Naming of Parts

Tonight B. and I were reviewing the extensive liner notes to Leave Your Sleep, Natalie Merchant's new collection of songs based on poems for children (I had written "children's poems," but that did not see quite accurate.) It is an impressive and engaging collection, worth all of the seven years Merchant devoted to it. When I saw the entry for Robert Graves mentioning him as one of the World War I poets enshrined in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, it brought to mind this affecting war poem. I could not remember the name of the poem or the poet. But as I recalled its impact on me, I become obsessed to find it. And I am glad I did. Reed is harder to find than the died-in-the-war poets, but far more useful in understanding war-as-phenomenon rather than war-as-experience. Reed's testing the flavors of the language, evoking the awful irony of military banalities in the ears of a young soldier learning to use his rifle in the ripeness of springtime--the equal of  his contemporary, Larkin. And no higher praise can I bestow. So read on...

LESSONS OF THE WAR

To Alan Michell

Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine gloria

I. NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
          And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
          Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
          Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
          They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
          For to-day we have naming of parts.



Reed, Henry. "Naming of Parts." New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942): 92 (.pdf).



I highly recommend you take two minutes to delicately but distinctly improve your soul by listening to Reed reading the poem. "Naming of Parts" is merely Part 1 of the longer poem, "Lessons of War." So don't stop here, read Part 2, Judging Distances and Part 3, "Movement of Bodies" now. Then order the collected works. Why Reed is not among the canonized English poets of war, I cannot understand. Maybe it is merely that his cool, meta-lingustics do not stir the febrile soul the way the less worldly Sassoon and Owen do. Or that WWII was not the same Romantic waste of English youth as WWI. But, hell, whatever the reason, let's you and I correct this distortion of the Free Market of Ideas. History is written by the living. So, let's do this thing. Who's with me?

Moments of Bliss: Finding a Source of My Beliefs In a 1970s British Sitcom

As cultural artifacts from my formative years continue to surface via the Long Tail of the internet and through remastering and digitizing of analog content, I am getting a fresh exposure and a new view into possible seeds of ideas that I have carried with me for a long time.

For several years I've been looking for a DVD compilation of the BBC sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin which aired between 1976 and 1979, so I would have watched this pretty much as it appeared, in my early teens. (Between Perrin, Monty Python, and Soccer Made in Germany, I have to wonder who I would be today if the programmers of the central Arkansas PBS affiliate had not taken such a worldly view of its programming dollars.)

Perrin is, in BBC style, a series with a closed narrative arc, completed in 3 seasons. It concerns Reginald Iolanthe Perrin (R.I.P.) who, in mid-life crisis (46 years old!), fakes his death. The rest of the series is the long and bitingly satirical tale of how he rises back into his life by making completely counter-intuitive choices. (Such as opening a shop selling items to give to people you hate--a shop that turns into an empire.) It is a sitcom sui generis--more savage in its critique, and yet more humane than any other I can think of. (If you have counter-examples, please share them. All those Norman Lear sitcoms from the same era tried for a similar balance but were less smart in their anger and more maudlin in their sentiment.)

I was thrilled to finally find Perrin on Nextflix, and have been slowly making my way through season 1. And then I got to the scene below, in episode 4. As I watched Reggie's speech, I was struck by how closely his argument parallels my recent post on certainty and doubt.

Although all of the clip is worth watching to understand his state of mind as he gets to the podium, at 6:45 into this clip, he gets to the meat of things (transcribed here without attempting to catch all of the asides, stuttering and misspeaking):

“’What do you believe in?’ I hear you ask. I'll tell you. I know...that I don’t know. I believe in not believing. For every man who believes something, there is somebody who believes the opposite. What’s the point? How many wars--how many wars-would have been fought, how many people would have been tortured if nobody had ever believed in anything? I’ve never heard--have you ever heard?--of the wars of the apathetic, or the persecution of the apathetic by the bone idle?”

Of course to get the full effect you have to watch it delivered in the rubbery-lipped rapidfire stream of consciousness that Leonard Rossiter perfected.



So that's where it started, I thought. And that seed was nurtured  by the Taoist writings of Chuang Tzu, the common sense and skepticism of Wittegnstein and William James, and experience. I encourage you to start your own campaign against belief by renting the series from Netflix.

Adios, World Cup, Goodbye

I guess it's over. Sigh. Let the last vuvuzela be melted down and made into green bracelets for Lance Armstrong's next public awareness campaign: "Bailstrong."

Carl, from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, please give the World Cup America's eulogy.

Apophenia 3

The shadows among the limbs of the triplets
cavorting on a circular bed in Backdoor Barbies
at 23:23 precisely are Robert Benchley’s face in profile,

looking down. At 32:32, a less precisely rendered
Alexander Woollcott, stares directly at the camera
from the strands of damp hair on Melody Mane’s

left cheek. Later there was Heywood Broun (nipple),
George S. Kaufman (bedclothes), and Tallulah
Bankhead (panties, flung, freeze frame at 1:06:09).

Oh yes, we made quite a thorough study of the artifact.
But no Dorothy Parker. No Dorothy Parker!
And we stayed up until 4 a.m. under the influence

of the idea that Dot’s ghost was taunting
her old chums, and wondering what other forms
of intricate paranormal persecution

might be present in every day that we just
don’t happen to see. We awoke at noon,
cloudy of eye and sheepish. I’m just saying.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem

By force of will I finished Chronic City in a late night reading binge. I had read what I now consider to be the best sections of the book--the Janice Trumbull epistles--compiled into an affecting short story in Tthe New Yorker a while back. The short story told of a way-long-distance romance between Janice Trumbull, stranded in a failing orbiting biosphere-space station and her boyfriend in New York. Chronic City is narrated by that boyfriend, Chase Insteadman. It turns out that he is an idiot cypher. Oh well.

All of it is hollow, false, ephemeral. Chase is a nobody, wandering the Big Apple aimlessly, buoyed by the residuals checks from his time as a child actor on a sitcom, Martyr and Pesty. (Honestly, I could barely get past that one. I do not consider myself overly sensitive to names that are so post-modern their obviousness is part of the joke, but in this book, even that latitude is exhausted. Richard Abneg? Please.) Janice's situation is somewhat better than Chase's: Janice and her plight are both entirely fictional (make that meta-fictional). Janice and Chase's romance is a soap opera (but with a flesh and blood hero walking the Upper West Side streets and gracing  gubernatorial soirées) perpetrated to distract the public by persons unknown but presumed to be public officials in cahoots with some meta-fictional production company. Awesome in the right hands, but...

Perkus Tooth (god, I was so tired of the stupid fucking names by the end) is the vessel of the plastic world. "Perkus" lives on coffee and marijuana. "Tooth" is a devouring mouth. If he were a mouth that issued forth creations, his last name would have had to be "Tung" or "Lipp," or, god help us, "Glottus." (Admit it: that is far less absurd a suggestion that it ought to be.) Perkus is nothing without his cultural touchstones and conspiracy theories. When he finally expires, the ER physician finds inside him only a "slurry"--no heart, no  liver, no stomach. Nothing, in short, essentially, or even mechanically, human.

If your book is going to be entirely about your bullshit ideas, fine. But make it interesting enough that I don't care if all your characters are cyphers, or painfully obvious metaphors. Lolita's obvious flaws notwithstanding, I will admit to being so taken with the talent and voice in the novel that I would easily take a Humbert Humbert and Vivian Darkbloom over Perkus Tooth and Richard Abneg any day.

Not fair to compare him to Nabokov? Sure. But he's also not: DeLillo, Pynchon, or even that bore Auster.

His ideas are weaker than his characters. And I loathe his characters.

Does the MacArthur Foundation ever retract a "genius" grant? Chronic City makes a strong case for an annual list of Take-Backs to go along with the awards.