attempts to leave Charles Village lead back to Charles Village.
Author Archives: weinberg
the aptly named Paint House
Here’s some prose you need: this is some good, good prose. It doesn’t really matter what it’s about: it is about the writer’s ability to write good prose. But read this:
On a sodden Saturday afternoon in January, the three-mile trip from the South London suburb of Stockwell to Clapham Junction is a dispiriting proposition. I had to go and get some paint from the aptly named Paint House on Northcote Road, and decided to take the tube to Clapham Common then walk across it, thereby exercising both myself and the dog, a two-year-old Jack Russell called Maglorian, whose puppyish manner complements his diminutive stature. When he actually was a puppy he was so winsome that small crowds used to gather round him in the street; nowadays, thankfully, it is only the occasional passerby who screws up his or her face and starts going ‘Oooh’ as he trots towards them.
Prose! (Don’t call me Prose.) It’s actually Will Self (can that really be his name? Yes!) in the LRB-to-which-you-should-probably-subscribe. It is taken from an essay about a British radio program to which you probably don’t listen, which will make you maddeningly jealous of the British, Radio 4, the BBC, arts funding, and literary culture in England. So why should you read the essay? You should read the essay, the whole thing, right now (what are you doing? Writing? C’mon.) because, if you do, there will be something so funny at the end that it will make you either forget about what it is you need to forget or else be reconciled to its unforgettability.
You are the author of this post.
Hey, check this. So here I am, pleasantly nowhere. And what if I don’t go home? What if I stay at wherever it is I am, or importune these kind laptopped strangers? What if everything changes, now? (I am supposed to teach tomorrow.) But what if I don’t? What if I pull a Brownlee? What if this is the last SOS blog post, ever, and neither you nor anyone ever hears from me again? Hmmm? Wouldn’t that be kind of awesome?
I will have a last post, one day! That’s awesome, too! Some day I will have written the last thing I will ever write, and what an interesting day that will be. I will not know when that day is, or what those words will be. I hope it is something crotchety and inappropriate. I hope it’s something whiny. I hope it’s “grievance, not grief.”* I hope that it is trivial. I hope the last thing I do is kick myself in the head on the dive down, with something like a Lord of the Rings reference. Like, for example, “but that day is not today,” Viggo.
* Before I even knew that this was the trope it is (it’s, like, bigger than “show, not tell,” except in Europe, where “show, not tell” still has lots of fans and can make a decent living off touring) or had been cited for violating it, I was thinking of forming a bluegrass band called The Grievance Committee.
semidemihemicolon
It is amazing what freedom can be achieved with a bus. I was on the way to where-no-one-knows-where-I-am, on the aforementioned bus, and the moment I got off it and onto the snowblocked streets I thought, exhilarated, “No one can find me! No one!” In order to write, it is necessary to place oneself somewhere a little bit precarious. It’s staging. It’s like moving the chair to what is clearly the wrong place. Gets your attention.
continue to walk in the world
with snow boots. Still navigating knee-deep curving trenches through the snowbanks of Charles Village, some so narrow you have to walk like you’re on a balance beam. The snow sits on the ground. But we’re back on campus, at last. It’s great to have classes again: theory, seminar, reading series, the whole nine. I even got into a practice room tonight.
We never know what we have lost, or what we have found.
We are only ourselves, and that promise.
Continue to walk in the world. Yes, love it!
He continued to walk in the world.
– RPW, from “Audubon: A Vision”
good, indifferent, or trashy
Auden more than once explained that his business was poetry and that he wrote prose to earn his keep while pursuing that ill-paid vocation. Luckily he had another powerful reason for writing prose: ‘unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’
– Frank Kermode on Auden in the LRB (from 2007)
the frolic architecture of the snow
Snow day IV. No classes. Here’s another snowpoem, by Emerson, that would have been more appropriate for yesterday around 1 pm. By now, late afternoon, the snow has stopped falling and has begun melting, and the roads and sidewalks are becoming more navigable. Nous sommes restless.
The Snow-Storm
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
who is thinking in these particular words, and why?
I have been writing comments by the window, if by “writing comments” you mean “reading the James Wood archive on the LRB.” Alternating between grading, laundry, and cooking requiring the use of the oven all day. The snow has stopped falling at present.
Here’s Wood arguing that Updike is too poetic.
Wood writes: “One of the dangers for the stylist* such as Updike – and one of the ways in which prose is unlike poetry – is that prose always forces the question: who is thinking in these particular words, and why? Point of view, a boring topic to most readers, is the densest riddle for the novelist, since words are either directly ascribed to characters (first-person narration) or indirectly ascribed to them (third-person narration). By contrast, the poet’s words are generally assumed to flow from the poet, who wishes, as it were, to draw attention to himself.* But the novelist may not, and should not, always want to. There is no doubt that the pleasantly alliterative phrase ‘in painful piecemeal’ is rather fine; but is fineness what is needed here, or does it slide a filter between the reader and the supposedly pained narrator?”
– James Wood on John Updike, “Gossip in Gilt,” LRB v. 23 no. 8 (April 2001)
* this is probably exactly why I like Updike so much, and why even his characters’ misogyny, on which Wood expounds further, does not disturb me as much as it would in someone else’s words. Style.
** Of course! Always.
POET FOUND IN THAW
A snowpoem of a different bent, from Richard Hugo. The poem is not all about snow but turns on it, and the idea of smothering. (ahem):
Letter to Logan from Milltown
Dear John: This is a Dear John letter from booze.
With you, liver. With me, bleeding ulcer. The results
are the horrific same: as drunks we’re done. Christ,
John, what a loss to those underground political
movements that count, the Degradationists,
the Dipsomaniacs, and that force gaining momentum
all over the world, the Deteriorationists. I hope
you know how sad this is. Once I quit drinking it was clear
to others, including our chairman (who incidentally
also had to quit drinking) that less 40 pounds
I look resolute and strong and on the surface appear
efficient. Try this for obscene development: they made me
director of creative writing. Better I’d gone on bleeding
getting whiter and whiter and finally blending
into the snow to be found next spring, a tragedy
that surely would increase my poetic reputation.
POET FOUND IN THAW SNOWS CLAIM MISSOULA BARD
I’m in Milltown. You remember that bar, the beautiful bar
run by Harold Herndon where I pissed five years away
but pleasantly. And now I can’t go in for fear
I’ll fall sobbing to the floor. God, the ghosts in there.
The poems. Those honest people from the woods and mill.
What a relief that was from school, from that smelly
student-teacher crap and those dreary committees
where people actually say “considering the lateness
of the hour.” Bad times too. That depressing summer
of ’66 and that woman going — I’ve talked too often
about that. Now no bourbon to dissolve the tension,
to find self-love in blurred fantasies, to find the charm
to ask a woman home. What happens to us, John?
We are older than our scars. We have outlasted and survived
our wars and it turns out we’re not as bad as we thought.
And that’s really sad. But as a funny painter said
at a bash in Portland, and I thought of you then,
give Mother Cabrini another Martini. But not ever again
you and me. Piss on sobriety, and take care. Dick.
– Richard Hugo, from the book In Your Hot Dream. His collected, one of the books for our seminar this semester, is Making Certain It Goes On.
Dara Weinberg 