Day 41: Louise Glück, Joy Williams, Joan Accocella
Louise Glück - Telemachus' Detachment
When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.
I couldn't find any particularly inspiring poems today but I quite like this short one from Glück's Meadowlands. (6 books into her collection - I loved Ararat but didnt give a damn for Wild Iris. Her calm sexy aesthetic of sadness is far too different from my own hideous one).
The poem works comedically in its relatable truth delivered with laconic bluntness. The poem is even more funny when you read the title - Telemachus of course being the son of Homer and Penelope in the Odyssey. This is one of the only times that I've understood a greek reference.
Typing this out, I realise she does something cool with the lines, enjambing each sentence so that the adjective is the beginning of each line. The poem could have read:
When I was a child
looking at my parents' lives,
you know what I thought?
I thought heartbreaking.
Now I think heartbreaking,
but also insane.
Also very funny.
It doesn't work as well. The eyes having to go to the beginning of the next line creates a micro-mystery, a micro-punchline that punctuation wouldn't satisfy.
Interesting!
Joy Williams - Nettle
These stories on the first read are somewhat incomprehensible. Nothing is really stated - what is stated is always faff, and the real story is between the lines.
I read it once and hadnt really gotten it but knew there was something to get. As usual I looked it up online to read some other bloggers who also felt the same way - the general feeling being "theres something here but I don't know what and can't be bothered".
I read it a second time and was able to put some peices together (its written like a jigsaw puzzle). And it is really really really sad.
I keep finding more things that are sadder and sadder about this story, especially the last paragraph and the last line:
He would have saved some goddamn thing or preserve some goddamn flawlessly innocent knowledge, because he'd convinced himself that that was the requirement for being born and once loved.
I feel like I will either forget this story as I have with her others, or I will think about this story for a very long time.
Joan Acocella - The Blooded Nightgown
But why does the book have a cult? Well, cults often gather around powerful works of the second rank. Fans feel that they have to root for them. What, then, is the source of Dracula’s power? A simple device, used in many notable works of art: the deployment of great and volatile forces within a very tight structure
In this New Yorker essay, Acocella writes of the West's cultural obsession with Bram Stoker's Dracula and also does a broad survey of the various annotated editions.
The actual sweep of the essay is so broad it is a bit like reading a Wikipedia entry, but well written and entertaining. Is the purpose to show off her huge amounts of research? I'm not sure, but I enjoyed the writing. The most interesting part is where she talks about Leslie Klinger's highly aberrant annotated edition, which made a joke of scholarly over-research and pedantry:
What could Klinger have found to elucidate that his predecessors didn’t? Plenty. In the scene of Mina’s encounter with Dracula, for example, he honorably cites the earlier editions, and then he goes on to alert us to a punctuation error; to conjecture, revoltingly, about the source of the mist in which Dracula enters Mina’s bedroom (“Perhaps this was not a vapor but rather a milky substance expressed from Dracula’s body”); to speculate that Jonathan Harker’s excitement, upon awakening from his swoon, may be a form of sexual arousal; and to question the medical accuracy of Stoker’s claim that Harker’s hair turns white as he listens to Mina’s story: “In fact, whitening is caused by a progressive decline in the absolute number of melanocytes (pigment-producing cells in the skin, hair, and eye), which normally decrease over time.” Even that old sentimental convention does not get past him.
The ending has a great bit of criticism and a clever twist, but I won't spoil it.