John Steinbeck – Of Mice & Men – Second Half

Candy said, “George.”

“Huh?”

“I oughtta of shot that dog myself, George.  I shouldn’t oughtta of let no stranger shoot my dog.”

–Of Mice and Men, p. 61

Lennie begged, “Le’s do it now.  Le’s get that place now.”

“Sure, right now.  I gotta.  We gotta.”

And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle of it close to the back of Lennie’s head.  The hand shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied.  He pulled the trigger.

-Of Mice and Men, p. 106

I knew I was in store for the reading experience of a lifetime after the class hyped up the ending and struggled to not delve into a discussion of the latter part of the novel—particularly, the tragically gorgeous finale.  Seems like the story escalates exponentially, moving slowly at first with the tranquility of the riverside, then spiraling to a atrociously depressing (yet absolutely beautiful) climax on the final page as George shoots Lennie in that same riverside clearing.  It all comes full circle in a sick and twisted way.  I knew something really fucked up was going to happen, but of all my dark and morbid speculations I never expected the novel to end like this, which is a good thing.  Steinbeck manages to capture the Great Depression in a mere hundred-and-seven pages, both in the historical and the visceral sense.  On one level, the novella is about the economic hardships that drove thousands of men to leave home in search of whatever work they could get: migrant workers.

Perhaps on a deeper level, the story’s pathos vibrates with a stark loneliness, the sense of desperate isolation that terrorizes not only the migrant workers, but also women and African Americans like Crooks and Curley’s unnamed wife.  Crooks, Curley’s wife, and Candy find themselves alone, even if they’re surrounded by other workers or a husband, and all three of them have a particularly strong urge to connect with other people.  “I ain’t got a right to talk to nobody?  Whatta they think I am, anyways?” Curley’s wife exclaims on multiple occasions, evoking her bitter lonesomeness (87).  Similarly—yet ironically due to the tense interaction between Crooks and Curely’s wife—Crooks tells Lennie morosely, “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.  Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you.  I tell ya,” he cried, “I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”  Crooks is the only black man on the property and is one of the few remaining African American’s left in the city of Soledad, leaving him isolated in a shack with nobody to interact with but racist whites and books.  Crooks is torn on the inside, seeing as he wants to connect with someone else but at the same time he cannot come to grips with the terrible way the whites treat him; so though he wants company in his shack, he ardently defends his ground like he’s defending the only piece of identity that he has left.  I wanted to know exactly where in the central valley the city of Soledad is, and upon ‘Wikipedia’ing’ it I realized that Soledad translates to loneliness in Spanish (something I should have known after 6 years of Spanish in jr. high and high school!).

I should probably address the two quotes that I slung up at the top of the page instead of continuing with that line of thought, although this theme of loneliness is pertinent to the two quotes and the subject matter they entail.  Like I said, I never would have expected George to do what he did on those thrilling final pages; to kill his own best pal—his only true friend, the only connection that so many of the other characters long for—is emotionally tormenting.  Show me a dead puppy and I cringe; show me a man shooting his mentally handicapped best friend and I implode.  Setting down the book after finishing it, I had one burning question: why did George decide to shoot the poor guy rather than let fate take over, perhaps letting him die by the hands of Curley or Carlson?  I sat for a while, stunned but frantically trying to piece together what was going on in George’s head to make him do that, and how he could even work up the nerve to be the one to end Lennie’s life.  Then I remembered the whole incident with Candy’s old mutt and how Carlson said the dog was no good, taking him away and shooting him right in the back of the head (just as George does to Lennie).  That’s when I realized why we didn’t want to touch on Candy’s dog too much on Friday: the incident heavily foreshadows the hardships and sorrows that kill their agrarian American dream.

As the first quote above exemplifies, Candy regrets letting Carlson, “a stranger,” end his dog’s life.  He wishes that he would have taken the poor mutt out, loved it, given it one final moment of joy and peace, and then ended its life; instead, the highly insensitive Carlson takes the dog’s life.  The dog died alone, in a sense, because it died by the hands of a stranger.  The way the dog is shot—right in the back of the head at the base of the spine—is the same way George chooses to shoot Lennie, creating a parallel between the “Candy/Candy’s mutt” scenario and the “George/Lennie” scenario, with the only difference being that George was able to take Lennie’s life away rather than letting him die alone at the hands of a cruel and merciless bastard like Curley or Carlson.  Thinking about what Candy said regarding his regret at not having taken his dog’s life, George was the one who took Carlson’s missing gun, taking it to meet Lennie where we first met the duo by the riverbank, the tree branch, and the ash heap (again, the cyclical nature of the story).  So no matter how much he didn’t want to shoot his friend, he knew “I gotta,” or else Lennie would die alone without George by his side.  No doubt about it, as he discussed with Candy and Slim, Lennie has to face the consequences of his actions, so rather than letting Lennie go through the horrible confusion of public execution or the lonesome death he would endure at Curley’s hand, George takes note of Candy’s regrets and beats anyone else to it.  He has no choice: either kill Lennie or watch him suffer a much more lonely and depressing death.  George won’t stand for that though, so he tells Lennie to “look down there acrost the river, like you can almost see the place”—this “place” being the plot of land they continually dream of (106).  By killing him like this, George lets him die in the comfort and peace of their dream, thinking happily of his illusory dream of “tending the rabbits” and living off the fat of the land.  It’s tragically beautiful, one of the most visceral reads I’ve had in a while.

John Steinbeck – Of Mice & Men – First Half

-Lennie spoke craftily: “Tell me – like you done before.”
“Tell you what?”
“About the rabbits.”
George snapped, “You ain’t gonna put nothing over on me.”
Lennie pleaded, “Come on, George. Tell me. Please, George. Like you done before.”
“You get a kick outta that, don’t you. A’right, I’ll tell you, and then we’ll eat our supper…..”
George’s voice became deeper. He repeated his words rhythmically as though he had said them many times before. “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to.”
Lennie was delighted. “That’s it – that’s it. Now tell how it is with us.”
George went on. ” With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.”
Lennie broke in. “But not us! An’ why? Because …. because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.” He laughed delightedly. “Go on now, George.”
“You got it by heart. You can do it yourself.”
“No, you. I forget some a’ the things. Tell about how it’s gonna be.”
“O.K. Some day – we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs and —”
“An’ live off the fatta the lan’,” Lennie shouted. “An’ have rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we’re gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that, George.”
“Why’n’t you do it yourself. You know all of it.”
“No…. you tell it. It ain’t the same if I tell it. Go on….. George. How I get to tend the rabbits.”
“Well,” said George. “We’ll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit-hutch and chickens. And when it rains in the winter, we’ll just say the hell with goin’ to work, and we’ll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain comin’ down on the roof — Nuts!” He took out his pocket knife. “I ain’t got time for no more. 

                                                                                    –Of Mice & Men, p.14-15

I know I picked a long passage from the Steinbeck’s novella, but I really feel like this evocative conversation carries “a bindle” full of the story’s most prominent themes.  Moreover, the exchange of dialogue reveals quite a bit about George and Lennie’s odd relationship.  Though they are not really blood related cousins, they consider themselves family in the sense that they both have each other—that is, they have a compassionate connection rarely found among migrant workers of the time: the dregs of America during the Great Depression.  George and Lennie “got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us.”  The “other guys” are the average migrant workers that work hard arduous hours in the fields for little money or purpose; consequently, they thrown their money away in bars just to escape their drab existences and drown their gloom with alcohol and prostitutes.  And even though George, the rational and stern protagonist, yells in a fit of anger that he would be much better off without the seemingly autistic or mentally damaged Lennie, his feelings fluctuate between senses of comfort in having a companion to share a dream with and annoyance at having to constantly cater to Lennie in a way that limits George’s chances at finding steady work or “a girl.”  They seem to know that they can always count on each other, even when George throws his existential tantrums and Lennie half-threatens to go live in “a cave” out in the woods somewhere—a half-assed idea but a very romantic one at the same time.  These come off as false threat though, as they always settle down when things get too heated; it’s almost as George bogs himself down with doubts about his life and his fancies about what could have been, yet when his subconscious vomits up some mean-spirited comment that belittles their mutual friendship he snap out of it, realizing that he needs Lennie as much as Lennie needs him.  Why this is, I’m not sure yet.  I’ll have to keep reading to find out!

The novella is has some very modernist qualities to it, particularly how Steinbeck just kind of throws the reader into the story and the lives of these two men, not giving a background of their past through narration but rather displaying these traits through the story’s immediate actions and dialogue.  Just how Earnest Hemmingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” starts out without any context and then builds constructs the scenario and characterizations as the story unfolds; similarly, Of Mice and Men begins with a beautiful description of California’s central valley, specifically the a river which is wedged between Willow groves and the Babilan mountains (just like the crossroads between the fertile land and the white hills in Hemmingway’s story), and then delves directly into action and conversation.  Formal introductions are left out, though the characters are described; the story just sort of starts though, plunging the reader into the lives of these two men.  For a while, we aren’t even sure what to think about Lennie: is he just dimwitted or does he have a serious mental ailment?  After a while, it’s pretty obvious that it’s a serious pathological issue and not a matter of intellect, though it has yet to be stated directly.

Although George represses his eagerness to move on to a better life and to “live off the fat of the land,” Lennie, in his childlike fashion, always jovially asks George about “the rabbits” that he dreams of tending for on their plot of land.  “The rabbits” Lennie loves to think about are a condensed and highly symbolic representation of George’s yearning for a self-reliant life.  And while Lennie pesters him boisterously into telling and re-telling their dream about buying a plot of land and living freely on it, his dreaming is more innocent and free of doubts.  In other words, they share the same dream, but George seems cynical about it coming to fruition since he gets somewhat aggravate about having to tell the story over and over again   I know stories get old, but it appears as if he is avoiding the thought of the dream because it makes him all the more depressed about his current situation.  Lennie, on the other hand, is inherently childlike due to his condition and thus carries the dream without any fear about losing it—he can’t wait to pet those rabbits and tend to them in their idyllic shack.  Alternating between George’s desire to share their dream and his fuming outbursts, his complex characterization is directly juxtaposed with Lennie’s innocent and somewhat ignorant view of the harsh realties of their meager lives.

Claude McKay – Selected Poetry

           

 

              The Harlem Dancer

                 By Claude Mckay

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes

And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;

Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes

Blown by black players upon a picnic day.

She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,

The light gauze hanging loose about her form;

To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm

Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.

Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curls

Profusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise,

The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,

Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;

But, looking at her falsely-smiling face

I knew her self was not in that strange place.

Though I’m not particularly fond of the sonnet structure, McKay works with the it in a very poignant way, evoking the “Harlem Dancer[‘s]” complex feelings into the tightly structured poem.  He does this using potent imagery which fluctuates between a Petrarchan glorification of a woman’s sensual beauty—her voice “like the sound of blended flutes,” her “shiny curls,” her body like a “proudly-swaying palm”—and a gritty portrayal of a woman’s plight against the “devour[ing] eyes of misogyny, specifically a black woman’s.  And although sex and race are both significant in this poem, I feel like gender is a more central theme to this specific Claude McKay poem.

Leaving the “bold-eyed boys” racially ambiguous, the speaker depicts the “applauding youths” as animals drunken animals starving with lust, drinking in the Harlem dancer’s sensualities, using her to satisfy their lascivious natures, and consequently turning her into an object who must “falsely smile” her way through life in order to live in a hegemonic white male society.  Not to mention they are watching her “with young prostitutes” by their sides.  As sonnets traditionally work, the last two lines of the poem changeup the flow and elicits the truth about the situation happening in this Harlem cabaret club; so while we are presented with a picture of this graceful, poised, gorgeous black beauty in the first twelve lines, the last two exhibits the true nature of the Harlem dancer.  As the speaker says while staring at her, “I knew her self was not in that strange place,” meaning he knows that she is putting on an act and placating these horny young men, playing into their sexist actions because she feels that, as a black woman, she has no authority.  Hence, her true self would not be stripping in a jazz club if it were up to her, but her lowly social location forces her to go against her own morals—to put aside her true self to fit into the male dominant construct of femininity.

Before I leave this poem I want to comment on the voyeuristic quality McKay incorporates in “The Harlem Dancer”: the speaker is watching and observing the dancer’s just as the “wine-flushed” boys are, except the speaker is gazing one step back, taking both the dancer and the audience into account.  Still, the speaker is objectifying the dancer in almost the same way the boys are, although he is able to see beyond the sexual façade she puts up.  He can see her true nature hidden behind that “proudly-swaying” body and can see that something is wrong with what he is seeing; even so, he’s somehow wound up in this strip-club of sorts, probably on his own volition, and he is ogling at the passionate beauty she is able to exude despite her inner melancholy.  Perhaps this is a comment on the complex nature that black women must face, seeing as they are faced with both the sexist gaze and the racist gaze.  I know that the audience isn’t specified to be white, but I just have this inkling that they are a bunch of white boys; likewise, I’m going to assume the speaker is a black male.  With this assumption in mind, the speaker can see her sadness by silently empathizing with her racial plights as an African American.  He can’t, however, quite see his repressive male gaze, at least not as well as he can see the racial gaze she is being subjugated to by the seemingly white patrons.  So whether McKay meant to bring it up or not, the major theme of this poem is the complications of African American women who were forced to fit into two normative aspects of American society, white society and male society.  Thus, the gaze becomes double-layered and immensely convoluted.

            If We Must Die

            By Claude McKay

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Another sonnet, McKay’s “If We Must Die” is an empowering call to arms for the African American community at the time.  Not that he is telling people to literally take up arms and start shooting their white oppressors, but rather he’s affirming African Americans’ right to liberty to stand up for themselves against racism rather than taking the more obsequiously and placating stance like their parents generation had done, who were still under slavery’s horrific indoctrination.  Harlem Renaissance writers and artists like McKay were attempting to create the “New Negro”; that is, to recreate the image of African Americans around their art and cultural views.  Perhaps this is why McKay writes in the traditional sonnet structure, so that he can redefine it based on his culture rather than the white culture that originally created the poetic format.

This poem is a response to the race riots in 1919, “the Red Summer”; African Americans returned from war and defending their country only to be met with ardent racism back in the States.  This lead to the riots, which McKay says they must fight nobly against in order to force their white oppressors “to honor us though dead!”

Langston Hughes – Selected Poetry

A Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I absolutely love this poem; it’s one of those poems you come across every so often that makes you feel, as Emily Dickinson once put it, like the top of your head were taken off.  Everything came to me in an ineffable sort of way, but as usual I’ll try to put it into words.  Hughes uses simple yet striking imagery to create an intricate display of how “a dream deferred” might react.  Posing the question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”, Hughes contemplates the various outcomes of this “dream deferred,” speaking about it as if it were a tangible object that might “dry up / like a raisin in the sun” or “crust over…like a syrupy sweet.”  The poem’s minimalist approach—reminiscent of the Imagist poets like Ezra Pound—shoots distinct and clear visuals into the reader’s consciousness simply by using distinct and clear visuals colored with sensory qualities.  These sensory descriptions alternate between the sweet and the rotten—that is, until the last line’s italicized question: “Or does it explode?”  Although this poem resonates with anyone whose dreams and aspirations have been trumped by some greater power, Hughes is specifically referring to the dream of equality and freedom that African Americans’ so fervently longed for at the time.  The second and longest stanza raises a series of questions concerning how the dream will react to its deferment, oscillating between “syrupy sweet” outcomes and rotting, festering, or sagging outcomes.  Will the African American dream of equality sweeten through its struggles, just as a raison becomes sweeter the more it endures the suns harsh rays?  Will it “sugar over / like a syrupy sweet?”  Or, alternatively, “Does it stink like rotten meat?”  Does it “fester like a sore / and run?”  These two questions juxtapose those positive outcomes, asking whether the dream of racial equality will rot over time like dead meat, decaying in the racially polluted environment of hegemonic white society.  Both results were real possibilities at the time, and to a lesser extent still are today: will African Americans ever truly break free from their brutal history of racial strife?  Or will they simple exist, sagging “like a heavy load” instead of actively breaking free from racial prejudice?  Obviously, it is out of their control, but their dream is still in their hands to a certain extent.  The last line demonstrates this explosive break from repression and alludes to the Harlem Renaissance, when African American culture exploded with art and the conception of the “new negro,” thus bridging the gap between their parent’s more whitewashed mentalities and the individualistic and active mentality of the new generation of African Americans who found pride in their roots.  Indeed, the deferred African American dream of racial equality exploded with the syrupy sweetness of artistic expression, but could it be that this explosion is a negative one?  Obviously I’m speaking in retrospect here, so I know that African American rights were eventually improved and racial tensions have eased up quite a bit, but at the time Hughes wrote this poem he had no idea what the future held in store for his people.  The ambiguity between whether this explosion represents a non-violent or violent shattering of racial barriers is a genuine question: how will the budding, individualistic “new negro” be accepted into society?  Will they take a literal approach to fighting for freedom, or will they, as Hughes seems to subtly advocate, build themselves up until white society can no longer contain their racial individualism.

Drum

by Langston Hughes

Bear in mind
that death is a drum
beating on forever,
till the last worms come
to answer its call,
till the last stars fall,
until the last atom
is no atom at all,
until time is past
and there is no air
and space itself
is nothing, nowhere.
Death is a drum,
a signal drum,
calling life
to come!
Come!
Come!

This poem, too, took the top of my head off—I guess Langston Hughes has a way of doing that, doesn’t he.  I love the metaphysical elements of the poem, particularly the notion that death preexists space, time, and the last atoms of the last worms who ate the last bit of decaying human flesh.  I imagine all life smashing into a dust of nothingness as it hits the thudding drum: Death.

Death is absolute because it is the only complete truth—the only thing humans can consciously know for a fact is that they will die, colliding with “Death” the drum.  And this drum is calling us, calling us like a Siren would in those ancient Greek myths I read a while back.  Oddly, the beating drum cannot be time, which is “nothing, / nowhere,” even though one would assume that time is that aspect which “call[s] life / to come!”  Yet time is consumed by death, leaving only that morbid drum as the omnipotent force of life.  This presents a vital paradox: the journey towards death is, in and of itself, life!  It may sound morbid, and to a certain extent the poem does hold cynical connotations, but philosophically speaking death is the product of life.  By these means, this is a celebration of life!  “Bear in mind” that all things, good and evil, stream out of that ever-conscious drum—Deaths drum pulsating with life.

Ernest Hemingway – “Hills Like White Elephants”

‘Well,’ the man said, ‘if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.’

            ‘And you really want to?’

            ‘I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.’

            ‘And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?’

            ‘I love you now. You know I love you.’

            ‘I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?’

            ‘I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.’

            ‘If I do it you won’t ever worry?’

            ‘I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.’

            ‘Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.’

For such a short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” has so much going on in it.  On a basic level, it is a vignette of crisis. Jig is pregnant and the couple find themselves at a jarring crossroads, both literally and metaphorically.  The couple must choose between settling down with a newborn child or having an abortion and carrying on with their formerly uninhibited, free-spirited lives.  And though the man repeatedly tries to soften their predicament by calling it “an awfully simple operation,” Jig clearly has more complex feelings about their decision, particularly because her lover is sending her mixed messages, telling her that “I think it’s the best thing to do.  But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” Ostensibly, the man supports her in whatever choice she makes, but the way he words things makes it appear otherwise.  In fact, it seems like he doesn’t even realize that he is out of love with her, that he is unconsciously scapegoating their problematic relationship on Jig’s pregnancy, and that the girl can sense this in him and fears loss and abandonment.  She is afraid that their relationship hinges on the baby, and that if she were to abort the child she would also be aborting her relationship with the man.  Hence, their tense and scattered conversation about whether or not to go through with the abortion is, on an unspoken level, truly a conversation about whether or not to go through with their relationship.  In this sense, the pregnancy symbolizes their instable relationship, romantic anxieties, and inability to commit to each other’s love.  For instance, she is immensely concerned whether, as she says to him, “things will be like they were and you’ll love me,” and whether their relationship, currently plagued by the pregnancy, will regain its original passion and piquancy.  Jig desperately wants their love to remain unfazed by the pregnancy and yearns for a time when she can say “things are like white elephants and you’ll like it,” alluding to their relationship prior to this incident.  As for the man, whether or not he knows it on a conscious level, he is terrified of giving up his uninhibited freedom to roam the world, to “look at things and try new drinks,” as Jig blandly puts it.  The child would be a hindrance to his freedom, so he can’t see the joy in having a child; all he sees is misery and an end to his independent, transient lifestyle.

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

            ‘And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.’

Jig is constantly gazing at the hills, contemplating how they resemble white elephants; every time jig brings it up, however, the man either changes the topic or appears disinterested in them. This is juxtaposed with Jig’s evident fixation upon those brightly lit hills to which she periodically ruminates over.  When she stares off into those white hills, she sees that the couple “could have everything,” both their freedom and the child.  When the man looks at those hills, on the other hand, he sees the death of his independence.  He makes this prospect of settling down “impossible” because he can’t break free from his internalized paradigm of settling down—his preconceived notion that having a child will interfere and complicate the simple and carefree life they had lived up until this critical point in time.  Thus, he doesn’t want to hear about, talk about, or even look at those pristine white hills, seeing as on a subconscious level they represent the end of his rugged individualism.  The two sides of the Ebro, the barren side and the fertile side, represent this difference in perspective.  To Jig, settling down with the child is fertile ground; for the man, it is a dry and relentlessly hot wasteland.

Gertrude Stein

I read Stein’s famous collection of experimental poetry, Tender Buttons, last spring in Graham Faust’s MFA poetry course.  After reading her for a couple of days, we were to bring in an imitation of Stein’s idiosyncratic poetic methods, so I thought I might as well share what I came up with:

GLUT BUTTONS

TEMPERED

You can never flank a troll.  If its temper meant to daze news, its tenderness tomorrows will surely headline surely with a surly gap.  Questions to those questions to that which dies in footnotes.  Yank or let the handle fly-black.  Cinch your life for keeps sake.

EDGES

An edge surrounds its content under pressure.  An edge is point B darkroom negative photos from life snapped to shack light upon starless slurs. An edge is an end, so bawl it in the mainline son. An edge being cryptic being asphalt beards and yellow turns blue tattoos.  Naturally, the topiary will not hold.  Naturally, will grow wild.

ARGUMENTS

Lengthen at will shank it it litters allies whose abstracts shone to part part way round that which will confound lost pros.

Seeing as I still can’t quite grasp what she does to create her very distinct and avant-garde style, my Stein imitations are a bit off.  That’s to be expected from any imitation, however, but especially for Stein: the enigmatic ringleader of the Lost Generation.  Still, I’d like to think that Glut Buttons does reflect some of the linguistic playfulness that Stein so masterfully uses throughout Tender Buttons; either way, it was a blast to give her style a go.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”

“I heard you lost a lot in the crash.”

“I did,” and [Charlie] added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

“Selling short.”

“Something like that.”

-“Babylon Revisited,” Chpt. V, Pg. 1630

This excerpt is near the end of the short story, a conversation held between Charlie and Paul, the Ritz bartender “who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom-built car,” as the omniscient narrator tells us in Chapter I.  Charlie constantly reminisces on the past, subsequently linking the luxurious excessiveness of the past—the 1920s Jazz age, as Fitzgerald called it—to the slow and weary present, a time of Great Depression, both economically and psychologically.  For those who had lived opulently through the Jazz age—as Charlie, Helen, Lorraine and Duncan had—it was a tough transition between the good times of the past and the jarring realities of the 1930s.  At the same time, however, millions of middle class Americans were suffering a great deal more than these elegant Jazz age types, seeing as Charlie’s economic downgrade entails “eat[ing] at a really cheap restaurant in Paris” instead of regularly treating himself “champagne dinners and long luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred vague twilight” (p.1618,1621).  Obviously Charlie’s mental hardships should not be belittled or taken lightly simply because he is wealthy.  His present miseries are the result of a more psychological, rather than economic, depression—the result of the abrupt destruction of the Jazz age’s ambitious dream.  In the conversation between Paul and Charlie quoted above, Paul takes the losses of the market crash to be purely financial, as affirmed by his response to Charlie’s grim realization; he assumes that Charlie is speaking about his economic loss when he says he “lost everything [he] wanted in the boom,” whereas Charlie is actually referring to the loss of his family due to his past hedonistic indulgences.  So while he did lose a great deal of his wealth during the crash, he paradoxically “lost everything” during the economic boom, when Helen and he would carousing the streets of Paris with Lorraine and Duncan, carelessly throwing their money away on fine liquors, lavish meals, and generous tips.

As Charlie dolefully drinks his daily allotment of alcohol in the Ritz bar—alluding to his struggles with alcoholism which lead to his “collapse”—his mind is muddled with frustration towards both Marion and his former drinking mates Lorraine and Duncan.  The latter, Lorraine and Dunc, are emblematic of Charlie’s incessantly hounding past, as seen when the two leeches make the boorish decision to intervene in Charlie’s new life—one where he is “functioning” and “behaving damn well” (Chpt. III, p.1625).  The two Roaring Twenties burnouts interrupt Charlie’s genuine attempt to explain his change of character to Marion, ultimately spoiling his attempt to regain ownership of over daughter and, in a sense, reestablish his “character.”  As the narrator tells us, “[Charlie] believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element.  Everything wore out,” (Chpt. I, p.1620).  Clearly Charlie’s personal ideology revolves around this concept of human character—a notion that Charlie once considered to be the only true and absolute quality one can hold, with all other values paling in comparison.  One’s individuality and personal integrity is the only truth in this world of ours, Fitzgerald implies, referring to the idealistic mindset of the Jazz era that was crushed by the stock crash and economic collapse of 1929.  These decadent romantics of the previous decade had dissipated “into thin air”, as Charlie contemplates, and had become lost in their overconfidence in this idyllic existence—a lifestyle that quickly came to a halt with the onset of the Great Depression.  Charlie has to face the consequences of his irresponsible boozing in his personal loss: Helen’s death, his mental breakdown, and his loss of custody over Honoria.

I wanted to know more about the story’s title, so I looked up Babylon and read up on the ancient and luxurious city.  With this in mind, the title “Babylon Revisited” creates a parallel allusion between the once flourishing Babylon and the fall of the extravagant 1920s Jazz age.  Just as the final line of Fitzgerald’s infamous novel, The Great Gatsby, says, the reckless nature of human history is doomed to repeat itself, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  I actually just reread The Great Gatsby this past August in preparation for the film remake starring Leonardo DeCaprio as Jay Gatby, James Gatz’s remade self.  I never feel like I connect with the novel until the last chapter, particularly the last three pages; the prose in those last few pages honestly made me shiver this last time I read it.  I’ve always had trouble getting into the groove of Fitzgerald’s prose, so I usually read his stories quite slowly, seeing as his prose is so beautifully thematic and meditative.  Lines like, “She had built up all her fear of life into one wall and faced it toward him,” and “I spoiled this city for myself.  I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone,” demonstrate Fitzgerald’s depth of his stunning and deeply insightful prose.

I also wanted to quickly note that from what I know about F. Scott Fitzgerald and his socialite wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, this story seems almost autobiographical, save some obvious changes, such as Charlie’s wife being dead instead of institutionalized, like Zelda was.  Knowing that Fitzgerald lived through this experience made his insights so much more true to life for me, making Charlie’s complex inner struggles between his past life and his present existence all the more visceral.  I felt bad for Charlie because I saw such a strong link between the author’s life and the incident he is writing about.

Marianne Moore – Selected Poems

The Fish

wade 
through black jade.
        Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
        adjusting the ash-heaps;
               opening and shutting itself like

an 
injured fan.
        The barnacles which encrust the side
        of the wave, cannot hide
               there for the submerged shafts of the  

sun, 
split like spun
        glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
        into the crevices—               
in and out, illuminating  

the 
turquoise sea        
of bodies. The water drives a wedge        
of iron through the iron edge               
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,  

pink 
rice-grains, ink-
        bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
        lilies, and submarine
               toadstools, slide each on the other.  

All 
external        
marks of abuse are present on this        
defiant edifice—               
all the physical features of     

ac- 
cident—lack
        of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
        hatchet strokes, these things stand
               out on it; the chasm-side is  

dead. 
Repeated
        evidence has proved that it can live
        on what can not revive
               its youth. The sea grows old in it.

Marianne Moore’s poetic style always strikes a chord with me: the way she uses nature and animal imagery as the basis for her ulterior commentaries and philosophies, her wordplay and unique formatting, and her whimsical stream of conscious.  I’ve read a couple of her poems before, but I really came to appreciate her in an MFA poetry class I took last spring with Graham Faust, when we wrote out the sentences she has (according to her punctuation) in her poem “The Fish.”  That poem amazes me in so many ways and has opened me up to Moore’s work.  Thematically, I love how it uses the image of coastal marine life surging against the wave-besieged cliff to convey nature’s mortality; structurally, she makes the poem itself surge outward and recede as the poem describes the barnacles and whatnot crashing against the dead cliff, making the poem’s form take the shape of what it describes: a sentence onamonapia, for lack of a definitive term.  Yet I digress from “The Fish,” which as I said opened the door to more Moore…

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish

Here we have thirst

and patience, from the first,

and art, as in a wave held up for us to see

in its essential perpendicularity;

not brittle but

intense—the spectrum, that

spectacular and nimble animal the fish,

whose scales turn aside the sun’s sword by their polish.

This poem also deals with a fish, which is similarly symbolic of nature and life; the fish in this poem, however, is a replication: a piece of art.  On a practical level, it is a glass bottle, as the title tells us.  The fact that it’s from Egypt further alludes to the fact that this glass bottle is more than just a device for holding liquids and that it is unique and genuinely crafted.  Yet the poem starts out by delineating the reasoning by which such a novelty would be made, stating that “thirst”—the natural instinct to survive, nourish bodily needs, and live on—prompted someone to make a glass bottle.  After that need is fulfilled, humans experience “patience,” a characteristic which lead to someone elaborating on the pragmatic bottle, engraving it with ornamentations until it becomes more of a piece of art than a usable bottle.  So like “a wave,” the practical series of situations that led to the fish shaped glass bottle’s production is “held up for us to see”: first comes the need (a thirst) for the tool, then comes the patience which prompts man to make an item of utility into an aesthetic piece of craftsmanship, or “art.”  The fish bottle is similar to an actual fish in the very same way that the “wave” of this creative “spectrum” is similar to an actual wave.  A wave is defined by its “perpendicularity,” or by its difference from the wholeness of the ocean from which it sprouted; similarly, the process of art is defined by how it reflects the natural world in a similar yet different way (creating more of a refraction of the original source; i.e., the fish shaped glass bottle is a refraction of an actual fish).  What interests me most about this whole notion Moore lays out here is that art is the product of need and patience: the fish shaped glass bottle, which is a piece of art, was produced over the years from both need and patience, two somewhat binary concepts seeing as it is hard to be patient when you need something.  The need to get to a doctor after falling down three flights of stairs won’t be easily met by patience.  The spectrum straddling nature (the origin) and art (the creation) is “not brittle but / intense,” meaning that the evolution and progression of art from its inspiration in nature is an intense bridge that humanity has crossed, not some brittle and unimportant connection that bears no importance and pales in comparison to its original source of nature.  Rather, Moore insinuates, art is the evolution of nature; that is, art is the genuine perfection of nature, not some gaudy attempt to replicate a more perfect nature.  The poem moves against essentialist ideas that claim that nature is the absolute, authentic source of truth and beauty, and that all else (art included) is a deviation from that essential center.  Instead, Moore posits the idea that art captures the ineffable beauty of nature and manifests that beauty into new and relatively permanent materials—statues, paintings, or as this poem portrays, glasswork.  While all of these materials will eventually decay and rot away into dust and nubs, they will no doubt last a whole lot longer than an actual fish, with its “nimble” and “spectacular” allure.  By these means, the artwork immortalizes beauty, capturing that natural splendor of a the fish bottle’s “polish[ed]” scales, which reflect “the sun’s sword”—symbolic of nature’s power to decay and obliterate—more efficiently than an actual fish.  It’s amazing how many ideas are jammed into these scant 8 lines—modern poetry never ceases to amaze me, especially three or four reads in.

Wallace Stevens – Selected Poetry

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I absolutely love this poem, it reminds me so much of Emerson’s Nature and his infamous transparent eyeball metaphor/image.  Like Emerson, Stevens maintains that “One must have a mind of winter” to truly imbibe nature’s infinite wonders, “To regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.”  The speaker infers that once one is “cold” enough “to behold the junipers shagged with ice” and other equally lovely facets of nature, that person has wholly communed with nature and eliminated the Self—both body consciousness and egoic consciousness.  One must become one with nature, meaning that the mind must be firmly attuned to the nature environment and cosmos, so much so that all likes and dislikes, fears and attachments, desires and churning thoughts—all of which are symbolized by “the misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves, / Which is the sound of the land.”  Although the wind is full of “misery,” the speaker implores us “not to think” of that misery, suggesting that the wind—when consciously unadulterated by those self-imposed doubts, fears, anxieties, and other negative attributions—is an absolute state of nature, one which human feelings, whether positive or negative, can be prescribed to “the sound of the land.”  In this way, Stevens is touching on a subjects that Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places” touches on in a more pessimistic approach: nature is a projection of the internal state, so what you feel inside your human nature is what you will see in external nature.  The last stanza is what reminded me of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, similarly asserting that “the listener”—the person immersed in nature “who listens in the snow” long enough to become a “Snow Man”—must become “nothing himself” and must see nothing in nature “that is not there,” referring to the “misery” or any human emotion erroneously applied to nature.  We must strive to become “the nothing that is,” to be “The Snow Man,” to be one and the same as nature’s totality.

I love how Stevens uses sound to depict that powerful force of nature which is both invisible and ubiquitous, much like the sound of wind or the sound of silence.  This poem particularly reminds me of Eastern spirituality and AUM, the cosmic sound.  When meditating in nature, I always try to hone in on some fairly constant sound, usually the wind, flowing water, or the whisperings of leaves and branches.  After focusing on whatever resonating sound I chose (often the sound of silence) and consciously attuning myself to that aural vibration, I—“the listener who listens in the [wind]”—allow my body and mind fade away into natures vibrating energy, becoming “the nothing that is.”  The few moments when I’ve truly felt close to that state of mind have been few and far between, but when it happens an avalanche of divine peace breaks down the illusory nature of my human existence.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I know this poem isn’t in Wallace Stevens’ section of the Heath Anthology, but I’ve read “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” before so I wanted to delve into it a bit more than the cursory glance I gave it the first time.  The title always draws me in and superimposes a playfully absurd image on my conscious mind.  Yet beneath this layer of clownishness, the poem bubbles with bizarre and morbid implications.  So on the basic level of imagery and context, the poem is itself an eerie paradox, a mixture of the chipper with the morose that constructs its surrealistic aura.  My favorite filmmaker, David Lynch, uses a similar technique when he mashes campy imagery of glorified American life with jarring undercurrents of evil and death; for example, in his infamous TV series Twin Peaks, the murder of the small town’s prom queen sets off a series of disturbing events which unearth the dark secrets of people who were previously perceived as mundane and kitschy characters.  In the same way, the “muscular one” who rolls “big cigars,” the “wenches,” the “boys” with flowers, and “the emperor of ice-cream” himself are all frolicking around, flaunting their vivacious youth, behaving joyfully and somewhat disrespectfully, since there is a dead woman in the house or room.  These “boys” and “wenches” indulge carelessly in the cigar roller’s “concupiscent curds” of what I am assuming is ice-cream—does this make him the emperor of ice-cream, and thus the central character in the poem?  It’s ambiguous, but one thing’s for sure: these young people are carousing around, indulging in food and flirting promiscuously, as implied by many of the sexually charged adjectives—“muscular” hands roll “big cigars and “whip…concupiscent curds,” to name just a couple.

Notice how “the boys / Bring flowers in last month’s newspaper”; conveying this unconventional mixture of death, represented by the outdated and obsolete paper, with life, seen in the flowers.  This lively celebration is a direct paradox to wake’s morbid occasion, and while it could be said that these people are celebrating this woman’s life rather than abiding by the normative conventions and traditions of death and mourning.  In 21^st century American culture, quite a few families actually choose to celebrate the deceased one’s life during their funeral, much like the poem could be displaying (minus the raunchiness perhaps).  People will often wear colorful attire instead of all black, will drink wine and laugh while telling memorable stories about the dead person instead of sitting in silent lament, everyone circled heads-down around the corpse or burial spot.  Maybe this is the beginning of this, one of the first wakes/funerals to practice this sort of festive way of dealing with death; it’s more likely, however, that this poem portrays their revelry within the context of the early 20^th century, a time when the death of loved ones meant black dresses and suits, nightlong vigils and running mascara, poignant elegies and forlorn faces.  I doubt Steven’s is trying to be didactic here, he isn’t trying to say, “this is how funerals/wakes should be held!”  Conversely, I think that because of the deep-seated traditions of mourning that were present during Wallace’s era, the poet was intentionally putting two opposing concepts together—jovial life meets cold death.  Maybe this is why the title is named “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” because ice-cream is a cold indulgence in much the same way that these “wenches” and “boys” are indulging in celebration in the presence of the woman’s “cold” corpse.  In the second stanza, the happy mourners cover the deceased woman with one of her own handmade blankets, carpeting it over her body.  Her “horny feet,” however, protrude from the blanket, symbolizing the human attempt to ignore and cover up death while we continue live our lives out in indulgence or carefree leisure.  There’s something mystical about this poem, something nostalgic and yet horrifying.  I think Wallace Stevens is one of my favorite 20^th century poets for that very reason.