[Overheard on the Mir Space Station]
FEMALE ASTRONAUT: I heard she studied with Margret Pish.
2ND FEMALE ASTRONAUT: Really?!?!?!?
[Overheard on the Mir Space Station]
FEMALE ASTRONAUT: I heard she studied with Margret Pish.
2ND FEMALE ASTRONAUT: Really?!?!?!?
I began writing a comment on this post by Ed Park, where he politely disagreed with Jenny Davidson’s negative response to the style of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time — but after two Stella Artois and some Ryvita crackers, I’ve decided to host my thoughts here, in my own air-conditioned corner of the web.
Tonight I’ll finish book nine, The Military Philosophers. I might not have made it this far into A Dance without the support of the Society I’m reading it with — or without Ed’s promise that once you get to about book three, things, as Levi notes on Jenny’s post, “will be layered with memory and meaning,” and become more enjoyable.
I couldn’t help but think of Jenny’s reaction to Powell tonight, when I read the passage in book nine where our narrator, Nick, hears Blake’s “Jerusalem” sung at a Victory Day Service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London at the end of Word War II:
Blake was as impenetrable as Isiah; in his way, more so. It was not quite such wonderful stuff as the Prophet rendered into Elizabethan English, yet wonderful enough. At the same time, so I always felt, never quite for me. Blake was a genius, but not one for the classical taste. He was too cranky. No doubt that was being ungrateful for undoubted marvels offered and accepted. One often felt ungrateful in literary matters, as in so many others.
Powell reminds Jenny D., she says, of no one so much as Pope, with the trouble he takes “to develop an elaborate and fluent idiom that seems… overequipped given the relative banality and commonplace nature of the thoughts therein expressed!” It’s funny that immediately following the passage quoted above — one of the most self-consciously literary-critical in the series so far — the narrator invokes Pope himself, quoting “Imitations of Horace”:
Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart.
“But,” our narrator adds, “surely the pointed wit was just what did survive?” And who now reads Powell? A weirdly vocal and large group, it seems. The pleasure of Powell is in his humor, and his humor is entirely social. “Wit was just the quality he brought to bear with such remarkable effect.”
Before returning to his narrative of periphrastically noncommittal observations of his daily trials and triumphs, Nick ends this section of literary reverie in St. Paul’s Cathedral with a critical reading of the National Anthem:
Repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination nor subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment.
I’m overly inclined to think I’ve found an author’s ars poetica whenever a literary-critical episode appears within a piece of literature. But I wonder if this itchily intrigued section of the Military Philosophers can connect somehow with Professor Davidson’s response to Powell’s style.
UPDATE: I hate this blog post! I’m going to sleep
Elvis Mitchell Trip Pouch
I.
Hibiscus jibsmeat or stoke rocks
rookie &
Layered up or Loans
Out for the out-troweled beast.
Books’ tarps
plus / clone
II.
Chime laughter’s step-smock
paper lops off the top of my peer.
Having pets is immoral. They don’t want to be your pets. Ask
VAL KILMER. Double styled
couch into a glove.
Ariana Reines posted a breathless (her paragraph breaks were lost in the posting) 1,400-word comment-response to Emily Gould’s Poetry Foundation review of Eileen Myles’s Inferno:
And your editors, you people, whoever you are, next time you commission a review from someone who is spunky and inexperienced, make sure you don’t publish it until something genuinely thorough has been written. What could praise possibly be worth when it comes with so little attention? The excellent essay that mainly deplores, but also appreciates, the poetry of Robert Hass, on this site, is a perfect example of everything this review fails to be: even to lambast an oeuvre so zestfully, as the author of that Hass essay does, is still a labor of sustained attention and care, ultimately the least that a ’30-plus year career’ deserves.
The Hass review she’s talking about is by Michael Robbins, whom I only discovered yesterday (via Village Voice editor @xZachBaronx). He has a poem in the December issue of Poetry that’s scathing and funny and full of weird smart uncomfortable sound:
You shouldn’t drink diarrheaunless you bring enough for everybody.Turn it into a teaching moment.Asian-American Students for Christhave the room until 2:30.
Rumi says no donkey is a virgin,no, nor any beast that bites the grass.Maybe it sounds better in Persian.An unseen force propels the cartsacross the Whole Foods parking lot.
Even though I’m pointlessly quitting my “good job” don’t worry I’m not trying to “become a writer” so it’s not problematic that I’m doing all this thesisless typing about poetry on my blog while I should be helping my “replacement.” Soon I’ll help dogs with diseases find new leas(h)es on life. In the meantime, I find myself anguishing through the composition of paragraphs like these:
Ariana Reines, still furious:
Emily Gould’s ‘review’ sounds like a high schooler’s personal blog, not the product of what I assume must be some kind of editorial process over at the Poetry Foundation.
writing criticism of an internet comment by Eileen Myles in what purports to be a review of her novel is ridiculous and me, my awesomely hilarious and controversial poetry reading, Jezebel, and Eileen’s comment belong NOWHERE NEAR a review of her novel unless the reviewer has something absolutely subtle, and stunning, to say about the internet’s relationship to literary production. That authorship, the status of authorship, prose, voice, poetry, and the internet are in uncomfortable relation in these times is certain, and a critic with enough care and acuity might be able to speak purposefully to this strange relation, but she would have to make the case for why.
[A fly lands on a guy’s wristwatch. “Not on my watch!” he shouts as he kills the fly. Or: Two guys are waiting for a train. “Did daylight saving’s time start today?” one asks the other. “Not on my watch!” the other hollers, killing a fly. “Are you a fan of this avant-garde numeral typeface I designed?” Sven asked Karl. “Not on my watch!!” Karl replied, his spittle drowning a family of larvae. “Hey, do you mind if I set down my luggage?” asked the weary Jewish prostitute. “Not on my watch!!!” declaimed Philip, who as you’ll remember had earlier placed his timepiece on the floor. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” Priscilla mewled. AND SO ON!!!!]