Well… one week ends and the weekend starts.
Work went well enough. It only took 90 minutes to get home. I walked over to 8th Street, bought two liters of diet Coke, and got the #12 bus; which was just late enough for me to miss the #5 home. This is beginning to be annoying. The humidity was still too much for riding the bike, so I stayed in and worked. It was 3:00 pm.
Some reading from yesterday:
The next afternoon, though, when we meet again in a high-rise above the 405 as L.A. approaches magic hour, Mann asks for another take. “You asked me about mortality, but I didn’t really answer,” he says. He takes a sip of coffee. “The thing is, I don’t think about mortality. I’m busy. What good would it do me? If I absolutely had to make ‘Heat 2,’ I wouldn’t have got lost in this beautiful story of Ferrari. And I took two years to write a novel.” He offers a mischievous smile and adds, “Fortunately, it became a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.” Then he says, “The things I’m into are things that fascinate me and keep me moving forward.”
I’m not sure I believe him. Mann has just spent two years writing “Heat 2,” vastly expanding the world of characters he has lived with for more than 30 years — the same amount of time “Ferrari” was in preproduction. He is a filmmaker; this is what he does. It’s hard to see him not being anxious to play the hand if someone gives him the chips.
Maybe Mann senses my skepticism, but he has to go. The light is starting to fade. He’s got things to do. He offers a parting thought. “Don’t misunderstand,” he says. “I want to make it. But if I don’t, I won’t be incomplete.”
Richard Hughes Gibson's Realism Confronts Utopia: “One word of truth outweighs the world.”
For nearly half a century, Gary Saul Morson has been pondering these questions—especially the last one—in the pages of the New York Review of Books, The New Criterion, Commentary, and The American Scholar, among many other periodicals, and in a series of award-winning books. In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, Morson has at last bundled his answers into a single, expansive volume. As its title suggests, the book is in part a literary history—stretching from the rise of Russian literature on the world scene in the middle of the nineteenth century to the fate of writers under Soviet rule in the twentieth—and in part an apology for the benefits of reading the literature produced in that period, particularly the realist strain spearheaded by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov (hereafter “DTC”).
Morson strives to make sense of situations such as the Solzhenitsyn affair with which I began. He shows that Russian letters developed under unique conditions that promoted and then embedded a distinctive form of verbomania in Russian culture whose repercussions were still felt one hundred years later. Soviet officials’ anxieties about and Solzhenitsyn’s fervent faith in literature represented rival stances within a long-running, agonistic, and prolific tradition. For a century (at least), Russians went wild over words.
What happened? In Morson’s persuasive account, Russian literary history is “telescoped”: literary and philosophical movements (including the novel, romanticism, rationalism, empiricism, political economy) that the rest of Europe had digested over centuries were devoured all at once in nineteenth-century Russia. Economic, political, and cultural reforms contributed to the rise of a mass Russian readership and, in turn, to the first class of professional writers, who fiercely debated the flood of foreign ideas in newly founded periodicals. In those venues, works that we now think of as “classics” jostled with political reporting, philosophical speculation, history writing, and translations. Morson cites the example of the February 1866 issue of The Russian Herald, which featured the first chapters of Crime and Punishment and War and Peace along with articles on poetry, flora, history, and religious sects, as well as chapters from Wilkie Collins’s Armadale in translation.
***
As Solzhenitsyn recognized, the most personally and socially dangerous thing for a writer to do under such a regime was to tell the truth. Realism, in Morson’s formulation, is the art form invested in such troublesome quotidian truths. The realist writer shows “uncompromising fidelity to actual experience”—as opposed to portraying experience in the intelligents’ ideological rearview mirror. The DTC trio, as I have said, are the foremost members of Morson’s realist school because they are exceptional, albeit in different ways, at bringing us inside the messiness of lived experiences that defy their contemporaries’ prescriptive accounts of human nature and life in the world.
Like Solzhenitsyn, Morson sees realism as a moral training ground in which we benefit from others’ experiences. And following the lead of the great Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, Morson argues for the aesthetic and ethical goods of dialogue. “Readers of Middlemarch and Anna Karenina,” he writes late in the book, “inhabit several consciousnesses in turn, so that when people with different beliefs argue they sense from within why each interacts with others in a specific way. In so doing, readers can come to understand even misunderstanding.”
KH has problems with my “Chasing Ashes” because Ahab and Omar Khayyam and Edgar Allan Poe are characters. He wanted to be a journalist; he thinks in terms of reality as a journalist would. He thinks my narrator is either delusional or drunk or both. I have no idea what he will do when Natty Bumppo, Thoreau, Emerson, Langston Hughes, and a water nymph show up. Cultural baggage is part of our reality. Well, mine anyway. But those bits above about not fitting the world into an ideological framework, ethical examples from experience of others, resonant with me.
Unlike, “Chasing Ashes” the stories that make up “The Dead and the Dying” are more traditionally realistic. My themes are the decline of industrial Indiana, the effects of capitalism and colonialism on the Midwest. Then there are more specific themes. Last night, I got to typing up “Irretrievable Breakdown.” It is about the breakdown of a marriage in the face of obsession; the obsession of one character to be a hometown hero. Two recurring characters run through it.
While at work, I ran through some changes in the story I worked on Thursday – “Vestiges”, is its title now. The frame keeps shifting on me. That is the good thing about dishwashing – I can play with things like that and make money doing so.
These are things important to me. I spoke with CC for a while yesterday. I also looked at apartment prices in Bloomington – much more expensive than I expected. I realized she and the PO have one thing in common – a talent for living on their assumptions. They do not ask the right questions. The Po asked how long I intended to live in this motel room, and I said for the duration. He never asked the duration of what. CC and the PO have never asked what I am doing with my life. They see the writing without asking what I am writing. CC sees me without income or status, and finds no profit in being around me. The PO sees me as a felon and an SO and a job to make sure I cause no more trouble. I wonder if I projected my own bias onto CC. If so, that illusion has gone. She is a hamster on a wheel of her own making, lacking any ambition for anything else in her life. She is here, she has the possibilities of being useful, she is not part of my future. When I leave, she will not notice when I leave. If I get dad's trust straightened out, she will be surprised I do have money and missing that she will notice. I am here until I get that trust business cleared up. What neither PO nor CC understands I am in Muncie to do business. That my purpose being back in Indiana is to wind up things started long ago.
I finished the night out reading Wilbur Sanders' The Dramatist and the Received Idea – it is about Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. History, culture affecting the two, and an overlap of their work. Reading such things generate idea – now if I had time to work on them! (I went looking for reviews today. This one focuses on a chapter – Macbeth – I have yet to reach, but which feels on point with what I have read.)
Last night was the last Friday of the month, so time for Land Of The Lost.
From Thornfield Hall this morning: Jane Austen vs. the Brontes: Does Anyone Still Read “Shirley”? I read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre long before I ever read Jane Austen. I think my mother had a copy of Jane Eyre around the house. This thought just came to: why did she have it? I know she saw Jane Eyre with Orson Welles; she said Welles came out of the fog scared her. Was my mother hiding her intelligence? I know she read more than I once thought. Maybe she was more a Romantic than I ever thought.
USA Today published MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ speech looms large 60 years later. Do we shirk our aspirations? Well, Donald J. Trump continues running for President.
I may not have given enough attention to Once Was Lost, Now Is Found by Frances Gaudiano. His opening impresses me. Its emotional content – and a whiff of mystery – kept me reading. I suggest you check out this short story.
I have a pork roast to start, more writing. I want to get to the farmer's market. I am out of Diet Coke. I have much to type. Okay, perhaps not the Farmer's Market. Laundry? Oh, the newsletter needs done, too.
t2 got me interested in this subject, BTK serial killer is prime suspect in two more unsolved murders, police say
Firefox crashed, so I took time to start the roast. Time to move on to other places.
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