The Paris Review's Blog, page 633

The Future of Libraries Is Coffee Shops, and Other News

Photo: Berit, via Flickr

A new report suggests that to stay relevant, libraries must become more like coffee shops, “vibrant and attractive community hubs.” You know, with Wi-Fi.
And the future of roads is fewer roads, because we have too damn many of them. The Trip Generation Manual, a commonly consulted urban-planning guide, “may overestimate the number of trips generated from a new development by as much as 55 percent—‘phantom trips’ … The result is that cities may build way more roads than necessary, perpetuating sprawl and leaving less street space for non-drivers in the process.”
Our editor Lorin Stein is judging Nowhere Magazine’s travel-writing contest—they’re “looking for young, old, novice and veteran voices to send us stories that possess a powerful sense of place.” First prize is a thousand dollars and submissions are due January 1.
Secret Behavior is a new magazine about “what intimacy looks like”: “The first issue, which explored anonymity, is full of emotional money shots: self-portraits of men’s feet when they climax from masturbation (paired with their responses to the artist’s wanted ad), breakup fiction by Catherine Lacey, Jesper Fabricius’s anatomical encyclopedia made from close-cropped pornography.”
A few months ago, John Paul Rollert wrote a piece for the Daily about an Ayn Rand conference in Vegas. Now he’s reported more on it in The Atlantic: “Escapism is the allure of Las Vegas. The city—with its shows, its clubs, even its casinos—is ultimately incidental. You come to leave your self behind. Escapism of a different sort is also the allure of a radical philosophy. It seduces not by promising a temporary solution to the contest between the grosser passions and personal integrity … but by providing an alternative vision of what the ‘real world’ constitutes.”
With his album Pom Pom, Ariel Pink has delivered some of the best pop music of 2014: “It all seems to speak to people in that world, all these aged tweens,” he said in an interview: “Everybody still thinks they’re a tween, but they’re not. They’re former tweens. Generation tweens … the new twelve-year-olds pop up and usurp the former twelve-year-olds’ hegemony. That’s what I love about the music industry. It’s run by these kids. The children dictate what’s cool, and then everybody else just thinks that they’re a kid the rest of their lives.”

Eamonn Doyle, i

Eamonn Doyle

Aperture’s Lit issue introduced me to the work of Eamonn Doyle, a photographer based in Dublin. His series i is inspired by Samuel Beckett. As he told LensCulture:

I was re-discovering the work of Samuel Beckett, specifically the “trilogy” comprising the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable. I began to be drawn towards a number of solitary “Beckettian” figures I saw on the streets of Dublin, people I had seen passing me every day who seemed to be treading the same ground, day in, day out … I wondered how I might approach the photographing of these people, who were after all (and who remain) near-total strangers to me … Is it possible to take photographs of these people in such a way that will honor their essential, even existential, distance from me? … This tension between, on the one hand, the attempt, and subsequent failure, to gain knowledge and, on the other, what happens in the act of attempting-then-failing is something that interests me. It’s a contradiction with which many of Beckett’s characters seem to be familiar. It’s also a point at which a representation, in reaching a limit point, acknowledges its status as an act.

See more of his work on his website, in Aperture, and at LensCulture.

Eamonn Doyle

How She Knows

Penelope Fitzgerald’s shifting reputation.

From the cover of Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.

Penelope Fitzgerald would have been ninety-eight today. We should mark the occasion by remembering that it is not extraordinary that she became a prize-winning novelist, though you may have heard otherwise.

In 2008, Julian Barnes described Fitzgerald as a jam-making grandmother, carrying a plastic, purple handbag. “Many readers’ initial reaction to a Fitzgerald novel,” he wrote, is, “ ‘But how does she know that?’ ” He said that he has reread the first scene of her book The Blue Flower (2000) many times, “always trying to find its secret, but never succeeding.”

And most everyone knows the story of the Booker dinner in 1979, to which Fitzgerald supposedly wore a flannel housedress. When she beat out V. S. Naipaul for the prize with Offshore, Robert Robinson of Book Programme proposed that the judges had made the wrong choice.

Then there’s Michael Dibdin, who once compared Fitzgerald to Jane Austen, of whom Lord Grey of Fallodon said something like, How astonishing that, despite the dullness of her life, she should write not only one novel, but several, and they are very good, too. Didbin was also incredulous of The Blue Flower: “How on earth was this done?”

Hermione Lee’s recent biography of Fitzgerald, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, has done great work in saying how, exactly, on earth this was done, recovering the deeply literary life that Fitzgerald was born into and led. Her father was Edmund Knox, editor of Punch and one of the famed Knox brothers, including Dillwyn, a cryptographer at Bletchley Park, and Wilfred, a theologian, who eventually became the subject of her second book. Her mother was one of the first students at Somerville College, where Fitzgerald herself went on to study with distinction. “I have been reading steadily for seventeen years,” she told the Oxford student magazine when she was voted Woman of the Year there. “When I go down I want to start writing.”

Strange, then, to imagine that this same woman was later said, by Julian Barnes, merely to have “fitted writing into the gaps in family life.” It has been the fate of many of the world’s most beloved writers to gain appreciation long after their deaths, but two years from Fitzgerald’s centennial birthday, we’re still only inching closer to acknowledging that her craft was more than a hobby. If Michael Dibdin’s 1995 use of Lord Grey’s 1816 statement is any indication, there is among male novelists an enduring tendency to regard the genius of their female counterparts as accidental, abnormal, and deeply inscrutable, when it is anything but.

Lee’s book rightly recharacterizes Fitzgerald’s success as deferred rather than late blooming—deferred, that is, by her relative poverty, a difficult marriage, and those prejudices that threatened her sense of ability—an important distinction. And it integrates a chronology of her life with deft analyses of her novels, like Offshore, into which Fitzgerald incorporated the houseboat on which she lived for many years, and which famously sank. The result, as Alexander Chee has written in Slate, is to pierce through the prevailing rhetoric that casts Fitzgerald as a bumbling grandmother of a writer. Lee has gone so far as to suggest that this persona was of Fitzgerald’s own devising: “And so she drew this other figure, the dotty lady,” as Chee summarizes, “over her own image, and she hid inside it.”

As a devotee of Penelope Fitzgerald the genius novelist, I’ll bend Lee’s perspective only slightly in my appreciation. Because viewing the “dotty lady” as a character put on by Fitzgerald doesn’t do enough to destabilize the categories of master and amateur that she defied—it doesn’t question the idea that these two identities, “accident-prone grandmother” and “English novelist,” could not have coexisted. It is vital to emphasize that Fitzgerald’s novels were not achieved in spite of her domestic life; they were borne directly out of it. Her work is radical in that it suggests that, in fact, a feminine experience, a liminal experience, might be better equipped than a male one to address the contradictions of human existence taken up by the greatest literature.

Fitzgerald once lamented to her longtime editor Richard Garnett, “How many books do you have to write and how many semicolons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status?” The Blue Flower, her last work, written at seventy-nine and concerning the German philosopher Novalis, echoes this question explicitly. It is no coincidence that the novel begins in the eighteenth century, when authorship in Europe became integrated into property ownership, excluding women. It specifically plays with the fragment, or aphorism, the chosen philosophical and literary form of the German Romantics. Short chapters, in bare prose and succinct phrases, invoke this style, but are ultimately undermined by a different set of novelistic devices that instead fill scenes with delicious richness, color that distracts from the supposed profundity of these men of few words.

This contradiction is introduced in the very first scene of The Blue Flower, in the midst of a washday. That Fitzgerald’s version of the life of a philosopher begins with the cleaning of the philosopher’s underwear is telling: immediately she has placed him inside a domestic sphere. Fritz (Fitzgerald does not use his Novalis moniker), in a Fichte-style fragment that he picked up under his tutelage at university, “Let your thought be the washbasket!,” but is interrupted by the barking of dogs, and by several maids, who cannot participate in his ecstatic utterance because their hands are full of his laundry. So the background becomes the foreground; the art of the scene is in its disorder, its fullness rather than its sparseness the main event. On the occasion of the washday, Fitzgerald locates beauty, rather than in the words of Novalis, in the sight of his siblings’ clothes, flung into the courtyard out of upper story windows, that “fluttered through the blue air, as though the children themselves had taken to flight.” The image captures the power of imaginative thinking, the lightness and deftness of the human mind despite the physical world more thoroughly than Fritz’s philosophical exercise ever could.

Later in the novel, Fritz tells his friend Karoline that she is “the thesis, tranquil, pale, finite, self-contained. I am the antithesis, uneasy, contradictory, passionate, reaching out beyond myself.” The exchange occurs in the kitchen—“as she chopped”—where Karoline, busy cutting countless potatoes into uniform pieces, can only listen. The Romantic project, concerned with a split self, the problem of subjectivity, considered the fragment as the ideal form. Its clipped poeticism served their core principle of self-reflexivity, providing a starting point, a question, rather than an answer. But consider Karoline’s truly split self: she listens to her friend speak, and contemplates antithesis and thesis, at the same time preparing a dinner to feed a whole house of people.

Fitzgerald deeply valued the preoccupations of male artists and writers—whether German philosophers or her father and uncles—with questions about the world and how to be in it, life’s continual “process of estrangement,” as Novalis described it. But her work exemplifies how these endeavors are endowed with greater understanding, enlightened by a form that is centered in and derived from the perspective of those who are estranged, of women. Herein lies Fitzgerald’s genius. The authors who cannot find it, like Michael Dibdin, who calls The Blue Flower “a novel in which nothing happens,” are the ones in most dire need of retraining by her work, which leads the eye to a different mode of seeing. Julian Barnes, too, might try revisiting that first scene, to understand the brilliance of the washday.

Bridget Read is an editorial assistant at Ecco. Her work has appeared in New York, Guernica Daily, and Words and Women 1.

Gags and Novelties

Illustration: Max Ronnersjö

“Do we need tea?” she echoed. “But Miss Lathbury … ” She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. ―Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

We have all experienced such “landslides of the mind”: moments that upend everything we thought we knew or believed, everything that made us feel secure. These are the moments when we grow up—or resolutely refuse to. They are the moments that define us. In my case, it was the moment, in middle school, when I saw someone actually slip on a banana peel.

If you’d asked me in the minutes—days—years before it happened, I would have scoffed at the very notion. I knew certain things as facts: The sky was blue. Everyone died. People slipping on banana peels were not funny. My certainty was so obvious as not to require conscious thought; and yet, in a sense, it underlay so many of my assumptions about comedy, sophistication, and human nature itself. 

As a child I was in the habit of listening to the 1918 Prokofiev opera Love for Three Oranges (dramatized for kids by the peerless Ann Rachlin), in which a prince has fallen into a melancholy from too much tragic poetry; the only cure is laughter. Yet all the most amusing clowns and jesters in the land fail to coax forth so much as a smile. It is only when the evil witch Fata Morgana falls over and exposes her underpants that the melancholy prince is roused to helpless mirth, and his life is saved.

Even in my earliest memories, I found this quite implausible and utterly unfunny. (The princesses trapped in enormous oranges was less of a stretch, apparently.) I was someone who “did not like” slapstick. This is who I was.

And then came that moment in the cafeteria. Someone had left a banana peel—outer side up—on the floor. A boy carrying a laden tray stepped on the banana peel and—yes!—skidded several feet, tray and food flying, arms flailing, legs thrown cartoonishly into the air. And like the melancholy prince, like a small child, like a Bruegel peasant, I guffawed. 

Was it “funny?” I don’t know. It was pure. It was pure human enjoyment of someone else’s misery and absurdity. And in the shocked minutes afterward, as people applauded and jeered and helped that boy clean up, I realized: I don’t know anything. Maybe it’s hilarious when someone gets pie’d. Maybe clowns have their place, and whoopee cushions, too. Maybe I like The Three Stooges. And then reality reasserted itself and I hid from that which challenged me. Maybe I drank tea; I was probably too young.

Still in the Grip of Kitsch, and Other News

Photo: Jean-Noël Lafargue

The origins of Times New Roman, the trustiest typeface of the PC era: “Times New Roman began as a challenge, when esteemed type designer Stanley Morison criticized London’s newspaper The Times for being out-of-touch with modern typographical trends. So The Times asked him to create something better. Morison enlisted the help of draftsman Victor Lardent and began conceptualizing a new typeface with two goals in mind: efficiency—maximizing the amount of type that would fit on a line and thus on a page—and readability.”
A history of kitsch and its enduring power: “Kitsch is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this—it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think, ‘Look at me feeling this—how nice I am and how lovable.’ ”
Great moments in swearing: an utterance in John Carpenter’s The Thing helped define our sense of a treasured obscenity. “The fuckin’ in ‘You gotta be fuckin’ kidding’ is surplus to compositional meaning but crucial to the moment and the encounter. Its trochee supplies essential force to the line’s measured disbelief, extending Palmer’s (and by extension the group’s) appalled bewilderment at the boggling form of their alien enemy.”
A new book purports to bust the stereotypes behind archaeology: “the work is often poorly paid, physically demanding, and prone to controversy … the unemployment rate in the field [is] at about fifty per cent.” (This piece, to its great credit, mentions Indiana Jones zero times.)
The best defense for research: “It’s in the archive where one forms a scholarly self—a self that, when all goes well, is intolerant of weak arguments and loose citation and all other forms of shoddy craftsmanship; a self that doesn’t accept a thesis without asking what assumptions and evidence it rests on; a self that doesn’t have a lot of patience with simpleminded formulas and knows an observation from an opinion and an opinion from an argument.”

Happy Haneke

A still from the German version of Haneke‘s Funny Games, 1997.

“My students, meanwhile, pitch only the gravest of topics. For them it’s always got to be the Holocaust. I usually tell them, Back off. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You can only reproduce what you read or heard elsewhere. Others who actually lived through it have said it much better than you ever could. Try to create something that springs organically from your own experience. For only then does it stand the slightest chance of being genuinely interesting.” —Michael Haneke, the Art of Screenwriting No. 5

I felt enormously clever writing that pun up there. Then I remembered that it’s already been used—it’s the title of Anthony Lane’s excellent 2009 profile of Haneke in The New Yorker. Tant pis!

Even so, my point stands: tonight marks the first night of Hanukkah, and our new issue features the Art of Screenwriting No. 5, an interview with Michael Haneke, whose name is pronounced in very nearly the same fashion. Coincidence? Yes, absolutely, nothing more.

And yet.

You may consider, during these eight nights of gift-giving, capitalizing on the Haneke/Hanukkah near-homonym and presenting your loved one with a subscription to The Paris Review, starting with our Haneke issue—just forty dollars for a year’s supply of fiction, poetry, interviews, and art, including a postcard announcing your gift with a personal message. They make a great present for aspiring writers, who should, in the words of William Kennedy, “read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.”

The Eyes Have It

Odilon Redon’s The Cyclops (detail), ca. 1914.

Philip K. Dick was born on this day in 1928. His story “The Eyes Have It” originally appeared in Science Fiction Stories 1953, but since the copyright wasn’t renewed, it’s lapsed into the public domain. “A little whimsy, now and then, makes for good balance,” the magazine’s editors wrote then. “Theoretically, you could find this type of humor anywhere. But only a topflight science-fictionist, we thought, could have written this story, in just this way … ”

It was quite by accident I discovered this incredible invasion of Earth by lifeforms from another planet. As yet, I haven’t done anything about it; I can’t think of anything to do. I wrote to the Government, and they sent back a pamphlet on the repair and maintenance of frame houses. Anyhow, the whole thing is known; I’m not the first to discover it. Maybe it’s even under control.

I was sitting in my easy-chair, idly turning the pages of a paperbacked book someone had left on the bus, when I came across the reference that first put me on the trail. For a moment I didn’t respond. It took some time for the full import to sink in. After I’d comprehended, it seemed odd I hadn’t noticed it right away.

The reference was clearly to a nonhuman species of incredible properties, not indigenous to Earth. A species, I hasten to point out, customarily masquerading as ordinary human beings. Their disguise, however, became transparent in the face of the following observations by the author. It was at once obvious the author knew everything. Knew everything—and was taking it in his stride. The line (and I tremble remembering it even now) read:

… his eyes slowly roved about the room.

Vague chills assailed me. I tried to picture the eyes. Did they roll like dimes? The passage indicated not; they seemed to move through the air, not over the surface. Rather rapidly, apparently. No one in the story was surprised. That’s what tipped me off. No sign of amazement at such an outrageous thing. Later the matter was amplified.

… his eyes moved from person to person.

There it was in a nutshell. The eyes had clearly come apart from the rest of him and were on their own. My heart pounded and my breath choked in my windpipe. I had stumbled on an accidental mention of a totally unfamiliar race. Obviously non-Terrestrial. Yet, to the characters in the book, it was perfectly natural—which suggested they belonged to the same species.

And the author? A slow suspicion burned in my mind. The author was taking it rather too easily in his stride. Evidently, he felt this was quite a usual thing. He made absolutely no attempt to conceal this knowledge. The story continued:

… presently his eyes fastened on Julia.

Julia, being a lady, had at least the breeding to feel indignant. She is described as blushing and knitting her brows angrily. At this, I sighed with relief. They weren’t all non-Terrestrials. The narrative continues:

… slowly, calmly, his eyes examined every inch of her.

Great Scott! But here the girl turned and stomped off and the matter ended. I lay back in my chair gasping with horror. My wife and family regarded me in wonder.

“What’s wrong, dear?” my wife asked.

I couldn’t tell her. Knowledge like this was too much for the ordinary run-of-the-mill person. I had to keep it to myself. “Nothing,” I gasped. I leaped up, snatched the book, and hurried out of the room.

 *

In the garage, I continued reading. There was more. Trembling, I read the next revealing passage:

… he put his arm around Julia. Presently she asked him if he would remove his arm. He immediately did so, with a smile.

It’s not said what was done with the arm after the fellow had removed it. Maybe it was left standing upright in the corner. Maybe it was thrown away. I don’t care. In any case, the full meaning was there, staring me right in the face.

Here was a race of creatures capable of removing portions of their anatomy at will. Eyes, arms—and maybe more. Without batting an eyelash. My knowledge of biology came in handy, at this point. Obviously they were simple beings, uni-cellular, some sort of primitive single-celled things. Beings no more developed than starfish. Starfish can do the same thing, you know.

I read on. And came to this incredible revelation, tossed off coolly by the author without the faintest tremor:

… outside the movie theater we split up. Part of us went inside, part over to the cafe for dinner.

Binary fission, obviously. Splitting in half and forming two entities. Probably each lower half went to the cafe, it being farther, and the upper halves to the movies. I read on, hands shaking. I had really stumbled onto something here. My mind reeled as I made out this passage:

… I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. Poor Bibney has lost his head again.

Which was followed by:

… and Bob says he has utterly no guts.

Yet Bibney got around as well as the next person. The next person, however, was just as strange. He was soon described as:

… totally lacking in brains.

 *

There was no doubt of the thing in the next passage. Julia, whom I had thought to be the one normal person, reveals herself as also being an alien life form, similar to the rest:

… quite deliberately, Julia had given her heart to the young man.

It didn’t relate what the final disposition of the organ was, but I didn’t really care. It was evident Julia had gone right on living in her usual manner, like all the others in the book. Without heart, arms, eyes, brains, viscera, dividing up in two when the occasion demanded. Without a qualm.

… thereupon she gave him her hand.

I sickened. The rascal now had her hand, as well as her heart. I shudder to think what he’s done with them, by this time.

… he took her arm.

Not content to wait, he had to start dismantling her on his own. Flushing crimson, I slammed the book shut and leaped to my feet. But not in time to escape one last reference to those carefree bits of anatomy whose travels had originally thrown me on the track:

… her eyes followed him all the way down the road and across the meadow.

I rushed from the garage and back inside the warm house, as if the accursed things were following me. My wife and children were playing Monopoly in the kitchen. I joined them and played with frantic fervor, brow feverish, teeth chattering.

I had had enough of the thing. I want to hear no more about it. Let them come on. Let them invade Earth. I don’t want to get mixed up in it.

I have absolutely no stomach for it.

You can find more of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction in the public domain at Project Gutenberg.

Half Magic

John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, 1886.

I like the arbitrary lists the Guardian often includes in its children’s book section: best villains in children’s books, best dogs, best mothers. As with all lists, these are made to be debated, and it’s always fun to see what the compiler chooses. But today’s list made me mad. Simply put, it was incomplete. “Best cauldrons in children’s books” did not include the cauldron from Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth.

I’m sure the cauldrons from The Worst Witch and Wyrd Sisters are great. I know the cauldrons found in Lloyd Alexander and J. K. Rowling are high quality. And certainly no one’s denying that Macbeth’s cauldron game is strong. (Even if it’s a stretch to call it a children’s book.) One can justify the exclusion of The Black Cauldron from this list, and, even though I’d have included Eleanor Estes’s The Witch Family, I understand that this is a matter of opinion. But Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth is nothing less than a glaring omission.

If you’re a fan of E. L. Konigsburg, you probably know her first book. It came out the same year—1967—as From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It’s the story of a loner, the titular Elizabeth, who falls under the sway of another girl, Jennifer, who claims to be a witch and takes Elizabeth on as her apprentice. Elizabeth balks at her mentor’s bossiness, but puts up with it: “Before I’d got Jennifer,” she says, “I’d had no one.” Jennifer declares that the pair will make a flying potion as a test for Elizabeth. But the cauldron actually appears earlier in the story, when the kids are asked to bring in kitchen props for a school play. 

Jennifer caused a small sensation. She brought in a huge black three-legged pot. It would hold about twenty quarts of water. A little kid could swim in it almost. Jennifer didn’t have to write her name on that pot to identify it. No one else had ever seen anything else like it except in a museum. I happened to know that it was the pot we were going to cook our flying ointment in.

Their spell-casting is based, in part, on that of Macbeth’s Weird Sisters. “Every modern witch ought to read Macbeth,” Jennifer says at one point. “Those witches cooked up a wonderful brew. Not flying ointment brew. Trouble brew. And the first ingredient was a toad.”

But in the course of their preparations, Elizabeth makes a pet of the toad, and when it comes time to sacrifice him to the flying ointment, she finds she can’t throw him into the cauldron. She defies Jennifer and the two fight bitterly.

In an interview, the author claimed that she was inspired by her own family’s move and the isolation her daughter found in their new apartment building. But most of all, she said, she drew on her students at a Florida girls’ school, who were “softly comfortable on the outside and solidly uncomfortable on the inside.” Konigsburg’s books often deal with loneliness and the relationships it forces; this is particularly true in the case of Jennifer and 1986’s Up From Jericho Tel, which is, incidentally, one of the weirdest kids’ books ever written, not just in its treatment of issues of class and race, but also in its look at the very real power dynamics that exist among children. 

I’m not going to write a full essay about the significance of the cauldron in Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth—though lord knows I hung papers on less, back in the day—but I would argue that it rates a mention. True, it’s not literally magical: that’s the point. But like so much in the book, and in a lot of good children’s lit, its power lies in possibility, in the thought that the everyday might be invested with magic, and that a strong enough personality might as well be magical. 

But that wouldn’t all fit in the Guardian’s comments section. 

Going Aboard

Retracing Moby-Dick on a nineteenth-century whaler.

Photo: Ben Shattuck

­­­When Herman Melville was twenty-one, he embarked on the whaleship Acushnet, out of New Bedford. We all know what that led to. This past summer, Mystic Seaport finished their five-year, 7.5-million-dollar restoration of the 1841 whaleship Charles W. Morgan, the sister ship to the Acushnet. The Morgan is in many ways identical to Melville’s fictional Pequod, save that sperm whale jawbone tiller and a few other sinister touches. Mystic Seaport celebrated the completion by sailing the Morgan around New England for a couple months. I went aboard for a night and a day, intent on following in Ishmael’s footsteps, hoping to breathe a little life into my idea of the distant, literary ship. Below are passages from Moby-Dick that involve the Pequod, followed by my own accounts.

 

NIGHT

Newport, RI

THOUGHTS ON THE FORECASTLE

 

From Moby-Dick

Chapter 21: Going Aboard

“At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept upon him.”

 

Chapter 97: The Lamp

“Had you descended from the Pequod’s try-works to the Pequod’s forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.

In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination.”

 

June 17, 2014

Newport’s fog beads on the Morgan’s rigging—a ropes course webbed overhead—and then showers down in a private rainstorm on the ship’s deck. I’m here with thirty or so other sailors—some professional crew, some donors, and some volunteers, like myself, looking for the same things a Civil War reenactor might look for. Everyone is downstairs (sorry, belowdecks), in the forecastle (sorry, f’c’s’le) getting ready for bed. The fog blots out the nearby ships, their abusively anachronistic lights, and the parking lot at the end of the pier. As I walk the wet decks, I hear nothing but rigging rain falling on wood, and smell only hemp or tar or wood. I’ll later learn that under the midday sun, some original wooden casks get so hot that they release the fishy-sweet scent of the whale oil they once held more than a hundred years ago.

I descend to the f’c’s’le and stand in the horseshoe of tens of bunks lining the snub-nosed bow of the ship. Where is the bath of orange candlelight I imagined, the one Ishmael described? Extinguished by coast guard regulations, it turns out—no open flames, no smoking. (What would Queequeg, who lit up the moment he descended into the f’c’s’le, do?) My fellow voyagers, their headlamps blinding, shuffle from their bunks to the bathrooms, toothbrushes branching from their mouths. Some are dressed in cutely patterned jersey pajamas. It feels more like the bunkhouse of a kids’ sleep-away camp than Ishmael’s shadowy room. Colorful curtains hang from one side of my bunk to the other. There’s none of the pure, oil-deprived darkness of the Pequod. Only plenty of LEDs.

We stuff ourselves into sleeping bags, making the sounds of people trying not to make sounds: shoes, zippers. I’d heard once that nineteenth-century Americans were short. Then I’d heard that fact was apocryphal. Now, buckling my legs in an impossible attempt to get comfortable, I go back to thinking there’s some truth to it. The place is cozy the way a high-altitude lodge is cozy—some ancient form of comfort derived from bunking up with kinsmen and women in a cave-like hold.

I’m trying hard, I think, to do something like time travel into Moby-Dick. Listen to water, I tell myself. I imagine Melville’s first night in the Acushnet, on the eve of his departure. He would go on to round Cape Horn and eventually jump ship in the paradisiacal Nuku Hiva of the Marquesas Islands, where—as recounted in his book Typee, which cast him as a literary darling long before the ruinous days of Moby-Dick publication—he’ll fall in love with a woman and maybe a man, his best friend, Toby. For Melville and Ishmael both, their first nights on the ship signified the beginning of a change in their lives. There was Melville, escaping dreary New England, headed for the South Pacific. And there was young, suicidal Ishmael, going to sea instead of revolver to solve his “hypos.”

The water laps against this big oaken cave. I am feeling transported, I tell myself.

Then my phone buzzes with a text from my older brother, who’s staying on a boat in the harbor with his friend, A.: “Hey, Ben. message from A.: Can we go to the Morgan with rum and drink with your brother?”

“Already in bed,” I respond. He texts, “Are you sleeping on port or starboard side? Will you hear our paddle if we approach with a dinghy? Again, these are A’s questions. Sorry to ruin the moment.”

I write, “No starboard or port bunks. Lights out now. Good night.”

“K. Night!”

But minutes later: “A. wants to tell you he has oars. He says ‘we can row over.’ ”

I am not feeling very transported.

It’s not likely that my brother is serious, but when he and A. are together, what starts as a joke usually turns out to be serious. I shut off my phone, praying not to hear a dinghy bump against the Morgan’s 173-year-old hull in the middle of the night; hoping not to hear my brother and his friend trying to climb aboard; hoping more than anything not to hear them stumble through the forecastle, peaking through the colorful curtains into the “triangular oaken vaults” as they wake “each mariner a chiselled muteness.”

He doesn’t come. The electric fan whirs through the night. The overhead lightbulb shines with the worried obligation of coast guard regulations.

Photo: Ben Shattuck

DAY

Newport to Vineyard Haven

THOUGHTS ON BEING A PASSENGER

From Moby-Dick

Chapter 1: Loomings

“Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don't sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing.”

 

June 18, 2014

There’s a stiff wind and a heavy swell from the storm that had passed some days earlier. The sails unfurl and writhe into shape. Everyone is seasick. I put my elbows up on the hot wood of the gunwales and stare at the horizon, commanding myself not throw up. The two people who probably weren’t seasick on their first day—I think?—Melville and Ishmael. Everywhere in the waves are sharp pins of sunlight that jab a multipronged head-and-stomach ache.

Cormorants rush over the water’s surface. A gannet—that long-necked and gull-like glider plane—singularly bombs downwind. Reports of a dead whale in Buzzard’s Bay ripple through the voyagers. “I think I know who they’re going to blame!” the captain says.

I put adhesive dots on my wrist. Ishmael probably didn’t use adhesive dots. I resist Dramamine, sure that it will make me too sleepy to soak in the time-travel. But with my face pressed flat to the gunwale, someone offers me pills, and I swallow them without wasting time for water.

When I finally peel my face from the gunwale, I look around to see that the no-cellphone-on-deck rule is being broken in every direction. A reporter calls his newspaper, yelling into the phone either because of the wind or his historic maritime zeal. Maybe it’s the Dramamine kicking in, but I feel a zesty thrill for this sort of breaking news. “We’re still sailing!” he yells. “Wait! There’s Martha’s Vineyard!”

How are you supposed to go away—how do you get to the “watery part” of the world, as Ishmael called it? There’s cell service almost everywhere, or, if not, at least a satellite creeping overhead ready to lap up an Iridium’s signal. There’s that story of the family off of Mexico, sailing around the world, who, when they ran into trouble, hit a big green button that summoned the coast guard in a couple hours. While the premise of Moby-Dick is that our hero was the last survivor of the Pequod to tell the tale, the Morgan is home to a handful of iPad users, all recording and uploading to the billowy cloud. This reminds me of a news story in which airplane passengers took out phones when the captain announced their flight was going down. A man in an oxygen mask had snapped a few selfies, which were later featured in the New York Times.

Ishmael was the book, the device, the last word. This voyage will be blogged, photographed, audio recorded, commented upon—blasted into a thousand pieces and perspectives. If we keep sailing, past Oaks Bluffs, past Nantucket, into the Atlantic, to the Azores, following the path of the Pequod around Cape of Good Hope, into the Indian Ocean, through Indonesia, up to Japan, and then east, farther and farther, into the middle nothingness of the Pacific where Ahab met Moby-Dick, anybody with a good Internet connection could come along for the ride.

We pass the southern side of Naushon Island, that preserved stretch west of Woods Hole. A wall of a beech trees lines the shore. Here, finally, I feel a touch of time-travel: this view, from this ship, is exactly as it would have been in the 1840s. I am looking at the island as it was, and the island is looking at the ship as it was.

The other passengers and I pocket our phones and cameras as we turn from Naushon and head into the port of Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard. Tens of boats stream from the harbor to greet us. As we approach land, cars stopped on the seaside roads honk. The few remaining commercial fishing boats blow their horns. A gaggle of children wave from the bow of a fancy schooner. The Vineyard Haven Yacht Club is firing a cannon, it sounds like, and the harbormaster is shooting a water gun. Everyone is ecstatic. The reporter yells into his phone, “We’re here! Can you see us?” As if you could somehow miss us: a 471-ton, 173-year-old whaleship drifting into harbor.

Photo: Ben Shattuck

Ben Shattuck, a native of the New Bedford area, is a recent Teaching-Writing Fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s currently working on his first novel.

Faster, Faster, Faster, and Other News

Adolph Menzel, Eisenwalzwerk (Moderne Cyklopen), ca. 1872.

Congratulations to our art editor, Charlotte Strick, whose design for Lydia Davis’s Can’t and Won’t made the New York Times ’s list of the best book covers of 2014.
Humankind has felt crunched for time for centuries, but now we really, really, really feel crunched for time. “If one’s leisure time feels like work that one doesn’t have time for, work itself increasingly feels like work one doesn’t have time for.” What effect has the speedup had on our cultural lives? A line from George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), of all things, applies perfectly to the rise of the online think piece: “The evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides … hence a demand for essays, descriptive articles, fragments of criticism, out of all proportion to the supply of even tolerable work.”
How did a work of One Direction fan fiction garner more than a billion reads and a six-figure book deal? Especially when this is its plot synopsis? “When clean-cut Tessa leaves her family (and cardigan-wearing good-guy boyfriend, Noah) behind for university, she meets Hardin, a darker version of One Direction’s Harry Styles—a pierced and tattooed punk with a reputation as campus lothario. They start an excruciating on-again off-again relationship, punctuated with drunk sex, laddish input from Hardin’s friends (the other pseudonymous 1D boys), and some of literature’s saddest handjobs. All that in a few thousand pages … ” The secret lies in the devotion of fan-fic communities.
Among AbeBooks’s most expensive used-book sales of 2014: a five-volume set of French Art Deco posters, Das Kapital, eighty-one Renaissance-era engravings of Mediterranean fish, a first edition of le Carré’s debut novel.
And now, finally, pictures of people standing next to their televisions.