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 Allow me to quote one of my many, many unpublished novels: "Alternately, consider a novelist who is writing to kill time, and to distract himself, or herself, from the more unpleasant aspects of a long period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.