You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Looking at a volume and realizing it’s one of my “keepers,” meaning the ones I keep close at hand, had me wondering if I could name a Top Ten list of books.
Nope, definitely not.
How about Top Hundred?
I turned to my mostly Quaker bookshelf and realized it has more than that alone.
So nope, definitely not.
Five hundred? Maybe, but it would be tough.
We know someone who ordered a book online but was confused when a much different volume was delivered. Not the right title or shape at all, much less the anticipated title. The seller was quite perplexed, too.
So the order was placed again, with another supplier, only to produce the same mistake in delivery. The very same wrong title, in fact.
Only after checking the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) did anyone notice the two titles – the one ordered and the one delivered – had identical numbers. I thought this was supposed to be a fool-proof system. How often does this happen?
As for the warehouse, I’m left wondering: Doesn’t anybody read the title anymore? A double-check for accuracy. And that was well before the Christmas rush. For the sellers, this was a costly error.
The tradition of art inspiring art is a long one. Perhaps we might even see a redundancy there and shorten the sentence to “Tradition inspiring art is a long one.” Or more accurately, “Traditions inspiring art are long.”
At the moment I’m reflecting on my poetry collection, 50 Preludes & Fugues, which springs in part from Dmitri Shostakovich’s 20th century homage to Bach. There are, we should note, two sets each with 24 preludes with fugues. I became acquainted with some of these piano pieces in college, via a budget LP recording apparently with the composer at the keyboard. (Memory had a young American pianist, as it is, but now I think it was the composer himself at the keyboard.)
And then these engaging, sometimes haunting, works disappeared from general public awareness.
Decades later, a Naxos CD set of the complete cycles by Konstantin Schebakov allowed me to rediscover their range – the discs were often playing as I drafted and revised the new poems. Still later, through a Christmas gift from my younger stepdaughter, I gained the opportunity to closely examine Keith Jarrett’s exploration on the ECM label, after hearing selections of his performances on public radio broadcasts.
What continues to amaze me is how different the two interpretations are. The Russian Schebakov is crystalline, restrained, centered on each chord and its ringing. The American Jarrett, in contrast, develops the phrasing – these pieces sing. Which version do I prefer? Or which is, in some way, “better”?
I can’t say. Instead, I’d argue that each is a counterpoint for the other, both springing from the same root. And that as a consequence, we’re all richer for their advances.
In the arts and if faith, we all build on deep roots that have come before us.
Even poets will often have difficulty defining exactly what a poem is. As if there’s a single measure for poetry to begin with.
To call it “slow prose” seems to me to slight both poetry and prose. Robert Bly once faulted traditional English-language poetry for the way it’s commonly functioned in the role of sermons, with any inherent wildness diluted or tamed. How much politeness can a poem contain, anyway?
One distinction might arise in parallels to music. There are good reasons composers set poetry and not prose to a score – and not all of them have to do with metrics or form. A good poem has much of the indefinable emotional sensation of listening or performing music, apart from any linear explanation. Both somehow take us into the darkened recesses of our soul.
Maybe I’ve come too much under the spell of what Bly instead calls “leaping poetry,” which can be found throughout the oral traditions of so-called primitive peoples or in many pages of Scripture, including the Bible, or in the visions of Asian, Latin American, or French poetic seers.
Not that it’s easy to veer far from our roots in linear composition, or at least speech. Many contemporary poems obviously arise as a strand of journaling or even confession – and I’ll plead guilty there, too, though hopefully I’ve compressed, distilled, and transformed my material into something, well, full of imagery and free flight that makes a particular become universal as well.
There’s also the continuing struggle of just how far a poem can run from the very basis of language itself and still communicate some underlying sensation or experience. Choosing pieces to read before an audience, as I’ve found, can lead to a much different selection than I’d have for on-page presentation, where more linguistically fragmented work might be more engaging.
Could it be, then, that the question then isn’t so much what a poem is but rather what it are? And then, how many of those elements exist in this work or that?
As I’ve previously mentioned, Quakers historically were among those Christians who did not observe Christmas, much less celebrate it as a holiday. Of course, I’ve also noted that it’s hard to live as a “peculiar people” within a wider society and not run up against the festivities, especially if you have children. (It’s far easier to be a minority if you’re not the only one or even the only family. Preserving your distinct identity really does require a community.)
Add to that the fact that Quakers do not follow a set liturgy through the year, although I might argue we’ve had a very subtle one based on the seasons and our quarterly and yearly meeting gatherings or even our monthly sets of queries.
One of the queries, though, reminds us of the importance of preparing ourselves during the week for our Meetings for Worship – taking daily time for prayer, reflection, Scripture, and spiritual readings. In that vein, joining with my wife in a book of readings for Advent seems to fit right in.
Finding the right book, though, has been another matter. Some years, we’ve found that the commentary and accompanying discussion questions don’t really fit with the Scriptural text or the excerpts from significant authors that open the daily reading. Other times, the focus veers into speculation, away from personal experience and encounter, and has felt less than edifying.
This year’s another matter, I’m happy to report. The book we’re following – Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life by Margaret Kim Peterson – isn’t even set up as daily readings, much less of an Advent sort, but the pages are working … well, let me use an old English word I’ve come to treasure, goodly. Not perfectly, then, but goodly.
The narrative opens with a defense of keeping house – something that has, as Peterson notes, become tainted in modern American society, even as it’s taken on a Martha Stewart mythology. Put another way, what we’re looking at is theology from a woman’s reality. As she argues, feeding and clothing the poor doesn’t have to mean people we don’t know. In modern society, impoverishment comes in many forms, even for people who seem to have more than enough material goods. People like us.
You can see where this is going – right to the heart of our daily survival.
Of course, I can also ask: What recommendations do you have for next year’s readings? Anything that’s especially moved you? Are there particular practices you find helpful? Any noteworthy memories? What are you doing this Advent, if anything? If you’re not in a Christian tradition, are there other winter solstice practices you find satisfying and would like to present?
Advent, we should remember, is quite different from a holiday shopping season.
Ideally, I’d allow a lot more time between the release of my latest book and the next. Give readers an opening to catch on to what I’m doing and then to catch up – or even a breather.
But I’m not, for several reasons.
As I watch my filing cabinets empty and the piles shrink, please understand the joy I’m feeling. Understand, too, how liberating I’m finding the opportunity to publish at Smashwords and Thistle/Flinch. And please delve into those offerings.
A young organist once mentioned that he doesn’t listen to music the way some of the rest of us do. While I’m usually aware of the time signature, or at least a basic pattern to beat, much more than that fills his awareness. We could begin with the key or chordal progressions or structural development or phrasing. As for emotions? Way down on his list.
Of course, something similar happens for me as a reader. The author looks at much else besides the story, as reading reviews of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex reminds me.
I’ve already mentioned that my primary interest was in its presentation of Greek-American life. These aren’t celebrities or university professors or artists but people trying to survive the economic challenges of everyday existence. He does so in a matter-of-fact way, with a darker view of humanity than I’d usually take but more accepting of their foibles and failures, too. Everyone’s flawed. He’s not afraid to reveal the villains among them, family or not. If only I could revisit my own Sunday dinners with such cold accuracy! (The skeletons in my family closet, from what I can tell, are much further back and mostly in my mother’s ancestry. But the dysfunctions, well, that’s an entirely different matter.) To put his accomplishment here in a different light, his details are both particular and universal. They hit close to home. If only we had terms of affection like Dolly mou, which I take to be a variation on Koukla mou. Or, for that matter, if we were only so outwardly open and affectionate, period.
The novel’s more prominent theme, Cal’s sexual identity, advances in good taste. Nothing salacious but rather an ongoing, almost innocent discovery by narrator and reader alike. Eugenides manages the rare accomplishment of being a male who writes a convincing female character from within. In fact, he gets close enough to have had me wondering if were writing autobiographically of his own condition. That, alone, is astonishing.
As I was reading, I wasn’t yet aware of his reputation as a short-story master, but it makes sense. Much of this novel builds as shifts between stories separated over time.
Technically, his use of point of view is amazing. His Virgin Suicides was acclaimed for its daring use of first-person plural. Here, though, he mixes first-person singular, with its immediacy and intimacy, and third-person, with its semi-omniscient awareness, sometimes in abutting sentences, so that you get a stereoscopic view at once from within and without. Through the first half of the book, especially, much of this happens before Cal’s birth, which creates a kind of time travel. And it works. How much of the related details are “real” and how much merely imagined by the narrator, we should note, remains up in the air. But it’s effective, all the same.
Eugenides’ presentations of the massacre by the Turks and later race riot in Detroit are masterful and moving.
Throughout, the factual accuracy feels right. He’s done his homework and often conveys complexities with a few confident brush strokes. His insights on Eastern Orthodox Christianity are especially notable that way. As for his takes on hippie experience, I’ll simply say, Ouch! As I said, he often takes a darker view of humanity than do I.
Another major subject is his corner of the American Midwest. Contrary to common opinion, the region is hardly homogeneous and is anything but compact. Ohio, for instance, is the size of England. Presentations of it in contemporary literature are surprisingly rare, at least in proportion to the population. And there are many variations in the underlying cultures and outlooks. Kurt Vonnegut’s Indiana, for one thing, is quite different from Saul Bellow’s Chicago – and neither of them resembles what I know of Eugenides’ locale, Detroit. (Let me add my own emphasis on the importance of place itself to the extent it might be considered a character within much of my writing.)
What Eugenides presents is a more compact metropolis than I remember, but definitive in a blend of influences I recognize across much of northern Ohio and Indiana as well. Whether dealing with the older inner city, which then leads into issues of race and racism, or later suburban life, the descriptions resonate with what I found throughout the industrial Rust Belt. Cal’s grandfather’s encounters with Ford Motor Company’s melting-pot police or Cal’s father’s dealing with the real estate point system quickly demonstrate the cost of maintaining a unique identity. You didn’t have to be an immigrant to run afoul of that, either, I’d add from another direction.
It’s not a “perfect” novel, but nothing this ambitious could be. As the Detroit Free Press review expressed, “What Dublin got from James Joyce — a sprawling, ambitious, loving, exasperated and playful chronicle of all its good and bad parts — Detroit got from native son Euginides.”
For me, a drift sets in late in the volume with the introduction of the Desired Object and Cal’s sexual desire awakening. The tight construction seems to be coming apart, sprawling, but! In retrospect, it’s more that a second novel is taking off with leaps to Manhattan and then San Francisco before coming to a powerfully focused and moving conclusion.
So here I am, full of admiration and wonder. How does he pull this off? Where do those brilliant flashes of humor spring from? How does he make some essentially unsympathetic characters come to life in daily survival?
He plays throughout the story with Cal’s grandmother’s skillful touch with silkworms and the ways their silk reflects events around them. It’s one more stream of knowledge that runs like a thread holding the work together.
Eugenides, then, may be seeing himself as a silkworm issuing the long, long filament – for that matter, a nearly endless stream of organ chords – or, as we’d say, spinning a yarn.
Somehow, it all fits. Marvelously.
Here’s a novel that could never have been written from an outline. I had to pour all the ingredients into a mixing bowl and start cooking.
No outline? No recipe! And no formula, either. Here are the ingredients, what are you gonna do with ’em? In this case, it starts out fantasy, of a sort, goes through steampunk, of a sort, and ends up dystopian, of a sort. Or somewhere close with a happier end?
The framework’s simple enough. Daily coded electronic dispatches between Bill, in the field, and his boss, in corporate headquarters – back in the days just prior to emails and the Internet – are soon augmented by a few trusted colleagues as Bill infiltrates the once bustling town of yrubBury. The goal is to covertly buy up the decaying riverside mills and, under the pretext of historic preservation, transform them into maximum security high-tech manufacturing.
For the record, I pursued the renovation angle from the earliest drafts of the novel, long before savvy investors bought up similar sites for small-business launch pads. In that regard, I feel vindicated by developments – including those where I now live.
As the conversations that shape the novel evolved, however, the conflict between small-is-beautiful and international conglomerates came into the fray.
When I first envisioned Big Inca, I was covering 14 states as a field representative for a Fortune 500 company. Or at least one of its subsidiaries. And I’d already been involved in management politics and thinking. Memos and checking in from the boondocks were already part of my repertoire. So all of that went into the stew.
There are other conflicts, of course, to contribute.
In the story, Bill’s a generalist in an age of specialists and fresh out of college when he’s sent into the field as a kind of entrepreneurial anthropologist. He’ll need detailed help along the way. He definitely can’t do it alone.
The town itself is populated with ancient ethnic rivalries – as well as some new ones, as Big Inca will demonstrate. The Old World and the New World are bound to collide, as they always have, especially in the most unanticipated places.
There’s even what’s legal and what’s shady to confront.
We have basic issues of making a living and making a difference and romance and intrigue to deal with. All thrown into the steaming cauldron.
Over the course of the novel, give them three years to simmer and boil.
Even if it took three decades to come together.
~*~
The novel is available here.
A passage in an essay by Joyce Carol Oates stopped me cold in my tracks:
Literature is not a medium that lends itself well to the Surrealist adventure of disponibilite. Even radically experimental fiction requires some strategy of causation, otherwise readers won’t trouble to turn pages. Unlike most visual art, which can be experienced in a single gaze, fiction is a matter of subsequent and successive gazes, mimicking chronological time, as it is locked into chronological time. … (“Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature,” New York Review of Books, August 13)
So that’s been my “problem” as a poet and novelist? A surrealist adventure? Oh, my! I’ve long been fond of surrealism, often because I often see and hear life in that vein. While stopping short of subscribing to any manifesto, including those that gave rise to dada and surrealism, their ambitions continue to suggest possibilities for artistic exploration and discovery. As for chronological narrative, certainly there must be other ways to relate an event. Right? Well, even the alternative realities of dreams seem to emerge along timelines of some sort, even if they overlap from episode to episode that form what is remembered as a single dream event. A poem, moreover, can aspire to exist purely within a given moment it expresses, even if the reader returns to the lines repeatedly.
Maybe my saving grace here is in my assumption of invisible roots – everything happens for a reason, even accidents. (You don’t have to impute divine intervention there, either.) Perceiving these underlying currents, as some would suggest, demands something other than Aristotelian logic. Hence, the surrealist option, among others.
I do like Oates’ sense of gazes adding up into a quilt-work pattern, though, especially when they can bounce off each other to create yet something more.
And then her essay takes a remarkable turn that reinforces my invisible-roots assumption:
The hypocampus is a small, seahorse-shaped part of the brain necessary for long-term storage of factual and experiential memory, though it is not the site of such storage. Short-term memory is transient, long-term memory can prevail for many decades … If the hypocampus is injured or atrophied, there can be no further storage of memory in the brain – there will be no new memory. I have come to think that art is the formal commemoration of life in its variety – the novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment of a specific place and time, and its suggestion that there is meaning in our actions. It is virtually impossible to create art without an inherent meaning, even if that meaning is presented as mysterious and unknowable.
Again, I’ve long viewed my writing as an attempt to remember what’s right in front of me in my life. Let’s face it, everything often seems chaotic. Times of reflection and self-evaluation are crucial. It’s easy to leap from there, as I’ve found, into meditation and the Quaker practice of group worship grounded in silence itself. Along these lines, Oates puts all this into another framework:
Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture – no collective memory. As if memory were destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we “were” no one – we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in contemporary society, where so much concentration is focused upon social media, insatiable in its fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of more permanent art feels threatened. As human beings we crave “meaning” – which only art can provide; but social media provide no meaning, only this succession of fleeting impressions whose underlying principle may simply be to urge us to consume products.
The motive for metaphor, then, is a motive for survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals.
Of course, I would see true religion, not art, as the provider of “meaning.” And now the conversation would turn lively.
Arts critics are often portrayed in the negative. Listen, for example, to the excerpts of voices who denigrated what became symphonic mega-hits or operatic standards. It’s a long list.
On the other hand, some critics (when it comes to classical music, dramatist Bernard Shaw and composer Virgil Thomson come to mind) have proved invaluable in sifting through artistic output and finding those jewels who would otherwise be lost in the volume before us and the drive for monetary success. Quite simply, good critics glean value from gems lost in the estimation of box-office success, bestseller popularity, and high audience ratings. With an eye for lasting quality, they guide individuals to work – and workers – they esteem.
As I look at the flood of artistic output on the Internet in our time, the role of good critics appears to be more crucial than ever.
Let me add that good critics are also teachers. I’m deeply indebted to people like Hub Meeker of the Dayton Journal Herald or Winthrop Sargeant of the New Yorker for their role in shaping my artistic awareness. As I’ve found over the years, reading a familiar critic becomes an active dialogue.
This leads me to a recent essay by the poet Charles Simic, long a star on the University of New Hampshire campus one town over from where I live. In “The Incomparable Critic” (New York Review of Books, August 13), he touts a collected volume of reviews by Helen Vendler and her examination of contemporary poets, centering down to her high estimation of one in particular:.
However none of these [William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, even the Beats] had the audacity, she points out, to switch back and forth between the sublime and the ignobly ridiculous as [A.R.] Ammons did. … for Ammons there is a “continuo of the personal – the ‘noise’ of the everyday mind – from which the lyric rises and into which it subsides.” This setting “of the lyric moment within its non-lyric ‘surround,'” Vendler writes, “is the fundamental device of modern poetry, from The Waste Land to this day.
That, in itself, is an audacious insight, of one reviewer to another.
Apart from any specific works, what is described is an ideal I admire – one I’ve sensed present in the works of Philip Whalen I’ve admired. And so we continue, writing and reading, in whatever quest we follow.
Jnana's Red Barn 