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.

Blog : Year One

It's been just about a year since I started keeping this blog. One year!

I read 37 books this year, which is 1 book every 9.87 days, or 3.08 books every month. Following are more reading metrics for the year. (Snore. Whatever.)

The Writing Life and Brief Interviews

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard


I would read a book where Annie Dillard describes folding laundry. A book about a life spent writing is not too far off that extreme. I read this book on a train ride from Portland to Seattle, and the slim volume was kind of perfect for the short trip.

If you've never read anything by Dillard, you should. You should go read a book she wrote called  A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for which she won a Pulitzer. I think of her as a nature writer, though probably she would resent it. She's written memoir, mostly, and some essays, and a couple of novels. She's very poetic, and deeply connected to both the line on the page and to the natural environment. I realize that isn't very descriptive. Mostly, her books are nonfiction narratives about the sense of wonder &c that can come from nature and from life.

This is a very good book! Like all her books, it reminds me of a book of poems in that it begs to be revisited and is worth taking time to really chew on the lines. Here is a quote that might easily have become the rally cry of this blog (I did know it before I actually read the book) if it were as easy to turn into a title as Calvino's line:

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.” 

I've read a handful of books about writing. This is probably my fav. Dillard is poetic, but also frank about the boring, un-glamorous and un-romantic daily reality of working on a craft. Thumbs up! Very like!

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace


Literary young men my age all have a major crush on David Foster Wallace. Dude is just so smart! Also painfully self aware and kind of generous with himself. Go watch this interview with him and Charlie Rose. I'm very slowly making my way through his monstrous Infinite Jest, and when I finish it and make a post several months from now, I'll maybe talk more about DFW's (as his homies call him) appeal as a figure.

But this book is a collection of short stories. Or if not "stories" exactly, it's a collection of formal exercises: several fictional interviews with hideous men, a series of eight narratives framed as pop quizzes, a few stories called "Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders," page-long footnotes, and very few paragraph breaks.

A quick browse might put a reader off of this book. It's too clever, too formally experimental, too concerned with the way that people ramble in everyday speech. But Wallace is a very good writer, and I doubt that anyone is as aware of his ability to push the boundaries of obnoxiousness as he was. The stories and the writing remind me of the bounds that a novice writer imagines pushing ("What if I wrote a story that was kind of just, like, you know, an interview, but without the questions--just the way that people really talk, you know?") but abandons. Sometimes this makes the stories seem almost childish? But it's usually pretty nice to read.

And taking the time to parse the difficult language reveals a very human writer. Some of the pieces are really brilliant, some are very opaque, lots are in between. They're gloomy and dark, but moving. Worthwhile. You can listen to Wallace read several of the stories on YouTube.

The Art of Fielding, Etc

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach


Little Brown bought this book (a first novel) with a $650,000 advance. Harbach was offered more, but ultimately accepted the offer from LB because Michael Pietsch, Executive VP and one-time-editor of David Foster Wallace, offered to personally edit the book. Which, just... whoa, you guys.

The book is about an extremely good shortstop on a college baseball team. It's also about the president of that college, his daughter, some other players. Henry (the shortstop) begins to over-analyze and then lose his talent, the president finds himself in an unexpected relationship with one of the students... Etc!

This is a good book, and I'm glad I read it. It's a big social novel in the style of John Irving--super accessible writing, a good balance of seriousness and fun (with slightly more emphasis on the fun), a big cast of characters, and a fairly complicated story. It's the kind of book you can enjoy if you just want to be entertained, if that's your deal, and it's also the kind of book you can spend a little more time with and ferret out thematic and stylistic statements.

Not that I did, obvi. One thought though: it seemed to me that the book was more interested in the college years of a person's life (though not exactly the college experience itself) than it was interested in baseball. The ending in particular seems to suggest the importance of that weird time between being a kid and being a real adult. Which disappointed me a little?

And the book also ended up feeling a little insubstantial to me. Not bad, just thin. Where Franzen, for example, saturates the reader in the inner lives of his characters, the characters here often felt distant to me. In some novels, the characters' actions end up seeming inevitable you get to know them so well, but there were more than a few instances here where I don't know if I could fully explain why Character X did this or that.

And that's fine. It's a good story, a really good story. And the writing has momentum and poetry. But novels are best when they let us feel the inside of someone's mind, and I very rarely got a sense of that here. So, good stuff, just not--at least not for me, at least not now--anything transcendental.

Still: mucho luv!

******

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer


I probably read this book when I was in middle school, because I remember it being popular, but I don't know for sure. It's the true story of a disaster on Mt. Everest in the 90s wherein several climbers died, written by a journalist who was present. The last third of the book deals with the disaster itself, and as emotional as that stuff gets (it is genuinely sad at times), I didn't find it as compelling as the earlier chapters about mountaineering in general.

I know enough about Krakauer to know he takes his work seriously and that he wouldn't put anything in print that he hadn't qraudruple-checked. My impression was that he wrote the book because wanted to understand what happened up there on the summit. But I'm not sure there was any person or idea or situation to blame, and I'm not sure there really is anything to learn from the situation except that for small reasons and big reasons sometimes bad things happen and people die who don't deserve to.

The first section of the book, which describes the culture and history of mountaineering, was much more interesting to me, and reminded me a lot of Born to Run, which I enjoyed a lot. There's probably something to say about the fact that some sports seem lend themselves to introspection and reflection and good books, where others seem not to.

Horoscopes for the Dead by Billy Collins


This is my favorite Collins collection, I think. It's less cute and less winking than some of his other stuff, though there are still moments of playfulness. It's also really long! Lots of poems! Collins is getting older, and, as the title suggests, this new book focuses a lot on death. The opening poem, for example, begins with a narrator standing at his parents' grave, asking them if they like his new glasses. Some of my other favorite moments: a poem where he sits and divides a landscape into those things which were there 500 years before (sky, water, the wind through the grass), and those which weren't (houses, boats, himself), and a second poem where he notices the empty chairs that we all seem to have on our front porch and imagines a day when everyone comes out and sits in the chairs they probably thought they would use more often.

Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges


A very small collection of essays, stories and lectures. I'll need to revisit Borges some other time, because I did not especially enjoy these pieces. The stories are not really stories, in the traditional sense. Things don't really... happen in them. They are descriptions of situations, mainly. Which is fine! But I didn't take the time to settle into their rhythm and logic, and so they mostly felt strange and thick. The essays were more interesting. I can admire his playfulness, his imagination, and the breadth of his reading... but admiration isn't the same thing as appreciation, and I was glad to speed through these and move on. Better luck next time, Jorge!