Markson – Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

Can Ramblings Make a Novel?

wittgensteins mistressMarkson, David (1988). Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press.

This 250-page book is presented as the almost-stream-of-consciousness of a middle-aged woman who is the last living animal on earth. Unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, it is not a narrator’s record of a supposed stream of consciousness, but rather, a putative journal. The journal is not quite stream-of-consciousness, because one cannot type as fast as one can think, and some self-editing is inescapable when writing. The device of having her thoughts be in journal form solves the timing problem that made Ulysses unconvincing as a genuine stream-of-consciousness.

The woman claims she was mad during certain times of her life, but her journal seems only loopy, showing the mental distortions of social isolation you would expect if you were the last person on earth. But perhaps she really is mad, alone in a beach house, self-secluded from normal society. Just because it’s in a journal doesn’t make it true, especially when the journal is a work of fiction. Such consideration does raise Wittgensteinian questions about the relations among thought, language, and world, but only by implication. Nothing like that is addressed in the book.

The woman writes about her past, her travels around the world, her interests in art and music. She is, or was, a painter. Being the last person on earth is no big deal to her; in fact she never mentions it. The reader infers it over time as we realize her travels around the world were in search of other humans. Finding none, she took shelter in the world’s great museums where she often burned picture frames for heat. Nearly all the great museums of Europe are mentioned, along with some superficial mention of the art contained in each.

So the book is not a post-apocalyptic thriller, alas. We never learn what happened to all the other people, or the animals. There are no birds, fish, or mammals. The botanical world is apparently unaffected, despite the absence of pollinators. There is no mention of  bacteria or viruses. Presumably the woman is in perfect health. There are no corpses, and we don’t know when the big whatever happened, but the great cities are not bombed out or burned down. She drives around in cars found still to have gasoline in them, and keys, too, presumably. She eats canned food she finds in stores, still well-stocked.

When we meet her, she has given up her search for others, and types her diary for reasons unknown. Frustratingly, she has nothing to say about “what happened,” very little about who she is or was, and no thoughts on what it means to be the last person on earth; what it means for history, evolution, death, and life; what it means spiritually, morally, personally, or even practically. The central fact of her story means nothing to her.

Nor does she consider why she is writing a journal that no one will ever read. I wouldn’t do it. The nature of writing entails the possibility of a reader. Perhaps writing is her expression of hope, though it seems she has fully accepted being the last person. No interesting philosophical questions are raised, despite the book’s title. And she never was Wittgenstein’s mistress. He was gay. The title of the book signals that she is an unreliable narrator.

So what does she write about? Nothing. She has no thesis, no point to make, no story to tell. Instead, she rambles, reciting jumbled and incomplete memories of her travels, and of history, literature, and painting. No science, architecture, mathematics, jurisprudence, politics, ethics, psychoanalysis, religion, education, or popular culture. Just the arts, and name-dropping a few philosophers. She is fond of apocryphal anecdotes about Rembrandt, Brahms, and Homer.

The focus then is not on what she writes about, but on how she writes, and therefore, how she thinks. The book is really a portrait of a mind disintegrating, an accurate representation, I believe, as the mind is fundamentally social. There could be no Robinson Crusoe, in fact. An isolated human being would lose his or her mind rather quickly. Perhaps that’s why Defoe introduced Friday as an interlocutor to Crusoe. Unfortunately, watching a mind fall apart in inconsequential ramblings is not very interesting.

The woman seems to know her memory is faulty so the narrative is replete with irrelevant digressions, tedious repetitions, and annoying self-corrections. There is a praising afterword by David Foster Wallace, which should be a clue or warning for potential readers. The book is an interesting work of experimental fiction, but for my taste, empty of content.

McCarthy – No Country For Old Men

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

No Country for Old MenAction-Thriller With Literary Chops

McCarthy, Cormac. (2005). No Country for Old Men. New York: Vintage.

An aging sheriff in 1980’s Texas despairs over the violent crime drugs trafficking has brought to his county, making it into a landscape he hardly recognizes. Thus the title of the book.

The story begins when a local welder, Moss, is hunting. He stumbles across bullet-riddled vehicles, dead bodies, and a canvas bag containing $2.5 million.  He takes the money (notwithstanding the weight, overlooked in the story. That much money in hundreds would weigh over 200 pounds). Later he returns to the scene, and is spotted by drug mobsters who want the money. Moss gets shot up, but escapes, and the chase is on.

Investigating the mass murder, Sheriff Bell realizes Moss is involved somehow, and searches for him.  Meanwhile a rogue psychopath, Chigurh, relentlessly hunts Moss to get the money. At the same time, a psychopath hit man  is hired by the drug cartel to kill Chigurh. There’s some good cat-and-mouse, multiple shootouts, lots of blood, innocent victims, and shattered glass.

How does it turn out?  The ending is inconclusive. The story just stops when McCarthy hit his page count. Consequently, the novel has no particular meaning or message, beyond the book’s title. Sheriff Bell waxes philosophical at the end, in a failed attempt to inject some meaning through deadly backstory.

With the exception of that final 40 pages, the book is well-written, extremely well-edited, with some innovations in narration and dialog that any writer can learn from. The book is an easy read, although it helps if you’ve seen the movie because the storyline in the book is so compressed, it is often not clear how characters seem to know what they know, and why they appear unexpectedly where they do. The movie wisely omits that last 40 pages of marshmallow-speak, but otherwise is faithful to the book. You can’t read Sheriff Bell’s lines without hearing the voice of Tommy Lee Jones.

There’s no punctuation beyond periods, question marks, and capitalized names and first words of sentences. There are few commas, which keeps the action moving breathlessly, as do the short sentences. The lack of apostrophes can be annoying in contractions and possessives, but having no quotation marks is the most noticeable formatting innovation. Why no quote marks?

Bell nodded. I aint a stranger to them thoughts, Carla Jean. I am very familiar with them thoughts.

In part, the lack of quotation marks might be a stylistic flair that comports with the characters’ simple lives and language. On the other hand, it may be related to McCarthy’s innovative narrator. Unlike many third-person narrators today, this one is not “close,” that is, he never gets intimate with the characters. Rather, he reports their behavior from the outside, without judgment or comment.

He went into the bathroom. He ran his forefinger around the sink. A washcloth and handtowel had been used but not the soap. He ran his finger down the side of the tub and then wipe it along the seam of his trousers. He sat on the edge of the tub…

This is pure behavioral narration that deprives the character of interiority. We never know what a character is thinking or feeling, or what he wants, except as we can infer it from his behavior. But if that kind of behavioral reporting were continued indefinitely, the reader would become bored, because a person’s external behavior is not rich enough to satisfy our need to understand characters.

So McCarthy fudges the narrator’s behavioral constraint in several subtle ways, one of which is to omit the quotation marks. In the dialog sample above, we are almost inside the head of Sheriff Bell, who is saying what he knows and feels. Except he’s not really saying it because there are no quotation marks. The narrator could throw up his hands and say, “Hey, I didn’t make Bell say that. Look, there are no quote marks! I’m strictly on the outside, here.”  It’s a cheap gimmick, but it does soften the harshness of pure behavioral reporting.

There are other techniques used to accomplish the same end. Action chapters, all in 3P-omniscient behaviorism, alternate with short, italicized chapters in Sheriff Bell’s first-person voice. In those chapters, Bell spills his guts to the reader about what he thinks, believes, feels, values, hopes for, worries about, and so on. They are confessional, and their intimacy stands in sharp contrast to the 3P narrator’s objectivity.

There are many other writing innovations in the book, although they would probably only be noticed by other writers, yet they do contribute overall to the book’s fatalistic tone and dark mood, making it a literary success as well as a competent thriller.

Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

Remains-of-the-Day-CoverReflection of a Fatal Flaw

Ishiguro, Kazuo (1988). The Remains of the Day.  New York: Random/Vintage. 245 pp.

In 1956, an English butler reflects back on his life of service to a grand aristocrat in a grand mansion, Darlington Hall, during the tense political buildup to World War II. He is on a six-day road tour to the west of the country to visit Miss Kenton, a woman who worked under him years ago as head housekeeper. He will suggest she come to work again at Darlington Hall, now owned by an American businessman and operating at much reduced capacity.

Narration is first person, in an intimate, confessional tone, verging on second person at times when he addresses the reader directly: “…I hope you will not misunderstand my meaning here.” We feel very close, inside the character’s thoughts.  Is this butler, Stevens, an interesting enough character to sustain a novel consisting entirely of his flashbacks and ruminations?  Well, yes and no.

The life of a butler is hardly thrilling. In reminiscence, he polishes silverware and plans great banquets. His present-tense road trip to Devon is likewise mundane. He admires the countryside,  runs out of gas, stays at a country inn, watches a heavy rainstorm. The real plot is not what happens, but the gradual revelation of who Stevens is. The author very skillfully lets us see, even if Stevens cannot, that what he considers his greatest virtue, was actually a liability that crippled his entire life.

In the beginning section, Stevens reflects on what constitutes a “great” butler. He examines several hypotheses and concludes that greatness comes from “dignity,” which he takes to mean always putting one’s duty ahead of one’s own needs and emotions. That, he concludes, is his greatest virtue.

In the middle section are flashbacks to his work at Darlington Hall in the 1930’s, when His Lordship convened elaborate banquets and conferences of European leaders, including von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador. Stevens is on the periphery of conversations, busy serving the soup, so he reports only snippets, but it is enough to suggest to the reader, if not to Stevens, that Darlington was a Nazi sympathizer.

A second strand in the middle section is Stevens’ interactions with Miss Kenton, head of housekeeping. They have a childish, competitive relationship that often turns hostile, in a petulant way. These interactions skillfully let us see, though Stevens cannot, that Kenton loves him.  Their insistent formality with each other creates a delicious tone of propriety to contrast the unspoken emotions between them.

In the final section, as Stevens drives west, the tension is palpable because we know, even if he doesn’t, that his real reason to see Miss Kenton again is because he loves her, not really to offer her a job. In the end, she reaches out to him one last time, but he maintains his dignity, one last time. He seems to grasp that his so-called dignity has cost him a life of happiness, but he can’t or won’t change. “We can’t turn the clock back,” he says.

In the end, in the remains of Stevens’ day, we aren’t sure if he is blustering nonsense to preserve his dignity, or if he really doesn’t understand what is patently clear to the reader, that life has slipped past him, leaving him empty. That is Ishiguro’s achievement, to have a first-person narrator tell us his personal and heartfelt story, while letting us understand a completely different story.

Ishiguro’s authorial flaw is similar to Stevens’ flaw. In order to pull off this tour-de-force of storytelling, he had to make Stevens so emotionally shut down that he almost ceases to be a human being. No man could be as blind as Stevens was about Miss Kenton. No person could really be that emotionally repressed and still function in society.Stevens is a bigger than life caricature that gets the message across, but crosses the line of character believability. That is Ishiguro’s fatal flaw, as preserving his “dignity” was Stevens’.

The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker prize, and was made into a wonderful movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, whose voices I could not get out of my head while reading.

Klatzky, MacWhinney, and Behrmann – Embodiment, Ego-space, and Action

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

Embodiment Egospace and ActionHow Big is the Fourteen-inch Pizza?

Adams, W.A. (2009). Embodied Cognition Gropes for Cohesion.[Review of the book, Embodiment, Ego-Space, and Action]. PsycCRITIQUES—Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, February 18, vol 54, release 7, article 6.

I once heard a customer in a pizza parlor ask the clerk, “How big is the fourteen inch pizza?”  For the contributors to this volume, that is not an unreasonable question, because they believe that much perception is understood in relation to the body, its location in space, and its activity.

Early theories of cognition focused on “disembodied” information processing, problem solving, memory retention, and computational linguistics. The embodied cognition movement arose in reaction, tapping sources like William James, Jean Piaget, James Gibson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Francisco Varela, who emphasized the importance of situational context, especially bodily context, in understanding cognition.

Perception and action  are not separate, content-agnostic cognitive modules, as traditionally taught.  The sensorimotor cycle extends from the world through the brain, and back out again, without mentality.  Paradoxically, however, most contributors to this volume are representationalists, a point of view that contradicts their basic assumptions of embodied cognition.

 Full Text

Alexie – Reservation Blues

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

Reservation BluesThe Indian Wars Today

Alexie, Sherman (1995). Reservation Blues. New York: Warner Books. 306 pages.

Chapter 1 starts with the line, “In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever arrived there by accident.”

That line sums the theme of Reservation Blues. It’s a heartfelt confession of a reservation Indian boy and his comrades. Alexie is now very much an “urban Indian,” of course, a world-renown and much-honored writer. But this book tries to show what life on the reservation was like, and still is like, for many people.

The opening imagery is fantastic, and sets the tone. Robert Johnson, legendary blues guitarist, is standing at a crossroads on the reservation. The young protagonist and narrator, Thomas Builds-the-Fire finds him there. Johnson seems sick and hurt, and Thomas offers to take him to Big Mom, an enormous Indian woman who lives in a cabin atop a mountain. Johnson believes that would be a good idea because he has had dreams of such a woman, someone who could reverse the bargain he made with the devil, selling his soul in exchange for his otherwordly ability to play the guitar.

The episode refers to the Faustian “Crossroads Legend” around Johnson (who died in 1938 at age 27): He met the devil at a crossroads (in Mississippi), and made the deal. The devil tuned his guitar for him and Johnson became a great player.

Keying off this opening scene, Johnson gives Thomas his magical guitar; Thomas gives it to his friend Victor, a drunken lout who suddenly, though intermittently, becomes able to play fantastic blues. They recruit another friend, Junior, and form a band, Coyote Springs. Thomas is the bass player and the “story-teller” (songwriter). They’re a terrible band, but the Indians on the rez appreciate their play in an abandoned grocery store.

The boys get an audition with a record label in New York. The talent scouts, Wright and Sheridan, buy the airline tickets for the band, which now includes two young Indian women (named Chess and Checkers), who were groupies but joined as backup singers.

It’s worth noting that “Wright” is the name of the U.S. Cavalry officer  who led the 1858 Indian Wars campaign that defeated the Spokane Indians, and “Sheridan” is the U.S. Army officer who famously declared that ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian.’  Alexie is fond of inserting cultural and historical references into his tale.

So Coyote Springs goes to the Big Apple, but the audition becomes a disaster when the magical guitar “turns” on Victor, attacking him. The group returns to the rez, but the tribe resents and rejects them for having left at all. Why did they try to sell their souls to the whites? Who did they think they were, attempting to have a successful life off the reservation? The mood turns dark.

The story line explores and demonstrates these larger themes: What is the Indian soul? Why do Indians, even today, still see the white man as the devil? What are the roles of music and storytelling, and dreaming in the Indian cultural life?  The novel tries to present a world view from the point of view of a young reservation Indian, Thomas, who is educated, sensitive, and thoughtful, and who doesn’t drink. Thomas is Alexie’s alter-ego. 

I enjoyed a couple of conversations with Alexie at the 2008 Port Townsend, WA film festival, which focused on films by and about Indians (He was the festival’s “official Indian,” he joked).

“Poverty is boring,” he said. “I was poor, and when you’re poor, it’s the same fears and worries and problems every day.  It’s like being in prison. There is no time.” It echoes the last line of the novel’s theme song, Reservation Blues, echo for me: “And if you ain’t got choices, Ain’t got much to lose.”

I asked him about the lack of ambition that seems to inhabit reservation culture and Indian life. He replied, “To have ambition means to accept the world of the people who destroyed you. Lack of ambition, even alcohol and drug addiction and suicide, are acts of rebellion against that.” I was skeptical.  “Are people really thinking that way?” I asked.  “Subconsciously,” he answered, “always.”

I believed him, because I believe him. I’m white; I’m the devil. I offer the magic guitar of opportunity that promises hope but will turn on you and attack you. From my culture-centric point of view, it’s hard to understand the racism and cultural and economic forces that keep the Indian wars going even today. This book successfully represents that and does it with engaging, likeable characters, stimulating imagery, original and sincere writing, and amazingly, with a light, humorous tone.  It’s an artistic masterpiece.

Steinbeck – The Winter of our Discontent

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

WinterofourdiscontentHow to Become a Rich Bastard

Steinbeck, John. (1961). The Winter of our Discontent. New York: Penguin.

In this 1961 novel, main character Ethan is a middle-aged grocery clerk in a small New England coastal town. He used to own the store he works in but he went bankrupt and now works for an Italian immigrant boss. Ethan’s family was once prominent in the town but the family lost its place. Still, Ethan accepts his history and is content, happy with his loving wife and two children, unambitious, and good-humored. He talks, sings, and quotes poetry to the canned goods in the store. Is he really content, or covering up seething rage?

His wife and kids are unhappy living on a grocery clerk’s salary, especially knowing the family was once prominent. They urge Ethan to do something. One day, for no reason, in a bizarre, unmotivated and unjustified reversal of character, he decides to rob the bank. He makes a plan and rehearses it.

Meanwhile, town council members use their political power to benefit their personal business interests. The whole town is rotten, but apparently that’s how things have  always been done. The banker urges Ethan to become a player by investing his wife’s nest egg in a new airport the council has voted on, if only they can acquire the perfect property for it, property owned by Ethan’s lifelong friend Danny, who became a drunk after the war.

Ethan offers Danny a thousand dollars for the land; Danny uses the money to drink himself to death as Ethan knew he would; Ethan becomes a major player in town and does not have to rob the bank after all.

Ethan’s financial problems are solved and his family is restored to aristocratic status, but he he worries about the ethics of how he got there.  He took advantage of Danny’s weakness; He decided to rob a bank; He took kickbacks from a grocery supplier; He anonymously turned in his boss to the Immigration Service; He took advantage of city council insider information. Ethan ruminates about whether he sold his soul to become member of the elite. Or did he behave like any normal, ambitious American who is determined to change his fate?

Ethan’s ethical breast-beating seems overwrought today, although it stands in contrast to the blasé attitude of entitlement among the monied class, blind to their disrespect of the ordinary people they exploit to sustain a higher status. Ethan is not blind to that human failing, and in the end, his self-awareness prevents him from interpreting his financial success as personal and class entitlement.  In that sense he provides a morality lesson as relevant today as it was a half-century ago (and just as inert, I suspect).

As a morality tale, I think the novel is successful, if obvious. Characters and settings are stereotypical, Ethan’s motivation is murky at best, and his personality unlikeable. The writing is light and frothy, a pleasant diversion, with excellent observations of small town life, and of course, it is Steinbeck. You could do worse.

Morrison – Song of Solomon

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

Song_of_SolomonGreat Writing, Weak Story

Morrison, Toni (1977). Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf.

This 1977 novel, Toni Morrison’s third, vaulted her to national attention. It follows the life of a black male protagonist, Milkman Dead, from late childhood to adulthood. Along the way, she creates the world of ordinary black communities, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

Milkman is an aimless boy and young man, with no particular drive or values, but his father is a relatively prosperous landlord so he is not driven to work. He eventually works for his father as a rent collector but is unenthusiastic about it. In the last third of the novel, he comes to believe in the existence of a hidden cache of gold and goes in pursuit of it, only to discover the “real gold,” his place in the larger community of his people.  Aaaaaw!

As an ardent anti-sentimentalist, I didn’t find the character’s motivations or emotions convincing or compelling. The novel is extremely well written however, so the pages keep turning, even if “nothing happens.” Morrison’s sentences are marvels of precision. Her imagination is amazing. Her sense of humor ranges from sarcasm to tongue-in-cheek. Her use of symbolism, especially Biblical, was a bit heavy-handed for my taste. So the book is an enjoyable read, but only as an example of good writing, not as an example of good storytelling, in my opinion.

The problem with the storytelling, for me, is that I am not much interested in genealogy, dark family secrets, and intra-family feuds. Granted, Morrison’s characters are inventive, unusual, interesting, and not stereotypes. But they don’t do anything but worry about their family secrets and family history. When they do act, their behavior can be so bizarre, and so poorly motivated, it often seems arbitrary.

Toni Morrison is a national icon, of course, having won the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, the National Book Award, and about every other literary award there is. So I realize I am going straight to hell for criticizing this book, one of her most famous and popular. But I don’t criticize her. I love her writing craft. I just don’t like her style of storytelling.

Robbins – Skinny Legs and All

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

skinnylegsClever For the Sake of Cleverness

Robbins, Tom (1990). Skinny Legs and All. New York: Bantam.

This novel is about Tom Robbins, who wants to show you how clever, funny, and sophisticated he is. With respect to that goal, the book succeeds.

However, does he create and motivate interesting characters? No. Does he develop an interesting story? No. Does he elucidate some significant point? No. Does he create a haunting sense of place or time? No. Does he skewer social or political practices with satire or parody? Maybe a little.

After reading this book, I felt like I had watched a TV sitcom. I chuckled and guffawed, then realized I just wasted precious hours of my life. Is there anything to learn from this novel?  Perhaps only that some people are good at remote associations, and if you think those are funny, this book is for you. I do happen to enjoy nonsequiturs, sequences of unexpected thoughts or images that have absolutely no relation to each other, so there were plenty of giggles for me.

For example, how would you complete this simile: “It was empty as  …”?  I might have said, “…a church at noon,” or “…an ice cream parlor at the North Pole,” or some such. I don’t think, even if I were smoking something, I could have come up with, “a paraplegic’s dance card.”

Funny? Yes, but only because of its extreme low frequency, not because the idea itself is funny. It is clever for the sake of cleverness. Often, Robbins’ comparisons are funny even when they make no sense at all. Consider this description of a sunrise that was “…like a neon fox tongue lapping up the powdered bones of space chickens…”  What?  I chuckled, but this is pointless, goofball humor. The ideas themselves are not funny, only their remoteness and juxtaposition are funny.

Once in a while, Robbins hits gold with an apt comparison, like calling the waning daylight of late afternoon “lame duck daylight,” or describing a woman as being “on the dry side of thirty.”  My favorite might have been a description of a man’s gaudy, mismatched clothing making a character feel as though she was being “pistol-whipped with a kaleidoscope.” There were enough of these truly creative – not just clever, but artistically creative – sentences to keep me turning the pages.

There are two and a half parallel stories in the novel. In one, a young redneck couple makes a pilgrimage to New York city in an airstream trailer that the guy, Boomer, a skilled welder, has made look like a roast turkey. His wife, Ellen Cherry, will strive to make it as an artist in the Big Apple. She doesn’t make it, but ironically, Boomer does, as his trailer/turkey becomes the toast of the avant-garde.

In the second story, five inanimate objects are on a pilgrimage from the U.S. to Jerusalem. They are, a can of beans, a dirty sock, a silver dessert spoon, a conch shell and a painted stick. Some have distinguishable personalities. Can o’ Beans, for example, tends to “fart with curiosity,” whereas Spoon thinks of herself as a Southern lady of taste and breeding. The objects have endless adventures of no consequence. For example, dirty sock gets washed away in a river, but somehow reunited with his colleagues. Funny? No. Clever for the sake of cleverness, is what I say.

The final half-story is about a cartoony, television preacher who wants to blow up Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, to cause World War Three, and hasten the Rapture. It’s a thin character with a thin story, but Robbins uses it in the last quarter of the book to create a theme of apocalypse and End Times, satirically symbolized by a Super Bowl game. 

Throughout, Robbins attempts to comment on middle-east politics. Ellen Cherry works at an Israeli-Arab restaurant across from the U.N., giving the author ample scope for commentary on middle-east politics. Robbins’ heavy-handed lectures about the history and politics of religion and on Israel in particular, are not interesting or informative. In the ultimate scene, his half-baked philosophical commentary morphs into a lecture about human self-delusion in general. Never has a novel ended with a more resounding thud.

There’s no denying Tom Robbins has his fans. His books are widely praised and wildly popular, so somebody likes them. I found this one mildly amusing, but ultimately disappointing for lack of substance or even sustained entertainment. 

Winterson – Art & Lies

Posted on by January 24, 2014
Reply

Art & LiesArt Transcends; Sex Lies. 

Winterson, Jeanette. (1994). Art & Lies. New York:Vintage

Idly, I picked up this book in a used book shop. The publisher’s blurb on the back said it was “…a daring novel that burns with phosphorescent prose on every page.”  I thought, “Yeah, sure.” I opened the book at random and to my amazement, every page I read burned with phosphorescent prose.

Is it a novel? Not in the Aristotelian sense. There is no plot, no storyline, no climax, no epiphany, no denouement. But there is life-drama, mystery, strong characterization and beautiful language. In fact the work could be read as a series of extended prose-poems.

Alternating chapters describe the lives of the three main characters, Handel, a physician-priest, Picasso, a young woman who paints, and Sappho, the pre-Socratic poet of sexuality. The three lives mildly intersect from time to time, unknown to the characters. A fourth, minor, enigmatic character who does not get her own chapters, is an aging prostitute searching for her boyfriend/john/pimp.

All these characters are on a train, going to their future, fleeing their past. The train represents the arrow of time that moves each character through their lives. Sappho, the ancient poet, represents herself, with  a lifespan of 2500 years. Picasso is not Pablo, just a young woman with that moniker, and Handel is not the 18th century composer, just a guy named Handel, (Although the prostitute’s sought-after boyfriend is named Ruggerio, a character in an opera by Handel the composer). In Handel’s life story, I had a sense of 19th century England, but other allusions, especially in Picasso’s story, place us at least in the 20th century. The location seems vaguely European. So: no fixed time or place.

The characters are fleeing themselves. Handel is trying to escape and forget a tragic surgical mistake in which he amputated the wrong breast in a botched mastectomy. That cost him his career. He’s also trying to escape his childhood, which involved long-term sexual abuse by a Catholic priest who nevertheless genuinely loved and educated him.

Picasso, literally running away from home, flees a childhood of incest forced on her over the years by her brother, and a tyrannical, dismissive family, and attempted suicide. She seeks to lose herself in her painting but may be losing her mind.

Sappho is the most difficult character. She resents that her poetry has been misunderstood or bowdlerized through the centuries. She claims to be a pure sexualist, not a romantic, not a metaphorical poet. “Say my name and you say sex,” she says. Sex alone is her topic, including its inevitable deceptions. She pontificates, beautifully, on the nature of art, despairs at the lack of passion in modern life, but it is not clear what her “mission” is, or from what, if anything, she flees. Her chapters are dreamlike.

I should read this book again, two or three times. It is laden with allusions, historical, and inter-textual references. Alas, life is too short. Based on a single read, my thought is that the title reveals the controlling theme: Art and Lies. Those are the only two elements that drive a life. The embodied life, is full of lies, lies mostly about sex.  But the mundane life of the flesh is transcended in art, which spiritually lifts one to another plane.

The  three biographies demonstrate this theme. In Sappho’s case, the lyrical language is so intense, it intoxicates the reader, proving by direct demonstration that art lifts one above the plane of flesh. That’s a brilliant innovation.

Here are samples, selected literally at random, of the kind of writing that drew me in:

Handel: “I like to look at women. That is one of the reasons why I became a doctor. As a priest my contact is necessarily limited. I like to look at women; they undress before me with a shyness I find touching…When a woman chooses me above my numerous atheist colleagues we have an understanding straight away. I have done well, perhaps because a man with God inside him is still preferable to a man with only his breakfast inside him.”

Picasso observes: “On the dark station platform, lit by cups of light, a guard paced his invisible cage. Twelve steps forward  twelve steps back. He didn’t look up, he muttered in to a walkie-talkie, held so close to his upper lip that he might have been shaving. He should have been shaving. Picasso considered the guard; the pacing, the muttering, the unkempt face, the ill-fitting clothes. In aspect and manner he was no better than the average lunatic and yet he drew a salary and was competent to answer questions about trains.”

Sappho prefers: “To carry white roses never red. White rose of purity white rose of desire. Purity of desire long past coal-hot, not the blushing body, but the flush-white bone. The bone flushed white through longing. The longing made pale by love. Love of flesh and love of the spirit in perilous communion at the altar-rail, the alter-rail, where all is changed and the bloody thorns become the platinum crown.”

The prostitute is described in third person: “Doll Sneerpiece was a woman, and like other women, she sieved time through her body. There was a residue of time always on her skin , and, as she got older, that residue thickened and stuck and could not be shaken off.”

Solves a Problem I Didn’t Have

Posted on by April 30, 2015
Reply

whirlpool-gold-gi6farxxf-refrigeratorI bought a new refrigerator. It’s lovely, stainless steel, lots of space, plenty of features. One feature is a carbon-matrix air filter to take out smells, supposedly replaces the box of baking soda. Was that a problem? It could be so construed.

But the feature that perplexes me now is the refrigerator light. Those have always posed a difficult epistemological question anyway: How do you know the light goes out when you close the door? And if you don’t know that, what else happens, or doesn’t happen when you’re not looking?  It’s a deep philosophical problem.

But my new refrigerator solves a problem I didn’t even know I had. When you open the door, the light does not come on instantly.  For a moment it’s dark inside. Then, over the course of about 1.5 seconds, the light comes on, dimly at first, then surging to its’ full 40W strength.  Every time I open the door, my reaction is “Damn light’s broke.” Then it gradually comes on and I think there is something wrong with my vision.  Did I just experience a blackout?

I’m sure I’ll get use to it, but I’m wondering, what problem does this technology solve? I never had any issues with the refrigerator light coming on when I opened the door.  Maybe if it were the middle of the night and I were grazing for a sandwich, I would be dazzled by a bright light. “Omigod!” I would shout, “What blazes creep hither?”  I don’t know. Has that ever been a problem for anyone? Sleepwalkers?