Return of the Counterforce

Back in April, a screaming came across the sky, the announcement of a new Thomas Pynchon novel, to be published in October, entitled Shadow Ticket. This marks a literary event, an unforeseen comet spark in the darkness. Pynchon is arguably the greatest living novelist on the strength of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) alone, but the reclusive 88-year-old had not published any new books since 2013's Bleeding Edge, so his fans might've been forgiven for thinking his days of writing new stuff might be over. There had been no word of any upcoming new work, until this big announcement dropped. This signal from the Counterforce emerges at an especially dark time in the world when it seems everything decent is under siege, the war machine rages on, books are being banned, free speech attacked, democracy crumbling, history rewritten, reality itself overstretched and worn out. We needed to hear from Pynchon at this moment. 

His works have always had a prescience to them that has helped to inform the present moment, possibly because his novels often focus on an era in the past thru the lens of Pynchon's deep history, paranoiac descrying, and comic relief. I'm thinking of how Gravity's Rainbow is a novel from the early 1970s but is set in Europe at the end of World War II, following the ridiculous misadventures of a wandering lieutenant and his cohort of castoffs aka "The Counterforce" and their attempts to jam the gears of power and thwart  the military-industrial complex seeking to consolidate power out of the ashes of post-war Europe. I'm thinking also of Bleeding Edge, the 2013 novel that deals with the tech underground, hackers and cyberwars, although it takes place at the end of the 90s dot-com boom in NYC, with its narrative punctuated by the 9/11 attacks. And then there's also Against the Day, which is my favorite Pynchon book, it came out in the mid-2000s, a work of historical fiction focused on years at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, weaving world-building narratives across decades with a global setting featuring elements of espionage, steampunk, sci-fi fantasy, and anarchist westerns, while examining and educating the reader on some of the factors that led to the First World War. (See my longer write-ups about Gravity's Rainbow here, Bleeding Edge here, and Against the Day here.)

We don't know much about the new novel, Shadow Ticket, at this point except for the one paragraph description provided by Pynchon himself. His synopsis places the story in 1932, focusing on a private eye in Wisconsin, Hicks McTaggart, who somehow gets dragged into "bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering" and ends up in Europe getting "entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them." The elements of a private detective, caught up in the crossfire of counterespionage, in the period leading up to a major war, these are all familiar in the Pynchon universe. The internet has been buzzing with Pynchon news ever since, with some readers having received review copies of the upcoming book.

Amplifying the vibes of the Pynchon renaissance, of course, is the new film from director Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another, to appear in theaters next month September 26th, supposedly a loose adaptation of Pynchon's novel Vineland (1990). There were rumors for years that PTA was interested in making a movie of Vineland after the solid work he did adapting Inherent Vice, also a Pynchon novel, back in 2014. Leonardo DiCaprio stars in the new movie, in a lead role seemingly similar to that of Zoyd Wheeler from Vineland. Here's the trailer:

One Battle After Another (2025, trailer)

Vineland (1990) was Pynchon's first book following an extended silent period after Gravity's Rainbow (1973). It had a reputation for being Pynchon lite, a more approachable and even optimistic story than his previous works, although for all its lightness and humor, it's also a novel of political grief, forecasting the escalating authoritarian police state in the United States. Vineland takes place in the year 1984 in a fictional equivalent of Humboldt County, in northern California, during the heightened Reagan-era drug war. The story mainly follows a father's attempts to protect his daughter from the blowback of her parents' revolutionary activities in the 1960s. The new film looks to be a loose adaptation that places the period closer to the present day, ostensibly with the parents' acts of resistance having to do with freeing immigrants locked in ICE prisons. 

I first read Vineland back in 2017 during the first Trump regime in America. A few years later, I read a great book by Peter Coviello called Vineland Reread (2020) which revisited Vineland in light of the presently unfolding descent of the US into a fascist police state. Coviello is an incisive scholar, his book is dense for a slim volume, I learned a lot from it, as he examines the nuances and political depths of Pynchon's most approachable and light-hearted novel as amounting to a story of resistance against authoritarianism and the carceral state. Consider it recommended reading. 

Around the time of his Vineland Reread book, Coviello wrote an article with some of the main points from his book, you can read that piece here, it's called "Vineland and the Coming Police State" where he writes of Pynchon's 1990 novel:

It hasn’t become less sad, and certainly not less funny. But read it today, in the midst of our own fever dream of penal sociality, and you are liable to be taken aback by the clarity of its insistence that a style of carceral fanaticism—a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis—is no less a signature of the thing we call neoliberalism than are manic privatization, oligarchic dominion, and the total absorption of public life into market imperatives. Uproarious and joy-propounding as it is, Vineland is a novel of acute political grief—a thing as near to us as it has ever been, and likely to get nearer.

Can't help but be struck by how some of these phrases resonate with today, like "carceral fanaticism" in a time where the regime promotes something they're calling "Alligator Alcatraz"; and "a making over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis" when the senile scoundrel occupying the presidency has manufactured crises in order to send the military to occupy American cities. 

Another book I was reading around that time was Occupy Pynchon: Politics After Gravity's Rainbow (2017) by Sean Carswell. It’s an academic study, this one looking at the novels Pynchon published after Gravity's Rainbow and examining their politics in light of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. The novels from Vineland thru Bleeding Edge seem to model a resistance that is non-hierarchical, horizontal, fragmentary, harder to detect and crush. But even beyond any kind of organized community resistance, Pynchon also celebrates the individual's enduring refusal to comply with authoritarian control. Small acts of kindness, simple gestures of affection, or the creation of good art, anything to emphasize our humanity, to preserve culture and oppose the continued authoritarian efforts to rot our brains with stress and frighten us into submission. Just like Peter Coviello's Vineland Reread book mentioned above, Carswell's study adds new depths to Pynchon's lighter, slimmer novels like Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, while highlighting the shift in attitude and vibes after the dark paranoia of Gravity's Rainbow, moving to a brighter, more humane, optimistic sort of pleasurable resistance. 

*   *   *

What is the counterforce? That's never made exactly clear. It's a subtle, unofficial, intangible, loose shifting entity that is named in Gravity's Rainbow, but which is present across all of Pynchon's novels in some way, always with a vague, imperceptible quality to it. A book by J.M. Tyree about the counterforce as it relates to Inherent Vice considers it to be an antidote to all orthodoxies, an outlook that recognizes that despite recent history suggesting "the low likelihood of the present and the future turning out any differently […] we still must care for one another as the tragedy unfolds." To quote from an article written by a biologist in a scientific publication, the counterforce could be seen as more of "an organizing principle" than an entity:

...in the last section of Gravity's Rainbow, there is a “counterforce”, an organizing principle that runs counter to the tendency towards maximum entropy, at least in some instances. His metaphor for the organizing force is the period immediately after the fall of Nazi Germany, when competing interests — national, commercial, and individual — scurried about to carve order out of the rubble. Pynchon ascribes almost mythical character to the counterforce, which he also refers to as the “green uprising” or the “Titans of the Earth.” He suggests that there is a general principle, as fundamental as the second law of thermodynamics, but running in the opposite direction, that allows daisies to grow out of the ashes.   

This fundamental law of the universe, a counter-entropy, allowing daisies to grow out of the ashes, reminds me of a recurring theme in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, captured in a quote Joyce took from historian Edgar Quinet, of abundant flowers growing out of the rubble of clashing civilizations throughout history's cycles of wars. All of this stuff also makes me think of the work done by artists, scholars, authors, monks throughout history trying to preserve and encapsulate the treasures of culture, buried underground or otherwise fortified to endure through the chaos and destruction of the siege, to plant seeds for the future. 

Another version of a fundamental law of the universe captured in a quote is used by Pynchon in Vineland where a character has memorized a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson having discovered it "in a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James," which goes:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil. 

[- Ralph Waldo Emerson] (from Vineland, Pynchon, p. 369)

I'm glad to see in the summer of 2025, Thomas Pynchon is now having a moment. It means great literature is having a moment. A new book from such a legendary writer is some of the best news of this year. I've been seeing copies of Vineland stacked forefront in bookstores across the country in the past year. A new movie inspired by Vineland is about to drop, with Benicio del Toro and DiCaprio. And then we get Shadow Ticket. Something like the counterforce is returning.

A few other things to check out: the Biblioklept blog gave annotations to The Guardian's recent ranking of Pynchon's novels. LitHub also wrote about why Vineland is the novel we need right now. And some reading groups dedicated to Vineland started up, including this one at the RAWillumination.net blog. 

The Stone Vortex

Walking in a quiet cemetery in a scenic valley in search of a poet's gravestone. Silence, tranquility, the peace of souls in repose. In the midst of a road trip, I'd made a quick stop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on a summer afternoon to pay a visit to the grave of the poet H.D. aka Hilda Doolittle (Sept 10, 1886 - Sept 27, 1961), located in Nisky Hill cemetery, on East Church Street. The same street where H.D. was born and spent her childhood.

    Three months prior, back in April, I was in Asia walking along the beach on a small tropical island in the Philippines where a thick blanket of humid heat smothered the air and the lines of H.D.'s poem "Heat" became a repeated mantra:

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

     A poem like this one is an object of contemplation, an artifact to be carried around, consulted, unpacked and admired. H.D. wrote many of these perfect gems. H.D. was the premier poet of the style her lifelong friend Ezra Pound had called Imagism or Vorticism, for the concentration of compacted representation into a vortex of words. Efficient, concise, unencumbered expression carved into verse as if chiseled into stone. As Pound described it in his Vorticism declaration, "It is the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not yet SPENT itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing."  The point of the Image, in Pound's view, was not simply to create a picture in words, but to create an intellectual and emotional complex. A convergence of meaning and impression. For H.D. especially, the poetic image was not something inert, a verbal photograph, but something alive, a compacted energy that opens up a portal. 

    H.D.'s poems had become important to me the last couple years. There is a force in so much of her poetry that I find gives me strength. I had been reading what's widely considered her greatest work the War Trilogy last year when I posted here about shell poetics and quoted, There is a spell, for instance in every sea-shell: continuous, the sea thrust is powerless against coral. That extended ode to the sea-shell comes from "The Walls Do Not Fall" which she composed in London where she was living during the German blitz of World War II. 

    Pound's declaration about Vorticism emphasizes the Image in poetry, and it was Pound who originally suggested to Hilda Doolittle that she sign her poetry "H.D. Imagiste." He touted her work as the exemplar of Imagist expression. This was around 1912, before World War I started. Pound had met Hilda Doolittle when they were high school students and they fell in love, he eventually convinced her to meet him in London where they got engaged, before breaking it off. But they remained friends. Doolittle had also known William Carlos Williams since their high school days in Pennsylvania. It's incredible that these three giants of 20th century literature all basically grew up together. 

    H.D. led an interesting life. She was a muse for acclaimed writers like Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and Richard Aldington, she consulted with Sigmund Freud for years, she even starred alongside Paul Robeson in a silent-film about an interracial couple. She was in London during both World Wars. She traveled to Egypt and to Greece (both cultures were major influences on her poetry) and was living in Zurich when she died in 1961. Her cremated remains were repatriated to the US so that her final resting place could be in the Doolittle family plot in the Moravian cemetery on East Church Street where she grew up.

    And so there I was walking thru that cemetery on a quiet street in Bethlehem, PA hoping to find H.D.'s grave and hoping it was worth stopping for. It was my girlfriend's idea, she's from the south Jersey/Philly area and accompanied me on the trip. Neither of us had any idea what we were going to find, though.

    When we reached H.D.'s gravestone, there was already a couple people there paying their respects. The grave stone was decorated with sea shells, it felt like a pilgrimage site for her readers.

    Her epitaph is an excerpt from a poem she wrote in her 1929 collection, Red Roses for Bronze, the poem is actually titled "Epitaph."

So you may say,
Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims forever
one who died
following intricate song's
lost measure.

    The silence which hung in the air of the cemetery that afternoon spoke to me about life and death. I'd just learned a few days prior that an old friend I grew up with had tragically died far too young. The shock of this knowledge was fresh and the air was pregnant with meaning. It was also a day or two after my 38th birthday which, thankfully, I got to spend surrounded by my close family. With all this in the air, in my mind, with a friend's spirit having been permanently exhaled back out into the mysterious universe, I was there in the quiet cemetery surrounded by gravestones and wondering: What is the value of a human life? What are any of us worth to the universe? Why are we here? Why do we live?

Looking at the gravestones I was struck by the inevitability of our bodies and souls all one day inevitably being summarized and compacted into a stone tablet on a patch of grass someplace. The Stone Vortex. I also was struck how H.D., Hilda Doolittle, a relatively minor literary figure unknown to most people on earth, had achieved so much in her life and made such an impact that I and countless others like myself were drawn to visit her gravestone and I actually felt great pride for what she had accomplished. Her own poetry was etched in stone onto her grave and she inspired people to turn her relatively small, unassuming final resting place into a shrine. A suitable legacy, perhaps. It is in the brevity and economy of her use of words, so carefully chosen, often simple recognizable words, together coagulating into an alchemical reaction, a mystical force capable of inspiring, impacting, staying with her readers, all birthed out of a few lines. In her "War Trilogy" she wrote:

I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;

they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned

to hatch butterflies…

    The backdrop to this cemetery scene was kinda surreal, as a little further down in the valley stood an old steel mill, its rusty interlocked tubes and chimneys granting a steampunk vibe to the setting. 

    This was the old Bethlehem Steel mill, active during the days when Hilda Doolittle was a child growing up on this street. There was a story to be discerned in looking at the graves in the Doolittle family plot. Looking at the names and the birth and death dates, later reading up on her family, one could see that the family had a daughter who died at five months old. Hilda was the only girl in a family with five brothers. One of her brothers was killed in World War I in 1918 and, very shortly after that, Hilda's father died. It seems he suffered a stroke upon the shock of learning his son had been killed.

    Another of H.D.'s poems from her collection Red Roses for Bronze, "Birds in Snow" has a bit that I think captures the essence of the scene I was encountering:

like plaques of ancient writ
our garden flags now name
the great and very-great;
our garden flags acclaim
in carven hieroglyph,
here king and kinglet lie,
here prince and lady rest,
mystical queens sleep here
and heroes that are slain.

    Her father was a professor of astronomy. When he was appointed as head of the astronomy department at University of Pennsylvania, he moved the family to a neighborhood just outside Philadelphia. At the observatory at the university, Charles Doolittle dutifully observed and studied the tiniest, most minute perturbations of the earth's spin on its axis. 

    In the swirl of my thoughts on life and death, and the story of the Doolittle family, I was remembering scenes from Terence Malick's 2011 film The Tree of Life. A son goes off to war, the family learns that he has been killed, and as the parents process their child's untimely death, the film shows a sequence beginning with the birth of the universe, the development of solar systems, our sun coming to form, the earth congealing into a round rocky orb, scenes of dinosaurs, and then a meteor blast. The unspoken message seems to be that every individual life began with the birth of the universe, and every single event that occurred afterwards, big or small, happened in such a way so as to allow for the birth and development of that individual person.

"Till tree from tree, tree among trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever." 

- Finnegans Wake (p. 259)

*   *   *

I want to suggest some further reading for anyone interested, because I've been immersed in several books about H.D. and it's sprung forth far more thoughts than I could document here. I've been reading Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book which is a close study of her work. Also, the H.D. biography written by Janice S. Robinson, H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet, is informative. Also been reading bits of The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner. The NY Times obituary for H.D. is maybe a bit unfair at times, but also sums up her fascinating life very well.

    My interest in H.D. originally was sparked by something I read in a book by poet & critic Peter O'Leary Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age (2018), where he talks about what happened when H.D. traveled to the Scilly Islands in order to recover from being stricken with the influenza virus during the 1918 pandemic, and where she gave birth to her daughter. O'Leary writes (on p. 16-17) that when H.D. was there she:

entered into a state of consciousness in which she felt herself merged with her surroundings and her new body. An oceanic feeling, if you will. Albert Gelphi explains that she "moved into moments of consciousness in which feelings of separateness gave way to a sense of organic wholeness: collapse gave way to coherence and alienation to participation in a cosmic scheme." H.D. herself characterized this as a state of "jelly-fish consciousness" in which an "over-mind" drooped down across her field of vision, "a cap of consciousness over my head, my forehead, affecting a little my eyes." [H.D. elaborated as] "a set of super-feelings. These feelings extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jelly-fish reach out and about [me]. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. These super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jelly-fish feelers are the jelly-fish itself, elongated in fine threads." H.D.'s oceanic feeling was so metaphorically saturated that it was pervaded with sea creatures whose motions activated an anticipatory awareness of the unison she would feel with her daughter.

    Later, O'Leary writes: "... she would merge (that Whitmanian term) with octopus and shark, powerful predators of the depths, unlocking secret doors and daring occult lore." (p. 20)

    Speaking of Whitman, I've been reading his Leaves of Grass where he writes, after a child asked him what is the grass: 

I guess the grass is itself a child . . . . the produced babe of the vegetation.
[...]
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

 And later he writes: 

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death ...
[...]
All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses

Rest in Peace Michael Zazulka.

ReBuilding and Re: Recent Roamings

"The Hut"
by Fanny Howe

Up the hill is a hut made of sound
where two windows rhyme
and the tiles stay on
because they are nailed to a dream.
The dreamer wonders: Can this be mine?

The floor is solid and straight
and is amber from sap.
The walls don't leak or let out heat
from gray embers in the grate.

This is the original home
at the heart of brutalist design.
No storm can slam its shape apart.
No thief can carry it off.
It dwells in ashen buildings where the present sleeps.

*   *   *

This blog has been dormant for a while. I'm going to try to bring some life back to it. In my last post here, more than six months ago, I talked about having gone on a self-driven path of deconstructing my life and embarking out into the unknown for a while. For seven months I lived a nomadic existence, traveling around many countries and cities, staying as a guest in various friends' houses, hotels, Airbnbs, and an extended stay with family in Staten Island and Brooklyn. The trip sprung from, among other things, a yearning to plunge into the unfamiliar, test my luck, and experience the world after so many months in lockdown during the pandemic. In the aftermath of that extended nomadic period, I tallied up these numbers: in the lockdown year 2020 I slept in three different beds all year (the bed at my house and a couple places I stayed at during a roadtrip to Colorado) whereas in the last calendar year now I slept in more than 40 different beds in at least fifteen different cities in six countries.

While bouncing across so many places and living out of a suitcase for so long, I got into thinking about the feeling of and the meaning of home. Found myself thinking often about Gaston Bachelard's book, The Poetics of Space. Bachelard wrote, "A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability." (p. 38) Some houses grant illusions or proofs of stability better than others. I stayed in a few dumps and at least one badly insulated space during a couple weeks of frigid temps. I stayed in a sprawling mansion in Ireland where I didn't feel comfortable because of an unwelcoming host, I also stayed in a repurposed 19th-century military barracks in Ireland, a Martello Tower made of stone that felt extremely comfortable because of the generosity of the hosts. I stayed in a garage attic apartment in Texas where time stood still and I stayed in a barn in Texas where the metal-roof resonated from a heavy hail storm. The constant moving from one place to the next felt like a recapitulation of earlier departures from shells in my life---leaving my parents' house at age 21 to move to the other side of the country, years later leaving southern California to come to Austin where I'd never been before but have now resided for 11 years. Each time felt like a crab leaving its shell to seek out a better one (my sun sign is Cancer the crab). 

"The atmosphere is nailed together.

Limb marking threshold.

Each element struggles to 
make threat subservient
to shelter."
- from "Doorway" by Elizabeth Robinson

"I dreamed of a nest in which the trees repulsed death" 
- from Bachelard, Poetics of Space (p. 123)

During the height of winter I was living back at my parents' house in Staten Island by myself (they'd gone to Florida to escape the cold). With the recent memories of so many different homes and rooms in various places, I was centered back there at the home where I grew up and had first conceived of the concept of home. Bachelard in The Poetics of Space says, "In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting." (p. 36) As much as I despise being in Staten Island, my old house still feels like home. The city is so crowded, the people are so angry, it seemed every time I went out someplace I had a hostile altercation with somebody, but the old house still feels like home and it feeds some inner craving for peace of mind when I'm there. 

Here's Bachelard again:
"The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and corners was a resting-place for daydreaming. And often the resting-place particularized the daydream. Our habits of a particular daydream were acquired there." (p. 37)

I've always been a homebody and my personal growth has involved breaking out of those habits to go far out into the unknown and find my way, find how I can build a new center of peace in the unfamiliar. As a kid I must have spent lots of time in the nooks and corners of my house daydreaming, but I could never have imagined the adventures that would ensue. Roadtrips spanning the width of the North American continent, piloting boats along the waters of the Mediterranean in the South of France, expeditions along the rocky coastline of Ireland, bike rides speeding through the alleyways of Barcelona, panoramic views from the hills of Lisbon, late nights partying in the village squares of Antwerp, connecting with the sky gods while perched atop the Pyramid of the Sun looking down the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacán far out in the desert outside Mexico City. 

When I was a kid I loathed having to go on family trips out to New Jersey to visit my grandma because the open spaces and relatively rural vibes of Jersey made me uneasy. I needed NYC's clusterfuck of intersections and delis and pizzerias on every block. That's what made me comfortable. Now I once again live in the middle of Texas where the city center is equidistant to me as farmlands with cows, my neighbor's yard has a friendly goat, and too much time spent in the crowded and cranky NYC boroughs drives me nuts. 

Rebecca Solnit in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost writes: "Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis." (p. 80) This was the process I went through as a young adult. And again years later, after I'd established a home over several years living in Austin which no longer felt satisfying, I underwent the same process again. Burned it all down to start over from scratch. Ashes make great fertilizer. The past year has been full of big changes and very little stability, it has not been easy but it has definitely been enriching. Again quoting Solnit, "he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else." (p. 71)

Spending such extended time staying within the hospitality industry (hotels and Airbnbs etc) you start to gain a deeper appreciation for little things that make a place feel like home and how a place becomes a home over time. Living transiently also affords one a chance to cut things down to basics, carrying around only what you need. Most of my belongings including my entire library, all my art, and most of my clothes were locked up in storage the whole time. I had a consolidated wardrobe, compact but versatile enough for different climates. I mainly carried around only the books with the highest ratio of insight and lexical originality-per-page, which I had decided are these two: Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and the epic poem ARK by Ronald Johnson. Those came with me everywhere. 

During my time in Europe I also read two nonfiction books by Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization on the immediate developments that led to WW2 and also his most recent book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, about the secret history of US military involvement with biological and chemical warfare. Both were timely and highly informative reads, and Baker's prose style is so easily digestible. The newer book Baseless felt like a sequel to Human Smoke, though at least with Baseless Baker regularly breaks up the revelations of dark and deeply upsetting information with simple and grounding stories about his dogs and domestic life. On the other hand, the cold facts and details of mass killings of Jews by the Nazis in Human Smoke seared my brain to a degree that I am forever horrified by it. I had to hide Human Smoke when I wasn't reading it because just looking at that book put a bad feeling in my gut.

This material was fresh in my mind as I rode around on trains and planes across Europe, looking at the scenery and thinking about the purpose of life, how flimsy and fragile it seems, how long the land outlasts us, how we should soak it all in and enjoy life while we can. Ultimately I thought of how sick and fucked up so much of mankind has always been with twisted ideology and racist hate. The same struggles for power, wars against tyrants, recur in cycles over centuries. How the endurance of hope persists despite it all. How we are all just looking for a place to call home, a shell within which we can grow and feel at peace. 

Baseball in the Works of the Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away in March 2021 just a few weeks shy of reaching his 102nd birthday. Last year I wrote about Ferlinghetti in a few places: the James Joyce Quarterly published my review of Ferlinghetti's final book, I also wrote about Ferlinghetti and Joyce at my other blog, then I wrote more about Ferlinghetti and his incredible final book on this blog.

April is both National Poetry Month and the opening month of the baseball season, so as April comes to a close I'm going to pay tribute to the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti by looking at how he wrote about baseball in his works. Ferlinghetti grew up in Yonkers, New York (located right above Manhattan Island) and after spanning the globe on manifold adventures he settled in San Francisco right around the time the Giants baseball team moved their home base from the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan out to the Bay Area of San Francisco. Reading through Ferlinghetti's books, one gets the impression that baseball was a ubiquitous aspect of his life. His writings on baseball also tend to intersect with his political diatribes, proving once again that you cannot separate baseball from politics in America.

Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" (1972) is the most well-known of his writings on baseball. You can listen to him reciting the poem in the video below. American history and its manifestations in present day contexts often figures into the works of Ferlinghetti. His perspective was that of a fiercely dissident poet yet he was also a WW2 vet who commanded a ship at D-Day in 1944 and later turned into a staunch pacifist following his visit to Nagasaki in late 1945. His "Baseball Canto" foregrounds what truly makes America great, its diversity and inclusiveness, but for Ferlinghetti the gameplay on the field finds metaphorical resonance with the struggles of marginalized people for empowerment and freedom within what he calls "the Anglo-Saxon tradition." Themes of racism, colonialism, and exploitative capitalism are observable in the poem. The umpires become Irish cops overseeing the action. He envisions Willie Mays as "a footrunner from Thebes." Tito Fuentes becomes a bullfighter being cheered by the Latinos in the stands. Sort of ironically, the poet is reading Ezra Pound's Cantos while sitting in the stands. Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" opens this way:

Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.

Ferlinghetti once published a bizarre little book called Tyrannus Nix? (New Directions, 1969) where the text is presented in the poet's own handwriting with minimal punctuation. A satirical work, Tyrannus Nix? deploys baseball metaphors to mock and satirize then-president Richard M. Nixon. "Nixon Nixon I'm singing you this baseball Diamond Sutra from way out here in New Left Field in the International League." Nixon was from Whittier, California and Ferlinghetti writes:

This is one national sport we hope is on the way out The Whittier White Sox we hope are all washed up It's time for a new umpire and a new Hall of Fame Throw out a new ball and a new uniform and a new flag too while you're at it and make the flag green this time instead of bloody red and black-and-blue (p. 7-8)

Later in Tyrannus Nix? Ferlinghetti observes, "things are really tightening up out here And there's no relief in sight for you or us although it occurs to me that we are your relief if you'd only admit it." (p. 12) He determines Nixon to be a pitcher wearing a mask and throwing with a deceptive delivery: "But I never saw a pitcher with a mask before What've you got under it That's what I've been trying to fathom ever since they brought you up from the minors Did you learn that windup with the Whittier Quakers It's the most deceptive ever seen in a World Series a windup that gives away nothing and telegraphs nothing so that nobody still knows what's coming We hope not a fast change-up One wild pitch and you've blown it Your windup is so weird." (p. 13-14)

Glad I picked this up. In 1969 Ferlinghetti wrote a book attacking and satirizing Nixon called “Tyrannus Nix?” Text is presented in Ferlinghetti’s own handwriting. The writing is loaded with baseball metaphors pic.twitter.com/9IHkqeB5GD

— pq (@PQuadrino) February 23, 2021

I would not consider Tyrannus Nix? among Ferlinghetti's best books, it feels dated and many of the jokes fall flat, but as a time capsule and example of the prominence of baseball in Ferlinghetti's work it's kinda cool. It's also an especially polemical display of Ferlinghetti's attitude about the poet's role in society, from the same guy who went on to publish the handbook Poetry as Insurgent Art (2007). Ferlinghetti also wrote a two-part epic poem on the history of America, the second part of which is surely one of his best books. In that book, called Time of Useful Consciousness (Americus, Book II) (New Directions, 2012), he quotes this line from the poet Philip Lamantia: "Baseballs lost among the Pleiades (quoth Lamantia)." (p. 7) Ferlinghetti made no bones about taking lines from other poets, many of his writings are loaded with literary allusions and borrowed phrases, he liked to celebrate that TS Eliot or Pound tradition of poetry, "summarizing the past by theft and allusion" he called it. Some of his books have helpful notes in the back with sources for these allusions. His last book, Little Boy: A Novel (2019), is filled with literary references but does not have any footnotes. I'm hoping there will eventually be an annotated edition of the book, but some lines are identifiable via Google, especially when he provided them in quotes. One that sticks out to me is this sequence from the poem "Truth" by John Masefield which he immediately follows with a baseball reference:

"Man with his burning soul has but an hour of breath to build a ship of Truth in which his soul may sail---sail on the sea of death for death takes toll of beauty, courage, youth, of all but Truth" and it's three strikes and you're out at the Old Ball Game 

(Little Boy, p. 122)

Little Boy: A Novel contains numerous baseball references, everything seems to return back to baseball. It was his final book and seemingly all the major themes of his previous works are gathered in Little Boy, a densely-packed word-hoard that goes into American history, his own life story, with lyrical escapes into mystical contemplation of the cosmos and the precariousness of life in our present existence on Earth. The latter half of the book often reads like Ferlinghetti's mind swings on a pendulum between despair over the dark state of affairs and ecstasies of blissful poetry about life. Somehow these oscillations often seem to involve baseball. For example, on p. 150 he wonders: 

And so why am I watching baseball to escape the pain or ecstasy of existence and the Reds are beating the Yankees and should I be happy It's all relative and life depends on the simplest things to yield a crop of happiness as if it were something you could harvest (p. 150)

Despair and happiness waver back and forth. One beautiful sequence on pgs 154-155 revels in "the jet streams of light in the upper air of the spirit of man in the outer space inside us Endless rubaiyats and endless beatitudes endless shangri-las endless nirvanas sutras and mantras satoris and sensaras Bodhiramas and Boddhisatvas karmas and karmapas! Endless singing Shivas dancing on the smoking wombs of ecstasy!" and so on and on until just a few lines later his perspective again shifts. It seems like he remembers who the president was at that moment (the same president who was booed at the World Series) and suddenly he's back to thinking about baseball:

and the Man without Shoulders who can't lift his weight in butterflies is now in charge of the world And is there any reason to watch the World Series on TV while this is going on as if the fate of the world were on the Men with Shoulders out there on the Field of Dreams as if a bases-loaded home run could change the fate of the spinning world spinning with a curveball or one-hundred-mile-an-hour fastball to wipe out our enemies and save the world from whatever Yeah play the 'Star-Spangled Banner" and sing about "bombs bursting in air" to show "our flag was still there" 

(p. 155-156)

Later towards the end of Little Boy, there's a dream sequence presented in italics where the poet drifts off into the depths of memory in search of his earliest moments of consciousness, seeking the roots of his existence, the exact place where he was born. The book is partly about Ferlinghetti's difficult childhood, he basically grew up as an orphan who bounced around different homes and never truly had a family. In this dream sequence he's simultaneously dreaming of going to and recalling when he physically went back to find the house where he was born, the address on his birth certificate, a house located just north of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The tiny details recalled of life in that house at that time then summon up more vivid memories:

All at once, an incredible overflowing feeling of happiness surges up from nowhere. Born here!. . . some three hundred yards north of the northwest corner of Van Cortlandt Park. It must have been all country back then. The kids must have played ball in this green park with its worn diamond and its ancient rusted screen behind the batter's box. I can hear the bat hit the ball (perhaps pitched by Pop). And my brother running for first base ended up in Baltimore forty years later . . . Shouts and laughter tears and whispers fill the air. (p. 174)

Little Boy: A Novel is so many things at once, a perfect culmination for Ferlinghetti's prolific career as a poet. It's really more of an epic poem in prose than a novel, plus it's sort of an autobiography. In a flourish of wordplay on page 119, Ferlinghetti describes his project this way: "I unlock my word-hoard of ruminations meditations exhortations celebrations condemnations excitations lamentations liberations and ecstasies plotless as a life." The one precursor to the style of Little Boy (2019) was the novel Ferlinghetti published almost sixty years prior called Her (1960), a plotless word-stream of prose wherein the reader swims from one dream vision to the next, following Ferlinghetti in search of his soul or his muse or his anima. Just as in Little Boy, the visions of the poet veer into baseball themes:

Perhaps I was merely a dumb member of the audience strayed onto the stage by mistake, looking for some printed program he had dropped under a seat. I had somewhere dropped the key that explained the action, and one could not tell the players without a program, for the faces interchanged, fused together. There they moved on their dark illuminated field, playing their curious night-game, bounding after stray balls, winding their pitches on grassless mounds, or squatting behind a batter in their tools of ignorance. I was a world's catcher, I crouched there, wearing my tools, a fat receiver. I received signals, sent out signals to others, squatting with a signal fingers hanging down between my legs, crooking a penis finger now and then, calling someone in. They all moved too far out, other figures ran, white celluloid shadows, as in a strip of film held up to a light, and the film running away with them. I could not catch them, and they ran off through the streets of the world, until only one figure was left, a white clay figure I had started with, who might have been myself. It was not. It was a her. (Her, p. 10-11)

Peace CodeX

 

Peace CodeX from CodeX (1974) by Maurice Roche

 

Life and Death During the Pandemic Era

The last several years I've written annual recap blog posts sharing things from the past year that inspired me (places I traveled, books I read, pieces I wrote, music I loved, etc), but up until now I couldn't bring myself to do so about this past year because, well, fuck 2020. 

Notes on Delmore Schwartz (Part 1)

The young Delmore Schwartz, probably sometime in the late 1930s. 

A couple years ago I became interested in the American poet Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913 - July 11, 1966) when I learned that two of his greatest passions in life were Finnegans Wake and major league baseball which struck me since those are probably my two favorite things in the universe. At the time I was working on my big compendium of notable figures who loved Finnegans Wake. The Brooklyn-born poet Delmore Schwartz was a Wake-head as devoted as anyone on that list---he was known to always keep a battered, heavily annotated copy of Finnegans Wake with him and he'd often pull it out and recite pages. His copies of the book would fall apart from overuse, he went through several. Peter Chrisp wrote a wonderful blog post going into detail about Delmore Schwartz's surviving copy of Finnegans Wake which is archived online by the Beinecke Library at Yale. There I discovered this historical nugget which blew my mind---biographer James Atlas notes that Delmore Schwartz would annotate his copy of Finnegans Wake while sitting in the stands at the Polo Grounds watching his beloved New York Giants play baseball.

    That one anecdote really captivates me. Envisioning Delmore Schwartz, the self-proclaimed poet laureate of the Atlantic, sitting in the Polo Grounds, that legendary old ballpark in upper Manhattan, watching the Giants of the 1940s and 50s while jotting notes in his tattered copy of Finnegans Wake, conjuring that image brings me immense joy. It's a potent conjunction of really interesting and important things in my universe. Part of why I am writing this series of posts about Delmore Schwartz is as a way to process why this is so meaningful to me. 

    Delmore Schwartz is most well-known for his short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" which was published in 1937 when he was 24 years old. Vladimir Nabokov considered it among his half dozen favorite stories. The story first appeared in the Partisan Review and then was published as part of a collection of Delmore's work (entitled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities) that included poems, short stories, and a verse drama. That first book made him famous at a young age and while he never quite matched those heights again, he had a productive career as a poet, short story writer, literary critic, film critic, poetry editor, and literature professor. In 1959 he became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for his collection of poems Summer Knowledge (which included poems from his entire career, thus the award was a sort of lifetime achievement recognition). 

    While I had some fascination with Delmore and his work, it wasn't until I read his biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet by James Atlas that I got really drawn in. I found his story to be very inspiring, fascinating, and sad. I was really moved by that book. He had a shitty childhood, at a young age he was often dragged into the middle of ugly quarrels between his parents. His father was having affairs and then ditched the family and died young. Delmore (and you'll notice it's the habit of anyone who writes about him to refer to him by his first name) was brought up by his mother who had her own set of issues. Once you learn these stories from his life then his writing takes on new significance because so much of what he wrote was autobiographical. The story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is all about a dream where the main character watches a film of his parents' courtship in Coney Island and hollers at the screen trying to stop it. "New Year's Eve" was another story I enjoyed and it helps to know that the partygoers described were all real people in the Partisan Review crowd of NY intellectuals in the 1940s.  Another example, the verse drama "Shenandoah" is about a bris where a child was to be given the bizarre name Shenandoah and the child's uncle tries to intervene to protect the kid from a lifetime of abuse for his ridiculous name. Delmore wrote with a great sense of humor and this story plays out a little bit like the bris in Seinfeld---but it's based on his own life and the shock of family members when his mother bestowed on him the unusual name Delmore, which his uncle really did try to prevent. 

    Reading in the Atlas biography about how the older Delmore eventually descended into paranoid psychosis, lashed out at his friends, ended up in a straitjacket in Bellevue, and eventually suffered an untimely death in 1966 at age 52 alone in a seedy Times Square hotel, it was depressing and sad not least because it brought to mind a writer friend of mine who just recently died at a young age after lashing out at friends and spiraling downward. One thing that really struck me was how, even during the worst periods of his manic psychosis and alcoholism, Delmore still managed to hold down a job as a professor, was still surrounded by adoring young women competing for his affections, and he still made an enormous impact on those who met him. His friend Saul Bellow went on to write Humboldt's Gift in 1975 (which won him the Nobel Prize for literature) which was all about how much his beloved buddy Delmore had inspired him. Lou Reed, who studied under Delmore Schwartz at Syracuse University in the early 1960s, knew the man during his crazy years yet was so deeply inspired by him that he wrote a poem "O Delmore how I miss you" and wrote a song about Delmore's ghost visiting him on his 1981 album Blue Mask.

    Since finishing the James Atlas biography I have been reading all of Delmore's published writings, plus his letters, journals, and the aforementioned fictionalized account by Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift. Again, this research has all taken place in the aftermath of me losing a friend who died in late October. That friend of mine actually published several novels, and as I've been reading about and contemplating Delmore Schwartz I've been dwelling on the fact that, even though we can read things written by the dead and hear recollections from their friends, there's no way to really experience what that person was truly like to be around. So while I'm grateful that there's so much extant material I can dig through to learn more about Delmore Schwartz, what will always be lacking is the ability to hear the man in conversation, his specialty, the forum in which he was always such a huge inspiration to everyone who encountered him. 

To illustrate my point, here is how Saul Bellow described his old friend in Humboldt's Gift:

Orpheus, the son of Greenhorn, turned up in Greenwich Village with his ballads. He loved literature and intellectual conversation and argument, loved the history of thought. A big gentle handsome boy he put together his own combination of symbolism and street language. Into this mixture went Yeats, Apollinaire, Lenin, Freud, Morris R. Cohen, Gertrude Stein, baseball statistics, and Hollywood gossip. He brought Coney Island into the Aegean and united Buffalo Bill with Rasputin. He was going to join together the Art Sacrament and the Industrial USA as equal powers. Born (as he insisted) on a subway platform at Columbus Circle, his mother going into labor on the IRT, he intended to be a divine artist, a man of visionary states and enchantments, Platonic possession. He got a Rationalistic, Naturalistic education at CCNY. This was not easily reconciled with the Orphic. But all his desires were contradictory. He wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate, able to say anything; he wanted also to be wise, philosophical, to find the common ground of poetry and science, to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to free and bless humankind. (p. 120)

*   *   *

Reading about Delmore Schwartz and reading his journals, it quickly becomes apparent that no matter what was going on in his life, no matter how manically depressed he may have been at times, he would reliably return to two distinct lifelong passions to provide relief: major league baseball and Finnegans Wake. These two things are what I want to focus on in this series of posts because they serve the same role in my own life. 

    This passage from Delmore Schwartz: The Life of An American Poet by James Atlas perfectly encapsulates Delmore Schwartz the baseball nut:

Delmore's eager accumulation of knowledge was by no means confined to literature. He had a mania for baseball, that "drama in which the national life performed itself," and acquired over the years a compendious store of statistics on the New York Giants, who rewarded his attentions by winning the pennant every year from 1921 ("My first year as a fan," he once noted) through 1924. The memory of that triumphant era never faded from his mind, and toward the end of his life he was still capable of dazzling an audience by recalling the Giants' lineup and batting averages of some forty years before. In a late notebook, he remembered the excitement that had overwhelmed him in 1927, when "suddenly, in the depths of melancholy, electrifying news transformed my entire attitude toward existence. The Giants had acquired Rogers Hornsby, the greatest hitter by far in the National League, from the St. Louis Cardinals." As a child, he would race to the newsstand on 181st Street for a glance at the standings, and he used to spend hours loitering in a radio store on Broadway to listen to some crucial game. Twenty years later, when Delmore was living at Yaddo, the writers' colony in Saratoga Springs, he stood in a field admiring "the immense winter sky, crowded with the stars in constellations, but desiring all the while to get to the World-Telegram and read of the winter baseball news."  (p. 17)

That last line is especially relatable right now because I've spent many nights lately looking at the stars in the winter sky while also pining for some Hot Stove baseball news. 

    While reading through the book Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz: 1939-1959 (edited by Elizabeth Pollet) there was a passage that stood out to me for its beautiful and vivid description of him attending a baseball game in the spring of 1942. It's short and compact but there's so much to take from it so I want to try to unpack it here.

April 19, 1942:

The calculated disarray of the garage region, the railroad yards, and the used-car lots. The painted lines of the bridge, the murals of the fences. 

    "Our country is now at war..." said the announcer over the public-address system. Directions for going away, and hiding under the grandstand or bleachers.

    Much feeling against Stengel and Paul Waner. The Giants scored three in the first. Mize hit the wall twice with doubles, thinking the first time that he had hit a homer. Melton argued with the umpire in the first, Witek looked pathetic, Tobin disgusted. Werber had a rooting section loudly against him.

    A purple-black curtain of cloud, like a quilt or like a great Assyrian army with chariots, was over the sky. The crowd was pleased that the Red Sox had defeated the Yankees.

    A strong wind blowing, much smoke, much soot from the railroad yards, the fragrancy of Pittsburgh. I admired the strength of the locomotive, the instruments (what are the names?), pistons, which drew up and down, and moved the wheels. So, too, a child might be given a toy railroad train, Industrialismus. (p. 56)

Now, when I first read this I thought it must be a description of him attending a game at the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan to see his beloved Giants. Delmore was born in Brooklyn but he grew up in Washington Heights very close to Coogan's Bluff and the Polo Grounds. He attended many games at the Polo Grounds and he used to invite his fellow writers to come watch games with him. He once told his publisher James Laughlin, "It has been observed that anyone who has not seen me at the Polo Grounds has not seen me." (from Letters of Delmore Schwartz, p. 272)

    But when I looked up this game on Baseball-reference it turns out this actually took place in Boston (at a different defunct historical ballpark, the home of the old Boston Braves), which makes sense because Delmore was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaching at Harvard during this time. Here's the game he attended, the NY Giants visiting the Boston Braves:

Baseball-reference.com has the full play-by-play where you can see that Delmore indeed had the details correct. Let's go through it line by line:

The calculated disarray of the garage region, the railroad yards, and the used-car lots. The painted lines of the bridge, the murals of the fences. You can easily envision from this description what the surrounding area of the ballpark looked like. The murals on the fences were the big advertisements all over the outfield walls at Boston Braves Field as seen here. 

"Our country is now at war..." said the announcer over the public-address system. Directions for going away, and hiding under the grandstand or bleachers. This game took place just four months after the United States officially entered into World War II in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Pretty crazy to imagine they were already warning fans about being prepared for possible attacks and hiding under the grandstand. Big league baseball would soon be impacted when several players across the sport were drafted into military service, including the Giants' #4 and 5 hitters from this game, Johnny Mize and Willard Marshall.

Much feeling against Stengel and Paul Waner. I love this note. The kind of thing you don't see in a box score---the home crowd was really getting on Braves manager Casey Stengel and Paul Waner. Looking at the context it's easy to see why. Mind you, this was the early phase of Casey Stengel's career before he became an icon as manager of the championship dynasty Yankees in the 1950s. When Delmore was at Braves Field for this game, Stengel's stewardship of the Braves had led to three consecutive seasons of 7th-place finishes and they were on their way to a fourth consecutive 7th place finish. The hometown fans were also probably angry that the Braves had blown the previous day's game against the Giants when they gave up 3 runs in the 9th to lose 8-5. The other guy who the fans were apparently giving a hard time was future Hall of Fame outfielder Paul Waner, the team's best player who had taken an 0-for-4 in that previous day's loss and came into this game batting .188 (he fared no better in this game, going 0-for-4). 

The Giants scored three in the first. Mize hit the wall twice with doubles, thinking the first time that he had hit a homer.  Johnny Mize, another future Hall of Famer, had been traded to the Giants the previous December so this was one of his first games in a Giants uniform and he made a good impression. Mize mashed for the Giants in that 1942 season, finished fifth in MVP voting, and then got pulled into military service and went off to fight in World War II, missing the next three full seasons. 

Melton argued with the umpire in the first, Witek looked pathetic, Tobin disgusted. Werber had a rooting section loudly against him. Interesting that he notes Cliff Melton, the starting pitcher for the Giants that day, was arguing with the umpire in the first inning---maybe because he walked the first batter?---he didn't get into trouble in the 1st and ended up pitching a complete game for the win. The comment about Mickey Witek, the Giants second baseman, seems pretty harsh! Then you notice Witek went 0-for-4 and grounded into two double plays. The keen-eyed baseball evaluator Delmore was clearly picking up on something because Witek would go on to lead the major leagues in grounding into double plays that season. "Tobin disgusted"---that would be the Braves starting pitcher Jim Tobin who failed to make it out of the 1st inning. "Werber had a rooting section loudly against him"---this one is interesting to try to figure out. Werber was playing third base and leading off for the Giants, but he wasn't an impactful player and while he had a couple hits in the game he didn't do much else. My guess is these well-informed and cranky Boston fans remembered Werber when he played for the Boston Red Sox for four seasons during the 1930s.

A purple-black curtain of cloud, like a quilt or like a great Assyrian army with chariots, was over the sky. The crowd was pleased that the Red Sox had defeated the Yankees. This is the type of magnificent description you get when a gifted poet journals his experience at a baseball game. Also funny that he notes the crowd cheering when the out-of-town scoreboard showed the Boston Red Sox had defeated the Yankees in New York that day, 5-2. 

A strong wind blowing, much smoke, much soot from the railroad yards, the fragrancy of Pittsburgh. I admired the strength of the locomotive, the instruments (what are the names?), pistons, which drew up and down, and moved the wheels. So, too, a child might be given a toy railroad train, Industrialismus. Another set of fascinating first-person details. The Society of American Baseball Research website has a very informative article about the old Boston Braves Field (the Braves moved to Milwaukee before the 1953 season then bounced over to Atlanta in 1966) where they note the ballpark's close proximity to the Boston & Albany Railroad which eventually led to deterioration of the ballpark structure. You can see in the below picture (click to expand, see bottom right) how the rail yards were just beyond the left field fence. Delmore describes the experience of being there with such exactitude that you can smell the steel. Not bad for a brief entry in his journal.  

Boston Braves Field (from here)

Couple more notes about this game:

- This game featured no fewer than five future Hall of Famers: Mel Ott, Johnny Mize, Paul Waner, Ernie Lombardi, and Warren Spahn.

- Incredibly, this game actually featured the major league debut of the great lefty Warren Spahn. The 21-year-old entered the game in the 5th inning, retired both batters he faced, then was removed and only appeared in three more games the whole rest of the season (Casey Stengel got mad at him because he refused to throw at batters on purpose). Like Johnny Mize, Spahn enlisted in the military and spent the next three full seasons in military service. He fought at the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded a Purple Heart. Upon his return in 1946 he went on to pitch for 20 full seasons in the major leagues, finishing his career as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. And the poet Delmore Schwartz just so happened to witness his big league debut at Boston Braves field on a random Sunday afternoon in April 1942. 

Read Part 2 here.

New article in the James Joyce Quarterly on Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Front cover of JJQ volume 57.3-4. Cover art by David Nowlan.

I am excited to have a new piece that was published in the latest edition of the James Joyce Quarterly. This piece is a book review of the newest book from the legendary American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fascinating and entertaining text called Little Boy: A Novel. The full article is behind a subscription wall, but you can read the first half of it here. 

Here's the opening paragraph: 

The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned one hundred years old in 2019. To mark the occasion, he published Little Boy: A Novel, a compulsively readable feast for the mind stuffed into a breezy 192-page text. Though calling itself a novel, it is hardly fiction. The book reads more like a memoir written as an epic poem in a lyrical thought-stream prose style devoid of plot, bereft of punctuation, laced with literary criticism, and seared with socio-political commentary. It is a novel in the truest sense of the word: Ferlinghetti made something new.

If you're wondering why this review of Ferlinghetti's latest book was in the James Joyce Quarterly, it's because Little Boy is a sort of homage to Joyce. You can find Ferlinghetti quoting from Finnegans Wake and Ulysses from his earliest published works like A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). He continued to bring Joyce into his poetry for decades and Little Boy is a sort of culmination or capstone of Ferlinghetti's career, an epic poem in the form of a stream-of-consciousness in which he quotes and imitates Joyce frequently (among countless other literary allusions). Over at my "Finnegans, Wake!" blog I shared a post with a bunch of examples of Ferlinghetti alluding to Joyce throughout Little Boy: A Novel.

Besides the prominent Joycean element, the reason I wrote the review is because I absolutely loved Little Boy: A Novel. It has to be one of the best books I've ever read. Little Boy is both moving and laugh-out-loud funny, the language is incredibly rich and engrossing with sentences that go on for pages and build up momentum, mixing lyricism and mysticism with memoir, literary criticism with social commentary, the author's earliest memories and experiences with his observations on modern society while sitting inside a cafe in San Francisco. There are reflections on several famous literary figures Ferlinghetti was friends with like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, etc. Ferlinghetti has had a very rich century of existence---he commanded a sub chaser in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, he went to Nagasaki in 1945 after the atomic bomb dropped and was so horrified he became a staunch pacifist and activist for the rest of his life. In 1953 he founded City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and went on to publish Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems which led to him going to jail for obscenity charges. He's published dozens of books of poetry, novels, and plays and is also a talented painter.

In January I randomly picked up A Coney Island of the Mind from my bookshelf and started reading it. I had discovered the book back in 2018 on a trip to the Bay Area where the title had caught my eye as I perused the bookshelf of a friend I was visiting. Didn't know anything about it at the time, but having grown up in NYC and played hockey at Abe Stark Arena in Coney Island for many years, the title of that dog-eared slim volume intrigued me. So when I later visited City Lights bookstore on the same trip, I picked up a brand new copy of A Coney Island of the Mind. At the time I didn't know was Ferlinghetti's most famous book and that I was standing in Ferlinghetti's own bookstore purchasing it. Once I finally started reading it earlier this year, I got hooked immediately. 

For the next few months I read and re-read several books by Ferlinghetti, my favorite being the second volume of his epic poem on the history of America called Time of Useful Consciousness (published in 2012, the title is derived from an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible). Then I picked up his newest book, Little Boy: A Novel (2019), and it just blew me away. While I haven't read every single one of Ferlinghetti's books yet, I have read most of them now and I can say with some certainty that Little Boy is his greatest work. A perfect distillation of all the knowledge and experience he's acquired over a century of existence neatly packed into a relatively short book. The structure is economical because there are no chapter breaks and after the first 15 pages or so there are even very few sentence breaks. The text becomes a rushing river of poetic prose. The language is full of informal dialects, street talk, puns, and idioms. Ferlinghetti is a (now) 101-year-old poet who has owned a bookstore for more than six decades so his knowledge of literature is virtually unsurpassed among those walking the earth. He's also an old New Yorker with a great sense of humor. This creates an irresistibly rich and entertaining gestalt that never seems to leave anything out. 

I enjoyed it so much that when I finished reading Little Boy: A Novel, I immediately turned back to the first page and started reading it again. Then I finished it a second time and immediately read it again a third time. Reading books has been my main hobby for a while now and I can't recall having that kind of experience where I read one book cover-to-cover three times in a row. 

Trying to summarize why I love this book so much, I come up this: as a NY native, I relate to Ferlinghetti with all his memories of Yonkers where he was born (and where I played many hockey games at an outdoor rink where I once scored a hat trick); I relate to Ferlinghetti's obsession with Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake; the informal, playful language he uses makes him a joy to read; there's so much to learn from his literary allusions and stories; he also loves baseball and refers to it frequently in this book; Ferlinghetti views the world thru the eye of a mystic; with all of his experience, knowledge, and wisdom, he is exactly the person whose perspective I am hoping to learn from as he comments, in longwinded jeremiads, on our current political and environmental predicaments. 

The review I wrote for JJQ was restricted by a word count so I had to keep it short and here I am going on about this book and I've barely touched on its most moving element as a memoir. Besides all the cultural-political-social commentary and piles of literary allusions, the core of Little Boy is about the little boy Lawrence Ferlinghetti who had a difficult upbringing which impacted him the rest of his life. His father died shortly before he was born. His mother couldn't handle another child and ended up in a mental hospital so she gave the baby to her sister. Ferlinghetti was raised by his Aunt Emilie and learned to speak French. For a while they lived with a wealthy family who his aunt was working for until suddenly she just left with no explanation, never to be seen again, and young Lawrence grew up without any real family around. As the book carries on we get more insight into the imprint of his childhood in which he never received real love or affection.

There are so many passages in this book that I've starred, underlined, and annotated and I'm tempted to quote from it at length. As I describe in the JJQ review, the style of this book is totally unconventional. Sentences span several pages with no punctuation and he jumps from one thing to the next and back again. I will share a long section here from pgs 93-96 where you can get an idea of how this book works. Note: A big block of unbroken text ensues. Not always easy to follow, but always richly rewarding to read.  This selection begins immediately after Ferlinghetti quotes from an unusually profound Levi's advertisement he saw in San Francisco one recent summer: 

And who was that speaking if not Whitman or every common man on earth or elsewhere who else if not an American certainly not a European with all his baggage of centuries like Pasolini said when he came to New York in the 1960s and met the New Left rads and wrote that he envied these Americans who could act without first having to wade through thirty centuries of intellectual baggage like what would Heidegger do or what would Descartes do or what would Plato say or Plutarch or Herodotus or Gramsci or some other great looming intellect haunting their old Euro heads yeah you can imagine what with the European Communist parties tied up in knots and eventually destroying the student revolution or revelation of 1968 And what Tarquin said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger and so today the messenger embodied now as the media spreads confusion and doubt as to any eternal verity as indeed so do the philosophers or other heavy-headed thinkers who spread doubt in every direction even as Socrates did So that so that today there is a veritable clearance sale of ideas strained through the semiliterate media which ends up giving us a kind of Gazpacho Expressionism or cut-up consciousness as in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch or in John Cage's cut-up of any classic text as he did Finnegans Wake annihilating the beautiful hushed talk of Irish washerwomen gossiping in the gloaming while doing their washing on a riverbank where field mice squawk and dusk falling and night descending into doubt and despair and fear and trembling O lord save us Blind in our courses we know not what we do or where we go O the semiconscious existential despair of not knowing who we are and the boy all his life looking for himself and where he came from Father lost Mother in a madhouse and he the little kid wandering around knowing nothing having been told nothing of where he came from and who was to tell him the little kid plunked down on earth somewhere alone like a stray cat or pup without a collar or name tag and how was he to find himself in this twirling world spinning to the music of the spheres which is the sound of Om in which all sound is absorbed in which all thought all feelings all senses are absorbed yes and Om the sound of living itself the great Om of all our breathing the voice of life the voice of our buried life the voice of the voice of the blood then coursing through us through even the penis that strange appendage a peninsula of sorts a third arm or leg that so imperiously asserts its authority and inopportunely rises up and inserts itself into affairs personal or worldly and then so arrogantly lets us down at critical moments at the very gates of paradise or Nirvana or hell and refuses all our incitements "of mind and hand" as some Frenchie philosophe said even as he let down his pants in the queen's chamber indeed indeed and we are left with the perpetual astonishment of man on earth when confronted with himself or his penis indeed what a piece of work is man and this his daybook his nightbook and I am not writing some kind of Notes from the Underground as if I had any idea where any underground is these days if I ever knew since I've always been off in my own burb in some suburb of consciousness dreaming away or otherwise goofing off or picking my nose in hopeless cellars with fellow travelers or their ilk imagining I'm going to change the world or something and so I'm just some kind of literary freak and my mind the constipated thought of the race all too shallow to be called nihilism while all the while all I want to do is walk around the earth cooking the Joy soup What else is there to do with the rest of eternity and would you tell me what it is we're all supposed to do on earth anyway I mean truly just sit right down and think of an answer to all that while there's still time just give me a concrete answer as to what humans are supposed to do with all our time what on earth that is are we just to sit around like blobs of perspiring protoplasm or like chimps in trees scratching our fleas or whatever I mean maybe in fact it's just dreaming that we're supposed to do after everyone is fed after all is said and done oh no that's just a big evasion of the basic burning question What I want to know is what in hell are we here on earth for anyway baby baby Am I your bedroom philosopher or Doctor of Alienation Am I a willing well-fed participant and protagonist in our consumer society a consumer-gatherer or a rebel antagonist revolutionary an enemy of the state or something in between neither fish nor fouling-piece Tell me tell me the night is young and you're so beautiful pardon me if I am overdutiful Babeee and that's what he was asking himself as he grew up into something new and strange at least in the eyes of some totally objective journalist sent down here to earth by some managing editor with a low tolerance for malarkey who wants the truth and nothing but the truth so let 'em have it tell us what is what and who we are and what we are doing down here anyway The top-dog editor wants to know the straight story and are you man enough to tell it or are you brain enough to tell it and are you man enough to say I love you man   (Little Boy: A Novel, pgs 93-96)

Looking Back on 2019 (Part 2)

Books Read in 2019:

1. Harpooning Donald Trump by Tom LeClair
A short book of essays by a literary scholar arguing for the importance of literature during times of political turmoil. LeClair goes into what he calls "systems novels" here, that is, enormous novels that seek to contain everything. These can be useful guides to crazy times. He especially highlights Robert Coover's The Public Burning, a satirical novel that features a caricatured Richard Nixon as the protagonist and narrator. The book's best chapter analyzes Trump from the perspective of Moby-Dick---what LeClair calls "the only book you'll ever need"---and concludes:

And we will need literate readers---like Ishmael---to counter Trump's unscrupulous monomania. Not just literate readers but literary, which is literate on Human Growth Hormone. Literary readers do not think any more carefully than literate people, but literature trains one to care about and care for language as a sensitive instrument, not just a blunt tool for propaganda and power. I'll quote Wittgenstein again: 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' The world of literature is large with possibilities of imagination and thought and feeling. The world of pre-literate Donald Trump is small, impoverished by ignorance and fear and anger. Literary responses to Trump may not bring down a president or even affect his policies, but literary artists still must continue to provide models of rigorous thought and rich expression---just as medieval monks preserved manuscripts in an earlier dark time---for great and great-minded literature is in and of itself a harpoon, a weapon against the fake 'great' and small-minded demagoguery. (p. 95)