Threescore and Ten
In Boston; went to the Museum of Fine Arts.
Tintoretto, self-portrait circa 1546
Tintoretto, self-portrait circa 1588
ἔργα νέων, βουλαὶ δὲ μέσων, εὐχαὶ δὲ γερόντων
deeds [are] of the young; counsel, the middle-aged; prayers, the old.
—Hesiod, fragments
Late at night I said to J., “I need to s-e-l-p-s,” then
collapsed into incomprehension over such a brain typo—I wish I could say this was the endpoint of grading, but in fact the work is barely begun. “For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”
Berkeley has an enlightened new policy where your kitchen scraps and yard clippings can decay peacefully together in big green bins; so taking out the new load of coffee grounds and tangelo peels this morning, we flipped open the lid and discovered a tiny glistening salamander inside, breathing through wee neck vents and taking in the world with alert black eyes. We dumped our refuse and closed the lid carefully; then I had an attack of worry over what might become of the salamander when the organic waste truck showed up, so I went back out and used a bit of Tupperware to transfer it to the temperate jungle growing alongside our house. It was quite cooperative about being moved and even helped matters out by clinging to the Tupperware with its tiny prehensile tail—who knew?! I believe it must have been a half-grown Aneides lugubrus. When we went back out to check up it had skedaddled, I hope to a more salamander-appropriate habitat.
Here’s the original Gerry-Mander from 1812.
And the surviving fragment of Anaximander—
Ἀναξίμανδρος [...] λέγει δ’ αὐτὴν μήτε ὕδωρ μήτε ἄλλο τι τῶν καλουμένων εἶναι στοιχείων, ἀλλ’ ἑτέραν τινὰ φύσιν ἄπειρον, ἐξ ἧς ἅπαντας γίνεσθαι τοὺς οὐρανοὺς καὶ τοὺς ἐν αὐτοῖς κόσμους? ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι, καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών? διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν.
Anaximander [...] says that the Non-limited is neither water nor any other one of the things called elements, but something of a different nature, from which came all the heavens and the worlds in them; the source from which things derive their existence and to which they return at their destruction, according to necessity; for they give justice and make reparation to one another for injustice, according to the arrangement of time.
eure sanscreed into oure eryan
Happy Guinness Whisky Milkshake day, or however you mark it—
A bit of my nonexistent cash flow went to this ere Vladimir Sofronitsky box (spell it any way you like, I guess)—he does so many things right, even if the recording suggests a single mike in the next room over stuffed inside a couple of sweat socks—he knows how to play the Chopin dance pieces like dance pieces without getting all Viennese-goofy about it—the Op. 53 heroic polonaise makes you have to polonaise around the living room like nobody’s business—so probably for the best there’s no longer a cat here—
Pica pica nuttalli, your old favorite and mine, is back with some handy hints!
Geisteswissenschaften
Last night J. brought home, along with her bad self, a package from the doorstep which turned out to be The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry, rev. ed., by some learned dudes. It’s a sensibly priced alternative to M.L. West’s Greek Metre or Bruno Snell’s Griechische Metrik, for which one can only pine in the specialty bookshop; and I swear on my honor, it is the first guide I’ve seen that actually makes sense of this stuff. I’ve been practicing on the beginning of the Odyssey and finding all kinds of things I didn’t remember, like the gratuitous slam at the beginning against Odysseus’s men—
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
“dumbasses, who ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun,” but κατὰ doesn’t seem to have a prepositional function, so I think it must intensify ἤσθιον: “ate up” or “devoured” instead of just “ate.” Dumbasses!
Dies Natalis Solis Invicti
For Christmas I gave myself some time to read the Life of Johnson; the moral Tory Boswell is a funny fellow to encounter after getting to know him through all the juvenile boozing and whoring in his 1762 London journal. Poor Boswell, striving for respectability and having to come out against female inheritance and the abolition of the slave trade; poor Dr. Johnson, condemned to take every conversation as a contest in which one man must prove superior; and poor Dr. William Dodd too.
Tucson is full of grackles; I don’t know why. They hang out by the dozens on top of billboards, bobbing their long tails and swiveling their dark heads and casting those bright yellow icterid eyes on the landscape. I’ve seen them in raucous clumps in Texas, but never here; I hope they’re migrating through and aren’t planning to replace the cactus wrens.
Also for Christmas Tyche dropped the plan for a new novel into my lap, I hope a good one. Is it not time, Sir—says the ghost of Samuel Johnson, when he isn’t making fun of my Latin—that you worked at a good novel?
The Kind Old Sun
Just in time for the Holidays of Change I have some CDs to give the world, or
sell to the world with the sale ported to a donation, because I’m unequipped to run benefit marathons. Cheers.
Does the Job
The teeming thousands who want the Sphinx to do Latin verbs are by this instrument informed that the Sphinx now does Latin verbs. I got re-interested in medieval Latin by trying to re-puzzle the Joyce and Aquinas connections, and then by all the Giordano Bruno in John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, which I really wanted to love. From the outside it’s obvious when an author is trying too hard to explain everything, writing an instruction manual to wrap around the book instead of letting it hang free. It’s much harder to know when you’re doing it yourself.
I suppose you don't know very Spanish
If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american, in the letter, because never I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them. My address is:
(via Edge of the American West)
My Bloody Valentine, The Concourse, San Francisco, 30.09.08
Everyone always jumps to the guitars, but let’s have a moment for My Bloody Valentine’s rhythm section. Used as I am to records where Kevin Shields assembled all the drum and bass parts himself and then buried them in the mix, I would never have expected such prowess. Granted that Shields is not only the man but the man behind the man; granted also that Bilinda Butcher has earned her place as America’s sweetheart and mine by strumming and crooning and looking at her shoes; it was Debbie Googe and Celtic warrior Colm Ó Cíosóig at the back of the stage who carried forward the flame of rock.
It turned out to be impossible that the show might sell out, because the Concourse is the huge sort of carpeted warehouse building where you might hold an office-supplies expo or the Republican National Convention. So they had the stage and audience and light show concentrated at one end of the building, with the rest left open for hipsters to mill around and drink their gin or Tsingtao (such is what I drank), and also with enough light for me to sit and read the Poe stories I’d brought while the opening act, fronted by a dude who used to be in Spacemen 3, went through its paces. This marks the second time (after seeing Spiritualized open for Radiohead long ago) I’ve had to deal with that band’s detritus, and it is not a trend I wish to encourage.
But yes, the guitars. With my earplugs jammed in tight they were friendly and enveloping rather than punishing, rippling in and out of phase not wholly unlike Ligeti’s Lontano at the symphony last month, and worked pretty economically around the problem of not having twenty overdubs on hand. (I didn’t notice too many of the sampled leads that have grieved some folks; “Only Shallow,” “Come In Alone” and “Thorn” had plenty of live action with all the right pedals.) The pre-Loveless material, some of which was mastered pretty oddly on disc, probably benefited the most from the chance to open up and breathe—I could have listened to “Cigarette in Your Bed” on loop all night. And the noise at the end? I like guitar noise, I liked this noise for what it was, but considering how long it went on I do wish they had incorporated some other kinds of noise. This was basically like standing in front of a jet engine for twenty minutes, and I kept waiting for it to start to warble and squeak. It could have warbled and squeaked! (I admit the nonplussed, disgusted expressions of the bouncers were worthwhile.)
In conclusion, because I am thirty and responsible I went home only slightly deaf in the right ear, and I want to rock like that when I am forty-five. Good evening.
David Foster Wallace (II)
The other day I didn’t get at the thing I really wanted to write about Wallace, which is what an ethical writer he was. Strictly I ought to say “meta-ethical”; he was interested in the conditions of possibility for ethics, an interest that I tried to describe as “seriousness” the other day. A compact example is the short piece “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” which is just a little too long to quote in full but ought to work in snippets:
Three weeks ago, I did a nice thing for someone. I can not say more than this, or it will empty what I did of any of its true, ultimate value. I can only say: a nice thing. In a general context, it involved money. It was not a matter of out and out “giving money” to someone. But it was close. It was more classifiable as “diverting” money to someone in “need.” For me, this is as specific as I can be.
It was two weeks, six days, ago that the nice thing I did occurred. I can also meantion that I was out of town—meaning, in other words, I was not where I live. Explaining why I was out of town, or where I was, or what the overall situation that was going on was, however, unfortunately, would endanger the value of what I did further. Thus, I was explicit with the lady that the person who would receive the money was to in no way know what had diverted it to them. Steps were explicitly taken so that my namelessness was structured into the arrangement which led to the diversion of the money. (Although the money was, technically, not mine, the secretive arrangement by which I diverted it was properly legal. This may lead one to wonder in what way the money was not “mine,” but, unfortunately, I am unable to explain it in detail. It is, however, true.) This is the reason. A lack of namelessness on my part would destroy the ultimate value of the nice act. Meaning, it would infect the “motivation” for my nice gesture—meaning, in other words, that part of my motivation for it would be, not generosity, but desiring gratitude, affection, and approval towards me to result. Despairingly, this selfish motive would empty the nice gesture of any ultimate value, and cause me to once again fail in my efforts to be classifiable as a nice or “good” person.
To summarize a couple of already-summarized pages, the narrator’s authorship of the act nonetheless slips out by insinuation over the telephone, leading to precisely that gratitude and affection (perhaps mixed with resentment) which he or she had feared, leading to the agonized conclusion:
And I had, despairingly, in addition, given off these insinuations so “slyly,” that not even I, until afterward—meaning, after the call was over—, knew what I had done. Thus, I showed an unconscious and, seemingly, natural, automatic ability to both deceive myself and other people, which, on the “motivational level,” not only completely emptied the generous thing I tried to do of any true value, and caused me to fail, again, in my attempts to sincerely be what someone would classify as truly a “nice” or “good” person, but, despairingly, cast me in a light to myself which could only be classified as “dark,” “evil,” or “beyond hope of ever sincerely becoming good.”
The obvious technical features are the absence of particulars and the uncanny voice which Wallace tries out in several stories, weirdly phrased with adverbs in unexpected places, generally stiff but occasionally slipping into colloquialism, as if a moral philosophy textbook were trying to impersonate a human being. One might draw a comparison to some of Lydia Davis’s acerbic short pieces, which also work as dry anatomies of social cock-ups, but the key difference is that Wallace is writing without satiric intent. A story like “The Depressed Person,” true, gives a terribly pointed picture of emotional narcissism; but the narrator of “The Devil Is a Busy Man” is trying in the best of faith for the kind of openness that would never occur to the depressed person. And yet it doesn’t help. That’s the important thing; this android speaker, who sets stringent and impossible criteria for his or her own moral worth, who is so uncertain of his or her own insides that any remotely evaluative term appears inside scare quotes, is like a great many people whom we love and we wish could be happier, like ourselves when we’re unable to justify ourselves, and I don’t see the slightest condescension in the portrayal. Only sadness.
Now of course one can say that this skeptical moral philosophy is
untenable or misdirected, just like one can say that the skeptical
epistemology of Wallace Stevens’s poetry doesn’t amount to a
serious philosophical problem. In either case that misses the point. These
works dramatize an emotional state, a kind of pain which appears as a
cruel inability to stop questioning oneself or the world, analogous to a
philosophical problem without being susceptible to any kind of solution.
(Wittgenstein’s biography, with his endless agonizing over
pecadillos
and blindness to real faults, is another example.) I always enjoyed
Wallace’s virtuousity, but his
understanding of this pain, and its many relatives, is what I’m likely to keep the longest.
History Moves Toward One Great Goal
But there’s no teleology even with dinosaurs, man—
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)
One wants to think that, should you live one of these lives that are full of suicidal ideation in the teens and early twenties, as long as you later find a stable point from which to reflect back on those years—to reflect in fiction, even—then they won’t come back. If suicide is a door that you can open at fifteen, you should be able to close it at twenty-five. One wants to think that.
But I don’t want to Assess his Importance right now. I just pulled Infinite Jest off the shelf, read ten pages at random and found them comfortingly close to what I remembered from ten years ago. Like a lot of gifted people, Wallace wasn’t the best judge of his own output; the stories were uneven, the essays often overreached, and Infinite Jest carries a lot of minor conceits far past the end of the signal. Still I think the fairest thing to do with writers, especially those who have passed on, is to forgive the misses and count the hits. His best work took the dizziness of seventies metafiction more seriously than the metafictionists took it themselves, and made it into something lovelier and sadder. I thought he had time to do more.
BAROQUE NOT BAROQUE
Flirting Proposing
Ellipse Circle
Tasty food Fasting
Eros, thanatos, Indie pop
erotothanatopsis
Vertigo Tree-climbing
Gold Beer (beer is Gothic)
Cryptomariolatry The trivium and the quadrivium
Bitching Shutting up
Syncretism St. Paul
ἤσθιον
Sr. Fidel Castro
Colegio de Dolores
Santiago de Cuba
Oriente Cuba
