After a week of notable birthdays, including Marx, Freud, Orson Welles, Willie Mays, myself and also my great friend Annalee Newitz, who celebrated the twentieth cumpleaños of our acquaintance yesterday, it is now Thomas Pynchon's fête. The author of my all-time favorite book The Crying of Lot 49, as well as close runner-up Vineland and the awesome Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon also wrote a trenchant piece on Los Angeles in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots that serves as the perfect counterpoint to the Southern California presented in his fiction:

Feelings range from a reflexive, angry, driving need to hit back somehow, to an anxious worry that the slaying is just one more bad grievance, one more bill that will fall due some warm evening this summer. Yet in the daytime's brilliance and heat, it is hard to believe there is any mystery to Watts. Everything seems so out in the open, all of it real, no plastic faces, no transistors, no hidden Muzak, or Disneyfied landscaping or smiling little chicks to show you around. Not in Raceriotland. Only a few historic landmarks, like the police substation, one command post for the white forces last August, pigeons now thick and cooing up on its red-tiled roof. Or, on down the street, vacant lots, still looking charred around the edges, winking with emptied Tokay, port and sherry pints, some of the bottles peeking out of paper bags, others busted.

A kid could come along in his bare feet and step on this glass--not that you'd ever know. These kids are so tough you can pull slivers of it out of them and never get a whimper. It's part of their landscape, both the real and the emotional one: busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste. Traditionally Watts. An Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia spent 30 years gathering some of it up and converting a little piece of the neighborhood along 107th Street into the famous Watts Towers, perhaps his own dream of how things should have been: a fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, encrusted with a dazzling mosaic of Watts debris. Next to the Towers, along the old Pacific Electric tracks, kids are busy every day busting more bottles on the street rails. But Simon Rodia is dead, and now the junk just accumulates.

A few blocks away, other kids are out playing on the hot blacktop of the school playground. Brothers and sisters too young yet for school have it better--wherever they are they have yards, trees, hoses, hiding places. Not the crowded, shadeless tenement living of any Harlem; just the same one- or two-story urban sprawl as all over the rest of L.A., giving you some piece of grass at least to expand into when you don't especially feel like being inside.

In the business part of town there is a different idea of refuge. Pool halls and bars, warm and dark inside, are crowded; many domino, dice and whist games in progress. Outside, men stand around a beer cooler listening to a ball game on the radio; others lean or hunker against the sides of buildings--low, faded stucco boxes that remind you, oddly, of certain streets in Mexico. Women go by, to and from what shopping there is. it is easy to see how crowds, after all, can form quickly in these streets, around the least seed of a disturbance or accident. For the moment, it all only waits in the sun.

Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun, hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.

From here, much of the white culture that surrounds Watts--and, in a curious way, besieges it-- looks like those jets: a little unreal, a little less than substantial. For Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the "action" everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town.

That bit about the "ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes" gets me every time. Someday soon, I need to make a pilgrimage to the Watts Towers and tilt my head skyward as the cone of sound engulfs me.

Tags: autobiography, friends, holiday, literature
Current Location: 85704

Tags: archive, history, literature, theory
Current Location: 85704
Muse: the strains of a Charleston from across the water

From W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz--

From the outset my main concern was with the shape and the self-contained nature of discrete things, the curve of banisters on a staircase, the moulding of a stone arch over a gateway, the tangled precision of the blades in a tussock of dried grass (108).

Tags: autobiography, commonplace book, literature
Current Location: 85704

The news that Adolph Rupp-era Kentucky All-American Ralph Beard has passed away calls back memories of the time I saw him at Louisville's storied Hotel Seelbach, which I wrote about in the early months of this journal. At the time I didn't recognize that Beard's involvement in a notorious college basketball point-shaving scandal that led to his being banned from the NBA made the location of my encounter especially rich. The Seelbach, you see, figures in The Great Gatsby, a novel in which the 1919 Chicago "Black" Sox scandal plays a role. When I saw Sherman Alexie deliver the keynote talk at the University of Louisville's annual literature conference last year, he kept coming back to the image of F. Scott Fitzgerald's ghost wandering the halls of the Seelbach, where Alexie was staying. I also didn't realize back in 2004 how deliciously ironic it was that Beard was accused of shaving.

Tags: history, literature, sports
Current Location: 85704

From Umbert Eco, The Name of the Rose--

Intent on their work, they seemed to forget that one of their brothers was being anxiously sought throughout the grounds, and that two others had disappeared in frightful circumstances. Here, I said to myself, is the greatness of our order: for centuries and centuries men like these have seen the barbarian hordes burst in, sack their abbeys, plunge kingdoms into chasms of fire, and yet they have gone on cherishing parchments and inks, have continued to read, moving their lips over words that have been handed down through centuries and which they will hand down to the centuries to come. They went on reading and copying as the millennium approached; why should they not continue to do so now?

The day before, Benno had said he would be prepared to sin in order to procure a rare book. He was not lying and not joking. A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks (183).

Tags: commonplace book, literature, sex, theory
Current Location: 85704

I just composed a long entry about Radiohead, inspired by my reading more about their new album. My subject header was "In Which I Stray From the Herd and Risk Unwanted Attention From Wild Beasts." When I went to save it, though, my application crashed, leaving me with nothing to show for my labor. I suspect that someone up in the firmament was looking out for me, possibly even Thom Yorke. So I won't bother to write my rant over. Suffice it to say that I continue to believe, despite owning and liking most of the band's records, that they are as overrated as James Joyce.

Tags: literature, music
Current Location: 85704

Walking to my office this morning, I heard the following in passing:

"He's one of those unreconstructed 60s types."

You can grow a whole world from that stem cell.

Tags: everyday, history, literature
Current Location: 85704

When I was in junior high school, I took Latin. Not understanding the work that is required to learn a language well enough to become proficient in it, however, I muddled along getting decent grades without really mastering anything. Most of my circle of friends were taking Spanish. And they seemed to be having a better time than I was. So I decided to switch to Spanish. That meant having to take Spanish I with kids two years beneath me and also taking my religion class as an independent study over the summer. But it was worth the maneuvering. Remembering my struggles as I'd gotten into more advanced Latin, I made sure not make the same mistakes twice in learning Spanish.

By the end of the year, I was doing well enough that my teacher gave me permission to try to complete Spanish II over the summer. My mother found a tutor at the University of Maryland, an undergraduate named Mark who charged absurdly little -- even in the mid-1980s, $5 per hour was a tremendous bargain -- and was willing to meet me halfway between his home and ours, at the perpetually depressed Free State Mall in Bowie. He changed my life.

I'd been so miserable at my school, not to mention largely ignored by my teachers, that the love of learning I'd had as a child had been beaten into a state of self-loathing. By sitting with me for an hour in one of the booths at Happy Italian Delight Pizza, conversing about his life and mine, Mark showed me that it was possible to be smart and interested in the world without being pretentious. And he showed me that school is not the place to learn, so much as the place to test what you've learned on your own.

He'd studied in Argentina and found a girlfriend down there with whom he was having the predictable long-distance relationship troubles now that he was back in Maryland. While he never broached details that might be inappropriate for our tutoring arrangement, he shared enough of his experiences with her for me to understand that, despite the misery of high school, I might one day have similar ones myself. Not knowing how marginalized I was at school, he treated me as I'd always dreamed of being treated: a bright person without the burden of history weighing him down.

Mark also introduced me to the idea that literature is more fun to read for fun than it is to read as work. In addition to conversing about our daily lives, we also discussed his cultural interests. His favorite author was Jorge Luis Borges, someone I'd never heard of before. Unlike many of the smart undergrads I've encountered in my teaching, I wasn't one of those kids who reads the classics early in life as a way of compensating for my sense of being different from the herd. I did the summer reading our school demanded with relative enthusiasm, but, once classes started, was so unhappy that I barely cracked a book. The idea that literature might mean something to me apart from being a subject I'd get a lazy "A" in hadn't crossed my mind.

Hearing Mark talk about his love for Borges, though, and feeling that love come through in his indignation that the great man still hadn't received a Nobel Prize, I decided that I'd give literature a shot. So I procured the only Spanish-language copy of a Borges title I could find -- remember, this was years before Al Gore invented the internet -- and sat down to read. The book I'd purchased, La cifra, is one of Borges's late works, a very minor one in the scope of his oeuvre. I didn't know that at the time, however, and was immediately taken, as I turned the pages, by the number of historical and literary references in Borges's pieces. That intrigued me. It had never occurred to me that poetry could be about culture instead of feelings.

Finally, I decided I would try to make it all the way through one poem. The one I picked, somewhat randomly, is not, it turns out, among the most interesting in the collection. But I worked hard enough at learning it that it remains impressed in my mind. I can picture myself reading the words out loud, over and over, as I sat on the curb outside the pizzeria, waiting to be picked up after an unusual nighttime meeting with Mark:

El sueño

La noche nos impone su tarea
mágica. Destejer el universo,
las ramificaciones infinitas
de efectos y de causas, que se pierden
en ese vértigo sin fondo, el tiempo.
La noche quiere que esta noche olvides
tu nombre, tus mayores y tu sangre,
cada palabra humana y cada lágrima,
lo que pude enseñarte la vigilia,
el ilusorio punto de los geómetras,
la línea, el plano, el cubo, el pirámide,
el cilindro, la esfera, el mar, las olas,
tu mejilla en la almohada, la frescura
de la sábana nueva. . .
los imperios, los Césares y Shakespeare
y lo que es más difícil, lo que amas.
Curiosamente, una pastilla puede
borrar el cosmos y erigir el caos.

I also remember being disturbed by the last two lines, which seem to take the vast range of the list that precedes them and render it meaningless. I suppose that was the point, since Borges was a master of the end-of-sonnet like turn, whether in prose or poetry. I also hadn't yet come into contact with cosmos-erasing substances. A few years later, when I was less innocent and more happy, I would drift off with this poem in my head, as if it represented a permit from the authorities to stop thinking and start floating away. Perhaps that's why, when I had the sort of minor surgery in 2003 that should probably come with scare quotes, but which, because I only needed a local anaesthetic, left me conscious for the procedure, I decided to read Borges to take my mind off of the operation. Tonight I'll be teaching Borges in my senior seminar. Right now I'm going to go prepare for class. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the labor.

Tags: autobiography, literature, spanish
Current Location: 85704

The Harry Potter madness of the past few days has been really strange for me. This is the first time that Skylar and I have been fully caught up with everything. And I'm suddenly aware, not only intellectually but emotionally, of the legions of grown-up fans of the series, some of whom are now expressing disappointment at the conclusion of the story arc. Because my pleasure in the books has mostly been routed A) through my daughter's pleasure and B) through my own pleasure at their pedagogic value, I'm taken aback by the mass of the burden they have been asked to bear. I know that those people who are interested in fan fiction have a special investment in Harry Potter, as they do with other made-up worlds, one that I can appreciate even if I do not share it. But I also get the sense that it might be salutory for them to take a few steps back from that investment and ask themselves whether the failings they are discerning in the final book and the series as a whole would qualify as such for younger readers or those who, like myself, have read the series as if they were still young.

Tags: daughter, everyday, literature
Current Location: 85704

From Tanijaki Junichiro, The Makioka Sisters (translated by Edward Seidensticker)--

The year before, the Makiokas had had lunch at the Pavilion of the All-Merciful, and the year before that at one of the tea houses by the bridge. This year they chose the precincts of the Temple of the All-Conquering Law -- that temple to which, in April each year, the twelve-year olds of Kyoto are brought to pray for a happy adolescence.

"Remember the tongue-cut sparrow, Etsuko? This is where he lived." They had crossed the bridge back toward the city, and were starting through the bamboo groves near the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon.

A chilly wind had come up by the time they passed the Nomomiya, the Shrine in the Fields, where in ancient times court maidens retired for purification before leaving to become Shrine Virgins at Ise. At the Enrian Hermitage a shower of cherry petals was falling, to decorate their kimono sleeves. Again they walked through the Temple of Clean Coolness, and, taking a train, arrived back at the Bridge of the Passing Moon yet a third time. After a rest they hailed a cab and drove to the Heian Shrine.

Those weeping cherries just beyond the gallery to the left as one steps inside the gate and faces the main hall -- those cherries said to be famous even abroad -- how would they be this year? Was it perhaps already too late? Always they stepped through the gallery with a strange rising of the heart, but the five of them cried out as one when they saw that cloud of pink spread across the late-afternoon sky.

It was the climax of the pilgrimage, the moment treasured through a whole year. All was well, they had come again to the cherries in full bloom. There was a feeling of relief, and a hope that next year they might be as fortunate, and for Sachiko, at least, the thought that even if she herself stood here next year, Yukiko might be married and far away. The flowers would come again, but Yukiko would not. It was a saddening thought, and yet it contained almost a prayer that, for Yukiko's sake, she might indeed no longer be with them. Sachiko had stood under these same trees with these same emotions the year before and the year before that, and each time she had found it hard to understand why they should still be together. She could not bear to look at Yukiko.

The willows and oaks beyond the cherry grove were sending out new buds. The oleanders had been clipped into round balls. Sending the four ahead, Teinosuke photographed them at all the usual spots: White Tiger pond, with its iris-lined shore; the stepping stones called the Bridge of the Reclining Tiger, reflected from the water with the four figures. He had them line up under the truly glorious branches that trail down over the path from the pine-topped hillock to the west of the Pond of the Nesting Phoenix. All sorts of strangers took pictures of the Makioka procession. The polite would carefully ask permission, the rude would simply snap. There the family had had tea, here they had fed the red carp -- they remembered the smallest details of earlier pilgrimages.

Tags: commonplace book, literature
Current Location: 85719

As I believe I have previously recounted here, I like to read Japanese novels in translation over the summer. I started doing it back in 1988, when a recommendation of my ex -- who had just broken up with me at the time, though not permanently -- provoked me to read Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari -- last name first, as per the national custom -- which moved me greatly, particularly as I had just taken a course in Asian Art History in the spring semester. The novel is rich with images that have antecedents in Japan's visual arts.

Even then, before my professional path had been cleared through the brush of indecision -- funny, isn't it, how rapidly the jungle can grow back to obscure one's Aufklärung -- I had the sense that Snow Country provided me a different kind of reading, distinct from the traditions with which I was familiar. Subsequently, once I'd decided that I wanted to go to graduate school to study literature, I nurtured this perception that I doing something exempt, to remind myself what it meant to read for pleasure, without the pressure to instrumentalize the process. When I was studying for my exams or working on my dissertation, this feeling was especially strong.

I've maintained the habit since moving to Arizona, making it a point to bring a Japanese novel on camping trips to the California coast. This has imparted an element of nostalgia to the practice, as I remember how I spent my California summers while fleeing Arizona ones. But it hasn't swayed my conviction that I'm reading for pleasure instead of work. Recently, however, I've been experiencing an unprecedented "bleed through" when I'm engaged in this ritual. This past semester I had a visiting student from Japan in my lecture class on the American novel, whom I was able to help by making connections between the course material and equivalent Japanese novels. And now, as I read Tanizaki Junichiro's The Makioka Sisters, which I've been saving to savor for many years, I'm seeing all sorts of convergence between the themes he treats and my areas of interest.

Today I even had the thought, after reading a passage in which his characters go to view the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, that there's a lot of similarity between the way that highly ritualized practice is conducted and the way that we listen to popular songs. I may expand on that insight, strange but potentially illuminating, at a later date. Right now, I'm struggling through the realization that I may have been reading for work all along without knowing it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does give the memory of pleasure a different cast.

Tags: autobiography, literature, work
Current Location: 92023

I started reading Skylar The Lord of the Rings out loud tonight. I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. I'm ecstatic that I will soon relive all the excellent bits, from Brandywine repasts to Tom Bombadil, that were left out of the film adaptation. I remain hugely impressed with Peter Jackson's accomplishment. But the books are still worlds better.

Tags: daughter, everyday, literature
Current Location: 85704

I've been reorganizing the mess that is my home office. Inevitably, this process leads to a point when I give up on the hopes of truly finishing and then throw the remainder of the piles in random boxes. Six months later, I'll clean out those boxes, only to fill new ones. I think they call this entropy. Nevertheless, I do feel that I've made more headway than usual this time. For example, I've reconfigured my dresser so that I can use the top as a base for my laptop. It's the perfect height for typing comfortably. And I've been having so much trouble with my right knee when it's bent for long periods -- two weeks of heavy duty office hours are to blame -- that standing to use the computer is a welcome alternative. I'm standing right now, in fact. Did I mention that today is Thomas Pynchon's birthday? Well, it is. And that's why I'm going to resume reading Against the Day, which I was enjoying greatly over break, but had to set aside during the semester. I'll let you know how the book strikes me in my current frame of mind, in which I spend the better part of each day feeling "framed" for misdeeds I didn't do. I wonder if this qualifies as a typical Live Journal entry. I'm trying harder to vent without worrying about the ratio of fuel to air. I'm also trying not to use so many conceits or to be so conceited. But those goals will be significantly harder to achieve. Back to the piles in my less than paradisal no-longer-a-bachelor pad. . .

Tags: autobiography, everyday, health, literature
Current Location: 85704