I am determined to be the first response to the search “illegitimate cherubs;” see below. Meanwhile, people are still persistently looking for wild boar piglets, I don’t know why, as I don’t know why “atreus mcdermott” gave The Haruspex as a result. And a second person has searched for “verdant selvage of Michigan,” a quotation from Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood.
a forest in Michigan
The story is about banned books, but some books have art in them.
In an effort to separate art from child porn, reviewers have come up with a test, Shelby said: If a naked child has clearly visible wings, it is a legitimate cherub and the book can stay. No wings? It must go.
“If he is naked, the Baby Jesus would be denied,” she said.
From The Statesman , Austin, Tex.
If there are legitimate cherubs, there must, ipso facto, be illegitimate cherubs.
From the endearing beginning to this ultimately disappointing book:
The classroom was empty, the windows thrown open as it was the first real warm day of spring, and outside children were laughing among the whinnying of the swings and the soft plush bounce of a red playground ball against the asphalt. Part of me wanted to join my peers, to forget about entropy and inevitability and bask in the joys of four square.
“But what about the Pit?” I asked.
“I don’t give a shittling about the Pit,” he said.
This moment of confrontation between us was frozen in my memory in a peculiar echo of the freeze-frame that I had described in my lab report. I wanted to ask what a shittling was, but frankly, I was too scared. The way he said this phrase with such an unabashed dismissiveness made me take a step back and blink and then blink again. How could a man supposedly dedicated to the sciences – the life force that bound my mother to unsquirreling the natural world, the discipline that housed her inexhaustible searching, and the method of inquiry that put all of my longing and curiosity to use crafting my little maps instead of mailing bombs to prominent capitalists — how could a scientific man take such an aggressively narrow-minded stance by using the word shittling? Though I knew the majority of scientists were still men, I wondered in that moment whether there was something innate about the XY chromosomal makeup, whether grown men with their leather jackets and their middle-aged entropic pudginess and their half-cocked cowboy hats could ever really be open-minded, curious, obsessed scientists like my mother, Dr. Clair. It seemed that men, with their Stenpock-like natures, were rather meant to open and close the same gate and work in the mines and hit railroad spikes into the earth in repetitive motions that satisfied their desire to fix the world’s problems using simple gestures done with the hands.
– Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, designed & largely illus. Ben Gibson, pp 49-50.
This illustrated novel about a precocious pre-teen seemed at the start to be fending off its most obvious threat, that of rancid adorability, but eventually failed in face of the next two challenges: creating a satisfying narrative around its quirky premise, and exploring the philosophical implications of that premise. What IS a map? Is it different from a diagram or an illustration or a chart (our protagonist seems to think of all of his drawings as maps)? Is TS’s obsessive mapmaking an exteriorization of every person’s desire to make sense of his life, or is it qualitatively different from a normal angle on the world?
– but I just heard David Garland say that Asteria would be on his WQXR afternoon program on Sunday, February 14, so that’s definitely worth a mention. Experts on 15th century Burgundian love, that’s Sylvia & Eric.
And for a while I was pleased with the poems that I published. I felt that I understood why people write poetry. I understood the whole communal activity of writing and reviewing and extracting quotes to go on the paperback. “Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery.” Being part of the interfaith blurb universe.
And now it’s like I’m on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way old aluminum ladders have that texture, that kind of not-too-appealing roughness of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I’m clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don’t know how I got here. It’s a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing, rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham, I see Billy Collins, I see Ted Kooser. They’re all clinging to the ladder, too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up there. Samuel Daniel. Sara Teasdale. Herrick. Tiny figures, clambering, clinging. The wind comes over, whsssew, and it’s cold and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up. Off to one side there’s Helen Vendler, in her trusty dirigible, filming our ascent.
– Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, pp. 196-197.
I worried about the obsessiveness that drives Baker’s work: would it make a novel with feeling? (Why did I worry? He’s done it before.) And creating a narrator whose task is to write a handbook on poetry? Didn’t it risk picayune pedantry? Well, as it turned out, Paul Chowder’s own uncertainty, the very doubts he’s working through as he does everything but write the introduction to his anthology, save his dogmatism from becoming dictatorial. (Sorry about the alliteration, folks.) He may think that only rhyming poems (in English, at least) are real; but he writes unrhymed ones himself.
Plus it is super-quotable. I couldn’t resist Helen Vendler in her airship, but how about this, keeping on the subject of the fates of poets (plus the modern art world, New Yorker covers, and a cat):
I know a little about that art world, or thought I did, in an odd way. One summer when I was fourteen I took care of a cat at a house owned by two gay minimalist painters, Jerry and Sandy. All their walls were flat white, and there were dozens of their paintings up, huge paintings, with silver ovals of metallic paint sprayed from a slight angle, dripping a little bit. The lonely cat roamed this white minimalist house, meowing in a whiskey voice. While she purred beside me, I sat on the minimalist black couch and read copies of Artforum and Art News from the neat pile on the coffee table. I was hoping to find paintings of naked women, and there weren’t as many as you would expect in those magazines because abstraction was confoundedly in vogue. There was an article about a man who cut his palms and the bottoms of his feet with a razor and photographed them healing.
Now I associate people like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara with this arty cool minimalist house where I catsat. And I’d never really cottoned to Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, the book that won three awards and made him known throughout the free-verse universe. I’d tried to read it a few times and failed. It’s arbitrary. It reads as if it’s written by a cleverly programmed random-phrase generator. It doesn’t sing.
But Ashbery is old now and therefore more likeable. And one of his former students once told me that when Ashbery had a few drinks he got quite silly and giggly and sat on the floor. And the new book had a beautiful cover, and the blurbs were spare and piercing, and although the poems themselves weren’t heartbreaking, the book made me think of the sound of someone closing the door of a well-cared-for pale blue Infiniti on a late-summer evening in the gravel overflow parking lot of a beach hotel that had once been painted by Gretchen Dow Simpson.
So I bought the Ashbery and the hell with it.
– pp 232-233
Back from Katharine Weber’s book event at the terrific new bookstore in Fort Greene, Greenlight Books. Katharine’s fifth novel, True Confections, concerns a candy company in New Haven, Conn. I sat with my friend Lisa P. and we laughed when K. read her narrator’s condemnation of chocolate snobs who pass around tiny tastes of obscure single-origin chocolates, the darker and bitterer the better, since K did just about the same thing in Lisa’s backyard a few years ago and we all had a lovely time. A number of Lisa’s fellow litbloggers were in the room — the conceit of the reading series is that bloggers interview authors, and Ron Hogan from Beatrice is the organizer. Katharine was fierce and funny and very much at home. Also, she brought candy. I recommend this to all authors. I don’t care, epic poetry, biography of Civil War general, guide to DIY kitchen cabinetry — just bring candy. And now I have my very own red-&-white-spiral book signed to ME ME ME. I look forward to finding out just how the highly circumstantial and convincing narrator we heard in Katharine’s reading turns out to be unreliable.
Here’s something that could be fantabulous that I just heard about today: Joseph Haydn’s dramma giocoso, Il Mondo della Luna – at the Planetarium! I don’t know any of the people involved with Gotham Chamber Opera and have missed all their previous performances, which have ranged from Handel to Britten. But this sounds like a must-not-miss. Five performances between Tuesday, January 19, and Thursday, January 28.
Written in 1777, it’s the story of a nobleman who refuses to let his daughters marry their true loves. With the help of a fake astronomer and a sleeping potion, the daughters trick their father into believing he’s been sent to the moon, where he discovers they do things differently, especially when it comes to courtship. On the moon, women are allowed to choose their own husbands.
The libretto is by Carlo Goldoni (Act I and Act II through scene xiv), and two later writers. Goldoni’s libretto was first set by Galuppi in Venice in 1750.
Haydn’s opera was commissioned by Count Esterházy, Haydn’s great patron, for his son Nikolaus’ wedding in 1777, which to me, given the subject described above, suggests a pretty good sense of humor; those better versed in Haydn’s biography may tell me otherwise.
Let me also remind you of the next Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, ARTEK’s production at St Ignatius Loyola on January 20. For followers of the Renaissance Street Singers, we’ll be singing this weekend, January 10, though I don’t yet know where. And shapenote this weekend is in Brooklyn on Sunday; alas, I can’t be there (see previous sentence), but we had a rousing singing at the Living Room on Saturday to start the year off strongly. The Continuo Collective also performs on Sunday, at St Luke’s Lutheran in Midtown, at 6:00. The repertory is contemporary with the Monteverdi Vespers, music of Peri, d’India (from his 1609 print Le Musiche), and others. Manieristi, mark your calendars.
So then I drank some coffee with Auntie Mariatou and told her the unwinding of the whole crazy evening, and instead of sympathizing she clucked like a turkey during my whole tale. Then she concluded with one of those magic phrases that have the ability to unravel the most serious situations and defuse the most charged atmospheres.
“Man is a jackal but what woman can do without him? A person needs two hands to clap . . .”
Auntie’s husband, Papa Demba, still looks at her with eyes filled with admiration and love, he’s one adorable person, solid and gentle, the ideal spouse. Their story, the one he told me anyway, is mad extraordinary. Of all the young women in the village, she was the one he noticed. One morning when he was passing by in a wagon, he saw her crossing a field. The view from that day never left him — I think he was making a subtle reference to her unforgettable backside — and then he swore to himself that she would be his beloved. He belonged to the blacksmith caste and she belonged to the noble caste so the union was impossible, but Papa Demba’s strength and determination won out over everything else.
I love that Auntie tells me these coupling stories, they make you laugh so hard you piss yourself. She always says that it’s the woman who makes the couple a success and the man will be its downfall. Maybe that’s a little extreme but it’s about right. She also says that love is like hair, you have to take care of it.
– Faiza Guene, trans. Jenna Johnson, Some Dream for Fools, pp 36-37
Lively, awkward — that might be the translation, or it might be translating something authentically awkward in this story of an immigrant fitting in, or not, in Paris’s center or its circling bainlieux, in her social circle, in the bled, the Algerian homeland.
I seem to have misplaced my bronze liver model, not to mention the hot and dripping sacrificial animal’s organ to be compared to it. So
Wallace Stevens, the man with a mind of winter
What on earth is she thinking of?
But perhaps the most interesting example of a mainstream novel which is also a detective story is the brilliantly structured Emma by Jane Austen. Here the secret which is the mainspring of the action is the unrecognised relationships between the limited number of characters. The story is confined to a closed society in a rural setting, which was to become common in detective fiction, and Jane Austen deceives us with cleverly constructed clues (eight immediately come to mind) — some based on action, some on apparently innocuous conversations, some in her authorial voice. At the end when all becomes plain and the characters are at last united with their right partners, we wonder how we could have been so deceived.
– P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction, pp 6-7.
It makes one — well, me — think of “The Macbeth Murder Mystery.” “I’m going to buy a copy of Hamlet, and solve that.”
