Category: Literature

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Coincidental Verse

The Writer’s Almanac. I’ve mentioned it before. Praised it. I like it. Appeals to my “finer things in life” side. (Yes, there’s more to the world than “Survivor” (finale tonight!), “CSI,” and “Six Feet Under” (the last viewed on DVD only).

I get The Writer’s Almanac email every day. Often I can’t bring myself to open it because of the possible emotional and time commitment. When I do, though, I’m occasionally surprised by how fitting the poem for the day seems to be. Not the predictable ones, like Thanksgiving-themed verse during Thanksgiving week. But shots in the dark that just fall squarely on some event in my life, something I’m thinking of. For instance, the poem “The Longly-Weds Know,” which the almanac sent out December 2, the day after my wedding anniversary.

And then there’s today’s almanac. The poem is “1100,” by Emily Dickinson. I hardly know from Emily Dickinson, though if pressed I might be able to tell you that she came up with the line “hope is the thing with feathers” and that Julie Harris played her on stage and small-screen. I was puzzled by the title, having been so Dickinson-deprived that I did not know her poems were not titled, but numbered. With Max’s passing on my mind, the poem’s really a bull’s-eye. It starts:

“The last Night that She lived

“The last Night that She lived

It was a Common Night

Except the Dying – this to Us

Made Nature different.

We noticed smallest things –

Things overlooked before

By this great light upon our Minds

Italicized – as ’twere. …”

Go and read the rest.

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The Wounded

Purplehearts_cover_1

Found this listed on Kottke.org: The Purple Hearts Gallery. Portraits of American troops seriously wounded in Iraq, with brief accounts from each about what happened, how they feel about it, and what their lives are like now. Another aspect of the war that most of us know exists but never see.

"But like here in California, nobody really knows what the soldiers are going through, what’s happening to them. They see on TV, oh yeah, two soldiers got wounded today and they think, yeah, he’ll be alright. But that soldier is scarred for life both physically and mentally, but like they don’t understand. They see one soldier wounded and they’ll forget about it like as soon as they change the channel, you know." (Army Specialist Robert Acosta, Santa Ana, California)

(Note: The gallery contains selections from "Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq," a book of pictures and essays on Iraq.)

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How to Get Me …

… to quit reading a book.

You could argue that it’s not that hard. In one of my many guilt-ridden dimensions, the guilt grows out of not getting through as many books as I’d like to. Last one completed (a couple weeks ago): “To Conquer the Air,” by James Tobin (the Wright Brothers’ saga). As soon as I’d finished Tobin, picked up a book called “They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus,” published in 2002 by Elizabeth Weil, a writer I’ve respected (used to see her stuff in Fast Company magazine, and in one of my former incarnations, as an editor at Wired News, I tried to get her to write some stuff for us, but she said she was too busy).

“They All Laughed” is the story of a failed space start-up called Rotary Rocket. The company tried to build a reusable launch vehicle to go to orbit and back. It turns out it’s not as easy as it looks, and the effort just barely got off the ground, in a literal sense, while burning tens of millions of dollars. On forums like Amazon’s reader reviews, “They All Laughed” got a mixed reception. Insiders from the new private-space launch community felt she’d caricatured their efforts, to some extent. But worse, in their eyes, she’d just gotten important facts wrong. I thought the comments sounded like sour grapes. So I bought a used copy online for about five bucks.

I got to page 47 (of 230, including two “acknowledgements” pages). I may get farther, but I’ve found reading the book to be disspiriting. It’s just deflating to see something so ambitious and promising so full of simple factual errors. I actually outlined a few of the simple space-related ones on Amazon. But what makes me feel like quitting is the appearance of errors on workaday details such as the names of roads. We’re told that there’s an exit off Interstate 5 for Mercy Springs Road — no, actually, it’s Mercey Springs Road; or that the town of Mojave, very colorfully described as permeated by “a mood of repressed violence,” is on Highway 57; well, no, it’s actually Highway 58. And why should I take the author’s word about the town’s moods or the characters’ quirks or how a rocket works or anything else if she can’t get this elementary stuff straight?

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‘Bridges Across Chaos’

Kate and I went over to San Francisco on Wednesday night to see Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing” at the American Conservatory Theater. I’ve enjoyed the few Stoppard things I’ve seen (silly stuff like “On the Razzle” or more serous stuff like “Hapgood”) because of his wordplay. “The Real Thing” is an older piece, from the early ’80s, but it was competently staged and pretty well acted. The basic plot is a struggle about commitment and faithfulness, to people and ideas, acted out between a playwright and his actress lover;/wife. That’s all I’ll say about the substance of the thing, because this is sounding like a bad college newspaper review. But the dialogue had some inspired moments. In the second act, the playwright character, Henry, gets to carry on about the difference between tangible objects — real things — and things that are just the product of how we choose to behave with each other. It’s a good moment:

“… There is, I suppose, a world of objects which have a certain form, like this coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle. I suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism — they aren’t even like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to change them as though there were something there to change, you’ll get frustrated, and frustration will finally make you violent,. If you know this and proceed with humility, you may perhaps alter people’s perceptions so that they behave a little differently at that axis of behavior where we locate politics or justice; but if you don’t know this, then you’re acting on a mistake. Prejudice is the expression of this mistake. ”

And later, he talks about the purity and power of words and the damage that’s done when they’re corrupted:

” … I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwiing bricks is a demonstration whle building tower blocks is social violence, or that an unpalatable statement is provocation while disruptng the speaker is the exercise of free speech. Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more. … I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead. ”

Both passages touch on the moment we’re living in, in our real world, right now.

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The Most Inspiring Thing …

… to come my way today was thanks to The Writers Almanac. It’s Robert Pinsky’s birthday today (born in Long Branch, New Jersey, a town where Kate’s family has some history, one-time home, briefly, of U.S. Grant and deathplace, about the same time, of James A. Garfield). The almanac had a couple of beautiful Pinsky quotes:

“The longer I live, the more I see there’s something about reciting rhythmical words aloud — it’s almost biological—that comforts and enlivens human beings.”

And:

“The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines — it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It’s bodily.”

A case in point: Although I’m probably less than a Pinsky fanatic, I actually have a couple of his books. Here’s a favorite from one of them, the title poem from “Jersey Rain”:

Jersey Rain

Now near the end of the middle stretch of road

What have I learned? Some earthly wiles. An art.

That often I cannot tell good fortune from bad,

That once had seemed so easy to tell apart.

The source of art and woe aslant in wind

Dissolves or nourishes everything it touches.

What roadbank gullies and ruts it doesn’t mend

It carves the deeper, boiling tawny in ditches.

It spends itself regardless into the ocean.

It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:

Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,

The chilly liquefaction of day to night,

The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one:

It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River,

Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne.

I feel it churning even in fair weather

To craze distinction, dry the same as wet.

In ripples of heat the August drought still feeds

Vapors in the sky that swell to drench my state —

The Jersey rain, my rain, in streams and beads

Of indissoluble grudge and aspiration:

Original milk, replenisher of grief,

Descending destroyer, arrowed source of passion,

Silver and black, executioner, source of life.

(Now, why is it a favorite? Reading it to myself, I’m in love with the imagery that springs from the statement, “… I cannot tell good fortune from bad/That once had seemed so easy to tell apart.” Then, bring on the rain: “The source of art and woe aslant in wind.” Then the sound, the rhythm, of a torrent pouring down on the roof: “… my rain, in streams and beads/Of indissoluble grudge and aspiration.” Indissoluble grudge! Original milk. Descending destroyer. Source of life.)

And that, al 11:59 p.m. PDT, is that.

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An Old Impulse

I’ve mentioned Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac” before. Kate started getting it a while ago and started reading me some of the poetry and literary notes that are part of the daily email. Then she signed me up, and then I signed my dad up. It’s the best day-to-day email “newsletter” I’ve ever gotten and usually superbly written and edited.

A recent example: While I was back in Chicago, I missed the almanac for Sept. 11 (the archiving isn’t ideal; you’ll have to scroll down to find the day’s entry). The poem offered that day was “To a Terrorist,” by Stephen Dunn (from his book “Between Angels“):

“For the historical ache, the ache passed down

which finds its circumstance and becomes

the present ache, I offer this poem

without hope, knowing there’s nothing,

not even revenge, which alleviates

a life like yours. I offer it as one

might offer his father’s ashes

to the wind, a gesture

when there’s nothing else to do.

Still, I must say to you:

I hate your good reasons.

I hate the hatefulness that makes you fall

in love with death, your own included.

Perhaps you’re hating me now,

I who own my own house

and live in a country so muscular,

so smug, it thinks its terror is meant

only to mean well, and to protect.

Christ turned his singular cheek,

one man’s holiness another’s absurdity.

Like you, the rest of us obey the sting,

the surge. I’m just speaking out loud

to cancel my silence. Consider it an old impulse,

doomed to become mere words.

The first poet probably spoke to thunder

and, for a while, believed

thunder had an ear and a choice.”

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Ambushed by History

Philip Roth had a long essay in the Sunday New York Times book review section. The subject was his new novel, a sort of reimagining of American history if the isolationist, anti-semitic Hitler apologist Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940 instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most of the piece is an explanation of the book’s origins and an exploration of method. But he takes a detour near the end to puncture our most comforting national myth: That the purity of our devotion to freedom has made us somehow indestructible, immune from history:

“History claims everybody, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not. In recent books, including this new one, I take that simple fact of life and magnify it through the lens of critical moments I’ve lived through as a 20th-century American. I was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power and F.D.R. was first inaugurated as president and Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor of New York and Meyer Ellenstein became the mayor of Newark, my city’s first and only Jewish mayor. As a small child I heard on our living room radio the voices of Nazi Germany’s Fuhrer and America’s Father Coughlin delivering their anti-Semitic rants. Fighting and winning the Second World War was the great national preoccupation from December 1941 to August 1945, the heart of my grade school years. The cold war and the anti-Communist crusade overshadowed my high school and college years as did the uncovering of the monstrous truth of the Holocaust and the beginning of the terror of the atomic era. The Korean War ended shortly before I was drafted into the Army, and the Vietnam War and the domestic upheaval it fomented — along with the assassinations of American political leaders — clamored for my attention every day throughout my 30’s.

“And now Aristophanes, who surely must be God, has given us George W. Bush, a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one, and who has merely reaffirmed for me the maxim that informed the writing of all these books and that makes our lives as Americans as precarious as anyone else’s: all the assurances are provisional, even here in a 200-year-old democracy. We are ambushed, even as free Americans in a powerful republic armed to the teeth, by the unpredictability that is history. May I conclude with a quotation from my book? ”Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.’

“In writing these books I’ve tried to turn the epic back into the disaster as it was suffered without foreknowledge, without preparation, by people whose American expectations, though neither innocent nor delusional, were for something very different from what they got.”

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A Real Infospigot

From The New York Times this morning: “A Walking, Wisecracking Encyclopedia,” a review of a book by a guy who set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, and did it:

“BRITANNICA

“The venerable encyclopedia that Mr. Jacobs chose to read from cover to cover. It comprises 32 volumes, or 44 million words. ‘Reading the Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system, one with no shortage of shows about Sumerian cities,’ he writes. To accommodate this exercise he decides to cut back on watching reality television.”

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Reading While Flying

outsideSo, another thing about flying: I’m almost always glued to the window to watch the geography below. But I made an impulse newsstand buy before I got on the flight in Oakland that distracted me a good part of the flight: Outside Magazine’s September issue. The cover story is a first-person account by Aron Ralston of how he became trapped while scrambling through a Utah canyon last year when a boulder fell and pinned his right arm to a canyon wall. He freed himself after six days, but only after he managed to amputate his hand. Even sort of knowing how the story comes out, it was a gripping, extraordinarily well told story (just an excerpt from a book due out this month), and I found myself really admiring this guy not for his physical courage, which was considerable, but for his skill and quick-wittedness in assessing his situation and trying to resolve it. And no, he doesn’t shrink from his own responsibility for the event. The boulder falling was bad luck. But he had left no word of his whereabouts and certainly would have died if he hadn’t been able to finally extricate himself.

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Faulkner’s Take

Here’s an oft-quoted passage from William Faulkner (from “Intruder in the Dust,” which no, I have not read) that grabs a lot of people:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago….

As a northerner and as someone who grew up believing (and who still believes) that the Civil War was fought in the most just of causes — ultimately, to end slavery — it’s probably impossible to fully appreciate the feelings Faulkner’s evoking there. Yes, history’s full of moments of barely missed opportunity, of heroes thwarted, of big “what if” moments. What if Lincoln hadn’t been at Ford’s Theatre? What if Bobby Kennedy had lived? But what Faulkner is talking about is where history blends into myth. In some important way, it doesn’t take into account a moral dimension of the event it interprets. What if Lee had prevailed at Gettysburg (that’s the premise for a series of historical novels being written by Newt Gingrich, by the way)? Yeah — and what if the Soviets hadn’t stopped Hitler at Stalingrad? Sure, we have a wish that true valor had some reward beyond a glorified version of “nice try” and a bullet in the chest. But part of the reason we can look back and daydream about these episodes is because they came out the way they did. The Faulkner quote reminds me of another that kicks around in my head, from Grant’s account of Lee’s surrender at Appamattox:

“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the
sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”