In the last hours of Sunday, March 7, 2021, I made some dinner and sat down to read. I had slept most of the day after having gone to bed near midnight the night before, i.e. the night of the 6th. This followed a busy day. Saturday I had taken care of errands and walked half way across town and back. Somehow I had turned my hips and ankles into tense ropes on these long walks and then made that worse by carrying a lot of groceries home. So, I figure my body needed the rest. But when I got up in the afternoon on Sunday I realized I needed again to get a few more things from the store. Happily I can report, I did that today and my aches are lessened, so I am more conscious of my posture etc. as I do this.
Many, many times over the years I take to writing down what I'm reading and researching. I do this in a number of ways for myself in order to keep track of what is in process. But now and then I get the urge to tell others. For this of course I have to write it down. There is always for me a wide range of materials. Longer views turn into lists as a result, by necessity, and might be interesting for no one but the far away in time. Still people ask what I'm doing and I laugh thinking what they may want or imagine is a finished product! But no, what gets the most attention is the constant process, after all.
After a normal morning routine when I think I may have cooked some pasta, and poured & drank a cup of cold coffee, it dawned on me that I wanted to finish the section in the recent Balzac novelette I was spending time with. First published in 1834 as a submitted manuscript in L'Echo de la Juene (or Young) France as "Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe)", it came a few years after the imposition of the new July Monarch of France. This was Duke Louis Phillippe from the other, 'lesser' Orleans branch of the Bourbon line.
The story though, takes place just a few years earlier when the other Bourbon line, that of the brothers of Louis XVI had wrestled for dominance after the fall and disgrace of Napoleon in 1814 and his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. A verbal contest of emotion is playing out here between a General and a Duchess. The time is the 1820's. The place for this contest is at the Hotel of the Duchess - her house - in central Paris, and near to the Palace Bourbon which lay on the south bank of the Seine. This neighborhood had for centuries been the domain of a number of noble houses close to that of the Palais Bourbon nestled in and among various churches and hospitals and charities. She is married to a Duke closely attached to the efforts of Charles X, and conveniently for the story, he was out of town on some extended mission. She had been close to the ladies in the House of Bourbon all her life.
The General is a hero from the Napoleonic wars. He had won battles and suffered much, got lost in the desert in Egypt, and had been away for so long that it took a man even with his commanding skill sets some time to return to the center of things back in Paris. When things changed in 1830 and Charles, the misruling monarch was replaced, the Duchess had already left and entered a Carmelite convent, far away, hanging off the end of Tarife at the southernmost tip of Spain. Then, Tarife was a British protectorate like Gibraltar is now and off limits for the French. The Bourbon family and entourage had also fled and spent the rest of their lives looking for safe haven.
This General had fallen for the Duchess who was inclined to let him visit her, and for some time, thus distinguishing him from other gentlemen, as her neighbors and nobles in the Court could point out. At this point in the story though they were both still in Paris. The Bourbon line and all the Houses with their deep associations still straining after decades of terror and reassemblage in the wakes of the revolutionary tumult, still felt far less than stable and it made some sense for ladies to make friends with powerful forces. These alliances and friendships however had to be carried out with a delicacy and finesse that the French fortunately had turned into an artform and which had existed for centuries. This Duchess knew very well who she was and what she would stand for and not. But, tragically for her she had never experienced real love. And this, unsurprisingly, the General still did not understand. He was a military man and she was a court lady and they both had different ideas about just what was going on. After months of his assertions based on his hopeful outlook, and her not quite denying how she felt for him, it is late, he is on his knees with his head in her lap. She runs her fingers through his curly dark locks, thinking to herself, realizing that he would kill her if he ever concluded she had been fooling him. Spurred by his expectations he meets the intransigence of her sense of self, and her appraisal of her responsibilities. The layers of proper behavior unravel where for him his endless sets of means reach out for an end that she will not abide. Because for her that end means death.
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The next thing within reach is the current NY Review of Books. In it, a brief overview of the writing career of American author Nicholson Baker is laid out alongside a new release for him called "Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act". Baker has been a regular author of fiction and sometimes essays since the late 1980's. His frustration with politics over the last twenty years in particular has led him to appeal to the US government through official channels to find out the answer to certain questions about the torture regime, drone strikes, and even the origins of COVID-19. He waits for years and time and again finds, when he does get responses, that they are so full of redaction he can't construct explicit enough answers or chronologies that could show what has actually happened. He laments that if we don't know what has happened then we don't know what is done in our name as Americans and so can't even say what we do or do not stand for.
We thereby lose a sense of who we are in these redacted intelligence files. But, in this latest book, Baker writes out these searches alongside his day to day routines, He has a pair of dogs he dearly loves and who are his constant companions. He goes to the market, he makes dinner. He washes the dogs, they sit by him when he writes or sleeps. These quotidian rounds, the freelance author Peter Baker of this review [NYRB 11Mar21] tells us, are the explicit known forms of actual known life that are most important to all of us anyway. For Nicholson Baker, he seems to tell us, they act as a solace rather, that counters the sought meanings which Baker returns to again and again in order to try to confirm for him and us what we likely already sense but know are likely beyond certain proof.
The next article from Jenny Uglow explores the beauty of an old mapbook of England published in 1815. A section on the life and career of William Smith follows. Another look at Smith's methods also show how he and the book's publication were paid out. It was a beautiful volume and still is as it sat in the archives for centuries not seeing the light of day, but it was hardly ever purchased. Mr Smith spent ten weeks as a result in debtor's prison in 1819. He would work on several projects in his time though and give birth to the study of geology on a massive scale. The title of Smith's major work was "A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland: exhibiting the colliers and mines, the marshes and fen lands originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names". As the first ever geologic map of an entire country, subscribers could pay 5 guineas (in 1815!) for individual sheets or pay £12 for the whole thing which covered 8.5 feet by 6 feet. He had worked as an engineer working out problems in drainage and irrigation, he traipsed across the lands and dug up fossils, and in the beginning worked as a youthful surveyor in Somerset where he took an interest in the seams of local coal sediment. Where do we stand? How is that possible? It's not so simple!
In 1921, Six Characters In Search of an Author brought fame and a resolution of debt to Luigi Pirandello, a 53 yr old Sicilian. Pirandello's father, a wealthy owner of a sulfur mine lost it all in a major flooding in 1903, and so, 35 yr old Luigi started writing. He spent nearly twenty years at it before they caught the public eye and then he became famous for these satiric, dark stories of betrayal and vengeance. [...]
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08 March
Awaking and looking briefly at the news, I get up to make some coffee and fill the water bottle. It is Monday and cool this morning but it promises to be 70F and bright, sunny with a strong wind from the south. The daffodil tops have slipped their spears above the crust of dead scrub in their little isolated clusters - first harbinger of spring I see here.
I returned to finish an interview with Toni Morrison from the summer of 1993 and published that fall in The Paris Review (no. 128), after having left off reading just a couple days ago. She had been talking about sources and inspirations and how to make plots work without detailing their central actions, leaving that til the end or for the reader's mind to work out and how understatement can work far better. She says she did this explicitly in her novel Jazz to be like the music, where the structure frames the improvisation. Where the work of endless hours, the years in countless measures, the practice polish is shown off in graceful paucity and crisp lines. Meanwhile the steady, propulsive beat is building all the while, working its underlying pulse where the melody accentuates, captures with some hovering hint, snatching and releasing from that driving undertow. Not only does she praise the understatement, she claims it as a must-be-so. The reader must never be satiated, she says. Instead they must be taught that the tune can be played again and again, but with endless variation. This can-can is a demonstration I see with a perfect number of steps, a flurry, and then it stops. A bow, the cheers, then the curtain.
Of course, because she can, a number of things rise to the surface in this interview. Asked about other structural elements in her work she tells of how migration and movement to the cities seems to have profoundly changed the course of so many lives but particularly African-Americans. The tumult, the difficulties, the density and diversity of wide-ranging populations, the grittiness and toughness of survival all proliferate new understandings and insights. Amidst all this, an individual can become themselves, can learn their own skill sets and hone them to a polish. The music and the dance and the words and the art become emblematic of self ownership. And then beyond that from that place of self-mastery, a person can become a center of one's own, of one's own circles with the ripples extending outward. The music gets heard and a person can learn of their own body, their own thoughts and then test them against so many others. Individuals stand out and an audience can hear and see - for the first time in the US - Black people aren't some indifferentiable, confused mass of inarticulate hordes. Duke Ellington is not like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis is not like Charlie Parker. You can hear anew, as Billie Holiday is not like Ella Fitzgerald or Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone. Of course, each of them, and us, have our own voices, often submerged. But we get the benefit when we witness their voices grow and change in time.
She explains how she was asked when she would write about white America. And to hear her say how she first wanted to be understood as an African-American writer gives a profound insight into her sense of place and being. And maybe the rest of us. She knows those asking that think it's a compliment that she can give her voice to the white experience, and she would, she said, if she wanted to. But primary for her was to write as an African-American woman. She defined for herself a place to write from.
Joyce, or Tolstoy, she says, weren't asked to do that, it was demanded of them though, because it was assumed that they already were writing from the center of what already existed. And they were branded as hostile to authority when they wrote what they did. The place of western civilization already was the arbiter, the decider of what could be and what could not be written about. She had set about to make another, different center, another locus to view things from. As long as people keep asking the question of when artists or writers were going to come into the center, to talk about that center, she says, then she won't, she can't: "...I'm gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me."
She wonders that the French didn't ask Joyce when he would write about Paris. This provincial sounding nonsensical question makes her point plain.
And,
"Each subject matter demands its own form, you know."
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The pandemic has sprung new habits for us all I think. This year I've been reading as much from the huge archive of the Paris Review that extends back to 1953 as anything else. It turns out to be a treasure trove of stuff I never knew existed before and every week I find more things I feel I have to make time for. Access to the archive is open to subscribers but will lock up when the subscription ends for me in September (I think). So I have an incentive to plow thru as much as I can, in case, for whatever reason, I can't renew. Since the beginning of January I've kept the pace of an issue of that per week. Jumping around decade to decade, for variety, I alternate one issue from the earliest years and one from some other decade. It seemed important to get as many of the earlier ones read to get a sense of how they started out, hopefully showing purpose and range of their material and consistency. For this scattershot reading approach I have to make lists of what I get done or I'll get lost. There's so much here for writers and readers alike. The earlier ones are shorter but sometime in the 1960's individual issues grew in length to around 200 pages, or more! My schedule is late with the 40 year anniversary issue no. 128 of fall 1993 finished today - with that interview with Toni Morrison.
She wonders that the French didn't ask Joyce when he would write about Paris. This provincial sounding nonsensical question makes her point plain.
And,
"Each subject matter demands its own form, you know."
__________________________________________________
The pandemic has sprung new habits for us all I think. This year I've been reading as much from the huge archive of the Paris Review that extends back to 1953 as anything else. It turns out to be a treasure trove of stuff I never knew existed before and every week I find more things I feel I have to make time for. Access to the archive is open to subscribers but will lock up when the subscription ends for me in September (I think). So I have an incentive to plow thru as much as I can, in case, for whatever reason, I can't renew. Since the beginning of January I've kept the pace of an issue of that per week. Jumping around decade to decade, for variety, I alternate one issue from the earliest years and one from some other decade. It seemed important to get as many of the earlier ones read to get a sense of how they started out, hopefully showing purpose and range of their material and consistency. For this scattershot reading approach I have to make lists of what I get done or I'll get lost. There's so much here for writers and readers alike. The earlier ones are shorter but sometime in the 1960's individual issues grew in length to around 200 pages, or more! My schedule is late with the 40 year anniversary issue no. 128 of fall 1993 finished today - with that interview with Toni Morrison.
...
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17JAN21
17JAN21
There was a recent Paris Review I picked up to see if, or how quickly I could speed thru it.
The structure is simple: each issue has a bunch of poems, some short stories, a couple interviews, a photo essay or art conception.
It all has the thrown together feel of a few dozen unrelated articles, stacked and squared-off, then cut, shorn into crisp, thick-paged form.
Regularized font.
Topics breeze in and sail out. Words dip and sway or jolt and cascade.
Meaning, substance, chiseled like aphorae,
but catalogued like discount coupons tucked sublimely next to the fertilizer.
A story of foreign agents? no.
They're little kids,
who comically clown, then, betrayed by the tectonics of culture, left brutalized, alone in fields of broken glass. Glass that time is viewed through.
A turn of page finds shop-worn counters of durable vows, shiny from frequent scrubbings, lined straight along sills of windows
left unwashed, too cloudy for vision to penetrate. Redounding back, Interiors resound like drums, then settle as leaves in fall.
"Are we there yet?"
Dozens of poems. Short, long, catchy, self-contradicting, lines double up. Words separate, untie united.
...
~05JAN21
This issue, spring 2019, #228, went right along. In a day-and-a-half, it was two-thirds done.
The interview with the living poet (Carl Phillips) who teaches on the other side of Missouri,
rides along the regular track. The obstacles that made his path uneven get highlighted, some.
The output is prodigious, but the thoughts and their presentation seem ordinary to me. The expected tracks of Obvious.
His life read aloud putters round that track: 'Glad to meet you." "Charmed I'm sure."
I should, I think, finish this issue up really quick.
~16JAN21
Ten days later... after a morning of this or that - the news, which treats the emotions like a yoyo with the string of reason made out of rancid silly putty -
and a paragraph or two of Michel de Montaigne, for good measure;
Maigret the chief detective, [in Georges Simenon's "Maigret & the Apparition] is back at the office and knows he won't likely make it home for dinner.
The second night in a row. There are threads engaged seeking witnesses afield. Surveil watches posted, calls made to London and Nice, awaiting what the researchers may unveil. Left with no idea who did it or why and only a sixth of the story left - even that, I can leave it til tomorrow.
Dinner on the stove gets a stir.
What there is left in this recent issue of the Paris Review can be mostly read backwards, piece by piece.
spring 2019, #228:
"Study of Two Figures (Orpheus/Eurydice)" Monica Youn
21., 16., 8., John Ashbery
"Elvis Has Left The House" James Tate
"Monsoon" Eduardo C Corral
"You're Gonna Write This" - Patricia Smith
