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.

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.

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.

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]

so that my nights are not full of regrets

I suppose it has become apparent by now that I am sensitive to certain turns of phrase; certain ways of the written word; and that there are ways of expression that touch me more than others. And that doesn’t refer to the topic, necessarily. It has more to do with intent. I am a romantic at heart, essentially. Not bodice-busting romance, of course not … but the romance of subtle gestures and recognitions; of outright lust and desire; of honest want and need. I doubt if that comes as a surprise to anyone who has read more than one of my posts. And, this is why I have never liked John Updike. And it is why I’ve read almost every book he’s written. Because, as with things I love, I need to know the things I despise just as well, in order to feel comfortable in my opinions of them. It has nothing to do with his writing ability. I think he (and I’m sure he would agree) is an exemplary wordsmith. Yes, he writes a fine sentence. The first 16-odd pages of Rabbit, Run and his description of basketball? Unparalleled. I grant all of that. That is not my issue.

My issue (as a romantic) is this: I hate his view of women. And I suppose, those of you who have been reading closely might find that odd as well. How could I hate good, Protestant, white-bread Updike’s view of women and crush on Bukowski’s? It’s quite simple. Yes, Bukowski wrote extensively of f*cking, and used that word liberally; he used a lot of other less delicate words, too. Here’s the difference: Bukowski loved women. Updike hates them. And please—I'm no prude, no feminist, and no saint, certainly. I would hope my comparison of those specific two writers would be enough to quell that thought. What I hate about Updike are the lies, the ease with which he allows his men to go to and from them. The completely unsympathetic female creations he conjures. The shrill tone he places on all of their tongues (I say this, mind you, as a woman who only in the past few years has been able to have close friendships with other women, and generally prefers the company of men). Bukowski's women could be ugly, vulgar, and often deceptive, but never more or less than he (Hank), his male character, was. It was all on equal ground. And that is the difference.

Since I no longer have any Updike in my library, I am working strictly from memory in this post. And, specifically, I am working from my remembrance of Couples, a book that I despised from its very first page. I understand that I am not alone in this opinion, and in fact, came to it some thirty years after the first reviews were posted. Still, looking back years after reading the book, and finding I am not alone now, and would not have been alone then, makes me feel a little less reactionary in my critique. A clip I found from the New York Times review of the book by Norman Mailer suggested he "keep his foot in the whorehouse and forget about his damn prose style." To that, I say, amen.

I’m not sure what it is about certain men (authors specifically) that exalt in the pleasure of deception, and in the game of deceit. I am not naïve, I know of the nature of desire, of what is unknown, and of what is wrong (and the pleasure in that). But to celebrate it? To offer it up as love (all the while pretending it is not)? To use such talent—and indeed, it is talent—to accomplish this? Let me tell you. That first page I spoke of? I remember it well. It all begins the story as told from “within,” which is the central conceit of this exercise for Updike. The opening scene is a bit of dialogue between one of the couples as they are undressing each other. The man says something to his wife, what he says is not important (though it is a tease of a sentence between two long-familiar and exhausted lovers). What is important is the point of view that we are offered; peeking out from the closet, fly on the wall. Updike is giving us access to this humiliation of the wife through the husband's critical internal narrative of her form as she hopefully awaits his touch. And it is about having this knowledge--of the truth of the lies--that we are to be titillated—not by the naked woman at the end of the page, you understand. That we are there to witness it, that we are in on the joke of her, that is the point for him. And we are to revel in the skill of the paragraph, for his words placed ever so purposefully, cruelly, so there can be no mistake about just how clever he is. That is pornography, in its essential form.

a single carrot, freshly observed (part 2)

So, (sorta) continuing where I left off in a pile of stones, with regard to the art of (or in) scientific writing ... What started out as a straight exchange of thoughts on the Lightman review, quickly devolved (on my end, naturally) when at some point in the email exchange, my friend mentioned, among others, some of Carl Sagan’s books as an example of “popular science writing.” I wrote in response that his work did indeed fall under the banner of being both artistic and scientific, and added, a bit facetiously, that part of his creative success might have had to do with his alleged frequent pot smoking. To which my friend responded:

The dope-smoking connection is probably empirical evidence for similar creative processes in the arts and sciences! If you can do art and creative aspects science while high, and especially effectively when high, but you can't do other types of work in an altered state, then that definitely suggests a commonality ...

And, well, a bit more scientific in nature than I dare go into here … but (yes, I always, eventually, bring it all back around) what this reminded me of was another Joshua Foer article that appeared in Slate where he used himself as a willing guinea pig for an experiment about creativity while under the influence. There’s nothing new in attempting to alter your conscious state in an effort to achieve a different perspective, but, what I liked about Foer’s attempt was his desired result. In the interest of science (always), Foer started taking Adderall, a drug usually prescribed to treat ADHD. Speed, essentially. I quite like the idea of amphetamines, a “cognitive” drug, as opposed to say, opium, or LSD. Basically Adderall and its ilk focus the individual’s brain, almost painfully, making it intent upon whatever the user is seeking to accomplish. Foer describes the effect, amusingly, as akin to having “been bitten by a radioactive spider”:

The results were miraculous … after whipping my brother in two out of three games of pingpong [sic]—a triumph that has occurred exactly once before in the history of our rivalry—I proceeded to best my previous high score by almost 10 percent in the online anagrams game that has been my recent procrastination tool of choice. Then I sat down and read 175 pages of Stephen Jay Gould's impenetrably dense book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory … When I tried writing on the drug, it was like I had a choir of angels sitting on my shoulders. I became almost mechanical in my ability to pump out sentences. The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my inbox apparently shut down ... I didn't feel like I was becoming smarter or even like I was thinking more clearly. I just felt more directed, less distracted by rogue thoughts, less day-dreamy.

So, it makes complete sense that amphetamines would be a favorite of scientists (and students, etc.) as much as artists. What I am curious about the effect is, as far as the individual user responds, does it make the person better at things they are already good at or does it allow them to focus enough to be better at anything? Or a little of both? I imagine this would be difficult to gauge as most users are taking it to accomplish a specific task that they already have some affinity for and are seeking something they presume to exist inside themselves already.

Now, it’s no secret (certainly not here) that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road while high on caffeine and Benzedrine (I can't imagine ...). What many might not know is that he did this specifically to write On the Road, he didn’t do it and then have the result be On the Road. That’s an important difference. What’s wonderful about him, as well, is how methodical he was in his spontaneity. All of his detailed preparation to achieve the effect of free-form. Take a look at his last requirement from his list of “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”:

If possible write "without consciousness" in semi-trance (as Yeats' later "trance writing") allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so "modern" language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's "beclouding of consciousness." Come from within, out-to relaxed and said.

It’s incredible how close that is to Foer’s description of taking Adderall. What's interesting to me about Kerouac choosing speed is, it would seem to contradict his need for the free flow of ideas. Everything he writes in his "essentials" from the "set up" and the avoidance of structure, to the need for language without limit, I'd think would be blocked by having the mind pointed so much on the act, and yet, not so. And what of the resultant art? Is it more honest, as Kerouac suggests, by not being bogged down by our internal and external censors? And if so, how does putting the mind into extreme focus do this? And to what extent is the drug a part of the art itself—and could it even be considered a co-creator? Certainly it opens up avenues, but it doesn’t explain why some people need to use these kinds of “enhancements” to achieve the mental state that allows them to be able to create, where others don’t. And I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they fascinate me.

As for Sagan, I believe he was exceptional not only in his ability to work exclusively as a scientist and exclusively as a novelist, but also with the high level he was able achieve at both. He also had an acute awareness of where to draw the line when adding creativity and personality to science in order to effectively communicate, inform, and entertain (ie, Cosmos) on a “popular” level. I can’t think of anyone else right now that managed such a range, though I’m sure there are a few. As for Sagan’s use of pot, well, the choice suggests the need for the opposite effect of Adderall and Foer’s experiment, and that Sagan’s reason for using it was what my friend suggested above, that in this altered state he felt he was more effective than when he wasn’t (one could only assume he experimented and compared work he’d completed in both states before reaching any conclusion). I’d guess Sagan wanted assistance in freeing the more creatively inclined parts of a brain, that I’d also imagine, was dominated by science (I’m only assuming this, of course, he could well have used it for his scientific work, too).

Eh, but I do go on ... Haven’t even begun to touch on two of the other main topics I wanted to. Will (eventually, or perhaps continuously) go to additional parts of this, can’t not discuss the issue of memory and altered consciousness and of course, The Yage Letters. But I may need to slow down a little to gather it all better.

one of us cannot be wrong

"A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility … I think it has something to do with the energy of love.”

It's often easier to tear open and pick at the things you dislike most about someone you love. I had a hard time even beginning to write about Leonard Cohen's first novel, The Favorite Game, in an earlier post. I fairly tripped all over myself and still only managed to stutter "it's my favorite." Whatever it touches in me is apparently too deep to articulate. Instead, I find myself looking at its opposite, his second novel, Beautiful Losers (1966). And though even his most effectively sensual songs tread perilously close to becoming overwrought and chauvinistic (and I'll admit to loving more than a few that slip there), for me, BL is a book that reveals his sometime tendency toward vulgarity and misogyny. It's the paperback equivalent of "Death of a Ladies Man." The Favorite Game produced by Phil Spector. All you need to know are the track titles to understand. Not that I have a real issue with vulgarity, it has a place and a purpose as with many uncomfortable things. It's just that some people wear it better than others. Woody Allen comes to mind as one who should never try it on--sitting through Husbands and Wives felt like watching a movie whose script had been written by a child that had just learned saying "f*ck" would startle the guests. Don't get me wrong, the book is stunningly well-written, and a complex achievement in language and metaphor.

Where does it deviate? Well, that's its whole purpose. We are told that Beautiful Losers is the story of a Jewish scholar (who is never named, thereby removing his humanity), his wife, Edith (who is the only one of the three without a narrative voice, thereby removing her humanity), and their friend and her lover F., a Military Police Officer with anarchist tendencies (which only proves him contrary ...). The novel is in three parts, under the affected titles of "Books" one through three: the husband's story of the relationship between the three; F.’s letter and confession to his friend, and “Beautiful Losers,” a third-person epilogue. There are deceptions and affairs and death; powerlessness and power plays; desire and sexual disassociation. And then there is Catherine Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint. I'm not sure it's early enough in the evening for me to begin on all of this. As his fans know, Cohen's bothered self-image about his Jewish upbringing in hyper-Catholic Montreal, Canada have always appeared in his writing. His allusions to the bible are never far from the surface if they dare go under at all, and as ever, he steals out of it with the skill of one who has suffered under its weight. Here he mixes the spiritual with the political; in this case Catholic obsessions that infect his characters with regard to Saint Tekakwitha and the question of how to marry that with what the secular poets and philosophers taught us to see in history, how that relates to the divine that is still held onto, and the self-doubt, and worse, self-loathing it creates. It is a return to one of Cohen's favorite prophets, Isaiah, and Isaiah's study of the political and historical through poetry. Here, however, he (meaning Cohen) only finds cynicism and despair--the divine world has failed, history is a hopeless cycle of pain, and the Messiah is lost.

If it all sounds fascinating to you, well, it is. So whither the vulgarity? A reviewer in Canada's newspaper The Globe and Mail described it as "verbal masturbation," and that is apt. And I suppose, a heck of an accomplishment, too. Amidst all of this richness, is how he corrupts all of the philosophical above and how he twists his often referred to elements in relationships between characters (be it in song or text); teacher and pupil; master and disciple. Here, instead of the slow-burn sensuality he uses the biblical pain of experience that he recognizes so well, and has his characters unleash it on each other. And it's ugly. It's ugly what they do to each other, their games and psychological tortures, and it's ugly in how it's described; made more so because he uses the power of the lyrical elements that he is master of to tell it all.

On an early edition, there is a description on the jacket flap that reads, "[Beautiful Losers] is a disagreeable religious epic of incomparable beauty." It is, yes, it is that. Perhaps I would be more forgiving if it had come from another of my men. I don't know.

[Cohen photo by J. Nisbet]

shadow-seekers and orphans of the sun

When Martin Dressler: A Tale of an American Dreamer came out in 1996, I was working at a science, technical, and medical book publisher (aka STM). And yes, it was just as exciting as it sounds. Go ahead, ask me about aneurysms. The office was pretty standard, with all of us holed up back-to-back in cubicles with groundhog-hole height walls and no doors. Crummy situation for trying to get any kind of editing done, but a fabulous set-up for commiserating with your neighbor. And I happened to get lucky on that front, as my cube buddy was a book and music aficionado, with taste very close to my own. And that was why I was surprised when he recommended Steven Millhauser's novel to me.

You see, the story of Martin Dressler is a mythical tale, and an American one, no less. And while the story takes place in the very real New York City, I was skeptical at best. I am not a fan of the fantastical in my books. Best to leave it to the special effects wizards of the screen; I prefer my prose and my protagonists to be pragmatic. Anyway. My friend, who had been taught by Millhauser when he attended Skidmore College, suggested I start instead with Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright. So I did.

And what is it about childhood and expectation in the hands of one who has not yet given it all away? Edwin Mullhouse is a true self-indulgence for those of us no longer in possession of such a view. It is youth in all its wide-eyed majesty, innocent proclamations and generous spirit. It is also terrifying, for perhaps those same reasons as, slowly throughout the novel, Millhauser takes that and brings shadow down upon it. The novel is full of tricks of emotion and of what is known, though it never loses its viewpoint--which is that of "biographer," Edwin's best friend, 12-year-old Jeffrey Cartwright. Jeffrey provides the immediate perspective (and perception) of childhood as witness to everything in his genius friend's life; from Edwin's unique language experiments to the anguish of his creative doubt and a certain second-grade girl. Adult obsession and foolishness alternating between the real and imagined world with the ease of children.

Needless to say, I was intrigued--my sense of pleasure had been challenged. And as I do when I'm in that zone of my brain, I took in all that was available, finishing off In the Penny Arcade, Portrait of a Romantic (a book that apparently had an influence on Jonathan Lethem and Fortress of Solitude), and Little Kingdoms. And, properly prepped, I picked up Martin Dressler. By then it had won a Pulitzer Prize, and like Edwin, it also felt like a book written in its own time; with a world and story so unique that it could come from almost nowhere but Millhauser's brilliant mind.

If I were to outline the plot of Martin Dressler it would sound like pretty standard stuff: 1890s NYC, boy from a working class family makes it huge as a hotel mogul. However, what sets it all apart, and in many ways defies description, is how Millhauser manipulates the reader's notion of dreams; the American Dream; and the subconscious--what is "real" fantastic and what is not--or I might say--is maybe not. You see, as each new hotel is realized so too is a dream--of the conscious and unconscious--and as the dream grows, so too the obsession of realizing it. Essentially this: consider the difficulty of describing a dream you had the night before to someone else--or have one described to you--then build it. Though even that is too literal by half. By the time we arrive at Martin's final creation, The Grand Cosmo, he has made tangible a building with all of the subterranean levels and hidden rooms of an actively sleeping mind--encompassing impossibilities within structure--rooms with trout streams and hallways with bazaars--and the dream has destroyed the dreamer. All accomplished without a wink.

"For he had done as he liked, he had gone his own way, built his castle in the air. And if in the end he had dreamed the wrong dream, the dream that others didn't wish to enter, then that was the way of dreams, it was only to be expected, he had no desire to have dreamt otherwise."

Fantastic stuff indeed. But I'm still not going to read Harry Potter.

i'm not coming back

Richard Brautigan drank a lot. And so it was probably a good thing he never learned to drive. He liked women, particularly Asian women. His second wife was from Japan. He knew how to title his books: The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster; The Galilee Hitchhiker; Revenge of the Lawn; In Watermelon Sugar; and his most commercially successful (though not his best, in my opinon), Trout Fishing in America. (And good luck finding most of these, if I like you I might loan you one of mine briefly, but even I don't have half of the above ...). While not my favorite of his novels, what I do love about Trout Fishing is the blurb (on the front, back, or inside, depending on which edition you own) that reads:

"Mr. Brautigan submitted a book to us in 1962 called Trout Fishing in America. I gather from the reports that it was not about trout fishing." -- An editor at The Viking Press

As an editor, the perplexed tone of that quote is truly laugh out loud funny, because you know what it's like to get reader reports from 21-year-old Editorial Assistants. Half the time you don't know whether they've actually bothered to read the manuscript (and I can only imagine the terror of the poor EA that had to type up that report) or if they were simply at their wits' end trying to impress the boss.

Sometime in early October, 1984, Richard Brautigan put a shotgun to his head. He was found three weeks later by a friend. I believe it was author Thomas McGuane, but I might be wrong about that. He left his ranch in Livingston and said, "I'm not coming back" and took his life in his other home in Bolinas, California.

I've read a number of reviews of Brautigan's books, and I'm always impressed at how the reviewers are able to interpret him. While some categorize him as a beat (mistakenly so, in my opinion, as they do Bukowski), they also recognize his deft ability to experiment and construct narratives that manage to balance "extreme emotional tension" with simple prose poem form, and many have (rightly so) attributed this to his zen beliefs and personal neurosis. Brautigan, simply put, elicits (for good or naught) what I like to describe as an itchy response. It's because he is so deceptively simple, a chapter may run two lines, maybe even one. Heck, sometimes his short stories are only two sentences long ... for example, "The Scarlatti Tilt" from Revenge of the Lawn:

"It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin." That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver."

That's it. That's the whole story. What else do you need to be told? It's brilliant. Perfect. My god.

You can read an RB novel in a lunch hour, but it is impossible really, to finish one in that time.

Brautigan was funny. His books are I-am-not-embarrassed-to-laugh-out-loud-on-the-subway funny. His sentences and his eye toward the world are razor sharp and he resurrects metaphor with his inventive style. But more than anything else, he is fragile. Achingly fragile. Take for instance these last few paragraphs of a chapter in my personal favorite Brautigan title (and it was difficult to choose an example, I'm certain I've not chosen the best) Sombrero Fallout, as the main character thinks about his (now) ex-girlfriend:

While they made love he was constantly cradling and stroking her hair and he felt that her hair was really caressing him back ...

Once he bit her very gently but just enough for her to make a noise like two branches of a cherry tree rubbing together at night in a spring storm with a heavy warm wind blowing all around. [break my heart, where, oh, where could this sentence come from but someone so utterly, completely fragile? -- vod]

Two years later, he sat there holding a strand of her hair, staring at it like a madman.

As I've noted (rather incoherently in previous posts) authors like Pynchon and DeLillo, et al. are dangerous because they discard narrative structure with self-congratulatory shifts in points of reference. They toy with the meaning of words and phrases, rendering them meaningless. It's an arrogant, masturbatory way to manipulate language; and it obscures rather than reveal. Brautigan does nothing if not reveal. If the language can't communicate, why is the author writing for publication and why, frankly, should we care? My favorite thought on this as a note on Brautigan's clarity and sense of language pulls from a discussion (written by someone way more eloquent than I could ever be on the topic) about Samuel Beckett and his response to what he felt was the "exhausted form" of the novel (in Beckett's case he was responding to Richardson & Joyce):

Beckett turned around and attempted to exhaust the form in its 'negative' image, as it were--the novel of incompetence. By incompetence Beckett does not mean novels written by incompetent authors. He means that, unlike Joyce, he cannot assume the possibility of communication among human beings, much less between human beings and the collective unconscious. For Beckett words don't work. They are an imposition, given us by others after our births; they really can't describe our own particular experiences in our own individual terms. Also, when we speak words, we need somebody else to hear and acknowledge them. A witness. In other words, we can't say us in our own terms for anybody's ears but our own. And if we were to try, say, by speaking out all the words of the Others once and for all, we would find that there's nothing to say, since Western civilization assumes that we are no more than what we were when we were born--a tabula rasa, a void, un neant, a nothing. And nothing can only be described by silence.

Silence, in contrast to wordy incoherence as mentioned above, however powerful, doesn't communicate enough either (but it doesn't communicate nothing). To bring this back around, what I wanted to come to is Brautigan's innate ability to paddle happily in between, always communicating. His humor, his frailty, his sense of the world around him. His ability to communicate through brevity without ever straining at being clever and always managing to keep his sense of humor. In Trout Fishing in America (another pause in sympathy for that underpaid EA) the two final chapters involve him first explaining to his reader that he's always wanted to "write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise" and finally ending the book with a one page chapter in the form of a note from his mother that ends with a P.S. and the word "mayonaise." ([sic] on purpose ... but I hope I didn't have to explain that.)

the great foes of reality

Recently got into a discussion about the importance of words. It was a really difficult debate for me, because, on the surface, I'd like to be the last person on earth to sit on the side of words being less important than other forms of communication and expression. But, perhaps my problem with the other side's argument "there is no form of expression more important than words," is that it renders everything that surrounds the words meaningless. Certainly the power of being able to express yourself verbally can't be denied, but the ability to do so doesn't simply rest on knowing the right words. I don't think the person was necessarily trying to simplify it to that extreme, but to some extent that was what they accomplished. My point was that words are meaningless without context that anything can be said, nice or not, but if there is no context and if there is no understanding, or if there is no wish to understand--even the most well-intentioned, well-considered words are rendered meaningless. Since words are a human creation, and humans are inherently imperfect, so, too are their words. And so too are people's use of them. And that's why they are simply one of a dozen tools that must be used for true expression.

Now, I'm not necessarily only referring to the spoken word here. The same kind of too-clever transposition of words on a page can (and does) have the same effect as listening to a language you don't speak. An author might write a beautifully turned phrase, or use a unique form of sentence structure, however, if not done with skill or understanding of the basic rules and form of language (and often if it is) the words become complete gibberish--even to those who are familiar with a variety of writing styles and those who open their thoughts to such thought play. Say, for example, someone who might want to read Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, but find themselves returning again and again to authors similar to John Cheever or Charles Bukowski--all four of those writers are phenomenal wordsmiths, with writing styles that run the gamut. For me, authors who write in prose style similar to Pynchon's are often, to my eye and mind, too oblique. I actually find what happens, instead of actually reading or becoming part of the story, is that I instead wind up getting distracted by the words themselves, and how they sit next to each other. I begin looking for what the author was trying to accomplish, rather than what he is trying to say. And when this happens, the only thing that I see is how hard he is working to find the right word, rather than telling me a story, or communicating (there have been quite a few more articulate articles about this type of thing). I don't know, I think I may need to consider all of this some more. It's a very complicated discussion.

related links:

World Wide Words
Choice of Words
WordSpy
___________________
"Words are Sweet Sounds for Objects Unreal" by Justin Simoni. Copyright © 2003-2004

liars and the lying lies they tell

Yeah, you may have heard, there's been a big brouhaha about a recent Oprah Book Club pick. Personally, the only side I'm buying into is that of editor Nan Talese, mediocre as her case may have been, it was the closest thing to sense the whole hour saw, which should tell you how I feel about the other two parties. The whole argument is rather myopic, even for the inbred world of publishing. And frankly, I've seen Oprah and her book club members take fiction by Wally Lamb just as seriously, so I found her whole injured party routine rather distasteful. And I refuse to subscribe to the comparisons they're making between this memoir and recent journalism fabrications, the two things shouldn't even be considered in the same breath. In the grand scheme of things ... does it really matter to anyone other than Winfrey and her need to save face? I vote no. But, rather than continue to further the whole exaggerated mess, here are some links, serious and otherwise that sum it all up rather nicely:

"Oprah Knows Good TV" - Chicago Tribune
"Don't Lie to Oprah, and that's the Truth" - Philadelphia Enquirer
Readers Letters - Salon
"Oprah Strikes Blow for Truthiness" - MSNBC.com

Also, see pic here for my thoughts on said commentary above ...