The Diffi(cult)ly of Thomas Pynchon

Well boy howdy . . . here's Thomas Pynchon! He's kind of a difficult read, no? So anyway, here's an entire "internet page" of advice for how to make your way through Pynchon for the first (and second and third) time. Some excepts:

Steven Maas
I tell Pynchon newbies:

• It's the most fun you can have without risking arrest in many states.
• Leave your preconceptions at the door and enjoy your new and exotic surroundings.
• If something baffles you, read on for the next moment of searingly bright light and don't worry about it. With time and re-readings everything (well, many things) will be made clear.
  

Difficult, schmifficult!

Lindsay Gillies:
Four short principles for newbies:

• Read each word, one after the other. Gravity's Rainbow is a deeply interconnected stream of jazz — you can't skim it.
• Let the stream affect you without trying to figure it out. Give up to it.
• Commit to getting through the first 50 pages. It's something very different than most other stuff you've read; not harder, just harder to hear.
• If, after 1, 2 & 3, you still don't connect, don't write it off, just put it away for a while.

And as my office mate and fiction writer Dave Nicholas says about writers: "If you've been on The Simpsons, you've achieved something."

See you there . . .

Happy Spring Break

Here's a shorter version of "The Waste Land," for your Spring Break enjoyment:

grumble . . . grumble . . . SOMETHING IN GREEK. . . grumble . . . grumble . . . DANTE . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . LONDON IS A HORRIBLY FRIGHTENING PLACE DON’T YOU AGREE . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . SHAKESPEARE! . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . THE BIBLE THE BIBLE THE BIBLE . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . THIS ONE ELIZABETHIAN SOMETHING OR OTHER . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . VEGETATION MYTH . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . DANTE X2 . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . A NURSERY RHYME OR TWO . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . THE GRAIL . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . GREEK MYTH . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . A LARGE PORTION OF EASTERN PHILOSOPHY . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . A SONG I HEARD JUST THIS OTHER NIGHT . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . CUT BY POUND . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . THE END? . . . grumble . . . grumble . . . WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT

Somebody's on to something!

Simply Me has a simply brilliant reading of "Burial of the Dead," the first section of "The Waste Land" (TWL):

The first section of the poem is titled the "The Burial of the Dead", sounds great? NOT. I thought to myself why would I want to read something that is titled that way. The title threw me off and the poem is nothing what you expect it to be. Eliot is talking about more then just literarily burying the dead. He is talking about the seasons dying. Summer is great but then fall comes around and everything dies. Also in the first section he says, "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." Made me think of how the birds migrate south in the winter for the warm weather. Maybe the world which he is living in "dies" so to speak because all of this.

She's right! One of the themes of TWL is the death and (hopefully) rebirth of the earth. Almost all ancient cultures had something called a "vegetation myth," a way of explaining to themselves (pre-science) why the earth grew cold and dark for a third of the year. If you put yourself in someone else's shoes who doesn't have the benefit of science to explain winter, it's a pretty frightening thing to experience.

Here's the vegetation myth in Greek Mythology, the story of Demeter and Persephone.

Some Words on "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

T.S. Eliot's essay, much like a lot of his stuff, is a daunting thing to encounter at first. That's why is I think Fresh does a really nice job isolating one of its main points:

Eliot describes in this case how poems as they are related to other poems and how that relation essentially makes or breaks them. Writing like many things in life comes from a long line of antecessors who have affected the way we write even today.

Regarding the above photo: I've always been fascinated with Eliot's hair. What kind of product does he use to get that effect?

Once, during a particular intensive week or so of reading Eliot, I had a dream in which Eliot and Ezra Pound spend a great deal of time making fun of my hair. It was weird.

The exasperation that is Eliot

R.A. Bella has a great post looking at some of the themes of Eliot's "The Waste Land":

A prevailant them throughout appears to be death, and life that cycles through death. Symbols of life are breeding lilacs(known for passion, beauty, deise, promise and life), summer, rain, rivers, lakes(all water representative of life) Where he writes," I will show you fear in a handful of dust, he is stating that life is fleeting, he writes again and again of life coming out of death. He writes of the warning of fleeting lives as he writes," Fresh blows the wind to the homeland; my Irish child, why are you waiting?He gives another symbol of life, the hyacinth girl. The line below says that 'waste and empty is the sea' Since the water represents life I am thinking that he is saying that life is empty when caught up in the past.

What do you want Essay #2 to be about?

So I'm in the midst of grading your first set of essays, and it led me to think about Essay #2. I'm still tossing around a few ideas about the assignment, which I'll give you before Spring Break.

But I wanted to hear your ideas--I'm sure you have them. So, let me ask this question: What would make a good topic for Essay #2?

I'm really interesting in your ideas for an assignment. I can't say that I'll definitely use an of them, but I thought bringing you guys into this conversation would be good for the class.

So, if you have ideas, half-ideas, thoughts, or suggestions for what you'd like to write about for the second essay, please leave them in the comments here.

The (Annotated) Waste Land

While I'm rifling through my past life, looking for my notes on T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," please take a minute to check out this site, the annotated version of "The Waste Land."

I can't stress its usefulness enough. It's pretty great. It allows you to read the poem in one screen and link to copious notes in another, all at the same time. If you're staggering through Eliot's poem, take 10-20 minutes to check this out. It may very well be the fragments you shore against your ruin (you know, so to speak).

Chandler's "Red Wind"

Here's a quick round-up of some really good blog posts on Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind."

stryker says:

Chandler's use of shadows to make his characters mysterious is done with great care and perfect timing. A good example of this would be on page 1556 when John Dalmus gets back from the police station and tries to get into his apartment building and hears a low quiet voice say, "Please". Dalmus states that he knew the voice so he got into her car. This is perfect timing because you now have a picture in your head of this tall beautiful women who you thought you knew but now she is doing something out of the ordinary. You think you have her pinned down as a loose woman but this appearance makes you wonder what she is really up to.

Octavius says:

One thing that I noticed about this piece is how Dalmas, who is a character, is also the narrator. I have read plenty of novels and never really paid attention to this very important detail. I think that reading and analyzing poetry has really paid off. The first thing I do when I read is automatically try to analyze what the author is trying to say, how he is saying it, and what it is he means by it. Another thing that I can attribute to reading poetry is the way that my mind wants to recreate what I read, giving it my own twist.

And finally, George lays out Dalmas's character:

Even though the story is very interesting, what interests me the most was Damas character. Like I mentioned in the beginning, Damas was a man that displayed courage and sensitivity. Damas showed courage in various occasions throughout the story. For example, when the murder left, he was the first to go after him and take the license plate numbers. He investigated Lola, Miss Kolchenko, and Mr Frank.

He encountered death when Mr Tessilore threatened him and during all these events, there is no sign that Damas ever carried a weapon or a friend with him. It shows tremendous courage to go after a murder, especially when we consider that Damas was not acquainted with any of the subjects that he dealed with.

Damas also showed sensitivity during the story. He did his best to cover up Lola since she had saved his life. He wasn't going to take this act for granted, and actually helped her out in may ways.

And here's Joan Didion, one of my favorite writers, talking about the Santa Ana winds, which play a large-if-mysterious role in "Red Wind":

I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

EXTRA CREDIT: Word, the English Club reading series

The English Club's reading series, Word, is taking place this Wednesday, March 10. The reading is from 5pm to 6pm, and it's in the second floor of the Nampa campus.

I also wanted to offer you the chance for some extra credit if you attend and write a little something about it. Here's the deal:

Zach Critser is reading nonfiction and fiction. If you decide to attend (and I encourage you to), write a short, 300-word blog post on his reading. It'll be worth twenty participation points, so if you've missed a class, this is your chance to make up those points.

I am also reading too, but giving you extra credit to write about my reading is weird, so I'm not going to do that. You'll need to write 300 words on Zach. A couple of you went to last semester's reading and really enjoyed it. I hope you'll come out again.

Well, this is kind of genuis . . .

You probably want to check out ol' Peg Leg's (count 'em) two pastiches of Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. They're pretty damn good.

Also, you may also what to consider the painting above, Juan Gris's "Violin and Playing Cards," an example of Cubism. This movement in art heavily influenced Stevens, especially in "Blackbirds."

"The greatest poverty is not to live in a physcial world"

If you've read any Wallace Stevens, the above quote doesn't sound like something he's say (though he did). The guy wrote "The Emperor of Ice Cream," for cryin' out loud.

But one way to think about Steven's poetry is through the lens of our relationship with the physical world, how human perception shapes our experience of our world.

If you're having trouble with Stevens, you're not alone. I spend my 20's trying to read him, failing to connect with any of his poems, and writing him off as some abstract/surrealist that didn't share any of my concerns, poetry and otherwise.

But then I found this poem:

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

I won't go into too much detail here, but I will say that after hearing Stevens read this, a lot of his other poems that had spent years baffling me just sorta clicked. Stevens is certainly a poet of ideas. And this idea fits in fairly comfortably with "Modernist" poetry. William Carlos Williams, who we'll get to in a bit, expressed a similar sentiment when he said "No ideas but in things."

In this poem, Stevens is very concerned with a thing, but it doesn't try to communicate a description--that would contradict the idea that's he's working with. We'll talk about about Stevens and this poem in class, but I wanted to get it to you here in case it helps you like it helped me.

Idealism versus Pragmatism

In light of last week's discussion about the pragmatism of Booker T. Washington's approach to racial equality in American versus W.E.B DeBois's more idealistic critique of Washington's philosophy, this WaPo story by Dana Milbank seems awfully relevant.

The story argues that Obama needs ditch some of the idealism that emanates from his White House staff and heed the advice of his uber-pragmatic chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Obama faces a question much like that one we wrestled with last class.

Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.

In my view, this is a question central to the idea of America, a political experiment that has its roots in the radical idea that "all men are created equal." Our reality does not match our ideals. So how do we begin to change--this is a debate that continues on and on.

Washington v. DeBois

There were some great posts on the Washington / DeBois question. I really like this comparison at "Lines upon the page of life":

Washington in his time was smart enough to know that Mary Poppin's medication worked best. If he had a theme song it would be," A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down!" Du Bois would be more like Beastie Boy's hit,"You've got to fight for your right, to Party."(not to make light of the subject) . Both Washington and Du Bois were valuable writers, and both were well written intelligent men.

Where do you get your ideas?

This is one of the most common questions asked of writers and poets. The more disingenuous writers try to convince readers that their ideas appear out of thin air. The more honest among us fess up--the best ideas for stories and poems are often stolen.

Just ask William Faulkner, whose seems to have drawn his inspiration for some of the best novels written in the last century from the diaries of a wealthy plantation owner:

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.

Paul Constant of The Stranger says it best:

Some will probably take this as an excuse to bash Faulkner for a vague kind of plagiarism. I think it's just proof that ideas don't come to people whole, and novelists are no exception.

Crossposted at ENGL291

On reading and blogging

Some interesting thoughts on the two subject as they collide by Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of my favorite writers:

Without getting into specifics, last month was the best month this blog has had since the election high. But the posts that do the best, in terms of traffic and comments, aren't quick hit, off the cuff, witty observations (Crash-bashing excluded) but the dense, long-ish stuff that usually comes from reading books. A couple of weeks ago, we had 100plus comment discussing whether slave should be considered as assets, labor, or both.

On Trickster-ism

Here's a past post about the Trickster figure we talked about in class. "The Signifying Monkey" is a classic Trickster Figure:

The toast itself usually is a narrative about deception, hustling, or someone getting over on someone else. But one of the essential elements of this story is that the trickster/bandit/hustler is almost always in a position of lesser power than the victim. The classic example here is the Signifying Monkey.

Here's nice site that explains the concept of the Signifying Monkey a little bit more and provides examples. Let's do a little quoting from the site, yes?

. . . a trickster figure such as the Signifying Monkey enjoys stirring up trouble for its own sake. All trickster figures, however, are rather wise too. Perhaps they know that laughing at trouble (and even creating trouble just to laugh) has a special kind of transformative power. Tricksters can level the playing field in a flash and make it possible for burdened and uptight people to suddenly feel lighthearted and playful. Tricksters show up in the folklore and creation myths of a number of cultures worldwide, including African, Haitian, Native American (or American Indian) and African American.

Another way to think about the Signifying Monkey as it relates to the toast is in terms of social power. Signifying, then, is a way to not only speak truth to power without getting killed (court jester) but also to indirectly attack it not through force but through intelligence and manipulation. Check out this video of Doug Hammond reciting on of the Signifying Monkey toasts.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because the toast is more than indirectly related to the beginnings of hip-hop in both form and theme. The hip-hop line is, for the most part, accentual--four beats a line. It follows a definite rhyme scheme. And good bit of the canon tells the stories of an anti-hero--the drug dealer. Like the toast, it is full of braggadocio, insult, and verbal ingenuity and dexterity (e.g. the first three Wu joints).

There is a book that is a wonderful, wonderful collection of toasts by Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me.

Whitman and the Boise YMCA

Hamster (that's Mr. Transcendental Hamster to you, buddy) has a wonderful post on Whitman and, well, life. It's really good, and you should probably read it.

Here's a taste:

There is an interconnection among us all! Yes, his atoms are my atoms, etc. This unexpected transcendental experience results in a spontaneous grin and chuckle. At this, my son's expression is quizzical as he asks me "what's up?" Obviously, he is not a student of Whitman's work.

Whitman in the VQR

The Virginia Quarterly Review dedicated an entire issue in 2005 to Walt Whitman. It's a fairly impressive thing--writers and academics and fellow poets thinking about writing about the same poems that you're reading for next week.

Here's the poet Jane Hirshfield writing about Section 26 of "Song of Myself":

“I Hear America Singing” holds one example of Whitman’s listening. Equally powerful is section 26 of “Song of Myself.” The halfway mark in that work’s liturgical year, it begins, “Now I will do nothing but listen.” Recorded in the lines that follow are the “bravura of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames,” the sounds of stevedores’ labor and laughter, of a judge gravely, reluctantly, pronouncing a sentence of death. The passage moves from the sounds of the natural and industrial worlds to those of violoncello, tenor, and a soprano whose voice “wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.” Whitman asks no less ardor of us. His omnivorous, compassionate insistence that we live as his companion “cameradoes” in the fullest pitch and range of existence—that is the irresistible music of Whitman, for me, the song of all of ourselves.

You can read the rest here.

Whitman Parodies

Our buddy Walt sure talks a good game at times. But not everyone took him as seriously as he seems to have taken himself.

Check out this post on the Poetry Foundation's blog -- "I, Too, Am a Vegetable: Walt Whitman Parodies."

A question: Do you think Whitman takes himself seriously all the time? Or do you ever detect some ironic posturing? If so, where?

Walt Whitman on PBS

Here's the link to the documentary on Whitman we watched in class last night.

Walt Whitman - American Experience

Working Habits

Proust
used
to
too.

-- George Starbuck