Bradbury Prescription Day 3: Plath, Collier, Huxley

Poem: Sylvia Plath - Spider

I really liked this poem. The imagery is fantastic. When I read it, I pictured a sly hunter that likes to display his trophies.

Near his small stonehenge above the ants' route,
One-third ant-size, a leggy spot,
He tripped an ant with a rope
Scarcely visible. ...

The crafty spider doesn't confront his prey head-on. He trips them with his scarcely visible web. 

Each time round winding that ant
Tighter to the cocoon.

Then, he wraps up their asses, as spiders are wont to do. Finally, the crafty bastard does this:

Then briskly scaled his altar tiered with tethered ants,
Nodding in a somnolence
Appalling to witness...

What an animal! He basically, hangs their wriggling bodies from his altar (trophy room). But what of those poor ants?

I normally don't talk about politics, but I could not help but think of this analogy as we rapidly approach the presidential election. Those ants:

The ants - a file of comers, a file of goers -
Persevered on a set course
No scruple could disrupt,
Obeying orders of instinct till swept
Off-stage and infamously wrapped
Up by a spry black deus
Ex machina. Nor did they seem deterred by this.

Just like our doomed ant friends, many voters will vote against their own self-interest out of some deeply ingrained belief system that may have been passed down generation after generation. They will just keep chugging along, perhaps out of a false sense of duty, perhaps for other reasons.

Short Story: John Collier - The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It

I continue to be extremely grateful to Ray Bradbury for introducing me to John Collier's work. This is one of those that I do not want to discuss in great detail because the ending is kinda the point. I will comment on a few things.

• Pacing - This guy has it in spades. Enough detail to keep it interesting, but not boring. When I read John Collier, it's almost like reading story beats. I love his terse prose that he manages to work into really great descriptions.
• Plot - His ability to come full circle and even surprise the reader is fantastic.
• Story - Even when I was "in on" the secret, I was smiling at how well everything fell into place.

Essay: Huxley - A Ghost of the Nineties

Huxley continues to impress me with his critiques. His wit is razor sharp and he doesn't hold any blows. He has an uncanny ability to both praise and belittle his subject in one swoop. This time his victim is Ernest Dowson, an English poet that, I must admit, I have not read.

The question of the day in this essay is "Why does Ernest Dowson deserve to be in 'The Modern Library of the World's Best Books'?" Indeed, Huxley aims to get us a little closer to that answer.

These lines, in particular caught me off guard for their saltiness:

How is it, then, that after a lapse of five-and-twenty years... Dowson's poetry is still sufficiently alive to make it worth a publisher's while to reprint it?

Dowson was a minor poet - "infinitely" minor, as he himself might have said. He could express only one emotion, he knew only one tune.

Ouch! Huxley, you salty bastard! But, he goes on to admire Dowson for the niche he has found in that "one emotion."

For by piping continually in the same melancholy mode he arrived in the end at a small perfection of his own; and perfection, even in a little, limited thing, will always ensure for the poet who achieves it a more than temporary hearing.

How nice of you, Mr. Huxley. Then, comes this little zinger.

Art can express emotion in a variety of ways: simply and directly, as in folk-song...; later on with the complexity of the symphony...; and then decadently, by allusions to other works of art...

Dowson was as incapable of writing folk-songs as of writing symphonies; he did not possess the spontaneous life or the mental capacity to do either.

Holy hell! How eloquently demeaning. 

Sick Burn, Bro!

Finally, to tie it all together, there's this little gem:

There are moods in which these variations on a nonexistent theme are all that the mind desires or deserves - moments of physical fatigue and mental lassitude, the true parents of sentimentality...

We all suffer at times from these attacks of sentimentality: let us prepare for the next by laying in, among other homeopathic remedies, a copy of Dowson's poems.

Damn. I think this is akin to today's "popcorn flick." It's empty fun that's good for when you don't want to think. Perhaps Dowson was that era's Michael Bay? Then again, I don't want to insult the guy any further than Huxley already has.