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Sudden Hamlet!

We were at a plaza by a movie theater and wandered by in the cold to see what's playing. It was 7:10, and turned out Hamlet was on. Which Hamlet? An apparently satellite-cast (U.K.) National Theatre one starring Rory Kinnear, who has a speech impediment-style lisp but was fantastic. Best I've ever seen, though I'd never seen a genuinely good one in any medium (maybe a few scattered moments of Olivier's passed muster). But very moving. And serendipitous - we didn't end up even missing any, as when we got into the theater some boring British guy was setting the play up.

(North of Seattle where we used to go to buy cheap books and decent Chinese and Mexican food - both entirely absent from Vancouver, the former despite/because of all the Chinese people - there was a long stretch of suburban road with several signs that cracked us up reliably. One was "Sudden Printing.")

They're doing a Lear in February. Derek Jacoby.

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I should stop calling people I'm inimical to narcissists, it's clearly an infinitely abusable word. And not a concept I necessarily understand.

Still, I mostly only hate them when I'm with them. At a distance they can be extremely amusing. In film and music they can achieve quite striking things: their tendency to see their own lives and whims as terribly important, epic, sacred affairs can be infectious at the remove these arts allow. Less so with painting, much, much less with literature, I'd say, which are forms where novelty itself can't carry the day. Narcissists don't understand what the rest of us find important, and tend to borrow the trappings of these Important Things to celebrate their own creative selves in a way that becomes immediately transparent in a book. (E.g.) Kanye West and Lady Gaga, like Madonna and Michael Jackson before them, are extremely amusing people you would want to murder if you had to deal with them in person and who have never spoken anything but bullshit on any actual topic. The only thing that tends to come out of their mouths is their ambivalence toward their own greatness. This ambivalence can take on complexity, intensity, and variation - and is probably forever novel to most of us - so it meets many of the basic criteria for artistic interestingness, but it can't take anything real into itself. It is ultimately stupid, which doesn't play in literature (and shouldn't have but did in the by-and-large train wreck that was 20th century visual art).

Great writers can be pretty horrible people, mind you, but you don't have to be a narcissist to be a horrible person. And vice versa - there must be border zones. Maybe great writers are in one? Smart enough to detect, crack out of their own colossal narcissism? The initial narcissism providing the energy used later to examine both it and other things? Who knows?

But part of me wants to go farther and agree with Borges that intelligent people are invariably kind. I think that fits with my own experience, but maybe I just try to make it. Ezra Pound's deficiencies as a writer and thinker seem to line up with his failure as a human being. And I've never seen the appeal of Chaucer, who may have raped someone - though he may be good in ways I can't yet see just like he may have been innocent of the charge. Dostoevsky, undeniably great in his way, was both a crazy dick and terribly unsound writer. The unsoundness works as a virtue in awfully narcissist-ish ways - more of the self-hating school of narcissists, or anyway the type fascinated to probe the rot of their own teeth. There must be exceptions? Schopenhauer? Flannery O'Connor? Her idea content's quite nasty but perfectly presented. They tell me conflating genius with goodness is fallacious (Truth/Beauty). But I think they may correlate, at least insofar as geniuses tend to understand morality better, and it's hard to be very bad when you understand the badness of bad.

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Relatedly: narcissists can also go farther in music and film because they can delegate so much of the work. "Write me a really catchy melody to go with this thing I wrote about how I'm both the best and worst person who ever lived," Kanye says to a talented co-writer; "Do something really cool and operatic with slow motion and black and white to my dumb storyboards of a child falling out a window while his parents have sex in the shower," Von Trier says to his top-drawer DP.

And narcissists are famously able to inspire awed loyalty and a sense of their shared task's importance in their (generally otherwise quite abused) disciples. See Hitler, possibly?

Kernel of all this was my thinking about the narcissist sides of Greenaway and probably Taymor, which may be necessary to understanding how they can suck so appallingly (and inhumanly) at times.

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What does interest me about those poems?

Centrality, I think is part of it: they really are ways to sum up the poet's statement about what they're doing, what world they confront, what results they hope or dread. Hence about what and where we are, what we do or should so, what will happen to us. Lyric (ambitious lyric) tends to reduce life to a moment - or a moment then its analysis, then a moment created by that analysis. Lyrics approach narrative without quite hitting it, and often borrow narrative elements but with a more concentrated, gestural purpose. The stage is set and then reacted to (then the reaction reacted to), like a tableau, so if there's a character other than the narrator or her stand-in they will represent something. Probably they will represent everything.

To vary the Love and Sleep kids' game: close your eyes, name a general place that you're walking through, name the specific place that you reach, name the entity you meet there. That is your life until now, your present moment, the truth you have reached but do not understand. Now write an essay about it.

Who would God be if we didn't presume to know him? Something irrelevant, if not seeable through the world - but if we took the world as our message from/about him? It makes life itself an encounter. Which it isn't, but treating it like that can be helpful for lyric, can force a summary assessment of the entirety of one's circumstances. Distill what life is like, for a reader to say aye too, so long as you get the feel of that feel just right. And presumably God himself is religion's ancient robbery from lyric. Lyric as conversation with our life. Or the record of the failure to have one.

(You: I have so many questions and complaints! It: [world noise]. You: Well, at least [insert consolation/insight won from listening to world noise].)

And of course all that is useless without the results. This form is itself the challenge of the giant.

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But of course none of that is what I can say. The Toronto application says to describe the dissertation you would ideally write. That's a crisis lyric challenge in itself, though obviously exactly what they have a right to ask.

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Decided to actually read my thesis. Immediately noticed this:

Thoreau: You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.

Kafka: There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can't do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.

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And Stevens' "Auroras" snake, "black-beaded on the rock," of which I note the similarity to Dickinson's "Narrow Fellow," now reminds me of the beads her robin's eyes are - even if he's talking about scales, they're both things. Glossy, hard, totally self-enclosed things we bounce right off. Beads are pure evil (see Achewood: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04112005).

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Forgot I'd even written about "13 Ways" and "Of Mere Being."

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The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, by Harold Bloom, out April 15, 2011. Publicity:

"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."
For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. The result is "a critical self-portrait," a sustained meditation on a life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?

Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poets — Shakespeare, Whitman, and Crane — as well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Ashbery, and others, The Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters. Each chapter maps startling new literary connections that suddenly seem inevitable once Bloom has shown us how to listen and to read. A fierce and intimate appreciation of the art of literature on a scale that the author will not again attempt, The Anatomy of Influence follows the sublime works it studies, inspiring the reader with a sense of something ever more about to be.