This looks promising! It holds my attention.
I must slowly re-read this.
No big deal but, this sentence caught my eye:
"I followed the quieted sounds in the rooms ahead. "
I question it, grammatically.
Perhaps, "I followed the faint sounds from the rooms ahead."
The sounds are faint to the listener, but no one has "quieted" them in a transitive sense.
The sounds come FROM the rooms ahead.
The hearer is not IN the rooms ahead, following the sounds.
They say DeLillo rewrites a sentence or paragraph anywhere from 10 to 50 times and keeps all the versions in notebooks, which he eventually sells to archives.
And this sentence:
The actually adult, imperious attendees eyed me with reproach.
Perhaps you might try:
The real adults in attendance imperiously eyed me with reproach.
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Monday, March 10, 2008
A Literary Discussion
Friend: I paint, write music, short stories, screenplays, and am generally "creative"
since creativity really has no more to do with those activities than business or what-have-you and have had an abiding interest in the creative process which tends to be my filter in most conversations - picking through the information for further insights
Sitaram: Robert Ornstein and Charles Tart describe consciousness as a moment to moment process of data reduction if we were equally aware of all internal and external stimuli at once, we would go mad
Friend: or enlightened!
Sitaram: and schizoprenia is involves a breakdown in the normal moment to moment synthesis of ordinary consciousness
Friend: which is something that the schizophrenia bit you mentioned reminded me of somebody said that madness was made up of lots and lots of bits of sanity and it occurred to me on a tonight-show introductory standup routine by the host how he connected one news item with an incongruous one to form an absurd, fictitious, third news item that it's good to have topical comedians because they show us how insane news is all these highly diverse bits of urgency assaulting you and often extremely difficult to assimilate
Sitaram: I saw on tv, one comedian in a greenwich village comedy club.... who got booed, for making a sexual joke that involves a minor in the joke, he is in the men's room, with a young nephew
Friend: how did he take it?
Sitaram: and the nephew says "your member looks DIFFERENT from mine"
Sitaram: so, the punch line is, "that is because mine is erect"
Friend: haha! hilarious
Sitaram: well, in a sense, we laugh but, many are also morally outraged
Friend: yes - humor often involves shock
Sitaram: because, laughing about sexuality and minors is quite taboo, and illegal
Friend: yes - I've noticed George Carlin has done it with fiercely unapologetic mannerisms and perfectly evil glee
Sitaram: I once commented that many start out as child molesters.... but they are children themselves
Friend: God - how true
Sitaram: I mean, when we "play doctor" at age 6 or 9
There is a funny movie "Little Miss Sunshine"
Friend: yes, and our patient might be a few years younger
I saw it
Sitaram: with an old grandpa, who asks the teenage boy, "are you getting any"
the boy says no
Friend: or the same age, of course
Sitaram: grandpa says "you are jail bait, she is jail bait, THAT IS THE BEST KIND" meaning, you fool, you SHOULD be trying to get some but, the most profound shot in the entire movie is in the car journey... a 20 second shot of the little girl, trying to manipulate a puzzle, that has a smiley face but, it is not quite solved and you realize that everyone in the movie is metaphorically working on that smiley face puzzle I mean, trying to find happiness
Friend: yes - I thought it was all a bit too obvious
Sitaram: but, many might not even notice
Friend: it's a good illustration movie I mean, one where you can discuss its elements
Sitaram: my wife was a CPA, but, she did not notice
Friend: to make points
Sitaram: I mean, she is not stupid but, she is not trained to make such observations
Friend: well, sometimes you block things out because they are so embarrassingly obvious
Friend: anyway, the audience should feel it. I think it won for best screenplay
Sitaram: Abraham Heschel said, in his book "The Prophets" (about the old testament), "we must learn to understand what we actually see, rather than to only see or find that which we understand
Friend: and I read an inspiring interview with the guy who wrote it
Sitaram: Annie Proulx was brilliant to think up the phrase "stem the rose"
Friend: yes - good quote - could cure a lot of anxiety
Sitaram: as a euphemism for anal
Friend: focusing on what is instead of what might be
Sitaram: I googled and it occurs nowhere else
and in the movie,... there is a scene, of the two men, years later, at a camp site, drinking "Old Rose" whiskey which is an actual brand
Friend: yes - I prefer, driving the hershey highway
Sitaram: but, that was not in Proulx's original short story
Friend: how is the phrase brilliant?
Sitaram: so, the director decided to enhance that image/metaphor
Friend: because the aureola on the sphincter is rosey?
Sitaram: BECAUSE, it obviously fits, yet, she coined it yes,.... there are references to "rose" previous to Proulx
Sitaram: but no one speaks of "stemming the rose" plus, she is a female writer
Friend: its horrible. absolutely horrible. lol
Sitaram: well, but, wait, look at the brilliance of Nabokov's lolita but, he never won a Nobel, because it is a taboo subject
Friend: I mean, stemming the rose is any number of times more obscene than some other things one might say
Sitaram: and, there is only ONE slightly prurient sentence, where Humbert speaks of "his shaft/lance" something like that yet, Nabakov masterfully crafts each sentence
The same with Proulx
Friend: Humbert's language was wonderfully giddy, but its brilliance also showed his ineffectual foppishness
Sitaram: but Proulx is not at the level of Nabokov So, it is like artistic "brinksmanship" You see how close you can come to the edge of the cliff of taboo, yet, not fall into the abyss of obscenity Same with "Brideshead Revisited"
Evelyn Waugh
Friend: there are instances where euphemisms are more offensive than blatancy
Sitaram: and, yet, all of Brideshead Revisited is an elaborate illustration of Cardinal Newman's coined phrase "illation illation means...
Friend: damn, I didn't read it or maybe only a few pages of it
Sitaram: years of experiences, which subtly bring someone to some conviction of faith
try to see the hour PBS production in which EVERY SINGLE LINE of the novel, becomes script there is NO page in the novel, no scene, which is not PRECISELY represented by that hour movie
Friend: but doesn't such a movie seem redundant?
Sitaram: well, for me, the movie was breathtaking....
Friend: I mean, they're two different animals
Sitaram: and years later, I purchased the novel
Friend: fascinating
Sitaram: some people love Tolkein,.... I cant stand Tolkein
Sitaram: I could not stand Tolkein when I was a young teenager
Friend: why not? I haven't read much of him
Too many precious brain children?
Sitaram: I tried, and his prose seemed juvenile
Friend: what is juvenile prose? didactic? watered -down vocabulary?
Sitaram: well, look at any page in harry potter, and compare the sentences with proulx, nabakov, virginia woolf.. childish, immature
Friend: but how can prose be immature unless it's the ideas behind it that are?
Carver or Hemingway, by contrast
Sitaram: I mean, once you acquire a taste for somone like, say Milan Kundera, you cannot easily go back to Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan series sentence structure and style can be immature
Friend: so the overall picture the author presents is trite and condescending
Sitaram: vocabulary can be immature
Friend: instead of humbly searching
Sitaram: plots and characters etc, can be immature
Friend: a lot of great books begin with apologies to the royalty who might be reading them
Sitaram: well, if you want to go for things like "humbly searching", then michael jackson is a poet, and mohammed was a saint, and the new york post is journalism
Friend: whereas one of these snoozy books might talk down to the average reader
no, I don't think so one who proclaims he knows the answers
Sitaram: I mean, one may take any mediocre author, and say that they are "humbly searching"
Friend: is often irritating
Sitaram: so, are you saying that every book in print, is a great book
Friend: but they're not! they're hacks who work a formula I mean, it's something you sense and usually they're humbly searching for better meanings
Sitaram: so, for me harry potter, and tolkien, are hacks that work a formula
Friend: not just how to write a complete sentence
Sitaram: I cant remember that one novelist, that recently sold his manuscripts for millions to an archive in texas but,.... DeLillo I remembered for years, he reworks a paragraph as much as or times Don DeLillo...
Friend: yes - I remember him compared to Pynchon
Sitaram: now, there is a book called "Critics Manifesto" which bashes DeLillo and Proulx and some others
Friend: and the import Haruki Murakami
Sitaram: Pynchon is an obvious craftsman, as is Rushdie I have not acquired a taste for DeLillo, I have not tried, but, I imagine he is a craftsman
Friend: can "obvious craftsman" imply pretentious? showoffy?
Sitaram: but, I disagree with that "Critics Manifesto" criticism of Proulx
and he picked the ONE passage, that I wrote pages about, in praise, analyzing it
Friend: do you have a favorite Proulx novel?
Sitaram: somethin about "furious dabs of tulips, stuttering"
I think it was in that .... oh, there goes my memory again, the fellow who fails in the usa, and goes to NewFoundland.... and writes
Friend: I started a novel by DeLillo - Underground or something like that
Sitaram: ah, Shipping News
Friend: just to sample the prose
Sitaram: you see how my memory fades
Friend: ok - I'll take a look at it
it comes back in the right circumstances
Sitaram: I mean, E.B. White is a master of what he did....
Friend: it's just that I must read slowly - these thick novels never seem worth their weight
Sitaram: Charlotte's Web is charming, thought provoking but, it is not supposed to be the prose of Nabokov
Hemingway whittled prose and dialogue down to the bare bone...
Friend: and often the novels only solve with bursts of inspiration the tedium they created in the first place
Sitaram: and received a Nobel for it Robert Rouarke, "Something of Value", was bashed for imitating Hemingway's style
Friend: I wonder what you think of the Fantes like john and his son dan
Sitaram: now, no one could pull off being an e.e. cummings, or a james joyce's Finnegan's Wake
Friend: did you think Rouarke was justified in his so-called imitation alleged, I mean
Sitaram: those people created something unique,.... but it becomes no-mans land
because they would by joyce wannabes or cummings wannabes
Friend: it becomes a signature and a trap for a lot of worthy successors who happen to be similar
Sitaram: yet.... didnt joyce invent stream of consciousness..... and one CAN employ that technique
Friend: it's amazing how many forgotten composers made works nearly equivalent to the quality of much of Beethoven
Sitaram: I mean, there were innovative things with st person, rd person, narrative, that do suffer emulation
Sitaram: which is NOT considered imitation
Friend: right
Sitaram: but then, there are things which are inimitable...
Friend: emulation is insightful
Sitaram: simply because the signature is too unique I mean, Plato was the first with dialogues
and Thespius, the ancient greek chorus leader, was the first to innovate a soloist dialogue in between the antiphonal choruses
Friend: humbly searching - an homage to his friend Socrates, right?
Sitaram: which is why actors are called Thespians yet, such stage or dialogue innovation suffers emulation perhaps Lady Murasaki, circa ce, was the first novelist, "Tales of Genji" but, it suffers emulation
Friend: look how many people don't want to watch Chaplin because Gilligan's Island has made them wary of slapstick or Marceau because street mimes have a bad name
Sitaram: we do not point at every subsequent novelist and say, "oh, look, a Murasaki Wannabe"
Friend: maybe any good novelist has to reinvent the novel
Sitaram: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner had their feuds, regarding what is literature, vs what is prostitution but, they all had to put bread on the table, as well
Friend: and has to cunningly fight off his rivals like a lot of rappers do in their lyrics Anais Nin's delta of venus contains such an apology
Sitaram: Nabokov took a big gamble with Lolita, and in some senses, won big time, and in other senses lost
Friend: about how the stories were commissioned by a pervert
Sitaram: the first person to "rap" probably seemed like an idiot Yes, now, everyone accepts it as a vehicle
Friend: it's the most obvious of its intentions of any art form that I know of...
"I want money. I want women. I want those sucker MCs who are taking my money and women and drugs dead"
Sitaram: times, they are a-changin
Friend: which to a lot of people is fairly refreshing
Sitaram: Bob Dylan's songs ran 10 minutes, when everyone elses singles were barely 3 minutes Dylan didnt care He just did his thing Emily Dickenson did not care, nor thoreau...
Sitaram: Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald cared in a significantly different fashion
Friend: this caring-not caring balance seems the essence of creativity
Sitaram: Camus speaks of "that paltry infinity called posterity"
in his "myth of sisyphus
Friend: and Borges distinguishes his aims from those of newspaper journalists
writing for posterity and not for oblivion like they do but Dylan cared intensely
so that he could appear not to care.
Sitaram: I mean, in Homer's Iliad, Diomedes and Glaukos meet on the battlefield, and have long speeches.... regarding how a generation of men is like the leaves which fall and are forgotten well, Dylan wanted success.... but he was determined to do it his way
Friend: Like Matisse organized his messes very secretly
Sitaram: Emily Dickenson did not even care for monitary success
Friend: sometimes one's own way is one's only hope for success.
Sitaram: nor that portuguese poet, Naruda... whats his name
Friend: fans sometimes think the artist could have done it any way when there was really only one path available
Sitaram: and every artist makes what is agonizing seem effortless, seamless
Friend: yes, the not-caring factor
Friend: like the japanese brush masters who did not make a single erasure
Sitaram: who was that ballet dancer, who did the Faun Fawn
Friend: and who painted their works in a matter of minutes with elaborate meditation and rituals preceding the act.
Sitaram: it is irritating that my memory does not work Nijinsky!
Friend: yes, what about him?
Sitaram: I mean, what an artist, yet, what an off the wall fruitcake I mean, like a Nnietzsche, bordering on genius and madness simultaneously Wallace Stevens is a great poet, but was also vice president of a hartford insurance company Stevens was hardly a Baudelaire, and Baudelaire perhas seems staid, compared to ... oh damn my memory
Friend: I've always been smitten by Manet, the revolutionary, whose paintings were dragged through the mud by critics, who was totally borgeouise in his manner and appearance.
Sitaram: the one who wrote Le Bateau Ivre The Drunken Boat
Friend: oh, yes, and charles Ives was an insurance manager I think executive
Sitaram: google helped me, Rimbaud
Friend: then you have picasso and henry miller who asserted an artist couldn't have a second profession
Sitaram: as crazy as Baudelaire was, I think he was conservative compared with Rimbaud But, I may be wrong
Friend: i've read that J.D. Salinger could be remarkably prudish
Sitaram: Woolf and Fitzgerald were quite unstable,.... but, frost, and many others I could name, were quite stable
Friend: which makes perfect sense when you consider that Holden wanted to erase all the fuk yous
Sitaram: good point, about Holden
Friend: and Hemingway seemed the paragon of stability maybe until
Sitaram: well, except for all the drinking and depression
Friend: in later years, yes one artist whose suicide seemed to nullify his body of work, to me,
Sitaram: I have Heminways "Nick Adams" stories arranged in chronological order
Friend: is Spalding Grey maybe a far more minor artist..
but a beloved one
Sitaram: and the very first story is about a young boy, with is dr. father, who thinks about suicide
Friend: does the chronology make more sense to you when you read them that way?
Sitaram: it is striking to read them in order, and see the ideation of hemingways suicide right at the beginning
Friend: oh ok
Sitaram: well, that is why they published that collection
Friend: dr. father?
Sitaram: doctor
Friend: the boy thinks about it?
Sitaram: Hemingway's dad was a doctor too... I think
Friend: ok the father talks about it
Sitaram: you would have to read the story
Friend: sure I might have it
Friend: today is friday?
Sitaram: and, in a way, Hemingway's preoccupation resembles "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinsky where the children like on the railroad tracks, while the train rushes inches overhead, and only in that moment of peril do they feel truly alive
Friend: the name of Hemingway's story
Sitaram: I cant remember
Friend: he has one called today is friday
Sitaram: I have it at home
Friend: but I'm sure that's not it
Sitaram: I will look when I get home
Friend: there's a beautiful movie called The Spirit of the Beehive
made in Spain
Sitaram: I did not see that
Friend: with two little girls standing at a railroad track
Friend: and the single shot of it passing is monumental
the train passing
Sitaram: oh, do you know why all those civil war photos look so stiff?
I mean, the people in the photo look stiff, rigid
Friend: yes, the long exposure
Sitaram: well, they had a brace behind , to hold them still
Friend: oh
Sitaram: so, yes, the brace was because of the long exposure
Friend: I see - that's practical
Sitaram: and all those 17th century and earlier where children look like tiny adults
Friend: the stiff remains
certainly make ancient civilizations look ponderous
corpses
ancient tombs
those profiled egyptians
easter island
It's hard to capture an ancient giggle
but
the roccocco age accounted for that
probably
Sitaram: their are Egyptian paintings in vivid color, showing dark-skined and light-skinned working side by side
well, Abraham's Sara laughs, when she is told she will have a child
in old age
so, we see some ancient humor
Friend: some
although it almost seems like a scoff
designed to show an obstacle in Faith
Sitaram: Homer has some comic scene, where there is a race, and someone falls with his nose in a pile of dung
Friend: How I long to have great belly laughs through Aeschylus
since creativity really has no more to do with those activities than business or what-have-you and have had an abiding interest in the creative process which tends to be my filter in most conversations - picking through the information for further insights
Sitaram: Robert Ornstein and Charles Tart describe consciousness as a moment to moment process of data reduction if we were equally aware of all internal and external stimuli at once, we would go mad
Friend: or enlightened!
Sitaram: and schizoprenia is involves a breakdown in the normal moment to moment synthesis of ordinary consciousness
Friend: which is something that the schizophrenia bit you mentioned reminded me of somebody said that madness was made up of lots and lots of bits of sanity and it occurred to me on a tonight-show introductory standup routine by the host how he connected one news item with an incongruous one to form an absurd, fictitious, third news item that it's good to have topical comedians because they show us how insane news is all these highly diverse bits of urgency assaulting you and often extremely difficult to assimilate
Sitaram: I saw on tv, one comedian in a greenwich village comedy club.... who got booed, for making a sexual joke that involves a minor in the joke, he is in the men's room, with a young nephew
Friend: how did he take it?
Sitaram: and the nephew says "your member looks DIFFERENT from mine"
Sitaram: so, the punch line is, "that is because mine is erect"
Friend: haha! hilarious
Sitaram: well, in a sense, we laugh but, many are also morally outraged
Friend: yes - humor often involves shock
Sitaram: because, laughing about sexuality and minors is quite taboo, and illegal
Friend: yes - I've noticed George Carlin has done it with fiercely unapologetic mannerisms and perfectly evil glee
Sitaram: I once commented that many start out as child molesters.... but they are children themselves
Friend: God - how true
Sitaram: I mean, when we "play doctor" at age 6 or 9
There is a funny movie "Little Miss Sunshine"
Friend: yes, and our patient might be a few years younger
I saw it
Sitaram: with an old grandpa, who asks the teenage boy, "are you getting any"
the boy says no
Friend: or the same age, of course
Sitaram: grandpa says "you are jail bait, she is jail bait, THAT IS THE BEST KIND" meaning, you fool, you SHOULD be trying to get some but, the most profound shot in the entire movie is in the car journey... a 20 second shot of the little girl, trying to manipulate a puzzle, that has a smiley face but, it is not quite solved and you realize that everyone in the movie is metaphorically working on that smiley face puzzle I mean, trying to find happiness
Friend: yes - I thought it was all a bit too obvious
Sitaram: but, many might not even notice
Friend: it's a good illustration movie I mean, one where you can discuss its elements
Sitaram: my wife was a CPA, but, she did not notice
Friend: to make points
Sitaram: I mean, she is not stupid but, she is not trained to make such observations
Friend: well, sometimes you block things out because they are so embarrassingly obvious
Friend: anyway, the audience should feel it. I think it won for best screenplay
Sitaram: Abraham Heschel said, in his book "The Prophets" (about the old testament), "we must learn to understand what we actually see, rather than to only see or find that which we understand
Friend: and I read an inspiring interview with the guy who wrote it
Sitaram: Annie Proulx was brilliant to think up the phrase "stem the rose"
Friend: yes - good quote - could cure a lot of anxiety
Sitaram: as a euphemism for anal
Friend: focusing on what is instead of what might be
Sitaram: I googled and it occurs nowhere else
and in the movie,... there is a scene, of the two men, years later, at a camp site, drinking "Old Rose" whiskey which is an actual brand
Friend: yes - I prefer, driving the hershey highway
Sitaram: but, that was not in Proulx's original short story
Friend: how is the phrase brilliant?
Sitaram: so, the director decided to enhance that image/metaphor
Friend: because the aureola on the sphincter is rosey?
Sitaram: BECAUSE, it obviously fits, yet, she coined it yes,.... there are references to "rose" previous to Proulx
Sitaram: but no one speaks of "stemming the rose" plus, she is a female writer
Friend: its horrible. absolutely horrible. lol
Sitaram: well, but, wait, look at the brilliance of Nabokov's lolita but, he never won a Nobel, because it is a taboo subject
Friend: I mean, stemming the rose is any number of times more obscene than some other things one might say
Sitaram: and, there is only ONE slightly prurient sentence, where Humbert speaks of "his shaft/lance" something like that yet, Nabakov masterfully crafts each sentence
The same with Proulx
Friend: Humbert's language was wonderfully giddy, but its brilliance also showed his ineffectual foppishness
Sitaram: but Proulx is not at the level of Nabokov So, it is like artistic "brinksmanship" You see how close you can come to the edge of the cliff of taboo, yet, not fall into the abyss of obscenity Same with "Brideshead Revisited"
Evelyn Waugh
Friend: there are instances where euphemisms are more offensive than blatancy
Sitaram: and, yet, all of Brideshead Revisited is an elaborate illustration of Cardinal Newman's coined phrase "illation illation means...
Friend: damn, I didn't read it or maybe only a few pages of it
Sitaram: years of experiences, which subtly bring someone to some conviction of faith
try to see the hour PBS production in which EVERY SINGLE LINE of the novel, becomes script there is NO page in the novel, no scene, which is not PRECISELY represented by that hour movie
Friend: but doesn't such a movie seem redundant?
Sitaram: well, for me, the movie was breathtaking....
Friend: I mean, they're two different animals
Sitaram: and years later, I purchased the novel
Friend: fascinating
Sitaram: some people love Tolkein,.... I cant stand Tolkein
Sitaram: I could not stand Tolkein when I was a young teenager
Friend: why not? I haven't read much of him
Too many precious brain children?
Sitaram: I tried, and his prose seemed juvenile
Friend: what is juvenile prose? didactic? watered -down vocabulary?
Sitaram: well, look at any page in harry potter, and compare the sentences with proulx, nabakov, virginia woolf.. childish, immature
Friend: but how can prose be immature unless it's the ideas behind it that are?
Carver or Hemingway, by contrast
Sitaram: I mean, once you acquire a taste for somone like, say Milan Kundera, you cannot easily go back to Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan series sentence structure and style can be immature
Friend: so the overall picture the author presents is trite and condescending
Sitaram: vocabulary can be immature
Friend: instead of humbly searching
Sitaram: plots and characters etc, can be immature
Friend: a lot of great books begin with apologies to the royalty who might be reading them
Sitaram: well, if you want to go for things like "humbly searching", then michael jackson is a poet, and mohammed was a saint, and the new york post is journalism
Friend: whereas one of these snoozy books might talk down to the average reader
no, I don't think so one who proclaims he knows the answers
Sitaram: I mean, one may take any mediocre author, and say that they are "humbly searching"
Friend: is often irritating
Sitaram: so, are you saying that every book in print, is a great book
Friend: but they're not! they're hacks who work a formula I mean, it's something you sense and usually they're humbly searching for better meanings
Sitaram: so, for me harry potter, and tolkien, are hacks that work a formula
Friend: not just how to write a complete sentence
Sitaram: I cant remember that one novelist, that recently sold his manuscripts for millions to an archive in texas but,.... DeLillo I remembered for years, he reworks a paragraph as much as or times Don DeLillo...
Friend: yes - I remember him compared to Pynchon
Sitaram: now, there is a book called "Critics Manifesto" which bashes DeLillo and Proulx and some others
Friend: and the import Haruki Murakami
Sitaram: Pynchon is an obvious craftsman, as is Rushdie I have not acquired a taste for DeLillo, I have not tried, but, I imagine he is a craftsman
Friend: can "obvious craftsman" imply pretentious? showoffy?
Sitaram: but, I disagree with that "Critics Manifesto" criticism of Proulx
and he picked the ONE passage, that I wrote pages about, in praise, analyzing it
Friend: do you have a favorite Proulx novel?
Sitaram: somethin about "furious dabs of tulips, stuttering"
I think it was in that .... oh, there goes my memory again, the fellow who fails in the usa, and goes to NewFoundland.... and writes
Friend: I started a novel by DeLillo - Underground or something like that
Sitaram: ah, Shipping News
Friend: just to sample the prose
Sitaram: you see how my memory fades
Friend: ok - I'll take a look at it
it comes back in the right circumstances
Sitaram: I mean, E.B. White is a master of what he did....
Friend: it's just that I must read slowly - these thick novels never seem worth their weight
Sitaram: Charlotte's Web is charming, thought provoking but, it is not supposed to be the prose of Nabokov
Hemingway whittled prose and dialogue down to the bare bone...
Friend: and often the novels only solve with bursts of inspiration the tedium they created in the first place
Sitaram: and received a Nobel for it Robert Rouarke, "Something of Value", was bashed for imitating Hemingway's style
Friend: I wonder what you think of the Fantes like john and his son dan
Sitaram: now, no one could pull off being an e.e. cummings, or a james joyce's Finnegan's Wake
Friend: did you think Rouarke was justified in his so-called imitation alleged, I mean
Sitaram: those people created something unique,.... but it becomes no-mans land
because they would by joyce wannabes or cummings wannabes
Friend: it becomes a signature and a trap for a lot of worthy successors who happen to be similar
Sitaram: yet.... didnt joyce invent stream of consciousness..... and one CAN employ that technique
Friend: it's amazing how many forgotten composers made works nearly equivalent to the quality of much of Beethoven
Sitaram: I mean, there were innovative things with st person, rd person, narrative, that do suffer emulation
Sitaram: which is NOT considered imitation
Friend: right
Sitaram: but then, there are things which are inimitable...
Friend: emulation is insightful
Sitaram: simply because the signature is too unique I mean, Plato was the first with dialogues
and Thespius, the ancient greek chorus leader, was the first to innovate a soloist dialogue in between the antiphonal choruses
Friend: humbly searching - an homage to his friend Socrates, right?
Sitaram: which is why actors are called Thespians yet, such stage or dialogue innovation suffers emulation perhaps Lady Murasaki, circa ce, was the first novelist, "Tales of Genji" but, it suffers emulation
Friend: look how many people don't want to watch Chaplin because Gilligan's Island has made them wary of slapstick or Marceau because street mimes have a bad name
Sitaram: we do not point at every subsequent novelist and say, "oh, look, a Murasaki Wannabe"
Friend: maybe any good novelist has to reinvent the novel
Sitaram: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner had their feuds, regarding what is literature, vs what is prostitution but, they all had to put bread on the table, as well
Friend: and has to cunningly fight off his rivals like a lot of rappers do in their lyrics Anais Nin's delta of venus contains such an apology
Sitaram: Nabokov took a big gamble with Lolita, and in some senses, won big time, and in other senses lost
Friend: about how the stories were commissioned by a pervert
Sitaram: the first person to "rap" probably seemed like an idiot Yes, now, everyone accepts it as a vehicle
Friend: it's the most obvious of its intentions of any art form that I know of...
"I want money. I want women. I want those sucker MCs who are taking my money and women and drugs dead"
Sitaram: times, they are a-changin
Friend: which to a lot of people is fairly refreshing
Sitaram: Bob Dylan's songs ran 10 minutes, when everyone elses singles were barely 3 minutes Dylan didnt care He just did his thing Emily Dickenson did not care, nor thoreau...
Sitaram: Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald cared in a significantly different fashion
Friend: this caring-not caring balance seems the essence of creativity
Sitaram: Camus speaks of "that paltry infinity called posterity"
in his "myth of sisyphus
Friend: and Borges distinguishes his aims from those of newspaper journalists
writing for posterity and not for oblivion like they do but Dylan cared intensely
so that he could appear not to care.
Sitaram: I mean, in Homer's Iliad, Diomedes and Glaukos meet on the battlefield, and have long speeches.... regarding how a generation of men is like the leaves which fall and are forgotten well, Dylan wanted success.... but he was determined to do it his way
Friend: Like Matisse organized his messes very secretly
Sitaram: Emily Dickenson did not even care for monitary success
Friend: sometimes one's own way is one's only hope for success.
Sitaram: nor that portuguese poet, Naruda... whats his name
Friend: fans sometimes think the artist could have done it any way when there was really only one path available
Sitaram: and every artist makes what is agonizing seem effortless, seamless
Friend: yes, the not-caring factor
Friend: like the japanese brush masters who did not make a single erasure
Sitaram: who was that ballet dancer, who did the Faun Fawn
Friend: and who painted their works in a matter of minutes with elaborate meditation and rituals preceding the act.
Sitaram: it is irritating that my memory does not work Nijinsky!
Friend: yes, what about him?
Sitaram: I mean, what an artist, yet, what an off the wall fruitcake I mean, like a Nnietzsche, bordering on genius and madness simultaneously Wallace Stevens is a great poet, but was also vice president of a hartford insurance company Stevens was hardly a Baudelaire, and Baudelaire perhas seems staid, compared to ... oh damn my memory
Friend: I've always been smitten by Manet, the revolutionary, whose paintings were dragged through the mud by critics, who was totally borgeouise in his manner and appearance.
Sitaram: the one who wrote Le Bateau Ivre The Drunken Boat
Friend: oh, yes, and charles Ives was an insurance manager I think executive
Sitaram: google helped me, Rimbaud
Friend: then you have picasso and henry miller who asserted an artist couldn't have a second profession
Sitaram: as crazy as Baudelaire was, I think he was conservative compared with Rimbaud But, I may be wrong
Friend: i've read that J.D. Salinger could be remarkably prudish
Sitaram: Woolf and Fitzgerald were quite unstable,.... but, frost, and many others I could name, were quite stable
Friend: which makes perfect sense when you consider that Holden wanted to erase all the fuk yous
Sitaram: good point, about Holden
Friend: and Hemingway seemed the paragon of stability maybe until
Sitaram: well, except for all the drinking and depression
Friend: in later years, yes one artist whose suicide seemed to nullify his body of work, to me,
Sitaram: I have Heminways "Nick Adams" stories arranged in chronological order
Friend: is Spalding Grey maybe a far more minor artist..
but a beloved one
Sitaram: and the very first story is about a young boy, with is dr. father, who thinks about suicide
Friend: does the chronology make more sense to you when you read them that way?
Sitaram: it is striking to read them in order, and see the ideation of hemingways suicide right at the beginning
Friend: oh ok
Sitaram: well, that is why they published that collection
Friend: dr. father?
Sitaram: doctor
Friend: the boy thinks about it?
Sitaram: Hemingway's dad was a doctor too... I think
Friend: ok the father talks about it
Sitaram: you would have to read the story
Friend: sure I might have it
Friend: today is friday?
Sitaram: and, in a way, Hemingway's preoccupation resembles "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinsky where the children like on the railroad tracks, while the train rushes inches overhead, and only in that moment of peril do they feel truly alive
Friend: the name of Hemingway's story
Sitaram: I cant remember
Friend: he has one called today is friday
Sitaram: I have it at home
Friend: but I'm sure that's not it
Sitaram: I will look when I get home
Friend: there's a beautiful movie called The Spirit of the Beehive
made in Spain
Sitaram: I did not see that
Friend: with two little girls standing at a railroad track
Friend: and the single shot of it passing is monumental
the train passing
Sitaram: oh, do you know why all those civil war photos look so stiff?
I mean, the people in the photo look stiff, rigid
Friend: yes, the long exposure
Sitaram: well, they had a brace behind , to hold them still
Friend: oh
Sitaram: so, yes, the brace was because of the long exposure
Friend: I see - that's practical
Sitaram: and all those 17th century and earlier where children look like tiny adults
Friend: the stiff remains
certainly make ancient civilizations look ponderous
corpses
ancient tombs
those profiled egyptians
easter island
It's hard to capture an ancient giggle
but
the roccocco age accounted for that
probably
Sitaram: their are Egyptian paintings in vivid color, showing dark-skined and light-skinned working side by side
well, Abraham's Sara laughs, when she is told she will have a child
in old age
so, we see some ancient humor
Friend: some
although it almost seems like a scoff
designed to show an obstacle in Faith
Sitaram: Homer has some comic scene, where there is a race, and someone falls with his nose in a pile of dung
Friend: How I long to have great belly laughs through Aeschylus
Thomas Mann - Death In Venice
Quite by chance, I stumbled upon a paperback biography of Thomas Mann, on sale for $1. The biographer, Richard Winston, passed away at a tragically young age, before he could finish the biography (which ends with a chapter on the writing of Death In Venice.)
The amazing thing is that Thomas Mann actually went on a vacation to Venice with his family, and actually had many of the experiences which he later wove into the novella. Thomas Mann himself acknowledged this fact. And, ten years after Mann's death, a translator interviewed the actual person whom Mann had seen as the "beautiful young boy." Mann, and all the other tourists actually fled Venice because of an epidemic. The composer, Mahler, a friend of Mann, had just died, and Thomas Mann modeled the character, Gustave Aschenbach, after Mahler.
I forget whether it was in high school or college that I was required to read Death In Venice, but I remember being quite impressed with it. Little did I guess that so much of the story was real-life events which Mann simply re-arranged and embellished.
I in no way mean to denigrate or demean Thomas Mann's artistic ability by stating the historical fact that Thomas Mann himself, in his memoirs, letters and conversations, asseverates that the material for Death in Venice was "handed to him on a platter", as it were, and he merely had to re-arrange it. I simply state this as something of surprise, since all my life I had presumed that the entire story was the product of Mann's imagination. I was even more surprised to learn that, 10 years after Mann's death, an old man in Poland was discovered and interviewed and confirmed to be that beautiful young boy whom Mann used as a model for the story. That fellow even stated that, during their vacation, he remembered an man (Thomas Mann), staring at him from the porch of a bungalow each day.
Mann's one biographer (cited above), quotes Mann at some length regarding the notion of a novelist "gathering material" from real life, as fodder for his fiction. Mann's fictionalization of real people and events even becomes a sore-spot with some of his acquaintances.
I do not feel that totally fictionalized works demonstrate greater artistic ability than works which draw upon actual historical events.
I am reminded of one argument that Hemingway's "Farewell To Arms", is a re-write of his failed affair with a nurse. In real life, she dumped Hemingway. In the novel, Hemingway gets her pregnant and she dies professing her love for him.
I suppose what might be explored, is the controversy between the intentional action of the artist, in crafting symbolism, or innuendo, or psycho dynamics into the work, versus the action of the author's subconscious, to color the narrative with something more profound, and all of that versus the notion that the reader's subconscious projects something into the material.
Kyle replies:
This is very interesting because in the film by visconti, much of Mahler's music is used. visconti's film, death in Venice, is almost just as good as mann's story. yes, death in Venice, is a very strong story. very intense and is not surprising that mann experienced much of the events. also think of how risky it would have been to write such a story in 1911. i did once read a small review of the book that was written in 1911 and of course it was scathing, mostly because of its views, not because of its literary merit. i can't remember if i read it in German or not. Mann remains one of my favorite authors, and the magic mountain and doctor Faustus are some of the best books in the 20th century. also i highly recommend reading the Goethe chapter in Lotte in Weimar. Mann does a brilliant stream of conscious of Goethe's mind for about 30 or 40 pages. it is probably better than the last chapter in joyce's Ulysses.
The amazing thing is that Thomas Mann actually went on a vacation to Venice with his family, and actually had many of the experiences which he later wove into the novella. Thomas Mann himself acknowledged this fact. And, ten years after Mann's death, a translator interviewed the actual person whom Mann had seen as the "beautiful young boy." Mann, and all the other tourists actually fled Venice because of an epidemic. The composer, Mahler, a friend of Mann, had just died, and Thomas Mann modeled the character, Gustave Aschenbach, after Mahler.
I forget whether it was in high school or college that I was required to read Death In Venice, but I remember being quite impressed with it. Little did I guess that so much of the story was real-life events which Mann simply re-arranged and embellished.
I in no way mean to denigrate or demean Thomas Mann's artistic ability by stating the historical fact that Thomas Mann himself, in his memoirs, letters and conversations, asseverates that the material for Death in Venice was "handed to him on a platter", as it were, and he merely had to re-arrange it. I simply state this as something of surprise, since all my life I had presumed that the entire story was the product of Mann's imagination. I was even more surprised to learn that, 10 years after Mann's death, an old man in Poland was discovered and interviewed and confirmed to be that beautiful young boy whom Mann used as a model for the story. That fellow even stated that, during their vacation, he remembered an man (Thomas Mann), staring at him from the porch of a bungalow each day.
Mann's one biographer (cited above), quotes Mann at some length regarding the notion of a novelist "gathering material" from real life, as fodder for his fiction. Mann's fictionalization of real people and events even becomes a sore-spot with some of his acquaintances.
I do not feel that totally fictionalized works demonstrate greater artistic ability than works which draw upon actual historical events.
I am reminded of one argument that Hemingway's "Farewell To Arms", is a re-write of his failed affair with a nurse. In real life, she dumped Hemingway. In the novel, Hemingway gets her pregnant and she dies professing her love for him.
I suppose what might be explored, is the controversy between the intentional action of the artist, in crafting symbolism, or innuendo, or psycho dynamics into the work, versus the action of the author's subconscious, to color the narrative with something more profound, and all of that versus the notion that the reader's subconscious projects something into the material.
Kyle replies:
This is very interesting because in the film by visconti, much of Mahler's music is used. visconti's film, death in Venice, is almost just as good as mann's story. yes, death in Venice, is a very strong story. very intense and is not surprising that mann experienced much of the events. also think of how risky it would have been to write such a story in 1911. i did once read a small review of the book that was written in 1911 and of course it was scathing, mostly because of its views, not because of its literary merit. i can't remember if i read it in German or not. Mann remains one of my favorite authors, and the magic mountain and doctor Faustus are some of the best books in the 20th century. also i highly recommend reading the Goethe chapter in Lotte in Weimar. Mann does a brilliant stream of conscious of Goethe's mind for about 30 or 40 pages. it is probably better than the last chapter in joyce's Ulysses.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
East of Eden Excerpt
Excerpt from "East of Eden"
by John Steinbeck (1902-2002)
Penguin Books
ISBN 0-14-200423-5
Chapter 19, pg. 216
A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers,
strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of
themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against
men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When
the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers
come in to help with the development - to solve problems of
ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And
finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out
of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.
The church and the wh@rehouse arrived in the Far West
simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a
different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended
to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of
the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did
the brothels. The sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud
and confident. Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built
churches which couldn't be paid for in a hundred years. The sects
fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine
lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed
all the others were bound for hell in a basket. And each for all its
bumptiousness brought with it the same thing: the Scripture on which
our ethics, our art and poetry and our relationships are built. It took a
smart man to know where the difference lay between the sects, but
anyone could see what they had in common. And they brought music -
maybe not the best, but the form and sense of it. And they brought
conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience. They were not
pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. And
any man could make something pretty fine of it within himself. True
enough, the Reverend Billing, when they caught up with him, turned
out to be a thief, an adulterer, a libertine, and a zoophilist, but that
didn't change the fact that he had communicated some good things to
a great number of receptive people. Billing went to jail, but no one
ever arrested the good things he had released. And it doesn't matter
much that his motive was impure. He used good material and some of
it stuck. I use Billing only as an outrageous example. The honest
preachers had energy and go. They fought the devil, no holds barred,
boots and eye-gouging permitted. You might get the idea that they
howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem
on a row of circus horns. But some of the truth and beauty remained,
and the anthem was recognizable. The sects did more than this,
though. They built the structure of social life in the Salinas Valley. The
church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the
Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the
little theatre.
While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul,
came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time,
the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in
silently and greyly, with its head bowed and its face covered.
You may have seen the spangled palaces of sin and fancy dancing in
the false West of the movies, and maybe some of them existed -- but
not in the Salinas Valley. The brothels were quiet, orderly, and
circumspect. Indeed, if after hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic
conversation against the thumping beat of the melodeon you had
stood under the window of a wh@rehouse and listened to the low
decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse the identities
of the two ministries. The brothel was accepted while it was not
admitted.
by John Steinbeck (1902-2002)
Penguin Books
ISBN 0-14-200423-5
Chapter 19, pg. 216
A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers,
strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of
themselves in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against
men, and perhaps that is why they went out in the first place. When
the rough edges are worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers
come in to help with the development - to solve problems of
ownership, usually by removing the temptations to themselves. And
finally comes culture, which is entertainment, relaxation, transport out
of the pain of living. And culture can be on any level, and is.
The church and the wh@rehouse arrived in the Far West
simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a
different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended
to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of
the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did
the brothels. The sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud
and confident. Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built
churches which couldn't be paid for in a hundred years. The sects
fought evil, true enough, but they also fought each other with a fine
lustiness. They fought at the turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed
all the others were bound for hell in a basket. And each for all its
bumptiousness brought with it the same thing: the Scripture on which
our ethics, our art and poetry and our relationships are built. It took a
smart man to know where the difference lay between the sects, but
anyone could see what they had in common. And they brought music -
maybe not the best, but the form and sense of it. And they brought
conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience. They were not
pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled white shirt. And
any man could make something pretty fine of it within himself. True
enough, the Reverend Billing, when they caught up with him, turned
out to be a thief, an adulterer, a libertine, and a zoophilist, but that
didn't change the fact that he had communicated some good things to
a great number of receptive people. Billing went to jail, but no one
ever arrested the good things he had released. And it doesn't matter
much that his motive was impure. He used good material and some of
it stuck. I use Billing only as an outrageous example. The honest
preachers had energy and go. They fought the devil, no holds barred,
boots and eye-gouging permitted. You might get the idea that they
howled truth and beauty the way a seal bites out the National Anthem
on a row of circus horns. But some of the truth and beauty remained,
and the anthem was recognizable. The sects did more than this,
though. They built the structure of social life in the Salinas Valley. The
church supper is the grandfather of the country club, just as the
Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the vestry sired the
little theatre.
While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul,
came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time,
the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in
silently and greyly, with its head bowed and its face covered.
You may have seen the spangled palaces of sin and fancy dancing in
the false West of the movies, and maybe some of them existed -- but
not in the Salinas Valley. The brothels were quiet, orderly, and
circumspect. Indeed, if after hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic
conversation against the thumping beat of the melodeon you had
stood under the window of a wh@rehouse and listened to the low
decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse the identities
of the two ministries. The brothel was accepted while it was not
admitted.
Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde’s "Picture of Dorian Gray" and Salvation by Faith Alone
Current mood: 
Category: Religion and Philosophy
I had met a young South American woman, who was desperately trying to get through a community college course which required her to write about Oscar Wilde's novel and subsequent trial and conviction. Her English fluency was so minimal, that it was difficult for us to even converse or correspond. I felt distressed that someone who really needs a college course conducted in Spanish, should wind up in such a course which demands native fluency in English. I tried to help her as best I could, but I fear she did not succeed in getting through the class.
But I found the topic of Oscar Wilde and the "Picture of Dorian Gray" very interesting from a theological point of view with regard to the doctrine of Sola Fides (Salvation by Faith Alone).
Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th. century suggested that one should "pluck out the eyes of reason" and simply accept, rather than question, and perhaps suffer some loss of faith.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
Excerpts from my notes:
My personal theory about this novella is that the picture which grows ugly, while the person remains attractive, is a metaphor for the negative aspects of Christian forgiveness. Gandhi explained in his autobiography that he rejected Christianity because Christians seemed MORE interested in escaping the consequences of their sins, whereas Gandhi desired, if possible, to diminish or even extinguish sin at its source.
Here is what I wrote several years ago regarding Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray":
I was so shocked the day I first realized the possible interpretation that Oscar Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray in order to demonstrate his perception of the potential ugliness inherent in the Christian notion that all sins may be forgiven. Wilde may have seen such forgiveness as sort of sweeping all the ugliness and hypocrisy under the carpet.
In the very last chapter of the "Picture of Dorian Gray" we read:
Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendor of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that.
Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a most just God.
I suspect that Wilde's attitude might have been influenced by his bitterness over the judgment and ruin often brought upon people by Christian society because of their sexual orientation, and the hypocrisy Wilde saw in such a society.
Christian forgiveness is seen by some existentialists as a lovely tapestry which conceals the indelible, ugly handwriting on the wall beneath, written by our actions and freewill choices, which tell us that we have been "weighed and found wanting."
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it
-- Omar Khayyam
It dawned upon me this morning that Dorian Gray says a kind of prayer, in a sense, when he impulsively wishes that the painting would age while he remains unchanged.
His prayer is answered; the picture becomes hideous while Dorian retains the outer appearance of purity and innocence.
The demons beseech Jesus to allow them to enter the herd of swine. The prayer of the demons is answered.
The ten wise virgins, who have sufficient oil for their lamps until the bridegroom comes, cannot answer the petition of the ten foolish virgins who have too little oil.
The ten foolish virgins ARE VIRGINS. That is, they possess a form of moral purity. But their virginity is not sufficient to sustain them until the bridegroom comes. They must have oil. And no one else can give them that oil. What is the oil? In the Greek of the New Testament, ELEION or oil, is a pun on Eleyison, or mercy, compassion. The ten foolish virgins are lacking in WORKS, acts of mercy, compassion, generosity, self-sacrifice.
I do not believe that one is saved by faith alone. Salvation by faith alone is the dream of foolish virgins.
It was Maximos the Confessor (born 580 AD, died 662 AD) who wrote:
"Do not say that you are the temple of the Lord, writes Jeremiah (cf. Jeremiah. 7: 4); nor should you say that faith alone in our Lord Jesus Christ can save you, for this is impossible unless you also acquire love for Him through your works. As for faith by itself, 'the devils also believe, and tremble' (James. 2: 19)."
Maximos the Confessor, THE PHILOKALIA, Volume Two, p. 56.
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