The theme of today’s coffee break is “ideal readers.” It was occasioned by Flannery O’Connor’s quote about the “monstrous reader” who always sat beside her as she wrote muttering, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.” I would think most writers have a Monstrous Reader living in their home — tall and shambling with a ghastly complexion and seersucker pants, who sleeps on the couch and eats all the chips at night.
But Ideal Readers exist as well, and here’s proof!:
• Nicholas Spice’s review of Elfriede Jelinek’s Greed ran in the London Review of Books many, many moons ago — but it’s stayed with me as a great piece of criticism. Remember hearing that Jelinek had won the Nobel Prize in 2004? Remember the excitement? Your gasp of “?????” I’ve read a few essays and articles about her since, but none of them has done so much to help me understand her books and what about her work gets lost in translation, both literally and culturally. It’s an example to me of a writer finding an Ideal Reader out there — always nice to see, but even more heartening when it’s an author whose work is as unconventional and thorny as Jelinek’s.
I remember when the prize was announced, Jelinek gave several interviews that really delighted me with their dolefulness (a performance by a Nobel Prize winner unchallenged until Doris Lessing’s “Oh Christ, I couldn’t care less” in 2007). At the time I thought it’d be nice to start a line of coffee mugs with inspirational wisdom from Jelinek printed on them, my favorites being, “I feel more despair than happiness” and “I have a social phobia, an illness known to doctors.” You know, something nice for around the office. (This is why I’m not Elfriede Jelinek’s Ideal Reader.)
• In this profile, Dave Cole comes across as a writer’s Romantic Ideal of a copy editor. Such tender, gentle hands! (Via sarahw.)
By the way, enjoy the dream, writers, but you should probably know: This is what your copy editor is really thinking about you.

Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Sylvia Plath, is often maligned, but it has its wonderful points. One of the best sections is on Plath’s residency at Yaddo (which she shared with Ted Hughes) — a period when Plath was reading a lot of Jung and Theodore Roethke and, under the latter’s influence, wrote “Poem for a Birthday” (representative line: I housekeep in Time’s gut-end / Among emmets and mollusks, / Duchess of Nothing, / Hairtusk’s bride.; the poem’s entire seven-part sequence can be read online here. It’s the last poem listed under “1959”).
In her own (excellent) biography of the Plath-Hughes marriage, Her Husband, Diane Middlebrook passes over “Poem for a Birthday” quickly, dismissing it as overly imitative of Roethke. But Stevenson spends a significant amount of time on the sequence, and her interpretation of the poem’s imagery is sensitive and stirring. She writes, “These are poems of nightmarish regression comparable to Roethke’s ‘mad sequences,’ attempting to reproduce in infantile images and language the mute appetites of babies and beasts.”
In college I’d been exposed to a few poems from Roethke’s “mad sequences,” but they never took — other people’s nightmares are sometimes too opaque — and up until recently the only poem of his I knew well was “My Pap’s Waltz.” But lately, I’ve been reading a lot of him. Here’s one of my favorite bits to re-visit. It’s the fourth part of “The Dying Man,” a poem in five sections written in memory of Yeats. This part is called “The Exulting”*:

Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after-image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh; and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face; there was another man
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying by my death.

*Taken from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.

• An excerpt from the title story of Mary Gaitskill’s new collection, Don’t Cry, which comes out in a couple weeks. Yay! The story appeared last June in the New Yorker; the magazine’s website is now registration required but if you’re a subscriber, you can read the full story here. (I can’t remember from whom I purloined that first link — if it was you, sorry.)
• Wikicuriosities: Book curses and fakelore. (Via Gwenda & The Millions.)
• The Cinetrix presents a compelling reason to re-watch All About Eve this weekend. As if you needed one.

Last week I got a copy of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, and I’ve been having an entertaining time leafing through it. The allure of the book, even if you already have a good thesaurus, comes from the contributing notes by David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Bryan Garner, Francine Prose and others.
These “word notes” are scattered throughout the text and marked by the contributors’ initials. They’re a mixed bag; some are useful and interesting, while others seem overly cute or casual, and I wish this latter group had been juried out or made to O.E.D.-up. After a while I found myself gravitating to certain contributors’ initials and skipping others as reliably irritating. (In that way it’s like scanning the table of contents of a new New Yorker to choose which articles you’ll read.)
But there are amusements and entertainments. Here is Michael Dirda’s note on “limn”:

This is the phoniest word in the critic’s vocabulary, aside from luminous to describe a writer’s prose (and usually rather gushy prose at that). People are unsure of limn‘s pronunciation, uncertain of its actual meaning, and generally pretentious when they use it. Most of the time journalists resort to limn because they want something fancier than describe. Yet while describe slips smoothly by without calling much attention to itself, limn jumps off the page to strut about and show off. It’s one of those words that want to be urbane and debonair but are somehow really ugly, pushy, and nouveau riche. But maybe I’m going out on a limb by saying that. So let’s just call limn fundamentally, almost viscerally, rebarbative.

I don’t agree with parts of it — “limn” is a great word for getting at a particular thing that “describe” doesn’t — but it’s always bracing to come across a good rant in one’s reference materials. I hope journalists listen.
RELATED:
For a contrary take on “limn” and a defense of one notable critic’s use of it, see here.

The sound quality isn’t the best, but if you’re a fan of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s version of “Summer Wine,” this clip is pretty wonderful. I’ve watched it about a dozen times over the last month, and I do not grow tired of Hazlewood’s bassetty gaze at the camera nor his delivery of the last line of the first lyric as “whoa-whoa, summer wine.” (On the album Nancy & Lee, this line is more like, “Oh-oh-oh, summer wine.” Who knew he was holding back?) Anyway, despite the title, a good (and cautionary!) song for that hectic yet languorous spring feeling.

Our household is in a sad, squalorous state. Last Saturday I met a significant, if arbitrary, deadline for my book and it was a very productive week — tired and raw at times, but also immersive and good. After I got everything mailed off I said to Lowell, “I feel married to the book now.” But Sunday I rested, and Monday I didn’t write well, and Tuesday either, and now it’s Thursday and I have nothing but a couple notebook pages and I’ve reached that hard, jangling mood that — in flashes of self-awareness — I realize is making me act like the cokehead at the party who no one wants to talk to because he/she is an ***hole. It is one of the most bewildering things about writing (I find), how one can be in the book one week, and then expelled from it the next.
Lowell is under a programming deadline and keeps talking about nervous breakdown. He needs a haircut. There’s a heating bill on the counter that’s been there for a month like a significant presence in the house, and everyone everywhere seems to be ahead of us in getting their taxes started. We’re out of groceries but Lowell can’t go because he’s legitimately working and I can’t go because I need to stay near my computer not writing. This morning a small but pivotal piece of the coffee-maker broke off and our mutual consternation was astounding. Lowell got out a flashlight and was shining it up into the interior of the machine to see if he could re-attach the small, pivotal piece. He couldn’t but found, shining the light up in there, that the interior of the machine is laced with dog hair. Neither of us knows how this happened — the dog generally isn’t allowed up on the kitchen counters. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the cat has had an upset stomach all week and keeps walking to the back door, catching my eye, and throwing up.
(It has taken me two paragraphs to describe this. Yesterday, on Twitter, Hit Song linked to this clip that summarizes the entire domestic mood in just :18 seconds.)
Terry and OGIC have their own terrible deadlines, and so this morning I was thinking I would have to put up a post today that said in effect, “Sorry, I am too busy NOT WRITING to write anything here.” And that reminded me of all of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great writing about not writing, which is incredibly artful and beautiful and often funny, even when the source was painful.
One painful source, of course, was the rupture with Wordsworth, and the letter I’m going to quote was written shortly after it occurred. (If you’re not up on your early Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge originally were to produce Lyrical Ballads together. But then Wordsworth limited Coleridge’s influence on the first edition, refusing to allow “Christabel” to appear in it, and then further boxed him out of the second. All of this sounds comic and arcane as one types it up for the Internet in 2009 but when you read about this period of Coleridge’s life in the Richard Holmes biography, it is like seeing someone get lopped off at the knees or taking some other terrible blow.) Coleridge entirely lost his confidence, and (as Holmes observes — this isn’t my insight) stopped for a time being able to write about anything but not writing. But even these submerged bits of creativity are masterpieces, and here is one:

In my long Illness I had compelled into hours of Delight many a sleepless, painful hour of Darkness by chasing down metaphysical Game — and since then I have continued the Hunt, till I found myself unaware at the Root of Pure Mathematics — and up that tall smooth Tree, whose few poor branches are all at its very summit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs — still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. — You would not know me — ! all sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme — I look at the Mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows) I look at the Mountains only for the Curves of their outlines; the Stars, as I behold them, form themselves into Triangles — and my hands are scarred with scratches from a Cat, whose back I was rubbing in the Dark in order to see whether the sparks were refrangible by a Prism. The Poet is dead in me — my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with Flame. That is past by! — I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy — but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat & square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.

At the start of this year I began, as a sort of unofficial reading project, to read through the Dickens catalog. This opposed to what I’d been doing the past several years, which was mooning over the same old favorites (Bleak House, Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield). I was inspired by the excellent Jane Smiley biography of Dickens I mentioned the other week, which (among other critical points) makes a case for Our Mutual Friend as an underrated novel in the Dickens oeuvre. I had read Our Mutual Friend in college, retained few fond memories of it, but decided to re-read it on the strength of Smiley’s passion for it–and while not as convinced as she is of its overall dark genius, was glad I did. It was a far greater novel than I remembered, and so now I’m shuffling through the rest of them to see what else I’ve missed.
Right now I’m midway through Great Expectations, and it’s the minor characters and bit players who are interesting me. At the close of a lecture on Bleak House, Nabokov talks about the qualities that make Dickens “a great writer” and he points as an example to one of the novel’s walk-on characters, one who is never named and whose only function in the plot is to act (briefly) as a bearer for Grandfather Smallweed’s chair. Dickens describes the man this way: “The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a ‘Mission’ for holding horses and calling coaches, receives his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires.”
Nabokov observes:

This gesture, this one gesture with its epithet “over-handed”–a trifle–but the man is alive forever in a good reader’s mind.
A great writer’s world is indeed a magic democracy where even some very minor character, even the most incidental character like the person who tosses the twopence has the right to live and breed.

Of course, Great Expectations isn’t a democracy–it’s a monarchy ruled over by Miss Havisham. But still the minor characters manage to live and breed. When Pip comes into his expectations he goes to see a tailor about a new set of clothes. The tailor, Mr. Trabb, is having breakfast in a room behind his shop:

Mr. Trabb had sliced his hot roll into three feather-beds, and was slipping butter in between the blankets, and covering it up. He was a prosperous old bachelor, and his open window looked into a prosperous little garden and orchard, and there was a prosperous iron safe let into the wall at the side of his fireplace, and I did not doubt that heaps of his prosperity were put away in it in bags.
“Mr. Trabb,” said I, “it’s an unpleasant thing to have to mention, because it looks like boasting, but I have come into a handsome property.”
A change passed over Mr. Trabb. He forgot the butter in bed, got up from the bedside, and wiped his fingers on the table-cloth, exclaiming, “Lord bless my soul!”

It’s the wiping the fingers on the table-cloth I love. (Also, that’s how I used to eat biscuits when I was a kid. It’s so gluttonous & satisfying.)
Contrast this to how, some fifty pages later, the law clerk Mr. Wemmick disposes of a similar meal:

Wemmick, was at his desk, lunching–and crunching–on a dry hard biscuit, pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them.

Everything is dryer, not just the biscuit.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
Sylvia Plath, “Wuthering Heights”