Like a Friend

 Literature  6 Responses »
Mar 022003
 

Will Duquette, proprietor of a fine blog of mostly book reviews, recently praised The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland by saying that when he was finished he knew the main character “like a friend.” That never seems like praise to me. I know dozens of fictional characters far better than I know any of my friends. I talk to my friends maybe twice a week; an author has direct access to his characters’ thoughts and actions 24 hours a day, plus, presumably, psychological insight and talent. He ought to be able to do better than I can. I would not testify, in advance, that any of my friends was incapable of committing some ghastly crime; I would take the stand for Newland Archer or Caspar Goodwood without hesitation.

Artemisia is a historical character, but still, you devote a few years to someone’s life and you ought to have a pretty good idea what makes them tick. “Like a friend” seems like a pretty abysmal standard.

Ty Your Mother Down

 Culture  3 Responses »
Feb 282003
 

In breaking Great White news, missing and presumably charred guitarist Ty Longley turns out to have starred in several adult entertainments under the nom de porn of “Tybo.” There are of course excellent reasons for choosing an alias for one’s pornographic career, but really, what a waste: blessed with the Christian name of Ty Longley, how could the man have improved on the original? (Link from Tha Weissblog by way of Colby Cosh.)

How to Read a Poem V: Tenor and Vehicle

 Poetry  3 Responses »
Feb 262003
 

Part I: Statement in Poetry
Part II: External Evidence
Part III: Scansion
Part IV: Public and Private Reading

The vehicle of a poem is the figure that carries the weight of the composition. The tenor is the subject to which the vehicle refers. (These useful terms come from I.A. Richards, author of Practical Criticism, which has the peculiar distinction of being the funniest work of literary criticism ever written.) Usually when two critics disagree about the meaning of the poem, one is reading at the level of the tenor, the other at the level of the vehicle. Great poetry succeeds at both levels. Consider J.V. Cunningham’s To the Reader:

Time will assuage.
Time’s verses bury
Margin and page
In commentary,

For gloss demands
A gloss annexed
Till busy hands
Blot out the text,

And all’s coherent.
Search in this gloss
No text inherent:
The text was loss.

The gain is gloss.

The vehicle here is scholarship, and how readily a work can be buried in the footnotes. On this level the poem is witty but not very profound. Yet there is the strange first line: Time will assuage — what exactly? What time always assuages: experience. What sort of experience? The answer is in the second-to-last-line, which refers to the text not as “lost,” as you might expect from the vehicle, but as “loss,” which is quite different. Cunningham is speaking of unhappy experience — but in general, rather than mourning some particular loss. The visceral quality of the experience necessarily diminishes as time passes. What is gained is “gloss” — only from a distance can you evaluate the experience and learn from it. The loss is real, but so is the gain, which may be sufficient compensation. This is the tenor.

To the Reader is remarkable in that every detail functions on both levels; most poems are sloppier. The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., is a more typical example. (It’s too long to reprint here, but go read it, it’s worth your time.) As Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, pointed out a while ago, at the level of the tenor the poem deals with the implosion of American Protestantism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The shay’s career, like Protestantism’s collapse, begins with the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. Musil writes: “In America, the New England Protestants had their own interpretation of the earthquake: God was showing the world that what the world thought was ‘Godly’ just didn’t measure up to divine standards at all. So the New England Protestants set about redesigning their Calvinist faith.” Just as the Deacon, a cleric, builds his shay. One hundred years later, the attempted reforms of Protestantism collapse, just like the shay, and “Seventh Day Adventists, Mormonism, Unitarianism and many, many other new or revitalized religions emerged from that mid-19th-century religious ‘Big Bang.'”

The one-hoss shay, however, does not gradually fall apart, as religious reforms do. On the contrary, Holmes takes pains to point out that, since every part of the shay is precisely as well-constructed as every other, the end finds

The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once, —
All at once, and nothing first, —
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

Musil says about this that “Holmes exaggerates the precision of the collapse,” but there’s more to it than that. In fact this detail is irrelevant to the tenor but indispensable to the vehicle, which is literal in this case. The poem, at the level of the vehicle, satirizes engineering. (It is quite popular with engineers, and hangs in many workshops.) Every made object has a weakest point, where it eventually breaks. Holmes’ Deacon neatly solves the problem by building each part to last exactly one hundred years. This is a superb joke on engineering but has nothing to do with Protestantism, just as the shay’s birth on the day of the Lisbon earthquake has a great deal to do with Protestantism and nothing to do with engineering. Some details work on one level and some on the other, whereas Cunningham manages his two levels seamlessly. This is one distinction between great and less great poetry.

To return for the last time to the Thomas Hardy poem, My spirit will not haunt the mound, with which I began the series: at the level of the vehicle, the poet says that he will live on only in the memories of those who cared for him in life. But at the level of the tenor, however, Hardy is addressing not his friends, but his readers. Otherwise why is he writing poetry at all? The details of where his “phantom-footed shape will go” are notably general: there are “places,” and “ways,” and that’s all. The places and ways are real, and they are imagined. They are from his life and his writing both.

Confederacy of Dunces

 Culture  3 Responses »
Feb 252003
 

For 97 people to die in a nightclub fire requires heroic effort all around. There’s the band, who neglected even to get permission for a pyrotechnic display they shouldn’t be putting on in a low-ceilinged room in the first place. There are the owners, who didn’t bother to supervise the stage set. And then there are the unfortunate patrons themselves, who, being Great White fans after all, didn’t concentrate in the right tail of the distribution. When the display caught fire, most of the fans just stood and cheered; all part of the show. The place held 300 people and wasn’t filled to capacity. All four fire exits were open and clearly marked, and there were at least two minutes to find them before there was too much smoke to see. Nonetheless nearly half of the patrons managed to die, with most of the bodies found piled at the front door, where the “victims,” if that is the term, stampeded and trampled each other to death in a panic. Sometimes stupidity is criminal; sometimes it is fatal.

Despoiling Dickinson

 Poetry  7 Responses »
Feb 242003
 

The unsuspecting reader who opens Emily Dickinson for the first time, in the orthodox modern version, confronts something like this:

I started Early — Took my Dog —
And visited the Sea —
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me —

And Frigates — in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands —
Presuming Me to be a Mouse —
Aground — upon the Sands —

But no Man moved Me — till the Tide —
Went past my simple Shoe —
And past my Apron — and my Belt
And past my Bodice — too —

And made as He would eat me up —
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve —
And then — I started — too —

And He — He followed — close behind —
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle — Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl —

Until We met the Solid Town —
No One He seemed to know —
And bowing — with a Mighty look —
At me — The Sea withdrew —

So what’s with the dashes and the capitalization? Nothing, basically. Dickinson’s sentence structure is not loose or complex, and the dashes can be replaced by ordinary punctuation in nearly every instance. This labor is left for the reader who wishes to make sense of the poem. Sometimes the dashes are worse than a nuisance. In the second stanza the dashes surrounding “aground” turn a restrictive clause into a non-restrictive one. The dashes surrounding “too” in the third and fourth stanzas, if read as elocution marks, spoil the rhythm of the poem.

The capitalization is similar. In this poem she mostly capitalizes her nouns and adjectives, with a few exceptions. “Me” is lower-case about half the time. “Took,” a verb, is capitalized (stanza 1), while “look,” a noun, is not (stanza 6). The organizing principle is not apparent because the organizing principle is non-existent. A reader who wishes to make sense of the fine poem that is buried underneath this detritus has to translate first, in a sense. The effort would be more profitably spent reading the poem itself. Many readers, I’m sure, are put off enough not to make the effort at all.

This mess is largely Dickinson’s fault. She notoriously failed to prepare her poems for publication, leaving them instead, hand-written, almost illegibly, in little bundles, or “fascicles” (who was it who said that sounds like Mussolini’s favorite dessert?), in many cases with several variations preserved, among which the put-upon editor is forced to choose. Take a look at this manuscript, of one of her best poems, “Safe in their alabaster chambers.”

Safe in their alabaster chambers page 1Safe in their alabaster chambers page 2

Every one of those tiny marks between words is now in the authorized version of this poem as an em-dash, and the man single-handedly responsible for this fact is Thomas W. Johnson, a former Harvard English professor. Johnson did yeoman scholarly service when he published, in 1955, a three-volume edition of Dickinson’s poems, collating all manuscripts, including all variants, and allowing, but also requiring, any sufficiently interested reader to write out the best version of a poem. In 1960, Johnson published a one-volume Complete Poems, containing what he considered to be the “definitive” versions. The dashes have been with us ever since.

Now it should be obvious that a manuscript in this state cannot be published as-is. To begin with, there are three quite different versions of the second stanza. (It might also be a three-stanza poem with two variations on the third stanza; it’s hard to tell.) For Dickinson this is not unusual. More than half of her manuscripts contain multiple versions of at least one word; many of lines, and even stanzas, like this one. There are also multiple manuscripts for quite a few poems, and of course these differ among themselves as well. They need a real editor, not a transcriber.

Johnson usually tries to solve this problem by choosing the last version, based on a dubious analysis of how Dickinson’s handwriting changed as she aged. But she left all of the versions, not just one, and it’s mind-reading to assume, with none of them crossed out, that the last is what she wanted. As Yvor Winters wrote, “The only thing one can do in a situation like this is to choose the best versions; this takes talent, and Johnson lacks talent.” Lacking talent, Johnson attempts to reduce the problem of editing Dickinson to application of mechanical criteria. His criteria always fail to produce the best version and sometimes fail to produce a version at all. This very manuscript of “Safe in their alabaster chambers” defeats him; he ends up offering two versions; he cannot choose.

In the 19th century editors used to edit, often with unfortunate results. A mid-century edition of the works of George Washington renders a small sum of money, “as but a flea-bite at present” in the original, as “totally inadequate to our demands at this time.” By comparison Emily Dickinson received very gentle treatment from her first editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece. They regularized her spelling and punctuation, showed some flair in negotiating the manuscript variants, and otherwise left her pretty much alone. In a dozen or so cases Todd substitutes words for which there is no textual warrant. (Bianchi, her successor, is clean on this score.) She notoriously changes “what a billow be” to “what a wave must be” in “I never saw a moor”; the poem is hopeless in either version. And she actually improves one of Dickinson’s greatest poems, “There’s a certain slant of light,” by changing “heft” in the first stanza to “weight.”

Later critics have jumped all over Todd for this, apparently preferring Johnson’s consistent approach, which wrecks all of the poems. But Todd and Bianchi do the hard work that Johnson leaves to the reader. This is Bianchi’s version of “I started early”:

I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me,

And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.

But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,

And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion’s sleeve —
And then I started too.

And he — he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle, — then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.

Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.

Which one would you rather read?

(Update: AC Douglas comments.)

Blackmail

 Culture  2 Responses »
Feb 212003
 

Reality TV these days lacks imagination. Joe Millionaire? Married by America? How about the old Monty Python skit, Blackmail? The Blackmail set consists of the host at a desk with a telephone. A crude home video rolls, with a running meter and a telephone number at the bottom of the screen. The video begins innocuously. A car drives down a street, an unidentifiable man walks into a house. Shadows appear in a bedroom window as the meter continues to run. The man and a woman begin to undress. The woman brandishes a whip. The camera zooms in…and the phone rings. It’s the poor sap calling, agreeing to pay whatever’s on the meter to stop the video.

Think about it. Zero production costs. Staff salaries partly defrayed by the swag. And who could afford not to watch?

A Pattern Language

 Culture, Heuristic  No Responses »
Feb 202003
 

My tiny corner of the blogosphere is abuzz with Christopher Alexander. Michael of the Blowhards has an excellent brief essay on him, with a link to Wendy Kohn’s more detailed treatment. AC Douglas also has a few remarks.

Alexander is a (now ex-) professor of architecture at Berkeley whose most famous books, The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language, have inspired a sort of cult. He believes that the key to architecture lies in rules, or recipes, which he calls patterns. The same problems occur over and over, and the patterns, which he claims not to invent but to discover, are well-known ways of solving them. A Pattern Language consists of 253 of these, with photographs and descriptions. Alexander maintains that if you simply follow the patterns, beauty will come. He aims to demystify all of architecture, and to a great extent he succeeds.

His patterns range in breadth from city planning to room decor, and many of them are alarming in their specificity. Cities should contain no more than 9% parking space; political communities should be around 7,000 people (this is reminiscent of the 19th century socialist crackpot Charles Fourier, who recommended 500 as ideal); no urban downtowns should serve more than 300,000 people; most buildings should be no more than four stories high; terraces should be at least six feet deep; every room should have light on at least two sides. Sometimes Alexander buttresses his rather ex cathedra pronouncements with studies and arguments; sometimes not. “Nine Percent Parking” gives a fair taste of his style:

We [he has co-authors] suspect that when the density of cars passes a certain limit, and people experience the feeling that there are too many cars, what is really happening is that subconsciously they feel that the cars are overwhelming the environment, that the environment is no longer “theirs,” that they have no right to be there, and so on… Instead of inviting them out, the environment starts giving them the message that the outdoors is not meant for them, that they should stay indoors, that they should stay in their own buildings, that social communion is no longer permitted or encouraged.

We have not yet tested this suspicion. However, if it turns out to be true, it may be that this pattern, which seems to be based on such slender evidence, is in fact one of the most crucial patterns there is, and that it plays a key role in determining the difference between environments which are socially and psychologically healthy and those which are unhealthy. [Italics his.]

To begin with, nine percent parking is based not on “slender evidence,” but on no evidence. It is a “suspicion,” which becomes a pattern, which becomes a dictum. Here you catch a faint whiff of the crank.

Yet it is a very plausible suspicion, even if the particular number is bogus. Urban landscapes full of cars, like Los Angeles, are depressing. Most of Alexander’s patterns are very plausible, even the ones that never would have occurred to me, like “Zen View”: “If there is a beautiful view, don’t spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view at places of transition — along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms.” The man who writes this has meditated long and profoundly about why some buildings succeed and others fail.

Alexander generally begins with what people want. You might think that most architects would begin there, but in fact very few of them do. Instead they talk a great deal about form, function, structure, “machines for living,” and the like. Alexander’s solicitude is one of the sources of his unpopularity within his profession and his popularity in the world at large. The photographs in A Pattern Language are of warm, inviting, pleasant places, places that would be fun to live or play or work in. They are not of monuments, large buildings, or what one has been taught to regard as architectural masterpieces.

In Alexander’s cosmology, beauty in architecture consists of satisfying people’s desires, and those desires are immutable. He uses words like “healthy” and “alive” with abandon. As Michael Blowhard notes, it follows that architectural standards are objective, and artistic standards as well. There is a human nature, to which buildings will appeal more or less successfully. It follows further that Alexander is in on the secret. It is this assurance, more than anything, that infuriates his fellow architects, who fancy themselves artists and resent the suggestion that someone has not only encountered their problem, but solved it.

Now I’m all for normative thinking, provided it’s kept far away from the police power. Jane Jacobs, with whom Alexander is frequently grouped, takes pains to show how livable cities grow organically from people’s natural behavior, while top-down planning leads to disaster after disaster. This concerns Alexander not at all: only ends interest him. Some of his grander patterns must be enforced by law, and he does not shrink from doing so. In “The Magic of the City” he writes:

Put the magic of the city within reach of everyone in a metropolitan area. Do this by means of a collective regional policies which restrict the growth of downtown areas so strongly that no one downtown can grow to serve more than 300,000 people. With this population base, the downtowns will be between two and nine miles apart.

He thinks people ought to own their homes. Arranging this is a simple matter: “Do everything possible to make the traditional forms of rental impossible, indeed, illegal.” So you’re not surprised to read this testimonial from one of his former students in Kohn’s article: “Chriss answer to my doubts about The Timeless Way of Building was to say ‘Find out your psychological problem that prevents you from agreeing.'”

Alexander’s biggest fans are not architects but computer programmers. Unless you are a professional, you don’t have a clue how vast his influence is in the field. The most important book written about software in the last thirty years, Design Patterns, takes its form explicitly from A Pattern Language. The authors enumerate thirty “patterns” that make for elegant, robust, even beautiful software. (The mark of a successful new technology today is the appearance of a book on it called Patterns in ...) Software design patterns are very like Alexander’s: solutions for recurring problems in software development. Cities and software applications are both complex systems that must be broken down into components to be understood. Alexander’s ideas lend themselves more readily to software than architecture because a software architect can control every aspect of a project. He need not rule the world to enforce his chosen patterns.

So we’re left with an inhumane humanist, a brilliant crank, an immodest prophet of modesty. Even so, A Pattern Language is one of the most interesting books about architecture, and the world, that you’re ever likely to read.

(Update: AC Douglas comments. I also posted a slightly different version of this to BlogCritics, where there are a couple more comments.)

(Another: Chris Bertram discusses Alexander and kindly mentions me.)

War Poetry

 Poetry, Politics  15 Responses »
Feb 162003
 

Why is nearly all war poetry anti-war, and not just now, but always? Stanley Kunitz thinks it’s because “[war] is contrary to the humanitarian position that is at the center of the poetic impulse.” Poets oppose war because they care more deeply about humanity than the rest of us. If this satisfies you then stop reading now, by all means.

A poem motivates, through technical means like rhythm, meter and rhyme, the emotion proper to its rational statement. Emotion derives from personal experience. Thus the statement of poetry tends to be personal. This is not to say that poems cannot make complex logical arguments. But these arguments will relate, in the end, to a personal experience.

War is, at the level of the statesmen (and the pundits), where one decides whether to wage it, or even at the level of the generals, where one decides how, as impersonal a subject as one could wish for. To decide rationally to wage war one must put one’s emotions aside, which is the opposite of what poetry asks you to do.

Therefore most poetry about war is written at the level of the soldier, the best of it often by the soldier, and it’s understandably not very favorable to the enterprise. For the soldier war is a bloody, muddy, destructive, terrifying, chaotic smash — hell, as Sherman said. At this disastrously personal level it is impossible to be pro-war: no one enjoys war, for itself, except the morally deranged. This poem by Yvor Winters limns the difficulty:

Night of Battle
Europe: 1944
as regarded from a great distance

Impersonal the aim
Where giant movements tend;
Each man appears the same;
Friend vanishes from friend.

In the long path of lead
That changes place like light
No shape of hand or head
Means anything tonight.

Only the common will
For which explosion spoke;
And stiff on field and hill
The dark blood of the folk.

Winters fiercely supported the Second World War, but this poem is neither pro nor anti. To support a war one must regard it “from a great distance,” while poetry tends, on the contrary, to regard matters up close. As much room as there is for the individual, there is that much room for poetry; when one disappears the other must as well.

This is why pro-war poetry like Kipling’s sounds like tub-thumping. Kipling had little poetic talent: his poetry resembles great poetry as Sousa marches resemble great music. But mostly he chose a medium that does not suit the subject.

The problem of war resembles the problem of “what is seen and what is not seen,” as Bastiat put it, in economics. Unsound economic policies like tariffs win support because the benefits are seen, while the costs are invisible, being good things that never happen. (Not coincidentally, very little poetry has been written on economics.) War is the opposite. The costs are seen, while the benefits are invisible, being bad things that never happen. All art, and poetry especially, deals best with what is seen. So poems about war will tend to be against, or ambivalent, but always myopic. Anyone looking for geopolitical wisdom from poetry should look elsewhere. And when faced with a subject that’s out of their ken, poets, like actors, should just shut up.

(Update: Jim Ryan comments.)

Another: Andrea Harris notes this pro-war poetry site. The poems are not very good, but they’re better than the anti-war stuff.)

Somebody Missed the Memo

 Movies, Politics  No Responses »
Feb 152003
 

Special thanks to Oliver Stone for Comandante, his upcoming searing exposé of Fidel Castro. Besides the “revolutionary” mustache Stone sports for his scenes in the movie, making him look like the missing Ortega brother, one detail cannot go unmentioned:

Throughout, Castro wears his trademark green fatigues, but when the camera pans to his shoes it shows how times have changed: even a veteran revolutionary sports the ubiquitous Nike swoosh.

Fidel Castro, supporter of evil capitalist exploitation of Third World sweatshop labor.

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