Box Elder

Jim Lampley and Emanuel Steward state, after tonight's win, that Manny Pacquiao is one of the greatest fighters of all time. All signs point towards their being correct. It is an exciting time to be a fan of the sport.

The Woman in the Dunes (Abe)

This is my second time with Japanese author Kobo Abe. Last year, while a temp agency had me sitting at a desk in a hotel for 8 hours a day, I read his meta-detective novel 'The Ruined Map.' Many of the ideas in the book were interesting and compelling, but there was something about the flow of the prose that just broke up the pacing of the story for me. At times, descriptions seemed as though they were full of detail but somehow lacking an object, as if the central idea were simply taken for granted as already explained. It didn't seem stylistic, though--this problem I had wasn't coming off as an attempt on Abe's part to purposefully obfuscate or to make a point. I remember being a little disappointed, even though I had been looking forward to the book since I had found out about it.

Now, with 'the Woman in the Dunes,' I've had a similar problem. Again, there is a fantastically simple and interesting story: a man leaves his home, suddenly, without telling anyone, and goes to a sea-side town to study the insect life there. He is not an entomologist by profession, but it is one of his favorite hobbies. Upon reaching the town he finds, surprisingly, a vast series of dunes and almost no town to speak of. Only when he gets further in does he notice that most of the houses are deep within huge sand pits, hundreds of feet down below the surface, in an almost inverse dune. While exploring, it grows dark, and he comes upon a villager who offers to find a place to put him up. He is brought down into one of the pits via ladder and placed in a home with the titular unnamed Woman. From then on, he is stuck, wondering why the town operates the way it does, why people don't run away, how life can be lived in this environment, and why he has been forced into it.

There are lots of strong ideas and some very good imagery. The constant threat of falling sand into the house, into the food, water, their clothes, mouths, skin, etc., gives the novel an uncomfortable feeling of dismal and squalid claustrophobia. The repetition of duties and the indecipherable actions of the Woman give the novel its purported 'existential' character, continuing in the tradition of books which find us to be isolated within ourselves amongst others in an absurd world. But, again, there seemed to be whole sections of description which were meant to make the picture crystal clear, and only left it smudged and foggy.

I've talked to people who have misgivings reading books in translation and usually I find it unfortunate. If you only speak English, most of the best books out there you're going to have to read in translation. And, generally speaking, the quality of literary translators is pretty high. But when I realized that both Abe books I've read so far were translated by the same person, I started to get a feel for what was going on in the books that I was having a hard time with. Now, the translations do read fine, and one gets a feel easily for what is going on in the book (I don't think the translation would be published if otherwise), but there remains a certain hollow feel at times that keeps the reader at arm's length.

Unfortunately, this may go a long way to explaining why Abe hasn't retained a larger foothold with American readers. The ideas are good, and I did like both 'The Woman in the Dunes' and 'The Ruined Map,' but its difficult to become as drawn in to the story as is necessary when it feels as though the events are being described by an intermediary, as I often did reading these books. I'll keep an eye out for alternative translations, and if this changes my opinion I'll make a note of it here. With such potentially powerful books, I'd hate to see him just fade into obscurity in America because of no fault of his own. Otherwise, I'd be curious to know if anyone had similar experiences to my own with Abe.

My Lobotomy (Dully)

A few years ago I heard Howard Dully's program 'My Lobotomy' on NPR and was, quite honestly, amazed by it. Mr. Dully was lobotomized at age 12 by Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who popularized the frontal lobotomy surgery and who performed nearly 3,500 lobotomies himself, many performed while touring the country in his "Lobotomobile" (this is not made up). Despite his lobotomy Dully seemed fairly well put together, albeit a bit emotionally compressed, in the program. He talked about the fact that he was never told that he would be lobotomized, and never given any explanation as to why it happened. One day he was taken to the doctor and when he woke up the procedure had been performed on him.

I think when most people imagine a man lobotomized they immediately think of Jack Nicholson shuffling down the night hallways of the asylum in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' essentially a vegetable. I'll admit that I too thought the procedure reduced all its recipients to a similar state, so it is an incredibly strange, and very haunting thing to hear a man so clearly in control of his faculties explain how the entire thing happened to him.

After hearing the program I was, for a while, incredibly interested in lobotomy. This eventually resulted in the Hard Girls song 'The Orbitoclast.' But I didn't actually become interested in reading Mr. Dully's book about his life until I found out something that I somehow missed during the radio program: he is from, lived in, and still lives in the south Bay Area--much of his life spent in San Jose.

For some time I have been considering the extreme lack of a literature of San Jose. In fact, much of the Bay Area is completely without its due presence in the literary world. I couldn't even begin to count the amount of books on New York, and I have no desire to try. New England has been written on to death. LA received its literary identity largely through noir and has also managed some interesting other perspectives. San Francisco and Berkeley do get occasional nods, but much of this area is treated as though it doesn't exist, or as though nothing happens here. San Jose is the 10th largest city in the United States and no one has anything to say about it? Most of this, I'm sure, is due to the fact that publishers are all continuing to look at that tired Manhattan skyline because they are so used to it.

Howard Dully, though, through his incredible tragedy, has published a book which is steeped in the feel and space of San Jose and its environs. His life was incredible sad and wrought with difficulties which didn't quite begin with the lobotomy, but certainly didn't end with it. If you're interested in non-fiction then its definitely worth a look. I'm hoping that it will be the first crack in the shell surrounding San Jose in literature.

We Are Real

Friends, I have added a feature to the sidebar that will allow you to order zines I've made, in case anyone is interested. Right now there is only one: a 20 page zine for the fellow fan of horror movies and getting creeped out. It was made for a recent zine show in San Jose. I plan on making a few more in the coming months. If there are any problems with the paypal button, or if you order it and don't receive it soon, please let me know. This is my first time doing something like this so it may take a little while to iron out the kinks.

Invitation to a Beheading (Nabokov)

The way I see it, if Hemingway is one pole of the towering influences for American writers, then Nabokov, lepidopterist pictured above, is surely the other--a near complete analog of Hemingway, with just as much sway over would-be authors. On the one hand you have sheer poetic simplicity (Hemmy), and on the other flowing poetic intricacy (Nabo). Both are deeply concerned with the language of their respective works, but Hemingway wants there to be some brute realism, while Nabokov seems to yearn for a world devoid of anything but language itself. His books aren't so much stories as they are examinations of the word, reminiscences on the sentence.

Nabokov is famously averse to any manner of symbolism, which makes it hard to take him as much more than an aesthete at times, dandily fawning over artful phrases. Invitation to a Beheading, on paper, sounds quite a bit like Kafka's 'Trial,' though in practice it is almost grotesquely different. It begins as our hero, Cincinnatus C., finds himself condemned to death by beheading for some manner of transgression. As with Kafka's Josef K., there is no indication of what that transgression is, and, as with The Trial in general, what follows is something of an absurdist take on the human condition (and another example for my theory of Arrest being the key element of 20th century literature). There are things that happen in the book, and there are things that don't happen. Nabokov very much likes to state the things that "another" Cincinnatus does which this Cincinnatus does not. This "other" Cincinnatus Nabokov describes as "the double, the gangrel, that accompanies each of us - you, and me, and him over there - doing what we would like to do at that very moment, but cannot..." For example, in an early attempt to appeal to some sense of reason from his captors,

Cincinnatus said, 'I obey you, spectres, werewolves, parodies. I obey you. However, I demand - yes, demand' (and the other Cincinnatus began to stamp his feet hysterically, losing his slippers) 'to be told how long I have left to live...and whether I shall be allowed to see my wife.

Though these things don't actually happen it seems of little importance to Nabokov. The only thing that is important to him is what is on the page--real or not. For him the construction of the sentence is much more important than the construction of any manner of reality and, because of this, the construction of the sentence does manage to create some strange form of internal reality. Simply, it does not correspond with our own physical, fleshly world. It only corresponds with the world between punctuation and words. In a conversation with his mother, Cincinnatus is told of a once popular toy of sorts called nonnons. The nonnon comes with a mirror, "not just crooked, but completely distorted:"

Well, you would have a crazy mirror like that and a whole collection of different nonnons, absolutely absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things like some kind of fossils - but the mirror, which completely distorted ordinary objects, now, you see, got real food, that is, when you placed one of these incomprehensible, monstrous objects so that it was reflected in the incomprehensible, monstrous mirror, a marvellous thing happened; minus by minus equaled plus, everything was restored, and the shapeless speckledness became in the mirror a wonderful, sensible image.

Though he would hate this to become symbolic of his writing, it is impossible to allow the old curmudgeon every bit of ridiculous fantasy he holds about his writing. It is human nature to find symbolism in every aspect of life, and often it is because without signs and symbols we would have no name by which to know something and "that which does not have a name does not exist" (a quote from Invitation to a Beheading). So, if the events of Nabokov's stories are the nonnons--the shapeless, knobby things which seem to make no sense by themselves--and the words on the page his "crazy mirror," then what you get is a reflection of perfectly sensible things. Except in Nabokov's case the reflection is always language--reflecting through language images of things which we see but cannot know until they are named.

This is my fourth time in his strange world (Despair, Pnin, and Pale Fire being the other three) and, though I don't always agree with him or even always appreciate his foppish bits of wordplay (unlike Hemingway, he certainly is the typical notion of a bookish, New England stuffed-shirt), I can't deny that his writing is singularly unique. His style may have been aped here and there by Updike, Banville and others, but his approach is much more difficult to copy simply because it is so chimerical and strange.

And, for what its worth, this has definitely been the best of his books I've read so far.

118-109, 120-107, 119-108

Well, those (like me) who were hoping for an upset in last night's fight will have to keep waiting. Pretty Boy Floyd remains undefeated.

The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)

A friend of mine is the grandson of a relatively famous Italian-American author who wrote at the same time as Hemingway. They had a bit of an unofficial rivalry going. After receiving a degree of success, my friend's grandfather was invited over to Hemingway's place one night. When he got there he found the author sitting in a chair, drunk, with a gun. He pointed it at his guest and said: "You think you're hot shit, huh?"

I don't think they did much hanging out after that.

This story has always stuck with me. It is completely averse to the more polite notions of authors as bookish, New England stuffed-shirts who thump out little bits of poetry on shiny typewriters. It speaks of writing having power, and the power writing has even over other authors. Even great authors. I'm sure more people today know the name Ernest Hemingway than they do Pietro Di Donato, but Di Donato's writing was strong enough to bring one as widely regarded as Hemingway to an act of maddened desperation. There's something beautiful about that.

The Sun Also Rises is my first real encounter with this ultimate in bad hosts. Chalk it up to the last vestiges of my teenage resistance to assigned reading. Had I read it when I was younger I probably would have found a reason to hate it. Now that I've had time to consider Literature as something other than busy-work assigned to keep kids from doing cool things like listening to $3 punk comps, I feel able to appreciate his writing. A lot has been said about his prose style, and he has made a clear impact on Bukowski (the literary savior to beard-punks everywhere), but its not so simple as it seems.

One thing which is hugely important in writing is what is left out. Hemingway leaves a lot out. He leaves out everything except the feeling of the words. Let's look:

I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn't keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I was thinking about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep.

Jake (the narrator) states only what is necessary to the scene to understand what is happening. There is very little description and most of the content of his thoughts is left unsaid. All that we see is that his thoughts were "jumping around" and then he thought of Brett (the female lead) and his mind stayed there. Instead of bogging the scene down in adolescent details of crying or what made him cry, we just know that he started crying and then he stopped crying. This, to me, makes the writing so much stronger. There is a certain violence in the way the words are cut down to the essential. In this paragraph there are only two commas, and no other means of punctuation besides the periods. Its very striking.

The story revolves primarily around Jake, ex-pat working at a newspaper in France. A small group of acquaintances revolves around him and he takes a trip with them, first fishing, then to the fiesta in Pamplona, Spain. Jake is only one of many people involved in Brett's life, though he seems to occupy some unique place in it. Jake is mostly a spectator in Pamplona, though he gets involved in a few scraps and his relationship with Brett is explored a bit more explicitly.

Again, though, it is the feeling in the remaining words on the page that seem to take up the most space. Far more than the content of the events. I was very happy with the book by the end, and some of the spare sentences have a remarkably haunting effect in their minimalism. As of yet I don't have any other of his books to compare it to, but if you're one of those American Literature guys then this is a pretty good one to look at. His writing style seems to have cast a pretty long shadow on the prose of many (if not most) Stateside writers since, and I would say its with good cause.

(for those of you interested, here is an article Salon.com published on Pietro Di Donato's most famous novel "Christ in Concrete.")