Thomas Bernhard, _Correction_. trans. Sophie Wilkins

 I have read a good handful of stories by Bernhard, but this was my first Bernhard novel. I chose it for a somewhat perverse reason: I had read that its sentences had the highest score on someone's "difficulty of reading" index. The sentences of Correction are long, true, but are not complex in the way that (say) Proust's or Faulkner's or Broch's are; they extend over whole pages because the narrator keeps interrupting himself to explain, or qualify, or revise, so the effect is more one of garrulity than complexity. The prose is not all that hard to read.

It's a worthwhile read, though. The (unnamed) narrator is writing to explain to us the life and work of his brilliant friend Roithamer, one of the sons of a wealthy and prominent family and a polymath of genius.  His final project was to build a cone-shaped dwelling for his sister in the center of a forest on or near their family estate. He completes the project, but his sister dies before she can move in, and Roithamer then kills himself--his suicide is the "correction" of the title.

I don't think the preceding paragraph would count as a spoiler, by the way--we learn of all these events within the first few pages. There is no suspense in the novel, nor plot, really--just the intelligent-but-not-brilliant narrator doing his painstaking, constantly self-correcting best to understand and help us understand his terrifyingly brilliant friend (based on Ludwig Wittgenstein). Rough analogues might be Serenus Zeitblom in Mann's Doctor Faustus trying to explain Adrian Leverkühn to us, or Lenù trying to explain Lila in Elena Ferrante's quartet, or even Jeffrey Cartwright trying to explain Edwin Mullhouse in Stephen Millhauser's strange and wonderful Edwin Mullhouse.

Bernhard's vision of the situation is a bit darker than Millhauser's, Ferrante's, or Mann's, which should come as no surprise. Genius is pain, as John Lennon explained to Jann Wenner back in 1970, and the pain in Correction is as bottomless as Roithamer's genius.

Theodor Adorno, "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry," trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen

 THE ENGLISH VERSION can be found in Notes to Literature, Volume II, if you are interested. Dates from 1960. Heidegger only crops up in the essay a few times, but he is definitely in Adorno's crosshairs.

I found this a demanding read, with its paragraphs sometimes stretching past the two-page mark and sentences such as "The sublimation of primary docility to become autonomy, however, is that supreme passivity that found its formal correlative in the technique of seriation." Hmm, okay. After three passes at such pronouncements, I tend to give up and plunge ahead, hoping things will clear up later. In other words, if you want a truly accurate précis of Adorno's argument, you will have to look elsewhere than here.

A few points emerged for me, though. The content of a poem is not what it explicitly states, Adorno writes--that is, not simply equivalent to the propositions it makes. How things are said matters as much as what is said. The form is part of the content. So far, so good--Heidegger would not dissent from that, I imagine. However, when Adorno writes, "Every interpretation of poetry that formulates it as Aussage [message] violates poetry's mode of  truth by violating its illusory character," I have a feeling he sees Heidegger as one such violator.

Heidegger definitely might dissent from the next part of Adorno's argument, which is that the form of Hölderlin's later poems (the Hymns, mainly) is dialectically engaged with (what we will call) the propositional content of the poems. That is, the sentences of the poems may be saying one kind of thing, but the form of those sentences--their parataxes, the ways they scramble or abandon classic Ciceronian sentence construction--is saying another kind of thing, posing a challenge to the propositional content of those very sentences. Thus, the truth content of the poem is not at all identical to the truth (or otherwise) of the propositions of the poem. 

I'm not in a position to judge how strong Adorno's evidence for this argument is, relying as I do on English translations of Hölderlin. But it made sense, as a general argument, and lines up with the widespread tendency to see Hölderlin as anticipating the ruptures of literary modernism (Adorno sees him a precursor to Beckett, for instance). 

I had not read Adorno on poetry before this--apart from his famous parenthetical aside that writing it after Auschwitz was barbaric--and I have to admit I was enlightened and impressed. I will have to build up some stamina before attempting another, though.

Morgan Parker, _There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé_

 PARKER'S 2019 COLLECTION Magical Negro was a favorite around here. She has since published a book of essays and a YA novel (and perhaps an analysis of Project 2025--can that be the same Morgan Parker?), and they certainly look worth investigating, but while waiting for the successor to Magical Negro I thought I would look into her back catalogue.

The cover of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé offers Carrie Mae Weems in bed, in a nightgown, legs splayed, cigarette in hand and wicked look on her face...as if to say, "if you can't deal with this, just go on back to that Mary Oliver book you were looking at." Somewhat like Roger Reeves and Shane Book, Parker can go from the canonical (W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens) to in-your-face contemporary ("99 Problems") in an eyeblink--no apologies, no explanations. She can be funny and furious at the same time ("99 Problems" again, or "Heaven Be a Xanax," or "13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl"). 

Her verbal invention never flags.

when moon rises peach
over Mom's kitchen table
some grasses bending
                     homegirl way

   ("Beyoncé, Touring Asia, Breaks Down in a White Tee")

It hits me first thing: I've never been cool.
I am driving with glass eyes and lead feet. 

I jetpack into the heaviness alone.
My bare face hanging out all over the kitchen counter. 

   ("My Vinyl Weighs a Ton") 

I'm sorry. Let me fucking mourn me.

For the diamonds that didn't shake loose.

   ("Funeral for The Black Dog")

The collection's leading theme is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, named in at least a dozen of the book's poems. I wish I knew enough about Beyoncé to say something credible about Parker's analysis of her place in the culture, but I just don't. I gathered she matters somewhat more than Barack Obama does, an insight that rearranged my own sense of the cosmos in what I suspect is a very healthy way.

Charles Taylor, "Engaged agency and background in Heidegger"

THIS IS A chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon and published in 1993. I picked up the volume hoping for some clarification of my question (i.e., how was it that Heidegger, an eloquent advocate for poetry and general and Hölderlin in particular, was also a Nazi?). Hölderlin only comes up in Guignon's volume a couple of times, and Taylor does not mention him at all in his contribution, but Taylor was still helpful. Very helpful.

Taylor's first sentence: "Heidegger's importance lies partly in the fact that he is perhaps the leading figure among that small list of twentieth-century philosophers who have helped us emerge, painfully and with difficulty, from the grip of modern rationalism."

If Heidegger wanted to get us out of the grip of modern rationalism, poetry would certainly be a way to do it. Poetry can be rational, of course, but it tends not to deal with straightforward propositions that are either true or false. When Keats says of the nightingale, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!", he is making an obviously false statement...arrant nonsense, even, if you are a strict logical positivist sort of person. Within the poem, though, the statement moves things forward, gets us somewhere, helps us understand something. Is there a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem? No, there is not. And yes, there is.

The problem arises because fascism in general, and Hitler in general, also tended to look down on rationality as inferior to blood, national feeling, intuition, instinct, the will to power, and so on. With disastrous results.

So, to restate my problem in the terms that Taylor has enabled me to see, can we have the opening-up-possibilities, new ways of seeing thing kind of irrationality that good poetry provides without at the same time inviting the demonizing, fear-mongering, blood-shedding kind of irrationality that turns our communities into war zones? 

I need to look into Taylor's most recent book.

Jenn Shapland, _My Autobiography of Carson McCullers_

AS SHAPLAND'S TITLE suggests, this is not exactly a biography of McCullers; Shapland tells us a lot about herself in it, but it's not exactly about her, either. Let's call it a meditation on what writers can come to mean to us even though our only relationship with them is actually only with the writing they left behind, much of which was not even intended for us, but which inexplicably has a power to explain us to ourselves. 

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers reminded me of A. J. A. Symons's brilliant but unorthodox Quest for Corvo (1934), in which he gives us a biography of the brilliant but unorthodox novelist Frederick Rolfe, who published as "Baron Corvo." Rather than start with Rolfe's birth and duly march readers forward to his death, Symons begins by telling us how he came to read Rolfe, how he began his investigations, what he found and where he found it, and how he was able to piece together Rolfe's life story. Biography as detective story, if you will.

Shapland's book is also about her investigations, her time in the archives, her spending time in the places McCullers spent time, her piecing together of a story...in this case, a story that (unlike Rolfe's) has already been entombed in weighty formal biographies (Virginia Spencer Carr, et al.). As with Symons's book, a portrait emerges that is all the more interesting because we have seen some of the process through which the portrait emerged.

Shapland goes much further than Symons does in revealing her own investment in the subject of her portrait, though. Rolfe was gay, and Symons straightforwardly acknowledges that while leaving his own sexuality out of the discussion. (Was Symons gay? On the one hand, he was married; on the other hand, he was also planning to write a biography of Wilde.) Shapland places McCullers's queerness in the foreground of the portrait right from the opening pages, and states plainly enough that writing about McCullers has been crucial in the recognition, acknowledgement, and embrace of her own lesbian sexuality. 

McCullers's other, more academic biographers tend to be cagier or more cautious on this subject. They tend to talk about bisexuality, conflicted feelings, ambiguity, that sort of thing. I don't know whether Shapland is right that Mary Mercer was McCullers's lover as well as a devoted friend. Clearly, Shapland wants Mercer to have been lover as well as friend, for reasons that have a lot to do with Shapland's own sense of kinship with her subject. In an academic biography, letting your own feelings tip the balance this way would not be okay...but it does feel okay here, because Shapland is so upfront about it, even calling our attention to it, and because it makes a valid point about how and why we read.

Shapland's portrait of McCullers has more than a bit of the portraitist in it, but Shapland is so honest about that (again, see title) that her book seems something more worth having than another biography. 

Sam Riviere, _After Fame_

NOT A TRANSLATION of Book I of Martial's epigrams, let's emphasize--maybe an "imitation," along the lines of Alexander Pope's Imitations of Horace or Samuel Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes." Apparently some of it was translated using a digital translation program, the kind of program which at the time the book was published (2020) was still capable of producing refreshingly odd results, but still, very far from a translation. Martial in a wobbly 21st century mirror, we might say.

For example, number 47 in Martial's Book I is about a contemporary of his who has switched careers from being doctor to being an undertaker, and Martial makes the joke that he has not really changed his work at all, as he is still putting people underground. Riviere's 47 reads:

This is to acknowledge

that poets do admin

in 2018: received

I think the joke here is that poets who get jobs in academia find themselves saddled with stultifying tasks, but perhaps in some cases their poetry was already stultifying, so no major change has occurred. So the relation between Martial's poems and Riviere's is more oblique and through-a-cloud-darkly than that between Pope and Horace or Johnson and Juvenal, but still discernible and sometimes wickedly funny.

After Fame certainly aligns with Riviere's 2021 novel, Dead Souls, a picaresque trip through the institutions contemporary writing inhabits (see LLL post of Oct 2, 2023). Martial is an urban poet whose short, sharply pointed poems conjure up a setting of ill-gotten wealth, literary sophistication, intoxication, sexual adventurism, and plagiarism, a setting which (mutatis mutandis) is an awfully close match for that of Dead Souls.

I wondered whether Riviere himself had had to bat away any accusations of plagiarism, since Martial accuses a few people of appropriating his work and Solomon Wiese, a key character in Dead Souls, has his own troubles on that score. Riviere's early poetry had incorporated random search-engine finds (like what the USA called "flarf") and that may have led to the kind of sticky intellectual property questions that Wiese deals with in the novel. (Working with Martial is risk-free in that regard; he has been dead for about 1900 years, and that may be part of the joke.)

The irony is, though, that Riviere is about as original poet as you are ever going to encounter these days. Reading him is a continuing surprise.

Ernst Junger, _The Glass Bees_, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer

 I WANT TO be careful slinging around the word "prescient," since the specter of replacing humans with machines has been haunting western literature since at least 1920 thanks to Karel Capek's R. U. R., but the frontier of what machines can do has moved so far since the original German publication of this novel in 1957 and even since the New York Review Books reprint of this translation in 2000 that one has to give Jünger a tip of the hat, at least.

Jünger's career was unique. His first book, Storm of Steel, differed from almost all fiction and non-fiction by WWI veterans (e.g., Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque, Henri Barbusse) in being frankly celebratory of combat experience. He was a prominent voice on the hard right in Germany after the war, but he didn't like the Nazis, even though they courted him assiduously; his On the Marble Cliffs (1939) is a novella-length parable about Hitler that makes you wonder how it even got published in Hitler's Germany, or why Jünger was not immediately arrested. He served in the German army during WW II but (according to Wikipedia) was in the remoter orbits of the officers who tried (and failed) to assassinate Hitler.

The Glass Bees is a short novel (roughly 200 pages) about a job interview. The narrator is Captain Richard, who was trained to be a cavalry officer but had to settle for being a tank commander--a suitable analogue for the crushing of the old ways under the wheels of modernization. He has landed a job interview with Zapparoni, a figure a bit like Peter Thiel and Walt Disney rolled into one, a Master of the Universe whose empire is built on automation. Captain Richard has been having a hard time since the (unspecified) war, his reputation suffering from his close association with the bad old days that his society is trying to forget (or repress). The interview is his best shot at getting a secure spot in the modern world.

He doesn't much like the modern world, though, "an age when hierarchy is determined by mastery of technical apparatuses and when technics have become destiny." "Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible," he writes; "If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other." For the Zapparoni business plan to be achieved, "man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed."

As he goes through the interview, Captain  Richard tells us a lot about his past, all of which underlines how uncongenial to him are Zapparoni and all of Zapparoni's works. Over the course of his interview, it occurs to him again and again that he has given himself away and blown his opportunity. Somehow, though, he gets the gig. We don't learn how it worked out.

Marie de Flavigny, Comtesse d'Agoult, writing as "Daniel Stern," _Histoire de la Revolution de 1848_

I HAVE BEEN reading, at a very leisurely pace, Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848. Excellent book--chapters on a variety of people who were on hand in Paris for the tumultuous events of that year and who went on to write about it: Marx, Hugo, Flaubert, Tocqueville, George Sand, Alexander Herzen. The poet Alphonse Lamartine not only wrote about it but was a leading figure, at least for half a year or so.

Among the book's virtues is its whetting my appetite to read (or re-read, in a couple of cases) what these people wrote about 1848. I had never even heard of Marie d'Agoult before reading Beecher's chapter on  her, but she's a compelling writer, and her history of the revolution, published under a pseudonym, may turn out to be my best find of 2025.

The Comtesse d'Agoult left her aristocratic husband to live with pianist and composer Franz Liszt in the 1830s; she and Liszt lived together for ten years and had three children (one daughter, Cosima, later married Richard Wagner). When they broke up, d'Agoult became a writer and led a noted literary salon. She was well acquainted with Lamartine, among others, and obviously had some all-the-way inside sources for her history, which appeared in three volumes published during the span 1850-53. 

I did not read the whole thing, which runs roughly a thousand pages, but I did read a chapter or two from each volume, a total of about 140 pages.

D'Agoult sketches personalities vividly, even the people she is not much in political sympathy with. She seems to be of Lamartine's party, seeking a liberal democratic republic that stops short of socialism, but she emphasizes the courage and resourcefulness of the workers. She does seem to have a distaste for Louis Napoleon, whose election as president in the late fall of 1848 was the dismal anticlimax to the year of revolution, but who can blame her?

She has a novelist's touch in rendering the revolution's most dramatic moments, which is what I zeroed in on for my reading: Chapter 16, on February 25th, when Lamartine talked a crowd out of substituting the red socialist flag for the Republic's tricolor; Chapters 22 about some of the leaders of opinion; Chapter 23 about the 17th of March, when a crowd of tens of thousands of workers showed up at a meeting of the provisional government at the Hotel de Ville (city hall) to present their demands; and Chapter 33, about the "June days," when the barricades went up and armed conflict broke out between the national guard and the workers of Paris.

Marie d'Agoult is the Hilary Mantel of 1848. I hope this isn't trivializing, but I couldn't stop thinking about what an amazing miniseries this could make. 

G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual_ (5)

WALDREP'S NEW BOOK inhabits a zone just beyond my reach, as shown by my not having spotted its kinship to feast gently and The Earliest Witnesses until I saw the word "trilogy" on the back cover, but I have no reservations about giving it my fullest recommendation. This is the real thing.

It shares features with the two preceding collections, but lends those features a higher, more sustained intensity. The attention to place--most prominently, Acadia National Park and Arrow Rock, Missouri--has a sense of pilgrimage, of trying to be open to what is sacred about a particular landscape. Something can linger where people have worshipped, and Waldrep can get at that, as Larkin does in "Church Going," but even more like what Eliot does in "Little Gidding."

The formal variety...Waldrep can be expansive, even chatty ("I grasped the shuttle in my hand it was a very good shuttle an antique you might say") but can also, as in "Saint Sauveur," compress the idea into a diamond-tipped drill going straight down into the core. 

He has read widely, and he is not going to pretend he hasn't. He crosses the line from the erudite to the recondite a few times, but hermetic though he sometimes is, he still conveys a spirit of invitation and generosity. How is that even possible? I have no idea. But there we are. The book's final poem, "In the Designed Landscape (Garden of Planes)," its stately stanzas somehow achieving intimacy, teeters on the edge of utter opacity but still wants us to get somewhere together. 

"[T]he kind of furiously curious, unabashedly ambitious poetry book I want to show everyone, to prove such books can still be written,"says Kaveh Akbar on the back cover of The Opening Ritual. Let me offer a humble second to that motion.

G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual _, (4)

AND THEN...THEN...the last poem, "In the Designed Landscape (Garden of Planes)," was addressed to "rakers of sand." "O you rakers of sand, come," it begins, and the rakers are apostrophized a few more times (e.g., "it is time for you to come to me, I mean, to where I stand." 

I think the more reasonable guess is that we are in a zen garden, where raking the sand (or gravel) is part of a meditative practice.

But because of all my recent preoccupation with Heidegger and Hölderlin also involves Paul Celan, I found myself thinking of the Celan poem that begins "NO MORE SAND ART, no sand book, no masters." What is sand art? Something we want no more of, obviously. but what makes art "sand art"? Since we cannot build on sand, since we cannot grow things in sand, "sand art" is that art which is just a dead end, which is sterile, which lends us no strength, no vision, no clarity. And the reader--let's say relentless book reviewer and Goodreads poster--who devotes time to this dead end, sterile, pointless art is...just raking sand. A raker of sand, c'est moi, is what I was thinking. 

I will probably keep raking sand, but the appeal to come to where Waldrep stands resonates with me. 

G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual_ (3)

 MY MALFUNCTIONING INTUITIONS (discussed in yesterday's post) are probably messing with me again, but at a few points The Opening Ritual seemed to be addressing my months-long preoccupation with Heidegger and Hölderlin.

The short poem "Saint Sauveur" is likely written about or inspired by the landscape of the Saint Sauveur mission, the first French Jesuit mission established in North America, in what is now Maine. It begins: "Am I music? is what / the water asks. (It isn't.)" Images of water are followed by references to time: "I wait / for the years/ to drop away from me. / (They don't.)" It ends: 

This is the non-sound

of everything. 

listening.

It's what poetry aspires to.

I did catch the twist on Walter Pater's famous line, "All art aspires to the condition of music," here rearranged to suggest poetry aspires to the condition of silence. Which makes sense. But I also found myself thinking of Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's "The Ister" and the "poets are rivers" idea. Does poetry aspire not simply to silence, but to being holding its breath to listen to the water--the water which is both a locality and a journeying, that is both the past, the present, and the future all at once? (this is all from the post of January 21, 2025.)

All this occurred to me, but I dismissed as an after-effect of reading all that Heidegger in January. But then, in "A Meadowlark in Arrow Rock, Missouri," we have  this passage:

And then: to bleed light, as it were a key.
                Wound wound wound wound!
        The wonder of it, almost but not quite a lock.
                        But it sounds better 
            than Hölderlin Hölderlin Hölderlin!
which is perhaps the more accurate translation.

Wait..what? What is it that can be translated as "wound" but (more accurately) as "Hölderlin"? Whatever is going on here goes to the core themes of (what I now know is) the trilogy: the natural world, worship, healing. But where did Hölderlin come from? How is he a wound?

Then, in "Marching Bear Group," we find "I feel / presenced. To the presence that dwells inside presence, / the presence that wind knows, that breath knows." Don't think that didn't set off little Heidegger-bells in my befogged brain.

G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual_ (2)

AS I READ The Opening Ritual, I kept bumping into realizations that I had been getting certain things wrong. 

These realizations started occurring even as I was glancing at the book's front matter.

For instance, I had been annoyed by Kaveh Akbar's not including Waldrep in his Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, but it turns out Akbar is an admirer. "The Opening Ritual is the kind of furiously curious, unabashedly ambitious poetry book I want to show everyone, to prove such books can still be written," Akbar writes. That's the part of the blurb quoted on the back cover, but lest you think that is just the usual dramatic but vague overstatement poets swap around in blurbs, in the more complete version inside the opening pages Akbar mentions and quotes particular poems in a way that makes me think he means it. I still think Waldrep should have been in that anthology, but perhaps Akbar deliberately chose to focus on  the tradition rather than on living poets.

In another encomium in the opening pages, Sasha Steensen notes that The Opening Ritual is the "third collection in a trilogy centered on illness and healing." I did notice that there was a strong sense of continuity from feast gently to The Earliest Witnesses: the importance of place, health difficulties, wide-ranging interest in possibilities of form, theological concerns. But I assumed it was the same kind of continuity a reader senses between Yeats's The Tower and his The Winding Stair, or between Heaney's North and his Field Work, not the kind between H. D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall and her Tribute to the Angels. The word "trilogy" occurs on the back cover as well, though, so all I can do is own up to my own impercipience. It does make me want to re-read the first two--although I might have done that in any case, I liked them so much.

The poems in The Earliest Witnesses set in West Stow Orchard reminded me much of Augustine (as I mentioned in this blog on Dec. 6, 2024) and made me imagine that Waldrep had drunk deeply of and valued Augustine's testimony, but in "Houses Built from the Bodies of Lions or of Dogs" Waldrep records, "I read Augustine on one of the islands (the first) and disliked him more with every page." Well, wrong again. "You won't have to read Augustine anymore," announces a later poem, with evident relief. 

I almost fell into the same mistake reading these lines in "The Arrhythmias":

               I have not forgotten

the taste shame left in the mouth of my childhood,

like bark stripped from some bitter tree &  then infused,

delicately, with the aroma of a single ripe peach

I'd stolen.

Didn't Augustine steal a peach as a child? I thought. Isn't this an allusion to the Confessions? But no. Augustine stole a pear. 

I wish Prufrock had asked, "Do I dare to steal a peach?" 

G. C. Waldrep, _The Opening Ritual_ (1)

 IN MY CRUSTIER moods, I complain that G. C. Waldrep ought to be published by Norton or FSG or some other high visibility outfit, but I have to admit that the Tupelo Press volumes always look good, especially this one. Take a bow, Ann Aspell.

I was initially taken aback, though, by the painting on the cover (a crow attacking a hare) juxtaposed with the title phrase, "the opening ritual," as it left the impression that the evisceration of the hare by the crow was the "opening" in question. 

I had to read no further than the first poem to learn that yes, that is exactly the kind of opening in question, and the painting is so apposite to the title that I wonder whether it was selected by Waldrep himself. Consider the opening lines of "I Have Touched His Wealth with the Certainty of Experience":

Body of a young hare quite dead lying in a corner

of the pasture. It wasn't there yesterday.

A magpie alights, worries it a bit. The magpie's head

in quick shakes, left & right, its sharp beak

performing the opening ritual. 

So, yes, we are talking about the tearing open of bodies. "The first thing the dead / lose are their eyes," we learn a few lines later. 

The title comes from a letter written by Simone Weil, which makes me wonder whether the poem suggests the arrival of grace as a physical shock, wounding, even traumatizing... or even fatal, perhaps. "Love always uses us as if we were infinite, it seems, / although it must know, by now, that we're not," is how the poem ends. 

This ritual of "opening" may be something like what happens in John Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," with its invitation to "break, blow, burn, and make me new," but in the case of Waldrep's poem there has been no invitation for the breaking, blowing, and burning, nor willing acceptance of it all, but more the bewildered anguish of "WTF, God?"

(to be continued)

Priscilla Hayden-Roy, _”A Foretaste of Heaven”: Friedrich Hölderlin in the Context of Würtemberg Pietism_

THIS MADE FOR a happy antidote to the all the Heidegger-on-Hölderlin I have been reading in recent months. Heidegger is only a little interested in Hölderlin’s biography and seemingly not at all interested in his cultural and intellectual context in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Indeed, a recurring note in his analyses is that we are only now (that is, circa 1934-44) in a position to really understand Hölderlin, since only with Hellingrath’s edition did we have the necessary materials; the unstated assumption, I think, is that only once Heidegger had dispelled metaphysical error were we really able to see Hölderlin plain.

Hayden-Roy, however, is all about the biographical, historical, and intellectual context. Hölderlin as a young man entered seminary (where he met Hegel and Schelling—what a seminary that must have been); his relationship to faith and the church evolved so rapidly that he did not complete his studies and became a tutor instead, but his exposure to the theological thinking of the time, including pietism, was thorough, and it made a difference.

“Pietism” considered from a distance seems a distinctly outlined and unified phenomenon, but looked at up close, as Hayden-Roy does, it gets awfully craggy and multiple. Still, the case that its emphasis on personal experience of the divine, its unwillingness to do much policing of the bounds of orthodoxy, and its indifference to the church’s role in being a prop to secular authority profoundly affected Hölderlin makes sense, given how carefully Hayden-Roy distinguishes between points at which Hölderlin shared ground with the pietists and where he parted company from them.. (The supporting quotations from Höldelin’s poetry and correspondence are untranslated from the original German, so I could not judge how airtight the argument was, but still, from what I could gather, I’d say it made sense).

I’d like to see some work on the English Romantic poets along these lines. Frank McConnell’s ˆThe Confessional Imagination, which put Wordsworth’s Prelude in the context of Methodist and Quaker thinking, comes to mind. But compared to recent scholarly attention to the Romantics’ interest in the French Revolution, the ways they may have been influenced by theological developments seems an under-explored topic.

Hayden-Roy does second Heidegger in one way, though: Hölderlin’s sense that his era was on the brink of a breakthrough, that everything was about to be transformed. The French Revolution, the re-connection with ancient Greece, the new theological thinking—it all meant that some “measureless consummation” (Yeats’s phrase) was a-dawning. Heidegger obviously saw this, too—I guess he just thought Hölderlin was talking about the 1930s.

Samantha Harvey, _Orbital_

 I READ ALMOST no science fiction, so I was surprised when my daughter handed this off to me after reading it for her book club; both the title and the brightly colored stars 'n' planets cover art say "science fiction here." But no--the novel is set on a space station, but Orbital is a fairly straightforward realistic novel about what people do on space stations. I thought it was excellent.

The novel is about a single working day on the station, which includes sixteen orbits of the earth, sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets. Four astronauts (from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Italy) and two cosmonauts (from Russia) make observations of Earth, conduct experiments, communicate with each other and with the people on Earth, reflect, remember, wonder...and that's the novel.

It's almost plotless. There are no aliens on board, no one is trying to kill anyone else on board, no one is falling in love with anyone else on board--no conflict, no rising action, no climax. Just how people live in a space station...which is perfect. The great novelists from Austen to Eliot to Joyce to Woolf to Wallace to Knausgaard (I'm willing to defend the latter two as "great," arguable though it might be), have always shown us that a lot is going on when "nothing" is going on, and Harvey does that here.

And the writing is wonderful--a little high cholesterol for some, maybe, but the lyricism of Harvey's prose was just what the novel needed to rotate the prism of the mundane so that one saw the light in it.

Richard Powers, _Playground_ (2)

 THE MAJOR SPOILER: the whole Ina-&-Rafi-in-Makatea narrative was generated by some powerful AI engine at Todd's request. Rafi actually became a librarian in Champaign-Urbana and died a few years ago. Evie Beaulieu, who had inexplicably and somewhat implausibly also shown up on Makatea, also died some while ago. Todd is not on his way to Makatea in some luxury yacht to launch a sea-steading operation. 

Nope, the whole thing comes down to dying Todd's wish for a final reconciliation with the already dead Rafi and tech titan Todd's access to unimaginably powerful AI, which he has asked to generate a convincing happy ending for him. Which the AI does, and that is what we read in the final pages. Not only are the three college friends reunited, but Todd's immense fortune will be put towards the restoration of the oceans. Everything is going to turn around!

I've been wondering what to make of this ending since I finished the book. On the one hand, it's a doozy of a happy ending, full of love and hope. It feels lovely. On the other hand, you know it's a computer-generated illusion. It didn't happen. Perhaps it could never have happened. It's a striking example of our ability to delude ourselves. The oceans are doomed. 

The finale of the novel is thus radiantly optimistic and forbiddingly dark at the same time. 

Richard Powers, why dost thou f*ck so with our heads?

Richard Powers, _Playground_ (1)

 IF YOU CARE about such things: big bright flashing spoiler alert.

The quickie description of this when it was published last fall was "does for the ocean what The Overstory did for trees," but that seems misleading to me. There is a diver/oceanographer character, Evie Beaulieu, whose role in the novel resembles that of Patricia Westerford in The Overstory, and Powers delivers some rich descriptions of what she sees on her dives, but Evie and her research do not seem as deeply incorporated into the fiction as was the case with Patricia Westerford. Her path crosses those of the novel's other main characters towards the end, but she does not seem to be at the book's thematic heart.

The novel is mainly about the other three main characters, whose lives are deeply interlaced and are presented in two narrative strands. 

One strand is the first-person narrative of Todd Keane, addressed to a "you" whose identity we do not learn for a long time. Todd grew up a child of privilege in a north shore suburb of Chicago. At an elite private high school he meets Rafi Young, a black Southsider who is in the school thanks to a scholarship funded by Todd's father. Both ridiculously brainy, they bond first over chess, then over the ancient Chinese game Go, and eventually over the whole range of nerdish realms that insatiably intelligent high school kids are attracted to. 

They both go to University of Illinois, Rafi because he can afford it, Todd in large part because of the school's research into artificial intelligence (which longtime Powers readers will recall from Galatea 2.0). There they meet Pacific Islander and aspiring artist Ina Aroita--the latest in a series of impossibly magical and charismatic young women conjured up by Powers (cf. Olivia in The Overstory, Alyssa in Bewilderment, Thassadit Amzwar in Generosity). 

Both young men fall in love with Ina, naturally. She chooses Rafi, but Rafi and Todd become profoundly estranged. Todd then goes on to create Playground, a social media platform that is also a game (following Rafi's suggestion), which makes him billions and billions of dollars. But--unhappily--he has developed Lewy Body dementia. In response, he is formulating a major plan to tie up his life's loose ends, in which the "you" he addresses will play a part.

The other strand, of course, is the story of Ina and Rafi. They have ended up on a tiny island in the South Pacific, Makatea (non-fictional), and are raising two kids. Makatea is recovering, scarred and abandoned, from extensive phosphate mining by western companies. The people of the island have recently gotten an offer from a consortium of tech bros who want start a sea-steading operation in their vicinity. The people are about evenly split, for and against, with Ina and Rafi against. Then they find out the main tech bro in the consortium is...Todd Keane.

Quite a set up, no? Will Todd, Rafi, and Ina reconcile and live happily ever after, or are we headed for murder and mayhem?

To  be continued. 

Annie Ernaux, _Les années_

THIS IS THE first book I have read by Nobel laureate Ernaux, and I understand it is atypical for her. She is a pioneer in autofiction (the term also exists in French, apparently), and most of her books are about particular eras or events in her own life. This one, while still autobiographical, is about the whole span of her life, from childhood up to the time it was published in 2008 (when Ernaux was 68). 

Les années is atypical in a more general way as well, as I find myself unable to think of another book quite like it. 

For one thing, it is as much her generation's "autobiography," one might say, as it is her own. She scrupulously avoids the first person, generally using instead the French pronoun "on"--"one," we might translate, although it also means something roughly like "you and me and just about everyone we know."

 The book's narrates from a point of view that aligns with Ernaux's own--her education, her marriage, her children, her career, her commitments--but is at the same time looking outwards, observing and recording, trying to map the social forces, fashion trends, and historical pressures experienced by anyone born in France circa 1940, especially anyone born female. "Une existence singulière donc mais fondue aussi dans le mouvement d'une génération" is how she puts it near the end of the book: in my own translation, "One person's existence, then, but also melted [dissolved?] into the movement [evolving?] of a generation." 

I can think of another book a little like that--Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves-- but it came out after Ernaux's, and it lacks the other astonishing dimension of Les Années: the ways its style evolves as she gets older.

I don't know quite how she did this, but the voice in the earlier sections sounds young--hesitant but fresh, naïve but energetic--and it metamorphoses gradually as experience accumulates into something maybe wiser, or maybe just more jaded, or deeper, or maybe just more tired...never less than graceful, though.

Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man does something a lot like this, but only up to age 23 or so, and it doesn't even try to represent a generation's experience.

The book has the effect of a  highly condensed Proust, the history of one consciousness in its historical generation boiled down to its essence in just 250 pages. It must be interesting to read this as a French person near Ernaux's age--a whole carton of madeleines. You'd be brought up against long-faded but arresting memories again and again. It must be interesting too to read it a long-time reader of Ernaux, as she revisits times and events she had written about earlier in her career, but from a new angle.

Every few pages, Ernaux makes an observation that just nails it--for instance, her noting near the end of the book that as adolescents we feel we are continually changing in a world that stubbornly stays the same, while in old age we feel we are staying the same in a world that is continually changing. We don't get it quite right in either case.

Roger Reeves, _King Me_

BEST BARBARIAN (2022), Reeves's second collection, was so good that I decided his first was worth a shot. King Me, published in 2013, is very nearly as good. 

It has the kind of audacity one often sees in strong young poets (especially strong young male poets, I would say), a little bit of "watch what I can do with...this!". A lot of syntactical gymnastics, a lot of astonishing imagery, a lot of erudite code-switching. Reeves, thank goodness, can actually pull this sort of thing off. Here is the beginning of "Maggot Therapy":

Not the debridement of the wound--the wedding

Dress decanted of the bones and snow-blown skin

Of a bride circling through the splinters of winter,

The ash and orchard of a gray heaven surrounding

The tumble of guests leaking out into the night

To wish her sloughing off of dress and wound well--

No, not this debridement, which is greeted with cake

And cymbal and the calling on of a mastering god, [...]

The sentence goes on for another eighteen lines, right to the end of the poem, but just about the time I was thinking Reeves was showing off a bit as he spun out this disambiguating explanation, it turned out the wound in need of cleaning was made by Reeves's brother's suicide--"eat around the bullet still thrumming against / the salt and clatter of a brother's brain [...]". The topic of mortality shunts us into a quick detour through Hamlet ("maggot how lightly you travel / Through the ribs of beggars and barns, kings and convents"), but we are still talking about debridement, since doctors often placed maggots in wounds to consume necrotic tissue back in the day. And then the poem tones down, but becomes all the more powerful as its language becomes simpler and more subdued:

Teach me again that I do not own this body

That walks me over this snow and cracked pavement,

The winter light pulling at my bare ankles, teach me

What to do with the dead I carry in my mouth,

Teach me to travel light with their bodies in my belly.

Not every poem in the book is as striking as "Maggot Therapy," and the verbal fireworks do sometimes seem to be set off for their own sake. But Reeves was writing strong poems right out of the gate.

Martin Heidegger, _Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry_, trans. Keith Hoeller

WHAT, THIS HOBBYHORSE again? Yes, I'm afraid so.

None of my local libraries had this, so thank you, University of Tulsa's McFarline Library, and thank you, Interlibrary Loan. 

Thank you, too, Humanity Books (an imprint of Prometheus Books), while I'm at it. I'm not sure why an ordinary university press didn't publish this...although I do have a guess.

The book is a translation of volume 4 of Heidegger's Gesamtaugabe, and it gathers several essays and talks he devoted to close readings of poems by Hölderlin. The longest, at about seventy pages, is devoted to "Andenken" ("Remembrance"), but there are also analyses of "Homecoming/To Kindred Ones" and "As When on a Holiday."

Many of the questions that drew me to find the book are (as it happens) nicely stated on the back cover:

   During the 1930s and '40s Heidegger published little, lending an additional air of mystery to his famous "turning" (Kehre) from the language of classical philosophy to that of poetry. Why did Heidegger turn from philosophy to poetry? Why did he choose Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), perhaps Germany's greatest, yet most difficult, poet? How can the poet help the the thinker to complete his thoughts? How can Hölderlin's poetry help Heidegger  to think the truth of being?

I also had a big question not summarized above: what does it mean that Heidegger's turn to poetry coincided with a grave political misjudgment? I say "grave," but "sinister" would also do, not to mention "nauseating." Heidegger turns to poetry, and the next thing we know, he's a Nazi. What does that mean?

Heidegger is good at explaining why poetry matters. A poetic idea, he insists, is not just a philosophical idea with frosting and ribbons on it, which have to be scraped off to get the real idea. No, the poetic idea is in the poetry, in the possibilities of figurative language, of sentence structure, of sound. As he puts it:

Poetry is not merely an ornament accompanying existence, not merely a temporary enthusiasm and certainly not excitement or amusement. Poetry is the sustaining ground of history, and therefore not just an appearance of culture, above all not the mere "expression" of the "soul of a culture."

Poets, for Heidegger, are demigods. They mediate between us and divinity. They create a home for us all by enabling us to see where we have always been. They draw from the past and the future to enunciate our now.

Heidegger goes quite quickly from there, though, to saying Hölderlin has a particularly important message for the Germans, who, if they heed Hölderlin, can turn the West away from the disastrous detour it has taken towards math, abstraction, Aristotelian logic, science, and technology for far too many centuries. Of "Wie Wenn am Feiertage" ("As when on a holiday"), Heidegger writes:

The poem was written in 1800. It was not until 110 years later that it became known  to the German people. [...] Since then another generation has passed. During these decades, the open insurrection of modern world history has begin. Its course will force a decision concerning the future character of the absolute domination of man over the whole terrestrial globe. Hölderlin's poem, however, still waits to be interpreted.

Until now, that is, as Heidegger launches into his interpretation, which concludes:

   Hölderlin's word conveys the holy thereby naming the space of time that is only once, time of the primordial decision for the essential order of the future history of gods and humanities.

   This word, though still  unheard, is preserved in the Occidental language of the Germans.

This essay was given as a talk several times in 1939 and 1940, the editor notes. That is, exactly the moment when the world was going to hear from Germany in the most terrible way possible.

So, I am as stuck as ever, loving how Heidegger explains how we need what the poets say, but horrified at his insistence that what the poets are saying amounts to "today Germany, tomorrow the world." 

You know who else is good at saying how important poetry is? Ezra Pound. See the problem?

Paul Auster, _4 3 2 1_ (2)

 MINEFIELD OF SPOILERS ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

To recap the previous post on this novel (July 7, 2024): 4 3 2 1 is quite different from Auster's other novels due to its length (866 pages), its longer, catalog-like sentences (Auster, usually a "less-is-more" kind of writer, gets very expansive here), and its drawing deeply on his own own childhood, boyhood, and youth, up to about age 23 (the point his memoir Hand to Mouth begins).

The novel's main character, Archie Ferguson, maps quite closely on to Auster himself. Born March 3, 1947 (a month later than Auster himself) to a (not very observant) Jewish family, he grows up mainly in a the northern New Jersey suburbs, with frequent forays to New York City. His keenest interests are literature, film, sports, and girls, the priority among which is always in motion.

There is a twist, though. The novel is about not one, but four Archie Fergusons. They all start out on  the same day, born to the same family in the same place. But then things begin to diverge. One Archie's father dies while he is still a boy, becoming the victim of insurance-scam arson when he works late one night. Another Archie's parents divorce, the father becoming wealthy while the mother struggles. Another Archie's parents stay married, but the father has given up, resigned himself to failure.

One Archie loses fingers in an auto accident. One dies in adolescence. One is bi-sexual. One Archie's first serious girlfriend is another Archie's stepsister. One ends up going to Princeton, another (like Auster) goes to Columbia, while yet another skips college to make a go at being a writer in Paris. 

Archie 2, when still a child, has a moment of insight that establishes the key to the novel. A boy in the neighborhood dares Archie to climb a tree; Archie does, then falls and breaks a leg. He muses on how the whole episode could have gone down differently, a train of thought that leads to surprising conclusions:

If his parents had moved to one of the other towns where they had been looking for the right house, he wouldn't even know Chuckie Brower, wouldn't even know that Chuckie Brower existed, and it wouldn't have been stupid, for the tree he had climbed wouldn't have been in his backyard. Such an interesting thought, Ferguson said to himself: to imagine how things could have been different for himself even though he was the same. The same boy in a different house with a different tree. The same boy with different parents. The same boy with the same parents who didn't do the same things they did now.

The whole development of the novel lies in these alternative scenarios. What if X had happened, rather than Y? If this person had moved away, if that person had stayed? The forking paths proliferate as the novel proceeds, one consequence being that the Archies become very, very differentiated, going from being nearly indistinguishable in the early chapters to being quite different people by the end.

And a thought-provoking idea emerges, for 4 3 2 1 is not just one of those now-familiar plural-universe stories, but a kind of unfolding demonstration of the role chance plays in our lives. 

When Auster was a boy at camp, as he has mentioned in interviews, he was nearly killed by a bolt of lightning. The lightning killed a boy standing near him, and Auster was untouched, but it stuck with him that the lightning might just as easily have killed him.  It was just a matter of chance. Reflection on the role of chance is everywhere in Auster's work; besides The Red Notebook and The Music of Chance, think of all the plot turns in his novels that depend on some event that could just as easily have flipped differently. And we all have stories like that, don't we? Roads not taken, snowy woods left unexplored?

This feels profound to me. In my part of the world, there is deep reluctance to grant that chance has any important role in our lives. This reluctance is audible in a bundle of expressions we hear all the time: e.g., God Has a Plan for Your Life, It Was Meant to Be, It Had to Happen, There Are No Accidents. Not to mention the variants in which whatever happens to you is your own doing, the precise consequence of your own decisions and actions.

In 4 3 2 1, we are in another kind of cosmos. No God, no plan for your life, no destiny...mainly accidents, which you will have to navigate as best you can, with absolutely no guarantees that virtue or hard work or talent will be rewarded. Scary but heady.

And then, in the final pages, the snake eats its tail.

Glad I lived long enough to get around to reading this.

Paul Celan, _Threadsuns_, trans. Pierre Joris

THE ONLY CELAN I have read is the selected poems volume translated by Michael Hamburger, and that was years ago--mid-nineties, I think. Reading Yoko Tawada's novel (see yesterday's post) inspired me to seek out Threadsuns (in the original German, Fadensonnen), the volume that is the subject of the paper Patrik is planning to deliver at the Paris Celan conference. I was in luck--a handy library had Joris's Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan.

Joris's commentary includes the observation that "Threadsuns may well be the least commented on and most critically neglected volume of Celan's oeuvre." That made a neat additional datum on Tawada's character; he does seem like a reader who would gravitate to the less-populated precincts of reading. Not only is he drawn to the famously difficult Celan, but also to Celan's least read book. According to Kai Fischer, whom Joris goes on to quote, Threadsuns "is not only the gateway into  the late work but also introduces and performs a new way of saying that will be characteristic for the following volumes." In other words, this is when things get really challenging.

I cannot shed much light on the poems, I'm afraid. I found them baffling, though baffling in a compelling and arresting way. Sorry about the self-contradiction--that is, saying the poems both compelled me, which suggests they pushed me along, and arrested me, which suggests they brought me to a stop--but there you go. I was, indeed, compelled and arrested.

The poems are full of abrupt turns, opaque allusions, and newly-coined words. For instance:

THE HEARTSCRIPTCRUMBLED vision-isle

at midnight, in feeble 

ignition key glimmer.

"Vision-isle" conjures up something without much readerly effort...but "heartscriptcrumbled"? The effect is a little like the coinages of Finnegans Wake, but only a little--somehow they land differently, less playfully than Joyce's compounds, seem more effortful, harder-won. I always felt like something was at stake that could be said no other way,, even without knowing what the something was.

The word "Trans-Tibetan," as used in Tawada's title, shows up in one of the poems: "Ashrei, // a word without meaning, / trans-Tibetan, / injected into the / Jewess / Pallas / Athene's / helmeted ovaries, // and when he, // he, // fetally, // harps Carpathian nono, // then the Allemande / bobbins her lace for / the vomiting im- / mortal / song." There's a Thomas Mann  novella in there somewhere.

I recently learned that Celan, a Holocaust survivor, on one occasion met Heidegger, a former member of the Nazi party. What was that like? There is at least one book about it, apparently. 

Yoko Tawada, _Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel_, trans. Susan Bernofsky

YOKO TAWADA WRITES fiction in both Japanese and German. From what I gather, her writing in both languages is not just a switch, as Milan Kundera switched from Czech to French or Jhumpa Lahiri switched from English to Italian, but an actual going back and forth. Remarkable, no?

She came to my attention via a review article in the LRB by Adam Thirlwell that discussed several of her novels--I picked this one because the title was irresistible. It was originally written in German.

The main character, Patrik, is also the narrator, although he usually refers to himself as "the patient" or "Patrik," only occasionally slipping into the first person. He lives in Berlin and may be German, although there is some uncertainty about his nationality. He is a Celan scholar but has no institutional affiliation, although he may have had one once. He is supposed to give a paper on Celan's volume Threadsuns at a conference in Paris, but perhaps he only thinks he is supposed to give one. In either case, he is flummoxed by the procedures he has to complete to get to the conference.

The outline of Patrik's identity, we could say, is insecurely fixed--mobile and porous. He is like a Thomas Bernhard character, a kind of laboratory animal trying to solve the maze of his own personhood and not making much progress. There is also a kind of Bernhardian eventlessness to the novel, which does not so much have a plot as a Debordian dérive as Patrik wanders about the city at the same time he is wandering through his psychological maze.

Within the maze, though, he finds a reward: Leo-Eric Fu, a deeply simpatico figure that Patrik encounters and then re-encounters. A budding friendship with Leo-Eric seems to hold out a tantalizing possibility of solving the riddle of Patrik. Leo-Eric has some kind of connection to the Asian continent, so he may be the the Trans-Tibetan Angel ("Trans-Tibetan," by the way, is a descriptor that appears in Celan's Threadsuns).

Is the last paragraph of the novel a kind of magical happy ending or the final dissolution of "the patient"? I don't know. I don't know what to conclude about the ending of "The Yellow Wallpaper," either. But we are airborne, and it feels right. Fly, Patrik, fly!

Anne Berest, _The Postcard_, trans. Tina Kover

A NOVEL, BUT based on Berest's own family history. Indeed, a lot of it could qualify as memoir, I think. Is the distinction between the two, always smudged, in the process of disappearing entirely?

The postcard of the title is received by Berest's mother, Lélia, in early 2003. On it are written the names Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques--nothing else. Berest's mother is shocked and scared, because these are the names of her own mother's father, mother, sister, and brother, all four of whom were Russian Jews who emigrated to France in the 1930s and were then sent to their deaths in the camps in 1941. Who sent the surprisingly knowing card, and why? 

The book is about Berest's and her mother's efforts to answer those questions. This involves a lot of detective work, which is the part that feels most like a memoir. As they learn more about how Myriam (Lélia's mother, Anne Berest's grandmother) lived in the 1930s and how she evaded capture during the years of the Nazi Occupation, Berest narrates an imagined version of what Myriam's life was like, which feels more like a novel.

All questions about the postcard get answered in the book's last few pages.

Worthy of note: Berest's family is Jewish, but not particularly observant. Early in the book, Berest attends a seder where she gets criticized for not being more familiar with Jewish traditions than she is. She can't come up with much of a reply in the moment, but near the end of the book (Chapter 38), she comes to some very striking conclusions about what her Jewishness means.

This was a book club pick--probably not something I would have chosen to read on my own. Good, though.

Mary Jo Salter (guest editor) and David Lehman (series editor), _Best American Poetry 2024_

 I WONDER WHETHER David Lehman is thinking of hanging it up. There's a valedictory tone to his foreword this year--reflections on Keats's "When I Have Fears," on the passing of Louise Glück, some parting advice he gave to one of his classes. Hmm.

And can we read anything into this being the first BAP to include some of Lehman's own poetry? We get thirteen stanzas from a longer poem called Ithaca that similarly feels like closing up shop, as though Lehman were about to light out for the territory where oars are taken for winnowing fans.

That's not all. Three of this year's contributors--Glück, Saskia Hamilton, and Mark Strand--are no longer alive, and two of the poems are about getting messages from dead poets: Jeffrey Harrison's "A Message from Tony Hoagland" and Mitch Sisskind's "Jack Benny," which begins, "John Ashbery called me after he died [...]."

Is Lehman thinking hard about taking his journey west?

I hope Lehman hangs around for a while, but he is getting up in years (born 1948) and he has been managing BAP since its beginnings in 1988, so he's certainly earned the right to hand it off. 

This year's guest editor is veteran anthologist Mary Jo Salter. Salter gives us a wide swath of the middle of the road here. The poems that are not from the New Yorker or one of the longer-established  reviews (Kenyon, Gettysburg, Hudson, Sewanee) sound like they could well have been from the New Yorker or one of the longer-established reviews. All solid and professional, but a bit watered down, with no surprises.

Nice to have a crown of sonnets from A. E. Stallings, though. Are these coming back? Sara Nicholson had one in her recent book. 

Anahid Nersessian, _Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse_

HAVING JUST READ Edmund Wilson's 1950s journals, I wondered whether he could  be considered the last great American literary critic who did not have a secure academic position (although he did have a few prestigious-visitor sorts of positions).  I couldn't think of another one from the last four or five decades. 

There have been some university-based literary critics who made significant efforts to write for broader, culturally literate but not scholarly audiences. Lionel Trilling, for instance. Harold Bloom was trying to do that in his books on the western canon and on Shakespeare, but both those books feel eccentric and polemical compared to Wilson's Patriotic Gore. There's Camille Paglia, while we are on the subject of the eccentric and polemical. Stephen Greenblatt made some headway with the larger public in the Shakespeare biography and The Swerve.

A whole crop of younger literary critics seem to going for the brass ring of the wider audience in recent years, writing for n+1 and NYRB and the New Yorker and the NYT Book Review, such as Merve Emre, Christine Smallwood, and the author of Keats's Odes, Anahid Nersessian. Nersessian has already published a couple of more straightforwardly academic books, but this one seems to be written for a broader (though still well-read) public.

I liked it a lot. I'm not sure I learned much that I did not already know about the six great odes (or the five great odes and Ode on Indolence), but the book had a wise and appealing voice, took some meaningful detours into Nersessian's personal history, and did Keats due honor. I especially liked how Nersessian drew on Roland Barthes in structuring her approach, and I loved how she put Keats into a conversation that included Alice Notley, Juliana Spahr, and Anne Boyer.

I wasn't always persuaded by the claims about the poems. Nersessian dislikes the complacency with which the speaker of Ode on a Grecian Urn regards the sexual violence depicted on the urn and the fatuousness of equating truth and beauty, and she has reason to dislike them--but why let Keats off the hook with the assertion, "Another thing that distinguishes this poem is that its speaker is not Keats, but a character or persona"? Not Keats? I cannot see why the speaker of Grecian Urn is any more a character or persona than any of the other speakers. I mean...come on. 

Nersessian (following Jerome McGann) is a bit more willing to call Keats out for leaving the Peterloo Massacre out of To Autumn. In general, she wishes Keats's poetry manifested more of his awareness of and attraction to radical politics than it does. I get that. But she (and McGann) ought to appreciate more how erratic poetic inspiration is. I can imagine a survivor of Hiroshima, say, a month after the dropping of the bomb, writing a poem about something completely unrelated--the  changing of the seasons, even. And why not? Is that a problem? Poets are not editorial writers.

On the other hand--Nersessian's chapter on Ode to Psyche is far and away the best thing I have ever read on that still under-appreciated poem. 

Keats's Odes and Joe Moshenska's book on Milton make me think there may be a whole dazzling wave of books by literary scholars that are aimed at the literary-but-not-necessarily-academic readers. As a retired academic who has waded through enough dissertation-ese to satisfy me for this lifetime, I'm ready. 

Edmund Wilson, _The Fifties_

 WHEN I WAS in graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a few critics/theorists whose names, when dropped, would elicit wise head-nods from one’s peers: Adorno, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson. I was too cowardly to mention my own great allegiance, except when I had had too many drinks, but there was a secret shrine in my heart for Edmund Wilson. 

Wilson was a bit dated, not very theoretically rigorous, had tended to publish in the New Yorker and similarly unscholarly publications. His politics were left, but in an Old Left way, and well short of 1980s sophistication about race and gender. His prose was lucid and graceful, which seemed a sign of shallowness at the time. You knew Derrida and Jameson were the real deal because you could barely understand what they were driving at.

I loved the lucid and graceful prose, however; I loved that he had learned as many languages as he had and could read the great Russian novels and the Hebrew scriptures in the original languages. I loved that even when writing about relatively minor figures—James Branch Cabell and Henry Blake Fuller, say—he read the whole corpus of their work. An essay by Wilson on anybody was a portrait in the round, a full tour.

The north side of Chicago had a used book store on every other block in those days, and with a few years of diligent scouting I acquired and devoured Axel’s Castle, The Wound and the Bow, The Triple Thinkers, To the Finland Station, A Window on Russia, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and my very favorite, Patriotic Gore. I read through the collected reviews and literary journalism: The Shores of Light, Classics and Commercials, The Bit Between my Teeth, The Devils and Canon Barham. 

His journals had been published, too, edited by Leon Edel. I started in on the first volume, The Twenties, in keen anticipation, but didn’t get far. Wilson had a habit, in those days, of writing long passages of natural description—a writing exercise recommended to him by a beloved professor of his at Princeton, Christian Gauss. I can take a certain amount of landscape writing, but not pages and pages, and I just bogged down.

Having heard that he to some extent had abandoned the habit in his  later years, I last year started in on The Fifties. It was like meeting up with an old, old friend. Here was the Wilson I loved, ruminating on what he was reading and the people he was meeting, which included not only various informants behind such books as Apologies to the Iroquois and The Dead Sea Scrolls, but also W. H. Auden, Dawn Powell, André Malraux, Vladimir Nabokov…Max Beerbohm, of all people. 

Should I try The Sixties? I think so. I may even try The Forties to see whether he had already started getting away from the landscape compulsion.

Martin Heidegger, _Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"_, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis

 THE THREE OR four people who regularly look at this blog may be growing weary of my returning to the topic of Heidegger. Sorry. The fever has not passed, unfortunately.

To resume: I love the way Heidegger talks about poetry; he seems to give it its full due. Take "The Origin of the Work of Art," for instance, or his insistence in this book (lectures for a course he gave in 1942) that poetic ideas are not simply philosophical ideas with a lot of frosting and bows. One does not subtract or scrape off the poetry to get the "real" idea. The idea is in the poetry, damn it.

However, I worry that Heidegger's thinking about poetry is fatally compromised by his support of Hitler and Nazism.

Heidegger has some insights here that left me slack-jawed in admiration. The main subject is Hölderlin's hymn to the River Ister (a.k.a. the Danube), and in Part I Heidegger describes a river as at the same time a locality and a journeying. Which struck me as profoundly true. The river is here before us, so it is a locality, but the water we see was upstream yesterday and will be downstream tomorrow, so the river is also an elsewhere. Similarly, the river is a now, while before us, but in its movement is also the past and the future. 

Part III declares that the poet is a river.  The poet is of the now--but also, if he or she is mindful of tradition, also a voice of the past and, in prophetic mode, a voice of the future. And the poet is of here--but also in his or her awareness of other traditions, perhaps also an elsewhere. Great idea, no? So the poet is a river--

--which means the poet is a demi-god, like the river. "Uh oh," you might think here. And then history gets married to the idea of locality and Heidegger starts suggesting  that the West is special, thanks to the Greeks, and the German are special too, since they come closest to grasping what the Greeks were about...and we are well past "uh oh" at that point.

Can we say poets are rivers and call it good, without saying they are demi-gods?

Part II, the longest section of the book at about 70 pages, is about the first choral ode in Sophocles' Antigone, and it too is astonishingly insightful, thankfully without raising so many red flags. A key point: the word deinon in the first line, most often translated "wonder," actually shades off into concepts like  anxiety and terror as well as awe--the frightful, powerful, and inhabitual is Heidegger's formula--so the chorus's claim that humankind has more deinon going on than anything else in the world is worth pondering, and ponder it Heidegger does. Part II is a neat demonstration that the poetic idea is not the pill under the sugar coating, but integral to the poetry itself.

Final note: German has a verb, dichten, which means "to compose" and is not quite the same as the word "to write." Rather than translate it as "writing poetry," McNeill and Davis render it as "poetize," which was odd at first but made sense, as it helps capture the act of discernment or framing that is part of writing poetry.

Mark Volman, with John Cody, _Happy Forever: My Musical Adventures with the Turtles, Frank Zappa, T. Rex, Flo & Eddie, and More_

THE BEST ROCK memoirs are often not by the biggest stars (e.g., Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen) but by those who instead were off to the side a little--Al Kooper's Backstage Passes and Ian McLagan's All the Rage, for example. Happy Forever is another such case.

Mark Volman was not a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame kind of performer, but he was certainly busy--first as founding member of the Turtles, who had several hit singles, including the still-beloved song alluded to in his title, then as the "Flo" of Flo & Eddie with fellow ex-Turtle Howard Kaylan, singing leads for the early-seventies Mothers of Invention and backing vocals for such luminaries as Marc Bolan and Bruce Springsteen. He knew loads of people and saw the whole dazzling late-sixties L.A. pop scene up close.

The book is not exactly written by him, though. Not that he had a ghost writer--instead, co-author John Cody has put together a kind of oral biography of Volman, compiling quotations from interviews he conducted with Volman's family, friends, collaborators, and so on. In other words, it is a great deal like Jean Stein's Edie.

This could have gone wrong in a great many ways, but the reminiscences of Volman's wide range of associates are so vivid and Cody is so astute an arranger of his mosaic of quotations that the book is a brisk and continually entertaining read (even, remarkably, when Volman becomes an academic).

Curiosity about the Turtles or even Frank Zappa is probably relatively slight compared to curiosity about Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, or his Bobness, but Cody constructs through these Volman-vignettes an evocative picture of the pop music business at a particularly interesting moment.

Bruno Schulz, _The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz_, trans. Celina Wieniewska

I HAVE BEEN meaning to read this for a long time--I bought it decades ago--and I am highly pleased that I  finally did. It is every bit as good as I always heard it was.

The book's two collections of short stories (The Street of Crocodiles [also known as Cinnamon Shops] and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) both feel like novels, as almost all the stories have the same narrator, an adolescent named Joseph, and are about his family and neighborhood.

The family and neighborhood are probably quite a bit like Schulz's own. He was born in 1892 in a town named Drogobycz (or Drohobycz), which is currently within the borders of Ukraine, but within the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire when Schulz was born and then in those of Poland after World War I. It was invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, but in 1942--the year Schulz, a Jew, was murdered on the street by a Gestapo officer--it was occupied by the Germans. 

A lot of tumultuous and terrible history there, but the stories are all set in the years before the First World War, in what turned out to be the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Franz Joseph is still on the throne, but throughout the stories the reader gets a sense of a world only superficially stable, that may be dead but is refusing to lie down. The fires of adolescence are burning, but in a twilit world.

The tone is everything. Imagine a triangle whose three points are Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Marc Chagall. Schulz would be right at the center.

And hats off to Celina Wieniewska. She seems to hit an unusually happy word choice again and again. This is from the story "Cinnamon Shops": 

"The Professor delved into a deep bookcase, full of old folios, unfashionable engravings, woodcuts and prints. He showed us, with esoteric gestures, old lithographs of night landscapes, of tree clumps in moonlight, of avenues in wintry parks outlined black on the white moonlit background."

I don't know Polish and cannot make comparisons, but I imagine that Wieniewska had a few choices available for "unfashionable," "clips," and "wintry," and I am convinced that she found exactly the right one. And "delved"! She must be the Gregory Rabassa of Polish.

Jefferson Cowie, _Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power_

A TERRIFYINGLY ILLUMINATING book, and a winner of the Pulitzer for history to boot. By looking at just one county, Barbour County in southeastern Alabama, from about the time of statehood (1819) to late 1960s, Cowie explores how "freedom" in our political discourse has often amounted to "the freedom of white men to do whatever they want with the lives and property of non-whites" 

The four principal sections of the book take close looks at moments when the federal government tried to circumscribe the actions of the white men who ran Barbour County and, basically, failed. 

In the 1820s and 1830s, during the Andrew Jackson administration, a treaty put together by the federal government ceded the Creeks a large piece of territory in southeastern Alabama in return for their withdrawal from Georgia. White settlers had discovered, though, that the land in question was excellent for growing cotton, so they just moved in and started plantations, completely ignoring the treaty. Federal officials (including, bizarrely, Francis Scott Key) were sent to enforce federal law. No dice. The white settlers got the land.

Reconstruction: in a scene enacted all over the South in 1872, white men secretly brought firearms to the polling place and shot at the formerly enslaved, now newly enfranchised Black citizens who were trying to vote. Federal officials were sent, again, and protests made in Congress. Were the voting rights of the formerly enslaved restored? Umm, no.

End of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: the state of Alabama discovers that a lot of revenue can be generated by using convict labor. The prisons fill up with convicts, enriching both the state and local  manufacturers. Federal officials try to stop this practice. Do they succeed? Nope.

Mid-1950s to mid-1960s: the civil rights movement galvanizes the country, leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Alabama governor George Wallace, native son of Barbour County, becomes notorious for leading the resistance to integration. Federal officials make some headway this time, and the federal legislation is enforced. Local officials, however, begin a decades-long project of whittling away at it. They have made a lot of progress.

The real looming shadow at the end of Cowie's book, though, is that George Wallace discovers that the political trick of marketing white supremacy as "freedom," as in "the freedom the founding fathers bequeathed us and that our patriots died for," is a hit all over the country. The Republican Party takes due note.

And that is why this important book is not just illuminating, but terrifyingly so. 

Brilliant book--not only energetically researched, but written with verve, some scenes (Election Day 1872, Wallace's one-on-one with LBJ) having a novelistic intensity.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Blithedale Romance_

 WE KNOW ABOUT "dystopian" novels, of course, but Hawthorne's may be the earliest example of an adjacent phenomenon, the "anti-utopian" novel, in which some bold and idealistic experiment in reforming human society comes a cropper due to all-too-human venality, pettiness, and short-sightedness. The inspiration for the novel lay in Hawthorne's time at Brook Farm, an 1840s experiment in communal living partly inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier (there were quite a few comparable experiments at the time). He ended up not much caring for it.

The novel is funny, in a satirical and somewhat ungenerous way, and has some brilliant writing. The most memorable character is Zenobia, who may be one of the first fictional depictions of an American feminist, apparently based in large part on Margaret Fuller. There's a tablespoon of spite in the portrait, I'd say, but she jumps off the page. She's certainly more interesting than Miles Coverdale, the Hawthorne-like narrator.

Literary works puncturing the balloon of human presumption have a long history. We could go back to Candide or Gulliver's Travels, not to mention Hamlet, the theology of John Calvin and the Book of Ecclesiastes. But circumstances change after the French Revolution, say, and the idea takes hold that humans can re-design their communities to make them more rational. Hawthorne's novel must be one of the earlier takedowns of that kind of overconfidence.

Modern inheritors--perhaps T. C. Boyle and Michel Houellebecq? And most campus novels, come to think of it, since they tend to contrast higher education's noble mission and its often shabby shortcomings. And definitely most writing program novels--Lan Samantha Chang's All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, Lucy Ives's Loudermilk, Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans...all descendants of The Blithedale Romance.

Robert Browning, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society_

 I'VE BEEN READING Jonathan Beecher's Writers and Revolution, an engaging account of the effects of the revolution of 1848 on various writers (e.g., Marx and Flaubert), and in consequence occasionally thinking of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, or Napoleon III. His election as President in December 1848 was a thumping anti-climax to most of the high hopes of that year, and his coup d'etat of three years later killed off whatever lingered. 

He has his defenders, no doubt, but I get the impression he is mainly remembered as a hypocritical opportunist whose main appeal was his association with his uncle, the Napoleon who conquered Europe. His main electoral appeal, back before he cancelled the new constitution and made himself emperor, was to make France great again. He was president for four years then emperor for another eighteen.

Thinking of Napoleon III led me back to this (which I first read in 1987 or so)--a 2,155 line dramatic monologue about a deposed monarch who finds himself exiled in England and sits down with some attractive young woman to explain what happened. It was published as a book in 1871, by which time Napoleon III had, indeed, been deposed and driven into exile in England after France's defeat in the grande debâcle of the Franco-Prussion War. 

Turns out, though, that Browning wrote at least some of the poem in 1859 or so, before things ended so badly. At that time, his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning was still alive, and she was one of Napoleon III's more vocal English defenders. Browning was sometimes a defender, too, though not so keen a one. It may be significant that he did not publish the poem until after Elizabeth died.

So...is the portrait sympathetic or satirical? Readers disagree. I would say satirical--the speaker is engaged in a long and complicated self-justification, a bit like Browning's versions of Andrea del Sarto and Bishop Blougram, and his case for hewing to the middle-of-the-road, being neither this nor that, often sounds like an apologia for mediocrity. It sounds exactly like a hypocritical opportunist's defense of his hypocritical opportunism. 

But the beauty of the dramatic monologue is that the whole performance sounds credible, at points. Hohenstiel-Schwangau ("high-stick swan-place," apparently) has heard all the criticisms of his rule and has a point-by-point  rebuttal ready. All he was trying to do was save society.

Hard to imagine this poem ever finding a wide audience, but it really is a fascinating study of a certain kind of political "leadership."

Patricia Lockwood, “Diary”; Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street,” trans. Edmud Jephcott

AMONG THE MYSTERIES: since Patricia Lockwood is an American national treasure, why do I find her stuff in the London Review of Books more often than anywhere else? 

Every issue of the LRB devotes its final pages to a “Diary,” which is rarely an actual diary in these post-Alan Bennett times but usually a personal essay. Lockwood got the spot in the December 5, 2024 issue, and somehow spun a dramatically diverse array of topics into a beautifully integrated essay: The X-Files, Phineas Gage (the man who survived a tamping iron being shot through his head in 1823), the medical emergencies of some of her family members, the novels of E. M. Forster, and people convinced they have experienced an alien abduction. 

The United States has long needed a Walter Benjamin, and I am starting to think Lockwood could pull it off. She could certainly come up with a contemporary “One Way Street”— Benjamin’s 1928 compilation of wit, parody, observation, and analysis. Lockwood can be hilariously funny but also unbearably poignant; she always has a weather eye open on the zeitgeist and knows the deep truth of any historical moment lies in the apparently trivial. 

The first half of No One Is Talking about This has the “One Way Street” feel: confident and vulnerable at the same time, earnest and satirical at the same time, mercurial, breathless, brilliant. 

I wonder whether she has plans to collect her short pieces? I would read them all again.

Can One Read "A"-24?

 "A"-24 is the final section of Louis Zukofsky's magnificent (say I) and lengthy poem "A". It is much the longest section--240 pages in the edition I have, published by the University of California Press in 1978. What prompts the question of whether one can read it is not its length, however, but its form. It's a score for a musical piece, composed by his wife Celia, with five elements. 

One element, taken from various pieces G. F. Handel wrote for harpsichord,  is rendered in actual musical notation. The other four are excerpts from Zukofsky's writing, arranged in lines under the Handel harpsichord score and to be spoken in cadence with the Handel pieces. One line uses excerpts from Zukofsky's critical essays, a second draws on his play Arise, Arise, a third has passages from his fiction, and the fourth and final part is from "A" itself.

So "A"-24 could be read as one reads a score--only a score is not the music, exactly, but instructions for a performance. When musicians with the necessary competencies and the required instruments read the score and play it, that performance is what registers upon us as "music." So running one's eyes over the pages of "A"-24 does not seem to place the reader in the presence of "A"-24, if you see what I mean. 

I did read it, in a way, adopting the strategy of reading the critical essay line right through from beginning to end, then the play lines the same way, and so on with the other two...but I  lost the effect of simultaneity, of course, which seems to be a key condition of the form: that you are getting four sides of Zukofsky at once. In short, you cannot read "A"-24 and feel like you have, indeed, read it because you have to hear it.

But how in the world are you going to hear it? Rarely as Pericles, Zukofsky's favorite Shakesperean play, is performed, you may actually come across a performance during your lifetime, but what are the odds your local community theater will present "A"-24? According to Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky (https://z-site.net/notes-to-a/a-24/), it "has been performed a number of times," but the most recent occasion they record was in 2009. 

PennSound has two recordings from 1978, featuring Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten, with Bob Perelman on piano, and one can only be grateful they exist, but they are not of particularly high fidelity. Something captured with really good microphones and nice stereo separation would be helpful, so that you could follow (if you wanted) one of the lines the way one can follow (for example) the viola when hearing a string quartet. The 1978 recordings provide an often-pleasing and not unmusical babble, but one wishes for more definition in the sound.

I tried some home experiments, using an mp3 of the "Passecaille" from Handel's Harpichord Suite No. 7, but I can't say the results were what I hoped. Matching up the parts to the music was difficult because different performers take different approaches to playing Handel's repeats, so getting a performance that lined up exactly with Celia Zukofsky's score was a bridge too far.

A carefully recorded performance would certainly be a gift to Zukofsky-philes everywhere, and there must be at least a few thousand of us.

Sara Nicholson, _April_

 I PICKED UP this collection of poems (her third, I think) on the recommendation of a friend, and it's really good. I hope to review it for a more serious blog than this one, so I am not going to say much here, save that the book has a lot to do with saints and with poets. Both saints and poets can be major pains in  the tush, but often turn out to be reminding us about something important.

Alain Badiou, _Manifesto for Philosophy_, trans. Norman Madarasz

 FROM 1989–THIS translation was published ten years later. I wanted to look at this mainly because of Lacoue-Labarthe’s mentioning Badiou’s idea of “The Age of Poets” in Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, so I read only that chapter and two others, “Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace” and “Sutures,” skimming a bit elsewhere.

Let’s start with the “suture.” Badiou posits that philosophy has four conditions: (1) the poem, (2) the matheme, (3) the political, and (4) love. That is, it might explain things through analogy, parable, and metaphor (the poem), or through strictly logical statements (the matheme), while concerning itself with establishing a just and flourishing polity (the political) or the ideal grounds for relationships among persons (love)—that’s how I would gloss it, in any case. A “suture” occurs when the practice of philosophy identifies itself too narrowly, “delegates its functions” as Badiou puts it, to one of the four conditions. A suture works to the advantage of the condition but leads to the “suppression” of philosophy.

A suture to the matheme leads to, for example, logical positivism and a lot of what gets called “analytical” philosophy, which benefited the theoretical understanding of the natural sciences but did not much advance (Badious thinks) philosophy. A suture to the political leads to, for example, Marxism. A suture to the poem leads to Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger…a lot of the key figures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

This was great for poetry—hence the Age of Poets in that same span. Badiou identifies seven by name: Hölderlin (“their prophet and anticipating vigil” from the early 19th century), then Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Fernando Pessoa, Osip Mandelstam, and Paul Celan.

Badiou (unfortunately, I think) does not explain why he picked these seven. I wouldn’t challenge any name on the list, but I was a bit cheesed at the omissions. Could we not put Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley alongside Hölderlin as distinguished precursors? How about Yeats and Eliot? Stevens? If English language poets are ineligible for some reason, why aren’t Rilke and Valéry on the list?

Oh, well. Moving on.

The suture to the poem was helpful in plucking loose the Descartes-to-Kant suture to the matheme. It’s a great move for poetry, opening up fruitful disturbances both in the notion of the Subject and in the notion of the Object. Unfortunately, this suture also produces Heidegger (the chapter “Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace” deals with the downsides of this development). Celan brings the Age of Poets to a close when he sees through this particular problem and shuts that traffic down.

Speaking just for myself, the suture to the poem sounds like a great idea. Philosophy produced by the suture to the matheme, by contrast, leaves me thinking, “is that all there is? Who cares?” On the other hand….Heidegger. Most of Heidegger seems powerfully right to me, but then I hit a toxic patch and think, God, please, no. 

I now think Lacoue-Labarthe’s book may have been looking for ways philosophy can stitch a suture or two into poetry without turning into an apology for totalitarianism.