"Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare"

I am in no position to make any statements about Shakespeare. As someone who is vastly under-read on the matter and has only studied the comedies (I dropped out of school before we got to the romances, much less the histories, tragedies or any of the poetry) I really am the last one to make any lasting statements about the bard, but Stephen Greenblatt is. He is the author of Will in the World. The man is also a professor at Harvard as well as the editor of The Norton Shakespeare, the definitive Shakespeare collection.

Greenblatt is a pretty good writer himself and his sheer enthusiasm for the text really makes the book fun to read. The notes on Shakespeare’s life are informative, but not really interesting or even new, as almost all that information has been said before (the notable exception, for me, was the concept that Hamlet was written for Shakespeare’s dead son, Hamnet). The real joy of the book comes the anecdotes about Elizabethan and Jacobean England and their interplay with Shakespeare’s plays. The chapters of note are the two on The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth. They serve to highlight the era in which those masterpieces were written while drawing attention to the reasons why (aside from the prose) they are so important.

In the end Greenblatt concludes that what really makes Shakespeare so special is his opacity and his love of the mundane. To me that is the definition of high art. One must fill the work with vagaries, giving the audience something to question, to seek. There has to be some sort of knot at the heart of the work that can never be untied, but is impossible to stop playing with. Then for art to be truly high it must be universal and what is more universal than the mundane.

Courtesy Clerk or How A Bag Boy's Soul Is Crushed A Little More Every Order

I tried my best not to bruise the woman’s peaches, but ended up doing it just the same. It would be more accurate however, to say that I did not intend to bruise the stone fruit. I had just gotten to the point where I did not mean to be malicious in any way; I had simply given up trying to be successful in any, way, shape or form.

“Excuse me. Excuse me, sir. Sir, excuse me. Are you trying to destroy those white peaches? And don’t think I didn’t notice you shoving those bananas around. Those bags are meant to be environmentally friendly, not for you to mangle my groceries. Just because they’re bigger does not mean you have to cram more stuff in them.”

I loathed those bags. They were some cloth bag that the self-righteous hag had purchased to feel better about herself every time she bought groceries. She could have even bought the store brand bags for 99 cents a piece, but no she had to do it herself, assembling an array of bags so oddly sized that evened the most seasoned of Courtesies couldn’t properly handle her order. Cramming a pineapple, buffalo meat and a baguette into an otter shaped bag purchased at some god-forsaken aquarium, I cursed her and the fact that she would probably ask for help caring the order to her Prius, only to not even give me the decency of a smile or a “Good day”.

“And would you like any help out to your car today?”

“No, I think I can manage.” I was blessed.

“Well have a nice day.”

Next order is, thankfully, traditional plastic sacks.

On Quitting

Quitting is such an ugly word that I have many times vowed to (I dare not say a certain word here) stop using it. However, quitting is something that I do all of the time. I do it so often in fact that I consider myself quite good at it. I quit writing a review. I quit reading a book. I quit eating a meal. I quit quitting, etcetera. These tiny aborted attempts have begun racking up considerably and I think that it is necessary to air a little bit of them out.

Most notably of my recent failures has been an essay about “quitting” a book. In my beautifully worded piece (I may post it later once I have weeded out some of the grammatical issues) I explained that “quitting” a book is really not something to be ashamed of, it is something to embrace. We should be free to read what we want and not be bothered to finish a book that is for some reason particularly difficult. We can always return to the novel at a later date when we are better prepared. There is no point in beating one’s head against a literary wall in some vain attempt at proving one’s intellectual might. There is no expiration date on fine literature.

Why I stopped this piece mid-stream I do not know. Did I let it sit too long between first draft and revisions? Did I make the mistake of showing it to someone too early? Or did I write at the wrong time of the day (writing in the middle of the night is still foreign territory to me)? These questions really do not concern me though. What concerns me is the simple fact that I have been quitting so many things lately. Even worse, I propose (mentally) to quit certain things to alleviate any discomfort. I cannot count the number of times I have quit my job this week alone. I wanted to quit a difficult conversation with a doctor. I even wanted to quit on a bowl of cereal because it had gotten soggy. These are not ventures that I actually end up quitting, only moments of displeasure when my mind jumps to quitting. And it is this fact that upsets me so much, the fact my mind rushes to ending without completion.

The answer to this still eludes me. Self-reflection in the form of blogging has failed to really yield any results. Maybe the key may lie in my old mantra of mental health “What if I’m blowing this out of proportion and am not really that crazy”. Perhaps this is something everyone else does and I simply don’t know about it. It could be some widespread, yet unspoken of condition. Even if I am completely wrong in this theory at least now I have a new skill, quitting.

"Lolita"

Lolita is so full of beauty and ideas that it is almost impossible to talk about it. So in order to ease this pain or out of sheer laziness I have distilled Lolita into four points.

1. Lolita is about America, an America that Nabokov loved more than Europe.
2. Lolita (the character) may stand for America and Humbert Humbert may stand for Europe, it is difficult to argue either side
3. Nabokov is a writer of virtuosic talent, and sometimes he may be too talented.
4. The backbone of the book is the raw emotional energy of Humbert Humbert.

Other things may be important, but the real soul of the book lies in these four ideas. I promote someone to add something I’ve missed, but I challenge anyone to remove anything from the list.

Untitled Piece

We were sitting outside watching the clouds. In the monsoon season there were these epic cloud formations and especially around sundown they would become particularly intense. We would sit out in the back yard in plastic furniture except for the piece Daddy made for Momma (a beautiful lightly stained cedar Adirondack) drinking soda (I was sobering up) and thinking about the future.

Daddy liked to put a lot of weight into conversation in those days. He valued a good talk and a man on if he could conduct himself in a good talk. But Daddy talked in a different way than the average man. If he wanted to talk about the inherent nature of man to do good and what it means to be just, he would talk about Superman. If he wanted to talk about betrayal and what it meant to lose your hero, he would describe being a folkie watch Bob Dylan (except you never called him Bob Dylan, it was “Zimmie, you don’t turn the man into a god.”) progress in his styles. He could never get out there and say exactly what it was he wanted to. You never heard what was buggin’ the man, you never heard how beautiful the sunset was, or how frustrated he was with being jobless. Instead you got a story about Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s feud and how they were secret lovers or you got a tall tale of Mark Rothko and the Seagram’s commission.

None of us could ever tell it straight in those days those. We had to weave around it, circle around it a couple of times, slowly approaching it and then not pounce. Never did we pounce. We let it lie. And then we moved on.

"amulet"

Is there some sort of rule written that if we like a particular author then we must like their entire body of work?
If the answer is yes then I am in some trouble.

The problem is not that I did not like “amulet” by Roberto Bolaño, but more that I even have to ask. I will be the first to say that Bolaño’s “The Savage Detectives” did more to influence my writing and me as a person than I can really remember in recent reading. There lies the problem with “amulet” a book taken from a small vignette in Detectives. It has references to all of these characters that I love but it is not really about them. It is about something different.

More confusingly I could never really tell how Bolaño was writing the book. I continually expected the style to become smaller, the stories denser and the writing tighter. I wanted him to switch styles from an epic (Savage) to a novella form (I wanted it to be like the excellent short book “Desperate Characters” by Paula Fox a really excellent read and novel/la I would really encourage reading) (The Great Gatsby, The Turn of the Screw, etc.) Bolaño never does this though. He keeps doing what he did before, but with mild variants made more to fit the story than the size of the book. What can be said is that is written in a similar and different manner than “The Savage Detectives”. This work feels less like the work of a visceral realist and more like really good not-so-magical (it is light on magic but heavy on musings on the actualities of modern physics[there is a long diatribe about the nature of time and place that runs through as a general idea as the entire book could be viewed as happening in one moment in a Women's bathroom) realist.

It could be said that I am harping on this book because it is not the book I wanted it to be. To such a question I would respond with “Yes, but why did Roberto Bolaño bother publishing a book that is so similar, but falls so much shorter. Why did he impress us with such skill and talent only to show it used to a lesser extent on a project that from the beginning is going to be second rate.”

Maybe my problem is I have too many expectations of what a book should and should not be. Maybe I invest too much into what a book will be without recognizing that all my favorite literary experiences have been surprises. However, it is impossible to go into some sort of artistic experience without preconceived notions, and in reality mine only existed because I loved the author’s previous work so much which really is not that bad, is it?

It could almost be said in his big books he does not do enough, but in Roberto Bolaño’s small work he tries to do too much.

"The Age of Wire and String"

“…that by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire…”

Surrealist and absurdist Ben Marcus says this fairly early on in his book “The Age of Wire and String”. One would never refer to this slim volume as a novel but more as an epic description of a society. By extension then we can call this a story because society is the grandest (in terms of size) story that can ever be told. Marcus attempts to tell us the story of some culture that simultaneously exists, is extinct and has yet to exist. Between the vagaries and the absurdities of Marcus’ descriptions (they come out as bizarre entries into a grand encyclopedia) one wonders where he actually obtained his source material, what that source material was, what he is manipulating, and when he is actually writing (in the traditional sense of the word). However none of this matters when Mr. Marcus really shines. In a description about eating he is able to bring home the peculiar and ridiculous nature of our most common activity. Another describes an act of home invasion in which the invader confines the family and forces them to witness the invaders suicide. The first works because Marcus has reinvented something that most of us have forgotten to talk about years ago and the second works because it brings the absurd and mixes it with the human for something incredibly visceral. The entry becomes a little too much for words. It may be a stretch to refer to Ben Marcus as a novelist, but it is not stretch to refer to him as a real writer.