Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Trillin Chillin'

On days like Sunday and Monday, with the heat and humidity and general atmospheric charm of the inside of a JV basketball player's sweatsock, when midtown smells like sauteed garbage, and the heat rising from the sidewalk grates brings to mind the outer circle of hell that is a rush-hour subway car with no working a/c, it's a little hard to justify living in New York. But then, it's hard to be bored with so much to DO. With that in mind, Wordwhore and I hereby resolve to attend more bookworm-y type events around the city. To make our resolution manifest, we have added a wee little calendar to the bottom of this page, by means of which, dear reader(s?), you may track our plans.


Thus inspired, we ventured up the western coast of the little island to 82nd street. There, in the pastoral expanses of the Barnes and Noble, we sat among a sea of white and grey head to hear deadline-poet laureate Calvin Trillin read from his latest book of political verse, Obliviously On He Sails. When I say a sea of grey and white, by the way, i mean that most people present seemed to have a good 30-40 years on us. It was like being at an Episcopal church. Are we unusually young for his fan base, or is it always like this uptown? (Mr. Trillin, of course, is a stranger here himself; his Greenwich village digs, he says, are surrounded by a metaphorical white picket fence, a symbolic boundary, marking his home as an eastern annexation of Kansas City. At one point in the evening, when remarking on his habit of using footnotes in his poetry, he allied himself with another member of the Missouri diaspora: "I use footnotes sometimes. T.S. Eliot used footnotes.... T.S. Eliot and I , I guess you could think of as the Missourah School.")

One of my weaknesses as a snooty and bookish sort is how twitchy I get when confronted by poetry, particularly in the reading form. No more am I a great fan of liberal preaching to whiny choirs, although I am the kind of democracy geek who even votes in primaries. Funny poetry, on the other hand, and witty preaching, are other things entirely. Trillan read his poems in a dry tone, and seemed refreshingly immune to the worshipful salivating of the post-reading audience:

In response to the first sychophant: "Nice to have a cousin here. I'm sorry what I said about Aunt Sadie. I forgot she was your mother."

To a tired little question about whether it's "hard" to write: "I have to turn the poems in on Monday , so I set the showerhead to iambic pentameter on Sunday night."

To one of a string of political questions of the sort that seemed to imply he is oracular: "My candidate remains Ross Perot, because of the rhyming possibilities. A good iambic pentameter candidate. A little buggy, but a great name."


Calvin Trillan is a great hero of mine, more for the combination of boyish enthusiasm and tongue-in-cheek description that characterizes his essays than for his poetry, which is the kind of candy I prefer in small doses. Still, while they can't touch the beauty of his recent New Yorker essay about his late wife, Alice, the poems -- particularly when read aloud -- have the charm of Ogden Nash and the bittersweet wit of H.L. Mencken. Plus, it's fun to get to call the war-mongering draft-dodgers populating Capitol Hill these days "sissy hawks."

Friday, June 16, 2006

On Moderation

Wordwhore and I need a Salinger break. It seemed like a good idea, reading all of it at once. Salinger's a whale of a good writer, of course, and he didn't write all that much, which makes the project emminently do-able. And once we'd done it, we'd have a handy trump card to play the next time some cocktail-party blowhard who skimmed half of Catcher in 10th grade and has the plot muddled up with Dead Poets' Society and A Separate Peace got started on some Bacardi-fueled mental masturbation about Christ-imagery or the effect of the Cold War on American letters or something equally insufferable.

So we read Nine Stories and we read Catcher. And they were, of course, amazing. The precise ear for dialogue -- any of the stories could become a play with almost no changes; if only most playwrights were so good making speech both natural and dramatic -- the consistency of Holden's cheerfully depressed voice, the characters rendered so complete with such quick descriptions of clothes or stance or habits of speech.... It was great.

But it was also a little much, or at least a little fast. The stories, each of which is each compelling and poignant and all that on its own, begin to bleed together when read as quickly and hungrily as we read them. Their endings, which are frankly not their strong points, begin to seem like gongs, or maybe like the inevitable clang of a huge bell put in motion with a yanked rope at the beginning of the story. The suicides and drunken breakdowns cease to suprise, which is why my favorite of the stories was "Down at the Dinghy", the crushed little boy and his mother racing back to, rather than away from, the house which is both the source of the boy's hurt and a haven. (Yes, there is a sorrow in the realization that the hurt will be repeated throughout his life, that his mother may not be the crusading protector we would wish him to have, but the ending leaves them running into the future, not either stuck in the past, wishing they could be stuck in the past, or about to be stuck in this moment forever.)

And then there was the weather. It's summer. It's not the time to hibernate and consider the emptiness of human achievement, the inevitable failures of people (or at least adults) to understand each other; it's time to lie in the sun. It's time to call our friends up and hang out. It's time to talk to the kids on the stoop who are hula-hooping and jumping double-dutch and playing with every dog that comes by, without imagining that they will grow into frustrated, misunderstood, emotionally broken adults.

So. We are taking a break. Wordwhore finally got a subscription to the New Yorker, which should keep her out of trouble, she's swooning over Ren Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, and staying true to our summer pledge to read more fiction with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, one of only two women (not that I think that's ridiculous or anything) on the New York Times' list of the best American fiction of the past 25 years. I forgot to renew and thus had to return Loren Eisley's The Night Country (I'll get it back, not to worry.), and I just can't quit John McPhee, currently the essays collected in Pieces of The Frame, which are making me believe in the Loch Ness Monster again.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

On Rereading

Rereading Grendel by John Gardner, which was my favorite book after senior year English class in high school (along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard), I'm getting a subtle sense of how my mind has changed. Rereading for me is often a practice in reading with two minds, because the specter of who I was when I first came to the book (or, for Catcher in the Rye, the last four times I came to the book) reads with me. Just in these first two chapters of Grendel, I see, and not without some degree of unhappiness, how much more intimately I understand the beastly flailings of my angsty, existentialist hero. I also see that I have long misquoted Grendel's near-death epiphany in the rotting tree. He realizes, not "Blink by blink, I create the universe. I alone exist," which is how I've remembered it since I was 17, but:
I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink. -- An ugly god pitifully dying in a tree!
It was adolescent bravado (and shoddy scholarship) that caused me to misremember, to shorten that anguished realization about the alienated nature of being into what became (for me) a statement of brash adoration for the self-centered artist.

Rereading Catcher so many times, through so many periods of my life has brought me to a point where the text doesn't change as much under my eyes. I remember and feel the same emotions, but they strike me fivefold. The text, somehow, is still new. And each time I visit, Holden lives in me for a few weeks, and I am morose but awake to small beauties, I am sensitive to phonies and craving the kind of simple honesty and openness it seems difficult to find anywhere but children.

I am glad to have disabused myself of the notion, perhaps for always, that rereading is a form of stagnancy, that by returning, I risk not moving forward. These texts, the good ones, are always new.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Blindness

Meteorologically, the past few days were perfect for reading Jose Saramago's Blindness: yesterday afternoon, as I read about the "white evil" -- an infectious blindness that leaves all the citizens of an unnamed country unable to see anything except a luminous whiteness -- a dense, white mist was curling over first tall buildings and then low treetops, crawling over to meet me. Now, a furious rainstorm pounds my windows and draws snakes on the pavement, like the redemptive rain that washes clean the much-abused characters in the novel, who fear they will lose their humanity in the face of the brutal vicissitudes of their society, by turns fascist and anarchic.

When epidemic begins, the government tries to contain it by interring all those who are struck blind and all those suspected of contamination (Does this begin to sound Orwellian? It's meant to.) in an abandoned mental assylum. Although the prisoners -- erm, patients -- are assured that they will be cared for in some minimal ways, the soldiers guarding them are terrified of contracting the blindness; their sargent keeps making comments like, "when the beast dies, the poison dies with it," which do not contribute to an atmosphere of compassion; and, of course, as the blindness engulfs the entire country, things like radio stations, banks, and the power grid cease to function. The book's pace is slow and steady. Each turn in the plot is presented calmly, as the next step in a logical and inevitable progression of horrors. Pretty soon, we have a filthy and over-crowded hospital, no food, and starving blind people shooting guns and wielding clubs and setting things on fire.

I said that everyone goes blind, but that is only almost true. One woman, the wife of a doctor who is the first to be sent to the assylum, mysteriously keeps her sight. She lies about it in order that she may remain with her husband, and she keeps her sight a secret at the hospital, too, afraid of the dependence and potential jealousy of the other inmates. They do depend on her, though unknowlingly: she is constantly touching people to guide them or trying to engineer some fairness in the distribution of food rations or spying on the gang with the gun in the ward down the hall. A few sentences ago, I thought about saying that she "miraculously" retained her vision, but that is not the story Saramago has written. While her vision is a blessing for her husband and especially for the group of inmates who stay with her when they escape the assylum and wander the ruined city, it is in many ways a curse for her. Not only does she bear more responsibility for caring for her blind charges, but she is forced to witness the disintegration of her world. She must choose, too, whether to bear witness, whether to tell her companions the truth about why she throws up walking down the street (because she sees a gang of dogs tearing apart a human corpse) or a less horrific version (that the dogs were eating another dog).

To my list of favorite characters from literature, I must add the dog of tears, a mutt of unknown origins who arrives to comfort the woman who can see. He licks her face clean when she falls down in the street and sobs; he discretely buries the remains of the chicken he has stolen from a suspicious old lady whose good-will they require; he clears a space for the woman and the doctor to sit down on the floor of a church filled with blind refugees and also with one of the most vivid and haunting images in the book, one I will not describe here in the name of not spoiling the read. The dog of tears is loyal and kind and self-sufficient; the characters in this book who fret constantly about turning into animals could do worse than to be like him.

It is a cliche to call a novel "breath-taking", and although I did read parts of this book without breathing, one hand clapped over my mouth, it was not the novel that took my breath, making me gasp with easy suprises, as some do, rather it was I who was holding my breath in, afraid of what would happen if I dared to exhale before the end of each scene.

The Rest of The Stories