Month: May 2018

Trolls

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For something sufficiently toad troll-like
Squats in me, too.
Bastardization of Larkin’s “Toads”

Originating in the dark caverns of the Scandinavian subconscious, trolls have undergone a sort of metamorphosis over the ages. Here’s the OED’s definition:

One of a race of supernatural beings formally conceived as giants, now, in Denmark and Sweden as dwarves or imps, supposed to inhabit caves or subterranean dwellings.

“Or under bridges” the scholars might have added, given the first troll we encounter as children is that creature who confronts the Three Billy Goats Gruff*, protagonists of a Norwegian folk take that appeared in English in 1859.

*”De tre bukkene Bruse”

As a child, I associated trolls with the frightening old drunks I’d sometime encounter in Azalea Park in Summerville, those grizzled reeking jug-toting vagrants who might snatch you and eat you alive. (Or, more likely, though I was innocent of such horrors, drag you underneath a bridge and molest you).

William Leonard of Jersey City

Of course, now troll has a new denotation as one of those belligerent threadjackers who disrupt internet colloquies with ad hominem attacks that ignore the subject at hand, whether it be Melania Trump’s anti-bullying campaign or Hillary Clinton’s views on cannabis legalization.

Although Rizzuto’s wit may fall short of say, Alexander Pope’s, at least he uses his real name and provides a photo of himself. Given the nature of the Internet, it’s all too easy to troll anonymously under various nom-de-nets like PatriotMom or GodfearingRaptor.

Here anonymity can breed fearsome ad hominem assaults in the worst of taste, sometimes alluding to family tragedies, as if the fact that your late uncle drove off a bridge in the early Seventies killing a passenger undercuts your argument that immigration reform is a pressing legislative priority.

Pope illustration by Marianne Goldin

Although I confess that something troll-like squats in me as well, I hope the term provocateur better describes what I sometime do on Facebook and in this blog. The difference is that the insults I sling appear in the context of some sort of argument (regardless of the argument’s validity). In other words, when I insult Tim Scott, for example, by calling him an Uncle Tom, it’s in the context of his political philosophy that favors the rich white super minority over those who can’t make ends meet and rely on food stamps and subsidized school lunches.

In no way am I comparing myself to HL Mencken in wit or writing ability, but he, I think, represents what I mean by being a provocateur rather than a troll. Although what Mencken says below is immoderate, if not downright cruel (especially since it appears in an obituary), he is, in fact, summing up an argument that he had presented in previous paragraphs:

Trump Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

I am, I confess, looking forward to the day in the not too distant future when I can let the dog of my discontent off the leash of my contractual obligation to represent my place of employment 24/7 as a sterling representative of discretion and moderation in all things. Now, I dare not confront certain subjects – like the schism in the Episcopal Church; however, when I retire, I’ll be able to pursue my twilight dream to become the Crazy Jane of the Internet.

Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

William Butler Yeats

“The Waste Land” vis-à-vis “Apocalypse, Now”

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Eliot and CoppalaJoyce would call it an epiphany – I’d call it a cartoon light bulb flashing above my head —  me slouching in a seat of a movie theater located in a strip shopping center off Sam Rittenberg Boulevard.  Apocalypse, Now had just come to town, and I was catching it at the first matinee I could.

I teach Heart of Darkness and was, of course, interested in how the transplantation from the Congo to Viet Nam would work out.

Here’s what switched on the light:

image from Apocalypse, Now

And here, Ol’ Possum, Groucho’s pal, TS Eliot hisself letting us in on a secret about his sources for “The Waste Land.”

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan, Cambridge) Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.[1]

Originally Eliot wanted Mistah Kurtz’s last words “the horror, the horror” to serve as the epigraph, but know-it-all il miglior fabbro Ezra nixed Kurtz’s utterance as “not weighty enough” and suggested this admittedly weightier snippet from Petronius’s Satyricon to serve the purpose of cross reference point.

“Nam Sybillam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum pueri illi dicerent: Στβμλλ
τί Θέλεις; respondebat illa: άπσΘνειν Θελω.”[2]

So I say that “The Waste Land” and its sources From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough are key in understanding Willard’s relationship with Kurtz, the ritual double sacrifice of caribou and the colonel, which/who are obviously linked.

Trigger warning:  This clip is not for the squeamish; two mammals are hacked to death.

 

Amphetaminetic  Synopsis of “The Waste Land”

Part 1:  The Burial of the Dead

Chaucer’s Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote becomes

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

This is Eliot’s MO – picking up post WW1 shards of Western Civilization’s shattered stained glass window and collagificating [copyright pending] them back together in ironic juxtapositioning. In Chaucer’s day, spring was a blessed rebirth, in Eliot’s god-vacated poem, a dreaded reoccurrence.

You see, winter is preferable to resurrection when we can keep warm beneath forget snow.

ZAP!

We’re in a Biblical desert among stony rubbish where Isaiah shows us

[. . . ] something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The Sibyl!

ZAP!

A tarot reading where Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante doesn’t find The Hanged Man, i.e., a god to be resurrected, not only a harbinger of spring, but what engenders the spring.

But there he  is – the Hanged Man — at Colonel Kurtz’s compound in Apocalypse, Now.

image from Apocalypse, Now

ZAP!

We’re in Danteville, headed to Hades/Hell/Work:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many

I had not thought death had undone so many.

 

 Jacobean echoing, a corpse “planted,”  dogs digging up that corpse, which is beginning to sprout.

 

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

 

Baudelaire:  “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

 

Part 2: A Game of Chess

Cleopatra hanging at the equivalent of Dorian Gray’s where a golden Cupidon peep[s] out among sevenbranched candelabra.

Among the ornate decorations

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

ZAP!

Neurotic banter:

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

  “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

ZAP!

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

ZAP!

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

So mechanical, so not Shakespeare, so-so-so civilization-in-decline.

ZAP!

We’re eavesdropping in on working class abortion gossip in a pub as the barkeep trumpets England’s equivalent to “last call for alcohol”:

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Speaking of death by water, enter Ophelia:

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.[2]

 

Part 3:  The Fire Sermon

Spenser:  Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

Not so sweet the Thames in the 1920s.

empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

But wait!  The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends.

 The city is empty.

ZAP!

The Fisher King:

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.

Human sacrifice, the king must die to generate the spring, like Jesus does every spring — dead, buried, resurrected — like those Neolithic god-kings Frazer writes about in The Golden Bough whose health and sickness are associated with fertility and famine.  They must be sacrificed and replaced, i.e. must die and be resurrected, to insure healthy crops, like Osiris, Attis, Adonis.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

 ZAP!

Gay hotel assignation, barren sex as far as procreation goes.

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

ZAP!

Enter voyeuristic but blind double-sexed Tiresias who witnesses arid copulation in interlocking sonnets:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

 

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone

ZAP!

Wagnerian canoe coitus:

Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.

 

la la

 

Part 4:  Death by Water

Here’s the whole shebang:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

                                   A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                                   Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

 

Part 5:  What the Thunder Said

We’re thirsty!

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

 

Things fallin’ apart:

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

ZAP!

I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

 We’re talking Holy Grail gone missing:

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih     shantih     shantih

 

The End!

 

 

So as Eliot relied on Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance as subtext so Coppola uses “The Waste Land” in a similar fashion.

When Willard kills Kurtz, he’s the new god, yet he gives up that honor to return to Babylon, so to speak. I’ve read that Coppola filmed two different endings, one in which Willard goes home and one in which he stays in the jungle.  The studio viewer-tested the ending, and, of course, the rabble wanted Willard to return to home-not-so-sweet home, to the cinema in the strip shopping center off Sam Rittenberg Boulevard where he would have a roof over his head.

I’ll give Conrad’s Marlow the last word.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city [i.e., Brussels after his ordeal in the Congo] resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance.

 

[1 ]i.e., rituals of human sacrifice

[2]With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging
in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: Sybil,
what do you want?” she replied: “I want to die.”

[3]Once again, the low and high are juxtaposed

 

Mom: One Year Later

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My son Ned on his mother’s demise.

King of nowhere

It’s been a year. Things feel normal now. Those moments of realization come still, but it’s now, “Mom’s dead. Oh.” Hard to believe, but I’m tethered to Earth again. It’s not dissimilar to those mornings I’d wake up in Kiel and realize I was thousands of miles away from home. Hard to believe, yes, but nothing revolutionary. The worst is over, though I’d being lying if I said there hasn’t been a wave building the past few weeks, spikes in anxiety and homesickness, old memories coming back to life. 

Mom rescuing me from St. Andrews pre-school. The smell of the cleaning agent. The cheaply tiled floor. The relief.

It’s hard to believe how much of grieving is self-centered. How much of Mom I always carried with me, how she was always a part of my reality. “I can’t wait to think tell Mom about this,” I thought multiple times…

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Matthew Arnold vs. Thomas Friedman

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Whenever I participate in interviews for prospective administrators or humanities teacher candidates at my school, my first question goes something like this:

Matthew Arnold once wrote that education’s primary purpose was “getting to know [. . .] the best that has been thought and said in the world.” I’ve recently attended a couple of conferences devoted to the brave new world of “21st Century education.” The lecturers at these conferences argue we should be preparing students for global capitalism, making sure they can command computers, work together in groups, plan and implement projects, etc.[1]  A survey of British literature, for example, comes off as impractical in this context.  After all, understanding how WWI’s shattering of Western Civilization’s stained glass window relates to the fragmentary nature of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” isn’t going to have much practical value in negotiating an international real estate transaction.

What’s your take on this dichotomy?  Should we jettison the great books and literature survey courses in exchange for a more practical, hands-on approach to dealing with data?  Does understanding the sequence of the history of thought have any practical value?

Of course, it’s not an easy question, but that’s the point.  And, of course, an astute listener will detect my bias in framing the question.

The truth of the matter is that British literature surveys in high schools are hobbling towards extinction.  Only my school’s sophomore honors classes encounter the historical sequence that features, among other riches,  Romanticism’s rejection of Augustan rationality (cf. the 60’s vis-à-visthe 50’s); the non-honor classes explore the British canon thematically, e.g., Beowulf and Frankenstein headlining a unit on “monsters.”

Instead of a tapestry, they get a quilt.

The counterargument, which I concede has merit, is that students need to understand non-Western cultures in our rapidly shrinking world.  On the other hand, reading a Chinese poem in translation means forsaking sound, which is what poetry is all about.  I would argue that understanding how Keats employs caesura to slow down the lines of “An Ode to a Nightingale” to convey exhaustion might have more analytical merit that engaging with naked poetic ideas from afar stripped of the original interconnections of sound and sense that enhanced their meanings.

* * *

What has sparked this post is a happy coincidence that has occurred in the 9th grade genre course I teach.  This year in the 9th grade we replaced 1984 with The Picture of Dorian Gray as our second semester novel.  As my fortitudinous non-plan planning has had it, I find myself simultaneously teaching The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) to freshmen and Heart of Darkness (1899), to sophomores.

Although I concede you could teach both in the monster unit — Gray versus Kurtz – students would be ignorant of the Victorian background that makes the contrasts of these two works and their characters so meaningful.  They would miss out the connection between this:

[Dorian] was seated at the piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of Schumann’s “Forest Scenes.”

And this, Marlow in “Heart of Darkness” talking about his European colleagues in the Belgium Congo:

“The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.”

“21st Century” educational question:  “Are Dorian/Lord Henry/Kurtz’s ‘Intended’ complicit in the slaughter of African elephants?”

 

Dig this; here’s our first peek at Lord Henry, the villain of TPoDG:

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum . . .  [my italics]

Here’s our first peek at Conrad’s alter ego:

Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol.  [my italics]

Indulge me on last contrast, a contrast in how one feels about lying, which is of particular political import right now in the USA.

“Let’s go to the theater tonight,” said Lord Henry.  “There is sure to be something on, somewhere. I have promised to dine at White’s, but it is only with an old friend, so I can send him a wire to say I am ill, or that I’m prevented from coming in consequence of a subsequent engagement.”

Marlow, on the other hand:

You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.

I’ve been highlighting snippets from the other novel to both ninth and tenth grade classes.  I pretend that the two events, Marlow’s telling his horrific story of what he saw in Africa on the Nellie in the Thames and Lord Henry lounging on the divan in Mayfield, are taking place simultaneously.

And, of course, they were.

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[1]Not surprisingly, this information is provided via lecture, rather than having the attendees discover it in group work,