respond to Mark Slouka's Spectator piece from last week.
(Strange as it may sound, I know very little indeed about the Writing Division, which exists quite separately from the Department of English and Comparative Literature, though the School of the Arts does fall for various historical reasons I can't attempt to reproduce under the umbrella of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I have no brief for either side in this case, and the only point I want to make here--which is surely entirely uncontroversial--is that it would indeed augment Columbia's MFA program in all sorts of ways if the university were able to offer much better financial aid.)
Monday, May 01, 2006
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Sunday frivolity
Rachel Cooke interviews Jilly Cooper at the Observer. I find the novels of Jilly Cooper completely addictive, they are really not very well-written at all in the conventional sense (and the one thing I genuinely disapprove of is her habit of putting bad puns in the mouths of characters regardless of whether it suits their personality or not, she should pick one suitable character and give that person all the bad jokes) and yet I will read them again and again in spite of their badness. There is something very delightful about her sunny view of human nature and her romantic temperament; this interview definitely gets it across, and in fact although I just ordered a bunch of Amazon UK books in a fit the other day (the new Alan Warner novel, Jenny Diski's new collection, Jake Arnott's new novel but also the Long Firm trilogy in one volume which I just wanted although I have read them all already but it is time to reread--and yeah, the shipping added up to almost twenty pounds, I felt ludicrously extravagant) I think I am going to have to order this one as well. I can't imagine it's being published in the US, those books (not the early romance ones but the funny sprawling "sex and drink among the trashy upper classes" ones of more recent years) don't seem to translate very well. Pity: I find them absolutely delightful. (Thanks to Sarah for the link.)
I am relieved to find myself straightforwardly coveting a trashy novel, I have been suffering more acutely than usual from this spell of anhedonia I can't seem to shake--I went to the excellent and highly light-readingesque Porter Square Books yesterday evening to see if I could find something I really wanted to read but after moping around the store for half an hour I still hadn't seen a single book that made my mouth water--I expect it was partly the weight of all these books back at the apartment as well, and in the end I just came back here and finished reading the B. S. Johnson biography (not a particularly anhedonia-dispelling book unless your spirits lift at the thought of the suffering of others).
But you know, partly the problem is that the particular kind of book I want to read in this mood is not produced in sufficiently high quantity and quality. Jilly Cooper aside (she is sui generis, there is nobody else like her), the kind of book that makes me most delighted is very well-written young-adult fantasy that is as complex and satisfying as adult fiction. And in fact what prompted me to write Dynamite No. 1 as opposed to some completely different novel was my determination to write the kind of book I most want to read: I realized one day that almost every month I went by the Bank Street Bookstore (oh, that store has virtually the same web template as Porter Square Books, must be some kind of shared service) and skulked along the young-adult shelves looking for a brand-new really wonderfully good young-adult trilogy (along the lines of Philip Pullman and Garth Nix) but that of course nothing had miraculously appeared since my last too-recent visit.
I am relieved to find myself straightforwardly coveting a trashy novel, I have been suffering more acutely than usual from this spell of anhedonia I can't seem to shake--I went to the excellent and highly light-readingesque Porter Square Books yesterday evening to see if I could find something I really wanted to read but after moping around the store for half an hour I still hadn't seen a single book that made my mouth water--I expect it was partly the weight of all these books back at the apartment as well, and in the end I just came back here and finished reading the B. S. Johnson biography (not a particularly anhedonia-dispelling book unless your spirits lift at the thought of the suffering of others).
But you know, partly the problem is that the particular kind of book I want to read in this mood is not produced in sufficiently high quantity and quality. Jilly Cooper aside (she is sui generis, there is nobody else like her), the kind of book that makes me most delighted is very well-written young-adult fantasy that is as complex and satisfying as adult fiction. And in fact what prompted me to write Dynamite No. 1 as opposed to some completely different novel was my determination to write the kind of book I most want to read: I realized one day that almost every month I went by the Bank Street Bookstore (oh, that store has virtually the same web template as Porter Square Books, must be some kind of shared service) and skulked along the young-adult shelves looking for a brand-new really wonderfully good young-adult trilogy (along the lines of Philip Pullman and Garth Nix) but that of course nothing had miraculously appeared since my last too-recent visit.
Female noir
A very good and quite unsettling little psychological thriller, Danzy Senna's Symptomatic, a novel of passing and stalkers and sublets. Not the book to have read just before going to bed, I fear: the scenario is stylized (the stalking is more like a haunting, you get the sense that the female biracial stalker Greta is like a kind of ghostly double for the blurry main character who is also biracial) but the feelings are incredibly vividly realized, I was particularly appalled and convinced by the description of the horrible sublet. The novel bears comparison with the other same-sex stalking novel in my mind, Enduring Love; now I am off on stalker-subset mental list-making, but I think that genre crime fiction must be mostly excluded or the list would get too long. I really loved Senna's first novel Caucasia; the main character here is not so appealing, but it's an elegant and striking book in its own right & I will look forward with considerable interest to her next novel.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
The blood-bond of Siamese twins
What a good book!
I've just finished reading Jonathan Coe's Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, and found it wonderfully enjoyable; during the first half I was having some skepticism, partly about whether it was really necessary to emphasize the formal peculiarities or strangeness of the biography itself and partly concerning the personality of B. S. Johnson who seemed to me overwhelmingly and horribly dogmatic and bulling (in a vein that is all too familiar, and I could horribly easily imagine what kind of a website he would have if he were alive today, and what argumentative and hectoring comments he would leave on other people's blogs, and how much I would shudder & resolve to steer clear).
Yet in the second half the humanity of Coe's biographical practice brought Johnson's more human side into focus as well, so that this maddening man's vulnerabilities and (though I still think it is possible Coe's sentimentalizing, the quotations he gives from various survivors of the early 1970s London literary scene blithely saying "Oh, no, Bryan liked his drink but he certainly wasn't an alcoholic" and "He was a kind man" are obviously problematic) his fondness for his children and his strength as an ally and colleague for those he admired started coming through; and I was in the end wholly won over by Coe's procedure. (And Johnson occasionally surprises you too, as when we see his production notes for a documentary he's making on his New Brutalist architectural heroes Peter and Alison Smithson revealing his frustration with their intellectual self-absorption: "You are NOT talking to yr architectural mates . . . either you discipline yourselves or I do in the cutting. . . ." Elsewhere he seems wholly in their thrall, so it is a relief to see him for once sensible and human and not overly dogmatic in his perception of what the general public should want.)
This book provides an interesting complement to The Rotters' Club, which is surely Coe's best novel to date (it is a remarkably moving book, both that and the Johnson biography really are exceptional). I haven't yet read the sequel The Closed Circle, but am reminded I must get hold of it (and also a copy of the first one which I think I had better reread before going to the second, the one flaw of The Rotters' Club was that it was almost impossible to keep track of the different boys...).
I distinctly remember first reading Coe, I was in grad school and I can't at all remember now how I heard of him (he was much less well-known in the US in the mid-90s than in England), but I got The House of Sleep from the library (it was one of those interesting and appealing large-format paperbacks you get in the UK, but bound in library covers, and I am almost certain--oh, perhaps I just picked it off the shelf there at random--it was in the L&B room at Yale's Sterling Library, an interesting trove of recent literary and popular fiction including a lot of first-run non-US stuff that you would in those pre-lit-blog days have never come across elsewhere) and was transfixed by it, albeit without being sure whether I altogether liked it.
I read all the other novels of his they had at the library & distinctly registered Coe as someone worth watching though it was only with The Rotters' Club that he ascended to my list of favorites. (Though their writing is completely different, there's a strong resemblance between the writerliness of Coe and Jonathan Lethem; you can see both of them moving from early novels interested in avant-garde art and film and collectordom of the teenage boy kind but also a serious commitment to exploring memory into more obviously autobiographical work in their later thirties, and a kind of opening-up of humanity in the fiction that is only hinted at in the early books.)
Longwinded preamble!
What I loved about Like a Fiery Elephant: Coe's seriousness about novel-writing (which ultimately is the basis of his affection for Johnson, who took novel-writing with the utmost--sometimes off-putting--gravity). I strongly, strongly responded to this, I like the way he's willing to put himself on the spot about writing and its importance.
What I loved & was pained by at the same time: the awfulness of Johnson's letters, they are absolutely painful to read! (And even worse are the transcripts of tape-recorded conversations in which Johnson's awful bullying drunken dogmatic manner comes across, nb. the one starting on p. 161 in the British edition.)
Johnson to a prospective agent for his novel TRAVELLING PEOPLE:
[T]he device of using a different style or literary technique for each chapter has succeeded well beyond my expectation, largely as a result of the unifying element of the central character's logical progression and development. Joyce used this device in ULYSSES, of course, but by allowing the nature of the subject matter of each particular series of events which form one chapter to determine organically the style chosen, I seem to have avoided the contrivance to which Joyce was sometimes reduced.
Johnson to Allen Lane on Penguin's declining to buy paperback rights to his second novel:
Dear Allen Lane:
In reviewing my novel ALBERT ANGELO, the Sunday Times described me as 'one of the best writers we've got', and the Irish Times called the book 'a masterpiece' and put me in the same class as Joyce and Beckett.
You have refused to buy the paperback rights of ALBERT ANGELO. Why?
Yours sincerely,
B. S. Johnson
(Funnier and more sympathetic though possibly equally demented as a specimen of epistolary style is his letter to the Chief Obstetrician at St Bartholomew's Hospital, asking for an exception to the policy on not allowing fathers to be present at births: "I have recently seen films of labour and delivery at the National Childbirth Trust (where my wife has attended classes) and have read appropriately: I am therefore prepared for what should normally happen.")
Most likeable authorial footnote, as an addendum to a Daily Mail diatribe of 1970 against the Arts Council's funding for (among other things) the Midlands Arts Lab in Birmingham, a ramshackle cinema and theater complex in which (so the article charged) "girl members often paint their faces and bodies and simply sit around":
The present author must come clean and confess that he was himself a patron of this louche establishment in the late 1970s. Things must have changed in the itnervening years because I remember it as a rather quiet place where sensitive souls like myself could repair for a cup of coffee, a slice of fruitcake and--if we were feeling racy--perhaps a Werner Herzog or Howard Hawks film. To be honest I never saw any 'girl members' at all, let alone with their bodies and faces painted, 'sitting around' in (for such is the Mail's clear implication) nude and provocative poses. Too late, as usual: to qutoe Johnson himself--'Ah, the chances let slip!'
Most appealing irrelevant biographical detail: on the expense claim for research done for a projected film commemorating the jubilee of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Johnson (having visited a meat-processing factory) requested "₤2.75 for shoes ruined by blood'--decimalization having been introduced a few weeks earlier).
Saddest list (from the notes for an unwritten novel):
Suicide - the goldfish - not to feed - but he came up mouthing - was he trying to commit suicide?
I am now thinking of this myself
I once had a gun (ref. SAC)
Now I have an air pistol, the cheapest
Buy a leg of lamb, say, belly of pork, see how far the pellet can penetrate
The combined pathos and humor--unintended?--of that line about the leg of lamb....
Most enticing possibility: that someone will release as an audiobook the BBC recording of Johnson and others reading aloud from Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (which sounds by far the most appealing of Johnson's novels): "when it came to Chapter XVI of the novel," Coe observes, which laid out how to build a Molotov cocktail, the narrator on the tape "explains--truthfully--that the passage has been banned by the BBC, and instead we get a recording of Johnson reading the chapter, but speeded up more and more until it becomes an incomprehensible stream of high-pitched noise."
Most perceptive comment about Johnson's writing by someone other than Jonathan Coe (the speaker is Istvan Bart):
Bryan may look like an avant-garde writer, but what turns out, after so many years, to be his contribution is that in fact all the time he was writing a folklore, a folklore of a whole society, of this working-class past: attitudes that simply disappeared and will never come back and are gone. Even at the time he was making this world up: it was not real at the time. It was dead. There were just relics of it. He was making up a lore for himself, on which to fall back. It was quite obvious that this was the past, this was gone.
I thought Coe's emphasis on his own distrust for the assumptions underpinning the writing of & popular appetite for literary biography was slightly overstated; surely all of the best literary biographies share this kind of skepticism (Biswell's Anthony Burgess one, for instance, or Richard Holmes's lives of Shelley and Coleridge). Similarly, yes, it is slightly unorthodox to paste in so many documents and offer self-conscious historical speculation, but I do not find it qualitatively different from many other biographers' practice (so that Coe, like Johnson, seems to be doing something rather more humane and--a word I rarely use in a positive sense, but in this case I will make an exception--middlebrow than he lets on).
But here is the book's real credo, the thing that makes it such a rich and fascinating and humane read (and it is idiotic of me to bury this at the bottom of such a long post, but it makes more sense after all the other stuff, and Coe saves it for the end too):
Real novelists, picking up their pens in the morning, booting up their computers, ask themselves this question every day: Is it worth it? Is there any point? Without that bedrock of doubt, nothing that you write will have any value. Novel-writing is not a hobby (although we're allowed to find it enjoyable); it is not a form of therapy (although it can be therapeutic). It's an intervention, if it is anything: an act of lunatic faith in the notion that by adding something to the world we might somehow be improving it. The stakes are that high, and taking our lead from B. S. Johnson we should occasionally throw off our wretched middle-class English self-deprecation (with which he was so thoroughly unencumbered) and say as much. Not many novelists are prepared to do that: to own up to their responsibilities - to the form, to their readers, to the tradition that they are inheriting. That is what B. S. Johnson meant by 'writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter'.
Here's a very thorough set of review links at the Complete Review, in any case; perhaps most notably, Ed Park in the Village Voice, Eva Figes in the Guardian and Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books.
I've just finished reading Jonathan Coe's Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson, and found it wonderfully enjoyable; during the first half I was having some skepticism, partly about whether it was really necessary to emphasize the formal peculiarities or strangeness of the biography itself and partly concerning the personality of B. S. Johnson who seemed to me overwhelmingly and horribly dogmatic and bulling (in a vein that is all too familiar, and I could horribly easily imagine what kind of a website he would have if he were alive today, and what argumentative and hectoring comments he would leave on other people's blogs, and how much I would shudder & resolve to steer clear).
Yet in the second half the humanity of Coe's biographical practice brought Johnson's more human side into focus as well, so that this maddening man's vulnerabilities and (though I still think it is possible Coe's sentimentalizing, the quotations he gives from various survivors of the early 1970s London literary scene blithely saying "Oh, no, Bryan liked his drink but he certainly wasn't an alcoholic" and "He was a kind man" are obviously problematic) his fondness for his children and his strength as an ally and colleague for those he admired started coming through; and I was in the end wholly won over by Coe's procedure. (And Johnson occasionally surprises you too, as when we see his production notes for a documentary he's making on his New Brutalist architectural heroes Peter and Alison Smithson revealing his frustration with their intellectual self-absorption: "You are NOT talking to yr architectural mates . . . either you discipline yourselves or I do in the cutting. . . ." Elsewhere he seems wholly in their thrall, so it is a relief to see him for once sensible and human and not overly dogmatic in his perception of what the general public should want.)
This book provides an interesting complement to The Rotters' Club, which is surely Coe's best novel to date (it is a remarkably moving book, both that and the Johnson biography really are exceptional). I haven't yet read the sequel The Closed Circle, but am reminded I must get hold of it (and also a copy of the first one which I think I had better reread before going to the second, the one flaw of The Rotters' Club was that it was almost impossible to keep track of the different boys...).
I distinctly remember first reading Coe, I was in grad school and I can't at all remember now how I heard of him (he was much less well-known in the US in the mid-90s than in England), but I got The House of Sleep from the library (it was one of those interesting and appealing large-format paperbacks you get in the UK, but bound in library covers, and I am almost certain--oh, perhaps I just picked it off the shelf there at random--it was in the L&B room at Yale's Sterling Library, an interesting trove of recent literary and popular fiction including a lot of first-run non-US stuff that you would in those pre-lit-blog days have never come across elsewhere) and was transfixed by it, albeit without being sure whether I altogether liked it.
I read all the other novels of his they had at the library & distinctly registered Coe as someone worth watching though it was only with The Rotters' Club that he ascended to my list of favorites. (Though their writing is completely different, there's a strong resemblance between the writerliness of Coe and Jonathan Lethem; you can see both of them moving from early novels interested in avant-garde art and film and collectordom of the teenage boy kind but also a serious commitment to exploring memory into more obviously autobiographical work in their later thirties, and a kind of opening-up of humanity in the fiction that is only hinted at in the early books.)
Longwinded preamble!
What I loved about Like a Fiery Elephant: Coe's seriousness about novel-writing (which ultimately is the basis of his affection for Johnson, who took novel-writing with the utmost--sometimes off-putting--gravity). I strongly, strongly responded to this, I like the way he's willing to put himself on the spot about writing and its importance.
What I loved & was pained by at the same time: the awfulness of Johnson's letters, they are absolutely painful to read! (And even worse are the transcripts of tape-recorded conversations in which Johnson's awful bullying drunken dogmatic manner comes across, nb. the one starting on p. 161 in the British edition.)
Johnson to a prospective agent for his novel TRAVELLING PEOPLE:
[T]he device of using a different style or literary technique for each chapter has succeeded well beyond my expectation, largely as a result of the unifying element of the central character's logical progression and development. Joyce used this device in ULYSSES, of course, but by allowing the nature of the subject matter of each particular series of events which form one chapter to determine organically the style chosen, I seem to have avoided the contrivance to which Joyce was sometimes reduced.
Johnson to Allen Lane on Penguin's declining to buy paperback rights to his second novel:
Dear Allen Lane:
In reviewing my novel ALBERT ANGELO, the Sunday Times described me as 'one of the best writers we've got', and the Irish Times called the book 'a masterpiece' and put me in the same class as Joyce and Beckett.
You have refused to buy the paperback rights of ALBERT ANGELO. Why?
Yours sincerely,
B. S. Johnson
(Funnier and more sympathetic though possibly equally demented as a specimen of epistolary style is his letter to the Chief Obstetrician at St Bartholomew's Hospital, asking for an exception to the policy on not allowing fathers to be present at births: "I have recently seen films of labour and delivery at the National Childbirth Trust (where my wife has attended classes) and have read appropriately: I am therefore prepared for what should normally happen.")
Most likeable authorial footnote, as an addendum to a Daily Mail diatribe of 1970 against the Arts Council's funding for (among other things) the Midlands Arts Lab in Birmingham, a ramshackle cinema and theater complex in which (so the article charged) "girl members often paint their faces and bodies and simply sit around":
The present author must come clean and confess that he was himself a patron of this louche establishment in the late 1970s. Things must have changed in the itnervening years because I remember it as a rather quiet place where sensitive souls like myself could repair for a cup of coffee, a slice of fruitcake and--if we were feeling racy--perhaps a Werner Herzog or Howard Hawks film. To be honest I never saw any 'girl members' at all, let alone with their bodies and faces painted, 'sitting around' in (for such is the Mail's clear implication) nude and provocative poses. Too late, as usual: to qutoe Johnson himself--'Ah, the chances let slip!'
Most appealing irrelevant biographical detail: on the expense claim for research done for a projected film commemorating the jubilee of the Transport and General Workers' Union, Johnson (having visited a meat-processing factory) requested "₤2.75 for shoes ruined by blood'--decimalization having been introduced a few weeks earlier).
Saddest list (from the notes for an unwritten novel):
Suicide - the goldfish - not to feed - but he came up mouthing - was he trying to commit suicide?
I am now thinking of this myself
I once had a gun (ref. SAC)
Now I have an air pistol, the cheapest
Buy a leg of lamb, say, belly of pork, see how far the pellet can penetrate
The combined pathos and humor--unintended?--of that line about the leg of lamb....
Most enticing possibility: that someone will release as an audiobook the BBC recording of Johnson and others reading aloud from Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (which sounds by far the most appealing of Johnson's novels): "when it came to Chapter XVI of the novel," Coe observes, which laid out how to build a Molotov cocktail, the narrator on the tape "explains--truthfully--that the passage has been banned by the BBC, and instead we get a recording of Johnson reading the chapter, but speeded up more and more until it becomes an incomprehensible stream of high-pitched noise."
Most perceptive comment about Johnson's writing by someone other than Jonathan Coe (the speaker is Istvan Bart):
Bryan may look like an avant-garde writer, but what turns out, after so many years, to be his contribution is that in fact all the time he was writing a folklore, a folklore of a whole society, of this working-class past: attitudes that simply disappeared and will never come back and are gone. Even at the time he was making this world up: it was not real at the time. It was dead. There were just relics of it. He was making up a lore for himself, on which to fall back. It was quite obvious that this was the past, this was gone.
I thought Coe's emphasis on his own distrust for the assumptions underpinning the writing of & popular appetite for literary biography was slightly overstated; surely all of the best literary biographies share this kind of skepticism (Biswell's Anthony Burgess one, for instance, or Richard Holmes's lives of Shelley and Coleridge). Similarly, yes, it is slightly unorthodox to paste in so many documents and offer self-conscious historical speculation, but I do not find it qualitatively different from many other biographers' practice (so that Coe, like Johnson, seems to be doing something rather more humane and--a word I rarely use in a positive sense, but in this case I will make an exception--middlebrow than he lets on).
But here is the book's real credo, the thing that makes it such a rich and fascinating and humane read (and it is idiotic of me to bury this at the bottom of such a long post, but it makes more sense after all the other stuff, and Coe saves it for the end too):
Real novelists, picking up their pens in the morning, booting up their computers, ask themselves this question every day: Is it worth it? Is there any point? Without that bedrock of doubt, nothing that you write will have any value. Novel-writing is not a hobby (although we're allowed to find it enjoyable); it is not a form of therapy (although it can be therapeutic). It's an intervention, if it is anything: an act of lunatic faith in the notion that by adding something to the world we might somehow be improving it. The stakes are that high, and taking our lead from B. S. Johnson we should occasionally throw off our wretched middle-class English self-deprecation (with which he was so thoroughly unencumbered) and say as much. Not many novelists are prepared to do that: to own up to their responsibilities - to the form, to their readers, to the tradition that they are inheriting. That is what B. S. Johnson meant by 'writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter'.
Here's a very thorough set of review links at the Complete Review, in any case; perhaps most notably, Ed Park in the Village Voice, Eva Figes in the Guardian and Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books.
In a random coincidence
not one but two of my high-school classmates have reviews in this weekend's Washington Post book section: Sara Sklaroff reviews two books on madness and creativity and Emily Bazelon discusses recent books on motherhood by Caitlin Flanagan and others.
A premonition streak
Wayne Koestenbaum is my hero, and I just finished a second read through his new book of poems which has the tantalizing title Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (and if you read no other poem in the book, do read the funny and strangely modest title poem and also the bizarre and engaging collection of back-cover blurbs--oh, and I did love the list-poem "John Wayne's Perfumes" too...).
I have written before here about Wayne, I idolize his prose style and his sensibilities (follow these links if you're curious to see previous praise-lavishing posts on Wayne's essay "My 80's", his general excellence and his delightfully baroque novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes).
Rachel Kushner had a good interview with him recently in Time Out New York, check it out: "I don’t think I’ve gotten the fantasy of Jewish porn films out of my system. My poem is a manifesto, a call for papers—a comic commentary on the fact that there aren’t any best-selling Jewish porn films. Let’s make some! I’ll start with Diary of a Jewish Sex Fiend."
What I love in these poems is the clarity of Wayne's voice and his absolutely unmistakable diction--someone could say these words to me in the most incongruous and far-flung setting in a funny voice and I would know in a second who wrote them. They're dreamy, dream-like (uncensored), often collecting a handful of shorter lyrics under baroque-noir rubrics.
"Stanzas in My 39th year" opens with "Why I Want X in My 39th Year":
I used to be pretentious;
then I grew simplistic.
Should I devote myself
to pleasure or to labor?
I dreamt of a deep thinker:
Rousseau? A moment ago
I had the idea (it escaped)
that almost saved my life.
I love concentrating,
hugging a periphery
or a hole:
I wish I could prove it.
Somebody strong circled
the word "was" when it occurred
three times in one sentence.
I might have been the figure circling "was."
I love how much work (word-work and idea-work) he gets the word "Rousseau" to do, you would swear it was more than just two syllables....
There are a number of poems here with that puzzle-diction where you can't quite figure out the artificial constraint that produced the extraordinary diction; in "Elegy for Everyone," for instance, which I particularly like, most but not all of the articles have gone astray, with striking but mysterious results. Or what about this sequence of lines in "Observations"?
You can tell when cauliflower is cooked:
it starts to smell like cauliflower.
Rule of thumb:
vegetables are done
when they smell like themselves.
The rule applies to kale, spinach, broccoli,
potatoes. Onions, however,
smell like onions long before they are finished.
I dreamt Elizabeth Hardwick
corrected my verbs--
she told me, "Instead of is, we use lead or invite."
Something about the precision of the observations ("Rule of thumb: / vegetables are done / when they smell like themselves") combined with the transitions and the surprise of the Hardwick grammar correction just ravishes me.
The poem that seemed to me most Wayne-like is another list-poem (there's a real name for that, isn't there? I'm thinking of Christopher Smart and those great long repetitive lines of "For I will consider my cat Geoffrey") called "In this Vale of Tears We Call Existence." It's got sixteen stanzas of five lines each, all following the shape and rhythm of that incantation; my favorite's number five though I don't know that you can get the effect when it's taken out of context like this:
in this genital mutilation I call rickrack
in this gender I call "No Pets"
in this Manolo Blahnik high heel I call rear-entry intercourse
in this intercrural congress I call fastidiousness
in this retro mentality I call assiette variée
And then elsewhere there are a few one-liners (only they are two or three lines) that jump out here and there, I will leave you with a few of these to finish.
Current events:
my sadomasochistic student
has the smarts for me. (Better than the hots.)
And this (OK, I'm going to have to give you all eight lines):
Eclectic pastoral:
I'm wearing
too much makeup,
or not enough.
I miss confetti,
lacunae. Pals,
I'm on a premonition
streak: please slap me.
A good line, that last sentence; surely useful in all sorts of contexts?
I have written before here about Wayne, I idolize his prose style and his sensibilities (follow these links if you're curious to see previous praise-lavishing posts on Wayne's essay "My 80's", his general excellence and his delightfully baroque novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes).
Rachel Kushner had a good interview with him recently in Time Out New York, check it out: "I don’t think I’ve gotten the fantasy of Jewish porn films out of my system. My poem is a manifesto, a call for papers—a comic commentary on the fact that there aren’t any best-selling Jewish porn films. Let’s make some! I’ll start with Diary of a Jewish Sex Fiend."
What I love in these poems is the clarity of Wayne's voice and his absolutely unmistakable diction--someone could say these words to me in the most incongruous and far-flung setting in a funny voice and I would know in a second who wrote them. They're dreamy, dream-like (uncensored), often collecting a handful of shorter lyrics under baroque-noir rubrics.
"Stanzas in My 39th year" opens with "Why I Want X in My 39th Year":
I used to be pretentious;
then I grew simplistic.
Should I devote myself
to pleasure or to labor?
I dreamt of a deep thinker:
Rousseau? A moment ago
I had the idea (it escaped)
that almost saved my life.
I love concentrating,
hugging a periphery
or a hole:
I wish I could prove it.
Somebody strong circled
the word "was" when it occurred
three times in one sentence.
I might have been the figure circling "was."
I love how much work (word-work and idea-work) he gets the word "Rousseau" to do, you would swear it was more than just two syllables....
There are a number of poems here with that puzzle-diction where you can't quite figure out the artificial constraint that produced the extraordinary diction; in "Elegy for Everyone," for instance, which I particularly like, most but not all of the articles have gone astray, with striking but mysterious results. Or what about this sequence of lines in "Observations"?
You can tell when cauliflower is cooked:
it starts to smell like cauliflower.
Rule of thumb:
vegetables are done
when they smell like themselves.
The rule applies to kale, spinach, broccoli,
potatoes. Onions, however,
smell like onions long before they are finished.
I dreamt Elizabeth Hardwick
corrected my verbs--
she told me, "Instead of is, we use lead or invite."
Something about the precision of the observations ("Rule of thumb: / vegetables are done / when they smell like themselves") combined with the transitions and the surprise of the Hardwick grammar correction just ravishes me.
The poem that seemed to me most Wayne-like is another list-poem (there's a real name for that, isn't there? I'm thinking of Christopher Smart and those great long repetitive lines of "For I will consider my cat Geoffrey") called "In this Vale of Tears We Call Existence." It's got sixteen stanzas of five lines each, all following the shape and rhythm of that incantation; my favorite's number five though I don't know that you can get the effect when it's taken out of context like this:
in this genital mutilation I call rickrack
in this gender I call "No Pets"
in this Manolo Blahnik high heel I call rear-entry intercourse
in this intercrural congress I call fastidiousness
in this retro mentality I call assiette variée
And then elsewhere there are a few one-liners (only they are two or three lines) that jump out here and there, I will leave you with a few of these to finish.
Current events:
my sadomasochistic student
has the smarts for me. (Better than the hots.)
And this (OK, I'm going to have to give you all eight lines):
Eclectic pastoral:
I'm wearing
too much makeup,
or not enough.
I miss confetti,
lacunae. Pals,
I'm on a premonition
streak: please slap me.
A good line, that last sentence; surely useful in all sorts of contexts?
Friday, April 28, 2006
Banville on Roth's Everyman
at the Guardian; other good things include Patrick Ness mouthwateringly making me covet Jake Arnott's new novel Johnny Come Home. You know what, enough of this semi-penitential library-book reading, I'm ordering it from Amazon UK in spite of the exorbitant shippings costs and the book problem round here! I must have it--I can always take it to read in Philadelphia where I will go for my brother's wedding before coming back HOME to New York, my brothers are Jake Arnott fans and I can leave it with them there....
Diana Evans reviews Gautam Malkani's first novel
in the FT. Londonstani won't be released in the US until June, but I am curious to take a look, on the whole I like these extreme-language novels; but I also think a ban should be placed on clever -stan and -stani titles, that is enough already (note Gary Shteyngart's forthcoming Absurdistan--recently excerpted in the New Yorker, but not I think online--and Masha Gessen's "Paranoiastan" in the first issue of n+1).
Ten is the safest age
A fascinating piece by Jo Craven McGinty at the New York Times, about patterns that emerge from New York City's murder victims and murderers over the last three years.
I love crime fiction, but I realized a long time ago I was never going to be able to write a straight-up crime novel--I don't approve, really (on account of basic lack of realism), of the kind where a private investigator ends up involved with a murder, and I am way too far removed from the milieu of homicide detectives or for that matter career criminals to do good "life of crime" type writing. I aim to make an attempt one day at some more female-noir-type crime writing (bad things happen inside families), but I have a feeling it's likely to turn into something a little less orthodox--like this idea I have about the animal-shape-changer in Upper Manhattan.
I'm not sure what responsibility the crime writer has to reality. I'm reminded of a talk I heard Cynthia Ozick give this past fall, and in fact I'm just going to paste in what I wrote then (the talk was called "The Rights of Imagination and the Rights of the History," and in it she made the counterintuitive claim--counterintuitive for a novelist, that is--that history is superior to fiction and that in certain circumstances fiction is indeed morally unredeemable; her examples concern failures of representation in Sophie's Choice and The Reader):
I think that as a writer or a literary critic you're better off critiquing books on the kind of evidence we deal with well (close reading, choices to do with plot and endings and argument) rather than this almost statistical argument about representation. (Ozick objects--I'm slightly simplifying her argument, but not by much--to Styron's choice to represent the suffering of a Polish Catholic in Auschwitz when only 5% of the victims were Polish Catholics, or to Schlink's decision to represent a female prison guard as illiterate when German society of the 1930s had very high literacy rates.) I asked a question afterwards that introduced an oblique analogy to put pressure on where this line of thought takes you--is it fair, then, to argue that people shouldn't write serial-killer thrillers because most women and children are killed by people they know & this covers up violence against women?
It happens that I have no problem with people writing serial-killer thrillers (well, in general of course I believe that people should write what they like, your imagination runs along certain lines and you will not do well to wrench it away from them), and yet it does start to seem odd if the preponderance of books published in a certain genre (one whose literary protocols tend to be fairly realistic, moreover) come to seem so much at odds with the patterns in reality.
I love crime fiction, but I realized a long time ago I was never going to be able to write a straight-up crime novel--I don't approve, really (on account of basic lack of realism), of the kind where a private investigator ends up involved with a murder, and I am way too far removed from the milieu of homicide detectives or for that matter career criminals to do good "life of crime" type writing. I aim to make an attempt one day at some more female-noir-type crime writing (bad things happen inside families), but I have a feeling it's likely to turn into something a little less orthodox--like this idea I have about the animal-shape-changer in Upper Manhattan.
I'm not sure what responsibility the crime writer has to reality. I'm reminded of a talk I heard Cynthia Ozick give this past fall, and in fact I'm just going to paste in what I wrote then (the talk was called "The Rights of Imagination and the Rights of the History," and in it she made the counterintuitive claim--counterintuitive for a novelist, that is--that history is superior to fiction and that in certain circumstances fiction is indeed morally unredeemable; her examples concern failures of representation in Sophie's Choice and The Reader):
I think that as a writer or a literary critic you're better off critiquing books on the kind of evidence we deal with well (close reading, choices to do with plot and endings and argument) rather than this almost statistical argument about representation. (Ozick objects--I'm slightly simplifying her argument, but not by much--to Styron's choice to represent the suffering of a Polish Catholic in Auschwitz when only 5% of the victims were Polish Catholics, or to Schlink's decision to represent a female prison guard as illiterate when German society of the 1930s had very high literacy rates.) I asked a question afterwards that introduced an oblique analogy to put pressure on where this line of thought takes you--is it fair, then, to argue that people shouldn't write serial-killer thrillers because most women and children are killed by people they know & this covers up violence against women?
It happens that I have no problem with people writing serial-killer thrillers (well, in general of course I believe that people should write what they like, your imagination runs along certain lines and you will not do well to wrench it away from them), and yet it does start to seem odd if the preponderance of books published in a certain genre (one whose literary protocols tend to be fairly realistic, moreover) come to seem so much at odds with the patterns in reality.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Good TLS things
Adam Kirsch on Elizabeth Bishop's uncollected drafts and fragments:
Compared to the decades-long gestation of other poems, “One Art” came to Bishop quickly, in just a few months – “like writing a letter”, she said. But the sixteen drafts of the poem reveal how far it evolved to reach its seemingly predestined form. The first draft shows the basic premiss already established, but Bishop expounds it in a dismally coy first-person monologue:
One may find it hard to believe, but I have
actually lost
I mean lost, and forever two whole houses,
one a very big one. A third house, also big, is
at present, I think, “mislaid” – but
maybe it’s lost, too. I won’t know for some
time.
If this attempt is paralysed by its assumed airiness, the succeeding drafts are nearly sunk by naked sentimentality. “One Art” became a villanelle as early as the second draft, but by the ninth Bishop was still contemplating a bathetic ending: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master. / oh no. / anything at all anything but one’s love. (Say it: disaster.)”. And not until the twelfth draft does she abandon the saccharine rhyme comparing the beloved’s eyes to “the small wild aster”. The perfection of “One Art”, the drafts show, was not given, but earned, through the disciplined refusal of Bishop’s deepest poetic temptations. That insistence on perfection, documented on every page of Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, is what makes Elizabeth Bishop not just a cherishable poet, but an exemplary one.
(The layout of the verse may have gotten messed up, by the way, in the paste-up.)
Also Raymond Tallis on Mary Midgley's memoir (mmmm, that's one I have to get, sounds great) and Bharat Tandon on Alan Warner (a mixed but very perceptive review, with some interesting thoughts on modes of contemporary fiction).
Compared to the decades-long gestation of other poems, “One Art” came to Bishop quickly, in just a few months – “like writing a letter”, she said. But the sixteen drafts of the poem reveal how far it evolved to reach its seemingly predestined form. The first draft shows the basic premiss already established, but Bishop expounds it in a dismally coy first-person monologue:
One may find it hard to believe, but I have
actually lost
I mean lost, and forever two whole houses,
one a very big one. A third house, also big, is
at present, I think, “mislaid” – but
maybe it’s lost, too. I won’t know for some
time.
If this attempt is paralysed by its assumed airiness, the succeeding drafts are nearly sunk by naked sentimentality. “One Art” became a villanelle as early as the second draft, but by the ninth Bishop was still contemplating a bathetic ending: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master. / oh no. / anything at all anything but one’s love. (Say it: disaster.)”. And not until the twelfth draft does she abandon the saccharine rhyme comparing the beloved’s eyes to “the small wild aster”. The perfection of “One Art”, the drafts show, was not given, but earned, through the disciplined refusal of Bishop’s deepest poetic temptations. That insistence on perfection, documented on every page of Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, is what makes Elizabeth Bishop not just a cherishable poet, but an exemplary one.
(The layout of the verse may have gotten messed up, by the way, in the paste-up.)
Also Raymond Tallis on Mary Midgley's memoir (mmmm, that's one I have to get, sounds great) and Bharat Tandon on Alan Warner (a mixed but very perceptive review, with some interesting thoughts on modes of contemporary fiction).
Queer as a clockwork orange
I've just finished Andrew Biswell's excellent The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, and the only bad thing about the experience is the painfulness with which my teenage self is called to mind. From age twelve or thirteen to seventeen or so, I was truly obsessed with Burgess, I read almost everything he'd published and really had a fixation of unmatched intensity. In retrospect, it makes tons of sense, Burgess is exactly the man of letters I still aspire to be, even his obsession with Augustinian versus Pelagian accounts of human nature maps very closely onto my ongoing interesting in the nature-nurture-perfectibility stuff; all the linguistic playfulness and intellectual polymathness was exactly what would have appealed to me at an age where you really only have limited access to such things by virtue of the unfortunate handicap (I'm borrowing this phrase from my novel) of a chronological age in the low double digits.
I am planning a massive Burgess reread at some not-long-from-now opportunity (if I was in my real apartment I would be reading A Clockwork Orange right now instead of blogging, having plucked it off my own actual bookshelf, and in fact I may go and buy another copy tomorrow, I have a sudden desire to incorporate it into the nature-nurture talk I have to give on Tuesday). For now, though, I at least have the satisfaction that this was one of those library books I'm so determined to consume. And it also leaves me with the puzzle of what to choose next out of two associatively related library-obtained volumes: Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson biography Like a Fiery Elephant, on the one hand; on the other (the association here is more remote, but Davidson--no relation--is one of the dedicatees of Biswell's biography, and it reminded me of the book's allure for me when I first heard about it) Peter Davidson's The Idea of North. Hmmm... tantalizing choice... anyone who has read one or both is encouraged to express an opinion in the comments.
One of the things Biswell deals with particularly gracefully is the extent of Burgess's own confabulation--call it lying--about his own biography, so the facts below may be taken with a large grain of salt. But here are ten particularly entrancing details garnered from Biswell's pages:
1. Burgess recorded passages from A Clockwork Orange (issued on vinyl, Caedmon, 1973) in a strongish Manchester accent, though he had otherwise modified his speaking voice to something more like RP (Biswell observes that "his speaking voice altered in the other direction when regional accents came into fashion later on in the 1960s, with the rise of the Beatles and the Mersey Beat poets").
2. In a piece for the Sunday Times Magazine in October 1977, Burgess declared his "Seven Wonders of the World" to be Tiger Balm massage oil, the chameleon, the pre-decimal British monetary system, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, the Petrarchan sonnet form, champagne and Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
3. In an interview for the magazine of the school at which he taught in 1952, Burgess answered the question "What do you think is the greatest menace at the present time?" thus: "Neo-Pelagianism (refusal to believe in Original Sin) which produced Russia, America, youth organizations and holiday camps."
4. Stanley Kubrick asked Burgess to adapt Schnitzler's Traumnovelle for the screen long before Frederic Raphael wrote the script that became Eyes Wide Shut.
5. After his return to England in the early 1950s, Burgess was so broke that his wife cut his hair using kitchen scissors and a pudding basin ("a mean economy, as the photographs of Burgess from this time testify," Biswell comments); he later also claimed to have paid the chemistry master at the school to make tonic water (at the cost of a penny per gallon) to save the expense of buying it in shops.
6. The junior neurologist who saw Burgess when he arrived at the Neurological Institute with a suspected brain tumor was Roger Bannister, the first person in recorded history to run a mile in less than four minutes (however--despite Burgess's later claims--Bannister did not "trepan the Burgess cranium").
7. Burgess in an unpublished letter written during the composition of A Clockwork Orange: "I've just completed Part I - which is just sheer crime. Now comes punishment. The whole thing's making me rather sick. My horrible juvenile delinquent hero is emerging as too sympathetic a character - almost Christ-like, set upon by the scourging police. You see what I mean by moral deterioration."
8. Burgess often wrote eight hours a day, seven days a week; when his concentration failed him, he took three dexedrine tablets and a pint of gin and tonic and returned to work.
9. The vocabulary of the Shakespeare bio-novel Nothing Like the Sun only includes words that Shakespeare could have known, with one exception, the word "spurgeoning," a deliberate anachronism to honor the literary critic Caroline Spurgeon ("He kicked in youth's peevishness at the turves of the Avon's left bank, marking with storing-up spaniel's eye the spurgeoning of the black-eddy under the Clopton Bridge").
10. Shirley Conran was his neighbor in (tax-havenish) Monaco, and he read her novel Lace in typescript, which led various people to speculate that he was her ghost-writer: "When she asked for his permission to name him in the acknowledgements," Biswell adds in a note, Burgess politely declined: "I don't think it's in order to express this putative help or encouragement publicly [. . .] I think it might even be considered indiscreet to mention help. So please don't bring me into it."
I am planning a massive Burgess reread at some not-long-from-now opportunity (if I was in my real apartment I would be reading A Clockwork Orange right now instead of blogging, having plucked it off my own actual bookshelf, and in fact I may go and buy another copy tomorrow, I have a sudden desire to incorporate it into the nature-nurture talk I have to give on Tuesday). For now, though, I at least have the satisfaction that this was one of those library books I'm so determined to consume. And it also leaves me with the puzzle of what to choose next out of two associatively related library-obtained volumes: Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson biography Like a Fiery Elephant, on the one hand; on the other (the association here is more remote, but Davidson--no relation--is one of the dedicatees of Biswell's biography, and it reminded me of the book's allure for me when I first heard about it) Peter Davidson's The Idea of North. Hmmm... tantalizing choice... anyone who has read one or both is encouraged to express an opinion in the comments.
One of the things Biswell deals with particularly gracefully is the extent of Burgess's own confabulation--call it lying--about his own biography, so the facts below may be taken with a large grain of salt. But here are ten particularly entrancing details garnered from Biswell's pages:
1. Burgess recorded passages from A Clockwork Orange (issued on vinyl, Caedmon, 1973) in a strongish Manchester accent, though he had otherwise modified his speaking voice to something more like RP (Biswell observes that "his speaking voice altered in the other direction when regional accents came into fashion later on in the 1960s, with the rise of the Beatles and the Mersey Beat poets").
2. In a piece for the Sunday Times Magazine in October 1977, Burgess declared his "Seven Wonders of the World" to be Tiger Balm massage oil, the chameleon, the pre-decimal British monetary system, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, the Petrarchan sonnet form, champagne and Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
3. In an interview for the magazine of the school at which he taught in 1952, Burgess answered the question "What do you think is the greatest menace at the present time?" thus: "Neo-Pelagianism (refusal to believe in Original Sin) which produced Russia, America, youth organizations and holiday camps."
4. Stanley Kubrick asked Burgess to adapt Schnitzler's Traumnovelle for the screen long before Frederic Raphael wrote the script that became Eyes Wide Shut.
5. After his return to England in the early 1950s, Burgess was so broke that his wife cut his hair using kitchen scissors and a pudding basin ("a mean economy, as the photographs of Burgess from this time testify," Biswell comments); he later also claimed to have paid the chemistry master at the school to make tonic water (at the cost of a penny per gallon) to save the expense of buying it in shops.
6. The junior neurologist who saw Burgess when he arrived at the Neurological Institute with a suspected brain tumor was Roger Bannister, the first person in recorded history to run a mile in less than four minutes (however--despite Burgess's later claims--Bannister did not "trepan the Burgess cranium").
7. Burgess in an unpublished letter written during the composition of A Clockwork Orange: "I've just completed Part I - which is just sheer crime. Now comes punishment. The whole thing's making me rather sick. My horrible juvenile delinquent hero is emerging as too sympathetic a character - almost Christ-like, set upon by the scourging police. You see what I mean by moral deterioration."
8. Burgess often wrote eight hours a day, seven days a week; when his concentration failed him, he took three dexedrine tablets and a pint of gin and tonic and returned to work.
9. The vocabulary of the Shakespeare bio-novel Nothing Like the Sun only includes words that Shakespeare could have known, with one exception, the word "spurgeoning," a deliberate anachronism to honor the literary critic Caroline Spurgeon ("He kicked in youth's peevishness at the turves of the Avon's left bank, marking with storing-up spaniel's eye the spurgeoning of the black-eddy under the Clopton Bridge").
10. Shirley Conran was his neighbor in (tax-havenish) Monaco, and he read her novel Lace in typescript, which led various people to speculate that he was her ghost-writer: "When she asked for his permission to name him in the acknowledgements," Biswell adds in a note, Burgess politely declined: "I don't think it's in order to express this putative help or encouragement publicly [. . .] I think it might even be considered indiscreet to mention help. So please don't bring me into it."
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Mark Slouka challenges the integrity of the Columbia MFA in writing
in the Columbia Spectator. (Thanks to Ben for the link.)
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
I am hell-bent
on reading an acceptable number of these library books before they have to go back, and so I've set myself a one-a-day rule; I'm not allowed to skip one just because I read a non-library pleasure book, but I am allowed an exemption if I need to be reading for work instead (especially because a lot of the work books are library books also). At last count, I had 164 checked out, of course at least fifty or so of those I've read already--a huge heap of off-putting Fielding criticism for instance, which I had to read this fall, and a lot of volumes of Johnson and Boswell and their critics--but there is no way I will get to read them all before I move.
Just now I've read a really excellent one, sly and uncanny and altogether having my strongest recommendation, James Lasdun's Seven Lies. The level of moral-psychological insight combined with linguistic firepower is here basically unimaginably high; and yet it is a deceptively simple-seeming little novel that would make a great film.
On every page there's something quotable, but here are a couple paragraphs I especially liked early on, a description of the narrator's mother (the setting is communist East Germany in the 1970s):
My mother in particular was an expert in that particular form of psychological control which consists on the one hand in withholding, or at least delaying, a smile or word of kindness when the situation seems to call for one, and on the other in bestowing her approval of something--when she chose to do so--with a magisterial impersonality, as if she were merely the channel for an objective fact that had been handed down to her by some celestial source of judgment. The effect of the latter was to make one feel elevated, officially congratulated, as it were; as if a medal with the head of Lenin on it had been pinned to one's chest.
You might imagine that in a socialist society a personality such as hers, with the distinctly unegalitarian idea of life that it projected, couldn't possibly thrive. But somehow she managed to short-circuit the mental processes by which people might form a criticism of her in political terms, and confront them instead on a more intimate and primitive level of the psyche, where authority, if it succeeds in imposing itself as such, is unquestioningly believed in and--how shall I put it?--quaked before.
It's a sad, strange, funny little novel about fate and (self-)betrayal, with lots of insights like this along the way; highly recommended.
(Here are my thoughts a week or so ago about his first novel, The Horned Man, which I loved. And I've pulled out of the comments on that post several additional book recommendations--for my own later library-going purposes as well as for readers here, all of these sound excellent though I haven't read them myself: in response to my observation about the appeal of poets' novels, Ed Park urges us all to read John Ashbery and James Schuyler's A Nest of Ninnies, Robert Kelly's Scorpions and Albert Goldbarth's Pieces of Payne; and Maud Newton recommends The Insult by Rupert Thomson.)
Just now I've read a really excellent one, sly and uncanny and altogether having my strongest recommendation, James Lasdun's Seven Lies. The level of moral-psychological insight combined with linguistic firepower is here basically unimaginably high; and yet it is a deceptively simple-seeming little novel that would make a great film.
On every page there's something quotable, but here are a couple paragraphs I especially liked early on, a description of the narrator's mother (the setting is communist East Germany in the 1970s):
My mother in particular was an expert in that particular form of psychological control which consists on the one hand in withholding, or at least delaying, a smile or word of kindness when the situation seems to call for one, and on the other in bestowing her approval of something--when she chose to do so--with a magisterial impersonality, as if she were merely the channel for an objective fact that had been handed down to her by some celestial source of judgment. The effect of the latter was to make one feel elevated, officially congratulated, as it were; as if a medal with the head of Lenin on it had been pinned to one's chest.
You might imagine that in a socialist society a personality such as hers, with the distinctly unegalitarian idea of life that it projected, couldn't possibly thrive. But somehow she managed to short-circuit the mental processes by which people might form a criticism of her in political terms, and confront them instead on a more intimate and primitive level of the psyche, where authority, if it succeeds in imposing itself as such, is unquestioningly believed in and--how shall I put it?--quaked before.
It's a sad, strange, funny little novel about fate and (self-)betrayal, with lots of insights like this along the way; highly recommended.
(Here are my thoughts a week or so ago about his first novel, The Horned Man, which I loved. And I've pulled out of the comments on that post several additional book recommendations--for my own later library-going purposes as well as for readers here, all of these sound excellent though I haven't read them myself: in response to my observation about the appeal of poets' novels, Ed Park urges us all to read John Ashbery and James Schuyler's A Nest of Ninnies, Robert Kelly's Scorpions and Albert Goldbarth's Pieces of Payne; and Maud Newton recommends The Insult by Rupert Thomson.)
Monday, April 24, 2006
I had a minor internal literary psychodrama
last year around David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, it seemed like everyone was raving about it & yet I didn't find the idea of it appealing at all, I checked it out more than once from the library and returned it unread when some other reader recalled it and finally I read the first few pages and thought "Oh, those are remarkably well-turned sentences" and returned it to the library without a qualm and also without reading another page.
It was a revelation of the "Just because everyone else is reading it doesn't mean you have to" sort, but it didn't last, I was having qualms again a month later, clearly most of my novel-reading is prompted by the pleasure motive but as a serious reader and fiction-writer I do sometimes have to read things that may not be calling to me as strongly as some other books. Sometimes, afterwards, I discover that I've been missing out on something I will love; sometimes not.
Mitchell's Black Swan Green sounded rather more my kind of thing, in any case, and so I have just read it, and I find myself still quite torn. (But clearly I must read Cloud Atlas, I've put it in the Amazon shopping cart, I feel that I cannot afford not to see what he's doing technically even if it is not exactly what I love. This is a major English-language novelist & I must keep an eye on what he's up to. That "afford" isn't a prudential assessment, in other words, it just signals my sense that Mitchell may be on the shortish list of writers who are pushing the bounds of what's possible & that if you don't see them doing these things you miss an opportunity to expand your own range of techniques & goals. That kind of missed opportunity is what I find unacceptable; thus the obligation to read things I don't always or necessarily enjoy.)
The book leaves me completely cold emotionally. I couldn't stop comparing it to other roughly comparable novels & finding it wanting; it is not as moving as Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club, not as frightening as Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy, not as intellectually and emotionally compelling (to me personally, I mean) as Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, not as well-crafted (as a novel as opposed to linked-story-thing) as something like--but of course this is one of the greatest novels of all time and not a fair comparison--Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, not (to go a little further afield) as perceptive about adolescent psychology and the dynamic of groups as Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. (But there is a rather good classroom scene late on in the book, it is my obsession that great novelists do not write enough about classrooms--where everyone spends a lot of their time at one stage of life, and where I continue to spend some of my most interesting & engaging time--it is one thing I like about the Harry Potter books, that they reclaimed the classroom as a place where you could write lots of scenes even in a commercially successful novel.) And back to the main drift here, not as rich a bildungsroman as my favorites like Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows or (of course) David Copperfield.
One aspect of the book struck me as absolutely wonderful, and at a different level from the rest: this is the section titled "Hangman" and (more generally) the novel's treatment of the protagonist-narrator's speech impediment. It's really, really cool and well done and amazing things happen with the language related to this strand of the book. It got me through the first third or so of the book when I was just incredibly irritated by the narrator's (only word I can invoke) prissiness: Mitchell has chosen to use this prim and rather pedantic way of transcribing contractions ("would've," "'cause," etc.) and I really wish he hadn't, I know it can be affected when people come up with radical new spelling things (like Shaw does in Pygmalion & elsewhere, just leaving out the apostrophes in contractions in an attempt to get closer to the spoken language) but I think he could have done something better like just had "couldve" if he wanted it, or else done it more conventionally altogether, this way it's really annoying. And I have a personal antipathy to this style of British male middle-class boyishness, it rubs me the wrong way & my irritation distracts me from what should otherwise be the pleasures of the language. So the stammer material took things up to a higher level & tided me over & then the second half drew me in much more effectively, so that by the end I was not nearly so annoyed.
There's an episode in the middle that features a character (I am told) from Cloud Atlas, Madame Crommelynck, that struck me as both excessively stylized-literary (I thought the book would have been stronger without it) but also a productive turning point in the book, as if Mitchell had to get this out of the way before things could get really good. Here's Jason Taylor (who's been publishing his poetry in the parish magazine under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar) on his second visit to this intimidating & cosmopolitan lady who has made contact with him on the basis of those poems (I'm quoting this to give you a sense of what I don't like about the novel's style, and yet what's also striking about it):
As I prized off my trainers I heard a piano, joined by a quiet violin. I hoped Madame Crommelynck didn't have a visitor. Once you have three people you may as well have a hundred. The stairway needed fixing. A knacked blue guitar'd been left on a broken stool. In the gaudy frame a shivery woman sprawled in a punt on a clogged pond. Once again, the butler led me to the solarium. (I looked "solarium" up. It just means "an airy room.") The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I'll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars're rooms. So are woods. Skies're ceilings. Distances're walls. Wombs're rooms made of mothers. Graves're rooms made of soil.
So I'm not objecting to what some reviewers have criticized, the incongruousness of this rather callow thirteen-year-old having such thoughts; I think that can be explained in terms of the voice, that awkward oscillation between immaturity and a precocious aestheticism seems to me psychologically more-or-less plausible. But the preciousness of the insights justs rubs me the wrong way (like the one about three people and a hundred); this is a very talented writer, don't get me wrong, but I suppose it's the same reason I don't like a lot of poetry, there strikes me as something terribly self-satisfied about lingering so long on these intricacies of self-observation and insight. Less would have been more: if I just had the plain sentences about rooms, I would find the observation more striking, but once it's presented alongside all this other stuff it takes it over the top in a way I find distinctly irritating.
Later in the section, Madame C. comments that Jason's best poem in the parish magazines is the poem titled "Hangman": "It has pieces of truth of your speech impediment, I am right?" she asks him. But common sense just has me saying here (in the internal monologue that accompanies my reading of a novel that has not fully engaged my emotions and attention), "But this is all very well and self-referential, and of course it echoes my own thought about the first hundred and fifty pages of Mitchell's novel, that the stammering stuff is much the best; but if you see it, and you see it's true, why not write me a really lovely short novel that deals with that truth in the amazing language I see in about ten percent of this novel, rather than giving me this blander and more middlebrow and prissy book clocking in at almost three hundred pages?" It's not an overly long novel, not by any manner of speaking, and yet I feel that some significant further distillation of meaning would have augmented my reading experience.
Some of the insights in the last part of the novel (about bullying, about self-knowledge, about secrets, about the power of being yourself) come a bit glibly, including a slightly over-obvious scene in the Hall of Mirrors at the village fair. "Secrets affect you more than you'd think," Jason tells us near the end. "You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone'll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in the charge of the secret, but isn't it the secret who's actually using you? S'pose lunatics mold their doctors more than doctors mold their lunatics?" All very well, but a bit too familiar to be a really satisfying payoff for this artfully crafted bildungsroman. It's related to that blandness I feel here and there; I think one of the things that makes it hard for me to imagine Mitchell becoming a favorite writer of mine, though I am extremely impressed with his abilities and his craftsmanship, is that the books I love most tend to be (a) demented and (b) funny, and neither one of those adjectives applies here.
I've got one other disappointment that I will register (I hope, by the way, that I do not sound evilly mean-spirited; I found this an interesting and stimulating book, and I'm writing about it here mostly for myself, to clarify what reading it showed me about my own beliefs about novels I might write myself as well as novels written by other people). I don't think Black Swan Green works as a political novel, and I think that given its own implied goals and aspirations this is a problem. Jason Taylor mouths a lot of political opinions that his later grown-up self will presumably have disavowed (his older sister has already dissented from the smug Thatcherism professed by the Taylor father & many of the other grown-ups in this novel), but the novel leaves it at the level of simple irony, something on the order of the joke elsewhere about Betamax beating out VHS. There's a long set-piece early on describing a news broadcast early in the Falkland war (I haven't put it in italics so as to keep Mitchell's own italicizing clear):
"Mrs. Thatcher frazzled this twerpy prat in a bow tie on BBC1 this evening. He was saying sinking the General Belgrano outside the Total Exclusion Zone was morally and legally wrong. (Actually we sunk the Belgrano some days ago but the papers've just got hold of the pictures and since the Sheffield we've got zero sympathy for the Argie bastards.) Mrs. Thatcher fixed her stained-glass blue eyes on that pillock and pointed out that the enemy cruiser'd been zigzagging in and out of the zone all day. She said something like, 'The fathers and mothers of our country did not elect me the prime minister of this country to gamble with the lives of their sons over questions of legal niceties. Must I remind you that we are a country at war?' The whole studio cheered and the whole country cheered too, I reckon, 'cept for Michael Foot and Red Ken Linvingstone and Anthony Wedgwood Benn and all those Loony Lefters. Mrs. Thatcher's bloody ace. She's so strong, so calm, so sure."
I think I see what he's doing here, we're of course meant to hear this as thin & self-deluding and Jason just echoing what his father's saying in a painful and embarrassing and short-sighted way, and the story gives us several later surprises and reversals (including a death) to provide context. The longish passage here, though, ends with the following sentences, and it came clear to me that the present-past ironies as Mitchell's set them up can only be expressed by a contrast between speech & story, not by some greater complexity within the speaker's own sentences:
"The Sun's paying ₤100 for the best anti-Argie joke. I can't do jokes, but I'm keeping a scrapbook about the war. I'm cutting out stuff from the newspapers and magazines. Neal Brose is keeping one too. He reckons it'll be worth a fortune twenty or thirty years from now, when the Falklands War has turned into history. But all this excitement'll never turn dusty and brown in archives and libraries. No way. People'll remember everything about the Falklands till the end of the world."
This just seems to me coy and entirely unsubtle; it had me pining for Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which I felt was both formally extraordinary and also a really brilliant and subtle argument about Thatcherism and the relationship between the present and the past. (Muriel Spark and Joyce Carol Oates also have really interesting ways of bringing in future events/foreshadowing, I was mentally comparing.) Hollinghurst's vision and technique are nothing like what I could ever pull off myself, it is not that I am a Hollinghurst kind of a person as opposed to a Mitchell kind, and yet I feel a much stronger affinity with that book than with anything Mitchell does here.
I have certainly gone on long enough. Some real reviews particularly worth looking at: Daniel Zalewski in the New Yorker; Adam Phillips in the Observer (imaginative choice of reviewer); and (my favorite) Ed Park in the Village Voice. And here's the roundup at the Complete Review.
It was a revelation of the "Just because everyone else is reading it doesn't mean you have to" sort, but it didn't last, I was having qualms again a month later, clearly most of my novel-reading is prompted by the pleasure motive but as a serious reader and fiction-writer I do sometimes have to read things that may not be calling to me as strongly as some other books. Sometimes, afterwards, I discover that I've been missing out on something I will love; sometimes not.
Mitchell's Black Swan Green sounded rather more my kind of thing, in any case, and so I have just read it, and I find myself still quite torn. (But clearly I must read Cloud Atlas, I've put it in the Amazon shopping cart, I feel that I cannot afford not to see what he's doing technically even if it is not exactly what I love. This is a major English-language novelist & I must keep an eye on what he's up to. That "afford" isn't a prudential assessment, in other words, it just signals my sense that Mitchell may be on the shortish list of writers who are pushing the bounds of what's possible & that if you don't see them doing these things you miss an opportunity to expand your own range of techniques & goals. That kind of missed opportunity is what I find unacceptable; thus the obligation to read things I don't always or necessarily enjoy.)
The book leaves me completely cold emotionally. I couldn't stop comparing it to other roughly comparable novels & finding it wanting; it is not as moving as Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club, not as frightening as Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy, not as intellectually and emotionally compelling (to me personally, I mean) as Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, not as well-crafted (as a novel as opposed to linked-story-thing) as something like--but of course this is one of the greatest novels of all time and not a fair comparison--Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, not (to go a little further afield) as perceptive about adolescent psychology and the dynamic of groups as Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. (But there is a rather good classroom scene late on in the book, it is my obsession that great novelists do not write enough about classrooms--where everyone spends a lot of their time at one stage of life, and where I continue to spend some of my most interesting & engaging time--it is one thing I like about the Harry Potter books, that they reclaimed the classroom as a place where you could write lots of scenes even in a commercially successful novel.) And back to the main drift here, not as rich a bildungsroman as my favorites like Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows or (of course) David Copperfield.
One aspect of the book struck me as absolutely wonderful, and at a different level from the rest: this is the section titled "Hangman" and (more generally) the novel's treatment of the protagonist-narrator's speech impediment. It's really, really cool and well done and amazing things happen with the language related to this strand of the book. It got me through the first third or so of the book when I was just incredibly irritated by the narrator's (only word I can invoke) prissiness: Mitchell has chosen to use this prim and rather pedantic way of transcribing contractions ("would've," "'cause," etc.) and I really wish he hadn't, I know it can be affected when people come up with radical new spelling things (like Shaw does in Pygmalion & elsewhere, just leaving out the apostrophes in contractions in an attempt to get closer to the spoken language) but I think he could have done something better like just had "couldve" if he wanted it, or else done it more conventionally altogether, this way it's really annoying. And I have a personal antipathy to this style of British male middle-class boyishness, it rubs me the wrong way & my irritation distracts me from what should otherwise be the pleasures of the language. So the stammer material took things up to a higher level & tided me over & then the second half drew me in much more effectively, so that by the end I was not nearly so annoyed.
There's an episode in the middle that features a character (I am told) from Cloud Atlas, Madame Crommelynck, that struck me as both excessively stylized-literary (I thought the book would have been stronger without it) but also a productive turning point in the book, as if Mitchell had to get this out of the way before things could get really good. Here's Jason Taylor (who's been publishing his poetry in the parish magazine under the pseudonym Eliot Bolivar) on his second visit to this intimidating & cosmopolitan lady who has made contact with him on the basis of those poems (I'm quoting this to give you a sense of what I don't like about the novel's style, and yet what's also striking about it):
As I prized off my trainers I heard a piano, joined by a quiet violin. I hoped Madame Crommelynck didn't have a visitor. Once you have three people you may as well have a hundred. The stairway needed fixing. A knacked blue guitar'd been left on a broken stool. In the gaudy frame a shivery woman sprawled in a punt on a clogged pond. Once again, the butler led me to the solarium. (I looked "solarium" up. It just means "an airy room.") The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I'll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars're rooms. So are woods. Skies're ceilings. Distances're walls. Wombs're rooms made of mothers. Graves're rooms made of soil.
So I'm not objecting to what some reviewers have criticized, the incongruousness of this rather callow thirteen-year-old having such thoughts; I think that can be explained in terms of the voice, that awkward oscillation between immaturity and a precocious aestheticism seems to me psychologically more-or-less plausible. But the preciousness of the insights justs rubs me the wrong way (like the one about three people and a hundred); this is a very talented writer, don't get me wrong, but I suppose it's the same reason I don't like a lot of poetry, there strikes me as something terribly self-satisfied about lingering so long on these intricacies of self-observation and insight. Less would have been more: if I just had the plain sentences about rooms, I would find the observation more striking, but once it's presented alongside all this other stuff it takes it over the top in a way I find distinctly irritating.
Later in the section, Madame C. comments that Jason's best poem in the parish magazines is the poem titled "Hangman": "It has pieces of truth of your speech impediment, I am right?" she asks him. But common sense just has me saying here (in the internal monologue that accompanies my reading of a novel that has not fully engaged my emotions and attention), "But this is all very well and self-referential, and of course it echoes my own thought about the first hundred and fifty pages of Mitchell's novel, that the stammering stuff is much the best; but if you see it, and you see it's true, why not write me a really lovely short novel that deals with that truth in the amazing language I see in about ten percent of this novel, rather than giving me this blander and more middlebrow and prissy book clocking in at almost three hundred pages?" It's not an overly long novel, not by any manner of speaking, and yet I feel that some significant further distillation of meaning would have augmented my reading experience.
Some of the insights in the last part of the novel (about bullying, about self-knowledge, about secrets, about the power of being yourself) come a bit glibly, including a slightly over-obvious scene in the Hall of Mirrors at the village fair. "Secrets affect you more than you'd think," Jason tells us near the end. "You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone'll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in the charge of the secret, but isn't it the secret who's actually using you? S'pose lunatics mold their doctors more than doctors mold their lunatics?" All very well, but a bit too familiar to be a really satisfying payoff for this artfully crafted bildungsroman. It's related to that blandness I feel here and there; I think one of the things that makes it hard for me to imagine Mitchell becoming a favorite writer of mine, though I am extremely impressed with his abilities and his craftsmanship, is that the books I love most tend to be (a) demented and (b) funny, and neither one of those adjectives applies here.
I've got one other disappointment that I will register (I hope, by the way, that I do not sound evilly mean-spirited; I found this an interesting and stimulating book, and I'm writing about it here mostly for myself, to clarify what reading it showed me about my own beliefs about novels I might write myself as well as novels written by other people). I don't think Black Swan Green works as a political novel, and I think that given its own implied goals and aspirations this is a problem. Jason Taylor mouths a lot of political opinions that his later grown-up self will presumably have disavowed (his older sister has already dissented from the smug Thatcherism professed by the Taylor father & many of the other grown-ups in this novel), but the novel leaves it at the level of simple irony, something on the order of the joke elsewhere about Betamax beating out VHS. There's a long set-piece early on describing a news broadcast early in the Falkland war (I haven't put it in italics so as to keep Mitchell's own italicizing clear):
"Mrs. Thatcher frazzled this twerpy prat in a bow tie on BBC1 this evening. He was saying sinking the General Belgrano outside the Total Exclusion Zone was morally and legally wrong. (Actually we sunk the Belgrano some days ago but the papers've just got hold of the pictures and since the Sheffield we've got zero sympathy for the Argie bastards.) Mrs. Thatcher fixed her stained-glass blue eyes on that pillock and pointed out that the enemy cruiser'd been zigzagging in and out of the zone all day. She said something like, 'The fathers and mothers of our country did not elect me the prime minister of this country to gamble with the lives of their sons over questions of legal niceties. Must I remind you that we are a country at war?' The whole studio cheered and the whole country cheered too, I reckon, 'cept for Michael Foot and Red Ken Linvingstone and Anthony Wedgwood Benn and all those Loony Lefters. Mrs. Thatcher's bloody ace. She's so strong, so calm, so sure."
I think I see what he's doing here, we're of course meant to hear this as thin & self-deluding and Jason just echoing what his father's saying in a painful and embarrassing and short-sighted way, and the story gives us several later surprises and reversals (including a death) to provide context. The longish passage here, though, ends with the following sentences, and it came clear to me that the present-past ironies as Mitchell's set them up can only be expressed by a contrast between speech & story, not by some greater complexity within the speaker's own sentences:
"The Sun's paying ₤100 for the best anti-Argie joke. I can't do jokes, but I'm keeping a scrapbook about the war. I'm cutting out stuff from the newspapers and magazines. Neal Brose is keeping one too. He reckons it'll be worth a fortune twenty or thirty years from now, when the Falklands War has turned into history. But all this excitement'll never turn dusty and brown in archives and libraries. No way. People'll remember everything about the Falklands till the end of the world."
This just seems to me coy and entirely unsubtle; it had me pining for Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which I felt was both formally extraordinary and also a really brilliant and subtle argument about Thatcherism and the relationship between the present and the past. (Muriel Spark and Joyce Carol Oates also have really interesting ways of bringing in future events/foreshadowing, I was mentally comparing.) Hollinghurst's vision and technique are nothing like what I could ever pull off myself, it is not that I am a Hollinghurst kind of a person as opposed to a Mitchell kind, and yet I feel a much stronger affinity with that book than with anything Mitchell does here.
I have certainly gone on long enough. Some real reviews particularly worth looking at: Daniel Zalewski in the New Yorker; Adam Phillips in the Observer (imaginative choice of reviewer); and (my favorite) Ed Park in the Village Voice. And here's the roundup at the Complete Review.
Nothing to do with books
but this article is one of the funniest & strangest things I've read for a while; especially check it out if you have any lingering interest (or not) in Finland, heavy metal or the Eurovision Song Contest....
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