currently: Thomas Pynchon
Just finished Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm. At it speaks to how extraordinary she is that even though to my mind it is not her strongest work, it is still soaked in that skeptical intelligence which is perhaps uniquely hers.
Also, got a ticket to see her at City Arts and Lectures in October and I am over. the. moon.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
I almost forgot
"Literature isn't innocent."
- The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
- The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
revisiting the moors
currently: Emily Brontë
A re-read of Wuthering Heights is proving to be infinitely rewarding. While the endless wallowing, raging, self-defeating, tempestuous characters grated on my pragmatic, 17-year-old nerves in high school, I now find them incredibly amusing. Perhaps because now I realize that much of the drooping, moaning, pining, and plotting is carried out by people my age or younger. In high school, I couldn't understand why they wouldn't behave rationally. Now, with some distance from my teenage years, it's clear that Emily Brontë knew what everyone knows: teenagers aren't rational.
Also, the almost total lack of sex is fascinating. Sex must happen, because there are children. But there are remarkably few children. They seem to exist more to further the plot than to prove the consummation of their parents. But the big question: did Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff ever have sex? is impossible to answer definitively. It seems as if they would have - they did everything else they wanted. However, there is absolutely zero evidence to support their having done so. All that pent up frustration! Yikes!
Tangentially...Ever wonder about the umlaut over the e in Brontë? I did. Wikipedia has this to offer on the subject:
"At some point, the father of the sisters, Patrick Brontë (born Brunty), conceived of the alternate spelling with the diaeresis over the terminal "e" to indicate that the name is of two syllables. It is not known for certain what motivated him to do so, and multiple theories exist to account for the change. He may have wished to hide his humble origins. As a man of letters, he would have been familiar with classical Greek and may have chosen the name after the cyclops Brontes (literally 'thunder')."
Also, thanks go, as they often do, to Monty Python for this somewhat abbreviated version of the story.
A re-read of Wuthering Heights is proving to be infinitely rewarding. While the endless wallowing, raging, self-defeating, tempestuous characters grated on my pragmatic, 17-year-old nerves in high school, I now find them incredibly amusing. Perhaps because now I realize that much of the drooping, moaning, pining, and plotting is carried out by people my age or younger. In high school, I couldn't understand why they wouldn't behave rationally. Now, with some distance from my teenage years, it's clear that Emily Brontë knew what everyone knows: teenagers aren't rational.
Also, the almost total lack of sex is fascinating. Sex must happen, because there are children. But there are remarkably few children. They seem to exist more to further the plot than to prove the consummation of their parents. But the big question: did Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff ever have sex? is impossible to answer definitively. It seems as if they would have - they did everything else they wanted. However, there is absolutely zero evidence to support their having done so. All that pent up frustration! Yikes!
Tangentially...Ever wonder about the umlaut over the e in Brontë? I did. Wikipedia has this to offer on the subject:
"At some point, the father of the sisters, Patrick Brontë (born Brunty), conceived of the alternate spelling with the diaeresis over the terminal "e" to indicate that the name is of two syllables. It is not known for certain what motivated him to do so, and multiple theories exist to account for the change. He may have wished to hide his humble origins. As a man of letters, he would have been familiar with classical Greek and may have chosen the name after the cyclops Brontes (literally 'thunder')."
Also, thanks go, as they often do, to Monty Python for this somewhat abbreviated version of the story.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
chase (file under: cut to the)
currently: Roberto Bolaño
who, as it happens, is stomping all over Kerouac and Beat literature in general like so many overripe grapes and making some damn good wine while he's at it. It's called The Savage Detectives.
who, as it happens, is stomping all over Kerouac and Beat literature in general like so many overripe grapes and making some damn good wine while he's at it. It's called The Savage Detectives.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
authors, death thereof, etc.
currently: Intelligent Life magazine (ed: frown)
About to attempt to fob this (really wonderful regardless of being wildly indebted to Borges) novel off on someone else, I flipped open to the following:
"For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of 'Is your novel an open work or not?' How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or 'With which of your characters do you identify?' For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously."
- Umberto Eco, postscript to The Name of the Rose
Bible dipping with post-modernism. This is why people believe in god.
About to attempt to fob this (really wonderful regardless of being wildly indebted to Borges) novel off on someone else, I flipped open to the following:
"For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of 'Is your novel an open work or not?' How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or 'With which of your characters do you identify?' For God's sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously."
- Umberto Eco, postscript to The Name of the Rose
Bible dipping with post-modernism. This is why people believe in god.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
where California comes in
currently: Jorge Luis Borges
There are some stunningly stunning passages in White Noise. Here, a brief sampling:
"Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as it happens somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mudslides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever is gets. Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. That alone merits their doom."
"For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is."
"...it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you're there."
I would even edit that to nostalgic for a place even when you're there. I miss Bavaria already.
There are some stunningly stunning passages in White Noise. Here, a brief sampling:
"Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as it happens somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mudslides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever is gets. Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. That alone merits their doom."
"For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is."
"...it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you're there."
I would even edit that to nostalgic for a place even when you're there. I miss Bavaria already.
Monday, May 11, 2009
applause, acclaim, and first pages
currently: Don DeLillo
There is a specific pleasure to beginning a book about which one knows nothing and being instantly taken in by it. Themes, motifs, even plot have only barely begun to emerge; what I am relaxing into is the deep satisfaction of a story well told. More on White Noise later, I predict.
Meanwhile, I continue to stew over the general approbation for the works of Michael Chabon. I've only read Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but I was not favorably impressed by either. Perhaps I wouldn't be so disparaging of Chabon's particular brand of pop-lit were it not for the fact that I sense he deeply wants to be taken seriously. After all, the backdrop of Kavalier and Clay is WWII and the Holocaust. But the Holocaust is not taken very seriously in this book - I don't mean to suggest it's mocked, merely overlooked, for the most part, overshadowed by the titular characters and their titular adventures. When the book does deal with Death, it deals with the Bitter Irony of Death, the Tragedy of Existence, etc., in a heavy-handed and self-serious way that made me grind my teeth more than a little. To be frank, I've been stewing over it off and on since December. To be franker, I think Chabon should get out of the fiction business, and into the screenwriting world where he so obviously belongs and even more obviously longs to be. The two novels I've read are over-plotted and under-written. His prose is indistinguishable and undistinguished. He spends a great deal of time describing people's physical appearance and accoutrement, but they do not stay in the mind's eye. I cannot call up a single one of them. While I feel one of the main reasons Zadie Smith has so often been called Dickensian is the tangibility of her characters, Chabon's are more like paper dolls that he dresses differently for each chapter.
I suppose I could just quit getting all hot under the collar about it. But I wonder when our idea of literature (he did get the Pulitzer*) adjusted to mean the stringing together of unusual, entertaining episodes, and stopped requiring depth? Or original style? It's not that I think Great Literature can't also be entertaining - quite the contrary, I think it should. But I also think it should offer so much more. I think my real grump about Chabon stems from the immense disappointment I always feel when my vast, towering hopes for a writer new to me are crushed by the writer's works.
Mr. DeLillo, my fingers are crossed.
*on the other hand, a quick glance at the past winners suggests that I would have much to discuss with the judges
There is a specific pleasure to beginning a book about which one knows nothing and being instantly taken in by it. Themes, motifs, even plot have only barely begun to emerge; what I am relaxing into is the deep satisfaction of a story well told. More on White Noise later, I predict.
Meanwhile, I continue to stew over the general approbation for the works of Michael Chabon. I've only read Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but I was not favorably impressed by either. Perhaps I wouldn't be so disparaging of Chabon's particular brand of pop-lit were it not for the fact that I sense he deeply wants to be taken seriously. After all, the backdrop of Kavalier and Clay is WWII and the Holocaust. But the Holocaust is not taken very seriously in this book - I don't mean to suggest it's mocked, merely overlooked, for the most part, overshadowed by the titular characters and their titular adventures. When the book does deal with Death, it deals with the Bitter Irony of Death, the Tragedy of Existence, etc., in a heavy-handed and self-serious way that made me grind my teeth more than a little. To be frank, I've been stewing over it off and on since December. To be franker, I think Chabon should get out of the fiction business, and into the screenwriting world where he so obviously belongs and even more obviously longs to be. The two novels I've read are over-plotted and under-written. His prose is indistinguishable and undistinguished. He spends a great deal of time describing people's physical appearance and accoutrement, but they do not stay in the mind's eye. I cannot call up a single one of them. While I feel one of the main reasons Zadie Smith has so often been called Dickensian is the tangibility of her characters, Chabon's are more like paper dolls that he dresses differently for each chapter.
I suppose I could just quit getting all hot under the collar about it. But I wonder when our idea of literature (he did get the Pulitzer*) adjusted to mean the stringing together of unusual, entertaining episodes, and stopped requiring depth? Or original style? It's not that I think Great Literature can't also be entertaining - quite the contrary, I think it should. But I also think it should offer so much more. I think my real grump about Chabon stems from the immense disappointment I always feel when my vast, towering hopes for a writer new to me are crushed by the writer's works.
Mr. DeLillo, my fingers are crossed.
*on the other hand, a quick glance at the past winners suggests that I would have much to discuss with the judges
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Homer never did this
currently: Barry Unsworth
What I love most about The Songs of the Kings is really very simple: the diction is so strange that you eventually wind up with sentences like:
"No we can't allow Agamemnon to be marginalized, whatever happens we can't allow that, [said Odysseus]"
Furthermore, while the story is ostensibly a retelling of an early portion of The Illiad, it's impossible for me to read it as anything other than an allegory for the Iraq War. It was published in 2003; perhaps chronology makes this impossible. I would argue that it doesn't. In support of this interpretation, I offer the following quotation:
"If the cause of the war is just, nothing that happens in the pursuit of the war can make the war less just. The slaughter of the innocent cannot detract from the justice of the cause, thought we may possibly call it an unjust effect of a just cause. If this were not so, there would be no such thing as a just war, only a necessary war, which is clearly absurd. Can Calchus be saying that Lord Zeus is embarking us on a just cause whose inherent nature was that it could subsequently become less just, was in fact embarking us on an unjust cause from the very beginning?"
A stupid but ambitious leader. The sense of a wrong that needs avenging. A loss of enthusiasm for the war. A search for a new cause for the war that will bind the people together and renew there desire to attack. Lots of jargon. If it was written too early to be an allegory, then it was a prophecy.
What I love most about The Songs of the Kings is really very simple: the diction is so strange that you eventually wind up with sentences like:
"No we can't allow Agamemnon to be marginalized, whatever happens we can't allow that, [said Odysseus]"
Furthermore, while the story is ostensibly a retelling of an early portion of The Illiad, it's impossible for me to read it as anything other than an allegory for the Iraq War. It was published in 2003; perhaps chronology makes this impossible. I would argue that it doesn't. In support of this interpretation, I offer the following quotation:
"If the cause of the war is just, nothing that happens in the pursuit of the war can make the war less just. The slaughter of the innocent cannot detract from the justice of the cause, thought we may possibly call it an unjust effect of a just cause. If this were not so, there would be no such thing as a just war, only a necessary war, which is clearly absurd. Can Calchus be saying that Lord Zeus is embarking us on a just cause whose inherent nature was that it could subsequently become less just, was in fact embarking us on an unjust cause from the very beginning?"
A stupid but ambitious leader. The sense of a wrong that needs avenging. A loss of enthusiasm for the war. A search for a new cause for the war that will bind the people together and renew there desire to attack. Lots of jargon. If it was written too early to be an allegory, then it was a prophecy.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Aristotle, the gauntlet has been thrown
currently: Doris Lessing
Right now I’m reading The Golden Notebook. A tragedy has occurred. The chapter title promised one, very matter-of-factly (“Two visits, some telephone calls and a tragedy”), and it has occurred, yet I don’t feel upset or torn-up, and I think that, at least as regards this novel, that’s a good thing.
I’m thinking about Children of Men, which I immensely enjoyed watching, was entirely wrapped up in, but by the end of the film I felt very manipulated. Of course, all narrative is manipulation. Or at least attempted manipulation, and bathos frequently stems from failed manipulation. When the audience says, you keep telling me it’s sad, but I don’t think it’s sad, it’s just maudlin. It leads to laughter, to mockery, kitsch (dreamy curiosity: I wonder if Lessing and Milan Kundera have ever gotten together and discussed Communist kitsch?). But. With this film, I felt that my emotions had been manipulated – successfully – just for the sake of it. Or perhaps so that I would take the film more seriously, somehow. That I was some kind of cinematic guinea pig. Obviously, some kinds of films are known for trafficking in this. The sharp intake of breath, the squeaks, squeals and screams, jumping in your seat, clutching the arm of the startled movie-goer beside you. That’s their trademark. And their ideal audience expects and enjoys the manipulation. Unsurprisingly, I tend to not fall into that category. It’s wearying for me to be scared over and over in this fashion. I invest too much in the experience and I get exhausted. But Children of Men was purportedly a more serious sort of film. Dystopia, afterall, has been established as a genre of social criticism. So I was disappointed when I felt that I was being jerked around needlessly.
All this is just to say that when a tragedy occurs in The Golden Notebook, I feel it. But it doesn’t make me cry. It makes me think. Which I am so bold as to imagine might be what Doris Lessing would like her readers to do. Earlier in the book, Anna the sometime-narrator reflects that “One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel – the quality of philosophy.”
Because perhaps catharsis is not enough. Perhaps art should not only release and refresh and restore, but also awaken. Also challenge.
Right now I’m reading The Golden Notebook. A tragedy has occurred. The chapter title promised one, very matter-of-factly (“Two visits, some telephone calls and a tragedy”), and it has occurred, yet I don’t feel upset or torn-up, and I think that, at least as regards this novel, that’s a good thing.
I’m thinking about Children of Men, which I immensely enjoyed watching, was entirely wrapped up in, but by the end of the film I felt very manipulated. Of course, all narrative is manipulation. Or at least attempted manipulation, and bathos frequently stems from failed manipulation. When the audience says, you keep telling me it’s sad, but I don’t think it’s sad, it’s just maudlin. It leads to laughter, to mockery, kitsch (dreamy curiosity: I wonder if Lessing and Milan Kundera have ever gotten together and discussed Communist kitsch?). But. With this film, I felt that my emotions had been manipulated – successfully – just for the sake of it. Or perhaps so that I would take the film more seriously, somehow. That I was some kind of cinematic guinea pig. Obviously, some kinds of films are known for trafficking in this. The sharp intake of breath, the squeaks, squeals and screams, jumping in your seat, clutching the arm of the startled movie-goer beside you. That’s their trademark. And their ideal audience expects and enjoys the manipulation. Unsurprisingly, I tend to not fall into that category. It’s wearying for me to be scared over and over in this fashion. I invest too much in the experience and I get exhausted. But Children of Men was purportedly a more serious sort of film. Dystopia, afterall, has been established as a genre of social criticism. So I was disappointed when I felt that I was being jerked around needlessly.
All this is just to say that when a tragedy occurs in The Golden Notebook, I feel it. But it doesn’t make me cry. It makes me think. Which I am so bold as to imagine might be what Doris Lessing would like her readers to do. Earlier in the book, Anna the sometime-narrator reflects that “One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel – the quality of philosophy.”
Because perhaps catharsis is not enough. Perhaps art should not only release and refresh and restore, but also awaken. Also challenge.
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