Notes, Ravenna Press

I have read a handful of books from Ravenna Press, lately——a good-sized handful, even though they are small books, physically ... perhaps even a great handful: for individually they seem large enough: each seems a full entity. A book of a size or a set of dimensions that makes it loom before you ... like a weighty hardwood chair, inviting your sitting, successfully, so that you end up occupying it for a time, even as its presence occupies you: books of this sort ... real entities. I have walked into stores and have seen the new books being pushed over and falling off their stands from the pressure of the eye's touch on their covers and spines, however fat those spines. These books of Ravenna's might seem to turn and lean before the gaze, at first. I suspect that even in a store mall-squared and plasticoated these volumes would stand firm, being slenderly empty of the synthetic mental gas-globules that make all those fat cartons of literary styrofoam shift so easily on and off their shelves. I say this but perhaps should not say it of all of them: for I have read fat books that are much more full of sense than they are empty. Yet I still can feel glad to hold in hand small books that breezes will not bear away.

Are these little volumes detached from our Mass Age, then? I think they are well attached. Pertinent, maybe I should say. Poet and editor and publisher Kathryn Rantala in her own writing makes it clear she moves in a world that has been commercialized, that has been striped with black roads and boxed in with buyable goods. Yet the reader finds it hard to say whether the gaze actually sits on material manifestations of our nearly ruined social spirit, or on the spaces between the objects held up for examination by her words. She displays deep concern with the beauty to be found through arrangement: and in any arrangement the whole takes on some quality missing from whatever small items within it first catch the eye. She also follows an instinct——exploratory, historical, knowledge-dowsed: I can use such words, to point toward where the instinct hides and abides. She follows this instinct, or inoculates the reader with it so that its movement then guides the reader around or underneath whatever meanings the words offer.

Even through the pages most dense with words I feel a movement of air——even as the words themselves stand firm.

Cheers ...

In Short

I have been given to longer postings here, lately ... due to having longer thoughts? I will think shorter ones, then——be short with you, in other words. Shortly. That is to say my head, normally visible above the table, will shrink from sight. "Ah, his lessened stature," you will say. "Long ago he was not longing to be short. He would not be long, not for the world——and is not long for the world." Should I dress in shorts, or in briefs? My utterances will achieve purity when they disappear from my lips before you hear them.

An SFRA Review of Kornbluth

I have only now stumbled upon a review of C.M. Kornbluth that appeared in the Summer 2012 SFRA Review, No. 301, written by Patrick Casey. This and another academic review by Joe Sanders both spend quite a bit of space objecting to my depiction of Frederik Pohl——perhaps understandably, since Pohl and academia have what seems a friendly relationship. These objections seem more important for these reviewers to discuss, in their brief comments, than the many other aspects and narrative strands that make up my book, to the point that I do find myself wondering how carefully they read what I wrote——a thirty-four chapter, 240,000-word study, with 439 pages to the end of the index.

As my first major effort at writing cultural criticism, my book does have flaws, inevitably. The book is, however, so unlike other works focusing upon science fiction that I imagine some reviewers might find that it lies too far outside their own academic specialties to fully appreciate: for cultural criticism is the blending, as Barzun noted, of history, biography and criticism.

Is Casey being a bit condescending in his opening? "Picture if you can the caricature of the science fiction fan. Not the science fiction reader browsing the science fiction aisle, but the “fan”: the person as passionate about the writers’ lives as he or she is about the works themselves. If you can picture that caricature’s tone in a debate about his favorite author, you’ll have a good idea of what makes Mark Rich’s biography of Cyril Kornbluth ... so frustrating. ... Rich writes as a true fan." If Bob Madle said these words of me, I would regard it as a compliment: for Madle was, indeed, a fan, and remains one; and he possesses a memory for names and facts, and a desire for precision, that any of us might envy. Casey, it strikes me, means something less than complimentary, however. So be it. If he means to demean someone like Madle, then I feel honored to be likewise looked down upon. I hope never to be regarded as a science-fiction academic myself if it means I must then condescend to the fan.

A few notes about minor points——such as this line: "Rich's apparent dislike of Pohl constantly threatens to undermine what could have been a wonderful biography of one of the Golden Age's greatest talents." Either it "threatens to undermine a wonderful biography" or it "undermines what could have been a wonderful biography"——one or the other. Interestingly, the review misspells Pohl's first name two different ways.

Casey did like a few pages of the book: the ones about Mars Child. (Thank you, Judy!) His last paragraph begins, "In the end, too much of the story remains untold and Rich, despite his enthusiasm and years of research, doesn't reveal enough to satisfy those looking for an understanding of the man and his works." Casey apparently missed my note on the third page of text, about C.M. Kornbluth opening up new avenues for research. As I have said before, the book establishes a documented basis for additional work, presumably by others. I was, in fact, astonished that I ended up being able to tell as much of the story as I did. When I began writing it, as far as I knew, and as far as anyone would tell me, the documentation I needed simply did not exist.

Casey seems unastonished by this accomplishment, in addition to being unsatisfied. I will indulge myself, though, by remaining astonished at how the book did finally come together.

And I do think the literary biographer should be as passionately engaged with the life as with the works themselves. Do we place months and years of our lives on alters that means nothing to us?

I pity the unpassionate.

Cheers ...

Judith Merril: Web Observations

Yesterday I grew curious about what biographical accounts of Judith Merril might have surfaced on the Internet. When I looked I found the usual plenitude of www.flagrant-error.com sources. While some accurate accounts exist out there——for instance Rob Sawyer's personal recollections——after a time I gave up the search for general ones.

People feel remarkably at ease trotting out for public view their insufficient knowledge of any subject. Does instant transmission mean that all such entries are to be viewed as ephemeral, so that today's posting has no special importance? That might explain the attitude. Tomorrow's error will take the place of today's, after all: how could that not solve everything? I suppose all who post to Flagrant-error.com live by the hope that someone else will tidy up the confusion left by a billion Johnnies-on-the-spot. Whatever careful work has been done by those who have built up the Web, what we seem to see most of, and first, are parroting finger-peckings and cut-and-paste posturings——the expressions of people or their virtual equivalents who might like to appear in command in an infodense realm but who too often wear the infodunce cap. These key-tappers take pleasure, it seems, in perpetuating the easily available errors of those who came before them whose preference, too, is to take to a worldwide stage when factually stumbling.

It surprised me to find a quite recent piece in Kirkus Reviews written by Andrew Liptak, whose name is new to me. The posting, despite the venue, makes its share of mistakes, unfortunately; and these and the surrounding expressions of misunderstanding have appeared not only here at Kirkus but also, apparently, at the "75 Years of Science Fiction" conference at University of Vermont on April 27, to judge from this sentence from Liptak's first paraqraph, in which he promotes his impending appearance there: "The paper will be on the evolutionary roots of the genre, and draws heavily upon this column!" The phrase "evolutionary roots" seems less than happy, to me; and the notion of a paper about "roots of the genre" offering Merril as an example seems to reflect a misunderstanding of the genre's early development and maturation, which occurred before Merril became involved. Liptak's use of the phrase "The Golden Age of Science Fiction," immediately afterwards, may reflect a similar misunderstanding, insofar as the "Golden Age," for most observers, antedated Merril's major contributions.

Much of the information Liptak mentions seems drawn from the Merril memoir Better To Have Loved. His ordering of events strikes some off notes, perhaps the result of reading source materials not quite carefully enough. The errors in names reflect particularly poorly on scholarship, proofreading, or both. I puzzled over who "John Michael" was, for a moment; but I felt startled to find the column getting wrong not only the publication date but also the title for Merril's first novel. It also gets wrong the title of the first Cyril Judd serial. Fuzzy thinking and lazy writing flow on to the end.

No doubt Liptak's well-meant posting will become a source for future ones by others. Quite likely it will inspire "corrections" to existing infodense accounts, and provide fodder for all those infodunces——most of them probably virtual——who wait in the wings.

Liptak's list of sources led me to the New York Times obituary by Gerald Jonas, which is quite short but not error-free. Jonas makes a rather large misstatement——"During and just after World War II, Ms. Merril was the only woman associated with ... the Futurians." His listing of prominent Futurians may mislead readers, moreover, since of the four mentioned only James Blish was a member when Merril was. Jonas also perpetuates an error about her birth name.

I know Jonas is, and feel confident Liptak must be, capable of excellent work. Overwork and hurry may well account for much, here. Even Judy had trouble keeping her story utterly factual——as she forthrightly admitted.

On Being Re-Enabled

My younger sister Barbara was among the stalwart few who visited this blog back when I, too, did so. How nice it is, then, to mark her birthday (she is trying to catch up in years to me, but since I am the tortoise in this race she keeps losing) today by revisiting these old haunts of mine.

My sporadic appearances here reflected computer problems, in part. This venue and many others have become territory partially hidden and inaccessible to old systems -- such as an old iMac a dozen years old or so. Given that, and that the computer was also hiding and scrambling some of my simplest TextEdit documents, my possibilities for adding to the miasma of global-energy-sucking blog postings proved a bit narrowed. While Martha's computer was working well, how often could I keep borrowing it?

The built-in obsolescence that so disturbed Kornbluth in looking at his 1950s world remains an unpleasant aspect in ours: for Web complexities move regularly beyond the capabilities of old machines to cope; and the relentless march of technical "improvements," even more firmly than in the 1950s, locks us into dependent relationships with industrial corporations.

Many, perhaps most, seem to accept this without much complaint. They like having new things, after all.

I love old things, by and large, and hate the habit of waste we condone in this society, which seems tied to our usual acceptance of the artificial, the simulated, the ersatz, and the commodified. View the contents of most shopping carts at the grocery store, if you doubt this.

As a writer I feel rather content with the pencil with which I write these words -- and quite fond of the manual typewriter that I have used today in some writing, too. Yet for several recent years I have been unbusinesslike as a writer thanks to a series of computer-related setbacks that added up to a stalled career. I remained a writer in my world, yet appeared to be a non-writer to the outside world because of my difficulties with my interface with that world.

I purposely use so unattractive a noun -- "interface" -- for it captures the difficulty of this situation. I enjoy being enabled, technically, with regard to the outside world. That I have little choice about accepting this enablement, however, disturbs me. The Internet continues its growth and its consumption of global resources that our earth can ill afford to waste. In being required by my work to deploy the same interface as everyone else, I am being required to help perpetuate and worsen the waste.

I am forced moreover to buy into impermanency. These pencil markings of mine have a potential existence that is so immense it makes the potential existence of whatever electronic version I make of them appear that of a gnat. Having lost such an incredible amount of manuscript-editing and manuscript-preparation work in the last three years has made the gnat-aspect clearer to me than ever. It has become another of the semantic twistings of technological society that the act denoted by the word "saving" can be, in terms of "documents," actually the act of alteration, destruction or obliteration.

As I say, I enjoy the benefits of being enabled, of being more "connected" -- more disconnected, in other words, from the quiet satisfactions of my isolated pencil and typewriter. I am accepting, as I wish more people would realize they are accepting, that I am "having the good of it," in the phrase of Phil Klass. As Phil saw, it remains for us to take the "moral stance" even while being culpable for taking the material good of a less than ideal situation.

... and all this may seem an odd way of saying hello to you, the reader -- whoever you are. Yet that is what I am doing. So:

Hello. Or, to some of you: happy birthday.

Cheers ...

For Verne's Birthday

"Complaining doesn't have to do any good -- it's enough all by itself."

Did Jules Verne see to the heart of the American soul? He himself made no such assertion but had his plucky American character Ned Land say it.

In observing Jules Verne's birthday today I thought I would celebrate the statement, and try to live up to its spirit.

I read his novel Lighthouse at the End of the World earlier this week -- and enjoyed it. The dialogue sounded stilted and less naturally Vernesque than I thought it should, which made me think the translator might have little experience in writing fiction ... and made me wonder if perhaps he took out too many exclamation marks.

"What! Too few exclamation marks in a Verne novel!" you say.

My reaction exactly.

Something I thought completely and strangely awkward, however, I saw in the translator's introduction. On the first page, in all-capitals, the word "PLOT" appeared before me. The introduction begins thusly: "Lighthouse at the End of the World (1905) by Jules Verne (1828-1905) is not well known in the English-speaking world ... Before studying its composition, characters, and themes, it is useful to summarize the plot ... "

Can this translator have any sympathy for Verne at all? Or for Verne's readers? What provoked him to summarize the story at a point when the reader has barely opened the book? I had no choice but to skip the introduction as a whole and go on to the story. Later I went back to read the translator's words -- and promptly found a use for those missing exclamation marks: for I needed something to pencil into the margins. In this "plot" the translator seemed to be making things up. I can repeat the statement that most surprised me, since it is not quite a "spoiler," being at best a misleading statement of actions: "The pirates draw in an American ship, killing all on board except First Officer Davis." Does this sentence not suggest to you that the pirates killed a ship's worth of American sailors? Yet such an incident failed to appear in the novel I read. (Were the editors at University of Nebraska Press asleep already, on page two of text?)

The translator then ends his "plot" with this: "The climax involves much drama and bloodshed." I believe this puts things a little strongly. His exaggeration cheapens his subject, unfortunately -- for this reader. I believe other intractable Verneians might feel similar disgruntlement.

I think the problem here may have arisen because the translator feels on secure ground, as translator, without feeling quite on the same ground as a writer. (His footnotes, I should add, seems to reflect a genuine scholarly impulse.)

I rather like this novel and hope to do more thinking on it someday. In the meantime since it does have a symbolic dimension it comes in for a small reference in my current book, which I will here just call Wonder Tales.

Before diving into the book, when reading the back-cover matter, I took pleased notice that William Butcher published something called Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography. While the "definitive" claim seems foredoomed to inaccuracy and gives off an unpleasant scent of self-importance, I have been wanting to catch up on more of the Verne materials that have cropped up, here and there, in the last few decades. After seeing what Butcher does, however, in foisting a "plot" of Lighthouse onto readers before Verne himself has a chance to squeeze in edgewise one of his own exclamation marks, I feel a bit more inclined to look for non-definitive books.

The first "review" of my own C.M. Kornbluth, as it happens, said in effect that I had probably written the definitive life of Kornbluth. In everything he said about the book this reviewer showed he had failed to read it before making his knowing pronouncements -- an accidental oversight on his part, no doubt (the book is immense, after all, compared to his paragraph of comment); and after saying his bit on the subject the reviewer laid this deep-sea whopper on my platter, fished from who-knows-what depths of ignorance. Had I planned to write the definitive biography I would never have begun the book in 2008. In C.M. Kornbluth I undertook to re-introduce Cyril to the reading world and to inspire others to pursue studies of his life and works. To this day I offer the book as an invitation, an exploration, and an introduction -- albeit an introduction with well-documented detail and some, I hope, critical vigor. Do I offer or did I ever offer C.M. Kornbluth as the last word? You may answer that yourself.

The "reviews" written without knowledge of the book being reviewed do considerable damage, even when not appended to a sales site at that thrice-be-damned cultural imposter named Amazon. I rather wish this particular reviewer would take back his statements about C.M. Kornbluth, even though all of them are favorable -- but wish especially that he would take back the one suggesting my book might be definitive.

It does me no good to wish this, of course.

And this quite satisfies me, since I have resolved to take Ned Land's words to heart.

Re-reading Poems: Poetry, November

28 October 2012:
Why a certain poem may draw the reading eye back — back to its page out of the many in a magazine or book; back to the first line again, after the last is reached --

This fails to rise to mind as the full question it is, frequently -- for so often our encounters with poetry occur in well-considered collections, in which the attractiveness of the poems from page to page tends to be a shared quality, in which a feeling of consistent reward dampens the force of the individual poem. I recall encountering a poem by Stephen Dunn in the pages of Poetry magazine a few years ago and being struck by its clarity and self-containment, and its effective striking of a note that seemed born of experience: for the meaning emerging from the poem arose from a narrative element ending in failure. Later when encountering the poem again collected into a book by Dunn, which I was reading against the backdrop of having cast my attention over prior volumes of his, I found the poem again and in it found a continuing attractiveness; yet now I took in its emergent meanings in light of the regular knelling of this particular bell throughout his career as a poet. This and other poems conveyed to the reader -- especially the reader taking a Romantic view that in his writings this poet was wrestling with his life -- that the poet had sought for meaning -- sought to find the vital design that applied in particular to him -- and had failed. This sense disconcerted me as I imagine it must disconcert others: for whatever structuralist or objective notions some critics might wish to foist upon readers I believe most of us dip into the realm of the poem not so much for guidance as for illumination that strikes, as if by accident, not only the path being taken by the poet but the path being taken by the reader. Some of the powers of poetry arise from moments when this dual illumination reveals to the reader a path -- even if only a suggestion or a glimpse of a path -- that the reader had failed to realize she or he was taking.

What may make us as readers return to a poem's first line may be a sense of being shown the New that is not so new as we thought, a sense of being presented the unconsciously familiar view. When we set even a single foot on a path and discover we reached that point unconsciously, we naturally ask ourselves how we arrived here where we suddenly are; and naturally we then glance back, perhaps even backing up to retrace our steps in the hopes we might do so with an ounce more consciousness.

29 October 2012:
I sometimes wonder, in contrast, if the ancient forms of riddle and conundrum may play a continuing role in our poetry reading. Who or what is the poet talking about? And where is the the poem going? The questions seem to arise in the mind, so that the reader goes on from one line's end to next line's beginning, impelled by curiosity. Does aesthetic enjoyment play as greatly into this first reading as in the second, when the reader has reached the ending? With the answer in hand, the reader may go back to re-read in order to see how the riddle played out, line by line -- or how the journey was affected. Since the riddle or puzzle has found resolution -- at least of some kind, definite or vague - the second reading lacks the propulsion of inquisitive curiosity. Instead aesthetic curiosity takes us through the lines again.

In the new November issue of Poetry Idra Novey's "The Visitor" uses the riddle form. One reads forward at first just absorbing the poem's perspective on the "visitor" -- whose actual nature, unveiled at the end, comes unexpectedly. The minor revelation sends the eye back to line one, to follow again the observations that now seem clues. A second poem of Novey's in the issue has something of the puzzle to it -- for the run-on sentences move evasively between apparent subjects. The poem, "La Prima Victoria," after several readings begins to offer the image of a woman discovering a disagreeable inner self. At the same time I half wonder how much I impose on the poem -- in part because "The Visitor" made me anticipate another riddle.

An unexpected function of conventional form made itself evident in reading "As Is," by Nicholas Friedman. I was sitting after supper, tired from a day of mostly working with old oddities and antiquities, as it happens, and had in my hands this issue of Poetry; and while my tired mind took in the word "antique" in line two of this poem, the poem only lightly penetrated my tiredness -- until the ending rhymed couplet. At my sudden thought, "A sonnet!" -- not so common in this day -- my eye went to the top again; and I read with more care and comprehension. Oddments: "Typewriters tall as headstones" puzzles me: I suppose the poem seems to evoke the low slabs near the ground bearing only names and dates. And "art deco bangles bright as harpsichords"? When I studied harpsichord, as I recall, the instruments were brown or black. I suppose the poem might lay claim to synaesthetic effect, with the bangles evoking bright harpsichord notes -- yet I think without much basis. And the phrase "to feign intrigue"? -- which perhaps was meant to convey what the phrase "to feign interest" does to us plebeians. I find it hard to feign interest in such misstepping: for it seems to me less than an innocent mistake.

The ending lines contain the poem's success, or otherwise: "One man's junk is another's all the same./ They don't buy much, but that's not why they came." Younger writers use familiar phrases -- if not more frequently than do older writers, then more obviously. The poem succeeds in its way because of its play on the familiar masculocentrist phrase, "One man's junk is another man's treasure": it succeeds because it diverts, for a moment. Yet to consider the understood phrase the poem offers -- "One man's junk is another's junk" -- the reader collides with negativism, with the transformative suggestion of the hackneyed phrase itself tossed out. Junked. It seems an admission that the poem -- or perhaps the shoppers at this antique barn -- have failed to find significance. They looked, then left. Why then present the scene? The last line offers the puzzle, with its lazy run-on construction and meter-rescue contractions. The line creates a nice surface effect: it rhymes, and seems to reflect some superior knowledge, some arch meaning -- but what arch meaning, exactly? Much could be read into this observation about these shoppers -- one of them after all has a unique way of feigning interest. The most obvious reading, given that feigning, is that this wise-posing final statement points toward their boredom. Cesspool la vie. For one line to suggest a failed search for value, for meaning or for transformation, and the next to suggest boredom, leaves me disappointed. I ask myself: I came this far for this?

And it is but a sonnet.

Friedman, by the way, is one of the five Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellows featured in the issue: also Reginald Dwayne Betts, Richie Hoffman, Jacob Saenz, and Rickey Laurentiis. An all-male slate of, indeed, fellows. Are all lily white? I have no idea: their names appear printed in black, no more. I may re-read them all, later, to see if my first impression of uninviting language came as just a tired thought. That the act of returning to Friedman's poem made it seem less inviting than it did at first I have to admit. I suppose a lesser poem does well by not calling attention to itself with rhymes. (I might well have had this thought after reading the Frederick Seidel poems in the September issue.)

One poem in the issue did make me re-read it instantly. I liked its feel, and still do. The words move along in comfortable meter, and have an inviting appearance of simplicity. The lack of intellectual parading makes it stand out -- makes it, perhaps, an expression that has better chance at moving nearer the vital impulse within it. As it happens I have read this poem several times -- and am only gradually myself moving toward what its impulse, its main notion, may be. So I will do no more than to say it is this: "Toward what island-home am I moving," by Joanna Klink.

Poetry 201:2, November 2012:
Other writers in the issue with poems: Elizabeth Spires, Hailey Leithauser, Vijay Seshadri, Casey Thayer, Donald Revell, Katie Ford, Jim Harrison, David Yezzi, Lisa Williams. I suspect I will re-read more among their poems. Particularly interesting in this issue, by the way, are "Poet Photos" taken from Poetry's files. I feel especially curious about the last image, in which six men stand shoulder to shoulder part-way down a stairwell above which hangs the sign: "The Rejected Generation." Taken circa 1960, the photograph shows six Milwaukee poets who never made it into Poetry. The editors name three among them: Ray Peckner/Puechner, John Schmidt and Jay Robert Nash. The appearance of their being a group, of the informal get-together sort, strikes an intriguing note. A club of rejected poets ... how could I or almost any poet not want to join?

Cheers ...