It’s a Mad Mad World

I haven’t been posting much lately.  I’m thinking.  The world is spinning inside my head.  I’m thinking Chris Hedges is right:

A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy.   [more]

I haven’t retreated into fantasy but I’m less and less sure of how to talk about illusions of reality.  I’m thinking.

And then there’s this.

Marilyn

From a review of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde by Pam Rosenthal:

How did a perpetually frightened and insecure young woman summon up such powers of illusion? Out of what fathomless need did an illegitimate child who spent years in foster homes command so much attention and so much love, even 40 years after her death? How, out of a series of doomed affairs and marriages and some not-very-good scripts, did she manage to tell us so much about sex? And what kept her from ever satisfying her own needs for love and respect?

Oates presents her story as a tale of the grotesque, a horror story akin to Stephen King’s “Carrie,” another book about an unhappy child with a mad mother. Like most horror stories, “Blonde” is a tale of freakish overcompensation, impossible wishes granted, awesome power ill-used, demons finally undefeated — the story of an injured child who can’t be healed, even by the love of the millions. There’s nothing supernatural in it, of course, unless you consider the immense sway that movie images and technology hold over all our imaginations.

Unlike genre horror fiction, though, “Blonde” is a huge, incantatory, expressionistic work that doubles back on itself to retell stories again and again, building its themes and variations through a seeming infinity of retakes. Description approaches hallucination. The action is told by numerous voices, some singular and famous, some anonymous and plural. Sometimes the narrative voice is breathless, almost gasping — the ghostly Marilyn Monroe voice, oddly formal and well mannered, too high and thin for the body that produced it.

Read the whole thing here

Galumph Don’t Glide

From Donald Fanger’s review of Stepping Stones: Interviews With Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll:

There is a lot here about how poetry comes into being. Speaking of Robert Lowell’s “epoch-making poems like ‘For the Union Dead’ and ‘Near the Ocean,’ Heaney explains: “They came from where he was cornered, in himself and his times, and were the equivalent of escapes, surges of inner life vaulting up and away. Every true poem arrives like that, with self-consciousness giving way to self-forgetfulness in the glee of finding the words.” An aside on Lorca finds him making the same point in other terms, finding in the Spanish poet’s essay on duende an implication “that poetry requires an inner flamenco, that it must be excited into life by something peremptory, some initial strum or throb that gets you started and drives you farther than you realized you could go.” “The image I have,” he writes later, “is from the old cartoons: Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse coming hell for leather to the edge of a cliff, skidding to a stop but unable to halt, and shooting out over the edge. A good poem is the same, it goes that bit further and leaves you walking on air.”

One striking example comes in his discussion of the famous lines from his early poem “Digging.” Heaney explains: “In the case of the pen ‘between my finger and my thumb’, ‘snug as a gun’, and all the rest of it, I was responding to an entirely phonetic prompt, a kind of sonic chain dictated by the inner ear. It’s the connection between the ‘uh’ sounds in ‘thumb’ and ‘snug’ and ‘gun’ that are the heart of the poetic matter rather than any sociological or literary formation.” That aural susceptibility is everywhere on display in this book, as when he comments: “I always hear the tinkle of a whitesmith’s hammer in the word ‘tinker’, the rim of a tin can being beaten trim”—or when he speaks of “poems full of linguistic burr and clinker.” (“If I couldn’t altogether escape an Irishy/Britishy formality,” he comments, “I had an inclination from the start to dishevel it. I’ve always been subject to a perverse urge to galumph rather than glide.”)

Read the whole thing here

Poetry for Breakfast

Anything that can be thoroughly said in prose might as well be said in prose. The everyday intellect remains satisfied with abstraction and explanation in prose; the poetic mentality wants more. In narrative poems, the poetry adds the secret (unsayable) room of feeling and tone to the sayable story. Philosophy in its more logical incarnations strives to eliminate powers of association because they are subjective and uncontrollable. Poetry, on the other hand, wants to address the whole matter of the human — including fact and logic, but also the body with its senses, and above all the harsh and soft complexities of emotion. Our senses, excited by sound and picture, assimilate records of feeling that are also passages to feeling. Poems tell stories; poems recount ideas; but poems embody feeling. Because emotion is il-logical—in logic opposites cannot both be true; in the life of feeling, we love and hate together—the poem exists to say the unsayable.

Donald Hall

Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected at Shortcovers

Seen One, Seen ‘em All

From Terry Eagleton at the London Review of Books:

Romantic literature, with its cult of the poetic personality, might seem just the opposite of this. Yet the Romantic poet’s richly particularised voice is largely a way of giving tongue to the transcendent. From Wordsworth to D.H. Lawrence, one speaks most persuasively when one articulates what is not oneself, whether one calls this Nature or the creative imagination, the primary processes or the dark gods. The self runs down to unfathomably anonymous roots. Men and women emerge as unique beings through a medium (call it Geist, History, Language, Culture or the Unconscious) that is implacably impersonal. What makes us what we are has no regard for us at all. At the very core of the personality, so the modern age holds, vast, anonymous processes are at work. Only through a salutary repression or oblivion of these forces can we achieve the illusion of autonomy. Anonymity is the condition of identity.

It is this bleak doctrine that Modernism will inherit, as a cult of impersonality takes over from the clapped-out Romantic ego. For Romanticism, the self and the infinite merge in the act of imaginative creation. To surrender oneself to dark, unknowable powers is to become all the more uniquely oneself. One must lose one’s life in order to find it. For one strain of Modernism, by contrast, the self is displaced by the very forces which constitute it – unhoused, scooped out, decentred and dispossessed. We are no more than the anonymous bearers of myth, tradition, language or literary history. The only way the self can leave its distinctive thumb-print, from Flaubert to Joyce, is in the fastidiously distancing style by which it masks itself. Language itself may be authorless; but style, as Roland Barthes claims in Writing Degree Zero, plunges straight to the visceral depths of the self.

Another strain of Modernism turns back to subjectivity itself, as if by way of refuge. The self may be fitful and fragmentary, but there is something we can rely on in the immediacy of its sensations. And though the essence of selfhood is now elusive, there are certain rare moments in which it can be fleetingly recaptured. Postmodernism, by contrast, rehearses the Modernist tale of the unhoused, decentred self, but without the consolations of an essential self. There never was such a thing, for Barthes any more than for David Hume, and we are doubtless all the better for it. What looks like a loss is actually a liberation. Unity is an illusion, and consistency is more a vice than a virtue. Postmodernism is full of personality cults, but they know themselves to be groundless. Like commodities, individual selves are basically interchangeable. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

Read the whole thing here

Ignatieff On Evil

Yann Martel’s review of Michael Ignatieff’s The Lesser of Evils in his monthly letter to Stephen Harper:

The Lesser Evil is a study on liberal democracies and terrorism. How do a people who value freedom and dignity handle those who commit senseless violence against them? What is the right balance between the competing demands of rights and security? What can a democratic society allow itself to do and still call itself democratic? These are some of the questions that Mr. Ignatieff tries to answer. He looks at nations as diverse as Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S., Germany, Italy, Spain, Sri Lanka, Chile, Argentina, Israel and Palestine, in their current state but also historically, to see how they have dealt with assaults by terrorists. He also makes literary references, to Dostoyevsky and Conrad, to Euripides and Homer. Throughout, the approach is open, fair and critical, the analysis is rigorous and insightful, the conclusions are wise. Last but not least, the style is engaging. Mr. Ignatieff has a fine pen. My favourite line in the book is this one, on page 121: “Liberal states cannot be protected by herbivores.”

Mr. Ignatieff is a passionate yet subtle defender of liberal democracies and he finds that generally the tools they already have at their disposal will do in times of terrorist threat. Indeed, he argues that overreaction to a threat can do more long-term harm to a liberal democracy than the threat itself. The U.S. Patriot Act and Canada’s Bill C-36 are two examples Mr. Ignatieff gives of well-meaning but redundant and misguided attempts to deal with terrorism. When the regular tools won’t do, he acknowledges that the choices faced by liberal democracies are difficult. He makes the case that when a society that values freedom and human dignity is confronted with a threat to its existence, it must move beyond rigid moral perfectionism or outright utilitarian necessity and—carefully, mindfully, vigilantly—follow a path of lesser evil, that is, allow itself to commit some infringements of the part in order to save the whole. It is a position that seeks to reconcile the realism necessary to fight terrorism with the idealism of our democratic values. To work one’s way through such treacherous ground, to get down to details and talk about torture and preemptive military action, to give just two examples, requires a mind that is tough, sharp and brave. I’m glad to say that Mr. Ignatieff has such a mind.  

I haven’t read this book and doubt that I’ll bother.  So, for the moment, I can only comment on what Martel has said about it.  This business of carefully examining how the ideals of democracy can be bent to meet real problems – funny, I thought democracy was made real at least in part by our unwillingness to sacrifice its ideals to “terror”.  Some say that it’s when the ideals are most difficult to defend is the time they’re most important.  And this – “Liberal states cannot be protected by herbivores”????  WTF.  Does that mean no vegetarians in Canada’s armed forces?

I’ve read some of Ignatieff’s earlier works.  Didn’t like them in terms of ‘point of view’.  Doesn’t sound as though I’d like this one either.  No more than I am fond of the man.  I suppose it’s good news that Ignatieff can wield a pen effectively.  But it also matters what he’s saying.

Cranes & Stones

Cranes

Cranes divide the night into sentry-duties

and they make up the sequence of the watches

by order of rank, holding little stones in their

claws to ward off sleep. When there is danger

they make a loud cry

 

 

 

The Peterborough Bestiary

Quote from The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson

via Nigel Beale

Black, Queer & Here

From a book review of Thomas Glave’s book, Words to our Now: Imagination and Dissent:

“The word ‘faggot’ itself is to me as nasty a form of violence as the perennial spit-nastiness in that classic American word ‘nigger.’ As a black male who is also gay, I and my brothers and our black lesbian sisters are considered ‘disposables’ in our own black communities and in white ones.

To this day I’m still extremely wary and skeptical of those black men who in convenient circumstances glibly call themselves brothers… who then, in their own peculiar type of fear, loathing, and hypocrisy often inflict violence on black gay men and lesbians whenever we are found either not to be useful or, far worse, too close to home.”
—Excerpted from Chapter 1

If you think it’s tough enough being a black male in America, you might want to consider the plight of the gay black male. For as Thomas Glave describes it, he feels alienated not only from mainstream white society but rejected by blacks, too. Glave, a Professor of English at SUNY Binghampton happens to be particularly adept at describing that sense of isolation in Words to Our Now, a series of essays which condemn a variety of prejudices which have persisted not only in the U.S. but around the world.

Although he weighs in eloquently on an assortment of international concerns from ethnic cleansing to Abu Ghraib, the author is most effective when reporting on or recounting incidents of gay bashing, a subject with which he is well acquainted. For one cannot help but empathize when he recalls from childhood the “wicked pugnacity” of “boys my age and older.” He describes the daily slamming of fists into his face unleashed by the meanest hoodlums, beatings invariably accompanied by a long line of harsh expletives which began with the word “faggot.”

There is something truly touching and deeply saddening about a book which has to make a case for the embracing of black homosexuals by their own community, when acceptance has been the prevailing theme around which the rest of African-Americana has rallied for generations. Who knows, perhaps it is a holdover from mistreatment during slavery which causes his own people to exhibit such severe intolerance for a minority within their own minority.

As a consequence, guess who now has the highest AIDS rate transmission, due to so many scared brothers on the down low choosing to work both sides of the sexual-preference street?

Glave’s intriguing answer to the crisis arrives in the form of a clarion call for social change, arguing that we are at a critical crossroad, that we must all put our bigotries behind us, and that time is of the essence. If nothing else, in emerging from the shadows via such a compelling, well-written opus, he has succeeded in humanizing the issue by lending his face to it, and by proudly putting a personal spin on ACT-UP’s unequivocal, defiant anthem of liberation.

“I’m here! I’m black and queer! Get used to it! “

This evening, Glave launched his latest book, The Torturer’s Wife, at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.  From the TWB website:

Author of the acclaimed story collection Whose Song?, award-winning Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. Here he expands and deepens his lyrical experimentation in stories that focus—explicitly and allegorically—on the horrors of dictatorships, war, anti-gay violence, the weight of traumatized memory, secret fetishes, erotic longing, desire and intimacy.

THOMAS GLAVE is an O. Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now:Imagination and Dissent (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction), and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Catholics

It’s been a long, long, long time since I identified as a Catholic.  Still they embarass me.  Having been a part of that community, I do know that some of them are better than others.  So, just to offset Ratzinger’s embrace of the holocaust denying Bishop Richard Williamson, I offer this book review by Patricia A. Kossman and James Martin:

Not a book for the faint hearted, this is nonetheless a noteworthy and needed addition to Holocaust literature. Desbois is secretary to the French Conference of Bishops for relations with Judaism; in 2004 he founded an organization called Yahad-in Unum that investigates the mass killings of Eastern European Jews by the Nazis from 1941 to 1945. Traveling with a team to Ukraine in 2007, he visited numerous locations and interviewed surviving witnesses (many of whom had been conscripted by the Germans to “dig”) to the humiliation and calculated murder of more than a million unsuspecting Jews. With the assistance of an interpreter, a ballistics expert, a photographer and an archival researcher, the author recounts in vivid, unflinching detail the methodical torture, shooting and burial of Jews (some still alive) in huge open pits throughout various small towns and villages. These were not isolated sites, but in full view of local villagers of all ages, the victims’ non-Jewish neighbors and even friends. A chilling refrain underlying all the testimony presented is that “the earth moved for three days.” History is indebted to Father Desbois and his team for uncovering the truth and bringing to light a dark, almost forgotten chapter in the story of Nazi atrocities.

Doesn’t excuse Ratzinger who, at the very least, needed to explain what he did and why he did it.

Flannery

From a review of Flannery: A Life of Flanner O’Connor by Brad Gooch and Collected Works by Flannery O’Connor by Wendy Lesser at bookforum:

Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” said Miss Katherine Scott, Flannery O’Connor’s freshman-composition teacher, speaking to a reporter many years later about her most famous student—“warped, but a genius all the same.” The teacher no doubt focused on the warped part when the seventeen-year-old Catholic girl with the spectacles and the searing wit took her writing class at Milledgeville’s Georgia State College for Women in the summer of 1942; and it was the warped part she noticed some ten years later, when she read O’Connor’s first book, Wise Blood, and flung it across the room. “I thought to myself that character who dies in the last chapter could have done the world a great favor by dying in the first chapter instead,” she told the same reporter.

This was the sort of understanding and encouragement that surrounded Mary Flannery O’Connor from her earliest years in Savannah to her death at the age of thirty-nine in the Milledgeville area. But we should not be entirely sorry about that. Familial and social disapproval evidently spurred this writer on, enabling her to form a pearl around each painful speck of grit. That O’Connor’s pearls are among the most luminous and valuable we have in all of American literature does not detract in any way from their strangeness and hardness. Indeed, their value lies precisely in that hardness, that strangeness. However many times you read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Good Country People,” you will not be able to figure out the source of their enormous power; in fact, they will become increasingly mysterious to you as the years go by.

Read the rest here