I am hard on things. I am clumsy. I expect things to last much longer than they
are really designed to. I know this. Alia likes to remind me of this. And yet
—
In a perfect world, nothing of my personal anything would ever be done or appear — however momentarily, however hidden inside a folder I know that the company
does not automatically back up — on my work computer. Beyond that, there are
non-zero times when I am out and about and would like to scribble a
little. And because the
"phone" in my pocket has a much better processor than my first n computers, it
has a git client, however rudimentary, it has a shell, also rudimentary, that
runs vim with enough of plugins and things, it makes sense that I’d want a small
keyboard that could travel with me, so I am not mistyping constantly on my
phone.
But I have been through three in the last year and a half or so, three
different models, and they’re all just fucking shit, e-waste, and I am sad and
mad about it.
First it was the hinges. Then it was a pinched wire inside of those hinges. Then
a battery inexplicitly died, or — perhaps — the hinges failed again, but in a
different way, as this last keyboard was of an entirely different design. And
sure, my backpack is not necessarily a friendly place for things with fragile
hinges and wires: I ride a bike in Boston, I over pack, the fuck do you expect?
But at least some pretense of durability, you would think —
And I had been happy enough with them, each of them. Sure, I had to remap the
Caps Lock key to Control every time. Sure, some of them didn’t have an Esc key
(requisite for "basic" vim use) and I had to get used to Ctrl-[ instead (which
is arguably as ergonomic, anyway). Sure, my phone screen is very small and not
the best for scanning and editing large chunks of text, but writing forward? But
wide enough, in landscape mode, to accommodate 80 characters at a reasonable
font size? I had made it work, and work well, I think.
But then all the keyboards broke. And now I’m reduced to typing with my thumbs
again, to using iA Writer again,
to lugging around a laptop if I actually want to get any writing done while out
in the world.
And yes, these are first world problems, of course they are. And yes, I’m sure
that somewhere there is a better option. But I’ve been burned three times, three
fairly different models, and so I’m loathe, really, to try again. I don’t like
consuming things. I want to buy only things that last.
But as my Zaydie said often, "It is what it is," and I am at least blessed with
opposable thumbs.
I’m not sure if I started The Essays of Leonard Michaels at the end of last
year or at the beginning of this year, but I do know that I bought the book at
the end of last year for a whole dollar bill at Commonwealth Books in Downtown
Crossing. Why it was so cheap, on the outdoor cart, I don’t know. Maybe because
the book boards flare out a little bit such that the book is never really
"closed." Maybe because it’s too niche, I don’t know. A fucking shame for
everybody else, though: the book is brilliant. Or, the book is a perfect book
for me to be reading now.
This is not a review, or even really a proper essay on the book. I don’t do
that: I don’t have the time, I don’t necessarily want to make the time, and
though there is a world in which I keep thinking about this book more deeply,
his work more generally, and write a real essay to be published in a real place
that is not this blog, this is not that world, or at least not yet.
I’m drowning in novels to read first chapters of to try and find comp titles for
my own middling manuscript, and so any additional reading or rereading, at least
for the next little while, is going to be focused on that.
I’ve been keeping a "scrapbook" of sorts — a quote book, really — since
reading Mike Chasar’s Everyday Reading during the first few months of lockdown
in 2020. It’s a good book and I recommend it.
At the time I thought I’d get a quote book bound every few years or so, and
though I’ve yet to do that piece of it, I still do collect the quotes.
So instead of trying to make some argument about Michaels’s work, I’ll instead
paste in what passages that stood out to me to copy down and, if I can remember,
say what what stood out to me (or: maybe just make something up).
Note that all quotes are from The Essays book, and if there is an additional
attribution, that refers to the title of the essay from which it was taken.
When Jonah goes to sleep in the hold of the ship, perhaps he wants to sink into
that darkness and let dreams come and deliver him to another story, another
life. "Whereof we cannot speak," says the great philosopher Wittgenstein, "we
must be silent." But it is also true that, whereof we cannot speak, we dream, or
tell stories.
— Leonard Michaels
The Story of Jonah
This is just nice. Michaels brings up Wittgenstein a number of times throughout
the book, which I find kind of interesting both as a historical marker of when
Michaels was working in Universities as well as a philosopher for him, as a
writer, a Jewish writer, to look to. But maybe it as much a grappling-with,
really. Here, I think, it’s just a great way to work though the story about
stories, in a way that the better professors I’ve ever had have also worked
through tales and myths and fables.
Marx began as a poet, failed, and converted to philosophy—perhaps in
self-loathing. Renowned for self-loathing are T.S. Eliot, who wrote a
dissertation in philosophy, and Coleridge, who was ravished by the Schlegels.
Keats belongs to this group, too; manifest poetical genius, he wondered if he
was philosophical enough. Plato, who started this ancient violence, was himself
a poet.
"Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent," says the philosopher Wittgenstein
in a mean little poem against poets. Negative thrust from "cannot" to "must"
slams the sentence shut.
— Leonard Michaels
Bad Blood
Ah, here we are again! I pulled these what feels like so long ago (this was only
a month, really: the first of these were added, according to the git log,
January 10th), and though I’m sure then I remembered the closeness of mention,
it’s fun to be reminded of it here. I like how he manages to get mileage out of
the quote twice, adding something here (which: "slams the sentence shut": just
beautiful).
One of my favorite things about Michaels since I started reading him seriously a
few years ago, is his attention to sentences and their sound, the way they move
and work (something I, too, am very interested in). There are better, more
illustrative quotes about this below, but here you get a teaser. The essay
itself, "Bad Blood," is about that between poets and philosophers. I don’t
remember it particularly well, but it’s short enough — almost all of the essays
are short enough, another boon for a reader like me — that it could easily be
reread and redigested, which is good, because the volume’s new home is on the
reference shelf in my "office" at home.
[Larkin] might even say that, long ago, value went someplace off to vomit and
has not returned. If this is true, we have been abandoned to the allure of
nonspecific possibility, or the thrill of infinite novelty. A lexical whorehouse
shines in the darkness of the modern mind… To descend again to my theme: your
hot lover has cooled into your "relationship," which is another aspect you have
with your grocer or your cat.
— Leonard Michaels
I'm Having Trouble with My Relationship
The prose, the irony, the dark humor: wonderful.
To have survived the guns of our grammarians and displaced more pleasant words
in the natural history of English, it must answer an exceptionally strong need.
The other words may seem impossibly quaint, but it isn’t the only sophistication
of "relationship" that is needed. It is the whole word, including the
four-syllable sound, which is a body stumbling downstairs, the last two — "shunship" — the flap of a shoe’s loose sole, or loose lips and gossip. In
fact, "relationship" flourished in the talky, psychological climate of the
modern century as we carried it from the offices of our shrinks and, like a
forgotten umbrella, left "romance" behind.
— Leonard Michaels
I'm Having Trouble with My Relationship
He’s talking about the word, here, but also sentences, but also being dazzling
himself: "the guns of our grammarians," "the flap a shoe’s loose sole, or loose lips and
gossip" — alliteration, assonance, clear vision, what more could you want? I
mean, there is the delicious middle but even the "p"s that frame the clauses — "flap" and "gossip" — are so smart, so right, so absurd as to drive the point
he’s making home further.
A lot of these essays have moments in which it’s a bit "old man shaking fist at
clouds," but also you never mind it, when it’s Michaels. You find it sweet,
smart if curmudgeonly, not entirely wrong, usually, too.
A definition, then, of the voiceless modern sentence should emphasize its
structural-visual character: "It is manufactured by alienated beings who know
some words, the rudiments of punctuation, and are capable of what looks like a
thought."
— Leonard Michaels
Legible Death
I read this during the another rumbling of the "AI Boom," when folks like my
teacher friend and my wife were forced to learn something about large language
models (LLMs), and it made me smile. Pairs nicely with my very slow, very
haphazard reading of Olson’s "Projective Verse."
Words in a book make pictures and carry an author’s voice, but these are
miracles of interior sensation and belong to the radical privacy available only
to human beings.
— Leonard Michaels
Masks and Lies
Why I still prefer books. I like "radical privacy," too. Almost as an antidote
to the modern surveillance state, isn’t it?
…but it must be remembered that Gilda was released when feelings — like
clothing styles, popular dances, car designs — were appreciated differently
from today. Perhaps feelings as such had a far higher value. Movies didn’t have
to show naked bodies, fucking, paraphilia, or graphic mutilation and blood
murder. Techniques for suggestion were cultivated — the zipper, for example — and less was more except in regard to words. There were long scenes brilliant
with words. We didn’t so much use our eyes, like roots digging into visible
physical bodies for the nourishment of meanest sensation. The ear, more sensuous
than sensual, received the interior life of people, as opposed to what is sucked
up by the salacious eyeball.
— Leonard Michaels
The Zipper
More "old man shaking fist at clouds" but in a nice way, but thinking about this
in the context of the "radical privacy" above. What he is at end interested in
is interiority, in the expression and communication thereof. This comes back
later down in the quotes, too. I think I copied this one out though, because of
that last sentence (sometimes what I want is only the last sentence, but you
also want context, because sometimes the punch only lands because of the
preparatory jabs — no that I know anything about boxing. I’d use a fencing
metaphor but that’s maybe too niche, and I haven’t had enough coffee today to be
clever.)
Barry and I locked together, twisting, stumbling. Marla leaped after my
rigidified head, slashing at it. Her cries and curses awakened my roommate. He
bounded into the living room in his pajamas. Tall, crew-cut, blond kid from San
Diego. Engineering student, he went to classes with a slide rule dangling from
this belt. Mechanical pencils sprouted from his shirt pocket like asparagus
tips. He’d never before witness critical intercourse among East Coast
intelligentsia. His name was Ted Gidding.
— Leonard Michaels
A Berkeley Memoir
Here, a great example: the second to last sentence is the punch (but you finish
the paragraph in your scrapbook because it’s also good). This made me laugh
very, very hard.
I read the entirely of the book on my lunch breaks in the WeWork office
downtown, reading while eating and then moving over to the couches with a cup of
mint tea to finish whatever essay I’d started (or to read another, depending on
how much work there was to be done). This laughing out loud happened a number of
times, though I didn’t quote every time because what’s the fun in that?
From skepticism I fell into black doubt. There had been too many rejections. The
screenplay was shopworn, passed around too much, soiled, cheapened. Not merrely
rejected; many disliked it. It wasn’t a novel or a poem; the opinions of other
people mattered. Worst of all, when I reread the screenplay, I didn’t know what
I felt about it. When one doesn’t know writing is okay, it isn’t okay, but there
had been too much talk and praise and encouragement. There had also been
tremendous work. More than anything work is destructive of judgment.
— Leonard Michaels
Kishkas
I felt this essay a lot because I read it right after AWP at which I was trying
to learn what to do with this novel manuscript I’ve got and the whole thing is
about trying to write and sell a screenplay, and again we quote the passage for
the last sentence:
More than anything work is destructive of judgment.
I’d add a comma after "anything," but that’s just my own ear (and, I guess, more
grammatically correct). But I’m still close enough right now to the novel that I
have no judgment about it at all — is it good? Shit? Just okay? — and this was
heartening, at least in terms of a kind of solidarity.
…Adam was required to name the animals, but how could he have done that unless
their names were already implicit in their individual being? Obviously, this
beast is Lion, and this can only be Pig. In regard to animals the case is more
individual than personal, as far as we know. If an animal could spell its name,
it would be spelled the same way every time.
Existence moves in the direction of names.
— Leonard Michaels
Writing About Myself
Again, this passage was to keep "Existence moves in the direction of names." I
don’t know if he’s really right about any of this but I like the impulse: it’s
also an argument about knowledge, categorization, understanding, ways of
differentiating the world from the self.
Yiddish is probably at work in my written English. This moment, writing in
English, I wonder about the Yiddish undercurrent. If I listen, I can almost hear
it: "This moment" — a stress followed by two neutral syllables —
introduces a thought that hangs like a herring in the weary droop of "writing in
English," and then comes the announcement, "I wonder about the Yiddish
undercurrent." The sentence ends in a shrug. Maybe I hear the Yiddish
undercurrent, maybe I don’t. The sentence could have been written by anyone who
knows English, but it probably would not have been written by a well-bred
Gentile. It has too much drama, and might even be disturbing, like music in a
restaurant or elevator. The sentence obliges you to abide in its staggered flow,
as if what I meant were inextricable from my feelings and required a lyrical
note. There is a kind of enforced intimacy with the reader. A Jewish kind, I
suppose.
— Leonard Michaels
My Yiddish
I don’t speak any Yiddish and to be perfectly honest with you I didn’t really
hear much Yiddish spoken growing up. A phrase here or there at shul, punchlines
of Jewish jokes. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Jews, though, and I think
there’s still fingerprints of it in American Jewish speech and thinking. I’ve
read a shit ton of Yiddish-native writers writing in (or having been translated
into) English. Shit, I’ve read most of how-did-I-find-a-copy-of
A Treasury of Yiddish
Stories. (Apparently there is a new edition? Great. These were
wonderful, and I read almost all of it except the very end where there were
children’s stories, I think, and I got bogged down by moving to Boston.)
The cadence is familiar, if nothing else. The obsession with music in language,
if nothing else.
And he just writes so fucking well about it.
And again: we see what a student, master, reader of The Sentence he is. So
smart, so right.
Ultimately, I believe, meaning has less to do with language than with music, a
sensuous flow that becomes language only by default, so to speak, and by
degrees. IN great fiction and poetry, meaning is always close to music. Writing
about a story by Gogol, Nabokov says it goes la, la, do, la la la, etc. The
story’s meaning is radically musical. I’ve often had to rewrite a paragraph
because the sound was wrong. When at least it seemed right, I discovered — incredibly — the sense was right. Sense follows sound. Otherwise we couldn’t
speak so easily or quickly… I can tell stories all day, but to write one that
sounds right entails labors of indefinable innerness until I hear the thing I
must hear before it is heard by others. A standard of rightness probably exists
for me in my residual subliminal Yiddish. Its effect is to inhibit as well as to
liberate.
— Leonard Michaels
My Yiddish
And here we return to music.
I’ve been thinking a lot about music, lately, in part because there are sections
of the novel manuscript that are songs (I know, I know), and I am thinking of
pasting in the sheet music à la Perrott’s Ex-Wife, and in part because I am
also always thinking about music, how I don’t do it enough anymore. I don’t
really even listen to it all that much anymore if I’m honest, compared to when I
was in high school, thinking I’d become some kind of composer.
To that end, I was rereading Joshua Cohen’s Wikipedia page, as one book or other
of his is likely going to be a good comp or at least a place to start looking
from — he’s much more serious than I am, but I feel like the prose impulses are
not too dissimilar — but anyway apparently he started as a music composition
student. I’d say "also" there but I never actually ended up studying much
composition in college, despite how so many of the schools ended up on my
apply-to list. I took a couple theory classes, wrote some counterpoint, got
distracted by Philosophy and became disdainful of the way they made it too hard
for non-music people to take music classes. In any case —
Leonard Michaels is often referred to as a "writer’s writer," which I think
is sometimes meant as some sort of embarrassed excuse for why he’s not read more
broadly. I haven’t yet read his novels but my guess is that it’s because his
best stuff is (so my understanding goes) is in the stories. I know that the
stories — one called "Making Changes" in particular — have had an outsized
effect on my on writing. But I also think, if I were to be more charitable, it’s
because of his close attention to sentences, their music. I think it’s because,
if I (and so let’s suppose my experience is not unique) ever think something is
"right" or "done," it’s because it sounds "right" and "done." It’s true, I
think, that "Sense follows sound."
And this, truly, is a beautiful thing.