… is a threat.
Daniel Handler recommends the personal canon, not cannon. (“A cannon is a mounted weapon used for firing heavy ammunition, usually spherical projectiles. Canon refers to either a group of works in a particular area of study or art or a collection of religious rules.” source EasyBib, a Chegg service) In his wonderfully misleadingly titled book,
and then? and then? what else?
because it’s very far from the childish as anodyne or comforting (in fact so are his books written by Lemony Snicket, acerbic sneer or acid smirk, among the synonyms suggested), he says,
I don’t think anyone I tell to do it does it.
I encourage people who want to be writers to delineate and study this canon, their own, above every other.
And then he cites whole passages (presumably he has the canon at hand), making comments: how the very clear sentences give you the illusion that you can follow the logic, that Sullivan’s mind is clear and easily explained, when really he’s as lunatic as the rest of us… This seems to be a theme, our shared lunacy.
All these things have been canonized in my head. They live there exerting deep influence on my work and on my life ...
... the most important literary canon is one's own—not just a list of favorite books or what have you, but the individual moments, the twists of plot or turns of phrase, the tiny secret reasons you love what you love.
What you love remembers another really great phrase in this book: We are who we are not who we look like. And—
There's a strange vertigo when you realize you're wrong about something. You float in space for a moment, the landscape see-sawing or vanishing into the distance. It's the same feeling when you're completely immersed in a good book and then, at the conclusion of a chapter or the intrusion of a noise, blink your way back to real life. You were wrong about the world, wrong about where you were. You weren't in the world of the book. You were here. It's a powerful feeling and I think an important one, being wrong. People talk about epiphanies, often forgetting that a moment where something clicks into place—where you think you've figured something out—is also a moment where you realized you were wrong about something before. Very wrong, perhaps, or even blissfully wrong. This all has a negative connotation to it—due in part, I think, to the tolling sound the word makes, wrong wrong wrong—but there's a certain kind of pleasure that comes with this vertigo. The discord that arises from leaning, incorrectly, on some idea that collapses under you carries with a small thrill, if not of progress, then at least of travel.
—but what about this canon, it’s appealing, right? an appealing idea, but try and put it into practice. I mean, I try and put it into practice. That’s why I mentioned that Daniel Handler cites passages, as the moments, twists of plot or turns of phrase, which made it into his personal canon and tells why. When I try and put it into practice, something that I advocated here in regard to academic writing, when I try to in view of simply writing, I face something like what Stravinsky called an abyss of possibilities.
His answer was in fact to return to his forms, why he was disparaged for suddenly appearing as a neo-classicist, as if he were merely trying it on.
Stravinsky also said of composition—and perhaps I’m here engaged in forming a canon despite myself—that it was an argument, an argument with Tradition. Not to know the rules so as to break them but to enter into their refutation. To argue with, through and against them. A canon can also be what you contest.
Why do I read John Ash, however? not to contest his approach or argue with it but in admiration. I am on his side. On his side against the easy, the grounded in identity, a culture or even the present. I feel a fellow exile. Strangely, Daniel Handler (it would seem odd to use only his surname) is here too, not because of his—as the brothers Quay might say—pathologies, his psychological peculiarities, as he himself terms them, not because he’s weird, or can give surety to a kind of etiology of those peculiarities in having had something bad happen to him some time or whatever but because he does not: he says his “ghastly assault” as a child is like a balloon—
It just floats around the book the way it floats in my life—present but unattached, like a balloon.
—while the balloon itself is attached. It is a specific balloon that floated past him and his friends when they were waiting outside a diner with this phrase in it, green like what one of his friends was wearing—
To Match Her Sweater.
