A Poetry Pet Peeve

What             are              poems

                        written       like         this

                trying 

                                                                      to

                                                             prove?  

Can someone please explain it to me?

First Line Friday

Alas, let us examine yet another first line today.  And at the risk of being too Hemingway-centric, I have been turning this first line over and over in my mind lately.  It's typical Hemingway; brief, clean, and concise.  As such, it's also (in my mind) very effective.

"He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees."

This sentence introduces the reader to Robert Jordan who is lying on the ground surveying a bridge (which he plans to blow up) during the Spanish Civil War.

To me, Hemingway is a lot like watching Paul Pierce of the Boston Celtics, by which I mean that Pierce is not especially strong, fast, or explosive.  Rather, he appears to be an everyday shmuck. Yet he is extremely effective on the basketball court, and I have yet to figure out why.

Similarly, Hemingway is not especially verbose, grandiose, intricate, or complicated.  His writing is all rather clean.  Yet he is extremely effective when it comes to conveying a mood or a feeling, and I have yet to figure out why.

Thoughts?

From the Pen of Ray Bradbury

I’m not going to review Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine,  because we’re in negotiations with that book for a very special episode of Literary Death Match (imagine a Mixed Tag-Team Throwdown between classic Coming-of-Age Novels), but I did want to share some of my highlights from the book.

The dialogue is a little hackneyed- with life-changing epiphanies breeding like rabbits at every turn- but Bradbury’s narrative descriptions will make you positively ache  with nostalgia for another, simpler time. (See this post from earlier in the week for one example.) Here are some other passages that made me sit up and drink them in twice. All emphasis is my own:

He unscrewed the top of the jar and tilted the fireflies in a pale shower of sparks down the windless night. They found their wings and flew away.

An aunt had arrived and her name was Rose and you could hear her voice clarion clear above the others, and you could imagine her warm and huge as a hothouse rose, exactly like her name, filling any room she sat in.

The eye sped over a snow field where lay fricassees, salmagundis, gumbos, freshly invented succotashes, chowders, ragouts. The only sound was a primeval bubbling from the kitchen and the clocklike chiming of fork-on-plate announcing the seconds instead of hours.

Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, or to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search for their animal souls. Her grey eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewing of pepper and sage…

And then there’s the haunting image of Colonel Freeleigh dialing a stranger in Mexico City to spend the final minutes of his life listening to the sounds of a far away world:

“Listen,” whispered the old man to himself.

And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing “La Marimba” –oh, a lovely, dancing tune. 

With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot.

He wanted to say, “You’re still there, aren’t you? All of you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional par ahoy!  to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can’t believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with its distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And so it is good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living…”

He sat there with the receiver tightly pressed to his ear.

And at last, the clearest, most improbable sound of all- the sound of a green trolley car going around a corner a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire…

Post script: I actually wrote this post Tuesday night, scheduled it for this morning and, sometime in the intervening hours, Ray Bradbury passed away. His death is obviously a great loss for the literary world. If you've got some free time, there are worse ways to spend it than listening to him tell his own story in this video.

2666: A nagging question and a satisfying answer

As of this posting, our friend Tucker should be right in the thick of Book 4 of Roberto Bolaño’s gigantic doorstop of a classic, 2666.  Getting to that point in the novel is kind of like reaching mile 20 in a very grueling marathon. It’s hard, it hurts, and you’re wondering why you ever started the race in the first place. (At least that’s how this  marathon-virgin imagines mile 20 of a marathon to be…)

Book 4 is titled “The Part About the Crimes” and comes in at around 350 pages in the hardcover edition. That’s not what makes it unusual, though. What makes it unusual is that Book 4 is essentially a 350 page catalogue of a series of violent murders that take place in Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s fictional stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Read about the real-life inspiration here.)

The reader basically gets a full forensic report on each of the victims, all of them young women, including where they were found, how they were found, what they were wearing, how they were killed, and on and on and on. After the first few cases are explained in detail, one gets the impression this is just Bolaño being Bolaño. He’s using an abundance of random detail to build a picture that’s almost too real to be fiction- just as he does earlier in 2666,  when he plunges headlong into page after descriptive page detailing the random dreams of his characters- dreams that seem to have no bearing on the story at hand, but which give the story a stamp of lifelike authenticity.

But when you get through a hundred pages of detailed murder descriptions, with no apparent signs of the author’s letting up, you can’t help but think there’s something else going on here. And by the time two hundred pages have rolled by, you’re convinced that he’s gone off the deep end- he’s no longer playing “fun with random details-”  he’s cataloguing the endless stream of murders out of some sordid, neurotic necessity. It’s an obsession almost.

So, why does he do it?

I don’t have any idea. At least I didn’t when I first read it. But while researching an old highschool classmate-turned-poet, I stumbled across a very interesting theory that he puts forward here (see the last paragraph.) Here it is in a nutshell:

1. There’s reason to believe that Bolaño sowed some wild oats in the northwest Mexico of his 1970s youth.
2. It’s not inconceivable that he had an illegitimate child or two the exact same age as the victims in 2666  (or the real-life victims in Ciudad Juarez.)
3. If Bolaño believed he might have had a daughter among the dead, then “The Part About the Crimes” could be his desperate search to find, name, connect with and honor her.

Still not sold? I'll admit it could be a stretch, but consider this: Bolaño dedicated 2666  to his daughters.

Mind blown, right?

The clatter of rotating metal through sweet summer grass

“Feeling the smile and wondering why it was there, he awoke. He lay quietly listening, and the smile was explained.

“For he heard a sound which was far more important than birds or the rustle of new leaves. Once a year he woke this way and lay waiting for the sound which meant that summer had officially begun. And it began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass. Clover blossoms, the few unharvested dandelion fires, ants, sticks, pebbles, remnants of last year’s July Fourth squibs and punks, but predominantly clear green, a fount leaped up from the chattering mower. A cool soft fount; Grandfather imagined it tickling his legs, spraying his warm face, filling his nostrils with the timeless scent of a new season begun, with the promise that, yes, we’ll all live another twelve months.”

-Ray Bradbury, in Dandelion Wine

My family’s push reel lawn mower didn’t make it into the 21^st century, but I’m pretty sure I was still pushing that thing in the ‘90s. (That would explain the embarrassing plenitude of ‘character’ I still hold in reserve, while all my friends have to show for their landscaping efforts are the sad, spent fumes of the very self-propelled, gas-powered engines that stripped them of their manhood.) 

Still, no matter how you do it, nothing says summer like the smell of freshly cut grass.

The Writer's Voice: Walt Whitman

Here’s one for all the linguists out there.

I don’t know why I was so struck to hear the audio recording of Walt Whitman below. I guess since the man’s been dead for a hundred and twenty years, I was stunned to discover that such a recording even existed. But what really amazes me is his accent- or his near lack of one by today’s standards.

Outside of a couple non-rhotic ‘r’s on “or” and “earth-” and a short ‘a’ pronunciation that sounds like more like a short ‘e,’ the man sounds more like me than, say, FDR or Kathryn Hepburn, two more recent figures from his mid-Atlantic neck of the woods.

And old Walt’s got a voice for tv or radio, don’t you think? This recitation could pass for voiceover work for the US Office for Travel and Tourism.  I’ll post the text of the poem below:

America

By Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Summertime: no pants required

"You like me, you really like me!"

Alright, so, in my defense of Catcher in the Rye  (here) I took the position that you don’t have to like the main character in order to love the book they star in. But after reading some other great books whose characters I ended up hating (see my take on Stegner’s Angle of Repose,  here, or Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,  at the tail end of this post) I may be ready to walk that back a little bit.

Maybe I love Catcher in the Rye  not just for its literary chops, but also because I have a soft spot for Holden, and because I relate to his sense of humor. I loved Angle of Repose  as a work of literature, but hated the grandmother with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. Okay, that’s too strong- but it does  aptly describe how I felt about just about every character in Wuthering Heights. Now those  characters were so unlikeable that the whole book was doomed for me.

On the other hand, you look at a book like A Bell for Adano, which I reviewed here, and a novel that might have scored an 8 or 9 out of 10, felt to me like an 11, simply because of the main character, Major Joppollo- the man was just downright likeable, and did everything right, against all kinds of odds. I also just re-read To Kill A Mockingbird,  and good grief, Atticus Finch was twice as good as I remembered him- twice the man I’ll ever be. That’s a book filled with great characters, and I’d rank it in my Top 5 all-time reads for that reason.

So where do you come down on likeable characters? Do you need them? Is a book doomed without them? Are they just ‘nice to have,’ but not really necessary? Tell us in the comments.

First Line Friday!

Today we turn to that classic of classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But we’ll tackle it with a slight twist.

You see, I’d like my kids to read great books just as soon as they are able- maybe even a little before that. That’s why I find it hard to pass by the dollar section at Target anytime they’ve got Dalmatian Publishing Group’s Junior Classics available for a buck.

I picked up their version of Huck Finn, and thought I’d do a quick side-by-side comparison, just for giggles. Here’s what they say about their simplified abridgement:

This Junior Classic edition of Huckleberry Finn has been carefully condensed and adapted from the original version (which you really must read when you’re ready for every detail). We kept the well-known phrases for you. We kept Mark Twain’s style. And we kept the important imagery and heart of the tale.

Well, let’s put them to the test. Below are the NOTICE, EXPLANATORY and first line of Twain’s original:

NOTICE

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, 

Per G. G., Chief of Ordinance. 

EXPLANATORY

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect;  the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR

 “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that aint no matter.”

And now, DPG’s version:

NOTICE

This tale has no reason,  

No lesson can be found. 

If you want a moral,

Quick! Put this story down!

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

  EXPLANATORY

~missing~

 “Unless you’ve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which I hope you have), you don’t know me.”

I don’t know. If you ask me, the second you strip Huck Finn of its dialects, you strip it of its very soul. Am I wrong?

Review: Blue Nights, by Joan Didion

This is another book I picked up in delayed response to New York Publishing’s relentless buzz machine. I’d heard enough about it over the past year or so to want to give it a shot. It’s a companion volume to Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking,  a memoir about the loss of her husband, but this one tackles her response to the death of the couple’s only child.

It’s an honest, probing memoir that makes no apologies for illegal alien housekeepers, Manhattan apartments big enough for 13 telephones or for the life of unbound privilege she and her husband gave to their adopted daughter (though she would quibble with you about the definition of ‘privilege.’) But there is also an undertone of lamentation and self-searching as she wonders whether her many choices as a mother constituted raising her daughter more like a doll than a little girl.

It’s not really our practice to comment on the parenting skills of an author, so I’ll tackle her prose instead. I’d never read Didion before (fiction or  non-fiction) and I have to say that the writing is quite beautiful. Didion undoubtedly has a wonderful way with words, but she has a tendency to repeat words and lists and phrases for rhetorical effect:

“Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?”

“Her depths and shallows, her quicksilver changes. Of course they were not allowed to remain just that, depths, shallows, quicksilver changes…”

Unfortunately, after the first couple examples, the only rhetorical effect it had on me was to make me groan in frustration. By the end of the book I was almost ready to throw things across the room. I came away thinking she needs to have a little more faith in her readers to follow along, draw the proper conclusions and link the related thoughts. 

As it is, I felt like I was being spoonfed each line, like I was being talked down to, and like she was putting on a writing clinic I really wasn’t interested in. Didion’s got some interesting things to say- I just wish she would say them and move on.

Anyway, that’s it. Admittedly short thoughts, but then it’s a pretty short book. I would definitely check out her other work, but I wasn’t exactly jazzed about this book. Anyone else read it?