mister tavares’ neighborhood

Yesterday evening, Mister Interpolations passed a kidney stone in the shape of a book. Literally. It plopped in the strainer.

Blinking with relief, Mister Interpolations fished it out and marveled at just how wonderful he felt.

He sighed: “It’s passed, it’s over.”

Then his mind began to work. How could a book be this painful? It doesn’t make sense.

To calm his wonder, Mister Interpolations opened the kidney stone and read it edge to edge in one sitting.

He concluded: “It hurts for a very good reason.”

Tired, he slept and dreamed of Gonçalo Tavares, a neighbor, leaping over fences that were obstacles one moment, ice statues the next, then fragments of pencils and finally shards of volcanic stone.

It was a fitful night’s sleep, tossing.

. . .

This is what Mister Tavares thought: “I want to write a novel.” Instead he writes a book. It’s called The Neighborhood.

Then mister Tavares peoples it with literary types.

Mister Valery is one such neighbor. Mister Calvino is another and there are Misters Juarroz, Henri and Kraus, too.

They cut amusing figures, ambling here and there trying to do X when Y would suffice and likely result in Z. OK, maybe P.

. . .

One day when Mister Tavares was writing, he thought: “Writing is a spatial exercise.” And to prove his point, he wrote down these words: “He wrote down these words.”

Mister Tavares smiled because the words looked right, they made sense.

Then he wrote them this way: “Words these down wrote he” and because he was feeling impish, Mister Tavares wrote them this way, too: “Sdrow eseht nwod etorw eh.”

Yes, he thought, writing is a spatial exercise. Semantics, too.

His eyebrows tilted in and up like a shallow V. Mister Tavares blurted: “One string of letters is meaningful, the others aren’t, but if the others aren’t, then they’re examples of things that don’t make sense.”

He paused, with good reason, and then the good reason passed.

He continued: “But if they’re examples of things that don’t make sense, then that’s their sense, they make sense.”

Mister Tavares felt good about the results of his experiment, but confused.

. . .

Mister Tavares enjoys wandering around the city until he’s lost.

To find himself lost more quickly, he gulped the last of his coffee, then smoothed out a map before him on the table, planning his steps carefully for his daily perambulations, excited.

. . .

Mister Tavares fancies pencils and pens. He doesn’t write with them, however.

He’s heard of computers and has even recommended them to others. But he doesn’t trust them.

That’s because they come with keyboards. And keyboards are made for tapping. Which is why he doesn’t like typewriters, either. Or dancing.

So he writes with marbles instead. This doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t prevent Mr. Tavares from shooting words at other words with a fastidiously closed pirate eye.

. . .

A loves B. B loves C. A doesn’t love C.

A is Mister Interpolations, B is Saramago, and C is Tavares. Love isn’t a transitive property. This is proof.

Now C loved B and B would have loved A if only B had known A, because A is handsome and loves B’s prose with a passion bordering on romance.

This shows nothing. Mister Interpolations mutters in his sleep: “Perhaps that’s the point.”

. . .

At last Mister Interpolations stirs, moans.

There’s no plot in The Neighborhood — no setting, no characterization, little or no sensory details, a few snappy metaphors, and only a few plucky observations.

Other than that, Mister Interpolations thinks The Neighborhood is a fine piece of prose fiction.

. . .

Mister Tavares’ neighborhood is pre-apocalyptic. That is, Mister Interpolations wants to visit destruction on it.

. . .

Postscript. I may not enjoy wandering Mister Tavares’ neighborhood but others do. Check out Trevor’s outstanding review at The Mookse and the Gripes. He plays the antidote to my venom.

the magician behind the baron

Melville fools readers of Moby Dick into the belief that Ahab and not Ishmael is the truly obsessed mind.

In The Baron in the Trees, Calvino performs a similar trick by fooling readers into believing that Cosimo is our hero, our “real” protagonist, and that the story is about Cosimo’s arboreal exploits and adventures.

Cosimo isn’t our protagonist.

Nor is the story “about” him except as a pretext for talking about something else.

Enter: Biagio, the younger brother of Cosimo. From his first person point of view, Biagio offers an account of Cosimo’s life in the trees. The story is cobbled together, he alleges, from Cosimo’s own words, plucked from the lower branches of the canopy, ripe or rotten we don’t really know. I mean, if Cosimo is outlandish enough to take to the trees in the first place, then he’s certainly inventive enough to confabulate.

As Biagio politely warns, Cosimo isn’t an entirely reliable source of information. In recounting his experiences in the trees, Cosimo amplifies, expands, subtracts and exaggerates until he hits the narrative nail on the head. So if the account of Cosimo’s life seems outlandish, Biagio isn’t to blame. He’s just reporting what Cosimo has told him.

Now if Cosimo is prone to exaggeration, why isn’t Biagio just as prone to it, too—maybe even more so? Perhaps he is the one “carried away by the mania of the storyteller.”

Yes, conventionality has its advantages. But walking the straight line of truth isn’t one of them.

So what’s fictionally “real” in The Baron in the Trees?

In Moby Dick, the whale is real although its meanings are many.

In Robinson Crusoe, Friday is fictionally real even though it’s Tuesday. Trust me.

In Atonement, Cecilia and Robbie’s consummated love isn’t fictionally real. It’s a narrator’s device to seek atonement.

In the Life of Pi, the Bengal tiger isn’t fictionally real. I’ve done the math. Richard Parker is a narrator’s device to show that some stories are so charming we should believe them. (God, I hate that book!)

In The Baron in the Trees, Biagio is fictionally real but his brother Cosimo flitting through the trees and making love to women and translating Virgil and hunting boar is not.

In the final and longest sentence of the novel, Calvino breathlessly reveals his ruse by identifying trees, which are symbols of playfulness, perspective and invention, with the life-enhancing powers of language and storytelling.

“That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and one and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.”

Biagio is our real hero.

And the story is about the glorious power of language. Cosimo, then, is a narrator’s device to show that storytelling is an essential element of life—providing support, shade, perspective, oxygen.

The Baron in the Trees is proof.

escargot in ombrosa, or no wonder cosimo bolts for the trees

Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees is a brilliant and inventive novel.

Because I want to focus mainly on aspects that occur beneath the surface of the story, let’s knock the plot out of the way, fast.

In June, 1767, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, 12, is fed up with family life and vanishes “from sight among the close-knit silvery leaves,” of olives, oaks and cherries. Cosimo never sets foot on ground again, ever. From arboreal heights, he hunts boar, foxes, hares and pheasants. He sews clothing, plants crops and trades with other villagers. He takes lovers in the trees, many of them, and studies the classics. But mostly he reads, reads, reads. This is noteworthy: Cosimo is a character in a novel made up of words who consumes words like carbon dioxide and gives off something else in return. What this something is will have to wait till next time when I share the glorious magic of the last sentence of Calvino’s superb fairy tale.

At the moment, however, having little or no ambition, I simply want to recount the horrors of Battista, Cosimo’s older sister. After all, she sends him fluttering to the trees in the first place. I savor the visually precise details of Calvino’s writing and hope you do, too. Apparently Battista is a cross between a rat and a witch cruelly disguised as a sister. Even her dad “did not dare look at her, for, with her staring eyes under the starched coif, her narrow teeth set tight in her yellow rodent’s face, she frightened him too.” In addition to her snoutish appearance, Battista has a knack for plating wicked culinary delights. “Once she made some pate toast, really exquisite, of rats’ livers; this she never told us until we had eaten them and pronounced them good; and some grasshoppers’ claws, crisp and sectioned, laid on an open tart in a mosaic; and pigs’ tails baked as if they were little cakes; and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills…, a baby porcupine, rosy and certainly tender.”

At last Battista serves a plate of sadistically prepared snails and Cosimo bolts for the upper canopy, and is gone.

The Sharon in the Trees

In the early forties, he once stood in the fork of an apple tree, my dad. He was alone, or thought he was alone, leaning there in the tree, standing in the midst of a silent orchard. He climbed apple trees often. On this warm day in summer, who knows what prompted him to these arboreal heights. But in the fork of the tree, he heard a sound like a tune or a whistle that wasn’t the wind but was, to his surprise, a little boy running through the apple orchard. A four-year old boy in flight, singing a tune and running stark naked through the trees, bobbing and weaving his way to the edge of the property, where he’d likely filch harvested vegetables or a hand shovel. His name was Craig, the little naked boy, and in time he would bury field goals 25 feet or more from the basket — and this long before the three-point line was established — and would fall in love with a young woman named Charlene and self-publish a work of poetry dedicated to her called None Such and would disappear into the wild of Alaska where, to survive, he broke into a small hunting cabin for warmth and gnawed at the corners of a leather rug for nourishment and would later, very tragically, put a shotgun in his mouth and toe-push the trigger. Many details of his life have filtered down through my family from accounts that Craig himself shared with my uncle Dave in the long ago. So it’s hard to know where the ruse of invention ends and the truth of fiction begins. Have I just introduced The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino? Yes, I think so. I do.

Postscript. My dad’s birth name is Sharon, by the way. A boy named Sharon. In the army, a drill sergeant simply refused to call him by his name. “You are Joe,” shouted the drill sergeant, during basic training. And from that moment on, he was.

it’s friday and i feel it in my gut

I’m in the mood to write but don’t have anything particular to say, a problem for most people, but not me, not now. After all it’s Friday and I’m in a mood. What follows is a drive by blogging, which might rankle a bit, given my stated dislike of gun ownership. But if you can’t have a wee bit of good metaphorical fun at your own expense, what good is blogging in the first place. I’m rambling. Bang. I received a new book in the mail today, Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. That’s Bryan with a y (or is it an y?). I’ve always liked photography, especially composition, but haven’t the faintest clue how to control for ISO, aperture and shutter speed to reliably produce great photos. When I’m not reading Moby Dick, which I’m already reading very slowly, I’ll be reading Understanding Exposure. And snapping frames like this one…

…which comes from a recent excursion to Hidden Villa with my family, a green cleft in the mountains behind Foothill College in the Bay Area. I particularly like the missing spokes and how they’re hard to notice until you notice them not there. That, and I’m a sucker for white clapboard houses and pastoral settings in general, and not just in literature. I snapped this frame…

…because who can resist the contrast of green lichen and red rust. Tell me if you can identify the farm vehicle that likely trundled about on this wheel rim. I’m thinking it’s for the front tire of a tractor, but it looks a little thick to me. And if you think you see an emerging theme here what with wagon wheels and a wheel rim, try your best to circularize the creepy, expressive beauty of this frame…

Guy Fawkes meets the Joker meets Cirque du Soleil. Scarecrows, those great terrifying parodies of people, work for a reason. I just now consulted Ahab who agrees with me: ”In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here!” I added the exclamation point because it’s called for. Bang. If you haven’t read D.G. Myers recent piece over at A Commonplace Blog, you really should. Therein you’ll find this phrase which has been ringing about my head all day: “Blogging is not merely an amateur’s medium. It is a dissent from the professionalization of literature.” I’m all a-tingle and feel as though I’ve discovered my motto. Lest the transition from scarecrows and Ahab to Myers wasn’t abrupt enough for you, let me quickly say that I’ll write about a whale’s penis on Tuesday.

sandy hook elementary school in newtown, connecticut

Not in a literary mood. No.

Since 2005 there have been 11 mass shootings, resulting in the deaths of 134 people, an average of more than 12 deaths per rampage.

If you support the right to own and bear military-style assault weapons, 12 deaths per rampage is an acceptable cost.

Psychopathy happens. It cannot be eradicated from the gene pool. Why arm it?

I am an American and think the Second Amendment is tosh.

If you care to sign a petition to be delivered to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama, you can do so here at Gun Control. Now.

That is all.

Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan

He cultivates roses and savors wine and haute cuisine. He loves Chopin—indeed, any music with “a sigh in it”—and is devoted to Proust’s colossal novel. He is David Anderton, a 56-year old Oxford-educated, English priest. As interesting as these passions are, none is more interesting than the passion to repress the yearning for love. Years earlier in college, David’s boyfriend, an idealistic young man, dies unexpectedly. Grief stricken, David enters the church as a refuge against temptation, not only the temptation to love another man but the temptation to live life fully. His years of “determined avoidance” come back to haunt him one night after a thoughtless evening of music and dance, wine and drugs. Alone in the rectory, he kisses a precocious 15-year old boy, as much for his physical beauty as for the striking example he provides of David’s own unlived potential. The kiss is neither criminal nor innocent. But appearances (and prejudices) are against him in a Scottish town filled with anti-English, -Catholic and -posh sentiment. David is this unholy trinity. Plus he’s gay. So he does what many sad, lonely literary types do: he wrestles with himself and struggles with his story to discover integrity and moral beauty. Be Near Me is a fascinating psychological study. But there is a compositional challenge that O’Hagan botches. It has to do with the intermingling of history and fictional autobiography. Hard-hearted banter moves along fine and well in the novel until O’Hagan feels compelled to signal the importance of this or that historical trend, be it globalism, environmentalism or militarism. Although these trends have a lot of cultural cache, they often have only an indirect bearing on David’s story. Distraction ensues. When it does, Be Near Me reads like a Billy Joel ballad stuffed with news headlines and hot-button social issues, from anti-Arab sentiment to pro-war fervor, from WMDs and Trident missiles to anthrax and hip-hop. My dear mum, who is a damn fine reader, wasn’t annoyed in the slightest by this cross-sectioning of history. But I certainly was. The best part of the novel centers on the idea of what it means to be a natural Catholic but not a natural person. That, and “the miracles of art to help one to live one’s life,” and to cling to the things that matter most. Forty years after Conor’s death, David says of him: “I hear his sacred heart and see his eyes closing as he falls asleep. And I say: be near me. The world is rowdy and nothing is certain. Do not stray. None of us was meant to face the day and night alone, though that is what we do and memory now is a place of fading togetherness. Be near me. True love is what God intends.”

wherein middlemarch is slammed shut

Yesterday I was in the dining room with a copy of Middlemarch sprawled open on a table, staring out the window. My daughter was asleep. Finally a moment to myself. Outside, in the front yard, a large tree, a majestic Chinese Elm, more than 40-years old, shivered in the wind. Although the weather was gray and drear, I was indescribably happy, so happy I couldn’t read. I could only stare and smile. If it’s true that “A poet is someone who thinks about something else,” then I was an abstracted poet, indeed. I had gone elsewhere entire. Pangs of happiness are intense but fleeting. I’ve had them before; they cluster around simple dear necessities: hiking in remote places, eating and drinking good food, watching my kids do perfectly kid-worthy things and reading, always reading. How many times have I slammed a book shut from happiness! On the inadequacy of words, I’m reminded, paradoxically enough, of this passage: “…he felt close to the sort of secrets he often caught himself wondering about, the revelations of which he only ever realized he had been in the proximity, and the phenomenon of becoming conscious, was the very thing that whisked him away, so that any bit of insight or gleaning was available only in retrospect, as a sort of afterglow that remained but that was not accessible through words.”

Postscript. Incidentally, the Chinese Elm is also known as the Lacebark Elm, presumably because its bark sheds in long strips with often intriguing designs. My son, 3, ever the searcher of tasty metaphors, simply calls the bark “bacon” and collects it as though he were a stone-age hunter and gatherer. Behind a smile, he gnaws on it and says “bacon” again, just in case I’ve forgotten.

#3 wherein ray bradbuy, ben harper, and freud smoke a doobie (or a are-you-just-happy-to-see-me)

“It was a pleasure to burn.” I’m reminded of a Ben Harper concert I attended at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, and the delicious, sweet aroma wafting over the crowd like incense when “Burn One Down” was played. This is a personal idiosyncrasy. Surely. What’s not idiosyncratic, however, is the abrupt use of “It” without a noun antecedent. A world of possibility opens up; the mind races to narrow down the prospects. Despite the ambiguity, we are given one blessed certainty: pleasure. Now who can’t relate to that? Lastly, I can’t resist a fast & loose Freudian riff, purely associative. Everyone knows about the id / ego / super ego business. What you might not know is that these terms are poor translations. In the original, Freud gives us das Es / das Ich / das Über Ich. A more faithful translation yields it / I / over I. So there you have it. What? “It.” And the purpose of “It”  in Freudian theory is, yep, you guessed right, the blind pursuit of pleasure.

a nasty brew of heavily steeped oleander

In the long ago, I once stuck a poor hapless, thoughtless yet generously embosomed broad with the check on my one and only blind date after she gushed about the poetry of White Oleander. Disgusted, I excused myself from the table and made as if for the bathroom, and left. My only regret, I forgot an Andes mint. My behavior was inexcusable, I know. But sometimes art requires a teleological suspension of the ethical. That’s why my conscience is pure and unruffled as a white rose pedal. Oleander is the most poorly written novel I’ve ever read—and I’ve read 10,162 books. What makes it so bad? Well, that’s ridiculously easy to answer. Oleander seized my throat like a pair of sour pliers and juiced me like a lemon; the ugliness of its prose made me sob like raw razors; and Fitch’s storytelling drifted over the valley of literary art like a vast headache and made people dumb with pain. If you mock my figures of speech — and you damn well better have — I kiss you flush on the mouth. Oleander is overgrown with them. (Incidentally, I yanked this goatgrass and knapweed from its rank fields.) Read this book if you want to expose yourself to today’s literary allergens. If it doesn’t bolster your appreciation for good writing by way of dreadful example, nothing will. You may as well read Fitch backwards and rave about the lyrical dreams of a foster child in search of beauty.