Category: Literature

Posted on

‘Sixteenth Today It Is’

A fictional 100th anniversary: The action in “Ulysses” was set on June 16, 1904. There’s a nice editorialin The New York Times marking the occasion. It notes that while the novel has become a symbol of impossible, elitist literature — a perception sadly reflected in a human-on-the-street poll today in the San Francisco Chronicle — it’s actually anything but inaccessible:

“Its stuff is the common life of man, woman and child. You take what you can, loping over the smooth spots and pulling up short when you need to. Dedalus may indulge in Latinate fancy, and Joyce may revel in literary mimicry. But the real sound of this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of centuries of streets echoing over the stones.”

Posted on

Sick

Well, I didn’t write yesterday. Felt flu-ish, though I wasn’t totally flattened. To break the monotony of aches. nausea and cold sweats, I spent part of the day reading “The Devil in the White City,” the best-seller that weaves together the stories of 19th century America’s most marvelous world’s fair and its most methodical serial murders, which unfolded side by side in Chicago. The book’s very good. I also pondered the cause of my brief illness — purely physical, or a combination of a bug and overwhelming Iraq crap, between the Bush-Rumsfeld post-Abu Ghraib publicity offensive and the heart-sickening murder (in Iraq) of Nicholas Berg, that poor kid from Pennsylvania.

Posted on

What People Want and Need

This should have been posted April 13. But it wasn’t because of repeated Radio UserLand finicks.

And now the news:

Kate sent me one of the daily entries from Minnesota Public Radio’s "The Writer’s Almanac."
I like it. That’s an official endorsement, though be assured no money
changed hands for it. It’s a nice collection of daily trivia on
writerly stuff that wanders into historical stuff. The other day was
the anniversary of the opening of Galileo’s trial, so the almanac
contained a short essay on why Galileo mattered and still does.
Yesterday, or now the day before yesterday, the 13th, it was Thomas
Jefferson’s birthday. He was actually born on April 2 in 1743 — so I
count him as a birthday pal — but the date was moved when Britain and
the colonies ditched the Julian calendar for the Gregorian in 1752. No
extra charge for that information — I’ve always been fascinated by the
idea of a bunch of people having their birthdays changed.

But what I really wanted to write about was this note in the little almanac section on Eudora Welty, also born on the 13th:

 

"She tried getting a job in advertising but, she said, ‘It was too much like
sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn’t need or really
want.’ "

 

So two things:

First, that’s why I think I am/would be no good at selling or promoting
or marketing stuff — goods, merchandise, services that you ought to
pay for if you want to be sated, satisfied, or successful. A voice
inside says, "You know, this is really in my interest, not yours, to
take this off my hands. And is it really as good as I’m telling you it
is? And is it what you need?"

But — and this is point two — I think the reason I’ve stuck to news or
things that closely resemble news is that I’ve always believed and
felt, mind and heart, that it’s something people really do need and
want. Still do, and that’s what makes the job fun still even if you
hear me whining.

Posted on

The Sweet Science

I believe time enough has lapsed since publication of David Remnick’s New Yorker remembrance of A.J. Liebling that any mention of it here is superfluous. So here’s my superfluous mention: Remnick’s piece is worth reading if you’re in love with
writing, reading, journalism, or just the joy to be had in joining words together in pleasing ways or observing one who’s good at it. The New Yorker site contains a real Liebling treat, too: a 1955 piece he wrote on a fight between the undefeated and long-time heavyweight champion,  Rocky Marciano, and Archie Moore, an aging light heavyweight (Liebling calls him “cerebral and hyperexperienced”) who had worked for years to get a shot at the title.

“When, during some recent peregrinations in Europe, I read newspaper items about Moore’s decisioning a large, playful porpoise of a Cuban heavyweight named Nino Valdes and scoop-netting a minnow like Bobo Olson, the middleweight champion, for practice, I thought of him as a
lonely Ahab, rehearsing to buck Herman Melville, Pierce Egan, and the betting odds. I did not think that he could bring it off, but I wanted to be there when he tried. What would ‘Moby Dick’ be if Ahab had
succeeded? Just another fish story. The thing that is eternally diverting is the struggle of man against history, or what Albert Camus, who used to be an amateur middleweight, has called the Myth of
Sisyphus. (Camus would have been a great man to cover the fight, but none of the syndicates thought of it.) When I heard that the boys had been made for September 20th, at the Yankee Stadium, I shortened my stay abroad in order not to miss the Encounter of the Two Heroes, as Egan would have styled the rendezvous.”

Bottom line: Both pieces are worth your time.

Posted on

‘The Old Knot of Contrariety’

And while we’re considering the reflective life, the musing life, the self-conscious life (OK, I was considering it — you don’t have to), there’s this from Walt Whitman:

“It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

The dark threw patches down upon me also;

The best I had done seem[d to me blank and suspicious;

My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;

I am he who knew what it was to be evil;

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger,lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me;

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.

I was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street, or ferry-boat, or public assembly, yet never told them a word,

Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,

Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,

The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,

Or as small as we like, or both great and small. “

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry“

Posted on

Why Kids Should Read

From a recent decision of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal on a copyright dispute involving characters in the Spawn comic franchise (via The Trademark Blog):

“The description of a character in prose leaves much to the imagination, even when the description is detailed — as in Dashiel Hammett’s description of Sam Spade’s physical appearance in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon: ‘Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.’ Even after all this, one hardly knows what Sam Spade looked like. But everyone knows what Humphrey Bogart looked like. A reader of unillustrated fiction completes the work in his mind; the reader of a comic book or the viewer of a movie is passive. That is why kids lose a lot when they don’t read fiction, even when the movies and television that they watch are aesthetically superior.”

Posted on

Speaking of Joyce …

My brother John points me to a BoingBoing post – a post via a post about a post about an article in the Irish Times, actually (don’t visit the newspaper site unless you’re ready to pay) — about the Joyce estate and its swinish stand on copyright: It’s threatening to sue for infringement if anyone dares stage a public reading of ”Ulysses” this coming June 16, the 100th anniversary of Leopold’s, Stephen’s, Molly’s and Dublin’s ficitonal day as recorded in the novel. The lead of an Irish Times story from February 9 (copyright The Irish Times):

Joyce estate warns festival over copyright issuesThe Joyce estate has warned the organisers of the Bloomsday centenary festival, “ReJoyce Dublin 2004,” and the Government that it will sue for any breach of the estate’s copyright.

“The warnings, which have also been given to the director of the National Library, RTE and the Joyce Centre, will prevent certain events from being held during the festival. These include public readings from Ulysses and a proposal by the Abbey to stage Joyce’s play Exiles. …”

Yes, that’s pig-headed. But, before I start gnashing my teeth — already worn down from other gnashings — it’s kind of hard to blame them if you look at the way copyright is being handled in this country. Whatever income  the Joyce estate protects by doing this, or creative ferment it stifles, it ain’t in the same league with the greed expressed in U.S. copyright law, which has been changed and changed again to grant nearly perpetual rights to creators or (more important) the owners of creations.

Posted on

Commonplace Book

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning. …

“…I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”–James Joyce“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Posted on

Pain in the Colon

Continuing struggles in the PC (punctuation correctness) wars, in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“… Lynne Truss, a 48-year-old longtime literary editor, did an entire BBC radio series on punctuation last year. And when she mentioned in a newspaper article that she was writing the book that ultimately became “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” she received about 1,000 e-mails and letters from readers pointing out their own punctuation pet peeves. Many of them landed in the book.

Those 1,000 correspondents were offered a discounted, signed edition, and a staggering 70% of them went for it. Otherwise, the book’s reputation spread largely by word of mouth, though it did make use of some marketing gimmicks, including a T-shirt that on the front says, “A woman, without her man, is nothing,” and on the back says, “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” …”

Posted on

The Night Above the Dingle…

One of the few lines of poetry I can recite from memory. In fuller context:

“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light. …”

That came from a brilliant and all-too-human mind. Could a piece of software do the same thing? Compose a poem so full of images and experience that it would rattle readers’ memory and emotions forever? I can’t say. But Ray Kurzweil is working on the code. See the story in The New York Times.

And here’s the full text of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.”