THE AFTERMATH OF A CONFERENCE

       On the way back from the AWP (Associate Writing Program’s annual conference) in Washington, I bought THE RILKE ALPHABET by Ulrich Baer at Dedalus Book Warehouse because under the letter K:  For Kafka and King Lear.  In the book Baer writes about the storm Rilke experienced at Duino on the Adriatic coast that in some way precipitated the great elegies… and this goes on to the storm Lear experiences in the play long after he has made the famous demand upon Cordelia…

           This lead me: while I had not been to Duino, I was on the Adriatic coast in August 1967 aware  the train had gone by Duino and having left that train at Trieste (the city of Joyce and Svevo, I knew even then) I was staying at the youth hostel right on the coast to the east of the city…         I met  Michael J. Peters who was on his way to Lebanon to see The Cedars of… we met two South African girls and went drinking and missed the curfew and found ourselves locked out and as the rain came down we found shelter in a cabana back from the beach and all night the rain on the metal roof… the holding of a damp shivering body and being held in turn…

          In the morning Michael  and I found a windowless room in a shabby hotel in the city… [I know his name as it is inscribed in an old address book, neatly block-lettered in his hand] we went up to the cemetery that overlooks the city… the bright garish decorations… the large mostly deserted official buildings of a city that had once been important... the parody of the canals of Venice… we took the ferry to Pula—as I knew even then that it was actually the first place Joyce lived in Italy… we stayed at a mostly deserted grand hotel… complete with gambling salons presided over by fellows who seemed to have stepped out of Last Year at Marienbad… in the early evening we sauntered, to be exact, around the central square with all the other young people looking at each other… we took the train for Zagreb and then went our separate ways as Michael was going to Athens--- I have not seen him since but have a few letters from back then when he had returned and was living in Seattle but I do not know what became of him--- and I was going to Sofia---to meet as I didn’t know at that moment Lilia, on Hristo Botev Boulevard within an hour of leaving the train--- and my life would change and be forever walking in the streets of Sofia.  

         The year before in Dublin in a UCD lecture hall I had heard Denis Donoghue lecture on King Lear and use as the center of his discussion of silence in Shakespeare the line of Cordelia’s in response to the demand of her father: I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth

-->

To this day and until I die I will never… so these books these sentences…  my new book’s failure, the absence of readers, my publisher’s failure---none of that equals the failure I feel in thinking about all of this and writing this as I wonder as surely any person would do::: to what end does a man buying a book, a remaindered book at that, have himself back in a storm near Trieste on the way  East to…

COLLAGE AGAINST FUTILITY: thinking of SHALAMOV, PINON, DONOGHUE, JUNGER

A collage to help me forget the futility of writing since each day is spent, hour by hour, consciously trying to forget that writing is futile and in my ignorance of not knowing a single publisher who might be capable of publishing my new books, sadly, and since Heidegger mentions that one of the aspects of the activity called writing is based upon "conversation"...no act of writing is complete until it has been read by someone other than the writer...

seven

A quote from what is probably the best literature site in the world: www.signandsight.com::::

Frankfurter Rundschau 18.11.2008

The poet Olga Martynova writes about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov and recounts a memorable decision that Georgi Vladimov had to make as editor of the periodical Novyi Mir. He could only publish one text about the Gulag, and had to decide between Solzhenitsyn's "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Shalamov's "Tales from Kolyma": "'You see' Tvardovski admitted, 'Shalamov might be the better writer. But' – and here the hidden mechanisms started to kick in - 'Solzhenitsyn's novel can be published in one go. Even if the censors tear it to bits, it will at least remain whole as a work. But with Shalamov's short stories, the censors would simply remove the best ones and the rest would perish.' And so it was ultimately down to censorship that Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel prize, went into exile, and taught mankind, and the Russian people in particular, 'not to live a lie'. While Shalamov, who was not allowed to publish a single paragraph in Russia during his lifetime, died bitter, sick and lonely in 1982."

One hopes that everyone would have read the KOLYMA TALES by Varlam Shalamov but I well understand this is probably not possible as it is the grimmest book ever written and its obscurity is testament to its power. Only A TESTIMONY by Alatoly Marachenko comes close. People have been stuffed with horror by the current and recent focus upon the Nazi killing machine, so stuffed is the public that there is little room for any other victims...

eight

To try to outlive the awfulness one can end up reading collections of letters in which one discovers comments about people one has known and well liked:

WORDS IN AIR The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell sent me to the index and NELIDA PINON but before I quote I opened again THE TRIQUARTERLY ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE, published by E.P. Dutton-- does anyone remember when that was a real and important publisher?--- and there is an inscription to me from Nelia prefacing her story "Brief Flower": TO DEAR THOMAS NOT A BRIEF AFFECTION BUT A LONG ONE I HOPE. Nelida Pinon New York 1971. I had met Nelida through Hannah Green and that year Nelida was living in a bare apartment in Brooklyn with a young elegant protege...this time in America, Nelida told me, she was not meeting famous people. In a previous visit he had met famous people. Updike had been warm and hospitable and a meeting with Philip Roth in a low bar on Eighth Street in Manhattan had been very disturbing as he felt called upon to make an advance on her and at the same time telling her, bragging almost, that this was his year to make a million dollars as had Bellow and Styron in previous years... and it is what he thought he deserved, she said.

Nelida Pinon no longer much travels to the Unites States. She reported on a later visit when she discovered universities in America are of no real importance and what happens in them seems to have very little impact on the country as a whole in spite of most academics' inflated sense of self importance. She learned this when she was invited to a big conference at Duke University and during that time she had the occasion to watch the local news reports and never once did any of them ever report on the conference which had brought writers and intellectuals from all over the world to discuss...

I do remember her talking about Lowell and his mental breakdown... but in the letters Nelida's affection for both Lowell and Bishop seems...

Bishop writes on September 21 1962, "Nelida has been here once to talk the higher Portugese with me and I think she will come now twice a week."

And then on November 7, 1962, "That girl Nelida came to call--- with a poet friend---pretty awful--- the Teasdale school, I think. They treat me as if I were 100--- help me up steps,etc! I hate lack of respect--- hate respect--- never pleased, I guess."

On December 24 from Lowell, "They (the Fairfield Foundation) also might be able to finance a trip by Nelida to New York. She might get a Ford if you and I and Keith sponsored her. I think she would have to apply first."

On January 8, 1963 from Bishop, "I don't want to mean-- but I don't think Nelida would be a good person unless there are fellowships to spare. Her novel is so bad, really. She is nice, personally, but arty and pretentious. I could have told you this that first time I met her, out of my superior knowledge of the language and the customs, but for some reason I was being discreet... maybe Nelida will learn. Clarice suffers the same kind of datedness provincialism, etc-- but she really has talent..."

nine

Edward M. Burns has just published with UCD Press in Dublin: A PASSION FOR JOYCE. The Letters of Hugh Kenner and Adalyne Glasheen. Kenner writes to Glasheen that, "DENIS DONOGHUE is not one to bury himself in a magnum opus, spending years away from the gratifications of celebrity continually conferred and renewed... Donoghue is an articulate ass."

The magnum opus was a biography of W.B. Yeats. Over the years Kenner and Donoghue had run into each other in reviews of each other's work. And I remember Donoghue in 1966 in the UCD Kevin Barry Room I think it was--- I might have the wrong room--- mentioning that the problem with Kenner was that he had no voice of his own. When he writes of Joyce he sounds like Joyce, like Beckett when writing about Beckett, when writing about Wyndham Lewis, Lewis...

As we all know, Kenner left really only one solid important book THE POUND AGE and it is a model of critical writing. DENIS DONOGHUE has written one of the greatest memoirs in WARRENPOINT and it easily holds its own in the company of such books as MANHOOD by Michel Leiris, BLACKLIST SECTION H by Francis Stuart, LITTLE SAINT by Hannah Green and A TRIP TO KLAGENFURT In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann by Uwe Johnson.

ten

And why not: the best book of 2008. ON PAIN by ERNST JUNGER just published by TELOS PRESS:

There are several great and unalterable dimensions that show a man's stature. Pain is one of them. It is the most difficult in a series of trials one is accustomed to call life... Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!

KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGHUE, DISTRACTED STUDENTS, QUALITY OF NOTHING

Denis Donoghue has concluded his two lectures on KING LEAR. He drew this listener's attention to an essay by Sigurd Burckhardt, "The Quality of Nothing" by adding that the author had been a friend and was a suicide. I have not read the article yet. Of course the essay is about the use of the word nothing in the play.

Donoghue also quoted from the famous Auden essay on the fool in Shakespeare. And he again quoted from Kenneth Burke and R. P. Blackmur. I mention these names because Donoghue is the sort of lecturer who is generous in his quotation and I have always found these leads to be productive of thought.
Most of Donoghue's lecture was composed of quotation from the final three acts of the play. It was an almost a perfect act of Walter Benjamin criticism: you will remember that Benjamin argued that the perfect act of criticism was quotation from the text under discussion and by the very quotations the critic's meaning would be made clear....

If I was a better typist I would quote at length in the same way...

I sat in the last row of that converted movie house on 8th Street. I noticed three students about me: the girl sitting next to me did not have the text before her. She took some notes and then stopped. The young man to her left typed on his laptop all through the lecture. He looked to be doing an assignment for another class. He also did not have the text with him. Immediately in front of me was a young lady also hard at work on her laptop scanning through the whole of the 75 minutes site after site... if you say I was not myself paying attention to the lecture by being distracted by these young people you would be wrong.

Now as then I have been thinking about whatever was going on in their heads? I do not know what to make of them. You just remember that no attendance is taken in this class so why do they go along to the class? Surely Donoghue's voice must serve as some sort of distraction... Donoghue is not bothered by this, he says and to be fair to the room at large there are some students who do read along with him and are taking notes...

"Certain things must happen..." Donoghue is saying as he launches into the lecture... "Certain things," I repeat to myself... and I take away the memory of tenderness of Donoghue's voice as he begins to read the passages when Cordelia and Lear are reconciled.

And then as the 75 minutes come to a close Donoghue is reading the last lines of the play when Edgar is saying, "The weight of this sad time, we must obey
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest have borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."

and Donoghue adds: "that is that with a minute or two to spare."

KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGUE, W.B. YEATS, ATOMIZATION

I know this is going to read--- as the kids might say, if they are still using this phrase--- a little heavy but please bear with the job of reading this passage from W. B. Yeats. It is from his book Essays and Introductions and is entitled EMOTION OF MULTITUDE.

Denis Donoghue quoted most of it during his first lecture on KING LEAR the other day and as I heard it I realized it was one of those defining texts about to the awful dilemma facing anyone who starts to write a blog, aware in some part of his own imagination that the word blog quite possibly has a surplus L that conceals the real nature of this enterprise. But first Yeats:

I have been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems necessary it one is to succeed on the modern stage. It came into my head the other day that this construction, which all the world has learnt from France, has everything of high literature except THE EMOTION OF MULTITUDE. The Greek drama has got the emotion of the multitude from its chorus, which called up famous sorrows, even all the god and all heroes, to witness as it were, some well-ordered fable, some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus, it has created an art where poetry and imagination, ALWAYS THE CHILDREN OF FAR-OFF MULTITUDINOUS THINGS, must of necessity grow less important than the mere will... The Shakespearian drama gets the EMOTION OF MULTITUDE out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of KING LEAR less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time. Lear's shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful children and the mind goes on IMAGINING OTHER SHADOWS, SHADOW BEYOND SHADOW, TILL IT HAS PICTURED THE WORLD... Indeed all the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich far-wandering many imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it...
(my emphasis, not in the original)

As I heard that I knew that by writing this blog I had fallen ever deeper into the atomization of the self and in turn as I am reading a blog I was falling into another atomized life because these solitary acts portray vividly the death of conversation, of the possibility of community: we are caught in the solitary voice as a fly on flypaper

Donoghue went on in his lecture to talk of the word BOND and how in many ways KING LEAR is an attempt to understand the consequences of bonds being broken and as I added, one can hear the very sentences trying to break the bonds of the very words they are composed of...

An aspect of this atomization can be seen in the proliferation of writing programs across the country and indeed across the world--- even in Ireland and France--- and whether those programs are "creative" or ordinary freshman composition courses is of no matter...

All of these programs fall apart because they all fail to realize that writing can never never be separated from reading and in fact any piece of writing is only finished when it is read by another. In all of these programs reading is an after-thought because it is only learned slowly and over many years--- it can not be neatly packaged into a once or twice a week class or into a 14 or 16 week course... a nation of writers within a nation without readers...

But why continue?...

Answer: it goes on
i leave the pronoun with no noun

KING LEAR, DENIS DONOGHUE, UCD, NYU

Tomorrow I am going along to listen to Denis Donoghue lecture in his Introduction to British Literature class at NYU. He will be talking about KING LEAR.

In 1964-65 Donoghue was a lecturer at University College, Dublin.
I heard him lecture on KING LEAR then and his theme was as I remember how Shakespeare tried to find language for feelings.
He quoted Cordelia's great reply in Act One Scene One: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty/ According to my bond, no more nor less.

I might have it all wrong from back then but I have over all these years used Cordelia's sentence as part of my own refusal to reach for the ready made phrases after my parents died... and it allowed for many a tortured moment with this or that person...

On Thursday as Donoghue was finishing up his second lecture on TWELVE NIGHT he indicated that he was now interested in Shakespeare's use of the word "bond."

I learned from Donoghue the use of the phrase, "to tease out."

I am not very good at "teasing out" much of anything but I can admire someone who does it with the skill that Donoghue bring to this near lost art.

I sit in the back of the theatre where he is talking and notice the students hard at work shopping, messengering, annotating work for other classes, reading The NewYorker, and some are even taking notes with no text in front of them. To be honest there are many who do have the textbooks along with them and read along as Donoghue reads long selections from the various texts and shows how those words work and no other word is possible...

In 1964-65 he lectured in the old Physics theater at UCD there on Earlsford Terrace.

In the front row was the celluloid curtain of nuns and priests while ranged up to the rafters were the hundreds of other students...

Today as then Donoghue lectures from no notes and with only the text in hand speaks out perfectly balanced sentences that remind me of my own failures as a college teacher but also of all that is being thrown away as students are constantly directed away from the reading of the actual words in front of them by the far more fashionable ideologues of gender, class, race who would much prefer to harangue upon the racist, class and gender issues implicit in the yellow pages of the local phone company...

Donoghue began last Tuesday's class by asking if students had seen that film LAST TANGO IN PARIS which featured at that time the depiction of a controversial and unhealthy sexual act involving the use of butter. Only two or three students raised their hands as having seen the film. Donoghue reminded the audience that the Marlon Brando character is saying in the other famous secene in the film in the tango palace, "If music be the food of love, play on,"
Donoghue mentioned that the Brando character should have realized that this was a bit of foreshadowing of his death later in the film because of what comes later in that passage in TWELVE NIGHT...

In January YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS will publish Donoghue's ON ELOQUENCE. In the book he recounts--- among other things--- his own student days at UCD and how he came to lecture there and how inadvertently Donoghue would bring to a close the glory days of UCD by promoting the inclusion of modern writers in the syllabus. It had been the glory of UCD that they did not lecture on any writer from after 1900. It was thought that such writing could be talked about in the pubs... as indeed it was in McDaid's, O'Dwyer's, The Bailey...

that is all for another day