Eric The Blue

Chabon on Joyce

It's the month of Bloomsday, and the Joyce articles roll past my hungering eyes.  Here is Louis Menand, in The New Yorker, summarizing the life.  Excellent, also enjoyable, especially on the subjet of what happened on the first Bloomsday, 16 June 1904.  And here is Michael Chabon, in The New York Review (alas, behind the subscriber wall, but I'm a subscriber), ostensibly on Finnegans Wake, but including along the way a song of praise for Leopold Bloom that serves as quite a concise statement of why many of us love Bloom (and Joyce).  Chabon writes that on his first reading of Ulysses he, being an aspiring writer, was most taken with the character of Stephen Dedalus.  Bloom?  An old guy, and a loser.

Then, in the spring of 2010, I made my second complete ascent of Ulysses, and came down hopelessly in love. . . .  Leopold Bloom was only an old dude, to me, that first time through; charming, touching, good-hearted, but old: a failure, a fool, a cuckold, crapping in an outhouse, masturbating into his pants pocket.  His uxoriousness was  beyond my understanding, as was his apparent willingness to endure humiliation.  His lingering sorrow over the death of his infant son meant, I am ashamed to admit, very little to me at all.  When I read Ulysses again I was shocked to find that, first, I was now mysteriously a decade older than Leopold Bloom, and second, that the tale of his stings and losses, his regrets and imaginings, was as familiar to me as the sour morning taste of my own mouth.  Where a bachelor had seen Bloom's devotion to Molly as pathetic, a husband saw it as noble and, at the same time, as simply her due.  In Bloom's retention, into middle age, of his child-sharp powers of observation, his fresh eye (and ear, and nose) for nuance and telling detail; in his having managed to sustain his curiosity about the people and the world around him after thirty-eight years of familiarity and routine that ought to have dulled and dampened it; and above all in the abiding capacity for empathy, for moral imagination, that is the fruit of an observant curiosity like Bloom's, I found, as if codified, a personal definition of heroism.

Ulysses struck me, most of all, as a book of life; every sentence, even those that laid bare the doubt, despair, shame, or vanity of its characters, seemed to have been calibrated to assert, in keeping with the project of the work as a whole, the singularity and worth of even the most humdrum and throwaway of human days.

James Joyce: not just for PhD candidates.

The Patrick Melrose novels

Of two great figures in 18th-century English literature, it is sometimes said that Jonathan Swift despised the human race while esteeming individual specimens, whereas Alexander Pope had an elevated view of humankind but hated its member dunces.  I've sometimes thought that something about this is like affirming arithmetic without allowing for algebra, or vice versa, but I can see why it may seem a useful taxonomy.  While reading the five novels Edward St Aubyn has written featuring the character named Patrick Melrose, however, I felt like the author was determined to set before us a lineup of disgusting gargoyles and perhaps more willing than Pope to follow through to the natural conclusion.

In the first installment, Never Mind, five-year-old Patrick is sexually assaulted by his father.  His mother is explicitly compared to Dickens's Mrs Jellyby, but as the novels progress the reader may conclude this is unfair to Mrs Jellyby.  The Melroses' opulent friends and relatives are their near rivals in monsterhood, but, to gain a feel for St Aubyn's unrelievedly bitter misanthropy, let us take note of a few of the most minor characters who drift into the narrative before being dismissed.

(A.) The second installment, Bad News, begins with Patrick on a plane.  He's headed to New York, where his father, who molested him, has died.  In the seat next to him is a rich American, Earl Hammer.  St Aubyn's narrative proceeds:

'You know, Paddy,' said Earl, regardless of the fact that that nobody called Patrick 'Paddy', 'I've made a hell of a lot of money, and I figured it was time to enjoy some of the good things in life.'

It was half an hour into the flight and Paddy was already Earl's good buddy.

'How sensible of you,' gasped Patrick.

'I've rented an apartment by the beach in Monte Carlo, and a house in the hills behind Monaco. Just a beautiful house,' said Earl, shaking his head incredulously. 'I've got an English butler: he tells me what sports jacket to wear--can you believe that?  And I've got the leisure time to read the Wall Street Journal from cover to cover.'

'A heady freedom,' said Patrick.

'It's great.  And I'm also reading a real interesting book at the moment, called Megatrends.  And a Chinese classic on the art of war.  Are you interested in war at all?'

'Not madly,' said Patrick.

'I guess I'm biased: I was in Vietnam,' said Earl, staring at the horizon through the tiny window of the plane.

'You liked it?'

'Sure did,' Earl smiled.

'Didn't you have any reservations?'

'I'll tell you, Paddy, the only reservations I had about Vietnam were the target restrictions. . . ."

[Snip]

'Have you ever been to the Tahiti Club in St Tropez, Paddy?  That's a hell of a place!  I met a couple of dancers there.' His voice dropped half an octave to match the new tone of male camaraderie. 'I got to tell you,' he said confidentially, 'I love to screw. God, I love it,' he shouted.  'But a great body is not enough, you know what I mean?  You gotta have that mental thing.  I was screwing those two dancers: they were fantastic women, great bodies, just beautiful, but I couldn't come.  You know why?'

'You didn't have that mental thing,' suggested Patrick.

"That's right!  I didn't have that mental thing,' said Earl.

(B.) Three chapters later Patrick is in a restaurant, exercising the solipsistic obsessions of a drug addict.  Then:

Who else was in this ghastly restaurant?  Extraordinary that he hadn't looked before; or not so extraordinary, in fact. . . .  He swivelled his eyes around the room with reptilian coldness.  He hated them all, every single one, especially that incredibly fat man sitting with the blonde.  He must have paid her to mask her disgust at being in his company.

'God, you're repulsive,' muttered Patrick.  'Have you ever considered going on a diet?  Yes, that's right, a diet, or hasn't it crossed your mind that you're quite appallingly fat?'  Patrick felt vindictively and loutishly aggressive. . . . 'If I looked like you,' he sneered at the fat man, 'I'd commit suicide.  Not that one needs an incentive.'  There was no doubt about it, he was a fattist and a sexist and a straightist and a druggist and, naturally, a snob, but of such a virulent character that nobody satisfied his demands.  He defied anyone to come up with a minority or a majority that he did not hate for some reason or another.'

(C.) At the end of the book, he goes to a club and picks up a woman named Rachel.  She's into "neo-objectivist art" and, noting the cut of Patrick's clothes and the hotel he's staying in, thinks maybe he will bankroll her.  First, however, she persuades him to take her to a diner at two in the morning, where she gorges herself.  Back at the hotel, she uses Patrick's bathroom.  He makes use of her absence to shoot up and, enjoying his high, forgets about her while she throws up.  When she emerges, her breath smells of vomit, and she is one of those people who looks better in clothes.  An attempt at love making fails.  Patrick checks out of the hotel, leaving Rachel behind, "white-bellied and heavy breathing" on the bed.

(D.) In the last installment, At Last, Patrick inventories former girlfriends.  One of them was named Inez:

With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank screens of self-love on which a small selection of fake emotions was allowed to flicker.  She made rather haphazard impersonations of someone who has relationships with others.  Based on the gossip of her courtiers, a diet of Hollywood movies and the projection of her own cunning calculations, these guesses might be sentimental or nasty, but were always vulgar and melodramatic.  Since she hadn't the least interest in the answer, she was inclined to ask, "How are you?" with great gravity, at least half a dozen times.  She was often exhausted by the thought of how generous she was. . . .

And on and on.  These novels are characterized by a bleak outlook, savage misanthropy, and a hard, glittering prose style that, in its cold intensity, may put you in mind of Swift.  Many readers will be too bedazzled to worry about whether it's really as bad as all that.

Pride Sunday

Sunday afternoon.  Hot.  Two kids napping, mom at the store.  Twins on the radio.  Feeling a bit like a bachelor, but in that event I'd be at the gay pride parade.  I became a devotee one day years ago when I happened to be downtown for another reason and stumbled into it.  This was back in the day when it was more of an eye-full.  The spoof on heterosexual wholesomeness was entertaining, but the parade has pretty much cast off that element, and is now safe for left-of-center politicians to march in.  Probably dykes on bikes still start if off, but there is less leather, less skin, more sun screen, and hundreds of sympathetic heteros lining the route--or, like Governor Mark Dayton, marching themselves.  Instead of satirizing the mainstream, the parade has joined it.  Homosexuals want to marry each other, and serve openly in the military, and inherit their partner's stuff without laying elaborate plans with practitioners of "gay law."  The usual suspects think the end of the world is nigh.  The sun rises, the sun sets, and the rivers run into the sea.  Go Twins.

More St Aubyn

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was reading Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, and I suggested that the grim view of life epigrammatically advanced in these books reminded me of the philosopher Schopenhauer.  I'm now into the fifth and last installment, At Last, and, lo, Schopenhauer gets a call out.  Mary, Patrick's ex, is waiting for the funeral service for Patrick's mother, which she has planned, to begin.  She sees a man, a scholar named Erasmus, with whom she'd slept while her marriage was shrivelling, and--

Why was she drawn to these gloomy men?  As a philosopher, at least Erasmus, like Schopenhauer, could make his pessimism into a world view.  He cheered up at the mention of the German philosopher.

"My favorite remark of his was the advice he gave to a dying friend: 'You are ceasing to be something you would have done better never to become.'"

"That must have helped," said Mary.

A few pages later we learn about how Patrick discovered the affair.  He saw a copy of Erasmus's book, None the Wiser: Developments in the Philosophy of Consciousness, on Mary's night table.

"You couldn't be reading that book unless you were having an affair with the author," he guessed through half-closed eyes.

And Mary had replied, "'Believe me, it's virtually impossible even then.'"

Bloomsday, 2012

Today is Bloomsday, so-called because the action of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, whose unassuming nonhero of a main character is the Jewish ad canvasser Leopold Bloom, takes place on the 16th of June, 1904, in Dublin.  The date was significant to the author because on that day he went out for the first time with Nora Barnacle, who would become his wife. 

Since I like to mark Bloomsday, which this year falls on Father's Day weekend, let us remember that Joyce's father shared many traits with the endearing Mr Bloom, and that Joyce was himself, as Harry Levin notes in his Introduction to The Portable James Joyce, somewhat more filial than Stephen Dedalus, the artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  It happens that the death of Joyce's father coincided roughly with the birth of his grandson, the events that stand behind one of his best poems:

Ecce Puer

Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.

Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!

Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

Weekend nonwarrior

I'm subject to the Sunday Night Blues, but Monday morning is seldom as bad as the prospect of it.  At least at work no one begs me to turn on another episode of Caillou.  Count yourself lucky if you need an explanation.  He's the title character of a PBS children's show, available on demand through Netflix, that features shapeless but tirelessly cheerful parents, playful grandparents, a little sister whose spats with Caillou are the occasion for sermonettes that quickly achieve the desired effect, friendly firemen and boat captains who invariably let Caillou steer, and a jingly theme song that on the hundredth hearing will put you in mind of Munch's most famous painting.  Watching the show I sometimes wonder whether to be as good a parent as Caillou's I also would have to suffer a certain infantilization.  One of the lies relating to parenthood concerns  how it's FUN and REWARDING to play for hours on end with people four years old. 

My real reward is usually Sunday evening's new episode of Mad Men, where beautiful women have been known to sleep with slack old men in order to land the Jaguar account for the firm (and gain a five per cent share in it).  Colleagues, meanwhile, hang themselves in their offices.  It's hard to imagine a helpful explanation rolling off the lips of Caillou's daddy.  Relief!  We, however, have Direct TV, which is subject to losing its signal when a storm goes through, which is what happened at precisely 9:07 p.m. Central Daylight Time yesterday.  Aaarrgh!  To bed early with Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk, a reasonable substitute.

More bad news for weekends: Click and Clack, hosts of NPR's Car Talk, have decided to stop making new shows.  All devotees have their FAVORITE CALL EVER--mine concerns the fellow whose dog, riding shotgun, was stricken with car sickness and vomited all over the dash.  Some of the juice seeped down through some vents, with the result that, even after several aggressive cleanings, use of the heater elicited an odor that put his passengers in mind of aged, warmed puke.  The idea of the show, consistently realized to humorous effect, is that the hosts have a lot of fun with the caller's car question before dispensing what  gearheads assure me is really good advice.  They had more fun than usual with this fellow before advising him to sell the car--in the summertime.

Nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs

This interview, of Mary Norris, a copy editor at The New Yorker, is funny, smart, a little offbeat, and a joy to read.  In maybe my favorite part, she comments:

I have been on both sides of the process, as a writer and as a query proofreader. Being edited sometimes felt like having my bones reset on a torture rack. I don’t ever want to do that to a writer, but I probably have from time to time. “What is this, the adverb police?” a writer who shall remain nameless once said in my earshot. “You betcha,” I wanted to say. I don’t remove every word ending in “ly,” but I like economy and concision.

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," advised E.B. White, in The Elements of Style.  "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."  Choosing a not-quite-right word, and then attempting to rescue it with modifiers--how much diffuse, dissolute, logorrheic sprawl is thus explained?  I would go farther.  A style that leans upon modifiers is frequently the calling card of a moral reprobate.  Here is a passage from a famous story by Hemingway called "Hills Like White Elephants."  A man is trying to persuade his pregnant travelling companion to have an abortion.

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said.  "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig.  It's really not anything.  It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything.

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time.  They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural." 

Try reading it again, only leaving out all the -ly words, and see if your sense of a wheedler isn't displaced by something else.  The adverbs disguise the falsity.  Liars habitually fall back on them.

 

 

Same-sex marriage: Kersten climbs back into the saddle, rides in place

Katherine Kersten's latest argument--I use the term loosely--against same-sex marriage begins with the announcement that it is but a short step from Adam and Steve to Adam and Steve and Eloise.  The middle of her case is less amusing and almost wholly incoherent.  The following is representative:

What will happen if we buy the civil-rights analogy and redefine marriage as a "unisex" institution on grounds that "equality" requires it?

First, we will weaken the institution's ability to support men and women in forming permanent, sexually exclusive unions.  Norms of fidelity and permanence are central to heterosexual marriage, where sex acts can produce children.  But they don't have the same logical necessity in unisex relationships, which are more like friendships in this respect.

It is not a good sign that the referent of "in this respect" is anyone's guess.  In what respect?  And to what does "they" refer at the beginning of the sentence?  The "fidelity" and "permanence" that are a logical necessity of heterosexual relationships?  But that only calls attention to the fact that fidelity and permanence do not necessarily characterize heterosexual relationships.  The whole thing is just a muddle.  No evidence is adduced; she thinks it so because she thinks it so.  Yes, Katherine, the sex acts of married men and women "can produce children."  What is the logical connection between the two parts of the sentence in which this phrase occurs?  Is it her point that if we agree with her about how babies are made, then we must agree with her about every crazy damn thing she says?  I have a feeling that if she had any powers of clear expression we'd see that her position is that same-sex marriage, if permitted, will be the cause of things that have already occurred.  She might also have to explain why heterosexual septuagenarians who meet at mixers in the community room of housing complexes in Sun City West should not be barred from marrying. 

When Judge Vaughn Walker heard the case of Perry v Brown, the challenge to the successful ballot initiative ("Proposition 8") denying same-sex couples the right to marry in California, he repeatedly begged defenders of the proposition to show evidence, advance an argument, make a case.  They just wouldn't, or couldn't, do it.  They were channeling Katherine Kersten. 

Power still out

Last weekend, the long one, I surfed over to the Power Line site, where I have for months now been failing to monitor the foam-flecked effusions of The Four Philosophers.  Yes, four.  Paul Mirengoff, whose law firm's clients didn't care for some of his foam, gave up blogging rather than the big paycheck, but now he's retired from lawyering and back in the game, with the same I-am-Sir-Oracle tone.  When Mitt Romney recently showed up in a Philadelphia neighborhood uninhabited by venture capitalists, he assessed the situation with characteristic aplomb.  Romney had committed a major gaffe when he allowed that he didn't care about "the very poor."  Now he would show the nonpoor that he in fact does care.  It's not clear why he should care, however, because the poor have themselves to blame for their troubles: they father children whom they don't raise and have kids while still teenagers and become addicted to drugs and vote for Democrats. In Mirengoff's hand, the poor begin to resemble the employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.  I will link to the post so that you can judge for yourself whether this is a caricature or a fair summary of his views. 

Meanwhile, after voters in North Carolina rejected same-sex unions of all kinds, John Hinderaker rounded up some ugly tweets by angry members of the losing team.  I was going to put them alongside some of the comments posted by avid readers of the Power Line blog, but, hell, why not just admit that the funny boys know some of the same words with which John addresses his correspondents.

The beat goes on at Power Line, but the Twins, even after losing tonight in Cleveland, have won eight of their last fifteen games.  At this rate they will be only a little south of .500 by the time Amanda and I see them in person at Target Field on September 28.