“After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics” by W. H. Auden—
If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so’s,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths – but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.
From the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Authors. Fantastic 1968 documentary: Tolkien walks about Oxford, shares insights on his work, looks at trees, and contemplates his love of beer. Great stuff.
Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux is rarely mentioned alongside his early classics like The Great Dictator, Modern Times, or City Lights, which is a shame, because it’s easily one of his funniest. Perhaps that’s because it’s one of his rare speaking roles, although that’s hard to believe—Chaplin is just as funny when he opens his mouth as when he’s cutting physical capers. I suspect that the movie is just too dark for some folks. It is, after all, a black comic take on the Bluebeard story, and I guess the story of a man who marries and then murders his wives as a form of careerism might not hold a general appeal. In any case, it’s hilarious. Here’s a compilation of clips that show off Verdoux’s seduction technique; these are some of the funnier moments in the film—
Monsieur Verdoux is hardly a romantic comedy though. Observed closely, it works as an allegorical commentary on the moral response to the horrors of WWII. These observations are made plain at the end of the film, as Verdoux, put on trial, must first account for his crimes—and then pay for them. Here is the extraordinary final scene of the movie, which contains spoilers, although I believe that one can still watch the ending out of context and later enjoy the film—
We see here the major hallmarks of Chaplin’s greatest films: not just comedy, but also genuine pathos and social commentary, all delivered with acerbic bite that nevertheless reveals a real love for humanity. Highly recommended.
Barry Hannah takes John Oliver Hodges on a tour of Tuscaloosa and shows him the shack where he wrote Ray; he also shares some wild stories from his alcoholic past. Read more at the Oxford American.
The spring issue of Oxford American is out now, sporting a Barry Hannah cover. In addition to a review of Hannah’s Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories, the issue features eight pages of remembrances by Hannah’s students, fans, and friends (along with pictures, of course). In fact, John Oliver Hodges’s review of Long, Last, Happy is really a memoir itself. Here’s an anecdote he shares—
Barry called me his amanuensis, and as such I heard him talk a bit about his feelings on fathers and sons and beautiful women, heartache, football, stool softener, and Krystal hamburgers. On the day that Ole Miss beat Gainesville, 31-30, it happened that we were in Tuscaloosa. To celebrate the win, we drove around the town in his silver Chrysler, his pistol in its holster under the seat. He gave me the grand tour, and as I drove, I videotaped him talking beside me, drinking a Budweiser tallboy (a rare treat to lessen the abiding pain), and smoking a USA, his brand. As we approached the green shack by the tracks where he wrote Ray, he said, “It was probably the saddest time in my life.”
(Quick editorial note: I’m glad that Hannah and Hodges could celebrate Ole Miss’s narrow victory, but Tebow and the Gators did go on to win every other game of the season, including the SEC Championship and the BCS title bowl. So there).
In addition to the Hannah stuff, there’s a great essay on fried green tomatoes, a look at what it means to be a black Republican, an appreciation of Southern hip-hop, stories and poems, and a series of letters by Eudora Welty, including her hilarious application to The New Yorker. Good stuff.
While I’m shilling for Oxford American, I might as well point out that they’re hosting a Summit for Ambitious Writers this June. It’s on top of a freaking mountain! Biblioklept fave Wells Tower will be there. Sounds cool.
Melville House has just published Imre Kertész’s Fiasco, available for the first time in English translation (Tim Wilkinson). Fiasco is the final part of a trilogy, along with Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child, that tells the story of the author’s time in the Auschwitz and Bunchenwald concentration camps, and his eventual return to an alien home. When I interviewed Melville House publisher Dennis Loy Johnson last year, he was enthusiastic about the book—
We’re doing another one with Kertész next year, which is a big novel called Fiasco. He wrote a trilogy years ago about his experience in the camps. What was he, fifteen or something, when he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, working in a Nazi factory trying to turn coal into gasoline? And he wrote a novel called Fatelessness about that and another one called Kaddish for an Unborn Child. And Knopf published Kaddish and Fatelessness but they never published Fiasco. So we’re really excited about that.
I haven’t read Fatelessness or Kaddish, but I very much enjoyed Kertész’s novella The Union Jack, and I’ve been enjoying Fiasco as well so far. It’s a strange novel, beginning with a 100 page prologue of sorts detailing “the old boy” (surely Kertész) riffling through a cabinet full of old sketches, half-formed ideas, and old papers in the hopes of generating a new novel, a novel that will save his name from sinking into oblivion—a fate he wishes to avoid for (apparently) purely monetary reasons. This prologue is recursive, full of parenthetical asides, diversions, and a general Kafkaesque anxiety about the narrative proper, the Auschwitz story, I suppose, that I guess will begin with chapter one (on page 119!). Anyway, more to come.
From the Oh, This Exists? Department — W.H. Auden’s 1956 New York Times review of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King. It’s a fantastic review that defends Tolkien’s literary authenticity against his many haters, using Erich Auerbach’s groundbreaking work Mimesis as a central arguing point. Here’s Auden’s intro, but again, I recommend reading the whole review—
In “The Return of the King,” Frodo Baggins fulfills his Quest, the realm of Sauron is ended forever, the Third Age is over and J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” complete. I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect. A few of these may have been put off by the first forty pages of the first chapter of the first volume in which the daily life of the hobbits is described; this is light comedy and light comedy is not Mr. Tolkien’s forte. In most cases, however, the objection must go far deeper. I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light “escapist” reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.
Cormac McCarthy and Werner Herzog, along with physicist Lawrence Krauss on NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow, in case you missed it. Which I did.
Check out Robert Dawson’s images of American libraries at Places. Evocative and even poignant in an age when libraries are under threat in this country, Dawson’s images remind us that libraries are, on one hand a monument to our culture and civilization, and, on the other hand, often the outposts of that civilization.
I came across this clip of Slavoj Žižek discussing the different types of toilets that one finds across Europe the other day, and his riff immediately reminded me of David Foster Wallace’s novella The Suffering Channel (or “The Suffering Channel,” if you prefer to think of it as a long short story). Here’s a version of the riff in English, which seems to approach a stand-up comedy routine at times—
“You go to the toilet and you sit on ideology,” says Žižek, arguing that “Disgust . . . is not necessarily, immediately characterized by its object” — disgust is when you confront something from your inside on your outside (Žižek is likely working in part from Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject here). His inventory and analysis of the differences between French, English, and German toilets immediately recalled this passage from The Suffering Channel—
She had also at some point spent a trimester at Cambridge, and still spoke with a slight British accent, and asked generally now whether anyone else who traveled abroad much had noticed that in German toilets the hole into which the poop is supposed to disappear when you flush is positioned way in front, so that the poop just sort of lies there in full view and there’s almost no way you can avoid looking at it when you get up and turn around to flush. Which she observed was so almost stereotypically German, almost as if you were supposed to study and analyze your poop and make sure it passed muster before you flushed it down
Of course, pretty much every page of The Suffering Channel concerns the scatological: it is literally about a man who shits out art. Wallace seems to be exploring the ways in which we are unable to reconcile what is inside us — that is, what makes us us — with its final form. For Kristeva, the ultimate abject is the corpse. Žižek, less mordant perhaps, seems to be signalling (in the short clip anyway) the relatively straightforward idea that ideology is always operating, always a force conditioning our identity.
Near the end of the clip (around 5:25 or so), Žižek brings up the example of saliva, pointing out that we are constantly swallowing it, producing it and absorbing it back into ourselves, yet to fill a glass with it and then try to drink it would be revolting, horrific. Compare this with another passage from The Suffering Channel—
‘Your own saliva,’ said Laurel Manderley. ‘You’re swallowing it all the time. Is it disgusting to you? No. But now imagine gradually filling up a juice glass or something with your own saliva, and then drinking it all down.’
‘That really is disgusting,’ the editorial intern admitted.
‘But why? When it’s in your mouth it’s not gross, but the minute it’s outside of your mouth and you consider putting it back in, it becomes gross.’
‘Are you suggesting it’s somehow the same thing with poo?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think with poo, it’s more like as long as it’s inside us we don’t think about it. In a way, poo only becomes poo when it’s excreted. Until then, it’s more like a part of you, like your inner organs.’
‘It’s maybe the same way we don’t think about our organs, our livers and intestines. They’re inside all of us —‘
‘They are us. Who can live without intestines?’
‘But we still don’t want to see them. If we see them, they’re automatically disgusting.’
Wallce lards his novella with example after example of this kind, of the ways in which abject encounters with the borders of self — shit, saliva, menstrual blood, farts — confer identity through a kind of ritual shame. I doubt that Wallace is following, overtly anyway, any post-Lacanian figures in The Suffering Channel, and the concordance of examples used by Wallace and Žižek is probably ultimately not that remarkable. What I do find worth remarking upon, I suppose, are the ways in which Wallace and Žižek were/are so adept at discussing those areas of humanity we’re often happy to overlook.
Sidney Lumet, who directed dozens of classic films, including 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, and Network, has died at the age of 86. We are big fans of his fine films, including the last film he made, 2007’s underappreciated Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (heck, we even liked his totally unnecessary remake of Gloria). Here’s Lumet talking about 12 Angry Men—
Biblioklept 