I watched La Haine twice in the last week

Which is fairly abnormal for me. I reread books and poems all the time, but I usually don’t rewatch movies. I get fidgety and bored and think about all the work I could be doing.

What was it about La Haine?

The jokes. How it starts and ends with a joke, and how the joke becomes so much more than a joke, proving that context, momentum, or mass can enliven or add profundity to or radically alter any element of language (in the same way that there are no cliches, only cliched uses of cliches  (I think?)).

How it ends: the compilation of events strung together fairly loosely (plot, yes, but with lots of room outside the plot for people to sit around, to tell stories, to be themselves) ended by a gunshot.

The humor (that batman joke!).

The graffiti. How it’s everywhere and means more than it says when it’s contrasted with the people who live by it and make it.

The contrast between “high” and “low” art, the former when Said, Hubert, and Vinz crash an art opening, the latter with the music in the streets (“Nique la police”).

So much. I could watch it again, but that might be overdoing things.

I finally saw Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby

thereby breaking a streak of watching only black-and-white films from 1960s France. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t terrible, even though Luhrmann probably piled too much extravagance on the book’s sleek structure. It was generally entertaining and at times funny, an adjective I had never associated with Fitzgerald’s text before. It was anyway worth the three dollars I spent to see it at the Riverview.

I shall probably return to 1960s France, though. Color, especially sharp contemporary color, has lately made me feel claustrophobic. No soul leaches through such perfection, whereas it bleeds through the fuzzed grays of Jean-Luc Godard’s work.

Goodbye strictly books & hello media

I’ve been thinking about writing here again in a semi-regular way. I have been reading a lot and writing some, but the two projects don’t immediately overlap and what’s more I’ve started to want an outlet for critical thoughts on pop whatever. If I watch songs on Youtube twenty times in a row it’s not because I’m brain dead, and the same goes for films. So maybe goodbye strictly books and hello media; partly the idea owes its beginnings to the experiences I’m talking about and partly the idea owes its beginnings to a book titled L’Adieu à la litterature written by a French academic named William Marx.

The book centrally argues that literature owes its marginal status among contemporary arts to the aesthetic positions that certain European writers and theorists took in the past three hundred years or so. Beginning in the seventeenth century, society began attributing all sorts of powers to literature that culminated in the eighteenth century with a widespread belief in literature’s ability, via the sublime, to act as a surrogate religion. Marx, using the analogy of an economic bubble,  calls this the period of “survalorisation.” A period of “devalorisation” followed, instigated by “art for art’s sake” theorists, who attempted to expand the authority that society granted literature by cutting off literature off society (“perd and emphasizing its formal, aesthetic aspects. As a result, Marx claims, society in general abandoned literature as literature itself, having lost its former powers, began increasingly to proclaim its own death.

I’m not entirely sold on all parts of Marx’s argument. For one, Marx attributes literature’s failure to its unwillingness to engage “reality” [“coupée du réel” (104)]. My doubts come from a knee-jerk reaction to the concept of “real,” as the concept is usually associated with mimetic novels (social realism, etc). This would make Marx’s thesis pretty bland. Who hasn’t heard someone or other pin literature’s irrelevance on its non-mimetic practitioners before? Clearly, “unrealistic” novels and poems (Ishmael Reed’s novels, Charles Simic’s surrealist poems) address real social issues. But I think Marx is after a certain literary way of talking about literature, not a certain way of practicing literature – one that believes that literature (especially poetry) has evolved toward an ever-purer form throughout history. The second “écueil” he advises his readers to avoid is the notion that “la poésie s’achemine peu à peu vers la pureté” or has an essential characteristic (14). Poetry doesn’t work toward a specific, unavoidable goal but is rather contingent, shaped by its place in society and history and the theoretical beliefs of its writers. It is “coupée du réel” insofar as it claims it is independent of such forces.

This aside, it’s the conclusion to L’Adieu, where Marx assesses literature’s present status among the other arts/fields of study, that really interests me.  He suggests that literature may be able to restore some of the public’s confidence in it through minimalism, by forgoing the grandiose claims of the “grand priests” of nineteenth century European letters:

Plutôt que de sortir de la crise par la haut, c’est-à-dire par la poursuite tous azimuts de solutions esthétiques radicals, mais au résultat incertain, les minimalistes choisissent une issue par le bas, en restreignant la literature à ses usages fondamentaux et en espérant par là revenir en phase avec un corps social qui, de son côté, n’attend plus grand-chose de cet art.

Literature, no longer preeminent, must learn to live with its disgraced status. I mean to partially reflect that in the subjects I write about in this blog.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry: Not as Ugly as its Name

[I wrote this for a class this semester and decided, hey, I kind of like it, why not stick it up?]

Where do I get my ideas about schools of poetry? For the longest time, I thought the Beats were losers, the confessionals solipsists, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets a bunch of drab Marxists deeply concerned with the Ethics of Poetry.

The one nice thing about harboring such terribly wrong impressions is it turns every reading into a revolution, from Plath to Ginsberg to Charles Bernstein. With Bernstein, I knew I was wrong the moment I started listening to the Penn Sound recording of him: his reading style (decidedly energetic) elicited background laughter throughout the whole of its forty-five minutes, and his sardonic humor carries through in his texts.

 “The Lives of the Toll Takers,” for instance, satirizes economic pragmatism by advertising poetry with business-speak:

                                                   Poetic

             opportunities

,

            however, do not fall into your lap, at least

very often. You’ve got to seek them out, and when you find them

                            you’ve got to have the knowhow to take advantage

of them.

The admonition “you’ve got to,” combined with the jargon of “opportunities” and “advantage,” conjures no one so much as an American Polonius, some suited-up busybody for whom expressions like “do not fall into your lap” and “you’ve got to have the knowhow” summarize the tenants for a life well-lived. Rather than mocking such triviality to its face, Bernstein keeps his straight, pushing the speaker closer and closer to absurdity. The benefits of poetry tick off like bullet points on a PowerPoint: “you’re less likely / to get in an accident if you’re home reading poems,” and:

(studies show higher levels of resistance to double-bind

political programming among those who read 7.7 poems or

more each week

 

).

None of this joking, however, precludes a more serious register. Bernstein follows the spatial and tonal levity of the preceding lines with a block of text whose import is as heavy as its mass: nothing less than a post-structuralist assault against the “‘plain sense of the word’” and its ability to obfuscate political agendas. “Genocide / is made of words like these,” writes Bernstein. But it isn’t long before the register broadens, skips a beat, enters nonsense [“These are the sounds of science (whoosh, blat, /  flipahineyhoo”)], and remerges as yet another speaker who, whatever he (she?) is, may be Marxist, but definitely not drab.

I started with the existentialists…

Camus and Sartre, then hit the harder stuff: Derrida, Barthes, Foucault. All French through and through, meaning I’ve tried to read them in French through and through (this, too, has gotten more difficult); and the question is (pardon my French), est-ce que cela vaut la peine? Speaking from a strictly utilitarian perspective, of course. Whatever the difficulty, I can read a Derrida text (let’s say) x-times faster in English than in French, and even if I’m reading it in French, I’m sure I’m not getting half the wordplay the text contains. Given these (again, strictly utilitarian) criteria, is reading the original (!) really better, more worthwhile, than reading the translation?

On the down-and-dirty levels of comprehension and expediency, surely not. I wouldn’t try this during the academic year; “La Structure, le signe, et le jeu dans les discourse des sciences humaines” cost me eight hours of headache yesterday. But I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to equal levels of fluency (equal levels of comprehension, equal levels of expediency) without this inefficient meanwhile.

And none of this takes into account the pleasure (la jouissance, surtout!) of actually saying the damn phrases, and scattering them about afterward.

I’ve been reading British historians lately

First Robert E. Lee: Icon for a Nation, by Brian Holden Reid, then Ghosts of Empire, by Kwasi Kwarteng. I was leery of reading the first one. I picked it up mostly because I thought it would be a hagiography and wanted something to laugh at. Once I saw it was by a Brit, though, I grew respectful and actually read it. His essential goal is to show the character and generalship of Lee, stripped of the cult of personality that, he argues, sprung up around Lee in the years after the Civil War. The book was short, methodical, and entertaining, though I would not have minded more maps (Wikipedia had to suffice). 

The second, though – that was something. If you’ve ever wondered about the sources of ethnic conflict in Sudan, Burma, Iraq, and Kashmir, this book outlines the basics, though Kwarteng’s purpose lies elsewhere. He wants to show how the British Empire was shaped by individuals with large amounts of personal authority, instead of by unified government policies. These individuals shared a similar educational background (Cambridge, Oxford), political outlook (imperial, hierarchical), and personality type (generally domineering), but nothing in the way of concrete policy. Colonial administration changed from one governor to another; so did the methods of interacting with the native populations, and the course one imperialist followed could be reversed by another. Hence Sudan: Arab north, African south, destined to be two different countries, yet abruptly jammed together by one person’s decision. Similarly Burma: never to be annexed, until Winston Churchill’s father decided upon it and sent in the military. For anyone interested in British Empire, or current world politics, it is well worth reading. 

We’ve been getting POETRY magazine for a couple months now…

And it’s strange. Some issues, I’ll read every poem again and again until I almost have every one memorized. The November 2011 issue was like that. It had so many poems that I read and reread and underlined and read again that I keep it like a book, separate from all the other Poetry issues we have accumulated. There was “The World is in Pencil,” “If,” and “Brutal,” not to mention “Bryant Park at Dusk” and above all Marcus Wicker’s “The Way We Were Made.” This last is a splendid finger-pointing (at some creator – God, I would assume): “but you made every / eyelash erotic….sweet / in every wrong way.”

Other issues, however, leave me cold, no matter how hard I try to concentrate on the poems. The latest issue – February 2012 – was like that. The only poem that I’ve reread for the joy of it is a reprint on the inside of the back cover. It is short, four lines: “The rhetorical ‘How goes it old boy?’; / the unnerving response: // ‘Infinitely sad, old warrior, / infinitely sad. I’ve just heard…'” Although the poem is just a snippet of dialogue (the ellipses is in the original), that snippet captures a rupture in the commonplace that I find startling and moving at once.

So, I’m not complaining about Poetry‘s selection; I’m not about to write a letter-to-the-editor lambasting their selections. Take this as more as an observation about poetry and taste: I can understand without liking, and like without understanding, but either way the only way to find out is to read lots and lots.

What I Read in 2011

In no particular order, with no particular organization or ranking, these are the books (that I remember) that I (re)read in 2011:

Freedom Jonathan Franzen

Lyrcis Alley Leila Aboulela

The Family Fang Kevin Wilson

The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

The End of the Affair, The Quiet American Graham Greene

Mimesis Erich Auerbach

Click and Clone Elaine Equi

Yellowrocket Todd Boss

Essential Modern Greek Grammer

Babbitt Sinclair Lewis

Keith Richards: Life

Crush Richard Siken

Some Mozart Biography that wasn’t too hot.

Essentials of New Testament Greek

Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger

Netsuke Rikke Ducornet

Seize the Day 

Portnoy’s Complain

Virgin Suicides

A lot of short stories by people like Chekhov and Hemingway

The Maltese Falcon

Passions and Ancient Days C.P. Cavafy

Greek Lyrics

Confederacy of Dunces

Ex Libris

A Moveable Feast

Daisy Miller

L’etranger 

Basil Katharine Rauk

The Poisoned Chalice Jennifer Woodruff Tait

The Greek Way Edith Hamilton

Mythology Edith Hamilton

Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts

And probably a lot I forgot.

The problem with Lyrics Alley

is it that while it might “bring to mind Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy” (Kirkus Reviews’ words, not mine), Leila Aboulela’s novel is also about a thousand pages shorter (Lyric‘s 308 vs. Cairo’s 1368). In these three hundred pages, Lyrics Alley follows five principle characters through the Sudan of the 1950’s. Each one is, in some manifestation or other, struggling against tradition and toward modernity. For example, Soraya wants to be a doctor, but her father won’t even let her wear glasses, and Nabilah wants to live in Egypt, but her husband loves backwards Sudan. The others – Nur, Mahmoud, Ustaz – are related in ways you would need the chart at the beginning of the book to get. I won’t take the time to disentangle all their aspirations and connections (at least one cousin-on-cousin relationship is mixed up in there). Suffice it to say that the complexity of this “family epic” makes for much recapitulation, abridgment, and summary in the short treatment Aboulela gives her story.

Take, at random, a scene where Mahmoud and Nabilah entertain a British couple, surnamed the Harrisons:

“[The Harrisons] got up to dance, clearly in love, clearly happy. It made Nabilah envious but also confused. She was not sure what she was longing for, what it was she wanted and didn’t want.”

Forget scene, description, objective correlative, interpretation, proximity of bodies, heat, touch, all that. Why bother with messy details? Aboulela has it figured out: as the proprietor of her characters’ emotions, as the god at the center of her fictive universe, she tell us exactly how they’re feeling and save her time-pressed readers some space. Hence Nabilah feels “envious but also confused,” Mahmoud feels “heavy with the responsibility of the risk,” Ustaz Badr feels “queasy and angry” – none of these emotions carrying any outward manifestations, all relying on telling, none on showing.

Her tendency to relate what’s happening, rather than show it, makes for some strangely bloodless scenes. At one point, the police arrest the annoyingly stupid and holy Ustaz Badr for a crime he (surprise!) didn’t commit. Aboulela writes:

“The policemen barked at the neighbours who were crowding the doorway. They fell back, and Badr was pushed out in to the street under their gaze. He continued to shout out his innocence. It was his cousin Shukry who had stolen the jewellery and hidden it in Badr’s house! He, Badr, had had nothing to do with it. Ask the owner of the stolen gold, he pleaded, ask Mahmoud Bey.”

This could have been a genuinely moving scene. Badr, the upright, the eminently status-concerned, disgraced in front of his wife, neighbors, and children, pushed into the dust, manhandled by cops. Instead, its emotion hinges on an exclamation point: “it was his cousin…!” Aboulela shouts, abstracting Badr’s words. He doesn’t get lines until the next paragraph, and then they are completely isolated from tone, gesture, or even response. “‘I would never take what doesn’t belong to me,'” he blandly “repeats” (though it’s the first time we’ve heard him say it on the page), then shores it up with another exclamation point.

Yet perhaps it’s just as well we are spared empathizing with Badr here, because after some sophomoric meditations on Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, his cousin is arrested, his name is cleared, and Badr continues his blessed life unaffected: “The miserable night he had spent in custody had not dented his reputation nor jeopardized his employment,” Aboulela writes.

Which is a pity. Personally, I would rather he had stayed in jail, where he might have actually undergone the valley of the shadow of doubt and come out the other end a more fully human character. But this is Aboulela writing. Her novel harbors no Thomases, no turmoil, no gritty hate that has marked the Sudan for the past nine years; all five plot stands resolve with the concord of a Victorian novel, in a happily-ever-after that doesn’t exist. Another reviewer has made that point better than I can. The only question I am left with concerns the cover blurb, placed under the title: how any critical imagination could have applied the adjective “visceral” to this rosy, abbreviated book.

I didn’t think I would like Click and Clone

Or get anything out of. For one, it has all the markings of the referential, post-post whatever poetry that really turns some people on. Poems set to movie stills of movies I haven’t seen, poems written by reading over people’s shoulders, poems that place one-or-two word lines together with no conjunction, i.e. “Heartbeat- / flipbook. / Clonebooth.” You know what I’m talking about. The kind of poetry that serves as a punchline on late-night TV shows.

But never judge a book by its cover, or a poet by her (or his) line lengths. There are several poems in Elaine Equi’s Click and Clone that I read three or four times – because I enjoyed them, not because I didn’t get them. “Sight Unseen,” “A Woman of the Wrong Altitude, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn,” “To Eddy Poe,” “#1 The Terror,” to name a few.

Take “The Libraries Didn’t Burn,” a poem that’s (somewhat) about how the internet age has changed how most Americans read: “the locket of bookish love / still opens and shuts,” she writes:

But its words have migrated

to a luminous elsewhere.

Neither completely oral nor written —

a somewhere in between.

Here, Equi puts together the truest description of internet reading that I’ve come across so far, that “luminous elsewhere” of the computer screen that engenders the “somewhere in between” of skimming information instead of listening to or reading it. I doubt that I am alone in having to make a conscious decision now to read a whole article instead of just scrolling through the highlights.

It’s all part of Equi’s larger design, though – to try to understand how art has changed in the digital age. And changed it has, she thinks. In the 20th century, James Schuyler “could say: ‘A cardinal enchants me with its song’ and get away with it,” she writes in “Reading Schuyler.” But now, in the 21st? Birds “shit on sentiment / and refuse to ornament / our lawns” (“Canceled Flight”). The Romantic’s nightingale “pauses midsong / for a very, very long time.”

There’s a sense here that nature, which used to be a source of beauty (and truth, to be Keatsian), isn’t sufficient inspiration for poets of the computer age. “Homer invoked Athena,” she says:

Sappho — Aphrodite

Milton — the Holy Spirit

Hopkins — the Virgin Mary;

I wonder who I can get to help?

Because humans, too, have changed. We’re “fin-de-siecle” ghosts,” never permanently anyplace, never permanently ourselves – always part Facebook, part cellphone, part Twitter, part blogger. In one of my personal favorites of this collection, “Sight Unseen,” Equi talks about the ancient symbol of the eye as a way into a person’s soul “seems corny” to us, who live in a world where “everyone has had to become so skilled / as a performer.”

I could go on with these quotes, detailing how “art is the simpleton,” but I’ve gone on long enough to get to my point. In an age of texting and digital skimming, the best gift you can give another person, writer or other, is your full attention. Elaine Equi well deserves it.