July 29, 2010. Thursday.
Situation: We got back from NYC yesterday afternoon, about 3:15, a little less than an hour before I had to leave for work. Since we’d just driven some 200 miles in an un-air-conditioned car, my first priority was to hop into the pool to cool off. So while Moi talked to Barb about our trip, I slipped on my swimming trunks and got in the water, spending my time largely skimming off dead bugs from the surface of the water, since we left the filter off during the trip as it’s been making a whining noise. Mway followed me out the door, heading toward the path and looking over her shoulder, only to be disappointed when I stopped far short of the path and started climbing up the pool ladder. This morning Moi has left for three days of out-of-town work. It has just been raining, but right now, about 9:10, it looks like it’s clearing up. I know Moi has fed Mway, but the dog’s been keeping close by my side. I have to work today, and I know the path will be soaking wet, but right now I’m going to put on my walking clothes and take her out.
State of the Path: I find the “pro-quality” stick under the bench where I had stored it (I didn’t want Barb using it, lest she might lose it). Thankfully I had clipped many of the weeds in the main path, or I would get more soaked than I do (as it is I don’t start getting really wet until I hit the red willows and the area over the ridge). Some of the goldenrod leaning into the path is very strongly anchored in the ground, and the best I can do as I’m walking along is bend the stem in half. The same brambles that have been clutching at me lately grab my shoulder again today. The stands of jewelweed that have survived the hot dry weather, particularly below the maples at the edge of bug land and along the creek, seem to look hearty today. (On our trip to NYC, I found myself gazing at the wild flowers along Interstate XX, seeing fringed loosestrife and common mullein; outside our hotel in Queens, Moi identified lamb’s quarters in the cracks at the street curb.) I look again at the still unnamed purple wildflowers in bug land (I told Moi about them but she hasn’t yet had the chance to look at them); on the way to the strawberry field I see a specimen growing along the path there, whose flowers have opened up more than the plants down at bug land, and so look less like a thistle and more like the outspreading flowers of knapweed. Unfortunately Audubon only lists the spotted knapweed, whose flowers are pink, but it seems to me I remember finding a purple knapweed online, which someone called common knapweed; with the evidence before me I’m beginning to think that this plant is at least some kind of knapweed – no, I want to correct myself: looking through Audubon just now I recheck the photo for tall ironweed. With the plant I just saw today, I see that these purple wildflowers are looking more and more like that photo. The photo is deceptive: the flowers look much bigger than the quarter inch heads mentioned in the commentary; the leaves are blurry, but they look like what I see, long, thin, lanceolate, pointed. I do believe I’ve made a definitive identification: tall ironweed (“tall erect stem bears deep purple-blue flower heads in loose terminal clusters,” “bracts beneath flower head blunt-tipped,” “Height: 3 – 7’.”
State of the Creek: Beyond the multiflora beneath the tree stand, I’m surprised the water is not gushing over the rocks after the rain. I almost stick my head in a cob web, which I belatedly see strewn with rain drops. The water covers about three quarters of the vinyl siding.
The Fetch: Mway seems rusty at first, but maybe it’s because I first stand in a new location in the clearing, but after a while she warms up and fetches the stick more times than I bother to count and plays “Put it down” about five times. On the way back to the house, she has to stop to readjust her mouth grip on the stick, as it gets knocked out of her mouth by the firm weeds along the path.
Addendum: After I finish work, I take Mway for a second walk, about 4:30, the first afternoon walk I believe I’ve taken her for for a while, because it has simply been too hot. But I also want to do some clipping. First I have to do Moi’s evening chores: feed chickens, gather the two eggs I find. I also turn on the pool and clean out the filter basket; in addition to the leaves and dead bugs I usually find in there, I uncover a drowned bird (a starling?). The chickens, who have gathered around me to eat any bugs I might dump on the ground, start pecking at the dead bird when I toss it under the lilacs. Out on the path, I trim along part of what I had clipped before, and then I bend forward in earnest on the way toward the clearing, chopping down goldenrod, sumac saplings, and any briars sticking in the way. Mway follows slowly behind me, in anticipation, I believe, that we’re heading immediately to the clearing to toss stick. But I throw her for a loop by turning around suddenly and heading toward the creek. I do some more rigorous clipping through the red willows and beyond the ridge, trying not to chop down any plants that I think might be promising new wildflowers, but of course I have no strict criteria to follow, so I have no idea really what I might have spared or not. I’m a little disconcerted when, after chopping down a row of goldenrod, I find suddenly revealed a lot of hearty poison ivy plants close to the ground, and I try to clip off the tops of these as best as my waning energy will allow me. Up at the clearing, finally, I expect Mway to fetch the stick many times. Moi mentioned to me a couple days ago that she has discovered that Mway will not eat her food if she has not taken her out to fetch stick beforehand. This observation confirms to me that Mway associates food and fetching, that the one is the just reward, or just wage, for the other. So I’m surprised when Mway only fetches the stick once. But things could be more complicated. Mway has perhaps become accustomed to me taking her for a walk between feedings, an extra walk, as it were, which does not require her to fetch the stick many times. Moi has said that if Mway does something twice it becomes a rule. And Mway perhaps had no idea that when we got to the house I would dish out some food for her; but I have no idea, really, what goes on in the dog’s mind.
20 comments:
Yes, M., your remarkable essay – thanks for writing it. (I would have responded before, but you know I’ve been busy day and night.) I don’t think it resolves the issue between us about this blog – that probably will never be resolved. But at least it helps me to understand you a little better. And oddly enough, I think it inadvertently and implicitly substantiates my claim of a lineage to Joyce, going a little ways to explaining how this blog, despite all appearances, is a footnote to the great writer. It doesn’t explain all the twists and turns to getting here though. For that you need to reread Beckett (and perhaps some of the other books on my shelves), and it also would help if you read, or reread, the essay from which I borrow my epigraph, Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus.” I know that you’ve been willing to do this, and that it’s me who’s been keeping the essay away from you. But I’ve decided now to leave the essay out for you to look at it. And I’ve got a complete copy of it now -- when I was in New York, I went to the Strand Bookstore and got one there. When I’m done with it myself, for I haven’t read this thing since I was in my early 20’s, I’ll leave it out for you. The issue between us over this blog – between your call for a Joycean sensual and playful richness and my deliberate, fully-conscious, un-naïve efforts at jotting down in a bare and unrevised way a few things about some moments spent in a small patch of abandoned land – this issue, as I said before, will unlikely be resolved. But if I now understand you better, you can at least try to understand me and my situation better too.
Aside from this, I think your essay is very convincing in explaining how Ulysses could be a dog’s favorite book, and, in doing so, I think it goes a long way in explaining how many humans read it too – and indeed how Joyce intended it to be read. Your thesis about Joyce’s ideal reader is not too much of an exaggeration, I think. As a jazz and blues musician, I’ve always found it hard to profess to my audience and my colleagues in the business my love for Joyce and Beckett, for it seems in this country at least that the two cultural fields (jazz/blues and Joyce/Beckett) are wrongly sustained, to whatever little extent they are sustained, in vastly separated communities of interest. A blues or jazz musician, depending on the particular style of music, will read, I don’t know, maybe Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, or the Tao Te Ching. A Joyce or Beckett scholar may listen to John Coltrane or Robert Johnson but is not paid to write about them. The artists themselves seem not to have been aware of each other. Joyce, to my knowledge, never commented on Duke Ellington. Thelonious Monk, as far as I know, never went to see Waiting for Godot. But if he had, he would have found an artist with similar interests; same for Beckett if he had ever dropped in at the Five Spot. That willingness to be perplexed that you describe as the ideal state of mind for reading Ulysses seems to me the same ideal approach to, say, listening to Miles Davis’s 1964 recording of My Funny Valentine. Joyce and Miles – both are masters at hiding an object.. Wouldn’t Bitches Brew sound great with Joyce narrating in the mix? Wouldn’t Endgame be enhanced by Evidence being performed in the background?
When I first began reading your essay, encountering the extended metaphor of two cities, I thought to myself – boy, how’s M. going to pull this off without straining. But I believe you do pull it off, better than I think I could’ve done myself – or rather, I wouldn’t even have attempted it. Probably takes the naivete of a dog to do that. And how like a dog, especially one of your breed, to get so excited about the cattle eventually making their appearance in the Oxen of the Sun chapter. I get the impression from your essay that you read Ulysses, at least the first time through, without a reader’s guide. It is that kind of an effort that I think really opens up the novel to the kind of intense reading you describe. Although, on second thought, perhaps using a reader’s guide doesn’t make much of a difference – the experience of reading is still intense. I myself never had one until I got one for Christmas on – I think it was the year I started this journal. So you might have had access to it. I’m wondering if you peaked in it at all and if you know that most of the bull references you cite are puns – for example, the “plumper and portlier bull” is a reference to Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope ever, who by a papal bull gave leave to Henry II of England to take over Ireland. But this doesn’t matter too much. The fact that you sniffed out the bulls in the first place is the most important thing.
What do you mean by “and how like a dog, especially one of your breed, to get so excited about the cattle…”? M.
In re-reading this blog (after making the final entry on December 24, 2010), I’d like to add the following statements to some of the comments I made above. When I was in college (so many years ago), a dorm-mate of mine used to drop acid, listen to Archie Shepp, and exclaim “James Joyce is fuckin’ unbelievable” all at the same time. A couple other friends of mine were Beckett as well as jazz fans. I’m sure if I were to go online I’d find some sort of website linking Joyce and jazz. There is such a thing as “jazz literature,” including such writers as Bob Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, and Jack Kerouac, the latter of whom, especially, probably was influenced by Joyce. Sometime or other I once came upon (and I don’t remember now where) the poetry of Charlie Parker, and it seemed to me to be as jubilant about word sounds as anything by Joyce and as Dadaistic as anything by Beckett. Nevertheless I think my main point above is still true. In this country, there is no Joyce and Miles museum to go to, no Monk and Beckett pub.
Also, I’d like to point out that the ideas of Giambattista Vico, which M connects to Ulysses, are more properly applicable to Finnegans Wake, as any reader of Joyce should know.
Also, it should be noted that, despite her seeming expertise, M never has made mention of a number of other dogs that appear in Ulysses besides Tatters and Garryowen. In the Circe’s chapter, Lynch kicks a spaniel, a terrier follows Bloom and Mrs. Breen, Bloom calls a retriever “good fellow” and feeds him crubeen and trotter, a bulldog growls at Bob Doran, and, just before Stephen gets flattened by Private Carr, a retriever barks furiously, saying “ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute” and “wow wow wow.” You have to wonder why M seems unaware of all this.
Also, in the Eumaeus chapter (I’ve been re-reading parts of Ulysses at the same time I’ve been re-reading this blog; much of my copy is in pieces, but Circe and Eumaeus are still bound together more or less), I find, after Bloom and Stephen have pretty much rested up in the cabman’s shelter, the latter not drinking his weak coffee and the former now thinking that he should take the worn, hurt young professor back to his house, this sentence: “The crux was it was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue (somebody having a temper of her own sometimes) and spoil the hash altogether as on the night he misguidedly brought home a dog (breed unknown) with a lame paw, not that the cases were either identical or the reverse….” -- which sentence I even underlined in ink the last time I read it (something like 35 years ago). You’d think if M had read this, she would have made something of it, for not only is it a mention of a dog, but it also seems to be a hint from Joyce that supports her earlier thesis, typed out hastily some time ago (see January 4 post), that he originally intended his novel to be about two dogs, at least one of which Bloom would bring back to his house.
Also, it’s odd, as I look back at the comment of January 4, that M would ask me on July 1 if I had any criticism on Joyce, as in her comment of January 4 she mentions Kenner, namely, the literary scholar, Hugh Kenner. It’s additionally odd that I say I don’t have any such criticism. Apparently I have something in my office written by Kenner on Joyce, and neither of us remembers it, and I can’t now find any such book. Certainly M wouldn’t have found the book in an outbuilding or some place like that.
M also makes no mention of Athos, Bloom’s father’s dog, whom Bloom thinks about three times during the day, first in the Hades chapter (“Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish,”) then in Circe (“Poor dear papa, a widower…he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death.”), and finally in Ithaca (“…be kind to Athos, Leopold….”).
And here again in the Penelope chapter (which I’m reading again after 35 years or so), Molly remembers Bloom bringing home the dog that Bloom thinks about in Eumaeus: “…like the night he walked home with a dog if you please that might have been mad….”
Finally, in Penelope, or at least in the pages of it I can still gather together, we also find “…scrooching down on me like that all the time with his big hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest for this heat always having to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do it and stick out her tongue as far as ever she could…” and some time later “…it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether….” I know M has read Penelope, not only from the evidence of the shape this part of my book is in, but also because she cites passages from it in both her treatise and essay, and you’d think she’d exploit these passages somehow, mount them someway in support of her thesis that Joyce has the brain of a dog, or a brain like a dog’s, or, at any rate, that his relationship with dogs is a very complex one. Why does she ignore these so obviously provocative thoughts of Molly? Could it be out of a sense of delicacy? This seems unlikely – I’ve never seen her be especially delicate about her body parts, her pooping style notwithstanding. Or could it even be – it suddenly dawns on me – a symptom of some sort of repression of her own sexuality brought about by the trauma of having been spayed by that person she calls – it’s making more sense now – “the monster”? I don’t know – it’s so easy to be freudened in today’s society, especially by some one who is not a doctor of psychiatry. Besides if such ideas could be applied to her psyche, you’d think M would have speculated about that herself, she being apparently aware of some of the works of the Viennese MD I have on my shelf. Perhaps M chose to ignore these passages simply because they’re embarrassing, doing it like a dog being applied to Ulysses’ antagonist, Bloom’s rival Blazes Boylan, and the sight of two dogs actually doing it being an unpropitious moment to Molly’s way of thinking. Or perhaps even more simply M doesn’t quite understand what “doing it” means. “It” occurs all over the place in Penelope, rather as a euphemism, a noun synonym, than as a personal pronoun with a textually proximate antecedent. Perhaps M still has some more literacy to develop. Certainly she has a little more reading to do before she can claim to have really mastered her favorite book.
By “today’s society” in my comment above I probably mean American middle-class society of 50 or 60 years ago. I don’t hear people bandying around Freudian terms anymore like they once seemed to do (though of course my life is hardly like a Woody Allen movie). Seems Freud’s ideas are currently more likely to be applied to the products of mind rather than the mind itself. (For a good introduction to this, see my copy of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, “Psychoanalysis,” discussing Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom, Julia Kristeva, et al., third shelf up, on the corner.)
Actually, I guess I keep it on the fourth shelf up – pretty high there. The book is worth reading in its entirety as a look at how some English speakers and the like have been reading since Matthew Arnold’s time. Since I posted this, I made a quick search of Eagleton on the internet and have discovered that my copy of the book is unfortunately out of date. Apparently it’s been reprinted since its publication in the mid 80’s with an afterword grandly narrating the history of literary studies since that time. I’m hesitant about going and buying another whole copy of the book just for the update, but I did find a synopsis at a website by a guy named Phil Gyford: http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2007/05/07/literary_theory.php. Might be worth reading this as an overview, but one should read the whole book (even without the afterword), unlike some of those who have thanked Phil for putting his notes up online.
I have to mention this. Last night, Wade having come home from a trip to San Francisco (with Randy and Tanya in tow to work on their documentary – see later comments), I overheard Wade telling someone about a place, where jazz is performed and poetry is read, called, of all things, Bird and Beckett’s. Obviously my one comment above is indicative of the limitations, not of the world, but of my own experience, and I feel like crawling in a corner somewhere. Still, as I continue looking at the name, it seems somewhat incongruous to me (when I heard Wade say it, I felt a kind of embarrassment, as if he were revealing one of my most intimate thoughts), and maybe the owners of the place chose the name primarily for its alliteration (Bird and Kerouac’s, for instance, not having the same ring). Could they have called the place Bop and Beat’s, or to be more expansive (as they apparently have in mind), Anthropology and the Absurd’s?
Someone (well, I guess it will be me) will no doubt bring up the famous meeting of Miles and Sartre in Paris and ask “where have you been all your life?” But doesn’t this noteworthy event illustrate what I believe I’m trying to say: a brief meeting of two worlds with profoundly similar features but very different histories? Note what Miles says in his autobiography about Paris, how astounded he was to find himself sitting in the cafes with Sartre. And when he inquires to someone about Juliette Greco, and is told “Well, you know she’s one of those existentialists,” Miles says “Man, fuck all that kind of shit. I don’t care what she is. That girl is beautiful and I want to meet her.” Besides, Sartre was not Beckett, and Beckett was not an existentialist: he didn’t believe much in the importance of free will, or at least in its efficacy in practical affairs. By the way, if Beckett, unlike Sartre, was an aesthete, he nevertheless was more obsessed about describing reality than any realist. (Looking right now through the index of John Szwed’s biography of Miles, So What, for any connection between Miles and Beckett I’m struck by how similar the Irishman’s name is to Bechet, as in Sidney Bechet.)
Been re-reading Eagleton. At one point he discusses how Louis Althusser uses Lacan’s “imaginary” to illuminate ideology’s determination of the self. To explain Althusser’s point, Eagleton says the following, in his usual clear, direct, and amiable fashion: “As far as society is concerned, I as an individual am utterly dispensable. No doubt someone has to fulfill the functions I carry out (writing, teaching, lecturing and so on), since education blah blah blah, but there is no particular reason why this individual should be myself. One reason why this thought does not lead me to join the circus or take an overdose is that this is not usually the way that I experience my own identity blah blah blah. I do not feel myself to be a mere function of the social structure which could get along without me, true though this appears when I analyze the situation, but as somebody with a significant relation to society and the world at large blah blah blah.” On the margin of the page, I then see I’ve addressed a comment to Eagleton. It says “good for you.”
Feel compelled to add this. Recently Tanya (you’ll meet her more properly later on), hearing me do one of Mose Allison’s tunes (I do his Parchman Farm Blues, Your Mind Is On Vacation, as well as covering his covers of Percy Mayfield’s Lost Mind, Willie Dixon’s Seventh Son, and Muddy Waters’ Rolling Stone – yes, I know, as Mose, who has a BA in English, himself probably knows, that song titles should be put in quotation marks, but screw that for now), asked me if I knew Mose’s Everybody’s Crying Mercy. I didn’t, but since Christmas is coming up, and I thought this great tune would make a fine holiday song, I put an old cassette with the tune on it in the cassette player and tried to learn it. The cassette tape got snarled in the machine, but after I pulled it out and rewound it on the spool (a skill that I bet people under 30 don’t have), I found the tune, which in the third verse contains the following lyrics:
You don’t have to go to off-Broadway
To see something plain absurd.
and I immediately thought to myself, here, in a nutshell, is a bluesman, playing in the tradition of Cole, Charles Brown, Amos Milburn, and Ray Charles, with hints of Bud Powell and Horace Silver, and even incorporating the blues from the Delta and Chicago, who’s also gone to see Waiting for Godot – here, in a word, is yet another thing that contradicts the thesis I’ve been trying to develop in these comments – which thesis I’m not even sure what that is anymore – one thing for sure is that this illustrates the drawbacks of commenting on a blog, where one can hastily publish a statement without any possibility of revision except by further hemming and hawing, although this sort of thing happens all the time in print too – consider, for example, Jacques Derrida typing out “il n’ya pas de hors-texte” (a kind of paradoxical statement like M’s, or rather MM’s, “[language’s] utter disconnectedness from reality”), which he ended up defending for the rest of his life against the Cambridge philosophers, who apparently took it as a simple proposition, which must be either true or false…Anyway, Mose seems to embody a contradiction to my thesis, though perhaps not necessarily – perhaps he is merely the exception that proves the rule. Moreover, when I go to youtube to look at other versions of the song, I find videos of Mose performing the tune in what looks to be the mid-70’s (Mose’s hair is bushed out in the fashion of the times), and he has changed the lyrics. Only a decade or so after the song first came out, he now feels compelled to sing “you don’t have to go to the movies, to see something plain absurd.” What movies is he referring to? Hollywood blockbusters like the Towering Inferno and the Poseidon Adventure? What now does he mean by absurd? I suppose Mose felt he had to change the lyrics because off-Broadway was no longer the site of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, but would “off-off-Broadway” have been too awkward to put in its place? At any rate, gone is the reference to Beckett, and the connection Mose once made has become dated (somewhat like my even thinking about this at all).
I can’t believe I never tried to learn this song when I first heard it, courtesy of my college roommate in 1973. But I guess I was still learning to bang out things on the piano in the way Sunnyland Slim or Otis Spann would have accompanied Muddy (from records that I mostly could only find in bargain bins). Besides, the guy in the room next door was listening to Chick Corea, Josef Zawinul, and Herbie Hancock, another guy down the hall liked Vince Guaraldi, the guy who was freaking out to Archie Shepp also listened to Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett (the latter, when singing to his playing, sounds oddly like Snoopy, doesn’t he?), a girl in the other wing had a boy friend who played like both Jarrett and Cecil Taylor, somewhere in my record collection I even had a record of Roger Kellaway playing the closing theme from All in the Family and another of Max Morath playing The Entertainer, another girl would talk about growing up listening to Errol Garner (and I’d smile and nod my head even though at the time I was not that familiar with Errol Garner), another guy who I’d become housemates with liked Maria Muldaur (relevant here because of Mac Rebennack’s accompaniment to Don’t You Feel My Leg), another guy who visited his girlfriend in the dorm had me listening to Tom Waits and Stevie Wonder, as well as Joni Mitchell (relevant here, I guess, because of her similarity to Carly Simon and later collaboration with Mingus), and it seems to me there were some guys, their rooms always thick with smoke, toking up maybe to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, King Crimson, or certainly that very Who album in which Pete Townshend wrote liner notes in praise of Mose Allison…plus I had signed up for pianoforte class through the college (at age 7, I had had a year-and-a half of piano lessons, but had given them up to play the trumpet through high school), and my teacher had me struggling with Clementi’s sonatinas, Chopin’s preludes, and Bartok’s Mikrokosmos. And when I first heard the song (and maybe it was only later, because I think the album my roommate played for me was Back Country Suite, which, if I remember correctly, doesn’t contain the song) would I have even understood what the lyrics referred to? – because, although I knew the term “absurd” from a high school English teacher (see later comments), I wasn’t really familiar with Beckett until the following year, when another housemate of mine turned me on to both him and Joyce (as well as to Miles…
“I’m Not Talking”: the Mose Allison tune I should really learn. “I’m not talking. Don’t ask me what it’s all about. I used to think I knew it, but now I just sit and spew it” -- or something like that. Lyrics – the last thing I usually pay attention to when I listen to a song – which says – what?
By the way, Charles Brown (mentioned above), the blues pianist and singer noted for such great recordings as “Merry Christmas, Baby” and “Driftin’ Blues,” should not be confused with the more famous cartoon character Charlie Brown, both of whom have probably had an important influence on this blog.
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