Orders of Infinity

Jacqueline Osherow's "Orders of Infinity" was on Poetry Daily yesterday. For a discussion of the particular concept of infinity she writes about, see the articles about infinity and aleph numbers on Wikipedia.

Fixing "The Lottery"

Warning: Before you read this post, read Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery."

So I had students write about Jackson's story, and one wrote a startling piece about how the lottery in the story is fixed. I was not sure I was utterly convinced, but then I suddenly was. Here's what I wrote to the student:

There's a fascinating point to be made here about the rules of fiction. After all, someone does pick out the victim: Jackson herself determines who the victim of the lottery is—or perhaps I should say of "The Lottery." The rules of fiction require her to have the victim of the lottery be a character she has already introduced to the reader. Further, in a context in which it is important that most of the figures be as nondescript (and hence "normal") as possible, the characters she does introduce to the readers are going to be the ones who "stand out" by stretching the rules of the game in various ways, as you have described.

In a sense, one level of the story's allegory is literary: this is a story about how stories work. They work by assuming a background of "normalcy" against which the outstanding qualities of the main characters can be established. By "outstanding" here, I do not mean "excellent" but something more neutral: the characters might be heroes, or villains, or even hypernormal people, but in one way or another, they have to stand out against that standardized background.

In most fiction, then, the author's job is to give the reader such "outstanding" characters to identify with. In "The Lottery," Tessie stands out in this way: not because of her excellence, but simply because her difference from the crowd makes her worth mentioning, whereas the crowd's standardized behavior, once established, recedes into the background. This makes the horror of "The Lottery," then, as powerful as it can possibly be: the reader identifies with the "outstanding" character, and the object of the reader's identification gets murdered. And all this is done in the most everyday way possible, which only increases the horror.

But all this also proves your point: Tessie Hutchinson's slight difference from the crowd around her selects her to be the victim. But it is not the lottery that selects her as the victim, it is "The Lottery" and its genre that do so. How? The same way that the characters in the story do so: by following the rules of the game.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Reginald Shepherd has published a brief but powerful reading of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" on his blog.

I read the poem in high school, and when I think back on it now, it was one of the first poems that showed me what a poem could do and be. Such memorable phrases and lines, too:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—an ecstasy of fumbling

...

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin

On Divination by Birds

Another interesting poem on Verse Daily today, "On Divination by Birds," by Kimberly Johnson. If I were to do an interpretation of it, I would pursue the idea that interpretation of poetry has some similarity to divination by birds.

I am always struck when a poem appears both on Verse Daily and on Poetry Daily, as Maura Staunton's "God's Ode to Creation" (which I mentioned here) has now done. Some may say that the two sites are so similar that there need not be two of them, but I like having two daily poems. I usually like at least one of the two!

Facing Reality—Climate Change

Birder Laura Erickson has some powerful things to say about what science is and what is wrong with the current administration's willful mishandling of science in her post "Facing Reality—Climate Change."

Thin Raft Anniversary on March 21

Thin Raft 10th Anniversary Reading
Wednesday, March 21, 6:30-9:00
Bergli Bookshop
Rümelinsplatz 19, Basel

This is your chance to hear local English-language writers read from their works: fiction, poetry, memoirs, etc. Come out and hear the kind of work produced by Thin Raft writers for the writing group, as well as for local and international publications. You can also find out how a writing group works and what it is for; all you need to do is start talking to the writers after the reading.

The Thin Raft group for English-language writers was founded in Basel in early 1997 and has been meeting regularly at various locations ever since. To celebrate the group's tenth anniversary, current members of the group will present recent work, and Padraig Rooney (TR member who teaches English at the International School Basel) will read from his recently published poetry collection The Escape Artist (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2006).

Thin Raft meets on the first and third Tuesdays of every month at Centrepoint in the Lohnhof. New members are always welcome.

Don't blame it on René

Here's a passage I meant to quote quite a while ago, from the Nov. 20 issue of The New Yorker: "Think Again," by Anthony Gottlieb, a review of recent books on Descartes:

'Descartes’s dualism is certainly not quite what it is often taken to be. In the 1994 best-seller “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,” the neurologist Antonio Damasio reports that Descartes believed in an “abyssal separation between body and mind . . . the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.” This is actually the opposite of what Descartes believed. He held that we “experience within ourselves certain . . . things which must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone,” and that these arise “from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body.” In his best-known writings, Descartes stressed the differences between matter (which occupies space) and thought (which does not). But he also maintained that, in human beings, mind and body are mysteriously and inextricably combined, as he tried to spell out in letters to Princess Elizabeth. (She kept pressing him on the point.) He could not explain how it is that mind and body are united, but he was sure that they were.'

Lake Superior

[This is another one of my "set pieces." I wrote it down back in 2002 and revised it a bit last week.]

In the summer of 2001, while we were planning our trip to Upper Michigan to visit my grandmother, everyone kept saying that Lake Superior is too cold to swim in. So we didn't plan our trip to include a stop there, especially as my grandmother lived close to the Michigan-Wisconsin border, a long drive both from Lake Superior and from Lake Michigan. But as we flew into the Marquette airport, we did get close enough to the lake to pay it a quick visit on the afternoon of my 37th birthday.

We had left Basel the day before, by train to Zurich, where we caught a flight to Newark and then to Boston, where we spent the night in a hotel near Logan Airport. Miles was then twenty months old and new to jet lag, so when he woke up at 2 a.m. (eight a.m. Basel time), he was ready to start the day. We managed to keep him in bed with us until 3:30, by which time we, too, were wide awake. We passed the time until the hotel's breakfast room opened at 6 a.m. by opening a couple of small presents Andrea had brought along for me and by reading books and playing games. Breakfast took long enough, then, that it was time for us to go to the airport to catch our next flight, to Detroit, where my mother met us at the airport and joined us for the next leg of the trip, the flight to Marquette. (As her children and grandchildren never ceased to point out to her, my grandmother was then living in the middle of nowhere, and it took a long time to get to her place for a visit!)

At the Marquette airport, we were met by my Aunt Marge, my mother's younger sister, who had come to pick us up for the trip's last leg, by car to Iron River. It was a beautiful August afternoon, and after we had realized that we would probably not get another chance to see the lake, we decided to go into Marquette to look for a beach — not with the intention of going swimming but only to look.

We found ourselves on Lakeshore Drive (echoes of high-rent Chicago penthouses) and parked by a beach separated from the road by a small brushy dune. The beach was nearly empty, but there were a few people around, including two guys in baggy swim trunks throwing a Frisbee back and forth while standing in the low waves. The water looked cold, but it didn't seem to bother the Frisbee players, so I slipped off my sandals and waded in a little bit. At least at this beach in the bay in Marquette, the lake belied both its reputation and its appearance: while the water was not really warm, it was not freezing cold either, and on such a warm, clear day, it was positively inviting.

But there was a slight problem: our swimsuits were packed away in the trunk of the car, and it had been hard work to get all the luggage stowed there. So, despite the lure of the low waves, Andrea did not want to get her swimsuit out, and I didn't really want to get mine out, either. Skinny dipping was the obvious solution, but there were just a few too many people around.

But it was my birthday, and I wanted to celebrate, and I wanted to be able to say that I had swum in Lake Superior on my 37th birthday. (The day was already becoming a story.) So I took off my jeans and my T-shirt and charged into the water in my underpants —which had a plaid pattern that, from afar, made them look like a Speedo bikini swimsuit.

Oh, the water! So much for the story that Lake Superior is too cold for swimming! I was so exuberant that my shouting and splashing almost upset Miles, but Andrea managed to keep him calm. Our camera was also stowed away somewhere, so I have no photographic evidence of my birthday swim, but wife, mother, and aunt were witnesses. (Miles was, too, of course, but I can't count on him to remember it later, except as a story his father likes to tell.)

When we walked back to the car, I solved the next problem by putting my T-shirt (which had also just served as a towel) on the car seat and sitting there in my "swimsuit" to dry off while we began the drive to my grandmother's house. About halfway there, Marge stopped at a little tiny crossroads gas station, so I took the opportunity to change out of my wet "trunks." I put on my T-shirt and sandals, grabbed my jeans, and headed for the toilets, which were inside the station's little shop. And then came the story's unexpected punch line: there, on the door, was a sign that had not anticipated a case like mine: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.

Soppy?

Julian Barnes's "The Past Conditional," a brief memoir published in the Dec. 25/Jan. 1 issue of The New Yorker, is a good read, but the best part of it is the first paragraph:

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

James Brown on New Year's Eve

I was not that moved by the death of James Brown, as I have never listened to his music in more than bits and pieces. Obviously, that also means that I was never that moved by his music, or I would have explored it further.

But the drawing in the "Goings on about Town" section of the Dec. 25/Jan. 1 issue of The New Yorker did move me: a red-black-brown-and-green image of James Brown singing, one arm raised in the air to celebrate or preach, with the caption "James Brown plays B.B. King's on New Year's Eve." Since he died on Christmas Day and I read the issue only during the first week of January, this picture became very moving suddenly (reminding me of the photos William Hurt looks at in Smoke, thinking they are all the same, but suddenly his dead wife is in two of them).

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I love the way people talk about Wallace Stevens's poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm." Adrienne Rich discusses it beautifully in her book "What Is Found There." Alex Ross just discussed it here (he also quotes the whole poem).

Most important finger

Miles got a paper cut on the tip of his left middle finger yesterday. In the evening, he noticed how it bothered him while we were playing cards, especially since he is a lefty.

This morning, he said, "It's a good thing I did not cut my left index finger. My left index finger is my most important finger, I think."

Not unfair

Miles: The world is not unfair. It's just what it is.

Andrew: "The world is not unfair. It's just what it is." That's good; can I quote you on that?

Miles: Yes. I am right.

(January 5, 2007)

Beauty and immortality

This is my comment on Don Brown's thoughtful piece "Getting Serious/Having Fun" (which is in part a response to my essay on Frost):

I keep coming back lately (for various reasons, both positive and negative) to Peter von Matt's "Die verdächtige Pracht." Von Matt describes two important characteristics of poems: they want to be beautiful, and they want to be immortal.

Neither of these desires necessarily has anything to do with meaning or with interpretation. Frost's "The Mountain" marks how the desire for meaning is, in a sense, derivative—always preceded by a desire for pleasure.

But as you suggest, Don, that does not apply to literary criticism. I have often considered "quality" to be the cat that criticism does not want to let out of the bag, but there are two cats in there: quality and pleasure. If they get out, then the project of criticism is ironized, as you suggest, and the critic becomes insecure and rejects the work that has let those cats out.

Von Matt's book is interesting in this respect, too: whenever he begins to do hard-core close reading, he apologizes to his audience, asking them to bear with him while he does a necessary bit of "philology." This allows him, as a friend of mine suggested, to maintain his status as "the one in the know," his professional status. He lets the cats out, but he still wants to hold the bag.

Hitchens on Ford

Here's some more grist for the mill of my previous post on Paul Constant's article about the death of Gerald Ford: Christopher Hitchens on the same.

God's Ode to Creation

I'm kind of curious what my resident curmudgeons (DMB? Mr. J?) might make of this poem, "God's Ode to Creation," by Maura Stanton.

Frost's "Mountain"

NATURE, CULTURE, AND LANGUAGE IN ROBERT FROST'S "THE MOUNTAIN"

Visiting an unfamiliar region, the narrator of Robert Frost's poem "The Mountain" engages in a dialogue with a farmer. Their discussion of the mountain dominating the landscape establishes the usual contrast between nature and culture (between the mountain and the farms and towns around it). The similes that come up confirm, unsurprisingly, that attempts to domesticate nature are necessarily doomed to failure. But this is not the poem's last word: as figurative language itself becomes a theme of the poem, language in general and poetry in particular can be seen as creating the very contrast between nature and culture the poem would otherwise overcome.

In fact, the poem begins with a simile: "The mountain held the town as in a shadow." The implications of this shadow depend on a second simile a few lines later:

Near it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.

The mountain's apparent proximity makes its shadow a source of shelter from the elements. In the comparison to a wall, the natural shelter of the mountain appears as an artificial shelter protecting the town from threatening outside forces (here, the wind). However, this sense of protection later proves misleading:

Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,
But only felt at night its shadowy presence.

The mountain may have felt like a shelter, but all one really has its "shadowy presence," with its much less protective implications.

At night, the comparison with a wall domesticates this "shadowy presence." During the day, in his dialogue with the farmer, the narrator identifies another way to domesticate the mountain:

"That looks like a path.
Is that the way to reach the top from here?— "

The route the narrator identifies could provide a means of ascent, but appearance is again belied by reality: "There is no proper path," the farmer explains. With the chance of an easy ascent blocked, the mountain remains wild in the midst of the farms surrounding it. There may be a way up "five miles back" that was "logged ... last winter"—but it is not here.

The mountain's relationship to the surrounding landscape is later even more unstable. The farmer describes the township's geography to the narrator, concluding with a description of the houses closest to the mountain:

... a few homes sprinkled around the foot,
Like boulders broken off the upper cliff,
Rolled out a little farther from the rest.

The houses are compared to boulders that fall from the mountain—that is, to the very thing that threatens them. The earlier attempts to "domesticate" the mountain failed, perhaps inevitably, but here, the mountain's "shadowy presence" makes even shelters that might otherwise seem safe into images of the failure to create reliable shelter, of the instability of the domestication of nature.

Earlier, the farmer makes an apparently paradoxical statement about the stream that flows down the mountain: "It's always cold in summer, warm in winter." At the poem's end, he clarifies the point:

"I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it's warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
But all the fun's in how you say a thing."

That is, when opposites are compared, when a paradox is presented, how one says it is more important than what one is actually saying. The poem itself does this when it expresses a desire for shelter or refuge through similes—the fun way to say something. But the poem goes on to undermine these similes of shelter, ultimately in the final simile itself (comparing the houses to the falling rocks that could destroy them). All this makes the poem's implications for poetry itself clear. As Timothy Steele's use of the phrase as the title of his book about prosody suggests, "all the fun's in how you say a thing" is a statement about poetry itself. Poetry is the fun way to say a thing that might not be as mysterious as the poem suggests. But "The Mountain" as a whole goes even farther: insofar as the similes in the poem are themselves examples of the "fun" way to say something, the mysteries and puzzles they generate are implicitly as easily explained as the paradox of the mountain stream. The mystery is not in the objects described; instead, it is generated by the language describing them, that is, by the linguistic pleasure of saying things in fun ways.

In this light, "The Mountain" acts out how poetry creates the contrast between nature and culture it purports to dissect. That contrast is the product of a desire not for shelter but for pleasure. "All the fun's in how you say a thing"—and only through that fun, "The Mountain" implies, through the excess created by poetry and by language itself, is the problem of nature and culture created.

[I used Frost's poem as a text for a composition class earlier this semester, and I was inspired to try to do something on the poem in the same amount of space I had assigned the students: 400-600 words. I failed the assignment: this is 825 words! :-) ]

[God I hate it that HTML won't let you indent first lines of paragraphs!]

Macmillan New Writing

Another interesting article from the Jan/Feb Poets and Writers is about the Macmillan New Writing imprint in England: "The imprint was controversial because, according to the press, Macmillan would not pay its authors an advance and would accept only complete, word-perfect novels—if the text needed editing, it would point the writer in the direction of a good freelance editor, but it would not pay for editorial work. ... The manuscript has to be finished (contrary to those press reports, however, Macmillan will assign an editor), must be a first novel, and is usually submitted by e-mail. Nothing in the contract is negotiable, so there is no need for an agent."

A Novel in Three Days

In "A Novel in Three Days," in the January/February issue of Poets and Writers (an article that is unfortunately not on-line), Patricia Chao writes about how she did indeed write a novel in three days, as part of the 3-Day Novel contest. One good line that has nothing to do with the contest: "To begin a novel takes inspiration, to continue takes endurance, and to end takes character." None of that matters in the three-day-novel contest!

Réda and Grünbein in Poetry, January 2007

The January 2007 issue of Poetry includes two of my translations: "Return from the Ball," a poem by Jacques Réda, and "The Poem and its Secret," an essay by Durs Grünbein. I recommend them both, of course, but I am especially fascinated by Grünbein's essay and recommend it highly.