5 Cent Lemons

“They shared a doom against which virtue was no defense.”

“Whenever I put the headsets on now,” he’d continued, “I really do understand what I find there. When those kids sing about ‘She loves you,’ yeah, well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different colors, shapes, sizes, distances from death, but she loves. And the ‘you’ is everybody. And herself.”

“…A vast iron bulk like the blade of a plough tore through the water, tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam leaped towards the steamer. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram, ”Thunder Child“, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping. The ”Thunder Child“ fired no gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. Martians did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.

Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear.

Another Martian raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of the ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through paper.

A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the ”Thunder Child“ sounded through the reek, going off one after the other….”

H.G Wells (1898)

Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance--
      These are the seals of that most firm assurance
        Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
      And if, with infirm hand, Eternity,
      Mother of many acts and hours, should free
        The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
      These are the spells by which to reassume
      An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

      To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;                     570
      To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
        To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
      To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
      From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
        Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
      This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
      Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
      This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!

Here’s something right out of my journal that has no place anywhere else.

  “What — you’ll let her go? And with her lover?”

   ”Whom with is her matter. I shall let her go; with him certainly, if she wishes. I know I may be wrong — I know I can’t logically, or religiously, defend my concession to such a wish of hers, or harmonize it with the doctrines I was brought up in. Only I know one thing: something within me tells me I am doing wrong in refusing her. I, like other men, profess to hold that if a husband gets such a so-called preposterous request from his wife, the only course that can possibly be regarded as right and proper and honourable in him is to refuse it, and put her virtuously under lock and key, and murder her lover perhaps. But is that essentially right, and proper, and honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish? I don’t profess to decide. I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of themselves. If a person who has blindly walked into a quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible.”

— Jude the Obsucre, pg 230

I think this passage shows a Hardy that goes beyond Classical Realism enough to break with the bases of the tradition but falls short of Modernism, settling in line with the fin-de-siecle Decadent Movement of the Continent represented by D’Annunzio and his similarily structured text Il Piacere.

In the passage above we have an example of Psychological Realism at it’s best, a very limited achievment. While the passage is, at least to me, entirely moving it is incomplete insofar as the character does not realise that it is not the quagmire of the other that his attention should be directed at, but his own. That is, it is only in listening carefully for our own calls for help, and learning to help ourselves that we truly overhear, in a Shakespearian sense – and in a sense central to modernism – ourselves (whether through the unconscious, or through something else is what becomes at stake).  

The Secret Book and Record Store is a great little shop on Wicklow St (just off Grafton and a 3m walk from the Arts Block) and I sometimes work there, so come buy second-hand books at great prices as well as browse the CD and Vinyl collections. 

Objectively, it’s the best 2nd hand bookstore in central Dublin, and much nicer than Chapters if that’s the come-back you had in mind, though I admit chapters is bigger, this is an example of quality over quantity. 

Clouds

Down the blue night the unending columns press
   In noiseless tumult, break and wave and flow,
   Now tread the far South, or lift rounds of snow
Up to the white moon’s hidden loveliness.
Some pause in their grave wandering comradeless,
   And turn with profound gesture vague and slow,
   As who would pray good for the world, but know
Their benediction empty as they bless.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain
   Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth.
         I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these,
In wise majestic melancholy train,
         And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas,
   And men, coming and going on the earth.

Rupert Brooke, Ocotber 1913

Double Whammy Review:

Everything and More will change the way you see mathematics, literature and to a great extent the 19th and 20th Centuries. DFW’s treatment of the history of Infinity gives insight into the complex thought’s of geniuses such as Dedekind, Cantor, Weierstrass and Godel (to name just a few) as well as revealing more and more about DFW’s own theories. While it is not entirely accurate in its descriptions, and some say its errors outweigh its merits the text is actually surprisingly accessible for any high-level book on the subject that maintains such an in-depth approach and is also enjoyable throughout.

Perhaps the object of greatest interest is how this text’s strong misreadings of a few fundamental concepts align themselves with the strong misreading of Wittgenstein mentioned in the introductory essays to Fate, Time and Language — the published Amherst dissertation, collected alongside relevant philosophical articles — another piece of DFW’s under-read catalog. In fact, the dissertation’s complexity can become overbearing about 2/3 of the way in but it communicated something beyond it’s dissolving of Taylor’s claims on fatalism — it reminds us of an attitude to scholarship, of personal dedication and of deep investment, that is waning in modern times under economic pressures of an educational system that is being forced to look at itself more and more through an optic of economic potential. His determination to undo what he saw as Taylor’s “sleight-of-hand” and right what he felt was at its most basic an insult to philosophy scholarship is one of the most compelling texts I’ve read this year, and I sat through it spell-bound in one sitting at the library, angered by having to return it to Santry.

Without doubt you will walk away from either of these (as with all of DFW’s work) with a new and way to consider the world around you. 

In Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a cloud of tea smoke. The pimp is one of these vibration and dietary artists — which is a means he degrades the female sex by forcing his chicks to swallow all this shit. He was continually enlarging his theories… he would quiz a chick and threaten to walk out if she hadn’t memorized every nuance of his latest assault on logic and the human image. 

“Now, baby. I got it here to give. But if you won’t receive it there’s just nothing I can do.” 

He was a ritual tea smoker and very puritanical about junk the way some tea heads are. He claimed tea put him in touch with supra blue gravitational fields. He had ideas on every subject: what kind of underwear was healthy, when to drink water, and how to wipe your ass. He had a shiny red face and great spreading smooth nose, little red eyes that lit up when he looked at a chick and went out when he looked at anything else. His shoulders were very broad and suggested deformity. He acted as if other men did not exist, conveying his restaurant and store orders to male personnel through a female intermediary. And no Man ever invaded his blighted, secret place. 

So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming “I got the fear” and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant — mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters — and waited for the bus to town.

A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead.

- Naked Lunch (1959) William S. Burroughs

This is the first passage I post with an aim to underline the role of a relatively unimportant character in complex novels; this is something I hope to write about for the next edition of the Trinity Literary Review and Burroughs’ Jane has always intrigued me. I won’t be commenting much on her, but you can expect Minor Character posts in the future to have a little more detail. Enjoy.