Showing posts with label Dostoyevsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dostoyevsky. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Fyodor


Fyodor, I think we would have gotten
very drunk together, and that
wouldn't have done either of us
any good. Still searching, but
I haven't yet found any writer
more delighted than you were
to dig into the muck
of consciousness. Others may
dig boldly or conscientiously,
some timidly, but you--
you did it in your prose with glee.

When I read your novels,
I get depressed and thrilled.
I get weary and joyful.
For about 45 seconds,
I may even become Russian.

I visited a "Dostoyevsky House"
they've created on your behalf
in St. Petersburg. It wasn't
bad at all. I bought a postcard
based on a painting of you.
I never sent it to anyone. Jesus
Christ, what you would have
thought of tourists! Lord,
help me: what you would
have thought of my
calling you "Fyodor."

Tolstoy overhead everything
that was said. You
overheard everything
that went unsaid.

Your books are as modern
as Dickens' aren't. You're
a brawler in prose.
You're also dead. What a
goddamned shame. Or is it?
It's so hard to know.


hans ostrom 2015




Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Performance-Enhancing Drugs







(image: Roger Clemens, unamused)



The recent hubbub over performance-enhancing drugs has made many a sports-fan morose. If we take the long view, however, athletes have always probably been looking for an edge of some sort, and one wonders about the extent to which some of the drugs have a placebo effect. Also, think about all the bad and mediocre athletes who tried the drugs, only to find out they (the drug-takers) were still bad or mediocre athletes, except that they'd expended cash and ingested something awful.

I do remember with some amusement the Cold War Sports-Era, when some of the East Bloc athletes, especially some women, looked, well, unusual, but I reckon some athletes from the West were mischievous, too. Ya think?


As usual, I tend to focus on peripheral questions. For example, with regard to Barry Bonds, I always wondered why more players didn't imitate him by choking up on the bat, not by taking (allegedly!) performance-enhancing thingamabobs. Bat-speed seemed to be one key to Bonds's success. I don't know of another major league player who chokes up on the bat. In fact, most to the opposite. They get their hands on the knob of the bat itself.

At any rate, I decided to apply the contours of this sports-scandal to literature:


Performance-Enhancing Literary Scandal


Reports from Greece today allege Socrates
may have take the human growth-hormone,
HGH (not an inventive abbreviation). Owing
to an allergic reaction (the report continues),
Socrates may have had to employ Plato to
write the philosophy for which Socrates is
famous. Socrates, having also ingested hemlock
long ago, was not available for comment.


Meanwhile, communiques out of St. Petersburg
and Moscow suggest Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy
may have ingested steroids that helped them
double and triple the size of their novels. Elsewhere,
Faulkner and Joyce scholars are vehemently
denying that the impenetrable sentences of these
two Modern titans are the result of performance-
enhancing chemicals and not merely showing off.


Spokespersons for Thomas De Quincey and Charles
Bukowski said, "Read the books; then decide whether
the stuff we ingested enhanced or not. Also, shut up."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, speaking from West Egg in Heaven,
repeated his oft-quoted line: "First you take a drink, then
the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."*
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*Quotable Men of the Twentieth Century, edited by Jessica Allen. New York: William Morrow, 1999, p. 13.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Rain-Cow



I've been reading some literary theory (now, don't nod off immediately; wait a few moments)--specifically Genres in Discourse by Tzvetan Todorov.

Of course, we all go around assuming genres exist--things like novels, poems, plays, prayers, and autobiographies. Then there are so-called sub-genres like naturalistic novels, satiric novels, tragic plays, celebrity autobiographies, adventure films, and the curious sub-genre, "chick flick," which I think is essentially a movie with reasonably good dialogue, not much representation of violence, and maybe a little romance.

Todorov is not the first to note that while we go around assuming these genres actually exist, the more we probe them, the more permeable they seem; boundaries between alleged genres disappear. He starts with a big genre, "literature," and shows how difficult it is to prove literary writing is essentially different from other kinds of writing. He goes over the usual stuff about mimesis, self-reference, and fiction; with regard to the latter topic, he notes that novels are neither true nor false (such as a report about weather) but simply "fiction." We may assume a novel has some relation to truth, but even so, we realize it's fiction.

He also sensibly discusses, via Rene Wellek and Northrop Frye, the issues of form (or structure) and function. So at first glance, the purpose of a play seems different from that of a prayer or memo, and the structure of a poem seems different from that of a scientific report.

"Seems" is the problem, especially after Modern writers deliberately disrupted genre-boundaries and were self-conscious about the seeming part.

Todorov ends by concluding that these things, genres, are in fact not essential categories but are determined and re-determined each time people actually use them--in discourse. So a single sentence, without being changed, might appear in a scientific report or a novel, and its being associated with one genre or the other would depend upon who was writing or reading it and why. In other words, society makes up, perpetuates, and disrupts genres all the time.

In later chapters, he presents some fascinating analysis of Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground (what genre is this book in, for heaven's sake?) and of Poe's writing in general. Poe, says T., is all about things that are very very small or very very large. He might focus on somebody's teeth until the teeth become extraordinarily symbolic, or he may present a most extreme experience, like getting buried alive. Poe was always pushing genre-boundaries and, along the way, inventing genres, such as the detective story, the horror story, and science fiction.

Todorov does have some affection for the notion that a literary text tends to be more self-referential than a simple everyday statement like, "I'd like to buy this book." That is, the literary text is less of a purely transactional one and more of a made-thing, of interest in itself.

I witnessed a nice example of this at the mall today. A five-year old who clearly knew some sign-language signed for her grandmother, "Rain here," or "It is raining here." She even interpreted the signs for her grandmother. It was a serious, matter-of-fact exchange. Then the grandmother, feeling whimsical, signed "rain" and "cow." The five-year-old cracked up, as did the grandmother, who had essential signed a wee poem that juxtaposed "rain" and "cow" and therefore asked us to imagine a creature known as a "rain cow." What exactly would a rain cow be? Good question. Lots of possibilities. Much imagery comes to mind.

The point being--well, the point being, laughter is good--but also that by "enacting discourse," the grand-daughter and the grandmother had essentially marked off two genres--one a piece of everyday communication--messaging, we'll call it; the other a kind of self-referential performance, a word-play, intended to entertain and to disrupt messaging. The latter kind is what we might call "literature," bu there's no way we can prove, absolutely, that the two statements are essentially different, in the way nitrogen and oxygen are.

Now I think I'll go imagine what the rain-cows might be up to.