Blog: Year Two

Two years!

Consider the Writer

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Like everyone else on the internet, I have a big boy crush on David Foster Wallace. It's not hard to see why. He was essentially what all literary young men like to imagine they'll become sometime in the semi-near future: famous and talented, critical and cerebral, slightly-edgy-but-ultimately-generous. He knew in interviews how to walk the line between self-awareness and self-absorption, and knew when to measure it with doses of honest self-doubt. He wrote big, generational novels. He had very cool hair.

And underneath all the hype about his personality, that romanticized tragedy a la Lennon, Cobain, Van Gough et al, underneath that (to me, bizarrely famous) Kenyon College commencement speech, underneath the discourse around his thoughts re: love and attention and the role of literature and loneliness... he was very, very good fiction writer.

But I'll be honest.

The first thing I ever read by DFW was the title essay in this book, and I hated not only the essay, but also immediately hated its writer. I hated it because he spent the first handful of his characteristically gluttoned pages describing in detail the ways in which the attendees at a Maine Lobster Festival were unsophisticated or uncool or otherwise unworthy of serious consideration.

DFW admits his disdain pretty directly in a footnote:

"I confess that I have never understood why so many people’s idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud hot crowded tourist venues in order to sample a “local flavor” that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. [...] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit.[...] As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

Now, it turns out that the essay is actually mostly about ("mostly" in terms of volume, at least) trying to untangle the reality of eating animals, in particular of eating boiled-alive lobsters. But before I ever arrived at the subject, I had already spent an exhausting layover at Snooty Judgement International, and had spoiled my trip.

The attitude rubbed me the wrong way for several reasons. First, even only 20 or so years Wallace's junior, the criticisms of hyper-commercialized, suburban America (maybe edgy and important seeming to Wallace) were already to me tired and boring. I grew up in the suburbs, raised on television and commercials and soft-drink-sponsored little leagues... and I felt fine. The families around me seemed perfectly happy and actualized and satisfied, and  more so, were abundantly sophisticated and aware when it came to parsing the intentions of corporate interests around them.

Second, the breezy judgement of his tone betrayed what I think of as one of the primary strengths and purposes of fiction in particular, and art in general: to provide empathy from a safer distance than real time interaction affords.  His article was not an attempt to get underneath the skin of Lobster Festivalites, to understand what motivated the tourists at agricultural events, how they understood themselves in relation to the event, to the industry, to their food. I don't believe he quoted a single tourist in the piece. Instead, the essay was the hyperliterary equivalent of the snotty asides you might say to a friend while walking past such an event on your way to some hip brewery's tap room.¹

Last weekend--while on my own grossly unhip vacation to a touristy island in the Puget Sound--I revisited the book.

By then, I'd encountered most of the essays elsewhere. I had also by then read a solid amount of his fiction, and learned an unhealthy amount of his biography via interviews and third party articles.

The essays are well-written and funny and packed with vivid detail. It's easy to see why they're so well loved. The strongest are "The View from Mrs Thompson's" a description of 9/11 from Bloomington Illinois,and "Host," about conservative talk radio.

But my general opinion of the tone of several of his pieces--what he himself calls "that whole cynical, postmodern thing" in "Big Red Son"--hasn't changed. Even in that essay, about the Adult Entertainment Industry, where several of the characters encountered really are probably worthy of some significant disdain, I found myself wishing he would spend more time trying to describe the event from their own perspective. My own natural reaction to the AVN awards is to raise an eyebrow, give an arch smile, and judge. Why have someone do that for me?

My favorite writers of magazine features tend to be those who have mined Wallace's style and strcuture the most deeply: John Jeremiah Sullivan, Tom Bissell. But these writers seem to have a stronger ear for empathy and a gentler voice. They can be nimble and playful with not only verbal content, but also with emotional content. Ultimately, they are better essayists than DFW ever was, their pieces more substantial (in terms of content) and generous (in terms of attitude).

But the more I know about Wallace, the less I feel compelled to hold his attitudes against him. I honestly don't believe he could help it. And I think he knew that, on some level, he was being unfair. Take another look at that Kenyon commencement speech, where he at one point describes in detail a thought processes:

" I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks"

That passage could be taken without irony or comment right from any of his earlier essays. And it strikes me as significant that the audience laughs and applauds Wallace mid-tirade, who has to explain that, no no no "this is an example of how not to think." He emphasizes, instead, the importance of an inner life that,

"involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."  

I can, of course, get behind that. And in small but important ways his fiction is saturated in the perspective. But the honest (petty, unsexy) truth, is that David Foster Wallace is probably somewhat over-esteemed as an essayist. There's value in these pieces, and its possible that I just don't appreciate how new they must have felt in 1996, but there are already writers who do his tricks better than he ever did.

Read the essays if you like. But make sure to hit up the fiction. That's where you get the know the talent behind (and worthy of) the hype.


^1. As a sub-point, here, I was upset not simply because he was predictably and unfairly judgmental, but also because he buried his judgement in the genre of "fly-on-the-wall" journalistic observation. He had excused himself of the requirement to make a specific argument, but communicated his conclusions anyway. (Your blog correspondent just can't help but include at least one winking footnote.) 

Ten Word Book Reviews

Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys: Poems by D.A. Powell

Well crafted, but distant. Surprisingly sexual, given the cover art!

The Vintage Collection of American Short Stories Ed. Tobias Wolff

Predictable selections, but these bad boys aint famous for nothin. 

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed by John Vaillant

Logging history, island ecology, american Indians, and environmentalism. True story!

Suddenly a Knock at the Door by Etgar Keret

Just listen to the best ones on This American Life.

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Chummy novel about WASPs of bygone days. Lots of boats!

Pastoralia by George Saunders

Off-kilter stories about looking for happiness in the wrong places.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion is set thousands of years in the future. Humans have control of a large collection of planets under a single governmental entity, all connected by some sort of instantaneous travel system. But this Hegemony is under threat by some outside faction who are poised to gain access to this interstellar portal system with the invasion of a strange, backwoods planet called.... you guessed it, Hyperion.

It is also a book with a very dumb cover.

The book is structured around seven travelers--pilgrims--who must travel over Hyperion's surface to locations called The Time Tombs where they may meet a creature called The Shrike. On their journey, each traveler tells the group his or her story, explaining their connection to the Tombs or the Shrike. It's a "frame story" structure, a direct homage to Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales.

The individual stories borrow from the conventions of stranded-island ethnographic adventures, hard-boiled detective novels, and romantic tragedies. And the world is thick with other touchstones, sometimes explicit and sometimes less so: Mystic Judiasm, John Muir, H.P. Lovecraft, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jack Vance. One character participates in a literal recreation of The Battle of Agincourt, and the poet John Keats plays a surprisingly large role in the plot.

All of this makes it sound like a silly  Narnia-like hodgepodge, but it's actually quite cohesive. The universe is dark and strange, and its texture is reliable and rich (even if it doesn't always feel exactly like a plausible future).

It reminds me a lot of Gene Wolfe: dark and dense and dreamlike. And deeply concerned with religion.

The struggle for science fiction (or fantasy) books that deal with religion is that they often--out of some understandable necessity--use fictional belief systems as rough stand-ins for real world religious organizations. You know: Oh, the Whatever Cult of the BlahBlah System is isolated and zealous. As a result, the connections to actual life are often overly abstract. It's hard for truths or observations to really hit.

I mean, this is true of science fiction generally, on political or social grounds (The Emperor won't allow Female Zarglings into his Galactic Cabinet!). But religions are such unique organizations and so tied to the cultural particulars of their history that, even when the abstract observations are full and sound and reasonable, they can feel too remote to connect with real world belief systems in a visceral way.

There are exceptions: Canticle for Lebowitz, Out of the Silent Planet. It's maybe telling that both of these authors are themselves quite religious. And in Canticle, Miller projects the future of Catholicism, so the abstraction is blunted some.

Simmons has it both ways. The primary narrative engine is the ritual of a made-up group on a made-up planet who worship a made-up monster. But the story is closely orbited by relics that a contemporary reader will recognize: Jesuit Priests, Jewish diaspora, organizations called "High Islam" and "Zen Gnosticism."These details give the thing an air of something like authenticity.

The writing is... fine. Well, OK. More than "fine." It's good, at least on its own terms. It also reminded me of Gene Wolfe, with a dark and heavy and ultimately silly melodrama. And like a lot of genre books, it's bloated with the awkward sentence structures that result from trying to jam exposition into narrative motion, and it draws its characters with simple, sitcom strokes.

Nevertheless, this is a very, very good book.

It's been so long since I've read something like this. It reminds me how big the tent really is when it comes to good literature. Strange as it sounds, I found myself comparing Simmons to Alice Munro, because I've also fallen in love with her work recently, and she might be the most prefect executor of the type of hyper-realistic short stories I've mostly read in the last few years. Despite having ostensibly the same job, they have little in common. I don't know that they would even know what to talk about if you sat them down together. Where Munro's work is more like poetry, with its tiny electric observations and individual empathy, Simmons' is more like history or even mythology, with its broad abstract strokes and sense of time.

Sometimes I'm tempted think that the things that prose is best at is limited to the beauty of language and the personal revelations of getting inside a character's head. Simmons' book excels at neither. But I forget that literature can also handle complexity and scale in a way that other mediums struggle with. In these ways, Hyperion is a book that necessitates its form.. Read it!

Stats and Poems

The Drunkards Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

Very good book about the history and day-to-day importance of statistics. I tend to think that it's a good idea for most people to have some kind of foundation in probability and statistics, if only because it can help defend against some of the ways in which our brains want to misunderstand probability or randomness (not that I know that much myself). Reading this book is easier and less boring than taking a class. Go read it people!

Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser

Kooser continues to be the best. Luv. It. Here, read this one:

"Casting Reels"
You find them at flea markets
and yard sales, old South Bends
and Pfluegers, with fancy engraving,
knurled knobs and pearl handles,
spooled with the fraying line
of long stories snarled into
silence, not just exaggerated tales
of walleyes, bass, and catfish,
but of hardworking men
who on Saturdays sought out
the solace of lakes, who on weekdays
at desks, or standing on ladders,
or next to clattering machines
played out their youth and strength
waiting to set the hook, and then,
in their sixties, felt the line go slack
and reeled the years back empty.
They are the ones who got away.

 Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

I didn't love this as much as I thought I would. The collection won the Pulizter last year, and it has all sorts of references to science and science fiction. Sounds fun! If nothing else, I was just eager to get away from the standard poetic objects of nature (oh blah blah here's a fox drinking water from a shallow pool blah blah). But it didn't get to me. Maybe I'll try again later. There were some nice lines, though! "Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people/ when what holds them together isn't exactly love"

Ultra Mini Reviews September 2012

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Very good book. It's hard to talk about too much without spoiling its secrets, but if you're in the mood for a literary, realist, understated dystopian set in England... read this!

Free Will by Sam Harris

Like Harris' last book, the ideas here are probably served just as well by its related YouTube video as they are by the book itself. I agree that the idea of free will doesn't make much sense either as a function of what we know about the universe or even as a function of our subjective experience. The book is fine, but the idea(s) is(are) great, and will probably stick with me forever!

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves by Karen Russell

Russell's novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer last year, along with Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace. This is her story collection, and it's solid. The stories are all quirky, fun things with eccentric characters and premises, but she tries hard to mine the situations for real heart (and is successful at least half of the time). Sometimes the unusual premises border on genre (e.g., the titular werewolf girls). This is the kind of book that I would write about more at length if I set aside the time, but since I'm just doing these mini reviews I'll leave it at, simply: "Very good book."

Weather Central by Ted Kooser

Kooser would later become a Poet Laureate. This book was fantastic. I am just crazy in love with this book. One of my favorite poetry collections I've read. I got this from the library, but I plan on buying several of his collections later on.

The Mysterious Affair st Styles by Agatha Christie

Christe's first novel. It's what you would expect, solid!

Alice Munro and Lucretius

Runaway by Alice Munro [link]

Munro writes very long, stylistically muted, hyper-realistic short stories about women in Canada.Stories about women on trains, or visiting their neighbors or going to see a lover.

There're no gimmicks, either thematically or structurally. I don't just mean there's no genre stuff like vampires and aliens and locked room mysteries. I also mean there are no tricks that get employed in more literary offerings: things like setting your story at the birth of the Manhattan Project or making your protagonist a world class bee keeper or switching between first and third person or using long, reflexive run-on sentences.

Which is all to say that its really hard to turn it into a pitch. Her work is nothing but craft, and it's really excellent.

Some of the stories are better than others, and the endings had kind of a weird habit of summing up the next several weeks/months for the character in a way that I'm not sure if I liked or not. But if you want to read something serious and insightful and super-realistic--read this book!

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Steven Greenblatt [link]

I think that am too sleepy to write anything interesting about this! I also enjoyed this more when I wasn't constantly asking myself to summarize and critique it for a future blog post. That may be too much information about how the blog sausage is made, but there it is.

This is a history book about the Greek poem/essay "On the Nature of Things" by Lucretius and its discovery by an Italian papal secretary named Poggio. That specific subject is a vehicle to explore much more general topics:the philosophical and cultural arguments that were going on during and prior to the Enlightenment, the history of books and scrolls, and the Greek foundations of naturalism.

I minored in History, but I am so so bad at it. I don't have a knack for the very detailed narratives of politics, and I think there's always been some secret part of me that isn't convinced that learning about History is important--at least not in the classic "doomed to repeat it" sense.

I always liked my history courses more for the ideas in them than for their brambled narratives. And this is the kind of history book for me--it reads like a Malcolm Gladwell take on History; you know "Hey! Here's an idea! Isn't it interesting???"

The prose is very accessible. This is the most readable history book I've ever read. What are you waiting for? Go read it!

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Quick and dirty summary: This is a story about Quentin Coldwater, a dissatisfied young man semi-obsessed with a series of fictional children's fantasy novels. These made-up novels are set in a land called Fillory, a clear stand in for C.S. Lewis' Narnia (and we as readers are abundantly meant to catch the homage). Quentin foregoes an Ivy League education to attend Breakbills, a Hogwarts-like college for magicians. After graduation, he has the post-college experience that many talented and aimless graduates have: he wastes his time in Brooklynn with sex and drinking. Before long, he and his friends discover that Fillory is, in fact, a real place, and they embark on adventures there. Along the way there's some drinking, some discovery of sex, some animal transformation, some magic sporting events, some monster attacks, etc etc etc.

Grossman takes Fantasy seriously here. By which I mean he tries hard to get at what real young adults might really think of the Harry Potter and Narnia universes if they found themselves there. Quentin, for all his initial excitement at each new stage of his life, finds most of the journey unsatisfying or boring. He is petulant and spoiled and ungracious, which sometimes makes him a difficult character to read. But he is those things in a way that I think most people can find familiar, particularly if they've spent any time around (or been a member of! hi!) the 17-22 demographic recently.

Quentin does eventually realize that the emptiness he feels doesn't exist at Breakbills or in Brooklynn or in Fillory--it exists in himself. And the solution to that emptiness is similarly internal. And I won't take this too far, but I think there may be additional significance here, outside of the personal significance to the character. Grossman understands that the longing for places like Fillory and Narnia and Hogwarts is in a sense a spiritual longing, and to have Quentin conclude that there is little or nothing that Fillory can offer that he cannot offer himself seems telling--particularly in the case of a Narnia (rather than a Lord of the Rings) stand-in.

This is a good fantasy book! It was better written than most, at least to my taste. This is a serviceable book about what it’s like to be a semi-adult. And this is a very good book about what its like to carry your childhood interests with you through life. There's value but also cost to leaning on things like Fiction to support your identity, and Quentin discovers that you're bound to feel disillusionment alongside love as you age.

The pacing is quick, but the structure is episodic, which means the pages can sometimes fly by and sometimes be excruciating, depending on the particular adventure underway. One scene in particular--where an otherworldly demon freezes time and invades a classroom--is just fantastic.

If you're ever in the mood for a fantasy book, but want a new spin on it, pick this up.



Also: I started reading The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead but stopped part way through. The beginning is fantastic and I'll probably come back to it later. Read this essay by J-Franz from 2010 if you want to hear more (you do!).

The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem

Do you know who Jonathan Lethem is? He’s a writer of contemporary literature, and a pretty “important” one. He wrote Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, which might be familiar titles to you. He’s what he might call a “white elephant,” a supposed eminence of the medium, trotted from one public radio interview to the next. 

He is a huge nerd.

And like all huge nerds (by definition!), he loves to talk about, and takes very seriously, the media he consumes.

The Ecstasy of Influence is a collection of some of Lethem’s nonfiction work, and it focuses on the extremely particular cannon of his personal interest—Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Phillip K Dick.  It’s a series of love letters to figures like Bob Dylan and Italo Calvino. And, look. I love those guys. I love Bob Dylan so so much. I can’t even begin to tell you! And the goddamn name of this blog comes from a very particular Italian short fiction writer.

And his essays are full of a random spattering of really good stuff. His introductory essay is great, and it’s even courageous (insofar as any kind of writing can be courageous in America in 2012) in the way it recognizes and semi-rejects the social script of the good, humble, grateful novelist.  His piece about Calvino and completeism is great.

But I can’t love Lethem.

This is a good opportunity to admit I’ve never read any of his fiction. Ooops! I don’t know why. I bet he’s great. I think partly it’s that his most famous book is called Motherless Brooklyn, and I don’t know anything about New York or have much of an interest in it.

But there’s also the other thing. Lethem, in his essays, is a fierce defender of Genre. Even more particularly, he’s a bulldog of tough, urban genre, the kind I imagine to be soaked in substance abuse and self-sufficient sub-cultures. I don’t like those kinds of people.

I mean, I’m sure he’s a great guy! And I like that kind of literature just fine. But I don’t like people who take their defense of Genre very seriously.

Oh boy. How do I even explain why? Is there even a real reason?

Here’s the thing. There is a conversation that takes places a thousand times a day between people who like to read. This conversation is about the merits of things like science fiction and fantasy, detective stories and westerns. “Why don’t people take such things seriously!” the readers of George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss cry. “It's the boring serious fiction that needs to go!”

And I’m very exhausted with the genre side of things. Here is why: I read mostly contemporary Literature. Capital L, award winning stuffs. But I also like a LOT of genre books. Ray Bradbury is my all-time favorite author. The Once is Future King and Watership Down are, for my money, some of the best and most accessible books ever written. Everyone should read them!

And everyone I know who likes “Literature” also likes good genre stories. Literally, every single person I know with an interest in, say, William Gaddis, is also interested in--I don't know--Gene Wolfe. The only closed-minded readers I’ve ever met are those who are particular to one genre: the engineers who only like sci-fi, the women who have a series of particular mysteries they love.

Lethem understands that to a certain extent intellectualism is a show, and he almost—almost!—admits in his essay “What I Learned at the Science Fiction Convention” what I had wanted to say to him so badly since page one: Alternative-ness is as much an affectation as is erudition!

Anyway, I’ve taken a side road here.

The title essay is the showpiece of the book. You can read it here, and it’s all about plagiarism and influence and borrowing in creative writing. This is as important and tricky an issue as I can imagine for people interested in fiction. He does a great job, and that’s all there is to it. It's clever and smart and great.

Although in a weird way, I prefer Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of the topic in “Something Borrowed,” because, while it lacks the stylistic fireworks or rhetorical depth of Lethem’s piece, it’s just so crystal clear and simple and personal and I think everyone interested in intellectual property should read it.

That’s all I’ve got! Dinner time!

Jesus Christ, Flannery O'Connor!

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor


Wow!


So, apparently, if you're a funny looking conservative woman in the 1960's and you want to become really famous and renowned prose writer (despite not fitting the profile of a solitary white male genius)... all you have to do is be way better than anyone else writing at the time!


Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels and 31 stories and then she died of lupus at like 39 years old or something. Everything That Rises is a collection of some of those stories--nine of 'em--and was published after she died.


The stories are all actually kind of similar. We're introduced to some Southern characters, one of whom usually thinks poorly of another one,  and these characters disagree with one another about X or Y for a while, and then something horrible and brutally violent happens at the very end of the story. Mix some racial tensions in there, some good ol' Southern religious flavor and shake well.


In some ways, O'Connor is a weird writer for me to read. She was very religious, and her stories are all religious. She was very explicit about this while she was alive (" All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it."). She did not think it was OK to see her characters through a purely psychological lens--she wrote them through a spiritual lens, and ideally her readers would see their struggle for salvation as central. Some of the stories are super-clear in their religious connections, and some are pretty opaque.

As a non-believer (ex-believer no less), I can't think of people in a spiritual sense anymore. Not in the same way she wants me to. Not as anything more than an exercise. And those characters who come under her spiritual judgement often are the most sympathetic to me. She did not think highly of doubters and atheists. She described "liberals" like this to a friend in a letter:

The notion of the perfectibility of man came about at the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century....The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own unaided efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up. Judgement is out of place because man is not responsible."

It isn't phrased the way I would phrase it, but it seems pretty OK to me!

But despite that--and this is where it gets confusing for me--she is a really really good psychological writer. Like, just... wow. The stories aren't what I generally think of as didactic. They don't read like stories concerned with ideas or abstract concepts. They are stories about people and about the chewy texture of being alive.


And that's basically what prose does, as far as I'm concerned. I think now that we've got TV and movies and video games and YouTube webcomic Twitters and etc... short stories and novels' purpose is to capture that really personal feeling you get from places and people, from going places and being a person. 


That's what I loved loved loved about this book. I know that means it isn't what O'Connor would've hoped for (she would be 80something today had Lupus not got her), but it is what it is.

Oranges by John McPhee: This book was fine. It was basically a really long magazine piece about oranges. If you're even semi-familiar with the longform article, you can basically guess the whole structure before you read the book: introduce an interesting person, give us some history, give us some science, introduce another person, etc etc.

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson: I was actually a little disappointed by this. It was good enough, but it was one of the best selling books for the entire two year period that I worked at a bookstore, and people were constantly raving about it. It's about the Chicago World's Fair, the guys who designed it, and a serial killer who was in the city at the same time. Pretty interesting, for sure, but I was glad enough to move on to something else. Who knows why? I'm sure there have been/ will be times when I would love it.

So Long, Ray!

Ray Bradbury was my favorite author.

Not the best author I’ve ever read, obviously. But really, honestly my favorite. He’s part of that weird cohort of writers that tend to usher young people into the world of serious reading--along with Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, J.D. Sallinger, Jack Kerouac.

All of those authors are special to me because I read them when I was younger, but I’ve also sort of outgrown them in my tastes, and I don’t ever feel a need to revisit their shtick.

But I’ve never got tired of Bradbury, and I can’t imagine that I ever will. I still re-read his stuff, and because he was so prolific, I’m always uncovering new stories.

No one wrote quite the way Bradbury did. He didn’t have deep insights into the way people work, he didn’t explore difficult truths about life. Frankly, with the exception of Something Wicked This Way Comes, he wasn’t very good at sustaining himself over a novel-length story. But he had this deep sense of magic and wonder about the world, and he could saturate his writing with it in a way that wasn’t overly sentimental or obvious. I’ve never seen anyone else pull it off like him.*

 He’s best known as a Science Fiction writer, but I more closely associate him with his stories about small towns. Dandelion Wine...  even in Martian Chronicles (his homage to Sherwood Aderson’s small town masterpiece Winesburg, Ohio) his best stories had a distinctive rural feel to them.

His style was poetic, but not showy or erudite or self-aware or even exactly impressive. It was electric and sharp. It was joyful.

I was trying to think of a good story to link to. I decided on “The April Witch”**. The only place I could find it online was here, at an extremelyhilarious website. Oh well!

"Tom," she said, faintly, far away, "in the Southern Seas there's a day in each man's life when he knows it's time to shake hands with all his friends and say goodbye and sail away, and he does, and it's natural-it's just his time. That's how it is today. I'm so like you sometimes, sitting through Saturday matinees until nine at night when we send your dad to bring you home. Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting at the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and entertained."

- Dandelion Wine

So long, Ray!

* (Actually, on second thought, Calvin & Hobbes has a similar feel to me, but.)

** (Bradbury loved to reference particular months. October Country, “West of October,” even the first line of Something Wicked is something like “August was a good month for boys.”)

Independent

Love is Not Constantly Wondering If You are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life by Anonymous

I'm kind of a books snob. Sorry! And so, even though the idea of independent books is pretty OK with me conceptually, I wasn't sure I'd ever really need to read one. I mean, I don't have enough time for all the regular books that already exist.

But I liked the concept for this book so much, that I read and am reviewing it anyway.

Love is Not Constantly Wondering If You are Making the Biggest Mistake if Your Life is structured like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel. At the bottom of each page or series of pages is a little choice: "If you help the cavemen fight against the ants, turn to page whatever. If you don't want to get involved and chose to flee back through the time vortex, turn to this other page." These are the only references to the B-movie adventure story plot about an alien planet of AntPeople. The actual text of the book is a straight up Realist story about a co-dependent, unhealthy relationship between you and an alcoholic named Anne. Instead of chapters, the book is separated into dates sort of like a journal. It covers four years.

Despite the options to flip between passages, a note at the beginning essentially admits that there's no advantage to this. The book isn't really written that way, and unlike the genre on which it is based, there is only one ending. You just read it start to finish.

And it's good! Not fantastic, not incredible, but good enough! I don't know that it has anything fantastically interesting to say about unhealthy relationships, but it captures the guilt and shame of their reality pretty well.

I tried to read it like a real "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel, where you jump from scene to scene--in this case, entirely out of order. There was some kind of sense to doing it this way. It reflects the idea that when you have something really difficult happen to you and you live in it in a really get-under-your-skin kind of way... time doesn't seem quite linear. It can be more like a bike wheel, events radiating out of that center hub like spokes, referring to and revolving around that one thing.

But I'm pretty sure that was more a half-realized, happy accident than anything else. If the book had really made use of the structure it could have been phenomenal.

I also read Train Dreams by Dennis Johnson, which is too good for me to say anything smart about it. I need to read it again. But it's beautiful. I read A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, which is about walking the Appalachian Trail. It's funny and smart and really makes me want to get out and do a long-term hiking thing.And I read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which is a 19th century proto-detective story. It's fine! I wasn't really paying attention while I read it.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

I really love Mormonism, and I mean that in a completely earnest, non-ironic way.

I don’t believe in God anymore, but I had a really formative Jesus phase and I was mostly educated at religious institutions and nearly all my close friends are very religious. This means that I tend to see the best in religions without needing to take their supernatural claims seriously. So while, duh, the golden plates that Joseph Smith found but would not show to anyone were not real, and—obvi—the American Indians are not the descendants of ancient Jews who sailed here from Jerusalem... Mormonism just appeals to me in all its industriousness and boy-scoutishness. I love the American-ness of it. The idea that the Western United States is sacred, and that the Garden of Eden was in wild Missouri just resonates with me as the beautiful nonsense that it is.

I once wrote somewhere in spitting distance of 75,000 terrible words of a novel about an American religious leader based not-so-loosely on Joseph Smith the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college.

Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist is a fine book. It’s about the head of a polygamist household. The narrative focuses primarily on him, his youngest wife, and one of the disaffected children on the family. He has an affair. He builds a brothel. The son gets into explosives…  

It’s… fine.

It reminds me of The Art of Fielding in that it’s solid and enjoyable, but thin and structurally sloppy. The style itself is technically sound but a little aimless. He compensates for a lack of psychological depth and narrative momentum by over-explaining the inner lives of his characters as though that kind of obsessive repetition were poetry. It’s a grasp at Franzen that’s a little painfully reminiscent to me of another (ahem) struggling stylist.

But the largest problem for me lies in the novels hapless titular character. Golden is just too passive as a character. He is described as a victim of his upbringing and environment and seems to only watch, blinking dimly as a polygamous life is first built up and then carries on around him. While it’s obviously true that we're the function of our experiences, the novel doesn't remember that our pasts effect how we think, not just how we behave, and I wanted Golden to be a stronger and more passionate adherent to his lifestyle.

I don't buy a character who lives that kind of lifestyle and is so seemingly ambivalent about it. You don't often meet people who hold extremist, traditionalist (and illegal and complicated!) religious beliefs just 'cause. They're usually kind of into it, you know?

I was looking forward to a book that explored what it feels like to really believe something seemingly unusual and other--to be a part of a community like that. But Golden isn't an interested or active participant in a religious community or even, most of the time, this novel.

Bill Henrickson, the husband from the HBO series Big Love was a more interesting character to me. He wasn't always a great husband (to be generous). But that was part of what made him fascinating to watch. That show embraced the ugly aspects of a polygamist lifestyle along with the loving ones, rather than using the set-up as a convenient conceit for telling a “big family” family story. Bill was a passionate advocate and evangelist for polygamy. He was in charge of his own life. His lifestyle seemed like a choice, at least to him. As a result it was a show about religion and religious people in a way that this novel just is not.

Books For Dudes: Raymond Carver

I read WhereI'm Calling From by Raymond Carver, and it's a good book. The stories are packed full of little diamonds of crushingly-great prose, and the characters are compelling and sad. But the overall style/approach (drunk and hopeful and sad middle America) is so common now that it's hard for me to appreciate what was once unique about the stories.

In any case, I want to use the book as an excuse to talk about something else I've been noodling over: books and dudes!

Where I'm Calling From is sort of a "Greatest Hits" book of Carver's stories, but his most famous is What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It contains the famous title story, put Carver on the literary map in the 80s, and inspired a generation of short stories about drunk husbands sitting around their houses. 

It's also the first book in this Esquire article called 75 Books Every Man Should Read.

I really like this list. It's a serious list. There are good books on it. I don't remember where I first saw it--Facebook or something--but, I remember that either the person linking to the list or the folks in the comments afterward or both were at least a little bit upset over the idea. They didn't like that the list singled out men. "I'm a woman, and I can read Cormac McCarthy!" said one person, maybe. Those kinds of comments made me very :-( at the time!*

There are a couple of ways to understand recommending a list of books to "Men" rather than "Everyone." You could think of it as exclusive--"No chicks allowed, bro!"

Or you could think of it in another way.

I worry sometimes about the state of young men in America. We've rejected (rightly!) a long history of What-it-means-to-be-a-man because it's been oppressive and sexist and gross. Men got it wrong for a long time. Don Draper is not a cool dude.

But we've replaced it with... nothing, for the most part! There is no coherent narrative for the modern American Male.

I'll say that again, because I've said this to people a couple of times before and they usually get kind of quiet and awkward, which makes me worried that it's either nonsense or somehow offensive. But here we go: There is no coherent narrative for the modern American Male.

We are video game players and beer drinkers, Family-Guy-watchers and Taco-Bell-eaters. To be ambitious in your career is to be a kids-movie villain. To be a family man is to be un-cool and impotent. We're left with the slacker-hero as role model.

Defining a list of books like that (a list of serious, difficult books full of important intellectual and emotional truths) for men is--in a small way--an attempt to carve out a little something more for us. It's to say that being a man can mean being artistic and serious, can require intellectual perseverance and ambition.

The truth is that one of the reasons that I'm attracted to books and reading and writing and all this stuff is that it informs my sense of masculinity. I know, I know!--the gender stereotypes equate math and sciences with dudes, and humanities with ladies. But when I look back on American fiction, I see mostly men.** I see industrious, strong, perceptive, sensitive, ambitious men.

And the Esquire list draws on those qualities. Someone clearly (to me) put a lot of thought into the selection of the books.

To say that there are no such things as books "for Men," is to say what our culture sometimes says now: There is no such thing as a male experience.

That's what makes me so :-(. I think there is a male experience. Or, to be more specific, I think we can talk about a male experience without it just being sexist or gross or anything like Tucker Max. In the same way that I can enjoy The Awakening or A Room of One's Own, while understanding that it probably contains things that appeal particularly to many women, there may just be such a thing as art and literature that deals with what it's like to be a dude.

And that may be OK.

To summarize: Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From. Pretty good????

*Or, if not :-(, at least pretty :-/.

* *Note: This is extremely unfair. It reflects gender bias and NOT talent at writing. Even today, when the majority of book-buyers are female, the most "big ticket" authors in America are men. And that's embarrassing. But it's a little beside my overall point, which is just that American Lit has been a sort of role-model factory for me as a dude.

-------------------------------

I also read...

Foundation by Issac Asimov: Loved it!

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: Disappointed! Wasn't very good!

Sixteen Bits by Spencer Hensley

Sixteen Bits is a collection of poems about old video games. You can buy it for the Kindle here. Don't have a Kindle? Buy the pdf here!

Free Samples:

Princess I Wonder

God Made the Videogame

Poetry--like art more generally--is difficult to define, and any definition will necessarily leave out obvious examples. And I should admit right now that my personal education re: poetry is pretty thin. But I've found it useful to think about poetry as a form that anchors abstract and experiential concepts to concrete objects. And, in doing so, poetry both heightens the objects and makes the abstractions more familiar. 

Poetry has got a lot of miles out of the natural object: the birches, the still lakes, the stand of avocado trees. And then there are the man-made but otherwise still satisfyingly poetic objects: the stone cathedral, the revolver, the cast-iron heirloom teapot. You know what I mean.

Sixteen Bits uses other, decidedly unromantic objects (consumer electronics of the 1990s!) and tries to  well... make poetry out of them! To make them unfamiliar and push them to the boundary of sentimentality. 

I wrote this collection because I wanted to combine something I love--words and sentences--with something I loved growing up--video games.

Of course, writing is hard. And it takes time. And your feelings have the nasty habit of changing on you when you sit down and actually take the time to explore them.

In the end, this book is several things. It's a chance for me to try my hand at an unfamiliar form. It's an attempt to capture the unique experience of playing games. It's an exploration of my own changing feelings about games. And it's a meditation on childhood and growing up.

I hope you enjoy it!

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Here's a thing about me: I get really nervous about the idea of BAD people. You know, the folks on the news who do whatever terrible thing gets picked up each week. In practice, I figure that everyone I meet is basically good enough... but bad people are theoretical folks, who live in TV land (not to be confused with TVLand) and potentially my otherwise-normal-seeming neighborhood, and I'm sure there's enough people on the planet for some of us to be beyond understanding and awful.

Which is all to say that I tend to sidestep novels about really bad people. I mean, unlikable people? Love it. But anyone who's violent towards innocent people? No. Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is about some not-so-great peeps. Homeless, violent, addicted, uneducated, angry etc. You get the idea. The narrator is unnamed and sort of drifts from one awful place to another.

A homeless man yesterday said some absolutely beautiful nonsense to me. He told me that black-holes are "nests of us," and galaxies happen when "god pulls out their innards like spaghetti," because "we are his food" and "we need to kill that motherfucker." I told him I thought that was beautiful, but I think he was hoping to shock me, because he got a little aggressive after that.

But part of the reason I loved it is that I felt like I was living Jesus' Son, which is a beautiful book. Here's a paragraph from the first story/chapter:

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated  there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere

.

I don't want to get too much into it, but what differentiates prose fiction from other narrative art forms like TV and movies is its ability to get around behind the eyes of someone else and show the reader, "This is how he or she sees it all." Even the best HBO show can't do that (though, duh, it can do a lot of things that a novel can't do).

And, anyway, good job Jesus' Son. Really, really great book.

I've got some big news coming here in the next month!

Oh, I also read Turn of the Screw by Henry James and it was pretty good!

Death and Enlightenment!

A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion [link]

I liked this book very much. Truth be told, I read this well before Christmas, and it's kind of hard to remember anything too specific, because I pretty much never take notes while I'm reading (the secret's out!). The book is a memoir about the very sudden death of the author's husband. The title comes from the way in which, despite knowing he was dead, she continues to simultaneously believe that he isn't exactly gone. The two examples that just kill me are these: 1) she can't throw out his shoes, because somewhere in the far back of her mind she thinks he might need to wear them again, and 2) she doesn't want obituaries to run, because she imagines it will be awkward to explain her husband's presence at parties later on. So... yes. This is a sad book. Didion has a clear, strong non-fiction style, but the topic wore a little thin for me as the book went on.

Sidhartha (Audiobook) by Herman Hesse [link]

It must be hard to write a "philosophical novel." Characters just stop and deliver speeches, have debates with one another, sit in rooms and THINK about stuffs. I can't imagine how you even begin to make that interesting, or even just make it not-obnoxious. The best book like this I've ever read is a different book by Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game. It's not as popular as some of his other books (like this one), maybe because it doesn't have as much of the hippie-dippie stuff in it that made him popular in the 60s, but it is so good you guys. It's sort of science-fiction-y, and is about the leader of this weird academic club that plays a game called "the glass bead game" and is great. Go read that one!

Siddhartha is fine. It follows the life of a young man during the time of the Buddha as he (the young man, not Buddha) searches for Enlightenment. The young man is inscrutable and annoying, always correcting people and being kind of dickish to his best friend or dad, but whatevs. It's not about what he's like, in a book like this; it's about what he says.

And the things he says are... OK. One of the major themes of the book is the value of experience over teachings in achieving spiritual enlightenment. So, like: experiencing nature or love or family tells you more about how to be spiritual than any religious teaching can. I agree with this, buuuuutt... the book is basically written like a religious teaching! It's a parable: dry, technical, boring.

C.S. Lewis explores this idea about 1,000x better in Till We Have Faces, in large part because the character in his book is better realized, so rather than just being TOLD the final conclusion, we experience it WITH her. Though, it might also just be that I’m culturally Christian rather than Buddhist.

Next time: 1491 and The Turn of the Screw and maybe others!?!???!

Best Magazine Articles of 2011

I haven't read many books recently. Work, holidays, Skyrim--you know the deal. But I discover a love for the Long Magazine Piece last year. So, in lieu of book reviews, here we have my favorite "longreads" of 2011. I tried to leave out pieces that you now have to pay for (most of the stuff in the New Yorker). So the cool thing about these is that--unlike the stuff I normally talk about--you can access them immediately, for free, and read them in one sitting!

Evolve by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus 

Orion is a stellar environmental magazine that I had never heard of until a piece about the intelligence of octopuses* got passed around a few months ago. In October they published this piece, Evolve, about the essential role of technology in solving the environmental problems of the present and future, and in the process fairly brutally deconstructed the liberal-and-academic-led, Western pro-environmental movement. This article has literally changed the way I think about environmental issues, at least a little bit. I read it very recently, so I'm not sure what to say about it yet, but it's my recommendation number 1, for sure!

Unnamed Caved by John Jeremiah Sullivan 

Earlier this year I saw Werner Herzog's documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about 32,000-year old (!!!) cave art in France. I haven't really mentioned it to anyone, because I'm not sure how to process what I saw, but the movie left an impression on me, and I haven't been able to shake some of the images. There's something deeply fascinating to me about people (like--human beings!), enough far removed from us by time that to be in so many ways unknowable, crawling into dark lonely caves in order to scrape approximations of animals on the walls that no one could ever hope to see but other, similarly-minded human beings. The bizarre-ness of that kind of behavior seems to say something salient about what we are, but I'm not sure how to parse it.

Anyway, that brings us to John Jeremiah Sullivan, who is a great writer, and who released a book this year of his essays, most of which I've been able to find online with their original publishers. His essay about the ancient cave art on this side of the pond is excellent and fascinating. It's always nice to remember that the indigenous people here had their own (often terrible, bloody) history--that they weren't just chilling and waiting for white guys like me to show up. And we'll probably never know what any of it means. Who doesn't love an unsolvable mystery?

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library by Maria Bustillos

David Foster Wallace has become an icon to writers my age and a little older, and it's not hard to understand why: his books are smart and inventive and hip, they are both exceptionally academic and arty, he speaks in interviews the way all smart people imagine they speak (but don't), and--as this surprising piece points out--he sought salvation from his considerable demons in some unlikely but understandable places. He was generous in a very particular way, or seemed to be publicly which is just as good. I've read lots about addiction and recovery, and none of it has stuck with me so much as the five paragraphs allegedly written by an anonymous DFW, uncovered in this article.

Looking for Someone by Nick Paumgarten

I find this fascinating more as someone with a social science education than as a person who might ever use an online dating service (though--sure, why not!). I had just always assumed that these sites must be more or less identical, save for their vague reputation--and therefore their clientele. But it turns out that dating sites take radically different approaches to finding their users matches. Which is to say that they take radically different stances on what it is that makes a good match in the first place.

Dangerous Worlds: Teaching Film in Prison by Ann Sintow

An article about a woman who decides to teach a course about feminism to prisoners, and chooses to do so subtly--laterally--through a bunch of movies. Their slow understanding (or not) of the principles she introduces reminded me a lot of what it was like to be an undergraduate.


BONUS: It was written in 2004, but I read John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Upon This Rock" this year and it is very good. It's about a Christian Rock festival--sort of. As an ex-Christian-fundamentalist who moved through more liberal theology to what is essentially atheism... I have high standards about the portrayal of American fundamentalists. One side tends to not be critical enough, the other far too much. But Sullivan, having gone through a similar journey, gets it. He knows that it's wrong. But he's also intimate with its virtues. The last section almost made me cry!

*Octopi is a dumb word.