As I pack and unpack stuff, I have fallen into reading novellas from an yellowing "Norton Anthology of the Short Novel" that I picked for a dollar at some book sale. The first short novel that I finished reading was Philip Roth's masterful study of class and class mobility (more particularly of the Jewish variety) in America in his "Goodbye, Columbus". It caught my attention among the eight short novels included in the anthology, mainly because the story is set in the great state of New Jersey, which is also currently the scene of my unfolding American story.

When I usually read stories or novels, I try to find a character I can identify with very closely, and into whose life I can somehow enter mentally and psychologically. While I found that I could understand the dilemmas and yearnings (and sympathize with) of Roth's lower middle class protagonist, Neil Klugman in his love affair with Brenda Patimkin of the newly yuppie and upwardly moblie Jewish Patimkin clan, I found it hard to identify myself in Neil, and thus enter the novel fully. This was unlike my New Year's re-reading of Tolstoy's " The Death of Ivan Illyich", where I could deeply feel, and be moved by, Ivan's suffering and self-understating brought on by the onset of death.

The fault, however, is not with Roth's skill as a writer for a masterful writer he is. For starters, his descriptions of sexual stimuli that young people respond to powerfully, have a simple elegance that imprints such descriptions instantly in the reader's memory. Who will be able to forget that Neil's yearing for Brenda began with a simple gesture of hers as she flicked her swimsuit to cover again the exposed skin on her hip coming out of a swimming pool?

My lack of identification towards characters in this novel then has to do with my expectations from it. While Roth clearly sets it up as failed love story of a poor boy meets rich girl, right in his title, the novel, in my reading, his writing devolves more into a study of manners, habits and social mores, and less into a love story. Perhaps Roth intentionally kept the love story tepid (it is hard to see how Neil and Brenda love each other vs. each being a more prosaic seeker of sex) in order to focus the reader's attention on questions of class mobility, in order to make the reader focus on the question if such mobility is worth all the trouble it entails?

This is a novel I definitely plan on re-reading again in the next few months for I will be making that upward journey myself here in America. In this context, this may well be the last substantial post here at Buoyantville for the next few weeks (or months) for I am renouncing (finally!) my graduate student bum hood, filled with numerous literary side trips, in order to scrabble for greenbacks from Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. Posting will resume, at a much lower frequency, once I find my groove, and clear some space in the course of work week to think about and absorb stimuli non-work related.

This past week's NYT Book Review touches upon a book that I plan on looking up on my next bookstore foray: C.K. Williams's "Collected Poems". I first read Williams's work around three years ago when his book "The Singing" won the National Book Award. Subsequently, I have had the opportunity to meet him in person after a reading he gave with his Parisian friend, Adam Zagajewski in Atlanta.

In my rambling literary conversations with my friend C, I often posit the question as to how a writer can map the bland commercial realities of living in urban America with its never ending processes of consumption and disposal, and their side effects on the post-modern man's morality, religiousity, and psychiatry into words, and even if such work is worth doing in the first place.

Williams' work answers these questions affirmatively, with seemingly effortless ease, as he writes about one man's ability to make sense of his encounters with a world, which mocks deep-time activities such as reading, through his long loping lines. Take, for example, these lines from the poem "The Singing" that begins as a description of an everyday street encounter with a black kid rapping:

"When a young man turned in from a corner singing no it was more of a cadenced shouting Most of which I couldn't catch I thought because the young man was black speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell he was making his song up which pleased me he was nice-looking Husky dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself hence his lyrical flowing over"

and after the poet's smile is rebuffed by the kid by a chant: "I am not/ I am not a nice person", the poem ends as a meditation on racial memory:

"No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions were left where they were It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice person either" but I couldn't come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he have believed it both of us knew just where we were In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to which we were condemned"

Williams' poems abound in such everyday happenings ricocheting off of an old intelligence. Here is a section from another such delicious poem, "On the Metro":

"She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg."

Williams also has some interesting things to say on his influences, his methods of writing etc in this recent interview with Alice Quinn, poetry editor at The New Yorker.

I came across the word "chautauqua" first in Prisig's "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle" when I read[1] it years ago, and it was something that came back to me this morning as I was reading Daniel Hoffman's lovely book length poem "Brotherly Love", which I picked up in the trash racks of my drug depot last evening for $1. Hoffman in this book, recreates the saga of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and recerates in rhyme (deploying words such as issimus, pone, payo etc) the pre-history of what was there before Penn landed at Delaware with his grand idea of "brotherly love". I have read through half of of this long poem, and perhaps will make myself finish it by this evening.

Speaking of love and bookstores, in my brief foray last night, I also managed to read about half an essay on Rilke by Seven Brikets[2] from his book "Readings". And Brikets's retelling of all the logrolling Rilke managed to do to support his calling had me laughing in the aisle. The essay also brought back to my attention John Berryman's famous prounouncement, in the voice of the drunk misygonist Henry of his "Dreamsongs": "Rilke was a jerk". While I know better than to dig into the wretched personal lives of artists, writers and poets[2], Rilke's life was indeed particularly appaling.

I was discussing this last night with my friend K, when she used the label "jerkface" to describe someone - Allan Bloom[3] I think. This meta-issue had actually come up many times before in my blabbering on artists (or more generally, great men's) lives around women. They seem to think that their greatness should be discounted because it came at a cost of them being absolute "bitches" to their families; classic cases in point would be Prince Siddartha, and now Rilke. This also drives some women to hate Woody Allen intensely for his disaster of a biography. I think I am more forgiving of these transgressions as women should be too, for isn't art supposed to be redemptive?

Finally, I think I might have figured out what Max Beerbohm was saying in his excellent parody[4] of the James-ian style, in his book of parodies on writers, "The Christmas Garland". And as I discovered last night, if you are typing out Henry James like utterances, it helps if you can hold your breath as if you were just about to take a dump when feeling extremely constipated[5].

We end this chautauqua with this public service cartoon (supplied by witty K) on minding your language:

[1] I skimmed, and even skipped over some of, the long philosophical bits to enjoy the motorcycle travelouge bits. I still think Prisig would have been an great travel writer, along the lines of Bruce Chatwin, if he wasn't batshit crazy