#but both of these books are more interested in the singular and solitary reader rather than the collective audience/readership

[finelythreadedsky]

it always makes me smile when scholars in academic writing refer to the hypothetical reader with she/her. "let the reader experience the battle as if it was unfolding right before her eyes". "a reader accepting her own historicity". "gives the reader the impression that she is following the events". "when a student is asked to write an essay on the aeneid she will normally be encouraged to read some modern criticism". like yeah i see you. i know you did that for me.

[a-cai-jpg]

it's startlingly easy for the line between reality and fantasy to blur

(hold on tight, don't lose your grip.)

glossary:

S. - novel by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams Ship of Theseus - fictional novel by V.M. Straka S. -  character in Ship of Theseus "S" - collective of writers Ekstrom, Durand, Summersby - part of "S" Filomela - editor for V.M. Straka Signe Rabe - daughter to Ekstrom and Durand (contested!) Desjardins - Straka scholar, married to Signe Rabe

For the past few days, I've been reading and re-reading a book titled S.

S. is a novel co-written between Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams. (I believe Dorst did most of the writing and Abrams came up with the idea.)

I was taken by the novel when I first saw it because of the handwritten notes in the margins and the inserts.

(I don't know if y'all remember those huge, flip books in Costco that would have inserts and pop-ups about dragons and faeries and stuff. I used to spend hours standing in that aisle flipping and perusing through all of them.)

But damn, S. is so much more than margin-notes and fake post cards.

S. is a novel with three different storylines.

When you first take the physical book out of its booksleeve, it's a book titled Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka, a novel published posthumously by Straka's editor, Filomela, after his untimely death in 1946.

Within this 456-page book, you become privy to the lives of three groups of people. Firstly, there is the protagonist of Ship of Theseus, a amnesiac man simply named S. Then, there are the authors of the margin-notes, Jen and Eric, two students at Pollard State University trying to discover the secret behind the mysterious and elusive author of Ship of Theseus, V.M. Straka. Lastly, there is the story of Straka himself.

(I feel like I can't talk about the book without explaining what I found in the book, so heavy spoiler alert.)

After some extensive note-taking and reading, I've more or less figured out the three storylines. I will allude to two of them, but the following is an in-depth-ish synopsis of Ship of Theseus itself. 

In Ship of Theseus, S. wakes up in an unnamed town known only as The Old Quarter, washed up from shore. He hears voices of those suffering, and he meets a girl who introduces herself as Sola. She is reading a novel titled The Archer's Tales. This is a real book (real, in the sense that it exists in the second level, the Jen and Eric level), written by Sobreiro. In Spanish, it is El Libro de Ese (The Book of S).

S. is kidnapped and wakes up on a ship, which is later revealed to have the name Sobreiro etched on its hull. After a storm, he ends up in a town called B--- and finds himself amidst a worker's rebellion against a factory. He sees a woman who looks similar to Sola, but goes by the name Szalómé, and in his pursuit of her, he realizes that there is a man planning to bomb the factory and kill the workers. He hesitates between warning them and following Sola, and ultimately retraces his steps back to the factory, but he is too late.

He and four crucial persons of the rebellion survive the blast and escape. In the getaway, the four are killed by the Detectives who work for Vévoda, the malicious owner of the factory hiding a dangerous secret. S. jumps off a cliff into the ocean. Somehow, he ends back up on the ship. It looks different, a patchwork of different types of wood, but he knows its the same ship. 

Something interesting to note about the ship is that the sailors have their lips sewn shut. There is a rotation system, where one sailor at a time goes to the orlop, but S. is never allowed to go there.

(i didn't know wtf an orlop is, but apparently, it's the lowest deck of a ship lol)

S. searches for his identity through writing and scrawls his stories into the wooden walls of the ship with a nail. When the ship approaches land again, he is rowed to shore by a crewmember. He follows a guide on the land through a town, El H---, and realizes that decades have passed since he last stepped foot on shore. In El H---, he arrives at a library/museum where the residents are packing up art and literature to protect from an impending invasion by the Agents, who are the evolved version of the Detectives. There, he sees a portrait of a woman who looks like Sola, but is told her name is Samar. He is given a valise and then told to return to the ship. The invasion arrives, but he successfully makes it back to the ship with the help of a person that he believes is Sola.

The valise is filled with material and notes on how to make various poisons and a stack of 57 photographs of individuals.

The next time he arrives on shore, the crewmembers haul boxes and boxes of cargo from the ship into a warehouse for safekeeping. He climbs a volcano and meets a very old woman who shows him a book of the Ship of Theseus. She tells him to make a decision, and that the question of Sola is always there. He races back to the ship, enters the orlop, and sees a solitary writing desk, ink, reams of paper, and boxes identical to the ones currently being packed into the warehouse. He sits down and begins to write. 

(It's clear that when the sailors go to the orlop, they too, are writing.)

The sailors return and sew his mouth shut. 

S. embarks on his new mission, having made the decision the old woman had presented him. He begins his journey to kill each and every one of the 57 people photographed, who are Agents of Vévoda. With every person killed, a page of a book is tucked into his or her pocket. In Vévoda's retaliation, a similar signature is used. 

In a mission to kill the governor, another one of Vévoda's people, he recognizes the governor as one of the original four who had escaped with him from the rebellion. Not only does he realize he's been betrayed by someone who believed in the cause even before he did, the guides who are with him are killed, and he thinks he sees Sola and his younger self.

After a stint in the Winter City, S. finally meets Sola, who travels with him to the château to kill Vévoda and his guests, who are all powerful statespeople and businesspeople from around the world. During the operation, which is to poison the black wine that Vévoda has created, he realizes that this is not what he wants. He asks himself if it matters what he wants, and makes the decision for the very first time that yes, it matters. So he doesn't kill them.

Instead, he persuades Vévoda's heir to drink the wine, and the young man ends up spilling the intentions of the Vévoda powerhouse, which is to create the opportunities and provide the resources for power-hungry people around the world to have their way, utterly disregarding the powerless. 

At the end, there is a vision where S. and Sola return to the ship and, as they sail, spot another ship that he says is "one of theirs."

Just Ship of Theseus by itself, ignoring the other two storylines, is packed with allegories and metaphors.

The novel itself is difficult to get through and vaguely existential, but I think Straka's message ultimately distills to the notion that the struggle against greed is both overwhelming and relentless. To join in the fight is to lose your identity and free will, but sometimes, it is the decision that you have to make.

S., therefore, is not a singular person, but rather, one link in an ongoing "tradition" starting with perhaps Sobreiro, in the 1600s (I quote "tradition" here because it is the term used in the book). He wakes up with no memory and is pushed into and along this revolution against the growing power of Vévoda, likely like the many people before him and the many after him (the younger S. that appears with Sola). 

(Hence why he has no name, but instead, a placeholder, because this is a story that will be lived many, many times by those who hear and answer to the calls of the suffering.)

(I write about S. in a very passive manner, because he is just that.)

The Ship of Theseus is a thought-experiment exploring whether or not the ship is the same ship if you replace all of its original parts. The answer presented in the novel is a conflicted one. The author argues that the next Vévoda, the heir to the corporation, may or may not be the same as his father. Furthermore, the author writes an S. that deviates from the original plan--who chooses Sola over the tradition. Both Vévoda and S. are placeholders for two ideas--the former being the corrupt and greedy, and the latter being the opposing force. Using the Ship of Theseus as the title implies that each iteration of Vévoda and S is identical, yet the author challenges that notion in the last chapter.

Why would the author do that, you may ask?

BECAUSE the message Dorst and Abrams tries to bring with S. is much more nuanced. 

NOW.

NOW IT'S TIME TO BRING IN THE NEXT LAYER.

WHO IS V.M. STRAKA?

That is the question asked in the foreword written by Filomela, the editor, but also the question Jen and Eric try to answer throughout the book. 

There is one compelling theory that I love very much, which is V.M. Straka is ultimately a figurehead for a movement started by a collective of radical literary scholars who are trying to uncover the corruption and greed of businesses and governments around the world, sometimes with very extreme methods like murder.

This is true. To a certain extent. (The group is known as "S.")

(Yes. I know.)

(Guess what their signature is? A page of a Straka book tucked in the pocket of the corpse.)

But, Straka was also a person.

(This is where Dorst and Abram's novel grows beyond Ship of Theseus.)

In the original Ch. 10 that Straka writes, Sola and three others die, and he returns to sea feeling like he has failed the people he's tried to protect. At the ocean, the point-of-view suddenly shifts, and the reader begins seeing through the lens of an unnamed young man.

The young man boards the ship.

WHAT BEGINS AT THE WATER SHALL END THERE, AND WHAT ENDS THERE SHALL ONCE MORE BEGIN.

See, Ship of Theseus is semi-autobiographical, regardless of how much Eric tries to argue that you can't assume everything a writer writes is about him/herself. Ship of Theseus is Straka's final reckoning with the movement in which he's immersed himself. This is why it’s titled Ship of Theseus.

In Straka's original manuscript, with S. standing in as himself, he writes that he's failed his fellow comrades. He despairs that the next generation will similarly be both humbled and tortured by the fight.

Because this original manuscript is lost after Straka's death, Filomela writes a happier ending, in which S. loses neither Sola nor the fight. S. and Sola continue the "tradition," along with numerous others after them. This is the ending she wishes for them, because she was in love with Straka, but the ending Straka never dared to choose.

Ugh, and that's what's so fucking powerful about S. It is a conversation amongst three S.'s and three Solas. There's the original S. and Sola in the novel, where S.'s preoccupation with the "tradition" ends in Sola's death. There's Straka and Filomela, where Straka's fear of choosing Filomela ends in his own death and a missed opportunity with Filomela. Then, there's Eric and Jen, where they choose each other AND Ship of Theseus.

They choose to continue embarking on this journey to prove who Straka is together, possibly outing the powerful corporation the “S” was fighting against in Straka’s time, and ultimately, reconciling the indecision of S. and the fear of Straka.

Before I leave you, there is one other thing Ship of Theseus discusses that makes my heart skip a beat when I think about it.

S. writes. His crewmembers write. Their writings are protected in a warehouse. They no longer have the ability to speak, but their power comes through the words that they write and leave for the next generation.

(Eric was right to be fixated on the "generation" theme.)

When S. is on the Territory (where he kills the governor), Vévoda's people are blasting mountains carved with images of the Old Village's history for natural resources to build formidable, destructive weapons.

The erasure of indigenous stories for the benefit of the greedy and powerful and the erasure of stories in general is a prominent theme throughout Ship of Theseus.

(similarly, our world is plagued by the same problem, both in the past and today. see: cultural terrorism. but also colonialism and imperialism in general lol.)

However, what is striking is the black stuff that Vévoda is manufacturing. This black stuff is the puddle of grotesque liquid that burns through the flesh at the top of the mountain when S. and his comrades flee from B---, it is the exquisite wine Vévoda saves for his most important guests and markets as his greatest weapon, and it is ink.

His most powerful weapon is ink. What all the rich and powerful want is the power to write the past, present, and future.

After Vévoda's son drinks the wine, he has a choice to make. He can continue on the Vévoda tradition and bring destruction about the world under the guise of creating something greater, or he can rewrite the future. He chooses the latter. (and unfortunately dies.)

BUT.

Straka writes, 

"He passes a barrel on which no mark is visible, as its contents have leaked through a split stave and blackened the wood below....He kneels down and touches a finger to it, and all at once, the mad chorus of voices in his head goes silent. 

Silent.  

Settled. Returned to the earth and settled. Voices and narratives, re-absorbed into the ground on which we walk. And this is the key, he realizes, the thing that makes the purpose of all that work on the ship and in El-H--- and on the Obsidian Island and in Budapest, Edinburgh, Valparaíso, Prague, Cape Town, Valletta, the Winter City, and a thousand others come into focus. All that ink, all that pigment, all that desperate action to preserve that which had been created--it is valuable because story is a fragile and ephemeral thing on its own, a thing that is easily effaced or disappeared or destroyed, and it is worth preserving. And if it can't be preserved, then it should be released and cycled. To write with the black stuff is to create and, at the same time, to resurrect. We write with what those who've come before us wrote.

Everything rewritten. Part o' the tradition."

We all have the power to write our own stories and the story of the world around us. We all have the power to choose to destroy or create. Destruction is not a necessary precursor to creation.

(I lied, I'm not leaving yet.)

There is very, very important note that Jen writes in the book. She says that for every person who betrays the "S," there is someone who is their ally. This applies to the collective "S" and S., the character.

I think the most irresistible part of S., this larger novel written by Dorst and Abrams, is the "S"--this collective of radical writers (the pen is mightier than the sword!) dedicated to bringing about a just world. 

I--

Oh my god.

Many of the members of "S" are parallels to the characters in Ship of Theseus (and this is the most exciting part with Jen and Eric's research, as they match each real life person with the characters).

There is one person in particular, Durand, for whom my heart sings. After her lover, Ekstrom, passes away (possibly due to Straka's carelessness), she writes and researches relentlessly. Before dying, she is determined to fight for women's voting rights and to untagle the stories of history so they are not forgotten. 

And then there is Filomela, who singlehandedly tries to rewrite the accepted "tradition." She falls in love with a person through the words, never meeting him, but dedicates ten years of her life to waiting for him. She isn't part of the "S," but she's part of the "S" because like how Sola has The Archer's Tales at the beginning of Ship of Theseus, the "tradition" is passed to Filomela, unbeknownst to her. But she fucking kills it.

I mean, she even fakes her own death and manages to live until over 100.

In her parting letter to Eric and Jen, she writes, 

"Please remember, though, not every question must be answered. Matters of the past may be allowed to remain in the past; matters of the present and future may be allowed to go unexplored. The world will not end in any case....I will tell you what matters most (although you must know this already, as you know my story): it is love. When you fall in love, friends, let yourself fall. It is my fondest wish that this note finds you both happy, healthy, and falling."

As Straka's editor, she must know that "falling" is a prominent theme in Ship of Theseus. As privy to part of the "S," she must also know that falling is ultimately how many of the members find their end. And yet, she uses and repeats this word, because falling is terrifying and negative and unwanted, but falling in love shouldn't be feared. 

I like that last line, but I really, really, really like, "...not every question must be answered. Matters of the past may be allowed to remain in the past; matters of the present and future may be allowed to go unexplored."

See, V.M. Straka is a person with flesh and blood, with history, with emotions. 

But he is also something greater than that. He is a collection of writings influenced and contributed to by a number of skilled authors and scholars with a singular vision. He is a fight against the corrupt and evil.

So, when Filomela fell in love with the words written, whom did she fall in love with?

Jen is convinced that she fell in love with the person, Vaclav Straka, who disappeared after a suicide attempt by drowning in 1910 and had his future erased to become V.M. Straka.

But, I think she was in love with the person who embodies a revolutionary spirit. She suspects who Straka is, she must have after so many years working with him, but she's okay with not knowing and loving the ideal in her mind, especially after Straka dies. 

(maybe i'm just projecting)

There's another arc in the storyline that I love very much, which is that of Signe Rabe.

In the "Interlude" chapter, Filomela writes a question to V.M. Straka into the text, asking, "Who is Signe Rabe?"

Jen and Eric ultimately discover Signe Rabe to be the wife of Desjardins, a Straka scholar, but also, the daughter of Durand.

The identity of Signe's father is contested. Some people think it's Straka, others think it is Summersby (another member of the "S"), but I like more answer more.

Signe Rabe is the daughter of Durand and Ekstrom, raised by Summersby and Straka (there's a margin-note where Eric talks to Summersby's lawyer's daughter, who mentions a little girl whose parents were killed and chased around the world by bad people so she's raised by two uncles).

I love that--I love it so much more than Signe being raised by her real father and his friend. 

(that's awful, i know but shh)

Because, the "S" is more than just a collective of radicals--it is a family bound together by their vision for a better world, a greater ideal. And Straka--Vaclav--who was like a son to Ekstrom, who was saved from ending his life by Ekstrom in 1910 to live this extraordinary life, atones for his sins and raises Signe, who forgives him.

WHAT BEGINS AT THE WATER SHALL END THERE, AND WHAT ENDS THERE SHALL ONCE MORE BEGIN.

UGH.

Ok, I'm done.

-ish.

(My favorite character is Desjardins, who is first described as "too old + senile to take on students" by Eric.

But God, imagine. This man who marries a woman he loves, a woman who dies far too young and leaves him with a secret about who she is. And because he loves her so much, he looks for Filomela for twelve years, possibly decoding everything in Ship of Theseus just like Jen and Eric did, and hands her the final chapter that Straka wrote. 

And he continues to pursue the question of "Who is V.M. Straka?" for the rest of his life, embroiled in this larger conspiracy for the simple reason that he fell in love with Signe Rabe.

And he ultimately dies, falling out of a window in the same hotel Ekstrom, his father-in-law, died in.)

(I HURT.)

( Filomela describes him as a nice, polite man "moving with great sadness.")

(I imagine him to be a wily, tall, young man who falls in love, who becomes sad and serious, who begins to hunch over as the years pass him, who finds someone--Eric--to continue on his work, who is okay with dying after passing his documents to Eric because someone will continue the tradition.)

(Ok, now I'm really done.)

(Thank you for reading. Farewell. Next time I will not write so much.)

daily song rec:  任贤��� - 天涯 (cover by 任贤齐 & 刘宇宁)

(sometimes i hear liu yuning’s voice and i’m like oh yes this is why girls wore wedding dresses to his concert)

[penniesforthestorm]

On Jane, Part 2

Actually I Mostly Talk About Rochester in This One

Greetings, pals! Today's chunk lends itself a bit more naturally to analysis, because it's primarily concerned with the development of the relationship between Jane and Rochester, concurrent with the deepening of the mystery surrounding Thornfield Hall (those 'bumps in the night' I mentioned in yesterday's post). Again, if you haven't read the book, you will probably be confused by a lot of what follows here—if you have read the book and you're still confused, I apologize. With that in mind, let's get to it.

First of all, let's talk about this Rochester fellow. By the time he actually physically enters the picture, we know very little about him. He's not a titled peer, but he's evidently wealthy enough to spend most of his time traveling around Europe. He's apparently well-liked by his tenants and employees, though Mrs. Fairfax (so far, the chief source of information for both Jane and the audience) makes a reference to his eccentric personality. Beyond that, he's an unknown quantity.

When Jane first sees him charging down the icy lane on his black horse, she thinks of a mystical creature, the Gytrash, known to haunt solitary lanes at nightfall. During their first real conversations, Rochester teasingly accuses Jane of bewitching his horse, asking if he had broken through a fairy-circle. These particular scenes are some of my favorites, because they give such a clear idea of both characters. For his part, Rochester addresses Jane as a person, with thoughts and opinions worth hearing. And Jane rises to the occasion, frankly and innocently answering his questions. In the second conversation, when Rochester asks if Jane finds him handsome, she answers ‘no’, not out of any intent to insult, but out of simple honesty. Rochester pretends to be piqued, but given the way the rest of the conversation proceeds, it’s clear that he finds her candor admirable, even as he pokes fun at her naïveté.

For a while, not much happens. Winter thaws into spring, and Rochester and Jane’s conversations deepen. He tells her the rather Romantic story of Adele’s parentage—himself, the young wastrel, seduced by the feckless showgirl Celine Varens. But the anecdote is revealing. Despite his professed lack of enthusiasm for the company of children and his rather dismissive attitude toward Adele herself, he nevertheless rescued her from a probable grim fate. In Paris, Adele was the illegitimate daughter of a woman who was about one rung up the ladder from a prostitute. In England, she is being raised in a comfortable home, and educated as a member of the upper classes, no doubt with an eye toward a future advantageous marriage, as long as nobody asks too many questions. One could argue that Rochester’s actions in this case constitute the most basic level of human decency, but within the context of the story, wherein children are either spoiled rotten or cast off and starved, Rochester comes off looking like quite the benefactor.

(I could derail this into a Whole Thing about the trend of novels in the 19th Century still functioning largely as allegory and not precisely meant to represent the Real World—Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy to an extent, and of course Wuthering Heights, but I feel like that deserves further and better research than what I’m going for here. Still, I think it’s another thing that often gets missed in discussions of this novel, and thus, the more melodramatic elements of the work seem incongruous with its overall ‘realistic’ tone.)

Now, a bit more on those bumps in the night. Ever since Jane’s earliest days at Thornfield, she’s been aware of an eerie laugh issuing from some rooms on the third story of the house. There is a servant who stays there, rarely venturing down to the rest of the house, and her name is given as Grace Poole. Everybody seems rather vague on the subject of what Grace actually does, and Jane, being observant, begins to suspect that there is something going on with Grace, despite her thoroughly ordinary appearance and taciturn manner.

These suspicions come quite literally roaring to life one night, when Jane hears that laugh in the hall outside her bedroom, and ventures outside to discover that Rochester’s room has been set on fire. Jane runs in and douses him with water, and once he is aware of the situation, he dashes off, telling her to stay there and wait until he returns. The bit that follows his return is an interesting one—Rochester urges Jane’s silence, and confirms Grace Poole as the owner of the laugh, terming her a ‘singular’ (here meaning odd) person. Jane begins to leave, but Rochester detains her for a second, sincerely thanking her for saving his life, and speaking to her in his fondest tone yet. This instant marks another significant step in Jane’s ascension—she is not just Rochester’s ‘paid subordinate’, she is his confidante and quite literally his savior. The incident has bound them together in a way neither of them understands just yet.

And this closeness is seemingly dashed the next morning, when Jane is informed that Rochester has gone off to visit some friends, and will likely not return for several weeks. When he does come back, he is accompanied by a full complement of guests, including the imposing, imperious Miss Blanche Ingram, who Rochester is rumored to be courting as a future bride. At first, Jane is crushed—Blanche has money, beauty, accomplishments, and power. Again, this could be a jumping-off point for a discussion about how marriage among the upper classes at that period of time still hewed fairly close to its feudal roots, more as a way of securing finances than as an expression of emotional attachment. But you can read Jane Austen for that. In this case, Blanche wanting to marry Rochester for his money isn’t quite as much of a stain on her character as it might seem to a modern reader. Her vanity and coldness, however, serve as kindling for Jane’s feisty side—at one point, she dismisses Blanche as ‘a mark beneath jealousy’.

Another strange incident occurs after the guests have been staying at Thornfield for quite some time. Mr. Rochester leaves on some errand, and in his absence, a stranger shows up at the house, claiming to be a friend of Rochester’s. He is described as around thirty-five, dark-haired and handsome, but somehow deficient. Jane gives particular attention to his ‘wandering eye’ and his peculiar accent. We soon learn that his name is Richard Mason, and he has come all the way from Jamaica to pay a visit to his ‘old friend’.

In the interest of keeping things moving, I’m not going to discuss the business with Rochester in disguise as the fortune-teller. Once he unmasks himself before Jane, and she informs him of Mason’s arrival, we see a reaction in him we haven’t seen before: fear. He begs Jane for comfort, asking her what she would do if the assembled company suddenly turned against him. Assured of her fidelity, he rejoins his friends and apparently greets Mason calmly enough.

Once again, however, Jane is awakened by noises in the dark—screams, this time, from the regions where Grace Poole keeps her dark vigils. In due course, Rochester summons her. The newly-arrived Mr. Mason is lying injured in an upstairs room, and Rochester enlists Jane to keep watch while he fetches the doctor. He orders Mason not to speak to Jane, which, considering that the guy’s barely conscious, doesn’t seem like a difficult request to fulfill.

Rochester and the doctor return, and it’s revealed that Mason was bitten, as well as being stabbed with a knife. Once Mason is fixed up enough to leave, Rochester sends him on his way, but not before a brief, fraught conversation, in which Mason begs him to take care of Her—that mysterious inhabitant of the upstairs room. Rochester tersely replies that he has done his best, and will continue to do it.

Rochester then summons Jane into a garden, and attempts to unburden himself to her. He alludes to his past misdeeds, without giving much in the way of satisfactory detail, and testifies to his sincere wish for his own redemption. He tells her, finally, that he thinks he has found it… in Miss Ingram. He calls her his ‘lovely one’, and suddenly becomes cheerful and jocular. Neither Jane, nor the reader, is satisfied by this.

This brings us nearly to the end of the book’s actual first volume, and (more to the point) near the end of this installment of my…whatever this is. I also think I’m going to need to do two more of these, rather than just one, like I’d originally planned. I’m assuming that if you’ve gotten this far, you’re just as invested as I am.

There is one more major occurrence: the illness and death of Jane’s Aunt Reed. Bessie, Jane’s old nurse, comes to inform her that Mrs. Reed has suffered a stroke, but has been asking for Jane. Jane pays one last visit to her former childhood home, to find it greatly changed: her cousin John has committed suicide, Eliza has become a religious obsessive, and Georgiana is a hapless social climber (though it’s worth noting that she treats the adult Jane with a certain friendliness). And what of Aunt Reed? Before she slips off her mortal coil, she passes Jane a vital piece of information—Jane has a rich uncle from her father’s side, a wine-merchant in Madeira, who has asked for information on Jane’s whereabouts, with a view toward making her his heir. Jane, for her part, offers her aunt her forgiveness, and in this way, seals off that portion of her past.

In tomorrow’s recap, we’ll get to the really juicy stuff. For anyone who’s reading along, thanks a bunch, and feel free to come tell me your thoughts. For anyone who missed yesterday’s, Part 1 is here: http://penniesforthestorm.tumblr.com/post/176721452934

[kostikivanov]

St. Vincent’s Cheeky, Sexy Rock

Annie Clark, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known as St. Vincent, has an apartment in the East Village. She’s rented it since 2009. But last winter and spring, while she was in town recording a new album, she didn’t stay there. If she wanted something, she sent someone to get it. “I need to not have to worry about the plumbing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the trinkets and indicators of my actual life.” She was immersed instead in the filtration of that actual life into song. She was in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary, sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called it. A stomach bug in March left her unable to stand even the smell of alcohol, and, anyway, there were so many things she wanted to get done that she didn’t have the time to be hungover. She abstained from listening to music, except her own, in order to keep her ears clear.

She was staying at the Marlton Hotel, in Greenwich Village, a block away from Electric Lady Studios, one of the places where she was making the record. Most days, she got up at sunrise, took a Pilates class, and then headed to Electric Lady, to work past sundown. She had dinner in the studio, or else alone at a nearby restaurant, or in her room. A book or an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and then early to bed. Not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.”

It had been more than three years since the release of her last album, which she’d named “St. Vincent,” as though it were her first under that name, rather than her fourth—or fifth, if you include one she made with David Byrne, in 2012. All these were well regarded, and with each her reputation and following grew. The music was singular, dense, modern, yet catchy and at times soulful, in an odd kind of way.

Still, the self-titled album was widely considered to be a breakthrough, a consummation of sensibility and talent, a fulfillment of the St. Vincent conceit—this somewhat severe performer who was both her and not her. The act was a blend of rock-goddess bloodletting and arch performance art, self-expression and concealment. (She says that she got the name from a reference, in a Nick Cave song, to the Greenwich Village hospital where Dylan Thomas died.) The ensuing tour was called “Digital Witness,” named for a creepy/peppy song on the album about our culture of surveillance and oversharing. Her life was a whirlwind. There was a Grammy, some best-album acclaim and time on the charts, and a binge of attention from the music and fashion press, and, eventually, from the gossip industrial complex, too, when she began a relationship with the British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne. The Daily Mail, struggling to take the measure of this American shape-shifting indie rocker, called Clark “the female Bowie.” (The paper’s stringers doorstepped Clark’s family.) When that romance came to an end, after more than a year, she began to be photographed with Kristen Stewart, another object of fan and media obsession, and so the St. Vincent project took on a new dimension: clickbait, gossip fodder. This bifurcation, as Clark called the split between her public life as an artist and the new one as a tabloid cartoon, was disorienting to her, and even sad. But there was a way to put it all to work: write more songs. Clark, quoting her friend and collaborator Annie-B Parson, the choreographer, told me one day, “The best performers are those who have a secret.”

For the new album—it comes out this fall, although Clark has not yet publicly revealed its name—she hooked up with the producer Jack Antonoff, who, in addition to performing his own music, under the name Bleachers, has co-written and produced records for Taylor Swift and Lorde. This has led people to suppose that Clark is plotting a grab for pop success. In June, she released a single called “New York,” and on the evidence the supposition seems fair. It is—by her standards, anyway—a fairly straight-ahead piano ballad, lamenting lost love, or absence of a kind. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me,” she sings. Fans immediately began speculating that it was about Delevingne, or, if you thought about it differently, David Bowie, who died last year. “It’s a composite,” Clark told me, though of whom she wouldn’t say. She objects to the idea that songs should automatically be interpreted as diaristic, especially when the songwriter is a woman. “That’s just a sexist thing,” she said. “ ‘Women do emotions but are incapable of rational thought.’ ”

A few weeks before the release she told me, “It’s rare that you get to say ‘This song could be someone’s favorite.’ But this might be the one. Twenty years of writing songs, and I’ve never had that feeling.” It was May, at Electric Lady. She was in the studio with Antonoff. “We’re doing the flavor-crystally bits,” Clark said. This essentially meant adding or removing pieces of sound to or from the sonic stew they’d spent months concocting. “There’s a lot of information on this album,” she said.

Clark, who is thirty-four, was sitting cross-legged on a couch. She had on studded leather loafers, a suit jacket, and black leggings with bones printed on them, in the manner of a Halloween skeleton costume. Her hair was black and cut in a bob. (In the past, she has dyed it blond, lavender, or gray, and has been in and out of curls, its natural state.) She wasn’t wearing much makeup. When she performs, she puts on the war paint, and usually goes in for fanciful costumes and serious heels. For the “Digital Witness” tour, she wore a tight, perforated fake-leather jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and smeared lipstick. Last year, she did a show while attired in a purple foam toilet. Parson, who is responsible for the rigid postmodern dance moves that Clark has embraced in recent years, referred to her aspect as “wintry,” which doesn’t quite encompass her tendency to throw herself around the stage or dive off it to surf the crowd.

Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent—it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. She has a sharp jawline, a few freckles, and great big green eyes, which can project a range of seasons. She thinks before she speaks, asks a lot of questions, and has a burly laugh.

On a coffee table in front of her were a Chanel purse and containers of goji berries, trail mix, and raw-almond macaroons. She stood occasionally, to play slashing, tinny lines on an unamplified electric guitar of her own design—a red Ernie Ball Music Man, from her signature line, that retails for upward of fifteen hundred dollars—which, on playback, sounded thick and throbby.

She shreds on electric guitar, but not in a wanky way. It often doesn’t sound like a guitar at all. Her widely cited forebears are Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, of King Crimson. “I don’t love it when the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said. “The problem is, people want to recognize that it’s a guitar. I have facility, and so I feel like I should use it more. I don’t have any other ‘should’ in my music.” (It can be funny, if dispiriting, to read, in the comments sections of her performances on YouTube, the arguments that guitar nerds get into about her chops.)

When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.

Part of this is a function of Clark’s solicitousness, her courteous manner. “She’s created a vernacular of kindness in her public life,” her close friend the writer and indie musician Carrie Brownstein told me. “But the niceness comes through a glass case.” Clark has observed, of the music industry in this era, that good manners are good business.

Clark and Antonoff had met casually around New York but hardly knew each other until they somehow wound up having what he described as an emotionally intense dinner together at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. “She was very open about the things in her life,” Antonoff said. “That’s what I was interested in. Continuing to reveal more and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics that people will tattoo on their arms.’ ”

Clark has eight siblings, some half, some step. She’s the youngest of her mother’s three girls. Clark’s parents divorced when she was three. This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, from a Catholic family with eleven kids, was a stockbroker and a prodigious reader who could recite passages from “Ulysses”; for a while, he had the girls convinced that he was a Joycean scholar. When Clark was ten, he gave her “Lucky Jim” for Christmas. At thirteen, she got “Vile Bodies.” She acquired a knack for punching up: in junior high, she toted around the Bertrand Russell pamphlet “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

By then, Clark’s mother, a social worker, had remarried and moved to the suburbs of Dallas. Clark was reared mostly by her mother and stepfather, and considers herself a Texan. Her father remarried and had four kids, with whom Clark is close. In 2010, he was convicted of defrauding investors in a penny-stock scheme, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. She has never publicly talked about this, although she told me, “I wrote a whole album about it,” by which she meant “Strange Mercy” (2011), her third. When I asked her if she felt any shame about his crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.”

As a child, Clark was shy, quiet, studious. She played soccer. (There’s a charming video from a few years ago of her demonstrating the mechanics of the rainbow kick, while keeping her hands in the pockets of her overcoat.) Her nickname was M.I.A., because she was so often holed up in her bedroom, listening to music. She was a classic-rock kid—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull—but the real gateway was Nirvana. “Nevermind” hit when she was nine, and she was precocious enough to notice. Like a lot of kids, she found a mentor behind the counter of the local record store, who turned her on to stuff like Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave. Also like a lot of kids, she started playing guitar when she was twelve. Her first live performance was at age fifteen, at a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood—she sat in with her guitar teacher on “The Wind Cries Mary.” She played bass in a heavy-metal band and guitar in a hardcore outfit called the Skull Fuckers: riot grrrl, queercore, Big Black.

Clark’s uncle—her mother’s brother—is Tuck Andress, a jazz-guitar virtuoso who, since 1978, has performed with his wife, the singer Patti Cathcart, as the duo Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teen-ager, she spent summers as their roadie on tours of Asia and the United States. After graduating from high school, she worked as their tour manager in Europe. It was a lean outfit, so she handled pretty much everything, from settling with the clubs to fetching towels and water—an aspiring rock star’s mail room. The greatest lesson, though, may have been witnessing the power that music could have over strangers. “I’d watch Tuck & Patti bring people to tears,” she said.

“We knew she was serious about this music thing,” Cathcart told me.

“You couldn’t keep her from it,” Andress said. “But, until you hit the road, you have no idea. Of course, now she travels in a dramatically more luxurious way than we do.”

Clark went to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, but dropped out after two and a half years, itchy to write and record her own music rather than train to be a crack session hire, which is how she saw the program there. The best thing she got from it, she says, is a love of Stravinsky. She still can’t read music. She moved to New York, but after three months ran out of money and retreated to Texas, where a friend who played theremin with the Polyphonic Spree, a big choral-rock band out of Dallas, encouraged her to audition. She toured with them as a singer and a guitar player for a while.

Later, she hired on with Sufjan Stevens, the orchestral-folk artist. He first saw her at the Bowery Ballroom, where she was performing solo as the warmup act for a band she also played in, the Castanets. “She was up there with a guitar, standing on a piece of plywood for a kick drum, two microphones, one of them distorted, and two amps,” Stevens told me. “Obviously, she had talent.” Off she went with another giant band. “At that time, there were a dozen musicians touring in my band, and there was always a moment in the set where people could ‘take a solo,’ ” Stevens went on. “All the men usually just played a lot of notes really fast. But, when Annie’s turn came, she refused to do the obvious white-male masturbatory thing on the guitar. Instead, she played her effects pedals. She made such weird sounds. It was like the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”

At the time, Clark had her first album, “Marry Me,” in the can, and sometimes she performed solo before her sets with Stevens. “I didn’t have that performance character she has,” he said. “I kind of wish I had. It’s both personal and protective. To get attention as a woman, in a heteronormative context where sex appeal sells, and to sell yourself instead by emphasizing your skill, ingenuity, and work ethic is an incredible feat.”

The first song on “Marry Me,” “Now, Now,” had her singing, “I’m not any, any, any, any, any, any, any, anything,” which, intentionally or not, sounds like “I’m not Annie, Annie. . . .” You might say that it was the opening salvo in St. Vincent’s still unfolding act of concealment and disclosure.

“This scaffolding that she has been so deliberate in constructing has allowed her to take more risks,” Brownstein said. “She presents this narrow strand of visibility. She can mess around with the whole thing of her being called doe-eyed or a gamine. There’s a classic kind of professionalism in the act, sort of like the old country stars—Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. They let you know when you have access to their world. It’s a contrivance.”

The new album, by Clark’s own reckoning, is the gloomiest one she’s made: “It’s all about sex and drugs and sadness.” It ends with a song about suicide, which she sings in a husky voice that is downright frightening. (“Like any red-blooded American, I’ve considered suicide,” she told Marc Maron, on his “WTF” podcast.) She says that she wrote it on a tour bus en route from Lithuania to Latvia. Sure, sometimes the Baltics can bring you down, but, beyond that, there’s clearly some serious heartbreak and darkness underlying this new project.

Around the release of the “St. Vincent” album, Clark had been on tour more or less perpetually for ten years. “I was running hard. There were family things, illness,” she said. “I’m a little like a greyhound. Get me running in a direction, and I’ll run myself into the ground.” Among other things, her mother had a health crisis, which Clark doesn’t like to talk about.

“I was hurling myself into crowds, climbing the rafters,” she said. “I felt like, if I’m not bruised and bloody when I come offstage, I haven’t done it right.”

There’s a song on the new album called “Pills.” “Pills to grow, pills to shrink, pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink / pills to fuck, pills to eat, pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink.” (As it happens, those lines are sung by Delevingne, who will be credited, for the benefit of the British gossip press, as an underground sensation named Kid Monkey.) “I was trying to hold on,” Clark recalled. “I didn’t have coping mechanisms for tremendous anxiety and depression. I was trying to get through pharmaceutically.”

Clark may resent the assumption that everything she writes about is personal, that the protagonist is always her. “You couldn’t fact-check it,” she said. To questions about sexuality, she insists on fluidity. “I’m queer,” she said. But “the goal is to be free of heteronormativity. I’m queer, but queer more as an outlook.”

Yet there is just one narrator on this album. “The emotional tones are all true,” she said. “The songs are the most coherent expression of them. Songs are like prophecies. They can be stronger than you are.”

One day, during a mixing session at Electric Lady, Clark told me that her favorite lyric on the album was “Teen-age Christian virgins holding out their tongues / Paranoid secretions falling on basement rugs.” Later, she texted me to say that her favorite was actually “ ‘Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll / intended it as a cautionary tale / you said you saw yourself inside there / dog-eared it like a how-to manual.’ Cause Christmas—carol—Emanuel.” That’s from a song about a hard-luck old friend or lover named Johnny, who hits the singer up for money or support. “You saw me on movies and TV,” she sings. “Annie, how could you do this to me?” I asked her one day who Johnny was.

“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”

As Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”

She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”

There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:

Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.

A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.

Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.

A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.

Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.

A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.

The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”

There are more—What’s it like to play a show in heels? What are you reading? What album would you want on a desert island?—and her answers are mostly but not always sardonic. They were written by Brownstein. Clark shot another film, a kind of surreal press conference, with a similar deadpan gestalt and Day-Glo color scheme and trio of kinky models. In this version, in reply to the woman-in-music question, she performs a “Basic Instinct” uncrossing of her legs, as the camera zooms in on her crotch, accompanied by the echo of a drop of water in a cave.

These videos don’t quite serve the utilitarian function that Clark had put forth—that of saving her time and energy by furnishing her interrogators with workable answers—but they do convey a sensibility that suits the brand: cheeky, sexy, a little Dada. (They’re more on message, perhaps, than her recently announced role as a star of the new ad campaign for Tiffany.) She’d prefer to embody certain ideas than to have to verbalize them, when the context comprises dubious, inherited, unexamined assumptions about gender, sexuality, songwriting, and celebrity. She prefers gestures to words. She sent me a photo of herself from a video shoot and wrote, “Me performing gender.”

Meanwhile, she was having a costume made for her solo performance: a “skin suit” that would give her the appearance of being naked onstage. One morning, I met her in downtown Los Angeles, at the L.A. Theatre, an old movie palace. She arrived alone in a black BMW M-series coupe. The costume’s designer, Desmond Evan Smith, met her outside, to take advantage of the sun. He had swatches of latex, to compare with her skin. One was too pink, another too yellow.

“This is me with a slight tan,” Clark said. “I’m pretty pale.” She had on cutoff jean shorts, a Western-style shirt knotted above her navel, and the studded loafers. Smith led her to a gilded hallway on the second floor to size her up with a tape measure.

“What do you need me to do?” Clark asked.

“I just need you to stand there and look pretty,” Smith said.

“Done and done.”

He read out her neck, waist, and bust numbers.

“Hear that?” Clark said. “Perfect babe measurements.”

He peeled down her shorts to measure her hips. “Cheetahkini,” she said. “Is that a portmanteau?”

“Spread for me,” Smith said. “Your legs.”

“Comedy gold, Nick,” she said.

Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony.

“Should we get someone to volunteer to be my body?” Clark asked. “To add a little pizzazz? I could choose my own adventure here. I could get a custom crotch.” She began referring to this as her “perfect pussy.” “I’ll scroll through Pornhub and find one.”

After the skin-suit sizing, Clark drove across town, to a coffee shop off Melrose called Croft Alley, to have lunch with her creative director, Willo Perron. Perron, who is from Montreal, does visual and brand work for a variety of pop stars—Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna. He helps them conceptualize music videos, album covers, and stage shows.

Perron, who is forty-three, wore white jeans and a light-gray T-shirt and black-and-white leopard-print skater shoes from Yves Saint Laurent. (“They may be a bit too rad dad,” he said.) He had a droll, weary air; his expertise was assured but lightly worn. He drives a Tesla. His girlfriend was the waitress at Croft Alley.

He wanted to discuss the album cover. There’d been a shoot in Los Angeles, on the same set they used to film the satirical interview kit. “Did you look at the photos?” he asked Clark. “Can we just do it? It’s good. It’s bold, too. It’s the one that stood out.” He was talking about a photograph I’d first seen on the home screen of Clark’s cell phone: an image of her research assistant, a photographer and model named Carlotta Kohl, with her head stuck through a pinkish-red scrim. Really, it was a picture of Kohl’s legs and rear end, in hot-pink tights and a leopard thong bodysuit. “This is not my ass,” Clark had said. “This is my friend Carlotta’s ass. Isn’t it a nice ass?”

Perron explained to me, “It all started, well— There hasn’t been a female lead who’s been able to be both absurdist and sexual. Sultriness but in a New Wave character. The energy of ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Cramps, the B-52s, with some chips of Blondie. Think of Poison Ivy, from the Cramps: absurd but hot.”

“Manically happy to the point of being scary,” Clark said.

“We built these Day-Glo canvases and had people sticking limbs and heads through the canvases. Then we found that the most entertaining thing was the back of the canvas: Carlotta ostriched into the wall, just her ass.”

“Can we do it?” Clark said.

“It says everything that we want to say,” Perron said.

“But will people assume that it’s my ass? I’m doing all these body-double things.” She went on, “I was thinking a photo of my face that encapsulates the entire record—but maybe that’s a bit of a fool’s errand.” She mentioned an image from the shoot of herself with some stylists around her.

“It’s too ‘1989,’ ” Perron said.

“Too on the nose?” Clark said.

“It’s a single cover, not an album cover.”

Clark and Perron hooked up four years ago, when she was working on the “St. Vincent” album. “That thing was near-future cult leader,” he said. “We were talking about media and paranoia and blah, blah. Annie referenced ‘Black Mirror.’ It had only been on the BBC. And the films of Jodorowsky. We were working with a 1970 psychedelic aesthetic, plus postmodernist Italian, but in Memphis style.” The cover showed Clark sitting on a pink throne, with her gray hair in a kind of modified Bride of Frankenstein.

“One of the early conversations we had was about how indie rock always does the unintentional thing, so that it doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,” Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a band in T-shirts, looking tough, standing in the back of a warehouse—authenticity as a euphemism for the absence of an idea. “But we wanted pop-level intention.”

“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas,” Clark said.

They got into Perron’s Tesla and headed to his office, on the second floor of a house on a residential street nearby. A few assistants worked quietly at laptops. There was a rack of file boxes, with the names of clients: Drake, the xx, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga.

They watched a rough cut of the interview-kit press conference. “There are moments where you seem really pretentious,” Perron said. “But then, the brand should be ‘absurdist.’ ”

Clark said, “Yes, there are moments where people will be, like, ‘Is she just a pretentious dickhead?’ ”

They discussed possible music-video directors and brought examples of their work up onscreen. (One was a duo called We Are from L.A., who are from France.) Then they talked about the solo show, with the skin suit.

“Remember when I said the only ideas worth doing might be terrible ideas?” Clark said. “This might be one. Me solo with the guitar, and other characters who are shambolically me. It’s high-tech Tracy & the Plastics. I want Carrie to write the dialogue.”

“There’s dialogue?” Perron said, wearily.

“Yes, I’m putting aside postmodern choreography for this round. But I like for there to be some physical obstacle to overcome, to help me focus. It’s about manufacturing your strength. You’re wondering why I came to you. It’s because you worked with David Blaine.” Perron said nothing. “It should feel bananas, not pretentious,” Clark went on.

Then Perron said, “Do we want to make a decision on this cover art?”

“Let me look again,” Clark said. “Option one: Carlotta’s ass. Two, one of my selects. A head shot.”

“That gives me the last two or three records,” Perron said. “I want this one to be more aggressive. Let’s move away from that thing.”

“You mean that kooky thing?”

“That sedated thing.”

Clark said, “Let’s do Carlotta’s ass.”

“The label will give us some pushback,” Perron said. “But, honestly, I think it’s great.”

After a few moments, Clark said cheerily, “Fun fact: Carlotta has scoliosis.”

“It’s been a generative time, creatively, and I would like for it to set the stage for a broader vision,” Clark told me one day, with uncharacteristic career-oriented self-seriousness. Talk like this, out of rock-and-roll people, usually means projects, sidelines, interdisciplinary schemes. For example, Clark had an idea to take old Mussolini speeches and make Mad Libs out of them. She’d have her nieces and nephews fill in the missing words and phrases; then, in an art gallery in Italy, Isabella Rossellini would sit and recite the Mad Libs (the script delivered to her by Clark via an earpiece, to add a layer of awkwardness) to a soundtrack of chopped-up, sort-of-recognizable Verdi and a monitor playing clips of Mussolini himself.

Or motion pictures. Last year, Clark co-wrote and directed a short film called “The Birthday Party,” for “XX,” an anthology of horror films directed by women. In it, a suburban mother hides her dead husband’s body inside a large panda suit at her young daughter’s birthday, and it keels over into the cake, providing the film’s subtitle: “The Memory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).” At one point, Clark had a development deal to write and direct another film, called “Young Lover,” which is also the name of a song on the new album. A writer in her twenties has a sadomasochistic affair with an older married woman—“ ‘Swimming Pool’ meets ‘Bitter Moon’ meets ‘Blue Velvet’ ” is how Clark pitched it. Recently, Lionsgate, mining properties out of copyright, approached Clark with the idea of directing a film based on “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with a female protagonist. The writer is David Birke, who wrote the screenplay for “Elle,” with Isabelle Huppert, which had become an obsession of Clark’s. (In the film, Huppert’s character’s father is in prison.) Birke, it turned out, had taken his daughter to see a show during the “Marry Me” tour, ten years ago. So, here was mutual admiration, a chance to play together in the sandbox of success.

The “Dorian Gray” treatment called for six historical settings. “It would be an expensive film to make,” Clark said. She reckoned twenty-five million dollars. “The likelihood of making this film is, like, two per cent. But I don’t care, because it’s fun. Worst-case scenario is I get seen as a hardworking person with ideas in a medium I’m interested in. I sort of subscribe to the idea of the busier you are, the busier you are.”

The day after her session with Perron, we drove up to Laurel Canyon, to Compound Fracture, which is what she calls the house that serves as her studio and working space. Technically, it is not a residence. There is a live room in the den (good for recording drums), a studio in the garage, and, just inside the front door, a white grand piano, with a book on the music rack of the complete Led Zeppelin (tablature for intermediate guitar), and, next to it, some lyrics scribbled on stationery from the Freehand hotel in Chicago: “Doing battle in the shadows / Baby you ain’t rambo (rimbaud).” She keeps a neat, sparse house. She’s a born de-clutterer. The art work is eclectic: a Russ Meyer nude, paintings made by people in extreme mental distress, and a photo mural of the high sage desert of West Texas. There’s a downstairs sitting room—“If musicians want to take a break,” Clark emphasized—with a stocked bar, William Scott busts of Janet Jackson and CeCe Winans, and some show-and-tellable mementos. She took one down: “I was on an ill-fated surfing trip to Barbados, in my 90 S.P.F., and I looked down and there was this cock and balls made of coral.” This had survived the purges. So had a brass heart sent by the surviving members of Nirvana. In 2014, when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Clark played Kurt Cobain’s part in a live performance of “Lithium.” There was a plaque in recognition of her inclusion, in 2014, on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list. “I’ve been wearing athleisure ever since,” she said.

For a while, her friend Jenny Lewis, the singer-songwriter, had slept on the couch down here. “She’s like a tree,” Clark said. “I would take shade in her. She made me eat food, because I forgot.”

Lewis told me, “I would go upstairs, make a quesadilla, cut it in half, and leave a half there. Maybe the little mouse would come. I’d come up later, see the half gone, and think, My work is done here.”

“As an adult, I haven’t cohabitated with another human,” Clark said. “Jenny and I have been on tour so long, we know the ways to not annoy people.”

When they first got to be friends, years ago, “we Freaky Fridayed,” Lewis said. Clark, eager to get away from New York, moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis, escaping some personal rubble in California, moved into Clark’s East Village apartment.

“We shared so much,” Lewis said. “The sacrifices you make for your music, not having a family. Some things unique to being a woman on the road, silly stuff like removing your makeup in filthy sinks around the world. Just being a woman out there trying to keep it together. Also, being a woman in charge, and the nuances of that.”

They also both had fathers who had been incarcerated. Lewis’s had been in prison for two years—“Everyone in my family goes to jail or prison,” she said—and then was diagnosed with colon cancer and died soon after.

Clark wanted to go for a hike in the midday heat. Every day, she tries to put herself in what she calls a stress position—some kind of physical difficulty, to force herself to persevere. We made the short drive from her house to a ridgeline with a view in the direction of Burbank, and began descending a trail through scrub and poison oak. She had on some flats that she called tennis shoes. The dryness made the steeper pitches slick, and she approached them with great care. At one point, a hum of bees caused her to shriek and run. I was reminded of her song “Rattlesnake,” which is about an encounter with a rattler while she was hiking naked in the Texas desert. “I’m afraid of everything,” she said. “I’m almost inured to it. Same with shame. I figured out years ago that, if everything is absurd, then there is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.”

Despite her stress-position talk, Clark is a creature of habit, a curator of routine. Brownstein recalled insisting that they go on a different hike from this one, a couple of miles away. “She asked that I never drag her anywhere unfamiliar again,” Brownstein told me.

An hour later, we were back at the house. A mixing engineer named Catherine Marks arrived, to listen to some of the mixes on the new album. Clark wanted a fresh set of ears. (The principal mixer, back at Electric Lady, was Tom Elmhirst, an eminence who has worked with Adele, Lorde, Bowie, and Beck.) Marks, a tall Australian, was wearing a tank top that read “La La La.” Clark had showered and changed into a Pink Floyd “The Wall” T-shirt.

They talked about the low end on one of the songs. “I want to give it more balls,” Marks said, which had a good ring to it, in the Aussie accent. “Tom is a genius, obviously.”

“Best idea wins,” Clark said. They talked for a bit about how unprepared each of them had been for how hot Elmhirst is. They went out to the garage studio, which was full of wonderful toys—racks of guitars, various mikes, and an array of vintage synthesizers. Check it out, an E-mu Emulator II.

Marks sat down at the console. “Smells nice in here. It doesn’t smell like dudes.”

“It’s this Japanese incense.”

A Pro Tools session in the dying light of a Laurel Canyon afternoon. Marks got to work checking out the mixes. It was easy to imagine Clark in here alone for hours, days, weeks, thickening and pruning the sound as it scrolled by onscreen. Outside, you could hear a neighbor playing drums and the occasional honk of a lost Uber. Inside, Marks was listening to a track that Clark wanted to reimagine. “The vocoder’s not working for me,” Clark said. “I like the guitar better. If you need to sleaze it up, add Gary Glitter tuning. Just add glam guitar.”

“I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark’s voice was singing, while Clark herself stood behind Marks, checking her phone.

“Oh, my God,” she said, eyes suddenly wide. “This is so stupid. Oh, my God.” She typed a response, put her phone down on a preamp, and began pacing in anticipation of a reply. “It’s so convoluted.” She scooped up the phone and read a new text. Typing a reply, she was shaking her head. “What?” Marks asked.

“It’s a cuckold situation,” Clark said. “I can’t talk about it.” This was more than just hot goss. It was the most excited I’d ever seen her. Another exchange of texts, more pacing, head-shaking, the burly laugh. “It’s the first time I’ve felt glee all day.”

Last month, Clark went into a studio, in midtown Manhattan, with her friend the producer, composer, and pianist Thomas Bartlett, to record an alternative version of the new album: just her voice and his piano, a chance to hear, and to preserve, the songs stripped down to their bones. She had signed off on the final masters of the record the day before they started. “I took a whole night off,” she said. She was wearing a leopard-print bodysuit. “Now I’m done with my emotional anorexia, my monastic fantastic. It’s so good to just play music.”

It went like this: An engineer, Patrick Dillett, played a track from the record, then Bartlett spent a few minutes learning it and vamping on an electric piano, and then they went into the recording studio and laid down a few takes, him on a grand piano and her cross-legged on a couch, singing into a mike. After the first take, Dillett said, “It sounds pretty. Is it supposed to?”

“Will I be ashamed of myself?” she asked him.

“I hope so. Isn’t that the point?”

They recorded in sequence and got through several songs a day.

Later that week, she and Bartlett invited a dozen or so friends to hear her perform the album. Among them were David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, and the singer Joan As Police Woman, who was celebrating her birthday at the studio afterward. They sat in folding chairs. Clark was on the couch, made up and dressed fashionably in a long jacket and pants.

“Now I can feel the feelings,” she said. She made a show of unbuttoning her pants in order to sing.

“The acceptance of beautiful melody is sometimes difficult for a downtown New York musician,” Byrne had told me earlier in the day. But here was Clark, without all the sonic tricks—the jagged guitar and the scavenged beats—accepting her melodies, feeling the feelings. She told me later, “I didn’t realize the depth of the sorrow on the album until I performed it that night.” The next day, she was shelled and had to cancel appointments. “It turns out that that was crucial to my being done with the experience of making it. Now I need to do what I need to do as a performer: I need to be able to disassociate.”

The final song on the album, the one about suicide, concludes with her repeating “It’s not the end,” in a voice that makes you want to bring her hot soup. On the night of the studio performance, she finished singing and sheepishly accepted the applause of her friends. Then she buttoned up her pants and said, “Party time, everyone.” ♦  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock

[4thvar]

Who’s ready for some g-g-g-gaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyys!!!!!

The answer is me. I am. And that’s why I wrote this paper about mid-century homoeroticism in literature. Please enjoy it and I hope someone, somewhere learns something.

It is not often in mid-century fiction that the homosexual gets a happy ending– a truly happy one, that is, and not the miraculous conversion by God or

psychoanalysis so commonly employed – and so the rare exception to this trope is of special interest. Such an exception is found in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt; indeed, the novel is quite famous for being one of the first “lesbian novels” to feature not only a positive ending, but also a frank description of a lesbian relationship. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, is, on the other hand, an almost exact opposite: in it there is no explicit mention of homosexuality; neither of the two main characters is given a happy ending; and the restrictive setting, a small New England boarding school, contrasts with the vast America The Price of Salt inhabits through Therese and Carol’s cross-country journey. What these two novels do share, however, is a conception of homosociality which is ever incomplete, divorced from the real by an ideological drive which underlies both texts.           

What strikes the reader first upon finishing The Price of Salt is that despite its romantic theme, it is a surprisingly solitary story. Therese Belivet, the main character, has no female friends, aside from Carol, who is not so much a friend as a lover, and indeed harbors a sort of disinterested antipathy toward even those female acquaintances she makes through Carol and her travels. Taking Sedgwick’s conception of female homosociality from Between Men, it would appear odd that Therese should be so sequestered on the one end of what is, according to Sedgwick, a relatively continuous spectrum.[1] But perhaps not so odd, if we consider that The Price of Salt, despite its lauded status as a progressive novel for its time, may nevertheless be underpinned by the very ideology (of compulsive heterosexuality) that it subverts. This latent ideology, which is by no means the only one at play, is manifest in Therese’s attraction to Carol, which is singular and seems to exclude not only men, but also other women. This becomes abundantly clear in the last chapter, where Therese, meeting a woman who strikes her with “a shock a little like that she had known when she had seen Carol”, upon reflection realizes that it is only a passing resemblance and “[She] would never mean anything to her, nothing apart from this half hour”. This singular affection seems to bring the text to an idea of same-sex attraction as sodomy rather than homosexuality (i.e., a single act), or at least to distance itself from an establishment of identity. The ideological work done here is twofold: first, it separates Therese from her desire in a way reminiscent of psychoanalytical “treatments”, thus associating it with pathology; second, and perhaps more importantly, it divorces Therese’s sexuality from any homosocial structure. The first point speaks merely to the social climate of the Fifties, in which compulsive psychoanalysis was popular, while the second speaks to a more nuanced separation between the homosexual and the homosocial that recalls Sedgwick’s description of male homosexuality. Highsmith recognizes homosexuality and gives it a voice, but in doing so reduces it to an isolated occurrence (excepting some mentions of girls who are “like that” made offhand). This tradeoff allows Highsmith her ending, which is singular because it is positive, but the price paid is the cession of context, of the sense of a wider homosexual/social world. This price is exacted by the ideology of the text, which is not the same as the ideology of the author, but rather, following Eagleton, the “product of a particular history”.[2] Clearly this sacrifice isn’t entirely a product of Highsmith’s personal ideology (she frequented of the Greenwich village scene herself), but rather a product of the prevailing literary institutions. It is interesting to note, however, that though these homophobic institutions could extract a price for positive representation, Highsmith’s individual agency was such that she could act within and against them to achieve something new. Thus, The Price of Salt should be seen not merely as a product of Fifties social institutions, but rather as a work restricted by prevailing ideology, but not directed by it.

A Separate Peace, by contrast, is a novel which is all but explicit in its portrayal of homosociality/sexuality. Its depiction of an all-male boarding school in New England (which seems at times to be more connected to Old England) focuses almost exclusively on male relationships and features no significant female characters, indeed lacks even a single significant instance of male desire towards anything female. The climate, then, is one of homosociality divorced not only from homosexuality, but also from libido as a category, including the heterosexual. The main relationship of the book is between Gene and Phineas (referred to in all but the most serious moments as Finny), and it is this relationship which drives the plot. Traditionally regarded as a bildungsroman, the plot centers on an accident in a tree (or a crime?), the looming war, and a transition into adulthood. This idea is what is presented, and has been presented, to generations of high school students, as a neat example of boyhood turned to maturity, of the nature of good and evil, and of a dozen other “vulgar criticisms”, to borrow a phrase from Eagleton, which always dance around the truly subversive. These vulgar criticisms are not the subject of this essay.Instead, let us regard the bond between Finny and Gene not as a unique connection (as in The Price of Salt) but rather as one twist in the fabric of cloistered homosociality which pervades Devon, and schools like Devon which in turn pervade the English literary tradition. There are two main factors that distinguish Gene and Finny from countless other male-boarding-school protagonist/deuteragonist pairs: first, there are the telling instances of clear homoeroticism, the most notable being Gene’s description of Brinker Hadley (the novel’s antagonist after a fashion), which focuses on “[His] salient characteristic, those healthy, determined, not over exaggerated but definite and substantial buttocks” and earlier, as the establishing moment of Gene and Finny’s friendship, he describes how “I threw my hip against his… This was why he liked me so much. When I jumped on top of him, my knees on his chest, he couldn’t ask for anything better”. These two instances (taken from dozens like them) form a sort of secondary vulgar reading, beyond the apparent themes of the book (the nature of good and evil, maturity, etc.), which it expresses explicitly through the adult Gene’s narration, but still associated with an idea of oblique one-to-one signification that lacks wider context. The stronger argument comes from the second distinguishing factor, which is the makeshift trial Brinker brings against Gene (and through Gene, Finny), the climax of the text, and including the chain of events that lead to it. The purpose of the trial is purportedly to find the cause of Finny’s fall from an infamous tree earlier in the year, which left his leg shattered, but this is only the surface. Below it, understood by all present, lies an accusation against Gene, of having caused the accident, of harboring hatred towards Finny, his best friend.

So we know what the trial is after, but the text is silent as to why it is set in motion, aside from a paper-thin explanation of Brinker’s antipathy towards Gene apparently stemming from a witty put-down in a common room. Instead of taking this explanation at face value, it may be more useful to consider the two events in opposition. The insult that supposedly initiates Brinker’s antipathy takes place in an informal court of sorts, the “butt room” where students are allowed to smoke, and which, unlike the rest of Devon, fosters an air of seedy freedom. The insult is a minor one – Brinker, insinuating that Gene may have had a hand in Finny’s fall, is called “Dr. Watson”, a jibe at his seemingly foolish conjecture – but it demonstrates Brinker’s “very weak foothold among the butt room crowd”. The natural inverse of this event is Brinker’s trial, which takes place in the assembly hall that has “row after row of black Early American benches” and “portraits in oil of deceased headmasters”. If the butt room is freely social and its judgements made on an organic basis, then the assembly room is akin to the “real” legal world, where Brinker gets at the “truth” of the matter with witnesses and cajoling. It is a vulgar truth, however, and no closer to the truth of Gene and Finny’s relationship, or to the “real”, than the casual sociality of the butt room.The ideological drive behind this change, from casual homosociality to inquisitorial patriarchy, contains echoes of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, especially in the change from a social conception of homosexuality as sodomy (the charge contested among peers) to a matter of formal inquiry (the charge presented in the “court”).[3] Brinker’s role in this transition is as important as Gene and Finny’s; in the first, he represents himself, and so Gene can deride him, attack his credibility, but in the second Brinker is not himself, but a representative. He occupies a raised platform, is removed, and is surrounded by “ten members of the senior class; all of them wearing their black graduation robes”. The idea presented by Brinker is of an investigation apart from the events themselves, a search for the “real” to remove Finny and Gene’s tenuous history – to “get all this out in the open” in Brinker’s words – but such a distanced inquisition is not possible because the subject of the inquisition, Finny, by way of Gene, has constructed his own history of the event, one which precludes Gene’s guilt, which is Brinker’s object. Brinker’s impulse is not then an investigative one, but a destructive one, after a fashion; he seeks to destroy Finny’s history of the event, and replace it with one which indicts Gene, seeks, essentially, to destroy Gene and Finny’s relationship, whatever it may be. Of course, the result is the death of Finny, and the ideology at play is the same present in the Price of Salt. But where in that novel it merely forces the de-contextualization of homosexuality, in A Separate Peace it is a re-enactment of that archetypal repressive act, the hostile question that predicts its own answer.

Taken together, these texts illuminate two distinct aspects of mid-century ideology. In The Price of Salt there is an isolation from homosociality which is produced from the psychoanalytic tradition of regarding homosexuality as an individual problem, rooted not in healthy homosociality but in singularly unhealthy heterosexuality. In The Price of Salt we are given a relationship untethered, and therefore deprived of its full meaning. A Separate Peace on the other hand, does inverse but complementary work. Here the full context of homosociality is presented, with all sign of connection to homosexuality carefully excised. When the potential for such a relationship emerges, as between Finny and Gene, it is the subject of investigation, and thus is singled out from the “normal” (or rather, normative) fabric of homosociality and is targeted by authority’s repressive impulse. The relationship is tethered, and is contextualized, but is presented as other than what it could be, and is therefore deprived of its full meaning. The Price of Salt can express only homosexuality, and A Separate Peace only homosociality, but never both concurrently. As stated, however, the ideological work is not, could not be, done on behalf of the authors; rather, both Highsmith and Knowles work within ideology’s restrictions to produce work that hints at the “real” status of homosexuality – as merely a continuation of homosociality, as inseparable from it. 

Side Note:

But why is this investigation destructive? What is it about the drive to know that ties it so inextricably from the drive to destroy? I am reminded of a late-night discussion I recently had, which spanned two topics, and ended unsatisfactorily on both counts. The first topic was the practice of literary dissection, which to my friend was not only completely useless, but detrimental to his appreciation of poetry. He asserted at length that because of his high school English classes he could no longer read certain poems without over-analyzing them to an unpleasant extent, even poems that on first reading he had once enjoyed. I responded that there was a certain joy in knowing something completely, or at least in working towards such knowledge, but it soon became clear that neither of us understood the experience of the other and so the conversation died.       

The second thing we spoke about (I can’t remember what initiated it) was certainty in a more general sense, that is, the question of whether anything could be known for certain. I thought, and still think, that because we all reason from experience (inductively), and real certainty can only be gotten from deductive reasoning, there is no way to reach absolute surety. So, however probable it might be that gravity is universal, we can’t know that it is (or know in a more real sense why it is) because we only have our own testimony to prove it. He resisted this idea very forcefully, asserting that because an objective truth must exist (on that we agreed), it followed that there would be a trace of it in our experience, and that the trace could be interpreted with certainty. This argument also went nowhere, although it was more heated and interesting than the last, even drawing in some others.It’s only now that I’ve connected the two in my mind.

It occurred to me that as far as the poetry went, it was not the investigation he loathed, but what its necessity said about the poem. Before, he had taken his joy in the poem, his subjective experience of it, as the “real”, but then, having been shown something behind the poem, something outside of a momentary reading, uncertainty entered in. This uncertainty, I believe, was the source of the unpleasantness, because it cast into doubt his idea of what was “real” in the poem. The same impulse was, I think, at the heart of his opposition to universal uncertainty. It is the drive to not only be sure of some solid foundation (which, again, we both agreed existed somewhere) but to be able to know the foundation.This is Brinker’s impulse in conducting Gene’s trial. It is the drive to lay one’s hand on a fundamental truth, and it cannot be anything but destructive, because it will always be frustrated. Before Finny falls there is a superficial experience of homosociality shared by all and accepted as “real”. Afterwards, there is nothing but an endless inquiry, first by Gene, into his own motivations, and then by Brinker, into the nature of Gene and Finny’s relationship. Answers are not forthcoming, only more uncertainty, and more inquiry. They search for facts, but the truth is it’s turtles all the way down.

[1] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. New York: Columbia UP, 2016. N. pag. Print.

[2] Eagleton, Terry, and Drew Milne. Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006. Print.

[3] Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Print.

[michaelskeltonblog-blog-blog]

Archaic Democracy

For the past few years I have been trying to work out, in my thoughts and notebooks, a conclusive critical appraisal of the significance of democratic idealism in American writing. I admit that I have come to feel internally divided by the effort: one part of me seeks to continue drawing nourishment from writers who have been the most formative in my education, while another part of me seeks to put to rest a tradition that no longer responds to (even if it directly addresses) the political and cultural moment I inhabit. But before I go on, I should define my terms:

By democratic idealism I refer to a defunct tradition of political and cultural thinking that regarded American democracy as an essentially imaginativestruggle unfolding alongside the political project of building egalitarian institutions by electoral consent. Among the deepest worries of the democratic idealist writers was the right of equally empowered minds to make consequential representations and judgments in the name of the entire demos. How could the individual literary genius work out the much-needed aesthetic synthesis of the sprawling, pluralistic mass? Who would be the common reader that could hold the literary genius accountable for her synthesis of the American manifold?

A beautiful symmetry binds this tradition, and its recurring questions, together. Idealism begins in the first half of the nineteenth century with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s address to the young graduates of Harvard, “The American Scholar,” and concludes, rather self-referentially, with Ralph Waldo Ellison’s “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” an essay that appeared in 1978 in a magazine named for Emerson’s Harvard address. Ellison’s astonishing intimation of the symmetry between himself and his namesake, between the national culture of the twentieth century and that of the nineteenth, and finally, between the Little Man and the American Scholar (two sides–audience and artist–of the same democratic coin), was, wittingly or not, a intimation that the idealist literary tradition, as well as the historical conditions that engendered it, were dying out with him.

Ellison was the last of the great idealists, and in the time since his most important writings, a host of non-idealist critical tendencies have taken the place of his stubborn faith in American democracy. This is not to say that certain vestiges of democratic idealism did not remain with a younger generation of writers who chose to carry Ellison’s snuffed-out torch into a new age of democratic skepticism. Robert Pinsky, who was Poet Laureate of the United States (the highest honor for a so-called “civic poet”) in the 1990s, is one such figure whose work arrests something important in the democratic idealist vision at the moment of its vanishing. Pinsky’s An Explanation of America, a book-length poem published the year after Ellison’s “Little Man,” shows a familiar propensity to represent American democracy as a sublime literary object while also cataloging the symptoms of a national culture aging out its aspiration to give ever-new accounts of itself.

The recent memory of Vietnam casts a shadow over Pinsky’s entire work; for the author, the war that nakedly exhibited America’s ulterior interests in global affairs remolded the ambitious, inward-looking republic into the ages-old template of an empire become corrupt. “I think [Vietnam] made our country older, forever,” he writes in a section of the poem called “Serpent Knowledge.” “I don’t mean better or not better, but merely/As though a person should come to a certain place/And have his hair turn gray, that very night.” And a few lines later: “I think/That I may always feel as if I lived/In a time when the country aged itself:/More lonely together in our common strangeness…/As if we were a family, and some members/Had done an awful thing on a road at night…”

Pinsky’s representation of the United States as aged and corrupted occurs alongside allusions to famous Roman battles and venerable Roman statesmen. A long section in An Explanation of America, for example, is written as if it were a letter from Horace to a friend concerning the duties of a citizen to his republic. References to ancient Greek literature crop up throughout the poem as well. In one section, “Bad Dreams,” Homer’s Odysseus comes to replace Walt Whitman as the ur-figure of the American poet-traveler taking account of the national landscape:

That quiet leads me to a stranger’s dread/Of the place frightened settlers might invent:/The customs of the people there, the tongues/They speak, and what they have to drink, the things/That they imagine, might falter in such a place,/Or be too few; and men would live like Cyclopes,/“With neither assemblies nor any settled customs”-/Or Laestrygonians who consume their kind/And see a stranger as his meat and marrow,/And have no cities or cultivated farms.

Pinsky’s frequent substitution of classical tropes for “American” ones extinguishes the sense of the United States as a country forever coming of age. In his poetry, democracy loses its open-ended, unhistorical freedom and becomes a historical prison for the incompletely emancipated. He writes of America’s “mellowing to another country/Of different people living in different places,” as if to suggest that, finally, enough past has accumulated behind the United States that it can now give a sober account of itself. “The accumulating prison of the past/Pulls us toward a body and a place,” he writes, “a plural headed Empire, manifold/Beyond my outrage or admiration.” The sobering accumulations of the past work together with the numerous classical allusions in the poem. Reading Pinsky, one gets the impression that ahead of the United States lie more inimitable achievements, both political and cultural, but also, like the great civilizations of the ancient world, more senseless wars, the inevitable entropy of empire, and a universalized “suffering that could [not] make us wiser,/or nobler, but only older, and more ourselves…”

The backward-looking classicism of An Explanation of America finds its corollary in the archaic psychologism of an important later essay by Pinsky called Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. First given as a lecture in 2001, the essay defines the current crisis of democratic culture in terms of primitive-seeming anxieties that are actually symptoms of democracy’s maturation: in one direction, democracy fears being unjustifiably dominated or coerced into a universal conformism that effaces difference; in the other direction, it fears over-differentiation, a diversification so diffuse that it cannot be gathered under a single proper name. “Historical memory,” Pinksy suggests, “tempers both of the[se] imagined extremes of culture”:

Memory resists uniformity because it registers fine gradations; memory resists the factional because it registers the impure, recombining, fluent nature of culture. It is memory that eventually undermines the apparently total successes of both the colonizing Conquistador and the leveling Visigoth. The fantastic element in democratic memory exaggerates the anxieties of uniformity and fragmentation. Accustomed to practicing an ancient, singular art amid a dazzling mass culture, the American poet is a kind of veteran of these anxieties.

Archaic anxieties and the ancient art of poetry find a common home in Pinsky’s backward-looking, memorialist outlook. For him, poetry discloses the evolving historical tensions between universalism and particularism, individual and mass, within the “mellowing” American psyche. The poet’s vocal medium is her chief asset in fulfilling this social task. “In a poem,” writes Pinksy, “the social realm is invoked with a special intimacy at the barely voluntary level of voice itself. Communal life, whether explicitly included or not, is present implicitly in the cadences and syntax of language: a somatic ghost.” This duality of solitary voice and ghostlike community — a duality that Pinsky repeatedly analogizes to the experience of democracy itself— has been with humanity since the first intentional sounds rolled off the human tongue. For, just like every poet before her, today’s American poet is nothing more than a solitary voice trying to overhear herself — trying, out of freedom and loneliness, to simulate a third-person’s empathy for her solitude — with rare affirmations of success.

It seems that, for Pinsky, poetry alone teaches the aging democratic citizen that the historical apotheosis of self-representation is in fact a reversion to an archaic struggle between voice and community, solitude and communal belonging. In its national poetry, American democracy magnifies tensions inherited from the most ancient human civilizations and creates a repository of mythical memory that attends far less to the empirical events of history than to the structuring dualities of the imagination. In the conceptual refinement of Pinksy’s arguments, one can sense his break with the more impressionistically minded democratic idealists that came before him. Having inherited their questions as something historically other than his own, he can now speak with a measured retrospection, as someone older, more jaded, than they. It is in this way that his reflections on the classical, even archaic, strains within American life expose the basically adolescent conception of democracy that belonged to the idealists. His poetry summarizes better than the critic can why his predecessors began to disappear with the first confirmations of the country’s irreversible aging.

(Originally published on January 8, 2017 on medium.com/@kelly.m.s.swope)