David Matthews

I cannot say exactly what possessed me to take up Ulysses as the fall project. It would be too easy to claim simply that this is a book I feel I should read, or would like to have read, at any rate, though there is something to that. Maybe foolish pride and inner need push me to such books as a way to cling to the belief that I continue to pursue the intellectual adventure and life of the spirit, however much circumstances may suggest that is just another illusion with which I stubbornly refuse to part.

I have picked up Ulysses on a number of occasions, several anyway, over the years without ever making much headway, invariably finding myself soon lost, appreciative of this soaring passage or that bon mot, but too often unsure who said what, or where, or what exactly is happening here, there, or when, in what must be the longest day in the history of the world. The impulse to take another crack at Joyce’s grand work was just that, impulse, whim, and perhaps symptomatic of a trend to aimlessness and lack of focus that marks the past few years, a kind of entropy of intellect and spirit.

The curiosity that served me in good stead from my first discovery of books and reading is still with me. The discipline to follow through is what has eroded. Thus my reading bounces from a bit of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to fascinating chapters about Proudhon the anarchist and John Stuart Mill in Alexander Herzen’s great memoir My Past and Thoughts to yet another perfunctory stab at Hegel for maybe no better reason than because he’s there and I’ve made little more headway with him than with Joyce, all of this highfalutin fare punctuated by a slew of contemporary novels, among them The Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell, The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Tragedy of Arthur and Prague by Arthur Phillips. Sylvia loaned the Mankell. The redoubtable Neil Anderson’s recommendation of The Tragedy of Arthur led to Phillips. I happened on The Club Dumas while searching for vacation reading, having previously enjoyed several other Pérez-Reverte novels. This is typical of how one comes on books: recommendations, reviews, one book leads to another, all well and good, except another among my illusions is that I might yet make something of my life, late in the day as it is for that, and that calls for a bit more discipline, a bit less of being easily diverted from serious projects by books and escapades even when they offer their own rewards.

That Ulysses has its rewards is evident from the beginning in Joyce’s wonderful capacity to describe the most ordinary things and everyday events with grace, elegance, and assurance, even at his most wildly, wordmadly inventive, in language that is never, ever pedestrian, however commonplace that which is being described. The novel’s opening—”Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air”—may not be up there with “Call me Ishmael”; “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; or “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never go there alone”; but there is something of it caught in my mind on first reading and remains.

Harold Bloom avers that “Ulysses is a pleasure, difficult but available, for the common reader of intelligence and goodwill.” I buy that it is available for the reader of intelligence and goodwill but balk at the unalloyed claim to pleasure. There are moments of pleasure, to be sure, passing at times almost to sublimity, when after a long slog one comes to a passage that is just special, as when old Leo Bloom waxes rhapsodic on the topic of Gerty McDowell’s undergarments espied from a distance as she, provocatively posed, leans back for a better view of fireworks, full aware of the view on offer, her face “suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. . . .” Such wonders are worth hacking through the wordy undergrowth for, half lost half the time, more than half, fighting the impulse to skim whole pages for a passage that might tender intimations of some sublime, even settle for lower pleasures but pleasures still, born of Joyce’s genius to let fly great tsunamis of words that in lesser hands would soon degenerate into sophomoric excess, show-offy twaddle to no good end.

The experience of reading Ulysses is akin to that of reading poems such as Keats’ “The Fall of Hyperion” or Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” where the challenge is to focus through lengthy stretches that may not enchant in and of themselves but are nonetheless integral to the whole, for a good poem’s meaning comes to more than just those special passages that lift us up out of ourselves and linger in our minds even when we do not formally commit them to memory. At present, barely halfway through Ulysses, I face the prospect of giving myself an incomplete if I do not go at it like a fury for the next few weeks. Yet there is the daunting but undeniable conviction that I would do well to go back to page one and begin anew with stately, plump Buck Milligan making the scene, yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, sustained gently behind him by the morning air, and take it up again with all the patience I can muster, enriched by the experience of what was absorbed on the first go around, having learned for instance that for me Joyce is best read aloud, at least moving my lips as I read, and in this sense too Ulysses is akin to those poems that mean most to me. This is where I stand with it for the nonce, with more, much more, to come.

David :: Dec.03.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »

With The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom has promised us his “swan song” as a critic. Fat chance. After some thirty original books and hundreds of edited volumes; after more than fifty years of brilliance, boldness, bombast, bathos, and bullshit; after Shelley, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens; anxiety, misreading, repression, and revision; Orphism, gnosis, Lucretius, and the Kabbalah; Shakespeare, genius, the canon, and the Book of J; after evidence of a logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard-put to shut it off, there is little possibility that Bloom has given us his “final reflection upon the influence process”—which in Bloomspeak means his final reflection full stop, since everything he writes is wrapped around that fixed idea. (William Deresiewicz, The Shaman, The New Republic, September 14, 2011)

Bloom is nothing if not loyal to the authors of his choice. His chosen ones (they are many, yet they are select) could not ask for more devotion or in-depth consideration than Bloom has given them over the decades. The unfeigned awe, wonder, and reverence he still feels before the likes of Shakespeare, Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, Browning, Yeats, and Stevens speak loudly for the faith that pervades these pages. I mean the faith in literature’s inexhaustible depths and endless capacity to reward the reader who descends into its Orphic underworld. If Bloom is right—and I believe he is–that “literary criticism . . . ought to consist in acts of appreciation,” he has fulfilled that mandate once again in The Anatomy of Influence. (Robert Pogue Harrison, The Faith of Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011)

Harold Boom is among the foremost literary critics of our time, an impassioned scholar, champion of the best that has been thought and said, to borrow yet again Matthew Arnold’s expression, which I first encountered in Bloom. He has read much and deeply and seems to remember all of it. A love for books and reading comes through on every page he writes.

Bloom can also be arrogant, imperious, full of himself, given to ex cathedra pronouncements that upon close reading dissolve into near gibberish, providing ample fodder for critics, of which there are plenty, for his detractors may well outnumber his defenders. Publication of The Anatomy of Influence, subtitled “Literature as a Way of Life,” presents an occasion for those on both sides of the Bloomian divide to blow hard about his merits and flaws. Of the essays cited here, Harrison’s is the more balanced, critical without being hostile, taking Bloom to task where appropriate while generous in giving him his due.

Deresiewicz  and Harrison lead me to reflect on Bloom and why I find reading him on the whole a pleasurable and rewarding experience. I have not yet read The Anatomy of Illness. My remarks here draw on earlier reading, which though partial is reasonably extensive.

In the prologue to How to Read and Why, Bloom writes of turning to reading “as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational enterprise. . . . Ultimately we read–as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree–in order to strengthen the self.”

. . . the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure. I am not exactly an erotics-of-reading purveyor, and a pleasurable difficulty seems to me a plausible definition of the Sublime, but a higher pleasure remains the reader’s quest. There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call “falling in love.” I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

The last two sentences echo earlier references to critics who mean much to Bloom: Samuel Johnson, whose prime concern is with “what comes near to ourself, what we can put to use”; Sir Francis Bacon, who gave the advice “[r]ead not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider”; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked that the best books “impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.”

We turn to teachers and critics, and what is a good critic but a good teacher, not to learn the “true,” the “real,” the “right” meaning of a poem or novel but rather to open ourselves up to ways of thinking about what we read that might not have occurred to us left to our own devices, unanticipated insights and perspectives that may yield the higher pleasure we seek. We also read criticism because there will never be time enough to read all that we wish to read, and our choices about what to read within the limits of our time must too often be made on the basis of insufficient evidence or outright chance. A critic with whom we find ourselves in tune can point us to authors who matter whom we would not have read otherwise. It might not be necessary that a critic’s account be strictly speaking accurate to serve this function. An imaginative enthusiasm ingeniously conveyed could do the trick. Conversely, one might also be led to a writer by negative criticism when it reveals something that strikes the reader’s fancy.

The acts of appreciation that mark the best of Bloom’s criticism throw off sparks that have kindled my imagination and enthusiasms. For this I am more than willing to make allowance for his flaws and excesses. We read criticism in ways analogous, if not exactly alike, to the ways we read poems and novels. Criticism is strong or weak, creative and imaginative or not, speaks to us or leaves us cold, and at its best gives us what we can put to use, leaves us with the conviction that the one nature wrote and the same reads. I suspect that Bloom has this in mind when he writes, that strong and creative criticism is his conscious aim. I would not go far as to claim that Bloom’s nature that writes is the same as my nature that reads, any more than I would say that of Keats or Dickinson. What I would say is that there is something in that nature we share, a kinship, a sensibility, an intimation of that secular transcendence for which we thirst, something once referred to as the Sublime, along with our conviction that there is something of worth to us in the quest for it.

David :: Oct.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New Philosophy,  NY Times Magazine, 9 December 2007

Joshua Knobe, Experiments in Philosophy, NY Times, 7 September 2010

David Menconi, Putting Philosophy to the Test, Stanford Magazine, September/October 2011

Philosophy’s New Take on Old Problems, NY Times Room for Debate, 20 August 2010

I.

Josh Knobe has comfortable seating in his philosophy department office at Yale University—a small couch somewhere between a love seat and a sofa in size. It is most decidedly not, however, an armchair, which might seem a trivial distinction. But in Knobe’s world, one’s position on armchairs can be a matter of grave import.

“Yeah, it’s a couch rather than an armchair,” says Knobe, [Stanford] ’96. “So there’s room for two, and that’s important. You don’t just sit there alone and think about something. You sit and talk to someone about it.”

For the past century or so, philosophy has primarily entailed solitary ruminations to puzzle out deep truths about the nature of human existence—questions about reason, knowledge, values, free will. Philosophy can seem like a lonely ivory-tower vigil, but the old school holds that sitting and thinking is still the best way to do it. As one prominent philosopher put it a few years back, “If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can.” (Menconi)

For me, it was that an enormous amount of work had been done using one particular tool, sitting in an armchair thinking hard about the problem. How much more progress could we make with that one method was unclear to me, whereas it seemed like there was an enormous amount of untapped potential in trying to understand the processes that generate these judgments. It’s not so much that the old armchair techniques were bad; we’ve just been using them for 2,000 years. We might get more insight by trying a new tool. More than anything else, the difference really is in methodology. (Knobe quoted in Menconi)

Experimental philosophy, called x-phi for short, is a new philosophical movement that supplements the traditional tools of analytic philosophy with the scientific methods of cognitive science. So experimental philosophers actually go out and run systematic experiments aimed at understanding how people ordinarily think about the issues at the foundation of the philosophical discussion.(The Experimental Philosophy page on the Yale University website)

Aha, a new movement is afoot to bring philosophy down from its ivory tower and into the real world, depose those doddering professors gibber-jabbering away about Platonic Forms, the Cartesian dubito, and Ockham’s razor, overturn their armchairs and wake them from their dogmatic slumbers, take it to the streets, again. To the things themselves! Wait, that was a battle cry of another era, another overturning of the old order to put philosophy once again on a firm footing that will, depending on the perspective of the revolutionaries, return her to her ancient, exalted status or put her in her place as handmaiden of the sciences, the kind of thing that plays out every generation or several and has for centuries.

Perhaps Josh Knobe intends his characterization of the traditional technique of philosophy as sitting in an armchair thinking hard about a problem to be taken as a deliberate exaggeration, hyperbole, for the sake of making a point, although there is no indication in the articles cited here that this is what he has in mind. Rather, the assertion is made seriously and without qualification, as if meant to be taken at face value, in which case he is either guilty of some sloppy thinking or he is deliberately engaging in willful misrepresentation of the old order to lay the groundwork for the radically new approach he proposes.

My earliest professors took some pains to hammer into the heads of undergraduates—and grad students, for matter–that philosophy is not just a matter of an individual thinking about problems in isolation, no more than poetry is just writing down whatever thoughts come into one’s head. Dr. Matsen was fond of pointing out that we stand on the shoulders of giants, by whom he had in mind the likes of Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroës), Duns Scotus, and so on. Philosophy begins not with one’s own thoughts, or not just one’s own thoughts, but with study of, to borrow Matthew Arnold’s term, the best that has been thought and said. Precisely what “the best that has been thought and said” comprises is up for debate, all well and good, for that debate is itself part of the philosophical enterprise.

Study entails a personal encounter with the giants on whose shoulders we stand, an attempt to engage them first on their own terms to the extent this is possible, acknowledging the outcome is always problematic, before taking them on from personal and contemporary perspective, rooted in subjectivity, experience, and the conventional thinking of the culture and age into which one was born. Reading and study of primary sources, discussion and dialogue with fellow students and teachers, consultation with secondary sources, all this is part of the deal, as is what I suppose Knobe has in mind with the armchair metaphor, those solitary moments alone, in the armchair, perhaps, or at the desk or on a long walk, when one attempts to digest and assimilate the material and from there to think contemplatively, reflectively, critically of the issue at hand. The metaphor of the armchair to represent this latter part of the process is fine as long as we remember that it is only a metaphor and only one aspect of an array of activity.

II.

Aristotle begins Nicomachean Ethics with an account how people think about what is good, how most of us lead our lives, and how we think we ought to live. The ordinary, everyday, common-sense way of looking at things is a point of setting out, not a conclusion. One thrust of philosophical inquiry historically has been to think critically about the everyday way of looking on things, reflected in the Socratic principle that the unexamined life is not worth living. The data gathered through an x-phi investigation are not an end in themselves. It is not just a matter of getting a show of hands on this or that issue.

The Knobe Effect is the conclusion derived from what seems to be a paradigmatic x-phi investigation, recounted by both Appiah and Menconi.

In many ways,[Joshua] Knobe is the closest thing experimental philosophy has to a rock star. Since last year, he’s been an essay contributor to the New York Times. An admirer from Australia maintains a Joshua Knobe fan page on Facebook. And a phenomenon bears his name: The Knobe Effect, derived from an experiment of his, is frequently cited to explain the effectiveness of negative political advertising.

Conducted in 2003, the experiment examined people’s perception of intentionality based on their opinions about two scenarios. In the first scenario, a business executive is told that a new product will increase profits but harm the environment. He responds that he doesn’t care about the environment, just profits. The program is implemented, profits go up and the environment suffers. When asked if the executive intentionally harmed the environment, 82 percent of respondents answered yes.

Scenario No. 2 is the same except for one key detail: The word “hurt” is replaced with “help.” Again, the executive says he doesn’t care about the environment. The program goes on, profits rise, and this time the environment benefits. But when asked if the executive intentionally helped the environment, only 23 percent of respondents said yes. So the Knobe Effect holds that people are more likely to assign blame for things that go wrong than to give credit for things that go right, a gap Knobe has spent the past eight years working to explain.

Why should the results of an action have a bearing on intentionality? And when it comes to questions of character, why do we tend to give more weight to negativity? Why does it sometimes happen that a single misdeed in a lifetime of otherwise exemplary behavior can destroy a reputation? (Think of how one racial slur can get someone branded a racist.) (Menconi)

The two scenarios are presented as if the only difference were that the outcome of one set of actions is harmful while the other is beneficial. Is the Knobe Effect the only, or even the best, interpretation of what is going on here? Might something else be at work other than a human tendency to assign blame when things go wrong but not give credit for things that go right? Are there methodological gremlins lurking about to confound Knobe’s conclusion?

Let us begin with scenario 2, where benefit to the environment is an unintended consequence of the executive’s program to increase profits. There is a tradition of moral thought that holds intentionality paramount. From the moral perspective, it is not sufficient that good result as an unintended consequence of action taken out of self-interest. One acts rightly in a moral sense only when doing the right thing because it is the right thing. Thus, the executive does not get moral credit for having benefited the environment. We might all be happy that the environment benefited from the executive’s action, and no doubt capitalists would be equally delighted that she or he profited, but morality has nothing to do with it. Intentionality is a necessary condition for one to be credited with moral responsibility for doing good.

On the other scenario, however, where a bad outcome results, intentionality and responsibility come into play in a different fashion. The executive is not setting out to harm the environment. The scenario would be trivial if that were the intention. Rather, the executive embarks on a course of action knowing it will do harm, though the explicit aim is to maximize profits, not to do harm. The executive’s moral culpability might be mitigated were she or he ignorant that the action undertaken for the sake of profit would be harmful. Here the executive bears moral responsibility for harm done because she or he knows these actions will be harmful and, acting from self-interest, forges ahead in callous disregard of that knowledge.

The sense of what it means to bear moral responsibility is not identical in the two scenarios. Might the responses recorded in the experiment be driven not, or not entirely, by a psychological inclination to more readily give blame for the bad than credit for the good, but by a sense, perhaps unarticulated but I think fairly conventional, that the relationship between intentionality and responsibility might reasonably be viewed differently depending on whether the outcome is beneficial or harmful? But, one might point out, have you perhaps subtly shifted the topic? You are talking about the nature of moral action and responsibility. The survey asks if the executive intentionally benefited or harmed the environment. Are these the same things or different things? Survey participants might have responded differently if the question had been explicitly couched in terms of moral action and responsibility, just as, conversely, responses to the question of intentionality could plausibly have been shaped by notions of the relationship between intentionality and responsibility and how that relationship might differ in the two scenarios.

An investigation such as the one presented here is useful insofar as it can open new avenues of discussion and ways of thinking about an issue. The real work lies in the discussion and thinking that ensues. Some of that work, not all of it by a longshot, but some, is a matter of solitary reflection, trying to think critically and well about the matter at hand, and for some of us the best place for that just might be an armchair.

David :: Oct.03.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Semi-Ambivalent Middle-Aged Male Lament #25
by Ric Vrana
Edited and with drawings by Ceylon Anderson
Published at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, Portland, Oregon, April 2011. 34 pp.
Available for purchase at St Johns Booksellers, Portland, Oregon

I should state at the outset that I bear no animus toward Ric Vrana for that little incident at the film festival last February when while waiting for the film to begin I found myself engaged in delightful conversation with a Czech woman seated next to me until he arrived, whereupon she graciously insisted on finding another seat in the crowded theater so I could sit with my friend. No, nothing could be further from my thoughts as I consider the merits of the poems that make up this little collection. She said she knew the film’s director.

The cover illustration for Ric Vrana’s Semi-Ambivalent Middle-Aged Male Lament #25 is a drawing of a smiling, naked, Buddha-ish figure brandishing a six-pack of PBR. The back cover has another drawing of the same laughing figure in the midst either of a backward tumble or a drunken sprawl. Together they call to mind the story of the eighth-century Chinese poet Meng Hau-ran.

Meng Hau-ran was a famous drinker. A government official once offered to introduce him at court, where he might get a position as a court poet.

But when the time came for him to go, a friend happened by, and they fell to drinking and talking. “Hadn’t you better be on your way?” asked the friend after a while.

“Oh, why bother,” replied Meng. “My job is to drink and enjoy myself.” (Greg Whincup, The Heart of Chinese Poetry, Doubleday (1987), p. 53).

I can scarcely imagine Ric Vrana as the court poet at any court, although I have seen him hold court many a night at open mics in basement bars, his poems marked by humor he directs as readily at himself as at others and the moral conviction of one for whom the idealism of his youth was never a thing to be left behind as he somehow balanced professional career, devoted parenthood, and a creative drive that has not flagged with the passing years. From “On My Terms”:

squandered innocence
maintained integrity
(not that anyone believes me anyway)
burned wood, money, time, the flag,
walked against the light
decided to hell with a god
that demands worship
to hell with a state
that demands allegiance

Drank a noon cocktail
took a long lunch
wrote one and a third
poems.

Vrana’s style is generally conversational, at times imagistic, accessible, and prosaic, in the manner of much contemporary American poetry. The style relies heavily on the poet’s capacity for wit, humor, and a keen eye to lift it from the realm of the mundane to be something we call poetry and not just prose with a ragged right margin. Vrana has these qualities in abundance. He is a maestro of humor who takes dead aim at our quirks, foibles, and general human foolishness.

Gregory Corso liked to say that humor is a kind of butcher with which you can get rid of a lot of garbage, a concept that Vrana grasps with a sure instinct. In “Cell Phone” he delivers ironic commentary on our abject servitude to technological toys, while in “Need a Dawg, Man” he is a bemused raconteur wryly describing an encounter in a bar with a young woman whose greeting, “You’re the man,” turns out to be a come-on to get him to take her uptight border collie off her hands.

His observations are honest, sharp, and never merely casual, as in the description of a poetry reading in  ”You Know Who You Are”:

Here we all are subversively
gathered in a group without being paid,
without getting college credits,
digging the poetry scene,
living in a country that stays inside the lines.

Culture is mostly Entertainment here.
We mainline it electronically,
consuming it at home because,
after all,
parking is just so hard to find
. . .

There follows a brief digression, which the poet acknowledges, along with acknowledging that he has lost his audience:

sitting there waiting your turn to speak,
to speak outside the lines.
But now I could say anything.
Even drop a Greek or Biblical reference,
or just leave the vague impression I did.

There’s that old guy up there again, going on . . .
What’s he talking about, protest?
Is this the sixties or something?
Love?
What’s that rat fucker got to tell me about love?

“Part of the Poem” is a poem whose subject is a clever analysis of itself, or maybe just an amusing parody of an analysis.

This is the part of the poem
that begins with a punch, some
line or two with rhythm, some
vivid imagery to draw you into a
Venus Fly Trap opening.

The next few lines initially rush
on to some metaphor or other
but it’s likely I’ll
axe it in the first revision so
it could start out being anything like
wind chimes crashing in a storm
—scratch that!

In the next stanza the narrator contemplates imposing a certain structure by breaking the poem into stanzas with the same number of lines in each.

I used to think this helped me think
but now it’s mostly to please my favorite critic
who loves to attack my “slavish devotion to form”.

All of which is prelude to

ramp up to the big finish
insert a fucking gratuitous
swear word or maybe pull
some non-sequitor surprise
out of my ass.
You may now applaud.

Indeed.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the biographical note, penned I presume by Ceylon Anderson, contains an item that, if not a typo, leads us to wonder if this might be a somewhat embellished account of the poet’s life, perhaps the product of the prodigious and irreverent, prodigiously irreverent, if you will, imagination for which Anderson is justly notorious and much beloved.  ”Mr. Vrana was expelled from Dartmouth University in 1959 for involvement with a prostitution ring. The university has sealed their report of the incident until 2020, leaving it open to speculation for another 9 years whether Mr. Vrana was expelled for soliciting or purchasing.” I believe that in 1959 Ric Vrana would have been about seven years of age, thus quite the prodigy, in all sorts of ways.

Be that as it may, the bottom line is that Ric Vrana’s poems are a delight to read. They give pleasure and convey a sense of how life is and how things are in this world. We are grateful to Ceylon Anderson for his role in bringing these poems to print.

postscript 17 July 2011: memo from the editorial desk

I should note that I did not approach this review without bias. Ric Vrana is a friend of several years standing with whom I have had the  pleasure of sharing the stage for some of the most enjoyable poetry readings in which I have participated. A video of Ric Vrana reading his poems can be found at Oregon Literary Review First Wednesday 2009.

David :: Jul.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Canadian poet Christian Bök’s Xenotext project is an intriguing intellectual exercise, and the use of DNA as a medium makes for a nifty marketing gimmick. Bök describes the project as his

nine-year long attempt to create an example of “living poetry.” . . . to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon [he uses] a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space). (Bök, The Xenotext Works)

Killian Fox, writing in The Observer, describes the Xenotext in terms of an attempt to achieve immortality through art:

Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian has realised, it all comes down to the durability of your materials. Bök has written a poem, “The Xenotext”, which he is inserting into the DNA of a particularly resilient form of bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans. This extremophile bacterium can survive exposure to cold, dehydration, acid and vacuums, meaning it could live on in outer space should the Earth cease to exist. (Killian Fox, How does a poet ensure his work lives forever?, The Observer, 24 April 2011)

Bök speaks of “making something that’s intelligible and interesting and probably deserves to last for a few million years.” (Christian Bök: Experimental Poet, Utne Reader, November-December 2009).

There is something misguided about this kind of thinking. Mere duration of a work of art through an extended period of time is not what we have in mind when we speak of artistic immortality. The Iliad and Hamlet are immortal because they continue to be meaningful to us as living humans, to move and touch us in a profound sense, long after Homer and Shakespeare turned to dust. Survival of a work of art, in whatever material or virtual form, is trivial apart from a connection to a human consciousness.

Bök’s earlier work Eunoia (2001) pays tribute to a French tradition that can be traced back to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and runs through Alfred Jarry, Dada, Surrealism, and le nouveau roman, and is

directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) — the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints. The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought. (Bök, Eunoia).

Each chapter consists of a brief prose poem that restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. For example, Chapter A begins “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art….” The composition is also governed by a number of subsidiary rules, spelled out by the author in a kind of postscript chapter titled “The New Ennui,” all of which makes for an entertaining exercise.

Readers of a certain bent may find Bök fascinating. At one time, when I was much taken with Surrealist automatic writing, the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, and postmodern experimentalism generally, I might have greeted Eunoia and Xenotext with enthusiasm. Today I find this sort of thing moderately interesting but not compelling. The form is not the poem. Not that form is irrelevant. Form shapes and generates content, and a strong poem may be rendered trivial by paraphrase into prose; but form is a subsidiary aspect.

My initial response on first reading of Bök and his Xenotext project was to wonder whether he is immortalizing art or trivializing it. Perhaps the Xenotext is a great work of art, but if so, it is not because it is translated into bacteria DNA. It is the poem that matters. Is it moving, provocative, insightful, or any of the many other things a poem may be in a way that matters to us? The bacterium’s DNA is just a medium, albeit an exotic one. Is a mediocre poem translated into DNA of greater merit or interest than a collection of doggerel printed in an elaborate font on nice paper, attractively illustrated, with a beautiful binding? As a technical exercise, perhaps, yes; but as poem, work of art, no.

David :: Apr.30.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

These days when I pick up the pen my thoughts turn to the past, almost invariably, of their own accord, as a plant turns to the sun, except that here it is more memory of a sun, and at that a sun that burns more brightly in memory than it ever did on a young man’s hopes and dreams so wild he scarcely acknowledged them even to himself. Perhaps it is not so much or least not wholly a turning to the past as it is a turning away from what lies ahead, which does not figure to be any great shakes.

Only lately is the depth of ambition become clear and parallel with it conviction that the ambition is not altogether out of the question, risible, ridiculous, a recognition that bears with it a shadow suspicion that it is too late for whatever shot I may once have had. Yet I am not willing to put ambition aside. It would be nice to think there is something heroic in this, to feel it more than vanity, foolish pride, stubbornness, and want of a better option. That something would be nice does not make it so.

For the better part of a decade the twin themes of hope and possibility animated the best of the poems that came to me at my desk and in coffee shops and on treks about the city, on the train to Seattle and a plane to Toronto, while reading Keats and discovering Emily Brontë, over dinner and wine and good conversation with a friend, at poetry readings and museums and bookstores, in the cinema waiting for the lights to go down and the film to come up, contemplating the sky, the drift of cloud through a distant blue early in the evening just before it all goes dark.

Those themes are no longer part of me. The onslaught of passing time has something to do with it. While I may not yet be old, I am certainly no longer young. More good years lie behind than ahead even under the rosiest of scenarios. A friend remarked recently that his mind is not as nimble as it once was. Neither is mine. How much, though, should be made of this? Lost nimbleness is balanced at least to a degree by a lifetime of experience, in which I include reading and the intellectual life generally along with so-called real life, which brings with it perspective, context, and greater resources on which we draw, whose absence left our younger, more nimble minds to operate under limits of their own.

My friend’s remark about lost nimbleness came in the context of his study of algebraic geometry, which he tells me is a really hot field in mathematics these days. I gather that he is frustrated by his inability to grasp more than the basics thus far. He has a master’s degree in math and keeps up with these things, but his circumstances now, in his early 60s and not a professional mathematician, are far different from when he was a young fellow studying the subject, exposed to its rigors daily in class, his thinking prodded by teachers and classmates, immersed in it then in a way he is not likely to be now.

The loss of mental nimbleness that comes with age is only part of the story. Our faculties may be diminished; they are not in ruins. The friend of whom I speak retains a critical intellect and remarkable curiosity. He reads voraciously on such a mind-boggling range of subjects that I can only feel admiration and a touch of envy. For my part, in November 2010 at the age of 58, I ran my first marathon. The capacity to be touched, sometimes brought to tears, by lines of poetry, a passage in a novel, a scene in a film, a piece of music, a flash of light on water or an expression of caring, is yet with me. My ambition as a poet remains vigorous, even as I am frustrated by my meager accomplishment. How diminished am I?

I do my best to reject all false hope. Integrity and intellectual honesty lie at the heart of whatever creed I hold. I have faith that my pen has not run dry. I could be wrong. We can always be wrong, but to acknowledge our errors and wrecks, our limits and failings, is not tantamount to giving in to them. I could wake tomorrow to find my physical health or mental faculties devastated by disease. For now fortune smiles. There remains an openness into which I may step and make of it the best that I can.

David :: Mar.12.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »

I am not a man of practical bent, though it might be reasonable to expect otherwise from someone of my heritage and upbringing. How I came to be who I am, to stand where I now stand, rather baffles me to this day. The old nature-nurture distinction is far too simpleminded. Nature by way of genetics, brain chemistry, biology, plays a role, as do family, community, education, environment generally, and pure, dumb, blind luck, chance, call it fate if you like.

I grew up in rural South Carolina on what had been in the youth of my mother and uncles a small farm where my grandfather, Mr. Dave Haltiwanger (1882–1956), as he was known, and my grandmother, Miss Sue (1892–1990), eked out an honorable but fairly meager existence. Granddaddy started out as schoolteacher, which is how he and Granny met. She was his pupil. It was said that Mr. Dave used to spend a lot of time helping Sue with her schoolwork. They married shortly after she graduated from high school. That kind of thing would be a scandal today. It seemed to have worked out pretty well for them.

Uncle John told me that my grandfather was ill-suited to be a farmer. He took over the family farm because it was his responsibility to do so, but he had no aptitude for it. My grandmother could drive a nail or saw a board straighter than he ever could. People always said I was image of Mr. Dave Haltiwanger, for whom I was named. Perhaps I took after him in other ways too.

My only memory of my grandfather is from his death in 1956, the year I turned four. After lunch Granddaddy lay down on his pallet to take a nap, and I went with Granny out to the pasture to count the cows, make sure they were all there. When we returned, he was gone. I do not recall my grandmother’s reaction or my own, but I can see vaguely old mid-1950s cars parked in the yard and Dr. Pinner getting out of one with his black doctor’s bag.

After Granddaddy’s death we moved from the house in Ballentine into the old family home with Granny. Elaine was three years younger than I, and Trani came along two and a half years after her. We grew up for the most part in a home with two generations of remarkable women and no male father figure. Mom worked for insurance companies most of her life. She was the kind of person who routinely stayed late when work needed to be done. On occasion she brought work home, stuffing envelopes while we watched television in the evening. Similarly I can see Granny in her old denim coat and galoshes slogging through the mud and winter rain to feed the cows. When there was work to be done, they just did it.

Granny kept cows and chickens, a garden, and some lovely flower beds. We helped put seeds in the ground each spring for corn and green beans, tomatoes, butterbeans, squash, and whatever else she grew. As summer played out we did some hoeing and weed pulling, put in stakes and tied up tomato  and bean plants, and picked it all when the time came. Sometimes at night we shelled butterbeans or peas while watching TV, Red Skelton, Andy Griffith, Bonanza, The Beverly Hillbillies, McHale’s Navy, Lost in Space. Not exactly high culture, but we delighted in it.

In the fall we filled big wicker baskets with manure from the stables and fallen leaves from the pecan and oak trees and spread it all out over the garden to fertilize it for the next year. I am reasonably certain that none of that ever sank in enough for me that I could have handled it on my own without Granny’s hands-on instruction. I could identify corn and beans and tomatoes, the roses, the magnolia and pecan trees, and I knew a cow when I saw one, but not much beyond that. I also remember once, when I was very young, someone tried to teach me to milk a cow. The lesson was not successful.

I should be clear that it is not as if we put a lot of time into these farming tasks. We probably did as little as we could get by with and spent considerably more of our youth playing ball, riding bicycles, watching TV, and in my case reading, than we ever did working. Perhaps I should speak for myself here. Elaine and Trani may well have more industrious than I was. I certainly did not set the bar at a high level. It was in school that I was conscientious and did well. I imagine that led people to cut me some slack in other areas.

We were not poor, but as I look back on those years now I realize we may not have been not all that far from it. I imagine the purchase of a set of World Book Encyclopedia when I was in elementary school was a significant expenditure. Of that I have some memory of Mrs. Ballentine, the fifth-grade teacher at Dutch Fork Elementary School, sitting with Mom and Granny in the yard on what must have been a summer evening explaining the value of the encyclopedia for our education. That would settled it if there had been any question about making the purchase. It was certainly a wonderful thing for me. Those books with the red covers with their grainy texture occupied a good portion of the bookcase in my bedroom, and I went to them routinely whenever a new subject of interest caught my attention or sometimes when just at loose ends, reading them as I read any other book, for the pleasure of it.

Mom was the school secretary at Irmo for a year or maybe two when I was eight or thereabouts. Irmo had grades one through twelve all in the one building in those days. I attended Dutch Fork, a small elementary school in an outlying corner of the district for the first six years before moving on to Irmo for seventh grade. One day Mom brought home two seventh-grade textbooks a sales rep had left with the principal. One was geography, the other U.S. History. I was in third grade when I picked up the history book and read it cover to cover. It was like reading a novel, an adventure story.

At about that same time there was a school program where we could order paperbacks through a company called Scholastic Books. A program like this was tremendously important because there were no bookstores to speak of. Some of the downtown department stores had book departments, but those were a far cry from Borders or Barnes & Noble or anything else that would come down the pike for a long time, and like the public library they were sixteen miles away in Columbia and not readily accessible, except second-hand after Mom left the school to take a job with an insurance company whose office was just a few blocks from the county library. I gave her lists of books, authors, and subjects, and she went to the library on her lunch hour and brought home what she found.

One of the books I discovered early on through the Scholastic program was Revolt on Alpha C, my first science fiction. No doubt the book was every bit as juvenile as its title. No matter. It cultivated a thirst that is yet to be slaked.  This would have been around 1960, at the beginnings of NASA and the first manned space flights, an exciting time when so much seemed possible. For the next ten years I devoured that stuff. Let me see, said the blind man. There was Isaac Asimov, the Foundation trilogy and the robot stories; Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End and a slew of other novels; Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers and a slew of other novels; A.E. Van Vogt, Slan; Andre Norton, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delaney, Harlan Ellison, and a host of others, along with a fair share of biographies, history, adolescent sports novels, comic books, and popularized science. I read in my room on summer afternoons, in a t-shirt and cutoffs, when every now and then a hint of a breeze would break through the stifling heat to rustle the curtains and cool my bare legs, and I read on the school bus and while watching TV and in bed at night until I fell asleep.

As chance would have it, yesterday evening after I had written much of the first draft of this essay, I happened to read a short sketch written circa 1916 by Isaac Babel titled “The Public Library.” The story’s opening paragraph sets the stage.

You can feel straightaway that The Book reigns supreme here. All the people who work in the library have entered into communion with The Book, with life at second-hand, and have themselves become, as it were, a mere reflection of the living.

There follows a series of brief descriptions of various library employees and patrons, a diverse and fairly motley lot, before the story concludes with three short paragraphs:

There are all kinds of other people in the public library — too many to be described.

It is evening. The reading room is almost dark. The silent figures at the tables are a study in weariness, thirst for knowledge, ambition….

Soft snow weaves it weft behind the large windows. Nearby, on the Nevsky, there is teeming life. Far away, in the Carpathians, blood is flowing. C’est la vie.

The implication is that books offer a second-hand life to be distinguished from real life on the Nevsky or in the Carpathians where blood flows. Is reading books, and by extension the life of spirit and intellect, really a lesser kind of human living than putting in eight hours at the office, going to the grocery or liquor store, kayaking, mountain climbing, going out to dinner or the symphony, drinking and whoring, cheering one’s favorite sports team? The stakes may not be as high as they are for a soldier in Afghanistan, an opposition leader in Burma, or a human rights activist in any of a number of places around the world, but that is true of most activities in which most of us engage pretty much all the time. In another sense though, the stakes are as high as they can be, for it comes down to the person each of us chooses to be and the values we would embody.

David :: Jan.10.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 2 Comments »

Three major projects occupied me in 2010. That there were three, and these particular three, was haphazard. New Year’s or any other resolution had nothing to do with it. I would not fare well in the world of business management, for I am not much given to setting goals and objectives amenable to quantitative measurement, benchmarks, metrics, and so on. There are realms where this kind of analysis is appropriate. Nowadays, though, this thinking spills over into spheres where it is not fitting. Not all aspects of life are quantifiable. This is not to suggest that we should dispense with reflection and critical thinking about these things. Thinking can be rigorous without being calculative and productive even when in the end things remain unsettled.

My 2010 revolved around the Brontë girls, the San Antonio Marathon, and the one-volume condensation of Joseph Frank’s award-winning five-volume Dostoevsky, the condensed version weighing in at just under 1,000 pages. I took up the Brontës toward the end of 2009 and focused on them through the first third of the year. At a party chez Ric Vrana in April, Neil Anderson mentioned that he thinks Anne is the best novelist of the three sisters. To that point I had given her short shrift as my attention centered on Charlotte and Emily. Next time at Powell’s I picked up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and through the opening chapters thought Neil just might be right, no surprise there, as he has long impressed me as an astute fellow, along with being a talented writer. Alas, shortly thereafter I was distracted by a raft of Scandinavian crime writers, Steig Larsson, The Girl Played with Fire, picked up to read on the train to Vancouver, BC., Arnaldur Indridason, Åke Edwardson, Åsa Larsson, Jo Nesbo, each a delight.

Then I happened on a review of the newly published one-volume Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky has long been dear to me, and Frank’s take on him is a pleasure, part intellectual history, part biography, and part critical examination of Dostoevsky’s stories, novels, and assorted nonfiction. Once I began this indulgence, the deal was sealed on getting back to Anne Brontë anytime soon. She remains a bit of unfinished business.

I began ramping up for the marathon in late spring and embarked on the 18-week training adventure in mid July. The marathon training led me to increase my mileage to a level it had not seen in years, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. That was the main good that came of it, really a pleasure. The marathon itself was almost anticlimactic, though it certainly was satisfying when I found the finish line.

I do not think of running in terms of goals. Running is just what I do. I am leaning toward a 2011 marathon, though I have not yet committed to that. When I told a friend of this, she responded, “You drank the Kool-Aid!” Well, it was more I drank the Gatorade, I suppose. If I do take a crack at another marathon that will just be what I do, who I am, someone who runs, ponders, takes pen in hand, agonizes and anguishes over how to be the person he would have himself be, and perhaps from time to time takes a crack at a marathon.

If I have a goal for 2011, it is to find ways to be more content with life than I have been. I have some sense of what is required for that to be possible but am without a clue how to get there. Even this is not so much a goal as something I have in mind. In fact, looking at it as a goal might well be counterproductive.

My thinking runs in terms of living the good life, in the Aristotelian, not the American, sense of it. Just what would constitute a good life and how to go about it remains problematic. Reflection on the eternal and unanswerable questions may breed discontent with our lot. Nonetheless, I am convinced that the contemplative life is one aspect of the good life, whatever that may be.

This winter’s project will be to take a look back to the Greeks, who took an interest in matters of this sort and much else besides. I began recently with a brief history, H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, and Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers. After these I will read a little Plato, a little Aristotle, some Euripides, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes, and perhaps go on from there. The treatment will be somewhat hit or miss. No doubt I will miss much. Even so, it will be fun.

Gary Snyder touches on what my ruminations here have been getting at with this observation from a Buddhist perspective:

I’m a fairly practical and handy person; I was brought up on a farm where we learned how to figure things out and fix them. During the first year or two I was at Daitoku-ji Sodo [in Japan], out back working in the garden, helping put in a little firewood, or firing up a bath, I noticed a number of times little improvements that could be made. Ultimately I ventured to suggest to the head monks some labor- and time-saving techniques. They were tolerant of me for a while. Finally, one day one of them took me aside and said, “We don’t want to do things any better or any faster, because that’s not the point — the point is that you live the whole life. If we speed up the work in the garden, you’ll just have to spend that much more time sitting [practicing meditation] in the zendo, and your legs will hurt more.” (The Gary Snyder reader: prose, poetry, and translations, 1952–1998, p. 104)

Doing things better and faster not the point? Now there is a subversive thought for the new year.

David :: Jan.02.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »

This has not exactly gone well. Twenty-two modest essays posted in just over seven months, one in the past six weeks, more or less, and it is a reach to call some of them essays. I go at it, with pen and paper at my desk, with my journal in coffee shops, at the computer, but not much happens. A pack of half-baked, vague notions float around, tentative beginnings with tentative titles such as “The Fetishization of the Center,” “Running and Psychobabble,” “The Intellectual and Income,” yet to attain coherence and too often failing to rise above the level of pedestrian drivel.

Vain enough to hope for better from myself, I continue to hack away. There was a time when I could take an opening like the one here and just run with it. Where I ended up might be no great shakes, and maybe that is part of what is going on now. I am less willing to settle for what is no great shakes. Mon dieu, I have standards, perhaps even ambition, and the consequence is a kind of paralysis, a profound sense of inadequacy, when those standards can never be lived up to and the ambition is beyond reach.

As often, I think of Dylan, this time “tryin’ to get to heaven / before they close the door.” I am trying to paint my masterpiece before the time runs out, before the rivers run dry, a canvas spread against night sky dusted with stars, beyond reach, beyond grasp, far from me as as time or love. I am realistic enough to acknowledge that age likely has something to do with this state of affairs. The capacity to go at the vision with focus and intensity for extended periods is diminished, to say the least, from whatever physiological and mind-bent causes.

The barrenness of the last several winters is the source of much distress. My work cycles are based on the school year. Summer has never been a productive season. I look to late September and early October for renewal of the spark, as the light softens and days grow a little shorter, the evenings cooler, and here in Portland on into October as the rainy season sets in. Last winter’s Brontë project was fruitful and rewarding, but even that was dug out in fits and starts and stands in bleak isolation. In the aftermath summer’s lethargy is more than little annoying.

I must grant that this summer much focus and energy is devoted to training to take a crack at the San Antonio Marathon with Big T in November. However much I relish running at a level that I have not known in years, it comes at the expense of the scholarly and creative work. The trade-off bugs me to the extent that it prolongs an already extended period of discontent with an aspect of life that is at the heart of what is best in me. Is it good or bad that running myself to near exhaustion is my primary means of satisfaction these days?

Some may think it kind of nutty for a fellow approaching advanced middle age to be taking a crack at his first marathon, and maybe it is. On the other hand, it is fairly amazing what those of us fortunate to be in reasonably good health at an age older than dirt can do. Arthur Webb at 67 (maybe 68 by now) has run 12 consecutive (maybe 13 by now) Badwater Ultramarathons. The Badwater is a 135 mile race through Death Valley for which Webb prepares by, among other things, running 15 miles in too-small shoes to loosen the nails on his big toes so he can yank them out with pliers because they tend to crack and bleed as the toes swell during the race. (Chris Ballard, Defying Death Valley, Sports Illustrated, 31 August 2009). Okay, so we are not necessarily talking about good sense here. Take the case of legendary grappler Abdullah the Butcher, who at 73, or maybe 69, still hoists his considerable girth, some 400 pounds, into the squared circle to wreak mayhem and stab opponents with his signature dinner fork, which after the match he offers to sell for ten dollars. (Mike Tierney, Still the Butcher After All These Years, New York Times, 26 July 2010). I do not know that it speaks all that well of me, but I find something kind of cool in this.

At one end of a spectrum there is William Wordsworth, who wrote his best poetry by his mid-thirties. He continued to write poems for the remainder of his life, and much of what he wrote on the back end of quite a long life was not very good. At the other stands Picasso. “In the main, Picasso only got better. That’s the take-away from the staggering exhibition of Picasso’s late paintings and prints at the Gagosian Gallery.” (Roberta Smith, Going All Out, Right to the End, New York Times, 16 April 2009, a review of a show featuring paintings from the last decade of Picasso’s life). Smith’s take is that the Gagosian Gallery show proves that “Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark.” Rather, he “painted, as usual, for his life.”

When I come to the end of an essay such as this one, I must ask if this is anything more than narcissistic whining? Is it, maybe, honest self-appraisal, legitimate criticism from which something of value might be derived? Perhaps in the end you never know, no more than you know if a poem you have written is really good or not. In the end I come down on the side of the latter, that there is something of worth here, fully aware that this may just be a lot of wishful thinking.

The marathon course in San Antonio is billed as flat and fast, a good one to try for a PR or to qualify for Boston. Big T will be looking for a fast time. I will be looking to find the finish line. From where I stand now, I can conceive doing it. The image that torches my heart, the one that reaches into my spirit, is of Picasso painting for his life right up to the end. I can conceive that too, putting brush to canvas stroke after stroke, putting one foot in front of the other, putting one word down on the page after the other, mile after mile, page after page, and finding delight there.

David :: Jul.27.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) in his 1971 doctoral dissertation “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Hero, and the Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald” placed the hard-boiled private detective in a romantic tradition dating back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, a tradition Parker  himself was soon to revitalize with the appearance of Spenser in The Godwulf Manuscript (1973).

Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Macdonald’s Lew Archer were cool, flippant, and irreverent, governed by an idiosyncratic code of honor and the determination to live life as much on their own terms as one is able. They were outsiders and loners whose moral compass not infrequently put them at odds with conventional morality, mores, and the letter of the law in a world where the cops were apt to be crooked, the politicians seedy and corrupt, and society’s upper crust decadent and depraved. They were more likely to show their toughness by taking a beating than by handing one out, and they solved cases less by clever deduction than by poking around the hornet’s nest until they stirred up a denouement.

After Spenser came a new golden era of such finely drawn figures as James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins, Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawksi, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, and Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole, to name but a few. Burke, Paretsky, et al., may not rank with the very best novelists of their generation, but they may not be so far behind either. As Parker noted (Charles L.P. Silet, Robert B. Parker Author Interview on Writing Mysteries: “Five Pages a Day”), the quality of the writing is what matters, and this is limited only by the author’s talent and ability, not by genre. I would quibble with Parker only by way of extrapolating that the best writers transcend genre, as for instance, Dostoevsky with Crime and Punishment, Robert Stone with DogSoldiers, and Cormac McCarthy with No Country for Old Men.

Some of the real action these days is in Europe, especially Scandinavia, where the protagonist is likely to be a cop but remains an individualistic outsider, bound by a stringent code, whatever his quirks, flaws, and all too human foibles. To my mind the best of them writing today, American or European, are Ian Rankin, whose John Rebus prowls the streets and pubs of Edinburgh while listening to music played in the dorms when I was in college 1970–1973, and Henning Mankell from Sweden, who I think of not as a writer of mysteries or thrillers but simply a novelist, and quite a good one.

On the cusp of the 21st century, Carol O’Connell debuted Kathy Mallory in the 1994 novel Mallory’s Oracle. Some ten years later Mallory was joined by her Swedish spiritual cousin Lisbeth Salander, one of the two protagonists of Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy now all the rage, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

Mallory was abandoned on the streets of New York at the age of six, cared for to the extent she was cared for at all by prostitutes, a child sociopath living by her wits and thievery until taken in by a cop and his wife who became her foster parents. She followed in the footsteps of her foster father and became a police detective, but she plays by her rules. Mallory’s maxim is, “If you didn’t catch me, I didn’t do it.” She instinctively bucks authority, and authority puts up with her only because she gets results. She has no scruples about breaking the rules if that is what it takes to get them.

Salander’s childhood was every bit as harrowing than Mallory’s. A victim of rape and abuse, with a history of violence, she is determined by the authorities to be mentally incompetent and placed under a guardianship. Her first guardian is a kindly man who is sympathetic to this strange, clearly troubled and just as clearly very bright girl with multiple piercings and tattoos, but when he suffers a stroke, he is replaced by a middle-aged weasel who does not have her best interests at heart, for which Salander will see that he receives his just desserts. She supplements the Taser and mace packed in her knapsack with a hammer on the principle that you can take care of a lot of problems with a good hammer.

Mallory and Salander are women others cross only at their peril. They are loners who keep a small circle of friends at arm’s length while remaining in their way fiercely devoted and protective. They are not inclined to explain themselves, much apologize for anything. To be open is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability must be guarded against at all costs.

Both women are freakishly intelligent, among other things world-class computer hackers. Mallory is drop-dead beautiful, Salander less conventionally attractive but no less desirable. If all this seems to require a bit much suspension of disbelief, well that rather goes with the territory. Spade, Marlowe, and Archer routinely shrug off the effects of being sapped and pistol whipped with no more than a passing headache, while Korean War vet Spenser beats the crap out of hooligans half his age and enjoys terrific sex with the love of his life, lovely übershrink Susan Silverman, in some pretty contemporary settings.

What Parker traced to Natty Bumppo is itself part of a broader tradition of the Romantic outsider who sometimes flaunts and is sometimes merely indifferent to the conventions and approval of society. The Byronic hero, bohemian artist, and hard-boiled detective are not so distant kin. They may be jaded and made cynical by the ways of man and the world. The hard edge they adopt to protect themselves from being hurt may condemn them to turn away from those for whom they care most (Spenser being a notable exception to this last trait). Yet they are after their fashion idealists too who take their stand against hypocrisy and philistinism and evildoers who are rich, respected, powerful, and seemingly immune to justice. They never give up on the quest for authenticity, whatever its cost and whether it is to be had in the end or not. They are heroes for a dark time.

postscript 1 June 2010

A better title, or perhaps a subtitle, for this one would be “notes toward a future essay.” Or perhaps multiple essays, considering themes of kinship between the hard-boiled detective and the bohemian and of Mallory and Salander as distinctive variations on the type, just as Spenser represented a substantive variation on his predeccesors. To do that I would have to go back and reread some Hammett, Chandler, McDonald, and O’Connell, at the minimum. That would be fun but would require time at the expense of other projects. Maybe some day.

David :: May.31.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »