Eve Arnold, "Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses," Long Island, 1954

Looks like she’s absorbed in Molly’s soliloquy. “Yes” indeed!

By a commonplace coincidence, I just recently finished The Dalkey Archive, which would lead one to believe James Joyce was still alive and kicking when the photo above was taken. In this account, Joyce is tracked down by an admirer and found tending bar in an out-of-the-way Irish village, having faked his death to avoid serving in World War II. He tries to convince Mick (the main character) that Ulysses was a filthy hoax perpetrated by a coterie of literary pranksters, that he knows nothing of Finnegans Wake (he’s been working on a book but won’t describe it), and has been writing religious pamphlets in the years intervening between his supposed death in 1941 and the novel’s present (the 1960s? not sure). After several conversations, in which Joyce’s natural wariness gives way to full-bore confession, we learn that his heart’s desire is to be admitted into the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits) and to end his days teaching at Clongowes Wood College, so vividly and painfully depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What a wicked sense of humor this Flann O’Brien (or Brian O’Nolan, or Brian Ó Nualláin, or Myles na gCopaleen …) has. Also recently read, The Third Policemen was great fun from start to finish, and At Swim-Two-Birds (which a graduate student in English at the U of C tried to foist on me years ago as the greatest of all novels) is still wondering when I will scrape away the requisite amount of time to dive into its loopy involutions.

And so, to kill some time between now and Tuesday, and to get a post in for the month of October, I’ll cobble together a personal, far from comprehensive, somewhat belated roundup of Russian news.

In late July one of my brothers gave me a T-shirt, for no reason other than the fact it had Russian writing on it and he figured I might like it. I do like it, but as luck would have it, I couldn’t wear it for a while.

It says, “Kiss me, I’m Russian!” (In the States, anyway, you come across such stuff all the time—“Kiss me, I’m Italian,” “Kiss me, I’m Lithuanian,” etc., etc.) Just the thing to wear during my bicycle commute, since my other T-shirts are getting ratty. Unfortunately, in August the Russians invaded Georgia, and my commute takes me past the Russian embassy, where the Georgians picketed for several weeks: “Russian tanks … out of Georgia” was the chant I heard the most as I pedaled by. I resisted the urge to congratulate them on having a president who is just about as reckless as ours. Speaking of whom, how could a person not laugh when George W. Bush, with no trace of irony (of course), criticized Russia’s “bullying and intimidation.” He said “Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected.”

The Russia bashing started in earnest, as prescribed by our fetid foreign policy conventional wisdom—even Barack Obama felt the need to join in, unfortunately. One could find scattered attempts in the US press to put the conflict in context, but the tenor of the coverage was Cold War redux. Here are a few pieces I found evenhanded or sympathetic (gasp!) to the Russian point of view:

• Mikhail Gorbachev: Russia Never Wanted a War
• Fred Kaplan on the “feckless response” of the US to the Russian invasion of Georgia
• Glenn Greenwald on being smeared for not toeing the line on the Russia–Georgia conflict
• The Nation: The Cold War That Wasn’t

Earlier in the month, a giant of Russian letters passed away. I would be remiss if I didn’t note, however briefly, the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

As I was coming of age in the 1970s and became infatuated with Russian literature and, soon after, the Russian language, the figure of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sure to appeal to an American teenager, especially during a time of protest against the Vietnam War, racial inequality, and a tight-ass culture. Here was a guy who was butting heads with the Soviet state. Brezhnev was sort of like their Nixon. The reasoning was pretty clear, if juvenile. A trace of my Solzhenitsyn craze can be found in the St. Joseph High School yearbook for 1972: at the back, a donation in the name of Oleg Kostoglotov, the main character in Cancer Ward. (I leave it to the devoted reader to say whether the 54-year-old is any less pretentious than the 18-year-old.)

After the Soviet Union dissolved, Aleksandr Isayevich turned his withering gaze on the West, with its liberal mores and diverse ways of living. It became clear that Solzhenitsyn was in fact a Russian nationalist and theocrat of the Dostoevsky mold—and a monarchist to boot. Whatever relevance he had to Russian public life seemed to fade with each passing year, even after he moved back home, eventually taking up residence in a dacha outside Moscow (between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko).

Whether or not he ever regains the stature he enjoyed for several decades, he had a big impact on me. And I often think of his breakthrough work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—not the descriptions of the grim conditions of the labor camp, or the political discussions among the zeks. It’s the fact that Ivan Denisovich wakes up feverish and achy but decides to work rather than spend the day in bed in the infirmary. And that night he concludes he made the right decision—he feels better, he ate better (he wouldn’t have gotten his full ration in the infirmary), and he accomplished something. It felt good to work, even on behalf of the Gulag and the Soviet state. The opening page and the closing page—for whatever reason, they stuck.

Time to lighten up a bit. Only recently I discovered you can select a “country content preference” in YouTube, and naturally I selected Russia. Almost immediately I found a video that played off the famous “Where the Hell is Matt?” video, only in this case Matvei does his “dance” in all the stations of the Moscow Metro.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was glad to have the opportunity to “revisit” the three or four I saw in person, and to get acquainted with the rest. The Russian guy starts off doing the exact same goofy dance that Matt does, but in what I would say is typical Russian fashion, he varies it occasionally—out of boredom, or to stave off anticipated boredom in the viewer, or both. In some ways it’s a more artistic product, but it is long; and, as different as the Metro stations are, they aren’t as varied as the locales in Matt’s video. But I like it, and tip my hat to him.

Translation of the introduction:

It took 27 hours to film this video. It took 7 hours to edit it. We visited all the stations marked on the map of the Moscow Metro. At each one, the same dance was performed.* About 300 people witnessed the dance in person.

At the end:

Thank you, Homepage.ru, for the jersey and the fares.

In the YouTube “more info” area for this video, it says further:

Для полных идиотов, без обоих полушарий головного мозга – это видео – стеб над оригинальным роликом танцующего Мэтта. Если вы этого не поняли и пишите, про какой-то плагиат – ВЫ ИДИОТ. [For complete idiots, lacking both hemispheres of the brain: this video is a send-up of the original film of the dancing Matt. If you don't get it and write that this is some sort of plagiarism—YOU'RE AN IDIOT.]

Among many nice touches: at the Lubyanka station, he dances in front of the police booth.

And now that I’ve discovered Homepage.ru, I’ve learned that they have discovered Halloween.

Addendum 2008.11.08: The New York Times has published an excellent piece, “Georgia Claims on Russia War Called Into Question,” based on accounts by international monitors—members of an international team working under the mandate of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. (OSCE is a multilateral organization with 56 member states that has monitored the conflict since a previous cease-fire agreement in the 1990s, according to the Times.) See also this piece about the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev (“perhaps the world’s most famous Ossetian”) and the heat he took for defending Russia at the time.
__________
*Not quite true, as noted above.

I finally got around to reading a novel a friend gave me a while back, Beyond Sleep, by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans. Enjoyed it immensely.

On Sunday I heard live jazz performed at a private home in Washington, DC.
The vocalist Ilona Knopfler was captivating, Steve Rudolph put on a great show on the keyboard, and my friend Victor Dvoskin brought his usual blend of intellect and passion to his accompaniment on the bull fiddle. After the first number, my hard-to-please college buddy, whose dad played jazz in New York City, turned to me and said, “We could be hearing this at Carnegie Hall.” But strangely enough, we were in the airy living room of a Russian émigré couple on MacArthur Boulevard. The afternoon more than lived up to the promise of the previous concert in January, featuring guests from Philadelphia and New York joining Steve and Victor.

Did I mention that this month is use-it-or-lose-it month at my place of employment? As usual, I have accumulated many hours of leave in excess of the number we can carry over from year to year, so, much as it pains me, I am taking time off work in May to the tune of 2–3 days a week. It is so indescribably liberating to be walking down Wisconsin Avenue at 11:00 in the morning, or 2:00 in the afternoon, dropping in to the hardware store or coffee shop. It makes me wonder: What have I turned into?

I still intend to write up a post titled Rhinochromatography. I don’t know why I haven’t got around to it.

Time for a nap.

I always imagined fifteen guys stomping up and down on some poor guy’s chest. Maybe I’m the only one—I never really checked with anyone else. Well, today I came across this translation at a Russian blog: пятнадцать человек на сундук мертвеца, which back-translates nicely to “fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,” but here the chest is a wooden thing you put stuff in, not the place where you breathe in and out (while you’re alive, anyway).

That certainly makes more sense. Still a tight fit, but more reasonable than fifteen pirates standing cheek-to-jowl on any person, prone or upright, living or dead. So, is that the correct interpretation?

Google to the rescue once again. Using the entire phrase as input, I found this:

Dead Man’s Chest is a tiny island that forms part of the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea. Pirate legends of the Caribbean claim that the notorious pirate Edward Teach (Blackbeard) marooned 15 of his pirate crew on “Dead Man’s Chest” as a punishment for their mutiny and desertion.

Can I trust this source? Let’s Google “virgin islands” + “dead man’s chest” … voilà: a nice Wikipedia article about Dead Chest Island. Apparently the name got shortened in the intervening years. At any rate, if you look at the photo of the island, you might imagine the thoracic cavity of a dead man floating in the water—if you have a particularly morbid turn of mind. So it would seem I was right all along. It’s just that the chest was metaphorical, and a whole lot bigger.

But wait! There’s an island south of Puerto Rico called Isla de Caja de Muertos—Caja de Muertos for short, which can be rendered in English as “Coffin of Dead Men” or “Dead Men’s Chest.” A wooden thing again! And really—why do I think I see an anatomical chest in the Virgin Islands and not a treasure chest (or chest of drawers, for that matter)? Round and round we go—maybe the Russian translator got it right.

I really thought the blogger had cleared up a problem I never even knew I had. Но, увы …

Due to the unprecedented way my cortical convolutions took shape in the latter stages of my embryonic life, the thought occurred that Obama might be using a passage he had delivered in the past (whether he personally wrote it or not) that his friend Patrick Duval had borrowed and used during his campaign in Massachusetts. So Obama might actually be “plagiarizing himself.”

I’m not saying that’s what happened. In fact, that probably did not happen. I’m just saying it can happen, and certainly has happened.

Richard A. Posner, in his informative and entertaining Little Book of Plagiarism, offers several amusing instances of “self-plagiarism.” Anyone who has read Tristram Shandy cannot fail to be impressed by the range of its author’s scholarship—until you learn that Laurence Sterne lifted most of the recondite passages virtually intact from secondary sources. So he was a bit of a copyist, to say the least. But did he go too far when he “sent letters to his mistress that he had copied years earlier from letters he’d written to his wife”? As Posner notes, “His plagiarism could do no harm to anybody; only the discovery of it could.” [pp. 41--42] Just as with modern American politicians.

The Roman poet Martial makes note of a cockeyed version of self-plagiarism. According to Posner, in the first century A.D. “[a] plagarius was someone who either stole someone else’s slave or enslaved a free person.” In one of his epigrams, “Martial applied the term metaphorically to another poet, whom Martial accused of having claimed authorship of verses Martial had written,” Posner says. “It is unclear, however, whether he meant that the other poet had passed off Martial’s verses as his own or had claimed sole ownership (the verses were his slaves), precluding Martial’s claiming authorship.” [p. 50]

In our theoretical modern example of Martial’s dilemma, Obama would be censured for stealing Patrick’s words, when in fact he was the author. Again, this was almost certainly not the case. Probably what made me think of this possibility was the not-at-all-theoretical problem faced by Ambrose Bierce when he collected his sarcastic definitions, written over many years and printed in the periodical press, and published them in book form as The Devil’s Dictionary. As Bierce writes in the preface to his book:

The Devil’s Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was continued in a desultory way and at long intervals until 1906. In that year a large part of it was published in covers with the title The Cynic’s Word Book, a name which the author had not the power to reject nor the happiness to approve. To quote the publishers of the present work:

“This more reverent title had previously been forced upon him by the religious scruples of the last newspaper in which a part of the work had appeared, with the natural consequence that when it came out in covers the country already had been flooded by its imitators with a score of ‘cynic’ books—The Cynic’s This, The Cynic’s That, and The Cynic’s t’Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness. Among them, the brought the word ‘cynic’ into disfavor so deep that any book bearing it was discredited in advance of publication.”

Meantime, too, some of the enterprising humorists of the country had helped themselves to such parts of the work as served their needs, and many of its definitions, anecdotes, phrases, and so forth, had become more or less current in popular speech. This explanation is made, not with any pride of priority in trifles, but in simple denial of possible charges of plagiarism, which is no trifle. In merely resuming his own the author hopes to be held guiltless by those to whom the work is addressed—enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humour and clean English to slang.

Although it’s not relevant to the discussion at hand, I can’t help but quote his last paragraph as well:

A conspicuous, and it is hoped not unpleasing, feature of the book is its abundant illustrative quotations from eminent poets, chief of whom is that learned and ingenious cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines bear his initials. To Father Jape’s kindly encouragement and assistance the author of the prose text is greatly indebted.

If the priest’s outrageous name isn’t enough to tip the reader off that he is a pure figment of Bierce’s imagination, the names of the other poets cited will certainly do the trick: Sadler Bupp, Bissell Gip, Marley Wottel, Armit Huff Bettle, Jex Wopley, Squatol Johnes, Porfer Poog, Theodore Roosevelt … oops: not a poet, and not a figment. His quotation: “Mr. Debs is a redundant citizen.”

To close, two definitions from Ambrose Bierce:

Plagiarism, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.

Plagiarize, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

And finally, a small dose of antidote to the insane possessiveness engendered by the “marketplace of ideas,” courtesy of Alan Fletcher in The Art of Looking Sideways (London: Phaedon Press, 2001) [pp. 434--5]:

• T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”*
• Lionel Trilling: “Immature artists imitate; mature artists steal.”
• John Updike: “My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal.”
• Igor Stravinsky: “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”
• Philip Johnson: “… what makes Mies such a great influence is that he is so easy to copy.”
• Pablo Picasso: “Copy anyone but never copy yourself.”
• Milton Glaser: “If one’s work is not imitated, one’s work is not understood …”
• Michael Caine: “I only steal from the best people.”
• Sir Joshua Reynolds: “He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own … will be obliged to imitate himself.”
• Louis Armstrong: “A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.”
• Frederic Goudy: “The old boys stole most of our good ideas.”
• Marcus Aurelius: “To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.”

__________
*This quote probably deserves to be expanded. Via Posner: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” [p. 56]

A while back the online magazine Smith presented a six-word “story” by Ernest Hemingway:

For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.

A remarkably concise tale indeed—pathos concretized pithily. Smith invited its readers to go mano-a-mano with Papa, and six-word memoirs from its readers came pouring in. The best were culled, and a book was born: Not Quite What I Was Planning, now available from your neighborhood bookseller.

Here are a few examples from the Amazon blurb:

• Found true love, married someone else.
• After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.

A few more from the Smith site:

• This place is getting borderline crowded.
• Married with children (and second thoughts).
• Brush with Death; Comb with Life.
• Interrupted invisible burnings always bright beneath.
• I grew into an abusive child.

I’m trying hard to like these things. Some are clever, but something is bugging me. Maybe it’s the preponderance of abstract words. Or maybe it’s the syntax—too many words need to be supplied by the reader. Is that what makes them start to sound like snippets from the personal ads, or telegrams? Maybe six words is six words too few. Maybe twelve is really the lower limit for a reasonable intellectual or emotional payoff. Even then, what we get might be more like an aphorism or witticism than a “memoir” or “story.”

I think Hemingway’s sixer was pretty darn good (even though it, too, reads like a classified ad). I don’t know if I’ll seek out more.

Addendum 2008.03.02: Last week Salon got into the act. The results to date are not encouraging.

The rest of the title refers to the fact that, in the narrow newspaper columns, the bits were invariably three lines long. They were first published serially in 1906 in Le Matin. Here are a few samples, translated by Luc Santé:

In political disagreements, M. Bégouen, journalist, and M. Bepmale, MP, had called one another “thief” and “liar.” They have reconciled.

Again and again Mme Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields.

The French ditchdiggers of Florac have protested, sometimes with their knives, against the amount of Spanish spoken on their work sites.

In Clichy, an elegant young man threw himself under a coach with rubber wheels, then, unscathed, under a truck, which pulverized him.

Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.

Soon after the book arrived, I stumbled—again—across an item in the newspaper that seemed to ask for Fénéonesque treatment. I thought: Why not try my hand at it? My first attempt was too long; after whittling, it came to this:

G. Edgerton, hunting alone in the woods of Dale County, climbed a dead tree, which fell and crushed him. His carcass was found the next day.

Right off the bat I had a problem. “Carcass” is accurate (though startling when used for humans) and injects a bit of irony. The cruelty, however, is uncalled for. This was an unfortunate accident, not divine retribution. (Unlike Fénéon, I’ve changed the name and location. Do I want the victim’s family or friends stumbling across this “clever” squib? Clearly I don’t have the stomach for this.)

The next version was slightly shorter and didn’t editorialize:

G. Edgerton, hunting alone in the woods of Dale County, climbed a dead tree and was found dead the next day, crushed by the tree.

Not enough story, I thought. So—

G. Edgerton failed to return from hunting in the woods of Dale County. He had climbed a dead tree that toppled and crushed him.

—the implied drama in the home he had left in the morning for perhaps the thousandth time. Better? Maybe it needs an expressive detail (and maybe the name could be dropped):

A local hunter failed to return home. His longbow was found before he was, crushed beneath the dead tree he had climbed and overwhelmed.

Wait—is it the man who was crushed, or the longbow? With something this short, syntax really matters. And: did he survive, or did he expire? By this point I’m spinning and slipping and losing my bearings completely. I think we’d better let Fénéon do the fénéoning:

There was a gas explosion at the home of Larrieux, in Bordeaux. He was injured. His mother-in-law’s hair caught on fire. The ceiling caved in.

Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook, “Forgive me, Dad. I like you.”

In order to see the world, Louis Legrand, Bedroux, and Lenoël, with a collective 36 years to go, escaped from the penal colony at Gaillon.

An unknown person painted the walls of Pantin cemetery yellow; Dujardin wandered naked through Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône. Crazy people, apparently.

And now—you be the photo editor (click to enlarge):

Yes, it’s pathetic. I take pictures of a dandelion instead of commenting on Virginia Tech, Alberto Gonzales, or Iraq. So it goes. Adios, KV.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)

Spring and Fall:
to a young child

Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh, ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The accent marks have to do with Hopkins’s concept of “sprung rhythm.” I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. But you don’t need to understand sprung rhythm to love his poems.