C. K. Williams' "On Whitman"

I wasn't particularly satisfied with this book. I could see that Williams was enthusiastic about Whitman. But the book was too scattered, too disorganized to pass that enthusiasm on to me.

I learned a few things about Whitman and this book gave me many samples of Whitman's poetry to sample. But I never felt that Williams offered a clear guiding hand to fully understand Whitman's artistry or to come to a good appreciation of Whitman's body of work. Instead this book came across as a stream of consciousness filled with recollections and enthusiasms about Whitman. You had to be an "insider" to appreciate a good deal of it.

I liked much of Whitman's poetry as presented in the book. I just wanted more introduction and more "glue" so that all the pieces made more sense.

Here is one bit that spoke to me. It is the poem "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

The one thing this book did do for me -- so you can call the book a "success" -- is that it has pushed me into reading two books recommended by Williams:

• Paul Zweig's Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet


• David S. Reynolds' Walt Whitman's America

Cory Doctorow

Here is a nice video of Cory Doctorow giving a reading from his book Little Brother at Google and answer questions. The reading was nice, but to me the real value of this video is the discussion he has with the audience after the reading.

I love the material on copyright and DRM, technology's role in defending status quo vs undermining the status quo.

The Life of a Poet

Here are some bits from a review by Katha Pollitt of the book Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien. From the review, this appears to give the raw and unvarnished view of the poet Lord Byron:

In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, and more in almost as many countries as appear on Don Giovanni's list; plus countless one-offs with prostitutes and purchased girls; a brief, disastrous marriage; and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. And that's just the women! It's a wonder he found the time, considering everything else on his plate. He composed thousands of pages of dazzling poetry, traveled restlessly on the continent and in the Middle East, maintained complex relationships with friends and hangers-on, wrote letters and kept diaries and read books constantly, boxed and took fencing lessons and swam, drank (prodigiously), suffered bouts of depression and paranoia and physical ill-health, and, in his later years, joined in Italian and Greek liberation struggles. Just tending the menagerie that he liked to have about him—monkeys, parrots and macaws, dogs, a goat, a heron, even, while he was a student at Cambridge, a bear—would have driven a lesser man to distraction.

...

But these affairs (and others) paled beside his incestuous affair with Augusta, Mad Jack's daughter, five years older, married, the mother of four, whom he came to know for the first time in London in 1813: "And so it is Guss and Goose and Baby Byron and foolery and giggles, Augusta wearing the new dresses and silk shawls he has bought for her, the thrill of showing her off to the acerbic hostesses, home in his carriage at five or six in the morning ... and somehow it happened, the transition from affection to something dangerous. Never, he said, 'was seduction so easy.' "

Why, given all this excitement, Byron chose to marry Lady Caroline's prim, religious cousin, Annabella Milbanke, is a mystery. Perhaps he hoped marriage would quiet rumors—incest was a bit much even for the cynical Regency grandees among whom he moved. Perhaps it was a gesture of despair, with a bit of fortune-hunting thrown in. In any case, the marriage was a nightmare, beginning with the bridegroom pacing the halls with loaded pistols on his wedding night and culminating in Annabella's departure, newborn infant Ada in tow, after only 16 months. In her legal case for a separation she accused Byron of ongoing incest with Augusta and appalling maltreatment of every kind, culminating in anal rape two days after she gave birth.

Ostracized by those who had lionized him, Byron left England, never to return. Further adventures and abuses followed, the worst of which was probably his cruelty toward Mary Shelley's stepsister, Jane Clairmont, who bore him a daughter, Allegra. Rather than financially assisting Jane in raising the child, which he could easily have afforded to do, he took custody and refused to answer Jane's increasingly pathetic letters begging for news; he soon handed Allegra off to assorted others before sending her to a convent school, where she died, unvisited by anyone but Shelley, at age 5. By then he had settled down with the young, beautiful, married Italian countess Teresa Guiccioli.

...

It is easy to see Byron as a cad, a narcissist and, at bottom, a misogynist. But that would be unfair. Byron's great insight, in an era where women were expected to be placid and insipid (not that they were!), was to see that women were much like men: They wanted sex and went after it eagerly, if secretly. Don Juan, his great satiric novel in verse, is a virtual catalog of passionate women who are anything but bashful, even if still virginal, and who are presented without condemnation, as human beings doing what human beings do. He understood, too, how limited was women's scope for action.

...

One final note: O'Brien has little to say about Byron's poetry, but without it, he would be just another eccentric milord. To find out what all the fuss was about, pick up a copy of Don Juan. It's as fresh and sparkling and hilarious and sexy as the day it was published, and will make you wish the author was still around, so that you could write him a letter proposing a discreet assignation.

Sure he sounds like an "interesting" character, but something gnaws at me. If he didn't have the money, he wouldn't have lived the ostentatious life and he certainly wouldn't have gotten away with treating so many people so badly. Today, as then, money/power is a secret lubricant that buys you "adventures" as well as a "get out of jail free" card.

For those of you itching to dig into Byron's Don Juan, here's a link to an on-line version.

John Steinbeck's "The Pearl"

I've always enjoyed John Steinbeck. I like the style of writing from the 1930s. Crisp, to the point, directed at the real human condition. None of the stylistic flourishes that distract me from the story.

I would have sworn that I had read this book in my youth, but after reading it, I know that I hadn't. Funny how you think you know the corpus of work of an author but discover gaps in what you think you've read. Well, I'm glad I finally "got around" to this book. Very enjoyable.

The story is simple: a poor Indian family discovers a pearl and it brings them no end of trouble until they throw it back in the sea. I notice that one of the critics takes the simple story and "discovers" that its hidden meaning is "the diver Kino believes that his discovery of a beautiful pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His fall from innocence is one of Steinbeck's most moving stories about the American dream." That is a bit much. The story stands on its own. I don't think Steinbeck was making a grand point about "the American dream".

What I do find in the story is Steinbeck's clear comments about the gulf between poor and rich, the cruelty of people, the depravity of some, the innocence of others, and the rich tapestry of life. If anything, this "meaning" is that life is deeply rooted and even the discovery of an object of "great wealth" probably won't change the underlying pattern of life. Society is more than the individual. Life is a stream and not individual events. And "nature" is indifferent to the individual.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise"

I was a bit disappointed with this book. The Great Gatsby was an enjoyable read. This one struck me as immature. Fitzgerald tries out a number of styles and doesn't create a compelling narrative. This novel was an immediate success back in the early 1920s. I suppose because it caught the zeitgeist. But I can't get too excited about an upper crust wannabe who flubs. The story ends with a fizzled out "self awareness" that was underwhelming. The guy is self-centered (he calls himself an egotist), social climber who fails in his love affairs and throws over a perfectly good job because it was "too confining". It reminds me of the 1960s, also an era where upper middle class kids got "tired" of the rat race and dropped out. While Fitzgerald's goal was to hang on to the coattails of the upper class, the kids of the 1960s were happy to "go back to the land" and embrace poverty. But both are symptoms of a time rising expectations that fail to meet those expectations.

This is clearly the early novel of an as-yet immature great writer. It shows an ability to grab you with its dialog and word painting. But it is uneven and too precious in many places. Its name-dropping is a bit comical because Fitzgerald rattles off lists of authors or poets or intellectuals that are meant to impress, but sadly most of the names have been lost to history. So his ability to "name genius" becomes a bit comical.

The jazzed-up language of this book grates on modern sensibilities. A lot of his hip language was never widely adopted, so it sound tinny. The theme of self-awareness and wrestling with one's culture comes across as overly dramatic and false. For his time this might have been exciting fare, but to a modern ear it falls short:

'Rotten, rotten old world,' broke out Eleanor suddenly, 'and the wrtechedest thing of all is me -- oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid --? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girles without being involved in meshses of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified -- and here am I with brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.'

This lament that women were somehow burdened by marriage while men were not it, to me, farcical. Marriage has always been a burden for both parties. The idea that men were free to run around and have affairs while women weren't is a bit precious. It takes two to have an affair. Who were these men running around with if it weren't women.

In fact, this is a slice of upper class dogma. Men were the titans of industry and women were to sit at home and knit. That might have been true for 5% of the population, but it certainly didn't characterize the bottom 50% and was an ideal of the middle class that was aspired to but not often achieved. Victorian ethics may have claimed obedience from the arbiteurs of taste, but my grandfathers who were running around in the 1900-1930 era were getting divorced, having affairs, and living what I would consider to be pretty normal human lives. Not the lives painted by morals teachers or novelists, but the real world lives of people with short lives and big temptations.

On whole, the book was satisfactory. If it weren't a "great" novelist, I would have dropped this book in the first 50 pages. I can't say I experienced the novel. Instead I viewed it as a quaint historical novel of interest for viewpoints but not something that swept me away in its language, story line, or big ideas. Instead, this line from the lead character's self realization grated on me:

'I detest poor people, ' thought Amory suddenly. 'I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it's rotten now. It's the ugliest thing in the world. It's essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.'

Yep... that's the Bernie Madoff, the Jeffrey Skilling, the Bernie Ebbers "enlightment" which inflicts our age, the Second Gilded Age. Fitzgerald echos this in his novel set in the First Gilded Age.

An Interesting Theory

You run across the intriging things in the strangest places. Here's a "news" story on the BBC web site that reports on a literary interpretation of the book The Wizard of Oz. It made me stop and think. Nobody knows what was in Frank Baum's mind when he wrote the book, but this interpretation will enrich the experience for me. Now when I watch the movie I'll be thinking populist history of the late 19th century in the U.S. It will add to my enjoyment:

In 1964, high school teacher Henry Littlefield wrote an article outlining the notion of an underlying allegory in Baum's book. He said it offered a "gentle and friendly" critique of Populist thinking, and the story could be used to illuminate the late 19th Century to students.

... He believed the characters could represent the personalities and themes of the late 1800s,with Dorothy embodying the everyman American spirit.

US political historian Quentin Taylor, who supports this interpretation, says: "There are too many instances of parallels with the political events of the time.

"The Tin Woodman represents the industrial worker, the Scarecrow is the farmer and the Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan."

Bryan was a Democratic presidential candidate who supported the silver cause. But he failed to win votes from eastern workers and lost the 1896 election. In the same way, the Lion's claws are nearly blunted by the Woodman's metallic shell.

The Wicked Witch of the West is associated with a variety of controversial personalities, chief among them the industrialist Mark Hanna, campaign manager to President William McKinley.

In this scenario, the yellow brick road symbolises the gold standard, the Emerald City becomes Washington DC and the Great Wizard characterises the president - and he is exposed as being less than truthful.

SYMBOLISM OF CHARACTERS

• Dorothy: Everyman American
• Scarecrow: Farmer
• Tin Woodman: Industrial worker
• Lion: William Jennings Bryan, politician who backed silver cause
• Wizard of Oz: US presidents of late 19th Century
• Wicked Witch: A malign Nature, destroyed by the farmers' most precious commodity, water. Or simply the American West
• Winged Monkeys: Native Americans or Chinese railroad workers, exploited by West
• Oz: An abbreviation of 'ounce' or, as Baum claimed, taken from the O-Z of a filing cabinet?
• Emerald City: Greenback paper money, exposed as fraud
• Munchkins: Ordinary citizens

Go read the whole article to get more details and background.

For more details:

(1) Here's a historians view of this interpretation. This statement in the essay caught my eye:

As scholars continued to extend and modify Littlefield's interpretation, laymen discovered it as well. Perhaps the best example was a widely-reprinted essay, first published in the Los Angeles Times in 1988, in which Michael A. Genovese described The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as "the story of the sad collapse of Populism and the issues upon which the movement was based." Genovese's brief analysis was pure Littlefield. But there was one notable (and somewhat disturbing) aspect of Genovese's piece: Littlefield's name was never mentioned.

(2) Look at this posting by a student raised on the Littlefield hypothesis. It includes an essay by Henry M. Littlefield:

The Tin Woodman, whom Dorothy meets on her way to the Emerald City, had been put under a spell by the Witch of the East. Once an independent and hard working human being, the Woodman found that each time he swung his axe it chopped off a different part of his body. Knowing no other trade he "worked harder than ever," for luckily in Oz tinsmiths can repair such things. Soon the Woodman was all tin (p. 59). In this way Eastern witchcraft dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine. Here is a Populist view of evil Eastern influences on honest labor which could hardly be more pointed.