Friday, November 21, 2008

Proof that God Loves Us and Wants Us to Be Happy

Here are some things that have made me think, "I should get drunk immediately" in the last couple of months:
1) the Buffalo Bills win
2) the Buffalo Bills lose
3) the people on The Office seem too sad
4) the people on the Office seem too happy
5) Lord of the Rings seems too long
6) anything at all about the movie The Last Waltz
7) my parents
8) everyone at my workplace
So there is a sampling, undoubtedly not totally representative -- I have thought "I should get drunk immediately" way more than eight times in the last few months -- but a sampling that correctly and conspicuously fails to mention books. Which is a shocker, because most lists I make that have to do with anything at all end up being pretty book-intensive. However, most books that have to do with drinking end up either being cautionary -- don't get as drunk as these protagonists! -- and there has never been, say, the book equivalent of the Last Waltz.

Rick Moody wrote an essay on celestial music that is included in the Best American Essays 2008, which I have been reading at coffeeshops the last few days, and one of the things he mentions therein is that in heaven, they need no intoxicants. "In heaven," he says, "you have not fallen short, you are not in a condition of wanting, you are theoretically happy, and so you are not looking for the music or drugs or spirits to intoxicate you in any way." I think that, in books, we need no intoxicants either. To me, alcohol represents the victory of not-knowing over knowing: he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Reading is the opposite, then, of intoxication: he who makes a reader of himself delays the pain of being a beast. To me, working through a piece of literature is the opposite -- but, I have to add, the equal -- of working through a bottle of gin: one puts me up higher, in a position to judge without caring, and the other puts me where I don't want to do anything but listen to Hall and Oates, in a position of caring without judging. Those two activities, I should note (judging w/o caring and vice versa) are not necessarily opposed, though: both reading (All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well) and drinking (Michelob Ultra) have reminded me to remind my father that I love him. However, I only mentioned that after reading the book; after drinking all that Mich Ultra, all I did was start jabbering at him about progressive income tax and socialized health insurance. That is what I get for having, as the one book I like to read when drunk, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal in my liquor cabinet. So I guess in the last analysis, as usual, books beats booze by a narrow margin.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Hamlet's Buddy

So I have scaled another assault -- from the beginning -- on Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land, and I like a lot, still. I read it on the stationary bike at the gym. But it still seems to me to suffer (if categorically, not specifically) from the almost piecemeal way in which the non-fiction characters are developed. It is better this time, at any rate, because I read the book in great swaths while on the bike, instead of in little nibbles while I wait at a toll or walk through the mall or watch tennis, in all of which situations I read the book the last go-round.

Anyway, I am reintroducing all of this because I was thinking about the idea of nonfiction characters, and what it is like to deal with people in writing who are not entirely open to us not because it is not especially material (the way that we are not vexed over what, say, what Captain Peleg was up to the whole time the Pequod was asea), but because they are real people, and because their chroniclers are prevented by the truth, not by convenience, from telling us everything they think. Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, about a case of mistaken identity from the sixteenth century, is a fascinating piece of this kind of inscrutablilism: there is a real Martin, an impostor Martin, a Mrs. Guerre who seems to be okay with either of them, and eventually Montaigne throws his two cents in. But it is really hard to ever figure out just why anyone is does what they do the way they do it and not some other way; from five centuries out, these people -- who did not write much that we have down -- are some of history's mysteries. The people who run the waste services in Garbage Land are a little more annoying -- they are obfuscating, rather than inscrutable -- but they are similarly and wholly nonfiction, and of course: the Return of Martin Guerre and Garbage Land are both nonfiction books. But!

But, are there ever any people like that in fiction books? It seems like it may be unlikely: the characters in fiction are more likely to be inscrutable for a reason than for the general inscrutability of the world. I don't know much about Pierce Inverarity's real affiliation with the Tristero people, but that's because Pynchon wouldn't tell me, rather than that he couldn't. But one person stands out, from fictiondom, as the kind of hard to read, obfuscating, and piecemeal character we expect from real life and reasonable reports from real life: Horatio, Hamlet's buddy.

It is disappointing to remember, as we must, that we are much more like Horatio than we are ever like his friend. We are in fact more like Horatio than we are like most of the outsize characters in Hamlet (thank goodness, for most of them). There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. That has a lot to do with our philosophy --and Horatio's -- concerning itself mostly with a recalcitrant earth. Hamlet is a magnificent fiction, and can have to do with those other things. But is that simply because Horatio is a simpleton, or are his problems of confronting recalcitrance more like ours for another reason?

I think that Horatio has problems which remind us of our problems because, unlike any of the other characters in Hamlet -- unlike any of the characters I can think of anyplace, off the top of my head -- he is doing an enormous amount of work in our world: he is, at several critical junctures, ensuring that you and I do not lack information about Shakespeare's drama called Hamlet. Why does he hang out with those night watchmen of whom he is so skeptical? Does he really have nothing better to do than wander around graveyards with Hamlet saying things like "E'en so, my lord"? And, most bizarrely, why is he the one who tells the queen about how crazy Ophelia has become? That last one seems, to me, to be inexplicable -- except by thinking that Shakespeare has needed us to see what she has been up to, and thus to provide us with an inexplicable -- but dramatically unnoticeable -- link to the rest of the story. Horatio is an in, for us, to everything else that goes on in Hamlet, much as the bland san men in Royte's book (remember that one from the beginning of this post?) are an in into her meditations on garbage. But, unfortunately, they are part of the same boring real world as we are.

I don't know whether or not this has much bearing on the more ethereal examples of people becoming fictional (a topic close to my own personal heart), but I am willing to think on it.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Review Reviews

Do you guys know those ads that look like no one was trying, that show up at the bottom of websites when you search for free streaming football games?  The all-text ads in blue that reflect an uncomfortable amount of knowledge about your Google searches, so that I keep seeing things like "Looking for singles in Pembroke, MA??" on my sidebar?  Those things appear to be constructed with the same eye and attention to detail as the book review of the newspaper of Buffalo, NY (our fair city).  Which, I think, is too bad.

I've been looking at majorish American cities' book sections in an attempt to see if anything comes close to the Times Book Review, which has the pole position by a lot.  (I don't actually understand poles and the positions of cars relative to them, so I only assume that you can have the pole position by a lot).  I liked the San Francisco Chronicle's section but it has more announcements and reportage than reviews. I like the one at the LA Times-- like its northbound statemate, both have a clean and colorful page setup. The one done by the Globe is ok, too, but has too much non-book stuff crowding it up.  And then there's the one from Buffalo (our fair city), the place that accounts for the "majorish" instead of a major in the first sentence of this paragraph.

I will admit, that as a rabid partisan of the New York Times, and as a person who likes to quote Christ on the reception of important people in their own towns, that I figured that the Buffalo News's book section would be a good opportunity to exercise the muscles used for scoffing.  But, I am an idiot, as you know.  This reviews are quite good.  They are not as voluminous as the ones at the Times but, well, obviors.  They are quality assessments of the books under consideration, which I guess is exactly what you want from a review.  But.

But, this is not a place I would go to three or four times every day (as I do NYT's Book Section, Bookforum, Bookslut, themillions and a few other booknerd places), and part of the reason is the failure to show a confidence that their readers care about books.  This is something I have noticed not only in reading reviews at different places, but in talking to people who are usually casual readers.  The greatness of the NYT Book Review, and of similarly great writing about books, is that they know that you, the reader, want to read something, and that reading is an important part of what you do.  They know it.  They don't have to sell you on reading a book of some kind instead of watching television; they want to tell you how the book they are talking about will shape itself into your life as a literary person.

So, Buffalo News: you've got the chops, go for it!  Shine up your book review website, show a little confidence in yourselves and trust in your readers! They (I) are (am) out there!

Friday, October 3, 2008

Loudth

Are there any loud books?  I have this idea that there are loud movies and quiet movies, and I am thinking about this idea because I am watching RockFest on VH1 Classic right now, and Guns 'n' Roses and Black Sabbath are certainly loud. Now, my first thought would be "no" because movies and bands make noise, and thus can be loud or not, and books, being made of wood, do not make noise unless you like bang them together. Even then, the noise will be unsatisfying and muted. But. I just went up into my room and yanked out a few things that might be contenders for loudness (incidentally, I hate the word loudness, and think it should be replaced with something classier like loudth, but loudth looks insane...I may try it for the duration of this post nevertheless).

So, first, Hemingway, who, if there is going to be SOUND DYNAMICS in fiction, has got to be among the quietest. He is the verses on Gigantic. His style is muted to the point that it gets made fun of for it. I guess that if books are quiet, Hemingway represents the bookiest books. There seems to be a studiousness about his work that is essential to it; try shouting a line from one of his stories at someone -- it will not work as well as it would with Mark Leyner, I guarantee it. Even a line that seems shoutable, like "Will you please please please please please please please stop talking" from "Hills Like White Elephants" sounds, relative to the world, wrapped in muslin.

Here are some guys whom I think might have some loudth, yanked from my bookshelves after a quick scan: Geoffrey Chaucer, John BarthNorman Mailer.  Let's see how they do.

Ok, here's Chaucer: "And whan I saugh he wolde nevere fyne/To reden on this cursed book al nyght/Al sodeynly thre leves have I plyght/Out of his book, right as he radde, and eke/I with my fest so took hym on the cheke/That in oure fyr he fil bakward adoun./And he up stirte as dooth a wood leoun,/And with his fest he smoot me on the heed/That in the floor I lay as I were deed."  That's from the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and it maybe this seems louder to me than it might've because it is in verse, and thus more like music; and music, like the music I was talking about before, is for performance and thus can obviously be loud.  Maybe the Wife of Bath is the thirteenth century Lita Ford.  That bit about the fight between her fifth husband (wilcome the sixt, whenever he shal) can have some loudth because Chaucer is so good at rising, both in tempo and dynamically (both sentences start with "and"), and with his repitition (I think it is loudly, raucously hilarious that she says that both she and Symkyn hit each other with a fist).  So Chaucer can get up there, mixing it up with some loudth and being funny.  Anyone else?

Barth, I think, is not really loud like Black Sabbath, but loud like this guy.  He's not raucous; he's fast and showy.  You don't get measured as quiet anywhere by stopping your story over and over to throw in an assessment of Freytag's triangle.  If Chaucer drummed up some literate loudth by honing in on a musical description of a raucous event, Barth gets his by making noise.  I think that is how a lot of postmodern writers, and Joyce work; Joyce is way loud, where most of his contemporaries are Hemingway-soft.  In The Sot-Weed Factor he has a list of women calling one another whores in English and in French, and that's a lot of loud noise.

I think that one of the reasons that I love literature is that I am usually confident that when I like books, it is because they are good.  When it comes to music, something that I am often enchanted by but probably do not love, I have no such confidence, because I can never tell if I like the song I like because it is good or dumb or both.  The big clue for music is that the songs that I like that I tend to think are dumb, I only like when they're loud.  So I think it's fitting, I guess, that the loudest author I can think of is Norman Mailer, one of the only writers whom I can't figure out as good, or dumb.  Norman Mailer (at least the Norman Mailer of The Armies of the Night, which is the only of his books I know well) is the Ozzy Osbourne of American writing, except he's the Sharon Osbourne too because he does his own spin right along with his antics.  Here he is, talking about the character of himself, insulted by Robert Lowell: "Mailer, looking back, thought bitter words he would not say: 'You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary?...What do you know about getting fat against your will and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states."  Next to this, in my copy, I wrote, "Seriously?"  And looking back, I mean...seriously?  This guy is a goofball.  But he is a brilliant and glorious dumb goofball, and so he's the loudest man in American writing.  As usual, I'm sure that there's something important about this, and unsure what.  Something about this bombastic guy being loud and yet clearly wanting to be Hemingway, and being so full of noise but reminding me of music.  Maybe if I expand my Mailer knowledge, I'll do myself a favor.  I will check back with you guys when I see if I figure out the secret of music and literature and loudth in The Naked and the Dead.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Listmania

We like lists, right? The internet is the best place for lists, as we learn constantly here, here, and here. And that's not even getting into power rankings, which are one of the better things on the internet. And amazon, the place for books and internets, has a whole feature called Listmania. So. Do you guys want some lists? The problem I worry about is that maybe books aren't ridiculous enough for lists? Certainly not the ones on cracked. Maybe Mende-Siedlecki has some advice. If you're reading, Mende-Siedlecki, hit me with your best shot. Anyway, here is the inaugural list:

The Top Three Ways in Which I Have Made a Fool of Myself in Situations Involving Books and Girls

3.  Here is #3: When I was in ninth grade, at all boys' school in Buffalo, I went to the library here in Lockport to find books about quantum mechanics.  When I was in ninth and tenth grades, you should know, my buddy Hogan and I were obsessed with pop quantum mechanics for some reason.  While there, I overheard the librarian showing some girl the books on euthanasia.  Perfect situation to meet a girl, I thought, because I had never met any girls before.  "You know," I murmured to the girl, while looking straight ahead, "euthanasia is Greek, for, beautiful, , death."  I actually murmured that, and it actually had all those dumb commas' worth of pauses.  The girl looked about as horrified as she should've.  But I was not satisfied with etymology, and I decided to go in for the kill, with puns.  "I myself" (when I was in ninth grade, I said things like "I myself") "am for euthanasia, because without them soon there'd be no adults in Asia."

In retrospect, this sheds light on my antipathy for the nonfiction section, maybe.  Also, then I didn't talk to a girl for six years.

2.  Seven years after I was in ninth grade, two of my friends and I got drunk and one of them decided to make some barbecue pulled pork sandwiches.  So far, this story looks good, because drunk and sandwiches.  However, this story also involves my Penguin Classics Edition of the Ambassadors by Henry James.  My copy had a painting on it that had some people sitting by what I thought was a river.  Or a lake.  The girl whose boyfriend was in making sandwiches, for reasons I don't super remember or understand, claimed that it was in fact not a lake or a river, but a concrete fountain.  I disagreed; she took the book away and stood on it for a few minutes.  This is how people have fun where I went to school.  Now, I especially loved this copy of the Ambassadors, and pleaded for it back; the girl agreed to surrender it, but only if, should the water turn out to be in a fountain, I would buy her lunch.  I negotiated with this terrorist, and in the cruel light of the next morning, amid pulled pork sandwich detritus, that thing really did look like a fountain.  Dammit.  So, I had to pay for a lunch.  And I felt forever disgraced in front of that copy of the Ambassadors.  I still do, actually.

1.  But because I am a recidivist, I have not stopped embarrassing myself in new and interesting ways with books and girls.  This one gets top honors even though in this story, I am only embarrassed in front of myself and, now, the internet.  And but so.  I went to the bookstore the other day, and because I parked like a block away, I brought one of my books with me.  And then.  The cute girl in the bookstore said, "Could you leave that up here?  They kind of get paranoid."  So then was I sunk.  You all remember, I've no doubt, my earlier claim that I was not going to buy any more books until I had no more than a hundred left to read.  Well, I could hardly get my book I had been reading back, in front of that cute girl, without buying a book, too.  So, here that claim's mettle was tested, and boy, did it fail.  In fairness (to me) I did hover around the poetry section in the front, hoping that the cute girl would go on break or something before I had to collect my book in penury and retire in disgrace.  But she stayed put.  So I did what anyone who is morbidly concerned with what strangers think of them would do: I threw my policy on bookbuying to the wind, and picked up the Best American Essays 2008.  Secret shame, secret overshare.

So there we have it, our first list.  Although on review it is less of a list and more three barely related things that couldn't have been coddled into full posts on their own.  Least publishable unit, I guess.  But!  Have you guys sorted your embarrassments into things with books?  Have you any ideas for lists?  Let me know!  I don't pay for the ability for you people to comment to heat the whole neighborhood, you know.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Ganging Agley

So. My big plan, for the summer, to read nonfiction books from the library, thus expanding my horizons and holding dear to my ducats, not so hot. It started with a schedule, and with a burst of enthusiasm; it performed execrably during June and July; and, despite a few solid efforts in August, it retreated shamefully into the fall. So, if there were an award for Specious Book Club's Specious Program Most Resembling the Last Twelve Years of Baltimore Orioles Baseball, I would have won.

Anyway, the inaugural and terminal selection of this summer program was Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, which I liked, did not get so interested in, owed the library money on, and finally deferred on, partially due to the stern reminders the NIOGA system kept sending me, partially because the copy itself was like falling apart, and partially just because, when I surveyed my stack of books littered next to my bed, I kept opting for like Cavell or Marx or Nabokov or Dickens, and getting just distracted away in general.

And, then, two weeks ago, I thought that I would do this: I would write about how, having given up on Confederates in the Attic, I had picked up a new book, Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, which I had just started then, and i would write about the differences between books about people and books about garbage, and wonder why I found a book about garbage so much more engaging than a book about people keeping the Civil War alive. It was for that post, in fact, that I wrote the above paragraphs, except...then, eventually, I kept reading books by Murakami and Wodehouse instead of my book by Elizabeth Royte, either. So, it was a short little collapse. A little more Mets than Orioles (sorry, Misk). And I think I came up with something.

See, originally, I thought of writing about how I found Royte's angle -- she's on a mission to see what happens to her garbage, rather than a nonspecific mission to find the soul of the South -- worked better because a nonfiction book should be all process (this is how this works) rather than just talking (this is what some people say) because why those people, why this talking? But even Royte, following her garbage, talks to people; naturally, that is how she finds out most of what she finds out (and, I should add, she writes well and interestingly and the people to whom she talks say interesting things, and I swear I'm going to finish this book, just -- I can't get into a groove about it). My problem, in neither book, was with the narrative voice, which in both nonfiction cases I found charming and interesting. It was with all those other people, because what were all those people doing there? This -- and I think this marks for me the reason that I can never get wholeheartedly into nonfiction narratives (n. narratives, I should mention, that are not essays [on which see]): it didn't have to be these people whom we are hearing about; and it could just have well have been somebody else.

Who but Blazes Boylan could have left potted meat in Leopold Bloom's bed? Who but Anatole Kuragin could have nearly run off with Natasha? Nobody, that's who: everything, every single thing that we learn about Blazes and Anatole is there exactly because it is important. It is not important because it is the part of the person's life that is most related to the Civil War, or to waste disposal, interesting as, say, Boylan's methods of waste disposal would surely be. But what the novel, what good fiction, offers to us is a vision of the person as an agent not of illumination but of meaning, of a person who does not help us to see something bigger because of what he does, but who is himself something bigger because he is. I really think that the best characters in fiction are the ones most like this, the people who exist best not only in themselves but for themselves, keep us able to believe that there is a meaning in people. I think that I find nonfiction narratives unengaging -- rather than stupid or not worthwhile -- because they only just fail in presenting the kind of richly determined characters imaginable in the novel.

Of course, if that is so -- if the benefit of reading a novel is seeing the most meaningful (in the fullest sense of meaning-ful) versions of people like ourselves -- it needs some kind of defense against a charge of mere escapism. For that, I'm going to want to talk about Pnin, though, so I will say: that sometime in the early (singly digited) days of October, we will hear my final thoughts on Timofey Pnin and his novel and then: a new selection for the Unpacking My Library Book and Film Discussion Club.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Two Things

Ok, so, two things, for now: one, you guys should check out the essay in the Times Book Review. It is a short piece of humorous writing, of the type that usually shows up in the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker, and it is about humorous writing (hooray, as saw in "The Avoidance of Love", for meetings of form and content). It is a funny look, I think, at the problem of humorous writing, and how serious to take it -- it is especially intriguing, I think, because of the depth of the authors he names at the end of the piece (Thurber, Woody Allen) compared to the more facile stuff that gets named generically (golf jokes, sex jokes).

Anyway, I need to cut out spending so much time reading essays because....I am packing my library. Now, before you get all excited, I am not quitting my almost imperceptible commitment to writing this blog. And, I am not physically putting my books in boxes. But! I am curtailing the number of books I buy. I am packing in the bounds of the ol' library, I guess. I am announcing here, before you and god, that I will not buy another book until I own no more than one hundred books that I have not read (current tally: 289).

That's a lot of books to read before I can get after my favorite pastime of buying books. But I think I can do it. I actually unofficially made this pledge about a month ago, and have been good since then, with one exception (I had lunch plans that fell through and felt so sorry for myself that I bought a book of short stories by Giovanni Verga). So wish me luck! I will keep you posted as we go along.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

David Foster Wallace

As I was finishing up the foregoing about loneliness, I read the very sad news that David Foster Wallace had died. The sadness of this occasion is obvious. Wallace was a writer all of whose work I admire, and some of whose work I love. For me, he was a writer who also typified the loneliness of the essayist -- I remember reading his greatly enjoyable Everything and More the same semester as Infinite Jest, and being struck powerfully and for the first time the way an authorial voice could sound so much like itself, but so stripped, when moved from the world of his created characters to the world direct address to a reader.

I don't presume to know anything about the real-life loneliness of David Foster Wallace, the real human being, but I do want put up here one of his many brilliant formulations, this one from Infinite Jest's litany of lessons learned at Ennet House. These can read like koans against loneliness, and this one is my favorite:

"That God -- unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both-- speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of other human beings, if there is a God"

Finally, when I graduated from high school, my mother sent a letter to David Foster Wallace asking if he had any advice to give me as I headed off to college. He sent the letter back, with his very practical advice written on in blue ink, along with his initials: Ave atque vale. In some small way, I wish I could say so back to him.

Monday, September 8, 2008

Celebrating Old Birthdays

The first day of this month, when I started this essay, is the birthday of my dachshund Schnitzel, Chris, our friend who cuts my mother’s hair, and of Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. In honor of that, and because I have almost nothing not totally general to say about Schnitzel (against him) or Chris (for him), let’s talk about “The Avoidance of Love”, a very long essay by Cavell, of which I am a very big fan.

The first time I read “The Avoidance of Love”, I had just walked home, around five in the morning, from a night I had spent writing English papers at the very end of my senior year at Williams. I decided I would sleep for a few hours, couldn’t, and decided I would start in on this essay instead. I read the whole thing, and finished it at eight in the morning. The second time I read it, in a different collection of Cavell’s essays, I made special time so that I could read it all at once, without at the same time watching tennis or cooking dinner or driving to a coffeeshop, or any of the other things I sometimes do when I read. Both times, it paid off.

I have been asked, after effusing about this essay, what it is about, and what Cavell’s argument is. It is about King Lear, and it is about spectatorship, and it is about how to deal with other people as separate moral agents. Dealing with them doesn’t look real good. Quoting from it helps a little (maybe), to try to address what it is that I find so lovely about this essay, or at least to explain what points he is making:

"Certainly blame [for cruelty to Gloucester, for Cordelia's death] is inappropriate, for certainly I do not claim to know what else Lear might do. And yet I cannot deny that my pain at Lear's actions is not overcome by my knowledge of his own suffering."

"Now I can give an answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events?...[I]f I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition."

(That last I view as kind of the punchline.) This, of course, tell only a little tiny bit of the story, especially from my point of view, because I read the essay both times that I did, in the holistic manner described above. I think that the poignancy of this essay lies in the way in which knowledge of the phenomenon it describes -- the fundamental separateness between each of us and each of everyone else -- hovers as a constant threat. And I think that the power of this essay lies in the way in which its form -- that of an essay itself -- marries into that content of separateness, and forms a kind of unspoken answer to it.

Let me try to explain this by talking about the special power of an essay compared to a novel. The novel -- like, say, Nicholas Nickleby, which I am reading now -- seems to be an act of world-building, which is to say world-replacing, which is to say a staving off of the reader's loneliness. The facsimile world (this is especially true for Dickens, I think) creates a space in which the reader can move around and, at some important level, forget that she reads alone. She reads with Nicholas, or Smike, or the Brothers Cheeryble. She can even, for cathartic anger purposes, read with Wackford Squeers. But the people she reads in the novel are themselves not alone; they have always their narrator, at least, for company. She is always reading a simulacrum of a community, which she can observe or imagine herself a part of as she pleases.

Not so the essayist, though, who carries on but by himself. The essay cannot provide a peopled, ruminative world in which its reader might (however critically) indulge. Rather, what I think the essayist offers (think of Montaigne ruminating by himself) is a fantasia of what a person can do in spite of loneliness, what a person can do sitting just by herself, writing, independent of any other consciousness. I think that I love "The Avoidance of Love" so much because of the way in which it represents a discussion of that loneliness -- that inability to successfully acknowledge another human being that is the problem of King Lear as well as the problem of tragedy -- while being, itself, the product and the glory of just that loneliness, the loneliness of the reader.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Bookslut, via Gawker(About the Catcher in the Rye)


So, I found this article the other day on Bookslut via Gawker, as you can see from what this post is called. How very bloggy of me. This was good timing for me, as I had just had a long conversation about the Catcher in the Rye with my brother the Duck. He finished it a few days ago; it is one of the required reading books for the AP English class that he is going to start in a week. Now, my brother Connor loved The Catcher in the Rye; I liked it a lot. The Duck didn’t like it one bit.

His attitude was similar Anne Trubek’s; he didn’t so much complain about what’s going on in the book itself, as say that he just didn’t see what all the fuss was about. “If Salinger needed to acknowledge Dickens in 1951, today any new adolescent coming-of-age-tale must go through ‘all that Holden Caufield crap’”. Trubeck also points out the peculiar cultural entrenchment of Catcher in the Rye that we see from its current role as a touchstone: every book has to be the Catcher in the Rye for the beekeeping set, or the Catcher in the Rye met with the NEC Manual. The enshrinement of the Catcher in the Rye now seems unwarranted and unnecessary. The problem that Trubeck points out is that the original reason for enshrinement was relatability, and that relatability is totally diachronic – it is a function of history – and as such, we are no longer impressed with how much Salinger appears to understand us readers. What could relate to Holden in us changed; but we were stuck with his book on our syllabi nevertheless.

I think that the problem with Trubeck’s reading – and with the Duck’s – is that, having pinpointed a legitimate problem in the cultural fact of the Catcher in the Rye, they overlook a fact of the Catcher in the Rye in each of its readers’ biographies. At first, the book is indeed alluring for its relatability, but it does not stay so, or at least did not for me. Rather, Holden quickly loses his cache as a figure to whom I might relate, and becomes instead someone about whom I care, in the same way that I care about people without particularly relating to them, like Priam or Charles Bovary or Simon Dedalus. The reading my brother offers doesn’t allow for a reassessment of Holden once the fuss has died down in his reader’s mind; his primary function seems to him to be one of relating to people (affecting them in his malaise, anyway) and his mission seems to have not been quite as accomplished as has been trumpeted. But if his mission and function come to seem, as I think they should, as unconnected from anything the reception of the novel has occasioned, we see that Holden is just a sad, confused dude: not a hero, but a character from a novel.

“In the 19th century,” says Trubeck, “a bildungsroman showed the growing maturity and self-awareness of a young person.” She goes on to add that this remains “more or less true.” I think that what is less true about this is exactly what makes Holden compelling just when we no longer recognize our current selves in him: Holden exactly fails to become the hero of a nineteenth century bildungsroman, he exactly fails to become mature or self-aware. One of the things the Duck hated about the novel was that, at its end, Holden just goes off to do it all again, at a different prep school. I think that in that failure to grow, we can see in Holden a fixed portrait of a kind of hyperdeveloped childhood. He isn’t necessarily someone to whom we can relate; the proper reaction to this novel is no longer to identify with Holden and feel both you and he are part of a zeitgeist. He is just there, like all of our favorites in fiction, to be cared about.

That, anyway, is why I think we should still read the Catcher in the Rye.

Monday, August 25, 2008

I'll Get You, Carnivalesque

So the other day I went out to the ballpark, to see the Buffalo Bisons take on the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, in support of which latter my father owns a hat. I went with my brother Connor, my sister Elizabeth, my brother the Duck, and the Duck's friend Nate. I drank two beers and ate one bag of peanuts, and, naturally, I brought a book. The book I brought was Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais. I figured that I could bang through a chapter or two about giants during, I guess, a pitching change, or the seventh inning stretch. So far, so what you'd expect. However, I left my book -- through a combination of jiggered and rejiggered seating arrangements and plain old negligence -- at the ballpark. Dammit.

Now, I should say that I have left books places before, or lost them forever. It took me three Signet Classics versions (and one Bantam, which my well-meaning mother bought for me but which had names transliterated totally differently) to get through Dostoevsky's the Idiot. I still can't find Brideshead Revisited or Brave New World, both of which I finished in the Lockport Public Library's copies. Once, I found my copy of Walden, on a sustenance break from my diligent search, in our refrigerator. So the quick pang -- where's my book? -- followed by slow acceptance -- huh, I need a new Idiot -- is an experience with which I am familiar.

I should also say that, at the time I was in the Dunn Tire Park mens' room and reading about Panurge the knave's haggling with shepherds, Rabelais wasn't exactly lighting my carnival on fire. I brought it partly because I figured that it would require less strenuous attention than Bend Sinister, which I was also reading at the time. I had described at one point my reading through the Gargantua book as a trudge, and when one of my friends said that few trudges were worth it, could defend the book only as a trudge with occasional fart jokes.

Nevertheless, on the 190, I realized suddenly and crushingly -- I had left Gargantua and Pantagruel under the seat. It might've hit harder because I knew exactly where it had been left -- it wasn't going to show up in the refrigerator -- and I knew that it was not going to be a particularly easy book to recoup. I kept imagining a bitter member of the grounds crew seeing the book next to a pile of peanut shells and throwing it vindictively into his dustbin. Sad, sad.

But -- and weirdest -- I didn't even particularly miss my commodity, for all that I am unemployed and that the MA Screech translation I had been using runs an extortionary twenty US dollars. Instead, I missed Pantagruel the sometimes giant and his preposterous, sometimes gigantic crew. I mean, these guys are not especially endearing, or even always separable guys -- earlier in this post I typed "novel" for what Gargantua and Pantagruel is and replaced it with "book" just because the characters sitting around and changing shapes and telling scholastic jokes seem, still, to fall short of the kind of fullness of characters that I associate with the novel. But I missed them intently. More than like, I missed Pierre Bezhukov when I had to do a problem set for Macro instead of reading about him in Petersburg, more than I missed even Kinbote when I finished my thesis. I think I missed Panurge, the "mad word-spinner", in particular, more than I miss most of the people with whom I lived my senior year of college.

The entire ride home, I whirligigged between waning woeful, on account of my lost book and missing Rabelaisian friends, and waxing joyous, on account of the fact that I just missed my book so much. It was a sort of base level mopiness -- and, my poor carmates will attest, that I was thoroughly and basely mopey -- with a commentary emotion of pride, that I had managed to successfully get so upset about something so theoretically minute, the opposite, really, of the way in which I felt bad about not feeling bad about most natural disasters.

I don't know what this means, as usual, because I don't tend to know what anything means, but like our old friend Briony Tallis, I am confident that what's happened to me at least means something. I don't think, for example, that it taught me to appreciate books more. I think I appreciated books just fine already. I think rather what it suggested to me was the way in which books can work just like people, a proof of George Eliot's claim that "art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot." Now I know how much some giants mean to me, surely an ampliative experience beyond the bounds of my normal personal lot.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The Water Father

Because none of us, not even Northrop Frye, is smarter than all of us, here is wikipedia on Free Indirect Speech, also called Free Indirect Style, Free Indirect Discourse, or Discours Indirect Libre:

[It is] a style of third-person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. Passages written using free indirect speech are often ambiguous as to whether they convey the views, feelings, and thoughts of the narrator or of the character the narrator is describing.

OK, so. The entry mentions Austen, Joyce, Kafka, and maybe Chaucer as noted F.I.D. practitioners, and my learned brother Connor informs me that our old pal Flaubert was a big fan, too. And I cannot stop thinking about the way that it is supposed to work, and how it appears to be going incredibly haywire, in Pnin, whose second and third chapters I have just finished rereading.

James Wood apparently makes a great deal of hay from F.I.D. grass in his new book, and in one of his old books, he mentions a misfire of attempted F.I.D. that, prima facie, looks like it is going on in Pnin. At several times, Wood finds fault with writers for using their own words rather than those of the characters while putatively absorbed in the character. This is not a negligible fault; the inhabitation of a character is one of the finest tasks of fiction, and to constantly retouch down on a piece of authorial showiness is to be a distraction, sometimes a hampering distraction, and to do less than right by one's characters. And, for the very long stretches of Pnin in which we can forget that the narrator is a character, that is what may be seen to be going on. The narrative consciousness can fit Pnin like a glove, but at moments the glove seems poorly tailored. So, for instance, we have the kind of joke that the narrator would make -- calling a sonic headache of the professor's jackhammering on "Brainpan Street, Pningrad" (Nabokov, 63)-- contrasted with the kind that Pnin would make, writing on: "the blackboard, which he wittily called a grayboard" (Nabokov, 67). One word from that, is, of course, the narrator's -- "wittily" -- but that is exactly ironical; his mocking claim of Pnin's wit, which is really a rhinestone among the narrator's jewels, is just the sort of judgment to which we and he are privy and not, his poor narrator.

So this is a deeply weird Free Indirect Discourse -- except, of course, that it is actually an embodied character, albeit one who thus far -- through the first three chapters -- has revealed himself only very obliquely. In fact, in the third chapter -- which I think my be my favorite, with Pnin being the victim of for the most part only harmless fun -- has no intrusion from the Narrator Character at all. This is the distinguishing mark of Pnin the novel: the narrator is not the normal, fallible first-person narrator we usually meet -- Nick Carraway, Ishmael -- Pnin's narrator seems to be on top of things in a way that is completely authorial. His near-omniscience is authorial, that is, and his prose style is (both obviously and obscurely) Nabokovian. Because of the latter, he is charming; but, because we are charmed, we can fail -- by which I mean, of course, that I had once failed -- to notice the degree to which, as a narrator, or at least as presenter of a character, our narrator leans toward the sadistic.

The morality of the narration is less of an issue in the third chapter than in the second, which I remembered as being cute -- Pnin meets the Clementses -- but had not remembered as poignant, nor as unsettling, which I found it to be on this go round. Pnin's confrontation with the horrible Dr. Eric Wind is not only heartbreaking -- poor, blindsided Pnin -- but it is structured almost sadistically by the narrator. We begin with a mundane, if slightly sad, story of Pnin's treatment at the hands of his colleagues. We then are lulled into a brief spell of Pninian contentment coinciding with real-world happiness, as he charmingly becomes friends with his fellow surd, Laurence Clements. But then the tone shifts again -- "The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag," (Pnin, 43), and we are introduced to Pnin's sometime wife, Liza, who will be coming to visit him. When discussing Liza, the narrator is at his cruelest, as we have been set up to think Pnin is doing all right just before he springs Liza's wantonness on us, and also (to this point, anyway) the closest to actual engagement with the plot. Here, again and again, he skates close to the text -- the Pnins get into America with help from a relative of his, he mentions the noise that Eric and Liza wind make when they say the word "group", something that Pnin, who has only read their letters, could not know -- and so the text's malign treatment of Pnin seems to have more and more agency.

The final, devastated Pnin, who has "nofing, nofing", is told by Liza as she asks for money, that he is the "water father" of her child. This is Eric Wind's preposterous phraseology, and Pnin rightly laughs at it, even as he begins to weep. Of the first three chapters, though, this is the only one that has such a sad ending; the other two have near misses, just the sort of happy endings the narrator has professed to hate. As we go forth, this seems to me to be the most important thread of which to keep track, in which the narrator seems to effect his desire that "doom should not jam" only by effecting his own closeness to the text. By the end of the book, we should also hope to develop a sense of Nabokov's strategy in presenting such an amorphous relationship to narration, and also to giving poor Timofey such a bad time.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Pnin: What to Expect

Today I am going to talk about Our Official Selection. Later, I will have stuff to say about Confederates in the Attic, about which I am pretty excited and a very small bit into. That will be one thing that draws comment, the doings of the nefarious M.R.'s -- who, worried that their all-girl book club's Benjaminite name sounded a little too much like something that Chairman Mao would've called his repopulation program, now appear to have starting calling themselves les Amies des Canard -- and probably some more stuff about the New York Times Book Review, about which I think very often. And of course there will be more on the books that at least nominally give this site a raison d'etre, our reading club books. And now, that book is Pnin .

This is the third time I have read the first chapter of Nabokov's Pnin. The first time was encountered in the New Yorker collection of comedy writing, called Fierce Pajamas, many years ago. Back then, I think I mainly viewed it as strange -- a quirky throwaway -- because it was not a knee slapper like "On the Sidewalk" or like "What We Talk About When We Talk About Donuts", which I laughed at so much once at Denny's that the waitress came over and asked me if I were going to be ok. Years later, I read the first chapter of Pnin -- along with most of the rest of it -- on the Red Line, when I went into Boston to take the GRE, had the people there tell me that I was eight days early, and spent the rest of the day just cruising around. That time, I was more of a Nabokov initiate, having thrown back already Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense, and, in a huge huge way, Pale Fire. And that time, I thought it was strange because Pnin, unlike the other English language heroes (Kinbote and Humbert Humbert) did not have the "fancy prose style" for which the latter says you can count on a murderer. Pnin was more like Cincinattus C., hero of Invitation to a Beheading, except that Cincinattus encounters a nightmare world of shady accusations and imprisonments, and Pnin encounters a confusing timetable. Comparatively boring, thought I.

Of course I was wrong, I being an idiot. I was told in a more flattering way than I deserved that I had gone about the book backwards by my good friend and advisor Prof. Fix, so I tried one more time. On my rereading now, I have only gotten through the first chapter, but already it feels more of a piece with its chronological neighbors, and less like a bagatelle -- because its narrator is so deeply weird. His attitude toward Pnin -- his sudden declaration that Pnin wrote a letter to an editor "with my help" -- and, overall, his outrageously explicit attitude of irony toward Pnin (telling us that Pnin will not make his train, he says "Now a secret must be imparted") -- this has all of the famous earmarks of the unreliable narrator, with none of the usual fullness of character for unreliable narrators (like Saleem Sinai, Dowell, and the more recent Leo Liebenstein). It will show you just how wretched of a reader I have been in times past that I am not 100% on much more he gets fleshed out, apart from the fact that I remember he gets somehow involved with the future ex-Mrs. Pnin. But we shall discover more on that anon.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Garbage Robots and Housekeeping

Great news, everyone, I am back from vacation on the glorious and lobster-rolled Cape Cod. I am going to take advantage of this momentous occasion to first, tell you about something that has nothing to do with books, really, and then eventually throw in some affaires d'etat. There are big things afoot. Also, I will justify this non-book stuff by talking about Canadian Ace Northrop Frye and his Anatomy of Criticism. So, prepare to be bored, amigos.

Have you seen Wall-E, citizens? Wall-E, a story about robots and floating space colonies of humans, made me think, of course, of the great Anatomizer, who has this to say about Highly Advanced Comedy:

The materials of the cognitio of Pericles or the Winter's Tale are so stock that they would be "hooted at like an old tale" yet they seem both far-fetched and invariably right, outraging reality and at the same time introducing us to a world of childlike innocence that has always made more sense than reality (Anatomy of Criticism, 184).

So it goes with the cognitio of Wall-E, a piece of childlike innocence that keeps up the tradition that has been building at Pixar of using the most stock materials to make the most fascinating and intellectually respectable entertainments provided today. Like its forebears (especially Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo), Wall-E represents in a way that I have not seen anywhere else, the continuation of the green-world comic mode that goes, as Cavell tells us, from Shakespearean romantic comedies through the screwball comedies of the thirties. Cavell called these latter comedies of remarriage, and in many ways that is what Wall-E is: both in the romantic pursuits of its protagonist (whose final scene is very much redolent of the anagnoresis of the great screwball comedies) and in the remarriage, as those of you who have seen it will know, of the people of this Earth with their home.

This business, I guess, could be done with books just as well. Because the chief searcher for this strain of comedy is the cinephile Cavell, I have tended to follow his lead and look for it just in dramatic work. (If any of you know of a novel that works this way, by all means, let me know). But, and this is where I will tie this post even more back into books than mere Frye-babble could: it negotiates both of its remarriages in the two terms I find to be the most uniquely cinematic, which are dancing and space. I am a person, as the old saw has it, who is more in thrall to Martin Chuzzlewit than Martin Scorsese; there are virtually no things that movies do that I would not rather see done in a novel, but boy, you can't beat film for sheer openness -- like the space of the trashscapes with which Wall-E opens -- or for sheer intimacy -- like the dance in which our hero and heroine unite their fates. Still, I will keep novels for my guide through my life, just as I keep Newtonian physics as my guide through physical medium-sized objects.

And now, the business of business: Did you hear, my Unpacking crew, that there is a rival gang of book nerds with a Benjaminy name? Well, there is. They rove unchecked across western New York, they are called the Mechanical Reproductionists, and their encroachment on our turf has not gone unnoticed. I will monitor them with an attention that borders on infiltration, and infiltrate their ranks with a thoroughness that borders on having actually started the club myself.

Business item two: while on my crustaceany vacation, I read a book called Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, which was just as good as I-Wish-He-Were-My-Uncle James Wood said it would be in the New Yorker.

And speaking of the New Yorker, in the most recent issue, there is a great piece by another avuncular-in-a-perfect-world chap, Adam Gopnik, on GK Chesterton (the link just goes to the abstract, desfortunadamente). In the course of discussing Chesterton's untoward political and cultural views, Gopnik says this thing I found true and amusing: "Besides, if obviously great writers were allowed onto the reading list only when they conform to the current consensus of liberal good will --voices of tolerance and liberal democracy -- we would probably be down to George Eliot."

If you thought that was uproarious and were a girl, I will marry you, and if you thought that was uproarious and are a guy, I will go with you to California and marry you there. Until then, stay tuned for more jokes about our inability to live up to George Eliot's standards next time, on Unpacking My Library.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Walking

Yesterday, the T broke or something and I ended up walking from the Andrew Street Station, in South Boston, to Harvard, in Cambridge. Actually, I walked from the Broadway Street Station to Andrew, realized I was going the wrong way, turned around, and saw all of Boston in front of me. I am an idiot. However, it did give me plenty of time, while I was walking around, to read What Maisie Knew by Henry James. This was a splendid way to spend a sunny day, I thought. I have been fighting a long battle against What Maisie Knew, which was assigned to us in my Henry James class in late 2006, and which I didn't finish then and -- as of this writing -- still have not finished. I have ten pages left to go. I don't know why it is such a struggle to finish this book, which I enjoy mightily. The only other books that I have had such titanic battles with are Life of Johnson and Proust, both of which are Loose Baggy Monsters in a way that Maisie is certainly not.

One of my friends expressed incredulity that I can read and walk at the same time. "And with glasses!" she said. I don't know when or why I developed this talent, but I wonder if this peripatetic reading is a good or a bad method, and whether it is good or bad for Maisie in particular. I certainly feel as if the books I have read partially while ambulatory have been understood as well as any others. I still underline in them, for example, though I usually stop walking in order to do that. I have sometimes tried reading while driving, though I do not recommend it, not even for Maisie. At any rate, it is good to remember, on the eve of Bloomsday, the day celebrating the most peripatetic of novels, that you don't have to be stationary to read.

[Editor's note: this was written during a fourth quarter timeout in the Celtics-Lakers Game Five, which was indeed the day after the T stopped and the day before Bloomsday. It is now neither of those things, but the trusty MacBook ran out of batteries and didn't get replugged until now. So, uh, Happy Belated Bloomsday!]

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Deep Discounts

Here, in honor of my final day of work having commenced, presented in roughly chronological order: the list of books I bought while working at Borders, using my employee discount:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz*; Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom*; Volpone, the Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson; The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee; The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon; The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton; The Marx-Engels Reader; The Road by Cormac McCarthy*; How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard; Grendel by John Gardner*; The Art of Fiction by John Gardner*; Author, Author by David Lodge; His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman*; The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger*; Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse*; Like You'd Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard; The Performing Self by Richard Poirier; Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov; The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse*; Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman; Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris*; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrakesaran; Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable by Samuel Beckett; Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler; The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom; Must Me Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell; The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell; The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges; Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis; and Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.

Asterisks denote books that I have actually finished. As you can see, my readerly eyes were obviously way bigger than my readerly tummy. Especially w/r/t the ol' Literary Criticism section though, in fairness, some of those were meant to augment my no-underlining summer reading. Gotta make up that underlining somewhere. Also, I am glad that my last three purchases as an employee were about baseball, alcohol, and things people made up, which I consider my three ruling passions.

Here, also, are the books that I read while on breaks/during down time, while at good old store 0196:
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus*; I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley*$; God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr*; After Theory by Terry Eagleton*; All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen*; and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama*.

Asterisks again denote books I have finished, for continuity's sake, and dollar signs denote authors whom I have Facebook friended.

And so of course I made these lists while I was bored at work, and waved them at my coworkers as a sort of conspicuous, tasteful consumption. But of course the more I thought about it, the more the list seemed to mean to me: there it was, laid out, what I wanted to do for nine months. Around January, I wanted to be a guy who knew about Walt Whitman and the Green Zone. I still know nothing about them, but I know more about me and what I'm doing, because of those books I picked up. Do any other commodities work like that? Can you still call something that works like this a commodity? I think that's one reason I am happy to be leaving my current position --I will get away from the commodification of books -- because, man, I love books. Them, and baseball, drinks, and imaginary beings.

Postscript -- glad to be leaving my current position as I am, I would be remiss, at any such juncture, not to quote the Doctor: "of a place which has been frequently visited, tho' without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart". That sounds about right. Fleeting heaviness, though, I hope.

Friday, June 6, 2008

Summer Reading

It’s summer! It is not actually summer, of course, but really. Summer enough for summer reading! The last time I made a summer reading list, I gave it the depressing .doc “Summer (Life?) Books” because I was all mopey that I would have a job and no summer vacations and summer books wouldn’t mean anything. Sad, sad. Also sad was that there were thirty-one books on that list and I read four of them. I mean, I read a bunch of non-list books, sure, but one likes to see one’s plans fulfilled.

I have little doubt that this list will itself gang agley. However, the alternative – no lists to disappoint – seems dour. And what I am doing in this “Summer Reading” program, unlike last year’s big books on Life and Theory (one was The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth – yikes, spikes!) or 2006’s Year of the Great White Male Narcissists, in which I attempted the tetralogies on Zuckerman (success) and Rabbit Angstrom (25% success), is going to be Books I Wouldn’t Underline. This is for two reasons: one, I am poor, and will be getting most of these from the library; two, they are the sort of bellelettristic non-fiction that I imagine one can do without underlining. It is dominated, I hardly need to say, by people who have been on staff at the New Yorker:

1) Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz (if this one is good, I will go for his A Voyage Long and Strange)
2) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
3) The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley (on the Times Best of 2007 list)
4) The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin (also NYT Best of 2007)
5) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
6) The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? by Francisco Goldman
7) The Post-America World by Fareed Zakaria

I think that should be a good list. And it will lead to a new column: adventures in the non-underlined, or something, and according to my records the last time I read a book remotely like any of the foregoing, it was (maybe) The Rest is Noise and (considered more rigorously) …Jesus, the Red Queen, which I read on the bike at the gym in Williamstown while I lived in Mission. So you know, a while.

And it should be fun. Summer reading tends to be fun, even, according to one of my creative consultants for this blog, for people who normally are unimpressed with reading. I’m not sure why. Why do you guys like summer reading, assuming its appeal is as universal as my consultant indicates? And what are you planning to read? Tell us, or beg for advice, below!

Monday, May 26, 2008

The Least Yet About Reading

So, as some of you know, I have decided to quit my marginally industry job and go home, mostly so I can drink beer and watch baseball with my brother Connor while we make jokes about books that we have read and only he has understood. This, and a recent State of the State address from The Millions got me wondering about what kind of things people really want from a bookstore. There are people who come into the Borders where I work and stay for hours, and who obviously don't really care about books -- one guy came and read nothing but "How to Win at Texas Hold 'Em" for four hours -- and lots of people who like niche books, what Borders calls "destination locations", which are mainly manga and cookbooks.

I think that what I like to do most at the bookstore -- bookstores where I don't work, I mean -- is to go and read paragraphs from the middle of books that I have heard about but am not familiar with. Especially if they are supposed to be "difficult" -- I have read chunks over and over again from Finnegans Wake-- and wondered whether I could see myself reading such a thing. Usually, I decide not and don't buy anything. Because I require virtually nothing out of a bookstore, really nothing but a few books I find intriguing and difficult to pick at, I don't have a lot to say about the ambience of the bookstore. I prefer it if coffee is around, but I also think that about department stores, supermarkets, taquerias, whatever. I don't especially want any music on, though I can abide it (granted, I hate hate hate any music played at Borders in Braintree between September 2007 and June 2008). But, I am a freaking dork. Of course my ideal bookstore would shake out to be more or less identical to a costly version of the Lockport Public Library. But what about you guys? Let us know, and who knows? Maybe some marginally industry insiders will read the comments (ha!), and take your advice and revitalize the whole business. See visions, dream dreams.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

For No Reason: A Plea for Your Thoughts on John Irving

OK, here is a sign of how far afield things get, but whatever. I was reading a particular book and it mentioned an author who was very much beloved, by me, in my ghastly misspent youth. That writer is John Irving, about whom I hadn't thought seriously for years until like three weeks ago when I read two or three pages at my soon to be ex-job while I was standing around doing nothing, from the Pension Grillparzer part of Garp. So anyway, now you see what the topic is, and here I ask:

What do we think of John Irving? The reference to him in that book I am reading now was majorly slighting, if that makes sense; the Times called his most recent book "bloated and lugubrious" but seemed to view this as a too-bad falling off of Garp's creator (Their review of Garp is all about tone and, for the Times, strangely void of a real critical stance). And weirdest, his admiring wikipedia page HAS A CHART LISTING COMMON WEIRDNESSES IN HIS BOOKS, with check marks for what book has what. New England, Prostitutes, Wrestling, Bears, Vienna, Bears, Deadly Accidents, and Sexual Variations (the Variations are, helpfully?, named). Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire are the ones, incidentally, that hit the octfecta. That seems like something that would get done for, say, pulp writers, rather than the sort of guys who get tapped to review the new Gunter Grass memoir.

I hope this doesn't sound hopelessly snobbish or pigeonholeminded, especially since a good chunk of it is based on the discrepancy between what seems to be reported (middlebrowish) and what I remember from eighth grade (cool). I don't think it is; Pierre Bayard says, "we never talk about a book unto itself...[each book and its associated books] serves as a temporary symbol for a complete conception of culture." (Bayard, op.cit, 73) So help me out, if you will: how should this guy fit into our symbol for a complete conception of culture?

Will anyone, will I, ever write here about poor dear Timofey Pnin? Who knows? More on something in the coming days.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

The Doings At Other Book Clubs

Never wanting to skip a reason to cross two entire states twice in one day, a week ago or so I bolted for the fantastic city of White Plains, took the much-touted Metro North into the city and attended a discussion on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, presided over by Gage McWeeny, a professor at Williams. This was part of the Williams Club’s series of discussions about books that have been made into semi-autonomous movies (that is, movie-book duos where both are agreed to be worth it; so like, The Cat in the Hat is out on one end, The Godfather on the other, and The Fountainhead on both).

This whole discussion was great good fun, because it was basically English class minus pressure and plus cocktails. What made it singular, or close to singular, or mentionable here in a context of more interest than pure praise, was that it represented to me a distinct way of talking about a book. Almost the entire discussion was geared around what I would call orientation. Normally the relationship between a reader and his book is one of use, and is assumed: at the most basic level, it is taken to provide amusement, and at higher, murkier levels, it may provide dignity or depth of feeling or whatever. But nobody asked what American Psycho might help us do, at least not at first; rather, we discussed what was the proper way to position ourselves to it.

I spent all day today watching baseball and reading book reviews from the Times, and while they ranged from high praise to sniffy contempt, they all took as their object – the thing under review – to be what the author had set out to do, and how well she had accomplished it. Not so, with American Psycho: what we talked about was how we related to it, whether we were allowed to take certain attitudes toward it or not. The capacity of this book – of any book – to cause real discomfort seemed a peculiar phenomenon. I don’t want to act as though I wasn’t made uncomfortable by American Psycho – it made me uncomfortable to the point that I opted out of lending it to a friend of mine who loved the movie – but I still wonder. For one thing, there are things as disturbing in other books that are not so discomfiting on the whole. Hannibal Lecter, from his cheesy books, is not less clinically creepy than Bateman. The problem maybe the first-person narration, a famously sympathizing gesture (though Ellis doesn’t use it much, and his robotic protagonist, even when he generates positive feeling from his readers, doesn’t quite get sympathy [I am at a loss to describe what quite it is he gets]). And the cinematic novels of Hannibal Lecter and his ilk, as David Foster Wallace said of mainstream films, “set us up so relentlessly to approve the villains’ bloody punishment in the climax that we might as well be wearing togas” (from “David Lynch Keeps His Head”).

Anyway, this seemed peculiar to me at that discussion. Can the merits of books that are utterly morally discomfiting sit at the table with books like Nicholas Nickelby? Can we shelve the moral problems with it and put its aesthetic merits (which are ample) on the same high-praise-to-sniffy-contempt scale that the Times uses? Are there other books that go in this slot where moral orientation is more important than artistic assessment? I have no idea. Post away, thereon, below.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Are You There, God? It's Me, Matthew

And but so. We (I) generated some momentum, but then it petered out in the cold face of a Judy Blume essay. As the hippest of you are apprised, I had planned on writing a piece on a rediscovered chunk of my childhood – the sudden coming-across, at my ridiculous workplace, of Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing and of Fudge-a-Mania, both by Ms. Blume, and my sudden, flooding realization that these books had at one point been deeply important to me. That essay, appropriately, began like this:

“Here is a quote about arriving at the bookstore, an experience that with effort I can still recall fondly, from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. He has just described the way in which you taxonomize the books you haven’t read, and then:

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time to Reread and Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It’s Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them.”

That essay was then to go on to talk about the sort of book that it’s time to reread again, and the space that that thing occupied – a shadowy space, that I used to fill in slowly with rereadings – and counter this with this intense and strange Judy Blume phenomenon, in which the lights were not dimmed up but flooded on – I suddenly remembered huge swaths of these books, plot-wise – and, more weirdly, the things I had been doing when I read them, at points throughout my prepubescent life. And this was deeply weird. There was one thing – I remember better than I have any right to, a moment in which my lovely and civic-minded mother and I were tasked to take something, somewhere – and all I remember is the sensation of listening to Adam Sandler’s “The Lonesome Kicker” in her van as she deposited whatever it was, and reading in my copy of Fudge-a-Mania the passage about the families’ baseball game. Other recalled phenomena were similarly accompanied – just quanta of interactions in Lockport, the impossibly dull little place where I tried to learn to be a real person, accompanied in a disturbingly inextricable way by Peter Warren Hatcher, that milquetoast fourth-grade nothing, and his rambunctious brother, Fudge. This disturbed me, in fact, into writing the essay that now lies in shambles in front of me, the essay upon which I am now performing a post-mortem.

What was weird – and what weirdness I had hoped to communicate – was not that I had associated particular events in my young life with books. All I remember of a trip to Carowinds amusement park in the Carolinas was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all I remember of a spring break 2000 is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; even a very pleasant trip to Bay Shore Long Island, in 2006, is dominated by reading Pynchon’s V. But – and I hope this makes sense – I remember those as discontinuities: “that was the week I read Kesey”, “Such were the days in which I read V” – and they are discontinuities that I remember. Those books may be books that, as Calvino notices, It’s Now Time to Reread – but they are books tagged as such every time I walk, with eyes averted, through the bookstore. So what the hell are these Judy Blume books that provided cross-hatch on all of the cartoony memories I retained of Lockport with my mother? I never, ever thought about these books until I started reading them and they cascaded in upon me. They were different, of course – one of the things I wanted to communicate in the original version of this essay was the decreased capaciousness of these books – but really, what astonished was the way in which this reading pervaded and controlled my memories of early Lockportian life, the way in which the only “there” there was provided by a pair of children’s books about a rowdy three-year-old named after a piece of candy. It is as if all of the time I imagined I spent wasted on slightly educational computer games and mooning about girls had been weirdly matched in importance by this series of novellas.

But what was most marking about this weirdness, of course, was that it was not weird in any palpable way at all. It was alienated not in the way that genius, but in the way that dreams are alienated – they return not with majesty, but with mundanity. I had hoped to tell you just how terribly strange it was that I was reading all of these things and finding them both familiar and bizarre – but that is nothing new under this sun. It is just the way in which we find those rare books that speak to us shortly and dissipate. Trying to tell you the weirdness of rereading Judy Blume would be like trying to tell you about the weirdness of my dreams – yes, you would say, that is peculiar, but is the world in which the peculiar finds its home. The very idea of the essay I see scissored up before me is one of tactibility, and one that the proper way of thinking reveals as a pomposity. You cannot find my relationship to Judy Blume any more interestingly strange than you could find my dreams, the other night, about the claustrophobia of airplanes. My relationship with these Fudge books – like my dreams – are not alien to me, but of my own making. To the rest of the world, this is business as usual. It is only to the suddenly remembering part of me that the system appears remarkable at all.

This is where, to the disappointment of dorks like me, books finally flare sadly out. One of my smarter friends has been telling me, for years, that books are whores – that, whatever their arguments for replacing the humans we know, their essentially mercenary nature will always keep them, well, whorish. What began, in this essay, as a plangent plea for commiseration – didn’t your lovely and civic minded mothers take you out to be amused by Fudge? – has ended in a declaration of, what else, loneliness. I cannot even put before you the passages that most made me feel as I feel – what would be the point? The point, of course, is alienation from a reading past – no different for me, looking ponderously back at a reading nine-year-old self, than it is for you, looking at me reading.

So why bother? Why read what I read, and try to find some common ground? The answer is not an answer, really, but a hope – a fantasia – that I am more different from my bookish nine-year-old self than I am from you, right now, fighting the same literary fights which I am fighting. It is perhaps a foolish hope, but it is what we have got. And isn’t that almost enough? This essay began as a call to common response – a sort of “Don’t you know what it’s like to have the books that mattered to your young self sneak up on you?” But, as such, it fails. And but all is not lost. Because while the weirdness of new readings of old things may not be communicable, there is something in books that is.

Here speaks our second favorite Emerson: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire” (from “The American Scholar”). I think that what my wise friend pointed out when she accused my bookishness of being a type of whorishness (or johnishness, rather) was that I had meant my recollection of books restored not to inspire, but to be an end in itself. These Fudge books were a source of inspiration that had died. They inspired me when I was nine; their alien quality now seemed difficult to reconcile with the potent force they had been once. But such is the way of reading. They had built me, like (as Emerson notes elsewhere) my meals from the same period, but there is no real call to remember them now. What we, of course, can do, is to talk not about the books that surreally inspired selves no longer current, but tease out the inspirations ongoing – so, tomorrow or the next day, I will tell you what I have thought of re-reading the first chapter of Pnin.

Friday, April 18, 2008

A Change of Plans

I didn't want to do this. You had been through enough, really, what with all the dithering about the ancient art of poetry. Stick to the book club! you said. These strictures were imposed to curtail just this sort of Wordsworth fawning! you said. What was the book we were reading again! you said. Well, guilty on all counts. But there are changes further.

I am now about a fifth of the way through Author Author and, like its main character, it's been a little thin up top. Hopefully, it will remain true to its mimeomorphism and be a little substantial around the middle as well. However, until then, a few events have conspired to lead me, for the first time in this book club's storied history, to table the current selection and install a new one in its place.

This was not a decision taken lightly. The New Pick was first suggested by the namesake of this guy, who is not to be screwed with. "Author Author?" he said. "I thought we were doing Pnin!" So he did think, and so he did threaten to make his family-friendly community into a second Avignon. To avoid this, and because my good friend and thesis advisor Prof. Fix suggested that there is more to Nabokov's Pnin than my description of it as "kind of a one-off" hinted at, we shall make it the fourth official selection of the Unpacking My Library book club. Now, since I have read Pnin before -- briefly, and not in the best of places -- I may have to hang some fire and post here on whatever else I am reading incidentally. So, catch up quickly, and democracy will return. And don't worry! Henry James will be back at some point. There is, after all, only so much democracy to go around here.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Winter Kept Us Warm (Part Two!)

Last night I screwed up and instead of considering poetry, I ended up considering some Corona Extra and Kate Bush, and being accused of living my life in accordance with the principles of The Secret. Not the best of times, but yet the epoch of incredulity. I have rebounded and am before you here to tell you the other two of my current Top Four Poems and expound on them, all in celebration of National Poetry Month.

Incidentally, The Millions Blog has announced what is news to me, that there is a National Poem in Your Pocket Day coming up (Thursday the 17th) which should be fun, and The Nation has an interesting article by Ange Mlinko (who is less enthusiastic about Poem in Your Pocket Day) about the status of poetry and its month, stacking the monthlong celebration against other pure products of America.

Anyway, the next poem is “Caliban Upon Setebos” by Robert Browning. In my chauvinistically pro-narrative days, I thought that one of the few ways in which poetry could be as effective as a novel or short story was to function like a joke – to have some delayed “aha!” punchline moment, and my idea of this par excellence was Browning’s “My Last Duchess”. (I thought the same thing about painting, especially Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” which, it turns out, made a good poem). Dumb, dumb. “Caliban Upon Setebos” is a poem that has no narrative, no punchlines, and works very well at something valuable that prose won’t do. This is Caliban, of The Tempest fame, holding forth on the god, Setebos, whom he and his mother Sycorax worship. Incidentally, he is also apparently so scared of Setebos hearing his ideas that he refers to himself in the third person, to throw off the omniscient. Throughout, he uses a sort of self-critique to analogize how Setebos must operate. Here is at one point:

Himself peeped late, eyed as Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, ‘stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words,
Has peeled a wand and calls it by a name

Like Wordsworth discussed previously, Caliban has slowed down to think in a uniquely poetic way (this poem, “Lines”, and “Leda and the Swan” discussed below, are all good foster children of silence and slow time). I find this poem additionally striking in its ability to tap into a narrative (the Tempest) and perform the good psychology of the play or novel at the tranquilly restored pace of the poem: airlifting the plot of the Tempest into the roomy space of Caliban’s printed thought can help us (me anyway) to slow similarly down.

Yeats is a huge fan of the plot airlift himself, especially keen on tapping into the legends surrounding Troy. My fourth poem on my current Top Four Poems is “Leda and the Swan”. It is a much shorter poem than any of the preceding, and it combines the slowness of Wordsworth and Browning’s Caliban with a compact quality that crops up often in Yeats and the Modernists with whom he crewed. Here’s the end of “Leda and the Swan”:

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Leaving aside the insight this affords into Zeus’s questionable sexual politics, we look at this as a model for reading (what else?). This is, once again, thought slowed to a crawl; and to boot, what is probably the most important event in Western letters is put into two and a half lines. That shudder in the loins becomes perhaps the act most larded over with meaning that one can imagine. And if poems can continue to, every once in a while, stack so much meaning into so few lines, the opposition mentioned in Mlinko’s article will remain ones that, if not baseless, can at least be countered. There is nothing “bland or morally ‘positive’” in this poem. After stunningly putting the Trojan War, and one of its most unwitting causes (Helen’s conception) into two and a half lines, Yeats ends the poem with a question of epistemology. Not the kind of question you’d answer, but it is the kind of thing that demands to be thought about. Poetry has an almost unique ability to pressurize language until its meaning explodes back out in readerly activity. Good poetry doesn’t just teach you how to think at a different pace; it demands it. And it is anything but cooked meat. And, it is the poem with which, on a 3x5 card, I will proudly stroll down Thursday, in my pocket.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land (Part One!)

April, the cruelest month (ha!) is also National Poetry Month. This means that it is time for me to tell you what I think about poetry, and to, in theory, hear what you think thereon. My thoughts about poetry, I should say going in, are even more confused than my thoughts about novels or my thoughts about the role of literature in modern American intellectual life, if you can imagine such a thing. But here are some poems I like and a little on why, and hopefully you can use these as a goad to celebrate the month properly until we get to New Zealand Music Month (no joke!).

First up: “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” by Robert Herrick. Before we get to him though, since NZMM is fast approaching, here’s Murray Hewitt:

“I’m not, you know, embarrassed to admit this, but I can’t really put my emotions into words, so I’ve decided to use lyrics.”

Writing lyrics when you haven’t got any music to put them on top of is kind of like giving yourself leave to write terrible poetry. If things slow up, through a few “ooohs” in. Or allow people to imagine that caterwauled it will do better. Or bring up your dead budgie to bring up emotions. Anyway, this Herrick poem seems to be the opposite. This poem seems to me to be among the best at doing what songs ought to do. Its stanzas bounce back and forth between long and short lines, as the speaker gets himself more and more excited about going a-maying with Corinna. He basically provides a swift-moving list, Dr. Seuss style, of things that the other kids are already out doing – “Some have dispatched their cakes and cream/Before that we have left to dream”. And, jubilantly songlike, Herrick sustains his one mood of relatively (compared to say, Marvell) innocent ebullience just until the last stanza when his almost de rigeur, for his century, remarks on the ubiquity of death show up for some gravity. It has been nice out in Massachusetts the last few days, and I have gotten much use out of “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.”

The remaining poems are nothing like that at all.

Here’s another one on nature, but this time Nature catapulted into thought and Proper Noundom, by Wordsworth, in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern blah blah”, which I boycotted in High School but have come to love. My favorite part of this kind of broody but hopeful poem is this:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration

That chunk is the second thing I think poems can do so well (after reverse the damage done by crappy, songless, non-word lyrics), especially broody poems like this, is put enough verbiage around a thought to arrest it and make it available for study. I think that most people have done what Wordsworth is doing here – basically, being nostalgic – but not most people have paid so much attention to what they are doing. A poem like “Lines blah blah” – and even more so Wordsworth’s Prelude, which I am still a little terrified of and have yet to finish reading – slows cognition down, forcing you to take account of exactly the words that are constitutive of that experience. The unpacking just to be done in Wordsworth’s last phrase – tranquil restoration – is a solid and rewarding exercise. This is, in a different way from lyrical doggerel, another opposite of Herrick’s poem, in which words sped themselves up in joy; Wordsworth slows us down in contemplation.

This is getting long, and for only like the second time since I had to show up at Commencement, I have important business tomorrow. I do have two more poems, and some Northrop Frye, that I want to tell you about, so, meet me here tomorrow night? For Browning and Yeats? Kthanxbai.