Austin Ratner's Blog, page 7

The Grand Cathedral

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom has a valid gripe with the "School of Resentment" as he calls it--i.e. the group of academics who are actively destroying the notion of a canon of great works, of classics.  The real virtue of this book, however, is in Bloom's wise and warm-hearted discussions of the art of the great works themselves.  He'll send you back to your favorite classics reinvigorated to discover them again or inspire you to tackle great works you've heard of but never read.  Either way, Bloom will arm you with much helpful wisdom about the books, their narrative strategies, their themes, and their relation to one another.  His approach is in my view the common sense one--to think about the writers not as vessels of impersonal cultural-historical forces, but as individual human beings, as artists acutely aware of, indebted to, and competitive with their predecessors.  It's a history of literary artists since the Renaissance as if they've all been working on the same piece, like architects inheriting the job of building a grand cathedral and passing the job on to the next generation.


The only disappointments for me were chapters 10 (on Jane Austen and Wordsworth) and 20 (on Kafka)--Bloom lapses into excessive abstraction in these.  But this book is an essential for any library.


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The Golem and the Blood Libel

The Golem by Isaac Bashevis Singer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By a long shot, this is the funniest book I ever read about the blood libel.


Caveat: despite illustrations by Uri Shulevitz that look suited to children, this is not a children's book.  It's about some gentiles who libel an innocent Jew for the murder of a child in 17th-century Prague.  German folklore, of course, really did depict Jews as demonic figures who used Christian children's blood in their matzah.  The legend is gruesome enough, but its demonization of Jews is even more troubling given the catastrophic consequences of such racism in the real lives of European Jewish families as recently as sixty years ago.  Golem folklore, meanwhile, emerged from the Jewish ghettoes of Europe and, at least in Singer's telling, serves as antidote to the racist folklore known to Jews as the blood libel.  Golems are pretend, as are demonic cannibal Jews, as is the arch distinction between heroes and villains in this and other fairy tales.  (Singer surely painted the righteousness of the Jewish victims and the venality and mendacity of their gentile accusers in stark terms so that the charges of cannibalism in the story would be understood as unambiguously false.)  But it's important to note that Isaac Bashevis Singer didn't make up the notion of the blood libel.  The blood libel appears in Chaucer's poetry and in the original edition of Grimm's fairy tales.  In The Golem the judge uses the frequency of the accusation of cannibalism as evidence of its validity.  That is surely one of the ways that rumors propagate--people believe hoax emails today for the same reason--and the Jews of Europe, an ostracized minority, were powerless to resist the damage the legend wrought.  They dealt with it as the Jews had previously dealt with hardships: they told stories about it.


Part of what makes Singer's story so funny and unusual is that it shifts from tragedy to comedy half-way through, when the Golem, having solved a major problem for the Jews of Prague, starts acting crazy in a very childlike way, doing unexpected and yet harmless things like climbing the bell tower and running around the bell and kissing a girl (who finds "his lips were as scratchy as a horseradish grinder").  The Golem, an earthen clay giant shaped by a rabbi with the name of God engraved on his forehead, seems to function like a work of art in the life of the Jews--like an Isaac Bashevis Singer story--alleviating tragedy through might and also through comedy.  The Golem is the creative life-force of the Jews, called up from the sacred depths of the spirit at their darkest hours with pious intensity, and then blundering past tragedies with actions bent implacably upon the earthly and profane.  The Golem doesn't listen to the rabbi and becomes preoccupied with childish games and the sort of quotidian needs that can look so trivial and absurd in the context of tragedy.  And by suggesting absurdities, the Golem performs a magic act like the one that called him into being: he summons laughter out of us like a genie out of a lamp, and our laughter in turn calls us back to the necessity, the joy, and significance of daily life.


One indicator that the Golem does not belong to the Gothic story tradition of self-destruction is his attitude to wine.  Boris Karloff as Dracula: "I don't drink ... wine."  Frankenstein's effete monster too specifically disapproved of wine.  The Golem: "Golem like wine!"  Even Manischewitz, apparently.


Isaac Bashevis Singer has a master's intuition and lightness of touch.  Uri Shulevitz's illustrations are perfect: funny, sincere, a little sad, big, and strange.


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Non Serviam

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On June 15, 1917, a U.S. marshal and 12 New York City policemen entered the Lower East Side offices of the radical magazine Mother Earth and placed its editor under arrest.  The U.S. was mobilizing to enter World War I, and the famous anarchist Emma Goldman had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft in violation of the Selective Service Act passed earlier that year.  She brought with her to the jailhouse, according to Vivian Gornick, only two things: "a small toilet case" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.


Joyce's novel was a rare object at that time (though, admittedly, not so rare as Emma Goldman's toilet case).  At the time Goldman was arrested, Portrait had been in print for little more than six months in an edition of less than a thousand.  Yet it's fitting, even if surprising, that she had a copy and attached such importance to it, since Joyce wrote the quintessential book against "the spirit of unquestioning obedience" that Goldman deplored.


While Goldman rebelled publicly against governments, armies, corporations, and churches in order to even the scales of justice, Joyce ignored a political bagatelle such as World War I.  He wrote not of the struggle to liberate a people but of the individual's struggle to liberate himself—if need be, from his people.  In his book on the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus—the best book ever written on male adolescence, I think—Stephen liberates himself above all from his own twisted conscience.  And that is hard enough.  To overthrow a government of the people is not so hard, perhaps, as to overthrow the government of the heart.


Plato confused conscience with reason, but Freud, the ultimate analyst of corrupt conscience (a.k.a. neurosis), did not.  He knew that for some it could be a catalogue of hysteric, childish dangers with sometimes pitiless, bullying, and sophistical methods for enforcing its prohibitions.


Joyce's Stephen Dedalus rebels against such irrational conscience, conscience that rules not by reason but by incantations and scare tactics, a sovereign conscience that "force hath made supreme / Above his equals" as Satan says of God in Paradise Lost Book I, ll 248-249.  At times Stephen shares the apostate angel's "unconquerable will" and "courage never to submit or yield," as Milton puts it.  When the priest names the cardinal Satanic sin—"non serviam: I will not serve" (Portrait p 117)—and says you burn in Hell for it, Stephen cowers and chastens himself.  But reason, courage, and self-sympathy prevails; in the novel's last pages Stephen twice echoes Satan's famous line, "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven" (PL I, l 263); he tells his friend Cranly "I will not serve" on p 239 and "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church" on p 247.  Dedalus soars over Hell with self-made wings, over the Irish Sea to Europe, hoping "to fly by those nets" of church and homeland (p 203) which are the aliases by which demonic conscience makes itself known.


This inner conflict, which shapes Portrait, in turn takes its shape from the family conflict in which its template was cast.  Just like in Paradise Lost, where the many crises of conscience turn on relations between God the Father and his curious, jealous children, Portrait is all about fathers and sons.  Patrick Parrinder, author of a great essay on the novel called "A Portrait of the Artist," says of Stephen Dedalus: "his father's voice plays a crucial part in the novel.  Portrait begins (as we have seen) with his father's words and ends with a cry addressed to an imaginary father."  It's battle and rapprochement between father and son, rebellion and submission, resentment and idolization, and a vacillation between these two positions, conducted wholly in the realm of language.  While writing my college thesis on Portrait I counted instances of the word 'father' and came up with 193 (including 'governor' three times and 'Papa' once) in 253 pages.  (Since this was before the internet and e-books, I counted by circling 'father' whenever I came across it and then I went back and tallied them up on notebook paper with hash marks in sets of five!)


There's a beautiful triangle form inside of Portrait, with sin at one end of its base and piety at the other, and a conciliation between the two at its glorious flying vertex.  Only Joyce could inscribe this abstract form onto a novel of such incomparable specificity and naturalism.  He does it with three motivic lines on Stephen's approach to reality.


First:


"It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin." p 103


Then:


"In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality." p 159


And then:


"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." p 253


There at the windy vertex Stephen throws off the yoke of oppressive conscience by replacing it with a conscience he made himself en route to maturity.  That is self-governance, no?  That is autonomy, and it enables "detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old," as Freud says in "The Transformations of Puberty," the third of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.


I'll soon be forty years old.  I've been done with puberty for months.  Now, if I could just move past this nasty, moody adolescence.  Well, here I go with my wax wings on, to set sail over the abyss, muttering to myself, " 'Indigestibly byronic'?  I find that incontestably mo-ronic, Mr. Kenner…."  Shit, it's a long way down there.



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Old Deuteronomy

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It somehow does not surprise me that T.S. Eliot was able to see the world so well through the eyes of a cat.  His created cat personas are charming, especially their names:


Jellylorum
Munkustrap
Coricopat
The Old Gumbie Cat (a.k.a. Jennyanydots)
Growltiger
Grumbuskin
Tumblebrutus
Gilbert
The Rum Tum Tugger
Mungojerrie
Rumpelteazer
Old Deuteronomy
The Great Rumpuscat
Macavity the Mystery Cat
Gus the Theater Cat
Bustopher Jones
Skimbleshanks
...and more

I love that cat "Gilbert" inconspicuously stuck in there.

It makes me squirm a bit, however, when T.S. refers to a group of Siamese cats as "Chinks."  And then Eliot writes of Growltiger:

But most to Cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed;
To Cats of foreign name and race no quarter was allowed....

Far be it from me to spoil the enjoyment of poetry with politics, but the date of first publication--1939--for me tends to compound rather than explain Eliot's moral tone deafness when he writes so casually of his cat protagonist's racism.  I feel in T.S. Eliot some shortage of charity toward human beings, which his lavish empathy for cats only emphasizes.  It reminds me in some way of Donald Pleasance as super-villain Blofeld in the James Bond movies sitting there with that hideous scar on his face and plotting world domination while stroking his white Persian.  Or of the witches in Macbeth with their cat--"I come, Graymalkin!"

Surely it's I who's being bigoted--toward cats--when I endorse the ages-old propaganda that felines are the suited companions of witches and demons like Donald Pleasance.  And yet I've seen some corroboration of their notorious stand-offishness; as well as of T.S. Eliot's.  His poetic personas are morbid--deliciously so, I would say.

But if you skip the fifth stanza of "Growltiger's Last Stand" and just say "cats" instead of "Chinks" in that same poem, I think it's inspired poetry for children.  I have two editions.  The one illustrated by Axel Scheffler is more kid-friendly and helps to disguise the faint odor of moral defect.  The other is illustrated by Edward Gorey, who is himself charming but also macabre, so the Gorey is probably somewhat better attuned to the macabre temperature of T.S. Eliot.

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Berlin Winters

The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris and  Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Berlin Stories, upon which the musical Cabaret was based, pairs two novels by Christopher Isherwood.  Both were inspired by his experiences as an English expatriate in Berlin in the early 1930s.  The second 'novel' (if it really is a novel), Goodbye to Berlin, is in my view far superior to the first, The Last of Mr. Norris (I would skip it), but both contain extraordinarily vivid prose, and Goodbye to Berlin is a paragon of modern realism and one of my very favorite books.

Particularly in the description of human behaviors, Isherwood exhibits a genius for metaphor, with which he makes the unknown world of the narrator materialize before your eyes by comparison to something known.  E.g.: "She wore a bandage round her throat, tight under the high collar of her old-fashioned black dress.  She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores."   Or this description of a Berlin winter (this is actually from Mr. Norris): “Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.”  He fashions many unforgettable images of 1930s Berlin in winter, in fact, and they've become emblazoned in my mind as omens of world war:

Tonight, for the first time this winter, it is very cold. The dead cold grips the town in utter silence, like the silence of intense midday summer heat. In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small black dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map. Outside, in the night, beyond the last new-built blocks of concrete flats, where the streets end in frozen allotment gardens, are the Prussian plains. You can feel them all round you, tonight, creeping in upon the city, like an immense waste of unhomely ocean—sprinkled with leafless copses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb. Goodbye to Berlin (The Berlin Stories), p. 186

Isherwood also shows what use can be made of adjectives, which are often abstract and dead on the page.  Isherwood's, by contrast, are often unexpected and helpful to the imagination because of their specificity.  He sets a hoity-toity dinner table not with silver and port, but with "historic" silver and "legendary" port.  And check out the modifier on snow in this sentence: "They drew back--harmless, after all, as mere ghosts--into the darkness, while our bus, with a great churning of its wheels, lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow."  Ironically the word "unseen" makes the moment seeable for any reader who's had a nighttime bus ride or been outdoors in the countryside on a winter night.

His character sketches have an uncommonly persuasive depth psychology to them, and the figures in the book are hence both real and very moving.  And while some might find Goodbye to Berlin too meandering, I think Isherwood has loaded the vignettes with story, albeit realistic story, life-problems.  Some of the characters also recur so that the novel itself does feel like it has a story arc.  Finally, Isherwood scales individual lives against the backdrop of history--all in all a very impressive work, a real piece of art, and in that old childish sense, I didn't want it to end.  I had that rare feeling of having experienced real people for a couple of hundred pages.  To me that is the gold standard of literary art--whether the author has successfully created beings of sufficient complexity, nuance, detail, and verisimilitude to seem real.  Sometimes it seems to me that works that do this particularly well are under-appreciated, precisely because of their ability to create a persuasive fictional dream without calling attention to the writer's artifice.  It's as though the characters really exist and the author had nothing to do with it, or is only to be called on the carpet for mistreating these real people he calls his characters or choosing the wrong people to be in his book.  Please do not make this mistake with prose master Christopher Isherwood.


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A Dog's Dog

Ribsy by Beverly Cleary
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No one has ever written so convincingly from a dog's point of view as has Beverly Cleary in Ribsy, not even Franz Kafka in his short story, "Investigations of a Dog," or Jack London in his story of dog-slavers in the Yukon, Call of the Wild.  

The excruciating Kafka masterpiece, which even for Kafka is a little weird, allegorizes the human condition at the same time that it sincerely plumbs the depths of a dog's life qua dog.  It rightly dwells on the canine obsessions of food and urination, but it also depicts a dog in rebellion against his own nature, a dog apart from other dogs, and in this aspect of the story, Kafka leans in the human direction more than the canine.  Ribsy, on the other hand, is one of those unquestioning dogs that Kafka's tormented narrator would have envied, and for that reason Ribsy better represents dog-kind in all its cognitively impaired glory.

Jack London's protagonist Buck, a mixed St. Bernard-sheep dog, is far more human even than Kafka's dog; he's basically a human being trapped in a dog's body.  Looking back into Call of the Wild as an adult, I admit I'm much impressed with London's power to evoke reality given that he wrote to entertain and earn a living.  But with more experience since junior high, of both humans and dogs, I'm a little suspicious of his characterization of Buck as "proud."  The salient characteristic of the domestic dog is humility, not pride.  Even a rambunctious, ill-behaved dog feels and acts upon his dependence on the greater wisdom of his more evolved companion homo sapiens, who long ago went up into the trees and came back down on two feet, able to turn a doorknob.  (My grandfather called all dogs "he"--and there was a logic to this, as there's something unfussy about drinking out of a toilet, an indifference to decorum and to malodor that is more rightly assigned to the male gender.)  While Kafka was forced to omit relations between dogs and humans from his allegory, London at least assigns due importance to this relationship.  Leave it to Beverly Cleary, however, to depict this cross-species relationship while keeping human beings human and dogs dogs.

Jeffrey Masson wrote a non-fiction book that tries to imagine the psychological experience of a dog and in the beginning of it he quotes "the British evolutionist Louis Robinson" on the presumed centrality of human beings in the canine weltanschauung.  If Jack London imagines dogs as men, Robinson thinks that dogs imagine Jack London as a dog:

It has been said that a man stands to his dog in the position of god; but when we consider that our conceptions of deity lead us to the general idea of an enormously powerful and omniscient man, who loves, hates, desires, rewards, and punishes in human-like fashion, it involves no strain of imagination to conceive that from the dog's point of view his master is an elongated and abnormally cunning dog--of different shape and manners certain from the common run of dogs, yet canine in his essential nature.

Cleary's Ribsy isn't proud like a person, but he's not religious either.  He doesn't worship people, but he loves them, at least those of a certain age--not too young, like Ramona Quimby, who annoys him--but people young enough to have energy to run and play and to be charitable with food.  (Some call these types of people 'children.')  Cleary, an expert story-teller, nails the picture of a dog's wants and conflicts: Ribsy wants his friend Henry Huggins, but other children of the right age will do temporarily; he wants hot dogs (and the more he eats and less hungry he is, the more picky he gets about them); he wants to find out what's making that strange noise; he wants to please; he wants to lie still when he's full; he wants to be at home.  And he experiences shame, but he isn't very neurotic, or maybe it's just that he's forgetful.  He rarely knows what he did wrong when he's ashamed and moves on with admirable briskness and resilience.  He solves problems with the tools he has at hand, for example, waiting.  (This is how he deals with Ramona.)  There is also barking and running away.  And there is trying again, and again.  As Cleary says, he's not easily discouraged--in a word he's dogged.  At one point he even feigns sleep, waits for a ticket-taker to walk away, and then sneaks into a stadium.  Wittgenstein said that a dog is incapable of hypocrisy, but I've seen many a dog pursue this strategy of waiting out somebody, a strategy that blends multiple doggy skills like waiting, persistence, humility, and a forgetfulness about what to be ashamed of.  It's a form of guile, I would say, but a most innocent one.

If we see anything human in a dog like Ribsy, we ought to see a child and like that child, we ought to run after hot dogs and forget what to be ashamed of.


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Out of Eden

The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism by Peter Gay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For more than a month now, I've been steeped in Peter Gay's sane and sage history of the sanest and sagest intellects from Roman antiquity to the 18th-century.  Gay's command of his subject is broad and deep.  He owns a subtle, temperate, and vivacious mind.   This book is a treasure chest of historical data, but it's also a philosophical meditation on the central question that nature has put to the human race: can you face the facts of life and of yourself, or will you bury your head in the sand like an ostrich?  (Do even ostriches actually do this?)  Will you bury your thinking mind in all manner of denial and magic and, one might add, will you in so doing destroy your planet, your kind, yourselves?  This question, which has been so well articulated by Carl Sagan, that great latter-day Justus Lipsius, intermittently haunted me while reading--but then anxiety haunts me even if I'm sitting on the beach, Corona in hand.  And more than anxiety, I felt a great comfort in my daily immersion in the humanism of antiquity, of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Gay focuses on the writings and ideas themselves more than on the personal lives of the writers and thinkers.  It isn't light reading in that sense, but it's leavened by Gay's perspicuous and unpedantic writing style and his sense of the drama in the flux of ideas across empires and ages.  I learned all the great Roman writers I should have read by now, and discovered the Carl Sagans of their time, the popularizers, the encyclopedists and curators of the arts and letters of the modern and humane.  People with fantastic names like Aldus Manutius and Poggio Bracciolini (I think I ate something like that braised with garlic).  Poggio, "the most assiduous and successful discoverer of classical texts in the Renaissance" (p. 261), was a church figure who shrugged off clerical duties to rescue manuscripts from monasteries.  "From 1414 to 1418," Gay tells us, "Poggio Bracciolini found himself Apostolic Secretary at the Council of Constance, a council which, fortunately for scholarship, rarely met." (p. 262)  Gay's dry humor keeps the history entertaining throughout and, despite the precedence of ideas before personalities, Gay does in the end resurrect certain personalities through his amusing and affecting anecdotes.  I learned that Boccaccio, the great progenitor of Chaucer and Shakespeare and author of The Decameron, was also a Raider of the Lost Ark.  Gay writes:

When Boccaccio visited the great Benedictine library of Monte Cassino, he found it a room without a door, with grass growing on the window sills, and the manuscripts covered with dust, torn and mutilated.  Profoundly dejected, and in tears, he asked one of the monks how such desecrations could have been permitted, and was told that the monks would tear off strips of parchment, to be made into psalters for boys or amulets for women, just to make a little money. p. 262

No one figure looms over the book, and over the Enlightenment itself, as does Voltaire--the archangel of the Enlightenment, an effete Machiavellian marauder on behalf of all the right things: science, tolerance, the classics.  Gay describes Voltaire's exile from the court of Frederick the Great thus: "Depressed, irritable, aimless, he wandered from elegant refuge to elegant refuge" (p. 363) until he landed at the abbey of Senones in 1754.  While Calmet generously hosted Voltaire at the abbey, Voltaire privately scoffed at him, "Felix errore suo," (p. 363-364) and used the abbey library to research polemics meant to destroy all that Calmet held most dear--the Christian faith.  

David Hume is the other hero of the book and the age.  Gay paints a portrait of James Boswell's visit to Hume in the weeks before the latter's death: "Hume's good nature and graceful acceptance of his imminent dissolution withstood even the tasteless intrusion of James Boswell," Gay writes (p. 356).  Boswell, like his mentor Samuel Johnson, was terrified of the philosophes' demotion of the Christian Heaven to the status of a fairy tale, and they particularly feared Hume, one of the most original and formidable minds of all time.  Boswell tried to extract from Hume some shred of Christian belief (as if Hume's endorsement would make it all true!) but even on his deathbed, Hume calmly refused to abandon the conclusions to which careful reasoning had led him.  "The Christian was on the defensive," Gay writes, "and grave doubts assailed him.  Perhaps to dispel them--he does not tell us--Boswell then sought refuge in an argument that Hume would certainly have been too charitable to use."  Boswell said in effect, Don't you want to see your friends in Heaven?  To which Hume replied, yes, but his friends didn't believe in an absurd notion like Heaven either.  "Not long after," says Gay, "as [Edward] Gibbon notes with majestic approval, Hume died at Edinburgh, 'the death of a philosopher.' " (p. 357)

"Hume makes plain that since God is silent, man is his own master: he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way," Gay writes in conclusion (p. 419), and I suspect he deliberately echoes the last lines of Paradise Lost on the departure of Adam and Eve from Eden:

"They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

Let us all be so courageously modern as Peter Gay, David Hume, Milton, Adam, and Eve.



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Life Also Sucked in Roman Times

Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica by Horace
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's almost shocking how modern and relevant Horace's social commentary reads today.  Every character type he attacks I recognize from my own experience.  Every flaw he describes in himself I recognize in myself.  He's caustic, crude, witty, self-deprecating, down-to-earth, and wise in his guidance on how to live and how to write.  His voice is so strong you can feel his personal presence from two millennia away.

Clifton Fadiman and John Major's New Lifetime Reading Plan, a sage and practical guide to great books, leaves out Horace.  This is perhaps because Major added a long list of "non-Western" titles to the list.  I don't disagree with that in any way.  I don't, and I don't think even Harold Bloom would.  But you can't bump Horace from a lifetime reading plan for anybody.  Bump Aldous Huxley instead.  There--now you, me, Major, and Fadiman have room for Horace.  Do not hold it against Horace that he is "Western," if such a category even exists.  He was the son of a slave, for crying out loud!  (Virgil wasn't even Roman--he was a Gaul.)  And Horace was a satirist, not an apologist for the culture in which he lived!  How much more marginalized do you want his CV to be?  What's important is not that he wrote in Latin but that he was wise, and an inspiration to many centuries of other profound thinkers.  He'll make you feel better about the headaches of modern times (jackhammers are even now shivering my skull) with all his complaints about the noise and irritating superficiality of life in ancient Rome.

I like the Loeb Classical edition, which contains a 1926 English translation by H.R. Fairclough side by side with the original Latin.  I can't remember much Latin at this point, but this translation seems to me to take fewer liberties than more recent ones do.  The Penguin Classics translation by Niall Rudd attempts to recapture the original's irreverent tone by modernizing the diction, but to me this comes off anachronistic and unfaithful.  Fairclough also provides helpful footnotes.


Mirabile visu.





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Another Day in June

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mrs. Dalloway may take a back seat to To the Lighthouse (to which I'm partial, for one), but it probably doesn't take a back seat to anything else in English prose fiction.  Like Ulysses, it takes place on a single day in June and it enters the thoughts of various Londoners (as opposed to Dubliners) on that day, often compelling different characters to reflect on one event, one object, one person from their many different vantages.  It's striking how often those different viewpoints agree, as opposed to disagree.  With an omniscience that hovers over all of London and thrusts itself confidently into any heart it wishes, Woolf creates a very firm sense of a fixed reality outside her diverse characters' minds, one that commands their attention and thought whether they like it or not.  This is both a departure from the relativism of the postmoderns (Woolf's characters have in no sense 'created' their own reality) and a feat of writerly verisimilitude.  I hate to compare this book to Ulysses, since I've been under Joyce's spell since I was 19 and still worship him, but there is something leaner, more elegant, more coldly beautiful--like a Bernini sculpture--something more profound even, in Woolf's affirmation of life.  For one thing, the alternative to that affirmation is made plainer in Woolf than in Joyce; in Woolf that alternative in self-destruction and despair is as real to her suicidally-depressed characters as it was to the author herself.  The dialectic between the despairing Septimus Warren Smith and the life-embracing Clarissa Dalloway makes Woolf's June book somehow more necessary than Joyce's.  The stakes are higher.  The narration is more stout-hearted as it insists on visualizing the grimmest coordinates on the map of human emotion.  Joyce pays the price in his art, perhaps, for having it a little bit easier in his life.


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Gallows Songs

Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I discovered Christian Morgenstern and his collection of poems called Gallows Songs (or Galgenlieder in the original German) while researching my novel The Jump Artist; Morgenstern was one of the many writers Philippe Halsman read while in Innsbruck Prison in 1928 and 1929.


The University of Michigan Press jacket copy says that this mysterious poet died in 1914 at the age of 43 and describes the world he created in Gallows Songs as one of "delight, dread, and unexpectable realities."   I don't speak German, so it's impossible for me to know how faithful W.D. Snodgrass and Lore Segal's translations are to the original style and content.  I'm suspicious of verse translations that rhyme as these do in the translated English, but they're really breathtaking.  Morgenstern--or at any rate the collaboration between Morgenstern and his interpreters--created a work that's tuned to some beautiful and strange frequency of the mind and heart.  The poems are mysterious, encoded and free associative like dreams, and yet they're coherent in the way dreams are nonsensical and still coherent.  The poems seem to trace sequences of real events. They speak like dreams to an intelligent but magical and emotional part of the mind and there elaborate a mood before the reader knows it.  Reading Morgenstern is akin to listening to music--to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring or Schoenberg's atonal sounds.  It's askew and somehow right and as it should be, and all about life and death in a minuscule space, just like a dream.  "Here one may find the Gallows Brothers swaying in the wind or meet those two eccentric spirits Palmstrom and Korf, their incredible theories, their insane and brilliant inventions, their Competition in Nocturnes," the unusually soulful and helpful book jacket says.


The Morgenstern together with illustrations by Paul Klee makes for a distinctively, passionately, exquisitely, magnificently modernist art object.


Palmstrom observing his candles:


There do this dreamer's eyes behold

On the fabled white escarpments

Undaunted myriads of the sun's pilgrims.


And in the next poem, thinking of the Alps in his bed:


190,000 feet he lies

Over Tschirn, seeing the stars, fistsize


And in the next one, baptizing a poodle:


The still unbaptized poodle of Fritz Kunkel

Was purchased by Von Korf's step-foster-uncle.


You heard him right, ladies and gentlemen: The still unbaptized poodle of Fritz Kunkel / Was purchased by Von Korf's step-foster-uncle.  Just FYI.


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