Everyone is familiar, I take it, with the following passage:
the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no
alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as
masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with
direct feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative
aorist preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary
verb, and quasimonosyllabic onomatopoeic past participle with
complementary masculine agent) in the passive voice
None of the sources I’ve seen propose an onomatopoeic explanation for
the verb in question here (and I’m actually curious about who the first
person was to spell that out in print), and I wonder if that’s not a
curious intrusion of Bloom’s incomplete information about the world and
word, similar to “aorist.”
Though not actually an avid reader of heroic fantasy, I have
nevertheless have high standards for it. If you want to call Wolfe’s New
Sun, Vance’s Dying Earth, Harrison’s Virconium, Mieville’s New Corbuzon,
and Le Guin’s Earthsea “heroic fantasy,” then that’s what I’ll tend to
compare new things I read in the genre to, however unfair that might be.
So when I came across a
recommendation
from Cosma Shalizi about an epic, witty fantasy trilogy that included an
inquisitor as one of the main characters and which seemed to be morally
ambiguous throughout, I thought that I had never actually read anything
by anyone who aspired to be an epigone of Wolfe, so why not try this
out? I ordered one book at a time, as to get around my serialism and
completism requirements, which I last explained in this
review.
Pound was proceeding by poetic intuition, and who knows, his may be
the only comprehensible poetry to the twenty-first century, when a new
economic order, unimaginable to us now, may have emerged from the
present apparently irreconcilable dogmas; it may be, for that matter,
a post-McLuhan age, an age of mixed media and ideogrammic thinking in
quick cut, when we may all be speaking Chinese, with nothing of our
civilization left but the fragments he has ‘shelved (shored)’ against
our ruin. (236)
Among the Phaeacians, Odysseus, with athletic vanity piqued: “Up he
sprang, cloak and all, and seized a discus,/huge and heavy, more weighty
by far than those/the Phaeacians used to hurl and test each other”
(Fagles’s translation, 8.216-218).
Why is this too-heavy discus there? Did the man-formed Athena create it
beforehand? I expect no Homeric discus is left unflung, so I’m sure
there are centuries of weighty scholarship on the issue. I suppose it
could just be one on the pile, so to speak, or a reminder of the mighty
men the Phaeacian ancestors were.
I’ve been intermittently reading Richard Posner’s judicial opinions.
They have been less witty and piquant than I had been expecting, but
there are moments. Consider his decision to retell this, for example:
James Gilles (“Brother Jim”) [. . .] is a traveling evangelist–the
latest in a line of Christian itinerant preachers stretching back to
Saint Paul and prominent in Methodism in nineteenth-century America.
Born near Vincennes, Gilles gives the following account of his
salvation. As a result of Satan’s machinations, he devoted himself as
a youth to drugs, sex, booze, and rock and roll. At a rock and roll
concert at which the well-known Van Halen band performed, singer David
Lee Roth shouted to the crowd: “Not even God can save your soul at a
Van Halen concert!” Gilles saw the light, called on God to save him
and thus refute Roth, and was saved.
I requested a review copy of this after reading an interesting-sounding
solicitation from a PR outfit. Now, I
have to read a lot of things. It’s important to understand this. I have
muscles for reading that many people don’t have. I am also a completist
and a serialist. If I start something, I finish it; and I read it
straight through. I don’t read anywhere near as fast as this
mutant; in fact, I think I may
read fiction considerably slower than the average person. Not only do I
give authors the benefit of the doubt, I assume that they are infinitely
clever. Omniscient. Inerrant. That everything will come together in ways
that I can only begin to anticipate.
Specialists may recognize John Matthews Manly’s and Edith Rickert’s
Contemporary British Literature: Bibliographies and Study Guides from
Harcourt Brace, 1921. It refers to Joyce as a defrocked priest, for
example, and sees fit to mention about Woolf only the apparently
inexplicable fact that she is the daughter of Leslie Stephen. In spite
of this, I found the most amusing entry to be devoted to Ralph
Hodgson:
Born in Yorkshire, 1872.
[. . .] Is a leading authority in England on bull terriers. His favorite
poet is Shelley.
I’ve looked around a bit at some of the reviews that’ve been posted of
this to date, and not many of them, as I remember, invoked Already
Dead as the most likely ancestor of this material, though that book is
far denser and perhaps as strange as this. The style of Jesus’ Son,
which I’ve always guessed–without having any real evidence—to be the
most influential of American books published in the 90s in the workshop
is on display here as well, though in a looser form. None of the
characters have the capacity for heightened perception that the
protagonist of that book does, so it’s not necessary a flaw in art.
We took Henry to the local zoo today. At one year of age, he seems to
have no instinctive fear of snakes, large carnivores, or even baleful
maras (“Patagonian cavies,” according to the plaque, which also
amusingly suggested that they could run at over 65 mph for an hour. They
very much had the aspect of creatures who wouldn’t hop a yard to piss on
you if you were on fire, as the saying goes, but who am I to judge?)
It’s understandable why a veteran Wolfe reader would be both constantly
vigilant and forgiving when reading one of his new books. Many of the
short stories, Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and (probably to a
lesser extent than the commentaries would suggest) The Book of the New
Sun have subtle and significant details that the reader must be very
careful to notice. Much of his fiction contains subtle details even when
they are not in fact significant. I am thinking here of An Evil Guest
and Pirate Freedom, his two most recent novels.