Acephalous

As long as the "conversation" about guns concerns hypotheticals about fictions ...

... I don't see the harm in adding more fictions to the hypotheticals. Given that the opposition's evidence is the "millions" of home-invasions that've been thwarted yearly, or most probably even hourly, by gun-savvy Common People Who Love The Constitution More Than Dirty Liberals Do, I don't see why Dirty Liberals oughta restrict themselves to reality. And so:

Q.E.D.

Breaking Bad: "Gliding Over All," said the fly to the money pile.

(This being another one of those visual rhetoric posts.)

I've had a week to digest the mid-season finale of Breaking Bad, "Gliding All Over," and for the first time in weeks I'm not going to talk about kitchen tables. The episode's title, "Gliding Over All," references Walt Whitman:

Gliding o'er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul—not life alone,
Death, many deaths I'll sing.

How is that relevant to the episode? Not in the way people online are discussing it. For one, I keep seeing it referred to as an ordinary "poem," when in fact it appears, untitled, on the title page of Passage to India. And the interpretations I've read of its relation to the episode all focus on the "many deaths" because of Walter's increasing comfort with lethal force. But take a quick look at the actual poem that bit above introduces:

Singing my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong, light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,
The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires[.]

"Passage to India" celebrates the connectedness of the world. These canals and transcontinental railroads and undersea telegraph cables have made it visible and tangible the connections between distant peoples.

O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, [then] shall be justified,
All these hearts, as of fretted children, shall be sooth’d,
All affection shall be fully responded to—the secret shall be told;
All these separations and gaps shall be taken up, and hook’d and link’d together

The voyagers and scientists and inventors create the conditions necessary to acquire a new kind of knowledge: one whose "secret ... separations and gaps" will be "hook'd and link'd together." In short: titling the episode "Gliding Over All" doesn't allude to the untitled poem's "many deaths" but to the process of acquiring an interconnected vision of the world through technology that Whitman outlines in "Passage to India." Given that Walter White and his contempories aren't in the midst of a world-shrinking communicative revolution, it stands to reason that they'll come into knowledge of how secrets are "hook'd and link'd together" differently.

Director Michelle MacLaren lets Walter have the first shot:

MacLaren opens with an extreme close-up on a fly. The shallow focus blurs the background to the extent that the only thing the audience can see is the fly. Because we want the shot to be meaningful, we begin to study the wings and shadows of this centrally positioned and obviously important fly. We try to connect this fly to some structure of meaning. Is this an allusion to "the contamination" that deviled Walter in "The Fly" and the extreme actions he and Jesse took to "clean" the lab? The camera lingers on the fly for seven seconds—long enough for these questions to arise but not long enough for them to be answer—before racking focus reveals that we're not the only ones trying to understand this fly:

Turns out the blurred "background" consisted of an extreme close-up of the top-half of Walter's face. Because the shot's level of framing is the height of a person sitting in a chair, we end up staring directly into Walter's eyes as he stares into ours. Except it can't be directly, because the fourth wall's intact, meaning Walter isn't staring past the fly, he's staring at the fly. Intently. He's studying the fly for meaning just as we did before the focus racked. The impression that he's staring through the fly—created by narrowing the depth of field in a way that blurs the fly invisible—is unsettling not only because it means that he might be menacing us, but also because it suggests that he sees some connection between himself and the fly that we failed to. He perceives the "eloquent, gentle wires" that connect him to that fly.

As well he should. There's a reason there's a fly in his office: Mike's remains rot in the trunk of Walter's car. He knows that knowledge of this fly's life-cycle could link him to Mike's murder by establishing a time of death. Even when Todd enters the room to inform him that he's disposed of Mike's car, Walter can't draw his eyes away:

This new world Walter inhabits requires a new breed of knowledge. Lest this discussion of eyeline matches and the connections they entail seem a little far-fetched, consider the last two shots in this scene:

Walter completes his intense study of the fly. When Walter stands and exits the shot to the right, MacLaren again racks the focus to reveal what the white blur behind Walter above is:

Which of course includes a taxonomic chart of flies based on the geographic distruction and rate of maturation. It is a secondary screwworm fly, meaning it only consumes necrotic tissue. Its presence connects Walter to the corpse decomposing in his trunk. We now know that this fly is unrelated to the one that taxed Walter in "The Fly," because that fly represented Walter's inability to maintain the illusion of an orderly world: he didn't know how it entered the lab and found himself powerless to remove it from it. But this fly? He knows exactly why it's there and exactly how to encourage it to leave. Its presence doesn't represent a disorderly incursion into Walter's orderly world but the extent to which Walter's come to define "orderly" differently: if he can see the connections he can control them and his mind "shall be sooth'd."

The idea established in this opening scene—that Walter has the power to acquire "secret" knowledge about connections in the world by staring at them intensely—is undermined when Skyler insists he accompany her to a storage facility. After they enter the unit, Skyler pulls aside a sheet. Instead of revealing what Skyler's uncovered, MacLaren cuts to a medium close-up of Walter's face:

Within a given episode of any well-directed television, the director will establish associations between particular shots and particular narrative elements. In the opening scene, MacLaren creates a correlation between extreme close-ups and a knowledgable mastery of the world. She combines a medium close-up of Walter with the expression on his face to indicate to us that this Walter can't fathom "these separations and gaps." He can't connect what he sees to the world he knows, and no wonder:

He's staring at a sublime amount of money. And I mean "sublime" as Kant meant it: it's a mathematical sublime, the effect of encountering an object whose greatness is unencumbered by the very idea of limitations. (Which is precisely the conversation Skyler and Walter have about how much money lives in that pile. They can't even imagine a way to count it.) Note that when the camera reversed the shot scale increased again. Walter's now in a classic medium shot here and when it reverses again:

The progressive lengthening of the shot scale suggests that Walter's becoming increasingly incapable of connecting this pile of money to the world as he understands it. Unlike the fly, this pile of money can't be categorized and put in its place: the pile lives in the storage unit because its size makes it impossible to launder its incomprehensible worth. Walter is shocked out of his fantasy of mastery-through-knowledge by an unknowable pile of money. That he decides to abandon the trade soon after encountering the sublime isn't surprising: his continued participation was predicated on his belief that he could out-understand his competitors. Now he can't even connect his labor to his capital.

These are but two moments in the episode in which this dynamic plays out. Tomorrow I'll discuss the most literal link between the episode and Whitman's paean to global shipping: the conversation between Walter and Lydia in the diner.

[Part II of this post can be found here.]

I didn't know conservatives wrote poetry!

The mysterious conservative poet known only as “Taboola” posted this masterpiece at the National Review:

If you can’t see the tiny print, that reads:

You may like:

Jon Voight ‘feeding’ daughter
Angelina Jolie 10 eye-catching looks
From last night’s MTV.
Is Karolina Kurkova
the most attractive swimsuit?

Hottest member of the GOP:
Sarah Palin.
Photo actress Aisha Tyler to Romney:
“You do not, Senator Lee.
Obama’s idea to amend Constitution
A One night stand. Harmless fun?
Or a Van Jones at Democratic Convention:
“I’m Being.”

That’s not bad, but I prefer the poem he or she published in The Daily Caller better:

For the visually impaired:

You may like:

Former Vietnam POW: I would approve

Fear

Laziness

and dishwashing.

CNBC host Kudlow:

Obama would rather Fluke argue

“A vote for Obama is a vote for cute overload!”

Animal videos that will make

Grenades, machetes sold at store

adjacent to

Jeb Bush: “If Clinton’s

‘the first black president,’

I’m Micheal Steele!”

New Generation of GOP?

Has.

Feel free to capture and share the poetry of “Taboola.” Like any good worker, he or she will perform on demand. All you need to do is hit “Refresh.”

Thomas Meyer's Beowulf

Via Eileen Joy and the outstanding number of medievalists I know on Facebook, I see that Thomas Meyer's translation of Beowulf is now available. For free. It possesses a striking cover:

And though I haven't had a chance to read it yet—this translation, I mean, because I've obviously read Beowulf before—the excerpt from the publisher accords neatly with my recent obsession on the relation of form to content in film:

The eyes of Hygelac’s kin watched the wicked raider
execute his quick attack:
without delay,
snatching his first chance,
a sleeping warrior,
he tore him in two,
chomped muscle, sucked veins’
gushing blood,
gulped down his morsel, the dead man,
chunk by chunk,
hands, feet & all. & then

footstephandclawfiendreachmanbedquicktrick
beastarmpainclampnewnotknownheartrunflesho
feargetawaygonowrunrun

never before had
sinherd feared anything so.

As the publisher notes, "the reader is confronted with the words themselves running together, as if in panic, in much the same way that the original passage seems in such a rush to tell the story of the battle that bodies become confused." This is a readerly experimental mode, in which the formal experimentation is meant to assist the reader in understanding the content of the poem by replicating the experience being described. The fact that that it's not easy to parse that second stanza is the point. (I've read it about twenty times now I still keep seeing the word "dreach," if only because it sounds like a word that belongs in Beowulf.) Point being, there are far worse ways to spend your Saturday night than reading a poem in which "hot gore pour[s] upon whirlpools."

Or with supporting an endeavor which, to quote Eileen, 

Every book we make, we will give away for free in electronic form, because we believe in the richest possible artistic-intellectual para-university commons in which everyone has access to whatever they need and want, whenever they need and want it, and so that authors can have the widest possible readership. But we also believe in the printed book: as work of art, as a stylish object for one’s cabinet of curiosities, as a material comfort [or bracing cocktail] to hold in one’s hands, as something that takes up weight and space in the world and adds something of beauty to the thoughts, images, and narratives we hold in common.

"We would have defeated them, but for the power of their art."

The wake of the NEA non-scandal is about as deep and dispersed as that of drifting rowboat in mid-Atlantic chop . . . unless that's your boat and you have a telescope trained on your trail like Michael van der Galien and the folks at Big Hollywood,* in which case you'll mistake the chop for wake and start praying you hold out better than the Andrea Gail. Once you regain your composure, you will write a post much like the one van der Galien—whose Big Hollywood archive proves something or other about how profoundly white people feel about everyone not one shade shy of albino—wrote and make claims like this:

Federal agencies are turned into propaganda tools. This is something we haven’t seen in the U.S. since, well, ever.

Technically, van der Galien is correct: even though the Federal Writer's Project, Federal Theatre Project, Federal Music Project and Federal Art Project not only existed, but had the word "Federal" in their names, if "we" were a 25 year-old Dutch conservative, "we" never would've "seen" anything like that "in the U.S. since, well, ever."

Because "we" aren't—and because we don't believing that having "seen" something is the only valid evidentiary standard—we're not overly concerned with the grievous threat Kalpen Modi and his ilk pose to the future of the American Republic. We should, however, concern ourselves with the fact that van der Galien wants to steal our artists and force them to create conservative propaganda:

[T]here is a reason the administration spoke to artists on the August conference call and was willing to take the risk of exposure: artists influence the people. The effect isn’t always immediate–it may take years for artists to truly influence society as a whole–but it’s there. If you want to “transform” society you need artists on your side ... Breitbart has taught us that the strategies the left has used to discredit the right can be used against them. We have to act on that, continue to do what Breitbart and some here at Big Hollywood have been doing. But we have to do more than that: we have to destroy and create.

If you didn't chuckle at the phrase "Breitbart has taught us," you have no soul. That said, the fact that the art or culture even exists only occurs to conservatives when politics are involved. When Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize, for example, conservatives were saying things like "[nobody] takes this stuff seriously anymore" and "I can't remember the last time I read a literary novel by a living writer or attended a play by a living playwright." Pinter winked into conservative consciousness long enough to be summarily dismissed, then faded back into the staticky irrelevance of the living.

Had he lived long enough to have participated in that conference call, though, he would've blitzkrieged his way into their tactically fearful hearts and onto their lying lips like Hitler on Poland.

*By "folks," I mean everyone who's written about the NEA non-scandal except for Jayne "Animal Mother" Cobb because he lives fifteen minutes down the 91 from me and I value my life.

Do [conservatives] dare to eat a peach?

Two groups of people are annoyed that the administration collaborated with the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney on a question about Iran: seasoned pool reporters invested in the pecking order who believe Pitney jumped the line, and partisan hacks whose concern for Iran disappears the moment an opportunity to denounce the media arrives.

As to the former, they are, to paraphrase Tim Crouse, journalistic Prufrocks who measure their lives in handouts, and Pitney had the audacity to receive more sooner than this collection of easy tools thought prudent. More significant, or at least more revelatory, is the response of those who have spent the past week full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse on the subject of Obama’s refusal to condemn Iran. They pressed Obama to use the word “condemn” itself, because any condemnation that doesn’t sets off their Neville detectors. No mere objection, they argue, no matter how strong, can rise to the level of a condemnation.

Now, in their mad rush to demonstrate the pervasiveness of liberal bias, they ignore the rather obvious symbolism the Obama administration employed here. At a moment in which the Iranian regime is doing its damnedest to prevent information about the situation on the ground from leaking, Obama grants an Iranian dissident the primacy of place in a news conference that will be broadcast the world over. Moreover, he calls attention to the fact that he’s breaking protocol in order to give voice to the very people the Iranian regime wants silenced.

With the whole world watching, Obama took a moment to humiliate Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But because conservatives are compelled to follow their tedious argument of insidious intent to its tendentious conclusion, what should be a story about the regime being humiliated on the world stage becomes yet another media pseudo-scandal.

(x-posted.)

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!

I concluded the previous post with a nod to William Blake as someone who explored the word-picture relationship and I will get to that, but first I should clarify a few issues I raised without fully addressing yesterday:

1. Vance rightly noted that titles of paintings were often left to benefactors and history, so putting that much interpretive weight on such thin ice might not be the best idea.  I agree.  I fully intend on leaving this series of posts immersed and hypothermic.
2. JPool noted that treating paintings like panels could be a category error and Miriam and Gene implicitly agreed, suggesting I might be better served by a Hogarth or one of his ilk.  I agree.  But I chose to go with Caravaggio and Blake over Giotto and Hogarth because I wanted to focus attention on an individual image before I moved to discussing the interaction between multiple images arrayed in narrative.  
3. Andrew liked the arrows and will be disappointed with this post. 

Now that I have well and cleared my throat, let us venture forward to William Blake and "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience (1794).  It reads:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Where to start?  Should I go full Keats and spend a day on each stanza?  Probably . . . especially when you consider that 1) his manuscript looked like this:

Because 2) he spent tedious years perfecting the placement of every word on every line.  Maybe I'll declare next week Blake Week and do just that.  But tonight I want to focus on the general impression of feline bad-assedness created by the text of the poem.  What we have here is a TYGER! MADE OF FIRE FORGED BY DREAD HANDS AND SHARP TOOLS OF METALLURGY TO HAVE DREAD PAWS.  So FEROCIOUS is this FIRE TYGER! that the poet cannot even imagine THE ABOMINABLE FOUNDRY in which SOME DEMENTED LORD created SO GRIM A BEAST. 

TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO LOOK INTO THE BRUTAL MAW OF HELL ITSELF DO NOT CONTINUE READING THIS POST BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO POST THE PICTURE OF THE FIRE TYGER! BLAKE INCLUDED WITH THE POEM.  SERIOUSLY IT'S WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOU I MEAN YOU CAN BARELY EVEN WATCH R-RATED MOVIES THIS WILL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU TURN AWAY I TELL YOU TURN AWAY!

The rubble of a prolonged catharsis.

Checking up that “proud cock” is two words, not one, so that I might strut it out, I came across the entry for “beast language“ in the Dictionary of Poetic Terms.  The diction of the entry is either unconscionably vague or deliciously derisive:

Theoretically, it seems the language of the poem moves backward from conceptual words to an intelligence of pure sound utterance that calls attention to the form, meaning, and derivation of the word.  The form is probably meant to be experienced more than intellectually understood, an experience that presumably links the reader with his own senses and the animal origins of language.

Since my knowledge of post-1940 American literature amounts to what I’ve read for pleasure and the Lord set Sunday aside for whimsical researches, I decided to find out whether the entry ought to be applauded or condemned.  First up, according to Google Book Search, was a work I inadvertantly committed to the memory hole: William Gass’s The World Within the Word.  In “Food and Beast Language,” Gass talks about something else entirely; namely, the forced materiality of Henry Miller’s prose.  Of its effect on Miller’s signature subject, Gass concludes:

So I fared, dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds, like culprits to the bar.

Rick Brookhiser thinks he can fool us.   He quotes a bit from Book XI of The Prelude so that American conservatives might better understand how their liberal counterparts feel tonight.  Here's some of the Wordsworth he cherry-picked:

O pleasant exercise of hope and  joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, us who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that  dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O  times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding  ways               
Of custom, law, and statute, took at  once
The attraction of a country in romance!

Superficial readers of Great Books make this sort of mistake all the time.  They half-remember some passage from their undergraduate Brit Lit survey and feel wicked clever.  They think:  "'The attraction of a country in romance'?  Sounds like Obama.  The world must know that I once read a Lake Poet.  To the internet!"  Then they post a passage from The Prelude in which Wordsworth mocks his younger self for the optimism he felt during the first days of the French Revolution.  So what does Brookhiser think it's like to be a liberal in America today? 

It's like being an old goat who's spent decades rewriting an epic poem about his intellectual development while he's deriding the only moment in his entire life in which he allowed optimism to enter his black heart.  For a second I thought he might've claimed this on purpose, so that when liberals are fed up with an inadequately leftist Obama he can link to that post and say, "I told you!  You didn't realize it at the time, you uneducated twunts, but I told you!"  Then he'll insert the ellipsed bits:

In the main outline, such it might be said
Was my condition, till with open war
Britain opposed the liberties of France.
This threw me first out of the pale of love;
Soured and corrupted, upwards to the source,
My sentiments; was not, as hitherto,
A swallowing up of lesser things in great,            
But change of them into their contraries;
And thus a way was opened for mistakes
And false conclusions, in degree as gross,
In kind more dangerous. What had been a pride,
Was now a shame . . .

He'll claim: "I told them they would be disappointed in someone new!  Did they listen?  Of course not!"  Once our "events brought less encouragement" and were "[w]orn out in greatness, stripped of novelty," Brookhiser'll pop from the bushes and shock us with his erudite ellision and we'll be forced to admit we'd been punked by a Joe Sixpack who happened to graduate from Yale. 

Then I remembered the sort of mind I was dealing with and drew a bath.

(x-posted.)

When am I not reading early modern poetry?

Am I the only one who thinks Glenn Reynolds only knew this quotation because it's the name of a popular science fiction trilogy?  Because it certainly doesn't mean what he thinks it means, as William Graham Sumner—one of the three people on whom the label "social Darwinist" can be pinned in good faith—noted in 1877:

Fluctuations in the measure of value are as inconvenient and fatal as fluctuations in the measure of length and bulk . . . . Business is turned into a guess, or a game of hazard, where the prevailing anarchy is overruled by accident:—

                                  "Chaos umpire sits
And by decision more embroils the fray
By which he reigns; next him high arbiter
Chance governs all."

In such a condition of things the gamblers have the advantage.  The stock exchange becomes little better than a faro bank . . . . The temptation of excessive gains leads from the beaten path of business.  Speculation without money takes the place of honest industry, extending from the stock exchange everywhere . . . . Honesty ceases to be even a policy.  (Works 472)

This is not to say Reynolds is interested in honesty, merely that he doesn't seem to know what words mean.

(x-posted not once, but twice .)

This isn’t even good nonsense. It’s insufferable.*

(X-posted.)

On this day in 1930, the only man to ingest every major work ever written and survive, Harold Bloom, was born.  His feats of speed and memorization are legend, but even most literary scholars are unaware that not only has he consumed the entire Western Canon, he has written a magisterial tome about each and every item contained therein. 

In an April interview concerning the three-month lag between the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and his anxious, Gnostic appreciation of it, Bloom confessed he finds it “increasingly difficult to remain abreast of major works of late because so many of them suck balls.” Asked to clarify, Bloom refused to mince words: “When I declared this the best novel in the history of ever, I must have been asleep.  It wouldn’t be the first book I’ve composed thus.”

When reached for comment, John Crowley was found on the floor weeping uncontrollably. His agent, Richard Cummings, on a stepladder in the hall affixing a noose to the ceiling fan, was also unavailable for comment.

---

*Cf.

No sniveller, or tea-drinking poet, no puny clawback or prude, is Walt Whitman!

On 5 July 1855, the day after the publication of Leaves of Grass, literary critics began thinking about how best to imitate Whitman.  Few are the authors who inspire the flattery of imitation more than he!  Few are the critics who are able to resist the urge to flatter any else but he!  Few are the sentences in which I'll continue to enact the enthused imitations I mock!

Think I'm making this up?  The following might be far less successful than zunguzungu's found Williams, but the poemified version of the anonymous review of Leaves of Grass from the September 1855 edition of The United States Review certainly is telling.

In a way, this is an extreme version of a common critical vice: read too much of this or that to the exclusion of all else and you'll start to inhabit the voice you purport to study.  The linked example may be Derrida, but read a few books on Joyce and Faulkner and you'll see the same unhealthy attitude abounds.  But I digress. 

On to the ersatz American heart of the body poetic!

His father is a novelist

So I’m not cracked to be thinking this Yglesias post was a poem, considering how it rendered in Google Reader. The first two lines are easy enough to improve — drop the “that” and “and energy to,” or maybe “time and … to” — but the third and fourth are a mess, but one with potential. I’d love to find a way to squeeze the bureaucratize of “official gatherings of descendants of Thomas Jefferson” into a single line, but alas, I’m doomed to failure.

So not a well-crafted poem, but a poem nonetheless. 

Only not. 

(And yes, I need new glasses.)

Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud," as Performed by a Giant Rapping Squirrel with a Cockney Accent

Via Martin G:

The Malkin/Klein Non-Kerfuffle; also, the Poetic Genius of Malkin's Commentariat

Just so I have this straight: Lynne Cheney agrees to be interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, but Michelle Malkin refuses to debate Ezra Klein in a venue of her choosing?  Telling. 

Fellow conservative bloggers should shame her into participating or refusing to.  The lack of actual engagement between the right and left is something to be mourned, not celebrated, lest we end up with people spouting unconscionably general nonsense like:

Unfortunately once the facts reach the ears of a liberal they automatically become violent and attack those that defy their world view verbally and at ever increasing intervals with physical violence.

No wonder Malkin fears facts.  (Frankly, I'm a little worried myself now.)  But the real joy in reading Malkin's commentariat comes from all those suffering from Sudden Onset Poetry Syndrome.  Someone'll be vitrioling along then LIGHTNING STRIKES! and they're channeling William Blake (or a reasonable approximation of him):

Ezra Klein? Never heard of him. Is a response necessary? The eagle does not do battle with the fly.

The eagle also never loses so much time as when he submits to learn from the crow.  And the eagle bites weasel.  Weasel bites back.  They fly up to nowhere.  Then in and out the eagle, and pop goes the weasel.  But the beetle implores the eagle.  The eagle brushes him aside.  After the eagle leaves, the beetle smashes all his eggs.

Q.E.D.

John (Ash)Berryman, the Most Important Influence on Literate Living Lyricists (despite being Dead himself)

Jonathan Lethem once called The Hold Steady "the John Ashbery of rock bands."  The man must have mistaken his berries.  He surely meant to call them "the John Berryman of rock bands."  Consider the opening stanza of Berryman's "Dream Song 1":

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

You can graft that onto many a Hold Steady tune and hear Craig Finn singing it. From the forced alliteration to the stilted colloquialisms to the jarringly sudden last sentence, it sounds like something off Separation Sunday.  Plus, the first track on Boys and Girls in America mentions Berryman by name: "Stuck Between Stations" [mp3].  The influence is obvious and I think Lethem must've meant Berryman of course. 

I admit: Finn's phrasing's damn contagious.

It comes from the Berry Man, however, not the Ash of Berries.  An understandable mistake.  But I come not bury Lethem, but to praise another band which chose to honor Berryman's breakdown and eventual suicide.  I'm not the biggest fan of this band, but I must give praise where praise is due: this song haunts me.  The band's Okkervil River, the song "John Allyn Smith" [mp3].  ("John Allyn Smith" being Berryman's birth name.)  The song's innocuous and pleasant for the first two and a half Berrymanian minutes, but turns brilliant when, for a reason desperately demanding interpretation, it turns into "Sloop John B" [mp3].

That's a traditional song, recorded by many an artist, but Okkervil River break out into the Brian Wilson version, which surely means something.  I'm not sure what.  Give it a spin and see whether or not you can enlighten me.

A.E. Housman & The Latin for Ass; or, the Kool Moe Dee to Our Busy Bees

Hunting down the source of the Latin maxim with which Wharton closes "The Descent of Man"—"labor est etiam ipsa voluptas" ("toil is itself a pleasure")—I came across numerous articles by A.E. Housman, best known to high-schoolers as the author of "To An Athlete Dying Young."  Regrettably, before tonight I knew little more about Housman now than I did in high school; by which I mean, it could've been summarized "'we chaired you through the market-place' taught me how to verb."  Now that I've become acquainted with him as a classical scholar, however, that's certain to change.  If the below's indicative of his professional correspondence, I can't wait to read his letters.

Perhaps this is well-known to all them what ain't rubes like me, but Housman tore his contemporaries new ones faster and harder and bigger than anyone this side of Stanley Fish.  Strike that.  His is the withering to which Fish-wit aspires.  Consider his introduction to Juvenal:

Frailty of understanding is in itself no proper target for scorn and mockery ... but the unintelligent forfeit their claim to compassion when they begin to indulge in self-complacent airs, and to call themselves sane critics, meaning they are mechanics.  And when, relying on their numbers, they pass from self-complacency to insolence, and reprove their betters for using the brains which God has denied them, they dry up the fount of pity. (xiii.)

W.M. Lindsay's shriveled riposte?

If [Housman's] preface, in spite of the unfortunate¹ style in which it is written ...

¹ I suppose it is useless to express a wish that Mr. Housman would cease to speak about veteran scholars of eminence ... in that fashion.

Fortunately for us, Lindsay's wish was useless.  In the preface to his translation of Manilius' Astronomica, Housman first lights into Elias Stoeber of Strassburg, "a city still famous for its geese":

"Stoeber's mind, though that is no name to call it by, was one which turned as unswervingly to the false, the meaningless, the unmetrical, and the ungrammatical, as the needle to the pole." (xix)

A later translator, Friedrich Jacob, fairs no better:

Not only had Jacob no sense for grammar, no sense for coherency, no sense for sense, but being himself possessed by a passion for the clumsy and the hispid he imputed this disgusting taste to all the authors whom he edited; and Manilius, the one Latin poet who exceeds even Ovid in verbal point and smartness, is accordingly constrained to write the sort of poetry which might have been composed by Nebuchadnezzar when he was driven from men and did eat grass as oxen. (xxi)

As to how Jacob and Stoeber compared:

In [Jacob's] short book, if only its vices are considered, is a scarce less woeful piece of work than Stoeber's: the difference is that while Stoeber never reminds one of a rational animal, the fog of Jacob's intellect is shot through, and not that seldom, by flashes of conspicuous and startling brilliancy. (xxii)

Of the conservative critic, Housman opined:

His trade is one which requires, that it may be practiced in perfection, two qualifications only: ignorance of language and abstinence from thought. (liii)

My admiration aside, I don't covet a return to this sort of scholarly interaction.  However much I may yearn for the passion of the craft, I can't countenance this sort of open insult.  But there are moments—deny it if you will, but you lie only to yourself—when you wish you possessed license and skill to roast your contemporaries as finely as Housman's roasted his.  Who doesn't want to decry a laurel-rester as Housman did, claiming that this book offers readers "perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child" (xxiii), or that this scholar's

eyesight was evidently feeble, and did not serve him well in collating MSS or correcting proofs; but that is not enough to account for the bucketfuls of falsehood which he discharged on an ignorant and confiding public. (xxiv)

Much as we hate to admit in polite company, we all share Housman's sentiment sometimes.  We merely lack wit and gumption enough to act on it.*  As for the title of this post: one half's an homage to a legendary rap battle; the other's a reference to Housman's essay on "The Latin for Ass" (1930).  Setting aside the joke others would've cracked at its appearance, you can't help but love the opening paragraph:

In English, down to the 19^th century, the beast which carried Balaam was generally and almost universally, both in speech and in writing, denominated the ass.  It is no longer: the name ass, except in metaphor as a term of contempt or insult, has disappeared from conversation and from most kinds of print, and survives only in serious poetry and in prose of some solemnity.  The name donkey, first printed in 1785 in a dictionary of slang, has usurped its place.