Sunday, October 23, 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
James Wood has, disturbingly but not quite unexpectedly, slouched into self-plagiarism.
On the plus side, Hollinghurst finally gets some New Yorker action. Not that he needs it.
On the plus side, Hollinghurst finally gets some New Yorker action. Not that he needs it.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
My favorite human being I've never known
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2011/sep/13/alan-hollinghurst-book-club-podcast
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Heh
One reason he was keen to finish the book was that he was running out of money. "I handed it in at the end of September, which was two years later than planned, so I had absolutely no money left. It was really getting quite hairy." Winning the Booker netted £50,000, there were foreign rights, a TV adaptation, and then the advance for this book, but even a novelist as successful as Hollinghurst – producing on average a book every five years – is not earning a vast sum annually.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Wallace Stevens's It Must Change
IT MUST CHANGE
I
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair
And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,
In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.
The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant
Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This means
Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.
It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene
Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,
It is a repetition. The bees come booming
As if—The pigeons clatter in the air.
An erotic perfume, half of the body, half
Of an obvious acid is sure what it intends
And the booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.
II
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains. But does
The body lift its heavy wing, take up,
Again, an inexhaustible being, rise
Over the loftiest antagonist
To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?
Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,
Find a deep echo in a horn and buzz
The bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?
The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical t
And the banners of the nation flutter, burst
ON the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack
At the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury
Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, why
Should there be a question of returning or
Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?
This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing
Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this
Booming and booming of the new-come bee.
III
The great statue of the General Du Puy
Rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques
Bore off the residents of its noble Place.
The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.
On Sundays, lawyers in their promenades
Approached this strongly-heightened effigy
To study the past, and doctors, having bathed
Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frame
Of a suspension, a permanence, so rigid
That it made the General a bit absurd,
Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.
There never had been, never could be, such
A man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors
Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,
As a setting for geraniums, the General,
The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged
Among our more vestigial states of mind.
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
IV
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.
In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.
The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men
Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.
Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,
Sister and solace, brother and delight.
V
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,
Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted
With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise
And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,
A green baked greener in the greenest sun.
These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in
White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.
There was an island beyond him on which rested,
An island to the South, on which rested like
A mountain, a pine-apple pungent as Cuban summer.
And la-bas, la-bas, the cool bananas grew,
Hung heavily on the great banana tree,
Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.
He thought often of the land from which he came,
How that whole country was a melon, pink
If seen rightly and yet a possible red.
An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
VI
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.
Ah, ke! The bloody wren, the felon jay,
Ke-ke, the jug throated robin pouring out,
Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.
There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.
One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single text, granite monotony,
One sole face, like a photograph of fate,
Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,
Eye without lid, mind without any dream—
These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird
Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.
VII
After a luster of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe
An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.
The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.
For easy passion and ever-ready love
Are of our earthy birth and here and now
And where we live and everywhere we live,
As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,
As in the courage of the ignorant man,
Who changes by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes
The book, hot for another accessible bliss;
The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
VIII
On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted Ozymandia. She went
Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.
I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.
I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear.
I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.
Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me
In its own only precious ornament.
Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.
Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.
Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening form the heart and mind.
IX
The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both
At once? Is it a luminous flattering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there a poem that never reaches words
And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seems
To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?
Evade, this hot, dependent orator,
The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,
Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker
Of a speech only a little of the tongue?
It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination’s Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.
X
A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre
Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of
The lake was full of artificial things,
Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.
The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.
There was a will to change, a necessitous
And present way, a presentation, a kind
Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,
The eye of a vagabond in metaphor
That catches our own. The casual is not
Enough. The freshness of transformation is
The freshness of a world. It is our own,
It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,
And that necessity and that presentation
Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
I
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair
And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,
In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again.
The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant
Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This means
Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.
It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene
Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,
It is a repetition. The bees come booming
As if—The pigeons clatter in the air.
An erotic perfume, half of the body, half
Of an obvious acid is sure what it intends
And the booming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.
II
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains. But does
The body lift its heavy wing, take up,
Again, an inexhaustible being, rise
Over the loftiest antagonist
To drone the green phrases of its juvenal?
Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,
Find a deep echo in a horn and buzz
The bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old?
The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical t
And the banners of the nation flutter, burst
ON the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whack
At the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury
Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, why
Should there be a question of returning or
Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?
This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing
Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this
Booming and booming of the new-come bee.
III
The great statue of the General Du Puy
Rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques
Bore off the residents of its noble Place.
The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.
On Sundays, lawyers in their promenades
Approached this strongly-heightened effigy
To study the past, and doctors, having bathed
Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frame
Of a suspension, a permanence, so rigid
That it made the General a bit absurd,
Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.
There never had been, never could be, such
A man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors
Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,
As a setting for geraniums, the General,
The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged
Among our more vestigial states of mind.
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
IV
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.
In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.
The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men
Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.
Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,
Sister and solace, brother and delight.
V
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained,
Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weighted
With garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoise
And his orange blotches, these were his zero green,
A green baked greener in the greenest sun.
These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles in
White sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes.
There was an island beyond him on which rested,
An island to the South, on which rested like
A mountain, a pine-apple pungent as Cuban summer.
And la-bas, la-bas, the cool bananas grew,
Hung heavily on the great banana tree,
Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.
He thought often of the land from which he came,
How that whole country was a melon, pink
If seen rightly and yet a possible red.
An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
VI
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.
Ah, ke! The bloody wren, the felon jay,
Ke-ke, the jug throated robin pouring out,
Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade.
There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.
One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single text, granite monotony,
One sole face, like a photograph of fate,
Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,
Eye without lid, mind without any dream—
These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird
Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.
VII
After a luster of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe
An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.
The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.
For easy passion and ever-ready love
Are of our earthy birth and here and now
And where we live and everywhere we live,
As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,
As in the courage of the ignorant man,
Who changes by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes
The book, hot for another accessible bliss;
The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
VIII
On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted Ozymandia. She went
Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.
I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.
I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear.
I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.
Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me
In its own only precious ornament.
Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal.
Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.
Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening form the heart and mind.
IX
The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both
At once? Is it a luminous flattering
Or the concentration of a cloudy day?
Is there a poem that never reaches words
And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seems
To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?
Evade, this hot, dependent orator,
The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,
Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker
Of a speech only a little of the tongue?
It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination’s Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.
X
A bench was his catalepsy, Theatre
Of Trope. He sat in the park. The water of
The lake was full of artificial things,
Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.
The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.
There was a will to change, a necessitous
And present way, a presentation, a kind
Of volatile world, too constant to be denied,
The eye of a vagabond in metaphor
That catches our own. The casual is not
Enough. The freshness of transformation is
The freshness of a world. It is our own,
It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,
And that necessity and that presentation
Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Rhythm, biatches!
A prose cadence, sinuous and archaic, can be seen making its way through the newspaper chat columns:
(Martin Luther King) "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."
Is that MLK we hear, declaiming to the masses? Or is it a portentous pretender? The answer seems to hinge on that last negation, which punily, and belatedly, qualifies what has come before it. "Not even an enemy", we would say, but only after we've crossed off a host of other possibilities: Not eunuchs, not New York cabbies, not card-carrying scientologists, not taxidermists, segregationists or theologians, not Iraqi-war veterans or Bin-Laden sympathizers...not even an enemy! No, that last phrase surely ruins everything; imagine instead the sentence without it:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is more in tune with the "I-have-a-dream" MLK, the one given to a certain endearing sententiousness. The sentence could be made even better, of course, by interposing a "single" between the "of" and the "one", but it is easier to make it worse:
"I'll mourn the loss [...]"
This sounds like a private decision rather than a public haranguement, and quite spoils the effect. Even worse would be the replacement of "thousands" by "millions":
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is no good. The word "millions" has been appropriated, since the late '70s, by the culture at large, and is now a vulgar---vulgar in the sense of common---placeholder for anything big; it also calls to mind millionaires, the prices of certain extremely expensive houses (like that of my advisor, for instance), the net worth of Jim Carrey, and the number of poor people in the world. On the other hand, "thousands", though actually smaller, is notionally larger; the medial diphthong "ou" contributes to the sense it gives off of a general proliferation. Note that neither "billions" nor "trillions" would work, because they exaggerate, and "tens", while interesting, has the unfortunate side-effect of being too specific. "I will mourn the loss of tens of lives---" "But not hundreds?"
There are other interesting missteps. The comma, to start with, is well-placed. Imagine if it weren't there:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is ungrammatical, but what if:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives but will not rejoice in the death of one."
There's something ineffably wrong about this. The "will" and the "not" seem to beg to be contracted into a "won't", and the sentence collapses on the resulting absurd drop in register. We also notice that there are two "wills" in the sentence, each of which depends on the other for its presence:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I'll not rejoice in the death of one."
This sounds like an Indian; a Tamilian, even. "I'll not rejoice [...]", with a nasal "no" and a hard "t"; a Tamilian on his Bajaj, holding forth to another Tamilian at a traffic signal while the Tamilian policeman, wiping, from his brow, some good old-fashioned Tamil sweat, waves them on their way. It is, in short, another absurd formulation, a fortuitous mix of high and low registers, effective as a piece of fictional dialogue, but inarguably unquotable.
The sentence, then, walks a tightrope of implications without quite falling off. Does it really belong to MLK? No, as bloggers have recently found out; the culprit was Jessica Dovey, a Japan-based teacher of English, who, while tweeting her disgust at Bin Laden's death, blended her own words of judgment with those of MLK's, resulting in a week's worth of misattributions by the general public.
It is a small and unintentional achievement that the quote was able to masquerade for so long as MLK's; I blame George Orwell, whose 1984 Dovey was reading before she found out about OBL's death and decided to reach for her Twitter app. 1984, as anyone who has read it knows, is full of ghastly, obviously-allegorical happenings. A sample from the first chapter, from the "Two minutes hate" part, reads:
"In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the
others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an
abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to
another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he
was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein
seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and
the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure
of civilization."
Reading this, and then reading about the assassination of the most dangerous terrorist in the world, is enough to set anyone on their own flights of judgment, peppered with a generous supply of "I will"s and "rejoice"s. No wonder Dovey was all shaken up, all biblical; she was responding to Orwell's rhetoric, not to Bin Laden's death.
But here's a more interesting postulate: can something of Orwell's rhythm be detected in the Dovey-authored quote? Specifically, is there something in the Two Minutes Hate section---which Dovey claims to have been reading immediately before before watching the news on OBL's death ---that is syntactically identical to Dovey's "I will [..]"? Maybe. I haven't been able to verify this conjecture myself, at least not in any detail; a perfunctory glance at the chapter in question hasn't yielded much. In any case, Orwell's first chapters are full of specificities, like those of a diligent thriller novelist; it is only later, during the final chapters, that the sententious abstraction, from which Dovey may plausibly have derived her own, kicks in. Besides, these postulates are less interesting in the phase when the postulate-er goes about his business, reporting clues and dead-ends with a poker-faced excitability that is sadly unrequited by the reader. Better to leave the entire thing hanging, as it were, by a thread of implication that the reader knows can be disentangled, if only the writer, or the reader, had the energy to do so.
(Martin Luther King) "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."
Is that MLK we hear, declaiming to the masses? Or is it a portentous pretender? The answer seems to hinge on that last negation, which punily, and belatedly, qualifies what has come before it. "Not even an enemy", we would say, but only after we've crossed off a host of other possibilities: Not eunuchs, not New York cabbies, not card-carrying scientologists, not taxidermists, segregationists or theologians, not Iraqi-war veterans or Bin-Laden sympathizers...not even an enemy! No, that last phrase surely ruins everything; imagine instead the sentence without it:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is more in tune with the "I-have-a-dream" MLK, the one given to a certain endearing sententiousness. The sentence could be made even better, of course, by interposing a "single" between the "of" and the "one", but it is easier to make it worse:
"I'll mourn the loss [...]"
This sounds like a private decision rather than a public haranguement, and quite spoils the effect. Even worse would be the replacement of "thousands" by "millions":
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is no good. The word "millions" has been appropriated, since the late '70s, by the culture at large, and is now a vulgar---vulgar in the sense of common---placeholder for anything big; it also calls to mind millionaires, the prices of certain extremely expensive houses (like that of my advisor, for instance), the net worth of Jim Carrey, and the number of poor people in the world. On the other hand, "thousands", though actually smaller, is notionally larger; the medial diphthong "ou" contributes to the sense it gives off of a general proliferation. Note that neither "billions" nor "trillions" would work, because they exaggerate, and "tens", while interesting, has the unfortunate side-effect of being too specific. "I will mourn the loss of tens of lives---" "But not hundreds?"
There are other interesting missteps. The comma, to start with, is well-placed. Imagine if it weren't there:
"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives but I will not rejoice in the death of one."
This is ungrammatical, but what if:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives but will not rejoice in the death of one."
There's something ineffably wrong about this. The "will" and the "not" seem to beg to be contracted into a "won't", and the sentence collapses on the resulting absurd drop in register. We also notice that there are two "wills" in the sentence, each of which depends on the other for its presence:
"I will mourn the loss of millions of precious lives, but I'll not rejoice in the death of one."
This sounds like an Indian; a Tamilian, even. "I'll not rejoice [...]", with a nasal "no" and a hard "t"; a Tamilian on his Bajaj, holding forth to another Tamilian at a traffic signal while the Tamilian policeman, wiping, from his brow, some good old-fashioned Tamil sweat, waves them on their way. It is, in short, another absurd formulation, a fortuitous mix of high and low registers, effective as a piece of fictional dialogue, but inarguably unquotable.
The sentence, then, walks a tightrope of implications without quite falling off. Does it really belong to MLK? No, as bloggers have recently found out; the culprit was Jessica Dovey, a Japan-based teacher of English, who, while tweeting her disgust at Bin Laden's death, blended her own words of judgment with those of MLK's, resulting in a week's worth of misattributions by the general public.
It is a small and unintentional achievement that the quote was able to masquerade for so long as MLK's; I blame George Orwell, whose 1984 Dovey was reading before she found out about OBL's death and decided to reach for her Twitter app. 1984, as anyone who has read it knows, is full of ghastly, obviously-allegorical happenings. A sample from the first chapter, from the "Two minutes hate" part, reads:
"In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and
down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort
to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little
sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and
shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The
dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the
screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the
others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to
act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining
in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous
ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash
faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of
people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into
a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an
abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to
another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred
was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his
heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian
of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he
was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein
seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big
Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an
invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and
the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister
enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure
of civilization."
Reading this, and then reading about the assassination of the most dangerous terrorist in the world, is enough to set anyone on their own flights of judgment, peppered with a generous supply of "I will"s and "rejoice"s. No wonder Dovey was all shaken up, all biblical; she was responding to Orwell's rhetoric, not to Bin Laden's death.
But here's a more interesting postulate: can something of Orwell's rhythm be detected in the Dovey-authored quote? Specifically, is there something in the Two Minutes Hate section---which Dovey claims to have been reading immediately before before watching the news on OBL's death ---that is syntactically identical to Dovey's "I will [..]"? Maybe. I haven't been able to verify this conjecture myself, at least not in any detail; a perfunctory glance at the chapter in question hasn't yielded much. In any case, Orwell's first chapters are full of specificities, like those of a diligent thriller novelist; it is only later, during the final chapters, that the sententious abstraction, from which Dovey may plausibly have derived her own, kicks in. Besides, these postulates are less interesting in the phase when the postulate-er goes about his business, reporting clues and dead-ends with a poker-faced excitability that is sadly unrequited by the reader. Better to leave the entire thing hanging, as it were, by a thread of implication that the reader knows can be disentangled, if only the writer, or the reader, had the energy to do so.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
A visit from the goon squad
A Visit from the Goon Squad is an upbeat book that pretends, for most of its 273 pages, to be the just the opposite. The novel opens with kleptomaniac New Yorker Sasha, who is having a difficult time controlling her habit: she steals a woman's wallet, and penitently returns it after swearing the woman to secrecy. Later, we are treated to procession of junkies, of musicians grown fat and cranky, of ex-jailbirds wanting a new start; of adulterers; of mildly untruthful wives, and their capitalistically-minded record-producer husbands; of the suicidally unloved. The profusion of characters, and the rather saturnine turns their lives tend to take, is meant to point at the pathetically fragmented lives that the fin-de-siecle generation are doomed to lead; Goon Squad is thus a postmodern novel as well as a novel that aspires to the condition of postmodernity, a rarity in today's literary climate, in which novels of the former kind feature cheerfully self-conscious narrators with a talent, or at least a taste, for the grotesque, and those of the latter kind exist, if at all, as gleams in the eyes of a few comp.lit senior-years from Stanford.
But Jennifer Egan, the author, is too kind-hearted, or perhaps too content, to follow this oddly plausible vision to its logical end. For Egan, pathos = drama, but also pathos = hope, which is a rather obvious, New-York-Times-Top-20 kind of viewpoint. She would rather be programmatically forgiving than thoughtfully vatic; she cleaves to a certain mentality that the rich New York based author seems to find irresistible, namely that a) New York is the center of the universe and b) New York will heal everything, including poverty, deadbeatness, obscurity, kleptomania, and, paradoxically, narcissism. (She shares this aesthetic with several of her colleagues, among whom number Jonathan Franzen, Colum McCann, and nearly all of the anointed twenty under forty, to name only the ones that immediately come to mind.) For her, New York is to literature what LA is Hollywood, a fact which, if true, should cause more depression than joy.
But it's all good. Goon squad achieves a canny populism---readers are sure to praise its large "palette" of characters, its plotless grandeur, its thematic coherence, and its symmetry---at the expense of... almost everything else worth talking about, but this is a loss that such novels can take very gracefully. Egan is one of a cabal of writers---Franzen is another---who are able to silence detractors at nearly every sentence, every scene, every piece of dialogue that passes between their characters; never mind the crumbling building, look how beautiful its bricks are. The fact that we value such novelists over, say, less obviously brilliant ones, the anti-David-Mitchells of the world, the dogged pencil pushers with high-flown artistic ideas but zero economic nous, is probably more our fault than theirs. They, like Fox News or Fukushima, are just giving us what we want.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Some Heaney to clear the rancorous air...
In the Beech
I was a lookout posted and forgotten.
On one side under me, the concrete road.
On the other, the bullocks’ covert,
the breath and plaster of a drinking place
where the school-leaver found peace to weigh
his chances with the pale thug in his fork.
And the tree itself an old one and a new one,
as much a column as a bole. The very ivy
puzzled its milk-tooth frills and tapers
over the grain: was it bark or masonry?
I watched the red brick chimney rear
its stamen course by course,
and the steeplejacks up there at their antics
like flies against the mountain.
I felt the tanks’ advance beginning
at the cynosure of the growth rings,
then winced at their imperium refreshed
in each powdered bolt-mark on the concrete.
And the pilot with his goggles back came in
so low I could see the cockpit rivets.
My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge.
My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Depression
Far and away the most desolate birthday of the past decade. Reading a cliche-ridden article about Hindutva in Caravan Magazine has *not* helped. Sample soundbites: "The cynosure of all eyes at the convention is not[...]"; "the bubble of my youthful confidence in the party burst, and the dark underbelly of its politics was [...] laid bare"; "the entire top brass of the leadership". Bah! I'm not, as a rule, crotchety about the odd cliche; I recognize that journalistic articles are written under a time constraint, and mannerisms do tend to slip through. But this article (to which I will *not* link) has the reverse problem: too much time on the author's hands, enabling him to draw, Rushdie-like, a parallel between the trajectory of his life and that of the BJP. He meditates on the apparent coincidence that he and the BJP were born on the same month, and follows himself into some 'brilliant' conclusions, conclusions which are supposed to lend a 'form', or 'structure', to an otherwise idea-bereft essay. Well, Mr Chowdhury, not only is your essay bereft of ideas, it is also insincere, strenuous and an utter waste of time.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Perry Anderson speaks the truth
"Beneath the veneer of worldliness it still affects, what the New Yorker delivers today is mostly a sententious conformism."
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
A certain puzzling affection for today's cricket-bitten Tambram, his confident generalizations, his taste for the Dickensian locution, his hard-won, abashed smiles; smiles which arrive punctually, like buses or army brats, on his oblong face, and whose presence, sensed belatedly, seems to surprise no one more than himself.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Zizek on racism
"Even racism is now reflexive. Consider the Balkans. They are portrayed in the liberal Western media as a vortex of ethnic passion – a multiculturalist dream turned into a nightmare. The standard reaction of a Slovene (I am one myself) is to say: ‘yes, this is how it is in the Balkans, but Slovenia is not part of the Balkans; it is part of Mitteleuropa; the Balkans begin in Croatia or in Bosnia; we Slovenes are the last bulwark of European civilisation against the Balkan madness.’ If you ask, ‘Where do the Balkans begin?’ you will always be told that they begin down there, towards the south-east. For Serbs, they begin in Kosovo or in Bosnia where Serbia is trying to defend civilised Christian Europe against the encroachments of this Other. For the Croats, the Balkans begin in Orthodox, despotic and Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia safeguards Western democratic values. For many Italians and Austrians, they begin in Slovenia, the Western outpost of the Slavic hordes. For many Germans, Austria is tainted with Balkan corruption and inefficiency; for many Northern Germans, Catholic Bavaria is not free of Balkan contamination. Many arrogant Frenchmen associate Germany with Eastern Balkan brutality – it lacks French finesse. Finally, to some British opponents of the European Union, Continental Europe is a new version of the Turkish Empire with Brussels as the new Istanbul – a voracious despotism threatening British freedom and sovereignty."
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Jonathan Gold, master prose stylist
A few months ago I was casting about for something to read, scanning the latest edition of the New Yorker with my typical mix of suspicion and only-mild envy, when I first heard of Jonathan Gold. Gold, the article coyly said, was one of our best food critics; his Pulitzer Prize, the only one by a food-writer so far---take that, Messrs Bruno and Bourdain---long overdue, even a trifle anticlimactic. I need hardly tell you how underwhelmed I was by such praise, coming as it did from a writer whose tone lurched from the acclamatory to the bathetic, sometimes in a single sentence: "On their behalf, he eats hoof and head and snout, and reveals which new populations have come to town […]" It was one of those mutually masturbatory interludes for which the New Yorker has become rightly known, where a hitherto unknown [writer, artist, journalist] is inexplicably championed by a hitherto somewhat-known [journalist, artist, writer], who in turn champions, in an article a few months down the line, the [journalist, artist, writer] responsible for his popularity, who is in turn championed…
But I thought I’d take a look anyway, and---to commit the first of many bathetic phrases myself---I was taken. The first article I read, the ferociously tactile appraisal of duck carnitas, began thrillingly, with a rhetorical question that went on into an asyndetic amalgam of the concrete and the marginally abstract. I would never taste duck carnitas, vegetarian that I am, but it was enough to have before me the evidence of Gold’s having eaten it; of his having understood its effect on his tastebuds as a kind of document, for all of humanity, of what it should feel like to eat duck carnitas (even the sturdiest of vegetarians will be turned to sin by Gold’s descriptions; Brahmins, beware). The article ended thus: “But if suffering good coffee, folksy music and the bourgeois presence of duck is the price one has to pay for access to Cacao's chiles rellenos, unbreaded roast poblanos stuffed with cheese and sweet corn or squash blossoms with cod, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” It was difficult to believe there was a whole fund of such writing, stretching back to the late nineties, when Gold was about my age, unaware of his genius, ambling about Los Angeles, looking for the next dish to subject to his excellent prose style. I dove into the archives.
As I suggest you do too. This blog-post, rarely for me, is one of those paeans, in which I swoon before a writer from whom I hope to learn and learn. The last such was Alan Hollinghurst, whose position in my writer’s hall-of-fame is next only to Henry James; Gold, in this admittedly schoolgirlish metric, clocks in at a sultry eighth place.
But I thought I’d take a look anyway, and---to commit the first of many bathetic phrases myself---I was taken. The first article I read, the ferociously tactile appraisal of duck carnitas, began thrillingly, with a rhetorical question that went on into an asyndetic amalgam of the concrete and the marginally abstract. I would never taste duck carnitas, vegetarian that I am, but it was enough to have before me the evidence of Gold’s having eaten it; of his having understood its effect on his tastebuds as a kind of document, for all of humanity, of what it should feel like to eat duck carnitas (even the sturdiest of vegetarians will be turned to sin by Gold’s descriptions; Brahmins, beware). The article ended thus: “But if suffering good coffee, folksy music and the bourgeois presence of duck is the price one has to pay for access to Cacao's chiles rellenos, unbreaded roast poblanos stuffed with cheese and sweet corn or squash blossoms with cod, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” It was difficult to believe there was a whole fund of such writing, stretching back to the late nineties, when Gold was about my age, unaware of his genius, ambling about Los Angeles, looking for the next dish to subject to his excellent prose style. I dove into the archives.
As I suggest you do too. This blog-post, rarely for me, is one of those paeans, in which I swoon before a writer from whom I hope to learn and learn. The last such was Alan Hollinghurst, whose position in my writer’s hall-of-fame is next only to Henry James; Gold, in this admittedly schoolgirlish metric, clocks in at a sultry eighth place.
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