Being and Formulating

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Originally uploaded by Tombrarian

On a two day roll with my Pics of the Day. I think for the first few days, I’m just going to take a picture of the first thing I think of just to get in the habit. I’m the type to bring a camera with me somewhere and then forget to take any pictures, which is one of the reasons I want to start a pic of the day project. I often regret not taking more pictures and want to have that option more on my mind.

I’ve been reading Infinite Jest since the summer. I have been enjoying it, but it is a really fat book, so it’s been taking a while. I’ve taken a few breaks from it as well. Twice back in the fall when I was traveling because I didn’t want to lug it with me on the place. And I decided to take a break from it over my winter holiday because, with my time off, I figured I could read something shorter cover-to-cover. I’m about 200 pages into Inherent Vice, so it’s quite possible that I will finish it soon, if not by the end of the weekend.

Not sure when I’ll get back into Infinite Jest because I will be traveling again on Friday. Maybe I will just lug it with me this time since I don’t want to set it aside for too long.

I am enjoying Inherent Vice. Probably my favorite Pynchon in a while. There are things I admire about both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, but wasn’t overall that impressed with either. Inherent Vice really is a companion piece to Vineland, both being California novels and both being shorter and less epic than some of Pynchon’s fatter novels.

I’m finding the California aspects of Inherent Vice particularly interesting now that I live close to CA and have visited a few times. I also know more people from CA, so can relate to those parts of the novel a little differently than I would have if I still lived in Philadelphia.

I just watched a fascinating documentary called Obscene about the life of Barney Rosset, the one time operator of Grove Press which published the first U.S. editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Rosset and Grove Press were involved in the legal fight against censorship for the first three of these titles.

I plan on writing more about Obscene in general over at Tombrarian because I am going to nominate it for the notable videos committee. But I want to dwell a bit here about something Rosset says about Henry Miller:

I didn’t think of Henry Miller being particularly involved with sex. He just had contempt for this country that I shared. I never even noticed the fact that it was supposed to be sexually explicit or anything else and I still don’t, but it is an insulting book to everybody.

I particularly like this quote for a couple of reasons. One is that it has always annoyed me that people focus so much on the sex in Miller’s books. I recently re-read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and I would be surprised if 10% of those books are about sex. There is so much else going on that I feel people are really missing the point if they look at them so narrowly.

The other reason is that Rosset points to Miller’s contempt for America. In re-reading the two Tropics, this aspect stood out to me more than ever. I think because a lot of what Miller critiques is still so much an issue. So much of the narrow-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, consumerism, puritanism, and lack of concern for the environment that he rails against in the 1930s are still issues today.

Another interesting point that Rosset raises briefly regards why he felt an initial connection to Tropic of Cancer. Rosset was taken my Miller’s description of his breakup with Mona and how Miller resolved, as Rosset says, that he “will exist without her.” At the time, Rosset was going through his own break up. I have long held that Mona (based on Miller’s wife June) leaving him is at the heart of Tropic of Cancer. There’s an essential sadness that is key to understanding why the character of Henry Miller behaves as he does and takes the philosophical journey that he does. All the sex in the book is intricatly tied to this event. The supposed sexual liberation of the book is tempered when viewed from this angle.

Re-reading the Tropics and being struck by Miller’s harsh critique of the U.S. led my back to Aller Retour New York, which is Miller’s long letter to his friend Alfred Perles which was published as a short book in Paris between the two Tropics and in the U.S. in 1945. The letter describes Miller’s visit to New York after he had been living in Paris. The letter is a long-reflection of many of the difficulties Miller has with the American way of life. One of his long-standing complaints is about how wasteful American’s are compared to the Europeans:

Everybody has a crease in his trousers and shoes highly polished. Nobody wears a last year’s hat, crisis or no crisis. Nobody is without a clean handkerchief softly laundered and wrapped in a seal packerchief. When you have your hair brushed by the barber he throws the brush away to be fumigated and wrapped in cellophane again. The cloth he puts around your neck is sent immediately to the laundry–by pneumatic tubes that deliver the following morning. Everything is a twenty-four-hour service, whether it is necessary or not. Your things come back so fast you don’t have time to earn the money to pay for this service you don’t need. If it rains you get your shoes shined just the same–because the polish is a protection against weather stains. You get trimmed coming and going. You are in the sausage machine and there is no way out–unless you take a boat and go somewhere else. Even then you can’t be sure because the whole fucking world is going a hundred percent America.

Feels awfully prescient for 1935.

I enjoy reading literary magazines and keeping up on new writing. There are so many out there that chosing ones to subscribe to is difficult. I prefer to read a variety of literary magazines, which is easy to do if you are submitting to writing contests. Often, the entry fee includes a year’s subscription. By submitting to a variety of contests, I have a nice flow of different reading materials coming to my door.

Of course, the upside for the publisher in including a year’s subscription is that people may opt to continue their subscriptions beyond the year. I usually fight the urge knowing if I subscribed to a lot of magazines, I would be overwhelmed. I already feel overwhelmed by all I want to read.

That said, I have been a long-time subscriber to Ploughshares. Despite having rotating editors, I find a consistent quality to what they publish. Recently, I have subscribed to Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century. I like that they balance a variety of contemporary poetry, interviews, and a section with a particular theme. The issue I just finished included a section about Cowboy Poetry, which, being relatively new to the southwest, I found intriguing.

What I also like about Rattle is that they offer a lot of their poetry online through their site and their blog. Interesting how putting up content for free is part of what enticed me to subscribe to the print. But that’s a whole other line of thought.

Also, by having their poetry online, Rattle gives me the opportunity to link to some of my favorite poems from the Winter 2008 issue (see, too overwhelmed to keep up):

• Scarlet, by Sherman Alexie
• Considering the Trebonites, by Dick Allen
• On the Poverty of My Imagination, by Tiffany Beechy
• Dear Internal Revenue Service, by John Brehm
• Nameless Boy, by Douglas Goetsch

I finished Against the Day about 5 days after Inherent Vice came out. I wasn’t going to rush out and buy Inherent Vice considering the pile of books I have at home waiting for my attention, but a large chain bookstore of whom I’m a member, sent me a 40% off coupon, so there you have it.

I began Against the Day right before our trip to Yosemite, so it took me almost two-and-a-half months to read, with a break for Revolutionary Road. Overall, I liked Against the Day, but it certainly is a lot longer than it needs to be. The book is overly ambitious, not surprising coming from Pynchon.

A lot of critics criticize Pynchon on the grounds that his characters often lack substance, that they often stand in for an idea, which, in some instances is true. But Pynchon is quite capable of creating fully realized and emotionally engaging characters. I found the main plot line of Against the Day about the Traverse family and their quest for revenge full of interesting characters and, for the most part, that plot line is quite engaging and often exciting. As with most of Pynchon’s big novels, any sense of a main plot is obfuscated by multiple tangent plots and hundreds of other characters. And it is with some of these subplots that Against the Day drags. I found myself thinking that there was a really great novel about the Traverse family lost in all the other chaos.

At the same time, however, it’s not easy to dismiss these tangents because many of them are important to the bigger ideas of the novel. The stories of Against the Day take place from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to the years following the end of World War I. The novel traces some historical events and some imaginary events that lead to the War to End All Wars. Part of what I found so engaging about Against the Day is how Pynchon uses this history to foreshadow the violence, corporate malfeasance, and social upheaval that pervades the rest of that century and the first decade of the 21st. Although the events of the book take place in the early part of the 20th century, it is very much a reaction to the G.W. Bush administration. But it is not only a criticism of that administration, but it is also a criticism of how we painted ourselves into that particular corner. Then again, as Pynchon himself supposedly said in a blurb about Against the Day:  “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

Speaking of Inherent Vice, Penguin Press has released a trailer for the novel narrated by Thomas Pynchon: Read more…

I took a break from reading Against the Day (and from the summer of long novels) to read Revolutionary Road. The main reason I took the break was because I was flying to Chicago and didn’t feel like lugging an 1,085 page hardback. It’s now August of my self-imposed summer of reading fat novels and I still have more that 200 pages left in Against the Day. I was hoping to have this and at least one other fat novel done before Inherent Vice comes out this week but that’s not going to happen.

The break for Revolutionary Road was worth it. I read about half of it on the plane and in Chicago, and I finished the second half the week we got back. I was not at all familiar with the book or with Richard Yates until I read a review of the movie. I have a strange fascination with the suburbs, especially in the development of the suburbs (as a place and as a way of life) in the years following WWII. When I read what the setting was in the film review, I knew I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie.

Revolutionary Road is reminiscent of the works of Raymond Carver and captures a similar post-war ennui as something like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Like those works, Revolutionary Road does not paint a pretty picture of post-war suburban life. For Frank Wheeler, in Revolutionary Road, and Tom Rath, in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, life in the suburbs and in business is drab and uneventful compared to their experience in the war. This discontent wreaks havoc on their family lives.

What’s difficult to appreciate is the novelty these works presented in the late 1950s. In the 21st Century, the idea that the suburbs are not some kind of blissful paradise is rather banal. But, at the time, this idea was unconventional and daring.

The film, Revolutionary Road, doesn’t quite live up to the novel, but it quite excellent. The film is very faithful to the book, with, of course, many scenes left out for length considerations. Having read the book, I wondered if these exclusions left too many gaps in the narrative and left too much unexplained. The biggest omission was the background story about Frank and his father. This background gives great weight to Frank’s working at Knox. In the film, Franks does explain a little bit of this background, but it certainly doesn’t compare to the actual scenes in the book. That said, the film still holds up well on its own. Even though I am not a big Leonardo DiCaprio fan, I knew he would make a great Frank Wheeler. Kate Winslet is likewise a perfect April Wheeler.

Being and Formulating is the personal blog of Tom Ipri. I also post to my professional blog, Tombrarian. The title comes from a quote from the diaries of Anais Nin. I came across this quote second-hand from Brassai’s book Henry Miller: The Paris Years:

“In Miller’s mind…to commit the events of one day, or even one hour, to paper takes days if not weeks. Anais would therefore never catch up with events, and her Diary would never be truly current. Moreover, all she was doing by trying was postponing the exhilaration of life, the moments in whose heat you would never think of writing. The pulse of life makes any formulation impossible…All the diary can reflect are life’s stagnant period, what Andre Breton called the ‘empty moments’ of existence. Anais wouldn’t always avoid throwing herself into the current of life. She too would directly confront the dilemma of whether to live or to write. She herself says as much in her Diary: ‘The river of life divides into two branches: being and formulating.’”

Although the quote obviously speaks to a period of time well before anyone blogged, it certainly speaks to the recent explosion of this technology (and certainly speaks to the on-again-off-again nature of my posting. So, if I’m not posting, assume I’m “being.”) I love this quote and decided I wanted to use something from it for the name of my blog: my choices being either “Being and Formulating” or “Life’s Stagnant Period.” While the later has certain panache, I opted for the former.

My other blog, Tombrarian, has existed since March 2006. I had another blog before that which launched in April 2005, and when that one met its demise, I uploaded all its posts into Tombrarian. Since its inception, Tombrarian had been both a personal and professional blog ; however, this duel use has caused some apprehension on my part. I’ve hesitated posting some lengthy library-related ideas fearing that I’d bore family and friends and have hesitated posting more personal thoughts concerned that they are not professional. Thus the creation of Being and Formulating.