Climbing thru Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, (MD) and have been for roughly the last month. It’s been interrupted by a number of other texts, including The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell, and the incandescent Consolation of Boëthius, and if I don’t get a move on, there will be other seasonal reads (esp. Tripmaster Monkey) to divert it.

At the end of July, I finished Vineland (VL) for what apparently was the first time. I had bought it breathlessly in 1990, right when it first came out, but I now realize I couldn’t possibly have gotten beyond the first thirty or so pages. Someone I thought was the main protagonist essentially vanishes abt that far into the book, not to return until almost the very end.

VL is generally pretty good, if a bit “lite” – it reads at times as if Tom Robbins were half-heartedly trying his hand at a Pynchon impersonation.

I am finding MD a far more mature and measured work even than GR. He can veer from Restoration satire (people bustling in and out of rooms, breathless maids with ripp’d bodices (bodices, in fact, designed to rip open and snap back closed again) thwarted lovers exiting precipitously thru windows) to trenchant observations on the corrosive effects of slavery on culture, often within the same paragraph.

It is written in the diction, grammar, phrasing, and spelling of an 18th century text, but also includes such bemusing phantasms as a talking dog, and wry anachonisms as the first anchovy pizza in England, as well as a 2 or 3 page discussion of “modern” music, ending with this great punchline (you will see, of course, the dazzling bait-and-switch):

“…Much of your Faith seems invested in this novel Musick–"
”Where better?" asks young Ethelmer confidently. “Is it not the very Rhythm of the Engines, the Clamor of the Mills, the Rock of the Oceans, the Roll of the Drums in the Night, why if one wish’d to give it a Name,–”
“Surf Music!" DePugh cries.

After we read about Mason & Dixon observing the 1761 Transit of Venus from the Dutch colonies of South Africa (during which a comically tragic portrait of racism and slavery is drawn with deft and bitter strokes), the two then depart for America to demarcate the disputed property line between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

This, their arrival in America, where everything is for sale, and people stay up all night in coffeeshops; here, in the seething, sprawling metropolis of Philadelphia (then second only to London among English-speaking cities of the earth), is where the satire and fantasy really kicks in. We meet, for example, the irrepressible Dr Franklin, always wearing sunglasses of differing hues, playing his Armonica in nightclubs, and rousing the latenight crowd out into lightning storms.

I am in the midst of a section wherein the two surveyors, standing in various farmers' back gardens, are attempting, with little success, to explain the mathematical and political causes of this geometric nightmare. It’s not just Pynchon’s own tangential writing that obscures the greedy human motives behind such tortured lines.

Okay, one more passage:

Every day the room [of the Coffeeshop], for hours together, sways on the verge of riot. May unchecked consumption of all these modern substances at the same time, a habit without historical precedent, upon these shores be creating a new sort of European? less respectful of the forms that have previously held Society together, more apt to speak his mind, or hers, upon any topic he chooses, and to defend his position as need be? Two youths of the Macaronic profession are indeed greatly preoccupied upon the boards of the floor, in seeking to kick and pummel, each into the other, some Enlightenment regarding the Topick of Virtual Representation. An individual in expensive attire, impersonating a gentleman, stands upon a table freely urging sodomical offenses against the body of the Sovereign, being cheered on by a circle of Mechanics, who are not reluctant with their own suggestions. Wenches emerge from the scullery dimnesses to seat themselves at the tables of disputants, and in brogues as thick as oatmeal recite their own lists of British sins.

773 delicious pages of this.

Will Ferrell recalls the first time he realized his destiny in life. “I remember in elementary school when I first learned to run into a door, kick up at the bottom and snap my head back,” he says. “I don’t know where I learned it, but I would get huge laughs from the other kids.” (2019 note: the link is long dead)

My mother sent me the link to this profile because it reminded her of my early propensity for exactly that trick, which works best with rattly screen doors. I developed a whole set of things like this, including Dick Van Dyke’s tumble over the ottoman. But the classic, the prototype, was of course the Pie Gag. I would gather up all my stuffed animals and assorted toys, hold them in my arms, stand at the top of the stairs, and call out, “Ten, banana, cream, pies!” Then I would throw myself down the stairs, amid a great clatter and crash. I was five or six. It was inspired by a skit on Electric Company (Sesame Street’s psychedelic younger sibling) in which a baker stands at the top of a grand staircase, balancing two very large platters on each arm, stacked with pies. He falls down, and tumbles to the bottom, pie filling everywhere, his baker’s hat deflated and askew. I never got tired of it.

My grade-school friend, Mike, when we were in maybe fifth grade, said to me that at the first opportunity, he was going to vote me “Most Likely To Grow Up To Be A Stunt Man.” But it wasn’t about the stunt; I was always after the laugh. And it was a good lesson for a kid to learn: you have to be okay with people thinking you really did just walk into that door.

Broadly speaking, there are two sorts of comedy. The first is the father of satire, parody, and the roast; it is the “comedy of resistance.” It deflates the pompous, skewers the vain. It is “The Aristocrats;” Abbie Hoffman levitating the Pentagon; Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford; Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It can be dark, because to raze another, you may be tempted to stand triumphantly over them, and to raise yourself. It is the comedy of the smirk against the smug.

The other comedy is mother of clowns, grandmother to the Absurd and surreal. The world is so sad, so unjust, so carelessly maleficent, that we have no recourse but to laugh, or die. It is collaborative humor, comedy of the improv, where you must cooperate. “Agree and add.” We’re all in this together: we must roll with whatever meanness or misfortune might come our way, and we have to make it as hospitable as possible for the next improv actor who will join us onstage. You must be generous with the punchline, and willing to play someone else’s straight man. The comedian who always has to be out front will soon find that Dame Fortune has stripped him of his gifts, and brought him low.

I don’t pretend to hide my allegiance. I may have developed some skill in the first sort, but I find it sometimes cheap, and often too easy. People always laugh when someone slips on a banana peel, but I’ll never be the one to plant a peel in someone’s path.

I serve the joke. If you are also impressed that I didn’t break my neck when I fell over the ottoman, that’s nothing to do with me. Humility is the only important lesson – otherwise, why would the whole cosmos be constantly teaching it?

I don’t know if I can stand the wait. (See this, and this as well.)

So much for the pattern; up until M&D, his books alternated between encyclopedic, historical sprawls and shorter, “contemporary” things focussing on NoCal. But the newest thing, said to be called Against the Day, is nearly a cool grand (992 pp), and judging by what few descriptions there are (including Pynchon’s own blurb), it is every bit as vast as the Big Three.

Speaking of vast, I’m taking another breather from Proust – only 1700 pages into it, and already it has formed a strong seasonal bond with long winter nights. My reading & rereading habits are often seasonal. Summer inspires me to reread Thoreau and the Odyssey (trnsl. Fitzgerald), and now I’ve been sucked into Crime & Punishment for the first time since 1989. Riveting! But all that, and the others stacked up around me, may have to wait while I dive into Mason & Dixon: it’s the only one I haven’t yet read, even once. I despair: I’m in the middle of about thirty books right now. Faster Pussycat: Read, read!

Based on the actuarial tables, I only have maybe 35 or 40 more years. Assume two books a month; that’s still only just under 1000 books. And what about rereads, which is essential for any good book? (e.g. either read Walden ten times or not at all.) Do they count toward the total? This is a terrible line of thought. If no more new books came out ever again, there are still well over 5000 books I NEED to read. Not to mention the ones I need to write. Who has time for work, let alone eating or sleeping? And dammit: we have Season 2 of Sports Night in the house – that’s time away from reading, too! Can I have some clones, please, like in Calvin & Hobbes?

I finished V.

It is the 20th century in microcosm. People are on obsessive quests for something they don’t understand, and which may be nonexistent; who believe their personal meaning-making can somehow illuminate the wider, meaningless universe – indeed, that simply because they make a connection between two things, they come to think that the connection exists empirically. The Authorities (governments, churches, corporations, aka “Them”) who are obsessed with the clean, the polar, the binary, the unhuman: plastics, robotics; who praise the individual, then crush it. And how delightful to reflect that nothing much has changed since 1204, except They have gotten even more powerful, by making us all think that we have. A great trick right out of Lao-tzu’s playbook: fill their bellies and empty their heads. We are all fated to die, masked and anonymous, pinned beneath the rubble in the basement of some unknown Mediterranean city, as the feral children strip us of our jewels. So remember, in only a few billion years, none of this will matter. In the meantime: go to church, buy your polyester and medications, and vote against your own interests.

Back to Proust with a vengeance; with Boëthius' Consolation, Henrick’s Te Tao Ching and the Tractatus for light distractions.

And still it rains.

So, I finished GR last night. So much more beautiful and obscene than I could possibly have fathomed as a callow teenager. And I have glimpsed more finely now the roots for so many of the esthetic choices in my life. “Keep cool, but care.”

The Shakedown is now between V. and resuming Sodom & Gomorrah a dozen or so pages on from where I left off. My mind is still reeling from GR, and there are more than a few overlapping characters and elements, so I may just have to dig in. My copy of V. is a disintegrating Perennial edition from 1986. It’s already lost the half-title page. The binding glue has calcified and is dropping off in little white flecks. I have paperbacks from the 1950s that are in better shape. Shameful. But I’ll make due.

Research for my prose pieces continues, and consumes most of my so-called free time. The minute I don’t want to learn anything new, someone shoot me. (As my neighbor said, tipsy from his second brandy alexander, if you stop moving, you’re dead.) Volcanoes; the Fisher King; the West India Company; the I Ching; the river IJssel; film terms and the history of cinema; the Iliad; medieval satires. Put it all in a pot, along with the medieval and modern ideas of evil (which are, delightfully, almost complete opposites), and you have something rather fun. And I’m reading Ruskin and Boëthius, too.

GR is still going strong: Slothrop is about to ditch his pig suit, so Marvy’s castration and the bombing of Hiroshima are only hours away; it is so much richer than I ever appreciated when last I read it, in the late 80s. Amazing what a difference of 19 years can make. The collective cultural deathwish; dehumanization thru the industrialization of everything; apocalyptic obsession with polarities: themes that have only gotten more terrifyingly relevant since August 6th, 1945.

Only thru gentleness, thru staying on the edges, thru pledging allegiance to softness, diversity, complexity, can we even begin to hope to find some unmarked exit out of this nightmare.

I remain hopeful only because (as Tolkien points out) despair assumes a foreknowledge that is by definition impossible, and is therefore as hubristic as that of the masters of war, who cling to deathlike certainties as fearfully as do the pacifist nihilists…

Time isn’t a line, or even a thing (tho saying can make it seem so); history cannot come to an end (tho histories can); ideas can (and indeed must) be forgotten, and the mountains and rivers persist; the cosmos (or what you will) is fleeting: it flows, and moves on, and we can scarcely step into it even once.

Gilbert Sorrentino has died. As of 9:30 am EDT, however, I can only find the Wikipedia article as corroboration of this posting.

The theologian Jaroslav Pelikan has also died. Obits here and here. I first encountered him while I was a student living in Aberdeen. I attended as many of his Gifford lectures as I could in the spring of 1992. The lectures I attended focussed on the Cappadocian fathers, Basil and the Gregs (good name for a band, no? playing the Divinity circuit).

Oh, and I read the Da Vinci Code last Sunday afternoon. The whole thing. Is this what all those mass market paperbacks you can buy in grocery stores and airports are like? It was only slightly more entertaining than an episode of E! True Hollywood Story, slightly less intellectually strenuous than watching someone get a haircut, and staggeringly inept in its history. I found it plainly, baldly, distressingly bad on so many levels. It was, as one of my coworkers likes to say, “craptastic.” So this reviewer’s take on the Da Vinci movie does not surprise me: “In the cinema, such matters are best left to Monty Python.”

So. The Proust has stalled. This is okay with me; I need time to digest all that has happened. I reached the end of Vol 3 at the end of January, and decided to take a few weeks off. I read Moby-Dick for what I think was the fifth time; then I finished The Master and Margarita, which had been an xmas present; then I drowsed thru Don Quixote; I put that down midway through while upstate last month, where I bought and read the incandescent Ginger Man by JP Donleavy. After finishing that, I gulped down Eco’s newest book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. There is, here, an online annotation project for all its millions of allusions and references. I learned of the Loana project from The Modern Word… where I couldn’t help but notice the Thomas Pynchon pages.

Now, people who’ve known me long enough may know of my teen obsession with Pynchon. It was, in fact, twenty years and one month ago that I bought Gravity’s Rainbow. 12 April 1986. I read it two times in succession, and one more time in college. I attempted it again without success some time in the late 90s, and then one more time in the summer of 2000. I couldn’t take it. Giggling fratboy jokes, I thought, and backshelved all my Pynchon.

But something happened as I clicked around the Pynchon page, and felt myself getting all wispy and nostalgic. Three weeks ago, I bought a new copy of The Crying of Lot 49 (the old one, like my copy of V., had long since disintegrated (strangely appropriate for an author so preoccupied with paranoia and entropy)) and dove in. And I loved it. It was actually human. And exuberant. The comedy was a welcome antidote to the lugubrious earnestness of modern “mainstream” fiction, a genre I had vowed I would never commit myself to again. So I pulled GR out, and started. Why not? What’s the worst that will happen? I’ll still find it too reminiscent of my hypereducated adolesencce, or it will make me vomit, and that will be that.

But that wasn’t that. Two weeks later, I’m on page 365. It’s a lark. By turns slapstick, philosophical, vivid, vague…

I am reclaiming old parts of myself. All this spring, as I relearn who I am, in light of deeply saddening revelations, I have been going back to the poetry, music, and prose of my youth and finding that little of it deserves the backshelved neglect it’s received. When did I decide I wasn’t allowed to like what I like?

I am a surrealist. The world is so irredeemably sick and tragic, and the surest way to wither to Bartlebian nothingness is to take it seriously. Instead, we must be like Charles Halloway and draw a smile on the wax bullet, to kill the October Queen. We mustn’t cry because of the world, but laugh in spite of it.

Laughter is a rebellious act. If the world is straight, we must bend it with comedy, which is, of course, the most serious way to face the world.

So I reclaim comedy, the absurd, the impossible, the hopeless. After all: it’s funny!

The trip to Florida was good, calm. We saw dolphins. We watched the Oscars. We developed an unhealthy taste for Sudoku. We returned and hit the ground running. The last two weeks have been an achronic blur. What month is this?

We also finally admitted the obvious, and bought the DVD set of Wonderfalls. Last weekend, a good friend came over to help my wife with the dance piece she’ll be showing next month, and we listened to a lot of Beatles. She stayed over and on Sunday, the three of us watched the entire Wonderfalls series.

Since then, I’ve gone back and watched the five or six episodes that also have commentary. I’ve got it bad.

Girl needs a boy. Girl needs a donut. Take a picture. Save the lovebirds. Lick the lightswitch. Save him from her. Bring her back. See a penny, pick it up. Get to the church on time. Ask the monkey. Shoelace untied: staple it. Show him who’s special. Let him go. Comfort her.

For most of December, we had a trio of DVDs from Netflix in the house, holding up our queue. The complete Wonderfalls, a TV show that was cancelled for no reason whatsoever. It resided in a shadowland between Gilmore Girls and West Wing on the one hand, and vintage supernatural shows such as Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie on the other. It also learned valuable lessons from Raising Arizona and Sliding Doors. It was witty, surreal, funny, sappy, deep, flaky, dazzling.

A cynical and world-weary 24 year-old woman named Jaye, with a philosophy degree from Brown, has returned to her native Niagara NY, and now lives in a trailer park and works at a souvenir shop near the Falls. One day, inanimate objects begin talking to her, exhorting her with cryptic requests to do things (“Ask about his wedding ring” “Get her words out”) or to not do things (“Don’t give her money back”). She quickly learns to comply, because the objects nag her mercilessly until she does, or smugly rub her nose in it when she doesn’t (“told you not to give her money back”).

Her family is quirky, and seemingly nothing like her; they’re all driven and successful, she’s stalled and under-employed. Also, all their names rhyme: Darren, Karen, Aaron, Sharon. As the episodes progress (there were thirteen in the season; only four ever aired before the show was axed by the typically imaginative and perceptive TV execs), the animals grow more, well, animated; the storylines weave into richer patterns; the characters and relationships deepen.

I found the show very moving, and I easily identified with this girl who is — by her own admission and in accord with her family’s perceptions — a black sheep wracked by the contradictory motives of apathy and compassion.

Most importantly, of course, is that the brilliant theme song was composed and performed by one of my greatest artistic heroes, Andy Partridge.

Watch the show and you’ll soon enough start imagining what the cow creamer might say to you and how it might change your life.

I finished The Guermantes Way a few days ago, after roughly ten weeks of reading. In Search of Lost Time is divided into seven parts, but because Parts 5 and 6 are fairly short, they are bound together. So in reaching the end of Volume 3, I think of myself as half way through. It is appropriate, therefore, that I take a moment and reflect on the book so far.

The Guermantes Way focused on a series of social encounters over the course of two years or so. The narrator has left behind his childish crush on Gilberte, and his adolescent obsession with Albertine, and now finds himself mesmerized by the Duchesse de Guermantes. He stalks her for many months, and in a double attempt to forget her and ingratiate himself with her family in the hope of being invited into her salon, he visits for several weeks one of his very good friends, Robert Saint-Loup, who is a nephew of the Duchesse.

His ardor for the Duchesse finally cools over the course of the next half year, and only then does he finally get invited to one of her parties. He is approached by the eccentric M. de Charlus, another Guermantes. He is an aloof, pompous, and, frankly, creepy old man. The narrator does not keep an appointment with Charlus because he learns that his grandmother has had a stroke. She dies early in the second part, or about halfway through the volume, but we do not hear much about it. Instead, we see how others react, or don’t react. The Duc de Guermantes stops by during the grandmother’s final hours and is left waiting in the hall because the rest of the family is rushing about, calling for servants to bring boiling water, or fresh towels, or more medications. The Duc, oblivious of the crisis, and perplexed that there could possibly be anything more important than a visit from a Guermantes, is extremely offended and goes away with the impression that the narrator’s mother is a distant and antisocial woman who does not know how to run a good house.

In all, the portraits of high society are deeply unflattering; vain and childish fools hide behind grandiose titles. The Proustian habit, established in the first two volumes, of delving into long, discursive reflections and descriptions of peoples' innermost motivations is often abandoned in Guermantes, in favor of straightforward narrative. It is less introspective and more purely driven by narrative than the previous volumes. Many characters' personalities are laid bare through simple descriptions of their actions and words.

So it was a shock yesterday and today to find that Volume 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, returns to the simultaneously microscopic and macrocosmic reflections on human nature. This volume marks the beginning of what Proust called the “great inversion.” Our perception of many characters, beginning with M. de Charlus, are altered utterly through a series of revelations regarding their hidden motives and relationships.

If the principal themes of Swann’s Way were that of childhood and memory (and the introduction of later themes, such as senseless obsessive love), and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower was that of adolescent puppy love, and The Guermantes Way was the glittering and worthless surfaces of high society, then Sodom and Gomorrah is that of homosexual love. It also begins the reprise of unthinking obsession, first stated relatively mildly in the backstory of Swann, the social-climbing Jew who is passing for a gentile, and Odette, the erstwhile prostitute and courtesan who is clawing her way into society. This time, it is the narrator who finds himself increasingly obsessed and jealous of Albertine, and not Albertine as she is, but Albertine as he imagines her to be, just as Swann has little notion of Odette’s past, and no inclination to find out.

The overall experience of reading Proust is a wrenching one. He is unsparing in his critiques and insights into human behavior; his portrayal of teen love was, for example, pitch-perfect and embarrassingly accurate. I find myself recasting my own life upon reflection. I also find myself recalling events in my own life that had otherwise fallen into oblivion. He describes the sensation of lying awake at night as a child, watching the faint lights seep in through the windows, or around the edges of the door, and I remember my own insomniac anxiety: the gold and glass chandelier over the stairs, the tan carpet, the distant adult voices downstairs.

Reading Guermantes has been, like the previous volumes, a great comfort, but unlike them, a mild torture. Proust’s acuity in portraying the quotidian nature of hypocrisy is devastating. Every relationship in this volume is in one way or another unhealthy, doomed, loveless, mercenary. The Duc, for example, is an incorrigible philanderer, cycling rapidly through gold-digging courtesans, who, when inevitably they are cast off, become confidantes and “ladies-in-waiting” to the spurned Duchesse. The Duc is kind to the Duchesse only when he has discarded a mistress or when he’s beginning to woo a new one. But they are a formidable social team, bound together by deep habit and ancient obligation, and so they entertain together. He serves as the Duchesse’s impresario; her wit is bitter and funny, and he sets up the marks for her to strike down with her sharp tongue.

Another theme relates to the utter divorce between loyalty and reason. The events in the book take place during the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Whether you thought Dreyfus innocent or guilty had almost nothing to do with the facts of the case, which were few and largely indisputable, and had almost everything to do with your social standing, your political sympathies, and, of course, whether you were Jewish or not, and Anti-semitic or not. Just as Swann finds himself blindly obsessed with Odette, despite knowing full well that the tart is a sly, self-serving, faithless whore, and not even remotely his type, so did royalists and conservatives unthinkingly condemn Dreyfus against all reason, and supporters of Dreyfus instinctively dismiss anti-Dreyfusards as worthless and mindless wastes of skin, regardless of their other virtues. It was to French society what the debate over abortion has been for the US in the last several decades.

This is what is so wrenching about Proust: the silly, the callow, the perverted, the vain, the noble, the naïve… they all are me, they all are us.

I may go to a book (poems or prose or fiction) to read new evocations or descriptions of what I already know, believe, feel; or I may go in order to discover new perspectives, previously unkown or unfamiliar ways of thinking, feeling, belief.

But if I am too eager for the one and encounter the other, I probably won’t like the work — it’ll have nothing to do with the quality of the writing or the value of the thinking, the depths of feeling and everything to do with my own expectations, needs, tastes of the moment. I may dismiss the work utterly simply because we are mismatched just then: twenty-four hours earlier or later, and it might have become a seminal and life-changing work.

“This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole.”

The news of John Spencer’s death makes me very sad.

Ever since Bartlet walked out of the Oval, having signed over his presidential powers to the Speaker of the House, I have hardly watched the show because, to quote Sam, “they forgot to bring the funny.”

But for a few years there, that show was deeply important to me, out of all proportion for a television show. It was important to me the way the Daodejing is important to me, or Gravity’s Rainbow. And the role of Leo McGarry was pivotal to its importance. Leo was the basso continuo.

Raise a glass to his memory.

We are hosting our nieces this weekend. They are 12 and 10, so our dinner last night was chicken fingers and french fries; I made a special trip to the corner store for ketchup, since the decree went forth to all corners of the realm that fries would under no circumstances be consumed if not accompanied by lots and lots of ketchup.

I went in to work yesterday to make up some hours, so they went out looking for xmas trees without me. We’ve gotten by for ten years with a two-foot tall munchkin but with our new, grand front windows, we decided it was time to upgrade to something a little bigger – after all, the little thing was more ornament than tree.

They found an artificial, pre-lit tree, set it up, and decorated it as evening fell. I could see the tree shining in the living room window from the lightrail as I came home.

I woke up this morning to the first snowfall. I turned on the tree and brewed some coffee. From my study window, I look out over a small city park. I can see people bundled, walking their dogs, who frisk and caper in the snow. All the trees and powerlines are still accented with thick white lines. The boundary between earth and sky is blurred. The eye, with nothing distinct to rest on, falls upward into the clouds.

In the last week or so, I advanced to Volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time. So far, we have returned to the youthful narrator’s perspective, and we are hearing about his naïve love for Swann’s daughter, Gilberte. We are also gaining more insights into Swann’s obsessive and disastrous affair with Odette, and we understand a little better how they came to be married, despite Swann having arrived at the sobering realization, at the end of Swann in Love, that Odette really just isn’t his type.

And Proust continues to do a very strange thing with the point of view; he regularly slides from his own first-person account of things to an omniscient narrator privy to everyone’s internal motivations and back again. He somehow manages to do this fluidly, without the slightest jolt to the narrative; we simply shift from, say, a dinner party at which the narrator is present, to deep background regarding events from years before the narrator would even have been born.

I experience no jolt because, I think, of the absolute trust he inspires. He could tell me about anything, however dull or otherwise not to my taste, and I’d happily listen for as long as he wished to speak, because he has proven beyond doubt that he can make insightful and profound use of anything at all, including wallpaper, furniture, mediocre Romantic sonatas — and of course madeleines dipped in herbal tea.

By a curious coincidence, my wife spotted a Proust reference in an unlikely spot. As a ramp up to the imminent theatrical release of its sequel, some cable channel has been repeatedly airing an action flick called The Transporter. At one point, a character bakes some madeleines, prompting a revery from the French police chief on the nature of memory and observation, noting that Proust, being a “details man,” would have made a great detective; he adds that in fact it had been his reading of Proust as a youth that inspired him to become an investigator.

She had just told me of this scene when we turned on the TV — and there was the movie, moments away from the very scene in question. And in a typically Proustian way, I experienced the scene twice — but the first one seemed more real, because it had been Ana’s story, and the actual film itself, upon which her version was based, seemed like a mere enactment.

(The silly Python song faded weeks ago, thankfully — except when my wife asks me, “And in the second book: what did Proust write about, write about?")

Mere pages away from the end of Swann’s Way — so close in fact that I don’t know if I should even haul it to work or not; I could finish it on the ride in this morning, and I hate lugging dead books with me. Volume 2 is somewhat larger, so I sure as heck don’t want to drag them both. Ah, the quandaries of a reader.

But more about the book itself:

It is breathtaking. He slows time down for you to draw out, over many pages, the refractions of a single moment. The narrator sees, for example, a girl through the hedge, falls instantly in love, and we then read about how the mind so often latches onto some framing detail, the colors of the leaves and flowers in the hedge, the flash of a beach ball, the sound of some distant wind high in the trees, as the crucial mnemonic detail that will forever stand in for the luminous flashing moment of first love. The mind can only grasp that first moment by approaching as it were obliquely, by way of some indirect and innocuous aspect.

The novel within a novel, Swann in Love, which I just finished, is a study of sexual jealousy, agonizing and embarrassing in its brutal and lacerating accuracy. A trainwreck in dreamlike slow motion. And Odette isn’t even his type.

I have at long last taken the Proust plunge. I began the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation about six years ago, but stalled out. I tried picking it up again this spring, and faltered once again. Then, on a whim a month or so ago, I poked around online trying to tease out what had always struck me as its bewildering history of translations in English. I found that there are essentially only two. The first is the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation. Moncrieff died before finishing, so Kilmartin rounded out Time Regained. Later, D.J. Enright worked his way through M/K, revising it considerably.

And the only other English translation, it turns out, is the one instigated by Penguin a few years ago, where each of the seven volumes has been assigned a different translator. Lydia Davis takes on Swann’s Way, and it is this volume that I bought, and am surging through on the train each day. I cannot speak yet to any qualitative difference between this and the M/K, since I’d rather not get distracted (and, frankly, I don’t remember much from my previous two incomplete passes), but suffice it to say, I have found myself completely enthralled, which is not how I would have described my previous attempts. Thankfully, I ride to the terminus of each of my commuter lines (at least on the way home), so I have not missed my stops.

One unpleasant side effect has been that I’ve been incessantly singing and humming, “Proust in his first book, wrote about, wrote about”… This will pass, I hope, once I move beyond the first book.

I think people follow sensational news stories that escalate into media frenzies at least in part to try to figure out why the stories have been whipped up into frenzies at all. We wait for some news outlet to supply us with something genuinely revelatory, the newsworthy fact that will justify all the live feeds and up-to-the-minute rumor-mongering, correspondents in parkas before the hotel, the impounded car.

Do we hear anything during these updates that sheds profound light on the human condition, or exposes some deep flaw in law enforcement, government, morality, ethics? Anything that makes us strive for something better, improve our relations to each other or ourselves? News that stays news? No. Instead, we get tawdry and callow soap operas, embarrassments of voyeurism. Nothing we haven’t seen or heard a thousand times before. Aerial shots of a white bronco passing slowly underneath the overpasses of LA. Posters of the pretty girl on telephone poles, her body later found in a trash bag at the base of the canyon.

To whom — besides the stubbornly naïve — is the news ever in any way surprising? Are there still hermits and anchorites so insulated that they are startled to learn that powerful boys of privilege will think themselves above the law? Every generation has its Raskolnikov, probably every family does. Who is still alarmed and surprised by human behavior? Are we not all human here? Don’t we all have vile thoughts that we struggle with? Do we not all find ourselves humiliated at one moment and smugly triumphant at another? I am all sorts, and so are you. The only surprise for me comes when I do not identify with something glorious or grotesque, and it is a rare surprise indeed. My mind is capable of imagining all sorts of horrors. I commit none of them, but I do not underestimate other members of my species to take that step. Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.

There is indeed an appeal for a poetry in which the author is “a connoisseur of yourself” because the vast undifferentiated mass of humanity drifts through life, somnolent, watching Fox news, always surprised, baffled, alarmed, terrified. Every moment. And the calluses build up over their raw, tender parts. Their carapace of fear prevents them from sensing almost everything that comes at them, and indeed pretty much everything within themselves. Mute and distant shocks, like a submarine striking a manatee. Those few among us who can say with Socrates, “I know nothing,” startle and amaze the rest of us. You have robbed me. God, I am naked. What shall I do?

So a poetry that offers such otherwise banal insights into the same self we have entombed within ourselves, like Paul D’s little tin box — this poetry can sell, and can actually seep into the groundwater of these polluted little ghetto-selves that would otherwise watch with rheumy eyes the clock ticking down to their unremarkable deaths. These are facile shocks, but useful to the anesthetized masses to simulate wakefulness.

But we want from poetry something truly startling, and not merely predictably shocking, not the shocks we can get used to; we can masticate with our rotted gums almost any pap dished out to us. Shock is easy, and mass-producible. We can commodify horrors.

We want from poetry something gently revolutionary, something sincerely strange and unfamiliar. Instead, we get the pretty girls, the fleeing black men, the millionaire sons blasting their sleeping parents with shotguns. We find a strange comfort in these images, we can sing along to the refrains. We can excitedly recite the verses with one another. We can forge a community from such familiar elements. Is that really what we want?

We are pattern seekers and meaning makers: we cannot escape form. Even a depiction of chaos will be, in some fundamental way, formal. Indeed, chaos is simply the unfiltered and the uncategorized. As soon as I call this bit “this,” and that bit “that,” I have performed an act of creation. We cannot choose to be formal; we can only choose how heavily we lean into it. Seeking patterns and making forms is simply our minds in the work of comprehension. Cognition is a winnowing, a series of choices that constrain. But constraints do not limit us, they free us. We sit down to write a poem: where to start, and where to go from there? Instead of all the cosmos, an endless wordhoard to intimidate and overwhelm us, we merely need something that rhymes with “now”, or three more syllables, or only six words.

I have been attracted to the Hay(na)ku form recently because the constraint (three lines of six words: 1-2-3 or 3-2-1) sits so lightly on the composition process. I may have half-formed ideas, or notes, or single words lying around, and no other place to put them. Thinking of five more words to go with these fugitives, or reworking a phrase to bring it down to the count, is a playful and surprisingly friendly way of working. It’s almost like not working at all. And yet, like all miniaturist forms, it is challenging in a way that long, discursive works are not. As Pascal quipped, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”

Some years ago, I heard a music reviewer criticize a band for “not furthering the discussion.” They were, he said, bringing nothing new or interesting to the form or structure of whatever sub-genre of pop they purported to belong to, nor were they engaging coherently with their own history or influences. He said they were simply making the kind of noise you make when you’re a band that wants to be “A Band.” Three chords, guitars, verse-chorus-verse, typical “Hello Cleveland!” crap.

And I remember reading an essay by Hayden Carruth, in which he talked about Paul Goodman’s sonnets, and his innovation of putting the couplet other places than at the end (quatrain, couplet, quatrain, quatrain; or whatever). regardless of what you think of Goodman, or sonnets (or, for that matter, Carruth), and whether you think this constitutes “innovation” on any meaningful scale, at least Goodman was goofing around with the form somehow, furthering the discussion, seeing what spaces he could find within the form.

Someone once said: “a good number of people using them [formal structures such as sonnets, etc] now are using them badly and for the wrong reasons.” Actually, I think the real problem is that too often people are using them for no reason whatsoever, other than that they’ve been led to believe that this is the sort of noise you make when you want to be “A Poet.”

I definitely don’t intend to start up any sort of mudslinging between neoformalists and verslibrists or whoever. I don’t care about any of that. (Though I would add that lots of sophomores make all sorts of noises when they’re trying to be “poets;” the particular noise is usually determined by what hero they’re trying to emulate, be it Jorie Bly, or Seamus Frost, or Gary Ginsberg, or Lew Kerouac, or Octavio Neruda, or Sharon Pinsky, or Kenneth Berrigan, or Jack Ashbery, or Lorine Zukofsky, or William Carlos Laughlin, or E.E. Cunningham, or whoever.)

I bring it up because the idea of “furthering the discussion” has shaped my critical perspectives for most of my adult life.

Furthering the discussion means, first of all, endorsing the idea that the discussion is useful, valuable. Second of all, it means doing what you can as a participant to encourage others to contribute, rather than discouraging them from participating; discussions are by definition collaborative. Thirdly, it means seeing that discussions are additive, and are themselves processes. They are not objects, they are events. Objects are static, closed; events are fluid, ongoing. A discussion cannot be static or closed. A discussion must flow, must move.

This also means that a discussion, to be completely healthy, cannot serve the agenda of any participant; if it does, however implicitly, then it will be unliving: it will be an object, it will be a stone cast by that person (or persons) who controls the message. It will certainly not be collaborative or open-ended. It will, in serving only one goal, serve no real goals. To live, to serve any goals, a discussion must serve no goals other than that no one can know ahead of time what’s going to happen.

If you can’t stand that sort of spooky indeterminacy, you’d better not join in. And you should head back to the nineteenth century, where you’ll be nice and cozy. You can have the past, just leave us our future.

I have been trying for many years to move away from writing out of anger or turmoil, from a place of psychological upheaval and trauma. To compose in this way, you fall into the stereotype of the frenzied writer “exorcising demons,” Mozart in his middle years, music erupting from him in a dirty flow, fueled by fear, dread, howling voices.

I find this sort of composition exhausting over time, both as a composer and as an observer. It is also destructive, leading a person over time to think that art can be generated only through crisis and stress — you could grow numb both to pain and to beauty.

I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that the polls are correct about the neck-and-neck nature of the presidential race. Rather, I think we’re in the grip of the massive collective idea that we are a divided nation, evenly divided, perfectly divided, poised. How elegant, beautiful.

This idea is too overpowering, too alluring, for anyone to imagine anything else, or want to imagine anything else, since nothing could be easier. We can simply say, “we are a divided nation.” This explains anything we want it to explain. It doesn’t matter if we’re actually polarized evenly: we can organize our thoughts and opinions around this. Just like all the other controlling images of our society, nothing you couldn’t outline with an 8-color box of crayons.

What sort of thing usually breaks blinding obsessions? I mean, apart from the whale dragging the Pequod down completely? Because whatever does, we need one now.

Of course, I thought Abu Ghraib was it: an unambiguous sign that we had lost all the global support of September 12th; that we had utterly forgotten how 9/11 was a crime against humanity not just against Americans; that we had embraced the ideology of our enemies and become them; that we were drifting aimlessly in a moral vacuum, casual violence the only vocabulary still retaining any sort of value.

But while I am still reeling in despair from those photos and their nauseating ramifications, no one “out there” seems to remember. The new anchors aren’t weeping with horror and shame each evening from their carpeted soundstages. No one is overturning cars and setting fire to the business districts. No one is marching on Washington and raging incoherently into the correspondents’ cameras. Not, at any rate, any significant proportion of the population. Certainly not exactly half the country.

And I’m not either, so which side am I on, really?

What can all this mean?

One thought is that we secretly believe we deserve it, that we deserve the hatred, the chanting mobs and car bombs, that it’s about time someone scolded us.

Another thought is that we welcome any sign of evil and destruction as evidence for our hard dualism. If we saw no evil in the world, our particular notion of good would cease to exist in any meaningful way. So we let evil persist (not like smallpox in a laboratory fridge, but like disgruntled servants downstairs).

The last thought, the one that stays with me when the abstractions fall away, is that we are simply a glib pack self-absorbed morons who honestly can’t grasp anything more complex than the vague totalitarian rituals of reality television, that our preoccupation with good and evil are just spiritualized versions of an instinctive consumer’s notions of good and bad: good fiber, bad carbs; good savings, bad credit.

We strutted around, pontificating on the divine concept of “liberty,” and we were bluffing. The terrorists called our bluff: we don’t give a shit about liberty. We want the lights to go on when we flip the switch in the den; we want hot water in the taps; we want fresh milk on the shelves; we want six hundred cable channels. And if that means that some of us have to be held without trial in military bases, then so be it.

We are well-fed and we are bored. Someone told us that the nuances don’t matter and we believed them. We are domesticated animals. Not one half of us, not the other half. All of us.

I don’t think poetry is necessarily after clarity, and I certainly never expect accuracy. I prefer a little slack between language and meaning, like the slack we find between language and the world itself.

Speech remains supple through constant blurring of the boundaries of received definitions. A word means this today then, maybe, a shade of that tomorrow. The cognates branch and fan out, and dialects accrete like silt over the bedrock. “The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf.”

Writing ossifies this process, of course — which is, you know, not entirely a bad thing; we all need good, strong bones.

Words become things, things become words again, and distinctions follow distinctions.

Empty the room to see the room.
Strain against voice to discover voice.

I will continue my explorations today by venturing to the Apple Store in Santa Monica, where I plan to watch the MacWorld Expo keynote tomorrow morning. The rumors include Apple’s long-anticipated replacement for Microsoft Office, and cheap low-end iPods. I haven’t been following the rumors. I never really listen to the rumor sites, but you can’t help but hear things sometimes.

Last night, we attended a party hosted by one of the teachers in The Wife’s program. His apartment is north of LA near Hollywood, and is perched on a west-facing hill with a panoramic view. We drove there and back on several LA freeways. Have I mentioned this is a large city? It is super-sized. As we wended our way slowly over underpasses, under overpasses, we could spy a number of downtown skylines. I have heard LA described as forty-six suburbs in search of a city, and our pilgrimage last night bore this observation out.

And at the moment, I have more California- and *LA-*centric songs going through my head than I can stand. Especially whenever I cross Santa Monica Boulevard. The bartender looks up from his want ads.