Books Life Blog tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2009-01-17:/mayas_blog//1 2010-09-02T07:41:03Z Movable Type 4.23-en What The Witness saw tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.176 2010-09-02T06:50:24Z 2010-09-02T07:41:03Z Maya Flower_arrangement_in_Karen_Blixen_Museum.jpg
At the Karen Blixen Museum in Rungstedlund, Denmark, floral arrangements complement the displays of furniture, paintings and tchotchkes from Karen Blixen's house.  The flowers come from a special garden, specifically tended to provide fresh flowers for the Museum's arrangements.  (After a slug invasion in the early nineties, a special, shin-high, slug-proof metal fence was erected around the garden to protect the flowers.) 

The care and attention paid by the Museum to the details concerning the flower arrangements are because Karen Blixen herself was an accomplished floral arranger and considered arranging flowers a form of art.  Photographs were taken of arrangements she'd made during her life, and the Museum claims that it "recreates" her arrangements.

Learning of this attempt at recreation, I thought of the Jorge Luis Borges story, "The Witness."  In this slender piece, a man dies in a stable.  He dies in the Kingdom of England,

but as a boy the man has seen the face of Woden, the sacred horror and the exultation, the clumsy wooden idol laden with Roman coins and ponderous vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners.  Before dawn, he will be dead, and with him, the last eyewitness images of pagan rites will perish, never to be seen again.  The world will be a little poorer when this Saxon man is dead.
(p. 161.)  Borges goes on to remind us that,

one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death . . . . In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man.
(Id.)  He wonders, "What will die with me the day I die?  What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?"  (Id.)  His proposals, in contradistinction to the preceding examples, are intimate, personal and apparently historically insignificant:

The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
(Id.)

Perhaps Borges believes that he has written down everything he witnessed worth preserving, so that when he dies all that remains will be meaningless outside his personal context.  Or perhaps Borges believes that he lives in a time that cannot parallel the greatness of the ancients, so that anything he witnesses cannot be of historical significance.  In any event, nothing in "The Witness" suggests a propensity on Borges' part to preserve his bar of sulfur in the drawer of his mahogany desk, and to project over it (on an endlessly repeating loop) an image of a bay horse in the vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, accompanied by a soundtrack of the voice of Macedonio Fernández.

In contrast to Borges' modesty, the efforts of the Karen Blixen Museum to ensure that Karen Blixen's flower arrangements do not die with her suggest a certain hubris that often accompanies hagiography.  Immodest and immoderate love cannot distinguish the important from the trivial aspects of the beloved. 

Similarly, the Karen Blixen Museum doesn't seem to appreciate that recreating Karen Blixen's floral arrangements is the kind of silly tribute that obsessives pay their objects of attention.  The effort doesn't present itself as an obvious priority for a museum dedicated to preservation of and promotion of a legacy that, like Karen Blixen's, is thoughtful, subversive, humorous, and controversial.  Rather, the emphasis and labor expended on the flowers suggests a focus on the fleeting and the decorative aspects, a preference for the pretty over the challenging.

In this respect, if not others, the world is a little poorer for Karen Blixen's death.
  
(Photograph of a flower arrangement in the Karen Blixen Museum gift shop taken by Maya Alexandri)
]]> A voice of her own tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.175 2010-09-01T12:11:00Z 2010-09-01T13:23:26Z Visiting the Karen Blixen Museum today in Rungstedlund, Denmark, I took advantage of the opportunity to listen to a 27-minute recording of Karen Blixen reciting her story, "A Letter from a King," in English, before an audience.I had known,... Maya HugoHellstenPhotoOfKarenBlixen1957.jpg
Visiting the Karen Blixen Museum today in Rungstedlund, Denmark, I took advantage of the opportunity to listen to a 27-minute recording of Karen Blixen reciting her story, "A Letter from a King," in English, before an audience.

I had known, from Judith Thurman's biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, that Karen Blixen intended her stories to be read aloud and listened to.  Hearing Karen Blixen tell her own story in her creaky-resonant voice with her old-lady inflection, I understood why.  The story on the page was two dimensions to the oral form's three.

Karen Blixen had a sense of humor, but - unlike Rabelais - it wasn't primarily scatological, physical or premised on misunderstandings.  These types of humor are sturdy vehicles that can survive the abuses of time and transmutations into different formats. 

Karen Blixen's sense of humor, on the other hand, is a fragile tone, easily lost in the migration of form and context.  On the page, I could understand why Karen Blixen might be thought to have been funny.  Hearing her tell her story, it was funny.  She earned her laughs from the audience. 

Moreover, in the oral form of the story, I realized that she was poking fun at herself with her account of how her friends in Denmark thought she was a snob for sending a lion skin to King Christian X; her self-deprecation - obvious in the oral form, muted on the page - made her likable.  Listening to Karen Blixen's tale, I was transported to a younger time, when I sat at my grandmother's kitchen table, listening to her tell stories with gentle punch lines.  (For this reason, I selected a photo of Karen Blixen, above, that reminds me of my grandmother.)
  
Beyond the restored humor, however, the oral form of the story took on a completely different meaning.  "A Letter from a King" begins by recounting an event that Karen Blixen describes in Out of Africa: a New Year's Day outing that ends with Karen shooting a lion perched on the carcass of a giraffe.  When they see the lion, Denys Finch-Hatton hands Karen his rifle and tells her to shoot it.  She doesn't like to use his gun; it's too big.  But, she says, the shot is for love, so shouldn't it use the largest caliber weapon?

The anecdote is a significant one to Blixenania lore.  Karen Blixen herself repeats it in both Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass.  Errol Trzebinksi begins her biography of Denys Finch-Hatton, Silence Will Speak, with a retelling of the episode.  Judith Thurman interprets the shot of love as being for Denys Finch-Hatton. 

But when Karen Blixen tells the story, the love is unquestionably for the lion.  Hunting, she insists, is like a love affair.  Usually, she admits, the passion is one-sided.  The hunter is in love; the prey, not so much.  But with lions, she insists, it's different: they want to kill her as much as she wants to shoot them.

This meaning (and its attendant humor) were largely lost on me when I read Shadows on the Grass and Out of Africa.  I was busy focusing on where the text betrayed clues of her love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton (who she refers to as her "friend" in "A Letter from a King"). 

But this subtextual obsession is exactly what Karen Blixen's oral performance obviates.  Reading from the page, I capitulated to the temptation to wander from her path, to sniff - like a pig hunting truffles - for buried treasure, to read with my own agenda.  Listening to Karen Blixen tell her tale, however, I was led where she wanted me to go, directed to the treasure before my eyes, engaged by her story in her voice.

For whatever reason - whether the clamor of her personal life has deafened readers to her literary voice, or whether English is too foreign a vehicle for her voice to carry on the page, or whether she's simply a storyteller in the ancient model of epic poet, and her tales work better orally - Karen Blixen's storytelling voice only emerged fully for me when I heard the recording.

It's a voice worth hearing.

The Karen Blixen Museum would do well to make her oeuvre available, where possible, in podcast.

(Photograph of Karen Blixen by Hugo Hellsten, taken at Rungstedlund, in 1957, on Kulturplakaten)
]]> Becky Sharp, c'est Thackeray tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.174 2010-08-31T15:20:01Z 2010-08-31T16:20:38Z Maya Melusina.jpgI've already blogged about how William Makepeace Thackeray's bitchiness to Becky Sharp fouls up his plotting in Vanity Fair.  But the more I think about his lack of compassion for Becky, the more compelled I am to take issue with his behavior simply as an affront to women and the poor. 

Thackeray creates Becky as a creature of few advantages.  Her mother dies when she's very young, and her father dies of delirium tremens when she is a teenager.  Moreover,

[Rebecca] had the dismal precocity of poverty.  Many a dun she had talked to, and turned away from her father's door; many a tradesman she had coaxed and wheedled into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more.  She sate commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the talk of many of his wild companions - often but ill-suited for a girl to hear.  But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old.
(p. 10.) 

Thackeray bounces orphan Becky from one demeaning environment (Miss Pinkerton's School) to another (the Sedley house, Sir Pitt Crawley's house in Queen's Crawley, Miss Crawley's house in London), marries her to a gambler solider without a penny, promptly revokes the soldier's inheritance, and then gleefully watches Becky make do (dishonestly) in genteel society.

Social climbing (particularly in Becky's time and place), of course, is vulgar, and people who do it well are invariably insincere, insecure, shallow and vain.  (Becky is all these things.) 

And, yes, vanity is a sin.  But one of the great innovations of Judeo-Christian ethics is proportionality: Inspector Javert, the policeman - not Jean Valjean, the thief - is the sinner in Les Misérables because hounding a man for a lifetime is a disproportionate punishment for stealing a loaf of bread when a man is starving.

In the same way, casting vanity on par with murder and cannibalism is hardly in the enlightened Judeo-Christian spirit.  Here, for example, is Thackeray giving an account of Becky after she's been ruined:

In describing this siren [Rebecca Sharp], singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water?  No!  Those who like may peep down under the waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, and curling round corpses; but above the water-line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish moralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie?  When, however, the siren disappears and dives below, down among the dead men, the water of course grows turbid over her, and it is labour lost to look into it ever so curiously.  They look pretty enough when they sit upon a rock, twanging their harps and combing their hair, and beckon to you to come and hold the looking glass; but when they sink into their native element, depend on it those mermaids are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling [sic] and feasting on their wretched pickled victims.  And so, when Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact the better.
(p. 620-21 (emphasis added).)  

I bridle reading this indictment.  Becky, without question, exploits those foolish enough to allow her to do so - her lady companion, Briggs, and her landlord, Raggles, in particular (both of whom she ruins financially).  She's beastly to her husband, Rawdon Crawley, and utterly cruel to her son. 

But, frankly, her crimes are the usual run-of-the-mill misdeeds of the impoverished.  The fever pitch of Thackeray's accusations is unwarranted.  (Besides which, his constant excuses that propriety prevents him from recounting her bloody - as opposed to economic and emotional - crimes is scarcely credible and makes the whole passage seem gratuitous.)

Thackeray's excessiveness surprises me because I believe he loves Becky Sharp (in contrast to Amelia Sedley, who I think Thackeray comes close to despising).  I don't think Thackeray would've made Becky so beautiful, intelligent, witty and resourceful - nor would he have given her an adventure with so many men and opportunities - if he didn't adore her.   

And yet, I feel that, in spite of himself - in spite of Thackeray's certainty that those of high birth and spotless reputation are as decrepit in their moral conduct as those of their opposites - Thackeray can't really accept a smart, resourceful, poor woman who isn't a monster.  Cerebrally or ideologically, he knows that poor women aren't deserving of especial reprimand; but viscerally Thackeray connects them with terror.  (As I discussed in another prior post, I think Thackeray attributes too much power to women, which may relate to this fear he manifests in respect of Becky.)

Thackeray's treatment of Becky also put me in mind of another novel about a rapacious, social climbing woman, a woman who exploits and abuses everyone she can, a woman who comes from crushing poverty and who dies desperate and penniless.  The book is The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa.

The Bad Girl is based on Madame Bovary, an ambitious book with which to compare one's work; and yet Vargas Llosa more than lives up to the company in which he places himself. 

The reason is his compassion for his bad girl.  Despite all her bad behavior, Vargas Llosa made me believe that poverty - not original sin or some other form of damnation - had tarnished her.  With this tactic, Vargas Llosa is not simply being sentimental: he's making his story work.  Although I never came to like the bad girl, I did feel emotionally engaged in her fate (and that of her steadfast lover) in a way that never happened with Vanity Fair.  I read The Bad Girl in a matter of days (not a month, like Vanity Fair), and the bad girl's scar of poverty has resonated with me for years after I finished the book. 

Speculating about the sources of authorial limitations and strengths is always risky.  Nonetheless, I'll hazard the following guess:  Vargas Llosa has compassion for the bad girl because he's well-acquainted with his naughty side; Thackeray thought Becky a monster because she was too close to what he didn't want to know about himself. 

(Image of Melusina from Wikicommons) 
]]> The final destiny of the gods tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.173 2010-08-31T09:18:28Z 2010-08-31T15:17:30Z Normal.dotm 0 0 1 1 7 www.openoffice.org 1 1 8 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;... Maya Thoth.jpg
My favorite story from Jorge Luis Borges' collection, The Maker (1960), is "Ragnarök."  In it, Borges describes a dream he had, in which he is at the College of Philosophy and Letters with other scholars.  Their discourse is interrupted by the sudden appearance of ancient gods (Thoth, Janus, etc.), who emerge from the Underworld and storm the dais. 

At first, people applaud and weep.  But then, one of the gods emits an animal scream of triumph, and "[f]rom that point on, things changed."

It all began with the suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the gods were unable to talk.  Centuries of a feral life of flight had atrophied that part of them that was human; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these fugitives.  Beetling brows, yellowed teeth, the sparse beard of a mulatto or a Chinaman, and beastlike dewlaps were testaments to the degeneration of the Olympian line.  The clothes they wore were not those of a decorous and honest poverty, but rather of the criminal luxury of the Underworld's gambling dens and houses of ill repute.  A carnation bled from a buttonhole; under a tight suitcoat one could discern the outline of a knife.
Feeling that the gods are "aged predators," "playing their last trump," the scholars draw their revolvers and "exultantly" kill the gods.

The story dramatizes the modern human fear of interaction with an other that cannot communicate on human terms (e.g., gods who have degenerated to animals).  At first, the return of the gods is an event of transcendent wonder; but if the gods cannot "talk," the elating feeling of "we are not alone" is transformed into the terrifying feeling of "we are with a threat."  Humans will no longer submit to the domination of animals. 

(In the Judeo-Christian tradition, of course, humans are made in the image of God.  Perhaps the most overlooked innovation of Judeo-Christianity is not monotheism, but the elimination of animal forms from the holy.  As for communication, if the Judeo-Christian God is not currently talking, it's because He chooses not to - or we choose not to listen.)

I noticed a similar kind of privileging of human communication in Kenya.  Before I lived in Kenya, I did not believe that animals had consciousness equivalent with human consciousness.  But even a short time passed in the relatively distant proximity of wild animals in Kenya convinced me (intuitively, not scientifically) that I'd been wrong.  Animals seem to me to have consciousness, but they lack a ready means of communication with humans.

That humans tend to equate consciousness with the ability to communicate on human terms is a terrible error.  It causes us not merely to fail to dwell in ignorance when we could learn from animals, but also to prefer human needs to those of animals because animals cannot persuade us that their needs deserve equal or greater weight.  The consequence - whether from destruction of animal habitats for human development, or from harvesting animals for human consumption - is the steady elimination of animals from the planet.

Borges begins "Ragnarök" with a citation to Coleridge:  "The images in dreams . . . figure forth the impression that our intellect would call causes; we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel."  Borges doesn't elucidate what his dream explains for him, but for me, "Ragnarök," explains the horror of humanity's profoundly disfigured relations with animals: not merely the defamation and violence against these "others" incapable of speaking, but the exultant joy in destroying them.

If we mourn ourselves as a godless and abandoned species, this is why. 

(Image of the god Thoth from BBC)
]]> Thackeray on women's marriage prospects: drivel or insight? tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.172 2010-08-28T20:52:26Z 2010-08-28T21:45:14Z What is William Makepeace Thackeray talking about, in Vanity Fair, when he asserts:If a person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear... Maya Amelia&Becky.jpg
What is William Makepeace Thackeray talking about, in Vanity Fair, when he asserts:

If a person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear Mamma to settle matters with the young man, she must do it for herself.  And oh, what a mercy it is that these women do not exercise their powers oftener!  We can't resist them, if they do.  Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once: old or ugly, it is all the same.  And this I set down as a positive truth.  A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.  Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts in the field, and don't know their own power.  They would overcome us entirely if they did.
(p. 25 (emphasis in original).)

While Thackeray is frequently an uncomfortably insightful critic on matters of human greed and gluttony, on this issue - the supposed freedom women have to select their own husbands - Thackeray appears to me to be a lunatic. 

Never mind the fact that his assertion is utterly contrary to my own experience: times have changed.  Vanity Fair predates feminism and, if feminism has proved one proposition, it is that women (with fair opportunities and without absolute humps) awakened to their own power - freed from their beasts-in-the-field likeness, in Thackeray's parlance - are far from assured of marrying whom they like. 

No, my sense of Thackeray's lunacy derives from his own depictions of women attempting to marry whom they like.  The marital trajectories of Thackeray's own characters contradict his overarching statement.  Becky Sharp, for example, begins the novel wanting to marry Jos Sedley.  Despite an exercise of her prodigious power, inopportune drunkenness on Sedley's part, followed by an unkind intervention on the part of George Osborne, drown Becky's hopes.

Nor does Amelia Sedley's marital history support Thackeray.  Amelia, too, exercised her personal powers to show (more than) a "little inclination" to marry George Osborne, but her own efforts would have resulted in spinsterhood.  Nothing short of the extraordinary social pressure exerted by Osborne's long-time friend, mentor and source-of-extra-funds-in-a-pinch, William Dobbin, convinced Osborne to take the plunge with Amelia.

So I return to my original question: what is Thackeray talking about?

One possibility is that Thackeray is just being provocative.  At playing provocateur, he excels.

Another possibility is that Thackeray just had one of those human lapses that lead to the fervent espousal of contradictory positions.  It happens to all of us, even in print, even when editors are supposed to catch that sort of thing before it goes public.

Yet a third option is that Thackeray is urging us women on to greater heights.  Although Thackeray is too much of a realist and a story-teller to be a severe moralist, he does take a firm stand against one sort of immorality: the refusal to grow. 

Thackeray can do nothing but frown on Amelia Sedley's steadfast devotion to the unworthy George Osborne; Thackeray has nothing but contempt for Becky Sharp's persistence in her manipulative and degenerative social tactics.  However much Thackeray hectors and berates his characters, and punishes their stubborn inertia, they don't change.  But perhaps we, the audience, might. 

Hence, just as Thackeray shows us what not to do, he tells us what we should do: ladies, he admonishes us, stop being cows and start getting what you want from the men you want.  In a word: change.

I appreciate the sentiment.  But I also appreciate that Thackeray didn't show us an example of his idealized woman for a reason: she doesn't exist in Vanity Fair - or, since Vanity Fair is a representation of our own materialistic world, she doesn't exist.

Which raises a fourth possible answer to my question of what, exactly, Thackeray is talking about: like most novelists, he too frequently makes things up.

(Image of Romola Garai as Amelia Sedley in Mira Nair's film version of Vanity Fair from Garai's website; image of Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp in the same film from The New York Times)
]]> Borges and Bolaño tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.171 2010-08-27T13:46:35Z 2010-08-27T14:43:09Z Maya JLBorges_and_RBolaño.jpg
In a prior post, I speculated about possible reasons for Roberto Bolaño's propensity to create writer characters whose oeuvres remain opaque to the audience.  By depriving these writer characters of an oeuvre, Bolaño isolates them from the possibility of literary dialogue with other authors and texts.  I conjectured that Bolaño might conceive of such a writer character as a symbol of mortality.

Now, however, I have a new theory.  I think Bolaño's oeuvre-less writers are a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges, after all, is the author who (as I highlighted in another prior post) eschewed composing actual novels in favor of imagining them and then commenting on them.  Borges' short stories, moreover, overflow with texts that we don't see (e.g., John of Pannonia's tract against the heresy of the Monotoni in "The Theologians"; Borges' own fantasy tale about the serpent Fafnir in "The Zahir"), and with texts that we don't see completely (e.g., Benjamin Otálora's tale in "The Dead Man"; Christopher Dewey's tale in "The Man on the Threshold").  Without too much mental gymnastics, one could truthfully describe Borges as a novelist who, instead of having an oeuvre, merely has a commentary on his own imaginary oeuvre.

By his own account, Bolaño loved Borges.  In The New York Review of Books, Francisco Goldman quotes Bolaño saying, "I could live under a table reading Borges." 

Knowing of Bolaño's reverence for Borges, and now having read some of Borges' work, I'm inclined to see the protagonist of Bolaño's novel, 2666, the enigmatic writer, Benno von Archimboldi (a/k/a Hans Reiter), as a Borges-like figure.  Like Borges, von Archimboldi is a man with a split identity (see Borges' short story, "Borges and I"); like Borges, von Archimboldi is withdrawn from the world; like Borges, von Archimboldi writes imaginary novels; like Borges, others (especially critics and criminals) see von Archimboldi as a figure of power and redemption; and like Borges, von Archimboldi hasn't won the Nobel Prize.

Goldman interestingly cites Bolaño's observation that, "[his] life . . . has been infinitely more savage than Borges's."  Benno von Archimboldi's life, however, has seen its share of savagery.  Perhaps, in Benno von Archimboldi, Bolaño was offering his mentor - who'd always been cagey about his identity as "Borges" - another identity, one less bookish and less focused on the 19th century, one more infused with the lessons that Bolaño had learned from his own life.  In Bolaño's hands, Borges could be everything he wasn't in life: a physical presence, a soldier, a killer, a lover - everything, in fact, but a writer with an oeuvre of novels. 

Even a novelist with an extensive oeuvre like Bolaño's, it seems, has some limits.   

(Image of Roberto Bolaño from Maud Newton; image of Jorge Luis Borges from Wikipedia) 
]]> Borges on Jews tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.170 2010-08-26T13:41:57Z 2010-09-02T07:51:22Z Maya Borges'_Aleph.jpg
I didn't know what to make of what Borges makes of Jews.  My first impressions did not accord with the assessment of academic Evelyn Fishburn, who wrote,

Borges' philosemitism is not at issue here: his credentials in this respect must satisfy all but the most paranoid.

Well call me paranoid.

Philosemitism didn't occur to me when I read the following description of "Aaron Loewenthal" in Borges' short story, "Emma Zunz" (from his 1949 collection, The Aleph):

Aaron Loewenthal was in the eyes of all an upright man; in those of his few closest acquaintances, a miser. . . . The year before, he had decorously grieved the unexpected death of his wife - a Gauss! who'd brought him an excellent dowry! - but money was his true passion.  With secret shame, he knew he was not as good at earning it as at holding on to it.  He was quite religious; he believed he had a secret pact with the Lord - in return for prayers and devotions, he was exempted from doing good works.
Fishburn doesn't quote this rigidly stereotypical character description in her discussion of "Emma Zunz," but she does say:

The story is placed almost entirely within the confines of the Jewish world of Buenos Aires around the year 1922 and includes scenes of embezzlement, prostitution, lies, betrayal and cold-blooded, premeditated murder, thus opening up the social and moral range of Borges' Jewish imaginary.
"Thus opening up the social and moral range of Borges' Jewish imaginary"?  Is Fishburn somehow suggesting that Borges is immune to common anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews that cast them as embezzlers, liars, betrayers, cold-blooded premeditated murderers (blood of Christian children in the Passover matzoh), etc.?  Without in any way suggesting that depictions of Jews should be immune from the full range of human behavior in which they (and all groups of humans) engage, I can't see anything laudatory about Borges descending to depict Jews consistently with anti-Semitic stereotypes.

That said, I do not think Borges is anti-Semitic.  As J.M. Coetzee writes of Borges in The New York Review of Books,

Englishness was one part of Borges's self-fashioning, Jewishness another. He invoked a rather hypothetical Sephardic strain on his mother's side to explain his interest in the Kabbalah, and, more interestingly, to present himself as an outsider to Western culture, with an outsider's freedom to criticize and innovate. 
Much as Borges might have been an example of the much-loved Jewish stereotype of the "self-hating Jew," much more likely (in my opinion) is that he extended to Judaism the same openness, curiosity and delight that he obviously shows in Islam and other traditions of long lineage in which he found interesting engagement with large questions of theology, time, existence and reality.

Rather than being an expression of anti-Semitism, I think Aaron Loewenthal is simply a function of Borges' generally weak skills at characterization.  In Borges' quick sketches, readers find many characters capable of grand action and exhilarating thinking, but very little in the way of deep psychological and emotional portrayals.  (Indeed, Fishburn votes for Emma Zunz herself as being Borges' most fully fleshed-out character: "his only moderately developed character is female; also Jewish, manipulative and murderous; and uniquely pitiable").  This being the case, I think that when Borges reached for a character description of Aaron Loewenthal, he defaulted to the "Jewish miser" stereotype.  So ingrained was this stereotype into the world in which Borges lived that his invocation of its broad form may have seemed "right" to him as a description of a Jew.  I doubt seriously that Borges even recognized in Aaron Loewenthal an anti-Semitic stereotype.

All the same, whether Borges was philosemitic or merely interested in Kabbalah (and even if he was prey to the anti-Semitic stereotypes of his day), I don't recognize myself, as a Jew, or as a Jewish woman, in Borges.  What Borges makes of Jews, however thought-worthy, doesn't strike me as Jewish.

(Image of Borges' El Aleph from Antiqbook.com)

]]> The unbearable heaviness of "Borges words" tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.169 2010-08-21T08:51:28Z 2010-08-21T09:55:14Z In a previous blog post, I focused on the explanation given by Jorge Luis Borges, in his introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths, about why he hadn't written a novel:It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one... Maya JorgeLuisBorges.jpg
In a previous blog post, I focused on the explanation given by Jorge Luis Borges, in his introduction to The Garden of Forking Paths, about why he hadn't written a novel:

It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one . . . the madness of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them
My prior post was occupied with the second half of Borges' remark: that imagining vast novels and commenting on them is better than writing them.  But, with extended reflection, I think the first part of Borges' statement may be more revealing: his conviction that novel writing is laborious and impoverishing madness.

Certainly, I agree with him.  Writing novels has consumed the better part of five years of my life; the work wholly exhausts me; I don't think anyone who knows me intimately would argue too strenuously that I'm sane; and I'm teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, having succeeded in never having earned a dime from my fiction writing.

Still, my guess is that Borges was referring to some other "laborious," "impoverishing" and "mad[dening]" aspects of novel writing.  I take my cue from this passage in his story, "The Writing of God":

[T]here is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say "the jaguar" is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer and turtles it has devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth.
Here Borges offers an extraordinary conception of a word, one that departs from our common currency.  Each "Borges word" has almost unimaginable weight and resonance.  The more "Borges words" one strings together, the more propositions one advances, the heavier and more unwieldy the work becomes, the more the universes conjured by each word clang against one another, creating cacophony and undecipherable complexity.

To write a vast tome from such components is truly laborious; hauling each "Borges word" into place must be on par with positioning the stone blocks that comprise a pyramid.  And the task is also impoverishing - to the language.  The vibrancy of each word is overshadowed, damaged and cramped by the presence of so many other words, by the weight of so many other universes.  Borges was not exaggerating to say that composing a novel with "Borges words" would be maddening.

And, although Borges didn't mention this corollary, to read a novel composed of "Borges words" might be a similar laborious and impoverishing madness.  Reading a Borges short story is so demanding that I read each of his stories twice . . . before I go back and "reread" them again.  The weight and resonance of an entire Borges novel might very well reduce me to my atomic constituents.

Luckily - however much Borges described his choice as that of an "inept" and "lazy" man - Borges knew both his power and his métier.  He spared me atomic disintegration and gifted me untold hours of pleasure in his stories, a balance that I can only describe as a prudential and laudatory use of "Borges words."

(Image of Jorge Luis Borges from The New York Times)
]]> Jorge Luis Borges, book blogger tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.168 2010-08-19T19:11:40Z 2010-08-19T19:37:36Z Explaining why he'd never written a novel, Jorge Luis Borges remarked,It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one . . . the madness of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to... Maya Jorge_Luis_Borges.jpgExplaining why he'd never written a novel, Jorge Luis Borges remarked,

It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one . . . the madness of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.
Not just books, or imaginary books, either.  Borges is a compulsive summarizer and commentator.  No text, real or imagined, seems too short to merit this treatment.  He opens his six-page story, "The Dead Man," by saying, "I do not know the full details of [Benjamin Otálora's] adventure; when I am apprised of them, I will correct and expand these pages.  For now, this summary may be instructive."

Nor does he restrict his commentary to a sentence here and there.  More than half of his barely five-page page, "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden," is commentary on an anecdote about a barbarian who switched sides while sacking Rome.  And while Borges' commentary constitutes the story in the foregoing example, his commentary seems to reverse the meaning of the story in the case of "Averröes' Search," transforming the tale from one of discovery into one of failure.

Borges offers a potential rationale for his inveterate commenting in, "The Immortal," at the end of which he appends a "postcript" [sic] to a text allegedly slipped into the last volume of Pope's Iliad.  Acknowledging that the text's veracity has been questioned because it quotes or plagiarizes from other texts, Borges remarks:

To my way of thinking, that conclusion is unacceptable.  As the end approaches, wrote Cartaphilus [the author of the text found in Pope's Iliad], there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.  Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men - those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.
What else is commentary but "words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men"?  To quote the words of other men (or the imagined words of other men) and "mutilate" them by placing them in another context, arguing with them, juxtaposing them against other words, complicating their meaning, burnishing or adding to their facets, is to engage in the act of commentary.  And for Borges, the raw materials for that commentary - the words - were "the alms left him by the hours and the centuries": his inheritance from history.

At this juncture, I'd like to offer my commentary on Borges' habit of commenting: his impulse is not so much like that of a fiction writer, but of a blogger.  Fiction writers are interested in stories: plots and characters.  Borges is interested in analysis.  Borges - because he's Borges - manages to make stories out of analysis, but his success doesn't transform his approach from one of a commentator into one of a fiction writer.  Nor does that fact that Borges is sometimes commenting on or analyzing imaged texts make his methodology suitable for fiction: just as a law student arguing a moot court case is practicing legal techniques, not fiction writing, so Borges is acting the part of commentator, not author.  

As Rivka Galchen says in her New York Times essay on Borges,

he thought of himself primarily as a reader; writing was just among the most intensely engaged ways of reading. . . . To love a text: isn't that just to find oneself helplessly casting about for something to say in return?
"[W]riting . . . [as an] intensely engaged way[] of reading" - that's why I blog about books.  When I finish a book, I want to deepen, heighten, round-out and complete the experience by writing about it.  "[H]elplessly casting about for something to say in return" to a book is a good description of my blog.   

In this light, Borges' stunning innovation is that he appears to have invented book blogging before blogs existed.  Not that this technological gap really matters.  If Cartaphilus can chat with Homer eleven hundred years after he wrote the Odyssey, then Borges can blog before blogs - or the Internet, or even personal computers - were invented.  In my analysis, Borges' stories, properly understood and contextualized, are blog posts.  Likewise, Borges' books are compilations of his posts - he may be the world's first blogger to have landed a publishing contract.  

And in this post, I am imagining Borges' blog and (imaginarily) hyper-linking to it.  Check it out, folks: once you read his posts, you'll want to leave a comment.

(Image of Jorge Luis Borges from The New York Times)  ]]> The bitch side of Jane Austen tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.167 2010-08-18T19:46:04Z 2010-08-19T19:50:15Z Maya William_Makepeace_Thackeray.jpgWilliam Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair should be a mandatory complement to any Jane Austen reading assignment.  Focusing on the same social set in the same country and time period as Austen, Thackeray offers a view of the world depicted in Austen's novels that is less romantic, less hopeful and less moral than the perspective Austen proffers.

Thackeray is also unrelenting.

I'm a fast reader, and yet Vanity Fair claimed a month of my time.  The extended reading period is odd.  Without question, I enjoyed the book, and I found Thackeray's authorial voice entertaining.  I loved the depth that Thackeray added to my understanding of social dynamics in Britain at the time of Jane Austen.  And, as I passed the hours in Thackeray's company, I admired his wit, courage and antics.  

But the extent to which I dawdled finishing the book is testament to an inherent flaw: the plot didn't function.

The plot is the engine of a novel.  Just like an engine, a book's plot has to rev up to full speed.  As the story progresses, plots should gather momentum like a toboggan hurtling downhill.  The plot should pull the reader onto the toboggan for the plunge.  When the plot functions, a reader should reach a point - somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way through - where he or she feels compelled to finish the book.  With Vanity Fair, I never felt that compulsion.

A major reason for that failure is Thackeray's unrelenting bitchiness.  He is so unsympathetic to his characters that he has disabled the plot in two ways.  First, he successfully persuades the reader that the characters in Vanity Fair are not worth caring about.  Here, for instance, is Thackeray discoursing about Rebecca Sharp:

Miss Rebecca was not . . . in the lease kind or placable.  All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treat ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get.  The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.  Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion . . .This is certain, that if the world neglected Miss Sharp, she never was known to have done a good action in behalf of anybody . . . .
(p. 8.)  Of course, the world uses ill many good people who drink deeply and undeservedly from the cup of bitterness, but Thackeray early on dismisses any notion that Becky Sharp might belong in that category.  Nor is Thackeray satisfied to pass condemnatory judgment on Becky, but he jumps up and down on the point:

And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce the, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of.  Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; . . . - whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success.  Such people there are living and flourishing in the world - Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main.                             
(pp. 70-71)  "[L]et us have at them . . . with might and main"?!  When an author recommends to his reader that he or she treat the protagonist thus, what can a reader do but comply?  And since Thackerey harangued me into not liking - and therefore not caring about - his characters, I never became invested in the resolution of their stories.

Second, Thackeray seems to have gotten so carried away being nasty to his characters that he neglected to plot adequately for them.  For example, when William Dobbin wakes up his commander, Mick O'Dowd, in the middle of the night and demands leave so that Dobbin can attend to a personal matter in England (i.e., Amelia Smedley's allegedly impending marriage), Dobbin's urgency generates momentum that Thackeray completely dissipates by failing to follow through on Dobbin's story line for more than a hundred pages.  

Similarly, after Becky's disgrace with Lord Steyne, she falls so thoroughly out of society that the end of the book can have no suspense with respect to her plot line: rehabilitation is impossible.  A compulsive drinker and gambler, living in flophouses, chased away and stumbling from city in city in Europe, Becky has neither the means nor the motivation to restore her reputation.  Thackeray has utterly gutted her plot possibilities both by casting her so low and by giving her a meager living from her ex-husband, Rawdon Crawley.  A woman with a regular income may wish the income were higher, but if she can survive on it, she'll adjust to it - which is what Becky does.  (By the same token, Thackeray ruins Becky's relationship with her son so early in the book that, by the end, when young Rawdon inherits the family money and title, reconciliation is unthinkable - yet another plot possibility for Becky eliminated.)

Thackeray's plotting misadventure is interesting and surprising because, as an author, he's self-aware (and voluble) on the topic of effective story telling, authorial motive and pacing.  Here he is, for example, on all three topics:

I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade, at Naples, preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing honest lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.

At the little Paris theatres, on the other hand, you will not only hear the people yelling out, "Ah gredin!  Ah monstre!" and cursing the tyrant of the play from the boxes; but the actors themselves positively refuse to play the wicked parts, such as those of the infames Anglais, brutal Cossacks, and what not, and prefer to appear at a smaller salary, in their real characters as loyal Frenchmen.  I set the two stories one against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them, which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and bad language.                       

I warn my "kyind friends," then, that I am going to tell a story of harrowing villany and complicated - but, as I trust, intensely interesting - crime.  My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you.  When we come to the proper places we won't spare fine language - No, no!  But when we are going over the quiet country we must perforce be calm.  A tempest in a slop-basin is absurd.  We will reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely midnight.  The present Chapter is very mild.  Others - But we will not anticipate those.
(p. 70).  And, yet, "sincere" Thackeray's storytelling and pacing did not generate the momentum of Thackeray's "mercenary" brother in Naples.  Whether the problem was that, in his enthusiasm for demonstrating his "sincerity," Thackeray went overboard - or whether Thackeray simply enjoys being bitchy too much to resist when necessary for the sake of the plot - the outcome was the same.  Bitchiness can be diverting over the course of an evening - but after a month, it gets old.

(Image of William Makepeace Thackeray from The Free Library)
]]> The Venetian gardener tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.166 2010-07-31T09:46:49Z 2010-07-31T14:25:15Z Maya Garden_in_Venice.jpg
In Roberto Bolaño's novel, 2666, an acclaimed, reclusive novelist, Benno von Archimboldi works as a gardener in Venice. 

Bolaño acknowledges the unlikeliness of Archimboldi's day job - it sounds like a joke, like being a trash collector in Antarctica.  But, no, Bolaño maintains that Archimboldi really is a gardener in Venice, employed by the municipality to tend to its public parks, however few in number or small in square footage.

Having just traipsed around Venice for the first time, I have a fresh appreciation for the disbelief that ought to greet any claim to be a gardener in Venice: the city really doesn't have any plants. 

Indeed, I believe I have identified what has to have been Archimboldi's workplace.  Pictured above is the only public park space I saw: four or so trees, clustered with some shrubs, by the Ponte della Accademia.  An enterprising Venetian municipal official might consider installing a plaque, "Here worked the mysterious and brilliant novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, according to that other mysterious and brilliant novelist, Roberto Bolaño" - or setting up a walking tour of Venice's public plants, similar to Stockholm's tours of points of interest from the Millennium trilogy.

That said, having seen Venice (however briefly), I now feel that Archimboldi's job was not a joke: it was a metaphor. 

Venice is a has-been metropolis.  Its dwindling population survives on the skimpiest of economies: short of seasonal tourism, the city has no industry, no offices, no business, no livelihood.  Its buildings are constantly decaying; upkeep and restoration efforts cannot hope to outpace the destructiveness of the rising salt-water.  A monument to a Renaissance pinnacle, the city is currently close to a tomb, a symbol of the absurdity and hopelessness of resistance to mortality.

Nonetheless, Bolaño doesn't grieve Venice's fate.  Everything has its span of existence, and Bolaño doesn't respect attempts at exceeding these limits.  Throughout 2666, Bolaño mocks stabs at immortality, whether through his repeated references to burned books or his antipathy to fame:

Until that moment Archimboldi had never thought about fame.  Hitler was famous.  Göring was famous.  The people he loved or remembered fondly weren't famous, they just satisfied certain needs.  Döblin was his consolation.  Ansky was his strength.  Ingeborg was his joy.  The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun.  His sister about whom he had no news, was his own innocence.  Of course, they were other things too.  Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition.  Also, fame was reductive.  Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished.  Fame's message was unadorned.  Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
(p. 802.)  Like fame, immortality is "rooted in delusion and lies."  Immortality is almost always twinned with ambition.  And it is reductive; to be immortal is to be diminished, the color stripped from the Greek statues, the music lost from the Greek dramas, the social context irrevocably severed from the surviving fragment. 

For Bolaño, literature is not about authors who reverberate through the centuries.  Rather, tthe point of literature is to help us to accept mortality, to benefit from its gifts, and to husband our energies so that we can avoid wasteful resistance to the inevitable.  In 2666, Bolaño suggests that mortality doesn't diminish life, but resistance to it does. 

Thus, he sends Archimboldi into the world's most beautiful monument to such resistance, Venice, to nurture life and growth in the midst of this blindingly gorgeous hollowness.  The task Bolaño gives Archimboldi is one either futility or nobility. 

In any event, it is the task of any brilliant novelist today.
]]> Giving American women readers their due tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.165 2010-07-31T06:59:10Z 2010-07-31T11:01:50Z Maya Biblioteca_Nazionale_Marciana_Venice.jpg
American women readers are the consumer backbone of the publishing industry.  (By some reports, women compose 80% of the market for novels.) 

Publishers think they're catering to women by publishing chick-lit and women-friendly novels (the kinds with "sympathetic" female protagonists, dealing with issues familiar to readers). 

Never mind the homogenizing impact this approach has on newly-published literature.  Never mind the narrowness and condescension implicit in this publishing strategy.  Never mind that some women - myself included - have no interest in these types of books.

Never mind that publishers might get better returns from their female consumers if they followed another strategy.  My vote is for publishers to follow the lead of the Renaissance Venetians: put a naked man outside the door of every bookstore or library.  I can't think of a better way to prime the ladies for furious book reading and thank them for their patronage.

(Photograph of the entrance to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, off Piazza San Marcos in Venice, by Maya Alexandri)
]]> It's a chicken's life tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.164 2010-07-29T21:19:23Z 2010-07-31T11:03:24Z Maya Naturalis_Labor_Chicken1.jpgThis evening, Teatro Astra in Vicenza (where I happen to be at the moment) presented a dance performance by Naturalis Labor, a local dance troupe.  Called "Chicken," the piece featured two dancers, Silvia Bertoncelli and Marta Bevilacqua. 

The dance began with the women showcasing the possibilities for modern dance based on chicken behavior.  Although entertaining, I wasn't totally convinced: why, I kept thinking, would anyone want to confine themselves to chicken-hood?  A chicken, after all, is not a lion or a wolf or an antelope; an aspirational animal it isn't.

Naturalis_Labor_Chicken2.jpgAfter documenting clucking, pecking and fluttering, the dancers depicted other limitations: flightlessness, cantankerousness, violent temperament, bloody claws.  And egg laying.  As one of the dancers ecstatically laid eggs around the stage, the other woman emerged from the wings clothed as a peasant woman.  First, she gathered the eggs.  Then, she began cracking and beating them manically, faster and faster, until the other dancer (who'd fled before the egg holocaust) reentered the stage, also dressed as a peasant woman, and carrying two trays of eggs.  A "peasant egg dance" ensued.

Naturalis_Labor_Chicken3.jpgTruthfully, I still didn't get where the dance was going.  Peasant women, I thought.  How kitch. 

But "Chicken" had bigger eggs to fry, and when the dancers yanked away a feather-covered cloth, their political agenda became impossible to ignore: across the back of the stage stretched several metal cabinets featuring props from the industrial processing of chickens.  Gone were the soft feathers and gentle clucking or indignant squawking of the farm-raised chickens; in their place, rubber, skinny, squeaky and dead, were caged chicken carcasses. 

Naturalis_Labor_Chicken4.jpgPossibly, the dance was about vegetarianism.  More likely, it had a "slow food" subtext.  But most definitely, the dance was not primarily about chickens: it was about women.

The situation of women in today's society bears uncomfortable comparison to industrially processed chickens, parallels that "Chicken" took pains to elucidate.  Clothed, first, in padded leotards and, second, in dresses that appeared to be made from sacks for transporting agricultural products, the dancers in the final part of "Chicken" illustrated that brutal, provincial and pre-modern can look pretty good, if the other option is the organized violence of industrialized modernity. 

Naturalis_Labor_Chicken7.jpgWomen, like chickens, are mass produced: packaged, stripped to their skin until the maximum level of conformity is attained.  The women's/chickens' connection to nature: broken.  The striving for flight: forgotten.  The ecstasies of egg laying: eradicated.  As the chicken goes, so goes our females.

Personally, I'm sanguine.   The darkness and shock of "Chicken" are both alien to my outlook.  And men, as well as women, suffer from the severing of relations between humans and nature, and from the industrialization of the process of putting meat-on-the-plate. 

Naturalis_Labor_Chicken6.jpgBut despite the atavism and inflexibility of its politics, and regardless of the pedantic quality of some of its choreography, "Chicken" made its argument more compellingly, and entertainingly, than I've seen in a long time.  The performance deserves a bigger audience than its getting at Teatro Astra in Vicenza.




Naturalis_Labor_Chicken5.jpg

]]> Shakespeare: climate change denier tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.163 2010-07-28T15:22:07Z 2010-07-28T15:25:57Z Maya Titania&Oberon.jpgI have one question for climate change deniers: have you considered the possibility that climate change-related phenomena are the work of fairies?

Shakespeare makes a strong argument for this position in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  When confronted by her husband, Oberon, with the accusation that she's taken the mortal, Theseus, as her lover, Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, retorts:

    These are the forgeries of jealousy:
    And never, since the middle summer's spring,
    Met we . . . .
    But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.

In Plain English: "You're nuts with jealousy, Oberon.  I never had a chance to get it on with the man because you were constantly interfering."

    Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
    As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
    Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
    Have every pelting river made so proud
    That they have overborne their continents:

IPE:  "As a consequence, the winds have blown fogs from the ocean onto the land, causing the rivers to overflow."

    The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
    The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
    Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
    The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
    And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
    The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
    And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
    For lack of tread are undistinguishable:

IPE:  "The fields have been flooded, crops lost, fields untilled."

    The human mortals want their winter here;
    No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
    Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
    Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
    That rheumatic diseases do abound:

IPE:  "The humans have ceased singing and blessing the night, so the moon is in a bad mood and causing disease to accompany the flood."

    And thorough this distemperature we see
    The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
    Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
    And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
    An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
    Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
    The childing autumn, angry winter, change
    Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
    By their increase, now knows not which is which:

IPE:  "All of which disturbance is causing the seasons to change.  Frost is coming in spring, and buds are blooming in winter.  The seasons are swapping characteristics, and nobody knows which is which."

    And this same progeny of evils comes
    From our debate, from our dissension;
    We are their parents and original.

IPE:  And this climatic mess is OUR FAULT.  Because you (Oberon) and I (Titania) are having a fight, the climate is going to hell.

Shakespeare's description of current climatic events is so compelling in its accuracy that I can only  think that his diagnosis of its cause is equally astute.  Rather than perpetuating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shouldn't the nations of the world invest in some marital counseling for Titania and Oberon, so they can stop fighting, and we can enjoy normal seasons again?

(Image of Titania and Oberon from BBC's website)
]]> Giving chance a chance tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.162 2010-07-28T15:01:44Z 2010-07-28T15:18:27Z In his most recent novel, Generosity, Richard Powers expresses frustration at the role of the novelist:I'm caught like Buridan's ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people... Maya Richard_Powers.jpgIn his most recent novel, Generosity, Richard Powers expresses frustration at the role of the novelist:

I'm caught like Buridan's ass, starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction. I see now exactly who these people are and where they came from. But I can't quite make out what I'm to do with them.
Michael Dirda, writing in The New York Review of Books, quotes this passage, and then continues:

He [Powers] confesses that he would really like to write the kind of story that "from one word to the next, breaks free. The kind that invents itself out of meaningless detail and thin air. The kind in which there's no choice like chance."
Dirda doesn't think much of Powers's aspiration - he calls it "more portentous than clear" - but I felt an immediate intuitive connection with Powers.  Having just finished a novel, I am currently traveling around the world in a relaxed and unplanned way.  Where am I going?  Wherever my friends or family are - or wherever my curiosity takes me.  When am I going?  Whenever it's convenient for my friends or family to see me.  How long will I be traveling?  I don't know.  What will I do afterwards?  I don't know.  

Why am I undertaking such a journey?  To this question, I have a solid answer: because I felt like it.  I had a strong, un-ignorable sense that this trip was the right way to fill my time at this stage in my life.  

Up until now, I've passed my days in a highly self-directed manner.  I decided what to do, and then I did it.  I wasn't easily distractable (I'm not one of those people who goes online to look up the spelling of a word and ends up frittering away two hours on trivial explorations).

For reasons that I can't explain, but which exerted powerful visceral force on me, I felt convinced that now I must change my approach.  I must surrender self-direction and float, like a jellyfish, wherever the ocean currents take me.  I must allow my life, from one day to the next, to break free; to invent itself out of meaningless detail and thin air.  Rather than deciding what to do and then doing it, I must accept that there's no choice like chance.

Powers' dilemma as a novelist is no different from anyone's challenge in crafting his or her life.  Humans make sense of their lives in stories, and each of us is, in a sense, penning a lived novel with our life choices.  Each of us is caught between allegory and realism, as we struggle to choose between actions that are symbolically meaningful and those that are practical.  Each of us ping-pongs between fact and fable, as we select the bases for our decisions.  Each of us struggles to keep creativity and non-fiction in balance in our lives.

I have just written a novel that was more planned than anything I've previously written.  I didn't allow myself the luxury of not "quite mak[ing] out what . . . to do" with my characters.  Practical in the extreme, the novel was strategically constructed to sell.  It's a fable that studiously ignores inconvenient facts; a creative act that required all the strength of a daily grind.  

Maya_Alexandri_swinging_from_a_tree.jpgLike Powers, I felt some frustration with this process.  But the character at loose ends by the end was me.  And the story that I wanted to allow to break free was mine.  For the sake of satisfaction in my life, and for the benefit of my writing, I needed to (re)invent myself out of everything in the world that I never allowed to distract me.  

Unscheduled time, chance, joblessness, disconnection from the rat race - these are the flotsam and jetsam of the modern world.  I am discovering what stories they yield . . . while I swing from a tree.

(Image of Richard Powers from Minnesota Public Radio website) ]]>