Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Religion

The others have perverse minds; I abide
In middling envy.  Unlike March, April
Aspires to nothing but shoots: the seeds
Applaud themselves into greenness.

We make love to intensify the cruelty.
At the bar:  a man who has become
His beard.  His bejeweled companion
Keeps on about Jesus. The beard
Is making her do it. It would

Make for a tear-stained sunset
If I staggered outside with a beard
Of my own, a minor beast, obese
With calculus, with glycogen,

And turned, bird-shadowed, for home.

James Salter Month

Anyone following these notes knows that I consider James Salter one of our greatest living writers. So I'm happy to see that The Paris Review is celebrating his work with James Salter Month and has named him as this year's recipient of its Hadada Prize.

The series of essays they're publishing in his honor appears to be worth following.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Mars vs. the Maestro

During our class discussion of a Roman love poem this morning, I asked students what's popular on the radio right now. A student from Afghanistan, Nasratullah, named the song "Grenade," by Bruno Mars. Using my classroom's overhead projector, we watched the music video online. Before playing the song I saw that as of today the video has been viewed—get this—over 128 million times.

Later, during my fiction writing class, we read "Extracts from a Life," by Lydia Davis. In the story, a young violinist, after playing Mozart, says: "Filled with the joy of love, I gave up sadness."

So I found some Jascha Heifetz. My heart lifted to see that this particular piece has received nearly two million views.

The Maestro is coming for you, Bruno!

Monday, March 28, 2011

Your Face Tomorrow, by Javier Marías

Your Face Tomorrow:  An extended exploration into the epistemological, ontological, and ethical implications of the word "or."

As in:
One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion.
That's the first sentence of the book. So you can't say you weren't warned.

I concede that the novel offers some genuinely wonderful disquisitions on—among other things—the end of love, the elusiveness of identity, and (yes) the epistemological, ontological, and ethical implications of death.

But they're buried—desperate for air (like this reader, as the end finally neared)—in avalanches of "or."

(A tip of the hat, nonetheless, to: "One should never . . . make people remember beings who have never existed." The book—you've been warned!—is abundant with similar pleasures.)

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Dawn

June flowers unfolding—
Your gory arrival—

Along the horizon, the trees
Brushed the sky
Reassuringly, through
The maelstrom. Your mother

Turned her gaze away

When they placed you, wrapped—
Overwrapped—in her arms
And let your blue skin

Pink.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson

On a wire outside my window a hawk scans the wet fields. The rain is gone and the storm's last winds ruffle the feathers on its chest. Its head clicks left. Time dilates. It's not wrong to say that the hawk is as large as what it sees.

At some point, according to an inclination that I take some pleasure in imagining, it will fall into the sky with the same leisurely ferocity that humanity has envied in the hawk since we first encountered one another. It will open into metaphysics.

Show me a scientific understanding of that hawk and I'll show you a travesty of reductionism. Of course it's accurate that its eyes are made of molecules; that its breath heats the air just so; that its wings move the vortices of the wind. Its vision, if your curious, = x.

But science has no equation for the hawk's experience of itself. Less yet does it have language for our encounter, this Saturday afternoon.

The modern error is to address that absence, that insufficiency, by supposing that anything science can't measure doesn't, in the end, exist. Both the hawk and my thoughts are molecules, fundamentally identical to the wire upon which the hawk stands, the air on which it floats, the chair—all atoms—that I'm sitting on. The hawk's flesh is an arrangement of atoms warmed by other atoms, which I perceive as extraordinary hair.

In Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson writes: "Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history." Through much of this book she laments our current willingness to hand over that definition to science, which promptly defines it as mind = brain.

If you don't respond to mind = brain with sadness, with skepticism, even—better yet—with terror, then you might not be interested in this book. But if you feel, as I do, that "the advance of science has impoverished modern experience," and that the insufficiency of science in the face of life's most compelling questions is, paradoxically, part of what makes science worthwhile, then I suggest you read Robinson.

But start with her novels. They swirl with hawks.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux

It doesn't happen much anymore that I can't put down a book. Maybe I've picked up too many of them.

But Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, written as a 25-years-later sequel to Theroux's breakthrough memoir The Great Railway Bazaar, returned me to that once-common pleasure. Ghost Train gives us all the gifts of travel: surprise, time to think, escape, bewilderment, novelty—and Theroux unwraps those gifts with broadminded, no-nonense optimism.

As far as it was possible, he retraces the trip he took as a much younger man. This time around, his thoughts on India, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and Japan are especially compelling. (I haven't read the first book.)

Wherever Theroux finds himself, both the continuity and the changes he records—within and without—remind us of this world's ongoing riches and unrelenting pain. I finished the journey sighing with wanderlust.

You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier

All that's wrong and right with Lanier's "Manifesto" you can find in this quote:
The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of the authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.
Lanier doesn't write well. There's simply no good reason in contemporary American writing to refuse to use contractions, to construct possessives using "of" and not an apostrophe, to build your central claims in the passive voice (with its consequent over-use of the "be" verb), and to prefer Latinate nouns over their more common Saxon synonyms. Poor writing, poor editing, from start to finish.

What makes Lanier's prose especially frustrating—on to what's right with the book—is that he has an incredibly fertile mind. The book brims with luminous ideas, provocative warnings, dismissive salvos. His insights, for instance, into the link between software design and the quality of contemporary thought are illuminating and timely.

So suffer through the sentences. The rough ride is worth it—even if it takes you, as it did in my case, a few months to finish. You Are Not a Gadget is a fascinating analysis of the delights, dangers, and possibilities of the Post-Gutenberg Age.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Life, by Keith Richards

The artist's life, kids, is work—hours upon hours of passionate, single-minded, obsessive, bleeding-fingers work. And if you've got an open soul—that's a hell of an "if"—and if you're lucky enough to meet your Mick Jagger, and if by some miracle you manage to remain alive despite the dangers of your own openness, you might make for the rest of us something that matters.

While I was reading this wonderful memoir—which is less about girls and drugs (although they're in there) than about the working life of an artist through the second half of the 20th century—I was reminded of a question by the German poet Durs Grünbein:
I don't want to frighten you, but have you ever thought about what happens to people who aren't artists?
Keith Richards spared himself that terror. If you want a glimpse into the cost of his calling—the highest calling that we can call a profession—then give the book a long listen. Like his music, it's worth every minute.

The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth

I had the good fortune of discovering Bellow before Philip Roth. It saved me a lot of tedious reading.

But I took a chance on The Dying Animal because of my affection for Elegy, a lovely film based on the book. Sadly the novel suffers from the same shortcoming that ruins all of Roth's books for me: the overwhelming sense that it's been constructed to show me the light.

A bully-pulpit characterized most of my early reading—not uncommon for an American reader, I suppose, especially one who grew up, as I did, in a religious home. In flight from the pulpit I discovered the novel. In all the great novels of my adolescence—Huck Finn, Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness—I heard for the first time the voice of uncertainty.

My god, it was so lovely, the Novel's not-knowing. That loveliness gave me permission to be curious. It gave me permission to love the world.

I read novels less than ever, now, sadly. If you're still reading them, don't bother with this one.

How Fiction Works, by James Wood

Of Milan Kundera's critical essays, Wood writes, "Occasionally we want his hands to be a bit inkier with text."

If that means producing a book like this, no, we don't.

I tried using How Fiction Works in class this quarter. I came away from the experience convinced that this is a book without an audience. Writers will want to stick with Kundera; young readers will drown in Wood's ink.

Of course the book has merit. Wood is indisputably a brilliant critic. Of Dostoyevsky, for instance, he says: "In the novel, we can see the self better than any literary form has yet allowed; but it is not going too far to say that the self is being driven mad by being so invisibly scrutinized."

But these thrills are too rare. For a novice, Wood is too inky, and for the practitioner, he lacks bravado.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Joys of Student Writing: Exhibit A

"My best friend often asks me for relationship advice. She once asked my opinion on whether the affection between her and her boyfriend really is 'love.' She cares a lot about him, but she was not sure if he is that special person, as she cares a lot about her mother too."

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Sentir

It's a pristine night. In the creek below campus the toads mourn, sheltered by redwoods. Walking to my office I stopped on the bridge to listen. Pretty soon, one by one, they went silent. Only when I was out of sight, well up the stairs, did they resume their moans.

On the drive from Half Moon Bay I heard a story on NPR about Jasmin Levy, whose newest album, Sentir, was just released in the US. Listening to her sing reminded me of a night long ago, in Madrid, when I sat with my friend Haukur Ástvaldsson in a small, smoke-filled bar and listened to three men and a woman take turns singing flamenco.

We humans know something about mourning, too, old toads.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Mint.com

From the Software-That-Works Dept., I enthusiastically recommend Mint.com.

If nothing else, if offers—at not cost—the melancholy pleasure of knowing exactly where all your goddamn money went.

Capitalism

I only wanted one bag of Ranch-flavored Corn Nuts. But when the first bag didn't fall, I was forced to either lose my dollar or buy a second bag.

My bug is someone's feature.