proximoception

36. Othello

Read it aloud until my voice weakened, then just did Othello and Iago aloud. Yes, the best play in the world. Maybe the other three tragedies would rival it if their texts weren't so corrupted and/or overstuffed. No one has ever suspected that Othello's text isn't the director's cut.

It seems at first strange that my own unlucky years have echoed the central anguishes of all four, excepting Lear, but I guess there's only so many ways to be unlucky. And I guess aspects of Lear resonate too, just not the main ones.

I don't accept that Iago's motiveless. Emilia as much as says that someone had Iagoed Iago, egged him on to jealousy. Which may have been deserved (though my sense is that it wasn't), given her cavalier, jesting attitude toward adultery, but the point is it hit him as hearsay. The career grievance combines with it, sure, but the more for the two people keeping him from his rightful place just happening to be the ones said to have put him out of his invisible nest. Iago drives Othello crazy in twenty amazing pages - how long had he been crazy himself?

I think my reading of Romeo and Juliet applies here, too, unexpectedly, and to slightly different effect: the only other marriage exhibited is that of Emilia and Iago, and the only other kinds of amorous interest presented are Roderigo's stalking and Cassio's demi-pimpish exploitation of Bianca. A universe of mockeries of love, of obsessive, self-interested, bitter sex is set up in the supporting casts of both plays. So maybe Othello and Desdemona are peerlessly loving and guileless because that's just them, but maybe their love is worth killing and dying for because, virgins, they don't yet sense it has limits. Maybe Shakespeare is just letting this element in here to toss some more stars into catastrophe - or maybe it's to get us further into Othello's shoes, by making us doubt true love's existence outside of the foolishly high expectations of the uninitiated, by Iagoing us up a bit ourselves. The strangest thing about this play is its complete plausibility, outside of the mechanics of strangulation, even with all the heightened rhetoric and impossible speed and superheroism, superheroineism (1604-style), supervillainy of the leads - Shakespeare has you buying every second of it. I think it's because we're made to face the blatant fact that Iago or even some much stupider imitator could get any of us; even if we haven't been betrayed, we've all been led to fear we were by some accident or other, experienced the horror of how quickly the ground we base our life on can be pulled away, the other horror of how apt we were to believe it had been when it hadn't. We can't even trust ourselves to trust. And we can love more than we love our own life and still not trust there is such a thing.

We're not very safe. But that's a dangerous thing to let ourselves realize.

34. The Poetry of Robert Frost

Just couldn't stop once I started. Frost and Dickinson are two of the colors that mix to brown mud in my own verse attempts, the only two I consistently recognize there - but what can I say, I love them. They're what poetry is for me, when I try to touch it, though I'm closer to Stevens and Shelley in what I believe. Frost and Dickinson aren't quite about belief - how and where to take things. They're makers of experience; they bring the poles of inside and outside together, something explodes, and they ask isn't it just like that, isn't that just where they would really explode, where they made them explode in our heads. They're both ridiculously tactile. But I don't want to bring them too close together: Frost is a good child of Emerson, Thoreau, and Robinson when he forgets to forget to be, and does have his own distinct vision, including prescriptive elements. Dickinson does too, though phrased still more thoroughgoingly in negative terms, but is even more often being bad off in the woods.

But I wanted to distinguish them, so I'd better. Texture, then - with Dickinson we feel the textures she bounces off, at the same time the ones she finds she's herself made of in that contact. But Frost spreads the elements thick, he unrolls the ground, blows a sky, slaps up fire between his hands to sow some stars, digs down to water. Every poem gets its own bit of world. And put them together you feel you've been everywhere, or at least all up and down a lifetime in a little state. You also have to read him in bulk to get suspicious enough to see how much he's up to.

I forgot this unforgettable phrase, maybe the one rammed fullest with Frost: "The saddest thing in life / Is that the best thing in it should be courage."

How right is that.

32. If on a winter's night a traveler

Read this last year to teach it, then reread the ten first chapters (not first ten chapters) to grade the students' assignments. So this time I just read the other parts, the main narrative - whether that's the bones or flesh of the book I can't say.

Calvino as much as admits in it that the book's the product of writer's block, probably of the close analysis of that block while suffering from it. It's one of the world's most wonderful books, though still only takes second or third place among his. As he also states in the book, Calvino made a career out of radical departures from himself, and this is one of them, but aspects of the framing narrative are anticipated in his early story "Adventure of a Reader," the Theodora parts of The Nonexistent Knight, and the end of Baron in the Trees. The aborted novels themselves sometimes have a faint whiff of the cosmicomical, but they're essentially a whole new genre of writing - despite being to various extents recognizably parodic of certain authors or novel types, and despite their debt to the outlines of Quain.

The book comes across as less crazy without the nov'lets, though it's still pretty insane. The main narrative has plenty of its own distractive attractions - which here are new, not quite finished explanations of what our vulnerability to distracting attractions means. Reading is both gnosis and deliberate ignorance: we strip ourselves down to our simplest to best take on everything. What we know is that by some provided means, perhaps this book of this author, everything's out there to be taken on. He stops on something of a shark analogy - we keep moving or we die, we don't ever both stop and live - but I wonder if he believed it. At the very least what you find on your travels (in this case another reader) helps you travel better, makes where you are a good place to keep returning to.

Hence the what do you call it, recursion, of the original hardback cover and hinted at in the Silas Flannery chapter, where the Snoopy-tormented novelist proposes to write the very book you're reading (which of course is largely about your inability to read it).

If we knew what we were doing we'd be done.

When I was a kid my father had this routine, vaguely along the lines of the 'remind me of a babe' one from The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer that they recycled in Labyrinth - and apparently a lot of other fathers have a similar one:

(http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2006/05/zanzibar.html)

But I don't know anything about its origin. He'd say something like,

It was a dark and stormy night outside the gates of Paris.
I met a man [I'm missing something here].
I killed a man, said I.
What was his name, said he.
Zanzibar, said I.
Zanzibar, said he, He was my brother. We must fight this out!

I think there was something violent after that - what sounds closest among those other versions is 'A shot rang out' but I don't think that was quite it. And then it loops. Good way to put a kid to sleep.

29. Love's Labor's Lost
30. The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald is a magician. And here's another invisible house, albeit of the visible variety, and another instance of land flowing like water. And the glaring precursor of Citizen Kane, Catcher in the Rye, and some things in Crowley.

My high school theory that Gatsby arranged for Nick to come out, had set up his job and home for him, does fit the facts but seems superfluous. Ockham lops another.

28. The Comedy of Errors
A. Chekhov's Later Stories (1888-1903)

Wasn't in the best mood for the former, but it passed the time. Probably his least baroque play, pun battles excepted - Shakespeare likes to have stuff falling out over the edges, but this one's quite streamlined.

Loved all the Chekhov, most of them even more than Logue. Garnett's very good with him - not head and shoulders better than V&P or Hingley, but she translated tons more. I really like this Modern Library volume - only complaint at all is that I still think '92 or '93 is a better organic cut-off. I guess The Steppe just has some traditional status as gateway to Major Chekhov, which perhaps it is, but "Gusev" or thereabouts is the gateway to Glorious, Hamlet-obsessed, Hopping Mad Chekhov, probably best read sequentially while up all night drinking tea.

26. Tartuffe, tr. Wilbur
27. Symposium, tr. Shelley

In the latter Socrates puts his own vision of love in the mouth of the foreign prophetess Diotima, but in quoting her has her allude to Aristophanes' presumably extemporized myth of twenty pages past, something Aristophanes himself notices. Since the dialogue is itself told by someone who heard it from someone else, this works as a defense of what Plato himself is doing: putting his own words into the mouth of a teacher who didn't publish (the two layers of someone-elses have previously clarified that way-too-young Plato does not purport to know exactly what happened at that apparently famous party, despite directly representing Socrates in so many others). Of course, since it's Plato's Socrates who's doing it, that's a hearsay, hence valueless, corroboration - but it does work as a kind of explanation of what Plato's doing with Socrates. And if Socrates' reliance on Diotima (and his daemon) is well enough known, maybe Plato's readers will accept the convention of a fictive authority as actually stemming from Socrates, or at any rate see how both author and character use it to serve an educative purpose. The Socratic dialogue isn't about reaching truth so much as dispelling error, but once Socrates has shut everyone who's wrong up he turns back to his other trick, mythmaking within the confines of the non-disproven. Which maybe all of us do.

Bloom, whose earliest work was on Shelley, always fought the notion of his being especially Platonic, I think because it discounts the personal element in Shelley's quest: Intellectual Beauty, the soul out of his soul, the Witch, the smiling light, is usually a 'thee,' often a she, and Shelley's of two minds about whether his wavering access to her has to do with his own limitations or whether she might not quite exist. Shelley's putting some of his own phrases in Plato's mouth here, though allegedly without bruising the limits of translation overmuch - but maybe he's constructing a Shelley's Plato as much as he's admitting to being Plato's Shelley. Which is quite Platonic of him.

20. The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck
21. The Coast of Utopia: Salvage

Latter two parts of Stoppard's 350 page megaplay about the Men of the '40s (see Fathers and Sons - or Demons, which I may resume next, since Coast of Utopia gives useful background on pretty much every figure Dostoevsky's spitting at) - a.k.a. Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky and sometimes Turgenev.

I've read a lot of very long plays, nearly all the ones anyone's heard of, and most of which are from the 19th century for some reason - though I never managed to get through The Dynasts or Bothwell. They're kind of fascinating for their unmanageability. You can't quite approach them as novels, which they do come to resemble, especially the unplayable ones; they're still doing the play thing, are sustained on that immediacy of people brushing by one another while talking, characters somehow autonomous, somehow drawn apart from their context in a way novel characters never are just by that isolation of their words. Their words belong to them, the portion of the work they speak is theirs. Not to overstate this, but it emphasizes the present moment at every point, highlights the ten things you need to remember about exactly what's going on now, and this somehow makes it hard to remember the hundred things at once you need to with novels. Maybe that's more what I mean, that novels aren't trying so hard to distract us but plays always are, and long plays maybe end up distracting us from the distractions to a point we're just lost.

So I've kind of lost the overall arc and I winder if that's because Stoppard did. Toward the end it was like he was explaining his own complicated, proudly self-contradictory political opinions (he's one of those leftists who tries to correct the left vaguely rightward, but not to anywhere near the right or for any of the reasons the right usually gives, rather like Orwell, I guess acting on the assumption that conservatives don't read/listen so that's the most meaningful way to have an influence?). Not that it wasn't all amusing and rewarding - but unless you have a special interest in the period I'd advise going for Invention of Love or Arcadia, among late Stoppard, which I remember being more consistently inspired and definitely cleaner.

Novels are crazy too, but we expect that of them going in. There's a reason Andy Kaufman read The Great Gatsby at an appearance, even that short novel goes on too long. But interesting things get into that 'too.' Too many to not read it. Move past successive presents and you start to make time.

17. War Music [Patrocleia/GBH/Permanent Red]

Books 16-19 recombobulated. Amazingly good. These little books verge on that category where you're mad at people for not having run up and smacked you unconscious with them so that you wake up later with just the book on your face and no explanation and therefore need to read it.

All Day Permanent Red was a phrase from a Revlon ad btw.

So many Logue lines you just go, "Fuck yes." Some:

Those who have slept with sorrow in their hearts
Know all too well how short but sweet
The instant of their coming-to can be:
The heart is strong, as if it never sorrowed;
The mind's dear clarity intact; and then,
The vast, unhappy stone from yesterday
Rolls down these vital units to the bottom of oneself.

Nothing needs saying about that, but he's so right how though the guts are on the way the bottom of the self is not the feet.

14. Preambles & Other Poems

I think I read most of these a year or two ago, but couldn't remember which, so just went on through. A few I've known for a long time because of Hollander's anthology Poems of Our Moment - and Bloom's essay on him in Ringers in the Tower - and others I've found or been given online, but Feinman's like Crane in that it's hard to retain a poem of his even if you broke your head grasping it. Presumably later attempts are much easier, at least. But also like Crane and late Stevens, and like Dickinson used to be for me, it is very important to be healthy, well-rested, unhungry and undistracted if you want even that first attempt to work. And for that matter Feinman marries a lot of the difficult points of all three poets: Dickinson's streamlined grammar, Stevens' jarring image transitions, Crane's every poem being a train of thought caught in medias res. Actually all three of them do all of those. I think what I actually mean is he does three times as much of all of them as all of them - and all at once.

Difficulty can be divided into good and bad types, like Pausanias divided love in The Symposium: there's the kind that signals that a work is for the few and not the unwashed multitude, that doesn't want to be understood because it has nothing worth understanding, that just tries to see how extreme it can get. But then there's also the kind that's somebody straining as far as they can, finding something so important for what it is that it must not be simplified, hence possibly lost, the kind that's so much a crucial conversation held with oneself on paper that to try straightening it out later is to intrude something foreign, some new and irrelevant self, the kind that wants you to work for something that's more yours for that attention - and that deserves that attention. Feinman's is the good kind - maybe avoidable, but you respect the dignity of his diffidence.

There's also the kind that fears it has nothing worth conveying, or that it will be esteemed that way, and therefore becomes a shy, private language, and I'd say the avoidable difficulty of his work is mostly due to that. He did find some readers, mostly other poets - Bloom, Hollander, Strand, Tate, Aiken - but you wonder if he knew what to do with them. Still, this fear usually manifests as not writing poems in the first place, or writing literally incomprehensible ones, or simple stand-ins for thoughts too complex to let yourself think publicly. Feinman often wears a poet's self-esteem.

He even has a few immediately lucid pieces: True Night, November Sunday Morning, Relic 1, maybe Noon and Late Light.

The story told is the necessity but also necessary failure of meaning, like in Stevens, but emphasizing the latter. He's a post-structuralist poet, yes, but the only kind I can stand: one who realizes there's nothing to say about post-structuralism past describing its stages and what they're like - i.e. making a model of how models fail. He's not attacking words, he's pointing out the surging reconfigurations of our senses of self and cosmos and what ties and what separates them. He's actually surprisingly positive at times - again and again a larger life washes back into us through or despite our imposed meanings. You abandon meanings purposely for something meaning more.

Instead I read:

12. Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Least likely reread of my life, too. Aloud to my wife, whose book club selected it over her objection. My 6th grade teacher made us, which is weird because it's kind of explicitly anti-Christian, but she was Catholic and I guess they let the Pope worry about those details. I didn't hear a word about it again until the Dutch narcissist Julie worked under one summer loaned her a copy. I told her not to read it no matter what she did.

The narcissist said she was a 'Buddhist slash atheist' which I guess fits the book, kind of? It's more of a Vedanta/The-Secret-type-Gnostic/Sports-inspirational hybrid, but it's also pretty much the narcissist manual. Jonathan is special, you see, maybe the most special ever - but the others don't understand him. But he'll show them. And they'll thank him. For he will show the way to perfection. But hahaha he's not a god he's just a gull like us. We too can be like him! It will take many lifetimes but he is patient as well as swell in the other ways. The trick is to realize our body is a thought of ours, as we are a thought of the Great Gull's. You can become anything you want if you just think different (while hoping he doesn't)!

It was actually very Broadway and that's how I played it. Channeling my high school's production of The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket.