March 3, 2009
Updike's Shiv?
Updike's review of the new Cheever
bio. Updike dismisses Cheever rather wearily---he hated himself and never
knew how to be happy and came late to realize he was gay and the biographer is
hardworking and the book is tedious. Updike doesn't sound very happy nor
nuanced about either book or subject. Might well have been pretty low on
energy if this is one of the last things he wrote. I did not realize that
there had been an earlier bio of Cheever by Scott Donaldson. Updike is
pretty hard-edged and snappy in his dismissal of Cheever. Maybe that is
the key to why I've never taken to Updike all that much. And he was a
generation 20?years younger than Cheever---perfect for the generational divide
and conflict.
also read the McEwan article on
Updike in New York Review of Books recently--
wrote to Phil about these both--
just finished the McE piece on
Updike & Updike's (last?) piece in this week's new yorker, on
biography of Cheever. McEwan was very generous with Updike and amazingly
detailed. how did he do that? did he havethe piece in his drawer
for many years or did he take a week to pull the books off the shelves
and find a key passage or two??
Wish Updike had been as generous on
the biography of Cheever---sounds like a plodding piece of workbut there still
sounded like a techy attitude on Cheever--maybe just a generationalist
difference---sort of like Updike fighting with his "father" -- 20
years difference in their ages---
in his reply Phil makes fascinating
point about Updike always having a "shiv" in his work---
Just before getting yr
email, I finished the Updike review of the Bailey biography of
Cheever. You mention the lack of generosity in Updike's
review. I often get the feeling that there's a shiv hidden in Updike's writing. His
portraits seem to be balanced and fair, adding the bad to the good, but the bad
always seems a little more weighty than the good. So, in the end, I get
the sense of a hidden knife with a poisoned tip.
What struck me about McEwan's view
was how religious he thought Updike's essential vision was. I'm not
sure McEwan was right about that. Yes, Updike liked to see the
universal in the particular, but I don't think that always added up to a
religious sensibility. Does McEwan have a religious sensibility? I
think not. So McEwan's piece shows, I think, how Brits view -
and misconstrue - Americans. Still, I was particularly struck by the
assessment of a church as "a serious place." I had never
thought of a church in that way. I had always thought of churches as
quite the opposite. But I can see how one might find them
"serious."
My thinking then went back over the
Updike review & I thought maybe I had found the shiv---or one of them--
Phil has an interesting comment on
Updike, that he always has a shiv (didn't know what that was until context
explained it) and here is one of those shivs in Updike's review essay on
Cheever. I mean he could have mentioned Cheever's struggle with sexuality
in passing but instead he ends the whole piece with it--a long discussion--and
earlier sets it up with this pointed comment---why "acolytes" and why
know about Max's work now as a technical writer?? put-down is why---of
both the acolyte and the priest---
Max Zimmer, the chief of the male
acolytes and servitors brought into Cheever’s life by his belated homosexual
acknowledgment and by his gradually increasing debility, said at the time, “If
there’s someone who never loved himself, it was John.” Twenty-five years later,
Max, married and with a family, and having turned his literary ambitions into a
livelihood as a technical writer, summed up his former mentor:
"He was
extraordinarily blessed by anyone’s standards . . . but he liked to say that
all he had in life was an old dog. There was his despair. And then there was
his inability to comprehend the despair and self-negation he inflicted on
others. "
March 3, 2009
The Fun of the Weeping Eye
-- Beckett and Poons
I'm trying to figure out Beckett by
looking at the recent paintings by Larry Poons. He has a wonderful new
show at Danese Gallery. My suggestion of the moment is that one or
more of Poons' paintings serve as the scene for one of Beckett's plays.
Or his novels. His work in general.
Here is a discussion of Beckett
from Deborah Barlow's site Slow Muse
Is Endgame too bleak
for these times? Well, maybe. But it is also hauntingly exacting in its
archetypal austerity. And for me personally, it is a default measuring device
for how the force fields of my life have shifted. I first saw it performed in
the 60s in San Francisco during a time when life as we knew it was being ripped
open and replaced with an unleashed wild energy of change. That shift was
intoxicating, exciting and personal, and Beckett was a clarion reminder of the
profundity of the revolution at hand. Or so it seemed to a wide eyed, teenaged
idealist.
Twenty years later in Cambridge,
the center of gravity of my life had turned domestic, having just had three
children in three years (and yes, we did finally figure out what was causing
that.) At that point in my life, the existential angst of Endgame felt more theatrical than a desperate call from
an inchoate world consciousness.
Now, 25 years after that viewing, I
watched the play last night and felt as though I had circled back into a world
where catastrophic change is rampant and ubiquitous, where the unknowns are
winning out against the knowns. Bleak and intense, Endgame has proven itself to be a play for all seasons—certainly
in my life anyway.
A few excellent quotes on Beckett
are provided below thanks to the dramaturgy work of ART’s Heidi Nelson:
One has to give up the comfort or
security of a single interpretation of Endgame, recognizing that the play does
not work towards the clarification of meaning but, rather, towards the
clarification of the impossibility of meaning.
Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to
discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work
must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends
upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of
experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The
radical simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature of
the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties
that plague the minds of his characters.
—Charles R. Lyons
At the root of his art was a
philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man’s relationship
with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued
living with a kind of stoicism.
—Mel Gussow
I suppose many would say that these
paintings are far too bright and joyful to serve as the scene for Beckett's
plays. But I am especially taken with the words Lyons uses above.
Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to
discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work
must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends
upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of
experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The radical
simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature
of the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties
that plague the minds of his characters.
Is it too much of a stretch to say
that Poons creates a visual simplicity through complexity, ambiguity and
indeterminacies. The colors vibrate, move, but there is no clear image,
no formal composition to speak of; Poons speaks of his process as the art
of the mistake.
Paintings are mistakes. You put a
mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it
would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50
or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t
finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished.
People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic.
It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With
applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration
doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art
lives, if it’s any good.
And in this next passage---could
this be a description of what it is to try to read Beckett?
You sense it. Very quickly you
reach a wall of impenetrability. It’s like you’re reading words and there’s
nothing there. You can’t penetrate it. And then you do - not all at once, but
maybe in a week, or a year, or ten years, and when you do, when it finally
pours over you, it’s just like anything else in art that you are really moved
by. When stuff resonates with you, then you’ve got a Bach or a Schuman or a
Brahms. You’ve got one of them.
I'm trying, maybe too hard, to use
Poons work to figure out whether I really like Beckett or just think I should
like him. For the moment I like this notion, that Poons is painting he
perfect "scrims" for any and all productions of Beckett's words.
Beckett loves sounds and loves silence. He reduces voice to
"minimalist" extremes. Poons does something similar in paint,
trying to use only color to generate resonant light.
Almost every time I come back to
one of these new pictures, I almost don’t remember it. It looks different every
time. I don’t understand it. We’ll, I do understand it because I see it, and
seeing is understanding when we’re talking about painting. There’s no
gap between seeing and understanding.
When you’re painting, then you’ve
got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But
once you see something - you’ll see a flow or a shape - then that’s what
you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from. And you just try to make
them real. And they’re real when they look like they’ve been done all at once.
When something happens so that everything that I’ve been looking at in the
painting becomes something else very different. All of a sudden little things
are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look
like it has a beginning or an end. Where did Cézanne begin a painting? Where
did Titian start? You can’t tell. You just don’t see it. But in paintings that
don’t arrive at this “colored moment,” you can always tell.
Beckett's works have this sort of
fluidity, don't they? They change on us even as we try to read and
re-read them to pin down what they mean and don't mean.
Ah yes, there's great fun to be had
from an eye, it weeps for the least little thing, a yes, a no, the yesses make
it weep, the noes too, the perhapses particularly, with the result that the
grounds for these staggering pronouncements do not always receive the attention
they deserve. (The Unnameable 373)
Is Poons painting the Color of the
Perhapses? In the dark foreground of their light is Beckett speaking
their silence?
I'm trying to figure out Beckett by
looking at the recent paintings by Larry Poons. He has a wonderful new
show at Danese Gallery. My suggestion of the moment is that one or
more of Poons' paintings serve as the scene for one of Beckett's plays.
Or his novels. His work in general.
Here is a discussion of Beckett
from Deborah Barlow's site Slow Muse
Is Endgame too bleak
for these times? Well, maybe. But it is also hauntingly exacting in its
archetypal austerity. And for me personally, it is a default measuring device
for how the force fields of my life have shifted. I first saw it performed in
the 60s in San Francisco during a time when life as we knew it was being ripped
open and replaced with an unleashed wild energy of change. That shift was
intoxicating, exciting and personal, and Beckett was a clarion reminder of the
profundity of the revolution at hand. Or so it seemed to a wide eyed, teenaged
idealist.
Twenty years later in Cambridge,
the center of gravity of my life had turned domestic, having just had three
children in three years (and yes, we did finally figure out what was causing that.)
At that point in my life, the existential angst of Endgame felt more theatrical than a desperate call from
an inchoate world consciousness.
Now, 25 years after that viewing, I
watched the play last night and felt as though I had circled back into a world
where catastrophic change is rampant and ubiquitous, where the unknowns are
winning out against the knowns. Bleak and intense, Endgame has proven itself to be a play for all
seasons—certainly in my life anyway.
A few excellent quotes on Beckett
are provided below thanks to the dramaturgy work of ART’s Heidi Nelson:
One has to give up the comfort or
security of a single interpretation of Endgame, recognizing that the play does
not work towards the clarification of meaning but, rather, towards the clarification
of the impossibility of meaning.
Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to
discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work
must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends
upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of
experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The
radical simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature of
the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties
that plague the minds of his characters.
—Charles R. Lyons
At the root of his art was a
philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man’s
relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and
continued living with a kind of stoicism.
—Mel Gussow
I suppose many would say that these
paintings are far too bright and joyful to serve as the scene for Beckett's
plays. But I am especially taken with the words Lyons uses above.
Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to
discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work
must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends
upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of
experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The radical
simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature
of the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties
that plague the minds of his characters.
Is it too much of a stretch to say
that Poons creates a visual simplicity through complexity, ambiguity and
indeterminacies. The colors vibrate, move, but there is no clear image,
no formal composition to speak of; Poons speaks of his process as the art
of the mistake.
Paintings are mistakes. You put a
mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it
would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50
or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t
finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished.
People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic.
It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With
applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration
doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art
lives, if it’s any good.
And in this next passage---could
this be a description of what it is to try to read Beckett?
You sense it. Very quickly you
reach a wall of impenetrability. It’s like you’re reading words and there’s
nothing there. You can’t penetrate it. And then you do - not all at once, but
maybe in a week, or a year, or ten years, and when you do, when it finally
pours over you, it’s just like anything else in art that you are really moved
by. When stuff resonates with you, then you’ve got a Bach or a Schuman or a
Brahms. You’ve got one of them.
I'm trying, maybe too hard, to use
Poons work to figure out whether I really like Beckett or just think I should
like him. For the moment I like this notion, that Poons is painting he
perfect "scrims" for any and all productions of Beckett's words.
Beckett loves sounds and loves silence. He reduces voice to
"minimalist" extremes. Poons does something similar in paint,
trying to use only color to generate resonant light.
Almost every time I come back to
one of these new pictures, I almost don’t remember it. It looks different every
time. I don’t understand it. We’ll, I do understand it because I see it, and
seeing is understanding when we’re talking about painting. There’s no
gap between seeing and understanding.
When you’re painting, then you’ve
got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But
once you see something - you’ll see a flow or a shape - then that’s what
you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from. And you just try to make
them real. And they’re real when they look like they’ve been done all at once.
When something happens so that everything that I’ve been looking at in the
painting becomes something else very different. All of a sudden little things
are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look
like it has a beginning or an end. Where did Cézanne begin a painting? Where
did Titian start? You can’t tell. You just don’t see it. But in paintings that
don’t arrive at this “colored moment,” you can always tell.
Beckett's works have this sort of
fluidity, don't they? They change on us even as we try to read and
re-read them to pin down what they mean and don't mean.
Ah yes, there's great fun to be had
from an eye, it weeps for the least little thing, a yes, a no, the yesses make
it weep, the noes too, the perhapses particularly, with the result that the
grounds for these staggering pronouncements do not always receive the attention
they deserve. (The Unnameable 373)
Is Poons painting the Color of the
Perhapses? In the dark foreground of their light is Beckett speaking
their silence?
March 8, 2009 Beckett "All I Am Is Feeling"
"This academic madness"
Beckett's work — especially in the early years though no less even now,
I would imagine — is often misinterpreted. Or, it seems possible to say, simply
interpreted, the mis-being implicit regarding Beckett’s
work; in one interview [...] asked what, if not a philosophical one, is his
reason for writing, he responds I haven't the slightest idea. I'm no
intellectual. All I am is feeling.
This sense of 'feeling' and not
'intellecting' is what always brings me back to Beckett's prose so strongly and
deeply, at least regarding work from the Trilogy onward.
Named Tomorrow goes on
to read Beckett's writing in accordance with this important apprehension. It
reminds me of Beckett's admiration for the mystics. When asked in the same book
as in the link what he thought of the essays and theses about his work, Beckett
waved his hand: "This academic madness..."
March
27, 2009
Before
the Computer
Before the computer I would wake up
and write in my journal and read.Now I touch the keypad and fire up the screen
and scanfor email and news and "news" of questionable value from the
myriad of bookmarks and links.Linking has replaced contemplating. This morning
I sent an Item about how celebs hire ghostwriters to keep them on Twitter
to my own Twitter page as this mornings post.
Before, however, I was much more
comfortable in my own skin, I knew myself better, I was more happily adjusted
to hanging out with just me and my problems and motifs and imaginary
complaints, my own interior landscape.Now I often wonder if I even know where
that is, where I am.
And do I really want to know
Craig185 got drunk on "Elvis Costellos" last night? Or that the
fake Christopher Walken has come up with another clever walkenesque
walkenpercue?
We are indeed all living in
Argentina after all.
March 29, 2009 Six Years
Before the computer I would wake up
and write in my journal and read.Now I touch the keypad and fire up the screen
and scanfor email and news and "news" of questionable value from the
myriad of bookmarks and links.Linking has replaced contemplating. This morning
I sent an Item about how celebs hire ghostwriters to keep them on Twitter
to my own Twitter page as this mornings post.
Before, however, I was much more
comfortable in my own skin, I knew myself better, I was more happily adjusted
to hanging out with just me and my problems and motifs and imaginary
complaints, my own interior landscape.Now I often wonder if I even know where
that is, where I am.
And do I really want to know
Craig185 got drunk on "Elvis Costellos" last night? Or that the
fake Christopher Walken has come up with another clever walkenesque
walkenpercue?
We are indeed all living in
Argentina after all.
