"Zonked, bushed, or just plain hebetudinous, most readers will be glad to get to the end of 'A History of Fatigue.'"

"Its virtues are undeniable; it is stoutly industrious and inquisitive, and, in the corralling of evidence, Vigarello shows such dedication that he should seriously consider moonlighting as a homicide detective. Any corpse would give its eyeteeth to have him on the case. The problem is that Vigarello’s piling up of information becomes too much to absorb, and he’s so frantically busy thinking everything through, as it were, that he neglects to pause for thought. Compare one of his predecessors, the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso... [who began his own study of fatigue with these words]: 'One spring, towards the end of March, I happened to be in Rome, and, hearing that the migration of the quails had begun, I went down to Palo on the sea coast in order to ascertain whether these birds, after their journey from Africa, showed any of the phenomena of fatigue. The day after my arrival I rose when it was still dark, took my gun, and walked along the shore towards Fiumicino.'"

 
Writes Anthony Lane in "The Exhausting History of Fatigue/Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse" (The New Yorker).

The book under discussion is "A History of Fatigue: From the Middle Ages to the Present." by Georges Vigarello.

Yes, of course, it was "hebetudinous" that pushed me over the line toward blogging this.

"Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It’s in having taken an ethos, as he does in Perri, that squirrel film..."

"... where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great. Alexander gave orders to the fishermen that if they found out anything about fish that was interesting, a specific thing, they were to tell Aristotle. And with that correlation you got ichthyology to the scientific point where it stayed for two thousand years. And now one has got with the camera an enormous correlation of particulars. That capacity for making contact is a tremendous challenge to literature. It throws up the questions of what needs to be done and what is superfluous."

Said Ezra Pound in an interview with The Paris Review in 1962.

I found that as a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond," pp. 30-31:

Goodbye to Jimmy Breslin.

"Jimmy Breslin, Legendary New York City Newspaper Columnist, Dies at 88," the NYT reports.

With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively simple and poorly imitated, Mr. Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the hurly-burly music of newspapers. Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated Herald Tribune column from 1963 that sent legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”:

“Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.”

And here is how he described what motivated Breslin the writer: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

This is me, in 1970, sitting under a Mailer/Breslin poster:


PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Cohen.

The NYT obit makes no mention of the political frolic with Mailer, but here's an earlier article, from when Mailer died (2007), "Mailer’s Nonfiction Legacy: His 1969 Race for Mayor":

His running mate for City Council president was the columnist Jimmy Breslin, who suspected the worst from the very beginning: that Mr. Mailer was serious....

Mr. Breslin recently recalled Mr. Mailer’s arguing brilliantly at Brooklyn College that the minds of white and black children would grow best if they were together in the same classrooms. One student interrupted: “We had a lot of snow in Queens last year and it didn’t get removed,” he said. “What would you do about it?” To which Mr. Mailer, abruptly dislodged from his lofty oratorical perch, replied that he would melt the snow by urinating on it.

Mr. Mailer’s political nadir was a campaign rally at the Village Gate nightclub where he vilified his own supporters as “spoiled pigs.” Mr. Breslin left the rally early. He later told a friend, “I found out I was running with Ezra Pound.” Mr. Breslin was referring not to Pound’s poetry, but to his insanity.

Mr. Mailer’s “left-conservative” platform called for a monorail, a ban on private cars in Manhattan and a monthly “Sweet Sunday” on which vehicles would be barred from city streets, rails or airspace altogether. He championed self-determination — the city itself would secede and become the 51st state. Individual neighborhoods would be empowered to govern according to their own prerogatives, which could range from compulsory free love to mandatory church attendance. 

I love the random resonances of blogging: Ezra Pound just came up 2 days ago. Poets. Poetry. I love it all. Even the "lofty oratorical perch." Reminds me of that famous Samuel Johnson line: "Sir, a fish's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

And I love that poster.



New York City — the 51st State. Makes me think of that old song:

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right....
How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again....

But it's all lost to the distant past. I'm not 19 anymore. Norman's gone. Jimmy's gone. The is-he-insane blustery assemblage of masculinity isn't a satirical mayoral candidate but President of the United States. And there's no newspaper columnist to give a damn about.

"Zeus and Achilles were 'almost a religion' to him; how could the 'insipid blackness of the Episcopalian Church'—the faith of fashionable Boston—compete with the 'whoring of Zeus and the savagery of the heroes?'"

Wrote 19-year-old Robert Lowell to 51-year-old Ezra Pound in 1936, according to this New Yorker review of a book about Lowell. Lowell was trying to ingratiate himself to Pound, trying to convince the old poet to let him "come to Italy and work under you and forge my way into reality." What on earth would you say to try to seem like a poet worthy of an internship with another poet? Lowell also said:

I had violent passions for various pursuits usually taking the form of collecting: tools; names of birds; marbles; catching butterflies, snakes, turtles etc; buying books on Napoleon... I caught over thirty turtles and put them in a well where they died of insufficient feeding....

I was looking for that passage — having heard it yesterday on the audio version of The New Yorker — and I happened to run into this other article which has some similar material: "The Sage of Yale Law School." The "sage" is Anthony Kronman, who's got a new book, "an eleven-hundred-page exploration of his personal theology, called 'Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan'":

Kronman’s book... explains the Greek view of life, as it was expressed by Aristotle; then he describes the Judeo-Christian view, as espoused by Augustine and Aquinas; finally, he explores atheism. In each case, he shows why the best possible version of each world view is unsatisfying. He concludes that “born-again paganism”—a theology of his own invention, holding that God and the world are the same—is the only truly convincing way to understand our place in the universe....

Kronman sees born-again paganism as inherently democratic. It “divinizes the distinctiveness of every individual,” he writes.... His ideas about divinity seem, at times, more poetic than religious; toward the end of the book, he devotes many pages to Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens....

Poets... but what about Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound? Neither are mentioned in "Confessions," and though I haven't scanned the 1100 pages — I've only used the "search inside this book" function at Amazon — I take it that Kronman's "paganism" has nothing to do with the whoring of Zeus and the savagery of the heroes. He also doesn't mention Episcopalians and their — as Lowell would have it — "insipid blackness."

"... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music..."

Wrote Ezra Pound in "ABC of Reading":

I was talking about Ezra Pound and "ABC of Reading" in connection with Bob Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Some people had been saying songs are not "literature," and I was looking at the etymology of the word "literature" and ran into another quote from Ezra Pound. (It was: "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.")

In the comments, Jeff Gee got me pointed to the quote clipped out above.

What's that Latin? It's Horace, saying:

Now drink
Now with loose feet
Beat the earth 

Pulsanda! I love that word. I need another rat just so I can call her Pulsanda.

Here:



Pulsanda.

I do understand how some literalists look at the word "Literature" and say that it denotes material that is to be read.

Here's what the Online Etymology Dictionary says:

In English originally "book learning" (in which sense it replaced Old English boccræft); the meaning "activity of a writer, the profession of a literary writer" is first attested 1779 in Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets;" that of "literary productions as a whole, body of writings from a period or people" is first recorded 1812.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. [Ezra Pound, "ABC of Reading"]

Meaning "the whole of the writing on a particular subject" is by 1860; sense of "printed matter generally" is from 1895....

Oh, hang on. I have a point I'm making. But I have Dylanmind and I must disrupt my literature — such as it is — to do my Dylan imitation. You're reading, but imagine hearing it:

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 — "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."

Ezra Pound never won. Nor did Ezra Pound really fight with T.S. Eliot in the captain's tower, whatever that is. Back when "Desolation Row" came out, it was 1965, and we would have assumed that something called "the captain's tower" was a phallus, but people don't talk like that anymore. And why didn't Sigmund Freud win the Nobel Prize in Literature? That was some kick-ass literature he wrote. It came out in book form, and people read those books.



That's Ezra. Man, look at him. He looks like Bob Dylan.

Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

Oh, Ezra. There are winners and losers, and he's a big time loser. But he said — see above — "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." He didn't say, it's got to be read. He said it is language, the best of language. That would include words written to be heard, not read, if only the words were good enough. But he had terrible political judgment.

Yet you are the literalist perhaps, and politics has no part in your assessment of the meaning of words. Literature is stuff that you read, and Bob Dylan's songs are designed to be heard mixed up with sounds from musical instruments, sounds that are not words at all.

But the Nobel Committee is not a committee on precision in language, and it controls the scope of the meaning of its prize. It doesn't have to give the prize to the person who most closely embodies the meaning of the name of the prize. And anyway, the committee is operating in Swedish. If you're so hot to be literal, start speaking Swedish.