Jess, “Fig. 2 — A Field of Pumpkins Grown for Seed: Translation #11″, 1965

Shopping for Christmas presents today, I naturally found something for myself instead: Jess: A Grand Collage 1951-1993, the catalog of an exhibition at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. (The show must have traveled — it was about this time that I saw the work in San Francisco, at the old Museum of Modern Art.)

How far can one trust autumn thoughts? Against the deciduousness of man there stand art, music, poetry. The Church was the great patron of such. Why should a country church not hear something of the overtones of a cathedral? As an antidote to ancient and modern, why not Byrd and Marcello? But was winter the best time?

Thomas makes more, here, of the possibilities of prose than do most prose-poets. At the risk of pedantry, I’ll try to point out some of what’s going on, sentence by sentence. Rhythm and sound matter strongly here, of course, but what’s distinctive, I think, is the logopoeia, the sequential movement of ideas.

How far can one trust autumn thoughts?

Opens at least two uncertainties: what does “autumn” mean? And is the question sincere or rhetorical?

Against the deciduousness of man there stand art, music, poetry.

This resolves both. “Autumn” referred (at least) to human lives — and probably not just to a late season in life, but to the figurative falling of something like leaves. And the question seems to have been rhetorical: this statement is a sensible followup to the implication that “autumn thoughts” are untrustworthy, not to the literal question of how far to trust them.

The Church was the great patron of such.

A fresh link in the chain, extrapolating from “art, music, poetry”; the association with the opening is not yet clear. (The discourse is unfolding forward.)

Why should a country church not hear something of the overtones of a cathedral?

Again, cantilevering forward, building on that part of the last sentence which was itself a new extrapolation. “Overtones” is nice. (The literal sense would chime with the musical theme, but a figurative sense seems more likely: both the usual one and a hint of something more. A cathedral stands “over” the country church administratively and culturally, so this way of putting it suggests that a bit of the center’s power is being experienced, out here at the fringe.)

As an antidote to ancient and modern, why not Byrd and Marcello?

This is rich — for most of us, Byrd and Marcello are as ancient as St. Paul, so the sentence implies a longer perspective (which indeed, as priest and intellectual, we know Thomas had).

Looking back, we now see two rhetorical questions that imply reasons to be having some music. First, it will counter our deciduousness (deciduity?). It also may relieve or distract us from the tension between the ancient time (probably the ages of the Testaments) and today; and it may bring us some grandeur.

But was winter the best time?

Winter, and not autumn. A bit enigmatic — a gambit, as in music, where to repeat something with a change is to set a challenge, to make the listener ask what’s next. Of all the sentences in the paragraph, this is the one whose connection to what’s gone before is most tenuous. Into this gap steps the first sentence of the poem:

It was winter.

That is, never mind whether the time was well-chosen. (And one could read this incipit without the context of the foregoing prose, as simply setting a scene.)

This is beautiful. Via Peter Campbell in the LRB, Rachel Whiteread’s solution, circa 2001, to the problem of what to put on the remaining monumental plinth in Trafalgar Square.

I wasn’t really sure what a plinth was until the recent project to turn this one into a temporary exhibition space, including Antony Gormley’s idea for do-it-yourself performance art (called, I learn,  “One & Other”). But Whiteread’s read is a good one — perhaps not something that could have stayed there forever, but definitely a good use of her signature technique. If she had chosen opaque plastic, or stone, as her medium, the thing would have been grotesque — instead, merely by the choice of materials, she made apt proportion between the artwork and its base. (Kudos also to the photographer for the placement of pigeons — though if my memory of Trafalgar Square is right, it would have been hard to find a moment without them.)

In the end, she names Christian Jungersen’s The Exception as an example of a real novel, better than the sort of thing she carelessly dismisses. I’ve read it now, on her recommendation, and it’s indeed pretty good. But to me it’s a fairly representative example, not of The Novel, but of the more psychologically-oriented sort of thriller. And this in turn makes me suspect that Batuman isn’t very familiar with the current landscape of genre fiction. It’s pretty common, even traditional, for crime fiction to engage strongly with issues and places — to establish a detective series, for example, authors must settle not only on a character but on an environment, both physical and social, and in giving their characters persistent attributes, they generally give them not only tics but more worthy preoccupations with large issues in the world. If she enjoys this, for example, she might check out Stieg Larsson.

Along with the virtues of crime fiction, of course, come characteristic defects. To my taste, now, the worst is that once the plot is fully underway, the story is driven only by the most extreme motivations — mortal drives such as saving oneself from death or exposure. My complaint is not that these drives are implausible, or (more accurately) that the situations in which they dominate our behavior are rare in real life, but that they lack richness as the material of fiction. All of us would behave desperately in desperate situations — extremity flattens us out.

This is why, I think, the Dogme 95 pledge forbade guns and murder as elements of a movie. Seeing someone compelled to action at the point of a knife or a gun is exciting, up to a point, but there’s not much dimension to it. And Jungersen too slips into this lazy mode. The catty backstabbing among the four female employees of a genocide research institution is clever and engaging, up to a point, but then the motivations tip over into the same range of extremity, with very bad bad guys pulling knives and guns, a fall to the death, and a fatal chase.

Again, it’s pretty good (better than Larsson, really!) but it’s such an arbitrary choice as to undermine Batuman’s argument. I would have welcomed a real discussion of workshop fiction — what is this “technique” people learn there? what are the virtues and defects of the style, if it is a style? — but Batuman isn’t prepared to dig that deep.

The immediate occasion is Francis Fukuyama’s review of a biography of Nietzsche. It’s generally positive, but at the end he lists a few criticisms. One is that the author includes incongruous modern references, of which “many simply detract from the book’s seriousness, like the dozen or so references to global warming scattered through the text.” In the very next paragraph, Fukuyama illustrates the continuing influence of Nietzsche with a reference to Burning Man.

I wish I knew who to credit for the snowclone “X for thee but not for me”….

Incidentally, I must be growing crabby in middle age, because the writing of the reviewer, Dwight Garner, strikes me as simply terrible. For example, to make a glancing point that Francophobia is still alive in Britain, he writes,

More beloved by English readers, though, at No. 4, is a book by Stephen Clarke with this impish title: “1000 Years of Annoying the French.” Garçon, there’s some snark in my soup.

He tells us twice directly that the title is funny, and at least once by implication, and there are more redundancies still in context.

Gillespie doesn’t dislike modern poetry, or at least he’s not arguing that it’s bad; instead he’s arguing that the poets of the heroic Modernist generation(s), by deciding to pursue experiment, destroyed the popular taste for poetry. I’m familiar with arguments of this form from the classical-music world (especially from old USENET days on rec.music.classical). There’s something plausible in them, but I don’t think the proposed causality makes sense. If it had been possible for poets of, say, 1940, to reach a popular audience the way, say, Whittier did, I can’t see what would have restrained them. The prestige of Pound and Eliot might, I suppose, have seduced a few talented popular poets into betraying their gift and writing obscurely; but the inducement of fame — if indeed it was achievable — would surely have lured still more writers down the path of accessibility.

Instead, I think there must be another mechanism at work, some large change in culture that caused both the flowering of experiment and the loss of popular interest. (For comparison, the rise of sound recording changed the propagation and reception of music utterly.) I’m no historian, but I believe many scholars have tried to address this. In this light, one thing that distinguishes the Modernist generation is that they expanded the range of the art greatly at a time when the popular appetite for poetry was still strong.

While Gillespie refrains from criticizing contemporary poetry, his commenters do not, and I doubt he has much use for it himself.

Darwin is presented unsympathetically, prompt to air nasty racial views, like a later-19thC “social Darwinist”. And the argument between FitzRoy and Darwin about transmutation is rendered schematically: they exchange print-ready potted expositions of their opposing views, escalating rapidly, and repeatedly, to open conflict. It’s hard to imagine they could have lived together for five years without accommodating one another more graciously. And in one late scene, as the publication of the Origin draws near, Darwin is made to shout out that there is no God, shocking FitzRoy and driving his own wife weeping from the table. For all I know, this may come straight from the written record, but it’s jarring on the page. In an afterword, Thompson claims much of the dialogue is given exactly as it was spoken; this is either naivety or (more likely) bravado.

I especially enjoy the characteristic ending, in which you realize at the last moment that Antin is winding up, precisely as he begins talking about endings that are abrupt yet effective, in order to say that’s characteristic of Acker. He could have stopped right there, and it would have been perfect, almost too perfect. Instead, he tacks on a conventional eulogistic summation, brief but enough to compromise the moment. One wonders, if he ever prepares this for print, whether he’ll edit out that ending, gracious enough but jarring. Perhaps not — since there isn’t, I think, in any of his books, a single perfectly formed example of his style. His mind may be shapely, to use the term he uses here (taking it from Robert Duncan, to apply it to Acker), but his compositions are always lumpy.

My very first exposure to his work was a short piece, on a memorial service with music directed by Pauline Oliveros, cited in a book of criticism. I remember that as formally polished, a lyric, within the limits of its page or so. From there I went on to Talking, etc., often with exhilaration, but also with some disappointment at digressions left unpursued, half-baked ideas, and so on. Now it occurs to me that that might be an element he values.

He refers to his wife Eleanor Antin’s work 100 Boots, which is new to me. Apparently Acker worked on it. I’d like to see the whole thing. Maybe I should read some Acker too.

In any case, its certainly silly to think that anyone with a “jackass ghetto” (read: African) name could ever amount to anything.

Point taken, but in a way, the commenter who found Coates’ given name to be “ghetto” was on to something: “Ta-Nehisi” is authentically and undeniably American. Obama bears the name of his father, a common way to choose names in many cultures. Coates, though, has a “synthetic” name, self-consciously drawn from the history of Africa, specifically Egypt.

(I too, of course, have an American name, of a different pattern — elsewhere in the Anglosphere, one sees Lastname Lastname by elision of the first, but we Americans have made a habit of replacing the Christian name entirely.)

Using names to affiliate ourselves or our children self-consciously to traditions shows some insecurity, I think, with respect to tradition in general. But that insecurity is part of what it means to be an American! What could be more American than Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

Tradition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

The commenter’s disgust at Coates’s name expresses the same kind of insecurity. If carrying an aspirational name is enough to disqualify him, then we’re all walking on very thin ice.