Anyway . . . what really happened is that I indulged in the usual literary and musical pastimes, and also discovered the New York-based culture news blog Gawker. I tend to skip the celebrity news, since I consider it none of my business, and also as beneath my dignity. But I do enjoy the banality of the "celebrity sightings," which are generally in this vein: "I saw Miss X at Peppe's restaurant, corner of 51st and Broadway. She has perfect skin in person, and as she was eating a salad with deep-fried curly things on it, probably calamari, she was saying to a well-dressed female friend that she doesn't like rainy weather." The reader comments are unusually witty and well-written, though there is tasteless joking that jars on me.
On Saturday I e-mailed four poems to the New Yorker. Their genesis was a nocturnal reading session, which I interrupted to open the Text file where I write my notes. After staring blankly at the pixelated white-grey rectangle for some seconds, inspiration struck and I began describing seaside scenes near Opapa's condominium in Sidney in good detail and well-chosen words. Every poem, even after I worked out the rhythms throughout the next days, has its flaws, but I am very proud of three of them. I sent the fourth poem -- a gory tale in extremely blank verse (as L.M. Montgomery once put it) about an eagle who devours a fish carcass on a pier, while fending off a trio of obstreperous crows, in a scene that I really did observe once -- mostly because I've found to my great annoyance that people tend to prefer the poems that I like least.
I thought that the first poem in my original series was nice but too generic, so I've copied it below. Unfortunately a dead crab is, in my experience, too limp to hold onto anything; but besides that small logical flaw the only other evident shortcoming is probably the colon, of which a grammarian would not approve, though the poet might.
In the Darkness of the Seaside
It is night, and on the shore
the darkened rocks are lapped in shadow;
beyond: the distant rush and roar
of the waves that curl the ocean's blackness,
and the tide creeps in oblivion
in along the sleeping sands
gently pushing and amassing
the kelp and seaweed that is passing
from the seafloor to the strand.
In the morning, on the shore,
the wettened fringe will still be there;
frail, thin corpses of the crabs
with tiny legs still grasping
slippery translucent bands
or tangled in a mossy clump
and chalky limpet-shells whose cones
and mussels whose oblong sky-blue casings
decompose, abrade and crack
and turn to dust upon the strand.
My teachers have liked my poetry, but from other quarters I've heard little, also because I usually don't show my productions to anyone, anyway. Firstly, I don't want to submit work to others' judgments when it does not satisfy my own. Secondly, I've taken the lesson of Aesop's fable about the man, his son, the donkey, and the critical strangers to heart. And, thirdly, there is the example of my "Elegy" poem. It may come across as a recycling of ancient clichés, but I wrote it in an English churchyard, in the evening, near weathered tombstones and a pigeon and a yew, and the feeling was genuine. Earlier in the day we had gone to St. Alban's Cathedral, and I had felt very sorry for the people who had been buried under the floor, whose engraved names were fading away to oblivion; I never visited graveyards in Victoria, so they seemed profoundly hallowed and mysterious places, rather than the quietly enjoyable places I find them to be now; and, prosaically, jet lag had made me hypersensitive. I put the verse in the family newspaper because I liked it, and thought that others might too, but I didn't want to submit it to any magazine because of its personal nature and solemn subject.
Anyway, one reader wrote to tell me that I should acknowledge that I was ripping off ("trying to emulate") Gray's "Elegy," which hurt very much at the time, though I think he didn't mean it to have that effect. To him it seemed that I was trying to attain Gray's level, which would have been absurd, whereas I really only wanted to record my mood and the scene. And, to be completely honest, I felt insulted by the implication that I would be so unintelligent as to try to deceive well-read people by plagiarizing a well-known poem like Gray's "Elegy." 'T'any rate, this jumble quite proved the point that if one feels deeply about a piece of art one should keep it for one's self. It's one of my two favourite poems and it has taken a while not to feel that it is tarnished.
Theoretically I much prefer the form of the novel, because it isn't so wishy-washy, abstract, and sentimental. At the same time I must admit that it is as common in prose as in poetry to fudge emotional experiences that one has never had, but that one enjoys in the same way as I don't much mind reading about a gruelling Arctic expedition in mid-summer. Anyway, I could go on and on about this subject, but I won't. The point is that I'd rather write novels, but I am convinced, also by experience, that I won't be in the position to write a good novel for decades, due to my immaturity of character and of intellect.
On Saturday I went to guard Uncle Pu's and Aunt K.'s house in the countryside. I was on my own after the first day and a half because my co-guard fell ill and went to see a doctor and recuperate back in Berlin. So, for three days and two nights I tended the house, and went outside only to fetch the mail, and to dig out chickweed in the strawberry plot (an oddly satisfying experience). I read Die Zeit -- but not front to back, through all the sections, minus the advertisements, as on previous occasions. My feud with the writing style and the mentality of the contributors (self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and not very engaged with the subject) persists; I was wickedly gratified to find an error in one of the many English phrases that were dropped; but the interviews with Helmut Schmidt in the ZeitMagazin were refreshing as usual, and this week's magazine was altogether unusually entertaining. And I liked Katja Nicodemus, the film critic's, interview with director Sidney Lumet. Striking the right tone in an interview is, as I've found in my extensive newspaper reading, highly difficult. Painfully inconsequential accounts of the interviewee's attire, prying personal interrogations, snide denigration or overt hostility, silly adulation, brain-deadeningly unoriginal questions -- these are problems that plague the genre.
As far as interviews go, by the way, the New Yorker is pleasingly consistent; even the recent article about George Clooney (whose appeal I have never fully understood) was serious, and I liked reading it, though it only confirmed my opinion that the actor is agreeable but bland. Somewhat à propos, I feel like relieving my mind about the Washington Post feature article, "Pearls Before Breakfast," that just won a Pulitzer. It deserves the prize for the nice premise (famous violinist dresses in street clothes and plays during rush hour at subway station in Washington, D.C.; how do people react?) and for the thorough work and enthusiasm that went into it; but not for the philosophical and musical sciolism,* or the style, which lapsed here and there into abject gushing.
But, to return to my week of rustication, I also played the piano and violin (Pudel's, which he generously permitted me to play) with much greater freedom than I feel when anyone is within earshot, so that it sounded quite good. And I read the first essay in Samuel Johnson's Rambler, as well as the biographical foreword; the first chapters of Middlemarch as well as a foreword by Gordon S. Haight; the beginning of an unsympathetic essay on Edmund Spenser; and the first chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop. My appreciation of Charles Dickens is unfortunately still greater objectively than subjectively (though I did greatly enjoy Nicholas Nickleby as far as I read it), because the way he keeps nudging the reader, and his characterizations of heroes and heroines, invariably "gets my goat."
Even Middlemarch irritated me, because I don't like the Victorian strain of idealization (verging on kitsch) and religiousness in it. For example:
Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees, buried her face, and sobbed. She could not pray under the rush of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own.Shakespeare himself, I admit, elevated his heroes and heroines into virtuous and wholly unreal abstractions; George Eliot, however, could have brought the modern tradition of differentiated characterization of primary characters to a fine peak, if she had not been defeated by her yearning to conform to the sentimental moralizing strain of her times. In any case, I had worried that I wouldn't bring any new insights to the reading this time (I last read it properly at least three years ago). On the contrary; it turns out that I used to ignore the gentle irony and observations, and the secondary characters like Mr. Brooke and Mrs. Cadwallader, so there is a whole, broad layer to the book that I now discern and value much more.
* sciolism: superficial pretense to knowledge
(I've had to look up the word a couple of times, hence this definition, paraphrased from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1964)
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