Bob Einstein's Literary Equations

Call This a 'Shane Jones Thank You Card', If You Like

2012-02-07T15:28:00.000-08:00

Ah yes, I do still exist here. Somewhat thoughtfully, even!

Who doesn't enjoy fables? And dreams, whose dreams aren't pleasant? A lot of times mine aren't. They're interesting, but I'd describe them as exhausting, too. Like getting into an involved conversation with a bespectacled, post-menopausal woman in the middle of a labyrinthine shopping mall, at the bottom of a staircase worthy of M.C. Escher. At which spot we conversed about how the staircase was stylistically similar to those staircases built in the '80s, lacquered wood-paneling for hand supports and thin, gray metal beams fixing them in place and completing the baluster -- although, as she'd said, it had been built even earlier than that, at least as early as the '70s. It had pre-dated the style. Perhaps it was the very first of its kind?

Now, what the hell was the point of regaling you with that, you wonder?

It illustrates why nobody likes to hear about your dreams, so stop bothering them. And in so doing, it offers an example of why, though dream-like (as many great works of fiction are), "Light Boxes" by Shane Jones is much much better than that reductive categorization. (Further, that that categorization is extremely easy and lame and when accompanied by nothing or little else, the term "dream-like" is pretty much devoid of meaning.)

Firstly, the plot, oh, the plot, indeed!

The plot operates as a kind of character in itself, stretching the limits of what its characters can endure. What they're asked to endure, put plainly, is an endless February that's together a person (the primary antagonist), a place (the two-holed opening in the sky (although this is admittedly a bit tenuously labeled, as the two holes isn't referred to expressly as February, but more as the residence of February; oh bother), and a thing (the endless winter in which circumstances of the narrative are situated).

Then there are the narrative shifts in perspective, from any number of the heroes, to February him/itself, to the girl who smells of honey and smoke (a simple description which is pretty remarkable for its potent terseness; a description you can almost taste).

There's much in the way of abstraction, and certainly in this abstraction, much metaphor to parse. I kind of like looking at it as a straight-up narrative, though. I remarked in an earlier post, a post I'd written before I'd known much at all about about "Light Boxes," writing that "everything in the novel is February. A nice and cold month devoid of feeling" (I was referring to Sam Pink's "Person" but apparently I could just as easily have been talking about "Light Boxes"). I feel like I get it, Mr. Jones, casting "February" as your villain IS the only logical choice.

And what a conflicted villain. We never know much about February's angle, except that it's something he/it feels he/it must do. There seems to be no pleasure resultant from the imposition of an endless winter. This subsequent lack of understanding motivation, even where understanding them means understanding something truly terrible, is repelled by most people. We want to know why people go on shooting sprees, or crash planes into buildings or commit a Holocaust. That's what Thaddeus, the leader of the townspeople, seems to desire. Why are people taken from him (in various ways) and why won't February end? How do we make it end? His obsession leads him down a road fraught with hazards, until finally he comes face-to-face, I think, with February.

It's a great read.

Oh, and apparently it's February now, as I'm writing this. Believe or not, that wasn't planned, though I do so love good coincidences.

Let's Get This Party Started on a Friday Afternoon

2012-01-20T10:33:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to beat around bush: I've got a collection of flash fictions, "Why God Why," coming from the newly conceived Love Symbol Press (also publishing heavy hitters like M. Kitchell, Josh Kleinberg and Heather Palmer; I'm in GREAT literary company, I mean / humbled to be included). The collection will be out later this year. No official date yet, just the broad 2012 label. STILL! I've enjoyed looking over potential cover art. Also there will be something in the neighborhood of 50 plus stories included when alls said and done. Swede.

Parsing "Us" By Michael Kimball

2012-01-18T20:39:00.000-08:00

"Us" by Michael Kimball is one of those novels that is so evocative, so emotive that in so conjuring, it does a lot to defy labeling or being "understood." Certainly one of its primary themes is mortality, and the effects of that inescapable truth on love and the living. But I'm not entirely comfortable with boiling it down to that. I think it's better to look at it as a great big whole without a distillative thesis.

So then, the whole. Well...

The narrator's wife is stricken with some form of illness, sending the narrator into a panic to save her. What follows is a rather surreal journey into the highs and lows of "The End" (there's some suggestion that the end is not The End, but that's all I'll say). The novel is heartbreaking, crushing. But it's powerfully so. It's the good kind of crushing, too. The kind I think everyone ought to force themselves to feel at least every once in a while. Not as practice. Not as prep for something bigger, but instead for its value as an emotive experience unto itself. Things can have value in and of themselves and not for some great palliative effect they offer later on. I believe this. Honest. I think it might be a touch contrary to the prevalent feeling of what does someone or something offer me as an individual, at this given moment but also possibly into the future. People and things don't have to be commodities, commodities we can then exploit for our specific needs and wants.

Nobody has to learn how to grieve. We know how to do that. Michael Kimball through "Us" offers a very powerful opportunity to be human in a very distinct way. To let us collectively experience a unique component of the human condition, having both its pros and cons, to be sure.

I don't want to oversell it. I feel I should always attach something like a rider that says: "Hey, that's how I experienced it, anyway. I hope you experience something similar because that leads to the great thing of relating, a great thing that people can do, that we have it in us to do." But that's not necessarily what will happen. I'm cool with that and I hope you are, too.

Thanks for reading!

What's in a Name?

2012-01-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

Well human psychology, I got one for you. Recently The Moonmilk Review began its transition to The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review. Fans of the literary references, Italo Calvino and F. Scott Fitzgerald respectively, needn't be clued in on their significance or their significant differences. Ultimately, it's all semantics / semiotics, what each as a word and image signifies in the mind of the beholder. Still, I get a categorically different sense from Moonmilk than I do from Eckleburg, even if the content of the publication should change very little. I, as beholder, am not a huge fan of "The Great Gatsby" -- although I do genuinely enjoy thinking about the image of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg regardless. (Dr. Eckleberg is one of my favorite parts of a novel I find generally underwhelming.) Alternatively, I'm a great fan of Calvino's collection "Cosmicomics" -- especially its "The Distance of the Moon," a story from which the term "moonmilk" in The Moonmilk Review is derived.

I know my misgivings about the name change will pass, as they'll have to necessarily since this is a thing out of my control. I will miss the name Moonmilk Review, though -- a surprisingly great deal, too. Much more than I would have ever assumed.

The Latest in Etgar Keret, "Creative Writing"

2012-01-10T08:27:00.000-08:00

I like when well known / regarded writers take a stab at writing about writing. Lorrie Moore's narrative second-person "How to Become a Writer" is an ought not to be missed kind of read, among stories like these. Handled deftly, they are a fascinating look at the creative process, the writing process in conversation and in workshop, even if / though it's not the "creative process" per se of the author of the fiction itself. And now, Etgar Keret has brought his own offering in the form of "Creative Writing," which appeared in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

Others I've enjoyed in this way are David Foster Wallace's character Rick Vigorous' storytellings in "The Broom of the System" and Will Self's disturbingly awesome "Nonce Prize" which concerns, among other things, creative writing in a prison setting -- and, actually I recall liking the stories within stories more than the primary narrative in novels like John Irving's "The World According to Garp." Even Albert Camus' "The Plague" plays with describing the writing process, when a character becomes enamored to the point of obsession with a sentence he's writing and constantly revising, to wit, "One fine morning in the month of May an elegant horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne."

Etgar Keret's "Creative Writing" left me feeling that, for all its many positives, the one thing I wished was also explored here? His characters' writing badly, or at least in a way that better suggested their novice status. Still, though, there's a lot here, and the stories within the story are conceptual oddities in themselves. At outset, the story concerns a couple who's recently experienced the loss of a child. I can't quite recall if this is expressly stated or implied. As recourse, as escape, as coping mechanism / impetus, the man suggests to the woman that she take up something like creative writing. She does and experiences success immediately, come in the form of praise from her instructor and peers. This leads to an odd form of envy in the man. He finds the woman talented, but also inscrutable. Her work is good but leaves something to be desired, he feels. He joins a beginner's creative writing course of his own. The narrative comes full circle. In a glib sort of way, I enjoy feeling the story's moral is: writing is hard, and endings are hardest of all.

Will Break Barry Graham [Stop] Must [Stop]

2012-01-05T11:04:00.000-08:00

AWP is rolling into Chicago come the end of February. At its commencement we'll be having a big arm wrestling tournament among writers and whatnot. What precipitated this? I challenged Barry Graham, DOGZPLOT Emperor-in-Chief, to an arm wrestling match. He then decided the tournament was a good idea (it is) and the thing has taken something of a life of its own. Worst case scenario? I lose and have to buy Barry Graham pizza and beer and kiss his ass literally and publicly. As you might imagine, I have no intention of losing. We'll see if strength and endurance on my side February 29th, though. I've been hitting the gym hard in the meantime. I expect this will pay dividends come arm wrastlin' time.

Also, Ben Tanzer is a traitorous ratfink who made one mistake when he double crossed me: he left me alive!

TEAM POWERBEEF!!! (That's my arm wrestling team. There's me, the wrestler, and there's the people I've conscripted to shout invective at my opponents / cheer me on (mostly the former, though).)

***

In other news, Jon Mau and I have concocted a template for further plans should Plan A and Plan B run afoul. You're free to use said template in your day-to-day lives as well, whenever the same happens to you.

Plan U - Try yelling at it from a seated position. Moving as little as possible. Saying something like, "I'm feeling too lethargic to respond to this physically."

Plan V - Sobbing quietly, hands resting on your face, cradling it as you're bent over yourself. Probably, you've moved little since Plan U, most likely not at all.

Plan W - Take a hostage. Then you release said hostage immediately, asking or pleading (most likely pleading) with them for assistance. You've been under a lot of pressure lately, is one big thing you might say to your erstwhile hostage.

Plan X - MELEE!!! (pronounced Mel-E)

***

New Untoward and Red Lightbulbs things in the world. Mark Jordan Manner, a really talented young writer, being a common thread between our two publications, as coincidence would have it.

I too have a publication on elimae that's up and at them now on elimae!

Things Which Will On Occasion Elicit Nothing

2012-01-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

Tao Lin. He's a fascinating figure/fixture in the world of contemporary indie lit. He's definitely hitting on something -- he has the ardent following to prove it. Gawker, even if sardonically, posts about his exploits often -- even going so far as to offer him a forum for posting of his exploits himself at least once. I consider myself neither a fan nor a hater. I'm an interested bystander. I was interested when discussion of Marie Calloway and Lin's role in publishing "Adrien Brody" and corresponding with its author broke a week or two ago. Then, despite its circular tendencies and refusal to take a specific position without contradicting that position, I quite enjoyed Janey Smith's reaction on Big Other.

Tao Lin is a curiosity, and as Janey Smtih notes in greater depth than I plan to go in here, he seems to deftly understand the importance of being great at getting attention. Everything else can be viewed as subjective in the marketplace, other than the plan fact of what sells. Tao Lin and Muumuu House sell, and much as I'm loath to admit it, Jordan Castro and the rest of the young Muumuuvian disciples are wise to get on board with this promotional machine. I'm sure it could be counted on one hand those people who know who Amelia Gray is or who Michael Kimball is or Blake Butler, even, but don't know of Tao Lin. If it's a shame that this is the case the best you'll be able to argue is for something subjective.

Of course it's crass to say because Lin has followers he also has merit. Fine, it's crass. So what? It's no less true. And even though I didn't much care for the substance of "Shoplifting From American Apparel," the first of Lin's books I've been able to get a copy of and read. It is fairly straightforward. It follows characters who are undoubtedly stand-ins for Tao and his gang, a fact all but revealed expressly in his Gawker piece cited above. He's simultaneously aware of the kind of "movement oriented" nature of his position in this place in history, having characters' remark to one another that they'll be no doubt referred to as the "blogniks," or some such media-driven expression to place them in the popular imagination of whatever discrete realm of pop culture they fit into. In so saying, he also has a hand in sort of positioning himself in this categorization, while also removing himself from it somewhat, by having his characters play aloof and dismissive of the idea.

So to the subjective, then, what can I make of "Shoplifting From American Apparel"? It's unlike anything I've ever seen only because of the discussion that surrounds it. But that's kind of fitting, in this day and age. When "reality" is yoked to television shows that are only real to the extent that their characters are marketable it's fitting that a major alt lit hero / pillar would be more worthy of praise for the things he elicits outside of his work and not from the work itself. Besides, he doesn't have time to entertain you with the outmoded medium of reading. I mean, there's just enough in there to keep you in it to the end, but the payoff there is minimal. Satire isn't part of it. Embracing a certain kind of commercialism certainly is, a certain commercialism lifestyle filled with iced coffees and vegan smoothies. All of this is to say Tao Lin knows what he's doing.

I think it's fitting I read Sam Pink just prior to reading Lin. They share many affinities but where Pink seeks if nothing else than to explore through his stories Lin is comfortable leaving the exploration tangential, as a reactionary aside to his life outside of writing or any art form whatsoever. Fair is fair, though, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention his literary forebears. No doubt the Beatniks were of a similar mind, Kerouac and Neal Cassady on the road. The blogniks pun is extremely apt if a little on the nose. Certainly, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. And last, but perhaps most apt of all, the literary Brat Pack of Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInierney renown. I can't help feeling, given their tendency to stay put and write about what was around them, the urban jungle of the 1980s, that there is more than a slight connection. Tao Lin's contemporary version of commercial culture is only slightly more terrifying and only because his characters seem to so earnestly and unthinkingly embrace it (and maybe that's the point). Reading about them left me feeling nothing, emoting nothing, empty of feeling, which might be where Lin diverges from all the other literary groups I mention. There's a catatonic quality to everything there, which to his credit freaks me out. If his goal was to freak me out with his emotionless writing he did accomplish that.

That's not to say it didn't have parts I thought were really strong. I liked the lockup scene, after Sam is arrested for shoplifting from American Apparel. I thought that was where some of the most heft of the story was found, in the visceral reaction of the inmates to one another and to their eventual pugnacious lockup partner, a man who was locked up for fighting in a Starbucks. He'd apparently gone there to go to the bathroom after a more verbal altercation with his assailant at the Bar he'd been at. It reeks of something true and honest, even if it's totally made up. Sam seems to understand that this is an important moment for him but he can't seem to understand how or why. The lack of serious introspection is further horrifying.

There's much to be horrified by in the works of Tao Lin.

And maybe it's good or maybe it's bad.

But those are pretty subjective things. after all.

First Read On E-Reader: "Person" by Sam Pink

2011-12-30T17:00:00.000-08:00

All right, before you judge me for having a kindle fire manufactured by the evil Amazon.com corporation, you should know that I'm very happy with its performance and that that should somehow make up for the terrible things Amazon.com does to competition in the arena of the free market.

Don't be evil and try your best not to be complicit. I will try harder.

No more questions!

***

(Brief parenthetical aside: I still like and plan to purchase paper books, often from used bookstores. This is what I tell myself and I know it to be true! Besides it's too hard for me to highlight passages and annotate margins on the e-reader. Paper books beat 'em where that's concerned.)

***

I read "Person" by Sam Pink. It's an unusual tale that reminds me somewhat of Daniil Kharms' disjointedness. Absurdity coupled with vague sense of the tragedy inherent in things being what they are and not necessarily logical. It's still funny, yes, but there's melancholy, too. Nobody can avoid the melancholy. You'd better learn how to cope with melancholy. It's a part of this. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, either.

A line I can imagine being in "Person" would go something like, "I met a student who was pre-med. He looked like he would be my doctor someday. He would always be the same way, and I might be a little bit different."

Here's another handful of lines actually from the novel and not just put upon it:

There's an advertisement for junior college along the inside of the train.

The ad features a smiling man holding books.

He looks nice.

One day I will figure out which stop the junior college is at and then I will go there and meet this man and we will help each other through life.

Pink seems concerned with the various superficiality of everyday life, and more to the point, the ephemerality that defines the superficial. The people you meet on the street aren't always going to be there. In fact, they'll be a part of your life far less time than the people you know, the difference between a year and a millennium. Those fleeting, superficial interactions tend to be the real and true microcosm of life and living. They constitute the people you knew in high school, say, and now only know on Facebook, if you know them at all. If you ever knew them at all.

Also, everything in the novel is February. A nice and cold month devoid of feeling. January might've also worked were it not too closely removed from Christmas and obviously New Year's (despite familial issues, unless something very negative happened to you at this time of year it's generally pretty positive, energy wise). Nobody cares about Valentine's Day. It's either too commercial or too lonely or both. Those things make it a sad holiday foisted on the public, and accordingly, it tends to be an afterthought -- even to those who enjoy it. It does not come up in "Person," which whether intentional or not, I agree with.

There's one epitomizing moment in which the unnamed narrator is confronted by his overly extroverted landlord, a landlord who wants all the building's tenants to be like family, and the landlord shows off a Halloween decoration she got at a discount because of its being so completely out of season. It does the thing it's supposed to do, this werewolf statue thing, apparently wiggling its arms staccato-like. More interestingly, the unnamed narrator does what he's supposed to, which is feign a kind of interest. He is a person enough to understand this nuance of human interaction.

There's also the sense of David Markson I felt in Pink's novel. In particular "Wittgenstein's Mistress" is very much felt. Take the plot of "Wittgenstein's Mistress" and put it in a world populated by other people, with a male narrator, and you have a nice, different sort of post-apocalyptic narrative. This is what I think Sam Pink fairly deftly achieves. The language is often terse and never overly florid, but it has this way of expressing a great deal. It makes you think and feel in a different way, a way that's purposely uncomfortable but, as you move through the narrative, you begin to find a kind of comfort, call it making do, with the lifestyle of the narrator, his nomadic existence. It's troubling but pleasing. It doesn't seem so bad. It seems like you don't always have complete control over your own fate, but you have some control over it, and with that you make what you will.

It's a fun read in the way that coming to terms with yourself and yourself in the grand scheme of things can be fun, when looked at from a certain kind of angle.

rowan university

2011-12-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

Peterbd gave me a little history lesson re: the history of the fine educational institution Rowan University. All of this is the god's honest truth. "Merry Christmas to you." - Frank Sinatra

i met a guy yesterday who graduated from rowan university.

he was like "wanna here how rowan university came to be?"

and i was like "no"

and he was like "listen anyway"

and i was like "ok"

and he was like:

jerome rowan was a billionaire from somewhere in europe and was incredibly tired of living in europe.

so jerome left europe in 1921 and decided to come to america. "america doesn't have stoopid

poopy head people like in europe" said jerome aloud. when jerome arrived in new york,

he decided to move to new jersey because the rent in williamsburg was high even for the 1920s.

"i'm a fucking billionaire" said jerome. "i'm gonna conquer new jersey and show those

williamsburg hipsters who's boss." "but how you gonna do that big daddy" said jerome's lover (at

the time). "you don't know a damn thing about academics." "get outta my house!" said jerome.

"anybody who doesn't believe in my abilities and doesn't love everything about me, needs to

get out of my life. so get out!" jerome's lover (at the time) later moved to the west coast

and had a tragic end as the black dahlia.

then i was like "so what's the point of this story. how did rowan university come to be?"

and the guy was like "hush up. i'm just gettin to the good part"

jerome unfortunately became addicted to crack in 1923 and blew all his billions. crack was

expensive in the 1920's so this was an extremely possible outcome. "what am i gonna do?"

said jerome. "i blew all my billions and can no longer give the middle finger to those hipsters

by building a university in new jersey". but just then, someone heard him. this someone was

craig rowan. craig was so inspired by jerome's sermon that he vowed to help him build the university

of his dreams. "just stay off the rock dude" said craig. "can do" said jerome. "but what's the catch?"

"there's no catch" said craig. "just make sure to name it rowan university". "my 1st girlfriend's

name was rowan and i loved her alot." "can do" said jerome. the end

then i was like "so what's the moral of this story? what's so great about rowan university?"

and the guy was like "matt rowan is part of the rowan lineage"

and i was like "but who's lineage? jerome's, craig's or craig's 1st girlfriend whom he loved dearly?"

and the guy was like "that's the thing. nobody knows."

and i was like "interesting. that's hella crazy"

and the guy was like "yup. bye"

and i was like "bye"

Too Friendly, Detailed Form Rejection

2011-12-20T21:34:00.000-08:00

So this is what passes as a form rejection down at Eclectica Magazine:
UPDATE: Given Ellen's considered response in the comments I feel it's useful to point out here and now that while I disapprove of the following I don't mean to indict Eclectica for it in specific -- just offer my opinion for why I disagree with this practice and using Eclectica's as an example of the practice in action. Certainly Eclectica is a fine publication and they are also not the only publication to reject in this fashion.)

Dear Matt,

Thank you for your submission to Eclectica Magazine. After careful consideration, I have decided not to select it for publication. There are many possible reasons for why a particular piece isn't selected, and I regret that I am unable, given time constraints, to offer further explanation as to which of those reasons applied to your work. I will say that you're in good company; as always, there were many authors and many pieces that I would have liked to include.

Best of luck with your writing and in finding a home for this work. I appreciate your support of online literature in general and Eclectica in particular, and I hope you'll try us again in the future.

Sincerely,
Tom // Eclectica

Don't get me wrong. I understand the good intent here. Or I think I do. But it's still misguided / misplaced if you ask me. If you decide to reject someone in a form way make it a form. Don't attempt being personal because that makes you seem like those dishonest salespeople who pretend they're all about good relations and honest sales practice but then find ways to subtly lose your confidence, allusions to things that suggest their inventory is limited and demand has been high, and sort of disingenuously pressuring you to buy. It's like either you be cold and streamlined, literary publication, or you legitimately put the legwork into actually being warm and friendly. This "happy medium" is unsettling and perplexing and makes me want to ralph on you, on one of you.

Want Your Interest for a Minute

2011-11-15T07:49:00.000-08:00

I'm just gonna fire right into this one. Went to Ear Eater for the first time yesterday. Apparently it's a reading usually held in a house and not a bar such as the Uptown Lounge, where it was held yesterday. But not this time, because it WAS held at the Uptown Lounge and it was hosted by Colin Winnette, who could quite possibly be the nicest person in the world. He should be in the running for that prize. And I don't mean that in some proto-Nietzschean (in which goodness is weakness), backhanded compliment sort of way. I mean that while I wish I were the nicest person in the world, Colin Winnette actually IS the nicest person in the world. So read his book! (read that also because he's a really good, up-and-coming writer.)

But also, at Ear Eater, some great writers. No surprise that Zach Dodson and A D Jameson were great. Love those guys. Zach Dodson read of England and bacon-ey chocolates to be had therein and Jameson read of a "great" friend whom he felt the need to disparage ad nauseam poetically.

It was Sara Levine who was my wild card, slated as the third reader in the group. But wow! She read a chapter from her forthcoming novel, "Treasure Island!!!" and WOW. Wow, I can't wait for this book. I need it and will have it. As will my girlfriend. We will each get copies. I will get one for her and then I will get one for me.

Meanwhile,

I had a few stories published, HERE and HERE.

Some items

2011-10-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

A few things, though it is exhausting to have to bother with actually typing these posts and then getting to the "publish post" button, a button I want to call "click post" for some reason I can't explain.

1.) Untoward Magazine will be having its one-year anniversary reading on December 14th at the Beauty Bar in Chicago, IL. So save that date! Or be square.

2.) Mason Johnson is up to his old tricks with P. Fanatics, and I will be a part of this next one. Ben Tanzer and I plan to team up to do something potentially real nice. I know with B-Tanz involved, at least half of what we do will be good. The other half will be me, which is sort of a mixed bag as that goes. Anyway that happens at Cole's Bar on Milwaukee, November 13th. Be there, or sadly don't. Its start time is always approximately 7:30pm.

3.) I story of mine was published on Red Fez this month! I've included a link in my sidebar of publications there, but I'll post one here too! This is to the issue in total. Read other people's great work. Red Fez has too much great writing. It'd almost be a problem if it wasn't great. http://www.redfez.net/

4.) I will have several more stories coming out in the very near future, which I will tell you about as they happen. Thanks for reading.

Time for "Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day"

2011-09-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

"Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day" is hands down, my favorite book of the year (and not likely to be supplanted). (Although I've enjoyed several others immensely: "Normally Special," "Amazing Adult Fantasy," "You Can Make Him Like You," and still need to read or finish reading several more, "Freight," "Giant Slugs" and "The Pale King"). (One dark horse candidate I've got many praising things to say about and I shall hopefully get to in the coming weeks is a poetry chapbook called "Piano Rats," which will be released by Curbside Splendor next month.)

But Loory's collection, returning to the subject at hand, is not only my favorite book of this year, but easily among my favorite books all time. That's to start with.

I've been avidly following Ben Loory's fiction for awhile now, since his story "The TV" appeared in The New Yorker (appears in greater length in "Stories for Nighttime") in spring 2010, I think (i.e. I think it was spring of that year that it appeared). It's hard not to be captivated in some way by how artfully he succeeds at expressing grand sprawling ideas and sentiments in austere, general terms. (For example, see just there? how I wrote "grandiosity" and "austere"? He would have succeeded at saying the same thing but artfully and with much more exact diction). And I should say, these terms seem austere and general but bloom very quickly into something greater, abstractly significant.

His collection is at times moving, challenging, detaching, philosophical, mythical, and downright funny. Loory is a master at saying just enough, enough to keep you scratching your head in wonderment, and plenty of just enough to allow room for your own personal interpretation. Like Raymond Carver, he's an author whose narrative vacancies have as much -- if not more -- meaning than the passages themselves. This isn't a matter of showing and not telling, or some old cliche about writing. Loory seems possessed by all the good muses that power fantastical fiction. His writing forces you to read and parse an enigma, which is both possible and impossible to solve. (See what I mean, yet?)

In my mind, this collection catapults him (via trebuchet, an ostensibly more powerful engine than the catapult) into the ranks of contemporaries like George Saunders, Amelia Gray, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. It also puts him among classic authors like Franz Kafka, Daniil Kharms, and Donald Barthelme. All of which of is to say, Ben Loory is easily among my favorite authors, both living and dead. (Not to be morbid, right, but folks often make a distinction, in those exact terms, between the two -- the contemporary and the classic? Or am I just morbid? I suppose I could have put it as contemporary and classic but, ah, that becomes an issue of semantics I refuse to digress into...)

Let me see if I can explain why high praise such as lumping him in the category of the many venerable names above is both correct and due.

See first, in my opinion, the story "The Magic Pig." This story is astounding. Turns notions of belief and skepticism and outright disbelief on their respective heads. A kind of potent farce in the appearance of a magical pig, which shows itself at the inducement of a father who is belittling his daughter's new found faith. The father tells his daughter if god is real then a sign should manifest itself, and so immediately comes the pig, delivered ostensibly down from heaven. This is not enough for the father, who absconds with the pig and demands it show him another sign. I won't explain where the story goes from here. (It's short and fun to read, so read it.)

But I will say there is something of the history of faith and belief in the story, a kind of allegory in the man's conduct. So much of what we believe in contemporary religion (even respecting newer ones like Scientology) owe their roots to tales of ancient supernatural happenings. Things that historical record has no way of confirming absolutely and which require faith. One imagines even those so-called miracles, at the time of their occurrence, might have looked different to different witnesses, if they even ever truly occurred at all. (Bear in mind, it is very likely George Washington never, in his youth, cut down a cherry tree.)

Skeptics were probably eager for more, wishing to see more, and you can imagine a deity of the variety believed in by Western cultures would have grown tired of showing itself at every beck and call, knowing its creation could never be sated. That skeptics might never be able to believe enough for their own or anyone's liking. That such search for belief could easily become an obsession, and that obsession would only grow more potent and powerful with time and age, and the succession of each new generation, further set apart from the miracle's origin. And maybe that's not the point of life, searching for the truth of faith. Maybe, Loory seems to say, you'll find out when you die.

Choosing favorites pieces in "Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day" is like choosing favorite chocolates from a boxed assortment that contains none with pie-like cherry filling -- they're all so very, very good and tasty. But given no other alternative my tops of the collection are certainly the above delved into "The Magic Pig" and "The Book," "The Crown," "The Octopus," "Death and the Fruits of the Tree," "The Shield," "UFOl A Love Story" (Easily the most emotionally charged among the rest), "The Graveyard," and "Hadley." Plus, "The TV' -- which is no doubt the most enigmatic and challenging of the collection.

"Hadley," though, I'll speak a few words of and then I'll stop with this review. "Hadley" was in the best sense "Weekend at Bernie's" meets "The Shawshank Redemption." Hadley comes up missing in an evening bed count at an unnamed prison and the guards, not wanting to take blame for his disappearance, invent a new Hadley (who is, I think significantly, one of the few characters in this collection who has a proper noun for a name). What ensues is startlingly profound, given the superficially farcical circumstances of the narrative. Which is something I think you as a reader will greatly enjoy. I certainly did.

So go get "Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day" if you haven't already. It's one of those decisions I have faith you won't regret.

LOVIN' INFANT MONKEYS, a mini review

2011-08-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

Lydia Millet's "Love and Infant Monkeys" to put it plainly rocks socks. I know I can be a little effusive when it comes to praise round here, but the truth is I was a less than enthusiastic fan of her novel, "Everyone's Pretty." But I enjoyed her short story "Sir Henry" that appeared in issue 1 of Electric Literature, so I thought I'd give her another go with the aforementioned "Love and Infant Monkeys" -- which includes "Sir Henry" in its pages.

I don't know if Millet is better in short form or what, but "Love and Infant Monkeys" was far more to my taste. A little bit daring in terms of using real-life subjects, i.e. celebrities and other famous persons, as primary or main characters. The strange tempo of the third-person stream of consciousness in the first story, the one in which Madonna has successfully if inadvertently killed a pheasant during a hunting outing with her then husband, Guy Ritchie and his cronies. His cronies, I think, are depicted fairly by Millet, at least what my imagination brings to mind.

The eponymous piece "Love and Infant Monkeys" is easily the most tragic of them, in terms of subject matter. It concerns the real-life experiments of an American psychologist, Harry Harlow, and the infant monkeys on whom he tested his various hypotheses. It's easy to see after a few descriptive passages of the animals' treatment, most disturbingly Harlow's "pit of despair" or in the story, Harlow recollects he's been entreated to call them "chambers" rather than "dungeons" by his assistant, a graduate student named Stephen Suomi, who noted the latter would be "bad for public opinion." Harry Harlow's dysfunctional, self-destructive nature is put on full display in "Love and Infant Monkeys" -- not used to rationalize as much as emote the purpose behind Harlow's eccentric behavior. He seems to float through the story in something akin to a alcohol-induced stupor, described early on in its pages as a "functional alcoholic." It ends with a particular strong narrative revelation about Harlow, which I won't reproduce here because you should read the story in its entirety and get the full effect.

The final story in the collection "Walking Bird" hit all the right notes for me too. Conveyed certain feelings seamlessly, touchingly. A good ending punctuation to the entire collection, and all told, the collection is one of the best I've ever read in terms of its "even" quality. These stories were made to be read side by side.

A Snapshot of Work in Contemporary the USA

2011-08-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

I had a rare opportunity at work the other day -- one of my jobs, a Costco sales employee -- to talk about things a little more meaningful than a more detailed discussion of the specs on the latest LED LCD Full-Array Vizio HD television we carry. The man, as it happened, was fairly well-traveled. He'd grown up in an Eastern bloc country, although I wasn't able to discern which exactly.

First, he talked about his visit to the Dead Sea and its immediate and literally corrosive effects. It's quite a vista, he added, noting especially its depth below sea level. He spoke of the Cold War, too, and the nature of U.S. - USSR power-play dynamics during that period. He also made an offhand remark regarding the nature of employment at a place like Costco, which, honestly, I was not offended by, but nevertheless, it immediately struck a chord with me. He said a job at Costco is fine for younger people, i.e. college aged, (there was a slight language barrier; his English was good but not entirely fluent) but that if an older person (i.e. above college-aged), an older man in specific, worked at Costco. then you knew something was, to paraphrase, wrong with that individual.

I didn't debate the matter with him, nor would I now with the benefit of hindsight, nor do I think he meant to insult me specifically (since technically I'm at about college age, or could reasonably be confused as college aged). I feel I understand his perspective, which is a common one, and is a stigma worn by people working in retail in general, not just at Costco. But what the man I spoke with failed to realize, and what the great many people who think in the same terms fail to realize, is that we've created an infrastructure, via cultural norms etc., in which this is the only alternative for many, many people, even college educated people, who for a pantheon of reasons do not work in more "respectable" fields. It's like everyone acknowledges we need companies like Costco., Wal-Mart and McDonald's, but nobody acknowledges that someone has to draw the short end of the stick and actually work there. These are the new factory jobs, people. Worse than that few of them are allowed to unionize where there was at least a time when that option existed for factory workers (still do for those who remain in the vastly diminished US manufacturing industry).

Look at this advertisement (later parodied by Dave Chappelle on his agonizingly short-lived "Chappelle Show"). It depicts a young black man who's bettered himself, avoided the pitfalls of his community, by working at a McDonald's. At the very least you should be able to see how this is a culturally insensitive portrayal of "Calvin" the young black protagonist.

We talk about socioeconomics and things like people's place in our society in glib terms, more often than not. If someone works a low level job at McDonald's it's because they aren't trying hard enough to go out and aspire to something better. But as I've said, I'm a Determinist insofar as I believe there are many external factors that play into who we become. No bigger is the cycle of poverty. Probably second to poverty's cycle is the cycle of affluence.

The point is, fine, go ahead and say "Calvin" is better off working at McDonald's than being a gangbanger and petty crook. No one disagrees (except maybe gangbangers and petty crooks). But how can we then say there's something "wrong" with a person who has evaluated his or her options only to decide / realize the best, most apparent one is working at a McDonald's? So we can then say the mentally defective populate these positions? And is it not funny that we let corporations off scot-free, bearing no burden of culpability by building these corporations that employ only "mental defectives," i.e. people who do not earn a respectable living, but the individuals themselves are the ones stigmatized. We need our McDonald's but we'd never deign to be employed by one! Or is there no incongruity? Is there no cake and eating it too, here?

How callous have we become as a society, and where does it end?

Regarding Untoward and People and Rejection and Stuff

2011-08-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I'm going to talk about Untoward, because I need as many venues as I have at my disposal to get word out that, primarily, my interest these days is in publishing fiction, i.e. either getting my own fiction out into the world (where hopefully it will elicit a reaction, either positive or negative (and no, truthfully I don't care which, I care more that you react than not)) or publishing other people's great fiction. And the latter of which is the point I most want to talk about here. Untoward Magazine exists and I hope you'll send something our way. We might reject it. I've been rejected, as a certain previous post will attest, probably somewhere in the 90-95% range to this point in my career. It's a part of it. Anyone will tell you that. This isn't new to anyone who has tried to get published. It's hard to create a name for yourself in the world of fiction publishing. But it's good that you're trying, too. Keep reading and ignoring posts like another of mine that appears here today on Literary Equations. The important thing is that you're building relationships with other people, so step out of your shell a bit. That is the realization that has kept me going throughout all of this, that it doesn't much matter to me if my stories get accepted (I'll keep crafting and developing my style just the same), what matters is I don't lose sight of the fact that I want to know and engage other people, even though that's not what comes most naturally to me. I force myself to do it because I know how much happier I am when I feel I've successfully related to someone else (and in this case, relating is almost exclusively positive, or I'm not happy if I've had a negative relational experience with someone. I think most people feel the same way, no?). All right, so that's my rant for now, but maybe you have some comments? I'd love to hear them.

Also, Untoward is on Twitter, so if you are I implore you to follow us. We appreciate your readership more than you know. http://twitter.com/#!/Untoward_Mag

No One Should Ever Read a Thing

2011-08-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

No one should ever read anything by anyone. Controversial? Perhaps. But I didn't join the blogging game to sit idly by and play nice. Oh no. I joined it to do otherwise.

But let's think about my blaspheme for a second, won't we?

What can you say you've honestly taken from reading anything? Besides nothing? Maybe you've taken thoughts from it, but were those thoughts you wanted to think? If you wanted thoughts you didn't want to think put into your head why not just go watch TV and some great advertisements? Not writing rife with thoughts you didn't want to think. What a waste of your thoughts. What about the ones you did want to think? Where'd those go?

Have I just blown your mind? I apologize, but it must needs be done sometimes.

Oh and I don't care about the irony here, reading something by me. I think of myself as much more like TV, in that the true endgame of my words is to subliminally get you to desire McDonald's or maybe Nike shoes, depending on my mood. So don't throw that in my face, because like Yahoo! "comments section" denizens who most often comment on stories of a politically charged nature and are named things like "THUG" or with single letters like "P." I don't have much desire to sit here and explain what I'm thinking. I just do. And what's more, think about how right I am if I just believe it. I think Stephen Colbert has vocalized something to that effect, if nothing else then subliminally.

Do you see how none of this is explained very well? That's fun to do!

A Brief Exchange

2011-08-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

The day buoyant met curmudgeonly. Of course. How could I forget?

“Ha ha ha, I have found you! I was looking for you and now I have found you!”

“Do I look like I give a care? Do I look like I give just one single care?”

“Yes! Yes, you do look that way.”

“Fine, now let me take you out for a cup of coffee and some sausages.”

“You’ve got yourself a done deal!” sprang the middleman, ready to shake hands, bring hands together.

And no one was killed or otherwise harmed for the most part, i.e. aside from one stinger to one member of the party’s left arm, following his being thrust down on his head very hard and purposefully!

If you think that I am smart

2011-07-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

Ever think I'm a really smart guy, as in me, Matt Rowan, is a really smart guy? Worry no more! Here's a perfect example of how I am not, and how actually I'm a moron just like the rest of us.

Dear MATT,

Thank you for your submission of "Surveil " to SmokeLong Quarterly. We gave the story careful consideration, and though we are not accepting it for publication, we hope you find a better fit for it elsewhere.

Thanks again for trusting us with your work.

Best,
Editors
SmokeLong Quarterly
http://smokelong.com

***

Dear SMOKELONG QUARTERLY,

You can change the setting on your submishmash account so a submitter's first name isn't all caps in your automatic replies. It'll preserve a modicum of your giving the story an honest read. I know this is a bit snarky in tone. I just find that to be one of the more irritating aspects of these rejections, and an easily correctable one. I hope my next rejection by your publication comes with my name in the standard capitalization.

-MATT Rowan

***

That's actually the way you spelled your name when you submitted the story, not an automatic setting on Submishmash. So if you submit your story to us with your name spelled the way you prefer, then it will appear that way on any correspondence we send you.

Thanks,
Tara

Editors, SmokeLong Quarterly
www.smokelong.com

TA DA!

HAHAHAHA, sigh, well I sent a very contrite email, acknowledging my mistake (and it was my mistake). Somehow when my account was set up, the default profile name was in all caps (either I did this or it's automatic). If you have a submishmash account you can alter your rejections email name (or acceptances) under your personal settings. All you have to do is investigate them, rather than jump to a conclusion of error on the part of an external source.

Or maybe I'm the only one who's had trouble with that, too.

P.S. SmokeLong is a good publication that's fun, so go read it and have fun. They put up with me and my snark, so there's something.

xTx is (AB)normally Special

2011-07-21T14:46:00.000-07:00

My title really ruined that oxymoron belonging to xTx's latest story collection "Normally Special." I've not read too many contemporary writers with nom de plumes, but of them, I like xTx best.

Frankly, I wasn't so sure that'd be the case. I mean, xTx reads like the title of a Vin Diesel movie (fitting, since he too is operating under a nom de plume, thank god). Happily, there's where similarities end because xTx doesn't tell stories as they might be by The Diesel. She tells visceral stories that make you feel something, sometimes something terrible (an emotion you weren't sure you understood / weren't sure you were capable of having), but, hey, if that's the effect, that's the effect. And these effects are enviable.

I've actually enjoyed the pocket-size quality of a lot of these various indie books I've gotten my hands on of late. (They make for great, surreptitious reading while I'm at work, for example.) Others, which I'll have further comments on, no doubt, are Ethel Rohan's "Hard to Say" "Artifice 3" (a great indie literary magazine), "Big World" by Mary Miller and "AM/PM" by Amelia Gray.

These are books by lesser known but equally worthy writers as those you'll find in prominent places like The New Yorker, Paris Review, Harper's, Granta and so forth. A Patrick Somerville to match a Gary Shteyngart, a Roxane Gay to match a Z.Z. Packer, a near-every late 20s-early 30s female writer (namely, Alissa Nutting, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, Jill Summers, Faith Gardner, Mary Miller, Frank Hinton, Ethel Rohan and, of course xTx) to match Karen Russell and Tea Obreht, a Michael Czyzniejewski to every Stephen O'Connor. And you get the idea. I like and have read many contemporary authors of all persuasions / categorizations. I refuse to concede that the better known ones are of a higher literary caliber. If anything I might say the opposite is the case. (I know, I know, how very provocative / controversial of me to side with what is presumably the anti-establishment (the independent publishers) but then again sort of its own smaller, niche establishment in its own right. Well, I'm siding with somebody! Dammit!).

All right, the point is xTx. Her stories fill you with grit, ask you to get gritty, enjoy making you feel like you're being abraded by something especially coarse. And I grant that this might sound a little tongue-in-cheek, but that's only because I have trouble expressing these types of emotions. (Yep, admitting a little vulnerability here, folks.)

My favorites of "Normally Special" were "Standoff" -- which I was on the verge of tears reading, but I didn't cry mostly because of manliness and mine being what it is. But the story is fucking powerful sad. I loved it. The mother and son relationship is tortured by all kinds of emotion, by guilt and by loss and by uncertainty. "She Who Subjected the Sun" is an ambiguously dystopian vision, one in which we are able to understand women have been returned to a state of subjection, or more so, really, made to desire being made subjects, perfectly docile, welcoming their subjection. It's something akin to a normative imposition of the sex slavery trade.

Many of my other favorites were colored by a kind of ambiguity. Maybe it was ambivalence, ambiguous ambivalence. It got me to thinking and to feeling, which I like.

What this is becoming

2011-07-15T13:25:00.001-07:00

My friends, anyone who's stuck around long enough to see this post, I'm not writing to you to say I'm changing anything. I'm saying I'm adding. I'm adding things like my writing credits. I'm also gonna touch on stuff outside the realm of literary criticism. What stuff? Anecdotal stuff. Things I find interesting. I've said I might post story fragments here, too. Thanks for your patience. My hope is that this is a place that is still worthwhile to be, once I'm done making changes.

Mini Review: "Crash" and Bang and All that Perverse Techno-Violence / Whatnot

2011-07-14T00:14:00.000-07:00

"Crash" by J.G. Ballard is a tough slog as reading goes. I remember my first, ultimately aborted attempt at reading the novel. At the time, Ballard's prose was too vivid, too sterile, too graphic for my tastes. I don't know that I was really thinking about it at all even, just my discomfort for its language, which is rife with reference to all sorts of sex and technology and the fusion of the two. For example, engine coolant and seminal fluid are inextricably tied, so as to be one and the same admixture, concoction, what have you.

But I think this imagery speaks to some weird bridging of the primal with the artificial, humanity's most base needs and its (to date) most profound, prolific inventions. "Meaning" in any sense is cast off and completely beside the point. In fact, for as much imagery as abounds in this story I've never felt less inclined to parse meaning, to scratch beneath the surface. "Crash" is violence incarnate. It's the disgusting birth video of future as a tactile entity. It's frustratingly, transparently straightforward in its canonization of simulacra. That's why Jean Baudrillard liked it so much.

The Beginning of Something New, The End of Something Old

2011-05-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

The beginning has to begin somewhere.

I'm serious, in a way.

I've enjoyed writing straight-up book reviews for the last year and a half or so, but, ever the intellectually whimsical, I'm feeling a bit spent on this type of (although fun) repetitive analysis. I want things that coalesce. I'd like to fuse this idea with that one, and build workable narratives to then consider that with regard to the phenomena of our present day and circumstances. Make my kind of sense of it all. More philosophical rumination.

This could be, as I see it, that outlet. And of course literary fiction will factor into the blog's new course very heavily. Maybe, also, I'll practice at storytelling of my own here. More to the point, this is to be a playground for ideas I'm teasing out. Some of these ideas will no doubt be more fully baked than others. In whatever their condition though, merely by the fact of my posting them here, I'll be looking for your reaction, as I toss ideas against the more or less sticky wall to see what sticks (stickiness depending for the most part on the idea and its solvency).

But let me just end on the homed-in literary topic of . . .

The Instructions

It is possibly fitting that I heretofore ended on Part I of Adam Levin's "The Instructions," because A.) that novel represents to me, among other things, a great example of what fiction is capable of in its sprawling many pages and B.) an impulse toward my own kind of instructions, a desire to think and be more critical about, for lack of a better term, the phenomena I mention.

But I don't want to leave anyone hanging too much. I'm not sure that there's a lot left to say about "The Instructions" on my part, though, not without ruining its very climactic ending. I go back and forth with my final evaluation of whether it was a "good" or "bad" novel. Perhaps my biggest negative criticism, one that I may have mentioned in commenting to a commenter, and the sole point of agreement I might have with Joshua Cohen's generally underwhelming review, is that Levin seems to be afflicted by the same self-consciousness that has beguiled previous long form fiction writers such as David Foster Wallace, who obsess to the point of seemingly desiring total control of their conjured world and, this admittedly a very great leap to make on my part, suggesting a desire for control of a bit of the real world by extension.

I put this upon every very intricately wrought piece of situational analysis and so forth, what happened and wherefore?, belonging to "The Instructions" and "Infinite Jest" and other notable longform works I've happened through. It is the desire for complete understanding, or perceptive "complete understanding" by, in Levin's case, Gurion, the young protagonist. And where Cohen sees DFW avoiding this pitfall by the multitudinous narrators and characters put under microscope, Levin suffers more for the fact that every character has only one thing on his or her mind in "The Instructions": Gurion Maccabee (including for the most part Gurion himself). Though this seems to have been in Cohen's view the novel's fatal flaw, I won't go that far myself. I think it's astounding how well Levin pulls off the necessary and lengthy singular focus of his novel. Gurion is flawed, certainly, but as close to all-knowing as flawed characters get. Gurion, to be sure, speaks volumes about things, about phenomena, and yet Levin somehow manages to have his cake and eat it too by creating in Gurion a believably adolescent temperment at his core.

All in all, it's a stunning achievement. And yet, still I waffle back and forth on whether I would classify it as among my favorite novels. Sometimes time and hindsight are required for the true merits of a piece to reveal themselves, and I suppose that's where I'll leave this mini-review of "The Instructions" -- at pure speculation.

END of reviewing The Instructions

I'll also end the entirety of this piece by simply remarking that you can expect me to have something in line with the poorly defined ideas I describe in the preceding paragraphs sometime very soon. I keep returning to totalitarianism and Nabokov's "Bend Sinister" -- which I must include among my favorite novels, if the criterion of its returning to my mind in a significant positive light bears any weight at all.

Thank you.

Halfway Through Adam Levin's "The Instructions": Of Sub and Serious Men

2011-04-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

Adam Levin's "The Instructions" is a novel with a lot to say. At a bit more than the halfway mark (pg. 610 approx.), I thought I'd hit the ground running with somethings it says that have especially struck me. So here we go...

There's a need to represent the voice of the modern, let's say especially male, illiterate in contemporary fiction. Does it stretch a writer's capacity, to write as a guy who doesn't have much to express in any coherent, articulate way? (Especially when you're an Adam Levin, who clearly does.)

No more so than a skilled actor affecting bad acting.

"The Instructions" is full of these contemporary Cro-Magnons or troglodytes or whatever historically lower-on-the-evolutionary-ladder group you wish to assign them to, i.e. men who haven't got much to offer the grand discourse but no less wish to add their two cents. They might also like to feel marginalized, on the fringe, like their way of life is under attack. True, sometimes -- often -- their way of life may well be under attack, but it's not without reason. The reason? Bluntly, the things they're willing to uphold are often terrible, like denying themselves and / or others of what should be basic freedom, of the right to decide for oneself what's moral and just.

This phenomenon brought to mind Simone De Beauvoir and her description of the "sub-man" and the "serious man" -- lowest in the order of her archetypal freedom seekers. The sub-man is led along like a calf to slaughter, and the serious man upholds certain idols for the simultaneous and fairly paradoxical ends of control and personal fulfillment. In other words, the serious man usually begins to believe his own fictions, perpetuating them and foisting them on the always less-discriminating sub-man. Thus are dogmas born and sustained, or so I say, in a nutshell. (Hannah Arendt would then have referred to sub-men as the disenfranchised necessary for demagogues to enact totalitarianism, which is something.)

[Various spoilers no doubt ensue. So proceed with caution!]

In Levin's fiction, sub-men come in the form of, primarily, the security personnel of Aptakisic Middle School, a major setting of the story and one in which we find the 10-year-old protagonist and primary narrative voice, Gurion Maccabee, constantly and deliberately willing himself into conflict. The hypertrophied, hyperactive argumentative abilities of Gurion and his cohorts on "The Side of Damage" (more on that group in a bit) who inhabit the Cage (a little more on this in the next paragraph) are put into direct linguistic opposition with these "mediocre men" -- to refer to them in Nietzschean parlance, because of all the damnable philosophical language already in use. Ron Desormie, lecherous gym teacher, is the ostensible leader to these sub-men, and poster child of "The Arrangement" (primary antagonist of The Side of Damage, which I'll get to when I get to both (they go hand-in-hand)), a serious man if ever there was one, his idol being the so-called self-evident value of winning, and doing so at any cost.

But my favorite of the sub-men, and probably the best rendered in terms of speech and appearance, is a handless (lost in a crop-grinder) Australian transplant, Monitor Victor Botha, disciplinarian to the Cage's inhabitants (The Cage being a place for students who have exhibited violent or otherwise dangerous tendencies that make them unfit for inclusion in classes with the general student body). Botha is the only major authority figure in the Cage, the teachers who flow in and out of its confines (literally a cage-like chain link enclosure) are rarely even subordinate to him in any authoritarian chain-of-command sense. Botha's law is, at the story's outset, absolute. Unlike, say, Nurse Ratched of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," who felt a panacea lay in the prospect of shaming those in her charge out of their difference, Botha desires not to be bothered. Only rarely does he shame anyone, and when he does, he does it with far less cunning and pre-meditation than Nurse Ratched. One such instance of Botha's sadism especially comes to mind, happening around the 100 page mark, which leads to a good turn by Benji Nakamook (Gurion's closest companion) and others in the Cage, as effect.

The incident in question occurred when Gurion first arrived at the Cage, practically his initial interaction with Botha and all others attending Cage classes. There was, meanwhile and hitherto Gurion's arrival, a student -- Egon Marsh -- who was constantly the butt of jokes in the Cage, apparently partially a result of his living in squalid, abusive conditions at home.

The incident began with Botha noting a smell, and said, in a little of his idiosyncratic accent (a bizarre fusion of Australian and, interestingly, really heavy Chicagoan), "Something smells downright bleddy Marshy." Gurion is unaware that the comment is aimed derisively at Marsh. The subsequent events are bulleted:

Gurion purposely breaks and asks to sharpen a pencil in an over-compensating attempt to demonstrate that the smell is not his own, as said unaware that Egon Marsh is the one who Botha's accused of being smelly.

Botha warns Gurion that normally he'd be given a "step" (the punishment progression at Aptakisic for misbehavior) as consequence for Gurion's speaking out of turn, but he'd benevolently let it slide this time. (Gurion probably correctly surmises, in narrative reflection, "That Botha might be actively trying to humiliate me ..." though admits it didn't occur to him at the time.)

Finally, as Gurion begins sharpening his pencil, Botha takes the opportunity to begin his assault on his easy target, Egon Marsh, saying: "Wait! Wait, Mr. Makebee! No need to waste your affort. I think I've found a writing implement here--yes. Look. Right here in this nest!" And he affected pulling a hidden pencil from Egon's hair.

The reaction this elicits is at first mirth, but then, Benji Nakamook decides it better to humiliate the perpetuator of humiliation, and says, simply, "Combover" to Botha. Because, as it happens, Botha class-act that he is, has a combover. This might seem trite in any other situation, an easy exercise of an old cliche, i.e. villainous lowlife = has a combover. But Levin goes to great lengths both to explain the combover as a thing in itself and then Botha's personal reasons for sporting that really unpleasant look. Partly explained by Gurion as follows, "Like those kids who when you tell them their foot-taps annoy you and then in response they tap faster and harder, these men kept their combovers intact to save face."

This then segues into a really involved effort by Nakamook to insult Botha by modifying his hairstyle to affect a combover of his own (a "Harpo Progression" as Gurion calls it), which like quite a few of the Side of Damage's efforts to mock the sub-men of authority, fairly quickly gets away from him and brings about wholly new problems that I won't delve into. (Gurion does a nice job, however, of incisively picking apart the psychological nuances of Nakamook's mockery gone awry, part of which can be blamed on Gurion's own misunderstanding at the time of the combover plot's unfurling.)

Botha's presence as law of the Cage remains ubiquitous in the narrative, even as lengthy passages lead Gurion elsewhere in and around Chicagoland (which is, if I haven't already said it, the greater setting in which practically all of the story takes place). I'll be very interested to see how he and his role change (however significantly).

The Side of Damage exists to undermine the Arrangement (authority for authority's sake, rote and pointless). One of the neatest things about "The Instructions" is how big ideas are rendered with very real-sounding churlish and / or childish vernacular. The Side of Damage sounds like the secret society of rebellious pre-teens and teenagers. And that's just one highly notable example. As the story progresses we see a psychological profile done of Gurion by his therapist, "Call-Me-Sandy" (a woman of some student-standing at the University of Chicago, brought clearly to bear in her profile of Gurion, which also has within it coded and not-quite-coded advances directed toward her female professor). In "Call-Me-Sandy"'s profile we learn in clinical terms (many of which "Call-Me-Sandy" later admits were used for the express purpose of impressing her professor) that Gurion has several very distinct ways of communicating with his peers, but which boil down to three different kinds of "codeswitching" (pg. 306-7): 1) erudite, 2) prophetical and 3) colloquial.

Largely ignored by me to this point is the nature of Gurion and his religion (which as the story would have it are inextricable terms). He demonstrates his great faith by making frequent reference to God "Adonai," the Jews "Israelites" (there are no longer Jews, and the term holds no meaning to Gurion), and other esoteric references to traditional semitic, chiefly Hebraic, texts and so forth. I mention that here because many of Gurion's friends and a great deal of the reason for why he has not been allowed to stay enrolled at any of his previous schools, believe him to be a kind of prophet, or very plain and straightforwardly, The Messiah. Accordingly he is referred to as "Rabbi" by many of his fellow Israelites, who see him as a scholar and authority on such matters. He sees himself in the same terms, more or less, and in his free time (in passages which fill the novel) he writes his scripture.

All of this then seems to fall under the auspices of The Side of Damage, although certainly Gurion has had some difficulty to this point in reconciling the somewhat dogmatic belief that Israelites are the chosen people, possibly needing to be led by Gurion, if he is the Messiah, and the more pluralistic membership, the generally neglected and oppressed, of the greater Side of Damage. The division is also sort of coming to a head at the point I'm at in "The Instructions" -- Nakamook is feeling betrayed to a certain extent by the fact that, as Benji is a goy, Gurion clearly cannot put him on the same standing as his followers, other Israelites.

Last, I'll mention Ron Desormie and one of his closest lackeys, Floyd The Chewer, and a situation involving them both while Gurion is trapped in an In-School Suspension (ISS). Gurion has constructed a weapon "a penny gun" that fires coins with enough force to cause bodily harm and property damage. He has used it on the scoreboard at Aptakisic, which is about as symbolic an attack on Ron Desormie as Desormie can endure. He doesn't endure the attack well and comes screaming at Gurion (Gurion is in his suspension for other reasons unrelated to the scoreboard, and it later is revealed the scoreboard was completely destroyed by an ally of the Side of Damage, not Gurion himself). Desormie then goes into a long soliloquy regarding his thoughts on Gurion and his "so-called" friends:

Not only don't I think your jokes are funny, ever . . . but I don't even get your jokes. And I don't think anyone does. And even if they do, I don't think they think your jokes are funny either, because you're not mature. Maturity, Maccabee, is control of yourself, and I don't think you've got control of yourself.

The soliloquy goes on to make reference to characters from "The Godfather" and "Good Fellas" and is mostly a rambling, ham-fisted diatribe. I like that Levin chose to have Desormie speak idiosyncratically with his expressing "Not only don't I think" and so forth. I think that, too, captures the voice of the individual he was going for, a man not totally in touch with how to express himself. I think it also sometimes goes a bit overboard, and I'm not as totally thrilled by malapropisms like Desormie's saying "non-sectarians" when he (probably) means to say non-sequitur.

Floyd the Chewer, a policing automaton of the school, enters the scene after Desormie has been led into the principal Mr. Brodsky's office, to explain the scoreboard and its destruction. Floyd wants to talk to "Ronny D" his nickname for Desormie, and asks Miss Pinge, the secretary, "So what about any updates on Ronny D and the chief, there? . . . You got a potentially predictional ballpark figure regarding the time for their pow-wow's overage, maybe?" All the malapropisms here are exceedingly forced, although I waver back and forth with this, because my main reason for feeling this way is that nobody in the world that I've experienced speaks like Floyd. But, then a.) who cares if anyone speaks like Floyd and b.) I have a feeling I'll one day meet someone who does, thus throwing that argument entirely out the window.

I'll have to reflect on this and still more things in what I have left to read of "The Instructions."

More to come!

P. Fanatics: HAIR! Edition

2011-04-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

If you're in Chicago next week, on a Thursday night, and you're looking for something to do, THEN consider the above image / invite. Possibly more details HERE.

Mason Johnson will be there, a cast of others will be there. I definitely will be there. So what more do you need? Gold? You don't need gold.

Can't Decide How Much I Like Karen Russell's Short Stories

2011-04-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

It is true, apparently, that Karen Russell's first novel, "Swamplandia!" was recently released. This title is befitting her previous collection of short stories, "St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves," which I've now read. I'm not sure about "Swamplandia!" (so you can search elsewhere for reviews on that). Let me start by saying I really enjoyed Karen Russell's short story featured in The New Yorker, as a result of her being one of the recepients of their "Top 20 Under 40" honors last summer.

Karen Russell is a good author, but is she better than that? Is she better than other young authors whom I enjoy? I like the sprightly quality of many of her stories. That much is true. I think by my natural temperament I swing toward the more negative side of positive opinion. This is not good, I think. I'd prefer to be sanguine and carefree. (Not carefree in a delusional way, if it's possible to be carefree any other way.)

But see there, in my parenthetical aside? See that I've said being carefree seems delusional, that it is implicit to the idea of being carefree? That's negative. And so too is the title of this post -- more or less -- implicitly as well. Too negative. Certainly some of Russell's stories speak to me more than others. Her collection "St Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves" is thus more uneven (take that, Mark Athitakis) than other collections I've read of late. But enough with soft praise and let me get to actual, considered criticism.

My biggest overarching negative criticism of Karen Russell is that she seems to be a writer without a fully realized ethos. I've wrestled with whether this is a fair assessment for a long time (I can't remember when I first started reading "St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves," much less began writing this review). The point is, there are many interesting stylistic qualities to Russell's work but I constantly felt let down by their weight, i.e. I kept feeling there was something more to her stories that she wasn't saying, or that there was something more that could be said. This, as criticism goes, is more on me, as a reader, but I guess as contemplative aspects to her storytelling go, I was left very underwhelmed.

I do like that whimsy abounds in the world of Karen Russell's fiction. I feel like Terry Gilliam, on his less morose days, could direct the hell out of one of her tales. That's another thing, Russell's stories feel like they should more appropriately be referred to as tales. I see in her writing some of the same things I've liked about the writing of authors like Stephen O'Connor, under whom Russell apparently has studied. But like O'Connor, she writes stories that don't always fully commit to their subject matter. Her whimsy feels only halfheartedly implemented, like an author who'd prefer to be writing fiction of a more realist bent but who likewise feels as though (s)he is not making enough of his/her creative abilities by doing so. Had George Saunders never existed, I feel like Karen Russell would be a very different kind of writer, as would many who appear in publications such as The New Yorker.

Allow me to further explain. Irreverent settings in Russell's stories strike me as having little point or no point OR have a hyper-telegraphed point (e.g. "Out to Sea" in which a retirement community has been built of old boats and so forth, and its denizens are literally isolated from society by this means, which it doesn't take a master of metaphysics to make the connection between this and an elderly inhabitant's emotional isolation, also). It's fine that the settings don't immediately or necessarily relate to the plot, in the former and alternative case listed above, but then why have the plot be something as vanilla as coming-of-age in an ice rink or giant conch shells? The concerns of the characters, most of which are children, are so ordinary and everyday that the whole collection begins to feel like it's on repeat, just with required changes in costume and scenary. (This would also explain why I think I liked "St. Lucy's" earliest-appearing stories the most*.)

I hate to just heap the negative criticism on a work like this, especially knowing that A.) Karen Russell is a skilled writer whom I can absolutely understand people liking and 2.) you could easily argue my position is one of a different school of thought. But like Stephen O'Connor, Russell shows a lot of creative agility and I'm disappointed by writers I feel could be doing far better than their body of work. With luck, that's what "Swamplandia!" is for Russell -- especially considering how I felt about her "20 Under 40" New Yorker story. It was far superior to anything I've read in "St. Lucy's." I'm not sure when I'll be willing to give Russell a try again, though. She frustrated the hell out of me.

*My favorites of this collection were "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" and "Z.Z's Sleep-Away Camp For Disordered Dreamers."

Now I Know About Jobs For Women and Girls: the 2nd Bibliographing Challenge

2011-04-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

Alissa Nutting is another young author you should take time out to read. She has a macabre view of life, at least as shown through her fiction. I like that. I ENCOURAGE it. Or the plan is that I will dedicate my life to the promotion of such things, ENCOURAGING such things as the hilarious macabre in fiction, for one thing I will do / am doing. (Check out Lindsay Hunter, Amelia Gray, Faith Gardner and Jill Summers if you're looking for more of this kind of good stuff (and yes, I've provided links, but there's more by all four authors athwart the internet and elsewhere, which you should also read).)

Nutting is also the second of two writers I challenged Nicole of bibliographing to read. Nicole, never being one to back down from a reading challenge of any sort, did just that. (Check out Nicole's good thoughts on the subject here, in fact.)

So without further ado, and not much reiteration of my "take that, challenged" etc. refrain of last time, here are my thoughts on Nutting's debut short story collection, "Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls."

The first story in the collection is called "Dinner." It's about a motley assortment of individuals being boiled alive in a kettle. I was reminded of cartoons in which the protagonist is set into similar circumstances, misinterpreting the situation at first as some sort of spa-treatment and, in specific, Jacuzzi, complete with a ravenous antagonist chopping carrots nearby. The inhabitants of the kettle are a little more immediately aware of their plight than, say, Bugs Bunny.

We are given, probably not surprisingly considering the entire collection's title, an offering of this experience through the narrative lens of the only female in the bunch, a bunch of six altogether. There's a weird pragmatism and a fatalistic resignation to her description. She describes the others by the degrees of their attractiveness as men, human beings and, disconcertingly, as meals. "The men do not look so delicious."

"'There are worse ways to die,' I tell myself, 'than being boiled then sliced with a knife.' But it takes me awhile to think of one." This is the sort of black humor that the piece drives on. The story itself is probably too outlandish to take its subject matter as seriously as it might have, i.e. sincere rumination on the cruelty of man feels misplaced when at several points an evil-seeming chef enters their boiling chamber to remove one of their ranks for preparation and consumption. Couple that with the fact that the narrator immediately gets it in her head to dive unthinkingly into faux-love with the nearest, most innocuous seeming of the men who surround her (e.g. she says: "'I love you,' I say. It's coming from a good-pretend place. I just want to pack as much into these last few moments as I can."), and what you have is a really charged story, powered by a comic eye for the absurd and a willingness to poke fun at the human condition, wherever said condition rears its terse, too serious head.

And while generally humorous throughout, there are a great many stories here that do in fact hit dramatic high notes and demonstrate considerable range on the part of their author. One in particular is "She-Man" -- which just by its title starts off by sounding a little callous, yet ultimately proves to be anything but. Human callousness factors into the story heavily, though. Deceit and love are components as well. I've never seen "The Crying Game" but "She-Man" strikes me, based on what I've heard of "The Crying Game," as a more honest appraisal of its outcome (at least a very different appraisal).

The narrator, an unnamed woman, is a complex person, hitherto the time of the story she'd been a transgendered prostitute in the employ of a pimp named "Daddy V." Daddy is as huge an asshole as one would assume a man of that moniker would be. He makes life hard for the protagonist, reentering her life and attempting to blackmail her and extort money from her boyfriend, a professional bowler named Ginno. Ginno is unaware of the fact that she was once a man, which is where Daddy's blackmail enters the equation. But she's unwilling to manipulate Ginno, in every way a lovable loser, into giving her the lion's share of his recent payday after a big tournament win.

Or as she puts it:

He wants the money. All of it, the whole pot of Ginno's winnings. Daddy didn't change the channel until he saw Ginno receive an oversized $30,000 check.

The terrible part is that I know I could invent some story that makes it seem like I really need the money and Ginno would have no problem giving it to me. Somehow that means there is no way that I could ever bring myself to do it. He's the first and only decent man I've ever been with. And that makes me a decent woman.

So she attempts to pay him off herself, which goes not the way she probably wanted. The whole thing turns into a massive nightmare, and despite her best intentions, the narrator is undone by her deception. I'll say no more of that.

"Dancing Rat" is another of the stories that I found particularly enjoyable. It tells the tale of a woman who plays the part of a mouse named Sneezoid on a kid's dance show called Whisker-Bop! It's also about her relationship with her infertile boyfriend and, also, her relationship with her young, opinionated co-star Missy. The interplay between Missy and the narrator, in specific, is peculiar. Missy is as manipulative and bratty as privileged people get. The narrator won't be browbeaten by her, though, if she is at least in general kowtowing and servile to her demands.

Others I really enjoyed and highly recommend "Gardner," "Deliverywoman" and "Bandleader's Girlfriend."

Probably the only story that really missed its mark (and of course we're talking purely opinion here) was "Hellion." I thought it ambitious, and it had a really excellent concept: a hell-bound woman, or "Hellion," who becomes entangled in a romantic relationship with the devil. What could go wrong? Well, for my tastes the story was just sort of blah, nothing much happens. I guess I'm complaining about what I felt could have happened more than I am what did. I suppose that's an irritating position to take, but I've never promised I'm not irritating in a great many ways. Read it and see what you think.

Go, go now and read it!

My Other Staple Reading: Philip K. Dick

2011-03-23T07:02:00.000-07:00

Vladimir Nabokov and Philip K. Dick have each appeared many a time on this blog to date. Why stop now? Why stop when such a good thing is going?

I don't know, perhaps because it's hard for me to imagine "VALIS" being topped by anything else in what remains of my "to read" PKD reading. I've nursed on this book for the better part of the last several months, not so much because I couldn't focus on it (although as previously mentioned focusing on reading has been difficult of late), but instead because it's such a bizarre and fun romp to read, and I am one to savor such books.

But "romp" probably doesn't adequately describe the fact that this book is insane. As Ben commented on a previous post, PKD sort of lost his sense of . . . things . . . near the end of his life. It's also possible that instead of losing his mind he became a modern-day prophet, technologically oriented and so forth. One thing is for certain, whatever the case, something profoundly affected his fiction. Something gave us "VALIS."

So let's talk about what it gave us, then. "VALIS" is in a very superficial sense a story about a man, his friends, and his mortality. It's about mortality, also, in a more general way. I feel like when Jean Baudrillard was sussing through the offerings of simulacra and postmodernity in the novel, sure, yes, "Crash" by J.G. Ballard was a good choice, a great example of the synthesis and synesthesia of postmodern techno-simulacra that's possibly come to define our present way of life, but c'mon, Baudrillard: Philip K. Dick. I mean, c'mon.

"VALIS" is so much a synthesis of the age-old theological, ontological questions set against the backdrop of modern communications and greater media. The modern prophet would receive his call from God through a medium like a major motion picture, wouldn't (s)he? The modern prophet wouldn't know if he or she was crazy or sane, right? (We, the viewing public, would assume insanity, which I maintain is not an unreasonable thing to assume.)

The answer to all questions posed above: yes, yes absolutely. (I'm comfortable being categoric as those things go.) But would the prophet, the receiver of this information simultaneously be both "VALIS"' third person subject/object of narration, i.e. Horselover Fat (PKD's alter ego), and the narrator himself, i.e. Philip K. Dick? Um, yes again. We're introduced to Horselover Fat at the beginning of the "VALIS" through a presumably omniscient, third person narrator, but who in fact, it turns out, is Philip K. Dick himself. This meshes perfectly with the dichotomous nature of the tale -- e.g. reference to the rational and irrational creators of the universe abound.

This will sound stupid, I suspect, but one of the most satisfying qualities of "VALIS" is just how much esotericism fills its pages. I mean, there's religious references of all kinds, Gnosticism (the codices of Nag Hammadi are cited frequently), numerous eastern sects (Buddha and the like), countless nods to various other derivations of the Semitic religions, Zoroastrianism, and truly more than I could hope to identify or keep track of, even when PKD invokes them by name. Then there are references to philosophical schools and their preeminent thinkers. Goethe's Faust is mentioned, and how that work more or less engendered existentialism, revealing in it that humans are defined not by words but by deeds. From this seed came the outgrowth of man's awareness of and relationship to his absurd conditions -- to, in PKD's parlance, the unstable creator deity who begat a world that is not rational but irrational. Richard Wagner is referenced several times. Wagner's "Parsifal," his last opera, is taken to task in an amusing anecdote:

I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says, "I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answered, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." SLAM.

SLAM, indeed, Wagner.

Others noted are Pascal, Spinoza and Schopenhauer. Immanuel Kant might as well have been cited by name with the introduction of Fat's friend Doug, a man Fat meets while he's institutionalized, following Fat's suicide attempt. Doug states his belief in two forms of knowledge that which is empirical and that which is occurring a priori -- i.e. knowledge that requires no experiential observation, et al, "that arises within your head." Certainly Kant isn't the inventor of a priori vs. a posterieri knowledge, but he is one of its greatest advocates, one who best advanced and infused this dichotomy in Western thought, of phenomenon (things experienced, or of the senses) and noumenon (thing-in-itself or Ding an sich).

All the while, an unnamed but monomaniacal search continues. It's a search for things, and each thing becomes a new singular focus. At one time it's a search for the cause of pain and of suffering. it's next the search for belief and a reason for doing so. It culminates with a search for the next coming of the deity variously referred to as Zebra, VALIS (which is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), and eventually the reincarnation of St. Sophia (and thus Christ) with a computer for a brain (although she's only referred to as Sophia, this second coming, or whatever coming she is).

Sophia, a two year old and product of immaculate conception, is the daughter of Eric and Linda Lampton, filmmakers responsible for the theatrical version of "VALIS" -- a movie which tells a tale of a dark world in which an evil ruler holds sway, Ferris F. Fremount (referenced as a stand-in for Richard Nixon). VALIS undoes Fremount's reign in the film, as it did in real life, or so is what's claimed by the Lamptons and Sophia. The Lamptons also claim to be immortals, members of the "Friends of God" Society, which is meant literally. They are immortal friends of him/her/it, God. There's also the deteriorating Mini, a man who is dying a slow death (of multiple myeloma) as a result of his experiments with lasers that are meant to reveal to him VALIS in its true form. Mini explains to Fat and Philip (who by the time in this story when the Friends of God Society is revealed is a functioning character in the story) that VALIS is living information. [I TOLD YOU THIS STORY IS CRAZY!] Ultimately revealed by Mini is that VALIS is our savior, meant to free us from our unreal maze world that's inherently irrational, or poisonous, toxic to humankind. This is at least partly because humankind did not originate on earth but on Albemuth, and VALIS is an artifact sent by those left behind to beam to us rational instruction . . . obviously. VALIS apparently looks like an old satellite. It's all very interesting.

Most of the "Friends of God" saga reads to the outsider, the reader, as the way in which people become immersed in a cult. It happens slowly, by subtle indoctrination, as with Scientology. Scientology doesn't reveal all the crazy truths that make up its origin story when at first you join, but slowly as you become more and more entrenched in the church's dogma. After that, Xenu makes a lot more sense, but I apologize for this digression; it's just one of the things I observed over the course of "VALIS."

There's also moments earlier in the story when it's revealed time and space are constructs of sorts (mechanisms of separation) and that all existence is happening simultaneously. That's not as strange as the cross-consciousness that results from it, i.e. Horselover Fat's thoughts begin to be penetrated by the thoughts of a man named Thomas, who is living in ancient Rome and who Fat says is smarter than himself, Fat. It leads to a lot of Ancient Rome's being superimposed over 1974's California. That would be kind of a mind fuck. I might parse this episode further but it's sort of exhausting just rehashing this much.

In fact, this might be a good place to stop. I feel as though "VALIS" is the kind of novel that begs for follow up reads, and follow up analysis, and follow up perplexity. I encourage you to check out other PKD before giving this one a go. It's less for the uninitiated, or rather it's worth waiting for.

A Few Items: bibliographing and Bartleby Snopes

2011-03-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

Firstly, Nicole has responded to my literary challenge with a post of her own on bibliographing. so I think you ought go over there and see what she had to say about Patrick Somerville and his very good book of interwoven stories.

I also have a news story up, "An Interrogation." It's readable at Bartleby Snopes. CLICK HERE TO READ IT! (along with the other stories of March). It's actually a section from a longer novel I wrote some time ago. Let me know what you think!

Have a great day!

"The bibliographing Reading Challenge" Challenger Reads Patrick Somerville

2011-03-08T12:32:00.000-08:00

Take that Nicole of bibliographing, and that and that! Words and more words. These are what I throw at you in challenge, reading-wise. Of course I'm referring to "the bibliographing reading challenge." Nicole and I are dead set against one another, reading two contemporary authors' latest short story collections. The first, you ask? Well, it's Patrick Somerville and his, "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature."

Honestly, this book is so good I'd say it reads itself if I were one of those people who found reading to be a tedious bore (e.g. the greater multitude of public high school students, perhaps?). But seriously, Patrick Somerville is no longer up-and-coming. The term simply doesn't apply. He's here and now. If he needed anything to cement that fact, "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature" more than does so. It's chock full of the kind of whimsy and humor that is guaranteed to get my approval.

***

The eponymous (and if you haven't noticed by now, I love that word) story, "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature" does much to live up to its being an eponym (boy, I hope that makes sense). It begins as a tale of three friends, art students so-called, working in the muddy waters of a program whose name reminds me of The School of the Art Institute or Columbia College in Chicago, The School of Surreal Thought and Design (SSTD) (also the school's acronym is one letter off from STD, #obviousobservations #horriblediseasescausedbysex).

[inescapable spoilers forthcoming] The protagonist, a girl named Rosie, is working diligently on scale models of a father and son's working on a scale model of the universe in miniature -- hence the repetition, the universe in miniature in miniature (which I think is hilarious, also: both the project itself and the name). It's all for the purpose of graduation, which as Rosie puts it, the requirement is this, "All we have to do, to graduate, is complete our final projects. Our projects are whatever we want them to be."

There are quite a few humorous notes to the story, for example the school in question's campus is located beneath Lake Michigan in "East Chicago." It's accessible through a bakery whose proprietor seems just the right mixture of surly and accommodating.

Then for all its humor, it's touchingly sad. It centers on one of Rosie's friends and fellow art students, Lucy, and her final project. Her final project involves observing (via many secretly installed hidden cameras) the degradation of a young man, up and coming in his employ as a lawyer, who was rendered permanently brain damaged after a slip and a fall.

The weird thing is this story and this project don't start off touchingly. One gets the visible picture that Lucy is studying the young man, Ryan Conrad, for exploitative reasons. In part because, as a Rosie who's our first person narrator also, says, "Her project is to observe the wholesale collapse of a family following major trauma." Rosie thinks at the story's beginning that Lucy might be evil. We learn from Rosie, as the story progresses, that Lucy once dated Ryan Conrad. You're sort of asked to relax on certainty of Lucy's evil as time wears on. The opposite is the case with Dylan, Lucy's boyfriend and the third member of the trio, who starts off seeming somewhat benevolent and sheepish, and in general at the mercy of the domineering Lucy.

Slowly, though, Dylan's motivations seem less innocent. He's working on a novel for his final project, a sci-fi piece about scientists who turn earth's water supply into soda pop. It ends up being a ludicrously lucrative expenditure of his time (which is not in itself evil or bad or anything). I wouldn't call Dylan evil or bad, as I don't think the story offers the opportunity to paint with that broad a brush. What it does do is modify our preconceived notions of each character: Dylan begins to seem less honest, Lucy less driven by her final project's nefarious ends. Rosie is caught in the middle of this, totally uncertain of what she should do and who she should be. The triumvirate is a good one, one that changes fluidly, without willfulness.

And that leads to what ultimately happens, which telling you about would be more than I think a review should offer. This is the teacher in me speaking, I think.

TAKE THAT AND THAT, NICOLE! CHALLENGED!

The thread that ties all the stories of the collection together is a combination of the randomness of any so-called order, here on earth or up in space, and the way perception is altered by a slightly new viewing angle. These stories repeatedly have within them -- very literally -- the depiction of a random stabbing, which is told through many different perspectives, and is often confused by the fact that in certain cases the victim dies and in certain cases the victim is possibly alive and well. The perpetrator is sometimes regarded as crazy and sometimes as a complete unknown. (All of this depends on the source of the information.)

In the first several versions of this anecdote the story seems to come from or to secondhand sources, a man who is just hearing about it by word of mouth or a mother who is being told by the hospital staff that her son is dead. In that way it reads like a news item or a tragic occurrence that has befallen a friend of the family, a friend of a friend of the family, on and on. Never are we the victim, not until the story comes firsthand from the victim.

Further challenged, Nicole, eh? Feeling the literary challenge heat, as they say?

***

Well, here, if you're desirous of more. . .

Another interesting idea that floats through a number of stories (at least two) in "TUIMIM" is what Somerville calls, "The Machine of Understanding Other People." It appears first, as a supposed idea Dylan has, in the short story "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature." (We later learn of the possibility that Dylan stole the idea from Lucy, as she claims he did.) We see it again in the -- gasp -- eponymously named "The Machine of Understanding Other People." This latter tale is the kind of story I wish I'd written (but didn't / can't), because it so perfectly encapsulates all those ideas of contemporary pluralism and social equity of modern liberalism, and the realistic challenges of actually understanding someone else from their point of view.

The machine Somerville offers up to his characters and the reader is both the greatest and most destructive invention in the history of mankind. It allows one to feel exactly as the subject they're viewing, done so by aiming a weird wand attached to a helmet that resembles something you'd wear deep-sea diving (like something out of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea").

But you, who wears it, (the two main characters in the story being Tom, an American and a middle-aged, broken-souled alcoholic and Eliza, a Briton and a relatively young, world-weary optimist given to flights of whimsy), are forced to see things through the eyes of the person at whom you point the wand. This, meanwhile, creates all new problems, as it doesn't swing open the gates of solipsism. You're still an occluded consciousness as you bring all your experiences with you to the experience of "understanding" another person. The difference is that you know what that person now feels and has felt throughout life, what's stuck. The baggage. You feel it, too, through your purview.

Tom and Eliza come into massive inheritances, although each one of them is different. The pair was brought together by the chance happening of an outlying eccentric uncle, who was born out of wedlock, the product of Tom's grandfather and Eliza's grandmother's brief affair. The uncle, Herman, went on to accrue some wealth and a very peculiar kind of machine, "of Understanding Other People." His mother, Eliza's grandmother, Beatrice, was some kind of genius and invented it during the second world war, the result of prompting from the British government to produce some kind of new weapon. By his own unstated means, Herman was able to keep tabs on and took an interest in Tom and Eliza, and upon his death, Herman willed away his monetary wealth to Eliza and his machine to Tom. Eliza, as a do-gooding idealist, has plans to create a university of free-thinking and invention at which whimsy and imagination are, above all else, encouraged. It's called Pangea University. It ends up creating quite a stir, worldwide. I will say no more. Read it!

The point is, "The Machine of Understanding Other People" is spell-bindingly layered, layered not only in plot points but in actual written structure -- at times reminiscent of The New Yorker journalism's unusual bends and folds in their articles. Narratives are strategically left behind and then returned to like so much parabola. Other stories of the collection are again referenced, even the murderer who stabs makes a cameo appearance (we get a fuller explanation of what is happening with him and that, also).

It's just all so much good!

***

But enough, this pugilist of the literary variety needs rest. I have made my literary challenge. It is your move, Nicole!

EXTRA! EXTRA! A Publication Alert! Metazen!

2011-02-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

Hey world, just wanted to let you all know that I, Matt Rowan, have successfully been published on Metazen (a really cool web literary zine). The story? It's called "Forevergrad."

If you're interested in checking it out or checking out whatever else is there to be found, CLICK HERE (for me) and CLICK HERE (for all of Metazen).

An Update Post, More or Less

2011-02-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

I'm a couple stories into A D Jameson's very recently released (i.e. this month) short story collection, "Amazing Adult Fantasy," available from Mutable Sound (a very cool Chicago area indie press). If you know of Jameson's writing from around these internets, either as a blogger on Big Other or just various fictions made available on web-based and print literary magazines' sites, you know he's not short on thoughtful and entertaining commentary and prose.

So far "Amazing Adult Fantasy" has blended references to my own favorite childhood pop culture icons, Oscar the Grouch, Indian(a) Jones, and Big Bird, with surrealist, humorous literary locales reminiscent of the stylings of writers like Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover and Curtis White. Of course where some of the preceding authors' works get a bit too disjointed for my tastes at times, narrative structure, though oft abstract, is retained in Jameson's fiction (which I hope encourages those of you who've been overly daunted by experimental writers in the past to maybe not give up on Jameson without first giving his writing an honest shot). There will no doubt be more to come on this subject as I continue to read "Amazing Adult Fantasy."

***

Meanwhile, I continue the challenge of reading "VALIS" by Philip K. Dick. I hope to finish this, his trippiest of trippy novels, before the month is out. I think it's hard to argue "VALIS" isn't also PKD's most ambitious work of fiction, likewise. Its features are much more relatable to the difficult structural turns of works by experimental, umbrella-termed postmodern writers than most science fiction authors I've ever encountered. It's also a visible departure from the more well-known stories that have made him a well-remembered author of the genre. This is all very much to say I encourage you to read "VALIS" (but after you've acquainted yourself with his earlier works). More to come on this once I've finished reading the novel, though.

***

I'm also beginning to read two books I've wanted to read for quite some time now, Alissa Nutting's "Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls" and Patrick Somerville's "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature." I'm reading both for bibliographing Nicole's "reading challenge." Wish me luck! There will must needs be more on the subject of this in the coming weeks.

So fear not, readers, while I seem like I'm neglecting this blog , the truth is quite the contrary, I'm striving more than ever before to deliver actual, meaningful content and commentary. Because what would be the point of barfing out whatever comes to my mind (i.e. barfing without clear focus).

(I can't really debate the logorrhea put forth here resembles a kind of word barfing, and for that I apologizes sooo muchs; I blame the Internet and the very nature of blogging, and conveniently not myself.)

Pu-neen!

2011-02-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

Weird, weirdo . . . weirdy weirdo. Weird! "Pnin" -- well, what the hell is it? It's by Vladimir Nabokov. Certainly that's good. That's a good thing for a book.

But before I get ahead of myself . . .

Consistency on the blog has been difficult lately. This is in part because, believe it or not, I'm student teaching presently. Student teaching is a challenging thing, I've discovered. I'm doing the best I can, but it's odd how try as I might, high school students feel no immediate need to read and enjoy the works of well-known authors and playwrights like Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. I mean, c'mon, obviously those guys had something to say, and shouldn't it be self-evident? Shouldn't they virtually teach themselves? Well, the answer is that, no, not necessarily on any of those counts, according to high school sophomores.

Don't ask the average high school sophomore what (s)he thinks of most literature if you want to be heartened by where the future of literary appreciation is headed. They won't have an answer, typically.

Don't worry, I'm not naive. I already knew there'd be likely . . . resistance, resistance to being taught. I have ways of making them talk, though, so don't worry. I'm also not jaded, perhaps inclined to cynicism but not jaded.

And just because I'm working harder than I ever have in my life to date, that doesn't mean I haven't had time for some recreational reading. How could I put off some recreational reading? I couldn't and I haven't! "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov is just one of those books that I couldn't put off. Sorry to you who might have thought I could have put "Pnin" and other such books off. I will not be foiled. To say that I will is not a true fact.

[So some spoilers will no doubt follow this point.]

One of the things that I noticed about "Pnin" is it's like all ascent story arch. There's no climactic summit, and there's not a "coming down" descent. You just keep learning about the Russian professor, Timofey Pnin, and his exploits first in Europe and then at Waindell College stateside. No tortured souls, no monomania of a telltale variety, no justification or apology of those sorts of things already listed. This is a different kind of Nabokovian tale.

Here's this to get started:

Roy Thayer avoided talking of his subject, avoided, in fact, talking of any subject, had squandered a decade of gray life on an erudite work dealing with a forgotten group of unnecessary poetasters, and kept a detailed diary, in cryptogrammed verse, which he hoped posterity would someday decipher and, in sober backcast, proclaim the greatest literary achievement of our time -- and for all i know, Roy Thayer, you might be right.

And while that quote might not be terribly good for summing up Pnin the character, it does a nice job of articulating the academic setting in which he finds himself. This is good in part for the fact that we don't learn much about Pnin the character. He's certainly given to his many tics and idiosyncrasies; he's an academic of many years and middling esteem, regarded by his colleagues as something of a laughingstock; he's bogged down by an inescapable lack of coherency given the deep-seated quality of his heavy Russian accent (a fact for which Nabokov himself may well have felt some affinity when you hear interviews of the man available on youtube, or consider Thomas Pynchon's recollection of his erstwhile instructor while Pynchon was a student at Cornell University: plainly, that he couldn't make out what Nabokov was saying because of his thick Russian accent); he's a Pollyanna to the extent that he imagines good things could conceivably come his way (facts set forth by the narrator repeatedly seem stacked against good outcomes).

Still the narrative turns strangely, asking you as reader to appreciate the life and times of someone ostensibly insignificant as Pnin appears to be. The unnamed narrator would seem insignificant, almost objectively third-person, were it not for the fact that throughout the story this individual speckles various pronouns such as "I" in reference to itself (or more like himself), which struck me as important. It struck me as a metafictional turn by Nabokov, though I'm inclined to think he'd flatly deny it. Either way, whether he meant to or not, the narrator begins to seem like the voice of Nabokov himself, recalling this Pnin character with strange, obsessive clarity.

And as I say, the narrator whoever he is, makes various references to the fact that he doesn't know Pnin firsthand much at all. He supposedly first came across the youthful Pnin while a child himself, needing to see Pnin's father, Dr. Pavel Pnin, after having a granule of debris become lodged in his eye somehow. "One of those silly incidents that remain forever in a child's receptive mind marked the spaec of time my tutor and I spent in Dr. Pnin's sundust-and-plush waiting room . . ." After the granule was extracted by Dr. Pnin, the narrator reported, ". . . the tender doctor removed from my eyeball the offending black atom! I wonder where that speck is now? The dull, mad fact is that it does exist somewhere." This last line especially impressed me, because you immediately run the idea parallel to the narrator's perception of Pnin himself, a man he acknowledges knowing so very little of personally, as said.

Pnin is the narrator's (or Nabokov's) black speck. A human speck that he wonders about existing someplace. Everything of the narration, with notable exceptions (exceptions for which we need to take the narrator's and thus Nabokov's (either tangentially or at the fore) word), is left up to the great probability of being untrue, of being something the narrator has conjured to fill in the blanks of Pnin's life, the things the narrator couldn't possibly be certain of.

So thanks for that, Nabokov, what another very subtle and sly mind game you weave. How'm I supposed to sleep easy with my own wondering, wondering and wonderment over that.

DDDDaddy's, a Collection of Life's Good Gristle

2011-01-31T14:01:00.000-08:00

Whoa, Lindsay Hunter. Way to be surreal. I mean it. Way. to. be.

Like, that's awesome that you were in the ways you were.

"Daddy's" is akin to few books I've ever read; I've read a lot of books. There is a syllogism in there somewhere perhaps, but I won't go further to suss it out. The fact is, Featherproof has completely won me over, not that I was ever terribly skeptical (I had a smallish -- but positive -- familiarity with Lindsay Hunter's work before I read "Daddy's").

And though I say her writing is more than anything all her own, Lindsay Hunter definitely has a little of what I've loved about certain authors who could at least loosely be termed of the southern tradition, which as she is a southerner, herself, that stands to reason. Writers like Cormac McCarthy and what I liked best about Barry Hannah stand out. In the latter case, that's this kind of unabashed enthusiasm for the dire straits of a penniless world, i.e. a world in which you've never known a single penny, as in possessing said penny or pennies. But that doesn't change that the world in these dire straits is hard and hardly alimentary. I think that's why junk food is such a useful metaphor here: abundance without sustenance. It's in the precision of her use of such images that strokes of real and remarkably terse genius are demonstrably evident. Like Raymond Carver, she says a lot without needing too much say so.

There's also something sinister in all the jocularity inherent to most of Hunter's stories. And that's because while not all people are, some people are horrible. Some people are horrible but still they have stories, and personally, I'd rather hear them told from a person whom I think is probably a good person at heart just trying to depict a horrible person from her good person vantage, as with understanding of a kind, and also imagination!

Actually, since writing the preceding I had the opportunity to see Lindsay Hunter perform a story in person (and I don't think her readings ought to be classified as anything less than a performance). Her narrator took on a whole new life. It was the story "Peggy's Brother" -- which appears in "Daddy's." In my own personal reading of this story I was struck by how tawdry and sordid the events that unfurled had seemed. (SPOILER ALERT (with a strong possibility of more to follow, from here on out)): it is the story of a relatively naive young girl who is taken advantage of by the older brother of her friend, the eponymous "Peggy.")

In Hunter's reading, though, I was surprised by how embracing of her circumstances the unnamed narrator girl seems, how -- in a certain sense -- she maintains control of herself and circumstances. She's ostensibly as curious about sexuality as Peggy's brother. She's less interested in the childish games her friends are in the midst of (A particularly crude game of "Truth or Dare"). Surely, Peggy's brother isn't the best option for her to experiment with, but he is the most expedient. It's an odd take that spins the normative expectations of youthful female sexuality, as something entirely submissive, and typically as something that's taken from them.

Here's an exchange between the narrator and Peggy's brother that rang very differently when read by Hunter:

Have you heard of fucking? he asks, raising his voice over Danny's mother's screams ["The Shining" is on television, in the background, through the entirety of the two characters' interaction].

I think so, I tell him.

Good, he says.

Oh, definitely, I say.

"Oh, definitely" is rendered extremely comical in Hunter's reading, its effect a nice punch-line to the absurdity of Peggy's brother's comments -- which would read absurdly no matter who's providing their voice, I think.

As previously alluded -- in Hunter's fiction, junk food has never seemed so horrible. Might never seem the same again. (Although funny how as I get older, junk food just keeps losing its luster and its mystique. And makes me sick more than I find it enjoyable, on the whole.) "Food Luck" is a great example of this. It's the story of two brothers, one who's speaking to the other, describing their sordid lives together. In the story food kills, weighs one down. It's excessive, the eating. Glutinous and vile. To the point where, I dunno, it resembles something else. Resembles the terrible engrams (in the loosest definition of the term) that alter our souls and codify our DNA somewhat differently, bringing about fundamental change. I believe there is science in my previous statement somewhere. I can't promise it is sensical, though. Still, I hope in some sensical sense that makes sense, what I've said. Food kills, because it isn't food at all. It's filler.

"Fifteen" is the story of quasi-orgy. Really vivid. Like a teenage make-out party in the house from something like "Fight Club" (the movie and not the novel). Descriptions of horrible living conditions and the kids, kids probably in the age range of fifteen, wallowing in it. Mothers sleep with teenage boys, boys "nearly eighteen so it was alright." The house has nooks filled with cat feces and wrappers for everything that comes in a wrapper. Then there's the subtly unseemly line that might have been a good alternative title, "the room smelled like breath."

"That Baby" is among my favorites of the collection. It's such a good idea for a story it makes you wish you'd thought of it sooo badly. I mean, it just clicks. I won't say anything more about it. You ought to read it yourself. Read it here, in fact. Then go buy (or somehow acquire) and read all of "Daddy's."

On Those Texts That Have Been Over-Analyzed: "Lord of the Flies"

2011-01-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

My likely career as an English teacher presents me with some unique problems, considering I love books but I don't necessarily love the books I'll need high schoolers to read, at least at times. There's also the correlating problem of, whatever the fiction, getting high schoolers to feel reading a novel, a poem, a short story and so forth is worth their while in the first place.

Studies show reading isn't the popular pastime it once was, and why should it be? There's every other kind of portable and stationary stimulation to fill its spot. Problem is, few of those alternatives train people to be as active intellectually as books do. And you don't need to be a Marxist, or a Luddite or some forward-thinking science fiction writer, and you needn't have seen "The Matrix" or "The Terminator" or any other example of technology run amok to worry at the dangers of intellectual complacency. It's just not a good idea to be such and such a way, in terms of blah, blah, blah. Because it's borrring . . .

Ech! Fell into a techno-trap, as these things will cause.

Ok, but honestly, I agree with those who've noted technology does hamper concentration, on being able to focus. We shouldn't lose touch with our ability to focus, or highway safety might be reduced to something lower than where it's at, which is a low place, I've judged.

So all of that leads to my thinking about "Lord of the Flies" -- William Golding's classic novel from the mid-1950s -- which wonders how a collection of English boys, ham-fisted together by chance and a crash landing, would fare without adult intervention on an island surrounded pretty exclusively by water, lots of water. The answer is, overall, not very well. Badly, you might argue. Most everyone has read this novel if the everyone in question has been to high school in the United States. Like most high school novels it's been drilled and mined for its symbolic worth to the point of, ostensibly, being depleted completely.

So why am I wasting my time talking about it? Because despite all of that it manages to be a mesmerizing tale, one that forces students to decide fundamental philosophical things about the nature of humankind. Are we inherently good or bad? Is it a societal construct? I think it's the atavistic nature of the boy's circumstances. As interesting as reads like "Of Mice and Men" and "The Great Gatsby" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" are, they don't have the staying power of a novel like "Lord of the Flies." Because students, nay people, should always wonder about the true nature of humanity, if only to be better than or live up to that true nature.

As the greatest bit of symbolism in that story, the death of Piggy and the destruction of the conch shell, once knowledge and infrastructure are lost it's hard to reclaim them.

Don't crush the voice of reason, or destroy a rational order.

Amelia Gray's Museum is Weird, Indeed

2011-01-16T08:13:00.000-08:00

Misapprehension is a stupid thing. You can, for instance, come across a trifling bit of an author on some literary journal or another and misapprehend its representing their entire body of work. And who wants to misapprehend? Not me, that's for true. So I'm glad that whatever it was that made me skeptical of Amelia Gray was easy enough to get past when I first heard of the content of her recent 2010 short story collection, "Museum of the Weird." It's weird, as advertised. It's like Lorrie Moore if Lorrie Moore decided she wanted to be the prefect fusion of Will Self concepts and Donald Barthelme-style abstraction and pith. It's a read you itch to get back to reading, when reading of it stops and you have to go do other things. Fortunately, the stories are all very short, so at least you get some sense of conclusion whilst you itch for more.

It's a disorienting world come to life, here, I mean. Hysterically funny and hysterically sad and hysterically difficult to pin down. But ever worth reading.

There's a nonchalance to the storytelling, as if to say, yes, this is a humorous, wry and thoughtful narrative, but we needn't get all hot and bothered about these facts. Stay cool yet emotionally plugged in. A tough balancing act but Amelia Gray succeeds pretty completely at it.

Let's break it down a bit; here are some of her stories discretely analyzed:

One of my personal favorites is "The Suitcase." I mean "The Suitcase" is about as perfectly comedic as literary fiction gets, the narrative centering on a woman's dealing with her boyfriend's preference to remain ensconced in a piece of luggage. I like to think of main character Claire's boyfriend, Alex, as emblematic of the current, generally infantalized generation -- he can't sprout like the healthy seed he is, if we're speaking of people in terms of their being like seeds.

You grow to love being kept safe and warm by the many safety nets society constructs to keep you safe, even if simultaneously -- if you're any kind of healthy, functional person -- you can't help but resent your situation. Feeling you need to be stuck in a suitcase is both succoring and stifling and you love/hate it. I think one scene that exemplifies this fairly well is when they're confronted by airport security, subsequently barred from boarding their flight, and brought to the airport chaplain (his name is Ted) for some reason. Their exchange is as follows:

"How does he live?" Ted asked. "How does he feed himself, or use the restroom? Doesn't he develop terrible sores? What of his work towards his spirit?"

The Samsonite hopped a little with rage. "We manage, guy," Alex said from within.

This segment also illustrates Alex's position for the entirety of the story, which is object and never subject (except prior to his enclosure in the suitcase). He always needs to react to the comments, is never referred to directly but only tangentially, and this produces the delightfully amusing impotence that defines his character. It's really something to behold that it's achieved with so few words, more with touch and with feel.

"Diary of a Blockage" reads to me like the study of singular obsession, a narrator ostensibly named Miss Mosely is suffering the feeling of a fleck of regurgitation caught in her throat. Yes, it's funny but why is it funny? It's funny because, geez, it's a horrible idea. Imagine if the blockage is only illusory? What a terrible, morbid thought. But from that thought emerges obsession, and obsession's thriving with the wrong -- i.e. destructive -- focus makes life difficult to live. It culminates with numerous excellent thoughts, but my favorite is in this narration:

. . . it is time for the blockage to finally emerge, the gestation period has concluded, the suffering is nearly through (though it has not been true suffering and we will never know true suffering), that which will most closely resemble joy is prepared to leave my body and move into the world

While I think the last line of that excerpt is interesting -- that the blockage will "most closely resemble joy" -- better still is, "the suffering is nearly through (though it has not been true suffering and we will never know true suffering)." Like the difference in poverty and abject poverty, human suffering can be measured on a relative scale. In another sense, you could argue true suffering is only measurable by your personal experiences, that you can never know another's experiences, not palpably, and so you're left to endure only what is worst to you. There is, however, a discriminating tendency in humans, the awareness of others, that shows itself with empathy and feeling you have experienced something similarly insufferable, so as to better understand what would be worse than that, through the perspective of another's experience. What's interesting is having that clarity of mind WHILE you are enduring something horrible, to know that this is not the worst thing that has ever befallen someone, not even close. But that's just one thing.

"Fish" seems to have been written, if for no other reason, then to illustrate the slippery slope of unusual romances. An oft-heard argument of the current political climate is that if gays are allowed to marry then soon no one will be able to present an argument for why beastiality isn't permissible, because a man or woman's having a romantic (sexual) relationship with an animal is no less logical than two members of the same sex being married. I won't bother with the speciousness of this argument. I don't think I have anything new to add to that. Amelia Gray tackles the issue, even if only indirectly, with her protagonists, Dale and Howard, and their respective marriages to a paring knife and a bag of frozen tilapia. The problem is these objects aren't spouses, can't share in anything of the nature of interpersonal interaction, and are thus rendered crutches -- helping Dale and Howard isolate themselves from other people, giving them cause to say others do not understand. I think this story wraps up particularly well, and it could be my favorite of the bunch, were I forced to pick.

All right, so there are many more stories than just the three above, but perhaps you see, they all beg to be analyzed and, really, just thought about. Because who knows if anything I've said here is true at all? What the hell is truth in that respect? I mean, these are just the things I think, so what do you think? What are the things you think on the subject of books and perhaps "Museum of the Weird," in particular? I await your reply.

Here's a link to a good interview with Amelia Gray on HTML Giant, if you would like to know more!

Todd Dills and My First Read Novel of the New Year

2011-01-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

Slowly but surely, I'm immersing myself in the work of authors from various indie presses of lesser or greater acclaim. I've already been told what The New Yorker thinks is good, by The New Yorker of all sources. In other words, and seriously no knock on The New Yorker, but I know what the establishment says is good fiction (in surprisingly many instances I would agree, what's more). I know, too, what the less mainstream, more erudite experimental authors of The Dalkey Press think is good fiction.

So now it's time for me to give a look elsewhere, to the slightly less lauded and more obscure publishers and their authors. Featherproof, for one, is a independent press that is producing some top tier stuff by talented young writers, one of whom is, yes, Todd Dills. Dills is a writer I first encountered last spring, when he hosted "So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel?" -- a reading series falling under the auspices of his Chicago-cum-The American South lit magazine, The2ndhand. Dills, himself, was born (and presumably raised) in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Chicago became the subject of his interest possibly when he came here to study fiction at Columbia College, where he received his MFA.

Most of what I've written in the preceding comes from what I gleaned reading his author bio in the back pages of his novel, "Sons of The Rapture," which IS the novel of his I read, recently. It's most of what the following words I write will be concerning, too.

Twang, what's the dictionary.com definition? (The most appropriate-for-my-purposes definition, anywho?) It's let's say this: "To give a sharp, vibrating sound, as the string of a musical instrument when plucked." I have opted not to use the definition (#3) that includes reference to human beings because I feel it has a negative connotation in its denotation. I want there to be no negative denotations or connotations to this: I think Todd Dills writing in "Sons of the Rapture" has a lyrically twang-filled tenor to it. In his prose there is all the thoughtfulness of a writer possessing a demonstrably wide range of diction but, likewise, possessing a singsong quality reminiscent of a folk tale told in or around a barn / old abandoned mill (or most probably a campfire, although ideally not one made in a barn / old abandoned mill for obvious reasons). Boiling it down, what I mean is whether you like the substance of his writing Dills sure can construct some melodious prose, boy howdy.

But the substance of his story is, to me, likewise compelling. "Sons of the Rapture" (published by Featherproof Books in 2006) is at its most pigeon-hole-able a coming-of-age story, if you can come of age in, ostensibly, your early-to-mid 2os, as seems is the case for the novel's primary voice, Billy Jones. He's also a man without a country (Billy is), a southerner sojourning, if not displaced, in Chicago. His brother is a murderer, and his mother the sole victim of his brother's murderous violence. His father, Johnny Jones, is a gadabout and a prankster, herding cattle and hating (for a very specific reason) a senator named Thorpe Storm, who bears a striking resemblance to a real-life one-time Dixiecrat and candidate for president, a man of infamy or veneration, depending on your politics. That is to say, the one for whom praising got Trent Lott into some trouble not too many years back. C'mon, still don't know? Geesus, it's Strom Thurmond, STROM THURMOND. If you've never heard of him consult a history textbook of some accreditation. I refuse to explicate further.

The story is not terribly long in terms of pages, 183 more or less, but there sure is a lot packed in to those pages, and in the tradition of William Faulkner, the story is told by different characters in alternating sections, among whom perhaps the most interesting is Artichoke Heart (aka A.H.), a tiara-wearing, cross-dressing, trumpeter of ambiguous sexual orientation. According to Billy Jones, He even says within the first few pages of the story, directed at what precisely is not entirely clear, "Girl on boy. Girl on girl. Boy on boy. No difference whatever." We learn from A.H. that he might have a dark past riddled with mob entanglements and the likelihood of his committing imprimatur hits on their behalf. But he's also a flamboyant showman and couple that with the oft-unpredictable, unreliable first-person narration both in general and with respect to Dills specifically and you're left basically wondering about his story's veracity all the way to the end.

But my favorite part is Billy Jones' reference to his erstwhile employ at The "Albert R. Parsons" Center, or in real-life The James R. Thompson Center, named for two men whose politics couldn't be much more divergent, I'd think. I won't digress down the path of an impromptu history lesson, but Albert R. Parsons was one of the Haymarket Square martyrs, and before that a contrarian ex-Confederate in the reconstruction, pre-Jim Crow era south. Parsons' views were wildly antithetical to mainstream opinion (there is significant evidence that his wife, Lucy Parsons, was of African bloodlines), especially as southerners of the period were concerned. He was subsequently forced into exile, lest he be killed by the KKK upon reconstruction's end and the northern troops' withdrawal. This led him to Chicago where he and Lucy joined the labor rights movement that would eventually cost him his life -- by an institutional lynching, if I may be so bold as to editorialize here for a moment. James R. Thompson, more affectionately known as "Big Jim" says wikipedia, is less interesting: the longest serving Republican governor in the state of Illinois, and probably some other stuff. Congrats to him for that.

Point is, I enjoyed Dills' reference there, ya know? Billy Jones also notes the propensity for suicide in that location, given the panopticonic series of balconies ringing its center to some great height, which offers the rather spectacular opportunity of jumping from its highest heights to what can only, morbidly, be described as resembling a bulls-eye down below, painted to the flooring of its food court. I passed it all the time as I changed el trains en route to me Alma Mater, DePaul. Happily, I never witnessed even the aftermath of a suicide.

If I have complaints about this book they tend to reside with the characters whose perspectives I was less interested in reading, which were basically whoever is left after Billy Jones, briefly A.H. and, somewhat less briefly, murderous Bobby Jones. It was nice to see Thorpe Storm mocked and messed with, though, as delighting in the failures of men who resemble Strom Thurmond will be.

Check it, yo!

As for Featherproof, Lindsay Hunter's "Daddy's" is next up!

Reflecting on the Year and Looking to the Future of My Happy Reading

2010-12-27T10:56:00.000-08:00

2010 was rife with awesomeness, reading-wise. I've added Philip K. Dick and Vladimir Nabokov to my list of all-time favorite authors. George Saunders remains among my topmost with a really just neat short story, "Escape From Spiderhead," that appeared in the recent issue of The New Yorker. David Markson, though sadly he passed away this year, also left a positive impression on me with "Wittgenstein's Mistress." William Gaddis proved his intangible value in my mind with "J R." Adam Levin and Patrick Somerville are two great young, Chicago-area writers I look forward to continuing things from. I've got "The Instructions" and I'm making headway with that, a really just enjoyable read so far. And I've got "The Cradle" and I'm waiting with bated breath for "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature." A D Jameson is another young Chicago-area writer worthy of note, and not simply because I know him, but because he has produced some damned inventive fiction you ought to check out. (Hell, he introduced me to Philip K. Dick and David Markson's awesomeness, among a great many other things.) Jameson's criticism is always thought-provoking, likewise, and his talent for honest and earnest introspection is unrivaled, as I see it. Lots of men-heavy talk here, but I mustn't forget to mention Lorrie Moore, who has just got lots of stuff that's worth your time. Lindsay Hunter and Karen Russell are two other female authors I've enjoyed in 2010, cannot wait for "Daddy's" to arrive. Oh, and I really enjoyed Shirley Jackson's "The Possibility of Evil," which I look forward to attempting to teach to high school students in 2011.

As for the future, i.e. 2011, well, let's start with several books I've gotten for Christmas. There's "The Physics of Imaginary Objects" by Tina May Hall, and that's just got an awesome title. Then there's "Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls" by Alissa Nutting, which isn't that also an awesome title? "Daddy's" as already mentioned. "The Museum of the Weird" by Amelia Gray. Somerville's titles, "The Cradle" and "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature." Roald Dahl's "My Uncle Oswald." "Pnin" by Vladimir Nabokov. Oh and philosophy by Soren Kierkegaard.

It should be a great year! How was your book haul? What do you look forward to in 2011, book-wise?" I'll probably give Nicole Krauss' "Great House" a try, and Jim Shepard's "You Think That's Bad." "The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace, also, which seems like a good idea, reading-wise.

Good Writing and Sad Happenings in "Revolutionary Road"

2010-12-23T09:37:00.000-08:00

The first thing I'll think of whenever I think of Richard Yates must necessarily be "Seinfeld" (and NOT the title of Tao Lin's latest novel) -- because he was apparently the inspiration for Elaine's grizzled, aloof father (a celebrated novelist named Alton Benes). Larry David, the well-known co-creator of "Seinfeld" and star of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," used to date Yates' daughter, Monica, which I imagine produced some very "Curb Your Enthusiasm" type moments, as well. I feel like Alton Benes' appearance was very much a precursor to the humor that has informed David's precedent sitcom. I both can and cannot imagine Larry David and Richard Yates seated in the same room alone together. I'm laugh-cringing already.

Here's something a little different, though: I feel like a lot of the time I approach these reviews with an eye more for the logos of the narrative than its pathos. Truth is, Yates' "Revolutionary Road" is nothing if it isn't a tour-de-force of powerful passions, life's life blood, and what results from a failure of things to "work out." Frank and April Wheeler are perhaps two of the most emotionally complex characters I've read in, well, ever. They just throb with every unfulfilled or feigned emotion, which you can imagine is a complex notion in itself, i.e. to be so palpably real in their falseness. I can't say that I enjoyed reading Yates with the same zeal I did Gaddis and Nabokov. "Revolutionary Road" is the kind of novel that demands your discomfort. "Revolutionary Road" gets inside of you. This is perhaps because it cuts to the core so precisely. Maybe you relate too well to the Wheelers, for example. Maybe I do.

Here come certain spoilerifics:

It's not enough to say it's about the stultifying effects of suburban malaise circa 1950, because in so many ways that's the story Frank Wheeler is trying to sell you, because that's the story he's sold to himself. Especially relevant and ironical to this notion is Wheeler's boss Bart Pollock's mantra (page 207 of my edition), acquired by Pollock from a "wiser older man," of which Pollock says, "He said to me, 'Bart, everything is selling.' He said, 'Nothing happens in this world, nothing comes into this world, until somebody makes a sale.'" There isn't much that's terribly unusual about this idea, a tried and true cliche of business speak -- that is, if you don't have the ancillary element of Wheeler imagining how he'll recast the situation to April later, saying to her, "And I kept sitting there getting drunk and thinking 'What the hell does this guy want from me?' . . . Of course I kept thinking none of it matters a damn, but still; he really had me guessing." Frank has sold himself a characteristic: bashful modesty and false ignorance. Plus, he knows he's been taken in by Pollock's own appeal to him, a job offer as head of sales for a new division: electronic computers for the American businessman. Frank's ego is stroked and there's no going back, despite April's plan to finally cast off the "hopeless emptiness" of America for the possibility of something better in Europe as ex-patriots.

Yet the truth of Frank Wheeler's situation is something much more pernicious, and it speaks to anyone who's ever allowed themselves to become just a bit too sure of their own significance and, perhaps, superiority. It's natural for people to want to feel as though they possess skills beyond those of anyone who has ever lived or ever will live. I mean, natural to the extent that we desire feeling unique, as means of demonstrating our purpose and implying a justifiable degree of immortality. We're not Homer of the Odyssey nor Homer of the Simpsons, but hey, we're not unspectacular, either. And given the opportunity, oh, how we might prove this!

You begin to see how Frank and April Wheeler demonstrate another kind of story. Lost in the macro, sociological criticisms -- fictional tellings or otherwise -- of American suburbia of the last half century, is the individualistic myth-making of those of us who seem to think we are above it all, because of our great awareness. "Revolutionary Road" is, among other things, a condemnation of the snobs, but not just any snob, the snob who thinks (s)he can stand apart from the rest of humanity, flippantly wave a hand, and live deliberately. There's also a degree of contempt for those who find they may once have felt differently but now are completely willing to let themselves become ensconced in life's circumstances, taking comfort in the fact that there is no other option. Hoping, praying, lying to oneself and pretending that things will be above and beyond one's control, whether this is true or not (anyone who reads this blog knows I'm an adherent of at least the possibility of determinism; and that I much revile Ayn Rand and her disciples).

The story's catalyst comes in the form of a man named John Givings, the unstable and institutionalized but rather brilliant son of the Wheelers' realtor and neighbor, Helen Givings. John is like a character plucked from Nurse Ratched's domain in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," with special reference to Chief Bromden's "The Combine," and set down into the unhappy middle class vista of Revolutionary Road, off of which lays the Wheelers' home, set just apart from the unpleasant cookie-cutter housing of "the dreadful new development" Revolutionary Hill Estates, which is symbolism that I don't think minces too many symbols.

John Givings is not one to mince anything, either. He likes what you're doing or he doesn't. It's to him that Frank Wheeler first uses the term "hopeless emptiness" to describe what they think of the contemporary American landscape. Givings himself commends them, saying on page 200, "Now you've said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the [West] Coast, that's all we ever talked about." Which is why John's reaction amounts to nothing less than disgust when he later is told Frank has found a useful reason for canceling the Wheeler's European exodus, to wit: April has become pregnant with their third child. John sees the sham of it all, sees more than anyone, that Frank is full of it. The Wheeler's happy marriage is anything but, which is why his final pronouncement on page 303 packs an especially powerful punch: ". . . he extended a long yellow-stained index finger and pointed it at the slight mound of April's pregnancy. 'You know what I'm glad of? I'm glad I'm not gonna be that kid.'"

The narrative descends to what I'd define as tragedy, but a powerful and worthy tragedy, one that I've yet to shake and one that I'd just as soon not describe here, because I feel there's such a thing as too much spoiling. My advice? Read "Revolutionary Road." (I can't vouch for the movie yet, as I haven't seen it.)

Mini Review of the Little Religion of "Miss Lonelyhearts"

2010-12-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

Boy-o, "Miss Lonelyhearts" is a short read by Nathanael West. I don't know that I have tons of thoughts about it. It started much stronger than I believe the rest of the story held up. It has an excellent climax. Someone forgot the middle, I think. Or maybe I'm just being lazy, as reviewing goes.

The story was, if I'm being overly critical, far too concerned with Miss Lonelyhearts, the man (Miss Lonelyhearts is a nom de plum that, nonetheless, is the only name by which the main character is referenced throughout the novel), and not enough with his job, which is advice dispenser for a widely read advice column.

My copy came used and annotated by an individual who focused on the many allusions to religion West makes. I think these allusions are a bit trite and obvious, not to make light of the reader who came before me and her (the handwriting suggests it was a female) interests / concerns.

The humanity of the story is in its people who populate Miss Lonelyhearts' column. Those who desire advice, those who are in many ways victims of the advice itself. For example, what proves Miss Lonelyhearts' undoing is when he allows himself to become romantically entangled with one particularly effusive advice seeker. In exposing himself as something quite human and of the earth he relinquish the quasi-deity potency he once held, not so much to his public but to himself, though his hold of it was already beginning to wane. And in fact that is what the story speaks to, the notion of adequacy as dispenser of truth. Miss Lonelyhearts is just another man behind the curtain, no Great and Powerful Oz. Why should his fate be any different than ours?

Bend it Like Nabokov, i.e. Sinisterly (Part II)

2010-12-16T18:09:00.000-08:00

So there is more, for starters. I attached "part I" to the title of my II part Nabokov "Bend Sinister" postings for a reason: there are II parts! Also, in this post I'm operating on the assumption that you've at least some familiarity with the previous part of this II parter, ya know? So don't act like you're not following me, especially when I gave you all this good fair warning. Same as before, spoilers are basically a given. Now, less ado and more Nabokov.

Here's what I think:

Nabokov slides in these oh so interesting morsels, narrative digressions that compound his novels with amusing, shrewdly crafted ideas to marvel in wonderment at, and from which to attempt to then divine meaning. Analysis of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" by Adam Krug and his friend, fellow academic and pedant, Ember, is one such instance of this, beginning more or less on page 105 of my edition. The thrust of this narrative digression is: what value might be attributable to pursuing high-minded interests in the midst of widespread suffering? The odd nature of such an endeavor described best here:

Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator's inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T . . .

There's more to the above quotation but I think that adequately tells its gist (gist used ironically here). The above is also a quote drawn from the exhaustive analysis of Krug, reacting to the nature of Ember's translating Shakespeare into the native. Yes, it is spectacularly well done, as Krug later remarks to Ember, but its relevance, not just in their society but in any society, is called to question. What is the point of such elaborate simulacra? What about the fact that Ember doesn't even know who's running the country, Paduk, as elucidated by the following quote, "To stress the artist's detachment from life, Ember says he does not know and does not care to know (a telltale dismissal) who this Paduk -- bref, la personne en question -- is." I mean, when does artistic, intellectual esotericism go too far? When it, however indirectly, threatens your life, I should think. Of course, like all those others who surround Krug, Ember is shortly after taken away by Hustav and the state police. Krug, for all his recondite and analytical abilities (which likewise are brought into the realm of ambiguity), does not take heed of the foreboding quality of these arrests. He still believes himself perfectly insulated by his high-standing as a figure of world renown. One suspects a man like Martin Heidegger probably saw himself in a similar sense, even though no one can be bigger than the state in a totalitarian society.

People, academic people mostly, like to imagine that if we aren't presently on such a track than perhaps some day we might transition to a world of perfect enlightenment, of free thought and exchange of ideas without the baggage of personal prejudice, yet without much difficulty, as fiction writers and philosophers have presciently demonstrated, the perpetuation of totalitarian creeds is just as likely a scenario from this vantage of human evolution. We are as susceptible as we were seventy years ago in Nazi Germany (one need only note the popularity of sloganeering in the politics, the shoddy distillation of news and the stultification of the two-party system here in the good ol' USofA to see we, i.e. human beings and specifically Americans, are quite at risk).

As Hannah Arendt notes in her opening line to part three of her seminal work, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," -- "Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movement in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced." In other words, if totalitarian heads of state won't stand the test of time in governments of their personal contrivance or, at least, reflective of their massive influence, how could anyone else hope to maintain an individual identity amid the thronging tide of The Masses, the one and only identity extant under a totalitarian regime. Food for thought, I suppose. I don't want the preceding to be viewed as alarmist or, worse, dripping with cynicism apropos of the human condition, but just simply to point out that no one should assume with the rise of so much grandiose technology and the ability to disseminate information faster and more broadly than ever before, that that necessarily means a more enlightened future for mankind. Quite the opposite is still very possible.

Anyway, to return from the preceding lengthy digression, and to return the lengthy digression into a more clearly applicable aspect of the subject matter at hand (i.e. "Bend Sinister"), Krug is operating on this rather false supposition that insists his personal importance in a totalitarian state. True but not too true, as the inchoate totalitarian state of Padukgrad will soon teach him.

Another of Nabokov's more fascinating digressions is the question of what I'll refer to as the presumed venerability of a well-regarded thinker. As it happens, I read a lot of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a thinker who has forced me to question what is valid, certainly what is certain, more times than I can now list. What's more, he begs by his own skillful linguistic philosophy to be questioned. That's not to say I consider him overrated or anything. In fact, it's for his very ability to question everything, including the correctness of his own personal certainty, and to labor over such ideas in lengthy meditations, that I find him, paradoxically perhaps, one of the most introspectively recondite thinkers of all time.

Krug, if he has any affinity at all to the features of Wittgenstein I note above, it's that he, too, sees a worthy question in his presumed validity. Most evocative of this idea, of this instability of his venerability, is found on pages 172-3, and with the following quotes, "He was constantly being called one of the most eminent philosophers of his time but he knew that nobody could really define what special features his philosophy had, or what 'eminent' meant or what 'his time' exactly was, or who were the other worthies." And then, likewise, ". . . he had begun regarding himself (robust rude Krug) as an illusion or rather as a shareholder in an illusion which was highly appreciated by a great number of cultured people (with a generous sprinkling of semi-cultured ones)." Most likely, in this one can see something relatable to Wittgenstein's reference to his own understanding in "On Certainty" -- "Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me." Is anyone's?

"Bend Sinister" ends in tragedy because it must end in tragedy. There are no two ways about it. Krug has sinned against not only and quite obviously the state but everything that rationality suggests. He is guilty of an abstruse kind of vanity that prevents him from taking the proper course to escaping the country. Yet it is not immediately he who pays for this, or rather, it is only tangentially he who pays for this first. His son, Daniel, the apple of his eye, is the one who first suffers. Daniel comes to great harm when Krug is finally apprehended by the state police. His boy is sent to a state correctional facility for the criminally insane and Krug is presumably sent to a prison for political dissidents. It's expected Krug will hold out indefinitely and refuse to sign whatever document acceding his full endorsement of Padukgrad. But, despite countless examples throughout the novel of the great and selfless lengths Krug will go to protect his child, the Ekwilists do not understand the power of this bond until it is far too late. Krug in no time at all says he will sign whatever they like with the only provision being the immediate return of his son.

As mentioned previously, however, Daniel is sent to a correctional facility for the criminally insane. Krug soon learns that Daniel was made use of in the most callous fashion imaginable, as an expendable unit intended to absorb the release of the inmates' worst desires, violent and so forth. The facility operated on the theory that if an inmate were able to indulge in his / her compulsive needs in measured doses, with the use of individuals of no particular societal importance (orphaned children mostly), then (s)he may be rendered less a threat to society at large. Thus is Daniel murdered, and thus is Krug swallowed up by grief so powerful it drives him to insanity, leading to a darkly, grimly humorous finale demonstrative of all that is best about Nabokov's fantastically unique storytelling.

Holy crap, this is a good book!

Through the Lens of William Gaddis' "J R" & More

2010-12-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

I think "J R" came into my life at just the right time. I consider this true from a variety of standpoints, namely 1) broadly, within the context of the nation's political and economic climate 2) as an educator who greatly fears the perils of complete acquiescence to psychometricians and high-stakes testing 3) as a busy, busy, busy person burning the candle at all ends because I must and because I desire the challenge, I know what it feels like now to be thrust into a seemingly unending stream of noise and human interaction, constantly talking to someone about something and then switching on a moment's notice to talk to someone else about something completely different 4) as a fan of literature and in admiration of the tremendous feat of literary derring-do represented by "J R". 5) More specifically as a fan of the 1950s-60s suburban angst of writers like Cheever and Yates, and now Gaddis, (even in certain respects Ken Kesey) and the demonstrative power they possess to elucidate the plight of those characters inhabiting this malaise-laden scene, which has if anything only further stultified in the years since.

It is a difficult novel, but I'm not convinced that the vitriol at its core (if it can be said vitriol or anger is what motivated Gaddis) causes it to lose all sense of whatever its guiding idea was, which is one among many criticisms Jonathan Franzen put to it quite a few years back.

Franzen emphasizes his difficulty in trying to come to terms with the feeling that he should be reading authors of modern and postmodern persuasions, whose work expresses concerns more overtly political and decrying of the establishment than the character-driven classic novels of authors like Dostoevsky and Dickens, or more contemporaneously Saul Bellow and Ann Beattie. For a variety of reasons I couldn't agree less with said assertion (especially since Dostoevsky and Dickens were profoundly political for their day). Still I, too, wrestle with the dichotomy he describes, of characterization being ancillary to more conceptual narratives. Franzen also uses the fact that he quite enjoyed "The Recognitions" -- Gaddis' first novel and arguably his most difficult (certainly his lengthiest: a whopping 950 plus pages) -- to defend his stance, which is a tenable position to argue from, admitting an affinity for an author but then describing the impasse other aspects of his / her oeuvre have brought to bear. Although I find his opinion, that Gaddis didn't craft characters per se, to be remarkably unfair, if not entirely unfounded. Gaddis wasn't like Pynchon, Coover, Barthelme and so forth. Characterization was a very important part of Gaddis' fiction. I hope what follows will demonstrate that somewhat.

Here's a quote by Franzen, taken only slightly out of context: "Battling through 'J R,' I'd wanted to grab Gaddis by the lapels and shout, 'Hello! I'm the reader you want! I love smart fiction, and I'm for a good Systems novel. If you can't even show me a good time, who else do you think is going to read you?'"

As I say, though, I liked "J R" in part because I found it so eminently relatable to my own life at this point. Over the course of a harried slough of cross conversations in classroom environments, both as instructor and student, or as an employee of a retailer like Costco Wholesale (which have I mentioned I'm currently employed by Costco Wholesale Corporation? Good company, on the whole, I really must admit). Fact has been, people seem always to be talking at me and I at them. Hopefully much hearing occurs between us, but no doubt in fragments. What's more, occasionally real humanity breaks through the din, and something such as the following utterance by Amy Joubert from "J R" might be expressed:

. . . someone came to dinner he was a man who made fine china and, Mama'd been cremated and he said if, he said right at the dinner table he told Daddy if they'd give him her ashes he'd, he'd make a fine chop plate human ashes make the finest china he said but, but why a chop plate why he said a chop plate . . .

"Why a chop plate why he he'd never met her but why he couldn't think of, couldn't even think of her as something less . . .
pg 505

Yes, there's the literal commodification of a deceased loved one there, a postmodern trope if ever I've seen it, an idea akin to Fausto Maijstral's ossification to "non-humanity" in "V.", but more to the point there is a woman who can't stand the thought of it, of her mother made into some cheap ware. There is humanity. And the story is rife with humanity. Had Frazen stuck with it, he would have discovered a particularly touching scene unfolds when Edward Bast, the long-suffering envoy of J R Corp. and its eponymous preteen founder, is laid up in a hospital next to Mister Duncan, one of the countless business reps who come in and out of the story, a man who was hospitalized after being beaten up and left to his fate by a prostitute. Mister Duncan espouses an angry philosophy much the same, but probably coarser, as that which Franzen accuses Gaddis' of harboring, i.e., Duncan sez, "It's taken me fourteen years to get out of the wallpaper business people think winning's what it's all about just ask those son of a bitches who ran that war, ran the whole country into the ground while they were at it . . ." and, later, ". . . give them a string of high p e ratios and a rising market it's all free enterprise all they howl about's government restraints interference double taxation, all free enterprise till they wreck the whole thing they're the first ones up there with a tin cup whining for the government to bail them out with a loan guarantee so they can do it all over again . . ." (This latter quotation striking me as more relevant today than when it was written, fool me twice and whatnot.)

But beneath the crotchety, lecherous veneer there's a guy in Duncan who likes people. Duncan's mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore, sure, but also Bast reminds him there's still a lot of humanity behind that Darth Vader cast that encircles world economic affairs. In a fit of creativity and the stifling after effects of employ by J R Corp. (he has been terminated by mandate of the board), Edward Bast insists he must complete some sort of work before he dies. He's being a bit melodramatic, and no one, nurse or doctor or anyone, attempts to humor him regarding this want, and he's left to compose (seeing as that's his creative discipline and labor of love, music composer) with a crayon and scrap sheets of paper. Duncan is dismayed by this treatment, saying, "Well then give him his fifty pencils, how do you know who's to die Waddles [a nurse overseeing their care] you give him this drawing paper and one purple crayon all he can write is something for one instrument, give him his fifty sharp pencils he can probably write us a whole concert and bring me some more newspapers. . .!" Then, slowly and finally Duncan moves into candor and opens up to Bast, saying:

. . . I lost a daughter, did I tell you that Bast? . . . she was taking piano lessons when they took out her appendix son of a bitches never let you down do they it wasn't her appendix at all. ... she was learning a song called for Alise's something like that I never did hear it like it was supposed to be, she'd missed notes leave little parts out and start again I always thought maybe someday I'd hear it right hear what I was supposed to . . . though that's all I, all I want, I can still, hear it? hear it . . . ?

Bast devotes himself to finding out which song it was Duncan wanted to remember, but Duncan passes, presumably from his injuries, before Bast can tell him who wrote it, Beethoven, most likely. But that's beside the point -- the point is humanity in slivers. Slivers of giving a shit amidst the all for one and one for one defining everything else, just as J R can only see things as commercially viable or not, much to Mrs. Joubert's chagrin in one memorable scene on page 473 of my edition. (i.e. J R: "like did you ever think Mrs. Joubert everything you see someplace there's this millionaire for it?" To which Mrs. Joubert takes J R outside and asks, "Yes look up at the sky look at it! Is there a millionaire for that?") Bast shares a similar scene with J R, as their relationship deteriorates to the point of no return. On page 655 Bast unsuccessfully exhorts J R as follows:

listen all I want you to do take your mind off these nickel deductions these net tangible assets for a minute and listen to a piece of great music, it's a cantata by Bach cantata number twenty-one by Johann Sebastian Bach damn it J R can't you understand what I'm trying to show you there's such a thing as as, as intangible assets?

There's so much unreason to the pursuit of wealth, and it takes a special kind of oblivious or apathetic naivety to care only for it, so seems a true message of "J R."

Bend it Like Nabokov, i.e. Sinisterly (Part I)

2010-12-02T08:38:00.000-08:00

I've acquired a copy of Brian Boyd's "Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years," which will nicely complement my copy of his "The American Years." I can imagine this will mean most reviews of Nabokov's novels will now come complete with some amount of biographical information, too. But it's the decent thing to do seeing as he's one of history's greatest writers. What I'm saying is it might be worth something to know something about his life or something.

He was a Russian, and in perhaps the simplest, most facile terms possible, a White Russian (as direct result of the fact that he wasn't a Red). This notwithstanding, his personal issues with the Soviets were more romantic, of innocence prematurely stripped, than anything else (certainly more than his dislike of their confiscating most every possession his family owned and could have laid claim to, which no matter how magnanimous he is in his writings of it, could not have been something he was A-Okay with). But here, from "Speak, Memory," he says:

My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for emigre de Kickovski, who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land, is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

More the point, though, is "Bend Sinister" -- which is apparently Nabokov's first "American novel," i.e. the first novel he wrote while living in U.S. America, Land of the Free / Home of Brave. Whether Nabokov the man felt any enmity for the dictatorship that at his writing "Bend Sinister" was at its height of power is beside the point. "Bend Sinister" is, if it shares any affinities with the popular dystopia novels of approximately the same period, circa late 1940s, a peculiar sense of the causation that makes and upholds oppressive regimes. The fascinating character study herein is presented in Adam Krug, a highly regarded, world-famous philosopher. [Spoilers are forthcoming . . .]

Krug is an extremely vulnerable man, because he is a man with a child for whom he cares deeply. This Nabokov fairly expressly points out in his prefatory remarks. I will take him at his words, and leave the meaning to be divined to the story itself. So Krug is a vulnerable man, because he cannot set aside his powerful love for his child. He imagines he is free of the power of the state, in deed and not word so much, for the simple fact that he is an academic and an intellectual, and the world would not stand for his coming to harm. The powers that be seem content to agree to this much. They wish only to persuade Krug to endorse the regime, so that the world will accept it as well. Seems reasonable enough.

But Krug, O, Krug! He is unwilling to put his integrity on the line for a regime that, he more or less observes, has none. Not the least of which belonging to his former schoolmate, now the leader of the ruling Ekwilist Party, Paduk, thus the dictator of the state. (Ekwilism being the ideology of the everyman to which Paduk and his disciples supposedly adhere.) Paduk's forces begin to arrest every cohort of Krug, in an effort presumably to get what they want from him.

Still, he refuses the Ekwilist's cause. But all the while, and made with such abundant implication and outright explication as to be almost ribald in approach, Krug is shown to be nothing short of a doting father of his young son, David, whom he cares for more than anything in the world. Therein lies the rub.

But before I get to that, let me say the black comedy abounding in this novel is truly astoundingly among the best I've ever read. Nabokov in all his works shows a talent for this unrivaled by, really, anyone. Such is true of the following passage, which to give a little background information, is an anecdote told by Linda, an Ekwilist, relaying the facts of her lover's (Hustav is his name) being necessarily murdered by the state and the effect this had on her daily routine:

I had to be at my dentist's at ten, and there they were in the bathroom making simply hideous noises -- especially Hustav. They must have been at it for at least twenty minutes. He had an Adam's apple as hard as a heel, they said -- and of course I was late.

In my annotations my initial reaction to this passage led me to regard this as "the most hideous and lyrical description of violent death I've ever read." I would add to that the descriptor humorous, as well. It's not hard to imagine a modern American dystopia as emotionally more relatable to the representative ideas Linda's attitude embodies than the synthetic happiness of "A Brave New World" or the scheduled outlet of pathos -- engendered almost exclusively with hate -- in "1984." In other words, pharmaceutical or psychological means needn't be used (though of course you could make the argument that both are already in place), people will wish only to not be inconvenienced themselves by the draconian measures of the state.

Happy Birthday to Bob / Happy Thanksgiving to All!

2010-11-25T09:59:00.001-08:00

This time last year, apparently on Thanksgiving, I posted my first post. It was a "brief" reflection on Walter Kirn's "Mission to America." Things have only become less brief since, but I'm glad for the outlet, thankful you could even say, and I'm glad for the various friendships with like-minded people this here blog has allowed me to make. I remain your undaunted reader and reviewer, to be sure! Books is life.

I've also not forgotten these literary equations, what with my focus on Untoward. There will be some more thoughts on Nabokov (as if I could go very long without thoughts on him, right?) and you should expect to see more on "J.R." by William Gaddis, as I near conclusion of that tome, which has been a really enjoyable reading experience in its own right, indeed. So keep checking back, and please, if you're so inclined, remark on said posts or email me. I do and will respond.

Thanks,

Matt

Untoward is A LIFE!!

2010-11-19T19:57:00.000-08:00

Greetings friends and so-called friends, I come to you as a man humbled by the greatness of the website he created with little assistance from others, or maybe lots of assistance. Actually a great deal of assistance from Jon Mau, who has also written a little for the site. One would imagine Jamie Ferguson will be contributing, though often pseudonymously it perhaps seems.

In any event, aside from cronies, I invite you, the world, to submit as well. Check out the beginning of what I hope will be a great and exciting new project (for all those involved). My opinion is that it will. So should yours be.

I suspect there may or may not be more to come on this project and the details. Please note, though, that I consider it more or less separate from my doings here. My doings here are a different sort of doings, which will continue to keep happening, as always.

I Think Therefore We Are: "A Scanner Darkly"

2010-11-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

Philip K. Dick might be our most underrated writer of the last 100 years. Yes, honestly, I mean that. I've said before his prose is more workman-like than artisan, which has cost him points with the establishment, but it can't be enough to detract from his recognizable gifts, not least among which are the sprawling spaces his narratives travel. Because it could just as easily be said that he was our most insane writer, too -- in the most positive sense of the term (though I acknowledge "insane" connotes many negative things).

"A Scanner Darkly" is the last book of his I needed read before "VALIS" (one of the handful I've read to date (all of which are reviewed on this site), a list based in one part on someone else's recommendation and one part my own self-imposed reading requirements) -- which is now, finally, at long last, next, and which I'm extremely excited about (although I believe I've said that before; I worry now I won't be anything but disappointed, ah, but that's enough negativity!)

There is something nearer and dearer about this novel, separating it from the other, more sci-fi oriented works of PKD's collection I've read. Never have I encountered an author who seems more committed to allowing his work to flow on its own momentum and not from something contrived. Donald Barthelme may have articulated this notion of "Not-Knowing" best, of valuing the cultivation of uncertain aspects of the story from the vantage of writer as artist, free from the convolution of a pre-established conclusion and the plot points building to that (showcased with devices like foreshadowing), but no one I've read has adhered to this approach more devotedly than seems PKD.

And "A Scanner Darkly" tells the story of a motley group of bums and burn outs the likes of which I've never seen before. Think if The Whole Sick Crew of Thomas Pynchon's "V." were given a follow up, set somewhere ambiguous in the future. Which if "A Scanner Darkly" is anything in specific, it's got to be an epilogue to PKD's experiences with drugs and excess in the '60s. As PKD himself notes in the opening line to his "Author's Note" at the end of the novel, "This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did."

It's also a novel about losing yourself. Ok, so then you ask, well, to what exactly? Drug use is the simplest answer. I wouldn't say it's an incorrect answer, but I do think with Philip K. Dick, there's something lurking on the tip of tongues, said but not said, and going beyond illicit drug use and dependance. It's about the paranoia that comes from attempting to live a subculture lifestyle free from the opprobrium and castigation of the mainstream. It's also about how desperation and mistrust / betrayal are rampant within the parameters of such an environment, not forgetting the fact that drug use does tend to take people out of their right mind so-called. (I do hate to sound like some nuevo-hippie hellbent on questioning the sacrosanctity of society's cherished mores as concern drug use, but I think judiciousness requires that I remind people (myself included) not to take the tack of the normative underpinnings of that mainstream I mention.)

Some spoilage immediately forthcoming, depending on your point of view: There is certainly something to how Fred slowly moves away from recognizing that he is, in truth, Bob Arctor, a not-so-subtle but still deftly achieved effect by PKD. Of course saying what I've said in the previous sentence requires a little plot background, so spoiler alerts sounding sonorously, here goes: Bob Arctor dwells in a home with two other miscreants, Jim Barris and Ernie Luckman, all of whom are regarded among the dope-using derelicts of society, wasteoids and burn-outs. They're criminals society takes time only to wrest from freedom and put into prison, or possibly some derivation of a recovery program, but such programs are occluded and one's admission is not guaranteed.

It happens that Bob Arctor is addicted to a mysterious drug referred to only as "Substance D." So too is his alter-ego or alias, "Fred," because, as it happens, Bob Arctor is also an undercover police officer. Problem is, "Substance D" is a mind-altering substance, um, literally? It literally alters your mind? Basically that's true, and how it does this is, in a nutshell, by impelling the two hemispheres of one's brain into two distinct and altogether separate consciouses.

And while this internal reconfiguration is ongoing, Arctor as Fred meets with "Hank," his superior, for reassignment. Arctor's last mission was a bust, and the criminal whom he was responsible for arresting apparently escaped into the arms of a recovery program. Worth mentioning is that neither Hank nor Fred knows the other's true identity (this is because all undercover officers are veiled in a scramble suit (described by a Lion's Club M.C. as rendering an individual a "vague blur"), which is a a suit made up of multifaceted quartz lens and attached to a miniaturized computer that plays on loop from its hard drive the multiple visage components of a million and a half human images).

So what's revealed by Hank is that Fred's reassignment is himself, Arctor, i.e. Fred is to surveil Bob Arctor and determine if he's as involved in illegal drug sales and so forth, as an informant has alleged. All the elements of Kafka's "The Trial" set in some futuristic dystopia, with, as said, a touch of Pynchon's "V." and Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for good measure. The artificiality of our world is constantly regarded by the rampant consumerism manifest in ubiquitous advertisement, which several characters find themselves in varying degrees of conflict with. The narrator reaches its most pitched pathos, however, with the interplay extant between Arctor and Donna Hawthorne, a young drug dealer, who herself seems to have something more than just drugs and drug use to hide.

In the end I'd say what's most surprising is how cleanly PKD pulls off the mania of this narrative. It's truly a departure from everything I've read of his, heretofore. Whatever rules I might have thought existed in his narrative world, they're very much tossed to the side in "A Scanner Darkly." I shall remember this when tackling "VALIS" -- which I can only imagine what to expect from Horselover Fat in its pages.

Here Comes Another Review . . .

2010-11-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker fiction has not been "doing it" for me in quite some time (I blame full immersion in their Top 20 Under 40 writers for my palpable awareness of this fact). I like Jim Shepard's latest, but mostly I'm off of New Yorker fiction. I feel as though I keep saying this, but much as I keep saying it it doesn't become any less true. I also haven't defined what precisely I mean by "New Yorker" fiction, which is fiction mostly concerned with the interpersonal dynamics of individuals and their family and / or friends, delivered in a very straightforward, often exceedingly literal way (with the usual symbolism and tropes interspersed) . It might also be referred to as "realism," although I'm not bothered by what of it that's "real" but the tired and banal, the used up, i.e. the crumbling ruins of writer's reactions to life and living which bore me.

Occasionally, though, and why I'll always keep checking up on them, the New Yorker'll publish an anomalously strange, good writer like George Saunders, Karen Russell, Chris Adrian or Ben Loory (I've about given up on Joshua Ferris, whose New Yorker fiction has only served to prove the point of his being ho-hum as invention goes). But another one who's legit, so far as I can tell (i.e. "legit" -- what an arbitrary term in this sense, meaning only that I approve of him), is Stephen O'Connor, whose New Yorker short story "Ziggurat" first introduced my eyes to his fiction and creative writing prowess. I might also add, before I go on, that O'Connor is legit but with a few caveats I shall put forth in the proceeding.

So O'Connor's "Here Comes Another Lesson" then presented an opportunity to really acquaint myself with what he does, oeuvre wise. Point blank: "Ziggurat" is more or less my favorite story of this collection. "Man in the Moon" is also very good. The series of stories featuring the professor of atheism were all good, if I felt at times he missed some kind of creative opportunity with them. Like, there was more there to them, and if he were willing to take still greater risks (an aspect of his authorial character for which he has received much praise from his peers, with superlatives like being one among the "bravest and most inventive" writers and a tendency to take, as said, "serious risks" in his fictions), I believe the stories would have been, well, more exciting. Serious Lee.

I am possibly speaking from only my own lived experience with writing, but I tend to think the psychology of this creative discipline is much the same as all other forms of creative expression, and that as with how evidence has shown nearly all (something around 98%) children start off with genius level ability at divergent thinking (my own anecdotal experience here reinforces this notion in my mind) and it is only with time and normative anesthetization of literal and non-literal varieties that we begin to lose it, so too is the case with writers who become creatively anesthetized. This is where the incestuous character of doing as others do is manifest to problematic, even noxious, degrees. O'Connor is a creative writer, but I'm bothered by what I perceive is an unwillingness to take the risks his talents afford him. So now let me cite specific examples of what I'm talking about and expositions of what I think don't hardly work near as well as it could (then you come in and disagree with me profoundly):

[SPOILERS ALERT] I'd put O'Connor somewhere on the same plane as that of my affection for the work of Gary Shteyngart, at least presently. (I'm hoping time will elevate both.) Gary Shteyngart errors differently in my esteem than O'Connor, though. Shteyngart to his credit takes risks with his penchant for "quasi-malapropisms" -- a term used if not coined by Andrew Seal over at Blographia Literaria, in a great post from last summer less-than-praising of Shteyngart's writing and general insights -- and various other narrative turns, which while not always effective, are often understandable (i.e. I feel I know why he attempted them). I'm less certain of O'Connor's risk-taking, in part because I don't think that's his inclination. Which is why he'll get praise of his writing for being not as "consistently arch" (Mark Athitakis -- a post which is over all very merited and good) as a George Saunders' collection. But arch is embedded in Saunders' writerly DNA, just as like it or not, Gary Shteyngart possesses stylistic quirks that clearly separate him from other writers. So too does O'Connor but he frustrates me as he falls back on monotonously ordinary plot lines, like, say, with "White Fire," a story of the war vet who wishes not to be called a hero, who can't speak about (except in a flash revelation expressed to his two young daughters) or forget the evil things that happened and in which he participated during his tour of duty; it's a nice character study but, I dunno, curious and uninteresting territory for a writer like O'Connor. Not that he shouldn't go there, but for what purpose? What was creatively inspiring about it? "White Fire" is a fine story, written with unusual and character-laden syntax, but there's not much more I can say that would excite you to read it.

O'Connor does fancy some kind of cliche or trope, as I see it, in that several of his stories either end or feature at some point a character slowly fading into the distance as an indefinable speck. I mean that literally, as in the ending of "Ziggurat": "Until at last -- there he was: A tiny figure moving up the shore. A minute silhouette against the mirror sand. A wavering speck. Then smaller. Even smaller." And then again with "The Professor of Atheism: Here Comes Another Lesson": "And gradually, to anyone looking up from the ground, he grows smaller and ever smaller, until finally he is such a tiny dot of light that he could just as well not exist." And finally, for a third time, with the cormorant in "Disappearance and": "Then the cormorant was only a bird in the blue. A tiny, horizontal wiggling. A trembling dot. Nothing." I mention this tendency in part because it is a good one, and he can use it as much or as little as he likes certainly, but I can't shed the feeling that its overuse says something of creative limitation, stuntedness. It's not as though the symbolism changes noticeably, in all its manifold possibilities, and is further developed / made new use of within the context of the three stories in which it appears. So I say, anyway.

I suppose I might go even further with various criticisms tending toward the negative, but I genuinely enjoyed O'Connor's collection. It's one of those things where I felt I must be forthcoming with all my misgivings, though. I suppose this problem is bigger than O'Connor, too, and he's not one of my top offenders in the realm of stymieing creativity via establishment-oriented writing. I guess I just hate to see good writers absorb some of these traits I don't like so very much.

AND . . .

I've been worrying over whether ruminating about something's being adequately creative is objective enough (if anything I write on this here blog is objective enough), then I decided that's kind of beside the point. What I take issue with I take issue with, and by that I mean: it bothers me in others' writing just as much as it bothers me in my own (and it bothers me when I spot it in my own. And I spot it in my own, often, bothersomely.). It's what I deem is taking the easy way out, the short cut home. Leaning on what you know because, hey, that's recognizable. People will identify with that. You could rightly argue that that's just my opinion, man, but then so is that yours, man or man-ette.

(P.S. - Put in less convivial, different terms, you can write anything you like as a writer, and you can like anything you read as a reader, but I don't have to be impressed by either of those things. I think I've made an adequate case for why that is.)

Kafka Nightmares and Freud's Slips: Curtis White

2010-11-04T08:04:00.000-07:00

Curtis White's writing is a lot like Franz Kafka's nightmares, i.e. the nightmares I envision Kafka having. I've never witnessed personally any of Kafka's nightmares, though an interesting idea -- oh, if I could (a tangent is building in my own mind, but I'll spare you that).

I like reading the Amazon.com reviews of books because sometimes you come across real gems of people not knowing what they were in for and thus being caught completely unprepared, then writing of their reaction to that. Here's one reader who did not get from Curtis White's "Memories of My Father Watching TV" what he had expected (which might also be the real genius of White's exceedingly innocuous-sounding, evocative title):

My 28 year old daughter gave me this for Father's Day because she knows I like old TV shows. I believe she had no idea about the content. I guess to be chartiable [sic] I will call this an artist's book about fathers.

Yes, well, in the strictest sense, yes, "Memories of My Father Watching TV" was a novel about fathers, skewed through the purview of a particularly humorous and morbid artist.

But, well, why is that such a negative thing? To this Amazonian.commer? If I'm dismissive and self-righteous I say he's a philistine. Maybe he is, but I choose not to be those things, at least whenever avoidable. And so instead I say White's abstract approach to old-time meat-and-potatoes television wasn't what this individual was looking for, and certainly not to the taste of his joie de vivre. (There now, I've certainly achieved full pomposity.) I also wonder if in the commentator's review there isn't a hint of resentment for his daughter's not investigating her gift more carefully. But that is getting beside the point, and I wouldn't ask you who read this to speculate about that without the entire context of the gentleman-in-question's whole review, which I flatly refuse to paste here. Because that would be exceedingly beside the point.

Weirdly, and since I'm culling from divergent, non-traditional sources already, the novel's back cover promotional synopsis reveals a little of what I would agree is more specifically than the preceding the essence of "Memories of My Father Watching TV":

Comic in many ways, Memories is finally a sad lament of a father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against the background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

It's a lot like that if you remember to also include very graphic and sometimes incestuous descriptions of sexual intercourse, like think in terms of sex as a violent act. Because to be fair, doing it sometimes is just that, you know, violent. White relishes descriptions of said violence. In re-imagining the real-life television show "Maverick," which I'll make small claim to knowing anything about, he depicts "Blue Maverick," ostensibly tied to the character Bret Maverick played by James Garner (the blueness of White's Maverick having to do with conflating the television show with eastern Indian religion and, in specific, the god Vishnu, all falling into another area in which I will lay no claim of knowing much about), but anyway, in a scenario besting a villainous doppelganger disguised as his sister. How? Like this:

Blue Maverick, however, was quite aware that this was not really his sister Lila . . . and he sensed that her breasts flowed not with milk, but with deadly poison distilled in fact from the horns of a million murdered buffalo . . . Maverick closed his eyes and allowed the beautiful woman to take him on her lap as if he were her infant . . . but when she gave him her tit, Blue Maverick squeezed it between his powerful hands . . . "Whoa, honey, that's a little rough," she said . . . "Simmer down. You know, that can hurt a girl. That's sensitive business in your mitts there. Owee. OWWWEEEE!"

See? Violent! Of course not entirely sexual, but you get the idea. In fact, the weird infantilization and sexuality of the situation, brought together with the fact that Blue Maverick is in fact slaying this creature whatever she be, is itself an orgy of perversion that somehow clicked with me, if for no other reason than its obvious excess. It's like, of course he would kill this entity by robbing it of its life fluid, its poison milk.

And speaking of the novel on the whole, which a very fractured story it is, everything Oedipal is happily conflated in one fell swoop of patricide coupled with the / a protagonist's lecherous preference for his sister more than his mother. Mothers make very few appearances in this story, apparently avoided with purpose or else this conversation between siblings at novel's end is strangely coincidental:

Then Janey said, "What about Mom?"

"Where's Mom?"

"Where has she been all these years?"

"She never does anything with us."

"Let's wait for her."

"Hey, here she comes!"

Indeed it was Mom, hopping across the lawn, laughing, catching up.

If you've never tried a Curtis White story before, I suggest you whet your lack with this short, "The Order of Virility," available for your reading pleasure at, also deserving of mention, ero guro sensu lit magazine (You might recognize a lot of its current imagery as being from the David Cronenberg cult classic, "Scanners," which I just finally saw this past Halloween season for the first time ever! Famous head explosion and all!).

It treaded into Kafkaesque territory, you should know. Sorry to say it, but it did. It's when the father becomes a pontoon bridge on "Combat," and it's necessary for the Americans on the show to blow him to smithereens, to thwart the Nazis.

So is it television? Is it real life? Since Kafka is directly and indirectly referenced in several ways early on in this episode, I needn't endeavor at all to convince you he was, at least, on the author's mind, to whatever extent. For example, here is this explication, rife with questions put forth to and impelled from the reader:

Was my father's fervently held notion . . . that he was a pontoon bridge for the Nazis delusional? Was Gergor Samsa's depressed ideation ("I am a monstrous vermin") delusional? Or were these things metaphors? Is a metaphor a delusion? Does the probability of Franz Kafka's depression require us to think less of him as an artist?

I suppose I most like the question proposing Gregor Samsa is suffering from depression. Lots of fragmented miscellanea abounds, but I have to believe the philosophizing and speculation is with some literal purpose, at least at times. I gather White fancies misdirection and constant invocation of the slow-burning effluvium of an American mind (any mind really, but for the most part, the book deals with American TV). Life merged with TV becomes the reality. But even then, one has no active role in the unfurling action. Waiting. Only waiting. I'll spare you obvious literal rehashing of the fate of White's "father" in this episode. Know that he departs from his predicament no worse for wear, though, if that's something that can really be evaluated within the framework of a story like this one. It certainly seems, as a pontoon bridge, this father was himself unhappy, if not depressed. I would be.

There's not much more I can say of this book, which I liked. It's another frenzy of chaos, of the specter of television and whatever that specter did to assisting in dissolution of human-household relations, of the nuclear family. White's labyrinth here is, of course, not designed to answer questions; that much I can say for certain. It certainly raises questions, but what does it all mean? -- that's worthless here. Maybe 'cause who can say what this means? We've got the catalytic addition of the television and its postmodernity, which of course led the charge of the burgeoning multi-media dispensaries, which can't easily be understood as an effect. We just don't have enough to go on at the present lacuna. Time will tell, so stay tuned -- as if you really have a choice.

He is Not Sidney Poitier

2010-10-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

He is Not Sidney Poitier. That is, his name is "Not Sidney." WTF, LOL?

M-i-rite?

But seriously folks, this is a very unserious serious read, good and all that too. What's more, I'd count "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" among the funniest books I've read all year. And Percival Everett is my kind of fiction writer, equal parts Joseph Heller and Ishmael Reed, with certainly enough originality to be all his own (if you'll forgive me that cliche).

Still, that's not saying enough. Everett writes like he's not even trying; I don't mean he makes writing look effortless; but I do mean that it's as if writing this novel was as enjoyable for him as it is to read. Is there a greater issue buried in the obfuscation of subtext? Something to do, maybe, with the high-minded literary themes ascribed to Authors of the capital A variety. Possibly there is, but the novel is written in such a way that those themes, questions of race and identity, for example, are relegated to the side, and so are beside the point. The point is, as far as I can tell, amused bemusement.

Not Sidney is never certain of what to make of his world. Racially, he's of a historically marginalized and mistreated people. By inheritance, he is extremely wealthy if bizarrely named. And so before I say something like the novel speaks of a search for identity, I will preempt such ideas with the conclusion that it is about not identity. About the person and not the greater community to which one belongs. All of this incongruence seems to negate itself, as with the specifically relevant example of Not Sidney Poitier being named what he's named while profoundly resembling Sidney Poitier, as gets mentioned repeatedly by numerous characters, including Not Sidney, throughout the narrative. What of the outlier? Of the man without a country, a community, a place? Hard to say, Everett seems to say, but lets put him through a hilarious series of hellish turns and watch how that all pans out.

Spoiler-laden Plot Synops: Not Sidney is the product of a hysterical pregnancy. His mother is a savvy investor (despite her hysteria and other afflictions) who gets in on Turner Media investment early in the game, becoming massively wealthy in the process. She dies. Ted Turner has become friends with the family, and with no one else to see that Not Sidney is more or less looked after, Turner invites Not Sidney to live in Atlanta, in close proximity to Turner's estate. (He refuses the possible scrutiny of a "Webster" or "Diff'rent Strokes" - type situation by insisting that he will not adopt and take in Not Sidney as his own ward.)

Not (and I refuse to get into the fact that every use of "not" in this post isn't meant as a pun, unless otherwise stated, I guess) surprisingly Turner, as written by Everett, quickly becomes one of the story's best characters, irrespective of his limited involvement in the story on the whole.

Percival Everett himself, in a meta-fictional turn, makes an appearance as a character, as a self-deprecating professor at Morehouse College -- which is a school Not Sidney eventually buys his enrollment at for various reasons I won't bother to explain. Read the book if you want to know. True fact: Percival Everett is a real-life professor at University of Southern Cal, so says my copy of his novel. Pleonasm is the term for categorization of redundant expressions like "true fact," which itself falls under the umbrella of tautology, but forget all that.

Apropos of nothing in the way of plot, here's a noteworthy dialogue exchange involving all three characters, Not Sidney, Everett and Turner:

Ted looked at his thumb. "What do you call it when you get that painful bit of nail on the side of your cuticle and you can't help but push it up and make it hurt more and you never have a clipper with you?"

"I never knew what that was exactly. Is that what I'm supposed to call a hangnail?" Everett asked.

"I guess that's what you call it," Ted said.

"Your right, though. It is really annoying," Everett said. "I always get them before I'm about to have sex for some reason."

"Would you two shut up?" I said.

And that's the sort of defining irreverence that colors this bizarre plot, one that involves things like a strange form of hypnosis called Fesmerization, after its creator/discoverer, that Not Sidney finds and employs often, crimes Not Sidney does not commit, ass hole black fraternity members, racist redneck police officers, seductive history teachers, and a mostly despicable family of black Republicans.

An Introduction to My Tome of the Year, "J R"

2010-10-25T06:15:00.000-07:00

Big Other pretty much inspired this post with Greg Gerke's report from halfway through William Gaddis' "The Recognitions." But it might also have been inevitable, considering "J R" is long enough that it warrants a halfway-through report in its own right. It's good, first thing. And then, also, it's hard to contain everything in just one epic post, so this is the first of however many it proves to warrant.

"J R" is my tome of the year, also. I most certainly may read other tomes in 2010 (I've acquired Adam Levin's "The Intstructions," which has a rather tome-ish quality accompanying its very many pages). But "J R" is the only one I've consciously set out to complete before year's end.

Now, works like "J R" are long and abstruse, which is true for a variety of reasons, though primarily this is because of characteristic disjointedness engendered by the great, near infinite many stylistic choices available to an inventive author. In that regard, I believe few people start out with a natural affinity for writers of an experimental bent. You kind of have to slog through them a little, find your rhythm, your own method for appreciating the experience of a more challenging literary endeavor, persevere a little. You acquire the taste. It's more a posteriori than a priori -- to finally reference Immanuel Kant on this here blog.

The Dalkey Archive Press has a great assortment of these type authors, lesser knowns than your Nabokovs, Pynchons, Ballards, Barthelmes, Barths, DeLillos, Calvinos, DFWallaces, and, yes, Gaddis (or is it Gaddi?). Two in specific I've enjoyed or am enjoying are David Markson and Curtis White. I'm also excited for Robert Coover's (and published by Dalkey Archive Press) "A Night at the Movies," since I had trouble getting going with "The Public Burning." Joseph McElroy is another writer whose work has been published with Dalkey whom I look forward to reading. Steven Millhauser is another. John Hawkes very possibly another still.

And my big overarching point is, while I see how people could find these authors and their stories disjointing and too abstract, they're wonderfully unusual is the real thing. Because they're unusual you might not know how to react at first, but that's why exposure is key, continued exposure and learning how to love that which does not come naturally (or necessarily easily). "Moby-Dick" is indisputably a classic novel, but it didn't get that way over night. It wasn't even the "Gravity's Rainbow" of its day, being that it was so often dismissed by its contemporaneous critics. From my Bantham Classics copy of Moby-Dick" was a notable scathing criticism. In the Atheneum, London, October 25, 1851 (just shy of 160 years ago, today): "Ravings and scraps of useful knowledge flung together salad-wise make a dish in which there may be much surprise, but in which there is little savour." Could this not be said of today's more unusual fictions? Read "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy, and you'll see what I mean, I think.

As to that notion's specific relevance to "J R," William Gaddis' National Book Award winning novel, here's a good quote to acquaint you with its flavor:

Gibbs: I worry about you sometimes, doesn't it ever occur to you to give up one or the other? the bank or the school? When you stop and . . .

Whiteback: Yes well of course the ahm, when I know which one of them is going to survive . . .

In a paltry few words: money and the miscarriage of its use factors into the story heavily.

Having thus made it half way, here are a couple observational items I've amassed so far:

1) As with "A Frolic of His Own," "J R"'s characters are constantly locked in a will-to-power struggle with one another in which the stronger personality seems (to lesser or greater extent) plainly evident, whether the dynamic is a hen-pecked husband and his wife, two colleagues of either sex, child(ren) and adult, and in any other permutative combination to be found therein. Which, to me, this gives the story a sense of the defining ethos of a fiscally driven world, a world driven by these power relations. People don't love; they shout to be heard, so that maybe they're remembered when it's time for the money to be made. If they cannot shout to be heard, then they probably didn't have anything valuable to say in the first place.

2) I like that I don't always understand / notice the characters' shifts, knowing who exactly is speaking. Gaddis became famous for writing novels of near-to-total dialogue, with almost no narration. Sometimes this is annoying, yes, as when I think I'm reading the thoughts of one character and in reality they are the thoughts of another, and so both characters get somewhat blurred. But mostly it's easy enough to delineate speakers. And the frenetic pacing that ensues is spectacular. The novel really gets going with some momentum, after the initial difficulty. It's like a freight train's slow methodical inertia back to life and, eventually, great speed. Like a train would be, it's then sometimes difficult to stop this momentum as the story takes you in.

Flowing a Tears My Policemen Says

2010-10-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

Oh garsh, I hope you all are ready for another reeeview of Philip K. Dick, whom I have been reading like a firestorm eats trees with its fire. "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said," has perhaps the best title of all his novels, of his entire compendium and not just those I've read to date. And PKD is a writer who had many good titles, I think.

Now as for the content of this one, as much as I like the idea in general: in the not-too distant future (or past, if you're going by its setting in 1988), a well known and beloved TV personality and genetically superior human being (due to certain bioengineered alterations that gave him the classification "6," a status repeatedly mentioned throughout the story, in opposition to "ordinaries" or the average "little" people) named Jason Taverner, possessing 30 million fans and counting, awakens after being gruesomely attacked to discover neither signs of his injuries nor having any recollection of how he has gotten to where he is, a seedy motel room. He quickly learns that only a day has passed, so say the newspapers he can find; he therefore deduces that he has not been comatose, not for any significant length of time. He also apparently has no identity whatsoever, which he discovers to his great discomfiture as he further investigates his situation. In fact it's much worse; it's as if he has never existed at t'all. So as I say, as much as I like the idea in general, it just didn't cohere for me as well as PKD novels typically do.

Why?

This is an issue of plot mostly. Normally the abstraction of whatever impetus is destroying / driving mad a PKDian protagonist is cleanly (or satisfactorily at least) brought together -- as is usually the case with, for example, genre mystery novels. In fact, "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" might share the most similarities with mystery / detective novels of the PKD's I've yet read (although I've seen the film "Blade Runner" so I gather he had that bent), and that might also be where it runs afoul in my estimation, likewise. I felt that Taverner's situation deserved a ton of very clear explication that established how such a thing could happen in a plausible enough way, i.e. the very malleable rules of sci-fi and PKD himself are stretched (fine) but remain unbroken in bringing the narrative full circle.

But that's not how Taverner's plight is explained. Instead [SPOILAGE ALERT! Lots of Spoilers from this point onward (Though I shouldn't need to say it; these were obviously forthcoming)] Taverner and everyone else who dwells in the first world is, by process of a drug-induced fantasy in which a user can literally re-imagine every other living person's perception (at great physical detriment to him or herself), transported to a new state of consciousness, in which Taverner's being a common man is at its crux. The drug user was motivated to do so by her desire to meet Taverner in real life, himself unbound by the trappings of fame. Yes, this effect is a mind fuck, but I can't escape the fact that there is no drug in the world (or any other) that is capable of more than destruction of a single consciousness.

(New-related-thought update (10/23/10): I mean, put another way, I just can't shake the feeling that PKD could have done better with this one. I just think his imaginative prowess wasn't made full use of, that with a little more creative oomph I would have enjoyed "Flow My Tears" all so much better.

So now I ask . . .

Am I grounding myself in narrative rigidity, rigidity by which the boundaries of fiction can't or shouldn't be withheld? Might I take the transference of one and all from the tangible hallucination (or whatever it can be called) of the user in a different light? Is it perhaps meant to showcase, I dunno, say that there is a solipsism to this, that in effect a new world was conjured from the old, and that in no way can it be perceived that any of these characters are the literal incarnations of their previous' dimension's selves but rather wholly new, a new world has been created? Yes, that's possible but a lot to extract from what's offered in the text, despite the depth of detail PKD provides for explanation of the drug's effect.

Of course the woman who uses the drug is ultimately killed by it. Her intense two-day long bender had her expending a preternatural amount of energy that fatally sapped her of her life force. And in a sense Taverner is blamed for this, as he finally meets the woman and is at the scene when she finally succumbs to her fate. Once she is gone, Taverner's fame begins slowly to return to the minds of the world's population (one wonders at this, why did Taverner escape forgetting who he was (i.e. famous) right along with the rest of humanity at narrative's outset -- a less interesting plot turn, perhaps).

What's most interesting about the preceding is how little it seems to factor into the story's bigger questions. All the while, in an atypical portrayal of a police-state villain, General Felix Buckman is following the exploits of Jason Taverner. He is made aware of all of Taverner's attempts to procure some form of identity so Taverner can thus avoid being sent to a forced labor camp (facilities put in place as a means of incarcerating the population of students who were apparently responsible for an uprising that led to a second civil war; they lose, ostensibly, and are left to hidden dwellings beneath the university campuses, but none of this factors into the plot terribly much).

Buckman eventually decides it's necessary to pin the crime of murder to Taverner (for plot reasons I'll avoid getting into because at this point it would be, like, why read the book yourself? Which is something I want to compel you to do, i.e. read it for yourself). But he wrestles with his conscience constantly, making him a far cry from O'Brien of "1984" fame. In debating the matter with himself Buckman finally decides that Taverner was doomed before the whole thing got its start, from the moment he was brought to the attention of the state, as he says in the following quote:

And I could never explain it to you, Buckman thought. Except to say: don't ever come to the attention of the authorities. Don't ever interest us. Don't make us want to know more about you.

It's a prescient thought. One that I would say is entirely relevant to contemporary America, especially when you consider Taverner's celebrity status. The even more remarkable detail is that, ultimately, Taverner is not convicted of the crime. He gets off scot free, in fact. Although it's never said, one wonders if this is because of his celebrity. If a lesser man had been accused, a non-celebrity without Taverner's good bioengineered grooming, would he have been so fortunate? Makes you wonder, but not terribly hard. Leads you rather quickly to the conclusion that no, the lesser man would not have been as fortunate.

So don't come to the state's attention, sure, but if you do you'd better be famous. I think that pretty much distills the story to its most essential element. Maybe you don't have to read it anymore, after all!

Good night, for now...

Nabokov's Memory Speaks To Me, "Speak, Memory" Speak!

2010-10-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

It bears mentioning that Vladimir Nabokov has in less than a year's time become one of my top five favorite authors. Honestly, I couldn't imagine listing my favorites without his inclusion. He's just that good, that indefinable. He's a historical weirdo (in the best sense). He wrote things that a man of his ostensible literary decorum should never have written (of which "Lolita" is merely the best known example, and a strange novel to be sure). Also, to begin, this post will be riddled with excerpts and, so, oodles of spoilers. You have been warned.

"Speak, Memory" is more a memoir than a work of fiction. I welcomed the opportunity to get a clearer glimpse of the personal life of this preeminent and unusual 20th century author, however fleeting a glimpse his "Speak, Memory" affords. And though not terribly long, a mere 240 pages, it turned out to be loaded with memory gems, even if one must wonder how possibly those gems were embellished by poetic license and the need to fill in gaps of time obscured. Although Nabokov does end his memoir with a rather poetic epitaph, which runs both contrary to my considered opinion and, to a certain extent, in concert with it (as such will be the case with writers, romantically capricious writers):

The garden was what the French call, phonetically, skwarr and the Russians skver, perhaps because it is the kind of thing usually found in or near public squares in England. Laid out on the last limit of the past and on the verge of the present, it remains in my memory merely as a geometrical design which no doubt I could easily fill in with the colors of plausible flowers, if I were careless enough to break the hush of pure memory that (except, perhaps, from some chance tinnitus due to the pressure of my own tired blood) I have left undisturbed, and humbly listened to, from the beginning.

I might also mention that my copy of "Speak, Memory" literally fell apart as I read it, which I decided was completely appropriate given the subject matter. I feel Nabokov would have wanted it that way. Like the beliefs of many east Asian traditions, Nabokov seems with his anecdotes to repeatedly suggest nothing lasts forever, no matter how "good" or "valuable" it may be. Certainly, it was a worthy tangible adjutant to his telling of losing Russia, following the revolution and the fall of interim liberal government of Kerensky and the duma, in which Russian government his father was active.

Brian Boyd's very good "Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years" has rapidly proven a great companion piece to "Speak, Memory," in which biography Boyd notes, ". . . unlike his egomaniacal narrators, his Hermanns and his Kinbotes, he does not assume that his life, because it is his, ought to be of interest or concern to others." Boyd also seems comfortable enough assuming the veracity of Nabokov's memories, which I like this tack as another way of interpreting the text, taking its truth on a kind of aesthetic faith that transcends what might be knowable. Certain biographical notes about Nabokov are extant in public record, especially those concerning his father, Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, the Russian liberal politician, who was an outspoken critic of both the Czar and Bolshevism. And, for the sake of argument and a complete disinclination to get into the finer points of New Historicism, I will join Boyd in accepting "the truth" of Nabokov's memoir and his recollections. A better way of putting it is, I believe the memoir comprises events Nabokov believed happened as he remembered them. There was no purposeful

Nabokov devotes an entire chapter to his governess, Mademoiselle, a Swiss woman who spoke only French. He prefaces the chapter with exposition like, "I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it." He goes on to then note, ". . . the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own." -- which I think that's an especially fascinating depiction of how an author culls from his personal experiences, and how those lived experiences, in transference to fiction, lose something of their personal authenticity, are thus rendered distant and intangible, emigres of consciousness. He concludes his preface deftly, I think: "The man in me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle."

Here's one particularly humorous anecdote concerning the French -- and only French -- speaking Mademoiselle at the dinner table, who labors to get a French word in edgewise amidst the cacophony of indecipherable Russian (apparently it was a common problem, but should not have been entirely surprising considering she lived in Russia and worked for Russians):

Little by little the truth would come out. The general talk had turned, say, on the subject of the warship my uncle commanded, and she had perceived in this a sly dig at her Switzerland that had no navy.

To be sure, Nabokov candid is a strange reading experience. His lamentations of his early writing (akin to Thomas Pynchon disparaging his own apprentice efforts in "Slow Learner") are often hilariously self-deprecating, as I think is well evidenced with this following excerpt and the analogy therein:

It did not occur to me then that far from being a veil, those poor words were so opaque that, in fact, they formed a wall in which all one could distinguish were the well-worn bits of the major and minor poets I imitated. Years later, in the squalid suburb of a foreign town, I remember seeing a paling, the boards of which had been brought from some other place where they had been used, apparently, as the inclosure of an itinerant circus. Animals had been painted on it by a versatile barker; but whoever had removed the boards, and then knocked them together again, must have been blind or insane, for now the fence showed only disjointed parts of animals ( some of them, moreover, upside down) -- a tawny haunch, a zebra's head, the leg of an elephant.

And, with his jejune Petrarchen fixation:

It seems hardly worth while to add that, as themes go, my elegy dealt with the loss of a beloved mistress -- Delia, Tamara or Lenore -- whom I had never lost, never loved, never met but was all set to meet, love, lose.

Or recalling his experiences at Cambridge, playing soccer with his Cambridge compatriots, but all the while musing on something very different, and, self-indulgent:

. . . [T]hink[ing] of my self as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer's disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates.

His eventual forced exile from Russia, which was pretty heavy with harrowing experiences that mottled the trek to western Europe.

We had a shotgun and a Belgian automatic; and did our best to pooh-pooh the decree which said that anyone unlawfully possessing firearms would be executed on the spot.

Still, once again he finds good ways to describe the naive and inchoate figure he cut in humorous ways, with for example the following (describing his wandering a train station platform at one of its stops on his voyage to Crimea, which had not yet fallen to Soviet hands after the October coup):

Had I been one of the tragic bums who lurked in the mist of that station platform where a brittle young fop [i.e. Nabokov] was pacing back and forth, I would not have withstood the temptations to destroy him.

But the memoir gets particularly strange when Nabokov references Sirin, and "Among the young writers produced in exile he turned out to be the only major one." Sirin's earliest works were forgettable, according to Nabokov, only getting truly worthy of reading at "Invitation to a Beheading" and "Luzhin's Defense" but then ". . . Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness." Never heard of Sirin the major author? Well, he was Nabokov and Nabokov was he. "Sirin" was Nabokov's nom de plume in the European literary world (Berlin and France), or "V. Sirin" more precisely. You might call this a pretentious scene, then, self-indulgent to say the least. And in that you might be correct, but I think Nabokov's pretentiousness or maybe, more fairly said, elitism is a part of his incongruous writer-aspect that makes him so enjoyable to read. Certainly, it's entertaining to hear what he thinks of other writers both of the past and contemporaneous to himself, but it's further entertaining to see how he views (even past incarnations of) his authorial persona.

As Boyd notes:

Nabokov describes his life in terms of his helical version of Hegel's triad, as "a colored spiral in a small ball of glass": his first twenty years in Russia form the thesis, the next twenty-one of emigration the antithesis, his years in America the synthesis (and, as he would later add in the revised Speak, Memory, a new thesis).

So pretentious though it may well be (and how many great writers / artists other than George Saunders are at least a smidge pretentious?), it also makes sense in the context of this greater notion of how his life has been broken into discrete sections of three a la Hegel's triad (apparently more accurately attributed to Fichte, so says wiki). Who doesn't feel like a vastly different person than the one they were ten years ago or fifteen or twenty or more? (I confess I haven't lived quite long enough to make this as compelling as it could be.) If you don't, you probably should, just saying (especially true as I continue my observation of high school students, on my path to becoming a teacher).

Thus my love for Nabokov, again, a strange figure, only grows fuller with this read. More needs to be said of him, and all in due time. Adieu for the meanwhile. Adieu, adieu for now and auf wiedersehen, Nabokov.

Your "The Intuitionist" -- A 10/10/10 Post

2010-10-10T08:21:00.000-07:00

I hate when a book fails to live up to your expectations. I think every active reader has experienced this letdown, and either decides to give up on the novel in toto, before any more disheartenment can occur, or trudge through it with the (often vain) hope that it will somehow be redeemed as the narrative is given time to more fully reveal itself. Sadly, overall, this is how I met Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist." It wasn't my cup of tea (tea drinker that I am). The novel didn't improve with further reading, either, regrettably.

Here's the deal. As "race" things go, I'm a pluralist. I'm pro all inclusion. Does that mean I become uncomfortable when discussions on race devolve into discussions of the problems presented by various races' presence in, say, America? Yes, it does make me uncomfortable, as it should make everyone feel but for some reason doesn't always do that, make everyone uncomfortable. People functioning thoughtlessly and with an eye only for their own selfish and self-centered lives also make me uncomfortable. I'll hear them out, and I won't necessarily argue my feelings with them (when I do, it's usually only delicately and in a way that's not likely to spark greater confrontation), especially when it's clear there's little to be gained from trying to dissuade someone of his or her hard-and-fast beliefs, much as you disagree. Point is, I've read enough authors (for one example of ways you might diversify your life experience) of all persuasions to know humans are equal, as those things go. Each race has its intelligent people and its less than intelligent people. Those arguing the supremacy of their own race over others or all others tend to fall in the latter camp, whether white or black or whoever. That is, it tends to be true, the less intelligent are more inclined to bigotry, though I don't mean to offend bigots of all races and creeds with that avowal. Some of you might just be incredibly egocentric, not necessarily stupid, for all I know.

So what was the point of stating all that I did in the preceding paragraph? Well, just that I SHOULD have liked "The Intuitionist." Or at least, I was very open to liking it (see Jonathan Franzen's analogous gripe with William Gaddis (although I disagree with Franzen's thesis, which I will touch on when I touch on William Gaddis)). It's also a novel that very specifically concerns race. The setting is an alternate universe in which race relations in the United States haven't changed much since the era of the Jim Crow South and the subsequent Civil Rights Movement (the assumption being: what would the world be like without that movement and the reforms it enacted?). Blacks are marginalized and only thought of, when they're thought of at all, in derogatory terms. It's an interesting premise, and I especially enjoyed the role elevators play in defining the characters. But ultimately my lasting feelings toward it could be described as follows, it was too darkly satirical to be taken as farce but too disjointed and grim to be taken as contributing something inventive and perceptibly applicable to the discussion of race in the late nineties (when it was published) and beyond.

The story follows Lila Mae Watson, the city's (which city was never specifically named but presumably it is a stand-in for New York) first ever black female elevator inspector. The city itself is corrupt and out of control but also feels austere, as its constant reference to elevators seems to have both the positive and negative aspect of providing clear and ceaseless vision of a concrete-laden landscape, a jagged skyline of high towers, nearly barren of organic life and certainly overarchingly dystopian. From the vantage we're afforded as readers, this world seems obsessed with debate over the two competing schools of elevator inspection, Empiricism and Intuitionism. (Lila Mae Watson herself subscribes to the latter school of thought.) And behind Intuitionism is a reclusive scholar named James Fulton whose passing coincides with Watson's attendance of the most prestigious elevator inspection academy in the country, whereat Fulton had prior to his death resided. Thus the two cross paths ever so briefly.

The rub of the story, meanwhile, is the failure of elevator 11 in the Fannie Briggs Memorial Building, a confirmed total free fall that occurs most inopportunely as The Mayor and the current Elevator Guild Chair Frank Chancre were among an entourage showing off the building to French diplomats. Watson was the last inspector to inspect the Fannie Briggs Building, putting a target squarely on her back. And so the story takes on a noir quality, mystery and dark alleys and the mob seemingly having a hand in the events that follow. Intuitionism seems to be under fire, as Chancre is an empiricist up for imminently approaching re-election. Furthermore, it's suspected by numerous factions that Fulton had completed another work, they refer to it as "Fulton's black box," which they believe will change how intuitionism is perceived, a "game changer" you might say.

Lila Mae Watson, as a character, never quite feels three-dimensional to me. I felt myself waiting throughout the story for some kind of apotheosis that simply does not come. It's not that she's largely the same person she was at the start of the novel by its end that bothers me; its that she never seems to be an individual of much flavor at all. Words I might describe her with, "independent," "guarded," deliberate," "intuitive," "lonely" and "smart." Never passionate, however, which is the one thing I think might have saved her character. I wanted her to care about her actions more visibly, but she seems more spectator than actor throughout the novel, going through the motions even when she reacted decisively in some fashion.

Its [spoiler alert] biggest revelations were somewhat confused, e.g. from the novel: "White people's reality is built on what things appear to be -- that's the business of Empiricism." Of course, white people were also intuitive, to be counted among those of the school of Intuitionism. But even these characters assume a villainous aspect as the story progresses. And you could argue turning all white people into the oppressive "the man" of blaxsploitation a la Shaft is perfectly legit and reasonable. But I never got the sense that that was Whitehead's intent, although neither did I get the sense that Whitehead was singling whites out as villains. No, instead it struck me as something in between, something incoherent, a hybrid of those two possibilities, and again, as I see it, poorly executed.

There's just very little clarity, as if the author himself wasn't sure of this story. What does Whitehead want from his novel? Anything? Nothing? I suppose in that sense it's interesting. The story leaves you intuiting that the world is breaking towards change, but little else leading up to this description impels you to feel that way. (Still more interesting, what might this change be in manifest? What's ideal for a society resting on so much unrest and misunderstanding? Certainly that question is applicable to our present day American circumstances, in which accusations of racism are invoked by all sides, no?)

I might also mention the character Natchez or the competing elevator manufacturers like Arbo, with a stake in Fulton's black box. But none of it moved me terribly much, and when the ending finally began to pull itself together few of the reveals were especially compelling, and were not terribly surprising.

Still, the book has its moments, and Whitehead is a fine writer. I imagine I might like his work, just did not here. Maybe somewhere and at sometime I will? Time will tell if intuition can't . . .

Moving Towards "Untoward"

2010-10-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

My plan is to begin an online literary magazine before the end of the year. I believe I've mentioned this plan before, so you might as well call this a progress report. It has a name, the site does. It will be, simply, Untoward. I like the word "untoward" and I think it denotes the general vision I have for the site.

What exactly is the general vision, then?

Well, might as well unveil that, too. It's providing literary fiction of a more humor-driven bent. I blanch a bit at saying "humor-driven" because there's a perceptible, if not prevailing, attitude that humor is ancillary to great fiction, not central. Well, despite that I think some of the best novels out there have humor at their heart, saying "humor-driven bent" is not to say other principle elements of fiction don't count or will be viewed as needing no presence in submissions whatsoever, that with this effort I intend solely to bring another version of "McSweeney's Internet Tendency" or some such to the table. No, my hope is that this site will satisfy an unsatisfied niche group of readers and those writers whose fiction isn't obviously placeable within the delineation of any of the numerous literary websites out there in . . . cyberspace.

How may humor form and inform the other elements of fiction? Think Vonnegut, Kafka, Nabokov, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace and more. Contemporaries like George Saunders, Pynchon, DeLillo, Lorrie Moore, Etgar Keret, Adam Levin and Patrick Somerville. These writers are funny in transcendent and complex ways, and their humor often is an attempt at more than just getting a rise out of their readership, amusing for purely amusement's sake. Humor can be densely complex while it's also profoundly hilarious. Unpack it a little, see why this is. So despite that I've read and thoroughly enjoyed many of cyberspace's websites' fiction, I don't think any one of those adequately satisfies the niche I describe, and neither do the big printeds -- no, not even McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

In any event, Untoward will satisfy my own selfish, personal need, which is to provide a place for my fiction and the fiction I tend to gravitate to. But my feeling is that there are others who'll fit right in, in the community I seek to establish with this effort. Obviously I've read others whose fiction is my kind of fiction, and I'm sure those writers have inspired many others. I want one and all to submit, known writers and unknowns alike. I welcome it wholeheartedly.

Horselover Fat Returns "The Game-Players of Titan"-Style

2010-10-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

Horselover Fat is Philip K. Dick's alter-ego in "VALIS," which is not completely unlike Kilgore Trout ... if Kurt Vonnegut had written about Kilgore Trout after many, many years of sustained and hard drug use. As for "VALIS," well, I haven't gotten to "VALIS" yet, still a few more novels by Philip K. Dick to read until I'm fully prepared for its ass-kicking narrative (they say), but I continue to look forward to reading it.

Presently, I've just finished "The Game-Players of Titan." One thing I like -- and I'm a man known for his liking things -- is there's not much use in guessing where a Philip K. Dick story is headed. He can change it up on you at a moment's caprice (it seems capricious for its irregularity). Maybe it's more planned than I know. But from what I've heard said, "The Game-Players of Titan" is anything but a clearly and finely contrived novel. So let's see if I might determine more, by finding out more about it, and thus knowing more. (It's a fairly simple process.)

...And I return from my frustrating, not terribly well-conceived Internet surf of "The Game-Players of Titan." Simple process? Not so much as it first seemed. Most of what I found was criticism wanting only to tear down "The Game-Players" in favor of other PKD novels or simply provide plot synopsis, which is useful to those people who haven't read the novel and want it ruined -- but not useful to me and my purposes.

Maybe I'm lazy and "not good" at surfing the web, but I was expecting something more substantial in terms of biographical information about the high profile PKD's work behind his work. What factors of note led to the conception of "The Game-Players of Titan"? Rumor has it he created the novel on a very short schedule, some three or four days, stopping each night and resuming the next day with renewed effort and a slightly shifted direction. Even if that's not how "The Game-Players of Titan" came to be, it is how it feels it came to be. There is something fascinating about the way the story stops and leaps forward throughout various points of the narrative. Pete Garden, the main character or central focus, is a very different man by the novel's completion. Or so it seemed to me.

In fact, the novel doesn't seem to get going until these twists, or leaps, in narrative take their first turn. To plot rehash so you have a basis for understanding everything after, the story concerns several characters living in a post-apocalyptic Earth, ravaged by the damaging effects and after effects of a Hinkel Radiation created by Bernhardt Hinkel whose weapon was acquired by the Red Chinese and via satellite used against the United States. However, the entire world lost because the Hinkel Radiation waves couldn't be contained and decimated all life on Earth.

Where we begin is in a world that has about two million or so inhabitants and of those inhabitants, for reasons no doubt related to the radiation (and / or possibly something more nefarious), only select combinations of individuals are able to produce viable offspring. (They thus constantly rotate spouses in hopes of finding a partner with whom this is possible.) Meanwhile, aliens from Saturn's moon, Titan, have intervened and enticed the remaining human population to gamble for control of huge tracts of land, say in city-size increments. For example, Pete Garden has just lost Berkley, CA, to his great dismay, as the story opens. These property holders are then referred to as bindmen. Apparently the Titanians themselves are huge proponents of the power of chance, which impels their decision to foist gambling on humans as their preferred and curious method of reconstruction.

Humorously and inscrutably, the game Earthlings are set against each other nightly to play in the battle for global supremacy is fairly simple, and sounded to me like a combination of the Candyland and Monopoly. I think perhaps PKD purposely made the game rather unexciting, because its a hilariously banal anchor in the screaming chaos of the narrative revolving around it.

Is there murder? Yes. Precognition? yuh-huh! Telepathy? A fair bit. Aliens from Saturn's moon, Titan, who are also called vugs and who materialize in strange places? And how!

I read in one review that this is not a PKD to start your PKD journey with, that it is "for completists" only. I suppose you might be better served beginning any of those they suggest, having read two of three and starting on the third, but skip it if you're not a "completist"? Perish the thought! As said, this novel is great for its inscrutability and chaos, its failure to be completely straightforward. And if you ask me, all things considered I'd say it ties together fairly well at the end (I have but one real point of confusion, which might be adequately well cleared up and is only a minor complaint, anyway).

"The Game-Players of Titan" is for readers who enjoy PKD, period. Suck on that, Infinity Plus!

"The Instructions" by Adam Levin is COOOOMMMMIIIINNNGGG Soon to me!

2010-10-03T08:11:00.000-07:00

Adam Levin is an author floating dangerously under the radar these days. My feeling is that will change with McSweeney's recent publication of his massive first novel, "The Instructions." It's getting called all sorts of things, as press releases and et cetera are wont to put forth, to build positive word of mouth and so forth, one imagines. (I think if you write a novel that exceeds 600 pages and you're under 40 years old you should just expect to be compared to David Foster Wallace, even if in no other way does your work resemble the late great DFW's.) I don't know. All I know is, I expect Levin will bring something decidedly different to the table, all his own. I don't get the impression he's the sort of author who writes a book of this staggering size without having something to say. He's too on the level from what I've heard from and of him to be that kind of self-indulgent. And he has written some wicked short fiction. Don't believe me? Fine. I don't care. I have bought "The Instructions," in any event. I am excited by what its reading may yield.

In related news, I've bought a slough of books lately, of which "The Instructions" is merely one I'm especially excited for. Others I'm similarly excited for (or I would not have bought them) are Patrick Somerville's upcoming "The Universe in Miniature in Miniature," Joseph McElroy's "A Smuggler's Bible," Curtis White's "Memories of My Father Watching TV," and Percival Everett's "I Am Not Sidney Poitier." Oh and Philip K. Dick, always Philip K. Dick. My thoughts on all of these authors and more will be forthcoming, I assure you. Thanks for your patience, small and loyal readership I've imagined for myself.

Know that I love you all very much, what is more!

Jonathan Safran Foer's About Wrapped Up My Enthusiasm for "Top 20 Under 40" Novels / Writing

2010-10-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

"Everything is Illuminated" seemed not to work exactly the way it could have, and might have, if Jonathan Safran Foer wrote his novel in a way that synced with my tastes and made me want to read more of his writing.

If, for instance, Alex was written less cloyingly and didn't remind me of Balki Bartokomous of the '80s sitcom "Perfect Strangers," with all the pair's shared imprecise English diction and turns of phrase. If, for instance, the entire plot didn't strike me as ground already trodden in more interesting ways, which is entirely subjective, true, but my subjectivity compels me to say it anyway. If he hadn't write his novel with nearly identical structural similarities to those of his wife's "The History of Love." If his only other story I'd heretofore encountered, "Here We Aren't, So Quickly," hadn't made me want to pull my hair out so quickly (which is part of why I'm more forgiving of Nicole Krauss' complicity in making her novel structurally similar to JSF's, if this was indeed a purposeful act perpetrated by either or both of them, which I concede it probably wasn't purposeful but still rubs me the wrong way; I liked Krauss' "The Young Painters").

I was told, as I mention in my post on "The History of Love," to read Jonathan Safran Foer after finishing Krauss' novel, because their writing in a multitude of ways seems very mutually influenced, or maybe one has exercised much more influence over the other. If that were the case it would likely be Jonathan Safran Foer whose "Everything is Illuminated" came before "The History of Love," but then not before Krauss' "Man Walks into A Room," so who knows? I haven't read the latter book, though I might.

Point is, comparing "The History of Love" to "Everything is Illuminated" proved an easy task. Weird idiosyncratic and sometimes-to-always idiomatic English put forth by an Eastern European? Check, i.e. Alex Perchov and Leo Gursky / Misha. Holocaust love story around which each narrative turns? Check. Inquisitive youth in present day trying to discern the true story about and details of said Holocaust love story? CHECK, i.e. Jonathan and Alma. Story broken down into chapters told from various points of view of previously mentioned similar characters, plus chapters detailing extraneous bits of information in third person narration about Holocaust love story? Extremely CHECK, i.e. back story of Trachimbrod and Litvinoff's "The History of Love." Even the younger brothers of Alex and Alma are similar, possessing unusual cognomens, i.e. Little Igor and Bird.

There are surely more similarities, but I'm tired of addressing them all. These I think shall suffice. More to the point, does it matter that a husband and wife each wrote a novel that is similar to the other's? No, or at least it's easy to argue it doesn't matter at all, especially if the quality of the writing is good and the story is told effectively. Bottom line? Safran Foer's novel didn't do it for me. This, and so much of what all I write about here, is largely opinion based. In fact, we could get into the real abstraction of certainty (which I've been avidly reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's "On Certainty"), and how even the so-called empirical sciences could, if parsed by their semantical meaning, could be rendered products of subjectivity just the same as the gray area of literary inference, but that might get impossibly beside the point and also possibly drive me insane. Instead, I'll acknowledge precisely how much my own opinion has led me to feel that "Everything is Illuminated" simply does not work, isn't to my tastes. Parts of it were amusing, to Safran Foer's credit. And I refuse to say he's untalented. He is. I just think his talent is misused here.

Also, I really didn't like "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" -- which this story struck me as the kind of pretentious work one will churn out in a highly pretentious MFA creative writing program, if you want to know.

As for thoughts lingering about the "Top 20 Under 40": I fully intend to read Chris Adrian's "Gob's Grief." I have it in my possession and it seems like a very interesting first time attempt, which I might then juxtapose with "Everything is Illuminated." See how these narratives might then be tied together, alle zusammen richtig ist!

This Time, Baby, "Bullet Park"

2010-09-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

Wow, John Cheever, wow. Damn, too, damn, John Cheever, damn. I was not expecting that from you. "Bullet Park" is a strange and fascinating novel. Clearly, I had you pegged incorrectly. Thanks for that.

See, nothing pleases me more than the revelation that I did not give a certain author enough of a chance in my first encounter with his or her work, and that his or her writing could, indeed, please me if only I'd open myself up to that possibility. Thanks, Dr. Suess, lesson learned. However, sometimes you need to be provided certain additional circumstances with your Green Eggs and Ham (both the dish and the children's novel). It's not always as simple as being willing to try them, I mean; you also sometimes need to be in the right mood.

But let's see, Mark Athitakis linked to a pretty useful blog post exhorting readers to beware this novel's description on the backs of book covers of certain editions. Methinks I had the same edition being described because mine does reveal something quite substantial about the plot, which might have served me better not to have been privy to. Still, I don't mind little or vague reveals provided the story is interesting. A similarly significant pithy revelation about its plot might have made reading "Everything is Illuminated" impossible drudgery, in contrast. (I'll get to "Everything is Illuminated" in a forthcoming post.)

So what makes "Bullet Park" good inmyopinion? [From this point forward I can no longer promise there won't be spoilers, read further at your own (potential) peril!] It's a lot like what Nabokov wrote but not derivative in the negative sense, i.e. lacking its own original vision. This pleases me. As you all know, you people who read this blog even merely occasionally, I'm pleased when things I read have a Nabokov-twinge to them. The Nabokov-twinge of "Bullet Park" doesn't make its appearance until part 2 of the novel, told entirely from the first-person perspective of Paul Hammer. Paul Hammer has something like Humbert Humbert or Dr. Kinbote or Hermann Karlovich in him, a strange zeal for upsetting the normative norms that dress life so plainly, in suburbia or wherever, and then reacting to this world in his own meta-beside-the-point way, which may or may not impel some sort of violent clash of sorts at the story's conclusion (which likewise has its Nabokovian feel, obsession being a thing that it is).

"Bullet Park" also begins, for me, a series of the myth of the American Dream novels, as presently I'm reading the lengthy but very good novel "J R" by William Gaddis, whom I was inspired to read in part because of a Big Other post in which Greg Gerke nicely states his thoughts on Gaddis' use of the sun and other elemental imagery in "The Recognitions" and in part because of the frequent mention Gaddis is given in "Wittgenstein's Mistress." A very editorial aside: Gaddis is probably the most underrated though paradoxically highly praised and awarded (2 National Book Awards among his credits) fiction writer of the last fifty years, or at least among the top five. (David Markson might well be up there as well, although I feel I should read more of his work before I affirmatively take that stance.) Also, aside from "Bullet Park" and "J R" I would then add "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates. I hear good things about "Revolutionary Road." Things I like hearing.

But to return to "Bullet Park," the novel also concerns Elliot Nailles and his son Tony, the struggle of the minutiae of their day-to-day lives. Tony at one point is shown being much too dependent on TV (or so Elliot decides), and Elliot (who is normally referred to strictly as "Nailles") decides he must rid his son of his dependency by destroying the television set. He does and this act seems to be the beginning of a rift that only grows larger between father and son as time goes on. Hammer speaks of being struck by a "cafard" in his early to mid-twenties, one that he decides can only be ameliorated by a house he becomes infatuated with, almost sensually, and in specific one of its room's yellow walls. Meanwhile, Tony suffers his own cafard, one that renders him completely bedridden and inconsolable. Tony is immune to conventional medicine, it appears, and Nailles and his wife, Nellie, opt to pursue a very different method of recovery (which I won't detail here, although it'll become obvious if you read the novel). This unusual method immediately has the desired effect and Tony seems, for all intents and purposes, cured. Hammer comes to the Bullet Park neighborhood with his wife, Marietta, who treats him badly. Hammer comes to Bullet Park, likewise, with an ulterior motive, which would have been surprising indeed had I not had the version of the book I had.

And on second thought, it would have been far better not to have known what was coming. Keep that in mind if you decide to hunt for "Bullet Park" somewheres. You ought to, hunt, though. Read it, I mean. DO!

"The Myth of Sisyphus" and Other Non-Myth Related Essays of Camus

2010-09-23T08:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not an existentialist. I've never read Satre, which I'm pretty sure is antithetical to considering yourself a party to the school of French existentialism. I have read de Beauvoir and she's great. I've also admired the fiction of Albert Camus for quite some time, and he's the philosopher poet of that particular derivation of, well, philosophy. But that said and perhaps bewilderingly considering what he's best known for, I've never thought of Camus in terms of his philosophical background until recently, having read his book of essays, "The Myth of Sisyphus." And now it will probably be difficult to think of him in any other light than that of existentialist, although he's certainly more than the imposition of limits inherent to such categorization.

The posts of the last month or so preceding this one are, I know, rife with allusions if not outright mention of Camus' existentialism. He's a fascinating person, from all I know of his background. His childhood in Algeria, which would color his world view for the rest of his life. His reporting from troubled parts of the African continent. His eventual tragic death in a car accident at age 46, which provided a strange sort of abrupt, exclamatory punctuation to the transience of his own life, and ephemerality being an eventuality which he attributes unflinchingly to all life in his philosophical musings.

To Camus, it was necessary to accept the fact that life was ephemeral, a quick breath above the endlessly deep waters of non-existence. It was also true, to Camus, that life was necessarily absurd, because of the inextricable bond of one's own human consciousness to the world in which (s)he resides, and that neither could exist to the exclusion of the other. ". . . [T]he Absurd is not in man . . . nor in the world, but in their presence together," as Camus himself puts it in "An Absurd Reasoning." Adding also, in the same essay, "I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other." These thoughts seem, likewise, similar to certain tenets of those philosophical theorists who preceded the existentialists. I'm thinking of Nietzsche most specifically, but also Kierkegaard of whose philosophy Camus makes a special critique.

For instance Nietzsche sez:

Only very naive people are capable of believing that the nature of man could be transformed into a purely logical one; but if there should be degrees of approximation to this objective, what would not have to be lost if this course were taken! Even the most rational man from time to time needs to recover nature, that is to say his illogical original relationship with all things. [emphasis Nietzsche's]

As Camus endeavors to explain the Absurd in "An Absurd Reasoning" the first essay of the collection, he notes something similar to Nietzsche's above aphorism, to wit:

"It's absurd" means "It's impossible" but also "It's contradictory." If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider this act absurd. But it is solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim he has in view.

And being a fiction writer of a certain caliber in his own right, Camus had some thoughts on fiction writers both prior and contemporaneous to him. This I thought was most interesting, his consideration of his peers. His thoughts on Kafka not so much. Kafka, to Camus, was an author whose work betokens a sense of hope, specifically in "The Castle," which does not in the end turn away from "subterfuge." Which then Camus kind of speciously goes to some lengths to argue this and other points, written with the turgid verbosity that only philosophers can conjure. He takes issue with the fact that Kafka has made ". . . this hideous and upsetting world in which the very moles dare to hope." Hope is verboten to Camus' artistic vision, or a kind of hope is, the kind that eschews the reality of the Absurd. And I think that's where Camus' own trouble begins.

Camus also says, "For if nostalgia is the mark of the human, perhaps no one has given such flesh and volume to these phantoms of regret." Further adding, "But at the same time will be sensed what exceptional nobility the absurd work calls for, which is perhaps not found here." I find Camus' aesthetic abstraction troubling here, in part because it seems to come from a place of passion I don't fully understand, but also because it feels so insincerely reasoned. It is this way because this is the way it is, he seems to say with empty question begging that has little else to defend it. And I do believe I really like the nebulous quality of Camus and Kafka's works equally, along with so much else, so this is not an attempt to defend the honor of Kafka or something so puerile. If I felt Kafka were being justly criticized I'd admit this was so. I hope I've got that much credibility here. But instead Camus' exposition in this essay seems a good example of what happens when too much philosophy invades the thinking of the individual. Indeed, Camus is inextricably bound to the Absurd, which may harm his fiction to some small extent in my eyes, although probably it won't at all.

Still, there is so much to like about what he expounds upon. "Don Juan" is thoughtfully reconsidered in his essay, "Absurd Creation."

A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are the end. Likewise, the whole effort of this conqueror will be diverted to ambition, which was but a way toward a greater life. Don Juan in turn will yield to his fate, be satisfied with that existence whose nobility is of value only through revolt.

You may call Don Juan a libertine, and on that point you may well be correct, but he is living outside of the rules society has mandated and outside of a false morality whose truth it assumes, when who is Don Juan harming? Women must know he cannot be chained down, since his behavior suggests nothing less than that he will not be. If this is so and still they cannot refuse him, that is their choice, as his is to be a libertine. I think the aforesaid is what Camus is essentially saying in this passage, and to that extent, I agree with him.

I don't always agree with him, but I always find him interesting, that Camus.

Italo Calvino is What's Awesome Today: "Cosmicomics"

2010-09-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

"If on a winter's night a traveler" is one of my favorite books. It's experimental fiction, to be sure. It's my kind of experimental fiction, to be surer. I had a smallish falling out with the works of Italo Calvino, however, when I hit a dead end with "Invisible Cities." "Invisible Cities" was not my kind of experimental fiction, to be surest.

And so I didn't know what of Calvino's to try next, to rekindle my enthusiasm, until a friend recommended "Cosmicomics." Glad he did. "Cosmicomics" righted my attitude about Calvino's fiction from the outset. The book amounts to a strung-together-in-premise series of short stories. And that premise is, in a nut shell: creation myths and all their usual whimsy bound to a kind of quasi-regard for modern astronomy. In fact, each story is prefaced with a paragraph-long exposition on some astrological (or in a few cases geo-primordial) phenomenon or another (I presume these expositions are factual. Most sound factual, at least). Then each story descends into the madness of Calvino's really pleasing and lyrical prose.

Much of Calvino's work in "Cosmicomics" reminded me of one or a few of Mark Twain's later short stories, in which Twain describes souls screaming across the ethereal realm of outer space, traversing the galaxy and then, often, coming upon Earth. I.e. e.g. "Extract From Captain Stromfield's Visit to Heaven." But this isn't about that, about Twain. It is about Calvino and his similar tales to those of Twain, or so I have argued. Souls or whatever you wish to refer to them as exist in the galaxies of "Cosmicomics" likewise, having names like xzcsds or some such.

"A Signal From Space" was probably my favorite of the collection, although as said, they're all very good. But "A Signal From Space" had something slightly additional, slightly beyond that of the others which resonated with me. It's also the story most concerned with simulacra, said in terms of this strange artful philosophical tract and combining the other two elements I put forth above (i.e. myths and empirical science). I don't want to go all Jean Baudrillard on you, reader(s), but still I feel I must express my interest in the phenomenon of simulacra vis-a-vis semiotics.

The final supposition of the narrator speaks both of the long history of humanity's tendency to interpret surroundings and the end result of attaching our own method for divining all meaning, creating with it our own signs and symbols. (Hell, for evidence of this egocentrism look no further than the fact that I'm assuming the narrator is human, despite the non-human characteristics it possesses (like being probably immortal).) The ending sentence is long and well wrought, going a little something like this:

There was no longer any way to establish a point of reference: the Galaxy went on turning but I could no longer count the revolutions, any point could be the point of departure, any sign heaped up with the others could be mine, but discovering it would have served no purpose, because it was clear that independent of signs, space didn't exist and perhaps never existed.

The question then might be: is everything subject to the same immutable artificiality of signs devoid of meaning? That is, as purely constructs of conscious thought? The story refers only to a sign as the thing in itself throughout the narrative, not what it is beyond that or what it might be as a nuomenon (i.e. as a thing apart from senses)? Does any of this speculative, theoretical hogwash matter? Possibly not, but I enjoy being given the opportunity to think about it in certain occluded locales like that of a written work, and so has Calvino provided for such interpretation in "A Signal From Space."

I realize I have given you very little to chew on here in terms of what the stories are "about." They're all about something less abstract than my ruminating here, but I'm tired in general and uninterested in what all about these stories might be. Read them and you'll see, though uninitiated Calvino readers might also start with "If on a winter's night a traveler."

Beware of Men Up There in High Castles

2010-09-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

So it's official, I'm hooked on Philip K. Dick. I could easily have made a jejune, churlish remark there, meant facetiously of course, but then I wouldn't be able to excoriate myself with the use of all these descriptive and reproving "words of the day" I've learned recently and compiled here. Hence, my disinclination to do so, plus how incomparably draconian must one get for the purpose of arousing some droll, mirthful rise from his readership? So is why I refuse to say: I'm hooked on Dick, although I could have easily said that and engendered a pun of very lewd alternative meaning. I could very well have followed it up by saying I'm thoroughly enjoying Balzac likewise, although I haven't read "Eugenie Grandet," which is the only work of his in my possession, and I've never read anything by him heretofore, what's more. Whence, pardon my untruth for the facile endeavor of being risible and jocund as I have been, although in that endeavor I have contradicted, nay thwarted, my stated original purpose, which I claimed was to be neither of those things, to eschew those things in fact for the sake of decorum and civility. Or rather, I said I did so for the fact that then I wouldn't be able to excoriate myself with words, which in truth I have done. So all is well, actually.

Trekking ever onward . . .

But of the author appearing in the former position of the preceding paragraph, I can say only praising things. (Well, I could possibly say more negatively critical things but I prefer to speak praise first, which drastically outweighs my negative criticism of his work.) "The Man in the High Castle" can only be called a seminal novel of the sub genre of science fiction thus known as: alternative histories. In the novel and indeed its alternative history, the Nazis and Japanese have triumphed over the Allies in World War II, and the globe is split amongst the Axis victors, with the smallest portion offered to Italy, the France of this paradoxical universe.

The story follows multiple characters, the most important of which are: a store owner named Robert Childan specializing in the sale of antique Americana; Frank Frink, a secret Jew and a skilled craftsman who fashions reproductions of period pieces valuable to the Japanese, then after he quits that profession, jewelry of his own contrivance; Juliana Frink, estranged and divorced from her husband, Frank, she wanders the Rocky Mountain buffer searching for a new life, and in so doing, meets and begins to trust an assassin traveling incognito; Nobusuke Tagomi, a trade commissioner who takes on one of the more important roles of the story, in my opinion; and Mr. Baynes, a Swedish salesperson of an industrial plastics corporation who may not be entirely what he seems.

There is also a story within the story called "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" -- also an alternative history novel, which even more paradoxically posits what the world might be like had the Allies won the war. Wikipedia, in a section on its "The Man in the High Castle" page, notes that the Allies' victory in "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" is hardly congruent with the way in which the Allies were victorious in WWII in our historical sense. That is, Russia ends up playing a very minimal role, FDR is not assassinated as he is in "The Man in the High Castle" but survives through his first two terms and then is succeeded by another Democrat, Rexford Tugwell, who stewards the United States through the remainder of the war, and Great Britain returns to its place of preeminence as the world's lone hegemonic superpower.

Nobusuke Tagomi, to focus on one character, epitomizes several of the chief themes of the story. One is, the preference with which Dick opts to present the Japanese. Despite the bellicose nature of their imperialism and recorded treatment of POWs and even opposing populations' civilians during our WWII, the Japanese are -- not surprisingly -- viewed as the lesser of the two extant evils. And to express one quasi-misgiving, this idea is taken to the further extent of a kind of overcompensation on Dick's part in which the Japanese are set upon a pedestal. And though repeatedly tempered by showcases of their human frailty, the Japanese are depicted very often in the light of an awkward veneration for their culture by both the novel's characters and, ostensibly, Dick himself, as exhibited with the frequent nods to the Japanese's Buddhist traditions and their appreciation for that which transcends tangibility, objects possessing auras, the Tao, and so forth. It seemed, to me, at times, a smidgen patronizing, is all I'm saying.

Still, Tagomi's epiphany with respect to this idea, to the religion of the Japanese, is a key moment in the story. Childan learns from a Japanese customer that the jewelry Frink and his partner are producing, while less than pleasing from an aesthetic standpoint, possesses "Wu" -- a Chinese term expressing a supernal sort of knowledge or wisdom, or so says the novel (I've done no independent research). Childan's first impulse is to capitalize on this monetarily, but then he begins to realize his customer is putting him to a test: is American culture just the same vitiated and enterprising consequentialist system that defines Nazi Germany and elsewhere? Or can it appreciate a thing in itself -- can its artists, in effect, produce true art? He realizes this and, apparently desiring something more substantial for the American way of life, rescinds his claim that Frink would be willing to churn out these objects and in whatever way Japanese customers prefer. I think it's possible this is an outcome Dick would have preferred was the case in our America, which seems to have taken Childan's original tack, and produced for what's beside the point, what's to be selfishly gained.

Meanwhile, Tagomi has just killed two German agents sent to, apparently, take Baynes into custody for reasons I will avoid discussing here, and so visits Childan's store with his life in a state of, to put it mildly, disorder. Childan shows Tagomi Frink's jewelry, which Tagomi is indifferent to at first, finding he does not know what, if anything, he believes. But then, hoping that perhaps it could make things suddenly manifest to him, Tagomi buys one small, silver piece, on the condition that he may return it if it doesn't produce the desired effect. It produces an effect, and though not necessarily desired, it brings things into perspective for Tagomi -- gives him a glimpse of a world in which the United States had defeated Japan. It's unclear whether this is as the outcome of the "Grasshopper Lies Heavy" laid out, or whether it's the history we know, or if it was a place altogether different. But that's arbitrary, ultimately, to the fact that Tagomi understands better how easily synthesized these things are. How, then, ostensibly mutually exclusive ideas can exist side by side, in paradox, yes, but also not entirely illogically.

I liked this book. Read it. Read it and see what you think. Then tell me what you think. Or if you have already read it, tell me what you think. Let's discuss!

"Wittgenstein's Mistress" -- A Writer's Read

2010-09-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

Sadly, David Markson died earlier this year. I'd never heard of him before then. Damn you, experimental fiction writers of relative obscurity! I don't know what learning of his work while he was still alive would have done for me, but I feel shortchanged just the same. O, bother!

Nevertheless, probably the best way we can honor writers who've passed is by continuing to read them, which is -- happy to say -- what I've done. You should to, specifically with reference to "Wittgenstein's Mistress." It's the kind of story that surprises you, I think. It's one that might require a certain amount of diligence, but continuing to read pays off fairly quickly. For my own reading, the narrator's philosophical ruminations and mode of conveying these terms took an interval to get acclimated to, but when I was fully acclimated -- O, boy! Things really started to engross, engrossingly, like they had never engrossed before. (An aside: I'm going through a "using the word 'engross' with liberality" phase, presently. It shall hopefully pass soon.)

Actually, truth be told, I'm feeling a bit daunted by reviewing this book, if only for the fact that it has such a rabid and devoted following of writers and scholars, all of whom know it and its author better than I ever will. I've heard Markson described as a writer's writer. After "Wittgenstein's Mistress" that seems like an apt description. So hopefully I have something meaningful to contribute to their profound and heady discussion already in progress, but if I fail in this endeavor just know my heart was in the right place, Markson devotees. -- Can't blame me for trying, is all I'm saying!

Here I try:

As it happens Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of my favorite philosophers, so finding my anchor of relevance within the rapid tides of narrator Kate's sporadic stream of consciousness was rather straightforwardly achieved (or as straightforwardly as a work of this nature allows). This is not necessary, but having an understanding of some-to-many facets of the arts in the western world for the last several hundred years might avail you in your reading of "Wittgenstein." There are plenty of references to most all of the western arts, I mean. (William Gaddis is one oft-cited writer whom it happens I know of and very much enjoy his work, which also helped.)

If there was a single defining characteristic of "Wittgenstein's Mistress," it seemed to me to be the notion of the certain, preordained ephemerality of our signs and symbols, or more precisely: of the sum total of humankind's cultural achievements (and in that regard humanity's achievements of every sort). (An aside: I have to believe existentialists like Camus would have found much to like about "Wittgenstein's Mistress.")

The fact that Kate has little-to-no knowledge (or at least fails to express it if she does) of eastern culture and other places beyond her westernized outlook seems to me to even more pronouncedly support this idea of emphemerality. Without the east and other places' having their own individual "keepers of the flame" or some such, a "Kate" of their own, they have already faded to dust, which is ultimately the destiny of that knowledge which Kate has accrued and shares freely and not always with certitude, what's more.

There's the stink of inevitable death all over Kate's narrative, as it unavoidably must be. Whatever she really is, what we know is that Kate is the end in and of herself. Kate evidences this slow decay of ideas somewhat abruptly when she discovers a cache of books in the basement of the house in which she has taken up residence. The rub is that the books are written almost exclusively in German, of which she has paltry little knowledge. It thus renders them, in this place she resides, superfluous and useless, or in one word: extinct.

Kaputt. Sehr tot. Kein "Sein und Zeit." Kein Heidegger.

But here, let me briefly describe the plot of a novel that hardly relies on its plot (which is why I've saved adumbrating it till now). "Wittgenstein's Mistress" follows narrator Kate who alleges to be the last person left on the planet (and very possibly the last animate being, all told). I might have said the last person "alive" but there doesn't seem to be anyone, living or dead, around. No corpses. Empty automobiles and other human machinery, yes. However, that is it. She's alone, all alone. The mystery of everyone's disappearance (explainable with any of a great number of possibilities) appears to be somewhat beside the point, when judged from the vantage Kate's unique perspective affords.

What's true is the single, stand alone quality of the Absurd. Kate and the world exist for as long as that is the case. Neither will exist when one or the other is ended. That said, there is of course an important missing component to this, the other individuals with whom meaning might have once been shared. They are entirely absent, thus removing a key element of the relevance of culture: that it belongs not to one but many, and can be transmitted to even more who will learn it by birthright or wish to understand it in whatever way they will as outsiders.

Kate, for her own part, becomes the perfect trumpeter of this altered state of humankind, considering these "new" circumstances of existence, as she notes herself, hardly differ from her life previously. She was alone then and remains alone in less abstract terms now. She seems both melancholic and unfazed by this turn, also, moving more towards the former as the narrative reaches its close, as if she laments not taking fuller advantage of some sort of intimate relationship while that was still a possibility. But knowing she cannot, there is a grimness to her accepting the inevitability of her fate. Subsumed by the greater end of the civilization.

If Kate is mad, as she asserts she once was, this is entirely beside the point, too. She may well be mad, but the world of which she describes is the only world she knows, and likewise, it's the only reality we're given as readers. And everything she puts forth might as well be the case. . .

Philip K. Dick, How is it That I've Just Finally Gotten to Reading You???!!?

2010-08-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

Funny how a writer can be at your periphery for years (such was the case with Nabokov for me), and once you finally get to their work you are stunned by how you had ever managed to dodge reading them before then. Philip K. Dick has proven in my first reading of him to be that kind of writer. Most everyone has heard of him, and he has a huge following, but he's easy enough to ignore as a genre science fiction writer.

Perhaps this commonplace dismissal is best described by Kurt Vonnegut, who once said of his own label as a science fiction writer, "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since [the novel "Player Piano"], and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal." And I agree with Vonnegut's assertion and consider its truth a shame, because while I can see how a lot of science fiction doesn't demonstrate the mastery of prose that you find in more turgid canonical works, it still often demonstrates a uniqueness of insight, of explicating the magical mysteries of our human condition and wondering who we are, that to me always matters more than artful and mellifluous composition / an author's meditative dexterity.

But, while not Nabokov, Philip K. Dick was above the median writing abilities of, even other widely read, science fiction novelists if you ask me. He has a straightforward way of expressing his narratives, but this always feels natural enough. There's no stilted or affected quality to it.

Moreover, I read on the back cover of my copy of "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (which is the novel of his I read, likewise) an endorsement of his stating, "Dick [was] many authors: a poor man's Pynchon, an oracular postmodern, a rich product of the changing counterculture." In particular I'm struck by the parallel to Pynchon, which is apt, actually. I hate to refer to Dick as a "poor man's" anything, but still Thomas Pynchon is a worthy comparison. This is especially true as goes each writer's deftness with absurd puns meant as satirical stand-ins for the kinds of needful-things products that define American consumerism.

In "Palmer Eldritch" what we are presented with is a world of unreality. The people of earth live under the auspices of the UN (become a kind of world government), and given the unsustainable population explosion, said people are frequently conscripted to live in the less hospitable terrains of other planets and so forth in our solar system (Mars and the moon, most notably). So to escape the monotony of existence in these desolate places the colonists take mind-altering substances. They're illegal, yes, but more or less tolerated by the UN because of the otherwise intolerable conditions of the colonies. "Can-D" is the drug of choice at the story's outset, sold covertly by the forces of Leo Bulero, owner of P.P. Layouts, which manufactures, among other things, human-like dolls in which takers of "Can-D" will assume conscious control during their fantasy, drug-induced moments. This in itself is a very trippy idea, certainly, but the story only becomes more so as the plot thickens -- a readily apparent defining characteristic of Dick's work.

The story centers primarily on Barney Mayerson, a precog under the employ of Bulero and P.P. Layouts. Mayerson is exceptionally skilled at precognition. His job requires that he look into the future and see what trends will become popular, and then allow for P.P. Layouts to capitalize on them by purchasing exclusive rights (a kind of question-begging proposition in itself, although not quite because Mayerson checks to see if products are hits or misses rather than what is verifiably trendy, cornering that market in advance).

Cue the return of Palmer Eldritch, a wealthy industrialist and space navigator who returns to our solar system after a decade of traversing other regions of space, most notably the Prox system, crash landing on Pluto. More importantly it's what Palmer Eldritch has brought back with him, a new drug called "Chew-Z." What ensues is a battle between Bulero and Eldritch for rights to the drug market in our system. "Chew-Z" promises to be much more than "Can-D" ever could, of fact which Eldritch demonstrates to both Bulero and Mayerson in separate moments. What it also seems to be is much more than just a drug, a means of living forever, if only seemingly within the illusion of the drug's escape.

More than anything, both the characters in the story and the reader are left to wonder what is reality after a certain while into the narrative. Which brings to mind, if "Inception" wasn't inspired somewhat by the works of Philip K. Dick I'll eat every shoe I've ever owned.

(Disclaimer: Matt Rowan will not actually eat shoes belonging to himself or anyone else if proven incorrect in the preceding assertion.)

"Pale Fire" and its manifold weirdness which makes it unlike the others: Part II - A Dash of Plot Summary

2010-08-29T06:03:00.000-07:00

In part because Kevin asked for it and in part because I can't stop thinking about this friggin' book, I have opted to write a second, follow up post about "Pale Fire." This time, as the title suggests, concerning primarily a few main points of its plot (because I really wish to not give all that much about it away, seeing as reading the novel is, without a doubt, better than my rehashing of it).

But before I get to that I wanted to mention I've found it really interesting that there's a debate about Nabokov's intent with respect to the earnestness of the poem "Pale Fire" itself. I'm told that previously it was considered a satire and John Shade himself a stand-in parody of various notable 19th-2oth century American poets mentioned in Kinbote's notes, one of whom in specific was Robert Frost (and the stygian quality of each poet's surname seems awfully coincidental, if nothing else). But there's a new school of thought, which it seems Nabokov might well have agreed with -- if his son is to be believed, that argues the poem was done with no such satire in mind. It was meant to be interpreted as a sincere attempt, whether one thinks it hit the mark or not. Although I wasn't completely taken with the poem myself (especially in a more lyrical sense), I can say I thought it was interesting how it told its story, with a lucidity of pith that wasn't -- by all I've read of him -- Nabokov's default mode, writing-wise. (Though the poem's still characteristically Nabokovian, I do believe.)

All right, so to at last get down to the point of this post, let's run through the key story line points that define "Pale Fire," shall we? Dr. Kinbote is, as far as we know, a real person, an academic who admires the poetry of John Shade, a canonical poet. (I say "as far as we know" because there are those who speculate about his reality, of whether he is a conjuration of Shade or any number of different possibilities.) The novel is broken up as mentioned in the earlier post by three sections, Kinbote's foreward, the poem itself, and Kinbote's subsequent notes which tell the bulk of the story. That story mainly involves Kinbote's homeland, Zembla. He makes it very clear his hope in John Shade's poem was that Zembla would be realized in wonderful prose, which is why he went to such lengths to tell its many stories and describe its scenery with persistence to the venerable poet during the pair's walks. It's also clear, frequently, that despite his fluency, Kinbote hardly understands the finer points of human interaction. He rarely gets hints that he's not wanted. And when he does pick up on them, he's usually contrived an excuse for Shade, disparaging whoever else (usually Sybil, Shade's wife) is culpable enough to attach blame.

Zembla's king, of whom Kinbote makes no bones he is a devoted subject, has been forced into exile in a recent uprising by ostensibly proletarian forces more or less supported by the USSR. This then leads to the parallel running narrative of Gradus, a villainous anti-royalist, sent after the king to, apparently, kill him. Fairly early on it's said that Gradus is John Shade's murderer (and yes, the climax of the story leads to the death of John Shade, but I don't consider this a spoiler; Shade's being dead is revealed in the foreward), and so in Kinbote's notes the two men's narratives run parallel, with Kinbote noting where each was in relation to the other (Shade completing his epic poem and Gradus' movement about Europe and elsewhere abroad) as they moved towards their fatal collision. All of this, believe me, has one questioning the sanity of Kinbote, who seems rather loony, I don't mind saying.

Another final point as regards plot and narrative structure is how unconcerned, almost dismissive, Kinbote seems to be apropos of the poem's real content. I began to feel, and there should be no mistaking this, that Nabokov was pointing out the absurdity of any serious literary critique, certainly of the academic variety, and his notes were principally meant to showcase how much of oneself said academics put into their "objective" analyses of authors' works. (Make no mistake, I see that I myself am doing the very same thing, here and now, even; but I do hope it's clear likewise that I am aware of how much of myself I cloyingly put into these analyses. The point is: please do not reject me).

Have a very great Sunday everybody!

And Reading "Number9Dream" is Done, an Engaging Novel

2010-08-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

Everybody's talking about "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet." Good for them. Good for David Mitchell, what's more. I hope he finally wins a much deserved Man Booker Prize. I've got my copy, happy to say. But now I haven't read it as of yet. I did, however, just finish reading the last of the novels I had left to read of David Mitchell's compendium that precede "Jacob de Zoet." (Does that make sense?) Well, it's called "Number9Dream." It was good. I liked it. But we'll get to that.

I think since "Inception" hit the scene and has been one of the top movies of the summer (and certainly a movie I enjoyed quite a lot) "Number9Dream" proved to be a fairly nice follow up to that. Mitchell's not quite as concerned with literal traversal through one's subconsciousness (By the way: is it possible for that to truly be literal? I guess . . .), but the notion of dreams, as the title certainly expresses, does play its own part. Mitchell, more or less, overtly expresses his influence by direct reference to Philip K. Dick in "Number9Dream," and his novel -- as much as any of Mitchell's others -- demonstrates this affinity for the much ballyhooed cult sci-fi writer with its surrealist plot turns and ambiguity, all of which have an advanced-technology bend to them, so that even though the setting is ostensibly present day Japan it still feels as if it is actually a place far more futuristic (as is sort of my impression of Tokyo, anyway) than our contemporary world, capiche?

(Ed. Matt's Note: It certainly doesn't hurt that I was reading "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" in concert with "Number9Dream" -- as specifically goes divining parallels between the two authors.)

The novel primarily concerns Eiji Miyake, the illegitimate son of a prominent Tokyo citizen whom the story centers on, to the extent that Miyake is trying to discover who, then, precisely this citizen, i.e. his father, is. What's somewhat interesting to me is how little, in the end, I felt the notion of numbers mattered to the story. They appear constantly, seemingly betokening any twist of fate, positive, negative, or neuter, that Miyake encounters, but even at that still do not -- from what I gleaned -- illuminate any greater truth of the story by their significance. 9 might as well have been 1568. But maybe that was the point. What do I mean? Just that we can find numbers everywhere and they can seem to follow us if we are looking for them to do so, and we can contrive meaning to attach to them for that.

It's probably in existential terms what amounts to an attempt at making sense of the absurd. (Camus help me out here.) The only meaning is that which we attach with our own personal consciousness (or the influence of others and theirs), if I'm correctly taking the existentialist tack, which I suppose I am. It's just that the novel is awash with references to the number 9, some seemingly important others less so, and I can only derive from this then that they are subsequently meant to mute each other's significance with their over-saturation. Of course I might just be a little too lazy in scrutinizing its significance, also. There's my little caveat copout, of which any reader who reads me blog consistently knows I am so fond of dropping at the end of these expositions-0-mine. So sue me.

What remains true in my opinion is that David Mitchell is a world-class story teller, who is among my favorite, possibly all time, in fact. There's still something Nabokovian to his writing, although my attitude about this being the case has diminished some from my originally asserting it in my post about "Black Swan Green." Moreover, he can take narratives and archetypes that may feel stale or false in the hands of someone less gifted and keep you engaged and enraptured till the story reaches its terminus. How Mitchell spins a story line that involves Yakuza mobsters, Miyake's romance with a talented-to-the-point-of-precocity young musician, his estrangement from his mother, factotum-lifestyle in the big city, and the overarching hunt for his father is beyond me, but he does.

So while "Number9Dream" is probably my least favorite of David Mitchell's works I've read to date, it was by no means bad, and is certainly worth your time. Absolutely it is worth your time, actually.

"Pale Fire" and its manifold weirdness which makes it unlike the others

2010-08-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

Others of Vladimir Nabokov's novels is how I mean "unlike the others," to clarify. -- Ed. Matt's note.

"Pale Fire" isn't just different structurally, although it is different in that way (set up to resemble a critical edition of an epic poem), but it's wildly different in shear scope of its introspection, given the strange mania of the narrator, Dr. Kinbote, who is, similar to a great many other Nabokovian characters, an obsessive. Nabokov's novels are never short on introspection, to be sure, yet this one is brimming with it. In fact, it's that strange detachedness belonging to the erudite narrators of Nabokov's stories, with their simultaneous zeal for the things that they find interesting, that keeps me coming back. All great writers are, of course, uncommon, and Nabokov's novels demonstrate time and again exactly how true that is of him, as well.

But to return to structure for a moment, it is the novel of an epic poem, but only as that's been rooted at its epicenter. The epic poem, which is also featured in its entirety, has the eponymous title, "Pale Fire," and is penned by the introverted but seemingly magnanimous poet laureate of Nabokov's imagination, John Shade. (Suddenly Paul Auster's characters' names appear to have a recognizable antecedent.) Shade is, meanwhile, the embodiment of Dr. Charles Kinbote's obsession, an affliction that has numerous layers, most of which still in one way or another return to his preoccupation with Shade and Shade's oeuvre. As is alluded to with the introduction, penned by Kinbote, and made undeniably clear with Kinbote's subsequent "notes," the story's true focus concerns not Shade but his ebullient biographer and one-time neighbor, i.e. Kinbote himself. Sybil Shade, John's wife, alternatively, struck me as representing the interests of John with respect to his dislike of Kinbote and people who act like him. People who find their way into one's life with fairly self-serving purposes at the heart of this endeavor. The whole "where were you before I made my money" sort of phenomenon.

Still, to be fair to Kinbote, I don't think that notion accurately describes his motivation, or at least not entirely. What he wants is something deeper, perhaps more nefarious, than basking in the reflected light of John Shade (no irony very intentionally intended). Maybe a more apt comparison would be to say Kinbote is a learned, slightly less cartoonish hanger-on like Bill Murray's ludicrously multi-phobic, dependent Bob was to Richard Dreyfuss' pompus psychiatrist and straight-man foil in the movie "What About Bob?" He's a man who has produced his own narrative, of a strange land called Zembla, which he deeply wishes would resonate with Shade, so that in some form or another it manifests itself in the poet's work. This desire shows itself to be something akin to the way we find meaning in all the terms we come across in life, and even more so to the minutely detailed way in which scholars of any discipline parse meaning from the important works of genius considered venerable-nearing-sacrosanct in their respective fields of study. Kinbote also proves that the line between the artist's culling a reality and one's own attempt at crafting a reality, as I guess would be the case of certain kinds of madmen, is -- as the adage sort of goes -- very thin. (you know, more precisely the line between genius and madness, which is specifically the old adage.)

I can say it's very hard for me to restrain myself from giving away crucial plot points (twists and so forth), even though with Nabokov, I think, twists are less important as a plot device (as a method of keeping the reader reading) than what they mean to the individual (as he seems to prefer the first-person narration) laying out the tale, whatever it be. Twists in that respect then, seem more a way of conveying how perception is the truth of any revelation, because what is the case is only the case insofar as you believe it to be thus. It's hard not to get a sense of the unreliability of Nabokov's usually self-interested narrators. Kinbote is no exception.

Perhaps in a separate post I will more carefully analyze the various principal plot points that define this masterwork. I haven't decided. I don't know if that's really necessary for my own self, in terms of feeling I've adequately gripped the text. But it is one of those novels that leaves you feeling there are so many places in which to invest your attention. A certain kind of madness has that effect on me, compulsion to continue to wrestle with its "meaning."

Novels and so forth are Rorschach Tests, by the way.

More Lorrie Moore with "Self-Help"

2010-08-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know if Anis Shivani would lump Lorrie Moore in the category of writers like Denis Johnson and Lydia Davis -- writers who he says university writing students are trained to like because they're easily "imitable" -- but Moore does teach at a university, so maybe. Whatever, it's no matter. I will say no more about Shivani's views for the time being. The previous post exhausted that topic to the extent that I am interested in it.

Lorrie Moore, meanwhile, remains an interesting subject -- one whom I only came upon earlier this year thanks to a friend's tip. She is a very unusual writer, and for that she is frequently polarizing, inasmuch as her career trajectory has disappointed quite a few people to this point while others have found her departure from the abstraction of her first story collections refreshing. I might be counted in the latter group, but I also find merit to Dan Green's arguments in the middle of the three links above.

Green notes, in effect, that all of the uniqueness that defined Moore's initial efforts has slowly been lost to traditional narratives, which she might have succumbed to for any number of reasons. One is that she's become, as a professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, too immersed in the academic realm of MFAs and the sort of fiction writing / reading encouraged in that milieu. Green notes that things have been lost in her style. And they have been, but I think crucial things have stayed the same.

Her humor is still sharp, as I see it. It's all her own, too. A really great wit defines the ironic turns of her characters' narration. And to depart from Green a little further, I found a friend of mine was correct when she complained "Self-Help" is best likened to candy that's too sweet or a really rich desert. The second-person, instructive narration is good in small doses but, in my humble opinion, becomes the bad sort of gimmick by the end. (Quick aside about gimmickry so called in fiction: I've always felt what separates a gimmick from a narrative device is the subjectivity of the reader -- BUT -- with respect to the subjectivity of this reader (i.e. me) -- one sure fire way to fall to gimmickry is to belabor it, whatever it is, for the length of almost an entire collection of stories.)

What's my point: well, that's a little to a lot of what "Self-Help" is. Don't get me wrong. It is good, but too much good stuff, as I've said before about other things. In this case, "too much good stuff" is a bad thing. I felt overloaded and overburdened by it to the point that it took me away from the narrative too greatly. Call me lame, but that's one of the things I enjoy about Moore's newer fiction I've read.

Read it for yourself, though, and enjoy or don't as the case may be, surely. Just don't call me "Surely." -- and yes I'm aware this "Airplane!" joke is a pun of the name "Shirley" (when spoken aloud, you see, one cannot distinguish very easily between the adverb and the proper noun) -- but what you forget is that that joke isn't funny and neither is mine.

Lydia Davis Has a Good "Almost No Memory"; But Anis Shivani Begs to Differ

2010-08-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

If you just wait long enough, it's easy to find a firestorm of controversy regarding certain literary topics of interest online. The last big one I can recall was Katie Roiphe's lamenting testicles being figuratively cut off contemporary male authors, though I think she maybe put it in somewhat less crass terms. But yesterday I woke up to the lit blogosphere sirens sounding about Anis Shivani's list of the 15 most overrated authors writing these days and questioning the merits of creative writing MFAs (which that latter point is one that's been made by lots of folks I needn't link to / is a popular point to attempt to make these days). YAY! I for one am thrilled about this article, in part because it somewhat involves Lydia Davis, who is the primary subject of this post, because of her short story collection, "Almost No Memory," which about a week ago I got around to finishing. (Shivani invokes Lydia Davis as one of a slew of authors who are popular in MFA circles because they are just so easily imitable, and, thus, I guess frauds for other frauds to ape like fraudulent apes. I think this is probably too glib, personally.)

A friend of mine recently made the comment that even regarding the authors he likes best he is certain he could exposit at great length on their flaws, on what about their writing, in effect, irks him. I think this is true in my case, also. For as much as I love the authors I love their are plenty of things about their writing that is, in my mind, less than perfect. It wasn't until my friend pointed this out to me that I realized it's perfectly reasonable for this to be the case, also. It's perfectly reasonable to like and yet still take exception to the work of the writers you admire. Nobody is beyond reproach. And that's the point.

And it's in part why 1.) I can say I think Lydia Davis is on to something interesting but not always something that is interesting to me (given my own personal interests) and that 2.) for as much fun as railing about how overrated certain writers is, as I'm sure Anis Shavini felt no small satisfaction in putting things so bluntly about those whom he deems the literati's sacred cows, it also seems tremendously beside the point -- because anyone could stamp "overrated" on any writer who has ever existed, especially if they've breached the boundaries of anonymity to the capricious embrace of the general public. "Shakespeare is overrated." Google that. Go ahead, and tell me you don't get a million pages worth of tirades against him (ok, 100,000), the man who might not have existed in the first place. (Then Google, "Fraudiam Fakespeare is gay." You'll no doubt get fewer page results.) And who cares? It's beside the point. You can also find a million reasons to argue that Fakespeare is good. These lists are superfluous because in the end they amount to one thing: personal preference, however nuanced and well thought out it may be / appear to be.

There's something too "Donald Barthelme" to ignore about Lydia Davis' work. I mean that in the best possible sense, that the two authors share a certain fundamental quality that informs their work, capturing that similar muse. Or maybe Lydia Davis has been influenced by Barthelme to some extent I'm not aware of. I know that I do not know about that.

"A Second Chance" was one of her stories in "Almost No Memory" that hit my personal mark of "being interesting." Tell me there's not something Barthelme-esque in there, someplace:

If only, for instance, you could get married at eighteen twice, then the second time you could make sure you were not too young to do this, because you would have the perspective of being older, and would know that the person advising you to marry this man was giving you the wrong advice because his reasons were the same ones he gave you the last time he advised you to get married at eighteen.

I think it's a worthwhile trudge to trudge through those great many moments of disconnection if only to get to the great many few-and-further-between moments when you do find something you value in what the author has written (which is to say: finding things of value is not so much on the author to provide, but for you to determine by yourself that they have value to yourself). This is something that can't really be cherry-picked through, as I see it. You have to read the whole and sum total of a work or collection to be sure you've given it the old college try. No skimming of passages is really efficient enough. I don't know about speed-reading, since I'm not a speed-reader and wouldn't want to be one, neither, gauldurnit. I therefore won't speculate where speed reading is concerned.

Anyway, you also don't have to trudge through something that doesn't interest you. I'm just saying, hey, maybe you'll find that there's something(s) worth liking in that trudge through Wharton or Woolf or Faulkner (although admittedly I had to stop with Woolf, full disclosure being the thing what it is). And maybe that will make you feel like those minutes you spent reading said work weren't crap minutes flushed down the crapper, because you'll never ever get them back, no way. That's not how time works, physicists have theorized and perhaps proven.

Now They Tell Me I Have to Read Jonathan Safran Foer

2010-08-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

I finished "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss, who is also -- it seems -- Jonathan Safran Foer's wife. They live together in the same home, I hear, and talk to each other as a result, or at least I'm willing to bet they do. I have no concrete evidence of their many (probable) exchanges, some of which might well be intimate! Who knows? I'm getting off topic and probably sounding a smidgen envious. Of who, precisely? Let your imagination run wild!

N-E-wayz, I enjoyed Krauss' fiction published in the New Yorker recently (before I knew she was married, or to whom, so you'll have to excuse my obliviousness), and I wanted to check out a novel of hers, accordingly. So I have, "The History of Love," as said. Plainly stated, the novel is mostly good with a certain amount of saccharine schmaltz that muddies it more than I would deem ideal. And yet, she uses "and yet" -- the characteristic expression of Leo Gursky, one of two characters the novel mainly concerns -- to great effect. I am perhaps alone in feeling the way I do about this, but I've decided it was appropriate in every instance it was employed, nicely timed and not overdone, despite its being often used. But that's just one thing.

Friends who've read both authors (i.e. Jonathan S. Foer and Krauss), who are more "in the know" about these two writers (because they've read both and not just one), tell me I have to read JSF, if for no other reason than the following: the two authors' styles and motifs are, they say, awfully similar. It's possible that this authorial tandem, husband & wife style, has been negatively impacted, creatively speaking, by their close proximity to one another, i.e. their marriage and life together. And if true, brings me to my next point: no marriages. Ok, ooookkkk, hold on. I'll agree to end the marriage ban on one condition: someone send me free books all the time. Or how about this? At discounted rates of the very variety. No? Fine. Great, once again I'm left with nothing, but oh well. At least I have books (-- not very discounted, though).

And one of those books is "The History of Love." I'm not sure if it's a complete history, the definite article preceding "History of Love" certainly implies that this is so, and yet . . .

Krauss nicely layers things. You begin by not knowing which way is up, which in my view is often a nice place to begin. The story is, at that point, the narrative of Leo Gursky, a man in exile from life lived, simply existing without companionship of near every kind. The best he can do is his upstairs tenant-mate, Bruno, a childhood friend who has reappeared later in life, after both men have resettled and long resided in America. Bruno may or may not be real (spoiler: he almost certainly isn't). Leo, meanwhile, is pursuing contact with his son, a professional author who doesn't even know Leo is his father. Leo falls into the locksmith trade, on arrival in America, because of a relative already in that business. Leo in turn becomes a skilled locksmith, the irony of which being he can open any door except those that matter most, the metaphorical ones that keep him from the people he'd like to be nearest to.

Meanwhile, there's young Alma Singer whose mother is depressed, having never quite gotten over the loss of her husband, Alma's father, and whose brother thinks he might be the messiah. Things change for the family when a letter arrives from a man asking Alma's mother to translate the novel, "The History of Love," a book which already has relevance in their lives for its making a profound impact on her father, who passed the book on to Alma's mother with the notation, to paraphrase, that it was the novel he would write for her if he could write.

I don't want to describe much more, as I feel that would run the risk of giving too much of the plot away (something I'm honestly trying to avoid in general on the old blog here). The other main component concerns the ostensible author of "The History of Love" -- Zvi Litvinoff. As you might imagine all the layers of this story converge, as each character's life crosses the others. It works in the end, though in a near dangerously schmaltzy manner, as said.

So now on to Jonathan Safran Foer, to see what I think about all that . . .

No "Despair"-ing Nabokov's Being So Good

2010-07-31T12:22:00.000-07:00

More puns! Ah, ok I'll shut the hell up about that. But I read Vladimir Nabokov . . . again! "Despair" this time. Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allan Poe would likely have appreciated this literary effort, too. It's rife with all the usual depth of a Nabokov tale: a hyper-aware protagonist, Hermann, attempts to explain away his monomania and the violence it leads him to commit, with many of the elements of a thriller masterminded by one or both of the two artists previously mentioned.

Hermann begins his narrative exposition with a wide array of dithering and seemingly extraneous background information, coming in weird clips and decisive backsliding (as to almost appear overwrought to the point of being premeditated / too carefully crafted to fit the image he's creating for himself), expressing thoughts in an oddly whimsical way at times (e.g. "Tum-tee-tum. And once more -- TUM! No, I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful sounds."), and all of which supposedly written as such for the simple fact of his culling it totally and completely from memory. Anything he knows is speculation he goes to great pains to make it abundantly clear that that is just what it is, speculative -- thus leaving everything to be doubted more so than usual when offered from the point of view of an unreliable first person narrator. His emphatic conviction makes him an untrustworthy individual, indeed. It's also a very nice bit of story-craft by Nabokov in those early, tone-setting few chapters.

The substance of the story, meanwhile, begins in the midst of everything else (his relationship with his wife, her cousin, his parents and so forth), when he describes coming upon a complete stranger named Felix, a man on the 180-degree opposite end of the socio-economic spectrum, a drifter and a panhandler whom Hermann believes to be his exact, perfect double -- uncannily resembling him in near every way, including countenance and stature. So is the seed of Hermann's obsession planted. Whatever logical end or imperative Hermann contrives to justify his plans, it's rendered moot and arbitrary when juxtaposed against his interest in the world perceiving his double as he does, i.e. possessing a flawlessly similar likeness. It takes a special kind of lunacy to aspire to this sort of social affirmation, going to the length of declaring ". . . I longed, to the point of pain, for that masterpiece of mine . . . to be appreciated by men . . ." And as the plot becomes more involved you sometimes wonder if Hermann thought Felix was handsome. I myself couldn't shake the joke of any person's flattering him or herself with the belief that they look like a certain celebrity or other-type beautiful person, even if the resemblance is tenuous at best.

Ultimately, it's beside the point whether there is something in Felix's physical appearance that Hermann admires. The real issue at stake is what possesses Hermann to prove to the world that their likeness is exact, to go to the extreme he hints at throughout the first many chapters of his tale. That's difficult even to theorize about. But it certainly invites your hypotheses. I'm always interested in the process by which humans either reject or accept someone into their fold, what sorts of traits one needs to possess to be accepted by one or an entire group at large. So accepted was Felix by Hermann, you might say, that the latter wished to adopt the life of the former, which is no small thing when you consider the difference of each man's social standing. There were facts about Felix that Hermann at least implicitly admires, even if more overtly he considers him a buffoon and a moron. His anonymity, in itself, seems to be a virtue. Felix travels all over with little more than a few personal items to show for it, to tangibly testify to his ever existing. Hermann wants a live evanescence, to become a shadow. Felix's being listed on his passport by occupation as a "musician" has a certain appeal to Hermann, as well. He might then be able to rid himself of his dislike of mirrors, which I'm sure there's some serious psycho-analysis to be done with that aspect of his character, in and of itself.

But Hermann is undone in his plans. I won't get into precisely how, but things don't go quite the way he'd hoped, or contrived. Instead, he is forced to deal with the little that is made of his "masterpiece" and the shame that no one but himself seems to think it is a striking resemblance.

But where Hermann especially fails is with his assumption that he is the smartest man in the room, when in truth many of the others whom he assumed to be fools, reprobates and / or oblivious were in fact on to him more or less the whole time (this seems especially true in the case of Ardalion, his wife's cousin). That and, basically, there no such thing as an exact double, so don't get any murderous ideas.