Sunday Notes
How quickly the morning has passed in the consumption of "media"; this I tell my friend C, is a sign of how chaotic and unsystematic our reading habits are, for we spend far too much time scattering our attention in all directions instead of focusing it, on say, the great books waiting at our elbows (for me this would be Stendhal's "Red & Black"), unread. But then the "post-modern" mind is fickle, unstable, and very demanding of "inputs" vs. say reaching for self knowledge through deep reading.
The pieces snared in this morning's roundup at various literary waystations include a close reading by Monica Ali of "A Painter of Signs" - a novel by "The Great Narayan" (to use the title of a Pankhaj Mishra's essay in NYRB). She begins, by writing:
"In his essay "A Story-Teller's World," Narayan, describing the oral story tradition of the Ramayana and other epics, says: "The tales have such inexhaustible vitality in them that people like to hear them narrated again and again, and no one has ever been known to remark in this country 'Stop! I've heard that one before.' They are heard and read and pondered over again and again, engendering in the listener an ever-deepening understanding of life, death and destiny." We could say the same of his Malgudi tales.In Malgudi, however, we do not fly with the gods but amble along the dusty lanes, loiter in the fountain in Market Square, watch the bathers at the river in the half-dark dawn. Heroics are of the everyday variety, the printing of a leaflet a momentous event, and there is frequently nothing to do but drink coffee and discuss the affairs of the world or the street. Accustomed as we are these days to the "big" novel, the novel of ideas and of information that soars across continents, spans decades or centuries, dazzles with science, flirts evenhandedly with glamour and gore and expostulates on the causes of war and terror, the world of Malgudi is rather a small one. Here is where the miracle occurs. Because all too often in the big novel, beneath the glitz there is a nullity. The author is free to kill off the characters; they were barely alive in the first place. Malgudi, by contrast, teems with life."
Ali then goes on to examine how Narayan plays with the jutaxpositions between the modern (signified by Daisy, a family planning crusader), and the tradition (embodied by Raman's - the hero's- aunt or "maami") through his genial, and to me grandfatherly, comedy. As Ali points out in this essay, Narayan, even as he appears to write beguilingly simple novels, does battle with some heavy themes. This clearly is in opposition to Naipaul's[1] dismissal of Narayan's fiction as some kind of Hindu quietism in face of worldy questions and problems.
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The Guardian also features a speech by Paul Asters on why we need stories, even though stories (and the process of creating them) are "utterly and magnificently ... useless". He says this on the power of stories:
"Those of us who are parents will have no trouble conjuring up the rapt attention in the eyes of our children when we read to them. Why this intense desire to listen? Fairy tales are often cruel and violent, featuring beheadings, cannibalism, grotesque transformations and evil enchantments. One would think this material would be too frightening for a young child, but what these stories allow the child to experience is precisely an encounter with his own fears and inner torments in a perfectly safe and protected environment. Such is the magic of stories - they might drag us down to the depths of hell, but in the end they are harmless.We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next. For years, in every country of the Western world, article after article has been published bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer people are reading books, that we have entered what some have called the 'post-literate age'. That may well be true, but at the same time, this has not diminished the universal craving for stories."
These lines very much echo the following line of Muriel Rukeyser's, which I often mutter to myself as I go on my walkabouts:
"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."
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In the New Yorker, Alice Quinn has a simaltaneous conversation with two American poets, Philip Levine and Galway Kinnell, both of whose work I like. While I agree with Wendell Berry's prescription (in his book "Standing by Words") that statements on "arse poetica" are best made in the form of an essay rather than in the ever poliferating medium of the interview, given the absence of much real time conversation (of high quality), I take guilty pleasure in reading literary interviews, including this one.
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Having read sections of Sven Birkerts's mournful, but clear eyed, meditations[2] on the business of reading in his book "The Gutenberg Elegies", at various book stores previously, I was glad to buy an old copy of it earlier this week for half a dollar (yes, cheap ass that I am). Birkerts's essay on his evolution as a reader is quite resonant to me, mainly because of the resistance against, and the furtiveness involved in, his early reading. As Jonathan Franzen detailed in a classification of readers elsewhere[3], Birkets and I (with my immodesty) were "social isolates", i.e., oddball children who take their oddballness into a relam of imagination. And because of its imaginary-ness, this world can't be shared with other children, resulting in "social isolates" having the most significant conversations with authors, and characters in the books they are reading.
[1] I find most Naipaul's fiction a pain in the ass to read
[2] And prophecies (circa 1995-1996) too, on how "information superhighway" will destroy the book; thankfully this never did happen
[3] In his famous Harper's essay, "Prechance to Dream"
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Morning Book Notes
Some sections from John Banville's dazzling "Ghosts":
"How courtly we were, how correctly we counted ourselves. I think that even if she had been fifty years younger there would have been no more between us than there was. And yet I belive there was much. Does that make sense? There are certain people who seem to know me better that I know myself. To some, I realise, this would be an uncomfrtable intrusion on their privacy and their sense of themslves, and it is true, there were occasions when in her presence I was concoius of the pressure upon me of the sagging and unmanageable weight of all she must have know about me and did not say; mostly, though, I felt, well, lightened, somehow, as if I had been given the permission to set down for a moment my burden - the burden of myself, that is - and stand breathing, unrequired breifly, in some calm, wide place."
"Let us take the hypothetical case of a man suprised by love, not for a living woman - he has never been able to care much for the living - but for the figure of a woman in, oh, a painting, let's say. That is, he is swept off his feet one day by a work of art. It happens; not very often, I grant you, but it does happen. The fact that the subject is a female is perhaps not of such significance., although it should be perfectly possible to "fall in love", as they like to put it, with a painted image; after all, what is it lovers ever love but the images they have of each other? Freud himself remarked that in the passionate encounter of every couple there are four people involved. Or should it be six? - the two so-called real lovers, plus the images they have of themselves, plus the images they have of each other. What a tangled web Eros weaves!"
And this absolutely perfect impressionistic word-painting from the opening pages of "The Sea":
"Later that day, the day the Graces came, or the following one, or the one following that, I saw the black car again, recognised it at once as it went bounding over the little humpbacked bridge that spanned the railway line. It is still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things endure, while the living lapse. The car was heading out of the village in the direction of the town, I shall call it Ballymore, a dozen miles away. The town is Ballymore, this village is Ballyless, ridiculously, perhaps, but I do not care. The man with the beard who had winked at me was at the wheel, saying something and laughing, his head thrown back. Beside him a woman sat with an elbow out of the rolled-down window, her head back too, pale hair shaking in the gusts from the window, but she was not laughing only smiling, that smile she reserved for him, sceptical, tolerant, languidly amused. She wore a white blouse and sunglasses with white plastic rims and was smoking a cigarette. Where am I, lurking in what place of vantage? I do not see myself. They were gone in a moment, the car's sashaying back-end scooting around a bend in the road with a spurt of exhaust smoke. Tall grasses in the ditch, blond like the woman's hair, shivered briefly and returned to their former dreaming stillness."
Banville is the latest writer I am raving about these days, to folks in my shouting distance. Why? Because Banville says such things that most of us, the unspeaking, walk around wishing to say, to express, but never succeed in doing.
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Last night I and my friend C went to a talk given by Alice Quinn on Elizabeth Bishop's unfinished drafts & fragments, which she had unearthed from Bishop's archive. Apart from the early signs of genius (as evident from the juvenelia), what really came home to me was how infinitely patient (even thought it could be, and has been, termed obsessive) Ms. Bishop was in getting her poems aloft. Paraphrasing what she wrote in her journals: prose is land transportation, music is sea transportation, and poetry is air transportatation. What a poem seeks to do is take the heavy stuff of life, and push it into flight. Many poems, however, simply keep flapping their wings, and fail to get off the ground. Others, even if they take off, merely hover in the air for a short period, then come crashing down; the landscape is thus littered with many stranded poems.
Ms. Bishop's years of precise re-work and percolation, on the other hand, have put her poems such as "One Art", "Sandpiper", "Fishhouses", "Villanelle" etc into the perpetual orbit of English poetry. Finally, if you enjoy Bishop's poetry, you might enjoy reading the TLS essay, "Elizabeth Bishop's hard-earned mastery" by Adam Krisch on these unfinished drafts and fragments, and on this book, "Edgar Allan Poe and The Jukebox".
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Ghosts
My body is yet to get used to the shift from the Florida heat to the fall cold. It needs to be pumped up with caffine, to be kept awake from hibernating. And books have to be dumped into its grouchy (why is it so grouchy even as the sun shines, and leaves crunch underfoot as it walks up and down the avenues, I wonder?) maw. So last night I made the pilgrimage again, this time seeking very specifically a beat-up copy of Banville's "The Sea" (I should succumb to my newly found prosperity, and buy the hardcover edition).
I couldn't find one. So instead I bought his previous novel (whose first fifty pages are as jewelled as those other fifty pages I consumed in an airport) called "The Ghosts". Very appropriate I thought, buying a book that has ghosts in its title on All Hallow's Eve (or Halloween). I also bought a bilingual edition of Lorca's "Poet in New York" (I think this was under the influence of playing Sting's "An Englishman in New York", on repeat, through the afternoon*), and Allan Bloom's tart disquisitions on "Love and Friendship" in the light of the Great Books.
I read some pages from "The Ghosts" this morning in the smallest room of the house, and have the words, and lines (underlined in blue ink) running through my head such as:
canted - as in 'canted to starboard'; also as in 'seeing Felix's silhouette on the ruby glass of the door, an intent and eerily motionless, canted form' 'the cat-smell of the sand' 'a flat place of dark-green sward' 'Light is her medium, she moves through it as through some fine, shining fluid, bearing aloft out of the world's reach, the precious phial of her self'
* The refrains of this song cut in many ways - I am an alien, Sting chant-sings, a legal alien, walking through an snow bound Nyooo Yooork City - that precise legal definition which bills one as an alien, and the more subtle definitions, by the way of speech inflections and odd personal habits and tics, which pin one down as an alien; these can be alienating as they are liberating (one can also find happiness in that mistaken thought that he or she is different from the others).
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