As a writer, I will forever have an affection for the close reading of prose and poetry. For me, nothing helps me on the micro-elements of my craft than paying close attention to what others, whom I respect, are doing.
Just in case any readers are unfamiliar with the "intentional fallacy," I'll explain it in the next two paragraphs. Oftentimes, close readers pick up stuff that is clearly there but was not intentionally placed by the author. This often happens to me not only with the small stuff, but large scale themes as well. Friends of mine, some of whom do not often read literature, will frequently see something that is evident in the work on the thematic level that I never picked up on.
All this is to say that a close read for me is not an effort to read a writer's mind, it's an attempt to see how he or she works the language as a craftsperson. The degree of intentionality is not important in a close reading ( though it certainly is in more autobiographical & historical readings of literature).
I want to look at four sentences on page 132.
"It is not because we want to regress that we explore the past. That would be a complete mischaracterization of our intentions. Nor are we the type to look back upon yesterday with a milky, romanticized eye, an eye that does not scrutinize, an uncritical eye.
"Rather, we look to the past because we must find the errors of our ancestors."
First, I want to emphasize that what is being said here about why we may study history is not necessarily Lily's beliefs. Point of view in this book is complicated, to say the least.
What interests me is that we have four sentences, only two of which have commas. One of those, however, is just after a brief introductory word, so it hardly counts. For all practical purposes we have three fairly simple, very short sentences without commas. Then, in the middle of these three, comes a very long one with three commas central to the expressive power of the sentence.
These commas contain the phrases that help explain the metaphorical "eye" with which this "we" looks at the past. There's an insistence on completely denying the romanticized mind by not having the sentence end at the first "eye," but having us readers hover over its negation for an extra half sentence.
On top of that is repetition and rhyme. "Eye" is repeated three times, the rhyming syllable "ize" twice in this one sentence. There is a tremendous determination to keep the word and the sound "eye" before us for the entire lingering, last half of the sentence.
She does this with no awkwardness, and nothing feels forced. I read to the bottom of the page and felt that something remarkable had happened, so I went back to look for it. I think she is able to keep the emphasis so strongly on "eye" without sounding clunky largely through her rhythms (I will not do a traditional scan, but I looked at it from that view point and there does seem to be some interesting emphases that come up) and her long consonants. When we get to the last half of the sentence hard consonants are usually buried within words, where they lose some of their fricative power, and she begins words with soft consonants.
In short, she draws us through the heavy repetition in the last half of the sentence by using rhythm and sound. The heavy repetition helps to thoroughly negate the "romanticized" way of looking at the past.
My next entry on this book will be a review of the book itself.
Preliminaries
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
1/3 through Lily Hoag's THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION
Before starting this book I thought, "No, Lily could not possibly do it again." She has written two terrific books in the last couple years, Parabola (Chiasmus) and Changing (Fairy Tale Press). Finally, Les Figues has just come out with The Evolutionary Revolution, a wild fabulist book where a number of remarkable things happen, among them females living in the sky and eating on the fertile moon at night. So far in my reading, it would seem she did it again.
Since I am not finished with the book, I would just like to share some of Lily's fine prose at this point. She writes in very short, half-page to two-page chapters that are often discontinuous. In one, entitled "Merman's Dream," these sentences appear:
"Emily is caught in a merman's dream..Once, she tried to sing, to comfort herself, but her voice came out as soft cashmere ... Then, out of nowhere, she hears him singing. His dream is a muted song and Emily uses her fingers to draw out the lyrics, which she must translate into Man, and when she has, she will be able to talk to the merman...Emily doesn't know about the merman's vengeful nature. She doesn't know that the merman isn't dreaming at all, that he's letting her think he's dreaming so she can waste the little breath she has left in interpretation. He has no problem killing little angels...He laughs broadly. Emily hears this. She thinks it's another clue to help in her escape."
This parable about interpretation, which I take to suggest that interpretation often has absolute limits beyond which is profound misunderstanding, is part of a larger narrative in the book about mermen and women with wings on their thighs and wax on the eyes. It's a remarkably inventive book, sentence after sentence right on. I am looking forward to the rest.
Since I am not finished with the book, I would just like to share some of Lily's fine prose at this point. She writes in very short, half-page to two-page chapters that are often discontinuous. In one, entitled "Merman's Dream," these sentences appear:
"Emily is caught in a merman's dream..Once, she tried to sing, to comfort herself, but her voice came out as soft cashmere ... Then, out of nowhere, she hears him singing. His dream is a muted song and Emily uses her fingers to draw out the lyrics, which she must translate into Man, and when she has, she will be able to talk to the merman...Emily doesn't know about the merman's vengeful nature. She doesn't know that the merman isn't dreaming at all, that he's letting her think he's dreaming so she can waste the little breath she has left in interpretation. He has no problem killing little angels...He laughs broadly. Emily hears this. She thinks it's another clue to help in her escape."
This parable about interpretation, which I take to suggest that interpretation often has absolute limits beyond which is profound misunderstanding, is part of a larger narrative in the book about mermen and women with wings on their thighs and wax on the eyes. It's a remarkably inventive book, sentence after sentence right on. I am looking forward to the rest.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
What is the value of reading & thinking about reversible novels?
The only answer to the question I pose in the title is that it loosens our assumptions and perceptions, making our world richer, subtler, and more nuanced. In a variety of ways we can join with others interested in this stuff, helping to create a culture of greater richness and subtlety, hopefully one less easily controlled. It's not surprising that the artists, especially the experimental artists, and the intellectuals are among the first rounded up by abject dictators.
That's the value: it insists on the complexity and richness of life. And this is a threat to dictators who need to keep things simple.
That's the value: it insists on the complexity and richness of life. And this is a threat to dictators who need to keep things simple.
Pavic on "reversible" and "nonreversible" art
"Long ago I came to understand that the arts are "reversible and nonreversible." Some arts are reversible and enable the recipient to approach the work from various sides, or even to go around it and have a good look at it, changing the spot of the perspective, and the direction of his looking at it according to his own preference, as is the case with architecture, sculpture, or painting. Other, nonreversible arts, such as music and literature, look like one-way roads on which everything moves from the beginning to the end, from birth to death. I have always wished to make literature, whish is a nonreversible art, a reversible one. Therefore, my novels have no end in the classical meaning of the word."
This is perhaps the key paragraph in Pavic's aesthetic. And it is far reaching. He sees the end of the 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st as not the end of the novel but the end of reading as we have known it. In a way, he preceded the computer, yet anticipated it. I believe it was Lance Olsen who said that Dictionary of the Khazars was the first book of the 21st century.
But if a book has no definite end, don't we have some sort of anarchy? Doesn't every reader approach it in a different way? Yes and no.
Think of a sculpture. Yes, every viewer's walk around a sculpture is unique, but that does not mean that there is not some sense of a whole that remains fairly consistent. The philosopher Edmund Husserl famously pointed out that when we didn't see a side of a box, we knew it was there, and that this knowledge seemed to precede some sort of empirical learning. It is just how we are.
If this sense transfers to Pavic's reversible novels, they will hold together, just in a different manner from nonreversible ones. They will hold together as a concatenation of events rather than a string of events. Neither is more "true" than the other.
What's more, let's face it, with nonreversible literary novels we often remember stuff that has little to do with their nonreversible quality. We remember a line. An image. A character's name or face or description. What's more, we remember a world or many worlds created by the author, worlds that, to a degree, hung together, and not solely because of a linear plot. In fact, in literary fiction the plot is often the least important part.
Not true with a mystery or a horror novel. A lot of science fiction is more about the building of a world than a linear plot, but a plot often shows up there as well.
Reading Pavic novels feels like doing a puzzle where there is no last piece. And its a delightful frustration.
This is perhaps the key paragraph in Pavic's aesthetic. And it is far reaching. He sees the end of the 20th-century and the beginning of the 21st as not the end of the novel but the end of reading as we have known it. In a way, he preceded the computer, yet anticipated it. I believe it was Lance Olsen who said that Dictionary of the Khazars was the first book of the 21st century.
But if a book has no definite end, don't we have some sort of anarchy? Doesn't every reader approach it in a different way? Yes and no.
Think of a sculpture. Yes, every viewer's walk around a sculpture is unique, but that does not mean that there is not some sense of a whole that remains fairly consistent. The philosopher Edmund Husserl famously pointed out that when we didn't see a side of a box, we knew it was there, and that this knowledge seemed to precede some sort of empirical learning. It is just how we are.
If this sense transfers to Pavic's reversible novels, they will hold together, just in a different manner from nonreversible ones. They will hold together as a concatenation of events rather than a string of events. Neither is more "true" than the other.
What's more, let's face it, with nonreversible literary novels we often remember stuff that has little to do with their nonreversible quality. We remember a line. An image. A character's name or face or description. What's more, we remember a world or many worlds created by the author, worlds that, to a degree, hung together, and not solely because of a linear plot. In fact, in literary fiction the plot is often the least important part.
Not true with a mystery or a horror novel. A lot of science fiction is more about the building of a world than a linear plot, but a plot often shows up there as well.
Reading Pavic novels feels like doing a puzzle where there is no last piece. And its a delightful frustration.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Mackey: SONG OF THE ANDOUMBOULOU 28
[This is one of a continuing group of entries that focuses on Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou poetic series. To read all the entries in the group, click on Mackey in the labels section below.]
"Song of the Andoumboulou 28" tells the story of a bus accident from three different angles, each one getting progressively briefer, more compact, and more elliptical.
The first section is a page and a half long. It begins by saying "I dreamt we rode / in dreaming," but there seems nothing dreamlike about the description of the bus accident on a slippery road that is a "split-second short / of Ever After." They rest on snow.
Mackey keeps circling back to this image of snow, both as a protectress, pillow, and as "awayfulness, numb." Eventually, they are rescued when "a chain / came / down, yanked us out of it." The violence of the imagery, "yank," is typical.
The second section is more metaphorical. "We were ... / fish reeled / in prematurely tossed back, / script / hastily written hurriedly /erased ."
In the third section he turns to "tricks played with letters": the anagram of "bus" is "sub," and they seem to be under the snow. The Andoumboulou, according to Dogon folklore, lived inside the earth, a failed first draft of humanity.
Mackey often compares us humans to them, since we, too, have not fully defined ourselves, are drafts in the making. He ends by pointing out how the numb fingers cannot turn the pages, which, nonetheless, are stuck together from being wet.
This poem seems to begin by denying dream and denying reading. Could it be about the intrusion of violence and fear and pain into our sedate worlds of ritual and calm expectation? If so, what does it gain from coming at the accident from three different perspectives?
Perhaps ending with people stuck in the snow, not knowing if they are up or down, literally in the middle, Mackey's vision of us humans, as rough drafts, perhaps confused, always incomplete.
"Song of the Andoumboulou 28" tells the story of a bus accident from three different angles, each one getting progressively briefer, more compact, and more elliptical.
The first section is a page and a half long. It begins by saying "I dreamt we rode / in dreaming," but there seems nothing dreamlike about the description of the bus accident on a slippery road that is a "split-second short / of Ever After." They rest on snow.
Mackey keeps circling back to this image of snow, both as a protectress, pillow, and as "awayfulness, numb." Eventually, they are rescued when "a chain / came / down, yanked us out of it." The violence of the imagery, "yank," is typical.
The second section is more metaphorical. "We were ... / fish reeled / in prematurely tossed back, / script / hastily written hurriedly /erased ."
In the third section he turns to "tricks played with letters": the anagram of "bus" is "sub," and they seem to be under the snow. The Andoumboulou, according to Dogon folklore, lived inside the earth, a failed first draft of humanity.
Mackey often compares us humans to them, since we, too, have not fully defined ourselves, are drafts in the making. He ends by pointing out how the numb fingers cannot turn the pages, which, nonetheless, are stuck together from being wet.
This poem seems to begin by denying dream and denying reading. Could it be about the intrusion of violence and fear and pain into our sedate worlds of ritual and calm expectation? If so, what does it gain from coming at the accident from three different perspectives?
Perhaps ending with people stuck in the snow, not knowing if they are up or down, literally in the middle, Mackey's vision of us humans, as rough drafts, perhaps confused, always incomplete.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Pavic-TWO VERSIONS OF DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS
There are, literally, two different versions of this novel. The male version and the female version differ by a fairly short paragraph. And the paragraph is not all that different. They both make sense relative to the paragraph above and below, which are identical.
This is a book that is blocks of text. After an introduction, the next three sections, which correspond to the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sources on the question of the Khazar's conversion to Judaism, can be read in any order. We may read these huge blocks of texts in any order we want. Then, apparently, the appendices and closing note we read last.
But, maybe not. In the end is a list of main characters. We can trace each one as they appear in each of the main sections, and that, too, is a way of blocking.
This book demands a read and a rereading. And maybe more. We must enter and exit in different places, come to inhabit it. It is true that we come to inhabit most good novels, but with them a literary convention pulls us through: we start at page one and end at the last page of the book.
Here, the only way to come to inhabit the book is to give that up, to inhabit it at different angles, and other ones. To enter many doors. To leave through many others.
This is a book that is blocks of text. After an introduction, the next three sections, which correspond to the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian sources on the question of the Khazar's conversion to Judaism, can be read in any order. We may read these huge blocks of texts in any order we want. Then, apparently, the appendices and closing note we read last.
But, maybe not. In the end is a list of main characters. We can trace each one as they appear in each of the main sections, and that, too, is a way of blocking.
This book demands a read and a rereading. And maybe more. We must enter and exit in different places, come to inhabit it. It is true that we come to inhabit most good novels, but with them a literary convention pulls us through: we start at page one and end at the last page of the book.
Here, the only way to come to inhabit the book is to give that up, to inhabit it at different angles, and other ones. To enter many doors. To leave through many others.
Back with Pavic and Mackey
I've been away for a month. I wrote a story that I then decided to expand into a novel. It was going to necessitate some serious research. Ultimately, I decided I could not adequately contextualize the material. So now I am going to cotinue working on Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars by exploring quotations and using it as the springboard for my own writing. I will also take a look at some of the lit. crit. on the book, some of which is interesting. He was featured in a Review of Contemporary Fiction.
I am also going to continue discussing Nathaniel Mackey's poetry series, Song of the Andoumboulou. I will take a different tack, however. I will begin to compare and contrast poems more rather than discuss them one at a time. I feel that I've gotten all I can hope to get going in that direction.
I am also going to continue discussing Nathaniel Mackey's poetry series, Song of the Andoumboulou. I will take a different tack, however. I will begin to compare and contrast poems more rather than discuss them one at a time. I feel that I've gotten all I can hope to get going in that direction.
Mankwe Ndosi & AS THE RHYTHM CHANGES
What should I do? The 20th-century is replete with examples of white people, like me, defining, evaluating, and stealing the cultural works of Africans and African Americans. Yet I saw a decidedly Afrocentric show last night in St. Paul, put on by five black women, that I feel compelled to write about for three reasons. One is for a practical reason — what if no one else writes about this? — and the second is because I am a writer and I write about what moves me. The third reason is because art work coming from this and similar perspectives is once again under attack in portions of the U.S. Arizona is attempting to water down or get rid of its ethnic studies classes. I guess they want one ethnicity at the center of study: white. Maybe all of us need to celebrate non-white art before we are all impoverished by losing it.
All that being said, what should I do? I don't want to be some authoritarian critic "explaining" or "interpreting" the work.
Perhaps, I will write questions to hold that voice at bay.
Some background first: The piece was written and produced by Mankwe Ndosi, a singular talent from Minneapolis who is of Tanzanian & Midwestern descent. She has performed internationally, and works in the media of theater, dance, music, spoken word and improvisation. Go here to see an example of her work. Here is an example of her singing with Nicole Mitchell's her band in Italy.
At the show they used instruments built by Douglas Ewart, who has had some of his pieces purchased by major museums. They were made out of, I kid you not, plastic cartons, skiis, racquetball racquets, crutches with bells attached, rolling pins, and so on. The quality and sound of this seeming detritus is amazing. When you see and hear them, you realize why museums would want to purchase them. See some of his instruments here.
"As the Rhythm Changes" was based on interviews with 20 Minnesotans conducted by Mankwe. Most dwelled in the Twin Cities, and a few lived on a farm that had been in the family for generations. She asked the same questions of all of them: 1. What shapes our everyday routines? 2. How do you keep your spirit nourished? 3. What about the changes, either by your own will, or because life changes? 4. How do you see humanity in relationship with the natural world?
The four different pieces performed last night were all inspired by an interview with a single person. The performance itself was funny, joyous, at times scary and angry. There was some talking, a lot of singing, some dancing, some improv.
MY QUESTIONS
Question 1: What is the relationship between art and the everyday? How do Ewart, with his musical skiis and rolling pins and Ndosi, with her interviews and musicality and dance, approach this relationship? similarities, differences?
2. Mankwe during the performance said that the percussion and singing (the art) provided a bed for the people's stories to float on. Does this entail that art can coax out and offer portions of the everyday to the audience? How is the everyday changed by being held up by such a bed? To what extent does it matter?
3. In a related question, could Mankwe be anything but gentle in her way of characterizing these interviews (i.e. she doesn't say that she "wrested the essence from the interview and boiled it down to its crucial points")?
4. Could the everyday be a construction made by the art? In a crutch with bells on it, does Ewart see himself as pulling the musical possibilities out of the crutch, realizing its latent possibilities, projecting an imaginative construction on it, or something else I am not thinking of?
5. This I am sure about: in some of Ewart's instruments there is a hidden gentleness. After the show a performer, Aimee K. Bryant, kindly showed me two of Ewart's shaken percussive instruments that, even after the sound falls away, the body of the performer can continue to feel the vibrations. Is there something sly about this "hidden" conversation from the instrument to the body? We obviously think about the body's impact on instruments all the time, but what about vice versa?
6. Mankwe asked her interviewees "What shapes our everyday routines?" To what extent does art do this? To what extent is a dinner table, set up with care, itself a work of art? It is art - ifice. To what extent, then, is Mankwe remaking art of art, thereby helping us to appreciate it all the more?
7. "We are the world we live in." Is the world art? Is the world art - ifice? Do we want to make a distinction?
8. Here is probably the most important question, given Mankwe's stated activist concerns: How can what I have written help us to better life?
I am going to try to answer this question. It will be based on something Alan Golding wrote a number of years ago in a book entitled From Outlaw to Classic. What I have written is read by people interested in the vanguard of fiction, poetry and jazz. They are culturally involved people and cultural workers who feel that more "mainstream" venues do not allow them to explore and express what they must. For the most part they are white, but not exclusively.
Since they focus on art more for the sake of their vision or compulsion, it is more likely to be tied to the nerve endings and radical fissures in the culture. To use an overly simple opposition, their culture is wedded to exploration; the other culture is wedded to the market. This piece I have written is one small part of the culture of exploration. It helps to build on it, to push, to trouble it, to wonder. Obviously, it won't have as great an impact as a Mankwe's play or a Toni Morrison novel, but that's not the point, is it?
This vanguard culture is hardly going to create any sort of revolution. What it does is attract people in college towns and big cities into groups of like-minded people who can support each others' values, work, and ideas. In that way everyday lives can be affected, and electoral politics can even be changed on a small scale. It is possible for left-wing candidates to be elected from neighborhoods where such people live. And, given what's happening in Arizona, we need all of those types we can get.
Well, this wandered a bit but I think you get the idea. Let me end by listing the other people in the show: Libby Turner-Opanga, Sarah Greer, Aimee K. Bryant, and Kenna Sarge.
All that being said, what should I do? I don't want to be some authoritarian critic "explaining" or "interpreting" the work.
Perhaps, I will write questions to hold that voice at bay.
Some background first: The piece was written and produced by Mankwe Ndosi, a singular talent from Minneapolis who is of Tanzanian & Midwestern descent. She has performed internationally, and works in the media of theater, dance, music, spoken word and improvisation. Go here to see an example of her work. Here is an example of her singing with Nicole Mitchell's her band in Italy.
At the show they used instruments built by Douglas Ewart, who has had some of his pieces purchased by major museums. They were made out of, I kid you not, plastic cartons, skiis, racquetball racquets, crutches with bells attached, rolling pins, and so on. The quality and sound of this seeming detritus is amazing. When you see and hear them, you realize why museums would want to purchase them. See some of his instruments here.
"As the Rhythm Changes" was based on interviews with 20 Minnesotans conducted by Mankwe. Most dwelled in the Twin Cities, and a few lived on a farm that had been in the family for generations. She asked the same questions of all of them: 1. What shapes our everyday routines? 2. How do you keep your spirit nourished? 3. What about the changes, either by your own will, or because life changes? 4. How do you see humanity in relationship with the natural world?
The four different pieces performed last night were all inspired by an interview with a single person. The performance itself was funny, joyous, at times scary and angry. There was some talking, a lot of singing, some dancing, some improv.
MY QUESTIONS
Question 1: What is the relationship between art and the everyday? How do Ewart, with his musical skiis and rolling pins and Ndosi, with her interviews and musicality and dance, approach this relationship? similarities, differences?
2. Mankwe during the performance said that the percussion and singing (the art) provided a bed for the people's stories to float on. Does this entail that art can coax out and offer portions of the everyday to the audience? How is the everyday changed by being held up by such a bed? To what extent does it matter?
3. In a related question, could Mankwe be anything but gentle in her way of characterizing these interviews (i.e. she doesn't say that she "wrested the essence from the interview and boiled it down to its crucial points")?
4. Could the everyday be a construction made by the art? In a crutch with bells on it, does Ewart see himself as pulling the musical possibilities out of the crutch, realizing its latent possibilities, projecting an imaginative construction on it, or something else I am not thinking of?
5. This I am sure about: in some of Ewart's instruments there is a hidden gentleness. After the show a performer, Aimee K. Bryant, kindly showed me two of Ewart's shaken percussive instruments that, even after the sound falls away, the body of the performer can continue to feel the vibrations. Is there something sly about this "hidden" conversation from the instrument to the body? We obviously think about the body's impact on instruments all the time, but what about vice versa?
6. Mankwe asked her interviewees "What shapes our everyday routines?" To what extent does art do this? To what extent is a dinner table, set up with care, itself a work of art? It is art - ifice. To what extent, then, is Mankwe remaking art of art, thereby helping us to appreciate it all the more?
7. "We are the world we live in." Is the world art? Is the world art - ifice? Do we want to make a distinction?
8. Here is probably the most important question, given Mankwe's stated activist concerns: How can what I have written help us to better life?
I am going to try to answer this question. It will be based on something Alan Golding wrote a number of years ago in a book entitled From Outlaw to Classic. What I have written is read by people interested in the vanguard of fiction, poetry and jazz. They are culturally involved people and cultural workers who feel that more "mainstream" venues do not allow them to explore and express what they must. For the most part they are white, but not exclusively.
Since they focus on art more for the sake of their vision or compulsion, it is more likely to be tied to the nerve endings and radical fissures in the culture. To use an overly simple opposition, their culture is wedded to exploration; the other culture is wedded to the market. This piece I have written is one small part of the culture of exploration. It helps to build on it, to push, to trouble it, to wonder. Obviously, it won't have as great an impact as a Mankwe's play or a Toni Morrison novel, but that's not the point, is it?
This vanguard culture is hardly going to create any sort of revolution. What it does is attract people in college towns and big cities into groups of like-minded people who can support each others' values, work, and ideas. In that way everyday lives can be affected, and electoral politics can even be changed on a small scale. It is possible for left-wing candidates to be elected from neighborhoods where such people live. And, given what's happening in Arizona, we need all of those types we can get.
Well, this wandered a bit but I think you get the idea. Let me end by listing the other people in the show: Libby Turner-Opanga, Sarah Greer, Aimee K. Bryant, and Kenna Sarge.
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