Intermezzo

            Sally Rooney has a large number of readers who enjoy and admire her work and an equally large (or perhaps larger) number of readers who dismiss her out of hand as a niche writer catering to GenXrs ("the Salinger of the Snapchat generation") by mirroring their romantic preoccupations. In his NY Times review of her latest novel, Intermezzo, Dwight Garner leads with an acknowledgment of the "Rooney backlash" before mounting a strong defense of the book. And so I find myself in the unusual position of siding with Dwight Garner, no stranger to snarky dismissiveness himself, in his assessment. Because Intermezzo, in my opinion, isn't just a good book, it's a terrific book, in pretty much every respect. It centers largely on five characters. Ivan is a 22-year-old chess prodigy. His brother Peter, ten years older, is a successful lawyer. They are both in mourning for the recent death of their father, and, from early on in the novel, they are both involved in complicated but utterly convincing relationships. Ivan falls deeply for Margaret, a woman in her mid-thirties. Peter has a close relationship Sylvia, an ex-lover his own age with whom he still keeps in touch, but he is also involved with Naomi,  a younger woman who seems to be using him for her own purposes at the same that he uses her for his. In the process they manage, without necessarily intending to do so, to create something that feels very much—first to the reader, and then to the characters themselves—like love. Peter and Ivan have a different kind of complicated (and convincing) relationship, elements of fondness and love warring against elements of resentment and dismissiveness as they try to find their way toward one another.

 

            A summary of this kind perhaps makes it all sound like some kind of hipster soap opera. What saves it from being so is Rooney's uncanny ability to render the events of the story from inside the heads of each of her characters. I don't recall having read a book which so strongly conveys what it's like to be torn in three directions at once as one attempts to decide what to do in a particular situation. Here's an example in which Margaret, who has just met Ivan at a chess match at a venue where she was the hostess, offers to give him a ride back to his room. They are both aware that there is something in the air between them, but neither of them is possessed of the sophisticated social skills that more experienced (and perhaps more jaded) proto-lovers would use to gloss over the awkwardness. The paragraph serves the very straightforward narrative purpose of getting Ivan from point A to point B. But Rooney follows Margaret's thoughts very carefully as Margaret considers not only her own feelings in the moment, but Ivan's as well:

 

Outside, the car park is glowing with the skeletal orange light of the streetlamps, the paved surfaces dappled and glistening. She turns on her wipers and they click and scrape rhythmically over the windscreen. It happens all the time that she drives someone home like this, or drops them to the station, and they sit in the car together this way, chatting about something. It’s just work. And if Ivan doesn’t want to chat, if he wants to sit there looking at his hands and then looking at her and back at his hands again, that’s okay — he’s only twenty-two, and very gifted at one particular kind of board game, and after all there’s no formal etiquette for the situation. Finding yourself in the car of an older woman after a presumably strenuous public event, being driven to your accommodation with your little black suitcase, no one ever teaches you how to behave under such circumstances. If he wants to sit in silence, looking at his bitten fingernails, that’s alright, no problem. She, too, of course, is sitting in silence, and has nothing to say. They come off the main road and down onto the small lane to the holiday cottages, the gravel crunching noisily under the tyres of Margaret’s car. She has done nothing wrong, has done nothing at all, in fact, beyond what is required for the purpose of driving Ivan from the bar to the holiday village. If she made a little error in the conversation earlier, if she used one little dubious word or phrase, asking him what he was passionate about, that was excusable, even in a sense deniable, because subjective. She pulls up outside one of the houses, a white bungalow with peeling paint and darkened windows.

 

Later, as another example, we are inside Peter's head as he is driving to court and adjusting to the pharmaceuticals he has ingested. I love the way the scattershot syntax and time dislocations convey what he has done, what he is doing, what he is seeing, what he is thinking, and how it all plays out:

 

In the morning, hiss of the iron, buttered bread roll, milligram of alprazolam, blue tie or green. Stands at the dining table rearranging his papers while the coffee cools, thoughts running rapid with broken phrases, details of argument, streams diverging and recrossing, hands clammy touching the pages. The point of law. To raise the question of. His briefcase then, bitter aftertaste, overcoat, and outside the chill wind of October moves through the leaves of trees. Wide grey streets around the Green, buses slowing to a stop, wheel and cry of gulls overhead. Leaves rustle over the park gates. Barred windows of Ship Street then and the vans reversing. Blue clearing in the white clouds, rain-washed cobbles. River dissected by the glitter of sunlight, Grattan Bridge. Copper stepped saucer dome over Portland stone balustraded parapet, dirty green cap in daylight, the Four Courts. Feels the effects by the time he’s inside, dressing: slow serene feeling beginning in the hands and feet. Breathing settles. Thoughts grow orderly and sequential, facts arranged in place, stately procession of claims and counter-claims. That’s not actually recreational, Naomi told him once. Like, you can get a prescription if that’s what you’re using it for. Along the corridor, scent of cleaning fluid, overheard voices. Even medicated he feels it: the white light of his own righteousness. Clear luminous certainty. In the courtroom, flow of speech unhurried, precise, inexorable. Admitting no contradiction. Familiar command almost perfect, yes, and pleasurable even, and then over.

 

Yes, this is writing that places demands on you as a reader. But it offers extraordinary rewards as well. I felt, and feel, like I got to know these characters as well as I have ever gotten to know most any of the flesh-and-blood humans beings I have met in my life. And that's because when you are with an actual person, you can never know for sure what they are really thinking. But with Rooney, due to her extraordinary psychological insight and writerly control, you can. 

The complexities in a story like this inevitably make you wonder whether the plot will be plausibly satisfyingly resolved, and whether or not the trip will have been worth it. The answer to both questions is a resounding "Yes!" Rooney is no longer occupying the wing in my personal house of literature  associated with interesting contemporary writers. She's in the larger room at the back having tea with Jane Austen and George Eliot.

 

 

 

The Deluge

 

 I spent a significant amount of time over the last few weeks reading the novel The Deluge, by Stephen Markley. I'll say right here at the start that The Deluge is not for the faint of heart. For one thing, it comes in at just under 900 pages. And those aren't pages with large print and big margins, either, more like nine-point type and half-inch margins. So to work through it requires a sobering investment of time and energy. And the story it has to tell is no walk in the park either. One of Markley's primary goals is to examine the likely consequences of climate change over the next twenty years. That in itself is sobering, in that many of the prognosticators currently wringing their hands and crying out loud about coming existential disasters talk about what is likely to be happening in 2050 or 2100. Markley's time frame is much more compressed. The sequence of events described in the book starts in 2013 and ends in 2039. Nothing of what is described is remotely implausible, or remotely encouraging. Markley describes in unflinching detail multiple scenarios which people across the globe are already experiencing and can expect to experience in the not-too-far-distant future: heat waves, fires, water shortages, dust storms, and decimated crops on the one hand; floods, storms, and sea-level rise decimating coastal cities across the world on the other. Those events will likely result in the displacement of literally billions of people who will find themselves homeless and on the move without resources.

So yes, it's a dystopian novel based on the impact of climate change. But one of the things which makes it such a gripping read is that it is also a character-based novel that depicts, again in utterly convincing detail, the interactions of an enormous cast of characters, the most central of whom are intelligent, well-meaning, and socially engaged, and trying to fight, each in their own way, against what they correctly perceive to be an existential threat to human life on earth.

There are 41 chapters in the book. Some are narrated in conventional fashion by major characters. They include a scientist, a charismatic social activist (one of the most memorable characters I've ever encountered on the page), the leader of an eco-terrorist group, an ad rep for a company helping industry give the appearance of supporting climate change activism while working frantically behind the scenes to forestall any change in the status quo. There are also chapters presented as primary-source documents: news articles, magazine articles, and most notably, position papers authored by a fiercely intelligent autistic savant who is tasked by various government agencies with trying to come up with coherent and intelligible delineation of the fearsomely complex issues which need to be dealt with through legislation. (The book would be worth reading if only for the depth and clarity of those position papers.) Each of these characters comes alive as a fully realized human being embedded in a network of family and friends, all of whom have their own stories and challenges as the world careens toward disaster.

What became clear, at least to me, as the story moves from year to year and crisis to crisis, is that the scientific and technical challenges having to do with dealing with climate change, vexing as they are, will amount to nothing next to the human challenges. Any single proposal for dealing with climate change, much less a coherent program of necessary initiatives, will necessarily be met with a torrent of indignation, outrage, obfuscation, disinformation, and denial. Some of that pushback is overt and explicit; a larger quantity is covert and maliciously duplicitous. None of which should be surprising to anyone who pays attention to our current political environment, which is exactly and predominantly that way, and getting worse every day.

I've read I don't know how many thousands of novels in my lifetime. I don't think I've ever read one more ambitious, or more successful in realizing its ambitions, than The Deluge. It's gripping. It's frightening. It's extraordinarily well-imagined and well-written throughout. It's certainly understandable that most of us would prefer to pretend that the threats we are facing are less immediate and less pressing than they actually are. Al Gore was attempting to call everyone's attention to "An Inconvenient Truth" sixteen years ago. What has changed in the meantime? Diddly squat, that's what. Markley's principled mission is to ask that we consider, individually and collectively, the human consequences of that sort of lassitude.

Since finishing the book, I find that as I scan the news each day I see the harbingers everywhere of the world as he imagines it in this book. Just this week the New York Times had a lead article entitled "Earth Is Nearing The Tipping Point For A Hot Future," another "last chance" reminder about the just-released UN report on climate change. What has been the response of our congress, of our president, of our global leadership? Radio silence. Big surprise. Maybe Stephen Markley can help tip the scales, at least for those willing to invest the time and effort into reading The Deluge. I strongly recommend that you be one of them.



 

Rachel Cusk, Second Place (I)

 

This evening, in preparation for a meeting of my book group coming up this Friday,  I finished re-reading Rachel Cusk's book Second Place. I had read it for the first time back in November and found it intriguing. Here are some of the preliminary notes I made at that time:

The Cusk book was inward and awkward and psychologically astute in ways that I have come to expect from her. The narrator is M, a middle-aged woman who has had a long-time fixation on a painter she refers to only as L, whose work spoke to her when she first saw it when she was a young woman. Now she's living with her husband Tony along a marsh on a farm of sorts that has an extra cottage called the Second Place. She winds up writing a number of times to the artist asking him if he'd like to visit; she thinks he would find the landscape inspiring, as she does. She also seems to be entertaining the hope that they will become friends, if not lovers. She hears nothing for a long time. Then she gets word that he is coming, and when he shows up, he's not alone; he's brought along a beautiful young woman named Brett. Most of the book has to do with the time he spends there, and the various disconnects between the narrator and L. There are subplots involving her daughter Justine and her husband Kurt, who have moved in just before L arrives. Justine is befriended by Brett, Kurt spends a period of time as a kind of assistant to Tony on the farm, and L navigates a series of psychological and physical crises, including a having, toward the end of the book, a stroke that radically re-shapes his life and the lives of all the people around him. The bulk of the book consists of interior monologue  rendered as direct address toward someone identified only as Jeffers. We're inside the narrator's head the whole time, but the conceit is that M is not talking to us, she's talking to Jeffers, and we are thus in the oddly oblique position of seeming to be listening in on the one-sided conversation. M is clearly a very intelligent and articulate woman who as a narrator and the conduct of her life is ruthless in pursuit of existential understanding. Her upbringing and the events of her life have led her to be suspicious of men on the one hand and family on the other. Her hopes and expectations of finding some formula for freedom and happiness in her life are more or less consistently thwarted by her own impulsive behaviors and insecurities. I liked the feel of the book as I was reading it, the way that the narrative never seemed to move in the ways in might be expected to move, but was insistently making its own way in its own time. It's the kind of book that would necessitate re-reading, and some not insignificant amount of study, to fully appreciate. I may go down that road, I'm not sure. At least enough to pull some quotes and think them over. Cusk has some interesting things to say about being a woman and about being an artist and about how hard it is to make sense of anything when you are in the middle of it.

I guess I'd say after a second reading that I feel the same way, only more so. There are, as Francis Bacon famously noted, lots of ways of to read. ("...some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"). This is a book that I suppose can be read for pleasure. That's the way I read it the first time. I was intrigued by these particular characters in this particular situation, and I was reading mostly to find out what happened. Which was fine at the time. But on second reading, knowing what was going to happen, I was much more attuned to the multi-layered psychological dynamics of the characters individually and in their interactions with one another: M and Justine. M and Tony. M and L. Brett and Tony. Brett and M. Justine and Kurt. Tony and L. And so on. I feel like for me to fully grok what is going on in the book, I'm going to have to go back and start pulling quotes that relate to particular themes and laying them out on paper and making charts and graphs in order to be able to figure them out. In other words, to be the reader that this book needs me to be, I've got a lot of work to do, quite probably more work than many readers would likely want to sign up for. Cusk is a thoughtful, demanding writer, and my sense is that there are rewards to be had in meeting her halfway.


So fine. But wait, there's more. As it turns out—and this is something I did not become aware of until I was halfway through my second reading of the book—the basic plot of Cusk's book has been appropriated from Lorenzo in Taos, an early 20th century novel by an American writer I had never heard of named Mabel Dodge Luhan. (Apparently, in at least one of the editions of Second Place there is an endnote in which Cusk acknowledges the primary source that she is working from. But that endnote does not appear in my paperback version of the text, and so I wasn't aware of it until I started perusing the reviews of Second Place.) Cusk uses the scaffolding of that book's plot in much the same way that Barbara Kingsolver uses David Copperfield as the template for Demon Copperhead, which I put aside midway through in order to re-read Second Place. So if I really wanted to do my due diligence, I suppose I would need to read Lorenzo in Taos as well. Not sure that's gonna happen. Obsessive-compulsive as I may be, I have to set myself some limits, especially inasmuch as I have a stack of about twenty other books waiting for me on my nightstand.

Anyway this is my preliminary attempt to process Second Place. My tentative plan is to do some of that culling and graphing and charting, then talk with my group, and come back with some further thoughts next week. Till then...


 

Midwinter Day (Mayer)

 

 

The name of the poet Bernadette Mayer has come to my attention several times over the years. Several years ago, for example, I ran across her listing of prompts for writing that has become something of a classic. More recently I read Rivka Galchen's piece in the New Yorker this December in which surveyed Mayer's career (she passed away in November of this year) and mentioned Mayer's book Midwinter Day, which I was able to find at my local library and started reading on December 20. Midwinter Day is a book-length poem, written about one day in her life, December 22, 1978, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of 1978. (She maintains that she wrote the entire book on that day as well, which seems on the face of it to be a physical impossibility, given the elaborate details of her rendering of not only what was going on around her, but what was going on in her mind as she considered each bit of incoming data. How she could have been experiencing all of that while she was writing is beyond me. But she says that's what she did.)

Midwinter Day divided into six sections, each of which takes us through one chunk of that day: her dreams as she's waking up, the morning she spends in her home with her husband and two children, and so on through the day. As it happened, I wound up reading the middle part of the book about December 22 on December 22. Much of the book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that seems to owe something to both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. There is a kind of manic omnidirectional energy in the poem, which keeps shifting in shape and in focus its attempt embrace everything going on around her and in her mind simultaneously. As might be expected in an experimental work of this kind, some of the passages are more reader-friendly than others. What I found most interesting were the instances in which she puts together inventories, some of which continue for four and five pages at a time. This passage, for example, gives an impressionistic rendition of her observations as she begins moving about her house in the morning:

From the bedroom, curtains blue as ink I stare at, red Godard floor white walls all crayoned, from the bed raised on cinder blocks at Dr. Incao's midwife's request so Sophia could be born, fake Indian cover Ray gave us for Marie American Indian and Ray's old real wool blanket and all our sheets her gifts,  Lewis' Aunt Fanny's crocheted afghan and Tom's old sleeping bag, the mimeograph machine and its cover, diaper rash ointment, from the walls a butterfly kite, a leaf on a ribbon from nursery school, mushrooms by Joe, an iris and a gladiola by Rosemary, the gladiola painted here, the stuck clock, the window faces south, laundry on it, closet doors hung with jackets, shawls, scarves and Marie's dress, closet floor boots shoes boxes bags baby carriers and my broken inherited chair, that's the airport, closet of stuff, carpet sweeper, another broken chair,from there I go to the kitchen sink you can sit on at the imagined forest window, two coleus plants too cold today, now a Wandering Jew, two related spider plants one is hanging, stones dead branches and collected pine cones, and old ghost and a Boston fern on the spooky refrigerator in which is the food, drawings of attempted faces by Marie that look like Cy Twombly, the dumb electric stove, George's red shirt calendar, soon it'll be over, the Lenox Savings Bank historical calendar, Pilgrims landed yesterday, winter begins today, shortest day of the year, Lewis and Harris with Marie in a Bronx corridor, little light, the African woman backpacking a baby, she's talking to a totem figure, a street scene by Rafael and a German altarpiece Rosemary sent, a crude drawing of a nude woman by Paul, a poster of a panda on the door to the former pantry now a house for two heaters one for air and one for water and the vents ducts and pipes for each, old flowerpots, the hall to the door to the hall, full of boxes of Angel Hair books, the broken bassinet now a toybox with turtles and cups in it, a small space full of brown paper bags and cardboard six-pack wrappers, broom, dishes and pots, fruit on the hood of the stove, bottles and jars, teas and books, medicines foods and detergents, binoculars, the dishwasher, vinegar, garbage, Lewis' mother's old Scotch kooler, spices, another of George's plaid shirts, coats on hooks, a red tray; to the deadpan bathroom, a woman by Matisse in yellow and blue and an ordinary mercator projection of the world, potty chair, diaper pail for cloth diapers, plastic bag of used plastic diapers, toilet sink tub, bath toys an alligator that swims mechanically and a shark with teeth that is a mitt and a sponge, hideous old curling rug lying in the tub after yesterday's flood, hooks on the back of the door, layers of clothing hanging on them, a mirror, ointments and pills, razors poisons and soaps, shower curtains; to the main room the living room, two leaping goldfish, cornflower plant, jade tree, Wandering Jew not doing too well, another spider offshoot, purple weed I don't know the name of accidentally growing in a pot of sedum, Christmas tree fern with a sense of humor, whiskey, the main collapsing table covered with things, rocking chair, small wearing rug on the golden wood floor, two couches with things on them, public school chairs with arms for principals at table, shelves of books and books in boxes, boxes of paper and stencils, two ring binders of photos since Worthington, my desk I steer and things, a standing lamp Nancy got us, a jacket by Joe and a blue shirt by George, a flower by Rosemary I don't remember the name of, a water color of a drapery by Rosemary done in Worthington, a drawing of Ted by Joe, a photo of Lewis by Gerard, pictures of the window out Main Street in different seasons, Main Street and Cliffwood Street, Our Lady of Perpetual Help-butterfly collage by Joe, a slinky male figure by Joe, a watch by George, some Kirschwasser, dead files and dead flies, magazines and library books, toys and balls, a stereo, four windows and the more frequent door. (32)

I'm sure some readers would find a passage of this kind to be exhausting, but I find it exhilarating, in terms of both its execution and its ambition. She comes closest to defining that ambition herself in this passage from later in the book:

I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory. (89)

 

I like the way Mayer pushes the boundaries of the sentence in a way that mirrors more accurately than traditional syntax the way the mind actually moves and makes connections in the moments of everyday life. It seems to me to be indeed "a magical service for survival by the use of the mind."

At the very end of the book Mayer employs a more traditional poetic form and diction to bring the poem, and the day to close with a praise song of sorts:

From dreams I made sentences, then what I’ve seen today, 

Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory 

To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, 

Then to end I guess with love, a method, to this winter season 

Now I’ve said this love it’s all I can remember 

Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December 

 

Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light 

That takes the bite from winter weather 

And weaves the random cloth of life together 

And drives away the long black night!

 

There are people who make it a point to re-read Midwinter Day every year in mid-December. I'm planning to be one of them. It turns out that in recent years there has also been an annual oral reading of the entire book that has been filmed and is available on youTube. There are lots of other resources available about the book as well, for example here and here.



 

Julie Carr: Noun Poem

 

 

Often when I run across a poem that interests me, either in a book from the library or online, I will go one what amounts to an online scavenger hunt, looking for other poems by the same poet or for interviews where the poet talks about what goes on in their head when they sit down to write. Very often this kind of online investigation leads me to blogs curated by other readers who share my interests and enthusiasms with regard to writing, and often in those blogs there is a sidebar with links to other poems and poets.

It was in just such a manner that I ran across Julie Carr. I was reading an essay written by Renee Gladman in which she referenced Carr, so I followed the breadcrumbs and wound up reading a number of poems by Carr, which I found interesting precisely because they challenged my sense of what a poem might be, how it might be read, and what sort of "sense" it might be said to be making.

I'd like to share one such poem, published in the Denver Post, and try to unpack some of what has gone on in my mind as I have read and re-read it. I can't claim to have any special insight or expertise, either in regard to this poem or to Carr's work in general, most of which I have not yet read. And yet this poem does engage my interest. I know that there are some readers who find it hard to relate to art or poetry which is nonrepresentational. I'm not one of those readers. I am actually really interested in the question of what happens when you take a literal medium and remove the literality. What is a drawing if it is not a drawing of something I can point to? What is a poem if it is not a poem about something I can point to? I am actually most drawn to artwork and poetry which explores the in-between spaces: work which is neither entirely literal nor entirely abstract. This one, for example:

Noun Poem


A man in need of a bird of yarn

enters a town with two suns

The bird unwinds its tale of read

in which a woman paints a postcard for her son

This is a sentence with two nouns

One is the noun we all know

the other will be formed of the wealth of the first:

a widower in search of a bride

Yes? I am thirsty, he says with laden head,

can I have a glass of milk, Mom?

She fills him a glass and watches him drink

the brush poised in her hand

The bird and boy whistle one to the other

red spooling from incongruous mouths

This is a song with two swallows

The other gathers others in the skies

This, a sentence with two eyes

One sits within his like an egg in a nest

the last spills as it mates, as it cries

 

The first thing that catches my attention, unsurprisingly, is the title, which immediately suggests that what will be foregrounded in this poem will be the kinds of words it uses, as opposed to the kind of meaning it makes. The first two lines confirm that suspicion:

A man in need of a bird of yarn
enters a town with two suns...

Having been nudged by the title, I am sensitized to the sequencing of the five nouns in the first two lines. And what I am more or less forced to notice in those two lines is that there's a kind of syntactic instability in play. Even though the words are all simple, familiar, one-syllable words (other than "enter" which is two, but still) that I recognize and understand, there's something odd about the phrasing. What is "a bird of yarn," for example? Is it a bird made out of spun wool? Or a bird in a story (yarn)? Or a bird of legend? All of the above? None of the above? And why would a man be in need of one? Carr is putting words together in such a way as to work against the part of my brain that wants to just read the poem and "get it." The third line does the same kind of work:

The bird unwinds its tale of read

The word "unwinds" suggests that maybe we are talking about a ball of yarn after all. But to speak of unwinding a "tale of read" suggests, in an oblique way, not only the the unspooling of yarn, but of a yarn (a story), or even perhaps of the very poem we are reading, as it "unwinds its tale of read."

So my sense is that there is a certain amount of playful misdirection going on here. The poem is unfolding, but is doing so in a way resists easy paraphrase, and encourages us to consider multiple possible readings simultaneously.

I'm going to resist the temptation to indulge in a line-by-line analysis of the syntactical shifts in the poem and the various possibilities that they present to me as I read, which would likely be as laborious for you to read as it would be for me to write. But I do want to make note of a couple of features of the poem which might not be obvious on first reading but become more so the longer we stay with it.

There are three places in which an assertion is in the poem made about the poem: "This is a sentence with two nouns," is the first, and later, "This, a sentence with two eyes." And in the middle of those two assertions, "This is a song with two swallows." I note first of all that are three assertions include doublings: two nouns, two eyes, two swallows. Once I've noted that, I notice other doublings throughout the poem: a man and a woman, a woman and her son, a bird and a boy whistling to each other, and finally  the two eyes at the end of the poem: one in apparent contentment in its nest, the other shedding what I take to be tears:

One sits within his like an egg in a nest
the last spills as it mates, as it cries

The piece that I've skipped over in that sequence is perhaps the most important for me in terms of how I construct the poem in my mind as I read. It's the middle assertion: This is a song with two swallows. And it is precisely this phrasing that snaps the whole poem into focus for me. It's a song. It is asking to be read as a sequence of words that make a certain kind of music. And once that is brought to the forefront of my consciousness, I see it everywhere. Re-reading, for example, those first two lines: A man in need of a bird of yarn enters a town with two suns. Put aside for a moment the question of what it might mean. Listen to the echoes there, the consonants: man, yarn, town, sun; need, bird; enters, town, two. These combinations and permutations of sound continue throughout the poem: a woman paints a postcard; a bird and a boy whistle one to the other; This a sentence with two eyes; spills as it mates, as it cries. If this poem were read out loud to a listener who had no English, they'd still hear its music.

But although this poem presents itself in some ways as an exercise in sound and syntax, it is also a narrative poem of a sort. There's a cast of characters in action in a landscape or series of landscapes: a man and a bird in a town with two suns, a woman painting a postcard and watching her son drinking milk and whistling with the bird "red spooling from incongruous mouths." Which I have to say is belatedly becoming my favorite line in the poem. And finally, surprisingly, the two eyes at the end, each living its own story.

I've read the poem maybe twenty times now and it's starting to cohere in my mind. I don't feel the need to have all of the elements here line up and make logical sense. The narrative makes the sense that it makes. The words make the music that they make. I find the poem to be curious and rich and, well, astonishing.

Process Reflection

 

 Every Tuesday for the last five weeks I've posted something here that I knew in advance that I wanted to write about. In each case it was about something or somebody I had been reading (Renee Gladman, Mark Strand). I had a number of motivations for doing so. One was simply that I had gotten out of the habit of posting to Throughlines, but was not yet ready to give it up, so I figured I'd better get myself together and try to jump start it. I have learned from long experience that I work well, or at least better, when I am working to a deadline, either one set for me or one I set one for myself. So I made a preliminary decision, after my first Tuesday post, that I would put something up each Tuesday for as long as I was able to keep that up. So now I'm writing this on Monday December 9, and what you are reading at this moment is the byproduct of that subtle pressure building up: what I am going to have ready to post tomorrow?

A second reason for posting was that as a retired English teacher I find it hard to get out of the habit of talking up writers whose work I admire. It's my hope that at least once in a while someone might read about a writer here and be encouraged to go out and read that author on their own. I once read someone's snarky description of a well-known poetry critic as being a "bobbysoxer for the poets that she swoons over." I thought to myself at the time, Well, what's wrong with that? There are of course legitimate differences in how individual readers will respond to individual writers. The question of what is good and what is not good in any of the arts is always up for debate. But as a matter of principle I am more inclined to respect those who speak up on behalf of what they like—even if I am unconvinced by their observations—than those who seem to take pleasure in ripping others to shreds.

The third reason—and in my mind the most important—is one I have often written about before. Writing about what I read is for me a generative act: it helps me to better understand what I have read, and, on good days, to work my way into thoughts and realizations that I would not otherwise ever have arrived at. And now that I find myself well into my seventies, it serves the additional function of imprinting in my mind the essence of what I am taking away from the reading. I find at my age that when I don't write about what I have read, it fades much more quickly from my mind. That's always been the case; it's more so now. In recent years I have on more than one occasion found myself halfway through a "new" book saying to myself, "Wait a minute. I think I read this book already." Books I have taken the time to write about, however, tend to stay with me.

The same logic applies, of course, to writing more generally: writing about our experiences, writing about what we believe, writing about our dreams, writing about people we know, writing about our pet peeves, writing about what's wrong and how to fix it. So much of what we experience every day is subliminal, below the threshold of perception. We may be scarcely aware of what we actually do think unless we make it a point of practice to spell it out for ourselves. That's why I'm here today, and why I am planning to have something to post next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. Given the world that we live in and its many distractions, it's easy enough to fall off the wagon, and I supposed at some point I will do that. Until I re-booted myself this November, I had gone sixteen months without posting anything to Throughlines. It's not that I wasn't writing, it's just that I was not posting any of it here. And I've come to miss that.

It's not that I'm under any illusions about failing my legions of followers. No one is going to suffer any intellectual or spiritual impoverishment in the absence of my reports from the field. The only person to whom this enterprise is truly essential is me. So here I am. It's good to be back.

From the Archives: Reading and Writing

I spent several hours today working through folders on external hard drive where I keep backups of pretty much everything, insurance against the day when my now-four-year-old laptop gives up the ghost. I was looking for several particular files I think I might like to use next week when I head back into the classroom, but I also ran across a lot of other files I had more or less forgotten about. One in particular caught my eye, a dialogue or self-interview I had put together maybe ten or twelve years ago which speaks to some of the goals and aspirations of the course I am going to be teaching. So this evening's exercise has been to read and revise that dialogue:

Why do you ask your students to read?

Well, first of all, I’m teaching an English course, and the traditional mission of English programs is to help students learn to improve their reading, writing, and speaking abilities. But beyond that, I’m convinced that reading is fundamental to whatever it is that the students will wind up doing in high school, college, and beyond. In almost any academic discipline, the way you learn is by reading. Whether you’re on your way to becoming a banker, a lawyer, a scientist, a doctor, an architect, a policeman, or a historian, there is a body of work in your discipline which you are going to need to be able to read and to master in order to be effective in your line of work.

But what’s the connection between the reading students do in sophomore English and the reading they may have to do later on?

Well, we could use an analogy. It’s like playing a guitar. You don’t just pick up a guitar and start to play. You teach yourself, through attention and careful practice, what you need in order to be able to improve. If you stop practicing, your skills deteriorate. When you pick up the instrument again, it takes a while to get your mind and your fingers up to speed. There is also no “end” to the process. You don’t simply arrive at a point where you are now an officially certified guitar player with nothing else to learn. There are always new challenges, new levels of craft. What you learn this week is what makes it possible for you to learn even more challenging stuff next week. It’s always possible to get better.

Like playing a guitar, reading is an acquired skill. Students already know how to read, but they bring to their reading a wide range of skills and abilities. They are all capable of learning to read with greater sophistication. Some students are good at one aspect of reading - getting the main idea, for example - and not so good at others. Some students can read one kind of text well—say, a particular kind of  short story— but find poetry (or analytical essays, or postmodern novels) baffling and frustrating to read. I tell my students that one of the goals of the course is to prepare them to be able to read anything they might encounter capably and with some degree of pleasure.

What about students who don’t like to read?

The question seems to imply that liking to read or not liking to read is an inherent and unchangeable trait. I don’t see it that way. I see it as a matter of choice. I frequently ask students to rate what we are reading on a scale of 1 to 7, with one being utter disdain and 7 being enthusiastic acceptance. Typically, in a room of 20 students there will be at least one student at each of the seven stations, and a cluster of students between 3 and 5. The point which I make with the students is that the range of responses—and there is always a range of responses—highlights the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with any of the texts we read. (In fact, pretty much any text a student is likely to read in class has already been screened multiple times before it even hits the students’ desk: it was selected by the author from among all the things s/he might have written to be published in the first place, it was later selected by the editors of whatever text they are reading, and it has been chosen by the teacher for their consideration.) A good reader, should be able to read such a text, get something out of it, and, ideally, derive at least some enjoyment out of the process of doing so. In my experience, many students do. And the fact is that all the way through high school and college students are going to have to read texts which are challenging and which may not at first glance be the kind of thing they would have chosen to read— if in fact they chose to read at all. I ask my students, “Given a choice, would you rather be the kind of student who can read works like this with appreciation and enjoyment, or would you rather be the kind of student who has to struggle through this, and who will hate every minute of it.” Because—and this is the key point—you do have that choice. Whether or not you enjoy what you are reading has a great deal to do with how you are reading it.

Students often find it easier to simply blame the text. They say things like “This book is boring,” or “This author can’t write.” But as I've already pointed out, there are of course other readers, including other student readers, who find value and enjoyment in the process of reading the very same book. So a student who wanted to learn how to read better might be well advised to ask, “What are those readers doing that I’m not doing?” Or, to pose the question another way, “How might I change the way I am reading this text that would allow me to derive more value and enjoyment from the process of reading it?”

We are none of us doomed to remain the kind of readers we already are. We can change, we can learn, we can get better. The bonus benefit is that there is a satisfaction that can be taken in that as well. The apprentice guitar player who finally masters his instrument has something he can DO that gives him pleasure. The same might be said of the apprentice reader.

Can you give an example of a change in the reading process that might result in a more pleasurable reading experience?

Sure. A couple of years ago we had a book-in-common reading program at my school. Everyone on campus— students, staff, admin, and teachers— had agreed (in theory) to read the same book over the summer. For many years previously the books were chosen had been mostly novels or other English-teacherly kinds of books. Someone made the suggestion that the books in common should rotate among departments, and the first department that was chosen was the science department, which selected Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif. The book was met with almost universal disdain by the students. The reaction was universal and antagonistic: the kids hated the book. Most of them read a few pages and simply gave up.

I remembered Microbe Hunters as a book I had read and enjoyed when I was in junior high school. But when I picked it up during the summer I read a couple of pages and said to myself “Uh, oh.” I felt two things right away: 1) that the kids were going to have trouble reading this book, and 2) that I myself was going to have trouble reading this book. There was something about the book that was deeply troubling to me. At this point, I had a couple of choices. One would have been to toss the book aside, as in fact most of the students did. The other option, the one we’re discussing, was to change my approach to the reading process. What I decided, very self-consciously, was to go back to the text and try to figure out exactly what it was about the writing that was getting under my skin and making it hard for me to read this text with enjoyment. I was looking to identify specific passages that bothered me: “See, here it is, right here! This what I object to.” Once I started reading this way, several things began to happen. First of all, the reading went more smoothly. I now had a different purpose for reading, and it became a sort of detective hunt, looking for clues, and that had a kind of inherent interest, and a satisfaction that arose as I was able to figure out exactly what stylistic features were presenting themselves. Secondly, because I now had a purpose for reading that was pulling me forward, other features of the text that I had previously not noticed began to come to my attention. I began to see that in addition to the (relatively few) things that were bothering me, there were a lot of other qualities which were worthwhile and admirable, not the least of which was that I was (re)learning a lot about science and history. Dr Kruif’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject and his admiration for the scientists he was writing about began to draw me in more. In the end, I was glad I had read the book, and looking back on it I can say that although I did not enjoy it when I started, I was able to change my reading process in such a way as to result in a more pleasurable reading experience.

But you’re an adult, and a skilled reader. Do you really think teenagers would have the patience and self-discipline?

It comes back to choices. I don’t think age matters. We all have choices. If there is work to be done (and there is always work to be done) wouldn’t it be better to figure out a way to enjoy doing it? I can’t imagine anyone saying, “No, I’d rather be miserable. I’d rather fail. I’d rather quit.” My working hypothesis is that it is always possible to change. The question is whether we are willing to try. Perhaps some teenagers do lack patience and self-discipline, but I would certainly hope that as teachers we would be in the business of trying to help them develop those qualities.

How do you do that?

First of all, by modeling them. To cite Gandhi's famous dictum: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” I think it’s important for kids to see us working though problems: reading problems, writing problems, problems of articulation or of execution. It’s not easy to read well, write well, think well. It requires time; it requires patience and flexibility and sustained attention. And I’ve become more and more convinced, both in my own life and in the classroom, that in the key to developing those habits of mind is writing. Writing is perhaps the most powerful instrument for self-teaching that we possess.

What is so important about writing?

Most of the time our thoughts at any given moment are in a greater or lesser degree of disarray: a complex jumble of ideas, feelings, beliefs, intuitions, hunches, desires, and moods. Writing is a kind of funnel, it channels thought, develops a line of thought, and allows the thinking to hold still long enough to be reconsidered. The act of writing forces you to stop and find words for what you actually do think. The process of articulating thoughts is clarifying. I often find that once I have written something I begin then to see it differently. In other words, the process of articulating your first thoughts makes it possible to begin having second thoughts. Writing about something you know allows you to consolidate and verify your knowledge. Writing about something you don’t know allows you to figure out what your questions are, what you have to find out. In either case, the process of writing produces thinking which is more structured, more disciplined, and more easily evaluated than thinking which “just happens” in the brain.

Writing, like reading, is a craft, a set of skills. Like most crafts, it can be done well or poorly, with a greater or lesser degree of artistry and sophistication. And the essential element in gaining mastery of the craft is regular practice. I ask my students to write so that they will learn to think better, and read better—and write better.

Are you assuming that writing is self-correcting? That all students have to do is write and they will automatically get better at writing?

No, not really. Although I would argue that such a thing might be possible. A kid who spends hours and hours on a basketball court may not become a good player unless he has mentors or models or coaches who help him learn the dynamics of the game. But in all likelihood, even without the feedback he’s going to wind up being a better player than the kid who only plays once in a while. Yes, it’s important for students to write often if they want to grow as writers and thinkers. But it’s also important that they get feedback and guidance from other readers: peers, teachers, significant others.

There’s another factor that has to be considered as well. “Careaboutability” is a term coined by one of my colleagues that gestures at the issue of significance. It has been my experience throughout my career that students tend to write much better when they are writing about something that is of central importance in their lives. To paraphrase Robert Frost, “No significance for the writer; no significance for the reader.” How well we write, and how carefully we think, has a lot to do with how much is at stake. The single most important element in thoughtfulness is quality of attention that we pay to what we are doing. Many students write as if they were on their way to doing something they consider more important. Which is in fact probably the case. We need to find ways to create with students the opportunity to think about and articulate things that are essential to them, that make a real difference, that are “careaboutable.”

How do you do that?

One way is by turning over the choice of form and topic to the students and allowing them to conduct their own explorations. I make a distinction in my classes between directed assignments and open-ended assignments. A directed assignment is one in which I tell the students what I would like them to do. For example, I might ask them to read a poem, frame a significant question about the poem, and then write two plausible answers to the question. That's a writing task of a fairly familiar sort that asks them to develop a line of thought about what they have been assigned to read. It's not unlike what students have been asked to do in English classes from time immemorial.

An open-ended assignment, on the other hand, is more like, "I'd like you to hand in a piece of writing on Friday. It can be in any form, on any subject you like. The only requirement is that you spend at least half an hour on it." That's an assignment that is in essence a gesture at a territory: "Go find a place to play. Come back when you're done and tell me how it went." I have been giving these kinds of open-ended assignments for 40 years and more, and I'm here to tell you that the writing that students do when you give them the chance to make their own choices is superior, by several orders of magnitude, to what they typically do in response to directed assignments. I'm not arguing for a steady diet of one or the other. But I do think students need both, and in most classrooms they get very little of the latter.

Finally, to return to the connection between reading and writing: my own personal experience has been that I understand and remember much more about what I have read when I make myself write about what I have been reading. Again, writing is a way of channeling a somewhat fuzzy conglomeration of impressions and hunches and perceptions and reactions to a text into something more structured and more deliberate. Writing about a text allows you to see very clearly what you do understand, what you don't understand, and what you have questions about. I find that students who have written about what they have read before they discuss the text in class get a lot further than students who come to class and "wing it" without having experienced the deliberate, thoughtful processing that writing provides us with the chance to do. Furthermore, writing about what you are reading while you are reading it allows you to go back to the text with a clearer purpose, a clearer sense of what you are trying to figure out as you read.

AntiQuotidian

Interesting post by Shane Parrish on Farnam Street last week about Alain de Botton's book How Proust Can Change Your Life. The full backstory is in the post, but the short version goes like this: in 1922 Proust saw and responded to a query in a French newspaper posing the following question:

An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in the last hours.

Proust's reply includes this perhaps surprising assessment:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future delays them occasionally...But let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.

Here's part of de Botton's gloss on Proust:

Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the imminence of death suggests that it was perhaps not life itself which we had lost the taste for – so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it, that our dissatisfactions were more the result of a certain way of living than anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence.

I'm bringing this up because it seems to be to be relevant to me and many of my friends and colleagues as we continue to come to grips with the loss of Dan Mindich. Keeping Dan in our minds and hearts is one way to combat the lamentable tendency to fall into the vale of quotidian dissatisfaction, and one way to continue to celebrate life as he chose to do.