Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
....Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
....Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
....And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
........Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
............But here there is no light,
....Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
........Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

--from Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats

ND: Actually I wanted to get closer to Fitzgerald’s style really...... I don’t mean to suggest some kind of transfer of technique, more like ‘what does he make you realise or see about writing or life?’ ‘What does he make you more true to?’ A conscience trues you somehow, straightens something out in the heart or the head--or it complicates you in a useful way. On the theme of conscience though, what do you think Keats does for Fitzgerald?

CJ: It’s a good question....... Fitzgerald obviously loved the poetry. The choice of Tender is the Night as a title for the big novel, is, as the academics would say, no accident. Already there is a lovely start to the line. Obviously the cadences of Keats, especially the Odes, are important. He had a sense that the Odes are beautifully cadenced. Above all they’re prose constructions on a high level. They’re prose constructions that are poetically arranged, poetically charged, but the argument is clear throughout, as Fitzgerald’s argument always was. It’s not so much that he decorates but that all the decoration contributes to the architecture. Fitzgerald’s prose is poetic in that sense and he copied a lot of that from Keats and the other poets....

As far as I can see, there is a shared smoothness of style. And I’m not attempting to suggest that Fitzgerald learned that from Keats, more that there’s an attraction to Keats because Keats talks that way naturally and so does Fitzgerald. But it’s not only smoothness, there’s also that love of sensual excess...... Both Keats and Fitzgerald are great at leading you to an abyss of feeling, only to demonstrate that the feeling is beyond anyone’s reach. Porphyro and Gatsby are left helpless when faced with these feelings, and so are we. But just in terms of style really, the way things melt, that melting, dissolving thing. That’s one of the key things that struck me when reading Gatsby anyway. It’s so fluid in the way that Keats is.

[from Talking About F. Scott Fitzgerald at ClifeJames.com]

Fitzgerald begins his last, and possibly best, novel, Tender is the Night on the veneered shores of the Cote d'Azur, where we meet a prideful psychiatrist named Dick Diver, his exotic and lovely wife, Nicole, and a budding 18 year old actress named Rosemary Hoyt, currently touring around Europe with her mother after the grand success of her first major movie production.

What could be more refined and elegant than the mingling of a man of accomplished stature with two beautiful women and one of the bejeweled crowns of Europe? When considering that the time is after World War I and just before the rise of Hitler, that Nicole was a psychiatric patient of Dick’s in her late teens and Rosemary, at this point in her life, only comprehends the world at the level of its glamorized exterior, a lot more.

Dick Diver plays the penultimate insecure Alpha male who’s stature it seems is only built up for the purpose of others finding benefit from watching it collapse as a result of top heavy hubris. Nicole, who when initially met by Dick, was a traumatized young woman and largely living within a sanatorium. Such a helpless young thing, greatly in need of Dick Diver’s guiding hand. Only, when she finally grows into a fully integrated person, a new dawn sheds light on the sacrifice that was made from living under an embrace that, while compassionate, was limited to protection only, “It had been a hard lesson but she had learned it. Either you think– or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.” Not unlike Nazi Germany.

So while Nicole was constructing an identity separate from the traumas of her past, it would only be inevitable that Dick would find himself not only removed to irrelevancy, but also possibly realizing that to give love also means to be loved, which Nicole was incapable of doing because of her self-perception of helplessness. Hence, enter Rosemary. But while it is questionable if Dick ever learned that one can’t give love without equally receiving love, he still suffered the ramification for not doing so. Dick was smart enough to recognize that the much younger and inexperienced Rosemary was not available for a long lasting relationship, but was without insight for his subsequent move towards even unhealthier means for feeding his collapsed ego– hard drink, half-baked career aspirations, social contentiousness, and even blunt physical aggression.

In the end, while the reader watches Diver collapse further into male-impotence, the reader also witnesses the transformation of Nicole and Rosemary into two individuals that understand the importance of taking command of oneself in order to establish a healthy relation with the world and others. In contrast, Dick always wanted to command the world rather than himself, initially under the self delusion of altruism and later, through brute force.

While my tone in this post is a bit flip, Fitzgerald consistently maintains an empathetic relation with his characters. Dick Diver was tragically limited to the social trappings of the male ego. While you don’t feel sad for him, you do pity him. Send in the chorus. Conversely, Nicole could be seen as being at fault as well. At what point could she have stopped playing the helpless maiden and taken control of herself in order to put an end to the resentment against Dick? To give love rather than be an empty and porous receptacle for love? For Rosemary, well, she was fortunate to begin compounding some valuable life experience, as you will if you also read Tender is the Night.

I'll be back in a week............

[Navaro Rapids; Ando Hiroshige]

"And now here's the thing. It takes a time like this for you to find out how sore your heart has been, and, moreover, all the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moiling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable to get anywhere, to obtain justice or have requital, and therefore in yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again. All by yourself? Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast."

--Saul Bellow (via whiskey river)

How does one know that the ending to Invitation to a Beheading is actually positive rather than negative? One could always think that if they want, but I found the book too abstract for Nabokov to intend a negative ending. What would be the point? Typically when a book ends with a downturn, there's a specific reason for this. But there is none in Invitation to a Beheading, instead there's too much momentum in Cincinnatus' internal development to view is as anything but personal growth and triumph.

With that said, there's an interesting article in the September edition of Harper's, The War on Unhappiness: Goodbye Freud, Hello Positive Thinking, which advises of a new trend in therapeutic psychology that downplays the theories of the subconscious and instead focuses upon conscious restructuring of patients' thinking processes. Its an approach that some claim is working wonders in the "particularly challenging glitch" of PTSD sufferers and will begin to really progress psychology forward in its rate of success and efficiency:

Aaron Beck discoverd that the dreams of depressed patients, contrary to Freud's theories about dreams and depression, were not filled with images of repressed anger. Instead, they contained themes of the dreamers' conscious lives: loss, defeat, rejection, and abondonment. It appeared, Beck said, that there wasn't as much of a gap between conscious and unconscious as Freud claimed, and, even more revolutionary, that the conscious mind, especially our thoughts, shaped our experience. Our lives, in other words, are neither good nor bad but thinking makes them so.

Beck concluded that Freud got us wrong. We aren't hopelessly complex or helplessly in thrall to the chaotic forces of the unconscious, nor do we need to settle for unhappiness, common or otherwise. In keeping with emergent congnitive scince that likended the mind to a computer, [cognitive behavioral therapy] attributed our misery to faulty information processing. We possess the potential to see the world as it is, to master ou experience, and to triumph over setback, if only we learn to think right. Identify and repair the glitches in our operating system-- dysfunctinal thoughts that arise automatically from our unduly negative core beliefs-- and we will find no adversity we cannot meet with resilience.

While cognitive behavioral therapy has been around for some time, its movement to "positive psychology" is the innovation:

Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association and the inventor of positive psychology, is giving us the good news..... At the beginning he was content to reorient psychology away from Freud's focus on pathology and towards a "science of happiness", but he recently decided that his goals were too modest. "I had thought that positive psychology was about happiness, but it is not," he says. "Positive psychology is about well-being," which is "what people choose to do when they are not oppressed, when they choose freely," Well-being comprises not only the the positive emotion we call happiness, but also meaning ("using what's best inside you to belong to and serve something bigger than you are"), positive relationships, and "achievment, mastery, and competence." Well-being on a wide scale results in a state Seligman calls "human flourishing". (emphasis added)

It seemed as thought at any moment, in the course of his movements about the limited space of the haphazardly invented cell, Cincinnatus would step in such a way as to slip naturally and effortlessly through some chink of the air into its unknown coulisses to disappear there with the same easy smoothness with which the flashing reflection of a rotated mirror moves across every object in the room and suddenly vanishes, as if beyond the air, in some new depth of ether. At the same time, everything about him breathed with a delicate, drowsy, but in reality exceptionally strong, ardent and independent life: his veins of the bluest blue pulsated; crystal-clear saliva moistened his lips; the skin quivered on his cheeks and his forehead, which was edged with dissolved light...and all this so teased the observer as to make him long to tear apart, cut to shreds, destroy utterly this brazen elusive flesh, and all that it implied and expressed, all that impossible, dazzling freedom--

--from 'Invitation to a Beheading'; Vladimir Nabokov

I had not been familiar with Vladimir Nabokov’s contribution to prison literature, as done with his shorter 1938 novel, Invitation to Beheading. In a fictional country with a gothic castle that works as the state’s prison ward, Cincinnatus C. finds himself arrested for the unspeakable crime of “gnostical turpitude”, a crime punishable by good ol’ fashion chop chop--- beheading with a fancy axe. While imprisoned and waiting for the unknown date of his execution, Cincinnatus struggles to come to terms with his life and future death through the act of writing but while also confronting the surrealism of the prison ward and his own imaginative escapades, together invoking a world comparable to Magritte, MC Escher and Lewis Carroll.

It’s a fun book. Not necessarily one that I have a lot to say about though because part of the enjoyment is in each reader’s personal interpretation of Nabokov’s parable. Included with these might be tensions between individuality and society’s pressures to assimilate, a comment on the absurdity of capital punishment, an example of existential enlightenment, the visionary role that must be taken to become an artist, a display of the dangers inherent to statist mentality or the ultimate importance of self will and conscious choice to live a fulfilling life.

While final understanding is to be personal, there are a few things are worth pointing out. First, Cincinnatus is face to face with impending death, which results in an intense inner life to come to terms with the inevitable. In comparison, the piffling concerns displayed by his visitors reveal their outward characters as comical and dream-like, a lack in substance to contrast the internal realism of Cincinnatus. Second, at the final moment of Cincinnatus’ execution, through the act of personal will, his executioners and the entirety of their world disappear. Cincinnatus walks out a free man. And don’t worry, I’m not giving away the ending at all because this is not a novel based on plot. Instead, it’s the stylistic tone and movement of events that lead up to Cincinnatus’ epiphany which create the unfolding experience of the book. Finally, as Cincinnatus moves closer to his final hour, a reader can’t help but share in what such an experience would be like, as is done in other books like Tale of Two Cities and In Cold Blood. As such, reading Invitation to a Beheading becomes an excellent memento mori, and certainly this would be an aspect common to all personal interpretations.

Invitation to a Beheading is by no means Nabokov’s finest work. But, along with his collection of short stories, it is an excellent recommendation to someone who might want to become familiar with Nabokov. Like a lot of people, I started with Lolita and only got about 70 pages into it. Instead it was his short stories that opened me to the dazzle of Nabokov’s synaesthetic language and the fantastical imagination that was always vailable to him, qualities which are both on display equally in Invitation to a Beheading. It should also be noted that Invitation to a Beheading has qualities that are very similar to Kafka’s The Trial, but Nabokov was adamant with his claims that he was not familiar with The Trial at the time of the book’s writing.

[engraving by Alexander Mair, 1605]

[Boy Looking At Mt. Fuji; Katsushika Hokusai]

from 'Three Times'; Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Taiwan)

Echo

Broken heart, you
timeless wonder.

What a small
place to be.

True, true
to life, to life.

--Robert Creeley

[Katsushika Hokusai]

In yesterday's post I neglected to directly mention one main subject for Norwegian Wood: mental illness. The reason for that is because its difficult to summarize without giving away some major turns in the story's development. Best for them to be revealed slowly. However, I'm going to pass along the section below because it is excellent advise for anyone who might be or has been in a close relationship with someone with mental health difficulties:

"What makes Naoko such a hard case for you?"

"Probably because I like her so much. I think my emotions get in the way and I can't see her clearly. I mean, I really like her. But aside from that, she has a bunch of different problems that are all tangled up, so its hard to unravel any one of them. It may take a very long time to undo them all, or something could trigger them to come unraveled all at once. It's kind of like that. Which is why I can't be sure about her."

She picked up the basketball again, twirled it in her hands, and bounced it on the ground.

"The most important thing is not to let yourself get impatient," Reiko said. "This is one more piece of advise I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to figure its going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time. Do you think you can do that?"

"I can try," I said.

"It may take a very long time, you know, and even then she may not recover completely. Have you thought about that?"

I nodded.

"Waiting is hard," she said, bouncing the ball. "Especially for someone your age. You just sit and wait for her to get better. Without deadlines or guarantees. Do you think you can do that? Do you love [her] that much?"

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is often seen as Haruki Murakami’s strongest effort because of it also being the most horrific, the atrocities of World War II haunting the first post war generation without any direct experience with the war. For Murkamai’s most surreal work, I would choose Kafka on the Shore as it explores, largely through the Oedipus myth, the archetypes that lay beneath violence and sexuality and how they effect such things as personal independence and identity, controlling personalities, group/individual conflicts, maturation and the constant interplay between our subjective understandings and the reality of the material world.

Both of these books are excellent and on equal par with one another. The one other book of Murakami’s that I would bring up to this level would be Norwegian Wood. On the surface, it’s a love story brimmed with burgeoning sexuality, and why it became Murakami’s breakthrough work (which I assume would have been with early twenty-somethings). However, while the main characters are college aged young adults, Norwegian Wood is a novel with incredible depth for any age as it explores such things as life long effects of childhood experiences, particularly with respect to tragic loss, commercialism’s move away from emotional investment towards treating everything (and everyone) as impersonal commodity, the natural conflict that exists in child/parent relationships, the lure safety (death) can have in an unsafe world (life), the importance of self accountability, the restorative qualities of the natural world.... the list goes on.

Of Murakami’s books, I would say that Norwegian Wood provides the most diverse cast of characters, and the development towards each is masterful. Typically, when I read a book with a host of side characters, inevitably some become more interesting to me than others. Not so with Norwegian Wood. All equally compelling and with aspects which both distinguish but also complement the others. Besides that, Norwegian Wood introduces us to Midori, and I don’t recall ever coming across a more vivid character in any book– where you know exactly how her voice sounds, what she looks like, her body language, complete even though none of this is directly described. More than once I found myself laughing out loud at her zestful acceptance of human behavior and with an emotional honesty to match. She’s also someone from who the main character, Toru (a slightly too plain fella in love with an emotionally traumatized childhood friend), learns a lot from. Metaphoric appropriateness: Midori was raised in a book store. I've never fallen in love with a fictional character, but I came close with this one.

Artistically, Norwegian Wood accomplishes with every page. There are number of references to other literary works, such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain when the setting moves to a secluded mental health ‘retreat’ in the mountains. There is also a reliance upon the metaphoric change in the transient seasons to develop the stories, a technique traditional to Asian art and poetry. As one would expect from the title, an ongoing soundtrack plays out with the constant name dropping of musicians. And, of course, there's Murakami’s trademark use of simple language to also reveal much deeper elements, those needing to be intuited and not capable of being pulled up onto the surface.

With all this said, Norwegian Wood was recently adpated for the screen, playing at TIFF in a few weeks. Not sure if I would want to see that or not. It would have to be fairly abstract to keep it from falling into a banal melodrama.

[Idyll; Giovanni Segantini, 1858-1899]

El aplauso/Applause
--Roberto Bolaño

She said she loved busy days. I looked at the sky. “Busy days”, as well as clouds and cats that slipped away between the bushes. Those flowers that I left in the field are my proof of love for you. Later I came back with a net to look for butterflies. The girl said: “disaster”, “horses”, “rockets” and patted me on the back. Her back spoke. Like crickets squealing in the afternoons of lonely villas. I closed my eyes, breaks squealed and the police quickly got out of their cars. “Don’t stop looking out the window.” Without speaking two of them reached the door and said “police”, the rest I could hardly hear. I closed my eyes, the boys died on the beach. Bodies full of holes. There’s something obscene in all of this, said the nurse when no one was listening. “Busy days, I looked at the sky, cats”, surely I won’t return to the open air, not with flowers, not with a net, nor with a damned book to pass the afternoon. The mouth opened but the author couldn’t hear anything. He thought in silence and later thought “it doesn’t exist”, “horses”, “a waning moon in August”. Cast in black. Someone applauded from the void. I suppose this is happiness.

(Translated by Tim Pilcher @ La Universidad Desconocida)

We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats. Everything that begins as comedy ends as a cryptographic exercise.

--from The Savage Detectives; Roberto Bolaño

From a Winter, 20002 issue of BOMB Magazine:

How does Roberto Bolaño, the master chemist, work?

RB .....when I write the only thing that interests me is the writing itself; that is, the form, the rhythm, the plot. I laugh at some attitudes, at some people, at certain activities and matters of importance, simply because when you’re faced with such nonsense, by such inflated egos, you have no choice but to laugh. All literature, in a certain sense, is political. I mean, first, it’s a reflection on politics, and second, it’s also a political program. The former alludes to reality—to the nightmare or benevolent dream that we call reality—which ends, in both cases, with death and the obliteration not only of literature, but of time. The latter refers to the small bits and pieces that survive, that persist; and to reason. Although we know, of course, that in the human scale of things, persistence is an illusion and reason is only a fragile railing that keeps us from plunging into the abyss. But don’t pay any attention to what I just said.....

If you belong to a tradition, what would you call it? Where are the roots of your genealogical tree, and in which direction do its branches grow?

RB The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write. For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing. Well, I’m probably wrong—it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise. But, as I said, I’m probably wrong. As to my idea of a canon..... I’d love to claim a literary past, a tradition, a very brief one, made up of only two or three writers (and maybe one single book), a dazzling tradition prone to amnesia, but on the one hand, I’m much too modest about my work and on the other, I’ve read too much (and too many books have made me happy) to indulge in such a ridiculous notion.

When we were young poets, teenagers, and shared the same city (Mexico City in the seventies), you were the leader of a group of poets, the Infrarealists, which you’ve mythologized in your novel, Los detectives salvajes. Tell us a little about what poetry meant for the Infrarealists, about the Mexico City of the Infrarealists.

RB Infrarealism was a kind of Dada á la Mexicana. At one point there were many people, not only poets, but also painters and especially loafers and hangers-on, who considered themselves Infrarealists. Actually there were only two members, Mario Santiago and me. We both went to Europe in 1977. One night, in Rosellón, France, at the Port Vendres train station (which is very close to Perpignan), after having suffered a few disastrous adventures, we decided that the movement, such as it was, had come to an end.

I enjoy how Bolaño barely keeps his thoughts together, which shows through in his fiction too. Often in his books you can tell when he's just unapologetically letting his fingers go, not caring if the writing is becoming monotonous. A certain heedlessness, but its this lack of rigid formality, to me, that makes the writing authentic. Bolaño knew that writing was a trick, a facade, something to be toyed with. Probably why he preferred poetry to the toil of fiction.

In the first section for The Savage Detective, Roberto Bolaño, through a sort of self-mythologizing, pulls his reader into the bristling energy of the visceral realists, a loosely formed gang of hoodlum poets in Mexico City during the 1970's and happen to echo Bolaño’s own life while in his late teens and early twenties (a dyslexic who dropped out of school to set out on a life that is self-taught and filled with poetry). Similar to the American Beats, the visceral realists defiantly rejected the literary establishment in order to opt instead for literature as vivacity itself, both the fuel and the fire in order to live a life brimming with raw experience.

And in this section, it will appeal to anyone who’s ever been tempted to romanticize literary life, poet as Tragic Hero. However, at the end of the section, two of the movements leaders, Ulises Lima (named after Ulysses) and Arturo Belano (obvious) flee northward on a grim New Years Eve in order help a young prostitute escape from her vengeful pimp while at the same time beginning a search for an inspirational force for their literary movement, Cesárea Tinajero-- a woman who disappeared decades ago after publishing only a few poems in various independent journals and handouts.

This first section is fun. Exciting. Adventurous. Erotic. Intoxicating. Mysterious. However, in the next four hundred pages, written in a documentary style which includes dates and locations, personal testimonies of about two-dozen people from around the world tell of their first hand experiences with Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano in the years that followed. And what is told shows two poets that have been deflated of their previous exuberance, living hollow, shell-shocked lives of melancholy, ill health, exile, irrelevancy and displacement.

Something went tragically wrong shortly after fleeing from Mexico City that January night. And what is to blame? Were Ulises and Arturo nothing more than large mouthed egotists and responsible for their own downfall? Or, was it the force of uncompromising reality which decided that there was no place in the world for renegade poets? Further yet, as the reader is only provided with the accounts of witnesses and never directly from Ulises and Arturo, could it be that it is their own biases and bitter frustrations at the world that cause them to portray Ulises and Arturo in a negative light?

With Bolaño’s genius, all of these are possible. Although, after reading the third and final section, a short one of only a hundred pages and accounts for what happened after their flight from Mexico City, the possibilities narrow and the underlying strength for Bolaño’s effort is revealed not through solving the personalities of Ulises and Arturo, but elsewhere. And you'll have to get to that final page to understand what I mean by that.

The structure of relying upon interview-type realism is now regularly used in fiction. So no big deal there. I think the greater contribution is Bolaño’s ability to both praise the literature from the Dionysic avant-garde, like Henry Miller or the Beat poets, but at the same time, viewing with an ironic eye, never forgetting that much of the world doesn’t put up with (or allow) such playfulness and that this sort of art, if not grounded, can quickly turn into boring narcissism. While the established literary world has fully accepted and largely praised Bolaño’s canon, Bolaño, at heart, was always anti-establishment and never thought of capitulating to the standards that might place him on the shelves of the dusty masters. He did something better. He matured outsider literature so that it can be brought in as a viable force of the fully grown adult but without compromising the equal need to run wild and free on the playground. Which is what makes Bolaño’s books so fun as well as being very serious commentaries on human behavior and history.

“The point is that all thought is inexistence and unreality, the only reality is green, love. Don’t you see that it is just the whole point of life not to be self conscious? That it must all be green? All love? Would the world then seem incomprehensible? That is an error. The world would seem incomprehensible to the rational faculty which keeps trying to keep us from the living in green, which fragments and makes every thing seem ambiguous and mysterious and many colors. The world and we are green. We are inexistent until we make an absolute decision to close the circle of individual thought entirely and begin to exist in god with absolute unqualified and unconscious understanding of green, love and nothing but love, until a car, money, people, work, things are love, motion is love, thought is love, sex is love. Everything is love. That is what the phrase ‘God is Love’ means.”

--Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, October 1948