Autumn 2020: Is Everything Getting Dimmer or Is It Just Me?

show high levels of inventiveness and linguistic skill adapting to different online environments

but, according to Ms. McCulloch's thesis and her examples, none of their strategies involve crafting sentences with subordinate clauses, but rather such abstruse tactics as deliberately removing periods imposed by grammar-nanny software, because periods suggest too harsh a finality and an unfriendly tone of voice. Such inventiveness only bewilders me.

I like reading a good sentence whatever the circumstances, so crack on!

I finished Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams (finally). It's beautiful and luminous and made me think about how a lot of my favourite books are travel-related and how this is a dying/dead genre - something I've seen change and pretty much disappear in my lifetime. It's a hyperbolic statement but what does travel even mean in our current context?

Anyway, speaking of good (and earnest - I like earnest) sentences, Lopez has the chops: No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of the conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the middle of such a paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.

I was a bit *shrug* about Autumn, Alfred. Intrigued as to what you make of it.

Chinaski, have you 'Coming into the Country' by John McPhee? I always pair that with 'Arctic Dreams' in my head. Both are excellent.

Obviously meant 'have you READ....'

Anyway, I am pausing on the daybooks-esque work of Faylor mentioned upthread to consider my holiday gifts.

I finished Denise Riley's 'Say Something Back/ Time Lived, Without it's Flow,' and I must say that it might be one of the better books about grief and mourning I've ever encountered. The first section is poetry, and then the second is a sort of essay and notes around the subject of losing her son. Might be one of the more extraordinary books I've ever read, to be honest. Anyway, here is a link: https://www.nyrb.com/products/say-something-back

Now, after some deliberation, I'm going to start Jeff Vandermeer's 'Annihilation,' because a dear friend recommended it. I always ask for one book outside of my usual genre interests, and this is the one for this year.

Hope some of you might have also had good books delivered to you in recent days.

Ah damn---good quotes from Lopez and others on All Things Considered just now, audio not up yet, but here's a (partial?) transcript:
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/26/948863127/barry-lopez-acclaimed-author-and-traveler-beyond-many-horizons-dies-at-75

No, I think it is the whole segment on him.

December reads:

Dickens - Great Expectations
Dickens - Hard Times
Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Salinger - Nine Stories
Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Salingers and Orwell were rereads, books I loved as a teenager to kick start my reading routine. I've failed with Dickens before so I'm glad to say I greatly enjoyed GE and HT

currently reading:

Dickens - Our Mutual Friend

about to start:

Salinger - Franny & Zooey

Grebt Expectations probably my choice of introduction to Dickens as there's a lot of good stuff in it. OMF was my first and possibly my favourite.

Bogged down slightly with Bleak House at the moment, probably just because I'm not at parents for Christmas and therefore not looking to escape by reading Victorian novels.

I finished Happiness, As Such. I think I will have to get my hands on more Ginzburg books. It was good, but in a different way than Valentino and Sagittarius. Her inimitable voice is there of course, but this book is more formally unconventional and oblique, and she's working with material that might not seem automatically promising for a novel. It still hangs together remarkably well. Now I'm reading Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli. The last-man-on-earth premise seems a bit tired (I recently read a Bradbury story with a similar premise) but the book is short enough I will stay with it to see if he puts some unique spin on it.

I love John McPhee, table - need to read more. I hadn't even realised Lopez had died when I posted about Arctic Dreams. Damn. RIP.

Angela Saini Inferior
Her book on the science of gender trying to dismiss the tradition that men are superior etc. I found Superior her book on Race Science very good which is why I was thinking i needed to get this too, I ordered it and was told it wouldn't arrive before Xmas but got here on Xmas Eve which some things I had due didn't.
So far only read the introduction but it seems to be pretty clearly written and I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

THere are probably other books along these lines that I also need to read. May be in the bibliography here so may be what I read next year at least in part.
Also really want to get the 2nd part of the BBC series on Eugenics that she was one of the people presenting, thought first part was great but missed the 2nds showing. Now potential d/lds aren't moving.

THE ARREST: I'm halfway through. It's a kind of post-mild-apocalypse, describing rural Maine after the world's technology has suddenly all stopped working. That could be enough of a premise in itself, but Lethem combines it with a dangerous old friend arriving from across the USA in a nuclear-powered 'supercar'.

The chapters are very short - say, two pages. In this it resembles much of the previous novel, THE FERAL DETECTIVE (2018).

It carries echoes of other novels: a character name from GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC; motifs and to some extent overall set-up from AMNESIA MOON.

I'm not sure how it will pan out. It's very readable.

I read a book I received for Christmas: R.F. Foster, ON SEAMUS HEANEY (2020).

I revere Foster as stylist and encyclopedically knowledeable historian. And I'm fond of Heaney, with a slight scepticism. This should have been a perfect book for me. It was very readable, fluent, smooth. It's a chronological account of Heaney's life and work. It contains almost no really new opinion or critical angle. It replicates what you already knew about Heaney. If you wanted a new introduction to Heaney, you could use this.

Two flaws: one, it's reverential - praising Heaney highly for almost everything he does or says. The only real exception is the volume ELECTRIC LIGHT (2001), which Foster echoes others in finding unsatisfactory. Foster agrees with all critics - except when they criticize Heaney. Then he attacks them, and defends him. Second, it's not really analytical. It uses critical terms (tercets, terza rima, quatrains), but almost never gets into quotation and analysis of small phrases, as against quotation of large chunks or whole poems.

The book has one real novelty and distinction: it draws on the Heaney archive, the Friel papers, letters and drafts that most of us have never seen. Repeatedly Foster drops such material in - it's by far his strongest suit. But he doesn't exactly do it systematically, or indicate a general way that the archive would change our view of Heaney. Perhaps, on the whole, it wouldn't.

The thing that I have always thought about Heaney, which I never found anyone else to think, is:

He is quite obscure! I mean, lots of his lines drift off into saying something that I can't make out. Quite often he does this with a last line, thus leaving me with a sense of obscurity about a whole poem. Or he says something but I can't tell why. The poem has ended, but what was it for?

I'm unsure how much this is deliberate: a wish not to be easy and understood. Or how far it's just intuitive, the way he writes and thinks.

The contrast with Larkin, whose work Heaney liked a lot, would be the most instructive. By the end of a Larkin poem you almost always know what he's said, or why. That's what I don't, so much, with Heaney.

Pinefox, I am really intrigued by this book, but could you flesh out a bit what you mean by Heaney trailing off? I’ve always thought it is the way he writes, but if you have any specific examples, it’s a cold morning in tier 4 and I’d love to talk about them.

I find Heaney nigh-unreadable, but I think for totally different reasons than either of you!

I love Heaney up through 1987; what a coincidence I was rereading him on Christmas Eve morn.

xp I don’t find him unreadable at all, the opposite in fact.

table, maybe I'm asking the question because you also disagree on the merits of Merrill, but are there any 20th century so-called formalists you read with pleasure?

I think I'll make a run at reading Froissart's Chronicles next. Not sure if I can stick to it, but it's an interesting period.

Year's end is always tricky for figuring out when to start a new WAYR thread. Winter solstice was a week ago, but 2021 is still five days away. Dear me! Decisions, decisions, decisions.

(procrastinates)

Alfred— no, not really. I love some poets who use formal techniques, and I've often found such techniques quite invigorating— my last book was written entirely in haiku, as I think I've mentioned before, and I've written a crown of sonnets. I should say that I find a few poems by Merrill and Heaney rather lovely, but don't really understand the immense praise heaped upon their work.

thanks!

It is interesting, though, because I revere Hopkins and Donne and Keats, for example, and think that some of the poets who are currently utilizing or repurposing older formal strategies are making brilliant work. Wendy Trevino and Nikki Wallschlaeger are doing immense work with the sonnet, for example.

With Heaney in particular, I admire his command of form, but find the actual poetry leaves me feeling rather bored.

Whereas I'd consider Donne's Holy Sonnets or Hopkins' collected poems to be desert island books, no joke.

Thankfully we’ll never end up sharing the same desert island, I hope.

impulse bought the kindle edition of the only good indians by stephen graham jones to kill time at work today and i'm glad i did - it's real good so far.

One of the most useful things my teenage self did was memorize a whole bunch of Hopkins, so I'll have him with me on my desert island no matter what.

I know it's not an arms race but while I like Heaney a good deal, and accept his project didn't necessarily require it (if that's the right verb?), he doesn't come close to Hopkins' heights (cliffs of fall, frightful). Xp

He's also a deal easier to remember than Heaney!

Totally with you on the Holy Sonnets and Hopkins.

I like the way his rhythms and absolute command over assonance still produce these verses that murmur like brooks. Like many poets in old age, he relied on technique to get him past an empty larder, but I'll always love Field Work.

When I taught poetry 18 (!) years ago, "The Otter" often made my syllabus:

When you plunged
The light of Tuscany wavered
And swung through the pool
From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,
Your fine swimmer's back and shoulders
Surfacing and surfacing again
This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.
You were beyond me.
The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air
Thinned and disappointed.

Thank God for the slow loadening,
When I hold you now
We are close and deep
As the atmosphere on water.

My two hands are plumbed water.
You are my palpable, lithe
Otter of memory
In the pool of the moment,

Turning to swim on your back,
Each silent, thigh-shaking kick
Re-tilting the light,
Heaving the cool at your neck

and I've been reading Hardy's poetry since "The Voice" speared this lovelorn teen two decades ago. The rhythmic experimentation and occasional clumsiness adds to their charm.

More Hardy is in my 2021 list. Maybe I'll try some of his poems too.

reread The Mayor of Castorbridge a month ago this weekend

Alfred, don't want to pick on you for your spelling but...

...it's too much fun to resist!

In keeping with Hardy's approach to prose and poetry.

I suppose that Heaney covers a lot of ground (sometimes literally lol) that is more mundane and is very connected to the landscape, which is not much different from the landscapes of my childhood. When he speaks of the scent of the air, the colour of the earth, he is putting the feelings of very ordinary people about their habitat into something almost divine. It helped me see the ordinary world in an almost magical and transformed way.

I have great regard for the matter-of-fact language he uses, it is simple, but not stupid, personal, but not parochial and these things by themselves make his work accessible and easy to read for people who may be far removed from the kind of places he writes about - so much so that it is easy to slag him off as boring, I guess. I think there is work of his that is discordant and that goes against this simplistic analysis of mine too. Act of Union has always been deeply disturbing to me precisely because it is written by him in his calm way, the imagery is visceral even in the present tense and allegorical as it is, and it is probably one of his most political works. I have never found it very easy to read, it’s shocking to me even now.

I will never forget learning Mid-Term Break in school at ten or so, as most Irish children do, and finding the poem terribly upsetting for very similar reasons - the mundane setting, the horror of the event, the bare bones simplicity that leaves you with all the murmurs in the house and the ticking clock in the waiting room. The sounds between the unsaid. I would be very surprised if there was much that still stuck to people’s minds a quarter of a century later, as that poem did to me.

When I think of Heaney I think first of the physical - the land, the air, the sea - and then the deep undercurrent of emotion running through his work, and what a pure pleasure it is to read his work, even when it is disturbing. I cannot read The Harvest Bow, in particular this:

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel

Booming post.

He gives life to topography.

An auction notice on an outhouse wall— startling slip-in, and makes me wonder how it relates to the next line, as they keep walking.

That is a lovely post, gyac. I think that perhaps my experiences simply render much of what you speak of as mere observation and narrative candor, which is more than fine, but not what I look for in poetry. I should also say that Heaney often does the 'dilatory epiphanic' move toward the end of his poems, which I find just intolerable, more and more so as I age.

All that said, I'm glad he brings you peace and enjoyment.

_An auction notice on an outhouse wall—_ startling slip-in, and makes me wonder how it relates to the next line, as they keep walking.

I respect very much what poster Gyac has said here.

Yet it doesn't quite square with my own sense of Heaney. I think because my own sense, as I said, is of greater obscurity. Either I am not always sure what Heaney is saying, or I am not sure why he is saying it. A line often feels inconsequential. And quite often a line just doesn't quite add up to me at all.

There are other issues with Heaney eg: that after a certain point, he is often not writing so much directly about these matter of fact, immediate things, but making overt reference to classical sources. A non-classicist, I never find this compelling. My hunch is that, as Larkin begrudgingly said, classical and mythic references don't make reality more impressive, and the poet should work to do that without them. (As Joyce did in Ulysses, which almost never advertises its classical aspect.)

I'm not certain what 'dilatory epiphanic' means, but my hunch is that what it means is precisely what you find, to a quite formulaic (but well-executed!) degree, in Larkin - and *not* in Heaney. If Heaney actually often did that then his endings would be less obscure to me than they are.

Poster Gyac mentions that his or her own childhood was in a landscape like Heaney's. Mine wasn't - perhaps that makes a difference.

As for 'Lightenings viii': having read Foster praise it in his own uncritical way, I'm inclined to say, with impolite contrariness, that that's now about as rusted a cliché as 'when hope and history rhyme'. What's actually good about it?

I see more myth than Classical allusions in Heaney -- Irish myth, but rooted in peat, loam, mud, and the smell of farm animals. It's what I like about him.

I recall now that there is a massive Heaney thread here:

Seamus Heaney-Classic or Dud (RIP)

In which several of us turned over the same ground only last year. ILX poster Gyac posted exactly the same quotation! And I, for instance, after a period of reading him quite intensively, wrote:

I come back - when I actually read him - to the fact that Heaney, much more especially late Heaney, has certain obsessions that he unabashedly indulges, primarily:

1: his rural childhood (I don't especially see the father as central to this; more place, objects, etc) -- and various named local characters, who are by definition unknown to almost all readers

2: the classics, ie: poetry, mythology or whatever from ancient Greece, maybe with Rome and old Norse also thrown in. There must be a fair number of people who see this stuff and think: YES - HEANEY'S REWRITING VIRGIL'S LAST WORK! But then a majority must be like me and have no idea of any of these works, and no identification, unfortunately, with the passion that presumably draws Heaney to them. He must LOVE this stuff, love engaging in depth with it, to go on about it SO MUCH.

You can say that 2) shows the limits of the audience, it's our fault, and Heaney is prompting us to learn. That's reasonable and optimistic. Most of us won't learn that much.

1) meanwhile can't be blamed on the reader, ie: you could only know who those people were if you read an in-depth biography of him.

What would be an equivalent? Maybe ... a contemporary person writing about their childhood friends from 20 or 30 years ago, and going on and on about things like ice lollies, Space Hoppers, Bros, Pokemon, etc -- and then, the rest of the time, going in for endless rewrites of a certain body of culture -- like, say ... STAR TREK. So every poem that wasn't about lollies or seeing Bros on TotP in 1988 would be eg: 'The Search For Spock, Scene III', in verse form.

This is a way for me to perceive and to say that despite my great affection for Heaney, I find his actual poetic choices, of subject etc, often dead ends, private obsessions. Suppose someone did write lots of poems about Bros (I can imagine it) - they would have some fans but might they not be seen as narrow unless they worked to show its importance and invite a broader readership to understand it?

It's funny, then, that he is also seen as such a public poet - for good reason, to be sure.

But there simply isn't much Irish myth in Heaney.

There is tons of classical myth - especially in the last 20 years or so of his career, when he spent half his time producing translations of it.

If he had wanted to write about Cuchulain, Deirdre, Finn MacCool or the Sidhe, he could have. But he didn't, as far as I recall -- for one thing, he will have known how much it had been done, almost a century before.

The exception is Mad King Sweeney, which / who he did write about a lot -- seemingly in part because he liked the rhyme with his own name.

Station Island?

I'm actually relieved he didn't write about Cuchulain, etc.

I much prefer a long poem about Bros, though.

When Yeats wrote a key position-taking play for the Abbey and the Revival, it was (among others) Cathleen ni Houlihan.

When Heaney wrote one for Field Day, about 90 years later, it was The Cure at Troy.

I suspect (as my post from the other thread indicates) that you will never fully get the measure and pleasure of Heaney unless you are somewhat steeped in classical learning, tales and poems of ancient Greek, at least in translation, so that what he does with them and alters means something to you, as it generally doesn't to me.

The long poem 'Station Island' is based on an Irish Catholic pilgrimage. I'm happy to call Catholicism myth, if anyone else is, but it's not 'Irish mythology' in the way that phrase is usually understood.

The literary inspiration for the whole thing is, above all, Dante - whom I don't pretend to know well at all. Again, if you did, you might get much more out of Heaney. Catholic, mythic maybe, but not Irish.

The poem is full of Irish elements but they're not mythic: actual victims of recent violence; Carleton, Kavanagh and Joyce; other people Heaney knew, like a late priest.

Part III of the book STATION ISLAND, though, is the Sweeney section - I grant that that is properly an engagement with medieval Irish mythology.

I think the Bros poem idea is not even fanciful now -- there seem to be a ton of younger type poets who would do such a thing (or maybe more likely NKOTB, or even Spears / Timberlake, or something), and be reposted all over Instagram for it. I can definitely picture this being celebrated in some circles, and getting a Short Cuts feature in the LRB.

In a certain way, though, it wouldn't be viewed as equally serious as what Heaney did. Its defiant unseriousness would be part of the point [etc etc]. Which they wouldn't say about Heaney writing about the 1950s.