Joshua Jones: Half Pint’s Pint

A curious work, difficult to classify. In part it is a poetry of its own, but equally a philosophical archive of numerous thinkers. Half Pint, by New York-born poet and president of the Prague Writers’ Festival, Michael March, was first published in 2012, where it appeared in a dual-language Dutch and English edition. Since then, it has seen a reprinting by Práh in 2013, in a Czech and English side-by-side translation, titled Půlpinta, or Half Pint. Czech critic, Milan Blahynka, surmised it in a review a year later. 

Není půlpinta, ale plná pinta jasnozřivé Poezie.

Not a half-pint, but a full pint of clairvoyant poetry.

The book can be likened to a collection of aphorisms or epigrams, experienced as much by the reader, as by the plucky central character, the eponymous Half Pint, who works his way through numerous quotations to decipher his own moral confusions in an overwhelmingly indifferent universe. It is in some sense a version of the commonplace book, where the thoughts and impressions of literature, spanning from Heraclitus, to Paul Celan, are gathered together in quotes and reinterpretations, sometimes abstracted from their source, as though Half Pint were stumbling across them, announcing them from the depths of his own memory.

Heraclitus: “Dogs bark at strangers.”

Half Pint: “Dogs bark at dogs.”

Camus: “Rebellion—the barking of mad dogs.”

In this way, Half Pint inscribes the past with the present, assembling a discourse of interaction with the inaccessible canon of old. Half Pint, an everyman, an anybody, mingles with the greats, and the greats seem like verbalizes in a bar. Dogs bark at dogs, seems like the cry of a madman in the forum, but then so do the rest of the quotes once they are assembled around it, voices speaking over each other across history. The dead coming to life. March’s Half Pint is a vandal who dislikes graffiti, an iconoclast obsessed with the ominous energy of proverbs, as much as with altering and rearranging them.

Lenin—painted the town red.

Klaus—painted the town blue.

Half Pint—hated graffiti.

This bizarre arrangement is a disorder in the usual way of looking at the literary past as a sequence of works and quotations handed down to the present over generations. Instead, the present overlaps with the past, and everyone is talking at the same time.

“If you look at yourself too long in the mirror—you’ll see

a monkey.” Half Pint looked at himself even longer than

that—he saw well below the monkey, on the fringe of the

vegetable world—at the level of the jellyfish.

And this act of looking itself requires an explanation. The arrangement of the book seems at the same time chaotic and meticulously structured, which, as in the case of all anomalies, suggests by virtue of its existence a kind of order. As it unfolds, the book implies a narrative, a journey of discovery that could take place in any order, but has been allotted this specific one, where Half Pint makes his way through the mysterious wisdoms and foibles he is presented with in his existence. Is there a mirror to be found? In Monsieur Teste, of Valéry, or in Pan Cogito, of Zbigniew Herbert. Perhaps. But Half Pint goes out in search of himself, the most dangerous venture of all.

“The biggest danger—that of losing oneself—can pass off

in the world as quietly as if it were nothing. Every other

loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is bound to

be noticed.”

Like the best of us, Half Pint is hiding (hiding behind quotes, behind truths, behind history) while at the same time searching for himself. Out of this comes the art of the commonplace book. The memories Half Pint uncovers are in part his own, in part, those of his predecessors, all of it a kind of fragmentary music of different voices and proclamations.

Half Pint entered the realm of tragedy—

an ancient, defective universe ruder than original sin.

“Shriveled in ecstasy”—at the side of a vineyard—

he fought like a young plant.

Reimagining the genre of the commonplace book is a difficult task, the form extending as it does from the Stoics of the Roman Empire, as early as the second century CE. The Renaissance practice of the zibaldone, in Italian roughly meaning hodge-podge, saw Venetian merchants compiling such miscellanies in codices and paper ledgers, an act that caught on with other members of the educated class. The 筆記, or biji, is the Chinese practice of note booking, keeping literary quotes, ruminations, anecdotes, criticism and any other such musings, an art that came to maturity in the T’ang Dynasty. And the sylwa rerum is one more equivalent, usually associated with the szlachta, the Polish and Lithuanian nobilities that spanned through the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Many of the sylwa were practically enormous, coming to some eight-hundred pages in a single codex, a number of which were destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Usually reserved only for the future generations of the family, such works often compiled moral advice, snatches of gossip, poetry, and also jokes.

Half Pint searched for Havel's secret.

The mind of philosopher kings.

He found the zipper—

what’s up—stays up.

What March achieves in Half Pint is exactly this sort of impressionism, the kind that is scorned by academics of the present day. Bibliographic references, footnotes, explanations, are nowhere to be seen. Instead there is a strange freedom, a disjointed feeling of reading completely abstracted from dissertation technicalities. This makes the book something of a rare find.

On the twentieth of January—Half Pint went across the

mountains—the way did not matter to him—up or down.

“He felt no tiredness—only sometimes it struck him as

unpleasant that he could not walk on his head.”

This disconnectedness comes across as obscure, making the book unlikely to win popular acclaim, though that seems beside the point. What happens instead is a sort of sleight-of-hand that moves between profound wisdom and absurdity, like some kind of recently uncovered Zen koan. It is exactly this obscurity that makes Half Pint interesting as a work. It is similar - but then not exactly like - anything else. To look at the greats, the classics, the unknown, and see them challenged, written up, written on, contemplated and defaced, is an unusual, but not unheard of curiosity in contemporary literature, obsessed as it tends to be with historical truth. Half Pint does not need to talk to Nietzsche to hear about the tenuous nature of absolute facts. A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms. Somewhere else, Half Pint put down the book, and leaving, forgot to lock the door.