Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock by Eliza Fenwick (1795)

It's cruel of F. P. Lock (as blurbed on Broadview's back cover) to suggest that readers contrast Fenwick to Jane Austen. As Terry Castle gleefully revenged, Fenwick the moralizing primer-writer never broke or scuffed the cheap toy characters and incidents of moralizing melodrama.

But she did at least have the courage to throw them away. Fenwick lived a life unconducive to smugness, and despite the risibly artificial details of her novel's course, I was shaken awake by the final kiddie boatride over the falls. The book's moral center, admired and feared by all, could be no more priggishly rigid than she is and still condescend to human involvement (and the novel frequently insists that hygenically avoiding human involvement lands one in worse scrapes still), but despite all her considerable ingenuity, her outrageously sound instincts, and her remarkable freedom of movement, she's correct to blame herself for the book's particular surprise unhappy ending. Fenwick energetically pursued the secret that virtually all novelists (including Austen) wisely, professionally, refuse to divulge: that we can never be good enough.

Early Harvest

From The Dial review of Douglas Sladen's Twenty Years of my Life (1914), via a tip from Philip Waller's Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870-1918:

Curiously interesting and rather characteristic of puzzling human nature is the fact that Mr. Sladen, with so many other books of far greater literary worth to his credit, seems to take especial pride in his editorship of the first “Who’s Who” in its present form — there had been an annual of that name in existence for half a century before he recognized, in 1897, the splendid possibilities in its peculiar title. So great is his satisfaction in this product of his editorial industry that he calls himself, on the title-page to his present book, “author of ‘Who’s Who,’” and nothing more. In fact, he devotes a special chapter to the history of “How I Wrote ‘Who’s Who.’” Among the interesting things he tells us about the planning of the work we quote the following:

“The idea of adding ‘recreations’ to the more serious items which had been included in previous biographical dictionaries was adopted at one of the councils of war which we used to hold in the partners’ room of A. & C. Black, at 4 Soho Square. And for selling purposes it proved far and away the best idea in the whole book, when it was published. The newspapers were never tired of quoting the recreations of eminent people, thus giving the book a succession of advertisements of its readability, and shopkeepers who catered for their various sports bought the book to get addresses of the eminent people, who were, many of them, very indignant at the Niagara of circulars which resulted.”

Phil Karlson in the Fifties

I'd hoped to write at the The Auteurs about the Pacific Film Archive series "Phil Karlson in the Fifties" (opening with two bangs and several beatings on June 5) but, well, you see how it's been around here.

Still, I should at least try to influence the one or two readers who might accidentally pass through this particular deserted funhouse: The close collaboration between Karlson and otherwise washed-up star John Payne compares to Sternberg's with Dietrich or Nicholas Ray's with James Dean. You'll never again hear the phrase "Thanks for nothing" except in Payne's voice. The non-Payne selections I've seen were inventive and fast-paced, and I still haven't seen what's supposed to be one of the best, The Brothers Rico.

Go. Watch. "Unvailable on DVD"!

Christina La Sala and "Petrified Forest"

May 8th - June 5th, 2009
ampersand international arts
1001 Tennessee Street (at 20th. St.)
San Francisco, California 94107

In writing, it's called "a strong voice." Across materials, across moods, a sense of continuous engagement with another. Maybe not quite the human being you meet at the reception, the reading, or the party, but not a pose or a persona, no formula. Something wholer than that, someone you recognize when you enter the room.

In the voice of Christina La Sala, there's wit and inwit, with no hint of smirk. There's painstaking elegance, insisting on beauty even in shabbiness and loss. Art is what this voice does, and making art is necessarily making do.

There's a sort of dyslexic synesthesia, modal wires crossing at a dreamlike concept both reasonable and uncanny: Braille chewing gum, for example. ("'Well, I've tried to say How doth the little busy bee, but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.")

There's a poised sense of confrontation: a dare to make the first move, to cross this line, tip this balance, pop the bubble, eat me, shatter me.... We're being asked, I think, to make a decision: to consume and have done, or to live with the experience. To live at all is to live with one's decisions and actions and circumstances.

Which is to live with one's art. The least escapist of artists, La Sala affirms without flurry or bluster, but hour by hour, week by week, over what Louis Zukofsky called "a poem of a life": the work of a life in work. Duration itself becomes preoccupation: the times that bind, as in the obsessive stitching of La Sala's "Stay Awake" bedsheet, with its dare to fall asleep.

When these characteristics coincide, there's nothing anecdotal about the result, but we're tempted to narrate, to put this perplexing artifact in its place in some known story. The voice resists us. The Rapunzel-length hair-and-steel-wool braid of La Sala's "Straw into Gold," for example, intertwines aging's fairy-tale transmutation of brown-to-gray with our age's science-fiction transmutation of organism-to-machine. Its weave is clean; the tangle is in the yarns we spin.

A return to glasswork after many years, "Petrified Forest" carries La Sala's voice at its strongest. In writing, it would be called a serial poem, a unified work made up of sets of paired individual works:

There's a row of large glass panels etched with various patterns — floral garlands, diamonds diamonded, curved boxes, pinstripes — made more elaborately decorative by shadow-play as each leans against the wall from a painted wooden platform — which, in turn, has been marred by carved tally marks.

There's a column of squat glass strips, smeared by tally marks, as if by a fingertip dipped in acid. Each bar is held flush close against the wall; the shadows turn them into a trompe l'oeil of greasy icicles or streaked unguents.

Naturally, I'm tempted into narrative. I recognized one pattern from gift wrap or wallpaper of my childhood, and then I thought of cargo cults and Renaissance reliquaries: how the fragmented kitsch of one culture, after everything falls apart, inspires the high craft of another culture. And a prisoner in the ivory tower leaves marks which, preserved and honored after everything falls apart again, become reproduced in their turn. As Alan Squire said in The Petrified Forest, "I've formed a theory about that that would interest you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that's shot from under us."

But my ramshackle construction, full of plot-holes, hardly matches the piece's confident coherence. Perhaps I should be thinking instead of natural history and microbiological cultures: a science museum with brittle slabs impressed by ancient ferns, flowers, floods, and crystals, and with slide mounts demonstrating, oh, the effects of antibiotics?

But that hardly conveys the piece's aggression, humor, and endurance. I might as well take the etymological approach: Arizona's fossilized trees are extinct members of a botanical family that includes the Chilean monkey-puzzle tree, named Araucariaceae for the Arauco people who live in the region. "Contrary to popular belief, the Quechua word awqa 'rebel, enemy', is probably not the root of araucano: the latter is more likely derived from the placename rag ko 'clayey water'." Yes, clear as mud.

Or maybe it's best if I pass this to the strong voice of Alice Notley, a poet born in Bisbee, Arizona, about 300 miles south of Petrified Forest National Park:

Text for a Picture Book

I learn from Chris Ackerley ("Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt," Journal of Beckett Studies, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2) of herniation in the short statement made by the reappearance of Arsene (known at that time as the gentleman with the fine full apron), extruded between "For in truth the same things happen to us all, especially in our situation, whatever that is, if only we chose to know it" and "But I am worse than Mr. Ash, a man I once knew to nod to" in the first edition and excised (leaving scar) from the next. Watt's narrative flow brooked no digression.

Being neither precious nor illuminating, the material should strike a (two-note) chord with our longest-suffering readers.

But what is this, so high, so white,
And what is this, so black, so low,
Burning burning burning bright,
Quenched long ago, cold long ago?
It is a duck, a duck, a duck,
An old East India Runner Duck,
On a mat, a mat, a mat,
A hairy mat, a hairy mat.
Oh ancient mat, oh hairy mat,
Oh high white brightly burning duck,
Cush's stones are crying yet,
Forth from the wall to Habbakuk,
And from the wood the answering beam
Cries yet of the appointed time
Still tarrying, and of old resolves,
Of wind, and sand, and evening wolves.

Impatient to be off, the little rascal, she has crept in and sat down on the mat. See how she opens and shuts, in imitation of her master, her orange bill. How against the fawn the dark eyes flash. But Not Heard, she is saying, in her duck language, it is time we were gone. Like the Jerusalem Artichoke, she was born in Newtown-Mount-Kennedy, and can hardly walk, but she is a true Indian Runner for all that. Her breeding is so high that she can eat nothing but pork scrap, pea meal, boiled bullock's lights, boiled sheep's paunches, and a little grit and gravel well scalded together with thirds and middlings. The lines were to her grandmother, I think. I was living in World's End then, I believe. For I have never been without my India Runner. Where I go, she goes too, and every time I leave she leaves with me. So we all bring something with us. You bring your bags, and I bring my duck. In this way we are sure not to go emptyhanded away. Pretty Nuala! They are the best wives a man ever had. And every Sunday she lays an egg for my breakfast. I wake up in the morning and find it in my bed. A long green egg. Which I gob.

Return to the Hotsy Totsy Club

And now that I'm fifty, I can even sometimes enjoy the journey from Too-Good-to-Be-True to Not-True. It's like watching an old bartender mix a new drink.

The Death Wish in American Publicity Material : Part 6 in an Occasional Series

Three Wheels

Reading Robert Musil elates me; reading A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil depressed me. Musil's work embodies (engenders, swaddles) "the other condition" in temporal and social limits. His characters' disillusionments don't disprove or deny their intuition: it's left its ambiguously eternal spot of space-time. Musil's summarizers live once too far removed from Musil's unions. You either walk with the point or beside it.

Homage to Kevin Nutt

If the timbre is sound the house will stand.

It may tumble into the cornfield or the sea, but it will stand tumbling.

Footnote without paper

The earliest English source I've found associating the now-commonplace but non-OED-attested sense of "ekphrasis" with a non-classical text ("Ode on a Grecian Urn," naturally) was an attack piece which in passing insulted its victim (Professor Earl R. Wasserman) for coining the "barbarous formation" oxymoronic in a book which does in fact predate the OED's first citation by two years.