Category Archives: Authors

Small Thoughts on a Huge Book: David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, The Moronic Inferno

I.
Although he never won a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, or a Pulitzer Prize—a good sign of how little such commendations mean—David Foster Wallace’s literary importance does not need much defending. (Besides, the MacArthur people did throw him one of those mega-grants.) Few serious American writers are better known. I would wager any amount of money that his reputation will hold up as long as English does, and at the core of this esteem will be Infinite Jest, his haunting, borderline-indescribable epic novel that I finished re-reading this week. It took nearly four months because, like all months, these were teeming with work and other distractions.

Wallace’s fame is relative, of course. Contemporary American society as a convulsive whole will never grant him anything like the profile of cool but lighter objects like Quentin Tarantino or the NBA; the moronic inferno (a phrase Saul Bellow lifted from Wyndham Lewis) has some good parts but rarely values works or entities that are intellectually, aesthetically, or emotionally complicated. There is nothing new about pointing out that mass culture isn’t much for thinking deeply while getting its heart broken and remade. Wallace knew this and seemed to realize that obsessing about it would not do anything besides paralyze a writer.

II.
Let me dust off my academic hat and say something about one of Jest‘s big themes and how the book’s structure contests it. Form and Content, people. I’ll spread this over a few sections.

The modes of consumption available within contemporary markets (markets that have been developing since Shakespeare’s time, the onset of European empire) can do awful things to the societies that enable and contain them. Capitalism has always found it necessary to stoke or invent our impulses, especially the greedy ones, but twenty-first-century global capitalism, or whatever you might call it, is extraordinarily reliant upon consumers with a twitchy, impatient need for more new stimuli right fucking now. The historian David Courtwright refers to this as capitalism’s “limbic turn,” and even reasonably self-aware people have difficulty evading the hyperactive gestalt that results from it. I haven’t. I just scanned my iTunes library for some reason even though I was not listening to music, then worried about posting this on the blog’s Twitter feed for all six of our readers. And so forth.

Narcotics (a heading under which booze definitely falls) and visual entertainment are the most prominent forms of pleasure in the novel. Its two main characters—one in recovery, one approaching a ghastly breakdown—have drug problems. Much of the book takes place in a halfway house for addicts. But it depicts plenty of other addictions that are just as catastrophic: addictions to sex, to dissembling, to work, to food, to various instantiations of social prestige, to violence and cynicism. Each of these is what Don Gately, one of those two central characters, has learned in AA to call “the Substance.” You needn’t be able to physically handle something for it to be a Substance. Many are emphatically not things you can smoke, drink, snort, or shoot. Americans tend to be discomfited by this.

In phenomenological terms what distinguishes all Substances is their ability to establish a nasty feedback loop between themselves and our worst Western tendency, which is to retreat into the self. You see this when people like Mitt Romney and the Koch brothers, whose accountants help them stash Olympian wealth in various spiderholes, behave as though they are one tax increase away from a box on Skid Row. You’ve experienced this if you have ever been around a serious opiates addict, and seen how they disappear into nods. At one point near the novel’s beginning its nameless omniscient narrator, who splits time with the characters, remarks that “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.”

Infinite Jest takes place in a near future, as American society undergoes an accelerating collapse into obsessive, lonely pleasures. One of the book’s running jokes is that the USA now rules an entity called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. Tendencies that will always bedevil any society which prizes wealth and democratic “independence” have hypertrophied and are keeping sales brisk. The cultural prognosis is grim. As Wallace liked to say, this is a sad book.

III.
A world like this, like ours (published in 1996, IJ is probably set in what would have been the 2010s, although in the novel’s present the years don’t have numbers anymore, just names sponsored by corporations), has a rough time with long texts. If one finds it hard to watch an episode of Breaking Bad in one go, then a thousand-page novel will be appalling. And so what arises throughout the culture is a suspicion that if a book is long, then it must be too long. I have met several otherwise intelligent people who deploy some version of the theory that while DFW was brilliant, he “needed an editor.”

Which he did have! Said editor was apparently OK with the book’s girth, and probably cut plenty before it was published.

It isn’t that people consciously want Infinite Jest to be Ethan Frome. But when attention spans wither a long novel is going to spook most readers into finding external reasons for not trying at all. It’s so big—no wonder people don’t finish it.

I don’t think the final form of Jest needs to be reduced. As published, it is not a mess of narrative appendages or dead ends, like many sprawling novels unintentionally are. Nothing feels out of place or redundant. Every word in the book is perfect, and when someone tries the “editor” tack, even if they have actually read some of Wallace’s stories or essays, I can’t help filing them under Second-Rate Taste. (Kingsley Amis said you could do the same with anyone who denies that Shakespeare is the greatest poet in the language.) A writer, especially a brilliant one, can put whatever he or she pleases into a work, whether or not some prospective readers want an imaginary proofer to condense things. It might be that Infinite Jest pisses off a lot of people, because it is regarded as a Cool Thing to know about in many cosmopolitan circles but is not easy to consume.

You can listen to all of Aphex Twin’s albums in a weekend. Same for Kubrick’s films. You might nibble on some Flannery O’Connor and talk later at the bar like you’ve got her covered. You cannot do that with an epic. You can try pretending that you’ve read it, but for anyone with a literary education and a decent radar for the kind of cultural-capital bullshit that some intellectuals try to sling at parties, bluffing is easy to spot. Plus, only that sort of nerd is going to care in the first place about how you read some long book.

Get off the fence. Don’t count your books—this is worth a pile of smaller ones. Besides, you are already spending time on a silly blog about books and Culture. Whatever you would otherwise be reading, you aren’t missing much even if Jest takes you six months to finish. Cf. Bleak House.

IV.
Wallace hung himself in 2008, as you may have heard. It embarrasses me to write it, but my first reaction to the news was resentment as much as sadness, as though he had stolen his talent back from the rest of us. God, the gods and goddesses, the Prime Mover, the watchmaker, the universe, whoever, whatever, takes a little extra time to wire you up as a someone who could make language do things that would stop an angel’s heart, and you pull your own plug at 46? Even when explicable—and it usually is—suicide is pure wastage, a cruel thing to lay on people who love you; and I only loved the writing, having (duh) never met the man. Near the end, his friends and family were frightened and watched him closely. He hung himself when his wife stepped out of the house. Jonathan Franzen, who was close to Wallace, got criticized for confessing that anger was part of the emotional blowback for everyone who loved Wallace. Lazy critics don’t reward honesty.

But Wallace lived most of his life with a strain of depression that many sufferers, however tough or gifted or well-medicated or lucky, don’t survive: the frantic walking nightmare of being “Buried above ground,” as William Cowper wrote in 1773, frequently leads to the pistol or the sealed garage. Outside of certain passages in Infinite Jest (Kate Gompert’s hospital intake, Hal’s monologues, Joelle’s preparation for her overdose), the only books I know of that come close to evoking this pain are William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible and Andrew Solomon’s astonishing “Atlas of Depression,” The Noonday Demon.

V.
I plan to read Infinite Jest about once a decade. (Dan does this every year with Gatsby.) This was the first replay, and as you would expect, reading it at 32 was different from reading it at 23. Granted, the novel shocked me back then, when I felt what Wallace calls the “click” of writing that speaks at the blood level to someone.

But now, when like pretty much every other grown-up on the planet I have actually lost people whom I cared about as an adult to illness, suicide, addiction, geographical and psychic distance, infidelity and selfish anger, to a bouquet of the universe’s surprises, of which our own meanderings and fuck-ups are a huge part (and when I know to expect lots more), finishing wasn’t a moment when I sighed and inwardly congratulated myself for being sensitive, not to mention persistent—long book, you know.

Finishing was visceral this time and I suppose that is the point. It was something like being emptied then filled with grief for the species, not just my own piddling self. I cried in private (I admit it, stop laughing) the way I do in some situations with certain works that aren’t trivial like the stuff I consume when driving, exercising, cooking, cleaning, and doing most everything else in my life. Part of my weeping list might go: some of Philip Larkin’s late poems, a couple of Hamlet’s speeches, the “Ode to Joy” at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth, the nameless boy soldier on the cover of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, the first field recording of “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” certain Psalms (King James Version only, bruh), Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” the Gettysburg Address. Usually words or music are the trigger. I was not thinking much about my admirable sensitivity. Instead I was having to deal with the reality that, well-trained sensibility or none, everybody is going to disappear one day, and that it is easy to die having never really known anyone besides yourself. A shocking moment for someone who is usually a selfish dick! Of course I can only offer this as a subjective and perhaps mawkish reaction. If the first part is true, though, it is difficult to explain Wallace’s sales.

VI.
Ironically, in building a world racked by loneliness—really an entire world, the kind only big books can assemble—Infinite Jest demonstrates that it is possible to reject or at least postpone drinking the cup of poison that modernity waggles at us. One needn’t buy the fantasy of constant, easy, tailored diversions. The novel’s multi-voiced giant performance shows that under some conditions art can help ward off solipsism, by (for example) socializing the reader into the long haul of a text that doesn’t seek to flatter or distract one, a phrase I have the feeling I stole from Wallace, though I can’t track it down. Reading is a mode of empathy. One can’t help being drawn out and then drawn into the book’s crowded, grimy Boston.

You read the novel, which a person made. Some evil mothers will try to tell you that everything is just dirt, as Lou Reed has it, and, further, climate change can’t be fixed with literature. Nonetheless in Wallace’s fiction life does have a tenuous meaning. We save ourselves by being present in our own lives, which in turn makes it possible to love others, even if the nature of mortality is to eventually fail at both things, since you die at the end of the story. Wallace took his title from the graveyard scene in Hamlet, the play’s funniest and most terrifying passage, for a reason.

Topical Verse: Philip Larkin, “Sad Steps”

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

Here is something to tide you over while I finish a gigantic Infinite Jest post that will go up within a few days. Surprise: it’s a poem! This lyric is “topical” in the sense that I love it, which is the main criterion behind whatever we crow about on the Reader. I can haul this one out from memory at parties. (Hey. Hey! Where’s everyone going?)

As a prose writer Larkin remains underrated. His essays about topics like early jazz, Sylvia Plath (a “horror poet” he admired), postwar British fiction, and Andrew Marvell are perceptive and witty, and his wonderful letters, which you should buy now, demonstrate that he was at once a bleeding-heart romantic, a cruel cynic, a self-hating hermit, a deeply kind man, a nasty political reactionary, a porn aficionado, a (sometimes downright evil) comic, and—what matters most—a poet with one of the sharpest critical sensibilities outside of Auden and Eliot.

Besides those two, Auden being his closest aesthetic relative, not many twentieth-century poets can match his music. Larkin rhymes. He scans. His poems are carefully rigged yet conversationally intimate. They often disguise and then slowly unveil their meditative depths. He published sparingly (like, Elizabeth Bishop sparingly), and while his poems are short, they are existentially enormous. So here you are. This is “Sad Steps,” written in 1968 and published in his final collection, High Windows (1973).

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate—
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

America’s Text Life

Posted on by under Authors, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno

While stalking the murky woods of final grading, your humble critic also foraged throughout the Internet, looking for choice edibles. Very local. So with today’s last spasm of energy, let me adduce the following links as evidence that humanity’s existential status is still blinking at “Worth Saving.” They are all about language and how we should take better care of it.

  • Norman Mailer’s critical fortunes have been on the wane for a while, though an eventual rebound is always possible for any writer whose name rang out during his lifetime. At least in the case of The Armies of the Night (1968), his fictional history/historical fiction/officious monologue about the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, this is unfortunate, because the book contains a wonderful depiction of the poet Robert Lowell, whom he found worthy of overlapping adjectives, “a fine, good, honorable man” whose “grace was in the value words had for him[.]” I love Mailer’s attention to the ethical consequences of language. As he saw it, Lowell always “seemed to emit a horror at the possibility of squandering them [i.e. words] or leaving them abused[.]” I tend to trust Mailer’s judgement on this, because in the same narrative he carefully dismantles the mid-century American version of imperial euphemism (VIETNAM WAR EFFECTIVE AND JUST). Dude spent time in the military and its profanity-rich cultural ecosystem, and guess what? “[A]ll the gifts of the American language came out in the happy play of obscenity upon concept, which enabled one to go back to concept again.” “What is magnificent,” declares Mailer, “about the word shit [sic] is that it enabled you to use the word noble[.]”
  • Years ago Paul Fussell’s Wartime (Oxford UP, 1989) drew my attention to the shit/noble point. Did you know that Fussell also wrote a slim study of Kingsley Amis? Follow that link to The Anti-Egotist (1994).
  • Dan has mentioned this essay before, so I apologize for repeating, but David Bromwich’s “Euphemism and American Violence,” published near the end of the Bush/Cheney administration, is required reading. It will always be required reading. That crew’s loathsome rhetorical productions will be classroom material for decades. Think about all those lyric villainies. Extraordinary rendition. Coalition of the willing. Axis of evil. Shock and awe. The surge. Even Richard Nixon, coiner of “War on Drugs” and the “silent majority,” can’t touch that swag. Sadly, Bromwich’s text is behind a paywall, unless you have a subscription to the NY Review of Books (duh) or are on a campus/library network that has access. As 2013 ends, let’s recall that we live in a world that is in some ways worse than what the Bush vandals dreamed up, thanks to the Obama administration’s shameful expansion of the American security state.
  • Re: the above: This is your semi-daily reminder that President Obama is not a populist with a cool iPod and a Lapham’s Quarterly subscription, but a modestly progressive, by-all-appearances personally decent member of the USA’s detached elite. In other words, not horrible like Romney, but basically Bill Clinton without the adolescent sexual habits.
  • At Slate, Rebecca Schuman has a modest proposal: abolish the essay-writing component of content-based or otherwise discipline-specific introductory college courses (e.g. Western History 101, Intro to Great American Words, Philosophy’s Biggest Hits, Musicology for Physicists, et cetera). Instead, she argues, intro classes should base their grading on oral exams, which, she argues, would force students to actually master course material, reduce opportunities for long-winded bluebook bullshit, and consequently make life better for teachers, who wouldn’t have to slog through as much coal slurry. No more papers or essay exams; just answering questions that a real person poses in real time. Paper writing would be left for later classes, where students motivated about their majors would be more willing to put in the labor it takes to produce decent prose. The article has drawn brainlessly awful hate mail as well as thoughtful discussion. It is worth your five minutes. Come on. Slate articles are short, and it isn’t like other experienced teachers haven’t also brought this up. Granted, as a comp instructor who runs a lot of first-year classes, I don’t think it’s feasible to stop assigning papers altogether. In fact, I’m generally skeptical of Schuman’s pitch, if you read it literally and not Swiftianly. When it comes to writing instruction at most colleges and universities, it would be more immediately helpful to have smaller classes, better job security for faculty, and a  K-12 system that allowed its best teachers to actually teach kids how to write and read stuff besides Instagram captions and SAT swill.
  • If you write, edit, or publish in any professional capacity, you are tight with the Chicago Manual of Style, the “Grammar and Usage” section of which is written by Bryan Garner, who also wrote the best usage guide around for contemporary English, Garner’s Modern American Usage. When it comes to that small cohort of English speakers/writers/readers who care deeply (maybe even obsess, kibbitz, spasm, and fret) about grammar and usage, Garner and David Foster Wallace are fellow travelers. (Wallace’s long essay “Authority and American Usage,” published first in Harper’s as “Tense Present,” introduced me to Garner.) The point is, I seriously fucking care about hyphenating phrasal adjectives. The second point is, D.T. Max has a cogent little post on the New Yorker‘s website about DFW and BG. Like Mailer on Lowell, Max emphasizes that Wallace’s bone-deep fascination with English usage isn’t aesthetic snobbery but a form of moral imagination. See above, David Bromwich, or Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”
  • Considering that I’m someone who is always looking for work, it would probably behoove me to be blandly professional on this blog, which pops up in Google searches.  On the other hand, I am from Virginia, I admire Thomas Jefferson, and Patton Oswalt is great:

Bang palace! (h/t Dan on this one)

  • Naomi Baron’s Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World (Oxford UP, 2008) is germane to everything if you live in an affluent country.
  • Since TGR didn’t get up a Weekend Beats post, I wanted to post a Tuesday jam. But because I’m on an Amtrak train (no big deal) right now, I can’t access YouTube content. This being the case, I suggest you listen to The Stranglers’ “Golden Brown” followed by Trina’s “Pull Over.” They’ll blend, TGR promises. Stay warm for the holidays.

Cowley’s Return

Posted on by under Authors, Good Reviews, Other Critics, Uncategorized

I don’t read Bookforum very often. I should really remedy this, especially if their articles are all as good as Doubleday editor Gerald’s Howard’s essay about The Long Voyage, the new collection of Malcolm Cowley’s letters edited by Hans Bak. Cowley, like Edmund Wilson, Maxwell Perkins, and Harold Ober, was a man who shaped the early- to mid-2oth century American literary scene even when he wasn’t in America. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he helped shape this scene precisely because he got out of America for a little while. Howard writes:

Gertrude Stein gave the American writers who flocked to Paris in the ’20s their indelible tag, “the Lost Generation,” but it was Malcolm Cowley who first gave his cohort its enduring narrative of rebellious escape from, and chastened return to, America in Exile’s Return (1934), a memoir and generational “collective novel” that beat Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to the punch by three decades. We take the near-mythic saga and achievements of this generation for granted today, but as Cowley writes in his elegiac retrospective chronicle and portrait gallery, A Second Flowering, his memoir was “howled down by older reviewers [who] ridiculed the notion that the men of the 1920s had special characteristics and that their adventures in Paris were a story worth telling.”

Had writing his literary memoirs been Cowley’s sole accomplishment, his letters would be worth reading. But Cowley did much more than write criticism and biography, including editing The New Republic, though this part of his career was tainted by his failure to side with the Trotskyites against the Stalinists in the battle for the future of Marxism. His most important contribution though was championing authors who might otherwise have remained obscure, Faulkner and Kerouac chief among these. It isn’t overstating the case to say that without Malcolm Cowley, William Faulkner wouldn’t have won the 1949 Nobel Prize. And without this award, Faulkner might have been forced to spend the rest of his life tinkering on Hollywood scripts to scrape together enough money to put out a novel here and there that would shortly go out of print. Cowley’s 1946 Portable Faulkner is one of the ten most important books of American fiction because it uses an author’s own works to make a case for his greatness. That’s the power of good editing, and even Faulkner himself was shocked by Cowley’s achievement.

Cowley is also responsible for On the Road getting published by Viking in 1957. It’s fashionable among some academics and writers to dismiss Kerouac (Capote famously called him a “typist”), but On the Road might very well be another of the ten most significant works of American fiction because it’s so threatening to middle-class domesticity. It reminds us (warns us?) that there are always people living on the fringes of American respectability who are just as smart and a hell of a lot more interesting than those living the lives they’ve been told they should. It provokes righteous indignation in older readers because it’s simultaneously naive and true: we have choices when it comes to how we lead our lives, and ultimately our regret-fueled misery is of our own making because we care too much about what other people think. It’s this disdain for respectability that connects Faulkner and Kerouac, making Cowley’s attraction to both writers less unlikely than it might at first seem.

So if you have an erudite wo/man of letters on your Christmas shopping list, you could do much worse than to buy s/h(e)im an 850-page volume of letters written by a man who changed American literary history for the better.

Sunday Night Links

Posted on by under Authors, mainly rap music, The Moronic Inferno, Visual

As the frozen moon called North America upon which many of our readers live continues to darken, its daylight progressively emaciated and its nights positively steroidal, your cortex needs food. Here are some links. Take, eat. Stay warm.

  • Advertisements that use kids to sell grown-up commodities like cars and cable packages are repulsive. Just look at this and this, and try to ignore that sad, green revulsion mushrooming in your chest. “We want more, we want more.” Or don’t, and just take our word for it. An Urban Outfitters ad for cancer-style skinny jeans wouldn’t be much worse.
  • David Foster Wallace could be a bad TV guest, like many (maybe most) writers. If you tend to consider your words and think about whether the complicated answer you are about to give is plausible, then most TV hosts won’t know what to do with you. But when Wallace sat down with a German station in 2003 the results, which are on YouTube, were riveting. Here is the man himself talking about how pleasure within market societies can be a form of slavery; and here he is admitting how small the demand for serious writing is, compared to the immensity of the American fear of silence; and later homie gets to the paranoid wastage of the Bush years.
  • There is plenty more Wallace material on YouTube and for cheap on the usual book-buying sites, so do your brain a favor and stop watching Glee or reading Twitter or buying linen scarves or whatever, because as long as people read English, people will read Wallace. Chances are that reading him will make you at least a little happier. He’s consistently on the aesthetic and thematic level of his gregarious, crowd-loving forebears (e.g. Austen, Dickens, Faulkner, Pynchon, Rabelais, Dostoevsky), which is rare enough; most writers are just lucky to occasionally do something comparable to what an influential presence did. He’s one of those writers whose work gives enormous pleasure to a lot of well-read people. As such, anyone who dismisses his work outright (which is very different from saying that you don’t personally like his work*) is likely a pedant whose opinions aren’t worth listening to. Samuel Johnson is right: if a book is long esteemed, it is good, to the extent that we can ever define “good.”
  • Unfortunately we live in a USA where writers have to remind people that public colleges should be free for Americans prepared for college-level work. A democracy must be seriously deranged if its members have trouble with that principle, but many Americans are only OK with spending public funds on simultaneous trillion-dollar wars in multiple theaters. This means that the USA has some serious problems, given the current national acceptance of five-figure in-state tuition bills and leagues of alumni who carry five- or six-figure debt loads. But that shit has a righteous foe in Sarah Kendzior, whose work you should follow. It is great: sarahkendzior.com. American higher-education systems may have gutted their faculty (the loan racket helped), but many of the castaways are vicious writers. Have hope. TGR is roping together some logs in the ship’s wake.
  • High art is not always pleasant. (Just ask anyone who has looked at a Francis Bacon.) I say this because someone recently put together a file of every “YEEAH-UUH!” that Metallica’s frontman James Hetfield has ever barked, snarled, rasped, or sneered. Though conceptually beautiful, it might drive you insane after 45 seconds. Seriously, don’t listen too closely unless you are already a metalhead.

* I don’t like Austen, just as I dislike Woolf’s novels (besides Mrs. Dalloway), but  I wouldn’t pretend that either isn’t worth reading for a person wanting to know more about the canon.

Topical Verse: Doing Justice

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

One of the ironic benefits of a lengthy education in a language’s literature (English in this blog’s two editorial cases) and its attendant scholarship is that you become skeptical of narratives and theories that purport to comprehensively explain any of that literature’s constituent parts, let alone the whole thing. Your bullshit radar gets good at spotting what Kingsley Amis calls “Victorian system building.”

If you ever took an English-lit survey in college, you probably encountered the magisterial Norton anthologies. I don’t use that adjective ironically: those books really are the best undergraduate-level anthologies ever assembled. You can carry a decent chunk of civilization’s accomplishments under your arm. Sorry, Longman, Heath, and other anthologies, but it’s true. (Although the Heath texts did help demonstrate what the supposedly conservative Norton has long since embraced, which is the idea that texts by “minority” writers are often not minor).

Problem is, an anthology has to simplify things a lot, because it is hard to cover all the ins and outs of English in a single volume. For example, according to your author’s much-thumbed and -beloved household Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, American poetry has two founding magicians, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. This is true, to an extent. Nobody in America had written anything that sounded remotely like Leaves of Grass before New York’s original bohemian perv showed up, and there is still nothing like Dickinson’s extraterrestrial hymns.

But things get more complicated from there. Despite the attempts of some critics to map Whitman onto William Carlos Williams (the vernacular, Jacksonian, quotidian voice); or to draw a line from Dickinson to Wallace Stevens (the aristocratic, post-symbolist, bizarro-metaphysical lyric tone); or to demonstrate that Dickinson is to Elizabeth Bishop as Whitman is to Allen Ginsberg, what Philip Larkin says about painters is true. (Grad students planning to write a dissertation which systematizes everything so brilliantly that a school hurls a tenure-track job at you, take note, then quit grad school immediately.) For Larkin, “each painter represents an exhaustion of a particular way of seeing things.” If visual art constitutes “heightened seeing,” he contends in this 1947 letter, then “Poetry = heightened talking.”

This doesn’t mean that the Romantic myth of the genius who has nothing to learn from anyone is true. Only creeps like Percy Shelley and Kanye West believe that. Rather, great artists are singularities, but within patterns, within contexts, within historical communities. They are both radical and traditionalist. Their language of experience is an intensified mutation of some other rather large group’s or groups’ language of experience.

Here I come to one of my favorite poets, Donald Justice. Homie often gets pegged as one of Stevens’s heirs, because his poems frequently read like dream-logic parodies of symbolist puzzles, but his work is also plainspoken. His voice might remind you of Raymond Carver, the Spoon River Anthology, and Whitman. Justice’s best poetry is situationally intelligible: in other words, you can generally tell what the basic set-up is (“OK, guy is looking at some flowers and remembering childhood”), which makes it easier to enjoy yourself. Much love to T.S. Eliot, but it doesn’t always have to be difficult. His heightened talking still sounds like regular talking. His poems could be scenes from novels.

Anyway, here is “The Telephone Number of the Muse” (1973):

Sleepily, the muse to me: “Let us be friends.
Good friends, but only friends. You understand.”
And yawned. And kissed, for the last time, my ear.
Who earlier, weeping at my touch, had whispered:
“I loved you once.” And: “No, I don’t love him.
Not after everything he did.” Later,
Rebuttoning her nightgown with my help:
“Sorry, I just have no desire, it seems.”
Sighing: “For you, I mean.” Long silence. Then:
“You always were so serious.” At which
I smiled, darkly. And that was how I came
To sleep beside, not with her; without dreams.

I call her up sometimes, long distance now.
And she still knows my voice, but I can hear,
Beyond the music of her phonograph,
The laughter of the young men with their keys.

I have the number written down somewhere.

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, education, mainly rap music, Pooms/Poetry, Reviews, Visual

Ayo, readers. Here are some weekend texts to keep you cozy during each November day’s 26 hours of darkness. (Or, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, to give you something to read on your phone so you don’t have to interact with other people.)

  • From The Economist, a brief piece on America’s repulsive penchant for mandatory minimums and life-without-parole for nonviolent offenders. Being TE, the bosom publication of neoliberal trans-Atlantic “moderates,” they have to screw it up by pasting “none too bright” onto “typically poor” when describing inmate demographics, and by pivoting (in fewer than ten words) from acknowledging that the best available estimates indicate that two-thirds of nonviolent lifers are black (ninety-one percent in Louisiana!) to assuring readers that “the problem with the system is not racial bias; applying such draconian, hope-crushing sentences to non-violent offenders of any race is cruel and pointless.” This is like saying that the problem with Stalin wasn’t so much that he butchered and enslaved millions of Soviet subjects, but that killing/enslaving anyone is evil. The fact that the second part is true doesn’t somehow invalidate the first, dear editors of major publication.
  • The branch of the UAW that represents UC graduate students recently released a report titled “Towards Mediocrity: Administrative Mismanagement and the Decline of UC Education.” Read ‘er here. It points out plenty of things this blog has underscored in its own little way: that holding impersonal classes in decaying buildings is bad for the UC; that not investing in teachers and researchers (especially younger ones) is bad for the UC; that going whole-hog for privatized online classes which are demonstrably expensive and shitty is bad for the UC; that reducing the amount of intellectual and material support for low-income students is bad for the UC (and the US); that well-compensated administrators, like UC Irvine’s chief medical officer, do not need quiet little (massive) bonuses, like said CMO’s $73,000 moving-expenses stipend. (Was dude moving to Argentina?) No doubt this report will do nothing to change the situation that inspired it. But hey, the President gave a speech.
  • Labor conditions got you down? Lucky for us, many episodes of The Muppet Show (1976-1981) are on YouTube. Here is the episode where Johnny Cash was the guest. Fair warning, though, if you don’t have a sense of humor or grasp of irony: At one point JC performs with a Confederate flag in the background while Gonzo rides a bronco in the fore.
  • This early half-gem of David Foster Wallace’s is being sold at Urban Outfitters now. Seems like an odd marketing move, considering that among the 200 or so undergraduates whom I have forced to read essays of his, precisely three—as a DFW fanboy I remember the number—had even heard of the man, let alone read anything he wrote. I am actually hoping that UO knows their target demo and is onto something wonderful. Like, maybe copies of Infinite Jest will be piled next to deep-Vs and cheap boat shoes. Could happen.
  • Now in the Grantland stable, Wesley Morris is my favorite film critic. Like DFW, Morris wields a sophisticated, erudite critical vocabulary when talking about American culture, including some of its trashier prongs, without being self-conscious about the performance. Read some stuff here (at his first home, the Boston Globe), here, or here. A sample sentence, from a review of Spring Breakers: “What [director Harmony] Korine does with the beer-soaked skin, face-devouring makeouts, and piles and piles of barely dressed people is intensify the college-party atmosphere in a way that feels simultaneously orgasmic and repulsive.” He hyphenated the phrasal adjectives! Even though I’m straight, I’m swooning.
  • I live in California, and these short days will only shorten for the next few months. Winter’s coming. So here is Karl Shapiro’s “California Winter,” a wonderful elongated lyric. Don’t worry if you don’t live in California, unless you believe that only English people should read Dickens.

Weekend Beats: I’ll Streak His Blood Across My Beak

Posted on by under Authors, Weekend Beats

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something in Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” She writes:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could even improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.

This quote is one of the many reasons Didion is, in my opinion, the greatest essayist I’ve ever read. Feel free to think I’m nuts, or that I’m discounting James Baldwin, Christopher Hitchens, DFW, Maxine Hong Kingston, or some other writer you favor; they’re all great. But Didion’s my kind of Californian, and I spent a lot time reading her when I was living alone in Santa Cruz, a year that it dumped down rain and was gray from about October to March. It was awesome, and that person I used to be is actually someone I sometimes wish I was in touch with more than I am. I’ll spare you a nauseating explanation of why I miss him and why we don’t talk much, but I can say that he would have loved this Songs: Ohia tune, had it been imagined and released when he was me and I was him. It wasn’t, and sadly the guy who wrote the song won’t write any more. But maybe next time that person I used to be comes round again, I’ll play this one for him.