Category: Literary Matters

Word of the Day: Triolet

Here:

An eight-line stanza having just two rhymes and repeating the first line as the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line as the eighth. See Sandra McPherson’s “Triolet” or “Triolets in the Argolid” by Rachel Hadas. 

Return
 
The taste is strong as ever,
figs and cheese and wine.
I recall each savor;
the taste is strong as ever,
even if it will never
be quite so fresh again.
The taste is strong as ever,
figs and cheese and wine.
……………………
 
I will now try to write a triolet.
 
Hooked
 
The ancient lures entice me still,
Property, pelf, and power.
Even if against my will,
The ancient lures entice me still.
Despite advancing age and wisdom's rise,
Their grip on me is unreleasing.
The ancient lures entice me still,
Property, pelf, and  power.
…………………………
 
But I'm no poet, and I know it, so there's no way I could blow it.

Sub-distinguishing the lie?

What does "sub-distinguishing the lie" mean in the following passage from A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (NYRB, 2001, p. 73):

He [Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. 'Baron Corvo'] was wont to condemn the alleged laxity of the Roman Communion in the matter of truthfulness, and its sub-distinguishing the lie. He himself, brought up a strict Anglican, had all the Anglican horror of lying and equivocation of every description. He seemed to be quite serious about it, which surprised us, as he was universally regarded as about the biggest liar that we had ever met.

What I want to know is what it means to sub-distinguish a lie, and I need examples of this alleged laxity of the Roman Communion in the matter of truthfulness.

Paging Dave Lull.  And a tip of the hat to reader Hector C.  for recommending Symons' intriguing book.

……………..

Addendum (8/2/24): Dave Lull to the rescue.  Mr. Lull writes, "I wonder whether the author means the distinguishing of the lie from “mental reservation.”  That's it, I think; bang on the link and see if you don't agree. 

The philosophy of lying is especially germane these days inasmuch as the Biden administration is composed from top to bottom of  serial, brazen liars, bullshitters, and prevaricators of every conceivable stripe, not to mention Orwellian language subverters.  (The Orwellian 180, as I like to call it, goes well beyond lying as I will explain later, and is far more pernicious.) A first-rate example of language subversion was provided by Alejandro Mayorkas, head of — wait for it — Homeland Security (sic!), when he said that the border is secure "as we define secure."  Alright buddy, but then you are literally a horse's ass as I define horse's ass. What's your game, pal? Are you the head honcho of the Reconquista?

Now who is this Dave Lull fellow? Here is a tribute of mine from 2011, with links to tributes from others:

Who is Dave Lull?

If you are a blogger, then perhaps you too have been the recipient of his terse emails informing one of this or that blogworthy tidbit.  Who is this Dave Lull guy anyway?  Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence provides an answer:

As Pascal said of God (no blasphemy intended) Dave is the circle whose center is everywhere in the blogosphere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is a blogless unmoved mover. He is the lubricant that greases the machinery of half the online universe worth reading. He is copy editor, auxiliary conscience and friend. He is, in short, the OWL – Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian.

For other tributes to the ever-helpful Lull see here.  Live long, Dave, and grease on!

Reading Now: The Blake Bailey Bio of Charles Jackson

Bailey has been called the literary biographer of his generation. That strikes me as no exaggeration. He is fabulously good and his productivity is astonishing with stomping tomes on Richard Yates, Charles Jackson, John Cheever, and Philip Roth. I have yet to find a bad sentence in the two I've read.

Jackson's main claim to fame is his novel, The Lost Weekend, perhaps the best booze novel ever published. That's not just my opinion. The novel appeared in 1944 and  was made into a  film-noir blockbuster of the same name.

Jackson (1903-1968) was a big-time self-abuser, his drugs of choice being alcohol and Seconal. (We called them 'reds' in the 'sixties.)  Jackson died, at age  65, a total physical and mental wreck. 

The mystery of self-destruction, so common among novelists.

See also: Reading Now: Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

…………………….

Dave Lull writes,

My late friend Roger Forseth  wrote about Charles Jackson in an article for Dionysos: The Literature and Intoxication Triquarterly: ““Why did they make such a fuss?’: Don Birnam's Emotional Barometer,” a copy of which you can find here and a slightly edited version of which was reprinted in his posthumous book Alcoholite at the Altar: the Writer and Addiction: the Writings of Roger Forseth, which was reviewed by Frank Wilson here.

It's great to hear from you, Dave.  The Forseth article to which you linked is very good, and so is Wilson's review of Forseth's book. I ordered the book. The clincher for me was our mutual friend Patrick Kurp's Amazon blurb:
When I learned that Roger, on alternative nights, read one of Shakespeare's sonnets or a letter by Keats, my first reaction was: how sensible. This is a man who knows how to enjoy himself and understands what's important, an impression confirmed when we exchanged thoughts on such mutual enthusiasms as Coleridge, Auden, and Raymond Chandler. His scholarly work on alcoholism and American writers will prove invaluable to future scholars and readers, but I will always think of Roger as the man who knew what to read before turning out the light. — Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence
As I recall, it was via Kurp's blog that I first made your acquaintance, years ago. 
 
This, from Wilson, also  made me want to buy the book:
Like them, he [Forseth] had had a drinking problem, complete with bouts of delirium tremens. He is quoted here as saying, during the last year of his life, that “the problem with alcohol is a philosophical problem dating back to Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, how to manage the desire for intoxication, for ecstasy. I started writing about this late…I think I had to wait until the alcoholism experience penetrated my theoretical mind.”
 
I've had a similar thought. It is the misdirected desire for fullness of life, ecstasy, joy that drives some of us to reach for the 'joy juice.'  "All joy wants eternity," sang Nietzsche's Zarathustra, "wants deep, deep, eternity." I myself am too bloody rational to overindulge: I know what the sauce does to the brain and the liver, and that knowledge keeps me within strict limits.  On the other hand, I consider the teetotaler an extremist.  It's all a matter of self-knowledge. For some, alcohol is the devil in liquid form. For others it is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life.  Know thyself!  If you discover that you cannot handle the hooch, then it is your moral obligation to abstain from it.  If you become an alky, then it's on you and your despicable refusal to control yourself.  If you compound the folly  by drunk driving, then  I want the book thrown at you. 
 
Is alcoholism a disease? You can guess my answer.I should dig up and dust off my old posts on the question.  Of course, it is undeniable that the stuff affects different people in different ways. But once you discover how it affects you, then it's on you and your free will.  Man up and take responsibility for your actions.  
 
 

“Murder Your Darlings”

Good advice. I should take it. I am too enamored of my own formulations, which I tend to repeat. Anthony Flood, a hard-working editor who is doing some editing for me, just sent me this:

The phrase "murder your darlings" is often attributed to the English writer and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He used a version of this expression in his 1914 lecture titled "On Style," which is part of his book "On the Art of Writing." The original quote is:

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings."

This advice encourages writers to remove their most cherished or self-indulgent passages for the sake of overall clarity and quality in their writing. Over time, the phrase has been popularized and widely used by writers and writing instructors to emphasize the importance of being ruthless in editing and prioritizing the work's overall effectiveness over individual beloved segments.

I've said some unkind things about editors, but they do provide a check on one's vanity and self-indulgence.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs from a Passage in Thomas McGuane

Here is a passage from Thomas McGuane, Nothing but Blue Skies, Houghton-Mifflin, 1992, pp. 201-202, to which I have added hyperlinks.

He [Frank Copenhaver] turned on the radio and listened to an old song called "Big John": everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John.  Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.

On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: "You've gotta lot of nerve to say you are my friend." No one compares with this guy, thought Frank.  I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it.  Frank paused in his thinking , then realized he was suiting up for his arrival in Missoula.  In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky the voice of Sam Cooke: "But I do know that I love you." Frank began to sweat.  "And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be."

[. . .]

All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: "Give me water, my work is so hard."  What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead.

Wandering the Sam Cooke wing of the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies, we may as well cue up Bring It On Home to Me and Cupid.

Literary Addendum

My go-to literary guys, one dead, the other alive, D. G. Myers and Patrick Kurp respectively,  have little to say about McGuane. Myers says nothing while Kurp reports, "I do remember reading the early novels of Thomas McGuane but I couldn’t tell you a thing about them."

Well, there are novels like that. I am now thinking of a novel I read a few years ago by a female, competently done, but I can't remember her name, or the title: forgettable and forgotten. To tell the truth, most of us will soon be forgotten no matter what we write or how well we write it: we're lucky if a few read us now. But if you are writing in the right spirit, it ought to be a matter of indifference to you whether you are read or not. Kerouac at one point spoke of "self-ultimacy." 

One novel I've never forgotten I read well over a half-century ago while an undergraduate. It made the cut at Myers' place, where we find:

Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (Serbo-Croatian, 1945; English, 1959). Anyone still interested in the former Yugoslavia must read two books—Rebecca West’s magisterial two-volume travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and the masterpiece of Serbian literature, published four years later. Compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude for its multi-generational sweep, Andrić’s novel is a hundred pages shorter, scrupulously avoids the magic in magical realism, and might be more accurately described as The Painted Bird with a conscience.

Alliteration

A reader who likes my alliteration found this specimen in a post from 2010:

The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social . . . .

Perhaps I overdo it. An argument against alliterative excess is that it could distract the reader from the content.  

A good writer attends to his style, but does not permit style to get in the way of content.

"Style is the physiognomy of the mind," wrote Schopenhauer to open his great essay, On Style.

Here is a long list of literary devices. There I go, alliterating again.  I did not do it intentionally! It just came out like that. 

Hitchens, Death, and Literary Immortality

Substack latest. Excerpt:

To the clearheaded, however, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitch now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.

To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism:

Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt.

"A book is a mirror: if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out."

Most readers are more apish than apostolic.  The fame they confer cannot be worth much, given that they confer it.

To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object of memory count as living on?

The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride. Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer. Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself. Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence. Otherworldly light simply can't get through. One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens. A mortal man with a huge ego — one which is soon to pop like an overinflated balloon.

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself.

The ego, having gone supernova in its egomania, collapses into a black hole in the hora mortis. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

Anthony Flood comments:

Eloquent, Bill, well worth exposing to a wider audience . . . and an occasion to remind you of Woody Allen's quip: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment." The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader (1993) Unfortunately he hasn't (as far as I know) yet accepted God's terms for enjoying aionian life during which death will no longer be working in him as it is inexorably now. 

Tony has unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, goaded me into thinking and writing about a further topic: the difference between the eternal and the aionian.

Ayn Rand on C. S. Lewis; Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand

Here, via Victor Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's  "Jack-hammering":

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)

My posts on Miss Rand are collected here. 

Here is Flannery O'Connor on Ayn Rand:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Miss O'Connor is exaggerating, but she is essentially correct in her literary judgment. Both women are firm adherents of worldviews that inform their novels, and in the case of O'Connor, short stories.  

The difference is that . . . well, you tell me what the difference is. Why do I have to do all the work?

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti

From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me.  It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.'

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

Related: Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

Oriana Fallaci on Writing

From The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 23-24, emphases added:

I must say that writing is a very serious matter for me: it is not an amusement or an outlet or a relief. It is not, because I never forget that written words can do a lot of good but also a lot of evil, they can heal as much as kill. Read History and you'll see that behind every event of Good or Evil there is a piece of writing. A book, an article, a manifesto, a poem, a song. . . . So I never write rapidly, I never cast away: I am a slow writer, a cautious writer. I'm also an unappeasable writer: I do not resemble those who are always satisfied with their product as if they urinated ambrosia. Moreover I have many manias. I care for the rhythm of the phrase, for the cadence of the page, for the sound of the words: the metrics. And woe betide the assonances, the rhymes, the unwanted repetitions. For the form is important as much as the substance, the content. It is the recipient inside which the substance rests like wine inside a glass, like flour inside a jar, and managing such symbiosis at times blocks my work.

This is from a book in which Oriana speaks her mind on the events of 9/11. The passion of her ambrosial prose, the charm of her Italianate solecisms, kept me up last night. Move over Camille Paglia!