The Monkey's Marginalia, No 9

These posts are about the various and sundry ideas, items and wagtails that are too short for their own blog post.

1.  The so aptly named Mississippi Muse commented recently on two of my blog posts and had some great insights.  Plus she is absolutely right that I should have included Gertrude Stein in the list of Lost Generation writers.  Her comments are below:

This maybe far fetched, but I think it is relevant. I know there are references to Hemingway early in the text. & the themes of being, "Lost", multiple characters, and this concept of "palimpsest" both pertaining to relationships and land/archaeology "histories of a place" reminds me of a quote Hemingway made about "The Sun Also Rises" (which bears the epigraph: "You are a lost Generation" --- Gertrude Stein) to his editor, Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost." Here is the Bible verse, Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 NKJV: Which has relevance and many themes pertaining to S. Verse 7. Which is similar to the quote: "What begins at the water shall end at there and what ends there shall once more begin" ..." & from the Book Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWaAZCaQXdo) " This is what happens when men are "LOST", Men are erased & reborn."

Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 NKJV

"Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher; "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." 3 What profit has a man from all his labor In which he toils under the sun? 4 One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever. 5 The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, And hastens to the place where it arose. 6 The wind goes toward the south, And turns around to the north; The wind whirls about continually, And comes again on its circuit. 7 All the rivers run into the sea, Yet the sea is not full; To the place from which the rivers come, There they return again. 8 All things are full of labor; Man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there anything of which it may be said, "See, this is new"? It has already been in ancient times before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things, Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come By those who will come after."

2.  In my last post, I mentioned the literary genre bildungsroman.  Goethe, who is considered the originator of this genre with his book, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,incorporated a secret society into this work.  More to come on this one perhaps, but I have some reading to do.  I have added it to the list.

3.  The Desjardins letter. I'll admit I totally misread the forward to Ship of Theseus and for a few days was geeking out over the fact there were 20 Straka books before I realized my mistake.  Doh!  Back to the Desjardins letter: totally disgusted and a bit discouraged I started going back through the book.  And I think there are a couple of scenarios that fit for the letter.  Remember in the marginalia, Eric states that he thought Desjardins' english was pretty good but maybe it was worse than he remembers (page 87) and later that Desjardins had written a paper in 1982 stating that Straka may not have been as fluent in languages as had been thought and needed someone to help clean up his work (page x).

• The letter was written by Desjardins, but is a form of constrained writing. Constrained writing is an encoded letter in which the true message is hidden within a seemingly harmless text. 
• The letter was written by Straka or someone with a less than fluent grasp of English and was NOT written by Desjardins.  
• The letter was written by Straka and is also a form of contrained writing.  

If it is constrained writing, I haven't figured it out yet. 

4.  Nabokov, like many other authors, did use pseudonyms.  One of these was "Sirin."  Which bears a striking resemblance the Serin Group mentioned in the marginalia. 

5.  I have discovered there is an unpublished and fragementary autobiography by the anarchist, devout Christian and King of the Hobos, Ben Reitman.  The name of the work?  Following the Monkey. 

(8/17/14, edited for grammar/clarity and tags added)

The Straka in Sherwood Anderson

It started as I looked into the feuds that Hemingway had with a number of other writers. He and Faulkner got into one starting around 1947.  Hemingway called John Dos Passos  a "pilot fish" in A Moveable Feast; the term was not meant to be complementary.  Hemingway and Dos Passos had a falling out after the death of Jose Robles.

Wallace Stevens intensely disliked the literati that started flocking to Key West, his long time hangout.  He got into a drunken fist fight with Hemingway;  which Stevens promptly lost (by way of a broken hand).  And Robert Frost forever earned Stevens ire by insisting that Stevens poetry "...purports to make me think." Which is an insult no matter which definition of "purports" you use.

Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring as a satire of Anderson's Dark Laughter.  It was Hemingway's satire that then caused his falling out with longtime friend Gertrude Stein.

But it was Sherwood Anderson that caught my eye.  His collection of loosely connected short stories in Winesburg, OH is considered his greatest work.  Published in 1919(!), the collection of 22 stories deals with the encroachment of industrialism and class on the fictional Ohio town of Winesburg.  In Ship of Theseus, Straka's novel Wineblood's Mine becomes a critique of unbridled capitalism.

In Anderson's short story Paper Pills, Dr. Reeky:

"wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reeky took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man."

Later, it is noted that:

"On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts."

And...

"During the winter he (Dr. Reeky) read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper."

Dr. Reeky marries a girl already pregnant, but she dies from illness within a year of their marriage.  Previously, her two primary suitors before her marriage were a jeweler with white hands and "a black-haired boy with large ears." (Not unlike the black haired sailor with bat wing ears on the ship?)

This caught my eye as S. finds himself in strange city with a sludge of paper with only an ornate "S" discernible.  Much later, he goes to retrieve the piece of paper only to find "...tiny, brittle wads sticking to the seam inside."

Also are the mention of apples which is evocative of the scene in which S. and his cohorts find some late season apples as they to try to escape from the brown coats.

"One nibbles at them and they are delicious.  Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all its sweetness.  One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them  Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples."

I was also struck by Anderson's use of birds and the titles of some of his other short stories.

The Man in the Brown Coat is about a professor of history who has been able to live a very comfortable bourgeois existence.  The narrator keeps seeing visions of his wife's face floating in front of him even as he acknowledges that he knows so very little about her.

Unlit Lamps concerns a dying doctor and his daughter's attempts to connect emotionally before it is too late.

Out of Nowhere into Nothing is the story of a girl who has come home for a visit at a critical point in her life.  "Rosalind thought he looked like a gigantic bird, an aged wise old bird, "perhaps a vulture" she thought."

The Lost Novel, in which an author finally inspired to write his second novel and does so.  But when he goes back to the pages, they are blank.

Death in the Woods, although presumably about the death of an old women, it's also about the fluid nature of narratives.

I must admit that some of the original passages by Anderson that concerned birds elude me in a cursory search, but as I find them again and additional connections, I will continue to add them here.

And I welcome the thoughts and inputs of others who may see connections and affiliations I have missed.




(7/31/14, edited for grammar and tags added)