This is a Book by Demetri Martin

Shout out to Ellen Hoover, who gifted me with a genre she knows I love – the form-shifting, point of view playing, short prose pieces you can enjoy in order, out of order, in one sitting or in twenty. The book travels through definitions, line drawings, full short stories and a variety of other forms I don’t know how to name.  It’s a little uneven, but mostly hilarious.

My favorite piece is “Socrates’ Publicist,” a three page romp through Hollywood and ancient Greek philosophy.  Martin imagines Athens overrun by the Hollywood types who feast on original talent, and turns Socrates into an entertainer ultimately persecuted by authorities for becoming overexposed before an audacious publicity stunt forces him to drink the hemlock.  It’s very funny, but also very smart, and also great satire.

A lot of the pieces are inappropriate for use in school, though I might dare to try some of them if I could swear a bunch of seniors to secrecy.  Alas, I don’t teach creative writing anymore. There is, however, one gem that I could use in Poetry Reading and Writing, a poem that concludes a piece called “Palindromes for Specific Occasions.” This particular poem is given a title longer than those given to poems of the T’ang dynasty, and it threw me for a loop at first.  The first two lines are, “Sexes.  Eh, the sexes./Never even.  Still, it’s DNA.”  Clearly, the first line is palindromic, and the second isn’t.  What’s up with that?  Well, skip to the end of the poem and you find that he has written the first and last lines as palindromes, but they merely frame the palindrome that is the entire poem, which is eighty lines long.  An eighty-line palindrome!  Are you effing kidding me?  Because the poem is mostly about boob and ass, given that it is set in a strip club, I’ll really not ever find an occasion to use it, but you have to admire the mind that can do such a thing.

I’m going to pass the book on to Coach Phill, who teaches creative writing at Harrison, and perhaps when I get it back, I’ll address it again on these very webpages.  Meanwhile, if you’re mature enough to handle really immature yet smart writing; if you liked Simon Rich’s Ant Farm, then you’ll definitely like This is a Book by Demetri Martin.  Gracias, Ellen.

About "The Answer Man" from the August 8 New Yorker

It’s been a long time since I’ve been really enthusiastic about an issue of the New Yorker, and a long time since a blog post originated in my notebook. But the August 8 issue, with its articles on the Roman poet Lucretius, the May 1 bin Laden assault and Oscar Wilde (not to mention a chuckleable Shouts and Murmurs about “God’s Blog”), prompted me to put pen to paper rather than fingers to keyboard.

I can’t tell you that I’d ever heard of Lucretius before, but I’ve been a fan of the article’s author, Stephen Greenblatt, since I first read an essay from his book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning in Jean Peterson’s Shakespeare Revisioned class at Wesleyan in 1999.  His Shakespeare biography, Will in the World, is my favorite work about our favorite playwright because of the author’s expressed need to make a human connection with his subject.  So I began reading because of the author, but kept reading for the connection he established with this subject, a poem titled “On the Nature of Things.”

Greenblatt begins with personal narrative about his purchase many years ago of the poem from the dime-a-book bin at Yale.  The poem, written in Latin (what with its writer being a Roman of the Republic), is a celebration of life based on the Greek philosophies of Atomism and Epicureanism (not the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure the Catholic Church turned it into, but the actual philosophy itself. If clicking on Wikipedia is too much work for you, Greenblatt quotes one of Epicurus’ disciples:

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living prudently and honestly and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.

Greenblatt’s engaging style makes otherwise boring topics easy to read, and in this article, that style is built on two parallel lines of connections, one implicit and one explicit.  In the implies connection, Greenblatt uses his discovery narrative next to another discovery narrative, the one in which Poggio the Florentine finds in 1417 the original text of the poem.  With his basis in Atomism (that all things are composed of different arrangements of the same tiny property – the atom), Lucretius writes, among other things, that the body is only one form of atomic arrangement (rather than some divine creation), and that the end of the body is the end of life, as opposed to some transition into an unprovable afterlife.  You can imagine that the Catholic Church, with its desire to focus its members on the next life instead of the one they’re in the middle of, would have disapproved.  Greenblatt provides one fragment of the poem and follows it with his personal take on its meaning: “to spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death is folly.  It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed.”

The poem speaks this message so clearly to Greenblatt because of his own upbringing, which makes for Greenblatt’s explicit connection.  He tells the story of his mother’s almost incapacitating fears of her own death, borne of her sister’s death from strep throat at the age of 16.  For Greenblatt’s mother, these fears manifested themselves in physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, and when she fell under a spell of emotion, either love or anger, she reminded her husband and son of her fragile hold on life.  A proof that poetry tells us what we feel is found in the sentence Greenblatt writes to follow the one quoted above: “…he (Lucretius) gave voice to a thought I had not quite yet allowed myself to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.”  Greenblatt’s story reminds me of a friend’s mother, and shows how Irish Mother guilt is the same thing as Jewish mother guilt. When we were in our late teenage years and picked up a friend for one of our nights on the town, her last words would be, “Every time you boys go out, you put me up on the cross.  I don’t come down until you get home.”

I’d give you more about the bin Laden story (an energetic military procedural) and the Wilde biography critique, but I’ve used all my time on Dr. Greenblatt and Lucretius, so you’ll have to check out those stories for yourself.

And for our last piece of business tonight, LeBron, the last few Patch posts.

http://newcanaan.patch.com/blog_posts/writing-to-learn-not-to-express-2

http://newcanaan.patch.com/blog_posts/i-found-what-i-was-looking-for-u2

http://newcanaan.patch.com/blog_posts/words-to-live-by-part-i

Sorry to stack all these posts up on you in one night, LeBron, but I wrote them while spending about twenty hours at the County swim championships last week, and they had no WiFi there. Then today, at the Conference diving championships, they had WiFi, but I had no computer. go figure.

Because I know you'll ask, Kate finished tenth out of twenty-five in the 10 and under girls. When I congratulated her on her top ten finish, she said, "I was hoping for top eight."

I responded, "You've been diving for five weeks. Chill, my sister."

Nevertheless, part II of the War and Peace post I promised.

Inevitability in Plot and Characterization in War in Peace

Now that we’re beyond love, examined in the preceding post, I can be a bit briefer. As I was reading the story, and found that, miraculously, Rostov and Bolkonsky were thrust together in a meeting, and that, magically, each had their separate face-to-face encounters with Napoleon, which took their differing idolizations of l’Empereur and crushed them with the great man’s human shortcomings, and all other manner of what might be called coincidence or contrivance in order to make characters’ paths intersect, I was struck by the notion that these chance meetings are what Borges would call “inevitabilities,” not accidents.

Why are these potentially contrived incidents inevitable? Because you’re reading a novel, and Tolstoy frequently reminds you that you’re reading a story. He talks to you at times; he frames the incidents within an argument, and later revisits the way the events of the story advance the argument; and he frequently comments on the action as it has been reported in non-fiction texts. As I remind myself to heed Alexsandr Hemon’s advice from Nowhere Man (see an old post about our “need for meaning”) about suspending my skepticism, I enjoy the experience of novel-reading much, much more, because it turns the text from an abstraction written for anyone into a personal communication between the author and me (much the same way that this blog is so enjoyable because of our relationship, LeBron.

I have no idea if that paragraph makes any sense, but between the sun glare on the computer screen and all the distractions that accompany writing about the book at the county swim championships while I watch my daughter get her chops busted about a boy for the first time, I find myself unwilling to parse my own syntax. (Especially in a public place.)

The other thing I like about the plot is its insistence on correcting history. Tolstoy is writing the novel 50-60 years after the events that accounted for the enmity and amity between Napoleon and Alexander, between 1805 and 1813, and the depth and breadth of his research is incredible. He despises the oversimplifications of history (I’ll deal with that in the “Things that appealed to me intellectually” post, rather than a Things I loved about the book” post) and uses the book to give the reality of narration to the abstractions of historical reality. To do this, he needs to know as much about battle plans as salon manners, as much about objets d’art from the beginning of his century as about the differences between the ways Russian historians and French historians account for the same battles. And above all, he has to have a preternatural sense of our shared humanity in order to give all his characters the diverse traits he gives them

While I can see the truth in his male characters because I feel like I have felt parallel thoughts or experienced parallel experiences, I wonder about the truth in his female characters. He gives them significantly more deth and texture than his English contemporary Dickens, and I’ll be amazed if he, as a thirty-five year old man, faithfully got inside the mind of teenage girls in his initial characterizations of Natasha and Sonya. When I talk about depth and texture, I think I’m really comparing Marya to characters like Lucie Mannette or Estella (for Dickens, even the female names are nothing but light). Marya’s self-sacrifice isn’t motivated by the author’s view of women as Purity, but derives from what would have been necessarily (or inevitably), her character, isolated by her looks and her obedience to her father. She experiences tension and she makes choices that aren’t easy for her, and knows that there is a disconnect between what she wants and what she must.

So, LeBron, if any of the women who follow you on Twitter every time you tweet one of my new blog posts read this, please encourage them to respond to my characterization question. Gracias.

When you write about a 1200 page book, you have to give yourself some sort of organizing principle. Okay, I didn’t really read all 1215 pages; Part II of the Epilogue is a series of arguments about the inadequacy of the explanations that historians offer for large-scale events, and the paradox of the power and futility of individual will.  Interestingly, when I looked at James Murnighan’s Beowulf at the Beach, which discusses the author’s fifty favorite novels and contains a “What to Skip” section for each, I found that the only part he thinks worth skipping is Part II of the Epilogue, so I guess I’m not alone.

So in my notebook, my initial reflection brainstorming revealed to me the following categories of “Things I Loved” about War and Peace:

• the knowledge of the human condition in Tolstoy’s characterization
• the redemptive power of love
• the sense of inevitability in plot
• the novel’s sense of truth, embedded in all of the above 

Because I would recommend War and Peace to you, LeBron, as well as to anyone else you see fit to share our blog with, I have to leave out a bunch of things in the interest of triggering the Spoiler Alert signals readers have planted up and down the East Coast of the United States. I’m also taking these suckers out of order, because you know what a fool I am for love and redemption.

The Redemptive Power of Love

We get to grow up with our main characters Pierre, Andrei, Nikolai and Natasha, and we get to see all the mistakes they make on their journeys through teens or twenties into adulthood.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I would become impatient with characters as they made mistakes, but without those errors of judgment or temperament, there is no need for, or possibility of, redemption.

Pierre evolves from the clueless trust fund baby, deprived of everything but money, into a man with profound understanding and insight into himself and others.  His journey follows the path to enlightenment through deprivation most notably trod by the Buddha and Jesus.  As a seeker, he finds temporary answers in Masonry, but sees the possibility for purity polluted by human corruption, by lip service to ideals that is trumped by the demands of the flesh in men whose words are strength and actions weakness. He ultimately arrives at his own truth about love and virtue, and that truth is manifest in his actions. 

For this quote, my margin notes say "the nature of human freedom?  why the quest for freedom matters:"

“He (Pierre) now often recalled his conversation with Prince Andrei and fully agreed with him, only he understood Prince Andrei’s thought slightly differently.  Prince Andrei had thought and said that happiness can only be negative, but had said it with a shade of bitterness and irony. It was as if, in saying it, he was voicing another thought – that all striving for positive happiness had been put into us solely in order to torment us without giving satisfaction.  But Pierre acknowledged the correctness of it without any second thoughts. The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one’s needs, and the resulting freedom to choose one’s occupation, that is, one’s way of life, now seemed to Pierre the highest and most unquestionable human happiness.  Here, only now (while Pierre is marching as a French prisoner), did Pierre fully appreciate for the first time the enjoyment of food when he wanted to eat, of drink when he wanted to drink, of sleep when he wanted to sleep, of warmth when he was cold, of talking to someone when he wanted to talk and to hear a human voice.  the satisfaction of his needs – for good food, cleanliness, freedom – now that he was deprived of them all, seemed perfect happiness to Pierre, and the choice of an occupation, that is, of a life, now, when that choice was so limited, seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a superfluity of life’s comforts destroys all the happiness of the satisfaction of one’s needs, and that a greater freedom to choose one’s occupation, the freedom which in this life was granted him by education, wealth, social position – precisely that freedom made the choice of an occupation insolubly difficulty and destroyed the very need and possibility of an occupation.

All Pierre’s dreams were now turned to the time when he would be free.  And yet afterwards and for the whole of his life Pierre thought and spoke with rapture of that months of captivity, of those irrevocable, strong, and joyful sensations, and above all of that full peace of mind, that perfect inner freedom, which he experienced only in that time.  (1013)

Andrei goes through a number of evolutions in the novel, and where Pierre is the embodiment of the journey motif, Andrei is the model for “death and rebirth.” There are too many spoiler alerts involved in a discussion of Prince Andrei, but suffice to say, he begins the novel beneath the armor of being his father’s son, respectful and obedient to his taciturn, critical father, but the reader senses an unspoken yearning in him to break free of that coldness.  After Austerlitz, he finds something resembling universal love after he is wounded in battle and has a face-to-face encounter with the man who is, in the abstract, his hero, but who turns out to be, in the flesh, a weak and vainglorious man.  After he is struck by the thunderbolt of true love, he becomes aware of the reality of personal love, of the kind of love within arm’s length.  However, the need for him to take his own journey causes a crisis that needs to be resolved one way or another before the battle of Borodino takes its ultimate toll on its survivors.

Here is the turning point in Andrei's view of the purpose of life, revealed to him on p. 813:

“After the suffering he had endured, Prince Andrei felt a bliss such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life, especially his most distant childhood, when he had been undressed and put in his little bed, when the nanny had sung to lull him to sleep, when, burying his head in the pillows, he had felt happy in the mere consciousness of life, presented itself to his imagination not as the past, but as a reality.

The doctors were bustling about a wounded man, the shape of whose head seemed familiar to Prince Andrei; they were lifting him and calming him.

“Show me…Oooh! oh! oooh!  his moaning, broken by sobs, was heard, frightened and resigned to his suffering.  Hearing those moans, Prince Andrei wanted to weep.  Whether it was because he was dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life, of from those memories of long-lost childhood, or because he was suffering, others were suffering, and this man was moaning so pitifully before him, he wanted to weep childlike, kind, almost joyful tears.

The wounded man was shown his cut-off leg in a boot caked with blood!

“Oh! Oooh!” he sobbed like a woman.  The doctor, who was standing in front of the wounded man, screening his face, stepped away.

“My God!  What is this?  Why is he here?” Prince Andrei said to himself.

In the unfortunate, sobbing, exhausted man whose leg had just been removed, he recognized Anatole Kuragin (the man who maliciously corrupted his fiancé while Andrei was in Europe and caused the dissolution of their relationship, which lead to a suicide attempt by Natasha). They were holding him up in their arms and offering him water in a glass, the rim of which he could not catch in his trembling, swollen lips.  Anatole was sobbing deeply. “Yes, it’s he; yes, this man is closely and painfully connected with me by something,” thought Prince Andrei, not yet understanding clearly what he saw before him.  “What is this man’s connection with my childhood, with my life?” he asked himself, without finding an answer.  And suddenly a new and unexpected memory from the world of childhood, purity, and love came to Prince Andrei.  He remembered Natasha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and arms, with her frightened, happy face ready for rapture, and in his soul love and tenderness for her awakened, stronger and more alive than ever.  He now remembered the connection between him and this man, who was looking at him dully through the tears that filled his swollen eyes.  Prince Andrei remembered everything, and a rapturous pity and love for this man filled his happy heart.

Prince Andrei could no longer restrain himself, and he wept tender, loving tears over people, over himself, and over their and his own errors.

“Compassion, love for our brothers, for those who love us, love for those who hate us, love for our enemies – yes, that love which God preached on earth, which Princess Marya taught me, and which I didn’t understand; that’s why I was sorry about life, that’s what was still left for me, if I was to live.  But now it’s too late.  I know it!”  (813-814)

And here is Andrei’s ultimate realization about love, from p. 921:

“Yes, love” (he thought again with perfect clarity), “but not the love that loves for something, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love I experienced for the first time when, as I lay dying, I saw my enemy   I experienced the feeling of love, which is the very essence of the soul and which needs no object.  Now, too, I am experiencing that blissful feeling. To love my neighbors, to love my enemies.  To love everything – to love God in all His manifestations.  You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.  That’s why I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What’s become of him?  Is he alive…Loving with a human love, one can pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, nothing can destroy it.  And of all people, I have loved and hated no one so much as her.”  And he vividly pictured Natasha to himself, not as he had pictured her before, with her loveliness alone, which brought him joy; but for the first time he pictured her soul.  And he understood her feeling, her suffering, shame, repentance. For the first time now he understood all the cruelty of his refusal, saw the cruelty of his break with her.  “If it were possible to see her just one more time.  One time, looking into those eyes, to say…”

For Nikolai, resolutions regarding what love is and what he thinks of love are harder to come by.  He begins the story by promising himself to Sonya in a moment of blissful infatuation at a time when the two characters are analogous to a boy going off to college and a girl getting ready to take the SATs, and Nikolai considers himself bound to that promise through two wars, usually against his will.  As he goes through his early twenties, he takes up the manly pursuits of drinking with his comrades in the hussars and hunting with his relatives (actually, that only happens once, but his expertise on the horse during the hunt suggests that he has plenty of experience off the page).  Rostov’s true loves shift from adolescent interests to guy interests, but the love he finally finds for Marya Bolkonsky is the kind of divine love Tolstoy describes, the kind of passion+compassion equation Dostoevsky describes in The Idiot.  By the end of the story, it’s safe to say that Nikolai is a man, but still a work in progress.

And Natasha, poor Natasha.  She begins the novel as a schoolgirl in 1805, in love with love, extracting a promise from Boris for no other reason than that Sonya had just extracted a promise from Nikolai.  When the men are off at war, Natasha thrives in her schooling, particularly her singing, but her flights of fancy for love return just as the men return from war.  Nonetheless, her idyllic world is shattered by a series of tragedies, and it takes her a while to find the strength buried within her to help her deal with adversity.  She suffers as dramatically as she feels, and it’s hard to remember that she is still in her very early twenties by the time the story ends.  To tell too much of her story is to cause a Spoiler Alert of tsunami proportions, so I’ll keep the plot details to myself for now.

Each of these characters finds redemption only through love, and it is notable that the characters who do not allow love into their hearts are the ones who are either one-dimensional or the ones whose lives end sadly. But you really should read the book, LeBron; it’s long, but it’s not at all difficult.

Let’s leave off here for now, and take on the other topics later if fate allows.