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This is a prized specimen on the peach tree in my backyard, before a squirrel discovered it this morning.
Most years, when spring arrives, the absence of bees dooms the tree’s production to a pathetic harvest of pea-sized, sick-green bulbs that drop in the harsh winds of June storms. But this year the bees showed up and fulfilled their pollenating duties.
So here in July, quick, before more squirrel depradation, I gathered these:
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Melancholy suffuses “Sleepless Nights.” A collage of memories, ruminations, vignettes, and character sketches, its 150 pages encompass a lifetime of poignant observations by a first-rate writer.
The book is most powerful as a remembrance of persons, mostly women, now dead (“They are gone, with all their questions unanswered”). Hardwick recaptures the essence of their lives, examining without compromise “the niceness and the squalor and sorrow.” Hardwick’s prose is a wonder. She assembles telling details in the service of building a series of fateful narratives. She produces writing that is in the best sense “novelistic” — even if the resulting book falls outside the category of a novel. The book is beyond category, and is no less rewarding for that fact.
Every few pages Hardwick recounts another love story she either participated in or was a wide-eyed witness to. She refers to them as “love affairs with energy and hope.” Each affair begins well. For example, she describes a temporary roommate in her Manhattan apartment, a gay man who “was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.” Yet every affair turns tragic, in its own way. These stories are so fully (yet economically) modeled that you’ll swear, by the close of the book, that you’ve read several novels. With Hardwick, the relationships of men and women, of both high and low station, almost always lead to bitter endings. Closest to home, a sad bitterness attaches to Hardwick’s own reflections on men, from her earliest encounters (among the “couples, looking into each other’s eyes, as if they were safe”) to her caustic memory, at the book’s end, of “a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.”
Hardwick always shows a remarkable empathy for the life journeys of others, especially for the deprived, those she finds “worn down by life.” Of a janitor, Hardwick notes: “He was one of those men who acted as if he expected to be shouted at and would not know how to reply.” Early in the book she profiles the doomed Billie Holiday, whom Hardwick knew in New York City in the 1940′s and 1950′s. The author re-envisions the jazz singer’s life, starting with a quick sketch of her physic presence (“the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean”), moving on to her performances, then offering the lesson of her early death (“she shared the changeling’s spectacular destiny and was acquainted with malevolent forces”). A later chapter of the book, Part Nine, stands apart as a remarkable essay about the cleaning women whose lives intersected with Hardwick, as she moved from homes in Maine, Boston, and New York City.
The scope of Hardwick’s curiosity is wide-ranging, yet three of her interests struck me as noteworthy. One is her odd fascination, her obsession, with people’s teeth. While she tends to introduce new characters with only minimal physical descriptions, she invariably tales note of the person’s dental health, as if it were a critical component of moral character. Is this a bit of folk wisdom absorbed in her youth spent in the horse-breeding state of Kentucky? A notable item in her bag of writer’s resources is her familiarity with farm animals and their behavior, which she freely applies to people. A Depression-era socialist organizer in rural Kentucky “had the look of a clever turkey.” Two city street people, homeless women, “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for.” A final attachment is Hardwick’s love/hate relationship with New York City. Early in the book she argues for a clear linkage between person and place: “It is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live.” Her verdict on Gotham: “This is New York, with its graves next to its banks.” And then there’s this surprising statement: “A woman’s city, New York.”
I recommend “Sleepless Nights” to writers who want to write better. Hardwick belongs to the elite class of “writers’ writer”; come and learn from her. I also recommend the book to anyone fascinated with Manhattan of the post-WWII era, and to anyone who wants to spend a few hours with a companionate teller of women’s truths.
[A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.]
He believes there is no better way to celebrate the start Spring than to swim in the nearest creek.
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To borrow the second person voice (“you”) that controls the narrative of Robert Coover’s new novel, “Noir”, let it be noted at the outset that you fall within one of three groups.
1 - You are a Coover aficionado and have read most or all of his output to date. You will buy or borrow the newly released “Noir” and read its slim 192 pages in a feverish swoon, critics be damned. If, at some point, you find yourself reading reviews of “Noir”, it’s because you’ve finished the book and want to relive the experience or compare your reaction to others. For you, there are comments further below.
Or:
2 - You have read one or two Coover books (maybe as part of a post-modern lit course) and want to catch up with what the 78-year-old author is doing nowadays. Is he still in the game, you wonder? The news is positive. You will find the pages of “Noir” spellbound by Coover’s signature mordant wit and claustrophobic worldview. Elsewhere you may have come across the much repeated statement by NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani: “Of all the post-modernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious.” So, yes, you’ll find “Noir” fitfully laugh-inducing — especially if you’re in the mood for a relentless, demented, hallucinogenic parody of crime fiction. If at its end you are still ambivalent about the book, well, that it not uncommon with Coover. At its close you may place a hand on your belly and think to yourself, that was not so much a satisfying meal as a bitter entrée. Or, you may be so delighted by its denouement, incorporating street philosophy, word play, puns, double entendres and all-around cleverness, that you will forgive being dragged through some slow sections.
Or:
3 - Coover is entirely new to you. If so, you are wondering how do you get a good sense of what “Noir” will mean to you as a reading experience? You’re finding most reviews of the book are frustratingly un-useful to a novice reader. (There seems to be a jargon-loving Coover clique that luxuriates in the cryptic.) Well, you might consider first checking out a short interview in which Coover himself explains the style and themes of “Noir”. This is available online (use these three words in Google search: Coover bookslut interview). Consider also spending a few minutes watching Coover in action, as he reads an early scene (and arguably the best pages) from “Noir”. The video is available using four terms in Google search: Coover Penn Reading Video. (His reading from “Noir” occupies the final minutes of the QuickTime video). If the interview and video generally pique your interest, and if you would not be put off by what is essentially a light entertainment somewhat burdened with down and dirty stretches of bleak pessimism and erotic haunting, then by all means read “Noir”. Or, consider one of the following alternatives to “Noir” as a better first experience of Coover: “Pricksongs and Descants”, his ground-breaking short story collection; or “The Origin of the Brunists”, a conventionally generous and very American tale of the spawning of a religious cult in a mining community; or, if you can find a used or library copy of “A Political Fable: The Cat in the Hat for President” (unfairly, it is currently out-of-print). “A Political Fable” may very well become your favorite piece of zaniness by any author ever. It is mine.
Finally, here are a few stray perceptions of my own to share with Coover fans who have finished the book.
Coover is nothing if not quotable. Wherever you are in “Noir” you are not far from coming upon yet another comment on humankind’s bleak condition. Coover spins endless variations on an astringent melody whose lyrics tell of “your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe” (page 103), a ballad “meant to provoke reflections upon life’s brevity, and its thin sad beauty” (page 108). Other examples: “It’s not the story you’re trapped in but how you play it out … your style … steppin’ round the beat … How long does that matter? As long as you live, meaning, no time at all.” (page 52). “What’s the connection? No idea. Connections [are] probably an illusion in such a fucked-up world as this. Why you’re down here. Illusory connections” (page 113). “The city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone defenseless in it, your moves not even your own” (page 175). Most Hobbesian of all is this: “The body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them” (page 159). The novel’s close brings a softer tone: “You can’t escape the melody but you can make it your own.”
Especially at the novel’s climax, borrowings from films are abundant: the shifting cityscape of “Dark City” (page 163), the mirror room scene in “The Lady from Shanghai” (page 181), and the false-identity caper “Catch Me If You Can” (page 186).
At one point Philip Noir tries to recall who once likened an odd juxtaposition to “a pearl onion on a banana split.” This is a line used by Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe. When another character advises, “Plant you now, dig you later, man” (page 111) , this is a twofer or maybe a three-way: its source is the jazz world of the 1920′s/30′s, but the phrase also was used as a title of song in “Pal Joey” and later as the title of a “Gilligan’s Island” episode — facts surely not lost on pop culture maven Coover. Other more careful readers (with or without benefit of Google search) will best me in this endless game of spot-the-allusion, but final mention should be made of one “high culture” reference I spotted, a reference that informs the musical ambiance of the book. Philip Noir notices a few words carved into the wooden tabletop at a jazz joint: “You are the music while the music lasts.” This is a line from “The Dry Salvages”, the third section of “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot.
I wonder whether the sympathetic character of Michiko (“she’s a work of art”) is Coover’s homage to the sympathetic critic of his work, Michiko Kakutani. But, given the fate Coover confers on the fictitious Michiko, I’m thinking maybe this is best left unexplored. As the author himself cautions:
“It’s all quite simple. But sometimes not knowing is better. It’s more interesting.”
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One final observation (to be filed under “Annoyances, Petty”): The covers of both the American and French editions of the novel sport photos that are at odds with the story. Both photos are of daytime scenes of a walker in a city. But the perambulations of Philip Noir take place entirely at night. Does the discrepancy matter? Probably not, but wouldn’t it be nice if the photographer, or the editors who selected the final images, had actually read the book?
(A version of this review appears on Amazon.com, here.)
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Yesterday, the snowpack was in retreat, revealing hidden activity in the front gardens on my block.
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In one of his poems e.e. cummings mocks the inventor who builds “an instrument to measure spring with.” His description of the inventor — “some oneyed son for a bitch”– brings to mind a camera.
Hands off my camera, e.e.
Photos of a “reserved” parking spot on my street in Washington, DC, February 13, 2010. It’s nice to see the tradition of using two metal lawn chairs as space savers is being upheld, well into the 21st century.
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So here’s the difference between Philadelphia (where I grew up) and Washington, DC (where I live): In Philadelphia it is understood that if you take the time to clear a parking space in front of your house after a snow storm, you then have a valid claim to its exclusive use. Sweat equity confers upon you that right and interest. Digging out gives you dibs. No questions asked.
But in Washington, questions are asked, ethics are examined, situational nuances are parsed. Commentators turn to Locke and Hobbes for guidance. See, for example, the lively discussion engendered by the article: “Can Shovelers “Reserve” Parking Spots They Clear?” in the Washington Post, here; additional views here and here. BTW, WaPo’s online poll, which has received 5000+ votes so far, finds 76% answering “Yes”. The reaction is more even-handed (but less even-tempered) in the dozens of comments posted by readers.
I awoke this morning to a Hiroshige-like scene of bare tree limbs filled with cottony snow:
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Below is Utagawa Hiroshige‘s “Evening Snow at Asukayama” (1837-38), a Japanese wookblock print from his series, “Eight Views from the Neighborhood of Edo”:
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It’s not clear whether the pack animal in the second picture came from an early Honda dealership.
A personal essay by David Owen (“The Dime Store Floor”) graces the Jan. 25, 2010 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Throughout the piece Owen’s narrative is intermittently brilliant, as he riffs on a theme posed as a question: What did childhood smell like? I think Owen should try his hand at writing a novel. At one point he describes a recent bike ride near his home, as he came upon members of a girls’ high-school cross-country team running in tight formation:
“As I passed the girls I rode through the invisible trailing cloud of their mingled shampoo fragrances, and suddenly I felt a sort of dumbbell patriotism. My thought was something like this: This is the tremendous strength of America — our vigorous, optimistic young people and their clean, clean hair.”
Dumbbell patriotism. I like that formulation. As an expression of aw-shucks awe at this, our country, and what this country hosts, it captures what I feel each time I come across some vibrant display of the nation’s life-blood.
I’m especially moved to thanks-giving by instances of everyday, nonchalant tolerance. In concept America is defined by freedom and diversity of thought in the public sphere. Happily, there are still a visible examples of that in practice. Consider the advertisement I spotted this week on the rear end of a public bus chugging along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.
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British novelist Ian McEwan, in conversation with Richard Dawkins, is less sanguine about the durability of America’s greatness in this regard. Video here. Dawkins mentions what he sees as an America “rapidly degenerating into a theocracy.” McEwan agrees, and says this development is “one of the most extraordinary reversals in history, isn’t it? You have this extraordinary social experiment: America, an immigrant state, founded in reaction to the religious absolutisms of Old Europe. And then, fast-forward a couple of hundred years, you have at least in Western Europe, more or less entirely, a set of secular governments, and political conversations conducted without any reference to God, while the United States is a place where you cannot hold high office without invoking this Deity.”
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This week I raked leaves in front of the house. While cleaning out the tree box near the curb I found, amongst brown oak leaves blown there from up the block and around the corner, a crumpled piece of paper. Unfolded, it revealed a drawing done with colored pencils. The artist’s use of line and color suggests it is from the hand of the same child artist responsible for the sidewalk chalk-drawing of a Mouse Musketeer I came upon last summer. (That earlier work is reproduced here.)
On the 9″ by 6″ sheet are two figures: a reindeer and snowman. The snowman sports a two-tiered hat, a classic carrot-orange nose, a lopsided mouth like Dick Cheney’s – and a rarely seen pair of legs and feet.
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The relational displacement of the snowman’s eyes, nose and mouth recall the portrait innovation Picasso developed in the 1930s — a style that led many exasperated viewers to blurt out, “My kid could do that!”:
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The first six words in the title of this post — if you count each un-capitalized “i” as a word — is the tagline of a new advertising campaign for Jeep vehicles. The campaign’s 30-second TV commercials have not been well received by media observers. See, for example, comments here, here, and here. Jeep is also placing “i live, i ride, i am” advertisements in magazines, and in my opinion these are truly, madly, deeply, bad. I’m talking about text so awful it defies parody. Here is a two-page spread in the December 14, 2009 edition of TIME magazine (pages 34-35):
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The words that appear in faint gray type in the upper right quadrant — the text providing the premise for the punchy tagline — reads as follows:
i’ve been through hell and high water
i can text but prefer to talk
i read Keats and wear cleats
i think toy dogs are ok
but big dogs rule
i get my “fresh catch” from
the sushi bar sometimes
i wear all earth tones,
but mud is my favorite.
Yes, those lower-case “i”s are indigenous to the copy. It wouldn’t surprise me if a phalanx of Apple attorneys were suspiciously eyeing those “i”s. It also wouldn’t surprise me if those same lawyers offer Chrysler, in lieu of crippling litigation, a friendly settlement proposal calling for minor changes in the tag line:
i live. i ride. i phone. i pod. i mac. i am.
But for now let’s give credit where credit is due. It was the Mad Men at Jeep’s advertising firm who came up with the idea of eschewing margins in favor of pseudo-poetically centering each of the nine descriptive lines. And it was their idea to italicize the word sometimes — a nuance sure to render many a reader weak-kneed.
I confess I was puzzled, however, to find the bold lack of punctuation surrendering to convention just when the statement reaches its final two lines. It’s as if the copywriter, almost done with the task, was suddenly touched by the ghost of her tenth grade English teacher, who whispered a plea: A comma and a period, please!
On the other hand, who among us can resist forming a wry smile at the rhyming of Keats with cleats? Clever.
As for the trendy sentiments expressed in the ad, yes, they’re sophomoric. But so what? (The visiting ghost came from the tenth grade, remember?) Maybe the whole thing is an homage to the malarkey found in the Manifesto of Thompson Hotels?
But enough about words. The bigger oddity is the photo in the left panel of the ad. This, presumably, is the Keatsian survivor of the fabled watery hell (or was it hellish waters?). This is a man who does not know for sure whether tonight’s dinner will include sushi. Can you blame him for scowling at us? Of course not.
But I wonder: Why was he asked to take a pose that is in-your-face and awkward, macho and goofy? Hey, I know the arm swing’s a guy thing; I do it too. But here’s the risk: Someone will be tempted to suggest this guy’s next gig ought to be on stage playing opposite Katisha (She: “My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.” He: “Ditto my left, baby.”)
Is it just me, or do you also find the more you stare at the picture the more his bare forearm looks like a raw turkey drumstick attached to his left ear? (OK, maybe it’s just too close to Thanksgiving for me.) Whether it be a drumstick or an arm, the fact is the thing’s projecting forward from pictorial space, and none too elegantly. As artists will testify, foreshortening can be a bitch. See, for example, Durer’s posthumously published treatise, De Symmetria. So why did the creator of the ad go there, and why compound the problem by featuring a limb that’s freakishly fingerless?
At least when we watch Simon Cowell’s bad habit of scratching the back of his neck, we see him in motion (as in this video at 1:41 – 1:43) and we get to see his hand, as shown in this screen shot:
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[As for the title of this post, if you want to read more about "i yi yi" (aka, "Aye Yi Yi"), an expression used to show frustration, hopelessness, sadness, annoyance, click here and here.]