The Monkey's Marginalia, No. 2

1.  I forgot to include in my post about Sherwood Anderson a bit about his mental breakdown early in his career which mirrors the amnesia of S. in Ship of Theseus a little.  Also the mention of "fugue state" in the wikipedia article may be relevant as a clue.  According to wikipedia,

"On Thursday, November 28, 1912, Anderson came to his office in a slightly nervous state. According to his secretary, he opened some mail, and in the course of dictating a business letter became distracted. After writing a note to his wife, he murmured something along the lines of "I feel as though my feet were wet, and they keep getting wetter," and left the office. Four days later, on Sunday December 1, a disoriented Anderson entered a drug store on East 152nd Street in Cleveland and asked the pharmacist to help figure out his identity. Unable to make out what the incoherent Anderson was saying, the pharmacist discovered a phone book on his person and called the number of Edwin Baxter, a member of the Elyria Chamber of Commerce. Baxter came, recognized Anderson, and promptly had him checked into the Huron Road Hospital in downtown Cleveland, where Anderson's wife (who he would hardly recognize) went to meet him.
Even before returning home, Anderson begun the lifelong practice of reinterpreting the story of his breakdown. Despite news reports in the Elyria Evening Telegram and the Cleveland Press following his admittance into the hospital outlining the cause of the breakdown as "overwork" and mentioning Anderson's inability to remember what happened, on December 6 the story changed. All of the sudden, the break became voluntary when the Evening Telegram reported (possibly spuriously) that "As soon as he recovers from the trance into which he placed himself, Sherwood Anderson...will write a book of the sensations he experienced while he wandered over the country as a nomad."  This same sense of personal agency is alluded to thirty years later in Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942) where the author wrote of his thought process before walking out, "I wanted to leave, get away from business...Again I resorted to slickness, to craftiness...The thought occured to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out..." This idea, however, that Anderson made a conscious decision on November 28 to make a clean break from family and business is unlikely.^"

2.  On 1/10/2014 @kmvastra made two tweets: 

• The constellations are clear this evening 
• L-749A-79-46

The tweets lead to a plane crash that occurred on October 28, 1949. The plane was travelling from Paris to New York with a planned stop in Portugal. The crash killed 48 and was attributed to pilot error when the plane flew into a mountain during approach to Portugal airport.

Among the casualities were Marcel Cerdan, world champion boxer, who at the time, was in a relationship with the singer Edith Piaf; and world class violinist Ginette Neveu. It should also be noted that "piaf" means sparrow, yet another bird reference. There is a wikipedia article on the crash here.

3. There is a discussion in the marginalia that S. may actually be a collective of writers, possibly writing under the name of Straka. If this is true, then Straka could be a literary heteronym.  

"The literary concept of heteronym, invented by Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa, refers to one or more imaginary character(s) created by a writer to write in different styles. Heteronyms differ from noms de plume (or pseudonyms, from the Greek "False Name") in that the latter are just false names, while the former are characters having their own supposed physiques, biographies and writing styles." (from wikipedia)

The heteronym was invented by Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet and writer. At last count, about 70 of his heteronyms have been identified. Other writers who have used heteronyms are Laura Albert (JT LeRoy), Soren Kierkegaard (12+), among others.

4. On page 10, Footnote 3 indicates that "Straka was attuned to the histories of places; he mentioned in a letter to me that he often had dreams that took place on several archaeological strata simultaneously."  For some reason, this reminded me of an archaeological palimpsest.  In looking up palimpsests, I found it can also refer to a state of amnesia.  Palimpsest also used to be title of the journal published by the State of Iowa Historical Society.  In addition a palimpsest may also refer to: 

• "The word palimpsest also refers to a plaque (in particular a monumental brass) which has been turned around and engraved on what was originally the back. This usage was coined by Albert Way in a paper published in Archaeologia in 1844."

• "In planetary astronomy, ancient craters on icy moons of the outer Solar System whose relief has mostly disappeared, leaving behind only an albedo feature or a trace of a rim, are also known as palimpsests or ghost craters"

• "In medicine it is used to describe an episode of acute anterograde amnesia without loss of consciousness, brought on by the ingestion of alcohol or other substances: 'alcoholic palimpsest'."

• "The term is used in forensic science or forensic engineering to describe objects placed over one another to establish the sequence of events at an accident or crime scene."

• "Several historians are beginning to use the term as a description of the way people experience times, that is, as a layering of present experiences over faded pasts.^"

• "Palimpsest is beginning to be used by glaciologists to describe contradicting glacial flow indicators, usually consisting of smaller indicators (i.e., striae) overprinted upon larger features (i.e., stoss and lee topography, drumlins, etc.)."

• "The term is also used to describe augmented realities brought about by the melding of layers of material places and their virtual representations.^" (from wikipedia)

The Chicago School of Media Theory has a good article on palimpsests and lists some additional types here. 

(7/31/14 edited for grammar 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)