Poetry/Not Poetry: Hopkins and Poe

What’s that you say? What? You’ll have to speak up: I’m trying to set the Samizdat temporal distortion teletype to the 1860s, and I keep on grinding the gears in the transmission. It’s making a hell of a noise. So: what? Oh! You’ve been reading my post from last July, about how the line dividing poetry from prose shifted in the early nineteenth century, and hasn’t really shifted back. You poor, sad person. I mean, this is how you spend your time? But I remember that post. I think the important bit was this:

I think we can say that something changed in the way we answered the question "how is poetry different from prose" right around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that, with some small modification, the new answer poets came up with at that time is still with us. This is Romanticism, people, nor are we out of it.

and maybe this:

“Poetry is always different from prose,” writes Roland Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero but in the classical period “this difference is not one of essence, it is one of quantity. It does not, therefore, jeopardize the unity of language, which is an article of classical dogma.” In other words, the classical or Augustan writer doesn’t grant poetry one of the rights that we moderns and postmoderns grant it: the right to follow rules significantly different from those governing discursive prose. It is more or less the same stuff, but with the added use of particular literary devices such as rhyme and meter. Think about it: Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man is more or less what it sounds like — a discursive, explanatory essay — it just happens to add versification. Even the title indicates a fundamental continuity between prose and poetry.

And then I sort of went on about how Coleridge saw poetry as involving a formal unity that was something an end in itself — that the poem was no longer paraphrasable, like prose. I think I quoted Colerdige’s essay on Shakespeare, where he said that in a true poem, the meaning cannot be paraphrased: “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare… without making the author say something else, or something worse."

The point I was trying to make was that the idea of poetry became a kind of autonomy: the poem couldn’t be put at the service of conveying a meaning, because it couldn’t be paraphrased. Also, the the poem couldn’t be bound by compositional rules (as prose is), since it makes its own rules and defines its own formal harmony. I went on with this for a while, and then argued that a lot of our own poetics are a minor deviation from the Romantic position — we argue that the poem is autonomous, free of formal rules and free of particular meaning, but we tend to say this has to do with its discontinuity and disunity, rather than with its unity.

So. Is that all you wanted to talk about? No? You say you want further elaboration? Ah! Well, I’ve just been able to set the Samizdat temporal dislocation teletype to 1864. Unless it pops out of gear, we should be able to get some kind of Victorian feedback. Let’s see. Ah! We’ve got Gerard Manley Hopkins on the line. Let me check the tickertape for what he has to say…

Okay. So it looks like he sees poetry as falling into several different categories. “First and highest,” he says, there’s “poetry proper, the language of inspiration.” Set against this is something called Parnassian poetry. This is lesser stuff, and not inspired. “In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism, if you like.” Each poet will have a different idiom, but it is the simple fact that it is his or her idiom, the recognizable stock-in-trade kind of line in the oeuvre, that makes it Parnassian. It’s different from “poetry proper” because it seems to follow the author’s own rules of ordinary composition (think of Wordsworth’s meditative line, or Ashbery’s phrases-bumping-together, or Milton’s sublimity and inverted syntax, or what have you). “I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian. We seem to have found out his secret,” or, in other words, his implicit system, his rules of composition — no matter how weird or arcane, we discover that “his poetry really does run in an intelligibly laid down path.”

This Parnassian mode is still better (because idiosyncratic) than what Hopkins calls the merely Delphic, which is simply plainspoken language put into verse. But true poetry, for Hopkins, eludes rules, even idiosyncratic ones. It stands free, autonomous, above explanation, as inspiration. What’s really interesting is (to borrow from and modify Barthes’ terms) the hyperdiscontinuity of language we find in Hopkins’ poetics. For him, it’s not just that real poetry is different from prose: it’s that real poetry is different from most of what we call poetry. I suppose we could see in this an intensification of the Romantic sense of poetry as distinct from prose by virtue of its various kinds of autonomy.

(We probably like to think we’re beyond such mystifications as the idea of inspired language, but an enormous amount of the writing about poetry now falls into a variant of this kind of thinking — it argues that poetry is beyond instrumentalism, disruptive of the rules of discourse, etc. So we’re walking down the same road walked by Coleridge, and later Hopkins. But I digress.)

Oh hell. The Samizdat teletype seems to have popped out of gear. Let me see if I can get it back…argh…ugh. Nope. Now it’s stuck in the 1840s. We’ll probably end up getting a transmission from Frederick William Faber or Caroline Clive or some other B-lister. Oh! Wait! We’ve got Edgar Allan Poe. Let me type in a question for him: “Hi Ed stop what makes a poem a poem stop just wondering stop Bob stop.” Wait for it… ah! The reply. He says he’s happy to discuss “the essentiality of what we call Poetry,” but we’ve got to be careful of what we mean:

…here, in the beginning, permit me to say a few words in regard to a somewhat peculiar principle, which, whether rightfully or wrongfully, has always had its influence in my own critical estimate of the poem. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags- fails- a revulsion ensues- and then the poem is, in effect and in fact, no longer such.

Okay. No one ever said Poe would be entirely coherent. I mean, he starts out talking about how a poem can’t be long, but then shifts on the fly to talking about how a reader can’t be attentive for long, which is a slightly different thing. Still and all, we get the general drift, and it’s a drift not too different from that of Hopkins: poetry is not like most other language. In fact, since the bulk of most long poems isn’t really poetry, real poetry isn’t like much of what passes under the name of poetry. There’s a real discontinuity between poetry and prose, and between poetry and much of what we call poetry.

But there’s more! It’s not just the case that poetry is defined by that post-Augustan discontinuity of language Barthes described: it’s also the case that poetry is autonomous. It’s free, for Poe, of any need to communicate any particular content, and exists as an end in itself. He begins by attacking anyone who sees a didactic use for poetry, then makes his point about autonomy:

It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

So there it is: the old Romantic line about autonomy and the discontinuity of language passes straight through the middle decades of the nineteenth century before arriving at the New Critical phase of the “heresy of paraphrase,” and then morphing into the “disjunction is poetic” world of elliptical poetry.

But I seem to have spilled my milkshake into the Samizdat temporal distortion teletype, and lost the connection to Poe. In fact, I seem to have gummed up the works pretty badly. I doubt we’ll be using the gizmo again.

Archambeau World Tour, Spring 2010

During the months I was carting myself around in a wheelchair after my little car-vs.-bike accident last year, I turned down just about every speaking engagement I was offered. I'm still taking it pretty easy, even though I'm more or less back to walking (albeit with what I hope is a rakish cane). But there's one engagement I didn't turn down, though, since it will let me return to my alma mater and see some old friends. So I'm firing up the motorcade, the tour busses, and the police escort, and making my way in stately procession to South Bend, Indiana this March, to give a poetry reading on a bill with Joyelle McSweeney and Cornelius Eady. It's part of a gathering of poets affiliated with Notre Dame. I'm hoping to be able to stick around to be on some follow-up panel as well. But those with a serious wish to either strew rose-petals in my path or hurl rotten fruit in my general direction are advised to look for me on the evening of Monday, March 29. Here's the schedule:


Monday, March 29

3 p.m. Reading: Jenny Boully, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Kimberly Blaeser.

(All readings followed by Q & A.)

4:30 p.m. Reception at McKenna Hall. Informal conversation open to all.

5 p.m. MFA and PhD students present papers and give readings from The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008.

8 p.m. Reading: Joyelle McSweeney, Robert Archambeau, and Cornelius Eady.


Tuesday, March 30

3 p.m. Reading: Francisco Aragón, Jacque Brogan, and John Wilkinson.

4:30 p.m. MFA and PhD students present papers and give readings from The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008.

8 p.m. Reading: Henry Weinfield, Orlando Ricardo Menes, and Mary Hawley.


Wednesday, March 31

10:30 a.m. Panel on poetry and poetics.

1:30 p.m. Panel on the poetic vocation and the poet’s education.

All events are in McKenna Hall, Seminar Room 100-104.


Many thanks for Colleen Hoover and Orlando Ricardo Menes for putting all this together.

Primitivism and Speech in European and American Poetry

Lately I've been spending my Fridays in the dull duty of an editor, working on an edition on the uncollected English works of the late, great Swedish poet and critic Göran Printz-Påhlson. I had the privilege of meeting him back when I used to teach at Sweden's Lund University in the 1990s, and he was living nearby in Malmö. He'd had a long career teaching in the U.S. (Harvard) and U.K. (Cambridge), and seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of English-language poetry and poetics, as well as a deep understanding of European poetry in several languages. He'd also been a mentor to the Swedish writers I admired most, notably the amazing poet Jesper Svenbro.

Going through anyone's unpublished works is a bit like trying to clear out the Augean stables, and if your scholarly patience is anything like mine, it can feel a bit like trying to clear those stables out with nothing more than a worn-out Swiffer. But there are some serious rewards, from time to time. The jewel-box hidden in the mire, in the case of Printz-Påhlson's work, has been the discovery of decent drafts of a series of unpublished essays from the 1980s called "The Words of the Tribe: Primitivism, Reductionism, and Materialism in Modern Poetics." My faith in American literary xenophilia is weak enough that I don't foresee these making a huge splash when the book appears, but my faith in Printz-Påhlson is such that I'm convinced they should produce some serious waves. I've just about knocked the first one, "Linguistic Primitivism in Modernism and Romanticism" into publishable shape (a few missing citations aside). Printz-Påhlson takes on various ideas of primitive language, eventually concentrating on the idea of common speech as a medium for poetry. He's not an advocate of it, though — more of an critic taking a cold, hard look at theories of simple language and speech as a fit medium for poetry. He looks at Romantics, notably Wordsworth (who believed in the language of the poet as the language of "a man speaking to men") and the young Ezra Pound, with his strictures about "no hindside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as ‘addled mosses dank’), no Tennysonian-ness of speech; nothing — that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say." He concludes with some sweeping statements about European vs. Anglo-American poetic traditions:

Linguistic primitivism has put its distinctive mark on modernist poetry in the whole Anglo-American tradition. When we look at modernism in a wider or European setting, we find very little that corresponds to it. The voices of modernist poetry in French or German poetry, from Hölderlin to Celan, Baudelaire to Bonnefoy, speak defiantly in another dialect, lofty, vatic, solemn, sermo sublimis rather than sermo humilis. Paul de Man has in a masterful and pregnant early essay traced the primary vocabulary of that dialect to its sources in figurative language of great simplicity, “The Intentional Image in Romantic Poetry.” In this essay he reminds us that whatever the demands of the language, of the social world or the sensual world, or even the ontological primacy of the natural object, words are used in poetry not as signs or names, but in order to name, in an Adamic act. He is quotes the words of Mallarmé (from his epitaph on Poe) “donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.” Is this to be taken, with the English poet, as an act of social acquiescence in the face of the intractability of language, or with the continental poet, as a defiance of social demands in order to reach the silences behind the words? Those are the questions that will be present for us in further investigations of these problems in this series of lectures. Let me conclude here with a quotation from Wordsworth’s third “Essay Upon Epitaphs,” which marvellously comprises both views in two sentences: “Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with” and “Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly, and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate and to dissolve.”

Like all sweeping statements, what's swept away are the moments when actual practice doesn't line up with the large theory. But still — there's much to think about here. Pound, Olson, Oppen, and in a different way much in the New York school (Printz-Påhlson was Ashbery's Swedish translator) — all have an affinity for speech, and the affinity became so strong in American poetry that Robert Grenier had to break with it, making his grand declaration "I HATE SPEECH." And the dominant English poetic tradition (in whose shadow the large, adventurous experimental crowd still stand) seems interested in maintaining a kind of continuity between the norms of spoken language and poetry (think Auden, think The Movement, think Andrew Motion et al). The question of just what this distinction from the more radically anti-speech Continental traditions can mean, especially socially, is fascinating. And it's the pull of that question that keeps me editing. On to the next three essays in the series! Excelsior!

Cambridge Literary Review #2: The Scuffle Continues!

Good news! The second issue of The Cambridge Literary Review is out. This is my kind of production: essays on Hume and Hegel rubbing shoulders with poems by Stephen Rodefer, Andrea Brady, Drew Milne, and other luminaries of experimental British poetry. Gluttons for punishment may want to turn to the letters section, where Andrea Brady and I continue the exchange we began on this blog, after an essay I wrote about Cambridge poetry appeared in the first issue of the journal.

Innovative Poetry: The Alternate Take

What's this? A new dispatch is just now coming in on the Samizdat Temporal Distortion Teletype. It seems to be from the late Christopher Caudwell, our correspondent from the 1930s. What's he up to? Ah! It's the usual 1930s business, to start — a big, familiar quote from The Communist Manifesto, the part that praises the energy and transformative power of the bourgeoisie (my people — and yours, probably) and their capitalism:

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Hang on a minute. Let me see where Chris is going with all this. I'm a slow typist, so I'll keep it short. Let's see. How about "Thanks for note stop where are you going with this stop say hi to Auden if you see him stop or Stephen Spender stop all best stop Bob stop." That ought to do it.

Ah! Here's the clickety-clack of his response, coming in on the ticker-tape now!

Capitalist poetry reflects these conditions. It is the outcome of these conditions.... Its art is therfore in its essence an insurgent, non-formal, naturalistic art. It is an art which constantly revolutionizes its own conventions, just as bourgeois economy constantly revolutionizes its own means of production. This constant revolution, this constant sweeping-away of "ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions," this "everlasting uncertainty and agitation," distinguishes bourgeois art from all previous art. Any bourgeois artist who rests upon the conventions of his time becomes "academic" and his art lifeless.

God, Chris types fast. Okay, let me spool up the paper and assess all this....Um hum. Hmmm. Looks like it comes from the notes that'll go into his book Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry. Mmm hm. Yup yup yup... But — but — but — but isn't one of our great sacred cows the notion that aesthetic radicalism is tied to political radicalism? Isn't it a given that experimental poetry is tied to radical leftism? We hear that received opinion echo from Ron Silliman's Palazzo Avant-Posti in Pennsylvania all the way over to the gates of Jeremy Prynne's secret bunker in Cambridge. Is Chris aware of the scuffle his opinion would kick up? I am just now reminded by my assistant Igor that Christopher Caudwell died while operating a machine gun against Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, so he probably wouldn't be afraid of a few angry poet-professors. Still, I should get back to Chris and tell him what he's getting himself into with this alternate take on poetic innovation. Sadly, though, I've become entangled in the tickertape, and must send Igor off to get the scissors. Until he returns, my hands are tied.

The Fate of the Novel and the Lonely Crowd

Last fall I found myself groping around for some brief, accessible definitions of realism, naturalism, and the genteel tradition in the novel. I wanted to give them to my freshmen, who were reading examples of all three kinds of novel from the tradition of Chicago writing (Hamlin Garland, Upton Sinclair, and Henry Blake Fuller, respectively). One of the things I turned up was an old lecture Norman Mailer gave to the 1965 Modern Language Association conference, "Modes and Mutations: Quick Comments on the American Novel” (there’s a version in Commentary’s March 1965 issue, which you can get online if you’re interested). Here, Mailer spells out the usual business about the genteel tradition (Jamesian stuff, about manners and personalities, containing nothing you wouldn’t put in front of Aunt Edna), realism (the harsh world of people of all classes in their struggles against an uncaring world), and naturalism (the great deterministic novels, in which the big social, biological, and economic forces are first described, then put into action to grind our hapless protagonist into the dirt). He then takes a typically idiosyncratic turn and declares these forms to have failed. The novel is in decline, says Mailer. By the post-war period, the novel was fading into irrelevance, and “Literature … had failed. The work was done by the movies, by television. The consciousness of the masses and the culture of the land trudged through endless mud.” I’m not too keen on the kind of anti-pop-culture sentiment Mailer throws in there (in this I’m as typical of my generation as Mailer was of his), but the disdain for pop culture and the mass media is not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that Mailer sees the decline of the kind of novel he admires as coincident with the rise of those things. As the big, serious novel fell in esteem, says Mailer, “the task of explaining America was taken over by Luce magazines.”

Mailer blames novelists for all this, seeing them as having given up on the creation of compelling characters:

Frank Cowperwood [the protagonist of Theodore Dreiser's The Financier] once amassed an empire. Herzog, his bastard great-nephew, diddled in the ruins of an intellectual warehouse. Where once the realistic novel cut a swath across the face of society, now its reality was concentrated into moral seriousness. Where the original heroes of naturalism had been active, bold, self-centered, close to tragic, and up to the nostrils in their exertions to advance their own life and force the webs of society, so the hero of moral earnestness, the hero Herzog and the hero Levin in Malamud's A New Life, are men who represent the contrary—passive, timid, other-directed…

That last term in Mailer’s catalog of the defects of characters in modern novels came to mind the other day, when the longsuffering Communications prof Dave Park popped into my office and was detained for interrogation about midcentury social theory. I wanted to ask Park about Vance Packard’s book The Status Seekers, which I’d seen was on the reading list for one of Al Filreis’ courses at Penn. “Packard’s okay,” Park mumbled between bites of his meatball sandwich (has anyone actually ever seen this guy without some kind of sandwich?), "but if you really want to know about that stuff, you want to read David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd." Riesman, I remembered, was the guy who gave us the terms “inner-directed” and “other-directed,” and I suspected immediately that Riesman would give us a better model for understanding the decline in the novel’s prestige than Mailer had given.

Despite the title, Riesman’s book is not about suburban angst and anomie, at least not primarily. It’s about the long evolution of our society, and the different types of subjectivities produced under different historical conditions. As Riesman puts it,

My concern in this book is with two revolutions and their relation to the ‘mode of conformity’ or ‘social characer’ of Western man since the Middle Ages. The first of these revolutions has in the last four hundred years cut us off pretty decisively from the family- and clan-oriented traditional ways of life in which mankind has existed throughout most of history; this revolution includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, and the political revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This revolution is, of course, still in process, but in the most advanced countries of the world, and particularly in America, it is giving way to another sort of revolution — a whole range of social developments associated with a shift from an age of production to an age of consumption.

The three principal types of character or subjectivity, for Riesman, are the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed, corresponding to the dominant types in the Medieval period, the Renaissance-to-Industrial Revolution period, and the contemporary period, respectively (Riesman includes a lot of demographic information in accounting for why these types rise and fall).

For Riesman, the tradition-directed type follows the inherited norms of his community. He “hardly thinks of himself as an individual,” says Riesman, “still less does it occur to him that he might shape his own destiny.” Think of the protagonist of some Medieval piece of literature — Beowulf, say, and you’ll get the idea. Beowulf doesn’t question the values of his tribe: he embodies them. Nor does he root around to discover the genealogy of his tribe’s morals: he accepts them as given, and defends them against outsiders. He’s not out to individuate himself, making of his life an exquisite work of art in the mode of an Oscar Wilde. Rather, he’s out to make sure his people and their beliefs don’t get attacked by the monstrous other. In the world of the tradition-directed, it’s all gemeinschaft, all the time. It’s not that tradition-directed societies don’t have deviants or weirdos or nonconformists, says Riesman, but it doesn’t encourage them, and when they do come into being it has places to put them (the role of the Fool comes to mind) where they serve a social role, rather than directly challenging social norms.

Inner-direction comes into being with the Renaissance and Reformation and Enlightenment, and really takes off in the nineteenth century, with the large-scale transformation of society brought about by the Industrial Revolution. As Riesman says,

In Western history the society that emerged with the Renaissance and Reformation and that is only now vanishing serves to illustrate the type of society in which inner-direction is the principal mode of securing conformity. Such a society is characterized by increased personal mobility, by a rapid internalization of capital (teamed with devastating technological shifts), and by an almost constant expansion… the greater choices this society gives — and the greater initiatives it demands in order to cope with its novel problems — and handled by character types who can manage to live without strict and self-evident tradition-direction. These are the inner directed types

One could say this is the society unconsciously experimenting with new types of people, encouraging mutations of personality, one or more of which may prove better adapted to new conditions than the old tradition-directed type, though Riesman doesn’t use quite this kind of pseudo-Darwinian language. He does, however, speak of the predominance of the new inner-direction among the class rising to dominance in the nineteenth century: “inner-direction,” says Riesman, “is the typical character of the ‘old’ middle class — the banker, the tradesman, the small entrepreneur, the technically oriented engineer, etc.” Such people were new social types, making their way through uncharted social territory. They didn’t need inherited norms. They needed their own inner gyroscopes, their individualized norms for behavior.

Here, I think, is where the association of inner direction with the rise of the novel comes into play. The novel, of course, is the most significant new literary genre to develop in the period of inner-direction, and one of the things it does best is to model that kind of inner direction. The bildungsroman is subgenre where we can see this most readily. Think of Jane Eyre, for example (a personal favorite). The book begins with the child Jane in opposition to traditional, inherited values. When her cousin John Reed tries to assert his prerogatives as the man of the house, she rebels, listening to an inner voice crying “Unjust! Unjust!” As the novel develops, we see Jane constantly rejecting the values projected onto her by school, by employer, by church, by peers, and working to develop an inner equilibrium. She tries to balance out her inner passion (all that fire imagery) and her inner, rational reserve (all that ice and cold water). By the end of the novel she has evolved her own personal balance of values, which we see visualized when she carries a tray on which sit a glass of water and a burning candle. We get much the same thing in the American novel of the period. Consider The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck, in choosing to help Jim despite society’s judgment that doing so will lead to his damnation, decides to follow his inner voice, saying “I’ll go to hell, then.” It’s all about inner-direction and the defiance of norms, and it’s sort of perfect as a model for the rising bourgeoisie — those guys needed to put themselves first, against society’s judgments, if they were to transform the world and advance their self interest. For a dark version of what this looked like, think of Daniel Day Lewis’ character in There Will Be Blood. It takes a busload of inner-direction to go ahead and drink someone else's milkshake.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the decline of the novel’s prestige Mailer laments occurs right around the period Riesman identifies as the beginning of the end for the inner-directed personality and the rise of the mass media.

The other-directed character type, which for Riesman comes into being slowly, but starts to triumph in post-war America, is a kind of self that doesn’t rely on an inner gyroscope for direction, but on the ever-shifting norms of a peer group. “What is common to all other-directed people,” he says,

is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual — either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media. This source is of course internalized in the sense that dependence on it for guidance in life is implanted early. The goals toward which the other-directed person strives shift with that guidance: it is only the process of striving itself and the process of paying close attention to the signals from others that remain unaltered through life.

I suppose my instinct, like that of many, is to recoil a bit at this kind of character. But looking at it with sympathy, one could say this new type is less likely to be a rigid, unchanging, self-serving pain in the ass than is the inner-directed type. Anyway, it’s not about what we like, it’s about what’s developing, and there is a kind of structural change at work. While early industrial civilization needed its inner-directed pioneers, more developed corporate culture needs something different. As Riesman puts it, if inner-direction is typical of the old middle class, “other-direction is becoming the typical character of the ‘new’ middle class — the bureaucrat, the salaried employee in business, etc.” These are people for whom single-minded conviction isn’t likely to be a virtue. These are people who need to get along with one another and to be able to switch gears when the orders come from on high.

I remember reading something in Matthew B. Crawford’s Shopcraft as Soulcraft, a book about his defection from the white collar world, in which he described the weirdly abstract language of management as a language designed to make no strong commitment, since the manager doesn’t want to alienate anyone in the administrative structure. After all, the direction the winds blow may change rapidly. Plan A gives way to Plan B, and the manager wants to be seen as playing along, not as having made a strong commitment to Plan A. This seems to me a particularly unpleasant version of other-direction, a kind of man without qualities. I imagine most of you have received memos written by this sort of administrator at one point or another. You may even have made a sport of sending them to your friends, asking for a list of specific affronts to human decency contained in the prose style. If so, you cling to inner-direction, and I salute you.

Anyway. This new type of subjectivity comes into prominence around the time Mailer sees the prestige of the novel falling away, and one could argue that the two are connected. The kind of novel Mailer likes — the novel that (perhaps paradoxically) teaches us how to be inner-directed — isn’t going to have a lot of resonance for other-directed people. While the novel can depict other-direction —Mailer sees this in Malamud — it isn’t a great medium for it. As Riesman points out, it is mass communications, or rather the constant presence of mass communications, that works best for other-direction, since other-direction is a matter of constantly shifting norms, fashions, and modes. The novel isn’t that fast or flexible. (Dave Park’s been thinking about other-direction in new media like Facebook, where one’s peers approval or disapproval modifies one’s behavior on small levels all the time. Ask him about it if you can).

Of course there probably are places where the novel of inner-direction can have a huge impact even now. Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem has had a huge impact in China, and deals with an outsider loner type defying the traditional norms of society (Rong, according to his English-language translator, hopes “that the Chinese will succumb less to the constraints of traditional behaviour, seek greater freedoms, become... if you will, wolfish”). This emphasis on inner-direction in Wolf Totem may have something to do with the phase of industrial development in China being more or less in line with that of nineteenth century England and America. And of course the novel in our own time and place can do a great deal, even examining the decline of inner-direction with trepidation (Don Delillo’s chilling Mao II comes to mind). But I don’t think Mailer can pin the relative decline of the prestige of the novel on a simple failure of novelists to be compelling. Bigger forces are at play, and the kind of novel Mailer admired isn’t going to have the prominent place he wanted it to have. Which is neither here nor there, unless, of course, you're like Mailer was, and have some deep need for others to confirm that you are important — which isn't other-direction, exactly, but something worse.

The Discursive Situation of Poetry: An Early Warning

Winter break was not, I'm happy to report, a dead loss, despite the sad fact that I was shanghaied onto a hiring committee and had to wade through several hundred job applicants, then hole up in a hotel room at the M.L.A. between Christmas and New Year's Eve. (If you are in the job-applying position this year, you have my sympathy — there's a lot of talent out there, and not many places for it to go). Besides my service to Our Fine and Collegial College, I finally found the time to sit down, root around in my notebooks, and write an essay I've been thinking about for months. I'm giving it a minimalist, colon-and-subtitle free name, "The Discursive Situation of Poetry." I suppose it's my contribution to the discussion about the relative decline of poetry's audience over the last century and a half (Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" and all that). Here's the opening paragraph:

Statistics confirm what many have long suspected: poetry is being read by an ever-smaller slice of the American reading public. Poets and critics who have intuited this have blamed many things, but for the most part they have blamed the rise of M.F.A. programs in creative writing. While they have made various recommendations on how to remedy the situation, these remedies are destined for failure or, at best, for very limited success, because the rise of M.F.A. programs is merely a symptom of much larger and farther-reaching trends. These trends are unlikely to be reversed by the intervention of a few poets, critics, and arts-administrators. I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Or, in any event, I’m not sure it is worse than what a reversal of the decline in readership would entail. Let me explain.

There's still time to do some revisions before it appears in a book Mary Biddinger is editing as part of a new series on poetics she's started at the U. of Akron Press, so consider this an early warning of pedantry to come. If you want to give me some notes on the draft (warning: it runs about 8,000 words), send an email my way at my Lake Forest College address.

Neruda's Earth, Heidegger's Earth

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things – all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

That's a quote from "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza” ("Towards an Impure Poetry"), the editorial Pablo Neruda wrote for the first issue of the short-lived and fabulously-named Spanish journal Caballo Verde para la Poesía ("Green Horse for Poetry") in 1935. The editorial was really an act of poetic self-defense: ever since the Chilean poet had arrived in Spain, Neruda had been under withering attack from the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who considered Neruda's work vulgar. Calling Neruda's imagination a sewer and a scrap heap, Jiménez objected to the world Neruda depicted. Stoked by the Mallarméan notion of poesie pur, with its ideal of a language as music, Jiménez wished Neruda would purge his poetry of all of the chunks of coal and shoe soles that, in his opinion, cluttered the verse with ugliness.

Neruda had been reading and translating Whitman, so he'd invested pretty heavily in a very different poetic enterprise than had Jiménez, but he was young and provincial and felt persecuted by the older, more established Jiménez, who seemed, said Neruda, to be “publishing tortuous commentaries against me every week." "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza" is certainly intended as a riposte to Jiménez. But I think its important goes further than its immediate occasion in the debate between the two poets. I think the passage offers a key to understanding one of the things Neruda's up to in Alturas de Macchu Picchu (The Heights of Macchu Picchu) one of the most acclaimed sections of his great, sprawling Canto General, and a book-length poem cycle in its own right.

Alturas de Macchu Picchu was published a decade after the essay on impure poetry, and is often seen as somewhat discontinuous with his work of a decade earlier. After all, the intervening years saw the Spanish Civil War, which politicized Neruda's poetry, and his time in Mexico, when he took inspiration from Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralist tradition and turned toward broad depictions of history and society. John Felstiner, for example, claims in Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu that Alturas de Macchu Picchu is simply “inconceivable” without the events of civil war. This is certainly true. But it's also true that there's a continuity with the project outlined in "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza." To understand the nature of the continuity, we need to understand a little more about "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza," which has much more to it than a simple defense of the Whitmanic depiction of ordinary objects in poetry.

The most powerful idea in "Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza" — an idea Neruda acts on in the composition of Alturas de Macchu Picchu, is the idea of the earth. It's something very much akin to what Heidegger was articulating in his lectures on art in Zurich and Frankfurt right around the time Neruda composed his essay. These lectures would later see publication as "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" ("The Origin of the Work of Art"), but not until 1950. I'm not sure that Neruda knew about the lectures. It seems possible but unlikely — the main conduit bringing German philosophical ideas into Spanish intellectual life was Miguel de Unamuno, who was near the end of his life in 1935, and I'm not at all sure he had any contact with Neruda (someone surely knows, but not the present humble blogger). The similarity between Neruda's idea, and Heidegger's more deeply-thought-through idea, were probably coincidental, a matter of intellectual zeitgeist rather than direct influence. But the similarities of both idea and terminology are certainly very real.

When Neruda writes about the important of looking at objects at rest, he's talking about an interestingly non-utilitarian, disinterested kind of perception, in which we become aware of the reality of things we'd been taking for granted. "Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest" — these are all things that, generally, we instrumentalize, that we treat as equipment, and that we take for granted. When we're driving a vehicle, we don't think of the wheels. We depend on them, but (unless they're malfunctioning as equipment) we take them for granted, and they go unnoticed, even though our activities could only go on with their presence. The same goes for the handles of carpenter's tools. They're essential to our tasks, and we're very intimate with them. Often, the handles are even discolored by, or worn to the shape of, our hands. But when we're building something, we tend not to be thinking about the handle of our hammer. We're concentrating on a utilitarian action, concentrating on not hitting our thumbs while we go about our business. So whole swathes of the world go unnoticed by us, even though we depend on them.

For Neruda, looking at these objects the right way, when they and we are at rest, reconnects us to the world we take for granted during all our utilitarian to-and-fro-ing. From the perception of these things, says Neruda, "flow the contacts of man with the earth." When we notice them, we realize we aren't isolated, Cartesian intelligences: we're rooted in the world, surrounded at all times by things that make our lives possible. Indeed, we come to realized our interconnectedness with these, and, ultimately, with all things. It's a big idea Neruda has in his little essay. It's also an idea uncannily similar to Heidegger's.

In "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" Heidegger makes an important distinction between "the earth" and "the world." [If, for some bizarre reason, you've actually read my big post about Adam Kirsch's misreading of Heidegger, you'll find this and the next paragraph eerily familiar — they're just compressed versions of things I said in that post]. When Heidegger writes about earth he isn't referring to physical stuff — not rocks, or trees, or door-latches. Instead, he's referring to the tendency of things to resist our ability to understand, or even to notice, them. There's a whole realm of the unknown and not-understood out there, and it surrounds and contains us, even makes up a great deal of our physical self and our psyche, and this is what Heidegger has in mind when he writes about the earth. There's a famous passage, in "On the Origin of the Work of Art," in which Heidegger talks about a Van Gogh painting depicting some old, worn-looking peasant shoes. He says that shoes like this are generally things we don't notice — we wear them and use them as equipment, for their instrumental value, and we tend not to notice them when we do. Shoes like this, when they're actually worn, "belon[g] to the earth" says Heidegger — and they belong their not so much because they are material objects, but because they go unnoticed and un-thought-of. But we notice them in Van Gogh's painting, where they become part of something more. Here, in the painting, they get noticed or, in the standard translation of Heidegger, become "unconcealed." It's the concealedness of the shoes before they get into the painting, when they're just something around us that we don't notice, that makes them belong to the earth. The earth and the things that belong to it are self-concealing, and withdrawn from our attention and understanding. But what about the world, in Heidegger's sense? The world, for Heidegger, is the context in which and through which we apprehend, understand, or notice things — it's where things become (to use the Heideggerian term) "unconcealed." History, myths, and the like give us a way of noticing things, talking about them and feeling their presence. Heidegger's "world" is sort of like what a later generation would call "discourse" — the systems of thought and representation that let us notice things.

The work of art gives us a special kind of relation of earth and world — a dialectic. That is, in the work of art, earth and world are always involved in a kind of struggle. If a work of art were pure world, it wouldn't be art, it'd be propaganda, or ideology: a closed system of mental coordinates that never come into contact with anything that resists it. But the art work doesn't allow anything so easy to happen. Even as it starts to open up a whole world (or discourse, or paradigm, or way of understanding) for us, it gives us elements that resist appropriation into that world. If the work of art in question is, say, a poem, we might say that it resists paraphrase, or closure; or that parts of it remain indeterminate; or that it shoots off so many connotations that we're uneasy reducing it to a denotative meaning. Any attempt to make the art work into mere world runs up against all kinds of elements that escape that world. So the work of art has the power not only to bring elements of the earth into the world — it has an kind of inexhaustibility, in that even as it brings the earth into the world, it also conceals other elements of the world.

Neruda doesn't go into the dialectic of the earth and the world, of unconcealing and concealing, the way Heidegger does, but he certainly gives us a part of the idea: that the necessary but unnoticed things of the earth can, and should, enter into our consciousness, under the right conditions of perception. This is the idea that, I'm convinced, informs the writing of Alturas de Macchu Picchu.

Some of the early sections of Alturas de Macchu Picchu depict a kind the kind of modern death-in-life we're familiar with from, say, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Here are some lines from section three, in Nathaniel Tarn's translation:

Being like maize grains fell
in the inexhaustible store of lost deeds, shoddy
occurrences, from nine to five, to six,
and not one death but many came to each,
each day a little death: dust, maggot, lamp,
drenched in the mire of subsurbs, a little death with fat wings
entered into each man like a short blade
and siege was laid to him by bread or knife:
the drover, the son of harbors, the dark captain of plows,
the rodent wanderer through dense streets:

all of them weakened waiting for their death, their brief
and daily death...

This is the nightmare of the life that goes by without our noticing it. Our very being falls away from us like so many grains, and our lives consist of "lost deeds" — things we don't notice doing, and don't remember having done. This sad condition is, in the poem, the curse of modern, regimented life, the world of "nine to five," in which our instrumental, utilitarian activities, our quest for our daily bread, is a mere matter of going through the motions, a "brief and daily death." We use things and keep ourselves alive among them, but we don't notice them. The earth (to use Heidegger's term, which is also Neruda's) retreats from us into the unnoticed, the concealed.

Eliot's remedy for this sad, afflicted state involved an attempt to reconstruct the myths and religious traditions that had become discredited or obscure. But Neruda's remedy is less mythic, and more a matter of existential perception, or restoring our connection to the concealed wonder of the world in all its dasein, its here-and-nowness. He wants to bring the unnoticed earth back into our perceptual world.

There seem to be three main techniques by which Neruda tries to accomplish this retrieval of the earth in Alturas de Macchu Picchu. First, there's an invocation of the unnoticed earth, such as we find in some lines from the poem's opening section:

Someone waiting for me among the violins
met with a world like a buried tower
sinking its spiral below the layered leaves
color of raucus sulfur:
and lower yet, in a vein of gold,
like a sword in a scabbard of meteors,
I plunged a turbulent and tender hand
into the most secret organs of the earth.

This eroticizing of a landscape is familiar stuff in Neruda's poetry (it's the whole charm of "Cuerpo de Mujer," the most famous poem of his best-loved book, Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada). Here, though, the technique is at the service of reminding us of the very nature of the ground we stand on, showing us the gold-veined rock beneath the Andes. Such gold is literally concealed, and literally of the earth, but it is also concealed from our consciousness, and therefore a part of the Heideggerian earth, the unnoticed. We walk on brilliant wonders, but we're so disconnetded from them in our daily grind we need the poem to reveal them to us, to bring them into our world. Whole sections of Alturas de Macchu Picchu aim at reminding us of the forgotten wonders of the earth, often in sweeping, incantatory fashion (check out section nine sometime, for a good example of this kind of incantation).

A second way Neruda tries to bring the forgotten earth to our attention is through an insistence on how, despite our inattention, we are always already connected to it. Consider these lines from section ten:

Stone within stone, and man, where was he?
Air within air, and man, where was he?
Time within time, and man, where was he?
Were you also the shattered fragment
of indecision, of hollow eagle
which, through the streets of today, in the old tracks
through the leaves of accumulated autumns,
goes pounding at the soul into the tomb?
Poor hand, poor foot, and poor, dear life...
The days of unravelled light
in you, familiar rain
falling on feast-day banderillas,
did they grant, petal by petal, their dark nourishment
to such an empty mouth?

Those first three questions are hard to answer. Things exist within themselves, independently of us. And where are we? Are we in any kind of relationship with stone, air, and time? On the one hand, the benighted nine-to-fivers Neruda described earlier don't have any kind of conscious relationship to these things. They don't stop to think of themselves in relation to air, stone, and time. On the other hand, we always have an intimate relation to these things: we stand on stone, breath air, make our way through time. Normally, though, they're like the wheels or carpenter's tools of Sobre una Poesía sin Pureza” — we depend on them, but don't notice them. Our perceptual world, in which we think only of getting by, has shrunk away from the things of the earth. But by the end of the passage, we're reminded that things like time and light are in us, and when we're asked if the "familiar" (that is, unnoticed) rain nourishes us, the only answer is "yes." We are reminded that we aren't just the "poor life" of forlorn little isolated subjectivities, but really we are manifestations of the larger earth, connected to it in our very bodies when they take it in. We are of the earth, and the poem tries to make us notice this.

Finally, Neruda invokes the idea of ancestry to connect the reader (especially the Latin American reader with native ancestry) with ranges of time that usually lie outside of our perceptual world. "Arise to birth with me, my brother," begins section twelve. The brother here is one of the pre-Incan inhabitants of Macchu Picchu, a member of the civilization that built the city. "Look at me from the depths of the earth," says Neruda to this figure, before telling him to "Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth / Speak through my speech, and through my blood." Neruda insists on how present-day Chileans are deeply, and intrinsically, bound to a past that they have let slip from consciousness. Their blood is, after all, the blood of the ancestors who build Macchu Picchu. They are connected to the past, even when they don't know it. Again, it is through the poem that these unthought-of things enter the world of our thought, and help save us from the forlorn death-in-life of the modern daily nine-to-five.

Of course, this think-of-your-blood business is a bit unnerving to we bourgeois liberals. And the importance the poem puts on blood ancestry raises a question about whether the coincidence between Heidegger's thinking and Neruda's goes beyond the mutual interest in bringing the unnoticed earth to our perceptual worlds in the work of art. Both Heidegger and Neruda were undeniably brilliant writers, but both were also drawn to brutal dictators (Heidegger to Hitler, Neruda to Stalin). One wonders whether there’s an intrinsic connection between concerns with existential depth and attraction to ambitious, destructive absolutist rulers. Put another way, one might ask if ordinary bourgeois decency, with its aversion to the concentration of power and it’s general you-do-your-thing, I’ll-do-mine indifference to others comes at the price of such depth. It’s worth considering – the English political tradition is certainly the European tradition most powerfully immune to dictatorships, and England is also the home to the European philosophical tradition most averse to existentialism and all the related traditions it dismisses as “continental philosophy” — something they do over there, across the channel, where they get up to God-knows-what kinds of politics. But here we begin to swim in waters too deep for me.

Neruda, Chicago, Whitman, Bolaño

Since returning more-or-less unscathed from the MLA convention in Philadelphia, I've been spending mornings kicking back with a couple of the books I got for Christmas: Pablo Neruda's giant Canto General and a weird little anthology of essays called Armitage Avenue Transcendentalists, edited by Janina Ciezaldo and Penelope Rosemont. It makes for an interesting combination, between sips of coffee and getting up to chase after my increasingly mobile 11-month old daughter, Lila. In fact, the pairing of these two books is almost a set-piece illustration of the difference between major and minor literature.

I know those sound like loaded terms: "Major Literature" seems like it must be Important and Good, while minor lit sounds like something unimportant and, potentially, poorly written, or at least unambitious. But I think of the terms the way Gilles Deleuze used them. For Deleuze, major lit is the kind of literature that seeks to speak for the dominant values of a society (think of Dante here, speaking for late medieval Catholic civilization and articulating its world-view), while minor lit is critical of those values, sometimes directly, and sometimes through all kinds of indirect means (formal weirdness and irony or what have you). Deleuze seems to like the minor more than the major, as do most of us in the non-commercial worlds of academe or bohemia. I mean, we're sheltered from, or have opted out of, the mainstream values of our time and place, so of course we like the minor lit perspective.

The Ciezaldo/Rosemont collection is certainly a kind of minor lit production, in Deleuze's sense of the term. It's a sort of rag-bag of memoirs by, or about, oddball Chicago characters (old Wobbly-style labor guys, street artists, African-American activists of the radical black nationalism era, Maxwell Street Market weirdos, etc.). The book is gloriously marginal in a few ways: it's about people who were critical of, or opted out of, the mainstream of their society; it's about people who did so in a second-tier city; it's published by a press that doesn't get much play in the media; and it asserts the need to commemorate exactly the kind of people and events that don't get commemorated. This last thing is something that's always fascinated me about books by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont: they insist on mythologizing and praising and treating as significant a pantheon of people from their own lives, most of whom aren't well known in other contexts. Sometimes I find it a bit of a push (there's an essay by the late Franklin in the current book about his high school friends and the poetry they wrote and recited in a graveyard in the suburb of Maywood, and he treats them as if they were an important avant-garde group). But then again, the proposition is wonderful: that what's important is what we find important, and the real action is the action that was real to us. Significant art and life are not located elsewhere, and are not those things that are celebrated in the big anthologies and consecrated with the big prizes. I like that idea. I like that idea a lot. Maybe it's my provincial background at work, with all it's skepticism about the fads of the glittering and distant capitals.

In contrast, Neruda's Canto General is clearly shooting for major lit status. A giant poem made up of fifteen big cantos (I'd say about 1,000 lines each, on average), it's an attempt to lay out the geography, history, and demography of all of Latin America. It's encyclopedic, sort of rhapsodic, and doesn't shy away from the idea that it can speak of and to a trans-national community. There's a politics to it that is critical of elites, that seeks to speak for the people at large. It isn't a matter of narrow identity politics: the poem asserts the dignity and grandeur of the whole region, and flies up into the heights of the sublime. It's really good at doing this, too. I suppose the closest analogy in the literature of the United States would be Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which also seeks to speak for a continent, name its parts, define its virtues and the nature of its people, and all that. And this is where a fascinating difference comes into play: I mean, Neruda was hailed in his lifetime as a major Latin American poet, while Walt Whitman went largely unrecognized in his lifetime. I'm sure there are a host of reasons for this. When you consider the context of the poetic norms of the time, Whitman was pushing the formal envelope more than Neruda was, for example. And Whitman's queerness gets into the poetry and may have put some people off (even as it attracted others, like Oscar Wilde). But I think the main difference is this: in Whitman's time, most Americans did not experience themselves as alienated from the major institutions of the nation. They could look to the flag, the constitution, the schools, and the popular entertainments of the day, and feel they were represented. But Latin America was different. The semi-colonial nature of the place (under the thumb of the U.S.) meant that local oligarchies did not enjoy the confidence of the people, and the official institutions of the land didn't seem to represent the values of the society. So when a work of literature came forward and presented itself as a repository of social values, people were ready to receive it as such. It scratched an itch that the big social institutions couldn't.

One problem with becoming a figure of major literature, though, is that the initially liberating articulation of social values can come to seem oppressive to later generations, for whom values have changed. I think this is why there's such a strong movement against Neruda-style grandeur in later Chilean poetry. I mean, Nicanor Parra invents anti-poetry as a kind of negation of the large-scale, sublime, majorness of Neruda's poetry. And Parra inspired Roberto Bolaño's work, with its stripped down style, and its refusal to articulate values for any group larger than the disillusioned, politically frustrated, economically marginal youth of Bolaño's generation.

I suppose Bolaño's minority, in the Deleuzean sense, is one reason for his current vogue among literary types in the U.S.A, where literary culture has long since become minor culture. I don't mean to discount other, more material factors, like the coincidence of timing for all those Bolaño translations, which allows publishers to roll out his works like hit singles. But there's certainly a minor-lit fascination going on in the Bolaño craze. Reading him is, after all, almost as good as reading someone sing the praises of local oddballs, misfits, and literary weirdos.

Reading, 2009

For the second year in a row, I’m inspired by Mark Scroggins and Steve Evans to list the books I've read over the past twelve months. It was a weird year for reading. I was on leave in the spring semester, but I was also being the chief baby-looking-after officer in the Archambeau household, so I read a lot, but in a kind of sleepless, not-finishing-the-book sort of way. Then, in June, I was in a bike-vs-car accident, and ended up in the hospital, too out of it on painkillers to read much of anything.

So what makes the list? The sole criterion of inclusion is that I only list books I actually read all the way through. Most of what I taught isn’t included, since it either comes out of anthologies (which I don’t list, unless I read the thing cover-to-cover), or is something I’ve read before and only skimmed this year. Most of the poetry I read isn’t included either, since I tend to read poetry in journals or online, or in manuscript. Most poetry I read in book form I don’t end up finishing, either. Sometimes that’s a judgment on the content, more often it’s a matter of simply setting the book aside and never getting back to it. Some of my most athletic readerly achievements don’t make the list — getting through much of Truth and Method and Being and Time took a lot of time and concentration, but I skipped huge chunks of both books. I also left out books I read to Lila, and baby-care guides, though I highly recommend Baby 411 for any 40 year old first time parent. It gets you right to the topic about which you’re freaking, and tells you not to worry.

Anyway, here's the list, in no particular order.


History

T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England

This is the best book on the mind of nineteenth century in England I’ve ever read. Heyck traces the movement from the world of the generalist men of letters to the rise of specialization and professionalism. Why did things change? A bunch of reasons: the challenge to literary authority by science, the growth of scientific specialization (and then of all professional specialization), the reform of the universities to support research and to divide work by field (and the migrating of intellectuals to the universities), the intellectual discrediting of Christianity (which drove a wedge between writer and reader, who no longer shared a common culture), and the rise of a mass, semi-literate audience (which made literary writing relatively unprofitable). If you want to know how the discursive conditions we as writers face today came into being, there’s no better book to read.

Stephan Collini, Public Moralists

I like Collini, probably because he’s a better literary critic than he is a historian, though I’m sure he’d object to that characterization. Anyway, he can read the hell out of a short passage of nonfiction prose, as if he were pressing the juice out of a sonnet in a classroom. He’s also got a strong argument here about why Victorian writers held public roles denied to later generations of literary people.

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir

W.B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

I think this must have been cobbled together from various essays. Either that, or Yeats isn’t as careful with his prose as he is with his poetry. Anyway, you get a good sense of milieu here, and catch Yeats at the weird intersection of art-for-art’s-sake and literary nationalism. I mean, those are some deep cross-currents, people. Gotta write something about that in my next book.

Richard Wright, Black Boy

It’s like getting punched in the face, reading this. I mean, it hurts. I think this book is as much of an accomplishment as Native Son, and it doesn’t bog down the way that one does in the second half. If you want to know the psychological torture box into which America put the black man at midcentury, read the scenes where Wright is working for an optical supply company and trying to read Mencken on the sly.

Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge

You want a one-volume Coleridge bio? Stop your shopping around. This’ll work. Bate gets at Coleridge’s fundamental insecurity, which explains the genuflection to Wordsworth, as well as the opium addiction (it was bad: Coleridge would tell servants to keep him from buying more of the stuff, then sneak out and score anyway).

John Kinsella, Auto

John Kinsella’s early life can only be described as harrowing. This is a memoir of violence, mostly of violence being done to the author.

Mim Scala, Diary of a Teddy Boy

Okay, so this is a memoir, not a diary, and Scala was only a Teddy Boy for a few exhilarating, intermittently terrifying months. It’s really a book about the long sixties, which happened to Scala pretty profoundly. The music industry, the dope-smoking, the trekking around north Africa and Sri Lanka, the acid tripping, the indigenous-artifact collecting, and the epic quest for the perfect mystical third-world music fusion groove. As an added bonus, I kept running across people who were about two degrees of separation from me. Small world.

Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

Homegrown dada. For real.

Penelope Rosemont, Dreams and Everyday Life

This is a strangely rambling memoir, and I’m glad of that. It gives disproportionate attention to the months Penelope and Franklin Rosemont spent hanging out with the Surrealists in Paris in the sixties (a sign of how formative those months were), but it also shows us the Rosemonts discovering the remnants of Wobbly culture, and being right in the thick of it when the Chicago cops rioted in 1968.

Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, Memoirs, (vol. 3)

Prince von Metternich kept the European establishment together against all those pesky people demanding republics and social reform. It’s easy to dislike him, but then again it’s easy to dislike anyone different from oneself. Reading his memoirs gives you the flavor of an utterly alien world — the ancien régime in its final act.

Christopher Ricks, Tennyson

The criticism of Tennyson’s poetry here is so good you forgive Ricks for making this more of an analysis of the poetry than it is a biography. Unless you’re Mark Scroggins, in which case your standards for critical biography are so high you’ll wander the earth forever, thirsting for you know not what.

Poetry

Lennart Nyberg, A Different Practice

This is about a decade old, and reads a lot like the American elliptical poetry that was going around. He writes in series, and has a fine meditative mind. I wrote about this for Boston Review.

Lars Gustafsson, A Time in Xanadu

This is the kind of poetry we think of when we think of Swedish poetry: quiet, thoughtful, existential. But I think Gustafsson is off his best game here. I wrote about this for Boston Review in the same article I link to above.

Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes

You've got to read this every now and then, and believe it. It helps counterbalance Byron. And it'll keep you (or mostly keep you) from wanting dumb shit like fame, recognition, promotion, preferment, money you don't need, and all that jive.

John Davidson, John Davidson: A Selection of his Poems

How the hell did I miss this guy? He’s a late Victorian with a deeply materialist outlook on things. I’m sure D.H. Lawrence must have read and admired him: he’s got that buzzing sense of the life force at work in the world. But he can get grim, too. I don’t know why nobody reads him anymore.

Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde

Kent Johnson is a rare thing: an actual avant-gardist. I mean, this book refuses to be at ease with the institutions and conventions surrounding and supporting poetry. The longish poem on the New York school is merciless in exposing the political hypocrisy of much experimentalist poetry — while still loving such poetry. I can see why a lot of people get ticked off at Kent. I admire this book immensely.

Nicanor Parra, Poems and Anti-Poems

Much of the force of these poems probably came out of their rejection of the hothouse conventions of so much Latin American poetry. They’re hard and cold and space, and disillusioned. I can see why Roberto Bolaño liked them so much.

Norman Finkelstein, Scribe

I reviewed this for the first issue of The Offending Adam, which should be out next year.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

I read a big Byron poem every year. I think I read this one last year, too, but what the hell. You can’t have too much self-obsessed narcissistic weirdness, right? (Here I anticipate groans from all who have to put up with my own self-obsessed jive).

Garin Cycholl, Hostile Witness

If Charles Olson had written Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, it would be a bit like this.

John Matthias, Working Progress, Working Title

I went back to this for an essay I wrote for The Salt Companion to John Matthias. Matthias really has reinvented himself late in his career, becoming a kind of rhizomatic writer without losing any of those qualities (playfulness, the historical sense) I love about his work.

John Matthias, Turns

This is another one I went back to for The Salt Companion to John Matthias. I’d written about most of Matthias’ major poems, but never really had my say about his “Double Derivation, Association, and Cliché: from The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster.” I’m glad I finally got around to it.

Charles Simic, White

It’s like what he’s writing now, but better. That cryptic-tailor’s-dummy-in-the-window-of-a-shop-that’s-been-abandoned-for-years kind of surrealism.

R.S. Gwynn, No Word of Farewell

I blogged about Gwynn a while back, saying he wrote the kind of poetry I couldn’t get into. He sent me an email saying he was going to kick my ass. We had a good correspondence and traded books. I got into an Augustan mode and really enjoyed “The Narcissiad,” which is worthy of Alexander Pope.

Michael Gizzi, New Depths in Deadpan

Not his best effort. I don’t know why. Maybe the same old game has become too easy.

Ken Smith, Tender to the Queen of Spain

Smith does a kind of Britsy ashcan-realism, and he does it very well, but just when you think you’ve got him pegged he hits you with bits of the sublime, of a sort of beauty opening up to the infinite. The opening and closing poems taken together should make the point, if you want to see what I mean. I should write something about him sometime. He was a good man. May he rest in peace.

George Oppen, Discrete Series

Sincere, restrained, austere. Anxious, too. I mean, William Carlos Williams is suffused with eros, everywhere – everything with him is the sap rising in the trees, and Penelope returning from the underworld bringing spring. But Oppen, who was attracted to the same kinds of scenes and wrote in a not-dissimilar vein, has none of that Williams exuberance. I think he worried a lot about whether he was doing the right thing. On a good day, he earns his “St. George” reputation. On a bad day, it feels like hang-wringing.

George Oppen, The Materials

Still sincere, restrained, and austere.

George Oppen, Of Being Numerous

Sincere, restrained, and austere meets a kind of E.M. Forster-ish injunction to “only connect.” The ending inserts a devastating new line break into Whitman’s Specimen Days, making Whitmanic patriotism problematic. I can see why so many people have been drawn to him lately.

Rachel Loden, Dick of the Dead

You want a book of freaky poems about Nixon? Rachel Loden’s got you covered. (Not all the poems are about Nixon, but my favorites are).

Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, The Rattle Bag

This is a big, catch-all anthology of poetry: some canonical, some not, some folkloric, some in translation, and presented in unconventional order. I spent a good chunk of the spring memorizing swaths of it while reading (later reciting) poems from this book to Lila, my daughter, who was born this February. She seems to like Blake most of all.

Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer

When I was in my teens I liked Rimbaud, but part of me sort of suspected I’d grow out of him, the way you grow out of Vonnegut or Kerouac (don’t hate me, Vonnegut and Kerouac fans — maybe I’m just missing what you’re getting). But I didn’t grow out of him. Every time I come back I’m more blown away by the audacity of the thing.

Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Compete

What can you say about Rimbaud? I suppose I could say I like Wyatt Mason’s translation. And I liked reading all of Rimbaud in the same book. The very early poems were a revelation: Rimbaud was a sharp-tongued critic of the bourgeoisie from the get-go.

Galway Kinnell, Body Rags

I know I read this recently, but honestly nothing much stays in mind, except that this was the looser Kinnell, not the super-tight work of the Kinnell who read Hopkins and tried to write like him.

Louis Scutenaire, Mes Inscriptions

Scutenaire was a Belgian Surrealist, which is the best kind of Surrealist outside of the Spanish-speaking world. This collection is just what it sounds like: a collection of his philosophical maxims, short (say, 5 line) dialogues, and slogans. Scutenaire’s the guy who said “It’s regrettable, for the education of the young, that memoirs of war are always written by people the war did not kill.” Also my favorite: “An angry cop: the usual, only more so.” I don’t know why American writers don’t often make books like these. The French have been at it for centuries. I translated a bunch of these this year, just for the hell of it.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems

Despite the title, this book is huge. Cinderblock huge. And while there are Tennyson poems I will always love and admire — “The Lady of Shallot,” say, or “The Lotos-Eaters” — these are atypical of his work. In fact, most of the current anthology pieces aren’t like the main corpus of Tennyson’s work. We’ve selected the pieces that suit our taste, and edited out the melodramatic, moralizing, longwinded poems — Maud, Enoch Arden— that are most typical of his work. It’s hard to like them, but they were unbelievably popular in his lifetime. I’ve been working a little on an explanation of why our tastes are so different from those of the Victorians. (We’re actually closer to the Romantics in how we see the poet — on the outside of society, being critical — than we are to the Victorian mode).

Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems

The woman had range. And a real power of compassion. I think she made a particular effort to put herself in the psychological space of the kind of people who would have hated her. And I mean people who would have hated her for reasons of race, class, and politics. The world needs more of this: half the poets I know refuse to put themselves in the psychological space of people with whom they have stylistic differences.

Roberto Bolaño, Trés

Thank god for his minimalist, stripped-down style: it’s all my Spanish can handle. The book consists of three longish poems, with the usual Bolaño obsessions: dislocation, vague disappointment, urges toward some unspecifiable better life, poetry as doomed escape pod from some general disaster, etc. I’ve got to write a proper essay about this guy sometime.

Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs

It’s the same deal here as in Trés, except the poems are shorter and translated into English.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market

I try to read this every now and then. I mean, it’s got everything you want when you look into nineteenth century femininity: anxieties about consumerism, addiction, sexuality, sister- and mother-hood, etc. And the moral at the end of the story is as out of whack with the story itself as is the ending of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Criticism

Seamus Perry, Alfred Tennyson

This is quite good on the music of Tennyson’s poetry, which is, after all, the main attraction. But I’ve been trying to think through the discursive situation Tennyson found himself in — you know, the weird moment in literary history where a poet could score big with the bourgeoisie. So I wanted an apple and Perry was serving oranges.

Jean Daive, Walks with Paul Celan

This is sort of a poem, sort of a memoir, and sort of a work of criticism. I loved it, and said why in this post.

Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries

I try to re-read this from time to time. Butler is very sharp regarding the social, political, and literary situation in which the Romantics found themselves.

Andrei Codresci, The Posthuman Dada Guide

Some people would say there are too many made-up anecdotes in this book for it to count as criticism, but that’s just a failure of imagination on their part. Anyway: Codrescu the critic is my favorite Codrescu, edging out the poet, the anecdotalist, the novelist, the editor, and even the media personality. Despite its formal differences, this book reminds me of Codrescu’s The Disappearance of the Outside, which had a great, very personal, history of Surrealism in it. Here, it’s Dada, set against political power. If you ever take the time to go over to the Internet Archive and download an audiofile of Codrescu’s Naropa lectures on Surrealism, you won’t regret it. I wish all critics wrote with this kind of verve.

Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology

I return to this from time to time. It’s the book that first made clear to me how deeply we’re still inscribed within the books the Romantics wrote. McGann wants us to get out. I’m not sure that’s possible, except incrementally.

William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure

I love these old British Pelican books from the forties, with “Not for Sale in the USA” printed on the covers. And they hold up well, too, since they’re smythe-sewn and not perfect bound with glue. Anyway, Gaunt writes a wonderfully embroidered and purplish prose. He’s light on explanatory power, but if you want a vivid, anecdotael history of the Aesthetic Movement in art and literature in France and England, Gaunt’s the guy.

Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle

Not everyone likes Wilson’s treatment of the symbolist movement in the closing chapters, but I do. A lot.

Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper

This is an odd book from the midcentury. At the time, Victorianism was on the outs with literary types. A New Critical version of modernism made formalism out to be the big thing, and the Victorians were moralists, through and through (and pretty establishment moralists, too). Buckley was their apologist. I disagree with damn near everything he says here, but he’s a worthy opponent. He occupied a lonely position, too, and I admire that.

Elton Smith, The Two Voices: A Tennyson Study

Wow, this guy’s sharp. His survey of the state of Tennyson criticism at the start of the book is out of date now, but he sees through everyone. He understands not just what the critics believed about Tennyson, but why — usually better than those critics did themselves.

Justin Quinn, The Cambridge Introduction to Irish Poetry, 1800-2000

This is how you write a theoretically-informed book of lit-crit. The whole project if deeply Foucauldian: an analysis not just of Irish poetry, but of the discourse of Irish poetry, with its powers of classification, inclusion, and exclusion. But Quinn never so much as drops a critical name, nor does he drop in a lot of quotation from the theoretical masters. He just executes the project, with confidence and clarity. I wrote about this for Contemporary Literature.

Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland, 1968-2008

A big, rangy book, kind of rough around the edges. But Kennedy-Andrews knows the territory as well as anyone. Way better than I do. I wrote about this for Contemporary Literature.

John Holloway, The Victorian Sage

I had hoped this would help me understand something about the difference between us and the Victorians. The introduction did. After that, it was all kind of familiar. Maybe his insights have been absorbed into the general culture of Victorian studies over the decades since the book appeared.

E.D.H. Johnson, The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry

This is the best book on the conundrums of Victorian poets ever written. Johnson really understands the cross-currents they faced: pulled in the direction of l’art pour l’art but also tempted by the chance of public honor, fame, and riches should they serve as moralists for the establishment (of which they were junior-members, mostly).

John Keats, Letters

I’m classifying these as lit-crit. I know it’s counterfactual, but I think if Keats had lived he’d have taken something like the Coleridge route to old-age Romanticism and become more of a critic. I mean, half his poems are about other poets, and he’s the most literary of the Romantics. Also, that aestheticism of his could get confining after a few more years. Then again, Keats lacked Coleridge’s philosophical background, so he probably didn’t have the chops to really develop his ideas with a whole lot of depth. Maybe he’d have ended up as a kind of Hazlitt.

David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

Lodge wrote these essays on various literary topics for a newspaper audience, and they have all of the journalistic virtues: brevity, clarity, coherence. I particularly like it when he mentions his own novels, but he's too English to do that as often as I'd like.

A.C. Bradley, The Reaction Against Tennyson

Bradley wrote this in 1917, and it tells you as much about the taste of that era as it tells you about Tennyson. Nice.

Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson

This is a first stab at a kind of poststructuralist/Marxian reading of Tennyson. Much of the book actually consists of a patient explaining of the premises of such a form of criticism, presumably for an audience that wasn’t already up to speed. I’m pretty sympathetic to the endeavor.


Fiction

Roberto Bolano The Savage Detectives

I blogged about this when I read it last year. I had to come back to it. Those short sections are like pretzels or wasabi nuts. You just keep going.

Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

This should probably be called a prose poem, not a work of fiction. Montage seems to be the structuring principle. It’s got that weird I-hate-my-loser-city/I-love-my-authentic-city Chicago thing going on.

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

Powell is not my normal thing. His ethos is so different: in the big cast of characters that recur throughout his linked novels, the good guys are always the reserved gentlemen, not the guys who seem to want to, you know, accomplish something. I suppose it’s too pseudo-aristocratic for me. I shouldn’t let this bother me as much as it does.

Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

I had to wait until the Bush years were over to bring myself to read this book about how fascism could come to America. It’s chilling how plausible it seems. When it comes here, it’ll look folksy and friendly and be media savvy and hook into the people’s resentment, patriotism, and anti-intellectualism, says Lewis. I believe him. I miss some of the fantastically painful imitations of banal American speech Lewis gave us un Babbitt and Main Street, though we get flashes of all that here and there.

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Weirdly, I’d never made it all the way through this before. It gets that naturalist thing down — showing how economic forces determine so many aspects of our existence. But I don’t think the man’s really got an ear for language.

Samuel Beckett, Fizzles

Short little prose pieces, rhythmic, and emblematic of a despair just barely held in check by the darkest humor. You expected something different?

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

I hate to think Pynchon might be fried out. Please, Tom, come back with something good next time out.

Thornton Wilder, The Cabala

I read a very sharp-seeming essay on Wilder’s early novels in The Believer and rushed out to grab a copy of this, his debut novel. It clanks. It clunks. I like the idea (the past stays with us, etc.). But you can get that from Faulkner and not have to feel like you’re reading a goddamn phone book.

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varinasi

There are two options here. Either this is a dreadfully bad novel, which was praised highly in the British press only because Dyer is a journalist and he’s hooked up with all the appropriate writers and editors — or it’s not so bad, but my experience of it was effected by the conditions under which I read it (gooned on oxycontin in the hospital after a bike accident).

Henri Murger, Scènes de la vie de Bohême

I don’t know why so much French prose of the mid-nineteenth century reads like it wants to be a play. This, of course, became more famous on the stage than it ever did between hard covers.

Bram Stoker, Dracula

It had been a while since I read this. It’s bourgeois as all hell. I mean, you leave modern England and head east, and you’re not just moving through space, you’re moving through time, into the primitive, irrational past — like in Heart of Darkness but without all of the self-reflexiveness you get in Conrad. And then there’s the nature of the threat: Dracula as the remnant of a traditional aristocratic society, who must be destroyed by a coalition of bourgeois professional men, with the help of technology. Franco Moretti’s reading is a bit different, though: he says that while Stoker thought of Dracula as a hold-over aristocratic threat to the middle class order, Dracula actually represents a capitalist threat to the middle class. He runs a socially-unsettling Ponzi scheme, and it’s the professional classes, not the business classes, who bring him to heel. Worth a look (Moretti, I mean. And Stoker, too).

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Gotta read this every year. Can’t do without it.

Philosophy and Critical Theory

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre de d'Alembert

The really good part of this comes at the end, with Rousseau’s famous argument against the establishment of a theater in Geneva. Theater may be harmless for the degenerates of monarchial France, says Rousseau, but in a republic like Geneva it can only do harm. It’ll reduce the population to a silent, isolated audience. What’s needed are participatory folk festivals, where the group dissolves into a Dionysian whole. It all sounds a bit North Korean to me.

St. Augustine, Confessions

If you make a conscious effort to transpose the Christian thinking into a language with less baggage attached to it, there’s much here about the nature of being that still speaks to us. And the bits where Augustine is truly culturally alien to us are fascinating, too, for the difference. Also, the satirical barbs aimed at the Manichees are still fun, even though no one’s needed to satirize a pompous Manichee for 1500 years.

Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II

I read this last year, and came back to it again this year. The piece on Anglo-American literature is fantastic.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature

I consumed this while riding the Septa trains between Bucks County and Philadelphia. The notion of minor literature — of a kind of writing that, instead of articulating the values of a civilization, messes with said values — is very much with us. In fact, I think it’s our (that is, we literary type people’s) embrace of minor lit over major lit that makes it so hard to like the main run of Tennyson’s work. Or, for that matter, makes us skeptical of Whitman’s patriotism. We no longer think of ourselves as a cultured minority leading the nation — we’re a minority culture, griping from the margins. You know, like in highschool.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, On the Line

This is a slick little semiotext(e) edition of some classic stuff, including the essay on rhizome.

Auguste Comte, Plan de Travaux Scientifiques Nécessaires pour Réorganiser la Société

One of my favorites of all the books I read this year. I mean, everybody talks about positivism, but people in English departments only seem to do so in order to sneer at it dismissively. So I went to see for myself what it was all about, and lo, Comte turns out to be a serious intellect. The division of history into theological, metaphysical, and positive phases, and the working out of the meaning of both the French and the (then incipient) industrial revolutions are fascinating. And Comte had a true historical imagination before most intellectuals did (okay, most still don’t). Anyway, I blogged a bit about some of his ideas in another context.

John Stuart Mill, Mill on Bentham and Coleridge

Mill’s an interesting guy, in that he’s a representative of Utilitarianism who nevertheless takes the German metaphysical tradition seriously. I don’t know if there’s a comparable figure in Germany, though maybe we could argue for Marx as the union of Hegel and British political economy, which would be sort of analogous.

Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution

I keep coming back to Williams, despite his flaws. I suppose it’s because he really does see the continuity of literature with the wider world.

Gherasin Luca, Dialectique de la Dialectique

I was turned on to this by Andrei Codrescu, who talks it up in The Posthuman Dada Guide. It’s an eccentric piece of work, more erotic-surrealist than Hegelian.

Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction

Critchley’s the man who explained the gist of Heidegger’s Being and Time in a half-dozen articles in The Guardian, and did a pretty solid job of it, too, considering the limitations. This book’s really written for a reader different from me: Critchely seems to assume the reader is a fan of Anglo-American analytic philosophy who needs to be talked into the continental tradition. Me, I’m the other way around.

Milovan Djelas, The New Class

Djelas explains the different kind of social evolution the Eastern Bloc underwent compared to the west, and does a good job of it. Long story short, the bourgoisie in Russia were too weak and too beholden to Western powers to form a power capable of modernizing the country and pushing for political reform. A new class of ideological technocrats had to be conjured for that. He got thrown in jail for his views.

Drama

Lorainne Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

The first African-American play to be produced on Broadway. It’s got a lot going for it: deep insight into the different psychological needs of different generations of African-Americans, a sense of the way real social constraints shape even the most intimate details of our lives, but in the end I think it’s just a bit too issue-y, a bit too talking-heads-ish to be a real favorite of mine.

David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

Recently a colleague told me he thought the play was less elaborate than the movie. I checked it out. He's right.

Graphic Novels

David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp

I didn't read many graphic novels this year, which is unusual for me. This one's good: the artwork is incredible, the story fine until the end, the meditations on the nature of creativity aren’t bad.

Gilbert Shelton, The Complete Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (vol. 1)

When I was a kid I would sometimes find some of Shelton's underground comics lying around in the art students' lounge at the University of Manitoba, where my dad taught. Reading Shelton's crazy-ass hippie comics again proves that, by and large, they hold up pretty well. I wish the long-projected Freak Bros. movie, Grass Roots, would get finished, but I'm starting to think it's not going to happen.

Gilbert Shelton, The Complete Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (vol. 2)

Volume one collected all of the black and white Freak Bros. comics, this one gives you the full-color ones.


Other

Adolph Reed, Jr., Class Notes

The essay on “Posing as Politics” more or less demolishes as ineffective pretention a lot of the left’s multiculturalism. That Reed does this demolishing from the left of the people he attacks may surprise some people.

Franklin Rosemont, An Open Invitation to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers

Like the title says, it’s a book about dialing and receiving wrong numbers. In accord with the great tradition of Surrealism, Rosemont looked on chance and error as a kind of poetry and as possibilities for micro-revolutions in consciousness. Rosemont died this year, a real loss. His edition of Breton is still the best one in English.

Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods

A book about the state of India, which does away with the lingering Orientalist trope of India as a land of spirituality not materiality. There’s some fascinating stuff on the odd way India is going about modernization. The classic order is industry, then middle class, then democracy. In India, the order’s been democracy, then the middle class, with industry left out. Luce tells you why.

Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On

After I broke my leg, a friend suggested I read this account of Sack’s own leg injury. I enjoyed the book, but really it should have been an essay. It came right after Sacks’ big hit with Awakenings, and I’m pretty sure his publishers found the right buttons to push to make Sacks think it would be a good idea to take a small amount of material and make a (very marketable) book out of it.

Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism

Tanenhaus is half-right about things. If you want to know why, and don’t mind me going on for too long about Comte, Metternich, and Sarah Palin, you could check out this post.

**

I think that averages out to a bit under two titles a week, not including whatever books I read between now and the end of the year. I think, though, I'll be settling down to about three months worth of unread copies of the TLS before I crack open another paperback.