Does the slob use more or fewer napkins than the neat eater? A true slob doesn't use any, but generally a messy eater will use many. A very neat person uses only a few. (An obsessive neatnik uses too many!)
So there is a correlation between two factors, messy eating and the use of napkins, but the correspondence is skewed at either end by the messiest and the most obsessively clean.
Once in the coffee shop at Stanford I was with someone I knew, I think it was Stephen Vineberg? or a similar name, and we were identifying every song that was being played, maybe by someone playing piano there? I don't remember. And my friend was saying, 'you know a lot of show tunes" and I was like, I don't think of those as show tunes but as jazz standards. Of course, we were both right. I didn't know the songs in their original context, as songs from musical comedies, but as songs played a lot by jazz musicians.
I pulled off the shelf the volume that contains my 1st scholarly publication, William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet (1983). I had remembered that others in the Williams seminar at Stanford, with Gilbert Sorrentino, were in this volume but I am only finding one other essay, other than mine, by my friend Bob Basil. Anyway, I will read his article soon, but I had someone thought that Joseph Conti was also in this book, but I am not finding him? Such is memory. I have no need to re-read my own essay.
Anyway, Sorrentino's own essay is only a few pages long, and analyzes the language of the story "The Knife of the Times." He explains that there are three varieties of language here, none of which is the habitual mode of Williams' other stories or novels. A habitual, automatic language, unmarked essentially. A refined, euphemistic language, meant to disguise reality. And the language of romantic fiction, also euphemistic. Sorrentino shows how each language variety appears, and how it is possible to use "debased" language with no satiric intent, a language unfit for literature but somehow redeemed.
The story itself is about two women attracted to each other who have no adequate language in which to process their experience.
Williams's story is a kind of linguistic miracle, in Sorrentino's retelling of it, and Sorrentino's brief essay is itself a critical miracle, for Mayhew. It is so direct, concise, and forceful. It encapsulates Sorrentino's admiration for Williams, based on very specific ideas about language and its relation to reality. Sorrentino is an interested party here. It would be possible to disagree, but I would see no point. I wish this were a normal way of doing literary criticism, not a rare exception.
I sent my future self a message, years ago
marking poets and poems in an anthology on my shelves
None of the Above, edited by Michael Lally in 1976
for future reading
Now I am receiving that message,
re-reading these poems I've marked
I am that future self, now, but really
a present one, here and now
The self that sent the message is a past one, now
though present at the time, or so I thought
Time is usually compressed, in narratives. Even the Aristotelian unity of time, in its neoclassical interpretation, sets a limit of one day, with the play itself lasting a few hours. A biopic lasts a couple of hours, representing an entire life. The opposite of narrative, as in Ulysses, a long novel dealing with events of a single day, is rightly seen as innovative.
Musical time: a single solo might be 50 seconds, but a lot is going on there. Time is intensely filled.
In the show The Good Wife, the governor was constantly shuttling between locations in Chicago and in the State Capital, Springfield IL. In the fictional universe of the show, there was very little distance between this two places, when in actuality it is 400 miles round trip. The reason was a need for compressing time in the interests of dramatic efficiency. We can't have the governor 6 hours a day in the car.
I'm not sure my position on triviality can be defended. How can I say that a certain kind of poetry is aesthetically trivial? For me it's the idea of bathos: we get a build-up, an idea that a certain kind of poetry is super important, central to something, and then we get the poem itself...
Don't get me wrong: bathos is my favorite trope, when used intentionally.
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An example: I was reading something by Rothenberg, and he refers, quite earnestly, to Carlos Castañeda, the worst kind of new-age charlatan.
There is political bathos too, which I won't get into right now. Let's say resisting Trump (a good idea!) but in a gesture that seems trivial, however meaningful and earnest it is to the resister. Let's order a Canadian beer today! That'll show em.
