Alleviation

Hey everyone, I hope that you are all getting into the holiday spirit despite the fact that you are being asked, by this organization, to read a bleak post-apocalyptic road novel that, to judge from what we've posted on so far, is just totally inscrutable at a syntactic level and horrifying at a semiotic level. I have finished the book myself, and, just as I was with NCFOM, I was convinced that there was something important and touching and meaningful that the book was trying to communicate, but that serious cogitation was needed to get at it. So, pending some more serious cogitation, we will decide whether or not to let the Gentleman Who Chose the Book stay in the club. And while that's pending, and for some holiday alleviation, and to celebrate the recent release of Rush Hour 3, here is a link to a McSweeney's piece detailing what Brett Ratner (dir. of RH3) would do if he got his hands on Our First Selection: http://mcsweeneys.net/2007/8/24molyneux.html
So: enjoy our first ever callout to the other elements of the Interweb, and ignore the fact that I'm not even blogcompetent enough to make a link the right way. Or rather, don't ignore it, let me know, and together, we'll keep carrying the fire.

grammar...to be followed by death and storms of fire

I'll issue the same vague spoiler-warning that Schratz did, in that I'll not make explicit the dramatic twists and revelations that may (or may not?) await you, but my devious subconscious may plant allusions that your formidable intellects may seize upon. Beware.

I want to talk about grammar. That grammar is generally boring as hell is what makes Mccarthy's style so notable-

I assume that, as a writer of some repute, Cormac knows how to compose a sentence. I further assume that I know how to read, at a level at least comparable to the members of Oprah's book club. So when passages are unclear because of the grammar, I must conclude that it is because Mccarthy wishes for them to be so.

Indeed, it seems that Mccarthy is quite a fan of ambiguity. The only proper name we encounter (Ely) in the story is immediately revealed to be false, everyone else is "he," "the man," or "the boy," which results in some confusion - especially later on in the story, when a couple of "he's" are having a conversation. It is not that the characters never use proper names (I can think of at least one instance of the boy shouting his father's name repeatedly), Cormac just never tells us what they are.

It could be that the grammar is unclear and names are hidden for the same reason: both are inherently referential to a time before the planet was scorched, an epoch that is no longer relevent or useful. "Ely" seems to think so, at least. Certainly, the father's name makes no difference to the son, just the son's name makes not difference to the father - it is only the relationship that matters. While I think that this shrugging-off of the past is a likely reason for the treatment of names, it is probably a bit of a reach for explaining Mccarthy's use of grammar in general.

Here, I think perhaps Mccarthy is blurring boundaries more generally. Boundaries and categories are what society was built upon before everyone got their shit wrecked. The father son duo are doing their best to hold onto these differentiations, but it gets harder and harder as their story progresses. Good Guys, Bad Guys - it sounds like a clean distinction (eating babies seems to be a deal-breaker) and yet the son is constantly seeking reassurance that they haven't crossed some fuzzy line. Good Guys don't steal. Well, I guess it is ok if the owners are dead...or if they are probably dead...or if they are dying...or if the good guy's are really hungry...or if the other guy looks like a bad guy. The father seems unwavering in his conviction of goodness, but his son - a product of this different time - seems more aware that these issues are not clear. It is as the son starts to understand these differentiations more clearly, and assert more cogent opinions, that the grammar becomes most conspicuously confusing. At times, what appears to be the father speaking is revealed to be the son, and vice versa. In addition to showing a transition of responsibility, this grammatical mess perhaps is blurring the final distinction between the father and the son.

I don't think I've ever given much thought to grammar in general, so my skills are lacking. Feel free to tell me why I am wrong. I promise my next post will be on something cooler, like death or firestorms.

New and Old

Sorry, I will not be able to elaborate much on his earlier writing. I read Blood Meridian many years ago when I read not for enjoyment, but because it marked you as an intelligent person. But from what I remember, it is a much more challenging read and certainly would have given Opera's book some trouble. The Road seems to be a redacted version of his old style; still has the raw landscapes and senseless human cruelty, but in Blood Meridian he takes his time. Let's you know exactly where you are and carefully describes the cold hearted bastards who are killing each other off. His scene setting in The Road is the pair standing on a ridge in front of some black trees, every time. A lot of ash too, but he never actually talks about the ash in the air. Just kind of forms on surfaces. And then there are the masks that everyone is wearing, leaving us to assume that they live in an incessant ash storm; a scene designed for poetic imagery that he does nothing with.

The First Third of the Road

Here are some preliminary thoughts on The Road. I’m on about page 100, and though I don’t plan on making many details of the book explicit, I may by accident. So, fair warning.

One of the things that makes a lot of the ad copy on the book – the back of the book, its blurbs on wikipedia and amazon – is that the father and son of this book are “each the other’s world entire.” That archaic phrasing is not, in main, representative of how the book works. Many more of the sentences in the book just work like this, selected at random: “He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a cornershaped hole in his trousers. Then one day he sat by the road-side and went through the contents. Some money, credit cards. His driver’s license” (McCarthy, 51). This is the kind of no-frills, almost monotone phrasing that Hemingway made so popular back when Hemingway was making things popular. It’s also how most of McCarthy’s previous novel, No Country for Old Men, went. But where NCFOM’s monotone was occasionally broken up by Sheriff Bell’s folksy narration, the break in droning in The Road is provided by things like “each the other’s world entire” – weird little inroads of poetic language that break in upon the dry reportage that constitutes most of the text.

From what I hear of McCarthy’s early output (TFlan told me this, actually, and elaboration from him would be apropos and appreciated), the prose is much denser. This was borne out by my highly sophisticated experiment of finding a copy of Blood Meridian and looking at a random page to confirm that the paragraphs seemed longer, more words per page, and endorsing the previously-denser hypothesis wholeheartedly. So the New McCarthy likes to inject something into his streamlined monotone. The most famous example of this I can think of, off the top of my head (this kind of injection, that is) is in the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses – in the middle of staccato, third-person and disorienting narrative, we get: “I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives” (Joyce, 140). That sort of thing presses home a strange point, since it is a chunk of writing clearly not of a piece with the writing around it, and it can have a strongly disorienting effect. Here are some more from The Road, similar to that other’s-world-entire moment: watching the depressing gray snow, Our Protagonist watches a flake “expire [in his hand] like the last host in Christendom” (McCarthy, 16). Choppy sentences first describe Our Protagonist in his childhood home: “A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold winter nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him” (McCarthy, 26). And then – suddenly, remarkably, and playing on the confusion of pronouns here – “Watched shapes claiming him he could not see.” Note just how differently “shapes” works in two sentences – the hedge and the claimants – so very close to one another. The intrusion of this poetic language seems mediated through Our Protagonist – so far (p100), he’s the only person we’ve really met who seems to be able to even think in such abstract metaphorical language, as his son has only ever been concerned with staying alive. Though, Our Guy’s wife seems to have had elements of poesy about her, too – I’m not sure how that affects these interstitial, guerilla bursts of poetry or what we make of them. It should be one to keep track of as we go on, though – whether these flashes continue, or fade out – and to wonder what that kind of fractured, decontextualized weird writing means in any writing at all.

On top of epigrams

Nothing you were sold on? NOTHING YOU WERE SOLD ON?! Oh there was some selling alright, when you sold out democracy and everyone in this club with your selfish Unpacking Schratz's Library! I don't wanna help you unpack your library, you are obnoxiously well read and that could take hours. Where the EFF was the vote that would have secured GYNO (Get Your Novel On) as the rightful title? A) because it's an acronym that forms a vaguely uncouth word, B) because of the tasteful nod to the classic urban slang of the 1990's, and C) because B gives us some much-needed street cred. As for epigrams, Master Shake of The Aqua Teen Hunger Force spoke best of reading when he shouted "I can't read, I'm not a loser!". Succinctly underscoring the tragic dilemma inherent to the issue of literacy, Master Shake(speare?) leaves just enough ambiguity for one to ponder whether he is refusing to be called a loser for being unable to read, or if reading is an activity only voluntarily engaged in by losers? I very much like to think he means the latter and that the latter is true. And so, unlike the title of this blog, the choice is ours, friends: read on and embrace erudite loserdom, or resist and be ignorant, yet deliciously cool, milkshakes.

NOTE - It took everything I had to resist posting in Webdings font, because NOTHING communicates righteous indignation like the abject absurdity of Webdings. I chose Trebuchet instead, because I have launched a fiery (also note the flaming red font) barrage upon Schratz's tyranny. This has been......The Dudebrodogman

On Epigrams

I thought, heading in, that we could have an epigram (or two), but, like names and really everything but book selections, there was nothing I was totally sold on. So instead, I thought I would trot out the quotes about reading that might’ve been epigrams, and rather than being a part of the permanent furniture of the blog, they’d just be another post before the serious posting flies. So. For your viewing pleasure, and your general edification, here are some quotes I have picked up and thrown in the quote pile that pertain to reading, and a thought on a few of them, as well, provided for free. If you like one, or have one of your own to add, feel free to let loose.

“We read to know that we are not alone.” -- C.S. Lewis
This one I wonder about. It seems unclear as to who joins us when we read – authors, characters, fellow readers? Any of these seems unsatisfying. Authorial presences rarely make me feel less lonely, for one; neither do characters, for opposite reasons. I am not inventing worlds, and I do not ordinarily take myself to be a member of an invented world that depends on one omnipotent authorial other mind. Together, authors and their characters seem to provide a tutelary function that, while an incredibly useful and helpful part of reading, is no solace for loneliness. The other possibility – that we are less lonely for the presence of our fellow-readers – seems as though it might have obtained when there were still things to read that had been banned. Reading samizdat might remind you that you’re not alone, but there’s not a lot of samizdat out there today.

“I am naïve enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know people profoundly enough.” – Harold Bloom
This one, like the previous one, has an ambiguity in it – what people does Bloom come to know profoundly through reading? Again, I don’t think it’s quite other readers, or authors, or characters. I like this quote more than Lewis’s because it suggests an element of practicality about reading – Harold Bloom is getting something out of reading, that will later let him know the actual people he sees around New Haven more profoundly than otherwise. It takes reading out of just the author/reader/characters pas-de-trois, and reintroduces real other people back into the act of reading, which, in Lewis’s terms, seem to be limited to samizdateurs.

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.” – Walter Benjamin
This one, from Our Eponymous Essay, was my favorite both for its origin and for its sentiment. Unlike the first two quotes, it does a good job of elevating readerliness above something like a struggle for companionship: readers are just what writers wish they were. It’s also more of a bon mot than the other two, which is crucial in a consideration of epigrams.

But as I say, none of those erupt of the page as sealed deals. So for now, pending just about anything that can pend, we sojourn on, epigramless.

More later this week, finally, on The Road.

Inaugural Proceedings

Welcome to the Inaugural Proceedings of Unpacking My Library! I have never emceed any Inaugural Proceedings before. Feels nice, thus far, but I’m not really sure what to do. I’m not even sure to whom to address myself – my esteemed colleagues in the book club, or the beau monde looking at it from the outside. So anyway. To whom it may concern, and whether I’ve told you it before or not: this is a blog dedicated to a book club, either of which has an affiliation with the words, “Unpacking My Library”, which is the title of an essay by Intellectual Rock Star Walter Benjamin. Benjamin means unpack literally – he is taking his old, collected, largely unread books out of crates – but I also like the connotative sense of unpack, beloved by English professors everywhere, as a verb meaning “figure out why these words were chosen to be arranged in the way they are”. It suggests, to me, a nuts-and-boltsy approach toward reading of which I am a fan, and which I hope will prove fruitful in the course of this blog’s existence. Which almost ominous addendum leads me to: a few words on How This Club Will Do What it Does, and Just What That Is. How the Club Will Do It is, read one book together, in order to focus what it is people have to say, and then post here on the blog whatever they would have said, had we been able to physically meet in ideal circumstances (say, a chain restaurant in Connecticut). And what I hope comes out of this is not just a set of smart things said about particular books, but smart things about Books and Bookishness. it seems fruitful to have this kind of club in order for everyone to stay sane about why we read anything at all. This will be good for you whether you're out of school, and read because you've had it drummed into you that you ought, or so that you don't go crazy bored commuting; or if you're in school and are too busy getting reading done for classes' sakes to wonder what other sakes you're serving. I for one have been concerned about this for most of my adult life, and cannot think of a better way for this sort of thing to get sorted out than by witnessing many people talk about what makes books good or bad, worth it or otherwise. The first selection we’ve made is Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, which has both prestige (Pulitzer) and indie-cred (very close association with the Coen brothers), and which also should be a very good book and motivate some very good things said about reading it, and about reading. So. I think that will conclude my Inaugural Proceedings. Stay tuned for next time, when the throat-clearing continues with a post devoted entirely to epigrams, and welcome aboard!