lhnmtbtt

SOMETHING FRESH

I just read SOMETHING FRESH by Wodehouse yesterday. And it was. He wrote it when he was about thirty five.  During a reading break last night, I stumbled upon this article in Arts and Letters Daily about PGW during WWII. I’ve always felt I understood PGW’s behavior simply because I laugh at his books: and, for me, laughter is something I do instead of being a missionary or propagandist of some kind or other. This article touches my sentiments, but I was annoyed at the feeling I got that the author of this article didn’t do any research beyond reading the Wodehouse Wikipedia page and associated links. 

THE CODE OF THE WOOSTERS

I read somewhere that you haven’t read any book until you’ve read it twice, which is an interesting idea which limits the number of books I’ve read considerably. Who makes up these rules anyway? Professors of English literature?

I can say for certain, given this rule, that I’ve read Voltaire, Shakespeare, Wilde, and PG Wodehouse: I’m reading Wodehouse again right now. One of my favorite books is THE CODE OF THE WOOSTERS. This must be the fourth reading for me. In this book Wodehouse is at his best. In his earlier works, his plots fall flat—not that I mind at all; his tone is enough for me. But in this one, he’s brilliant not only in tone, but in the wild events buffeting Bertram at every chapter’s end. Like chapter seven, which leaves Bertie attacked by a young woman’s lapdog and marooned atop her dresser:

… I soared like an eagle on to the chest of drawers, Jeeves was skimming like a swallow on to the top of the cupboard. The animal hopped from the bed and, advancing into the middle of the room, took a seat, breathing through the nose with a curious whistling sound, and looking at us from under his eyebrows like a Scottish elder rebuking sin from the pulpit. And there for a while the matter rested.

Delicious.

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER

I’m not used to reading books in which the author tells me what I’m thinking immediately after the fact. Take page twelve,

For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this [train] station where I have got off is a station of the past or a station of today: instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man’s land of experience reduced to the lowest common denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in the story before you realize it—a trap.

OK, then.

SALOME

I just had an interesting reaction to this play.

Over the last year, I’ve been researching prose poems, symbolism, Maeterlinck, Debussy, and reading a lot of Wilde. Aesthetics aside, I’ve been wondering when a stage play can also be considered a novel. And, I like complex writing—I enjoy Saramago’s baroque prose for example—, so one would assume that I would enjoy a stage play that is also a prose poem: but I didn’t enjoy SALOME: it feels like something to watch or listen to—not something to read. Oddly, this play wasn’t written for the stage: it is a prose poem; it IS for reading. So what’s my problem: why didn’t I enjoy the tropical-jungle diction, the ripe, apple-bough lines, and all those heavily perfumed bodies dancing in the moonlight?

Plot, I believe. Saramago writes complex, baroque prose, but I follow the plot. Here, in SALOME, we’re taking a really long, beautiful, sumptuous, evocative, emerald, labored, ermine, long—did I say long?—long time to get to the beheading of John. Actually the play is only about fifty pages, so it just feeeeel long. It isn’t, uh, literally long. Oddly-more, I love the world, the tone of the language, and would pay to see an opera, a play, or a movie. I believe I want to listen to the story, but when I read it, I get tired. So, my conclusion is that I’m missing plot. This play feels like beautiful music, but music without enough speed. I need someone to perform it to me.

But there is a plot in it, of course. So when I say plot, I don’t mean plot: I mean discussed action in the dialogue. In Wilde’s other work, muffins, handbags, and fans influence the dialogue. I just read THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST for the second time this month. My favorite part of this play is about muffins: a conversation about how one should or should not eat muffins when one has just lost one’s earthly happiness. Whereas, in SALOME, he describes moonlight, the sound of a dark angel’s wings, and a gem’s particular shade of green—all while we’re waiting for Salome to make her request.

In SALOME, it isn’t the language itself, but the object of the language that bothers me. When reading SALOME I want to skip the long paragraph speeches because I know they don’t hold anything important: I mean, plot. It isn’t that I’m not interested in how the characters talk: I am interested in it. But I’m interested that their talking gets somewhere. I don’t mind trivial conversations about muffins as long as the muffins have consequences for our characters, which they do: Algernon delays his departure from the country house with, “I can’t leave just yet; there’s still a muffin left.” And then later, in the next act, the wounded ladies discuss the significance of the muffin eating with, “The men have been eating muffins: that looks like repentance.”

ENGLAND, ENGLAND

I read until the word “Carrots” on page eight. Perhaps another time.

PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF TERROR

I’m not finished with this book yet: I read it in the metro between classes on my máquina. It’s very interesting to think about globalization, fundamentalism, and the condition of the possibility of drinking coffee in a Madrid McDonalds. 

TERROR. “The essence of terror is not the physical elimination of whomever is perceived to be different but the eradication of difference in people, namely, of their individuality and capacity for autonomous action.”

FUNDAMENTALISM. When an unrestrained capitalism enters a traditional society, the free market erodes the power of traditional values: money governs the marketplace, but outside the market, money means nothing. Outside the market, we have value and habits, and, although companies try to create value (i.e. Nike isn’t selling shoes, they’re really selling you a healthy life, new habits, etc.), it’s mostly all talk. Value and money aren’t happily married. This creates insecurity in the traditional mind, which reacts with a moral-majority movement or a suicide bombing: i.e. the aim is to either replace the irreligious market with a market of family values, or to destroy it. But we actually don’t want any of these because they all create terror: the eradication of different ways of life.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

On the back of my copy of Oscar Wilde’s complete plays, I read an interesting tweet: “The Importance of Being Earnest is the only pure verbal opera in English” —@WH Auden.

Interested as I am in opera, I wanted to know more. Unfortunately in my short-lived quest to learn, I opened The Cambridge Companion (CC) to Oscar Wilde and found something, but it wasn’t about verbal opera—i.e. genres, history, the text itself. I found, literally, gender theory—i.e. a lot of subversive, rebellious sex, regimes, systems of control, the holocaust, and ignorant, unconscious natives.

While reading the CC, I turned from essay to essay and all I saw were penises: beautiful bouquets (I excitedly admit) of freshly martyred penises. I was ravished again and again. My iphone got sticky from reading in the metro, which led me to practice safe reading in the privacy of my own apartment between consenting portions of my psyche. Mid-passion, I switched to my Kindle (larger screen), which I finally taped to my ceiling with Duct tape—to get into some really difficult arguments. I want the ipad.

Slowly, thrust after thrust, vigorously and without regard for my quaint otherness, I learned that verbal operas—genre and the text—really don’t matter. Wilde-qua-Wilde doesn’t matter. No; Wilde’s subtext unlocks secret power structures and subverts oppressive forces for today’s world. In reading Wilde, I really read myself: I have subversive, provocative power-altering onanism between myselves. I enact self-erasure and re-scribe myself again. It’s the gender structures—deep, intrinsic power structures—of today’s world that Wilde is really, literally about.

In gender theory, something lends itself to something else and, as such, it aims at something, not so much to enact whatever as to liberate whatever, which naturally does violence against native impulses by inscribing a regime counterturn of literal fabricated stuff. The violence is the very strategy by which something else subverts something. The regime took the whatever as the script for enacting violence and inscribing itself literally somewhere. You, the gentle native, have unconsciously sublimated the deep structure and lost your unconscious orgasms. Now your gestures just don’t feel the same any more. You’ve lost that tingle feeling in your gesture.

The following is a list of words and phrases in a Wilde essay. This is your average gender theory’s bouquet of martyred penises:

Literally, deep and intrinsic structure, by means of performance, share contempt for, fashion one’s self after, at the expense of potency, revolt, relies on the force of, reciprocity, turn and counterturn, implicit structure, having come to the center from this periphery, doublespeak, presumes unanimous consent, drew on the resonances, linguistic control, regime, indoctrination, extraordinary tyranny, absolutely distorted, express the obverse, proper and simple meaning, right significance, radical estrangement, live under the compulsion, witnessed the policy of linguistic terrorism, seal a sense of displacement, turn the doublespeak back on itself, subversion, contentious gender issues, reflex platitude, condemned, enforcing social consensus, keep distinct, border patrol, along these fronts the linguist battles were fought, turn the linguistic front into a no-man’s land, Victorian hypocrisy, trans-valuation of values, expose the slight of hand, control became an agenda, moral fundamentalism, middle-class consensus, to advance oneself, author of an alternative Bible, nakedly, put under question, the very bias of authority, work in the field alerted the verbal police, oral nature, the very image of, displaced desire, detached, native, suspend, absorbed, unutterable longing, saturates, live outside the context of, seeks, fabricates, tolerate, threaten, destruction, violence, do violence, enact violence, subvert violence, use violence in a sentence, talk about violence, violent violence, struggle, struggle to retain, numbness, implied numbness, literal numbness, unconscious grace, liberate, slash, mime, meme, unmake, indeterminacy, inscribe, undermine convention, infect, escape, shape, insidious,

I think reading has estranged my obverse nativity to the linguistic terrorism of counterspoken-reflexes in anti-Victorian trans-valued contexts. I need to go have myself an earnest, exorbitant gesture.

Baltasar & Blimunda

Saramago went barefoot until the age of fourteen. 

He confessed himself a late bloomer: he divided his life into two segments: “Until the age of fifty we have to learn, and after fifty we have to work until the end occurs.”

And in his work: Saramago developed peculiar prose that weaves together narration, description, and dialogue: some describe it as baroque. When a friend wrote to Saramago complaining about this impenetrable complexity, Saramago suggested his friend read aloud. The next day the friend wrote back saying, Oh I get it. A certain musical quality reveals itself in performance and performance simplifies the confusion. No wonder that two operas draw inspiration from Saramago’s novels.

Now, seventeenth-century baroque aimed to pique the emotions of the viewer or listener sort of the way an essay attempts to persuade the reader. Wouldn’t I be interested to know that Saramago claimed he wasn’t a novelist at all but really an essayist who wrote novels because he didn’t know how to write essays? Yeah, I believe I would be.

Digression: baroque slowly snickered into a new style called rococo, which left off the emotions of religious artwork and focused on fun. Example: American’s “pursuit of happiness” was writ by Enlightenment guys.

In comparison to Saramago, I believe TRISTRAM SHANDY is rococo. But Saramago’s stories aren’t shaggydog. His complex prose showcases conventional novel structure, which can be seen very easily in BLINDNESS, which Hollywood found conventional enough to translate into a movie by the same name. If Hollywood can, so can you. In Saramago, the story telling rambles, but the plot doesn’t. 

QUIJOTE

I think people only talk about the windmill fight because that’s as far as they read. It’s a big book, and intimidating (except this excuse doesn’t work on me because I’m reading on a Kindle, which might explain why I stopped reading it). I stopped reading after Quijote’s servant vomits in Quijote’s mouth.

THE CITY AND THE MOUNTAINS

When I was getting to know one of my favorite people, we had a long conversation about favorite books: mine, CANDIDE; hers, THE CITY AND THE MOUNTAINS, by Eca de Queiros. We agree: cultivating your garden solves all earthly problems.

Unfortunately I don’t have the book here in front of me, so I can’t open it and quote directly from my favorite passage, but—like happiness itself—the exact words, maybe, don’t matter: the approach, the style of the thing really does it, which keeps things je ne sais quoi and what not. So it’s better if I just recount my own approach to my favorite part:

Early in the book, there’s a moment of foreshadowing where you think, “Oh the hero will meet and marry the narrator’s cousin and they’ll live as a huge happy family.” They do marry; no surprise. But what’s fascinating for me was how much the author delays the meeting between the hero and his bride. He doesn’t get the two talking and then, because of pride, prejudice, or zombies, keep them apart—agony! No: the two characters don’t meet at all. And then, suddenly, she walks into the room and the narrator says something like, “So, that’s the day my best friend met his future wife, my cousin. They had two kids together and were very happy.” I was a little confused. Didn’t Eca just yada yada over the best part?

Which got me thinking: there are two kinds of intimacy. One is the kind we’re used to around these parts—i.e. in the Internet—where, a la Rousseau, gushing heartthrobs of detail churn up orgasms of sincerity. We confess everything. We talk about sex and linger over the topic for as long as possible. We also linger over why our parents were stupid and how, if we had just been nurtured differently, the world would be ours.

The second kind of intimacy works like this: eff off: it isn’t your business, and it isn’t online. Plus, why do you care? Cultivate your own damn garden and stop looking over the facebook garden wall at the other guy. Something like that.