summery resolution

Jenna Krajeski, a poetry editor at The New Yorker, shares a predilection for biking, Saul Bellow's Herzog and half-maintained resolutions with some people:

At the beginning of the summer, I resolved to do two things more often: ride my bike and read novels. So far, not so good. My poor, abused Fuji popped a tire after the first ride, requiring me to cram it onto the engorged post-Mermaid Parade F train from Coney Island, and my likewise worn paperback copy of Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” has already lost its cover and suffers from a spine that breaks with each page turn; reading it is like running from high tide.

Unlike some people, however, she seems to be getting something done. Or perhaps not. Maybe all she's doing is writing blog posts as well.

"History"

Saul Bellow's Herzog contains numerous instances of Moses Herzog attempting to account for his position, both in terms of personal relationships ("When he thought of the endless anxious tedium of courtship and marriage with all that he had invested in arrangements--merely in practical measures, in trains and planes and hotels and department stores, and banks where he had banked, in hospitals, in doctors and drugs, in debts; and for himself, the nights of rigid insomnia, the yellow boring afternoons, the trials by sexual combat, and all the horrible egomania of it, he wondered that he had survived it all. He wondered, even, why he should have wanted to survive.") and the broader currents of culture, society and history. This last, which might be said to encompass all the others as well, he makes a scapegoat for all the people whom he perceives to have turned against him. Or, rather, he believes those people have made history their excuse: "'History' gave everyone a free ride."

What exactly he means by this isn't immediately clear. He seems to be suggesting that equating personal responsibility and historical contingency is a dubious moral claim. How much can anyone claim an exemption from their responsibility to other people because of the force of history, even the most traumatic historical events? Even if you've personally participated in, or fell victim to, that history, are you off the hook when it comes to more present domestic needs? Herzog's statement exudes ambivalence. On the one hand, certainly, why shouldn't people be excused? On the other, a jerk is still a jerk no matter how he got that way.

"How can you ask this question?"

When does a metaphor cease to be a metaphor? In this documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog repeatedly says that the boat being pulled over the mountain is "the central metaphor" for his film. But a metaphor for what? In My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, Herzog admits that he is still not sure. The documentary makes this conflation of object and symbol especially clear. Fitzcarraldo portrays the feat as a magnificent achievement, but this is not a result of filmic effects. Pulling that boat over that mountain was exactly as hard as it seemed to be.