In my preparations for Easter I watched (almost all) three movie versions of the story:
King of Kings,
The Last Temptation of Christ,
and Passion of the Christ.
The comparison and contrast was fascinating, and after I looked up a few things which I found noteworthy.
The oldest of the three, King of Kings, is from 1961 and parts of it did not age well. The thing which sticks out the most is the sensibility of the movie; at no time while I was sitting there was I unaware that this was a presentation from 1960 Hollywood. The movie did not suck me into its false reality with suspension of my disbelief. The one thing which distinguishes it is the music. The score is by Miklos Rozsa, one of the best ever film score composers. I have this CD (not too bad) and in the liner notes they have comments by Rozsa. He did Ben Hur and King of Kings right after, and he comments that Ben Hur was the Jesus story without any of his speaking parts, and then Jesus' speaking parts are immediately picked up in King of Kings. King of Kings is, so to speak, one of the many supplemental discs for Ben Hur. The cover photograph on that CD illustrates one of my problems with the movie. It shows a still from the movie with King Herod and the queen and they are wearing really goofy costumes.
Omitting Ben Hur from my program may have been a blunder. I had always thought that Jesus was a minor character in this movie, but in looking at the program notes for the DVD they have a picture of the jacket from the original novel where it says in a plain English sub-title: a novel of The Christ. Easter isn't for a couple more weeks and so I may remedy this, but it is a very long movie. The thing I remember most from my last viewing is that Charlton Heston's abdomen closeups were as impressive as anything they have ever gotten out of Brad Pitt. That guy spent a lot of time in the gym.
The best of these three movies, for me, was The Last Temptation of Christ. No Rozsa score, but the Peter Gabriel score is not chopped liver. The thing which I really appreciated was the depth of seemingly all, even the most minor characters. The relationships between Judas and Jesus, John the Baptist and Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Jesus were all believable (for the two hours I was sitting there watching it) and very interesting. I do not know what Palestine in the zeroth century was really like, but the setting provided for this story was clearly like nothing I am familiar with from my everyday life. The contrast between this and the familiarity of King of Kings is large.
Then there is The Passion of the Christ. The beginning of the movie was great. They have the dialog in Aramaic with English sub-titles, which I thought was an interesting way to do it. I could not watch the movie to the end, however. When the Roman guards beat Jesus during his trial, it is just too gross. It is like those scenes at the end of Rocky where the beating is way more than a human could withstand, and still maintain conscious brain function. I watched Rocky all the way to the end, so I can stomach a lot. Passion is at least five times worse than that, perhaps much more. When the bloody gore got to the five Rockies level, I shut the DVD player off.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
03 April 2011
14 March 2011
Angle of safety
In February 2009 on the 100th anniversary of Wallace Stegner's birthday, Timothy Egan wrote a thoughtful tribute to Stegner on the New York Times Op-Ed page. He did not get any facts wrong, but he did not put his emphasis where I would have, although I have only read five of Stegner's books and only three of these were novels.
Stegner's greatest accomplishment was his versatility: first an award winning novelist; second a teacher with award winning novelist pupils (Kesey, McMurtry, &c); third a writer of terrific non-fiction with expertise in history and biography and ecology; and fourth an innovator in environmental politics. My own appreciation for Stegner is centered on two non-fiction books which were essential for my own education:
Beyond the hundredth meridian, and
Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs.
Egan complained that Stegner is under-appreciated, that even at his home at Stanford University nobody reads him any longer. This complaint is wrong, and perhaps even meaningless. The man's books are in print and his most-read novels have hundreds of five-star reviews on the Amazon web page. There is one lesson in Stegner's books which is not generally appreciated in my experience. That lesson is the environment in the western United States is very fragile and its organic evolution has left it incapable of supporting the number of people living on it. Many people in the eastern United States who have never spent much time in the west do not appreciate this fairly simple fact, regardless of what they have read or heard. If you have not spent enough time there, you may not be capable of appreciating it.
The hundredth meridian in Stegner's book refers to an approximate boundary across the Great Plains of the United States. To the east of this (curved) boundary rainfall will support agriculture, and to the west agriculture requires irrigation because the rain is too sparse. If you look at the google satellite map of the United States, the east is green and the west is brown; the line of demarcation is approximately 100 degrees west in longitude, the hundredth meridian.
The central character in the book is John Wesley Powell, a legendary giant of a man. Powell lost an arm at the Battle of Shiloh, and in spite of this handicap he commanded the first (white man) expedition to navigate the length of the Colorado River. In the vernacular, the man was a little nuts. He was also the first man to raise the issue of water allocation in the settlement of the western United States.
Near Moab, Utah, at the visitor's center to Canyonlands National Park they show a movie about Powell's expedition, and they have a replica of Powell's boats. The technology of rapid running water vessels has come a long way since the 1860's, and people now do this trip for fun. People also suffer accidental death doing these trips for fun with modern vessels. Some of Powell's men were killed by Indians, which is one hazard the current adventurer (and their life insurance underwriter) probably does not have to account for.
In around 1993 I learned firsthand about the fragility of the land in the west. There is a spectacular overlook of the canyons of Canyonlands at Dead Horse Point, at the confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River. As you look away from the river confluence, you can still observe the tracks of seismic survey lines placed by oil exploration companies. Canyonlands was chartered in 1964, at which time seismic surveys were no longer permitted. Now a seismic survey line is a pretty benign environmental impact, but in Canyonlands you can see the remains of one for at least thirty years. On the gulf coast that is going to be invisible after a single growing season. East of the hundredth meridian, the environment is very forgiving. This is the sense in which living east of the hundredth meridian can blind one to the fragility of the environment, and this is the lesson which Stegner worked so hard to provide in his books.
The other thing about life in the West which Stegner expressed better than any I have seen is the human element of opportunism which is so prevalent. In American History class in high school they told us all about "Go west, young man", but they did not tell us this story with any of the detail and passion with which Stegner tells it. His father moved Stegner's family all over the western United States and Canada pursuing an assortment of half-brained schemes and investment scams. Stegner told the story of his father's life in a brutal New York Times Sunday Magazine story which I can no longer link to. The ending was unforgettable.
"He died friendless and penniless of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a fleabag hotel hundreds of miles from his last permanent address, after a lifetime of creating more environmental damage than he could undo if he had a second lifetime to devote to the task."
I have no doubt mangled that quote a little transcribing it from my memory, but that is the gist. I am saddened a little that such a great writer as Stegner did not more fully absorb Emily Dickinson's lesson to tell it slant.
Stegner's greatest accomplishment was his versatility: first an award winning novelist; second a teacher with award winning novelist pupils (Kesey, McMurtry, &c); third a writer of terrific non-fiction with expertise in history and biography and ecology; and fourth an innovator in environmental politics. My own appreciation for Stegner is centered on two non-fiction books which were essential for my own education:
Beyond the hundredth meridian, and
Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs.
Egan complained that Stegner is under-appreciated, that even at his home at Stanford University nobody reads him any longer. This complaint is wrong, and perhaps even meaningless. The man's books are in print and his most-read novels have hundreds of five-star reviews on the Amazon web page. There is one lesson in Stegner's books which is not generally appreciated in my experience. That lesson is the environment in the western United States is very fragile and its organic evolution has left it incapable of supporting the number of people living on it. Many people in the eastern United States who have never spent much time in the west do not appreciate this fairly simple fact, regardless of what they have read or heard. If you have not spent enough time there, you may not be capable of appreciating it.
The hundredth meridian in Stegner's book refers to an approximate boundary across the Great Plains of the United States. To the east of this (curved) boundary rainfall will support agriculture, and to the west agriculture requires irrigation because the rain is too sparse. If you look at the google satellite map of the United States, the east is green and the west is brown; the line of demarcation is approximately 100 degrees west in longitude, the hundredth meridian.
The central character in the book is John Wesley Powell, a legendary giant of a man. Powell lost an arm at the Battle of Shiloh, and in spite of this handicap he commanded the first (white man) expedition to navigate the length of the Colorado River. In the vernacular, the man was a little nuts. He was also the first man to raise the issue of water allocation in the settlement of the western United States.
Near Moab, Utah, at the visitor's center to Canyonlands National Park they show a movie about Powell's expedition, and they have a replica of Powell's boats. The technology of rapid running water vessels has come a long way since the 1860's, and people now do this trip for fun. People also suffer accidental death doing these trips for fun with modern vessels. Some of Powell's men were killed by Indians, which is one hazard the current adventurer (and their life insurance underwriter) probably does not have to account for.
In around 1993 I learned firsthand about the fragility of the land in the west. There is a spectacular overlook of the canyons of Canyonlands at Dead Horse Point, at the confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River. As you look away from the river confluence, you can still observe the tracks of seismic survey lines placed by oil exploration companies. Canyonlands was chartered in 1964, at which time seismic surveys were no longer permitted. Now a seismic survey line is a pretty benign environmental impact, but in Canyonlands you can see the remains of one for at least thirty years. On the gulf coast that is going to be invisible after a single growing season. East of the hundredth meridian, the environment is very forgiving. This is the sense in which living east of the hundredth meridian can blind one to the fragility of the environment, and this is the lesson which Stegner worked so hard to provide in his books.
The other thing about life in the West which Stegner expressed better than any I have seen is the human element of opportunism which is so prevalent. In American History class in high school they told us all about "Go west, young man", but they did not tell us this story with any of the detail and passion with which Stegner tells it. His father moved Stegner's family all over the western United States and Canada pursuing an assortment of half-brained schemes and investment scams. Stegner told the story of his father's life in a brutal New York Times Sunday Magazine story which I can no longer link to. The ending was unforgettable.
"He died friendless and penniless of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a fleabag hotel hundreds of miles from his last permanent address, after a lifetime of creating more environmental damage than he could undo if he had a second lifetime to devote to the task."
I have no doubt mangled that quote a little transcribing it from my memory, but that is the gist. I am saddened a little that such a great writer as Stegner did not more fully absorb Emily Dickinson's lesson to tell it slant.
22 February 2011
Memory Relentless
I have a memory of an interview on National Public Radio from a few years back with Maurice Sendak. In the interview he expressed a depressing view of his own life and his memories of it. The gist of this (my own memory is fuzzy enough that this is not verbatim) was that he found his memories to be relentless; that he would associate from one thing to another and it was inevitable that he would eventually arrive at something painful, too painful to escape from to a next painless association.That is not exactly what he said, but I can clearly recall his use of the word "relentless".
One of the stories which he told of his early life was unforgettable. His family was first or second generation in the United States; they were Jews who had immigrated from Poland. All of their family that stayed behind were wiped out by the Germans in the war. This was a horrible experience to be related to, but it contaminated their American life. He said his mother would not allow him to forget it for a day. If he was late to the dinner table, his mother would tell him, "your cousin Benjamin would love to be able to come to the dinner table on time, but he can't because the Nazis killed him."
Now Sendak was born in 1928. Unless they had some special inside information (possible but not likely) Maurice was 17 years old in 1945 when the full horror of what happened in Poland during the war finally became common knowledge. When I heard this story on the radio, I thought "my God what a horrible thing to say to a child." This was the tone in which he presented it. I was surprised when I looked at the dates because, although that is a horrible thing to say to a child, a seventeen-year-old is not a child; and I wonder if he was not exaggerating for effect and even perhaps he might have made the whole thing up.
The other strange thing in the interview was he said he was in psychoanalysis for 25 years and he had never been happy until just recently. It was a rather sad presentation for such an apparently successful writer and man. Perhaps those of us with less relentless memories are very fortunate.
One of the stories which he told of his early life was unforgettable. His family was first or second generation in the United States; they were Jews who had immigrated from Poland. All of their family that stayed behind were wiped out by the Germans in the war. This was a horrible experience to be related to, but it contaminated their American life. He said his mother would not allow him to forget it for a day. If he was late to the dinner table, his mother would tell him, "your cousin Benjamin would love to be able to come to the dinner table on time, but he can't because the Nazis killed him."
Now Sendak was born in 1928. Unless they had some special inside information (possible but not likely) Maurice was 17 years old in 1945 when the full horror of what happened in Poland during the war finally became common knowledge. When I heard this story on the radio, I thought "my God what a horrible thing to say to a child." This was the tone in which he presented it. I was surprised when I looked at the dates because, although that is a horrible thing to say to a child, a seventeen-year-old is not a child; and I wonder if he was not exaggerating for effect and even perhaps he might have made the whole thing up.
The other strange thing in the interview was he said he was in psychoanalysis for 25 years and he had never been happy until just recently. It was a rather sad presentation for such an apparently successful writer and man. Perhaps those of us with less relentless memories are very fortunate.
02 February 2011
Vengeance on a Dumb Brute
In the current wikipedia article on Melville they have that business about the mental constitution of the man. I have seen a lot of odd things about Melville and particularly about his novel, Moby Dick. I am not obsessed with Ahab, but I am interested. Sometimes I can believe I am the only reader who understands what exactly is going on in this novel. (That is not a bad criterion for a an effective piece of art--it leaves much of the audience feeling that they have a special understanding of the artist's point.) There is something about a working voyage on the deep sea in danger and isolation and boredom which can drive men mad.
There is one sentence in particular which I don't think I will ever forget. They are talking about the whale and Queequeg (the cannibal) offers:
"And he have one, two, three-oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him-him-" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle-"like him-him-"
Well it is not exactly a sentence as somebody else finishes what Queequeg seems powerless to get to the period at the end of. This character who is not a native English speaker emits one of the greatest phrases of all: all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him-him-.
The first time I read Moby Dick it was for a class. That was not much fun. On later readings with nothing at stake I developed a love for Melville's language. The story is OK, but the color and richness in Melville's language are what make the book great. If you have had a hard time with it before and are interested in trying again, my Joyce trick has worked for me for this book as well.
Another thing which I did not appreciate in my first reading of Moby Dick is that Ahab has a black magic ritual in that quarter deck chapter:
"Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow-Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death! The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered."
Ahab pours grog into the hollow connector ends of the harpooners' weapon points and they drink libation and swear a blood oath for Ahab's vengeance upon the dumb brute. Ahab's destruction is nothing more than a representation of evil invocations returning back to their source. The law of karma. The points are of course screwed onto the harpoon shafts, all twiske-tee be-twisk.
Ahab's ravings are not the speech of a self-actualized Maslow man. This is the feature of the language of Moby Dick which can be the hardest on the reader. Melville is creating a character who is mad, and madness is never easy to follow. Melville himself had sailed with whalers, and if you have ever spent time working on the deep ocean you may know exactly what he was writing about.
On Christmas Day the New York Times published a long story about the last hours of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was destroyed in a blowout and explosion and fire last April in the Gulf of Mexico; eleven of the crewmen on the rig died that day. The thing in the article which disturbed me most was the following sentence:
"In a few hours, the drilling crew’s 21-day hitch would be done."
I have done a handful of 14 day tours offshore, and one 21 day tour. The last day of my one 21 day tour was the longest day of my life, and the last hour of that day was the longest hour. After fourteen days my brain turned to mush. I was on seismic survey ships instead of drilling rigs but the environment is similar: heavy equipment, high pressure hydraulics, diesel engines with thousands of horsepower, flammable fluids and welding equipment. On the back deck of a seismic ship, as on a drill ship, there are a thousand different ways to die.
You are in close quarters with a bunch of other guys (mostly) but the isolation is severe when you are a thousand miles from a 911 emergency operator. If the sun is out and there are no clouds, there is a view which is spooky as Ahab's black magic curse of the whale--there is nothing in any direction but blue, blue sky above, blue water below, any direction you turn there is nothing but a uniform blank blue field in your vision. One time I was staring at it and six white storks came out of the blue and flew right over the ship. It was maybe only ten minutes from when they appeared to when they disappeared in the other direction, but that also was like an interval of forever.
There is one sentence in particular which I don't think I will ever forget. They are talking about the whale and Queequeg (the cannibal) offers:
"And he have one, two, three-oh! good many iron in him hide, too, Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him-him-" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle-"like him-him-"
Well it is not exactly a sentence as somebody else finishes what Queequeg seems powerless to get to the period at the end of. This character who is not a native English speaker emits one of the greatest phrases of all: all twiske-tee be-twisk, like him-him-.
The first time I read Moby Dick it was for a class. That was not much fun. On later readings with nothing at stake I developed a love for Melville's language. The story is OK, but the color and richness in Melville's language are what make the book great. If you have had a hard time with it before and are interested in trying again, my Joyce trick has worked for me for this book as well.
Another thing which I did not appreciate in my first reading of Moby Dick is that Ahab has a black magic ritual in that quarter deck chapter:
"Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow-Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death! The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and shivered."
Ahab pours grog into the hollow connector ends of the harpooners' weapon points and they drink libation and swear a blood oath for Ahab's vengeance upon the dumb brute. Ahab's destruction is nothing more than a representation of evil invocations returning back to their source. The law of karma. The points are of course screwed onto the harpoon shafts, all twiske-tee be-twisk.
Ahab's ravings are not the speech of a self-actualized Maslow man. This is the feature of the language of Moby Dick which can be the hardest on the reader. Melville is creating a character who is mad, and madness is never easy to follow. Melville himself had sailed with whalers, and if you have ever spent time working on the deep ocean you may know exactly what he was writing about.
On Christmas Day the New York Times published a long story about the last hours of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was destroyed in a blowout and explosion and fire last April in the Gulf of Mexico; eleven of the crewmen on the rig died that day. The thing in the article which disturbed me most was the following sentence:
"In a few hours, the drilling crew’s 21-day hitch would be done."
I have done a handful of 14 day tours offshore, and one 21 day tour. The last day of my one 21 day tour was the longest day of my life, and the last hour of that day was the longest hour. After fourteen days my brain turned to mush. I was on seismic survey ships instead of drilling rigs but the environment is similar: heavy equipment, high pressure hydraulics, diesel engines with thousands of horsepower, flammable fluids and welding equipment. On the back deck of a seismic ship, as on a drill ship, there are a thousand different ways to die.
You are in close quarters with a bunch of other guys (mostly) but the isolation is severe when you are a thousand miles from a 911 emergency operator. If the sun is out and there are no clouds, there is a view which is spooky as Ahab's black magic curse of the whale--there is nothing in any direction but blue, blue sky above, blue water below, any direction you turn there is nothing but a uniform blank blue field in your vision. One time I was staring at it and six white storks came out of the blue and flew right over the ship. It was maybe only ten minutes from when they appeared to when they disappeared in the other direction, but that also was like an interval of forever.
13 January 2011
Life as literature
This is the title of a book by Alexander Nehamas. He is a philosophy professor and his book is a study of some of the writings of Nietzsche, with a theme that literary criticism is a handy set of tools to examine all of human life. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is not too big. The simile is a little off though, and it works much better in the other direction. A novel can put you inside the mind of another (fictional) person in a way that no psychological monograph ever can. Walter Kauffman presented this idea in his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy in a short discussion of Tolstoy and Napoleon and Tolstoy's character Natasha. If the ghost of Napoleon were brought to modern earth and set down in the library with a dozen of his biographies, he would read them from beginning to end and say, smugly, "Ah! My secret is safe." If the ghost of the person who inspired Tolstoy's character were brought to modern earth (assuming there was a single person who inspired Tolstoy's invention) and set down in the library with War and Peace, she would erupt in tears and cry, "Oh my God! They knew!"
A number of psychologists have put this idea to work. Carl Jung famously asked the question "what myth am I living by?" In his case it turned out to be the Tower of Babel and he occupied himself in his retirement using stones to build a house and a tower and monuments and other things. It was his childhood occupation--building models out of small stones; and in his old age he assumed it as a calling. His student Joseph Campbell went further with the idea and liked to describe us as beings who tell stories, that we are little more than the stories which we tell. This is a similar small error to the one Nehamas makes. The stories are important, but we contain the stories; it is not the stories which contain us.
Without going overboard, I endorse the value of story telling. Not long ago I did some work with the career manual "What color is your parachute?" This is one of the most popular books for people in job transition such as myself. A large fraction of the book is devoted to introspection for the person in transition to make choices which are consistent with who they are. The tool is story telling. The author poses question prompts and the stories which the reader provides are supposed to be clues for making good career choices. I went through this part of the book very quickly, because I had independently done a very similar task a couple years ago, and I still had my worksheets handy near the top of the ugly stack of papers on my desk.
The version I used was by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox: Your Mythic Journey. This is only 129 pages, but I easily used all my spare time in three weeks working through the exercises and I gave up before I had finished them all. The authors ask the reader a sequence of simple questions:
Who was your first hero?
What was your first well-done job you took pride in?
What was your heaven ideal?
And villains and disappointments and hell etc.
I don't have the actual worksheets any longer. I cooked them down to their essence and they are now five dense pages, dated 17 February 2008. They are amongst the most valuable, sensible, and unambiguous notes I own. To me, they make a compelling story. I really doubt anybody else would find them interesting. They are a part of my life, but I do not consider my life to be literature.
A number of psychologists have put this idea to work. Carl Jung famously asked the question "what myth am I living by?" In his case it turned out to be the Tower of Babel and he occupied himself in his retirement using stones to build a house and a tower and monuments and other things. It was his childhood occupation--building models out of small stones; and in his old age he assumed it as a calling. His student Joseph Campbell went further with the idea and liked to describe us as beings who tell stories, that we are little more than the stories which we tell. This is a similar small error to the one Nehamas makes. The stories are important, but we contain the stories; it is not the stories which contain us.
Without going overboard, I endorse the value of story telling. Not long ago I did some work with the career manual "What color is your parachute?" This is one of the most popular books for people in job transition such as myself. A large fraction of the book is devoted to introspection for the person in transition to make choices which are consistent with who they are. The tool is story telling. The author poses question prompts and the stories which the reader provides are supposed to be clues for making good career choices. I went through this part of the book very quickly, because I had independently done a very similar task a couple years ago, and I still had my worksheets handy near the top of the ugly stack of papers on my desk.
The version I used was by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox: Your Mythic Journey. This is only 129 pages, but I easily used all my spare time in three weeks working through the exercises and I gave up before I had finished them all. The authors ask the reader a sequence of simple questions:
Who was your first hero?
What was your first well-done job you took pride in?
What was your heaven ideal?
And villains and disappointments and hell etc.
I don't have the actual worksheets any longer. I cooked them down to their essence and they are now five dense pages, dated 17 February 2008. They are amongst the most valuable, sensible, and unambiguous notes I own. To me, they make a compelling story. I really doubt anybody else would find them interesting. They are a part of my life, but I do not consider my life to be literature.
24 December 2010
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--
This is on page 249 of my collected poems of Emily Dickinson. The notes say she wrote it in 1868 and it was first published in 1945, which might be some kind of record for late blooming. This poem contains value for poets and writers. An excess of honesty can really mess you up.
In the last couple weeks I have listened to all eighteen of my Henry Rollins spoken word compact discs in chronological order, sometimes as many as three in one day. Henry could have been a great artist if he had taken Emily Dickinson's valuable advice to heart. Alas he did not, which makes listening to him something akin to an assault. I made some notes of some of the most tactless items in his work.
"I smile every time a pig gets greased."
"I don't want to be a father; I want to kill mine."
"Death from a bullet in the head is death from a natural cause."
Now Henry is posing as a punk here, and the posture is straight ahead without any slant. No pulling punches. This is, if you will please pardon the expression, not art. These are all ideas which can be expressed artistically, but they need to lubricated. These are not ideas which can be artistically expressed straight ahead with a punk pose.
Jimmy Ross told my old poets group a couple times that "if you write about your friends, pretty soon you will not have any friends." This is mostly true, but he left out one important detail. If you can dress it up like Emily Dickinson, you can say anything. Violence, sexual deviance, crime, addiction, corruption, or anything which is taboo in polite dinner conversation can work quite well in literature with proper care and respect.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--
This is on page 249 of my collected poems of Emily Dickinson. The notes say she wrote it in 1868 and it was first published in 1945, which might be some kind of record for late blooming. This poem contains value for poets and writers. An excess of honesty can really mess you up.
In the last couple weeks I have listened to all eighteen of my Henry Rollins spoken word compact discs in chronological order, sometimes as many as three in one day. Henry could have been a great artist if he had taken Emily Dickinson's valuable advice to heart. Alas he did not, which makes listening to him something akin to an assault. I made some notes of some of the most tactless items in his work.
"I smile every time a pig gets greased."
"I don't want to be a father; I want to kill mine."
"Death from a bullet in the head is death from a natural cause."
Now Henry is posing as a punk here, and the posture is straight ahead without any slant. No pulling punches. This is, if you will please pardon the expression, not art. These are all ideas which can be expressed artistically, but they need to lubricated. These are not ideas which can be artistically expressed straight ahead with a punk pose.
Jimmy Ross told my old poets group a couple times that "if you write about your friends, pretty soon you will not have any friends." This is mostly true, but he left out one important detail. If you can dress it up like Emily Dickinson, you can say anything. Violence, sexual deviance, crime, addiction, corruption, or anything which is taboo in polite dinner conversation can work quite well in literature with proper care and respect.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
04 December 2010
Man Versus Man and Man Versus Himself
When I took my first fiction writing course many years ago, on the first day our teacher explained the three basic plot lines: 1.) man versus man; 2.) man versus nature; 3.) man versus himself. Every story requires the creation, development, and resolution of a conflict. The story in my post today is how I became a fan of the Oakland Raiders and the Oakland Athletics and the Golden State Warriors and gradually grew out of that into something else. I became a fan of these teams by birth. My birthplace was Oakland. These were the teams that were always on the television; on the occasions I got to a ballgame these were the home town teams to root for.
It is an altered state of consciousness to be enraptured by a group of athletes on the playing field or on the television set. For a couple of hours it is possible to submerge one's identity as an individual into the group identity of the hundreds of thousands who identify with the greatness of the team or the greatness of the stars of the team--Ken Stabler, Reggie Jackson, or Rick Barry. This is not what sports is about to me any more. The turning point in my story was when I moved to New Orleans, and was immersed in a very different culture and experience. There was only one team in that town, the New Orleans Saints, and that one team did not win very often.
My initial reaction was that the experience of watching the games and cheering for the team was a ridiculous waste of time. Gradually I discovered something new, that the post-game talk radio was far more entertaining after the Saints lost than it was when the Saints won. People would call up the hosts--first there was Hap Glaudi; then after Hap died it was Buddy Diliberto; now Buddy is passed on and it is Bobby Hebert--and the callers would moan on and on half-drunkenly about all the years they have supported the team and all the years they had owned season tickets and the team never wins. And how many more years is this going to continue?
That is a rhetorical question, as the host of the radio show is not God and he cannot foretell the future. Also in retrospect it is clear to see that it would continue until February of 2010 when the team finally won the championship at long last after 44 years of failing, and often failing in the most spectacular heart-wrenching fashion possible. The pity and the pathos and the passion on all those years of post-game talk radio was as real as anything I have ever seen or heard. Those folks were deeply submerged into an altered state of identity with their team, and what it created was a story. This is what sports is to me now: a bunch of stories.
With all of the attention and with all of the money, sports in our culture present compelling and ongoing stories. This is why my interest has survived the passing of my previous idolizing of the heroes of my youth. And right now there is no story in the world which has captured me as much as the story of Michael Vick. This past Thursday he had another great performance; this time it was against my new hometown team, so I got a detailed update on the Michael Vick story. It was astonishing to me how generous the accolades were.
This story includes some ugly morality. Michael Vick is now the world's most celebrated dog-killer. (To be accurate, he is celebrated for running with and throwing a football, not killing dogs.) But he has served his prison sentence. He is making restitution and showing contrition. He is following all the directions which the public relations professionals of the league and of the team have set for him. Some people want to know: is it fake? What is really going on inside Michael Vick's head and heart here? Has this monster been truly rehabilitated, or is he conning us all by going through all these formalities to make all the profit dollars he is going to get for himself by behaving in this manner?
The only person who knows the answer to this question is Vick, and the only way you could know the answer would be to be him. So this question is ultimately stupid. Just about everybody would like to be in his pay grade, but nobody (possibly including himself) wants to be Michael Vick. This example is the purest major modern sports figure who is nobody's hero. At least nobody who has an ounce of common sense would look to him as a hero. In this case there is nothing here but the story. In spite of the ugly baggage, many of us are fascinated by the Michael Vick story. It has man versus man (Julius Peppers and Ray Lewis and all those guys are out to crush his limbs and smash his brain), but really it is man versus himself.
It is an altered state of consciousness to be enraptured by a group of athletes on the playing field or on the television set. For a couple of hours it is possible to submerge one's identity as an individual into the group identity of the hundreds of thousands who identify with the greatness of the team or the greatness of the stars of the team--Ken Stabler, Reggie Jackson, or Rick Barry. This is not what sports is about to me any more. The turning point in my story was when I moved to New Orleans, and was immersed in a very different culture and experience. There was only one team in that town, the New Orleans Saints, and that one team did not win very often.
My initial reaction was that the experience of watching the games and cheering for the team was a ridiculous waste of time. Gradually I discovered something new, that the post-game talk radio was far more entertaining after the Saints lost than it was when the Saints won. People would call up the hosts--first there was Hap Glaudi; then after Hap died it was Buddy Diliberto; now Buddy is passed on and it is Bobby Hebert--and the callers would moan on and on half-drunkenly about all the years they have supported the team and all the years they had owned season tickets and the team never wins. And how many more years is this going to continue?
That is a rhetorical question, as the host of the radio show is not God and he cannot foretell the future. Also in retrospect it is clear to see that it would continue until February of 2010 when the team finally won the championship at long last after 44 years of failing, and often failing in the most spectacular heart-wrenching fashion possible. The pity and the pathos and the passion on all those years of post-game talk radio was as real as anything I have ever seen or heard. Those folks were deeply submerged into an altered state of identity with their team, and what it created was a story. This is what sports is to me now: a bunch of stories.
With all of the attention and with all of the money, sports in our culture present compelling and ongoing stories. This is why my interest has survived the passing of my previous idolizing of the heroes of my youth. And right now there is no story in the world which has captured me as much as the story of Michael Vick. This past Thursday he had another great performance; this time it was against my new hometown team, so I got a detailed update on the Michael Vick story. It was astonishing to me how generous the accolades were.
This story includes some ugly morality. Michael Vick is now the world's most celebrated dog-killer. (To be accurate, he is celebrated for running with and throwing a football, not killing dogs.) But he has served his prison sentence. He is making restitution and showing contrition. He is following all the directions which the public relations professionals of the league and of the team have set for him. Some people want to know: is it fake? What is really going on inside Michael Vick's head and heart here? Has this monster been truly rehabilitated, or is he conning us all by going through all these formalities to make all the profit dollars he is going to get for himself by behaving in this manner?
The only person who knows the answer to this question is Vick, and the only way you could know the answer would be to be him. So this question is ultimately stupid. Just about everybody would like to be in his pay grade, but nobody (possibly including himself) wants to be Michael Vick. This example is the purest major modern sports figure who is nobody's hero. At least nobody who has an ounce of common sense would look to him as a hero. In this case there is nothing here but the story. In spite of the ugly baggage, many of us are fascinated by the Michael Vick story. It has man versus man (Julius Peppers and Ray Lewis and all those guys are out to crush his limbs and smash his brain), but really it is man versus himself.
14 November 2010
A coincidence in my literary life
In October of 2002 I experienced a spooky coincidence that I can recall as if it happened yesterday. It concerned a woman, a poem, two poets, and a spree killer.
The woman is named Kim and in October of 2002 she was a waitress in my favorite sports bar. I had a regular poetry night downtown which started at 9:00 P.M. Between the end of my work and the beginning of my poetry I had a couple hours to kill, so every Tuesday night I went to this place and got a cheeseburger and a couple of beers and polished up my poem for the reading later in the night. After a few months of this routine, one of the waitresses asks me about my poems that I am always working on. We talked about poetry for a few minutes and I asked her "would you like me to write you a poem?"
She replied with an enthusiastic, "Yes!" So I got to work on it the next day. And I spent nearly all of Saturday and Sunday writing it and rewriting it and then illustrating it. There were five stanzas, five pages, five illustrations. One of the lines was:
There are no negroes in my tarot deck except maybe Death and the Devil
This page had on it my own drawing of the Devil card. Unknown to me at the time of my writing my poem for my suddenly favorite waitress, the Death card was going to be on the front cover of Time and Newsweek magazine in four days. The second of October 2002 was the day that John Allen Muhammad left a Death card at the scene of one of his murders. By Tuesday this news was all over the place. This is the central coincidence in my tale, but it is not the only one.
There were also two poets who had coincidental connections to my poem. I used a trope which is not uncommon but which I learned from a friend of mine, Dennis Tyler, where all five stanzas had very slight variation in their final line. The final line of each stanza went like:
She is X and I do not know her name
(X=laughing, crying, dying, &c. Sort of a true fact as I still did not know the woman's last name.)
On the day when I wrote this Dennis had been absent from our shows for many months, but on that Tuesday he showed up. It was a pleasant surprise when he walked into the venue shortly before it was my turn to get up onto the stage.
The other (small) coincidence was the hostess of the show that night was a person whom I had never met and never heard of, named Eve. The biblical Eve also was a character in my poem. All of this put me into an excited state when I was going up there onto the stage. I can still remember talking to the audience, before I read my poem, about all these strange coincidences that I had stumbled into. It was the first time I ever read before that audience that I had a total grip on them all and I had not even begun to read yet. Then I read and it went swell. It was something of a transformation of my relationship to that entire group of people. Before, I was almost like an interloper; and after, I really belonged in that group.
Later I was explaining to a friend of mine the story of the episode, how I actually lost almost all of my stage fright in one minute and it was a complete accident. She insisted it was not an accident, there are no accidents. Her preferred explanation was something on the order of there was a cosmic force injecting the Death card into the human world and me and Muhammad were on the same channel. What happened was quite weird enough without cosmic forces channeling into me and this other guy across the country on the same day.
The woman is named Kim and in October of 2002 she was a waitress in my favorite sports bar. I had a regular poetry night downtown which started at 9:00 P.M. Between the end of my work and the beginning of my poetry I had a couple hours to kill, so every Tuesday night I went to this place and got a cheeseburger and a couple of beers and polished up my poem for the reading later in the night. After a few months of this routine, one of the waitresses asks me about my poems that I am always working on. We talked about poetry for a few minutes and I asked her "would you like me to write you a poem?"
She replied with an enthusiastic, "Yes!" So I got to work on it the next day. And I spent nearly all of Saturday and Sunday writing it and rewriting it and then illustrating it. There were five stanzas, five pages, five illustrations. One of the lines was:
There are no negroes in my tarot deck except maybe Death and the Devil
This page had on it my own drawing of the Devil card. Unknown to me at the time of my writing my poem for my suddenly favorite waitress, the Death card was going to be on the front cover of Time and Newsweek magazine in four days. The second of October 2002 was the day that John Allen Muhammad left a Death card at the scene of one of his murders. By Tuesday this news was all over the place. This is the central coincidence in my tale, but it is not the only one.
There were also two poets who had coincidental connections to my poem. I used a trope which is not uncommon but which I learned from a friend of mine, Dennis Tyler, where all five stanzas had very slight variation in their final line. The final line of each stanza went like:
She is X and I do not know her name
(X=laughing, crying, dying, &c. Sort of a true fact as I still did not know the woman's last name.)
On the day when I wrote this Dennis had been absent from our shows for many months, but on that Tuesday he showed up. It was a pleasant surprise when he walked into the venue shortly before it was my turn to get up onto the stage.
The other (small) coincidence was the hostess of the show that night was a person whom I had never met and never heard of, named Eve. The biblical Eve also was a character in my poem. All of this put me into an excited state when I was going up there onto the stage. I can still remember talking to the audience, before I read my poem, about all these strange coincidences that I had stumbled into. It was the first time I ever read before that audience that I had a total grip on them all and I had not even begun to read yet. Then I read and it went swell. It was something of a transformation of my relationship to that entire group of people. Before, I was almost like an interloper; and after, I really belonged in that group.
Later I was explaining to a friend of mine the story of the episode, how I actually lost almost all of my stage fright in one minute and it was a complete accident. She insisted it was not an accident, there are no accidents. Her preferred explanation was something on the order of there was a cosmic force injecting the Death card into the human world and me and Muhammad were on the same channel. What happened was quite weird enough without cosmic forces channeling into me and this other guy across the country on the same day.
25 October 2010
Luck coincidence fate and fiction
On my post of 15 of October there was an odd coincidence. I had an anecdote about the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. It turns out Mandelbrot died on the 14 of October and the news was in the papers on the 16 of October, so I was writing about Mandelbrot as the world was awaiting the news of his passing. I also posted this on the LessWrong group web log, as you can see here. At least 22 of the people there read my article and gave it a positive vote and around 10 people commented on it, but nobody mentioned the coincidence about Mandelbrot being in the post. It may be weird to nobody else but it sure felt weird to me when I looked at the New York Times front page on the 16 of October and there was Mandelbrot's obituary and I was just posting about the fellow yesterday.
There is a vast literature on the whole topic of low probability events that we observe all the time. Why do people believe weird things? Apparently human reasoning about probability is naturally terrible. Leo Tolstoy might have thought my holy guardian angel guided me to the usage of the Mandelbrot example on that day. The man obviously had a horrible grasp on what is a possibility if you judge by the plot of his great novel War and Peace.
There is luck. There is coincidence. And then there is that is completely impossible to observe in a billion trillion human lifetimes, which is what Tolstoy writes about in that book. Just off the top of my head:
1.) Andre and Anatole in the same surgeon's tent at the same time at Borodino where 30 000 Russian soldiers were fatally wounded.
2.) Andre being evacuated to the Rostov's house in Moscow, then being among the ten randomly chosen to evacuate further to one of the Rostov's country houses.
3.) Nikolai foraging around Smolensk and happening upon Maria's country house at the exact precise hour her serfs were carrying out their rebellion.
Apparently you have to have the genius of Tolstoy to make stuff like this up. The probabilities here are like 30 000 to 1, 100 000 to 1, and 100 000 000 000 000 to 1. This isn't impossibly unlikely. It is fiction.
There is a vast literature on the whole topic of low probability events that we observe all the time. Why do people believe weird things? Apparently human reasoning about probability is naturally terrible. Leo Tolstoy might have thought my holy guardian angel guided me to the usage of the Mandelbrot example on that day. The man obviously had a horrible grasp on what is a possibility if you judge by the plot of his great novel War and Peace.
There is luck. There is coincidence. And then there is that is completely impossible to observe in a billion trillion human lifetimes, which is what Tolstoy writes about in that book. Just off the top of my head:
1.) Andre and Anatole in the same surgeon's tent at the same time at Borodino where 30 000 Russian soldiers were fatally wounded.
2.) Andre being evacuated to the Rostov's house in Moscow, then being among the ten randomly chosen to evacuate further to one of the Rostov's country houses.
3.) Nikolai foraging around Smolensk and happening upon Maria's country house at the exact precise hour her serfs were carrying out their rebellion.
Apparently you have to have the genius of Tolstoy to make stuff like this up. The probabilities here are like 30 000 to 1, 100 000 to 1, and 100 000 000 000 000 to 1. This isn't impossibly unlikely. It is fiction.
05 October 2010
Thrice told tales
After a little research and consultation with a few peers, I have decided to place into suspended animation, and I may soon permanently retire a storytelling rule which I have observed for years: limit a story to three tellings.
It is a fuzzy memory at this point how I came upon this rule, but I do know there were a couple key observations of other story tellers which led me to conclude that it had value. The first storyteller was a man who participated with me in a number of Gestalt group psychotherapy workshops. This was in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The workshops were led by an experienced Gestalt therapist and they would be eight hours on Saturday and six hours on Sunday and a dozen or so people would show up and everybody would take a turn in the hot seat. If you have never done this I highly recommend trying it at least once. It is always entertaining and can be very educational.
This one fellow told the same story repeatedly. It was about an automobile accident in the desert in the southwestern United States, a fatality in his family, and an Indian witness who subsequently became a spiritual familiar to him. The first time he told this story, it was riveting; it was one of the most compelling stories I had ever heard. Every subsequent telling was flatter and flatter. Then one day I was watching Oliver Stone's movie, The Doors, and the opening scene of the movie was the same one I had seen in the Gestalt psychotherapy workshops until I was sick of it. Surely there was more than one fatal automobile accident in the southwestern United States witnessed by an Indian who made an otherworldly impression on one of the people in the crash; still the first idea that came to my mind when I saw Stone's movie was that my Gestalt group psychotherapy pal had made most of it up.
The second storyteller who was influential in my formulation of my rule about retiring all stories after three tellings was a woman who briefly came to some of the poetry shows I was involved in during the 2000's. This was a loose association of 30-40 poets and every week we would gather at an open mic and fifteen or so people would read their stuff. We had almost no restrictions, so there would always be a musician or two; sometimes dancers, or stand-up comics, or storytellers. This woman had a one-character drama about her experiences as a stripper. She was rehearsing for this dramatic arts event where they had a couple dozen short plays in one space and people would bounce around and see seven or eight of them before the night was over. So we saw her for the four weeks before her performance that she was practicing for; she did the exact same number for ten minutes for four straight weeks. We never saw her before that, and we never saw her again after that. The first time I saw it, I thought it was great. Times two through four were about as good as a re-run of Gilligan's Island that you saw ten times when you were a kid.
This is almost no evidence upon which to base so severe a rule as limiting every story to three tellings. I am sure there must have been other observations that contributed along the way, but in examining my rule these were the most obvious contributing pieces. In discussing this with others, I have heard support for the rule (or something similar) from people who described a goofy family member who told the same stupid story every Thanksgiving and Christmas for thirty years and they had heard it sixty times, but I have not had any personal experience along that line.
I took a class from the Houston Police Department shortly after I moved here. It was three hours a week for fifteen weeks and very interesting. One of the most interesting presentations was by a detective giving interrogation tips. He said you always have the person repeat the story several times. If they are telling you the truth, it changes subtly from telling to telling and hangs together. If they are lying, it is repetitious; it is practiced; the exact same phraseology occurs over and over; no new and consistent details get added the second and third and fourth and fifth times they tell it to you.
There is a nagging suspicion in my mind that part of my rule was motivated by a paranoia that too many of my stories have a component of bad faith to them and I fear being found out. Although my iron clad rule of telling no story more than three times is in suspended animation and I may retire it forever, I think the notion of not repeating a false story three times is gold.
One of the other people I discussed this with told me something very interesting. She does a lot of stage story telling and she said that there is a strange interaction between our memories of our life and our memories of stories we tell about our life. The memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus have studied memory malleability and conclude a rather odd fact: most of what we remember is not the original event, but our most recent memory of the original event. My storytelling friend says that in looking at old documentation on her stories she has found that her memories have shifted in the direction of her vibrant stories, and there are some things in her life which she will now not use as story material for fear of polluting the memory.
In the Schoepenhauer's fate post I made a couple weeks ago I told a story that was formerly retired. The story about how I took my first job out of college is now back in my repertoire. Everybody I have ever told that story to seemed to enjoy it; it now seems silly to have censored myself so needlessly for so long.
It is a fuzzy memory at this point how I came upon this rule, but I do know there were a couple key observations of other story tellers which led me to conclude that it had value. The first storyteller was a man who participated with me in a number of Gestalt group psychotherapy workshops. This was in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The workshops were led by an experienced Gestalt therapist and they would be eight hours on Saturday and six hours on Sunday and a dozen or so people would show up and everybody would take a turn in the hot seat. If you have never done this I highly recommend trying it at least once. It is always entertaining and can be very educational.
This one fellow told the same story repeatedly. It was about an automobile accident in the desert in the southwestern United States, a fatality in his family, and an Indian witness who subsequently became a spiritual familiar to him. The first time he told this story, it was riveting; it was one of the most compelling stories I had ever heard. Every subsequent telling was flatter and flatter. Then one day I was watching Oliver Stone's movie, The Doors, and the opening scene of the movie was the same one I had seen in the Gestalt psychotherapy workshops until I was sick of it. Surely there was more than one fatal automobile accident in the southwestern United States witnessed by an Indian who made an otherworldly impression on one of the people in the crash; still the first idea that came to my mind when I saw Stone's movie was that my Gestalt group psychotherapy pal had made most of it up.
The second storyteller who was influential in my formulation of my rule about retiring all stories after three tellings was a woman who briefly came to some of the poetry shows I was involved in during the 2000's. This was a loose association of 30-40 poets and every week we would gather at an open mic and fifteen or so people would read their stuff. We had almost no restrictions, so there would always be a musician or two; sometimes dancers, or stand-up comics, or storytellers. This woman had a one-character drama about her experiences as a stripper. She was rehearsing for this dramatic arts event where they had a couple dozen short plays in one space and people would bounce around and see seven or eight of them before the night was over. So we saw her for the four weeks before her performance that she was practicing for; she did the exact same number for ten minutes for four straight weeks. We never saw her before that, and we never saw her again after that. The first time I saw it, I thought it was great. Times two through four were about as good as a re-run of Gilligan's Island that you saw ten times when you were a kid.
This is almost no evidence upon which to base so severe a rule as limiting every story to three tellings. I am sure there must have been other observations that contributed along the way, but in examining my rule these were the most obvious contributing pieces. In discussing this with others, I have heard support for the rule (or something similar) from people who described a goofy family member who told the same stupid story every Thanksgiving and Christmas for thirty years and they had heard it sixty times, but I have not had any personal experience along that line.
I took a class from the Houston Police Department shortly after I moved here. It was three hours a week for fifteen weeks and very interesting. One of the most interesting presentations was by a detective giving interrogation tips. He said you always have the person repeat the story several times. If they are telling you the truth, it changes subtly from telling to telling and hangs together. If they are lying, it is repetitious; it is practiced; the exact same phraseology occurs over and over; no new and consistent details get added the second and third and fourth and fifth times they tell it to you.
There is a nagging suspicion in my mind that part of my rule was motivated by a paranoia that too many of my stories have a component of bad faith to them and I fear being found out. Although my iron clad rule of telling no story more than three times is in suspended animation and I may retire it forever, I think the notion of not repeating a false story three times is gold.
One of the other people I discussed this with told me something very interesting. She does a lot of stage story telling and she said that there is a strange interaction between our memories of our life and our memories of stories we tell about our life. The memory researchers like Elizabeth Loftus have studied memory malleability and conclude a rather odd fact: most of what we remember is not the original event, but our most recent memory of the original event. My storytelling friend says that in looking at old documentation on her stories she has found that her memories have shifted in the direction of her vibrant stories, and there are some things in her life which she will now not use as story material for fear of polluting the memory.
In the Schoepenhauer's fate post I made a couple weeks ago I told a story that was formerly retired. The story about how I took my first job out of college is now back in my repertoire. Everybody I have ever told that story to seemed to enjoy it; it now seems silly to have censored myself so needlessly for so long.
15 September 2010
How to quickly read a thick novel by Joyce or Tolstoy
There are many speed reading techniques, but most are notoriously inadequate for dealing with challenging material. Two of the most daunting works for literature students are War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, and Ulysses, by James Joyce. I have a method for each which worked for me. These methods may be applied to other challenging works.
I. The Tolstoy method.
The trick to getting through War and Peace as quickly as possible is to recognize that the minor characters, like Denisov and Dolohov, do not need to be attended to at all in the first pass. There are dozens of these characters. They have names which are unfamiliar to English and American people. If you try and keep track of them all you can get bogged down deep. There are only five characters you have to pay close attention to: Natasha Rostov, Pierre Bezuhov, Andre Bolkonsky, Nikolai Rostov, and Maria Bolkonsky. When the action involves one of these five, read close. When the action moves elsewhere, skim.
Also there are two long passages in the book you can skip entirely. The passage in the middle of the book between Natasha's betrayal and Napoleon's invasion of Russia is long and of little importance to most readers. The epilogue is the same. Although these are of little importance to most readers, that does not mean they were not important to Tolstoy. They clearly were.
After you get through the book with this negligence, you may decide to revisit the book and investigate the parts you missed. This is well worth doing. I have read War and Peace so many times that I have lost count of the exact number. I love this book. Denisov and Dolohov are both marvelously drawn characters. The action after Natasha's betrayal is essential to appreciate that she is rooted in the earth of the steppes, in spite of her family's royalty. It is all great stuff, but many readers find it much too much to swallow it all in one gulp.
II. The Joyce method.
The key to getting through Joyce with no experience is to view him as a cross between a novelist and a bard. He was trained on poetry, poetry which was meant to be read aloud. His sentences which twist your mind inside out when read silently have a completely different effect on you when they enter through your eardrums. The sound of his sentences can be delightful, and this is still true even when you are not entirely clear exactly what you just heard. On Bloomsday in Dublin they read the book out loud for hours in packed rooms.
So to get through Ulysses fast, open to page one and start reading aloud. When your voice tires, read silently. You will make faster progress than if you had started reading silently on page one. You will not get far. Put the book down. The next day pick it up where you left off and start reading aloud. When your voice tires, read silent. Alternate. After about ten or twenty cycles, you should be able to read the book nearly as efficiently as any other book. His style takes getting used to. I have also used this method successfully with Finnegans Wake, which many people have described to me as completely unreadable. I like Ulysses, but I do not love it. I am almost indifferent whether to keep my copy. I will read War and Peace again and again.
(Yes I know that is Natasha Rostova and Maria Bolkonskaya.)
I. The Tolstoy method.
The trick to getting through War and Peace as quickly as possible is to recognize that the minor characters, like Denisov and Dolohov, do not need to be attended to at all in the first pass. There are dozens of these characters. They have names which are unfamiliar to English and American people. If you try and keep track of them all you can get bogged down deep. There are only five characters you have to pay close attention to: Natasha Rostov, Pierre Bezuhov, Andre Bolkonsky, Nikolai Rostov, and Maria Bolkonsky. When the action involves one of these five, read close. When the action moves elsewhere, skim.
Also there are two long passages in the book you can skip entirely. The passage in the middle of the book between Natasha's betrayal and Napoleon's invasion of Russia is long and of little importance to most readers. The epilogue is the same. Although these are of little importance to most readers, that does not mean they were not important to Tolstoy. They clearly were.
After you get through the book with this negligence, you may decide to revisit the book and investigate the parts you missed. This is well worth doing. I have read War and Peace so many times that I have lost count of the exact number. I love this book. Denisov and Dolohov are both marvelously drawn characters. The action after Natasha's betrayal is essential to appreciate that she is rooted in the earth of the steppes, in spite of her family's royalty. It is all great stuff, but many readers find it much too much to swallow it all in one gulp.
II. The Joyce method.
The key to getting through Joyce with no experience is to view him as a cross between a novelist and a bard. He was trained on poetry, poetry which was meant to be read aloud. His sentences which twist your mind inside out when read silently have a completely different effect on you when they enter through your eardrums. The sound of his sentences can be delightful, and this is still true even when you are not entirely clear exactly what you just heard. On Bloomsday in Dublin they read the book out loud for hours in packed rooms.
So to get through Ulysses fast, open to page one and start reading aloud. When your voice tires, read silently. You will make faster progress than if you had started reading silently on page one. You will not get far. Put the book down. The next day pick it up where you left off and start reading aloud. When your voice tires, read silent. Alternate. After about ten or twenty cycles, you should be able to read the book nearly as efficiently as any other book. His style takes getting used to. I have also used this method successfully with Finnegans Wake, which many people have described to me as completely unreadable. I like Ulysses, but I do not love it. I am almost indifferent whether to keep my copy. I will read War and Peace again and again.
(Yes I know that is Natasha Rostova and Maria Bolkonskaya.)
26 August 2010
The Vision Thing
My blog which I started here three years ago and promptly abandoned for two years after making the first couple entries has now arrived at a steady state. This post is a short explanation for what has been here for the last six posts and what I intend to write here for the foreseeable future. It may look random, but there is a method behind the randomness.
It is a system with four subsystems. The system is to report my recreational research which others might find useful. The four subsystems are those of the poet, the philosopher, the psychologist and the theologian. This post is labeled: literature. The subject is my writing. Every fourth post will be labeled: literature. The subjects will rotate regular; from my poet-self, next to my philosopher-self, next to my psychologist-self, finally to my theologian-self and then repeating, in order. The other three labels are: philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics. So far, I have kept to this system for six posts, every five days over the last thirty days.
The next post, on philosophy, is nearly complete; the one after that, on psychology, is close to a first draft. There are a number of other planned posts, some of which are now nothing but one sentence fragment. There is also a four-page glossy brochure, which a few folks in real life have seen. On page one I have the Coleman-Smith-Rider-Waite "Hermit" image. There is also an original drawing, a slogan, a sigil, and a number of other characteristics which I try and bring into my writing and hazards to avoid. Pages two through four have a similar form, symbolized by the Fool, the Chariot, and the Magician. The other features are tightly parallel in a format which is loosely patterned after an Occult Table of Correspondences such as Aleister Crowley's 777.
In addition to a catalog of my recreational research activity, this blog also serves as an association record. A couple years ago I took a class at the Houston Jung Center on Active Imagination, which was Jung's term for his trance technique. Active Imagination is closely related to self hypnosis. I asked the teacher what process goes on in our minds when we find ourselves daydreaming or in reverie and we are thinking the weirdest thing; and we stop and ask ourselves, "whatever made me think of that?" We try and work it backwards, but we are lost in a wilderness of weird grouped thoughts. She said it is an association process, like free association in Freudian Psychoanalysis. My blog posts are a map of this association process in my recreational research.
It is a system with four subsystems. The system is to report my recreational research which others might find useful. The four subsystems are those of the poet, the philosopher, the psychologist and the theologian. This post is labeled: literature. The subject is my writing. Every fourth post will be labeled: literature. The subjects will rotate regular; from my poet-self, next to my philosopher-self, next to my psychologist-self, finally to my theologian-self and then repeating, in order. The other three labels are: philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics. So far, I have kept to this system for six posts, every five days over the last thirty days.
The next post, on philosophy, is nearly complete; the one after that, on psychology, is close to a first draft. There are a number of other planned posts, some of which are now nothing but one sentence fragment. There is also a four-page glossy brochure, which a few folks in real life have seen. On page one I have the Coleman-Smith-Rider-Waite "Hermit" image. There is also an original drawing, a slogan, a sigil, and a number of other characteristics which I try and bring into my writing and hazards to avoid. Pages two through four have a similar form, symbolized by the Fool, the Chariot, and the Magician. The other features are tightly parallel in a format which is loosely patterned after an Occult Table of Correspondences such as Aleister Crowley's 777.
In addition to a catalog of my recreational research activity, this blog also serves as an association record. A couple years ago I took a class at the Houston Jung Center on Active Imagination, which was Jung's term for his trance technique. Active Imagination is closely related to self hypnosis. I asked the teacher what process goes on in our minds when we find ourselves daydreaming or in reverie and we are thinking the weirdest thing; and we stop and ask ourselves, "whatever made me think of that?" We try and work it backwards, but we are lost in a wilderness of weird grouped thoughts. She said it is an association process, like free association in Freudian Psychoanalysis. My blog posts are a map of this association process in my recreational research.
06 August 2010
Whitman the psalmist
A literature professor told me a few years ago that the poetic structure and voice of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was very close to that of the King James version of the book of Psalms. The King James Bible was the one book in everybody's house when Walt grew up and he was taught to read from it. Among the easiest books to read is Psalms, so he naturally became a psalmist in style. I have looked for confirmation of this idea intermittently and have not yet found a good source.
I decided to perform a short experiment. I examined one of my favorite Whitman passages, the last stanza in Song of Myself. Then I went to the Psalms, started at Ps. 23 and searched forward until I found one that was roughly the same length. This was fast as I chose Ps. 26 to be close. Then I counted the feet.
Song of myself, stanza number 52
King James Psalm 26
1Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the LORD; therefore I shall not slide.
That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works.
I decided to perform a short experiment. I examined one of my favorite Whitman passages, the last stanza in Song of Myself. Then I went to the Psalms, started at Ps. 23 and searched forward until I found one that was roughly the same length. This was fast as I chose Ps. 26 to be close. Then I counted the feet.
Song of myself, stanza number 52
King James Psalm 26
1Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the LORD; therefore I shall not slide.
2Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.
3For thy lovingkindness is before mine eyes: and I have walked in thy truth.
4I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with dissemblers.
5I have hated the congregation of evil doers; and will not sit with the wicked.
6I will wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O LORD:
7That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works.
8LORD, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine honour dwelleth.
9Gather not my soul with sinners, nor my life with bloody men:
10In whose hands is mischief, and their right hand is full of bribes.
11But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity: redeem me, and be merciful unto me.
12My foot standeth in an even place: in the congregations will I bless the LORD.
___________________________
By my counts, Whitman Song of Myself stanza 52:
7 verses; syllables 22, 29, 39, 31, 29, 20, 26; total 203, average 29;
Psalm 26:
12 verses; syllables 29, 15, 18, 18, 22, 20, 20, 21, 15, 14, 24, 20; total 236, average 20.
This was a fun experiment. From two data points we cannot conclude Psalms is written in decameter and Leaves of Grass is written in pentadecameter, but it might be that Whitman did represent a shift of line lengthening, or a consideration of Psalms as being a book of poetry, first. At the time he began many poets were grooved upon the pentameter line, and poets as late as Alfred Lord Tennyson were concentrating on pentameter. The literature professor is not at all contradicted by my findings.
I have been playing with Natural Language Processing and it seems it would be feasible to construct a line analyzer and construct statistics in an automated fashion for all of the Psalms and Leaves of Grass and quantify this idea. I do not personally know any Natural Language Processing practitioners; perhaps this is a trivial exercise they all do in their first semester class.
As a public speaking exercise, I have been reading aloud from Psalms and Leaves of Grass. My teacher who told me about the resemblance also told me that the voice of Leaves of Grass is the voice of American public discourse. He said any time Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama gave a speech, it echoed Whitman. He told me professional political speechwriters read Leaves of Grass over and over to use as a template. If one can internalize that voice, it will make his own voice more listenable. I have been doing these readings for around a year and a half, but have not noticed much effect yet.
One thing is unarguable. Whitman is the voice of the psalmist in that he lived one of those verses in Psalm 26--he told us all of God's wondrous works. At times it can seem as if Whitman was obsessed with Ps: 26.7.That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works.
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About Craig
- Craig
- Houston, Texas, United States
- I have been living in the lovely neighborhood of Spring Branch in the great city of Houston since late in 2005. I started out with the idea of making this blog about my life in this neighborhood. That did not last long. Right now I am posting every five days on the alternating topics of literature, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics. This project has been ongoing since July 27, 2010 and I believe it will continue for at least a few more months.