Twenty Questions

The other day there was an interesting post on Tumblr a list of questions that Paul Thek used as “Teaching Notes” for a class that he taught at Cooper Union from 1978-1981. I have always been intrigued by inventories of this kind—lists, list poems, brainstormed possibilities—both as artifacts in themselves and as challenges to me (and, once upon a time, to my students).

I have had in my files for more than 40 years now a poem by Donald Justice that goes like this:

Twenty Questions

Is it raining out?
Is it raining in?
Are you a public fountain?
Are you an antique musical instrument?
Are you a famous resort, perhaps?
What is your occupation?
Are you by chance a body of water?
Do you often travel alone?
What is your native language, then?
Do you recall the word for carnation?

Are you sorry?
Will you be sorry?
Is this your handkerchief?
What is your destination?
Are you Aquarius?
Are you the watermelon flower?
Will you please take off your glasses?
Is this a holiday for you?
Is that a scar, or a birthmark?
Is there no word for calyx in your tongue?

I find this poem to be, well, charming. It’s playful and purposeful at the same time. There are elements of structure in it (the framework of the game of twenty questions, the sense that there is a conversation going on between strangers who speak different languages, the suggestion of a seduction taking place) combined with elements of (apparent?) randomness (“Is this your handkerchief?”). It’s a kind of verbal collage. The poem has a logic, individual lines undercut or redirect the logic in ways that are surprising. The poem creates in a short space an implied world, a world in which certain facts are established but most are left open to question.

There’s a game being played here, and, as often happens when we see a game, there’s at least the possibility that we might ask, can I play too? I’ve had my students write “Twenty Questions” poems; the results are always surprising and interesting to read. There’s something about not having too much in the way of a pre-set intention that frees them up. So here I am, working on this post, and here as well the task is to come up with something to say. So I think I’ll play. Here goes:

Twenty Questions

Did you hear the thunder this morning? What was up with that?
Shouldn't there be an easier way to get those sneakers clean?
Have you seen my sweater? What are we going to do about
Elizabeth? Can you tell me what you have in mind? Don’t you
Think we’d be better off if we just stayed home? What is that crow
So upset about? Is there a reason why you need to be doing that
Right now? How many times have I asked you to stop?
If I get done in time, would you like to come with me
To the basketball game? Why are the newspapers still covering
That story? Would you care for some peppers? Is my scarf
Too much? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to fly a plane?
What do you think you’re doing? Isn’t there a statute of limitations
On that? When is the rain supposed to end? Can I ask you a question?

Okay, so there’s a draft, created in the moment and lightly edited as I set this up on blogger. I may go back and work on it more later, but for now it serves the purpose. What I noticed as I was writing was that even as I was just pushing forward certain elements of voice and tone kept asserting themselves more or less in spite of me. I’ve remarked before how every collage—every work of art, really— is in some ways of necessity a kind of self-portrait. And that certainly applies to this poem. It’s a little bit odd. It’s a little bit random. But it was fun to write. How about you? You want to try?

Sue Grafton: An Appreciation

In the final days of 2018 I was saddened to hear about Sue Grafton, who died on December 28. I was a fairly recent convert to her works. I had been vaguely aware of her name showing up on the best-seller lists. She was the author of 25 mystery novels, starting with A is for Alibi, and progressing through the alphabet right up to Y is for Yesterday. I had not read any of them until about a year and a half ago, when someone donated a bunch of used paperbacks to the local library-sponsored second-hand bookshop. I saw them there and picked up several for 75 cents each, which turned out to be the bargain of the year as far as reading materials are concerned, and started me on a long and satisfying reading journey. 

The novels feature a feisty, irreverent private detective named Kinsey Millhone. Grafton started the series in 1982 and wrote roughly a novel a year until 2017. (In an interview with Mora Macdonald of the Seattle Times, she commented wryly on how that played out: “When I started, she was 32 and I was 42,” Ms. Grafton said. “And now she’s 39 and I’m 77, which I just do not think is fair.”) 

In any event, I was taken with the books. They are inventively plotted and keep you turning the pages, as mystery novels are supposed to do. But what I appreciated about her writing, more than the stories she was telling, was the clarity and vividness of her descriptions. What Kinsey Millhone sees and feels in the course of her investigations goes a very long way toward making her a credible crime-solver. Often as I was reading the books I found myself marking particular passages and then typing them out for the sheer pleasure of it. Even when the descriptions have nothing to do with the case at hand, they serve the purpose of indirect characterization, offering evidence of a Millhone’s particular brand of sensitivity to the world. For example, here is a passage from early in B is for Burglar where Kinsey is just out for a run:

I generally do three miles, jogging along the bicycle path that borders the beach. The walkway is stenciled with odd cartoons at intervals and I watch for those, counting off the quarter-miles.  The tracks of some improbable bird, the mark of a single fat tire that crosses the concrete and disappears into the sand. There are usually tramps on the beach; some who camp there permanently, others in transit, their sleeping bags arranged under the palm trees like large green larvae or the skins shed by some night-stirring beast.

            That afternoon the air seemed heavy and chill, the ocean sluggish. The cloud cover was beginning to break up, but the visible sky was a pale, washed-out blue and there was no real sign of the sun. Out on the water a speedboat ran a course parallel to the beach and the path of the wake was like a spinning ribbon of silver winding along behind. At this distance, the low-growing vegetation looked like soft suede, with rock face showing along through the ridges as though the nap had worn away from hard use.

There’s nothing self-consciously artful about the language or the syntax here. But there are thoughtful, intelligent choices that Grafton is making about what to include and what not to include that make the scene come to life in my imagination. The speedboat, for example, is not strictly needed; it does nothing to advance the plot. But it does a lot of other important work. It helps to snap the afternoon run into focus. And, taken at face value as the thoughts of the protagonist rather than the verbal choices of the author, it demonstrates the alertness and  attentiveness of the narrator in a way that makes me feel that I like her and trust her.

Here’s a similar sort of passage from M is for Malice. This time Millhone is just walking:

I walked home along Cabana Boulevard. The skies had cleared and the air temperature hovered in the mid-fifties. This was technically the dead of winter and the brazen California sunshine was not as warm as it seemed. Sunbathers littered the sand like flotsam left behind by the high tide. Their striped umbrellas spoke of summer, yet the new year was just a week old. The sun was brittle along the water's edge, fragmenting where the swells broke against the pilings under the wharf. The surf must have been dead cold, the salt water eye-stinging where children splashed through the waves and submerged themselves in the churning depths. I could hear their thin screams rising above the thunder of the surf, like thrill-seekers on a roller-coaster, plunging into icy terror. On the beach, a wet dog barked at them and shook the water from his coat. Even from a distance I could see where his rough hair had separated into layers. (!)

Subtle, the way that the narrator is able to see the children in the surf and make the imaginative leap into their physiological experience, their eyes stinging from the water, their minds on the edge of exhalation and terror. And then the bit about the patterning of the hair on the dog: unexpected. Surprising. Delightful.

Putting Millhone on the road in her VW gives Grafton another opportunity to paint word pictures. Here’s an example from N is for Noose, where she crafts makes an explicitly painterly description of lake country:

I reached Lake Nota… in slightly more than three hours. The town didn’t look like much, though the setting was spectacular. Mountains towered on three sides, snow still painting the peaks in thick white against a sky heaped with clouds. On the shady side of the road, I could see leftover patches of snow, ice boulders wedged up against the leafless trees. The air smelled of pine, with an underlying scent that was faintly sweet. The chill vapor I breathed was like sticking my face down in a half-empty gallon of vanilla ice cream, drinking in the sugary perfume. The lake itself was no more than two miles long and a mile across. The surface was glassy, reflecting granite spires and the smattering of white firs and incense cedars that grew on the slopes.

Or an even more detailed, extended description from B is for Burglar, displaying, among other things, Millhone’s (and Grafton’s) knowledge of local flora. And I like the way the description culminates in a generalizing remark that puts all of human life into the context of larger natural cycles:

The clouds hung above the mountains like puffs of white smoke left in the wake of a giant old-fashioned choochoo train. We took the old road up through the pass, my VW making high-pitched complaints until I shifted from third gear to second and finally into first. The road twisted up through sage and mountain lilac. As we approached, the dark green of the distant vegetation separated into discreet shrubs clinging obstinately to the slopes. There were very few trees. Steep expanses of California buckwheat were visible on the right, interspersed with the bright little orange faces of monkey flower and the hot pink of prickly phlox. The poison oak was thriving, its lush growth almost overwhelming the silvery leaves of the mugwort which grew alongside it and is its antidote.

            As we reach the summit, I glanced to my left. The elevation here was about twenty-five hundred feet and the ocean seemed to hover in the distance like a gray haze blending into the gray of the sky. The coastline stretched as far as the eye could see and the town of Santa Teresa looked at insubstantial as an aerial photo. From this perspective, the mountain ridge seemed to plunge into the Pacific, appearing again in four rugged peaks that formed the offshore islands. The sun up here was hot and the volatile oils, exuded by the underbrush, scented the still air with camphor. There were occasional manzanita trees along the slope, still stripped down to spare, misshapen black forms by the fire that had swept through two years back. Everything that grows up here longs to burn; seed coats broken only by intense heat, germinating then when the rains come again. It's not a cycle that concedes much to human intervention.

Grafton is also excellent at describing the human habitations that Millhone finds herself in as she pursues her investigations. In this passage, also from B is for Burglar, Millhone goes to the Tip Top Cab company in hopes of getting a look at whatever records they might of a cab taken by one of the people she is investigating:

         

Tip Top was jammed between a Humane Society Thrift Shop and a Big 'n Tall Men's Shop with a suit in the window designed for the steroid enthusiast. The office itself was long and narrow, partitioned across the middle with a plywood wall with a door cut into it. The place was furnished like some kid's hideout, complete with two broken-down couches and a table with one short leg. There were drawings and hand-lettered signs Scotch-taped to the walls, trash piled up in one corner, dog-eared copies of Road and Track magazine in an irregular tier by the front door. The bucket seat from a car was propped against the far wall, tan upholstery slashed in one spot and mended with Band-Aids covered with stars. The dispatcher was perched on a stool, leaning one elbow on a counter as littered as a workbench. He was probably twenty-five with curly black hair and a small dark mustache. He wore chinos, a pale blue T-shirt with a faded decal of the Grateful Dead, and a visor that made his hair stick up on the sides. The shortwave radio squawked incomprehensibly and he took up the mike.

            "Seven-oh," he said, his eyes immediately focusing on a map of the city affixed to the wall above the counter. I saw a butt-filled ashtray, an aspirin bottle, a cardboard calendar from Our Lady of Sorrows Church, a fan belt, plastic packets of ketchup, and a big stenciled note that read "Has Anybody Seen My Red Flash Lite?" Tacked to the wall was a list of addresses for customers who'd passed bad checks and those in the habit of calling more than one cab to see who could get there first.

The thing that strikes me about this passage is how funny it is. I have of course never been in this particular office, but I’ve sure been in ones that were like it. The description is laden with all kinds of telling details: the table with one short leg, the bucket seat mended with Band-Aids covered with stars, the cardboard calendar from Our Lady of Sorrows Church, the note asking about the “Red Flash Lite.” The old saying goes, you couldn’t make this stuff up. But that is exactly what Grafton is doing, making it up, and clearly having a blast doing so.

In another passage, this time from N is for Noose, Grafton describes with great precision and wry humor Millhone’s first impressions of a hotel she has to visit:

The hotel must have been considered elegant once upon a time. The floor was green marble with a crooked path of newspapers laid end to end to soak up all the rainy footsteps that criss-crossed the lobby. In places, where the soggy papers had been picked up, I could see that the newspapers had left reverse images of the headlines and text. Six ornate pilasters divided the gloomy space into sections, each of which sported a blocky green plastic couch.  To all appearances, the clientele was discouraged from spending time lounging about on the furniture as a hand-printed sign offered the following admonishments:

NO SMOKING

NO SPITTING

NO LOITERING

NO SOLICITING

NO DRINKING ON THE PREMISES

NO FIGHTING

NO PEEING IN THE PLANTERS

Which just about summed up my personal code.

I’ve read most of her novels now. And if you were to ask me to recount from memory the plot of any one of them, I would have a hard time doing so. What does stick in my mind, however, is the feeling of being in the mind of Kinsey Millhone, and sense of the way she inhabits and observes and celebrates the world. It’s unfortunate that Grafton never got to finish Z is for Zero, which was to have been the final installment of the cycle of 26 novels. But there’s also something deeply resonant about that. She lived her life, she set herself an ambitious goal, and she pursued it for as long as she could and wrote it as well as she could. Her life’s work brought a great deal of pleasure to me and to countless other readers. I’m grateful to her for that.

Reservoir 13

One of the enigmas of human life is that as humans what we know for certain about the nature of our lives is most often inconsistent with our lives as we actually lead them. We know, for example, that the universe is unimaginably large and has been in existence for an unimaginably long time. In his book the Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan included a graphic called the Cosmic Calendar, in which he laid out a timeline as if the history of the universe were overlaid on a calendar of a single year. In these terms, the origin of the Milky Way comes around May 1, the formation of Earth on September 14. Life on Earth begins on September 25. The first humans arrive at 10:30 p.m. on December 31. All of recorded human history occurs in the last half second of the year. The birth of Christ? 11:59:56.

Here’s the poet Rosser Reeves, coming at the same concept from a different direction:

E=mc²

Someday, perhaps, some alien eye or eyes,

Blood red in cold and polished horny lids,

Set in a chitinous face,

Will sweep the arch of some dark, distant sky

And see a nova flare,

A flick of light, no more,

A pin-point on a photographic plate,

A footnote in an alien chart of stars,

Forgotten soon on miles of dusty shelves

Where alien beetles feed.

A meal for worms,

Sole epitaph,

To mark the curious end of restless man,

Who for a second of galactic time

Floated upon a speck of cosmic dust

Around a minor sun.

An individual human life, seen in this context, is a very small thing indeed. And yet that is not the way that we as individuals experience our lives. For us, “a lifetime” is a synonym for “forever.” Our consciousness is housed in blood and bone, and as individuals we are the center of our own worlds, regardless of whatever scientific evidence might offer by way of contradiction. We are, in this sense, always deluded. Our subjectivity skews our vision of the world and overemphasizes the importance of our place it. We live within a network of what we take to be certainties, but are surrounded by much greater and numerous uncertainties.  What we don’t know is always by many orders of magnitude greater than what we do know. But we do not, we cannot, live that way. It’s a dilemma that raises existential questions.

This past Sunday, Maria Popova, in her blog Brain Pickings, cited Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue talking about how we might respond to this dilemma:

Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds. All thought is about putting a face on experience… One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. So a question is really one of the forms in which wonder expresses itself. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways to wonder.

O’Donohue suggests, and I certainly agree, that the proper response to our inevitable ignorance is to ask questions that are rooted in wonder, which is to say, appreciation. The other, and unfortunately more common response, particularly in our present political climate, is to simply double down on your certainties, whether or not you have any evidence that they are in fact reasonable. The problem with that, as O’Donohue points out, is that “thought, if it’s not open to wonder, can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous.”

One of the most powerful and value-creating functions of literature is to liberate us from our certainties, free us from the constraints of our inherited perspectives, and allow us to see our lives as individuals, however briefly and ephemerally, from a broader perspective.

Which brings me to the best novel that I read during 2017, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. It tells the story of an English village in thirteen chapters, one chapter for each year. McGregor eschews most of the familiar novelistic conventions. There are characters in the novel, more than 40 of them, actually, but the narrative does not focus on them one at a time, nor does it include what we would normally think of as scenes with dialogue. (The closest thing to a plot device is the disappearance of a teenage girl in the first chapter, which is revisited in each following chapter.) Rather, the story is told from a strategically distanced third-person perspective, written in simple declarative sentences, focused as often on animal life or landscape or weather as it is on human characters. It reads like a prose poem of sorts, an inventory of absences and presences. As you read, you get to know each of the characters in small doses over an extended period of time. You get a sense of the larger rhythms and patterns of their lives circling back on one another, moving forward in time even as they stay in one place.

An example, taken more or less at random, but indicative of the narrative style and tone throughout:

At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from the towns beyond the valley but they were too far off in the distance for the sound to carry and no one came out to watch. The dance at the village hall was canceled, and although the Gladstone [the local bar] was full there was no mood for celebration. Tony closed the bar at half past the hour and everyone made their way home. Only the police stayed out in the streets, gathered around their vans or heading back into the hills. In the morning the rain started up again. Water coursed from the swollen peat beds quickly through the cloughs and down the stepped paths that fell from the edge of the moor. The river thickened with silt from the hills and plumed across the weirs. (5)

Or, later:

The winds changed and came from the north, pulling a bog-sweet smell of damp down from the hills. After dark two of the badgers snuck out of the sett at the top end of the beech wood, sniffing at the air before foraging across the wet soil around the edge of the abandoned lead pits, looking for the earthworms that had always been there. Will and Claire came back from the hospital with a baby daughter, and went straight to the Jackson house to introduce her to Tom. They were calling her Molly, and when they laid her on Tom’s lap he looked terrified… On the television there were pictures of an earthquake’s aftermath; people walking down a road covered in dust, collapsed bridges, rescuers kneeling in the rubble to reach down into dark spaces… (123)

Reading Reservoir 13, one is put on constant alert to the larger patterns that underlie the lives of the individual people in the village, of which the villagers themselves are often only tangentially aware. The book is a reminder, to borrow O’Donohue’s words, of the many different dimensions of life that we are either blind to or that are not available to us, unless they are called to our attention, as they are in this case by an extremely confident and gifted writer.

This is the first book I’ve read in a long time that, having finished it, I was moved to go back and start again from the beginning. Reading it is an experience of the pleasures and rewards of the simple act of paying attention.

End note: If you’d like to get a fuller sense of what I’m talking about here before deciding whether to read the book, I suggest you take a look at James Wood’s characteristically brilliant review of it in the New Yorker. That’s how I found out about it.

A New Year

So 2017 has come and gone. Not my favorite year, by any standard. But the New Year has arrived and with it the opportunity to re-establish at least some of the productivity routines that were disrupted last year when I had to undergo two hip replacements (the first one failed) and an extended course of antibiotic infusions. One of my tentative goals for the New Year, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, is to try to breathe some life back into Throughlines.

I began this blog eleven years ago, when I was still teaching full time. It was at the start primarily a venue for me to reflect on my teaching practice and think my way through various ideas that presented themselves during the course of my professional practice. I have long held as an article of faith that writing is a very powerful tool for the generation and elaboration and refinement of thoughts which would otherwise remain either unarticulated or inarticulate.

If your goal is to be a thoughtful person—and I can’t think of any reason why it shouldn’t be, can you?—then an obvious question is “How can I encourage myself and support myself in my attempts to be thoughtful?” And my answer to that questions would be, “Well, you could try writing about what you are thinking.” Because, as I often told my students over the course of 45 years in the classroom, writing makes thinking hold still long enough for you to have second thoughts, not to mention third or fourth thoughts. If there is something you take seriously, or something that you have ideas about that you want to be taken seriously, what better way to make that happen than to write about it?

I also felt at that time that as a teacher of English (and therefore of reading and writing) I had a personal and professional responsibility to my students to model for them what I was asking them to do. I am all too familiar with teachers who are very comfortable giving students directions—and often very counterintuitive and counterproductive directions—about how to write, but who never write anything themselves more ambitious than the occasional email or text message.

I’ve been retired for four years now. I still return to my old school to teach a high school English course during the summer session, but during the rest of the year I am most often alone with my thoughts. The continual overflow of ideas from issues raised in class discussion is no longer provoking me to speak, or to write. Most days the only person I speak with at any length is my wife, and there’s a limit to what I can reasonably expect her to put up with in terms of incoming verbal stimuli. As an outlet (and an act of discipline) I do keep a journal on my computer, and my default goal is to write 500 words a day. On the days when I do write, it’s easy enough to come up with the words. But to be honest in the last year or so there have generally been more days when I never got around to writing than days where I did. Part of that is inertia. And I suppose, part of that was the default gestalt of 2017, existential despair. It’s hard to rouse yourself for a principled defense of thoughtfulness in a world in which there is so often so little on display. 

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But I’ve dug through my drawers and dusted off my rose-colored glasses. I’m suiting up. I’m working out. I’m making a public commitment to my legions of devoted followers, that I’m going to post something here at least once a week, for as long as I can do it. Not so much on your behalf, but on my own. 2018 is going to be the new 2006. Buckle up.