truth, approximately

Winner of the Ba Jin blog prize for Best 2016 book read in 2017

PROXIES: ESSAYS NEAR KNOWING: {A RECKONING}
Brian Blanchfield
Nightboat 2016

Nothing too thoughtful I can say about this fascinating and modern essay collection. It does a lot of thinking about itself already, whether it’s the many senses of the term proxy, or on the curious subtitle {Permitting Shame, Error, and Guilt, Myself the Single Source}. Blanchfield seems to have gone back to basics. On the surface, these seem like old-school, 18th century  essays: short, focused on a single subject (“On this, On that”). There’s only one space break in the whole text. However, the pieces do not use any research; if Blanchfield wants to mention Erich Auerbach or an essay by Berger, he must rely on memory and paraphrase. A 20-page section at the end called “Correction.” (what could the full stop mean?) contains a rolling list of errata.

Each piece starts out innocuously enough, expositional. He gives us the two main meanings of “frottage.” But then the rhythm of thinking takes a dip, and we land in something dark and personal. Some scenes, like a weird physical game between young Brian and his mother, are clearly painful for the author to render. The single-subject format provides an oblique way to account for (reckoning) a life that has been through New York, Boston, Tuscon, and also through Baptist church, academia, the NY gay scene at the tail end of the AIDS crisis. How ontologically multiple an ordinary life can seem.

How about the style? Every so often Blanchfield will build up lovely, sinuous sentences. On being asked why he, a poet, does not write the way he speaks:

Why is poetry pretentious? Is that the question? Certainly to answer “Well, there I was speaking as my representative shepherd” doesn’t help the cause. There are all kinds of ways to answer the question, including to define poetry as yet another art that pulls attention to the medium, language, defamiliarizing it from its usual invisible, directly communicative and expository functions, thereby discovering it afresh, activating and liberating it. But it is in usual, directly communicative and expository language that this explanation is offered, and so seems paltry, and even if one cuts to the chase and says, “You don’t tell a dancer that’s not how you normally move,” the defensiveness concedes the point. What was the point? (25)

The shepherd, evoking the pastorale, the happy place (this is from “On the Locus Amoenus”). In another piece, “On Propositionizing,” he constellates Heidegger, of all people, with Helen Keller’s famous breakthrough. These essays, so modest in tone, are actually flaunting the kind of analysis that is possible without recourse to wikipedia or fact-checking. If anything, our addiction to facticity and accuracy can even block off certain styles of thinking. Is this reactionary? Not at all, just a gentle reminder of the complexity of what we can know, and what we do know. Benjamin and Adorno, working under the failure of the German socialist revolution, were making the same claims. One can’t make do with facts and reason alone. We need to reckon with the irrational, the free-form paths of the mind. There’s a distinction to be made between epistemology and epistemophilia.

(I wonder if it’s a particularly USian thing to want facts, adult education, from all media, including novels and stand-up routines. This isn’t a recent thing either: Melville’s early novels were received like travelogues, and then were disappointing as such.)

Those who would claim that critical theory with its jargon and relativistic nuttiness is responsible for the “post-fact world” (the soft left’s version of the right’s complaints against “cultural Marxism”) are invited to see what an unconstrained thinking mind is capable of in this clever, modest, beautifully written project.

Reflections at a port in Tema circa 1953 (quote)

Richard Wright’s BLACK POWER: A RECORD OF REACTIONS IN A LAND OF PATHOS, pp. 158-59.

It seems that the world cannot leave Africa alone. All of Europe is represented here in Africa, to kill or save Africa. The businessman, the missionary, the soldier are here, and each of them looks at the question of the meaning of human life on this earth when he looks at Africa. The businessman wants to get rich, which means that African suffering to him is an opportunity. The soldier wants to kill — for the African is “different” and is, therefore, an enemy. The missionary yearns to “save,” that is, to remake his own image; but it is not the African that he is trying to save; it is himself, his sense of not belonging to the world in which he was born…. (No one should be allowed voluntarily to enter Africa; one should be sentenced there to service….)

One does not react to Africa as Africa is, and this is because so few can react to life as life is. One reacts to Africa as one is, as one lives; one’s reaction to Africa is one’s life, one’s ultimate sense of things. Africa is a vast, dingy mirror and what modern man sees in that mirror he hates and wants to destroy. He thinks, when looking into that mirror, that he is looking at black people whoa re inferior, but, really, he is looking at himself, his first impulse to vindicate himself is to smash this horrible image of himself which his own soul projects out upon this Africa.

In the future men will die, has they have died in the past, about the meaning of Africa; the only difference in that future fighting and dying will be that the Africans themselves will be whole-heartedly involved in the fighting and dying from the beginning, for they too have now caught a sense of what their problem is; they too have seen themselves reflected in the mirror of their misery and they are aroused about the meaning of their own lives. The European white man made Africa what he, at bottom, thought of himself; it was the rejected and self-despised of Europe who conquered and despoiled Africa. But today Africa is not alone in her misery. She is keenly aware that there are others who would solve their problems at the expense of her misery….

To ask if Africa can be changed is to ask if man can be changed. Africa must and will become a religion, not a religion contained within the four walls of a church, but a religion lived and fought out beneath the glare of a pitiless tropical sun. The fight will be long, new, unheard of, necessitating a weighing of life in terms that modern man has not yet thought of.

Life in Africa must handle life; life here is just bare, sentient life; life is all life has in Africa. This might sound strange to Western ears, but here it is so plain and simple and true. No wonder men killed and enslaved others in Africa; no wonder they sacrificed human beings; no wonder they invented fantastic religions — they did these things because they were really reacting to themselves, their sense of themselves.

Africa, with its high rain forest, with its stifling heat and lush vegetation, might well be mankind’s queerest laboratory. Here instinct ruled and flowered without being concerned with the nature of the physical structure of the world; man lived without too much effort; there was nothing to distract him from concentrating upon the currents and countercurrents of his heart. He was thus free to project out of himself what he thought he was. Man has lived here in a waking dream, and, to some extent, he still lives here in that dream.

Africa is dangerous, evoking in one a total attitude toward life, calling into question the basic assumptions of existence. Africa is the world of man; if you are wild, Africa’s wild; if you are empty, so’s Africa….

V. Woolf cracks a dick joke

from A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before. Here I came to the books by living writers, and there paused and wondered if this fact were not at the root of something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire for self-assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged before, rather excessively. That perhaps accounts for some of the characteristics that I remember to have found here, I thought, taking down a new novel by Mr A, who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, apparently, by the reviewers. I opened it. Indeed, it was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter ‘I’. One began to be tired of ‘I’. Not but what this ‘I’ was a most respectable ‘I’; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that ‘I’ from the bottom of my heart. But—here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But . . . she has not a bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and here I turned page after page very fast, feeling that the crisis was approaching, and so it was. It took place on the beach under the sun. It was done very openly. It was done very vigorously. Nothing could have been more indecent. But . . . I had said ‘but’ too often. One cannot go on saying ‘but’. One must finish the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, ‘But—I am bored!’ But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter ‘I’ and the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing will grow there. And partly for some more obscure reason. There seemed to be some obstacle, some impediment in Mr A’s mind which blocked the fountain of creative energy and shored it within narrow limits. And remembering the lunch party at Oxbridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti all in a bunch, it seemed possible that the impediment lay there. As he no longer hums under his breath, ‘There has fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate’, when Phoebe crosses the beach, and she no longer replies, ‘My heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water’d shoot’, when Alan approaches what can he do? Being honest as the day and logical as the sun, there is only one thing he can do. And that he does, to do him justice, over and over (I said turning the pages) and over again. And that, I added, aware of the awful nature of the confession, seems somehow dull. Shakespeare’s indecency uproots a thousand other things in one’s mind, and is far from being dull. But Shakespeare does it for pleasure; Mr A, as the nurses say, does it on purpose. He does it in protest. He is protesting against the equality of the other sex by asserting his own superiority. He is therefore impeded and inhibited and self-conscious as Shakespeare might have been if he too had known Miss Clough and Miss Davies. Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different from what it is if the women’s movement had begun in the sixteenth century and not in the nineteenth.

“Death can be so beautiful”

Svetlana Alexievich’s VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL, pp. 151-152

At first the question was, Who’s to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do? How do we save ourselves? After realizing that this would not be for one year or two, but for many generations, we began to look back, turning the pages.

It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber’s. I’m preparing lunch when my husband comes back. “There’s some sort of fire at the nuclear plant,” he says. “They’re saying we are not to turn off the radio.” I forgot to say that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn’t any ordinary fire, it was some kind of emanation. It was pretty. I’d never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn’t have them went to friends’ houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, “Look! Remember!” And these were people who worked at the reactor — engineers, workers, physics instructors. They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful. Thought I wouldn’t say it had no smell — it wasn’t a spring or autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn’t the smell of earth. My throat tickled, and my eyes watered.

Merry Christmas~

true pessimists don’t kill themselves (quote)

Simon Critchley’s SUICIDE p. 106-07

Perhaps we have to calm down and look at matters more soberly and more pessimistically, without giving in to the optimistic delusions that our death would solve any kind of problem, enact payback, revenge or retribution, save us from ourselves, from others or from the painful commotion of the world. In a delicious coup de grace, Cioran writes,

‘The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?’

I find something grimly reassuring and even fortifying in what we might call ‘the inelegance of the refutation of suicide.’ Let’s grant that the capacity for suicide is what, at least partially, picks us out as a species. For as long as we are in possession of the powers of reflection and basic motility skills, we own the weapon with which we can assert our freedom and end our days, should we wish for such a consummation. But this does not entail that we should use that weapon. Not at all. That would be far too optimistic an Act. Nothing would be saved by our suicide.

Why not calm down and enjoy the world’s melancholy spectacle that spreads out so capaciously and delightfully before us? Why not linger a while in the face of what Nietzsche calls ‘strict, hard factuality?’ Why not try and turn ourselves inside out, away from the finally hateful inward suffering, and outwards and upwards towards others, not in the name of some right or duty, but out of love? Each of us has the power to kill themselves. Sure. But why not choose instead to give oneself to another or others in an act of love, that is, to give what one does not have and to receive that over which one has no power? Why not attempt a minimal conversion away from the self-aversion that lacerates and paralyzes us towards another possible version of ourselves? Is this not finally more courageous? Such is perhaps what Nietzsche calls the pessimism of strength as opposed to an optimism of naivety and weakness. True pessimists don’t kill themselves. Is that not enough?

feelin’ monstrous and free (notes)

Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (reread)

The most damning thing i can say about it is that it just didn’t really change this time since senior year in high school. The text felt inert in that way. i remembered reading the same language as before, and it is beautiful language, about the sepulchral metropolis, or the jungle as a dream, or the steamboat as a crawling beetle, and Kurtz’s head as an ivory ball. It’s still racist. There’s plenty of criticism about this; the only that ive read is a squib by Jane Smiley, arguing that that the novella’s misogyny and white supremacist attitudes are enough to knock it off the tier of art. We may or may not go so far, but this time around i wasnt impressed by Marlowe’s storytelling. He gets ahead of himself, like at the beginning of part 2, when out of nowhere he talks about “the girl” and describes Kurtz when he was in the middle of the river journey, or bringing up the report with “Exterminate all the Brutes!” It wasn’t effective for me this time.

Joan Didion’s SALVADOR

But speaking of HoD, this novella length work of non fiction uses a long smack of it as an epigraph. Didion’s literary reporting on the Salvadorian civil war is modeled on that book in a way; the short length sustains a fragmented and nonlinear structure. i read it in one sitting, and i dont know what was up, but i was just so distracted that i really didnt take it all in. It’d be interesting to hold this piece in relation to “The White Album,” tho. Didion’s persona with her paranoia and disorientation fits this topic and location, where the weather is always “earthquake weather,” and the who what where when and why are unstable and always changing, especially statistics.

That’s what makes the journalism “literary,” as well as a self-reflection; Didion writes about how she reports and writes:

This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was presumably being saved, and I wrote it down dutifully, this being the kind of “color” I knew how to interpret, the kind of inductive irony, the detail that was supposed to illuminate the story. As I wrote it down I realized that I was no longer uch interested in thsi kind of irony, that this was a story that would not be illuminated by such details, that this was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all, that this was perhaps even less a “story” than a noche obscura. As I waited to cross back over the Boulevard de los Heroes to the Camino Real I noticed soldiers herding a young civilian into a van, their guns at the boy’s back, and I walked straight ahead, not wanting to see anything at all.

Joseph Tabbi’s NOBODY GREW BUT THE BUSINESS

This has been my subway book. It may sound weird to plumb Gaddis’s fiction (and his daughter’s) for biographical details, but Tabbi pulls it off with careful reading and evidence from correspondence. It’s an exciting hybrid of critical biography and broader cultural commentary, that’s really exciting to read right now bc it’s so contemporary. Tabbi has some of the best thoughts on our cybernetic hypertextual internet age, and how fiction writers are still sprinting to catch up with Gaddis’s JR in capturing it, made all the more difficult bc of our literary culture’s backlash against what Wallace called “Image-Fiction” and in favor of realism. Tabbi argues effectively that it’s not illegibility that makes work like Gaddis’s “difficult,” but how they ask for readers-as-collaborators.

jottings

Much reading, little writing — for the blog, that is. i’ve been wrapped up in doing re-writes for my “serious” pieces and a magazine submission (eeep). There are big plans in store for the reading diary, however. Readers can look forward to a very long but casual post on Tarkovsky, book reports on a couple of Coetzee novels, and two Let’s Reads which will at one point be running concurrently.

Yet i feel compelled to at least keep a catalog of my reading this past week.

have the courage to read this book

[CN: Anti-black violence, n-word mention]

It’s really exciting that a piece of literature so completely dis-interested in appeasing whiteness is getting the scale of attention this book is receiving. Yes, you should read it. Yes, it’s every bit as beautifully written as they are saying it is. It really is an open letter to Coates’s son; it has the language of a letter in its simplicity, its anaphoras. The paragraphs are breaths, extensive and measured, containing an incredible rage at a cosmic injustice, and they end on powerful and sometimes enigmatic imagery.

You can almost see the struggle of the publishing industry in trying to market this book. The blurbs i hear on it, regurgitated from press kits, is that it’s part autobiography and part historical examination of the Civil War and of black power struggles in the time after the Movement. And it has those elements. The language includes history, grapples with it, shows much of it to be an illusion conjured by the white establishment, the Dreamers. But it’s not for your edification. The jacket says Coates’s language builds towards “a transcendent vision for a way forward,” when nothing could be more diametrically opposed to the author’s framework. Coates is a thorough materialist, the body is the spirit, and this makes the violence wrought on black bodies in Amerikkka, the power lorded over these bodies, all the more tragic and criminal.

the teachings of Gertie (selected quotes)

“Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence,” by William H. Gass, pp. 69, 75-76, 81, 112, 118, 122

Books contained tenses like closets full of clothes, but the present was the only place we were alive, and the present was like a painting, without before or after, spread to be sure, but not in time; and although, as William James had proved, the present was not absolutely flat, it was nevertheless not much thicker than pigment. Geography would be the study appropriate to it: mapping body space. The earth might be round but experience, in effect, was flat. Life might be long but living was as brief as each breath in breathing. Without a past, in the prolonged narrowness of any “now,” wasn’t everything in a constant condition of commencement? Then, too, breathing is repeating — it is beginning and rebeginning, over and over, again and again and again.

granity’s rainbow

Having been so intrigued by “Street Haunting,” ive been scrounging around for more nonfiction by V. Woolf, looking especially for her theorizations on writing and fiction. Here are my responses to three well-known pieces in which she looks at essays and novels, where they came from, why they dissatisfy her and how she understands the modernist movement in letters.