Conversation (The Art Student's War)

I was moved by this passage from Brad Leithauser's The Art Student's War:

Bea had never known anyone so easy to talk to about nothing—although none of this felt like nothing, their rapid-fire chatter: oh, it felt like something, it felt like life itself.

Bea is falling in love, of course, and she's eighteen, and the sentence captures the breathlessness of falling in love at that age.

The passage also struck me in linguistic terms: "chatter" is a type of speaking that is often disparaged, but from a linguistic perspective, "chatter" is just as important as conversation that is full of "important content." And the passage captures its importance: "chatter" creates bonds people, even when they are "talking about nothing."

A vague version of the above crossed my mind when I marked that passage, so I was pleased to find the following two pages later, as a kind of summary of what I had been thinking:

It was as though their remarks were gifts to each other—conversation as an exercise in gift giving.

All We Can Do

In my two recent posts on Simon Armitage poems ("Snow Joke" and "On Miles Platting Station"), I discussed how the poems raised the issue of what evidence is. The next poem in Armitage's Zoom! is called "All We Can Do," and it brings up a related issue: reading and misreading. After all, in order to determine which things are evidence, you have to read them correctly, and the danger of misreading always looms. Here's the beginning of the poem:

The engine has less bite 

than a baby's cough

so you nurse it into

the all-night forecourt.

David will come,

the cordage 

of his half converted skip truck

clanging from streets away,

his bush-baby eyes

picking us out

in the battered kiosk.

This David who comes to take care of the speaker's car trouble has to perform an act of reading to find "us," "picking us out" in the dark. But not only does he have to read the scene, he also has to read the car, as it were, to determine the source of the problem:

He cleans the dip-stick

under his armpit

and tells us the car

has more faults

than he could shake a stick at.

As David tows the car away, a misreading is explicitly mentioned:

I steer and brake 

in the car behind,

misreading the tangents

of the pavements and corners

as the gold 

of each streetlight

burns

through your hairstyle.

The poem ends up identifying David as someone who reads things correctly and the speaker as someone who misreads things; the larger issue is how reading and misreading function in the determination of what is evidence and what is not. Or in the case of the speaker, not what is evidence, but where he should steer the broken-down car, and he gets the geometry of it wrong.

The Art Student's War

I picked up Brad Leithauser's new novel The Art Student's War the other day and have read the first chapter and a half. The first chapter is a tour de force, even if it begins in the present tense, something I often find irritating in fiction. But Leithauser makes a brilliant transition to the past tense:

Everything changes—as it so often does—the moment she climbs down from the enclosure of the streetcar; time itself shifts, shifted. When, in the open air, she spoke the words once more, Bea felt a renewed sense of wistful impoverishment: "He didn't even hear me thank him." This time the phrase sounded dry and matter-of-fact, as though the soldier really did belong to the past tense and their story were over.

I did not notice the shift of "shifts, shifted" until the reference to the past tense at the end of the paragraph.

Here's a whole nother point: in the second chapter, a character says, "I have a whole nother thermos." Is that use of "a whole nother" old enough to have been used in 1943? (Which is when the opening scenes take place.) As my friend Dan once said, "What is the status of the word 'nother'?"

On Miles Platting Station

Simon Armitage's "Snow Joke" raises the issue of how something becomes a sign of something else, of how something becomes evidence. "On Miles Platting Station," the next poem in Armitage's Zoom!, concludes with an explicit mention of a different kind of evidence:

Somewhere beyond that the water in Shiny Brook

spills like a broken necklace into our village.

The police are there again: boxhauling the traffic,

adjusting the arc-lights. They have new evidence tonight

and they lift it from behind the windbreak, cradle it

along their human chain and lower it carefully down

into Manchester.

This makes me wonder about evidence: when is something evidence, and when is it not? How does something that is not evidence turn into evidence? I assume there are theoretical discussions of this in criminology, the philosophy of science, and philosophy in general (not to mention medicine and psychology, where the issue is what a symptom is).

But in the reading of poetry, and in the reception of art in general, everything in the work is evidence; that is, everything is ready to be understood as a sign of something else, as a symptom. Every feature of a work of art is always both itself and, by virtue of being in a work of art, something more—if nothing else, it is evidence of that surplus, that excess, an excess created by the identification of art as art, by the recipient's readiness to understand the object at hand as art.

Google Books

I'm translating a German essay for an art catalogue, and I just came across a German translation of a passage from Lyotard. The essay provides excellent bibliographical information about the German publication the quotation was taken from, so I was able to do some searching and find the English title of the essay. And then Google gave me the first page of the essay from its publication in an English selection of Lyotard's works, and the quotation turned out to be from the first paragraph of the essay, so I could just type up the passage in question.

There are many good reasons to be suspicious of Google's project of scanning in entire libraries, but this experience shows that there is one excellent reason for doing such a project: research! I did all of the above from my desk here at home, at the computer. A German-English translator working in Basel on such an art-catalogue translation in 1990 either had to translate the translated text, find the original and translate it (if he or she could), or do all kinds of extra work to get the translated version from the UK or the US.

Snow Joke

Poems can raise questions about how things are perceived, and it is often best when they leave those questions unanswered. Simon Armitage's "Snow Joke," the first poem in his first book, Zoom!, tells a story about a man who dies when his car gets stuck in a blizzard, and concludes by addressing the question of which of the three men who found the car under the snow "was to take the most credit":

Him who took the aerial to be a hawthorn twig?
Him who figured out the contour of his car?
Or him who said he heard the horn, moaning
softly like an alarm clock under an eiderdown?

Beyond the openness of this ending, there is also the issue of the details of these perceptions and misperceptions: the aerial as a hawthorn twig; the mound of snow understood to be the contour of a car; the horn under the snow (something alarming, cold, dangerous) heard as an alarm clock under an eiderdown (something alarming, of course, but warm and unthreatening). The harmless has to be perceived as a site of harm in order for the dead man to be found. Evidence has to be seen as evidence, as sign, rather than as ... well, nothing much at all.

You can read the whole poem on this discussion page, a little ways down (where it is posted without its quatrain form).

[Warning: I have Armitage on the brain right now, as I am preparing a seminar on his work!]

Amores

I recently read the Penguin Classics edition of Ovid's Erotic Poems, translated by Peter Green. In the first sequence in the book, the Amores, I was quite struck by two poems in particular: number 13 in book 2 and number 7 in book 3. The former is about an abortion—a topic I would not have expected to find discussed in classical literature! How many abortion poems are there from before the late 20th century?

The latter is about impotence:

I imagined every variety of erotic pleasure, invented
No end of positions—in my head—
But still my member lay there, an embarrassing case of
premature death, and limper than yesterday's rose.

I suspect there are many more poems about impotence scattered across the centuries. In its tone and style, this one also reminds of Rochester's "The Imperfect Enjoyment"—but that one is about premature ejaculation, not about impotence!

Federer's most important X

Miles likes ranking things, and recently he asked me what Roger Federer's most important match has been. I wondered whether it might have been the first Wimbledon victory, or even perhaps the loss to Nadal at Wimbledon, but then I decided that his most important tournament win was the French Open in 2009 (tying Sampras, completing career Grand Slam), which means that his most important match must have been that final, right?

But no, that final was arguably a bit of a letdown; the semifinal against Del Potro was more crucial to the tournament win than the final against Söderling.

But then arguably the most important match of the tournament was the five-setter against Tommy Haas in the fourth round, where Federer came back from two-love down to win.

And if that is the most important match in Federer's career, then it's also possible to identify the single most important point in his career: a forehand winner on a break point in the third set. And from my narcissistic perspective, the coolest thing about that winner is that I noticed how important it was (in that match at least) right after he hit it! (And even before he won the tournament!)

Haze, by Mark Wallace

We live now in an empire which, in the name of reasons, has stolen our lives away from us, but which will then sell them back to us at the cost of all that we have ... ("Reasons To Write")

These lines from the brief opening essay in Mark Wallace's Haze made me think of some of my most-quoted lines from Greg Brown's song "Where Is Maria":

There'll be one corporation selling one little box.
It'll do what you want and tell you what you want
and cost whatever you've got.

As an iPhone owner, I quote these lines all the time! :-)

Another passage from Wallace's book made me think of another of my favorite musicians, this time Ornette Coleman, who once said something to the effect that he knew that the music he was playing had a system when he realized that he could play wrong notes:

Discourses create a network of statements it seems relevant to think and say. One of the main ways to recognize that one is in a discourse is through the feeling that one recognizes when other people make statements irrelevant to the discourse. ("The Haze")

And later in that essay, Wallace reminds me of Mark Rowlands's claim in The Philosopher and the Wolf that it is in our moments of defiance that we are most ourselves:

Haze shows that the potential of the human can be found just as much in what resists organized Discourse as in what organizes Discourse.

This could probably all be worked up into a nice little essay but I'll just leave it at that.