Waiting Room

Four strangers in a silent waiting room, trying not to meet each other's eyes. Accidents will happen. The passing of trains has as much relevance to this place as the passing of time. Which is to say it only an excuse. Which is to say there are five dimensions: length, breadth, height, long ago and far away.

You use your chair as a ladder. climb up to where the window looks back at you, looks through you. The others watch you as though you were a clock.

The appointed hour is late. You go down to the station bar, order yourself a sonata. You come back shaken. No one else has stirred.

Fear

"what I feel when I am told that my neighborhood is dangerous is not fear but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live with a delusion - namely, that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within the certain very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety.

Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared."

-Eula Biss, from Notes from No Man's Land

The trouble is: fear is not invented but inherited. And the fears we are socialized into are fears we cannot empirically disprove, because there is never enough evidence, and what there is is biased by selection, and therefore self-fulfilling. And there is always, underneath that social fear, a second more private anxiety - of looking foolish, of being ashamed.

Top Poetry Picks 2009

I know, I know. The time to post best of the year lists is the last two weeks of December, not the middle of February. But well, I've been busy. And some of these books took time to get hold of (I'm still waiting to get my hands on the new Ashbery). So here they are, better late than never and in no particular order, my top 10 picks from books of poetry published in 2009:

1. Rae Armantrout, Versed

Few poets writing today understand the fault lines of language as intuitively as Armantrout, or are as willing to stand on its cracks. These are poems from the crumbling edge of poetry, every line a tripwire; poems that require a mind nimble with meanings, alert to possibility; poems that leave you with a joy so fragile, so insidious, it can feel like loss.

2. Albert Goldbarth, To be read in 500 years

If Armantrout subverts with precision, Albert Goldbarth's long-winded poems seem like a manifesto for expansiveness, for inclusion. Goldbarth's mind ranges everywhere, like a maniac let loose in a grocery store, picking allusions from shelves high and low, the poem magically coming together at the (invariably witty) check-out line. Goldbarth's inimitable style can seem garrulous, but this is a ruse to disarm you, to win you with trifles before engaging in ideas of deepest consequence. The result is a book of poems marked by generosity, good humor, and an almost philosophical tenderness for the world and everything in it.

3. Ann Lauterbach Or to Begin Again

I confess: I'm still only half way through Ann Lauterbach's Or to Begin Again. This isn't because the book is unreadable. On the contrary, it's because every time I sit down to read Alice in the Wasteland, the long poem at the center of Lauterbach's book, I barely manage a page or two before my mind is totally blown, and I have to stop and just breathe. Alice in the Wasteland is, nominally, an encounter between Carroll and Eliot (you can see why I love this already), but it reads like the love child of Ed Dorn and Anne Carson with a fondness for LSD. One of these days I hope to make it to the end of the poem. Or to begin again.

4. Shrikant Verma, Magadh

And while we're on books I haven't read, I may as well include Shrikant Verma's Magadh, a long extract from which (in translation by Rahul Soni) appears in the current issue of Almost Island, and was enough to convince me that I needed to get my hands on more of Verma's work the next time I'm in India. Verma's poems have a Cavafy-like quality, combining a sparseness of style with an eye for the metaphysical to create poems that seem both conversational and revelatory, both historical and timeless.

5. Anne Carson, An Oresteia

Strictly speaking, Carson's new book - a version of the Oresteia with one play each from Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides - is not a poetry collection. Yet you'd have to be blind and deaf not to sense the poetry pulsing through every line of this book, just waiting to be spilled. Carson's translations - particularly her rendition of Aiskhylos' Agamemnon - breathes life into the old texts, restoring to them their full-throated lyricism, the power of words so savage, so devastatingly beautiful.

6. Kazim Ali, Bright Felon

Kazim Ali's Bright Felon is a book that doesn't so much defy description as evade it. An autobiographical account of the poet's life in the United States, Bright Felon engages with issues of religion, nationality, sexuality, family - all the things that define and complicate identity - in lines delicate and vivid, introspective and indignant. This is a book about displacement pregnant with a deep sense of place, of homes both lost and found, exiles both chosen and enforced.

7. Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids

Treading a fine line between the visionary and the bizarre, the poems in Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids inhabit an exhilarating alterverse somewhere between the solipsistic and the apocalyptic. An architecture of urban mythmaking with windows of disillusion.

8. Heather McHugh, Upgraded to Serious

There is a special joy one gets from reading McHugh, whose poems combine a pitch-perfect ear with a twinkling eye. Reading Upgraded to Serious is a bit like listening to Mendelssohn, one is charmed by the sparkling surface of the thing, all wit and melody, then one discovers the music of echoes that lies underneath, an abiding seriousness, idea and insight laughing quietly between themselves.

9. Carl Phillips, Speak Low

The third of the National Book Award finalists on this list (and the one I would have given the prize to) is also one of my 'discoveries' for 2009. In Phillips' best poems you sense a mind treading water, a mind probing, without caution but with care, the nature of what matters - longing, death, thought itself - a poet aware, as only a poet can be, of the fragile arrangements by which inanimate words are brought to resemble life.

10. Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents

How can you not love a poet who describes herself as the mother in smothered? Rachel Zucker's Museum of Accidents is a book filled with hilarity and hi-jinx, a verbal trapeze act that is also a half-ironic, half-desperate attempt to ward off the terrible gravity of parenthood and the anxiety of being middle-aged. For all the tedious mommy poems out there, with their propaganda of fulfillment, their miracle-of-life banality, Museum of Accidents is a shot in the arm and a spit in the eye.

Bonus picks: Two of the finest books of poetry I read last year were both technically published in 2008, but need to be mentioned anyway - Jack Spicer's My Vocabulary Did This to Me, which showcases one of modern poetry's most electric and original voices; and Sarah Lindsay's Twigs and Knucklebones, which marries artifice to lyrical insight, and provides an object lesson in how a collection of poetry can be more than the sum of its parts.

Bonus picks [2]: Finally, I feel I ought to include a mention of Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense, which I'm still in the process of working my way through, but which I'd highly recommend to anyone seeking a friendly introduction to contemporary poetry (see also: Burt's blog)

Hell

No shrieking demons, no fire and brimstone. Just a drab little room at the end of a hallway, the size of a walk-in closet, no light bulb, no ventilation, and a sign on the door saying Lost and Found.

A room cluttered with all the baggage our heroes have taken down there, the things they have left behind, returning alone and empty handed, their eyes unused to the light. A faraway look that we mistake for wisdom. That they mistake for pain.

Death by numbers

Symptoms multiply. You try to divide yourself from the pain but there is always a little left over. Injected with decimals, you grow diminished, then irrational. Death a kind of unity, the lowest common denominator.

Asolando makes the night's acquaintance

You said you wanted to walk away from this
with dignity

like a man walking into the sea
in a suit and tie.

You said you wanted to face it head on
"breast and back as either should be"

which is why

I didn't call you back
or say goodbye.

Ashes

You always were a slob.

The day of your funeral I clean your apartment, putting the surfaces in order before your family returns to claim them. A pall of used smoke hangs over the house. As though your breath were reluctant to leave. Cigarette butts everywhere, on display in every room like souvenirs from a bitter country, the debris filling all the ashtrays, then spilling over into glasses, saucers, flowerpots, whatever happened to be at hand. It is as though death, in those last days, was marking its territory, claiming this space for its own.

Carefully, I gather it all in a plastic bag. Your ashes. I imagine taking them home with me, not to display, of course, but to hide away in some corner of my closet, a memento, a keepsake. The touch of your vanished lips.

I must be going mad.

I go into the kitchen, find a thermos, empty the bag into it. Then I throw the bag away.

***

The security guard at the airport doesn't believe me, of course. He insists on opening the flask to check its contents. Your ashes scatter everywhere, a minor cloud wafting over the other passengers-to-be, tourists, businessmen, all clutching their shoes in their hand, all panicked to see this gray dust settling on their clothes and skin.

There is a commotion. Voices are raised, accusations levied, alarms set off. Boarding Area C is closed for two hours while the necessary tests are completed. Meanwhile I sit in an interrogation room in the bowels of the building, trying to explain.

At first I am angry, indignant. Then just very sad. I feel as if I have let you down.

Later, I consider that it may not have been a bad thing. I imagine all the passengers passing through that gate, unaware that they carry a piece of you with them, your ashes traveling to a thousand different destinations, scattered to all the corners of the world.

On Readings

Since there's been all this talk about poetry readings on the blogosphere lately (or at least in the derelict corner of it that I haunt), I figured I'd weigh in on the subject with my two cents, if only because it's Sunday and it's too cold outside to go out (yes, Percy, if Winter comes, Spring can be very, very far behind).

As I see it, readings as they've evolved today, generally have two distinct parts. The reading itself, and the Q&A that follows. Let's start with the Q&A. In my (admittedly limited) experience, Q&As following readings are generally snooze-fests, with questions ranging from the trivial to the inane. And I think there are good reasons for that. Nice as it would be to believe in some Athenian ideal of spontaneous public conversations giving rise to blinding insights, this is extremely unlikely to actually happen. Meaningful discussion requires a level of honesty, that the norms of politeness attendant upon a public conversation make difficult; respect for the opinions of others, which is hard to muster in a room full of unscreened strangers; shared assumptions, understanding and language, that a group of people randomly gathered are unlikely to have; a clarity of agenda that these meetings almost never have; and a quantity of time and patience that is incompatible with the format of a 15-20 minute Q&A. It's hardly surprising then, that most public Q&A's end up being exchanges of trivial platitudes. It's the same reason why having an intelligent debate on the Internet is nearly impossible.

Could moderators or discussants help raise the level of conversation? Perhaps. But aside from the practical difficulty of finding intelligent discussants, there are at least four problems with the discussant model. First, it's not clear what exactly the discussant's role is. If the discussant is expected to ask questions that are of interest to the listening audience, then a good discussant will, logically, ask more or less the same inane questions that the audience would have asked itself. After all, that's what the people really want to hear. Even if the discussant were capable of initiating a genuinely meaningful dialog with the poet, in doing so he or she risks alienating the audience, who may neither understand nor care for what is being discussed. Second, is the exchange between the poet and the discussant / moderator a conversation or an interview? If the former, then we need to ensure that the discussant is someone capable of contributing to that conversation, which suggests that he or she should be part of the reading as well; if the latter, then what, exactly, is the poet supposed to be getting out of this? Third, in either case, why is this exchange taking place at the end of the reading in front of an audience. Why not do it either in private, where both people could talk more freely, or record the conversation and broadcast it either through print or other media?

Finally, why do we believe that a verbal conversation is the best way to engage with a poet anyway? Poets aren't stand-up comics or politicians. Providing coherent, even glib answers at the drop of a hat is hardly their strong suit. If anything, what we value about a poet is often his or her ability to take an idea or an image and after long hours of contemplation, find the exactly right way to put in words. To then turn around and expect the same person to fluently respond to questions on the fly, and to judge him or her on his or her ability to do this seems irrational, if not outright cruel.

All of this suggests that Q&As as they are currently run are largely a waste of everyone's time, and makes the case for either scrapping them entirely, or, at the very least, making them an optional extra - much like discussions with the cast and crew are at film screenings or dance performances. It also suggest revisiting the format of the Q&A, perhaps switching it to a discussion or panel between multiple poets reading at the same time, though even that (and even assuming the best case) will not fix all the problems listed above.

So much for Q&A. Let's consider the reading itself next. And in doing that, let's start by accepting that as a medium of delivery the spoken word has several disadvantages over its written counterpart. First, reading a poem means that all spatial arrangement of words on the page is necessarily lost (unless the poet uses Power Point - which I've never seen or heard of a poet doing), and such arrangements (and the caesura that attend them) are an integral part of the poet's craft. Second, poetry, with its compactness, is an art of hidden meanings, of verbal and mental booby traps. There may be people who can follow a poem in a straight line from start to finish, but when I read a poem I usually end up going back and forth over the text, ferreting about among the words to catch the scent of the meaning, and that's hard (or at least harder) to do when you're hearing the poem read aloud [1]. Hearing a poem read aloud, then, may cause us to miss out on its subtler aspects.

Finally, there's the problem of interpretation. Great poems work by leaving themselves open to various readings, multiple interpretations. Hearing the poem read aloud, especially if the one reading it is the poet, can end up imposing one official interpretation over all the others. It's not unlike the feeling you get when you watch the movie version of a book you love - how either the disconnect between the images on the screen and the images in your head is so severe that you cannot take the film seriously, or you accept the onscreen depiction and are then never able to think of the characters and images in the book in any other way.

Overall then, the spoken word as a medium for poetry has several disadvantages, and all of the above is assuming at least a base level of competence in the reader. Add the possibility that the person reciting the poem may actually damage or obscure its meaning and flow and the downside is even greater.

There are, however, compensations. A truly good reading can bring a poem alive; can enrich our understanding of it, enhance our experience. What this requires, however, is something more than a vanilla reading. It requires, in the truest sense of the term, a performance. And that in turn requires both talent and preparation on the part of the one performing. The problem, of course, is that many (if not most) poets neither have the requisite talent nor are willing to put in the effort of preparation.

And why should they? If the poet's primary role is to write poems, then this requires neither a talent for public performance (reading and writing are inherently private acts - it's what draws many of us to them) nor a desire to take on the onerous distraction of prepping for such performances. This is not to suggest, of course, that poets should go unprepared for readings, or that they should not do readings at all. It is to suggest that if we start to think of reading poetry as a specialized performance, independent of the main business of writing poetry, rather than as a natural and normatively necessary extension of the fact of being 'a poet', then those poets who also happen to have the talent or desire to be performers can put in the time and effort to put together readings, while others (I suspect, but cannot prove, the majority) who have no such talent or ambition can not bother with readings all together [2].

Switching to a view of readings as performances in themselves has two further implications. First, it would mean that we could hold poetry readings to a higher standard - essentially the same standard that we hold other forms of performing art to - and this would mean that we're more likely to get exciting, adventurous readings rather than the familiar spectacle of a poet droning on from behind a lectern. And this in turn may actually increase attendance at readings; I know I'd be more willing to attend readings (which I currently tend to avoid) if I thought that poet's decision to do a reading was the signal of a deliberate and considered choice, rather than just a knee-jerk reaction to something he or she was expected to do. And greater attendance in turn would motivate those looking to perform poetry readings, thus setting up a virtuous cycle, from which everyone - audiences, poets who want to perform their work, poets who don't want to perform their work (or suck at it, and are introspective enough to know this) - would benefit.

Separating the writing of poetry from its performance also brings us to the question: why do poets read their own work? Playwrights almost never act in their plays (at least not outside of high school dram socs), scriptwriters rarely appear in their movies, composers may occasionally conduct or play the piano in their pieces, but I've never heard of a composer singing his or her own arias, and certainly there's no expectation that the composer will be the exclusive or primary performer of his or her work. Why do we insist that poets, arguably the least capable of all artists at performing in public, retain their amateur status and read their own poems? If we want to hear poetry read aloud, why not subscribe to division of labor and get professional actors / performers to do the reading? The petty vanity of poets aside [3], it's hard to see how handing poetry readings over to the professionals could do anything but improve the experience for all concerned.

Finally, once you get rid of the Q&A, and focus on the performance aspect of the reading, you're left with the question of why, in the Internet age, we persist with brick and mortar readings. There is, after all, no dearth of sites that host readings of poems, both by poets themselves and by other performers, and posting a reading on the Web means the poem is likely to reach a wider audience, and that audiences are likely to get more reliable quality. What, then, makes attending a reading a superior experience to listening to poems read on the web, and reading the text itself on the page or screen? We go to live music events because the concert experience is far more exhilarating than listening to the song or piece at home. We go to movies because staring up at the big screen has an effect that no TV or monitor can duplicate. What is it about the average reading that is so much more thrilling than hearing the poem read online? And, more to the point, if we want poetry readings to continue, what can we deliver in a physical reading that we can't over the Internet?

Notes

[1] It's interesting that readings of ghazals / other poems in Urdu (or at least depictions of them in the media - I've never actually attended one) usually involve repeating each line several times, just so the audience can fully take in its meaning

[2] The other argument that's made for readings that it helps poets reach out to an audience. I'm skeptical about this, if only because I don't know who these people are who won't read poems in books / journals, but will show up at a poetry reading of someone they wouldn't otherwise read, or why, as a poet, I would take them seriously. In any case, the idea that readings are a way for people to discover new poets and for new poets to be discovered, only makes the point about public performance not being the poet's primary expertise more salient. We need to resist the celebriti-zation of poetry - a world where the first screen by which a poet is judged is how well he or she performs in public is a world where poetry is considerably diminished.

[3] Personally, I think a lot of this reading mania is driven by the fact that there are more people out there who care about being poets than about writing poetry, which makes readings the perfect format. But that's just my (probably biased) opinion.

That clapping sound

Did you hear about the guy who asked for his new girlfriend's hand?

He figured he'd been left so often, he'd earned the right.

Seymour

Because you knew Death could be
both innocent and sly,

as clever as a child,
as private, as self-aware.

You were the one who noticed
how grown-ups passed her by

the one who knelt down to say
“Don’t cry!”

then realized
you were the one crying.

Because you understood the special bond
between children and madmen –

how they both look at the world
from very far away –

and knew that for all her talk
she was only pretending,

trying to be brave,

you gave her your hand to take,
went with her,

both of you helpless,
both keeping the other safe.

A Field of Eternal Rye

"Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."

- J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

R.I.P.


Update: Via the Book Bench, twelve Salinger stories in the New Yorker.

(for BM)

I am sad because
the cherry tree has blossomed
one more year is gone.

Loneliness like oxygen

Love suffocated him. Now he breathes loneliness like oxygen, his heart burning proud.

its tempting emptiness

"Very soon a number of unconsolable oils found themselves being shipped back to Moscow, while another batch moped in rented flats before trouping up to the attic or creeping down to the marketstall."

"He lodged for another happy year in that cosy house and died of a stroke in a lift after a business dinner. Going up, one would like to surmise."

"I taught thought to mimick an imperial neurotransmitter an awsome messenger carrying my order of self destruction to my own brain. Suicide made a pleasure."

"the cemetery of the assymetrical heart"

"The minor poetry of mystical myths"

- Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun)

Ah, Nabokov.

Pretend

After a point I think we both knew I was only pretending to pretend. Trying to make it easy on you, so you wouldn't have to deal with the fact that I believed in something that could never come true. So you wouldn't have to trot out the usual reasons, the old arguments I knew so well I could have recited them in my sleep, knew them the way one knows a line of poetry or a speech from a play, one rehearsed so often it no longer means what it was meant to say. So we could spend all day laughing at my foolishness, my silly play-acting, and I could go home and drink myself to sleep every night, secure in the knowledge that I could tell you anything, anything at all. But the truth.

Tissue

The indulgence of old photo albums. Each page separated from the next by a sheet of translucent paper, so as to spare the photographs the indignity of rubbing against each other, so as to give each trapped face its privacy.

There are days when I wish my memories were so distinguished, so well-preserved. So I could tell the difference between impression and image, dream and ghost.

They asked me how I knew

[In Memoriam Eric Rohmer]

The quest for love,
like the quest for truth,

is a moral quest. Meaning
it is confused, and arbitrary, and never

complete. This is not to say
that love is truth. Only

that both are circumstantial,
that both demand

a certainty that neither
can attain.

A true love is a love
too good to be true.

So say that love is not true,
is never true, is always make-believe.

In the making of that belief lies
the essential wager,

the theorem of a possibility:
we tell ourselves we are in love

and it is the telling
that makes it a lie.

The quest for a beloved truth, then,
for the perfect

goodbye.

Pratilipi

Work has gone a little crazy this fortnight, so blogging will be slow. In the meantime, though, you can read the new issue of Pratilipi, which features, among other things, a delightful set of pieces by the inimitable Manto, and a surprisingly competent story by one Shrimoyee Ghosh.

Bitter grapes of Roth

Reading Katie Roiphe's flimsy, rambling and generally pointless essay about Male Novelists [1] then and now in the New York Times Book Review, my first thought was that Ms. Roiphe pretty much answers the question she's set out to explore in the first paragraph. Why do New Male Novelists not write like Old Male Novelists? Because that's the way Old Male Novelists write - why would you want to repeat what's already been done?

But that isn't the point of this post. The point of this post is to take issue with what I see as Ms. Roiphe's misrepresentation of David Foster Wallace (henceforth DFW)'s take on the Great Male Novelists. In her piece, Ms. Roiphe has DFW quoting a friend describing Updike as "just a penis with a thesaurus" [2] and going on (in what Ms. Roiphe describes as a vitriolic review) to dismiss the anguish of one of Updike's protagonists, saying "I'm not especially offended by this attitude, I mostly just don't get it."

The essay in question, is called 'Certainly the end of something or the other' and can be found in DFW's Consider the Lobster (a version of it that appeared in the New York observer can be found here, and is well worth the read[3]). Several points about this essay, and the way Ms. Roiphe twists it to serve her own ends, are worth noting.

First, the "penis with a thesaurus" crack is quoted by DFW as an instance of the kind of irrational dislike some people have for Updike, a dislike that DFW feels is undeserved. In the essay, DFW describes himself as a fan of Updike, and praises some of his early novels as being "all great books, maybe classics". And even as DFW criticizes Updike's latest novel, he goes to great lengths to highlight what he considers to be its redeeming features. Hardly what you would expect from a 'vitriolic' reviewer.

Second, it's instructive to read the sentence that follows the line about not getting the protagonist's attitude that Ms. Roiphe quotes. DFW writes: "Rampant or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the novel's first page." DFW doesn't get Turnbull's attitude not because (as Ms. Roiphe, with her cherry-picked quote would have you believe) the idea of sexual emasculation as existential crisis is unintelligible to him, but because it's clear that Turnbull's crisis precedes and is independent of his loss of virility.

What's noteworthy about the DFW essay, moreover, is how much clearer an explanation of the movement away from the Great Male Narcissists DFW offers. He writes:

"There are, of course, some obvious explanations for
part of this dislike -- jealousy, iconoclasm, P.C. backlash, and the fact
that many of our parents revere Mr. Updike and it's easy to revile what
your parents revere. But I think the major reason so many of my
generation dislike Mr. Updike and the other G.M.N.'s has to do with
these writers' radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical
celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their
characters."

and again,

"But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the
same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and
self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and
anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have
different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a
peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once
having loved something more than yourself."

There, in two short paragraphs, is a more concise and, to my mind, more plausible explanation for the repudiation of the old ways than anything Ms. Roiphe manages to come up with in four long pages of text.

One final point: about Narcissism. DFW's critique of the GMNs is three-fold: that their characters are inherently narcissistic, that they are closely modeled on the author, and that the writers themselves seem to celebrate this narcissism. The first two, it seems to me, are hard to argue with; it would be a brave champion of Roth or Updike indeed who would argue that their characters are not self-absorbed. Certainly Ms. Roiphe presents no evidence to counter this claim.

DFW's third assertion is shakier - possibly true of Mailer and to a lesser extent of Updike, but not so much of Roth (and certainly not of Bellow). Portnoy, Zuckerman, Sabbath - these are immortal narcissists, but I would argue that Roth is keenly and critically aware of their narcissism and of the potential for caricature inherent therein. It is hard to read Portnoy's Complaint as an "uncritical celebration" of its protagonist's self-absorption.

It is unclear to me whether DFW really meant to lump Roth in with the other GMNs (the essay is, after all, a review of one specific Updike novel) and whether he did not, perhaps, get a little carried away. But even if you take his assertion at face value, and even if you grant that the assertion that the GMNs are uncritical of their character's self-absorption is contentious, it is worth noting that Ms. Roiphe's critique of contemporary male novelists as also being narcissistic really doesn't follow. DFW's criticism of the Updike & Co. is that their characters are narcissistic and closely modeled on the authors themselves, and that the authors seem to see this narcissism as a positive quality. Even if you disagree with that last claim, and even if we grant that the characters in novels by younger male writers are narcissistic in their own way, it is hard to argue that the younger writers are creating characters who are reflections of themselves (unless Ms. Roiphe is seriously suggesting that young male writers today are either lousy, nervous lovers or children / virgins), and harder to argue that these young writers see self-absorption as praiseworthy.

I have no real argument with Ms. Roiphe's piece per se. I think it's uninteresting and ends up severely caricaturing contemporary male novelists in order to defend the old guard that Ms. Roiphe clearly values, and while I tend to agree that there is something to be said for the older writers, I don't see why it's necessary to take cheap shots at the younger ones to do so. Mostly, though, I just don't like the way she represents DFW's views, setting them up as a convenient strawman.


[1] A group that is not, and, I would argue, has never been, as homogeneous as Ms. Roiphe would have us believe. Four writers (with Bellow's inclusion being questionable) is hardly the sum of Great Male Novelists.

[2] A quote which, you have to admit, is pretty funny.

[3] If it isn't already obvious from all these footnotes, I'm very fond of DFW.

Perfect Stranger

It is too early for conclusions.

I saw you in the park yesterday. Or someone who looked just like you, which is to say, like someone I didn't recognize. Your unawareness of me seemed a kind of meditation. It made me feel more opaque.

I'm explaining this badly, I know. It's just that there are times when I feel myself slipping away, and others when I float, oarless, on transparent water, barely disturbing my own thoughts. It gets hard to distinguish sanity from light. And then yesterday, watching you read on the bench, it occurred to me that I could root myself here, above this spreading shadow, scribbling leaves of crisp phrases in a diary of high summer, throwaway pages, their anguish imaginary and weightless as the blue of the sky.

I would say you made this possible but you are the opposite of possibility, like the resumption of weight at the bottom of a fall. In a city of eight million you are the only one beyond coincidence, the only one who understands, or knows instinctively, that isolation, like any dance between two people, has its rules. To call you a stranger would be an imposition. To thank you an ingratitude. Yet I return every day to the same spot, certain you won't be there, and the knowledge anchors me.

It is too late for conclusions. All the questions we could ask have already been betrayed.

Fidelity

It was a question of honor. She had betrayed him, had let other people find out. It had to be done.

Afterwards, he carried her broken body back home, laid it out on the table, tried to match a stone to every wound.

Chronos

The boy followed the old man. He had nothing else to do. It was summer, school was out, and his friends were all away on vacation. The boy had been left to his own devices, which this morning consisted of his two hands and a hoop that he wheeled absently along the sidewalk, too bored to run. That's when he saw the old man.

The old man was old. He looked a little like the boy's grandfather, if the boy's grandfather were someone who wore his shirt untucked and whom the boy had never seen. In any case, he was a stranger, which in a town as small as this made him a novelty.

When the boy first saw him he was coming down the road that led to the highway, walking slowly, as though he'd traveled a great distance. Had he walked all the way from the next town? No, that was impossible. For one thing it was too far, and for another, as the boy's mother had repeatedly told him, it wasn't safe to walk on the highway. He'd probably parked his car on the edge of town and was just on his way in. But why? And where was he going?

The boy waited till the old man came up to him. "Hello", he said. The old man made no reply, did not even look up to register the boy's presence, just walked straight past. Perhaps he was deaf. His hoop forgotten, the boy followed, walking companionably along with the old man, waiting to be noticed.

But the old man never looked up. He just kept walking, eyes lowered to the ground, feet trudging along at a steady but listless pace. He seemed to know his way around town, or at least had a clear sense of where he was going, because he never stopped to take his bearings or ask for directions. Was he going to meet someone? But who?

Maybe he had family here, maybe he'd come to stay with them for a few days? But if so, where was his luggage? And why hadn't he driven straight to their house instead of walking in from the edge of town? Maybe he'd lived here once, and was returning after many years. Maybe he was a hero of some sort, maybe he'd been with army and had been locked away in an enemy prison all these years and was returning now to the place he'd been born. Maybe he'd come back to find his sweetheart. The boy had only a vague notion of what a sweetheart was, but he knew from the stories he'd read that heroes were always going back to find them, and the thought that this old man might be one of them was thrilling. He imagined telling his friends all about it: how a genuine war hero had returned to the town, how he, the boy, had been the first to spot him, to befriend him. How it was with his help that the hero had finally found the house he was looking for. Wouldn't they all envy him then!

Meanwhile the old man was marching on through the town. All this time the boy had been silent, following a step or two behind, keeping his distance, but now that he knew what the man was after he felt it was time to take a more active role. As they approached Main Street the boy stepped forward, started to point out the town's various landmarks - the church, the school, the main bus stop - naming each one with proprietorial pride. He showed the old man the bank his father visited every week, the pharmacy his mother bought groceries from, the ice-cream parlor his parents would take the boy to if he had been very good (here he paused significantly, but the old man kept up his relentless gait). Some of the shops and buildings were unfamiliar to him, but he said what he could about them anyway, feeling it his duty as the old man's guide.

To all this information, the old man said nothing. Indeed, it seemed he hadn't noticed the boy at all, and was just walking along past the storefronts, unaware of what was being said. This wasn't true, of course. Obviously the old man was listening, was taking note of everything the boy told him. He was just pretending not to notice because that was what heroes did - they stayed silent till the right moment, seemingly oblivious, then it turned out they'd been paying close attention all along. The boy understood this. Any moment now the old man would stop, would smile at him, would say something incredibly grand and wise and funny that the boy could relate to his friends later as proof of his new friend's ineffable herodom. In the meantime, the boy was happy to skip along by the old man's side, prattling on about the dry cleaner and the gas station and the little park on the corner that the boy was too old for.

After a while, though, the boy quietened down. For one thing he was starting to get tired. For another they had wandered off Main Street, and were now in an unfamiliar part of town, one that the boy was uncomfortably aware his parents had warned him never to go to alone. Still, he wasn't alone, was he, he was with his friend. Yet something told him his parents wouldn't see it that way. They would get mad, say that he shouldn't have gone off with a stranger. Which was silly, of course, because the old man wasn't a stranger, he was a hero, and needed the boy's help, but grown-ups were inflexible that way.

Perhaps he ought to turn back? He considered suggesting this to the old man, maybe even proposing that the old man come back with him, so he could get something to eat at the boy's house, maybe get some directions. (The boy was beginning to suspect that the old man didn't really know where he was going. Perhaps the torture he'd suffered under the enemy had caused him to lose his sense of direction?). But what if the old man thought he was scared or weak? He would be disappointed in the boy then, would think him unworthy. No, he mustn't risk it. Not after they'd come so far. He would just have to see this through to the end.

The boy finally stopped where the houses ran out. He had never come this far before. He didn't dare go any further. For a minute he was afraid he wouldn't be able to find his way back, but he realized they had been walking in a straight line, the old man and he, all the way across town from one end to the other. A long, long walk.

"Goodbye", he said, to the retreating figure on the road in front of him. But the old man gave no sign of having heard. He just kept moving, head down, shoulders a little slumped. The boy stood there and watched him walking away for a while, until the old man disappeared around a bend in the road and the boy, realizing he would have to hurry back to avoid trouble, turned around and started to run.

As he ran back to his house, he wondered what his mother had made for lunch.

[Happy New Year, everyone!]

2009

1. Turned 30
2. Got PhD
3. Got job
4. Moved to new city
5. Read, no, finished reading 122 books
6. Published 1
7. Put up 220 blog posts (or 221 depending on how tomorrow shapes up)
8. Listened to 15 Shostakovich symphonies. Twice.
9. Started 68 poems, completed 52, did not regret 6.
10. Baked one batch of cookies, regretted them all

All in all, not a bad year.

Sincerely

"You don't really mean it, do you?"

"What?"

"What you just said. You don't really mean it."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because I can tell. It's okay. You don't have to lie to me."

"Okay, you're right. I was just saying it to make you feel better. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It did make me feel better."

"Really?"

"Well, until you admitted you didn't mean it."

The Spare Room

Death as a spare room. A space we never enter, rarely even think about. A door kept safely locked.

Unused but necessary, the spare room is a presence that defines us as grown-ups, adults who feel the need to be, who are, prepared. For any eventuality. For the eventuality.

(inspired by Helen Garner's brave and terrifying book)

P.S. Merry Christmas to you too!

The things we do not choose

We do not choose how we die. Which is probably for the best.

Just look at the mess we make choosing how to live. Not the mistakes or the failure, but the ugliness, the lack of imagination.

Art does not imitate life, it enacts it.

But all this is artifice. It is the things we do not choose that make us, if not unique, at least human. Like our dreams. Our death.

Unhappy Research

If you've been surfing the web lately, chances are you've come across some version of this news story about a research study that shows that New York is the unhappiest state in the country while Louisiana is the happiest. A finding that is, prima facie, ridiculous.

Before you start moving your family from Manhattan to New Orleans it's worth considering what's wrong with the story - which strikes me as being the perfect combination of dubious research wedded to journalistic misinterpretation.

As I understand it, Oswald and Wu basically construct a subjective measure of happiness by state by taking survey results on people's stated level of satisfaction and running a regression predicting these satisfaction levels as a function of a range of individual level attributes (such as income, education, employment category, etc.) plus dummies for each state (except Alabama - the omitted category). And therein lies the misinterpretation: the subjective coefficients they report are not telling us how happy people in each state are, they are telling us what the net effect of the state is after all other individual level factors are controlled for. In other words, the negative coefficient of New York means that a person with exactly the same income, education , employment, etc. would be less satisfied in New York than in Alabama.

Now, this would make sense if individual attributes that contributed to happiness were uncorrelated with state of residence, but this is clearly not the case. If states differ substantially in the average levels of happiness-causing attributes (i.e. if people in New York are likely to have higher levels of education, higher income, etc.) then the coefficients for the state dummies by themselves are not meaningful; in particular, we are likely to see a negative bias in the coefficients of states with high levels of positive attributes. What's more, this bias is going to be considerably amplified if the dependent variable of happiness / satisfaction is right-censored, that is to say if the measure of satisfaction used does not adequately capture differences in satisfaction levels at the higher end of the range (which, btw, is the case with the data used in the study - on a 1 to 4 scale the average score is 3.4).

To see this in (exceedingly) simple terms, imagine that we have only two people from two states - Louisiana (L) and New York (N); that we have only one other explanatory variable - Income (I); and that the satisfaction score for both people, on a 1 to 4 scale, is 4, i.e. they both claim to be 'Very Satisfied'. The regression would then try to solve

4=B1.Il + Bl

and

4=B1.In + Bn

where B1 is the coefficient for Income, Bl and Bn are the satisfaction coefficients for the states, and Il and In are the income levels of the person in Louisiana and the person in New York. Now, imagine that the person in New York has twice the income of the person in Louisiana. We then have

4=B1.Il + Bl = B1.In + Bn = B1.2Il + Bn

Now, if B1.Il + Bl = B1.2Il + Bn, and assuming B1>0 (more income means greater happiness), this would mean that Bl>Bn, i.e. the satisfaction coefficient of Louisiana is greater than the satisfaction coefficient of New York. Notice that this doesn't really mean anything about living in New York, it's simply an artifact of the fact that satisfaction measures top out at 4 and that New York has twice the income levels of Louisiana.

On the whole then, it's unclear that the coefficients of the state dummies actually mean anything. But even in the best case, all they mean is that moving from New York to Louisiana will increase your satisfaction, provided you can find the identical job and continue to make the same amount of money. Good luck with that.

Finally, let's think for a moment about the researcher's claim that their study shows a surprisingly strong correlation between subjective and objective measures of satisfaction. Again, let's think about what the subjective state coefficient really is. It's the average difference between the satisfaction of a person with a certain level of income (uncorrected for cost of living), education, etc. living in the focal state (New York) vs. a person with the same level of income, education, etc. living in Alabama. Now what might cause a person making the same dollar amount to be less satisfied in New York than in Alabama? Obviously, cost of living. And what is a major component of the 'objective' measure the study uses to rank states? Why, it's cost of living. Is it really surprising then that the two measures turn out to be highly correlated? I don't think so.

What would be interesting, of course, would be to see a version of the study that a) controlled for the location choices of individuals through some kind of simultaneous equation model and b) included income levels adjusted for cost of living in the regression equation to predict satisfaction levels. Then we might actually learn something.

Ironically, this is one instance where a naive application of the satisfaction scores - a simple table of the mean satisfaction scores by state - may actually be more accurate and representative than the subjective coefficients calculated by the authors. I'm not sure how the mean satisfaction score for New York compares to the mean satisfaction score for Louisiana, but I'd be amazed if New York scored lower than Louisiana, let alone if New York was the lowest of all states. Now that would be surprising.

Just add insult

I linked to this on Twitter earlier today, but Tehelka's second fiction issue is now online. I have to say it's a decidedly mixed bag: a couple of stories that are tone-deaf and frankly unreadable, and quite a few that while not bad, exactly, are fairly meh (see here, here and here).

Interestingly, the two translated stories - Charu Nivedita's Morgue Keeper and Gaurav Solanki's Beyond Fear - struck me as being among the best of the bunch, demonstrating both an inventiveness and an emotional depth largely missing from their English counterparts. Whether that says something about the gap between regional literature and Indian writing in English, or is just coincidence, I'll leave up to you.

My own favorite though (aside from this, obviously) was Kuzhali Manickavel's punchy, quick-witted and exhilarating Anarch. Now there's a voice I want to read more of.

Upper Class Twitter of the Year

So I finally decided to try out this Twitter thing.

Not that I have any intention of joining in any conversations or anything - I just figured it was the most efficient way to share poems I find on the web and other such bric-a-brac. We'll see how it goes.

Obviously it's going to take me a while to figure out a) how this thing works and b) what I want to do with it, but in the meantime suggestions are welcome.


P.S. The title of this post is, of course, a reference to this.

Atropos Nothing

We are puppets of our arteries. The blood not circulation but dance.

Cut the strings and the body falls. Clear. Free.

Remember Marsyas.

Better to be a liberated heap than an upright slave. Or is it?

The freedom of the severed kite.

A cut above. The rest.

Liu Xiaobo

Via the Pen American Center, a petition demanding the release of Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo.

Certainties

You say I have too many certainties. That I only need one.

I'm not so sure.

He collects poems

like a magpie lining the
bare nest of his heart.

The fear of dying...

...is just a special case of stage fright.

Eden

I had to let them go.

It was the right thing to do. I didn't want to hold them back, after all. And things between us had been so awkward lately - it was clear they needed their own space.

Still, it's hard. I'd got used to having them around.

What I need is a hobby. Something to take my mind off it.

Maybe gardening.

Never judge a book by its lover

via Book Bench, this handy list of authorial stereotypes

Apparently I'm a confirmed 90's literati with good taste in music, wine and bondage who didn't fit in as a kid, as a result of which I now avoid cream cheese with tenacity and thinks John Cusack movies are dubious, but who Lauren Leto would like to sleep with anyway (and who can blame her).

I'm also a high-school professor with either an undergraduate degree in English or a master's degree in French (I can't remember which because I spent most of college making out with other girls and writing it all down in a journal), but we'll let that pass.

Acclimatization

You know you've been living in Minneapolis too long when you check the temperature outside and it's 10 F (that's -12 C, btw) and you think "Ah! A warm day."

***

In other news, don't miss this wonderful live chat with Lydia Davis over at the Book Bench blog. The woman writes short short fiction, loves Bach, Beckett and the piano, says most of what she writes is finished quickly and used and spends time arranging her stories but is then happy for people to jump back and forth through them. Sound like anyone we know?

A moment's happiness

"Are you happy?"

"You mean now, in this moment? Or generally, in life?"

"Either. Both."

"Well, I'm happy right now."

"And in life?"

"I guess. On average."

"Why are you happy?"

"Because I'm with you."

"No, seriously."

"I don't know. I just am. Aren't you?"

"Happy?"

"Yes."

"Right now? Or in life?"

"Right now."

"I don't know."

"How can you not know?"

"Do you always know when you're happy?"

"I know when I'm not."

"Well, I know that I'm not not happy. I just don't know if I am."

"Don't you like being with me?"

"Of course I do. Being with you makes me really happy."

"So?"

"I guess I'm happy that you're you, but I'm not happy that I'm me."

"You'd be happier I were with someone else?"

"No. I'd be happier if you were with me and I was someone else."

"Who?"

"Someone different."

"Different how?"

"I don't know. More alive. More capable of happiness. Someone who wouldn't sit here with you feeling sad."

"So you're sitting here feeling sad because you're not someone who wouldn't sit here feeling sad."

"I guess."

"You're crazy, you know."

"I know. Does it make you less happy to be with me, knowing that."

"On the contrary, it makes me happier."

"How come?"

"I like being with a crazy person."

"Why?"

"It's exciting."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Because there's always the chance of something new. Unexpected."

"And you like that?"

"Yes?"

"But I thought you were perfectly happy just the way we are."

"I didn't say I was perfectly happy. There's no such thing as perfect happiness."

"But you're happy?"

"Yes."

"Yet you'd like for something new and unexpected to happen? You'd like for things to change?"

"No. I'd hate for things to change. I just like knowing that there's the possibility that they might."

"You're pretty crazy yourself you know."

"I'm not. I'm just philosophical."

"There's a difference?"

"Of course there is."

"What?"

"I don't know. I just know there is."

"How can you know something when you don't know it?"

"Okay, fine, I dream there is."

"Any moment now you're going to quote Hamlet at me, aren't you?"

"I was thinking about it."

"I could tell."

"You can always tell."

"I know. It's great isn't it?"

"It's special."

"It's why being with you makes me feel..."

"...happy?"

"...philosophical."

"I feel philosophical being with you too."

"I know. Crazy, isn't it?"

In Store

The footage from the security cam shows that girl caught shoplifting had been eyeing you with interest for some time. Was she hoping you'd notice her, or making sure you didn't? There's no way to tell now, which is why you take her number, promise to call. After all, she has nimble fingers, bad judgment and indifferent taste. What more could you ask for? You consider that this might be love but discount the possibility, there being too many left over from last year. With every chance you buy you get a second one free, is how you put it to the young couple looking shy and lost and happy by the sporting Good, before directing them to Aisle 15, which is where the weddings are. "Did you take this modem to boost your illegally stolen wi-fi?" you ask the girl, and she says she did, so by the power of your company vest you take it away from her, show her to door, where she proceeds to inform you that you may now kiss her ass, but you don't take it personally because you're still thinking about what a great story this would make to tell the grandchildren the two of you are never going to have.

On Meaning

A spotlight means. The sun is.

A fool

is just someone the angels are jealous of.

Curiosity did not kill the cat. The cat died because it was mortal. Which is also why it was curious.

Disturbing the peace

A new beginning. A sky scraped clean.

A man in a tie and shirtsleeves is sitting on the steps of a brownstone on 74th street, a briefcase between his knees, his head thrown back.

At first I think he's having trouble breathing. An asthma attack? Then I realize he's laughing, laughing silently, uncontrollably. Laughter like a nosebleed. The kind that just won't stop.

Somewhere far off I hear the sirens approaching. Someone must have called the cops.

I'd better get out of here before things turn beautiful.

Falstaff Culture Tip # 308

Never, ever sit in the front row at a Taiko performance.

Watching the drummers from five feet away is an incredible experience, but your ribs ache for hours afterwards from the pounding they take.

Disaster 'Poetry'

Remember The Tay Bridge Disaster?

Well, McGonagall's poem now has a desi equivalent, in the shape of this piece of doggerel posted on the I'm a Bhopali site. Ms. Zaidi's poem is like an object lesson in the writing of juvenile verse - uninteresting rhymes[1], trite images, uncertain tone, lines that don't scan and the overwhelming impression that any sense the verse may once have had has been subordinated to the rhyme scheme. Old William would have been proud.

***

By contrast, the regular press actually managed to turn out a couple of good articles for the occasion, including a surprisingly decent NY Times Op-ed piece by Suketu Mehta and Indra Sinha's article for the Guardian. It's almost enough to restore one's faith in the MSM.

[1] For a contemporary example of what interesting rhymes might look (and sound) like, see here.

Injustice

In Memoriam Dec 3, 1984.

Because it goes
too easily unnoticed

is toxic but invisible,
impossible to touch, taste, smell or hear

impossible not to feel.

Because it pricks at our eyes,
corrupts our blood,

fills our lungs
until they refuse to balance,

weighs down our hearts.

Because it is passed down
from generation to generation

until death becomes
a byproduct

irrelevant yet necessary.

Because it's in the air
we continue to breathe,

the excuses we swallow,
the tears

we do not cry.


[Part of this (1)]


[1] Sort of. I'm not sure I entirely approve of the whole 'I'm a Bhopali' shtick - it strikes me as trivializing the suffering of the real victims. Which doesn't mean, of course, that the anniversary should go unmarked. Hence the post.

Mental Ears

"The discourses of modernism in Western poetics make steeper descents into sub-intelligibility; and in my own case I am frequently accused of having more or less altogether taken leave of discernible sense. In fact I believe this accusation to be more or less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long has seemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry ("what does it mean?") seems less and less and unavoidably necessary precondition for successful reading. The task, however, is not to subside into distracted ingenious playfulness with the lexicon and cross-inflectional idiomatics, but to write and read with maximum focused intelligence and passion, each of these two aspects bearing so strongly into the other as to fuse them into the enhanced state once in an old-fashioned way termed the province of the imagination. "Mental ears" do not relegate us to the domain of performative sonority, nor do they elevate us into the paramount abstraction of inferred ideas and beliefs: they are an intense hybrid and I treat them as the essential equipment for reading poetry in today's post-traditional world space"

***

"I should not wish to claim that this selection was in any sense deliberate or conscious; if the underlying textual features exist it is because poets are tuned into their language structures to an unusual degree of linguistic susceptibility. Such features are neither invented nor discovered, they are disclosed."

- J.H. Prynne 'Mental Ears and Poetic Work', Chicago Review 55:1 2010

And because Prynne's essay references them, and because it made me go back and rediscover these exquisite lines:

"That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awaked, and found myself reposed,
Under a shade, on flowers, much wondering where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave, and spread,
Into a liquid plain; then stood unmoved,
Pure as the expanse of Heaven. I thither went
With unexperienced thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A Shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me. I started back,
It started back; but pleased as I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love."

- Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV

Irre-verses

n. A line or set of lines that really don't fit in the poem but are so beautiful otherwise that you can't bring yourself to take them out.

Leftover Emotions

Some say they won't keep. Others that they're better the next day.

Sharp and mild, bitter and sweet. Sometimes I store them up all week, bring them all out on Sunday. A real family meal.

Left too long in the fridge happiness curdles to nostalgia, turns green with envy.

Leave space in your heart. I've saved us some regrets for afterwards.

Nothing special, you understand. Just a little something I had put by.

Contraband

Illegal lonelinesses. Substanceless despair.

These are the songs you smuggle through customs, carrying them in your gut, taking care not to let them touch you.

These are the poems they shall cut with raw grief.

This is the language they will sell on the streets, your words whispered in the ears of unsuspecting strangers, or offered at parties to careful friends, every line an invitation.

These are the phrases they cannot get enough off, an addiction to meanings, mouths writhing at the end of every hook.

Dream Interpretation

I blame the New Yorker. It's all their fault for printing articles about nightmares and screwing around with impressionable minds like mine.

So, last night I have this dream. The details are a little hazy now, but it's a sort of Alistair Maclean meets Lost scenario involving a scuttled ship that may or may not have been carrying nuclear weapons and a handful of survivors who find themselves trapped on a remote tropical island without either communication devices or firearms but a fairly impressive collection of medieval swords. There are a whole bunch of subplots (none of them erotic, in case you were wondering) but the main story revolves around four people, who I shall call Good Guy, Bad Guy, Scientist Lady and Mystery Girl. After a whole set of clues and at least three dead bodies (that I can remember) Scientist Lady figures out that the ship was wrecked deliberately, for reasons that are never explained but that are immediately clear to everyone involved once the discovery is made. Suspicion falls on Bad Guy and Mystery Girl, who are nowhere to be found, mostly because Bad Guy has lured Mystery Girl into the jungle to poison her so he can have all the prize (whatever that might be) to himself. His greed and treachery prove to be his undoing, however, because when he returns to the group his is confronted by Good Guy, and, not having Mystery Girl by his side, is killed after a protracted and fast-action sword fight. Needless to say, all this happens in full-blown Hollywood action flick mode.

But that's not the disturbing part.

Apparently dissatisfied with the way the dream plays out, my subconsciousness decides to run the whole scenario again. Again the ship runs aground, again the crew starts to die mysteriously, again Scientist Lady does her thing and figures it out. Only this time when Good Guy confronts Bad Guy, Bad Guy gets the jump on him and wounds him badly. Things are looking pretty bleak for Good Guy, until Mystery Girl suddenly appears and proceeds to defeat Bad Guy in hand-to-hand combat (again with the Hollywood action flick effects), before handing herself over to Good Guy and Scientist Lady. Has she had a change of heart? Was she secretly on the side of the righteous? No, it turns out that she learnt about Bad Guy's plan to betray her because she dreamed about it, and decided it was more important to her to get even with him, even if it meant her own undoing.

And no, that isn't the disturbing part either.

The really disturbing part is that the next dream I have involves me lecturing on the underlying themes and motifs in the last two dreams - the central thesis being that the trinity of the Good Guy, the Bad Guy and the Mystery Girl is really a reference to the Holy Trinity (or is it Peter Paul and Mary, with the ship as Puff the Magic Dragon?), or that the whole thing is really a political allegory, with the ship being the ship of State, the Good Guy being capitalism (because of his 'invisible' hands), the Bad Guy being socialism (look, his sword is really a sickle) and the Mystery Girl being fascism. (I swear, my dream self was actually trying to explain this to other people.)

I need help.

Portrait

I could never be an artist. I think I always knew that. Or at least suspected. It wasn't that I didn't have talent. Though there were days...no, it wasn't that. I just wasn't brave enough, tormented enough. Not enough to be great. And if you're not great as an artist what are you? A craftsman, an entertainer. The silhouette of an artist, all shape and no substance. What Dylan Thomas would call his sullen art. Sullen art. Such a beautiful phrase, that. The kind of phrase I could never...No, I was never meant to be an artist.

They used to tell me all I needed was to have faith. In my talent. In myself. As though faith were ever anything more than a lack of imagination. As if I didn't already have something more important - doubt, and the need to disprove that doubt, the endless circle of frenzy and disillusion, like a dog chasing its tail. And what a tale it was, this unwritten story, the life I once imagined but could never bring to life. All over now, of course, all impossible.

But wasn't it always impossible? Wasn't this the way I always knew it would be? Not a failure of fiction but a fiction of failure? And wasn't that what drew me to it in the first place, the romance of not being good enough? To believe in the impossible. Not to pretend to believe, you understand, but to believe truly, irrevocably, and in the certain knowledge that what you believed could not be true. The passion and the certainty locked together, feeding on each other, like darkness and light. Oh, how foolish the young are, and how heroic. And could it be there is an art to this? To falling short beautifully? But no, I was never an artist. Look at me. If I were an artist would I be sitting here like this, whining and whinging, when really, what has happened to me? Nothing.

No, nothing has happened to me. Nothing has ever happened to me.

Damaged Goods

Afterwards, God sat under the tree, weeping. Mourning the damage to his most precious fruit.

Identity without ideology

"But, if feminism becomes a politics of identity, it can safely be drained of ideology. Identity politics isn’t much concerned with abstract ideals, like justice. It’s a version of the old spoils system: align yourself with other members of a group—Irish, Italian, women, or whatever—and try to get a bigger slice of the resources that are being allocated. If a demand for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism without feminists."

- Ariel Levy, Lift and Separate, New Yorker Nov 16 2009.

Exactly.

Identification without ideology means power without purpose; you end up with a louder voice, but with less to say.

The really treacherous part of this is that the impulse towards identity politics is generally well-meaning. It's tempting to be inclusive; after all, there's strength in numbers. But that strength can only be used to achieve the lowest common agenda, and every new constituency you include diminishes the scope of that agenda further, so that in the end you're left with a mass that is all gravity, and no force. In a sense, identity politics is a local optimum - any movement from the status quo comes with an immediate cost and an uncertain (though potentially significant) benefit.

United we stand for nothing, and very still.

Grazing

Little by little, he takes possession of language. His lines like barbed wire stretched tight across the page.

The mind, blown, passes to where dreams graze like cattle on greener grass.

The Strongest Link

The way sometimes the poem turns
on a single verb.

My entire happiness comes
from seeing you

smile.

The Malignant and the Maligned

In other news, you may have seen this story about how couples are substantially more likely to get a divorce if the wife gets cancer than if the husband does, which has been doing the rounds.

What I find interesting about most of the discussion surrounding the story is how there's an implicit assumption that the 'proper' state of things would be for the partner to stick around. Personally, I'm a lot more shocked that more women don't leave, and can't help wondering if the difference isn't so much that men are that much more evil or selfish, but that women are that much more likely to be financially dependent on their spouses and therefore less able to walk away, or just that much more socialized into seeing themselves as doormats. In a truly gender equal world, would more men stay, or more women leave?

Transcendence precedes comparison...and other arguments to watch out for

It's been a heady week for reading here in Falstaff-land, what with me feverishly alternating between the new Amartya Sen and Alison Bechdel's glorious, glorious Essential Dykes to Watch Out For [1].

Anyway, I'm only a third of the way through the Sen, but I figure if I wait till the end before I blog about it, then I'll end up needing to write a 5,000 word essay and given that I no longer do long posts (or hadn't you noticed) I may as well jot down my thoughts as I go along. What follows may seem a little cryptic if you haven't read the book. Then again, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably like cryptic.

So at one point in the book Sen is making a comparison between what he calls the transcendental view of justice (what is a just system?) and the comparative view of justice (which of two given systems is more just?), his agenda being to champion the comparative view over the more well-established transcendental view. Sen argues that the two views have little to do with each other, and that, consequently, the general preoccupation with transcendental theories is not particularly useful to solving real world problems of justice. In particular, that a description of what constitutes a truly just society (the transcendental question) is neither necessary nor sufficient to enable a comparison between two available alternative societies (the comparative question).

In making this argument, Sen spends a lot of time showing why a description of an ideally just society is not sufficient to make a comparison between two alternate societies - a point on which I'm in total agreement. The problem being, of course, that comparing two less-than-perfect options requires us to make a judgment on which option is more imperfect (or less perfect, but I don't dislike double negatives), and knowledge of what perfection looks like alone does not tell us how to make that judgment.

When it comes to arguing that an answer to the transcendental question is not necessary for an answer to the comparative question, however, Sen essentially hand-waves his way through, arguing that there's no reason why we need to discuss what a third best alternative might be in order to compare the two alternatives in hand. It seems to me, though, that this is only partly true. While we may not, strictly speaking, require a clear description of the best possible alternative to undertake a comparison between two less-than-ideal alternatives, we do need some agreed upon dimensions or criteria on which we shall evaluate these alternatives, and it's not clear to me how we would arrive at these criteria without first attempting to answer the transcendental question. Every comparison involves some kind of measurement, however imprecise; and every measurement involves some kind of theory, however imperfect. Of course, defining the dimensions or criteria of justice is not, strictly speaking, the same thing as describing what a perfectly just society would look like, but the distinction strikes me as trivial, and it could be argued that with something as inherently complex as justice visualizing a perfectly just society may, in fact, be the best way to isolate and identify the relevant dimensions. In short, while a complete answer to the transcendental question may not be essential to an evaluation of the relative justice of two available alternatives, the process of asking and trying to answer the transcendental question would seem to be a necessary prerequisite of any meaningful comparative exercise. In that sense, then, transcendentalism does seem to be necessary for comparison.

It's possible, of course, that Sen has an answer to this problem and I just haven't got to it yet (as I said, I'm only on Chapter 6). Still, it'll be interesting to see where he comes out on it. Stay tuned.

[1] It's not just that I like being eclectic. It's also that spending two hours chuckling my way through a book called Dykes to Watch Out For while my students sat and dutifully worked their way though their finals seemed a little too outrageous. After all, it's a business school. We're supposed to be dyed-in-the-Brooks-Brothers suits conformists, not same-sex loving subversives.

A life together

I know that closure is not death, and death not closure.

But is it so wrong if your ghost and I get along?

Bread and circuses

What does a king do
in the republic of pain? Give them
bread and circuses like any king,
the bread of memory and the circuses of forgetting,
bread and nostalgia.

- Yehuda Amichai (translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld), from Open Closed Open

***

Bread and circuses. Memory and forgetting. What makes life possible and what makes it worthwhile.

I too would believe in the trapeze of oblivion, if I could only forget the dry taste in my mouth.

Humpty Dumpty Revisited

In memory of Nov 9, 1989

All the king's horses and all the king's men
Brought down the wall in a show of their strength
And when they were done breaking and hauling
They paid their respects to those who had fallen
Each one secretly wondering whether
What was broken could ever be put back together.

See also

Desdemona

A light put out for putting out too lightly.

Doubt's output proves heavy when it comes to light.

Indulgence

A little selfishness is a guilty thing.

Alien Exchange

Gravity as greed. The Earth holds on to us as though we were money. Intelligent life the most precious commodity in the Universe.

A giant leap for Mankind, a tiny loan to the Moon.

Somewhere out there is a planet with a currency all its own. The challenge, if they ever make contact, will be figuring out the exchange rate.

Eurydice

I should have looked back more often.

I don't know where I lost her. She was there five minutes ago. And now she's gone.

Did she get stuck at a light, maybe miss a turn? I told her to follow me. It should have been easy. There isn't even any traffic going this way. Maybe I should have gone slower? I don't know.

What do I do now? Wait? Go back? But where to? Better to keep going. She'll make her own way, I guess. Maybe ask someone for directions. Though it's late, and there's no one on the streets.

It can't be helped, I suppose. I keep glancing in the rear view, hoping to see her headlights, hoping it's all a mistake and she's still coming up behind.

Built or driven

Not a pilgrimage, but a migration. Grief you revisit but may not return to. The desire more instinct than constancy, more intuition than belief.

Suffering like a nest you line with fresh memories. The weight of the unspoken set down on every branch.


Note: Title taken from here.

A series of small deceptions

"I'd always thought art
was a series of small deceptions
performed in the service of the truth."

- Jude Nutter, 'The Last Supper', from The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press 2007)

All these performances. The way we turn possibility into consolation, imagining what might be.

The truth, but not the whole truth. Anything but the whole truth.

The mindlessness of strangers

You know, the more time I spend in the company of strangers, the more I despair for the future of the species. There's just no getting away from it - people are weird.

Take the woman sitting next to me at the concert on Friday, who sat through Anthony Ross' encore with a scissor in hand, trimming her nails. Yes, actually trimming her nails while the cellist was playing [1]!

Or the woman at the ballet yesterday [2] who decided that since her ticket said Row 20 Seat 4, she was obviously in the first seat in row 24 (because 20+4=24, see!).

Or the person sitting behind me in the bus this afternoon, saying this to an acquaintance she ran into on the bus (and speaking, needless to say, really, really loud):

"I have to confess I keep going back there just for him. I can't help it. I really want him. He's so delicious. I know it's silly. I know I have to stop. But, I mean, I'm not doing any harm am I? I mean, it's not like I'm stalking him or anything. I just keep showing up there to see him. To be honest, I've known for some time that he's into boys. You know. And that just makes me sad. I keep thinking maybe he'll get over it and notice me. I know it's silly. I really have to stop, don't I?"

[acquaintance, who has been maintaining an embarrassed silence through this outpouring, says something noncommittal]

"Yes, I know. I will. It's just that I've never felt the kind of passion I feel for him for anyone else. But then, passion can turn bad too, you know. But I don't think that's happening to me. I just need to stop myself from going there. But he's so attractive..."

I'm NOT exaggerating. Promise.

[1] Okay, said encore consisted of a fairly uninspired rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow [3], so it wasn't exactly the highpoint of the evening, but still.

[2] The Royal Winnipeg Ballet premiering their new ballet - Moulin Rouge. All in all, an exquisite performance. The fact that it kept slipping into bathos probably has more to do with the fact that I'm not a big fan of traditional ballet than anything else.

[3] Which is a nice enough song, but playing it after Schumann is like serving Hershey bars after a wine tasting.

Signifying nothing

The stillness of man amid the dance of his distractions. Like the beam of the spotlight that, falling on nothing, holds the stage together.

Neu Roses

Taming the lion was easy. Getting the mirror to disobey him impossible.

Hercules lifts the orchestra on his shoulders. The air expands to let the music through.

Beauty is never predictable.

Narcissus in a cage trying not to maul himself.

***

Ever since I've moved to Minneapolis, I've been trying to wean myself off my beloved Philadelphians and bring myself to the Minnesota Orchestra, a task made particularly arduous by the latter's insistence on playing inordinate amounts of Tchaikovsky [1].

Tonight, however, the Orchestra made up for it all, with a concert that featured a splendid rendition of Schumann's Cello Concerto followed by an almost note-perfect performance of Shostakovich's Fifth under the baton of Stefan Sanderling. Glorious stuff.


[1] One does not like being made to listen to Tchaikovsky. It's like listening to a wimpier version of Brahms. Plus I can no longer listen to the first Piano Concerto without thinking of this.

Ladder

A ladder left leaning against a wall, as though someone had eloped with the window.

White rungs like the moonlight practicing scales.

An uneasy bridge between the vertical and the horizontal.

The way the lack of an object turns ascent into transcendence, something to aspire to, a grasp exceeded only by its own reach.

Beforewards

I long to see you in an old light. In your first rain. In the dance you wore to monsoon communions. In a time before the taking of photographs or the invention of tears. See you as you were before the flashbulbs of beauty, in an age of crooked teeth and stringy hair. You standing there, in the shadow of who you would become, like a girl beneath a billboard, trying to light a match.

A short short (love) story

Overheard on the bus:

"You mean he didn't tell her he slept over with you on his birthday?"

Beyond an uncertain point

It's not that you wish to die. On the contrary, you no longer feel the need for a reason to live.

Somewhere there is a world where everything you no longer believe has proven true. What remains is both less probable and more necessary. The way a sealed window is an invitation to look down at the city, to look up at the sky.

It's not that you wish to die. It's just that above a certain height you have to consider the possibility.

But a whimper

"Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm."

-Tracy Letts August: Osage County

People are always saying how when one door closes another opens. Which is bullshit. When a door closes you look for a fucking window and if you're lucky enough to find one you jump straight out of it without bothering to look.

And you hope you aren't too high.

Yes and No

Fastidiousness or indecision? In either case an unwillingness to commit. A refusal to take sides is a sign of judgment, until its a sign of cowardice. The difference between reaching across a fence and sitting on it. "The best lack all conviction", Yeats says. No, the best just take their time to be convinced. Yet how do we tell a diplomat from a politician? Is there a difference?

Does that answer your question?

The shortest flight

...between two points is a fall.

Hanumanhattan

Scenes we'd like to see dept.

A version of the Ramayan with Hanuman as King Kong.

Hanuman grabs Sita (Scarlett Johansson) and climbs to the top of the Empire State building. Ravan (Javier Bardem) comes after them in his Curtiss Helldiver named Pushpak, and proceeds to set Hanuman / Kong's ass on fire, at which point Hanuman / Kong threatens to incinerate most of mid-town sparing only the brief stretch of Lexington with his favorite desi places. Things look pretty dire for Manhattan until Ram (Woody Allen) arrives and proceeds to read Kierkegaard to Hanuman / Kong until the big ape can't take it any more and commits suicide by ripping his chest open and tearing out his heart. Sita (Johansson) throws herself at Ram (Allen) because nothing makes a girl hornier than being saved from Javier Bardem by a short man in glasses old enough to be her grandfather, but Ram has just realized that being the sixth incarnation of god makes him an existential schizophrenic, and ignores her.

The End.

First Movement

A music of madmen rearranging furniture in rooms of sound.

The rhythm of things lifted, let down. Muscles tensed and released.

Pause. Are you pleased?

Let's try it differently. But quick, quick, before silence gets home.

Offering

Buckets of silver
light poured into the river
to summon the moon.

Largo

There are days when my happiness depresses me.

***

There is an ugliness to perfection - it is too obvious, too ostentatious. To be beautiful is to be damaged, in subtle and irreparable ways.

Like the wings of the butterfly crushed to pure color. Or the mournful call of the cello that knows itself alone.

Double jeopardy

You can't be thrown into the same river twice.

Water Walking

"to walk
on water as water, demonstrating
that we hardly know under what terms
we perform our sitting in air, our miraculous,
perilous stepping out in the flesh
over the everyday void."

- Tess Gallagher, 'Water Walking' from Dear Ghosts, (Graywolf 2006)

***

Impression follows impression. Nothing sinks in.

An escapist vision: the Resurrection as the first film. The sea a dark negative the light touches and moves on.

Or, as the three wise critics said, a star is born.

A house with everything you've ever dreamt of...

...would be an extremely scary place.

Think of the monsters under the bed, the snakes in the shower, the staircases you couldn't help falling down.

Think of how the floor would constantly trip you, so you'd stumble yourself awake.

***

Have you ever had a fall where it felt like you were dreaming until your face hit the ground?

***

The plane explodes mid-sentence, at the height of a blue morning. I look up and the sky is filled with cogs. A propeller comes spinning down, like a lethal tumbleweed, bounces off the road, smashes into the house.

Unsleeping Ghost

You return to loss the way one returns to a bed one has slept in, long ago, as a child.

Amazed that your body still fits within its dimensions. Tempted to pretend you never left.

Meditation

I quiet the voices inside my head, listen to the silence around me.

The Puddle

Toss the moon in a puddle and it becomes a coin.

Someone has run the puddle over. It lies by the roadside, eyes wide open, ripples opening and closing like a mouth that has something to say.

Evaporating confessions.

Tomorrow it will be impossible to tell a damp spot from your shadow, your forgetting from my past.

Intelligent design

The fact that we can find pattern in the Universe is proof that existence is man-made.

Would a supremely intelligent being be satisfied with anything less than true randomness?

Not here forever

"If you were to enter the room now and say: 'I am leaving for a long time, forever' - or: 'I don't think I love you any more' - I would not, I believe, feel anything new: each time you leave, each hour that you are not here - you are not here forever and you do not love me."

- Marina Tsvetaeva, Earthly Signs

***

It finally happened. You left. Just as I always feared you would. All those business trips when I was so sure you weren't coming back.

So why is it that now that you've finally left I keep expecting you to walk through that door?

The Promenades of Euclid

Rene Magritte

Aspiration

Inspiration

What it reaches

Where it leads

A mirror held up to

A glass through which we see

Geometry

Transcendence

Above

Beyond

More evidence that I'm a sociopath

"At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”

from David Grann's incredible must-read piece in this week's New Yorker.

Walking on the beach

"The complete concurrence of souls requires the concurrence of the breath...for people to understand one another, they must walk or lie side by side."

- Marina Tsvetaeva, from Earthly Signs (translation: Jamey Gambrell)

***

You set your pace by the ocean, I matched my step to yours.

We talked of ice cream and sunsets, and how to tell a castle from a mound of sand.

Meanwhile the tide withdrew to a distance, and the waves snickered among themselves.

Cerro Blanco

Because it is there.

An emptiness surrounded by space. A silence from which the lines radiate.

Neither source nor center, it is a surrender of coordinates, the held breath of a horizon between feeling and music, dark earth and air.

Things come together. Anarchy cannot hold.

Passing time is noise, eternity merely volume; after the end and before the beginning there is only this - a balance that is destroyed in being established.

Like the difference between white and blank, invisible and transparent,

long ago and far away.

Of the night for the morrow

Love: to recognize something as necessary and know you can never have it.

If our ideas about death are romantic, it is because we are mortal.