On the lost art of mastering disaster

Again, in one fell swoop, all my petty irritations with The New York Times dissipated into nothingness with this interactive interpretation of Elizabeth Bishop’s much celebrated 1976 poem, “One Art” – a well put together analytical piece from the NYT critics, Parul Sehgal and Dwight Garner, enhanced through referencing Bishop’s drafts and an exposition of the poet’s methodology.

Elizabeth Bishop builds her poem with the consummate skill of one who has honed her craft; working up from a very concrete foundation – the loss of an object, keys perhaps – to that of the more transient – some place, be it near, like one’s home or the greater space that surrounds. And always lurking; pesky, ephemeral time – taken, wasted, forever lost, and so done in the interest of another loss. Loss multiplied, if you will.

Beginning with generalization, her distanced voice evolves into a personal address, and in the last stanza, a much more intimate loss is revealed – that of one loved. Has the lyrical self convinced one own self that such a loss can be conquered by rational means, as those others have been before? She doesn’t say, but as the poem concludes it’s to be supposed she is working on it still – mastering this art of losing.

And maybe she never succeeded in doing so, but Elizabeth Bishop certainly mastered the art of the villanelle; a composition form that she only used on this one occasion. Long live the villanelle!

Should the NYT not deem to let you in: Whilst very much copyrighted of course, “One Art” is available to be read all over the place, including here at the Poetry Foundation, along with a further selection of her works – me, I’ve always especially loved “At the Fishhouses”.

I herewith remind myself of a still outstanding book recommendation, given to me quite some time ago: “On Elizabeth Bishop” (Princeton University Press, 2015), an introduction to the life and work of this great American poet by the wonderful Irish writer, Colm Tóibín.

Parrots or people

As said in the previous post, legendary amongst many, is the Monty Python “parrot” sketch” (sometimes called “The Pet Shop”); this I have always understood to be a parody of the linguistic flights of fancy [sic!] we have taken (at least in the Anglophone world) to avoid speaking plainly on the subject of death. I must admit to being fundamental in this regard, and even the oft used “pass” and its derivatives (-away, -on, -over), though inoffensive, irritate me madly.

When all’s said and done we share the same fate. So, say it out loud, that what needs to be said: be it parrots or people, let dead be dead. Or is it: “bleedin’ demised”?

Introducing John Cleese and Michael Palin and a stuffed “Norwegian Blue” in “The Parrot Sketch”!

Mixed emotions

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: on grief…and then, if that wasn’t enough…!

A couple of weeks ago I caught Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour (03 June 2021, still online as I write, at about 02:40 in) speaking on her new book Notes on Grief. I see here on the Penguin Random House website that it is only a very slim work and, as I presumed, is an extension of her very fine essay in The New Yorker which I addressed last year. Sadly, Adichie’s grief over the death of her father was not the last she would suffer in this wretched year of reckoning for many; revealed now is the very recent death of her mother. For her, only some consolation in being at home in Nigeria on this latter occasion, and not impeded in sharing the physical near that is as much a part of death as it is life.

With Emma, Adichie wonders aloud; that death should so surprise, so devastate, when it is assured to all and every one of us; that this thing called grief, springing as it does from love, can cause such visceral hurt; of the realization that when grief retreats to the private crevices of memory, the own life left with in its wake is fundamentally other. And, the banality of the “speech” of grief – given and received. This, not so much of the euphemistic as applied often to death, and as brilliantly parodied by Monty Python in the famous dead-parrot sketch, but an act of avoidance, of (not) saying out aloud what can not be said – of confronting the one great absolute.

Extract from “Notes on Grief” read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

And, now, for something completely different! But staying with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Reported on here in The Guardian, and finding resonance through the international media, was Adichie’s furious essay excoriating, specifically, two writers who (she claims) have abused her friendship and/or collegiality and, more generally, an increasingly pretentious and self-absorbed younger generation (too much of a generalization here perhaps) who use social media outlets to pontificate on the latest orthodoxy; using the language of parrots (I can’t believe I’m back with the parrots!) rather than that of personal reflection, denying the complexity of living a life – or lives (and I am not thinking reincarnation! But now I am thinking about attacking the convoluted pronoun argument some time soon!). Suffice to say, Adichie’s piece was met with support by some and scorned by others.

I should add, that this whole fracas has roots in Adichie’s comments on transgender women – in 2017! – that were considered by some to be trans-phobic. (I will not dignify this assertion with the paltry evidence that the offending quote offers.) This mini-kerfuffle escaped my attention then, though I seem to remember Adichie’s voice as one (of reason) in the contentious, never-ending rigmarole surrounding J.K. Rowling and her last Tweet, next Tweet, no tweeting at all. Forgive me, but so ludicrous have some of these identity debates, or rabble rousing under the guise of such, become! No longer are they concerned with respect and kindness, or interested in a fair exchange, instead have everything to do with who is the loudest, who next can be vilified – or better still “cancelled”!

“Blue” – Joni Mitchell (1971)

Earlier in the year, I celebrated the 50th anniversary of one of my personal favorite albums – Carol King’s “Tapestry”. Joni Mitchell worked musically on that album, and on June 22 of the same year released a new work of her own; called “Blue”, it too has become a work of legend. (James Taylor also worked on both, and his guitar playing is essential to the overall character of some of the tracks on Mitchell’s album.) Taster below, go to Spotify to hear more.

At the NYT, a great interactive celebration of “Blue” with tributes – in the form of personal and varied analysis of each track – from Mitchell’s peers; her contemporaries like Taylor, Judy Collins, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, and from members of younger generations who have been inspired by her work.

On June 19th in 1865

…and now every year

The way to recognition of Juneteenth has been long and sometimes contentious, but then such are the highways and byways of the Lone Star State and the routes leading out, but yesterday the US Congress passed a bill to make June 19th – “Juneteenth” – the United States’ eleventh federal holiday.

Until last year I had only heard vaguely of this particular day, or of its origins – and I defy many outside of the US to even pretend otherwise! And, I now read that there are an awful lot of Americans equally as ignorant. It seems, over some years now, many of the States have adopted a variety of “Emancipation” or “freedom” days that relate to their specific history, and so there is some reason to question, as Kaitlyn Greenidge does in her guest piece at the NYT, the sincerity of a unison national embrace around an event that honors the implementation of the Emancipation proclamation (of Jan 1st 1863) in Texas (two and a half years after the fact!). Kevin Young, in his essay, shares some of her misgivings but is more hopeful that Juneteenth will maintain its celebratory characteristics but evolve from being a mainly Black day of festivity into a shared national experience. Yes, to be hoped; after all, freedom now, as then, requires two committed parties: one in need of being freed and another willing to free, and an awareness that freedom is not unconditional but being permanently tested and renegotiated.

The bill as introduced to the 117th Congress.

Irrespective, today, President Biden will sign the bill into law, and another small but important step is taken by the United States on a path towards a new culture of collective memory. That can’t be a bad thing, and reason enough to celebrate.

As a matter of interest, in terms of legislation, the Congressional Research Service arm of the Library of Congress is one of the providers of information to members and committees to assist in their decision-making process – which didn’t deter fourteen (all Republicans) from dissenting on the Juneteenth legislation. The relevant so-called “Fact Sheet” is available here at the CRS, or may be directly downloaded below.

Juneteenth: Fact Sheet Congressional Research Service Download

Generally, these Fact Sheets offer some very accessible insight into even complex material (of which this example is actually not one), and a place to go when the media gobbledygook gets too, well… convoluted …or worse, suspiciously too well spun!

Janet Malcolm

There are names in journalism that everyone knows – Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16 in New York City at 86 years of age, is one such. During her almost sixty years at The New Yorker, she wrote a multitude of pieces over an extraordinary range; some I have read but most I of course I have not – being (funnily enough!) once too young, and later, before the digital revolution, while the said esteemed publication came my way only sporadically.

Interesting, are the controversies commented on in The New York Times obituary – serving to remind of just how radically the print media and journalism has changed in the last decades – how trite Malcolm’s transgressions now appear and how prescient her ideas about what good journalism is and what it could and could not do.

Also, in the NYT obit, and as one forever on the watch for lurking wolves – hunting in pack for easy prey, with family in tow or home in the den – I note with delight the link to her great 1995 essay in The New Yorker; entitled “A House of One’s Own” and inspired by the Stephen/Woolf/Bell family house-hopping, correspondence and biographical works, including Quentin Bell’s famous Woolf biography, and culminating with conversations with Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell during a visit of her own to Vanessa’s Charleston home. Malcolm brilliantly explores the Stephen sisters’ coming of age and complicated relationship; with others and with each other and brings Vanessa out of the shadow of her more famous sister. She surprises with details of the familial animosities and inconsistencies that the protagonists left in their wake for the next generation to grapple with. But, in considering Angelica Bell’s bitter recriminations, what Malcolm also does in this essay is articulate her own personal theory of biography; one in which choices have to be made, circumstances rarely prevail and moral certitude anything but.

In what I have written, […]I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, […]and if we pause to remember that [they] were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. […] Another biographer might have made—as a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.
Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker A Critic at Large – June 5, 1995 Issue

Finally, The New York Review of Books, to whom Janet Malcolm also often contributed over very many years, kindly provide a peep into their archives (probably for a limited time) to celebrate a great journalist’s life. From their mail of June 17, 2021:

Free from the Archives:

Janet Malcolm, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six. Between 1981 and 2020, Malcolm published thirty-eight pieces in our pages, including the essay below, part of her career-long meditation on the hazards of writing about other people. “Almost from the start,” she writes, “I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.”

The Morality of Journalism
There is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art.

25 June 2021: There have been numerous tributes to Janet Malcolm in the last days, but I would just like to mention one last one; an antipodean perspective that unites her with another that I have long, long, admired. Should one have read any of Helen Garner’s non-fiction works, it would surely not surprise that she would have been influenced by Malcolm, in style, in sensibility and in methodology. (It also should be said, both writers shared a talent for attracting controversy, and not shying from it, and that Malcolm was not uncritical of Garner on a book and its repercussions that received intense scrutiny in the Australian literary scene and beyond, and that this appears not to have affected Garner’s admiration.) Here in a Guardian tribute adapted from her introduction to the Australian publication of an essay collection entitled “Forty-One False Starts“, Garner says:

To open any one of her books at random is to find myself drawn back into that unmistakable sensibility, that unique tissue of mind, and to grasp how deeply I am indebted to her. […]
[…]I saw manifest [in her Plath biography,The Silent Woman] what I was at the time painfully trying to learn: the fact that beneath the thick layers of a writer’s self-censorship, of her fear of being boring or wrong, lies a whole humming, seething world waiting to be released. I learned from watching Malcolm in full flight that I could go much further than timidly nibbling at the edges of people’s peculiar behaviour. I saw that I could get a grip on it and dare to interpret it, to coax meaning from it. The tools were already in my possession. […] that in journalism, as well as in fiction, I could call upon the imagery, the spontaneous associations and the emblematic objects that I had learned to trust when I myself was groaning on the therapist’s couch.
Helen Garner on Janet Malcolm: ‘Her writing turns us into better readers’, The Guardian, June 24th 2021.

Doing the Bloomsbury Walk

This warm mid-June Wednesday (June 16th 2021), decreed this year to be “Dalloway Day”, is just the most perfect opportunity for a city stroll. Not the famous London walk from Westminster to Bond Street that Clarissa Dalloway made all those years ago to buy flowers for her party, but a virtual guided tour with Bonnie Greer through some of the haunts of Clarissa’s creator and her friends – and, what a radical bunch they were; more than queer, however one chooses to define the word, some were, like Duncan Grant, unabashedly taking the private into the public space – and making art out of it.

Each Dalloway Day, then, can be none other than an opportunity for a sometimes loud, but often reflective, celebration of Virginia Woolf and those in her orbit; artists all, who were inspired by their favorite haunts in a city coming to terms with the monumental intellectual and material changes of modernity – its tempo and its promises.

The many lives of St. Ives

As the G7 gathers for the first time since the wretched Covid-19 pandemic took grip, and dignitaries and media descend upon Cornwall to do whatever it is they do, it seems an appropriate time to pay a visit too, albeit only in one’s head – and that of Virginia Woolf.

In 2018, NYT had a very nice travelogue feature (the usual “subscriber access” proviso applies) entitled “In Search of Virginia Woolf’s Lost Eden in Cornwall”. I know, of course, from my own reading, how very much Woolf cherished the childhood Summers spent at “Talland House”; how those memories found their way into so much of her later writing – Jacobs Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Mentioned in the above article; this letter written by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, in the summer of 1884, describing the “pocket paradise” that the two year old “‘Ginia” was getting to know and explore.

St. Ives, Porthminster Bay, Cornwall, 1895

The above postcard image from 1895 is particularly poignant; although from the year after Virginia Woolf’s mother’s death, and the first Summer in Virginia’s young life that the Stephen family did not spend at “Talland House” (instead at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight), it still must be very illustrative of the St. Ives town and coastal landscape that so enriched her own memories of the time and later literary work.