Only a Blockhead

The Unknown Donald Rumsfeld

Something I wrote about Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago:

Knowing Donald Rumsfeld

      Hart Seely, writing in Slate in 2003, was among the first to comment on the poetic genius of the then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  Though Seely feels that Rumsfeld’s “work . . . is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’ [and] . . . is as entrancing as Frank O'Hara’s,” it is clear that Rumsfeld’s “jazzy, improvisational riffs,” as well as his embrace of spoken-word performance, are in a direct line passing through the Beats and on to their grandchildren, the poetry-slammers who howl to this day into open-mikes at Bohemian cafés.

      Few poets, however, Beat or otherwise, have grappled with fundamental philosophical questions as passionately as Rumsfeld.  This is, perhaps, most evident in his much-loved and much-anthologized, “The Unknown” (2002), in which he speaks of epistemological conundrums such as: What do we know? What don’t we know? and Can we know what we don’t know? with the intensity other poets might reserve for the death of a beloved pet or the setting of the sun behind trees.

Knowledge and lack of knowledge are Rumsfeld’s obsessions.  His tragedy is that, writing about them in the conventional way, he is a prisoner of his own subjectivity, inevitably constrained by his lack of knowledge, and even more by his knowledge.  Rumsfeld recognizes this, and concludes his masterpiece with a poignant evocation of his defeat: “We don’t know.”

      Employing the mesostic method that John Cage put to such good use we can move the profundity of “The Unknown” beyond the limits imposed by Rumsfeld’s knowledge and lack of knowledge.  We do not know what the method will produce; in not knowing we begin.

      Many would consider the Iraq War to be Rumsfeld’s greatest achievement (placing his poetry, of course, to one side).  Thus it is tempting to use “Iraq War” as the spine of the mesostic.   Considering, however, that Rumsfeld did not see the Iraq war as a one-off, but rather hoped that it would serve as a template for future wars of liberation, the broader, more all-encompassing “war” seems appropriate.  Using “war” as spine rewards us with a poem that moves us a step further on our epistemological journey:

unknoWn
           As
      theRe

    knoWn
           Are
      theRe

    KnoWn
       ThAt
      theRe

           We
           Are

      “[U]nknoWn / As / theRe,” we learn in the first stanza, and history dictates that we read “theRe” as the “there” with which the poet will forever be associated: Iraq, a place that, for Rumsfeld, was then and is now mostly unknown. 

      This lack of knowledge is quickly complicated however, by the first word of the second stanza: “knoWn.” In the midst of the unknown “theRe” is something known, but known by whom?  The perspective, we see, has shifted: the “knoWn” is “theRe” with the Iraqis—distant from the poet who is trapped here, in his own world, his own subjectivity.

      The third stanza elaborates on this elusive knowledge that is never here, but always there.  What is known is “ThAt,” but what “ThAt” is is mysterious; the deictic remains an elusive, perhaps even empty, signifier until the final stanza in which the poem takes a sudden Cartesian turn: “We / Are.” 

      Whether we are here or there is unknown; all we can know is that we are, and by affirming this we can return with fresh eyes to the known knowns, known unknowns, and finally to the most perplexing of epistemological riddles, the unknown unknowns that defeated Rumsfeld in "The Unknown."  The mesostic has shown us a way out.

 

--David

After Reaching the Coast

You see people on TV
Younger, in charge
You know they haven't
Listened to the Grateful Dead

You wander through back
Catalogues of Los Lobos
While language posits
New pronoun/verb agreements

You cannot know or really care
What will happen to Raymond Chandler
He didn't hear A Box of Rain and
The Santa Ana winds are normal

This version won't hold after you

—NC Tate

Books David Finished in 2020 (Highlight Reel)

The first book I finished in 2020 was László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, the inaugural volume in a series of four novels that Krasznahorkai thinks of as his life’s work (though he’s written many other books). It culminates with Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming which was certainly my novel of the year. Here’s what I said about it:

In a one-star review on Amazon.com a dissatisfied punter says of this novel, “Fans of Ulysses by James Joyce will probably enjoy this novel.” He seems to mean it as a criticism. As odd as that may be, he’s not wrong: Those who enjoy novels in which the author strives not for mere competence but for greatness, and achieves greatness, will enjoy this artful mingling of voices from in and around a provincial Hungarian city, the things that happen there, mundane and odd, the threads the conductor of this symphony picks up and drops, the entirely satisfying aesthetic delight László Krasznahorkai gives us. Read this novel now. You won’t read a better novel any time soon.

A little earlier in the year I read for the first time the poet Yoko Danno and found in her Further Center: Poems 1970 ~ 1998 the best collection of poems I read this year. I wrote:

Most of this book is filled with some of the best poems by a living poet I've read in a while. This would be the first two-thirds of the book which is made up of carefully chosen words sparingly used in the service of careful description, like this:

the glazed

ground

began to thaw:

 

she looked

back

 

to shake

the dew

from her straight hair:

 

the pointed trees

stood leafless against

 

the slippery sky

 

like a triumph.

“Triumph,” surprises us, and is evidence of the skill with which Danno, a Japanese who writes in English, makes use of the language. One wonders if, as with Beckett and Conrad, writing in a language that is not her first makes Danno a better poet than she would otherwise be. The last third of the book is largely given over mostly to a prose poetry fantasia in memory of her son, who died in a mountain climbing accident. For all the emotional power of this section, reading it one often feels the same dread as when collared by someone who announces: “I had the strangest dream last night.”

The best non-fiction work I read, because it was the most challenging, was Miguel de Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History I made a weak effort at summing it up thus:

“Despite its title, this is not a book of history but a book of philosophy.” So begins Manuel De Landa's thought-provoking Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. All histories, I suppose, have a philosophy implicit in them, and all philosophies occur inside histories. De Landa makes this explicit, and in the course of doing so rejects, as I suppose most historians do these days, histories built on notions of progress and great men. He postulates and demonstrates, in three sections—one devoted to geology, one to genetics, and one to language—that it may be more fruitful to think of history as the stratification and solidification of, for want of a better word, energy. “Our individual bodies and minds,” he writes, for example, "are mere coagulations or decelerations of flows of biomass, genes, memes, and norms.” He helps us see that this sort of development has parallels in geology (stratification, solidification) and languages (congealing into standard forms). In building this philosophy he fills every page with startling insights, makes us see connections we had not seen before, and shows us the usefulness of his project in prose that is careful and clear.

The best reread of the year was Samuel Beckett’s trilogy plus (for the first time) How it is which came packaged together in the second volume of my complete Beckett. I responded to those masterpieces:

In Beckett’s miracle years, roughly 1946 to 1950 he completed three of the novels collected here: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable as well as the play which garnered him substantial attention, Waiting for Godot. Having seen what his friend James Joyce had accomplished in Ulysses, and what he was going on to do in the work in progress that would become Finnegans Wake, he realized that one kind of novel had reached its apotheosis, and set out to write something different. He succeeded with the novels of the trilogy, and began his lifelong project of paring away, leaving only hints of a plot, faltering action, and characters barely distinguishable from the mud through which they often find themselves moving. In so doing he created masterpieces, an alternative to pretty good books written in the usual way. His work is often not an easy read, but as someone once noted, there’s a joke every page and a half; one can only agree with Hugh Kenner that Beckett is, indeed, a comedian.

The fourth novel in this volume, How It Is, takes the further step one might have thought impossible after the trilogy away from the busyness of standard issue fiction. Much is made of its being fragmented and unpunctuated. What is astounding is that even without the marks that we usually depend on to tell us how to read, it is always clear when to pause, where one phrase ends and another begins. Beckett is not only a comedian, but also a master stylist.

In addition to these highlights, other standouts are Emily St. John Mandel’s Station 11 (a post-apocalypse novel that’s actually good), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (unfortunately topical, and the best thing I’ve read on pandemics), Shakespeare’s history plays (what fun!), Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage novels (Virginia Woolf is not the only female who belongs in the modernist canon), Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter mysteries (hard-boiled in the tradition of Ross Macdonald [they share the Southern Californian settings] with the twist that the detective is gay), and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels (I’m working through a biography of the author now. She’s as odd a bird as Ripley).

Happy new year!

Dances with readers

In the sidebar of this blog (below David’s notes on what he reads), I try to capture the books I read and the movies I watch in a paragraph. I do it to both clarify and savor my experience, and possibly steer others toward (or away) from the work, and I try to do it without giving away plot, or raising hopes too high. I write before reading other criticism, reviews, or blurb so as not to be influenced, for others inevitably put things better than I do.

The last book I read was “My Name is Lucy Barton” by Elizabeth Strout, just out in paperback. What I said about it was: “Centered on a stay in a New York hospital, a woman relates incidents from her life. This novella is artfully artless, with an honesty that leads deep into human motivation and emotions, including the functions and dysfunctions of family, how we hurt ourselves and others, and the aching ecstasy that accompanies love. This is my second Elizabeth Strout, and it’s every bit as good as her ‘Olive Kitteridge.’” which I was satisfied more or less captured it. Then I read the review excerpts printed in the book. They are so superior to what I said that I’ll quote some of them here:

“unsparingly honest and forthright” (Chicago Tribune); “I was frequently put in mind of Hemingway’s famous injunction to write ‘the truest sentence that you know’” (The Wall Street Journal); “careful words and vibrating silences; a rare wealth of emotion” (The New York Times Book Review); “You think, that’s it. That’s what life is like.” (NPR); “attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue” (Hilary Mantel).

How does Strout do it? She recently contributed to the Guardian's My Writing Day series, and I think there are clues there. For the honesty and attention to reality:

“Almost always I will start by writing a scene or a piece of a scene. I have learned over the years to take anything that is most pressing to me – it may be as mundane as a concern about upcoming dental work, or as serious as worrying about the safety of my child – and to transpose that emotion into a character. This will give the scene life, as opposed to having it wooden.”

And for the way Strout draws her readers in. This is less mentioned by reviewers: if you are being taken expertly through shimmering countryside, you are not aware of the vehicle.

“The actual writing of [the book or story] – deciding what the reader needs and when the reader needs it – is not as fun as writing the scenes; I feel less free, but there is a pleasure in drawing myself – and the reader – together this way. I always imagine an ideal reader: someone who is patient, but not too patient; someone who needs the book and wants to read it, but may not read it if I do not write it honestly. For me, it is a dance with the reader.”

In two books (three? I immediately read “Lucy Barton” a second time), Strout has become a favorite author.

--Julian

Nailing it

After a storm-free summer, it’s suddenly typhoons one after the other. One is passing as I write: sickly sky; sheeting rain; roiling trees; canceled trains. A good day for reading. I’m in the middle of a second pass through Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. The first time I was absorbed with the characters and their story. This time I can better appreciate how he does it.

How he fragments the story for maximum suspense and effect. How he describes things, including, ironically, the kind of summer weather we don't have today. I've often tried and always failed to satisfactorily describe what it looks like to see greenery in the bright sunlight. A few posts back, the best I could do was, "The sun reflects from the trees, bushes and grass." Then Franzen on page 260:

"The sun had turned fierce.... Every color... was both itself and blazing white."

He nailed it. 

 

--Julian

The World of Zoran Živković, Part 2

The second of my reflections on the work of the Serbian writer Zoran Živković is up at the Kurodahan Press Blog.

Check it out here.

The World of Zoran Živković

I'm writing about  Zoran Živković over at the Kurodahan Press blog. You can see what I said here.

--David

Oh, Tama!

Here's a  short review by me from yesterday's Japan Times.  See if you can find the small blunder, one that, I trust, doesn't obscure how much I enjoyed the book.

--David

Gothic / Decadent / Noir

Where the gothic and the decadent meet: me on Hisaki Matsuura's Triangle:

For most of us the notion of life in a tight-knit village is pure fantasy: We have lived our whole lives in and around cities. One would think, therefore, that we would have grown comfortable with the anonymity and the promiscuous mixing with strangers that define city life. Novels such as Hisaki Matsuura’s “Triangle” suggest, however, that cities, particularly those as multifarious as Tokyo, still make even seasoned urbanites nervous. Rich with possibility, cities are also rich with peril: They are places where anything can happen.

Read the rest here.

—David

Genretown

“There are only two kinds of music," Duke Ellington may have said, "the good kind and the other kind." Books, like music, should also be judged in terms of their quality rather than their category—are they the good kind or the other kind? To assume that because a book belongs to a given genre it is, therefore, inferior to literary fiction (which does not float above genre, but is a genre) is simply lazy. Discernment is always necessary.

That's from my consideration of Barry Lancet's Japantown and of genre fiction in general.

Read the whole thing here.

--David