the studio arrangements are done precisely to enhance these qualities. The final product is an eminently appealing one--the most fully Neko Case of Neko Case albums so far.

Case has certainly found herself more truly and more strange on this album, but more and more in her songwriting you have to ask where exactly she is in the midst of these swirling words. The lyrics of many of these songs employ shifting personas, slippery voices that can at best be only partial reflections of Case herself. "I'm not the man you thought I was," she sings on "Vengeance Is Sleeping"--fair enough. "Prison Girls," one of the best songs of Case's career thus far, unfolds with a hallucinatory dream-logic all its own. In the interview from the Interface podcast, Case attributes the origin of this song (and that of "This Tornado Loves You") to a dream. Ostensibly, there is something about touring or at least travel involved in "Prison Girls"; the events described seemingly take place in a hotel. And a song about women inmates inescapably evokes the familar Case theme of gender roles in the postfeminist era (cp. "Pretty Girls" from 2002's Blacklisted). But it's the dream quality that sticks with the listener. The imagery in the song is hallucinatory but not psychedelic, Freudian in the truest, weirdest sense. It bears a remote kinship with the fever-dream quality of Howlin' Wolf's "Moanin' at Midnight." What distinguishes the tones of these two songs, though, is that while "Moanin' at Midnight" is shot through with paranoia, "Prison Girls" features a world-weary attitude of mildly bemused cynicism. When the persona sings to the mind's-eye prison girls (imagine a troop of them straight out of a low-grade '50s cult flick, then merge them with an equivalent number of motel cleaning ladies) that she "loves your long shadows and your gunpowder eyes," she discovers: "The prison girls are not impressed / The ones who have to clean this mess / They've traded more for cigarettes than I have managed to express." The harmonies and the plucked cello push this song into the sublime.

Elsewhere on the album, Case sings about wanting to be loved and about the failure of love with the kind of directness she has used before (cp. "Outro with Bees" and "I Missed the Point" from Blacklisted) but with a new level of maturity and a startlingly frank brand of self-examination. On the title track, Case sings: "I can't give up acting tough / It's all that I'm made of / Can't scrape together quite enough / To ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact / That I need love." The prime mover of the album, though--from the tornado-themed imagery of the opening track to the zoo animals gone berserk of the first single ("People Got a Lotta Nerve") and beyond--is Case's attitude toward kingdom animalia. This theme and others on the album climax in "I'm an Animal"--subtly but undeniably the most rocking song on Middle Cyclone. "I'm an Animal" is about the kind of certainty that comes only from instinct; it's about love as action. And it serves as a reminder that if we don't follow those instincts sometimes we ourselves end up not so different from the caged tiger that finally cracks. When we remember (happy birthday, Darwin) that we are animals, too, we lose some of our purchase on this place we inhabit. We become just another migrant species in the evolutionary chain, but, unexpectedly perhaps, we also become more connected to where we are in the world. All of this is implicit in these songs. The role of nature carries over into the overall sound of the album--and not just in the closing track--a thirty-plus minute field recording called "Marais la Nuit," which consists enitrely of frogs singing from a pond outside Case's rural Vermont home. You won't find yourself listening to this track all the way through very often, but at the same time you won't really mind its being there. It reinforces the major theme at work here, but also reminds us that Case is at the point in her career when her albums are wholly her own.

Case's ear for sound idiom has transposed steadily from a particularly fiery brand of alt-country to a more contemporary baroque indie-pop, but it still somehow maintains the earnestness and immediacy of the analog garage-band aesthetic. Middle Cyclone maintains a layered but organic sound, not decadent with manufactured tones. Still, it's all about the vox. Case refers to herself as the "horn section" of any band she is in, but what she means--self-deprecatingly describing herself as brassy and blaring--doesn't capture the truth of this statement. Listening to Case sing, you are made aware (through the sheer volume she musters, a quality that no amount of studio compression can disguise) of what an intensely physical event singing can be. There's no point singing along to these songs; even for the shower or a country drive, you can't do them justice. But there is a useful exercise in breathing along with Case as she sings. You realize that there's a lot of air being pushed through those pipes. You get a feel for the effort that's involved here, one that starts somewhere in the middle and breathes outward like heaves of storm.

Flannery O'Connor Revisited

2009-03-28T20:15:00.000-07:00

She was strictly and devoutly Catholic in word and deed, and she considered this the defining quality of her work. By all accounts, the woman was parochial, provincial, a reactionary of sorts, one whose gaze was--against the grain--retrospective at the dawn of the postmodern era. In short, it seems that she was the kind of person whose insight into the lives of others must of necessity be circumscribed by the limitations of her own experience and attitudes. How remarkable, then, that Flannery O'Connor produced a body of work that is so powerful, so compelling to a broad literary audience, so recognizably full of grace in so many ways.

With the publication of Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, the details of O'Connor's life and work have been thrust into the spotlight. What's going on is not so much a reassessment as it is a pronouncement in the popular press of O'Connor's status as a canonical figure. Joy Williams and Joyce Carol Oates have both written reviews of Gooch's book, in The New York Times Book Review and in The New York Review of Books, respectively, and though each takes a different tack in approaching the subject, their common admiration for O'Connor overtakes in each case what the reviewer has to say about Gooch's work.

For me, there is no doubt of O'Connor's greatness. The question is, what makes her great? How to qualify that greatness in the face of her many limitations?

To some extent, O'Connor boasts the appeal of the idiosyncratic. Hers was a vision complete in and of itself, reliant on no one else's. There is the quirkiness of her prose, of her characters. Consider, for instance, this description of Hazel Motes, the protagonist of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, as he sits perched behind the wheel of his beat-up fifty-dollar car:

"His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth."

The three-part visual description grows increasingly complex as it goes along, ending on a less-certain note than the one with which it begins. The last part seems a little clumsy at first--a face being compared with a door and not with the face behind the door--but in the context of O'Connor's writing it works somehow. The phrasing resembles something one of her characters might have said, especially the colloquial "where" instead of the more formal "in which." This last description also follows through on the notion of "closed up," and it is striking for the way it adds a notion of powerlessness to our understanding of Hazel Motes' character. There is a sense that there is someone else tied up inside of Hazel Motes, trying to get out. Here's a guy who is struggling to control himself, struggling to shake the ragged, bumming Christ that rattles around in the back of his head. He can't do it, though. In this particular instance, the Jesus that Hazel Motes sees is less stubborn revenant (as described as elsewhere in the novel) than he is two-bit gangster thug. Not that O'Connor would have agreed.

An offhand-seeming description of some roadside trees early on in O'Connor's famous short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" provides, for me, the most memorable example of O'Connor's skill as a writer: "The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled." This line takes on a powerful resonance later on, when we find out that this story is precisely about how the meanest of things bears the hope of redemption.

This last point demands some further consideration along thematic lines. O'Connor ought, on the surface, to appeal only to her fellow Catholics. What about those of us who do not subscribe to O'Connor's narrowly-defined but pervasive notion of spiritual salvation? What redeems O'Connor as a writer is the ability of her stories and novels-and even some of her nonfiction--to withstand secular readings. The finely-honed details of her prose are perhaps the primary component here, along with the saving grace that, though the stories develop Catholic spiritual themes, O'Connor's characters are almost exclusively Protestant--specifically, God-haunted borderline-lunatic Southern Protestants. There is in her writing always a certain distance between the keenly perceptive but far-away third-person objective narrator O'Connor typically employed and the characters themselves.* Together, these factors create enough gaps--between the author's attitude and the story itself, between the story and the characters--that one can creep into the reading with another perspective. Based on the growing critical response to her work (Oates cites statistics such as the number of dissertations on O'Connor registered by the Library of Congress), the consensus seems to be that O'Connor's work does withstand a secular approach. O'Connor transcends herself. She would, it seems, based on her nonfiction writings and her biography, not be so happy herself to know that. When she talked Jesus, she meant it; she aimed at a narrow readership.

Beyond all of this, there is something else at work, something about the notion of salvation that bears a strong inherent appeal to a broad audience, religious and secular alike. Just as early strains of evangelicalism in America morphed into Transcendentalism, the notion of personal salvation--an inward transformation to a better self--has writ large become a deeply entrenched component of modern culture (cf. Oprah and Tyra Banks for the latest pop-culture incarnations of this phenomenon). I think it safe to say that it requires a jaded and cynical person to take no stock in any concept of redemption or salvation at any level--not even a wholly secular conception of these notions. O'Connor's idea of grace, represented most effectively in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by the grandmother in her final moments, bears with it a semi-universal appeal that O'Connor herself did not quite intend. Who would not like to believe that in the last seconds of your life, you could be transformed into a figure of goodness? Don't we imperfect humans deserve such a chance? O'Connor's stories give this chance to us.

The other category of limitations that falls on O'Connor has to do with her intense Southern-ness. It is disappointing to find out that O'Connor was no more progressive in her racial attitudes than most other Southerners of her time--but then again, it may well be the gravest of mistakes to look to writers and artists for lessons in morality, and the fact of O'Connor's unsurprising racial insensitivity has little bearing on what we see in her writing. Her characters prove to be almost without exception racist, but what else would we expect of characters whose primary feature is most often their mean-spiritedness--"mean" in every sense: not just cruel, full of anger and outrage, but little and weak, in need of a moment of grace.

Unlike William Faulkner, whose shadow she self-consciously labored in, O'Connor never seemed to espouse a sense of the mythic qualities of the Southern Gothic--her native postage stamp of soil was to her precisely that, and not some ahistorical microcosm of the larger world--not, like Shakespeare's stage, a timeless place that speaks of the universal. Her vision was precise and wedded to the soil. And yet we have as a culture always identified with the South as a bedrock of American culture, especially in terms of popular music, most all American forms of which originate in the South. Perhaps the South, in O'Connor and in American culture at large, serves as a kind of exaggeration of the landscape the rest of us live in. The South is America, only more so. It's problems are our own problems amplified: poverty, racism, a struggle to overcome the past, a complicated religious heritage.

Finally, we must consider O'Connor's deliberate use of caricature and the grotesque. O'Connor's most famous statement about her own work is on the nature of the grotesque: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." Thus the sometimes stunning violence and depravity of her writing, and thus Oates' description of O'Connor as most-gifted of cartoon artists. For O'Connor, the modern audience is hard of hearing to the Word and nearly blind to the truth--she would do anything to catch our eyes. Seeing and blindness, in fact, figure prominently as symbols in Wise Blood. Sabbath Hawks, the daughter of a preacher who pretends to be blind in order to establish ethos with his audience, says of Hazel Motes, "I like his eyes ... They don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep on looking." Hazel Motes (whose very name evokes the image of eyes, hazel being an eye color and a mote being something that, according to Hamlet, troubles "the mind's eye") seeks to look beyond, and to do so is to recognize the paucity of literal sight; in effect it means to have an inward-looking eye. Motes seeks to establish the truth in his own mind, and he literally blinds himself in an attempt to achieve this.

Ultimately, these stories and novels work because O'Connor was, perhaps without her realizing it herself, a kind of neo-Platonist. By calling her a neo-Platonist, I mean specifically that she believed that the truth--for O'Connor, a religious truth--exists somewhere beyond the grasp of our senses, and that it is only through an inward experience that one comes to know somehow of this truth. For Plato, this inward experience was the true philosopher's use of reason; for O'Connor, as for Jonathan Edwards and every evangelical since, it was the spiritual transfiguration--to be inhabited by grace, to be born again.

O'Connor also believed in mystery in the Catholic sense, though, which is epistemological uncertainty in the philosophical sense, and which many American Protestants don't seem to be especially susceptible to today. What any Platonist gives us, in the end, is images--appearances--and not reality, for it is only through applying the power of the mind to these images that we can establish the truths that lie beyond them; it is only through the imperfections that surround us that we can come to understand these same things elsewhere in their perfect form. No one can give us truth; we must find it ourselves. Thus images are the essence of artistry. The reality that O'Connor believed in contains moral truths, but these are not what she gives us in her writing because art--despite every contrary intention of the artist--will continue to have nothing to do with such things.

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*O'Connor herself claimed a bit of powerlessness here, speaking of how her characters were always off and getting themselves killed as though she could do nothing about it.

Netherland

2009-03-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland does something remarkable and peculiar -- it gives us an up-to-date version of the archetypal American novel without any archetypal Americans.

At least not any archetypal Americans of the kind that the literature of the 20th century has made recognizable to us as such. The Americans here are all recent transplants, some of them temporary, from England or Trinidad or places unidentified, and in this regard Netherland signals the literary equivalent of the great call to make-way that seems to be booming everywhere around us -- that these transplants are rapidly becoming the new archetype. In the narrator, however, a Dutchman-by-way-of-London named Hans, we see that this new archetype is in fact merely a remixed version of the old one; Hans' unlikely Trinidadian friend, Chuck Ramkissoon, reminds the transplanted Dutchman at one point that he is "a member of the first tribe of New York, excepting of course the Red Indians."

Hans' background brilliantly serves to justify the somewhat un-contemporary sound of the novel's prose, which is generally too formal to capture the rhythm of things today, but which would not have been out of place a hundred years ago -- and which is believable, coming from a financial analyst who learns English as a second language in England. And the truth is that the sound of this prose is Netherland's most immediately engaging quality. Reviews comparing Netherland to The Great Gatsby abound, and not without good cause. We are reminded of Nick Carraway almost instantly -- the trustworthy narrator, one who, we are certain, is telling us the truth because he does not go out of his way to make himself look good to the reader. Fluid, graceful, and finely-crafted -- we thought that these qualities no longer had a home in the contemporary novel. How gratifying it is to see these attributes in action on the page -- even if we suspect that no one, not even O'Neill, will ever be able to pull it off again. Consider Hans' knowing observations when he and Chuck navigate their way through the city:

We made our way through animated hordes of men. At a certain point, Chuck grabbed my arm and said, "Let's cross now," and he trotted quickly across the avenue as a surge of traffic came roaring up. He had, I realized, waited for a moment when the pedestrian light showed the fierce red hand, and then taken his chance. Evidently he felt this gave him an edge--and it did, because it meant that, walking on down Sixth Avenue, he and I were signaled forward at every cross street by the purposeful white-glowing pedestrian whose missionary stride was plainly conceived as an example to all (and whom I cannot help contrasting with his London counterpart, a green gentleman undoubtedly rambling with an unseen golden retriever).

There is a whimsical quality (of the sort that we sometimes see in Hans' Fitzgeraldian precedent) to the descriptions of the walk icons. But this paragraph also sharply reveals Chuck's cunning, his knack for strategy in competitive environs, as well as Hans' quick ability to discern what his friend is up to. The comparison of the walking figures is telling as well -- the archetypal purposefulness of the genericized American contrasted with the mannerliness of his British equivalent. This kind of easy symbolism -- at once both effective and readily grasped by the reader -- pervades the whole of the novel. We see such symbolism throughout the novel not only in discussions of cricket -- which is what brings Hans and Chuck together -- but also in Hans' frequent lyrical descriptions of the clouds and sky, both as they appear to him in Manhattan and in other locales throughout the world -- everywhere Hans has been. (For a more thorough treatment of this subject, see James Woods' review of Netherland from The New Yorker.)

Netherland sometimes starts to fall flat when it comes to dialogue featuring Hans' co-workers and other born-and-bred Americans. It's not that the dialogue is poorly done; it's just that it sounds so jarring alongside the narration that the discord threatens temporarily to undermine the whole enterprise. These moments remind the reader of the improbability of a voice like the one Hans displays here, but they also serve as placeholders, in a way, marking off instances where we might find insight into the big idea that animates this novel. We have to be reminded that this in not a story about typical Americans in the old-fashioned sense.

In keeping with the novel's examination of a new American internationalism -- something that is less sought out by than it is thrust upon the nation -- O'Neill's characters have involved themselves to varying degrees in an attempt to replace our current (fading) national pastime with the promise of a new international one -- cricket, the sport favored by this burgeoning population of new Americans. Hans and Chuck are keenly aware of the far-reaching symbolic resonance of their sport and its ability to bring together people from different cultures -- everyone except for the Yanks, it seems. Chuck in all earnestness describes cricket as possessing a democratizing influence, helping to spread law, order, and civility throughout the world, and a more cautious but still somewhat dreamy Hans tells us, "I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice."

In this respect we come to find out what Netherland is really all about: personal lives adrift in the wake of policies of American exceptionalism in the early 21st century -- the personal up against the political once again -- only the politics here are more wrapped up in Chuck's attempt to achieve his grandiose dream, a world-class cricket field in New York, than they are with the about-to-erupt war in Iraq. Netherland is very bluntly a post-9/11 novel set in New York -- something that nobody has seemed to want to read until this book came out -- something that seemed impossible to pull off because of the weightiness of the subject. Despite its big themes, Netherland manages to avoid collapsing under its own weight. A few years ago, Don DeLillo's Falling Man started off with a powerful and compelling first chapter, then fizzled into a tepid drone. It took O'Neill's skewed outsider-insider perspective to make the post-9/11 novel work.

And in all, Netherland does work, though there are gaps in the story it tells that, like the patchy American dialogues, threaten to do harm to the potential long-term reputation of this book. The tidiness of the narration and the lyrical brilliance of the prose cannot disguise the fact that this is a sometimes messy novel, one in which the narrative core sometimes disappears, turning the novel into a series of riffs with no discernible rhythm. The problems are twofold: one has to do with Hans' estrangement from his wife, Rachel--an estrangement that for most of the novel seems predicated on narrative convenience rather than sprung from the characters' own devices; the second involves the supposed occasion for the novel, Chuck's cricket-field dream.

Chuck, whom Hans once describes as "a man cheerfully operating in the subjunctive mood," is the Gatsby to Hans' Nick, but the sliders of wealth and class have been tampered with, and O'Neill adds into the mix the inevitable intricacies of race dynamics. Chuck is still the relentless outsider trying to crack into a world of prosperity, but he has not gotten as far as Gatsby in terms of his grand ambitions, and we are aware from the start that he never will. And he has no Daisy -- just the figurative green light of aspiration, given over here to the more expansive and less pointed green turf of a cricket field. Chuck is also throughout much of the narrative less central to this novel than Gatsby is to his, and that is a discernible flaw here. The problem begins when we start to wonder what happens to Chuck -- not his ultimate fate, mysterious as that is, but rather his absence from the narrative at times, leaving us alone with the sometimes overly thoughtful, overly lyrical, and occasionally insubstantial Hans. Hans the character needs Chuck to give ballast to his life just as Hans the narrative creation needs Chuck to give ballast to the narrative. When Chuck is not there, we wonder where he is and why Hans has forgotten about him. It all makes Hans seem self-centered sometimes.

Ultimately, though, Hans serves us well as a substitute for Nick Carraway, though the two are different enough. Whereas Nick turns out not to have a mind for the world of finance, it's second-nature to Hans. Still, Hans claims, "I've never been open to the fantastical aspect of business. I'm an analyst--a bystander"--in other words, just what we need in a narrator. Nick seems nearly sexless in Gatsby, and oddly enough, for all of his inelegant talk about "f-cking" (which does seem tonally out of place at times--even though it is the 21st century), Hans is nearly sexless as well -- at least free of any overpowering desires. Perhaps we need the narrator of such a novel, though, to be free from such passion. Hans' Jordan Baker appears in the form of his estranged wife, Rachel, who has gone back to London after the terrorist attacks while Hans stays behind in a rented room at the Chelsea Hotel. We can tell from the start that Hans, like Nick, will not be a New Yorker for long, that he will end up going back from whence he came, and from the perspective he gains there tell us the story of his time in the city in retrospect.

Which brings me to one final thing that Netherland does for the reader: it helps to put the nature of the City in perspective. We need this kind of thing now and then, a reminder of the thrill of being in New York, of what it means to be there, whether just visiting or on a permanent basis. Apparently, to O'Neill (himself a New Yorker by way of several countries: Ireland, Holland, and England), the City means nothing less than civilization itself. Of the many post-9/11 New York incidents that illuminated the true nature of the city, we have the 2003 blackout, an incident that Hans rides out on the roof of the Chelsea. At first, there is gloom and doom in the forecast; to one resident, the blackout is nothing less than the utter collapse of civilization: "Basically we're going back to a time before artificial light. Every nut out there is going to be acting under cover of darkness. ... Turn off the lights, people turn into wolves." Before too long, though, a party is under way on the rooftop. Things get a little harried at the Chelsea that night (in the novel, at least), but essentially the message is that people recover from a catastrophe pretty readily. They do so because they have to. Maybe it is not so easy to fling something as evolved and complex as civilization -- or a marriage, for that matter -- into the wastebasket. Who knows -- civilization might even continue to thrive without cricket.

Upon reading Netherland, one has to wonder: is this the first great American novel of the 21st century? Will it, despite its flaws, be a work that endures? Of course, future generations will have to decide how relevant it is to them. In the meantime, I can posit for you an image that seems more than just a little bit likely: the stacks of undergraduate theses comparing Netherland to The Great Gatsby. Would it be too much of a stretch to say that civilization demands such things?

Milton and Shakespeare

2009-02-12T18:55:00.000-08:00

Someone named Nigel Terry recently wrote a book entitled Is Milton Better than Shakespeare?

One is tempted to respond by saying that "comparisons are odorous," but the fact is that Shakespeare is clearly better--or better at the things that matter most.

Milton, for all of his considerable poetic brilliance, did not have the faintest idea of how to develop character. As testament to this, we have the Romantic poets' deliberate misreadings of Milton's Satan. (That they could be so successful in promoting this misreading is ample evidence of Milton's shortcoming in this regard.) Shelley saw Satan as a hero possessing "magnificence" and a moral superiority over Milton's God, who is, as I have stated before, a real flat bore, and--as Shelley claims--vindictive to boot.

The real attraction of Milton is the quality of his verse--once you manage to untangle it. His sentences are convoluted to the extreme, and they make no pretense of accessibility. But they are grand, powerful, graceful--sometimes stunningly so. I'll take with me to my grave Milton's evocation of Satan's shield--massive and round like the moon viewed through the "Tuscan astronomer's" (Galileo's) lens, and his spear taller than the tallest pines of Norway. There's something about reading the epic simile rendered in one's own native language that is powerfully stirring, more so to me than when I read a like example translated from Greek. Part of the effect here is that the figure of Satan is so completely familiar to us that it is only through this new rendering of him that we find ourselves enabled to reconceive the figure itself. This was very much part of Milton's project--to enable us to see these figures recast, to behold new dimensions of meaning in the familiar narrative.

In Paradise Lost, Milton tosses out some heavy questions--most of which he can't answer successfully, but that doesn't make them any less compelling. His attempt to "justify the ways of God to man" is in effect nothing less than a theologically-based attempt at tackling what we now call the problem of evil. The attempt fails to suffice for a modern audience, but it's such a noble and fascinating attempt that it still bears consideration. It may indeed be true that no one has ever wished that Paradise Lost were longer, but that doesn't mean that we aren't glad (some of us, at least) that it exists.

Shakespeare, by contrast, reflects the Elizabethan universalist's skepticism of absolutes, and that is why he is ultimately the stronger and more appealing writer--because those of us out here in the real world are swimming in ambiguity. Milton's era was a time for taking sides--supporting the Puritans or supporting the king--while Shakespeare's era, just a few decades earlier, was a time for laying low, keeping your opinions to yourself--or perhaps even eschewing opinion altogether, seeing as how having one was likely to get you eviscerated and then beheaded. As Zadie Smith recently said of Shakespeare, "even more than for his wordplay we cherish him for his lack of allegiance. Our Shakespeare sees always both sides of a thing." In that regard, Shakespeare traffics in the mysteries of human character, and all ideas and ideologies are sifted so finely that in the end they blow away to insubstantiality. Take the running critique of stoicism that spans the first four acts of Hamlet. Polonius--subjected as he is to our scorn--embraces stoical precepts and by association renders them susceptible to our ridicule. Hamlet tries to embrace similar stoical attitudes, but they fail him--until the fifth act, when Hamlet's stoical acceptance of fate enables him to finally triumph in his project of avenging his father's murder. The end result for the audience, however, is that we are left not knowing what exactly it is that Shakespeare is saying about stoicism. Is he telling us that stoical precepts, used properly, are the means of transcending those infamous "slings and arrows"? Or does stoicism merely serve as a convenient means of finding the resolution to a plot that is going nowhere and taking its own sweet time to get there?* We will never be able to say with any degree of certainty: throughout his canon, Shakespeare gives us uncertainty instead of ideology. We are left not with ideas about the world, but with real-seeming characters who live in that world.

In the process, Shakespeare gives us some amazing lines. Sometimes his metaphors merge on the mixed variety, and sometimes his lines lack the intricacy of Milton's, but Shakespeare's greater appeal is deserved. Sometimes, though, I genuinely don't know which to prefer, the words of Hamlet:

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Or the words of his successor, Satan:

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

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* Four acts of going nowhere is just fine in this context, but I suspect that W.S. may have sensed the need to resolve things before the audience caught wise to the fact that essentially very little has happened in the preceding 4000 or so lines.

Zadie Smith in NYRB

2009-02-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading the transcript of a beautiful, brilliant lecture by Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books. Her comments, ultimately about Barack Obama's ability to "speak in tongues," address everything from her own personal experience to Pygmalion to Shakespeare, including Cary Grant and Frank O'Hara along the way. Here is the link:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334

Marlowe and Shakespeare

2009-01-31T18:57:00.000-08:00

An illustration from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
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I've been looking at Christopher Marlowe's plays, trying to puzzle out how to assess them on their own terms. It's hard to beat the rap of second-best playwright of the Elizabethan era, but that's what he is--and it is a distant second.

Some critics like to point out that we don't know what Marlowe might have done had he lived to enjoy as long a career as the first-place playwright. But we can to a reasonable extent extrapolate from Shakespeare's earliest work the greatness that was to come. From Marlowe's work, it's hard to see that he would have produced anything else but more of the same. In Shakespeare's Henry VI, there is an overpowering sense of emerging yet still uneven craftsmanship. In the Marlowe that I have read, there is the sense of an assured and mature style. Of course, we could endlessly debate hypotheticals, but at the end of the day we can only rely on what talent and fate have given us. We wouldn't have had Shakespeare without Marlowe--at least not the same Shakespeare--but nevertheless W.S.'s work shows some markedly different--and more remarkable--characteristics from its precedent.

Marlowe himself was a powerful improvement on his own general precedent, the medieval morality tale. One becomes an English major in spite of the medieval morality tale, I like to think. If Marlowe's Faustus borrows a few of the common tropes of the morality tale, it also improves upon them immeasurably, giving us an exciting protagonist who thrills not so much by the lesson his damnation might provide for us but rather by the exhilaration we get to experience vicariously through his transgressions. He pays for the thrills so we don't have to.

Marlowe's characters, however, bear little of the human dimension of even Shakespeare's early work. Tamburlane is my favorite Marlowe play; it's about one man's fast-paced scramble for the "sweet fruition of an earthly crown." The hero is a prototype of Macbeth, but he bears only traces of the complexity that the wayward Scot displays. Marlowe's plays are intellectual to the core, driven not by character but by ideas, but the poetry of Shakespeare's work comes to us through the methods he uses to define his characters, particularly those soliloquies that spell out for the first time in the history of our language the nature of the fragmented consciousness. As choppy as Henry VI is, I would argue its superiority--in moments, at least--even to Marlowe's greatest hits, thanks in no small part to Queen Margaret, who makes Marlowe's Queen Isabel in Edward II seem the very paragon of virtue in comparison, but also thanks to young Richard of the Yorkist faction--the original Tricky Dick--who would in Richard III become Shakespeare's first truly great creation. As an ineffectual king, Edward II himself bears a certain resemblance not only to Henry VI but also--more so, perhaps--to Shakespeare's Richard II. Edward II fascinates in large part because of his love for Gaveston. We don't expect to find a character in Renaissance drama--much less a king--who so blatantly pursues a love affair with another man. However, Edward's interest to us is less a matter of his speechmaking than of the circumstances of his life, though I do greatly admire his evocation of "perfect shadows in a sunshine day." In Edward's love for Gaveston, Marlowe gives us little psychological insight into what it might have been like to be a gay man in pre-modern society. By contrast, Shakespeare's Richard II, though he inhabits a far from perfect play, amazes us with the consistently poetic force of his speeches. Through him, we see what it is like to be placed on the throne by historical circumstance when in fact the man belongs elsewhere.

A.D. Nuttall is right, I think, in pointing out that Shakespeare's Prospero is akin to--and in many respects represents a one-upsmanship of--Marlowe's Faustus. Faustus may well be a modern character on the Promethean bounds of a new and ever more secularized world, but again there is little to make Faustus seem like a real person as opposed to a walking idea. What is it, exactly, that makes Prospero by contrast seem real? For one thing, we have the moral complication resulting from Prospero's complicity in his own usurpation. Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, deliberately turned his attention away from affairs of state to pursue magic; he placed his brother Antonio in charge of governance of the state, thus giving Antonio the responsibility of leadership without any of the perks and in effect tempting his brother to usurp him. Thus Prospero inhabits an infinitely more grey moral climate than that of his predecessor--and this moral greyness is something we recognize from our own lives, from the decisions we face. Faustus voices some uncertainty about his bargain, but his doing so is superficial--it never bites deep. Shakespeare, who made the self-disclosing soliloquy the cornerstone of his art, in an odd move gives Prospero--often regarded as the bard's most autobiographical character--a curious inner life that he chooses not to reveal directly to us, and somehow, improbably, this method works as a new means of realizing the self on stage. Instead of outright pangs of conscience, Prospero experiences puzzling headaches. His doubt is implicit, understated, unexplained. In such a way, Prospero voices more than ambition, awe, and fear--the three tones that Faustus displays. Prospero is cranky, domineering even over those he loves, well aware not so much of the thrill of political power as he is burdened by it--by the memory of the duty he once neglected. The backstory of The Tempest casts aspersions on the value of knowledge; until he is on the verge of renouncing it, Prospero's magic bears no rewards; it merely serves to compensate somewhat for the damage Prospero's negligence had brought about. For years, Prospero bears the obligation of rectifying the damage wrought by his pursuit of magic, and a tremendous irony underscores Prospero's entire career as magician: in his pursuit of knowledge, he loses power. In short, Prospero is at the core of a dynamic that is far-reaching and intricate, and it is largely through context that he achieves dimensions of complexity. Prospero--along with Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's moodiest characters, not to be outdone by the non-human Ariel--possesses a range of emotions, from care and generosity to anger and callousness, but it is more than anything the fact that his love bears with it a trace of anger, his anger a trace of love, that makes Prospero seem real, complex, human--like someone you might know.

Early genius sometimes fades or fails to improve upon itself, and, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in a recent article in The New Yorker, sometimes it is the late bloomers--those who arrive upon their genius in mid-career or at mid-life--who provide the most enduring work. Shakespeare was hardly old when his career as we know it began, but if he was a youthful prodigy in his early twenties, we'll never know about it. Marlowe, by general accounts, lived fast, loved hard, and died young. He was an innovator who left an impressive body of work, but we will never know what kind of work he might have produced had he lived, like his great contemporary, to the age of fifty-two.

Writerly Self-Doubt

2009-01-30T20:03:00.000-08:00

Montaigne has this to say on the subject:

"And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?"

Such self-doubt is utterly respectable in a writer. This is what makes Montaigne great, even.

You also see something like this in Orwell's essays. I'm thinking of "Shooting an Elephant," in particular, because I just taught it. Rarely does anyone come out of an Orwell essay looking honorable, and in this one Orwell emerges as the biggest fool of all. Above all, Orwell is to be admired for his ability to take a unflinchingly honest look at everything he believes in--and at himself.

Self-doubt may be essential to a good writer. Even Hemingway had it, though he went to great pains to cover it up. Shakespeare might have had it the worst, though. I'm thinking of Macbeth's big moment, when he calls his own story "a tale told by an idiot"--the idiot, presumably, being Shakespeare--or Prospero's relentless self-doubt in The Tempest.

I've known this kind of doubt. I've tried to quit writing many times. What have I ever gotten out of writing? I've never been satisfied with anything I've written--not for long, at least. Maybe if I continue to doubt the virtue of my work, though, I'll end up like Orwell or Montaigne someday. It's a fructifying kind of doubt to strive for.

The Other Boleyn Girl, The Illusionist

2009-01-22T19:41:00.001-08:00

There's little I can say about The Other Boleyn Girl that is worth sharing, just a representative observation:

I did not enjoy hearing Mark Rylance (a fine Shakespearean actor, I hear) ask his fictional 16th century wife to "look on the bright side, for once." No one in the 16th century ever would have said anything like that, not in those words. This was, for me, the most painful bit of dialogue in the film, but there were plenty of wooden lines that were nearly as bad.

The Illusionist, however, is a different matter. I wouldn't call this film brilliant by any means, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do: it entertained me without insulting my intelligence.

The Band, 40 Years On

2009-01-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

From one perspective, it's an unfortunately generic moniker for a band that is anything but generic. From another perspective, the name is entirely apt. They really were The Band. It's hard to think of another musical group with this level of interaction between members. Robbie Robertson did most of the songwriting, but he plays such a subdued role in the performance of these songs. All five of the primaries pulled their own weight, so to speak.

It's also hard to think of an album with a sound as fully American as The Band's eponymous second release. Blues, folk, country, rock, R & B--not only do the musical styles shift seamlessly from song to song, they also do so within songs. When people think of The Band, they probably think of Woodstock or Ontario, but listening to The Band you realize how grounded this album is in the atmosphere of the American South. By 1969, Americans were pretty used to British takes on American musical traditions, but the mostly Canadian version offered by The Band provides a different, closer perspective--more like that of the insider, but not quite. Part of it is Robbie Robertson's being bowled over by Sothern tradition when he first came down from Toronto to Mississippi, but another part of it is Levon Helm's voice, which makes "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" the song that it is. (The beautiful drumwork he does helps. Can drumming be beautiful? It is here.) Lyrically, the song is less a lament for the defeat of Southern culture than it is an exercise in perspective--it's about a man who lives through that defeat. "Sweet Home Alabama" makes me want to unplug the stereo; "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" moves me nearly to tears.

It's also worth considering "Up On Cripple Creek." It's easy to want to overlook this song, overplayed as it is on classic rock radio--but then again, the radio never understood these guys. "Up On Cripple Creek" riffs on a theme from a traditional folk song called "Cripple Creek"; it's about a good-time rounder who reminisces on the virtues of a woman who understands her man. Like "Dixie," this song highlights Helm's earthy vocal twang, but there is also a funkiness to this song (as embarrassing as that term can sometimes be when applied to white music) that seems as natural as anything. This funkiness comes from the distinctive sound of a clavinet played (by Garth Hudson) through a wah-wah pedal (a sound Stevie Wonder would later apply to "Superstitious"), but it's hard to say where geographically this sound comes from. Chalk it up to The Band's inventiveness. You can also hear that inventiveness in the sprightly honky-tonk piano at the end of "Rag Mama Rag"; the song fades out, but Garth Hudson--certainly one the best piano players in the rock music tradition--seems unwilling to quit. "Rag Mama Rag" also boasts a tuba instead of a bass; the song just bounces along like a rubber ball.

It's hard to tell sometimes who is singing on a particular song; everyone in the band, it seems, gets his time at the mic. Helm's voice might be the soul of this ensemble, Robertson's pen the heart, but really no one takes the lead for long enough to diminish the others. For me, The Band stands beside Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and The Byrd's Sweetheart of the Rodeo as one of the great albums of its era, not just for what it says about the moment of its creation but also for what it says about traditions in American music.

Bob Dylan, Diane Arbus, and Sword Swallowers (Albino and Otherwise)

2009-01-17T19:36:00.000-08:00

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, "Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan"
--Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man"

Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" and Diane Arbus' photographs of carnival performers essentially do the same thing, make the same point, establish the same relationship between subject and object.

There is a curiously defined notion of otherness in both artistic visions represented here, and in Arbus' case (because she worked in the realm of the visual, presumably, and not the aural: because we can tell that a particular individual is represented in this piece of work) this has resulted in criticism of her photographic method. These critics accuse Arbus of exploiting outcasts and those on the fringe; they claim that she has depicted others as Others from her own privileged perspective on the inside. They claim that her photographs do not ennoble their subjects, that they posit freaks only as freaks. Without attempting to elaborate upon what Arbus might have intended with these photographs, I will still claim that these criticisms are misplaced. These photographs capture something that is and, without a narrative context, ask us to interpret its significance entirely on our own. This is, of course, what any photograph does, and in this respect photography is in a way perhaps the purest of media. Susan Sontag pointed out many years ago that photography bears great potential for corruption--"the worst form of mental pollution," she called it--neglecting, however, to point out that her own chosen medium, that of written text, has just as much capacity to pollute. We are reasonably intelligent people, are we not? We can determine the value and function of a photograph on our own, without text, without narrative. Those who are reasonably imbued with humanist sentiments will see the humanity of the photographic subject. Those who are not so reasonably imbued will likely go elsewhere to get their kicks. Moral function just might have to come from somewhere else, from some source entirely external to the photograph, to the song, to any work of art. Ultimately the artist doesn't get to choose how the work of art will be decoded.

Arbus' sword swallower one-ups Dylan's by being albino to boot, and it's worth noting that it is more the albino quallity that makes this performer a "freak" than it is sword swallowing, which, though unusual, is an acquired skill and not a natural aberration.

As for Dylan, his Highway 61 Revisited is an album full of freaks. They march in and out of the songs, especially "Ballad of a Thin Man" and "Desolation Row," the latter of which announces in its first stanza that "the circus is in town" -- as if it weren't apparent from the managerie of oddballs on display. Furthermore, the freaks seem primarily to serve the purpose of pointing out how weak in understanding--how morally thin--the rest of Dylan's characters are. The Thin Man of Dylan's ballad is, it would seem, the ignorant one, the one who doesn't understand: "And you know something is happening / But you don't know what it is," Dylan intones at the end of each stanza. The Thin Man bears witness not only to the sword swallower but also to a one-eyed midget and a host of others. It was 1965, and things were getting strange; it was time to freak out the squares. In the case of this Thin Man, his squareness takes on the quality of a moral fault, an inability to understand the other, and Dylan seems to harbor little sympathy for such a type. If the lyrics don't convince you of this, the tone of derision that unmistakeably inhabits Dylan's voice in this song should do so. Dylan has an advantage over Arbus here; while she works in one-dimension, his words function on the page and through the added dimension of sound.

Freud and Hamlet

2008-11-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

When I read Hamlet, I can't help but think of Sigmund Freud -- probably not for the reasons you're thinking, though.

I don't care much for Oedipal interpretations of the play; there's nothing in it, in my reading, that lends credence to the notion that Hamlet wants to get with Gertrude himself, that that is why he hesitates in his quest for revenge -- nor does it make sense that an admixture of rage (for his father's murder) and jealousy (because he himself wanted to be the one to supplant his father) would give him pause -- rather, all the more reason to kill the dirty bastard who stands in his way. There are plenty of other explanations for Hamlet's pause -- the conflict between the warrior's desire for revenge and the Christian's desire for mercy and God's judgment; the uncertainty over the true nature of the ghost; the fact that Claudius appears to be praying when Hamlet comes upon him, ready to do the deed, and Hamlet's understanding that revenge at such a moment, were Claudius really praying, might send his enemy directly to heaven while his murdered father languishes in purgatory -- all of this in addition to the primary fact that Hamlet is himself a man of thought, not a man of action, and that for him "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Rather, Freud serves other purposes in relation to Hamlet. It may seem easy these days to dismiss Freud as a misguided, coke-snorting fantasist from a by-gone era, but to do so would be to overlook the powerful impact that he made on modern consciousness -- and his take on modern consciousness certainly involves that earliest of moderns: Hamlet, who is, as Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare's "least archaic" character.

Once you strip away the fancy details of Freud's theories, you're left with two essential ideas. One is that human consciousness is fragmented. More than anyone else, Freud, who trafficked in the language of myths, is responsible for destroying that falsest of myths: that the mind is a single, unified entity. Descartes' mind-body duality is the predecessor for this idea, but also a dead end in its inability to fully understand the relationship between mind and body. Freud's understanding of the fractured mind is the true mark of the modern; Freud may not have invented this notion, but he popularized it. Of the Renaissance writers I know, only Montaigne and Shakespeare seem to articulate a notion on par with the modern view of the fragmented consciousness. With Montaigne, such an understanding quietly underscores the whole of his essays. With Shakespeare, this understanding is the prominent characteristic of his most famous hero. Shakespeare and Freud both understood that it is very much a human quality of mind to hold simultaneously multiple conflicting desires -- to want to do something and not want to do it, to wish for something and know that we shouldn't have it, to weigh both sides of a matter and feel compelling qualities on either -- to feel ourselves ripped to shreds by the centrifugal forces of our own minds. The specifics of id, ego, and superego are less relevant than the fact that there are varied aspects of the mind representing various influences. We take such an understanding for granted now -- the ambiguity of character, the complexity of mind -- but this is the revolutionary quality that Hamlet stood for, a quality that Freud explicated most successfully in prose. Such an understanding of the complexity of character gives the lie to Polonius' stoical maxim that if you are true "to thine own self ... Thou canst not then be false to any man." To which self must one be true? Hamlet is perhaps the first character in all of literature to be so untethered to any solid notion of self. He's a free agent of thought. When stoical maxims fall short, as they do in his famous soliloquy on suicide, Hamlet ranges off into undiscovered territories of thought. He cannot be true to himself, because he has no central core to which he might be true. His only self is limitless thought, and in this context the idea that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" takes on not only a proto-Romantic aspect but also a vertiginous quality as well, the quality of existential nausea. (I may be riffing off of A. D. Nuttall here; he introduced me to the notion of stoicism in Hamlet in Shakespeare the Thinker.)

When Hamlet does find himself -- or rather creates himself -- it is after his encounter with a Player who teaches him to act out an emotion and another encounter with a rival prince who teaches him how to act out a deed. In the meantime, Hamlet talks, and here we see the precursor of Freud's other significant idea: that it is in talk that we discover ourselves. The Freudian notion is of course famous in caricature for enacting several generations of New Yorker cartoon characters who take to the long leather couch to speak to their shrink. Psychoanalysis has been writ on a larger mass-market scale, though, for more up-to-date audiences. First the talking cure graduated (via the middle school of Phil Donahue) to the Oprah Winfrey Show: instead of taking it to your shrink, you could take it to a television audience of millions. Now, we can take it to our blogs, as well -- no reservations for the production studio required. Hamlet didn't have the Viennese doctor -- nor Oprah, nor the entire membership directory of Facebook -- to hear him; instead, he had us -- that audience whom he addresses so directly in his final speech, but whom he has really been talking to all along in his many famous soliloquys. The art of the soliloquy is the art of self discovery and self-invention, and is that not what Freud wanted his patients to do? To lie down on the couch and soliloquize, to invent their own tragic personas ....

And in the case of Hamlet, the talking cure works. In Act V, he is ready to face his destiny, whatever that may be: "the readiness is all." It may well be that Hamlet didn't have a destiny until he had talked it all out.

I'm sure that many lives have been needlessly complicated by the bombasticism of primitive psychoanalysis. But who could resist the lure of seeing themselves cast as Elektra, as Oedipus ... as Hamlet?

Obama in Berlin

2008-07-27T12:30:00.001-07:00

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EED9123DF934A15754C0A96E9C8B63&scp=1&sq=marc%20charney%20obama%20berlin&st=cse

Conspicuously absent from Marc D. Charney's list of "echoes" in Barack Obama's Berlin speech is any reference to John F. Kennedy's 1963 speech delivered there. Obama did, however, allude to Kennedy when at the end of his speech he described the "aspirations shared by all people ... [to] live free from fear and free from want," claiming "It is because of these aspirations that all free people--everywhere--became citizens of Berlin."

Who made them citizens of Berlin? It was Kennedy, who said--as an introduction to his famous closing line--that "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin."

Wisely perhaps, Obama chose to allude to the less-famous intro to the statement "Ich bin ein Berliner" rather than risk seeming presumptuous by quoting Kennedy's use of the German. In doing so, Obama successfully updated Kennedy's notion for our times. The kind of sentiment expressed here is fully consistent with Obama's particular political genius--his inclusiveness--and helps to explain why the junior senator from Illinois was able to draw a crowd of 200,000 in a foreign city.

Keats' Tombstone

2008-07-15T19:21:00.001-07:00

Image of Keats' tombstone from http://englishhistory.net/keats/grave.html
------------------------------

"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."

This was the inscription that John Keats, who died at age 26 of tuberculosis, asked to have written on his tombstone--no name, just a line of verse prophesying what he thought would be his own pending anonymity. There is a historical irony here--that the verse in stone would prove part of the poetic apparatus that ultimately insured his name was not written merely on water.

Though not a line of strict iambic pentameter, there are a lot of consecutive iambs in this inscription--after the initial stressed syllable, four of them in a row. Instead of the initial iamb, we have a single, short, dramatically stressed syllable--"Here"--a declarative and fittingly pronounced beginning. The rhythm proceeds in iambs till the end, when we check a final unstressed note at the end of "water." Thus we have a ten syllable line, a stress followed by four iambs and ending abruptly with a syllable that is so weak that it simply seems to disappear. The effect of the final unstressed syllable is to stretch out the line a little and to provide a different tone at the end by hinting at the unstated, at implications, instead of offering certainty. The verse begins with emphasis and lingers at the end, pondering and thoughtful, trailing off into speculation and denying the sense of dramatic conclusion that we might expect at the end of such an important line as an epitaph. Even the first syllable of "water," where we expect something with significant declamatory power, is not stressed so heavily as we think it should be, certainly not as much as the other stressed syllables in the line, and that is part of the effect as well. To further emphasize the weakness of the ending, consider an alternative statement: "Here lies one whose name was writ in stone." "Stone" has a powerful finality to it that fits with the intended meaning. The way Keats has it, though, the ending invites us to meditate upon the legacy of his work.

He was a poet to the very end.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

2008-07-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

Tell someone that you just finished reading The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, and see what kind of reaction you get. You can explain to them that the book is a profile of recent and current members of the Supreme Court and of the events and movements that have shaped their judicial philosophies. Tell them that the author has cracked the facade of that most illustrious of judicial institutions--one that is historically very private--to gain an insider's perspective on the inner workings of the Court. Your partner in conversation will likely be very impressed at your literary accomplishment. You can leave the conversation with a smile at a bit of insider's information of your own, because after having read The Nine you know how imminently readable a book it is. All you have to do is crack open the spine, and from that point on the book pretty much reads itself. No law degree required.

Toobin writes for the New Yorker, and the book is the product of years of covering the Supreme Court for that magazine--and for its literate but popular audience. It is unfortunate that, in ways, the book has been outdated since it hit the shelf--such is the nature of change in today's Court that decisions of the last couple of months might either enhance or defy some of the conclusions Toobin made for his book. But ultimately that is of no matter. The Court that Toobin profiles is one with a significant back-story that goes back decades, and any portrait of the Supreme Court is bound to end in a freeze-frame snapshot of an institution about to change. Indeed, the future of the Court, as the mixed messages of its recent session indicates, is far from settled, but the outcome of the next presidential election will certainly decide whether the Court remains divided almost evenly along ideological lines (with swing voter Anthony Kennedy siding with the Court's conservative faction about 60% of the time). Given the election of John McCain, the Court would be likely to develop a solid right-wing majority the next time a justice is replaced. (Justice John Paul Stevens is eighty-eight. One can imagine abortion opponents hypocritically praying for his death before Bush's term of office comes to a close.)

One thing that you can say about Supreme Court justices as a whole is that they are certainly an idiosyncratic bunch, despite the fact that so many of them at present march in lock-step with each other along ideological lines.

David Souter in many ways stands out. Appointed by George H.W. Bush, Souter was looked at by those on the right as a potential key player in their hope to establish a conservative majority on the Court--one capable of overturning Roe v. Wade--but since his appointment Souter has veered decidedly to the left. Reportedly, Souter does not have a cell phone or an e-mail account, and it is said of him that someone once gave him a television but that he never plugged it in. Toobin also reports that when Souter joined the Court in the late 80s he had never before heard of a popular beverage that some of his colleagues enjoyed--Diet Coke. He seems to have lived in his own professional bubble, aloof to the goings-on around him. There is something fascinating and, in a way, very admirable about Souter's quaint rejection of modern life. While one could argue that a justice should be in touch with the pace of contemporary thinking, one could also say that a justice should be tuned in to the timeless truths of rationality and the law and that the rest is irrelevant.

Clarence Thomas is another stand out, though for very different reasons. I am not the first to speculate that there is a certain degree of self-loathing at the core of Thomas' being. He is, by his own account, a bitterly angry man, and a great deal of his anger is directed at affirmative action, the policy by which he himself was accepted to Yale Law School as well as appointed to the Supreme Court--ironically, as a replacement for Thurgood Marshall. If Thomas displays so much public distaste and bitterness for the policies that made him the man he is today, how must he feel about himself?

I knew this much already about Thomas before reading The Nine. What I did not know, though, was how much Thomas is liked by virtually everyone around him, from his opponents on the Court to cafeteria employees there to the strangers he befriends at NASCAR events and on RV campgrounds. Suddenly, the portrait had become more complex--if anything, more puzzling.

Since the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2005 and his subsequent replacement by John Roberts, the Court has moved to the far right in a majority of its decisions. This is in a way surprising, since Rehnquist himself was staunchly conservative through most of his career. Despite his continued adherence to conservative ideals, Rehnquist did not pursue them as doggedly once he was appointed Chief Justice. Toobin posits a solid rationale for the softening of Rehnquist's position in recent years, but Rehnquist was not the only one whose stance changed. Others have changed more dramatically--not just David Souter but also John Paul Stevens. In a recent interview for the New York Times Magazine, Stevens, a Ford appointee, said that he still considers himself a Republican and a conservative despite his reliable affiliation with the liberal faction of the court. Perhaps what Stevens does--unlike some of his colleagues--is to isolate his personal political views from his jurisprudence, but it is also possible that his view of "conservatism" was defined in a different era, when it meant something different than what it means now. Only two justices--Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Bryer--of the current nine were appointed by a Democratic president (both by Clinton); Souter and Stevens are the two who, mavericks in their own way, have kept liberal principles at play in the Court.

As you read The Nine, you encounter not only the big personalities but also the big questions at the heart of any analysis of the Supreme Court. First of all, what is the relationship between the judicial branch and the legislative branch, and to what extent does the Court have power to create--rather than merely explicate--the law? (The traditional answer is that the Supreme Court only interprets the law, but in reality that is simply not the case.) Also, what role should political ideology play in the Court? Regardless of what is proper for the supposedly blind procedures of justice, there is a disturbing degree of ideological bias in the current Court, and this bias will be a factor in the goings-on of the Court most likely for decades to come.

Another question involves the role of precedent in Supreme Court decisions. For generations of Supreme Court justices, respect for precedent has been standard operating procedure. At present, however, the increasingly conservative body in the Court threatens to tear apart decades of precedent on issues such as abortion and affirmative action that even Rehnquist was reluctant to dismantle.

A final major question involves the conflict between, on the one hand, judicial originalism and, on the other, the notion of a living constitution. Originalism is the notion that the preceise meaning of the Constitution was established by the framers at the time of its composition and that any interpretation of the Constitution that strays from the original meaning is invalid. As Toobin informs us, this approach to interpreting the Constitution is historically a pretty new one that emerged in the 1980s, and it is represented for those of us who lived through the tail end of the Reagan era by Robert Bork, whose appointment to the Supreme Court was denied by Congress. Appointees who could be described as roughly Borkian in attitude (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) sooner or later made their way into the ranks of the nine, and originalism might be said to be the defining force behind the Court's recent overthrow of the Washington, DC, handgun ban. That said, the more one scrutinizes the philosophy of originalism, the more impractical and even foolish it seems.

There is a reason that the Court has not stuck strictly to the framers' intents in a variety of domains: the framers lived in a society that is fundamentally different from our own. At what point does a necessary respect for the foundations of the Constitution become a crippling burden to those of us living in the twenty-first century?

Toobin, who on occasion betrays a mild moderate to liberal bias, hints pretty clearly his belief that the alternative to this notion of originalism, that of a "living Constitution," is really the only sensible way of making the Constitution a document that continues to serve the people. Furthermore, it makes sense in context of the bigger picture. The framers were at the core of a revolutionary generation who acted on the principle that if your government does not work for you, you should replace it. The government has to have some flexibility built into it. It is therefore sensible to think that the framers might intend for the document to change over time to accommodate the needs of a changing society.

It must be said that Toobin keeps his editorializing to a minimum, that he is able to praise both conservative and liberal members of the Court, and that he expands into his own commentary only once the necessary details have been relayed.

Above all, the effect of reading The Nine is to come to a true understanding of the relevance of this judicial body. Although Presidents select members of the Court, the Court in a way has more authority in defining what counts for law than the President does. Although the Supreme Court is a fully fallible institution, Toobin makes his readers understand that the system of checks and balances usually works--that power is thereby distributed to more than just the President and a handful of influential members of Congress. The judicial branch is sometimes referred to as the "Third Branch"--a name that indicates its status as the aspect of government that is easy to forget (in part, perhaps, because we think of it as being so localized; we see the court in action on regional issues and when we get speeding tickets, and we forget that there is more to it than that). What Toobin does with The Nine is to get us to realize that the Supreme Court is a truly powerful body, and that those in the know value the President's right to nominate members as more than just a perk of office.

Justice personified is depicted as being blind, but in truth it is not blind at all and never has been. Toobin gives us a chance to see what the eyes of justice see. The image is sometimes baffling, sometimes illuminating, and always fascinating.

Why You Should Listen to The Pernice Brothers

2008-07-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

They don't have any new albums out, just some old ones that have kept growing on me over the years. For what my opinion is worth, I think they're one of the most underappreciated bands around.

All Music Guide, Pitchfork, and just about everyone else have all compared Joe Pernice's voice to that of Colin Blunstone of The Zombies. (Usually the word "smoky" is used.) The comparison is inevitable and apt. The similarity owes less to imitation, I would like to think, than to natural ability. Both singers possess voices that sound more fragile than they really are. Their vocals are whispery but not breathy: these guys are actually singing. It's the kind of sound that won't often work for the heavy stuff--It's worth noting that 2006's Live a Little includes a song about The Clash, but The Pernice Brothers seem unlikely to be able to actually pull off a Clash cover. There's a bit of that that Clash influence there, but for the most part The Pernice Brothers' specialty is intelligent pop music for a literate adult audience--music that is geared for the kind of listener who has been around the block a few times and is perhaps sadder but wiser for it.

Joe Pernice's lyrics prove that he possesses a great ear for the sound of words, and for the most part he avoids cliches and goes instead for more original figures of speech and, quite frequently, clever, sardonic wordplay. Pernice is also also a writer of short stories, and his gift for character sketch translates into his lyrics, as in this example from "Cruelty to Animals":

She won't mind if the place we stand is marked by ash. She believes what
doesn't kill her only takes more time to kill her. Then she smiles as she
paints her lips and does her lashes. Stunning as a taxidermy victim in a
silver cage.

The images and clever turns, startlingly good for pop music, continue: "Stuck in dumn amazement like a dog who's told to levitate." "... spinning glue back into horses."

It's true that musically there is nothing revolutionary or bold about his songs, and in fact some of them in tone and sentiment even border on what we might vilify as "light rock" or "adult contemporary." Don't let that easy tone fool you, though. There is admirable craftsmanship in every track the Pernice Brothers have released, and their work is all the more remarkable considering that it's all indie label material. Thirty years ago, one would think, these guys would have been all over the radio. Video really did kill these would-be radio stars.

So, what the Pernice Brothers offer is exquisitely crafted pop songs: shimmering, incandescent, approaching the sublime sometimes in the way that the best power-pop (The Beatles, Big Star, those Neko Case harmonies on certain New Pornographers tracks) can do. There's a bit of the Zombies, a bit of Elvis Costello, that distant hint of Joe Strummer, even some Squeeze and Joe Jackson, perhaps. The Elvis Costello similarity comes across not in the sound of the vocals but in the phrasing; listen to the way Pernice stretches out words sometimes at the ends of his verses, as in "Somerville," his ode to coming home with your tail tucked between your legs after not making a go of it in the city.

My favorite Pernice Brothers album is 2003's Yours, Mine, and Ours. At a first listen, this album seems a little too slick, perhaps. This is partly due to the opening track, "The Weakest Shade of Blue," which is so well put-together that it seems like something only a machine could produce. You learn to live with its over-perfection, though. For a Pernice Brothers song, "Weakest Shade" has moments that are brimming with optimism. You shouldn't get used to that, because the next track, "Water Ban," and most of the rest of the songs that follow strike more troubled notes. The melancholy tone persists to the end of the album and almost drags it down a little in the end; my only complaint about this set is that it needs another track (in addition to the exquisite "Sometimes I Remember") with a little more drive in it to hold up the last few songs. Nevertheless, the songs are in and of themselves pitch-perfect. This is an imminently listenable collection of songs. "One Foot in the Grave"--despite its ominous title--strikes the perfect balance between up and down; this is what power-pop is supposed to do. "Blinded by the Stars" and "Waiting for the Universe" are other stand-outs. Although this is the most heavily rotated album on my iPod, I am still waiting to get tired of listening to it.

My next favoriate Pernice Brothers album, 2006's Live a Little, does not quite, to my mind, achieve the same level of the sublime, but it's still a great album by any measure. Thematically, the songs focus mostly once again on mature perspectives on adult relationships. It does boast my favorite Pernice Brothers song, "Lightheaded," a song about celebrity, fame, and all that glitter and flash that have eluded Pernice. If this is the result of obscurity, though, he comes off all the better for it.

It's easy to consider Joe Pernice--voice, lyrics, melodies--as the sole architect of this band's sound, but that would be a mistake. As important as he is, all of this would fall a little flat if it weren't for the music that holds that wispy voice aloft. What really makes the Pernice Brothers such a spectacular band is the band. These aren't stripped down acoustic numbers that we're listening to, and as much as the craft of songwriting is in evidence here, I wouldn't want to listen to these songs presented in a bare-bones singer-songwriter fasion. That's not what they're designed for, though it's true that an acoustic guitar track is put to good use at the heart of most Pernice Brothers songs. The arrangements are pretty lush for indie music--especially given the strings on Live a Little--but they're never over-produced. The songs really achieve definition from Peyton Pinkerton's guitar lines, which never quite jangle, exactly, though they do parse out the contours of Pernice's melodies to great effect. On YM+O, the keyboards--at first almost unnoticeable, a mix of organ and spacey-sounding synthesizer--also add flourishes that would be sorely missed were they not present, and LAL features some steady piano work. I've started to appreciate the drums, too, lately--not just the precision of a well-kept beat but also the fills on "One Foot in the Grave," for instance, or at the end of "Automaton," which serve as a reminder that, despite the subtlety of the music, this is a rock band we're hearing.

What happens to a band like The Pernice Brothers? They have a sizeable following for a band that releases on its own label, but mainstream commercial success in today's music industry climate seems well-nigh impossible. At this point, I imagine, every record sale counts, so my recommendation is to get out there and buy a Pernice Brothers record first chance you get.

The Assistant

2008-06-19T10:32:00.001-07:00

Unassuming and tacked down to a hard and unromantic urban setting, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant is surprising for the force and power of its lyricism. Perhaps, accustomed as we are to an either/or that so typically presents the hyper-examined lives of the well-taught and well-to-do or the naturalistic squalor of the deprived, we don't expect such yearning, such depth of feeling, in characters so restrained by poverty, by disadvantage, by a want of education that is so consciously felt by the primary characters themselves: when you are grappling with how to pay the bills, who has the clarity of mind to think and feel with any depth? (Viz. Raskolnikov here--an extreme version of this syndrome: a man of great sensitivity whose judgment is so clouded by his poverty that he commits murder.) Malamud never grants a single sentimnetal word in his descriptions of his characters, but throughout the novel, with Dostoyevsky-like precision, he pries into their minds, setting out in plain terms every least doubt and each glimmering of hope. The result is that these people are real as daylight, sympathetic despite their sometimes coldness, and eminently there, on the page and in the reader's mind.

The Assistant begins with Morris Bober, a down-on-his-luck emigrant Jewish grocer who has set up shop in a hapless Brooklyn neighborhood with a primarily gentile population. We soon meet his wife, Ida, whose nagging and browbeating don't seem like stereotype until you back away from the novel to put things in perspective; in the novel, she comes across as a realized character, and the constant verbal put-downs she directs at her sad-sack husband seem like a logical response to the meanness of their livelihood and the decades of barely scraping by they have faced. Morris and Ida have a daughter, Helen, who is bookish and aspiring and whose beauty and quiet melancholy suffuse the book with an elegiac quality; Helen is only in her early twenties, but her life already seems like a look back on opportunity that never quite developed. Lurking somewhere in the background is a dead son, Ephraim, who passed long ago and is by this point little more than an occasional memory, another reminder of a past that, rather than providing a romanticized counterpoint to the present, only makes the present seem part of the same hollowness. To this family dynamic enters Frank Alpino, a drifter who wants to make something of himself and, through a chain of unlikely events that Malamud somehow makes seem realistic, becomes Morris' assistant at the grocery. Frank, orphaned at age five, might be there to serve as Morris' surrogate son, but if he somehow fulfills this embedded psychic need, Morris himself, numbed as he is to the world around him, seems not to be consciously aware of it.

Though dirty and unshaven at first, Frank is not without a certain charisma, and much of the appeal of his character (to Morris and to the reader--and eventually to Helen) is his earnest desire for self-improvement, which he is more than ready to put into action as opportunity arises. Frank's admiration for St. Francis of Assissi (presumably his namesake) establishes a blatant but still effective symbolic nod to the life of the saint, who represents a kind of discipline and asceticism that Frank wishes to achieve himself. This kind of discipline is something Frank needs, because just about every move he makes is a misstep; every time he tries to do right, it seems, he ends up doing wrong, and the result is that the more bad he does, paradoxically, the more the reader sympathizes with him. Frank is a liar despite his forthrightness. He is a thief and a peeping-tom, and eventually he does worse, but what defines him as a character is his constant wish to do good. We never doubt that he wants to do right.

Frank pursues Helen, furtively at first, and eventually, through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, establishes something of a relationship with her--initially one-sided, but more and more mutual as she opens up to the notion of his potential. Helen then takes it upon herself to educate Frank on some of the finer works of the Western literary canon. Among these works are Anna Karenina, whose title character provides something of a model for Helen's character, and Crime and Punishment. Malamud's novel benefits nicely from the name dropping, especially regarding Crime and Punishment: both novels are about poverty and suffering, and both take on as their protagonist a criminal who at times challenges our sympathies but never strays far from them. Both novels also resonate with religious meaning, though for Malamud this means not a discovery of Christian themes (St. Francis notwithstanding) but rather an exploration of the cultural and spiritual significance of Judaism, which in The Assistant signifies a way to live despite suffering, a way to endure. Both novels also struggle with Big Ideas of universal import, though Malamud's novel does so in a notably less self-conscious manner than does Dostoyevsky's. In the grand American tradition, Malamud chooses to ground all of his ideas in the hard-scrabble everyday.

In contrast to this groundedness, the lyricism of this novel has much to do with birds. There is only a handful of real birds in the book: notably, when Frank is in the park feeding pigeons and they flock to him, just as they did in the story about St. Francis preaching to the birds, only Frank has bread for them, not spritual convictions. Representations of the avian factor in elsewhere. When Frank crawls up an air shaft to peak through a bathroom window to spy on Helen as she undresses to take a shower, her breasts appear to him "like small birds in flight." Later, dejected and at odds not only with Helen but with himself, in the midst of a confused and confusing love, Frank on a whim carves out of an old pine plank the form of a bird. The symbolism is clear: no one takes flight in the novel, but everyone wants to. Snow and moonlight and flowers also present symbols of nature, and it's not hard to see what these elements mean in a setting that is unlovely and unkind. Ironically, perhaps, it is the nearby park that provides the scene of the novel's most violent and depraved event, reminding us how our attempts to restore a semblance of the natural in the midst of human contrivance often take on a sinister tone.

The Assistant is not an absolutely perfect novel, but it's about as close to one as we could ever hope for. At times, it seems as though the prose dashes along a little haphazardly and the sentences serve just to shove us forward to the next event, but if so perhaps it is only because Malamud and the reader both are anxious to move toward the next phase of the narrative. The conclusion of the novel is a little suspect also; I found myself not entirely believing it, but I appreciated it nonetheless for what it said about the characters, about where they were going, about the continuous potential, never quite realized on the page, of their asserting the meaning of their own lives.

2008-06-08T09:31:00.001-07:00

From the window of the delivery room, I could see a construction crew at work on the roof over the entryway to emergency, two floors below. The roof was a curving metal wave, very modern, and it was, in a way, before the contractions got to be too big, kind of comforting to think of the world operating in its usual fashion outside of our little room. Amy was being induced, which is part of the story, as we'll see, and early on things were easy. She was holding my hand and listening to The Flaming Lips on the iPod, rocking out just like it was 1993, before we'd met and before anything like the birth of a child had occurred as any kind of definable reality for either one of us. It seemed easy so far, but this being our second child, we knew better. We knew that this was a peaceful little interlude before things got really heavy.

My wife was being induced because Dr. Awesome--so called by Amy because of her relentlessly sunny disposition--said the sooner, the better. All around, at the Ob-Gyn--the Baby Factory, as we call it, in and out like clockwork--we've gotten better than usual service. Amy's dad is a doctor at the nearby hospital, and there was a precise advantage here to her keeping her maiden name. More than that, though, she has a blood clotting disorder of the kind that will probably never cause her any trouble in her life but which, if care is not taken to avoid conditions favorable to clotting, could result in a serious lawsuit. Nobody wants that. Care was indeed being taken from every angle.

And that was part of the reason for the early induction, a week and a half before the due date. No one wanted to take any risks. Also, the Little Brother, as we'd taken to calling him, was not gaining weight at the rate predicted, which could be a sign of clotting in the placenta. Better safe than sorry.

When the contractions got to be too much, Amy got up and walked around the room--staggered is more like it, tethered by all sorts of cables to a monitor and IV stand that I had to push along behind her--and sat in a chair for a while. When she got back in the bed, the nurses had trouble with the monitoring equipment. The contractions were getting too strong too quickly. Amy was shaky, quivering. The nurses gave her oxygen. The baby's heartbeat had dropped from the 130s to the 80s. For a while, it disappeared altogether. More nurses came in--four, then five, then six--followed finally by Dr. Awesome, who said something about "another option." One of the nurses handed Amy a form on a clipboard signifying consent to undertake a c-section, and she scribbled something on it that bore a vague resemblance to her signature. Before I knew it, the whole crew was headed down the hall to the operating room. One nurse stayed behind as I started putting on the scrubs she handed me. I ripped the pants while pulling them on.

To get to the operating room, we had to go through construction. The air was clogged with dust from sanded drywall compound, and a big plastic tarp was blue-taped to the end of the corridor. The others had already gone through, and one of the workers was already taping the plastic sheet back to the wall. He took it down again, and I went in following the nurse. I had to wait out in the hall for a few minutes, between the construction area and the operating room. I wasn't sure why I had to wait. I sat down in a plastic chair. A worker came up to re-tape the tarp hanging over the doorway. He saw me sitting there, and he asked me how it was going. He might have thought I was a doctor, or maybe he didn't. I don't know what kind of look I might have had on my face. I don't remember what I said back to him.

In a few minutes, one of the nurses came out and called me into the operating room. There was more talk of another option. I heard pieces of conversation, but I didn't understand most of it. I remember hearing a fragment of a sentence from a nurse I didn't recognize: "All the stuff they've put in her," a fragment that had, in context, the weight of a declaration. I assumed she was referring to Pitocin, the agent that induces contractions. She wasn't referring to any kind of pain medication because Amy hadn't had any. I stood next to the bed holding Amy's hand while Dr. Awesome reached in and manually effaced her cervix the final two centimeters.

"We've got baby's heartbeat again and he's looking just fine, but just in case we're going to stay right here. The anesthesiologist is standing by in case we need to go for another option."

The anesthesiologist came into the room, all matter of fact, but perturbed about something. He spoke to Dr. Awesome for a moment, then came over to Amy, whose contractions were getting stronger. He hovered over her, waiting, while Dr. Awesome waited at the other end of the table. She told Amy to put her right foot up on her shoulder, and I helped hold up the leg and put it into position. Nurses held up the other leg.

The anesthesiologist started asking questions, matter of fact, his tone no different than if he were sitting down in the office and running over a few of the routine preliminaries. He said he knew that she was not in the best frame of mind to be answering questions, but that admissions had failed to go through the required paperwork on the matter (a hint of annoyance there interrupting the facade). He was interrupted by Dr. Awesome before his interrogation had really begun:

"OK, Amy, on your next contraction I need you to bear down."

Instructions were given for breathing and counting. I was to do the counting. The contraction came. The doctor said that Amy was doing a great job: awesome. The nurses gave their praise. The anesthesiologist went back to his questions. Had she ever been given anesthetic before? Amy said that she had, when she'd had her wisdom teeth out. Any problems? Everything was fine. He asked her about allergies, history of illnesses. Bronchitis last fall. OK. Another contraction. The breathing, counting, pushing. The anesthesiologist backed off.

Two more rounds of contractions and the boy was out. He was fine. He sucked in the air and whimpered like a cat. He turned from purple to pink just like that, just like he was supposed to.

Numbers, Anglo-Saxons, the Supreme Court, Ulysses S. Grant, and More Not Small Talk

2008-05-27T18:59:00.000-07:00

The Figure 5 in Gold, by Charles Demuth
---------------------------------------

On Monday, June 2, I have been scheduled -- with the kind of procedural regularity that has become a touchstone of our modern medical culture -- to become a father once again.

The likely result is that I will not be submitting any blog entries in the near future for you, my loyal reader, to consume conspicuously at your leisure. ("My loyal reader" -- you are not so hypothetical; I think I know all three of you.)

But there are so many Not Small Talk items out there to be addressed. Let me summarize a few of them, briefly -- some ideas that have been scattershot through my mind lately. I leave you to draw your own conclusions on these and many other topics.

* Numbers: Do they exist? I mean, do they exist in any sort of transcendental or platonic fashion? Does the number five, for instance, exist somewhere in the universe independently of things that are five in number? Put another way, does the notion of fiveness exist independently of consciousness?

About once a year, I have this discussion with the calculus teacher at school, and he always responds instantly by saying that he doesn't think it could be any other way. If it is the case that numbers exist transcendentally, is number identity comparable to the law of gravity or some other physical reality--a fundamental force of the universe? In what dimension do numbers exist? If they exist, it seems to me, then mathematics would have to be a branch of physics because it relates to the study of physical properties of the universe. Something to think about--and for my former student Shiv Subramaniam, majoring in comparative lit and mathematics, to tackle before he graduates from the University of Chicago. (You have three years, Shiv.)

* "The saddest thing about any man is that he is ignorant, and the most exciting thing is that he knows." -- Alfred the Great

Of course, it would be a mistake to romanticize the Anglo-Saxons too much, but they are one of my favorite historical groups of people ever, and I agree wholeheartedly with Tolkien's assertion that the Norman invasion was the greatest disaster in English history. Combined with Henry VIII's closing of the monasteries (and the subsequent destruction of already-aged Anglo-Saxon manuscripts), the result is that we are left with precious few insights into their collective life and mind, but what we have shows a people with a powerful culture that was in some ways vibrant and progressive beyond what you could find anywhere else in Europe at the time. Here are some of the highlights of Anglo-Saxon culture and society as I see them:

1. An emphasis on localized self-rule that differed from that of other emerging European kingdoms. This factor is likely due to the preservation of tribal traditions enabled by the geographical isolation of the British Isles. (This theory might owe a little bit to British historian Robert Conquest but also to the kind of geographic determinism favored by Jared Diamond.) Because most greater Anglo-Saxon borders were defined by coastline (Pictish and Celtic adversaries on dry-land borders notwithstanding), the pressure to centralize authority was not the same as it was on the continent. Gaul, for instance, surrounded by emerging kingdoms on most sides, had to centralize authority much earlier than England in order to protect its continued existence as a politically independent entity; a strong monarchy was necessary to keep the neighbors at bay. The Vikings who constantly raided England's shores seemed to have been content with settling in the Danelaw; they didn't until Canute the Great present a critical threat on a national level. This left the Anglo-Saxons free to develop political traditions in a more gradual and deliberate manner. Even after the Norman invasion, some of this tradition remained; it was built into the economy and even the geographical divisions/township structures of England by that time. It resurfaced most notably in the Magna Carta and in the formation of Parliament.

2. King Alfred's progressive attitude toward literacy and education. Granted, he understood that poetry could be great propaganda, but that consideration doesn't diminish the empowering aspect of literacy for those who possess it. The fact that the Vikings, the Normans, and the Protestants essentially demolished the archival remnants of this literary tradition is unfortunate. There is something about Alfred's policies that speaks of a proto-democratic tradition that had repercussions beyond the literary; Alfred was the uncommon king who didn't sell his people short. The English have also been superlative at producing and preserving the documents of bureaucracy: wills; deeds ("indentures"); birth, marriage, and death records, etc. These items speak in their own way of a vibrant tradition of literacy.

3. Dynamic and progressive trade practices that allowed society to flourish. English democracy, even in its infancy, has always relied on prosperity. The English have been a prosperous people. My socialist sympathies notwithstanding, I have to admit that there is a common ground between free trade and political (and therefore personal) freedoms.

* "Bush's appointment of Roberts and Alito may prove to be among the worst of the many disasters of his mistaken administration." --Donald Dworkin

Dworkin writes for the New York Review of Books on the Supreme Court. This line sums up pretty much everything there is to say about the Supreme Court and about what is at stake in that regard in the next Presidential election.

* "The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion." --Article II of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams in 1797

A useful quotation to have around when discussing the issue of separation of church and state. Jefferson's "Notes Concerning the State of Virginia" is also handy, as are Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages" (containing a scathing satire of the reputed purpose of religion) and excerpts from the latter sections of book two of his Autobiography. While not outrightly condemning religious practice, Franklin approaches it pragmatically, and it is pretty clear that his idea of a divine being is not so different from Aristotle's Prime Mover. That is, Franklin, scientist that he was, believed that something must have set everything in motion, but that whatever it was doesn't much bother with what we're doing day-to-day in the here-and-now. Franklin believed that the purpose of religion was to instill values in people so that they could be productive members of society. He was not, as some evangelical Christians have outrageously claimed, a Christian himself in terms of any beliefs he may have held. The calculating and arch-ironic attitude he displays in his discussion of the virtue of humility in the Autobiography is proof of his lack of genuine spiritual conviction.

* Henry V: Machiavellian bastard or paragon of princely virtue? I can't decide. I can't even decide what Shakespeare wants us to think of him. For years, I've been on the side of judging him a Machiavellian bastard, but I'm planning to reread the entire Henry IV/Henry V cycle and reassess. Perhaps I'll let you know what I think at a later date.

"Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world." Harry does, Harry will. Jack Falstaff is human weakness and vice but also human wit--and perhaps even humanness itself writ large (very large). Does Henry give up his own humanity when he denies Falstaff? Or is he just doing what he must do to accept the mantle of responsibility?

And that whole bit about invading France on weak pretenses. (Not even weapons of mass destruction -- they're just tennis balls.) Reminds me of a certain contemporary political leader of whom 29% of the population still somehow bafflingly approves.

* Ulysses S. Grant: One of my favorite presidents, not so much because of what he did during his presidency but because of what he did before it. As a general, he was a pragmatist who could have been profiled alongside William James and Oliver Wendall Holmes in Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club. An unustly maligned character in part because he rarely spoke up against his detractors. A kind of Washington-like humility emanates from his reticence. His Personal Memoirs sets the record straight, partly; I've only read a few bits and pieces, but when I have time (someday) I'm going to read the whole book--it's as long as Ulysses, which took me a year to read.

* Joan Didion. If I don't get a chance to reread any of her essays in the coming days, I'm at least going to be thinking of her. I need that kind of open-eyed clarity right now. I won't bother trying to convince myself that I know what I'm getting myself into, but I'd at least like to admit to myself what I don't know, which is in the end what her essays always seem to me to be about, and which is a non-negligible kind of self-knowledge.

Wish me luck.

JFK and political authorship

2008-05-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

Ted Sorenson (from the New York Times Book Review)

Theodore Sorenson, speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, recently published a memoir (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Rosenthal-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin) and in doing so has dredged up a perenially favorite topic for those in the business of writing about such things: who wrote Kennedy's most famous lines?

That Kennedy had a gift for rhetoric is undeniable. A sizeable part of that gift was in the delivery, but regardless he had a flair for a good line. As Louis Menand pointed out a few years ago in an article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/08/041108crbo_books?currentPage=all), Kennedy improvised at thirty-two different points during his one and only famous inaugural address. He went over draft after draft with Sorenson, who saw it as his job to help Kennedy articulate his own ideas in the most effective way possible. To this day, at a point when most people who bother to think about it just assume that someone else is writing every word that comes from a politician's mouth, Sorenson insists that Kennedy's words are Kennedy's words and not his own. It would be fair to say that the two were co-authors; Kennedy was not minimally involved.

As for Kennedy's two most memorable lines, one was a paraphrase. Menand also pointed out that Kennedy's Headmaster at Choate was fond of telling students that it's "not what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate." Thus a call for alumni giving became a political catchphrase that defined an era. This is fitting: JFK was in many ways the ultimate prep school boy to the end: popular, aloof, smart, cool, ambitious, more than just a bit cynical in his approach to power and leadership, and he brought all of this with him to the White House. I say this not to degrade Kennedy; I understand the reasons why so many bowed down to the alter, but at the same time no one believes anymore that the man was a perfect savior. Sorenson, by the way, still gives Kennedy the credit for the "ask not" line. As for the other line--"Ich bin ein Berliner"--Sorenson takes credit for the blunder. Though seemingly grammatically correct, the use of the article "ein" renders this an idiom declaring, "I am a jelly doughnut." Nevertheless, we know what Kennedy meant, and this is a powerful line that complements the other from the inaugural two years before. One line asks us to give to others through service to our country. The other asks us to look beyond nationalism and see ourselves as global citizens of the free world. In the end, what matters is how the words were used, and Kennedy certainly used them to good effect at a time when American identity was challenged by the threats--internal and external--of Cold War policy.

What Kennedy and Sorenson both understood is that rhetoric matters, that a meaningful political reality can be crafted out of genuine sentiment well expressed. That explains why Sorenson is an Obama supporter (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-Q4-t.html?scp=7&sq=Deborah+Solomon&st=nyt). It also explains why so many think that Obama has a shot at creating a new kind of political landscape, like the one that Kennedy, for all his faults, started to shape before his assassination.

Will Obama change things? We can hope. The less one pays attention to the current media spectacle--where each candidate is forced situationally into disingenuous and sometimes ludicrous remarks--the better. What we can say about Obama is that he has a flair for rhetoric on par with--perhaps better than--Kennedy's. Let's hope furthermore that Obama, when given the chance, has the audacity to say what he really means. He certainly has the skill to do so. I haven't read The Audacity of Hope and I've only read parts of Dreams from My Father, but what I have read seems to prove that Obama can turn a good sentence, that he is a thoughtful composer of words, that he is--Joe Biden's gaff notwithstanding--indeed very articulate. I am assuming, of course, that Obama and not Ted Sorenson wrote these books.

On The Road

2008-05-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

For a while when I was in my early twenties, Cormac McCarthy was pretty much the only writer who mattered to me. There was something about his prose--the visceral and lyrical qualities both at once on the page, the contrasting tautness and then flow of the lines--that took hold of me. His writing displayed the control of language that I admired in Faulkner and Joyce and Hemingway, but in a context that brought new dimensions of meaning. McCarthy possessed what seemed to me a new kind of authenticity, a way of looking at the world without flinching. That was what I wanted to do in my writing.

I squandered a graduate career in creative writing laboring under his shadow. No one has suffered the anxiety of influence greater than I did in those days. At a certain point, I knew that I had to get out.

This was just after the publication of Cities of the Plain, a novel that seemed to exaggerate the worst qualities of McCarthy's prose--the way his lyricism tended to the overwritten and the overwrought. I cut out McCarthy cold turkey, and I never looked back.

Until now.

Used bookstore, April 27, 2008: a copy of The Road sitting on the new arrivals shelf. I pick it up out of curiosity. I read the first line. I'm hooked.

* * *

It's not that McCarthy was ever a bad writer, but he did stagnate more and more as the Border Trilogy wore on. The work that I never lost respect for was Blood Meridian, which portrays human beings--men, really--at their absolute worst: depraved, violent, thoughtless. No book ever rattled me as much as this one.

The Road makes a good counterpoint to Blood Meridian. Both novels are set in waste lands that are partly natural and partly of human design, but ultimately the work of some detached and very distant neoplatonic god that communicates marginally through elemental symbols: blood, stars, desolate and leafless trees, the lay of the landscape and the way the sun sets on it. (Or, in the case of The Road, the way the sun sets behind the clouds that perpetually cover it.) The difference that separates the landscapes of these two novels--one set in the past, the other in the not-so-distant future--is the presence of something in The Road that never shows up in Blood Meridian, and it is something that is evident in the very first line of The Road:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

In the desolation and ash of a post-apocalyptic landscape (where the only things alive seem to be a few ragged, dingy human beings subsisting on what canned goods--or what other human beings--they can find) there persists something that could only be described as a deep and enduring love--though McCarthy himself would never use such a sentimentally laden word for it. Here at the end of the world, though, this is what we have.

The novel that follows is tense, brutal, dismaying at times--and desparate throughout--but it never loses as its focus this core bond between father and son. The protagonist of Blood Meridian, known only as "the kid," never seems to know anything that remotely resembles this kind of bond with anyone. The child present here knows it as the central fact of his life in a place where even insects and fungi seem to be dead.

In general, McCarthy has, by comparison to some of his earlier work, wisely toned down the prose in this novel. Occasionally, a line might make the reader wince as it collapses under its own heavily descriptive syntax, but a few such lines can be tolerated. We get a lot of clipped sentence fragments, most often images of the landscape: "Barren, silent, godless." Or this line, with a Hemingway-esque barrage of nouns and modifiers, lacking a finite verb: "Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind." In a field the travelers see "The corrugate shapes of old harrowtroughs still faintly visible." A stretch of ruined city appears: "Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered." Eventually, the sea washes up: "Cold. Desolate. Birdless." In other instances, the sentences roll on without the hindrance of punctuation.

The overall effect of the description is sometimes stirring: who would have thoughts to describe "hands" of wire, a phrasing that reminds us of a vanished human presence?--and "corrugate" for the fields, which not only enables the reader to see the contours of the fields but also gives off the suggestion of a hard, unyielding quality to a once-fertile landscape? That landscape still bears a trace of human design though the people who once worked the land are well beneath it now. McCarthy's descriptions of landscape depend at once upon specificity (in terms of imagery) and vagueness (never is a particular stretch of road or a ruined city or town ever mentioned by name, though the travelers have with them a tattered roadmap and they themselves know the names of everything). This dynamic between the revealed and the withheld is one that urges on a mythical, legendary quality--this is someplace but it could be any place. The same notion applies with names; just as the kid in Blood Meridian is never identified by name, neither father nor son ever utters the name of the other in these pages.

In all, the style here is typical McCarthy--poetic and sometimes overly poetic, dominated by imagery--and yet the pace of this novel (the plot of which is not much more than typical dystopian/sci-fi fare) is brisk. This book is a quick, compelling, and easy read--what they typically call a "page-turner."

McCarthy resurrects for this novel the motifs that have become typical of his ouvre, and it is a good bet that many of the readers out there who have made this book a bestseller have skipped over the more complicated and esoteric allusions. Religious symbolism figures largely and frequently takes on a gnostic or neoplatonic flair: we get shadows, caves, flickering light, a mysterious God who chooses not to reveal himself in any very direct way. There is a running theatre motif as well that reinforces the notion of an acted-out fiction, a discrepency between appearances and reality. Together these factors develop the epistemological notion that the underlying truths of the world are somewhere inaccessible to anyone who walks this earth. We get a sense of characters who are part of the landscape but can only wonder at their role within it, characters who simultaneously know something and don't know it, "Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must." The second-person address here implicates us as part of this universe, and it is this quality--this making readers aware that they inhabit the same world that McCarthy's characters do--that separates his work from cheap fantasy and makes reading it such a powerful and affecting experience.

Throughout the novel, the word "pilgrim" shows up on a regular basis to remind us that father and son here are not searching merely for material sustenance but for a deeper, more profound meaning as well. The book gives us a glimpse of this kind of meaning, the force that animates the world. Father and son find it in each other: the father "knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." (It is poignantly worth noting that McCarthy, who seems patently emotionless in the few interviews he has agreed to, dedicated the novel to his young son, John Francis.) The child here bears a crude but ingrained bent for the rhetorical, and by the end of the book we are led to believe that he is, if not the son of God, at least a prophet with a vague resemblance, ready to spread the word.

Ultimately, the future apocalypse of The Road only disguises allegorically the condition of the present: the persistence of evil in the world, the fragility of life, the bond of kin, the mystery of the created world. How McCarthy, who has taken us from the Old West to a future age, will reveal that world to us yet again remains to be seen.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses Revisited

2008-05-07T19:43:00.000-07:00

An N.C. Wyeth illustration of a scene from Last of the Mohicans

Why on earth would anyone in the twenty-first century bother to read The Last of the Mohicans?

This is a question that resounded in my mind as I sat in my study slogging through the book. Why on earth was I reading it? In retrospect, I might say morbid curiosity, but that would be somewhat disingenuous, really. When I picked it up, I had some vaguely inspired notion that it might be fun. Some seventh grade memory of enjoying the book--and of being disturbed by the brutal deaths in it--had lingered with me, but as I read through the clunky narrative, all I could think of was Mark Twain's utterly hilarious critique, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Twain got it right; if for nothing else, you should read this book so that you can appreciate Twain's essay.

There are some entertaining action sequences, but nothing in the book can withstand more than marginal scrutiny. The faster one reads the book, the better it is; you can get a sense of things without getting bogged down in the sometimes nonsensical prose. For a novel that focuses so much on the role of the wilderness landscape, it can be awfully hard to get your bearings straight as you read. When Cooper's characters enter into a cave, watch out--you'll never be able to get the dimensions of the cave right in your mind or be able to figure out how it is that they seem to be able to see in the utter darkness of an unlit space. Somehow they do, though, without so much as stumbling over a single crooked stone.

The primary object of Twain's ridicule is something that plays a key element in the book: the preternaturally keen sensory awareness of the scout Hawkeye and his two Mohican friends, Chingachgook and Uncas. CSI has nothing on these guys. They can detect half of a day-old mocassin print in a dry creek bed and tell you the wearer's weight, height, eye color, and what he had for lunch the day before. From a bent blade of grass they can tell which direction their prey, the wily and unkempt Magua, is going and how fast he is traveling to get there. Hawkeye is always waxing philosophic on the Indian's natural abilities to understand the way of the forest. "Whoever comes into the woods to deal with the natives, must use Indian fashions, if he would wish to prosper in his undertakings," Hawkeye notes, but he is no slouch himself; he knows, too, that moss grows on the north side of a tree. This guy never gets lost. He's what you had before GPS.

To boot, we get a heap of taciturn Indians--some good, some bad--who seem custom made for the cigar store. We get fainting ladies, and it is with one of those damsels--easily more Walter Scott than early American realism--that we nevertheless find one of the more compelling themes, something that not only gives graduate students something to talk about in relation to this book but also makes it very American in a crucial and (if you can get past the patronizing and dimensionally limited tone) surprisingly progressive way. Cora, the older of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, is at least a sixteenth black. It's no secret that noble savage Uncas fancies doomed, sad Cora more than just a little bit, and it's true that he would make a worthy match to her stalwart temper. Had there not been elements of tragedy at the end of the novel we might have seen a for-its-time daring display of racial integration on the frontier of American possibility. We also see a hint of complexity in the principal villain, Magua, aka Le Renard Subtil, whose disgrace is in no small part a result of negative peer pressure from whites: "Was it the fault of Le Renard that his head was not made of rock?" he asks rhetorically--rhetoric being one of his specialties. "Who gave him the fire-water? who made him a villain? 'twas the palefaces, the people of your own color."

In fact, the collisions of race and culture in this novel--and the way Cooper embodies the attitudes of his times toward these topics--do make it worthy of study--to graduate students, at least, and to anyone who wants insight into the mindset of early 19th century Americans, or Europeans, for that matter, since Cooper was a bestseller at home and abroad. Unfortunately, that still doesn't make this book any easier to read.

Charlie and Other Roosters

2008-04-20T18:12:00.000-07:00

It was a Sunday morning last fall. We were walking downtown, Mass Street quiet and near empty. Edie in her stroller saw him first: perched on the bed-rail of a beaten Chevy pickup with his jaunty blue wings, russeted body, a dark green fan of tail feathers, red comb.

There was a man dropping off his wife or girlfriend at work at the hotel, or maybe he was meeting her on her morning break. They're locked in embrace beside the truck, but he sees us coming by, hears Edie talking, grins at us. He says, His name's Charlie--I've got him trained like a dog.

We stop so Edie can look at the rooster. The woman goes across the street to the hotel, back to work, and the man gets in his truck. Charlie sits next to him on the passenger seat on the way home.

There's something about a rooster that begs for anthropomorphism of the beast fable/cartoon variety. There's a direct line from Chanticleer to Foghorn Leghorn.

Theprimary factor in this, it seems to me, is one that seems in fact counterintuitive. The rooster's appeal is so strong because of a trait that is not found in humans: that it is the male of the species and not the female that appears to be all gussied up with someplace to go. The male chicken is pretty--proud, regal, cocky to boot, a damned fine looking bird in general. The brashness of the colors at a glance is balanced out by the subtlety of the tones when you look at a particular part of the bird. The fine coloration and the sturdy posture are entirely undermined, though--turned comic, ridiculous--when you take into account the limp flap of a red comb that clashes with the refined beauty of the feathers.

No doubt the rooster's pride is not hurt by anything I could ever say, and indeed I have nothing but affection for the dapper little fellows. Chaunticleer is easily my favorite character in Chaucer's arsenal: he's Foghorn Leghorn before cartoon animation. It's the same thing, in essence: madcap tomfoolery with a moral lesson. When a whole village full of people, various random animals, and a hive of bees all chase Reynard the Fox (with Chanticleer caught in his jaws) through the woods, those of us who grew up with Looney Toons know that we have seen this kind of thing before.

Though Chanticleer has license that we do not--he has seven wives--his follies are human ones amplified. Pretty fellow, he is literally the most hen-pecked of us all.

On Vultures

2008-04-02T19:08:00.000-07:00

Audubon's Turkey Vulture, Cathartes aura
---------------------------------------------------

It's spring, and the vultures are back.

Winter skies around here were characterized by bald eagles and red-tailed hawks, eagles by the water and hawks by field and trees, and of course the ubiquitous crow. The eagles high-tailed it out of here all at once when it started to warm up. The ranks of the hawks are diminished. Humble, homely, and massive, the turkey vulture with its gruesome red skull and vast silver-black wings will rule the sky by default between now and the first frost.

The crows seem puny by comparison.

2.

I work on the west side of town, the sprawl of suburban developments punctuated with open fields of yet-to-be-developed space and lined with gallery trees. In the winter, I can look out the window of my classroom to see hawks on the telephone line across the street. This time of year, I see vultures, right now as singularities, but later I'll see them in twos and threes. In the summer, on the highway between here and the outskirts of Kansas City, I will often see upwards of a dozen of them circling over the woods. I sometimes see a batch of them on the roof of a barn near my mom's house in Desoto, Kansas, huddled about in various states of disarray. By appearance, the vulture seems an untidy bird, its feathers always a little out of place, disheveled.

Like hawks, vultures appear to be expanding in number--either that or they are simply succumbing to the promise of greater amenities in the suburbs. Maybe they are just getting over their initial shyness around people--but that doesn't quite seem right because the vulture seems to be an entirely unselfconscious type of creature. A few years ago, I saw them only on the jagged edges of town, near open fields or woods. Twice already this year, I have seen vultures flying over my own neighborhood of Old West Lawrence, right in the middle of town.

On my way home from work, sometimes, I drive through their shadows. I crane my neck to the window following them. I've got to be more careful about this so that I don't end up on the menu anytime soon.

3.

A hawk in flight soars; it glides on currents of wind and climbs them. There is something sharper and tighter about a hawk's maneuvers than even those of an eagle. With its short, stout wings, the hawk works in a more confined space.

A vulture, in contrast to both, kites. It takes up vast amounts of sky. A vulture always looks a little flimsy despite its massiveness, its wings a little papery, blown about by the wind. The hawk seems always to be in control. The vulture seems always to be at the mercy of the skies, even though it is a much larger bird. If you've ever seen a novice skier lose control, careen too quickly down the slope, you've seen a vulture slide along with the wind, seemingly unable to brake.

Despite their reputation, I can't think of them as sinister. Bumbling, clumsy, graceless--but still, there's something about them that I like, something endearingly comic.

4.

The vulture is a mute species; it has no voice box. Unlike other birds, vultures compose no love songs; they communicate by huffing and wheezing. What cool means of seduction one vulture can offer another, I've no notion. Nor can I imagine what crises of self worth they must undergo now, listening to the spring birds with their gentle, intricate trills.

The vulture is generally gregarious, huddling with others of its kind in big bands in the tops of trees, splitting up into singles in mating season. Never altogether sad nor merry, that's how I imagine them most of the time.

Dutiful servants of nature, they've got a job to do, unglamorous but essential, like taking out the trash. Their literary equivalent is Prince Hamlet's gravedigger, and they serve a similar two-fold purpose: comic relief, disposal of the dead. Unlike other raptors, their eyesight is not so keen; they sense carrion by smell. Their talons don't have the vise-like gripping power that hunter birds possess. Vultures circle awkwardly, lazily, on updrafts until they scent something or until the wind batters them some other way. The green and verdant landscape opens up beneath them, for them, but they have no songs to sing in celebration of it.

Their heads are bare so that they can plunge them deep into the carcasses that others dare not devour.

5.

On the expansion theory, maybe the weather conditions have been good for them, or maybe there's less of a certain pollutant since the Farmland plant closed down on the other side of town. Maybe the stars are aligned, or maybe the moon or whatever goddess watches over them just said, go ahead.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Historical Spectacle

2008-03-29T11:02:00.001-07:00

Queen Elizabeth I's short but powerful speech to her troops at Tilbury was, in many ways, both the highlight of her reign and one of the best political speeches of her era. The most compelling aspect of it is Elizabeth's understanding of her audience and her attempt to treat with them on common ground. In short, she shows them that she cares, that she appreciates their being there on the anticipated battlefield. How much this is genuine sentiment and how much it is merely geared to buck up soldiers facing a numerically superior force we will never know. Regardless, the speech still stands impressively more than four hundred years after the fact. Boldest of all here is the Queen's direct address of the issue of her gender: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too." Elizabeth's task, no mean one, was to convince her soldiers that she, a woman, could lead them as well as--or better than--any man. That she ruled so long and so peacefully--comparatively, given the religious strife that had so torn the country during her lifetime--is a testament to her ability to win over the people.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age seeks to capture something of the woman-monarch's matchless charisma and to recreate the tense drama of this moment at Tilbury, when the emerging British empire is nearly at the mercy of the great Spanish Armada and the ten thousand troops it threatens to bring to England's shores. In addition to the opening address ("My loving people"), the film retains only one line of Elizabeth's speech, closely paraphrased: "I am resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all." Instead of the head-on tackling of gender dynamics and the repeated invocation of God, kingdom, and people--the three domains of the Renaissance world-view--we get references to the sails and guns of the enemy and a Crispin's Day-like promise either of glorious victory or of defeat equally glorious. On paper and in the film, Elizabeth's speech comes off as much more genuine and much less Machiavellian than good King Henry V's, though we must acknowledge that she was certainly not without her Machiavellian qualities. Her speech in the film, however, adds a greater dash of battlefield flavor than the original possessed. It urges the good fight while simultaneously foreshadowing the computer-generated spectacle at sea we are about to witness.

The staging of this speech in the film begins with the right approach--woman warrior in steel cuirass and viking-maiden braids--and then sells out language-wise in favor of boosting the plot dynamics. It's a disappointing moment for Elizabeth I enthusiasts, who might possibly have sat through the preceding hour and a half of film waiting specifically for the delivery of this speech, but obviously we are not the target demographic. Elizabeth really did wear a plate-armor breastplate, but the sails of the Spanish Armada were not likely to have been visible from Tilbury and they certainly did not run aground en masse on the English coast (the fleet was near Ireland when it sustained its heaviest losses). Elizabeth did not look out across the windy surf to see their burning wreckage, as she does in the film. Of course, historical accuracy has been sacrificed here for the sake of narrative momentum, but no matter--dramatists have been rewriting history since the birth of the written line. The problem here is how cheap it all sometimes seems.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is not a bad film, just a disappointing one. We might expect something better than what it has for us. What it does offer is an overview of the major themes of the middle parts of Elizabeth's reign, picking up where the first Cate Blanchett-driven Elizabeth film left off ten years ago, Elizabeth's status as monarch solidly established along with her commitment to the preservation of her own celibacy. Thus we start out firmly embroiled in the personal-political dynamic that informs the age of Elizabeth: in order to maintain power, Elizabeth must rule alone. Whereas male rulers, such as Elizabeth's own father, would literally kill for the opportunity to produce a male heir, Elizabeth seemed to have cared less about all of that. She knew that her legacy would be established solely by her own words and deeds.

The particular revisionist focus of this film involves the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism--or, as writ in this film, the conflict between liberal, enlightened religious tolerance and religious extremism. Clearly, this epic struggle has been played up in the film to resonate with modern viewers. Philip II of Spain represents the dark side of the religious spectrum, declaring essentially a holy war (that very phrase is used) against the English in response to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Little is made of economic or political objectives that may have motivated Spain to wage war against the English. Elizabeth is presented as the prototype of moderation in religion, and it is true that under her the Church of England emphasized adherence to outward shows of ceremony over inward matters of faith. In other words: show up for services on Sundays, but believe what you want to believe. Such a stance was a political expedient in a country in desperate need of reconciliation after decades of faith-based strife, but it also proved to be a key development in the birth of religious toleration. The only Catholics the queen seems to have persecuted were those who were trying to kill her--and fair is fair in that regard. But the tones taken on here in the examination of this conflict seem overly exaggerated without the full political context. That the war between England and Spain was more about religion than it was about empire--this is a hard sell. In The Golden Age, it's the past that gets sold out; the blunt imposition of our modern concerns overrides everything in order to give the viewer a chance to identify with the world of the film.

The primary element, though, at work in this film is personal and dramatic--at times melodramatic--and again it involves a fair degree of historical whitewashing. I am speaking here of the relationship between the queen and Sir Francis Drake. Historically, Drake was a pirate, an explorer, a shameless opportunist; he is frequently identified as an instigator of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, Drake (Clive Owen) is a roguishly handsome pirate with a heart of gold and a keen smile, an explorer, a bit of an opportunist in the Han Solo tradition but ultimately loyal to the queen, and there is no mention of the slave trade, only his interest in the native inhabitants of the Americas. The writers have also grafted elements of Sir Walter Raleigh into his story. His only betrayal is an affair of the heart; unable to love the Virgin Queen, though they do in fact fancy each other more than just a little bit, he makes it with her lady-in-waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish), whom he marries in secret, thus landing himself in prison until the queen goes to him in her hour of need. Of course, he is the only one who can pilot the sixteenth century British version of the Millennium Falcon and lead the underdogs to victory against the evil empire.

All of this is fine, really, and I am mocking things a bit just because it is easy to do so. What makes this grand historical spectacle so hollow at times--what makes it seem cheap--is the wooden dialogue. Drake's lines, in particular, are often groaningly awful. "We mortals have many weaknesses," he wisely advises the queen when she faces a moment of self-doubt; "We feel too much. Hurt too much ... All too soon we die. But we do have the chance of love." Worse still, when Bess comes to visit him aboard his ship:

DRAKE: This is my life, Bess.
BESS: It seems to me a lonely life.
DRAKE: Sometimes. But it's the life I've chosen.

Such lines are chiseled to match the set of the jaw on Clive Owen's face, but they don't well make good script or, for that matter, match the tone of the period. Later, Drake tells Bess when she faces a crisis of loyalties, "We're all humans"--but this kind of understanding of the nature of humanity seems more a product of the golden age of Oprah than of the golden age of Elizabeth. At the very least, it relies on an understanding of what it means to be human that, if Harold Bloom is correct, wasn't invented until Shakespeare started writing in the decade that followed the defeat of the armada.

There are other objections we might raise here. I find it hard to believe that Elizabeth would have so many qualms as she does here about the execution of her cousin Mary (Samantha Morton), especially in an age of so many commonplace executions and the public posting of body parts. The proto-scientific but also Oprah-fied sage advice of Mary's personal wizard, Dr. John Dee (David Threlfall), is a little hard to stomach at times. Only Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), the queen's councillor and spymaster and an early purveyor of a gritty realpolitik, comes out with nary a scratch.

It is a difficult thing to merge history, which demands facticity and realism, with romance, which demands simplicity of perspective, and that is why so many historical novels and films fall flat, especially to contemporary audiences accustomed to a greater degree of realism. The fact of the matter, though, is that any life of Elizabeth I, like any life of the famous and equally inscrutible bard whose works she may have enjoyed later in her life, must by necessity be an imagined one. The lines she herself wrote were too crafted to reveal the inner nature of the woman, and little of real personality escapes the carefully designed (lead-based) facade of white face paint she wore. In this regard, however--in the realm of imagery--Elizabeth: The Golden Age achieves the great triumph that makes it worthwhile for the Elizabeth enthusiast. As Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett in white face is eerie, shocking, sometimes frightening, strangely beautiful but also hideous, like a figure in a wax museum come to life--like something out of a horror film but with all of the terror stripped away, leaving only wonder. The filmmakers do not go out of their way to exploit the parallel between the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mother (how can they when depicting a Protestant society?), but it is there and ready for the taking. When Elizabeth appears, backlit and glowing amidst the gold figures in her chapel, she demands veneration. Later, holding Drake and Bess' infant child, we understand the appeal of this great ruler of men: "I have no master. Childless, I am mother to my people." We have no choice but to follow.

Diane Arbus and the Nudists

2008-03-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

Much has been made of Diana Arbus' photographs of the mentally disabled: accusations of exploitation or at least insensitivity on her part. I might argue that her motives in taking the pictures are largely irrelevant--that the pictures stand on their own regardless of the photographer's intent--but I'm too distracted to join the fray. It's all the naked people who have my attention.

As nudes go, they're not much to look at at first. Accustomed to the plasticized and the airbrushed as we are, we might not know what to make of such real bodies. A few of them might be considered attractive, but that seems besides the point. Take a look through the collection in Revelations. The pitifully scrawny, the average, and the obese all have one thing in common: each of the individuals photographed is utterly, completely comfortable in his or her own skin. That's what makes them fascinating to see. If Adam and Eve really did eat the apple, it's news to them.

The bodies I speak of were photographed primarily at nudist colonies, the whole enterprise of which seems to be a recovery of that mythological time before the Fall. After all, it was Adam and Eve's awareness of their own nakedness that betrayed them: "Who told you that you were naked?" My favorite photograph in this series shows a husband and wife in late middle age, resplendent in their shoes, in their cabin at a nudist camp. The man is the perfect picture of scrawniness, with thick-framed spectacles. The woman is sprightly, a little bit of style and sass in her pose. In short, the two look happy.

Of course, Arbus also photographed strippers and transvestites. She chronicled all sorts of people. In a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1963--the same year she shot photos in nudist camps--Arbus expressed the wish to document the "considerable ceremonies of our present." Of the present, she said, "its innumerable habits lie in wait for their meaning"--a statement that seems to suggest that the establishment of meaning is a retrospective act. There is, I suppose, no other way for a photographer to look at it.

Juno: A Father's Reaction

2008-03-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

My dad never seemed to have much interest in what I did during my leisure time while I was in high school. Granted, he didn't need to--I was by any standards of classification a geek and a bookworm and by disposition practically incapable of getting into trouble--but he justified his laissez faire attitude by stating that there was only so much trouble his boys could get into. With the girls, though--that was another story.

Chauvanist as this attitude is, there's a truth to it that any feminist--pick your wave--has to admit. Girls can get into a particular kind of trouble that boys can't get into. Of course, both male and female parties need to be involved for this kind of trouble to occur, but the boy has the option of cut-and-run. The girl doesn't.

Enter Juno, with a unique twist on this theme: it's the girl who wants to cut-and-run (in her own particular coming-to-term way) and the boy who, though he might not know what he wants, doesn't want to cut out. The reason it has taken me so long to get around to seeing this film has to do precisely with the subject matter of the film: I, like the male lead in this film, got a girl pregnant. Unlike Michael Sera's sweet-natured and bumbling Paulie, I am older and married (though still bumbling), and the woman I got pregnant was my wife. In fact, I have gotten her pregnant twice, and the product of the first such undertaking is a two-year-old who makes going to see witty and charming films like Juno virtually impossible.

The younger product (who won't be born until June) went with us to the movie and must have absorbed it with interest, albeit indirectly. Based on post-film discussion, I'd say that the film fired off some powerful responses in my wife and that some of this response must have taken the form of hormonal transmission to the little bird inside her belly. It was, for us, a film that was poignant in ways that it could not be for many other viewers.

What struck me about the film wasn't really the kids, who were perfectly endearing and harmless in their own way, but the adults. In particular, the film has three relationships: Juno (Ellen Page, as if you haven't heard) and Paulie, Vanessa and Mark (the adoptive parents, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and Juno's dad Mac and his wife Bren (J.K. Simmons and Allison Jannie). Juno and Paulie are convincing enough on screen but outside the world of the film rather improbable. Real teens aren't as witty as Juno and no one at any age (outside of Wes Anderson films) is capable of the blend of ironic-cool and naivete that Paulie embodies. (Paulie's a geek but cooler than he knows: he's totally retro and he plays guitar.) Despite their departure from the wholly realistic, Juno and Paulie are convincingly developed, which is what we expect out of good characterization. Vanessa and Mark, by contrast, are mostly foils for the younger couple: they're stereotypes of the suburban couple carried to an extreme, not entirely unrealistic but not entirely real, either. Nevertheless, the sting of the satire is there: Mark, the adult, who is supposed to be mature by virtue of his age and station, does the cut-and-run at the prospect of becoming a father; Vanessa, who has Pottery Barned to the max their house in the remote burbs, seems caught up in appearances, but her heart is golden. If the film has a message, it's that someone who wants to be a parent should be a parent, and that someone who doesn't shouldn't be.

The other relationship that sticks for me is not so much Mac and Bren as it is Mac and Juno. Mac's marriage to Bren is a second for Mac; Juno's mother cut-and-ran (thematic parallel observed) years ago. Toward the end of the film, Mac tells Juno (rather like the protagonist of a late Shakespearean play, one where the mother is seemingly nonexistent) that the relationship that will last is his fatherly love for her. This is a bit of a change from his initial response, when he tells Juno that he thought she was the kind of girl who knew when to say when. Mac's kinder words got to me because, like those Shakespeare plays, they say so much about what it means to be a parent. Mac faces the reality of a daughter in a predicament. I face the uncertainty of the very, very young/not-yet-born. I don't know what my kids are going to do. I'm hoping for the best, ready for anything.

A couple of months ago, Caitlin Flanagan, who writes thoughtful and challenging pieces for The Atlantic Monthly about issues affecting teenage girls, called Juno a "fairy tale" in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. I can sum up the fairy tale so: girl meets boy, girl gets pregnant, girl decides to give the child away, girl does so, and girl meets boy again and they go on with their happy, carefree teenage lives. Juno is a fairy tale then in depicting an improbable but ideal outcome that defies statistical fact in the lives of teenage girls, but not so in its depiction of the lives of adults. The fact of the matter is, nothing can prepare you for parenthood except the wish to be a parent, and Juno gets that right.

Cat Power's Jukebox

2008-02-26T19:26:00.000-08:00

Chan Marshall is one of only a few recording artists these days who seems to understand that the art of interpreting someone else's songs can be an act of creation on par with the act of songwriting itself. Each song on Jukebox, Marshall's fifth full-length release as Cat Power and her second album of covers, participates in an act of transformation. The original song is lost, submerged in a new wash of sound, and comes out something different.

The experience of listening to Jukebox is, at first, a little disorienting. Listening to "New York" and "Ramblin' (Wo)man" the first couple of times around, you might try to match the melody that Marshall sings to that of the familiar originals. Eventually, though, you would have to give up on this, because the melodies as Marshall reworks them are not the same. She could have written new words to the arrangements on this album and never been accused of theft. But that, it seems, is not the point Marshall is trying to make.

The iconic "New York" (the title pared down from the more familiar "New York, New York") takes on new meanings with Marshall's breathy reading of it. Some of the Sinatra swagger is there, but there is a quality to Marshall's voice that makes her version less about the braggadocio of taking the big town by storm than about the vulnerability of wishing for some experience that is beyond the limits of your own life as you have known it so far. She takes Sinatra's swing and replaces it with soul. The song will always be about taking a chance on the big city. Marshall makes taking the chance seem like a more risky enterprise than Sinatra did, but the risk here pays off. "Ramblin' (Wo)man," aside from taking liberty with gender role reversal, takes one of Hank Williams' only minor-key songs and spooks it out almost beyond recognition. On the original recording, Williams' voice is plaintive and apologetic--the voice of a soul in turmoil. Marshall issues no apology and makes no excuses for her rambling ways; she offers an explanation instead, stripped down as it is: "When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' woman." There's no other accounting for the mystery of her character. The echoing sound of electric piano is perfect for the mood Marshall evokes on these two songs: soul in the deepest sense, haunted, from the vaults.

As she did on The Covers Record, Marshall covers herself here, reworking "Metal Heart" from Moon Pix, filling out the song and giving her vocals a bigger sound, somewhere between the breathier hush of her earlier work and the classic soul-inflected tones she has pursued of late. Marshall will never be a belter like some of the singers from eras past that she seems to be drawing inspiration from, but her voice now is far from fragile.

Nowhere is Cat Power's new vocal confidence more evident than on her version of "Aretha, Sing One for Me," a somewhat obscure number by blues-soul songwriter George Jackson. The band is loose here in a good way, and the production is playful--listen for the whistling at the beginning of the track and Marshall's pronouncement to the studio engineers: "keep rolling." On other tracks, Marshall takes old songs and makes them new; here, the mood is retrospective, but it's an utterly winning track in all ways--impossible to dislike.

Really, there isn't a song on this album that doesn't profit somehow from its presence here, even if the result is not to overtake but to draw out new meanings from the originals. The Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion" (something of a Townes Van Zandt knock-off) takes on the opposite effect at work on "Ramblin' (Wo)man": these outlaw blues inherit a new sensitivity, and the cover, like "New York," exposes a kind of longing heretofore latent in the lyrics. James Brown's "Lost Someone" also holds up admirably. The sparse arrangement--unaccompanied electric guitar--on the traditional "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy" is pitched right for the song, which effectively gives the album grounding right at its center. (It also serves as a nice complement to "Moonshiner," another traditional song that Marshall covered on Moon Pix.) Dylan's "I Believe in You," from the odd and somewhat baffling Slow Train Coming (a fifty-cent bin favorite across the country), fits nicely with a chunky guitar riff powering it from start to finish. The tempos start to sag a little toward the end, but Joni Mitchell's "Blue," while doing nothing to inject energy into the album, is lovely nonetheless: thin and ghostly but aching with a soulful quality that again brings new dimension to a song that is now approaching a certain age.

There's one more gem here worth drawing attention to: the album's only new original track, "Song for Bobby." This is a quiet, understated song that brings to mind Cat Power albums of the past but also shows how much her music has refused to stay still. It also gives us reason to look forward to more original songs from Marshall in the future.

On Reading Keats

2008-02-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

Helen Vendler once called John Keats' "To Autumn" "one of the best poems in the English language" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Donadio.t.html?pagewanted=1&sq=Vendler&st=nyt&scp=1). I can't argue with her--I wouldn't dream of it--but I will say that it has taken me years to come around to an appreciation of Keats.

A few years of teaching poetry to high school students yields a simple explanation of what makes Keats so hard to appreciate: we don't read or hear with the same ears today. We stumble over the words, sometimes even the ones we know. Reading is re-reading, and we generally don't have the patience for that. Unless you grow up cultivating an ear for the musical quality of English verse, it takes years to develop your sense of sound. In teaching Keats, what I have discovered, though, is the joy of reading his poems aloud. "Joy" isn't a word I use often or lightly, but it applies here.

To take in the full effect of iambic pentameter, you have to learn to hear it twice at once. You need to learn to hear the steady beat of the iambs, and you need to hear the fluidity of the melody that surrounds this beat: the natural flow of the line. To read properly, you have to see both on the page. To hear properly, you have to listen for both--and you have to read it out loud. This is the music of English poetry from the time of Chaucer to the Modern era, and although we don't tend to use it much anymore, that doesn't mean that it can't sing to us now.

When we read out loud in class, I normally make my students do the work. With poetry, they take turns; they go around the room and read to a significant punctuation mark (period or semicolon, usually), or sometimes they practice "spirit reading"--where you start and stop as the spirit moves you. This year, I let my students perform a spirit reading of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," but then I told them that I was going to read "Ode on a Grecian Urn" myself. I wanted them to hear it the way I hear it, after having worked on the reading for years. I wanted also, somewhat greedily, the experience of reading the poem aloud.

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" gives us Keats' initial statement on the power--transportive as much as it is transformative--of poetry. Transport figures large in the sense that the speaker claims to have "travell'd in the realms of gold" but not to have truly breathed the "pure serene [air]" of far-away lands until reading Homer--specifically, Homer as mediated through the Elizabethan translation of George Chapman. In Keats' envisioning of him, Homer ruled a "wide expanse" of the ancient world "as his demesne"--that is, as though he were the lord of a feudal territory. Five years later, Shelley famously expressed a similar notion to what Keats hits on in this poem when he said, in A Defense of Poetry, that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." (That Shelley's statement came five years after Keats' poem--and the same year that Keats died--is of little consequence; the two poets are of the same moment and ideas surely ran back and forth between them.)

In "Chapman's Homer"--as in Shelley's "Ozymandias"--the speaker's experience of the ancient world is mediated by time, history, and art, and in the process gives example to a great talent that the Romantic poets had for embedded narration. (Blake also does this to some extent in both versions of "The Chimney Sweeper.") This same method is used to convey a message of devastating irony in "Ozymandias" and a message of sublime inspiration in "Chapman's Homer."

In "Ozymandias," the "frown," "lip," and "snear" of a terrible king are the means by which he conveys his famous message ("I am Ozymandias, king of kings, / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."). A sculptor transfers that message to stone. Time wears away at the stone, altering the message and shattering the statue to pieces. A traveler sees the crumbling remains of the ancient statue, and conveys the message to the speaker. The speaker tells us, and the message has changed: even the king of kings is subject to the decay of time, and we ourselves have little hope of withstanding eternity.

In "Chapman's Homer," the bard is figuratively the king, and his message is translated by Chapman and received by the speaker. The speaker relays it to us, only the content of the message has been lost in the transfer--there are no details evoking the great contest for Ilium or the voyages of Odysseus--it's like the statue of Ozymandias without the inscription--and what we have instead is a statement on the power of poetry. Shelley designs for us a message of despair and the inevitable wrack of history, while the message of "Chapman's Homer" is in praise of the ecstatic, transportive power of literature. (This same message was later transposed to the domain of visual and sound phenomena in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and together the two poems cover the spectrum of aesthetic experience.)

In effect, Homer is more than anything else an idea in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Specifically, he is the idea of the poet, and the power his work gives form to is the power that accompanies any great work of literature. Keats tells us about the transformation brought on by his experience of reading, not about the text itself, and in this context the claim of the poem is that reading is not only an experience but also an act of creativity in and of itself. The experience of reading is first related to the discovery of a new orb in the heavens--"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." But before Keats can travel further along these celestial lines, he changes tack and grounds us with a more developed earthly simile: the discovery of the Pacific by European explorers. The only reaction that Keats can muster initially, upon reading Chapman's Homer, is identical to that of his imagined explorers discovering the Pacific--amazed silence. Thus Keats' poem also corresponds with Wordsworth's famed statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." At the first moment of feeling, the poet is stunned, staggered with awe. There are no words for it then. The words come later. In the case of this poem, it wasn't much later--Keats is supposed to have written the poem immediately the morning after an all-night reading session with friend Charles Cowden Clark.

Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transfers the aesthetic experience of studying the work of a great poet to that of studying intensely a single work of visual art, specifically the "Attic shape" evoked by the title. Keats goes as far as to claim that the urn "canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," though I wonder whether Keats would have stuck with that stance had he been pressed on the subject. Keats devotes the first three and a half stanzas to the sensual imagery evoked by the woodland setting that rolls across the surface of the vase: a lover pursuing the object of his affection, "winning near the goal"; a piper, whose unheard melody transcends in sweetness that of the heard variety; trees with their "happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed" their leaves; and a "mysterious priest" leading a heifer to the sacrificial altar. As in all of Keats' major works, the evocation of sensory experience is riveting and complex, sometimes contradictory; senses overlap in the curious and powerful kind of synesthesia that is Keats' trademark. In the fourth stanza, Keats takes us beyond the imagery directly evoked by the urn itself to imagine the "little town by river or sea shore" that is "emptied of this folk, this pious morn." In Keats' mind, the town is still there to this day, abandoned, wondering where all her inhabitants might be. This extrapolation beyond the surface of the vase's image and into the super-historical moment depicted by it is perhaps the most powerful expression in the poem of the kind of reality engendered by artistic experience.

Keats almost--almost--wins us over with his famed closing statement. Again in the vein of embedded narration, the vase itself tells us that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'" That, supposedly, is all we need to know. This statement corresponds with Keats' prose statement on negative capability from his December, 1817 letter to his brothers, where he asserts that the submersion of "fact & reason" and the ability of "being in uncertainties" defines the great poet. For Keats, "the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration" and achieves a kind of factual nature. Keats seems to mean that the aesthetic experience is all and everything, that it supersedes history, politics, morality, and even nature itself. If so, this is perhaps the epitome of the Romantic worldview.

I am eagerly willing to go along with Keats until I realize where I am: in the classroom, with obligations to my students, papers to grade, a paycheck to earn, bills to pay, wife and children and mortgage, etc.--all of the things that are important but beyond the purely aesthetic.

The fact of the matter is that Keats' friend Shelley was a cad for abandoning his first wife and their child to pursue new love--and his own artistic temperament. Beauty is not truth. But it is to Keats' great credit that he comes so close to convincing us that it is.

P. T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood

2008-02-07T19:24:00.000-08:00

[Warning: You may not want to read this review if you have not seen the film.]

Something of great significance—a gesture with much power and thematic resonance—occurs early on in P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Daniel Plainview, iron-willed hard-scrabble oil prospector, slathered in the raw gore of his trade, picks up the just-orphaned son of an oil worker killed during the digging of a well shaft and smears a black daub of crude oil onto the infant’s forehead. With such a gesture, Plainview, some kind of prophet of the oil industry at the turn of the last century, baptizes his just-adopted son into a new religion. This moment—imbued with all the articulated grace that Anderson and his formidable star, Daniel Day-Lewis, possess—communicates with the viewer viscerally. It is one of many great moments in this film, but perhaps in its simplicity and humanity the most profound. It is certainly the most hopeful.

This moment exemplifies the thematic elements at the core of There Will Be Blood, which is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil! In addition to being a family drama (minus the family, more or less), There Will Be Blood does something rarely seen in American film: it perfectly explicates the two impulses that founded our nation and sees them out to their logical conclusion. Of course, the Enlightenment-influenced revolutionaries of the late-eighteenth century founded our government. But the Puritans who preceded them set the cultural standard that has persisted to this day, and they operated on two drives: religious extremism and capitalism. Over time, these elements became sometimes isolated and even set at odds against each other. Both of these factors are at work in There Will Be Blood, separated out but still insinuating themselves within and around each other, their volatile equilibrium threatening to give way. Although Daniel Plainview displays an open contempt for the rampant Pentecostal Protestantism that grips many of the people around him, he is not by any means a godless character. A different kind of enthusiasm--an entirely more terrestrial one--possesses him. The rituals of the oil economy are the binding ties of his church.

Plainview proselytizes in evenly measured, plainspoken terms when he comes to a new town to deliver his pitch about how he is the best man to take control of their underground resources. He is convincing enough, knowledgeable in his trade, perhaps even a fair trader early on. But Plainview is near monomaniacal in his drive, of the same ilk as Captain Ahab; a landlubber, however, Plainview is perhaps closer to Thomas Sutpen from William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! When Plainview buys out parcel after parcel of land to pursue his ambition of building a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, we come to see Manifest Destiny acted out in miniature. This makes There Will Be Blood achieve a kind of American-ness in a way that Moby Dick achieves only metaphorically. America is about geography. Sutpen understands that, and Plainview understands it as well. For Plainview, it is not enough to merely own the land--he has to suck it dry. Still, the similarities to Melville obtain, and the image of oil-men washing their hands in crude oil in this film seems clearly to allude to the crew of the Pequod washing their hands in spermacetti oil.

The primary threat to Plainview's livelihood is initially the earth itself: it takes a good bit of work to get that bubbling crude started, and once it spouts the stuff can hardly be contained. This is man versus the elements. A new threat emerges, however, to counter Plainview's hold on the ground: the threat is not religion itself but rather one particular minister, whose ambition rivals that of Plainview himself. Along parallel lines, Day-Lewis's spectacular performance as Plainview is almost upstaged at times by the antics of Paul Dano, who plays not only the preacher Eli Sunday but also (briefly) Eli's brother Paul. The twinness comes to full effect only at the end of the film, when prophet becomes confused with profit, and we are given a clearer vision of how things truly are. (In fact, I wasn't sure that "Paul" was not simply an alias that Eli used until I saw both names listed separately in the credits.) Eli is an excellent raver, and the scene in which he performs an inspired act of faith-healing upon an old woman is, as Plainview puts it afterward when paying respects to the preacher, "a goodamn hell of a show."

The central conflict then that takes over the story is that between Plainview and Sunday--between capitalism and religious extremism, that is--and the central scene of the film is Plainview's reluctant baptism into the church. Sunday wants Plainview for his church--and he wants Plainview's money for his church. Plainview clearly regards it all as superstition, but Sunday gets his way. Plainview wants land; church members own it. Sunday cannot take Plainview's soul--it seems that he might not have one--but he can get what he wants, which is a nice show in front of the congregation. This is one of the few well-lit scenes in the film, the light provided by an open-air window in the shape of a cross behind Sunday's alter. Plainview's baptism is real and fake at the same time, an honest but forced statement of his transgressions, a washing in the light and in clean water--not oil, for once. Plainview clearly isn't saved.
The emotional core of the film--since Plainview's emotive range is so clearly limitied--is Plainview's adoptive son, H.W. The relationship between father and son is the only thing that humanizes this driven man in a way that enables us to identify with him. H.W. (Dillon Freasier) is taciturn to begin with, eager to assist his father, and (especially in context--he doesn't have much competition) altogether endearing. His interaction with Eli's little sister Mary is the only touch of romance, innocent as it is, in an otherwise nearly sexless film. When H.W. loses his hearing in an oil derrick eruption and subsequently starts to act out on his frustrations, the viewer becomes distraught, not only out of sympathy for H.W. but also because we know that he is the only thing keeping Plainview at bay. The question is whether the adoptive bond is strong enough to withhold the scalding mania that Plainview holds inside his head.

What does Daniel Plainview want? To some extent, this question cannot be answered. Anderson's film is remarkable in part for its retroactive perspective. Plainview forcefully and accurately embodies the attitudes behind turn-of-the-century Realism, and as such he is a pre-Freudian creature who does not know or even wish to know the forces that drive him so relentlessly. One thing that is clear, though, is that he--again, like Thomas Sutpen--wants family. More accurately, perhaps, he feels the absence of it, and true to the title there is a growing, parasitic suspicion in Plainview's mind that if there is not blood between kin there is not kin. This suspicion seems to take over at the end, and when Plainview disowns H.W., we see the worst in him. Plainview is too devoid of tenderness, it seems, to marry and father his own offspring, or for that matter even to consort with the employees of a brothel when he briefly finds himself in one.

The film includes one lamentable aesthetic mistake, aside from any objections we might have to the film's ending. Plainview’s killing of a man who claimed to be his brother—and who got away with it for some time—is distracting. Yes, Plainview felt more than cheated—he was wounded to the core by the very theme that afflicts him throughout the film, his lack of family. He has no blood ties to anyone else in the film, it turns out. In essence, though, the problem here is that this act detracts from the viewer's focus: we wait for fall-out, but none ever comes. Perhaps the lack of reaction merely shows that Plainview can commit murder and then never let it trouble him again. This act diminishes the impact of the things around it, though. It is clear a few moments earlier that Plainview determines that the man is a fake. There might be better reactions here that don't disturb the narrative momentum so much. This is the only verifiable moment when Anderson shows a lack of appreciation for the value of subtlety in this film. Sometimes understatement is better, which is a lesson that few American filmmakers seem to understand. Otherwise, though, in this film, it is a lesson that P. T. Anderson has mastered, taking in as he does the colors, the landscapes, and the subdued pacing of Hollywood's maverick directors of the 1970s.

The end of the film marks a major shift in tone, from elegiac American realism a la Terrence Malick to a Scorcese-esque grotesquerie of violence. The shift may be a mis-step, but once the new tone is set, it is consistently developed, at least, and artfully executed.

The big question that the film leaves us with is this: What's next for P.T. Anderson? (Another question is what's next for Day-Lewis, who makes few films but is, for my money, the best performer making the rounds these days.) To say that this film is something of a departure for Anderson is understatement. Not that earlier films such as Hard Eight or Boogie Nights were bad, but there is nothing in them that suggests that Anderson had a film like this inside of his head waiting to get out. Though There Will Be Blood might stop just shy of indelible classic, it is a powerful cinematic endeavor. If Anderson persists with films on par with this one--which achieves a kind of timelessness in its universality--legends will emerge. What did Shakespeare do in the 1580s? What did Robert Johnson, who had been a lackluster guitarist in his earlier days, do to acquire his masterful mature style? Story has it that Johnson made a pact with the devil. Anderson's devil is Daniel Plainview. Let's hope that they keep dealing.

Satan Is Real: Milton, Shelley, and the Louvin Brothers

2008-02-01T18:10:00.000-08:00

The story behind the cover of the Louvin Brothers' 1960 Satan Is Real album is the stuff of country music/folk-art myth--it's like something out of a Flannery O'Connor story come to life. Ira Louvin soaked old tires in kerosene, buried them in rocks, set them on fire, propped up a hand-painted twelve-foot devil, and stood in pristine white with his brother Charlie while the photographer snapped pictures--and while the heat from the flames caused the rocks around the brothers to crack and split like real brimstone. The point: the devil is real, sin is real. Satan Is Real.

When you hear the Louvin Brothers sing, you're tempted to believe in the reality of the devil, no matter your religious persuasion or lack thereof. But in fact, the Satan depicted here was only plywood, and despite Ira Louvin's bad behavior (he was the rounder, and brother Charlie the teetotaler; Ira knew all too well that sin was real) this fallen angel doesn't have much depth. Not so the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost.

In Paradise Lost, Milton strived to create something remarkable--something "unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Not only was the fusion of classical epic and Christian tradition untried, no one had ever before endeavored to parse out the dimensions of Satan's character in the way Milton had. Marlowe's Mephistopheles, for instance, simply delights in evil, and that is that. He is a walking embodiment of the idea of evil, as all good devils had been up to that point. Milton's project, to "justify the ways of God to men," required that he indicate the devil as the source of the first fall from grace experienced by "our grand parents." That is, Satan, in the exercise of his own free will, had to corrupt Adam and Eve, who acted also on the premise of their own free will. Out of this situation will emerge God's greatest triumph: the redemption of downfallen humankind through His "Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy."

For all of this to work, though, Satan must be a compelling and convincing tempter. He must possess depth of character. Satan must be real, or at least as real as Hamlet--which is pretty real. Like Hamlet, Satan is complex, convincing, and--if you can conceive of such a thing--morally ambiguous. That is why Milton's Satan, who through the poet's liberal imaginative faculties fills in the blanks left by the Bible, engages our imaginations and at times perhaps our sympathies.

As a thinker, Milton was something that is inconceivable to many of us today: he was both a religious extremist and a rationalist. Moses (invoked in Book I of Paradise Lost as the author of the Pentateuch) was obviously not a rationalist. Milton planned to remedy that situation by rationally explicating the problem of evil as part of his larger project. Paradise Lost is a logical argument for God's rightness, and only in an era of burgeoning rationality would a poet feel so compelled to explore Satan in the way Milton did. The Enlightenment, a later era that took the rationality of Milton's day several steps further, replaced religious extremism with judicious humanism. A yet later era, the Romantic era, replaced this judicious humanism with a belief in passion and the imagination; the Romantics by and large said to hell with rationality as well. What happens when you take away both the rationality behind Satan's characterization and the religious impulses that automatically make Satan the would-be ursurper and God the legitimate source of power? You get Percy Shelley, who claimed in A Defense of Poetry that "Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost." If you think that sounds like crazy talk, then you haven't read Book I of Paradise Lost very closely.

Milton was not quite "of the Devil's party," as Blake claimed, but he might as well have been. Of course, Milton could not have anticipated the attitudes of later eras and how they might transform the concept of his wicked Archangel. Skipping over the parts about Satan's devotion to the "study of revenge" and his "immortal hate" (and is it not sensible to hate a tyrant?--for Satan, that's all God was), we are left with a being whose appeal to the Romantic poets is all-too apparent: a powerful figure with an "unconquerable will" and "courage never to submit or yield." Satan embraces adversity and strives to find a way to overcome. Satan's grand statement to Beelzebub, when the chief of the fallen angels hails the abysmal landscape of Hell as his new home, is among the most powerful testaments to the power of mind and imagination in all of literature: "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." (And is there not an echo of Hamlet here, who could get stuck in a nutshell and count himself "a king of infinite space"? Satan's character in Paradise Lost is far more sensible and consistent.) Satan continues: "Here at least / We shall be free ... / Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav'n." Satan is no rebel without a cause, especially given the fact that God in Paradise Lost is a real flat bore. Milton accepts it as a given that his audience would not conceive of the possibility of seeing God as anything but the good guy. He didn't count on the coming of a genuine anti-Christ like Shelley.

All of this raises a fundamental question about the value of literature: does the meaning of a text emerge from the author's intentions, or from the reader's interpretation? Jaded citizens of a postmodern landscape that we are, we are unlikely to believe anymore that it somehow springs magically from the text itself. Perhaps it's not magic, but just like the tree falling in the forest without anyone there to hear it fall, the book on the shelf doesn't own any meaning unless somebody reads it. Regardless, there's no doubt that Shelley's interpretation of Satan is itself a feat of great imagination, and not one without legitimate grounds. For Shelley, at least, Satan was truly real.

Joel Sternfeld's Prospects and Perspectives

2008-01-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

We were graduate students then, my (soon-to-be) wife and I, and though the word "poor" might be an insult to those who face true economic adversity, we didn't have a lot of money, especially not the money for coffee-table photography books. But when a copy of Joel Sternfeld's American Prospects was discounted at the campus bookstore--someone, perhaps one of us, had thumbed through it a few too many times, and the edges were getting dog-eared--it became ours. This book was my introduction to the notion that photography could engage a kind of meaning that existed beyond the box of family photos I had grown up with. It's a notion that has stuck with me since.

The first compositional quality one notices in these photographs is the broad perspectives: the wide angles that generally define each scene, that allow meanings to emerge over time instead of all at once. The viewer scans the pictures, looking at one item and then another, trying to figure out which detail is most important and how it might then be used to assert the overall significance of the image. The photographs in this book were taken in the late 1970s and early 1980s as Sternfeld criss-crossed the country over and over. He needed the wide angles to get in what the eye sees, what he saw as a traveler. These perspectives force the viewer to do most of the work, to figure out what there is to see within the frame and how to interpret it all.

The first thematic quality that one notices in American Prospects is a pervasive irony. It's generally a whimsical irony, not a bitter one--light and amused, sarcasm at a glance but not in any kind of depth--and it arises most frequently from the juxtaposition of the natural and the synthetic. In one photo, a wind-beaten basketball post stands forlorn on a barren plain in an Arizona landscape that otherwise bears no evidence of the existence of the human species.

Other photos posit stormy skies lingering over a gleaming new subdivision or a line of tourists on horseback , escaping the hazards of the civilization they have created, trailing through a scrub-laden Arizona landscape. Where does our authority end and nature's begin?

In this context, photographs that do not ostensibly push this theme can be seen as pushing this theme. Sternfeld's picture of Harris Ranch, a California ag-industry giant, displays a cattle pen densely packed with animals. There's not a single jot of green to be seen within the fencing, which makes us question the nature of this domesticated arrangement and its relationship with our now rather quaint notions of the pastoral. Several of the cows are lined up along the barrier, staring into the camera, it seems, or staring out at the space that lies beyond the palings. Then there is the photograph of a bald-topped man, what hair he has dishevelled, barrel-bellied in gray slacks and white t-shirt, seen from behind and off-center in the foreground as he stares across a runway at the space shuttle Columbia, preparing for its maiden voyage.
This image might spur thoughts on the nature of space exploration and the limitations of habitable human landscape, but more immediate to the viewer it creates a contrast between this dumpy looking man and the sleek new machine that he watches from a distance. He's probably the one who built the thing, the viewer might decide. Elsewhere, trains shuffle off beside Eastern hillsides lined with telephone wires and redbuds in flower, and everywhere in the West subdivisions spring up out of the desert floor like mushroom colonies after a sudden intense rain. In Cato, New York, two hogs gaze thoughtfully into the distance while a decrepit outbuilding slowly sinks back into the hillside. Nature is taking it back.

Many of Sternfeld's photographs do just fine without any human subjects; the existence of our species is implied well enough. Others treat people as just another part of the landscape, and others still serve as fine examples of portraiture in a particularly Sternfeldian mode. The most ennobling example of this in American Prospects is "A Blind Man in His Garden, Homer, Alaska, July 1984," which recasts Alaska as Paradise and a blind man (presumably, by his CAT ballcap, a former driver of heavy machinery) as the sole resident. His hollyhocks extend several feet higher than his head, and the whole garden is abloom at once: foxglove, columbine, daisies, all improbably tall and densely clustered.

Perhaps Sternfeld's most complex examination of human character can be found in "Solar Pool Petals, Tuscon, Arizona, April 1979." An older man stands in the foreground on the right side of the frame on a patio stair that leads down to a swimming pool. The pool is covered with the lily-pad-like disks evoked in the title. An untied tie drapes over the man's neck. We don't need anything else to tell us that it's the end of the day--if nothing else, the tie does it, but the light in the sky also suggests it. The man's hair is graying, and his stance and attitude are nearly identical to those of the man watching the space shuttle--standing in the "work done" position--but this man is not willing to go as far as stripping down to his t-shirt. His face is away from us, his hands on his hips. A woman of indeterminate age (somehow younger seeming) lounges on a chair poolside. Her face is also away from us, staring down the distance, assessing the day. They could be father and daughter, or they could be husband and wife. They could also be complete strangers, for all we know. The woman seems to be unaware of the presence of this man--or she is deliberately ignoring him (my wife is definitively for the latter interpretation).

Does he look at her, or does he look over the edge of the brick wall at the cactuses, palms, and telephone wires that stretch out along the hillside, the city faintly visible in the haze below in the valley? Perhaps he is looking out over the low wall only to try to see what it is that she sees. We could never know at this point. There are layers of perspective here: the woman's, the man's, the photographer's, our own. It's only that last one that we can ever be sure about, but then we notice the photographer telling us to look at the man again, and the man telling us to look at the woman, and then the woman telling us to look out at that distant vision of the greater world that is beyond us all. There's a story here, and we come so close to it, but we'll never know what it is unless we imagine it. The photograph stops just short of expressing a meaning that extends beyond a lesson in perspective, but if anything we might find it all the more meaningful for that.
Also along human lines, "Studio City, California, June 1982" portrays a punk-rock Adam and Eve in a mixed-up tableau, banished to the suburbs, an orange tree behind them bearing some kind of forbidden fruit. The couple might be seventeen, but the expressions on their faces could just as well have been at home on the faces of a couple married forty years. Under this Adam's mohawk is a stern but straight-ahead set of eyes, and this Eve with her short bleached hair looks slightly askance, the slightest touch of a smile--or is it a smirk?--touching her lips. This is their Garden. One wonders if they are still there today. Based on the photograph, you might say that it is at least a possibility.

Another photograph, "Member of the Christ Family Religious Sect, Hidalgo County, Texas, January 1983," more overtly grapples with a religious theme. A young bearded hermit in what we take to be rough woolen robes has emerged, from the torso up, from his simple hermitage: a hole in the ground covered with two-by-fours. Here is a seeker, a man encountering God and nature and the elements, finding out what life is about, whether it be mean or profound, trying to figure out how to get to where it is he wants to go when the time for going comes. The setting is Texas, but the hot-weather brush and the hard-packed dry-dirt floor of the ground evoke thoughts of the Holy Land. If there is a perfectly cultivated field, crops lined up in unerringly straight rows, in the distance behind him, we can come to terms with that easily enough: wilderness has its limitations, its end points, and cultivation is certainly a Biblical thing--parable of the mustard seed and all of that. But then we look closer and we see that, in the hermit's right hand, near the fold of his robe, he holds an orange. Oranges do grow in Texas, maybe even on one of the trees surrounding this rough hermitage. But there's something about that orange that clashes with our notions of Biblical asceticism, something that smacks of luxury. Something about it suggests cheating--locusts and honey, but not oranges. The piece of fruit serves as a knowing wink to the viewer. (Does our hermit have some connection to Adam and Eve in Studio City?)

More than any of the others, though, one photograph brings together all of the major elements at work throughout American Prospects. This is also Sternfeld's most famous image. I have done my own part to make it that much more famous by sharing it over the years with my English comp students as an exercise in attention to detail.

There are so many things going on at once in this picture, "McLean, Virginia, December 1978," and the chief irony, duly noted by all who look at the image, is the fireman picking out (stealing?) pumpkins while a house burns down in the background. There are leading lines going every which way here, so many things to look at that I won't bother enumerating them all, but I will tell a story, how I once showed this photo to a colleague who grew up in McLean, how he thought he remembered the place, the event, how he confirmed my theory that the burning house was being used for fire practice, he thought, but then he wasn't sure. Which is to say that this is a story about how memory plays tricks with suggestion, how we see ourselves sometimes as residents of a past time and place that, when we stop to think about it, we're not really sure existed. I experience the same thing when I see images of myself running along the beach in south Texas, three years old. I can't remember if I remember the event or if I just remember seeing the pictures, hearing people tell me about it. The mystery of what happened inevitably remains mysterious despite our best attempts at analysis.

There are so many other photographs here worthy of discussion: a beautiful stream of rusted-out automobiles spilling down a hill covered with sparkling aspens in the fall; a U-Haul parked in front of a new home construction, a family's furniture spilling out the back of the van, and sitting on a sofa in the midst of it all a mother with her breast bared feeding an infant child; the Wet 'n Wild Aquatic Theme Park in Orlando, pumping out shimmering articial blue waves just a few dozen miles from the ocean; a group of three domestic workers waiting for the bus in an immaculate Atlanta suburb.

This book provided my grounding in photography, so that when I first came upon Susan Sontag's claim, in On Photography, that this medium provides the "worst form of mental pollution," I could hardly restrain my ire. Words can do anything: they can deceive or tell the truth, though more often than not what they do best is something in between. American Prospects proves that photography can be as rich as any other form of communication, as full of meaning or deception or some odd admixture of the two.

Felix Feneon's Exercises in Compression

2008-01-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

Has anyone read M. Feneon? Very few, presumably. More should join their ranks.

I refer here to Felix Feneon (1861-1944), and the above introduction was written with a glancing nod to the writing style he employed in the series of three-line vignettes pulled together in Novels in Three Lines, recently published by New York Review Books. The book collects Feneon's unsigned pieces written for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906, and while the ostensible purpose of these tightly constructed micro-stories is journalistic, literary ambition is also definably present. Is it possible to write a novel in three lines? Judge for yourself:

"Arrested in St. Germain for petty theft, Joel Guilbert drank sublimate. He was detoxified, but died yesterday of delirium tremens."

"Love decidedly has a hard time sitting still. Emile Contet, 25 Rue Davy, pierced with his knife his wife's breast."

"In preparation for his journey to the United States, where he will be buried, M. Stillman (car accident on July 18) was embalmed in Lisieux."

Each item has its own narrative arc, its own climax. Some are missing the conclusion, but great literature is judged in part by its capacity for generating artful ambiguity--for setting off possibilities without causing confusion.

Why did Guilbert drink poison? What is the relation of his drinking poison to his committing petty acts of thievery? And then the irony--detoxified and, presumably, granted a reprieve from death, only to succumb to the lingering effects of the poison later on.

Contet's spousal murder is one of many that Feneon recounts, domestic violence being a staple of French society in the early 1900s, or so it would seem here. The way the illustration so startlingly and conclusively develops the theme presented forces us to acknowledge a kind of retro-active understatement in the first sentence when we re-read it. The dry, deadpan irony is wicked in its intent.

M. Stillman evidently intended to emigrate to America. The move was permanent in a way he never intended, though parts of him, it seems, are meant to remain in France.

What Feneon is saying, indirectly, in each of these cases is that he has told us all that we really need to know. Either we can figure out the rest, or the rest is unknowable and we stare right in the face of life's mystery.

Throughout the collection, Feneon's "novels" are shot through with irony, particularly understatement. Again and again, Feneon returns to the same subjects. In particular: domestic violence; theft, murder, and general criminal activity; suicide; fatal and near-fatal accidents; elections; strikes; love gone wrong. Occasionally, he discovers to us a tiny episode of serendipity or of tragedy averted:

"M. and Mlle Mamette were canoeing down the Marne. At Bibelots-du-Diable they capsized. Assisted by M. Oauliton, the brother rescued the sister."

Amidst so much squalor and turmoil the reader begins to seek out these events, count the pages between them. Such moments are indeed few and far between. The overall picture is bleak, French realism that complements Zola but with great terseness. When one entry announces a simple festivity, we wonder what darkness lingers just beyond the fringes of the report:

"In Caen, on the esplanade along the river Orne, the students' fair (dances, wrestling matches, etc.) was jolly despite inclement weather."

Seems innocent enough, doesn't it? Don't you believe it. When a woman's one-hundredth birthday is celebrated, you wonder what kind of awful secrets she has harbored, what she has seen in her life, but Feneon doesn't tell.

In Feneon's world, homemade bombs full of powder and nails are frequently left on doorsteps, but more often than not they fail to go off. That leaves the near-victim with cold comfort--it's unsettling to know that someone wants you dead--and it leaves the reader puzzled, because we are given no explanation as to why these anonymous acts of attempted terrorism are being perpetrated. Labor disputes? Anarchism at work? Unrest is the rule of the day; this is a volatile place in history.

Outside of the political, the cruellest of tragic ironies are delivered, in Feneon's words, like punchlines. This makes the jokes of poor taste but for all that strangely affecting:

"Catherine Rosello of Toulon, mother of four, got out of the way of a freight train. She was then run over by a passenger train."

Other novels skirt the edge of mystery. We come close to a truth, but never quite arrive:

"In a hotel in Lille, M. H. Hallynch, of Ypres, hanged himself for reasons that, acccording to a letter he left, will soon be made known."

But the reason is never made known. Presumably there is one, somewhere, but there's likely not a soul alive who is privy to it now.

Some entries exercise a kind of extended compression, as though Feneon was pushing himself to even greater degrees of compactness:

"Their horse reared, scared by an automobile, and ejected from their carriage M. Pioger, of Louplande, Sarthe, and his maid. Killed. Injured."

Names and places figure largely in these pieces. The onslaught of place-names is bewildering to one who is not intimately familiar with French geography, but such detail does nevertheless give a sense of specificity and precision to these events: we know that they are occurring somewhere, in a place as familiar to the characters who act them out as our own neigborhoods are to us. Feneon often refers to characters by last name only, as though we might know who they are--as though we were co-workers, comrades, or neighbors. This assumption of familiarity is sometimes chilling, as in the case of the neighborhood kids whose play borders on the fatal:

"In the course of a brawl among children in Gueugnon, Saone-et-Loire, Pissis nearly stabbed Fournier to death."

In all, this catalog of a world of woe is strangely compelling. It makes the reader question the nature and purpose of the news. It's no wonder, you think, that the upbeat human interest piece has become such a staple of reportage in our culture. Such stories, trite as they may sometimes seem in the context of a slicked-over television news production, fend off despair. But Feneon forces us to look. His mini-tragedies evoke fear and pity. We close the book glad that we are ourselves still in one piece. We promise to be a little more careful next time we cross the street against heavy traffic.

[With all due apologies for the absence of accent marks!]

Darjeeling's Limitations

2008-01-16T18:17:00.000-08:00

To what end did Wes Anderson put together The Darjeeling Limited? This is a question that demands to be asked when viewing this film. Needless to say, perhaps, most good films don't demand that we ask this question.

Darjeeling boasts some nice segments, some clever cuts, nods to cinema techniques that were abandoned several decades ago and that now look fresh again. And no one could doubt Anderson's skill at using music montage: here it is The Kinks that make the scene, popping up to good effect throughout the film, though nothing could quite top Anderson's masterful sequence from Rushmore involving "A Quick One" by The Who. Anderson knows how to make music work on film.

Anderson's strengths also reveal his weakness: he's too hip for his own good sometimes, and much of this film reduces down to indie-cool posturing. Anderson's relentless reconfiguring of family-structure breakdown and rebuilding gives him something to work with, but by now his characters seem to be plodding through the landscape without any direction--which is alright as long as someone in charge (the director) knows where they are going. This is a journey film in which nobody (audience included) seems to have anything genuine staked on whether we ever get there or not.

Worst of all is the prologue to the main story, a short entitled Hotel Chevalier, the purpose of which seems to be to showcase the contours of Natalie Portman's body without actually showing any direct frontal nudity. It's supposed to illustrate the wound that is central to the inner life of Jason Schwartzman's character, Jack. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It's hard to buy into the fiction that such a relationship ever existed. The brazen go-to-it-iveness with which Portman's character borrows Jack's tootbrush is the only redeeming moment.

Excursions into the quirky and the unexpected gave Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums a noteworthy charm. At this point, though, we have come to expect the quirkiness, and for this reason it has lost its charm. The tailor-fit retro fashions displayed by Anderson's characters once made style seem like substance, but now they just seem like style, which on its own inevitably falls out of fashion. In all, Anderson needs to strive for something different--something more substantive--next time around.

I'm Not There

2008-01-14T20:12:00.000-08:00

Throughout I'm Not There, I was distracted by the music. If for nothing else, the film ought to be commended for making viewers want to listen to Dylan.

Otherwise, the film was hit and miss, nothing too profound in terms of insights into Dylan's character. For that, Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home does a fine job. In No Direction Home, Dylan himself seems mystified at how he could have embodied so many different selves, and in this respect Dylan is just like the rest of us, negotiating through different personas at different moments of our lives, only Dylan's grappling with different versions of himself is (literally and figuratively) amplified--and Dylan just happens to be the genius who reinvented American popular music for his time. My own favorite Dylan is the cynical, disillusioned folkie (or perhaps ex-folkie) of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde--Dylan as the master ironist whose cutting remarks spare no one, not even himself. In I'm Not There, it is Cate Blanchett who somewhat improbably--but to great effect--takes on this role.

I can never tell if Cate Blanchett is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen or one of the plainest. Regardless, she excels at playing a self-absorbed 1960s Dylan-esque asshole. Some of the other performances were intriguing or endearing, but Heath Ledger's 70s asshole Dylan ("Robbie Clark") made me want to run from the theater. There wasn't anything compelling about his louche debauchery or his casual affairs or about the Hollywood schlock that, supposedly, had torn him away from music and propelled him into a life of hollowness and vacancy devoid of any redeeming artistic quality sufficient to save him from himself. The gradual dissolution of his marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) was too gradual for me: I couldn't wait for them to split and get it over with. I didn't sympathize. It seemed like we had seen this sort of thing done so many times already in other films, sometimes to much better effect, and the fact that its purpose in this film was to say something about Dylan wasn't enough.

Marcus Carl Franklin's turn as a black kid self-identified as "Woody Guthrie" ticks off some interesting interpretations of what Sasha Frere-Jones termed "musical miscegenation" in a recent New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones), and it's hard not to like Franklin when he's up there on screen. Richard Gere's "Billy the Kid"/Dylan doesn't do much except to add some interesting imagery, though Jim James' performance of "Goin' to Acupulco" during this segment is powerful, probably the best of all the Dylan covers to grace the movie soundtrack.

We admire the noble failure, and for me at least I'm Not There qualifies as such, though in the future I would appreciate more of the nobility and less of the failure.

"Great Adaptations" and Anglo-Saxon Epic Poetry

2008-01-14T18:21:00.000-08:00

Sophie Gee's claim, in yesterday's New York Times Book Review, that both Beowulf and Paradise Lost are "now virtually unreadable" is the kind of thing I would expect from a high school student, not from a professor of English at Princeton (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/books/review/Gee-t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin). Of course, as Gee knows, they are indeed readable, even if it does require assistance to read them. What Gee means, in effect, is that they do not reflect modern values--either culturally or in terms of our literary sensibilities. They are not written in our language, and they don't reflect the way we live our lives today. This does not make them unreadable. Rather, it makes them classics, reflective of attitudes that preceded and helped to shape our own.

According to Gee, not only has the screen adaptation of Beowulf "succeeded aesthetically," it has also given the story "the kiss of life." To indicate, as Gee has, that the new film version of Beowulf triumphs by "picking up on [the original's] weirdest and hardest-to-parse particulars" is a stretch. Seduction of the sexual variety is not an element in Beowulf--at all--nor is the hero's succumbing to temptation of any sort.

Women in this epic poem lament for the dead, but they do little else. To say that this Anglo-Saxon epic is dominated by the masculine perspective is an understatement, but at least the women involved aren't playthings or caricatures. In fact, we sympathize greatly with Hildeburh as she weeps over her dead husband and dead brother, slain in combat with each other, victims of the heroic code of vengeance (the wergild, or man-price) that pervades the warrior culture. Nobody seduces anybody, and Beowulf, manly man that he is, dies a virgin for all we know. He's too busy making war to make love, and it seems that the Anglo-Saxons admired him for all that. That's exactly the way they wanted him to be.

The lure of gold and its potential for corrupting even great men is a prominent element--but the great men in Beowulf never fall prey to this. Rather, they espouse the Anglo-Saxon ideal of great leadership: the great ring-givers share their treasure with their people. That Beowulf himself is morally infallible--but absolutely mortal--is part of the point, and to take this quality away is to misread the poem. Beowulf occupies a special place in the canon of epic literature: not only is it the only surviving epic of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is also perhaps the only epic that gives us a fully human protagonist in a natural landscape. Beowulf's skills, though remarkable, are simply the skills we have but amplified: immense strength, fantastic fortitude, an iron-hard will, but no supernatural protection. There are no gods in Beowulf as there are in epics of the classical tradition--only a distant and vaguely understood Judeo-Christian Lord. Even the monsters--Grendel, his mother, the dragon--are more like forces of nature, our archetypal fears (to borrow language from Seamus Heaney's introduction to his stunning translation of the poem) personified.

The twists of the new film, which according to Gee point to Beowulf himself not only as the founder of his own myth but also as a falsifier of the truth, may satisfy a postmodern audience's skepticism toward hero-worship, but they don't present character the way Anglo-Saxons saw it.

What you have when you change these elements may be entertainment. It may be good or--for all I care, call it what you want--even great film-making. But it's not Beowulf, and what bothers me about the film is not the modernization of an ancient story but the claims of authenticity that promotional materials for the film make. Gee, in her essay, seems amazingly unwilling (given her profession) to entertain the possibility that 10th century participants in the oral tradition might have appreciated the story as it is: "Purists will object that none of this is in the original, composed sometime between the seventh and 10th centuries. Well, maybe not, but it should have been."

What do we expect from the literature of past eras? Gee ought to know that rarely will it pander to our world views, our values, or for that matter our need to be entertained. As it is, Seamus Heaney's popular translation of the poem is imminently readable, even to high school students, and even without the added benefit of Angelina Jolie's presence.

I'm glad Gee at least enjoyed the film.