Day 43: Ted Hughes, Anton Chekhov, Joan Acocella
Ted Hughes - God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark
Read here
Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter – your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give –
Whatever you found
They bombarded with splinters,
Derision, mud – the mystery of that hatred.
I am finally getting around to reading Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, the book of autobiographical poems about his marriage to Sylvia Plath and its tragic ending.
The book is HEAVY. Every poem is designed to depress, and every poem at the end comes back to the reminder of her suicide.
This poem speaks of Plath's lifelong feeling of rejection, whether real or percieved, it is heartbreaking.
This is a thought/feeling I have about my self all the time: "nobody wants what you have to give". It is easy to feel this way in a culture of silence and indifference.
You tried your utmost to reach and touch those people
With gifts of yourself –
Just like your first words as a toddler
When you rushed at every visitor to the house
Clasping their legs and crying: ‘I love you! I love you!’
Too sad!
Anton Chekhov - A Doctor's Visit
The only person who feels happy here is the governess, and the factory hands are working for her gratification. But that's only apparent: she is only the figurehead. The real person, for whom everything is being done, is the devil.
And he thought about the devil, in whom he did not believe, and he looked round at the two windows where the fires were gleaming. It seemed to him that out of those crimson eyes the devil himself was looking at him -- that unknown force that had created the mutual relation of the strong and the weak, that coarse blunder which one could never correct. The strong must hinder the weak from living -- such was the law of Nature; but only in a newspaper article or in a school book was that intelligible and easily accepted. In the hotchpotch which was everyday life, in the tangle of trivialities out of which human relations were woven, it was no longer a law, but a logical absurdity, when the strong and the weak were both equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting to some directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from man.
A wonderful story that is much more, for lack of a better word, didactic than his others, being so explicitly about the problems of capitalism - that it makes everyone miserable.
I quite like the angle Chekhov takes - that it is not God running the world, or the powerful minority of human exploiters... but the Devil. This makes a whole lot of sense to me.
I think that the basic nature of humanity though requires no devil explanation. Selfishness and therefore cruelty underscore our basic humanity. Each person is the devil to someone or something. This short story has put this idea into my head.
Joan Acocella - The English Wars
I have been reading a lot of essays in the last few days, but none have been particuarly inspiring. Maybe because I am just reading NYRB style author profiles from Macdonald and Acocella (I want to finish these books). I'm also reading a book on how to read Guattari and another book about what makes certain music annoying.
Well I said fuck it, I'll just write about this Acocella essay about the prescriptivist/descriptivist grammar debate. That topic always gets me excited.
The essay is a comprehensive history of the debate throughout dictionaries and usage manuals with, as usual for Acocella, some funny examples pulled out from her research. I get the sense that compared to the other literary critics I've been reading (Hardwick, Macdonald, DFW), Acocella's style is less the polemic or thematic or narrative essay and more the "heres a tonne of research I've done, and heres an engaging summary of the bulk of it". She is entertaining, but omniscient, leaving her own personal opinions out of it.
This essay treads the same ground that David Foster Wallace did in his dictionary review, an essay that is one of my favourite essays ever. I can't help but feel DFW did this article better, yet Acocella is more scholarly and concise. Perhaps next I will read Dwight Macdonald's essay on the topic, who Acocella cites and calls him acidic.
I also really need to read one of these grammar books and style manuals. I have several on my shelf, but when does anyone ever make time to actually read these things? I've never heard of anyone doing this.
Thats all!