Well this came out of the blue, which is one of the reasons I like having a bog. But one reader, Allan Henderson by name sent me a fascinating suggestion about a controversy I deal with in a chapter of %%AMAZON=0375503390 The Shakespeare Wars%%.

For those of you who have not yet read the book (and what’s your excuse?), in Chapter 7 “The Search for Shakespeare in a Delicate Pause” I address the impassioned contention by Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company that contemporary Shakespeareans have neglected a profoundly important element in the way actors speak Shakespeare’s iambic (da DUM, da DUm, etc) pentameter verse line: the need for a delicate pause at the end of each five-iamb line.

According to Hall, the crucial pause helps define and give full resonance to the sound and sense within each line, setting each line off slightly from the line to follow and thereby allowing its subtlies to resound with all their beauty and power intact–rather than losing the line’s majestic integrity by hastening on to the next line for some illusory “naturalistic effect”. The pause makes each line a virtual poem unto itself, bounded on either end by that delicate esthetic enclosure. .

it’s not uncontroversial and I didn’t completely understand Sir Peter’s insistence on line structure until I interviewed the extremely astute director Barry Edelstein who had his own novel but persuasive interpretation of the Hall pause. Edelstein believed that that delicate interval could be looked upon by actors as the moment when, metaphorically, they think up the next line.

Not that they actually make it up anew every night, obviously. But heuristically it gives a sense of freshness, of newly minted utterance to lines that can otherwise sound merely recited.

In any case Mr. Henderson sent me a fascinating fresh speculation on this subject that he thought up while simultaneously reading my book and Steven Pinker’s new work:

“Hi Ron,

I was reading your SHAKESPEARE WARS book at the same time as
reading Steven Pinker’s new THE STUFF OF THOUGHT book, where he points
out that the human experience of the present moment is not a continuous
flow, but a roughly 3-second interval - which is about the duration of
the pentameter line. So maybe this supports Peter Hall’s point that
the pentameter line needs to pause before moving on to the next present
moment. If you write back to me I can
send you more about this.”

Fascinating! i wrote back and he expanded on this line of thought:

“Steven Pinker’s observation about the 3-second present comes from Ernst Poppel, a brain researcher at the University of Munich. Dubbed Poppel’s Law it says that “We take life three seconds at a time.” Poppel illustrates his law by pointing out that a handshake lasts about three seconds. So does the preparation for a golf swing, short-term memory, a phrase in spontaneous speech, the pause when channel surfing for a television program to watch, and a line of poetry. Pinker talks about this on page 189 of his new book THE STUFF OF THOUGHT, where he says “our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an instantaneous instant. Instead, it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous ‘now’ but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.”

“If you go to this web page– you’ll see that Poppel has timed several poetic lines, and he talks about “breath units” and pauses in lines of poetry too.

“It seems to me that if the human mind processes information in roughly 3-second chunks, then a line like Shakespeare’s will play into that human tendency to experience time as a train of “boxcars of fixed length.” Shakespeare can then play with that 3-second length for lots of sophisticated effects. On the other hand, it seems to me that Shakespeare’s prose is a different story, where he doesn’t have the fixed-length boxcars and has to do a lot of work to define the size of the boxcars as he goes along with a different set of techniques.

“By the way, if you multiply it out mindlessly, without thinking about any extra pauses for important dramatic things going on, then you get about 1200 lines of iambic pentameter per hour, which is about 2400 lines in a play for a ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage.’

“Time as ‘a train of boxcars of fixed length’” Who’d have thunk it? What a thought-provoking connection! It’s a subject I’ll have to return to after further (more than 3 seconds’) thought.

But I’m grateful to Mr. Henderson, further confirmation of my feeling that while this blog may not have the most readers in the blogosphere it has some of the smartest.

I met Katha Pollitt a long time ago at a party and it wasn’t five minutes before we found ourselves in a heated argument over Dickens (me) versus Trollope (she). I know: why do you have to choose?

Well you don’t, but I think it was a way of identifying who we were. Both novelists offered conflicting ways of looking at the vast fabric of Victorian society, no, of the whole human condition, in their 900 page novels. My Dickens was more weird haunted, hallucinatory, heartbreakingly sentimental, visionary and spiritual. Her Trollope was more sophisticated, analytical, realistic, humane, precise.

What was great about the argument was that even though she didn’t convince me Trollope was better, she persuaded me that I should read more Trollope than I had and I went on a multiple 900 pager Trollope jag for a couple of years, that was immensely pleasurable, although ultimately of the Three Great Victorians Wilkie Collins probably has my heart now.

Anyway although I don’t know her well, this is a way of saying I know her through a series of thought provoking arguments, that I’ve admired her engaging form of argumentation which have distinguished her polemics inThe Nation. I admired for rising above the plodding polemical ruck.

But I felt she’s reached a whole new level, a real breakthrough in her work in her recent personal history stories collected now in %%AMAZON=9781400063321 Learning to Drive%%

Maybe you saw the title story and it’s semi sequel, sort of, “Webstalking” when they appeared in The New Yorker.

They deal with the aftermath of a disastrous affair she had with a philandering Marxist intellectual and the rethinking of so many things she goes through afterward. They were both brave, observed with Trollopian precision and yet open to ambiguity.

Recently she sent me a copy of the new book calling my attention to the story that followed those two, one called “In the Study Group” which, she said, in an accompanying note “made me think of some our long ago conversations in apartments that probably no longer exist.”

The apartments probably don’t, but the conversations do, and the thrill of being in New York where, after fleeing Yale Graduate school, I found I could have exciting intellectual conversations with people who were smart enough not to be straitjacketed by the narrowness of academic sensibility.

It brought back a world that doesn’t exist, a world unique to New York where you’d meet people who spent all day sessions “In the Study Group” discussing arcane and obscure Marxist spllnter group philosophies.

I had no idea Katha Pollitt had immersed herself in what she now realizes was a virtual cult, but I loved the story because only in New York could a cult/”study group” this incredibly obscure, with such twisted mixed motives, exist. It was about the life of the mind of life of a sort that doesn’t exist but one that still asks tough questions about life today.

The Marxist splinter group just happened to be led by her philandering soon-to-be ex-boyfriend and to be populated in large measure, it seemed by his ex girlfriends some aware some unaware of each other’s status Very Trollopian minus the obscurity of the marxist splinter.

Although I have to admit I could see the splinter’s appeal, precisely in its obscure, rarefied super intellectual, totally impractical quality that rejected all real-world forms of communism. It believed in a kind of pre-Leninist, sort of anarchist-syndicalist utopian cooperative society. It was something called “anti-Bolshevik council communism”. I’d never heard of it, never heard of its savants, and I thought I was familiar, if not on a first name basis, with even the most obscure deviationist splinters.

In fact it actually sounded like the only appealing form of Marxism I could entertain these days, in part because there was absolutely zero chance it would ever win any more adherents than the members of that study group. In the real world it died with Spanish anarchists in Catalonia.

Anyway what’s great about this story is the conflictedness of the narrator who doesn’t moralize so much as meditate on her own conduct and on the impossiblity of expecting from life the gentle perfection of the one true communist utopia, just as expecting truth or fidelity in human romantic relationships is nigh unto a utopian impossibility. Was she, she wonders at some point, part of a cult or was the utopian earnestness of these obscure hopeless idealists something to be admired however hopeless?

The emblematic image in the story, the beautiful, tragic final image is that of council communism’s leading thinker, a Dutch astronomer named Anton Pannekoek.

She imagines him writing his single book,a work unknown to almost everyone everywhere now except the study group, a book called Worker’s Councils that he worked on during the German occupation.

She imagines him “living alone and writing his steadfast and hopeful book day by day…while the Nazis occupied Holland , and Anne Frank and her family were
rounded up….and people starved in the streets in the terrible winter of 1944. It would have been easy the to believe that civilization was finished, that human beings were wolves–no, worse than wolves. Perhpas even though he was a scientist, Pannekoek looked up at the stars and wondered if they sparkled with malice. But he kept writing…and then one day the war was over, and he put down his pen and looked around him and thought., And so we begin. Again.”

Whether “the stars sparkled with malice”. It’s the question the astronomer in Primo Levi’s “Tranquil Star” story, indeed Primo Levi himself, would appreciate.

I commend both books to you.

I’ve always had a kind of superstitious feeling about books that one comes across by accident or gift rather than a pre planed decision to find or buy.

For example I’m wandering around in a huge local Rite-Aid drug store waiting for a prescription to be filled, and I’m gazing at the paperback book rack, which seem to be mainly Barbara Taylor Bradford romance novels and the like, you know the ones with flowing silver-gilt title lettering.

But then there’s this slim hardcover book that seems out of place–doesn’t even fit in the paperback sized racks–%%AMAZON=9780393064681 A Tranquil Star%% by the late Primo Levi the brilliant Holocaust survivor, writer, poet, memoirist and chemist, most well known for The Periodic Table. The back of the book called Tranquil Star, a collection of previously unpublished short stories, “The first new fiction of Primo Levi to appear in English in a generation.”

Unspoken here is the fact that it’s the first new fiction published since 1987 when he died or committed suicide–I think it’s still a controversy.

It seemed strange for such a serious work of literature in translation by a Holocaust survivor to be found among the Barbara Taylor Bradfords. I decided it was some kind of sign: that its strange appearance there meant that I was meant to find it. The buying experience itself bore out my intuition.

The cashiers were having trouble finding the book in their bar code system. I don’t know exactly what the trouble was, but this confirmed my feeling that a Mysterious Stranger of some kind had for some obscure reason planted the Primo Levi among the Bradfords and the toothbrushes and the deodorant soap bars.

But why? For anyone? A special message for me? That way lies madness. But I brought the book home and started to read the title story.

It was a six page story and the first five pages were a Calvino/Borges type evocation of the life of a tranquil star that suddenly, for no known reason, became unstable. A tranquil star whose shifts in magnitude are only noted by a diligent medieval Arab astronomer who gave it the name Al-Ludra, “the capricious one”.

“Al-Ludra oscillated , but not regularly, not like a pendulum; rather someone who is at a loss between two choices.”

So it it a star which seems to have something like free will. A star that goes into virtual invisibility until sometime in 1950 astronomers with advanced new technology discover that millions of years ago Al-Ludra underwent a massive self destructive stellar explosion.

A supernova like explosion, an event to those imaginary planetary inhabitants of its imagined soar system of “intrinsic horror”, an event that reduced to vapor the inhabited planet, “along with all the delicate and subtle works perhaps created there…along with all the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined the sky and had wondered what the value was of so many little lights and had found no answer. That was the answer.’

Well it’s not hard to imagine what he’s talking about in a sad gentle, infinitely distanced horrified way: the burden of the knowledge of “intrinsic horror”, however distant.

That burden: In the last page of the story when he introduces Ramon Escojido, a South American astronomer who lives with his European-born wife in the remote jungles of the continent manning an observatory. There is some marital tension. An expedition out of the jungle is planned to relieve the isolation. Then Ramon he is the one who first notices the tiny disturbance on a a photographic plate that registers the beginning of this infinitely distant infinitely ancient cataclysm of Al-Ludra’s explosive self destruction.

The story ends with Ramon, realizing he will have to disappoint his unhappy wife by canceling a planned outing. He realizes he has an obligation to be at the observatory to register on photographic plates the subsequent progress of the blow up of the distant star. (”The way we look at a distant constellation that is dying in a corner of the sky”: Did Paul Simon read this story? Or was he just thinking along the same lines in Graceland’s “Boy in the Bubble”).

That’s it. End of story. But I probably don’t have to tell you what it suggested to me: the loneliness of someone who sees, at a vast distance, a terrible cataclysm unfolding too far in past to affect even if we could…