Now you, too, can read Paradise Lost
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/paradise-lost-in-prose/
Yes, a good idea but certainly studying the “translation” shouldn’t be a substitute for studying the original. I like the bit about Leavis and Davie, pasted at length below, because it highlights the trend toward ”good story-telling” and away from a multi-faceted text that’s meant to be lingered over and relished for its multiplicities of meaning. If we try to preserve the long-form written narrative by proving to readers that this form, like film or youtube, can also entertain them with a rollicking good story, then we’re going to fall short and, worse, miss the point entirely. Reading a text always requires some degree of translation and awareness of ambiguity, variability in meaning, intentionality, etc., and that participatory aspect is part of what makes the medium unique. Ah, the vagaries of anti-intellectualism……..
“The experience of reading poetry like this was well described by the great critic F.R. Leavis, who said of Milton (he did not mean this as a compliment) that his verse “calls pervasively for a kind of attention … toward itself.” That is, when reading the poetry one is not encouraged to see it as a window on some other, more real, world; it is its own world, and when it refers it refers to other parts of itself. Milton, Leavis said, displays “a capacity for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words.” The poetry is not mimetic in the usual sense of representing something prior to it; it creates the facts and significances to which you are continually asked to attend.
It is from this strenuous and often frustrating labor that Danielson wants to free the reader, who, once liberated, will be able to go with the flow and enjoy the pleasures of a powerful narrative. But that is not what Milton had in mind, as Donald Davie, another prominent critic, saw when he observed (again in complaint) that, rather than facilitating forward movement, Milton’s verse tends to “check narrative impetus” and to “provoke interesting and important speculative questions,” the consideration of which interrupts our progress”
Yours in the struggle…
This past spring, I spent about a month toting Adorno’s Minima Moralia everywhere with me. I would get through maybe two paragraphs on a subway ride, which was fine because Adorno’s writings are to literary theory writing what short stories are to fiction. Small dense gems of insight. Susan Sontag wrote that one Adorno book was worth a whole shelf of other books. Every time I closed the book, I felt as if my mind had gotten stronger.
I’ve felt the lack of intellectual stimulation recently. My studies for the English Lit GRE didn’t allow time for me to linger over fine points, and I certainly didn’t have time to reflect on the material in writing. Especially in my situation—apart from time spent socializing, the only people I talk to are high school students and the occasional eighth grader—falling out of the writing habit can be damaging.
For example, this afternoon I drafted an email asking a former professor to recommend me to graduate programs. My first draft was the driest, most stilted piece of writing I’ve seen in a while, and though I was able to cut out some extraneous words and recalibrate some of the worst bits, the words didn’t sing, or even hum.
In my exasperation, I turned to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” which I’d come across in my studies but only skimmed. It was tonic. Take this: “This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases…can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.” And this: “Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”
Writing the second draft was painful, but the result was less awful.
Encounter on the subway
I was reading my introduction to theory. An old man sat down next to me and asked me about the book. We started talking, I explained that I’m applying to graduate school; he explained that he is a poet. Samuel Menashe. On his way to a reading at McNally-Jackson. He wrote down the time and place of his next reading—Nov 1 at a library—on a piece of an envelope he had in his pocket. We talked for quite a while–it was a local train. He couldn’t remember the story about my name, so I told him, and I also told him where I’m from, Nashville to Boston to New York, and he told me about his being published in England and Ireland but not the United States until recently. He showed me his book from the American Poets Series. Then he took the piece of envelope back and said he wanted to give one of his poems to me. Don’t look at it until I’m finished, he said. I want you to see it all at once. After he wrote the poem, he signed his name underneath it and made a note, dated, that it was copied out for me, and he wrote out my name. The poem is two lines long. It concerns a pot, and it suited the occasion perfectly. The poet said it has been anthologized a few times. We came to 14th Street and I said I’m glad you said hello, and I’ll see you at the next reading.
Birthday Party
As far as the Jonathan Franzen aspect, it was interesting because we went into this nice orderly apartment, where a friendly but sober-faced man greeted us and offered us a drink, introduced himself, played well the part of the good host—and as he did this I was retracing his work’s impact on many memorable moments in my own life. I remember being drawn to the essay collection, How to be Alone, wanting vindication rather than a how-to—I already know how to be alone—and getting that. Discussing the collection with a now ex-boyfriend while walking over Weeks Bridge the first night we met. Reading The Corrections, sharing that and perhaps the essays with my best friend, my father, my brother. The moment in the novel when the father falls overboard, a line from that section standing out weirdly italicized in my mind as I accepted a glass of white wine, wanting to thank the author for this experience that I was able to share with so many people I care about.
Dispatches from South Carolina
How does environment affect writing style? It may be my imagination, but I at least seem to notice a change in my thought patterns when I leave New York. Over a period of few days, my mind sheds the residue of the city, my speech slows, and I have less to say. I’m not bombarded with stimuli here.
At my office job, with a hundred or so projects proceeding independently at different speeds, I had a few succinct things to say about many topics. Couldn’t go deeply into any one thing, so that when I went to The New Yorker to explain my interest in grad school to Louis Menand, my explanation couldn’t go much further than: I like modernism. I like writing about literature and the history of ideas. In the coming months I’ll be returning to that deeper way of thinking, narrowing down my topics, and I’ll have more to say about the topics I choose.
Brooklyn is made of concrete and plastic. The air is full of particulates, black dust and exhaust, the ground is tamped down and every blade of grass seems like a perversity. Here, in South Carolina, the plants seem swelled up with oxygen and clean water, the sky is enormous (“I would like to step out of my heart / and go walking beneath the enormous sky”), and there is less of a need to formulate responses. There’s a sense of expansion, which is what I want and need.
Reading: André Gide’s The Misanthrope caught my eye. I also have Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism and David Berman’s Actual Air, a gift given me by a friend just before I left town.
Is bad writing bad for you?*
I’ve spent the day completing a close edit of a business school application essay. The writing is so atrocious that, faced with certain sentences, I hardly know where to begin. Subject-verb agreement? Prepositions, what are they and what are they for? Flawed logic? Implied connections that should be stated directly, or vice versa?
I’m accustomed to editing the work of intelligent writers with a grasp of basic grammar. Editing has been like a conversation meant to test and flesh out ideas. Not so now. But I’ve enjoyed crafting explanations of syntactical choices that seem obvious to me, and it puts me in mind of an observation I’ve heard many times from friends who tutor and teach: you have to know something twice as well to teach it.
This sort of editing will cease to be interesting, I predict, as soon as I learn these basic rules of writing twice as well. Or, to put it more precisely, as soon as I can frame adequate comprehensible explanations for all the basics. Then it’ll be drone work, and my increased efficiency may be outweighed by compensatory reading of the “good writing” I’ll need in order to stay sharp.
*The short answer: yes.
Vanity Fair
This amuses me: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/31/fashion.celebrity.
The Female Thing
Read Laura Kipnis’s The Female Thing: Dirt, Envy, Sex, Vulnerability. [A point in favor of the Oxford comma, for those interested: it allows you to omit the ‘and,’ though that’s not technically grammatically correct.] I acquired it on a recent trip to Strand. Having gone in to purchase two specific books, neither of which was in stock, I left with four completely different books. The blurbs on the back of Kipnis’s book, though positive, point out that the strength of the book is not its even-handedness, its cogence, its thoroughness, or its evident but not over-stated intelligence, but rather sauciness. In fact it isn’t particularly even-handed, cogent, etc. Kipnis writes books that create buzz. She revels in setting contradicting ideas side-by-side, gesturing at their deficiencies with a roll of the eyes, then ending the paragraph with a snarky comment and tromping off to the next inconsistency.
Her observations are interesting, particularly those that touch on women’s own ambivalence about how they wanted to be treated, how they want to act. I particularly enjoyed her discussion of pornography, a section of which culminates like so, “Pornography’s critics take porn very literally, as if it purports to be social realism, but a better comparison would be sci-fi, another genre that takes the ‘what if things were different?’ approach to bodies and societies….Sexual synchrony between men and women—what an interesting prospect to contemplate.” Of course the production of porn is a social reality, a fact that gets in the way of any attempts to generalize about whether the fantasy is harmless.
Back to the family, there’s a portion of the “Sex” chapter in which Kipnis reels off a spate of historical facts about higher infant mortality, the practice of naming an infant after its dead sibling, infanticide, child abandonment, sending children to wet nurses following birth and to foundling hospitals or workhouses when economic circumstances dictated it, then concludes that the maternal instinct is “a culturally specific development, also an economic luxury.” She drastically oversimplifies here. Certainly there’ve been external circumstances in various societies throughout history that have amplified or restricted expression of this instinct, if it exists. But that doesn’t mean there is not instinct—only that the current cultural response to it is one that might be altered. Kipnis wants us to bring about a “culturally specific” instinct that puts equal weight on the paternal instinct. Fair enough. Educated women with reproductive control are by far less likely to procreate, which means that birth rates in first world countries have declined. The trend is due, at least in part, to the fact that women get the short end of the stick. Haha.
Kipnis touches on many controversial issues, makes a few pithy observations, then moves right along—and I can imagine a reading of her book would provide fodder for arguments for months. And she leaves you wanting to know more, at least in order to make your own case. Good stuff.
Interlude
Took a break from 2666 to read The Mystery Guest: An Account, written by Grégoire Bouillier and translated by Lorin Stein, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I came to it through a back issue of n+1. Someone in my office mentioned a Paris Review article on watching for fire, but a previous article of his—“My Life and Times in American Journalism”—sounded more pertinent to my own life, so I borrowed the back issue of n+1 to take a look. The piece itself was disappointing. First off the writing wasn’t particularly good. It was a straightforward confessional piece, whiney in the usual way. Philip Connors, the author, assumes the reader’s on his side and, further, that the reader thinks he’s intelligent and worthy. And at the end of it all, he leaves, walks out of a copy-editing job at the Wall Street Journal, and you share his disgust but you’re relieved to part ways. I agree with the person who lent me the magazine—it’s the two excerpted Frederick Seidel poems, and the bit of the story on which they impinge, that make the piece worth reading. Seidel’s poetry is dangerous and outrageous, but dapper. I’m delighted to know that the WSJ published a Seidel poem every month for a year. It is a good tonic.
Scanning the rest of the issue brought me to an excerpt of The Mystery Guest. I remembered the title from Mark Sarvas’s blog, The Elegant Variation, on which he’d posted a very fetching picture of the cover—it was designed to conjure the label of an expensive bottle of wine, a Margaux, which makes an appearance in the story. [And just to further complicate things, I’ll mention that the introduction to the excerpt prompted me to read my first Susan Sontag essay. Because the first line of The Mystery Guest is, “It was the day Michel Leiris died,” and I hadn’t heard of Leiris. The introduction helpfully made mention of the Sontag essay, so off I trundled to my well-stocked if disorganized book shelf to locate Against Interpretation. I want to learn more about Leiris, but won’t go into that now.]
Bouillier-via-Stein has a masterful way of illuminating the little interior explosions that make up the day-to-day life of a truly neurotic person, and he makes them funny without downplaying their real impact. Like this:
“Yes, despite my turtleneck-undershirts a woman had taken an interest in me of late. And to my shock my turtlenecks didn’t put her off, even though most women feel an instinctive, to my mind legitimate, revulsion toward men in layered turtlenecks, unless they somehow find them attractive—but I gave those women a wide berth then and still do. At any rate she wasn’t one of them; she just seemed not to notice my sartorial neurosis, for which I was profoundly grateful. At the same time it frustrated me. I was unnerved that my turtleneck-undershirts didn’t bother her, never even gave her pause, when it would have made me feel so much less burdened and alone, would have meant such a sharp rise in the value of her affections, if only I’d known that she loved me with open eyes. But no, she saw no secret meaning in my layered look, so there I was, misunderstood at her side, furious, divided, unfairly and hatefully demanding that she adjust to my turtlenecks when it was exactly her easy acceptance of them that had brought us together in the first place, and everything about us is so twisted and convoluted, and isn’t every piece of luck that comes our way a trap in disguise?”
I suspect that many of the people who read this book and enjoyed were also neurotics, or normal people who have their moments of neurosis. A blurb from GQ on the back cover of the paperback proclaims the reader will “see [her] own scaled-down reflection” in the book. More like scaled up, though it may be more a matter of noticing and thoughtfully engaging with the mix of dire / decisive / delirious moments that occur when we, for example, pick up the phone and find ourselves suddenly speaking to the person who broke our heart years ago without a word of explanation. This sort of scrupulous “accounting,” as Bouillier calls it, seems similar in a way to the life-blogging that we’re seeding so much of now, but exponentially better.
