Day 17: Louise Glück, Katherine Mansfield, Laurel Schwulst
I gotta post this now before I sleep. Features a lot of rambling.
Louise Glück - The Islander
Sugar I am CALLING you. Not
Journeyed all these years for this:
You stalking chicken in the subways,
Nights hunched in alleys all to get
That pinch... O heartbit,
Fastened to the chair.
The supper's freezing in the dark.
While I, my prince, my prince...
Your fruit lights up.
I watch your hands pulling at the grapes.
I have no idea what the heck this means but I like the way it all sounds. It might as well be a newspaper cut-up. "O heartbit" is my favourite line...
I've had five Louise Gluck recommendations, so I bought a cheap omnibus edition of 12 of her collections. I have almost finished the first chapbook, Firstborn which I like okay- the poems seem quite random, coming from different personas, sometimes men, often violent. I hope I find a good one soon. For now I will settle for Beckettian gibberish.
Story: Katherine Mansfield - The Singing Lesson
A very short story of five pages that is masterful display of classic modern tricks - but if anything, it is too soundly-constructed. It feels like something we would've had to read for a high school ATAR exam.
Perhaps this feeling comes from the fact that Mansfield is from New Zealand, so the story feels like one of those dull Australian stories we were forced to read throughout high school... yet Mansfield's language is too prim and prissy for the Australian market, who even when filthy rich, make sure to pretend that theyre working class. Perhaps this is the same in NZ, with their laconic national character and such. And although she is greatly respected in the wider world, Mansfield is mostly unread in Australia, being from the rival country and also having committed the mortal ANZ sin of "having airs" and moving abroad - to France of all places!
I am doing Mansfield a disservice. Yes most of her stories in The Garden Party have a slightly grating Enid Blyton frilliness, but there is always a sudden switch in her stories, from jam-and-cream jolliness to life-negating despair. Her characters are always changing their minds and emotions, and these changes recolour the whole world of the story.
Out of all the stories, this one grabs me the most as it starts immediately on the non-jolly side:
With despair–cold, sharp despair–buried deep in her heart like a wicked knife, Miss Meadows, in cap and gown and carrying a little baton, trod the cold corridors that led to the music hall. Girls of all ages, rosy from the air, and bubbling over with that gleeful excitement that comes from running to school on a fine autumn morning...
I love the immediate contrast between the character's inner and outer worlds. "A teacher's mood makes the weather", so I heard again and again in teaching school, and it is true. I think this first line does well at foreshadowing the inevitable conflict.
I find the situation of this story very relatable. The description of not just heartbreak in the abstract, but the physical feeling of being impaled, like a mouse being pierced on the thornbush by a devillish shrike- this physical feeling has been with me for almost a year now. Having to do any job with an impaled heart is hard, but teaching small children - a noisy stressful job requiring smiles and patience... yowza!
Fortunately I teach adults, but after my own heartbreak, I became a noticeably worse teacher, going from cheerful and tuned-in, to a sleepwalker at best, and a loose cannon at worst, sometimes getting frustrated and ending class an hour early.
Now due to teacher cutbacks as an effect of changes in visa restrictions, I no longer have the primo teaching job, and am competing with all the other laid-off casuals. But I have been glad not to have a job in a way. I don't feel comfortable being a shriked teacher. Previously I had felt my best self in the classroom, but for the last year I have felt completely uninterested, doing the job, but not being good at it. I want to do something that makes no difference for a while.
This story knows how it is. I think its remarkable what it does in five pages. A real humdinger.
Essay: Laurel Schwulst - My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
(A lukewarm review. Some things I find good, some annoying- less so because of the authors style (written in 2018) and more that this style has become prevalent).
The title of this is very blogcore, that kind of smol-tech optimism I see all the time in webzones like bear. Another pet peeve of mine is meta-posting - of blogging about the idea of blogging; as Bill Callahan said, "you could talk about the water, or you could just get in"- there are an infinite number of topics and things and ideas to write about. No more vague gushy metablogging! So from this title, you'd think I'd be set to dislike this essay... but I like the strange metaphor, which nests multiple metaphors inside itself.
"A website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge".
But I have a bone to pick - I understand how a website can shift, but why/how is the house shifting? Unless its shifting because its foundations are being eroded by the river of knowledge... This to me is also quite poetic, but not in the way the author intended - the house/website as a sinking ship, fated to collapse into the river and become nothing but knowledge. "Hey, do you remember hipsterrunoff?" "Nah, whats that?" "Oh it was this really funny ironic blog site that satirised the like, wait, do you about indie sleaze?"
Perhaps my worldview is too grimdark and this article is too hopepunk. The author suggests that we can change the downhill state of web by using our imaginations and working together... but at the same time, I do think she makes a valid point- that websites have the potential to be endlessly shifting works of art that create communities outside of the feudal lands of kamikaze trillionaires. Rats! Now I am sounding like a Blogger.
Lastly, feathers in my cap: I dig the suggestions of how to think about your website: as a room, shelf, plant, garden, etc. I wish I had the willpower to change from this default theme. I also love the birds saying the quotes, and the phenomenology of metaphor spiel at the end.