Seriously. It is. So… take your child already, will ya? And no, browsing on Amazon doesn’t count. Can’t believe you even tried to pull that stunt. A bookstore, people. Take your child to a real bookstore.
‘War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.’ – Ambrose Bierce
Poetry calls to us, like wild geese
Did a collector of Symbolist paintings orchestrate this museum heist?
Despite being named Clives Staples Lewis, he apparently went by Jack. Must be an English thing.
Lewis is a writer who I have gone back to at various times in my life. As a child, naturally, I read the Narnia novels. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe being the first and best loved, of course (it has the most ‘magic,’ you might say – and the description of Lucy’s tea with Mr. Tumnus, with the sardines on buttered toast and a dozen other lush, tasty descriptions of the sorts of traditional English food that an American boy in a naval town had never heard of; still makes my mouth water). Though I gather it has a poor critical reputation, I always loved The Horse and His Boy. It’s a great book for a lonely boy who doesn’t feel quite at place in the world (am I Freudanizing myself? maybe, I don’t know – piss off). Also, the romance in that one is of a perfect level for a child who isn’t quite old enough or is only barely old enough to appreciate the opposite sex (or same sex, depending on orientation).
His science fiction books were never of great interest to me. The Christian apologetics never quite felt natural in Out of the Silent Planet, the only one I read (though as I think about it, I want to read it again, partly to trace its lineage back to A Princess of Mars).
My mother had a boxed set of some of his treatises and explicit apologetics: The Screwtape Letters (which I read several times in junior high), The Great Divorce (which I read once in junior high, but didn’t have the theological background to understand what he was driving at), Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and I think one other…
Later, as an adult, I read A Grief Observed, a naturally heartbreaking but comforting book (I was mourning a love affair, not a death, actually).
Basically, he’s got something for everybody.
The second part of TOUT VA BIEN is entitled FUGITIVE STATE and is a more traditional poetic form.
Actually, the first page and a half consists of three line stanzas, with relatively lengthy lines, focusing on forms and framework and things that limit. It’s all very good and I wish she’d kept it up. Not that the rest of FUGITIVE STATE isn’t good, it just isn’t as good. The changing formal nature (shorter lines, longer and shorter stanzas, prose poem paragraphs) doesn’t add anything for me. Partly, this is because I was so wrapped up in that initial bit that the shift was disappointing for me. It’s like reading a novel and discovering that the guy you really liked at the beginning is not actually the main character. Sure, maybe you’ll like the rest of the book and this new, real protagonist, but you were really into that first guy.
The focus also shifts to identity. Now, that’s a complete break, because, after all, isn’t identity a limiting agent? And Stein definitely explores that, but also gets into the meaningless of identity (the repetition of a line about an ‘anti-terrorist’ who is financed by terrorists), but that subject is a little worn over for me. She does take it over to the subject of political alienation (as you can guess by the ‘anti-terrorist’ bit).
I should note that she does go back into (mostly) using the long lined, three line stanza structure, but even then, it’s broken up with other forms and the spell (a repetitive spell that brings attention to form) is broken (though breaking the spell also brings attention to the form), or leastways it was for me.
Stein also has tendency to let cool sounding phrases take the place of lines and stanzas that actual move the poetic project forward.
I was an American correspondent in America, who could no longer correspond to anything…
I don’t know. Too me, that’s cool thing said in a coffee house to a friend after too much coffee and collegiate philosophizing (or after too much time in the bar after too much alcohol and barfly philosophizing). Not so sure it belongs in a work of poetic creation.
But credit where credit is due. The ending, the final page of FUGITIVE STATE is magnificent and could stand as a fine poem in its own right:
so How long until How make long the lost bucolic?
there’s a descriptive act and a de-descriptive act
surface-oriented slippage I wanted to Ask
internal Organ failure internally
accurate and externally Sordid
as gestures that aren’t That didn’t
make
I wanted to Make
it was building it was irreparable
taken apart Under Accidentally Right on Target
with the script flipped I once there was
Absolution, once Have you taken stock of your Conduct?
The crowds inside, or the Trap as, we were well before
the fact
Desire’s a Tool to put to use I wanted to
That’s a great bit, and also crystallized for me the implicity touches from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari’s book, Anti-Oedipus, with its ‘bodies without organs’ and ‘desiring machines.’
Speaking of which, did you know that Anti-Oedipus is now being published by the Penguin Classics imprint? Seriously. I feel old.
David Foster Wallace wrote, in the pages of Infinite Jest, about it being
a nausea of the cells and soul
Marvelously apt, but also reminds one of the great ancestors in the literature of depression, Jean-Paul Sartre. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but more than misanthropy, aren’t plays like Huis Clos (No Exit) really about the alienating features of depression? But, really, what that phrase drove me to was Sartre’s Nausea.
We are trained to look at it from a rarefied angle: Kierkegaardian anguish of the soul (though not ‘soul,’ this is Sartre, but anguish of the ‘being’ isn’t so Kierkegaardian as of the soul) and anger at the shallowness of other people and their inability to comprehend the absence of outside meaning in the world.
But the red-haried protagonist and his writer’s block (he can’t finish a book about Gustave Flaubert) and his inability to connect with a past lover he desperately wants to re-connect to… isn’t he depressed? And lashing out at his former flame, sabotaging their connection, that pained combination of pushing away and begging for someone not to be pushed away by one…
Sartre would probably hate this comparison.
I’m going to try to do a close reading of Suzanne Stein’s . I can’t remember where I got this – I think it came with something I ordered (TOUT VA BIEN has only been given away, rather than sold).
It’s divided into several sections, the first of which is HOLE IN SPACE.
HOLE IN SPACE is the transcript of Suzanne Stein speaking extemporaneously at St Mark’s Poetry Project in 2008. ‘Hole’ is apt, because a significant portion of the text are ellipses and ‘um’ or ‘uhhh’ – each of those being a ‘hole’ in speech. On the other side of things, it’s hard to see much else. I just read it and I can barely remember what it was about (which is primarily a discussion of space and place – how the internet has changed the sense of place, what site-specific work would/should look like in the current environment; which presents a contrast to the title, which translated means, ‘it’s going well;’ while that’s just a colloquial phrase for ‘things are okay,’ looking closely, it does use ‘va’ or ‘goes;’ motion in the title, but the first section is about not about ‘going’ or motion, but about mindfulness of place).
The effect is very similar to some of the works of Kenneth Goldsmith. Like his complete transcription of single issue of the New York Times or his transcription of a year’s worth of traffic reports or his transcription of a year’s worth of weather reports, HOLE IN SPACE encourages a center mindfulness, if one is willing to enter an empty, meditative state. However, that effect is not to make one aware of ostensible meaning. Reading Goldsmith’s transcription does not give one greater understanding of the meaning of that day’s New York Times, but rather of words and repetitions without meaning. Free from connection to literal meaning, it takes lectio divina another level. Which is why I struggled to remember the meaning of the talk she was giving, but remember very clearly the holes in the transcribed language. Looking for meaning between the words and sentences of language rather than within the words and sentences in language.
the coffee philosopher 