Jhumpa Lahiri's "Hell-Heaven"

My brother and I were born to Indian parents, but raised in the United States. My brother was born in India, but a year and a half after his birth, our Mother brought him on a plane to the United States, where he would meet our Father for the first time.

I never really thought about my experience, or my brother's experience, as particularly "Indian," though I know it must have been. Certainly language is a huge one, but there are many cultural things I'm slowly becoming more aware of. I'm not complaining, mind you, just saying that it was different than any kind of "norm." I never thought about how that deviation from the "norm" was related to my first generation upbringing until I heard Jhumpa Lahiri read the first half of her story, "Hell-Heaven."

Reading the whole thing (printed in the New Yorker) and thinking again about her reading I felt an immediate connection not necessarily to the plot of the story, but to the moods and tones surrounding her characters. Something about the looks the characters share sounds so familiar to me that I immediately attempt to find characters in my life that are the same as these. There must be some kind of mirror that I'm just not seeing.

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A Few Thoughts on the Last Half of "Vertigo"

**This Contains Spoilers**

I feel like I’ve read a lot about the second half of Vertigo and the obsession displayed by Jimmy Stewart’s Scotty character, but in a lot of ways, the story in the second half has more to do with Judy’s desire to make Scotty love her rather than her former alter-ego. Judy, despite her obvious knowledge of all things going on plot wise, doesn’t seem to grasp Scotty’s obsession with her version of Madeleine. This is in spite of her near-obsession with gaining Scotty’s affection, which is only truly achievable by playing to his obsession. It’s almost as if she has herself convinced that she has done nothing wrong- her part in the events leading to the real Madeleine’s death and the birth of Scotty’s obsession are non-existent. She even childishly runs off to the corner, upset that she is being turned into Madeleine, rather than denying or attempting to obfuscate Scotty’s attempts to change her back to her Madeleine avatar. Scotty’s oft repeated line “it can’t matter to you” leads me not to think of it as some kind of male chauvinism, but rather his knowledge that this is Madeleine and that if she has been transformed once, she will be transformed again in order to feed his desire. But Scotty to a great extent is willing to play along rather than let on until near the end that he is aware of the double-cross. In fact, I believe he is not fully aware of either his actions, or the realization that this is his Madeleine.

Judy even ends up admitting that she no longer cares for herself and that, in order to satisfy her quest for Scotty’s love, she is willing to creep slowly closer to a re-transformation, all the while unaware that Scotty isn’t as blind as he appears. Judy does know, however, when she enters in full re-Madeleine that the hair style is the final conversion- and she fights it. However, upon stepping back into the room having put her hair up as Scotty requested, Judy’s look of satisfaction upon seeing Scotty’s reaction to her completes her quest for his love, even if he hardly cares for Judy at all. Unfortunately, Judy cannot separate herself at all from Madeleine and chooses to embrace her exterior transformation. Scotty’s decision to kiss her completes the obsessive satisfaction for both.

However, for Scotty, this is not enough. He must do two things: save Madeleine from her death, and perhaps over-ridingly, solve the puzzle that has been created. Hitchcock’s shot of Scotty and Madeleine as the camera rotates and Scotty looks away from Madeleine isn’t the birth of his desire to save her, but rather than decision that he has been duped.

Hitchcock makes it obvious though, of course, by giving us obvious visual cues. It’s one of the main faults of Hitchcock’s film making here, I think: he gives away when he could hold back. It’s his desire to make the audience feel as they know better than Hitchcock’s character and create a kind of tension. However, I would be interesting in seeing the film without Scotty’s realization played out so completely. A subtle look and then his forced march of Judy and his explanation of the crime to her and his interrogation would make it even more surprising for the audience.

But I digress…

Judy it seems is motivated by guilt when she rips up her letter to Scotty and chooses not to leave but rather give him the love she hopes that he wants since she is in love with him. Her guilt, however, leads her to the fatal, and I believe sub-conscious, mistake of wearing the necklace which leads to Scotty’s detective side realizing that she has been lying to him the whole time. However, more interestingly, when Scotty tells her he knows and that she shouldn’t have been so sentimental as to keep a souvenir of the crime, he means himself and not the necklace. He’s her souvenir of the crime as much as she’s his souvenir of Madeleine.

Judy’s immediate reaction is to tell Scotty the truth, which is an act revisited by her mistake. She sub-consciously chooses to tell Scotty the truth by showing him evidence that even in his advanced state of psychosis he would be forced to notice. While I don’t believe Judy needed to die, she certainly needed to have Scotty know because her ultimately goal was making Scotty love her.

Scotty’s violence towards the end of the movie when they reach San Juan Bautista is a fantastic combination of his obsession and his knowledge of Judy’s deceit. However, Judy sees it, for a moment, ONLY as Scotty’s obsession and when she realizes that Scotty knows, her resistance becomes even worse. She’d been fighting him, realizing that Scotty’s obsession had gone too far during the drive south of San Francisco.

Typefaces

So we watched Helvetica again. It's a pretty fascinating documentary not only on the font itself, but what it means to use type and what that type carries with it.

Today, I am writing from the John Hay library at Brown University, where I am working on reading a book for Claire Donato's class. I am sitting in on Claire's undergraduate poetry workshop in preparation for my own teaching.

As Graham Foust told me, you can gauge a good library by whether or not they own Joseph Ceravolo's Transmigration Solo, a book which reader's of this blog and of the Ceravolo Project blog know I am well-acquainted with and in adoration of, so when I knew I was coming to look up one book, I naturally checked to see if they had TS.

Brown's copy is number 93 and is signed by Ceravolo himself. All the copies I've seen so far are signed and numbered. This is the highest I've seen, having seen #36 at Iowa. I cannot remember the number at UGA. I might ask someone to look that up for me.

Anyways, about typefaces: Transmigration Solo is set in Centaur, which was created by Bruce Rogers in the late 1920s.¹ It's a serif font which has a lovely emotionality that comes with it and adds nicely to the text of TS. There's a level within the font that adds to the lush nature of Ceravolo's poems- like the layers of Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" production method. It's fuller with the font than a font that attempts to remove all emotionality.

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1. Fonts.com piece on Rogers and Centaur.

The Gold Party

My old friend Benji Barton's band, The Gold Party:

Fashion Poetics V: The Empire Strikes Back

I’m not immediately against Capitalism. Well, I guess I’m more against it now than I ever was before, but ultimately, it’s not the worst system. I do believe, to some extent, in the personal freedom that *ought* to come with Capitalism- in that you’re not living in some despotic Communist-in-name-only country. I figure if you want, you should be able to own a business and sell stuff you want.

Same goes for presses, of course. Publish what you want. You have more money; you publish more stuff you want. Sometimes it sells, which means you ought to sell it, right?

Not exactly. Looking back on some of the early Fashion Poetics posts, I got to thinking again about the analogous nature of fashion with poetry: there’s fashion that goes on the runway and fashion that sells at K-Mart. Some might argue that the “fashion” at K-Mart isn’t fashion at all, but rather a utility, but at some level, it was designed with an aesthetic in mind.

Of course, I’m hard-pressed to call something utility clothing, because by extension that means there’s utility poetry- poetry that serves a basic function and sells in high quantities just so people can buy some poetry for whatever reason (actually- why do people buy utility poetry?). To say that there’s utility poetry means there’s someone out there writing poetry in order to sell it, and maybe I’m just not that cynical.

But maybe I should pretend for a while. Maybe I should consider that beyond someone writing poetry in order to sell it, they’re writing poems they think are meeting a certain aesthetic, like the clothes on the rack at K-Mart (which, I should say here, I’m not knocking- do I look like I’m a high fashion guy?). You hope to meet a certain aesthetic and they hope you buy it, thinking you’re meeting that aesthetic.

But you’re not, and they’re playing you. They are crafters of a pseudo-aesthetic style that makes sense to the great majority of people. “These are jeans. They fit. I bet they’ll look good.” However, my guess is, for Fashionistas, there’s a lot more to even just basic jeans that maybe the average person wouldn’t give a shit about.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying poetry should attempt to be beyond the reach of the average person, but maybe what I’m saying is that it should not apologize for it. Poetry should not feel bad for being “difficult,” if anyone can define that term. Poetry shouldn’t attempt to play to any denominator because maybe it shouldn’t end up on a mass-consumption rack.

It might not sell. It’s not supposed to sell. It’s supposed to be pushing the edges of what we understand language to be. Well, maybe not, but your aesthetic ought to be whatever you make it, but selling it should not be your goal. If it is your goal, I suppose you’re what I’m railing against.

Back to the earlier question: why do people buy their poetry from Barnes and Noble or the other big chains? Is there anything interesting there? I think it has to do with poetry being viewed as some kind of higher level- some kind of elite tradition which, by not only shopping in the poetry section at B&N, but also having it on your bookshelf at home, you’ve now included yourself in. Poetry is considered, as Johannes once said, “high falutin’” and it’s something you’re into when you’re attempting to appear superior to others. However, all you’re doing is continuing to support the established set by considering it in that way and buying with that in mind.¹

While I say poetry should not apologize for being “difficult,” I think that’s separate from what I believe most poets want to say about their work these days. Yeah, I’d say my poems are a bit weird, but there’s nothing to “get” about them necessarily, a common complaint I hear. “These are kind of cool, Amish, I just don’t get poetry.” Neither do I, to be honest.

This Fashion metaphor isn’t perfect. What I suppose I mean by it is that yes there are channels and options in poetry like anything else and simply because something appears not to have a practical use doesn’t mean it’s useless. Poetry doesn’t need to comfort or make you feel anything about a specific event. I’m reminded by a book of “Friendship Poems” that I have, given to me by David. Is it necessary to categorize poetry in that way? Aren’t all poems love poems or hate poems in some way? Aren’t they all about friendship and death and all these topics common to the “human experience?” Maybe poetry isn’t any of those things at the same time.

Art, I feel, has its own merit beyond its ability to sell, or at least it should. It should be more about the limits and pushing past them, which should not be tied to sales or even jobs. In fact, on the subject of jobs, I think poets ought to be hired for how far they are outside of the norm within a department, not how well they meet it. ‘Ars gratia artis’ and all that.

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¹ Do Non-Poets Buy Poetry Books?

A Fellow Brown MFAer

Mark Baumer can't manage to write a novel, but he's writing fine blog posts. Check out his web page, which will be over on the side once this post is pages away.

Oh, and the dartboard image? That's my shot. It was magical.

Jennifer was useless, but it's darts: mano y mano and all that.

Just the Part with the Glenn Beck Bit

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The quote I was looking for: "Just remember: when you put yourself up there, you can never drive in the last nail yourself."

Cosa Nostra Update

Dear Friends of Cosa Nostra,



We're proud to announce the release of Anthony Madrid's The 580 Strophes and Mary Hickman's How to Be Healthy & Heal, in addition to two broadsides: Benjamin Paloff's "Maimonides on Scriptura...l Passages with Seemingly Purposeless Contents" and Mary Hickman's "[The comets laugh...]." These letter-pressed items are now available at http://www.cosanostra-editions.com/.

The President's Health Care/Move to Providence

1. That Barack Obama was elected by no small majority of Americans seems to have been clearly wasted. No, I don't always think that legislation ought to be forced through, but clearly, Americans chose to give the Democrats a certain level of power and they have fucked it up royally.

That Obama backing down from these incredibly well-organized faux grass-roots lunatics is kind of surprising to me, honestly. There have been nut-jobs all along and Obama has done an amazing job of avoiding them in order to, for example, get elected. To back down now is much worse, I would say, than simply losing this fight. Obama has weakened himself throughout much of this term and is certainly in no position to help Democrats maintain their numbers in 2010. I think there's a good chance that we could well lose enough to be back to even in the Senate and House.

That the Right and conservative Democrats have been able to maintain their funding from the health care industry at the expense of the American people is nothing short of corruption. That the organized Right have been able to cause such a ruckus as to make it so that facts have been completely obscured and their "bull" (to use the phrase of that NRA guy in Montana) has become larger than life is disgusting. They claim that people are mobilizing themselves at these rallies, even when faced with the evidence of busing and corporate sponsorship.

The removal of the public option is disgusting, and that Obama seems to be on the verge of abandoning it is nothing less than denying the mandate which he was given when elected. That Obama and the Democrats are so afraid of these fuck-nuts protesters to the point of changing their tactics is perhaps one of the greatest let-downs in modern American politics. Without a public option, this bill is just an excuse to force Americans to buy expensive health care with no alternative.

As Mark Wallace points out, the fat lady has yet to sing, but I fear the Republicans, smelling blood in the water, are circling quite close.


2. Providence has been...interesting. We've had a rough time of it so far, to be honest, though I have no doubt we've been spoiled a bit in the past. It has been HOT and with no A/C, Jennifer and I have had a rough time sleeping (at night) or doing much of anything during the day time.

Providence is lovely but quite busy, and moving from the quiet streets of Iowa City hasn't helped. There's constant noise from the street and I think it's just contributed to the feeling of things being different.

The car decided to pick this period to mess up, so now that we've spent a chunk of money on it, we're not doing terribly well on money, which of course simply adds to our nostalgia for Iowa City.

On the plus side, all university-related issues have been easy and fun. I've hung out with the Waldrops and emailed back and forth with students who are coming in. I'm unbelievably excited about school, though slightly nervous about, you know, actually HAVING to write on a regular basis. School starts in a few weeks, so we'll see how it goes.

Needless to say, I've been glued to the television watching the news, especially regarding the Healthcare quagmire.

Soon: a post of the motivations of the Right in all this mess.

Our Favorite Song of Late