proximoception

2. My Antonia

Beautiful book, especially the first half. Hadn't read much Cather before, just "Paul's Case" (early sympathetic analysis of narcissism) and "Neighbor Rosicky" which is along the same line as this novel. One of the things I'm proudest of having done is a drawing of a car from a sideways angle, back in high school - it was very difficult to convey three dimensionality. Cather attempts something similar by writing life events sans plot, succeeds far past anything anyone else could have done. To her the ordinary things were exciting, and it's exciting anyone could share that so well.

3. Goodbye Columbus

Second time. I'm not sure how much of the message I caught back in 2004 - this time I was presenting on it, so read it carefully, and it turns out it's aimed at close reading as much as those stories they pick out for 101 textbooks are. Every single detail means something beyond its descriptive function, like in major poems by Bishop and Frost, and a lot of Chekhov's stories. I found it pleasant the first time but it wasn't one of my favorites - this density of oblique content that didn't flag itself as content probably made for a paradoxically distracted effect. Makes me somewhat apprehensive that the rest of Roth is like this too, but I don't think so, since Roth's switch to voice-based writing with Portnoy necessarily took him away from symbols. Not that there aren't any, but this is practically a mosaic. And a good one. I like what he's saying, against the worst, runniest part of America - it's a more impressive debut than I'd known.

4. An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition

Picked near randomly for a class assignment - started a couple longer Bishop books but was turned off by academic-ese and pretentious poet-ese, respectively. Hit and miss critical work, to some extent criticizing Bloom but very much contaminated by him. A large percentage of the Bishop monographs were from c. 1990, so most are written out of the same feminist moment, where the Adrienne Rich-type scorn for Bishop's supposed meek gentility gets replaced by insistence that she's instead sneakily subversive of patriarchy.

This author, Jeredith Merrin, also tries to argue that it's okay that Bishop and Moore are influenced mostly by male figures, for her Herbert and Browne, respectively; Gilbert and Gubar decided women can influence one another in sisterly, unagonistic fashion, and Merrin suggests Browne and Herbert were sisterly too, somehow. She does realize Moore and Bishop are continuators of Romanticism, but insists that it's there their subversion comes in. It's also there that agonism comes in, at least for Bishop, which Merrin might agree with but doesn't address. Moore might be an exception - see below.

5. Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Schulman

Here's below. I'd mostly avoided Moore: of the poets who are clearly saying something, and something not idiotic, I found her by far the most difficult. In class once I compared reading her to having the shit beaten out of you for ten minutes then handed a thimbleful of really good ice cream. Having made the effort to grasp her in toto I don't think I'll ever feel so beaten up again, but I'm still not sure it was worth it (though I do thing everyone should take a stab at her thirty or so most anthologized pages). She's beyond amazing at times, but those times are usually restricted to passages, even in Marriage, which I read a dozen times and agree is her best. At other times she made me wince all over my body by being way too right about what goes wrong with me: Old Tigers, To a Steamroller. She wrote a whole stack of poems like that, self-castigations where the self's our shared one. So even the really good ice cream can be You Suck-flavored.

I didn't need to make a real effort here - few of my fellow students seem to have, judging by their talk before and after class. Mostly I wanted to see if she's truly a presence in Bishop, and truly she is. She's a ridiculous, exasperating, bizarre figure with something amazing in her. Often Bishop cherry-picks the amazing and carries those bits over into her own pure amazingness parade. But she doesn't get all of it. And it's not at all clear to me who Moore's essential influences are. She's writing her own genre, something that wanders through the sublime sometimes but then back out, across backyards in several worlds alien to me.

6. The Grapes of Wrath

I'd seen the movie a couple times so much was overfamiliar, but the parts that weren't filmed impressed me a lot - the platonic scenes, the ending. Steinbeck had some immense strengths. I think his main flaw was not realizing when he was being awkward. Time and again he achieves supermimesis for a passage or two then puts his foot in it. I read most of this aloud to Julie, as it's one of her favorite books, and was impressed at how vocally distinct the main figures were. He's good with characters, dialect, incidents, meaning, everything really. He just falters in magicianship, in sustained command, and it's sad how much that seems to matter. I was reading him at the same time as Cather, and boy did she win in that department. And that department was the only one that mattered: other things only matter as you can get them onto that blue guitar, and Steinbeck's kept flashing brown and violet.

7. Miss Lonelyhearts

Gazillionth time. His shock metaphors don't stop shocking. Most because of thingness, the way we fall into just things. And all so well done - I'm reading Chandler and Bishop now and there's no contest whatever with Chandler, despite how neat his can be, and an astonishingly close one with Bishop, who just nobody beats in metaphor. The perfect book of the worst of our several moods.

Unlike Steinbeck and Moore, who are peerless in their corners of strength and just weird otherwhere, West's book is very influenced, especially by "Young Goodman Brown" and Bartleby. And it sires promiscuously: Crying of Lot 49, when fused with "Lottery of Babylon" and Bartleby again; Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn't There, among tons else in the Coens; and a major strain of Roth's, even in Goodbye Columbus I'm seeing. Central, slicing, fantastic story.

Ads after The Colbert Report for Hostel, Part 2 leave me furious. Does anyone watch this disgustingness except on a dare? Is this ever actually liked, even by 19-year-olds whose puberty, parents' divorce and first mistouching by clergy occurred exactly simultaneously? I watched the first one on a couples outing, the show we'd come for was sold out and my fervent Cassandrings were ignored by the girls of the group, who somehow had the idea it would be a "psychological thriller". Regrets were enjoyed by all; comparing notes, we found that each wanted to leave through the last most of it, but assumed someone else in the party was somehow being entertained. It was much, much worse than even I had expected. I checked the imdb reviews a few months later, amazed at the lack of public outrage I'd expected. The three or four people who expressed that had all had my exact experience, seen it with friends who chose it at random. Most others were disappointed that it was not in fact the goriest film imaginable, as had apparently been promised. Hence the sequel, I guess. Being this offended is rather confusing to me, with my small rep as Phlegmato-Man; I don't think this is coming from my growing older, though. The ageing of horror movies is the culprit: the random slashing up of teenagers was undreamtof in the '30s because less specialized shocks were still feelable. Likewise with Hostel compared with those c. 1980 movies, the necessary exponents having been applied. Tolerance for this, interest in this, can only have been built up by seeing the wrong ten thousand horrible movies in the right order. It has to be that, though even that way the "taste" defies my imagination. I can only think back to my friend Ben, whose ideal movie might be 90 minutes of a pair of breasts firing guns at one another, who didn't think Saving Private Ryan was violent at all. Whatever Spielberg invented there was picked up by horror movies c. the Dawn of the Dead remake, stomach-churning enough in itself but still several Darwinian switchtracks from Hostel. Inhuman slime. Boycott Quentin Tarantino's movies just for his association.

Now that my blood's down I'm thinking about sequels in general. Seems like, in Cap-L literature, movie-style repeat-nearly-everything sequels don't exist but there's a few major followup types, such as: 1) mere recurrences of characters (Twain's Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn books, Lawrence's Brangwen books), 2) revisitings of a popular book years and years later by an author of mostly less popular ones (Brave New World, Erewhon, Catch-22--sometimes this goes little past the title, e.g. Paradise Regained), 3) a direct, planned-feeling continuation of the prior book or books, though somehow still short of 'multivolume' unity (the relation of the last Border Trilogy book to the first two), 4) continuations the earlier text didn't realize it needed, treating it like the fragment it was never intended to be then completing it--self-applied version of Bloom's tessera, I think it was.

Multivolumes: Remembrance of Things Past, The Man Without Qualities, Aegypt, War and Peace I believe, Joseph and His Brothers. Were Trollope's two series planned or accreted? Even such nonsequels enter sequel-ish territory when the end seems to remember as much about the concerns of the beginning as the end's oldish author does about the less-oldish beginning's one.

What to make of Roth's Zuckerman books? I guess all the above bonds apply to some of the transitions. The thinness of the lines separating them from the Kepesh, Portnoy, "Roth", "Everyman" and even Sabbath books complicates their relations even further, probably to the point of discussion-defying simplicity. How many has he done so far:

1. My Life as a Man (kind of; name applied to two versions of a fictional precursor figure--of entirely different parentage etc.)
2.-5. Zuckerman Bound series: The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy
6. The Counterlife (more parallel 'versions', but this time of the ZB Zuckerman; presumably the final section's is more or less official)
7. The Facts (kind of; Zuckerman responds to Roth's life story in a thirty page epilogue)
8. Deception (kind of; Roth and a lover dream up some new adventures for Zuckerman, including his death I think?)
9.-11. The American Trilogy: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain (Zuckerman narrates the life stories of some people he's met, somewhat in the manner of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, being mostly present in the stories as on-site listener)
12. This October's Exit Ghost

Exit Ghost is apparently the first straight, actually-definitely-happening, actually-about-Z. book since the Bound tetralogy, which is helpfully being released as a Library of America volume in October (a 700-pager; those things are getting shorter and more expensive at the same time, aren't they?). Seems to hark back to Ghost Writer in its plot, too, making it ambiguously, impossibly type 1), 2), 3) (since Roth may have intended to kill him for real from the start--assuming he does kill him) AND 4), all at once.