Some Came Running

Literary interlude

But Professor Skizzen had noticed that God was always excused. Any and every God. For any and every thing. A tornado might trash a trailer park and the poor wretches who survived would think to thank him for sparing them, as well as preserving a children's plate and one photo of the family grinning at the Falls asif they'd pushed the water over by themselves. 

Perhaps the Gods alternated fucking off. "I won't interfere with the destruction of the temple, if you won't prevent the crucifixion of the Savior." The pagans, the Christians, and the Muslims had taken turns burning the Library of Alexandria, but it was a moment of rare cooperation. Most of the time the celestial bodies were at one another's throats. The thought of burning drove Joseph to his attic where there was nothing but paper, sticky strings of clippings, rows of books, piles of magazines, stacks of newsprint, rolls of placards and posters, so he was always frightened by any word that implied ignition. The fact that burning had occurred to him was significant. Set those mountains of painful testimony ablaze, shred the evidence, erase the stories: of the young woman who was raped by her judges in punishment of the adultery of her brother, for instance. Out of what dark corner of the human mind...? or is it all dark, even in the light? or do our murderous desires lie hidden in the closet of the entry? under the runner unrolled down the hall? or disguised as that spot under the dining table where the rug is stained? By whom are we ruled if not by our nature? Remove all signs of those murderers who now make movies of themselves going through their grisly motions; and there will remain the badgering of sweet maids by their horny masters or the drowning of babies in their baths. It is impossible to conceal all the evidence. Yet how easily we forget who we really are. Because it should give us the creepts. His father's plight had been desperate indeed, for where could one go, really, to stay clean—worse, who could one be to be tolerable?

—William Gass, Middle C,  Alfred A. Knopf, 2013

Literary interlude

    So having said, a while he stood, expecting

Their universal shout and high applause

To fill his ear, when contrary he hears

On all sides, from innumerable tongues

A dismal universal hiss, the sound

Of public scorn, he wondered, but not for long

Had leisure, wond'ring at himself now more;

His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare,

His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining

Each other, till supplanted down he fell 

A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,

Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power

Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned

According to his doom; he would have spoke, 

But hiss for hiss returned with forkèd tongue

To forkèdtongue, for now were all transformed

Alike, to serpents all as accesories

To his bold riot; dreadful was the din

Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now

With complicated monsters head and tail,

Scorpion and asp, and amphisbaena dire,

Cerasts horned, hydrus, and ellops drear,

And dipsas (not so thick swarm'd once the soil

Bedropped with blood of Gorgon, or the Isle

Ophiusa), but still greater he the midst

Now dragon grown, larger than whom the sun

Engendered in the Pythian vale on slime,

Huge Python, and his power no less he seemed 

Above the rest still to retain; they all

Him followed issuing forth to th' open field,

Where all yet left of that revolted tout

Heav'n-fall'n, in station stood of just array,

Sublime with expectation when to see

In triumph issuing forth their glorious chief;

They saw, but other sight instead, a crowd

Of ugly serpents; horror on them fell,

And horrid sympathy; for what they saw,

They felt themselves now changing; down their arms,

Down fell both spear and shield, down they as fast,

And the dire hiss renewed, and the dire form 

Catched by contagion, like in punishment,

As in their crime. Thus was th' applause they meant,

Turned to exploding hiss, triumph to shame

Cast on themselves from their own mouths. There stood

A grove hard by, sprung up with this their change, 

His will who reigns above, to aggravate

Their presence, laden with fair fruit like that

Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve

Used by the Tempter: on that prospect strange

Their earnest eyes they fixed, imagining

For one forbidden tree a multitude

Now ris'n, to work them further woe or shame;

Yet parched with scalding thirst and huger fierce

Though to delude them sent, could not abstain,

But on they rolled in heaps, and up the trees

Climbing, sat thicker than the curly locks

Thar curled Megaera: greedily they plucked

The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew

Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed;

This more delusive, not the touch, but taste

Deceived; they fondly thinking to allay

Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit

Chewed bitter ashes, which th' offended taste

With spattering noise rejected; oft they assayed,

Hunger and thirst constraining, dragged as oft,

With hatefulest derelish writhed their jaws

With soot and cinders filled; so oft they fell

Into the same illusion, not as man

Whom they triumphed once lapsed. 

—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book X. Illustration: Plate 43, Gustave Doré.

Literary interlude

François Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Helen Scott during the interviews that created the book.

F.T. Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?

A.H. Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the piece of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic are to acheive something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely acheived this. it wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. 

F.T. Yes, that's true.

A.H. That's why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can't get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we're using now. People will say, "It's a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it. " I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional. 

—Hitchcock/Truffaut, by François Truffaut, 1966. 

Literary interlude, with image from "Holy Motors"

Elise Lhomeau and Denis Lavant, Holy Motors, Leos Carax, 2011

She sank upon her knees beside his pillow, took his thin hand in her own; begged him not to make an effort—not to tire himself. 

His face was of necessity serious—it was incapable of the muscular play of a smile; but its owner apparently had not lost a perception of incongruities. "What does it matter that I am tired, when I have all eternity to rest?" he asked. "There is no harm in making an effort when it is the very last. Don't people always feel better just before the end? I have often heard of that; it's what I was waiting for. ever since you have been here; I thought it would come. I tried two or three times; I was afraid you would get tired of sitting there." He spoke slowly, with painful breaks and long pauses; his voice seemed to come from a distance. When he ceased, he lay with his face turned to Isable, and his large unwinking eyes open into her own. "It was very good of you to come," he went on. "I thought you would; but I wasn't sure."

"I was not sure either, till I came," said Isabel.

"You have been like an angel beside my bed. You know they talk about the angel of death. It's the most beautiful of all. You have been like that; as if you were waiting for me."

"I was not waiting for your death. I was waiting for—for this. This is not death, dear Ralph."

"Not for you—no. There is nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That's the sensation of life—the sense that we remain. I have had it—even I. But now I am of no use but to give it to others. With me it's all over." And then he paused. Isabel bowed her head further, till it rested on the two hands that were clasped upon his own. She could not see him now; but his far-away voice was close to her ear. "Isabel," he went on, suddenly, "I wish it were over for you." She answered nothing; she had burst into sobs; at last he gave her a long groan. "Ah, what is it you have done for me?"

"What is it you did for me?" she cried, her now extreme agitation half-smothered by her attitude. She had lost all her shame, all wish to hide things. Now he might know; she wished him to know, for it brought them supremely together, and he was beyond the reach of pain. "You did something once—you know it. Oh, Ralph, you have been everything! What have I done for you—what can I do to-day? I would die if you could live. But I don't wish you to live; I would die myself, not to lose you." Her voice was as broken as his own, and full of tears and anguish.

"You won't lose me—you will keep me. Keep me in your heart; I shall be nearer to you than I have ever been. Dear Isabel, life is better; for in life there is love. Death is good—but there is not love."

"I never thanked—I never spoke—I never was what I should be!" Isabel went on. She felt a passionate need to cry out and accuse herself, to let her sorrow possess her. All her troubles, for the moment, became single and melted together into this present pain. "What must you have thought of me? Yet how could I know? I never knew, and I only know today because there are people who are less stupid than I."

"Don't mind people," said Ralph. "I think I am glad to leave people."

She raised her head and her clasped hands; she seemed for a moment to pray to him.

"Is it true—is it true?" she asked.

"True that you have been stupid? Oh no," said Ralph, with a sensible intention of wit.

"That you made me rich—that all I have is yours?"

He turned away his head, and for some time said nothing. Then at last—

"Ah, don't speak of that—that was not happy." Slowly he moved his face toward her again, and they once more saw each other. "But for that—but for that—" And he paused. "I believe I ruined you," he added softly. 

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Chapter LIV), 1881, from the 1985 Library of America edition 

Ellis island

Over on Twitter, my pal Brian Koppelman wrote yesterday, "My friend @Glenn_Kenny gets fired up (and aggro) at a moment's; yet he's been quiet despite @BretEastonEllis attack on DFW." Well, relatively quiet. I will not reflect on the irony that it is partially due to the ministrations of Brian and a few other friends that I've made an effort to be Not Such An Asshole On Twitter, despite the intuition I have that one of the few things Twitter is kind of good and amusing for is just that sort of thing. But my reasons for not weighing in more fully on Mr. Ellis' fulsome expression of negative opinion on David Foster Wallace...as I am about to do now...have more to do with an attachment to some old-school journalistic ethics than with what Richard Hell once referred to a "share of excess nice." 

First off, I don't really know all too much of Bret Easton Ellis' writing. Once I read Greil Marcus (in what was in fact a positive review) describe a scene in the novel Less Than Zero in which a poster for the Elvis Costello album Trust played a prominent symbological role, I thought "Later for this guy." This was around 1985, when I was writing rock music criticism for the Voice, and my editor Tom Carson and I would regularly compare notes concerning poetic form in Nabokov's The Gift, or as we would refer to it, Dar.* Just as we didn't need no fascist groove thing, so too did we not need facile pop-culture referential accounts of the anomie of the rich kids of our generation. After American Psycho made its splash, or whatever it was, I read precisely enough of it to determine to my own satisfaction its authorial voice, which was/is a ventriloquist dummy's inept parroting of Alain Robbe-Grillet dressed in a "Die Yuppie Scum" t-shirt. I wound up admiring Mary Harron's film version, because the array of cine-rhetorical devices the director broke out for it wound up putting a reasonably sharp point on the book's facile satire, and Christian Bale's embodiment of Patrick Bateman had a knowing gonzo wit that was nowhere evident in the prose I read. I understand that Ellis himself was less than thrilled with the movie. Go figure.

And then I was done with the writer. I was obliged to review the movie adaptation of The Rules Of Attraction, a stacked-deck college saga that makes the uncommon mistake of trying to concoct some kind of High Tragedy out of the capricious behavior of largely unformed post-adolescents. Aside from finding the whole thing overdetermined, albeit the sort of stuff that an unformed post-adolescent actor might read and think it's REALLY HEAVY, my response was pretty much along the lines of Albert Brooks' dismissal of William Hurt in Broadcast News: "You really blew the lid off of nookie." 

And so, to now, and to Bret Easton Ellis' Twitter feed, which, the fawning of any number of literary wannabe starfuckers notwithstanding, has really been little besides sad, between the dithering about how HE would put together a movie version of Fifty Shades of Gray, and his little aperçus that come off like USA-Today-column era Larry King channelling Michael Musto (which, I know, is kind of unfair to Musto), as in, "The celebrity couple I'm most compelled by right now: Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsom." Oh, do tell. Is that because Andy Samberg's a COMEDIAN and Joanna Newsom plays the harp and writes and sings such odd, idiosyncratic songs? Oh, that's weird, right...? Okay, I'll stop now. And then there's the name-dropping, and the observations such as "The best American movie right now is Magic Mike and if you're thinking it's Moonrise Kingdom then you are a hipster douchebag," the personal hilariousness of which my newfound sense of discretion inhibits me from fully discoursing on, although I will say that, demographic-alienation wise, Ellis ragging on "hipster douchebags" seems even more ill-advised than Michael Chabon poking fun at organic-food fetishists. But never mind.

ANYWAY, the SECOND reason I haven't weighed in more is that I have yet to read the D.T. Max biography of David Foster Wallace that has set Ellis off so. I AM SUPPOSED TO HAVE GOTTEN A COMP COPY, and I have not, and I have this fucked-up rule in place right now that I am not to PURCHASE any more books until I finish War And Peace, on which I'm up to about page 800. So there's that. But it was in reading Max's book that Ellis apparently felt so many (presumably) old resentments against the late Wallace stirring up. And, so moved, he deemed the "Wallace myth" "borderline sickening" on a "purely literary level," went on to say "Anyone who finds David Foster Wallace a literary genius has got to be included in the Literary Doucebag-Fools Pantheon," to aver that Wallace's "pretentiousness" made Ellis "embarassed to have any kind of ties to the publishing scene" (n.b., that's "publishing scene," not "publishing," I presume there's some kind of distinction to be discerned there), threw around terms such as "tedious," "overrated," "tortured," "pretentious" (again!) and so on. As the hippie therapist said to the troubled kid on some early '70s Afterschool Special, "that's a lot of rage there, you wanna rap about it?"

In a blog post in which he gives Ellis more of the benefit of the doubt that I'm inclined to, the always-amused-by-literary-kerfuffles James Wolcott gets some insight from venerable New York editor Gerald Howard, who worked with both Wallace and Ellis and who's also the editor of Wolcott's own diverting memoir Lucking Out. Trying to be a good dad to both his sort-of kids, Howard notes, "At the moment the Wallace style is dominant and that is what drives Bret Ellis nuts." There's a lot of issue to be taken with this sentence, one of which would be that the Wallace style is, at its best irreproducible, but there's little doubt that SOMETHING is driving Ellis nuts. Howard goes on to wax skeptical about This Is Water, which is, I think, a little unfair to Wallace, who did not supervise its publication (what with being dead and all) and who I do not think really considered it as among his signature works. But anyway. While the Wallace "style" may be "dominant," the Wallace backlash has always been with us. Not just that awful Maud Newton piece in the Times Magazine (no fucking link). Back when he was alive, and he and I would work together (yeah, you KNEW I was gonna get around to this sooner or later, didn't you?) on occasion, I can't tell you the number of colleagues who would almost literally nudge me in the ribs and make reference to "Footnote Boy." You know how the eccentric movie blogger Jeffrey Wells likes to go on about how if director Terrence Malick had a REAL producer like Bert Schneider, than he'd be disciplined into making another Days of Heaven instead of all that airy-fairy not-narrative-enough wackadoodle nonsense? Well, I was the anti-Bert-Schneider to Wallace. "You commissioned the piece at 300 words and he gave you 3,000? That's SO undisciplined. I would never stand for that." And so on. And you know, it WAS kind of a pain in the ass to have to patiently talk it out with Wallace why we were gonna have to pass on 3,000 words on Terminator 2, and then have to go and find another writer, do another agent negotiation, and so on. But in the end, such as it was, it was all worth it, because, Douchebag-Fool that I am, I thought Wallace was a fucking genius. Still do. 

I would think that Ellis would be delighted that, while an undergraduate, Wallace rhapsodized over the "smell of cunt in the air;" it makes him sound like a particularly loathesome character in, well, a Bret Easton Ellis book. The Wallace I knew and worked with was over that way of thinking about women, and was quite well-mannered, and chivalrous. I remember him being very sweet to my future wife, and saying very nice things about her in conversation thereafter. But wait...I think I'm banking near that "middlebrow sentimentality," the rejection is the most "furiously important thing an artist can achieve in this historical moment," according to...hey, wait, who's being "pretentious" now, Bret Easton Ellis?

Back to the tweets; the latter ones have gotten, not unpedictably, a bit, yes, sad. "No problem that David Foster Wallace was smarter than me and a better writer but he was so much colder than I ever was. He faked it. Almost." And then: "David Foster Wallace: when I say 'better' writer I don't know what the fuck that means except he knew big words, syntax, grammar. Big deal." Any time a self-styled creator of literature complains over "big" words it is once again time to bail, and yet there's something poignant about all this. After excoriating "Saint Dave," Ellis wants you to know that HE, Bret Easton Ellis, is really the good person. I am reminded of Ellis' high regard for Don DeLillo, and I remember the incredibly moving eulogy DeLillo delivered for Dave at NYU at a memorial for the writer there, and I recall the correspondence that DeLillo and Wallace shared to the end of Wallace's life. And I see Bret Easton Ellis sitting in the back of the classroom, alone, putting his hand up and biting his lower lip, and keeping it up so long he needs to put his other hand under his arm to prop it. And then starting to quietly piss himself.

*This is made up. Tom Carson and I never did that. But one of us may have thought of it. 

Literary interlude

Mass Cards #17

 

As to what

                        is left

that is our only

way home over what is already gone

 

to a painted head

of Alexander Hamilton

 

                                    hanging

inside clouds about the falls

on the walls of a cartoon bank

 

            our way out

of not knowing what body is missing

to restore nothing that can be named

as they are a prayer, no longer left to us

 

and all that might be sun in late November

glowing gold and crimson in the bend of a

few trees singing with birds on Cianci Street

 

and feel the warmth on this window

just heating up before a road to St. Michael’s

            church

 

the screens of the jail and a star a thousand

years above Paterson

 

—Michael Reardon

From the anthology A Place Like Paterson, edited by June Avignone, Lincoln Springs Press, 1992

 

Words I have had to look up while reading "The Complete Fiction Of W.M. Spackman"

"pibroch"

"oestrus"

"manumission"

"meiosis"

"gerent"

"ullaged"

Literary interlude

An English Catholic painter came to paint the Pope's portrait. Hadrian knew him for a vulgar and officious liar: detested him; and, at the first application, had refused to sit for him. His Holiness was not at all in love with His Own aspect. It annoyed him because it just missed the ideal which He admired; and He did not want to be perpetuated. Also, He loathed the cad's Herkomeresque-cum-Cameraesque technique and his quite earthy imagination: from that palette, the spiritual, the intellectual, the noble, could not come. But, He thought of the man's pinched asking face, of his dreadful nagging wife, of his children—of the rejection of all his pictures by the Academy this year, of the fact that he was being supplanted by younger grander minds. Ousted from livelihood! Horrible! Love your enemies! Ouf! The Pomtiff would give six sittings of one hour each, on the condition that He might read all the time.

The privilege alone was an inestimable advertisement. Alfred Elms looked upon himself as likely to become the fashion. Hadrian sat in the garden for six siestas; and he read in Plato's Phaidon, which is the perfection of human language, until His lineaments were composed in an expression of keen gentle fastidious rapture. Elm's professional efforts of conversation were annulled quietly and incisevely. The Pope blessed him and handfuls of rosaries at the end of every sitting. Sometimes His Holiness was so elated with the beauty of the Greek of His book, that He even was able with a little self-compulsion to utter a few kindly and intelligent criticisms of the painter's work. That was startlingly real, mirror-like. The varied whitenes of marble and flannel and vellum and the healthy pallor of flesh, gained purity from the notes of the reddish-brown hair and the translucent violet of the amethyst. The clean light of the thing was admirably rendered. The painter could delineate, and tint with his hand, that which his eyes beheld, with blameless accuracy. What his eyes did not see, the soul, the mind, the habit of his model, he as accurately omitted. Hadrian made him glad with a compliment on the perfection of the connection between his directive brain and his executive fingers. At the end of the last sitting also He gave him two hundred pounds, and the picture, and a written indulgence in the hour of death. The painter went away quite happy, and with his fortune made. He never knew how vehemently his work was detested, how profoundly he himself was scorned. 

—Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Hadrian The Seventh, 1904

Literary interlude

Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. In newspapers. In columns in newspapers. Special columns devoted to the personal papers of literary men. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life. 

Is he a fool? No. Absolutely not. He is doing what is appropriate. He is following a sound instinct. Instinct is so important. You have to go with the gut feeling. The gut feeling is that nothing could matter less than Ruskin. The guy feeling is that there isn't any grid to support Ruskin. The two grids left are the grid of enormous success—the grid of two hundred million—and the tiny, tiny baby grid of you and me and baby and baby's problems and my problems and your problems and can we keep even this little baby grid together?

And comfort? What is comfort? It's focus. You bring this grid together with that grid, you get the images to overlap, and suddenly things have a bit of focus, as in a certain sort of 35mm camera. What shall we bring together? The two grids. You and me and baby and baby's problem breathing and the grid of two hundred million. It is such a comfort. So it is a comfort when the literary man who knows no Ruskin tells us how it feels in his marriage when a friend brings home a pretty young girl. And it is a comfort when a comedienne whom we know, whom we love, whom we've known for years and years, whom we've loved for years and years, tells us that there has been a drug problem in her family. Suddenly, the grids merge. You and me and baby and drugs together on the grid of two hundred million. It's so intimate. It's like waking up with a friend. But just for a minute. 

—George W.S. Trow, Within The Context of No Context, 1981, Little, Brown. Originally published in The New Yorker;  republished by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1997, with introductory essay "Collapsing Dominant"

Literary interlude

ERASMUS DARWIN (1731-1802)

Erasmus Darwin, M.B., grandfather and to some extent precursor of the more famous Darwin whose evolutionary hypotheseses were for some time accepted as law, was a Lichfield physician of some personality. His bodily and mental vigour was extreme, his eccentricities included that of drinking only "English wines," his temper was imperious and irascible, and he heartily disliked Dr. Johnson, who returned his dislike thoroughly: for each lion deemed the other a bore.

Darwin's grotesque verse, a critic has remarked, everywhere shows a powerful mind. The Loves of the Plants was published in 1789, and was followed by Zoonomia, or Laws of Organic Life, and Phytologia, or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening. The first was praised by Cowper, Hayley, and Walpole; two of these being men of piety and benevolence, the third a man of fashion. The vivid romance of Elize which follows is unique in that never before has an English (or any other) poet so clearly demonstrated the folly of taking the children to see a battle. Not only does the constant rushing about make them peevish, fretful, and overheated, but a ball may easily sink into their mother's neck and she may fall to the ground, hiding her babes within her blood-stained vest. The agony of the warrior after finishing the battle is graphically conveyed; yet he, too, has a blood-stained vest, in which he immediately wraps the children, thereby staving off the inevitable rash, whooping-cough, and croup.

It might be justly added that in this age of univeral exploitation in print of erotic situation Darwin's tribute to the chastity of the Truffle strikes a welcome note. His respiring lampreys will probably arouse little emotion in a generation to whom similar embraces have become, by assiduous contemplation of American superfilm, a commonplace.

—from The Stuffed Owl, An Anthology of Bad Verse, selected and arranged by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, 1930