(no subject)
Three Four Five days ago, I was lucky enough to catch Michael Chabon at Northwestern, where he delivered a brand spanking new lecture on Edgar Allan Poe (hahaha, Chabon: "It was either Poe or Robert Ludlum. In the end, I just pulled the trigger and picked Poe.") and made me miss my train.
It was fantastic. He's such a great speaker--he has this very laid back, playful delivery (he even pulled the old Alan Shore trick of pausing for a sip of water in the middle of a suspenseful sentence), and you could tell he wanted his audience to have as good a time as he was having and enjoy Poe as much as he did.
"When I was twelve years old, I became persuaded that I was the reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe," he started (and if I had any doubts about the lecture being good, that's when they vanished). He went on to talk about himself as a child, the lonely kinship he felt with Poe, how he would recite to himself the opening sentence (and later the opening paragraph) of "The Cask of Amontillado" when enduring the daily torments and indignities of life in the sixth grade. He consoled himself with the thought that Poe's (his) enemies had long since been swept into the dust-heap of history, the notion that, even if he couldn't exact revenge on his persecutors in the style of one of Poe's narrators (look at me, not making a "poetic justice" pun) or write scathing reviews of their work, perhaps one day he would rattle off their insignificant names to a hall full of attentive listeners.
He then proceeded to rattle off their names.
After that, he read Ulalume" (the link goes to Jeff Buckley's reading, which is fairly awesome as well). I'd never heard the poem before--in fact, when I went to dig up a link, I had no idea how to spell the title--but to my surprise, I really liked the repetition ("The leaves they were crispèd and sere/The leaves they were withering and sere") and the imagery ("These were days when my heart was volcanic/As the scoriac rivers that roll/As the lavas that restlessly roll/Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek/In the ultimate climes of the pole"). Chabon read really well, too--he used this kind of driving cadence that seemed to sweep you from one line to the next, and he didn't shy away from the poem's excesses. God, I wish I'd thought to make a recording.
He finished (pausing first to offer a pretty conventional interpretation of the events of the poem) with the tenth stanza, the one that purports to explain everything and is usually omitted. But rather than dispel the mystery, he contended, the tenth stanza actually deepens it--it ascribes the wondrous (and sinister) apparition of a "miraculous crescent" with a "duplicate horn" to the workings of "a sinfully scintillant planet/From the Hell of the planetary souls."
Ah, of course. The Hell of the planetary souls. That clears everything up.
It reminded me of something my screenwriting professor said when we were discussing Psycho. In Hitchcock's original cut of the movie, he'd offered no explanation for Norman Bates' madness. The studio, however, balked and demanded he account for Bates' behavior in some way. So Hitchcock threw in a five-minute (if that) scene with a psychologist, who basically said (I'm working from memory here, so bear with me) that years and years ago, little!Norman, feeling neglected and probably not a little jealous, had killed his mother and her lover. Over time, his personality had merged with that of his mother, and whenever it felt their relationship was being threatened, the murderous mother aspect would emerge.
Sure, at first blush it seems like a logical explanation, but when you think about it...what does it really explain? Okay, so their personalities merged--how was that accomplished? What prevents more run-off-the-mill murderers from assuming (or playing host to) the personalities of their victims?
The unresolved ending is hardly a new concept, I know, but there's something really cool about an explanation that doesn't fulfill its function--or that appears to do so while nudging you toward the realization that whatever light it's shed on the mystery is dim and diffuse and waning. (Chabon's metaphor of choice was a magician's trapdoor.) And it makes you wonder about our need to know the reason behind everything, our eagerness to accept anything that sounds even the least bit plausible.
Anyway, back to Chabon. He spoke for a while about the qualities that made Poe (even when he was writing short stories) a poet: his ear for speech, inherited from his mother, a celebrated actress, and honed in college, where he studied French and Latin. His analytical abilities, which allowed him to understand language as a system, to break it into its component parts and then reconstitute them. And he talked about the things he had in common with Poe--although there aren't any actors in his family tree, there are more than a few lawyers, and although he never received formal instruction in Latin, he's always enjoyed tracing the origins of words. He hears "curfew," for instance, and thinks of people in the Middle Ages scurrying to cover their fires (for anyone who's interested in that kind of thing, I'm reading a fantastic book on it right now).
To close, he talked about himself as a poet. Usually, when somebody asks him whether he writes poetry, he'll say he dabbled in it as a teenager and tried his hand at imitating all the greats (the only one I can recall by name is O'Hara). But, he confided, what he actually wants to say is, "Yeah, I do. Every damn day." He called himself an enemy of dead language, said he strove to include in every sentence a word that, like a night watchman, roused the other words so they could ambush the reader whose attention had flagged (only it sounded a lot prettier coming from him). He said he hoped that, if you were to read some of his best passages aloud, they would be indistinguishable from free verse.
And then I had to go do my taxes, so I couldn't stick around and ask him to sign the Chicago Public Library's copy of Pale Fire--the only book I had on me--"Charles Kinbote." I think he would've liked that. Or thought I was nuts. One of the two.
It was fantastic. He's such a great speaker--he has this very laid back, playful delivery (he even pulled the old Alan Shore trick of pausing for a sip of water in the middle of a suspenseful sentence), and you could tell he wanted his audience to have as good a time as he was having and enjoy Poe as much as he did.
"When I was twelve years old, I became persuaded that I was the reincarnation of Edgar Allan Poe," he started (and if I had any doubts about the lecture being good, that's when they vanished). He went on to talk about himself as a child, the lonely kinship he felt with Poe, how he would recite to himself the opening sentence (and later the opening paragraph) of "The Cask of Amontillado" when enduring the daily torments and indignities of life in the sixth grade. He consoled himself with the thought that Poe's (his) enemies had long since been swept into the dust-heap of history, the notion that, even if he couldn't exact revenge on his persecutors in the style of one of Poe's narrators (look at me, not making a "poetic justice" pun) or write scathing reviews of their work, perhaps one day he would rattle off their insignificant names to a hall full of attentive listeners.
He then proceeded to rattle off their names.
After that, he read Ulalume" (the link goes to Jeff Buckley's reading, which is fairly awesome as well). I'd never heard the poem before--in fact, when I went to dig up a link, I had no idea how to spell the title--but to my surprise, I really liked the repetition ("The leaves they were crispèd and sere/The leaves they were withering and sere") and the imagery ("These were days when my heart was volcanic/As the scoriac rivers that roll/As the lavas that restlessly roll/Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek/In the ultimate climes of the pole"). Chabon read really well, too--he used this kind of driving cadence that seemed to sweep you from one line to the next, and he didn't shy away from the poem's excesses. God, I wish I'd thought to make a recording.
He finished (pausing first to offer a pretty conventional interpretation of the events of the poem) with the tenth stanza, the one that purports to explain everything and is usually omitted. But rather than dispel the mystery, he contended, the tenth stanza actually deepens it--it ascribes the wondrous (and sinister) apparition of a "miraculous crescent" with a "duplicate horn" to the workings of "a sinfully scintillant planet/From the Hell of the planetary souls."
Ah, of course. The Hell of the planetary souls. That clears everything up.
It reminded me of something my screenwriting professor said when we were discussing Psycho. In Hitchcock's original cut of the movie, he'd offered no explanation for Norman Bates' madness. The studio, however, balked and demanded he account for Bates' behavior in some way. So Hitchcock threw in a five-minute (if that) scene with a psychologist, who basically said (I'm working from memory here, so bear with me) that years and years ago, little!Norman, feeling neglected and probably not a little jealous, had killed his mother and her lover. Over time, his personality had merged with that of his mother, and whenever it felt their relationship was being threatened, the murderous mother aspect would emerge.
Sure, at first blush it seems like a logical explanation, but when you think about it...what does it really explain? Okay, so their personalities merged--how was that accomplished? What prevents more run-off-the-mill murderers from assuming (or playing host to) the personalities of their victims?
The unresolved ending is hardly a new concept, I know, but there's something really cool about an explanation that doesn't fulfill its function--or that appears to do so while nudging you toward the realization that whatever light it's shed on the mystery is dim and diffuse and waning. (Chabon's metaphor of choice was a magician's trapdoor.) And it makes you wonder about our need to know the reason behind everything, our eagerness to accept anything that sounds even the least bit plausible.
Anyway, back to Chabon. He spoke for a while about the qualities that made Poe (even when he was writing short stories) a poet: his ear for speech, inherited from his mother, a celebrated actress, and honed in college, where he studied French and Latin. His analytical abilities, which allowed him to understand language as a system, to break it into its component parts and then reconstitute them. And he talked about the things he had in common with Poe--although there aren't any actors in his family tree, there are more than a few lawyers, and although he never received formal instruction in Latin, he's always enjoyed tracing the origins of words. He hears "curfew," for instance, and thinks of people in the Middle Ages scurrying to cover their fires (for anyone who's interested in that kind of thing, I'm reading a fantastic book on it right now).
To close, he talked about himself as a poet. Usually, when somebody asks him whether he writes poetry, he'll say he dabbled in it as a teenager and tried his hand at imitating all the greats (the only one I can recall by name is O'Hara). But, he confided, what he actually wants to say is, "Yeah, I do. Every damn day." He called himself an enemy of dead language, said he strove to include in every sentence a word that, like a night watchman, roused the other words so they could ambush the reader whose attention had flagged (only it sounded a lot prettier coming from him). He said he hoped that, if you were to read some of his best passages aloud, they would be indistinguishable from free verse.
And then I had to go do my taxes, so I couldn't stick around and ask him to sign the Chicago Public Library's copy of Pale Fire--the only book I had on me--"Charles Kinbote." I think he would've liked that. Or thought I was nuts. One of the two.