in every childhood, an enchanted place

Back from the great white north, which was not as white as it had been until recently, but also not as green as the city I returned to, which had taken to bursting into full-leaf overnight, so so it appeared.

It had been almost a decade since I visited Montreal, since I had been to Canada, actually, but it was just as I'd remembered it; quaint, urban, provincial, and worldly, all at the same time. It's more French than Paris; perhaps because as part of French-Canadian Quebec, it's in a constant battle for it's own identity.

But, language issues aside, Montreal has always held its own as far as its attraction to artists. In fact, in 2005, it was chosen by UNESCO as the "World Book Capital City." ANEL President, Denis Vaugeois said of this honor, "Montreal, as well as Quebec as a whole, really deserves this honour, which is a tribute of the quality of its editorial production and the dynamism of all those who are involved in the book industry.” Good to know, should I ever need an escape from New York and a job.

Literary Montreal for me, begins with Leonard Cohen (no surprise there), so as I mentioned in an earlier post, I spent one beautiful spring afternoon walking around the neighborhood of Westmount in search of Cohen's childhood home. Thanks to the Leonard Cohen Files "A Short Walk in Cohen's Westmount" and some Montreal Metro map investigation, I was able to find 599 Belmont without any trouble. And it was a beautiful time.

It was an odd sensation walking down the extraordinarily normal streets of Westmount on one of the first true spring days the city had seen. The trees were just aching to bud and the sky was blue ... and aside from the sound of a lawn trimmer being used on the grounds of the Greek consulate, there wasn't another soul to be seen. It was the suburbs in all it's generic glory. Having grown up on (what I always felt were) the not-so-gritty streets of NYC, I've always been fascinated by suburban culture and its effect on the artistic soul. Those friends I've come in contact with over the years from those manicured parts of the world seem to not believe that one could ever exist under the age of 19 in an apartment without some kind of dirt to skin one's knees on (all my childhood scars are concrete based). But I digress ... so I walked down Westmount Avenue on this beautiful day and take in all of it's quiet--indeed, the lack of humanity offered me a true Cohen moment of solitude--and the first thought upon turning right down Belmont Ave to number 599 was, "whither the angst"? Does this say something about the discrepancy of growing up in different environments? The homes in Westmount are upper-middle class, beyond any type that I, or even my "wealthy" Long Island relatives ever owned. I had to question, based on my own sense of disdain for the ennui of the entitled ... what was it that created the discontent for Cohen? Was it simply religion? (Not that religion is ever simple.) That has to be the case. And it is a part of my wonder ... is it possible that religion is so much more powerful than wealth? Having no experience with either, I suppose I must consider this to be true. Certainly, I've had experience with religious zealots and millionaires both, in my life. But, I've also had poor friends plop down in the middle of some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country who did not experience the type of disassociation with their surroundings that Cohen did. This is not a complaint or a criticism, mind you--more of a further wonder about a man whom I have long revered over his extraordinary ability to see into the human emotional condition.

Childhood is a precious thing, it creates us in so many ways. We begin who we are in the most unusual ways, and what we take with us; what we hold on to, even our parents must wonder about.
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"on the block" and "whither the angst" © 2007 duluoz cats

for hearts that don't make sense

Goodbye Sky Harbor
Is tomorrow just a day like all the rest
How could you know just what you did?
So full of faith yet so full of doubt I ask
Time and time again you said don't be afraid
If you believe you can do it
The only voice I want to hear is yours
Again
I shall ask you this once again
And again
He said:
"I am but one small instrument."
Do you remember that?
So here I am above palm trees so straight and tall
You are smaller, getting smaller
But I still see you

Books and music. These are the things by which I am able to keep myself alive (and a cat in my lap, too ... sometimes). It's fun when those two things intertwine, particularly when just by happenstance you find that two things you love very much, have found a connection to each other. So, as I sat perusing the internet this afternoon, I found the lyrics to a Jimmy Eat World song (a band that connects other things in my life in strange and wonderful ways), off their album "Clarity," that I like a bit and read that it was based on one of my most beloved books, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. It's a book that I've now read four times, each time it captures me in different ways.

John Wheelwright is one of my favorite characters of all time. And the scene that the lyrics of the above song describe, which takes place toward the end of the novel, are a lovely tribute to the doubt and faith that pervades the whole book. Religion is a loaded topic for me. In fact, there is not much good I have to add with regard to organized faith. But I am full of faith--I am full of belief. I tend to place it in myself and those I hold closest to me--I choose my faith the way I choose to keep those who capture me, close. They are what I accept as my soul. So, there is something about John, a recognition, as it were, about his doubts with regard to Owen's unfailing trust in the unknowable, without allowing that to have any doubt about Owen--his best friend.

There are plenty of heady conversations and monologues in the book about belief, written in a manner that I always found to be some of the most intelligent and gentle of ways--layer upon layer of knowledge and theory. Each side is represented in Irving's trademark quirky brilliance, with pain and tragedy and moments of pure innocence. Small moments of truth. There is criticism, certainly--but always handled in the searching way that all things one places one's life's faith in should be. And it is intertwined with questions of fate and justice and the hypocrisy of blind belief. And John, the straight man to Owen's "prophet" (if there can be such a thing), points his finger to the sky (and looks down on Owen from the sky, in this instance) still questioning Owen's absolutes.

Never one for absolutes myself, I enjoy the view from above, searching the horizon without expectation, looking forward to the answers, should they ever reach me. Clarity, indeed. Thoughts on that, another night.

a necklace of incomparable beauty

"Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? ... Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? I hardly even get out to the country very often. Could you teach me about leaves?" --Beautiful Losers

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"St. Antoine" © 1999 duluoz cats

unstuck in time

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber." --Slaughterhouse Five



Ow. My heart. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

So it goes.


Obits
NY Times
Voice of America
_____________
Photograph of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Associated Press

off with her head

I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when I was in college. One of the children's lit classes I took--funny how I always knew that was where my heart would lie. It's a complicated tale, made all the more so by the history and psychological profile of author, Lewis Carroll. But, ignoring all of the rumor and implications of his love of young girls and its place in his writing of the story, as an adult, I find reading "children's" stories ever so enlightening (and why I am never as impressed as everyone else at "child" authors; for there is something ever so much more difficult for an adult who looks to reach out and speak to a young mind, to curl up and in point of fact, place himself back into seeing the world as a child, and who recognizes the intellect and cadence of their mind, that than any author of adult fiction can ever know.

Alice, however. There is a fascinating parallel with her that I feel right now. Something about nonsense and misconception; deception and "things that aren't what they appear to be." That seems to be all around me these days.

Having no head (no pun intended) for math or numbers (and some would argue, logic), I find it all the more incredible that this little book of "nonsensical things" would have been written by a mathematician. I suppose one would have to allow that the whole connection between "logic" and "mathematics." But to add to that fiction and story, and "make believe" is a dichotomy not even I can bridge.

So much has been written and dissected about Alice, but what I like most to focus on is the need that she has to express and understand. Chapter 1, as I remember writing about, oh, so many years ago--her "eat me" drink me" was a demand for conversation, the need for conversation and her disappearance down the rabbit hole because of a sense of being ignored, of having been denied wisdom of information and understanding. Lacking a dialogue with others. This is a very basic aspect of human psychology, and also a basic technique of good old-fashioned children's morality tales. Think Aesop or Grimm. When one applies the psychology of conversation and understanding with the art of fairy tale and a child's sense of disconnection with the adult world--the sense of being out of control of one's own circumstance--you get to the basic human feeling of "falling" or, more simply, failure. This relates to a child's lack of understanding of the conscious (and why children's stories are so often based in the world of fantasy and make-believe). And why children, old people, and drunks are often thrown into the same tank together. There is that old saying, of course, about "drunks and fools [read children, "innocence"]" and the fact that they don't allow reality to interfere with their world. It is the figurative "falling down the hole" in order to avoid hurt and damage, physical and emotional--a literal escape, as well.

What is fascinating about Alice, though, is the sense that the first few chapters make--she knows who she is until she comes in contact with the outsiders, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter. She is certain of herself and her emotions--she questions ceaselessly (even when confronted with the gibberish of the peanut gallery)--it is her great concern to find the significance of life (and here is where chess and math and logic play their role in answering her concerns), and more specifically, her current place in the world and the what she should do with with her life. In fact, her great question, posed in Chapter 6 to the Cheshire Cat is, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" To which he replies, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." But, Alice, being a child, doesn't know where she wants to go, she only knows that she doesn't want to "go among mad people" (who among us does?)

This is my joy of her. Her great understanding (or Carroll's, as the case may be), of the concept of Wisdom. The understanding of the "sphere of the visible" and what it means to incorporate consciousness and reason--the chessboard, being the obvious physical manifestation of reason, in this case--more to the point, however, is that Alice understands emotion and environment and all of its many mutable incarnations. Her behavior, particularly in Chapter 2 as she tries to find her way through her new environment, takes her through many emotions that both a child and an adult go through as they look to find their way in the world.

________________
Illustrations by John Tenniel, from the 1866 publication of Alice.

and battlefields which have their heroes

Must brush away the layers of dust I've allowed to accumulate these past couple of months where I let this space sit idly while life continues to move ever faster and in more head-spinning ways. It has taken me over a year to get to this place in my head--back to reading, back to enjoying life and all its many surprises. So, I am glad to begin anew with some thoughts on my most beloved art form, in a newly discovered way. For myself, anyhow.

I've never been a fan of short stories, have always preferred to get myself lost in the long form of a novel. However, after having spent over a year without having dropped my eyes to the page of anything that had a spine, I have found myself recently looking to try to rejoin the world of the written word. The drought could only last so long. So, I scanned the shelves (now overloaded and disheveled), and came across Cathedral, by Raymond Carver. Carver is one of those authors I have never gotten around to reading, though he should be, by my own favor, someone whose work I devoured long ago. A good decision, as I was anticipating it would be, one should always start at the heights when one is looking to understand and embrace something new.

How I avoided Carver for this long, a man who wrote in the clipped prose style whose cadence my mind taps along to, is a testament to my intense avoidance of short story form. There's no news here, except, perhaps, to me, and I'm preaching to the converted, myself included. I'm simply the most recent convert, and I am slapping my wrist for not having joined in the chorus sooner.

Carver masters all of the elements I require in my scribes ... all of the reasons I am captured by language and how much more wonderful it is when it is manipulated simply without making the reader feel manipulated. His impeccable ear for dialogue and an equally impeccable hand at expressing the subtlety of, in particular, those two ever-so-tricky words attached to desperation and longing--whittling away all that is extraneous in those bloated emotions--and getting down to the basics of human communication in all its isolating imperfection.

So, it is also appropriate, perhaps, that my favorite in the collection, is not, the highly-accaimed story that takes its title from the book (deservedly so), but another, equally so-recognized one, "Where I'm Calling From," originally published in the New Yorker, on March 15, 1982, oddly enough. In the tradition of all that captures me when discussing the written word, the story is told by an unnamed narrator, who is vulnerable and uncomfortable in his own skin, struggling with his "self," an alcohol problem, in this case, and looking to reach out to those who are not readily available. Uncertain in his memory and his future, reliving his life and his relationships within himself. And, in what I can only see as a blissfully uncertain ending, we are only privy to the narrator's desire to reach out to his past ... despite never being sure whether he has fulfilled his need. It is that renewal of hope ... the compulsion to not give in to the endless emotional separation that remains.

whiskers on kittens

Ah, justice ... what comes around, comes around again, apparently ... and so, it seems that I've gotten myself another tag. This time courtesy of (parenthetical remarks). So here we go with My Favorite Things in no particularly significant order ...

Things I'd like to do before I die
1. Make love last
2. Visit Russia
3. Quit smoking
I suppose I'm glad this was a difficult list to fill in. Means I've gotten to do many of the things I've wanted to do so far. Of course it could also mean I have no ambition whatsoever ... though I know that's not it because I almost wrote, "rule the world" ... heh.

Things I cannot do
1. Look away
2. Say no
3. Get out the door without at least two cups of coffee in me

Things I can do
1. Change my mind
2. Smoke while bicycling
3. Admit when I'm wrong
And then again, this was hard, too ... don't know what that means ... too self-critical? Not self-aware? hrmm ... definitely not the second of those.

Things that attracted me to my significant other
1. Intelligence
2. Sense of humor
3. Kindness

Things I like to say
1. "Apparently ..."
2. "Indeed ..."
3. "Be that as it may ..."
I'm a good one for "As it were ..." and "Frankly ..." as well.

Books I like best
Well this list is really getting kind of repetitive ... so I'll mix in a couple of new ones ...
1. The Favorite Game, by Leonard Cohen
2. Post Office, by Charles Bukowski
3. Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

Movies I like to see
1. Reds
2. Star Wars
3. Raising Arizona

Jeeze. This stuff, as a friend likes to say, hurts my brain. So, I figure this time I'll share the headache with a few buddies. Let's see what you've got astoria harpsichordist, absolutely anything, and gud stuf nyc.

______________________
Star Wars Photo by John Jay - All Rights Reserved © 1978 John Jay.

to free men from the bondage of irrational fears

CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW RESPECTING AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION, OR PROHIBITING THE FREE EXERCISE THEREOF; OR ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS; OR THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES. - The Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution

Twenty-five years after the first observance of Banned Books Week, a recent request to remove nine books--including The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Beloved by Toni Morrison--from a Chicagoland school district saw more than 1,000 people stay well after 1 a.m. debating the constitutionality of the move. Fortunately, this time, the books were all allowed to remain on the shelves.

Actions such as these are not uncommon. In 2005 alone there were 405 known attempts to remove books from the shelves of libraries and schools (where over 70 percent of such challenges take place). Of these titles, Robie Harris’ It’s Perfectly Normal was the most challenged, with the other top five most cited books in 2005 being perennial favorites of the censorious:

Forever by Judy Blume for sexual content and offensive language (and one of more than 70 titles a Fayetteville, AK mother requested be removed last year).
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger for sexual content, offensive language and being unsuited to age group;
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier for sexual content and offensive language;
Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher for racism and offensive language.

Additionally, there is this list of the top 100 challenged books of all time, and below, the top ten challenged authors from 1990 to 2004, according to the list of 8,332 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association include:

1. Alvin Schwartz
2. Judy Blume
3. Robert Cormier
4. J.K. Rowling
5. Michael Willhoite
6. Katherine Paterson
7. Stephen King
8. Maya Angelou
9. R.L. Stine
10. John Steinbeck

For more information on Banned Books Week you can visit the American Library Association website. They have great resources for fighting challenges to free speech and other First Amendment issues. Amnesty International is also a great resource for information on censorship and ways to support the fight against artistic persecution. Their focus during Banned Books Week is on "the plight of individuals who are persecuted because of the writings that they produce, circulate or read."
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The above image depicting the Statue of Liberty lost in a good book is by illustrator Roger Roth, from The American Story: 100 True Tales from American History and was written by Jennifer Armstrong (Knopf).

everything we do and think is colored

Huh. So proof that this stuff I post here isn't just going out into the ether or, at least, only to the five people who read this little space ... it appears that I've been tagged with a "Book Meme" by The Truffle. Until today, I'd never heard of this. Flattering, though, I must say. So. No real surprises in my list (as I've discussed most of them in detail previously), I had a really difficult time keeping it to a choice of just one title each, so I mostly didn't ...

A book that changed my life:
The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem; Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

A book I've read more than once:
Oh, lordy, I'm nothing if not a creature of habit, so many ... including: The Favorite Game, Leonard Cohen; The Color of Light, William Goldman; Women, etc., Charles Bukowski; Sombrero Fallout, Richard Brautigan; The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger; Superfudge, Judy Blume (ha!)

A book I would take with me if I were stuck on a desert island:
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving; (see also "A book that changed my life")

A book that made me laugh:
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut; Straight Man, Richard Russo; anything by Bukowski or Brautigan

A book that made me cry:
Microserfs, Douglas Coupland; 25th Hour, David Benioff [possible post on this one TK]

A book that I wish had been written:
Uh ... wow. Tough one (and I'm not going to beat The Truffle's response on this one ... heh. Though, after receiving my absurd ConEd blackout bill, I might just go ahead and grant the wish). I suppose the opposite of the topic for one of the titles I list below, which would be, The Day the Towers Stood.

A book I wish had never been written:
I like (parenthetical remarks) suggestion of the Bible, however, I have two ways I want to respond to this. First is, "A book I wish hadn't needed to be written," which is: American Ground, William Langewiesche. Second would be under "Books that made me want to throw them across the room," and they would be: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers and Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, by err .... what's her name? (Don't even want to look it up, frankly, I hated that book so much ... and please don't ask why I even had it to read ... it was in the "free book" bin at the place I used to work ... I should have left it there.)

A book I've been meaning to read:
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano

I'm currently reading:
I'm afraid I'm still without a current book in my hand, so I will say that the last book that I read in full was, It's All Right Now, Charles Chadwick.

______________________
And now the five other bloggers I'm wont to recommend as part of who I'll meme, a mix of friends and strangers both:

Short Term Memory Loss
Glass Under My Skin
Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant
Amy Loves Books
BookLust

insolence is not invective

Jonathan Franzen has a new book out, The Discomfort Zone. Are those crickets I hear chirping in my apartment now? However, as if his reappearance on the literati radar weren't irritating enough for me, I goaded myself into reading the review by Michiko Kakutani in today's NY Times.

And after I stopped cursing him for forcing me to actually agree with Kakutani, having wiped the tears of laughter from my cheeks over the irony of a Times reviewer using phrases such as "self-absorption," "pompous," "preening," and "odious" to describe both Franzen and his characters, I realized, no. I am not going to read this book. Not interested. I fell for the hype once before with The Corrections (that Salon.com review is interesting if only to note the further irony of the opening sentence against the date the review was published). That book was long enough and the publicity furor endless enough to count as a "fool me twice, shame on me" moment. MobyLives' Dennis Loy Johnson called that one right just a month after its publication when he wrote, "It's official: Jonathan Franzen is a buffoon."

Not that a criticism such as that would ever faze someone such as Franzen. Someone with his level of self-interest has all his own needs covered. So, in this new tome, which is more self-referential and autobiographical than The Corrections, I need know no more. I'm already familiar with the fact that he's a petulant prig with a narrow entitled view of the world. I don't need to hear any more of how much pleasure he gets at his own self-involvement, in paragraphs that tell us he is freed from the concerns of global warming because he chose not to have kids. In all honesty, how can we be asked to take a man who understands suffering as having been "cocooned in cocoons that were themselves cocooned" seriously as anything other than an overgrown spoiled MFA graduate? I mean, poor baby. Someone who must now, at forty-five battle demons that find him:

"grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die."

My stomach lurches when I think of how he has crowned himself chronicler and scribe of twenty-first century society and pop culture. G*d help us, even I, on a particularly cynical day, do not believe humankind to be so utterly bereft as to deserve judgment by his adolescent suburban high-hand. Because, if I want to read about a "character" who revels in "deploring other people" and "their lack of perfection" I'd read a novel by a truly talented author, one who did not take pride of ownership in that myopic perspective, but who created from the recognition and observation of the world outside his head. In other words, an artist.

---

Illustration © Patricia Storms, care of her blog, BookLust (a terrific blog, despite the defense of Franzen ... her homage to a cover of a book published by Fantagraphics is a brilliant take on Franzen's love of Peanuts).

until the bare lies shine through

"I wish to record my debt of gratitude to the stories and novels of Richard Yates, a writer too little appreciated." - Richard Ford

A few months ago I wrote about the frustrations of being an editor (and the frustrated diatribes launched at said editors by unpublished authors). I noted in that post, that the common complaint that there are too many books being published these days causing great novels to be overlooked entirely. So, what then is the excuse for the highly-acclaimed but thoroughly ignored works of Richard Yates? Yates' first novel, published in 1961 (when there weren't 4,000 works of fiction published a year), Revolutionary Road, is a contradiction of these fears. As with so many of my favorite writers, he is one of the most accessible of scribes. His work functions at the top of the literary scale with a mastery of form and structure without the acrobatic linguistics of those authors I love to hate, but will not name again here.

Revolutionary Road was a huge success at its time of publication and stood along such classics as Catch-22 and The Moviegoer for the National Book Award that year (and now one of Time magazine's top All-Time 100 Novels). Yet, Yates, for all of the accolades he received from such heavyweights as Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, and Tennessee Williams (and even as a first-time author, he was indeed, their peer), barely ever broke the 10,000 copy sales mark--numbers that might not even get him published in today's market. So what of this? How is it that a scribe with a skill at chronicling the post-Baby Boom high of middle-class America that can be matched only by Raymond Carver and John Cheever found not one but all of his books out of print just a few decades later? What does that say about our industry? What does that say about readers? Is there any place on the shelves for a true writer's writer?

I myself was only recenly made aware of Yates, and that discovery was entirely accidental. I am embarrassingly (and eternally grateful) for Amazon's (normally off-the-wall bad) recommendations pages for this. For Yates is my kind of writer. His stories are unfussy and his sentences are lacking entirely in pretension. Yates' style is so simple, he might even fight for space near Bukowski in my regard for his ability to say a profound thing in a simple way. To write with the skill and eye that Yates did, and then to be entirely removed from literary memory is, frankly, terrifying. I think authors believe (as they should) that if they write well enough, their stories and the world of those stories will live on in paperback for all eternity. So, how is it that Richard Yates, a writer so obviously talented, so universally respected by his peers found his novels (his brilliant, life-defining, wrenching novels) out of print just a few years after they left the presses? A mystery, certainly.

In any event, luckily, some of his titles were recently reissued, and I stumbled across his first novel, Revolutionary Road. I came across it at a particularly prescient time in my life as the book tells the story of the excruciating slow erosion of a marriage--the Wheelers, a suburban couple who believe they are smarter and better than their neighbors and too good for the mundane lives they have found themselves in. Husband Frank works a boring job in a nondescript office, but dreams of moving to Europe to become a writer; April, his wife, is his booster, the core of his self-confidence; she is "first-rate," or so he must remind himself. Of Frank, Yates writes that, "he hardly ever entertained a doubt of his own exceptional merit," while never having actually ever accomplished anything of significance, by having avoided "specific goals he had [also] avoided specific limitations." As a couple, Frank and April are constantly watching themselves, gauging their lives against the ideals of their peers. Theirs is a self-conscious anxiety, one full of the fear of never knowing precisely how they are expected to behave. They paralyze themselves by playing at their roles of husband and wife and mother and father--exhausted in their attempts to not blow their lines, all the while silently seething at each other across emptier and quieter rooms.

While Revolutionary Road's cynical view of the American Dream might seem trite in today's world, it is how Yates allows us to sympathize with two very unsympathetic (and very recognizable) characters that strikes you. The lament of life in the suburbs and consumerism, is ahead of its time, but more incredibly, is how he shows these things to affect their (and our) humanity--how it builds frustrations and self-conscious sorrow, and allows us to unapologetically place blame for all of it on those we love. The main characters revel in their disdain for the banal and are repulsed when they realize, that in the end, they aspire to the same. It is this failure, through no fault other than their lack of imagination, that Yates shows us--he takes us into their inner lives and allows us to contemplate that absence. It is this merciless view of his characters that makes Yates' writing so compelling. You cannot but recognize the disappointments they suffer. But there is no relief for the reader, no punchline at the end of the humiliation. Worse, is that Yates empowers his characters, there is never a point at which they would be unable to pull themselves out of the depths--they simply continue down the path they have already decided they despise, unwilling perhaps, to acknowledge their mistake and try again.

A bleak vision, certainly--as it accounts not for some foreign history or fantastical horror story--but one that is easily envisioned as we wait for the next train to arrive at the platform. And it is this blunt reality of failure--the view that family and love are not only difficult, but sometimes near impossible--that captured me more than I have ever been by an author. To read a story that understands that sometimes there is no luck, or happy coincidence to spare us, was a revelation and oddly, a reward, for for having survived it at all.

a way of organizing the universe

January 1994 was a long time ago. Over 12 years, on my last check ... A large chunk of my life and an eternity in terms of the technology that has appeared in that time. By January 1994, I was already on my second Macintosh, a Mac clone, exciting for its color monitor (my first Mac was a Performa 200), though without the elegance of Macintosh design.

January 1994 was also when a just booming magazine, Wired published the beginnings of a short story, by the already-famous author, Douglas Coupland. It was his quiet little research exercise, looking into the suddenly hip world of "geeks" and "nerds," computer programmers and soon-to-be dot-commers. The story was called Microserfs (reviewed in the NY Times, appropriately enough when it arrived in book form, by Jay McInerney [whose most recent book The Good Life, is, dare I admit it, fabulous ...]). Written in journal form, with notes and scribbles and playful text, it told the tale of the lives of a group of six of these twenty-something computer programmers, and their world working at the Microsoft "campus" in Washington State.

It was a heady time for the West Coast. There was the (by now mainstream) Seattle music scene, Silicon Valley, and the legitimization of Generation X (a term coined by Coupland in his 1991 novel of the same name).

In my searching, I came across an reminiscence of the book that offered the very compelling point that Microserfs would never have been published as fiction today (considering Coupland's own research for the book living on campus, etc.), and that it would more than likely be printed as a "memoir." I'd guess that this certainly would be true considering the prevalence of everyone's "life story" on my local bookstore shelves ...

But, even when it was first published, Microserfs, in its diary form, was a pop-culture time capsule; a letter to future selves. It is easy to dismiss the book with a Grinch's heart as all surface and shallowness, however, to do so would simply be wrong. For Coupland has always insinuated his characters with a need for the divine in the pop. In Microserfs, there is "Bill," the obvious stand-in as lord god of the company and his disciples (who leave the flock), the main protagonists (though I would stop at calling Daniel, the narrator, a Jesus figure, despite his martyr-tendencies, I believe he is simply a gentle soul) move forth and break down corporate structure for community and modern-day family. Despite their technological success and social failure, they cannot but recognize their need for love and companionship--in its most traditional sense--amidst the existential crisis they experience within their technological minds. For all its clever graphics and (now) quaint descriptions of cutting edge work environments (email! smileys!) it remains one of the most human and touching novels I've ever read.

And more than Generation X, I've always felt it recognized and defined my world and society that I grew up in. There is the necessary evil; working for the aforementioned corporation, a place that exists only to create product and print more money; the way that work has changed so much in the past few decades, encompassing our lives to the extent that it is also the hub of our human interactions and opportunities for relationships--in this case Daniel's physical and emotional connection to Karla, and how it gives him the desire to create something new (something "1.0"). The book is also a testament to how prescient Coupland was about technology and how it would change us and the world. It's incredible to flip through the pages and see how much Coupland recognized with regard to how it might liberate people's ability to communicate with one another and provide a completely new outlet for thought and creativity.

So, it's all the more distressing that his most recent novel, JPod, comes at us from an entirely opposite realm. In it, Coupland returns to his technogeek characters in a loose update of Microserfs, though, tellingly, JPod, and the characters who inhabit the book, lack the innocence and searching natures of their previous counterparts. It was a bit sad, really, to see this loss of curiosity coming from Coupland, as, no matter what he has written (and whether it has been enjoyed by me or not), what I have always been struck by is his sense of the spiritual, his joy at the wonder of every day life (it is the ability to do this that I appreciate most from others, and allow me to continue to aspire to it). The eternal possibilities of man and machine and that which lies beyond them both. In Microserfs, it is our physical form that fails and technology that saves both the spiritual and intellectual--reviving hope. In JPod, it is all cynical word play and razor jabs at our current society, with none of the curiosity.

we follow after bubbles, blown in the air

So, I am sitting here trying my damndest to compell my fingers not to type the quote "It was the best of Times ..." etc. to begin this post, as I peruse the NY Times "Best Work of American Fiction in the Last 25 Years." The list was published today, as threatened. They also posted the the list of the judges who participated. I was surprised to see that Russell Banks, Paula Fox (who I hope to write about some day), and Richard Russo agreed to participate, among some other names of whom I have a high opinion.

There are no surprises here (indeed, no surprise in that at all). The only portion of this list I found mildly interesting were some of the choices in the "multiple votes" section, where it looks as if at least a few of the judges got up from their desks and perused their shelves a little more closely.

And maybe it is my returning cynicism, but I find it terribly yawn inducing that among the multiple picks by the same handful of uber-masculine "runners-up," the winner is only one of two female writers on the list (and the book by Marilynne Robinson was not reviewed by the Times at any point). Has it really become the case that we are so hyper-aware of political correctness that it shows itself without embarrassment in this manner? At least they were consistent in their appreciation for the more oblique scribes, what better way to ascribe meaninglessness to such a meaningless endeavor. In any event, here is the list:

The "Winner":
Beloved, Toni Morrison

The Runners-Up:
Underworld, Don DeLillo
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Four Rabbit Angstrom Novels, Rabbit at Rest, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit, Run, John Updike
American Pastoral, Philip Roth

Titles that Received Multiple Votes:
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
White Noise, Don DeLillo
The Counterlife, Philip Roth
Libra, Don DeLillo
Where I'm Calling From, Raymond Carver
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
Mating, Norman Rush
Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson
Operation Shylock, Philip Roth
Independence Day, Richard Ford
Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth
Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
The Human Stain, Philip Roth
The Known World, Edward P. Jones
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth

I was a bit distressed to see that Roth wasn't on the list of judges, as I was certain he must have stuffed the ballot box. Twenty-five years is a long time, are we really to understand that only a handful of authors have been good during this period? What of Millhauser? Ian McEwan? And, frankly Banks? This exercise frustrated more than I anticipated. More for the disappointment in being correct in my not-so-optimistic-belief that all the members of our current literati are interested in is preening the already well-groomed.

the glare that obscures

"Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all." --William Goldman

Books that have for a main character a writer often prove difficult for authors to offer up, as their narrator will more often than not, reveal themself, even if it is not done so intentionally. I noted in an earlier post, Stingo, from Sophie's Choice, who is the sad and sensitive stand-in for William Styron, and then there is, of course, Hank Chinaski for Buk, and Burrough's William Lee. Each of these authors uses their alter-writer-self to varying degrees of ego and self-deprecation, and with equally varying degrees of success. It can also be a risk in that it may distract the reader from the real tale, by making them wonder how much of the protagonists thoughts are "biographical," while from the creator's perspective, the sense of revelation might cause them to write more close to the vest, causing them to wrap themselves within the writer within.

The devastating tale of too-soon genius and destructive madness of The Color of Light by William Goldman, who if you are more familiar with as the screenwriter for The Princess Bride, may stun you, though perhaps not as much if you know Marathon Man (the novel or the movie). Certainly Goldman is comfortable in his sense of the treacherous, but what sets The Color of Light apart from his other stories, even those that use cruelty as easily as a smile, is the relentless menace that bears down on his characters throughout the novel.

In The Color of Light, Goldman gives us Charley "Chub" Fuller, who may or maay not be too much of himself, I never got a sense that Charley was more real than a dream Goldman might have had of himself at one time (or perhaps a fear of himself). Charley is a promising young writer, who with the help of his eccentric college buddy, "Two Brew" Kitchel pushing him to succeed as his agent/editor manages to have his first novel published at a very young age. Perhaps in a bit more deflection of the character as alter-soul, Goldman has Charley deal not only with the difficulty of early and easy success, but also has him struggle of how to decide to fictionalize his life; whether or not to use his own or whether he can get away with using his father's experiences as a soldier and subsequent alcoholism.

As in his other brilliant novel, Boys and Girls Together, The Color of Light is rich with unexpected human connections and coincidence; each of the characters, who are as different from one another as they can be, return to one another over several years, under increasingly unusual (and often difficult) situations, and as they do, they are each left with a newly-created bond of trauma. And then there are always the obstacles in those moments of desperate desire; whether it be to capture their dreams or satisfy their passions. And when the troubled love of Charley's life finally leaves her husband and returns to him with her daughter, in one of Goldman's cruel twists, Charley finds his creativity blocked; distracted by beauty and want, by destructive love, and the mind's deceptions. He is barely able to complete his follow-up work with a half-realized collection of short stories, and after that, more trouble lies ahead for him.

And as the novel progresses intensifies the emotional struggle of Charley. Every joy, every imagined wish destroys him a little more. By the second half of the novel, innocence is twisted so far, and you realize, so naturally, that it practically becomes obscenity. While on the surface it may seem that the characters do nothing but wander about their lives, in moments you may recognize as your own, it is the shock of the psychological, for the characters and in turn, the reader that stuns you in the end. What Goldman does for character, what he does, perhaps better than most, is defy you to love the people he creates for you, and like the cliched car crash, you realize, and often know, that you can't help but keep looking for what pain lies ahead. For it is only when we are certain of joy that we are vulnerable to such destruction.

every hour takes part of the things that please

"All I know is that my happiness is built on the misery of others, so that I eat because others go hungry, that I am clothed when other people go almost naked through the frozen cities in winter; and that fact poisons me, disturbs my serenity, makes me write propaganda when I would rather play …"
—Jack Reed

And so, it is May 1. May Day. The worker's day (and appropriate, considering how mine went ...). A good day, I think, to take a [brief] look at propaganda. While both the former Soviet Union and the American government (conservatively called "Loyalty Day" or "Americanism Day") associate May Day with militarism, the origins of this day have been obscured (and this is a testament to the power of it) by the specific designs of propaganda. The truth of May Day is two sided. There is a Green and there is a Red. The green is the day's relationship to the natural earth, its abundance and the necessary aspects of life; the red (as red often is) is blood spilt, class struggle, and social exploitation. Historically, both sides of the propaganda machine have used May Day as a tool to further their agendas. And both sides are equally adept with their use of powerful textual and visual imagery; the green tending toward creation and desire and the red of class struggle.

Green May Day, being closer to the earth, is also more ancient in nature and its traditional celebrations. Its modern day form takes shape as expressions of freedom from oppression—and this stems from historical efforts to fight the relentless attempts to establish industrial order of the factory owners. Led by the Puritans and their desire to spread word that to toil was be godly and that less toil was wicked. The green could only be destroyed by increasing the workday and abolishing holidays. There is an historic piece of propaganda about this called "Funebria Florae," or "The Downfall of the May Games." In it, the author attacks "ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swashbucklers, maid-marians, morrice-dancers, maskers, mummers, Maypole stealers, health-drinkers, together with a rapscallion rout of fiddlers, fools fighters, gamesters, lewd-women, light-women, contemmers of magistracy, affronters of ministry, disobedients to parents, misspenders of time, and abusers of the creature, &c." For the green represents thought and doubt. Decadence. It is hedonism and free love—"all the scume of the earth," as one colonial governor wrote. Sounds like my kind of group.

While my tendency is to associate more with the green on a personal level, my interest tends to lean more to the Red; the modern and political associations of propaganda, particularly that of the early twentieth century with its stark cubist visuals and black & white world view expression of it. The beginnings of the red of May Day is generally associated with the events of Haymarket and "The Day of the Chicago Martyrs," particularly with regard to the American view of the day and its "revolutionary" nature—sad that revolution after 1776 in this country means "union"—but it is the1917 Bolshevik victory in Russia (and as an aside, the 1905 Revolution began on May 1) and its Red associations that really advanced the day's shift to the Red and truly rearranged it to its modern associations, while transforming the style of modern propaganda. The fear extracted by that political shift in the general population of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, was celebrated by union organizers and those the day was meant for to begin with, the workers. It became a day of political action, and a time for the radicals to offer up their pamphlets attempting to manifest class solidarity, strengthening the socialist movements throughout the world. And as is often the case with radical movements, many of the artists of the time were fascinated by the upheaval of political thought and used the new and exciting world view to create and explore new aspects of the arts; new ways to express the world. Activists and artists such as Jack Reed (quoted above), Emma Goldman, Max Eastman and Isadora Duncan (to name a very few), actively provoked through their creative and nofiction work, and later, in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald published one of his earliest short stories, "May Day," The tale represented his fleeting curiosity about naturalistic fiction and it related his personal frustration at his soul-deadening work at an advertising agency, the fruitless nature of labor in a society that has no respect for the worker, as well as his failure to conform. In "May Day" he writes:

"Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer's credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own.... During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more."

In the late sixties, all of the social, sexual, and political movements of the time brought back renewed interest in May Day with new slogans (the poster below, roughly translated means "Be Young and Be Quiet" or "Be Young and Shut Up," is one of the more well-known posters from the French civil actions) and radical expression. In 1968 ('68 Mai), that storied year, some European events saw Allen Ginsberg made the "Lord of Misrule" in Prague (just before the Russians arrived, appropriately enough, to effectively shut expression down); students in London protested Britain's Parliament against a bill to stop Third World immigration into England; and most notably, the student strikes in Paris, that eventually extended throughout France and ended with over ten million workers following suit in support, paralyzing the country across all industries and all parts of French society in a general strike of near-revolutionary proportions. Here in the United States, African-American students in Mississippi could not be disuaded from protesting their jailed friends, while locally, Columbia University students petitioned against armed police on campus. Union workers also actively organized themselves for the first time in over a decade with the help of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) who aided a wildcat strike at the Hamtrack Assembly plant in Detroit, in a fight against management's "speed-up" productivity requirements. And while the movements in the U.S. were less unifying, and tended to either be political or artistic in nature (rather than a melding of the two), the extensive nature of the unrest, and their manifestations on May Day, attest to the historical significance and its meaning for both.

The nineteenth century essayist, Leigh Hunt, said of May Day that it is "the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature, and the love of each other." I would say this is definitely true of the "green" aspects, but, for the "red," there is less the union of the world and more awareness of the division and the only way to a semblance of unity may be seen as the continuing struggle. And the struggle is for the workers to realize and overcome—it is they who have the responsibility, who exist in a world defined by the pushing aside of dreams; of pain before joy—and it is they who must fight for relief against this in order to create social change. As Reed wrote:

"And yet I cannot give up the idea that out of democracy will be born the new world—richer, braver, freer, more beautiful. As for me, I don’t know what I can do to help—I don’t know yet."

people whom even children’s literature would corrupt

“It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky.” - Muriel Spark

As with a lot of the things you think are useful when you are in college, I took a course in British Children's Literature, which turned me into a British Literature major (perhaps not useful, but prescient, in retrospect). In any event, one of the books we read was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark. I was surprised at the time, and still am, that this was considered kid lit, particularly since its original publication date was 1961. It was quite risqué, as they say, what with its free love and general disdain for traditional English crumpets and tea. The book, ever-so charming on its surface, never completely hid what others have called Spark's tendency toward "dark tales of perversion." I wish YA novels were still written with this kind of subversive and thoughtful intellect.

Perhaps it was her beginnings as a writer of propaganda during WWII, perhaps it was her connection to Graham Greene and her Catholic conversion, perhaps her early influences of Mary Shelley and Evelyn Waugh, perhaps it was the Scot in her, or perhaps she was simply ahead of her time. Whatever the "perhaps," Dame Muriel Spark (nee Muriel Sarah Camberg), died April 15, at the age of 88.

---

obits
Guardian UK
New York Observer
works
Muriel Spark Archive - National Library of Scotland
What War and Peace ought to have been called - Slate Diaries


[Muriel Spark's desk at home in Tuscany, by Scottish journalist Alan Taylor in 2003]

the horrible burden of Time wrecking your back

And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a ditch, in your room’s gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, ask everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, ... ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, "It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk constantly! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you choose.” - Baudelaire

Oh, I'm exhausted. Haven't been sleeping well. The time shift didn't help much (good to know I'm not alone as "springing ahead" apparently increases both traffic accidents [by 7%] and the overall accident death rate [by 6.5%]). Enjoying, too, correspondences, interludes, and connections (and lots of ice cream). Have this buzz running through my brain and my thoughts have become cut-ups without need of any chemical assistance. A definite sign of sleep deprivation. That and difficulty focusing the eyes, moodiness, hallucinations, fragmented thinking, slurred speech, and diminished mental ability (though, no, I am not so far as to have gotten to some of these, as yet). And so, what better time than to return to creativity and altered consciousness? Paging Dr. Benway ...

In 1951, having been released from a Mexico jail after accidentally shooting and killing his wife in a "game" of William Tell, William S. Burroughs, who it goes without saying, was no stranger to altered states, journeyed to the Amazon in search of "the final fix"--a rumored telepathic, hallucinogenic drug called yage (pronounced ya-hay). Burroughs became fascinated with the drug (also known as ayahuasca) after learning of how it was used by natives to find things--lost bodies and souls, specifically. He recorded his journey and all of its lush incidents, in letters to his good friend, Allen Ginsberg, in what was later published as The Yage Letters. These notes and Burroughs' experiences during his travels also became the base for Naked Lunch (once criminal, now one of Time's "All-Time 100 Novels") as well as his "cut-up" writing form. The Yage Letters also includes Ginsberg's experiences during his own exploration of the drug, and his corresponding visions and terrors while on it.

As with Kerouac's structured quest for altered consciousness, so too was Burroughs', though his was also a quest through drugs to achieve this. He found himself a curandero and worked with him closely in order to experience not only the high, but also the ritualistic trance-state that the drug produces. It is not a casual experience, as both Burroughs and Ginsberg found out. After his first attempt, Burroughs wrote "checked into the hospital junk sick and spent four days there. They would only give me three shots of morphine and I couldn't sleep from pain and heat and deprivation." Without going into all of the gruesome detail of the body's reaction (you can read it here) the effect of the drug is to first purge you, bodily--from both ends--and then release you mentally. However, unlike Kerouac, for Burroughs (and for Ginsberg as well) the discovery was painful indeed, he did not find the enlightenment that he sought from the experience, not immediately anyway--the aforementioned novel and, more important, his "cut-up" form came afterward.

While his cut-up technique was literal, he would cut passages (by himself and other writers) and rearrange them randomly, from a prose perspective, he was seeking "the lost"--the hidden meaning of words. For Burroughs, the cut-up was "a montage of fragments ... consciousness is a cut up. Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors." The cut-up disturbed continuity, but he worked within the randomness, assigning it limits with a result he felt went only so far as the fact that it was unintentional. It was about the subliminal flow of information, and perception hidden from our conscious. It was meant to directly contradict popular-culture manipulations--to be guided away from the visible and the "virus" that words have become in our culture. By juxtaposing sentences--logical sequences not represented in our brains--he renders the words meaningless and their control over our brains harmless. The cut-up is a method for direct action against mind control. And while he did not accomplish this under direct influence of yage (he certainly wrote under the influence of many others, whether in Tangiers with Paul Bowles, or in New York, under any number of substances), what his experience of it did was open this mind view.

City Lights Books has just this month published a new, more complete edition called, Yage Letters Redux. The text includes some previously unpublished (and previously unpublishable) correspondence, as well as a detailed history of both the drug, and Burroughs' obsession with it.

some people never go crazy

"Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot."
- Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
After all my talking, this post will surely be a letdown, one that I'll want to write and rewrite again. But, gotta let go sometime. Not going to go into individual books here, might prefer to touch on those somewhere down the road. I consider this a preface.

Why I love Bukowski. Because he was reflective; because he was funny; because he was socially awkward; because he was able to say a profound thing in a simple way. Buk died March 9, 1994. I was working at a comic book company at the time. And in fact, he was the reason I got my first full-time job in publishing. I had to fill out a questionnaire before the interview, and one of the questions was, "Name some of your favorite writers." I almost didn't write him down. But, it turned out the woman who would become my boss, was a huge fan as well. So she hired me. When I got to the office that morning, I found on my desk that a friend (and future boss) had left the NY Times obit there with a note that read, "go home early, mourn Hank." I wish I still had that.

Looking at bookstore shelves with their "newly published" or "newly found" Bukowski titles, it's hard to believe that he only wrote six novels while he was alive. Of those, only one of them wasn't autobiographical (Pulp). His alter ego, Hank Chinaski appears throughout the other five. And like Buk (whose first name was Henry), Hank despised society and loathed and feared the middle class and their values. Hank was brilliant at unearthing the motivations of those he came in contact with and as much as he fails, whether in love or lust, or employment (or housing), his tormentors never escape without having been laid bare by one of his devastatingly funny and brutally honest observations. But, as is often the case, what lay behind that wit and cynicism and bluster was exactly the opposite--Buk was a lonely and vulnerable man full of self-doubt and loathing. Someone longing for love and to be loved--and it is this, this essential part of his soul, that is never gone from the page, no matter how vulgar or crude the scene.

Charles Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920, and though his first works were published in the 1940s, he gave up writing to generally live the life he would eventually describe when he returned to the typewriter, about 20 years later. He spent his childhood as a social failure, in a lower class family, with an abusive father and horrific acne (the extent of which can be clearly seen on his ravaged face), just as Hank did. For years his work was either compared to the Beats or dismissed outright as too simplistic, but more recently it has been accepted in "literary" circles and has even found its way into coursework and literary theory. Perhaps most famously, was an essay that appeared in Granta by Bill Buford, which dissected Bukowski's novel Factotum (even if by doing so, it missed the point, entirely). Buford called the form "Dirty Realism," and his theory takes Roland Barthes idea of writing in the style of "literary consciousness"--essentially, the reader experiences immediate pleasure at the moment of reading--and turns it on its head. For Buford, dirty realism transfers the consciousness to the writer at their required moment:

Imagine someone ... who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old spectre: logical contradiction ... [Bukowski not only] discards ... logical contradiction, but flaunts his disdain for consistency, logic, and accountability. He is not only conscious of contradiction within his text, but celebrates a willful hypocrisy, indiscriminately exhibiting (and conscripting to his own ends) the incongruities of postindustrial capital. Bukowski turns passivity into a subversive practice by self-consciously displaying his subjection to capital's indeterminacy, in effect replicating and co-opting that indeterminacy to empower himself.

In other words, Bukowski was an insecure, confused, uh ... human being. Whatever the thought, this piece did bring much attention and to that book, as well as his other work, and provided much of the long-overdue legitimacy it deserved. More recent theories include British author Jules Smith's critical analysis of Buk, Art Survival and Poetry, that, as the book's blurb states:

Smith investigates in detail the formal influences of Whitman's broadening of subject matter, iterative parallelisms, and revival of narrative, Robinson Jeffers' Inhumanism, and the long, strophic lines of both predecessors. As a poet based for thirty-six years in Southerm California, I am especially grateful for the insightful attention paid to the complex relationship of subsequent generations of L.A./Long Beach writers to the Bukowkian model. I share, furthermore, his conviction that Bukowski's work is of at least the stature of Ginsberg's, Kerouac's, and Henry Miller's - I would, in fact, place him a notch above all three. I also find of great significance the "anxiety of influence," to invoke Harold Bloom's terminology, of Bukowski's Oedipal relationship to his towering, glowering forefather, Ernest Hemingway.

This theory sounds a little closer to the spirit of Bukowski, insofar as considering the thought of his work being deconstructed on the basis of a prurient interest in Papa by a room full of twenty-year-old coeds. The idea of which, I imagine, would tickle Hank no end.

I mentioned I was re-reading Run with the Hunted, to refresh my thoughts on who he was, and even in part to see if what I thought it was that I found so appealing in him was even true anymore. And, it was. It only gets funnier as you get older; more recognizable; just how spot-on his rants about life and love were; and the petty frustrations and petty people you run into throughout both; and how often you revisit it all, no matter what alleyway you find yourself walking down. As far as the book itself, as a concept, Run with the Hunted is an inspired idea for a "biography," and I'd recommend it for that reason alone. Since so much of Buk's work was semi-autobiographical (his short stories and his poems, in addition to his novels) what editor John Martin (the genius behind Black Sparrow Press) did was take excerpts from novels, short stories, and poems and put them in the chronological order of Buk's life. And what this does is provide an entirely different view of him. It reveals just how sensitive to the world Buk was, how utterly dumbfounded. And it also reveals why more clearly. This is important I think, in understanding him. Because, if you read just one book, or if you read many in varying order, it may not occur to you that most of the stories are true. And it's easy to see in that case, how his writing might just come across as simple and profane. But to read these poems, excerpts, and stories in the order of his life puts all of that into perspective. You may still find him repulsive, but you can't help but recognize the pain and humor behind it. And with that recognition, you also come to see how deceptively simple his writing is. There doesn't exist a Bukowski sentence that runs off for a full paragraph. Not only was he incapable of that kind of preening, he was incapable of bullsh*t. Period.

I wish I could include more of his poetry here, because as with his novels, their simple form makes reading poems much less of a chore. It becomes instead, what the form was intended to be, emotion boiled down, in a simple way. Please click to read these, if you have the time.

eulogy to a hell of a dame
for jane: with all the love i had, which was not enough
a radio with guts
as the sparrow
an almost made up poem
confession

I think I can live with this as is for now. Maybe.

["Conversation" line drawing by Charles Bukowski]

art simply facilitates persuading

Martin: What would we do here?
Eddie: Well, you could uh-- tell each other stories.
Martin: Stories?
Eddie: Yeah.
Martin: I don't know any stories.
Eddie: Make 'em up.
Martin: That'd be lying wouldn't it?
Eddie: No, no. Lying's when you believe it's true. If you already know it's a lie, then it's not lying.
--True West

People often talk about the experience of going to the theater; the immediacy, the singular moment of the delivery of a line; the sense that anything can happen. It is true, that a great play, even in the hands of mediocre (but not terrible) actors has a poetry that is often lost on the page. For a while I was obsessed with plays, they were all I read for close a year while in college. I've always been drawn to dialogue, and a writer's ability to capture conversation with all of its imperfect starts and stops. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my two favorites playwrights are Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill and I have been lucky enough to see my favorite by each performed on stage. It hasn't seemed like it, because I usually only go to one or two plays a year, but going through the archives, I realized, I've actually managed to catch quite a few of my favorite plays.

Just a partial list of my favorites (and I was surprised when looking at the cast lists how many movie and TV actors starred) in addition to Long Day's Journey and After the Fall, Sam Shepard's True West (with Gil Bellows [of all people], 1993), O'Neill's Anna Christie (with Liam Neeson, 1993), David Auburn's Proof (with Jennifer Jason Leigh, 2001), Lanford Wilson's Burn This (with, sigh, Edward Norton, 2002).

The only play that I truly miss not having seen, and it was unfortunately out last year, is Shepard's Fool for Love. And if you are familiar that play, and with more than one of those others, you'll note certain themes; love, desire & repulsion, lies and the mind's truth, memory, and point of view. Shepard wrote Fool for Love after a divorce. Shepard described his play as "the outcome of all this tumultuous feeling I've been going through this past year … it's a very emotional play and in some ways embarrassing for me to witness but somehow necessary at the same time." The beauty of Fool for Love is its ability to bridge all different levels, from its soap opera elements to its sensationalistic topics. It's a beautiful allegory of love lost and a vision of it as personal drama--particularly ill-fated love. The other element that always struck me is how the characters deal with their shared past, and how different their interpretations of that past is; how crucial that remembrance is with regard to how each of them manages to (or doesn't) get through their life. And how memory, deep memory--the sort that shapes you--places you. How you become stuck with who you are based on how you've chosen to remember your life and what you are able to do with that remembering.

You see this kind of self-deception a lot in plays, I think it's intrinsic to the medium in a way that no other allows, because unlike a movie, or even a book, everything is so dependent upon the word and character that the result has nowhere else to go but into the mind of the players on the stage. In Burn This, the characters confront desire that is pushed far down, to initially be released as anger and blame; and in Long Day's Journey, the final scene sees Mary Tyrone, no longer able to keep the past or the lies she has had to create in order to survive it, down. And that is only brought to bare--and she is only barely able to survive the recognition--because of her drug-induced state. After the Fall is just a memory. It is the thought and denial--the excuse of memory. Miller's opening stage direction instructs this: "The action takes place in the mind, thought, and memory of Quentin ..." It is the waiting room of the mind where those we have known and who have gone from us appear again and again--the past, and how we blame ourselves and others; missed communication, and conversations not had; or the conversations we force ourselves to believe we've had in order to fool us into thinking all that could have been done was and get through the next days.

"We are freed, at the end ... not because the playwright has arrived at a solution, but because he has reconciled us to the notion that there is no solution—that it is the human lot to try and fail, and that no one is immune from self-deception.” -- David Mamet on Arthur Miller