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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/reading-fleur-jaeggys-sweet-days-discipline/"></div>I tend to have many thoughts when I read a book — or does the writer’s imagination just make me more aware of them? Over the four days of taking in Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, I considered more things while reading than I ever have, probably because I’m older and life continues to cave in, with worries galore: The Future! The Present! The Past! — you bet your ass it isn’t even past.
I wasn’t so interested in the story of Jaeggy’s novel — it’s obviously a coming-of-age book, though the narrator looks back from a distance that seemingly grows more lyrical as it proceeds — since I clearly subscribe to William Gass’s “You do not tell a story; your fiction will do that when your fiction is finished. What you make is music, and because your sounds are carriers of concepts, you make conceptual music, too.” There is a music to Jaeggy, even if translated by Tim Parks. So is the music his, while Jaeggy retains a larger share of the authorship concerning the “carriers of concepts?” I don&#8217;t know, I’d like to ask her — and Tim Parks. I’d also like to ask Parks about the first page — the third and fourth sentences in the book: “He [Robert Walser] died in the snow. Photographs show his footprints and the position of his body in the snow.” Does the Italian repeat the phrase “in the snow”? It does — but it’s two words there: “nella neve.” Does it sound different? Surely. “In the snow” in English is turgid, it’s a prepositional phrase with the connotation of the famous Breughel painting “Hunters in the Snow” — the phrase conjures the image, the trudging in the snow. To monolingual ears “nella neve” is a pretty exotic flavor of ice cream, but in Italian it might rest on the ears in a similar lazy formation. I kept thinking about that ungainly repetition as I read through the first 30 pages. Why repeat that? Pretty much nowhere else is there intentional repetition. Why not “…of his body there” or “of his dead body”? Plus, the aliveness of the book is coming upon a bounty of different words, like “ecclesiastic” fitting into the right slot near the end when the narrator sees the object of her obsession (the older girl Frédérique) later in life: “She told me she had seen some cockfights in Andalusia. ‘La chaleur ne dure pas longtemps.’ And she had something Spanish about her, something ancient, something ecclesiastic.” In tandem with this, I again thought of Gass’s travails to make people understand the architecture and soul of the sentence, the world within the word. The concepts of Jaeggy are more the impressions and the shrewd juxtapositions, since the next sentence following the “ecclesiastic” (they are watching a stove on the ground) is “The blaze of heat died and the cold of the mountain tops and the glaciers swept down.” But they are in an apartment in Paris. Of course, the enduring time is their days among those vaunted Swiss mountains so many years ago in boarding school.
The book is filled with old world melancholic wisdom and carnage (Keats: “I have been half in love with easeful Death” — and Jaeggy has devoted an essay to that small man who expired in Rome). In the middle of the book there is a passage that opens one of the short unnumbered sections which comprise it:
<blockquote>Frédérique was likewise asleep while I took my walks. The crows flew low over the steep grassy slopes, hideous, boastful, cruel. I had compared them to our adolescence as they searched for a place in the earth round the school to sink their claws into. In half an hour I was already high above, filling my lungs with the cold air. The universe seemed mute. I didn’t want Frédérique, nor thought about her. She read at night, perhaps she had only just fallen asleep. In the morning she was a bit stiff, shadows under her eyes. Up on the hill I was in a state you might describe as ‘ill-happiness’. A state that required solitude, a state of exhilaration and quiet selfishness, a cheerful vendetta. I had the impression that this exhilaration was an initiation, that the sickness in the happiness was due to a magical novitiate, a rite. Then it went wrong. I didn’t feel anything particular any more. Every landscape constructed its own niche and shut itself away there.</blockquote>
Knowing only English, I comparatively thought of Paula Fox, Elizabeth Hardwick, James Salter, and Christine Schutt — but maybe that pacing also held a dash of Don DeLillo; V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee, too. This is to say that I had programmed myself to respond to these tropes, these modern bends and straightaways of cunning, biting, and bitter psychological portraits from these writers, born from 1916-1948, who were weaned on Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Evelyn Waugh, but primarily Beckett (and one could also set a certain pose for the delicious sentences [in a wholly other, though distinct way] of Melville, James, and Faulkner). This needling force also charges the late 20th-century ethos of Barthes and Sontag (she, of course, blurbed Jaeggy) — critics who came up as Beckett rearranged the literary room — which counseled that every thing that is our memory is sacred and, like Keats’s odes and the poet himself, they are open to simultaneous decay and over/under-powering romanticization (“She dwells with Beauty  — Beauty that must die”) — a negative capability so many in the twenty-first century can’t authenticate. There is so much glorious, cruel, and ethereal judgment in Jaeggy’s book that I thought back on my few visits to posh Europe and wondered if the majority (not just some) of the eyes pointed at my youth, height, and hippie-outerwear were eviscerating me by thinking Fleur Jaeggy thoughts — and, for unsurprising reasons, I imagined Isabelle Huppert’s horror-show straight-line face rearing up to smite me with only one of her least powerful of many daggers, when injecting those piercing Jaeggy words. I added to this with the truism that people rarely forgive a bad first impression — and I toppled. The actual English words of this viperous, militarily erect language in the passage are the ones so often heard: hideous, cruel, sink (verb), claws, cold, vendetta, rite, wrong, shut. Other visuals populated my brain: the frames of Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ingmar Bergman — each in turn austere, elegant, and occluded — always the black and white films, never the color ones, where the life displayed is rent, jagged, and crying out, often soundlessly.
The key part of the above passage is the narrator’s description of her “ill-happiness.” A state of “solitude” and “exhilaration.” But then: “I had the impression that this exhilaration was an initiation, that the sickness in the happiness was due to a magical novitiate, a rite. Then it went wrong.” This is the swerve, as Gordon Lish advocates might call it, but these two sentences are probably the reason why more people read than any other, since they talk to and about the reader. They say, Hey, I know you heard some things about life and have taken a few licks — I have, too. Here’s what I came away with, and, instantly, there is a metamorphic ESP/bonding — the narrator describes an aspect or a defamiliarized component of the reader’s life and now the reader and writer are looking at each other and locked — and when the narrator confides further “I didn’t feel anything particular any more” this is only more reassuring, signaling to a reader that: This person, this force, really cares about me because here they are confessing to me — a process making it much easier for a reader to project (in a good way) their confession onto the narrator, that timeless ghostly agent of the text. Wayne Booth’s literary term the “implied narrator” is the image of the writer that the reader composes as he or she reads the text — but it can complexify beyond Booth’s original concept, as one can also call it the author’s “second self” or something like Proust’s &#8220;innermost self.” These beings have more substance than any surface personae, but couldn’t it also be, beyond that, the reader’s innermost self? This is why the experience of entering Jaeggy’s world or Sleepless Nights, or W.G. Sebald (with Proust as the distant great Alp) carries the scent of acetylene as well as a rare embroidery — the result of finding oneself in fiction. The implied narrator morphs into the reader in a risky way since the reader can quickly reject such personal intrusion into their business, their soul of secrets. The decorum, distance, and constructed characters in Flaubert, James, Mann, Faulkner, Gaddis, Gass, and Pynchon, are nearly impossible to enter in the same way.
For the second last quarter of the book, I sat on a bench in Prospect Park, smelling the inevitably delayed autumn in the trees and the dirt while a variety of baby strollers pushed by nannies crossed my obstructed and unobstructed eye-line. Back in the book, my palms and underarms went sweaty with a corker Jaeggy offered: “Joy over pain is malicious, there’s poison in it. It’s a vendetta. It is not so angelic as pain” and, a few sentences on: “The wind wrinkled the dark lake and my thoughts as it swept on the clouds, chopped them up with its hatchet…” From this to goo-goo-ga-ga and back again. It was like being at a wedding or a funeral, filled with the old and the young, the long train of life — Tennessee Williams: “Art is short, but a man’s life is long” — but who was the old in my picture? Surely, the book — the wisdom, however tainted, reminded me of the recumbent gods etched onto the sepulchers in the great old European cemeteries, decaying 300- and 400-year-old houses of hardwood filled with 19th-century books, and the tireless rituals around gastronomy, even if there is a McDonald’s in a place that Mozart once lived. And then, the morning after, I finished the book with a shudder and put it down and thought how Hugh Kenner said that the most important part of a book is what happens in the five minutes after finishing it. But I was only raring up for the next book (probably a Jaeggy), because in that five minutes I had to attend to life, getting my daughter ready for school and taking her there. All that while I feared she would grow up to hate me as almost all the girl characters in the novel do their parents. So much for those five minutes — my implied narrator was haunting my daughter. And then I went further. I thought of her getting the Jaeggy/Parks words tattooed on her arm when of age: “Joy over pain is malicious, there’s poison in it. It’s a vendetta.” So much for the future. Literature: I live for this.
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On Reading Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline

On Reading Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline

tinmen-cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/time-say-goodbye-summer/"></div>Grieving is such a strange arena of blind chance. “Being lost at sea” is a good metaphor — you think you are going one way, but the water takes you toward a different destination.
During last year’s storied summer, up near where the Appalachian trail drops off one thousand feet in New Jersey, before calmly crossing a field of cows into New York, I drove back alone to our vacation house after dropping my family by friends for the afternoon. I followed the windy road, in view of that declivity and the coffee-colored rock faces nestled in a green expanse, soon to be in New York for 30 seconds before re-entering New Jersey via an old road from covered wagon times, when the Spotify mix dialed up “I&#8217;m Not the Man I Used to Be” by the Fine Young Cannibals. With those first blue though beat-filled tones, I spontaneously began to cry.
The reasons are indirect but common-sensical enough. My father, who died a year before, had taken me to see Barry Levinson&#8217;s Tin Men in the summer of 1987. The Cannibals had three songs from their forthcoming best-selling album The Raw &amp; the Cooked in that film, though not the somber tune that knocked the breath out of me. Over years of sporadically listening to the album, I shy away from the overheard hit “Good Thing,” but enjoy most of the others for their aural distance — I don&#8217;t want to ruin their good thing, so I monkishly keep listens to a minimum.
The summer of 1987 is a cornerstone in my life, beginning with my parent&#8217;s separation in June and ending just when I turned 13, with more belly fat to gird my start into hormonal eighth grade, and more fatherless than I could have imagined, though the man had only moved across the street to his mother&#8217;s house. A 12-year-old wants treats and spectacles — so during those hothouse months, aimless with no homework, he would take me to eat and then to movies I wanted to see (second-run for a dollar): Project X, Tin Men, Stakeout, and the long grown ignominious Adventures in Babysitting. I had seen it before with a friend and only dragged a nearly 50-year-old man to its badness for the selfish reason that I had some fledgling sexual attraction to Elizabeth Shue; her indolent yet inviting face and spritzed 80s hair, very like the pristine one of the girl I loved through seven grade school years (and kissed in our second) and who looked forward to the last only for the fact that she wouldn&#8217;t have to see me again after it. I enjoyed the naked thrill of hearing Shue say, “Don&#8217;t fuck with the babysitter,” in a PG film that the MPAA had eased up on.
Tin Men, the best and most adult (Full Metal Jacket would be in the fall), ended up leaving the most swirls in my brain pan with some delicious dirty-word phrasings, like “Hey, asshole! This is the ultimate &#8216;fuck you.&#8217; I just poked your wife,” Richard Dreyfuss&#8217;s smarmy comedic inflections almost always spot-on. I&#8217;d forever hated the little pissant known as Danny Devito and rooted for Dreyfuss to eventually triumph and romance Devito&#8217;s wife (Barbara Hershey) who Dreyfuss pursues to get back at him for the car accident at the beginning. Revenge is the thrust of the film (and of most Western narrative art, according to Alexander Theroux), something understandable and even appealing to a 12-year-old boy who became hooked because of the TV trailers highlighting this impulse.
My father enjoyed it, too, and laughed about how these men get mad at each other and their scheming, something more a matter of honor for people of my father&#8217;s generation and before, but now incredibly awful, bloody, and almost sure to carry innocent victims in our time. I can only see now, being a few years shy of my father&#8217;s age then, another aspect to his viewing this; how he was on his way to getting divorced — the greatest failure of his life, he told me on his deathbed — something he couldn&#8217;t have talked to me about at the time even if he ached to. I wanted to be entertained, while he was meanwhile stewing at the lowest (and scariest) point of his existence. He was not an easy man (is any writer&#8217;s father, or parents?), but the combative and solitary side somehow caught up to him and the last 20 years of his life, beginning with the birth of his first grandchild, were undesignedly of much lighter spirit. Yes, my sister and I concurred, in the days after his death; how he did change and carried a quiet dignity, never blaming or complaining during his many hospitalizations, including one of nearly a half-year, three years before another spate of months culminated in death.
All I&#8217;ve recounted hit with metamorphic force in less than a second when driving the New Jersey road that would soon welcome me temporarily into New York with a glowering sign. I know long stretches of Tin Men&#8216;s dialogue (even camera moves and cuts) by heart, as I know many other meaningless things, like baseball statistics from the 1980s and countless film and book trivia. Art takes us back to loved ones and even lets us live with them a little longer, which is probably one of the reasons why it is so vital. Tin Men is not 2001 but it is a gateway to my father; and the Fine Young Cannibals, long since disbanded, are not Bach, but they are closer to my soul in a magical way that even visions of the Star Child being reborn can&#8217;t touch — probably because it didn&#8217;t happen. Our family and friends are maybe the most important part of any work of art — they are both the ghosts that inhabit the characters, settings, and voice, and the people who shared the living space, who help us create who we are.
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Time to Say Goodbye for the Summer

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/jennifer-jason-leigh/"></div>It’s taken some years to return to 1996 and decipher just what was going on between Jennifer Jason Leigh and me. Our elder selves don’t really pay for the sins (supposed or real) of the past, they explain them away with requisite jargon and prideful omissions. Some people do so after a second beer, but I need a pen crossing paper to find my wellspring.
It must have been the Single White Female performance that first triggered something: the visage, the mysterious tone, the uniquely placed awkward gesture — all would qualify as brilliantine and they now fall under the rubric of artistry. It was a large projection of a projection; a teenage boy’s dream of lines, curves, that crickety voice, her fashion statements, her interiority — the small face at undeclared war with herself. And there was that aspect, but, being alive, I get to circumvent truth and reanimate the situation to give my transmutation a mica-glitter during these gouty pandemic days.
Her early-to-mid-nineties streak of electric performances continued with Short Cuts, then The Hudsucker Proxy, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Dolores Claiborne, and finally, Georgia — at the end of which time I am still a virgin, while she is probably the best young actress in the country. I’m happy for her and I feel the one-way connection between us, like an amputee senses the phantom leg. Just then in the midst of making student films at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, I want her to act in my forthcoming longer efforts, and indeed, I have already overcompensated — I’m ahead of schedule. The summer before, I wrote a screenplay for her and Juliette Binoche to star in (set in an as-yet unvisited Paris) and after I see Georgia at the Downer Theatre, I cavalierly sidestep a drunk couple kissing and think how I really need to figure out the matrix of registering the screenplay with the Writer’s Guild of America so no one will steal my naïve effort.
I can safely say she wasn’t someone I wanted to physically be with, for her to know my family, my bad habits — fear is often on the back side of the coin called virginity. I only wanted her emanation in different characters (and in spectral shivelight) to fire my heart or what I thought my heart might be. Fantasy makes the world go around and mine drove me to mature for the object, to be ready to receive and give, but suspecting I wouldn’t garner this reality, I could still achieve some heartfelt high through watchfulness.
And so, the other day, I watched Georgia for the first time in the 25 years now passed, happy to see something in which there is no resolution; people don’t have to magically change in the course of a running time — they will not forgive, they will not be able to see — and we might grasp how those downtrodden, reckless, desperate, and pained characters are richer in spirit than a number of “successful” people the national media continually prop up. I don’t know how Jennifer Jason Leigh could get up on a stage and act as if she is someone who believes in singing (though she can’t), but continually does because it is the only thing keeping her from death. Passion and spirit are two qualities long grown counterfeit in the age of YouTube stars and social media influencers who risk no live audience redress to immediately find out how foolish they are. When Leigh sings (not quite the right verb — “yells,” or rather, “emotes”) the eight-and-a-half-minute Van Morrison song “Take Me Back,” I couldn’t help shedding tears — not romanticizing our invisible connection or necessarily feeling the character’s pain, or wonderweeping at Leigh’s abilities. This scene (wonderfully staged and edited by director Ulu Grosbardt) is a florabundant monument for the enormous pain in the world in 1996 and certainly now, as the country we are living in is to most empathetic minds not what we want to experience:
<blockquote>Take me back, take me back, take me back 
Take me way back, take me way back, take me way back 
Take me way back, take me way back, take me way back 
Take me way back, take me way back, ah! 
Take me way, way, way, way, way, way, way back, huh!</blockquote>
The muse needed a vessel and Leigh keyed into a light which could ennoble trespass and be a beginning, a portal for people who saw her — a true time machine to the thing itself, their memorial life.
Soon generations will not know that once, people only had magazine pictures of the stars they wanted to see at something that could be called “their fingertips.” It was probably Entertainment Weekly that I kept on a shelf — a profile of her, a posed picture with a herky-jerky smile not in character. When I looked I didn’t lust, but I imagined — some cold iron sensation traveling up my neck and stopping in the eyes, saying, I so desire to get to the other world, that world inside this one, where art is made and people talk about their jagged and splendid feelings, not who won the game, who won the election, who we hate for fucking up our car. I lost the magazine sometime down the line, but I carried shards of that sunbursting urge into my next fearful day on the planet — then another, then another, and then, after a while, the frozen sea within began its thaw.
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Jennifer Jason Leigh and Me

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/meretricious-marriage-story/"></div><blockquote>
<h5>&#8230;a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, our social life, in our vices. [&#8230;] It is the secretions of one’s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one  gives to the public. What one bestows on private life — in conversation&#8230; or in those drawing-room essays that are scarcely more than conversation in print — is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.</h5>
<h5>— Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve</h5>
</blockquote>
&nbsp;
What seems to happen in Marriage Story is that Noah Baumbach has continued to take himself in his art too seriously, by which I mean a callow didacticism inherent in his superficial self — spawned in The Meyerowitz Stories — is given more license, and though there are some fine moments, the whole feels misquilted. Slow fades to black break up the rhythm, granting the whole no timing — the perfectly calibrated comedic cues of Greenberg, Frances Ha, and Mistress America are mostly gone, save for the beginning montage and the scene where Nicole&#8217;s (Scarlett Johansson) sister (Merritt Wever, who the film needed more of) serves Charlie (Adam Driver) divorce papers. Blending the serious and the comedic is an incredibly difficult feat. Woody Allen (Baumbach&#8217;s obvious precursor) successfully married the two modes in Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, and Irrational Man, but during Baumbach&#8217;s journey along these new paving stones there are stumbles, mostly stemming from the script.
Marriage Story, like Phantom Thread, carries an underdeveloped narrative vertebrae of mass appeal that doles out more and more concessions for easy audience identification, rather than reveling in their disreputable characters. What makes Baumbach&#8217;s and Paul Thomas Anderson&#8217;s best films soar is their rootedness with their misfit protagonist or protagonists. Baumbach cherishes the asshole in his three triumphs, but in Marriage Story, Charlie doesn&#8217;t have enough asshole in him. It&#8217;s Driver&#8217;s film (he gets plenty more screentime), but there is something currying favor encoded in his lines, with a backstory that is more name brand soup than thick homemade stew. He is a man who struggles to have time with his son. There are many men like this, but by itself, such a fact is not a requirement to feel for him. We don&#8217;t see too much of his life as a theatre director, though it is the main reason for the marriage&#8217;s destruction. More than a few things just happen without much preparation: suddenly, he&#8217;s singing and suddenly, she&#8217;s doing a comedic dance skit with her mother and sister, whose previous fireworks together makes this somewhat uncalled for. There&#8217;s a puerile gimmick to Charlie cutting himself in front of a court evaluator in the custody battle, as well as the film&#8217;s last gesture of the shoe tying that might speak to the minds of Oscar voters or people who don&#8217;t want to think too hard about art or life, but smacks as tawdry — almost “first thought, best thought.” In conjunction, the Randy Newman score sounds too much like Terms of Endearment and brings with it that cloying treacly tone which uses an aural onion to make sure the audience&#8217;s eyes are crying, mirroring the script&#8217;s own insistence.
Why show only a few minutes up front of the couple&#8217;s togetherness? With so little time dramatizing their togetherness, the relationship seems oxymoronically not so important anyway. We don&#8217;t know what is at stake — a bread and butter phrase of token critics everywhere — but this leads to the “what the artist has to say” bromide, by which I don&#8217;t mean wisdom or insight, only form. A filmmaker says what she feels through the medium, i.e. what she feels is translated onto the frame, the camera&#8217;s positioning, the editing, and in the souls of the actors who speak her lines, the mainstay of Baumbach&#8217;s cinema. But this translation is garbled. The film is more a self-help pamphlet on divorce — yes, there is rage, and three stripes of the scum of the earth divorce lawyer, but this is the familiar surface most people are well acquainted with. I hope we ask art not to give a simple recounting, but a much deeper blast into our brain that reflects life&#8217;s beauty, ugliness, and uncanniness, something Alan Parker&#8217;s Shoot the Moon, from 1982, does contain — a work that could be imbibed as antidote to this hampered effort. It also begins at the breaking point, but the essence of the marriage comes out over the rest of the running time. That is to say, the characters define how they came to be distraught without flashback (in laconic Carver/Lish dialogue and with children taken much more seriously than merely pawns), whereas in Marriage Story, they simply cope.
With the help of Greta Gerwig, no one has captured the beyond lost generation of 20- and 30-year-old Americans like Baumbach (her generation, not his) did in the three films starring her — all more comedy-laden. Laughter can put one in touch with the tragedy of so many people taking their personal, exiguous lives too seriously, while ignoring the greater world around them. Too many of these same people feel that anything as earnest as unsentimental melodrama is dismissible and cancel-worthy, but comedies let one&#8217;s piper get paid in the days or even years after viewing, when what used to taste so sweet (rampant ego-mania) turns spiteful. This is exemplified in W.S. Merwin&#8217;s translation of Hadrian&#8217;s poem “Little Soul”:
<blockquote>Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things</blockquote>
In those three films, Ben Stiller and Gerwig are completely self-absorbed until they are justly cut down to size. Someone tells them to grow the fuck up. That courtesy is not extended to the principles of Marriage Story. Instead there is the touchy-feely, Hallmark-Oscar sentiment, “Don&#8217;t worry folks, it will be alright.”
The influence of Eric Rohmer (Baumbach named his first child the Frenchman&#8217;s pseudonymous last name) should not be underestimated. Baumbach has subsumed some of the playful montage aspects in Rohmer&#8217;s whimsical yet dramatic and diaryesque films Claire&#8217;s Knee, Pauline at the Beach, The Green Ray, and A Tale of Winter (see especially the Sacramento section in Frances Ha). But Rohmer likely didn&#8217;t say to himself, “I&#8217;m going to make a film about a father dying,” or, “This is my divorce film” — both acid 21st-century catchphrases that offer a bleak commentary about where art is.These claims keenly feel like Baumbach&#8217;s aim in the last two works, rather than the more fanciful approach in three triumphs, where the shooting and editing match the mood of the enterprise, which isn&#8217;t insistent on “saying” anything, as Kubrick averred,
<blockquote>I don’t think that writers or painters or film makers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form: they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don’t think that any genuine artist has ever been orientated by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.</blockquote>
This serious-sickness has become widespread — David O. Russell made one of the greatest comedies in American cinematic history, Flirting with Disaster, before embarking on tendentious projects — beginning with The Fighter, where he professes to be so invested in the characters&#8217; lives — but which do not warrant a second look. The gloss in those and The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story betrays any deeper artistic merits or uncompromised vision, so much so, that, after seeing these disappointing works, and being someone who looks to art to love it as I do other humans, only the direness of Louise Gluck&#8217;s poetry describes my exhaustion:
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>Do you see?</blockquote>
</blockquote>
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
&nbsp;
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?</blockquote>
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Meretricious Marriage Story

Meretricious Marriage Story

babyshark

puertorico

capture

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/baby-sharks/"></div>Some wordsmiths claim they work by serendipity. Certainly James Joyce would have qualified. When Samuel Beckett was taking dictation from Joyce for what was then called Work in Progress, at a knock at the door, Joyce broke off and said, “Come in.” Reading it back afterwards, Joyce let the “Come in” stand.
There is a root system in World Literature that rivals any other man-made thing on the planet, where languages mingle, shorting or exploding the ideas and poetics they contain. I had just been corresponding with Paul Skinner, editor of the Ford Madox Ford Society&#8217;s journal, when I heard, in an obscure online lecture from 2012 at a Paris Poetics conference, the poet Geoffrey Hill describe his serendipitous discovery of a passage in a nearly forgotten book by Ford Madox Ford. Between St. Dennis and St. George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations was republished by Forgotten Books two years ago. According to Hill, it is a book of anti-Prussian propaganda published at the height of WWI. Inside, Ford celebrates French culture (he was a Francophile and knew pages of Flaubert and Maupassant by heart), promoting its arts and the lifestyle of its citizens. About mid-way through, he writes a curious and awing sentence about literature&#8217;s importance:
<blockquote>If you will read with great care and assimilate with a humble intelligence — for humility is necessary in approaching the study of words, and your mind must be utterly cleared of any trace of preconception — if, then, with humility and attention you will read the following sentences you will know more of France than if you spend months and months and months in one of the large hotels near the Tuileries Gardens&#8230;</blockquote>
And there follows the fourth paragraph of Gustave Flaubert&#8217;s “Un Coeur Simple” from Trois Contes, which gives a detailed account of the widow Madame Aubain&#8217;s small house, ending with, “Two deep arm-chairs, tapestry covered, flanked the yellow marble mantelpiece in the style of Louis XV. The clock in the middle represented a temple of Vesta — and the whole room smelled slightly musty, for the floor was lower than the garden.” Thereafter Ford offers six pages of close textual analysis. It is an infamous paragraph within an infamous novella within an infamous book — one Gertrude Stein translated into English as an exercise. Ezra Pound took much about technique from Ford and a few of Flaubert&#8217;s sentences from that paragraph are to be found in his Canto VII. Ford, after the example of Flaubert, helped change how people wrote English prose. His aim, per Pound, was “the just word” and “good writing as opposed to the opalescent word, the rhetorical tradition.” In the midst of the war to end all wars, Ford himself read Flaubert&#8217;s just words iconologically:
<blockquote>Modern life, the modern life of our great cities, has got hideously too far from the quiet rooms where sit the mothers of the race — the quiet rooms that smell faintly of mould because they are a little below the level of the garden. And, if these are hideous days, with hideous occurrences devastating appalling nights, that is very much because the world has got too far away from Mme. Aubain&#8230;</blockquote>
We are 100 years from the Great War now and there is barely anyone alive who can remember actual scenes of it or the bloody fields in aftermath. A popular notion is that time is moving faster. Don DeLillo is always good on this topic. In a 20-year-old essay, he writes about the “drama of white-hot consumption and instant waste,” observing, at the cusp of the internet era, how “the microwave, the VCR remote, the telephone redial button and other time collapsing devices may make us feel that our ordinary household technology reflects something that flows through the deep mind of the culture, an impatient craving for time itself to move faster.”
As time revs up, it seems the past falls quicker and more fully out of memory. I&#8217;ve just hit the age which is (in)famous for recommended colonoscopies. In day to day life I rarely come into contact with someone in my age bracket who remembers the release of the American hostages in Iran, just after the 1980 election, my first political memory. I do remember seeing Star Wars in the theater at three, and I&#8217;m sure many people would prefer to talk about that, but I don&#8217;t. Our memories are bound to trick us, to play keep-away or engorge the ego and add another delusion of grandeur, as in how we “swam” with dolphins, though we were near shore and the dolphins were at least a third of a nautical mile away. In numerous op-eds and social media messages, a repeatedly promoted notion is how we are losing memory — that is we have to be, in order to be suckered back into electing fascist-like leaders, while extremists on both sides consciously or unconsciously take after the worst of humanity&#8217;s past.
Time and memory are on the move, cresting and sinking in frightening, unforgiving spasms. It&#8217;s not a coincidence that the internet has been around for about 25 years. Artifacts used to be a craze with many hours spent deciding what to put in the cornerstone of a building or a Mars-bound space capsule. Now, basically most everything is catalogued on the internet. You can&#8217;t eat the internet but you can get almost all the other things humans want out of life on it. The most common pose of a human in a developed country is to sit, stand, or lay while clicking and scrolling — though a semi-driver who recently ran over someone on the road evidently watched porn while commandeering his big rig to become a murder weapon. But there are multiple stories like this every day — that is what the corrupting media, which upholds a wide end of our plutocracy, is for — keeping us entertained so as not to disturb pace of the widening income gap.
So what is emblematic of our time, which is roughly the last 25 years, starting with the infancy of the internet to the present? What can tell us, like the Flaubert paragraph, about our society? My answer is the image of a shark swimming next to a car on a flooded highway or street.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-13114" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/capture.jpg" alt="" width="743" height="492" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/capture.jpg 743w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/capture-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 743px) 100vw, 743px" /><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-13113" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/puertorico.jpg" alt="" width="1" height="1" />
I first saw this doctored image during Hurricane Sandy because it was the only hurricane situation I&#8217;ve been in and I watched for up to date carnage on social media, parsing plenty of other doctored and altogether fake photos. Actually, it debuted on a street in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Irene.  Apparently, the junk artist who constructed it — a person following the definition of a counterfeiter given by Hugh Kenner: “&#8230;he imitates not things but occasions, and that a work&#8217;s historical context, real or feigned, is part of its meaning” — took a 2005 National Geographic Africa picture of a kayak on water and photoshopped in a rearview mirror, added the wall and the highway&#8217;s concrete barrier, dialed down the deep blue sea color to treacly shallow aqua, and voilà, a creation that maybe took an entire hour from conception to completion, and, probably, immediate dissemination. Was he or she a radical green who wanted to convince the naysayers about climate change, or maybe just a bored teenager, who certainly spent some time constructively? Tens of thousands of people believed and will believe this image, which reappears whenever a major hurricane or tropical storm hits the shore.
But as far back as the 1997 film Wag the Dog, one could see how computers could manipulate not just images, but moving pictures, to create a simulacrum of war. There is something deeper to this pissoir image, something greater, beyond how well it took people in. It is speaking in the tradition of an Andy Warhol soup can, without signature, yet it is only unsigned so as to appear real. The junk artist (or counterfeiter or agent provocateur) who assembled it, thoughtfully reproduced the new standard of taking a photograph out the window of a car while driving, except it&#8217;s not awkwardly angled enough.
But the philosophy behind its creation is what makes it emblematic, an image to put alongside Duchamp&#8217;s Mona Lisa, the “Don&#8217;t Tread on Me” flag, and probably the picture of the sailor kissing the girl on V-J Day, also staged to a degree. It was made to sow fear, and/or humor. But the major difference from the Flaubert paragraph is that you do not need to read it with great care and assimilate it with humble intelligence — no. You don&#8217;t have to do much of anything because it so typifies the twitching trigger finger behind our current perceptions, our feelings toward art, people, and the sun. It is full of sass and snark, as weightless as cotton candy, all surface, with no moral consciousness, no conception of history, just a tawdry tease to tempt us to think the end of the world might be closing in.
In 100 years there may be no “artwork,” whether literary, visual, aural, or otherwise that so embodies our era. Not even the tweet, some fatuous forlorn pronouncement utterly egoistic and untrue, is as telling as this image — for isn&#8217;t iconology, as Guy Davenport says, “the true study of the world, the true way to criticize anything”? Like that paragraph of “Un Coeur Simple,” this image will inform someone living one-hundred years from now (earth willing) about many of our wayward hours at this moment.
Images dominate us now much more than words — images, no matter the veracity, are our ideas, like the understudy of a star actor, with “text” only as the optional seasoning. Harold Bloom averred that thinking depends almost entirely on memory, of which reading, and especially reading disagreeable things, helps build up, foundation to vane. A too-large segment of the population, situated on the extremes of the two political parties, seems content to dismiss and bully, to banish at the drop of a hat (a thumb jerk against the screen) because they are unable to hear anything contrary — the slightest eye twitch can be as provoking as the Archduke&#8217;s assassination.
The headwaters bend a bit but not too much when you mix the extremists with the half of the country that doesn&#8217;t vote, but by and by the parties merge and submerge and one might make sense of it with the stark term called “anarchical plutocracy,” a view forwarded by Geoffrey Hill, but which originated with William Morris in his 1883 essay “Art Under Plutocracy.” It means a system, headed by the wealthy, which “destroys memory and dissipates attention,” where too many succumb to consumerism and are “self-satisfied with the offer of total solipsistic pleasure in the self” — social media&#8217;s legacy. When fused with the “resistance,” most of which is angry and hate-filled messaging to match the psychosis on the right, are we, as Hill believed, not taking seriously enough what is going on? Are there too many addictive creature comforts that keep us enfolded and quite sanitary, only able to publicly foment all the bitter heart-scald it&#8217;s become tantamount to display with our own private but now public address systems?
Perhaps, in the style of the unnameable junk artist, too many of our friends and neighbors are on the path of a lifestyle choice which essentially rebrands them as counterfeiters, those who sow discord under the aegis of resistance, those who curry favor with the pitter-patter or sonic boom of ass-kissing for all to see, and those who get further from their feelings, and those who become more automaton-like, more disabled from joy, pain, and sadness by tracking their ego&#8217;s day like the stock prices on the ticker-tape. One hundred seventy-five years ago, Emerson wrote, “We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great men.” Things of this sort have a track record, but we don&#8217;t have go much further than the Senate Chamber and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to see who is in charge of allowing now, with “great” perhaps being the furthest adjective from the truth.
Someone looking at the shark photo 100 years from now will also notice the “person” or “tulpa” is sitting in their car, living by recording what is interesting to them, but what is interesting only in so far as it will instantly get them attention. There are no humans in the counterfeit image, only a sliver of a ghostly car. It is all perspective.
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Baby Sharks

marianne-moore-large

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/marianne-moores-silence/"></div>The mishmash of the poet (author) with the speaker of the poem (fiction), in verse or prose, is a misprision often attacked by the greats, whether William Gaddis, via one of his characters (“They think if something happened to them that it’s interesting because it happened to them”), or Geoffrey Hill, writing on the late 20th century dependence on “the quotidian and how it has been, with significant exceptions, overvalued as the authenticating factor in works of the imagination. The poem itself, assessed in this way, becomes the author’s promise to pay on demand, to provide real and substantial evidence of a suffering life for which the poem itself is merely a kind of tictac or flyer.” The collocation has become so radioactive in our culture, one searches for a foothold along the slippery rocks near pop parlance’s viscous lagoon.
Luckily, Marianne Moore detailed her “borrowings” in the notes sections of her various books. The first one held the caveat, “acknowledgements seem only honest,” adding the proviso that more fanciful readers might “take probity on faith &#8230; and disregard the notes.” In “Silence,” a poem published almost 100 years ago in The Dial (October 1924), Moore paints a picture that can easily be consigned to the confessional poet realm that came to dominate English-language poetry from the 1950s onward.
<blockquote>My father used to say, 
“Superior people never make long visits, 
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave 
nor the glass flowers at Harvard. 
Self reliant like the cat— 
that takes its prey to privacy, 
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth— 
they sometimes enjoy solitude, 
and can be robbed of speech 
by speech which has delighted them. 
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; 
not in silence, but restraint.” 
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.” 
Inns are not residences.</blockquote>
All but two and a half lines are in quotations marks, Moore’s quotation marks. I can hear the murmurs of interpretation — e.g. “To have had such a bilious paterfamilias as he &#8230; someone who would talk in tedious epigrams” — but something happens within the long block of the speaker’s father’s speech: his thought patterns don’t match anything said from “Self reliant like the cat—” to “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.” It is a more lyrical voice, concomitant with the detours and witticisms of the speaker’s voice in many Moore poems. It is maybe how the speaker’s father would like to describe himself, if he had imagination, but he can’t — and wouldn’t — because if he understood the tenure of those lines, he would object, except for the last one, “not in silence, but restraint,” which seems a retort to the speaker’s (not the father’s), “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;” with the semi-colon being the net between the two sparring family members. It is unimaginable the father could believe such a sentiment. He is caught up in pontificating to the “silent” people, like his spawn, whether male or female, who is “self reliant” and certainly has a higher propensity to be “robbed of speech / by speech which has delighted them,” as most poet types, whether poetasters or the real thing, do.
Even if the poem can be read this way — more about the reaction of the progeny and less about the buffoonish father — it becomes even more confessional. And if one takes associative pleasure in it, such as thinking, My father or mother was a hard-ass, too, so much the better. Poetry can comfort and assuage, it just doesn’t comfort and assuage everyone — at least that’s what those people claim.
Although, the father of Marianne Moore never said the things set out in the poem. He wasn’t a success like the figure here. Moore never met him; he suffered a psychotic episode before she was born and her parents separated. In fact, according to Moore’s notes, Miss A.M. Homans, Professor Emeritus of Hygiene at Wellesley said, “My father used to say, ‘superior people never make long visits, then people are not so glad when you’ve gone.’” “Self reliant like the cat” and beyond, up until “Nor was he insincere in saying,” is all Moore, until philosopher Edmund Burke makes an appearance with the line, “’Make my house your inn,’” from A Life of Burke by James Prior, before the coup de grace “Inns are not residences,” which is, again, Moore, infusing more pomposity into the situation: the joke’s on the father, even if he thinks he’s a good citizen.
So the poem is a construct, like much of Moore’s work. As Guy Davenport writes, “Her subjects are those of a mind intent on seeing things not only for what they are precisely, but how they act in and with the imagination.” Her methodology demonstrates a good exercise in creativity: listen to people, read some old books, think, and presto, poetry. Is there a sense of being robbed out there? I can imagine a few of the people who were outraged by the James Frey scandal might feel a little swindled here, especially if they repeatedly stoke their cognitive experience on identifying with the author’s pain.
Perhaps the penultimate line is most telling: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence,” which is the truest of all the epigrams and is probably a version of something Moore read, forgot, but engrafted into her thought — that synthesizing in artistry called “Putting wisdom in your own words.” The expected emotional discharge — on the order of “I hate my father” — is never stated, but forwarded obliquely to give the poem’s tragedy more potency: the speaker won’t talk directly to the father. Silence is very far from restraint, it is a glorious weapon and often the only one available.
Sometimes masques or personas are very close to the source (the writer), and the closer they seem, the more latitude one has with the audience, more trust; and the audience is happy to comply, even to be played. In the spirit of Moore’s infamous line describing poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” here her artistry says, “Make my poem your inn.” To those invested in pari-mutuel pain, the poem magically adds, Take what you need, there’s enough to go around. And perhaps it’s fitting to end with Wallace Stevens’s shrewd take-away on the many-faceted Moore from a review, further imbricating the relationship of the poet and the speaker of the poem, with a third entity, the person:
<blockquote>Miss Moore’s form is not the quirk of a self-conscious writer. She is not a writer. She is a woman who has profound needs. In any project for poetry &#8230; the first effort should be devoted to establishing that poets are men and women, not writers.</blockquote>
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On Marianne Moore&#8217;s &#8220;Silence&#8221;

gerke-naipaul

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/return-enigma/"></div>Once, in an email, after I&#8217;d named W.G. Sebald as the barometer of the novel in our century, a friend wrote of V.S. Naipaul&#8217;s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), describing it as “sort of like Sebald before Sebald.” Months later I finally put eyes on the page, but the opening swarm of perceptions about the English countryside threw me. This wasn&#8217;t a novel (though of course, it was), but, at the same time, it was far afield from reportage. Bricolage it was, and the reality of Naipaul&#8217;s time in the countryside bent and swerved to the extra-literary, to the whims of a narrator plainly him, though self-scalped. Some 10 years of time had been flattened, fractured, and upended to spawn a matrix of narration that had then been desiccated and reestablished — a broken mirror autobiography glazed in the modernist mode. I petered out, but knew I&#8217;d be back in a better mind.
Another writer friend dubbed him V.S. “Corrugated Iron” Naipaul. Every book, 15 fiction and 15 non-fiction, contains this word, sometimes donning a hyphen, sometimes not. In Trinidad, where he grew up, the use of this building material was widespread and he would often see more of it on his many journeys into other developing nations. By the time he began Enigma in 1984, he enjoyed a stardom few writers in America ever achieve, gracing the cover of Newsweek in 1980. That year, he&#8217;d just written about the Republican National Convention in Dallas for the New York Review of Books, a periodical that carried much of his travel writing over the years, including the nearly-full text of several books. What to say about the Reagan World only came to him when he was back home in England, responding not to the “staged occasion, but the things around the occasion.” He wrote Enigma in the same oblique manner, in a continual searching: “&#8230;finding experience where I thought there had been nothing&#8230;” Indeed Enigma might be one of the best how-to books on novel writing because the narrative is the process and the veil is rent to show the hard-to-imagine-truth of how the writing of a book is the discovery of what it should be, how it goes in ways never planned until the words flow.
Large portions of Enigma appeared in The New Yorker prior to its publication, with one section spanning 50 magazine pages. In March of 1987, Knopf released it. Ostensibly it is the account of his time in a cottage on an estate holding a large manor house, until later he purchases his own cottages nearby. Broken into four parts and an epilogue, Naipaul outlines the area and its surroundings, near to Stonehenge, in the manner of the 19th century country writers Richard Jefferies and William Cobbett, the later being referenced in the book. The vivid prose deconstructs the very act of looking that is so central to a novel of perceptions:
… here the rivers of the chalk valleys all around met and ran together, the water always clear, giving an extraordinary brilliance to scattered pieces of litter, the water seeming (like glass paperweights or like photographs) to have the power to isolate ordinary or well-known objects and force their details on the eye.
Given his own Trinidadian background, he lays out his autobiographical, Proustian program very early on:
That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate […] with few connections to the present […] I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.
He talks about the books he wrote while staying there, especially In a Free State (1971), as well as his own health concerns. The most glaring omission is his wife Pat. She often resided there with him — when she initially read drafts, she thought about libel.
When one considers Naipaul, the best adjective to encompass both him and his writing is “severity.” When I&#8217;ve foisted Enigma onto others, I&#8217;ve described it as pastoral, though it is heavily concerned with severe portraits of neighbors seen through Naipaul&#8217;s discerning eyes. He thus incorporates the hidden form of autobiography, that is, coloring one&#8217;s own psychic makeup by detailing others&#8217;. The neighbors he portrays often live on the grounds of the estate itself, working in various guises: from a gardener, a car-hire-man, a servant, and a caretaker to the invalid landlord who Naipaul only sees twice in his time there. In casting these portraits, Naipaul goes by way of deduction, detailing what clothes they wear, their faces, their explicit emotions, and how they use language in what few words they say to him:
The new dairyman was an ugly man. His wife was also ugly. And there was a pathos about their ugliness. Ugliness had come to ugliness for mutual support; but there had been little comfort as a result.
His sentimentality frightened me. It was the sentimentality of a man who could give himself the best of reasons for doing strange things.
These psychologically-pungent miniatures are blunt, even caustic, but they certainly contain as much of Naipaul&#8217;s soul as those he seizes upon. Naipaul started in radio and the concision of material required to fit time-slotted “stories” probably helped formulate these tart rejoinders to another person&#8217;s world. This economical style expands to detail cultures and countries in the travel books, as in his razor-wire nod to Buenos Aires from “The Return of Eva Peron,” (written in those years) wherein lies “the stupefying nightclub, which enables people who have said everything already to be together for hours without saying anything.”
Naipaul said he wrote the book in the order in which it proceeds. Part two of Enigma, “The Journey,” stops what narrative there is — a narrative where things befall the people he describes, where everyday mysteries pile up and implode — to detail his first journey from Trinidad to Britain (and eventually to Oxford) when he was 18. He notes the culture shock in the plane, in Manhattan, on the boat, and in London, as well as his first fumblings as a writer. In part three the book reverts to where the narrative began and his time in the cottage after journeying into the countryside 20 years after arriving in England. Without the prior recall of the virgin journey (coupled with him finding a reproduction of The Enigma of Arrival, the titular surrealist painting by De Chirico, at the cottage) and without his fleshing out those first green feelings, there would be no sounding board to play off the pastoral and British personality-traits surrounding the nearly 100 pages of part two. If the reader didn&#8217;t know the flailing Naipaul details in his account of his premiere voyage, how could she come to see deeper into his perceptions? How could she trust a consciousness that is so imperious as to thresh the psychologies of all those around him? Projected as such a strong, indomitable presence later, the Naipaul of 18 years old is naive, untried, but with a tint of the uncompromising nature and severity he will toil so hard to foster. This structuring goes against the grain and shakes up the ground of the narrative because the typical points of empathy with the narrator are put off almost 100 pages.
Revitalized, the book charges on. Many details are now explored with a counterpoise from his own past. People that were only gestured at in part one, like his landlord, Pitton the gardener, and Bray the car-hire man are greatly expanded, again with a pitiless regard: “Both Pitton and his wife were people without the gift for words […] But the beauty of Pitton&#8217;s wife was of such a sort that it overcame her intellectual, which was also her social, disability […] Beauty is beauty, though; and beauty is rare; no one who possesses it can be indifferent to it.” With this further fleshing-out of other characters, so is there a more clear intention for himself:
I wanted, when I came to the manor, after the pride of ambition, to strip my life down. I wanted to live as far as possible with what I found in the cottage in the manor grounds, to alter as little as possible. I wanted to avoid vanity; and for me then vanity could lie in very small things — like wishing to buy an ashtray.
I believe he wanted to live without vanity, which is to say I believe he is vain and strongly admits it, though with a deflection. His belief is that everything should be in service of the work — things, even wishing for things, would not get his art to where he wanted it to go. Metafictionally speaking, it was just this type of asceticism that led to a drastic change in tone in Naipaul’s oeuvre, exemplified in the three violent masterpieces: In a Free State, Guerillas, and A Bend in the River, all written at the cottage in the &#8217;70s.
In a book full of so many perceptions — with its celebration of nature, lamentations of change and decay, and its biting judgment and censure of people — I&#8217;ve often wondered how Naipaul himself might be judged. Or rather, why is he excluded from the judgment he exercises against others? Who watches over him? To answer this question, it helps to look at the Proust he quotes in both his Nobel Lecture and an earlier essay, words that could be etched as epitaph to Enigma:
… a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, our social life, in our vices […] it is the secretions of one&#8217;s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life — in conversation […] or in those drawing-room essays that are scarcely more than conversation in print — is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.
Ironically, the two selves — the author’s actual self and literary self — are both firmly on display in Enigma. That he speaks often and highly of himself is acceptable because he has enfolded himself into his literature—even though the narrator is Naipaul, it is still Naipaul as the speaker of the novel, as in the speaker of the poem. This person is a construct, even though 99% of what he details might check out with how the decade bore out. So the grandiosity and large pronouncements continue on in the second half of the book. He is a megalomaniac, he is near to paranoid (numerous times while meditating on certain nature scenes in the manor grounds he tries to stave off the emotional letdown of their inevitable change by saying, “At least I&#8217;ve had this for a year, at least I&#8217;ve had this for two years&#8230;) and yet, he is a seer. There is little room for argument with this man, the construct. He tells you who he is (save the women who propped him up—he had a lover at the time) and what he is thinking. Sometimes his perceptions about people are off and he will admit so, but in a way that does not hijack the fact of everyone else being his theatre, those he studies to soon strip down to their final fold of skin.
In trying to reconcile the megalomaniac with the artist, it&#8217;s instructive to consider Naipaul&#8217;s most famous line, the opening of A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” A line everyone must grapple with no matter their politics. No one should try to claim the artist as friend, one self is always getting in the way of the other. In Naipaul the innermost self does flicker off and on as he writes of his own breakdowns and fear of death by describing that of others. The apparent superficiality in his loaded and strong-armed remarks is poached, aligning them to his perceptions — the act of looking inside and out at the same time. He constructs a hearty truth about the world and its people — how they are often afraid of each other and say one thing when they mean another. People show their insides to him here because he — the narrator, the writer, the construct, the enigma — is the watcher, the listener, but also the proctor and prodder.
Written in the 52nd, 53rd, and 54th years of his life, the book is more than a meditation on death: it is a reverential treatment of history, civilization, morals, scruples, and compunction. Naipaul supersedes the cliché that we look at others to learn about ourselves, saying instead, “We look at others to define the world, then we are able to make our place in it.” As he says near the end about the book, “The story had become more personal: my journey, the writer&#8217;s journey, the writer defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing, rather than by his personal adventures.” Naipaul, wise and impossible, and probably intolerable, writes fearlessly and “not always respectably” — a critic&#8217;s phrase he often cites, holding it as a quite agreeable mantra for his artistic sensibility.
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Return to Enigma

749-789_carroll_street_park_slope

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/autumn-new-york/"></div>If real estate is the most notable thing about New York City, it stands to reason that construction should dominate the streets. We are well beyond paving the parking lots that once replaced paradise. Thanks to the policies of the current and former mayors and the city council, as well as Albany imbroglios and mega-graft, there are shell companies (or real estate tax shelters for rich foreign buyers) set up faster than social security numbers. To those who make policy, money is paradise, often attained by growth in the form of building more buildings. This process cryptically translates into the watch words, “job creation,” a term flowing into and making up that amorphous thing called “the economy.” Who is this paradise for, exactly? The middle class, who pay a higher share of taxes than anyone, the poor, who live day to day and hour to hour, discouraged by their intractable position, or these wealthy buyers who decline to list their properties as their primary residences so they can avoid paying income taxes?
For seven years I had a job, homeless outreach, that permitted me to drive in Manhattan. I know the streets as well as a taxi driver. I know their ebbs and flows: the FDR versus the West Side Highway, Canal Street avoidance, and the ludicrous East Houston Street renewal from Bowery to the highly trafficked artery at the FDR, which is still dragging on after seven years. It’s a pittance compared with the near decade-long 2nd Avenue subway project, recently reported to have been rushed to completion to fit the Governor’s New Year’s Day deadline last year, with the MTA failing to complete final safety testing — an eerie echo of the doomed space shuttle Challenger’s rushed launch for Ronald Reagan’s State of the Union speech. And though I know September brings the traffic back to top levels with the return of students and the reduction in people taking vacation, to drive or walk almost anywhere below 14th Street, now, is an unadulterated mess, the worst I’ve ever seen it. Grand construction projects, mostly on buildings and not the streets themselves, though streets are closed or blocked to work on them, harpoon any hope of a normal day’s work or a pleasant day’s stroll. Who lets this occur? The Department of Buildings doles out permits like a narcissist tweets. To say construction is at an all-time high is an understatement, with some 40,000 projects ongoing as of September. DOB commissioner Rick Chandler touts this fact at the same time that his department suffers from having too few inspectors to get people back into their houses via inspection five years after Hurricane Sandy, carrying its own history of graft, and lagging safety measures with increased accidents, injuries, and nearly three dozen construction deaths since 2015. Still, the Department continues to promote its $29 million computerized system, DOB NOW, which makes it even easier to get a permit.
Commissioner Chandler admitted in a WNYC interview that most of the building is going on in Brooklyn. The borough of choice some call it, others the borough of boom and bust. In much maligned and ballyhooed Park Slope, named one of the best neighborhoods in the country and locally reviled for its wealth and record-breakingly big baby strollers like somehow only giants were conceived there, my wife and I rent the upper unit of a piece de resistance, the brownstone, on land where once the Lenape natives lived before the Dutch formed it into a sprawl of farms. My street has a proud history and just down the way by 5th Avenue, the beginning of the Battle of Long Island took place in 1776. All that history is fodder for tourists now, the kind who take pictures of the unkempt statues of unimportant men around Grand Army Plaza, save the one of JFK. What they can’t keep out of their photos is commerce. Looking north down Flatbush Avenue, from the Plaza’s Sailors and Fountain, one would see, for over a year, cranes at work on two window-laden towers surrounding the Barclays Center—luxury condos more closely resembling erector sets.
I’ve lived in three different places in this neighborhood over the past five years. In walking it daily — to go to the park, the library, the food-coop (no, I’m not a communist, but who can say no to organic produce at 80% the usual price) — the thought that nearly every brownstone over Park Slope’s one square mile is worth approximately three million dollars, is a blithe though unrelenting reality, which upsets the picture of my little family’s humble existence, and more so of the billions who truly struggle in our time of the greatest income disparity in human history. A good number of the owners of these buildings have second homes up the Hudson or on Long Island, some have a third somewhere else. Since the unthinkable came true with Hurricane Sandy, I’ve often wondered about the liquidity of the insurance industry if say, 200 houses were to be destroyed by an act of God or worse. That’s $600 million. Can there be an insurance industry after such a situation? Beyond the Department of Buildings hijinks, people in New Orleans are still fighting to be compensated for their losses of $50,000 homes. I’m not sure any cliché approaches the situation’s indecency.
There is the mild incongruity of persisting in such a neighborhood, to be seeded in an area that represents some of the most capitalistic, ill-liberal thinking, though the vast majority of the neighborhood’s residents might justify their righteousness by citing their political leanings (88% are registered Democrats). My self-professed detestation of the rich can’t hemorrhage too much, when I tell my writerly self: It’s all material. Writers have a way of culling from their situations, whatever they are, though I don’t imagine a novel on the order of The House of Sand and Fog’s immigrant house-flipping tragedy anytime soon. U.S. literary history shines another light. Henry James had to infiltrate the houses of great wealth in order to eviscerate them, but of course, he was born with an entree, coming from a well-off family — so he had to keep current. And Upton Sinclair? He grew up poor and wrote dime novels in his teenage years, a practice which paid for moving his parents into a better apartment. He went undercover in a meat-packing plant to write the country’s most famous whistleblower novel, The Jungle. I’m not really breaking into the brownstones of the Slope, but I’m seeing the day-to-day operations of wealth: the West Indian nannies, the thousand-dollar baby strollers, and the miniscule orange cones across the sidewalk alerting people there is a cord and it’s plugged from the ground-level unit of a brownstone into a large Tesla, owned by a young entrepreneur who dresses like a page out of 2001’s The Hipster Handbook with a wife beater and his rangy hair hooded by a mesh beer hat. Do I gab with my neighbors about real estate, decrying the latest intrusion on this picturesque world, the loss of parking spaces for Citi Bike stands (amounting to around 20 spaces), or about how they are making a killing by Airbnb-ing their upper floors and will continue to do so because their listings are legal? No. We mostly smile and talk about the weather, as the reverse beeping of the Awesome Finish Carpenters van blares while it parks for the fourth week in a row.
On a ramble through the neighborhood, it is de rigeur to hear another sound of such distinction, like a high-powered drilling of one of King Kong’s molars. In actuality, it is a high volume chipper, not so many decibel notches under a jackhammer, for removing the outer layer of that sedimentary stone on a brownstone’s exterior or staircase. This is just one component in that niche larceny called Brownstone Renovation, which boasts over 20 companies locally. When I hear construction, I know in many cases there is a good reason, and I would be a fool not to admit that one of these was to make it better in order to sell at a higher rate than it was bought for, or to charge more money in rent. One can defend everything on some kind of ground, whether moral, high, or low. I’m not interested in extremes, I want some peace. Daily, the chipper starts up, promptly at nine a.m. and three or four hours go by with the block polluted by this noise. Or some days, a landscaping person comes to weed-whack or leaf blow a yard, usually 10 by 10 feet. These noises — the chipper, the weed-whacker, the leaf-blower; the jet-ski when on vacay — these are products of a certain comfortability, and whether earned or inherited, the high blasphemous whine of all those tools sound the same. As a young irritable boy, I was made to weed my family’s miniscule front and back lawns. I used a short two-pronged weeder, grabbing the root of the nettle or dandelion with a heavy gloved hand to safely remove the entire offender. As any bourgeoisie will tell you, the memory of yard work is one of the great reminiscences one can have, because, of course, that time is probably well over or drastically fallen off. I don’t know the station of my neighbors’ souls, but many, although cognizant of money, carry the same memories as me, and possibly the same futile wish that all the prettifying could surcease, but surely it won’t. If I heaved my heart into my mouth, I would risk being seen as a fool, or worse, a rabble-rouser. Yet there could also be a tenuous connection, a forged common ground, and we could share a shrug from across the street at the early morning sound of the chipper or the hundreds of honks at the inconsiderate person who leaves his car, which costs more than a decent house in Detroit, blocking the road after street-cleaning time begins, and all would be sotto voce, the preferred way to express our quiet desperation.
As it should, much is made of Virginia Woolf’s small piece, “The Death of a Moth,” written between the two World Wars. According to W.G. Sebald, “There is no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows as a reader of Virginia Woolf that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls — the souls of those who got away and, naturally, of those who perished.” In keeping with this, the key line is not at all about the moth but the forces outside the room where the moth dies: “Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular.”
Has anything changed? Woolf would say, like Heraclitus before her, that everything is connected, and everyone has a hand in the quilt that makes up our collective life. If quality of life is seeing a few movie stars at a coffee shop, or having a nice park and good schools, you could say Park Slope’s quality is high. Unfortunately, it is ruled by the free market of commerce. It is a unique freedom to have $15 ramen, organic frozen yogurt, and artisanal gelato whenever one wants, the latter two specialty stores being 161 feet away from each other. But a few hundred feet further from where people sit and lick sweetness, men work on brownstones. Many are non-union and some are undocumented and the probability of them getting a working wage commensurate with the type of service provided is slight, especially when some reported working for $12 an hour during a WPIX investigation.
I wish more of my compatriots disbelieved the “construction is good for the economy” crap line that politicians fall over themselves to ape along with myriad statistics, the catnip of rationalization and a bulwark against deep thinking, exercised with faulty aplomb in all presidential debates. We each have our statistics, and it’s easy to find any study to spin our own personal political propaganda, as I have. But does it take a fellow at the Brookings Institute to see the connection between $12 an hour labor and $15 ramen? Or Middle East oil and the ubiquitous SUV’s overfilling the streets in our country? Or those beneficiaries of credit-default swaps, the donors to political parties, and other greedy financiers and the exploding homeless population and rising crime rates — though the figures on white-collar crime are underreported? The day we stop scoffing at the efficacy of the phrase “everything is connected,” belittled by many inner consciences as a platitude, might be a day of reckoning.
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Autumn in New York

williamgass

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/remembering-william-h-gass-1924-2017/"></div>He grew up in the worst of times and died in end times. The Great Depression colored his mind’s eye and President Tweetledum and “The tweet is mightier than the truth” zeitgeist recently told him, Yes, the language can be more perverted and debased than anything heretofore. No matter, for William H. Gass, the world was within the word, the soul inside the sentence, the great texts together made a temple, and he added overly qualified artistry and highly poetic explication to the great chain connecting Joyce to Shakespeare to Homer. <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/remembering-william-h-gass-1924-2017/#more-6018" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Remembering William H. Gass 1924-2017

Everything Like Before

Biting Reality: On Kjell Askildsen’s “Everything Like Before”

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain

Fiction

To Tell or Not to Tell

Greg Gerke’s work has appeared in&nbsp;Tin House, Film Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other publications.&nbsp;See What I See, a book of essays, and&nbsp;Especially the Bad Things, stories, were both published by&nbsp;Splice&nbsp;in the Autumn of 2019.

Greg Gerke

Approaching New Consciousnesses: A Conversation with Genese Grill

"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think." — Lorraine Hansberry

Philosophy &amp; Critical Theory

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

“Carpenter’s Gothic”: William Gaddis’s Compositional Self

Questioning Minds

A Mutual Bewitchment

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

“Toni Erdmann” and the Anti-Hollywood Ending

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers

Film

True and False Authorities: An Interview with Mark Greif

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil