in Runners World (he and Joyce Carol Oates must be the two most famous writers-who-run, no?):
One aspect that I have gained from running in the past 22 years that has most pleased me is that it has helped me develop respect about my own physical being.
I think to realize this is very important for all human beings.
To have such respect for your own body makes it possible to do the same for others. If more people on the earth shared this same feeling, there should be no terrorism or wars. Obviously, to our great disappointment, things are not that simple, that much I understand.
The most important qualities to be a fiction writer are probably imaginative ability, intelligence, and focus. But in order to maintain these qualities in a high and constant level, you must never neglect to keep up your physical strength.
Without a solid base of physical strength, you can't accomplish anything very intricate or demanding. That's my belief. If I did not keep running, I think my writing would be very different from what it is now.
This is cheering, I don't like running very much (if at all; I mean, I do a bit of it now and then, on a treadmill, strictly for fitness purposes, but I don't find it enjoyable) but I do like Haruki Murakami a lot and (unrelated) I have been spending huge amounts of time and energy this year on exercise, it is heartening to see someone intellectual make the official argument in its favor. Secretly I still feel that maximum productivity is ensured by large amounts of caffeine and nicotine, highly irregular sleep hours and occasional overindulgence in alcohol to let off steam (exercise does not form a part of this regime), but I see that this is not sustainable in the long run....
On another unrelated note, except that it vaguely has to do with sport, that Sports Illustrated piece by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams about Barry Bonds and steroids is really an excellent read.
(Thanks to Conversational Reading for the running link and The Millions for the Bonds one. And Game of Shadows is now at #4 on Amazon, how fun.)
It's clearly one of those weird blog-addicted days, I've got one more post TK in a little bit after I go and retrieve my laundry from the laundromat. It is going to be a great luxury, aside from all the other reasons, to be back in NY in an apartment where there's laundry in the basement.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
There is no particular reason
I should be linking to reviews of Ludmila's Broken English by DBC Pierre, but this TLS one is rather irresistible (the author is--oh, I am glad I do not have one of these names myself, much as I hate my own first name at least it doesn't have any obvious associations other than the general unfortunate 1970s-ness of it all--Peter Parker):
It is all too characteristic of Pierre's writing that nobody in the novel merely looks at a person: Blair 'hung a stare on his brother's hair', while Bunny in his turn 'hung a dull eye on his brother', then 'curled an eye over his back like Quasimodo'. A few pages on, 'one eye curled down like the feeler on a snail', then, later, Bunny 'wound his eyes up to Blair' and (yet again) 'hung his eyeballs on Blair'. When eyes are not being hung or curled, they are being tossed about ('he threw an eye to the elder', 'she tossed her eyes to a crowbar') or sliced ('he sliced his eyes into tiny leers', 'she sliced her eyes at Gregor').
(In the unlikely event that this inspires you to preorder the novel from US Amazon, here's the link for Ludmila's Broken English.)
Elsewhere on the Times website, Celia Brayfield soft-heartedly observes (from painful personal experience, evidently) that "it does reviewers no credit to join the kind of feeding frenzy that is churning bloody water around D. B. C. Pierre. A second novel is like February: one of God’s serious mistakes and something you just have to get through before life can move on." But I disagree with her. I like all different kinds of books, I read Vernon God Little with an open mind and found it direly awful, a novel of no integrity, shamefully crowd-pleasing (I suppose its most likeable feature is the author's show-off-y "look-at-me" air, if you like that kind of thing that is) and displaying a uniquely insensitive ear for American English. (It is second only to Martin Amis's Night Train in this; I really, really like Amis in general, at one point he was one of my favorites, but I read this book with my jaw hanging open in amazement that he had been allowed to publish it in that form--the first-person voice of the American woman cop is extraordinarily unpersuasively realized.) I think that it is inhumane to brutalize minor authors but that the really high-profile ones are fair game. I sympathize with the pain and the plight of the author, in other words, but occasionally I read a book that so outrages my sensibilities and my beliefs about what is or is not worth reading that I feel compelled to join the frenzy. In fact, it would almost be worth reading this one just so that I can righteously say why I think it's bad (hmmm, maybe not quite worth it, but if I come across a copy in an idle moment, it would be tempting).
(The Literary Saloon had a sensible post about all this some days ago that includes some other review links.)
It is all too characteristic of Pierre's writing that nobody in the novel merely looks at a person: Blair 'hung a stare on his brother's hair', while Bunny in his turn 'hung a dull eye on his brother', then 'curled an eye over his back like Quasimodo'. A few pages on, 'one eye curled down like the feeler on a snail', then, later, Bunny 'wound his eyes up to Blair' and (yet again) 'hung his eyeballs on Blair'. When eyes are not being hung or curled, they are being tossed about ('he threw an eye to the elder', 'she tossed her eyes to a crowbar') or sliced ('he sliced his eyes into tiny leers', 'she sliced her eyes at Gregor').
(In the unlikely event that this inspires you to preorder the novel from US Amazon, here's the link for Ludmila's Broken English.)
Elsewhere on the Times website, Celia Brayfield soft-heartedly observes (from painful personal experience, evidently) that "it does reviewers no credit to join the kind of feeding frenzy that is churning bloody water around D. B. C. Pierre. A second novel is like February: one of God’s serious mistakes and something you just have to get through before life can move on." But I disagree with her. I like all different kinds of books, I read Vernon God Little with an open mind and found it direly awful, a novel of no integrity, shamefully crowd-pleasing (I suppose its most likeable feature is the author's show-off-y "look-at-me" air, if you like that kind of thing that is) and displaying a uniquely insensitive ear for American English. (It is second only to Martin Amis's Night Train in this; I really, really like Amis in general, at one point he was one of my favorites, but I read this book with my jaw hanging open in amazement that he had been allowed to publish it in that form--the first-person voice of the American woman cop is extraordinarily unpersuasively realized.) I think that it is inhumane to brutalize minor authors but that the really high-profile ones are fair game. I sympathize with the pain and the plight of the author, in other words, but occasionally I read a book that so outrages my sensibilities and my beliefs about what is or is not worth reading that I feel compelled to join the frenzy. In fact, it would almost be worth reading this one just so that I can righteously say why I think it's bad (hmmm, maybe not quite worth it, but if I come across a copy in an idle moment, it would be tempting).
(The Literary Saloon had a sensible post about all this some days ago that includes some other review links.)
Read it and weep!
Discretion compels me not to say much about this wonderfully (and very precisely) scathing piece by Claude Rawson in the TLS (no subscription required), A dot com history of English Literature (a review of The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780, edited by John Richetti). I haven't seen the volume in question, I know and admire the editor and any number of the contributors, in short I really must not get myself enmired in controversy here. But I do want to take this chance to say how very much I owe to Claude, from whom I learned the lion's share of what I know about eighteenth-century literature. (Also Claude was a student of C. S. Lewis, and it gives me a thrill to think that I was the student of the student of C. S. Lewis--a Monty Pythonesque formulation, somehow, but still one that means a lot to me.)
Claude was one of my two dissertation advisors in graduate school (the other was David Bromwich), and I cannot imagine a better pair. From Claude I learned how to read widely as well as deeply, to attend to the smallest fluctuations of tone and style and to make imaginative but responsible connections between works from different times and places (also to use the correct editions and to be scrupulous in my footnotes). Every time I read Swift (and this is true for other authors as well, Dryden and Fielding in particular and mock-epic in general, but Swift especially), I feel grateful to Claude for having opened it up to me in the first place. (And David Bromwich is the person who taught me how to think and argue, in the first instance by taking the time to read Burke and Hume and Adam Smith very closely and in the second by giving the most perceptive and helpful comments on my dissertation chapters that you can imagine. And how to read ethically, in the most serious sense.)
From both my advisors, I also learned the kinds of lesson that you might take from Orwell or Flaubert: that clarity of thought depends on precision of style, and that saying or writing things because you think you should will lead to a kind of intellectual and ethical bad faith that will be immediately visible to your more attentive readers. I think I was already fairly intellectually honest when I got to graduate school, but I learned there to be absolutely scrupulous; indeed, to this day I never write a sentence without asking myself whether it's something I could stand by even for these most stringent readers.
Anyway, that was an awfully long preamble, I don't know why I'm in such a rambling mood today, but here's a paragraph of Claude's review that will give you a lovely if minor feel for his style:
There is a vaguely panic-stricken geniality about this book, constantly looking over its shoulder and anxious to keep everybody happy. The suggested canon-changes are affirmed with a kind of flagging aplomb. The language is habitually undercut or qualified, as if subject to an unseen censorious gaze: “in large measure”, “one might even say”, “to some extent”, “in some important sense”, “as it were”, “as they have been called”, “it can be argued”, “as they called it”, “in many ways”, “to some extent”, “to take a few obvious examples”, “in a word”, “steadily and comprehensively if not always directly or chronologically”, “In some cases”, “to use an ugly but accurate contemporary term”, “what is now labelled”, “In an obvious and important sense”, “what we now consider”, “that we would now label”: all of these in a brief nine-page introduction.
And if you want more of the feel of Claude's thinking about eighteenth-century writing, Swift in particular, here are his remarks from the review on the contribution by my colleague Michael Seidel:
It is a fresh, wide-ranging discussion, knowing, coat-trailing and oblique. You would not go to it for reference-book information. But it is one of the livelier things in the volume, expounding in its own idiosyncratic way the often poorly understood but indispensable notion that Swift implicates himself in his own satire. Seidel is acute on the subject, though he engages in special pleading when he argues that the praise of Swift by the “impartial” commentator in the Verses on the Death of Dr Swift is to be read as a self-deflating exposure of Swift’s own delusions about himself. This seems an indulgent treatment of, for example, that extraordinary panegyric (“Fair LIBERTY was all his Cry; / For her he stood prepar’d to die”), spoken by the “impartial” commentator, not Swift himself, whose gist is mainly that Swift deserved the praise, which he did, while being shy of using in his own name a “lofty Stile”. Swift lacked Pope’s unabashed way with self-exalting grandeurs, a characteristic which, for some readers, gives Swift’s poetry the advantage, but which here amounts to a subtle bad faith. He wants the praise while disclaiming responsibility for affirming it. The fact that this part of the poem is especially full of elusive and self- undercutting in-jokes, and a teasing amalgam of autobiographical truth and untruth, is better understood as a sign of general embarrassment than of self-deflation. The latter is an activity Swift seldom really risks, except in bits of Shandean foolery designed to conceal rather than castigate his prickly self-importance.
I highly recommend the collection of Claude's essays titled Order From Confusion Sprung, and Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830: Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition is another good entry-point into his criticism (it includes an indispensable essay on Burke and other matters called--I don't have the book here to hand--"Revolution in the Moral Wardrobe," about images of clothes and drapery and the idea of covering-up--it is a remarkable piece of writing and thinking and scholarship).
Claude was one of my two dissertation advisors in graduate school (the other was David Bromwich), and I cannot imagine a better pair. From Claude I learned how to read widely as well as deeply, to attend to the smallest fluctuations of tone and style and to make imaginative but responsible connections between works from different times and places (also to use the correct editions and to be scrupulous in my footnotes). Every time I read Swift (and this is true for other authors as well, Dryden and Fielding in particular and mock-epic in general, but Swift especially), I feel grateful to Claude for having opened it up to me in the first place. (And David Bromwich is the person who taught me how to think and argue, in the first instance by taking the time to read Burke and Hume and Adam Smith very closely and in the second by giving the most perceptive and helpful comments on my dissertation chapters that you can imagine. And how to read ethically, in the most serious sense.)
From both my advisors, I also learned the kinds of lesson that you might take from Orwell or Flaubert: that clarity of thought depends on precision of style, and that saying or writing things because you think you should will lead to a kind of intellectual and ethical bad faith that will be immediately visible to your more attentive readers. I think I was already fairly intellectually honest when I got to graduate school, but I learned there to be absolutely scrupulous; indeed, to this day I never write a sentence without asking myself whether it's something I could stand by even for these most stringent readers.
Anyway, that was an awfully long preamble, I don't know why I'm in such a rambling mood today, but here's a paragraph of Claude's review that will give you a lovely if minor feel for his style:
There is a vaguely panic-stricken geniality about this book, constantly looking over its shoulder and anxious to keep everybody happy. The suggested canon-changes are affirmed with a kind of flagging aplomb. The language is habitually undercut or qualified, as if subject to an unseen censorious gaze: “in large measure”, “one might even say”, “to some extent”, “in some important sense”, “as it were”, “as they have been called”, “it can be argued”, “as they called it”, “in many ways”, “to some extent”, “to take a few obvious examples”, “in a word”, “steadily and comprehensively if not always directly or chronologically”, “In some cases”, “to use an ugly but accurate contemporary term”, “what is now labelled”, “In an obvious and important sense”, “what we now consider”, “that we would now label”: all of these in a brief nine-page introduction.
And if you want more of the feel of Claude's thinking about eighteenth-century writing, Swift in particular, here are his remarks from the review on the contribution by my colleague Michael Seidel:
It is a fresh, wide-ranging discussion, knowing, coat-trailing and oblique. You would not go to it for reference-book information. But it is one of the livelier things in the volume, expounding in its own idiosyncratic way the often poorly understood but indispensable notion that Swift implicates himself in his own satire. Seidel is acute on the subject, though he engages in special pleading when he argues that the praise of Swift by the “impartial” commentator in the Verses on the Death of Dr Swift is to be read as a self-deflating exposure of Swift’s own delusions about himself. This seems an indulgent treatment of, for example, that extraordinary panegyric (“Fair LIBERTY was all his Cry; / For her he stood prepar’d to die”), spoken by the “impartial” commentator, not Swift himself, whose gist is mainly that Swift deserved the praise, which he did, while being shy of using in his own name a “lofty Stile”. Swift lacked Pope’s unabashed way with self-exalting grandeurs, a characteristic which, for some readers, gives Swift’s poetry the advantage, but which here amounts to a subtle bad faith. He wants the praise while disclaiming responsibility for affirming it. The fact that this part of the poem is especially full of elusive and self- undercutting in-jokes, and a teasing amalgam of autobiographical truth and untruth, is better understood as a sign of general embarrassment than of self-deflation. The latter is an activity Swift seldom really risks, except in bits of Shandean foolery designed to conceal rather than castigate his prickly self-importance.
I highly recommend the collection of Claude's essays titled Order From Confusion Sprung, and Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830: Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition is another good entry-point into his criticism (it includes an indispensable essay on Burke and other matters called--I don't have the book here to hand--"Revolution in the Moral Wardrobe," about images of clothes and drapery and the idea of covering-up--it is a remarkable piece of writing and thinking and scholarship).
Household deer
Oh dear, it was about midnight and though I spent the evening at an interesting talk about pandemics I felt like I needed something really mentally stimulating; the pressure of having all of these library books that must either be read or (horror of horrors! this is my least favorite thing, and must be avoided at all costs even if it means reading to the point of disgust) returned unread by May 19 having exerted its force, I picked up Girl in Landscape with the goal of advancing the whole reading Jonathan Lethem backwards project.
I had an uncanny feeling in the first chapter of rereading some lost-in-my-distant-past young-adult science-fiction novel from the eighties (you know, what you found in battered paperback on those wire carousels), and then when I got to the scene where the children's mother tells them about the household deer on the planet they were going to go and live on it came back to me: I had read this book before. Really read it, I mean, not imagined reading it.
(As for not remembering name or author, I can only say that I read a lot of novels, and that I almost certainly plucked it off the shelf of the public library in New Haven in 1998 or 1999, read and enjoyed it without having a mental pigeonhole to put the author's name in, and only realized now that this book fits with Motherless Brooklyn/Fortress of Solitude guy.)
It's very good, a verging-on-great bildungsroman whose treatment of female adolescence rings true with me & also reminded me of a host of other literary treatments (there is a whole Western/John Ford thing going on here that I am not qualified to speak about since I am almost completely ignorant of such things): The Awkward Age and What Maisie Knew, of course, but also The Death of the Heart and Sybille Bedford's wonderful and underread novel A Compass Error. There's a great part in the middle where the Western-style guy comes up beside the heroine Pella Marsh and says "Pella Marsh. What do you know." And it's a sardonic exclamation of mock-surprise and also a question at the same time, as really this book (like all novels of adolescence/development, maybe? That's why the Henry James "What Maisie Knew" title is so brilliant) is all about what Pella knows.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading it again, it's very good (and more moving than it has any business being, it's fairly slimline but very effective). It made me think about my relationship with crime versus science fiction/fantasy fiction. I don't know, I've never counted, but I expect I read a lot more crime than sf/f. Partly that's because there just is a lot more crime fiction out there (I'm not wrong in thinking this, am I?), and thus a lot more really good writers; but also crime is loosely aligned with style (think all that noir stuff) while sf/f for better and for worse (there are obviously also some exceptional stylists working in these genres) is affiliated with ideas and the imagination, both the rational (novel as social argument) and the fantastic (novel as vehicle of the uncanny/the intuitive). And I care a lot about style. And also I read a lot of books from libraries and crime fiction is more respectable and thus more likely to be purchased than sf/f. But there is something in sf/f that really calls to me, maybe its huge compatibility with the novel-of-development thing (and maybe also the way it is so well set up to negotiate the relationship between reason and imagination, something crime fiction can't really be particularly good on); you hardly ever read a crime novel that really would count as something like a bildungsroman or coming-into-culture story, that is just not how they work, whereas a lot of the best (or at least my favorite) sf/f stuff foregrounds education and culture as well as ideas more generally. All this is to no particular end, just trying to clarify a few things for myself that I've been thinking about for a while.
I think I need to read another book now for more stimulation.
I had an uncanny feeling in the first chapter of rereading some lost-in-my-distant-past young-adult science-fiction novel from the eighties (you know, what you found in battered paperback on those wire carousels), and then when I got to the scene where the children's mother tells them about the household deer on the planet they were going to go and live on it came back to me: I had read this book before. Really read it, I mean, not imagined reading it.
(As for not remembering name or author, I can only say that I read a lot of novels, and that I almost certainly plucked it off the shelf of the public library in New Haven in 1998 or 1999, read and enjoyed it without having a mental pigeonhole to put the author's name in, and only realized now that this book fits with Motherless Brooklyn/Fortress of Solitude guy.)
It's very good, a verging-on-great bildungsroman whose treatment of female adolescence rings true with me & also reminded me of a host of other literary treatments (there is a whole Western/John Ford thing going on here that I am not qualified to speak about since I am almost completely ignorant of such things): The Awkward Age and What Maisie Knew, of course, but also The Death of the Heart and Sybille Bedford's wonderful and underread novel A Compass Error. There's a great part in the middle where the Western-style guy comes up beside the heroine Pella Marsh and says "Pella Marsh. What do you know." And it's a sardonic exclamation of mock-surprise and also a question at the same time, as really this book (like all novels of adolescence/development, maybe? That's why the Henry James "What Maisie Knew" title is so brilliant) is all about what Pella knows.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading it again, it's very good (and more moving than it has any business being, it's fairly slimline but very effective). It made me think about my relationship with crime versus science fiction/fantasy fiction. I don't know, I've never counted, but I expect I read a lot more crime than sf/f. Partly that's because there just is a lot more crime fiction out there (I'm not wrong in thinking this, am I?), and thus a lot more really good writers; but also crime is loosely aligned with style (think all that noir stuff) while sf/f for better and for worse (there are obviously also some exceptional stylists working in these genres) is affiliated with ideas and the imagination, both the rational (novel as social argument) and the fantastic (novel as vehicle of the uncanny/the intuitive). And I care a lot about style. And also I read a lot of books from libraries and crime fiction is more respectable and thus more likely to be purchased than sf/f. But there is something in sf/f that really calls to me, maybe its huge compatibility with the novel-of-development thing (and maybe also the way it is so well set up to negotiate the relationship between reason and imagination, something crime fiction can't really be particularly good on); you hardly ever read a crime novel that really would count as something like a bildungsroman or coming-into-culture story, that is just not how they work, whereas a lot of the best (or at least my favorite) sf/f stuff foregrounds education and culture as well as ideas more generally. All this is to no particular end, just trying to clarify a few things for myself that I've been thinking about for a while.
I think I need to read another book now for more stimulation.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
It's a violent and funny play about a black cat
and I really, really wish I could see it: in the New Yorker John Lahr reviews Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore (oh, sad to say it's only running through April 9, that's no good).
There was a great profile of McDonagh last week in the New Yorker by Fintan O'Toole (whose biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a fabulously good read). I think it's not available online, but here's my favorite paragraph (describing the playwright watching the rehearsals at the Atlantic Theatre Company):
For five weeks, he sat in the rehearsal room, at a small wooden table to the right of the director, Wilson Milam, in a state of high anxiety. He stared at the actors, pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes, and nervously rubbed his forehead. He often frowned as if displeased by what he was observing. One afternoon, the costume designer, Theresa Squire, and her assistants proposed that Domhnall Gleeson, the actor who plays Davey, a gormless seventeen-year-old who has the task of caring for the terrorist's cat, Wee Thomas, wear a T-shirt bearing the logo for "Cat Scratch Fever," a recording by the heavy-metal band Motorhead. The costume designers were excited by the idea; the song's title, they pointed out, could be understood as an allusion to Wee Thomas, and during one scene Davey sings a few lines of another Motorhead song. McDonagh, however, didn't appreciate the cleverness. Davey is "not cool," he said. "He rides around on his mammy's bike. This looks like it's striving to be a heavy-metal look. He doesn't have heavy-metal friends. What shops could he go to to buy this kind of stuff? It's just saying too much."
That's the kind of attention to detail I approve of. It makes me crazy when I read a bad novel and it's full of jarring details--you know, where the character orders something in a restaurant that is just distractingly random, neither interestingly against type nor wallpaperly what you'd expect. (NB hint to male authors writing about youngish present-day urban female characters: if in doubt, make them drink Diet Coke.) I am only half-joking when I say that I think all novels should be read by teams of fact-checkers before they are published; some writers are immensely careless with detail (I am still fuming about a novel I had to stop reading because of a fundamentally unpersuasive use of Huntington's disease as part of its vaguely science-fictional opening premise--no, I'm not talking about Ian McEwan, either), and all the time you see things in movies that are unpersuasive. Part of the appeal of writing novels as opposed to plays is the fantasy of complete control.
There was a great profile of McDonagh last week in the New Yorker by Fintan O'Toole (whose biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a fabulously good read). I think it's not available online, but here's my favorite paragraph (describing the playwright watching the rehearsals at the Atlantic Theatre Company):
For five weeks, he sat in the rehearsal room, at a small wooden table to the right of the director, Wilson Milam, in a state of high anxiety. He stared at the actors, pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes, and nervously rubbed his forehead. He often frowned as if displeased by what he was observing. One afternoon, the costume designer, Theresa Squire, and her assistants proposed that Domhnall Gleeson, the actor who plays Davey, a gormless seventeen-year-old who has the task of caring for the terrorist's cat, Wee Thomas, wear a T-shirt bearing the logo for "Cat Scratch Fever," a recording by the heavy-metal band Motorhead. The costume designers were excited by the idea; the song's title, they pointed out, could be understood as an allusion to Wee Thomas, and during one scene Davey sings a few lines of another Motorhead song. McDonagh, however, didn't appreciate the cleverness. Davey is "not cool," he said. "He rides around on his mammy's bike. This looks like it's striving to be a heavy-metal look. He doesn't have heavy-metal friends. What shops could he go to to buy this kind of stuff? It's just saying too much."
That's the kind of attention to detail I approve of. It makes me crazy when I read a bad novel and it's full of jarring details--you know, where the character orders something in a restaurant that is just distractingly random, neither interestingly against type nor wallpaperly what you'd expect. (NB hint to male authors writing about youngish present-day urban female characters: if in doubt, make them drink Diet Coke.) I am only half-joking when I say that I think all novels should be read by teams of fact-checkers before they are published; some writers are immensely careless with detail (I am still fuming about a novel I had to stop reading because of a fundamentally unpersuasive use of Huntington's disease as part of its vaguely science-fictional opening premise--no, I'm not talking about Ian McEwan, either), and all the time you see things in movies that are unpersuasive. Part of the appeal of writing novels as opposed to plays is the fantasy of complete control.
I am not sure I agree with the premise
(in fact, I definitely don't) that most science fiction is "primarily concerned with the master-slave relationship," but Dream Hampton has a nice piece about Octavia Butler in the Village Voice.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Types of ambiguity
John Gross has an excellent piece about William Empson in this week's New York Review of Books (online only for electronic subscribers; I'm making headway towards getting this subscription thing worked out at the Columbia end, but have not yet got it sorted, so no lengthy extracts); it's a review of the first volume of John Haffenden's Empson biography, Among the Mandarins. I am absolutely horrified to realize that (a) I've somehow never read any of Empson's poetry before and (b) it's sort of amazingly good at least as quoted here by Gross; I think perhaps that is the thing to get and read rather than the biography, though that sounds tantalizing (but it's the notorious hazard of these good NYRB essays, that they make you not need to get the book itself--which is 695pp. and only goes up to age 33). I have been thinking about Empson recently because of Elliot Perlman; Gross's comments here on the peculiarities of Some Versions of Pastoral fit very closely with what I thought when I last read it. Makes me want to write an essay about Empson.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Dipping in rather than reading properly
Georges Perec's W or the Memory of Childhood. Perec casts a kind of spell over me, I'm not sure why. Here's a passage from late in the book about one of his early memories of reading, centered on Dumas's Twenty Years After (the translation is by David Bellos):
It feels as though I knew this book by heart and that I took in so many details that re-reading it was simply a matter of checking that they were still in their proper places: the silver-gilt corners on Mazarin's table, Porthos's letter tucked away for fifteen years in a pocket in one of d'Artagnan's old doublets; Aramis's quadrangle in his convent; Grimaud's toolroll, thanks to which it is learnt that the barrels are full not of beer but of gunpowder; the incense paper d'Artagnan burns in his horse's ear; the way Porthos, who has still got a hefty fist (the size of a mutton chop, if I'm not mistaken), turns some fire-tongs into a corkscrew; the picture book which the young Louis XIV is looking at when d'Artagnan comes to fetch him away from Paris; Planchet in hiding with d'Artagnan's landlady and speaking Flemish to pretend he is her brother; the peasant carting wood and telling d'Artagnan the way to Ch^ateau de La F`ere in impeccable French; the unyielding hatred of Mordaunt when he asks Cromwell for the right to replace the hangman kidnapped by the Musketeers; and a hundred other episodes, whole chunks of story or mere turns of phrase which feel not only as if I had always known them but, much more, as if they were, to my mind, virtually part of history: an inexhaustible fount of memory, of material for rumination and of a kind of certainty: the words were where they should be, and the books told a story you could follow; you could re-read, and, on re-reading, re-encounter, enhanced by the certainty that you would encounter those words again, the impression you had felt the first time. This pleasure has never ceased for me; I do not read much, but I have never stopped re-reading Flaubert and Jules Verne, Roussel and Kafka, Leiris and Queneau; I re-read the books I love and I love the books I re-read, and each time it is the same enjoyment, whether I re-read twenty pages, three chapters, or the whole book: an enjoyment of complicity, of collusion, or more especially, and in addition, of having in the end found kin again.
It feels as though I knew this book by heart and that I took in so many details that re-reading it was simply a matter of checking that they were still in their proper places: the silver-gilt corners on Mazarin's table, Porthos's letter tucked away for fifteen years in a pocket in one of d'Artagnan's old doublets; Aramis's quadrangle in his convent; Grimaud's toolroll, thanks to which it is learnt that the barrels are full not of beer but of gunpowder; the incense paper d'Artagnan burns in his horse's ear; the way Porthos, who has still got a hefty fist (the size of a mutton chop, if I'm not mistaken), turns some fire-tongs into a corkscrew; the picture book which the young Louis XIV is looking at when d'Artagnan comes to fetch him away from Paris; Planchet in hiding with d'Artagnan's landlady and speaking Flemish to pretend he is her brother; the peasant carting wood and telling d'Artagnan the way to Ch^ateau de La F`ere in impeccable French; the unyielding hatred of Mordaunt when he asks Cromwell for the right to replace the hangman kidnapped by the Musketeers; and a hundred other episodes, whole chunks of story or mere turns of phrase which feel not only as if I had always known them but, much more, as if they were, to my mind, virtually part of history: an inexhaustible fount of memory, of material for rumination and of a kind of certainty: the words were where they should be, and the books told a story you could follow; you could re-read, and, on re-reading, re-encounter, enhanced by the certainty that you would encounter those words again, the impression you had felt the first time. This pleasure has never ceased for me; I do not read much, but I have never stopped re-reading Flaubert and Jules Verne, Roussel and Kafka, Leiris and Queneau; I re-read the books I love and I love the books I re-read, and each time it is the same enjoyment, whether I re-read twenty pages, three chapters, or the whole book: an enjoyment of complicity, of collusion, or more especially, and in addition, of having in the end found kin again.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
A dedication to Derek Raymond and Ken Bruen
and a blurb from James Sallis: I knew I was going to really, really like this one, and I did. It's The Not Knowing by Cathi Unsworth, recently out from Serpent's Tail, and it's great. The first third or so I found a bit rough round the edges, but it came into focus for me around the middle and the personality of the main narrator is very appealing (and competely persuasive--this is good female noir, again). What's really special about the book is its amazing evocation of early 90s scenester London: music mags, Brit noir, Camden, Ladbroke Grove, unbelievably vivid and persuasive. There are a lot of if-you-were-there-you'd-know-who-the-real-person-was characters here; and I was secretly convinced that Ken Bruen was the model for the Irish police detective, though I have no idea if that's really the case.
Here's Unsworth talking to CrimeSquad about how she came to write the book:
There are two people who I really owe it all to - Derek Raymond and Ken Bruen. I met Derek, or to use his real name, Robin, when I was 25 and a music journalist. My favourite band Gallon Drunk made a record with him of his book I Was Dora Suarez and he and it totally changed my world. I had loved the dark, foggy London of Sherlock Holmes as a child, but, wrapped up in the hepcat swing of popular beat music as I was since I started writing for Sounds at the age of 19, I hadn't read much in the way of thrillers since. Dora Suarez showed me what a crime book could do and Robin fixed in my head what a crime writer should be. That was it, I was hooked. Crime fiction became the new rock-n-roll, and just as well, with bloody jolly old Britpop on the horizon. Robin was such an inspiring person - there didn't seem to be any kind of age gap between himself, who was in his 60s, and me and Gallon Drunk who were in our 20s. I was gutted when he died, only a year after I'd met him. I didn't think I would meet anyone like him again. But I did - I met Ken Bruen when I was doing the books page at Bizarre. I loved his books the same way I loved Robin's - here was another writer looking from the gutter up, who took in the theatre of the street and cared about those who dwelt there - and was also fucking funny and totally believable. I became great friends with Ken, and after a few years he said to me: 'Right, you've met all your heroes, now it's time you wrote a book.' He gave me a list of rules to stick to - Ken's Kommandments - and off I went. I worked with a Sacred Heart Ken gave me on my desk and a portrait of Derek Raymond my friend Mark Reeve drew looking down from the wall. How could I let either of them down?
I fell hard for Derek Raymond, it must have been 1997 or so and I really can't remember now how I first came across him--possibly I picked up one of the Serpent's Tail rereleases from the shelf in the L&B room, one of Yale's best-kept secrets? Or maybe I read something about somewhere and realized I had to get his stuff as soon as possible. At any rate his books became my obsession, I read them all and then tracked down anything else associated with him (Iain Sinclair's essay in Lights Out for the Territory, which I am too lazy to link to now, various other things) and basically was completely fixated on them for some time. The Factory books are extraordinary, but all of his fiction is must-read. It pained me to think I would never meet him, he had died only a year or two earlier, and then like Unsworth I also discovered Ken Bruen's fiction and it was like the second coming of Derek Raymond--not to imply that Ken's fiction is not completely and utterly sui generis, it is only like Derek Raymond's in being utterly striking and absolutely most satisfying in the literary sense and also of course very much like life (fortunately life seems less like that these days, at least externally, but seriously, in New Haven during grad school I was living on an incredibly seedy block right above this awful bar owned by a bail bondsman, the strangest things would happen, including one night when the bread-delivery truck for the bar/restaurant accidentally--in my opinion the driver must have been stoned out of his mind, it's one of those bread-delivery things--backed into the plate-glass window of the hair salon immediately downstairs, it was three in the morning and it sounded like the world was coming to an end; the hair salon guy rang my doorbell the next morning looking absolutely devastated and asked what had happened, I was only vaguely able to fill him in; of the two other apartments in my building, one was occupied by a falling-down drunk alcoholic who worked for the water board, literally you would see him staggering home from the bars after happy hour barely able to walk, the other by a middle-aged dominatrix whose customers unappealingly seemed to ring my doorbell far too often by mistake, as I irritably told them to ring the second-floor buzzer instead I felt they should be paying me a surcharge for yelling at them over the intercom). In any case, Raymond and Bruen and Chester Himes are enshrined in my heart as my three personal favorites of noir, there are other great ones but none that quite hit me personally in the same way.
Here's Unsworth talking to CrimeSquad about how she came to write the book:
There are two people who I really owe it all to - Derek Raymond and Ken Bruen. I met Derek, or to use his real name, Robin, when I was 25 and a music journalist. My favourite band Gallon Drunk made a record with him of his book I Was Dora Suarez and he and it totally changed my world. I had loved the dark, foggy London of Sherlock Holmes as a child, but, wrapped up in the hepcat swing of popular beat music as I was since I started writing for Sounds at the age of 19, I hadn't read much in the way of thrillers since. Dora Suarez showed me what a crime book could do and Robin fixed in my head what a crime writer should be. That was it, I was hooked. Crime fiction became the new rock-n-roll, and just as well, with bloody jolly old Britpop on the horizon. Robin was such an inspiring person - there didn't seem to be any kind of age gap between himself, who was in his 60s, and me and Gallon Drunk who were in our 20s. I was gutted when he died, only a year after I'd met him. I didn't think I would meet anyone like him again. But I did - I met Ken Bruen when I was doing the books page at Bizarre. I loved his books the same way I loved Robin's - here was another writer looking from the gutter up, who took in the theatre of the street and cared about those who dwelt there - and was also fucking funny and totally believable. I became great friends with Ken, and after a few years he said to me: 'Right, you've met all your heroes, now it's time you wrote a book.' He gave me a list of rules to stick to - Ken's Kommandments - and off I went. I worked with a Sacred Heart Ken gave me on my desk and a portrait of Derek Raymond my friend Mark Reeve drew looking down from the wall. How could I let either of them down?
I fell hard for Derek Raymond, it must have been 1997 or so and I really can't remember now how I first came across him--possibly I picked up one of the Serpent's Tail rereleases from the shelf in the L&B room, one of Yale's best-kept secrets? Or maybe I read something about somewhere and realized I had to get his stuff as soon as possible. At any rate his books became my obsession, I read them all and then tracked down anything else associated with him (Iain Sinclair's essay in Lights Out for the Territory, which I am too lazy to link to now, various other things) and basically was completely fixated on them for some time. The Factory books are extraordinary, but all of his fiction is must-read. It pained me to think I would never meet him, he had died only a year or two earlier, and then like Unsworth I also discovered Ken Bruen's fiction and it was like the second coming of Derek Raymond--not to imply that Ken's fiction is not completely and utterly sui generis, it is only like Derek Raymond's in being utterly striking and absolutely most satisfying in the literary sense and also of course very much like life (fortunately life seems less like that these days, at least externally, but seriously, in New Haven during grad school I was living on an incredibly seedy block right above this awful bar owned by a bail bondsman, the strangest things would happen, including one night when the bread-delivery truck for the bar/restaurant accidentally--in my opinion the driver must have been stoned out of his mind, it's one of those bread-delivery things--backed into the plate-glass window of the hair salon immediately downstairs, it was three in the morning and it sounded like the world was coming to an end; the hair salon guy rang my doorbell the next morning looking absolutely devastated and asked what had happened, I was only vaguely able to fill him in; of the two other apartments in my building, one was occupied by a falling-down drunk alcoholic who worked for the water board, literally you would see him staggering home from the bars after happy hour barely able to walk, the other by a middle-aged dominatrix whose customers unappealingly seemed to ring my doorbell far too often by mistake, as I irritably told them to ring the second-floor buzzer instead I felt they should be paying me a surcharge for yelling at them over the intercom). In any case, Raymond and Bruen and Chester Himes are enshrined in my heart as my three personal favorites of noir, there are other great ones but none that quite hit me personally in the same way.
Top 50 players in the world of (UK) publishing
Robert McCrum in the Guardian. It's a fun list, I'm glad to see Pete Ayrton of Serpent's Tail making a prominent appearance; and some other good Serpent's Tail coverage in Louise France's 'posh porn' piece (I've got Emily Maguire's Taming the Beast here near the top of a TBR pile).
I got a great packet of books from Serpent's Tail last week, it reminded me of why I love their aesthetic so much--their website is currently under reconstruction, I'll link when it's all up again (and I think I'm going to be writing short author-appreciations about Charlie Williams and Heather Lewis, it's a new feature for the all-new site), but they really publish the most amazing stuff, I am super-proud to have made it onto their list with Heredity. The person I'm really gearing up for reading is Heather Lewis, only I am waiting for a weekend where I feel really stoical and in good mental health, the only one of hers I've read so far was fairly mind-bending. Also I'm having to sort "read now" out from "read after I'm back in NY," mostly based on whether they are things due back to the library/on loan to people here; and the work reading must take priority, too, for the next few weeks. More TK, in any case.
I got a great packet of books from Serpent's Tail last week, it reminded me of why I love their aesthetic so much--their website is currently under reconstruction, I'll link when it's all up again (and I think I'm going to be writing short author-appreciations about Charlie Williams and Heather Lewis, it's a new feature for the all-new site), but they really publish the most amazing stuff, I am super-proud to have made it onto their list with Heredity. The person I'm really gearing up for reading is Heather Lewis, only I am waiting for a weekend where I feel really stoical and in good mental health, the only one of hers I've read so far was fairly mind-bending. Also I'm having to sort "read now" out from "read after I'm back in NY," mostly based on whether they are things due back to the library/on loan to people here; and the work reading must take priority, too, for the next few weeks. More TK, in any case.
Hilary Mantel reviews John Burnside
in the London Review of Books (no subscription required); plus a pretty great essay by Ian Sansom on Johnny Cash (makes me want to read one of Sansom's books, any recommendations?).
Friday, March 03, 2006
All good things come to an end
including the Mangel Trilogy, a work of complete demented comic noir genius by Charlie Williams; I've just read the final volume, it is incredibly funny and violent and full unexpected twists and just genuinely delightful. Here's the link for King of the Road at Amazon UK (I think it's not yet released in the US); or if you haven't read the previous ones and you're a US-er you can get Deadfolk and Fags and Lager from US Amazon. Or (which is what I recommend) wherever you live you can order all three directly from Serpents Tail, who have a sweet free international shipping deal.
Here's why I liked Deadfolk, anyway ("even a complete sociopath becomes perversely endearing if you get the voice right") and here are my thoughts on Fags and Lager. This one is just lovely too, it's funny and endearing and there are a lot of dismemberings (it's possibly even more violent than the first two). But the thing that makes all the books work is this amazing first-person voice. You simply can't believe Royston Blake's not a real person, Harold Bloom says this about some of Shakespeare's characters (Hamlet, Falstaff, Rosalind) and I say it about Royston ("Another boot for us, this time up the arse. Hurts a bit but not so bad as the one in me plums just now. Mind you, I've known worse in that area. Sal used to kick us harder. Must be them little feet birds have. More accuracy").
Here's why I liked Deadfolk, anyway ("even a complete sociopath becomes perversely endearing if you get the voice right") and here are my thoughts on Fags and Lager. This one is just lovely too, it's funny and endearing and there are a lot of dismemberings (it's possibly even more violent than the first two). But the thing that makes all the books work is this amazing first-person voice. You simply can't believe Royston Blake's not a real person, Harold Bloom says this about some of Shakespeare's characters (Hamlet, Falstaff, Rosalind) and I say it about Royston ("Another boot for us, this time up the arse. Hurts a bit but not so bad as the one in me plums just now. Mind you, I've known worse in that area. Sal used to kick us harder. Must be them little feet birds have. More accuracy").
Derek Mahon on Swift's poetry
in the Guardian; it's a good little essay (only I disagree with him about "Cadenus and Vanessa"), excerpted from his introduction for a new edition of Swift's poems. Last week I reread Gulliver's Travels, it's for the chapter I'm writing for the book on breeding (the chapter's about the idea of perfectibility, Swift to Godwin, with digressions on horse-breeding and cultural versus genetic perfectibility); Swift really is the most amazing writer, there's no one else like him. (Well, Burke, a little.)
Here's a link for one of my favorite Swift poems, "The Lady's Dressing Room" (edited by Jack Lynch); I've pasted in some lines below (the inventory of what Strephon finds in Chloe's dressing room).
And first a dirty Smock appear'd,
Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear'd.
Strephon, the Rogue, display'd it wide,
And turn'd it round on every Side.
On such a Point few Words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest;
But swears how damnably the Men lie,
In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces,
The various Combs for various Uses,
Fill'd up with Dirt so closely fixt,
No Brush could force a way betwixt.
A Paste of Composition rare,
Sweat, Dandriff, Powder, Lead and Hair;
A Forehead Cloth with Oyl upon't
To smooth the Wrinkles on her Front;
Here Allum Flower to stop the Steams,
Exhal'd from sour unsavoury Streams,
There Night-gloves made of Tripsy's Hide,
Bequeath'd by Tripsy when she dy'd,
With Puppy Water, Beauty's Help
Distill'd from Tripsy's darling Whelp;
Here Gallypots and Vials plac'd,
Some fill'd with washes, some with Paste,
Some with Pomatum, Paints and Slops,
And Ointments good for scabby Chops.
Hard by a filthy Bason stands,
Fowl'd with the Scouring of her Hands;
The Bason takes whatever comes
The Scrapings of her Teeth and Gums,
A nasty Compound of all Hues,
For here she spits, and here she spues.
But oh! it turn'd poor Strephon's Bowels,
When he beheld and smelt the Towels,
Begumm'd, bematter'd, and beslim'd
With Dirt, and Sweat, and Ear-Wax grim'd.
No Object Strephon's Eye escapes,
Here Pettycoats in frowzy Heaps;
Nor be the Handkerchiefs forgot
All varnish'd o'er with Snuff and Snot.
The Stockings, why shou'd I expose,
Stain'd with the Marks of stinking Toes;
Or greasy Coifs and Pinners reeking,
Which Celia slept at least a Week in?
A Pair of Tweezers next he found
To pluck her Brows in Arches round,
Or Hairs that sink the Forehead low,
Or on her Chin like Bristles grow.
The Virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia's magnifying Glass.
When frighted Strephon cast his Eye on't
It shew'd the Visage of a Gyant.
A Glass that can to Sight disclose,
The smallest Worm in Celia's Nose,
And faithfully direct her Nail
To squeeze it out from Head to Tail;
For catch it nicely by the Head,
It must come out alive or dead.
Why Strephon will you tell the rest?
And must you needs describe the Chest?
That careless Wench! no Creature warn her
To move it out from yonder Corner;
But leave it standing full in Sight
For you to exercise your Spight.
In vain, the Workman shew'd his Wit
With Rings and Hinges counterfeit
To make it seem in this Disguise,
A Cabinet to vulgar Eyes;
For Strephon ventur'd to look in,
Resolv'd to go thro' thick and thin;
He lifts the Lid, there needs no more,
He smelt it all the Time before.
As from within Pandora's Box,
When Epimetheus op'd the Locks,
A sudden universal Crew
Of humane Evils upwards flew;
He still was comforted to find
That Hope at last remain'd behind;
So Strephon lifting up the Lid,
To view what in the Chest was hid.
The Vapours flew from out the Vent,
But Strephon cautious never meant
The Bottom of the Pan to grope,
And fowl his Hands in Search of Hope.
O never may such vile Machine
Be once in Celia's Chamber seen!
O may she better learn to keep
"Those Secrets of the hoary deep!"
Here's a link for one of my favorite Swift poems, "The Lady's Dressing Room" (edited by Jack Lynch); I've pasted in some lines below (the inventory of what Strephon finds in Chloe's dressing room).
And first a dirty Smock appear'd,
Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear'd.
Strephon, the Rogue, display'd it wide,
And turn'd it round on every Side.
On such a Point few Words are best,
And Strephon bids us guess the rest;
But swears how damnably the Men lie,
In calling Celia sweet and cleanly.
Now listen while he next produces,
The various Combs for various Uses,
Fill'd up with Dirt so closely fixt,
No Brush could force a way betwixt.
A Paste of Composition rare,
Sweat, Dandriff, Powder, Lead and Hair;
A Forehead Cloth with Oyl upon't
To smooth the Wrinkles on her Front;
Here Allum Flower to stop the Steams,
Exhal'd from sour unsavoury Streams,
There Night-gloves made of Tripsy's Hide,
Bequeath'd by Tripsy when she dy'd,
With Puppy Water, Beauty's Help
Distill'd from Tripsy's darling Whelp;
Here Gallypots and Vials plac'd,
Some fill'd with washes, some with Paste,
Some with Pomatum, Paints and Slops,
And Ointments good for scabby Chops.
Hard by a filthy Bason stands,
Fowl'd with the Scouring of her Hands;
The Bason takes whatever comes
The Scrapings of her Teeth and Gums,
A nasty Compound of all Hues,
For here she spits, and here she spues.
But oh! it turn'd poor Strephon's Bowels,
When he beheld and smelt the Towels,
Begumm'd, bematter'd, and beslim'd
With Dirt, and Sweat, and Ear-Wax grim'd.
No Object Strephon's Eye escapes,
Here Pettycoats in frowzy Heaps;
Nor be the Handkerchiefs forgot
All varnish'd o'er with Snuff and Snot.
The Stockings, why shou'd I expose,
Stain'd with the Marks of stinking Toes;
Or greasy Coifs and Pinners reeking,
Which Celia slept at least a Week in?
A Pair of Tweezers next he found
To pluck her Brows in Arches round,
Or Hairs that sink the Forehead low,
Or on her Chin like Bristles grow.
The Virtues we must not let pass,
Of Celia's magnifying Glass.
When frighted Strephon cast his Eye on't
It shew'd the Visage of a Gyant.
A Glass that can to Sight disclose,
The smallest Worm in Celia's Nose,
And faithfully direct her Nail
To squeeze it out from Head to Tail;
For catch it nicely by the Head,
It must come out alive or dead.
Why Strephon will you tell the rest?
And must you needs describe the Chest?
That careless Wench! no Creature warn her
To move it out from yonder Corner;
But leave it standing full in Sight
For you to exercise your Spight.
In vain, the Workman shew'd his Wit
With Rings and Hinges counterfeit
To make it seem in this Disguise,
A Cabinet to vulgar Eyes;
For Strephon ventur'd to look in,
Resolv'd to go thro' thick and thin;
He lifts the Lid, there needs no more,
He smelt it all the Time before.
As from within Pandora's Box,
When Epimetheus op'd the Locks,
A sudden universal Crew
Of humane Evils upwards flew;
He still was comforted to find
That Hope at last remain'd behind;
So Strephon lifting up the Lid,
To view what in the Chest was hid.
The Vapours flew from out the Vent,
But Strephon cautious never meant
The Bottom of the Pan to grope,
And fowl his Hands in Search of Hope.
O never may such vile Machine
Be once in Celia's Chamber seen!
O may she better learn to keep
"Those Secrets of the hoary deep!"
Thursday, March 02, 2006
More on Octavia Butler
Here's a personal remembrance from Tananarive Due, courtesy of Tayari Jones's blog (and here's the rather belated New York Times obituary).
By the way, both Jones and Due are writers you should be looking out for if you're not already.
Jones is the author of two really excellent novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling (here are my earlier thoughts, she's a novelist of grace & style and has a great feel for what's important--both of her novels really hit a spot for me, the first around the autobiographical stuff of being a child in the early 80s with the Atlanta murders looming--I think of James Baldwin's essay, too, which is surely the other best-known literary record of that terrible incident--and her second because it is one of the best novels about lying I've ever read).
Due is the author of some horror-genre-but-they-are-so-well-written-it-doesn't-do-justice-to-them novels that I have absolutely loved (thank the public library for this one, I discovered her books in hardcover on the "new book" shelves and have read them with great delight, though mostly before I was blogging so you won't have heard about them here): The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep are completely gripping, while The Good House almost literally haunted me after I read it, I could not stop thinking about the way it laid out alternate lifelines and counterfactual futures. Very, very cool stuff. If you love Stephen King and Clive Barker and also care about high levels of character development and literary accomplishment, Due is the person you must be reading.
By the way, both Jones and Due are writers you should be looking out for if you're not already.
Jones is the author of two really excellent novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling (here are my earlier thoughts, she's a novelist of grace & style and has a great feel for what's important--both of her novels really hit a spot for me, the first around the autobiographical stuff of being a child in the early 80s with the Atlanta murders looming--I think of James Baldwin's essay, too, which is surely the other best-known literary record of that terrible incident--and her second because it is one of the best novels about lying I've ever read).
Due is the author of some horror-genre-but-they-are-so-well-written-it-doesn't-do-justice-to-them novels that I have absolutely loved (thank the public library for this one, I discovered her books in hardcover on the "new book" shelves and have read them with great delight, though mostly before I was blogging so you won't have heard about them here): The Living Blood and My Soul to Keep are completely gripping, while The Good House almost literally haunted me after I read it, I could not stop thinking about the way it laid out alternate lifelines and counterfactual futures. Very, very cool stuff. If you love Stephen King and Clive Barker and also care about high levels of character development and literary accomplishment, Due is the person you must be reading.
The grammar of skyscrapers and pavement
I read and loved The Fortress of Solitude in September--what a great novel--and then I went to the library and checked out all of Lethem's other books. But for some reason the only one I read at the time was The Disappointment Artist (here was what I thought). There is something anaphrodisiac about having a shelf full of someone's complete works from the library, I got a lot of A. L. Kennedy on that same trip and though I absolutely loved her novel Paradise having all her books sitting there (and they're short-story collections mostly, so not so much my cup of tea) left me unmoved to take up and read (Augustine!).
Anyway I got a recall notice the other day for Motherless Brooklyn so I thought I had better actually read it and as soon as I started I was completely captivated. It is a lovable novel, more lovable though perhaps less technically impressive (less completely overwhelming) than Fortress; the narrator is incredibly appealing (you have to slightly suspend disbelief that he is so articulate, though of course it is in the best tradition of noir to have these under-educated hyper-articulate narrators), the language is excellent, the whole Tourette's Syndrome thing works really well. I pretty much loved it, in other words; its pathos-type appeal is really stronger because Lionel Essrog is so much more moving (and a first-person narrator, too, that's part of the reason) than Dylan Ebdus in the later book.
A few things I especially liked:
The phrase "blond by nurture"--I am going to start using that--but it especially captures the tawdriness of belated-gumshoe noir.
Lionel's riffs on the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and the glyph for his name (which I am intrigued to learn is represented by O ( + > in ASCII characters--now there's your trivia fact for the day, and if I were a Lethem-like obsessive I would link to the actual magazine cover story the novel references and tell you exactly when it ran thereby dating the incidents of the novel, but I am too lazy to investigate further); in a corner store Lionel picks up a copy of Vibe because Prince is on the cover (the black cop interviewing him puts this down as mockery) and is seized by the need "to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph" ("Skrubble," "Plavshk"--what this really reminds me of now, of course, is those word verification strings in blog comments). Later on there's a really excellent passage about the Tourettishness of Prince's music ("The way he worried forty-five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition"), it's beautifully written and made me listen differently to the music of Prince as well, which is remarkable as I listen to it all the time. And the last appearance comes when Lionel learns from a Maine fisherman that "urchin season" runs from October to March and says the word "Urchin?" without comprehension and feels as he says it "that I'd ticced, that the word was itself a tic by definition, it was so innately twitchy" and that it would have made a good pronunciation for Prince's glyph. Endearing, no? Smart, cerebral, but not at the expense of the emotional tug on the reader.
The drive to Maine near the end of the novel is especially well-realized and well-written. Lionel says of a coastal town called Musconguspoint Station that the "name had a chewy, unfamiliar flavor that tantalized my syndrome": "Whether or not Maine's wilderness impressed me more than suburban Connecticut, the road signs would provide some nourishment." And, facing the ocean:
Waves, sky, trees, Essrog--I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. I experienced it precisely as a loss of language, a great sucking-away of the word-laden walls that I needed around me, that I touched everywhere, leaned on for support, cribbed from when I ticced aloud.
The person who should read this novel if he hasn't already is Ken Bruen, I would love to know what he thinks of it (there's a funny Gene Hackman reference that totally reminded me how much I loved The Hackman Blues which is a work of particular Bruenesque genius; and the two books while not particularly similar are both novels about vengeance, or "taking the V train" as Lionel puts it).
(Lethem also has an unusually beautiful but rather enigmatic website.)
Now I've been set underway, I'm going to read all the other Lethem. There is something counterintuitive about reading a novelist's irv (a Lethem coinage) backwards, as it were; I am going to stick to that reverse order, it is like watching one of those time-lapse photography sequences backwards (the flower folding itself back into the bud).
Anyway I got a recall notice the other day for Motherless Brooklyn so I thought I had better actually read it and as soon as I started I was completely captivated. It is a lovable novel, more lovable though perhaps less technically impressive (less completely overwhelming) than Fortress; the narrator is incredibly appealing (you have to slightly suspend disbelief that he is so articulate, though of course it is in the best tradition of noir to have these under-educated hyper-articulate narrators), the language is excellent, the whole Tourette's Syndrome thing works really well. I pretty much loved it, in other words; its pathos-type appeal is really stronger because Lionel Essrog is so much more moving (and a first-person narrator, too, that's part of the reason) than Dylan Ebdus in the later book.
A few things I especially liked:
The phrase "blond by nurture"--I am going to start using that--but it especially captures the tawdriness of belated-gumshoe noir.
Lionel's riffs on the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and the glyph for his name (which I am intrigued to learn is represented by O ( + > in ASCII characters--now there's your trivia fact for the day, and if I were a Lethem-like obsessive I would link to the actual magazine cover story the novel references and tell you exactly when it ran thereby dating the incidents of the novel, but I am too lazy to investigate further); in a corner store Lionel picks up a copy of Vibe because Prince is on the cover (the black cop interviewing him puts this down as mockery) and is seized by the need "to try to pronounce that unpronounceable glyph" ("Skrubble," "Plavshk"--what this really reminds me of now, of course, is those word verification strings in blog comments). Later on there's a really excellent passage about the Tourettishness of Prince's music ("The way he worried forty-five minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition"), it's beautifully written and made me listen differently to the music of Prince as well, which is remarkable as I listen to it all the time. And the last appearance comes when Lionel learns from a Maine fisherman that "urchin season" runs from October to March and says the word "Urchin?" without comprehension and feels as he says it "that I'd ticced, that the word was itself a tic by definition, it was so innately twitchy" and that it would have made a good pronunciation for Prince's glyph. Endearing, no? Smart, cerebral, but not at the expense of the emotional tug on the reader.
The drive to Maine near the end of the novel is especially well-realized and well-written. Lionel says of a coastal town called Musconguspoint Station that the "name had a chewy, unfamiliar flavor that tantalized my syndrome": "Whether or not Maine's wilderness impressed me more than suburban Connecticut, the road signs would provide some nourishment." And, facing the ocean:
Waves, sky, trees, Essrog--I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. I experienced it precisely as a loss of language, a great sucking-away of the word-laden walls that I needed around me, that I touched everywhere, leaned on for support, cribbed from when I ticced aloud.
The person who should read this novel if he hasn't already is Ken Bruen, I would love to know what he thinks of it (there's a funny Gene Hackman reference that totally reminded me how much I loved The Hackman Blues which is a work of particular Bruenesque genius; and the two books while not particularly similar are both novels about vengeance, or "taking the V train" as Lionel puts it).
(Lethem also has an unusually beautiful but rather enigmatic website.)
Now I've been set underway, I'm going to read all the other Lethem. There is something counterintuitive about reading a novelist's irv (a Lethem coinage) backwards, as it were; I am going to stick to that reverse order, it is like watching one of those time-lapse photography sequences backwards (the flower folding itself back into the bud).
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