Blank

I have three gigantic books going, four if you count the audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE. Rememeber when I fancied myself a one-book-at-a-time man? At night in bed, instead of old comic books, I now read old BUDDENBROOKS by "blog" favorite Thomas Mann. Then, of course, there's the Pessoa biography I read in bits and pieces as part of my blood pressure ritual... the doctor has me taking my blood pressure less often now, so I may never finish it. Just like Pessoa never finished his masterwork, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET. Ha ha, oh, Pessoa, you're something else. And I have a smaller book next to my favorite chair, but I don't want to talk about smaller books today. I want to talk about the 800-page monster THE SOT-WEED FACTOR by John Barth, which seems like a single joke stretched out to unimaginable lengths, something I can deeply respect. So, in THE SOT-WEED FACTOR, we find "a countenance blank as an owl's," which is fairly neutral as far as owl depictions go in figures of speech. As you know, an owl is "wise" if it's lucky, but more often it's drunk or stupid, etc., at least as far as the owl-hating literary giants of our times are concerned. "Blank," I'll take. It is at least more accurate than the "grinning" and "smiling" owls we have run across elsewhere. Please "click" on the "hyperlinks" for more owl information, or visit your local library.

The Music Critics

Last night as we were watching the John Wayne movie McQ, Dr. Theresa noted that the theme to McQ reminded her an awful lot of the theme to THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123. She conjectured that Elmer Bernstein "got lazy." I replied that while I agreed with Dr. Theresa's observation about the similarity of the themes, Elmer Bernstein didn't seem like the lazy type to me, and I wasn't even sure which movie came first. So I looked it up, and they both came out the same year! So I suppose there was just something in the air, something that went, "Ba-dum-dum-dum, Ba-dum-dum-dum," and composers Elmer Bernstein and David Shire heard it independently with their magical musical ears. (Dr. Theresa also noted, brilliantly, I thought, when watching McQ stride across a lobby, "They should have had John Wayne play Frankenstein." But that's a different subject!) Here's the thing! WHILE we were watching McQ, I received an email from McNeil, who said that sometimes the music of Hank Williams made him think that ol' Hank "went to too many luaus." I don't know about that, although a lot of his songs that aren't depressing are about fun parties. McNeil's remark rests, however, in my belief, or assumption, mostly on instrumentation. "It's not a criticism," insisted McNeil.

The Chicken Soup Occurrence

Here is something I don't care about. But I've been sitting here thinking about it so I'm going to write it down. There I was, minding my own business, slicing up some leeks to go into a big pot of chicken soup, and in my headphones rang the voice of Barry McGovern, who reads the bulk of the audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE (Marcella Riordan had just finished pitching in with the famous "washerwomen" chapter at the time of the soup making in question), and Barry McGovern said to me, quoting James Joyce in FINNEGANS WAKE, the word "googling," lodged there in an otherwise indecipherable sentence. I double checked it with the physical text once the soup was simmering, and there it was, all right: "googling," right there in FINNEGANS WAKE. Big deal. As we know from previous "blog" adventures, Mark Twain used "googling" in 1884 (as I learned from Roy Blount Jr., or one of his books, though I do know him in person, don't you worry about that!) and Jack Kerouac used "google" in 1959 (after Joyce, of course), and though FINNEGANS WAKE was published in 1939, we know that James Joyce was working on it for 17 years, and still, with all that, he just can't beat Billy DeBeck, who created the comic strip character Barney Google in 1919. (It occurs to me that the oft-touted "invention" of the term "googol" by a nine-year-old in 1920 might not be such a gobsmacking tidbit after all. Maybe he just liked to read the funny papers! Take that, nine-year-old! DAMN! I see that wikipedia has beaten me to this speculation, which is fitting, given my apparent obsession with the prerogitives of chronology. Hoist with my own petard!) Oh! What the hell else? I know nothing about the game of cricket, or, really, about the insect the cricket, except for my possibly false knowledge that the latter makes music with its legs... please, entomology pedants, tell me where I'm wrong! I beg of you! Anyway, I vaguely recall that in the movie HOPE AND GLORY, a grandfather threatens his grandson with some sort of cricket move he calls a "googly." I looked it up just now, and the first googly was thrown, if that's the correct word, by Bernard Bosenquet in 1900 (the last year of the 19th century, I say, which is why the momentous event is not recorded in my famous history of the 20th), so he beats everybody except Mark Twain, assuming that Bosenquet named the googly as well as putting it into practice, and I just don't care enough to find out, which is funny, because I care enough to type all this, just barely.

Shrug

Hey, remember in 2012 when I told you some things that Thomas Adès said about Mahler? You do, huh? LIAR! Why must you always lie to me? Does it make you feel big and important? Anyway, that's okay, because I want to tell you something else Thomas Adès said about Mahler, specifically about two notes at the beginning of the 9th symphony: "It contains a fruitful paradox: it resolves onto a dissonance... If he'd planned, he'd never have started. That is why it's so moving when he does work through to a logical way of resolving the paradox. It's a very Viennese answer, a shrug which as if accidentally makes the problem disappear." Thomas Adès has so many mean, hateful things to say about Mahler all the time that when he throws him a backhanded compliment, the reader turns giddy, as if the big turkey just arrived at Bob Cratchit's with all the trimmings. But that's not the point. The point is that it's connected with what Dr. Theresa and I were talking about on New Year's Day. You remember that, don't you? LIAR! Are you trying to gaslight me? Allow me to quote one of my many, many unpublished novels: "Alternately, consider a novelist who is writing to kill time, and to distract himself, or herself, from the more unpleasant aspects of a long period of unemployment. Such a person would inadvertently produce a number of annoying little strings that needed to be knotted up, like the haunting interval in Mahler’s Ninth..." and from there I go on to work in a Thomas Adès quotation, which is what everyone wants in a novel. And, as you can see, it is also a novel about, in part, a novelist, and everybody goes absolutely 100% ape for that too! "Why can't there be more writing about writers?" people are always shouting in my face all the time. 2025 is the year I give up. Again.

Blank Spots

Well, you knew I would read GILGAMESH eventually, because you know just about everything, don't you? You're a real smart guy, huh? Looks like we got us a college fella. Yes, I was reading GILGAMESH and Enkidu was putting a curse on Shamhat... don't worry! He takes it all back a couple of pages later. Anyway, he's like "Owls will roost in your"... and that's it! What of hers will owls roost in? We just don't know! Much like Humpty Dumpty, GILGAMESH hasn't been put back together again. There are lots of missing pieces. In this translation, by Sophus Helle, there are blank spots on the page where the missing pieces would go. Later in the same stanza, for example, it's blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, "purple" blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, blank spot, "sullied thighs" blank spot, blank spot, "thighs sullied" blank spot, blank spot. So what's going on there? We may never know how those thighs got sullied or what was purple. Luckily, as Sophus Helle mentions in his introduction (which also includes not one but TWO Star Trek allusions [see also]), they are finding new pieces of GILGAMESH all the time. There's even a "website" ("click" here) where all the latest bits and pieces of GILGAMESH can be tinkered with at your leisure. Speaking of poetry, I read a New York Times obituary of the French poet Jacques Roubaud, which quoted him as saying "an Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape." And it's really funny (is it, though?), because Dr. Theresa and I were talking about something similar yesterday as we drove back from Memphis, where we had celebrated the New Year. Dr. Theresa was saying that she sometimes saw the act of writing as consisting of nothing but problem-solving, and I was like, "Yeah, it's interesting, because you're solving the problems but you're also creating the problems." And we talked about that for a while. Look, it's a long drive! Not that long. Anyway, so I'd say Jacques Roubaud's aphorism applies to all writers. Or people! And no, I never heard of Jacques Roubaud before reading his obituary. I get most of my knowledge from obituaries. I'm not a big smart guy like you, smart guy.

One for the Fan

This one is for you synchronicity fans (that is to say McNeil... see also). So, recently, I was watching the Joel Coen version of MACBETH and I was taken with the scene featuring some old dude. I was like, "What's the deal with this old dude?" So this morning I found my copy of the text and I read the scene, and boy has this old dude been seeing some dire portents and such! "A falcon, towering in her pride of place, was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd." That's the kind of dire portent I'm talking about! This I must have heard while watching the movie, but maybe it didn't register so good in my sad brain parts. But when I read that, I thought, WAIT! Wait, I thought, while I was walking around the neighborhood yesterday, listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE, didn't I hear something about owls hawking? I did recall that in the graphology section, as I think of it, though, to be clear, I have no idea what I'm talking about, there was something about E's looking "like sick owls." So my investigation began. I got out my trusty and seldom-opened (until now!) hardcover of FINNEGANS WAKE, given to me, as mentioned previously, by a defrocked preacher, and there I found that the passage was one and the same: "crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens" (see also the owl's connection to Athena, as hinted at by "hyperlink" in the previous "post")... anyway, so there you have it, owls hawking and owls being hawked, yes, there you have it, all right, but what is it? I mean, I know what it is, but what is it?

Effort

I don't mean to brag, but I was walking on the beach on Christmas Eve, listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE. I was listening to Chapter 10... wait! I must already interrupt this wonderful story that has you on the edge of your seat. It wasn't really Chapter 10. More to come on that in a moment. Anyway, I was listening to what I thought was Chapter 10, and, hey, do you remember the comical "French" accent I imposed on a character in my second book? Well, it sure sounded to me like James Joyce perpetrated the same offense, and in a remarkably similar style. So, suddenly, I was proud of myself instead of being so terribly ashamed. I decided that upon my return home, I would double check my physical copy of the book, which was given to me by a defrocked preacher when I worked in a bookstore in downtown Mobile, to see whether Joyce and I had indeed independently hit upon the same inaccurate and even potentially embarrassing method of presenting to the reader a comical "French" accent. And that is what I did, or tried to do. The first thing I noticed upon digging out the book was that there are no chapter headings. I have run into this problem before, notably when I was trying to teach BELOVED during my brief flirtation with doing that kind of thing. Authors! Please number your chapters. Don't be like James Joyce and Toni Morrison. Ha ha ha! What terrible advice. See also the travails of the Dune Book Club. As I leafed through FINNEGANS WAKE - and allow me to state, just to help you understand what I've been through, that the online index to FINNEGANS WAKE I found years ago is now nothing but a zombie "link"! - it seemed to me (as already hinted) that Joyce's chapters were longer than the "chapters" of the audiobook, which, though unabridged, had been broken into bite-sized chunks... bite-sized if you're a hippopotamus! But relatively bite-sized, making my search more of an effort, especially given the fact that I no longer care about anything. I did track it down, though: "you wish to ave some homelette... Your hegg he must break himself." Believe it or not, that's James Joyce, not me. From context, the speaker seems French, though there is some German sprinkled around the passage, too, just to drive me batty. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! On Christmas Day I was walking along the beach again and the audiobook said to me, "it being Yuletide"... and it was! Dr. Theresa could not walk on the beach with me because she had twisted her ankle. I would not be listening to an audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE were I pleasantly strolling hand-in-hand along a beach with Dr. Theresa. I am sure you will recall that the last time Dr. Theresa and I visited my parents, we saw a mink run across the road and a pig run across the road. This time, we saw nothing run across the road. While I was taking a bag of trash to a garbage chute, however, I saw a little bright pink lizard of a kind I have never seen before. I want to say it was a salamander, because I have always imagined salamanders - no doubt incorrectly - to be pink. I also saw this guy (above) on the day after Christmas. Oh! I forgot! So I also heard Joyce use "owl-wise," I thought, seeming to mean both "always" and "wise as an owl." And I checked! Like a hero! Just to satisfy myself. And neither my hearing nor my huffing and puffing brain had deceived me, though my brain had added a superfluous hyphen. I found "the eternals were owlwise on their side every time"... and let me state for the record that I do not believe James Joyce was referring to the Marvel superheroes The Eternals, created by Jack Kirby, though, of course, there are certain similarities (see also). I also thought (and still sort of think after consideration) that owlwise could have meant "as regards owls," as, for example, when somebody (is it Jack Lemmon?) in THE APARTMENT says, "That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise."