only an extemporaneous, half possession

It's March, 2007. A new year and a little over a year since I started up this little space. It's been quite a long while since I've had the time--and the time to think--to post here. So much has occurred in the past year, upon reading some of my previous entries again, it is almost as if none of it was me, even if all of it was intrinsically so. But now, back in the corner of my room, to this comfortable corner of my mind (that is mine and mine alone), I am answering the call of several moments that I've had recently ... it feels like it's time to return to the part of my brain that pulls from the various ... and so ... flame on ... indeed.
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"flame on" © 2007 duluoz cats

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.

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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.

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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.

it is the pen which dreams

"So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it."
--Harold Acton

I'm picky about my choice of writing paraphernalia, so when I saw an article on MobyLives linking to a report in The UK Telegraph, about the popularity of the classic (used throughout the centuries by artists and writers alike) Moleskine notebooks, I just had to make mention. Paper and ink, and the melding of the two, is just one of my favorite obsessions. I love new notebooks, I love the feel of a perfectly balanced pen. The correct paper and ink combination offer specific sensations. And for those of us so neurotically inclined, this can make or break a creative session. The ink must be black. The lined paper white collegiate ruled. The page must have a smooth heavy weight (though not too much cotton so as to make it soft and porous) because, the ink must not bleed. This may be accomplished in a few ways, however, the perfect duo includes the aforementioned little Italian notebooks, and the incomparable French-made S.T. Dupont Rollerball pens. Though, if their cost is too steep (and indeed their prices boggle the mind) Rotring makes a fine Rollerball, as does Sensa.

the way the sun defines the silent streets

There is a scene in Sophie's Choice (the movie) that takes place on the Brooklyn Bridge. It is a scene that does not appear in the novel. The three main characters (of the book and the movie) Stingo, Nathan, and Sophie are celebrating Stingo's writing. For the moment they are each free of the troubles that strike their minds. With Champagne in hand, Nathan, from above, hanging on to one of the bridge's massive cables, toasts:

"On this bridge, on which so many great Americans writers stood and reached out for words to give America its voice. Looking toward the land that gave them Whitman and from its Eastern edge dreamt his country's future and gave it words ... On this span of which Thomas Wolfe and Hart Crane wrote ... we welcome Stingo into that pantheon of the Gods ... whose words are all we know of immortality."

Dreamt his country's future and gave it words ... whose words are all we know of immortality. Is there a lovelier way to express the joy of passion and creativity? I hope not, it would be too much. And it is my thought here that these words flow easily when one stands high on that bridge's span, with the incomparable skyline (even in its 1950s form) as muse in the background.

Thoughts on writing and books are all a jumble these days. So I've been looking a little closer to home for how it is all done. As an outer borough resident, I admit to a certain amount of defensiveness about my hometown, about the often accused (but wrong) belief that the only creative minds live in Manhattan. I'm an unapologetic Queens native, I find myself both irritated and relieved (it will keep the "pretty people" away) by the let's-acknowledge-a-good-reason-that-Queens-shouldn't-yet-be-used-as-landfill-again pat-on-the-head articles the NY Times prints every couple of months. Because, let's face it, if you live in NYC and you don't live in Manhattan you might as well live in Staten Island or, g*d forbid, Jersey. And throughout the decades of cliched hopefuls in all media coming to this city in the hopes of "making it," the one thing in common they have is their emergence from whatever burg they've come from into Manhattan. Certainly they do not arrive in Queens. Not even Brooklyn. (Though they may find their success a long time in coming and wind up in one or the other in order to afford the rent ...)

Brooklyn. If you are able to at least afford there, you may maintain some credibility. Apparently. But, I have never understood the allure of the place. Brooklyn. It simply doesn't appeal. Except in fiction. Because at least it has some real weight from its depictions in novels. And while I ruffle at the Times' condescension, even I understand that Queens is has been immortalized by Gatsby as the "valley of ashes"--which, is Fitzgerald's description of Corona and Flushing Meadows Park, the town my family and I are from. So I wanted to take a look at what else one might find as far as offerings using the backdrop and imagery of Queens (we do not have many landmarks here that serve to inspire such quotes as above). And, while what I was able to uncover was somewhat slim, it is not a completely barren landscape. Here are a few:

Paradise Travel, Jorge Franco Ramos - A tale of Colombian immigrants arriving in New York and living in Jackson Heights.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Dito Montiel - A Memoir, though I include it anyway, as we should all know by now how uncertain they are ...

From Rockaway, Jill Eisenstadt - Not a favorite of mine, and I was quite hard on it in my High School paper book review of it, however, while its subject matter is rather trite (bored teenagers getting into trouble), it's backdrop is certainly unique (as is Rockaway as part of Queens).

And we even have a couple of publishing houses and our own Book Fair (and our own month for celebrating books, apparently, April. I missed it, as I imagine most of us did ...):

Q-Boro Books - Jamaica

The Spirit that Moves Us Press - Flushing, Morty Sklar, Editor (and wonderful poet)

And lest we forget, Queens gave you The Ramones and Kerouac lived here (right above what is now Kalish Drugs on Woodhaven Blvd.), too.

that makes life worth living for the ordinary

I don't know if I'll be able to respect myself in the morning after this post, but, so be it. It's spring and the trees are delicate green and I am finally able to walk outside without automatically cringing at the chilled air. I did not wear black today, and everyone made comment, but I did not feel self-conscious. I believe I may have entered an entirely other realm. Maybe because it was "Take your Child to Work Day" and I had friends' babies placed in my arms every five minutes (not something I usually find any comfort in ...) and spent my lunch hour being fed Cheerios by (how time flies) one-year-old X on the grass in Central Park. Maybe it was because I was able to just do my job (which is a joyful one) and not deal with the murk of office politics (we should have babies everyday).

Whatever it was about today, everything about it just made me happy. And to celebrate children, happiness, and budding trees, I thought I'd post a note today about a wonderful children's book Art & Poetry Series that Welcome Books published in the mid-nineties. And much like that mix of springtime and babies, the editors at Welcome took beautiful poems and songs and equally lovely artwork and matched them up just as naturally. I own, no surprise, Dance Me to the End of Love, which uses that most romantic, nay, giddy as Leonard Cohen gets, songs, and combines it with the ever bold, bright, and joyous (and sensual) images of Henri Matisse in that comfortingly familiar, for me anyway, slim page count and oversized trim. A tactile experience that automatically makes me feel five-years-old again.

The Art & Poetry Series has been out of print for a number of years, however, each of the books is set for re-release, and this time I will not miss snatching up a copy of the perhaps doubly romantic May I Feel Said He, the edition that takes that playful e e cummings poem and one of my favorite artists, Marc Chagall, with his misty-floaty imagery--and creates perhaps the only combination that is sexier, more lyrical, and giddier than the above.

Oh, I'm going to have a helluva hangover because of this tomorrow ...

words such as buzz or murmur that imitate

"Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact."
--Willa Cather
I wonder if any of us can remember when we learned to read. It's a memory I wish I held, but can't seem to bring it up in my mind fully.

Perhaps because it was more structured, I can remember learning the meaning of pieces of words--roots, prefixes, suffixes (Conjunction Junction on Saturday mornings, not withstanding)--and the power of the order of words. I remember learning how to curse. I do remember learning to write, I even remember learning how to write in "cursive style." In notebooks with rows of two solid lined pages with the dashed line in between. But I do not remember the moment I learned to read or to recognize words on a page. I wonder if anyone who learns to read at a young age can. I wonder if it is possible to remember what it was like before words had context or if that is something that disappears seconds after language is understood. All I know is, the moment letters put on a page came mean something to me is unknown.

I've been playing most of this evening with Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus (clicking on the images will enlarge them for a better view of the text). It's not new, I've known about it for a while, and have played with it now and again, but, today, for some reason, maybe because my brain has been more frazzled than usual, I found myself in front of its tentacled connections for hours, fascinated with the word play.

I've often enjoyed toying with language and words. But I am especially fascinated by the language of thought and perception, their interwoven nature, and their visual associations. How lists of ideas and events, and even physical sensations may be associated with images and words; or sounds and words, or words and other words (ditto/Dorito as a friend has placed in my mind recently). I wonder why there are times words form visual associations other than the letters they use to form themselves. And what happens inside an individual's brain that makes these associations, it's not necessarily simply how something is read or misread, or misheard. I believe there is more to the fragmented narrative of our brains.

What I love, today especially, about Visual Thesaurus is how successful it is at pretending to achieve the randomness of human associations (or perhaps that is because they are not random after all?). It does not simply list synonyms and antonyms, its programmers were much more clever than that. It takes words and offers phrases that are not casually referenced and go beyond a computer's usual linear connections, mimicking the chaos of a human brain. And you can click on the associations endlessly, each time finding a changing relationship, between words, with new words and phrases; they shift, meanings altered, contexts lost, refusing conclusion.

judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
- Voltaire

I haven't bought a copy of the Sunday New York Times in close to 10 years. It was one of those NYC pretentions that I actually allowed myself. I think I stopped because, despite having lived in a mostly Jewish neighborhood during those years, I couldn't find a place that made a good bagel to save my life. That, and the fact that Sunday Styles just annoys. I always liked to see what had made it to the cover of the NYT Book Review, however, at some point their dissection of Clinton and their quaint "pat on the head" views of those of us in outer boroughs came to be too much. And so, once again this rainy Sunday morning, not actually reading the Times, but of it, has me grinding my teeth. I steadied myself before reading Sara Nelson's most recent PW column, but to no avail. They are (or rather the editor is) planning on of my biggest pet peeves--the naming of the definitive. But, first a little primer.

Almost two years ago Sam Tanenhaus took over top editing spot for the Book Review section, probably one of the least-known well-known facts (knowing is simply another example of publishing's myopia. I'd reckon a guess that two people outside of the business would be able to name him, though why they should is lost on me). Tanenhaus who wrote, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is also a historian, and a former Vanity Fair editorial alum (a favorite mag, despite its celebrity adorations), among many other literary pursuits. He has managed to meet two of the three main concerns folks had at his appointment: 1. Pull the section to the right and 2. Ignore fiction. Number 3 was dumbing down the section, which hasn't really happened to the extreme that was anticipated (unless you are of the opinion that any continued attempt at defending the actions of the "person" in the White House is, by association, dumb. I'll leave readers of this post to take a wild guess as to where I stand on that). But, Tanenhaus is, generally perceived as, an intelligent man. A view still held despite his continued employment of (the much limned ... heh) Michiko Kakutani (and A.O. Scott, frankly). It seems he plays as conservative and safe as an editor as he does as a writer. I say that, because, despite publishing's tendency to believe the whole world cares about books as much as we do, I'd guess there were a limited number of us who would be able to cite his book about us, Literature Unbound: A Guide for the Common Reader. In it there is a quote, which had many of us mailing reader cards for Sunday subscriptions from L.A., that reads, "our greatest triumph is usually not doing, keeping things in balance, refraining from the act we can't redeem." Not doing, yes, I believe that is a good view of his work, and they are his own words. That book received a little more play upon his ascention to the post, and there was much discussion as to what it could tell those of us who cared about what to expect. Arrogant enough to have written the tome in his early twenties, the views are difficult to really take seriously, as is the case, with any certainties so soon in life (or at least they should be). In Unbound, he provides us "literature as game," a lot of reviews of Western authors (no surprise there considering his politics), accuses Joyce of "double-speak," highlights Ayn Rand (again, no surprise), and generally offers up the usual conservative wariness of difficult prose (and please, as I have lamented Pynchon and DeLillo myself, note the difference in the definitions of difficult [his view] vs. oblique [mine]).

So, back to Nelson's article, which was about the Times' most recent pandering publicity stunt, the fact that come May 22, Tanenhaus is going to announce "the finest work of fiction published in the United States since 1980." Why? Why would this question need asking? Why waste more time on a question without any possible answer other than to force debate and provide fodder for the letters column. Modestly, the decision is not to be his alone. He will even have those "difficult" writers helping out. I hope that come a month from now I can avert my eyes, though, I'm sure I am not so strong and despite my attempts to extricate, still all too human, there will be some rubber-necking on my part, for sure. A few posts ago I noted that there were over 4,000 novels published in 2004, another few thousand more, at least, since then. Add to that the 20+ years prior and anyone who has read more than a handful of books during that time will tell you to pick either their favorite or the best, is a nigh impossible and unwelcome challenge. For one who plays his hand close, I guess I should applaud Tannenhaus' attempt at taking a chance, however, I'd venture to say that the result will be more of what we feared of him to begin with.

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.

so it is the basic law of life

A friend recently sent this bit of text to me, and I had never encountered it before. As with all things mysterious about the brain and its functions, I was truly tickled by it:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,
it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a
wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the
frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The
rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed
it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn
mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
the wrod as a wlohe.

Ah, chaos. If only the mind could find a set of keys so easily in a disheveled room as it can read the above paragraph. I am struck by redundancy. I notice, when reading--for any reason, be it pleasure, a subway advertisement, or to edit--it is one of the first things I pick at. But, generally it appears to me on a less intricate level. Never so much to the letter, as it were. Having never been good at math, I find the fact that my brain is so good at structure--planning, dates, organization--odd. It seems to come from some unknown piece of myself, yet it is one of the first things people notice about me.

In any event, the trick to the above (though there really isn't one), is that a good reader is able to successfully comprehend the text as written because only the internal letters have been randomized. Essentially, there is a logic to the disorder (there is enough information for one who has some essential knowledge) the mind is able to reconstruct the information so that it makes sense; it can extract, deconstruct, and rebuild before you even realize it has done so.

And amid another twist of connections, this evening's conversation, that at some point turned to the events of September 11 (I may dare touch on the novels that have appeared recently about this date, but I am not certain I can do so without some personal regret for it), brought to mind the children's book Unbuilding by David Macaulay. Macaulay is a fascinating artist and author who is known for is intricate explorations of the mechanics of everyday things. Macaulay's work, though written for children, is extraordinarily complex. His line art is minute and exacting in its detail. He takes items, usually architectural in nature (though also the human form), and he explains their essential being. For him, the forms he examines must be deconstructed in order to be understood--order to chaos for comprehension. Unbuilding takes the Empire State Building and undoes it. Bolts and all; in specific sequence.

There is a spread in the book (and also on the cover) that is a view looking downtown from what appears to be about 40th Street. And the Twin Towers, in their linear certainty still stand. Later, in a similar spread, they are obscured by clouds, and the Empire State Building is half dissolved (and there is one last image of this at night). I remember having the random thought after the first tower fell that, it couldn't stay that way. They both had to fall. To have one and not the other, would have been some kind of cruel rearrangement.

To those of us
who don't always
appreciate things
until they're gone

[the dedication for Unbuilding, published 1980]

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.

all which isn't singing is mere talking

So I’m re-reading Run with the Hunted again, to prep my thoughts on C.B. It includes many of his poems as bridges in the narrative. And I’d forgotten how much I love his poetry. I say this, because generally speaking, I am not much in love with the form. Nor do I read short stories for that matter. I suppose I find them unsatisfying because it is so rare for one to convey all that I need from the characters. Not sure why I don’t enjoy poetry more than I do. There really are barely a handful of poets I can read at any length and they're pretty standard: e e cummings, W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and yeah, Bukowski (the post on him is coming around, yes, slowly ...).

I used to have a book of poems I had to buy for a college class. As I no longer have the book, and don't remember the class ... one of my writing courses, certainly, I'm afraid I can't offer the title. I doubt if I ever cracked the spine of it more than once. I was never that kind of student, I preferred to listen to the lectures and class dialogues, and study from my own notes and memory. Served me well. In any event, I know that I paged through this book at least once, because I remember coming across a section that dealt with the poetry of song lyrics. I don’t seek out lines of poetry the way I do song lyrics. I don't know if the words mean more to me because I can hear them to the music or not. I imagine that must have something to do with it.

The connection between poetry and music lyrics seems a pretty obvious one to make. I don't think there is anyone who would argue the poetry of certain songwriters. I suppose some might say songwriting is harder, in so far as the musical accompaniment required, but, I don't know that it is a significant enough difference. And from a strictly technical standpoint, they both require a knowledge words and how to twist and play and use them; they require rhythm and rhyme; and the understanding of metaphor extensively, etc. And then, from a historical perspective, there again they are intertwined: the minstrel, troubadour, court jester, what have you. The lyric poem, the poetic lyric, one in the same.

As far as favorite poet lyricists, I can name more than a handful of mine; Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Phil Ochs, Woodie Guthrie, Lou Reed, among others. And as much as I would love to sit a while and discuss each of these artists at length, it’s the first three that are dearest to me, and they were the three who had songs that were used as examples in the book (there is actually a course at the University of Alberta that uses all three together). Unfortunately, the editor’s choice of songs was pretty uninspired; "Suzanne," for Cohen, "Like a Rolling Stone," for Dylan, and "Born to Run," by Springsteen. I admit here, in print, that I loathe the song "Suzanne." Yes, loathe to hear it, the words on their own, however, don't bother me as much, a little trite, but they don't have me running for the fast forward button. As for the other two, they're more than fine tunes, but would not have been my first choice for examining the verse of either artist. I don't think they represent the strengths of any of them. Dylan and Springsteen, are easier to compare (despite their significant differences). They share a similar sensibility, in their ability to put words to the experience of the "common man," the rambling folksy-Americana--Woodie Guthrie, whom they also share as far as an important influence. Cohen's work has the structure of a writer and poet, with language that is more refined, formal, and referential. And many of his songs were poems first before they were put to a tune. Forced to choose, I would have placed these in that chapter instead:

Springsteen: Drive All Night
Dylan: It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Cohen: The Stranger Song (after much handwringing…)

["Bird on a Wire" art as T-Shirt from Meddlesome Kids]

of what is not present in the senses (part 2b)

I don't think one can sit down and say, "I want to write
a magnificent poem, and so I'm going to take LSD."
- Aldous Huxley
A little digging around and some interesting finds, including the Huxley quote above, which I like because it's the opposite of what Kerouac wanted from speed and expresses a different reasoning (or anticipated effect) behind experimenting with mind-altering substancees. Also came across some info on experimental work done by Oscar Janiger, a scientist who worked in the 1950s and 60s researching connections between LSD on creativity. The book LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process is about his work and was published in 2003. His studies are especially interesting because of the personalities who took part in his study--Janiger himself took part, admitting to having experimented over 10 times with LSD, which he described as having helped him see "many, many things were possible" (not especially helpful, but I suppose it gives him some sort of personal reference by which to judge other reactions.) In one trial, he used an artist, a scientist, and a writer--his belief was that a "prepared mind"--one inclined toward expansion and experimentation were the best subjects. This suits my needs as far as my personal exploration on the topic, but I wonder if it removes the science behind it by stacking the decks, as it were. In any event, his theory was that the writer--in this case, Anais Nin (though he worked with Huxley as well)--would be most able to describe the experience and whether their mind's world was in any way expanded by it. It appears he was correct in his theory, as apparently the artist was merely able to express "being expanded" by taking the drug, while Nin wrote of the experience:

The memory of the LSD experience is very clear and I wrote the whole thing out--a long, long, long reverie. And then I compared it to see whether the images brought on by LSD were similar to images and sensations and impressions I had already described. And I found them in my work--particularly in the first book I wrote, a prose poem, The House of Incest, which was made up of dreams. The material was so like what was brought on by LSD that it proved my point that this dream world is a world accessible to the poet, accessible to the artist. If we wouldn't belittle the artist and the poet so much, we wouldn't need drugs to reach these visions.

A fascinating slap at the world, those last two sentences, if a bit self-pitying (something no self-respecting artist is without a bit of ... heh). But, I especially like that for Nin, her aesthetic is consistent as far as her artistic output (whether it was good under either circumstance, well, that's subjective). She achieved, consciously through memory of her unconscious, and through drug-induced "expanded" consciousness, the same result. It's all just reaching in and being able to drag it out. Curious.