Are poems like fishes? Why do we put them in schools? The word school sounds like something the angler does, schole-ing leisurely from a sleepy bank for a slippery shoal, far from the madding swarm and floundering souls of the city multitude.
What we call schools would be better named arguments – over what poetry is, what it might be used for, how it should look and sound. A poem is a thing made, and you can go to a school and try to learn how to make it, or apprentice yourself to a master poet and imitate until you find yourself making something new. Or not, an imitation can stand alone. This paragraph would make sense to Aristotle or T. S. Eliot.
Whereas Modernist difficulty was seen to argue against Victorian restraint, as Romanticism was to have recoiled from Augustan manner, our own age draws a blank; no one voice speaks with enough authority to credential all the rowdy students. Poets have at times named themselves partners to this or that poetic theater. Now there are too many partial, local, overlapping or redundant movements, dubbed such-and-such by critics, and often now by the poets themselves. If too many schools is a problem for critics, and for students, it wouldn’t seem to be for poets, each of whom prefers to think of their own voice as unique and above the sound of the babbling brooks, even if subscribing to a particular issue or zine or venue – wherever they can get a toehold.
Of course poetry is not the only discipline (if it can even be called that) where critics form schools to organize and historicize and argue about style and substance, value and influence, from Beaux-Arts to Pop-art, Bebop to Cool, Moz to Min. The method of forming a school and naming it is critical shorthand the artist can exploit or ignore – or name a school of his own making. The starving artist must also make a living.
And yet the original meaning of school is leisure, time set aside not for production but for attention. Reading without credential, writing without outcome. Recess, maybe, but unsupervised. And the true poet drops out even from that respite, to prevent leisure from becoming another class, even if that means abandoning poetry utterly.
Robert Bly began his book “Silence in the Snowy Fields” with a quote from Jacob Boehme: “We are all asleep in the outward man.” Indeed, and what makes me think my own intelligence isn’t the most artificial of all, talking of influences and other outward things?
I was reading a blog post this morning that begins with, “Winter is my favorite season.” It’s true that once the snow begins to fall and cover all with its soft warm blanket (for snow protects the rose bush in severe cold by insulating it against the east winds and super freezing temperatures), I too succumb to the inward.
But in winter I often regret nostalgically our move north to the rain and cold, the damp and wet. Not that I mind the water, but it’s not salty or warm here, and the ocean is far away, and the water seeps up as the table rises and floods fill the news. But I just checked the ten day forecast and there’s not a freezing temperature on the horizon. Still, I’m reminded of Camus’s “The Sea Close By”:
“I grew up with the sea and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable” (172).
Bly turns away from cultural surface noise. He understands what’s biological and what’s merely cultural, and he cuts through cultural, social identities to uncover the cold of the soul.
Bly’s book is divided into three parts: “Eleven Poems of Solitude,” “Awakening,” and “Silence on the Roads.” But the book begins with a poem about driving through snowy fields, what seems an unlikely beginning for a book about inward being:
“It is a pleasure, also, to be driving Toward Chicago, near dark, And to see the lights in the barns.”
from “Three Kinds of Pleasures” (11)
Maybe that’s what I should do today, drive out through the Gorge and into the east wind, a risk of icy roads and freezing blows, the river fat and runny, a long train every now and then, to or from Chicago, and big trucks rumbling and rattling by with giant tire chains wrapped around metal hooks and racks on the tractor frame.
But no, I’ll stay in here where it’s warm under my laptop and write this post which a few readers might like and might even get a comment from someone down south in a beach chair camping out at Refugio.
Coast Starlight Amtrak train moving north through the Cascades, 1978
In the 1960s, running arguments were often tackled mid-field with the rebuttal, “Oh, that’s just semantics.” The argument was dismissed as being about words rather than ideas. For example:
A says, “It’s not a just war.” B replies, “There’s no such thing as a just war.” A says, “Now you’re just getting into semantics.”
In his second comment, A claims B is not addressing the war with moral evaluation, that B is changing the subject. A might sound right, but he’s using rhetoric as avoidance, while B’s claim is definitively not just semantics; it’s a rejection of A’s moral premise.
The other day, I mentioned S. I. Hayakawa’s “The Use and Misuse of Language.” It’s a collection of essays selected and edited by Hayakawa, originally published in “ETC.: A Review of General Semantics,” from 1943 to 1962.
“The Use and Misuse of Language” is still relevant today, and as we are so distanced from most of its content, is less likely to cause friction where it otherwise might – no one has an interest in the Edsel anymore, yet certain cars are certainly still laying eggs. In his Foreword, Hayakawa quickly clarifies what he means by semantics:
“In general semantics, when we concern ourselves with how people talk, we are not worrying about the elegance of their pronunciation or the correctness of their grammar. Basically we are concerned with the adequacy of their language as a ‘map’ of the ‘territory’ of experience being talked about” (vii).
What words we choose and how we choose them (by hook or by crook) are important considerations for the semanticist. But we may not feel we’re making word by word decisions. So what’s to look for? Still in his introduction, Hayakawa says:
“What general semanticists mean by ‘language habits’ is the entire complex of (1) how we talk – whether our language is specific or general, descriptive or inferential or judgmental; and (2) our attitudes toward our own remarks – whether dogmatic or open-minded, rigid or flexible….Words, then, are more than descriptions of the territory of human experience; they are evaluations. How we think and evaluate is inextricably bound up with how we talk” (vii-viii).
Hayakawa was interested in how language affects thought and action. But for the common reader today semantics might still be considered just semantics, an ironic and circular argument that points to but doesn’t explain the gap between technical meaning and a shout in the street. Does the word semantics suggest a method of study or dismissal of one’s statement? Does it call out perceived errors in pronunciation or attempt to explain what’s really being said? Does semantics “call the whole thing off” or try to mediate?
But let’s take a look at Hayakawa’s book for an overview, one we might glimpse from just the titles of a few selected pieces, which might come as a surprise and entertainment, not what we might expect if we thought it was a tome of academic exercises:
“Popular Songs vs. the Facts of Life” “Sexual Fantasy and the 1957 Car” “Why the Edsel Laid an Egg: Motivational Research vs. the Reality Principle”
Above, we see popular subjects then as now: songs, cars. And below, arguments, how to write, and while psychologists have taken pains to craft what they do as a science, the art of something most of us don’t get to use:
There are 18 essays, not including the Foreword and Introduction, so I’ve just picked a sampling. Now I’ll select a single sentence from each of the above essays, that, out of context, might cause laughter or argument, but hopefully at least some reader curiosity.
Matching Game
Pick the essay (from the six above) to which the extracted sentence (below) belongs (answers are at the bottom of the post, or click on the footnote number):
“American males, according to a point of view widely held among Freudian critics of our culture, are afraid of sex.”1
“Very often it is by the expression of differences of opinion and interest that ideas are clarified and solutions worked out.”2
“Students of general semantics are familiar enough with psychiatric concepts to know that when the world of reality proves unmanageable, a common practice is to retreat into a symbolic world, since symbols are more manageable and predictable than the existential realities for which they stand.”3
“Perhaps the most powerful weapon in the analyst’s arsenal is the use of silence.”4
“Different people have different needs, with respect both to transportation and self-expression.”5
“Only to the extent that the various readers of a statement agree as to the specific conditions or observations required for ascertaining its validity can the question of its validity have meaning.”6
In creating the game, where you match the excerpt with the essay it came from, I had in mind a recent article in The New Yorker online, which says the new Pope, Pope Leo, plays The New York Times game called “Wordle.” And at the same time I noticed The New Yorker has created its own similar game, called “Shuffalo.” The Pope article (a Profile by Paul Elie) is behind the paywall, but I’ll give you the part I’m referring to:
“Made famous overnight, he stuck to a Midwestern matter-of-factness: he addressed the cardinals who’d elected him in flat-vowelled English, phoned his family daily, kept up his morning habit of doing the Times’ Wordle puzzle, and sent e-mails and texts from his personal accounts.”
These online games, though they may cause some readers headaches, are obviously very popular. And I was thinking a game’s the thing to make the blog more enjoyable for my intended common reader audience (though any reader is of course welcome).
But “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”?
“You say tomato, I say tomahto.”
It’s not how we speak but how we listen that’s most important, including how we listen to ourselves. Listening to oneself is not easy; one might consider calling the whole thing off. “If they understand that their utterances are about the state of their own minds,” Hayakawa said, “that is something else again” (vii). Maybe that’s why silence is sometimes so effective. Once experience has been folded into a particular verbal shape, like a paper map out of the glovebox, it resists being refolded along the same creases.
~~~
Here are the answers to which sentences go with which essay, the matching game:
In Buckminster Fuller’s imaginatively scientific “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” (1969), he looks forward to automation and computation, and I’ve no doubt he would have welcomed the automation we now have at our disposal called Artificial Intelligence, or AI.
Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate “comprehensivity.” Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us. Evolution is apparently intent that man fulfill a much greater destiny than that of being a simple muscle and reflex machine – a slave automaton – automation displaces the automatons.
How to describe the common reader’s understanding of AI? We use AI, often unwittingly. Like it or not, it’s increasingly shaping our online experience. If we use it directly, via the Gemini or ChatGPT apps, we might notice the fine print: “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” And, “Gemini can make mistakes, so double check it.” When I asked Gemini about the possibility of making mistakes just now, it responded, in part, with this:
“The fact that I can make mistakes is a core part of how I function.”
I’m not quite sure what that means, but it gives me pause. And I’m not at all sure how well I understand AI, what it is, how it works, where it’s headed. What to do? Ask AI?
AI is already significantly affecting, often asymmetrically, with both positive and negative results, every part of our daily lives: in schools, where it’s being encouraged or banned; in finance, where it’s considered a smart bet or a bubble; and in healthcare. In June of 2025, Bill Gates, speaking at the African Union, talked about including AI in solutions to health care problems:
Gates spoke about the transformative potential of artificial intelligence, noting its relevance for the continent’s future. He praised Africa’s young innovators, saying he was “seeing young people in Africa embracing this, and thinking about how it applies to the problems that they want to solve.” Drawing a parallel to the continent’s mobile banking revolution, he added, “Africa largely skipped traditional banking and now you have a chance, as you build your next generation healthcare systems, to think about how AI is built into that.”
If the banking comparison seems simple, consider how the distribution of health care works, the availability of diagnosis and providers, particularly in rural areas.
How to balance that potential good with the possibilities of bad outcomes? But assuming AI takes off on its own, as in some sci-fi doomsday predicting scenarios, how is that any different from what human agency has already spread? Fuller addressed this question:
Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable-techno-economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of war faring.
Am I hopeful, as Gates seems to be, or do I see AI’s future as business as usual, as the usual hands spoil it? Perceived winners and losers already seem to be taking sides. Fuller anticipated such, and here he talks about what we might call “guaranteed income”:
“It is easy to demonstrate to those who will take the time and the trouble to unbias their thoughts that automation swiftly can multiply the physical energy part of wealth much more rapidly and profusely than can man’s muscle and brain-reflexed-manually-controlled production. On the other hand humans alone can foresee, integrate, and anticipate the new tasks to be done by the progressively automated wealth-producing machinery. To take advantage of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed intelligently by humans and unblock automation’s postponement by organized labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking. Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live. The use of mind fellowships will permit humans comprehensively to expand and accelerate scientific exploration and experimental prototype development. For every 100,000 employed in research and development, or just plain thinking, one probably will make a breakthrough that will more than pay for the other 99,999 fellowships. Thus, production will no longer be impeded by humans trying to do what machines can do better. Contrariwise, omni-automated and inanimately powered production will unleash humanity’s unique capability – its metaphysical capability. Historically speaking, these steps will be taken within the next decade. There is no doubt about it. But not without much social crisis and consequent educational experience and discovery concerning the nature of our unlimited wealth.”
“AI at the Crossroads” means, depending on which road we turn down, AI can either unfold Fuller’s wealth or create more disparities — and the outcome depends on choices being made in our moment. But first we have to figure out what it is, if we still have time. Let’s hope there’s not a pact with that strange figure Robert Johnson met up with at his crossroads.
“Who’re your influences?” Jimmy Rabbitte asks, interviewing applicants responding to his Hot Press ad for members of a new Dublin soul band he’s forming and will manage, in Roddy Doyle’s hilarious “The Commitments.”
He judged on one question: influences. – Who’re your influences? – U2. – Simple Minds. – Led Zeppelin. – No one really. They were the most common answers. They failed.
“The Commitments,” Roddy Doyle, 1987. First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, July 1989, page 21.
I thought of Jimmy while following links from a recent Matt Mullenweg post in which he linked to two apparently well read and seemingly productive and influential workers in the tech industry – Dan Wang and Zhengdong Wang. They both show on their sites their reading, and I’m interested in influences – what have they read, and what not. And what might I list as foundational in my influences. Combining the two, that is, trying to form a kind of Dublin soul band (or book club) with reading suggestions anyone in an influential position in the tech industry might benefit from I present my influences (list limited to what might be relevant to those involved in compute, scaling, A.I., and the future of humanity and machines):
I made the reading list and this post because where Dan and Zhengdong show their reading on their sites, I didn’t see mention of any of these books, and they are deep cuts, and as cuts on a kind of playlist, I think they emerge into a significant whole. I hope the techies don’t, as Jimmy did:
Jimmy shut the door on that one without bothering to get the phone number. He didn’t even open the door to three of them. A look out his parents’ bedroom window at them was enough. (21)
At the end of the movie version of “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy learns from the good witch Glinda that she can get back home simply by clicking together the heels of her ruby slippers. What if the link is broken? She must also express the wish to get back home. The link from Dorothy’s line, “There’s no place like home,” to its source, may for some viewers be broken. It was for this writer. It’s an old sentiment, no doubt linked even further away than this:
“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere Home! Home! Sweet, sweet home! There’s no place like home There’s no place like home!
Blog links over time get broken, but you don’t know the link is broken until you click on it, resulting in reader frustration. Sources linked to get deleted, moved, paywalled – mysteriously disintegrate into the unfortunate 404 message, that what you’re looking for is not, down this passage, to be found. I don’t mind seeing links, and, in fact, often snap at them like a foraging fish, though links can be distracting, even if, maybe especially if, links go missing, and following links, one into another, one often wonders if one will ever get back home. I use fewer links than I once did. I’ve noticed readers don’t usually click my links anyway, assuming the stats catch such nibbles.
Speaking of stats, I would be remiss, as the rhetorical phrase goes, were I not to mention that the bots recently flooding the blog stats have disappeared. For the past six days running, the tidal wave of views has dropped, the tide receding to beachcombing depths. The statistical tinnitus, the buzzing and hissing of the bots, the grunion runs in high tides, has gone silent. Many thanks to what WordPress Happiness Wrangler figured out a solution.
There are also, of course, regarding missing links, connections that never actually existed, the friend, for example, that proves to be a missing link in one’s social chain-link fence. But who wants to be part of a chain-link fence? Or maybe that old friend simply drifted down river and out to sea. Those days you fell asleep in Grammar, and now you can’t recite, define, and give examples of the parts of speech, missing links in your learning. But in any case, the parts of speech have changed, the interjection now a missing link, while the comma can signal a missing link or itself be a missing link. A parenthesis unenclosed, dangling fore or aft; the shortstop who dropped the double play ball; the letters Salty wrote Penina – all missing links. Or the letter returned
“to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone.”
(from the Elvis song “Return to Sender,” Scott and Blackwell, 1962)
At the beginning of Faulkner’s novel “The Sound and the Fury,” Benjy watches the golfers “through the curling flower spaces.” The golf course was built on Benjy’s pasture, sold to afford a year at Harvard for his brother Quentin, and when Benjy hears the golfers call “Caddie!” it reminds him of his sister Caddy. The curling flower spaces are the twists and loops of steel wire, the links, repeating zigzag shapes, of the chain-link fence now bordering the remaining, diminished land and the golf course. Benjy’s non-linear memory is full of sensory, associative links. When a link is lost, as Caddy has been lost, he’s confused and disoriented, as we all are when what links us together and makes us whole is lost or broken.
What is the logic of a hotel, its language, the action? In the 1960 black and white film The Bellboy, the hotel functions as a circus, its logic dreamlike, its language a dialect derived from silent films, its action as surreal as Fellini’s later 8½ (1963). Silent cinema can feel surreal as the action suggests sound which somehow fails. Stanley, Jerry’s bellboy, says not a word during the film, not until the very end, when he’s asked why he never speaks. Circus scenes shift from one ring to another without obvious transitional phrasing that might link to form some sort of logic. The spotlight moves around the hotel setting, the rest of the world remaining in darkness until awoken for its local act. The language is impressionistic, like the scene where Stanley conducts the empty orchestra on stage in front of an empty audience. Here we can see him speaking, even read his lips, but can’t hear his words, while the band plays on, with percussive emphasis. The film makes no attempt to describe some inner truth. The Bellboy scenes focus on perception as reality. The plot is stream of consciousness, the scenes like dream fragments.
And the two dimensional black and white aspect of the film functions like a cartoon, just as a hotel is a cartoon for its two dimensional lifestyle – it’s not a real home. In the orchestra scene, Stanley stands on the stage, his back to the empty hall, conducting with a baton and music stand. He’s a bit severe, kicks out the drummer, whose rhythms we’ve been enjoying, but who then comes back, as if on cues. And that’s the cartoon – cues, commands, gestures. How is a hotel constructed? Corridors, an infinite number of doors and windows, elevator boxes like cartoon panels read up and down, and the lobby, with its front desk and bellboy stand, the artificial intelligence of the entire enterprise, a system of cues and responses.
The Bellboy is like a drawn cartoon, geometric, architectural – straight lines and right angles, like Jerry’s body. Watching it the other night on the Criterion Channel, I was reminded of the night I stood in the lobby of a now defunct mid-century modern designed movie theater in Los Angeles, in usher uniform with flashlight, about ten feet from Jerry Lewis, who had left his seat in the last row on the center right aisle, from which he was controlling the sound volume, at an opening night, red carpet special, of his less successful film, Which Way to the Front, ten years after The Bellboy. Jerry wore glossy black tuxedo pants with even glossier stripes down the long straight pants legs, a starched white shirt, no tie, and a cardinal red cardigan sweater, and shiny reflective black patent leather shoes, his short black hair equally glossy and waxed matching above. He looked so natural in that mid-century lobby setting, inside, interior, not a word or nod to me, though he must have recognized me, boy in bellboy like uniform, both of us in cartoon like panels, his legs like stilts, while I felt stilted in a different way, wanting out, while Jerry wanted in.
“Why are you always yelling?” “Why are you always asking so many questions!”
Like real lives, a book’s life changes over time. And some are longer, others shorter, extreme change, usually passing out of fashion, or none at all. Or we might think of, as Henry Miller did, “The Books in My Life,” a book startling mainly for how bad it is, its list of books so obscure one wonders where to begin, but probably true to one’s own rambling random reading. Miller thought people read too much. Or, as for Ezra Pound, reading the wrong books is worse than reading none at all (as Henry Miller thought hypocrisy worse than bad manners). And of course Pound supplies us with a list of the right books.
“For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.”
And having read a few of them, what to do with them, where to put them, bibliophile or purveyor, bookworm or hoarder. Bring the oldest to the front, begin again, but sitting there in that place on the shelf of history, still “botched,” or do you mean begin again with something new, with the old lies dressed in new fashion, under the clothes fresh off the catwalk the same bent cover boards framing a new fame.
Such was the mental weather, under an atmospheric river, no less, as we made our way to visit one of the newly remodeled Multnomah County Library bibliothecas. Wandering among the few fiction book stacks, wondering how they decide among the thousands of books which ones to put out, a librarian, perhaps sensing we appeared lost in a woods, approached and asked if she could help. We asked her how they decided which books to shelve for physical browsing. Her answer, in short, involved automation and algorithm, referring to neither Henry Miller nor Ezra Pound. Yet we were surprised to find a 1955 first edition of Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Simple Truth,” noteworthy but not necessarily read worthy. The librarian asked us what kind of book we were looking for. A book like a clean, well-lighted place, but we didn’t put it that way, and we left with, for us anyway, a terrible choice, which we’re now anxious to return.
We had just finished reading aloud yet another book from the 1920’s, this one exactly 100 years old, and also part of our historical hotel reading project, “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds,” by Anita Loos. Of course we’d heard of it, maybe saw the movie, certainly heard the song famous from the Broadway play (1949), “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Lorelei says in her entry of April 27th:
“So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever.”
The book, a diary novel, would today make for an interesting blog. Lorelei is an unreliable narrator, but at least she’s consistent. Part of the satire is that she’s a writer, by virtue of her actually writing, without ever having read a book.
“A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs.” (Mar 16)
There are only a couple of books Lorelei actually names; though quite a few are suggested indirectly. One that is mentioned directly follows, and her plan for reading it:
“April 2nd: I seem to be quite depressed this morning as I always am when there is nothing to put my mind to. Because I decided not to read the book by Mr. Cellini. I mean it was quite amuseing in spots because it was really quite riskay but the spots were not so close together and I never seem to like to always be hunting clear through a book for the spots I am looking for, especially when there are really not so many spots that seem to be so amuseing after all. So I did not waste my time on it but this morning I told Lulu to let all of the house work go and spend the day reading a book entitled “Lord Jim” and then tell me all about it, so that I would improve my mind while Gerry is away.”
The book was a gift from one of Lorelei’s gentlemen friends:
“Well I forgot to mention that the English gentleman who writes novels seems to have taken quite an interest in me, as soon as he found out that I was literary. I mean he has called up every day and I went to tea twice with him. So he has sent me a whole complete set of books for my birthday by a gentleman called Mr. Conrad. They all seem to be about ocean travel although I have not had time to more than glance through them. I have always liked novels about ocean travel ever since I posed for Mr. Christie for the front cover of a novel about ocean travel by McGrath because I always say that a girl never looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht.” (Mar 22)
Lorelei’s interests in culture seem inexhaustible, and her number one gentleman very very much wants her to get educated.
“And of course Mr. Eisman has sent me quite a lot of good books as he always does, because he always knows that good books are always welcome. So he has sent me quite a large book of Etiquette as he says there is quite a lot of Etiquette in England and London and it would be a good thing for a girl to learn.” (Apr 11)
We quickly see that Lorelei talks about books more than she reads them. Her learning is experiential, anecdotal, though none the less purposeful and well learned.
“I have decided not to read the book of Ettiquette as I glanced through it and it does not seem to have anything in it that I would care to know because it wastes quite a lot of time telling you what to call a Lord and all the Lords I have met have told me what to call them and it is generally some quite cute name like Coocoo whose real name is really Lord Cooksleigh. So I will not waste my time on such a book.” (Apr 12)
There’s no question that diamonds are more valuable than books, or that reading and writing are both time consuming chores, so of course one should read only the best books.
“So I told Major Falcon that I told Mr. Bartlett I would like to write the play but I really did not have time as it takes quite a lot of time to write my diary and read good books. So Mr. Bartlett did not know that I read books which is quite a co-instance because he reads them to. So he is going to bring me a book of philosophy this afternoon called “Smile, Smile, Smile” which all the brainy senators in Washington are reading which cheers you up quite a lot.” (Apr 14)
The “Smile” book might be a reference to Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem of the same title, “Smile, Smile, Smile,” a contemplation in irony on those who died, published posthumously in 1920, Owen himself having died in the war, one week before the Armistice was signed.
It might come as no surprise to the perspicacious reader that Lorelei is not her given name.
“So it was Judge Hibbard who really gave me my name because he did not like the name I had because he said a girl ought to have a name that ought to express her personality. So he said my name ought to be Lorelei which is the name of a girl who became famous for sitting on a rock in Germany.” (Apr 13)
Lorelei, like the rock sitter of German folklore, similarly ruins her gentlemen. But the reader feels no loss. Loos might have had in mind the Heine poem when she named her character after a famous siren:
“I think the waves drink up off the rocks ironman and dory for with her song Lorelei has done them very wrong.”
Heinrich Hein, “Die Lorelei,” 1824, Creative translation by yours truly, changing location from the Rhine to Redondo Beach.
But it’s not on the River Rhine where Lorelei finds her men, but hotels:
“So we came to the Ritz Hotel and the Ritz Hotel is devine. Because when a girl can sit in a delightful bar and have delicious champagne cocktails and look at all the important French people in Paris, I think it is devine. I mean when a girl can sit there and look at the Dolly sisters and Pearl White and Maybell Gilman Corey, and Mrs. Nash, it is beyond worlds. Because when a girl looks at Mrs. Nash and realizes what Mrs. Nash has got out of gentlemen, it really makes a girl hold her breath.” (Apr 27)
Loos book in form is a cartoon, the characters exaggerated, satirical types, the writing a string of captions. Our edition (1998 Liveright paperback) contains actual cartoons, with captions taken from the text, the title page describes as “Intimately Illustrated” by Ralph Barton, the 1920’s productive but troubled cartoonist. There’s a 1998 introduction by Candace Bushnell, author of “Sex and the City,” who says, “Now that changing hair color is almost as easy as changing underpants, a more appropriate moniker might be Gentlemen Prefer Breasts” (XVI). And a second introduction, titled “The Biography of a Book,” by Anita Loos herself (for the 1963 reissue), in which she relates a television interview where she was asked what theme today might she write about, and she replied, “Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen,” which, she adds parenthetically was “(a statement which brought the session abruptly to a close).” Loos had lost none of her sarcasm or satirical bent. Writing about the success of her book, she added, “But I feel that Lorelei’s accomplishments reached a peak when she became one of the few contemporary authors to be represented in the Oxford Book of Quotations” (XXIV).
The waters deepen quickly – an important book, in terms of success or influence, doesn’t have to be a book of realism, naturalism, literal representation, doesn’t have to be a serious book. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” is satire, like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which comes to mind as Loos closes her reissue introduction: “But if that fact is true [that gentlemen prefer gentlemen], as it very well seems to be, it, too, is based soundly on economics, the criminally senseless population explosion which a beneficent Nature is trying to curb by more pleasant means than war” (XXIV).
Maybe the most profound theme of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” if one’s interest is in seriousness (tragedy) in the face of comedy (happy endings), is class, social distinctions, climbing ladders to successful benchmarks where one finds the benches are not as comfortable as one had thought they would be. In that regard, Loos book might indeed warrant the Edith Wharton opinion that it is the Great American Novel. If so, it might be refiled under the title, “Gentlemen Prefer Books,” for it did seem that most of Lorelei’s gentlemen pushed books upon her, wanting to smarten her up, oblivious to her intellect already superior to theirs, and to the fact that reading books rarely if ever smartens us up, or we’d certainly be smart by now, after those two thousand books in our lives, but hardly anyone seems to be, while being smart actually suggests being able to take advantage of another for one’s own advancement, regardless of class.
The third in a series of surfing slides taken at the Redondo Beach horseshoe pier late 60’s early 70’s posted for “Sliding into Saturday.” 35 mm Ektachrome slide taken with an Exakta 500 with 120mm portrait lens.
“Sliding into Saturday” is a blog meme, a day-themed prompt for posting electronic copies of old slide transparencies, usually 35 mm slides, but also 120 and 110 formats.
No, I’ve not been living in a hotel; that would be Nabokov at Montreux Palace, Twain at the Chelsea, Simone de Beauvoir at the Hôtel La Louisiane. I’ve been reading books that take place in hotels. Some hot telling going on there, too.
I just finished reading aloud to Susan “The Enchanted April,” by Elizabeth Von Arnim, first published in 1922, our copy a Penguin Classics, 2015. The Mesdames Wilkins and Arbuthnot answer an advertisement and arrange to spend a month in Italy:
“To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1,000, The Times.” (3)
Who could resist? Not the insistent frumpy Mrs. Wilkins, who talks the reserved Mrs. Arbuthnot into the adventure, and the two abandon their troubled husbands in fog everywhere London, recruit two additional to their party to help defray expenses, the young and extraordinarily lovely socialite Lady Caroline and the lonely aging Mrs. Fisher, and train down to the sunny gardeny clime.
Not strictly speaking a hotel, the castle originally a Genoese fortress, built to protect Portofino’s harbor, but Castello San Salvatore functions like a hotel in the book’s closed setting and stage-play like structure, where no character is at first what they might seem to be, and class or social structures or strictures are dissolved to reveal the human frailties of psychological skeletons. But if that sounds like a horror, it’s not; the book is profoundly funny, each character misinterpreting another in a comedy of manners, such that we first see each character not for what they are, or might become, but what someone else thinks they are, or where they might have come from, ignorant of their true origins, problems, needs and wants.
And before “The Enchanted April,” I had recently reread Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Hotel” (1927), her first novel, also set on the Riviera. Bowen’s writing style is different from Arnim’s, though both often feature long convoluted or circuitous sentences, subjects and objects meandering like mallards down steams through a woods, often placed somewhat distantly and not quite directly from predicates. Something like that; I haven’t actually diagrammed any in the old school way. But the common reader may find such writing distracting; it’s not Dashiell Hammett.
And I also recently read Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize winning “Hotel Du Lac” (1984), though here the setting is Switzerland and it’s coming on fall and winter and cold out, reminding me of home:
“The beautiful day had within it the seeds of its own fragility: it was the last day of summer. Sun burned out of a cloudless blue sky: asters and dahlias stood immobile in the clear light, a light without glare, without brilliance. Trees had already lost the dark heavy foliage of what had been an exceptional August and early September and were all the more poignant for the dryness of their yellowing leaves which floated noiselessly down from time to time.” (67)
And time, and now, but it would be inaccurate to say suddenly, still, here we are just a little over a week from winter solstice when the days will begin to, in spite of the cold, last each a little longer and potentially at least warmer. But for now, back to the hotel of books, until the wistaria and sunshine return in bloom and heat and smell and we can open again our own hotel, now closed for the winter.
Jay Caspian Kang’s article in the online New Yorker this week reminded me of the early days at the Toads, when the “Reading Crisis” first appeared. The argument, at the time somewhat famously mentioned in the TheAtlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” and in a couple of Caleb Crain articles in The New Yorker, including “Twilight of the Books,” was formally discussed in the Congressional Quarterly Researcher. Kang’s article is titled “If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?”
Never mind false dichotomies, not to mention the embedded claim that reading books is somehow superior to spending time on social media, it’s a worthwhile, as refreshing as the changing seasons, question. I tried just the other day to quit the blog; would I read more books? That resolve lasted not even a week. The habit of writing almost daily for 18 years (the blog, 8 books, plus stuff for various jobs) was harder to kick than I had anticipated.
Last year (as usual late to the book club), I read Kang’s book “The Dead Do Not Improve” (2012), which I enjoyed for its San Francisco setting and its surfing theme, but I’m not sure I learned anything from it, other than Kang’s a good writer, by which I mean his book accomplished its objectives. But I did not read it to learn anything, but for pleasure, but I’m still not too pleased with the title, but I get it: there are no tidy endings in a random world.
That reading anything in any amount suggests being or becoming smarter is already a tired bias held by, well, those purportedly who read the most. But Kang, in the article, admits to trading book time for phone time, and he’s concerned reading skills might be atrophying, and that he’s wasting time on social media even while facing a deadline for a new book that he, well, will want others to put their phones down and read.
But what we do learn from reading, or should learn, though it’s sometimes intuited, such that we might not even realize we’re getting it, is rhetoric, by which we mean the art of persuasion, and, of course, rhetoric can be misused, and only by reading extensively will we come to recognize rhetorical devices being used and their effects on us. Still, as for reading making us better people, there have been and still are well read people who are arguably not the best examples of humanity, but even that doesn’t mean we should give up reading as a way to improve our minds, our spirits, our conversations: as Becket said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Worstward Ho, 1983).
There are many activities that keep us from reading: playing a musical instrument, watching a movie or listening to a baseball game on the radio, playing cards, attending church, talking – not to mention work: waitressing, plumbing, nursing, gardening. Does it follow that if we abandon any of these activities we’ll read more?
But if we are reading fewer books, are we becoming more illiterate or non-literate? There’s a difference. It’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture, as McLuhan showed. And people in non-literate cultures have never been and are not now stupid; on the contrary.
The Coming of the Toads 