I remembered reading Louise Glück before but I didn’t go back and refresh my memory on what I said about The Seven Ages until after I read this book. I think I have to deduce that I’m not that into her poetry as I could almost say the exact thing this time around.

The title refers to the lake in Naples, Italy regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld, so the poems are largely about the areas between death and life with many winter themes. Interesting and not unlikeable but underwhelming for me.

There are many interesting takes on “modern” life in this collection of poems. From the kind of anachronistically futurist Robo-Boy placed in a banal contemporary setting to the militarily apocalyptic series that maps words found between future and terror in the dictionary. The two semi-abecedarian series ascend the alphabet in one and descend in the other but maintain the same sense of desolation.

The Future of Terror / 11

From the gable window, we shot
at what was left: gargoyles and garden gnomes.
I accidentally shot the generator
which would have been hard to gloss over
in a report except we weren’t writing reports
anymore. We ate our gruel and watched
the hail crush the hay we’d hoped to harvest.
I found a handkerchief drying on a hook
and without a hint of irony, pocketed it.
Here was my hypothesis: we were inextricably
fucked. We’d killed all the inventors and all
the jesters just when we most needed humor
and invention. The lake breeze was lugubrious
at best, couldn’t lift the leaves. As the day lengthened,
we knew we’d reached the lattermost moment.
The airlift wasn’t on the way. Make-believe
was all I had left but I couldn’t help but see
there was no “we”—you were a mannequin
and I’d been flying solo. I thought about
how birds can turn around mid-air, how
the nudibranch has no notion it might need
a shell. Swell. I ate the last napoleon—
it said Onward! on the packaging.
There was one shot left in my rifle.
I polished my plimsolls.
I wrapped myself in a quilt.
So this is how you live in the present.

I thought I’d read a book of Harvey’s before, but she must have just gotten lost on a list somewhere. So there are a couple more books to put on my list.

For some reason I always assumed this novel was first of all science fiction and secondly a sequel, and it definitely is neither. Not sure where I got confused — maybe I was thinking of Eraserhead?

Set between the wars in upper-class England, it is instead an über-nostalgic story of middle-class Charles Ryder’s relationship with the more upper-crust Flyte family and their country estate, Brideshead. The whole story is told as a recollection in the midst of WWII. It’s very absorbing with themes of religion and fluid sexuality (apparently the 2008 movie version ruins this) and messed-up family dynamics. There’s a lovely wistful feeling throughout.

It’s a little ridiculous how long I’ve been reading this book, considering it’s less than 100 pages long. It doesn’t even feel so dense but running at such a blistering pace that it’s a difficult to continually put it down and pick it back up again, as it becomes necessary to constantly backtrack to get back up to speed. I still wound up feeling like I barely maintained the thread throughout and should have done my best to read it in one sitting.

The thing I love about his writing is that he recognizes the need to emphasize with both all caps and italics:

To better understand such a heretical point of view about the programmed demise of the VOICES OF SILENCE, think of the perverse implications of the colouration of films originally shot in BLACK AND WHITE, to cite one example, or the use of monochromatic film in photographing accidents, oil spills. The lack of colour in a film segment of snapshot is seen as the tell-tale sign of a DEFECT, a handicap, the loss of colour of the rising tide under the effects of maritime pollution …

I’m not sure I agree with all his ideas, like that synchronized sound entirely ruined cinema, though I appreciate how he defines genetic engineering as a frightening new version of expressionism. But then there were also a lot of references that went over my head, with the lack of breadth in my mid-20th century art history knowledge. In that regard, I should have definitely attempted reading this somewhere other than on the subway.