Insomnia

a few half-thoughts:

a) My destiny is to create a new brand of insomnia and then market it door to door during the graveyard shift.

b) I read that sleep apnea can be caused by fat deposits surrounding the neck area. The fat obstructs the breathing it seems. I resolve to adapt more aggressive shaving techniques. Problem solved.

c) At 3 a.m., I read that Philip Roth describes his nights as full of post-it notes attached all over his body and midnight runs to the writing studio. A mere mortal, I walk to the fridge.

to be continued; of course.

a little Pound for your day's commute

“In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Alas, I’m not in Paris; I’m not in Washington DC. I’m not in a large city or even near one with underground transit for the masses. Or for today’s DC version, the rich (see a recent Harper’s index for the $109K median wage for DC subway riders). I grew up with Philadelphia’s North-South Broad Street Line, its East-West elevated line, and a small web of subway-surface cars (“trolleys”) surfacing in University City and extending into Southwest Philadelphia. So I can’t say I ever lived permanently in a city whose mass transit is dominated by an entire web of underground trains like New York City or Paris. I have visited New York a bunch of times, and I’ve been lucky enough to live for a summer in both Paris and Seoul, South Korea. I’ve experienced the thrill of navigating a complex web of subways in a language extremely foreign to one’s native tongue. I’ve lost my way.

Pound’s poem suggests we do not need to know subways to know our fellow “apparitions” and “petals.” We do not need to stand apart or mingle upon a platform with a group of commuters. We can be connected to the “wet, black bough” even if we cannot skip over the turnstile or pay the local fares. We do not even need the rain.

When I read the poem, I hear the last line fighting the first line while the title cries out, “I am a line of this poem too.” And I hear the famous story of Pound trimming the fat of a much longer poem and ending with these two lines. And I consider Pound’s own sad ending outside DC, his second stay in a city with a Metro. And I wonder what views Pound would express if he were active in radio politics today. Could a man who could write like this sound as superficial as a Rush Limbaugh or Neil Bortz or any of our failed “liberal” radio hosts?

As you were, poetry.

Michael Vick reads Martin Heidegger

For all your moral needs, "Michael Vick apologizes; Heidegger remains silent":

http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2009/08/14/michael-vick-apologizes-heidegger-remains-silent/

I've got the page 56, 5th sentence down blues...

It's been a long, hot summer and my anxiety over the facebook page 56, 5th sentence down thing has made me sweat even more. I saw facebook "friends" post their witty sentences and I grew jealous of their reading selections. Each time another posted and recommended the same, I would check not only the closest one but numerous books nearby; the ones that weren't board books (these went to page 24 tops) had nothing to offer. No wit. Nothing literary but pornographic all at once. No tidbit to reveal the soul of me or at least my reading habits.

I fell upon a literary novelist, an import from Europe, and although I'd be posting in translation, I knew there was promise. But his fifth sentence on page 56 included an obvious comma splice; I flipped through another of his novels and found a long-winding snake that was nevertheless a sentence fragment. I am almost certain this non-standard text was the author's attempt to philosophize on time passing or the fragmented nature of our lives, but could I dare reveal to my virtual friends that I was reading novels full of misplaced punctuation and injured prose?

In a flash of genius, I checked my own "work in progress," call it a novel if we must, and I swear upon page 56, my brilliant fifth from the top read, "What's up?" I didn't have the nerve to drag the book to the trash bin or kill myself. I did however yearn for an earlier time when matches and flame would have carried the day.

Later, I found Eva Thury at whenfallsthecoliseum.com intellectualize on "write down sentence 5 on page 56 as your Facebook status" as well as other concerns in her nifty article, "Google my Codex." Well, I like Dr. Thury, but she lost me in the next paragraph when she said she didn't care much for physical books as her "medium." I hate extended reading off the computer screen and with my weak lower back, I am in no position to return to "clay tablets." I don't know where I'd be without crates of favorite books in a storage space I pay ever-increasing monthly rent on to keep nothing else of value. Remainder shelves have never been safe near me, and I'm the kind of instructor who still bothers to peruse and perhaps lift what the others have left in the English Department hallway for undergrads or the poor. If you are someone who can live without the smell of hardcovers and tradepapers--and I don't insist they all require coffee and cookie stains--we are decidedly not on the same page. It was "turn to page 56," not "pagedown to screen 56" or "lift and lug tablet 56," no?

Nevertheless, I persevered. Late in summer, I wandered into a tasty but reckless novel, The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames, and in triumph I flipped to page 56 intent upon seizing a quality fifth sentence and achieving fame with an imposing facebook status. Alas, page 56 was blank in my trade paperback copy.

So where do I go from here?

In my vision as revolutionary, intent upon changing the world of facebook forever, I imagine myself pounding fists at the podium but, "Little slips on which [I] had jotted the announcements kept fluttering from [my] fingers."

Yes. I relent. It is a fifth sentence from a fifty-sixth page from my trusted Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories and Carol Bly's "Talk of Heroes."

I find it makes a fitting finale to this sad affair. Bly's title alone might be enough to illuminate my own tale.

Is it time to keep the lamp lit or cool down in the dark? You tell me.

As you were in the August heat.

New by Nabokov

Busy with the parental concerns and giving the people what they want (which for better or worse is Delillo's White Noise), I may be taking a break from assigning Lolita this fall, but America will get a chance to revisit its greatest dead immigrant in exile publishing posthumously. In November, an unpublished novel by Vladimir Nabokov will appear. This link details Hugh Hefner's successful pursuit of publishing an excerpt a week early in Playboy:

http://www.observer.com/2009/daily-transom/holy-lolita-hefner-hoovers-first-serial-rights-nabokovs-last-novella

Gregory Cowles's "dolorous haze" of speculation is also worth a perusal:

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/lolitas-ancestor/

I was impressed that for a few seconds, the link to Cowles's blog on books appeared just under the article on the Senate voting to block $1.75 billion in military spending on the F-22. If Nabokov could only know he was linked to the front page of the New York Times online...

...alas, I suppose it is up to the reader to raise the dead.

Living Past Your Fictional Representation

One of my favorite short stories to assign is "Home" by Jayne Anne Phillips. According to my second-favorite story anthology, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, "Home" was first published in Phillips's Black Tickets in 1979. The Vietnam War lurks in the background, and the tale features a mother knitting afghans in front of the TV while a rebellious, debatably liberated but sexually engaged daughter explores the scarred men in her life. Bob Dylan quoting the Old Testament--"[S]he who is not busy being born is busy dying"--very much sums up the cultural clash of generations living under the same roof. The first sentence is the mother's declaration, "I'm afraid Walter Cronkite has had it," and we soon learn that by it, she means cancer. Well, cancer victim or no, Cronkite lived and lived well past the period of this story; in fact, he was still alive 35 years or so later:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts424

Cronkite's living 35 years past his literary dying reminds me of another protagonist living well past his own literary death; in this case, the book is Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and the person whom Hemingway based the old man upon lived and lived well past the publication of this novella, and of course, well past Hemingway's suicide. According to this article, Gregorio Fuentes was Hemingway's "fishing companion and confidant":

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/29/books/the-old-man-who-loved-the-sea-and-papa.html?scp=10&sq=%22old%20man%20and%20the%20sea%22%20&st=cse


In some sense, no doubt, Hemingway's sense of his own great ending, was transferred into this man swimming against the strength of an ocean destined to devour us all.

A lesson here?


I'll bore you with the full lecture another time, but I'm thinking it involves the post-ironic disconnect between reality and reality, in other words, fiction and the lives that purport not to mimic it.