Just posted some of my thoughts on In the Basement of the Ivory Tower over at Good Reports. Throughout most of recorded history, individual cultures have had special, if not always sacred, texts. The Greeks had Homer. Chinese civilization had the Five Classics. Christianity had the Bible. English literature had Shakespeare. What unites us today? Professor X was curious to find out:

One of the things I try to do in English 102 is relate the literary techniques we will study to novels the students have already read. I try to find books familiar to everyone. This has thus far proven impossible to do. Many of my students don’t read much, and though I tend to think of them monolithically, they don’t really share a culture. To Kill a Mockingbird? Nope. (And I thought everyone had read that!) Animal Farm? No. If they have read it, they don’t remember it. The Outsiders? The Chocolate War? No and no. Charlotte’s Web? You’d think so, but no. So then I expand the exercise to general works of narrative art, meaning movies, but that doesn’t work much better. That really surprised me — that there are no movies they have all seen, except one: they’ve all seen The Wizard of Oz. Some have seen it multiple times. So, when the time comes to talk about quest narratives, we’re in business. The farmhands’ early conversation illustrates foreshadowing. The witch melts at the climax. Theme? Hands fly up. (The students can rattle off that one without thinking. Dorothy learns that she can do anything she puts her mind to and that all the tools she needs to succeed are already within her.) Protagonist and antagonist? Whose point of view is the movie told from? Can anyone tell me the cowardly lion’s epiphany? Are the ruby slippers a mere deus ex machina? What would you say is the symbolic purpose of the winged monkeys?

The movie comes in handy. Discussions are pretty lively.

From El Narco (2012) by Ioan Grillo:

“When I did my first hit, I got a little too close and shot too many bullets into the body. Then the blood and guts exploded out all over me and I had to throw away my clothes and wash hard to get it off. That night I had bad dreams. I kept remembering shooting the person and the blood spurting out.”

Gustavo did more hits and the bad dreams stopped. Every few  weeks he would be given a new target. Mostly he killed in Medellín but he was also sent to take out victims in other cities across Colombia such as Bogotá and Cali. Soon he had killed ten, then fifteen, then twenty people. Then he lost count.

I ask him if he thinks about the victims. He shakes his head.

“I keep focused and do my work. Before I go out, I pray to Jesus and clear my mind. I never take drugs or drink before a job as I need my five senses. When I come back I will relax and smoke a spliff and listen to music.”

…

Does he feel remorse about the people he has murdered? I ask. How can he square what he does with his Catholicism? “I know it is bad,” he says. “But I do it out of need. I do it to support my family.

He also knows that his work may well lead to his own murder. But he tries to keep any fear tucked deep inside.

“I need to keep strong and focused. I can’t spend all my time worrying if they are going to kill me or not. Everyone dies in the end.”

From “Closing the Books” by Arthur Krystal, Harper’s Magazine (March 1996):

At fifteen or twenty, the books we read — or rather the minds behind them — are far more interesting than our own. But as we experience for ourselves the rites of passage that were previously only read about, and as we mature and reflect on what those experiences mean, novelists and poets begin to lose an important advantage — at some point we’ve all been down that road. And what may happen is this: we begin to find that most writers are less interesting than we think ourselves to be.

From Bookslut interview with David Markson (July 2005):

Where did I read that you no longer pay attention to more recent fiction?

It’s true. Any fiction, really. I hate to admit it, and I don’t really understand it, but it’s some years now — it just seems to have gone dead for me. Not just recent stuff, but even novels that I’ve deeply cared about — I try to reread and there’s none of the reaction I used to get, none of the aesthetic excitement or whatever one wants to call it, all a blank. With one exception of course — I can always reread Ulysses. In fact I went through it twice, consecutively, just a few years ago. But hell, that’s not like reading a novel, it’s more like reading the King James Bible. Or Shakespeare. You’re at it for the language. But even The Recognitions, which I think is categorically the best American novel of the twentieth century, just doesn’t do anything similar for me. It did, the first four times I read it — and four is not an exaggeration, by the way, in spite of its length — but the last time out it just went flat. It’s not the books, I’m sure, it’s me — I’m just not bringing the same receptiveness to them that I used to.

No other exceptions?

Oh, well, there are books by friends, that you do give yourself to. You approach them with a different psychological stance, somehow, wanting to enjoy. And doing so. As with the most recent Gil Sorrentino, for instance. Or Ann Beattie’s new collection of stories. But there’s simply no impulse toward anything else, and certainly not toward the latest generation. They all seem like they shouldn’t have driver’s licenses, even. You do become aware of the names, of course. Who are they, Lethem, Foer, Eggers? Are they mostly named Jonathan?

You know of them, but you’re not interested in reading them?

Seriously — to paraphrase Ezra Pound, there’s no record of a critic ever saying anything significant about a writer who came later than he did. You grow up getting interested in books, and the writers of your own generation or the generation or two before your own are the ones you pay most attention to. But listen, I’m scarcely as bad as some of the people I know. But good lord, some of the people I went to college or even graduate school with pretty much quit about nine days after they got their diplomas. And haven’t read a poet since Auden, or a novelist since Hemingway. There was one fat novel I did read. In 1996, in fact. I remember the date because my novel Reader’s Block had also just been published: Infinite Jest. Before I’d heard of David Foster Wallace, way back in 1990, he’d written a very perceptive long essay on Wittgenstein’s Mistress for a periodical. Even though I was never able to solve the structure of his novel, to understand why it ended where it did, I admired the hell out of it. Eight or nine years ago even, I wasn’t reading with the equipment I possessed when I was younger. But pat me on the head, I did manage to get through one novel that long in the past decade.

(1) Why does Helena rat Hermia out? Her competition for Demetrius is leaving Athens to get married! Let her go! But no:

I will go tell him of fair Hermia’s flight:
Then to the wood will he, tomorrow night,
Pursue her; and for this intelligence
If I have thanks, it is a dear expense.
But herein mean I to enrich my pain,
To have his sight thither and back again.

The “dear expense” is an ironic compensation. She’s betraying her friend to him for nothing but the bit of grudging attention she will receive. But it puts her in an even worse position than before.

I guess she’s one of those women, happy to be Demetrius’s dog.

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love —
And yet a place of high respect with me —
Than to be used as you use your dog?

Argh! They’ve always been with us.

(2) It’s often been remarked how the diminishment of one sense enhances another. Hermia expands on this when she follows the sound of Lysander’s voice in the dark:

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The more quick of apprehension makes;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.

But is this true? Do we hear better at night? I think the science is still shaky, but it’s interesting that as folk wisdom the idea has such a long history.

(3) Near the end of Theseus’s “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet” speech he offers this up:

Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy

This strikes me as one of those profound human truths Shakespeare is always tossing out, but I wonder why it’s expressed in such clunky lines. They’re hard enough to read much less speak aloud. Was that intentional?