TODAY is the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that overturned America’s obscenity laws, setting off an explosion of free speech…
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The historic case began on May 15, 1959, when Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, sued the Post Office for confiscating copies of the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which had long been banned for its graphic sex scenes.
– Fred Kaplan, “The Day Obscenity Became Art,” NYT. It’s a great article.
Yesterday was the first day in Baltimore that I have felt more than 75% awake. I spent the morning helping the housecleaners at my housesit and grocery shopping. I told the clerk I had just moved here, and she, thankfully, did not tell me not to go out at night. The housecleaners, however did. That makes three people in twenty-four hours in Baltimore who have told me not to go out at night.
Afterwards I wandered up Charles and St. Paul Streets, from about 25th to 34th, to see what there was to see. After leaving a land of so many cathedrals, it’s amusing to find an equal density of cathedrals here in Baltimore. One Catholic country to another. I wandered past a Civil War memorial and the BMA, which is Free For All, but did not go in – I was too excited about getting to campus for the first time. I walked through some grassy parkland that’s south of the Homewood campus, and entered campus for the first time through the East Gate.
To my right was a big circle of grass called “The Beach,” with girls sunbathing, bottoms up. I want, so badly, to call them “coeds.” In front of me was the Eisenhower Library. I went in. I slumped down by the periodicals section and began my intensive program of cramming on contemporary poetry. I read the current and back issues of Poetry and American Poetry Review. Lots of good stuff. Some quotes I’ll put up.
The following is from THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt. I adore it, because I’ve started and withdrew/withdrew/C-minused ancient Greek three times, and I know just enough to be amused by the constructions. Also, it reminds me of the project I have about putting Molière into English but preserving French word order. Anyways. Fun.
“…Francis was so impatient with his happy news that he did not even wait for Tracy and Judy to leave the room but told me immediately, in sloppily inflected Greek, while sweet dopey Tracy wondered aloud at our wanting to keep up our schoolwork at a time like this.
“Do not fear,” he said to me. “It is the mother. She is concerned with the dishonor of the son having to do with wine.”
I did not understand what he meant. The form of “dishonor” (atimia) that he used also meant “loss of civil rights.” “Atimia?” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“But rights are for living men, not for the dead.”
“oimoi,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, dear. No. No.”
He cast about, snapping his fingers, while Judy and Tracy looked on in interest. It is harder to carry on a conversation in a dead language than you might think. There has been much rumor,” he said at last. “The mother grieves. Not for her son,” he added hastily, when he saw I was about to speak, “for she is a wicked woman. Rather she grieves for the shame which has fallen on her house.”
“What shame is this?”
“(Greek),” he said impatiently. “(More Greek.) She seeks to show that his corpse does not hold wine” (and here he employed a very elegant and untranslatable metaphor: dregs in the empty wineskin of his body).
“And why, pray tell, does she care?”
“Because there is talk among the citizens. It is shameful for a young man to die while drunk.” ”
– THE SECRET HISTORY, Donna Tartt
Baltimore since Thursday has been sunny and inviting, reminding me of nothing so much as Berkeley. This may have nothing to do with its resemblance to Berkeley, but more that everyone in my family views Berkeley, California as the apotheosis of location.
I spent the day before yesterday learning about my housesit – plants, cats, more plants. I was warned, strenuously, not to go out at night. K and I drove to her community garden in Druid Hill Park, where I saw, for the first time, okra in its natural form. I get to water and eat it, and I also get to drive S and K’s Volvo. The parking brake, passenger-side door, and gas gauge do not work, but it moves!
At night, I took the Volvo out, braving the traffic of Baltimore for the first time. People here drive like they’re on skateboards, and most of the streets are one-way. I picked up my friend T and J, both residents in Hopkins medical. We went to Bo Brooks on the waterfront and ate enormous crabs with our bare hands. I was warned, for the second time, not to go out at night. I took them home, as they both work much harder than anyone else on the planet.
I was temporarily startled when the Washington Monument loomed up in the middle of northbound Charles Street like the resurrection of the Hermai, but realized I could drive around it. Spent the rest of the night finishing THE SECRET HISTORY by Donna Tartt.
I almost bought a copy of THE SECRET HISTORY in Chicago, but didn’t. The edition looked too new and blue. I wanted it to be creepier, somehow, after all the hype about this book. And then I found it waiting for me when I got here, in S and K’s tall, academic bookshelves. It is, of all things, a proof copy from before publication, with a Bennington bookstore bookmark in its pages. So cool. S went to Bennington, where Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and others also did. I had forgotten.
I have been reading it in bed with a great sense that the book followed me from Chicago to Baltimore, along with what makes me me. This has been reassuring. One of the reasons I’m going back to academia, for a time, is a sense that some portion of my identity which lives only in university libraries has been lost, or lessened. Finding the book here makes me feel like I am on the right path.
I finished it at about 2 AM and didn’t sleep very well – but I’m always glad to lose sleep to something well written and troubling. It’s about a group of classics students who lose their moral bearings and start killing people. (I’m giving away nothing that’s not in the first sentence – the book isn’t a mystery, but a road map of ethical deterioration.) I dreamed of a person with his head smashed in.
All these warnings about not going out at night, plus TSH, made me kind of jumpy about letting the cat in at 2 AM. I sort of expected to be shot.
Nothing, however, happened. Calvert Street was quiet, suburban, streetlit, car-parked and spotlessly clean. I think the Baltimoreans are a little excessive about their warnings. I am not going to disregard them, but I just want to point out that I let the cat out without either of us sustaining any injuries – and the cat seems to live outside all night and return home without gunshot wounds.
Today I got sick of being ear-infected and quarantined in my apartment. I went up to Ravenswood and wandered: brunch, the library, the Grind, an hour of a movie I’d already seen.
The best part of it was sitting in the sunlight and writing on the granite curb-seat outside the Ravenswood library, and watching the kids who went by – and watching them watch me.
As one little family approached me, I heard the mother saying, with resignation, “Don’t climb up there – DON’T climb up there – ” and I saw the girl looking at me like “She got to climb up there! What the hell, Mom?” She even put one hand up onto the curb, longingly, and kind of looked at me as if she hoped I would overrule her mother. I couldn’t help her out.
I wrote, a very little. (Stop with the Austen constructions.) I found myself wanting to draw, probably because I read SLOTH (graphic novel) at the library, about teenagers in comas and lemon orchards. I drew a planter and a tree and wrote “I can’t draw” on top of them.
At the Grind, I was reading WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, by Philip Roth, and the girl sharing my table with me (tiny cafe) was like, “That book’s really good.” I do like the way Chicago is so demonstratively literary. And I also like the way that strangers tell you what they think.
That’s the final sentence of a one-pararaph bio of Austen which preludes my coverless, trash-salvaged copy of NORTHANGER ABBEY. I don’t believe it for a second. I only believe it in the sense that she neither lived nor died with any sort of quiet or serenity.
“But, perhaps, I keep no journal.”
“Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies’ ways as you wish to believe me; it is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.”
– Catherine Morland & Mr. Tilney, NORTHANGER ABBEY (Jane Austen)
Merry-go-roundup:
Riding home today on the Division bus with a grocery bag full of five boxes of matzah, I felt like Golda Meir, shopping for her sister’s Denver Seder for all the tubercular Zionists, and meeting Morris, perhaps. I have no idea if that’s what she did or not, but it made me think of her.
The pigeons and I both rejoiced today at the removal of the Winter Snow Covers from the fountain in the concrete public-triangle-square at the Ashland/Milwaukee/Division intersection. Soon, pigeons, soon, the fountain will run freely again.
If, for the sake of argument, you waited until you were 27 to read THE TURN OF THE SCREW because you were creeped out by the hype, you’re going to be kind of underwhelmed. You might also decide that you have read your last novel about governesses. Nonetheless, I am still trying to plow through aaaaall of Henry James. One of the advantages of aging is that I am able to take him in, and I want to take it all in before it’s too late. I feel like I have a limited James window. Next: THE BOSTONIANS.
My pink phone is dead. Maybe it was too pink.
My roommate has TWILIGHT on Netflix.
Sometimes there are so many things to say that you don’t know where to start.
I’ll say this: I’ve been reading Jacques Lacan for a book club, and here is my favorite anecdote so far.
I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or the sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time, Brittany was not as industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn’t all danger and excitement – there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that’s what we called him – like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class – this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were suppose to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me – “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”
He found this incident highly amusing – I less so.
– Jacques Lacan, The Line And Light, “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a,” THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
My wife is a killer. She dreams at night of my death, and when she awakens, in her guilty consciousness she gives my body a hug that shatters my own desirous dreams. By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams’ truth: she wants me and the deer both dead.
– John Updike, TOWARDS THE END OF TIME
Dara Weinberg 