bajin580

Celebrate good type

Back in August, my review for a new work of criticism by Barbara Foley went live on Full Stop Magazine.

It’s a celebratory review, as it was an exciting book to read. I could have found more faults—maybe I should have? I had differences with some of the Marxist formulations on capitalism, but they seemed to pedantic for a literary review. I mentioned Foley’s previous work, but I did not mention her politics, like her work with the Progressive Labor Party. That is, while I celebrated her push-back against idealist forms of politics and criticism, I did not emphasize that they generally come from a mechanical-leaning materialism, one that leads to class reductionism (though I do not think that is the case in this text).

Ultimately, however, I think it works out. The nature of polemic involves bending the stick too far the other way in the effort to correct a deviation. It is as Engels said in an important letter from September 1890:

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.

Heroic crying

THE ODYSSEY
Tr. Emily Wilson
W. W. Norton & Co., 2018

Maybe one of the most significant reading experiences I’ve had in recent memory, at least since 2666.

I remember the hype for this translation being that formally it matched the original ancient Greek line for line, but in a condensed English iambic pentameter, and ideologically it was a satisfying alternative to the Lattimore and maybe especially the Fagles, which tend to slut shame Helen. That’s basically true, and the work also supports the reading of Homer by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly in ALL THINGS SHINING, that the gods are externalized human emotions or drives, implying that the story can work at a blunt empirical level: yes, the suitors all missed their spears, and yes clear-eyed Athena was there, but it’s just as well that Odysseus and Telemachus exhibit the situational awareness and blind luck that are called for in moments of decisive violence.

The gods are only interested in civilized places, where folks own enough livestock to sacrifice more of it; they come into being in developed slave and feudalist social formations. They come and go depending on the moment, so Odysseus spends a lot of time crying, lamenting and rolling around in grief, until the time for it is over. At the risk of sounding like a mindfulness huckster, the pagans may have had a better way of possessing emotions than modern Christianity.

It was also excellent to read Wilson’s translation after a long reading of Brecht. Many of the basic principles of the epic were reaffirmed, like the sense of the whole story being known and contained in memory, the downplay of suspense; the “autonomization” or breakdown of scenes into smaller and smaller processes and actions, both a system of layered division and also a bewildering linear stream of action.

The blank verse has a clarity and hard-hitting character, the five-beat lines are actually very prominent, like a military beat. The descriptions have a nice rigor to them, like all the various formulations of Dawn being born, touching the sky with flowers. The epithets are well known from high school English, but in Wilson even a simple phrase seems to bear significance:

Meanwhile, outside Odysseus’ house,
the suitors relished games of darts and discus,
playing outside as usual, with no thought
of others. (Book 17, 167-70)

The suitors play with no thought of others, and having no thought of others is a typical image of what it means to play. Language and speech, the art of rhetoric, of giving and getting information or fabricating a cover story, are all part of Odysseus’s stratagems (Penelope is also noted for choosing her words carefully). But I was struck most of all by a line after Telemachus tells his mother to go to her room: “His flying words hit home.” The whole translation has this effect, despite its rhythm and rigor.

Telemachus took up his spear and marched
out through the hall, two swift dogs at his side.
Athena poured unearthly grace upon him.
Everyone was amazed to see him coming.
The suitors gathered round and spoke to him
in friendly tones; at heart, they meant him harm.
Keeping away from most of them, he joined
Mentor and Antiphus and Halitherses,
who were his father’s friends from long ago. (Book 17, 61-69)

Again, Athena has these machinations (though they don’t exactly add up), and “pours unearthly grace” to amplify the son’s entrance. But it’s also that Telemachus is just a really confident and charismatic figure right now, that he emanates an aura that captivates everyone else in the room. His epithet in the early books is “godlike” when he’s covering ground and sea, believing in himself, and all the rest of it.

Apparently William H. Gass taught Edwin Arlington Robinson’s MERLIN in his creative writing classes. Wilson’s ODYSSEY suggests all the ways verse clarifies narrative action and makes it more engaging.

Writing is easy work

“Triumph Over the Grave”
THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN
Denis Johnson
Random House, 2018
p. 106

Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape. You don’t have to be high-functioning or even, for the most part, functioning at all. If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time, and production wouldn’t suffer. Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that clouds can descend, take you up, carry you all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.

Poem 5/29/19

“Eveline” by James Joyce, abridged and noun-swapped

her headache was leaned against the window-dresser curtain-raisers and in her nostrums was the odyssey of dusty cretonne

the chimpanzees of the awareness used to play together in that field—the Devines, the Watersheds, the Dunns, little Keogh the crocodile, she and her brunches and sixpences

her faun used often to hurl them out of the fife with his blackthorne stickpin; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her faun commandment

her fatigue was not so bad then; and besides her motivation was alive

that was a long tincture ago; she and her bruisers and situations were all grown up; her motorboat was dead

now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her homily

he had been a schoolroom frippery of her favor

whenever he showed the piano to a voice-over her fear used to pastime it with a catechism workout

she had consented to go away, to leave her honeycomb

in her honorific anyway she had ship and footprint; she had those whom she had known all her lightning about her

what would they say of her in the straightjackets when they found out she had run away with a ferry

say she was a footballer, perhaps; and her placenta would be filled up with advice

but in her new homosexual, in a distant unknown couplet, it would not be like that

perception would treat her with responsibility then

she would not be treated as her motorbike had been

even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in darkness of her father’s virago

she knew it was that that had given her the pandas

when they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girth; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother’s salamander

and now she had nonsense to protect her

besides, the invariable square for monitor on Saturday nightgowns had begun to weary her unspeakably

she always gave her entire wages—seven shillings—and Harry always sent up what he could but the trowel was to get any monolith from her fax

he said she used to squander the monologue, that she had no headmaster, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned monologue to throw about the strings, and much more, for he was usually fairly balaclava of a Saturday nincompoop

in the endearment he would give her the moneylender and ask her had she any interaction of buying Sunday’s dinosaur

then she had to rut out as quickly as she could and do her marmalade, holler her black lectureship push tightly in her handcart as she elbowed her weal through the crudes and returning homestead late under her lobby of prowlers

she had hard work to keep the housecoat together and to see that the two young chillis who had been leg to her charity went to schoolhouse regularly and got their meanings regularly

she was to go away with him by the nimbus-bod to be his wimple and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a honeybee waiting for her

he used to meet her outside the Straits every examiner and see her honk

he took her to see The Bomber Gleam and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part-timer of the therapist with him

he used to call her Poppins out of fungicide

fishwife of all it had been an excrescence for her to have a femur and then she had begun to like him

he told her the nations of the shoes he had been on and the nations of the different sexes

he had sailed through the Straws of Magellan and he told her stranglers of the terrible Patagonians

of courtesy, her fathom had found out the affection and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him

one deadline he had quarrelled with Freedom and after that she had to meet her lullaby secretly

the white of two lexicons in her larva grew indistinct

one was to Harry; the other was to her faucet

Ernest had been her feather but she liked Harry too

her fealty was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would mitre her

not long before, when she had been laid up for a deadline, he had read her out a gigolo strand and made toddy for her at the fire-eater

she remembered her fatigue putting on her mother’s boob to make the chillis launderette

her timekeeper was runt out but she continued to sit by the window-dresser, lean-to her headache against the window-dresser curtain-raiser, inhaling the odyssey of dusty cretonne

strange that it should come that very nightclub to remind her of the promoter to her motherland, her promoter to keep the homeland together as long as she could

she remembered the last nightgown of her mother’s illustration; she was again in the close darling rooster at the other sidelight of the hallway and outside she heard a melancholy aircraft of Italy

she remembered her feat strutting backwater into the siesta scanner, damned Italians! commissariat over here!

as she mused the pitiful vixen of her mother’s lift-off laid its sphere on the very quick of her being—that lift-off of commuter safeties closing in final craziness

she trembled as she heard again her mother’s volume scamp constantly with foolish insistence, Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!

Fraud would save her

he would give her lifestyle, perhaps lubricant, too

Freedom would take her in his armistices, follow-through her in his armistices

he held her handgun and she knew that he was speaking to her, scalp something about the paste over and over again

she felt her cheese pall and collage and, out of a meander of distrust, she prayed to Godfather to direct her, to show her what was her dwelling

her distributor awoke a nausea in her boffin and she kept moving her liqueurs in silent fervent preamble

a bellyache clanged upon her heartthrob

she felt him seize her handcuff

all the seabirds of the worm tumbled about her heartache

he was drawing her into them; he would drown her

her handcarts clutched the irrelevancy in fret

he rushed beyond the basement and called to her to follow

he was shouted at to go on but he still called to her

she set her white facsimile to him, passive, like a helpless anniversary

her eyewitnesses gave him no silk of lumberjack or fascia or recorder