Game of Shame: Emerson

When I was in graduate school, studying American and English literature and dreaming of being a "professor," my best friends' father was one of my professors (there's a tangled sentence), and he told us about a game that he and his friends used to play in the good old days at Johns Hopkins, where he was a graduate student -- the Game of Shame.

The rule for the game is simple: confess the "great" literature that you're supposed to have read that you haven't.

I can't remember what this professor said he'd never read (he did confess it to us, again), but I can confess that I've never read the entire Inferno (sorry, Dante) but only the parts that Eliot referenced in The Waste Land, and everything that Tomas Mann ever wrote made my brain freeze.

And now one of you (who shall remain nameless in this open space -- but you know who you are) has assigned us "The Conservative," by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And I will confess that I've read about zero of the man ... and, it turns out, with good reason: he also makes my brain freeze, and my eyes roll back into my head, and my senses dig into the darkness.

I just can't really make sense of the guy. I find myself wondering who he's addressing -- this is a speech, after all -- and on what occasion.  And, finally, what's the slippery point that he's trying to make (or, as the case may be, avoiding to make)?

Here's a random passage from the essay in question:

In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics, shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If we read the world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the present hour and circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the best throw of the dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. If we see it from the side of Will, or the Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and the Present, and require the impossible of the Future.

Okay. So let's close read this fucker.  "Each of these elements" no doubt refers to the central ideas of the essay -- conservatism and idealism/reform.  So, Emerson seems to be saying something like: In nature, the impulse to stay the same (conservatism) and the impulse to change (reform, or evolution) is always present at the same time.  If we want to take a stand in this natural debate, we either side with the conservative (leave things alone)  or the reformer (change things).

Then Emerson loses me. "If we read the world historically," he says, and I wonder what he means by that?  Does he mean: if we look at things the way an historian would, we say "this present moment is the cumulative result of the past"?  And what does it mean to see the world "from the side of Will" -- is that the same as saying "if we see the world from the side of the innovator or the dreamer"?

Sigh. This is one reason why I've never really read Emerson (I win the Game of Shame here).  My husband, when he wasn't my husband, came home from some seminar in American Lit (taught by the Great Professor Father of my Friends) talking about Emerson's transparent eyeball, which he proceeded to explain to me (at length).  Yes, dear readers, I still married him ... but what I gleaned from that second hand lecture and exposure to the Big E was that I was in no way shape or form a Transcendentalist (except in the fact that I love Whitman).  I think my vision of "reality" or "what matters" is perhaps the modernist's or the existentialist's -- which can perhaps be boiled down to "isn't it pretty to think so?" or "so you think you're all that?  well, shithead, you'll die too one day."

I should thank the young man who assigned this essay to me for the humbling posture it's put me in. Once again, I'm reminded of all that I don't know, and how insignificant I am in the so-called design of this random universe. There's something to be said for this RESET button; for the down-low feeling of the student, reminding me to keep learning and reading. And maybe there's a fire and energy to the abstract language of the Romantics that I could benefit from ... with the right training, and translation.

Reading Angela Carter

Thanks, first of all, to Sam K. for bringing my attention back to Angela Carter.  (Here's the story she assigned us to read, if you're interested: "The Lady of the House of Love".)

I was first introduced to Carter in graduate school, when I took a 20th Century Brit Lit course and we read through her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, which this story comes from. I remember clearly how much I liked (in theory?) her retelling of Bluebeard and her story devoted to Lizzie Borden.  Angela Carter's style is lush, overstated, even baroque: she reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe, building phrase upon phrase over the gothic ruins of a horror house.  And "The Lady of the House of Love" doesn't disappoint (or depart from) this model -- it's soaked with gothic flourishes, with rotting wood and spider webs, with Tarot cards and eerie bloated beauty -- plus, it's about a vampire, which should draw me in.

I'm a fan, that is, of monster stories, and of fairy tales. I like the way that horror shows us what we fear and loathe paired with what we most desire; the discomfort that such reading or viewing arouses in us feels, physically, like forbidden desire ... because it is forbidden desire, according to most literary and social/psychological theorists. Our disgust = inverted lust.

Once upon a time, I liked the literary flourishes that Victorian prudery built up around these base longings. Looking back, I could read Poe's swirling sentences as evidence of his adolescent (stunted? arrested?) sexuality, as nascent (shuddering) horniness (for lack of a blunter term); I could assign over-writing as a symptom of perverse "binding," and suggest that the (young? arrested?) writer wraps language around and around the bloated rose he's avoiding.

The older I get, the further away from that time in my life when sexuality, the sex act, both fascinated and repelled me, the more I avoid such linguistic crenellations.

I have no ending for this.

What are short stories good for?

I was driving home yesterday and listening to NPR when a little segment about Rick Bass came on. Bass is a fiction writer who I seem to recall dominated the contemporary literature scene when I was taking MFA courses in fiction writing (in the late 80s, in other words).

Here's the bit, if you want to read it or listen to it:  Rick Bass on the art of the short story

Bass says that "The short story is a beautiful reservoir that you enter. You learn something, and you get out. It fits our brain. It's a unique package, a lozenge, a lens that helps us process all kinds of information. The classic short story form with that elegant, tapered shape - it's not formulaic. It's organic, and it fits who we are as a species."

I'm not sure what he means by this, frankly, but it sounds pretty beautiful and hits me in the poetry center of my brain, a part of it that doesn't really need to make complete sense of a stimulus but instead experiences it physically. All I know is that, driving down Ashland past the thawing parks by the train tracks toward downtown Green Bay, I liked (in the pit of my stomach) the idea that short stories fit our brains like lozenges.

A lovely sentiment, like the BOOM epiphany of a poem about spring arriving at last.  But is it true?

Are short stories "organic" or are they in fact artificial?  Really, how many of us crave short stories?  How many of us read them?  How many of us write them when they're not assigned by circumstances?

I'll be the first to admit that I crave, instead, serial narratives -- family sagas, soap-operatic works in the tradition of Downtown Abbey (but on the page, of course), series of novels devoted to the same detectives, TV shows that follow the same characters through 8+ seasons of personal life.  Short stories, even if they're "linked," don't give me the same thrill.

I just finished reading and listening to all of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series. He started this cycle of novels as a serial entry in a newspaper and then branched out into the sphere of novels. All 8 of these books had me gripped in a set of characters living and working and making their strange ways in San Fransisco, beginning in the 70s and moving slowly into the first decade of this new century. His characters are richly drawn and intricately connected to each other -- gay and transgender and "straight" in a time of social upheaval that's still going on. I lived with those characters for weeks. They became part of me, their worlds overlaid on mine as I walked the dog around the frozen block, as I drove from home to school to home in the routine of an ordinary life.  And their presence made that ordinary life take on a kind of wonder and richness that I needed.

I think I'd like to argue, then, that the serial narrative is more organic to the species.  The epic poem, the series of novels, the long family history, then, are all more organic than the short story, which seems (frankly) like an amputation.

But, hell, I'll take a short story over silence any day.

A Poem a Day, Parenthesis, and ... wait ... what?

In April, this thing happens -- poets are challenged to write a poem a day (April is poetry month) and to publish those poems on a public forum (ie, the internet).

For the last three years now, I've done that. I've written a poem a day and published them in a blog. (You can find 2015 right here, if you scroll down long enough.)  Some of those poems have been pretty good, if I do say so myself. Some of them have struggled to reach meh level.

I'm already getting some nods on Facebook and other places about 2016's poetry challenge. My fanbase, such as it is, is waiting.

And I'm conflicted about that. I'm conflicted about having to write a poem a day. I'm confused and also amused by having a few fans out there, waiting for me to deliver. I'm afraid that the well might be dry (at first I typed "will" instead of well -- and that might be a more accurate comparison ... my will might have dried up).  I'm tired, too, and my body hurts a lot of the time, so I'm wondering if all of my poetry might be part of a long and semi-amorphous complaint about aging.

On the other hand, I've already started to compose little poetry snippets in my head. I think something occurred to me this morning while I was blowdrying what's left of my hair. (That something is already gone. See above about wills and wells.) I even contemplated, for a bit, writing a bunch of the daily poems beforehand, as in now, today, and even though I knew it was cheating I made some sort of firm plan to do it when I got to campus today that I totally forgot about as soon as I left the bathroom.

That's another thing. How can I write a poem a day when I can't keep a random thought in my brain for longer than it takes to blow out my bangs (that's what we used to call that part of your hair that hangs into your eyes, and it's so much more poetic than "fringe" or whatever else you kids are calling it these days)?

I just lost, again, the flow of thought, thinking as I was about the fact that my last sentence took the parenthesis to a new level of distraction, and then after that riffing in my head on the idea of poetry falling into parenthesis, as if into cracks in the ground, or old disgusting weeks old snow. (Poetry.)

See?

(I'll just have to decide what I'm going to do later.)