The Awful Possibilities

i’ve been busy. sorry. i will have something to say about other peoples’ books soon.

in the meantime, i wanted to tell you about a news that happened while i was busy, which is part of the reason i was busy. the news is that my collection, the awful possibilities, will now be published by featherproof rather than paper egg. those of you who know anything about featherproof and paper egg know that featherproof and paper egg were two rooms in the same house, but this means it will be available for all time for everyone, rather than just a limited time for someone. it also means the book won’t be out until april. but don’t be sad. i will call you up and read it to you over the phone in the meantime if you get lonely.

in any case, if you already ordered it, you’ll still get it, unless you don’t want it, in which case there are all types of generous options available.

you can get details on the book here, and for an explanation of your options, go here.

this is exciting news. it will allow me to dismantle the world more methodically.

like i said, soon i will talk about somebody else’s book. it was a book that surprised me. it had been a while since i’d been surprised.

“And so when you read how worried are you about what a poem literally means?” he says.

i say:

this is a tough one because he’s got two words that don’t necessarily go together, those being “literally” and “means.” but of course they don’t not go together of necessity. you could say, for example, that “She squeezed my tie shut and popped my head off and then I floated away but she didn’t” [here i am quoting sasha's forthcoming book, which is a very good book, without permission], and i would have no problem imagining a certain narrator’s girlfriend yanking his tie until his head popped off (although it says he flew away, as opposed to his head) and flew away, in the context of the book, which is the only place the narrator is, of course. and this is a pleasing image to take literally and that is the literal meaning of that sentence.

i have this feeling that sasha is asking if i’m looking for a “deeper” “meaning” — in other words, a symbolic meaning.

and then there’s also “poem” to complicate everything.

the inclusion of the word poem reminds me of that emily dickinson poem about the narrow fellow in the grass. i actually love that poem, as i love a lot of dickinson’s poetry, but it always made teaching poetry difficult, because i wanted to insist to my students, who had been told by their high school english teachers that poetry had a secret meaning, that poetry does not have a secret meaning, that there is not a single key that the initiated use to unlock a poem.

but in some cases there is a single key. that narrow fellow in the grass? he’s a snake. until you realize that, the poem can’t be more than word music to you, and if it never becomes more than music to you, you can’t get on to the really interesting questions, like why does dickinson gender the persona of the poem male (“But when a Boy, and Barefoot…”), and why, after gendering the persona male, does she close with a feminized and arguably sexual reaction to the persona’s surprise encounter with a snake (“But never met this Fellow/Attended or alone/Without a tighter Breathing/And Zero at the Bone”)?

precisely. nothing.

i’m glad dickinson sprang to mind like that, because, and here i’m just projecting, i would doubt that she would recognize that description i quoted as feminized or sexual. feel free to school me if i’m wrong.

point being — what is the symbolic meaning here? i don’t think there is one. i don’t think it matters to literature or emily dickinson. i think emily dickinson wanted to write a poem about seeing a snake in the grass from a boy’s perspective.

okay, i said i don’t think it matters, but that’s a little disingenuous, because i do think it matters that (as opposed to what) we think about what a poem (or story or novel or television commercial) is saying, as object (as opposed to reflection of the world), because it keeps our brains spinning and creates new possibilities for things we can write and also do.

on the other hand, like i implied you absolutely have to be a good enough reader to see that the narrow fellow is a snake. or as a writer, you absolutely have to be a good enough writer to show me that the narrow fellow is a snake. this is a weird line and i’m not trying to draw it in the sand tonight, but i can tell you this — i know it when i see it. or i mean i don’t know it when i don’t see it.

this kind of calls back to my last post, the one about joyce.

anyway, my advice direct to sasha would be:

make sure your audience (however smart or dumb it may be — that’s your decision, at least until the book’s out, at which point it’s their decision, which sucks but there’s nothing you can do) (or it’s pretty in an absurd way) knows the “literal meaning,” that is, what is happening or happens. and then sit back and enjoy while they diagnose your philosophies, politics, sexual orientations, mis- or philanthropy, and pathologies. but don’t skimp on the literal meaning. sitting around trying to figure out “what happened” is only fun for teenagers who just saw their first david lynch movie.

everybody! — sasha and i are reading together at the dive with superstars blake butler, samuel ligon, and robert lopez in philadelphia on sunday, 9/20. come see us. details here.

in the course of an engaging discussion on htmlgiant last week about, as far as i can tell at least, literary ambition, i found myself admitting, i think for the first time in (quasi) public, that i never cared for the work of james joyce, with specific reference to ulysses. well, now that i’m out let me flame.

this will not be an analysis of ulysses but of my attitude toward it.

first, i’ll start with my attitude toward the book as though it is a singular literary object that could possibly exist in a vacuum. you know, like einstein and the speed of light.

the problem is, this is almost impossible for me to do, since the first time i read the book was for a first-year seminar in college titled “the intertextuality of the epic” in which we read every western epic and a couple non-western ones and discussed the relation of these epics to each other with ulysses last. this, by the way, is a move in the direction of the way joyce intended it to be read or why else would he have called it ulysses (more on this below). also, i tend to read all books in relation to each other, which is why, for example, i have no problem finding bleak house kafkaesque. but much of the aforementioned conversation around ulysses implied it was sui generis, so here’s my best thumbnail of ulysses as an island:

there are many, many good sentences in many different styles, all clearly written with great care on (on the surface) topics that i care about very little, or in the case of stephen dedalus’s obsessions, that i care about, but not in the whiny, self-important, and humorless way that he does. on the cosmic scale, very little happens in the book, because it takes place over the course of one day and follows people of very little historical note (and i’m well aware this is part of the point, but are you?).

so a thumbnail, yes, but enough to get my point — that taken out of context, ulysses doesn’t amount to much — across. and it wasn’t what joyce meant by it. if you try to read it that way, the title has to become and obstacle.

so let me get on to my real take on the book:

don't forget about tennyson. or do. what do i care.

the title, as i don’t have to explain to anyone who has read this far, is a latinization of homer’s greek epic, the odyssey. the odyssey is in many ways the complete opposite of ulysses. where the latter focuses on the ordinary, the former focuses on the extraordinary — an extraordinary man doing extraordinary things with the aid of the gods on a (i know this concept is anachronistic) world-historical scale.

i don’t read much literary criticism (all of my formal education focused on primary texts) so i don’t have any authority to refer to here, but the title ulysses screams for context. with the death of god and the rise of humanism and individualism, the modernist project was to find or create new gods on a more human scale, so joyce takes an extraordinary epic and endeavors to make an ordinary epic.

i have no problem with this idea. in fact i like this idea. but really the idea itself goes back at least as far as the turn of the seventeenth century and don quixote. in other words, this was the project of the novel all along. cervantes just didn’t provide us with a shitload of meta-commentary about it. in other words, seen from this perspective, joyce was more of an end than a beginning. it was like he blew up our spot. which i’m also cool with.

but the meta-commentary is the problem. see, the parallels joyce attempts to make between his epic and its namesake are so idiosyncratic as to not actually exist. call this novel stephen and leopold and their friends spend a day in dublin and leave no notes behind and no one will ever find those parallels.

basically it’s like joyce says to you “i’m thinking of a number between one and infinity” and then you flail and guess and hedge until he says, “yes, that was the number i was thinking of” if you ever get it right and he ever admits it.

what it ends up doing is paving the way for the professionalization and academicization of reading. i admire the gall of a man whose mission is to write a novel that it takes a career to understand and which forces all other books to point in its direction (a new bible, to go along with my parallel about modernism above), but i just don’t care much for the book.