Stephen McGrath's Blog: Boats Against the Current

Let’s just say it: This section of Onegin  is kinda weird.

First we have the exhausting look within Eugene’s closet. Centuries before the Internet, Pushkin shows us how rad Onegin’s Instagram would have been… That or his YouTube channel. You get the point.

From here we proceed to what many have called the foot fetish section of Pushkin’s classic (see, dear God I dare you, here).

So what then are we to discuss in this post? There’s so much out on the surface. What more could be hiding there for us to dissect?

Shall I try letting words paint pictures, so you might see the hidden room?

1:23 (Douglas Hofstadter)

As our translator of the month hints, there is far more to see.

Here are just a few reasons why these verses matter:

Eighteen

All this, at eighteen years of age, adorned the sanctum of our sage.

1:23 (Stanley Mitchell)

This line from Mitchell is pregnant. Onegin’s room of brushes, clippers, perfumes and knicknacks is his “sanctum.” This is his safe place. All this calculation. All this control. All in the hands of a man who is, at this moment, eighteen.

Now, eighteen in the nineteenth century was different than it was when I was a child (when eighteen year olds were worthless and lazy superchildren, see….. me), and it’s different too than that age is today (when eighteen year olds can run start-ups and change the world, see Ziad Ahmed).

Still, eighteen years is not a lot of time to have collected experiences, and no matter one’s power, there still may be lessons left to learn.

The wisdom we see from Eugene in later chapters, the depth of his anger and sadness, none of these belie a mere eighteen year old. And yet that’s what he was.

How will the story be driven by his youthful vitality? How will it be driven by an impatience that begs us wonder just to where Onegin was rushing at so early an age? All this shall be revealed later.

The Prison of Superficiality

These verses, both in and out of Eugene’s room, connects us to the value Eugene places on things. It seems cliche, but one who relies so heavily on objects is far less likely to have found security in himself, much less others.

How will this, the collecting of things, affect our tale? A dance with Olga, and an ultimate dismissal, seem to argue that this theme matters much.

At first, we have the dressing closet. From there we travel to the ball. Where before he collected brushes, he now collects attention.

He’s fashionably late (1:28) and yet becomes bored when not noticed (1:36).

There’s such repetition in his routine (shock, right?), and one wonders to what extend Onegin is the architect of his own future dissatisfaction.

Longing and Powerlessness

The chapter closes with… well… with the feet section mentioned above. Still, beyond the fetish which Pushkin and I most certainly do not share, there is Onegin’s trademark longing.

This is the color of the tale. (This is why Pride and Prejudice doesn’t even compare to Eugene Onegin.)

Onegin is a miserable tale. It is a slow-motion walk to heartbreak.

It defined a genre. It defined a nation. And all that starts in the first chapter of this masterpiece.

And about those feet… Beyond the obvious podophilic themes throughout the end of this section, there is a lot being said about why these feet affected Pushkin so.

It’s where they walked. It’s how they navigated terrain both soft and difficult. It’s the forbidden, and how that excites the author who by this time could already have had anything he wanted. (Anything.)

Many are the instances from which greater depth can be mined, but we leave with this moment of gut-wrenching beauty.

I recall some storm-brewing ocean: Jealous, I watched its waves that beat a path straight toward her in devotion, to swirl in sequence at her feet. To join those waves, my soul was burning … [Never before] was my young heart ever so sharply torn apart.

1:33 (Douglas Hofstadter)

Why do the waves charge towards our feet? Because they must. Because they must. But as soon as they arrive, they retreat once again, so powerless is this most powerful of natural elements.

Let’s keep this scene in mind. A powerless hero left begging at the feet of his beloved… Let’s see how that goes, shall we? Thematic preview? I’d say yes.

We’re disconnected. We are all out at sea. Awash in shell casings and the hatred our parents thought they’d put to rest, we don’t see eye to eye. And so this has become that thing that must be missing.

What if that’s not all?

We Americans are the stuff of Hollywood, and we prefer our catch-in-the-throat endings to seem surprising, so long as we can bank on them.

Life, though difficult riddle, needs be solvable; we rest in the arms of this inevitable salvation.

So we are, right now, quite foreign. The man or woman next to us seems so much different than those dorm room romances that seemed at the time to be so far from home. And in this analogy exists a clue… just maybe.

You see that dorm, that faraway transit station… We chose to be present in those moments of elsewhere. In that way, the disconnect was not only acceptable, it was expected.

Who among us asked for where we find ourselves today? Via our technology, we are closer than we’ve ever been before. Have you ever felt so alone?

And so no matter how alike us our neighbor may sometimes seem, the way we didn’t choose this isolation makes us seem all the more adrift.

Dice throws, gun shots, white lines of salvation. We do just about anything to assert ourselves on a world where we’re otherwise invisible.

But then the horror happens. We witness it “together” – our hashtag wakes last, sometimes, entire afternoons.

We see, in these moments of less lonely, that what we’re really missing is an understanding of our neighbor.

Bridge building, bipartisanism, every city has a name for it, but we assume what is missing is the full power of a collected Us.

And so we unite, or at least anoint this the missing piece. The great If Only… It only leads to our next accusation.

We assume that in seeking our commonality we’ll somehow find the urgency to overtake all that ails us. Except we each have burdens that are themselves so foreign… How could my neighbor ever care about mine? How can I then care for hers?

We assume that to know one another would begin a much-needed thawing. Maybe we’re right. But what then? What if, due to a lack of common challenge or even context – just too many years spent not knowing – we still don’t even see how (or why) we can save one another?

You think this is lonely? We, the wounded citizens of the former greatest country on Earth face to face with this week’s moment of greatest need… It couldn’t be worse, could it?

It could.

The only thing worse than this loneliness will be the reality that gangs of us will still not feel familiar. We long for teammates but value little more than our lineup cards. A list of names does not a family make.

This may still get more hopeless… And what we use to fill that void will say more than any hashtag, more than any virtual fist raising.

I came to realize that the one you’d been before, a person I’d never known all that well, had changed into the kind of person for whom I wouldn’t mind putting the kettle on… Still, I don’t know what I can save you from.

– Kings of Convenience (paraphrased)

We do need the connection. We do need the shared moments. We do then need to listen, for it isn’t the fault of one we’ve never told if they fail to know what it is we need.

And in that moment, kettle steaming between two who were just yesterday strangers, a new conversation will commence.

Will it carry answers? Only if we both care about the other’s problem.

Even in the world of frosted-hair 80s frontmen, Jani Lane was hardly (at all) bad ass. 

Still, the basset-hound eyed lead singer of Warrant left a massive impression on me as a writer and human. 

It was 1991, and gladiators wore spandex not kevlar. Lane and his band were arguably at their peak when they arrived in Morrison, CO in support of their massive second album, Cherry Pie. 

I spent A LOT of time at Red Rocks amphitheater in 1991 and 1992. (Red Rocks is an outdoor mecca which has hosted the Beatles and where, on 6/8/1983, U2 began their climb to world domination.) I even recall seeing 4 shows in a week on at least one occasion. 

The 1991 season closed September 22 with a show from then-white-hot Warrant, and I was in the audience on that cool fall evening. 

It was the encore that I’ll never forget. The band returned to the stage, but Lane was nowhere to be found. Suddenly, the lights went up, and there was Lane standing among the crowd in maybe the tenth row. As he introduced the band’s next song, snow began to fall. 

His intro, long lost and windblown to the years that have since passed, went roughly along these lines. 

“This next song… Well it’s… I can’t believe this. It’s snowing… I think this song is about a place just like this.”

As he began to play the introduction to his bands first and forever greatest hit, Heaven, this impressionable writer was never to be the same. 

LESSON: One’s success matters little when compared to the power of a moment. 

LESSON: Whatever we plan to say, nature is the ultimate wordsmith. 

LESSON: Humility is truly the baddest ass thing one can example. 

It’s this last lesson that became the most impactful. Not that I’m great with humility, or timely gratitude, but that Lane was… It was something to aspire to. 

The idea that a boyhood dream had come true, for singer and audience… It’s why each plays and/or attends a show. 

The same can be said for that connection between writer and reader, at least that’s a belief that drives me. 

Jani Lane passed in 2011 at only 47 years of age, and I hope his life was filled with more nights like that cool September evening in Morrison, CO. 

Even if not, and in honor of his lesson, I’ll settle for being grateful that I was there that night when the universe left a frontman speechless.

This post (and this blog in general) is about one writer’s first encounters with Story. 

Last week, I posited (confessed) that many of my earliest dances with narrative may well have been on vinyl (cassette more likely) and not in a book. 

To this end, I’m revisiting the records of my youth, and this week we begin with one of my generation’s biggies. 

Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet (1986) has an almost unrivaled status among its peers. Over 12 million copies sold tells of its reach, though the numbers only say so much. To be sure, a number of other bands owe their very existence to the boys from NJ. They certainly impacted me as well. 

It’s possible that I, at the age of 13 or so, first heard of Romeo and Juliet on Slippery’s I’d Die for You. The irony of this is how Jon Bon Jovi sees himself as the anti-Romeo in this song, or at least a hero in a world that no longer knows Romeo and Juliet. 

Additional irony manifests as one concedes that the bulk of Slippery is in fact this same tale of star-crossed lovers. 

But Jon’s world is not Verona. No, NJ is docks, pawn shops, diners, and long cold nights spent dreaming of tomorrow. 

Still, a dream and some determination, and one can find themselves halfway there, or so perhaps Bon Jovi’s biggest-ever hit boldly promised. 

But where does this leave our inquiry? The songs of Slippery When Wet are even more than an introduction to Shakespeare. (Truth be told, they were most probably my first exposure to Springsteen as well, what with Never Say Goodbye and its gorgeous tribute to Bruce’s Point Blank – more on that here.) 

No, Slippery also introduced a generation to Jon as steel-horse cowboy. His tale of lonely redundancy, of course, being one of the band’s other colossal hits. 

Bon Jovi even knew how to work a sequel, with their New Jersey (1988), beyond being my favorite album of theirs if not of the decade, reinforcing most of the themes discussed above. 

And so, though my bookshelf was empty, I moved forward into my future life as a writer. A loaded six string, it turns out, is quite as potent as an English class… At least it was in my case. 

I’m not sure on the statistics, but I assume my words published/pages (not) read before I turned twenty stat is uncommon among my other scribbling friends. 

The truth is that I read LITTLE while in school, something I took another ten years to forgive myself for. 

See, I assumed that no proper writer – whoever they are – was poorly read – whatever that is – and it seemed clear my status as the latter would forever harm my ability to be the former. 

My writing has 100% developed positively as I’ve rallied as a reader these past twenty years. Whether graduate studies on Othello or the book that led me to meet my wife, the written word has served me well. No doubt. 

But this does not mean that my having not been a reader made me insufficient beforehand, though I was crap at Trivial Pursuit. 

Sure, there were also other embarrassments. It turns out that people who only know sentinels from the X-men, who only know big words via Joey Potter can occasionally muck up other uses/spellings of those same words. 

Yes, life was difficult before reading, and life is more open since it. 

But none of this is to say that I wasn’t always into storytelling. 

No, that passion developed much earlier. 

I found stories on television (including both the WWF and the WB, no less), in comics, and – perhaps earliest of all – in rock and roll. 

Now if you’re sitting there doing the Math and wondering a) my age and b) the era of music I may have been most influenced by, you may be in for a shock. 

Beatles? No. Stones? Sorry. I’m even too young for those earliest moments of Aerosmith/Frampton/KISS/Queen. 

No for me, while my musical journey began on Duran Duran and the Thompson Twins, the formative years all had a bit more…. hairspray. 

My most influential chapter was the mid-80s, you see. 

As such, while I believed in Story, Jon Bon Jovi was a far bigger influence than Steinbeck or Hemingway. 

So now I write a bit, and I find myself thinking about influences from time to time. 

One of the fruits of knowing other writers, and especially of blogging, is that I no longer feel any shame over these original mentors. 

In fact, I’ve long wondered about exploring the influence that these early examples of narrative had on me. 

That I’m doing so now is equal parts nostalgia, social sciences, and writer’s block. 

No matter, for all topics are worthy of exploration, no matter the initial motivation. 

Writing is many things, but it is perhaps most often a series of highways all leading to the heart of one’s origin story. 

That being the case, I welcome you to mine. 

There will be guitars, there may later be superheroes. It seems either way there’ll be spandex. 

What follows will be, as all before it was, my story. 

I’m grateful you’re along for the ride. 

He’d still be sleeping on occasion,

When served by servants with the post.

“Hallo? What’s this? Some invitation?

Not one, but three would be my host?

Let’s see – some ball, some children’s party…”

Where will be dash, my dashing hearty?

Where to begin? It’s all the same –

He’ll make all three! Life’s such a game!

1:15 (Douglas Hofstadter)

As Onegin transitions from introduction to action, we see our dashing fop entertaining a set of invitations. The above passage carries with it at least four lessons.

First, Onegin is popular. His attendance is valued. Whether it is his status or what he himself lends to an evening, we do not know. What seems clear, however, is that Onegin is not at risk of being bored.

Second, when such does boredom hit, Eugene may not handle it well. We’ve already learned that he’s a womanizer. This is not an error, He is not a romantic, there is something far more calculated at play. Eugene “softens” women as he calculates ways to “make the guileless marvel” (1:11, Mitchell). Eugene is also a gossip (1:12). In short, Eugene, when bored, creates his own entertainment… often at the expense of others.

Third, Onegin sees little value in choosing between options. When facing a fork in the road, he simply answers Yes. For parties, this may be fine, though how many of us have gone to one too many tourist stops on a trip only to realize that the memories conflate into one? How much substance did Onegin derive from any one of his many nightly stops (or lovers, or…)?

Finally, Onegin cares little for the need to choose, for he sees life, as Hofstadter translates it, as simply a game. We see this now, and we will see this many times as the story progresses. Life and love are just a game, until each is not, but therein lies the tale.

The other significant character in this section of Onegin is, in what is an early example of a product placement we might today take for granted, Eugene’s trusted Bréguet. [accent]

Its chime interrupts his tour of the boulevard (1:15) and tells him when it is time to attend the ballet (1:17). I would contend that there is a larger theme here as well.

Onegin’s tale will often be affected by his ability to know when to engage or disengage. With Bréguet at his side (or in his pocket one might imagine), Onegin is rarely late (… r than he may otherwise have been). But what of when timing is left to Eugene alone?

Throughout Onegin, the title character will be at times early and quite often late. He will fail to arrive when needed, he will fail to disengage before consequences force him to. What begins as a timepiece shall end in a bullet, and still Onegin will wander.

This section closes with Eugene’s arrival at the ballet. Contrast the way he tramples feet with the champagne ‘pop’ which accompanied his arrival at dinner. Is Onegin celebrated for his attendance or is it a disturbance to others? Yes.

Before this art, this splendid beauty, Eugene is disappointed by others who surround him. Mitchell writes, “At boxes, at the tiers he gazes; with all the finery and the faces he’s dreadfully dissatisfied” (1:21). This dissatisfaction with those allowed to cohabitate his world – and he resents their ‘stamping, coughing, hissing,’ etc (1:22) – is nothing that will wear off soon.

Onegin is entertaining so long as he feels entertained. Once bored, it’s manipulation, gossip, and untimely interruption, as we are surely bound to see.

I’m envious of songwriters/filmmakers/painters/poets, and almost every other kind of artist. 

This isn’t a case of “If I had it to do all over again…” Not anything of the sort. 

No, my jealousy comes from how much more digestible almost every medium other than writing is. 

Make a movie and want to share it? Ask your friends for two hours. Record a song? Ask them for under five minutes. Write a novel? You’re asking people to give you a week, if they’re committed (and they’d better be, for reading is ALSO the least multitaskable medium). 

The result? Fewer friends who’ve experienced that thing by which you most define yourself. That’s fewer ambassadors (and fewer sales). It also means that social networking is far less useful to writers. (Hello Twitter, my old friend.)

It’s harder to get friends (or anyone) to discuss a book… certainly at random. 

I can count on on one hand the number of times I’ve been out and just started discussing a new release that others had read as well. Contrast this with movies or songs, which one can even “catch” before seeing their friends just to prepare for the potential conversation. I didn’t even preemptively read books in grad school. Reading is a commitment, even for those of us who love the practice. 

I’ve gone too long without saying, but this post has zero to do with movies/songs being easier to write. I have no concept or belief that any art is easier to produce than another… though being a YouTuber has to be easier than being a novelist. It just does. 

So what’s a scribbler to do? 

Few talk about books, and those that do only talk about their own. While I get that this is pretty much the author version of talking about one’s kids, it’s, in truth, hollow as F-.

Perhaps we assume that the Internet is the new salon. It isn’t. At all. 

No patron is paying me to write, and no audience is awaiting my arrival to somehow validate their discussion. 

People sharing sentence fragments as a response to other’s inane offerings isn’t even marketing. It certainly isn’t reading. 

All of this results in a death spiral where most writing is crap, and the good stuff is even harder to find. 

And that’s at least part of the goal, isn’t it?

Churches have been facing/marketing on this for years: When one’s in love, they want to celebrate with others who feel the same. 

Where is that experience for writers? Where is that experience even for readers, because I’m not finding it on Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook or the ilk. 

So this brings us back to the beginning (and without much promise for satisfaction). 

Where is the YouTube for writers? (And without it, do we really stand a chance?)

Kind of Blue is an amazing song, and it’s an even better story. Now, this won’t be a Behind the Music sort of deal (I actually avoid such background when writing about songs).

No Blue in Green is magic because of the artistry, because of the layers of constraint.

There’s Miles’ muted horn, there’s the famed modal limitations placed upon each musician. It’s a song designed to withhold something.

It all starts with that piano. Bill Evans plays it light, almost Peanuts, until Miles walks in the room.

From there, it’s every Saturday evening detective story. His horn – the mournful coda to an otherwise assured moment.

For sure, the piano revives us. It argues that something isn’t quite so bad. It isn’t just positive, it’s a counterargument to Miles’ complaint.

And then comes Trane. I mean, it’s Trane. Here, he’s Worthy to Magic, Pippen to Jordan (though we know this +1 was more than capable of fronting his own team). It’s Coltrane here who shows the punch by which Miles’ career might me characterized. The clarity, the voice of reason after the first duo’s disagreement, all the more pronounced for that which surrounds it. Even his two brief explosions (2:50, 2:59) show a wink, as if Miles might have argued, “You know this is a ballad” only to have Trane respond that there was no reason one could not slow dance with style.

But then the storyteller comes home. The story belongs to Miles, and it’s his version that we’re indebted to hear. His horn whines, it pleads us to understand.

And though Evans and his ivories will have one more try, their interrupted finale indicates that the Maestro has had enough.

Sometimes you gotta give into the pained one. Accept his truth for what it is (his), and keep your side discussions for another day.

It’s been said that if one reads the Fatiha (the opening chapter of the Quran), that person understands the totality of that book. Much the same could be said of the first ten verses of Eugene Onegin.

All the themes are here. There’s love, loss, and learning… arrogance, grooming, and indifference.

Pushkin first introduces us to Eugene in the second verse, but really he’s there from the very start.

What folly it is to care for things that are half dead, Pushkin writes. Surely this must be a metaphor for much of Onegin’s calculus. Throughout the journey which is to come, we will see Onegin engage and disengage as he teases his way towards the loss and pain of both others and himself.

Another striking feature of verse two is how global Onegin [the text] has become. Onegin [the man] hails from the Neva, as Pushkin assumes many of his readers must have as well. While Onegin is clearly read in St. Petersburg, this line is especially lovely for someone like me, who writes you today from Maryland, though much of my love for Onegin developed while living in Asia. It is worth noting that I’ve been to the Neva, to Pushkin’s apartment nonetheless, but the text has taken on far more meaning to me since that trip in 1997 than it ever had before that journey.

From here, we learn of Onegin’s learning, while always being reminded that this knowledge somehow makes him different. Even in his skill, as in the events and parties which are to come, Onegin is isolated. His knowledge in economics is used to show how little his uncle knew of the the world. His impressive schooling was forced upon him via game and folly, and all fell to the side once love came to call.

That Pushkin obsessed over Don Juan the way I obsess over Pushkin should surprise no one who reads Onegin. Nabokov says this of Onegin’s mastery of/obsession with love:

what he more firmly knew than all the arts,

what since his prime had been to him

toil, torment, and delight,

what occupied the livelong day

his fretting indolence was

the art of soft passion

This observation is, of course, pregnant. They who are obsessed with love in this way are not romantics. Perhaps they are sociopaths. Perhaps they themselves are the loneliest of sorts (terrified of forever being this way, in fact). But they are not romantics. And so Onegin from the start should be seen as one in conflict even when he is at his best. His cleverness? A facade.

I proposed that a deep knowledge of verses 1-10 could impart an understanding of the story as a whole, and nowhere is this more true than in verse 10. Stanley Mitchell translates it thus, “Loving one thing exclusively, How self-forgetting he could be!” and this certainly speaks to the obsession Onegin felt for love.

However, there’s more. As we approach the final lines of this tale (and long before then if we pay attention), it’s the translation of Douglas Hofstadter that we would be best to keep in mind:

He breathed but love, he loved but love,

And lost himself in quest thereof.

It’ll take us awhile to get there, but the end is tragically the same. Onegin will love. Onegin will lose. The rest is just the most beautiful story ever told.

Don’t let the name fool you, this isn’t a post about running… But then, to be honest, it is. 

There once was a writer named Stephen. Eager to connect with others like him, he took to the only singles bar wannabee intellectuals call home (Twitter). 

Once there he engaged, he posted, he searched for others with the same favorite book or character. He discussed his writing with other authors, some of whom had massive followings. This was to be the first hit, so to speak. 

As he followed others, and saw them eager to follow him back, our author got himself an idea. 

“What if I too could amass a following? What would that say about me, and how many more would read what I had on offer?”

So he followed writers, and they followed him back, he even unfollowed those that abandoned him. His army increased in rank, until finally he crossed that plateau. 

10,000 followers, and now he could rest. 

But he could not. Still he followed, still he culled, and it was never enough. 

To make matters worse, his engagement numbers weren’t all that good. He did everything he knew to be effective, but no increase in those actually READING him was in the cards. 

A good friend suggested he interact with his followers more. That this was revolutionary is almost shameful, for Stephen was no Salinger. No, Stephen loved to interact. No wonder the relentless pursuit of numbers felt hollow. 

So back to Twitter he went. He’d spend time each day reacting to the posts of those he followed (and this number was, at one point, almost 8,000). 

Well two things happened. 

First, Stephen noticed that his Twitter feed read more like the Sunday Target ad. There was little other than hyperlinks, off-center graphics, and unpalatable pull quotes. To what was he even to respond? 

Second, those Stephen did reach out to rarely reached back, and they never started the next conversation before he did. 

All of this leads us to today. As I write this today, my (because it’s me, Stephen – third person is just more…. literary) followers stand at 10,000. I’m down 700 followers since I began trimming the accounts I followed just one week ago. 

Initially, it was the bots I cut. Follow everyone and automate your tweets? Bye. The next criteria is even more harsh, for only those I actually want to hear from will remain. 

I stand today at 10K, but this number will crash as this next purge begins. The thing of course is that others do the whole unfollow me and I’ll unfollow you thing by which I once swore. As I leave them, they will leave me. And with that, my beloved 10K shall fall. 

That’s fine. It is. For what will remain will be a group of people with whom I truly want to interact. Young writers (in craft, if not belly button) and a number of others I actually care about the musings of.  

Am I over 10K? Heck no. I want it back already. But when I re-reach it, it will be people who want to read me, not pay me back. I love writing, though for the past six years it’s paid me shit. I no longer dream of a best seller, I dream of actual readers. The world owes me nothing, but I’m good. It’s their loss for not being here from the start.

Now I just have to show them. And when a few readers tell their friends to give this writer a try… Maybe the 10K will be back. Maybe. 

Either way, I’ll write about it.