The Perfect Poems: V. 1: "In the Waiting Room"

Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room"

My first two blogs were very long, and I do not want to try anyone’s patience, so I will try to keep this one a brief as I can. I have included the full text of Elizabeth Bishop’s perfect poem “In the Waiting Room.”

Strange to say, but I am not really a poetry kind of guy. In fact, until the first year I was in graduate school, I used to say “Any poet worth his/her salt would be writing fiction by now.” Happily, I have come to really appreciate brilliant poems though.

When I teach poetry in my classes, we spend several days discussing poems that are for one reason or another emblematic of a certain period or form, or else we study poems that have excellent examples of different literary devices. This sort of thing is compulsory to be sure—I am, after all, supposed to give them the tools to make sense of poems. However, I always save some room at the end of our poetry unit for a handful of poems that (at least for me) peal back the edges and give me a passing glance of what is on the other side. Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning” always makes the list, as does this poem by Elizabeth Bishop.


For me, great poems are always concrete, at least initially. I am not much for lyric abstractions. I don’t want unicorns or butterflies. Bishop’s poem puts you in a dentist’s waiting room with a young girl who is accompanying her “Aunt Consuelo.” You can feel the discomfort of the child as she sits and tries to read. The mind of this girl is distinctly child-like (note phrases like “full of grown-up people,” “I was too shy to stop,” and “wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs”), but at the same time very intelligent (“spilling with rivulets of fire”) even condescending (calling her aunt a “foolish, timid woman”). To pass the time, this girl awkwardly reads the National Geographic, horrified by the "large sagging breasts" of the native women photographed there.

Then in the second stanza, she hears her aunt cry out in pain from the next room. This sends her mind spinning because for some reason she strangely recognizes the voice that calls out as her own. Not in a metaphorical way either. He has this kind of transcendent moment, where she realizes in a flash that “Without thinking at all / I was my foolish aunt, / I—we—were falling, falling.”

In the third stanza, we find the girl has this strange sort of anxiety attack where she feels a startling emotion that is equal parts empathy and alienation. She struggles to individuate her own identity from everyone else around her by reciting, chant-like, her own biographic details. He is connected to everything at once, but also finds everything distinctly foreign. The poem turns deeply philosophical, and I choose no to paraphrase her questions or argument, except to say that she keenly articulates how strange it is (how “unlikely”) to be human in a sort of David-Lynch-Presents-The Lion-King's-"Circle-of-Life" kind of way.

"Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance"

For me this is the real power of the poem: how strange it is to be human. How generous of Elizabeth Bishop to share her "sidelong glance."

Enjoy:




In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

Copyright by Elizabeth Bishop

The Perfect Novel V. 1 Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest

Tonight my good friend Jason Hensley sent me a text message: "david f wallace killed himself."

I have spent the last few hours reading new stories, listening to/reading/watching interviews, and thumbing through his books. It is hard to explain how deeply this news hurt me. At the moment, I am less sad than I would be if a sibling of mine died, but decidedly sadder than I would be if my dog died. I am much sadder now than I was April 5, 1994, when I was crossing the Mexican border with some friends, andI heard on the radio that Curt Cobain died. And that was the only other time that I was legitimately sad when I heard a celebrity died (unless you count Mother Teresa).

Some years back a guy on sports radio was mourning John Ridder, and I thought , John Ritter is getting you that worked up, really?! I have always been a little disgusted by people's false-intimacy with celebrities. When Kobe said in his press conference that he slept with that girl in Colorado, I was disappointed a bit, but not much. I did not know him or think He was a good guy; why, oh, why did he do it?! I don't know what kind of guy he is. To be disappointed by celebrities is to believe naively that knowing their public persona is the same as know them. Imagine the youtube videos of the teens pleading for people to "Just leave Britany alone," as if they truly believe that they know that she actually wants to be left alone. This sort of false intimacy with celebrities, as I see it, is evidence that a person is intellectually squishy. To borrow an expression from my old friend Little Big Jay, this sort of foolishness clearly indicates that someone does not "knows what's what."

And even though, despite myself, I can't help but feel as though I know something of DFW from his work, this is not the main reason that I am sad. Wallace was 46 years old. I am 32. Wallace was the greatest writer of my generation. I will never get to read the follow up novel to what I consider the best novel written in my lifetime: Infinite Jest.

Should you decide to look it up at your local book store, the first thing that will strike you about the novel, Infinite Jest, is that is seriously huge. I do not mean big the way that books are sometimes big; I mean big like "Wow, books should never be that big." There are 1079 pages, but truly that does not communicate the size. Looking at a random line of print on page 513, I count seventeen words. By comparison a random line from page 177 of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions contains only nine words. That page from Vonnegut has thirty-one lines; Infinite J p.513 has forty-three lines. Thomas Pynchon's epic Gravities Rainbow is only 760 pages. A light read by comparison. As far as I can tell, the only books I own that are longer than Infinite Jest are my dictionary, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Furthermore, the actual text of the book ends on page 983. Three-hundred-eighty-eight endnotes spread over almost one hundred remaining pages. These are typed out in a font that is decidedly smaller than the main text, which is (as I have explained) typed out in a font decidedly smaller than your average novel. You will be reading along, and run into a little superscript indicating an endnote. Then you will have to flip to the back of the book and look up the endnote. Sometimes it is short, like a sentence or two. Sometimes the endnote is huge, longer than the entire chapter where you found it. For example, endnote 110 is an entire chapter in its own right, stretching from page 1004 to 1022. This endnote includes pages of dialogue, full transcripts of mail correspondence sent between Mrs. Incandenza and her son who is a punter in the NFL, and (you are going to love this) endnotes (i.e. when you read the endnote it contains endnotes, so that you must flip to the end of the endnote to read additional stuff).

One of those people who read this book is my friend and colleague Doug Eisner, who confessed to me that he found the book so engrossing that at one point he was sitting on his chair reading and spilled a glass of red wine on the carpet in his condo and could not break himself away from the book to clean up the mess.

***

So what is the deal with Infinite Jest?

Setting:

The years in which the novel takes place are named after products because in the near future, after the United States joins with Mexico and Canada to form the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN for short), the new nation accrues an enormous dept and begins to "subsidize time" by selling the year to the highest bidder. Thus "Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment" and "Year of the Wopper." Most of the American north east and Canadian east has become a giant nuclear waste dump. The radiation drifts mostly into Canada, and they don't like it. In fact a group of wheelchair-riding-Quebecois-assassins/terrorists figure prominently in the plot of the book.

The actual action is split between The Enfield Tennis Academy where we mostly follow adolescent Hal Incandenza and his junior-tennis-star peers/classmates, and Ennet House—a half-way/twelve step sort of place that is just down the hill.

Plot:

Seriously, it is a really big book. Therefore I will not even try at this. But here are a few things. Hals' father is a multitalented genius who eventually killed himself be cooking his head in a microwave. Hal's father, amoung other things directed some films, including something called Infinite Jest. The movie stars a woman who now resides in Ennet House with a veil over her face. The film is so entertaining that anyone who watches it is immediately sent into a deep unrecoverable-from catatonic state. This video is wanted by the Wheelchair Assasins as a weapon, and ONAN tries to get it as well.

The tricky thing:

The book starts with Hal in the admission office of a NCAA college where he is at a conference related to a tennis scholarship. They suspect that he is guilty of plagiarism, and they want him to explain himself before they will grant admission. When he tries to explain himself he cannot control his speech, and you hear the reaction of the other in the room, and they are all, "Gross, what is he doing with his hand!?" and "Good God in heaven, I have never in my life…" and so forth. His mind is sane and lucid, but when he tries to speak it is all crazy-sounding/looking.

Well it turns out that this scene takes place some months after the very end of the book. Then the real beginning comes and we get pages of building and building toward something. But about two-hundred pages from the end, you begin to suspect that the thing you are building toward will not be actually revealed because in order for that thing to come the pace of the book would need to increase by about 100,000 times. So you get to the end, and you never get to see it. See it? See what? I don't know. I didn't get to see it because the book ends.

Then you go back read the beginning again in that "Did I miss something" kind of way, and you notice a couple things that are raise-the-hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck interesting. Like Hal mentions going into the toxic waste of the north east and digging for his father's head. But if his father's head was melted in a microwave, how could he…

And you realize that whatever you didn't get at the end of the book must have been really, really good.

As my good friend Sterling put it: you get the exposition, and you get the fall-out at the end, but you don't get good stuff, like the plot… you know like the climax.

***

So why is this a good book again?

Because in Ennet House the addicts working through the twelve steps are engaging the existential questions in an absolutely accurate American idiom. And as I read about it I find myself to moved indescribably by the following and more: the impossible paradox of our trite and profound dilemma; the perilously feeble linguistic/semantic and epistemological/intellectual tools we have to confront our own deep and unknowable hearts; how stupid everyone sounds when they try to explain this… everyone but DFW that is; the recondite mysteries locked in the stupidest and most banal of clichés.

Because I am terrified by the beauty of this woman in the veil. Madame Psychosis. She has an intoxicating/toxic beauty akin to Helen of Troy. And I am always terrified of the truly beautiful, especially when it happens to be a woman. Physical esthetic beauty is so dreadfully powerful, but mostly in a destructive way. I never realized that before I read this book.

Because I always knew that sports are important, but I always assumed that this was not compatible with intellect and literary stuff. But Wallace approaches sport (tennis in particular) in a way that make it important on the grand scale, even though it isn't really. Hemingway made sports matter for a generation. But his reasons seem a bit silly now. Wallace gave us new reasons.

Because no writer has captured the self-consciousness of our age as Wallace has done. I.e. the moment we say "I should not feel guilty," it makes us feel guilty that we are not able to make ourselves stop feeling guilty.

Because it matters whether Hal decides to put his socks and tennis shoes on left foot, left foot, right foot, right foot, or left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.

Because it defamiliarizes the familiar, by presenting something unfamiliar but making it normal, and by presenting familiar and making it seem so strange.

Because postmodern authors such as Pynchon, Barth, early Delillo and others may have put their finger on something inescapable, and their irony is a deeply sane reaction to the world we inhabit, but Wallace pinpointed the problem with this sort of irony and found a way out of their irony that is also sane… probably more sane. Not pre-postmodern, not retreating back, not denying the truth in Foucault, Baudrillard, Pynchon, Derrida and the rest. Not backing away and hiding in naivety, stubbornly pointing to something that is clearly already and always gone. Not that. Something else. He found a way to work through the irony.

***

Irony? What the heck are you on about Floerke?

Yeah I need to explain this the best I can because for me this is the heart of what makes this book so very very good. The irony I speak of is the one we turn on ourselves as a defense against our age. We begin to shrug at everything, the bigger the shrug and the more expansive it is, the cooler you are. Try it. We must discipline ourselves to have a posture that shrugs at our words as we speak them. We must even shrug at our posture that shrugs.

Think of Thom Yorke's posture and facial expression. Think of Vonnegut "And so it goes…" Think of Curt Cobain on the cover of Rolling Stone with a white tee shirt that he has written on with a magic marker: "Corporate Magazines Still Suck."

But this shtick is reasonable. We do it as a defense against the monster of our age.

A few specimens of the sorts of thing that makes us shrug:

A life insurance commercial that concludes with a quote from Henry David Thoreau—the guy who held everything with a loose hand, selling at one point all his possessions to live day-by-day in a cabin by Walden Pond.

A Nike commercial with Yo Yo Ma playing Bach so beautifully that I can barely stand it—a thirty second commercial with sentimental shots of athletes turning double plays and such that makes my chest hurt.

***

You know what? I can't explain it here. I will try another day.

Suffice it thus: Wallace does not shrug, though he knows how to write it when someone does (shrug I mean). Instead he stands up with Wayne Coyne and says "yeah!" It is tentative. This is not a Hallmark "yeah," and it is easy to miss if you don't look just right, but it is there.

More importantly, he makes "yeah" believable. His affirmation is no lie, no cheap or phony consolation. Not the sort of thing for a coward to rely on.

Hemingway tells us that a writer is a bullfighter, that his line should be straight, that he can't fake it. His feet and vulnerable side must really be in harms way. Confront it head on and don't lie about it, don't write a line that would leave a bad taste later. And boy o boy are Hem's good books great. And that line he writes is straight too, mostly.

Problem is that Hemingway's straight line is great fiction, but hard to believe in. At least it is hard to believe now. It was God's truth for a generation of serious readers, but now Hem's straight line ain't straight. Not faking it… seems fake.

So Pynchon taught us to bend the line. Accept no straight line. And he bent it most beautifully. He bent it so crooked you could never straighten it back out. So Wallace writes a bendy line too.

But David Foster Wallace's bendy line is somehow straight.

The footnotes are a part of it. Wallace looks in the human mind and sees many voices inside. I don't mean like multiple intelligences or demon-possession. I mean we have the voice of psychologists, and teachers, and parents, and friends, and other voices we can't even place all rolling around in there. We cannot just say what is on our mind and expect that to be what is real to us. In fact, the human mind and heart and soul are so… distance from us. You will hear people describe how our perception of reality is so "mediated" and that is a good point. There is something in between us and the real—like TV or mobile phones, or computers, and so forth. But Wallace recognizes that this is not only a result of technology, but an essential part of the human experience. The mediated reality is in our head already and shapes how we see the world, but even more importantly, it shapes how we see ourselves in the world.

The trite Americanism: "follow your heart." What is that? My heart says ten conflicting things. And my mind can add seven more to the mix. What now?

So Wallace bends the line with endnotes. He fractures the narrative, and we feel that fractured consciousness in there.

But you know what else Wallace does? And I ask that you try to appreciate how hard this is to imagine: out of the trite, worn out, banalities—commercial manipulations, industry jargons, pseudo-psychological-day-time-talk-showisms, high-culture esoteria, MTV rock-star drivel, and everything else—he creates an idiom that is true and real. Genuine and stunning. Heartfelt and important. Bendy and straight. Right.

I will never read the follow up to Infinte Jest, but he left behind some great reading material:

Novels

* The Broom of the System (1987)

* Infinite Jest (1996)

Short story collections

* Girl with Curious Hair (1989)

* Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)

* Oblivion: Stories (2004)

Nonfiction

* A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)

* Up, Simba! (2000)

* Everything and More (2003)

* Consider the Lobster (2005)

If you want more:

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/1997/03/27/2/an-interview-with-david-foster-wallace an interview with Charlie Rose

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwS5pEfcQNk him reading his own work

http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace2.html an interview with Salon

http://www.davidfosterwallace.com/news.shtml his unofficial website

The Perfect Albums V. One

Miles Davis

"Bitch's Brew"

I was reading a bit of my Masters Project the other day—brushing up on my "Taming of the Shrew" for Honors Intro to Literature—and I read a certain combination of words, and some wires in my brain crossed and a shot of music surged into my body, accompanied by a feeling that I had forgotten all about, but that was immediately familiar again. The music that I heard was Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew." The feeling that I felt… that is harder to explain.

Miles had formed a reputation for himself as one of the most progressive musicians in jazz well before the 1969 recording of "Bitch's Brew." His "Kind of Blue" (which may be his best album) is notable among other things because of the quixotic composition process that Davis brought to the record. It is well documented that Davis "wrote" the songs on "Blue" in only the loosest sense. He would take a hint of a melody or a mild suggestion of a key or mode, a couple chords, a few notes, a tempo, a few words about the feeling he wanted… that was it. Then they rolled the tape and the band played. The results are stunningly beautiful, even for the uninitiated into the world of jazz. Any fan of music will attest to the amazing pathos of that record.

But even for its innovation, "Kind of Blue" is still very much jazz in a conventional sense. Davis's trademark on the trumpet was a cool, luscious style and rich tonality. This is never more keenly felt than on "Blue." Simply stated, when one listens to "Kind of Blue" you can tell immediately that your ears are in good hands. Davis is gonna take care of you.

All this to say: "Bitch's Brew" was no "Kid of Blue."

Legend has it that Davis was inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and the wildness of the rock music scene he saw at Woodstock a few months prior to recording. Here we see Davis breaking all the rules, in an almost adolescent way. Imagine an electric bass, and upright bass, three drummers, two or more electric pianos, and a bass clarinet all playing at the same time. Now imagine that Miles called these people together into the studio, not only without ever practicing any of the songs, but often with no clear idea of the song at all. With the prominent rhythm section wailing, rattling, collapsing, resurrecting, exploding, breaking, diving, halting, whimpering, spanking, barking, pouting, and slipping its way along, Davis plays simple yet aggressive melodies over the top, occasionally accompanied by a sax.

What are the results? Frankly, it is a complete mess. If "Blue" makes you feel like it is under control, "Brew" makes you feel like nothing, absolutely nothing is in control. In fact listening to this album is more than anything else like reading the worst parts of Thomas Pynchon's long novels. For those of you who have never been in the guts of one of Pynchon's novels, I will not try to approximate it, but let me say this: his novels are 1000 pages or so and feel like 5,000. Tedious, arrogant, chaotic, difficult, esoteric, and frustrating.

So why on earth is this album under my "Perfect Albums" list. Well, first of all, I put it here for the same reason that I would probably put something from Pynchon's difficult fiction on my "Perfect Novels" list. The work that is demanded of you to listen to the CD is rewarded by rare but breathtaking payoffs. The accumulated effort that is required to grind through the esoteria prepares your mind perfectly—just perfectly—for the moments of brilliance. The dis-ease builds up and builds up and the frustration grows until, unexpectedly, there is a moment of sublime culmination. In fact, there is no other way to get this exact kind of experience with art. There is art like "Kind of Blue" that feels right from the start. But there is also art like "Bitch's Brew" that feels wrong almost all the time.

I liken it to Chuck Yeager's descriptionsof breaking the sound barrier for the first time. Every time anyone got close to the speed of sound, the jet craft would start to shake madly and the pilot would become afraid it might fall apart all together. So the pilots would decelerate and the engineers would go back to work. But after trying and failing several times, Chuck finally just said "to hell with it," and when his jet started to shake itself to pieces, he punched the throttle all the more. Maybe it would come apart, maybe not, but he was determined to find out what it felt like to go faster than sound. What he discovered is that once he hit the speed of sound, the sonic boom would crack through the air and the jet would flatten out, smooth and still like the morning. This is how it feels to work through "Bitch's Brew" and to find those moments of culmination. Is it fun to when you are shaking around, fearing for your life? No. But without that work, you could never get where you want to go.

The first time this album worked for me, I was about twenty-five or so, and I lied on the floor of my family room, placed the speakers of my stereo on the floor beside me pointing at my ears from each side. I was determined to make it all the way through (I believe that I read somewhere that J. Spaceman listed this as one of his favorite albums), so I cranked the volume and let it fly.

The physical discomfort that I felt was measurable, but I stuck with it. And when the clouds broke and I found myself on the mountaintop with the light of God shining on me… well it was really something. Something in fact that I could never have gotten without doing the work of enduring through it. That work, you see, made me ready for the eventual revelation.

It turns out I have had many good experiences with the CD, although none of them has equaled the first time. Interesting note that I cannot fully explain: each time I achieve the white light with this CD it has been at a different point of the recording. Hm.

So when I was reading my MA project the other day, the words I read triggered a neural reaction, and I found myself in the basement of the California State University, Fullerton Library, in the computer lab. My project was in the final deadly throes. The words were thrashing about the pages and pages of notes I was writing from, snapping at the screen, tearing my sentences apart. I was facing a cruel and ruthless deadline, and I simply had no choice but to get the words written and the project done. I would use violence if I had to. I wore headphones and blared music through my portable pre-mp3 CD player. I tried various CD's, but the only two that worked (seriously I couldn't write single stinking word without one of these CD's blaring in my ears) was Medeski Martin and Wood's "Tonic," and Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew." The music was maddening. It nearly drove me crazy, but it was the right kind of crazy. A madness that got me through my project.

And that was the feeling I felt in my office the other day. And I was reminded of what a great and perfect album this is.