What to do about Homer…

When moving a text from one language to another (in this case, Greek to English), you’ve got some choices. You can attempt to translate nearly word-for-word in an effort to keep meaning as well as sentence structure. You can do a translation for meaning only, rendering the text in whatever way you see fit so as to encapsulate the most precise meaning of the original, even altering sentences structure. You can also, for poetry, translate within or without the strictures of meter and lines/stanzas, instead rendering the text paragraphically, with breaks introduced where you think they should be, rather than based on the original stanzas. There are other possibilities, but you get the idea.

Stanley Lombardo, a professor of Classics at the University of Kansas (somehow he doesn’t strike me as a Jayhawk), has spent a good deal of his time translating Homer’s epics, most significantly The Iliad and The Odyssey, in a most ambitious manner. He has made a very formidable effort to render the Greek into an English that sounds like the language contemporary speekers use while retaining the beauty and the epic metaphors of the original. Now, this is an ambitious effort, as I’ve said, but that doesn’t mean it was successful, nor does it mean that it could, at any point, be successful. I do applaud the man, though.

Professor Lombardo’s main goal was to create a text meant for vocal recitation, and he does in fact read his own works, recording them for posterity and, naturally, sales. He is very successful in this endeavor, for he has created a piece that is so fluid, that runs so smoothly, borrowing colloquialisms from current English while trying to maintain some sense of antiquity, that you almost don’t mind the way he disjoints the narrative by displacing every epic metaphor into a new italicized stanza. Almost:

“And he headed out. The other commanders stood up,
Convinced he was right,

The troops were moving now,

Swarming like insects over the beach, like bees
That hum from a hollow rock in an endless line
And fly in clusters over flowers in spring,
Grouping themselves in aerial throngs.

The Greeks made like that as they swarmed
Out of the ships and the huts clutched beneath them…”

They pretty much come out of nowhere and, I must admit, it’s rather distracting. My other criticism is that sometimes Lombardo gives us very awkward sentences, like the one above: “The Greeks made like that as they swarmed.” “Made like that?” For comparison, here is the same passage from Robert Fagles’ (much better) translation:

“And out he marched, leading the way from council.
The rest sprang to their feet, the sceptered kings
obeyed the great field marshal. Rank and file
streamed behind and rushed like swarms of bees
pouring out of a rocky hollow, burst on endless burst,
bunched in clusters seething over the first spring blossoms,
dark hordes swirling into the air, this way, that way -
so the many armed platoons from the ships and tents
came marching on, close-file, among the deep wide beach…”

First, notice the lack of disjointed, separated metaphor. Second, notice the much better rendering of that metaphor. “Pouring out of a rocky hollow” has a much better sound than “hum[ing] from a hollow rock,” as does “burst on endless burst” rather than “in an endless line.” Third, notice the very different takes on the first few lines. In Lombardo’s version, “he headed out,” he, in this case, being Agamemnon, and the other commanders were “convinced he was right,” while “the troops were moving now.” Compare that to Fagles’ Agamemnon, “out he marched,” who led “the way from council,” while the other “sceptered kings obeyed the great field marshal,” and the “rank and file streamed behind…” Lombardo’s Agamemnon has “commanders” who were convinced he was right, whereas Fagles’ leader has “sceptered kings” who obeyed their leader. In “obeyed” we don’t necessarily have the sense that the people obeying were convinced their commander was right. I don’t have the Greek in front of me, and couldn’t operate it if it were, but this is a discrepancy that has some significance. If Agamemnon’s commanders obey but don’t think he’s right, isn’t that important? Finally, and this is an aesthetic point, “rank and file streamed behind” and “so the many armed platoons…came marching on” are obviously superior to “the troops were moving now” and “The Greeks made like that.” Having to type that last line almost makes me vomit.

Lombardo is obviously trying to introduce a particular vernacular, a more conversational tone to the story and to the styles of speaking of the various characters, but he ends up writing these odd monologues that have elements of both current idiosyncratic speech as well as older, more classical forms. Example:

“You damn soothsayer!
You’ve never given me a good omen yet.
You take some kind of perverse pleasure in prophesying
Doom, don’t you? Not a single favorable omen ever!
Nothing good ever happens! And now you stand here
Uttering oracles before the Greeks, telling us
That your great ballistic god is giving us all this trouble
Because I was unwilling to accept the ransom
For Chryses’ daughter but preferred instead to keep her
In my tent! And why shouldn’t I? I like here better than
My wife Clytemnestra. She’s no worse than her
When it comes to looks, body, mind, or ability.
Still, I’ll give her back, if that’s what’s best.
I don’t want to see the army destroyed like this.
But I want another prize ready for me right away.
I’m not going to be the only Greek without a prize,
It wouldn’t be right. And you all see where mine is going.”

Lombardo has phrases like “Nothing good ever happens!” alongside “And now you stand here/Uttering oracles before the Greeks.” I find especially repugnant “She’s no worse than her/When it comes to looks, body, mind, or ability” because, based on the rest of this monologue, it is something Agamemnon would absolutely not say. Listen to the words as they fall off your tongue, say them out loud; they just sit poorly in the mouth of an English speaker, and they are certainly awkward coming from this big, burly, angry, lustful king. Take Fagles’ rendition of the same passage:

“Seer of misery! Never a word that works to my advantage!
Always misery warms your heart, your phrophecies -
never a word of profit said or brought to pass.
Now, again, you divine god’s will for the armies,
bruit it about, as fact, why the deadly Archer
multiplies our pains: because I, I refused
that glittering price for the young girl Chryseis.
Indeed, I prefer her by far, the girl herself,
I want her mind in my own house! I rank her higher
than Clytemnestra, my wedded wife – she’s nothing less
in build or breeding, in mind or works of hand.
But I am willing to give her back, even so,
if that is best for all. What I really want
is to keep my people safe, not see them dying.
But fetch me another prize, and straight off too,
else I alone of the Argives go without my honor.
That would be a disgrace. You are all witness,
look – my prize is snatched away!”

Immediately we can tell that this monologue is consistent for one single character. He speaks and styles his words in the same manner the whole time. Also, notice how he comes off as a less of an asshole than Lombardo’s Agamemnon, claiming quite sincerely that it’s his people he wants safe, though he also wants his due. He comes off as arrogant, prideful, but sincere, whereas Lombardo’s dictator sounds like a misogynistic wife-beater who really just wants sex and power, at the expense of those around him. And the vomit-inducing line from before about “looks, body, mind, or ability” is rendered as “she’s nothing less/in build or breeding, in mind or works of hand.” Not only is it consistent with the rest of the language, but I don’t feel like I’m watching two male birds mate, each unaware that the other is not a female.

I think the problem with the line about the one woman being superior or “nothing less” than the other is that in order to be true to the Greek, one must produce all the elements of the original line, the body, mind, ability, and looks. Lombardo wants to make it colloquial, 20th century English, but a line including all those elements just isn’t feasible. No husky, lustful commander in the 20th century would use those ideas about body, mind, looks, and ability, so when Lombardo rendered it, he was helpless. He had to simplify the ideas from the original Greek so that it sounded mildly like General George S. Patton, whereas the rest of it he was able to render successfully and naturally as Patton. Fagles wasn’t interested in colloquial English, and so his line about “build or breeding, in mind or works of hand” is perfect and beautiful and consistent and doesn’t clash with anything, including our ears and tongue.

What it comes down to is that Lombardo is engaging in an immediately disadvantageous battle, which is why I called it “most ambitious” in the beginning. The Greek doesn’t lend itself very well to rendering in colloquial, General Patton English. It does, however, move gracefully into Fagle’s English, “classical prose,” if you will. What I’ve written should be sufficient, but if not this will do – first Lombardo and then Fagles:

“When the tomb was built, they all returned
To the city and assembled for a glorious feast
In the house of Priam, Zeus’ cherished king.

That was the funeral of Hector, breaker of horses.”

“And once they’d heaped the mound
they turned back home to Troy, and gathering once again
they shared a splendid funeral feast in Hector’s honor,
held in the house of Priam, king by will of Zeus.

And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses.”

One is incorrigibly dry and seems to give off all the splendid wonder of a burnt out light bulb, while the other emits a prismatic array of feeling and power, radiating and creating a wonderful conclusion to a truly epic poem.

“You damn soothsayer!

You’ve never given me a good omen yet.

You take some kind of perverse pleasure in prophesying

Doom, don’t you? Not a single favorable omen ever!

Nothing good ever happens! And now you stand here

Uttering oracles before the Greeks, telling us

That your great ballistic god is giving us all this trouble

Because I was unwilling to accept the ransom

For Chryses’ daughter but preferred instead to keep her

In my tent! And why shouldn’t I? I like here better than

My wife Clytemnestra. She’s now worse than her

When it comes to looks, body, mind, or ability.

Still, I’ll give her back, if that’s what’s best.

I don’t want to see the army destroyed like this.

But I want another prize ready for me right away.

I’m not going to be the only Greek without a prize,

It wouldn’t be right. And you all see where mine is going.”

Mimicry in Book Land

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else – Christopher R. Beha

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World – A.J. Jacobs

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21, 730 Pages – Ammon Shea

There is a new formula in Book Land: take some formidable and iconic group of books, read them in a year, and then write a book about it, memoir-style, finding clever ways of intertwining the gargantuan task with whatever is going on in your life. This can be enjoyable reading: A.J. Jacobs’ spirited quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica was, at times, clever, moving, entertaining, and funny. The “moving” parts involved his family and their problems, especially his wife and father. It was a quick read, quite in contrast to his own task, but it was worth the time invested. Upon finishing it, I felt I had read a rather solid piece of work.

Later, though, I found out about Ammon Shea, a man who decided to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary – and then write a book about it. He doesn’t intertwine nearly as much personal information into the narrative of reading the OED – as Jacobs does – but still, the basic formula is repeated: read some iconic and huge (group of) book(s) and then write a memoir about it. Inside, one will find, naturally, clever insights about life and smile-inducing anecdotes connected to the reading challenge that make the book more than just a shitty play-by-play of one man’s reading habits.

And that’s the thing: these books on their own, the OED and the Encyclopedia Britannica, are apparently not interesting enough to sustain a modern audience, so they must be read by average, ordinary people who then tell us what it was like, all the while reminding us that they are not nearly up to the task of engaging these works in any meaningful way and that this is funny, because, hahahaha, we’re all just ordinary people: here’s my ordinary book.

So while I wasn’t really disgusted, I was at least a bit unsettled that a new formula was appearing, or at least the first suspicions of a formula. Then I opened up today’s Sunday Book Review in The New York Times and saw a piece on Christopher R. Beha’s new (only) book, in which he recounts the twelve months he spent reading The Whole Five Feet – the books more formally known as the Harvard Classics library, a collection of works from Plato to Darwin encompassing the “best” of Western literature – and in which he cleverly intertwines the books, the ideas, and his own life. Along the way, obviously, an aunt dies and Beha, himself a cancer survivor, finds out he has Lyme disease and eventually tears a meniscus. So while reading the Harvard Classics, lots of personal shit goes down and he is there to spin together Oprah-style messages about life, books, and death. Ordinary man, ordinary book, ordinary price tag.

I suppose I wouldn’t be nearly as annoyed if I hadn’t just read Jacobs’ book and stumbled upon Shea’s book. But still, what’s next? Should I read every Sunday Book Review section from The New York Times going back 150 years and then write a memoir about the EPIC task and how it related, conveniently, to personal drama and, you know, life? (Chances are, suicide would have intervened long before I had a chance to write a book about the experience.) Or should I go ultra-modern and play every Final Fantasy role-playing game, all twelve of them, from beginning to end, 100-percent-ing them (meaning I uncover every secret and get every item and beat every conceivable boss/enemy) and then write a book about it, leaving potential readers with memorable anecdote after memorable anecdote?

Whatever happened to writing fiction?

I don’t know, perhaps I’m bringing down the hammer too early and too hard, but when it becomes commonplace to do something EPIC for twelve months, something no one in their right mind (that is, no one in this day and age) would do, and then write an entertaining and averagely-written memoir about it, well, I start to get annoyed at the lack of invention of my fellow human beings. If mirroring past successes in order to achieve one’s own success is the aim of writers today, why didn’t they just skip English classes in college and head straight to business school? When did invention go by the wayside? When did mimetic activity become accepted and preferred? Well, I suppose that last one is answerable: what sold last week is likely to sell this week, so get in while the iron’s hot and make some money.

Just another reason why I don’t feel so bad hatingotherpeople.

The Day Some More Music Died

So Michael Jackson is dead. He was many things, but I don’t think we ever saw him as dead at 50. Of course, nowadays it’s commonplace for just about anyone with money and notoriety to be found dead/dying/somethingterrible, so we don’t find this as shocking as we found, say, Princess Diana’s car crash death in the late 90′s. For that one, when I was just 9 years old, I remember staying up, on a school night, until three or four in the morning with my mom and brother watching all the news and stuff. It was pretty damaging, shocking stuff. My mom cried and I just sat there, unsure as to the right emotion. I was 9 so things like “world-class lady who helped the poor and was constantly hounded by terrible people (paparazzi)” hadn’t really sunken in. I just knew my mom was crying and that it must have been a big deal. When I watched the funeral a few days later, I think it was made a little clearer.

But Michael Jackson? The best I can say is that the Twitter feeds of everyone I know were on fire, along with Facebook status updates. No one really knew what was going on and everyone was firing questions out into cyberspace hoping for an answer. The confusion was internet-based and not very frantic, for we can’t really take too seriously the presence of sad-face emoticons and exclamation points and ellipses. And Farrah Fawcett died merely two hours before Jackson did, and Ed McMahon bit the bullet yesterday – famous people are just dropping left and right, who can keep up or even muster the sorrow necessary to involve one’s self in their foreign and exotic demises?

I’m not even sure of the appropriate response. First I’m reminded of the child molestation charges and their creepy seeming veracity. And then I think about how this was a guy, at 50, who had just cleared a whole lot of shit up, just finished (or about finished) a new studio album, and had concerts scheduled for the coming year. He was getting his act together, things were starting to work again, his family was there and everything – and then he just fucking has a heart attack. So on a basic human level, I’m very sympathetic because, in spite of past offenses and tragedies, he was putting the pieces of the puzzle back together and they were just about complete – and then he just fucking has a heart attack. I mean, who does that?

I certainly noticed the reactions of people I know, which varied from outward expressions of sadness to outward expressions of “good riddance, he was a pedophile” – a la my lovely brother – and there was a certain measure of sincerity that, I think, affected me more than Jackson’s actual passing. But then, I’m naturally a sucker for communal expressions of emotion, even if each member of that community is expressing a different emotion. At the end of Spartacus when everyone stands up claiming to be Spartacus and the guy just executes all the prisoners, well, I just die at that moment it’s so good. Or in Love Actually, both beginning and end, when they’re playing The Beach Boys’ God Only Knows while showing dozens of average folks hugging and kissing as Heathrow Airport – yep, that also gets me.

In any case, just one more life on the up and up that got derailed before completing the rare upward spiral. Thanks God, you’re swell.

A Writer-to Writer Meme – Yay!

Found this on some cool dude’s blog. Naturally, I appropriated it for my own.

“Instructions: Please answer the Meme with a post on your blog, and reference the original link:   Got Muse? A Writer-To-Writer Meme. Leave the link to your Meme in my comments section, so we can go read it!”

Got Muse? A Writer-to-Writer Meme:

1) Where do you write?

I open up the curtains in my room that overlooks the crappy, small street I live on, a street, mind you, that’s bordered by my house on one side and a wall on the other. I enjoy the natural light. And if it’s dark out, I close the curtains. But I’ll write anywhere, really.

2) When do you write?

Whenever it hits me and whenever I need to do it. I’ve been reading more than writing lately, but it all ebbs and flows depending on circumstance, mood, temperament, whatever.

3) Planner or Pantser? [I had to look this term up.]

I haven’t been around long enough to get into any sort of reliable rhythm. At this point, I do a bit of both, though it appears that when writing fiction, I tend to plan the arc of the piece and then go at it from different angles. When writing nonfiction, however, (like essays and such), I tend to freewrite for brainstorming purposes, which in turn creates some semblance of structure, which I then might use in part or in whole.

4) Coffee or tea?

I don’t like either. A can of coke or bottle of water does me good, though I have a penchant for not doing anything while writing, including breathing. Don’t have time, you see…

5) Pen and paper, or computer?

When I want to get down the action of a scene, the nuts and bolts, I use pencil and paper because I find I write what’s happening when physically moving my hand in oddly shaped geometric figures across a page. But if I need description, typing is where I go because I type so fast that my brain has to catch up with my hands, thus allowing for more thought, more planning, more description, etc. Pencil and paper keep me focused on action because my hand is constantly having to catch up with my brain.

6) What gets you in the writing mood?

Reading: it just generates so much thought and discussion in my head that when I read I have to constantly curb the temptation to just start writing, using whatever my eyes are seeing as a starting point.

7) What pulls you out of the writing mood?

Other than regular annoyances (people, pets, recurring nightmares about politicians), I’m only distracted by my own inability to say what I mean, or say anything at all. The times when you have nothing to say are the worst. You just sort of stop writing altogether and pick up the nearest book.

8 What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever read/heard/received?

Most of what you hear is old hat, but occasionally you get something that puts a unique spin on something, like the way Hemingway famously described writing, talking about catching fish, watching it come out of the water, etc. His big point was that you have to describe the stuff around the main piece of action, and in doing so, you’ll bring it into better focus, such as the way the light glistens off the water as the fish rises up, or the way the string goes taught when the chase begins – stuff that like.

9) Got muse?

Pretty much me. At this point I haven’t found anything that drives me other than my own determination and sense of self-worth (I estimate myself much higher than I ought to, though).

10) Who is the biggest supporter of your writing?

Well, other than me it would probably be my mom, because she’s a good mom and stuff. But again, it all comes down to me. If you’re not buttressing yourself more than everyone else, then why are you doing whatever it is you’re doing?

11) Sound or Silence?

It depends. Beethoven has been known to kick my ass into gear. But on other occasions, early Miles Davis sets the mood. And then again, I’ve used Avril Lavigne to create the write atmosphere. For me, music can dictate tempo, dynamics, mood, atmosphere, all of it, so I choose music (or lack of it) depending on how I want things to go. Most of the time I’m choosing music without realizing that what I’m choosing is just right for the sort of writing I’m about to do.

The Agrarian Ideal: Know those beans!

“I was determined to know beans.”

Henry David Thoreau was a strong and persistent man. If there was but one thing to take away from “Walden” it was that he sure as hell wanted to know those damn beans. The phrase is obviously a metaphor for bigger and greater things – take your pick – and he probably had a few in mind, but I like to think of Thoreau as a spry man in his late 50’s stooped over sowed fields, checking on bean plants, changing, moving, experimenting, coming at the cultivation of beans from different angles. Like Gregor Mendel but without all the gene splicing and a lot more fun.

And I mean beans by the way: Thoreau, in this image, is trying to figure out beans; not life, but fucking beans, man.

Naturally, Voltaire’s Candide comes to mind. The encouragement at the end, the last line of the book, is to cultivate one’s garden, one’s own individual and personal plot of mulch and fertilizer. Voltaire is also using horticultural pursuits as a metaphor – that is, worry about yourself and stop trying to kill other people – but what if we look at this as literal, like Thoreau, that we should just focus on gardening?

And why not? There is at least one person who took this advice seriously and literally: Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire’s ideological offspring, advocated the agrarian ideal while attempting to live it, post-presidency. He was astonishingly bad, though, but at least he was living the principles he sought to legitimize, unlike that guy Emerson.

What’s the personal (for it’s always an intimate and individual endeavor and never a communal event) enchantment we seem to have with horticultural pursuits in our own backyard? I think that when life gets really fucked up, that when complacency strangles one’s hometown (Thoreau’s Concord); when politics takes its toll (Jefferson’s life); when life’s absurd tragedies are too great (Voltaire’s Europe), we turn back the clock to a simpler, more primitive moment in human history when agriculture was man’s highest (and only) achievement.

What’s interesting, though, is that we don’t turn back all the way, to, say, living in caves and dragging women around by their hair and painting crude symbols on rocks, taking down elephantine creatures with groups of spear-wielding, prognathic early humans. We seem to desire the recent past, the agrarian lifestyle of the solitary farmer, what we see as the hero of the world. But we don’t go back any further.

This raises the question of whether the farmers of Egypt dreamed of olden, golden days in the sun, living nomadically from field to forest to mountain to field. Did those prognathic humanoids dream about living in the forest, swinging from the trees, throwing defecations at one another? And did those primitive primates dream of being lizards and fish and crustaceans and small, one-celled bacteria?

And in 200 years, will future Americans hearken back to the days of the Noble Savage, a la Thomas Paine and France circa 19^th century?

Perhaps, but I think the reason Man has been attracted to the agrarian lifestyle for so long is because it’s a way of living by one’s own means, on one’s own. It adopts as supreme law the free will we all seem to desire. With farming comes individual power – both the power to live and the power to die.

So, in the words of Voltaire: “Cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. [That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden.]“

Some History Finally Being Given the Once Over

As a preface, I should say that I have absolutely no clue what prompted this. I haven’t thought about this particular bit of my history for quite some time and I really don’t know what stimulus forced it out of me at this peculiar moment. Nevertheless, out it came.

It must have been fear. I can’t really think of anything else that would have driven me to deny, multiple times across the span of many months, an invitation to have lunch with a girl who is – was? it’s been a while – pretty, intelligent, ambitious, outgoing, and – greatest of all – most likely crushing on me.

What the hell was I thinking? In private moments, I use to think that she was the sort of girl I was looking for (not for the future or anything ridiculous, but just in general). In public moments, even, I expressed this sentiment. Keith heard me say it a number of times: the kind of girl I wanted to be interested in was smart, funny, outgoing. I suppose a key word there is “wanted,” for who knows what that part of me which judges these sorts of things – my head, not my penis, though I can’t doubt its powers of persuasion – thinks about the sorts of girls I would like to like. It may be that she was the sort of girl least suited for my own behavior, merely the girl best suited to those arbitrary and perhaps untrue tastes I designed on my own. It may be that we think we want one thing and then want another. Well, actually, I know that to be true. Science told me (the social/psychological kind), through the medium of Malcolm Gladwell.

So if it’s true that we don’t want what we think we want and we want what we think we don’t, does that explain why I backed out multiple times? Not really, because it doesn’t always hold true. There are, certainly, times when we want what we want and don’t want what we don’t want. It doesn’t always have to be that we want or don’t want the opposite of our professed feelings.

So, then, it must be fear. That’s all that explains it. But what was there to be afraid of? She and I got on great! We were wonderful together. We made jokes, she laughed at everything I said, I was always smart and funny and she was competitive in that area, so what the hell is wrong with me? What was there to fear? Was I afraid that we were going to hit it off and that I wouldn’t then know what to do? That’s all I can think of, that I was afraid it would work out, that it would be okay, and that I would be in an exotic, foreign position, one with which I had little experience.

I’ve been in ‘romantic’ relationships, sure, and even some that were “successful” for a period of time, but at no point in any of them did I delude myself that things were great. I usually despised the other person for being a moron and for not having any sort of ambition for life. (That, or I was an asshole, probably both.) Sure, they wanted to LIVE, and do all sorts of things that constituted LIVING, but most people who possess that sort of ambition for LIVING tend to be holding on to something fragile and not worth the effort. Very few people have the ambition to LIVE in that unadulterated, hippie way – rather than live – and believe me, the people I’ve dated were not those people.

I suppose – and this seems to be getting closer to the truth – the real reason I was afraid of whatever was going to happen with her was that I saw myself reflected back, and that was scary. I saw a person ambitious, smart, sarcastic, witty, clever, arrogant, yet more or less nice and congenial. I saw ME. I saw another Jeff, or, perhaps, another her. Whatever appellation we give it, it was reminiscent, though not nearly as humorous, of Jerry Seinfeld seeing himself as a woman and being driven away from her for some inexplicable reason (in that one episode). It’s not nearly as humorous here because it’s real. Should I have feared my double? Should I have gone head-first into a potential relationship with my feminine counterpart? I don’t know, but I should have given it a try. What’s the worst that could have happened? We date for some meaningless amount of time, I come to resent her for meaningless reasons, and she resents me for equally meaningless reasons, and we break up, with very little pomp and circumstance? It would merely prove that history repeats itself. On the other hand, it might have proved that life isn’t always torpid and fraught with existential puzzles.

While it seems strange that this moment in time would come back to me, I guess it’s really not all that strange. I’ve occasionally let these questions pass through my mind and then quickly leave – because I didn’t want to think on the matter, yet. Why think on it now, at 11:30 pm when I should really be going to bed and getting some much needed sleep? I can’t answer that. But then again, I don’t think we can answer for everything our head, heart, and penis drive us to do.

Currently Reading: Still running through Vidal’s essays. It’s not necessarily slow going, there’s just a shitload of them, and they’re dense and great and long. Also, in the midst of them, I’ve managed to read a few issues of “Harper’s Magazine” that I let back up, along with a John le Carré novel, The Looking Glass War, which was typical le Carré: good writing, good story, good ending – but all typical and not very exciting. It’s not that typical is bad, just that typical le Carré is enjoyable but not necessarily great or excellent. He’s at his best, I think, when the hectic pace of his writing matches the hectic pace of his stories. He usually tells his stories with the gait of a mildly fit middle-aged man who could still use a bit more exercise for endurance purposes. Whereas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carré ran with all the fervent energy and passion of a 19 year-old college freshman who just discovered that sex is awesome.

Some Thoughts on NYTimes Book-Chat

I think this is a safe assessment (and perhaps a generous one) about The New York Times Sunday Book Review: It is getting to the point where the writing is indistinguishable from piece to piece; it would not surprise me if one guy/girl wrote all of them under different pseudonyms.

A formula has revealed itself after many weeks of reading the Sunday Edition of the Times after slipping it from its blue cellophane wrapper (which, btw, is much more durable than the wrapper used by The Arizona Republic; but then again, one newspaper claims to be the most popular in the world, and the other is looking more and more like a meagerly fed child who is withering away, becoming more and more emaciated as the seasons progress). The formula for NYTimes book-chat/literary criticism can be rendered thusly:

40% of review piece is devoted to awkward summarization of the book.

20% of review piece is devoted to obligatory criticism of the book, usually in the form of “If there is anything unsatisfying about this “positive adjective” and “positive adjective” book, it is…”

40% of review piece is devoted to a short discussion of something the reviewer found compelling/interesting/noteworthy/etc.: “The book raises practical questions”; “But for all the excitement, we never lose sight of the mourning”; “All this is reported with dispassionate, almost surgical precision”; “Those are gorgeous sentences, but they are also tyrannical…”

And, naturally, most reviews have an artistic/classy/obviouslyterrible picture of the author situated in some set location. One Miss Cristina Nehring is draped oddly against an opened and windowed door, with red curtains on either side. She is wearing a dress that ill-suits her and her hair is frazzled in a way that suggests discomfort or wind, neither being particularly delightful. Another has Kate Walbert sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees and she is staring up into the distance, with a look suggesting something epic and profound – her book is called “A Short History of Women.” My favorite, though, is from a few weeks ago: Arthur Phillips is sitting in a corner booth of some strangely decorated restaurant (it is obviously not a real establishment but a set piece) – deep red drapes over a window that goes nowhere with deep red walls and a painted picture of someone who looks a lot like Confucius – and Mr. Phillips has his elbow on the table and his head resting very uncomfortably in his open palm, smashing his cheek against his fingers. He has a bored look in his eyes and seems like he would rather be elsewhere. I cannot help but comprehend the staged reality of this photo and that someone planned this and thought it was a good idea.

It all makes me wonder about the artistic license we give people nowadays. I suppose on some level a large canvas painted neon green with a red dot in the middle might be considered “art” in some circles, perhaps widely-circulating circules, but I find it tragic that someone is allowed – no, is paid – to take such an awful photograph with the assumption that it does something to add to the review, to the reviewer, and, most dishearteningly of all, the author. Bad execution of normal art standards is something much more grevious than the assertion that something exotic and new is, itself, art.

The awkward summarizations in these review pieces are astonishingly bad. Take, for instance, this opening for today’s Book Review headline piece on Miss Nehring’s new book:

“For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary. But Cristina Nehring has a different idea. Her ardent polemic, “A Vindication of Love,” puts forward a darker, more demanding vision of love. This is not, it should be said right away, a book without ambition: the subtitle is “Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century,” though it is not exactly romance Nehring is writing about, but a more difficult, vital image of passion she believes we have lost.”

Naturally, one might read this lazily and not realize how strangely constructed it is. Katie Roiphe immediately tells us that the book’s author “has a different idea” about love, and that her “ardent polemic” presents a “darker, more demanding vision of love.” So right away, we have a “different idea” about a hotly contested topic (love) and its characterization as “polemic[al].” Why then, Kate Roiphe, do you proceed to tell us “right away” that this is not “a book without ambition?” You have already said that it is a polemical book presenting a “different idea” about LOVE. Is it necessary to point out that it is an ambitious undertaking? Have you not already made the point that it was ambitious? Is your audience moronic and incapable of picking up on subtle hints like “different,” “polemic,” and “more demanding vision of love?”

In any case, I am glad (read: obviously saddened) that Miss Roiphe ended her piece with the following, apparently revelatory anecdote:

“A solid, freckled 5-year-old from my daughter’s class recently came up to me on seeing that I was pregnant [insightful child, by the way]. “Are you going to get married?” she demanded, hands on hips. “Not now,” I said. Which either is or is not a vindication of love.”

What does this mean? Her plan to not get married though pregnant with child (she thinks she is breaking long-standing tradition, here) “either is or is not a vindication of love?” I am unconvinced that Miss Roiphe could even explain that line to me. By not getting married – though heavy with child – she is, on one hand, perhaps vindicating love? And on the other, perhaps not? What does it mean to vindicate love? How does one justify love by not getting married in this situation? Or by getting married? Perhaps she means simply to present Miss Nehring’s case and let it speak for itself, thus she will not comment on whether her situation is a vindication or not? I understand its relation to the title, but I am still lost.

In the end, I am left, confused and startled, to consider the accompanying artwork: two “people” are dancing what appears to be a Tango of some sort. Their bodies, from the shins up, are made entirely of interlocking hands which, in turn, interlock with each other. I am still wondering why their feet are left intact and untouched.

Fact or Fiction

So throughout Gore Vidal’s essays he bemoans the state of readership; in all the early decades (50′s, 60′s, 70′s) he registers this complaint: everyone is becoming more and more concerned with facts rather than imagination. In that famous essay where he runs down the top ten best sellers from January 1st, 1973, three or four of the books were purportedly true or based heavily on true events – and some of the others made the appearance of fact. I can’t help but think that in the 2000′s the same holds true for the average reader.

How popular have recent and true autobiographies about tragedies and drug addicts been? We can measure the obsession with “real” stories by remembering the mob justice that nearly spilled into the streets when it was discovered that James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces was only 97% true. Remember when Oprah emasculated him in front of four billion people and everyone enjoyed it? And he just sat there because he knew the media attention would make him millions?

Naturally, very few readers realized that even if the entire work were fictitious right down to the first names, it could still be a good book, worthy of the time and energy invested. Sadly, very few readers are willing to, you know, think before they act, and thus we have all sorts of hyperbolic statements about how terrible a person must be, how depraved and wretched, before they would think to write down lies and expect someone to read them.

Strange, huh, the notion of reading FICTION.

Currently Reading: Vidal’s essays, duh. Also, I started John Cheever’s The Falconer. I’ve only read his short stories thus far, so it should be interesting to dive into a full-length novel, though a critic I read felt that Cheever’s novels (the few he actually wrote) felt like a group of short stories separated by chapter headings. He restated his belief in their good quality, however. We shall see.

Studies in Pessimism

You can’t just write. You have to have some sort of foundation. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t have to be rock-solid. It can be tenuous and flexible and shadowy, but it still has to exist. Most writers look in their backyards and identify cultural/familial/regional infrastructure and just go from there. Faulkner had the Deep South; Hemingway had his own gargantuan Self; James had the upper classes and the damnable inferiors that tried to usurp them. Even Barth and Pynchon, with their postmodernism, had hometowns and families to inspire their labyrinthine tales. Shit, even Robert Parker had “The Complete Works of Raymond Chandler” to set up shop with (which led to the pumping out of Raymond-Chandler-light crime novels).

So the first key to writing is picking your foundations. I say “picking” and not “identifying” because you can make one up. It just has to be believable.

That’s where I’m at in my (ideally) burgeoning writing career. I can write, but I don’t know what to write about. That’s usually a bygone conclusion for most aspiring authors, the subjects and plots and so on. It’s the technique and the skill that needs work. I’m no genius, but my skill set gets better all the time (because I work at it), yet I have very little to apply it to, other than blogs and the occasional adventure into “literary essay land,” which is happening more and more often. (Quick: define “literary essay.” Ha! Trick question, bitches.)

I meandering over to the conclusion that my foundation is going to be ideas rather than some physical location or group of people. My prognostications point this direction because I look around and don’t see much worth writing about. I’m middle class and live in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s no fun writing about faux-rich idiots and their stupid children. Besides, that’s too easy, and maybe that’s my problem. I see the endgame, the resonating themes and criticisms at the end of all these stories and ideas, and find it all too easy and historically repetitive. Why write about stupid rich people when I could read something from the 19th century? Why write about the problems and successes of the middle class when Updike and others clearly beat me to it? (Btw, Scottsdale is inhabited by non-rich, non-white [non-American] people. We’re not all $100,000 millionaires riding foreclosed houses into poverty.)

Of course, the next step is metafiction, because what else is there to do if my main goal is not to make money (and thus write NYTimes Bestseller List Trash)? Naturally, the question then arises, Why write wacky satirical meta-narratives when it’s already been done? It’s then I begin to wonder if writing anything new is possible. Is there something we’ve missed? Some creative way of forming narratives that hasn’t already been exploited by some white male from the 60′s? And one that’s not needlessly confusing, just for the sake of being different?

I’m sort of scared, here, because I think a formula for writing in the 21^st century has developed. You look into your own backyard and write what you know, and write consistently. If you fail to follow that last bit of advice, no one will take you seriously and you’ll never make any money (as if you were going to make any anyways, right?).

What’s also scary, but on a secondary level, is that this is obviously where I’m headed, where a lot of us “creative writers” with MFA’s or dreams of having MFA’s will end up: in the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times in some artful, classy photographs embedded within simultaneously praising/critical reviews by authors who are indirectly promoting their new books by keeping their names in the public eye by doing book reviews for nobody authors trying to get a jump into the field. Is that what we’ve come to? Authors yelling at their agents to get them opportunities to do book reviews for shitty books in the Sunday Edition so some portion of the already-small demographic might actually, you know, purchase their work?

But can I even get to that point without having a suicidal father, a drunk mother, a famous uncle/cousin/grandparent, or only three limbs? Isn’t that what I read every Sunday? Things will be going along nicely, the work in question is being slathered lightly in ambiguous statements that may or may not mean anything, and then comes that paragraph about the author’s history and how the inherent drama somehow makes the work in question better or vindicates its very existence.

This formula is frightening, as I’ve said. So do I just spin off into crazy post-post-postmodern land, eclipsing all those greats of old? Is that the rhythm of art? It coagulates into a formula, which some clever people break open, scattering blood and guts to the winds, only to have time and mediocre talent coagulate their legacies into new formulas, which are then…and so on? Does the process repeat itself inevitably and perpetually until movies finally destroy all that was great and beautiful with paper and pen? Time and nuclear arsenals and retarded leaders of the Free World permitting?

If that’s the case, I see that classy yet tragic Sunday Edition book review spread in my future, and I can’t say it excites me. But hey, at least I’ll be eating three meals a day.

Currently Reading: If it wasn’t obvious already, I’ve jumped right into The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal. His ironic and witty pessimism is clearly rubbing off on me. Also, I got a huge beef with the editor, Jay Parini. Everything’s great except for one seemingly small detail, but one with great ramifications. In the table of contents and at the end of each selection, the year the essay first appeared is given, but not at the beginning of each selection. So when you get to a point in one of Mr. Vidal’s essays where he presents time-sensitive criticism, such as “In our current decade…” or “…at the present moment, we as a nation…”, you have to leave the selection and hunt down a publishing year. Now, doesn’t that suck balls? Why isn’t this at the beginning of each selection? I realize there’s a certain tradition of putting the copyright information at the end of each piece, but seriously, is my complaint not a common one? If it isn’t a common one, I don’t know what’s going on, because clearly you want to know the historical context of a work when the author talks about historical context without referencing the year. And why should he? Original readers were perusing Esquire and what not, and obviously knew that it was 1953 or 1978 or whatever. I, however, don’t have that psychic ability to figure it out beforehand. So, thanks for the great editing, Jay Parini.

Books, Roller Coasters, and You

I recently read Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, a short work – technically a novella – that, alongside another seminal work of the same period, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, illustrates what I like to call the “roller coaster” concept.

Some roller coasters are great amalgamations of loops and twists and turns and ups and downs and all sorts of physically possible yet psychologically terrifying constructs. And others are merely a straight drop from some frightening height preceded by a measured, deliberate, and tension-building rise up to the Nth story.

Bellow’s writing in Seize the Day exemplifies the first kind of roller coaster. On the whole, it is excitingly lucid, much like a roller coaster ride, when you’re blood pressure is hovering constantly around a level where everything seems to be heightened: the sensations are stronger, the reactions are quicker, and everything is just so brilliant. It’s like seeing life through a prism, with the light reflecting in every direction, cascading off of every surface.

You don’t immediately apprehend ideological leanings of Bellow’s style until it eventually explodes onto the page, dripping with acid and words that, in Bellow’s time, were crossed out, though modern readers can easily tell their identities. And as soon as these explosions grace the page, they’re gone, receding into vivid memory as the paragraphs and pages roll on. It’s only after you’ve traversed a number of these rolling hills, these peaks and valleys, these twists and turns of some monstrous roller coaster, that you realize the purpose of the mostly conservative writing style, one that is, at times, austere, reserved, and stark. The explosions, the peaks, the crossed out words, the exclamations – their power is enhanced because of the austere writing they’re embedded within. It’s because of this reserved – yet somehow informal – manner of writing that Bellow’s rises and falls are so effective and so moving.

Greene’s The Quiet American, on the other hand, represents the second type of roller coaster. As the novel progresses, you realize somewhere in the middle – or perhaps at the end, as I did – that you’ve been on a train, a long and lonely railcar that’s traveling towards somewhere into the distance. The end of the novel feels like you’ve just looked out the window for the first time: you’re in a wasteland, naturally deserted, an arid landscape with no discernible limits. The infinity of that wasteland – the infinity of human apathy – is where the power resides.

All books have a particular roller coaster in mind and the author tries very hard to make the reader’s journey through the book as similar to the one envisioned in the author’s imagination. Seize the Day is such a personal work, a story, a set of details, a man’s innards that so completely enthrall the reader because of their intimate proximity to the protagonist, that it draws its power from this set of circumstances. We’ve all felt the same ups and downs that Wilky has felt, the same existential crises, the same worries, the same jaunts about town that aim to preserve some dignity in the face of personal destruction. The roller coaster rolls on, through twists and turns, upside down and rightside up, spinning and rising and falling with the celerity of the great colossi that litter Disneyland and Six Flags.

In a work like The Quiet American, the roller coaster is much different. Greene wants us to go down, down, down psychologically, corresponding to the up, up, up of a roller coaster like The Superman, that rises seemingly indefinitely until it plummets back to the surface. It’s during this free fall that we realize with spine-shuddering certainty the mess we’re in as human beings, the mess Greene is trying to present to us. The regret – no, the sadness that Thomas Fowler expresses in the final paragraphs is the same sadness we sometimes realize when presented with the world in all its miserable, desolate glory. The book, in other words, does not move even slightly into the realm of optimism at the end, but remains firmly entrenched in the pessimism that humans are and always will be wretched creatures.

The difference here is important, because to grasp Bellow’s power in Seize the Day you must first understand the roller coaster. We’re so close to Tommy Wilhelm that when he hurts we hurt, and this is exacerbated by the anguish he feels so publicly, so readily and forcefully. If we share any pain with Greene’s Thomas Fowler, it’s because we react so powerfully to the sobering quality of his pain. Our reactions to the stone wall Fowler presents to the world are the very emotions he is hiding. With Tommy Wilhelm we feel the emotions Tommy feels because it’s public, because it’s so immediately in the forefront of the story. In Seize the Day we ride the roller coaster, up and down and in circles. In The Quiet American, the roller coaster is up but once and down forever.

Bellow gives us a gargantuan ride: it’s short, simple, yet dynamic and soul-crushing. Greene gives us a train ride through nothingness, through a desert of apathy culminating in the shattering realization that life is so difficult as to be impossible. The key to these stories is the roller coaster underneath each, the currents coursing through the contours of their divergent paths.

Currently Reading: Finished Blink. As good as expected. Would recommend it. Now it’s on to either a John Cheever novel (The Falconer) or some essays by Gore Vidal. I can’t really decide which. John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World is in the mail, too, and should be here in a week. So maybe I’ll read some both Vidal and Cheever and then start on McPhee’s herculean effort. In the morning, I suppose, the truth will out.