Sunday Tourist Miscellany

New piece on Cormac McCarthy

Did everybody but me realize that Cormac McCarthy is pretty funny? I am reliably informed, by the way, that I am, in the long and honorable history of Commonweal, the first person ever to use the words “Chapo Trap House” in an article. So that’s something.

Some good things I’ve read recently

Adam Roberts on cowardice in literature.

An excellent piece of journalism perfectly summarized by its own headline: “A Christian Health Nonprofit Saddled Thousands With Debt as It Built a Family Empire Including a Pot Farm, a Bank and an Airline.”

Some good things I’ve listened to recently

The Blue Hour: Carolyn Forche set to music by Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider. I don’t know much about the other composers but I love Shaw. She won the Pulitzer in music ten years ago for this piece. Is the music Pulitzer generally better than the literature Pulitzer (which “takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses,” as William Gass beautifully said)? Because that was a good choice.

Honestly terrifying levels of human excellence in this 1991 live performance of “Not Too Soon” by the version of Throwing Muses that had Tanya and Fred before they left to form Belly, which is more or less my favorite Throwing Muses iteration. Maybe the one right before that that had Leslie on bass was even better. I think this version of “Hook In Her Head” is from the same show.

Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses is a synaesthete. So, I learned this week from a friend, was Olivier Messiaen. The second, higher, more staccato theme in this piece is supposed to represent the dripping blood of Christ.

The Wake’s Influence

I asked the friend who told me about the Messiaen piece whether it was technically considered “atonal” or not. She said that it’s not strictly twelve-tone but that it has no key center.

Michael S. Judge (the podcaster/novelist, not the creator of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” though I hold both of these artists in relatively high esteem) describes the method of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as “word-chords.” You write the word, and several disavowed words it sounds like, and its cousins in another language, and you let all the associations hover over the sentences. When I read at the Wake — I’m not gonna sit here and tell you I’ve read it all, or that I feel like I’ve read the parts I have read — part of what I find difficult is that, in a lot of the sentences, I can’t pick out which overtone should predominate: I can’t pick out what to hear. Take the first few sentences:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

OK, well, this one I can cheat a little, because if you’ve taken a decent twentieth century literature survey someone has told you that the first sentence of the Wake picks up from the last sentence (because everything is just a big cycle, man, a single cavernginas from which we all originulate, or whatever). I can look at the notes and get a basic sense of what this sentence is doing (invoking a particular Irish landscape, a river, and the original family). But then right away:

Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe totauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after,

OK, there’s already so many references happening that I lose all focus and start to despair at how little of this I’ll be able to hold on to, although I can chuckle at “penisolate war” (“peninsular” war, but also, penises, isolation, power-over, etc. etc.). And from here a lot of the sentences will be big, billowing, oceanic things — music delivered without measures, syntactic units that I can’t see starting and stopping.

I’ve read a couple books that have tried to use the word-chord style of the Wake for at least sections at a time. William Melvin Kelley does it in Dunfords Travels Everywheres and, if memory serves, a few times in dem, both of which I thought were excellent. Right now I’m reading Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which like many long novels — of the small subset of long novels that are good enough that you don’t bail in the first hundred pages — is both beautiful and tedious, its small flaws magnified by sheer scale (so many of the Alma Warren parts just feel like Moore indulging his own pleasure in the persona that he’s created for himself in interviews and public performance over the years). There’s a section I’m on now where he is writing from the perspective of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, who was famously confined to an asylum for much of her life. She thinks in Wakese. (Moore has already used this style in several of his comic projects — there’s a section late in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that uses it, and my favorite example, there’s Saga of the Swamp Thing #32, from 1984, in which Moore and illustrator Shawn McManus pay simultaneous tribute to Walt Kelley’s “Pogo” comic strip and to the word-chord method. It’s a lovely little fable, a grace note in a generally terrifying and brilliant run of comics, one of those little flourishes that says “I’m the GOAT.”) In both Kelley’s and Moore’s appropriations of the form, they deform and reform words, but the syntax is normal enough that you can see some basic skeleton of an English-language sentence peeking through. There’s a base meaning that you can pick up on right away, and then you can hear other, dream-meanings hovering overtop. The difference between what Joyce does is like the difference between truly atonal music and music that has a clear key center but is, you know, a little nutty with it. I’m not sure that I want to say one is better than the other: one pursues the method more radically than the other, but the other is certainly easier to digest.

(Apparently Moore has announced that he’s writing a five-volume fantasy epic. Alan, man, I love you, but there’s no argument that Jerusalem wouldn’t have been better as a very wordy comic, perhaps with lengthy text interludes, a la Watchmen and Providence.)

All Hail Our Orb Queen

Speaking of people with strong attachments to non-organized religions: It’s not clear to me at all that contested primaries “damage” candidates — I think this is folk wisdom inscribed by reporters who have grown bored with the facts, and clung to by Democratic-primary voters who don’t want to face how conservative they’ve become — and so I don’t really see any downside to voting for Marianne Williamson in the 2024 Democratic primaries. (Unless, obviously, Bernie runs again, or, say, Rashida Tlaib runs for the first time, which is hard to imagine.) She offers such a nice combination of “Fix the damn roads” and “Fix your hearts or die.” She probably started out as a grifter-guru but she has memed herself into being right about a lot of what matters. And she says it all in a Katherine Hepburn voice that would sound so nice doing the State of the Union.

Is this just a bit I’m doing? Is she just a bit she’s doing? Who knows.