Predictive Fiction and Frankenstein

“The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.” – Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

This seems good advice on which to recommence my novel. She incites her reader with the simple claim that, like all good ghost stories, her story is based on the truth. Isn’t this what readers of science fiction prefer over those of fantasy? (if such a distinction is helpful) Science fiction implies a building from science, from experiment and experience – from truth. Especially in predictive fiction, the author extrapolates from present reality toward something more than reality but not outside its structure, by definition. At least, that is the kind of science fiction/predictive fiction that I prefer.

If Frankenstein were predictive fiction, it is a successful one and not only for its readability. So many of its themes grow from reality and so many more intertwine with our present. We can make life now, in many different ways. We must take responsibility for life, on the planet, for the life we permit and the life we take away. The mutated fish can face us like The Creature; the IBF child can turn to its parents with the same demands; but most importantly, every ‘naturally’ conceived child can—and perhaps will – address its creators with need for justification for its origin. So we create gods and turn to them: to pose the question of our origins and our destinations

Last week, I was lucky to see a vampire ballet based on a short story by John Polidori, a friend who stayed with Byron and Shelly while she wrote Frankenstein. The dancing had its limitations but the costumes and the concept were remarkably innovative.

Now back reading Frankenstein...

Frankenstein and Life

We saw Frankenstein by the British National Theater in a film version at SIFF last week. I’m afraid it’s leaking into my writing. That’s not inappropriate, but I don’t want to let it color the work too much. The play and the book are about the creation of life, the mystery of the difference between life and death, the responsibility of altering life. (I really need to read the original Shelley.) These are themes I’ve been thinking and writing about for a while now, from my dissertation to my article on species to teaching Aristotle’s On the Soul. It’s exciting to teach that text now because it provokes us to discuss the relation between life and non-life which seems especially pressing in relation to current biological and technological innovation. (And that’s very trendy even to passive students.)

I couldn’t help but imagine that the Creature spoke for, say, a child who’d been created by artificial insemination by, say, two men from the genes of different men or women. How would the child feel about the nature of this conception? Would she feel “unnatural”? Brought about into a situation that necessarily marked her as different? Of course, the Creature succeeds insofar as it speaks for all children: Why parents have you brought me into the world only to allow me to suffer it? Why am I not like everyone else? Why have you brought me to life if only to die? At the end of the play, the Creature asks Victor who’s near death what death is? And will he die too? Even Victor, the genius, doesn’t know.

Keats on Winter

"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,"

-Keats, Hyperion. A Fragment

Great Thoughts

I’ve just discovered Kay Ryan. Well, really, I’ve heard about her for years, picked up her books and rejected them a dozen times, and now, finally, I’m captivated and compelled by her precision and minimalism. I’m thinking about Ryan, along with Rae Armantrout and Heather McHugh, in preparation to review a few other new books. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the lack of representation of women in literary journals, MFA program faculty and the like (for example, here in Slate). I think there’s some vague sense that women get MFAs because they have free time after (or when) they raise families and need to "express themselves" thus have only introverted and domestic, not Serious poems. This triumvirate of serious, funny and cerebral ladies should disabuse anyone of such presuppositions.

Today, I’m just thinking about Ryan, but the rest of the authors might come up in my public reviews. In Ryan’s more famous book, I entirely missed the poignancy and comic seriousness of the first, title poem “Say Uncle.” Now, I feel it and it hurts – like a strained lower back. It pulls you up in this truly painful way but with such suddenness and excess that you laugh at your own incapacity.

The poem that really got me, though, in my current disagreement with philosophy was this one:

Great Thoughts

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

Ryan sets up confusing and then counter-intuitive analogy. Why would one think that great thoughts do nourish as parents do children? Then, before explaining, she frames a second analogy: instead of like children, the thoughts are like the eucalyptus. What? The reader as yet has no idea what kind of great thoughts she means or what qualities they could share with that tree (scent? dusty greenness?). The next two lines resolve both apparent false analogies: great thoughts clear a space beneath themselves, perhaps poisoning the ground, perhaps taking its nutrients (I’m not quite sure how it works with eucalyptus: with black walnuts, it’s a poison.) So, well, gosh – the end of the poem tells me – it is awful here, next to great thoughts, if you aren’t having one, or worse, if you are trying to grow one, then, there’s no room. You must go to the fringe of the meadow and sow your seeds if you want any sunlight or soil.

That's where I'm headed, I hope.

Hyperion and Science Fiction

Because I have a lot of grading to do, I thought I’d read some Keats in order to fortify my soul before its drain. I have been thinking about Hyperion but I hadn’t yet reread it. In the poem, I find a wish for magic. That is a wish I understand. It’s the same desire that leads me to science fiction. Keat’s Saturn longs for the power to create another world, an alternative physics to the one he finds around him. Listen to him as he wakes under this gravity: “But cannot I create? / Cannot I form? / Cannot I fashion forth/ Another world, another universe, / To overbear and crumble this to naught?/ Where is another Chaos? Where?”

Saturn discovers what all adults who enjoyed childhoods full of fiction find: in this reality, radical creation is not possible. Fiction cultivates in us the expectation that life includes resolution and radical innovation: in stories – especially in fantastical stories – the heroine or hero can enjoy an adventure that include a changes in the very structure of space time. She lives forever (Tuck Everlasting), she can travel time (A Wrinkle in Time), she can change the form of her beloved (Beauty), she will meet a wizard who will deliver her intended loves (The Once and Future King). Such a childhood leaves a reader of fiction with a distinction sensation of Fall, l’ecarte: a separation not from grace but innovation: heaven is parted from thee, and the earth/ Knows thee not, thus afflicted for a God.” This earth does not recognize our secret self as the environment of Harriet the Spy ultimately acknowledged her potential and gave her super-natural powers. Keat’s Saturn expresses the love of ever reader and writer of fiction and poetry: the possible rather than the actual. Upon leaving the childhood of fiction, like Keat’s Saturn: “I am gone / Away from my own bosom; I have left/ My strong identity, my real self / Somwhere between the throne and where I sit / Here on this spot of earth.” My own “strong identity” formed when I read those books. To discover their ultimate impossibility is to be ever disappointed in “this spot of Earth.” Such disappointment can, of course, also provide great motivation to write, to make that world of possibility, so that “there shall be / Beautiful things made new, for the surprise / Of the sky-children.”

Poetry and Plot or Poems or Plot? On Nicholoson Baker's Anthologist (and a little bit about V LaValle's Big Machine)

"I've had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I've been genuinely interested in poetry -- interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing poetry it is a very different activity. Writing it, its as if the word 'poetry; is a thousand miles away. It's inapplicable."
- Nicholoson Baker, The Anthologist

Baker's narrator in this novel-on-poetry offers all kinds of tidbits that the writer-within-you will most likely identify with. ( Here's a link to a charitable and mostly accurate review. ) I think you can be pretty sure (if you're a writer) that you'll identify because nothing he says is too controversial or too particular. He -- the character -- is a distillation of any number of neurotic literary personalities into one burbling stream of consciousness. It can be comforting to listen to some sounds from your internal monologue echoed in the rambling, in a nice get-out-of-cartesian-isolation sort of way.

I respect Baker because he does little things like print "writing poetry it is" instead of "writing poetry is." That little "it" colloquializes the speaker's phrases and also makes a little verbal phrase that sediments a whole room -- context along with the activity-- into "writing it." There you are, in a room, staring off or at a screen or paper, wedged between things, at some distance from a window, working on a particular project. Just "writing" is contextless, theoretical, conceptual.

That said, I am reading the Anthologist because I got bored with Fermata. Sure, I found it titillating and fanatically well-written (for narrative details like the above "it") but ultimately, I found it broke Aristotle's recommendation to privilege plot over character. Coming from a poet, this may be unexpected, but I like plot. (I also think the best poems have plots: little intralinear dramas.) I love V Woolf and W James not because of their characters per se but because the way the characters propel domestic microplots. And I almost always prefer a snappy William Gibson novel to anything concerned with what you might label "personal discovery."

I haven't finished the Baker, but I'm not holding my breath for a reversal and recognition. Quite by contrast, I adored the finale and creepy, disgusting, allusive whirlwind of Victor LaValle's Big Machine. After finishing it, I looked backwards to his earlier Ecstatic but it didn't grip me with the same perversity of plot twist. I am looking forward to what ever he does next.

fallow blog

Shall I sow some words?


Poetry
I am reading Thomas Sayer Ellis's Skin, Inc. and finding myself in a complex socio-political net that he has constructed for himself and his readers. It must be exhausting to write with such hyper consciousness of yourself and your readership!

Fiction
I'm craving the last Stieg Larssen book the way I crave a cigarette two days after I've quit... the biochemical urge hasn't disappeared and without conscientious reflective restraint I'll have it in my hands before I can help it.

Philosophy
Speaking of reflective restraint, I'm reading some things Heidegger has to say about human reflective cognition in contrast to "animal drives" in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. It's fascinating to read Heidegger using the word "protoplasm" and writing about the irises of bees. Nonetheless, he persists in dismissing animal life as "driven" and "poor" in world. He also claims that they are never "free for" things "as such." As if I can ever be "free for" my cappuccino as such! Or a cigarette "as such"! I identify much more with his description of animals than humans. Ah, my friend Heidegger, reflection is less frequent than we think. Present-to-hand is a useful descriptive ideal but nothing more actual than the ideally feminine, masculine or free.

On judgment - for John

My new adviser just gutted a poem of mine and gave me some wonderful advice. On a practical level -- on the level of judgment -- he was totally correct about what the poem needed. But on a theoretical level, I am puzzling about this advice as a general stance.

He told me to review the poem and to merely look – as a formalist would – for the strongest language and excise the rest. In one sense, I totally agree: that was what this poem needed. In another sense, I am not sure I agree at all (nor actually that he does, given his respect for Eliot’s Four Quartets... but more on that later). In a way, I think it could be the strongest thing my poems ever do if I actually manage to keep that “weak” language and reuse it.

To reuse that language would be to do a pastiche.

John’s thesis at MIT was on pastiche. He presented a renovation of a movie palace in Brooklyn to a group of Dwell-magazine reading (latent) modernists on the review board: Eisenman, MyStudio, a few others. At first they tore him to pieces: his work exploited ornament, doing-up the movie palace in more curlicues and glitter than was in the original. But then the board loved him… because, I think, they realized they were uncertain of the origin and justification for their own predilection for simplicity. Why should we have white walls and white dresses, to use the words of Mark Jarzombeck? Of course, John’s building was also sustainable, malleable etc., and included a few other neat tricks; but for the most part, it called attention to the ground of contemporary taste. (Wow, John!)

I think in contemporary poetry we have a similar predilection for simplicity and consistency. We prefer language that does the same thing throughout, that deploys itself smoothly and with a bang at the finish. What if a poem went, dribble, Bang! Bang! Dribble dribble. Pop. And the end was so unsatisfying that you needed to start again? I think that might be interesting, and that very few people would like it.

Our preference for poems that – like my advisers's own – take one tone is a matter of taste. Of judgment.

Where do we get our sense of taste? Why is the one better than the many? Western metaphysics prefers one god, one good, and apparently Western poetry prefers one tone. We know that the subject dissolved, that god was gutted and replaced with the multiplicity of the world, but when we see art, we still want to know who made it, who’s speaking. Even when we read Joyce – with his multiplicity of styles undermining our search for “The narrator” – we read Joyce and we know who he is. We give exams to graduate students and ask them to identify authorial styles. We assume that a style commits a work to an author, and in poetry, I think we still identify a style with a tone.

Next summer, I think I might like to give a class on judgment. When we judge, we move from the singular toward the universal. For Kant, a determinative judgment – ‘all cows are bovines,’ or ‘this cow is black’ – collects the particular under the general ; an aesthetic judgment makes a judgment about the universal from the particular: ‘this chocolate is yummy’ or ‘this painting made of chocolate is beautiful.’ What is the beautiful? It is this painting I just encountered. What is a poem? It is this thing I just read. For Aristotle, we acquire phronesis from childhood; practical knowledge is acquired by practice. With Kant plus Aristotle – as in Arendt and Nussbaum – we find that aesthetic judgment is acquired gradually, from childhood, in history, by encountering many particulars: particulars so neatly crafted as to point the way toward the universal… without ever arriving.

In my course, I would begin with close readings of poems. I would say nothing general first; nothing about what poetry is. (The first words of the class would be “let’s read this poem.”) Rather, we would look at how one moves from a particular poem – and gradually, through encounters with many poems, in many circumstances – toward a general knowing of what poetry is. And, roughly, I found that to be this disruption of the logical “is/is not” with the metaphoric “like.” (Most recently, I saw this in the Carol Anne Duffy poem presented in a class...but again, more on that later...)

Indeed, more on all of this later!

the inimitable George Oppen

I have been worrying over my lazy, unpolitical, unworldly existence as a poet... occasionally philosophy seems justifiable. But poetry? What do we do for anyone but ourselves? We had dinner with someone who works for the Gates foundation on microloans and savings in Africa who'd just returned from Ethiopia. She may not buy organic vegetables, but her very vocation improves the world. And I... write.

So, here are some wise words from M. Oppen:

"So with artists. How pleasurable
to imagine that, if only they gave
up their art, the children would be
healed, would live."

- from "Some San Francisco Poems"

art instincts... against my instinct but intrigued

Denis Dutton's Art Instinct has been getting a lot of attention and recently in the New York Time Book Review I am terrified that this book on "Darwinian aesthetics" shares too much with the horrific Neo-social Darwinism in recent issue of the Economist that I whined about here. But I'm also intrigued... this is just intersection of the sorts of issues that interest me: art, biology, evolution. How can we talk about Nature and not lose sight of human-sized meaning for us? I've been thinking a lot about why evolution and speciation rarely comes up in phenomenology. It seems it's time to start talking about it with the number of Cambridge, MA evolutionary biologists making the New York times magazine. But does phenomenology have anything to say? I think it does -- what exactly I'm working out in that dissertation thing-y -- but it doesn't seem to be saying much yet. But how to begin a conversation in the dominant language ? "Instinct" is in the title of this book and not in, at least my, phenomenological vocabulary. Again, I come back to the problem of translation between two cultures...

space tools: scripts for architectural historians of the future

Last night, I joined J and another computational designer for dinner with some heads of the architectural software firm Rhino. (Yes, I was there just for the free food) J and his friend have been showing some Oregonian architects what's up with scripting in 3d and this was a dinner to celebrate their success. Now, personally I'm fascinated with how designers "think" in the digital design atmosphere. (I've written a little about it in an article that will be out next year) CAD is so Cartesian: the circuit of hand and eye is disrupted not just by a pencil but a bunch of algorithms, a pregiven geometry and a certain order in which designers can create form, volume, lighting and texture. (an order quite backwards to which they might work in the 'real' world: volume and texture come at the end for example)

So I've been mulling all this over and thinking that Rhino which uses a different geometry and nerbs modelling system is a good alternative to allow a little variety in the methods for making the built world. ... lest everything look like a textureless CAD fly-through. The CEO s of Rhino are pretty proud of their product... but surprisingly to me, they didn't seem to think much about the long-term implications for (and restrictions on!) design and the built world. They felt they were creating a neutral tool that just let architects do better what they'd always wanted to do. In no sense did they feel the tools prescribed design ... even when J pointed out that it was a little bit odd and awkward to think about volume after form.

I imagine art historians of the future looking back at the last 10 years of architectural design and excavating not tools, but scripts and codes. They'll be trying to figure out which version of Rhino or Grasshopper a designer might have access to in 2007 or 2013 in order to invent as they did. They'll be thinking about how space became something we understood in relation to the fly-through tool.

But it was a great lesson to me that Rhino developers didn't need to think about any of that to make the built-world altering tool they've created. Nor do they want to think about it in order to sell more or refine it. And they certainly aren't reading anything coming out of architectural theory ... yet again (pace my post yesterday), there seems to be a one-way sort of conversation between theory and practice, humanities and technology.

stuck between two cultures

I enjoyed this essay on C.P Snow's two cultures because I'm feeling quite caught between those two cultures right now. Well, no, more precisely I'm definitely from one culture -- the literary, humanities one -- and desperately trying to understand how to talk about the other culture. I just spent the afternoon reading up on 1950s developmental theory. This followed a week or so of trying to understand some evolutionary theory from the same time period. That actually wasn't the hard part... these articles tend to be quite readable, flush with quotes from Shakespeare and allusion to Goethe and plain language expressions of the experiments the scientists had attempted on developing cells.

The hard part was trying to figure out how these views of half a century ago compare to current views. This entails me tracking down basic developmental biology terminology that any kid with a B.A. in biology would understand. I found these newer essays much more impenetrable. Dense with abbreviations for particular genes and chemistry, they required much more work to translate into the language of my culture.

This process also put into relief some of the unique grammar of my culture. What people who might read what I write (let's assume these people might exist!) would want to know is what are the implications of these? what do these microscopic events mean for a person at a macroscopic scale? I have to formulate my sentences in terms of why and for whom. The claims should be at a person-sized scale.

And what in the world would it mean to translate those claims back into the other culture? Could there possibly be a developmental biologist out there interested in that project? Or, by definition, is this a one-way conversation? This latter possibility worries me even more than how little I know about genetics... or perhaps those are two sides of the same coin.

no, writing isn't all that fun...

Apparently Colm Toibin made a snarky comment about how he didn't take pleasure writing. The KR blog puts this in context I suppose I have to agree somewhat with Tobin... only he gets paid for his 'suffering.' So it can't be all that bad. But let me clarify... it's not that I "hate" writing. No, hardly. But it's certainly not "fun" (like, say, playing shuffleboard or going iceskating). At the least, the pleasure of writing isn't in the process but in the afterglow. A friend said that I "write like I sweat." On the surface, that's a pretty good metaphor; it implies that in order to write, I have to work myself up, work out, get through something and along the way, some writing will be sweated out. But that metaphor only gets to the initial moment of productivity, forgetting that once you've "sweated out" some images, ideas and phrases, you have to work them into actual art.

Even so, in terms of when it offers pleasure, I could say that writing a bit like going for a very long run, at least for me. (Now, I want to say first of all that the following is a completely over-used and abused metaphor... but I use it again, not under the impression that it's novel, but because it, like many cliches, has a bit of truth) The actual picking up my feet and putting them down, the getting in shape to go more than a mile or two... none of that is fun (at least for me). Likewise, actually suffering through revisions and worrying over word choice, that's not fun either. Most of the time it's nerve wracking! But the endorphins after the run and the endorphins after finishing a poem do feel pretty good. The place where this metaphor breaks down -- if it hasn't already -- is that it's not quite clear when one "finishes" a poem nor when or if the endorphins are certain. I enjoy running in and of itself; I don't need to win a race to feel good about running. (In fact, I kind of abhor races!) But with writing... I do kind of want the secondary satisfaction of publication. I do get a certain pleasure out of just finishing a poem: wow, it's there! look how pretty it is when I change the font to garamond! But often there's a secondary moment when that pleasure is taken away from me. I go back to the "finished" poem and find it's not at all complete. Or, that it's "complete" but awful. Or, that it's complete and half-way decent but no one will ever read it. It would be like believing you'd finished a 6 mile run -- and feeling as tired as if you had -- and then discovering that you'd only gone a 1.5 miles. Or finishing a race but forgetting a chip and finding that your score doesn't count.

need more quarks

It's spring break and I am absolutely craving a nice pseudo sciencey, popular physics book. Any suggestions? I want something with long discussions about black holes, strings, and flavored quarks. I don't even want science fiction! Or... well, I want popular science that is not consciously fictitious; I certainly will never be able to distinguish it from a good yarn.

But why do I want this? Well, experientially, it's just very calming to read about all these Very Big Things and Very Small Things. John and I went for a nice desert hike last weekend in a Very Big canyon; I had been haunted by some problems all week, but in comparison to the desert, they were Quite Propotional. That was comforting. After looking at the Very Big difference between the mountains in the snowy pass and the valley desert, I felt my little moods swings were Quite Negligible.

It's important that these Very Big and Very Small things also be True things. (Even if I can't tell) This is key to their calming quality. I live with plenty of fictions, makings, imaginings... but these all remind me of the human sphere. Precisely what is required is a perspective on the human sphere and all its made things and tools for making.

My inner nerd has always been calmed by a good star-gazing trip. But from our overcast Pacific Northwestern vantage point, there are few stars to be seen. So I require a virtual tour of some constellations or their contents. I do prefer the macroscopic to the microscopic, I must say; so any suggestions for my reading list might take that into acccount. Any thoughts?

Tony Gilroy and the Birth of Tragedy

I just enjoyed this classically New Yorker, long-winded-but-pleasant story about the screen writer of Bourne Identity, Tony Gilroy.Gilroy sounds like a brilliant and thoughtful writer. He's not just clever but quite up on what's needed by his era. A bit like Euripides, actually. But let me back that up....

First some clarifications: In the article, the author claims that Gilroy virtually invented or at least first truly exploited "the reversal" as a plot device. They write "The core of “Duplicity”[Gilroy's latest film] is the screenwriting trope known as the reversal. Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.” Well, I hate to break it to the article author or to Gilroy, but "the reversal" goes way back. Aristotle claimed it was one of the essential components of tragedy (along with a hero, a downfall, recognition and scenes of suffering). Many stories, not just Greek tragedies, have reversals: the audience thinks the character and her plot are heading in one direction, but oops! all is not as it seems. But in the end, the audience experiences some relief at watching the character suffer through these twists and turns.

Gilroy is know for increasingly complicated reversals. He feels that modern audience have become so savvy to possible plot twists -- making use of DVDs to replay and unravel them -- that it's harder to satisfy them. The authors suggest that the trend of Gilroy's method of making dramas more and more complex will continue. But is that the only solution? What about Euripides solution?

In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche noted that while the reversal method of effecting catharsis could work, sometimes plots were so complicated that the audiences wasn't getting the payoff . So Euripides introduced a figure who gave a prologue and told the audience ahead of time what would happen. That way, the audience could lose themselves in the pleasure of catharsis without needing to expend all that energy "figuring it out." Nietzsche found this decision of Euripides quite sly but also quite savvy in itself. (Notice that Nietzsche himself claims this is all philologically unjustified... so if there are any errors in this history, blame Nietzsche who doesn't mind anyway)

I suggest that film is moving in the direction of Euripides's plays. There's a limit to the complexity audiences can or are willing to take on. But, there seems to be no end to our pleasure in catharsis. So, rather than make plots more complicated, we have formulaic stories in which we enjoy for the effect and possibly for the novelty in aesthesis of the presentation of the standard plot (take Forgetting Sarah Marshall, as e.g.) Gilroy himself seems away of this with his basic rules about “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.” But perhaps the solution to "not boring the audience" is not to make things more, but rather less complex plot-wise.

david foster wallace and "something so simple, really..."

Now, I don't really like to do a lot of reflecting on what I think Literature Ought To Be or how I think one should write. One should write. That's it. But I was really struck by a few things in a recent New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace. I don't even particularly like Wallace's work per se; honestly, I've always found Infinite Jest to angsty, male and empty to get through. It's something my male friends read and cite in the same breath as the Big Lebowski. I know that's unfair to both the authors and enjoys of all those concerned, and it only reflects my personal hang-ups. But in this article, I did like what Wallace says about writing and what his writing seemed to be in his life as it appeared through the article.

After leaving a drug rehab half-way house, Wallace changed his tune and his reading interests. He found that the sorts of things that AA taught -- take it one day at time, for e.g.-- actually meant something to him, something that a lot of contemporary literature with its tricks and games didn't: "As he later told Salon, "The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important."

Again, treading lightly into the territory of what writing ought to do or be in genearl or for me, I'll dare to make some claims. In terms of visual art, I am *tired* of post-modern pastiche with its cheeky, snarky self-reflective struggle. This is something John and I have talked about countless times. Where's beauty? Why not just make something beautiful, for people to judge as such, and leave it at that? Why be cruel?

But I usually leave those grumpy claims for visual art and haven't extended them to poetry. It's easier to make definitive judgments about an art you don't practice. But in a way... I think I am starting to feel the same for poetry. I like to read beautiful poetry. I like lyrics, I like one-offs that stand on one, two, maybe three pages at most. I like them to ring and to be recitable. I like Bishop, not Lowell. I've never had the attention span to read or enjoy the epic; I tried to struggle through Lowell's The Dolphin and a few other later books as I read his biography and collected letters with Bishop. But little he wrote -- except maybe the poem for Bishop -- touches me the way her work does. Take her "Armadillo" for instance. This sayes more to me of Lowell's mania that ten of his sonnets that I have to string together to find a story.

I realize that the connection to Wallace may seem thin. What could Infinite Jest or any of his other works, finished or not, have to do with Elizabeth Bishop's poetry? Perhaps nothing in the larger scope of literary criticism. But for me, they are connected in what they mean for my intention as an artist and for my right to predilections as a reader. In a sense, I'm the intellectual's intellectual, the ideal product of an extremely liberal arts education. You'd think I'd be eating up the most post-modern, reflective of literatures, say -- I don't know -- Calvino and Ashbury. But with all my reflective tools, with all my purported knowledge of what art can do, I still just want to enjoy beautiful things that risk cliche before they risk being uninventive. There is something to the AA statement, "take it one day at a time." It works, I remember it. There's something to using a rhyme. It sounds good.

Well, that's all for now. We'll see if this leads to any good or at least pleasing work on my part.

Sounds and sense

In the December NY Review of Books, I enjoyed an article on two new books on Robert Frost, one a novel and one a biography. This of course sinks with my interest in maybe writing a biographical novel or biography, but also it called my attention to Frost in way that I hadn't considered before. I do love his work, but like an artist over-played on Starbucks' radio, I find it hard to appreciate the good bits hidden behind the over-popular pieces. I like what he says about sound in his prose reflections, for example, in this quote in that I'd like to find in its entirety to flesh out his position:
"I speak of imagination as having some part in the sound of poetry. It is everything in the sound of poetry; but not as inventor nor creator -- simply as summoner. Make no mistake about the tones of speech I mean. They are the same yesterday, today, and forever. There were before words were -- if anything was before anything else." (Collected Prose of Robert Frosted, cited in NY Review of Books, Dec 08)

To think of sound as summoning poetry is quite different that emphasizing the particular sonority or meter of a poem in reflection. Of course, it's all very useful to appreciate the meter in Hardy and to try to pound out a good anapest in your own work. But... I think this standarized, metrical / scansion model of understanding sound is only useful for criticism, not for creation. What Frost describes is how speech sounds evoke poems in the ear of the writer. With Frost's iamb's, the momentum of sound it quite strong. The iambs carrying that rocking feeling of walking, of the momentum of the walk carrying you in one direction until the next step is felt before it is thought. But you cannot see this meter as construction or appearing only in reflection; Frost had to hear that sense of sound, to get into it before thinking and then following into a poem. Hearing the "sound of sense" going before you as you write is like hearing a band playing in the other room and starting to write a melody to overlay while gradually sneaking up on them. The sound is much more than a meter: it's a sound-place, a complexity, open totality to explore. My old stand by, Merleau-Ponty, might call this the indirect voices of silence: the meaningful silence before and between speech. It's not an empty space or time but one which calls you toward speech.

Certainly, the sounds of Frost are ramifying all through American poetry. I certainly can't write without hearing a bit of "Whose house that is, I think I know..." already going before me

"this suffering business"

In one of Bishop's letter's -- sent in a time just around her own alcoholic breakdown and Lowell's first manic episode -- she slips in the following comment between chatter about lobster pounds and Eliot's criticism:

"Sometimes I wish we could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business, anyway. I imagine we actually agree fairly well. It is just that I guess I think it is so irresistible & unavoidable there's no use talking about it, & that in itself has no value, anyway..." (E Bishop to R Lowell, Sept 8th, 1948)

of that which we cannot speak....

Biography, mania and mysticism

Out of basically voyeuristic interest, I dug up a Robert Lowell biography at the university library today. Some of his person comes through in the letters to Bishop, but from the sketchy details of his mania and instability in the introduction, you get the impression that there must have been other sides of his character not represented. From the biography, that indeed seems to be the case. I read (quickly) the Hamilton 1982 biography which I found about as readable as a set of note cards – very choppy and full of too many long citations – but also detailed and informative (I’d like to see if there’s another better version?). Given my latent interest in mysticism, I was intrigued by the descriptions how in certain fits of mania, Lowell ‘renewed’ his Catholicism and became obsessed with prayer; the biographer says he “confused religion and sexuality" (158). Certainly that “symptom” would describe the behavior of certain mystics… the question is then whether they shared something psychologically with Lowell or whether Lowell perhaps read too much mysticism and unconsciously imitated them.

Having sated my biographical craving – in fact, I feel a bit abashed now, having actually been overwhelmed and terrified by Lowell’s character even at this distance – I’m going to turn back to the poetry now. I stumbled on a used copy of his complete works at Magus books, and read “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” while standing up in the bookstore. That read certainly confirmed it was worth the purchase.