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[...] He felt polluted, but he read about purity. He had reached a bad stage of limited selfhood, disaffection, unwillingness to be; he was sick; he wanted out. Then he read this dazzling book. It rushed over him. HE thought he would drown. But he didn't drown; he floated.
[...] He couldn't speak to Amy of the solitary death in store for her. There was not a cloud in the arid sky today, and there was no shadow of death on Amy. [...]
Wicks said, "Don't do that, Hat. Guess I went too far. You're right."
"You'll never have a chance to make it up," she cried. "Get out!"
On that cry he disappeared, and since then she had never seen him.
"Wicks, dear," she said. "Please! I'm sorry. Don't condemn me in your heart. Forgive me. I hurt myself in my evil. I always had a thick idiot head. I was born with a thick idiot head."
[...] Whether the American working class should give material aid to the Loyalist Government of Spain, controlled as that was by Stalinists and other class enemies and traitors. You had to fight Franco, and you had to fight Stalin as well. There was, of course, no material aid to give. But had there been any, should it have been given? This purely theoretical problem caused splits and expulsions. [...]
amazing
[...] It was she who produced the white Vintage paperback volume of Wallace Stevens at some point in the drive and suggested that we take turns reading the stanzas of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” I was stunned by the poem. I am still stunned by the poem. After we had read around and gotten over the shock and novelty of the way the adjectives play over and transform the surface of the poem, and after we had read a few others by Stevens, and other books were produced and other poems read, the conversation moved on, but I got my hands on Marie’s Stevens and when we arrived in Carmel and got some more wine and watched the sun set over Carmel Bay in a light rain, I suggested we read the poem again, which we did, to humor me, I think, while the last light smoldered on the horizon. Then we tried to build a fire on the beach, but the rain turned into a lashing Pacific storm and we spent the night, quite wet, eight of us crammed into the car in the parking lot, laughing a lot—it was very sexy as I remember—and making jokes about cars and autoeroticism. I will start to feel like Kinbote, the lunatic annotator of other people’s poems with incidents from his own life in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, if I tell you the story of the lives of each of the people in the car. Marie, who returned to the Philippines and who, I know, had two children and whose spine was badly injured when she was struck by a car; Killpack, who did go to Vietnam and then army intelligence toward the end of the war and after that seemed to disappear from sight; another friend who was a classics major and later managed a café and wrote poems and died of cancer a couple of years ago; but I will resist except to say that the poem stays with me, in the way that songs we fall in love to stay with us, as a figure for that time and those people, and their different lives will always feel to me as if they are playing out in time the way the adjectives of experience play over the adamant nouns in Stevens’s poem: rosy chocolate and chophouse chocolate and musky chocolate, perplexed and tense and tranced machine.
ahhhh i love this
I suppose these stories are the equivalent of newspaper cartoons. They call for a quick, cynical laugh. Chekhov got very adept at writing them, and he must have learned a lot about condensing his material, since some of the papers paid more for short effective pieces than for longer ones. Later he was always advising young writers to cross out, even Maxim Gorky, and especially—here is a bit of Chekhov’s letter to Gorky—“to cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out. It is comprehensible when I write: ‘The man sat on the grass,’ because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: ‘The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.’ The brain can’t grasp all of that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.” His favorite sentence in the Russian language, he said, was one written by a classmate of his in grammar school. It went: “The sea is large.”
[...] Summary can’t catch the bedraggled air of the two daring young sinners, who, three days after their defiance of convention, are already starting to feel that vague loneliness that overcomes people who have just done something that is supposed to solve all their problems. [...]
on chekhov's "neighbors"
[...] One of the great moments in “Neighbors” occurs when Peter parts from Vlasich and Zina. “Riding into darkness, he looked back and saw Vlasich and Zina walking home along the path—he with long strides, she at his side with quick, jerky steps. They were conducting an animated conversation.” Peter’s loneliness is in that last sentence, and so is the splendid and perfect blindness of the lovers, who will get immense mileage, maybe even years, from conversation about their situation, followed by conversation about how they used to have conversation about their situation, followed by—what? Misery, some happiness, children perhaps, the final collapse of the porch, acrimony, bickering, recrimination, thickened waists, life.
He was born in New Rochelle, New York, born to some wealth—his father was a diamond merchant—and after George’s mother’s death when he was four, the father remarried and moved the family to San Francisco, where George grew up. He started college at Oregon State and was expelled within months for staying out all night with his girlfriend, Mary, who became his wife. The young couple took off for New York City, where they met other young poets and started a press (with George’s money) and where, at the age of twenty-four, he published his first book of poems, Discrete Series. It was 1934, the country was in the depths of the Depression, and—this is a story poets know—George and Mary got involved in tenants’-rights strikes in Brooklyn, took up political organizing, joined the Communist Party of America, which eventually sent George to work in the auto factories in Detroit. During those years he simply set poetry aside. When the U.S. joined the war in 1941, he was thirty-three years old, working in a critical war industry, and he didn’t have to go, but he enlisted, elected to be in the infantry, and fought his way across France until he was wounded in 1944, awarded a Purple Heart, and sent home, to a country that was not hospitable to the young radicals of the 1930s.
sick
[...] I first laid eyes on George at one of San Francisco’s mammoth group poetry readings. It may have been to honor the memory of Ezra Pound, who died in 1972. Gary Snyder read, I remember, and Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure. There were a couple of dozen poets, and in those tumultuous years, they all tended to dress florally. Suddenly on the stage appeared a taut, lean, grizzled man in a quiet dark suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie. Hard to convey how unexpected he looked. The person I was with, older than me, with different points of reference, turned to me and said, “Who is that guy? He looks like he’s been editing the Daily Worker for the last thirty years.” And then George read, for three or four minutes, poems that were so exact, concentrated, musical, and resonant that I found myself looking around, a little amazed, to see if other people were hearing what I was hearing.
lmao