Quicksand.

“Anne Grey herself was, as Helga expressed it, ‘almost too good to be true.'” (Larsen 44-45)

 

This sentence exemplifies all but one of the components of Nella Larsen’s writing to which I strongly reacted.  First, it provides literally no tangible, sensory detail.  It is telling, and shows nothing.  Can’t we see her in some gesture of kindness, rather than being told of her goodness?  Why can’t we smell the cookies she baked for Helga, or see the makeshift bedroom she prepared when she found out Helga needed a place to stay?  It feels as though Larsen doesn’t think the reader capable of interpreting acts as “good,” and so need to have the word in quotes.  

 

Second, it contains a stock phrase (“almost too good to be true,”) and plays it off as thought it is original, or fresh, or in any way especially applicable to the situation at hand.  There is no specificity which justifies its use–it is simply dropped into quotations, which implies that there is an originality and importance to its use.  A quote should never be used if it is only a quote on the grounds that a character said it.  Something needs to legitimize its use, and in this case, nothing does.  

 

Furthermore, it contains her consistent awkward diction.  The placement of “herself” cuts up the sentence, the repetition of full names throughout the text is distracting, and quotations are not placed carefully.  This sentence, and much of the book, feels like a tacked-on explanation for a decent story that may have been written somewhere else, once.  

 

This passage even touches on one of her most surface writing flaws–her insistence on repeating the word “gray” (or, in this case, “Grey”) in some half-baked hope that it will subliminally inspire feelings of hopelessness when Our Heroine is especially struggling.  The word “gray” begins to blend into the background as another trite phrase Larsen relies too heavily on.  At the same time, the reader is vaguely aware of its presence, but as it is accompanied by almost no other sensory description, it loses all meaning and is just an annoyance every few pages.  

 

The only aspect of her writing I noted repeatedly which wasn’t included in this sentence was the fact that the text was riddled with run-on sentences.  They raged over the line of stylistic device and into plain sloppiness.  But this one ought to cover it: 

 

“The husband of Mrs. Hayes-Rore had at one time been a dark thread in the soiled fabric of Chicago’s South Side politics, who, departing this life hurriedly and unexpectedly and a little mysteriously, and somewhat before the whole of his suddenly acquired wealth had had time to vanish, had left his widow comfortably established with money and some of that prestige which in Negro circles had been his.”  (Larsen 37) 

 

The content of this book had the potential to be handled very well, but it was given no chance to do so.  It was crippled from the start by an impersonal narrator who gave almost no details to distinguish her from millions of other people feeling disenfranchised.  This may have been an attempt at universality, but the entire novel felt over-explicated, and as though it may have been much better suited to be a personal essay of some kind.  The narrator’s disengagement throughout the book infected the reader to be disengaged with the novel–because even if we were told she was undergoing emotional experience, we were not grounded physically enough to feel them.  As Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

Why made the baby

Who dunnit?

Some days, I want a baby.

Some days, I want whiskey, 

but mostly a baby, 

like the one I met in Nebraska

–kept under cherry trees

and fed marshmallow fluff–

to listen for like a pileated

woodpecker from my bedroom,

its breath rapping against a pillow.

 

 

Some days, I want that baby,

that anvil around my neck,

a heavy peach as happy

and gone as winter.  Somedays

I see Castro on the TV, think

of a little room, a cave

off Arlington Street, the sounds

at midnight when the cats come through,

an ownership all their own,

 

 

when no babies are left outside,

no slugs for the killing.

Some days I want a good taffeta baby,

a baby smells like turpentine 

and sunflowers, with a fuzzy walk.

 

 

But sometimes 

I eat when I’m not hungry

and I say, stomach, you envious gut, 

see reason, you are eating

for one.  Some days I drift by,

like a cerulean baby frozen,

fed well, and I got no second part

but some days still I think

why not take it? 

Beads

“In the rosary of the Unborn,  each ‘Hail Mary’ will spare one child.”  

 

The Ave Maria is an intercession– a prayer on behalf of someone else.  In Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria,” he prays to the “Mothers of America” to save their children by giving them the run of the earth.  His plea is that mothers allow their children the “darker joys.”  It is crucial, therefore, to notice that he invokes the name of the highest mother figure throughout history, the Madonna.  He is beseeching women to allow their kids to cultivate themselves through a kind of darkness, and so while it may be unusual for him to put the poem under the heading of the virgin Mary, it is not inappropriate–Mary represents the mother of one the most exalted symbols of hope and higher understanding in the Western world.  A symbol who, incidentally, is famous for enduring physical trials to attain enlightenment and tranquility.  It is therefore entirely logical that O’Hara would conjure this image in the context of a prayer seeking the freedom to viscera for children.  Perhaps the “gratuitous bags of popcorn” or “leaving the movie before it’s over/with a pleasant stranger,” will fill them with grace.  

 

There is also the matter of saving each child.  The nature of the Ave Maria implies that child is incapable of saving itself.  The Hail Mary is often intended on behalf of others, as the O’Hara poem is–in this way, the poem becomes a civic duty of sorts.  It suggests that the child will not know what it is missing if the mother does not let it out, will not have a chance to embrace or reject the world they find in the movies.  They will only have a chance to stay “up in their room/hating you”.  It is therefore the responsibility of the poet to intercede for the children, and the responsibility of parents to agree to the intercession, the responsibility of all adults to acknowledge the darkness and let their children out into it anyway.  Otherwise they will only know it later, and it will not be part of something greater, but part of something bitter.

Midnight Cowboy

Ratso had to die on that bus. Not because it was predictable, or because he was a bad person.  I had a fiction teacher once who told our class never to write what could have happened, but what must have happened.  As soon as Ratso stepped on the bus, it was over.  It wasn’t his worst fear, either.  His main complaint was that he felt he was losing his dignity–as when he wet himself on the bus.  He could have stayed in New York forever, living as a decrepit, deteriorating body, which would maybe be passed on to a new generation at some point but which would never really die.  Instead, he wanted a way out.  There comes a point in everyone’s life where they have to decide if they want a doctor or a bus ticket, and Ratso made up his mind.  New York would never have granted him peace.

I did find the laughter in the room when Ratso died extremely disturbing.  Not because I don’t understand laughing at inappropriate moments in movies.  Rather, the laughter seemed to embody all of the cruelest components of apathy, the ones which had allowed everything in the movie to take place to begin with.  It is active disengagement from humanity to find tragedy amusing, let alone hilarious.

Joe Buck was an example of what happens when a country boy is thrown into a city, but Ratso was the embodiment of what happens when a city takes over a person.  I hoped like hell when I left the room that it wouldn’t be sunny outside, and it wasn’t, thank goodness.  It would have been so insensitive of New York to destroy someone like that and have the audacity to shine sun while their body was still warm.

The fragmented way in which the movie was shot was usually heaviest when the camera was following Joe.  It was an accurate way to depict the synaptic craze which comes with the territory when an outsider comes in.  On the other side, the camera work was more steady, more consistent, and with longer shots when the focus was on Ratso.  This, I believe, was a way of suggesting that Ratso was no longer shaken up by the madness of New York which had Joe by the balls, hands, eyes, and nostrils.  The only real time the camerawork was as frenzied with Ratso was at the party, where Ratso was disturbed by the scene around him, where he finally found something that reminded him of feeling like a foreigner to a new world.

A city in which it never snows

Cities are so much more bearable when they reveal themselves to be susceptible to those things we all recall, like snow.  A city in which it never snows is in denial.

Feeling potlucky

I am very much about people feeding each other.  I organize the potlucks, Sam houses them.  Sam doesn’t make anything of his own, really, just boils pasta and uses Jen’s pesto sauce that’s in the freezer.  We all go to our zealous grandmothers’ on Christmas and then cook each other food on Boxing Day.  I make pierogi and sauteed onions, twice-baked potatoes with garlic and cheddar cheese, green beans with almonds.  People take the lid off of the green bean dish and when they close it again with out taking any I yell at them to eat their vegetables.  The sirens roll by all night, their noise barely audible above all of the talking and Dan showing off his new record player.  Emma and I sit on the edge of the tub purpling our lips with sugary wine and talk apart from the party until someone has to pee.  Attractive Drew brings equally Attractive Simone who brings a butternut-squash lasagna and I bring them drinks.  They are in that first phase of breaking bread with each others’ friends and I’m tickled.  We are a good window of copper light in the pale darkness of Bolton Hill tonight.  I am always tired early from cooking and the end of it I curl up in a ball in Sam’s bed and fall asleep to the noise of all my friends still eating.

Poems/Close reading of “Broadway”

Some, like the Whitman, are built on knowing yourself to be less than a city.  Some are Robert Lowell’s old photographs of the Hudson.  Some are about the city interacting, the city as salvation, Sharon Olds seeing a group of men’s relief when the city has pushed crisis back.  In some, e.e. cummings tells about the city, the celestial body.  Some, like the Baudelaire pieces, are how the people of a city cope with being the people of a city or, like the Davis, how the people of a city cope with being people.

 

“Broadway,” by Mark Doty, is a series of handouts.  The poem is handing out jewels.  The first handouts are the macaws.  The second is Carlotta’s hand–the narrator puts his hand out to Carlotta but is really receiving something–“containment,” and then, when it is full again, he gives back to Ezekiel, “replenishing.”  Ezekiel’s poem is the next handout, the next jewel.  It is his way of continuing the cyclical nature of handouts, because he was replenished, and is now full enough to give out, in a different way.  

 

At first, this poem struck me as inordinately prosaic, with the bare language and stanzas undeniably reading like sentences.  However, it makes perfect sense that it should be in poem form, and not prose, because it is the final handout.  It continues the replenishing, just as Ezekiel’s poem did, and gives the reader the capacity to go hand something out of it.

Fact about a neighborhood I’d never visited before

Friday night I couldn’t sleep until five-thirty.  At nine a.m., Sarah Jane called me.  Sarah Jane has worked at a Maryland  library since she was sixteen and is now twenty-three.  Sarah Jane writes great good poetry about bodies and god and her father.  She was in New York.  At ten-fifteen I got out of bed and showered and walked to Tillie’s to meet her.  I spilled a chai all over the floor and I offered to mop it up but instead a girl with some face piercings did it while I apologized.   My face turns red when I spill things and when I say something in a class.  My face turned red when I met Li-Young Lee and later my father told me that when I met Li-Young Lee, my face had been red.   

Sarah’s face gets red too but it’s mostly because she has a manic giggle and it’s nice to hear it as we skid up and down Allen Street looking for someplace to eat.  I’ve never been on Allen Street so I don’t know anywhere to eat.  She asks me about New York and I ask her about Baltimore and we are both very tired and hungry.  She has a friend with her, a man, he is in love with her in the way that every man she’s introduced me to has been.  My brother and father and I are also in love with Sarah Jane in this way.  It makes my brother reluctant to call her even though she requested it.  It makes me giggle along with her.  My father talks about how he can’t date anyone younger than his waist size.  His waist hasn’t been Sarah-size since the late seventies.  We three are harmless.  

Sarah and I know each other in Catonsville, a suburb of Baltimore.  When I was sixteen and bald we sat at a pink Dunkin Donuts table learning each others’ books and movies and she offered numerous times to buy me liquor.  I am five years younger than Sarah Jane and I am still the one who picks her up and drives her home.  I don’t want her to get a car because I like the drive from my apartment to hers.  Between our two apartments I drive on Bloomsbury Avenue, which has lots of tributary-roads running off of it.  One of them, Asylum Lane, used to house a mental hospital which is now just abandoned buildings begging to be broken. 

We eat at a vegan restaurant and drink green tea from decidedly un-dainty mugs.  The L isn’t running.  The A isn’t running.  I take the 4 in two redundant directions and Sarah is overwhelmed on the F.  She is the first person I’ve heard say it: “I don’t like this,” she says.  ”The metro.  The subway.  I don’t like it.”  I transfer to the G and she continues on with her friend, the man, and worries like a good aunt, telling me to call her when I’m home safe.   

I am safe.  I look it up.  Asylum Lane is in Baltimore but Asylum Street is in New York, only now it’s Allen Street, and it was named for the same literal reasons.  It has had four names.  We didn’t know how important it was we lost control of our laughter.  We were owning the crazy we thought we’d left at home.  

Bill Murray, etc.

Happy Groundhog Day.  I was thinking about what the date was because I was curious how long it’d been since I smoked a cigarette (three months, two weeks, and two days) and I realized it was now technically February two.

Dreams

For a few months somewhere from November on I had a nightmare almost every night I slept in this city. When I have a nightmare I have to get up and drink a little water or else pace, I have to do something so that I don’t fall right back asleep and into the same nightmare. My brother tells me not to call them nightmares, he thinks it sounds corny and anyway says he likes to have them occasionally because he’s so glad to wake up. But usually my bad dreams are of things which scare me even more once I’m conscious. I never fully got over the bogeyman.

Tonight I was reading “A Farewell to Arms,” for the hell of it, because it’s nice to read Hemingway when you can fall asleep at any given time and not feel guilty, and maybe wake up and read a little more. Well instead I woke up and found it was ten-thirty, now Sam gets out of class at ten so I called him. At once I lapsed back into some kind of sleep and it was only after I had hung up with him that I realized I’d been dreaming from the perspective of Frederic Henry, and had been moaning things into the phone about hospitals, and telling Sam how insensitive he was not to ask how I was when I was injured.

I had just gotten to the part of the book where Henry is in the hospital with the wounded leg. I was rolling around in my bed as I spoke, and when Sam asked worriedly “You’re injured? What do you mean?” I said something about how I had a fever, and must have felt injured because of that. I was just too hot from sleeping under the comforter with the heat on. I saw that Emma had called me and so was recounting all of this to her as I figured it out, when I realized it would have put anyone ill at ease to be on the receiving end of the phone call prior, so I called Sam back and explained and am going to bed.

It was not a bad dream, and once I wake, nightmares don’t scare me half as badly in a city. I feel a certain amount of safety in numbers. In any case this was the first time my dreams carried into a waking state.