in the hall of mirrors

Failed

Last night I saw A Scanner Darkly, which was quite wonderful. On my way out, I bumped into Jonathan, the handsome and successful young doctor who has helped me on some of the HIV presentations, who was headed into another movie; I was in enough of a daze that it was actually rather difficult to fake casual conversation.

The book has always been one of my favorite Philip Dick novels (with Ubik, the first I ever read; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which is a sort of parallel to Scanner; and, above all of course, the mysterious The Man in the High Castle, which has a climax that I always find far more disorienting than any of the basic concepts that run the novel). I couldn't help identifying fairly deeply with the film – the anomie, the sense of decline, the sense of confused waste and the constant return to the repetitive, meaningless, draining actions that create that waste.

I also spent an appreciable part of the afternoon arguing with a postgraduate applicant who seemed to be dooming himself to failure through doing everything backwards, and complaining about the results; and I had the mild shock two days ago of having my opinions dismissed by a colleague, a fairly frequent experience during the school year (I become unused to it in summer, but will have to deal with it again on the usual regular basis, starting in a couple of weeks); and of course the previous weekend in London, and the week in Spain, spent with colleagues and advisors who have great affection for me, but not much in the way of expectations, and two of whom have made some promises they will clearly not bother to fulfill – not out of any malice, just out of a combination of forgetfulness, plus the implied sense that effort spent on my career is effort that is kind of wasted. Good money after bad, I suppose.

They all acknowledge my potential – but of course I've been playing the potential card since my early teens. Potential instead of action: a disastrous exchange. As I think backwards through time – the past few weeks, even months, and most certainly the years, the evidence simply continues to collect....

All this, with various other minor and fragmentary experiences, plus my normal obsessive concerns about writing and failure, came into focus as an acutely lucid morning dream and waking vision of my current position: that, although it is true that I am not a dramatic failure, it is no wonder I am powerless at work, not invited to preside at pretty much anything, simply not considered by a great many of my colleagues, locally and internationally. It is all simply a natural and accurate response to the figure I cut in the world, to use a rather eighteenth-century phrase – people do not think of me because I myself have not made enough happen; I am indeed perhaps in the middle of the scale of normal academic failures, not someone anyone would need to fire, but someone who will simply be in the back of various pictures, someone who is not really suitable for promotion, or attention, or being asked to speak in a professional context.

And this is not experienced with my usual inflated, narcissistic tragedy or self-pity: just an edge of horror at how clearly the picture develops, if I look at it straight on – that, whatever excuses I can drum up around health and history, I have firmly cast myself as an also-ran.

And even this blog, of course, is simply an ineffective attempt to bypass the work that would have a significant effect on my position, in favor of the casual, ephemeral – the failed....

Fragments and overview

At 2:30 am, my smoke alarm goes off. There's no battery in it, there's no smoke, it just malfunctions. Somewhere in what I'd watched that day were the bleakly sunny rooms of an everyday Los Angeles apartment, with all its implied background – that strange flatness, that subtly disturbing sense of endless emptiness that is a standard trope in LA novels and poems. And somehow, because it's the middle of the night, and the bland white plastic cover of the smoke alarm has a strong metaphorical/cultural resemblance to all that bleakness, I am bothered for hours by visions of a land without magic, of culture without depth, of imprisonment in the leisurely and meaningless.

Although I've lived in Los Angeles, and was comfortable there, and even wanted to go back there to work; and although I ultimately distrust Atlantic cultures more than the Pacific ones (I kind of like the Mediterranean ones though!); and although I think the Western European dismissal of Los Angeles culture, especially films, is motivated as much by a sense of jealous competition as anything else; nevertheless – that bleakness does exist, and there are times in LA when everything seems to have that disturbing depthlessness, even the plants and the sky.

I was reading some minor books and stories by Alexei Panshin, whose one excellent book – Rite of Passage (1968) – is still rereadable, a delight, and won awards at the time. His other work is hardly worth keeping (or worth ordering through the Internet - there's a few pounds I won't see again). I get the impression of a pleasant and intelligent guy, interested in growing up and in ethics and in society, but whose development as a writer stalled in a certain amateurism or pedantry. But the ideas of the short stories – not the stories themselves, they're alternately clunky and sketchy – suggest that disturbing disparity between what we want and what we have. Panshin and his wife were the kind of 70s counterculturists who moved to a farm; they reminded me of my vague, intermittent desire to see copies of the Whole Earth Catalog again – though I was too young and self-centered to take the counterculture very seriously, its values have colored much of my imagination.

Of course, I'm more of a child of the 80s – I was just too late to really connect or identify with 1968 and its aftermath, except as a bewildered spectator and younger brother. So, for me, the dominant experience of the post-1968 era is a Reagan/Thatcher one of yuppies, mirrored office buildings, rapid upswings in heartlessness, corporations, and hostility, and equally rapid downswings in naturalness, social supportiveness, and the arts.

It makes me wonder: how does our contemporary urban Western culture look from the outside? It's not a good era, of course, by any means; probably not as bad as, say, 1930s Germany, or the late Roman Empire. (Although, admittedly, some day we may look upon this as the last golden era before climate change destroys everything.) But it is hard to really take our own temperature; would it be accurate to see us as comparable to, say, mid-19th-century France, an era of dull prosperity and desperation? No doubt about it: a certain bleakness is the norm in our time – and I don't think that's just me imposing the images of my own problems on the world.

And I can't help thinking: the way out is... what? Imagination? I can't manage the extreme exits of high spiritualities (meditating one's way to a world that makes more sense requires immense discipline, and a willingness to ignore a lot of things); but it seems as though simply imagining our world as somewhat different than it is would give us a great deal more flexibility. And, perhaps, the possibility of transformation....

Solaris

Continued light-headed, or perhaps woozy, all afternoon. Didn't go to Catherine's birthday dinner. Did go in for interview with prospective postgraduate – and I'm sorry if it sounds heartless, but what a waste of time that was. Well I suppose that in the larger sense, as I gave her advice about where she should consider studying, that it wasn't wasted – for her.

Later: less weak, but a headache that won't go away. Perhaps it is an overburdened liver; I obviously need to cut back on the supplements to find that out (unless I have the nerve, and it would take a great deal of that, to go into the clinic and demand a blood test on liver function).

And still later: an episode ('Strain') of Law & Order/Special Victims Unit on television, about AIDS, gay men, clubs, a new deadly strain, murders, drugs. The killer targeted PWAs who had infected his brother: and although he was convicted, I was a bit dismayed that no one seemed to feel very strongly that he was a madman. Of course it's an ambivalent situation – but not that ambivalent, I think.

And, still with this headache, I finally switched over to the last ten minutes of the 2002 remake of Solaris; I had known it was on television, but since I have the DVD, it seemed silly to watch a broadcast. That was, of course, enough for me for the evening: although I understand some of the complaints about the film, I nevertheless think that the remake is extraordinarily beautiful – the colors, the slow, calm words, the eerie, half-unexplained plot, the shimmering music, the bruised, haunted look in Clooney's eyes, the emotional resonance of the whole: the truth is, it is virtually my favorite movie.

Complaints? Of course: popular culture belongs to everybody, and everybody always has opinions, often negative ones. Film is collaborative, negotiated (like opera and musicals, and much theater); there is hardly a film that doesn't at moments step down to a lowest common denominator, and slightly spoil its own taste. Most of the complaints are comparisons with Lem's 1961 book, or Tarkovsky's 1972 film; I'm not willing to fall for those – the book is too heavily, scientifically conceptual (though brilliant) and the music for the Tarkovsky is not as successful (I can't hear the Bach out of context; it seems to me more like the quasi-parodic use of classical musics in Kubrick's 2001).

Yes, towards the end, there are two mistakes: the hand held out to the phantom child is too overtly Sistine; and Rheya's final speech is too long. But the whole is such a beautifully constructed poem: all the words of the book have been stripped out, and only the emotional core is left – all played out in a claustrophobically narrow range of images, and supported by an utterly beautiful film score by Cliff Martinez, which seems to use what must have been a vast amount of time studying Ligeti's orchestral works from the 1960s. The music is, in fact, so beautifully made and so hypnotic that, this winter, I listened to it over and over....

Those final words: up until the extra sentences that slightly clutter the ending, they are entirely perfect. They are, in fact, answers to the griefs and nightmares of the past twenty-five years, at least for me. Kelvin has apparently somehow returned to his home; we see a repeat of the first scene where he is making dinner, cuts his finger, etc.; but this time it ends slightly differently – as he washes his finger, the cut vanishes. When he sees that, he knows things are no longer as they were: he turns to see his dead wife walk into the room, and he asks her, his eyes huge with love, grief, and a hint of fear – "Am I alive, or am I dead?" And Rheya, smiling up at him wutg love and comfort, gives the perfect answer, which I have found so strangely consoling: "We don't have to think like that any more."

I identify almost too completely with the film. It's heartless of me to say so, of course – not as my reaction to that student interview was heartless, but in a different way; because friends and family inevitably find it important that one not have a heart that seems utterly broken. That's why I don't share this film, or my other favorite Urbania (also about grief and the aftermath of loss) very often. But the truth is: those shots from the opening of Solaris, of Kelvin sitting on his bed looking out bleakly at the rain, are just too utterly real for me. And too familiar.

... My headache is – not gone, but – fading....

Abasement of the Northmores

After a rather disappointing day, where I just sort of maintained cruising speed – didn't really do much useful, but didn't stop completely – it is now late at night, when I should be sleeping (as I can't sleep in tomorrow, because I have a doctor's appointment in the morning). But I am not sleepy... so I read a short story of the Master's, the above title, a late story mentioned in a review by Borges I read this morning.

Lovely. Perfectly written, of course, though the fragments of dialogue towards the beginning remind me of why James was such a failure as a playwright – there's a very fine line between his writing and parodies of it. But the whole is definitely a fantasy – that, after their deaths, two men who had been so misjudged by the world – the dull one successful, the intelligent one obscure – would be re-judged on the publication of volumes of letters: as though people would really read, and would read so carefully... I doubt that would ever happen; more probable is that the existence of two volumes of correspondence by a famous man would simply be regarded as monumental proof of his importance.

But it is a pleasant, if slightly vindictive, fantasy. I think Borges said it was a late work – no surprise – of course he was thinking of posterity!...

It leaves me still trying to get to sleep, but – with a (Jamesian) oblique, mysterious smile playing about my lips....

Bookshelf

Enjoying Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf. He has a slightly unexpected style – very educated, articulate, intelligent – but at the same time rather stiff, with not infrequent falls into gracelessness. Perhaps it's just because he is a design engineer, who has become fascinated with books. I get the sense that he sometimes regards words as tools, to be logically/rationally deployed; and other times he uses metaphors and idioms with a drunken-sailor extravagance (which, in this case, also includes said drunken sailor's inability to exactly control his actions). However, it's still quite wonderful and sensible; it's lots of fun to go into the mechanics of books and bookshelves (more than you might think).

It occurs to me that the slight irritation – that slight ache of the teeth, as it were – that I feel at his style is more my fault than his. After all, he is not a stylist, he is a scholar; and I read too much for pleasure, too much for style. I should be spending much more time on scholarly literature; it's a shame that my own discipline (musicology) is not for the most part known for its interesting style, except for the contemporary radicals – but I should be reading them anyway.

Susan kept the books she needed to read, to work with, at home; at her office were only those professional books that she didn't particularly care about, or needed only for classes. Philip had vast and pleasant bookshelves at home, including his professional books. But I have made the mistake – and, although organizationally sensible, it probably is a mistake – of keeping all of my professional books in my office: a pleasant office indeed, but there is no couch to lie on, and there is always too much of the garbage of unimportant work (administration, classes) that is in the way....

Indulgences

No, not Catholic ones. (Always amusing to note: although my father was brought up Catholic, and my mother Orthodox, they got married and became Presbyterian – which here, close to Scotland, is a tale that brings in a lot of incredulous looks. I suspect they want to know: why on earth would one become Presbyterian if one didn't have to? And didn't care about predestination?...)

[LATER ADDENDUM: My eldest sister checked some of the stories I told below, when she was at a cousin's wedding – seems that there are some inaccuracies in what I was told about who changed religions and when – more details later.]

I'm finally recovering from feeling overwhelmed over the past few weeks, although I know there's a mass of research and administration waiting for me; today I was reading an e-book (Emma Bull's Bone Dance, which was pretty good from the beginning, and is getting markedly more interesting in the middle); then went out for a relaxed antipasto with Tess, while discussing plans for a writing workshop (which didn't require that much discussion, but she wanted reassurance that we were on the same page; and we had fun, flirting with Italian waiters). Then went to a movie with P– (Pirates 2, of course – fun if rather gloopy – there's an amazing amount of slime in it, I hope I don't dream of squids and such). Then we went for a pint (really three drinks, but knowing me the middle one was mango juice) to the Head of Steam, which is always a nice compromise among bars/pubs – not really gay but with gay guys casually dotted here and there, and many surprisingly cute straight ones; sort of alternative but not aggressively so; and they have Belgian Frambozenbier, which is a big plus. Although I still get fairly bored by the bars of northern England, P– could convince me (with my admitted collusion) to stay for two hours – just the prospect of looking at cheerful lads, and talking to My Buddy, seemed enough. Lots of indulgences....

P– was talking about Angela Carter's short stories, which he's been reading; some he doesn't like at all. I was defending them, generically and without specifics, which is of course a pretty weak position to take; but I suspect P–'s scientific background is causing him to miss the interesting bits of some of her more experimental stories, or at least not to enjoy them as they're meant to be enjoyed. They may be a bit edgy and formalist, but that makes sense – it's of a piece with British experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s; from my angle they would compare to, say, early Maxwell Davies, when he did all those short pieces with aggressively traditional roots and equally aggressively experimental surface textures. I'm not thinking so much of Eight Songs for a Mad King, or Vesalii icones, although those are exactly in this style/genre; but instead of the short choral works that are so utterly startling – that ruthless Ave Maria that is made up of unadulterated medieval monody, served straight up, but then set in an almost unbelievably intense a capella texture of major sevenths and minor seconds. The piece is made even more beautifully, artistically edgy by being notated almost entirely in sharps, in a way that is both hard to sightread and very clear in intention – there's no way it can soften into something casual or unproblematic; it always feels like a knife dance, and one that needs to be carefully negotiated if the singers are to reach the end without wounds.

And that reminds me of Mr Punch: my post on Gaiman's comic reminded me of what is still my favorite piece by Birtwistle, also written when he was young (and, I think, a close friend and colleague of Maxwell Davies – a Brit composer was gossiping to me last week on the train about when they split up, and how they refused to talk to each other after a certain point, but I'm pretty sure it was after this). It's the opera Punch and Judy (1967), which, like those Maxwell Davies pieces, is constructed in short, easily (structurally) graspable pieces, which are nevertheless so, well, sharp-edged, that in grasping them you cut yourself (and how's that for a bizarrely extended metaphor). Amazingly shrill and savage, but all in short, easy-to-hear pseudo-traditional quatrains and such; it's a remarkably powerful work. Unlike the Gaiman comic, which refers atmospherically to children's memories of Mr Punch, it actually creates those emotions, and in adults – the length (hmm, according to my CDs it's about... uh, I'm adding in my head here... an hour and three quarters) with the rapid repetitions of short phrases, plus the shrill, familiar-but-twisted instrumentation, make it a powerful, almost a psychotic experience. And in an unexpected way, too: one doesn't get any impression that the composer is psychotic, but that in a strange way the music itself is psychotic – as, of course, is Mr Punch.

(Afterthought: does this compare to that cynicism that I so dislike in a lot of British postwar novels? – Martin Amis, or even those Byatt novels with miserable endings... no, this seems different to me: it's more formal, more self-consciously artistic – which saves it, as far as I'm concerned: so much elegant artifice  implies that something is worth doing, unlike the trashier approach of Amis and such.)

Hmm, maybe, despite its second paragraph, this post isn't about indulgences: it's about indulgences and flagellations – since that is sort of what these works are like.... How very Catholic.

Or maybe I'm just dithering – not a surprise, after two beers (and a juice). Hey, don't sneer! – one of them was a Belgian beer – higher alcohol content... it's a relief to get rid of this shirt, though, which smells of bar smoke....

Secrets

Read today Gaiman's Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch – quite wonderful. I know that in becoming a Neil Gaiman fan, I'm jumping onto a very large bandwagon, and doing so pretty late in the day – but this one was really a surprise: a slow, dense, atmospheric tour of the shadows and incomprehensibilities of the author's childhood. A time when adults do casual, everyday things – and disturbing ones – at a level that a child can't understand: the whole world of apparent secrets, of illusions that the world conceals great mysteries. In fact, of illusions that adults know what they're doing: that adults actually understand their own actions.

This is probably why P– and I are such good friends: we both had that kind of experience when we were little.

Even though that kind of cluelessness – typical, perhaps, of extreme thinking types – is alarming, or perhaps even frightening, for a child, in that same person as an adult, it would lead to a fascination with figuring things out, with secrets, with Theory (as practiced in literary/cultural circles). The latter, of course, applies rather heavily to me....

Remarkable, the English fascination with Punch and Judy. Actually, it's not that remarkable – the mere fact that such a bizarre, intense thing would exist would certainly leave a mark on many children who saw it.

Night, heat, stasis, change

Last night remained hot – not very hot, but hot enough to reproduce that feeling of endless night, of I'll-never-get-to-sleep, where faint noises (not traffic – something electrical? an air conditioner a block away?) and the pillow, which is only blessedly cool for a moment when you change to another part of it, create a space of awareness where time stops, and your whole life, mind, imagination are suddenly seen as contingent decisions, as things that actually didn't need to go the way that they did.

I've had many nights that are technically like that; many of them acutely uncomfortable (stomach problems, mostly), or some that were worried (I don't, fortunately, tend to be wakeful in anxious circumstances – good thing, I suppose; instead I stay asleep as long as I can, to avoid them). However, this one was somewhat different, and had instead a resonance with other kinds of nights that are rarer: where I really seem to see everything as an accident, and vaguely wonder how it could all be made different. Where my whole life seems to be a story – and therefore, of course, a story that could have been told differently.

The night that I was reminded of last night: at some point – when would it have been? – we were in New Hampshire for a cousin's wedding, and I was put upstairs in the front room of my grandmother's apartment, along with a handsome red-headed sailor. Impossible to sleep; and impossible to not be aware of this man (I was pretty young – late teens, early twenties? – and acutely disoriented by how close he was, and how attractive he was). A very long night, with I'm sure passionate dreams (now pretty faded or forgotten); but also with a broader awareness of myself in time (made more acute because of the relative narrowness of the house, of the time-scale, of the space-scale, of the area where the Greek side of the family lives – it was always so disturbing for me to imagine myself in a smaller town like this one).

I suppose the normal responses to such a thing are: well, one can't feel that way all the time, if one did one wouldn't get anything done at all. (Which might explain why I get so little done, at all.) Or: that's existential angst, and then you try to figure it out by reading and discussing. (Hmm. Feh.) But I suppose I want something that would touch on my long, close relationship with fantasy, with ideas of science fiction and magic and such – that somehow, if I really can see my life whole, that it could be changed, either retroactively or at least from this point forward.

Today, I was continuing to read Bender's Sandman Companion, where he runs through synopses and details of Gaiman's wonderful Sandman series. (I first read the Sandman books this winter, at Vanessa's instigation – and was surprised to realize that they are indeed extremely good, and very much to my taste.) When Bender launched into an explanation of The Kindly Ones, book 9 of the series, I abruptly became very, well, avoidant – in a way that has been very familiar over the past five years or so: when any novel, story, television drama, reaches the point where terrible things are happening and everyone has to cope with them, I shut down and become unwilling to read/see any more.

Wimpy, I know, but there you are. Although I've always been a bit like that, it was never as bad as it is now, since the Australian debacle. A weakness in the area of dealing with disaster – frankly, all of Aristotle's catharsis theories seem beside the point; or perhaps, more accurately, after one has been through several disasters, the 'created' disasters of fiction don't seem like any fun. At all. (Incidentally, this is probably why I like CSI and Law and Order so much these days – the really terrible stuff happens at the beginning, quickly, and then most of the show is taken up with calmly figuring out what happened, and of course with retribution.)

In The Kindly Ones, many terrible things happen; things that have been made inevitable by various decisions and mistakes strewn through the previous eight books. Change happens – big change, with finality – and a whole relative stasis, where big things return to normal after everything gets a bit messed about, vanishes. Brilliant, but difficult for me to stomach: perhaps the greatest mercy of this book is the speed with which everything happens – you can see it coming, and then it does, and then there's nothing to do but think about the aftermath.

Terrible things happening: yes, I know, These Things Happen To Teach Us, etc. So many people around me are going through difficult times, transitions, trials – C–, P–, V–, and others I'm sure. I know: I should be more willing to be the confidante, the helper, a supporting player in other people's dramas, but even that seems emotionally tiring. Maybe I'm just at a stage – or perhaps more accurately, at the end of a stage – where I'm tired of things happening, and can't deal with them or learn from them. Wanting stasis; wanting time to slow down; wanting a relatively simple, daily approach to life....

Ruined by a book

It is fascinating but slightly disturbing to look through the e-books available for free through hacker websites. The offerings are linked to what is available on respectably capitalist sales sites, of course – the most popular are rarely well-written, generally non-fiction, books that purport to tell the ambitious and the desperate how to change their lives in some way. Lots of IT, medical and engineering textbooks, some body-building, some comics, some rabble-rousing (it is interesting to see the books on global conspiracies, especially the AIDS ones).

However, the hacker sites are not desperately trying, as are the commercial sites, to push a lot of current fiction. Since the hacker sites represent the (or merely a?) buyer's side of the market, whole genres and areas drop out – some of the more elaborate sites (hagioteam, xpressionsz, bookwarez) reflect something a bit different: what seems to be the equally desperate, but perhaps more sensible, desire to know how to get ahead, to gain power and money in the world through technical or secret knowledge. Especially the Russian websites: there is a sense of trying to catch up with what must still feel like a tidal wave of change, the wrenching chaos being yanked from one dominant set of ideologies to another one. It's an attitude one frequently sees in the faces of international students: the understanding that there is nothing casual about doing a university degree, and there is nothing fun about it either – it is a survival technique, and it would be impossible to work too hard at it, to do it too quickly. The feeling that one must amass valuable information and take it home, before everything falls apart....

It does make me slightly uneasy, because it suggests that many of the things I care about are unimportant, peripheral, even invisible to a larger public. Carefully constructed sentences, fine, expressive writing, thoughtful reflection, the hope for revelation – all swept away by an avalanche of textbooks, and idiot's manuals, which are of course textbook guides to textbooks.

Of course, I'm probably reading too much into these sites. They are run by individuals, who have merely individual tastes and desires – although the above sites evidently operate through a number of participants, that doesn't mean their collections reflect the demands of a vast part of humanity. A counter-example is fictionbook.ru, which is so elaborate and yet aimed at pure enjoyment – a vast, carefully organized collection of science fiction and contemporary literature, put together by someone who has a gourmand's taste for extended series (the kind of thing that needs numbering).

And, of course, there is the first site I got to know a year or two ago, which has recently reappeared in a new avatar – the brilliant, abrasive German radical site, textz.com. Although textz does have more of a pedagogical quality – the choices don't appear to represent what people demand, but what someone (a highly intelligent, but highly opinionated, someone) thinks they ought to want.

Actually, what all these sites have in common: they aren't trapped in the value systems and disgusting habits of most commercial publishers – and that is perhaps their most refreshing quality....

As for me, I'll return to Jonathan Carroll's Outside the Dog Museum, with its fine writing, expressive revelations, etc. etc. I may be unimportant to the culture of the world, but at least it's not trying to eradicate me, or the likes of me. Not yet, anyway.

Difficult poetries

Ha, well, then! - two days after writing about poetry that might seem too difficult (Language Poets, Temblor), I got a copy of Dylan Thomas' Death of the King's Canary, his bizarre murder mystery pastiche, complete with parodies of individual 'difficult' poets/poems. Very fun, very obnoxious, fairly silly...

Admittedly most of the poets parodied have vanished into history. I managed to find somebody's PhD dissertation online where one section explained some of the sources - most of them, aside from Auden, Eliot, Empson, etc., are unknown to me. But the nasty caricatures are still funny (titling a poem 'Lamentable Ode', or a short bio written for the Prime Minister that says, "Sound man, but American wife.... Scarcely suitable").

Hmm, something amusing for relaxation after a mildly chaotic day.

***

[Later:]

There is real humor here, but much is rather heavy-handed – and heavy-handed for an unexpected reason: Thomas seems to combine a real irritation at 'difficulty' with a tendency to dig into the poems and really write them. A lighter touch would have made the parodies funnier; but a bit more work might have made some of them into real poems, if peculiarly directed ones. That ambivalence is perhaps what killed the book, and prevented him from publishing it during his lifetime (the dissertation by Amanda French claims that Thomas was more interested in 'difficult' poetry than he might have been willing to admit). Nevertheless, it's fairly enjoyable – perhaps this has what some 'serious' poetry lacks: it needs to give the reader permission to find passages ludicrous, and to thereby enjoy them.