Beg Borrow Stijl

Kicking up/off the Dust

2012-02-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

Another piece of the puzzle, from Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurdis Brigge:

It would be difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son is not the legend of a man who didn't want to be loved.

As put this way, here - at the tail end of a book so basted in amour de soi that it turns whatever room you read it in into a stuffy Parisian garret - the sentence unwinds hypnotically and strikes you on the forehead. Was it there the whole time? Meaning, have I really been returning every night, after days of dreaming, to a room not empty and peaceful but in fact stalked, like a bathroom sluice by a venomous cobra?

The prodigal fears knowledge because for the same reason we all do: because he knows that it will imply him in the world, which he loves deeply but is also revolted by and terrified of. The story of the prodigal, like the flight of a boomerang, gets its shape exactly from this weird tension, between the hyperactive, self-involved twirlings of the hero, and the larger, slower, but no less circular arc along which these twirlings are gradually returning. For a good example of this, pick that most Oedipal of our century's genre's, the neo-noir. The private eye works his way deeper and deeper into a mystery, until finally he becomes a part of that mystery - and not just any part, either, but the agent: the keyhole through which evil leaks at last into the world. He has tried to do good, but in his puritanical, utterly-cool way he has insisted that the good he does be done on his own terms, meaning professionally, in a way he could escape if he wanted to. Except that you can never escape, no one can, and to build a super-capable persona around the idea that there's somewhere else to go other than the world means, in the end, to become that most beautiful and illustrative of characters, the Fool.

What does this have to do with us? The philosopher Stanley Cavell's kaleidoscopic reading of King Lear, The Avoidance of Love, frames the problem with characteristically care (and commas): "If good is to grow anywhere in this state, it must recognize, and face, its continuity with, its location within, a maze of evil." For Cavell, Lear messes up because he refuses to recognize this - and he refused to recognize this (the world as a "maze of evil") mainly because he does not want to admit that, in this kind of world, we have an obligation to one another - an obligation that we must acknowledge in order to even begin to consider ourselves good people (or maybe just people).

But Malte, like all prodigals, kicks instinctively at obligation. "Not until long afterward would he realize how thoroughly he had decided never to love, in order not to put anyone in the terrible position of being loved." Oh how generous of you, Malte! How utterly selfless, to avoid that most difficult of human works - not because you resent having to take out the trash and brush your teeth twice a day, but because you want to relieve all your potential lovers of "the terrible position of being loved"!

It's easy to laught at Rilke - but I remember reading NMLB for the first time when I was 17 and being floored by this very inversion. Yeah, I thought! (with that peculiar, almost glandular feeling of teenage epiphany, which I remember being somewhere between popping your ears and realizing that you're coming down with a cold) Being loved sucks. It pulls you out of your self-sufficient dream and into a relationship, meaning something contingent and social and imperfect. More importantly, it forces you to "put yourself out there" in a way that Cavell, again, utterly nails in the Lear essay: "We must learn to reveal ourselves, to allow ourselves to be seen. When we do not, when we keep ourselves in the dark."

The dark, the dark. The other night, a friend and I had a few beers and walked around town talking about atonement. Portland at midnight is an interesting place: empty enough to feel strange, but still small enough to feel domestic. Its west end (spotted like a pumpkin patch with empty brick mansions) crests in a promenade that overlooks the city like a tsunami too in love with itself to fall. Inspired, perhaps, by this melancholy vageling, my friend (who has read far too many German books) made the suggestion that his decision to go into healthcare (after years spent doing something completely different) was motivated in some part by a desire to atone. Cue shiver of recognition - but then isn't that how it happens in the story, too? The prodigal sits in a strange bar, salted by indolence, unaware of everything except the person who sits down next to him by chance, and then opens up his mouth to say a truth so startling that our hero understands immediately that someone is watching. The boomerang of meaning returns. As Rilke says somewhere else, forever, "You must change your life".

(image: not sure. If anyone has any idea, please let me know)

Sleep: a Job for Ghosts

2012-02-12T13:04:00.000-08:00

Sleep. As a nursing assistant working the night shift in a large hospital, I have a complicated relationship to it. On the one hand, I worship it the way a farmer worships the sun - that is, as the mysterious fickle God of my art. On the other hand, I don't get much of it. So, despite all my attempts at equanimity I find myself eyeing sleepers with a sort of sideways glance, like a vampire at a drive-through.

One of the most paradoxical things about hospitals (especially big hospitals, which seem to be the only kind there are these days) is that they prize sleep as a central component of the body's healing process, while at the same time making it practically impossible for real live patients to get any. They are noisy, terrifying, and most importantly full of interruptions; on an average night an aide like me will wake up a patient at least twice simply in order to check his or her blood pressure. The reasoning behind why I do this is sound from a medical perspective: most of the patients on my unit are in a fragile state of health and therefore need to be monitored. But the actual consequence of this reasoning is paradoxical. We monitor the patients' health, but every time we do this we wake them up, meaning prevent them from healing as effectively as they would in a more quiet environment.

Real nursing, as far as I can tell, begins where the various manipulations that are typically help to be the profession's bread and butter - the pulse taking and medication-administering and catheter-inserting - end. In the aftermath of the disregulation forced on the patient by such interruptions the good nurse (or nursing assistant) creates something utterly different: calm. With meticulous art, he prepares the patient's room for sleep - and not just the literal room, but the other rooms floating inside it: bed, body, heart. The head-scratching and - I hate to put it this way, but so it goes - magical nature of his ability cannot be overstressed. I have seen it happen. Great nurses walk into a room and people start to relax. Relaxing, they begin to heal.

Nurses bring sleep: because of this, however, they are not typically great sleepers. Like Morpheus, they are imagined most of the time as watchers, lingerers, pausing in the corner of other people's dreams but never staying there long. Gennady Aygi, in his essay/poem "Sleep and Poetry", writes about the Russian poet Velmir Khlebnikov: "Unlike the other futurists, [he] belongs to the 'sleepers', the dreamers. But he is vigilant too, like a tempted saint." Are nurses similarly tempted by sleep? No doubt. But, the lure is bitter - for like all creators they buy their power at a significant cost. They can manipulate, but not participate.

The peripatetic nature of "runners-from-sleep" (to translate from an Aygiism that doesn't exist) links them with that other character of recent concern: the walker. Like him, they exist on an edge that may be made-up and may be real, between will and waste. Having sublimated their true fears (of surrender, extinction, regeneration), they move through the world without every being completely in it. Are they happy? No less than other people - though perhaps it is this very question that prevents them from resting, since it suggests that happiness will be found if only they keep looking.

"To speak means to be forever on the road," says Mandelstam; still, it's always interesting to ask how much sacrificers secretly enjoy their sacrifice, no matter how much they like to complain about it. Nabokov characteristically called sleep "the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals". My own relationship, for all its leer, is similarly patronizing. I don't want to sleep, because deep down I think of life as a race and sleep as time wasted, away from the fight (somewhere, someone is gaining on you). So I feel compelled to say that night nursing - that most sleepless profession - is actually perfect for me, since it lets me both have my cake (not sleeping) and eat it too (complaining that I never get to sleep). A job for prodigals, it posits the testamental division between prophets and false prophets, meaning those who can renounce their pride, and those who only pretend to. One group is sleeping, the other is not. But then the next question comes: which one?

Image: Chagall, "Poet with Birds", 1911. "The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping the sense of wonder awake in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in his long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep"

Walking II

2012-02-05T15:39:00.000-08:00

Walking around town this evening thinking about...walking around town, when suddenly I notice that the few other people on the street have stopped and are staring into the trees. Crows. Crows on branches and rooftops and the spires of our cold, humble, but sneakily-beautiful town. Which is both a miracle and not so strange since, as everyone who lives here knows, Portland belongs to two peacefully-co-existent tribes of highly intelligent birds. Down by the harbor, the gulls rule easily - but here in the heights it is Crow Central. Sometimes they get together to stare in our windows and delight our children. Apparently, Super Bowl Sunday is one of these times.

Point proven, to my mind - for without walking, how would I have ever seen this? How would I have ever known that there was a small army of creatures amassed outside my window? More importantly, how would I have seen the dude across the street standing there hooting at them, or the three little kids dive-bombing each other around his knees? In the NYT article, Mozgov pitches his flaneur's individual eye against Zuckerberg's "We want everything to be social"; but what spontaneous miracles such as this one demonstrate is that flaneurie - at least as I understand it - is interesting precisely insofar as it combines both the personal and the social. When we sit in a movie theater we watch movies simultaneously "with people" and "alone". The borderline creates a frisson, which is one of the reasons why some of my favorite moviegoing experiences have occurred after the movie itself is over, on the drive home, or over coffee, when the two moviegoers walk through the movie they just saw step by step and so realize how much, or how little their viewing experiences have in common.

So, walking is in danger, says Mozgov. But I wonder if devoted walkers (of both the physical and electronic varieties) shouldn't ask themselves an important question here. That question is this: is walking a form, or an impulse? Is it a matter of using one's physical feet, or waiting for a page to download? Or is it an expression of an inherent human urge towards chance and generosity, which will outlast/overflow any of its particular manifestations? (inevitable question: is it, somehow, impossibly, both?)

May I quote some Russians on this? One of the great poetic walks was performed in early 20th century St. Petersburg, when Osip Mandelstam wrote his magesterial flaneurie, Conversations About Dante (queue my 1.5 regular readers' yawns of familiarity...here comes Mandelstam again). Born, allegedly, from an actual conversation between Man and Andrei Bely, the Conversation creates its own universe out of airplanes and beehives and sticks. Dipping into it for quotation is like drawing water from a well full of goldfish: you always get more than you wanted. For example when we hear that:

There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of words, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence.

Fair enough; but then set beside this the transcendental materialist monk Pavel Florensky, a mathematician and philosopher murdered too young by another, more deadly form of transcendental materialism. His book Iconostasis is, among other things, a long meditation on aesthetic phenomenology, meaning on the role that materials play in the creation of art. What we write with (pen, pencil, keyboard) influences what we write. Here he is on painting:

The way the artist's hand moves, its characteristic motion in applying paint, doing it over and over: this motion is connected to inner life; and if this characteristic movement for some reason does not correspond to inner life, thereby conflicting with it, then it must inevitably be changed - and changed not merely in the practice of one artist but in the artistic practice of a whole people, nation, history. Is it even conceivable that thousands of artists for dozens of centuries somehow, during all their nearly countless artistic lives, moved their hands in ways and rhythms that had no inner connection with their souls?

On this point, I am reminded of the scene in Peter Weir's Witness, when the bedraggled Amish grandfather explains a gun to Lukas Haas. "What you take into your hand, you take into your heart," he says. So, according to Florensky, our materials create us. Walking down a cobblestone street in 19th century Paris means something different from walking along the shoulder of I-95. The internet when you had to wait for it is different from the internet now that you don't. Technologies does not (contrary to what I said in my previous post) exist outside of us - or at least, not wholly outside. Things look back at us.

Where do we stand (Emerson: "Where do we find ourselves?")? Mozgov's article is persuasive and, I think, true. It also panders at least a little to the nostalgia for forms that besets any walker. Walking, when it works, is a risk, a dance with waste and therefore death. As soon as its practice no longer involves this risk, it is time to change, as Florensky says. What needs to be cultivated - and with maximum atavistic frenzy - is not a particular form of the internet, but our Mandelstamian impulse. And who knows, maybe we can't. But people have been saying that since the first walker stepped out of his living room.

(Image: Florensky and Sergie Bulghakov, by Mikhail Nesterov. Screen shot from Norstein's Tale of Tales. Also, many thanks to a great local flaneur for the Mozgov tip!)

Cetography

2012-01-31T07:36:00.000-08:00

Reading, as we all know, can be exciting - but what about not reading? What does not-reading feel like?

I think that in order to answer this question, we've got to first examine the relationship between reading and time. Begin with that original message scrawled on clay or bark or whatever: suddenly, instead of having to repeat a description of where the good watering holes are, OOg-Na-Gok can simply point to the map he made and have it speak for him. His experience, once locked inside his chest like a rib, becomes a tool, a thing outside him and therefore free to go about its (meaning his, as OOg presumes) business. So we see that writing, in its original aspect, is very much a technology - meaning very much an invention meant to save us time.

Good for us! Except that one of the most interesting problems of human experience is that, once we've saved some time, we find ourselves faced with the equally thorny problem of how to spend it. Here, the purely pragmatic aspect of language provides us with no help at all; the misuse of this aspect, however, does. For what if someone (OOg's little brother, say, who is a terrible hunter and on top of that was born without a left ear) got it into his head to draw a map whose lines corresponded to no actual watering hole at all? And what if, freed from an absolute fidelity to a real landscape (though still bound by the mapmaker's desire to convince his readers that what he was showing them was real), this counterfeit mapmaker found himself possessed by an intoxicating freedom? Green lakes, trees of fire - a camp just like theirs, inhabited by a beautiful race of one-eared women! The listeners sit spellbound, hardly noticing as the sun sinks below the horizon. The next night they crowd around the fire to hear more about this mysterious kingdom, so similar to their own and yet so different at the same time...

Time and language are bound up together from birth, like Romulus and Remus or Cain and Abel. Notice how one of those brothers always dies? Well, pay attention to that dagger in language's teeth. Words kill time, close it, box it up and mark it "spent". One of the reason we read is so that there will be a "well" there too. Book-reading is time well spent, not just because it is, but because we've been told it is. Newspaper reading? Internet reading? Back of cereal box reading? Jury's still out.

Into this world of reading, not reading descends like a sickness: a fever or plague or, yes, nauseé sickness of the familiar. Surrounded by books, all the books are wrong, meaning potential wastes of time. Impenetrable disciplines requiring time and devotion, from which we will wake up at the end no more enriched by our effort than we would be if we'd spent it stuffing pillows. Or: these books are good, these books are fine - but the One Book is out there. The book that will change my life, transforming me from a finger-sniffing clerk into a writer who surfs with whales, taking notes, penning masterpieces. It hovers in the darkness, radiating a soft light. Waiting as I waste my life.

Idealism imprisons; should we really be that surprised, then, that so many of the greatest books have been hammers thrown at Stendhal's highway-wandering mirror? Faced with the paralysis of Not Reading, the reader has two choices. He can give up, immolate his library in a sublime auto-da-fé. This is the way of Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Shields. A Reformation, in which our suspicion that God does not really exist in little crackers makes us want to torch the entire edifice, from altar to stained glass to tapestries, and start worshipping in the woods or better, our own basements.

I confess, I am VERY sympathetic to protest; but I've read (and written) too many shitty experiments not to be suspicious of works that lazily discard the trappings of tradition. Destruction is, if you think about it, one of the most difficult projects, and requires a deep formal sense that I frequently suspect may be beyond me. On the other hand, what's left? The Church of Realism? A fundamentally Anglican reduction in ambition and scope, a defeatism that relinquishes Lawrence's "Bright book of life" for provincialism that seems to want, at the end of the day, to simply be left alone? (and yes, James Wood, though you are a beautiful writer, I am asking this question of you, with you (hopefully), not because I reject your definition of realism, but because I want it so badly to be true. And yet, and yet...)

I believe in doubt - I have to, really, or else disqualify myself from the whole thing. Writers are Paracletian, I'm sure, whether their descending angel comes bearing a sword or olive branch. But the question that the Book of Jonah asks is, what do we do while we're waiting for revelation? What do we do when it comes? We all want to be prophets, but few of us want the prophecies we're given. Being in the whale, then, may be one of the ways that we learn how to read our books.

Image: Brian Jungen, Shapeshifter/Partial Cetology, 41 foot long partial whale skeleton made out of plastic deckchairs

"Tell, Don't Show"

2012-01-26T11:17:00.000-08:00

....As we've all heard a thousand times. But then witness last Friday, when I regaled my huddled in laws and vaguely-bemused wife with a story of one Tim Tebow, the Anointed and therefore Man Who Had To Die. Reader, I toot not my own horn when I say that they were enraptured...But after the inevitable Passion, and Fall, an inevitable question arose:

"Wait, you like watching football?"

I don't, actually. What I do like, though, is listening - and not to sports, but about them. The habit was ingrained in me early via my father, a lifelong fan who, what with our living in places that had no real televised broadcasts (especially of American sports) had to field endless questions from my brother and me. What was a baseball? Who were the Red Sox? And how could Mo Vaughan - a behemoth whose photograph I'd seen once in a Herald Tribune and feared ever since - possibly secure enough Bostonian orphans to satisfy his monstrous appetite?

So I learned about sports through a medium that I've been told since is defunct: the oral tradition. It didn't stop there, either. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of a long car ride, during which my dad was subjected to a veritable inquisition on the mysterious world of "Star Wars" (a movie he was sure we'd love). Less a start-to-finish retelling than a sort of encyclopedic Q&A (a story "in pieces", a la Calvino's Invisible Cities or Shklovsky's Sentimental Journey) the universe he created on that and subsequent drives remains one of my ur-texts, vivid and unrepeatable. Its digressive, deceptively-casual shape has remained in my brain ever since, knotted by loci of what still seem unbearable fascination. Han Solo, for example: was he a Jedi, or part of the Empire? Good or Bad? But what side of the Force was he on?! I give my dad infinite credit for refusing to give into my zeal for categorization. It made the story better - for even then I recognized that in a universe of super-powerful creatures, it was exactly Solo's slipperiness made him unique, and uniquely powerful.

Nowadays, I still love a good paraphrase, no matter what form it takes. I devour reviews; ditto previews, to which I have an embarrassing addiction. I hate playing video games, but love watching people play them (or talk or write about playing them). I read about sports without any desire to watch them. All predilections, I'm afraid, that are ridiculously easy to punch holes in (consumerist! American!) - but then what if there's something interesting going on here, too? What if what I'm really searching for when I ask someone to tell me about it is not an end to the conversation, but a return to that backseat of my family Volvo ("olvo" after the V fell off), with a loved face explaining the world to me one question at a time?

All this may have nothing to do with anything... On the other hand, take a second to think about how my father's storytelling differs from the kind that apprentice writers are generally told to practice today. Ruled as it is by Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, contemporary American writing bows before the "eye" - not the real eye (abused constantly by tiny print and pulsing screens), but by the metaphorical organ of literary cliche. Writers are exhorted to "show", "make the reader see it", "notice" - all wonderful pieces of advice, of course. But I wonder if they don't occlude the world, occasionally, by making their words too unbearably clear? "What happens next?" we ask, and wait rapturously for the answer. Do we need to see it? Sometimes yes, sure, we do. But then remember Henry James (one of O'Connor's favorite writers), or Henry Green (who was blind), or Hermann Broch (who...uh...didn't own a TV). Think of Nabokov himself, whose noticings, though vivid, are always strategic and, I guarantee you, much rarer than you remember. "Showing" is an essential spice: but the meat of storytelling is telling. The human mind loves to put things together and this is why a book, among other things, is a big bag of legos. A generous writer understands that the best stories inevitably leave their readers feeling that the best, or most important, or just most interesting parts have been left unshown.

Why We Walk

2012-01-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

Listening to the mellifluous Stephen Metcalf on this week's Culture Gabfest (1/18), I was struck by his final "endorsement" of poems/passages. All three had to do with walking and looking; specifically, with the imaginative/empathic act of seeing something/someone and "inhabiting" them via a sort of brief non-Vulcan mind-meld. Metcalf asked for a genre tag to describe this grouping - a question that seemed interesting to me, since only a few minutes earlier he'd mentioned an article by one of the great literary walkers/lookers, Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - SM's off the cuff paraphrase is, I should mention, concise and elegant, meaning it made sense of an article that I've read and baffled over multiple times).

Benjamin's stock seems to be particularly high right now. Nearly all the year's best of fiction lists were topped by either Teju Cole's Open City or Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station: two books that I haven't read, but which seem to be, among other things, walk novels. The second of these is frequently compared to Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurdis Brigge, the first to the German pan-fictionist W.G. Sebald, who himself rivals Bolano in his secret-saucitude among my friends who like writing and reading. In the same way, I don't know a person in grad school who doesn't worship the very dog-poop on Benjamin's shoes (actually, to be fair I don't know a person in grad school, period. Unless you count nurses. Which I do. Even though they don't usually read a lot of Benjamin).

But to return to SM's genre-begging: I'd say that the mini-genre all these works belong to is, simply, the walk. Pioneers would include the American transcendentalists, English romantic poets, intra-war Germans (and Swiss - can't forget Walser here, not just for his name but for his long short story "The Walk"), Russians at all times (my favorite Russian saying: "When late for work, walk slower"), the French when they're feeling piqued (Baudelaire: a great theorist of flaneurie and the grain of sand hidden in most of Benjamin's best pearls) and of course Guy Davenport. After Dav, walking as an actual pursuit withers, at an inverse rate to the blossoming of its literature, until finally we get to the internet, which, if you're feeling generous, could be seen as an epic, breezy, and occasionally frustrating-walk that everyone with a computer is taking together. Hence, I believe, this discovery of walking.

Do I like to walk, I mean me, personally, as a person with a body? Yes I do. At the same time, I am terrified of walking. Something is always at stake - time, for example. The wager is that sharp attention is enough and that the world is so suffused with meaning (or available to our meaning-makingness) that even the most out of the way detour will end up redeeming what we've spent on it (and if you don't like the mixture of spiritual and economic language here, please take it up with Emerson, also a great walker). Another way to say this is that the walker has faith, which is one of the reason why timid, conservative people like writers are so drawn to walking: not because we're naturally good at it, but because we recognize in it a set of skills that we are somehow deficient in.

Drunken Boat II

2011-10-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

(Best Garrison Keillor Voice)

It's the birthday of Gaullic assfucker Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud. Born somewhere in rural France, nobody really gave or gives a shit where (least of all him), he lived a life of putrid fakery until he began writing poems, at which point he realized that keeping this up would force people to forgive him everything. So he did, and they did, and the rest is history. Read his poems if you want to find out at exactly what it means to be an adolescent, because really, no one was more of one than him (hence his enduring appeal with adolescents, serial killers, and rock and roll singers). Imitate him if you want to die of leg cancer in your mother's barn.

Back when he was still writing things that looked like poems, he wrote a mini-epic called Le Bateau Ivre, which is always translated as The Drunken Boat, but which I like to call The Ship, Shitfaced. It starts like this.

The Ship, Shitfaced

I was going down

river when suddenly I realized that everyone was dead! Redskins

had stapled their pale faces to my boards, which were red too now.

Yippee!

Then the suitors showed up: wogs with cotton

and the butter-boxes. They

wanted me, but I told them to fuck off:

I had a man already. His name was River

and he was a drunk.

He called me kid-stuff because of the way my ass hugged

his peninsula. He lashed me so hard I screamed.

Tohu-Bohu!

We danced all night. Ten nights straight. By

the time we made it to sea I knew

I wasn't his first, but you better believe

I didn't look back for a lighthouse.

He tasted like apples. Kid-stuff! he cried.

It didn't matter,

he made me clean,

no more wine and puke. Just green green apples.

From then on I took a bath

every morning. I was milk and stars.

Sailors the color of old fish passed

us with electric blue smiles on their faces. I waved.

Then things went red.

...And so on and so on, for 24 unbelievable stanzas. One of modern poetry's greatest monuments. After it, nothing was the same. Of the extant translations, I've found some accurate (Fowlie), beautiful (Schmidt), or confusing (Eshlemann). Probably my favorite is by early Nabokov, who turned it into Пяный Корфбль.

Two Thoughts

2011-10-06T07:14:00.000-07:00

1) The much-reported impossibility of translating the great 19th-century Russian poets (Pushkin, Lermontov, a bunch of wonderful writers who my under-read ass doesn't know) makes sense when you think of those poets as translators, and their untranslatable poems therefore as translations. Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which is my favorite book, presents a particularly striking example of this: translated into English (no matter how adeptly) it sounds unsurprising, like something we've read before. Il est plat, votre poet, as Flaubert told Turgenev. Which is perfectly understandable, since that's what EO is: a translation of Don Juan, not just into the language, but into the mood, place, spirit and character of Russia. In this way, it's closest analogue in English is probably something like the Rubiyat or Pound's Cathay or Logue's War Music: an original poem that gets its poetry from the fierce and loving annex of a foreign sensibility. Pushkin as master translator (better: genius as translator. Shakespeare, who dealt in Ovid, another perfect example. Or Chaucer, who is to my mind the closest English-language comparison to Pushkin).

2) For a long time, I thought it would be interesting to write about the problem of film adaptations (Lord of the Rings or Spider Man, or the forthcoming Lord of the Spider Ring Lantern Vampires), which seem to me to succeed or fail insofar as they have the balls and vision to depart creatively from their source material. But then I realized that movies, like plays, are themselves already adaptations of a pre-existing text. Interesting, no? So, if we agree that the problems of adaptation and the problems of translation can throw at least a little light on one another, we should therefore also admit that movies are particularly useful things for a translator to study. The need for more books or records that show us this process happening. Documentaries? X on X-type collections of interviews?

Le Bateau Ivre 1

2011-09-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

Rimbaud seems to be one of those super-translatable writers, a fact that I didn't understand until last night when, after reading Paul Schmidt's version of "The Drunken Boat" next to Wallace Fowlie's, I began to experience a strange, stereoscopic blurring. It was like I was trying to listen to two men tell me the story of a trip they'd taken. One of the men (Fowlie, who appeared before me in a pastel-blue vest), was bearded and dour and obsessed with telling me exactly what had happened; while the other (Schmidt, who was also wearing blue, but who looked like an older, somewhat-less-androgynous Stevie Nix with his ridiculous menagerie of scarves and bangles), was trying to entertain me. I listened to them both; but after a few minutes I realized that I wasn't really listening to either. The story itself faded into the background, transforming their flailings into a sort of dance, though one whose gestures served a purely decorative and abstract purpose. I watched it hypnotized - and then as I watched, I began to notice something moving behind these patterns: something coiled and mangy, like a sick zoo animal. The whiffs I caught of this strange beast were so pungent that I immediately focused on it exclusively, ignoring the dancing men despite the fact that they had redoubled their efforts in the face of my obvious boredom. Their arms whirled to the point that it became almost impossible to see what they were hiding behind their backs. Or was it whom? At this point I couldn't be sure, though of course as soon as I realized that I couldn't be sure, I was. I was completely sure in fact, for I could see now that the flashes of snot covered-tunic I'd been glimpsing belonged to the man himself, or rather the Boy himself. I shoved the other two aside testily (a reader's work is never done!), and grabbed his arm. What happened, I asked him? His velveteen jacket had the disastrous heaviness that all fine fabric does when wet, but his candy-cane pantaloons were dry as bones. Holding my palms out, I could feel the heat radiating off them: an impossible heat, as if they'd just been taken out of his mother's machine. And now he was talking, too: automatically, like an athlete running an obstacle course that he's done so many times he dreams about it. I, I, I he said; but by this point, I wasn't listening to him anymore. I wasn't listening to any of them: I was sailing or floating, or anyway just sloshing side to side, like the inch of bug-juice and gasoline that floods every boat no matter how clean. And I was sailing too. I had cast off, or was cast off, to go looking for the poem I'd read. Did I think I would find it? Not really, no. Not at all, actually. But it didn't matter. I was gone like Cortez - almost exactly like him, in fact. Cortez, Cortez, I hummed, as the wind plucked vacantly at my rigging. As for my companions, I found out later that they'd been stapled to my masts like children's drawings on a refrigerator. What music they'd had was used up, and though they thought that they'd escape, they hadn't. It was a crying shame, really; at the same point it was my only hope - for in the pit of my heart, I knew that I knew something they didn't. I was safe, even in the storm's heart, for I had God's arms around me like a lifejacket of love. So I sailed on, pinned like Sebastian in my rigging - of happiness or sadness, I repeat, it didn't matter. I had everything I need, and I couldn't stop, so I didn't. Until suddenly, one blood-red morning, I did.

Walserology

2011-09-15T05:43:00.000-07:00

Been reading a lot of Robert Walser these days and even writing a little about him (in this review of his Microscripts, for the Collagist, and a just-finished review of the Berlin Stories coming out in the next issue of the wonderfully-named The Literary Review). To my mind, two questions naturally follow from this: 1) Why Walser, and 2) Why reviews?

Let's start with Walser, a writer who I was initially excited about, then disappointed in, then gradually re-excited about. In this way, I think I'm like most people, who probably heard about his wacky life (last 25 years spent in a mental institution in the Swiss countryside) and bizarre literary output (a veritable ocean of unclassifiable story/essay/prose-poems, which grows significantly thicker and more gnarled during the sanitarium years, when Walser began writing exclusively in code, on the backs of beer coasters and envelopes, etc. These form the aforementioned Microscripts), and then read him, only to discover that his voice is insanely straightforward and therefore almost impossible to read. Children would probably get, and love Walser. Children and horses. For poor convoluted lit majors like myself, however, his little hymns are disconcertingly shiny. They lack the handholds I've been trained to expect in fiction: the puzzles and ambiguities that I expect to find under every book and usually do. So reading them is either like trying to walk on ice without my skates on (I slip all over the place), or wearing skates and trying to walk through a parking lot (I herk and jerk through the stories without any real fluidity).

Nevertheless, being a true literary masochist, I persist. After reading pretty much all his books over the course of the last three months, (I think the only one I haven't opened is The Assistants, an early novel), I'm getting the hang of it. I'm starting, not only to be fascinated by Walser, but to actually enjoy reading him. And of course, now that I can actually get something out of him, I've decided that he really is one of the great marginal authors: a mini-talent of epic proportions (everything in Walser is both mini and epic: he's like a Joseph Cornell box in this way, as many people have remarked, or like a Yuri Norstein film, as I believe no one has).

Some tools for access that have been useful for me, and which I offer to the aspiring Walser reader (in no particular order):

1. Proximity. More than any other author I've ever encountered (except maybe Bachelard), Walser benefits, or suffers, from the actual physical distance between his books and the reader's face. I know this sounds goofy, but I swear it helps. You cannot read Walser standing up, or at a desk, or at arms' length: like an optical illusion, he seems to snap into place somewhere around four to six inches from the nose. Ideally, I think he needs to be read with your cheek on the opposite page, so that the letters begin to stand up off the page like tiny trees. In this way you immediately get the strange balloonist's intimacy-with-distance thing, which is one of Walser's most beautiful effects.

2. Speed. Walser should be read in third gear. Any faster, and you'll just glide down the page; any slower, and you'll start sinking through it. Above all, don't savor his metaphors: their doors don't open, they're like model train sets. They run and look beautiful, but don't really benefit from exploration or pressure. In this way, they are the exact opposite of Gogol's tiny animals, which they superficially resemble.

3. Ballooning. I touched on this before (and in the Collagist article), but Walser is a balloonist. He's also a walker - except that, somehow, he turns walking into a sort of human-sized ballooning, as if his head were the pilot and his body the jumble of air and strings. I like to think that anyone who has ever been in a hot air balloon (I have not) will get a physical sense-memory reading him.

4. The English Romantics. In the Literary Review review, I compare Walser to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both were depressives, walkers, and attentive noters, and in both cases, this combination of emotional instability and the very crafty use of vocal instability as a styistic tactic can be both confusing and illuminating. We want to say that Walser wrote to be happy, and that when he stopped being able to write, he became insane - and I think, in an interesting way, that this is both true and not true at the same time. Like Coleridge, Walser was (sometimes dismally, sometimes ecstatically) aware that his true subject was himself, and that use could and should be made even of his difficulties.

5. Flaneurie/The Dandy. Readers of Beaudelaire, Walter Benjamin (especially in One-Way Street and the Arcades Project), Ammons, Thoreau, Will Schofield, or any of the other great literary dandies will recognize immediately what he's up to. Basically, the trick is to put down your book, or pipe, or Wii and go outside. After that, the world begins coming to you, and if it doesn't, you're still fine, since the lack of inspiration is one of the central tropes of late dandyism.

6. The Prose Poem. Walser's works make this category pointless.

7. Diaries. Unlike Kafka, Walser didn't keep one.

8. No irony. There isn't any in Walser. This is maybe the hardest thing a prospective modern reader has to get over.

Silly and juvenile as he occasionally sounds, Walser is a sharp, sometimes frightening author. The Berlin Stories can sound like Triste Tropiques occasionally - there's this feeling that the narrator is standing in the middle of a crowded street, not alienated at all but rather completely immersed: dreaming the same dream as everyone else. In this way, he shows just how much of an outsider he is.

Anyway, a wonderful, pantheon-level writer, and one that I'd recommend. Start with the early stories, either in the Berlin Stories or elsewhere. One of the other unique things about Walser is that he appears to have been translated solely by translators of genius, particularly Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky. I haven't found a bad edition of his work in English.

I think on second thought I'll save reviewing for next time.

(Drawings both by Guy Davenport, who wrote the greatest single piece of criticism about Walser, which is actually a story)

The Worrier

2011-09-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

Worry and stories: the pit and meat of a fruit that I've been gnawing my entire life.

I have no idea when it started. Young. Self-mytholigization (which I practice constantly) is great for braids but tricky about origins, since who can really tell where things start. On the one hand, there are the obvious culprits. I'm an oldest child, which means that I saw my place as the center of my parents' universe be completely disrupted when my brother came along. When I was six, my family moved from small town Vermont to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where we lived for the next four years of my life. I did not see this coming. After PNG, we moved to Lusaka, Zambia for three years; then I went to boarding school in Connecticut; then to college. At this point in my life, I'm 31 years old and have never lived anywhere consecutively for more than four years. Anywhere but Vermont, that is, for those first six.

Being an expat teaches you two great lessons: gluttony, and the importance of stories. The first of these is more fun, but leads to terrible habits. In Zambia, for example, we had three household gods: light, water, and the telephone. Capricious and playful, they ruled over our lives with high-handed glee, frustrating our efforts at stability and sending my mother into fits of rage so terrible that the rest of us huddled for mercy, waiting for the thunderbolt. Stop, shhh, don't anger them, we whispered at her from under the kitchen table. But mom didn't care. A major deity in her own right, she envied these third-world interlopers their freedom. When the power returned to our house after three days of absence, she sniffed slightly before returning, unimpressed, to her Laurens Van Der Post. She wanted to convey a sense of our dignity as human beings to these despots; but as usual, she was thwarted in this by the rest of us, who were not as strong. We whooped with joy the minute the first flicker caused our massive refrigerator to hum to life and continued celebrating throughout the night, cheered on by the happy mutter of whatever appliances we could find. My brother ran through the house turning on all the lights as my father thwacked the television, causing a dim, static-infused image to waver there. You could barely see anything of the picture itself - but then there, in the corner, the chubby little CNN logo stood unmistakably, along with the time and date - in New York city, of course.

We had been there, allegedly. When school or the simple loneliness of being 12 got me down, I asked my brother, who my mother called a "pack rat", to get out the placemat he'd kept from one of our last MacDonald's visits. It was wrinkled slightly, but could still be counted on for a faint, ever-alluring whiff of grease. We examined it for hours, luxuriating not just in its word scrambles and mazes (which my brother traced out lovingly each time, despite the fact that we'd crayoned in the solutions long ago), but in the marginalia: the copyrights and directions and promotional codes. Though less immediately satisfying, these offered a subtle and completely thrilling reality that the more obvious material could not match. We poured over them like archaeologists, hypothesizing and explaining our way towards the fantastic civilization that they represented - that we ourselves would be a part of, some day!

When exactly that day would come was contested - but its existence was unshakable. My father and mother debated its precise date with the passion of medieval theologians debating the Apocalypse, while my brother and I listened quietly. We had our own theories, of course, which deviated from the family story in detail while following it in bulk. My brother thought we would return through Heathrow, I was sure it would be Charles De Gaulle. My sister, who had been born in Papua New Guinea, and whose status as a bonafide American we therefore maintained was suspect, wanted to know if Moses, our gardener, would come on the same airplane as us, and if she could carry our beloved family calico, Kitty Waddy Doo Doo, in her backpack. I told her that Moses hated snow, and that Kitty Waddy would suffocate in her backpack. As the oldest, it was my job to break the hard truths to my siblings, who I knew had absolutely no idea what was going on.

In private, I had my doubts, which I brought to my mother. "My little worrier," she said, smiling - assuring me, as only she could, that everything was going to be alright. But my worrying was relentless: a force that I could neither control nor harness. A year earlier, when my family had travelled the remote Cook Islands (my dad was trying to decide between moving us there, or to Zambia), I'd spent a week's worth of nights camped outside my hotel door, waiting for my parents' feet to appear. They were in a different room from us - which fact had convinced me, or my Worry at least, that they were going to slip out one night and disappear, abandoning my siblings and me to this paradise. I still remember that feeling: the intense, overpowering physicality of it. Despite everything that my mind and heart knew to be true - despite all the evidence of twelve years of familial love - I was convinced they would leave us. It was just a matter of time, before sleep-deprivation overcame the uncomfortableness of the hotel pillow, and I fell asleep at my watch, and then woke up (as one always wakes up, when Worrying) alone.

Writing this now, I'm not sure how to put it. I don't know if my mother stroked my hair like in a movie (I do remember her stroking my hair), or snapped at me (sometimes she snapped at me), or just stopped whatever she was doing and told me straight that nothing like that was going to happen. However she did it, I am sure I emerged from the kitchen, or bedroom, or wherever we were, refreshed: ready to spread the Good News. Anxious to, actually - for like all converts, I was insecure in my confidence and so desperate to hear it echoed by those around me. I told my brother and sister that it was true: we were going back, it was just a matter of time. A matter of months - weeks, even, which we could count on a calendar or make a snake of construction paper loops to measure, as my mother had advised. She believed in looking at one's fears directly, which is one of the reasons my shifty worries drove her so utterly crazy. But I dove to it, cutting and stapling a long chain that I drooped around my bedroom walls like the carcass of some gigantic beast that I had slain. It wilted in the intense moisture the sub-saharran rainy season until, a few weeks later, I threw it away.

There was, however, another way: a spell so secret and unpredictable that I kept it from all of them, even my mother. I'd discovered it myself, on one of those long nights that I spent begging God to protect my family from harm. I pictured Him listening intently, with a the tricky smile of a Arabian Nights djinni. He would grant my wishes; but in order to prevent him from slanting them into horrible lessons, I had to be specific. I had to tell him, not just that I wanted my mother not to die, or to be seriously injured, but that I wanted her not to die the next day, in a car crash, caused by a careening truck like the one we'd passed earlier that day. The truck would not be blue, yellow, white, black or red. Or orange. It would not be driven by a man drinking a Coke, or smoking, or with a hat on. For each calamity that I named, four more seemed to appear - but I tracked them down ruthlessly, exhausting myself with disasters. By the time I fell asleep (almost always mid-prayer), I'd imagined everything: I'd seen my mother die horribly, crying, her heart crushed, her eyes raised in desperation. The word God, repeated incessantly at the beginning, had disappeared now, subsumed by the tide - but it didn't matter, for I wasn't talking to God anymore. I was chanting, talking my Worry into a words so terrible that I'm sure they would have caused the rest of my family to pale.

It worked, too. Like a pipsqueak Scheherazade, I turned my worries into stories, which, as all skeptics (whether adults or children) know, never come true. I saved my life for one more night - saved all their lives. After three years in Zambia, we went back. Our house was still there. I went to school, grew up. Then, in 2005, my mother died of brain cancer. Something none of us saw coming.

Nature Writing

2011-09-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

Another chapter of Eugene, OR. I'm letting them land pointillistically, which is a fancy way of saying cut me some slack for this having apparently nothing to do with the last one. The title has a "II" at the end of it because this is the second chapter of the novel "Nature Writing" (one of eight novels in the cycle). Don't worry: I am fairly certain that this will all make sense, at some point. Or worry. That would be refreshing.

Nature Writing (II)

Then I made my body into a bear’sbody – for her, I said. It happened after one of our terrible dreams. My wifewas lying in bed thinking about the fight we’d had, about the silverware, whichI could never get clean, and about the correct way to floss teeth. Her longthumbs made her a natural at the serial pick-and-slide; but the rabbit, who wasalso there, found faithfulness of any kind bourgeois. He believed that a trueflosser – an artist in other words, displaying an artist’s playfulness with the limitations of his medium – would gravitate naturally towards risk. One of his morepopular demonstrations of this hypothesis was to spool an entire box through his lower jaw and then jerkit out, like a magician removing a tablecloth. He called this trick “Tullaine”, aftera lost love. But my wife was skeptical. “What does a rabbit know about flossingteeth?” she asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror.

That was the dream; but then later, while I was taking a shower, Inoticed that my shoulders had developed two thin ridges of fur on them, right along the top. I knew I had to think fast; so I focused on my right arm,which is my brave arm. “Epaulettes!" I shouted at theshowerhead, which in our apartment is even better than a tin can. Sure enough, ina few seconds my wife’s voice came trickling out of it. "Epaulettes?" "Epaulettes," I repeated. "I’m sorry about the silverware." “No you’re not," said my wife. "Youjust don’t want anyone to be mad at you." The dripped syllables sounded distant: as if she were stuck in the plumbing somewhere. I wanted to twist the shower-head off and shove my paw down it until I felt the soft water of her hair. But I was too big now to do something like that, which meant that all I could do was tell her to wait. "That's what I'm doing," she said. "I'd be down there now, but bears hate water," I said. "Cat's hate water. Bears love water." "I'm changing," I said. "Well then turn the water on," she said. So I did. It rushed over me like an embrace, and I howled for my life; but this, as my wife explained in a letter she sent me after it was all over, only proved that she was right. I hadn't changed a bit.

Wait

2011-09-07T14:33:00.000-07:00

The biggest feeling I get from not working on my novel is dread; ironically, this is almost exactly the same feeling I get from working on my novel. Still, this non-work dread seems slightly more dreadful than the working kind. It's like having a staff or seal of office taken away from me, so that suddenly there's no difference between me and the next guy. How strange! How deeply terrifying, to go overnight from an aspiring member of the elect to someone whose life is not in any way connected to a deeper narrative of work and progress! And is there a writing beyond this kind of narrative? Or am I "giving up", and betraying a dream I've had since I was a kid (though now that I think of it, my dream was initially to make video games, then role playing games, then poems, and finally, novels)...?

The question seems to turn around the word "patience", which Kafka called, not just a virtue, but the virtue. I agree with him; but I think that the real problem for the patient man comes a few steps earlier, when he has to decide whether or not a particular trial is worth being patient about. Let's take a hypothetical: a man is told that he'll inherit a million dollars if he can refrain from drinking alcohol for ten years. In this case, to me, "patience" seems like it would be one of the easiest things in the world to display. The reward is there, the time is definite. Beset though it may be by difficulties and hardships, success becomes essentially a matter of muscle. Will prevails over circumstance or doesn't.

But can we really call this patience? I don't think so - and I don't think Kafka would either. In Kafka's (deeply patient) universe the hypothetical runs more like this: a man is told that he must refrain from drinking alcohol. He is not told why, or for how long, or what the reward for his abstinence will be. Nevertheless, the messenger who tells him this assures him that his task is a matter of the greatest importance - that it is, in fact, the single event that his life has been building up to. He departs in a flurry of what could be wings, or a duck that he's hidden under his trench-coat. He does not pay for his beer.

Putting these two scenarios together, we get a sense of how difficult real patience is. It has nothing to do with willpower; if anything, it insists on the kind of anti-willpower displayed by stones and peasants in Italian movies. To talk about it "requiring" faith sounds wrong: it imposes faith, demands it, in many ways creates it, in reaction to the overwhelming miasma of doubt that it dumps over the patient man's head. In order to counter it, people evolve systems and stories; but this is a last-ditch and somewhat pathetic - if ubiquitous - response. For the world of patience, unlike Harry Potter, will always be there.

I think - and it's true, I could just be blowing smoke up my own ass here - that by putting the novel away after a solid year of hacking at it, I'm trying to exchange my will for a little patience. Does that make sense? I don't want to make it sound neat: it's not neat, or at least I don't think it is. I'm trying to burn my house down so that I can take it with me. My intuition/guess/wager is that the story I've been telling myself about what writing is has become so huge that I can't see whatever is, or isn't, behind it. And I don't think I can write if I can't see.

The next question is, who cares if I write or not? Do I? Or do I just want to be different from everybody else, in a way that my mind knows I've never been and never will be, but my stubborn and human and deeply juvenile heart insists is still possible? To be absolved, and the world alibi no matter where you look...

Li r e s Mut t

2011-09-05T10:18:00.000-07:00

The history of literature is full of if onlys. Two of my favorites are Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser. If only they'd been recognized in their own time, two lives of loneliness and mental illness might have been averted, and the histories of American and German and World literature invigorated a hundred years earlier. Plus, we would probably have the cure for cancer and a black president and new iphones....for everybody!

Thinking of this, we moan and weep about the waste that is human life...But what if, between Kleenexes as it were, we put the problem to ourselves in a completely opposite way, and say that Dickinson's and Walser's lives occurred exactly as they had to in order to produce the works that they did; and that therefore, the hypothetical "fulfillments" that we wish for them would actually have been disasters, which would have prevented these writers from creating the works they did?

Viewing a writer's life this way - that is, as less a success and more a complicated, elaborate mistake - is itself problematic, since it takes the capacity to write out of the creator's hand and diffuses it into that strange and unreliable god Circumstance. But then isn't every writer simultaneously an autonomous creator AND a sort of conduit to his/her times? And following this, aren't the snakes that the world puts between a writer and his/her goal at least as important as the ladders, since they force him/her beyond a willful expression of intention and into the strange, dangerous, quasi-improvisational space that is creative reaction?

In order to get a picture of this, close your eyes and imagine you're an aspiring writer (if you're already an aspiring writer, don't bother to close your eyes). As an AW, you've grown up reading or hearing or seeing works of art that you admire, and this admiration leads you to want to create works of art of your own. Naturally, your first attempts at this are imitations of those works that you admire - imitations that succeed or fail to a varying degree (both in your own eyes, and in the eyes of others). With every success, you gain confidence and ambition; with every failure, discouragement, and an appreciation for the successful works that others have pulled off. Eventually, you get to a point where you are either succeeding more than you're failing, or failing more than you're succeeding. Both of these possibilities have their own satisfactions and problems - but it is only in the latter's case that you are gradually pushed towards a difficult question. The question is, very simply, Are you ever going to stop failing and succeed at this? A Yes to this question means back to the drawing board for more work; but what does a No mean? Does it mean Stop writing? Or does it mean, perhaps more strangely, Stop writing these things that you've been trying to write, that you love, and that have for so long been associated in your mind and heart with any future you might have as a writer?

Putting it this way, I want to suggest that the urge to write, to create, is less an aspiration (with its airy connotations of rising) and more a drag, a sinking towards oneself, so that certain writers' "careers" can resemble the movement of spilled water towards the edge of a table. Along these lines, inherited conceptions of what successful writing would look like can act like cards or hands placed in the path of the water, causing a build-up of mass that may at first seem like a failure to move but is in fact nothing more than the accumulation of potential movement that will express itself, and in gushes, the minute said conception disappears.

In other words, by failing to write like Faulkner, Welty learns to write like Welty. By failing to write like Browning, Pound learns to write like Pound. The writer shoots for something that he loves and falls short, and again and again, until eventually he falls so short that he relinquishes his goal - at which point his idol cracks and he sees what he's been missing this whole time, which is not just his own possibilities, but the real object of study, life.

Seen this way, failure is a key mechanism of an artist's development - maybe the key mechanism. So we might profitably bogue a page from David Foster Wallace's essay Authority and American Usage, in which he suggests that SNOOTlets (DFW's neologism for budding grammar nazis) develop their hypertrophic linguistic abilities due to an inability to mimic other kids:

"Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They're learning about Discourse Communities. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT - in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn... He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for 'peer rapport'..." (Consider the Lobster, p. 103)

Culture here reminds me of biology: adaptations evolve due to a weakness in the organism with respect to the pressures of its surrounding environment. Ergo, if you adapt perfectly, there's no need for the claw or tail or eyespots to be called from the depths of their cells.

So far so good... But what about that second group we mentioned above, the Successes, who set out to imitate, and do? To those of us getting spat on, their lot seems pretty sweet. But I wonder if there isn't more to it, at least in some cases. To adapt is one thing, but to be born into a world that seems to have adapted itself to you, before you even got there?

The self-mutilation that this fit might demand returns us to that old saw, the Prodigal Son. His story was a favorite of Walser, who also achieved a fair amount of success as a young man. His first essay-stories and novels floated into the world to critical acclaim and then disappeared, as he eventually did, to a Swiss sanitarium. The rest of his career can be seen as a series of increasingly-drastic obstructions, both literal (the sanitarium, an aggressive abhorrence of self-promotion) and literary. Of these latter, the most famous is Walser's habit - adopted around the time he entered the sanitarium where he would spend the last two decades of his life - of writing his stories out in stenographers' shorthand on whatever scraps of paper came his way. These included beer coasters, bills, envelopes, postcards. Sometimes the story filled the frame, sometimes it didn't.

Fans of the Microscripts (as these collected stories are called in English) usually praise the product, while lamenting the (diagnosed) schizophrenia that caused Walser's life to be so strangely, severely mangled. Rightly so... But behind these lamentations is the question of whether the Microscripts could exist without the weird panoply of obstructions that their author adopted, or felt the need to adopt, in order to call them into existence. The question, difficult and unsolvable, turns around our conception of happiness. What is it? And what about those strange individuals who seem to run, not to it, but away from it - as if in terror of the nightmare of perfect adaptation?

The story of the prodigal son contains a great mystery, which is why someone with a happy life would decide one day and seemingly out of the blue, to exchange that life for wandering and unhappiness. Why would anyone do that, we wonder? And yet, we exchange our happiness for unhappiness everyday and in a hundred different ways. Walser and Dickinson write in ways that they "shouldn't", live in ways whose invisible logic we describe as tragic and impossible - as if it weren't logic at all but a sort of super-human, sub-human force, like gravity.

Literature as Self Mutilation

2011-09-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

Progress

2011-09-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

Here's something from a poem in novels I'm writing called Eugene, OR. It's in progress, of course. Actually, I just spent the last hour writing it.

The Prose Poem

One night, when the moon was inthe sky and the smell of wet grass clinging to the earth like a torn shift onthe body of a drowned girl, the prose poem went down to the river. Behold me,said the moonlight! Beheld, said the prose poem irritably; only in truththis answer had less to do with the transcendental qualities of moonlight thanwith the darkness and uneven earth. We can assume there was a woman in itsomewhere: not the drowned girl, we’re not talking about her at this point, buta woman, meaning a consummation. Something devoutly to be wished, as the prose poemdescribed it while dipping its feet into the river’s edge. What do you mean“devoutly”, asked the moonlight? I mean devoutly, like on your knees and with your eyelids droopy,almost asleep. Your remember Sunday mornings? (Of course the moonlightremembered Sunday mornings) Well, there is a certain feeling that one gets, nomatter what one’s spiritual orientation. There’s the left side of the skylooking bright and the right side dark beneath a quilt of clouds. Do youfollow? Behold, whispered the moonlight, more insistently now (for it was nearly dawn). Behold, behold! But bythis point the prose poem was starting to see it. You never washed my dishes,you never cared – or rather, you did these things, but without any of thesexually-suggestive aprons that men secretly expect from a lover. Yourcomplaints became verbose, dead on, to the point that soon I watched you likea man watching his house burn down in the middle of the night. Literally burn, askedthe moonlight? But the prose poem shook its head. As usual, he was getting tired of explaining himself. There are stellar bodies – stars, so to speak – and then there is thismoon, this hole in the sky. The light drains through it until it’s all gone, atwhich point god takes the waist and turns, like this. Moonlight: Well, ok, that works, but now you've missed her. Prose poem: But I always missher. That's what she loves about me.

Russian: A Love Story

2011-09-02T05:17:00.000-07:00

A dangerous admission: I am actually not that good at Russian.

No doubt this sounds odd coming from a self-identified translator, but it's true. At best, I'd put my language abilities at "low-advanced" to "high-intermediate". My favorite and strongest skills are interpretive: reading (which I do all the time, with a dictionary at my elbow) and listening (which I don't do that much). According to a Russian friend who I have tea with every once in a while, my speaking is about on the same level as a 17-year-old. My writing is awful. Altogether, I have a pretty solid vocabulary and a sound, if not totally intuitive knowledge of Russian grammar. I'm certainly not hopeless, but I recognize that there's huge room for improvement.

How, given these limitations, can I possibly have the cheek to translate Russian books - and not just any books, but the classics, the high points of pride in one of the most religiously bibliophillic countries in world history? How could I have I presumed to write an English version of Pushkin, the greatest and in some ways most subtle Russian prose writer? Have I no shame?

Actually, shame has been one of the ground-notes in my relationship to Russian since I started learning it 17 years ago. A snotty and distractible student, I had little patience for the memorization and painstaking work that all language-learning requires (I still don't, which is probably one of the reasons my Russian's been stuck at this level for years). What I did have was curiosity - a curiosity that was only increased by my wonderful high-school Russian teacher, Keith Moon. Anyone who's been in school long enough has had (or should have had) a teacher like Mr. Moon. From the first minute of the first day of class, he bounced around the room, pulling answers from our tiny class (there were five of us in Russian 1 and barely twice that in the entire four-year Russian program, maybe a twentieth of the recruits for French and Spanish). On that first day, without speaking a word of English, he taught us the Cyrillic alphabet and a dozen vocabulary words. Walking out of his classroom, I felt like my head was going to go flying off at any minute.

The scant gifts I have to offer the world of Russian translation can all be traced back to that class. In my opinion they boil down to a passion for something that I have come to understand as "Russianness", in all its various forms: music, food, language, people, and of course, literature.

What to say about Russian literature? After I graduated high-school, I took the not-that-unorthodox step of going to live with a family in Moscow for the fall and winter. The Lyubopitovs (whose name means "curious" - I am not making this up) were warm and welcoming, eager to share their culture with me. The father, who worked for the military and had therefore not been paid for over three months (this was smack in the middle of the huge currency crash of 1998, during which the ruble was devalued drastically), had neat grey hair and sad eyes. One night, while the rest of the tiny apartment was asleep, he asked me which Russian writers were my favorite. I answered Tolstoy (I'd read Anna Karenina through cover to cover earlier that year, on a three day bus trip from Connecticut to California) and Pushkin (whose Eugene Onegin I was reading in Charles Johnson's acrobatic translation). He smiled and recited, effortlessly - though with a fair amount of eyebrow waggling - Tatyana's love letter to Onegin.

If I wrote a novelization about my experiences as a young expat in Moscow, this scene would probably not make the cut. It's too obvious - too stereotypical and predictable. But it happened, in that small, dimly-lit kitchen, with the Lyubopitov's electric-blue budgerigar Keyasha watching from behind Mr. Lyubopitov's shoulder. When we finished our tea, I went back to my bedroom (by far the biggest in the apartment, with a huge picture of mid-scream Freddy Mercury hanging above my bed) and, after reading a few stanzas of Johnson's Pushkin's Onegin to get my juices going, wrote three terrible Pushkinian stanzas about the experience.

I wrote a lot of those while I was in Russia - more than I'd ever written before, about anything. In fact, looking back I think I can say that Johnson's Eugene Onegin was the book that prompted me to take that first step from wanting-to-be-a-writer to writing. The regular, rhymed stanzas just seemed so unassuming - so flexible and attractive. Pushkin applied them so liberally to his world (and that's really what EO is: a world) that it encouraged me to try and create my own tiny planet. Poetry could be fluid, witty, light. It could cover everything, animating memory and experience and transforming the thousand-thinged world into a gigantic, glistening chandelier. And I could do it. Badly, but I could do it. So what if I didn't do it a fraction as well as Pushkin, or Johnson, did. I could try. And there was something worthy in that.

Twelve years later I am still trying, and failing, to write like Pushkin, like Kuprin, like Zabolotsky. Translation is a losing proposition, especially for someone like me, with less-than-prodigious linguistic abilities - and though I understand and agree that the coin of great literature should not be debased unnecessarily, I am wary of voices who would deny people like me (that is, essentially, amateurs, meaning lovers) the chance to add something valuable to the constellation of Russian-in-English. Translations are not monuments - not even great ones, like Johnson's Onegin or Volkonsky-Pevear's Karenina, or Nabokov's Lermontov. They are attempts, doomed at the outset, to make express in one language what was originally expressed in another.

I approach my own translations with humility, excitement and, yes, shame. I know I won't be good enough. At the same time, I have too much respect for the human spirit of curiosity and passion to simply give up the race before it's been run. Translation is failure - but that's what makes it so wonderful. Like marriage, it's a process that can seem doomed at the outset - to the unsympathetic viewer, at least. Which is what makes both marriages and translations so quixotic - even heroic.

I pray that I'll be given more opportunities to publish my translations, not only because the process has become so important to me, but because I honestly believe I am a good translator. Russian has been one of my great, hopeless loves since I was a young teenager. No matter which book of hers I open, she's there, floating seductively in an area whose accessibility I can't determine for sure. Is she beyond my reach, within it? Will she ever be? Who knows. But I know she's there.

WHIM

2011-09-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

No essay today: I'm just too beat, which is something that I feel reluctant to mention but want to, if only to ruin this past week's "streak". I'm suspicious of streaks. They're superstitious and inevitably lead to non-streaks, especially for worriers like me. Anyway, blogging is (god willing) a complicated and ongoing failure and I'm really just shooting myself in the foot by pretending otherwise. So there it is: WHIM (on my forehead).

We can even imagine that Mr. Hulot himself disappears for ten months of the year and then reappears spontaneously, in a kind of jump cut, on the first of July, when the alarm clocks finally stop and, in certain privileged places on the French coast and in the countryside as well, a provisional time creates itself, between parentheses as it were - a duration softly whirling, closing in upon itself, like the cycle of oceanic tides. This is Time for the repetition of useless gestures, for minimal mobility, and especially for stasis at the siesta hour. But it is also ritual Time, given a rhythm by the vain liturgy of idle pleasure more rigorous than the work of any office hour. (Andre Bazin writing about Jacques Tati's Les Vacances, as translated by Bert Cardullo)

I'm excited about this week of blogging and have a few ideas for the blog going forward. Ideally, I'd like to continue with the poetics and add more personal stuff, while at the same time working in more discussion of translation as a process, not to mention translations themselves (my own and others). Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments, either by leaving comments on the individual posts or contacting me via email at josh.billings@gmail.com. And of course thank you for reading, whoever you are.

Oh yes, and I did some heavy edits on yesterday's essay on parody, which I think improved and deepened it. Have a look!

Small Man Trapped In A Box, Says, YOUR GENIUS - wait for it - IS YOUR ERROR

2011-08-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

But what about parody? In an interview with J. Alfred Appell (a name whose Nabokovishness a Russian teacher of mine once taught a whole class on), Vladimir Nabokov says, "Satire is a lesson. Parody is a game." The distinction may seem thin - good games always teach you something, after all - but I think I see his point. There is art that keeps you seated and art that invites you to get up, and for some reason parody seems to stand balanced like a sword between these two, with the potential to fall either way.

In Nab's underrated The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the eponymous hero's breakthrough book, The Prismatic Bezel, is described like this:

As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J.L. Coleman has called it 'a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,' and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bevel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud. The decayed idea might be in itself quite innocent and it may be argued that there is not much sin in continually exploiting this or that thoroughly woen subject or style if it still pleases and amuses. But for Sebastian Knight, the merest trifle, as, say, the adopted method of a detective story, became a bloated and malodorous corpse. He did not mind in the least 'penny dreadfuls' because he wasn't concerned with ordinary morals; what annoyed him invariably was the second rate, not the third or N-th rate, because here, at the readable stage, the shamming began, and this was, in an artistic sense, immoral. But The Prismatic Bezel is not only a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale it is also a wicked imitation of many other things... (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight p. 90)

The parody that Nabokov describes Sebastian using - whose humor bends into a "springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion" - is one we see over and over again, both in Nab himself and in many other high-points of 20th century fiction (Flannery O'Connor, for example). For these writers, in order to be serious you have to first earn your reader's trust by showing him or her that you know how deeply unserious the majority of daily life is. The debatable assumption behind such a method - that more people experience their lives as absurd than tragic - feels like a natural product of a time in which ironically bitching actors are used to sell soda; but its origins go back much further than Nabokov. As literary critic Erich Auerbach describes in his book Mimesis, comedy and tragedy have always struggled against one another - to the point that, in classical literature, the concept of "realism" was itself held to be utterly comic and unserious:

In modern literature the technique of imitation can evolve a serious, problematic, and tragic conception of any character regardless of type and social standing, of any occurrence regardless of whether it be legendary, broadly political, or narrowly domestic; and in most cases it actually does so. Precisely that is completely impossible in antiquity...Everything commonly realistic, everything pertaining to everyday life, must not be treated on any level except the comic, which admits no problematic probing. A a result the boundaries of realism are narrow. (Mimesis, p.27)

For Auerbach, this division between serious-high and comic-low was a natural one in a world whose writers were almost exclusively upper class generals, politicians, statesman, or at least landholders. But with the rise of Christianity - a religon whose heroes come from all walks of life, including the working and peasant classes - this dynamic changes. Christ's speech both promises an inversion of earthly values in heaven (the rich will be poor and the meek inherit the earth, etc.) and demonstrates how this could happen in his stories, which treat their poor subjects with dignity. So a realm that was until that point seen as comic comes to be seen as secretly serious.

Parody is, in many ways, a literary version of this same switch. It attempts to find seriousness in places that have traditionally been seen as unserious: in genre-writing, for example, or television, or on the internet. A protean impulse, it has at its heart the democratic (and, dare I say it, Christian) idea that anything, no matter how unpromising it might appear, can be valuable - can be real - if it is loved.

Perhaps it is the hovering Paracletean Silverhawk in me (to borrow, sort of, a Michel Tournier formulation) that encourages me to set this loving parody up against the hateful parody practiced by Sebastian Knight. Maybe I'm wrong here - maybe the two emotions are not so easily separable, and the key to successful animation is the strength of feeling in the animator (take as an example of this the savage parodist Nathaniel West, or another favorite of mine, Flannery O'Connor). But then what about Nabokov himself? Is there any other writer of the twentieth century whose love for and fascination with his objects of fun is so obviously, inescapably sincere?

In my last post, I worshipped the Menelaen sincerity Viktor Shklovsky demonstrates as he grapples Tolstoy in his book The Energy of Delusion. Writing like that is powered, not by clinical detachment, but by an impulse: the probing feeling-your-way-through-a-dark-room that we get so powerfully in writers from Sterne to Kafka to Bolano. The Russian sweater-maker Osip Mandelstam describes this impulse when he says that There is no syntax: there is a magnetized impulse, a longing for the stern of a ship, a longing for a forage of worms, a longing for an unpromulgated law, a longing for Florence. (Conversation about Dante, p.41) Which I think brings us closer to what really happens at the center of the Proetus myth. You remember this myth, of course. Menelaus (who the Coen brothers bring back to life as Governor Menelaus "Pappy" O'Daniel) is told by the shape-shifter's daughter that if he hangs on long enough, he will get his answer. Wrestling in ancient literature is usually a one-way affair. In the Greek version of the myth, the God changes. In the Biblical version, the human being (in the case I'm thinking of, Jacob) is the one who steps away from the battle altered. But strangely enough, when I imagine these battles, I see both shapes shifting. The angel, who after all is defeated, must finish the fight with at least a little food for thought, in the same way that, when I think of Menelaus grappling, the thing that really interests me is what's going on inside him. Maybe this is the novelist in me speaking: for if any image encapsulates writing a novel, for me, it is wrestling. The thing changes under your hand; but you change too, perhaps just as dramatically. In fact, you might go so far as to say that the writing changes because you change: because there is a consistently-different person writing it, in the same way that Menelaus who's already wrestled Proteus the Lion and Proteus the Pig has a different set of tools to tackle Proteus the Tree or Lake or Flea.

Cinema, which after all depends as a genre on many successful transformations (of places, people, objects), understands the palaien nature of transformation at least as well as literature. There is a wonderful moment late in the recent movie The Trip, when Steve Coogan tries to imitate his frenemy Rob Bryden's "Small Man Trapped in a Box" routine. After a few unsuccessful attempts, Coogan gives up. "I don't care about silly voices," he squeaks bitterly. The moment is touching - especially so since it comes towards the end of a movie that has, up to this point, succeeded precisely because of Coogan & Brydon's encyclopedic (dazzling, frightening) ability to mimic whatever they want. More than touching, actually: it seems real. (Ironically, and puzzlingly, Coogan's failure simultaneously feels like the most fictional moment in the movie, since after an hour and a half of watching him become everyone under the sun, I have absolutely no doubt that he could mimic the shit out of "Small Man Trapped in a Box").

Like impression, parody is often seen as a soft, or minor genre. It is, mostly - but only because most parody is unsuccessful: a daliance instead of a possession. Or I could approach the problem from the opposite direction by saying that impression is undervalued in literature because the greatest parodies don't look like parodies at all. Seen this (come to think of it, is quite Nabokovian) way, parody is not a minor literary form at all, but rather one of writing's most integral mechanisms. Nabokov parodies Joyce who parodies Sterne, in the same way that, say, Marilynne Robinson parodies Melville parodying Milton. In each case, the attempt to rewrite one's favorite book results in a completely different one - but the spirit, the "magnetized impulse" is ferried over, changed and, ultimately, enriched.

Seth's uncle Deano draws the moral from this story in his documentary on the 80s punk band Recklessness:

(I always tell my students not to worry about originality; just ty to copy the manners and musics of the various, the more various the better, poetries you love: your originality will come from your inability to copy well: YOUR GENIUS IS YOUR ERROR.)

Deano's idea inverts Harold Bloom's famous idea that strong art comes from an attempt to escape the art we love: no, Dean says, not escape, but imitate. To become what we love, which we can't no matter how many books we've read or not read. The Law of Identity rules on earth as it does everywhere else in the universe, thank God, since it's exactly the differences between ourselves and our idols that provoke us to mimic them in the first place.

Village Explaining

2011-08-30T02:02:00.000-07:00

Talking this way, I risk earning that most famous literary pejorative: "village explainer". The epithet applies more easily to Americans than it does to writers from other countries, which seems mysterious to me. Why isn't Gombrowicz a village explianer? How do Milosz and Kundera and Brodsky escape the title, when their non-fiction writing is no more acute than Pound's was and in most cases much less? Is it something national, something inherently cranky in the American non-fictive voice? And if so, should I really try to avoid it?

But a question like this really is nothing more than a placeholder for a larger one, isn't it? Why am I doing this? Why am I waking up at four o'clock in the morning and engraving my "thoughts" (more like moods or weather patterns) onto the unruled palm-sized electronic notecard that blogger hands me? What do I get out of this? Fame? But surely you realize that I might be writing all this down on the back of a beer coaster for all the people who will ever read it? My own patient passage through the Vale of Soul-Making? As if Keats would have written a line without the promise of someone, somewhere waiting for him on the other side...

Bloggers are the New Crusoes. You remember the story? If you do, you don't, since the real book happens in the gorgeous, green-green valley between Crusoe's arrival and when Friday shows up. Not that I don't like Friday: I do, especially after reading the French anthropologist/aspiring-vampire Michel Tournier's translation of him. But his arrival transforms Crusoe's redolent solitude into a society, which means conflicts, motives, and, eventually at least, plot. The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky titled his book on plot in Tolstoy "The Energy of Delusion", which as I understand it is meant to equate the conviction required for story-making with the kind of whipped-up and blinkered myopia we might find in someone wearing a sandwich board. Shklovsky's own book is frustratingly plotless: a whirlpool of lines that seem to be less arranged against their margin than clinging to it, like iron filings on a magnet or arrows from St. Sebastian's side. This is frustrating at first - but the further you read in the book, the more you come to see that Shklovsky is in fact attempting his own kind of literary mimesis: mimicking the peripatetic and searching adventure of Tolstoy's drafts (hundreds of them on AK - entire rewritings even!) in his own investigation. The result is an unending digression on literary creation, a fractal fable:

"I'll repeat what's important for me: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy said that he didn't know how to draw a circle; he had to close the line and then correct it.
He knew how to think by juxtaposing words, by awakening them, in a way.
When he wrote his major novels, he would begin with something plotted, i.e., something that was happening or had already happened, and sought the relationship between the incidental and the inevitable.
He studied the thoughts of a child and how cunning emerged at its first stages.
The so-called draft version is not an adaptation of a text to the norms, not sorting through gems, like jewelers do when making necklaces or crowns.
Drafts weigh the essence of events. The scenarios, which the hero of the work goes through, they should be called 'hypothetical circumstances.'
This is the analysis of how man was created, i.e., his sensation of the world, and how through the movements of scenarios, experimented and tested hundreds of times in fiction, the truth becomes clearer.
This work is like that of a captain who navigates by the stars and moon, using his chronometer to verify and make sure of their hypothetical place in the sky. The captain is testing the ship's course." (p. 134)

Shklovsky's dedication to the search ("The purpose of my search is art", he says) was so great that he scrapped the more recognizable generic forms ("The only genre that interests me is film itself" - Tarkovsky) for something ragged and messy-looking. His book is, at times, almost viscerally embarrassing. But failure or no, it is also something infinitely valuable: it is sincere. An outmoded and abused virtue these days, I know....but how striking! How amazing, to watch him flail and attempt and then finally hit on something that you know he simply could not have said in a 20-page letter to the academy. Why couldn't he have said it? Simple: because he couldn't have seen it. As he describes it being for Tolstoy, writing for Shklovsky is a sea-voyage - a discipline (or ecstacy) of perception, wherein the calcified generic modes must be stripped, Blake-style, from the organs of perception, so that the truth of the world (truth, which likes to hide) can be glimpsed and revealed.

Does this actually happen? I'm wondering. Whatever good news I have to bring, I'm bringing; but I'm wormy and skeptical, especially when it comes to the rhetoric of vision. Blogs, luckily, let you do this. You can backtrack and undermine, revising your own assertions as you go. What won't you get by doing this? Well, among other things, you will never write Anna Karenina. Make peace with that right now: stare yourself down in the mirror, sure in the knowledge that your beard will never dangle, nor your t-shirt stretch into the peasant blouse that you so sorely desire. Your eyes will go unhaunted by that revelation of ordinary life that is Levin and Kitty, or the romantic pyre of their dark, ridiculous shadows, Anna and Vronsky. Not for you.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out here (what a village-explainery sentence!) is: what am I writing? At the same time, I think I'm trying to forget that: forget "novel", forget "blogging", forget "Tolstoy". No wonder I feel the need to explain myself so much.

Our Eerie U Our Ray

2011-08-29T06:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I wrote that an urge towards mimesis - that is, towards a sort of free-hand copying of the world's things and procedures - is one of the main impulses of my writing. Is this true? Well, I think it's true, though of course there's a very real possibility that I really only like the idea of myself as a mimetic writer, and that all this blogging vs. fiction writing crap that I'm trying to build up is really just another way for me to justify and entomb myself - to make myself feel right and secure and padded with the sofa-cushions of Truth when really I am as wandering and peripatetic as everyone else.

Still, I guess I can at least say truthfully that I am deeply in love with the word "mimesis" and the process of art that it seems to represent. Mimesis. Something small and squeaky and therefore incredibly mouse-like about its sounds; come to think of it, something mouse-like about the entire word, with its unmissable M-ears, then the "eek!" as it's seen, followed by the scurried disappearance of that tail-like "sis"... And do you, dear reader, remember when words used to do that? When they seemed, not just evocative but actually alive on the page, like tiny penned animals? Maybe that, more than the Greek stamp of approval, is what I'm looking for: a return to the kind of relationship with words that I remember having as a kid, when every letter seemed like an animal flush with its own integral, mysterious life.

The connection between words and animals is something that any child whose ever stared longingly into the large, pony-sad eye of a lower case "a" can tell you about. Here is David Malouf, who is not a child, but who is Australian, describing Ovid describing a wild Eurasian boy he's adopted mimicking, first bird-call, and then man-call :

I have begun to understand him. In imitating birds, he is not, like our mimics, copying something that is outside him and revealing the accuracy of his ear or the virtuosity of his speech organs. He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man. Speech is the essential. I have hit at the very beginning on the one thing that will reveal to him of what kind he is. In making those buzzing sounds he discovers his throat. In intoning through his nostrils he realizes that he has a nose, and behind it, caverns where the sound reverberates. And so on for lips, tongue, teeth. As he builds up the whole range of sounds that we make, he is building up in his own head the image of head, checking and rechecking with his fingertips against my throat, my jaws, my lips, that he is made as I am, that he is a man.

Paraphrased by Malouf (via his made-up Ovid), the process of mimicry transforms into something more than a game; but it is important to notice that there are actually two types of mimesis described here. In one - the kind practiced "by our [Roman, civilized] mimics" -the movement occurs from the outside in and so exerts only "accuracy" and "virtuosity": valuable skills, sure, but not exactly ground-breaking. The child's form of mimicry, on the other hand, is a sort of studied possession. It, too, is virtuosic - but it employs its virtuosity as a tool in its search for a deeper, essential identification with what it's trying to imitate. The point is not to "pass": the point (or dream, maybe) is to imaginatively enter another being, and then to speak, for as long as you can, from within that being. So the child becomes a man in the same way that he becomes a bird: imaginatively, meaning (in Malouf's formulation, at least) for real.

Writing it, I see it: mimesis as art is a door, an imaginative tunnel from the self into the world and then back again (loaded with riches). To borrow a phrase from the non-Maloufian Ovid (or at least, Arthur Golding's version of him), it's a "translation of bodies", in which the mimic's powers of observation, control and - perhaps most importantly - imaginative generosity are all used to ferry the spirit of his subject from one set of (temporal, linguistic, physical) circumstances into another.

In this way, the Child's mimesis resembles another sort of translation - the kind that I'm ostensibly more familiar with but really just as baffled by. In his wonderful study Translating Neruda, the essayist/translator John Felstiner describes it in terms that we might happily juxtapose with Malouf's:

To get from the poet's voice into another language and into a translator's own voice is the business of translation. It depends on a moment-by-moment shuttle between voices, for what translating comes down to is listening - listening now to what the poet's voice said, now to one's own voice as it finds what to say.

At first, superficial glance, Felstiner's description of literary translation sounds a little like the "copying of something outside" that Ovid attributes to his Roman contemporaries - but this doesn't do justice to the book in which we find the quotation. Translating Neruda is, as Felstiner himself says, an anatomy. It includes, not only Felstiner's wonderful translation of Paplo Neruda's "Alturas De Macchu Picchu", but also a 200-page description of the history and poetics that Felstiner studied in order to make the translation. Part biography, part ars poetica (or ars translatica...sorry, I couldn't stop myself), it is really a long, fascinating digression on, and demonstration of, translation's unique mode of "listening". It admits - as the Malouf quote perhaps does not - that even the most possessed and imaginative mimicry has limits. Two voices can never be the same, and this is both limit and opportunity, since it takes translation out of the goopy, table-floating realm of pseudo-literary seance, and puts it squarely where it belongs: in the house of art. John Felstiner is not Pablo Neruda, as "Heights of Macchu Picchu" is not "Alturas De Macchu Picchu", and to claim any differently is to paradoxically impoverish translation's possibilities. We try to copy, and fail to do so perfectly - but in our failure, we create something entirely new in both languages.

As an art built on the admission of limitation that is typically swept under the rug in other genres, translation gives us a unique place from which to consider literary success. It makes us understand what we can't do while at the same time exciting us by the possibility of what we can. As the Irish taxonomist Paul Muldoon says in his introduction to The Faber Book of Beasts, "It seems that in poetry, as in life, animals bring out the best in us. We are most human in the presence of animals, most humble, and it is only out of humility, out of uncertainty, out of ignorance, that the greatest art may be made."

Are Australians naturally humble? As someone who grew up (at least partially) on an island only a few hundred miles to their north, I am tempted to say "not especially". But then there is way that fat man/bard Les Murray becomes, not just a bat, but batness:

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.

Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening's a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:

ah eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry - aura our orrery,
our eerie u our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear our aery Yahweh.

This is taken from the sequence of poem/translations titled Presence: Translations from the Natural World. It is itself a paraphrase: in the book, the bat-speak is the part in italics, and that "u" in the second to last line should be an umlaut, which I can't seem to get blogger to write. Do these changes make a difference? Without a doubt. In my version, it is Murray's voice that is flying italicized through the air, and the bats' that comes to a stop as if jerked. This seems like an unfortunate confusion of effects - although who knows, maybe the stillness of the sonar is meant to suggest the platonic perfection of their voice, their true voices. And now it is "our eerie you": an address - to Yahweh? The reader? The ambiguity seems important, though I miss that umlaut and its ludicrously-small hat.

Murray's humbly-audacious translations are what I'm talking about. Reading them, I feel the same way as I did when I was four years old, leafing through my still favorite book, I'm as Quick as a Cricket. Through it's simple and inexhaustible magic, I transformed into animal after animal, simply by uttering those two words: "as a". The miracle of metaphor, which I found to my stunned amazement was portable and could open anything. Armed with it, I could not just wander, but inhabit the world, snuggling down into its nooks or soaring through its spaces. And with each transformation I wrote another line in what I come to see now was a riddle. I am you and you and you, which adds up, at the end of the day, to I am this, I am this, I am this, until inevitably we arrive at the question that all poems ask, the underquestion: What am I?

Writing, like translating, is riddling. Books are riddles with as many solutions as readers. In 1072, the Bishop of Exeter died, bequeathing to the Cathedral library the Codex Exoniensis (Exeter Book) that we can only hope gave him so much joy, thought, and consolation while he was alive. Here are two of its riddles, which most subsequent commentators agree are really separate versions with the same answer. Brilliantly translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland:

66
I stretch beyond the bounds of the world,
I'm smaller than a worm, outstrip the sun,
I shine more brightly than the moon. The swelling seas,
the fair face of the earth and all the green fields,
are within my clasp. I cover the depths,
and plunge beneath hell; I ascend above heaven,
highland of renown; I reach beyond
the boundaries of the land of blessed angels.
I fill far and wide all the corners of the earth
and the ocean streams. Say what my name is.

and

69
On the way a miracle: water become bone.

Earwig Art

2011-08-28T11:32:00.000-07:00

The relative "storylessness" of blogging is, to me at least, simultaneously one of its most terrifying and attractive features. In order to understand this, please put yourself for a moment in the shoes of a young man with literary dreams. How do you begin to pursue those dreams? More importantly, how do you articulate what the realization of those dreams would look like to you, were it to happen?

The simple answer to both these questions is probably quite similar to the one you'd give a young person pursuing any other type of achievement: you model your life after your heroes as best you can and then hope, wish, pray that your own talents fit or perhaps refit the world. For a fiction writer, at least as I have understood it, such a mimesis basically boils down to an apprenticeship spent accumulating notice, then the big breakthrough (novel), then, ahem, the rest of your life, which is both a continual trial and a sort of Swiss dale, over whose daisy-covered fields you twirl like James Franco in a habit.

Fair enough - but then what about blogging? Compared with such a solid, straightforward, though admittedly quite trying quest (for, as Rilke says, an artist is "In love with the difficult") it looks decidedly shaggy. Young and unofficial, it compares to the larger career-narrative the way waitressing or a summer hiking would - that is, as a diversion from, but also preparation for, something much more serious. People who spend too much time at it might enjoy themselves for a while, but their self-indulgence may put them at risk for that most dire of conditions, Unpaid Eccentricity. They may find their energies diverted, into tide pools that, while comfortable, will eventually force those same energies to adopt their own stunted proportions.

In describing the problem this way - as a choice between embracing one's plot or punking out (as my most aggressively-narrative teacher wrote in the margins of one of my stories) - I am of course being stinkingly American, which both means something and doesn't since these days anyone can become American by brushing their teeth. I am describing the plot lines of countless movies and books, which is both completely natural and also strange, since who says my life is ever going to look anything like what I've seen or read? But then how do I not think this? How do I somehow step outside the story I've been writing around myself without trading my status as hero for a bit part that asks me only to deliver my catchphrase once an episode and then leave, so that the real drama can proceed without me?

Blogging vehemently refuses to answer these questions, which is one of the things I find most appealing about it. There's no story to it yet; and because there's no story, there's nothing to distract me from the actual moment and act of writing. The sweet spot seems so much closer, my face so much closer to the page. Ridiculous, given that there's no page for my nose to be close to... but there it is. The world outside the story, before the story, nameless, which is to say utterly able to call names out of us. In David Malouf's beautiful novel An Imaginary Life, which I finished last night as lightning stepped around Portland like a giant looking for his dropped glasses, Ovid (imagined Ovid, real Ovid) imagines this state:

The earth, now that I am about to leave it, seems so close at last...Round the base of these roots, seeking refuge amongst them as in a forest, finding food, are the smaller creatures - wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death.

For me, Malouf here is describing the world beyond stories, or rather (as he perfectly intuits), the world beneath them. This is the world I need - not "want", but really need, since why would I open my mouth (which I am of course not really doing, any more than I'm putting my face close to a printed page) if not to name even the smallest part of it? Mimesis, which entails both imitation and, beneath that, attention, praise, generosity, remains the whole fucking point, no matter what the medium. Organs are useful insofar as they facilitate our part in that process, bringing us closer, not just to the literal earth, but to the shared and personal ground of lived experience.

But can novels still do that? Can blogging?

How?

Images: Publicity still for Circle in the Square production of Ovid's Metamorphoses; Publicity photo from New Platz's production of same; Poster for Whistler in the Dark's adaptation of Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid

Skywriting

2011-08-27T10:34:00.001-07:00

My models for blogging are: the Polish genius/disruptor Witold Gombrowicz and the French philosopher/guru Emile-August Chernier, who wrote under the ungooglable pen name Alain.

News of Gombrowicz first reached me while I was living in Prague, a city riddled with both expatriates (which Gombro was) and shitty writers (which he was not). In such a city, it is easier than you'd think for an American to get a library card, and to check out, using said card, the British edition of Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, and then to read in this small, tattered, but ridiculously-well-argued book that the Joyce-Mann-Proust triumvirate that he has worshipped for so long is in fact a distant second string to the real giants of the period, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Witold Gombrowicz. The American, of course, has never heard of any of these writers before. But Americans being Americans and shitty writers being shitty writers, he of course believes every word of it.

Ten years and numerous investigations later, Gombrowicz's thought has utterly infected me. Viruses, like most great organisms, do their work in the dark; but the success of Gombro's prose has less to do with outright force than with its unique combination of speed and sharpness. This is especially true in the Diaries, which, were I a real writer, I would mention in an interview as "my War and Peace" (causing the same puzzled excitement in Shitty Young America that, say, Philip Roth did in me, when he called Celine "my Proust"). Written during his impromptu exile in Argentine, they are among the great blogging ur-texts: a rancid epic of inflation, mutilation, and change (which, despite his desires to, Gombro really does not: this is simultaneously the work's great victory and its tragedy). And it all plays out in that wonderful, hiding-under-the-sofa level of mundanity that blogs are so fascinated with. Comparing the book with Tolstoy may seem flippant: it is. It is ludicrously irresponsible. But put a page of the Diaries next to the last chapter of Anna Karenina, and then stare at them with all the intensity you'd give to the Magic Eye poster in a TGIFridays's bathroom. After five minutes, you will start to get very bored - but then, after fifteen or twenty minutes the candy-colored waters will part, and the Unicorn of Meaning leap from the wall to gouge your eye out.

Gombro's genius was to be so vituperously witty about himself and the world that he eventually broke them both. In pictures he looks like what he was: a grouchy and effete old perv. But this is also not what he was - for the real Gombrowicz is not in these pictures at all, at least not visibly. The real Gombrowicz is sitting in a tiny cockpit at the top of the picture-Gombrowicz's head, moving his arms and legs via an elaborate system of levers when he has to, but mostly just sitting there in disgusted awe. Yes, there is awe in Gombrowicz, that most romantic of romantic Polish intellectuals. But he will not settle. So, like a particular strain of idealist that can be found everywhere (even in America), he spends most of his time telling the world and himself how incredibly much they fail to measure up.

Going from Gombrowicz to Alain is like deciding to switch parents with your best friend. There is the fear, the flush of encounter, the relief at feeling valued, hopeful, optimistic... and then, of course, the mysterious realization that these new parents are actually a lot like your old ones. A populist, a Marxist (though seen through his eyes Marx resembles the Brothers Grimm much more than Goethe or Schiller), Alain wrote almost exclusively in a single form, which he called the propos. As Richard Pevear explains it in his introduction to The Gods:

The word basically means a conversation, a talk. These miniature essays make up a large part of [Alain's] work; between 1903 and 1936 he wrote over five thousand of them, an average of one every two and a half days...The nature of the propos grew out of the unusual working conditions Alain set himself: to fill two pages, at one sitting, with no revisions. In fact, he would not erase a sentence once it was put down; he would make his thought follow the words. In a note written in 1908, he compared the propos to the stretto in a fugue, the abbreviated repetition of subjects, which come together 'as if they were passing through a ring. The material crowds in, and it has to line up, and pass through, and be quick. That is my acrobatic stunt, as well as i can describe it; I have succeeded perhaps one time in six, which is a lot...'

The state of concentration that he describes here as being necessary for the writing of the propos links Alain's writing to more physical and improvisational modes of creation: dance, for example, or the guitar solo, or drawing. The mad British sculptor/painter/novelist Michael Ayrton describes the last of these beautifully: "The process of drawing is before all else the process of putting the visual intelligence into action, the very mechanics of taking visual thought." In a similar way, Alain's propos seem less written to me than sky-written, performed. Despite their density I read them quickly, before they dissolve, and then mull over them for hours.

This conception of writing as a physical, improvisational, and above all risky act is what makes Alain so important for me. Most of the fiction I've tried to write over the last decade has been the result of enormous effort - not concentration, necessarily, but effort. But as anyone who's ever been a long-distance athlete can tell you, time spent at a task does not immediately translate into time well spent (and then just there, I had to rewrite that sentence). Too often while writing fiction - while writing any prose, really, except those pieces that I can somehow convince myself are "not important" - I put my head down and push, with the same blinkered tenacity that I used to show when I volunteered for the most difficult events during a high school swim meet. Why did I do this? Why especially when my thighs at fourteen were things of beauty, and my breaststroke (the most delicate, dance-like and furious of the competitive strokes) an unbeatable knife-stab into perfectly-parting waters? But breaststroke was also the slowest stroke and therefore a notorious haven for malingerers. Even the name was pansified. So I gave it up, exchanging what I still hold would have been a meteoric career for four years of a frustrated attempt to succeed at something that I just - wasn't - good at.

Fear. But one of the great ironies (or necessities) of Alain's writing is that, effortless though it may seem, it is obsessed with work. The Gods - still my favorite blog, even more so than the Diaries - is a hymn to disillusion: a reverse and antidote to Gombrowicz's Polish escapism. For Alain, the point is not to escape, since anywhere we escape to will just be the same thing. We carry our problem - our "soul error" as Alain's great predecessor Montaigne put it - inside us. It is a misunderstanding (shades again of Tolstoy and that secret Tolstoyan, Ludwig Wittgenstein), which means that we can correct it. There are no paradises, no edens since Eden. As soon as we accept that nothing comes into being without work, we can begin to remedy our situation ourselves, in the world. Putting it this way unfortunately makes Alain sound like an Australian trying to sell blenders - but this is not philosophy. Or rather, it is philosophy in the same way that Alain's propos are writing: philosophy as action.

Alain's legacy, for me, is intensity: of style, of voice, of ambition. His famous students included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil. His first sentences are impossible composites of equation and fairy tale: "A child is first carried or wheeled around." "Violence is everywhere under the peacefulness of the fields." "The Gods are moments of man." "Ulysses, on Calypso's beach, thinks of the smoke above his roof in Ithaca, and wants to die." "We always have to eat." Impossible not to read the sentences that follow them - which is, I realize, one of the things he has in common with Witold Gombrowicz.

Weft and Whale

2011-08-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

For those people who, like me, spend their vacations eating pizza and thinking about Bible stories, I have good news: I know why Jonah slept.

I’ve been thinking about this moment for years, ever since I 1) started working in a hospital (whale-like institution), and 2) got about 300 note-cards into a retelling of the Book of Jonah, which I was trying to write in a single, cetological sentence.

I started the project as a sort of antidote against the writerly constipation that I’ve been suffering from ever since graduating from my MFA program: a crippling and uncomfortable perfectionism, in which I get really excited about ideas and even begin executing them, until about twenty pages in, when I for some reason go back and start revising what I’ve already written with the obsessive scrupulosity of a man locking himself into smaller and smaller rooms of his house. Chapter, paragraph, sentence…The last step of this imprisonment (which proceeds with a cunning that I can only call diabolic) is of course the single word, which I repeat like a five-year-old who has just discovered that even the most familiar name dissolves if he says it enough. And no, I haven't really figured out how to deal with this.

In the Jonah project's case, the word I got locked in was “asleep”, from the story’s fifth verse. God sends his storm:

“And the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god; and they cast forth wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it unto them. But Jonah was gone down into the innermost parts of the ship, and he lay, and was fast asleep.”

To me, Jonah’s nap is the key mystery of this extremely mysterious book: a knot that defies psychologizing and allegorizing alike. How could he sleep? Was he faking it? Was he stupid? And what does it mean that he slept? How does it fit in with his subsequent admission, and acceptance of himself as preacher; the famous whale-dive; the frustrating gourd-blight after the prophecy has been delivered (and for those of you who don’t remember this part of the story, as I didn’t, take a look: you’ll be surprised at where it goes).

My previous attempts to understand Jonah’s sleep never really worked…but this past weekend, an explanation came to me that both slides into place and turns, revealing that what I had taken to be the tale's “movement” was really only my eyes sliding over its intricate facade. The explanation is this: Jonah is beloved.

Beloved. A precious word in the Old Testament (though to be fair, I have no idea if it ever appears in it), which is after all a book (or collection of books) about fathers and sons, both God the Father and his human sons, and the individual fathers and sons of the stories themselves. In so many of these, we see a struggle or rather two struggles: the son’s for his father’s blessing, and the father’s for his son’s obedience. There are tricks and schemes on both sides, but never any backtracking. Once the blessing is given, it’s given, and the plot moves on, relegating the non-blessed to the margins of their more favored siblings’ story. Occasionally they resurface Ishmael-like with their own stories. More often they just disappear.

In the midst of this generational scrabble, the beloveds appear with their strange insouciance. Jacob, Joseph, Abel, Jonah: the pretty ones, the charmers, at whose feet the world seems to throw itself. We love these characters – more importantly, God loves these characters. His favor flows to them like water running downhill.

So now imagine you were one of these beloveds, sleeping as the storm buffeted… Would you be afraid? Or would you perhaps, like Jonah, eye the whole thing kind of sleepily, like an only child being yelled at by his grandparents? Oh yes, you’ll punish me. Sure. But then where will your love go? Who will be your hero? Give me my toys.

Beloveds, who have never experienced it, don’t believe in punishment: this is why Jonah sleeps so soundly. He has been chosen. A favorite, meaning someone who will never be hurt. A rich kid, a genius. No problems. And because no problems, no way forward. Watch the movies of Sophia Coppolla if you don’t believe in this last dynamic: the plotless anhedonia of someone born with every advantage. Moods and mood-pieces, into which God’s wrath, terrible at first, breaks like a ray of sunlight, convincing us for a while at least that we might actually die. So, alive at last, Jonah makes his confession from the Whale’s belly. Uncle, uncle, he shouts! I give up, show me the plot and I’ll join it! At which point God says, patiently, I don’t believe you, you haven’t suffered yet. You are faking even your confession…

Coming as it does at the very end of the Old Testament, the Book of Jonah belongs to the gigantic mishmash of folk-tale, commentary, genealogy, and prophecy that make up the bulk of that book after the Pentateuch. Read in the 21st century, by someone raised on Disney movies, it sounds very much like a “lost book”: a free-standing story that both waits for an ending and resists subsequent attempts to rope it to Christ’s happy ending. But I think it resists this. Stubborn and irresolvable, it sticks in the craw of the larger Biblical narrative while simultaneously seeming like a mini-allegory of the whole thing. To me, it is (again, like so many other Bible stories) a story about talent, and waste, and our inability to escape either of them.

Images: Albert Herbert's Jonah and the Whale, Jonah and the Whale Cake from cakecentral.com, Jonah and the Whale balloon sculpture by Pastor Andrew Grosjean

Authority

2011-08-26T13:08:00.000-07:00

Authority. Art is a simple but thrilling game played, not against, but with this antagonist: less arm-wrestle than hide-and-seek. There are two ways you can lose. The first is obvious. The eager ephebe falls in love with the works that have given him so much pleasure, and this makes him the worst of all lovers. In thrall, he can do nothing except repeat the last thing you said. The other fail is more subtle, less publicized, maybe more common. Student lights out for territory, looking for his own rules, then discovers to his dismay that rules, like all true things, do not belong to him – or at least not to him alone. Spinning in the wilderness he is like a boxer underwater: resistance nowhere, which means resistance everywhere. No way to figure out what’s good, which may sound trite but then think about it like this: No way to do that thing that art promises, to link your own self up to the larger matrix of humanity, being, whatever else you want to call it.

Pushkin, the newest author in the history of literature, was weirdly enough no innovator. People used to talk about this all the time. He collated, syncretized. He picked up the almost-completed crossword that generations of Russian writers had worked on before him and, through genius (which is to say, through something as close to chance as it was to destiny or “hard won skill”) saw what was missing. Child’s play! Or at least that’s how we imagine it. Experimenters deserve our love, praise, devotion, and study…but the greats do not experiment. (And perhaps this is the key to Mandelstam’s idea that the poem is already there, waiting to be found, like a rock on a beach?)

Salieri

2011-08-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

It's been over a year since I posted on this blog, a year during which I've had plenty of reasons to post and even ideas about posts, but have nevertheless successfully prevented myself - with a 100% success rate - from posting a single word. Why?

Blogging to me is a form of failure: a rich and potential-filled form, sure, but still essentially what Seth Pollins wrote at the top of another now-defunct blog that he and I wrote together: a distraction, from writing and by writing. Meaning, a distraction from what's important (a shimmering and mirage-like "career" as a novelist, or poet, or travel writer, or whatever) by what is not (the mundane but richly present worlds of blogging, translation, review writing that seem to be constantly tapping me on the shoulder).

One of the funniest things about admitting this, of course, is that the writers I love the most were almost all dilettantes. In fact, one of my own favorite novels is Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, in which the idea of literary history as a series of straight-forward thumb-wrestles (Milton fights Shakespeare, Blake fights Milton, Ginsburg fights Blake), is replaced by an upside-down, inside-out labyrinth of evasions, twists, and chickening-outs. According to this history (or my version of it, anyway), even the most industrious writers tend to have a wide streak of spiritual loafing. They "face the facts", but selectively, and in a way that makes it possible for them to write something new and strange.

Their failure gives me hope, the thing with feathers. Writing is hard for me. Writing fiction (the thing I feel like I should be writing) is especially hard - a fact that I find particularly inconvenient, since, as a Mozartian prodigy of unheard-of potential, I really should be killing this shit on a daily basis. And the fact that I'm not makes me wonder. Why can't I do this? Why don't the words flow from my fingers with the sort of facility that would make the curious peruser of my drafts stop in wonder and raise his head, to mutter at my buxom Austrian wife, "Original manuscripts?.... But there's not a mark on them!"

Blogging is a form of failure: a discipline in it, actually. But then, as Mandelstam reminds us, "Salieri is worthy of respect and burning love. It is not his fault that he heard the music of algebra as loudly as that of living harmony."

Show and Tell: Powder Blue and Red Macaw

2010-05-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

Show: The Childers

This is a classic version of "The Childers", a salmon fly invented around 1850 by one Colonel Childers. In its original version, the Childers is made up of what appears to be a mixture of LL Bean sweater colors and the short stories of JD Salinger:

"Tag: Silver twist and light blue silk.
Tail: A topping, strands of red and powder blue macaw, and pintail on top.
Butt: Black ostrich herl.
Body: Two turns of light yellow silk followed by light yellow seal's fur and three turns of scarlet seal's fur at the throat.
Ribs: Silver lace and silver oval tinsel.
Hackle: White furnace hackle dyed light yellow.
Throat: Scarlet hackle and widgeon.
Wing: Strands of tippet and tail of golden pheasant: brown mottled turkey, Amherst pheasant, pintail, bustard, summer duck (wood duck), green parrot, powder blue and red macaw, gallina (guinea fowl), mallard roof and a topping.
Horns: Blue macaw.
Cheeks: Chatterer.
Head: Black ostrich herl."

(source: the Classic Salmon Fly website)

Many other versions of the Childers have been developed over the years, including ones by Rizah Trokic:

and Martin Bach:

Is Bach's rashly neon body a legitimate advance? Is Trokic's innovative hackle arrangement a discovery, or only avant-garde posturing? "Even the masters of old tied flies with the same name in many different ways and who are we to say which way is best", say the legitimate enthusiasts.

Tell: Translation's Audience

Translation is, in some ways, the clearest and simplest version of literary mimesis: you are trying to write something that "looks like" something else that someone else has already written. In order to do this, it's important to consider constantly the conditions and predilections of your audience; but even a super-fastidious observance of these quantities is no guarantee of success. The fish either bites or it doesn't: there may be a certain amount of whimsy involved in its decision, even luck...though here, as usual, any superstition we allow ourselves must be true superstition, meaning highly pragmatic. You may not know why wearing your wife's bra around your neck lets you catch on average two more fish a day. But your knowing why is not the point. Or rather, "why" is a luxury that can be maintained only so long as it remains intimately connected to "how".

Translation is not a science, though it is filled with sciences. It is impressionistic and therefore vulnerable, circumstantial, ridiculous. At the same time, it is almost completely unrenumerative, meaning the closest thing to street ball that literature has right now. In its own unique, and I think endearingly naive way, it believes in what anyone with half a brain knows is impossible: the miraculous/mundane transubstantiation of foreign into native. Parasitic as a pilot fish, its poetics must therefore be deduced, as the sun deduces salt from seawater, which is slow of course, but which earns for the translator, after long effort, the paradoxical combination of crystalline hardness and a generous capacity to dissolve instantly in water or saliva.

Translation has not, surprisingly enough, been "figured out". There are memoirs, but no adequate manuals. Like China, travel writing, and certain types of concrete poetry, it is an art of perpetual arrival whose moment in the sun is always "on the horizon".

The End: a Paleontology

2010-04-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

I. Petrified Metaphors

Ponder, if you will: no human being on earth, alive or dead, has ever seen a dinosaur.

In his fantastic exploration of millennial thought, The Sense of an Ending, British literary critic/experimental essayist Frank Kermode examines the concept of "spatialization" in literary criticism, first described by Joseph Frank. Frank's idea, roughly paraphrased by Kermode, seems to be that, while we read a book once "in time", we continue to experience it - through either memory or rereading - in space. Personally, I find this metaphor a little difficult to wrap my mind around (can time and space be isolated like that? Don't we always experience things in both time and space? Could I somehow interact with my living room in a way that doesn't require my moving through time as well? Could I spend an hour outside of space?). What seems crystal clear, however, is the qualifying aside that Kermode appends to it:

"Used in this way 'spatialization' is one of those metaphors which we tend to forget are metaphorical, like the metaphor of organic form." (p. 178)

For me this sentence sums up, among other things, the Novel, Russian literature, and What It Means to Be a Young Man. "One of those metaphors that we tend to forget are metaphorical". Say it with me - go ahead, don't be proud! After all, we're none of us so good at tracking squirrels or carving spoons out of larger spoons that we don't occasionally (read: all the time) treat our metaphors like a teenage boy lavishing backstory on his fake Canadian girlfriend. We're human: mixing up art and life is what we do, whether we're Jan Brady or a brainy Dostoevsky scholar.

II. Real Disasters

Dinosaurs are a perfect example of this. Who has ever seen a dinosaur? At the same time, who can forget the impact of Jurassic Park's introductory brontosauri? No amount of screen clippery can convey the impact this image had on me as a 13 year old; roughly paraphrased, my impressions were probably along the lines of "Holy crap: a real dinosaur!" And truly, this is the effect that Spielberg's expert technology shot at and achieved that long ago summer, for millions of people all over the world. A real dinosaur - meaning, a dinosaur that made the representations we'd been given in the past appear to be, not awe-inspiring and lifelike, but comical, ridiculous. Dinosaurs are not like that: they're like THIS, and thank god someone finally got them right! So the representation seemed to reach, not just back in time, but forward as well, rendering not only its ancestors, but its children obsolete as well.

In this way, the aesthetic implications of Jurassic Park were, as with all masterstrokes of mimesis, apocalyptic. In order to fully appreciate this, imagine an animator who had working on a dinosaur movie at a rival studio (Disney, for example) seeing those brontosauri for the first time: while the audience gasped, he was no doubt trying to decide which high-rise to throw himself off of - for really what's the point, after such mastery? Where can we possibly go? Hope shuts like an antennae-touched sphincter and the creative brain (which, after all, need hope to function) shrivels into something like dried fruit: something sustaining, in other words, and full of nutrients, but ultimately unsatisfying, like all desert foods.

This feeling, of course, is completely normal: a mix of jealousy, dread and despair that anyone who has ever tried to create something new or at least original has experienced again and again. The history of art is a book of last days: just look at our own chapter if you want proof. Genres are dying, fundamental procedures being re-examined, hallowed formal and extra-formal procedures pushed back by forces that not even the most fervent fundamentalist believes they will be able to overcome. Innovators are heralded as precursors of Mayan-level apocalypses and hold-outs scorned with the cold gaze of opportunistic Bruckheimers peddling their personal 2012s (in which they have decided, despite the promising casting of John Cusack, to stick to the familiar Hollywood disaster-movie formula). Meanwhile, everyone is waiting for the little water glass on the dashboard to start trembling.

III. Last Boat to Kairos

The novel, named for its newness, is gloriously susceptible to these murmurs. As Kermode says:

"Any novel, however 'realistic', involves some degree of alienation from 'reality'. You can see the difficulty Fielding, for example, felt about this, at the very beginning of the serious novel; he felt he had to reject the Richardsonian method of novels by epistolary correspondences, although this made sure that in the midst of voluminous detail intended to ensure realism, everything became kairos [Kermode's appropriation of a Greek word concept of time that is about to end (as opposed to time unoppressed by, for example, a gigantic tidal wave)]."

Fielding debunked the vision of novelistic time that he found in the novel as it had been left to him by previous writers; so he invented a different way of putting things together that he felt was more realistic. The public agreed; but the important word to remember here is "invented". He was making it up. At the same time, the thing he made up appeared, to many people, to be a more accurate (or at least intriguing, beguiling, etc.) representation than what had come before it.

Was Fielding wrong to do this? Actually, Kermode says, he was, in his inventions, being far more the novelist than many of his more derivative contemporaries:

"In short, [Fielding] is, and would have been happy to hear it, of the family of Don Quixote, tilting with a hopeless chivalry against the dull windmills of time-bound reality. All novelists must do so; but it is important that the great ones retreat from reality less perfunctorily than the authors of novelettes and detective stories." (p.51 - and I would advise the reader concerned with the uniquely realistic mimesis of genre fiction to substitute here, for Kermode's somewhat unimaginative "novelettes and detective stories", whatever literature they find most generic)

IV. Hold on to Your Butts

To all those troubled by the coming End, I recommend a re-watching of Jurassic Park. As a meditation on novelty, the movie is endless: a formal and thematic mobius strip, in which the constantly-expressed mistrust of innovation is continually transforming into a delight at newness, or if not newness than at least technology, wittily adapted and charmingly executed (Spielberg's direction being an analogue here of Tom Cruise's smile: irresistible because impenetrable, and impenetrable, not because we can't find our way to the other side of it, but because we feel content to enjoy it as an end, however reduced). I find the velociraptors particularly heartening - for with their green eyes, hunched backs and withered little arms, they are so clearly caricatures that the question of how "real" they look becomes irrelevant, pedantic. Bugs Bunny wouldn't look like that, let alone walk on two legs, let alone talk. Yet he is a persuasive mimesis - if not of a rabbit pure and simple, then perhaps of something (or someone) "rabbity", or perhaps harelike. Animals are riddles - even dinosaurs. Applying them to our lives inevitably involves alterations, infidelities, as all translations do.

Art, like everything, is contextual, and just saying that once-revolutionary innovations now look stupid (or amazing) to us does not absolve us from acknowledging the newest New Thing, even if only by rejecting it. At the same time, my own experience of trying to make is that context can become overwhelming, and that, when this happens, it is helpful to remember that none of us succeed, not even the geniuses. The world goes on, or as A.R. Ammons (who, derivative-sounding when he appeared, has grown since his death into the most experimental American poet) writes:

"the anthology is the moving, changing definition of the
imaginative life of the people, the repository and the source,
genetic: the critic and teacher protect and reveal the source

and watch over the freedom of becomings there: the artist
stands freely into advancings: critics and teacher choose, shape,
and transmit: all three need the widest opening to chance

and possibility, as perceptions that might grow into currents
of mind can find their way; all three are complete men,
centralists and peripheralists who, making, move and stay:" (Sphere, p. 18)

Fiction's Failure

2010-03-11T18:33:00.000-08:00

I. Making Mistakes

The opposite of failure is success - but what's the opposite of a mistake? A success? And what is a success? The word belongs to that peculiar class of abstract English nouns we call "states", which you can travel into and out of without hassle or identification. But then you try to buy gas and the prices are different.

Mistakes, on the other hand, are local as furniture. They have no lexical antonym and are therefore free to roam through English unharassed. Their peculiar combination of flimsiness and power makes them interesting, unlike success - for success is the Velveeta cheese of human conditions: the same no matter where you slice it. All successful men are alike, to paraphrase Tolstoy. On the other hand, when a man tells us that he's made some mistakes, we want to know EXACTLY what they were.

"Everybody makes mistakes."

"Make one mistake and you're dead."

(Success may be something you achieve, but mistakes are made)

The most common uses of "mistake" imply recognition, which in turn point to two separate (-seeming) worldviews. Either 1) error is folded into life, which means success is a matter of overcoming one's errors, or 2) Success is achieved only through the strategic and near Herculian ability to avoid making mistakes.

"You had it all planned out - but you made one mistake" (sardonic, heavy-eyebrowed gangster-voice). In this sentence, as in the two quoted above, the sense of "downfall" is both heightened and strangely mitigated by the inherent domesticity of the "mistake" itself (which unpacks as something like "one little mistake"). The speaker is luxuriating, as choruses do, in the justice of the gods. The sentence creaks comfortably beneath him - for in the rumpus room of his thoughts, everything, even the juice stains on the carpet, contributes to a sense of ingenious inhabitation.

(and then isn't there also a sort of wonderful artistry about mistakes? Don't we appreciate them aesthetically - even when they're our own?)

II. Failure and Floating

To move into failure from this cozy realm is like being shot into deep space - for if mistakes are the most distinctive of nouns, then failure, I would argue, is the most nebulous. It's a "frozen verb": a linguistic/conceptual black hole ("frozen star" in Russian), whose location is fixed but whose axis pulses with mind-bending movement. Failure vibrates, like a fly on flypaper. It moves without moving. Next to the other "states" we occupy, it always seems to have been put into our box by mistake from some other puzzle.

Success is an endpoint, hence our dissatisfaction with its worldly version - for in achieving it, we inevitably discover that we have not achieved it. Being a failure on the other hand is like being stuck on one of the Snakes and Ladders snakes: you're not supposed to be there, but there's a luxuriant satisfaction in floating past the world's ankles with such impunity. You're moving. It's over, but it's not over - it is failure, which is similar to the pre-natal dream in that during it we feel both perfectly responsible and perfectly absolved. We are Jonah, delivered from the small whale of anxiety into the larger, more-predictable whale of God's will. This is the fall-as-rise of comedy - of Hrabal and Svevo and Flaubert and Tolstoy, among many others - which transfigures our inability to do what we want into precisely what God wanted all along.

III. The Mimic Plot

In fiction - from the hackneyed who-done-it to the lofty roman fleuve- the most persuasive mimesis of this transfiguration from mistake to failure to success is plot itself. What - you didn't see it coming? Well relax, and watch your anxiety transform alchemically into a faith that the confusing events of your life (which seemed so distinct at the time) really will, as James said, "hang together". Mistakes will turn out to be not just themselves, but part of some larger failure, which you couldn't see at the time you made them. Likewise this failure, so final-seeming when it fell, will turn out to be inside out.

This is why novels, as a genre, are so particularly powerful: not just because they contain mimeses (characters, settings, dialogue), but because they ARE mimeses. They're "graphs made up of graphs" as Guy Davenport puts it: collections of accurate particulars tilted against one another like dominos, so that the reader's attention might move through it Rube-Goldberg-style, losing - and yet somehow at the same time gaining - energy.

(So, when I hear people talk about difficult (read: "experimental") art pejoratively, I find myself strangely divided. On the one hand, I also hate art that lacks interest and attention. On the other hand, I feel that what these "traditionalists" are freqeuntly missing is the existence of this second-level mimesis. They want trees that look like trees: but the book itself looks like a tree)

A fictional plot, then, really is a sort of distilled failure: a strange-making, to use Shklovsky's phrase, which we live (..."in order to" wants to follow this somehow - but doesn't the Old Testament (that great book of plots) suggest the insignificance of a final clause? Order is in us, as we are in it. With a setup like that, there is no point in looking for a "point")

If the novel has a secret, particularly, it is how natural this plottedness is to it, and how, if we look back at the great novels of the past, we almost always find exactly what Sterne, Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Bolano say we're going to find. In saecula saeculorum, or as the KJB translates it, World without end. For how could we "succeed", in life or art? Likewise, how could a faithful mimesis fail to untie its own knots, no matter how convincingly it presented them? What would we think of its conscience?

IV. (close parenthesis)

(Finally, writing fiction, then, must be a matter both of being willing, and - MUCH more importantly - able to fail.

This is far more difficult than people realize)

Rabbit or Duck?

2010-03-04T21:30:00.000-08:00

Contemporary literature and visual art share a vague, background-level prejudice against/weakness for mimesis - that is, for works that blend, stick-insect-style, into the bewildering tree of the real. Personally, my view of this is Tolstoyan (in the novels, not the criticism) and therefore completely unrealistic: it's all a misunderstanding, a question of an original unity splitting itself through will and perversity into a series of schismatic offshoots, whereas if our wife was dying on the other side of the room we would find a way not just to forgive the lover that she had left us for, but actually to love him ourselves, and with all our hearts.

I mention this strange Russian garden of aesthetic peace because the British tradition of criticism, both literary and artistic, has always seemed to me to be fundamentally Tolstoyan. The desire is not to overcome an opponent's argument by amassing esoteric tautologies one on top of the other like a tower of spinning dishes, or to deconstruct relentlessly until everyone whimpers, but rather to ask, at every point, "What are we actually talking about here?" The appeal is twofold: towards "we" on the one hand (the shared reality of communication), and "what" on the other (the world under discussion). The overall tone is one of stern good will. It is all a misunderstanding, but we will make it through, you and I, these two men (women, children) of taste and understanding.

The sheer pleasantness, not to mention charm, of this kind of writing is obvious to anyone with an ear and heart; it's usefulness, unfortunately, is not. We want our aesthetics to be high tech and glistening, or folksy and hemp-smelling. Manners, we all agree, are boring.

They are not, of course: they are the heart of it, the backbone, the solution. We swim in manners. E.H. Gombrich's Art & Illusion even goes so far as to suggest that we are manners, or at least that any "original" act of seeing/reading is original only insofar as your decision to die your hair blue was original. It was, of course - but at the same time, it wasn't: it was a choice between existing possibilities, which you made either for or against the opinions of your peers - but still within the context of those opinions.

Multiply a choice like that times a thousand, Gombrich says, and you've got Van Gogh's decision to paint the skin in his self portrait using green paint. Was he painting from life? Or was he making his decision within a context of conventions so fine and expansive that spraying an aerosol can around his head would have revealed a veritable spider-web of ruby-red lines radiating out in every direction?

Freedom and meaning are incompatible: this is the tragedy of space and the reason why there will never be any great epics written by children who were raised by wolves - unless, of course, they are later taught by a French Catholic schoolmaster. Art is a continual process of debunking and rebunking, but in order to do either you've got to know, somehow, what you're doing. Not knowing leads to sterility and death, even if you manage to hit it once. So when you're out walking around town trying to see nature and dust and the soles of people's feet, take a copy of Whitman, or Rilke, or King, or something.

Gombrich's book is not just a history of art, but a plea for histories of art. If you want to know how to see better, it behoves you to learn how others saw in the past, and to think about the similarities and differences between their vision and yours. After doing this, you may be surprised to find that certain trends persist, for example, the desire to copy - to be, as Gombrich calls it, illusionist. You may find yourself either troubled or comforted by that, depending on how you fancy yourself.

More Please

2010-03-02T09:38:00.000-08:00

Watching Shrek in Tehran is a four part Believer essay by author/teacher Brian T. Edwards that trades particulars for a gloss that I, at least, found smoggy and vague. In the first section, the Alborz mountains disappear "shade by shade into the ever-increasing fog", as Edwards's "smart and dynamic" Iranian interlocutor Nahad (whom the orientalist will no doubt imagine in dark sunglasses and a mini- skirt) describes the national love of Shrek: "You know," she says, "It's not really the original Shrek we love so much here. It's really the dubbing. It's really more the Iranian Shrek that interests us." In the second section, Edwards abandons Shrek in order to introduce the mysterious "Ali", a 35 mm. film collector, whose illicit lending and projection of western films has earned him the nickname "The Iranian Henry Langlois." The sixty year old Ali wears "a plad shirt under a worn tweed jacket." No pun intended. "Everybody knows Ali, but nobody knows where his archive is." In the third section, a brief filmography of the renowned Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami contrasts with a description of two articles about said filmmaker: a laudatory, if inadvertedly political one by Deborah Solomon (in the New York Times magazine), and a more rhetorically savvy, if still naive one by SUNY Buffallo's Jean Copjec. Finally, a fourth section manages to touch on the recent political unrest by quoting lengthily from a pair of Guardian articles by young gun Iranian filmmaker Mosen Makhmalbaf.

All of this leaves us wanting more about the whole Shrek-dubbing phenomenon, which surely deserves its own article/monograph/career. The translation of American movies is apparently growing into its own as an art form. Like the melody in a jazz song, or the text in one of Maurice Sendak's "picture books", the film itself becomes a set of constraints that the audio track then plays with and against. Local details (stereotypes, characters, political critiques) are grafted onto mythological stock (much the same way that the American Shreks harness fairy tale themes to, um, Mike Myers's Scottish accent).

------

In Travelling Between Languages, the poet Chen Li asks "Is writing some kind of translation, travelling between languages"? More Hanks than Clooney, when it comes to air travel at least, he lingers in the terminals of his various poems like a short, nondescript man with dark sunglasses and a newspaper folded over his knee. That glow you feel radiating off of him is love: "Travelling in the family of poetry is the most substantial and warmest link on the lonesome journey in the universe," he says, which is sort of like what Mandelstam said. Actually, a lot of his poetry reads like Mandelstam to me, which would seem to be the most striking and improbable translation of all (except maybe not so improbable: after all, family members do tend to resemble one another...)

Failure, or Why I Blog

2010-02-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

My excitements about blogging are: immediacy, risk, invention and community. My worries are superficiality and failure. Especially failure, which I’m obsessed with and actually quite good at, especially on the internet.

Looking back, I find my success as a failure funny and even ironic – for like many great successes, I began my life hoping to pursue a completely different career than the one that has, apparently, become mine. The career I wanted to pursue was success; so, having heard that success is the opposite of failure, I set out to avoid failure at every turn. The resulting contortions – which cost me huge amounts of time and money, not to mention the respect of my peers and the love of those who had the gall to believe that really, failure was not such a terrible thing after all – were ridiculous and, I suspect, a little absurd: like trying to avoid the ground after you’ve jumped out of a plane. But when it comes to failure, I think I can say that I’ve succeeded, up to a point. Meaning of course that I’ve failed, at least at the success that I originally thought was my purpose and métier.

This may sound depressing to you; but the interesting thing is that accepting my failure has opened up many avenues of experience for me – at least as many as my attempts at success have shut down. For example, there is the diary that I have begun keeping ever since I realized that the chances of successfully getting anyone to hear or read about anything I did were slim, at best. At first, of course, I felt a slight twinge at having given up so easily on my dreams – at settling (as it is impossible not to feel that I have) for a less demanding, and therefore less glorious, and interesting medium. But then the truth is that, by keeping this diary of mine, I have really been following in the footsteps of previous failures the world over.

I will make a digression here, if you don’t mind – since I am apparently failing, once again, to keep on track – on the nature of diaries. Diaries have dangled for centuries from the foreheads of certain intense and observant young persons, as they walked down their streets or through their woods. Many times, these persons were simply trying to make themselves feel like less of a failure – but many other times, this attempt to make themselves feel less like a failure went hand in hand with the intuition that, even if they themselves were a failure, the world was not. In this, I find my own attitude in line with the classic diarists – for to me, the world is a success, meaning, so far as I can see, that a walk through the world, on any given day, can yield the kind of great lines and slow bits and effects that make you suck in your breath or grab yourself inappropriately that a successful poem, or novel, or movie does. If the diarist experiences enough of these moments, he or she might, after a while, decide that they are worth holding under other people’s noses. So said diarist might attempt, not to succeed, necessarily, but to report the world’s successes – which effort (the diarist’s, I mean) would look a lot like success, so long as the observer was not standing more than a few feet away from it.

In closing, I will say that of course, in keeping this diary I have also been somewhat of a hypocrite, since I’ve been trying to make a success of it, and so escape my fate as a failure. Will I do it? I pretend despair, but no matter how thoroughly I pretend, there is always hope. I hope, meaning that I think that the world I live in would be interesting to other men. More importantly, I think that the world I live in would be interesting to me – or rather more interesting – if I looked at it, not just as a success, but as a success that requires my participation in order to succeed. This is my hope, anyway, and the reason why, at the end of the day, I have failed even at failure, which I have heard described as “that most exacting of arts”.

Hump Links

2010-02-10T01:57:00.000-08:00

Translating the Golden Calf

How did they get that violin inside the cloud?

A Short History of Polish Comics

Circularundbrev: Finnish for "scrotom-tightening"

"Dramatizing the fiction of accuracy"

Tournier in Iraq

2010-02-09T01:59:00.000-08:00

"Trois annees passent, et les pirates se manifestent a nouveau. Je recois une lettre de Nazareth avec un exemplaire de Vendredi. Cette fois il doit se livre a l'enevrs, car il est traduit en arabe. Il vient de Bagdad, et est produit par les editions tres officielles du ministere irakien de l'Education et de la Culture. Je me disais bien que Saddam Hussein ne pouvait pas se passer plus longtemps de mon livre. Je suis incapable de virifier la traduction. Mais les illustrations de l'edition francaise ont ete reprises. L'une d'elles figure Vendredi nu et de face. Dans l'edition irakienne, on l'a pudiquement habille d'un bouquet de feuilles."

"Three years pass, and the pirates appear again. I receive a letter from Nazareth with a specimen of Friday. This time it must be delivered backwards, because it is translated into Arabic. It comes from Baghdad, and is produced by the very official editions of the Iraqi ministry of the Education and of the Culture. I said to myself well that Saddam Hussein could not do without my book longer. I am unable of verify the translation. But illustrations of the French edition were taken again. One of them appears naked Friday and of face. In the Iraqi edition, one of them has moderately equips with a bouquet of sheets." (trans: babelfish)

"Three years later the pirates make another appearance. I receive a letter from Nazareth, along with a copy of Friday. This time, I have to read the book backwards, since it has been translated into arabic. It comes from Baghdad and has been produced, in a very official edition, by the Iraqi minister of education and culture. Apparently (I tell myself) Saddam Hussein could not wait any longer for my book. I am incapable of checking the tranlation. But the illustrations have been reprinted from the French edition. In one of the pictures, Friday is shown nude, en face. In the Iraqi edition, his pubic area has been covered by a cluster of leaves." (trans: Billings)

Source: Michel Tournier, Vendredi et les Pirates, in Les Vertes Lectures

Wane Anew

2010-02-08T06:01:00.000-08:00

Ronald Johnson, from Songs of the Earth (at the Light and Dust Mobile Anthology of Poetry)

Fantastic and Wild, Part 2: Fox as Ruth

2010-02-06T12:13:00.000-08:00

(Part two in my four part Fantastic Mr. Fox/Where the Wild Things Are longform. A little late, hopefully not too short. Coming soon: Maurice Sendak as syncopated master-poet!)

Translation is an act of love; but as anyone who has ever been in love will tell you, love is not enough.

This goes double for movies. Take the Lord of the Rings films, in which a series of flawed, but narratively masterful books are bear-hugged by a project so bloatedly faithful that the end effect is like having to sit through a piano recital by your best friend's daughter: sure, she's talented, and sure she's cute; but in the end all you want is for Gandalf to stop - talking - so -damned -slowly, and kiss a Hobbit. That he can't, and won't, of course, is one of the limitations of fidelity - for where most works of art are free to follow their own involutions, translations have their hands tied. As such its tricks are limited, so much so that the phrase "the book was better" is as unsurprising to us as saying that so-and-so author is more X (interesting, beautiful, musical) in his original language.

The exceptions to this platitude can tell us a lot about being faithful. When the books version of the fantastic Mr. Fox finds himself and his family trapped by the three farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, he decides to dig. His wife watches him spring to action:

"Slowly, Mrs. Fox got to her feet. She was suffering more than any of them from the lack of food and water. She was very weak. 'I am so sorry,' she said. 'But I don't think I am going to be much help.'
'You stay right where you are my darling,' said Mr. Fox. 'We can handle this by ourselves.'" (p. 28)

What are we seeing here? A happy family. More specifically, a happy family in a children's book. Mrs. Fox's suffering is like a heavy cold, and her polite attitude to her husband evidence that, even under duress, the family unit will function like a body, with the father as the brainy head, the mother as the beating heart, and the children as the, uh, frantically-digging paws.

Compare this to the same scene in Wes Anderson's movie version of Fox. After asking "to have a word" with him, Mrs. Fox tells her husband that she's going to lose her temper. "When?" he asks. "Right now," she says, before slapping him across the face. With the sharp, but gorgeously pointed facets of a mineral deposit glittering behind her, Mrs. Fox asks her question:

"Mrs. Fox: Twelve fox years ago, you made a promise to me, while we were caged inside that fox trap, that if we survived you would never steal another chicken, turkey, goose, duck or squab, whatever they are, and I believed you. Why - why did you lie to me?
Fox: Because I'm a wild animal.
Mrs. Fox: You are also a husband, and a father.
Fox: I'm trying to tell you the truth about myself.
Mrs. Fox: I don't care about the truth about yourself. This story is too predictable.
Fox: Predictable? Really? What happens in the end?
Mrs. Fox: In the end? We all die. Unless you change."

So many things differ between these two scenes that it seems almost pointless to say what, other than the two characters involved, they share - but I think that Anderson is actually sticking closer to the spirit of his text than we think. In his version, Mrs. Fox is harsh and accusatory; Mr. Fox "honest" and self-deceiving. But they are still husband and wife. The scene is, like its original, a picture of a happy family; except that now, the word "happy" has been translated out of the language of childhood in which it originally appeared, and into the language of adulthood. Happy, as derived from the middle english "hap", which denotes a balance that is precarious but also durable, like a stick balanced on the end of your finger. The stick moves, you move; you move, the stick moves. The Fox couple fights without resolution; but they persist. Mrs. Fox's fidelity to her husband includes confrontation, because it is based on an idea of a relationship that goes beyond cordiality and into intimacy, where we give and take the capacity to hurt because it makes the person we give to or take from important, even unique. Because of this, the scene speaks to an adult in a way that the book's version can't.

Think of the many ways that this could have gone wrong. In an over-loving version, Dahl's emotional choreography is repeated step for step, and the movie is at best a good kids' movie, at worst an adults' movie that treats its audience as if they were emotional idiots. On the other hand, the version that replaces the spirit of Dahl's scene with a word of its own is unloving - meaning careless, butterfingered. A translation that thinks too much of itself and too little of its source, or decides that what it is doing is "better for everybody". Neither of them will be rewatched, at least by me. Stay with your man out of nostalgia, stay with your woman because you want to feel like a master of the universe. There are a thousand ways not to fall in love. But fidelity means (strangely enough) being willing to change.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox succeeds because of its mix of fidelity and daring. It is a fairy tale, like its original; but the world that it is trying to explain is the adult's universe of consequence, rather than the child's world of courage. In order to do this it has to find common ground: the "master language" of human experience behind both.

Fantstic and Wild, Part 1: Escaping Safely

2010-01-31T12:16:00.000-08:00

(this is part one of a four-part discussion of adaptation, movies, kids books, and Generation X, among other things. It uses the recent movies The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things Are as a starting point. Part 1 is on the various book versions of TFMF. Part 2, which looks at the opera- and stage versions, as well as Wes Anderson movie and cinema in general, should go up by Wednesday. Part 3, on Maurice Sendak, should be ready by Friday, and then (fingers crossed), I'll round it out with part IV this weekend. Please feel free to post responses along the way, and enjoy!)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a story about doing: a hymn to action whose main character succeeds, like Tom Sawyer, no matter what obstacles are put in front of him. In part, this is what makes his book so wonderful to kids - for as the French philosopher Alain writes, "Courage is the king of fairy tales and the god of childhood". Children, who are terrified all the time, and who therefore have a very good idea of what "being brave" means, want bravery to be a skeleton key that opens any lock; so, as soon as Mr. Fox is menaced, he sits and thinks. Then he has an idea. Then the idea is translated from his head out into the world of action. The transition between each of these stages is smooth, even flawless, leading us to assume that the two languages - thought, and action - are less separate languages than dialects, or even accents, like British and American English, whose occasional differences of pronunciation are cause more for gentle awkwardness (or at worst a misunderstood street name) than any real disaster.

Donald Chaffin's illustrations in the original Alfred P. Knopf publication (1970) of TFMF only emphasize the essential harmlessness of Mr. Fox and the world he lives in. With his soft, inexpressive eyes, frozen smile and teapot-shaped head, this version of our hero is less like a drawing of an actual beast and more like an icon: a sticker peeled off its sheet and placed against a series of autumnal landscapes. His double-breasted waistcoat is always impeccably clean, even after an afternoon of hard digging - but then this is exactly the point, since dirt in this fox's world is not a dense element that must be dealt with in order to succeed, but a sort of second atmosphere, as civilized and malleable as butter.

Such heightened domesticity is of course a staple of children's literature, which works to transform the hard world that children experience into a sort of gigantic rumpus room. In Dahl's book this impulse is most obvious in the plot itself, which summons Boggis, Bunce and Bean like a trio of evil clowns and then knocks them over without once making us feel that they might actually manage to harm our hero or his family. Throughout this, Chaffin's cozily undramatic pictures (the foxes appear to be smiling even as they "frantically" try to escape from an approaching bulldozer) form a perfect accompaniment: a sort of light jazz for the hospital waiting room of the story.

It is interesting to note, however, that on his way to this placidity Chaffin glosses over those moments of nose-picking grotesquerie that are the calling card of Dahl's prose. The book's descriptions linger over the three farmers like a schoolboy picking through entrails: Bean's smile is "sickly", showing "more gums than teeth"; he pulls "something black and hard out of his ear" and tosses it in the grass. Bunce eats donuts filled with goose liver paste. The trio are physically disgusting - and then, though this atmosphere is missing entirely from the pictures, it creates an interesting tension in the book as a whole: as if what we were reading was not one, but two stories, which agree in places and disagree in others, like a pair of old men squabbling over a single story.

Such stereoptic storytelling may seem strange in what is supposed to be a straightforward story - but as master illustrator and children's book writer Maurice Sendak says, it is actually normal - exemplary even. For Sendak, the "picture book" (as he calls it) is by its very nature a hybrid, in which text and image dance around one another with a freedom that is, perhaps, the most childlike part of it. The task of the author/illustrator is therefore not to downplay this interaction, but to encourage it. As Sendak says in an interview with Walter Lorraine:

"You must not ever be doing the same thing, must not ever be illustrating exactly what is written...You have worked out a text so that it stops and goes and stops and goes, and the pictures become so subtle, too, that quite independent of the words they tell their own side of the story. The illustrator is doing a tremendous job of expansion, collaboration, of illumination." (Sendak, Caldecott & Co., p. 186)

Given this potential for interplay, one of the most interesting things about rereading (or watching, or listening to) TFMF in its various interpretations is the chance that it gives us to see how illustrators over the years have changed the work, emphasizing or downplaying certain elements depending on their own visions and temperaments. In Quentin Blake's translation, for example, Dahl's fox sprouts pan legs and stiff, wing-like coat-tails, not to mention a coat of fur that looks like it was scratched onto him by a particularly dreamy fifth-grader. The paint-box water-coloring gleefully overrun its outlines, giving each picture a happy, anarchic feeling, like a doodle whose energy and wildness have been rendered harmless by the controlling figuration of the characters. In turn, the Mr. Fox we read about in this book is wilder, freer: less the super-effective aristocrat of fate and more the cockney jobber. His success is the fool's success and therefore lovable, though perhaps less parentally endorsable.

Comparing these two characters raises the inevitable question: who is the real Mr. Fox? Is it Chaffin's wall-hanging, or Blake's sculpted snot-chunk? Sophisticates may scoff - but anyone with children will understand the importance of this point, which unfortunately only gets more complicated the more we look into it. Puffin will publish two more versions: a Chaffinesque saga with a beautiful, moonlit cover by Jill Bennett, and the more Blakean "young reader" version by Tony Ross, in which Mr. Fox looks like a cross between Elmo and Bart Simpson. The drawings are excellent; but in each of these cases, the illustrators, like their predecessors, conceive of their protagonist through one of two personas: the mischievous trickster, or the Victorian gentleman. Confusingly enough, the text supports and contradicts both - which is important, since it in turn illustrates for us the way that Dahl's writing is itself already syncopated (to use one of Sendak's terms): not a pure stream at all, but a muddy river of twigs and branches and seeds, which flows, sure, but also eddies, to the delight of its readers and profit of its interpreters.

Counter-intuitive though it might seem, this narrative syncopation is one of the real reason why kids like Dahl so much - for no matter what strain its illustrators choose to pick up on, TFMF retains two basic tools: the reassuring and protectively regular plot (Dad), and a giggling, distractible, body-obsessed description (Dad's boozing, lazy, no-good brother Tom). The reader gets to have her cake and eat it too, laughing at the descriptions of the triumphant Mr. Fox launching belch after celebratory belch without having to worry that his joy de vivre might cause him to do something excessively vigorous, and so overflow the conventional outline of his cage/house.

The God Plot: Michel Tournier's The Four Wise Men

2010-01-25T03:02:00.000-08:00

The French novelist and children's book author Michel Tournier has a gift for first sentences. Here are three from his novel Gaspar, Melchior et Balthazar, published in English as The Four Wise Men:

1. "I am black, but I am a king." spoken by Gaspar, King of Meroe

2. "I am a king, but I am poor." spoken by Melchior, Prince of Palmyra

3. "Sri Akbar had that ambiguous - half-cajoling, half-ironic - smile on his face as he handed Prince Taor a casket of sandalwood inlaid with ivory."

Like Samuel Beckett (his exact opposite on the color wheel of writers) and St. Augustine of Hippo (blood red to his cool French blue) Tournier writes sentences for their shape as much as for their sound or content. Amalgamated, these shapes make patterns; so the plots of his novels unfold like gigantic placemat-mazes, through which the pencil-line of the reader's attention is shuttled with the heavy-handed direction of a Disneyland tour guide.

Such sculptural control may seem redundant and even condescending to readers used to more open-ended experiments; but a close reading of Tournier's works shows that his formal designs are always matched by a deep interest in how human beings turn their lives into stories. A plotter, he writes about plots with the naturalist's combination of loving eye and muscular mind. He also writes about plotlessness: a perhaps mythical state of mind that has its own flourishes and attractions to even the most single-minded storyteller.

Each of the wise men in Tournier's book is unbalanced: tipped by the tiny flipper of a comma into a mirror-story where what they have is nothing and what they lack is everything. For Gaspar, the black wise man in Brueghel's "The Adoration of the Kings", this lack is called "blondness" - specifically, the blonde hair of two of his slaves. For Melchior (the young King in the picture) it is politics; for Balthasar (the old King) art. Their opening sentences state their problems, summing their lives up and boiling them down at the same time, into a single, unanswerable paradox. Is this how real life works? Maybe, maybe not - but again, I think that, by exaggerating the familiar features of his "hyperrealistic" storytelling (his own words) Tournier is studying something more interesting than it might at first seem. His mimesis is of storytelling itself, not the ancient world. As such, he is more a performer than a representer: a bird of paradise tufting its neck-feathers, rather than a stick insect trying to remain hidden.

The Kings are trapped in plots that even they find stale and unconvincing; but by finding the child Jesus, they are allowed to escape into a story that is bigger, fresher, and more interesting than their own. In the Gospel of Matthew (its only appearance) their visit occupies a mere sixteen verses; Tournier extends it to 158 pages of narrative that might have been written by Jules Verne on a particularly inspired day.

After them comes Taor, Prince of Mangalore. Taor, who does not appear either in the Bible itself, but whose existence Tournier claims to have cobbled together from "the American Pastor Henry Van Dyke, the German Eduard Schaper, and Russian Orthodox legend", is a child of sweetness. He sets out to cross the ocean in search of Turkish delight, a pistachio cube of which is contained in that initial sandalwood box. An "eternal latecomer", he meets the wise men on their way back from the famous manger, rushing onto the scene with the flailing exuberance of a vaudeville comedian making it onstage just as the curtains are being drawn. After they leave, he is gripped with aimlessness and depression. He has missed the climactic scene of his own book, and so finds himself outside the story that he's been hearing about for months now.

But novels, as Milan Kundera said, are what happens on the morning after, and in Taor's case, this is nothing less than a Passion of Salt. He loses everything - slaves, elephants, candy - as he moves further from his goal, and closer to the horrific salt mines of Gomorrah. Tournier, however, in the great tradition of comic inversion, figures this series of losses as a Progress:

"More and more clearly, [Taor] saw his life arranging itself in stages or levels, each showing an evident affinity with those preceding it, but also a surprising originality, at once forboding and sublime. And in each of these levels he was bound to recognize himself. Fascinated, he saw his life metamorphosed into a destiny. For now he was in hell, but hadn't the whole story begun with pistachio nuts? Where was he going? How would it all end?"

Taor's lament here is familiar to any novelist afflicted with the peculiar aimlessness of writers' block; it should be, for Taor at this point is not just a character in, but a writer of his own story. The arrival of Christ has changed things - but how to live inside that change? How to exchange, in other words, the diary of luxury for the novel of belief?

For Tournier, then (as for Nabokov), God is a writer, and Christianity a translation of a text that has become too difficult for us to read in its original language. The sense of every person's life having a personal destiny - a plot with its own distinct stages and trials - is what is added to the world by the translation of a placeless, absent deity into human form. God is now within all of us, even pistachio-obsessed princelets. So the story expands, from a local saga into an epic of worldwide (perhaps unprecedented) proportions.

Tournier's books have been called formally retrograde; but if anything they force us away from nostalgia, and towards deeper thinking about what we mean by progress in literature. A translator when young, he retained the translator's Frankensteinian relationship to literary history. In his autobiography, The Wind Spirit, he writes, "Literary and artistic creation are important because myths, like all living things, must be irrigated and replenished or die." In The Four Wise Men, he shows us one way that this can be done.

Image: Pieter Breughel's The Reverence of the Three Wise Men

Found in Translation: A Short Essay in Two Parts

2010-01-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

Part 1: God as M. Night Shamalyan

If there's one thing the history of religion teaches us, it's that Gods are like movie monsters: the most memorable ones stay hidden.

Take the God of the Old Testament. Other deities of the period lived in knives or trees or mountains, and in this way they acted more like roommates, or perhaps local celebrities, than the gods that we worship today. But for a nomadic and frequently exiled tribe, an unmovable, place-based pantheon was about as useful as an expensive set of furniture. What they needed was something they could take with them, or better yet something that they didn't have to. So they invented (or met, or came to understand) a God who was homeless, like them, and who could therefore be unfolded like a placemat no matter what the terrain.

Seen in these terms God's invisibility is less a random characteristic and more an adaptation, like the zebra's stripes or the butterfly's eyespots. Like any deviation, it must have appeared strange and even freakish upon first arrival; but the interesting thing for me is how the increased "nowhereness" of God, which at first must have seemed like such a reduction, actually ends up expanding his worshippers' sense of spiritual sufficiency. For if God lives nowhere, then really God is everywhere - and if God is everywhere then home is everywhere, at which point look, the world just got significantly less terrifying.

The much-lamented absence of God, then (which after all only increases as the story of the Bible moves forward) is actually a genius move of imaginative entrepreneurship, on par with stuffed crusts and the all-night drive through. Apparently, it caught on. As the philologist Erich Aurbach describes it in his book Mimesis, "[God's] lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but developed even further in competition with the comparatively far more manifest gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world."

Anyone who has seen the famously effect-dependent "Clash of the Titans", or better yet watched the trailer for its remake, will be able to attest to the wisdom of this strategy. For all their popularity, the gods of the time were Michael Bay: stuffed with special effects that were big, sure, but also fundamentally alienated from the imaginative needs of their audience. Yahweh, on the other hand, knew the importance of story.

Part 2: Threading the Needle Instead of Pounding the Rock

The good news for those seeking religious clarity is that gods come with instruction manuals. The bad news is that these instruction manuals are usually washed out, strangely-folded, and written in Korean.

The Bible you and I and quite a bit of America know is a sort of hall of mirrors: a translation of an anthology of a set of documents that, written over a very long period of time, were themselves altered, augmented, and annotated by the vast game of telephone that is popular culture. Within this process, translation plays an important part - for with each new version of the books designated The Bible, a new set of the old words had to be found, dressed up, and shoved on stage. Sometimes the things that emerge from their mouths are disappointing. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, Christ designates Peter as the person on whom his Church will be founded; the statement is not a simple compliment, but a pun that, in ancient Greek at least (the language in which the Bible was written, though not the language Jesus himself was speaking), probably had them rolling in the aisles. In English, however, the effect if not the meaning is lost, unless of course some industrious and sacrilegious translator decides one day to rename Peter "Rocky".

This is just one example; but the truth is that, even if you grant the Bible's origin in God Himself, you're still left dealing with what must be among the holiest of holey documents. Were the Author around to correct our readings, the problem might be "solved" - but it's important to remember that clarifying may mean locking us into rather pedantic clarities. "Trust the tale, not the teller," as D.H. Lawrence said. For example, in the famous eye of the needle analogy:

"And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:24)

Like most of Christ's parables, this one benefits from its precise and evocative balancing of particular and abstract terms. In this way it's a lot like an algebra equation, which consists of both actual numbers and placeholding x's. Solve the problem and the equation vanishes, meaning you can stop worrying your pretty little head about it. As translator Robert M. Adams puts it in his book Proteus, His Lies, His Truth:

"Translator-interpreters with well-to-do congregations have been known to explain the passage by saying that there were a couple of tall rocks by a road near Jerusalem known popularly as 'The Needle's Eye'; the space between them was narrow indeed, compared with the surrounding plain, but not so narrow that a fully loaded camel could not pass through quite comfortably..."

Adams's semi-facetious example makes us remember that sometimes more comprehensive scholarship does not necessarily mean a better translation. For those people who speak the "original language", in this instance, a riddle with an intriguing euphony of possible solutions collapses into a comment on local geography. We are left with "the truth" of what Jesus said - though it's important to remember here, as Adams does, that there is no debunking which does not simultaneously rebunk. The solution is self-interested: offered to "well-to-do congregations". One reading is replaced by another, more linguistically accurate, though perhaps less "true" one.

So, in examining the King James version of this parable - which, like many details in the Bible, can be "explained" out of its resonance and into a matter of local and historical fact - we see a clear example of a rather underdocumented (though quite common) process. A significant nuance has been, not lost, but found in translation.

Image: The Last Supper, from The Brick Testament

Play Well

2010-01-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

Beg Borrow Stijl is a blog about translation, written by me, Josh Billings. Like everything I do it's an imitation, in this case of the dozen or so blogs that I've fallen in love with over the last five years. It's also an experiment in thinking out loud, meaning something done in front of anybody who wants to watch.

Actually all writing is done in front of somebody, which is the point, since writing practiced in absolute solitude is 1) impossible, and 2) like a chemistry experiment where you get to make up all your own elements. That might sound like fun, but think about how boring video games became when you discovered the cheat that let you walk invisibly past your enemies. Language on the other hand doesn't have cheats - or if it does, they lead to other levels, secret doors, games within games. Finding them isn't the end, because there isn't any end to language, or at least none that those of us trapped inside it will ever be able to find.

In this way there's no difference between Super Mario Brothers 3 and James Joyce's Ulysses: both are, essentially, gigantic advent calendars. Like normal advent calendars, the specific toys hidden behind each of their doors isn't really the point: the point is that, in opening/playing/reading them, we train ourselves to treat the world the same way - that is, as something we can explore, expand, use. To me this, more than snow, is one of the main reasons why Christmas always feels so wonderfully deep.

The best books, like the best video games and Lego sets, are batteries of creative energy. Building them is just the beginning; the eral adventure is taking them apart and rebuilding, combining one set with another until something happens. That something does happen (at least if we wait long enough for the codebreaking attention to be coaxed out of its place) is the article of faith powering this particular enterprise.

When I say that BBS is going to be a blog about translation, this is the sense of the word I want to try and jimmy. The world can be opened. In fact, it wants to be.