Month: January 2023

consider not the thoughts I may have regarding these classics of Hinduism; instead, seek to know the power whereby I may have these thoughts.

delightful. Helen DeWitt’s deadpan is intimidating. her commitment to drawing out the absurdity of her premise and following it through to its logical conclusion makes her a fearsome satirist. the anger and contempt that fuels this work is palpable; without having read The Last Samurai, I can sense that a considerable share of the motivation behind this book is the disappointment she felt at having worked so hard on a novel that barely made an impression when it first came out. hence the departure for Joe’s ascent through corporate America being his failure to sell even a single set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. anyone who complains satire is dead clearly isn’t sufficiently indignant, nor funny. every cliche she drops is a searing indictment on American culture, her fellow writers, and the pervasive anti-intellectualism that fuels neoliberalism. and at the heart is a burning desire for a better world, one where people could be given the opportunity to live up to their potential, which DeWitt fervently believes in.

I really can’t recommend this book highly enough.

I quit reading this book, which is unfortunate, because I thought I was going to like it. more a collection of shorter works than an actual novel, Memoirs of Hecate County offers vignettes on the lives of upper-middle class Northeasterners, told from the point of view of a nameless man who becomes involved in Hecate County’s goings on to varying degrees. the first few stories I really loved. “The Man Who Shot Snapping-Turtles” is a quasi-allegory of how economic incentives pervert one’s sense of value, using one man’s struggle to maintain a pleasant backyard as a lens for understanding how capitalism and advertising lead to fascism. Wilson’s overarching concern in this book is just that: how, when all values are sublimated into the demands of the market, anything that is beautiful, human, transcendent, etc. is quickly drained out of life.

sounds dope, right? so why did I quit it? well, I will probably eventually finish, but the book’s centerpiece, a novella titled The Princess with the Golden Hair, just bogged me down a lot. it’s too hamfisted with Wilson’s preoccupations, and I found myself not really caring what was going to happen between Anna, Imogen, and the narrator. I already plan to revisit the story “Glimpses of Wilbur Flick,” centered on the psychological and political evolution of an entitled bourgeois man who eventually becomes a stage magician.

wanting to keep my momentum going, I started Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt, a similarly angry but much funnier critique of market forces.

and because I love to be unhappy and paranoid, I’m alternating between the John DeCamp and the Nick Bryant books on the Franklin Credit scandal until I decide which one will be a better tour through the satanic world of America’s elite pedophiles.

the scansion was hard enough, forgive me for not attempting to rhyme also.

O, what a weird and dense collection, these 
verses of English poetry. Some nerds 
obsessed with Melville's letters to Hawthorne 
make hay about the subject being some
young man, but what these poems are about?
Beyond me. Allegory, say, about 
poems that wrestle Eternity from
the grasp of Time? Maybe. But then how is
the youth a symbol? Why then does he need
a monument to his beauty? Fuck me.
Literature is hard. Self-loathing pours
from Will, who seems to be speaking throughout.
Some proof, you ask? One sonnet ends with him
saying "my name is Will, dawg, don't you know?"

well this certainly was a strong corrective follow up for Berryman’s minstrelsy.

planning a longer literary theory thing that’s about this book and a few of my other favorites.

so for now all I’m saying is that Ishmael Reed rocks, you should check him out.

there’s no way for me to say much that’s insightful about these poems without at least a few rereads, other than that they are mostly very depressing, when they aren’t totally inscrutable. why were all the most prominent midcentury American poets so doomed? this is a question Berryman explicitly poses (well, as explicit as anything in these poems is), the beginning of the sixth book using the death of Delmore Schwartz as a launch pad for an extended meditation on the deaths of his poet friends, many by suicide. Berryman himself would ultimately throw himself off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minnesota.

Berryman had an encyclopedic knowledge of the lives of poets, something that informs the work, especially in the back half, which constantly references Yeats, Keats, Whitman, Rilke, among many others. as much as you can say these poems are “about” anything, they seem to be grappling with the tension felt by a poet who wants to leave a legacy that will be remembered, an impulse at odds with his tendency towards nihilistic depression. that tension produces many beautiful verses here, but they never quite escape the overwhelming darkness that pervades the work.

that being said, these poems are also often very funny. though they’re also kind of offensive, with a recurring minstrel type character frequently breaking in to criticize Henry, Berryman’s literary doppelganger, in a not-exactly-racially-sensitive caricature of African-American vernacular. it’s like a prototype of digital blackface.

don’t get me wrong though, I really enjoyed these poems.