Month: June 2017

Intake Valves of the Soul: Quirks and Perks

christopher-campbell https://unsplash.com/photos/Cp-LUHPRpWM

I do not often imagine the soul as a machine, but a good metaphor expands the imagination.

Quote: This was when Geryon liked to plan / his autobiography, in that blurred state / between awake and asleep when too many intake valves are open in the soul. / Like the terrestrial crust of the earth / which is proportionally ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul / is a miracle of mutual pressures.

— Anne Carson,  Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

Continue reading “Intake Valves of the Soul: Quirks and Perks”

In the Eye of the Guinea Pig

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait_in_a_Convex_Mirror
Parmigianino’s Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror

 

It’s an old expression.

Before-Christ old.

Lots of people have said it.

Shakespeare has said it: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye (Love’s Labour’s Lost).

You probably know it as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 

I know it as T-shirt slogan and the vision of the credits from the James Bond film, GoldenEye, with Tina Turner singing the soundtrack in the background (speaking of farfetched memory and meaning overlay).

In More Mileage for Your Metaphorical Money, I gave a few clichés a new polish. Today, I look at Anne Carson‘s version of what is to be found in the eye of the beholder; her Quote isn’t as snazzy, but in some grotesque way it is memorable. Towards the end of Autobiography of Red the protagonist, Geyron, attends a meal where guinea pigs are served … as food. He does not eat the poor cooked beast on his plate (it’s a she, we’re told). Geyron and his friends get up to leave.

Quote: In the cooling left eye of the guinea pig / they all stand reflected / pulling out their chairs and shaking hands. The eye empties.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Unadorned, cinematic detail.

Continue reading “In the Eye of the Guinea Pig”

More Mileage for Your Metaphorical Money

samsommer https://unsplash.com/search/sea?photo=J3ABLQjZQBg

Where the metaphorical seas lap the literal sands of language, idioms are born. Some of them are then picked up, like pebbles, to be tossed around, transmitting meaning and merriment. Some get dropped, others get so smoothed out by time, tongues, and tortuous trajectories, that they’re labeled clichés.

Does that mean that a cliché is linguistically dead in the water and beyond the pale? That everyone is sick and tired of it? That you run the risk of boring someone stiff if you use it? Not necessarily. There are ways and means. Let’s see a demonstration (emphasis is mine).

Quote: Stories without [an implicit framework] go unread; stories with it are capable of knocking the socks off someone who’s barefoot.

This is from Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence. Her implicit framework is what Jorge Luis Borges called algebra in his observation that art is fire plus algebra. (How she interprets this algebra-framework is the essence of her book.)

What makes the Quote quiver?

Cute turn of a turn of phrase.

Continue reading “More Mileage for Your Metaphorical Money”

Earthlings: Quirks and Perks

vivek-krishnakumar https://unsplash.com/search/lava?photo=9UUge-2dWwM

Quote: 

Little rackety wind went by. / Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep. Somewhere (he thought) beneath / this strip of sleeping pavement / the enormous solid globe is spinning on its way—pistons thumping, lava pouring / from shelf to shelf, / evidence and time lignifying into their traces.

— Anne Carson,  Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

A reminder that beneath the layer of human activity the planet still does as it pleases—we are mere passengers, to be lignified in time.

Until then, let us find meaning in the passing scenery.

We are part of the passing scenery.

Big Silver Pin

markus-kauppinen https://unsplash.com/search/pin?photo=2W0feTQOor0
If there’s no silver, settle for gold

Quote: 

It happened by accident. Geryon’s grandmother came to visit and fell off the bus. / The doctors put her together again with a big silver pin. / Then she and her pin had to lie still in Geryon’s room / for many months.

Today’s Quote from Anne Carson‘s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse could also have been an excerpt from a prose piece. (I talked about the structure of her novel in verse in Dark Smell of Velvet)

A few observations without knowing any context:

  • Four sentences, four (or more) facts.
  • The tone is emotionless, straightforward.
  • There is an awkward, creepy feeling between the lines.

A bit of context explains some of the above: Geryon is a small boy, who is also a red-winged monster; the close third person narrator is saying why Geryon had to move out of his room and into his brother’s. The Quote is heavily filtered through this unusual boy’s mind, with the purpose of not only providing the back story, but more importantly, providing insight into his worldview.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Figurative language delivered as fact.

Continue reading “Big Silver Pin”

Dark Smell of Velvet

julian-bock https://unsplash.com/search/black?photo=Y6-GL40aPPs

Imagine you’re reading about two people having an awkward night-time conversation. One of them says: this isn’t a question it’s an accusation. You then read:

Quote:  Something black and heavy dropped between them like a smell of velvet.

My first thoughts: Fine line, weird line, I’m not sure I understand it, but I do actually, it’s neat, it passes.

What are your thoughts?

The Quote is from Anne Carson‘s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), a mesmerising, modern re-creation of an Ancient Greek myth as a coming-of-age story featuring a red-winged boy called Geryon. Its form is unusual; its content, unforgettable.

An example of a typical verse novel, according to Wikipedia, would be Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which is mostly written in the iambic tetrameter of Onegin stanzas that follow the rhyming scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, with the lower-upper case letters designating feminine-masculine endings. A restrictive form.

I recently reread Onegin, and the experience is nothing like that of reading the Autobiography of Red. Carson follows no rhyme or stanza scheme, no obvious metre; typographically, her lines alternate regularly between long and short lines. Whereas Onegin is written in corseted language of colloquial register, Autobiography of Red is written in loosely structured narrative verse while balancing poetic metaphor and plainly stated fact.

You’ll have a chance to see what I mean over the next few posts. But today’s poser is: What is black and heavy and can drop like a smell of velvet?

What makes the Quote quiver?

Sense shock.

Continue reading “Dark Smell of Velvet”

Mephisto and Words: Quirks and Perks

Words, power, and the Devil in Goethe’s “Faust”, pitted against Manguel’s “The Library of Night”.

angel-jimenez https://unsplash.com/photos/JZY4OdcUda8

Faust or Faustus of German legend started his literary life in a late sixteenth century chapbook by an unknown author. He was brought to the English audience by Christopher Marlowe in his play Doctor Faustus, and then flourished in Goethe’s Faust more than two hundred years later (and has become a literary trope since then).

Faust is God’s favourite scholar, bent on learning all there is but dissatisfied with what he has thus far achieved. Mephistopheles is a demon who bets with God that Faust can be corrupted, and proceeds to pit his wits against Faust. In Goethe’s dramatisation, Mephistopheles is a whimsical, down-to-earth character—he is the cynic to Faust’s romantic—and he has some of the best, if not wisest, lines in the play.

Since Quiver Quotes is devoted to fine writing, and in that sense too, the art of rhetoric and the power of the word, let us hear what Mephistopheles, or Mephisto as is his hypocoristic, has to say about words, paradoxes, and human nature. (Taken from the Wordsworth Classics edition; translation by John R. Williams.)

MEPHISTO.    I’ve always found that you can fox
                           A wise man or a fool with paradox.
                           It’s an old trick, but it works all the same,
2560                 And every age has tried time and again
                           To spread not truth, but error and obscurity,
                           By making three of one and one of three.
                           And so the fools can preach and teach quite undisturbed —
                           Who wants to argue with them? Let them wander on;
2555                  Most men believe that when they hear a simple word,
                           There must be some great meaning there to ponder.
                                                                                               (2557–2566)

Continue reading “Mephisto and Words: Quirks and Perks”

Con, Con, Congeries

https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14733168616/in/photolist-orVkJy-otWZaC-orXrW9-otEZaP-ocuuyA-orTUAQ-otYaiz-oygCAv-orWcYS-otWVQp-osNqow-otGvdn-odjCWu-otKkrq-orQ1Dj-otLpgN-ous93c-orX1JW-odruyL-otEVWp-otKWHY-otLuYQ-ovGWj4-otJdP9-owbpMh-otNjBU-ocuqLn-otYyrL-orWESb-ocuBgk-ovGfkX-otREu4-orXPZh-otN8t1-otDGiV-orVviJ-odctZK-oygr3k-otG9Ki-otKr4N-ovByFz-otWDpZ-ocYv7G-orVRZd-ouQhMx-otWu39-oeQCcX-owu9yU-otZ6UP-otFP9e

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.

And so starts Charles Williams‘s War in Heaven. It’s a murder mystery. It’s a Grail quest. It’s a very British take on … ? Whatever it is, its beginning had me gripped—for about ten pages. The opening line isn’t today’s Quote, although, it has merit: there’s the urgency (the wildly ringing telephone), a conflict and contrast (but without results), and the kicker in the most emphatic position of a sentence (but the corpse).

Moving on. A character called Kennet Mornington is caught in a drizzle as he exits the train station. He takes refuge under a shed.

Quote: 

“Oh, damn and blast!” [Kenneth] cried with a great voice. “Why was this bloody world created?”

“As a sewer for the stars,” a voice in front of him said. “Alternatively, to know God and to glorify Him for ever.”

Kenneth peered into the shed, and found that there was sitting on a heap of stones at the back a young man of about his own age, with a lean, long face, and a blob of white on his knee which turned out in a few minutes to be a writing pad.

“Quite,” Kenneth said. “The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative. They might be con-con consanguineous? contemporaneous? consubstantial? What is the word I want?”

“Contemptible, concomitant, conditional, consequential, congruous, connectible, concupiscent, contaminable, considerable,” the stranger offered him. “The last is, I admit, weak.”

“The question was considerable,” Kenneth answered.

What makes the Quote quiver?

A list,

a pile,

a heap,

a stack,

an assemblage,

an accumulation,

an aggregation,

an agglomeration.

Continue reading “Con, Con, Congeries”

Startled, the Armchair

Personification in John Banville’s “Mefisto”, and other examples.

jennifer-pallian https://unsplash.com/search/candy?photo=dcPNZeSY3yk
Is the candy angry about being eaten, or is it calling out to be eaten?

We, humans, see human-like activity everywhere and it makes life all the more agreeable.

Be it the solution that jumped out at you, the chocolate ice-cream that calls your name every time you pass the fridge, or the red spots that dance on your eyelids if you close your eyes after staring at the sun. And those are just the terms that have crept into everyday language. Of course, there are also the poetic varieties, like:

Here’s John Banville, in Mefisto, giving a living room description. The shutters are down; outside is a sunlit afternoon.

Quote: Sophie opened the shutters. The room greeted the sudden glare with a soundless exclamation of surprise. An armchair leaned back, its armrests braced, in an attitude of startlement and awe.

What makes the Quote quiver?

The room, the armchair as living beings.

Continue reading “Startled, the Armchair”

Humour: Quirks and Perks

igor-ovsyannykov https://unsplash.com/search/pottery?photo=HT_MKv4MuVc

Humour is one of those things that you recognise about the time it makes you smile. Most people would rather enjoy it than figure out its rhetorical secrets. But there’s good reason to make an effort: not everyone is born a humorist, and I believe that those of us left without the gift can still learn to throw a joke, the way even the worst apprentice learns to throw a pot—it may be a laughing stock, but it’ll hold water.

Don’t let the first line of the Quote throw you.

Quote: Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his moments and his down moments, and you certainly don’t have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of situation and mood. But there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying, and if a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break over into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.

— E. B. White in his essay, Some Remarks on Humour.

Truth can banish and burn like fire;
          Truth can cleanse and calm like water.
Truth can be relative and unknowable,
          Truth can be worth dying for.
Truth is hysteria at wit’s end and euphoria at life’s beginning.
xopɐɹɐd ɐ sı ɥʇnɹ⊥
Truth is the reason we can cry while laughing and laugh while crying,
          and why it’s not the same thing,
                    and why poetry still makes sense centuries later,
                    and why humour doesn’t, but we write more of it anyway.

Continue reading “Humour: Quirks and Perks”

Understate to Underline

jules-miller- https://unsplash.com/photos/Kw1OTtDcWUE
California—where Chandler’s novels are set—on a good day

 

Wealthy client speaks first. Detective-for-hire speaks second.

Quote: 

“Tell me about yourself, Mr. Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?”

“Sure, but there’s very little to tell. I’m thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there’s any demand for it. There isn’t much in my trade. I worked for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once. His chief investigator, a man named Bernie Ohls, called me and told me you wanted to see me. I’m unmarried because I don’t like policemen’s wives.”

It’s humour this week, and today I’m featuring one last Quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (for a while, at least).

If you read my previous post, Stained-Glass Romance, or indeed any of last week’s posts about Marlowe’s adventures, you’ll have a context for the Quote, and it’ll mean something if I say the client speaking is General Sternwood, whose front door accommodates Indian elephants and whose stained-glass windows feature clumsy, sociable knights attempting to untie scantily clad damsels bound to trees.

If you don’t have the context, you need none.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Ironic self-deprecation.

Continue reading “Understate to Underline”

Stained-Glass Romance

On quoins that make Raymond Chandler’s prose humorous. (Quoins are what I call quirks in the text.)

jeremy-bishop https://unsplash.com/photos/uLXBeh6oHn8
One baby elephant coming through

Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep sets the standard for humour against which I measure other similar hard-boiled detective novels. In the second paragraph of the book, Chandler uses a number of figures to achieve his signature deadpan style. His private detective and first-person narrator, Philip Marlowe, is visiting a wealthy client, Mr Sternwood. Marlowe describes the place.

Quote: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.

If you’re curious about the first paragraph of the book, I discuss it in No One Knows About the Dark Blue Clocks.

Whilst the genre was already replete with humour before he started writing, Chandler managed to give Marlowe imaginative, literary metaphors and an eye for the amusing, making him both a pulp-fiction hero and poet of droll wit. Metaphors I discussed last week; this week is about humour.

(By the way, droll, the adjective, can be thought of as an auto-antonym, or Janus-word, meaning both intentionally and unintentionally amusing in a quirky, queer way.)

What makes the Quote quiver?

Imagery, innuendo, imaginative irony.

Continue reading “Stained-Glass Romance”

Metaphor: Quirks and Perks

On Raymond Chandler’s “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts”, and why it works.

-173775 https://unsplash.com/search/heart?photo=JxLf4KYVT-A
Hearts of crockery: easier to break. Or are they?

 

Quote: Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

This is one of Raymond Chandler‘s most famous quotes. If you haven’t read The Big Sleep you may think it comes as a closing line of a grand argument or as a poignant reminder of life’s tragedies during a display of heightened emotional turmoil. You may think it, but er … I guess I shouldn’t tell you. It is at least true that the protagonist says it and not some minor character or the antagonist (e.g. in Goethe’s Faust Mephistopheles gets some of the best lines).

Hard-boiled detectives in general, and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in particular, are descendants of the nineteenth century romantic heroes—think Goethe’s Young Werther who got it all started, Dumas’s Dantès, Pushkin’s Onegin—those self-destructive, misunderstood, lonely souls that pursue justice or a higher truth on society’s margins. So it is to be expected that Marlowe should contribute to this romantic tradition with a statement about love, death, and the thing that causes both and lies in the middle: life.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Shimmering depth.

Continue reading “Metaphor: Quirks and Perks”