Witcraft in 1901 and 1951 - a distinguished crankologist is prepared to give lessons in this important subject

In 1901, William James gives a series of lectures in Edinburgh that will become The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).  In 1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein dies.  James and Wittgenstein guide us through Witcraft’s English philosophy for almost two hundred and fifty pages (the chapters are getting pretty long).

1901 features more Mill, now a radical and feminist, and more Carlyle, now a hero of the new Labour Party.  Darwin, Spencer and Huxley are dragging philosophy in a new direction, as are Marx and Engels.  The first great philosophical craze, though, as we have discussed before at Wuthering Expectations, is for Arthur Schopenhauer, taken up by every decadent and aesthete, to be followed by the Nietzsche craze.  Also Hegel: “Before long Hegel-worship was taking hold in England too” (393).  In the 1951 chapter, it’s Kierkegaard; in a theoretical 2001 chapter, it would be Sartre and Derrida and various other French writers.  I would not mind reading a literary or book history of received philosophy.  It explains a lot (of what is in novels).

For example:

For some of Nietzsche’s followers, however, profundity was not enough.  Their leader was a self-styled ‘man of affairs’ who was a political agitator in Australia before surfacing in Chicago under the name of Ragnar Redbeard…  ‘Death to the weakling, wealth to the strong,’ he added… The full doctrine was set out in a pamphlet called Might is Right…  Redbeard’s propaganda struck a chord with a young student in California called Jack London, helping turn him into a writer who aimed, as he put it, to proclaim ‘the paean of the strong with all my heart’, while ‘raging  through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond beasts’. (390)

Ragnar Redbeard!  This chapter is filled with interesting figures who were not themselves significant writers, but who were great propagators, most notable the Scot Thomas Davidson who “by vocation” was “a rebellious vagabond” of high intellectual powers, who drifted around Britain and the United States thinking and teaching, often in philosophical clubs.  “Davidson got on well with the ‘St Louis Hegelians’, as he called them – yes, a St. Louis specific Hegel-craze, headquartered in the St. Louis Mercantile Library, which I urged you to visit in this post.

Here we see a page of advertisements in the special Christmas edition of Mind! magazine (1901, p. 457).  I have adopted “a distinguished crankologist” as my new self-description, even though I am not particularly distinguished.  Am I ever prepared to give lessons.  I’ve been delivering them on this very website for years.

The long 1951 chapter is essentially a “life and times” of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who I take as a hero of Jonathan Rée’s, an exemplar of the practice of philosophy.  He barely publishes.  He is always thinking and talking, working on the most difficult problems.  His intelligence is astounding; who knows what he could have done if he had remained an engineer.  He has a perpetually complicated, comical, relationship with universities.

Bertrand Russell becomes, in the narrative, something of a villain, a corruption of philosophy.  I don’t know that Rée thinks of Russell as a villain, but narratives have their own logic.

The chapter’s title is “A Collection of Nonsense”:

The main topic of his classes [this is 1929] was still nonsense (or ‘nonsense in the philosophical sense’, as one of his students put it), and he spoke with great animation, sometimes rapidly, with dashes of ‘schoolboyish English slang’, sometimes slowing down and sinking into silence, ‘with perspiration streaming down his face’.  Students were often bewildered, but the effect was ‘hypnotic’. (475)

I suppose I see part of my attraction to Witcraft here.  I take nonsense, and not necessarily in the philosophical sense, as the basis of literature, with meaning and mimesis and all of that built on top of and out of language.  Ideas are made of language.  It is great fun to play with language, but it is also full of traps.  “Philosophy as [Wittgenstein] saw it was ‘not a theory’, but the practice of clarifying thoughts that are otherwise ‘opaque and blurred’” (613).  I do not see literature so differently. So Witcraft is a congenial book.

But it is a big book, too.  There are many other things a reader could do with it.

Sylvie and Bruno, begun and Concluded - It are ever so many other things

Little, Big has a major character named Sylvie.  She has a lookalike brother named Bruno.  Her adventures have some vague resemblance to the title character of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (188) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), the most flummoxing Victorian novels I have ever read.  Perhaps the resemblance is more than vague, but if so I missed it.  As I said, I was flummoxed.

The narrator, a character not so different than Charles Dodgson, falls into dreams and trances that move him back and forth between a crazy Alice in Wonderland-like dream world and a no less unreal world that is like a sentimental Victorian romance, with noble renunciations and temperance pledges and self-sacrificing doctors heroically exposing themselves to the Plague.  Neither of these worlds are especially “real.”  Behind both of them is a vaguely glimpsed Fairyland, the home of the fairies Sylvie and Bruno, which overlaps with the other worlds during “eerie states” distinct from the dreams and trances.  The process is “such as we meet with in ‘Esoteric Buddhism’” (SBC, Preface).

So there is this mode, in which fairies lead a laborer to take a temperance pledge:

I know full well that the taste for this kind of sentimentality thrives today, but some of this stuff feels like kitsch.

“It’s a miserable story!” said Bruno.  “it begins miserably, and it ends miserablier.  I think I shall cry.  Sylvie, please lend me your handkerchief.”

“I haven’t got it with me,” Sylvie whispered.

“Then I wo’n’t cry,” said Bruno manfully.  (SBC, ch. 23).

Bruno is not referring to the melodramatic plot, but to a poem that runs like this:

Little Birds are writing
    Interesting books,
    To be read by cooks:
Read, I say, not roasted –
Letterpress, when toasted,
    Loses its good looks.

I was happier with the ample nonsense of the other plot, when cruel, fat, spoiled boys turning into giant porcupines:

Or when the Gardener recounts his autobiography in verse:

“He thought he saw an Argument
    That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
    A Bar of Mottled Soap.
‘A fact so dread’, he faintly said,
    ‘Extinguishes all hope!’”  (SBC, ch. 20)

Or when the Professor describes the famous 1:1 scale map:

“We very soon got to six yards to the mile.  Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile.  And then came the grandest idea of all!  We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight!  So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”  (SBC, ch. 11)

That map is Carroll’s invention, yes?  I always thought it was; now I have seen it with my own eyes.

Some of the transitions between the “worlds” of the novel are uncanny and surprising.  The puns are incessant and destabilizing, actively interfering with the movement of the plot (I am listing good things about the book now – this is a plus, the element that led James Joyce to wonder if it would be possible to make every single word a pun).  Characters transform in lively and unpredictable ways.  The inset sentimental novel I found so irritating is pretty clearly both what it seems but also a parody of its genre.

“It are ever so many other things,” said Bruno. “Aren’t it, Sylvie?” (SBC, ch. 11)

Bruno’s insufferable cutesy-poo baby talk is another difficulty.  Oh well.  He is right, he has hit the Sylvie and Bruno novels smack on the snout.  I don’t know what they are.

That is impossible, that’s all nonsense! - a look at Dostoevsky's The Idiot - "Did you receive my hedgehog?"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, serialized from 1868 to 1869.  I want to start with two scenes, so mostly just some quotes today.  David McDuff’s 2004 Penguin translation is doing the hard work.

The plot:  Prince Myshkin, young, saint-like, even Christ-like, returns to Russia after a long illness, where he accidentally falls into someone else’s preposterous soap opera.  Myshkin’s superhuman insight into character and limitless capacity for forgiveness affect some of the soap operatives positively and drives others to madness.  Much of the story somehow becomes a contest between two women who want to marry the prince, or do not want to marry him, depending on where each woman is in her wild mood swing.

The Idiot is a novel of great scenes, but the plot is not so good.  Crime and Punishment is a much better thriller.

Aglaya is one of the women, the saner of the two, who sometimes wants to marry the prince  In this scene we are nearing the end of the novel:

It was at this very moment that Aglaya entered calmly and grandly, made a ceremonious bow to the prince, and solemnly took the most conspicuous place at the circular table.  She gave the prince a questioning look.  Everyone realized that the resolution of all their bewilderment had begun.

‘Did you receive my hedgehog?’ she asked firmly and almost angrily.

‘Yes, I did,’ replied the prince, blushing and with sinking heart.  (IV, 5)

I love that “bewilderment” line.  Dostoevsky’s fiction is full of lines that sound like self-commentary.  Be honest, after that line, what were you expecting?  “Did you receive my hedgehog?”  Oh, you were?  Well, I was not, even though the hedgehog had been delivered only four pages earlier.  A boy, Kolya, had bought a hedgehog and an axe from someone on the street who happened to have those two items in his possession.  Aglaya buys the hedgehog in order to send it to the prince.  No idea where the axe goes.  

Kolya agreed with delight, and promised that he would deliver it, but at once began to ply her with questions in return:  ‘What does a present of a hedgehog mean?’

Good question.  I will someday answer it, in what will become my best-known essay on Russian literature, "The Hedgehog and the Axe."

Now this is from hundreds of pages earlier.  Prince Myshkin is interrogating Lebedev, a toady, about some plotty stuff:

Lebedev began to cringe and grovel.

‘I’ve waited all day to ask you one question; just answer with the truth for once in your life, right from the first word: did you play any part in that carriage business yesterday?’

Lebedev again began to cringe, giggled, rubbed his hands, and even, at last sneezed several times, but was still unable to bring himself to say anything.

‘I see that you did.’  (Pt. II, Ch. 11)

And Lebedev is one of the novel’s sane characters!  Cunning, thoroughly selfish, and capricious, but rational.  The argument ends thusly (it is important to remember that the prince is almost inhumanly meek and forgiving):

‘Be quiet, be quiet!’ the prince shouted violently, red all over with indignation, and perhaps also with shame.  ‘That is impossible, that’s all nonsense!  You’ve thought it all up yourself, or madmen like you have.’

This is why I was reading and writing about nonsense – to prepare me for a week or so of writing about Dostoevsky.

Conventional signs and the absolute blank - some nonsense aesthetics (guest starring Swinburne and Morgenstern)

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
    Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
    A map they could all understand.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
    Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
    “They are merely conventional signs!
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
    But we’ve got out brave captain to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “That he’s bought us the best –
    A perfect and absolute blank!”   (Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark,” Fit the Second)

The nonsense poems I have been reading are not so far, looked at kind of cockeyed, from the early modern descendants of Petrarch I was writing about last week.  Elizabethan sonneteers were working under narrow constraints, rewarded for ingenuity as much as, or more than, meaning.  It was at times hard to see the difference between dozens of tiny variations on an entirely conventional idea and the absence of any idea at all.  “They are merely conventional signs!”

The two orders of poetry also share a common ancestor in the classical pastoral poetry tradition.  Thus ends today’s sermon in literary history.

It is not that nonsense and its cousins are not meaningful.  The Alice novels are as deep as I want them to be, rare examples of fiction with something to say about metaphysics.  But there is a side of nonsense that directly addresses the possibility of meaning, that tries to see how close it can get to the blank map.

I have been paging through The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse (1979), ed. Geoffrey Grigson, where I came upon a cluster of Christian Morgenstern poems including “The Great Lalulā,” of which I present the final stanza:

Simarar kos malzpempu
silzuzanlunkrei (;)!
Marjomar dos: Quempu Lempu
Siri Suri Sei [ ]!
Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!

Well said.  All punctuation in the original.  Morgenstern is often described as untranslatable for some reason.

The poem is selective in its chaos, keeping rhyme, meter, sound and, what else, alphabetical characters, although I bet it was originally published in Gothic script.

Algernon Swinburne achieves a similar effect with English words and grammar in “Nephelidia”:

From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn
        through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
    Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that
        flickers with fear of the flies as they float,

A page and a half of this, frankly very hard to read for more than a few lines at a time.  It constantly seems to approach meaning, but that is hardly the point.  Wonderful stuff, and just a smidge over from the way Swinburne often sounds in his serious – I hate to call them serious – poems.

Little children seem to figure all of this out without any help, the fun of turning everything, including language, upside down.  In a comment to yesterday’s Carroll post, Jenny from Reading the End praised the sheer joyfulness of Carroll’s nonsense.  He shares that sense of play with all of the nonsense and light verse writers, the delight created by the discovery that an unrelated jumble of words, placed together in a particular order, have turned into something marvelous even without meaning a thing, which is itself meaningful.  And thus I have invented aesthetics.  A little late.

Lewis Carroll's nonsense - Exactly and perfectly true.

Lewis Carroll is the hard one for me to write about.  When I read the Alice books last year, I had no interest in writing about them, although I had no qualms about using out of context quotations to support unrelated arguments.  And I have called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the Greatest Novel of the 19th Century, and sometimes even meant it.  It is a defensible position.

I have also called the “Pig and Pepper” chapter the high point of Western civilization, and the “Turtle Soup” poem from the “Lobster-Quadrille” chapter the greatest of the century, or of the English language, maybe, but I was joking.

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
Soo---oop of the e---e---evening,
    Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Etc.  Joking to a certain extent.  “’Chorus again!’ cried the Gryphon,” who has critical judgment much like mine.

Adam Roberts, novelist and Victorianist, has been teaching the Alice books.  He said he had trouble finding critical distance from them.  He overcame the problem with a series of essays so good I dread linking to them, since few will return here.  The one where Roberts deduces the shape of the missing third book of the Alice trilogy, Carroll’s Paradiso, using the principle that two points form a line, is something to see.

Carroll’s nonsense is so sensible.  It often has rules and logic, just the wrong rules and bad logic.  Thus the incessant riddles, puzzles, and even math.  Mathematics is to Carroll both utterly logical and a marvelous game.

As one Snark hunter explains to another:

“Taking Three as the subject to reason about –
    A convenient number to state –
We add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out
    By One Thousand diminished by Eight.
The result we proceed to divide, as you see,
    By Nine Hundred and Ninety and Two:
Then subtract Seventeen, and the number must be
   Exactly and perfectly true.”  (“The Hunting of the Snark” (1876), Fit the Fifth)

Or 3 = 3, or 3 x (a set of calculations equaling 1) = 3.  But in verse.  Every word is true, the calculation accurate, yet the result is nonsense.  Logical, accurate nonsense.

Miguel of St. Orberose wrote about, and posted generous excerpts from, Carroll’s 1869 book Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, a collection more like Gilbert than Lear, satirizing ghost stories, amateur photography (in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” measure for some reason), and fashionable poetic attitudes.  In “Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur,” a novice poet asks advice of an expert:

“For instance, if I wished, Sir
    Of mutton-pies to tell,
Should I say ‘dreams of fleecy flocks
    Pent in a wheaten cell’?”
“Why, yes,” the old man said: “that phrase
    Would answer very well.”

In other words, plenty of nonsense lies elsewhere, in the poems of other people, not Carroll.

Chorus again!  Everyone, sing along!  Careful with ending of the third line.

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
    Beau---ootiful Soo---oop!
Soo---oop of the e---e---evening,
    Beautiful, beauti---FUL SOUP!

And I am a doggerel bard - some Bab Ballads

W. S. Gilbert hardly used any nonsense at all, so it is entirely appropriate to include him in Nonsense Week.  He used it once in a while.

Of Agib, who amid Tartaric scenes,
Wrote a lot of ballet-music in his teens:
    His gentle spirit rolls
    In the melody of souls –
Which is pretty, but I don’t know what it means.  (“The Story of Prince Agib”)

For many people that describes poetry, not just its nonsensical version, but never mind that.

In the early 1860s, young Gilbert discovered a talent for light verse and crude illustration, and thus became a regular contributor to a magazine with the oppressive title of Fun.  His poems were collected as The Bab Ballads in 1869 and rearranged and reprinted many times.  This is all over a decade before he began his theatrical collaborations with the composer Arthur Sullivan.  Long before he was part of Gilbert and Sullivan, he was Bab.

Gilbert was more of a satirist than Edward Lear, a creator of characters who were types and behaved ridiculously yet within their social role.

"Your mind is not as blank
    As that of HOPLEY PORTER,
Who holds a curate's rank
    At Assesmilk-cum-Worter.

"He plays the airy flute,
    And looks depressed and blighted,
Doves round about him 'toot,'
    And lambkins dance delighted.

"He labours more than you
    At worsted work, and frames it;
In old maids' albums, too,
    Sticks seaweed — yes, and names it!"  (“The Rival Curates”)

The curates are rivals in mildness.  I can imagine the Monty Python game show – “Welcome to England’s Mildest Curate.”  Gilbert  blows up his types to absurd proportions.  He is not so interested in wordplay.  I am comparing him to Thomas Hood, the previous generation’s master of light verse, who used far more puns and punchlines than Gilbert, more jokes.  Although Hood had his share, Gilbert is more violent, with lots of jolly beheadings, murders, and cannibalism.

Last year, during Ghost Week, I put up a bit of a Gilbert poem, “The Ghost to His Ladye Love,” that I thought was splendidly imaginative.  Few reach that height.  “Emily, John, James, and I: A Derby Legend” comes close, ordinary in content but ingenious in form:

EMILY JANE was a nursery maid –
    JAMES was a bold Life Guard,
And JOHN was a constable, poorly paid
    (And I am a doggerel bard).

A very good girl was EMILY JANE,
    JIMMY was good and true,
And JOHN was a very good man in the main
   (And I am a good man, too).

Rivals for EMMIE were JOHNNY and JAMES,
    Though EMILY liked them both;
She couldn't tell which had the strongest claims
    (And I couldn't take my oath).

Every fourth line is a parenthetical from the narrator, the most intrusive of all intrusive narrators, who even intrudes on the action at a crucial moment.

Gilbert is a bit hard to excerpt, I realize to my regret, since his poems are almost all narrative and almost all a couple of pages long.  Much of the Fun, honestly, is just seeing how he turns this silly stuff into verse.

I have borrowed the illustrations from this Gilbert and Sullivan archive.  They are arranged as they struck my fancy, aside from the curate with the sheep.  My text is the complete, exhausting 1980 Belknap Press edition.

Some Edward Lear - When they screamed in the nest, he screamed out with the rest

César Aira makes a perfect transition to mid-Victorian nonsense.  Samples from the Golden Age of Nonsense.  Three authors – Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and W. S. Gilbert – are surely enough for a Golden Age.

I am using the word “nonsense” loosely.  Nonsense is only one of Carroll’s many modes, and Gilbert’s Bab Ballads are only rarely nonsensical.  Only Lear provides his nonsense uncut with satire or riddles.  Nonsense and nothing but.

Lear’s 1846 A Book of Nonsense, a collection of 112 illustrated limericks, one after the other, hypnotic and numbing consumed in bulk, stood by itself for 25 years, when in 1871 Lear published Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets – a no-nonsense title, isn’t it? – which was soon followed (1872 and 1877) by two more little books with similar contents.  More limericks, of course:

                There was an old person of Crowle,
                Who lived in the nest of an owl;
                When they screamed in the nest, he screamed out with the rest,
                That depressing old person of Crowle.

But also, thankfully, longer, varied poems like “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” a brilliant bit of nonsense cookery (“Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as fast as possible”), a couple of story-like texts, and the startling botanies:

                                                    Piggiawiggia Pyramidalis

I find the latter have, like the limericks, a cumulative effect.  I also find that I ask myself questions like “Why am I laughing at this?” and “Why is this funny?”  There is sometimes so little to Lear.  The Nonsense Cookery has recognizable jokes of an absurdist type.  The cartoons are obviously essential.  I can imagine that owlish fellow screaming, and his screams make him even more owlish, so I laugh.  Something like that.

Lear is a bit easier to dissect in prose.  A bit of "The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went around the World":

‘It does not quite look like a human being,’ said Violet, doubtfully; nor could they make out what it really was, till the Quangle-Wangle (who had previously been round the world), exclaimed softly in a loud voice, ‘It is the Co-operative Cauliflower!’

And so in truth it was, and they soon found that what they had taken for an immense wig was in reality the top of the cauliflower, and that he had no feet at all, being able to walk tolerably well with a fluctuating and graceful movement on a single cabbage stalk, an accomplishment which naturally saved him the expense of stockings and shoes.

I will defer on jokes, but it seems that the last one does nothing, a cute joke for the kiddies, but that otherwise we see three fundamental types of nonsense here.  The reversal “softly in a loud voice” is an undermining of the meaning of words.  The business about using the stalk to walk misapplies rhetoric.  And the Co-operative Cauliflower itself is freely inventive, but a peculiar kind of invention where the game is to defeat every imaginative expectation of the reader, no matter how unreasonable.

As you can see, my goal for the week is to kill all of the fun in these writers.

The episode ends, by the way, with a remarkable and sublime sight.  The Cauliflower “suddenly arose, and in a somewhat plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun…  he finally disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific sand.”

I borrowed Lear’s illustrations from the fluctuating and graceful nonsenselit.org.

Perhaps the purest ramble I have ever posted - travel plans, reading plans, bad plans

I have to disappear for a few more days – back Thursday.  I had planned to write a book review-like post today, but that’s bad planning, isn’t it?  Nearly a week with some random book review topping Wuthering Expectations.  I should instead feature something that strengthens the brand.  If only I knew what that something was.

The book was Demolishing Nisard (2006) by Eric Chevillard, a short novel full of goofy vitriol and revenge.  The narrator hates a particular critic and blames him for everything wrong in literature, and life – the critic’s life, all life.  Traffic accidents, crime, you name it.  “He uses his phone on trains” (55).  That the critic, Désiré Nisard, has been dead for 120 years, is a minor detail for the narrator.

The best reason not to review the book is that Trevor Mookse Gripes did such a fine job in April, so what is the point.  What does he say – “one of the funniest books I’ve read” – I don’t go that far, but parts are awfully funny.  Vitriolic Thomas Bernhard is funnier.  “The book’s existential conundrum: in hating Nisard, the narrator brings on his own Nisardification” – now that is just right.

The only real point I want to make here is directed at the PR person at Dalkey Archive:  because of Trevor’s review I bought a copy of Demolishing Nisard with my own money, so keep sending him books.  He has generated at least one sale.

The Chevillard novel was part of the recent Frenchification of my reading.  I am going to France in July so I am reading about France, even though the books have nothing to do with where I am going.  Not only am I not going to Jersey, the setting of Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea, but I am going about as far from it as I can get and still be in France.  And strictly, even loosely, speaking, Jersey is not even in France.  So why I am reading the novel?  General cultural seepage, I guess.  Also, it is awesome, although people uninterested in unusual parts of the world should skip the long introduction, and then also skip much of the rest.

The Francis Steegmuller book Flaubert and Madame Bovary is outstanding but mostly set in Normandy.  I am working up to a Madame Bovary festival.  Flaubert is a sort of household god at Wuthering Expectations, so it should be fun to explain what I mean by that.  Has everyone read Prof. Maitzen’s Flaubert posts?  The second one, Bovary vs. Middlemarch is especially idea-rich.

The Janet Lewis novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, is set near my destination, so it qualifies as more direct research.  Now there’s an idea – I should end with an open-ended question, allowing thoughtful strangers to do my research for me.  I have read that blog posts should end with questions.  How about this one:

What do you recommend I do in Languedoc-Rousillon, which is where I will be?  Eat cassoulet?  Yes.  What else?  And what should I read?

A year of good .... reading AHEAD - revisiting my New Year's resolutions

Happy 2012!  Blogging vacations stave in my writing.  Last year, to cooper the writing barrel,* I uncharacteristically resorted to New Year’s resolutions.  What would happen if I revisited them?

1. “I vow not to write bad prose this year.”  What was I thinking.  See two resolutions down for the grisly results.  I remind myself that resolutions are aspirational.  I did what I could.  This resolution is promoted to 2012.

2.  “I’ll read Middlemarch.”  And I did.  Tess of the d’Urbervilles advances to the #1 pre-20th century British literature most-famous-book-I-ain’t-read slot.  For some reason, this does not irritate me as much as not knowing Middlemarch; nor does my lack of significant Zola, or the Henry James perplex.  The resolution served its purpose and is retired.

3.  “Finish fewer books.”  Meaning not what I wrote but:  abandon more books without finishing them.  Accomplished, although a disadvantage of the practice is that I have trouble remembering exactly which books I abandoned.  My memory palace is built for completed books, it seems.  Promote this one, too.  Abandon even more books.  Abandon even better books.

4.  “Write about music more.”  Jane Austen’s songbook.  A passion based on Hans Christian Andersen.  Massenet’s Thaïs.  I actually wrote, and deleted, an entire additional piece about Thaïs, tracing the musical motifs, which was valuable to write and deadly to read.

I wonder why more people do not write posts like these.  The key, for someone like me with only basic technical knowledge, is to write about music that has a text.  The connections between opera and literature are particularly rich.  Opera is just theater.

So more of this, more, more!  Something about Richard Wagner, maybe, or Charles Ives, The Concord Sonata, say.  What else would be fun?

5.  “Write shorter posts.”  Another triumph!  This is turning into one of those humblebrags.  I have been aiming at 500 words and staying under 600 when I want.  Going over when I want, too, but that has been rare.

The great advantage of writing a serial is that I can advance the beginning of an idea and receive feedback, spurs, corrections, and taunts, often from comments, always from myself, which may well improve the next day’s writing.  One decent idea at a time, that’s enough writing for a sitting.

Last year’s resolutions post was exactly 500 words long (that is just a regular old brag).

Tomorrow: plans.

The Federal Art Project poster atop the post is borrowed from the Library of Congress.  It depicts, with uncanny precision, the way I bring books home from my own library during the long winter.

*  This metaphor is terrible.  The attempt to use a more original, vivid verb in place of “hurt” is not by itself so bad, but once I had used it I felt the need to continue the conceit, because I had now conjured the smashed barrel, and, well, the wreckage you can see for yourself.  And thus, I demonstrate what vacations do to my writing.

Ooh! What a nasty word. Pa Ubu, you’re a dirty old man. - the first word of Ubu

Act One, Scene One

PA UBU, MA UBU

PA UBU.  Merdre.*

Now, what would have happened one hundred and fifteen years ago, at the 1896 première of Alfred Jarry’s  Ubu Roi, after this utterance of the play’s first word, is a fifteen minute theater riot.  In the context of the pandemonium at the 1830 debut of  Victor Hugo’s 1830 Hernani, caused by his violation of French Classical prosody, such as misplacing the caesura in the opening line, or the fooforaw over Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring in 1913, I am not convinced that fifteen minutes is particularly long for a French theatrical riot.

Still, some patrons fled, others whistled, and still more punched each other.  The avant-gardists drowned out the philistines (decide for yourself who is which).  The Ubuistes in attendance included Stéphane Mallarmé, Edmond Rostand (the slightly more conventional Cyrano de Bergerac would debut the next year), and, most amusingly to me, William Butler Yeats, who did not understand French well but enthusiastically “shouted for the play,” but later, in his hotel room, mourned the death of literature – “what more is possible?  After us the Savage God.”**

All of this fuss is adorable.  Am I right?  Screaming and hooting over a single scatological crumb, a speck of not-quite-profanity, a malformed cousin of “Shoot” and “Sugar” and “Wednesday.”***  I have seen, or perhaps, since I can’t remember any details, only heard about movies where the first ten or twenty words are profane, a gesture that I suppose is meant to shock an audience numbed by Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet.  Does it ever actually work?  Maybe on television, where I still occasionally feel that jolt – you can say that on broadcast TV now?  But on screen or stage, please.  So the genuine outrage and horror of century-past French theater-goers – ones who specifically chose to attend an avant garde play – delights me.

Only a few years later, Dadaist theaters had to distribute rotten fruit to their patrons, had to demand that they be outraged, had to actively facilitate their anger.  Yeats was right  - Jarry’s jape had changed the world, just a little bit.

That’s the first word of Ubu Roi.  Tomorrow, the second word.  That’s a joke.  Here are versions of the second and third lines:

MA UBU.  Ooh! What a nasty word.  Pa Ubu, you’re a dirty old man.

PA UBU.  Watch out I don’t bash yer nut in, Ma Ubu!  (tr. Connolly and Taylor)

McLeish has Ma Ubu simply say “Pa Ubu, language,” which is a better gag for an actual performance, if “better” has any meaning in Ubu-world.

What has bibliographing nicole been writing?  Oh, she’s going after the first word as well.  It’s irresistible, as a part of theater history, too important to ignore.  As literature, eh, thin stuff.  Nicole presents a passage that suggests there is more to Jarry than shocking the bourgeoisie.  Oh, there is, there is.

Update: Look at what In Lieu of a Field Guide does with the first word - now that's a good pummeling - and then it just keeps going.

* “Pschitt!” as translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor, and note their unnecessarily punchy exclamation point; “Shikt.” per Kenneth McLeish.  Translating Ubu Roi is fun, fun, fun.

**  I am pilfering Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1955), particularly pages 161-4.  The quotations from Yeats, and his entire paragraph on the performance, are on p. 163, and can also be found in the second volume of his Autobiography, the 1922 The Trembling of the Veil.

***  “Miercoles” in Spanish, a polite, and hilarious, substitute for “merde.”

The Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity

1.  bibliographing nicole, host of last year’s historic, blog-shattering Clarel readalong has thrown down a metaphorical gauntlet, demanding a Challenge!

2.  Roberto Bolaño obsessives have circulated lists of his favorite books, for example this list, where Bolaño expresses his affection for “Anything Ubu by Jarry,” which may well have been a translator’s misunderstanding.  Bolaño might be referring to an actual book, Tout Ubu, a French omnibus of Ubu.

3.  This step is extremely important, but I have forgotten what it is.  I will consult my notes, which are unfortunately poorly organized, and insert the missing information later.

4. The result:

All are invited to consult their consciences and read Anything Ubu, or carried away by their newly awakened and insatiable appetite, Everything Ubu.

What is Ubu?  The first great character of the 20th century.  The destruction of literature.  The beginning of Modernism.  A travesty.  A nightmare.  A moderately amusing jape.  Two authentic portraits of Papa Ubu have been ensconced at the head of Wuthering Expectations.  A sample, Act 4, Scene 5 of Ubu Cocu, complete:

The same, MEMNON showing his head.

MEMNON’S HEAD:  It’s not functioning at all, it’s broken down.  What a dirty business, like your braining machine.  I’m not afraid of that.  It all proves my point – there’s nothing like a sewage barrel.  In falling in and popping out again you’ve done more than half the work for me.

PA UBU:  By my green candle, I’ll gouge your eyes out – barrel, pumpkin, refuse of humanity! (He shove him back, then shuts himself in the lavatory recess with The Palcontents.)

“It all proves my point” – that is my new motto.  Expect me to deploy it in your comments soon.  Cyril Connolly is the “translator” here.  Many translations and adaptation of the Ubu plays exist.  The plays are:

Ubu Roi, or King Ubu, or whatever you want to call it.  Written and performed, actually performed in an actual Paris theater, by human actors, in 1896.

Ubu Cocu, or Ubu Cuckolded.  Published in 1943.  Jarry was long dead.

Ubu Enchaîné, or Ubu Enslaved, published in 1900, I think.  Who cares.

In some sense, this is the proper order of the plays, and a proper reader would want to start with Ubu Roi.  The proper reader would also end with Ubu Roi, probably before he gets to the bottom of the first page, and “sense” is really the wrong word to use in the context of Ubu, so forget all of that.

These three plays make up The Ubu Cycle but are not the end of Ubu.  I have only alluded to the fact that these plays have an author, Alfred Jarry, who is visible, in Picasso’s portrait, peeping over the Challenged! button up above.  Jarry’s writings outside of the plays are suffused with Ubu, soaked in Ubu, dripping with Ubu.  Jarry, in what for the sake of argument I will call “real life,” actually became Ubu.  For legal and ethical reasons, I urge participants in the Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity not to actually become Ubu.

Nicole and I invite one and all to defile their blogs by sampling Anything Ubu.  We think we will begin the disembraining (or, to use an antiquated technical term, “discussion”) in the last week of June.  Bolañistos and Bolañistas are nuts not to join in.  Other readers – see you in July!  Or August – the Ubu stink may be gone by then.

Wuthering Expectations resolutions for the new year

Since, on my vacation, I seem to have forgotten how to do whatever it is I normally do here, I will have to resort to something else.  It’s a new year, yes?  Happy 2011!

My resolutions:

1.  “I vow not to write bad prose this year.”  Thus swears Prof. Mayhew at ¡Bemsha Swing!  No one expects resolutions to actually be kept, right?  So I, too, vow etc.

2.  I’ll read Middlemarch.  It tops my mental Should-Have-Read list.  Eliot and Les Misérables alone would be a perfectly satisfying pair, come the end of 2011, to check off the list.  The whole idea of the list is absurd.  The actual, secret, point of this resolution is to murder the impulse to write an entire dull post about my Humiliation checklist.  Who cares?  Impulse: strangled.

3.  Finish fewer books.  Dr. Johnson, who read more than anyone, was pressed about a new book.  Had he read it through?  “No, Sir, do YOU read books through?”*  Johnson was correct.  You are perhaps thinking of all of the marvelous books that it would be a crying shame not to enjoy from beginning to end and then back to the beginning.  Yes, yes.  But what about all of the other books?  I’m currently reading a book I won’t finish.  Or that I will finish, without having read it through.  A start.

4.  Write about music more.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the trip recorded in the Italian Notebooks, makes use of a standard guidebook (“Murray”) that is packed with Byron’s poetry.  Every line of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describing actual locations in Italy or elsewhere is, in the guidebook, evaluated against the real thing.  Poor Hawthorne, perfectly aware of the idiocy of the exercise, cannot help but do the same, except that he is comparing the view before his eyes not just to Byron, but also to Murray and to Byron-in-Murray.

More or less simultaneously, I was discovering all sorts of curious traces of Byron in Emily Dickinson’s poems.  All of this somehow led me to repeated spins of Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy (1834), and a projected post or posts about all of the fascinating connections between the music and the various texts.  I would love to read those posts, but I guess I did not want, or know how, to write them.

One three year old post about Robert Schumann; that’s Wuthering Expectations and music.  I suspect this is less a resolution to write more than a reverie about a road not traveled.  But who knows.  Maybe I’ll think of something.

5.  Write shorter posts.  I seem to have found a comfort level in the vicinity of 600 to 750 words, which is too long for a blog post.  No, sorry, not your blog posts.  Those are perfect as they are.  Can’t wait for the next one.  Mine are too long.  Time to put ‘em in the vise, give ‘em a good squeeze.  Time to end this one.

*  James Boswell, Life of Johnson, somewhere in April 1773.

Edward Lear - He purchases pancakes and lotion

There was an Old Man of Quebec,
A beetle ran over his neck;
But he cried, 'With a needle,
I'll slay you, O beadle!'
That angry Old Man of Quebec.

This poem is from Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense (1846/1861). I pilfered the image from the remarkable nonsenselit.org, where all of Lear's nonsense is easily available.

What's a person to make of a poem like this? There's hardly anything there. Context might help. The Penguin Book of English Verse contains three bits of nonsense (e.g., "There was an old man with a beard") stuffed between Robert Browning and Emily Brontë. No, that's not much help.

Reading A Book of Nonsense as a whole increases the strangeness of the limericks. There are 112 of them, two to a page (so one sees four at a time), all with identical meter and rhymes, most, as we see here, repeating a place name for two of the three rhyme words. Each is accompanied by a cartoon, quality ranging from crude to pretty crude.

Some readers might find this monotonous. In Lear's later nonsense books he includes more varied fare - for example "The Owl and the Pussycat" or the nonsense alphabets - as well as more limericks. But in A Book of Nonsense they just come at you. There's no relief.


There was an Old Person of Bangor,
Whose face was distorted with anger!
He tore off his boots, and subsisted on roots,
That irascible Person of Bangor.

So what I mean is, it's a wonderful book. There is no "understand" here. Just delight, or shock, or misfiring synapses. Or something else, who knows?

The title tag is from the "Self-Portrait of the Laureate of Nonsense," something more like a recognizably great poem:

He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

This is hardly even the best stanza. I could really go for a chocolate shrimp right now. Off to the mill!