About Lawrence
Lawrence La Riviere White is a graduate student in English at the University of Washington. He is working on a PhD in Theory and Criticism, specializing in U.S. Literature of the 19th & 20th Centuries. He has poems included in the recently published Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.
Email Address: llwhite@u.washington.edu
Posts by Lawrence
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Acting!
Allow me to riff off an old post over at Peli Grietzer’s Second Balcony. In it, Peli bemoans his inadequacy when it comes to appreciating acting. For an example, he considers Hugh Laurie, who is able to do “embarassing”:
as well as “cool”:
and decides that the yawning size of the gap indicates genius. But he also recognizes that such a perception is not exactly fine-tuned. I don’t think Peli should be too hard on himself. The Academy voters don’t seem to have that much more sophisticated an understanding. Take a male with gross developmental disablities (Rain Main) or a female who’s willing to make herself look ugly (Monster), turn it up to 11, and that’s Acting!
But I too wish I knew more about acting. One of the many things I have failed to do in my life is attend much theater. Somehow I think it would help me better understand the inherent theatricality of all poetry. But if I may add another example of the kind of obvious Acting! that impresses me, I’d like to say a couple of things about Geoffrey Rush’s performance in The Life and Death of Peter Sellars.
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Sunday, May 11, 2008
Tudor Booty Call
First off, let me apologize for the title. Not that I could come up with anything better, but it’s not only lame, but lame in an academic way. That is, it’s an attempt at jazzing things up, but it’s hopelessly outdated. As is the term “jazzing things up.” My first experience with such lameness was in Robert Pinsky’s workshop, back in the mid-80’s. We were discussing the difference between poetry and song lyrics, Professor Pinsky’s example was Bob Dylan. And we all did (to ourselves) a Jon Stewart avant la lettre “Waaah?” He might as well have mentioned Rudy Vallee. (Nowadays I have a much higher opinion of both Dylan and Vallee. And I know I’m in no position to call anyone else lame.)
Anyway, over at {LIME TREE} K. Silem Mohammad has a 100 Best-Loved Poems list going. I love lists! And the most recent poem is Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me,” only K. Silem is calling it something else, and he’s juxtaposing it with some hippety hop, Mike Jones “Back Then” (actual working YouTube here), which he says is the “inverse” of the Wyatt, which reminds me of how my friend Jennifer Clarvoe has written some of what she calls “inverse poems,” mirror images, as it were, of canonical poems. Only she doesn’t have any of them online, nor does she have a clip on YouTube.
But reading the Wyatt again sparked one thought.
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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Talking Pathetic Fallacy Blues
Something that takes up again the theme of popular music, and something posted earlier: Paul Rodriguez, commenting on Rohan’s post about lit crit on or about the spherical public, made a distinction that caught my attention, between “criticism of style” and “criticism of content.” Now I might have misunderstood what was meant, but it brought me back to my travails in grad school, in particular suffering through some courses I thought were overly inflected toward cultural studies. The problem, I thought, was that we were reading books solely for the interestingness of their content and not for the interestingness of their style, for what they were talking about, not for how they said it. For example, if one took how Iola Leroy was written and made it about some Philadelphia lawyer’s family of the same period, the book would be utterly unreadable.
This kind of feeling helped me feel sorrier for myself, which is very important for some graduate students. But some time later, I got to thinking more, and things got more complicated. The specific object that complicated things was John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After completing my fourth reading of the book, this time with the express intent of evaluating whether or not it was a good book, that is, one that couldn’t be pigeon-holed as genre fiction, and finding that it was really that good, it suddenly occurred to me that my judgment was compromised because I really liked the content of the book. I liked a whole lot what the book was talking about, spies skulking about Europe, cerebral emotionally disaffected males, etc. etc. So who was I to talk down someone else’s reading for content? & I could list off other examples, such as Raymond Chandler & the Los Angeles of the 30’s he conjures. Heck, even Ulysses interests me for its content, the sense it gives of exposing hundreds of hidden details in the life of the city.
So it would seem difficult to extricate style and content. A more recent case exposes the problem yet again, Nick Tosche’s Where the Dead Voices Gather.
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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Let’s You and Him Fight
David Crystal is a gem! (Google says I’m the first one to make that terribly obvious joke online. I win the internets!) I’ve just finished David Crystal’s The Fight for English, my first go at one of his books. Mention at Language Log had gotten me started, but when I told a friend about it, he was surprised I hadn’t read any before. Now I’m surprised too. Crystal is entertaining and informative, taking a dry subject and making it into a juicy story.
But this newness for me goes beyond Crystal. Only in the last few years have I been reading what linguists have to say about grammar, mostly on the internet, with Language Log being a central source. In real life I am an adjunct composition teacher, one with a higher than average emphasis on sentence quality. To riff on Gertrude Stein, writing is about sentences and paragraphs. But I’ve had to train myself in the details, to improve my own understanding, since I had no real training in this stuff, other than what I learned in French and German classes, and to improve my explanations to the students. Just what am I asking them to do?
The linguistic perspective on these questions has thrown me a bit. I had the world neatly divided into dries and wets, fusty prescriptivists like Safire and Kirkpatrick, and loosey goosey descriptivists, liberation theologists of grammar. And I suspected I was a bit on the fusty side. Linguistics blew this binary up. Linguistics is dry. Perhaps not politically dry, but it’s rigorous, even tediously so. Nothing I’ve read could be called hippy thought. Yet it’s thoroughly descriptivist, or at least it seems, in its online manifestations, to take supreme delight in skewering prescriptivism.
Of course the situation is still more complicated than this. If it’s a fight, I’m going to have to take more beatings before I start to wise up.
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Sunday, April 20, 2008
Bible as Literature (Not)
I am reading James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible. Kugel’s Bible course at Harvard was famously popular, and this book seems, in the nearly 700 pages it takes to get to the endnotes, a record of pretty much every point he could have ever made in the twenty years he taught the course. Similar to Herbert Dreyfus’s Heidegger book, How to Read the Bible feels like making up for a lost opportunity, for those of us who could not attend the course (Dreyfus’s class, I admit, was not megapopular, but it had its fans). While it covers a big number of details, the tone is bright & conversational. One can see how Kugel was a popular lecturer.
Beyond the quite accessible main text, Kugel presents, in the nearly 90 pages of endnotes, something like a bibliography, with commentary, of the history of Bible studies, offering points of departure for further & deeper readings, that is, something for the more scholarly inclined. & in one of these notes he slams (slams, I tell you!) a revered figure in much of literary scholarship, Erich Auerbach & his renowned Mimesis. Well, he doesn’t slam the whole book. He says everything after the first chapter is “quite wonderful.” But that first chapter, “Odysseus’s Scar,” which also happens to be the most famous part of the book, not so much:
this chapter stumbles on precisely the point we have been making. Abraham and the other figures in the tale are not, as Auerbach claims, “fraught with background”; there is no background! There is only the schematic foreground, in which Abraham’s only “trait” is his willingness to kill his son, and in which Isaac barely exists as a human being at all; he is a mere prop. Indeed, Auerbach’s essay is a fine example of what happens when someone trained as a literary critic tries to read a text that is fundamentally not literature.
D’oh! But it’s such a fun chapter! Next he’s going to tell me donuts aren’t good for me. So what should we be believing instead, Professor Kugel?
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Translation Wars. Once More Into the Breach Edition.
Here’s the promised follow up. To start, a confession. Master & Margarita is one of my favorite novels. Or should I say, the Mirra Ginsburg translation of it is. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s romantic, it’s historic. & it’s about religion, about politics, and of course it’s about show business. As everyone knows, the best musicals are about making a musical.
Imagine then my disenchantment when one day I’m visiting a friend & he has a copy of the new Penguin Master & Margarita & he tells me, “This is the famous new translation. All other translations of the book were lame.” Here this book had been so close to my heart, & it turns out I never knew it at all. Worse than that, I read some of the Pevear & Volokhonsky, and I didn’t like it. It felt clunky. It didn’t have the snap of Ginsburg’s prose. But if the P/V is the real thing, that meant that the Bulgakov was clunky, & what I had loved was just some put-up job.
Then I read Bill’s post, or rather John Emerson’s comment, or rather John E.’s links to Language Hat, & it seemed maybe it my original enchantment was okay. & I also learned something about translation, or rather I found a nice expression that matched an unexpressed thought I’d had.
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Thursday, March 20, 2008
Translation Wars. Go!
Translation is impossible, of course. & that’s the good news. Someone will always be unhappy. Talk about job security. Well, if you can figure out how to get paid for it.
Anyway, I found, via Silliman, an Eliot Weinberger review iof a new translation of the Psalms. & tWeinberger doesn’t like it. But it reminded me of something I’ve thought about Ezra Pound & translation. Pound of course is, in the the translation wars, the Napoleon of the activist camp. But there’s something about his strategy that is not fully appreciated, as far as I can tell. Pound’s principle of translation might be summed up thus: if the poem is a good, or even great, poem in its original language, then a proper translation of it must be a good, or even great, poem in the target language.
I think this is a principle often neglected. As you’re looking through a journal, & you come across some translated poem, ask yourself, if this wasn’t a translation, but an original poem in English, would it be any good? Most times, no. The poem isn’t propelled by its language. Instead, it’s the idea of the poem that makes it interesting, w/the usual exoticism often present. Always present is the other poem, the original, which can serve as an excuse for any infelicities in what you have before you.
But my judgment could well be impaired. I started doing poetry workshops in the Bay Area in the early 80’s, & Charles Simic & Mark Strand’s Another Republic had, dare I say, biblical domination over the local poet’s imaginations. & from there to Berkeley, where Milosz was virtually Pope, w/Cardinals Hass & Pinsky at his right & left hand (in that order, BTW).
So what? you ask. Well, people like to blame the excesses, or rather the shortcomings, of academic free verse of the 70’s & beyond, the kind of stuff that’s filled year after year of APR, on those seminaries of poetic orthodoxy, the MFA programs, & the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in particular. You know the poem, the slack-versed celebration of the poet’s self-regard. Whatever sins MFA programs may have committed, the popularity of translation also had something to do w/it. Too often American poets were not taking the original as the model, but the translation. & the translations were not good models, because they were not good poems on their own.
Not that that was the only problem. American poets were also mimicking the existential dramas of the original, which came off as mawkish given the translation of the drama from the concrete dangers of Lodz or San Salvador to the more abstract dangers of Borinda, California. But this was to be expected. There had to be some drama outside the poem, in the life of the poet, because there was so little drama in the words of the poem. Say what you want about LangPo (an American poetry phenomenon exactly contemporary w/this so-called Iowa stuff), but at least there was something going on on the page, even if it seemed a trainwreck.
Was that bellicose enough for you? In the next installment, I’d like to make an (of course) belated response to Bill’s post on Pevear and Volokhonsky. & I don’t like them either.
P.S. Weinberger talks some about modern poets and the psalms, but does not mention Celan. Felstiner makes a persuasive case for the persistent, if indirect, presence of the psalms in Celan’s work.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
The PostModernist Crisis of Invention
This post will start poorly and end (I hope) better. The better part is a further comment on Reznikoff. The stupid beginning was inspired (not the stupidity, but the topic) by a recent post over at pseudopodium, combined with something I mentioned in and keep remembering from my post on the John Dolan book.
A part of Ray’s post and some of the links touch on the blurring between postmodernist pastiche & plagiarism. The touching pushed my thoughts onto a tangent, into the kind of philosophizing best done in dorm rooms or bars, that is, the playing with truisms: to wit, our age is a lesser age, cannibalizing the works of the previous, creative ages. I kind of feel that way sometimes, though I suspect that has more to do with the lesser-ness of my own imagination. But it is something of a commonplace today, and common in history, so I don’t seem to be the only person to have or have had this problem. Something Dolan says shows a different way of looking at the issue, a way to redescribe it. & redescription, as the Cat-in-the-Hat might have said if he went to graduate school, is fun.
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Hear Me Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat
Sometimes you have an idea, some critical judgment, that feels like a discovery, something that was hidden has been revealed. & you look around for evidence to support your idea, & you find out you weren’t the first person to come up w/the idea. Of course this is deflating, but at the same time a little exciting, perhaps even uncanny. It’s as if maybe this aesthetics thing weren’t totally subjective, as if there was something true about some of things we talk about.
What am I talking about? Rocky and Bullwinkle, of course. Because I have at least one parenting technique similar to Pa Holbo’s, namely, the indoctrination of young children in important pop culture. On our end, this involves more DVDs, not so many comic books. The kids don’t get to watch their own Saturday morning cartoons: they have to watch daddy’s. I’m sure it won’t produce any long term effects.
So one afternoon we’re watching, & it struck me. I already knew that the cartooning was crude. But it was more than just crude. It was for the most part unnecessary. That is, it conveyed no information not already presented in the soundtrack, more specifically, not already presented by the speech of a character or the narrator. This superfluity of the images seemed to apply 100% to the Rocky & Bullwinkle storylines, with the others—Aesop’s Fables, Fractured Fairytales, Dudley DooRite, etc.—having an occasional visual gag.
This was an insight surely worth blogging. But every post must have links, so I had to do some research. Where to go to first other than Wikipedia, but only to find a rude awakening, & in the very first paragraph of the entry: “the strengths of the series helped it overcome the fact that it had choppy, limited animation; in fact, some critics described the series as a well-written radio program with pictures.” As one might say, “D’oh!” If I have nothing to top Wikipedia, I’m an even lamer blogger than I thought. That may be true, but I’ll go ahead, as I can make a couple of tie-ins to previous posts, including a further consideration, this time literal, about voice.
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Friday, January 04, 2008
The Great World Small
More of Poetry 35:7, this time Charles Reznikoff, who might be considered the Objectivist par excellence. At least Zukofsky seems to have considered him so, considering that the founding document of Objectivism, the essay “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” included in the appendix of the special Poetry issue & from which Zukofsky coined the term “Objectivism” when called upon by the editor Harriet Monroe to come up w/a label for the movement, takes Reznikoff as the exemplar.
As with many of the Objectivists, Reznikoff had an interesting life—not interesting as in you could make a movie out of it, but interesting as a writer’s life, more specifically, as an example of someone who maintained the life of a writer despite deriving no income from it and having no audience. As with most of the Objectivists, an audience finally showed up at the very end of his life and seems to be steadily increasing since his death.
The work itself is a supreme example of Modernist concision, but without any of the referential obscurantism of Zukofsky. Which is not to say that it isn’t baffling: though all of the references may be clear, the poems eschew narrative frames that would explain the importance of the presented scenes, and there is to a degree perhaps unmatched by an other practitioner of vers libre a fearless refusal to distinguish itself from prose by any means other than the unjustified right margin. Reznikoff is not the greatest poet of all time, but represents an idiom developed to its highest level, which is a great accomplishment. And given the importance of his themes—history, religion, life in the city—, he is a poet certainly deserving of a wider audience.
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Thursday, December 06, 2007
How’d Ya Get Them Spurs?
It’s that time of year again. Theory season! Which reminds me of something I meant to ask about last time, but didn’t get to it. Actually, a post over at Crooked Timber reminded me. Kieran Healy directs us to an essay from back in the day, by Michele Lamont, that lays out a full panoply ("intellectual, cultural, institutional, and social") of the factors in Derrida’s rise to notoriety. & just about the first element Lamont brings up is style. Basically, Derrida wrote in the socially (for intellectuals) acceptable style. & what style was that? According to Lamont, “sophisticated and somewhat obscure,” “highly dialectical,” full of “rhetorical virtuosity,” and “highly rhetorical.” All of which is fairly vague but fairly accurate. But the question I want to ask is behind the matter of style. Really, what was behind it? & I was reminded again of a Perry Anderson piece from the London Review of Books some years ago.
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Sunday, September 23, 2007
What a Book Would Be the Real Story
I am reading two biographies of Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane’s & Tom Hiney’s. They each have their virtues. The Amazon reviewers note that Hiney got some summaries of the novels wrong, so they’re worried he might have got some other stuff wrong, but I think he does a much better job of creating a book out of the life story. MacShane’s is kind of shapeless, or at least heavily skewed toward the latter part of the life, after Chandler he was pretty much done writing everything except letters. & it’s odd how MacShane treats the alcoholism in passing remarks.
These books are interesting enough, but neither are as interesting as Chandler’s life was. I’m not thinking of his inner life. My post title, derived from a Stein comment about Hemingway, is misleading. I think there is plenty of evidence for the real Chandler in the biographies. No, what interests me more is his outer life.
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Friday, September 21, 2007
LZ
Louis Zukofksy, to you. The guest editor of Poetry 35:7. The ringleader, as it were, of the Objectivism, having reluctantly coined the term at Harriet Monroe’s insistence that the issue have a title.
Comparisons to Pound are easy, Pound himself being an inveterate ringleader. Zukofsky had sent his a copy of his first mature poem, “Poem beginning ‘The’,” to Pound, and Pound started directing people to Zukofsky & Zukofsky to people. Pound’s and Zukofsky’s poetry comes in similar formats, a collection of shorter pieces, Personae and All, and a book-length serial poem, Cantos and A. (Zukofsky’s situation is more complicated, with some other volumes of poetry, such as 80 Flowers.) Both wrote extensive critical works. & if you want something sensational, there is the fact the extended relation between Pound and Zukofksy is complicated by & complicates our understanding of Pound’s anti-semitism & Zukofsky’s Jewishness.
I must confess to not having read as much of Zukofksy as I should. I plan on reading A, but I don’t yet own a copy of it. I have read much of the shorter poems, & I find something in them off-putting. The poems display a high level of accomplishment, of craftsmanship with words, and a strong sense of the individual poem as an integral whole, but they feel arch, cold. I am not drawn to them enough to appreciate what they are doing, because they, as is typical of Modernist poetry (if not most poetry), take a good deal of work to appreciate and thus require a certain level of motivation to get into them.
The allusiveness in Zukofsky’s poem puts me off. Of course allusiveness is a Modernist commonplace. (If there were more of a Zukofsky industry, producing comprehensive glosses of all his work, it would make things easier for me. Though the Z-site is very good & a shining example of the good things the Internet can do.) But something about his particular brand of allusion leaves me cold. & if I knew more about poetry, I could describe it better. There is an insistence in the allusion, a sense of constant pressure towards what is not there in the poem. As trying to make the missing parts are importantly present in the poem. Putting the matter in an overly dramatical way, I could say that the poem is composed in equal parts of what is there & what is not there. If I’m correct that the poems are doing this, then they are doing something very interesting. I will keep reading them to figure it out, if only to learn more about what poetry can do.
Some concrete examples after the jump.
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Friday, September 07, 2007
And Now for the Katastrophe!
I’m interested in how violence works in Godard. Well, not Godard tout court, but the previously referred to Masculin/Feminin, as well as Vivra Sa Vie and Week End. The Criterion Masculin/Feminin disc has suppléments, mostly interviews. Such as, two middle-age guys from back in the day, talking about how they didn’t like the film when it first came out, but now they can see it’s formidable. & one of its virtues, they claim, is how accurately it predicted the future. For example, the pervasive violence in society. If he is predictive, I think it’s more a matter of the pervasive violence in the media. But in any case, I’m not so interested in what violence represents in the films as how it works.
Another of the supplemental interviews gets more at it. One of the producers talks about how a film about the banality of day-to-day living, such as Masculin/Feminin, still has to work as a film. Hence the interludes of violence, says the producer. This gets more at it. I have an idea of my own, which involves reference to Krazy Kat. What would the Valve be without comics?
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Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Springy
Here is the first installment of further comment on Poetry 37:5. As mentioned before, one anomalous feature in the collection of second generation Modernists is the presence of a first generation figure, William Carlos Williams.
Williams had met Ezra Pound when they were both at Penn. They both spent about their first decade of writing in mostly standard meters with rhyme, and they both modernized themselves at about the same time. Whereas Pound got himself some degree of attention (as mentioned before, it was not nearly as much attention as he gets now), Williams gained no traction in the larger world of poetry till late in his life. Pound had committed himself without reserve to a career as a poet, and his work, even the miniaturist “Station of the Metro,” was done in grand gestures. Williams became a doctor who wrote in his off hours, and his work was kept small, or at least kept away from grandness. His book-length poem was about a town in New Jersey (unavoidable pop culture reference: in the first season of the Sopranos, when Uncle Junior’s crew throws Rusty Irish off the pedestrian bridge, that’s Paterson Falls—& thus the great cultural leviathan turns to Postmodernism). Pound also left for Europe, while Williams stayed home. This would be another characteristic of the Objectivists: except for Bunting, they were all Americans who stayed in the U.S.
I just want to mention one thing about Williams’s work. At its best, it has a springiness, both tensile and elastic. Or if I may use another line of imagery, it has a greenness, as in uncured wood. Each poem is a cabinet made of green wood, with a kind of warping pressure within it. One way of evaluating Williams’s poems would be to prefer those with higher degrees of such tension. The pressure is not consistent throughout his career.
Of course I’m not being terribly original here. After all, the “spring” in Spring and All is more than just a season. Spring and All was first a book, published in 1923 by a small French press. (Nothing like having your book typeset by folks who don’t speak the language.) The book alternates a series of twenty-seven poems (the famous red wheelbarrow first appears here) with short prose apologetics of the wild and speculative sort. When the poems are removed from the book, the first in the sequence, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” is also titled “Spring and All.” & there’s a line in the poem, “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf,” that could serve as an ars poetica, a condensation of all I’ve said: the “stiff curl” of a steel spring, only it’s green.
After the jump I’ll offer a couple of examples with some cursory explication.
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