unpacking my library

Chess

2011-07-25T21:19:00.006-04:00

By one metric (lifetime record versus my cousin Mary, who is six), I am good at chess (10-2-0). By another metric (performance against the computer at chess.com on a level called "Silly", which is below "Easy") I am bad at chess (0-4-0). It seems obvious that one of these metrics is a better indicator of quality than the other, so I suppose it's incumbent upon me to just sort of now live life as a person who is bad at chess, at least until I improve (and not just by beating Mary until those two losses become statistically insignificant).

I'm not bad at chess merely insofar as I can't think enough steps ahead, either, which is what I thought about when I used to think, abstractly, about how and why I was so bad at chess. The problem in this scenario (which, again, I largely just imagined in the half-decade or so when I just didn't play chess at all), would be that I would go to move and -- oh no! -- realize all of the sudden that either my bishop or my rook was doomed, doomed, and I could only save one of them. In fact, I am a much less tragic, and much more stupid, chess player than this. I lose my important pieces not so much by grinding ineluctabilities as much as by wild, arms-flailing acts of stupidity. "I will just move my queen here, to bide her royal time," I think, and then the computer snipes her off with its bishop that I should, of course, have seen, what with its position five clear, unimpeded diagonal squares from the queen's landing. At no point here at the library where I'm playing my chess did I take off my cap in a gesture of resignation, as I realized that the computer had masterfully played me; rather, I made a kind of stuttering motion with my head and then grouchily flung my mouse cursor over to the corner to close out the game rather than sticking around to actually get mated. (This was against a computer, so don't worry, my resignation strategy wasn't like screwing up anyone else's stats).

Unlike say, backgammon or Scrabble, chess is a narrative game (the bishop attacked the queen!) and unlike say, Key to the Kingdom it's not a game with what anyone who's read a book would call an interestingly narrative game (the castles moved (?) to successfully box the king in again). But the hyperdiegetic story, of each person's relationship to chess, is an interesting one, as we negotiate, in chess, intimately but harmlessly (unless you're Luzhin), between ends that are tragic and ones that are stupid.

In news news, I am reading in addition to losing at chess, and I will soon lose my access to the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, so I plan on writing here about that. Expect more. Happy reading.

Joss and Sally

2010-08-31T22:27:00.003-04:00

"And then, so true is it that one thing leads to another and that you can try a good man just so high, he suddenly found that she was in his arms. After that, he hardly knew what he was doing. Chibnall, however, could have told him. Chibnall, with his intimate knowledge of the Nosegay Novelette series, would have recognized the procedure immediately. He was clasping Sally to his bosom and showering burning kisses on her upturned face." -- P.G. Wodehouse, in Quick Service

Chibnall, in this scene, is a butler, and he loves novelettes; his fiancee, Miss Pym, is a barmaid who loves detective stories. The beginning of the passage that I have quoted is distinctively Wodehouse (the twinned bits of cant in the first sentence; the subtle ordering of the scene in calling what's happening "the procedure"). The very end is an example of something that pops up in Wodehouse a lot, distinctively his by distinctively not belonging to him: just as later, with a lot of gangster talk, he will weave in bits of Miss Pym's detective stories, we are getting a little undigested prose from one of the Nosegay Novelettes. We have already figured out, probably by the second sentence, what the he is doing to the her; and it is a fun and funny little reward when the romance novel's language arrives so exactly. Joss (the he) is kissing Sally (the her): that's the plot, and all of the fun in the sentence is the running from the Wodehouse to the Nosegay register.

"You need kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how" -- Rhett Butler
"For 'kissed', substitute the word you're thinking of." -- Roger Ebert

Wodehouse can move with ease between these two registers because politeness and lust had teamed up, over a few hundred years, to make sure that writing about kissing was often carried out in a fairly regimented way. The kisses are often hot, or accompanied by hot tears, and are often showered or otherwise discretely dispensed. My favorite part of the passage from Wodehouse is that they are all falling on Sally Fairmile's upturned face. Upturned face is the best, the most clearly romance-literary chunk of the passage. It perfectly and asexually reminds us about these two bodies, angled toward each other, Joss showering burning kisses on Sally, in the most rewarding position that they can be, in chaste Wodehouse or in chaste Nosegay novelettes.

"Moreover, the kiss, one particular contact of this kind, between the mucous membrane of the lips of the two people concerned, is held in high sexual esteem among many nations (including the most highly civilized ones) in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract." -- Sigmund Freud, from "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"

Shortly after the procedure described above, Joss and Sally are interrupted by Sally's fiance, Lord Holbeton, who says, "I say!" (Wodehouse describes this as not quite the thing that Othello would've said). Shortly after that, Joss begins applying mascara to his face, as a mustache, and writing on the mirror of the room (his employer's) with lipstick. I don't know why he does this; it's not quite gone into. However, it coming right on the heels of the kissing put me in mind of the marvelous above sentence, from Freud, his fascinating bewilderment at the act of kissing, which seems just as ungovernable, as unliterary and unchaste and just plain unusual, as the mascara mustache or the lipstick writing. Freud gets a bad knock, I think, for being obsessed with sex, or with attributing too much to various sex drives or such. Instead, I think that what Freud insists upon is the deep weirdness of every single in the world. Everything is filtered through sex drives for Freud because sex drives are weird, and so is everything else: form, digestive tracts, kisses.

Yes. Isn't It Nice to Think So?

2010-08-30T00:20:00.003-04:00

I'm reading a (ahem) rather scholarly book about Nabokov's fake scholium on a fake poem Pale Fire, which is called Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. It is by the apparently very well regarded (and why shouldn't he be?) Brian Boyd, and apparently it caused something of a scandal when it was unleashed upon the world, as in it, Boyd renounces his position as a leader of the Shadeans (people who think that John Shade, the fake person who in the novel Pale Fire is credited with writing the poem, actually invented Charles Kinbote, the fake person who writes a misguided commentary about the poem) and returns to the position that KInbote and Shade each wrote the sections that the text says they wrote. Everything is what it is and not another thing. However, Boyd goes onto say that both Kinbote and Shade are influenced by the ghost of Hazel Shade, and that, post-his-own-mortem, Shade joins his daughter in suggesting things to Kinbote that make the most compelling parts of his commentary compelling. Boyd does a lot of work to tease out hidden connections: Kinbote's grandfather's mistress, Iris Acht, is one of Hazel's avatars because her name is an eye-part, and because Hazel's name is a color that refers almost exclusively to that eye-part.

Frankly, I don't have any idea what to make of any of this. It is difficult enough to talk about Pale Fire to anyone who hasn't read it (really: try explaining it to your mother and see if you make it past "999 line poem in heroic couplets), and it's difficult enough to talk to anyone who has read it without just enjoying yourself in the comic and tragic luxuriances of its prose. I honestly can't figure out how the idea that dead Hazel has, like Sibyl Vane, started communicating through Nabokov's words unbeknownst to anybody would affect the way I feel about the novel. It's a weird lack of involvement after reading nearly three hundred pages about a novel I love. I've written on here before about the quondam king of Zembla, namely to write about how, while watching Mad Men one night, I realized that I don't know what he looks like. Knowing me, I probably came to the conclusion that it was best to just keep him vague. Is it good to keep oneself in the dark (shaded) about whether or not a prominent character in a book is, as a ghost, dictating the thematic of the book?

Earlier, when I said that everything is what it is and not another thing, I thought I was quoting Bishop Berkeley, the idealist British philosopher. Wrong! It turns out that I was quoting a different bishop, Bishop Joseph Butler. I now know exactly two things about Bishop Butler, which is one, that he said that, and two, that he shares his name with a musician from the Lovin' Spoonful. And while I'm onto them: I was positive that one) there was some kind of major connection (like, shared members) between the Lovin' Spoonful and Herman's Hermits, and two) that at least one, and possibly both, of these bands featured one of the four guys who would go on to be Crosby Stills Nash and Young. I don't have any fucking idea why, as of fifteen minutes ago, I thought all of that. It will be very difficult to get around to not thinking it. But now I know it's wrong.

Do you remember that move Socrates was always doing? Socrates had this move where he'd ask forty questions, and eventually someone would say that a bold man is better than a just man, but that justice was better than boldness, and then Socrates would say, "Oh, no, Hippomarchus or whomever, we've gotten ourselves into a scrape!" and then Hippomarchus or whomever would make hesitant noises, and probably go home. That's Socrates for you: the bulldog of the law of the excluded middle. I always feel bad for all of those Hippomarchus and whomsever. Excluding the middle is alright for gadflies and saints but seems like a terrible place to eat. Tomorrow I am going to consider the evidence about Hazel Shade and not change how I feel about Pale Fire. Also, if I think about the Lovin' Spoonful, I will also think about Herman's Hermits and about at least Graham Nash. I'll believe in anything. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe.

With Me, It's All or Nothing

2010-08-02T01:41:00.004-04:00

I'm reading a book by Brian Rotman called Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, and one of the things he talks about is the Greco-Christian opposition to the idea of nothing: it was a scandalous idea, a terrifying idea, an idea that attacked everything that made sense, it was intolerable. And that's just what it was to the Greeks. To the Christians, it was even worse, because it seemed situated, in every important scale, across the table completely from the Godhead, which was a plenum: a site of fullness. Zero and nothingness, especially to, say, Saint Augustine, are the ultimate privation, the most complete sense of difference from God, whose majesty lies entirely in His completedness: hence Augustine's conception of the God before time, outside of time, et cetera.

Naturally, those of us who have to wake up in the morning don't exist in any plenums, or even near any. Do you all remember the episode of Futurama called The Why of Fry? No? Well, in that episode, a bunch of sentient cerebrums (cerebra?) called the Brainspawn decide that they are damned close to an epistemological plenum -- that they, as a race of sentient brains, have come to know everything -- and that they ought to destroy the universe in order to close the set of potentially knowable things, so that they will not have to come to know anything else. The knowable but unknown foreclosed, fullness achieved. Luckily -- luckily! -- the plan of the Brainspawn is foiled by Futurama's protagonist, delivery boy Philip J. Fry, in a series of events that you should all familiarize yourselves with by watching this and every other episode of Futurama. But the plan of the Brainspawn is an interesting, if high-concept, rejoinder to the horror vacuii that Augustine responded to with his exaltation of the plenum. It's one thing to think of the fullness of God as something a spiritual analogue to pre-Oedipal life in Freud, or to any other condition of pristineness (each pray'r accepted and each wish resign'd), but the thing about the fullness is that the fullness is DONE.

The quotidian ballast to this high thought balloon came about in my life today when, bored at work, I made a list of books that I will soon be able to X off of my list of Books Bought and Unread, among them Brian Rotman's Signifying Nothing. There's a way in which the entities that make up that list could be fulfilled, obviously, which is that I could actually finish reading all of those damn books and eventually my library would be a wall of accomplishments (such as they are) rather than aspirations (ditto). It is more likely that the constitution of my Books Bought and Unread will never really achieve a plenum, that they will be less like the Labors of Heracles (check, check, check) and more like the people of the Earth, interred and replenished as need and desire strike. The list -- refillable until the Big Crunch or not -- is itself a weird space where it's unclear to me what sides fullness and nothingness take. Finishing each book, moving it off of my current truncated bookshelf and onto the now three (progress!) piles of Books Read, next to the fan and behind my box of sweaters -- should that represent an increase in fullness (Now my Read Books are fuller) or in the nothing (the list, after all, is getting smaller)?

There's an allure to the middle state of incompleteness, the participation in a going concern. It's like people who don't want to have watched every episode of a television show they like, because then there's nothing left to watch. I did a similar thing, or at least committed to a similar thing, when I was sixteen and fell in love with Slaughterhouse-Five, and vowed that I would never read the entire Vonnegut oeuvre, lest there be no oeuvre left. But I fucked up, and had read all of the available Vonnegut before I was twenty. So it goes. Of course, the books I might read is crucially different from the books that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in that one is practically inexhaustible and the other one I exhausted. But the feeling, the sliding from incompleteness to fullness to nothing, is there when I watch the list contract and expand. Make a list, feel the presence of the plenum, and then, even faintly, nothing.

Kicks Against Solipsism

2010-07-27T00:31:00.005-04:00

"If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years less six months and four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" -- Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

"Then producing smartly a hammer from an inner pocket he dealt himself, right in the middle of his ancient wounds, so violent a blow that he fell down backwards, or should I say forwards. But the part he struck most readily, with his hammer, was the head, and that is understandable, for it too is a bony part, and sensitive, and difficult to miss, and the seat of all the shit and misery, so you rain blows upon it, with more pleasure than on the leg for example, which never did you any harm, it's only human." -- Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

The first sentence contains two instances of the same adjective, which is dressed up for some reason as an adverb. The second sentence contains a bunch of adjectives, but of more worthy of notice is the way in which it slides up and down the pronoun persons, like the Olympic podium -- third, then first, then second. Both are from novels in which the narrator is rather difficult to follow, and both are things that I have underlined recently, less because I thought they were totally crucial to the work as a whole, but more because I thought they were good candidates to go into my collection of sentences.

I conceptualize my collection of sentences as being something like a mason jar that one would toss sentences into, and then I guess shake the biggest sentences out for use on laundry day. I've gone on at great length previously about my love of the sentence as a unit, mostly I think because I tend to get overwhelmed by larger units (paragraphs, stories, novels, ouevres) and there's only so much one can say in praise of individual words. These two additions to the sentence jar are especially indicative of the evocative power of sentences on their own, because the narrators are themselves constantly confused, or confusing, or in some manner not the final arbiters of what's really going on. People who are not the final arbiters of what's going on are of course well known to us; they are most of the people whom we meet, and their sentences, like the sentences of Dowell and Malone are free to break out and do whatever they please. It's entirely possible that in years to come, I will be swimming through my piles of money like Scrooge McDuck and I will, unbidden, think of John Dowell and that all that I will be able to remember is that he has something to do with goodly apples, or that the only thing I will remember about Malone (because even his titular dying isn't as knee-weakening as that sweet sliding sentence) is that little tidbit about the horrifying guard Lemuel. They aren't Pip Pirrip; they aren't in charge; I can remember of them whatever I please. Them and anybody I might see on the subway or talk to at work or at dinner parties. Ha, ha, everybody.

The claim of the power of sentences, naturally, isn't going to shake the world, any more than the claim of the power of words or the claim of the power of much else verbalized these days. But those two sentences I love, the former of which I knew about years before I encountered it in its natural habitat, and the latter of which snuck up on me unawares. The staunch defiance -- with or without context -- of the goodly apple sentence, with its aching bookkeeping; the bitter spit of those sentences against the bony and sensitive and difficult to miss head; look at 'em go! Do these sentences have anything in common, apart from their fierce motion to be free of their speakers? They each reach out to their readers, their hearers: Dowell's (Ford's) by virtue of its being a question and Malone's (Beckett's) by virtue of its slick move into the second person. Words kick against solitude; every word has its hearer, even those shouted into a hole by Midas's barber. The indelibility of these sentences stays on, I think; they remind us, in their weirdly similar ways, of our unaloneness, even when uttered by their deeply idiosyncratic speakers.

The Goldfish Pile

2010-07-26T00:57:00.005-04:00

I went to Buffalo, and from there to Lockport, the ancestral manse, to look at my bookshelves. And after about thirty-six hours, I put a bunch of the books from my bookshelf into a bag and got on a bus and just before seven this morning, put the books in a pile on my bed. I don't know when I will read any of these books; none of them are books that I, say, had urgent needs to get my hands on. Now I am sitting on my bed, and the books that I got off my giant wall-sized bookshelf have been moved to the floor. Although the bag in which I moved them across New York state (and probably part of New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; I fell asleep after Syracuse) also had some clothes and some other books (ones I had read/read from on the way to Lockport), the new recruits to my little room in Brooklyn are now sitting by themselves, in a pile next to the cardboard box that I use for a desk. I felt like it was necessary to do, like how when you buy a goldfish you put it in the fishtank still in its plastic bag for a while.

When I got home, finally, from my overnight trip, and before I had even got the books out of my baggage and into their new goldfish pile I thought about whether or not to go to sleep, and listened to a podcast of Baseball Today from last Thursday, and eventually decided to sleep, from maybe nine to noon. While I was asleep, I had a dream that, while I was on a lunch break from my current job at a Barnes and Noble, only it was the dream version of the Barnes and Noble where I work (it has appeared on previous dreams; it is somehow still at Lincoln Center, but also in a wooded environment). I was running late, in the dream, to get back to work, so I recruited some of my friends, all of whom were about fourteen, to pick up my Honda CR-V and carry it over the turnstile into the subway. "Too late to drive!" dream-me must have thought. "C'mon, my young friends, let us get our Honda onto the uptown 2!" This resulted in trouble of a nondescript variety; when I woke up, the thing that I thought of was that what I was remembering -- the manifest dream content, as I quickly realized -- was in fact the plot of an episode of the Wire. I cannot for the life of me account for why that is what I thought of first, but it is. I thought about that for a few minutes, and thought that 1) although I have seen every episode of the Wire, I was not familiar with the events of the dream; 2) none of the episodes of the Wire take place in New York and most saliently, 3) I was prominently involved in the dream content, and I was not featured even a little in any of the episodes of the Wire.

I can remember literally nothing about what I thought or did for the three hours in between when I deduced that the episode of "Putting Jeff Schratz's Honda CR-V on the 2 Train to Get to a Sylvan Version of Barnes and Noble Store 2628" was not an episode of the Wire and when I actual got to the non-bucolic BNS2628 at around three. I must have showered and ironed my clothes and taken the subway, and I must have put the books that are new to my room in their current new goldfish pile next to my cardboard desk. That makes the books of my room into three segregated groups: on the maimed Target bookshelf, decapitated in the U-Haul when we moved here, are the books I haven't read but that have been here since I moved to New York. In two piles by the wall next to my fan are are all of the books that I have read at some point during my New York life. I keep imagining that they will get lent to people, but no one comes by to see them. And then there is the goldfish pile.

Not only is the bucolic version of the uberurban place where I work bucolic, it also appears to be in a cross between the Hundred Acre Wood and Lockport, New York, where my ancestral manse and my wonderful wall-sized bookshelf are. And not only was the Honda CR-V that my young wards and I were muscling onto the 2 a Honda, but it appears to have been the very same maroon 2005 CR-V that my father drives in the winter and my brother the Duck in the summer, and of which, one year on the night before Christmas Eve, I flattened the tire driving home at two in the morning. All but one of the lug nuts came off easily enough, but one of them needed a special Honda lug nut device which was, though I did not know it, in the glove compartment. When I prevailed upon my poor father to come to my aid, he did not know it either, so he came and we kicked at the tire in the snow in the parking lot of a donut store for ten minutes before we went home, wet and tired and befuddled.

I haven't decided yet whether to know for very long that the books in the goldfish pile have unique status, or that they are in some way brothers. I can't decide whether it is inane or thoughtful to keep in mind their biobibiliographies, to associate Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth just as much with Kafka's the Castle, which is now on top of it, as with Goodbye Columbus and American Pastoral. More than likely, it will not be up to me to decide to know; I will just know it, and every time I think about either of them or Four Plays by Henrik Ibsen or the Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks or the Checklist Manifesto, I will think too about the assimilatory quality of plastic bags, about shoving one favorite means for getting about your home into another with the help of young faceless dream-strangers, about being two places at once.

Doesn't/Isn't

2010-07-18T23:34:00.006-04:00

Socrates is a philosopher who never wrote down any philosophy. Stanley Cavell once asked if it were possible for this trick to be plied in other fields -- a novelist who didn't write any novels, a poet who didn't write any poems. The idea, I guess, is that someone who fit the bill would just BE those things; agrammic poet X would be a poem, would make his life into a poem in some important way. This is deeply stupid, insofar as what I've guessed the idea to be is the idea; a life is not a poem, or a novel, because in life you keep having to eat dinner and be bored and so on. I have addressed these temporal concerns elsewhere and elsewhen, if I am not mistaken. The idea that a person, by means of not writing, just IS (by the way, all of these conjugations of to be connecting a person to the poem or novel that is her life sound, in my head, to be capitalized, but I'm going to stop doing it from here on because it's typographically annoying) their work is a category mistake. Johnson wrote that you should avoid meeting the authors of works you've liked, because it is like poking a very pretty soap bubble. And persons are not soap bubbles. It can seem here, I think, as if I am being overliteral or picking on a straw man or something, which is a danger of which I am cognizant. But what I'm thinking about is a set of ideas that has come from, among other things, my long and habitual lapses of activity, times in which I am a blogger who doesn't blog. So it's possible that a sturdier-than-straw man, a stick man, maybe, could be built on the figure of a poet who didn't rely on being a poem, but a poet or novelist who had just an endless stack of poem starts or disconnected chapters. What's that work worth? And what's that work worth if the poet or novelist or blogger, as a part of real life, thought constantly about their poem or novel or blog post that seemed, for a critical reason, that it ought to remain unfinished, that there were something beyond laziness keeping the work from getting done?

It certainly seems like a form of entitled laziness to do this sort of thing: it's a bit like, in Johnson's metaphor, to want credit for making a beautiful soap bubble by buying soap, then never mixing it with water, but constantly imagining what you're going to do with your soap once you open it up. The only benefit of no soap bubble over a soap bubble is that you can't poke it and ruin it; and I am a person saying this who played with soap bubbles three days ago. That too, beyond entitled laziness, is the benefit of undone poems and novels and even blog posts that have been sitting unwritten; they can't be fairly poked, or ruined, because they are already ruins. You can't live as a poem or a novel, but everyone who tries to be a poet with no poems or a novelist with no novel is living in a house made out of planned and unborn poems and novels, and that is a thing you can do.

Here's another way of talking about this. I think that the only way to live in anything approaching reasoned comfort is only to live within your nonpublic failures, especially insofar as they are failures of words (poems, novels, blog posts). Something finished, whatever its quality, is in some perfect as itself; but you can't live in a soap bubble house. The ineffable -- because, again, I'm refusing to allow that mere human laziness is preventing these endeavors, and consigning part of their incompleteness to the ineffable -- keeps things from finishes, keeps mere good sense from owning and ordering. Here, we go to Johnson again, this time from the life of Pope:

But good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy. Pope had likewise genius; a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do.

Of course, we writers who can't write don't have Pope's genius to give supremacy to our safety; but there's something to be said for endeavouring more than you can do, and especially (this is where Johnson is most perfect, I think) imagining something greater -- not than one can accomplish, but than one knows, even if it's as small in scope as going to work in the morning, rather than writing the Essay on Man. Or even the Essay on Criticism.

Revelation of the Mysteries

2010-06-30T00:49:00.002-04:00

The first time I read Flannery O'Connor was in the very bad old days, when I didn't know anything. I had gone online and found NPR's list of the 100 best characters in fiction since 1900, and decided to get to know as many of them as I could (I'm up to 68, by the way). That summer, the summer of 2002, I read four books based entirely on the recommendation of this list -- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, the Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. The last of these I read first on a plane that went from Buffalo to Cleveland, and then on a plane that went from Cleveland to Boston, for the purpose ostensibly of investigating colleges and actually of hanging out with my aunts. There was a weird picture of Hazel Motes, the character who had made the list, on the cover of the copy I had from the Lockport Public Library, wearing his glasses that he acquires toward the end of the novel.

The next time that I got my hands on a Flannery O'Connor book was five years later, when my Uncle Dan sent me, on the occasion of my graduating from college, a copy of her collected works along with Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and a note that said that these books would help me adjust from college to Real Life. Now, I don't know whether Uncle Dan's real, non-collegiate life is full of women without the requisite number of legs or corrupt Bible salesmen or gigantic talking cats, or whether there were some other point he was trying to make, but there it was: I now had all four Flannery O'Connor books, a selection of her letters, and her uncollected stories and occasional writing. It was time for me, now in the not so bad old days, to get into Flannery O'Connor.

But it still took me a long time to get back to it-- I read Wise Blood again on a plane from New Orleans to JFK last year, I just recently read Everything that Rises Must Converge in and around New York, and I read A Good Man is Hard to Find sometime in between (it's one of the rare books on my "read" side of the ledger whose circumstances of reading I can't quite recall). Now I have read all of the collected Flannery O'Connor stories and one of the novels and my Flannery O'Connor arsenal can be said to not be doing so bad. What's strange is, the relationship that the ideas I never stopped having -- never, since I first ran into Hazel Motes and the legend of his maker on that list -- to the ideas I have about her work now.

There's a thing you can do, if you are a writer of short stories especially, I think, where you get really good at doing a particular thing over and over and you obtain a kind of geographically limited mastery. T. Coraghessan Boyle said once that Flannery O'Connor had achieved that kind of thing by creating a series of cartoon universes that managed to be suddenly poignant, and I think that he's absolutely right and that this is what makes her stories, in particular, of such lasting value. The characters in her stories begin life as cartoons -- the preposterously illustrated Parker in "Parker's Back", the comically behatted mother in "Everything that Rises Must Converge", the creepy yet insupportable intellectualism of Asbury in "The Enduring Chill" -- and somehow take on the set of overtones that one associates mostly with the Bible. This kind of creation of stakes is not easy to do, and it is especially not easy to do in a short story, where you have neither the naturally evocative mode of a poem nor the girth of a novel, and it is insanely difficult to do in a short story that also has the room for the kinds of silliness noted above. See the revelation of Mrs. Turpin, the protagonist of "Revelation" who has been called a wart hog from hell:

Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.

The kind of opaque, "abysmal life=giving knowledge" that Mrs. Turpin seems to find at the end of this story is mirrored throughout all of O'Connor's stories: there is some towering, invoked, unseen mystique at the heart of these grotesqueries that is in some way keyed into the core of significance, of signification itself. And it's mirrored again in the role that, to me at least, "Flannery O'Connor" the writer has, that unchanging signification that is felt without being totally understood. In a different way from the whodunits, O'Connor might be called a mystery writer; she is unique, and unwavering, in leaving the mystery of meaning unsolved.

Ventriloquists

2010-06-22T00:31:00.005-04:00

Comes a time in a man's life when he has to take a good long hard look in the mirror and think about what he's doing. In fact, comes that time more often that one would hope. In further fact, maybe the frequency of that time a-comin' is one of those things that need be faced in the mirror. Ahem. So, look, I'm going to level with you: I love to write on this blog about the bad attitude and bad decisions made by Young Fat Schratz. He is always doing dumb things, and I am always able to sit and think about what a clever fellow I am now that I have wised up past him. Well, the reason that I have had to give the mirror good long hard looks and all, is that I got all excited to write, in this post, a Young Fat Schratz story, when I realized that the version of me protagonisting in the story is not all that much younger and not all that much fatter than the me as currently operating. The main guy in this story (which is still forthcoming), has much more in common with the me writing this in 2010 than he does with the YFS we've come to know and love, the one who hit on girls at the library with Greek-root puns and who failed to appreciate Wise Blood and who did all of those other things I had supposedly Risen Above. Nevertheless, I will face my shame and tell the story, and then keep talking. Which is, I hope, no less than you'd expect.

Not So Very Young and Not So Very Fat Schratz was once on an airplane flying from Boston to Buffalo, reading The Emperor's Children and thinking about what a grand success the previous National Poem in Your Pocket Day had been. In particular, I was thinking of a girl with whom I was soppily in love, and how the previous N.P. in your P. Day I had been the lucky recipient of hearing her read several of the poems that I and my hangers on had had in their pockets. What a voice! I thought. What poems! I thought. And, like an idiot, once I got bored with The Emperor's Children, high in the sky on my way back to my native land, I decided to write a poem, on the back of a receipt from the Logan Airport Hudson News.

For almost as long as I can remember, I have been soppily in love with a succession of girls who did nothing to deserve it. My grandfather once told us a mildly offensive piece of doggerel, and when we asked him where he picked it up, he told us that they said it all the time in the Service. When we asked him why, he said, "Well, we had to do something" which I think also explains my decades-long free-floating soppiness. And given that it has spanned the decades, it is something of a marvel that I have been able to restrain myself to writing as few soppy poems as I have. And yet this poem I was writing on the back of that receipt, if I still knew where it was, might strike me now as one of the soppiest. I believe it was built on the kind of conceit that would shame Abraham Cowley, with a bunch of guff about how when I read Shakespeare I imagine Kenneth Branagh's voice reading the parts, and when I read Dr. Johnson I imagine Professor Fix, who taught my Samuel Johnson class, reading it aloud, and how I, the poet, could think of few things in this vale of tears nicer than making her the default voice for poems in my head. Like I said, none of these women deserved all this sop, and I am sorry for it. But it's what I did.

And I've been thinking a lot about that poem I wrote half of and lost because I have been listening to stories in voices like never before. Since I have moved to Brooklyn, I have had no television, and since I have frittered away my loan money, I have had no netflix account, and so I have been exulting in the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (which is the occasioning event for this post and which makes its appearance here, I believe, burying the lede). The way that podcast works is famous writer X reads a story published at any point in history by Famous Writer Y and then talks about it with Deborah Triesman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker. All of which is good clean fun, but it is making me think things like that every story by Donald Barthelme sounds like it's read by Donald Antrim, or that every story by John Updike is read by Roger Angell (the only writer on the podcast so far who has remained like unvoiced, when I read him later, is Nabokov, who's been read on the podcast twice). And check out this nutty piece of syllogism: I now think that Joshua Ferris sounds best like Monica Ali, that George Saunders sounds best like Joshua Ferris, and that Isaac Babel sounds best like George Saunders. That's right: now when I read Babel, I imagine it read with George Saunder's great Chicago accent flattening out all of those translated vowels.

It's a typical response at this point, when I go through these things in my head, to wonder who cares at all. Babel may sound like George Saunders, but it's not like this is making me think that Makhno's Boys took place near Lake Superior. But, after all, the problem of voicing once got me to write a poem on the back of a receipt, so maybe it means something. Voice can't be unimportant; once, it was all that stories had (and I'm not even going to get STARTED on the things I've thought of regarding this and Derrida's wonky take on voicing writing in Signature Event Context, because I thought about that once and it kept me up all night). The iterability (ok, just a little Derrida) isn't even the issue here, because whatever Famous Writer X sounds like is STUCK as what Famous Writer Y now sounds like to me. Like everything else, I think that what it comes down to is a defense against loneliness: it may be dire when it's just me and Don Delillo, but if Don Delillo sounds like Chang-Rae Lee, then, it's me and Don Delillo and Chang-rae Lee, and that makes a difference, I guess. It hurts your head sometimes reading, that you're alone with your gods, and it helps to have someone (and the promise of intelligent discussion with that someone and Deborah Triesman minutes away).

It occurs to me, as I finish it, that it is perhaps germane to this discussion that, when I imagine myself speaking, I imagine neither my actual voice (blech) nor my head voice (too clever by half!), but the impression that my brother Connor does of me, usually when he is making fun of me for being a mope. In fact, a lot like the way he would say it if he were talking about me writing those soppy poems.

Here and Now and Time and Space

2010-06-05T02:03:00.004-04:00

I'm reading a book of essays by Susan Sontag, called Against Interpretation and Other Essays, and I'm watching Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch. Dead Man is a movie about the Old West, created in the mid-90s; Against Interpretation and c. is a book of essays about other books, movies, plays, from the Sixties or the time immediately pre-Sixties, and presumably meant to be read in the Sixties or the time immediately post-Sixties. I'm agnostic I guess as to whether or not Dead Man was meant to be watched specifically in the mid-nineties (as a person who was alive and reading and caring in parts of the nineties, I have trouble thinking of it just yet as a Capitalized Decade; so much so, and is this strange?, that when I think of the capital-N Nineties I imagine the Gay Eighteen Nineties. That probably is strange). Whatever Jarmusch wanted, I am watching his movie and reading Sontag's essays in the very early twenty-tens or the very late twenty-oughts, depending on your numerology. And like you couldn't but do, doing these particular things, I am thinking about time and place.

When I was young and went to school in the mountains, I wrote a sixty-five page English paper about people trying to extend past their own particular time and place. Specifically, it was about the efforts of certain writers to shove the time and place to which they were relevant further into the future. Pale Fire, I wanted to say, did this in a way in which David Copperfield was not, and especially in a way that an essay by Susan Sontag about the lamentable lack of Georg Lukacs's work in English is not. That paper was about success: who had shoved their lives, or their relevances, or whatever, further than anyone else (Nabokov won on a judges' decision). Today I am wondering less about success (who got the most points in forty-eight minutes) and more about reasons (why bother getting nine other guys together and throwing that ball at a net?). Are people really trying to shove outward their time and place, and why do something like that?

Last night I drank a bunch of beer with my brother, and on the subway ride home I did a piece of furious underlining on the Q train: I underlined a sentence from one of those Susan Sontag essays about the then-current state of literature, because it was a claim about the then-current state of literature that I quite liked. And today I got full of nostalgia and compared one of my college friends to the Dude from the Big Lebowski -- he was just the man for his time and place. One of the facile pleasures of reading -- one of the ones easy to observe, I mean -- is that you can check in other times/places, like Sontag as the pulse of the Sixties.

I guess the thing that I'm thinking or worrying about now is: what is so great about now and here, among all the other times and places? In its way, it seems like those are the worst two coordinates to have: it's not as if one could be coherent and claim that someone was the man for his time and place RIGHT NOW. On the other hand, what the fuck other time are people angling toward? When Sontag expresses reservations that her book is a signpost of some mythic thing called the Sixties, surely she what concerns her is that consignment to the Sixties is consignment to irrelevance Right Now. This is probably something like a concern that the only way to make sense out of anything is to do it retrospectively (remember Hegel's Minerva's owl's flying only at dusk), which is I guess an old concern. But why do people push ahead to other right heres and nows?

And more importantly, if that goddamn owl is only flying when it's dark, what are we supposed to do in the daytime?

Judgment of Paris

2010-05-20T00:27:00.007-04:00

You've had a big responsibility suck lately, because you went from having your school books that other people need to read to read, and now you just have the books you've endorsed (by buying) to read, for yourself, to justify to you that you bought them for a reason. Soon you will have to get a job, which is a whole terrifying glob of responsibility that is about to rain down on you, but you are deciding that for like what, a week, a few days, you will put that off, because you pulled two all-nighters and one all-dayer to write your final papers and they are not bad. So you schedule your days to have certain far away things to do this week, and you always take the local to these things, because it has been too rainy for the park and you think that the next best place to the park, reading-wise, is the subway. For a while, you read the school books you skimped on, and get a lot of tail ends of arguments from post-structuralists. You get bored with that and feel the feeling you've had for a long time that you need more fiction in your life, like that if you get back into those cavalcades of sentences you think you've always been in love with, so you look at your shelves of books and you feel like you should start reading all of them at once, which is not totally feasible.

You think about reading and writing about the book club book, which you have doubts that anyone else you know is reading but your poor mother, who is probably weirded out by it, and you read some more of it on a bus and get the nagging feeling that for Flannery O'Connor, there is little to do but just quote her so that everyone can see her for themselves. You buy a PG Wodehouse novel, but that lasts about three Brooklyn-to-Harlem local subway rides. So you yank like ten books off of your shelve and do that dopey thing you do where you make a list of books to finish in May and then in June and then in July and you know that maybe like ten per cent of them, you'll have finished by August. But there is a more pressing issue at hand, at that is that you want to have a good thing, probably preferably fiction, to have your hooks into on all of those subway rides. So you look at the stack next to your bed, and you think about it.

You have yourself narrowed down to Johnson's selected essays, a book of short stories by Cortazar, the Spoils of Poynton, the Good Soldier, the Animal that Therefore I Am, and Paradise Lost, which is, looking at it, a lot less fiction and way fewer novels than you would've thought. Hm. A thing these have in common is that you bought them all for no reason. You keep thinking about the seas of sentences you thought you would be looking forward to so much, which you guess makes either James or Ford the frontrunner. And you read them for a while and you have this terrible feeling that the sentences are, what, not doing it for you? That you can't delight in sentences with the ease with which you once did? And you think that maybe this is like the whole reading-books-as-if-they-were-subway-maps ordeal that you had months ago, but it's different from that. Instead you get this sort of mortifying gut thing that you've fucked up, that like no way will you ever read again the right way, that you've failed to ask the Fisher King how he was wounded and now you need some book to be, what, an Awakening. You wonder whether there is any one book that does this.

A thing you think about just now is your Failsafe Song, which is Everyone by Van Morrison, and which is the only song that you will not listen to when you are miserable and need pop music to cheer you up. The reason you won't do that is that you are afraid that one day you will listen to the song and it will fail to cheer you up and then where will you be? And now you sit in front of your bookshelf and wonder whether or not whatever you pick up next will be the sort of failsafe book, the book you will need to restore the Fisher King, and your two shelves of book look bigger than other and you're just even confused about whether you've got to the Failsafe Book, and yet you've got to read something and there they are. So, decide.

Up and Down

2010-05-03T00:40:00.004-04:00

Here are some sentences, from public information outlet wikipedia, about the Disney Channel Original Movie Read It and Weep:

After the prom, which was ocean-themed, Jamie invites everyone to eat at her parents' pizza parlor. When Lenny rushes into the kitchens to help cook the pizza, his jacket, which was covered in seaweed from the prom, accidentally lands on some of the pizzas, covering them in seaweed. They do not know this, but when the pizza is delivered to the customers, they discover it is delicious, and Jamie's father finally figures out the secret of how to save their business, ending the film on a happy note.

And here are some sentences from our friend Flannery O'Connor, who wrote the book that we're reading this (month-ish):

It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

I, for my part, really really like all seven of these sentences. But it's good to see how they do what they are doing differently so that we can start to think about what Flannery O'Connor is up to (we will spend less time thinking about what whoever wrote the wikipedia entry for Read It and Weep is up to, I am sorry to say).

The first two of the wikipedia entry's three long sentences have "which" clauses in them, which serve to fill us in on information withheld in the preceding account of the movie and which get us crucial information to understand the third sentence, where we get our happy ending. They barrel along. The only adjectives in them are "ocean-themed" and "delicious", which I think is delightful. They are like subway cars, these sentences, on their one level and on their track and getting the job done. Getting the job done, though, is not what we want out of short stories. We want something else, and we get it from the title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge.

There is something about the sentences from people like Flannery O'Connor that makes them different from the kind of popcorn sentences that we read through at prodigious clips per minute. What I think one of the pleasures of those sentences is -- what I think makes the sentences I quoted upstairs from Ms. O'Connor different from the sentences I quoted above from wikipedia -- is their sense of moving not just forward, but up and down. A little bit earlier, describing the character Julian's reaction to his mothers less comical than jaunty and pathetic hat, and the prospect of taking his mother out in public generally, Julian is described as "waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to start piercing him". A long simile, but a delightful one. O'Connor does her work so delightfully by moving not just forward but up and down, in so many delightful registers. Is that an obvious thing to note? I think that the way in which O'Connor manages to flit between registers while maintaining the momentum we see in the wikipedia passage is one of the things, but only one of the things, that makes her so worth our reading. Read up and down and read slower.

That is what I took, anyway, out of the magnificence of the sentences in this our first Flannery O'Connor story. There will be more!

No One To Witness And Adjust, No One to Drive the Car

2010-05-01T22:37:00.003-04:00

There are few times, in your life, I think, when you are entitled to a sense of your own momentousness. I've only felt momentous three times, I think, and would not be terribly surprised if I never felt momentous again. There's a reason that the kind of desperation that most lives are led in is quiet. Even the three times I have felt momentous, I have retroactively decided against it. "Not so momentous after all," I write on the Life Event Review. Momentousness is a weird thing, anyway; I think the reason so many people are keyed in to getting to something momentous already is because they watch television. I have talked about this before, I think: one of the major ways in which deal with other human persons is like this:

A SERIES OF EVENTS --> A BIT OF MYSTERIOUS MOMENTOUSNESS --> and then the screen goes black and says LOST or whatever, and you don't deal with things until next week. But really, you've got to brush your teeth and wake up tomorrow.

Anyway, the three times that I felt like there was some momentousness approaching were the three times I graduated from anything (yes, my catholic grammar school made a big deal about moving up from eighth grade, and called it graduation, and had a commencement speaker and a valedictorian, and such). You would think that after the eighth grade and high school graduations had proved themselves to be not quite the unassimilable ends of old forms of life I'd thought, I'd have learned my lesson. But I didn't, and in May 2007, I went to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to do Nothing and to feel momentous for a while before going back to Massachusetts to graduate from college. And one of the only Things That I Did while I was there was read "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens, to help one of my friends, back north, write a paper about it.

"The Emperor of Ice Cream" is about a kind of thwarted momentousness. It begins with an invocation, to call in the roller of big cigars. The first time that I read this poem was in seventh grade, back in Lockport, for a guy called Mr. Brown who made us read stuff that seems a little heavy in retrospect for seventh-graders; in addition to this and "The Cask of Amontillado" and a couple stories by H.P. Lovecraft, he had us read the "Snowden" chapter of Catch-22, about which both holy shit and, come on, Mr. Brown, give us a spoiler alert. Anyway, I remember even Fat Young Dumb Schratz figured out that what this poem is all about is the movement from the title's having an Emperor in it and the calling of the roller of big cigars into the mundanity of the wenches dawdling in such clothes as they are used to wear. The poem is all about the crashing of two languages, the language of emperors and the language of ice cream. And something interesting happens.

Being momentous in Hilton Head, I spent a lot of time drinking beer and buying carne asada at the taqueria down the street and making plans while drinking beer to buy more carne asada. I read part of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and went to the beach with my sneakers on, which is something I do whatever beach I go to. What no one did, me least of all, was verbalize anything like "Well, this is it" or "So ends college, chums" or "Of what great moment is this week!" and out of a sense of ruining anything, but out of the sense that it would've been stupid. That any kind of language of Momentousness would've been dumb because there were still things going on. And there are always things still going on. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" helps to teach us that there are always things still going on, that even at the death of the poor woman whose horny feet protrude, there is only an emperor of ice cream.

It is a point of actual fact that the poem that my friend was writing about was not "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens, but "To Elsie, or The Pure Products of America Go Crazy" by William Carlos Williams, which is a very good poem but doesn't have a lot to do, that I could figure out, with momentousness and Hilton Head. My brother the Duck suggested using Stevens instead.

It's the day after National Poetry Month; National Poetry Month 2010 is done, embalmed, put in its monument. I missed out on writing about it from a combination of laziness and actual busy-ness. I even missed out on National Poem in Your Pocket Day. April 2010, the Month I Let National Poetry Month Down is now in the same book as that week in May 2007, the Week I Went to Hilton Head with the Rest of My Graduating Class. They're momentous events; they are the kind of things my brother Connor would make fun of me for calling "famous"; call the roller of big cigars. But me, I'm not in the book; I'm just outside of it, still here. The only emperor is the emperor of Ice Cream.

There is No End to Williamstown

2010-03-11T02:10:00.004-05:00

I went on vacation last weekend. Here is the schedule of things that I was under an obligation to do in the week immediately leading into last weekend:

Class: Monday, 630-830 (CANCELED)
Class: Tuesday, 620-820
Class: Wednesday, 330-530

So you might think it's idiotic that I should decide to take a vacation, and I might say: you are right. But I went on vacation anyway: I took a bus, on Friday morning, northwest to Williamstown Massachusetts, a place that I have been at least a little in love with since I went there as a side trip once in the late 1990s, on a family vacation to Boston, and my father took us to Colonial's Pizza which (prepare to have your mindgrapes squashed, Williams alumni) was at the time on Spring Street. I think it's important -- and important as a bookish person, no less -- to describe Williamstown as a place I have been at least a little in love with since the second Clinton administration because it is also the only place in the history of the world that I have found whose architecture and whose nature I found especially conducive to capital R Reading and capital W Writing.

"It would be no small advantage," Thoreau said, "if every college were thus situated at the base of a mountain." This is the ice-breaker of Williams commencement speakers from time immemorial (or at least time back to Thoreau, which, face it, is not memorialized properly). I have no idea if this is true, and I know of no possible way to test whether it is true; I find it even harder than this to determine whether finding out if it were true in any measurable sense is worth a damn. Would it be so great if we proved that it were less of an advantage to be located in smaller hills? Or on plains? I doubt it. But I can't care about that. At some level -- and I hate people who leave it at "some level", so let me offer the unpalatable but factual counterclaim, "my level" -- at my level, it is absolutely an advantage to have your college at the base of a mountain, because it is my mountain. When I realize that the bus that I'm on is going up -- not just west or north, but UP -- my heart, as silly as it sounds, goes up. The mountains, the mountains, yeah, I greet them with a song.

My big plan for my ersatz vacation was to go to the mountains and sit there reading a whole hell of a lot of Judith Butler, who writes on things like indefinite detention and precarious life, and Jacques Derrida on metaphors, and I read a fair bit from them, for my classes, for what I'm doing just right now. But I also brought, as a sort of off-hours plan -- a vacation plan -- Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, to read for fun. And because I am, I guess, perversely more committed to anything I'm doing for nominal fun over anything I'm doing for nominal work, the only one of the many books that I brought (mostly for work) that I finished was A Moveable Feast. That book is a book a person living with very little money in Paris in the 1920s, but more universally it is a book about a person who is a writer, and why he wrote at a particular time in his life, and the circumstances surrounding him as he did so. And of course, this is the part with which I fell in something like love. Bolstered and given breath by his place, Hemingway bets and eats and discusses, but more than anything else he WRITES. The thing he comes up with is The Sun Also Rises. Which is pretty damn good. Pretty incredible, really.

The work that anyone has to do is the work they have to do, and there are going to be people sitting around wondering whether or not the work has got done. There are people -- people whom I quite like -- who had a very vested interest in determining whether or not I had got through all of my Butler, or all of my Derrida. The work in front of you is going to sit there and get done or undone forever, and the accidents of your life are going to adjust themselves exactly as they should, relative to this sort of thing. But there is, of course, a thing that is not an accident; there is a thing that you can make into your work that no one is going to look at, and that is what you can WRITE. So write when you see your mountains that you've loved for all of your life that matters a damn; write when you see flatness that is all you've ever come to expect; write when you've got nothing else to do to situate yourself between the buildings that make up your landscape. But you've got something in front of you, or that you can get in front of you that, for Christ's sake, you can write about. Write it down. Make words out of the accidents you've got. It's what they are there for. And Williamstown is a moveable feast.

Yes, You

2010-03-08T23:07:00.004-05:00

The day after Valentine's Day, I went to the bookstore, because I go to the bookstore like every day. I don't have enough money to buy books every day, and I don't have enough time to read through a book every day, but I go anyway. Just look at the books and such. Anyway, I went to the Strand, and then I went across Union Square to the giant Barnes and Noble, and I started looking at the poetry books. As you know, it is never too early to start getting excited for National Poetry Month, and every year, around this time (or rather, that time, the day after Valentine's Day and continuing up to and through now), I decide to start revving up the poetry engine. So I stood in the little section and read two poems by Frank O'Hara and one by Anna Akhmatova and one by Ted Hughes. Then I realized that I couldn't remember the first line of the ee cummings poem that I had used as one of my Poems in my Pocket for Poem in Your Pocket Day 2008, and started flipping through one of the ee cummings Collected Poem books.

I eventually found the one that I was looking for -- "somewhere i have never traveled gladly beyond" -- but before that, the book fell open to a different poem, which is called "since feeling is first". The reason that the book fell open to that poem, is because the book had stuck in it at that page, as a sort of bookmark, a red construction paper heart, with "You are loved" written on the obverse, and "Yes, you" written on the reverse. This was strange.

The poem is very good -- it's about the textiness of life versus the feeling of life, the latter of which is represented by kissing and the former of which is represented by what's called, in the third line, "the syntax of things". The last line of the poem, which makes a bold claim along this axis (and which was the only line of the poem I remembered, and by which I just found it on google) is "And death i think is no parenthesis." Good stuff, romantic stuff. So what on earth did it mean that the book had a red construction paper heart, with that double message on it, next to this poem? I developed two sorts of theories.

A) On the first theory, the construction paper heart was stuck into the book while it was in private ownership, and then it was returned to the giant Barnes and Noble on 17th Street. This is actually a galaxy of mini-theories. Maybe someone gave it to their beloved, as a gift, and the beloved returned it. Maybe the beloved returned it because they failed to reciprocate the love of the lover. Maybe they returned it because they wanted a different book instead. Maybe someone prepared the book with the construction paper heart, realized that the beloved already owned the collected work of ee cummings, and took it back him- or herself. These theories, especially imagining the book as a Valentine's Day gift already repatriated the day after Valentine's Day, take their appropriate places across a spectrum of more or less sadness.

B) The other theory is weirder, and of course suggests the alternative explanation that the construction paper heart was neither forgotten nor unnoticed, but put into a book that had been, and remained, the property of Barnes and Noble. This is strange. Even I think that leaving messages in bookstore books is strange, and I once drafted (though wimped out of delivering) a note to whomever had checked out the first volume of In Search of Lost Time from the Lockport Public Library (my brilliant plan was to leave the note in Volume II, so that the person would have to prove her commitment before being invited into my Proust Appreciation Society). Maybe the person who left the heart loves everybody, or maybe the person just loves everyone who would read ee cummings. But why stick a message of love that is nothing more than syntax next to a poem all about the syntax-defeating power of kissing?

I didn't buy the book; I hope that someone has, and I hope they got something out of the construction paper heart, with its oddly insistent message, and that they enjoyed the poem next to it to believe and disbelieve the construction paper heart at the same time. Osculum vincit omnia. It's a strange thing to meet just words that tell you emphatically that you are loved: after all, life is not a paragraph. But I guess that the intervention wasn't just words, either: it was also a heart made out of red construction paper.

Late Capitalist Cartoons

2010-02-26T17:48:00.002-05:00

"Cartoons and stunt films were once exponents of fantasy against rationalism. They allowed justice to be done to the animals and things electrified by their technology, by granting the mutilated beings a second life. Today they merely confirm the victory of technological reason over truth." -- Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"

"Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators will become accustomed to theirs." -- ibid.

And so, choices. Horkheimer and Adorno seem not to consider them choices, actually, but of two occurrences on a closed social order. They bear the relation not of choices, but of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or something: we used to have one, and now we have the other. But it has never been demonstrated to me that you are obliged to keep your bios in the same century as the one wear you keep your zoe, and, so, choices. Or a choice, between the second life of mutilated beings, and beatings to which the spectators have become, qua spectators, accustomed. The difference between the choices is not obvious; Horkheimer and Adorno evidently favor the former, allying it with truth over technological reason. But really, would not the granting of second lives to mutilated beings simply accustom one to the beatings that mutilate in the first life? Shouldn't the relative equanimity of Daffy Duck, his beak blown to the back of his head by rifle fire yet again, inure us to rifles? The history of cartoons, since their inception, is the history of backbreaking fallings down with backs rendered unbroken in the next installment. What else would accustom one to his beatings?

The interior logic of the cartoon is what changes; what accustoms is what makes sense. To grant of a second life to a mutilated being is to operate according to the special sort of justice that has nothing to do with reason, especially not technological reason: which is to say, justice outside of the Law. It is a grant that produces justice and truth. Technological reason gives Donald Duck and the unfortunate victim and the spectators all of the accustomed beatings that are reasonable, once one has taken on the premises that are offered by the Late Capitalist Cartoons. So, choices. Hidden is the justice in grants, the justice without premises, of truth without technological reason. Find it, I guess, and give your mutilated beings second lives.

Be Kind to Your Fictional Beings

2010-02-22T21:32:00.002-05:00

So, I know I wrote empty promises last week about my triumphant return to reading fiction, but then I didn't read any fiction except for Kafka, which is glum and written in enormous oppressive paragraphs (he has the world's most annoying refusal, which is a double one: he refuses to make his characters speak distinctly, and then refuses to give each line of their dialogue a new paragraph). Now, please don't get me wrong, I love Kafka; but given that the flavor of fiction I was lamenting last week was Kingsley Amis, you can see how he wouldn't really address my needs. But the other thing I've been doing that may be some sort of fiction sop, is writing fiction. This is a little like knitting someone else a sweater because you're cold, but whatever. It is what I did.

And doing it, I have noticed one of the Worst Things in the World of Fiction, which is a particular problem of voice. I know it is the worst, because I do it all the time when I try to write fiction, and Young Fat Schratz did it ALL THE TIME even when he was writing nonfiction, and now there are certain sentences that I created that haunt me like Erinyes, reminding me not just that I used to be dumb but that I used to, in my dumbness, imagine myself clever. Anyway, the problem is something like "representing thoughts that no one would ever consciously form, as conscious thoughts". I went looking around for examples, and found a quite good one and a quite bad one, in the same chapter of Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

As for robbing the caisse, in which Bond himself was not personally concerned, but only interested, he reflected that it would take ten good men, that they would certainly kill two or three employees, and that anyway you probably couldn't find ten non-squeal killers in France, or in any other country for the matter of that.

Great reflecting, Bond! Here we have Bond thinking about something he actually would think about (logistics) and that revealing facts about the mission (it's complicated and dangerous), cheery Francophobia (no non-squeal killers in France) and an even cheerier weltschmerz (it's a world problem, not just a France problem). You can imagine how, say, the penultimate attribute could've been gone into badly, if it hadn't had the concept of men who can reliably kill as a lead-in: "Bond checked into the caisse. France, he thought, how pathetically devoid of non-squeal killers!" Or something like that.

Or something like this, again from Casino Royale:

Some of this background...passed through Bond's mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little.

Gah! Who would think such a thing? Away from his therapist? This is the problem, of course, with free indirect discourse especially and with the head-on obligation to represent another human being that every fiction writer (most fiction writers) takes on: to say things that someone else would say, while knowing all that you, the writer, know about her. Ian Fleming is even more psychologically astute than James Bond, so he is in a position to talk about feather-bedding. I am fairly positive that I, as a thinking thing, have never had the sensation "I rather like this" pass through my mind about anything except food, and even then not often. It's an autodiagnosis that no one makes, but it's exactly the kind of diagnosis that smart writers find easiest to make on fictional beings, including their own. And it drives me nuts, both when I see it and when I do it. So please, fiction writers. Be kind to your fictional beings. Do not force them to say impossible things. They and I will appreciate it.

p.s.

2010-02-16T23:31:00.001-05:00

my SU box is 2935

why let schratz have all the fun

2010-02-16T22:54:00.002-05:00

well to be honest i am posting in order to receive a free book (why has no one else yet taken advantage?), but since i devote such a great portion of my brain to constant literary rumination, i may very well end up saying something relevant by the end. i spent winter study in china after convincing peter murphy and chris pye (piece of cake) that either a) i would work on my thesis every day or b) i didn't really need to work on my thesis at all. whichever story i told them, it worked, and i bet you can all figure out how much work i got done. but thats ok. i did get some reading done- most of "the birth of tragedy", henry james' "the altar of the dead", some murakami of course. as for the latter, i think he's pretty good. not much to say else. i don't have any gripes with him yet, and that says alot. oh and a few stories from a book called "dangerous laughter", i forget who it's by, far inferior to murakami.

what i have been thinking about these days is james joyce. i have a carrel on the 2nd floor of sawyer, tucked away in the northeast corner, facing the bold front of stetson and otherwise promoting scholasticism by the extent of its detachment. yet every time i walk around the corner to go to the bathroom i have to first walk directly towards joyce's claim in the stacks, and the spines of dozens of books with "ulysses this" or "ulysses that" or some stupidly clever thing like "a portrait of the artist in exile". A portrait of the exiled chamber music of ulysses finnegan as a young dubliner. so its virtually impossible that i go very long without being prompted to think about joyce, excepting rare cases of sustained dehydration. and now i am taking a break from reading some essay on JSTOR about the aeneid and the waste land. it's kind of convincing -- all i've read so far is a list of reasonably direct allusions -- but it's still equally plausible to me that Dante stands as an un-ignorable (help, schratz, i am always looking for a real word to say "un-ignorable" that is more accurate than undeniable or incontestible) middle man between the two. that is to say, i am not so far convinced that one is in error who continues to categorize bleeding trees in the waste land as a dantean, and not a virgilian, homage. but then again i still have to finish the essay.

what a strange relationship i have, and have had, with these two modernist poster children. i suppose i grew disillusioned with eliot at least a year or two ago, though i fear his personal influence will never truly leave my brain, eager though i am to move beyond his clutches. regardless, i don't think i have anything really new to say about him, other than i refuse to hold in too high esteem any critic who so vehemently attempts to disguise himself as a poet. and no, it is not the other way around. yet my thoughts on joyce i feel still need development. by the end of taking the ulysses class with tifft i thought i had made a huge breakthrough by recognizing that stephen is the true odyssean figure of the novel, lest we concede to acknowledging that all bloom had to do to consummate the odyssey's vastly important homecoming is, well, come home. so stephen's leaving the bloom house (and it is his heroic capacity to leave just as much as his mere presence which finally re-qualifies molly's sexuality) is some greater and more symbolic kind of homecoming. for example joyce's leaving ireland as the step by which he "returns" to some kind of real, pure, or worthwhile literature. which is really anti-modern, in contrast to the pride with which eliot seems to want to portray boring people and consider those portrayals as successful literary endeavors.

i mean, i guess i still agree with myself that all those things are interesting and perhaps true as long as one feels tied down to homer, but i am starting to feel, and gladly so, less and less of a real desire to think of homer at all. after all, it's not like i will ever really be able to absolve myself of a homeric consciousness, no more than literature itself will. but i feel its the mature thing to do at this point. but damn! it's still so hard to commit to any of these postures with someone you know is trying to trick you all the time. once you realize that joyce is so mischevious, it's like you say, "oh! i get it! he was just fucking with us the whole time" and you feel like you've got him figured out. but then after such a fleeting moment of self-satisfaction you begin to wonder, "but wait- what exactly is the trick he's playing on us?" there is a large pool to choose from there. i guess that's why it's such a good book. or why it's such a bad book. and in what senses do i mean "good" and "bad" here? i guess "good" if you like thinking alot. or if you just think he puts words together favorably. "bad" if you have some devoted concern with the sanctity of literature- which, if it is in fact threatened, i still feel we must attribute less to joyce himself than to the door he helped open.

A Team of Reggie Jacksons

2010-02-15T15:14:00.004-05:00

I haven't read anything from Canonically Accepted English Literature Properly So Called in like a week, and I am starting to suffer a form of withdrawal, I think. Since I finished Lucky Jim on the Q train Super Bowl Sunday (good work, Saints, btw), and lovingly bumped it off of my Books Unread list, I have been reading, thanks to the vagaries of syllabi and just what at the time I happened to feel like reading -- a whole crapload of theory books, and also Better by Atul Gawande which is so clear and well argued that one hardly feels like getting what he has to say into one's brain represents any literary work.

It's been all steak knives and no steak, I suppose I want to say, or all straws and no drink, or something like that. (And thinking of the most famous use of the straw/drink metaphor, it is funny to imagine the authors whom I have been lugging around -- Horkheimer, Adorno, Marx, Deleuze, and Atul Gawande -- as a team full of Reggie Jacksons). All that nonfiction hurts my head. I remember one summer I decided that I was going to read nonfiction all summer, to rectify what I believed was a serious nonfiction deficiency in my diet, and boy, Did That Not Work. I've talked in various ways about this before, particularly the gap between real people, who are unknowable, and fake people, who aren't, and who is thus more available to counteract loneliness (this all being one of my famously vaunted concerns). But, eating ice cream and watching the best Desmond-Penny episodes of Lost on Valentine's Day, I thought, rather forcefully, of that vaunted concern in particular, and thought to write about it, and I guess to issue a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do: don't stop reading your fiction books! You'll never get enough from just Gilles Deleuze. I am now going to take a dose of my own medicine, and you will be hearing from me on I'jaam tomorrow.

The Overdetermination of Everything

2010-02-10T02:36:00.001-05:00

It was a slow day reading today, for me. I went to Battery Park to read from the Freud Reader, because where else would you go to read Freud, and what else would you read at Battery Park? Then I went to Grand Central Station and sat in the Dining Concourse without buying anything, and read from the Marx-Engels Reader. The name of today was, evidently, Philosophers of Suspicion Day Among the Tourists. One of the things that I saw while I walked around Battery Park was the Battery Grill. The Battery Grill looks like it should be famous, in the way that particular restaurants look like they should be famous. Tavern on the Green, that one place that is blue and orange in Bryant Park...places in parks, I guess. Anyway, I saw the Battery Grill and thought, "that looks famous", and then I went home. Home, I continued reading of my philosophers of suspicion and watching the Food Network, as is my habit. And what should come up on the Food Network but the show Chopped, one of whose contestants was the executive chef of the....Battery Grill! Spit take! And, spoiler, he won. But there it was, right on the television, the place where I had been earlier in the day. What a crazy coincidence!

That's true, but whatever: the point is that, despite more or less everything I did today fitting into a pretty trim nomological account, really what I did was dick around all day, while floating in enough pieces of meaning that I could construct a trim nomological account of what I'd done. Read enough, watch enough television, go to enough places with names, and when you are called upon by yourself to give an account of what Things You Did, it looks like you did something that makes sense. The world is overdetermined with meaning; everything you do (by which I mean, of course, everything I do) is, to borrow Richard Poirier's description of Pynchon's V., "preposterously coherent". Life is preposterously coherent if you look at it the right way.

This reminds me, eventually, of Murakami: is he preposterously coherent? Certainly, coherence -- especially preposterous coherence -- is a different kettle of fish from ultimately making sense; otherwise no one would have ever said it about V. One of Murakmi's stories -- the story that I had in mind when I started to write this summing-up-of-Murakami post -- is all about this kind of preposterous coherence, the overdetermination of meaning that suggests meaninglessness. "Chance Traveler" is rife with overdetermined coincidences: the little local coincidence, that the piano tuner and the woman are drinking in the same cafe; the stranger coincidence that they are both into Dickens; the huge, huge coincidence that the woman and the piano tuner's estranged sister both have breast cancer; and even the slightly peculiar circumstance that, of all the triads of coincidence that there are in the world, this one, coincidentally, was presented, by his piano tuner to the Japanese short story writer Haruki Murakami. That, anyway, is the gabble of coincidence that makes up "Chance Traveler", and the kind of gabble that makes up, say, my days that I spend reading philosophers of suspicion at tourist places.

But it's easy to get overdetermined. What I think, in the last analysis (this being my last analysis for now, here, anyway), makes Murakami special -- why I think we should read him -- are those things that, rather than content themselves with finding meaning in the overdetermined gabble that anybody could've found, the literally quotidian meaning that I find in as dull a work of art as my own life, knock a damn hole in meaning and everything else. Better than coincidence, the ghost surfer that maybe appears in "Hanalei Bay"; better than a day that seems, eerily to make sense, the haunting private detective (working for free!) in "Where I'm Likely to Find It"; and, more splendid than damn near anything, the appearance and revelation of the title primate in "A Shinagawa Monkey". To be cleverer than either writer deserves: if Pynchon is preposterously coherent, Murakami, at his best, is coherently preposterous.

So that closes the digital book on Murakami, for us. I will write him down on the syllabus, for when the syllabus is again in need of a dusting-off (2013, probably). OUR NEXT BOOK: will be I'jaam, by Sinan Antoon. It is supposed to be quite good; it is an Iraqi prison narrative, written by a gentleman currently teaching at NYU; it was recently featured in the New Yorker's roundup of recent Arabic literature in English translation, and I am starting it tomorrow. Happy reading!

The Grown-Up

2010-02-08T01:47:00.002-05:00

It's unthinkable, to me, what will happen when I run out of books that are on my bookshelf. The Matthew Schratz Pages to Read number is like the national debt: I know, in theory, what it is, but it is inconceivable in practice. For the last year or so, it has fluctuated around 65,000 or 70,000 pages; I don't know how different that number is, bigger or smaller, from the number when I started the list, or the number from a year ago. Today I finished reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and the number of pages to read that I own went down by two hundred and fifty one. That represents, liberally, one third of one percent of the pages left on my bookshelf in the "To Read" section, a section built by overzealous purchasing, gift giving, and the (very) occasional reassignment of a book that I've already read and already too much forgotten. That is a lot of pages. It took me about a week to read Lucky Jim; assuming that all of the pages remaining are as easily read (they aren't) and that the number will only decrease (it won't), that means that I will have conquered my library in three hundred weeks, or about six years.

To have read all of one's books: not all of the books one wants to read, or needs to read, or ought to read, but all of the books one has on his bookshelf: that is the prospect I see before me, in six years. In six years I will be thirty years old, which means I will be inescapably a grown-up. And to have finished reading all of my books, in the narrow way I mean, is what I have to look at as a number that makes more sense as the number to tick down until I am a grown-up. I own a copy of A Tale of a Tub that I bought, from amazon.com, in 2002, obsessed with getting as much Swift as I could get my hands on after I read A Modest Proposal in high school. I own a copy of Thoreau's selected essays that I bought at the now long-defunct Waldenbooks in the Lockport Mall. And I own a copy of Decline and Fall that I bought at a used book store in Massachusetts, with long term aims of impressing with my knowledge of it a girl whom I knew, at the time, to be enjoying the Loved One, also by Evelyn Waugh. The point about these books, and many others of their near neighbors, is that I cannot possibly imagine ever self-identifying as a grown-up while they sit there, unread. Like Investing, or Quitting Smoking, Reading All of My Books seems like a task impossibly grown-up, like a thing I couldn't possibly currently do.

And yet, and yet, I finished Lucky Jim today on the Q train, around eleven thirty tonight. So there it went. And I currently want a cigarette about as badly as I can remember, and yet I took off my shoes and brushed my teeth instead of going to the bodega. So there that goes. I will whittle my pages down. Man never is, always to be, blest.

Foreword is Forewarned

2010-01-27T20:38:00.006-05:00

Today I went to see a talk by a performance artist named Deke Weaver, who is a very interesting and talented man. He told a story about a polar bear that was just magnificent, and then he screened a portion of his performance called Monkey that he had put on in I think Illinois. You should check out his website.

I went to this talk partly because it was sponsored by one of my professors, and has some concerns in come with the class I am currently taking with that professor, but I also went because, like all such small events given by American universities, they had FREE FOOD. I was so excited! They had sandwiches, they had enormous pickles, chips, salad, and for dessert, cookies. I happily loaded up a plate with turkey/brie/bacon sandwich, chips, pickle and salad, and sat down to listen to the first segment of the talk. When I had finished my food, I thought, "I can't wait to get more food at the next break!" But then, in the time while watching the performance, I became seized with a deep panic. Frequent readers of this blog know that I get into a deep panic about thinks like turning off my light too early or hurting the feelings of my books I've owned since high school, so this should not be a surprise. What was I in a panic about, you ask? I was in a panic about this: I could not sort out whether or not I should get another pickle and bag of chips, or get a cookie. This was a horrible dilemma. Do I risk getting too full on the pickle and chips, and having to forgo the cookie? Or do I eat the cookie, feel un-full, and go the entire rest of the day feeling one pickle short? I often feel this way about desserts and the closure they offer: how do we know it is time to put the capstone on things?

You'd think it would be easy to know when to put the capstone on a book you're reading: figure the capstone is the last tenth of the book, or whatever fraction, and then read the tenth that comes last, last. But it isn't, because books -- especially Important Books -- have decided to fuck with you by inventing the Foreword. The Foreword is actually the dessert of the book, even though it comes first. It's a big time aberration. Here come some spoilers, too, so if you care about Major Plot Developments in Crime and Punishment, then beat it. This is good news because it means now you all have an excuse not to read a post. Go with god, people who want to avoid spoilers!

Now, down to business. The allure of the foreword is twofold: one, it is fun because the people who get called upon to write forewords are usually writing about something they quite enjoy, but do not have a huge stake in (you bought the book, it's not as if they are breaking their balls to sell you on it), so the writing itself is usually lively and fun. Two, it is fun because it's not like you have to super pay attention. Just read it! If you zone out while reading Moby Dick, maybe you miss out on part of the Great American Novel. No one is going to wish they had paid just a little more attention to the Great American Editor's Introduction. They are high in sugar and low in nutritional value, the cookie of the Parts of the Book. But caveat lector, because they are cookies that sometimes have, I don't know, steak cubes or something else in them; stuff that would be fine as part of the entree, but that are just disastrous and appetite killing if they come in the cookie eaten too soon. And those steak cubes or whatever, are Critical Plot Points.

Nothing ruins the good dessert feeling of reading a foreword like those. The first time I was exposed to this was when I was in tenth grade, and my friend's mother was giving us a ride home from school but had to stop at Office Max for printer ink on the way home. This was a disaster for me on par with being unable to determine how full I am. I was terribly fat and shy in high school, and I had a catastrophic bowl cut, and the two kids also getting a ride home were a year ahead of me and thin and probably knew girls. So, like Mizaru, I elected not to look at anything but a book, so that these Two Cool Guys would not try to talk to me, or make fun of my Looney Tunes tie, or whatever. Now, it would never do to read a book I was actually supposed to be paying attention to, because my chubby heart was pounding away in fear, and I couldn't focus; so instead I read the Foreword to the Signet Classic Edition of Crime and Punishment, which comes with a handy little map of St. Petersburg, marking key events like the bridge where Svidrigailov commits suicide, which happens on like page 500. What the hell, map? At least he shoots himself on the bridge, rather than jumping into the river, saving a little bit of surprise. I was disappointed. I could taste the steak cube in my cookie. I turned green, slightly, the chalky greenness of those who have had their future surprises ruined, and of those who have miscalculated their appetites by one bag of chips and one giant pickle, and foreclosed them with a cookie. And those kids made fun of me for turning an unnatural pastel color while reading, despite my brilliant strategy of not looking at them. I guess I should've been more like Kikazaru, instead.

So the moral of the story is: Forewords, delicious and enjoyable, but for god's sake only partake when you're sure you have already had enough book to eat. That, and check out Deke Weaver.

A Long Green Flattening

2010-01-22T00:18:00.005-05:00

It's sports season; I am watching, and discussing in civilian life even more than usual, sporting events; according to Steve Almond (and I think he's right), the troubling recent political events out of Massachusetts can be called The Sports Talk Radio Election; and soon we, even the parts of we who don't give a shit about sports, will watch the 44th running of the American Football Super Bowl, an event so important, and an event that works as such a metaphor of importance, that every time I've been up for more than forty hours working on a paper, at some point I will begin thinking, over and over, "All right, Schratz, this paper is our Super Bowl". It's like a Waterloo that doesn't necessarily end you, which I guess means it's like the real Waterloo.

And so imagine my delight when the protagonist of the book currently serving as my roman de gare, Jonathan Lethem's the Fortress of Solitude, watches Super Bowl IX with his friend and the friend's father. He thinks this about the tilt, between the Minnesota Vikings and the Pittsburgh Steelers:

The game itself...turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan's interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were.

Later, Dylan, the protagonist, is given a ring that enables him to fly, so, that shows you how unlikely things in fiction (rather than sports) can stay. But no matter: there it is, a masterful evocation of The Sports. An arrangement of failures. The most crushing thing about sports -- and, I suppose, a thing that can crush us in fictions about which we care, as well, is the total lack of a) appellate processes, and b) corrigibility. No matter how much you care about the Buffalo Bills (and I do), or how much you think they ought to have won, based on talent, a particular game, they will a) never get the decision reversed, and b) never get to play quite that game again. And no matter how much you want Othello to wait ten minutes or whatever and listen to what Desdemona has to say, he is a) never not going to suffocate her, and b) never not going to kill himself later that scene. No appeals, no corrections. A proving how unlikely most things are.

Of course, unlikely things do happen, no matter how proven their unlikelihood. That is why I am announcing here, as the Official Super Bowl XLIV recipient of the support of the Unpacking My Library book blog, the previously un-Super Bowl'd New Orleans Saints. I hope that this works out better for them than the time we, as a blog, threw our support behind the Cleveland Indians. We'll find out in two weeks!

Paris Before the War

2010-01-18T23:40:00.005-05:00

Proust, why not, I'm tired:

Moreover, the name Guermantes existed for me in many forms. If the form which my memory had merely noted down as in an address book was not accompanied by any poetry, older forms, those which dated from the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to renew themselves in me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the glaring light of the person with human features did not quench the mysterious radiance of the name. THen once again I began to think of Mme de Guermantes's dwelling as of something that was beyond the bounds of reality, in the same way as I began to think again of the misty Balbec of my early day-dreams as though I had not since then made that journey, or of the 1.22 train as though I had never taken it....Then the idea of reality returned as I entered the Duchess's hall. But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real intersection between reality and dream.

It's a sign that you are reading a book so long that you have less read it than lived parts of it that I actually felt the way he feels about the name Guermantes, the 1.22 train, Balbec, before I even did the usual readerly solipsistic work of thinking about things that work for me that way. I don't have to think of women I knew of and then knew to feel the way Proust does about the duchess; I just have to think of Oriane de Guermantes, and I get enough of the sense of lost mystique to feel with him.

What is Oriane de Guermantes before we knew her, when all she was was a set of phonemes blobbed together that reminded us of a lantern projecting figures of long-dead nobility on the wall? Nothing, I suppose, the same way in which the people that we haven't met yet are, for us, nothing now. Young Proust, thinking of her at Combray, can't think of anything about her that he can say: this is what the Duchesse de Guermantes is. But there is nothing that he can say she isn't, and so she gets to be, as a name, free-for-him. The name Guermantes is for young Proust freedom, freedom as the condition of uncollapsedness. No possibility in her, in Balbec, in the 1.22 train, has collapsed into its own not-actually-having-been. What that is, I think, is the fullest form of freedom: not the negative freedom, that, say, Kant condemns (the freedom to do whatever one pleases), nor the positive-but-in-practice-soulless freedom that Kant really likes (the freedom to act noumenally in accordance with laws and so verbosely on). Both of those freedoms are actionable senses of freedom -- they sit open to action, and as such, they sit with their collapsability into an accomplished fact -- an unfree fait accompli -- as their most salient feature.

The downside to the fullest freedom we can feel -- Oriane before we knew her, Paris before the War, Williams College just before I graduated-- is that, of course, it can only be recognized after we know Oriane, after the War makes our bullfights and our lives in the brasseries seem so open and wonderful, after I graduate. The Duchesse de Guermantes whom we actually know -- incredibly stylish, sharp witted, more than a little superficial -- is a saturated object of knowing (to slightly alter topographical metaphors), a collection of possibilities filled in, closed off. And so with every damn thing: know more, wonder less, long for the haunting that those names had for us once, that little haunting that is the one proleptic taste of fullest freedom we can get our hands on. And to long for that haunting -- to be full of a yearning for the sensuous notion of the uncollapsability of everything that has gone before -- that is just what it is to be tired.

Syllabus!

2010-01-13T00:30:00.004-05:00

"What are the books your book club has read?" Ryann's friend Serena asked me today at dinner. Good question! And nobody is in a better position to answer than me. So let's take a look, shall we, at what kind of syllabus we've built up over the years here at unpacking my library.

We led off with The Road, which, I wrote, is a horrible book with which to lead off one's book club. Not an auspicious start! But the lack of any auspices ended quickly, with Atonement, which was a good 'un. And then the wheels came off, as far as anyone regularly remembering to read the book and comment on it, your truly not excepted. But the off-wheels brigade looks like this:
Grendel by John Gardner
Author, Author by David Lodge (SUSPENDED)
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
And now, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami.

Here's the first thing: I would have guessed more books! This is like figuring that a cousin or someone you haven't seen for a while must be seventeen or eighteen by now and finding out that he's twelve. Also, in the interim, I've read, on my own time, about a hundred and twenty books. Yikes. I'm sure you too, Official Book Club Members and Also Interested Members of the Public, have read way more than eight books since November 2007. So I guess the first thing we learn from the Syllabus is, we should try to stay a little firmer in the saddle on the curricular horse.

What else can we learn about the books chosen, in methods varying in their democratic-ness, as the Official Selections of our book club? No women thus far, a statistic on which we should improve. A bunch of books that, the Road notwithstanding, are sort of academic but still sort of fun. The theme most evident on the Syllabus, I guess, would be writerliness, particularly in the amount of time stretching from My Late Life in Norwell, with Atonement and the aborted attempt at Author Author (which I finished, incidentally, while also half-listening to life stories from my cousin Kate at the Tampa Bay airport) up until my Wintry Life in Western New York, with the Savage Detectives. Granted, this was almost exactly the period of my dictatorial control of the Official Selection of the Book Club, but there we are: a book club that, Officially, wants to read fiction about people whose job it is to write fiction. That seems right, if a little broad; maybe a book club that, Officially, wants to read fiction about people who are critically ambivalent about their destinies as producers of fiction (Briony, Grendel, and the narrator of Pnin in particular, here). And what the hell, me too, or at least someone ambivalent about his evident destiny as a producer of words for the purpose of entertainment. And, there being no better way to struggle through the production of words for entertainment, than continue to produce words for entertainment, I suppose we will go on, thus writerly, unpacking our library.

Murakami and Privacy

2010-01-11T23:43:00.003-05:00

What's it time for again? What else, but a slightly self-serious piece of literary criticism done on a couple of short stories. These short stories are the first dozen-ish in the Current Official Selection of the Book Club, which is Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. To talk about a book of short stories is, I think, to talk about a series of attempts to do something. It is hard for me to imagine a wild-eyed, free-spirited Writer Type who wasn't working on poems or a novel; the production of some, and especially the production of many, short stories seems to me to be a guarantor of authorial seriousness, or some sense that the author knows what she is doing well enough to keep plugging away at it: there's just so many of them.

A couple of Murakami's stories in this collection feature his commentary on his process as a writer of short stories, or at least on the process of their own production. One wishes to look in these pieces in particular for something like the Murakami credo, and in "A Poor Aunt Story", we find something that, if not a credo, will do til the credo gets here. The narrator/protagonist is trying to explain to his companion that he wants to write a story about a poor aunt, despite the fact that he has no poor aunt (the companion does). Trying to explain himself, he says this: "I can't put it into words very well...In order to explain why I want to write a story about a poor aunt, I'd have to write the story, but once the story was finished, there wouldn't be any reason to explain the reason for writing the story -- or would there?"

Or would there? Murakami's stories always have some element that, once we've done the usual work we do on short stories, that still demand a reason to explain the reason for writing the story, little cores of ineffability, which, if you didn't like Murakami, could probably seem really really annoying. What is going on with the dabchick at the end of "Dabchick"? Why does Tony Takitani just send the new woman away, and why is everyone more or less ok with this? What the hell is a poor aunt, really, and how does one materialize on one's back? And why is the other thing that might pop up on one's back a hatstand?

Richard Rorty writes that the things we value in artists (and he counts just about everybody using words in the category of possible artists) is that their system of private metaphors that they find important has resonance with us. The most lasting artists are the ones whose metaphors (a Rorty example is the atom as a metaphor for the way stuff is organized) become public property. What I find so appealing about Murakami, I think, is that his metaphors are the floatiest possible kind -- almost all signifier, for which we can stick in any signified -- so that we get the sense of resonance with Murakami that we get with great artists while at the same time retaining our privacy. We can identify with the Vinteuil sonata, and love Proust more for it, but by doing so we are in some way become less private persons. (Incidentally, this is even more an issue with television shows -- I love Liz Lemon to death, but I love her for the same reason that millions of other people do). I am much more confident that my fascination with particular Murakami stories is a more private affair, because I feel like I have brought a lot more to the table on which he and I are going to figure out what the hell he's talking about.

My favorite story this far has a good example of this: "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes", which features a narrator in the "what the hell was that?" mode in which Murakami operates so well. The story culminates in crows pecking each other to death over a question of whether or not a cake of the narrator's making is a genuine Sharpie Cake, and the narrator washing his hands of the whole affair. It's not impossible that the crows and the cake are a metaphor for writing to please oneself rather than crows, but it's also not impossible that that has nothing to do with it. I personally like it because, owing largely to a Kafka quote I happened to read in the New York Review of Books two years ago, and things that Kafka quote about crows has meant to me in the ensuing years, I think that the set of phonemes "crow" is absolutely gorgeous and fascinating and important, and the idea of crows determining cake quality was for me an aesthetic delight. And Murakami's ineffable prose lets me have exactly that delight.

New Years Resolution

2010-01-05T01:58:00.004-05:00

In my current lodgings, I am obliged, just before going to sleep, to stand up from my bed, kick the cardboard box on which I keep my laptop out of the way, lean over about a yard, and switch of the light before repositioning myself in the bed and going to sleep. This is terrible, because it is causing me to leave reading minutes on the table. I noticed this when I was home over Christmas, and slept in a room whose light switch was less than the length of my arm away from where, in prone reading position, I kept my arm on the bed. I would read until I was just about to fall asleep and drool onto my book, and then at the last second fling the book on the ground, smack at the light switch and go to sleep. Often, the next morning I would discover my flinging to have been overzealous, not be able to find that particular book, and be forced to go find another one, but that was a small price to pay.

The worst part about those minutes in which I feel as though I could -- not should, but could -- be reading is that my anxiety that I have misestimated how long it will take me to fall asleep often itself prevents me from falling asleep. I am constantly curious whether I had, say, another chapter's worth of wakefulness left in the tank, and I feel as if I find myself waiting up to see if I will wait up long enough to have read that chapter, a process which, if it makes sense, is absurd. Sometimes I will even capitulate, turn the light back on, survey my books on the floor and on their shelf, and attempt to happily read myself to sleep again. Of course, at the end of this process is the ominous truth that at some point I will again have to estimate that reading time is up and that the standing and kicking and toggling must be got through again, an ominous truth that not only prevents me from sleeping but prevents me from being at all attentive to whatever soporific reading I thought I was going to be doing, and fills me with even more potent metaphysical doubts that I will ever even really sleep again in my life.

When I was a child, and lived in a room with my brother Connor in twin beds with a toybox/bookshelf thingum between us, I used to take advantage of my status as sole literate member of the room (he was two years old) by monopolizing all of the books we owned for the night. I would arrange them in a stack, with the most entertaining books on the bottom and the least entertaining books on the top, and read every single one of them, every night, and fall asleep triumphantly at the end of the stack, lights on and all. I have surveyed the books currently on my floor, and do not think that a return to this practice would be a good idea -- it would take too long, for one thing, to read through the whole stack, and also I have got to a point in life where the burden of assigning entertainment value to all of my books (or even all of the books I have recently flung on the floor) is too great for me to bear, as I always wind up feeling really sorry for the books adjudged least entertaining.

Given all of that, my New Years Resolution for 2010 is to buy one of those things that will turn the lights on and off by clapping.

Besties

2009-12-29T23:13:00.005-05:00

The day after the day after tomorrow is certainly the last day of the year, and, according to most, the last day of the decade. Because it is fun, this has got people to wonder what the Best (Book/Movie/TV Program/Album) of the arbitrary period of time has been. And, in just before the gate closes, it's time to do just that here at unpacking my library.

First, the best book of the year was, I have no idea. I have read I think two and a half books published this year, and they were fine. I think that the larger commitment of time and mental energies that books demand results in their being less plausible than movies and music to being the accoutrements of a particular year. Everybody listened to Funeral by Arcade Fire in 2004, because that's when it came out; but everybody read the Time Traveler's Wife when it came out, or when it came out in paperback, or when it was optioned for a movie or after they saw the movie or when they had time to kill at Logan Airport on Christmas Eve 2007. It's just a more drawn-out thing. The only book I can at all remember associating with a particular time is The Corrections (on which more below!), which was a Big Deal in pre-September 2001, and even that was more to do with a television hoopla than with the book itself. So the best book of the year is best talked about not the way we pick a Best Picture, but more as a sort of suggestion: the best thing that I happened to have read this year rather than another year. For me, that was probably the Sound and the Fury. Boring, but oh well.

Decades, on the other hand, are long and slow enough to let books be the kind of thing that, retrospectively at least. It makes sense to try to order how we understand the past by awarding some books The Book of the Decade status. Infinite Jest, for example, jumps out as The Book of the Nineties; maybe On the Road or the Catcher in the Rye for The Book of the Fifties? The Dudebrodogman has even suggested that books can be The Book of a Decade without even being published in that decade, in which case his vote for American Psycho would beat out mine for Bright Lights Big City as The Book of the Eighties. So maybe the Book of the Aughts won't get written for another five years or so; but until then, who are our contenders? Here are my ideas, in no particular order.

1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- this got the vote of New York Magazine, and one can see why. Of the books I've thought about, it has the form best suited to a claim of representing, somehow, the millennial attitude toward the presentation of information.

2) The Corrections -- this one was the best book of the Aughts according to themillions, and, again, it has a lot of prestige and such. I personally was underwhelmed by the whole thing, but am willing to hear arguments contra.

3) The Road -- this is one of the two Gloom and Doom contenders, because really, the decade was pretty gloomy and more than a little doomy. It's a spare kind of g&d, as many of you know, since it was our ill-advised first pick for Book of the Book Club.

4) 2666 -- and here's some of the other kind of Gloom and Doom. I actually think this would be a better Book of the Aughts than the Road, because its sense of vaguely defined menace also has the decade's particular style of overinformation and overdetermined connections that's on display in the less apocalyptic Oscar Wao.

5) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- and one for the optimists. I think that this could make its case for being the Book of the Aughts the same way in which Gravity's Rainbow could make a case for being the Book of the Seventies. They both use raw matter from actual history, refashioned in their own time.

6) The Tipping Point -- this is probably really the Book of the Aughts, because the most people read it, and it gets taught in seminars and such and isn't fiction. I guess I spent too little time reading non-fiction in the past ten years; I guess I'll have to shape up.

On the Giving and Receiving of Books

2009-12-26T15:36:00.004-05:00

I always give people books at Christmas; I almost never get books from other people on Christmas. This is fine with me; I get enough books, however they're got, that I don't especially have to count on Christmas for any kind of influx. That I have become expected as a giver of books, too, is fine with me. It is rare, I suppose, and I am lucky, I suppose, to have any sort of gift-giving nature that coincides so nicely with my larger nature; it makes a man feel nicely fixed in the universe. My brother likes dance as much as I like books, and it is not as though that translates nicely into his gift-giving life.

There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.

Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.

Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.

So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.

The Mall and the Bookstore

2009-12-23T17:14:00.002-05:00

Today I went Christmas shopping at the mall, even though I went to the same mall -- and, more importantly, the bike shop and the bookstore -- yesterday and bought all of the gifts that I am going to buy for anyone. So I suppose that it is not right to say that I went Christmas shopping at the mall, but rather that I went to the mall in the company of people who were Christmas shopping. I don't know exactly what it was that I was doing, then.

The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.

Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.

The Short Story Mixtape

2009-12-16T01:13:00.004-05:00

Before I heard about the subject of this piece from the Guardian UK, I had already thought of it, for the first time that I especially remember in a bar in Buffalo: when a girl whom I was talking to refused my offer of a mix cd because she already had enough mix cds, I told her that that was ok because I don't pay enough attention to new music these days to offer what I feel like counts as an engaged mix cd anyway, and what (shifting here to the contemplative register) I would really like to do was offer people a Short Story Mixtape, a book of short stories that I had personally curated for someone's linear enjoyment. Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides had done it; why not bring their fun to the masses? The girl at the bar told me that she didn't like short stories, saying that if something was going to be short it should just be a poem and if it were going to be long it should just grow a pair and be a novel. But! The people who brought us the Kindle are now bringing us the download-alone short story, which means that my idea (and really, it's an obvious idea, I don't want to sound like those people in the Windows 7 commercials) could be a reality.

The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.

Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster

Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov

Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?

What Does Charles Kinbote Look Like?

2009-12-14T22:56:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I was watching Mad Men, and because there are damn buses driving past my window all night, and because Mad Men is an Important Drama with Frequent Nearly Inaudible Speeches, I could not figure out what was going on on the show, and my mind wandered. And what it wandered to was that I don't know what Charles Kinbote looks like. I thought about it some more: I don't know what Tyrone Slothrop looks like, I don't know what Don Gately looks like, I don't know what Kilgore Trout looks like. And these are people whom I've spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about, imagining in actual situations and doing actual things. I have thought long and hard about Kinbote puttering up to Shade's house and being told that he's not there by Mrs. Shade; I just kind of imagine the abstract idea of hopefulness, in one old body, puttering up to an abstract idea of disdain. I am having trouble even talking about what it is I can't do, because if you asked me, well, you understand, do you not, that a man is driving over to another man's house and encountering his wife, I would of course say yes. But I keep imagining different Kinbotes -- different old people reconstructing into the deposed old king -- and none of them stick. This is even true of people whom I met first in books whom I later saw in movies; Gilbert Osmond will never ever have quite the same features as John Malkovich, especially not in the way that Osborne Cox will always have exactly the same features as a particular John Malkovich.

When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?

In Praise of the Book Table Guy

2009-12-11T17:54:00.003-05:00

It is too cold for the book table guy, apparently, because I wanted to go buy a book from him and he's not there. The book table guy -- or, I might say, my book table guy, because there are others -- is a guy with a van who sets up several tables of books along West 4th Street, near the NYU library, and sells them to you for smallish amounts of cash. I don't totally understand his operation; there are five tables, and some of them seem to have their own dedicated workers: I do not know whether these men are his underlings or his competition. And his level of knowledge of his wares is uncertain: sometimes he seems very excited to sell me books (he knew an awful lot about the Man in the High Castle) and other times it appears to be just another transaction, commodities for dollars.

There are certain things for which I can rely upon my book table guy: he always has a bunch of cheapie Wodehouse mass markets, he always has at least two copies of the Second Sex, and he always has several things edited by Marshall McLuhan. I don't know where he gets his Wodehouse and de Beauvoir and McLuhan, but he's always got them. And it wasn't until I met the book table guy that I decided that I don't like e-readers. Up to now, the arguments against the e-reader, and for the e-reader, have been all academic for me. I don't particularly want one, but to each her own. But thinking about the book table guy, and the trunks of old books that his van wouldn't hold if all of his wholesalers or donors had bought electronic files instead, made me feel at least slightly philosophically opposed to them. (I know that I have blogged earlier about the failure of e-readers to show off how recondite my personal reading is, but that was more a vanity statement than a philosophical one.) The book table guy (when it is warm out, anyway) reminds you that the book as a thing that sits on its shelf is something that sits, which is to say it is something that is. It can do things you don't intend. When one buys her shiny new copy of the Code of the Woosters, she does not imagine that someday that copy, yellow and with is back cover mysteriously flaking away, will delight someone she's never met while he flies home for Thanksgiving in the relatively distant future. And that is something about books to go all swoony over.

Our namesake essayist writes about knowing the history of one's books from the point of view of a collector, and his namesake essay suggests a man who takes pride in knowing whence the physical objects that make up his unpacked library. What I like so much about the books I've got from the book table guy isn't their history so much as their futures; as these books, lumps of paper and glue, have come to me, so might they get dumped off from me to people I've never known. And the truncation of those futures is, to me, the first frightening thing about the advent of the e-readers that I've ever felt at all viscerally.

Life Sentences

2009-12-10T14:27:00.003-05:00

The other day a friend of mine called me and told me that she had a list of fifteen great opening sentences from novels, and then she named them, and I correctly identified the books that twelve of them opened. I don't think that this speaks to my outstanding knowledge of things, so much as the general fame of first sentences, last sentences, and cool sentences in general. I seem to recall reading somewhere lately that the sentence is the basic unit of any kind of meaning. This is given a relatively loose reading of the sentence (a sample of this kind of "sentence" was a weather report claiming that Tuesday's High would be 34 degrees Fahrenheit and Low 36 degrees Fahrenheit), but I think it makes sense. The reason for that is because there are dozens and dozens of sentences with which I am infatuated, and a negligent number of phrases about which I feel the same way. Even the ones that do -- James's "a second and even a more extravagant umbrella", Shakespeare's "so musical a discord" -- I actually like synecdochally, as parts representing their sentence wholes which I like even more.

I was given the task in school of writing a perfect sentence, in accordance with Donald Barthelme's perfect writing assignment that he used to give his students. The perfect sentence is one that is i) surprising, ii) in some sense true, iii) beautiful, and iv) possessed of a metaphysical dimension. His example of a sentence fulfilling only condition i, and of a sentence fulfilling only conditions one and two, are both fantastic: the former is "It has always been my desire to sleep with -- that is, to have sexual intercourse with -- the New York Review of Books." and the latter is "The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.". His example of a perfect sentence, one that meets all four criteria, is from Kafka and goes like this: "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand, and becomes part of the ceremony.". That is a great Kafka sentence, to be sure. Our professor in this class provided us with a selection of sentences that he had culled for their perfection, and a lot of them were good, but none of them were as good as that Kafka sentence, and I think the reason why is that the sentences culled from their homes are, while indeed building blocks of meaning, building blocks more like Legos than anything else.

When I was young, it bothered me that if I built a wall out of Legos, the top level of the wall still had rising out of it the studs that all of the blocks making up the lower strata of the wall had as well. Each block in the lower strata called out for a capping level of blocks, and each was satisfied; but those on the top level were not. It should come as no surprise that I spent a huge amount of my childhood by myself, with childish things and a furrowed brow. It should come as no further surprise that I spend a huge amount of my time currently by myself with a furrowed brow, although now I do it surrounded by words instead of Legos. Sentences, however gorgeous, if yanked from their places of residence, seem yanked: they want to be prepared for, and to work at preparing for something else (hence the mania, I suppose, for first and last sentences, which are half saturated). And so I wonder what it would be like to make a craft of just sentences. One such is Kafka's sentence-story about the leopards and the chalices, which is not yanked from anywhere, but designed simply to stand as a magnificent sentence. That sentence seems less to me like a Lego, and more like an ice cube: complete, glistening, inscrutable (ice cubes are inscrutable, right?) Somewhere, there is a sentence-smith waiting to just churn out little igloos of perfect sentences, and I cannot wait.

By the dubs, I had to actually write two sentences that attempted to meet Barthelme's criteria, and I am going to post them in the comments -- where you should too!

Unpacking My Starship

2009-11-30T17:05:00.007-05:00

It has been a long time since I have posted on here. But that is going to change, with the Announcement of a New Book Club Book and a bit of explanation, occasioned, in a stroke of luck perfect for explanatory essays, by two different things: one being that I read too much, which is to say I unpacked too much of my library all at once; and the other being that I went "home", sort of, or failing that, that I went back to my biggest and favorite pile of books, the one in Lockport that my father and I built with second-hand lumber and which takes up an entire wall.

The obvious way in which one could read too much would be a crisis of content. It has been hypothesized (by others, not by me) that my personal, usual practice of reading two or more novels "at the same time" would result in some kind of intertextual freeforall, in which, in the first instance I remember hearing cited, Pip Pirrip would for some reason be in my mind imagined as rubbing elbows with Sissy Hankshaw, since I read Great Expectations and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues "at the same time", the simultaneity here consisting in reading the former for about an hour in the van on the way to a ski trip, and the latter while on the lifts, on the same day. I would experiment, sometimes, with the shortest acceptable unit that I could read from two books I was trying to read "at the same time" -- is it a sentence? A paragraph? What would it mean to read, say the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and the Early Stories of John Updike with interpellated sentences? Would you have read either of them? Would, in fact, your understanding of Tarbox, MA come to be infiltrated with charming Russians with hilariously poor English vocabulary? At any rate, I should say, I never broached whatever line there is, and this crisis of content never happened to me. My crisis in reading too much took on a wholly different form.

If you read all the time, you'd better do it quickly. And if you own countless (actually strike that; I have them counted, in an Excel spreadsheet, on this very computer) pages and pages of unread book, you had better read quicklier still. I moved to Manhattan four months ago, exulted in my little closet in which to live with an internet and books and no cable, and set about the important business of Reading. And I read quickly. I read swaths of the internet by day, then I got onto the subway with a Train book and off of the subway with a Park book, and read and read. While commuting, I read the subway map and thought about other places to go; while dining, I read the menu and imagined other food to eat; and eventually, while reading, I thought principally about other books to read. I became a parasitic reader; I ignored the beam in whatever book it happened to be, and thought only about the motes in other books' eyes. It was a goddamn mess is all. I read everything like it was the subway map, and here is the thing about reading the subway map for no reason, over and over: I have done it for months, and I can not successfully tell you how to get anywhere except for certain intersections in Manhattan, between 135th and Bleecker Streets (which is to say, the gridded part, or, the part in which one does not need a map).

And so for a few months my goal was to read my books more strongly than I read the map on the subway. It was hard. I don’t know if I pulled it off. But for a while, I didn’t read anything that wasn’t on a syllabus, and then I had a flight to Buffalo, so I decided to relax my rule a little bit and I bought a book off of a table in the park, by Wodehouse to read on the flight, which was fun enough.

And then I got to my library, my actual library, in a mess around the reject lumber that my father and I built into shelves. My books. Not all of the shelves were saturated; there was a Target-sized bookshelf’s worth of books missing, which are in my apartment in Harlem. My bed, which used to sit across the room from the bookshelves was gone (it’s in my apartment, too). So I grabbed one of the books that I had made a note of looking at when I got home – Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar – and sat in the corner and read. And I don’t know why, but I felt like I read it the right way. I felt like I felt reading on the subway before I had had my brains had been overread. This was fantastic.

And it has carried on. I wish I had something more epiphanic to tell you about what I thought of, or some more specific set of phenomena that I could detail about how my reading is different, but I am afraid I cannot: all I can tell is that I was positive there that the time had come to get the band back together, that it was time for me to begin reading off of both my syllabi and my library, and that this book club is once again operational. We have a new cast of commenters; we have a new set of commitments; and we have a new book, which book being Haruki Murakami’s book of short stories Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. So here we are: time to read like we are not reading a subway map.

Pedagogy

2009-09-01T11:13:00.007-04:00

I have one, and really only one, piece of evidence that suggests that man may be corrigible. When I was little and fat and bumming rides from my teachers, I once shanghaied one of those teachers into driving me into the Wal(star)Mart out on Niagara Falls Boulevard past the 290 so that I could buy the Wall, in exchange for store credit that I got from two unopened Britney Spears cds that my dad had won at a silent auction. My evidence of corrigibility? It's that although on the day and for some weeks (months?) after, I viewed this as a potentially momentous day -- "THE DAY I HAD MY EYES OPENED BY THE WALL" -- I now have come around to think that the Wall is a very very stupid record. Sonically, sure, it's fine, but it has some of the most ridiculous pseudo-profound lyrics on record. I once sat around and thought about how "Mother" was a song that REALLY GOT ME. Yikes.

Anyway, I bring this up because I wanted to write a post about bad and almost-bad teachers in the world of literature and I was going to title this post a quote from "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" but all of the quotes from it were just totally stupid. So now, boring title, interest anecdote and message of hope about how there is hope for all of us. And I bring up teachers not just because I will have some again soon, but also because I am reading the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a book about a woman who is rather a bad teacher, which makes for quite a good book. I can't imagine a really really good book about someone who is a really really putatively good teacher, because it would a) probably be inspirational and b) be by someone the teacher had inspired and c) thus be uninteresting to really everyone who wasn't there. Good teachers are like weird dreams: you have to be there for either adjective to really be important. So here are my favorite bad teachers, in no particular order, and presented as generic types:

The Wackford Squeers: Wackford Squeers, master of Dotheboys Hall from Nicholas Nickelby, is in practice really the worst kind of teacher possible. He's an idiot (his lessons are hilariously inaccurate); he is a cheat, both ripping people off and, when that seems like too much work, enabling other terrible people acting in loco parentis to rip their wards off; and, like so many teachers in fiction, he hates children. In fact, like his most apt pupil, the Trunchbull from Matilda, he hates children more than anyone in the book in which he lives. The best you can say about him is that he tries to do right by his family; but even then, he did name his son Wackford, though he must know full well, from experience, that being named Wackford sucks. He (and the Trunchbull) fall most obviously on the "bad person" end of the bad teacher spectrum.

The Deasy: Lord, do I hate Deasy, from the Nestor chapter of Ulysses. Like Squeers, he fails to meet what one would think are the basic qualifications for being a teacher (know something; don't hate children); and, worse, he's a blustery anti-semite. His methods are not as outlandish and cartoony as Squeers's, so he slides a little ahead on the list. But. What an ass. The two big coffee-mug quotes that Stephen gives us in the Telemachiad part of Ulysses -- "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and "God is a shout in the street" -- seem to me prescient about half the time and stupid the other half. When I feel the former, I blame Deasy for not appreciating his assistant, and when I feel the latter, I blame Deasy for not telling him to shut up. The guy's just a dick.

The Jean Brodie: The other people I have on this spot are Henry Burlingame, from the Sot-Weed Factor, and Hannah Schneider, from Special Topics in Calamity Physics. These people are the renegade teachers, the anti-authority, stick-it-to-the-man ones, and the reason that they -- of the hundreds of such fictional teachers -- made the list, is that they are the three I can think of whose books suggest that they are actually kind of silly. Miss Jean Brodie, who will not shut up about her prime, really introduces her charges into the fine points of objectivist philosophy, and also really likes Mussolini. She is not unlikeable; she is just a bad teacher. No matter how dumb you think forcing ten-year-old girls to get through their primers is, it is probably not a better idea to tell them all about the Great Loves of Your Life on school time instead. Likewise, Hannah Schneider seems a little too enamored with the idea of herself as The Cool Teacher at Private School (she has on her walls Italian posters for American movies, sheesh), and Burlingame manages to endorse every possible position in his tutelage of Ebenezer Cooke, so at least about half of them must be bad. These teachers get closer to the "bad teacher" (or bad influence, as opposed to bad human) end of the bad teacher spectrum.

The Pnin: And here's Pnin, that terrible teacher of Russian, whom I really really like, and in whose care I would really really not want to entrust my children's education in any language, Russian or otherwise. Pnin stalks around fighting insane fights about library books and being secretly heartbroken over and over again, at the hands of his horrible narrator, and for this I find him totally lovable; but still, you can't get away from the fact that his course appears to consist of bad puns and unexplained opinions about Russian writers.

The Big Move

2009-08-31T18:12:00.005-04:00

I live in Manhattan now. The biggest, most immediate improvements:
1) the subway -- I don't have to drive anywhere, so instead I take the subway around and listen to Coffee Break French, a program where two Scots teach you how to conduct rudimentary conversations in French
2) the Local Interest Section at the Barnes and Noble around here has stuff like Bright Lights, Big City and The Collected Stories of Damon Runyan, instead of this stuff.
3) there are parks to read in -- I realize that this is true of most places I used to live, but these parks have other reading people in them. A crucial improvement.

In fact, there are people reading all over the place, and, most importantly, anonymous people. It is one thing -- it is quite a nice thing, actually -- to sit around in rooms with other people who are reading and whom you know. I do it all the time. But it is actually even a nicer thing to sit around in Starbuckses or in parks with people who are reading and reading wholly apart from you. They're reading a book they call loneliness, but it's better than reading alone, William Joel would say. Everyone sits and reads their books, and no one talks about it, but in the massed quiet of readers, is comfort. I've read considerably more since I have moved out here, even before classes have started: I read a bunch more of Updike's short stories, I read Benjamin and Moretti on cities, I read a lot of Mason and Dixon (my and my brother's book to read over vacation) that I didn't finish over vacation. When I used to sit in my hot hot house and look at my books, as I did for most of this last summer, sweating and miserable, they seemed more than anything like a bunch of things I had to work through, methodically; like they were a pile of pages I had to solitarily mark as read, like so many TPS reports. I don't know that it speaks especially well of me that it took such a drastic relocation to reappreciate my library, but I am glad that it happened.

Zeppo

2009-08-11T22:40:00.009-04:00

Today I read jack squat. I painted the side of my house, I drove into town for lunch, I staked out the ice cream man, I went to the gym and almost fell off the treadmill, and I went out into the ocean and tried to catch some fish barehand. But I didn't really read anything. And then, just before I went to bed, we decided to watch the Marx Brother's fourth movie, Horse Feathers. This was their penultimate movie for Paramount and, more critically, the penultimate movie to feature Zeppo Marx, in my opinion the best and greatest of the Four Brothers.

Zeppo's importance, I am told by wikipedia, has been of late the subject of some scholarly study. The revisionist history on him seems to be something like, he is a gateway figure, or our representative in the anarchic world of the three older, more obviously lunatic brothers. Charlotte Chandler, in a book I now really want to read called Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, says this about Zeppo:

Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type.

This is fascinating stuff, especially her suggestion that Allan Jones, whom I find to be loathsome, is some sort of Zeppo failure. However, I find Zeppo's allure to go beyond his likeness to us; it is not just his unavoidable Marxiness that connects him to his brothers in a way that we fail to. I don't read Zeppo as an entree into the world of the maniacal brothers; instead, I see him as a lesson in how to adapt their ways into the world of our own.

Now, plotwise, he often is such an entree. In Horse Feathers, as Groucho's son, he offers some insight, gleaned from the home, into the possible policies of Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (yammering on about how Dad will hound them). As Horatio W. Jamison, the field secretary of Capt. Spaulding in Animal Crackers, Zeppo sings reverently about how the Captain is a moral man before retreating for the middle two thirds of the movie, and in Duck Soup, as a secretary this time called Bob Roland, he bounces in a little too quickly to announce that the boss is making an appearance just when the clock on the wall strikes ten. In all of these circumstances, his presence is one that, above all, reassures us as to Groucho's connection to a world outside of Groucho: that is, Zeppo knows this guy, and appears to be vouching for him. He lets us know what's coming, just before Groucho -- the ostensible star of the show -- arrives.

The problem with this is that he is, in each instance above, spectacularly wrong. Prof. Wagstaff's single coherent action in Horse Feathers is hounding out the wrong man (that is, his other brother Chico instead of the legitimate football ringers); Capt. Spaulding's first big scene after his introduction is a halfhearted attempt to commit bigamy; and, of course, Rufus T. Firefly does not show up at ten to be sworn in (or introduced or whatever) as the ruler of Freedonia. As our entryway into the world of the lunatic Marx Brothers, Zeppo as an explainer is useless or worse. Yet he never appears to be upset, or betrayed, by any of this; he doesn't really care. So why tell us these bizarre things? I think that one particular scene from the films illustrate what Zeppo is really all about. These is one of the scenes I most often point to when I have to defend my Zeppo above all policy to incredulous family and friends.

In Duck Soup, Zeppo has been silent since the first scene (he has had one scene, Groucho's meeting with his cabinet, in which he makes, to my way of thinking, several absolutely hilarious faces) when he pops into the boss's office after the latter has met with Harpo and Chico and got nothing done. He walks in purposefully, as always, and, as a good citizen, goes to take his hat off and place it on the hatrack in Groucho's office. There is no side to the hat on his head; he is wearing half of a hat. Briefly, Zeppo is nonplused, and this is important: Zeppo is almost never nonplused. That is a state for college professors, society doyennes, cabinet officials, that is, people who are wholly outside of the Marx dominion, and if Zeppo were to voice his confusion ("Your excellency, I've lost half a hat!"), he would stake himself as a similar outsider. But he does not; he just plunges in, throws his hat away, and gets down to telling Groucho, for reasons that I have never really been able to place, that Freedonia needs to goad Sylvania into war. At no other point that I know of in Marxdom does someone have such a moment of decision -- and opt in. Here, he is most like our guide into Marx Brothers lunacy: like us, he has decided for some reason that these are people who merit his time, such as it is.

But then he begins to push for war with Sylvania, and becomes, somehow, the only free man in the entire world of the Marx Brothers. To prove that Trentino, the Sylvanian ambassador, is sensitive enough to be goaded easily into war, Bob Roland tells Firefly that he once told Vera Marquel (the gorgeous dancer and apparent hanger-on at the Freedonian court) something -- I find it compelling to believe that this "something" is either a joke or a joke-like thing -- in Trentino's presence once, and that Trentino slapped his face. Firefly, when he hears this joke whispered to him, slaps Bob Roland's face as well (and, as he says, should've slapped Mrs. Teasdale's face when she told it to him). This moment is another remarkable moment in Zeppodom: I did not realize, until he makes reference to his having done it off screen, that Zeppo is a Marx Brother free of the manic compulsions that drive his brothers: the drive to joke, and the drive to chase pretty women. Chico and Groucho will solemnly sacrifice any bit of sense to jokes, even bad jokes -- look at the self-disgust in the exchange of sewer and manhole jokes in Animal Crackers -- and Harpo's distracting pursuit of women is evident. Harpo, Chico, and Groucho seem madcap and free, but theirs is only negative freedom, the freedom to reject the demands of normal persons. Zeppo can move exactly as he pleases. Zeppo alone, exists in and of all of this, and simultaneously in and for himself. He is not just a stand-in for us, who watch passively as these dramas play out, but he is a freer man than we are. Inscrutable, self-assured (all that striding into rooms!), perfectly possessed: our Zeppo, the most perfect agent of positive freedom in the most anarchically free movies of all time.

Analysis Yet Again

2009-08-10T20:20:00.006-04:00

Another week, another reason to drag my favorite two-word Henry James phrase into things, that quote being "remorseless analysis." (Narrowly beating out "extravagant umbrella", "hang fire", and "sacred rage"). And the reason today is that my mother tells me, daily, and the other people who live in our house confirm, daily, that what my problem is ("I have just one problem?" -- Hal Incandenza) is that I overanalyze everything. She rarely uses the word "remorseless", but there it is: the problem: overanalysis. Now, this may be a bit of killing to cure, but, as the fact that I can't get through an entire sentence here without a variety of embedded clauses and parentheses might have tipped you off, my first instinct is in most circumstances, indeed, to analyze things. But is it over-such? Can one overanalyze, and do I? Let us overanalyze.

When Strether, in the Ambassadors, invokes that beautiful phrase, he is sad; he is disappointed that his friend Waymarsh will never remorselessly analyze him. It's as though he is jealous that his powers of analysis -- which seem to be involuntary and, we learn throughout the novel, not terribly keen -- will never be turned on himself. A friend of mine once told me that she was disappointed after making a certain song the music that others heard while her phone was ringing; because she did that, she was the person she knew who heard the song the list. I myself often consider it a cruel trick of fate that, while everyone else sees it all the time they get to listen to me, I only see my perfectly straight hairline on the occasion that I visit a mirror. So maybe remorseless analysis is like that. But probably not -- it doesn't seem as though being the object of it is enviable (I mean really, think about it). Nor does it seem as though overanalysis is exposing some ugly truths through which the rest of the world slumbers, because it is, after all, not just called enoughanalysis.

Rather, I think that what my mother pinpoints when she calls overanalyzing my problem is that overanalysis is exactly what makes something into art; and art is exactly useless. I read a story this morning -- a deeply weird story -- by Nabokov, about a dragon, called The Dragon. It wonders what it be like if a dragon flew into a little town in Germany, and comes up with: it would get papered with advertisements for a tobacco company, it would be attacked by a circus performer dressed as a knight and in the service of a rival tobacco company, and as a result of this, flies up to his cave, embarrassed, and dies of shame. Which doesn't sound really wrong, as far as dragons in 1930s Germany go. And I don't mean to suggest here that my babbled observations with which I annoy my mother (or whomever's ear is the one closest to my right {which, I notice, is the side to which I most often darkly mutter snark}) is of a quality similar to a Nabokov short story, even a weird Nabokov short story. Rather, that same stream of muttering is something that, as a person who reads and probably reads too much, I have come to take for just the noise of the world; and, of course, the real world is much more often just quite. Just enoughanalyzed. I am subjecting my poor family to that roar that lies on the other side of silence.

Now, I don't super know what to do about this. It is probably the most insidious thing I have ever noticed about my career as a reader, and, luckily, it is not all that insidious. It is one of those lucky problems whose solution is the not talking about it. I tried to defend my constant, remorseless overanalysis to my mother by telling her that it was compulsory, and I don't really know which of the two of us was correct. But obviously, broadcasting whatever Deep Analysis I think of is not compulsory. It's just the fruit of reading too many stories that really work through what the tobacco companies would do to dragons.

More on Rock Bands

2009-08-07T11:52:00.003-04:00

Today is Friday, here's a list.

TOP FIVE BANDS/MUSICAL ACTS FROM BOOKS WHOM I WISH WERE REAL

5) The Weird Sisters, from Harry Potter -- Ok, I know they already kind of real, by virtue of being played in the fourth Harry Potter movie by half of Pulp and 2/5 of Radiohead. But that has to be recommendation enough to get them on a list of imaginary bands, right? And, the Do the Hippogriff song is good. It's sounds like it's by Jarvis Cocker, which it is, and that is sufficient for my imaginary band purposes, at least. They are described as "extremely hairy and dressed in black robes that had been artfully ripped and torn" and apparently have names like Heathcote Barbary and Orsino Thruston and Gideon Crumb (which last plays the bagpipes). So yeah, I would have had a 10" by 20" poster of these guys, if they were real.

4) Ormus Cama and Vina Aspara -- These ones are on here largely because of curiosity as to all the people they wouldn't be. Ormus Cama is one third John Lennon, one third Elvis, and one third Freddie Mercury, but he lives in a world in which Elvis has somehow ripped off the music that he has been hearing psychically. It's kind of confusing. And Vina is his muse, so she'd have to come too. One of the most interesting thing's we'd learn from these people, if they were real, is what fem-Lou Reed is like, because in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Lou Reed is a woman: when his ghost twin Gayomart tells him about how weird the other world he's visited is, it's ours, and one of the things about which he is shocked is that Lou's a dude here. Fascinating.

3) Mary Bennet -- Poor Mary. All she does in Pride and Prejudice is bum everyone out, by being plain and wanting to talk about god. However, she is apparently quite gifted at the piano. She could be like a frumpier Glenn Gould! And I always feel bad for her, so she gets on the list.

2) Ok so for this one, I was going to put on Bucky Wunderlick, the pseudo-Bob Dylan from Great Jones Street, but do you know what? I didn't really like Great Jones Street. And anyway, Bob Dylan is barely real anyway, so I'll just throw him on the list his own personal self. From Chronicles, Vol. 1.

1) the Paranoids -- It had to be them, right? The goofball, fake-British invasion house band from Paranoid Mess The Crying of Lot 49 are awesome. They party at least as hard as any band in fiction, or probably real life, and they say funnier cryptically literate things than any band in real life except maybe Radiohead. They seem to sound like the Kinks when the Kinks were only loud, and their lyrics bounce around between sounding like they're by Jack Kerouac and like they're by John Donne. Just the best of both worlds, with this guys. I have an Axis: Bold as Love t-shirt that I wear and always feel self-conscious about, because I feel as if I don't know Jimi Hendrix's work well enough to justify it. And that is exactly the situation I can imagine myself in with regard to the Paranoids.

For Those About to Rock Band, We Salute You

2009-08-04T21:32:00.006-04:00

I decided the other day that one of the ways I had scaled back my big dreams was, that I had previously imagined being in a band, and now I just imagine impressing a group of people with my prowess at the game Rock Band. Really. Like, before, while dangerously closing my eyes and air guitaring in the car to When You Were Young by the Killers, I would see myself on a stage with like minded hipsters in thrift store clothes, belting away. Now, instead of that, I listen to the same songs and imagine myself impressing instead maybe eight or nine people in thrift store clothes at a party. Sometimes it gets so bad that I end up thinking explicitly about that scene at the end of the episode of Gossip Girl where Serena and Vanessa decide to become friends via Guitar Hero. Terrible.

There are more than enough, probably, books about famous singers; the two I can think of off of my head are Great Jones Street and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I would count Ulysses as a book that's at least a little about famous singers because of Blazes Boylan, I imagine that there are a lot books about aspirant singers, too, though I am sorry to say I cannot think of any of them that I have read. I think the new Jonathan Lethem one was about that? I don't know. But at any rate, I am willing to bet, and cannot imagine, a book about someone's quest to become great at Rock Band. No one wants to see Rock Band on television or in a movie or in a book. Even that thirty second scene in Gossip Girl, with Guitar Hero, seemed as though it were wasting its and our time. The only way that could possibly be deployed would like to mark the would-be Rock Star hero as a dork.

It is as if the kind of fame simulacra is unjustifiable in a fictional character, or at least it is unjustifiable for now. It is as if we expect that if a character is going to be given some dreams, they can at least be bigger dreams than we ourselves could get for one hundred and fifty dollars at WalMart. It would be like reading about someone whose big goal was to break into Twitter, or someone who wanted to get their photos accepted by facebook. Those are not things about which people ought not to care; they are not even things about which particular persons ought not to care a great deal, or to the exclusion of caring about making it as a tambourinist or a writer. But, and because everything seems like an excuse to me to think one more thing about books, it seems worth appreciating that characters -- those fictitious entities whose race written people are the most representative of, for their pure created-ness (viz., there is not even a real person confusing things by portraying them) -- for the fact that no matter how mundane my dreams and goals get, theirs, if I'm going to care about them, will remain big. No matter how many times I start dreaming about five oncoming neon rectangles as the notes I'm banging out instead of guitar tabs, there will still be fictions dreaming the biggest dreams dreamable, like their ancestor, tilting at windmills.

The False Azure of the Windowpane

2009-08-03T18:12:00.007-04:00

Today I went for a run, and remembered that another reason I, as a literary nerd, like our house here: not our street, or the one next to it, but the one next to that is called Waxwing Lane, which is only a small, pluralizing sibilant away from being waxwing slain, and we all know what poem I have a crush on has that phrase in it's first line. Anyway, that made me think about a book issue that I often try to engage my family on, to their long-suffering: how much do you think about books when you're not reading them? Or actually, I guess the question is more: how much do you use books to think about other things?

Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.

That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

2009-08-02T09:49:00.004-04:00

So, today is the first day of my vacation. Since about June, I have not been doing much of anything other than being nervous and earning my keep around the house, so this trip to North Carolina is sort of a vacation from already being on vacation. That said, I am excited: the annual Schratz family trip down here is SUMMER READING TIME, even though my reading time at home has been largely unimpeded and summer is about two thirds over. There are several reasons why going to our house in North Carolina represents ideal reading time, and that show what an ideal reading situation has on offer.

ONE: Chairs. The chairs here are better than the chairs at our house in Lockport for reading, hands down. I don't think we have any chairs in our house in Lockport, actually, except at the dining room table. It turns out that I can read for like 20-25 more minutes per sit-down of reading, when I can put both of my arms on an armrest at once. This is a critical improvement over our couches. Beyond that, we also have like a hammock swing-chair apparatus, which begs to be read upon. The more utilitarian chairs one might take for granted. When you see a hammock swing-chair apparatus, you know that it has to be sit on; and what better thing to do while so sitting, than read your book? So, lesson: Get yourself a chair you can appreciate, and appreciate it.

TWO: A relative paucity of books. I own too many books. I have to read Benjamin's Unpacking My Library essay constantly, to reassure myself that it is ok to have as many freaking books as I have. In that essay, Benjamin recounts an admirer of Anatole France's asking him (France) if he had read all of the books in his library, to which France said, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?" Point, Anatole. Anyway, I don't know if my unread books make as bad a portion as 90% of my book volume, but whatever they make, it ain't great. They take up five-ish shelves, and I stare at them. Often. Half of my unread books have bookmarks on page 3 or 4, from where I decided to start reading the book after staring at their spines before returning, like a chastened philanderer, to the books I was already on pages 50 and 300 of. In North Carolina, I've only got ten books, so way fewer opportunities to spread myself too thin. It's like committing, for two weeks, to use your Sevres china and use the hell out of it, until it is properly appreciated. Lesson here: it may be necessary to take physical measures to curtail the reader's wandering eye.

THREE: A massive body of water. This is more of a societal issue than a me-issue, but it is surprising to me how much people are more willing to let you go sit and read all day if you do it in front of an ocean or a river or a lake or whatever. Thousands of times, I have huffily told my brothers that I am BUSY READING; the only times that they have retreated with dignity in the face of this huff has been with their backs to bodies of water. I tried this once at home at the Erie Canal, but that didn't really work. There is not a lot soothing about the Erie Canal. This isn't much of a lesson; it's hard to find somebody who will really sell you on being against the contemplation of oceans.

So those are three of the reasons why I am excited for my little vacation I'm on. The books themselves, obviously, are exciting too: I've got more Proust (Proust forever), Mason and Dixon by Pynchon, The Spoils of Poynton, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a few more. So GET AMPED to be bloggified (and now tweeted! @CaptainSchratz) in the coming days. The reading chair is a good blogging chair, as well.

Nervous Summer

2009-07-31T22:14:00.005-04:00

And but so. I have spent most of the last two months, in which I have not been blogging, being nervous. I have spent hours and hours in front of the ESPN network's Baseball Tonight program, not paying attention to them and instead focusing, with Great Mindfulness, on the pains in my stomach and wondering how much of them were psychic and how much somatic. It was, I began to notice, an almost wholly situation-independent case of nerves; no matter how pleasant or un- things would seem to be, I would become maximum level nervous, and dream up reasons to be so. It made me nervous that I hadn't gotten into any schools, for a while; then it made me really nervous that I had gotten into NYU. It made me nervous that the one of the dogs we live with developed a cough. It made me nervous that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were revealed to have taken steroids in 2003. Anything made me nervous. It was a nervous few months.

I started to notice that there were a few homey things that soothed my nerves to total satisfaction. One was going to the supermarket; one was listening to John Sterling call Yankees games. And a big, generic, booky thing, that I learned from the Summer of Nerves, was the incredible therapeutic power of the Fat Book of Short Stories. The particular Fat Book of Short Stories that I have been seeking solace in is the Early Stories of John Updike, but based on some dabbling in Nabokov and Flannery O'Connor, I think that others can work as well. Novels (most novels, anyway; not, say, Proust, on whom more soon) can be tempestuous relationships; they are capitalist little monsters, committed to dynamism. Things should have changed greatly from one chapter to the next in the novel. Take, say, Mansfield Park, a great book by Jane Austen, that makes enormous changes in both tone and pace. At the time in life in which I read Mansfield Park, I read a lot at a Starbucks while I waited for my brother Pete to finish his driving lessons. And it sort of jerks around: Fanny always seems at the point of being denied the life she wants, and the narrative takes some time off for class satire. Or, things are speeding along, and then we get the very long, very excellent, but very disruptive focus on the play that Fanny's cousins put on. Not quite a soothing element.

The Fat Books of Short Stories, however, are little pieces of stasis. Very little happens, and it happens beautifully, exquisitely. The well-formed short story tends to have one action, one Thing That This is the Story About; and the action is surrounded by a murmur of beautifully pitched observation, framing our action and delighting us. Especially in a writer like Updike, whose capaciousness allows for infinite gradations of tone, or one like O'Connor, whose singleness of purpose provides the same, we can return, story after story, to our Fat Book and find ourselves right where we were, and, provided that this is an author we like, we find ourselves just where we want to be. My nervous summer began with me reading 2666 on a beach, with its swooping plot and jagged contours; and hopefully, the nervous part of that summer will end here, with Updike and his fat book of beautifully considered, beautifully same moments.

Incidentally, I am only about a third of the way through my Updike book, which only goes about two fifths through Updike's career, but my favorite stories, for those of you wanting to get a toe (soothingly) wet, are: Pigeon Feathers, which has a magnificent final sentence; Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth; A Trillion Feet of Gas; and Twin Beds in Rome. So, for all of you who wondering what my favorite Updikes from about before 1960 were: there you are.

Me on Denby on Snark

2009-05-07T13:34:00.007-04:00

OK, David Denby. I wanted his indictment of snark to be good. I read a screed -- an "agony", if you please -- against quirk that ran in the Atlantic about two years ago, and I thought it was good, which is to say well-argued, and it made me kind of mad because I loved all of the things that it was slightly dismissive of (Royal Tenenbaums, Flight of the Conchords, Ira Glass). I thought that it was all wrong, but I liked that it formulated intelligently a position that I viewed as incorrect. It thought that there was too much quirk, that quirk was overdeployed, &c. I thought that all it was really doing was lumping some common things together that were, for their own reasons, bad, and announcing them as a bad form of quirk while salvaging the things they liked. As such, it was ultimately unsatisfying on its own, but at least it articulated a position that made my own, pro-quirk position more easily defensible.

Snark does the same sort of thing -- it rattles off about forty things that annoy David Denby, says that they are making everyone mean, and then says that they ought to stop. His problem is a harder one, though, to tackle than the Great Quirk Issue of Aught Seven, because snark is wider ranging and more insidious than quirk, which, when it is bad, is just kind of annoying. It's an evasion of art, is bad quirk, while snark suffocates art. Indeed, according to David Denby, "contemporary art is post-aesthetic." The snarkers don't make art; he seems to suggest that they are artistically impotent; all they do is make wisecracks. And of course, that is true of some of the scenarios that Denby describes. He mentions Penn Jillette saying that, during the 2008 presidential primaries, Obama outperformed Hillary Clinton in February, that being Black History Month, and that Clinton should do better in March beause that is "White Bitch Month". All of the volume of Denby's pique against Snark ought to be directed at such stupid things as that. But this is where, again, his scope outpaces the Quirk issue, and goes too far. He wants to say that all vicious bitchiness is of a piece with that shockingly unfunny thing that Penn Jillette. And of course, other named snarkers, including betes noires like gawker, wonkette, and Spy Magazine, do nothing of the kind.

Denby is particularly insistent about two issues. First, he is constantly invoking his love of the Colbert Report as evidence that he appreciates vituperation when it is properly aimed. And secondly, he is constantly calling upon a notion of "knowingness" as the element of snark that is particularly galling. Neither of these points, unfortunately, make any sense when stacked against his actual complaints. The kinds of nasty humor to which Denby pays lip service as valuable public goods are, of course, as dependent on knowingness as anything put up in the dreaded blogosphere, only the knowledge to which they appeal is largely to be found in the New York Times. The knowledge to which snark appeals is apparently unacceptable for its being found elsewhere, in all sorts of low culture media. And the biggest mistake that Denby makes here is his assumption that the sort of knowingness he derides is sought, that it is something that the snickering snarkers have gone out of their way to achieve. It is in fact quite the opposite.

What Denby spectacularly fails to consider is that everyone today can be appealed to as in a position of knowingness, because everyone is told things constantly, and all of the time. The things that he decries as snark (besides the obvious straw men like that Penn Jillette quote, which I guess he thinks trades on knowing that March is women's history month) are almost always commentary about commentary, more information about how much damn information we are always having thrown at us. I know way more than I want to about all of the actors, writers, athletes about whom I care, and the supposedly destructive snark is not a gleefully wicked celebration of that fact, but a lament. Snark is so sick of supposedly earnest information that, even as it itself presents more information, it rails against the whole damn thing. And that's what Denby, somewhat surprisingly, fails to see: this form of communication that so outrages him is itself a form of outrage, an exhaustion itself rather than an exhilaration.

Have You Heard of That Kindle Thing?

2009-05-01T13:11:00.000-04:00

So, sometimes the Book Review -- my old friend -- and I get tired of each other. We are not the perfect fit that say, this blog and its two readers are. Sometimes, the NYTBR gets a little BookTV for me. I always think that I should like BookTV, but then I always find myself watching the third Josh Elliott/Hannah Storm Sportscenter in a row. The problem is mutual -- sometimes, I want more depth then the Book Review is set up to provide (no spoilers and all), and sometimes, I am just cold more of a book nerd than whatever other kind of nerd they are catering to on BookTV. Like, they will have a guy on talking about the CIA, for CIA nerds, and I will be more curious about whether or not there is anything in the book as frustrating to think about as the fact that David Addington brought his own gazpacho to lunch everyday.

The place to go for way more depth is, of course, "scholarly articles", which are fine to read and to talk about if you can get past the fact that everyone will stop wanting to talk to you when you say things like "Great article in Milton Quarterly last quarter, you should check it out." For the other kind of thing that I like -- pure book nerdiness -- you have to just wait for the Times to deliver, and boy did they deliver today.

The title is already great -- "With Kindle, Can You Tell It's Proust?" -- and then imagine my delight when, after some scene setting about Kindle and the usual oohing and aahing over the putatively great Kindle techne (boring) we get this, the crux of the piece: "Please, they’re [that is, they who worry about Kindle's effects on the economics of reading are] overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?" The effects of anything on literary snobbism are, of course, the first effects I think about. I also found myself nodding happily when I read some of the testimonials later in the article: "When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person" (although minus points to that guy for showing off that he sees movies at MOMA); "I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading Ulysses." Judging and hoping to be judged by books? Done and done. It's not even two pm and I've done both of those already today. The problem with the Kindle, as assessed here, is that this makes this hard. If I were Kindling Ulysses instead of carrying it around, well, for all we know you're just Kindling, oh, I don't know, something easy and non-impressive to read. (Something un-Prousty, say.)

This reminded me of the article, discussed here last year, about whether or not there were books that represented deal-breakers in relationships, and The Furious Debate that that engendered. Except, of course, there was no Furious Debate at all. There as here, the only thing that we really come away with is mild snark against popular books (this year, He's Just Not Into You, last year, Marley and Me) and the sense that, the fantasies of all book nerds (myself included) notwithstanding, there's really no eluctable way in which the sum of the things you read, or want to read, or endorse, constitute the person you are.

That is kind of a bummer. The part of me that looks forward to nothing more than this kind of article -- not a book review, not a scholarly article, but a sheer slice of nerd fantasy sociology -- also wants to believe that the way you make friends is to find people who like the same books as you, preferably just by walking around with your book like a badge, and then skip to making snarky jokes about Marley and Me together. But really, you have to actually act like a whole person instead of a syllabus, which, as iterated, is difficult. That's the sort of sadness of things like this Kindle article: if the world was built by book nerds, the Kindle would be an intolerable instrument of opacity; in the world as we have it, it's no big.

This is all true, and is all the sort of thing one knows, as one knows that the world is round. But it's not at all the case that one has to act as such. You can bet that, the next time I see a girl in a coffeeshop reading the Sun Also Rises or whatever, I will, however briefly, envision her as the future Mrs. Schratz. Isn't it pretty to think so?

Ostranenie

2009-05-01T09:42:00.000-04:00

So, bad job by me, both at celebrating National Poetry Month and its resorbed, smaller twin, National Poem in Your Pocket Day. I actually did celebrate each somewhat, but I only wrote about two (2) poems on this "weblog", down from four (4) last year. And, worst of all, I did not post anything at all on National P. in Your P. day itself. I meant to, but ha! as usual, things ganged way the hell agley once again.

I did manage to walk around with poems in my pocket yesterday, although again down from four to two. Last year, I spent the whole day basking in the glorious Williamstown, MA sun, handing out poems like it was my job. This year, I had to a) proctor a test and b) drive ten hours, round trip, to a courthouse in Fulton, New York, to contest a speeding ticket. On my way to the former, I realized that oh crap, I had been talking up National Poem in Your Pocket Day for over a month at the school where I sometimes subsitute teach, and that I had gotten as far as the donut store on my morning routine with zero (0) poems. So I wrote on napkins the two poems that I felt like I had the least chance of screwing up: Sion, by Cesarea Tinajero, and The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. You will, I've no doubt, remember Sion, the three-lines (not three-line; it's actually 0 words, three lines, and three squares) poem that is all that remains of the poetess Tinajero's work in the Savage Detectives. No one that I showed that one to seemed impressed.

The other one, I showed to my mother and asked her what she thought was the most important word in the poem. She voted for wheelbarrow, which does get top billing and is probably right and made me feel a little silly for asking the question in the first place, because my dissenting vote is that the most important word in the poem is "glazed". That is because every other word I have probably said in the last three days without thinking about it. From very cursory reading -- like, four pages in Eagleton's introduction to Literary Theory -- I am learnt that there are Russian formalists, and that they came up with an emphasis on a thing called "ostranenie", or defamiliarization. Said Shklovsky, consonant-endowed ringleader of the R. Formalists: "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known...art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." Now, beyond the enigmatic sense conveyed by the first stanza of Williams's poem (depends for whom?), all of the energy is focused on the artfulness of that wheelbarrow -- and I contend that that energy has its crux in the word "glazed", the defamiliarizer. Read the poem with a workaday word like "wet" or even "soaked" for "glazed", and I think it fails to live up to its own first stanza. But as it stands, the poem is breathtaking: the one little syllable of ostranenie makes an entire scene into a piece of art.

Anyway, armed (or pocketed) with my two poems, I drove all the way out to Fulton, on the Thruway, through Rochester and Geneva and Syracuse and Utica, flipping through NPR stations as their signals faded; and my ticket was dismissed (hooray!); and I drove home along Route 5, listening to the Yankees win and to the Celtics lose, and I drove behind a west-moving, intermittent rainstorm. I had never driven all the way home on Route 5 before (it takes a really long time, but there is no toll), but most of Route 5 looks like most of Route everything else -- lots of box stores and fast food places and farms -- except that, I am not kidding, because of the storm I followed, absolutely everything was glazed/with rain water. For six hours of intermittent rain and a universal, unrelenting glaze, with my poem in my pocket, I was treated to two hundred miles of New York State Highway as an object of artfulness. It damn near made up for the Celtics losing.

So au revoir, National Poetry Month. Coming up: I am still plugging away at Proust, life-changingly, so more on him; much-belated final thoughts on Ms. Tinajero's book (so you all can post your final thoughts, too!); and the possibility of a National Short Story Month (get on it, Congress). Stay tuned!

Happy Shakespeare's Birthday!

2009-04-23T12:33:00.005-04:00

Happy Shakespeare's Birthday, everyone! One of the seventh-graders whom I was substitute teaching today asked, when I had written that on the chalkboard, shouldn't I have written Happy Birthday, Shakespeare. Well, no, because he is dead and anyway it's a happy occasion for us, not just for him. Not even for him, now that he is dead. Anyway here is a Birthday Listicle for my man Shakespeare, of the top four quotes that I think celebrate the big 4-4-5.

Oh, also, I think "Talk Like Shakespeare" day is kind of silly unless you take it WAY EXTREME and start using real, pre-vowel shift, clipped jabbering instead of just saying "sirrah" and "neither a borrower nor a lender be". I don't think that part of "talking like Shakespeare" is the same as "quoting unnecessarily and stupidly". We'll save that for talk like Polonius day.

4)"Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
Thou know'st, when we first smell the air
We wawl and cry..........................
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools." -- King Lear

So, right of the bat, a downer. Someone, I think Cavell, points out that, uh, Shakespeare, that's not really why we cry when we're born. But still. On your birthday, you can feel that way. I used to refuse to celebrate my birthday, because if you made up a ledger with all of my woes on it, I was doing a lot better pre-birth than post-birth, and didn't want to celebrate just the start of all my troubles. But with the right inflection, you can be a good stoic on your birthday by reminding yourself that indeed, we came crying hither.

3)"And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones." -- King Henry V

This one is a little testy, too, and I'm not totally sure that the tennis balls that the Dauphin sends Henry (for laffs) are a birthday present (in fact, I'm almost positive they're not). But this is a useful one for the Shakespeare-birthday quote arsenal, to trot out if anyone's gag gift incites you to invade their country while claiming the benefit of Salic law.

2) The First Twelve Lines of Sonnet XXX

I like this one -- it's the "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past" one -- not just because it's a little Prousty (a lot Prousty for anglophones), but also because it has the kind of grim account taking that I imagine one does on one's birthday. The last lines, though, I feel are a little soppy. This one's kind of a downer, too, like the first one; but like I said, with the woe-ledger, I generally get down (sad down, not boogie-down) about birthdays.

1) "When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring: a plague of sighing and grief! it blows up a man like a bladder."--Falstaff

So, sad about anyone's birthday? Nothing will cheer you up out of that faster than Falstaff. After all the mopery of the proceeding, I laughed several times reading the post-Gad's Hill robbery scene, the one whence this quote. One of the best things available to us on our birthdays -- other than the impulse to pwn your Salic enemies -- is to look back and reward ourselves not just with the "fore-bemoaned moan" from the sonnet, but also with, what the hell, a vision of your life as you'd have liked it to be. Falstaff is an expert at that, and on Shakespeare's birthday and our own birthdays, we can choose to remember the times that we could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring, because why not.

Wild Surmise

2009-04-07T11:42:00.009-04:00

Here are some thoughts on poem two of a long National Poetry Month; let's see if we can knock down poems a little more quickly from here on in. This poem is about looking into old poetry, because what else is this month about? This poem was re-brought to my mind by a friend of mine who lives in Darien (but not the one mentioned in the poem) and who vacations in Smyrna (but not the one from the famous Hemingway supershort story On the Quai at Smyrna), making her, I guess, a sort of ersatz literary celebrity. Anyway, the poet is Keats (big poet Keats) and the poem is "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer".

This thing is a Petrarchan sonnet in scheme but not in flavor (it has an octave and a sestet; but it is about ancient Greek literature instead of about a pretty girl). It appears to endorse the radical position that Chapman did a better job of showing what Greece is like than Greece does, which is to say, it is right in my wheelhouse. It's set up weirdly: first we get Keats's big claim about how traveled he is (the Nineteenth Century "Where I've Been" facebook app); then we iris shot in to get a little about how he never breathed the pure serene of one wide expanse that deep brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne until he read Chapman's translation; then we telescope back out from books into an even wider expanse, of planets and of the New World. The thing that moves me the most about the poem is the way that after that cinematic telescope out, we get two of the most breathtaking images of which I'm aware in poetry, presented with stunning and Keatsian economy. First, we get "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken", an image of sudden discovery that gets me every time (me, and Bertie Wooster, too). And after that, stout Cortez, staring at the Pacific, looking at his men with wild surmise -- "silent, upon a peak in Darien".

I think that the last two lines of the poem are another thing to put in our sort of menagerie of little things poems could do. One of the things that we remember (or anyway that I remember) every National Poetry Month, is that poems are the way in which words can be used most versatilely. We had the Snark, and its blank terror, and we had all that stuff last year about poems that can act like songs or be really slow. And now, we get the poem that does the best, I think, at the Keatsian job of being quiet. Short stories are quiet all the time, especially compared to the bustle that, at their most bustling, novels can throw at us; but this poem doesn't have the eye-of-the-storm stillness of a Hemingway or Raymond Carver, but rather a kind of stillness at the end of any action. The most glorious views of nature resolve themselves in such a way that words just seem unnecessary. Keats's poem is brilliant, poignant and unsettling for suggesting that art -- Chapman's rendering of Homer's Greece -- might do the same thing.

Charmed with Smiles and Soap

2009-04-02T15:13:00.005-04:00

This post is about snark, or rather, The Snark, the quarry of Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark". It is not about David Denby's book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, which I will talk about soon. Rather, my reading some of Denby's book (which Miles mentioned in a comment a little ways back, and which seems in general the kind of Hip Zeitgesity Thing I tend to write about a few months late) has inspired me to look into the etymological provenance of Snark, and that place is Carroll's poem. And! It is National Poetry Month! So, count this as the festivities beginning.

What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:

"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."

This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.

Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.

What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.

Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.

How How Proust Can Change Your Life Can Change Your Life

2009-03-25T12:53:00.004-04:00

Connor and I went to New Orleans last week. As soon as we got to our hotel, we went out to a series of touristy bars, at which we drank away most of our money (Pat O'Brien's Hurricanes, Spring Break!), so we spent the rest of the time looking at cemeteries (often closed), eating ice for dinner, and going to bookstores in order to read the magazines there without buying them. The one that held my interest the longest was the current issue of Mental Floss, which has a book with the coils that you see on those big fat square batteries on the top of it, to herald a list: The 25 Most Powerful Books of the Past 25 Years. I had only read eight (weak), but all of them seemed like reasonable choices. The ones I didn't read seemed, from their blurbs, reasonable as well, and there were no books that I could think of that seemed more Powerful from the last 25 years, although I think part of that is I feel like I am not really qualified to gauge what is and is not powerful about books, since I cried at the end of Pnin and clearly overvalue the power of books in the first place. Anyway, number 17 was How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, and I am choosing it as the newest book club selection, because hey, you should all have your lives changed by Proust as well.

You all know Proust, yes? He is the fellow who tasted madeleines, dipped in tea, and remembered his life for the next three thousand pages or so. Proust can change your life, I think, insofar as someone who like me has only got to know him in translation can vouch. C.S. Lewis, in a quote that I once floated as an epigram for Our Beloved Blog, said that "We read, to know that we are not alone." This is a quote that I have a number of problems with, as I've mentioned; one of the things I said was that maybe essays, much more than fiction, could remind you that you're not alone. My favorite thing about Proust, which shows up in the de Botton book and which I am gleaning (halfway through Within a Budding Grove) in reading it myself, is that he has torqued his novel into something like an endless essay; it's like those little, once-every-ten-paragraphs generalizing mini-essays that George Eliot gave us have taken over the entire show. Proust loves to tell you not what people are like, but what sort of people people are like. "Swann was one of those men," he tells us, "who, having lived for a long time among the illusions of love have seen the blessings they have brought to innumerable women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness toward their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will allow them to survive after their death." Reading along, one might not think a lot of it. "Of course, one of those men." But really? Do you know anyone who does that? I don't, and I certainly wouldn't, if I met one, call him "one of those men". But the fantasy that Proust offers is one of infinite generalizability: if there is a person out there, he or she is one of those persons, and if there is a church that young Marcel visits, it is one of those churches. I find this inordinately appealing, maybe even...life changing?

In the Mental Floss blurb, they call How Proust Can Change Your Life "The Book that Helped People to Stop Helping Themselves", and they have de Botton saying, "What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense...I find a certain kind of pessimism consoling and helpful. Part of fulfillment might be recognizing how awful life is." Sounds good. So, check out the book; check out the actual Proust book if you also care to (I plan on finishing Within a Budding Grove and starting the Guermantes Way tomorrow while I'm supposed to be doing chores).

Cool Ideas

2009-02-18T03:02:00.002-05:00

This is going to be a post against cool ideas. Now, in general, I am for cool ideas. They are often cool. A cartoon song about George Washington? That's a cool idea. Puppies at halftime during the super bowl is a cool idea. These are also both clearly the fruit of someone thinking "you know what would be cool?" and then making their cartoon or their halftime show. So, in most walks of life, cool ideas do good work. But not novels. I mean, novels are the one place, really, where just wanted to have a cool idea set forth just isn't going to cut it.

I started writing this post without really knowing why this was going to be true, but knowing that I was going to end up coming down on Downtown Owl for failing as a novel by being rather obviously a string of written episodes clearly inspired in their author by a series of cool ideas. Related but non-interlocking stories is a cool idea, and sets up early for a big convergent ending, which is a cool idea. Nicknames are a cool idea, and novels offer unchecked nicknaming range (it's almost only in novels that we find those guys with nicknames whose working is dependent on a nickname-last name hookup [I say that as a gut thing, especially since the only such nickname I can think off the top of my head is from a movie {Randall "Pink" Floyd}]). But none of these nicknames sound like anything that real humans would make up, and, more importantly, none of them seem especially revelatory about the characters whom they nickname. One guy is called the Dog Lover because he, uh, loves his dog; but at no point does his dog-loving stand in poignant counterpoint, or even poignant point to anything else that goes on in the novel. One guy -- one of our main guys-- is named Mitch Hrlicka, and is called Vanna, because his football coach thought his name needed more vowels. That is clever enough -- except it seems like cleverness cheaply bought, because, of course, the same author who made up the nickname actually made up the nickedname, too.

I think that one of the opposites of this is the sublimely ridiculous Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer, where Mailer talks at huge length about his own involvement in a march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. He keeps yammering about Mailer's long suffering, and the Huge Historical Importance of everything he does. On paper, it is irredeemably lame: writing a novel more or less explicitly to justify a certain thing you've done is like the anti-cool idea. But Mailer has two things that I think are at the core of what good novels need: he has an undeniably magnificent sense of literary style, and he has an unswerving sense of commitment to writing these things down with that style, a sort of ineffable sense that he, Mailer, is absolutely compelled to write this book (this sense of compulsion is something that I keep invoking to defend Bolaño's so thinly veiling the version of himself [Belano] who stars in the Savage Detectives). What Downtown Owl ends up suffering from is a decent but not overwhelming style -- a style that's really most at home with observational stand-up comedians and a pre-backlash Malcolm Gladwell-- and an overarching sense not of compulsion, but of coolness.

This may not be a thing that causes concern for everyone, I have just thought; but to me, what makes these two shortcomings (and shortcomings may be putting it strongly; cool ideas and hey-what's-the-deal-with-this style make some brilliant essays, for sure) so galling to me is that they seem to come short of justifying the invention of the world of Downtown Owl. Why this might not concern everyone, is that I am well aware that I more than most put heavy stock in fictional people. I care about them deeply, and want to care about them almost as autocratic beings. When the characters in a book like this -- and a book that, in its final third, is clearly set up to inspire some kind of cosmic pathos -- seem to have been born not out of a compulsion to create people on the behalf of their author, but out of a desire to serve cool ideas, it ends up making me feel disappointed.

So that's that. According to the BS report with Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman's next book will be essays; I will almost definitely buy it in hardcover. And leave my highly exacting needs for novels to somebody else. Somebody called maybe, Bolaño? More on him tomorrow.

Green Eyed Monster

2009-02-15T15:42:00.003-05:00

So, this isn't super surprising, probs, but I am often jealous of fictional people. I am much more often jealous of fictional people than I am of actual people, because, whatever actual people, do your own thing. But people on television and in books, I am often envious of. This is probably not the way most normal people confront the universe. But it's what I've got. So anyway, I have been barnstorming through our soon-to-be Book Club Book Emeritus, the Savage Detectives, and it got me to wondering in a particular way about these jealousies, to wit: I started to wonder whether the oblique way in which Belano and Ulises Lima exist has eclipsed the occasional way in which television characters exist, as the mode of going about life of which I am most (and most unrealistically) jealous.

I should say that, ever since I started waking up to watch the 3am to 5am block of Nick at Nite programming (Dick Van Dyke, the Lucille Ball Show, and maybe F Troop?) when I was in fifth grade, I have felt as if living in a television program would have been the best way to do it. In my own, actual life, I would say I generate enough activity of interest (to hold my own interest, I mean) for maybe an hour or two, with, which skillful editing, could be brought down to about forty-eight minutes, a week. So I could be an HBO show or something. The rest of my actual time I spend doing things that even I think would be better left off camera -- sitting around, waiting for things, updating my cache of quotes that are clever enough to text to people. I used to think that what would really be the best, would be if I could have to pay attention to what I was doing for those forty-eight minutes -- with music and montages -- and spend the rest of the week, I don't know, doing something else. This happens to me especially when I drive home from work, having had a successful night of playing Trivia Whiz on the Megatouch at the bar in Lockport, and a song I really like comes on the radio while I pull into my driveway. This, I think to myself, ought to be the end of this episode, and it seems like a big anticlimax that I actually have to get out of the car and brush my teeth and all of that.

Anyway, those montages are great and all, but now, more and more, I find myself wishing that the best way for my life to be talked about wouldn't even be in episodes, but in peripheral interlopes into other people talking about what they were up to when I ran into them. This morning I wore pajama pants and a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah t-shirt to go buy an air freshener and a frozen pizza at the grocery store, and the whole time I thought about how fantastic it would be if instead of something like this blog post, my trip to the grocery store was chronicled in somebody else's story about how they were picking up a sandwich tray and saw some guy in a CYHSY shirt ambling towards the aisle with scented candles and incense and such. And, say, that's how you'd know I spent a year here outside Buffalo. Just like Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, I wish to be hovering around whatever narrative arc that I'm currently propelling, in the muddled way that I'm propelling myself. Is that a strange thing to want? Periphery? And what do you guys think is better, that one, or episodes? Please, let somebody write that they too are jealous of the invented. Please?

The Book Review Review

2009-02-10T12:11:00.003-05:00

So, yikes, a whole week with no posts. I am sure that you are all wondering what I could have been doing during all that time. Well, what I was doing was mostly sitting in my kitchen, drinking scotch, eating cereal, and reading gawker. So, really, I have no excuse for myself. I did read a little -- I finished Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman (on which more later in the week), I read a bunch of the Savage Detectives (on which more a little later in the week when I finish the book), I continued my adventures without underlining. Mainly, though, it was cereal, scotch, and the Book Review!

The big essay in the Book Review this week was about Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's bon vivant who would be turning eighty this year. He is also the star of one of the very few books that I own that are tie-ins to movies or tv shows. Here is the whole list: Fight Club, the Talented Mr Ripley, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Les Miserables, and Different Seasons by Stephen King (which is a tie-in for Apt Pupil, one of the stories in the book; I bought it for a different would-be tie-in, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), and the copy of Gossip Girl that I stole from my sister. I don't think that that list has any sort of cohesion, frankly. I managed to get in just under the wire with both the Road and with Atonement, my copies of which have their original paperback covers, but a little sticker that says "Soon a Major Motion Picture!", and I fought hard to get a copy of The Haunting of Hill House that had not been repackaged as just the Haunting. I don't know why i have this constant battles against movie tie-ins, especially because I so often determine to read books just so I'll be ready to watch the movies that they make of them. Like most of the things about my books that have more to do with objectness than bookiness, I think I do it for the benefit of people who will look at my books someday, even though pretty much no one ever looks at my books. Someday, though, I will be able to say: "Oh, yeah, Everything is Illuminated, I read that a while before it came out."

Ahem. Tom Ripley, I should know, would've probably made a point of discouraging any movie tie-ins among his books at Belle Ombre. He was stylish to the point of madness, according to the end of this Book Review essay: "the madness of perfect manners, of impeccable taste, of watertight civility." Now, because the rest of the Book Review was long, and because of all the scotch and cereal, the only other book review I read was the prequel somebody wrote for the Maltese Falcon (looks interesting!). Other than that, all weekend, all I did was watch Gossip Girl. Now all I do is watch Gossip Girl. I keep having to go buy myself dinner so that I will be reading, at least, instead of watching Gossip Girl. Anyway, that is my lame excuse and apology for slagging off my blog. More tomorrow!

The Book Review Review

2009-02-03T00:26:00.003-05:00

Book Review this week: eh. The most interesting thing to me, naturally, was the double review of those two new Johnson biographies. Now, I'm sure that many of you have been waiting for literally weeks! for me to make some kind of noise about these new biographies of Johnson, ever since Adam Gopnik wrote up and down about the bizarre sex life of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale in his summing up of these new books. Gopnik says stuff like this: "Johnson’s piety is more impressive if we imagine it up against the keen daily edge of erotic appetite, rather than simply a long-term bulwark against imagined insanity." I guess it is? Whenever Johnson's undoubtedly bizarre life is brought up again for reconsideration, besides token deference to Boswell, the thing people always mention is that Johnson did biography too, as if that we reason enough to put him under the microscope again. But I'm not convinced that any reimagining of a grumpier Johnson or a more sexually frustrated Johnson is especially warranted, and I hardly think that that's what Johnson did to those whom he biographied. He complained about Milton's politics, as most note; but I think the sort of legend-making that he preferred, and that he got from Boswell, is more like what he puts forth in the Life of Savage, or even in the Life of Swift where, for all his nastiness toward Swift, he refuses to mention why Swift's food was pre-cut at the end of his life (he had tried to stab himself with his fork). Boswell, for all his flaws, did something that his further biographers seem to either not wish, or not be able to do; which is to make him a great character. It may be that Boswell poisoned the well; that the character of Johnson is such that it's now impossible to create a great nonfiction character out of him to contend with Boswell's more literary creation, the way that, say, Joe Gould, from Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould's Secret is a great nonfiction character. Anyway. The review of these two new books (like most reviews of them I've read, this post has coupled them and had a lot more to say about Johnson than the books themselves) ends by pointing out that though neither of these books will be wished longer than they are, Johnson would've appreciated their being written for the tercentenary of his birth. Maybe. I will try to get a hold of library copies of these and let you know. Or maybe I'll just reread a hundred pages of Boswell or so, instead.

Screen Book Reviews

2009-01-28T12:29:00.005-05:00

So here's one for you, the week that I got drunk and watched very late-night tennis instead of reviewing the Book Review for you: should we bother reading book reviews? What's the point of them? Whom do they serve? I don't mean to ask these things rhetorically, but really: after all, I do read book reviews, compulsively, and wherever I can find them. I am often unsatisfied, for example, with my review-knowledge of a book of short stories if I haven't seen a breakdown of each story, with a little description of each one (vide my high-school era review at Prestigious Critical Organ amazon.com, of Girl with Curious Hair {or rather don't vide it, because I wrote it in high school}). I want to know what's what, going in, usually.

But I don't know if I want book reviews. I think that really, what I want is something like "to have already read the book and formed a shorthand reminder of what it's about, which reminder is:". So, instead of a few quotes and some musing and scene setting, my pre-reading review of, say, the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay would be "Depression and World War II Era comic book guys/lots of relationship trouble/episodic pacing/very well written/satisfyingly unsatisfying ending". It would be like "plot keywords" on IMDb, except for books. And really, too, I do not know whether that would lead to a better idea of what was in store for books I meant to read or not; probably not, given that most of you who have read Kavalier and Clay might've put down totally different keywords, and many of you who have not read it might now be imagining Kavalier and Clay, based on my list, to be a book totally different from what it actually is. Although possibly not too different, because probably too amorphous. The reason I got to wondering all this about the worthwhileness of book reviews has to do with the occasionally massive discrepancies between the actual books we read, and the books we imagine we're approaching based on their reviews.

Pierre Bayard borrows a term from Freud and calls the idiosyncratic set of ideas we each make for ourselves out of the reputation of a given book that "screen book", and I think that what happens so often to me is that I dream up, based on a book review (or an amalgamation of book reviews) a screen book that is radically unlike the idiosyncratic ideas about the book that are based on actually reading the book. Which is absolutely not to say that I feel as if book reviewers are disingenuous, or shoddy, or creating unjustified hype; simply to say that I am I and they are they and thus we think different things. I think the most egregious case of this was the review I read a book that I enjoyed very much, the Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. I don't know why; subtle phrasings like this: "the metaphorical pawn in their struggle [that is, between Murray Thwaite, Mr. Earnest Liberalism, and Ludovic Seeley, who is basically Nick Denton] -- a struggle over status -- is Bootie Tubb." This is a slightly sophisticated point; in the book, Murray and Seeley are largely unconcerned with Bootie, who's kind of a twerp. But the position here in the book review made me keep an eye out for it. Also, the three main characters are introduced, naturally, at the beginning of the review, and as a group; in the book, they are less of a group and more of a loose aggregate.

Are these big deals? Are they some kind of misrepresentation of the book? Absolutely not. But they are a series of what, to a reader sensitive to sorts of readymade stories, could launch a weird series of in-between screen books. So, in sum, I don't know what to do about book reviews. I guess I'll just keep reading them; it's not like I've got that much better to do. Except maybe read the books they're about.

Time in a Bottle

2009-01-26T23:30:00.003-05:00

Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano have made it to Europe, at the point I've gotten to thus far, and Ulises Lima farther than that, to Tel Aviv. Today I want to talk a little bit about how the oral history structure of the book is working, and how that contributes to the way, discussed earlier, in which Our Guys are got at peripherally, rather than head-on. First a note on what it is not: every once in a while, when someone says something particularly nice about Arturo Belano, I am tempted to think what I have been told is sometimes thought, viz., this looks like a way for Bolaño to sneak in some nice things about himself, like Norman Mailer's huffing and puffing about "Norman Mailer" in the Armies of the Night, or anything that has to do with Agent Michael Scarn. But I don't think so. I don't have a really definite reason for why I don't think so; maybe it's just because I haven't read the introduction, and don't yet know how narrowly or widely the life of Belano differs from the life of Bolaño.

But I mention this because it is, critically, not that displacement strategy which I think is served by the oral history. Now, to be disclose-y, I am not what you'd call an oral history expert; the only other one I have read is Rant by Chuck Palahniuk which, like the Savage Detectives, is totally made up. What I think Bolaño is doing, and doing better than Palahniuk does in Rant, is to create different time signatures. The passages that made up Rant tended to be roughly the same size, and passed not chronologically as far as the events related were concerned, but seemed presented chronologically with their telling. Not so with the Savage Detectives. So far, I have sorted out three kinds of passage: one, the self-contained stories, like Auxilio Lacouture on her activities during '68 or Norman Bolzman talking about Ulises Lima in Tel Aviv; then, the running commentaries that keep pace with Our Guys, like those by Quim Font and his daughters, or Luis Sebastian Rosado, whose years of comment keep ticking up; and then, by itself, the very long description of an encounter with Arturo Belano and Felipe Muller that we get, alway from 1976, from Amadeo Salvatierra. That last one, in particular, is probably one on which to keep an eye.

As usual, these ideas are inchoate, and consist mostly of notes and very little of judgments (beyond the fact that, given that I am now reading this book at a rather fast pace, they appear to be working). But so. There's something about the Savage Detectives to bear in mind. Until to-morrow, friends.

Where's Waldo?

2009-01-21T23:09:00.003-05:00

Today I have some books missing. Now, I always have books missing, somewhere or other. Many of them are lost to the ages, that I lent to people whom I no longer ever see, like the pothead who ran the coffee shop in Lockport when I was in high school, or the son of my family doctor. Others, I just don't see around my bookshelves anymore and can simply not account for. The white whale of these books is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition), which I had to buy for English 121, in 2004, and which fell into a black hole shortly thereafter. But. This white noise of lost books is nothing at all compared to the freakout in which I engage when I lose a book which I am in the middle of reading. This has happened before, as documented here, when I left Gargantua and Pantagruel at a Buffalo Bisons game, and couldn't handle 24 hours before buying a new one. Now, the book I have lost is Ralph Waldo Emerson's Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, a book that my facebook Visual Library says I've been reading for eight months.

I kind of have; I keep starting it and then getting distracted and then deciding that the part where I pick up isn't resoundingly Emersonian enough and starting again at the beginning. But now, I don't know where it is, and I find this troubling. Should I clean out all of our cars? Look in the refrigerator (I've found books there before)? Last night, after looking for it at my uncle and grandfather's houses, I went to Barnes and Noble and stood looking at the outside of the book for like twenty minutes, wondering whether or not to spend $4.95 on a new one. To put how hard of choice this really should've been in perspective: I spent more than twice that much this weekend buying shots of Ouzo for the bartender. But I didn't buy it, then went home and sat around scowling that I didn't have any books of Emerson to read. I tried reading some Civil Disobedience, but it just wasn't the same.

Thinking about it, I have no idea why I didn't just buy a new damn Selected Essays &c. I have some things underlined in my current copy, but nothing that's really lighting the world on fire. Most, in fact, are things that I got all excited about from recognizing them from other things that referred to Emerson, like the epigram to Then We Came to the End (Is it not the chief disgrace in life, not to be considered a unit?) or things that Bootie Tubb really liked from the Emperor's Children. I guess I just like having lost books. I wish them well; I hope that they are doing right by whoever has found them. (The big exception in this case is my copy of High Fidelity, which was lent out and which, I have on good authority was unread and then later dropped in a ditch and not recovered, sad, sad.) So. I think I will resign to another lost book, and by another copy later today, and keep it on my shelf next to my successor copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel. A proud spot, indeed.

The Book Review Review

2009-01-19T20:28:00.004-05:00

There was a big deal a few years ago, when the Detroit Tigers were all of the sudden good, when Jim Leyland had Pudge Rodriguez bat, for either the first time in his career or for the first time in a long time. That it was it was like when, smack first in the Book Review this week (subtitled "Democratic Vistas"), we get a facefull of roundup, this time a roundup of books about Obama by the guy who wrote my AP US History textbook. The leadoff roundup has all the benefit, really, of an extra essay, which is basically never bad. Brinkley gives a brisk rundown of books about the election, including one that he says is interesting but less prescient than it should be; the former because it is by Rahm Emmanuel and the latter because it is by 2005 Rahm Emmanuel. Which made me think: who is reading these election books? Don't the kind of people who would get these, just get newspapers instead? It seems to me like topical books like this need an angle on which to hang their hats, like Recent Book I Liked Imperial Life in the Emerald City: for years, it can be The Book about the Green Zone. I'm not sure that things bode well for books to be The Book about the Obama campaign, if they are being collected in a roundup by Alan Brinkley. But who knows.

The other democratic vistas all look either sobering or inspiring, just as they ought to; there's Gwen Ifill's book The Breakthrough, a book on the composition of Martin Luther King's Dream Speech, and a piece on a spate of books about FDR. Never one to shirk their Prime Directive, they also throw in a few otherwise-ly literary choices. And the essay, about William Buckley meeting Reagan, and the way they represented the battle between the brains and the brawn of the conservative movement, is intriguing. All in all a decent one, but still waiting to return to midseason form after the winter holiday.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists

2009-01-19T17:04:00.004-05:00

So I guess if you're a visceral realist, the word of the day, everyday, is "poetry". Like I said earlier, Brian Blood is skeptical of the visceral realists and their poetry. I kept making the "These books make me want to smoke on curbs in Lima" argument, and he kept saying "Yeah, but you won't talk about poetry all the time like they do." This is, perhaps, true. In general, I do not talk that much about poetry, except in April (and, btw, get ready for a bonanza April). But I think that I could, and I think that I for sure would if I were friends with the poet Ulises Lima.

This is how, early in his career (1976, when he was 18 or so), Ulises Lima is described as creating poetry:

He wrote constantly, that's what I remember most about him, in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing. and he never wrote poems, he wrote stray lines that he'd assemble into long strange poems later on if he was lucky...

That's Lima, and that's what I want to be; or rather, that is the kind of poetry that I could talk about all of the time. There's a kind of poetry not in vilanelles, or perfectly formed pieces of performance, but in scribbled down bits -- stray lines that could, maybe, be assembled into long strange poems. More so even then the kind of commitment to poetry that, in their more theoretical moments motivates the visceral realists, this kind of commitment to words is what makes me glad to have, on the basis purely of hype, picked this as our book club book.

But you guys? What do you like about it?

Short Story COUNTDOWN

2009-01-15T12:52:00.004-05:00

So here's another list you all like so much, this time of my favorite short stories. I am not, I think, a short story expert, because I've only read one short story by Chekhov and that was in ninth grade. But whatever, I'm not a Judy Blume expert or a Robert Herrick expert either, and lord knows that didn't stop me from talking about them. Top five:

6. Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk, by Franz Kafka -- So I think there are basically three kinds of short stories: short stories that basically do what novels do, but shortly; short stories that have a plot culminating in some sort of gimmick, like stories by O. Henry; and then there are stories like the ones by Kafka and Borges and Steven Millhauser, that are all gimmick and almost no plot. Like the one by Millhauser all about the town that is a copy of the town that the narrator lives in, or Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which is all about an encyclopedia. There is not really a plot, as such, to my favorite Kafka story, Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk. It is all about the one mouse, in the mouse community who wants to sing songs, and the slow-building resentment of the rest of the mice. It is a great slow burn, of mouse resentment, and it's weird, and, for Kafka, it's surprisingly undepressing. Or rather, still pretty depressing, but more depressing about mice than about us, which kind of lets us off the hook.

5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl --This story absolutely freaked me out when I read it as a kid, because at one point, the narrator interrupts his story about a guy who uses yoga to see through the backs of cards and win money to tell you what might happen next, and what the narrator tells you is that Henry -- a slightly unscrupulous but generally charming guy -- may just look at himself in the mirror and see, with his yogic powers, a blood clot, and then fall over dead. What actually happens is that Henry becomes a philanthropist, and founds orphanages all over the place. Imagine being twelve and having this author butt in to tell you that his characters survive only because of his caprices, that he could at any minute blood clot any one of them, even the titular hero of his "wonderful story". Yikes. This one gets on the list on sheer oomph.

3. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri -- This is a pretty good example of the short story as a mini-novel: it's got an interesting, metaphor-ready situation (the main guy is a tour guide whose other job is translating diseases for a doctor who doesn't know English) and then a few hours' worth of emotionally charged plot. Not a lot "happens" happens, but with Lahiri's quiet prose, not a lot happens very very strikingly.

2. Menelaiad by John Barth -- This thing, which is seven levels of story going in and then seven more exploding out, is a bravura retelling of some of the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, told by Menelaus. Of the stories on this list, except for the creepy authorial interlude in Henry Sugar, this one has the most going for it in terms of short story gimmick, what with its nested stories and classical references and such. And in the middle of all of that is the most plangent thing I think I've ever read -- in the middle of yet another narrative three-ring-circus about his slightly embarrassing marital life, Menelaus breaks through half a dozen layers of story to ask the reader, "Why don't they call her Helen of Sparta?" It there were ever a claim on which to hang my nerdy hat, ladies and gentlemen, there it is.

1. Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov -- The season is cloudy and dull, but the story is wonderful. This is not a short story that's built like a novel, but a short story built like someone talking to you about a novel. It is also elegaic and full of delightful sentences and remorseless analysis, which is why I like it so much. I think that it strikes a mood of elegy, in fact, that is uniquely suited to a short story -- such a novel would get maudlin, such poems have too much the element of performance about them (see Dr. Johnson on Lycidas, e.g.) -- and makes it my favorite instance of what a short story can do.

Nonfiction Lunch

2009-01-15T11:17:00.005-05:00

Every New Year's my Uncle Paul names the year that's going to happen. For the first few years this millennium, it was Body 2000, then Body 2001, and so on. Then it was 2004: It's All Coming Together, which was really the rightest one because that year his family gained a cute daughter, and the Red Sox won the World Series and the Patriots won the Super Bowl, which got Uncle Paul all amped up. Since then it's been things like 2006: Nice One and 2008: This Year We Play For Keeps. Anyway, the thing is that the little manifesti that Uncle Paul announced to go along with the year names were usually only partially achieved. Like all named things, the years since 2000 have been in some way a disappointment. And even so with the dead horse I'm going to here kick, my Summer of Adventures without Underlining.

That, the lonelier of you will recall, is what I meant to do last summer in order to save money and learn things: since I didn't expect them to have a lot of finely tuned phrases (no "(picnic, lightning)"s to scribble under), I could forgo underlining nonfiction books. And because I didn't have to write in these books, I could get them at the library (cheap!). And then, as you know from my reporting on the epic battle of me vs. Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, the best laid plans &c. But! I have been secretly sticking with it, to surprise you! On a day just such as this! With the news that I have kept up low-level commitment to nonfiction books, and, for an inveterate fiction snob like yrs truly, it has been going ok.

Of books I wanted to read, I am not doing so hot. I've only read one, the Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, but that is the one about which I want to talk to you today. The Nine was a very good book, and had a lot to say about the Supreme Court under William Rehnquist, and some sharp things to say about where the court is headed now. That said, the only thing that really stuck with me about the book (apart from a few zingers from Scalia) was that David Souter eats an apple for lunch every day -- and eats the core, too. That blew me away. Did his parents teach him, in harsh New Hampshire winters, that no part of the apple should go to waste? And did their parents? Or did Justice Souter just decide one day, enough is enough, I'm eating this whole apple? This was the main thing I took away from this sharply written, thoroughly researched book about one of the three most important bodies in the United States. That probably means something.

Anyway now I'm reading the Dark Side by Jane Mayer, which is good. On the lunch front, all I've seen so far is that David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, ate gazpacho for lunch everyday by himself. That seems to be sadly humanizing, but doesn't hold a candle to Justice Souter's bravura, philosophy-encapsulating lunches. More on nonfiction next week, and a list later today!

This Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare

2009-01-15T00:50:00.005-05:00

So, I took my show on the road this weekend, hoping to knock off some books. You will remember, from your slavish devotion to this website, that I am trying to pack in the ol' library a little, by means of reading some of these freaking books before buying more. It has gotten to the embarrassing point. When I meet women in bars, I am sick of the sheepishness with which I have to say, on presenting them with the wallet-sized photo of my bookshelves in my wallet, "Well, you know actually, I haven't read all of them...no, actually, I haven't really read about that, er, third in the middle". My dad doesn't impress patients with a bunch of diplomas on his office wall that he's thinking about getting. So anyway: trip to New York, booklight, big hopes about finishing Jane Mayer's the Dark Side, Ben Jonson's the Alchemist, and maybe putting a dent in Rabelais and his World. Way-ell, that is not what happened. Rather, I read thirty pages of the Dark Side, none of anything else, and wound up with a net gain of like 1000 pages on my increasingly onerous spreadsheet of pages left to conquer.

Part of this was not my fault (Christmas, magnanimity). Part of it was (outright theft). Happily, none of it was books bought, so at least I am doing ok in the "Don't Buy Books" part of my resolutions for a better life. I was not (imaginarily) peer pressured into buying these 1000 pages by cute booksellers; I did not do any mental gymnastics to convince myself things like, "If I didn't think I was supposed to tend bar on a particular day, but then did, the money made that day is free money and thus can be spent on books." But I got more books, nonetheless. I feel like Lyra Belacqua, and book pages are dust. Just unavoidable, given who I and what they are. So what am I going to do?

On the drive home from this eye-opening trip to New York, I did what you've been waiting for me to do ever since I called this feature what it's called, and I thought about Shakespeare. Specifically I thought about this:

...But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required,
Some heavenly music, which even now I do
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.

(I love that he's going to bury his broken staff "certain fathoms" in the earth; not five or a few, but "certain".) That's right: I thought about, deeper than ever did plummet sound, drowning my books. Getting rid of 'em, something. But that seems like such a throwing-one's-hands-up-in-resignation thing to do. Prospero, shortly after this announcement, claims further that in Naples, in his post-libricide life, every third thought will be his grave. Unpleasant! So here's what I am going to do. I am going to view that spreadsheet as onerous no longer. It's not a list of books I haven't read, but a list of books that I have thought about having had read. Subjunctivity will save my face again. What a happy day! Also, I'm going to tell my dad what the hell, go ahead and throw that MA in Architecture he's always fantasized about right up on his wall.

Los Detectivos Salvajes: (Upside Down Exclamation Point)Primera Vista!

2009-01-13T13:09:00.005-05:00

So what's going on in the Book Club Book, you ask, having remembered that it is Roberto Bolano's the Savage Detectives, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer? Not a lot. As far as I know, I and Blood are reading it actively, and we have slight commitments from the Dudebrodawgman's father, which is good, but anyway here comes a CAVALCADE OF SPOILERS so sit back.

I'm 140 or so pages into the book, which has been narrated by a guy named Juan Garcia Madero, who is usually called by his friends the Poet Garcia Madero. i do not want to hang out with the Poet Garcia Madero, but that's ok, because he is about to be relieved of narrative duties. What will continue, I know from reviews, is a bunch of different narrators will take over and slowly tell us more and more about the Main Event of this novel, the chief visceral realists, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. Even if you hadn't read the reviews, you would know that these guys are ones on whom to keep an eye, given that a) they always show up as a unit and b) the latter guy has a name that looks a whole lot like Roberto Bolano's name. This is maybe one of the few times I have wondered why a writer would throw such an obvious reminder of himself into a text and come up with an almost immediate answer: in a book in which the most important people are only seen peripherally, it's a heck of an effective way to get us to remember that he's important. And that might make Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano the coolest people I've ever seen in a piece of writing.

They show up occasionally in Garcia Madero's diary, which is more about women that he has slept with. The bounce in and out, usually making oracular claims like that the visceral realists walk "backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown." Garcia Madero:

I said I thought this sounded like the perfect way to walk. The truth was I had no idea what he was talking about. If you stop and think about it, it's no way to walk at all.

Too true, pedestrian Garcia Madero. And that's the whole point of these guys: marked with his author's name, Arturo Belano and his friend maintain their haunting, outrageously cool auras, models of coolness cooler than real people, or even real head-on characters in a novel could ever be. They are just too cool. Do you guys think so? I mean, every time I read about them much I want to grab one and maybe two friends of mine and move somewhere -- Vancouver, Tucson, Buenos Aires, anywhere far away -- and sit on curbs and smoke Camels and talk about books. It was brought to my attention that that was just what I wanted to do all of the time, which is not true, because as you know, some other non-book stimuli make me want to be drunk, rather than talking about books in Tucson. I am intrigued to see whether or not Bolano can keep this up; throughout the rest of this long book, whether or not is possible for mystique to be sustained for so long. Also, can people maintain being this cool while being way into poetry? Brian Blood says no. Next time I talk about the Savage Detectives, one of these days, I will tell you about the poetry angle that Blood finds so silly. Til then, patriots.

The Book Review Review

2009-01-12T22:03:00.002-05:00

Let's take a look at this Sunday Book Review, shall we? Frankly, when I first looked it over, I decided it looked a little boring so I read the whole thing while listening, over and over, to the whistle intro to "Patience" by Guns n Roses. So, uh, bear that in mind.

The big ticket reviews are a new novel about a guy who wishes he were a bird, a "no really, he wasn't that bad" book about William Randolph Hearst, and a bunch of letters from Allen Ginsberg. The latter made me wonder how much I will have to be interested in a writer to want to read his or her letters. I think someone should make a Best of Letters book. I would read that, and then know whose letters were worth pursuing. Same with journals. Get on this, Penguin.

Then we had the Roundups, which I read this week: a crime writing roundup, and a children's books roundup. The angle on the children's books were that they had to be about math. Here's what I thought about the crime roundup: everyone's worried about slim pickings available for long form journalism, and afraid that the Atlantic and the New Yorker are not bulky enough anymore. They should make the cover of PW next week look like US Weekly and have, I dunno, Harper's looking cadaverous in a bikini: LONG FORM JOURNALISM: HOW THIN IS TOO THIN? Anyway, what about really really short form journalism? Not like twitter, but like this crime roundup, which I thought was great because it just sat down and got the job done. It has abrupt little new paragraph ledes that reminded me of Groucho's time in the announcer's booth in Horse feathers. "When did publishers get so smart about re-issuing out-of-print mysteries?" she writes, after having written about something else. That's a great cold segue. I found this tremendous. Anyway, the kids' one was good too, it did what anything about childrens' fiction in the times should do, which is made me think "I should get that for my cousins so that when they're seventeen I can remind them about what a Hip Positive Influence I was." The other thing that jumped out about the kids' roundup was this: the reviewer, Jim Holt, who wrote a book about jokes I really liked, commends one author for her bold palette, then adds in a suspiciously offhand way: "those who experience numbers coloristically (in my case, four is blue, seven is green and eight is orange) know how important this can be in making friends with them." Wait, what? Do other people experience numbers coloristically? (Komorowski, I'm looking at you for help on this one.) This was definitely the hidden highlight of my week's reading of the book review.

The essay is about kids' books too, or rather a particular new kid's book that compiles old and out of print radically leftist stories for littluns. It is a good little essay, or rather a good longish review, but not one to set the world on fire, like that glorious old one about books that were turnoffs to teh ladies. Anyway, that's all for today, a bunch more on Bolano tomorrow, PAX.

Party Party

2009-01-09T00:11:00.003-05:00

This is the Thursday listicle, showing up on Friday because I'm lazy and because my car started leaking gas and I had to take it to the shop and then go to the gym or WHATEVER. In the future I hope to bring you more fun things on Thursdays. I have to report to you on the doings of the Mechanical Reproductionists, who are still at large and still about as much a book club as this thing, and we'll get to that Friday-proper-ish. But for today, this ersatz Thursday (and my mother's birthday!) here is a Thursday listicle, of the top parties in literature, which I would like to have attended. Bear in mind that these are the ones I would have wanted to attend, not necessarily the best or rock-out-ingest ones. Frankly, I probably would have just been resentful and sat in the corner at most of the rock-out-ingest ones, and I can do that in real life.

5. Pnin's Faculty Party -- just because I feel for the guy. I want to stay at his house once it's over, and at the very end of that chapter yell "your glass isn't broken!" before he has to suffer.

4. A Gatsby party of some sort -- you've got to have at least one of those. When I was little and my big ambition was to be a fiction writer instead of a blogger, I tried writing a story about one of the first Gatsby parties. You've got to figure they were lame, right? By the time Nick shows up, the man is a legend, who floats around looking out across the harbor and being Mysterious. In my story, Gatsby sits around talking himself up to no one but Klipspringer, and they eat an awful lot of citrus that he had meant to garnish a lot of drinks with. Those are the ones I want to be at -- get in on the ground floor.

3. The party at the lying-in hospital in the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses -- yeah, I made fun of that chapter the other day, but who cares. The main reason I'd want to go is that Buck Mulligan is there, being ridiculous, claiming as soon as he shows up (at a maternity ward, mind you) that "it grieved him plaguily to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its purest pledges" and that he will try to combat this by offering, free of charge, his services as a fertiliser and incubator. And, at the end of the party, when they head out into Dublin, we get this:"The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum." If that isn't a description of a night that makes you want to find the next party, I don't know what is.

2. The boat party at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -- I can't decide whether it is more or less fun to remember that this would sort of be a boozy, hooker-y party with Jack Torrance, Frank Reynolds, and Grima Wormtongue. I'd go still, though.

1. The neverending floating party from Life, the Universe, and Everything (book three of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)-- this has been beau ideal of an event for me ever since getting together with a bunch of people stopped being called a playdate and started being called a party. This sealed it:

One night, long ago, a band of drunken astro-engineers of the first generation clambered around the building digging this, fixing that, banging very hard on the other, and when the sun rose the following morning it was startled to find itself shining on a building full of happy drunken people that was now floating like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.

That party, in the book, is on its third or fourth generation and shows no sign of stopping, so, you know, there may be time for me yet.

Why So Serious?

2009-01-07T13:28:00.005-05:00

Did you know that the New Yorker has talking, animated cartoons at their website? They are exactly what you expect from talking New Yorker cartoons: there is one frame, one of the characters delivers what would, in the magazine, be the caption, and the other characters respond minimally (in the two I watched, one woman in a boardroom backed away from a guy with a hand puppet, and in the other one a slug frowned). Why does the New Yorker have cartoons, incidentally? I mean, I like them; I'm glad they are there; but in an organ of serious long form journalism, why cartoons? Wikipedia tells me that Harold Ross founded the New Yorker because his old magazine, Judge, was too corny. From what I've dug up of Judge, Ross could've included just one cartoon about cowboy slugs a week, loaded the rest with depressing Seymour Hersh articles, and handily won the New York Magazine humor battle. Anyway, the cartoons stuck around, like the poems, sort of atavistically, and now here they are, littered among more technically serious business.

So that's that in cartoon/solemnity abutment; what about cartoon/solemnity melding? Not stuff like Watchmen, which is hardly really a cartoon, but stuff like Steven Millhauser's Cat 'n' Mouse or Derek Zumsteg's Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever, both of which consider, very very seriously, very very frivolous things. The former takes as its object of study Tom and Jerry cartoons in general, and the latter a particular Looney Tune, "Baseball Bugs". The former performs a sort of literary analysis on the lives and motives of a cat and a mouse not unlike Tom and Jerry, and the latter performs sabermetrics on a ludicrous game of baseball played, on behalf of a collection of geriatrics, by Bugs Bunny against some thugs. What they have in common is a relentless commitment to not wink. Millhauser's story has passages like this:

This makes the cat dangerous, despite his stupidity, for the mouse recognizes that he himself has long periods when the cat fades entirely from his mind. Moreover, despite the fundamental simplicity of the cat’s nature, it remains true that the cat is cunning: he plots tirelessly against the mouse, and his ludicrous wiles require in the mouse an alert attention that he would prefer not to give.

And also passages like this:

The cigar explodes. When the smoke clears, the cat’s face is black. He gives a strained, very white smile. Many small lines appear in his teeth. The teeth crack into little pieces and fall out.

The diction is the same; the authorial attitude is the same; and yet.

Zumsteg is similar, though he keeps asking how, rather than why, the preposterous events of cartoons have come to pass. He considers Bugs Bunny's unorthodox fielding style, and has this to say:

That means that Bunny was able to cause the ball to accelerate by at least 50mph/s^2. Based on these calculations, it would seem possible for Bunny to actually fly and even to achieve escape velocity and orbit the planet using only his heckling. However, it’s important to note that as demonstrated in this game, we can only definitely establish from the footage that he is able to perform the acceleration when drawing an object to him, and only on the baseball.

There is a natural inclination to say (many of the people who commented at USS Mariner have said) that the focus of serious critical apparatus on cartoons is simply a waste of time. Really? For one thing, in neither of these cases does it seem like a waste of time relative to the most probable alternative -- say, doing literary analysis on Ralph Nickelby rather than a mouse, or doing sabermetrics on like the Seattle Pilots-- and I don't even think any of those things is really a waste of time. Another inclination would be to say that somehow it's an eiron's work to treat frivolous things like cartoons as bits of seriousness -- that it levels down, and shows as frippery our attempts to take serious things seriously -- but I don't think that's right, either. What I think is that this work is a kind of leveling up: if Bugs Bunny has merited sabermetrics, if we give the same attention to Jerry the mouse as we do to Lambert Strether, maybe that is good news too for the rest of us; maybe eventually we'll all deserve remorseless analysis.

This First Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare

2009-01-06T13:11:00.005-05:00

So, this is part of the New Year overhaul attempt: the Tuesday morning-ish installment of Unpacking My Library, which I have codenamed "This Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare", in which I will have something to say about my adventures as a person who thinks about books, and Shakespeare in particular, more often than the other "guys seeking friendship" on Buffalo craigslist. I imagine that this series will have a lot to say about bookstores. And this installment, in fact is going to be all about bookstores, as well as The Economy, because that's what the whole internet is talking about and who am I to disagree. It doesn't actually wind up having any Shakespeare mentioned, though I did look at a few books about him at the bookstore. Maybe I could do with a better segment title? Thoughts?

Yesterday I talked to one of my friends who had recently decided that she didn't know anything about the economy, because she talked to people from Barclays and found herself conversationally adrift. Rather than sniffily call economics the dismal science and get back to Bolano, which is what I would have done, she trooped out and got Alan Greenspan's the Age of Turbulence, which is what I would have done if weren't lazy. She also bought the World without Us by Alan Weisman, about what would happen if we homo sapiens turbulent ourselves right off the planet. So, bleak. Anyway, that was yesterday.

Today, I got hustled out of bed in the EARLIEST HOURS of the morning, in order to take one of my brothers to school because the other brother had made off with his car. Being up then, with no plans for the next five hours, I decided to go to Starbucks and read, and from there I decided to go to Barnes and Noble and see what was up. It was bleak there, too: all of the holiday-fattened displays had slimmed down, and even the once proud front display, where mere weeks earlier I had seen Paul Krugman's new book about Depression economics rubbing spines with A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O'Reilly now was all fitness books. And not entirely new fitness books -- books that people already deludedly bought when they were going to really change their lifestyles in 2006. This was depressing: not enough books. We hear about that all the time, of course; print media is always in crisis, and why not? The number one way to deal with a print media crisis is to write about it, and that gives a lot of us something to do, and some people even something to do in print.

What struck me the most about these two days, though, was the way in which the latter undercut the former: that is, the problem that one of the ways in which people try to understand Our Troubled Times is to read books, while one of Our Time's Troubles is that books are getting sparser. I can't imagine that the kind of information that my friend sought in her books by Alans will go away (or at least not before we are in much deeper trouble than that), and I suppose that kind of faith in things to get written is something on which to hang our collective hat. But it's more troubling to think about slimmer bookstores, offering less comfort to the only recently ungroggy who go to just wander around among all that heft of words.

Of course, I could just go in my room, where there is a shit ton of books sitting around, too. So I've got options.

What's the Story, Book Review?

2009-01-06T02:57:00.003-05:00

So you can tell that I wasn't dicking around about that recommitment to this blog, I am posting again, in what I hope will be a new running feature in which I tell you what I think about the New York Times Book Review. For friendless book nerd, the New York Times Sunday Book Review is the most important thing that happens every week. It's got a lot going for it. It comes on Sunday, and what else are you going to do on Sunday? It combines book reviews, lists of best sellers to be indignant about, and, the piece de resistance, the Fun Essay About a Topic. This is the NYTBR equivalent of the New Yorker's Critic at Large pieces, which are basically little chunks of thinking out loud about books that are occasioned by Events. Lots of times, the Event is a biography or a movie or something. This week's fun Essay About a Topic is about a new translation of something, namely Kafka's first novel, Amerika. Adam Kirsch considers the weirdness of this, Kafka's first and unfinished novel, as the first spin of a spiral that "surveys the same spiritual territory but from a [progressively] more commanding height." As Adam Kirsch, who wrote this essay, notes, Amerika is the least commanding height; the Trial and the Castle would later encompass more of our guilt, and understand our complicity in a way that the more defensive Amerika fails to.

This Fun Essay About a Topic was a good one. As for the rest of the NYTBR, well, I will admit that this first week was not the best, and that I did not (ahem) technically read all of it. Or really any of it, apart from that thing about Amerika and the review of Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman, which failed to be totally excoriating and thus determined that I will end up reading Downtown Owl. Which leads me to want to say another thing about why the NYTBR on Sundays is so great: the reviews. What's so great about the reviews, you ask me, those are in every day excluding Saturdays! Well, I say, these aren't just any reviews. They are like the Judicial Branch reviews. Every day, Janet Maslin, Michiko, and those other guys show up lay down the book review laws. Then, once a week, in rolls the big shots, reviewing books that may or may not have been reviewed by the everyday guys, doing whatever they please. Interpreting the laws. So anyway, hopefully soon I will have more things to say about the reviews. But for now: don't necessarily avoid Downtown Owl.

Auld Lang Syne

2009-01-06T02:43:00.002-05:00

And resume. Happy New Year, kinder! So, that was a long vacation, and I'm sorry. I have successfully navigated some claims on my time, and now we’re back: in the spirit of backness, I'm officially turning the page on Pnin (sorry, Pnin) and declaring a new book...at the bottom of this post (surely you all remember the heady early days of this blog in which I communicated mainly by e-mails that had 800 words of throat-clearing followed by the book pick at the end; and here we are again). Before I get to that, I want to say some things about another one that got away: our old pal Henry James.

Not the real Henry James, but David Lodge's Henry James, the fussy old failed playwright who is the going concern of Author, Author, a book of which I claimed that it was thin on top, and which I held out hopes that it would get portly in the middle. These are some hilarious jokes when one remembers that Henry James himself was both of those things, and because I am actually laughing right now as I type them for the second time, I can see why I am often lonely. Anyway, I read the rest of that book, along with most of Kafka's short stories, on a trip to visit my grandmother in Florida a few months ago, but only remembered to tell you more about them until just now. Oh well.

One of the reasons that I was originally fascinated by the idea of this book was because I liked Henry James and because I liked the sort of decoupage idea that a successful and established writer would want to plaster a different successful and established writer all over one of her novels. To this end, I bought Author Author and The Master of Petersburg and decided to get cracking. And then, best laid plans as you know, of course, and I wound up not reading them for a while. So here, belatedly, is what we have to say about: the Purloined Author.

Though, before going on, this is what C. Auguste Dupin has to say about a method for finding a purloined letter: “When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is anyone, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart as if to match or correspond with the expression.” That’s what Dupin learned from a schoolboy who hustled for marbles, and it set me to imagining Lodge fashioning the expression of James’s face, or the lightly bearded Coetzee fashioning the expression of the massively bearded Dostoevsky. But none of that happened in these books I read; the Master of Petersburg reads an awful lot like Disgrace, and Author, Author looks an awful lot like Changing Places. Neither book knocked my socks off; I don’t know if they would have, had one sounded more like Crime and Punishment and the other more like the Ambassadors. That may have been worse, actually, netting us a kind of limp parody or, god help us, something like the Oxen of the Sun chapter from Ulysses.

The Lodge book had a few moments that seemed like the explanations to jokes; at one point, his Henry tells his friend du Maurier that his cousin Minny, for whom he had stilted romantic feelings, had “a burning desire to do something great with her life.” Du Maurier responds: “Like Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady?” I cannot imagine a circumstance in which Henry James would ever need reminding whence Isabel Archer, and I cannot imagine a friend of his thinking that he needed such reminding. That is the problem with this guy, the protagonist of Author, Author: we frequently are reminded that he is Great Novelist Henry James, which gets irksome. It is as if people kept asking Hamlet if he felt melancholily Danish; to be part of a believable universe, it is better if that sort of tag is just assumed. This is not to say that the book is irrevocably scuttled; just occasionally bothersome. In fact, I enjoyed greatly the section in which James’s play opens miserably; its panoramic view (of other notables sitting in the audience) and its lack of Henry James proselytizing (all he does is fidget) made it an interesting portrait of an artist as his play flops.

The Dostoevsky of the Master of Petersburg is not constantly reminded of his Dostoevskiness, which is slightly odd given that unlike the events of Author, Author, the plot to which he’s purloined is almost entirely made up. It is built up out of some facts about a historical nihilist named Nechaev, some from Coetzee’s biography, and some from a suppressed chapter of Dostoevsky’s Demons. Out of this stew we get a peripatetic author, who gads about Petersburg thinking Dostoevsky things (beauty will save the world, gambling is great) in Coetzee’s short, present tense sentences. (For some reason, I can’t imagine the actual Dostoevsky abiding the historical present tense, by the way.) In both books, I found myself consistently wondering just why these authors had been impressed into protagonist duty, and unable to come up with much. Michiko Kakutani finished the Master of Petersburg “marveling at the waste of Mr. Coetzee’s copious talents on such an odd and unsatisfying enterprise.” I’m with her. Like the letter in Poe’s story, Dostoevsky seems to just sit available in the open – in his own writing – while Coetzee dismantles the tables all around him, searching for what’s really going on.

I don’t know if this spells the end for these other-writer books with which I thought I’d be so delighted; I’ll hold out hope for Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, about Shakespeare. But! In book club news, here we shift back to the safer territory of books about thinly disguised versions of their own authors, with: the Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano, a book that the part of me that pretends that I have Janet Maslin’s cell is shocked I haven’t read already. I have actually started it; it is fabulous. Expect fuller updates later in the week, as we begin a new and newly committed year of unpacking my library.

Proof that God Loves Us and Wants Us to Be Happy

2008-11-21T11:58:00.000-05:00

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.

Hamlet's Buddy

2008-11-20T00:05:00.001-05:00

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.

Review Reviews

2008-10-06T21:45:00.006-04:00

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!

Loudth

2008-10-03T13:32:00.007-04:00

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 Barth, Norman 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.

Listmania

2008-10-01T23:48:00.007-04:00

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.

Ganging Agley

2008-09-30T23:31:00.002-04:00

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.

Two Things

2008-09-20T15:47:00.001-04:00

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.

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-13T23:07:00.002-04:00

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.

Celebrating Old Birthdays

2008-09-08T21:43:00.004-04:00

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.

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

2008-08-29T01:32:00.003-04:00

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.

I'll Get You, Carnivalesque

2008-08-25T16:20:00.004-04:00

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.

The Water Father

2008-07-30T23:49:00.007-04:00

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.

Pnin: What to Expect

2008-07-11T02:05:00.003-04:00

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.

Garbage Robots and Housekeeping

2008-07-07T23:54:00.003-04:00

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.