Over and over and over again

Next time you feel that you're not being productive, that your day amounts to nothing more than an exercise in wheel-spinning, take heed from some lovely words in Chris Arthur's recently published essay collection, "On the Shoreline of Knowledge: Irish Wanderings" (Sightline Books/University of Iowa Press).

Success is measured in linear terms in our society. If you're not moving from point A to point B, you're not succeeding, right? It's an unfortunate situations.  And it makes Arthur, whose home is Fife, Scotland (lucky guy), start thinking of his stoop-shouldered mother. At trying moments in her life, she mutters "I'm just going round in circles," despairing that:

"...her energy has been frittered away on a treadmill of trivial distractions that have claimed more time than they warrant. She's annoyed at her own lack of focus, the way she's allowed herself to become mired in unimportant chores."

Sound familiar?  (An old professor of mine, British poet Geoffrey Hill, had a really grandiose way of referring to this situation: He'd say "we're all trapped on a carnal treadmill." Pretty fancy, but then again, he's a poet.)

But Arthur's book of ruminative essays is an effort to recall the virtues of repetition and aims at restoring the dignity of that much-maligned geometric figure, the circle:

"The circle is variously taken to represent enlightenment, clear seeing, the absolute, one-pointedness of concentration, the universe.... Instead of impatience with some treadmill of time-wasting chores, instead of any kind of frustrated vacuity, a sense of pointless repetition and being stalled, think rather of the great wheel of the seasons, the orbits of electrons and planets; think of life cycles, the circulation of our blood and breath and the water that sustains us. We are cradled in a myriad of circles."

He then offers up the Zen practice of enso, the practice of painting circles of black ink. Beautiful.

Try not to be frustrated (though it's difficult - take it from me). You're exactly where you're supposed to be. Maybe the wheel-spinning is trying to tell you something?

Gimme some Mo

If you follow book news, you may already realize that the Nobel Prize in Literature has acted a little like a talent scout in recent years. The prize has been used to throw light on writers more of us should probably know about (Jelinek, Le Clezio) than recognize undeniable masters (Murakami, Lessing, McCarthy).

Or else the Prize has been a tool for making a political statement by picking dissident artists (in the Eastern bloc, for instance) who've long suffered in opposition to totalitarian regimes in their homelands.

Which made the selection of 56-year-old Chinese novelist Mo Yan for this year's Nobel a bit of surprise.  The guy's not an outcast. He's successful. He's had at least one book made into a film. He's an active participant in the government's official writers' groups.

So what happened? Well, maybe the Nobel hit this year closer to the mark of what most people think about when they think of what a prize should be.  It's about talent, brilliance, and less about political factors (though I'm sure that's a part of this one too - I read one pundit who sees the choice of Mo as another gesture, like the Beijing Olympics, of inviting China to belong to the world community).

I only know Mo's work in passing - but this time around with the Nobel, everything that's been said about his artistic powers makes me more interested in reading him. It's the same curiosity I felt when Kertesz got it - and, after reading Kertesz, I knew the Nobel committee had been right.

Still, it feels pretty lame that a major prize needs to be parsed in order to make sense of its recipient. I definitely feel the same frustration as Cristian Mihai noted on his blog soon after the Nobel was announced.   To cope with the aggravation, I just remind myself that Conrad didn't get the Nobel; Joyce didn't; Proust didn't; Pound didn't (well, ok, maybe his whole fascism thing made him ineligible). In the end, this prize is at the mercy of the people on the committee. (That's partly the reason why I prefer to dwell in the lands of fantasy these days: Shoot, if I had been on the committee, I'd have recommended George R.R. Martin for the Nobel.)

Guess fans of Murakami (in the days leading up to this year's Nobel, some betting firms gave him great odds) will have to wait another year. Hope we don't have to wait much longer than that.

Glimpses and sightings of an epic

Dipping into the pages of a new poetry collection by David Ferry, "Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations" (University of Chicago Press), makes me feel as giddy as I do when I hear that a new trailer of Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" is about to be released.

Why?

Ferry is an acclaimed poet in his own right -- check out "Of No Country I Know" -- but what I've eagerly followed over the years are his translations from Virgil.  His "Eclogues" and "Georgics" translations (both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux), are beautiful songs of the Earth, of prophecy, of pragmatism and protest.  Reading them has always made me wonder, When is Ferry going to tackle the big one?  What about Virgil's "Aeneid"?

His new collection "Bewilderment" gives the answer: He's working on it.

Along with the sharp clarity of original lyrics "Coffee Lips" and "Street Scene," there are long passages from books II and VI of the Mantuan's masterpiece.  I'm more than giddy, however; I'm also humbled by it. Ferry's book is dedicated to his late wife, critic Anne Ferry, and near the end of this collection, his version of Aeneas' departure from Troy feels informed by Ferry's own grief.

After he evokes the image of Aeneas hoisting his lame-legged father onto his back:

I take up the tawny pelt of a lion and

Cover my neck and my broad shoulders with it,

And bowing down, I accept the weight of my father...

he then continues on with Aeneas' grief when he fails to find his wife at a reunion site before the fugitive Trojans escape from their burning city:

When all of us,

At last, had gotten there, we all were there,

But she had vanished and she wasn't there.

Gone from her people, gone from her child, and her husband.

That final line is searingly painful to read. Anyone who's lost a loved one knows what this is. Everyone is Aeneas in their grief.

Glimpses and sightings of Virgil's epic -- I feel a little like Palinurus with Carthage behind and the deep sea ahead.  Can't wait for the rest of Ferry's project.

Related articles

• On Aeneas (livingoak.wordpress.com)
• Etruscan Angst (writermoe.com)

P.S. On Koslow's 'Slouching'

Ok, if this blog is supposed to be devoted to books about myth and lore, then why include a review of a book that looks at an aspect of contemporary America (Sally Koslow's "Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-so-empty Nest")? How does that fit in? Easy: The American dream is difficult to realize in today's economy -- for some people, in fact, it has more of the quality of a myth than a reality. So I think it does deserve a place here.

Reading for the candidates: Koslow's 'Slouching'

The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that about 1.7 million students graduated from U.S. colleges in June. While many have gone on to grad school or to start promising careers, a big percentage are back home with Mom and Dad—so much for the empty nest—and Sally Koslow wants to know more about them.

“Who are these people sandwiching a chunky stage between adolescence and adulthood, these individuals who resemble adults but aren’t, exactly?” she asks in “Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-so-Empty Nest” (Viking).

What happened? Why aren’t they out there in the world, fighting the good fight?

What’s changed—is it frustration, a different work ethic, a shrinking economy, or all of the above?

Koslow’s answer tends to embrace this entire spectrum. And she doles out plenty of humor—”twenty-eight is the new nineteen,” she says—in the course of this fascinating look at a group labeled as “adultescents.”

Take her own college grad son, for instance, a stubbly dude who’s living large and still sleeping in his childhood bedroom: “A weekly unemployment check was financing more late-night eating and drinking than my husband and I had done in the last two decades.”

But there is a far more serious point to her examination. The career path model that worked for so many people not long ago—even within the last decade—has fragmented for a variety of reasons. Some are technology-driven factors; others are market-driven as other parts of the world open up their work forces to employers eager to keep costs down

Koslow doesn’t hesitate to point blame in the mirror, at herself and older generations: “Perhaps the drifting we see is also a sensible response to contingencies our children can’t control. The big, bad real world we’ve helped to create for them in which to live as adults is a mess.”

In other words, if older generations created the problem, they can help create the solution, too.

That’s why I’d recommend this book to the two main candidates for U.S. president: There are plenty of new books that talk about the macro-condition of the economy, but Koslow focuses on a specific segment of young people who are suffering now.  If the youth are the future, as the saying goes, they deserve more attention than they've been getting.