My course blog for an American Lit survey at ECU last year gets about
ten-to-twenty hits each day for “anecdote of the jar analysis” or
similar. I told the students in that class that this would be likely to
happen and that they were writing for future generations (and even
developed a poster presentation based on this alarming pedagogical
thesis).
Other than habit and general inertia, one of the reasons this happens is
that it’s a deeply mysterious poem, one that probably deserves no place
in freshman and sophomore anthologies. (I can and have done much better
with “Sunday Morning,” “Emperor of Ice Cream,” and even–(men lie about
it)–“The Comedian As The Letter C.”) Here’s a partial list of topics
I’ve tried:
Much has been made of it, not least in the long New Yorker profile I
linked to a few days ago. But did anyone find young Nick Sabotka
listening to Iggy and having a π tattoo on his neck a bit hipsterish for
type? Perhaps conurbation is to blame.
I watched this sparkler last night,
perhaps on some half-remembered reference from a David Remnick column, I
don’t know. Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Karloff, two aspiring goons,
misadventure, and eventually stake some heroin legit to Moscow Centre
for currency speculation.
I believe a nationalist line might be inferred from the kino, with the
casual brutality and racism the object lesson of the classroom in the
beginning, etc.
I was involved in a deck collapse at Wrightsville Beach, NC some years
ago. Clustered cups, herded tightly on the deck by some barrier force. I
pushed my way almost to the living beachside room, almost crossed the
threshold, when a sudden crack–a sound more blinding than overhead
lightning–cast arms, legs, and cups down to the parking garage. I
somehow righted myself out of the blight with only small, distrusting
welts, to later cross an alley across the road and to face a gun pointed
at me by a propertied man on his own intact deck, who had had enough. I
heard later that limbs were broken in this incident, even a complication
resulting in a fatality. One thing that’s always troubled me about my
memory is that I reported to friends very soon after that the citizen
and taxpayer did so brandish, but that even then I didn’t know if he did
or if I had only seen, momentarily, into the heart of things. You don’t
have to recall Double Indemnity or Memento to imagine the
fact-finding missions that might have extended even to that observer, or
even to imagine that a smooth fulgurite leaned in a corner of his own
beachside room, supporting many structures.
I spent the last week in Liverpool, working in the Olaf Stapledon
archive. I found, as you do, many serendipitously interesting things
(letters from the young Frank Kermode to Stapledon, for instance) and
have nearly gone blind trying to read his micrographic journals and
notebooks, made even more amusing by Greek-letter substitution at odd
intervals and syllable-reduction. But, a worthwhile experience, all in
all. I encountered Marseilles soccer enthusiasts chanting in the streets
and ate several varieties of the heavily spiced local cuisine. (I was
met with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun when I asked for tzatziki
at a kebab joint, which I had judged to be of Greco-Turkish extraction,
for example.)
I’ve noticed that both The Sopranos and The Wire have throwaway
references to Gainesville (vending machine falls on someone in the
former, Bunk’s wife visits family there in latter). Given that every
other college graduate, roughly speaking, is from Ohio State, Florida,
or Arizona State, I’d guess that some company gaffer or another’s having
a bone thrown; but I don’t know.
Also, one of the Buffy seasons, maybe six, has an extra with a guy
wearing a UNCW shirt, which pleased me.
From the OED entry on “ignis fatuus”: “It seems to have been formerly
a common phenomenon; but is now exceedingly rare.”
Why?
Because it was what it was thought to be, and has sensibly sublimated to
a different medium? Did McLuhan write anything about this? I’m pretty
sure he must have.
I’m also coming round to the idea that Gregor’s sister Grete was
čarodějnice. Cui bono, etc.
Clancy and I watched Sunset Blvd. a few nights ago, and I wondered
then why Miss Olsen didn’t have the career for which she was obviously
suited. I own several volumes of Hollywood Babylon, and she checks out
clean. (That’s from memory. I could be wrong.)
She could have played Galadriel in the film version of The Lord of the
Rings Wilder was rumored to have wanted to direct in 1959 with
exquisite refinement and catoptromantic pluck.
From the previous, re Adorno’s potential attitude toward The Pick-Up
Artist, I think that he would have continued the line of inquiry began
in the essay on Odysseus and started here: “Non formosus erat, sed erat
facundus Ulixes/et tamen aequoreas torsit amore Deas.”
Kierkegaard quotes that bit from Ovid in Diary of a Seducer.
