The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

He resides in a Connecticut of the mind. People exist as muses and intimations.

Mark S: I agree that 'puritanical' is a key word, but what does it mean in relation to Eliot?

The truth is surely that in relation to Eliot, it has its most banal meaning - the thing that everyone would casually think puritanical means - that is: a fear and suspicion of sexuality.

It is arguable that this is present in TSE's most famous poem. Arguable also that it was present in his life, though that's another matter.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

Or did Lowell really mean to say something else about Eliot, by this word? If so, I don't know what it was.

yes i agree it doesn't open things up very much at all, and that many readers will likely reach for the least testing meaning -- tho i'm guessing a boston new englander might have more complex references for it, including even some positive ones? as much as anything it's a religion-based philosophy (what should you do? how are you saved?) and eliot was both religious and philosophical…

the interviewer should have asked him what he meant the word! (i haven't read the interview so i'm just parsing that point) (instead of getting down to my own work)

The interviewer should have asked him a lot of things. A poor job.

I agree that Lowell probably did, indeed, mean it positively, as you say. But again, TSE was not from New England, and was not a puritan - he was raised as a Mid-Western Unitarian and then became an Anglo-Catholic in London. To say he was a New England puritan seems something of a fiction.

I think I should partially withdraw my last statement, as Unitarianism could perhaps be called a form of puritanism.

well i think he's making a provocative rather than a factual claim: TSE is the most "new england" of poets – despite largely being from elsewhere – bcz to be a puritan is above all to be "new england" and TSE was above all a puritan. what did he mean by this tho? we do not find out (bcz the joke or the trolling or whatever it is went over the interviewer's head, and requires ilx to tease it out)

That seems a good reading. The point of the statement is that TSE is "very New England" despite not being from New England.

(he's robert traill spence lowell IV, of the boston lowells who came over on the mayflower = as new england as you get?)

Anthony Powell, almost certainly well aware of Lowell's family lineage, used to say that his own surname should be pronounced in just the same way as Lowell's (ie not to rhyme with 'towel').

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

brb developing a hilarious internet meta-joek in which they're pronounced poo-ell and loo-ell and also instead of boo-ie it's boo-urns

I did try to read Lowell 14 years ago. It was a struggle and unrewarding - just as Mark S has said. I seem to have got almost nothing out of them.

Can anyone who remembers tell me, or us, what (some of?) Lowell's poems are about?

Yeah, if Lowell meant puritanical and/or Brahmin related, then Stevens could not count, as he had to actually work for a living (horrors!) in the most dreary of professions, too.

mark s and the pinefox, he wrote what I would call historical confessional works that mostly involved the relation of the self to history as perceived in the present. “For the Union Dead” is an emblematic poem— blank verse, the intrusion of modernity and the (here literal) excavation of history, the way personal memory imbues a place with a certain subjective personal history as adjunct to objective history, a healthy dose of racism.

https://poets.org/poem/union-dead

I should say, i just woke up so “blank verse” not the term as it’s usually utilized— I meant free verse.

He wrote one poem that I love unreservedly— otherwise, meh.

But is that really what Lowell meant to say: that TSE was prudish and fearful of / revolted by sex? If so, it has an element of truth, but it's a strange way to praise someone for being from New England.

This made me laugh out loud.

His dense Tate/Eliot-indebted early work is about the only Lowell I can stand.

He lived in a tent on Allen Tate's lawn!

the only kind of influence i recognise

Poster table, thanks for your description of Lowell's work. This is helpful and clear. Apart from the racism, you do not make the poetry sound bad.

Caroline Blackwood the most interesting writer in the whole Lowell 'set', imho.

Hardwick. I like Blackwood too.

Hardwick's criticism, her fiction not so much.

Lowell really loved the "n" word, among the reasons why I dislike him tbh.

Trust was a fitting title as far as the first book because it calls into question the basis of finance and common knowledge (and presuppositions about behavior and mutual ties and obligation). When something is backed by nothing other than trust, what happens?

So did Tate. Cal learns from masters. xpost

"During Fever" by Lowell (thanks ILX for restarting my interest in poetry)

Blackwood, Hardwick, Stafford: excellent literary taste in choosing his abused wives (note related imagery of names too)

Now into the second book about Bevel, I am thinking that this novel reminds me of Buddenbrooks and Thomas Mann in general when it seemed possible to associate business with goodness and solidity that later dissipated into anxiety and fret manifest as care about linens. Wealth buys freedom from care which can turn into freedom from responsibility which I see can engender resentment. The ideal middle class would be exempt from privilege and want and be sympathetic to expansion (i.e., sociable or socially minded if introverted).

There are also strange ideas about (women and) health and frailty perhaps labeled Victorian or hypochondriac or melancholic.

I picked up a book that I got as a gift, Clark Coolidge’s “This Time We Are Both,” written in 1989 when he accompanied the ROVA Saxophone Quartet on their album tour of the same name in the USSR. It was published in 2015 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Among the qualities I admire in Coolidge is that one has to re-learn how to read him with every book, and this book no different. It took me two sections to understand and flow with his basic strategy, which involves interrogatives answered by seeming non-sequiturs that eventually wind their way back to the question at hand. There are a lot of references to jazz, of course, as well as what was obvious even then as an eventual collapse of the Union. Super interesting and rhythmically complex book, the latter being a hallmark of Coolidge’s poems, as he is/was a jazz drummer.

I am glad there was more to Trust. I need to read the last book again with a piano around, even though I am probably tone deaf.

Regarding Lowell, or more generally, I am not sure if a line by line reading expands or constricts interpretation.

Christina Stead - The Man Who Loved Children.

Nearly finishing this novel (discussed around it a bit here: Like the 20th Century Never Happened), its a memoir of sorts from Stead -- who grew up with a step mother and had many step brothers and sisters -- and writes so well about the chaos in her early life. My first book by her and I hope to read a couple more.

I envy you. Read I'm Dying Laughing next.

Picked up Hazel Rowen's Christina Stead: A Biography at the library to give it the totally unfair Random Read Test, and was immediately pulled into Stead & hubbie's international escape from his prosecution for financial shenanigans, also description of her father as inspiration for The Man Who Loved Children: he wrote letters to his offspring and their pals in Uncle Remus "dialect" and signed off as "The King of the Kids"---also resented, challenged Christina for doing well in high school, like she was going above her raising/his level---on the other hand, was a pioneering polemicist, pushing his fellow Australian adults toward recognition of their environmental despoilation---a hundred-odd years ago.

Speaking of Hardwick, did yall read that New Yorker excerpt from Darryl Pinckney's forthingcoming memoir, here recalling his relationship with her, student/teacher/friends? Also scandalizing her some of her older white friends when they were seen in public together, going somewhere for actual recreation, enjoyment of an occasion, rather than tucked away working, or her out alone, trudging to or from the classroom, and no doubt still pining for the evil Lowell, poor thing. In Pinckney's take, she was taken for an interracial cougar (though he's gay, and they were taking a break from writing-critiquing). Not much she says here about writing tells me anything I didn't know, but she's a compelling presence---can't wait to see what else he says about her and others. Are his other books good?

The Man Who Loved Children is so extraordinary. Sam Pollit is like the inverse of Livia Soprano, inasmuch as he works against that dictum that whoever created the character must have really hated them. He continues to inhabit the outer rim of my imagination (for good, for ill). And hell, that closing section, with the line I have gone for a walk around the world. Take me with you.

A formal exercise for playwrights or copy editors if they ever had to line up as candidate typists and stenographers for job interviews as in Trust: screen or stage play of advertising copy lines as in Pierrot Le Fou or Ubik with extra points for penny magazine copy, obscure local dailies, etc. and imperceptibility / plausibility

Not sure whether to give up Vigdis Hjorth. Why does Norwegian literature seem state funded (not propagandist)? Started Crying in H Mart while deciding whether or not to continue.

I read my fourth Ross Macdonald: THE GALTON CASE (1959). My first in the 2012 Penguin reissue series (which only comprised a few). I can see why it merited that. It's probably as good as any of the other 3 I've read so far. The usual qualities: crisp dialogue, crisp thought and observation, large cast of minor characters, terrifically intricate plot, poetic flashes of description. This one has the additional theme of identity, whether a character is who he is said to be, making it slightly more uncanny.

I omitted to mention that this novel has a strong literary undercurrent. Eliot and Rimbaud are mentioned; Macdonald includes a whole poem, which seems to have been his own youthful work, repurposed; Lew Archer attends a San Francisco poetry club and hears a long Beat poem which is superbly rendered. Pynchon hardly did these things better. One passage even remarkably seems to invoke a discussion at the very start of Ulysses. The resemblance is so great that I suspect that it was conscious, but that Macdonald didn't require or especially expect readers to see it.

McDonald writes terrific, unusual endings - usually the worst part of a whodunnit. I love the "last place at the end of the world" feeling when The Galton Case changes location in the last few chapters. And in The Chill - the abrupt ending is incredible.

I think what was disturbing in Trust was the idea that booms and busts could have been engineered beforehand. This feeling of insecurity and powerlessness also pervades modern notions of privacy and security and undermines other forms of agency, to which one should respond somehow?!?!

(to rub it in by someone who didn't know what he was doing and incarcerated his wife until she could no longer provide market tips)

which may be a fanciful idea in the first place but just contributes to the sense of being completely unmoored from "reality"

All that is in there?! Got to take a look at that book.

I recently finished a book which I believe would fall into the category of detective fiction as discussed by Pinefox earlier in the thread, To Each His Own by Leonardo Sciasci...the detective story is inseparable from the milieu of Sicily in which it take place, a place where it is generally accepted that it doesn't pay to stick one's nose in where it doesn't belong. The protagonist of To Each His Own is a professor of literature and a somewhat unworldly man, more comfortable with books than with the confusing motives and passions of the people living in his town. This being a detective story, a murder has taken place -- actually two murders -- and the professor gets drawn in, somewhat reluctantly, by his acquaintance with the victims (it's a small town) and his belief that the police are underestimating the import of a clue. His motive is not one of justice -- he doesn't seem to care very much if the murderer is caught -- but rather intellectual curiosity. An "obscure pride" prevents him from confiding in the police. There is an evocative passage: "At play in this obscure pride were the centuries of contempt that an oppressed people, an eternally vanquished people, had heaped on the law and all those who were its instruments; a conviction, still unquenched, held that the highest right and the truest justice, if one really cares about it, if one is not prepared to entrust its execution to fate or to God, can come only from the barrels of a gun." This view seems to fly in the face of the "conservative" streak that is supposed to run through detective fiction as a form.

― o. nate, Saturday, October 8, 2022

You don't call the cops.

Rereading Don DeLillo, WHITE NOISE (1985).

Isn't that a Spillane thing too? Don't know how many other crime novelists go that way, but some people call it conservatism, deep tradition---

Think that's a false equivalence: the Spillane mode suggests cops are useless because they've been tied down by red tape and are unable to go on glorious murdering sprees of the criminal element. Sciasi sees the police as part of a fundamentally rotten, authoritarian system. They both view the police as corrupt, so there's overlap, but it's not really the same thing.

You don't call the cops.

"'Why don’t they go to the police?' I’ve always replied, 'They don’t go to the police because it’s dull.'" - Alfred Hitchcock