Reading Frost this afternoon...much focus on mortality in poems like an old man's winters night...midlife in the oven bird...death or afterlife in after apple picking...the nature of decisions and rationalizing them in the road not taken...good stuff, very relevant to me at this point....love the line about highway dust over everything from the Oven Bird...sounds contemporary like Bob Dylan...(I was thinking of the line Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues...you can tell by the way she smiles...from Visions of Johanna)

...then going to Starbucks in Nob Hill to meet a friend for coffee...we talked some about the parallels between literary and architectural periods...I have tried several times to explain Postmodernism to someone not interested in literary theory, and I suppose the fact that I don't really understand it doesn't help, but I was able to talk with some coherence about modernism, and some of the parallels between literature and architecture really struck me:
-- a certain adherence (awareness at least) of the classic structure and design, not a neo-classicism, but a sort of nod to tradition, form, and structure...

--a reaction against excess and flourish of Victorian styles

--challenged by post-modernists on the grounds of a certain sterility and-- probably because of its attention to some elements of classical form-- elitism.

This is interesting, and I can really see much of this in modernist literature, though I don't know enough about architecture to recognize whether or not these parallels are real. I do know that, in literature people like Joyce, Eliot, Pound all seemed acutely aware of the western tradition in literature and not at all throwing everything away, or even deconstructing, but refashioning things, not to destroy literature, but to reevaluate literature and to make it (as Pound said) new, in order to make it relevant once again.

What I can see in modernist buildings is new materials (concrete, glass, steel), but lots of right angles and recognizable shapes. I am thinking of the Seagram Building in NYC and IBM Plaza in Chicago. Isn't there a parallel to many modernist writers' works: Joyce certainly covers some very 'new material' in Ulysses--defecation, menstruation, fornication; DH Lawrence (need I say more). So the material is new, but in many ways the form is the same (or at least recognizably based on a traditional form). Ulysses is an Odyssey, albeit a modern rendering. DH Lawrence's novels (Son and Lovers, Lady Chatterley's Lover) don't seem overly experimental in terms of form, but the material (theme, subject) is new. 

And finally, in this post, we come full circle...back to Frost. I memorized Frost poems in the eight grade with Mr. Ehler's and I think I always kept the poet in my mind as a nice, respectable, patriotic, Pastoral. But,  I have to say, I see something else now. The form, the language, the rhythm all seem familiar, easy, even lovable. There is something more though-- something, if not sinister, highly sceptical about Frost. You see it in a poem like the road not taken, for example. I think it is funny how that poem has been held up as a 'hallmark card' of poems-- celebrating the visionary American, the Yankee Pioneer, who's not afraid to take the less traveled path and stick to her guns. In reality, whichever path we take, the other paths in life all become 'Roads not taken'. Is this poem mainly a poem about how humans rationalize their own decisions, even though they know the other path might have been "just as fair"? And then they tell it "with a sigh" because they are aware of their own rationalizing dishonesty.



The other thing which comes to mind with much Robert Frost poetry is the possibility for a sort of Taoist/ Buddhist interpretation. I am reminded of the old Buddhist parable that is called Se-ung-ji-ma in Korean. I know it through Korean and through a children's book called Zen Shorts . The story can be summarized as follows: A man finds a horse. His neighbors say good. He says maybe. His son falls from the horse and breaks a leg. Neighbors say bad. Man says maybe. This goes on and on, illlustrating that good and bad are all about perceptions. I think this is easily relatable to The Road Not Taken (if we take the poem as ironic).

Attemting to send to blog from phone. Family leaves for Korea on Saturday, and from that point until the end of August I need to read, read, read....

BC Southam on Eliot

I picked up BC Southam’s Selected Poems of TS Eliot at the CNM Library last week, along with a collection of essay on Eliot, edited by Harold Bloom. Some basic observations from Southam’s book so far:



• TS Eliot’s poetry is difficult and this book’s purpose is largely focused on helping readers deal with the difficulty caused by the many and varied allusions and quotations in his works.

• Eliot defends his own complexity as a reaction to the complexity of the modern world.

• Eliot attempted to “assemble the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole”… I like this idea, and I was thinking about Ezra Pound’s dictum “make it new”… some discussion of making it new in order, not to destroy art, but to make it more relevant, and essential to a new generation was included.

• There is much discussion of Eliot’s debt to the French Symbolist poets who he discovered while a student at Harvard. He learned technique and also an appreciation that his life did indeed provide poetic material out of unpoetic circumstances. He was particularly fond of and influenced by Laforgue.



Some of Southam’s ideas about Prufrock:



• Mentions parallels to Dante (Ironic, pathetic, comic), and parallels clearly some of the language in the poem to Laforgue’s language.

• Also outlines influence of Bergson

• And the echoes of Ecclesiastes (the notion of return and a time for everything)…this was a very popular theme of Americans in Paris in the 20s it seems, as Hemingway used it as the epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises.



Some of Southam’s ideas about Geronition:



• Wyndham Lewis observed Geronition is a close relative of Prufrock.

• Connection to war poets who “took up theme of youth dying at the front—while old men (Geronition like) remained securely…at home”.

• The image of “Christ the Tiger” is interesting

• Concept of history is reminiscent of Joyce’s Stephen Deadalus saying “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”



Some of Southam’s ideas about Sweeney Among the Nightingales

• Title may be a reference to Ode to a Nightingale

• “nightingale is also a slang term for prostitutes…Eliot once remarked that the action of the poem takes place in a dive…”

• Eliot has been quoted as saying, “all I wanted to achieve with this poem is a sense of foreboding…” It does seem to have a very strong sense of something impending.

Another Bloom's Day passed

Wednesday was Bloom's Day, and I observed it in several ways: 1) feeling middle adged and frustrated with my life, both domestically and professionally, 2) noticing the brightness of the late afternoon and the really amazing bloom of every living thing at this time of year, 3) sitting in the courtyard/ garden behind the house in the evening and staring up to the starfilled sky, and wondering.

I read Ulysses two years ago when my family spent the summer in Korea, and last night reading the Pericles Lewis book on modernism--which treats prose fiction by placing Ulysses as the center of the modern universe, and explaining how everything else radiates out from there-- I was again struck by the beauty and the power of the book. I wanted to post here my notes from two summers ago on Ulysses-- nothing conclusive or particularly scholarly or earthshaking, but helpful to me in my attempts to uderstand a little more about Joyce's vision.

Reading Notes



Ulysses


07/07/08/ updated 6/13/08; Updated 07/24/08

I want to take a few notes on Ulysses as I attempt my multi-modal reading/understanding of it this summer. I am listening to it via my I-Pod (I actually checked Ulysses Audio CD's out of the library, but there are several places you can find the Audio book online). and I have been looking at notes from online sources, and I will watch the 2004 film Bloom. Probably, I will find a critical source as well before this odyssey is complete. Blooms Day is fast approaching, and I will be close to a third of the way through this initial reading by then. I will begin with some overall impressions and a note on each of the main three characters.


The book has been amazing in its ability to get into my head, and to give me the impression that the rhythms of speech and the thought patterns of the characters relate in some ways to my own.



Stephen Dedalus


The book begins with Stephen, who is also the hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent, and is hanging around with Buck Mulligan, a boisterous medical student, and another young student from England. Stephen’s thoughts are those of a young man, and I find that I relate less to them now than I might have a few years ago. A lot of focus on Hamlet and the death of the father. Stephen’s mother has died recently, and he has strange guilt about it. This seems to stem largely from the fact that he refused to pray with his mother while she was on her deathbed.






I am now at the part in the novel when, after being saved from the police (after being attacked by an English sailor) by Bloom, and then after having spent time together in a sort of cab man’s shed, Leopold and Stephen go to Bloom’s home. It is a very interesting moment when just before Stephen takes leave of Bloom they urinate together. So much of this novel seems to me explainable by talking about voice. Perhaps it is bigger than that, but I don’t know how else to describe the sections that seem so clearly and easily identifiable as being attached to either Bloom or Stephen, or some of the other characters, such as Mr. Deasy the anti-Semitic school master, or the anti-Semitic Cyclops, who throws a goblet at Bloom, or Buck Mulligan. There are, of course structural things going on: the question and answer format of the section I am currently reading; the advertisement like sections nearer the beginning; the hallucinations that seem to go on forever in the brothel (particularly the first and second watch, and Bloom being systematically humiliated by several people).






Leopold Bloom


This interior space (that of Mr Bloom’s head) is really haunting, in that I find myself the last week feeling like his voice is so similar to my own thought patterns. Joyce really brings you into this rhythmic pattern that allows you to feel that you are the thinker thinking these thoughts. Brilliant! Bloom is aware that his wife has a lover it seems and so spends the day away, presumably to give her time to go through with her tryst. The day of Bloom and the way it is written from inside reminds me of Virginia Woolf, especially Mrs. Dalloway. It is beautifully banal and full of the day, time, thoughts of the moment, that somehow seem universal to mankind. Bloom is a character who is so easy for me to relate to. He is intelligent, but not confident. He has lost his relationship with his wife, or at least it is not what it once was. He also is still disturbed by the loss of his infant son, who would be 11 years old if he had lived. One recent online resource I checked discusses Bloom as being an everyman hero and as dealing with two major crises (the death of his father/ and Son Rudy as one crisis- break of his male family line; the infidelity of his wife, which seems to stem from the death of their son eleven years before). The online source used the phrase “cosmically lonely”, which is interesting in the sense of not knowing one’s place in the world, which is a very modern sort of condition, even for people who don’t have infidelity and a broken male family line.






At the moment when Bloom and Stephen part, Bloom looks up to see two remaining stars in the early morning (near dawn) sky and hear the church bells tolling. There is maybe a sense of Bloom’s ‘cosmic loneliness’, and also a very strong contrast with Stephen. It seems to me that Stephen is thinking more deeply on every subject, as their thoughts are compared. When the bell tolls, for example, we are told Stephen thinks of Latin phrases corresponding with the chime, whereas Mr. Bloom simply mimics the sounds in his head (ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, ding, dong... or something like that).






At the same time, I don’t feel that Joyce is treating either character in any privileged way. I suppose he may like Stephen more, since it is in many ways him, but he seems to treat Bloom with affection and not straight satire, though Bloom would be easy to satirize in much the same way that a writer like Sinclair Lewis satirizes a character like Babbitt. Bloom is complex, and maybe all people are, and it seems that Joyce wants to look unflinchingly, not judgmentally, at the man. Maybe Bloom is a representation of a modern man attempting to find meaning. Somewhere I read that Bloom is an artist that never became an artist, and that Stephen, or course, is the Artist as a Young Man. There is some common ground between the two men, and there is of course the father son possibility. Stephen is somewhat estranged from his father, and Bloom lost his son in infancy.





Molly Bloom





I finished this first read of this amazing book last night, and, so now, I have a somewhat clearer picture of Molly, since most of what I read yesterday and last night was the section of the book in which Leopold encounters his wife in bed (after his 10 year day), thinks about her and their relationship, goes through envy of Boylan, jealousy, and finally kisses her bottom and tells her about (most of) his day. Molly’s section is amazing. No punctuation, just a rambling, but easy to follow line of her thoughts. Again, talk about voice! I wonder how a feminist criticism of this section would read. She is completely sensual in her approach to the world. Her attempts after pleasure and away from pain are perhaps more base than Bloom’s or Stephen’s, but are they any less valid, acceptable, appropriate in the face of what Molly calls a “vale of tears”—this life. She says at one point, when thinking of her dead infant son Rudy, “I won’t think myself into sadness" or something to that effect. She is surviving in the 20th century, and I don’t see her as any less lonely than Bloom or Stephen, maybe more so. It may be true that she doesn’t have the refinement or education to express her own cosmic loneliness, but, by god, she expresses it all the same through the impact of this section of the book. I see her as really alone, really! She seems lost, distracted, mentally lazy, in the pursuit of pleasure, because it is only in sensual pleasure (food, sex, and the resultant need to remove food and the remains of sex from the body) that she feels alive. I feel like so many ‘modern’ people are so much like Molly. She is a poster child of modernity’s gifts to the human race, and so many today (most people, at least in my experience) are not living the postmodern/ postcolonial hybrid life advocated by some thinkers (which is necessary if we are to escape the past and turn our society into something beyond war, devastation of the natural environment, and domination by one group of another, with nothing but greed and the profit motive driving us). Most people I see are living a life of lonely consumption—in need of things to make us complete. Isn’t Molly essentially empty, and doesn’t she go about filling the “hole” inside her as her primary purpose in life.






The Story


Is there a story? This all takes place in one day (June 16th 1904?) (which may have been the day James Joyce first went out with (or met) his wife). The hook line on the movie preview for Bloom gives some clue as to what Ulysses is “all about”. It says, “All of life in one day”, or something like that, and now halfway through the book, I think that is appropriate. There is a normalcy, a sameness, a day in and day out feeling about this book, and yet it seems so important, so dramatic in some ways. Life lulls us with its normalcy and its day in and day outness, and then we forget what a wonderous thing it is just to have life. I say wonderous in that it is a real mix of good, bad, and indifferent. It is hard to be awake, to pay attention, to love life.






I find it really interesting that we are with Bloom while he is defecating (two times so far), masturbating, eating, drinking, etc. We really see a day in his life. And in the meantime his wife is fornicating, urinating, and menstruating. It is such a strange book and I don’t pretend to have a handle on it, but I do feel something—a throbbing life force inside the pages. It is homely and it is eternal and lovely in places.






It is interesting to compare Joyce’s tale to Homer’s tale, from which the book borrows its name. Ulysses was trying to get home from the Trojan wars to his wife. When he does get home, after ten years and many adventures, he has to fight off (and kill) the men hanging around the house trying to get to Penelope, his wife. In the end, they “live happily ever after”. For Leopold the suitors after his wife have already had her, but still Leopold will have to find acceptance from his wife, and they will find a place together that is tenable, leading up to Molly’s famous “Yes”, of which I believe she is saying yes to her existence, as it is, which, for me, includes Leopold. I’m not sure of the significance because it seems that she is saying yes to staying with Leopold, but probably not as a faithful wife. So, does this just mean that everyone works out a new logic, a new order, a new contract in order to remain alive, and engaged in doing what humans do? It seems as though Leopold has done so. He has worked something out to allow him to live though his wife is unfaithful and his son Rudy has died, and his father has committed suicide.





Links:

I like this link about Leopold:

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/ulysses/terms/charanal_1.html



This link is really helpful in understanding what is actually happening in the physical realm of the novel (since most of the action seems to be in the heads of the characters).

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/summary.html

Beginning the Waste Land

Explore the WastelandI read the waste land by T.S. Elliot again yesterday, and also found some very interesting, helpful links to a site which helps you explore the poem. With all the references this really does make sense.

I am right now just grappling with trying to keep track of where the narrator changes, and making use of the exploration site to get a sense of the references. It is beautiful, of course, but a bit puzzling.

The range of references from the Bible to Whitman, to Chaucer is daunting, so I will continue on and post again on this poem when I have a better sense of it.

Listening to Elliot himself read is also helpful: this link to audio files/ the wasteland is, I think, great!

Ten Books piled at my doorstep

The title of this post is not an undiscovered work by Ezra Pound, but the reality of what I found waiting for me when I arrived home last night. I had ordered quite a few books from different suppliers (all via Amazon), and for some reason nearly all of them arrived on the same day.

I had picked up Dylan from school, and Sunyoung and Bridget were in the East Mountains for tutotring with Christine, and when we opened the door there they all were. Dylan and I opened them all together in the floor of the living room, with the swamp cooler full blast (still having record heat in the 100s).

The books were: Pound: Poems and Translations edited by Richard Sieburth, The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats edited by Richard J. Finneran, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes edited by Arnold Rampersad, W.H. Auden Collected Poems edited Edward Mendelson, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and The Playwright as Thinker by Eric Bentley.

I’ve got lots of stuff to read on the Novel (in terms of Critical sources), and have read most of the Novels on the department reading list for Modern British and American, but poetry is an area I’ve not touched for many years, so I think I need to emphasize it.

I read in the Pericles Lewis Intro to Modernism up to the discussion of Modern poetry, which focuses on the wasteland, and I will drop that book for now, and dive into reading poems from the list, with as much critical support as I can find for each author. I will probably approach it in the following way:

1)   a reading journal aside from this blog

2)   working through one author’s work at a time

3)   finding critical sources online and from the library

I would like to focus on poetry for the next month, so that by mid-July I can move to drama. There is less drama on the list, and I will probably spend from mid-July to the end of July on the Drama. I have three novels on the list and I will begin reading those in August, hopefully finished with the reading and note taking by the time family returns from Korean near the end of August. The Novels, I think, will be Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner), The Ambassador (Henry James), and To the Light House(Virginia Woolf). Depending on time I will also read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein), and House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)….We’ll see. Also, as I read some of this may change, as I make connections, and decide to focus on works of some writers more than others.

It’s important to make thematic connections across authors, nations, and genres. That’s the plan for now. Well , I ‘d better stop writing and start reading!!!

E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1904-1962

 

I received E.E. Cummins complete poems in the mail yesterday evening. The kids were so cute—they love hiding my books and then playing ‘hot and cold’ to make me find them. It was funny because I kept asking ‘hot or cold’ and Bridget kept saying cold. I couldn’t figure it out until I realized the book was hidden in the freezer!

 

Dylan is funny too in regard to this game. He always hides it but can’t resist telling me. “I hid your book Dad, it’s under the couch.”

 

I was in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington recently, and took this picture of Cummings with my phone (they actually allow taking pictures with phones these days, but no flash).

 

I’m finishing the Modernism intro by Pericles Lewis today or tomorrow, and then finding a way to dive into modernist poetry. The Lewis book focuses on one work of poetry (Elliot’s the Wasteland), one work of long fiction (Joyce’s Ulysses), and one drama (Pirandello’s Six characters in Search of an Author). These texts are all on my list, and I love The Wasteland, so maybe that’s the place to begin, with Thomas Stearns???

 

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An introduction to Modernism; Impressionists in ABQ; Record heat

The Poems of Dylan Thomas, New Revised Edition [with CD]The Flowers of Evil (Classic Reprint)Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics)I began reading the Introduction to Modernism by Pericles Lewis this weekend, and made it through the introductory chapters. It is, as the back cover suggests, a very concise, readable text, but filled with information.

The book begins with discussion of the roots of modernism in mid to late 19th century French literature, in which description of two famous obscenity cases shows changing attitudes toward ‘representation’ in the arts. The author used the term representation to mean the way in which reality may be conveyed by a work of art. This involves both the chosen subject matter and the techniques employed by the artist. In the court case against Charles Baudelaire, the state alleged poems from the Flowers of Evil created ‘an offense against public morals’. Together with the similar case against Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary these court battles are taken as a watershed, in that they mark two notable artists choosing subject matter, as well as techniques, which offended enough to bring on law suits.

I was surprised by how much the book connected the movements in modern art to movements in literature, and there is a lot of discussion of the artists working in France in the 19th century, especially the Impressionists. While I was plowing through the book determined not to leave home on Saturday, Sunyoung called from the Albuquerque Museum of Art to let me know they were having, believe it or not, a family day there to celebrate a loan from the National Museum of Wales of works from Turner to Cezanne. So after reading about modernism and impressionists and their influence on twentieth century modernism, I was able to sit on the floor of the main gallery with Bridget and Dylan, listen to a story about Monet's Garden, and then get up close and personal with water lilies, among other paintingsLinnea in Monet's Garden. How very cool and serendipitous!

On Sunday, I received Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems, and I plan to dive into it as soon as I’ve read the introduction to Modernism, before the week’s end.

We had record heat all weekend, so it was a good weekend to go to the Museum and read. However, I did work on the swamp cooler and repair and re-install part of a sprinkler system.

Reading List

/>The Department reading list for Modern British and American Literature is the beginning source for my study.

I have read most of the texts on the list in terms of Fiction. Poetry and Drama are another story, and I'll be starting with poetry and drama. I've been watching some interesting documentaries via CNM's (central new mexico community college) website, on the libary's page-- W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Sean O'Casey, so far. Good stuff! I need a multi-modal approach to learning, and blogging, maybe is going to be a helpful part of that.

I have been looking for film versions of O'casey's work, and, so far, have found only Alfred Hitchcock's version of Juno and the Paycock

The Drama part of this is going to be dominated by the Irish, I think-- with Sean O'Casey, John Milton Synge, W.B. Yeats, and one Irish American will figure in whose work I've loved since I was an undergrad (Eugene O'Neil). I know there is a great film version of Long Day's Journey into Night with Katherin Hepburn.

Beginning with a delivery

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)I am planning to take comps in February to cap five years of study toward my PhD. I am doing reading this summer to prepare specifically for the Literary/ Historical field, Modern British and American Literature. I will also comp in Composition and Language and Rhetoric. I feel relatively strong in the Rhetoric and Composition areas, as I've invested more time and study thus far in those areas (my focus is Rhetoric and Writing), but a little shaky, though in love with, Modernism. The idea for the blog is to track my progress toward the Literary/ Modernism part of my comps.

When I arrived home yesterday, after a day as Director of our ABE program (my new job as of May 24th), the UPS guy was on my porch. Sunyoung and the kids were out, so he handed me a plain brown wrapper. Sound exciting? It was a very good recently written introduction to Modernism:

And so it begins...