Books and Shit!

Sorry, John Darnielle

2011-01-23T23:24:00.000-08:00

Ok. In case the Herculean pause between the last post and now has not made it abundantly clear, I am a little in over my head with this whole Heretic Pride thing. My life lately has made it much too difficult to complete such a big task with the detail that it deserves. So, I would like to propose a return to form here, i.e.: less shit, more books.

One thing I would like to mention is that I have, myself, been writing a lot of fiction. I was humbly able to do a reading from a novel I have been working on at this year's LitQuake festival in San Francisco, which was tremendously exciting. Now, I would like to bring in some thoughts of a guy trying-to-be-an-author, as well to the format. That's sort of shit-and-books simultaneously, right? A sort of dialectical synthesis, or what have you.

Anyway. I have not been able to read quite as much as before, but I have still read some good ones lately. I hope to have my next post be on Jack Black's You Can't Win, a pretty nice piece of realist hobo-highwaymanism from around the turn of the previous century. I promise it will come sooner than this post did.

2. San Bernardino

2010-06-08T22:56:00.000-07:00

The mystery of the map, and of going somewhere is by now so much a part of The Mountain Goats' consciousness that it is practically a joke. "Going to San Diego," "Going to Jamaica," Going to Georgia," Going to Marrakesh," and the 41 other songs that fall into the Going to... category of Mountain Goats songs have helped to shape a large part of the band's identity to this point. And so how does the "Going to..." absent "San Bernardino" begin?

We got in your car and we hit the highway

Like at least 45 other Mountain Goats songs, it begins with the concept of "going" somewhere.

As the second track on Heretic Pride "San Bernardino" exists both to carry on the feelings begun in "Sax Rohmer #1," and to abate those feelings somewhat. Like the previous character, the hero of "San Bernardino" has a purpose and a direction. But unlike his chronologically older brother, this one also has an object of his anxiety: he is almost a father.

I am not a father. I still drink Four Loko much too often to be ready to be any kind of father figure. But there is something in this notion of giving birth which seems to exist so deeply within the human conscious that it is practically a given of our thrownness in life. Just hearing about people becoming mothers or fathers seems to arouse an overwhelming sense of wonder. It just seems...impossible. Or at the very least implausible. We are so used to being completely out of control that the thought of physically creating something real and living seems absolutely baffling. I think that this experience must be even more baffling for us guys, since the mother has an intense physical connection to her baby for nine months. For us, suddenly it just exists.

These feelings of becoming (and specifically of becoming a father), however implausible, seem to be embedded within "San Bernardino." Like The Sunset Tree's "Dilaudid," the music accompanying Darnielle is almost entirely strings. Frenzied pizzicato plucks describe the nervous energy of the moment, while warm long strokes belie the calm underneath, as the character finds a motel where his wife can give birth to their soon-to-be son. Unlike "Dilaudid," which gives in to the tension and ends frantically, "San Bernardino" finds a very sincere care in the husband's attempts to help orchestrate the event. As he (somewhat cartoonishly) fills the bathtub with flower petals for his water-birthing wife, he guilelessly admits, "I loved you so much just then." It is a rare occurrence for a Mountain Goats song: a moment of tenderness that isn't delicately intertwined with cruelty.

The universality of how fresh this moment is for everyone who experiences it comes through in the unnamed protagonists' experiences. Darnielle refers to the guard at the gates to the Garden of Eden, then states, "but we consulted maps from earlier days," implying a history before history, like something arcane and eternal. Dead languages. Nearly quantum truths. Like every other song on the album, the lyrics evoke great mystery. And as if to mediate on these mysterious thoughts, after the final lyric has been sung the strings continue for almost a full minute of its taut 3:15 running time.

Like all the album's stories, these characters deal with things which are much larger than themselves. However, none of the others do so with such a peaceable wonder as is felt on this song. The fears in "San Bernardino" arise from genuine concern, and give way to an earnest calm, and the music reflects this beautifully. They may not be Going To San Bernardino specifically, but it welcomes them.

Darnielle has always been a mature lyricist, but I really think that these lyrics bespeak a new maturity, putting some of the youthful frenzy aside and edging closer to something which is universally Human. For once we see a couple struggling for each other, instead of constantly struggling with each other.

1. Sax Rohmer #1

2010-06-08T20:57:00.000-07:00

However quietly, the shadow that has been cast by the full-bandedness of the Mountain Goats' previous four albums (Tallahassee, We Shall All be Healed, The Sunset Tree, and Get Lonely) finally emerges into the fullness of the day at the beginning of Heretic Pride's first track:

The album starts with a four count of drumsticks.

This is no small statement from a band whose previous 15 albums(!!!!!!!!) were almost entirely lowest-fi acoustic affairs, with Darnielle belting his particularly genial brand of human misery over it all. It almost slips by you, too, which is the first indication of the strength of the arrangements on the album. On Heretic Pride, The Mountain Goats appear to have actually turned into a band, and what's more notable is the fact that it works so naturally that it actually takes a few listens to even notice.

From the first lyrics that follow those four clicks, "Sax Rohmer #1" is an enormous, nightmarishly anxious song. Everything is distorted to inhuman proportions--from the threat of Imperial spies, to colossal machinery miserably decaying; from chalk marks that seem to imply some deeply paranoidal dead drop, to nature taking its course as predators swoop in on their tiny, helpless prey. The classic story of coming home ("if it's the last thing that I do") culminates in what is one of the most strangely powerful visuals that the strangely powerful band has ever written: "All roads lead toward the same blocked intersection." As unreal and untrue as the events are, they nonetheless feel remarkably real, terribly true, tangible and frightening.

One of the most striking themes both in "Sax Rohmer," as well as the rest of the album, is the futility of violence and how this stands in for a futility of larger action. There is no mistaking the violence and struggle at the heart of the song, but there is simply never a winner. "Every battle heads towards surrender on both sides," Darnielle insists, hideously. Even as he returns to whoever is waiting for him at home, he has his "own blood" in his mouth--implying more a shocked sucker-punch than a successful fight of any kind. But there is also no "enemy" of the song. It is the story of battles, wars, spies, and blood, all without a knowable opponent. The mystery and horror of this feeling implies the later track "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" (also about a xenophobic genre author), and is best evidenced by the fact that "Sax Rohmer #1" is bookended by the lyrics: "an agent crests the shadows." Somewhere out there something has power, something has agency, but all we can see is the movement of shadows in distant alleys.

For anyone else this would be all that is needed to shake at least a few sturdy listeners, but, oddly enough, this is all territory that Darnielle has been pacing around in for some time. What makes it different this time is how boiled down the lyrics feel, and how tight and propulsive the arrangement is. All of the groaners are gone (no horribly twee lines like: "our love is like the border between Greece and and Albania;" no half-thoughts like: "I wanna say I'm sorry / for stuff I haven't done yet") leaving almost nothing but choking terror. And instead of pick-on-crappy-strings percussion (something I do quite like), we are surrounded by the huge crashing of cymbals in the song's post-chorus, hammering home the desperation of Darnielle's fever dream. The Ennio Morricone guitar riff in the second verse lends the whole thing a sense that there really is danger lurking around the corner--while still pushing the song's heart-thumping melodicism--and the tinkling-down-the-major-scale riff builds that ball in the throat as we struggle through the scenery.

"Sax Rohmer" manages to lay the foundation for all the coming themes of the album: alienation, hopelessness, the futility of violence, the creation of monsters, and the results of creating such monsters. And to top it all off, the song fucking rips.

How to Embrace a Swamp Creature

2010-06-07T22:40:00.000-07:00

Today is my birthday. As a treat to myself, I am going to begin a new project here. From the first listen, The Mountain Goats' album Heretic Pride quickly reserved a very special place in my heart, but whenever I mention this to people I inevitably get one of three responses: 1) "Really?" 2) "Have you heard Tallahassee?" or 3) "There's a couple good songs on it." Respectively, I would like to respond, "Yes," "Yes," and "Keep listening to it."

So, as Darnielle himself once did for Radiohead's fantastic Amnesiac, I would like to embark on a track by track exploration of this album that I think is fantastic, rewarding, and (in my opinion) the best Mountain Goats album there is. This will begin shortly, starting chronologically with the instantly canonical "Sax Rohmer #1." Soon we will all be perched atop a throne of human skulls.

A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway)

2010-03-11T12:37:00.000-08:00

"The poetry of heroism appeals irresitably to those who don't go to a war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy" - Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Since I'm pretty late to the game, I'm sure many people already know the basics of this book (Henry is an American acting as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during WWI, he falls for an English nurse, leaves the service, and they abscond to Switzerland), so I won't go into it at great length. Instead, I'd like to look briefly at a few literary analogues, and see how the war affected much of the literary consciousness of the time.

There are two other novels which strike me as going through similar movements via WWI: German Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel, and Frenchman Louis-Ferndinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night. All three of these novels involve young men enlisting in their respective countries' armies, and all three problematize this immediately. Hemingway's Henry seemingly arbitrarily joins in the Italian army. Céline's Bardamu enlists anarchically, to prove a point to his friend. And Jünger's memoir immediately belies a breakdown of language--what is seen cannot be said, and what is said has nothing to do with what is seen.

Though these novels all come from different sides of the war, all result in the absurd, and all explode the concept of heroism (I think, despite Jünger's beliefs). Hemingway's Henry is very nearly murdered by members of his own army, simply because of his rank (and he, himself, only kills an Italian during the whole war). Céline's Bardamu comments, while fighting, that he has never been hurt by a German before, and can't understand why he must now kill one (I would quote this, but I can't seem to find my copy at the moment). And Jünger comes out of the war a hero, simply by dint of the fact that he was injured 14 times and survived.

The first two thirds of A Farewell to Arms deal directly with the war. Henry relates much of the day to day life he leads, which primarily involves drinking, going to whorehouses, chatting with a priest in the canteen, and joking with his close friend Rinaldi. Hemingway's Henry doesn't seem to particularly think about the war too much at this point: it is simply something that he is caught up in. Even after he is injured, he goes back to the front and takes place in the massive retreat. As his final action in the service, he is literally forced to go AWOL to save himself from being executed by a group of young Italian soldiers who are murdering all officers they come upon.

For Bardamu in Journey to the End of the Night, escape comes only from injury. Unlike the other two protagonists, Bardamu is free from the immediate grip of the war after being wounded only once. It is at this point, however, that we see the real affect that the war has had: Bardamu is cracked open by the experience, and nearly every other experience he has is an hallucinatory frenzy of senselessness. The brute truth of death and destruction caused by one man to another is felt in every lingering action afterward; from the French colonies of Africa, to the Ford Motor plant in America. Bardamu sees it all as cruelty. And he generally engages in cruelty himself, finding it the foundation of all human action, and finding death as the concrete reality waiting at the end of all human action.

For his part, Hemingway's protagonist is a bit more bright-eyed than Céline's. Henry and Catherine Barker (the English nurse who becomes his constant companion) make it to Switzerland. They are optimistic about their future and look forward to raising their child. But, again, the ground is unsettled beneath civilian society after having seen the massive senselessness of the war. It seems to open up a chasm beneath all who enter it, revealing death as the only reality left. As Henry states:

You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

They, in this instance, is not the opposing army: it is the formless They which perpetrates bad deeds on the innocent. It is the They which kills and inflicts diseases and leaves people homeless and hungry. And it is this They which is forever on the edge of the page in both A Farewell and Journey.

Yet somehow, in the end, Jünger comes to a slightly different conclusion than Hemingway and Céline. Many people have criticized him for being a proponent of war--or, at the least, not damning enough--and he does seem to cling to the "poetry of heroism." After the initial publication of Storm of Steel, he added to the introduction the lines:

Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart.

Though the others have been ripped free of any form of nostalgia, I do believe that all three considered the war a thickly cerebral form of schooling. However, if Jünger found it schooling for the heart, Hemingway and Céline can only be said to have found it schooling of the absurd, and a schooling in cruel mortality.

A Farewell to Arms is a good book, I've decided after much thought. Hemingway fans will tell you that he's the best writer who ever lived. Personally, I'm still only an initiate to his writing, however, I can say that the last 20 pages of this novel nearly knocked me out. Even if I don't count his as high in the ranks of authors yet as other people, I do see much merit in his writing. Though his works seem un-poetic in their simplicity at times, there is a poetry to their pointedness. He exemplifies another quote by the furious Céline:

If you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you. - Louis-Ferdinand Céline

In the First Circle (Solzhenitsyn)

2010-02-20T09:45:00.000-08:00

Abramson was naturally slit-eyed, and when he removed his glasses, his gaze seemed to show more plainly than ever his boredom with the prison world. He had seen it all before; the Gulag Archipelago could hold no new shocks for him. He had been in prison so long that he seemed to have lost all feeling, and what to other people was a tragedy he accepted as merely a modification of routine.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) has, in a very short period of time, gone from an author who I appreciate to one who consistently amazes me. Though this book originally appeared in 1968 (six years before his massive The Gulag Archipelago project), it has only recently been restored to its original state--with the re-addition of nine whole chapters, a slew of details, name changes, and fleshing out of characters. As it stands now, it is a novel of extreme complexity. However, this is not because its ideas are so abstract, but because the care poured into each of the novel's 59 central characters(!) causes every action to send ripples out for miles. Like the sharashka prison where most of the events take place, the book is so packed full of individuals that it is practically a Monadology.

In the chronology of his fiction, one could see this as prologue to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which then leads to Cancer Ward: it is the first circle in Solzhenitsyn's own trip through the Gulag. The sharashka (where Solzhentisyn, himself, spent a few early years of his decade long sentence) is a manner of indentured servitude. It is where the arrested scientists, mathematicians, and engineers who were still useful for the Soviet state were placed, rather than sending them to a labor camp. Because of this, the regulations are a bit less strict than elsewhere. The prisoners are allowed to converse, are fed relatively well, can read, submit complaints, and have the occasional visitor. However, the freedoms that they have are kept on such a short leash that it only serves to make their arrest all the more apparent. Conversations are always monitored by informers among the ranks, books are subject to censorship (and personal dedications from loved ones are torn out), complains often go unheard, and prisoners are only allowed to talk about a short list of things with their once-yearly visitor (no talking about work, regulations, status of their case, and no touching, hugging or kissing is allowed), and there is a guard in the room during the entire visit. Each prisoner works at least 12 hour days, and food privileges can be revoked, or simply ignored if a prisoner is interrogated during meal time. For Solzhenitsyn, the sharashka is Dante's first circle of Hell. As in The Inferno, what is most notable in this circle is the pain of separation. Prisoners are given hopelessly long sentences (ten or twenty-five years), and are never sure if the end of their sentence means freedom or simply a second sentencing. They are strung along by their nose, always kept in the dark and in danger of losing what freedoms they have. Those with nothing left have no fears, but those in the first circle are kept in fear of losing still more, endlessly.

And yet, as always, Solzhenitsyn paints with thick strokes of humanity. Though the cast of characters takes up four pages, each feels as though he or she is human, through and through. This goes for the guards and the ministry of state, as well as the prisoners. Nearly 100 pages are devoted to understanding Stalin as a human, though the result is less than favorable. Everyone--everyone--is kept inches from destruction by Stalin's sweeping gaze, and somehow Solzhenitsyn keeps every character's particular interests and investments close at hand, from state minister Innokenty's decision to warn America of the Soviet development of a nuclear bomb, to the prisoner Rubin's unwavering love for the Soviet state; from Yakonov (the chief engineer in charge of the prisoner) who can feel his own time in power running out, to Solzhenitsyn's self-modeled Nerzhin, who can feel that he will soon be shipped out to a hard labor camp. What is amazing is how each characters motivations and actions are not only believable, but understandable. It shows a deep connection to human nature, running from the top to the bottom of the social ladder.

It is very easy for publishers to market his novels as a rallying cry for the West in Cold War terms, but to do so is to completely miss the point of his work. Solzhenitsyn's characters are the victims of politics, but his work is never political: it is all about the human experience in desperate conditions, about retaining dignity in squalor, and simply about the beauty of the written word. He is clearly Russia's successor to Dostoevsky: an author whose works greatly exceed the breadth of their pages. And he is probably one of the best authors the 20th century ever produced.

Up Above the World (Bowles)

2010-01-12T14:06:00.001-08:00

I had often heard the name Paul Bowles uttered in the same breath as many of my favorite books. The words most commonly accompanying descriptions of his works were ones that piqued my interest: horror, viciousness, fear, and simplicity. My childhood fascination with all things frightening has given way into a love of a sense of sublimated horror in literature. Kafka, Hamsun, Celine, even Dostoevsky: all know how to insert some unknown dread into their books which seem to arise from somewhere near madness.

Paul Bowles certainly fits into this strange niche. His books seem to primarily revolve around couples who are out of their depths in some foreign land, and always give the impression that something horrible is on the verge of happening. In The Sheltering Sky a young couple implodes while traveling through Africa, leaving traces of their own insecurities and inhumanities in the form of death, fear, and failed immersion. The pair are notably lopsided, as they travel with a friend who is more often than not a source of animosity for the two.

This lopsidedness appears again in Up Above the World, this time in the form of a sizable age difference between the male Dr. Slade and his young wife, Day. Again, the couple is on holiday, this time in South America, and again Bowles teases out a discomforting feeling of alienation in every movement the two make. By chance, the Slades meet an ex-pat living in the unnamed country and are invited to his lavish apartment, where most of the rest of the novel unfolds.

The body of the text is a strange sort of chess match. Day begins to grow uncertain about their host's motives, and her fear only serves to drive a wedge further between her and her husband. There is a constant sense of impending threat surrounding Grove, their host, but it is impossible to say whether this is unfounded or not. Bowles purposefully avoids tipping his hand too early, keeping the reader unsure of both the direction the book will take, as well as the true intentions of many of the characters. It is a strange sort of fever dream that only really makes sense when looked at afterward.

However, there is truth in the events as they are happening, and they are not merely lead-ups to some reveal in the end, a la Shyamalan. Bowles exhibits a deep care for his characters, bringing them to life very naturally and imbuing a sense of cruel reality into each scene.

Where Bowles truly succeeds (again, as he did in The Sheltering Sky) is in the depictions of an unraveling reality. For example:

In front of him, not three feet away, there was a face--a muzzle, rather, for it surely belonged to an animal--looking at him with terrible intensity. It was unmoving, fashioned from a nameless, constantly dripping substance. Unmoving, yet it must have moved, for now the mouth was much farther open; long twisted tendons had appeared in each cheek. He watched, frozen and unbelieving, while the whole jaw swiftly melted and fell away, leaving the top part of the muzzle intact. The eyes glared more savagely than before; they were telling him that sooner or later he would have to pay for having witnessed that moment of its suffering. He took a step backward and looked again. There were only leaves and shadows of leaves--no muzzle, no eyes, nothing. But the leaves were pulsating with energy. At any moment they could swell and become something other than what they were.

Scenes like this one evolve from seemingly nowhere in Bowles' writing. He seems deeply in touch with a lurking madness which most people wish to coat over with a successful relationship, job, friends, and vacation. In his writing, it is always still there, beneath it all. This immediately makes him a difficult author, though a very rewarding one.

The Sheltering Sky is considered his masterpiece, and I do think that it is a more complete statement than Up Above the World, however, if you like The Sheltering Sky, know that his other works are equally as well honed. Up Above the World probably won't end up being your favorite book when you're through with it, but it is the product of an incredibly skilled writer. And in the couple-in-trouble-on-vacation genre, this is far and away superior to Ian McEwan's fairly crappy novel The Comfort of Strangers which was, probably, modeled after Up Above the World.

Happy Musical Surprises of Late

2010-01-12T02:49:00.000-08:00

Flight - Flowers
The Yummy Fur - Sexy World
Pere Ubu - Non-alignment Pact
This Heat - S.P.Q.R.
The Scrotum Poles - Pick the Cat's Eyes Out
Eat Skull - Oregon Dreaming
1990s - See You at the Lights

Past-due

2010-01-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

It has been far too long since this has been updated. I've been without internet here, and there's a whole slew of books (Hot Water Music, Tortilla Flat, The Sheltering Sky, Group Portrait with Lady, The Road) and fights (Williams/Martinez, Diaz/Malinaggi II, Angulo/Yorgey) to discuss. I'll try and get to these but I might just have to do some alluding, since I prefer to write about something when it's fresh in my mind. Probably the next post will be on Paul Bowles' Up Above the World, which will allow me to write about The Sheltering Sky as well. Who knows! Its a wild world, baby baby.

Box Elder

2009-11-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-11-11T10:04:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-10-05T17:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

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.")

5 - 4 = Unity

2009-08-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

Today Books and Shit officially turns one.

39 book reviews/ruminations, the occasional musical interlude, 4 followers, and assorted polemics. Cool.

Vonnegut Treasure Trove Pts. II & III: The Sirens of Titan, Hocus Pocus

2009-08-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I think I've made my position on Kurt and his writing pretty clear in previous posts, so I'll let this one speak for itself.

I have just looked up Harvard University. It has 13,000,000 bound volumes now. What a read! And almost every book written for or about the ruling class. - Hocus Pocus

Mother Night (Vonnegut)

2009-08-11T16:30:00.000-07:00

America has had its fair share of good authors. Henry Miller and Bukowski are enjoyable old creeps, Dick and Niven have got sci-fi down pretty well, Lovecraft is fun, Auster will always be there to derail his own story, people love McCarthy, and there's still Melville, Baldwin, Burroughs and the ilk. It has also had plenty of lesser authors as well. Ayn Rand did write all her tripe in America, lest we forget. And Palahniuk consistently churns out "shocking" little diddies at a feverish pitch. But time and time again, the American writer who I find the most salient, and the most truly admirable is ol' KVJ.

I rarely find him as hilarious as other people do though his books do make me laugh, and a book which is genuinely funny is about as rare as a pretty girl who is. But it is the obvious care he has when joking that makes his books so strong. Mother Night received an 'A' from the Kurt Vonnegut self grading system (which is pretty good press!) and I think its just as relevant and well written as both Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, his two 'A+' books. I have long ago decided that he was one of those consistently lauded authors who actually deserved the praise received, and its always nice to read such a firm reminder of that.

Mother Night is the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr., American writer living in Germany during WWII, secretly an American spy, and publicly a vehement Nazi propagandist. Campbell also appears in Slaughterhouse Five as the Nazi who attempts to recruit American POWs to fight for Germany. Like always, Vonnegut spends most of his energy giving a sort of pathetic humanity to his characters and I think Campbell is quite possibly the strongest character he ever wrote. The "moral," Vonnegut claims in the introduction, is that we are the things we pretend to be. In other words: it is the action that counts, not the person who may or may not be behind it. As always, it is pessimistically human, but his disappointment and resignedness seem here a little more powerful, probably because of the run-down, broken nature of Campbell's humanity. He will forever be remembered for terrible things, and he had to, himself, be terrible to be a convincing enough Nazi. Does his spying justify the things he said and the people he influenced? There isn't really any manner of answer to that other than that we are what we do. And that isn't usually enough of an answer to satisfy people.

I, obviously, recommend this book. It takes difficult subject matters and avoids both pedantry and sheer flippancy. It has good humor among horrible people, and definitely makes the notion of being any manner of "hero" seem utterly absurd. Its another clear example of why Vonnegut will always be remembered as one of the best America ever had going for it in the literary world.

After Dark, My Sweet (Thompson)

2009-08-03T17:06:00.000-07:00

I've never been a huge fan of sports. I played baseball when I was younger, and enjoy playing it now when I get around to it, but I have a hard time caring about teams. To really care about a sport it always felt like you needed to really care about a team, and most people really care about a team because they happen to live in the city the team represents. And that just never made sense to me. Recently, however, I've gotten into boxing. I caught a fight by accident once, then started catching them more and more often. Part of the allure, for me, is the lack of a team in the sport. To me, it is the Struggle personified in two people--something which is irreducible to the geography of happenstance--and the more I've watched it, the more I have begun to see the beauty of the sport.

Now that I've done my self-serving, Pitchfork-esque introduction, I can get to what I'm actually writing about. My dad, upon seeing me become a fight fan, recommended Jim Thompson's 'After Dark, My Sweet' to me. The book centers around William "Kid" Collins, ex-pugilist whose time in the ring has made him fog headed, a little snappy and, when cornered, pretty much all blind hooks and uppercuts. He quits the sport after an incident which happens pretty early into his rising career and then spends most of his time in and out of institutions. The book picks up after he has snuck out of his last institution, roaming the streets with just a few dollars left to his name. On his last legs, he ducks into a bar off the highway, gets a beer, and finds himself at a stool next to Fay, an alcoholic widow who serves as the femme fatale to draw Collins down into the depths of Thompson's lean noir. He is quickly drawn into a kidnapping plot, holed up in Fay's decrepit home off the highway, and is caught deciding between whether he wants the money, the girl, both, or none of it at all. Neither of the options seem to make any more sense than the other, and Thompson does a good job forcing Collins into the sort of nightmare logic necessary to allow the book's events to unfold, and for Collins to go in deeper and deeper.

Though I enjoyed the plot quite a bit, I had a hard time telling, up until the end, how much I liked the book itself. The prose remains pretty dry throughout, never really turning many an interesting phrase, and serving only to move the book's events forwards down the line. Though it is written from Collins' perspective (and his character could explain the lack of depth in the prose) I would have liked the book quite a bit more if the language had more vivacity. However, I do think that it reached a strong point at its inevitable conclusion, and, though the last line is really the first in the book that struck me as carrying poetic weight, that last line is really good. This seems to be one of Thompson's strengths: to take a subject as far as it will go, unflinchingly. Though its content may be a little more tame to today's audiences (most of whom are probably quite familiar with the noir tropes which Thompson must have had a huge influence on), it is still worth looking into if you're looking for a short, dark, plot-driven read. And, though I still have mixed feelings about it, I'm quite curious about his earlier book 'Savage Night,' which seems to dive even deeper into blinding personal madness and desperation. This is something which Thompson must have been familiar with himself, seeing as how when, later in life, he found himself bed-ridden after a series of strokes, and riddled with arthritis to the point that he could no longer hold a pen to write, he decided to stop eating and effectively starved himself to death. That certainly takes some kind of personal madness. And, like the protagonist of 'After Dark, My Sweet,' it shows a near absurd desire to conquer, to rise out on top in the Struggle, no matter what the outcome entails.

A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick)

2009-07-27T22:11:00.001-07:00

Ok, enough with the polemics for a while and back to books.

I had bought A Scanner Darkly a while back, after reading VALIS and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but just finally got around to it now. Again, here Philip K. Dick gets deep into his circular logic, and again he takes elements of sci-fi (particularly some terminology) and then writes a book more about psychoses, experimentation and metaphysical quandaries, than about anything which typically falls under the heading "Sci-fi."

Here we are introduced to Bob Arctor, a junkie hooked on Substance D (or "Slow Death"), which causes permanent brain damage if taken enough. He lives with two other junkies--Jim Barris and Ernie Luckman--and tries hard to court Donna, a young girl who doesn't use D, but who supplies him with it and does many other unsavory things. However, Bob Arctor is also Fred, an undercover agent whose assignment is to get involved in the world of Substance D so that the feds can find out where it has been coming from. He is deep undercover and, when reporting to his higher-ups, can't let on that he is also Arctor. They've never actually seen him because of a high-tech cloaking device that all drug agents use when interacting with each other. Already you can see the direction that Dick is taking the book--the notion of a singular self is brow-beat by nearly every detail of the narrative, both when Arctor is Fred (and since Fred could be anyone seeing as no one knows what "Fred" actually looks like), and when Fred is posing as Arctor, gathering information as Arctor for Fred. At a point, Fred's target is switched to Arctor and he has to begin the tight-rope act of reporting on himself without letting on that he, himself, is his self. Then things begin to unravel. It is all about posture and positioning, throwing notions of a cohesive self out the window entirely.

Personally, I enjoyed the book quite a bit. I found the desperation and paranoia in the users' perceptions of reality to be very well realized, especially since the locality of the narrative places the reader too close to the events to be able to tell when they are just being paranoid, and when something is actually threatening them. But the strongest thing about Dick's writing, despite his often endless trove of ideas, is that fact that he is an honest-to-God prose writer. In a way that many of the genre simply are not. He does break my cardinal rule of literature--no using the word "Dude"--but the dialog is so deeply entrenched in colloquialisms that it actually comes off as somewhat natural, instead of a paper cut-out of slice-of-life reality as that word often reads. He manages to tease out poetic imagery and language and couch it within a natural flow, instead of ever feeling put on. To put it simply: he writes well.

What is also heartening to see is how deftly he avoids any manner of moralizing the events of the novel. The whole thing takes on a deeply circular route, both in a temporal sense, and in the sense that, within the book, the solution leads back to the problem, just as the problem leads to the solution. In an afterward written by Dick, he states explicitly that he is not writing from a perspective of condemnation, only one of concern and exploration--giving a sincere, post-novel dedication to the people in his life who characters in the book were based on, as well as what happened to them due to their desire to avoid reality, "like children playing in the street."

There is obviously a deep care in his writing, even when he is writing about "cephalochromoscopes" and "scramble-suits" (the aforementioned cloaking device), which is why, to me, he stands out as an important author not just in the genre, but as an Author.

Advice to the Graduate

2009-07-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

For those of you about to go into advertising, know this: you will probably make a lot of money, and I hate you.

Know that you will be actively contributing to the systematic destruction of human dignity, and you will be paid handsomely for it. Know that the closer in tune you are with how your fellow man thinks, you will be rewarded for exploiting that information. Know that with every way you improve at your job, you will be pushing the course of human development back, inch by inch. That's all.

Viva Verizon.

The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky)

2009-07-16T18:39:00.000-07:00

Most of the books which I've read in this past year and a half or so fit into one of two columns. Column A is the books which have been somehow left out of the canon--the ones which are of considerable interest and worth but, for whatever reason, have been ignored by the public consciousness. These would be the Célines, the Machados, and the Zweigs, among others. The question I try to keep at hand is why these have been left behind whereas others have remained "classics," or are simply more widely read. Column B would be those books which are deemed "classics," or those which are simply more widely read which I, for whatever reason, haven't yet read. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Siddhartha, and Darkness at Noon, fall into this column. And now Brothers Karamazov does, too.

Unfortunately, I don't really know how to add to the discussion of the Brothers. It is undoubtedly a great book, of staggering proportions, which seems to tackle almost all aspects of humanity in its many different forms, through its huge population and careful detail. But, beyond that, what can one say about it which hasn't already been said? And that has certainly been said already, too. One thing I can say is that this is a book which has earned its place within the canon and within the public consciousness. Not because it deals with 19th century issues and is a strong indicator to what was happening at the time, but because of the strength of its thought and because of the piercing look into human behaviors--from the good to the bad, as well as all of those caught between the "two abysses:" the "sense of the lowness of degradation," and the "sense of the loftiest nobility." And though the book ends in a judgment, a verdict, Dostoevsky shows that judgments and verdicts are, again, an absurdity when it comes to a human life. It can never get inside a human, only feel around its contours and describe it based on beliefs of man's essence. In this regard it is very clear how Dostoevsky is often considered the grandfather of existentialism, and even here we have the clear watermark of the century to come: Arrest.

Worth reading if you aren't bored to death by the staggering Russians, as I know many readers can be.

Darkness at Noon (Koestler)

2009-06-06T16:31:00.000-07:00

In an age when public speeches, the plays in our theaters, and women's fashion all seem to have come off assembly lines, arrests can be of the most varied kind. They take you aside in a factory corridor after you have had your pass checked--and you're arrested. They take you from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about your arrest--just let him try! They'll take you right off the operating table--as they took N.M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in 1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer--and drag you off to a cell, as they did him, half-alive and all bloody (as Karpunich recollects). Or, Like Nadya Levitskaya, you try to get information about your mother's sentence, and they give it to you, but it turns out to be a confrontation--and your own arrest! In the Gastronome--the fancy food store--you are invited to the special-order department and arrested there. You are arrested by a religious pilgrim whom you have put up for the night "for the sake of Christ." You are arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the street, by a railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie theater. Any one of them can arrest you, and you notice the concealed maroon-colored identification card only when it is too late.
-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Part 1

Most of twentieth century literature can be summed up in the following sentence:

Someone must have slandered Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

The presence and absurdity of arrest (and Arrest) is almost constantly present throughout the entire 100 years. Most times for unknown reasons, as in Solzhenitsyn and Kafka. However, even when the reason is known, as in Camus, Banville, and Sartre, it is often just as absurd as when it is not. In fact, then the absurdity seems to come to the fore all the more, since the very question of "why me?" is even disarmed.

Darkness at Noon operates somewhere between these two. The protagonist, Rubashov, was once an architect of what we can assume is a regime similar to Stalin's (the book never explicitly states where it takes place, nor does it cite the name of the regime's leader). As things grow more and more uncertain politically he begins to realize that he could be arrested at any point--and, in fact, is (upon waking from a dream in which he is being arrested). In his dream, which he has had periodically for years, three men come to his door, drag him out of bed and arrest him without explanation (much like Josef K.). He tries to put on his jacket but the sleeve is turned inside out, and he struggles to get his arm into it until he is knocked out by one of the officers. It is at this point that he wakes up to the pounding of the officers outside his door.

The particularity of his arrest is felt throughout the Gulag type prison he is kept in--his neighbor a cell over discovers who he is and is disdainful, since Rubashov was part of the organization that landed him in prison in the first place. Despite the tension between the two, they maintain a very human relationship throughout the novel, finding common ground in the hopelessness of their mutual situations. What follows as the novel unfolds is an exploration of the way a political body evolves, gathering new blood as the younger generation picks it up from the older, and how this political body--though created by and made up of people--acts ruthlessly against the humanity of those who once represented it. Rubashov, as the older generation, is "made an example of," even though he has committed little more than second guessing himself (and spends much time in prison trying to pinpoint the meaning of this second guessing, and second guessing it as well). He searches for meaning in why he is there, and finds only absurdities which become twisted into reasons through a rigorous systematic logic which has no desire to recognize absurdities. Simply put: in a political system, the absurd does not get people to act.

The Times Literary Supplement describes it as:

"...a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships..."

but the political significance is only scratching at the surface of the depths Darkness at Noon probes. At heart, it is almost a cautionary tale of the Hegelian, idealistic dialectic taken to its logical extreme. Though I wouldn't necessarily categorize this as distinctly "existential," I think that this concept of arrest--and Arrest (as an abrupt stop)--which runs through the twentieth century is one which is concerned primarily with existence, and particularly existence in disjunction with an Ideal. In this sense, Koestler's book is, in Kierkegaard's words: "a dialectic which always knows how to keep the problem hovering, and precisely in and through this seeks to solve it." But, to continue in Kierkegaard's words: "there is another dialectic which, since it begins with the most abstract Ideas, seeks to allow these to unfold themselves in more concrete determinations; a dialectic which seeks to obstruct actuality by means of the Ideal." That would be the dialectic which jails Rubashov, and the one which is being confronted in Darkness at Noon.

It is a simple book, and I don't mean to, myself, start with abstract Ideas and sully it by over academizing it. But there is also something in it which is wholly representative of an entire century of thought, and which shouldn't be brushed aside by saying: "its about communism being bad." Or: "its anti-totalitarianism." I don't even necessarily think that you could logically state by the end of this book that it has anything to do with the concept of communism. Like almost all writing of the 20th century, and all good writing after Kafka--from Camus to Sartre, Beckett to Banville--it is concerned with existence.

Epitaph of a Small Winner (Machado de Assis)

2009-05-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

Probably Dona Placida did not speak when she was born, but if she did, she might have said to the authors of her days, 'Here I am. Why did you summon me?' And the sacristan and his lady naturally would have replied, 'We summoned you so that you would burn your fingers on pots and your eyes in sewing; sad today, desperate tomorrow, finally resigned, but always with your hands on the pot and your eyes on the sewing, until you wind up in the gutter, or the hospital. That is why we summoned you, in a moment of love.' -Machado de Assis

If you appreciate Kurt Vonnegut (as I hope you do), then you should do yourself the favor of tracking down what you can find of Machado de Assis' writing here in the U.S. His near complete absence from the American literary consciousness is astounding considering his is the most clear precursor to Vonnegut, who is one of the most recognized figures of American literature. Maybe there aren't enough good Portuguese translators to give the Brazilian author's work the translations they deserve, but I generally first suspect the unfortunate lack of interest in anything that isn't already canonical or a current craze. Harry Potter, Dan Brown, Twilight, Junot Diaz...come on, guys.

The levels of comparison are near infinite between Machado and Vonnegut--from the sadly humorous, resigned humanism, to the short chapters and clever title-chapter interplay--but I won't go so far as to say that Machado is the "original" Vonnegut, just that their writing is often remarkably similar. 'Epitaph of a Small Winner,' also published under 'The Posthumous Memoirs of Braz Cubas,' is exactly what the second title implies. Braz Cubas writes his memoirs from beyond the grave, going over his somewhat uneventful life in brief chunks of text which often are equally about the book being written as they are about his lived life, as in the chapter 'Deleted' (which remains in tact) where he comments: "I have half a mind to delete this chapter," and then concludes it with "Yes, I shall definitely delete this chapter."

The passage quoted earlier is in reference to a minor character who aids Cubas in carrying out an affair with the married Virgilia who he almost loved before they were married. Dona Placida, as small as her role is, typifies most of what the book gets at: the odd human comedy which allows some to putt about, carry out love affairs, find money on the street, dabble in politics and never really learn anything, while others must work themselves to death, get taken advantage of again and again and also never really learn anything. And yet, Dona Placida's hard life is significantly made easier by her abetting of Cubas' affair, as Cubas notes:

If it had not been for my illicit love, probably Dona Placida would have faced the same miserable old age as so many other human creatures. From this observation one may reason that vice is often the fertilizing manure of virtue.

The one thing which makes Cubas the "small winner" of the title, when he balances the books on his life, is his conclusion that he at least he never had a kid, thereby subjecting to no one else "the legacy of our misery" (which sounds rather maudlin out of context, I'll admit). But again, like Vonnegut, Machado seems entranced by humanity, finding it simultaneously laudable and laughable. Sure, he didn't subject anyone to the legacy of our misery, but he, as some manner of ghost, is still thinking and reliving his past life, clearly finding something of interest in it, even if it is only to destroy many sentimental notions. When his affair is finally crumbling, as Virgilia leaves him presumably forever, Cubas states: "to titillate the reader's taste for the dramatic, I ought to suffer deep despair, shed some tears, and certainly not eat. This would be romantic but not biographical. The pure fact is that I lunched much as on other days."

William Grossman, the book's translator, writes in the introduction:

In his best work, Machado is perhaps the most completely disenchanted writer in occidental literature. Skeptics generally destroy certain illusions in order to cling to others. Machado rejects everything mundane.

The choice then, he continues, is to "reject Machado or, with Machado, to reject the world." Unfortunately, based on his lack of presence in literature today, it seems as though many have rejected Machado instead of taking the second option. Too bad, too, because as Alpha 60 says: "it is our misfortune that the world is reality."

I might add that its also my misfortune that I dropped my film from the Classics of Love tour off at Rite Aid and not anywhere else because, apparently, it takes them six fucking days to develop two disposable cameras.

Women in Love (Lawrence)

2009-05-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

D.H. Lawrence has been posthumously stricken with what are, chronically, the absolute fucking worst book covers outside of the fantasy genre. But the man sure can play some romantic saxophone!

What is so particularly displeasing about these horrible cover designs is how much they miss the feel of his writing. Its as if someone said, "this book has the word love in the title, so...let's slap a shitty picture of a Victorian woman looking forlorn on it! While you're at it, let's make the picture gauzy so it looks more romantic." Old David Herbert does have a penchant for throwing around the L word in his titles but, if this book is any example, his aim is nowhere near to soothe one with whimsical tales of ladies casting furtive glances at guys with moustaches, nor is it just a case of racy sexuality (as many people seem to think of his novels). In Women in Love, it feels as if Lawrence is trying to empty every fluttery, polite notion from the concept of love--exploding its perceived purity, and revealing it for the thick morass of sludge and emotional torpor that it is.

The plot is simple enough: Ursula and Gudrun, sisters in a small town, fall for Birkin and Gerald (respectively). One has a pretty successful go of it after some work, the other fails quite miserably. As far as plots go, this is nothing remarkable. What is quite remarkable, however, is the sheer violence of Lawrence's prose when exploring such an innocuous thing as two sisters digging different guys. It is not a common thing to read a story about a successful relationship that is described like so:

He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame--like a demon, laughing over the fountain of mystic corruption which was one of the sources of her being.

A constant, near occult, inhuman darkness is almost always just on the edge of the page even when the four are just sitting in a boat, or Gudrun is simply looking at a sleeping Gerald. There is an almost spiteful sense of monotony felt in Gerald and Gudrun's (mutual) attempt at love with each other, which finally gives way to the brief spat of violence that feels as though it has been lingering ominously since the first mention of any sort of human feeling in the novel. And though things do work out for one of the couples, it seems only through the process of staring into the abyss that anything emerges sound, and, though they have each other, they still both would much prefer that humanity had never existed. For how often people comment on the powerful physicality of his writing, they don't often seem to note the sheer horror of physical being he seems to uphold. Gerald's body is "a plunging, unconscious stroke of blood...the terrible plunging of his heart." In the act of loving another, Lawrence writes: "Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death." In a moment of extreme anger, hideously, Lawrence describes the situation by saying: "His wrists were bursting"--one of the most violently realized examples of consciousness being poured into physicality that I've read in a few years. Bukowski held Lawrence in the highest of regards and I think it is these moments of hideous prose that show exactly why. Its pretty incredible.

So, in the end, though the characters are of my least favorite type in literature (rich Victorians), the incredible violence of Lawrence's prose brings a sense of life to even those who seem the most removed from it (rich Victorians), which is something. And of the titular concept--women in love, itself?

Gerald stood still, suspended in thought.
"What do women want at the bottom?" he asked.
Birkin shrugged his shoulders.
"God knows," he said. "Some satisfaction in basic repulsion, it seems to me. They seem to creep down some ghastly tunnel of darkness, and will never be satisfied till they've come to the end."

So, please, put a picture of two doe-eyed lovers lying in a field of wheat on the cover. That seems the most appropriate thing.

The Busy Kids

2009-05-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, so there's this now:

couldibedespised.blogspot.com

If one directs one's self there they will soon find the journals I kept while on the recent Classics of Love tour to the UK. It might take a day or so since I'll be collecting pictures and since typing up the journal I kept by hand is tedious work. But rest assured, oh, ye who read this, it will be updated soon in various parts.

Once finished with that, I will have three new entries here to put up: Women in Love (Lawrence), Epitaph of a Small Winner (Machado), and Darkness at Noon (Koestler). But that will probably take another day or so, too.

Cheers, mateys.

Rock Music

2009-04-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

The last two albums that I really "got into" in the way that my younger self once got into, say, Left and Leaving, Pinkerton, or Lonesome Crowded West, were Separation Sunday by the Hold Steady, and Marquee Moon by Television. These were somewhat strange acquisitions for me given their decidedly capital R Rock sound, but there is something somehow exposed and earnest about them. The Hold Steady, in particular, took me forever to understand. They came at a time when irony was at the height of its too-cool-for-truth ubiquity, and I thought (understandably, I think) that everyone, including the band, liked their rock riffage in an ironic way. It's funny because it sounds like Aerosmith, but we're an "indie" band. Get it? Ha. Accidentally catching the end of How a Resurrection Really Feels and really listening to it, however, I could finally hear the sincerity behind Finn and co.'s strange desire to rock and tell good stories. That was the entry point for me. And now what I once thought was the most obvious example of irony on the album, Hornets! Hornets!, with its cromagnon Dad-rock lead riff, has actually become my favorite. I feel that ridiculous minor seventh bridge. And when the drums kick back in!...don't get me started.

The same goes for Marquee Moon and especially to its 10+ minute title track, which is decidedly Rock in its excess and blown out guitar solo proportions. Its easy to crack jokes and ridicule things like this (whether or not they intended to be ironic, The Darkness was certainly a bitter pill of pure irony in the musical landscape), but when a band does it right--when it is how the song was meant to be played--there is no explaining how right it is. The solo in the middle of See No Evil rules. It just does. This is a Rock album, and it is completely done right. Most days now I just want to listen to it over and over again, which is exactly what I did last night.

I'm coming around to my point finally. Something in Separation Sunday and Marquee Moon is very truthful--it is very revealing of their creators' desire to rock. This notion is often laughed at, made light of, Jack Black-ized. People want to lose themselves in music, but at the same time its never really very "cool" to do that. Its much cooler to like what is popular at the time, aim at being ahead of trends or at least maintain a comfortable distance from the music. Play something dancey. That way the audience will dance and they don't have to notice the musician. Put in some synth parts. That's cool! Hey, how about you play the synth while I do a dance beat? Genius! Now take a picture of me pretending to not notice the camera! Oh man, that looks boss (make sure to ironically say boss sometimes, too)! Wanna rent Juno? She mentioned Thundercats! I remember that show! So that makes it funny, right?

The way that the Hold Steady and Television really dive into these respective albums is beyond uncool. But that's also what makes them so good. That George Thorogood sounding guitar part in the verse of Friction...the downright Elton John piano part in Stevie Nix...they risk looking like a Rock fool to really go somewhere with their music, and I think that these two albums alone do more for music in general than most decades I can think of (80s, I'm looking at you). Like the very unromantic, "I want to fuck you" at the end of Lifter Puller's Nassau Colliseum, these take a chance, put themselves on the line, and completely rule because of it. You can choose to agree or disagree with me. Maybe later we can do some sexy things, take a couple photographs and carve them into wood reliefs?

When we were young, we wanted to die...

2009-04-04T03:31:00.000-07:00

Despite this horrible picture, Low is one of the best bands I've ever heard. I forget that sometimes...

Philip K. Dick: VALIS, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

2009-03-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

"Everything is true. Everything anybody has ever thought." -Rick Deckard

So more Sci-Fi, apparently. And really good Sci-Fi, I might add. The kind like the aforementioned 2001 and Solaris which make the case for Sci-Fi as something bigger than stories of cool aliens wars, exotic alien women, and really cool exotic alien female warriors. Sci-Fi which uses the Science in its Fiction as a backdrop against which to ask big questions and explore the fundamental nature of Man's place in a big, empty, uncaring universe.

These are my first forays in Philip K. Dick's actual writing (pictured above looking like a member of Slint, or Unwound, or some other such 90s indie rock outfit), but I'm kind of surprised at myself for not having read him much earlier since I've always liked Blade Runner, and since Mark E. Smith quotes him as such a primary influence (next to Lovecraft!). But it wasn't until my brother started to tell me about VALIS that I finally figured it was time to check him out properly. VALIS, in description, runs something like this:

Horselover Fat thinks he had an experience with God. Philip K. Dick is Horselover Fat, but he forgets that sometimes. God may be a laser. God may be a two year old girl. God may be telling Horselover Fat / Philip K. Dick to never believe in God, and God may be in the hands of technoreligous zealots. Also, the quest for God may just be a way to plug a hole in one's consciousness ripped open by the constant need to help the dying/suicidal.

It is, quite obviously, strange, but it is also really well written and chimerically creative. As with David Lynch, I think it sometimes helps to view a book like VALIS not from a purely linear or developmental vantage point, but to simply go along with the experience and admire the craft. However, I do also believe that it is possible to take this in a linear fashion without reducing it to a clusterfuck of nonsensical what-have-yous, though it would be very difficult to convince a detractor of this ("what do you mean 'Real time ceased in 70 CE with the fall of the temple of Jerusalem and started again in 1974?!"). The same thing happens when you try to tell someone who isn't digging it that you think Mulholland Drive "makes sense," but what are you going to do?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by comparison is much more straight-forward, though it also contains many strange bits that get entirely glossed over when given the Harrison Ford treatment. Also, I think that this is probably the best Sci-Fi book I've ever read. Actually it is. No probably.

Deckart (Descartes) has a much more cerebral trip hunting down the andys in this book than Ford does hunting down the replicants of Blade Runner. Though the movie makes a clear move towards "maybe the replicant hunter really IS a replicant!" DADoES goes a bit more subtler route, simply teasing out questions of the difference by-and-large between humans and androids--particularly when the androids are programmed to believe themselves to be human. I think its fair to say that Deckart, in novel form, could still possibly be a 'droid, but what the book seems to push for more is the notion of what it means to be human if increasingly the life around you is replaced with android equivalents meant to pose as life. A big section which gets cut out of the film is the status/empathy symbol of owning and maintaining an animal--which gets to the point where many people, in lieu of being able to afford real animals, buy "electric" ones to appear more successful and/or empathetic to those around them (thus the "electric sheep" in the title).

The writing is tight--neither too prosey nor too dumb-dumb-action-android-gun-fight, which works well for the simultaneously tense and ponderous atmosphere--and all in all I was highly impressed with both books, and Dick's writing in general. Now I definitely want to look into A Scanner Darkly.

Also I should mention that Bohren und der Club of Gore's album "Black Earth" is the best doom-jazz album I'm aware of. Could practically be called "Songs from the Black Lodge." Good music to have on while reading Philip Dick.

Pale Fire (Nabokov)

2009-03-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

Where do you even begin?...

Pale Fire is a metafictional beast--the "body" of which is a 999 line long poem by the fictional author John Shade, with frequent commentaries and endnotes by his editor, fictional college professor and possible ex-king of possibly fictional Zembla, Dr. Charles X. Kinbote. Also, both these characters may be fictional even within the context of the story. At heart it is a struggle between authors, a problematizing of intent, and a shit ton of more or less unanswered questions. The poem itself takes a largely backseat role next to Kinbote's commentaries, which are mostly autobiographical--in truth it is all autobiographical. These notes are often about Zembla and her last king Charles Xavier (no relation), but they are just as often about Kinbote's spying on Shade, and his attempts to get him to make his final poem (Pale Fire) about Zembla and her last king. Kinbote continually attempts to wrest Shade's autobiographical poem from his hands, and force his own autobiography on top of it, finally doing so simply by dint of his edits and notes.

I would venture to say, though, that the amorphous content of the book is (somewhat) less important than the book's structure and, its true focus, its prose. Regarding the first: it works incredibly well. What seems, initially, as somewhat showy or unconventional-for-the-mere-purpose-of-being-unconventional comes off quite naturally, and the struggle between Shade and Kinbote is doubly clear when you have the book open at two places simultaneously--interrupting Shade's poem for Kinbote's prose.

There are so many different ways to attack this novel, so many different entry points and interpretations, that I found it near impossible (at least implausible) to really commit to any one understanding. Its a book which is best to let wash over you--follow Kinbote's many notes, which often suggest you jump ahead to a different note to get further information, read the Shade poem interrupted, and uninterrupted--look through the book instead of too closely at any one of its weird bits of intrigue. There are frequent references to trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye) paintings, which I find to be the best reference point when reading the book. It is illusion. The illusion of art being something real, making it into something different from reality and different from real art. Unlike many "difficult" texts, it is neither a chore nor a very tiresome read--Ulyssian in direction, but not nearly as staggering--like Pynchon in the way it must be read, but much more...readable. Nabokov writes beautifully, which is, more or less, the whole purpose of his writing. Allegory, metaphor, modernism, post-modernism, even realism: none seem to really apply to Nabokov's strangely distinct literary actualism. In the end, he just writes beautifully.

Bomb the Music Industry! - Scrambles

2009-03-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

This album is fantastic. It has the obligatory ska and punk songs, but it is mostly a wildly creative, frantic and desperate bit of indie rock glory. The Yoko-era Beulah sounding "Wednesday Night Drinkball" into "25!" (which has a nice ELO-inspired vocoder part) just fucking rules. Perfect for your Ska Mitzvah, Quinskañera, Guy Skawkes Day, or Skalpurgis Night.

A Hole in Space (Niven)

2009-02-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

Science Fiction is a strange beast. I have a number of friends who simply love it--some love the novels, one or two love Star Trek, a few others are just generally egalitarian in their unabashed love for science fiction--but beyond a few instances, I've never really been able to get that into it. And yet there are movies like 2001 and (Tarkovsky's) Solaris which are decidedly sci-fi but also manage to be hugely arresting simply as stories.

I haven't read much straight genre fiction since abandoning horror novels at 13 or so. But when I was much younger I went on a number of walks with my dad, during which time he would often explain to me various Larry Niven stories he had read. At that early age I found them incredibly interesting, and I think generally those stories (particularly 'Inconstant Moon' and 'The Fourth Profession') cast a long shadow on structural elements I like in a story. His writing often toes the line between dreamy disconnection and concrete reality . Stories often start with characters being wrenched from sleep, so that when the more fantastical sci-fi elements are taken with a degree of calm by the characters, the whole thing takes on a sort of dream-logic (and, appropriately enough, I read most of this book while waiting in my car, shortly after being roused from sleep myself). What helps this is that his sci-fi inclinations are decidedly less wild and goofy than a wide swath of sci-fi plots, feeling naturalistic in the way that science comes into his fiction. There is always a pull between the future and the present in his writing that seems to mirror the pull between dreaminess and reality, enhancing its effects. But what he really succeeds at is introducing a simple concept, and exploring it.

The first short in the collection is 'Rammer,' which typically begins with a man awakening in a strange environment. What's different about Jerome Corbett, is that he was essentially dead--frozen for two hundred years, waiting for medical science to catch up with his heath conditions. When he wakes up he finds himself alive and in a new body. Basically, the story runs that in a futuristic society The State (as it is known) takes career criminals, erases their personality, and inserts the mind of frozen stiffs from the past so that they can work for them. In this sense Corbett is given another chance in a new body. But in another sense, it is also the criminal who is given another chance, and even though Corbett's mind inhabits the unnamed perp's body, The State simply regards him as the criminal with Corbett's personality, not as Corbett in the body of a criminal. This existential quandary is a good example of the types of thing Niven teases out of simple sci-fi plots: he comes up with a scientific advancement (or occurrence), puts a person into the situation, and then observes the problems that emerge.

A Hole in Space has some really good shorts in it, but I don't know if its the best example of his work--mostly because, comparatively, I haven't read all that much of his work. Many of the stories have to do with problems which would emerge if teleportation "booths" or anything of the like were developed. One short is also just a laundry list of different alternatives to planets, taking ideas from fiction but essentially being a simple compare-and-contrast of vaguely scientifically possible concepts. I couldn't really get through that one. Finally, the collection ends with two very strong pieces: The Hole Man (which won a Hugo Award), and The Fourth Profession (which I think is a better story). Even though the reveal at the end of The Fourth Profession is a little more ridiculous than I remembered, it is still a great bit of sci-fi-informed detective fiction, and a strong example of Niven's creativity in general. All in all, this is a nice little read.

Murder, etc: La Bete Humaine, and Crime and Punishment

2009-02-19T11:39:00.000-08:00

Initially I wanted to read Emile Zola's La Bete Humaine because I liked the title (something akin to 'The Human Beast'). What I knew about it was somewhat strange--that it is the squashing of two novels together: one which deals with the human impulse to kill, and one which deals with the presence of the railroad in late 19th century France. The combination actually works in a fairly interesting way since Zola's focus on heredity and his "naturalism" almost espouse a sort of social fate in his characters, just as a train must run down its inevitable track. What I didn't realize until I had gotten further into the book was that it was partly written in response to Crime and Punishment, a book which, until now, I hadn't read. In particular Zola seems to object to Dostoyevsky's concept of how Raskolnikov decides to commit his murder--his justifications and intentions beyond the murder itself. When I realized this, I immediately began to wonder why Crime and Punishment has remained canonical while La Bete Humaine (and even Zola himself) have largely been forgotten, which is, I guess, what I'm trying to answer here.

La Bete Humaine explores a number of concepts and perceived social aberrations, tying most to something like sexual repression and/or frustrations. Roubaud, who the book opens on, decides to murder the elderly statesman who he discovers has molested his wife in the past. Jacques Lantier is driven compulsively to murder women at the outset of any sexual arousal by some vague notion of "a grudge that had passed from man to man since the first infidelity in the dark recesses of some primeval cave." And, in time, multiple people are driven to kill Jacques for various reasons resulting from sex or the lack there of. It becomes a fairly big mess for everyone involved, and Zola tries to show how actions pass through social environments and influence disparate people, instead of assuming people to be autonomous monads who exist outside the realm of hereditary and social influence. While apt from a social standpoint and intelligent in aim, the dry prose and somewhat outlandish events make this book a bit mired in its time. Part of Zola's quest is always to be as accurate as possible in details of money, depictions of technological advancements and faraway cities, etc, but this does withhold some of its relevance to future readers as I doubt many are too particularly fond of sweeping descriptions of the average income of railway workers in La Harve during the 1870s. So his approach definitely cuts both ways.

Wildly on the other end of the spectrum is Dostoyevsky with Crime and Punishment--another in the list of books I never read because I opted for an easy senior year in high school. Whereas Zola's account of murder(s) and obsession is from a largely antiseptic, encyclopedic, bird's-eye view of many peoples' lives, Crime and Punishment is insular and claustrophobic, moving constantly through fevers, madness, nightmares, and suspicion. Most people have probably read this and everyone knows the basic idea so I won't summarize it, but there are clear differences from the very beginning between his and Zola's respective approaches to this subject. Interesting to note, though, is that this is also the product of two books forced together. A large section of C&P was initially going to be published separately under the title 'The Drunkards,' just as Zola's was originally intended to be two different books.

But its Dostoyevsky's prose alone which goes a long way to answering my initial question as to why this is still read, since it is incredibly modern and powerful. The beef that Zola had with C&P was with Raskolnikov's Nietzschean ideas of a superior person being beyond the law which the more common types live by. Near as I can tell, he found this nearly psychologically impossible to be a strong enough impulse as Jacques too convinces himself of this idea, but still cannot commit to the act when the time comes. But Dostoyevsky really gets into the psychology of a person struggling with this concept, and struggling to believe that he himself is one of the superior types. Though I normally pull for the underdog, this is one of those times where I can clearly see why the canonical has remained so. Because its really good.

The translator to C&P, in his short introduction says:

The true hallmark of a great creative artist, however, is that his work is not only of contemporary, but also of universal significance, and that with the passing of time the contemporary problems, which to him seemed so important, tend to recede into the background, while the universal significance of his work comes more and more to the fore.

This is absolutely indicative of why Crime and Punishment remains widely read, and why La Bete Humaine has fallen by the wayside--the latter is mired in then-contemporary significance. This is also why things like the fictitious punk band in Oracle Night, the persistence of 'dude' in the generally shitty Choke, Junot Diaz, and the like all really bother me: they all sacrifice any universal significance to mire themselves in the contemporary.

Sorry Emile, you frumpy old sod, but Dostoyevsky, "the most terrifying of all writers," wins out here.

Women and Children First

2009-02-11T00:21:00.000-08:00

For satire to be good it has to be a bit dangerous. But, shit. Sometimes the Country Teasers are downright frightening.

"I must have had sex with a prostitute when I was age 13,
because now I see sexual advances in every woman I meet.
In my late teens I think someone spiked my drinks,
I have craved all types of drug and alcohol ever since."

"If I had my way, I'd have all of you shot."

Such warmth...

Amok and Other Stories (Zweig)

2009-01-18T17:30:00.000-08:00

All in all not as strong as Chess Story, but the four shorts in this book are all interesting in a 'Sorrows of Young Werther,' psychological-exploration-of-suicide sort of way. I've read that Zweig was primarily concerned with the notion of human limitation which became quite clear in both the abrupt ends to the lives in the stories, as well as the frequent allusions to a "dog-like" nature in people. Unfortunately I don't have too much to say about this book other than that I liked it. I already opined about the lack of Zweig in bookstores, and I'm also about a hundred pages into Zola's La Bete Humaine which I've been curious to read for some time. I suppose more on that soon.

Recording for the first Classics of Love EP is finished.

Man in the Dark (Auster)

2009-01-13T01:57:00.000-08:00

"The weird world rolls on." -Rose Hawthorne

Paul Auster is one of the few contemporary authors who I really appreciate. But after reading Oracle Night I was afraid that I may have placed my faith in a shitty wolf in postmodern sheep's clothing. Man in the Dark, however, has completely won me back to his side. It is very much the product of an aged veteran--both nuanced and simple, the appropriate length for the meat of the story, a fine balance between story-within-story as well as main-story...its a strong reminder of the fact that Auster really is a positive force in writing these days. Also its focus on a crotchety, old, compromised man coupled with the strength of its prose call to mind John Banville, probably my favorite currently-writing author. But what is even more impressive about the book is the way that Auster handles contemporary issues without feeling like he's simply aiming for chicness or sacrificing future relevance for immediacy. Unlike in Oracle Night, the more populist themes are handled with grace and distance (often put into a dream-like world of an elderly man's stories to himself), allowing them to emerge organically instead of the sophomoric way Oracle Night handled pop-themes-and-love. The same is true for the relationships of the characters of Man in the Dark in general. Everyone is compromised without feeling as if constructed to be so--the book breathes naturally in its divergent paths without trying to hammer you over the head with any of its themes. Not only is this a pleasantly strong book for contemporary standards, I would submit that this is one of the better books I've read out of the last fifty or so.

Chess Story (Zweig)

2009-01-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

"I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth."

These are the words Stefan Zweig left to explain the double suicide of himself and his wife in 1942. With the rise of Nazism, Zweig fled Austria but could not escape the fear that there was a brute, ignorant force mowing down much of the groundwork laid for the intellect during the late 19th and early 20th century. Unfortunately, though his words were a direct comment on the Nazi threat they have not ceased to be relevant as we see the Market constantly diminishing the role of such "intellectual labor" in society. A perfect example of this is the lack of Zweig in most, if not all, American bookstores. Like Mishima, when they do have him at all it is usually only one book, though he wrote many. Also, never once in all the literature classes I took throughout college did I even hear his name mentioned which is even more disappointing.

Chess Story is the first Zweig I've read after only having heard about him accidentally, as well as recently, but despite its short length it is incredibly salient both in prose and in its concepts. Simply enough, the narrator finds himself on board a cruise bound for Buenos Aires along with an unimaginative man-child who, as it turns out, is the reigning world Chess champion. The developments are deceptively simple, I suppose much like any number of openings for chess (if you want to carry out that metaphor), but his prose carries each character quite strikingly. From Czentovic, the artless Chess whiz, to Dr. B, an escaped prisoner of the Gestapo who learned Chess abstractly and purely by accident. This is very much a novella which does not look as good in synopsis as it does in its entirety, so I won't do it the injustice of boiling everything down to broad strokes, when it already stands so well on its own. Its a thoroughly good book.

The question of why Zweig is so completely unacknowledged in America is an odd one to me. Most of the authors who I begrudge the obscurity of are also difficult, myopic reads, but Zweig is clear, less demented, and very readable for anyone who actually enjoys books...and yet he goes unread. The one silver lining is the press company itself--the New York Review Books--which also put out an English edition of Ernst Junger's book The Glass Bees (which I've seen, along with Chess Story, on many Best Literature of the 20th Century lists). Thankfully there is at least a few small presses still taking chances on good books that don't already have a dollar sign attached to them here. Pushkin Press is another one of the good ones.

Gotta end on a positive jam.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (Mishima)

2009-01-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

Mishima has an undeniable talent for writing violently, and that's exactly what made The Temple of the Golden Pavilion so fantastic. Its protagonist is a estranged Buddhist monk obsessed (much like Mishima himself) with the ideas of beauty and death, until the two become completely indecipherable from each other. The same is true in "The Sailor..." except that it is couched in a more mundane environment than the whirlpool mind of a madman. The basic story is very strong: a young widow falls for a sailor; her son, a member of a violent group of gifted young adult-haters, looks up at the sailor until he decides that the sailor is just like every other adult, and the group decides they must murder him.

The typical Mishima themes of beauty, masculinity, death, the sea, and militancy all show up again, but they take the backseat for most of the book as he tries to develop the ordinary nature of the widow's love for the sailor, her son, and her job. At these times it seems like Mishima is out of his element--trying to make a realistic portrait of everyday existence, when his own worldview is so obviously skewed towards death and glory. At first I thought the clunky prose in these sections was the fault of the translator until I discovered that it was the same person who translated just about all of his books, and who spent most of his life around the general Tokyo literati of the time. So this reinforces my theory that Mishima is simply ill-equipped to write without the violence, order, or abstraction which he revels in. The last forty or so pages are fantastic and one gets the impression that Mishima is back in familiar territory--impending glory, the threat of death--the very same that he ended his own life around. But the book, by and large, just stumbles around for too much of its slim length.

What is also curious about this book in particular within Mishima's work in general is that this is often the only one found at bookstores. I think Death in Midsummer is his most famous work, but this is almost always the only one I find. Why is it this one in particular, then? It is significantly less disturbing (and, thus, less powerful) than either Golden Pavilion or Death in Midsummer, which may in large part lead to its availability. Though interesting in its scope it doesn't offend the viewer's sensibilities too much, and the laser sighted accuracy of Golden Pavilion's rotting prose is replaced with something more casual and lilting--making it a much weaker read. If this were already the only Mishima book available I wouldn't be surprised if people didn't look for more, but when there have been many in circulation prior the reasons why this is (often) the only one remaining seem curious.

Equally curious is the fact that there was an, apparently, "inept" film adaptation in the 70s starring Kris Kristofferson. Check out this absurd poster for it.

"Their love will arouse you..."

Decisions Are Made

2009-01-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to do the 50 book challenge again this year, or at least not officially. The drive to keep pushing up those numbers unfortunately meant that I often had little time to digest what I had just finished, and instead immediately pour into something else. That being said, I finished 2 books today. But I think that was more because of the strength of the second, as opposed to a pointless mania for reaching some arbitrary number.

What I've decided is that there is a growing problem with the journalism, education, and availability of art. The first has gotten lazy, taking what's given to it as opposed to looking for something new. The second is canonical and complacent, often meaning that it gets stodgy or predictable or simply flaccid. The third is more of a problem with business in general, but it is the evolution of the first two problems--because journalism only reviews what it gets easily (and what will sell ad space), less popular or less marketable things fall by the wayside, and because people are growing less and less educated they look on their own less, and stores can only support themselves by selling certain things. All in all, shit sucks. But books are alright (not all of them, though). Here's the new goal: let's separate the books from the shit. And the books from the shit books. Whereas before "Books and Shit" was sort of a lazy way to say what you can find here, now I hope it will stand for a dichotomy--sort of "Books vs. Shit."

Whatever. I'm still going to read books and I'm still going to put up some of my thoughts on them here. A handful of people will still check it out every now and then, and a lot won't. That's fine. Just formulating my approach to this weird mutation of the internet that is the web log.

Sometime tomorrow: The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (Mishima), and Chess Story (Zweig).

If it kills me...

2009-01-02T03:19:00.000-08:00

Ok, so the year is over. Right? I guess that means its time for lists, huh? Here goes:

1. Peeling the Onion - Günter Grass
2. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets - David Simon
3. The Glass Bees - Ernst Jünger
4. Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks
5. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
6. Foe - J.M. Coetzee
7. The Aspern Papers - Henry James
8. Conversations With Professor Y - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
9. Cat and Mouse - Günter Grass
10. Turn of the Screw - Henry James
11. Blindness - Jose Saramago
12. I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski (does this count?)
13. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
14. The Farewell Party - Milan Kundera
15. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
16-18. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
19. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
20. The Way to Rainy Mountain - N. Scott Momaday
21. Faust Pt. 1 - Goethe
22. Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
23. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
24. Tripmaster Monkey - Maxine Hong Kingston
25. Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith - Mark E. Smith
26. Four Great Plays (A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder) - Henrik Ibsen
27. Cancer Ward - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
28. Falconer - John Cheever
29. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami
30. We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
31. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll
32. The Stranger - Albert Camus
33. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend - Thomas Mann
34. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
35. The Clown - Heinrich Böll
36. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
37. Oracle Night - Paul Auster
38. Bullet Park - John Cheever
39. Good Morning, Midnight - Jean Rhys
40. Quartet - Jean Rhys
41. The Ruined Map - Kobo Abe
42. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
43. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
44. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
45. Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
46. The Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan
47. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
48. A Season in Hell - Arthur Rimbaud
49. The Time of the Assassins - Henry Miller
50. Grendel - John Gardner

So that makes 17 American, 8 German, 3 French, 2 Norwegian, 6 Brits, 5 Russian, 3 Japanese, and some change. 7 books for school, 6 re-reads, and 6 nonfiction.

Bests in no particular order:

Cancer Ward
Hunger
Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Good Morning, Midnight
(The New York Trilogy was really good, too)

Worsts:

Musicophilia (though with some interesting sections)
The Way to Rainy Mountain
The Comfort of Strangers

Biggest Disappointments:

Oracle Night
Cat and Mouse

So that about does it for the books. Quickly in other categories:

Favorite movie of the year:

Encounters at the End of the World

Weirder-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Herzog movie, which, contextually, makes it not very weird at all.

Favorite albums of the year:

The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride

This might, in fact, be my favorite Mountain Goats album all in all. I think its the most cohesive, and has some of the strongest writing of their entire career.

Eat Skull - Sick to Death

Completely un-cohesive and crazy. Like if Bee Thousand era Guided By Voices really wanted to be a punk band instead of The Who. Or like The Thermals doing variations on the Pavement song "Serpentine Pad."

I also just ordered the Religious Knives album that came out this year ("The Door) after hearing one really good song on KFJC. Maybe that'll make my Top 2 a Top 3.

Ok. That's it. Maybe I'll just keep this up for next year since I'm halfway through another Mishima book right now. Who knows!

Grendel (#50!)

2008-12-24T16:45:00.000-08:00

So with the only recommendation I actually received through this...blog...I can now say that the challenge has officially been met. And a good closer it was, too. Gardner's Grendel is a creature which defies easy categorization as a monster, but also doesn't fall for the easy trappings of "the cruelest monster of all is MAN!" type faux-Twilight Zoney bullshit. Instead, and like Mishima's Golden Pavilion, its one which embraces paradox and stares deep at the swirling nothingness at its center. Gardner also writes, paradoxically, in two ways I like to read--both in colloquial, sometimes crass language, and in worrisome reflections on the "object-ness" of the world (including one very Sartre-ian moment in which all things in the world reveal themselves to Grendel as "not-my-mother"). The focus on mortality, morality, choice and creation are all unflinching without the prose falling into haughty pedantry, or taking itself too too seriously. So, all things considered, a very fine book! Thanks, Feshbachs, for your communal work in getting this to me.

So the 50 is done! I haven't really thought about what to do with this...thing now, since this more or less nihilates the use of this...thing. But Max suggested going for 52 so that it would be a book a week, and in the last dwindling days of the year that's not impossible. So I'm going to keep it running until New Year and then decide what to do, I guess.

Meanwhile: Merry Christmas, etc!

#49: The Time of the Assassins

2008-12-22T12:15:00.000-08:00

"The road to heaven leads through hell, does it not? To earn salvation one has to become inoculated with sin. One has to savor them all, the capital as well as the trivial sins. One has to earn death with all one's appetites, refuse no poison, reject no experience however degrading or sordid." -Henry Miller

And here is Henry Miller himself earning his ticket to heaven.

After putting down Rimbaud's Season in Hell I was a little curious to know more about the guy since the name has been floating around the edges of my awareness for a long time. And since I'm not big on poetry I decided to read something besides more of his writing. Luckily I found this copy of Henry Miller's "study of Rimbaud," which falls somewhere between literary theory, philosophy, and just-another-Miller-book-of-rambling-and-the-N-word. While we were on tour with Pteradon Max bought a quickly crumbling copy of Tropic of Cancer which got passed around the van a bit, and I read between The Tin Drum and what I got through of The Gulag Archipelago. I don't think I would have counted myself as a Miller fan after that though--his propensity for proto-beat quasi-poetics and his (apparent) complete lack of an editor sometimes got to be a bit too much for me, though I liked the idea of the book a lot (and there were often fantastic bits shoved in with all the "cunts" that littered just about every page). But I was quite surprised with this slim little thing, both in the saliency of his ideas and just how interesting the entire project turned out. Ostensibly, its his "study" of Rimbaud, but its very much a Miller book as is shown by the very typically Miller anecdote with which it begins:

"I was 36 years old and in the depths of my own protracted Season in Hell. An absorbing book about Rimbaud was lying about the house but I never once glanced at it. The reason was that I loathed the woman who owned it and who was then living with us."

As is clear, this book is equally about Rimbaud as it is Henry Miller, but I think that it actually helps ol' Henry's writing quite a bit to have a subject in mind, instead of just writing about himself and all the cunts he can't wait to get his dirty little hands on like usual. The prose seems to be quite a bit more focused than usual here, though he does occasionally go off on long high minded rants about the importance of the poet which are well-meaning but get a touch redundant. All in all, though, I found this to be very useful in understanding Miller's take on literature as well as picking up a general idea of Rimbaud's very odd life. Despite its status as a "Study of Rimbaud," this could quite easily fall into the general fiction section under Miller, since his books defy easy fiction/non-fiction classifications. I guess dude from the Strokes liked it as well, since I recently read on tinymixtapes that 'The Time of the Assassins' is the name of his new solo album, for what that's worth.

#47-48: Notes From Underground / A Season in Hell

2008-12-01T22:47:00.000-08:00

There's the guy who British Sea Power declared "the most attractive maaaan."

These two books have been sitting on my "why haven't you read these yet?" shelf for a couple of years now, and I finally got around to them under the crunch of deadline (30 days left for the last 2 books). Dostoyevsky often gets considered a sort of godfather to existentialism, and I think its almost entirely because of this book. Walter Kaufmann, the great Nietzsche translator and general commentator on continental philosophy, went so far as to call this "the best overture of existentialism ever written." Whether or not this is hyperbole (or relevant) I'll leave up to others to decide, but suffice to say that Notes From Underground very clearly lays the groundwork for the canonical fiction of the existentialists--particularly The Fall and Nausea, I think. Its not necessarily the circuitous and problematic thoughts of the nameless narrator which is the bulk of the novel's content (though that is, in context, a fundamental example of the 'existence before essence' credo) but his final insistence on his inauthentic and often abortive actions as being reflective of people as a whole, that this is something in all of us, and that hes "not trying to justify [him]self by saying all of us." Its a nice technique--a little jarring, a bit accusatory, but effective in getting the reader to possible acknowledge a bigger problem. But then again he also says: "left alone without literature, we immediately become entangled and lost--we don't know what to join, what to keep up with; what to love, what to hate; what to respect, what to despise! We even find it painful to be men--real men of flesh and blood, with our own bodies; we're ashamed of it, and we long to turn ourselves into something hypothetical called the average man." Which brings me to my next point.

You would not believe how many responses in a Google image search for 'Rimbaud' were pictures from peoples' Myspace pages! Yep, nothing says Anarchist, or Poet quite like fucking Myspace.

Good job, guys.

#46: The Comfort of Strangers

2008-11-24T21:52:00.000-08:00

Get a load of that smug nerd.

So I've been out of town for a couple of weeks, and working 9-5 since returning. Fun, followed by no fun. But busy either way. Music has also been picking up a good amount recently and all these things have conspired to cut my reading time down significantly. I hacked through a good section of Celine on the plane and in the van but that New Year's deadline is creeping up and I've been sitting at 45 of 50 for a while now. So that means its on to some short books that I can (reasonably) get done in the 11th hour.

The first of these books is Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers which my Dad had bought a while back, and which was lying around in plain sight while I scrounged for something quick but unfamiliar. McEwan is another one of those McCarthy, DeLillo, Murakami types that you see people reading a lot these days (possibly because they're still writing these days and people presume that means that they're more relevant). In this list there are two good authors, one not so good one, and DeLillo.

Despite being generally very readable, I think what sets McCarthy and Murakami apart from the McEwans of the world is a sense of danger--of really committing to something which many people may not like much at all. Violence does surround all three, but the violence present in Comfort of Strangers is one which sits in plot, whereas the other two M.'s violence is more central to the heart of their writing. They use violence because they write violently, taking risks and exposing flaws both in others as well as themselves. But McEwan's writing is very clean, calculated, and methodical. The book unfolds in an easy to swallow, neither too descriptive nor too vague prose which keeps the reader at a comfortable arm's distance from its events. When it reaches its violent conclusion it retains a degree of shock, but does not use the violence to reveal or expose anything in its reader, besides a (possible) gasp. People may find me strange for looking at a book like this and saying, "where's the danger?" but, really, where's the danger? Where's the desire to show someone something they haven't seen before? Not even that they haven't seen before, but simply from an angle they haven't seen before? The Comfort of Strangers is a tidy little gothic novella that doesn't linger too long on the page or on the consciousness, so that people can enjoy the rush of fright without having it do any lasting damage to them. That's not a good thing. This is the equivalent of a quick dip in a roller coaster--which is fine for amusement parks, but not that exciting in the world of award winning novelists. Unfortunately, this is also indicative of why McEwans win awards, and Solzhenitsyns die without a bit of news coverage. People love those who give them a quick shake yet don't scare or challenge them too much, but good art needs to scare, and to frustrate, and to challenge, so that you've actually gone through something during the interim. That's why there's this guy:

#45: Cat's Cradle

2008-10-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

Slaughterhouse Five is a great book. Vonnegut himself gave it an A+ (Breakfast of Champions he gave a C), and I think its difficult (or, if nothing else, stupid) to make the case that it isn't a great book. However I truly believe Cat's Cradle to be a work of genius. There are endless things you could write about it and endless ways to look at it but, ultimately, all of those would be impotent next to the book itself. So, instead, I'll simply quote Horlick Minton, American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo and restate that this is a work of genius.

"Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise."

Sun Dogs

2008-10-16T00:47:00.000-07:00

I remember when my friend Adam got really into mini-comics and all of us thought, "honestly, who the fuck is into mini-comics?" I'd never paid much attention to the top-most racks of Space Cat's collection but that was where he would instinctively go, as befuddling as the concept was. Looking at it now, though, it makes perfect sense: we've both always been into punk, we both started to get into more personal endeavors like graffiti (though he much more than I), and we both had always liked comics in general (again, he more than I). So, it was no surprise when he began to work on getting his own mini-comic--copied, hand stapled, pain-stakingly laid out by hand-- (since it was the logical following of the zine format {zines are to magazines what mini-comics are to comics}).

Like a lot of my friends, Adam now lives in Japan, while I fritter away my time at temp jobs and rereading Cat's Cradle (next post). But I finally got around to reading his mini-comic diary, entitled Sun Dogs, that he has been keeping on his time not only as a quasi-ex-pat in Japan, but also as a 25 married man and recent father, all in one. It is fantastic, inspiring, and (I think) the best thing he has ever worked on. I'm really excited for him and for the fifth issue of Sun Dogs--as well as for Ami and Nimo--and, if you're interested, you should definitely check out the comics. Its available on Big Ugly Robot, and I promise that I'm not just recommending it as a friend. I'm very excited to see this continue.

#44: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

2008-10-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

While I'm dishing out advice and taking shots at lame comedians I might as well drop some more advice: don't try to read Finnegan's Wake when you're 18. Its not going to work. I don't know when, if ever, it will work but it certainly won't then. Besides that brief foray into utter impenetrability this is my first real reading of Joyce, and it was good. Ostensibly the story of baby tuckoo and a moocow, Portrait does something very interesting by its end. Stephen Daedelus decides, after reaching a certain age, that what he truly needs to do is "to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race" (his race being the Irish). What one presumes, then, is that were the book to continue Stephen would either succeed or fail in this quest. However, it is in the act of formulating the problem that Joyce already solves it: the development of the need to create this conscience in Portrait is the creation of it itself--each article of inherited culture that Stephen sheds from his emerging self exposes both what has defined the Irish, as well as what has held them back (from the churches, to the British, to the general political backdrop). Of course the particularity of the Irish race isn't whats at stake here, its an indictment more against those who do not question both themselves and those around them, and the way people take their selfhood as a given, as opposed to something which is to be created. Again, Nietzsche seems applicable since this act of creating the self as one would a work of art (arguably, exactly what Stephen Daedelus spends his time doing in the novel) he describes as the "one thing [which] is needful." The development of the narration--moving from objective third person to subjective first person by the novels conclusion--also reflects this development of self, and the shedding of objectivity. Here we also see the early rumblings of Joyce's trademark stream of consciousness as Stephen's thoughts are more bits of conflicting thoughts and plans than traditional narration.

This is, obviously, a good and very well written book. But I wouldn't necessarily count it as one of my favorites or as one of the best this year, even. This is simply because there is very little viscera in the book. Its explorational, clever, pieced together well, but Joyce does little to compromise his protagonist and the end result is that it all comes off feeling very safe. Of course, the original version of the book was rejected something like thirty times on accounts of it being blasphemous, so perhaps this was a conscious act of restraint on his part. Also, at this point in the year's reading a lot of these books are starting to just wash over me and I think that a lot of them won't really hit me as they should until a bit into next year when I can think back over them properly. Either way, I would definitely like to check out Ulysses since I've been meaning to get to it for a while. Probably won't for a while still, though.

Now: let's click on the pants zone!

Anthony Jeselnik

2008-10-06T00:06:00.000-07:00

Dear Anthony Jeselnik,

Way to cash in on contemporary stand up "humor" and still be completely incapable of saying anything remotely clever or funny.

Love,
A fan!!!!

#43: Siddhartha

2008-10-05T17:31:00.000-07:00

I think the best advice I could give for someone in high school is to not take AP English. The normal senior English class is a breeze--don't stress yourself out for no reason. What's more, the class which AP replaces in your freshman year of college is also absolutely nothing. Don't waste your time or effort.

A few people I know read Siddhartha when they were in high school--I know Jon in particular was really impressed by it--but I just kept on reading whatever I felt like because I sure as hell didn't need to actually read any of Ellen Foster to convince my pace-setter English teacher that I was keeping up. And now that I'm actually interested in reading it, I enjoyed Siddhartha quite a bit. Just like Slaughterhouse Five, I feel like my appreciation of it is entirely my own, uninfluenced by some class that's more trouble than its worth. What's more, there is actually quite a few recurrent threads of thought between Slaughterhouse Five and Siddhartha--thinking about it, its a pretty odd coincidence that I happened to read them back to back. In particular the notion of time, and how people fit into it, is very similar between the two. Tralfamadorian time is not unlike the notion of time which Siddhartha envisages while sitting before the river which comes to mean everything to him.

To be honest, I really didn't know much about the book before reading it and assumed that it was a gentle bit of historical fiction--exploring how Siddhartha became the Buddha--but was surprised and quite pleased to see the direction Hesse took it, which is a decidedly existential take on many Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. The message he seems to be striving most of all to get across is that life must be lived including mistakes, one can never really learn wisdom from teachings and even if one agrees with the teachings they must experience it themselves, not take it as given. So now I feel even more justified in dodging homework and coming upon this outside of class. What's interesting, as well, is seeing where some very German concepts push up and coalesce into the Buddhist and Hindu philosophies. Schopenhauer wrote extensively about the Veil of Maya, which is present here both as realism for the Indian characters, as well as seeming to be a critique of Schopenhauer's dogmatic insistence on pessimism. Siddhartha's interest in the river as a sort of "flow of time" call to mind both Anaximander and Nietzsche's later interpretations of him--in particular the idea of existence as constant flux, and that one can never step into the same river twice. And in some of the final passages there is a completely clear Heideggerian notion of man: thrown, and projected into his own future--Siddhartha comments that within the young there is already their approaching death, and within the sinner there is already the repentant, etc.

But what is perhaps the most striking is how Hesse manages to keep these ideas from becoming heady or cumbersome, keeping them within the reach of Siddhartha's own unassuming reach. The prose is spare in a way that leads to many pleasant surprises when a poetic phrase seems to emerge almost out of necessity from the events, as opposed to craftsmanship. And despite its slim size, it seems to take quite some time to get through--each section feels filling, though it is often only a few pages.

I don't know that I would count this as one of the best this year, but I certainly enjoyed it, and can see myself coming back to it almost definitely in the future. Also, its nice to get a bit of a picture for Hesse, who I haven't read at all until now.

#42: Slaughterhouse Five

2008-09-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

"Art renders the sight of life bearable by laying over it the gauze of impure thinking." -Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't often disagree with Fritz and I don't plan on starting here. What I can say is that I think people read entirely too much nonfiction and not nearly enough fiction. What Kurt Vonnegut does with Slaughterhouse Five is show exactly why it is the case that fiction is so important, and why Mann has dubbed it "the humanistic science."

I didn't read this book in high school because I didn't really read any of the required reading in high school. If it was required then I thought that it sucked and was probably shitty. Obviously that is not the case with Slaughterhouse Five, but I'm glad that I read it simply because I wanted to and not because I was going to have a pop quiz on what Bertram Copeland Rumfoord thought of the bombing of Dresden. I've been reading it again at the request of a friend who was reading it as well, so there can be a sort of sounding board for thoughts about it.

One thought that I had when reading this again (and actually one which has remained since reading it the first time) is the question of why Louis-Ferdinand Cèline is not read, discussed, or even acknowledged more. He gets name dropped about ten pages into this, one of the most read books in America. I think. Maybe what used to be the most read book in America, replaced now by the works of the esteemed Stephanie Mayer, Janet Evanovich and Chuck Palahniuk. Anyone who has read Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, or Guignol's Band seems unable to remove themselves from the experience. Cèline's writing is tremendously powerful, bold, revealing and filled with care. That last one may be disputed but I believe that he has great care for his terrible thoughts. The only reason I can see that he is not read is because it is problematic to say that someone who came out as an anti-semite can write good things. Is that what we've come down to, though? Heidegger was a cowardly nazi stooge and an adulterer to boot, but he is often (rightly) considered to be one of the, if not the, most important philosopher of the 20th century. Ezra Pound was a fascist asshole but poetry geeks love him. Burroughs was a drug addict and a pederast but you can't deny his writing. James Joyce, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, Raymond Carver, and Shane McGowan all either were or are alcoholics--and in the case of Raymond Carver he didn't even write half the shit that gets slapped with the tag "by Raymond Carver"--but people still love them. And Alan Moore worships a snake. So people have problems, is what I'm saying, whether or not they write. Yet everyone else seems to have been given a pass, leaving Cèline out in the cold. There still needs to be a stronger push for the disconflation of the author and the work, because people seem to be having a very hard time with this. Perhaps this is exactly why people have such an unfortunate tendency towards non-fiction and easy lit: because it doesn't raise the question in their minds that maybe bad people are capable of great things, and maybe great people are capable of bad things. Reading non-fiction one is only associated with events, they aren't traversing the locale of someone who may or may not be a good guy. But you aren't racist for reading Huckleberry Finn--that's something all high school teachers seem obsessed with belaboring--so why can't we accept that you don't have to be anti-semitical to read Cèline? Cèline himself was, paradoxically, a pacifist and after having been released from prison and repatrioted stated, "On the subject of Jews, I grew to like them a long time ago." Its hard to tell whether this is subterfuge or what, but he is not one to cover for himself, so I highly doubt that he is saying it as lip service. So at that point is it even still useful to blacklist him as anti-semetic? If all it does is mean that good books are not being read?

Vonnegut wrote an introduction which was published in every edition I've seen of Cèline's last three novels. In it, he describes Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Cèline's real name) as a great man who did terrible things. A doctor who often treated the poor--accepting nothing in return when that was all they had--and a brilliant writer, as well as an anti-semite and more often than not a raving lunatic. For the sheer impentrability of his persona alone I think he should be examined more, as it takes bravery to look into something which simply destroys the line between beautiful and hideous. The section which follows the earlier Nietzsche quote in Human, All Too Human articulates it better than I ever could:

One is limiting art much too severely when one demands that only the composed soul, suspended in moral balance, may express itself there. As in the plastic arts, there is in music and poetry an art of the ugly soul, as well as an art of the beautiful soul; and in achieving art's mightiest effects—breaking souls, moving stones, and humanizing animals—-perhaps that very art has been most successful.

Often it has been the ugly soul (or at least the pretty fucking weird one) which has created the greatest things. But what is most important of all is that fiction continue to be read because its effects simply cannot be emulated. In a poetry class I once took (bad idea) a guy claimed that the difference between poetry and prose is that poetry wasn't bound by logical progression from beginning to end. That guy was a moron. Fiction, and novels in particular, are pretty much capable of anything when someone approaches them creatively. Vonnegut did that in Slaughterhouse. He eviscerated the difference between fact and fiction, as well as the idea that prose must move like a person--starting somewhere and ending somewhere, but seeing it all in a straight line. Cèline did the same thing, bringing the novel as close as it can get to having some bat-shit crazy French guy yelling at you for a couple hundred pages. I, for one, appreciate that opportunity. Non-fiction can be fun and informative and provoke many "oh that's interesting" moments, but it isn't art. And I think Cèline was right when he said "without incessant artistic creation by everyone, there can be no society."

#41: The Ruined Map

2008-09-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

My current job (ending today) has been to sit at a desk in a hotel from the hours of 4pm until midnight. I watch as about twenty people go in and out of a conference room but beyond that I don't really do much of anything except read, which has been beneficial. Quartet I finished on Monday, today I'm slogging through New Grub Street, and yesterday I read Kobo Abe's The Ruined Map.

At the Q&A session with Paul Auster someone asked him if he was influenced by this novel and he sort of dodged the question, saying that he had read it but that it wasn't really an influence. Liar! That's fine though. To be honest I think that his quasi philsophical meta-detective novels are a bit better than this one but, regardless, the similarities are beyond number. The Ruined Map starts out with a short case file describing the situation: a young woman's husband has been missing for six months and she wants to find him. Much more so than "where is he," the real question that emerges in the novel is: does someone have a right to disappear? I think that this moves in a somewhat more typical detective fashion than Auster's New York Trilogy, but it follows a very similar spiraling descent into questions of identity, the relational existence of reality, and the self/other distinction. Unfortunately, many of the sentences seem rather awkwardly constructed and I have a feeling that this is due to a spotty translation. In other sections, however, the prose slams into you with otherworldly clarity, but the disparity between these sterling passages and the rest of the text is a bit too high.

Among the events, however, there is one seemingly autonymous moment in which the detective briefly preys on a young girl at the library. He witnesses her damage one of the books and tells her to follow him, cashing in on her embarassment and relative innocence. When they are outside he pulls the car up and offers to drive her home before snapping, slamming the door in her face, and leaving her perplexed on the sidewalk. It is the scenes like this which justify the book's fantastic epigram which follows:

The city--a bounded infinity. A labyrinth where you are never lost. Your private map where every block bears exactly the same number.
Even if you lose your way, you cannot go wrong.

It is this idea of the labyrinth in which you are never lost that grounds the novel, and its conclusion has the strength of culminating its circuitous paths--the only problem is that some of the paths just don't read as well as others. Intensely problematic (at least, I found) were the extended colloqueys without any "I said," "she said," (etc) to distinguish between who is talking. Though the case could be made that this is part of the book's surreal aesthetic I found that it was more detracting than supportive of the feel. It came across as affected and confusing rather than effectively confusing.

So I have a general feeling of ambivalence left with me. It has some true strengths and as a historical document of the metaphysical detective genre it has its place, but I came away less impressed than I expected based on the high praise and interesting concepts. I'll definitely keep him in mind (Woman in the Dunes is also supposed to be good), but I won't yet recommend him unless there is some specific reason. Let's just say the case isn't closed on this one yet! HAHAHAHA! HAHAHA! Oh god...

#39-40: Good Morning, Midnight / Quartet

2008-09-22T14:08:00.001-07:00

I've tried for a while and just have never been able to find any female authors that I particularly like. Sylvia Plath makes me roll my eyes, Jane Austen writes about uninteresting subjects, Zadie Smith is a bit too precious, and Ayn Rand is a windbag (at best). The one novel I read by Mercè Rodoreda wasn't bad, and Frankenstein is actually quite good, but in Jean Rhys I feel as though I've finally found a female novelist who I can appreciate.

As a half Dominican, half British, often poor and perpetually nationless woman in the early twentieth century, the sense of being adrift in her writing jumps off the page. Good Morning, Midnight picks up after the protagonist (who chose to go by the name Sasha, and whose real name is never really revealed) has tried unsuccessfully to drink herself to death for an extended period of time in London. This, apparently, is something Rhys herself also failed at between the years of 1939 and 1957 (a long bender!). A friend, then, gives Sasha some money so that she can visit Paris, where she has many of her youthful memories, and hopefully come away with a renewed sense of life. During her time there, the stream of consciousness first person narration jumps between the past and present, distracted by objects and breaking thoughts off halfway through, giving a sense of being awash in events and places (as well as waves of alcohol). Her fractured mindset gives way to the most ellipses I've ever seen in a book not written by Céline, which was pleasing in and of itself, and the language alone carries this book far beyond the disconnect between genders and places it firmly in the universal human experience.

Good Morning, Midnight was the last thing she wrote before disappearing for a decade, and lying in relative obscurity for another eight years. Quartet, however, was her first novel and the second one of hers I read. It reads much more traditionally than Midnight, and seems to be more directly autobiographical (though dealing with many of the same subjects and events). Also about a woman without anchor in Paris, Marya's husband is arrested and thrown in jail while she is left to wander the streets and become acquainted with her own alienation. She is sort of picked up by another British couple living there and encouraged into a highly passive aggressive affair with the husband, while the relationship of the three of them grows tense and insulting. Both novels seem obsessed with the notion of humans as essentially cruel, and in both the protagonist is equally harmed by those who care for her as those who don't--however they avoid a sense of melodramatic theatre of the tortured heroine (which is why they succeed). Quartet was originally published under the title Postures, though neither name seems to really suit the novel quite as well as Good Morning, Midnight's does. Good Morning, Midnight should really be the name of her entire catalouge since, both as a book and as a title, it pierces down to the heart of what she is writing about, which is the encroaching night.

#38: Bullet Park

2008-09-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

The oft-asked question, "How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever's?" is answered in this devastatingly sharp book. In a very poor American Lit class at the tail end of my UCSC tenure, I read Cheever's short "The Death of Justina" and realized that it was hands down the best thing we read all quarter. There was also a Joyce Carol Oats short that was surprisingly good, but I'm going with my man John C. on this one. Earlier in the year I read Falconer and was a little disappointed with what I found. There was some real strength in there but it didn't have any of the urgency that "The Death of Justina" utterly exuded out of every word, and in the end I came off of it a little flat. I was even going to write off that short as possibly a great fluke (since Falconer seems to be the most critically acclaimed of his work) until I found my dad's old copy of Bullet Park lying around and decided to give him another look. Admittedly, this was also an attempt to get another quick read under my belt before dealing with George Gissing, who I had queued up but that's neither here nor there. I'm glad I did, though, because Bullet Park is a novel which finally reaches greatness with America as its chief influence.

There is a deep care for the characters present in Bullet Park, which gives them all a much needed, very human aspect. You can see why someone would fall under the lulling influence of the American Dream just as easily as you can see why someone would want to kill that person. There is a complexity to even the banal societies which allows their banality to breathe naturally without coming off as hectoring or dismissive. And the rampant alcoholism present makes Bukowski seem sort of like that kid who just found out about The Boondock Saints and talks about it all the time. I can't stress how many times people go to get a drink, go to the pantry to mix a drink, have some cocktails, scotch and soda, scotch and water, whiskey, bourbon, gin and scotch again. And the absolute casual assiduity with which these arrive in the narrative levels them down to the most natural and unthinking acts. It's a sort of blurred, flattened existence which is violently broken up in a way completely unexpected to the inhabitants of Bullet Park. But one of the main strengths of the book is in the way it unfolds for the reader--naturally and unrushed. Though one can see what is coming, it isn't until the final act that it becomes apparent that anything will happen at all. It is really beautifully constructed. Thankfully, the publisher of the edition I have has included very little in the way of plot description, because I think that this is how the book was meant to be read. So instead of getting into the plot myself, I'll say that the book is fantastic and reprint the description here:

"Bullet Park. The beautiful and leafy suburban village where the American Dream went crazy and tried to kill a young boy with gasoline and a burning cigarette. The boy was saved. The Dream died."

Paul Auster cont.

2008-09-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Commonwealth Club of Silicon Valley, I saw Paul Auster field some questions last night and talk about his career in general, and all in all it was really great. I don't think it's of any importance to discuss this like I've been going over the books, though, so I'll just mention some points of interest.

I found out about Kobo Abe, who I'm now very interested in, as well as a book called W, whose author I forgot the name of and now can find no information on because searching for "W" is entirely too broad (anyone know who wrote it?).
Coetzee, Murakami, and Delillo were the names he mentioned as being good contemporary authors. I've been very skeptical of DeLillo because of his precocious high school kid fan base, but I guess I need to actually stare into the abyss now (meaning I'm going to go watch the movie The Abyss).
Compared Barack Obama to the Mets (perennial Mets fan, as Auster is) in that he's sincerely worried but hopes he/they win.
Oddly enough, Auster is friends with Philip Petit--the Man on a Wire guy--and he also possibly influenced Beckett to not truncate the English translation of Mercier et Camier (a book I read last year).
I guess that Hunger introduction was taken from Auster's Masters Thesis, written when he was 23. Hopefully that means that one day my Masters Thesis, "Why I Think Skateboards are Super Cool!", will be published.

#37: Oracle Night

2008-09-11T11:36:00.001-07:00

Like Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster seems to be an author primarily of ideas. Both have struggled with the explosion done to traditional literature by people like Beckett and Burroughs and now aim to fit that sort of experimentation into a somewhat more traditional narrative. Auster's New York Trilogy is a collection of short novels which explode the detective genre by following utterly circuitous paths to the point where the mystery no longer means anything, the detective is usually someone else, and the victim has usually disappeared. The character Paul Auster also shows up in them, apart from the narrator. When I found that he had also written an introduction to a later edition of Knut Hamsun's Hunger I read it and was pretty shocked with how perfectly he articulated everything unavoidably brilliant about the book. So I've held him in pretty high regards since those two forays into his writing.

Oracle Night, however, is a somewhat challenging book. Not challenging in that it challenges your expectations for a novel, or that it challenges your ability to grasp it, but challenging in that I was a little taken aback. It strikes me as significantly more pop than anything else I've seen him capable of, falling into many of the trapping of contemporary American fiction--bad dialog, somewhat safe characters, the protaganist is a successful writer, etc etc. Plus, I don't want to seem like a fascist but I just don't believe that there is any place for the word "dude" in books, as partial as I am to that particular colloquialism. Once Chuck Palahniuk threw "dude" around egregiously in Choke it helped me to realize how little I had liked him beforehand. When it comes to books, "Dude" is the nail in the coffin for me. Now, I made a point to move past it because "dude" only ever pops up once in this book (and Auster's credentials are significantly more noteworthy than Palahniuk's) but it gets at the problem with the dialog in the book--too much is shown and too little is told. You can have a character say a lot without ever having him quoted, and that's exactly what I wished Auster had done with the Jacob character. Oh, and another thing: whenever a book mentions a fictitious punk band the name is always stupid and it always comes across kind of pandering. So two nails in the coffin.

But this does neglect the fact that there are some fantastic ideas in the novel. The first half moves along swiftly and explores some very interesting places. The novel which the protagonist is writing--and its own internal novel--take over the vast majority of the story for a while and are, quite honestly, much more interesting than the real novel. Is this a comment on the mundane reality of factual existence? I don't think so. But it did work quite well, I thought. Once this section reaches its untimely close, however, nothing really interesting happens the rest of the time.

It is also difficult for me coming off novels like The Clown and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, in which the prose is endlessly lyrical and is constantly exposing the human qualities of its characters, since Oracle Night is tiresomely American in its short, swift sentences which simply move the story along. The last paragraph is really the only one where a troubling feeling is examined, however briefly.

So I guess I wouldn't really recommend this book, though it had its highlights. I'm going to see Auster speak later on in the month so hopefully I can get a better feel for him and, in particular, find better books of his than this one. But I am at least glad that this was just lying around and not something that I spent money on. Small pleasures!

#36: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

2008-09-09T02:24:00.000-07:00

"The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail. And to see all that in the pitch darkness!" - Yukio Mishima

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a book which seems to exist sheerly by the strength of its own alienation. Often alienation is perceived as something which is reactive--one is alienated because they aren't accepted elsewhere. This doesn't even come close to probing the depths to which Mishima explores in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion--it is something entirely different. It explores alienation as alienation, and not alienation from something in particular. And it does so with such incredibly forceful prose that it is utterly impossible to deny this way of life that many people simply can't imagine exists. Mizoguchi, the novel's protagonist (based on a real Buddhist acolyte, and burgeoning Herostratus in Japan), describes his progression from a withdrawn child entranced by beauty, to a young priest completely obsessed with destruction. His father, a dying Zen Buddhist priest himself, frequently describes the Temple of the Golden Pavilion as the most beautiful thing in existence, and so Mizoguchi struggles his entire life to find this same beauty in the temple. Later, he is left to become an acolyte at the temple and finds himself utterly captivated with it, to the point that it interferes with all other aspects of his life. He is torn between the factuality of the real world, and the ephemeral otherworldliness of the Temple as it exists in his mind. In the end, the only thoughts which he can bear any longer are of burning the temple to the ground and destroying himself in the process.

In the same way he is constantly struggling with the Zen teachings he undergoes and--in a way--his own insanely destructive path has a certain aspect of the Zen to it. The categorical denial of any dialectical reconciliation between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit is embodied in his act of arson, just as is mentioned many times in the Zen problem recounted in the book: "Nansen Kills a Cat," in which a Buddhist scholar slits the throat of a recently discovered kitten to end the discussion of which temple will care for it. Mizoguchi continually mistakes metaphors for challenges, and is taken under the wing of a nihilistic clubfooted student who also twists the Zen teachings to fit his own take on life. This relationship is further complicated by Mizoguchi's friendship with another young acolyte who exists in a seemingly perpetual state of human understanding and caring, twisting Mizoguchi's many brooding and dangerous thoughts into benign niceties. Where Mishima succeeds wildly is in denying any answer to which side is correct (or even which side is different), and completely avoiding any sort of moralizing so that, like the Zen riddles mulled over endlessly, paradox is upheld and the dialectic is utterly disarmed.

This is by far the best thing I've read by Mishima.

Listless

2008-09-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

1. Peeling the Onion - Günter Grass
2. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets - David Simon
3. The Glass Bees - Ernst Jünger
4. Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks
5. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
6. Foe - J.M. Coetzee
7. The Aspern Papers - Henry James
8. Conversations With Professor Y - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
9. Cat and Mouse - Günter Grass
10. Turn of the Screw - Henry James
11. Blindness - Jose Saramago
12. I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski (does this count?)
13. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
14. The Farewell Party - Milan Kundera
15. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
16-18. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
19. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
20. The Way to Rainy Mountain - N. Scott Momaday
21. Faust Pt. 1 - Goethe
22. Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
23. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
24. Tripmaster Monkey - Maxine Hong Kingston
25. Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith - Mark E. Smith
26. Four Great Plays (A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder) - Henrik Ibsen
27. Cancer Ward - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
28. Falconer - John Cheever
29. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami
30. We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
31. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll
32. The Stranger - Albert Camus
33. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend - Thomas Mann
34. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
35. The Clown - Heinrich Böll

Getting there...

#34-35 Doctor Faustus / The Clown

2008-09-01T13:41:00.000-07:00

"Yes, Monsignor Hinterpförtner is right: we are lost. In other words, the war is lost; but that means more than a lost campaign, it means in very truth that we are lost; our character, our cause, our hope, our history. It is all up with Germany, it will be all up with her. She is marked down for collapse, economic, political, moral, spiritual, in short all-embracing, unparalleled, final collapse." -Thomas Mann

As far as I am concerned, just about all the world's greatest literature was written between the years 1870 and 1970. Granted, there are some good things on either side of those bookends (Don Quixote before, John Banville after), but if you want to see just what books are capable of then that century stretch is a pretty damn good place to look.

I have a growing tendency towards German literature and a sizable portion of what I read now is German but, obviously, things are a little conflicted if you're reading German literature from around this time. Perhaps that's exactly why the writing is so strong: because of the immense conflict of the time. Well, I've recently finished two books which articulate this palpably: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: The Life of The German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend, and Heinrich Böll's The Clown.

Mann's take on the Faust tale runs roughly from shortly before the first World War up until the unfortunate and inevitable outbreak of the second, and it is from this that the earlier quote comes from. Though it is, ostensibly, the story of the fictional Adrian Leverkuhn's final damnation it is much more involved with the state of Germany's soul than Leverkuhn's alone. The narration takes place during WWII, as Mann's narrator is saddened and alienated by his own country's actions, and as he looks back on the downfall of his friend Leverkuhn. Since it is by Mann, there are lengthy moments of very dry, hifalutin prose, but he is a master of the "humanistic science" (as he dubs literature) and so its moments of clarity very finely explore the highly conflicted nature of being a German at a time when Germany's actions are horrific. The unfortunate thing about WWII is that over time it is all too easy to simply look at Nazis as evil--and it is also difficult to distinguish between the average German citizen during this era and a Nazi. Though their actions were frightening and inhumane, even Nazis were humans and so it is necessary to look at the situation in human terms. This is something which Gunter Grass's memoir Peeling the Onion did quite well: explore the unfortunate involvement that actual human beings had in truly inhuman acts. Mann's stance is more distanced--the war feels as though it is being viewed from a screen, all distant bomb blasts and low rumbles--so it takes a more metaphorical position in the book. The war exists as the fall of Germany (just as the leaving of Gretchen was the fall of Faust) since Germany has certainly sold its soul in its actions. However, there is something sadly consistent between its fall and its wistful philosophies, and fate seems to be the main catalyst for action in Doctor Faustus. There is never even an active selling-of-the-soul for Leverkuhn. He is merely visited by the Mephisto character who reveals the fact that Leverkuhn's soul is already sold. It really only begins to make sense when looking at Faust's own words, as often quoted by Mann: "I die as a bad and as a good Christian." Mann takes Germany's most famous contribution to Western Literature and uses it to show how little his country has learned from its own creations.

If Doctor Faustus feels as though it is leading up to the fall, The Clown exists as a survivor in the rubble of previous mistakes. Böll's writing is even often described as "Trummerliteratur," or literature of rubble. This is felt tremendously in The Clown both in that Schnier (the titular clown) was a child during the war and is now dealing with its lasting vestiges, and in that he has effectively destroyed himself at the book's outset and is now dealing with the rubble of his own life. After an embarrassing drunken performance he is left with no career, no money, and his fiancee has left him for another man. And he's almost out of cigarettes, too. The caustic narration explores hypocrisy in many different forms--from those who now speak glibly about "Jewish spiritualism" but until the last moment of the war were violently calling for the death of the "Jewish Yankee," to the Catholic priests who determine others' subsistence levels though there own is much higher. From under his white makeup, The Clown turns his mirror on society and shows everyone the clowns that they are. Its gripping and powerful and quite sad.

What is also alarming is the quote from the Christian Science Monitor on the book's back, describing it as being "filled with gentleness, high comic spirits, and human sympathy." This is alarming not because it is wrong but because it is so accurate. Where are these Christians?--those who actually stand for the things which Christ taught. Were this book published today, in the climate of the Ann Coulters and the Jerry Falwells, it would be deemed blasphemous for its relentless assaults on both Catholicism and Protestantism, though it is impossible to deny that these attacks are like those of a beat dog: angry after having been hurt so many times.

I've been lucky to have read many good books recently (I'm on a pretty good streak right now) but The Clown stands out even among some of the best of those. So far I'd say the absolute best books I've read this year have been this, Hunger and Cancer Ward. But Mark E. Smith's book was pretty good too.

#33 (and #27) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich / Cancer Ward

2008-08-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

Hot off the heels of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, I recently read through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. These two books, though similar in content, are wildly divergent in form. Cancer Ward is a bona fide tome. Like Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain it flows at an explorational pace, letting characters emerge and develop over a period of time. Ivan Denisovich, however, seems to have no time for any sort of langour. It takes place in a single day, like the title implies, and follows the eponymous work camp prisoner from reveille to lights out as he builds a wall of bricks, buys tobacco from a Latvian, runs errands in hopes of receiving an extra bowl of thin gruel and ends his day by tucking his legs into the arm of his jacket to stay warm. The prose is quick and things happen quickly, without time to really sink in. Shukhov (Ivan) is introduced immediately, and the characters all simply exist around him as they have for the past 8 years of his sentence.

In a sense, Ivan is much like Kostoglotov--the main character of Cancer Ward--who, himself, has earlier served life in exile and labor camps, except this time of his life is never looked at up front, only through dialouge and ruminations. What's more, Kostoglotov isn't even introduced until after one of his foils. The focus of Cancer Ward moves like a camera, following characters where ever they go and veering off to follow different ones when they interact. Both books evoke Solzhenitsyn's almost completely inexplicable sense of dignity and stoicism. The fact that he was able to survive his own time in labor camps, exile, and as a cancer patient, let alone maintain any (bittersweet) optimism is almost impossible to believe, but is also impossible to write off when reading his novels. Denisovich even concludes, at the end of the day, that his day has been a particularly good one: he had two bowls of gruel, a chunk of bread sewed into his saw mattress to be saved for later, new tobacco and he managed to not be thrown into solitary confinement. There is a palpable joy in these small pleasures for him and he even ends up concluding that, to him, that bowl of gruel (in all its meagerness) is more fulfilling than release simply because it is attainable and staves off hunger for that much longer.

What I'm trying to say is that these are two really fucking good books from a brave and almost indestructably critical voice.

What is unfortunate and infuriating is how little coverage his recent death had on stations touting themselves as "news." The passing of a literary giant, nobel prize winner, and intellectual treasure with such little fanfare is a sad sign for the state of public interest in the arts. NPR covered it which is unsurprising (though very reassuring), as did online news sources, but from what I saw that day there was not even a mention of the event on CNN, MSNBC or the like (I won't even pretend to be surprised by the near analphabetic Fox News). Instead what passes for news is essentially the political equivolent of a gossip rag--parcing idiotically the minutia of campaign trail bullshit and talking points on polls etc. These things are not news. Even on a political level, the importance of Solzhenitsyn's life and work is significantly greater than questions on whether Obama can get Hillary supporters to his side, or the (unsurprising) foibles of the McCain campaign's attempts to reach out to anybody. Yes, this election will cast a long shadow. Yes, I sincerely hope people are smarter than they were this time four years ago (but they aren't). Yes, it's good to know the facts about someone who may have a major role in either restoring or reducing to fuck-all America's credibility to the rest of the known universe. But I guarantee that in three years--hell, in one year--no one will be reading the books written on these campaigns. Though the number is decreasing, people will always read the fantastic things this man struggled to get to the ears of humanity, simply because they are truly important--and not because they are "a shattering portrait of life inside Stalinist Russia," as the publisher of Denisovich has slapped on the back (its important to note that Solzhenitsyn was just as critical of America when given amnesty here), but because it is an incredible portrait of humanity which reveals blemishes next to beauty.

A Salty Salute

2008-08-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

New beginnings and what not!

Alright, here's the deal as best as I can figure it. I've been playing music in bands for a long time and I've met a lot of people and talked with music about them and had a grand ol' time. However, I've noticed that when I meet someone who is a stone cold reader I find myself relishing the conversation a lot more than usual. Dudes in bands love music--and who could blame them? But there's something about a wildly good book that just knocks you on your ass.

For a long time I've been considering getting some manner of "blog" (though I've dreaded using that retarded word) and this year I decided to undertake the challenge of reading 50 books before the 365 day mark. I've read some really good ones recently, sos I figured I might as well write about those. I usually end up writing songs about them anyway. So, in accordance with the name, I plan on writing about books and shit! Hopefully you like books and shit! Hopefully you'll like Books and Shit (the blog)! I think I also might review some Fish and Chips places because I'm finding myself enamored with them. Maybe not though.