The Dish

The Literary Tourist

Laura C. Mallonee visited the former New York homes of poet Elizabeth Bishop:

So this is what it’s like to see the world through Elizabeth’s eyes, I think. In her poem “Varick Street,” she describes “wretched uneasy buildings,” “pale dirty light,” “soot and hapless odors,” but today the neighborhood is charming, almost idyllic: an enclave of expensive Georgian architecture and blooming flowers. The sun is out today after a long winter; birds sing almost too sweetly. I think how much I love New York.

But Bishop was never happy here; she wrote to her psychologist in 1948 that she disliked the city. The same year, she half-jokingly told Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” After [her building] was bulldozed in the summer of 1949, the poet checked herself into Blythewood, a mental institution. And yet she had just published, in 1946, her first volume of poetry, North & South, which was deluged with critical praise and later won her the Pulitzer. Wasn’t she an established writer, friends with Moore and Lowell? From the perspective of a lowly graduate student, I envy her vantage point: no longer striving to prove herself capable; a seat at the literary round table; a contributor to the cultural dialogue.

I stroll along snapping photos with my camera phone, and a breeze rushes down the sidewalk, carrying with it a dense whiff of urine. I fondly recall the “elongated nostrils/haired with spikes” in “Varick Street” that “give off such stenches.” Before I know it, a dark figure is lunging toward me and I cry out, slumping awkwardly against a gate. When I look up, the thief has bolted with my iPhone. No one is around to see me break into an irrational mixture of tears and hyperventilation. “What do we long for when we see beauty?” Nietzche once asked. “We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.” Perhaps this is true of success, as well.

Recent Dish on the relationship between Bishop and Robert Lowell here.

Speak The Speech

Sam Leith considers the components of a good speech:

It must be forceful in argument, memorable in style, resonant in its references. It must also, before anything else, connect its speaker to its audience. This is what Aristotle, the first Western authority on rhetoric, called ethos—the basic movement in any effective speech that transforms the “me” of the speaker and the “you” of the audience into “we”: “Friends, Romans, countrymen…”

Ethos is established by, quite literally, speaking the audience’s language: shared jokes, common reference points, recognisable situations. As the rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke has said: “You persuade a man only in so far as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.” You can then take the shared language—and with it your audience—wherever you want it to go.

On Anger In Writing

In an interview, Jamaica Kincaid addresses being labeled an “angry” writer:

It’s an interesting thing, the angry thing. And I wouldn’t mind being labeled as “angry,” if it wasn’t used once again to denigrate and belittle. First of all, I don’t feel I’m angry. I feel as though I’m describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called “angry.” If I had an affair with my husband’s best friend (an imagined husband, mind you; I now have to be careful about these things!) and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I’m not doing that. When I wrote A Small Place, the New York Times reviewed it in “Briefly Noted” and the thing the reviewer said, for the most part, was “Oh, it’s so angry.” I think that’s where the angry started, with A Small Place.

I’ve come to see that I’m saying something that people generally do not want to hear. In my writing, I’m often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, “You know, what you did was incredibly wrong.” …

In my writing I’m trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn’t whether I’m angry. The more important thing is, is it true?

(Hat tip: The Hairpin)

After winning the Trillium Book Award for her short story collection, Dear Life, Alice Munro told an interviewer “it’s nice to go out with a bang,” which seems to indicate she’s retiring from writing. In response, Laura Bennett reflects on our fascination with literary retirements:

There are plenty of novelists whose withdrawals from writing became the stuff of legend. Rimbaud flamed out before his 21st birthday and spent the rest of his life working as a soldier, in a stone quarry, as a salesman of coffee and guns. Salinger’s reclusive retirement fueled the mysterious lightning bolt quality of his legacy: one landmark novel, countless unpublished works. But today, in a culture obsessed with the minute chronicling of celebrity doings, our parsing of writers’ retirements has become preemptive, a kind of artistic augury.

Of course, one needn’t retire from writing as if it were the same as quitting a law firm or terminating an athletic career. It’s nice to hold onto the myth that writers write because some inner urge compels them, rather than publishers or deadlines or financial pressures. And when a writer fails to retire, it is equally a media marvel. Whenever someone over eighty publishes anything, half the book review often reads like a referendum on their age. Cynthia Ozick toldThe New York Times Book Review in March that she was tired of seeing reviews written as a measure of a writer’s mortality. “Middle C [by William Gass] is nearly everywhere accompanied by the numeral 88, as if Gass were a set of piano keys. Even his publisher sees fit to identify him by his years: a masterpiece by an 88 year-old master.”

Recent Dish on Munro’s work here.

A Poem For Saturday

Muriel Rukeyser was born on December 15, 1913, so this year marks her centennial. While at Vassar College she founded – along with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and Eleanor Clark – an undergraduate literary magazine called Con Spirito. Rukeyser was in Spain as its civil war erupted, reported on its tumultuous first days, and remained politically committed all of her life, becoming president of the American Center of PEN from 1975-76. Her debut collection Theory of Flight won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1935, and subsequent works included her Collected Poems and A Muriel Rukeyser Reader. In an introduction to Selected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, published in 2004, Adrienne Rich wrote:

Reading Muriel Rukeyser, writing about her as I have from time to time, I have come to feel more and more the power of her work and presence in American literature—the many kinds of lives and issues she touched, the silences she broke, the voices she made audible, the landscapes she covered. In our own time of crisis, when the idea of perpetual war has dropped whatever masks it ever wore, when poetry is still feared yet no longer so marginalized, when a late-1920s schoolgirl’s perception of the ‘grim towers of empire’ and ‘the terrible, murderous differences in the way people lived’ accord with what more and more people around the world are experiencing and naming, this poet has readers waiting for her….

We’re featuring Rukeyser’s poetry all weekend, beginning with “Gift”:

the child, the poems, the child, the poems, the journeys
back and forth across our long country
of opposites,
and through myself, through you, away from you, toward
you, the dreams of madness and of an
impossible complete time—
gift be forgiven.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book. Have at it.

Datamining The Classics

“Today’s student of literature must be adept at gathering evidence from individual texts and equally adept at mining digital text repositories,” according to English professor Matthew Jockers. John Sunyer reports on Jockers’s controversial “big data” approach to literature:

[Jockers] holds the distinction of being the first English professor to assign more than 1,200 novels in one class. “Luckily for the students, they didn’t have to read them,” he says.

In his recent book Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (2013), Jockers publishes a list of the most influential writers of the 19th century. The study is based on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900, he explains. It took a lot of digging, and a computer did it by cross-checking about 700 variables across the sample, including, for example, word frequencies and the absence or presence of themes such as death.

“Literary history would tell you to expect Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain to be at the top of the list,” says Jockers. But the data revealed that Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

The Rise Of The Recall

And it’s only 2013:

Seth Masket analyzes the spike:

What these numbers suggest is that the recall, much like the filibuster or a vote against the federal debt ceiling, is one of those rarely-used political tools that suddenly becomes commonplace during a period of intense partisanship. Using them for regular political disagreements, rather than for extraordinary cases of malfeasance, may seem crass and opportunistic. But if you have these tools lying around, they’re simply too tempting for a member of an aggrieved minority party to ignore.

The Cannabis Closet: Home Invasion, Ctd

A reader quotes the previous one:

I was told that he did not need a warrant because he had “plain smell”. I told him that I knew that wasn’t true, and that I was not opening the door without a warrant….

As a former apartment dweller, I would just like to attest that the above is nonsense. If you smoke in your apartment, I can smell it in the hallway. When you smoke, some of the odors are absorbed into your carpet, your drapes, your cloth furniture, and your clothing. And it retains the odor long after you’ve put out your doobie. Also, most apartments have exhaust fans for one apartment relatively close to intakes for other apartments, so probably your neighbors could smell it in their own units while you’re smoking. And don’t they have rights not have their spaces permeated by your illegal behavior?

Furthermore, many people, me included, have jobs where we get tested for drug use. I don’t know if second-hand marijuana smoke can cause a false positive, but I sure as heck don’t want to be flagged because my neighbor is a pothead and hasn’t figured out that the smoke is airborne. I don’t think its my responsibility to find out.

My husband smokes regularly, and I find that until he has showered and gone for a pretty significant workout after smoking, I can smell it on him. I clearly don’t have a problem with it – hell, I’m married to someone who smokes regularly. But to try and pretend that it doesn’t smell or impact your neighbor? That’s just insulting. In the meantime, until you can get a space of your own, can I suggest you make brownies? Chocolate aroma bothers no one.

For the record, while I’m not fully on board with your reader’s take on being able to smell the smoke in the hall, I am fully on board with the fact that the cop’s apartment search was wildly inappropriate.

Another:

Your post from the reader whose apartment was searched enraged me.

It has taken me more than 30 years to accept that decriminalizing marijuana is necessary even though I don’t have much tolerance for pot smoking, but I saw no reason for the cops to behave the way they did. I kept wondering why someone hadn’t just complained to the tenant about the marijuana, either face-to-face or anonymously. That’s what I would have done.

But the more I thought about it, the more I became concerned that legalizing marijuana is going to lead to a lot more disputes between neighbors in attached housing. Here’s the problem: construction isn’t necessarily good quality and smoke and odors can go from one person’s space to another. Did this tenant’s marijuana smoke seep through the walls to irritate the neighbor’s asthma or waft up near the baby’s crib? Do some neighbor’s rugs smell like pot smoke whenever the tenant relaxes at home? Is the smoke not bothering the neighbor, per se, but is it making someone’s closet smell like pot, and is that person getting harassed with drug tests at work because they are a teacher’s aide or a crime-and-courts reporter or a hospital cafeteria worker and their supervisor can smell pot on their clothing?

There’s a reason why a lot of people dream of owning the detached house in the suburbs. I have one, but I was widowed a couple of years ago before I hit age 60, and I’m not happy that I may have to live in a townhouse or apartment because I can’t afford this house. I do have problems because my neighbor’s wood smoke sometimes comes down my unused fireplace chimney (even with the flue closed) and fills my first floor with smoke that makes my eyes water and my upholstery smell. I worry that if I rent an apartment I will have noisy neighbors, have to deal with cigarette or cigar – or now, marijuana – smoke, other penetrating odors or volatile chemicals from air fresheners or cleaning products, neighbors who are hoarders, neighbors who burn candles and are careless about fire hazards, or neighbors whose pets cause any of a number of problems.

Now I think there needs to be some candid discussion about marijuana smoke. I am glad smoking tobacco is so restricted these days, and I do think any kind of smoking should be confined to places where it won’t bother someone else. That means if an apartment building is nonsmoking, the nonsmoking rule applies to more than tobacco.

What the police did in Alexandria was despicable. The tenant never deserved such treatment. But maybe the tenant was unaware of some unexpected side effects of their behavior, and so what should have been a polite discussion between tenants turned into a confrontation by proxy by involving the police.

Finding Fault

Geologists have discovered a fault system off the coast of Portugal “which scientists believe could be the first signs of an eventual convergence of the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates”:

Geologists from Monash University mapped the ocean floor off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula, finding the evidence for what lead author João Duarte described as “an embryonic subduction zone”. These subduction zones are where one tectonic plate dives underneath another one to be destroyed, often causing earthquakes in the process. … [T]his new subduction zone near Portugal becoming active could signal the very first steps of that process of separation reversing — one of the stages of the hypothesised “supercontinent cycle“. This theory holds that the Earth’s plates routinely form into, and break out of, giant supercontinents over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Pangaea was the most recent of these. …

The new study … proposes that, in an estimated 220 millions years, the North American plate will begin moving towards the Eurasian plate again as a new supercontinent begins to appear, with the Atlantic Ocean disappearing into the new subduction zone near Portugal.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)