Literary devotion

{Photo by rocketlass.}

On the recommendation of Ed Park, I've spent the past couple of days laughing out loud on the bus at Christopher Miller's Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank, a novel that takes the form of a reader's guide to the life and work of an imaginary sci-fi writer modeled on Philip K. Dick. The book is jammed with great jokes and absolutely brimming with ideas, primarily ideas (many surprisingly compelling despite their ridiculousness) for Dank's stories and novels--though, as the more skeptical of the guide's two authors points out in the entry for the story "Bacterial Rights," that's not to say the stories are good:

Many of Dank's stories would be better if they were shorter--the shorter the better. Often their very titles exhaust whatever interest their premises hold. "Bacterial Rights" is a perfect example: Dwell on that title for ten or fifteen seconds and it's safe to say you just thought up a better story than the one with which Dank, unencumbered by any real knowledge of biology or sociology, eked out to the length of something saleable (though only, be it said, to a magazine called Twat). "Bacterial Rights" is a cautionary tale about misguided hippies who, convinced that "Germs are Living Beings Too" (their battle cry) break into the R & D wing of "a top antibiotics factory," smash all the beakers and flasks, and are infected with a strain of meningitis so lethal that it barely leaves them time to beg for the life-saving antibodies they sought to destroy. Except perhaps as evidence that when he wrote it in 1972, Dank liked prescription drugs more than he liked hippies, the story is worthless.

I'll have more on this book--and how, if read in too close conjunction with Steve Hely's similarly hilarious How I Became a Famous Novelist, it could induce permanent literary paralysis in any aspiring writer--in the coming days. For now, however, I'll highlight one passage, the moment when the guide's primary author, a thoroughgoing Dank apologist, explains how he came to choose to study Dank in graduate school:

If literary scholars serve a purpose, it is not to count the adverbs in Ulysses or prove that Charlotte Bronte was a hermaphrodite or that the same versatile theory can enshroud both Henry James and Stephen King in jargon so interchangeably opaque as to obscure any reason to reading one and not the other. No--our raison d'etre is to call the world's attention to unnoticed beauties and profundities. I'd had my winter of discontent with Dank because I'd been demanding that he give me what I got from Joyce or Shakespeare (though in truth I've never had much use for either), rather than the thrills that Dank alone can give, and had always given me so generously when read on his own terms. In a midnight of the soul I date to March 18, 1991 . . . I vowed to love my fate, to love my dissertation, and to love the odd niche my advisor was driving me into. In other words, I vowed to love Dank, through thick and thin (and at his thickest--e.g., the 936 pages of Listening to Decaf--he did put that love to the test), in sickness (artistic) and in health, for the rest of my life. I took my vow so seriously that a few nights later I got into a fistfight with a drinking buddy who'd ventured to disparage Dank, though he was just repeating sentiments he'd heard me expressing all winter.

And yes, I know how odd it sounds to vow to love an author, but after all I'd loved him all along, ever since I first encountered his fiction at the age of fifteen. All I was doing now was solemnizing our relationship: putting a sacramental stamp on a teenage crush.

I know that Miller is exaggerating for effect, but even so, he captures some the reluctance that kept me out of graduate school: good god, how could I decide, in my early twenties, to specialize! To whom could I pledge fealty and unwavering interest? What author, or even period, all alone could hold my attention for a career against the ever-tantalizing pleasures of generalization and dilettantism?

The passage also reminded me of the lunatic--if at the same time admirable--devotion of the scholars who populate Elif Batuman's The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Some of the best examples come from the annual Tolstoy conference at Yasnaya Polyana, where Batuman, having lost her luggage, spends a week wearing the same flip-flops, sweatpants, and flannel shirt she'd traveled in; some of scholars, she explains,

assumed I was a Tolstoyan--that like Tolstoy and his followers I had taken a vow to walk around in sandals and wear the same peasant shirt all day and all night.

Batuman's accounts of the panels and literary arguments at the conference bring to life the pleasantly ridiculous flavor of academic obsession. For example:

At breakfast, one historian had described his experience researching the marginalia in Tolstoy's editions of Kant. . . .

"Were there at least any good marginalia?" someone asked.

"No. He didn't write anything in the margins at all," the historian said. He paused, before adding triumphantly: "But the books fell open to certain pages!"

Then there's this account of a panel discussion:

[A] Malevich scholar read a paper about Tolstoy's iconoclasm and Malevich's Red Rectangle. He said that Nikolai Rostov was the Red Rectangle. For the whole rest of the day he sat with his head buried in his hands in a posture of great suffering. Next, an enormous Russian textologist in an enormous gray dress expounded at great length upon a new study of early variants of War and Peace. Fixing her eyes in the middle distance, consulting no notes, she chanted in a half-pleasing, half declamatory tone, like someone proposing an hour-long toast.

The best, however, may be the reaction to Batuman's own paper, in which she compares Anna Karenina and Alice in Wonderland. This causes some controversy when she is unable to say unequivocally that Tolstoy had read Alice before writing Anna. An argument breaks out:

"Tolstoy had a copy of Alice in Wonderland in his personal library," said one of the archivists.

"But it's an 1893 edition," objected the conference organizer. "It's inscribed to his daughter Sasha, and Sasha wasn't born until 1884."

"So Tolstoy hadn't read Alice in 1873!" an old man called from the back of the room.

"Well, you never know," said the archivist. "He might have read it earlier, and then bought a copy to give to Sasha."

"And there might be mushrooms growing in my mouth--but then it wouldn't be a mouth, but a whole garden!" retorted the old man.

The discussion goes downhill, steeply, from there.

All of which calls to mind the other reason I never turned to graduate school: in my early twenties, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of years working in a scholarly bookstore, where I met grad students from a wide range of departments . . . nearly all of whom carried themselves at all times like dead-eyed inmates of a nineteenth-century prison/mental asylum, as if their souls were slowly being squeezed out their pores--and criticized unrelentingly as they emerged.

It didn't take many cash-register conversations with these forlorn figures for me to realize that dilettantism, with its love of breadth and raffish unconcern for deeper knowledge--neither of which would necessarily preclude the occasional impulsive dive down an interesting-looking rabbit hole (see D'Israeli, Isaac)--was clearly the way for me. And, swagger stick twirling, that's the road I've been traveling ever since, and will keep traveling on this blog next week, and the week after, and the week after--that is, as Batuman's Tolstoy scholars like to say in imitation of their master, "if we are still alive!"

Don't say the Louvin Brothers didn't warn you!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Now, if I know my Bible, it's the day of the Lord that so cometh like a thief in the night, and we should watch therefore for we know not the hour of his arrival . . . but this week it's been not the Lord, but Satan who's been sneak-sneak-sneaking into my reading!

His first appearance of the week was courtesy of the satirical pen of Wilkie Collins, who turns one portion of the narration of The Moonstone (1868) over to the wonderfully entertaining, pious, and hypocritical Miss Clack. In hopes of saving her dying aunt's immortal soul (and, if it should just happen that way, securing a small monetary legacy for herself), Miss Clack comes loaded for bear--heathen bear, that is:

Here was a golden opportunity! I seized it on the spot. In other words, I instantly opened my bag, and took out the top publication. It proved to be an early edition--only the twenty-fifth of the famous anonymous work (believed to be by precious Miss Bellows), entitled The Serpent at Home. The design of the book--with which the worldly reader may not be acquainted--is to show how the Evil One lies in wait for us in all the most apparently innocent actions of our daily lives. The chapters best adapted to female perusal are "Satan in the Hair Brush"; "Satan behind the Looking Glass"; "Satan under the Tea Table"; "Satan out of the Window"--and many others.

"Give your attention, dear aunt, to this precious book--and you will give me all I ask." With these words, I handed it to her open, at a marked passage--one continuous burst of burning eloquence! Subject: Satan among the Sofa Cushions.

Sadly, like that of Onan, Miss Clack's seed falls on fallow ground: her aunt is not saved, her legacy remains but notional. The Invisible Library, however, is not so hard-hearted: we'll be cataloging this veritable gazetteer of Satanic hideouts as soon as our next shift clocks in!

For his next appearance, Satan chose Uzbekistan. Elif Batuman, in her hilarious new book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, tells about a summer she spent in Samarkand, a city whose glory has faded a smidge since Tamerlane's day. There to study Old Uzbek language and literature, she lived with her boyfriend, Eric, who was pretending to be her husband, in the house of a woman whose actual husband, she was told, was in California studying to be a yogi--a story that was given the lie by his arrival on the scene:

Shiny-headed, with muscular shoulders and a paunch, Sharif indeed projected the impression of someone who had never lived in California, which he thought shared a border with New York.

He may not be a yogi, but Sharif, it turns out, is interested in Satan:

Another statement Sharif liked to repeat was that Satan wasn't outside us, in the world, but within us. "You think Satan is out there" (pointing in the bushes); "but Satan is everywhere--above all, inside us!" (pointing at his stomach).

"What's wrong with his stomach?" Eric asked.

"He thinks Satan lives there," I told him.

"Tell him!" Sharif urged me. "Tell your husband! Satan is everywhere!"

"He wants me to tell you that Satan is everywhere, including his stomach."

Eric narrowed his eyes, assessing Sharif's stomach.

All of which sent me back to Zachary Schomburg's strange and impressive new book of poems, Scary, No Scary, which I reviewed for the Quarterly Conversation earlier in the week--and to its handy index, which led me to the dreamlike prose poem "The Darkness and the Light," where I once again found the conniver lurking. After a few lines describing a house that is nothing but light inside and nothing but darkness outside, around which a parade marches noisily, Schomburg's speaker reveals:

There is only one thing that can be seen: Satan. Satan is floating endlessly, tirelessly, a few feet above the ground along the parade route outside of my house, arms crossed across his fiery chest. He looks like he's made of glowing rock, cracking with the pressure of hot gaseous lava. Lava is spilling out of his hollowed eye sockets. His hair is wind-swept wild-fire. The heat that radiates from his body keeps my house very warm. Like a clock, he slowly floats past the front window of my house at noon and midnight. It is how I keep time. It is Satan's job to keep time. It is Satan's job to be the only light in the darkness. Some people think it is Satan's job to make what is wrong with this world, but those people are wrong. It is Satan's job to make us choose between the only two things that are right with it.

And should we choose wrong, well, as Elif Batuman tells us, Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying.

"It is a great conviction of youth from which some people never escape that everyone is having a better time than they are," or, Powell to Batuman

A tip for any aspiring bloggers out there: should you be on any given night too busy to put together a proper post, turn ye to Anthony Powell's grab-bag of notes, ideas, thoughts on character, and snippets of dialogue, A Writer's Notebook, and thereof shall ye feast!

Being in that situation myself tonight, I offer you this:

Love is like being seasick, you feel you are going to die, then when you walk down the gangway on to dry land you can hardly remember what you have suffered.

Or:

I shouldn't think a woman could ever really forget a man with breath like his.

Then there's a pair of bits about literary critics:

Having no opinions is a positive advantage for a literary critic.

A literary critic says, "It's rather exterior."

But, because I'm an old hand at this blogging thing, I'll go one more and also offer a passage from Elif Batuman's wonderfully strange and funny new book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them--which is full of literary critics like the ones Powell was imagining, and which might just as honestly be titled, OMG, Aren't Russians and Academics--Particularly Graduate Students--Weird? (with a subtitle of Lovably, Endearingly, Almost at Times Understandably So, That Is).

The book is absolutely stuffed with quotable oddities, which makes it a particularly good chaser for a week of Isaac D'Israeli. I've chosen the following passage, relatively pedestrian by the high standards of the rest of the book, to share tonight because of the brief, unexpectedly Powellian aside in its last line. Batuman is telling about the wedding of Peter the Great's niece, Anna Ioannovna to Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Courland:

At the wedding banquet, the tsar cut open two pies with his dagger. A splendidly dressed dwarf jumped out of each pie and together they danced a minuet on the table. The next day, Peter treated his guests to a second wedding: that of his favorite dwarf attended by forty-two other dwarfs from all corners of the empire. Some foreign guests saw a certain symmetry in the double wedding, one between two miniature people, the other between two pawns in the great game of European politics.

One the way back to Courland, the teenage duke died, of alcohol poisoning. One his last night in Petersburg, he had engaged--rashly, one feels--in a drinking contest with Peter the Great.

Yet another item to add to the list of things one ought not to do if one ever found oneself in possession of a time machine: engage in a contest of any kind with Peter the Great.

As for Anna--"'seven-foot, 280-pound Anna,' in the words of one courtier"--this would be far from her last experience with dwarves, who ended up playing many unpleasant parts in the litany of cruel whimsy that was her reign. Batuman's got plenty of jaw-dropping details there, too; Empress Anna and her ice palace alone are enough to make the whole book worth reading.