Finished!

Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. Boston: Back Bay, 1996.

2009-04-21T22:48:00.004-05:00

I Finished! this back in 2000, at the end of a scarily cold winter that I remember as only having snow on the ground the whole time. I had just graduated college and the newspaper at which I was freelancing couldn't find a full-time job for me. My car broke down three times. Or, well, it broke down once and then I took it in because it seemed the battery died. Then, a week later it broke down again, then another battery, and then, yes, a third time. Turns out the trunk light was staying on even when the trunk was shut. My grandfather came up with the idea to check it.

I was cold and unemployed and living with girls. I wrote things like this:

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU'RE UNEMPLOYED 2

When you go to sleep at 1:30 a.m. and set your alarm for 9:30 a.m. and make a mental note of that being exactly an 8-hour span of time as long as you fall asleep right as your head hits the pillow, you get a nice feeling of the fact that not only are you going to have a nice night's sleep, but you will also be getting up at a fairly early hour of the morning and will have a good head start of the things you have to do during the next day. This is good and you think so what if I don't have a job to wake up to and you smile under warm blankets.

When you wake up at 9:30 a.m.—after having woken up at 7:30, 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. due to the fact that sunlight just naturally wakes you up but still leaves you tired enough to fall (thankfully) back to sleep—you seemingly can't (but actually just won't) convince yourself that getting up at 9:30 a.m. is half as good an idea as it was when you thought of it last night, because really, you don't have a job to wake up to and what the hell do you have to do that can't wait?

When you wake up a half hour later to the sound of your radio, you quickly get up (actually up and out of bed because you moved your alarm clock across the room a week or so ago not just to make space on your makeshift bedside table created from your future roommate's box of who knows what and two plastic drawer things bought at some big Mart before you came to college (probably from money you got from your graduation party where you were too hopped up on cold drugs to remember much, except being really hopped up on cold drugs) but also to ensure that turning off your alarm clock or hitting the SNOOZE button would force you to get out of bed and start walking (albeit only a couple of steps) which in turn, in theory, would make you wide awake to start the day) and set it for another half hour later, because like really I mean that's all you need.

When you wake up another half hour later (it's 10:30 a.m. after all this foolishness) you think hey yeah I'll just lay (lie?) here in bed for a while, and you do, eyes closed, but music tuned to the oldies station (the good one that bothers to play people like The Turtles and The Four Seasons, not the stupid one which can't seem to get enough of K.C. and the Goddamn Sunshine Band) keeps you partially awake, and just when you think you're about to fall back asleep, quiet oldies notwithstanding, the song changes to "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog" or whatever the official title of the song is and now you're entire morning pattern of late sleep is ruined because really, who the hell can go back to sleep after leaping so violently out of bed to turn the radio off before the singer could even think about moving to the word "bullfrog"?

And now you're awake and you realize that, while you probably do have things that need done (ask Ma and editor and good-angel conscience if you need hints) you're really not going to do anything, and you stand in the middle of the living room and just look around blankly as if something will pop out at you and say "Over here!" and actually temporarily distract you from the ever-present fact that you don't have a job to wake up to and really, really, really could use one.

Boo hoo. I published this crap on my Web site: http://www.pitt.edu/~dcmst25, the second incarnation of what I don't like to call "my web presence." It's long gone, now. At any rate, DFW's big book was the perfect way to spend those many empty weeks. Something in the ease of the showy run-on language makes the vast, immense world it creates so immediate and accessible. My inclination to fall into books as a way of escape isn't what I'm proudest of, but I like it, selfishly, and this book is the best one to fall into.

So I'm reading it again, at last. I've Finished! my annotated bibliographies for my comprehensive exams, and so I'm able to read leisurely now without guilt. 1079 pages without a pencil in hand. Yes!

At any rate, I didn't want to close this blog with a negative post about some already-forgotten New Yorker story. So I'll let this book stay permanently at the top of all these bloviated entries. I've said before it's the best book you'll ever read. It is. I promise.

Thanks for everyone who's been reading this over the past few years. If you want another way to kill time at work, you can check out this site. Some people are so vain.

Watson, Brad. "Visitation." The New Yorker 6 Apr 2009. 62-69.

2009-04-08T20:01:00.004-05:00

Here's a sentence I'm never happy to see in a short story.

Loomis felt no affinity for any of them.

I like stories about loners, I guess. But can I brook stories about loners who've graduated high school? Loners with kids? What about straight, white loners named Loomis? It seems I can't. This week's New Yorker story is a pretty sad reversion to the oldest New Yorker story ever. Loomis's last name may as well have been Bascombe.

Loomis and his son just can't make it work, maybe, because he is, I guess, emotionally crippled and quote-unquote disillusioned with adulthood or something, and then at one point in the story this happens:

He recalled the days when his life with the boy's mother had seemed happy, and the boy had been small, and they would put him to bed in his room, where they had built shelves for his toy trains and stuffed animals and the books from which Loomis would read to him at bedtime. He remember the constant battle in his heart those days. How he was drawn into this construction of conventional happiness, how he felt that he loved this child more than he had ever loved anyone in his entire life, how all of this was possible, this life, how he might actually be able to do it. And yet whenever he had felt this he was also aware of the other, more deeply seated part of his nature that wanted to run away in fear. That believed it was not possible after all, that it could only end in catastrophe, that anything this sweet and heartbreaking must indeed one day collapse into shattered pieces. How he had struggled to free himself, one way or another, from what seemed a horrible limbo of anticipation. He had run away, in his fashion. And yet nothing had ever caused him to feel anything more like despair than what he felt just now, in this moment, looking at his beautiful child asleep on the motel bed in the light of the cheap lamp [. . .] (68)

Bullshit. Spare me. Watson can't even give this son a name he's such a contrived plot object.

I tend toward arrogance, but I'm not so arrogant as to think I'd ever do a better job of filling out this magazine's 48 fiction slots as D. Treisman has. And yet here's this terrible mistake. Can someone shed some light, here?

Zalewski, Daniel. “The Background Hum.” The New Yorker 23 Feb. 2009, 46-61.

2009-04-03T12:38:00.002-05:00

That down there was my 200th post, by the way. The one about sex and eating. The momentous one.

Still writing comps papers, meaning I'm not reading anything substantial. This article, though, from a back issue I hadn't really picked up when it came, gave me something I just put in the paper I just Finished! So I'm almost done. In two weeks I'll be reading again.

At any rate, it's an extremely thorough profile of Ian McEwan's life and work. Very well researched. very glitzy, too, ending as it does at McEwan's 60th birthday bash at the London Zoo, where Martin Amis and Zadie Smith make glitzy cameos. Here's the part I want to talk about:

Three years ago, McEwan culled the fiction library of his London town house, in Fitzroy Square. He and his younger son, Greg, handed out thirty novels in a nearby park. In an essay for the Guardian, McEwan reported that "every young woman we approached ... was eager and grateful to take a book," whereas the men "could not be persuaded. 'Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks, mate, but no.'" The researcher's conclusion: "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead." (46)

I've been looking a lot at 20th/21st-century claims on the death of the novel for this paper, and this is my favorite one. It's also, I think, the most authoritative. Men write about the death of the novel, and then proceed not really to buy a lot of novels, or, if they do, not to have any idea who it is that's buying their own novels. Women write novels and buy them and write more.

This, I'm pretty sure, has always been the case.

Hadley, Tessa. "She's the One." The New Yorker. 23 Mar 09. 62-69.

2009-03-30T15:17:00.004-05:00

Look, I'm sorry. All I have time to Finish! these days are magazine articles. The books I pick up I scan so as to sum up and explicate them in six or seven sentences. It's no way to read.

I'm going to put forth an extended metaphor that like all metaphors maybe is flawed. It ties in to ideas about traditional and nontraditional writing styles that've been running through my mind lately. It also ties into something James Wood writes about in How Fiction Works about realism and convention, specifically that the former has become the latter to such an extent that, oh, it's so incredibly dull. (No handy, easily quotable quotes are presenting themselves, so take my word for it.)

In short: realism is very rarely not dull and conventional.

So, then, my analogy:

realism : food :: experimentalism : sex

I mean, here, to line up two instincts I seem to have as writer with two instincts I share with all of humanity. I mean also to do this without becoming one of those irritating diaristic bloggers whose sex life becomes eighth-rate e-pulp for a handful of anonymous RSS subscribers.

It seems in my life that food is of greater necessity than sex, that I hunger for the former more often and more physically than I do the latter. Call me a prude or whatever. And so maybe in line with this it also seems that bad food—like really bad and depressing food—hurts more and feels worse than bad sex. There's a Shoebox Greeting here, to be sure, but it's rare that "bad sex", whatever it might be, is all that bad. It's still pretty nice. It's still a treat. Afterward I feel kinda okay. But bad food, and by this I mean the sort of thing that's unpalatably, spit-it-out bad (a green-olive omelet, maybe, or cottage cheese on banana bread), is just unbearable. It makes me want to run away from myself or from life or something.

Such is the case with fiction. Realism is very much the food I run to books for, and when it's bad—when every metaphor rings obvious and when characters get so predictably marshaled toward conflict with one another, when unsurprising detail is meant to carry far more weight than it ever really could—I hate books and I hate life and writing and everything. I want to spit it out. I get very depressed. Experimental writing—which I don't have the time to try to define, but I basically mean both language-driven fiction and fiction of the impossible, so maybe "nontraditional writing" is best—when bad (when language performs without ever revealing, when surrealism fails to save a banal situation) is still kind of a treat. Afterward I feel kinda okay because at least I've been given access to something if not new then at least un-ordinary.

But sometimes realism is great. Like: great. And it's like when you sit down to eat a meal, and you take a bite and you make that noise in your throat, the one that goes: "Oh, yeah. Fuck I forgot that it could ever be like this." And just like that meal can remind you of everything you ever loved about eating as a kid, really good realism (which is probably just realism written "freshly", to continue to destroy food metaphors) makes you remember every reason you started reading as a kid and every reason you continue to come back.

Nontraditional writing, too, when great, is mindblowingly, impossibly great. It's a different kind of greatness. It's not, okay, a lesser kind of greatness. It's, at the risk of being gross, like drainingly great. And it's greatness is new, relatively. It's adult and mysterious. There's no early-developmental analogue. Okay? Maybe?

I'm losing control of this metaphor. Please open the comments window to dispense your ridicule. But all this is something that came to mind after reading Tessa Hadley's story in the New Yorker, which suffers from a flat ending that's asked to carry too much weight (though is probably the only way she could have ended it), but which also includes such incredibly food-great passages as this one:

Hilda complained about the farmer whose land they were walking on. She said that she had contacted the R.S.P.C.A. because he didn't treat the foot rot in his sheep, and that he'd tried to stop her walking there, although it was a public right of way. It was true that quite a few of the sheep seemed to be hobbling on three legs, or half kneeling, their front legs bent at the joint. Ally worried that the farmer would come out to confront them. She didn't want to have to take sides. As she tramped beside Hilda on the way back, the day draining out of the sky seemed to empty her, too, leaving her weightless. When they arrived back at the cottage, they could still see each other clearly, but the light was at its moment of transition, and, as soon as they went inside, the night outside the windows appeared perfectly dark. In the cottage downstairs there was only one room, with a kitchen at one end and a sitting room at the other, a flagged floor and a wood fire smoldering in a wide stone hearth, one wall stripped back to the naked stone. Hilda put logs on the fire and switched on a couple of lamps. (66)

Why do I love this so much, this whole story minus the end? It's not the verisimilitude that we traditionally value in realism so much as the density of it all. No: the quickness. Again, like McPhee, I'm attracted these days to writing that moves faster than I do, writing I have to keep up with. Hadley's story begins at a writing center, the sort of place where unpublished writers pay to get instruction from published ones, and probably the thing I like the most about this story is that after the first page we never go back to this writing center. Bad realism would follow certain rules (picked up, perhaps, in a paid course at a writing center) and "keep the story focused" on its "unique setting" and the relationship between Ally and Hilda would get straitjacketed into predictable gestures and exchanges taking place in predictable, professional locations. It would be unreal, it would taste like shit, and we'd all run upstairs, to the dirty unspeakable books we keep under the bed.

McPhee, John. "Spin Right and Shoot Left." The New Yorker. 23 March 2009. 54-61.

2009-03-23T19:52:00.004-05:00

I like nonfiction for reasons similar to what I once heard Philip Lopate say about his genre: I read it to watch a mind at work. I don't think much about truth or reality distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. I'm not interested in memoir, usually, at least I'm not interested in memoir because it might be telling me a story that may actually have happened to someone in this world. I'm not interested in nonfiction telling me a story at all. I read fiction for stories. Nonfiction gives me ideas about things.

I've read a smattering of John McPhee in my day, almost always in nonfiction writing classes. Usually I find him longwinded. Impressive but dull. Smarter than anything I'll ever accomplish but encumbered by data.

So what happened to McPhee when he wrote this lacrosse piece? Remnick should always hand McPhee a 4,000-word limit. His prose here jumps and pops like an ants-pantsed Kerri Strug. There's this looseness throughout, the work of a man so in control of his subject—McPhee's some honorary faculty member/teammate for Princeton's lacrosse team—that he's able to drop little facts of the matter in the most curious of his paragraph's spots. One paragraph about the International Federation of Women's Lacrosse Associations suddenly, five sentences in, slips into a discussion about the Iroquois and the Indian National Lacrosse Foundation. It's either some factor of septuagenarian wisdom or New-Yorker-veteran flippancy. Another paragraph about FOGOs (Face Off, Get Off players) consists chiefly of a long quotation from some lacrosse trade mag, then ends this way:

In 1888, Princeton's face-off man was Edgar Allen Poe. His granduncle (ibid.) wrote "The Raven."

And who cares? Factoids are like Doritos for the research-high nonfiction writer. We grab and grab and grab at them hoping they'll sustain us. Because we've uncovered so much stuff and having spent so long to find it and write it down we damn well better find a way to make the reader appreciate it.

The only way to handle it is to throw it in and get the hell right out. Quit building scenes and just string facts together. You'd think I'd've learned all this from "Slouching Towards Bethlehem". You'd think I could trust the material on its own by now.

Marcus, Ben. "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It." Harper's. October 2005.

2009-03-19T09:43:00.003-05:00

We're back full circle with Tom Wolfe in this essay, in that the very thing Wolfe was decrying as "a literary game, words on a page being manipulated by an author" (49), Ben Marcus holds up as a purpose for writing: the pursuit of (and endless play with) new language shapes. (Indeed, reading Marcus back-to-back with Wolfe, it's clear that Wolfe's problem is that he sees the reality of post-Reagan America as far more linear and logical than do most other writers.) It's not just a matter of making language hard, of writing for the intelligentsia, it's a matter of seeking new opportunities or new methods by which language can represent reality.

The other key difference about Marcus's essay compared to the others we've looked at this week is that he's not coming to any new ideas about the direction his writing in specific or fiction writing in general should now go. He's not, like Wallace and Franzen, trying to figure out what (or why) to write. Like Wolfe, actually, Marcus knows what he wants to write, and he knows that what he wants to write has been disparaged, and so he’s writing a defense. "[W]hen a major, prize-winning novelist seeks frequent occasions to attack a diminishing and ever more powerless avant-garde and its readership, a response is in order," Marcus writes. The subtitle of this piece is, cleverly enough, "A Correction."

But before Franzen gets destroyed as the essay's title promises, Marcus has to describe what he means by "experimental writing"—a term, we'll see, that he's not a fan of. (Is anyone a fan of any term used to describe their writing? I don't know a single writer who willfully adopts the label "experimental" nor do I know anyone [except maybe me] who says he writes realism.)

He opens the essay with a lesson in physiology: the Wernicke's area is the locus of language comprehension in the brain, which was located all the way back in 1874. This is an important brain part for all writers, of course, but particularly so for writers like Marcus and those he's trying here to champion. If we think, Marcus suggests, of Wernicke's area as "the reader's muscle" (39), then we can come to a new understanding of books. They're things that work this muscle, or, in Marcus's words, books are "the fuel that allows this region of the brain to grow ever more capable" (40).

It's a very peculiar view of the practice (habit? hobby? desire? need?) of reading. The purpose of reading is to become a better reader (read: a smarter reader, read: a reader more quickly able to form logical connections between strings of language whose associative leaps are less prosaic). Marcus seems to read the way certain people lift dumbbells, where the lifting of the dumbbell isn't done in order to improve one's tennis swing, say, or achieve better control over one's bowling ball. The lifting of the dumbbell is done in order to be better at the lifting of a future, heavier dumbbell.

As a person who lifts dumbbells in order basically to pose more alluringly before a mirror, I can't fault the guy. Fine: reading is its own reward. This does away, as Franzen seeks to, with any demands that the novel "enrich" a person, or "comment" upon the world. These things, if they happen, happen by accident, or as a by-product of the reader's communion with language. One of the smartest things Marcus does in this essay is show that "experimental" and "realist" writing (isn't it the case that the real problem with those terms is how readily they demand ironic quote marks?) are not as at-odds as they traditionally get painted. Reality is every writer's domain.

No matter my interest in reality, in the way it feels to be alive, and the way language can be shaped into contours that surround and illuminate that feeling: because I don't write the conventional narrative language, and because I haven't often foregrounded the consciousness of characters in my fiction, and livestocked those characters in a recognizable setting, I will never be considered a realist. (41)

"Realism", Marcus convincingly argues, would operate as a better marker (a more accurate marker) were it an earned description, not a school in which one is given compulsory membership. In an ideal world, realism would be a term "conferred only on writing that actually builds unsentimentalized reality on the page, matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. It would be assigned no matter the stylistic or linguistic method, no matter the form" (42).

One thing his essay would benefit from would be some illustrations of writing that seems (or gets labeled as) "experimental" but which actually does a more accurate job of rendering reality than, say, Munro and Cheever and Updike have done. We get lists of endorsed writers whose work does this, but never a depiction of how they do it. But again, as Marcus writes, "This isn't a manifesto."

So, while language-driven writing has all (if not better) the capability of traditional writing to depict reality, there's this idea that for novels to be successful, they need to deliver their worlds in a familiar package. Here is where we start to get to Franzen, but first Marcus makes a pit stop at the 2004 National Book Award controversy. Do you remember it? Here were the finalists:

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Christine Schutt
Joan Silber
Lily Tuck (who won)
Kate Walbert

Never heard of them? This was the controversy: that books which sold very few copies and which hadn't become famous upon their publication were being offered a major award. "This," Marcus writes,

was a clear announcement that the value system for literature was tweaked to favor not people who actually read a lot of books but a borderline reader, highly coveted by the literary industry, who might read only one or two books in a year and who had damn sure better be recommended a prize-winning book that will flatter his intelligence and bring him warmly into the fold of the most audience-friendly writing. (41)

Here we have another Marcus-Franzen intersection: the myth of the general audience. One problem with publishing today seems to be that writers continue to write (or maybe that publishers continue to market) to this "borderline reader" who may or may not exist, rather than to the devoted subculture of the committed, compulsive reader who actually buys a lot of books.

Then he tears into Franzen, who, sure, needs to be exposed for the fame-seeker that he is (Marcus shows pretty clearly the ways Franzen's a writer "deeply antagonistic to writing. One senses him trying to lure his favorite writers away from language, plying them with the promises of other media, where no doubt they could achieve greater fame" [46]), but the weakness of this essay, for me, is the lengths to which Marcus goes to show, point-by-point, all the ways Franzen is wrong. It's weak not because I like Franzen. I agree probably with each one of Marcus's arguments surrounding Franzen's equation of literary achievement and fame. It's weak because all of Marcus's great ideas for what writing can be and do are put on hold for far too long.

Yes, there are wonderful moments. At his meanest (and sharpest) he sees in Franzen the unthinking totalitarianism of Bush II:

Franzen seems to have decided that if someone as smart as he is cannot enjoy [Gaddis’s] books, then all those who say they can must be lying. [. . .] [He] has also decided that his subjective experience must form a basic template for the reality of others. This is an unfortunate trait in a novelist: it is a failure of empathy, an inability to believe in varieties of artistic interest, and a refusal to accomodate beliefs other than his own. I recognize the personality type, and I did not vote for it. (48)

And there's also a nice analogy to the music world, in that Franzen "seems desperately frustrated by writers who don't actively court their audiences, who do not strive for his specific kind of clarity, and who take a little too much pleasure in language," which is "a little bit like Britney Spears complaining that the Silver Jews aren’t more melodic" (50).

It takes a while, but we finally get an explanation of just what's so great about language-driven writing.

While it might indeed be pleasurable to get what we knew we wanted [as we do in traditional realism], it is arguably sublime when a text creates in us desires we did not know we had, and then enlarges those desires without seeming desperate to please us. In fact, it's prose that actually doesn't worry about us, and I don't find that ungracious, because novel writing is not diplomacy. It's a hunger for something unknown, the belief that the world and its doings have yet to be fully explored. (48)

I like this, for the implication it makes that writing for oneself—or, actually, writing toward one's own interests and concerns—isn't masturbatory (or, as Marcus sardonically puts it, "dry-humping whatever glory hole [one] can find" [41]) but rather the age-old aim of the artist.

Franzen, Jonathan. "Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels". Harper's. April 96. 35-54.

2009-03-18T14:02:00.002-05:00

No one likes Jonathan Franzen. Surely, after his Oprah episode and the dreary irrelevant memoirs he published in the New Yorker several years ago he makes such dislike easy. But I like him. I do. I think he's smart and terribly good at running with an idea. I like him the way I like Jim Belushi, or friendly kittens to whom I'm allergic.

Franzen's essay was written six years after DFW's essay on TV and it's concerns are similar though directed less specifically at TV and more toward a mass- and multimedia culture of image. Whereas Wallace's problem was that TV is such a totalitarian force of ever-progenitive self-conscious irony that fiction writers are stuck writing in response/reaction to it, Franzen sees the problem as many others before and after him have: there aren't any interested readers left.

Well, it's not only this, it's also that novelists may have once been able to "tackle" the culture, but not longer. "The novelist," he writes, "has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?" (40).

In other words (and here's especially where he and DFW line up), how can a novelist comment on our chimerical mainstream culture without becoming either (1) a product of that same culture or (2) so outdated (DFW uses the term "outmoded") as for your comment to be irrelevant?

Franzen's eventual answer is to direct those energies elsewhere, and engage a subculture of born readers rather than the supraculture of American Society. This seems at first to be almost petty (or pitiful) in its lack of ambition. It's not going to stop, so just give up. But once this problem is stated Franzen then goes to show a few key things that help us see where he's getting to.

One, the social novel is an obsolete relic. (Is that redundant? Probably, sorry.) Here's where he diverges from Tom Wolfe, in that even if all U.S. writers were to suddenly heed every word Wolfe wrote in Harper's in 1989 and start hoofing it to the streets to do some hardcore Breslinian reportage, the novels they'd produce would all be inferior records of contemporary U.S. mores than anything seen on TV or in movies or read online. Newer faster media have superceded novels in the job of reporting what the world is like. (Franzen calls Wolfe's essay "the high-water mark of sublime incomprehension, chiefly owing to "his failure to explain why his ideal New Social Novelist should not be writing scripts for Hollywood" [42].)

Two, though writers like to think of a general audience, such an audience is a myth. This is the part of the essay that he quotes Shirley Heath a lot, who's shown that readers—i.e., people who sort of kind of have to read—are formed, not innately created, due to the presence of specific external forces acting upon them in childhood. I won't get into all of it here, but what this means for Franzen is that readers form a community or subculture and that, if one does one's research, this has kind of always been the case.

Three, because the social novel (and the kind of democratic nation of keen, conscious readers it dreams of) is obsolete and because the community of readers comprises such a relatively small but fiercely devoted number of people, the novel cannot seek to inform/expose/enlighten, it can only seek substantivity.

That's a lousy word, but it ties in with how Heath understands serious fiction, that it's "substantive," meaning that it "impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them." And what's cool about this idea of what constitutes literary fiction is how well it mirrors the act of creation of fiction on the writer's end. What else do we do as novelists but impinge circumstances on people's (well, characters') lives? Cutely, Heath argues that building characters (whether as a writer or reader) builds character.

And anyway, Franzen writes, the social novel's successes, whatever they may have been, were chiefly accidental, a function of time and technology, of the novel in the 19th and early 20th centuries having no real competitors. It's not a factor, as Wolfe tries to argue, of something inherent in the form of the novel. "Although the rise of identity-based fiction has coincided with the American novel's retreat from the mainstream," Franzen writes, stating as a plain fact what Wolfe points to as a troubling concern, "Shirley Heath's observations have reinforced my conviction that bringing 'meaningful news' is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental by-product" (48).

So why write? Or, when writing, write what? I keep quoting, but Franzen's saying it all better than my paraphrases could. "Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn't this enough? Isn't it a lot?" (49).

What I like about this quotation (and it may be my favorite from the essay; when I just reread it for the fourth or fifth time this morning I underlined it with the kind of recognition I do when singing along to like an R.E.M. song I once spent an early-Nineties evening listening to closely and repeatedly to learn the lyrics of) is how it seems to sit like Switzerland between the Germany of J. Franzen and the France of B. Marcus. If the one thing hunters and animal rights activists can agree on is that extinction is a very, very bad thing, the foremost importance of careful, honest sentences seems to be what Franzen and Marcus can share a beer over. It's the way we can as readers enjoy as I do both Franzen and Marcus, and I'm surprised it's the conclusion we've come to in this essay. I suppose the issue now becomes (between realists and nonrealists) what "authenticity" means in the quote above, and whether taking refuge is an adequate response on the part of the reader.

But what I'm taking away from this is the whole "meaningful news" as "accidental by-product" of the novel. Because lying therein is the possibility that novels can indeed do this. (Franzen's caveat, though, is that "[i]t's all too easy to jump from the knowledge that the novel can have agency to the conviction that it must have agency" [52].) Both The Corrections and Infinite Jest followed these essays about the difficulty of writing novels that mean or say anything, and yet look at how much they say or comment on. And yet these comments are always sublimated to characters. The Corrections is only a novel about a family that's all grown up. And by sticking to this, Franzen somehow found all manner of things to say about psychopharmacology, haute cuisine, post-SSR Baltic states, and Caribbean cruises.

All this out of tending to one's sentences. This, amid the driest spell of my writing life in the past few years, gives me some hope.

Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.

2009-03-17T14:11:00.003-05:00

I'm going to try to give a brief summary of the argument here and then a discussion on its problems in as brief a time as possible, for a couple reasons. One is that the essay is 60 pages and took two hours of close pencilling to get through. Another is that I have to run to the grocery store and get final ingredients for tonight's traditional Irish dinner. What's not helping? My tedious explanation of all this for you.

This essay has a thesis, and I know this because one of its subsections is titled "I Do Have a Thesis", and that thesis is that television has become (by 1990, when this was written) so masterfully good at embodying and depicting ironic self-consciousness, that there's no way fiction can exist today without taking television into some kind of account. And even more so: TV is so good at what it does, that any attempts on the part of fiction writers to change or alter the U.S. self as it's been formed by TV will be always rendered irrelevant.

The bulk of the essay is filled with DFW's careful delineation of the ways TV has grown increasingly self-aware and increasingly adept at dismissing any critiques of its vapidity by in fact celebrating vapidity not just in itself but in its millions of viewers. I can't go into this in full, so you'll have to just trust it's true. Trust it's true that because of TV, what is now the most authentic mode of human experience is the understanding (and rendering) of oneself as continually watchable. And that (this one's easier and more obvious) TV has coöpted rebellion in all but its most militaristic forms (although maybe a case could be made...), such that one lone viewer viewing alone in his room is shown ways to rebel from the crowd by buying products which, of course, are on TV solely because of their ability to be bought by millions of other lone viewers.

So here's the problem, for fiction writers, in DFW's words:

[H]ow to rebel against TV's aesthetic of rebellion, how to snap readers awake to the fact that our televisual culture has become a cynical, narcissistic, essentially empty phenomenon, when television regularly celebrates just these features in itself and its viewers? (69)

In short: apres TV, whither U.S. fiction?

One direction is what DFW calls "Image Fiction", which "uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions of 'real,' albeit pop-mediated, characters" (50). In other words, the early stories of DFW's Girl with Curious Hair, particularly "Little Expressionless Animals" (Sajak, Trebek), "My Television Appearance" (Letterman), and "Lyndon" (Baines Johnson). Though he never refers to any of these stories either directly or in-, lots of this essay reads, if you know yer DFW enough, like a kind of apologia for his 80s fiction, and a confused need to figure out where to go next. (In this way it's a lot like Franzen's later Harper's essay, in terms of the moment in a writer's career at which it appears; Infinite Jest is just on the horizon for DFW when he wrote this, and indeed there's a reference to Depend Adult Undergarments early in the essay, and enough going on with notions of television and addiction to render this essay a practical foreword to the novel.)

The problem with Image Fiction, as DFW sees it, is that it comes close to a respectable project of a new form of representation (whereas Realism, he argues, was/is all about connecting the reader to selves and nations and cultures he may never otherwise see—i.e., making the strange familiar—Image Fiction works after the samenessing of TV to recover a texture to our world and make the familiar strange) but inevitably Image Fiction fails because of the ironic, deadpan tone it takes in this strangification. Irony, it's clear, did a great job for the early metafictionists of exposing hypocrisies in the Father-Knows-Best culture of its time, but irony, it's also clear, is "singulary unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks" (67). Image Fiction, then, isn't so much subversive and critical as it is itself hyperinformed by television. It operates cynically but is in fact naïve.

It's Mark Leyner who bears the brunt of DFW's attack on Image Fiction, specifically his novel My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, which he describes in ways that'll seem familiar not only to anyone who's read the novel, but also to anyone who's read any experimental/lyric/nonrealist/hip/online fiction in the past ten years or so:

There’s [in the Leyner] a brashly irreverent rejection of "outmoded" concepts like integrated plot or enduring character. Instead there's a series of dazzingly creative parodic vignettes, designed to appeal to the 45 seconds of near-Zen concentration we call the TV attention span. In the absence of plot, unifying the vignettes are moods—antic anxiety, the overstimulated stasis of too many choices and no chooser’s manual, irreverent brashness toward televisual reality. (80)

This kind of stuff is, for DFW, "the ultimate union of U.S. television and fiction [. . .]—doomed to shallowness by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all ridicule."

And so we get (again?) to the problem. This kind of writing isn't at all revolutionary or even new, in that it's just doing what TV's been doing for years and years now. And then so one wants to find another solution, another direction for fiction now that postmodernism and post-postmodernism no longer work, but really any other approach to a more "authentic" form of fiction is going to itself be rendered irrelevant by TV. What do we do, go for integrated plot and enduring character? Sure, at the risk of coming across like a total fucking ninny.

DFW, I think, found another way. An obvious way, once you think about it. He ironized irony. (This is Marshall Boswell's idea.) Looking at the fiction that'll come after this essay, you have, time and again, characters and narrators exposing the hypocrisies of the ironic stance as being far more naïve than those standing so ironically would ever allow themselves to admit. Think of the hideous men in all those interviews: what makes them hideous isn't so much the ways they treat and think about women, their hideousness lies in the quickness with which they're ready to confess to all this. It's the common pose seen everywhere on TV: "Hey, I'm just keeping it real." If we can brandish self-consciousness before others expose its lack in us, all sins, no matter how mortal, can be magically forgiven.

The only unforgivable sin of course is not being in on the joke.

Jin, Ha. Waiting. New York: Pantheon, 1999.

2009-03-16T09:14:00.002-05:00

A love story set in and somewhat formed by China's Cultural Revolution. Lin Kong is a man who married an unattractive woman with old-fashioned bound feet through an arranged marriage, and leaves her (and his daughter) for a military-hospital post in the city. He's there 50 weeks a year and soon falls in love with Manna, a comrade at the hospital. Every year Lin tries to go back home and divorce his wife, but each time she changes her mind at the last minute, or her brother intervenes to plead her case.

The truth of the matter is that Lin is just as complicit in each failed divorce as his wife is. Maybe more so. As the book's title suggests, indecision and uncertainty is the reigning mood here. The writing throughout is crisp and plain, like in a folk tale—which, indeed, is often what it feels like one is reading with this book. The plot is fast-paced and economic, as we have about twenty years to get through in under 350 pages, and so suddenly in Part 2 Lin's cousin comes on the scene hoping to be set up with a potential wife, and Lin asks Manna if she'd rather not wait for him and try to marry this cousin. After she agrees to meet him, the chapter ends: "So Lin planned to introduce the two in June" (109). Next chapter opens with that introduction.

Something about this economy makes the novel's sudden dips into a close, close third-person point of view seem clunky and contrived. At the moment of Lin's greatest indecision, Jin creates this voice he can "speak to" in his head, and the back-and-forth thought dialogue seems to come right out of ENGL 252.

Still and all, it's a smartly told tale. The Cultural Revolution, with its laws and customs, hovers all around the margins of the book, coming to the fore only in certain moments like Lin and Manna's eventual wedding, where the couple wear matching uniforms and bow three times to a portrait of Mao, as though he were present to sanction this marriage—which in a way he was.

Wolfe, Tom. "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel."” Harper's. Nov 89, 45-56.

2009-03-13T15:42:00.004-05:00

Wolfe got a lot of flack, I think, from this article, which he wrote after publishing The Bonfire of the Vanities and while he was working on A Man in Full. It's in one sense a response to the critics of Bonfire who felt the novel was a sprawling messy hybrid of fictionalized reportage—Wolfe doing Wolfe while making characters up. And this article's thesis is, if I can try to sub it up briefly, that since World War II what is both heralded and also simply desired in American literature (well, let's just say the novel in specific) is a smaller kind of novel. It's not so much a novel of ideas as it is an overly performative novel. The novel as game, something geared more and more geared toward the gradually developing intelligentsia and less toward the middle class, where the novel once aimed itself. The "death" of the novel, such as it may be, Wolfe argues, is really just an overly fussy refining of a novel's inherent aims or abilities.

What Wolfe always wanted to write was the novel of New York in what he calls "the American century" (it’s keenly apparent reading this in 2009 that that century is very much over) a la the novels of London and Paris in their nineteenth centuries. That is, he wanted to be the American Balzac or Dickens. And he makes a good case about the value of such writing, in that these writers never really impressed or attracted the intelligentsia of their times, but rather sought popular readerships. Now the idea of seeking a popular readership is sort of just to hold a flag up saying "No thanks I actually don’t want to get good reviews to say nothing of the respect of my peers."

One'll find holes in the argument if one looks closely enough. One thing, for me, is that I'm not quite sure how to sort out the chicken-egg origins of all this. I mean: the novel is, now, without question, terribly irrelevant compared to its pre-television forefather. This is what Franzen's big Harper's essay is all about: why try to write a social novel that describes the world when practically every new medium that's come out in the 20th century does a far faster and more accurate job than the novel can? But Wolfe seems to argue that it's this narrowing of the novel's scope—this distrustful turn away from realism over the last fifty years or so—that has led the novel toward its current irrelevance. Not, as I'd assume to be the case, that the novel's inability to be socially relevant has then led writers to seek out new projects or goals for what the novel can do.

Having read this after Wood's book, I'm now fully on board with the notion that realism isn't just a school of writing but rather the central mechanism that makes narrative work, which is to say, that makes a reader look at words thrown together and see in them something of his own relative experience. Wood says realism isn't a genre but rather the thing that allows all other genres to exist. Here's how Wolfe puts it:

The introduction of realism in literature in the eighteenth century by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett was like the introduction of electricity into engineering. It was not just another device. The effect on the emotions of an everyday realism such as Richardson's was something that had never been conceived of before. It was realism that created the "absorbing" or "gripping" quality that is peculiar to the novel, the quality that makes the reader feel that he has been pulled not only into the setting of the story but also into the minds and central nervous system of the character. (50)

He follows this with an astoundingly tall claim: "No one was ever moved to tears by reading about the unhappy fates of heroes and heroines in Homer [. . .] or Shakespeare" (50). Really, Tom? No one ever in the hundreds of years since both those guys started writing?

If a move away from realism is the problem, the solution as Wolfe argues, is for more reportage. Novelists need to get out in the world and write about what they see. As a person who came to writing through journalism—and a person who worried for years about what on earth to write when he wrote fiction—the command ment is a sound one. Reportage, Wolfe says, gives a writer "something to say." Without it, all writers have is a facility with words. And I’ve complained enough in this venue about beautiful language with nothing behind it to belabor the point further.

At any rate, I'm rereading Marcus's anti-realist / -Franzen screed next week, as well as Franzen's take on this, and Wallace's "E Unibus Plurum" and probably even Zadie Smith’s recent take on the debate, all in preparation for my scholarly paper for the field list in my comprehensive exams, which is going to take a close look at all these recent writers writing on what's needed in contemporary fiction and figure out okay: what are the problems? What are the demands? What are the novels that have been written in the last 20 years or so that have in some way responded, either directly or in-, to these problems and demands?

Oh and I also have to blog about Ha Jin’s Waiting, which wasn't bad but also not so great, despite winning the 1999 National Book Award.

And upon rereading, one final confession: I yearn (mostly) for realism in the novels I read but am usually bored by its use in short stories. This isn't entirely true, but I think it might have something to do with why George Saunders has not yet written a novel.

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. New York: Penguin, 1998.

2009-03-12T08:18:00.005-05:00

A diasporic novel in line with Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and McCarthy's The Road. Which is to say, it follows people trying to escape turmoil, in this case Amabelle and other Haitian workers as they try to escape the Dominican Republic during the "Parsley massacre" of 1937—called such due to the shibboleth used by the Dominican soldiers to determine a person's heritage. (They'd hold up a sprig of parsley and ask, "What is this?" and if you answered in the Haitian Creole, you died.)

All this shit I had to Wikipedia, but it's there, in the book. Like, the book is a great historical account of the five days or so that the massacre lasted, and for this I have to give it a lot of credit. It's peculiar that Danticat selects such a narrow scope for his novel; Amabelle's our narrator, and so we see only her immediate world throughout the book, and thus any figures such as the Generalissimo or the Dominican army are shadowy figures relegated to the novel's margins. But then again, such is the experience of massacres/disasters from a victim's viewpoint. Danticat's novel isn't so much about the massacre itself as it is about the massacre's effect on people like Amabelle—people who for a time lived on two sides of a border, forced one day to choose one or the other.

The novel opens with the birth of twins (Amabelle works in the Dominican Republic as a midwife), and a car accident that has killed a Haitian cane worker. It still remains unclear what this accident is doing in the novel. The way it's presented, it seem like what's to come is a novel about two different communities clashing over this event. But once the massacre comes, decreed from on high, there's little time or interest in arguing over justice for the dead man's family. And nothing ever comes of it.

A struggle to get through. Very little going on on the sentence level. POV in straightforward delivery. I wouldn't recommend the book.

Akeley, Delia. Jungle Portraits. New York: MacMillan, 1930.

2009-03-09T16:16:00.003-05:00

Delia Akeley is renowned in her own right—she's the first woman to explore any number of African locales—but for the most part she's famous as the first wife of Carl Akeley, called by some the Father of Modern Taxidermy. This book was published four years after his death, and six years after he left her for a woman almost half his age. I, of course, had to read it for research, and by the end I was mostly skimming.

The hunting narrative, I've decided, is a dull, dull genre. There's a flatness to the hunting story that makes it proceed more like Freytag's line than Freytag's triangle:

Exposition: The hunter decides to venture out to find an animal.
Turning point: The hunter sees the animal.
Rising Action: Here the hunter takes his first shot, and strangely enough it doesn't matter whether he hits or not. Regardless, two things can happen here:

The animal runs off. This begins the chase.
The animal stays put, either hurt or merely stunned, and the hunter creeps closer.

Climax: The hunter hits with a critical shot and the animal goes down.
Denoument: The meat is discarded or eaten. The skin is stuffed, or not.

It's that rising action that's so dull. Because yes, nearly every single hunt is different, but it's merely a procedural difference. Not a dramatic one. Nothing ever changes. Nothing surprises. The animal is pursued and felled. The end.

Delia keeps hunting stories to a minimum here (especially compared to Carl), and instead tries to make her 1930s reader feel the wealth of exotica that Africa has to offer. Or at least had to offer Delia, on her several expensive safari trips she undertook with museum funds.

The book is a post-colonialist's nightmare (or dream, depending on what kind of paper she's hoping to write). Natives' skin is described, nearly always, as "dusky," and much fun is had over how quickly they are prone to laughter and dancing. It's all very weird because Delia is respectful throughout, and seems to admire the men she worked with on safari (particularly her cabin boy, Ali), and yet neither she nor her editor seemed to notice how belittling the tone is almost throughout. "A well-proportioned pygmy," reads one photo caption.

Oh well, earlier times I guess.

I always thought Delia was my favorite of the Akeley wives. Mary Jobe swept in very late in Carl's life, and after he dies her letters to the management of the American Museum of Natural History are just so cloying and gross, begging for an office or even just a desk for her to continue her busywork on keeping Akeley's legacy going. She also worked her ass off to get Delia's name removed from everything she could, as though she were Akeley's first real love.

But then Delia seems to selfish and paltry in this book. The chapter she chooses to end it with, after a lengthy and interesting account of her living for a time with a pygmy tribe, is one that tells of the night she bullied twenty porters into taking her through the jungle at night to find Carl's body, which had been recently trampled by an elephant. They don't want to go because nothing is darker than the African jungle in the middle of the night. She insults all of them and threatens them with her gun, and the lesson, I guess, of the chapter is thank god she found such courage. "The fact that his wounds were care for [by Delia] so promptly prevented infection," she writes, "and without doubt saved his life."

Bully for you, Mickie. (This was her nickname. From Carl's biographer: "Delia, a.k.a. Mickie for her bellicose ways, was forever getting into scrapes.") Your husband was, maybe, a dick for leaving you, but you brought back to New York a monkey you kept in a dress that tore up the furniture and made your lives hell. And yet you could never part with the thing. What was going on in that bellicose head?

Kalmansohn, David. Subscription Solicitation Letter. Men: The Monthly Magazine of Male Erotica. Homosexuopolis: Men Magazine, 2009

2009-02-26T10:57:00.004-06:00

If you're gay you can subscribe to magazines about being gay. One's called The Advocate and it's kinda like our Newsweek and another's called Out and its kinda like our Cosmo. Or maybe Cosmo's like our Cosmo. At any rate, there are dangers in doing this. One is that these are often very terrible magazines. Sometimes they are smart and good and informative, but not often. Another danger is that they will sell your addresses to other people, like, say, Men: The Monthly Magazine of Male Erotica.

The assumption, I guess, is that if you're gay you like pornography. I, of course, never touch the stuff, but that doesn't mean I get all offended when solicitations like this one come in through the mail:Dear Friend:

If you like MEN—and I mean nude, beautiful, erect men—you'll want to subscribe to MEN, the monthly magazine of male erotica.
What's unclear from the beginning is that the first all-caps MEN is in red text, whereas the second, i.e., the magazine's name, is in black. All other uses of MEN are in red and refer to the magazine itself
It's just that simple. Only MEN consistently delivers such incredible male photography and such stimulating erotic fiction issue after issue. It's the only magazine of its kind worth subscribing to.
Take that, Black Inches!CONSISTENTLY EROTIC MEN
Quality comes first at MEN. Since 1984, MEN has set the standard for what you want from a magazine of male erotica. That's why it continues to outsell all other titles—bar none!
I don't get this usage. "Bar none" is maybe used as a filler meaning "absolutely!" but it really means "without any exceptions" right? So "all other titles without any exceptions".... But I'm being ridiculously nitpicky, when I should be working harder on figuring out how to be more consistently erotic.
The quality starts with our uncompromising production standards. In MEN, you get all the hot detail and true-to-life skin tones our great photography deserves. But expensive printing is just the beginning.
Here I'm reminded of a Bill Callahan lyric: "Skin mags in the brambles / for the first part of my life / I thought women had orange skin." So it's a relief MEN is committed to their models' skin tones being true-to-life. For the first part of my life, I thought that men while erect had wasted, vacuous expressions.
But best of all is our taste in men. MEN's men are extraordinary, simply the best and widest selection of men to be found in a gay man's magazine anywhere. Proud glorious hunks—blond and black, smooth and hairy, cut and uncut. Men whose eyes stare out from the page and say, "I'm here for you."
Well, I suppose that's one way to read them.
Along with our great photos, MEN publishes erotic fiction calculated to take your imagination to a fever pitch. Because we know words have an erotic power all their own, we print fiction that's a cut above the rest: literate, arousing, and drawing from a wide variety of settings and plots.

You'll also relish MEN's expert video reviews focusing on videos with the hyper-masculine casts you enjoy most—along with lots of show-all photos. Plus, you'll find plenty of erotic illustrations, letters from readers like you, and a whole range of advertisements for adult products. Every issue will bring you many satisfying hours. We guarantee it!
I looked throughout the letter and in the fold out pictorial of previous MEN models, all consistently skin-toned and erect, and didn't find any actual guarantee. So, like, if I find an issue that brings me only one satisfied hour, or even many frustrating hours, I don't think I have any means of reparation.
What other adult entertainment fits in your briefcase or under your bed ready for a private encounter at a moment's notice? MEN is one magazine you'll save, issue after issue, to share with friends or enjoy alone.
What I love here is the endearing expansion MEN tries to enact on the ways gay porno mags get, um, used. Your briefcase! Moments' notices! Friends!How can you say no to such a temptation? Rush us your order today.
For the record, each issue of MEN costs $9.99. A 12-issue subscription is just twenty dollars. Oscar Wilde could resist anything but temptation, but I'm not Oscar Wilde.

Rohrer, Matthew. They All Seemed Asleep. Brooklyn, N.Y./Portland, Ore.: Octopus Books, 2008.

2009-02-24T09:49:00.003-06:00

I picked this up at AWP after selling a handful of copies to kind people. What happened was this: Mathias Svalina, one of the editors at Octopus Books, was talking to someone about Matthew Rohrer, and like I thought it was some other full-length book he'd published elsewhere (this one's a chapbook), and Mathias was all, "It's an action-adventure story about a homosexual uprising and some shadowy militant figure named The Cat." And I thought what a cool book that would be to read, but if it's a whole book of poems I don't know if I'd enjoy it. Not because I don't like poems but because I have really foolish simplistic needs when it comes to narrative, and sussing out a plot arc amid 50-60 poems would be maybe too taxing for me. Or if not taxing than at least I'd know throughout my process of reading the book that I'd be missing something, deliberately missing something, in the pursuit of something less central to the book's aims.

Well, it turns out Mathias wasn't talking about another book, but this one, and that this book isn't a collection of poems, but one long one. So I grabbed a copy and read it on the plane home and it's awesome. There's a great physical landscape of coasts and cities where the action is set, and though the book is written in loose verse the reader's engaged in exactly the same way she would be were it something Hollywood might option. It's kind of weird how this works. Here's a random sample, from page 3:

in torchlight, so I headed
up the street and joined the crowd
they cheered as a man was raised
awkward, impaled on a pole
which swayed as they tried to hold
it up, so his arms were flung
like a puppet's, and shadows
made his face seem to flicker
everyone around me cheered
and spilled their drinks I backed out

People talk a lot about fiction for poets. Ben Marcus is sort of all poets' favorite fiction writer, isn't he? And here I can argue we have poetry for novelists. It's not just the fact of its being narrative poetry. I think something that's also awesome in the act of reading Rohrer's book is the continuous tension between the poetic line and the prosaic sentence. This isn't a revolutionary idea. Like probably all poets play with this tension. But look above and check out how the lack of punctuation and capitalization isn't just "being experimental" but actually works to control (and sometimes especially disallow such control over) your reading pace.

I won't ruin the end for you, but that even a poetry book has a ruinable end is awesome, I think. Who, experts, are the other good poets for fiction writers? Who are the Marcus converses?

Go buy it.

Hollinghurst, Alan. The Spell. New York: Penguin, 1998.

2009-02-23T14:26:00.005-06:00

I haven't read anything in ages! And I've written even less. How my time's been spent is of no interest to you, surely. My stats on this blog have dropped to where even a sixty-eight-year-old retiree's assisted-living-center contract-bridge blog enjoys more hits than I do. Thank god for wayward Googlers. Welcome credo-seeking carnivores!

What I've been doing here is skimming through introductions of critical texts and traveling to Chicago and reading up on collecting and taking naps. I've been guilt-tripping my own self, thanks. And I've been reading this, which isn't even on my comps list. More guilt. I only wish it'd had been a better book.

I think I've spelled myself out here* as a pretty big Hollinghurst fan, and I am. His The Line of Beauty, which won the 2004 Booker, may be one of the best novels I've read, among those novels in the Forsterian/Jamesian tradition, if such a tradition can exist. You know what I'm talking about. Novels about the lives of interesting people just a shade more fascinating and a shade better looking than average, whose lives fall in the midst of some greater sociopolitical moment. &c &c. What's surprising is how that incredible novel came out of the writer who produced this small one.

It's not a bad book by any stretch. It tells the story of Alex, who is invited up (out? down? westward?) to Dorset by his ex-boyfriend Justin, to spend the weekend at his (Justin's) and his boyfriend, Robin's, cabin. While there he meets Robin's son Danny, who—because this is an early Hollinghurst novel and, thus, every man held within its chapters must be if not gay in full than at least game for some gay sex—is also gay and eventually falls for Alex. So you've got a nicely complex love quadrangle here, and what makes this novel work is that Hollinghurst moves among each man's close-third POV, so that as the novel progresses all four of them become more complicated and interesting.

But that's all they are is complicated and interesting. It's a perfectly competent novel, but I think just a little too small in scope for my tastes. And for Hollinghurst's; he's always better when he's got something larger to anchor his narrative to. In The Swimming Pool Library you can constantly read Hollinghurst trying to get a handle on Ronald Firbank, and in doing so he does a great job of connecting the newer, post-lib gay scene with the older pre-war closeted one. Line of Beauty would be nothing without the specter (and eventual manifestation) of Margaret Thatcher haunting its pages. Like take a look at this passage from that book:

[Thatcher] came in [to the house of one of the central characters, a conservative MP who's been courting her as a guest for the whole novel] at her gracious scuttle, with its hint of a long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power. She looked ahead, into the unknown house, and everything she saw was a confirmation. The high hall mirror welcomed her, and in it the faces of the welcomers, some of whom, grand though they were, had a look beyond pride, a kind of rapture, that was bold and shy at once. She seemed pleased by the attention, and countered it cheerfully and practically, like modern royalty. She gave no sign of noting the colour of the front door. (328)

Maybe the like majesty of it is lost in excerpting, but my grand point here is that if Hollinghurst were a major league batter I'd accuse him of discovering steroids between 1998 and whenever Line of Beauty was written. It's just on a whole other scale, and seeing as how that latest novel owes as much of itself to Henry James as it does M. Thatcher, I may imagine Hollinghurst's "juice" was the master himself.

Why don't I read more James? Other than the obvious?
===
* Minutes after writing this I can't figure out what I was thinking. Is this an idiom: to spell oneself out as something? Am I trying to pun of this book's title? Typographical error?

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: UC Press, 1990.*

2009-01-28T22:41:00.004-06:00

Of central importance to this now-canonical text in the field of queer theory is Sedgwick's recapitulation of the essentialist/constructivist argument (viz.: are gay people only and always gay people, from birth, like; or are they socially constructed given any number of social, cultural, psychological, and, yes, biological factors, and is therefore sexuality a fluid, unpinpointable thing in us all?) as one between two similar but different contradictory views of "homo/heterosexual definition." Namely, the minoritizing view, which sees such a divide as of chief importance to a "small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority" (1) and the universalizing view, which sees the divide as important for everyone, regardless of his or her position along said divide.

I, if you care to know, probably take a universalist view of things. The closet, I've known since right around the time I left it, is damaging to straight people as much as it is gay people. I think Sedgwick is with me on this one, considering that she positions this book as taking as a given that the entirety of Western culture cannot be fully understood without interrogating the contexts and structures behind this homo/heterosexual divide. In other words: that gay people have become different from straight people to the point that it becomes the foundation of some people's identity has all sorts of things to say about how texts central to the Western canon have been constructed.

Can you just like feel how steeped in theory jargon this book is, and how even after spending just 90 minutes reading the introduction my little blog post is, too, as a result? I'm trying, really, please, trust me on this.

She begins her text by laying out seven notions she takes to be axiomatic. One of these (Axiom 4) is that the nature v. nurture debate on sexual origins is faulty owing to "a very unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nurture and nature" (40). Also that any sort of solution or consensus in such a debate would have negative effects on gay people. Sedgwick sees the whole thing an unwinnable game. If we somehow prove it's nature (there's a gay gene, say), we deny a divorced man, for instance, the choice of gay self-indentification that can sometimes come very late in life. At least, we deny this without, what, DNA evidence? If, then, we can prove it's nurture, that people become gay, or more specifically establish themselves in a sociocultural position of sexual difference that makes them impelled to identify as gay, then this seems to suggest that people can become straight given enough work or time or, like, prayer. And outside of young women at any of the Seven Sisters, evidence seems to show this is very rare.

"The scope of institutions whose programmatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginably large," Sedgwick asserts. The state. The military. The law. The church. Mass culture. All work to encourage heterosexual coupling and proliferation, some more overtly than others. "So for gay and gay-loving people," she writes, kind of cutely (I sort of love gay-loving people, who of course love us like I imagine they love certain pets, celebrities, and forgone childhood toys), "every step of this constructivist nature/culture argument holds danger" (42).

(Don't worry, it's "also becoming increasingly problematical to assume that grounding an identity in biology of 'essential nature' is a stable way of insulating it from insulating it from societal interference" [43]. Hence Sedgwick's recapitulation. Convince all people that the voluntary or otherwise othering of gay people is an important subject of inquiry for everyone, gay and straight, and heteronormatizing/antihomophobic actions will seek to have their desired effect. I think.)

Sedgwick is married to man, did I mention?

And did you know Billy Budd and The Picture of Dorian Gray were published in the same year? You didn't? I didn't either. Turns out they weren't, even though Sedgwick claims them to be in Axiom 6. Wilde first published his book in 1891, which was the year Melville died. Yes, he was working on Billy Budd, among other things, up to his death, but the thing was left a little unfinished and wasn't published until 1924. Still, we'll allow her her little game of contemporaneity, because yoking the two together as she does is really neat. As she writes:

It tells the story of a young Englishman famous for an extreme beauty of face and figure that seems to betray his aristocratic origin [. . .]. If the gorgeous youth gives his name to the book and stamps his bodily image on it, the narrative is nonetheless more properly the story of a male triangle: a second, older man is tortured by a desire for the youth for which he can find no direct mode of expression, and a third man, emblem of suavity and the world, presides over the dispensation of discursive authority as the beautiful youth murders the tortured lover and is himself, in turn, by the novel's end ritually killed. (48)

There's a lot this suggests about canon formation, directly, and also about what must have been in the ether at the end of the nineteenth century. It's too simplistic, I think, to say Well Wilde and Melville were both big flaming 'mos and so of course they wrote about that shit. I think (and what I'm sure Sedgwick argues in her second chapter) there's more going on about the growing stickiness of male-male relations in the decades after homosexual (and, later, let's not forget, heterosexual) gets named, defined, and demarcated.

Malebranche, Jack. Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity: Reclaiming Masculinity. Baltimore: Scapegoat Publishing, 2006.

2009-01-26T17:34:00.002-06:00

Here's a curious thing. I Finished! this weeks ago, and haven't known how to begin talking about it, so I'll keep things quick (maybe). Jack Malebranche* (of, like, the Sparta Malebranches?) loves men and hates gays, or more specifically hates the gay identity. This is because he sees a direct correspondence between gayness and effeminacy. In short: he's a homo who doesn't like musicals. I mean, join the club.

There's so much to make fun of in this book, but the weird thing (and what's made me hold off on writing about it) is that there's a lot I agreed with and was glad to read. And its audience is no one who's read even the tiniest amount of gender theory; Malebranche's fans all tend to be gay men who grew up in strong, good-old-boy environments and who, one imagines, were hot for daddy without ever wanting to dish with sis.

Let me just skim over some places where this book is interesting and stupid.

We can start with Malebranche's preferred term: androphilia, meaning a love for men. So fussy, right? One imagines him out in a bar and getting hit on by some other guy (one surely larger and gruffer than he), and being asked "Are you gay?" and him saying "No, I'm an androphile." I mean it's such a pain in the ass. And the insinuation—that being gay is about loving a kind of faux femininity innate in us gays more than it is plain loving men—is not so much offensive as it is short-sighted. How's this book any less bigoted toward self-identified gay men than something published by, say, Focus on the Family?

One very smart assertion in the book is that "the Gay Rights Movement has turned to nitpicking" (33). Malebranche admits that in the middle part of the 20th century such a movement was vital to give homosexual people a sense of self and pride, and more importantly to bring about an end of public shame and often physical abuse. His argument that it's been a complete success is a bit specious—I don't think I'll get to a point in Lincoln, Neb., where I'm comfortable holding my boyfriend's hand on the street in broad daylight, which is less a factor of my wussiness and more a factor of past acts of assault I've read about in the paper—but he also adds that the Gay Rights Movement is far more interested in manufacturing homegrown terrors than looking at and calling attention to terrors wreaked on gay people abroad. I've been asked to fight the ban on gay marriage more times that I can count, but the only time I've been asked to think about the plight of people in countries more militant and scary than this one is probably through moveon.org or something. Never a specifically gay organization.

One chapter is titled: "'Man' – The Natural Religion of Men" and here might be a good place to point out that Malebranche is, reportedly, "an ordained Priest in the Church of Satan," which means he actually believes in the devil. The devil!

In many places in the book, Malebranche calls for little more than good old fashioned respect for others. He likes the idea that men have a universally agreed upon code of honor, that we're all deserving of other men's respect simply because we're all men, and we're, I guess, in this rough, female-dominated world together? It's silly, but the advice behind it all—aim for self-reliance, be respectful of others, strive toward some kind of public achievement—is hard to argue with.

And then lots and lots and lots of boneheaded advice. Adopt a Masculine Ideal. Surround Yourself with Men. Abandon Affected Gay Behaviors. Why can't everyone just be how they want to be? Under Alter Your Everyday Influences and Explore Male Culture, Malebranche claims that

[m]any gay men's music collections consist primarily of female vocalists, and I believe that over time this has a profound effect on their psychology. They literally have women's voices in their heads (italics in original).

Malebranche suggests the androphile-in-training "Balance out his collection by acquiring some male-oriented music" and "awaken [him]self to the voices of other men." Also: "Take up a male-oriented hobby."

Ha! I was going to do the work of coming up with some great zingers to try to answer what "male-oriented" music and hobbies might be, but I'm rushed and busy right now. A. Peterson, I'm looking in your direction.

===

*Probably goes without saying that this is a nom de plume.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: FSG, 2008.

2009-01-19T13:21:00.003-06:00

Let me try in text to set the tone of my voice for you, or to place myself in a hypothetical setting in which what I'm about to say will come to you with the appropriate affect. Let this blog be for a second a church basement somewhere and this entry specifically can then serve as a nightly AA meeting I'm attending for the first time, on my own, because while I don't know whether I should be here I also don't know whether I shouldn't. The moderator or leader or captain or whatever asks if anyone is at the blog entry for the first time, and I raise my hand and am invited to stand and speak, and so I do:

I write realist fiction.

Lots of times I'm able to hold onto this as a source of pride, in that I "believe in" realism and what it can accomplish—what it has accomplished for me as a lifelong reader. But lots of other times I understand it as a limitation. I do the best I can, and I can't write anything other that realism. Not with much confidence. When I step up to the plate, so to speak, it's a swing and miss. Given the chance, I'd have a young man wake up one morning and find he'd metamorphosed into a shoebox, or envision a future where Quebecois separatists wheel around on unicycles.

James Wood's book, then, was very good for me to read. Not that he has anything disparaging to say about nonrealist fiction—to the contrary, any fiction that does the work of creating life, in all its known and unknown manifestations, is what he's trying to uncover here—but he's very good at showing how difficult and how rewarding is the attempt of building a character and getting a reader to feel herself inside that character's consciousness.

Wood is smart to bury his chapters on language and dialogue in the middle of his book, because such are the things it's the easiest to get right. I've probably written about this before, but the easiest thing to do in a fiction workshop is go to work on what's been written with a toolbox of techniques. Writing prettily takes only a good ear, which might be the first writer-body-part that develops in full (consider Orwell's stages of self-development as a writer; after sheer ego, wanting to craft perfected prose was his most rudimentary desire).

But what do you do when all the techniques are in place in a story and the prose is crafted and the story is simply boring, or the characters pose and perform more than they live and breathe? Such stories seem to evince a lack of psychology, or maybe philosophy. There's a often palpable sense in great novels that their writers know not just characters but people, humans, so well that throughout our reading we're forced constantly to go "Ah" and "Oh" like we do when fireworks explode.

The best chapters in this regard might be "A Brief History of Consciousness", where Wood traces the Bible's complete refusal of its readers' engagement in characters' minds, through Shakespeare's clunky soliloquies, to the novel (Flaubert, mostly) where we get full accounts of the way people think; and "Sympathy and Complexity", where he tries to uncover the ways authors get us to extend our sympathies to people who don't even exist, and how this practice enables us to do the same to those who do. And then this final paragraph, which I'll quote in full:

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind—lifeness—is the origin. It teaches everyone else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. It is nothing like as naive as its opponents charge; almost all the great twentieth-century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice. All the greatest realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists. But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn in mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional. (italics mine)

We've all read realist fiction that is dead on every page, and then we extend this deadness to the genre as a whole. The hard part, Wood says, is to accomplish all that realism can in a way that seems fresh and new, and it's such a hard task that it's very tempting to toss realism out altogether, and allow surrealism or lyricism to stand in for novels' pursuit of novelty.

Or maybe everyone just writes what he can. If anything, read this book for the great skewering he gives Updike. This plus James Wolcott's recent skewering in Vanity Fair gives me high hopes for Updike's complete absence from the canon by the time I'm his age.

Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah (1922). Trans. John Sturrock. New York: Viking, 2004.*

2009-01-16T13:17:00.002-06:00

I'd really like to read Proust one day. Like, more than the introductions/synopses to his books.

Proust signals right in the title that this, its fourth volume, is where the theme of homosexuality will come to the fore of his epic In Search of Lost Time. The book opens with Proust's stand-in, Marcel, spying on the sexual tryst between the haughty Baron de Charlus and Jupien, the waistcoat maker. Noteworthy is the impassioned remove that Marcel maintains throughout the scene. If he's shocked, it's more in the line of a curious discovery. Indeed, he reads the encounter as thoroughly and studiously as he would a dinner party.

Keeping with his two-tiered approach to capturing life in Combray—taking both the Guermantes Way, signifying the aristocracy, as well as the more pedestrian (mind the pun) Swann's Way—Proust seems to set his homosexual relationship right up alongside class/power dynamics. Jupien is far below the Baron de Charlus in status and such is the bulk of what attracts him to the former.

Sodom and Gomorrah is also notable in that it signals the introduction of Albertine, who will become Marcel's central love interest. It's well understood that Albertine is a female stand-in for Proust's real-life lover, Alfred Agostinelli. Alfred served as Proust's chauffer—which gives us some understanding of Proust's reading homosexual relationships in terms of class struggle.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988.

2009-01-14T18:02:00.004-06:00

Spoiler alert, I guess.

How did Sethe's baby die? As soon as the novel opens we know she and her daughter Denver are haunted by a ghost and that this ghost is the disturbed though not unkind spirit of Sethe's first daughter, who died when she was still a baby. Morrison uses a wandering third-person narrator—not quite omniscient, but freely moving among her characters—throughout the novel and yet it takes about halfway for this central mystery to get solved. And when it does, Morrison gives it an elusive treatment. We are placed in the point of view of the four horsemen (points to her for not lingering too heavily on this mordant, prophetic symbol, in a scene that is maybe the novel's second most apocalyptic) that have come to round Sethe and her children up to return them to the plantation they've escaped.

We don't know any of these men, and so we cannot feel relaxed in their viewpoints. We're learning them at the moment we read the scene, while they themselves are trying to figure out what it is they're seeing. They don't know the characters' names like we do, they have no idea who these people are, and so all the action and detail—Sethe shut up in a shed slitting one daughter's throat and trying to crack another's skull open on a wall—seems displaced. That is, because of this withdrawn POV Morrison dips into for one chapter, we have to work so hard to piece together what is going on, which in turns makes us both removed from the scene and also weirdly voyeuristic with it.

It's such incredible control over such incredible violence. A lesser writer would have kept us in Sethe's POV, or gone as omniscient as the constructs of the narrative would allow. Morrison's choice is right on. We're complicit, somehow, in both the violence of the scene and the self-interests of the slaveowners.

Erdrich, Louise. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2001.*

2009-01-05T22:50:00.002-06:00

Set chiefly just before the First World War on a Native American reservation in North Dakota, Erdrich's National-Book-Award-Nominated novel is remarkable in the somewhat twinned nature of her protagonist, Agnes Dewitt, who leaves a convent as a young woman and flees to to north, where she meets Father Damien Modeste, who has been assigned to the reservation. After the Father dies, Agnes cuts her hair and binds her breasts and takes his clothes and heads to the reservation to do the work that he was meant to do. Erdrich handles this transformation by keeping both "characters" on the page. That is, Father Damien Modeste is the public persona that the people of the reservation know and speak to and care about, and Agnes Dewitt remains the private person who is stuck with her own memories and thoughts.

This duplicity Agnes calls "the most sincere lie she could tell" (61), and the line between truth and lies is at the center of this novel, especially once Father Jude arrives, sent by the Vatican to confirm the possible sainthood of Sister Leopolda. A sainthood that only Father Damien, still alive after 100 years, can validate.

You can see by the asterisk above that I didn't really Finish! this one. I got pretty far into it. Page 200 of 360. But there are so many books to read, and I'm really anxious to get these books on my comps list (and, as I've been thinking about it, this blog) over with. It's a good book. I mean, it was nominated for the National Book Award and all. I think my problem with it is that (a) it's an historical novel, which probably isn't actually a problem in its own right (I'm reading Beloved right now and having no trouble with it), but it's an historical novel set in the West, and for whatever reasons I can't engage in stories that take place west of the Mississippi before, oh, 1950 (I don't for instance have much interest in reading The Grapes of Wrath despite everything I've heard about how good it is); and (b) it has too many characters.

I know I just wrote about how Munro is better when she throws a lot of characters together, but from what I've read online to put together the above it seems that Erdrich is carrying over a lot of characters from previous works of fiction, and this makes a lot of sense now. I guess my first warning that the drama in this book would be generational was the two-page family tree printed just after the title page. The only other time I can remember seeing a family tree in a book was when I devoured Madeline L'Engle.

If I were 12 again, if I had nothing but time to submit myself to the entirety of a big novel's big created world....

Munro, Alice. "Some Women". The New Yorker. 22 & 29 Dec 2008. 69-77.

2009-01-02T20:29:00.006-06:00

I like everything Alice Munro writes, pretty much. I know what this reveals about me. I mean, I'm "one of those" writers. Like, in the AWP Chronicle there was this article titled "How to Write a Story Like Alice Munro" or some such, and, while on every level I found the idea behind such an article odious and disgusting and so terribly depressing it still makes me want to slit my wrists all over the millions of photocopied workshop-story pages written by all us faceless creative-writing graduate students around the country hoping one day our dull stories about nothing will be as sought after by the New Yorker as Munro's great ones about nothing are, I devoured the article happily, even if I didn't necessarily learn anything by it.

But the last one in the New Yorker? or maybe Harper's? the one about the woman who sits alone in her kitchen and then some maniac stops by to try to kill her? the Flannery O'Connor one? I didn't like that one. I think the reason is that Alice Munro + two characters = a waste of her talents. She's always so good at four or even five characters. "Some Women" is about this time in the life of the narrator when she had a job taking care of a man dying of leukemia, back in the first half of the 20th century. Taking away the mother of the narrator (who only butts in to counter certain attitudes and desires of her daughter's), there are five characters in this story, and right when you think you have the antagonist pinned down (the invalid's mother) Munro introduces another character to take her place (the invalid's wife) and yet once you think now you've got a grip on the story there's a new character, the invalid's stepmother's masseuse of all people, who enters the story and maybe works as an antagonist, but more correctly just complicates things to the point where no one's an antagonist, or everyone is.

Every step, as always, she takes is a surprise. And that's why I like Alice Munro. Her stories are so happily inscrutable. But you know who hates Alice Munro? Like, not the kind woman living in Canada but the writer showing up in magazine pages far more often than he does? Ben Marcus. And I like Ben Marcus. Or, at least, I like what I've read of his (chiefly Notable American Women, which was incredible), but when it comes to criticizing Alice Munro's disinterest in pushing the boundaries of language, and how depressing it is that readers flock to her and her stories and not to Marcus's or, like, Gary Lutz's or somebody, Marcus can suck on it.

Because Munro's paying as close attention to language as he is. To gloss over the following sentences and not recognize a love for and mastery over language as compelling and valid as Marcus's is to be as poor and limited a reader as our departing president:

"None of us mattered to her—not me, or her critics, or her defenders. We were no more than bugs on a lampshade" (70).

Don't be all, "Dude, Marcus is looking for more than an apt simile," because I read his Harper's article, too. Here are sentences jut as full as the kind of word-rubbing going on in the sentences Lutz argues for in that Believer reprint everyone's blogging about this week. Maybe Munro doesn't have to crowbar a noun into some verb's syntactic spot (though undoubtedly she can and has), but her sentences demand our writerly, nerdly attentions and earn them.

I wonder why she doesn't write novels.

Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. New York: Anchor, 2006.

2008-12-31T10:58:00.004-06:00

All I knew of Jane Smiley was that she wrote Moo, and that Moo was a fictionalized account of her teaching in a midwestern creative writing program (I think). I never knew which one until now, after I just highlighted her name up there and used Mozilla's clever little Ubiquity app to Wikipedia her in a new browser tab.

It was Iowa State.

At any rate, I thought this book would be light and breezy, probably because of ill-informed notions I had of Smiley as a writer (I guess I placed her near Anne Tyler in some kind of continuum), and because of the folksy title. The conceit behind the book is that shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, Smiley found herself not just stuck/bored with the novel she'd been writing, but also unsure about the importance of The Novel in general. So she set the book aside and read 100 novels over the next three years. The notes she took on these novels (ranging from The Tale of Genji [1004] to Jennifer Egan's Look at Me [2001]) form the basis for her discovery on what the novel is and can do and should do.

Some of this stuff is arbitrary and valuable only in Smiley's need to construct some new apparatus to set her book aside from the dozens of others like it. For her it's the Circle of the Novel, which is a kind of clock face with some form of discourse at each of its numbers. Going around clockwise it's this:

Travel narrative
History
Biography
Tale
Joke
Gossip
Diary/Letter
Confession
Polemic
Essay
Epic
Romance

So you can put any novel ever written at the center of the clock and start drawing lines to the forms included therein. Smiley's able to show that novels we kind of communally agree to be "great" have lines going off in all directions. Like at least seven of them. But then again, such novels tend to be certain kinds of novels (i.e., 19th century ones; one of the smartest things Smiley says in this book is that Middlemarch isn't necessarily the best novel ever written, as many people like to contest, but that it's merely "the most novelish of novels" [182]). And to, like, plan a fresh, unwritten novel by trying to figure out the best 1-12 combination would be a bad enough idea that I don't think I have to talk about why, do I?

So, it's neat. Lots of the book is Aristotelianly neat in how much sorting and ordering into types gets done. Also, the whole second half contains extended summaries/analyses of the 100 novels she read,* which is handy for any level of English student.

My favorite bit is when she gives a clear precis to Forster's comparison between James and Proust. The former, Forster argues, works too hard to make his readers aware of his novels' perfected structures, due in part to James's interest in elevating the novel as art, which is inherently self-conscious. "I am an object to be appraised," James's novels say to us. Whereas Proust, well I'll just quote it:

Forster proposes that the novelist in search of artfulness substitute the model of music for the model of painting, and that he attempt to attain a kind of internal pattern analogous to rhythm. He uses In Search of Lost Time as his example. [. . .] The huge French novel is not asked to limit itself and fix itself inside a structure, "and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally" (p. 165). (142)

Zadie Smith talks a lot about the "scaffolding" her first three novels have needed, and I guess she means that she's needed to follow an external form (be it Forster himself, or Kabbalah) in order to put her stories together. This idea reminds me of what I learned from Christine Schutt last summer, that stories can grow (and should grow) from the writer's commitment to his sentences. Don't "raise the stakes" or "add to the conflict" as a way to move toward resolution, simply keep being careful with your sentences, connect them and juxtapose them, and when you get to the end you'll have by default a cohesive story.

Turns out you can do this with a novel, too. I'll have to try it in six years or so, because the novel I'll write, oh, someday, already has an external structure to follow: the 18 holes of a golf game.

===

* Here are the books she read that I've read, just to give you (well, me) an idea:

20. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
23. Stendhal, The Red and the Black
28. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
33. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
41. George Eliot, Middlemarch
43. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
44. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
46. Kate Chopin, The Awakening
47. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
48. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
51. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
56. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
57. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
[60. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (I read book one, not the whole thing, but I'll include it here because I can't believe Smiley read the whole thing either.) UPDATE: Sorry, Ms. Smiley, I sit corrected.]
63. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
68. P.G. Wodehouse [I read one, but none of the four Smiley read, but aren't they all the same?]
72. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
75. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
91. Nicholson Baker, Vox [didn't finish! it]
98. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
100. Ian McEwan, Atonement

So, 22. God, I kicked your ass on that one.

One Word Reviews of Every Book I Finished! in 2008, An Ordered List in Order of the Order I Finished! Them In

2008-12-29T18:10:00.007-06:00

O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood = Cruel.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby = Fast.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita = Hilarious.
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice = Tragic.
Firbank, Ronald. Valmouth = Empurpled.
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's = Faggy.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22 = Klein-bottled. [Hyphens don't count.]
Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo = Wikipedic.
Cooper, Dennis. Closer = Mannered.
Peterson, Adam. My Untimely Death = Roo-roo'd.
Delany, Samuel R. Hogg = Unwise.
Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces = Swindler.
Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy = Forgettable.
Foucault, Michel. A History of Sexuality: An Introduction = Fundamental.
Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End = Masterly.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting = Old-timey.
McNally, Terrence. Corpus Christi = Light.
Wilsey, Sean. Oh the Glory of It All = Lyric.
Frazier, Ian. Great Plains = Unblogged.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire = Best.
Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames = Denouement.
Colbert, Stephen. I Am America (And So Can You!) (abridged) = Audiobook!
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (abridged) = Phony.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory = Windy.
Schutt, Christine. All Souls = Balm.
Schutt, Christine. Nightwork = Instructive.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children = Dull.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise = Ridiculous.
Harrison, Colin. Mrs. Corbett's Request = Spotty.
Tóibín, Colm. Love in a Dark Time = Obligatory.
Gide, André. The Counterfeiters = French.
Monette, Paul. Afterlife = Poor.
Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman = Feline.
Self, Will. Dorian: An Imitation = Polarian.
Mishima, Yukio. Forbidden Colors = Sexy?
Roth, Philip. Indignation = Overpriced.
Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater = Cheap.
Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods = Shelveable.
Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina = Rednecked.
Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley = Midcentury.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home = Smart.
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin = More.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie = Elementary.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club = Misguided.
Call, Ryan. Pocket Finger = Tragic.
Kramer, Larry. Faggots = Megaphone.
Saunders, George. The Braindead Megaphone = Dumb-covered.
Simpson, Mark, ed. Anti-Gay = Intrigue.
Rowling, J.K. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. = Christmas.
Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel = Unfinished!

Rowling, J.K. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. New York: Scholastic, 2008.

2008-12-27T13:19:00.002-06:00

Oh, I read this, too. My sister gave it to her boyfriend for Christmas. It took me an hour, and I was keeping up with The Family Man playing on the television the whole time, so I could have finished sooner. Then dinner was on, and I missed how it ended. How did it end, can you remember? Nic Cage "goes back" to his flashy life, but surely he gets with Téa Leoni at the end, right? Does he have his, like, designer briefs and eat them, too?

This book contains the following word: simulacrum. I learned this word, oh, four years ago, only after poring over Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation for what was assuredly a failed paper on the use of same in Saunders's short fiction. I was twenty-six at the time. That kids who got this book for Christmas (or my sister's thirtysomething boyfriend, somewhat of a kid himself) will be learning such a word at such a young age is kind of cool.

I wonder how, in their silent reading minds, they'll pronounce this word. I read Catcher in the Rye at age 12, a hand-me-down from my H.S.-senior sister (the other sister), and when I got to the word sonuvabitch I pronounced it /sawn-YOO-vuh-bitch/. I went to my sister (the same other one, the older one) and asked her, "What's a sonuvabitch?" And I had to go grab the book and show her the word before she knew what I was asking her and was able to laugh, fully, in my face.

Simpson, Mark, ed. Anti-Gay. London: Freedom Editions, 1996.

2008-12-25T22:24:00.005-06:00

Well, see below. There were more crappy and useless essays (the more personal/memoiristic tended to be the more worthless), but there was lots of stuff that was smart and that I liked. I should for the purposes of my comprehensive exams' annotated bibliographies go over this stuff in learned paragraph form, but I'll go unordered list on you jokers:

John Weir's argument that identity politics are useless after AIDS, seeing as how they've killed off empathy. To assert "I am gay" is not just to assert alongside it that "You, het, are not," but also, "You can't ever know what it's like." Identity politics refuses earnest attempts at empathy, and, as a (hopeful, one-day) novelist, this seems like poison.
Weir's other argument that it's easy for white men to own and champion gay identity, and then to demand the same from other homosexuals, because before coming out their identities were pretty nonexistent. I mean, what white man identifies as a white man? But this choice? It's not so easy for, like, gay black men or lesbian Asian-Americans. Which identity trumps the other?
Weir's other argument (I gotta find more from this guy) that gay criticism of the military (for the latter's discriminatory policies) is the privilege of a mostly urban, bourgeois gay culture which
overlook[s] the fact that enlisting in the armed forces is often the most viable economic alternative for working-class young men. If you're seventeen-years-old [sic] and you don't like musical comedy, and you don't want to move to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, and you don't have enough money for college; and if you know that you like sweaty, male environments; and if you want to get the hell out of your small town, why not the Marines? (33-34)
From what I've read (in private) online, it's not so inhospitable an environment for us.
Paul Burston's really, really smart criticism of gay film critics (and gay moviegoers) who seek always to see themselves reflected on the screen, and who get angry when gay characters aren't depicted "truly" by the filmmakers, because what on earth is a "true" homosexual? And also, the desire for cinematic self-identification is stupid. "In an adolescent," Burston writes, "this fixation would be entirely understandable; in an adult, it begins to beg a few questions" (85). In other words, a gay film theory that seeks out only known, familiar, gay characters is an immature theory. We need more.
Burston's extension of this to gay criticism in general, and how shitty it is. Two quotes and then I'm done: "Despite a growing trend towards 'queer', 'oppositional' readings within some (mainly academic) circles, the bulk of what we refer to as 'gay film criticism' still starts from the premise that what matters most is not what the film in question contributes to the art of cinema, or what pleasures it might hold for a queer-literate audience, but the degree to which it explicitly serves the gay political cause" (85-86). And: "One of the arguments made against so-called queer readings is that, far from constituting a legitimate critical strategy, they are merely a convenient, fashionable way of suspending moral judgement [. . .]." (96).

I've been guilty of all the thoughts and action critiqued above, and so it was a pretty fun book to read. I realized about halfway through that these critics are writing from a very privileged position. Like, they're probably themselves living in New York or L.A. or wherever, and able to go through their days-to-days without getting, say, killed or hit or otherwise abused. And rather than this being a nitpicking thing I want to fault the whole book for, I think it's a good thing. This lack of defensiveness is giving them clear enough heads to point out rather obvious hypocrisies and problems that other gays—those more oppressed, say, or more dedicated to asserting their still-forming queer identity as not insane or unhealthy—may be too busy defending their lives to see, which, of course, isn't their fault either.

Tatchell, Peter. "It's Just a Phase: Why Homosexuality is Doomed." Anti-Gay. Ed. Mark Simpson. London: Freedom Editions, 1996.

2008-12-24T14:56:00.004-06:00

I'm probably going to do a whole thing later on Mark Simpson's Anti-Gay, but I'm at this point only halfway through, and because all the bloggers I read are signing off until January and because all I have to do this week is watch TV and repeatedly launching my browser to see what new things I can find to click on, and also because this essay in particular is causing me some trouble, I feel the need to post something today about it.

(Mark Simpson, for the record, is a British journalist/columnist who coined [and has now disavowed] the term "metrosexuality".)

At any rate, Tatchell's essay starts off strong enough, when it gets to its point that homosexuality—as a distinct identity—has not always existed and, thus, will not always exist. I mean, it's pretty hard to argue with. "The Homosexual" as we know him (or her) today is about as old as Oscar Wilde, and yet people have been having sex with those whose genitals they share forever, but Socrates, we imagine, didn't wear velvet and green carnations in order to assert himself as such.

And then he continues to make an interesting point when he says that the inevitable death of "the homosexual" is connected to the death of heterosexual superiority, because the former (and its offshoot homophobia) is a product of the latter, invented in order to supress the otherwise attractive same-sex desire:

It is not in the interests of lesbians and gay men to maintain barriers based on sexual difference. Our liberation is irrevocably bound up with the dissolution of separate, mutually exclusive, rival orientations and identities. (44)

Okay. So I'm on board. It's kind of the reason I'm reading this book: I've come to understand in my reading and in the past five years of living as an out gay man that an identity defined solely by one's sexual orientation is limiting and dangerous not just to the self but also to homosexual and heterosexual people in general. Dangerous in that it's limiting. Dangerous in that it reduces selfhood in a selfish and maybe tragic way. So I'm not as interested anymore in arguing how my sexuality makes me and my existence completely different from a straight person's.

Anyway, all of the requisite Kinsey/Freud shit is thrown up on the opening pages of this essay in order to show how we all have multiple sexualities lying dormant inside of us, and while this isn't something I care or disagree too much about, repeated citations of Kinsey's sex-spectrum statistics are, for me, gradually failing to have any significance. Sure, everyone's capable of same-sex attraction, but I don't think it's fair to then assume that for a person never to choose to act on that attraction (and, likewise, for a gay person never to act on a latent opposite-sex attraction) that person must be in denial, or, like, isn't Living Their Lives To Their Sex-Positive Potential.

At any rate, given that everyone's a little queer, Tatchell's use of this is where his essay starts to go haywire. Because his main thesis is that in order for the barriers between hetero and homo to be completely dissolved, homosexual liberation must be fully granted and accepted. Or, in his words: "Only when sexual difference is fully accepted and valued will it cease to be important and consequently slide into oblivion" (45).

Really? So what's the problem, exactly? What's the thing holding us all as a human race back from our eventual goal of getting rid of the hetero/homo divide? It's the fact that some of us are refusing to acknowledge the Kinsey spectrum? Or, if they're acknowledging it, they're not accepting it? That because of those people who refuse to believe that somewhere inside them lies this even teeny tiny other part, we aren't able to get to the point where said other part is no longer significant?

The worst comes next, when Tatchell contrasts the "conservative gay rights" movement (aimed at highlighting our sexual difference, making us deserving of the same [marriage] rights of heterosexuals in the culture they've created) and the "more visionary queer emancipation project" (aimed at completely overhauling the [patriarchal] het order). He argues that the latter:

seeks a far-reaching sexual revolution to transform sexuality in ways that ultimately benefit both homosexuals and heterosexuals [. . .] such as the reduction of the age of consent to fourteen for everyone, the repeal of the puritanical laws against prostitution and pornography, and the introduction of explicit sex education in schools from primary classes onwards. (47-48, his emphasis)

More on this in a sec, but I guess the dumbest part actually comes right after: "If everyone is born with the potential to be queer, as the evidence suggests, then the struggle for queer freedom is obviously in everyone's interest and we should all be working for that freedom side by side, regardless of our sexuality or gender" (48, my emphasis).

So, like, really? This is in everyone's interest? Why can't it be enough to end the possibility and desire for discrimination? Is it really an important goal that we have consensual sex among 14-year-olds? Or "explicit sex education" for gradeschoolers? And if so, where did these arbitrary divides come from? What's "explicit" mean? A kind of demonstration right out of Barthelme? And why 14 when we can go to 10?

I guess my beef in the end is how careful this essay begins, and then how stupid it becomes. How Tatchell is completely unable to consider a viewpoint other than his own "sex-positive" one. (Just look at the above italics.) It's just these kinds of splintered, meandering, kitchen-sink manifestos that let Santorum connect equal rights for gay people with marrying your dog.

We're never going to win an argument by insisting to straight people that we know what's best for them, too. I know I began this splintered, meandering post claiming such a thing, that gay liberation is good for straight people, but not because it'll change the entire basis of their culture. Not because it'll help them become as fabulously sex-positive as we are. Instead, it'll make us all a lot more trusting of one another, a lot less suspicious.

I think.

UPDATE: Oh, I just realized that far more objectionable than consensual sex between (or, well, among I guess) 14-year-olds is consensual sex between 14-year-olds and, say, 40-year-olds. Or maybe I'm just sex-negative.

Saunders, George. The Braindead Megaphone. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

2008-12-21T09:11:00.004-06:00

I'm feeling the need to compose this entry elsewhere, revise it, and then copy it into my Blogger dashboard window, as opposed to typing up what comes as it comes, scanning it over for typos (or not) and hitting "PUBLISH POST". Why I'm doing this is because of the metaphor Saunders titles his book of essays after: a general loudness and lack of sophistication in the parlance these days. And how it's a cause for some complex kind of ruin:

Megaphone Guy* [who stands at a party and dominates the conversation merely through volume] is a storyteller, but his stories are not so good. Or rather, his stories are limited. His stories have not had time to gestate—they go out too fast and to too broad an audience. Storytelling is a language-rich enterprise, but Megaphone Guy does not have time to generate powerful language. The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them—if the storytelling is good enough—we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us [...]. (9-10, emphasis mine)

There's a number of essays that deal with this general theme of dumbing down and lack of empathy, and readers of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech (among other recent nonfiction) will maybe scan through a lot of this, filing it under "old hat." This, I think, is a good thing, because maybe doesn't it show that people are listening? In the same title essay, Saunders comes up with a laughably bad run-on sentence of the sort that seemed to fall hourly from Sarah Palin's mouth, and mentions that, these days, when this shit is uttered, nobody laughs, or cries, or otherwise points out the problem.

But is this still the case? Palin looked unassailable on paper—her narrative, positions, and family situation (well, until the dirt got dug up) perfectly tailored to a Bush-era ethos, and yet wasn't part of her downfall her idiocy, her inability to put together a sentence? If you want, if you're like me, you can read 2008's presidential race as a failure of the subliterate to outyell the literate. They gave the presidency to the guy who'd written books.

At any rate, I'm clearly not going to heed Saunders's passionate urging for careful revision here. I've got some notes of things I want to cover and I'm not even halfway through. This is what happens when you have two days of travel woes (hence my quick-reading of this book) and now a whole week of sitting around with family members. You have time to ramble. And still, I want to talk about revision for a bit. Ramblingly, probably.

That emphasized part of Saunders's quote above ("The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively") is one of the best articulations I've read of something I've always felt, and it also reads (only now as I was typing it out) as the reason why so much "online fiction" (by which I mean the shorter, language-driven stuff I often find in online journals) rarely holds my interest. Or, like, it does, but only as I'm reading it. Then I click elsewhere and it's immediately forgotten.

What's missing in these situations, I think, is that truth-seeking impulse. It's hard for me to figure out what they're saying, really. What they're trying to mean, or what they're even trying to do with meaning. I'm not implying that these fictions aren't revised, but I'm not sure they're revised "extensively," as Saunders asks for. What revisions are done seem to be language- / image-oriented, making the prose "tighter" to more optimally suit its eventual medium. And this is, sure, important work to do as a writer, but it's later work, it's finishing stuff, corresponding to what Carol Bly calls "literary fixing."

We writers, particularly those of us who go through graduate programs, are very, very good at literary fixing. We can trim excess and sharpen images better than anything. But what we're not as good at, or at least what I'm not as good at, because it's so much harder to teach and talk about, is what Bly calls (I think), "spiritual deepening," which is, yes, one of the shittiest terms ever (I think she also calls it "empathic questioning"), but it refers to the stage after the initial drafting when the writer looks at his story and asks himself some hard-to-answer questions. What have I written, here? What is it saying? What is it about? Where might it position itself along a continuum between the virtuous and the morally reprehensible, and why? And what questions does it itself ask?

Without taking this step (which is what I think Saunders means when he says "extensive"), fiction becomes a gorgeous mess. Or like a beautiful void. How many stories have we all read that say nothing, but say it incredibly well? This problem is the same problem Saunders writes about happening on a national scale: how often have we heard the television say something that sounds convincing and true, but is really vapid and ridiculous?

It's an important point to make, and Saunders makes it several times. If you've read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" you'll want to skip a lot of it. Or skim. Particularly the part where Saunders cites a euphemism-filled quote from a Nazi official regarding the killing of Jews in concentration camps that makes the same point as Orwell does with his "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results from doing so." You almost sort of wish Saunders would just say "If you really want to understand this point I'm trying to make about language and thought, you should go, as I have, time and again, to Orwell."

Because he's all about pumping up other authors in this book. The best stuff in it (besides maybe the reportage stuff he did for GQ in Dubai, Nepal, and along the U.S.-Mexican border) are the essays about Vonnegut, Barthelme, and Twain. I won't dawdle on this, but these essays are the best I've read on why Slaughterhouse Five, "The School", and Huck Finn are so good. I wish now that I'd brought all three with me on my trip.

Instead I've got Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (almost halfway through), Mark Simpson's (ed) Anti-Gay, and Bill Reichard's first book of poems. And lots of time. So more surely to come.

===

* One really awesome moment of symmetry, maybe, comes later in the book, where Saunders is reporting on a demonstration in Texas between the Minutemen and the Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste, in which the latter have megaphones of their own and are chanting loud enough for the former's own "Deport them now!" chants to be all but drowned out. There's a black Vietnam vet standing on the side of the Unión, talking earnestly about how the Minutemen are only looking for a new minority to keep down, but that "the brown man built this country" &c., and he's making it hard for the Minutemen to counterargue, and but the whole thing is being drowned out by the Unión's megaphones, and so Saunders, perhaps aware of this metaphor that will run through his book and seizing a golden opportunity, actually runs over to the Unión, and points out what the vet is saying, and they run a bullhorn over to this vet so he can make his point more loudly. The Minutemen soon drive off to another location.

If this whole book were an essay, this would be its ultimate scene, or maybe penultimate, but as it stands in the book it's somewhere in the middle, and like not even heralded in any way like I would try to do. ("See? See, the megaphone can be put to good use, when in the right hands. Do you get it?")

Kramer, Larry. Faggots (1978). New York: Plume, 1987.

2008-12-15T12:25:00.002-06:00

Right from his choice of a title, Larry Kramer—one of the founders of AIDS activist group ACT-UP and still today a vocal, vehement critic of both AIDS policy and queer promiscuity—positions himself and his novel as a harsh critique. This won't be a glowing portrait of gay men in New York City nearly a decade after the Stonewall Riots. It probably won't even be a fair one. Instead, the book is a mix of loathing—of the self, of other gay men—and celebration, an attempt at gathering strength. Or, as Kramer attributes to his stand-in, Fred Lemish, "[D]id he not hate that word 'gay'? He thought it a strange categorizer of a life style with many elements far from zippy. No, he would de-kike the word 'faggot,' which had punch, bite, a no-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-depracatory than, say, 'American'" (31).

The novel takes place over Memorial Day weekend 1977, when the historic Everard Baths burned down, killing nine men. This event concludes the book's opening act, continuing through the death of Winnie Heinz, the Marlboro Man, during the opening of a new disco the next night, and the start of the summer season on Fire Island that culminates in the novel's climax: the public, orgiastic double-fisting of Fred's paramour, Dinky Adams, in the "Meat Rack"—an off-the-beaten-path area of the Fire Island Pines.

The amount of sex in this novel could rival all of Edmund White's autobiographical trilogy, but for Kramer, sex isn't always (actually, it's rarely) the self-affirming experience many gay men of his generation paint it to be. Instead, it's reckless, drawn here in his novel so often as a caricature. This is part of my attraction to the book; the way it quite smartly makes fun of the idea that rampant fucking is somehow intrinsic to gay identity. Here's how Richie Bronstein, the closeted son of a wealthy film executive, puts it:

[H]e knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.

I have to! I have to! he would torture himself before several hours napping in his lofted bed. Because it's part of the faggot life style—to find abandonment and freedom through ecstasy—fucking and being fucked and light s & m and shitting and pissing and Oh I want to be abandoned! and where's my copy of the Avocado... (60-61)

In watching the man he's been for years obsessed with get fisted by two strangers while dozens of leering men watch, Fred is finally able to see Dinky's inherent sadness and emptiness, and that night they amicably "break up" (quotes because Dinky can never be said to be with any one man). The final pages of the novel show gay men simply together, not fucking or fighting or both, but just sitting together on the sand as the sun rises over Fire Island, and passing from lips to ears and lips to ears is one repeated phrase: "I love you."

It's a sentimental ending to an otherwise angry novel, and it comes a little out of nowhere, but what's important about it is that it pushes Kramer's argument toward a kind of solution: less fucking, more loving. That this book was written four years before AIDS broke in the newspaper makes it all the more important.

Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook (1962). New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.*

2008-12-15T12:13:00.004-06:00

A novel fascinating in its structure: Free Women is told in five parts, each with a third-person narrator, telling the story of Anna Wulf and her friend Molly, and the men and children that fill out their lives. These sections are interrupted by Anna's notebooks, in which she tries to sort out her own life story (told in the first person), by allocating different aspects of her life into different colored notebooks.

For instance, her time in Africa is told in the black notebook, and he gradual straying from communism is told in the red notebook. Eventually she falls in love with an American writer, and is driven to bring all these disparate elements together in the golden notebook of the title.

This fractured structure enables Lessing to cover not only a great breadth of narrative, but also to fully investigate her themes of communism, class, and the feminist movement in such a way as to not have to privilege any of them.

Call, Ryan and Christy. Pocket Finger. Baltimore: Publishing Genius, 2008.

2008-12-01T15:20:00.003-06:00

A lot of the new fiction I read online these days does good work with language and image, but not good work with character or story. Sometimes it's simply bad work, these things haven been lately short-shrifted in a, oh, post-whatever world. Call me old-fashioned, but when I want language and image I can go to poetry. I want my fiction to take me somewhere and show me some people I don't know and let me spend enough time with them that I can watch how something happens in their lives that makes me reconsider me own.

I also want brilliant sentences, and all of the images to be inscrutable. Too much to ask?

No! says Ryan Call, a buddy of mine who just released this great chapbook illustrated by his sister, which is appropriate as the story is about two siblings living quietly in the margins around a sick mother and a very sullen and terrifying father. I think what makes Ryan's book work so well is that he's (or his narrator's) directing all his best sentences, all his close watching and description, at this father and not at himself, and so what results is this close relationship between the observer and the otherwise distant observed, which the goings-on of the narrative then work to develop:

What Father had suffered during his brief absence, what he had inflicted upon others in his derangement, my sister and I could only imagine. We each held for his abilities a newfound, horrified respect, and with this respect we carefully guided him away from the estuary when he grew distraught by his failure to draw a single bite. [. . .]

My sister distracted him by locking her thumbs together and flapping her delicate hands softly about his face to coax him onto the pathway home. And I pressed lightly my tiny head into the small of his back and motored him along, occasionally losing my footing in the fetid mud, sobbing, filthy.

Pocket Finger is the exact sort of thing I would love to see in The Cupboard, but alas the good folks over at Publishing Genius got it. You can read the whole thing online if you like, or if you don't like, like I don't like, they'll mail you one with color images and a nice handwritten note. Go buy it, it's only like four bucks.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Owl Books, 1997.

2008-12-01T15:15:00.002-06:00

I'm not sure whether I've ever read a novelization of a movie, but reading Palahniuk's book is like reading a novelization of David Fincher's movie.

This is not a credit to whomever wrote the screenplay. This book is awful.

Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie (1945). New York: New Directions, 1966.

2008-11-24T16:45:00.003-06:00

Tennessee Williams's first major play and, as he writes, his quietest. It's also his lightest, a little story told in seven scenes of the Wingfield family, or what's left of it. The mother, Amanda, is living in a more palatable past of continuous gentleman callers, the days before she met the man who ran out on her and their two children: Tom, who runs out every night to "the movies" (which, this being Williams, is code for "seedy places in St. Louis where men can rendezvous with one another"); and Laura, who lives in a world of isolation, listening to the Victrola and fawning over her collection of glass figurines.

The play culminates in the arrival of Tom's co-worker—the gentleman caller Amanda's been waiting for—and it's here that Williams can't keep his love for symbolism from weighing the whole play down. Jim, the co-worker, starts to bring Laura out of her shell, and they begin to waltz around the sitting room to the music from a neighboring dancehall, only to run into the table (Laura's got a bit of a gimp leg) and knock over the glass unicorn Laura's just confessed is her favorite:

LAURA: [. . .] Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are. The traffic jars the shelves and things fall off them.

JIM: Still I'm awfully sorry that I was the cause.

LAURA [smiling]: I'll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!

[They both laugh]

Now he will feel more at home with the other horses, the ones that don't have horns. . . .

That's when we find out Jim's engaged, and the hornless unicorn is given new meaning. Get it? Can you see how the unicorn is a symbol for Laura's blah blah blah?

There's just something so inelegant about it, and I think the problem is that Laura is given nothing to attach to her character but her leg, the Victrola, and the menagerie. She doesn't even get a good monologue or soliloquy. This is supposedly the most autobiographical of Williams's plays, written to express his remorse for leaving a sister he had similar to Laura. But rather than leave us to weep over her unending tragedy, wouldn't it have been better to go deeper into her character such that she becomes human, rather than constantly shining heraldic beams of light on her such that she remains this mythic angel?

Make her a horse is what I'm saying. Everyone knows unicorns never existed.

Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.

2008-11-24T12:44:00.004-06:00

I've read, now, three Atwood novels and none of them is A Handmaid's Tale. Not that I'm bragging or anything. But I've read, in this order, Alias Grace and Oryx & Crake, and now The Blind Assassin and all of them are just like so awesome!

This novel is three novels in one. Starting from the title, it refers to this work of sci-fi that's being spooled out—orally, basically—from one character to another while they're in bed together. Like post-coitally. She asks to hear a story (he's a sci-fi hack writer, among other things) and he tells her about these people on another planet who sacrifice young virgins once a year to "the gods" and the blind assassin who is sent to stop this ritual. The telling of this story is part of a larger novel, also called The Blind Assassin, written by Laura Chase, which was published posthumously and became a cult classic.

Laura died after driving off a bridge (whether this was a suicide remains a mystery throughout the book) in the 1930s. She was survived by her older sister, Iris, whose attempts to tell her and Laura's story becomes the third novel, the frame surrounding it all. She does this in the present, well into her 80s, and so part of the time she's writing about her life now, all the failures of her aging body, and but most of the time she's flashing back to almost ancient history at this point, she and her sister living together in their father (a button factory owner)'s manse named Avilion.

So you've got Iris's life now. Iris and Laura's life then. Laura's novel about this couple that meets for illicit trysts. And her (Laura's) male character's ongoing sci-fi narrative. It is, yes, a lot to keep track of and is also, yes, a good reason why this novel is more than 500 pages long.

But a page turner, too. To say anything of value, I'm going to have to ruin the book's mystery or central effects or whatever, so I'll try to change the font color, and if you have no plans to read this or don't mind spoliers, then just highlight what follows and don't say I didn't warn you.

Naturally, with so many layers of narrative, point of view is going to be a central concern. For the record, Laura's novel and the sci-fi narrative are told in the third person. Iris's narratives (both present and past) are told in the first person. And where these narratives intersect is in Iris's eventual confession that she wrote Laura's novel, after her sister's death, attributing it to her for two reasons: as a memorial, and as a mask. For once we know Iris wrote about this adulterous couple, we realize that the novel is completely autobiographical.

In telling the story of her life and Laura's, Iris mentions Alex, the man we come to understand she's had an ongoing affair with, but all we she reveals is that he once tried to kiss her, when she was very young, and she ran off. Shortly after, she gets married, and we never hear about him again. So it becomes a puzzle of sorts for her as a narrator: how to present herself as an authority while also hiding a certain part of the truth. And then how to reveal the truth in a way that doesn't feel manipulative to her reader (who, specifically, is her granddaughter; she's writing this for her granddaughter).

Iris handles this by keeping the focus on her sister. Also, it seems that she's assuming a familiarity on the part of her reader with Laura's novel. Atwood peppers this novel throughout Iris's own, so that our understanding of who these two lovers are happens alongside our understanding of what happened to Iris and Laura. In doing this, when the truth is revealed it's as though Iris never really did it, that we just came to understand it as she has. "As for the book, Laura didn't write a word of it," she writes (512). "But you must have known that for some time."

The question I have, though, is why wait to reveal this? If Iris's intended reader knew the story "Laura wrote," why not just begin with this fact?

On a narratological level I can't figure it out. But one thing is obvious: it makes for a far more engaging story. I tend to repeat myself a lot. And one thing I say again and again, even if I only write it, is that all good stories are mysteries of a kind. Atwood's stories are always among the most mysterious. And therefore by the transitive property they're the best.

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

2008-11-18T10:50:00.003-06:00

I had some mixed reactions to the Bechdel book, a memoir of growing up with a closeted father. I thought at times she pushed so hard to connect the goings on in her life to some kind of historical or literary context. Her father was very Proustian, it seems, and her family's life was straight out of In Search of Lost Time, and also some James novels, and Gatsby. But throughout, Bechdel is critical of her need to make these connections. I mean, she's aware of what she's doing, and treats it, in her self-conscious narration, as some kind of tic she can't help. This assuages the obvious manipulation of experience she's got going on.

And then toward the end there's this great moment with Ulysses, which she reads in a winter-term course because it is her father's favorite, and yet slacks behind in class because she has better, more vital reading to do. Which is to say: books by and about lesbians. (Bechdel came out in college.) So I thought this was going to be some inevitable refutation of, like, the patriarchal, "big books" canon that her father somewhat forced on her, but no.

I think I only want to read memoirs in comics form, in the future. The great thing about the form is how economical it is with time. So many pages have panels next to one another that move from Alison as a toddler to Alison as a teen, then back to toddlerhood and then all the up to her near-present self. These sorts of moves would be either incomprehensible, in a written memoir, or so glacially slow and dull if the writer made sure we were following her jumps in time. This way, the comic can work a lot like how our memory works, which is so rarely chronological.

For a while I thought Bechdel's paneling and general structure was really straightforward, not really pushing the form anywhere, until I got to the "climax" of the book (or maybe it is the climax) on pages 220-221. To avoid runing the "plot" of it, what has been throughout the book a pretty loose and varied style of paneling becomes on these pages this lock-step grid where every image is the same. Just the dialogue changes. It's not only a great mirror to what's going on in that cramped little space of her father's car, but it also works, like I said, as a visual climax, some kind of epiphanic inevitability.

I like it when comic books let their art signal narrative shifts, I guess is what I'm saying.

Highsmith, Patricia. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). New York: Vintage, 1992.

2008-11-11T09:07:00.002-06:00

I read this for a class I'm T.A.ing. It was good. A suspense-filled page-turner. This is exactly all I have to say about the book.

Allison, Dorothy. Bastard out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 1993.

2008-11-06T12:14:00.004-06:00

I Finished! this one a couple weeks ago. Maybe last week. The following evening I saw Dorothy Allison give a talk at UNL's annual GLBTQIAAQ??? dinner about ... well as with the first time she spoke here a couple years ago I can't quite recall what it was about, but I know it was incredibly moving and inspirational, in the way sermons probably are. Why couldn't her book be? At the dinner, she spoke about a woman estranged from her daughter because she (the daughter) was gay. She spoke about how happy she is that Nebraska has such a liberal Safe-Haven law, because infants aren't the only one who need last-ditch solutions.

Allison's central theme in the speech, and here in this, her first novel, and I think in much of the writing that's come since, is family. Indeed, a friend of mine had lunch with Allison on the day she spoke and the words "You've got to love your family" came out of her mouth at one point. And I do. I do love my family. But I also love...I dunno myself or my life enough to know that if that family ever betrayed me in any way I could take that love away and feel all the stronger for it. I'm aware that for anyone potential conditions exist such that they didn't have to love their families.

Maybe it's the uninterrupted love my family's given me that allows me to feel this way. One thing I know for sure is that Bastard out of Carolina is, in the end, a very conservative book. Its focus is on the family. Ruth Anne Boatwright is a girl born the titular bastard to a teenage mother, Annie, and an absent father. The mother remarries after she has another kid with a man who dies, and this man she marries—Daddy Glen—turns out in what has now become a cliche in the memoir/autobionovel genre to be abusive. First it's verbal/emotional, then it becomes physical/sexual. All the while, Annie turns a blind eye, or sees what's going on and gets really upset but then goes crawling back to Daddy Glen because she can't stand to be alone. The novel ends with this reconciliation between daughter and mother than rang, to me, completely false and sentimental. "You're my own baby girl," Annie says. "I'm not gonna let you go." And the line is so clearly another lie, yet Ruth Anne does everything in her narration to assert that this time she believed it, and therefore we should.

Another problem I had with the book was its point of view. I don't remember what the problem was, exactly, just that a problem was had. I think it had something to do with the fact that for much of the book Ruth Anne doesn't do anything but watch her colorful family members yell and lie at one another. And then this combined with the book's insistence that we never question Ruth Anne's perspective on herself and the events of her narrative. It's like this depressing by-product of the Victim Narrative That Resists At All Costs Being Labeled A Victim Narrative. I fully submit that this is a matter of personal taste, not one of literary ideals or whatever.

Like, I like my first-person narrated novels to be a bit more aware of the inherent unreliability of every first-person narrator ever. Bad memoirs are completely ignorant of this. "I" am witness, they say. "I" will tell you what you need to know. Novels, though, usually know better. Or, at least, they should.

UPDATE: This is unfair and snarky of me but I'm in the sort of mood where I can't resist. From a Goodreads review of this book (5-star): "To read what happens to her page after page literally cracks your heart open and I find myself begging in my mind with the author (even though it's far too late!) 'Please don't let her get raped'. She does get raped...."

Am I a dick to assert that there's something, well "wrong" about any novel that, if even unintentionally, drives a reader to beg for a main character not to get raped? Is it like begging for certain characters not to die by a novel's end? Or is it something else?

Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1994.

2008-10-30T14:10:00.003-05:00

From a series of lectures Eco gave at Harvard. His extended metaphor is a lot like Gardner's: reading a text is like getting lost in a forest. Many of the lectures provide readers with a set of notions or tools to help them navigate their ways through said forest. Foremost among these notions is that of the Model Reader, which Eco says every text creates (not, to be clear, every author; which is to say that a Model Reader isn't simply somebody the author has in mind when he writes the book, but more so it's the figure by whom a text intends itself to be received), and which every reader should try—in the act of reading—to become.

This ties into certain other theories I've run across like the erotics of the text, and the way that modernist texts embed within themselves "instructions" if you will on how to read them. Eco's most interesting application of this idea is when he tries to figure out what makes a text a cult favorite.* Turns out "cult" works have a "disjointed" quality to their structures, by which he means that "The Rocky Horror Picture Show [. . .] is the cult movie par excellence precisely because it lacks form, and so can be endlessly deformed and put out of joint" (127). The same, it seems, goes with Hamlet, Casablanca, and The Divine Comedy.

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* Along similar lines, Eco has a great bit in the lecture on story time and story duration about how he was able to, like, systematically decide whether a cinematic work was pornographic or not. It has nothing to do with obscenity or even sex acts. Pornographic works allow everyday actions the exact amount of screen time as is required in life. Or, in other words, "[W]hen in a film two characters take the same time they would in real life to get from A to B, we can be absolutely sure we are dealing with a pornographic film."

Although this might not be the case when A=The Bedroom Door, Clothes On, and B=like, Impromptu Threesome. Or Anal.

Ryman, Geoff. Was. New York: Penguin, 1992.

2008-10-28T10:38:00.002-05:00

Ryman's novel is a greatly titled one when you know that it's both a rethinking of the Wizard of Oz mythology and a book both enamored with and troubled by the past. it brings together three (probably more) central narratives: that of Dorothy Gael, who lives in Manhattan, Kan., with her Aunty Em and her Uncle Henry; Frances Gumm, who grows up to become screen star Judy Garland; and Jonathan Lastname, an AIDS survivor who has an obsession with Oz in specific and Kansas in general.

I couldn't understand at first why Ryman fragmented his narrative so much. Well, I suppose I still can't quite figure it out. Specifically, the sections where we're witness to the making of the film, and the life of Frances Gumm/Judy Garland. Yes they're relevant, but this isn't Garland's story in any way, it's this "real" Dorothy's story, and Jonathan's, too. I could find no way to mediate those latter stories through the old-Hollywood narrative. I think maybe Ryman had done a ton of research into Garland's life and needed to find some use for it. She had a gay dad, probably—I suppose that's of interest.

The choice of the Oz narrative by a gay writer is an obvious one. All my life, and certainly all my out life, I've wondered what was going on with gay U.S. men and The Wizard of Oz. They seem to love it so much, and why exactly? Why the euphemism "Friend of Dorothy"? Why the ubiquitous rainbow?

And then reading this book I got an idea: "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". There's a clear connection for Dorothy's pining for some place other than Kansas. Some colorful place where magical things happen. Here one can maybe map (clumsily) "Kansas" as "inside the closet" and Oz as outside.

Except this isn't what the story as a whole is really about. Dorothy doesn't live a new, exciting life in Oz. She survives through far more dangerous obstacles there than she had to in Kansas, and eventually it's all too much for her and she pines for the simplicity of home. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" isn't the story's theme, it's that "There's No Place Like Home".

And maybe gay men today have happy memories of home and healthy, productive connections to their families, but could that Friend-of-Dorothy/pre-Stonewall generation say the same thing? What's so great about the black-and-white home Dorothy works so hard to return to?

Ryman does a good job of opening notions of "home" up beyond The House One Grew Up In, but I want to argue that the movie his novel is based on does not. Why this complete embrace of what may be old-Hollywood's most conservative movie?

Has anyone read the original Baum book? Does it have the same No-Place-Like-Home drive as the film does?

Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Audiobook.

2008-10-21T09:30:00.004-05:00

I had a friend back in Pittsburgh who was incredibly smart and very kind and funny, but had a tendency toward literary snobbishness. (I know: can you imagine such a person?) Once he had something disparaging to say about Kurt Vonnegut, I can't remember exactly what. Some well timed comment that pretty much wrote him off as a hack, and I recall being almost hurt by it, seeing as how Vonnegut wrote so much stuff I loved as a teen.

And I guess that's maybe the rub. I loved Vonnegut as a teen. Sure I only read Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle and the collected stories. Breakfast of Champions. Slapstick? I read like five of his books. Timequake, six. And so when I found this audiobook I thought it would be a good one to listen to on my trip.

It was not good. Vonnegut's Redistribute All Wealth moral is completely overbearing, and so whatever aims for satire seemed to just fall off to dumb and obvious caricature. (Quickest plot summary ever: The scion of a wealthy family is crazy, maybe, but just so crazy that he considers actually helping people rather than using them to create more wealth.) The final scene reads only like a punchline. I could practically hear the rimshot at the end of the book, and this is no way for a novel to end. Maybe a short story, which form maybe Vonnegut should have reserved for this story.

Also, I don't understand why he has such a loathing, in this novel, for dependent clauses joined with anything other than a stupid, belchlike comma. Let me cue up one of the chapters at random and write the first example I hear (okay that took twenty seconds, is how rampant these sentences are in the novel): "Norman Mushari killed the afternoon by driving over to Newport, paid a quarter to tour the famous Rumford mansion."

Am I the only person who reads in such a sentence a downright scorn for the English language? There's like this gross boredom with the actions of the character, as though whatever motivations or mental processes that linked all causal events in the novel were of no concern. One can postmodernly argue these are all myths, but while Vonnegut gets lumped in with the postmodernists he's not that kind of postmodernist. I don't recall this construction in his other novels, but I wasn't as sensitive to syntax I was then, was instead a reader for story.

Man, even typing one out feels like rubbing someone else's feces into my keyboard.

Mishima, Yukio. Forbidden Colors (1953). New York: Perigree, 1980.

2008-10-21T08:41:00.003-05:00

Often, when you come to this blog and find the same old stale book "review" sitting there at the top of the page, chances are I've probably read something, and then I've had to go on some kind of trip, or I've actually sunk myself into some "more important" writing project, and as the days go by that I don't write about the book I Finished! my knowledge of that book and the things of interest I think I could say about it wane more and more, to the point where I just wake up in the morning and can barely even spell "blog" much less remember that I maintain one.

For those who don't know, Yukio Mishima is one of Japan's most-revered writers of the 20th century. He committed suicide in 1970 that tragic and noble ritualistic way they have over there, and he was probably gay, though he was definitely married (to a woman). This novel is, above all, a harsh critique of marriage. Like Thomas Mann, the story begins with an aged, single, famous writer (Shunsuké) at the beach, gazing upon the impossibly beautiful body of a young male (Yuichi, much older than Mann's Tadzio). Shunsuké has been hurt, emotionally, and like embittered by two previous women he was with, and so he takes Yuichi under his proverbial wing as a kind of experiment.

Yuichi is to marry a young woman, but confesses that he can't ever love a woman. He feels nothing for the sex as a whole. Shunsuké tells him that women should be treated as stupid animals, easily manipulated, and tells him to go through with it for the sake of power and position. Then, throughout the rest of the novel, Shunsuké basically uses Yuichi's good looks to get him to seduce and emotionally destroy the very women who emotionally destroyed him.

It's, clearly, a pretty angry book. At one point Yuichi is walking with one of his many lovers throughout the book, and overhears a passing woman say something like "Ugh, gays!" He blows up to his companion:

"Them! Them!" Yuichi ground his teeth. "They who pay three hundred and fifty yen for a lunch hour together in a hotel bed, and have their great love affair in the sight of heaven. They who, if all goes well, build their rat's-nest love nests. They who, sleepy-eyed, diligently multiply. They who go out on Sundays with all their children to clearance sales at the department stores. They who scheme out one or two stingy infidelities in their lifetimes. They who always show off their healthy homes, their healthy morality, their common sense, their self-satisfaction."

Victory, however, is always on the side of the commonplace. Yuichi knew that all the scorn he could muster could not combat their natural scorn. (238, emphasis added)

So an angry book, but a pretty wise one. This is the most articulate version I've read of the idea that a gay man's anger or hatred toward the heterosexual order is always limited by the fact that he came from such an order, whereas a hetero can do everything possible to keep homosexuality out of his life all together, making his hatred for it real, powerful, and thorough.

The copy on the back of my copy of the book is not so wise, however. It interprets Yuichi's situation as being "[d]rawn to homosexuality after a loveless marriage," as though gay sex were some logical form of therapy (which for some married men maybe it is...). Mishima somewhat addresses this pre-"gay rights" homosexual dilletantism late in the book, once Yuichi starts sleeping with Kawada, who is some important financial worker:

The homosexual of promise, whoever he is, is one who recognizes that certain manliness within himself, and loves it, and holds fast to it, and the masculine virtue that Kawada recognized in himself was his ever-ready nineteenth-century predilection for diligence. A strange trap for one to be in! As in that long-ago warlike time, loving a woman was an effeminate act; to Kawada any emotion that ran counter to his own masculine virtue seemed effeminate. To samurai and homosexual the ugliest vice is femininity. Even though their reasons for it differ, the samurai and the homosexual do not see manliness as instinctive but rather as something gained only from moral effort. The ruin Kawada felt was moral ruin. The reason that he was an adherent of the Conservative party lay in its policy of protecting the things that should have been his enemies: the established order and the family system based on heterosexual love. (380)

Paging Larry Craig. Mishima's narrator loves to butt in a lot like this with a grand, sometimes-smirking knowingness about his characters, but it always felt more companionable than intrusive. All-in-all a pretty good novel, though I imagine his better-known books—those without, perhaps, so strong a need to delineate their author's desired position somewhere between the code of the samurai and that of the homosexual—are better reads.

Oh and there's this incredible sentence: "Drunker than if he had drunk saké, he was drunk on intoxication" (222).

Yes!

Roth, Philip. Indignation. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

2008-10-08T08:01:00.004-05:00

As a child, I had sometimes been taken by my father to the slaughterhouse on Astor Street in Newark's Ironbound section. And I had been taken to the chicken market at the far end of Bergen Street. At the chicken market I saw them killing the chickens. I saw them kill hundreds of chickens according to the kosher laws. First my father would pick out the chickens he wanted. They were in a cage, maybe five tiers high, and he would reach in to pull one out, hold on to its head so it didn't bite him, and feel the sternum. If it wiggled, the chicken was young and was not going to be tough; if it was rigid, more than likely the chicken was old and tough. He would also blow on its feathers so he could see the skin—he wanted the flesh to be yellow, a little fatty. Whichever ones he picked, he put into one of the boxes that they had, and then the shochet, the slaughterer, would ritually slaughter them. He would bend the neck backward—not break it, just arc it back, maybe pull a few of the feathers to get the neck clear so he could see what he was doing—and then with his razor-sharp knife he would cut the throat. For the chickens to be kosher he had to cut the throat in one smooth, deadly stroke. One of the strangest sights I remember from my early youth was the slaughtering of the nonkosher chickens, where they lopped the head right off. Swish! Plop! Whereupon they put the headless chicken down into a funnel. They had about six or seven funnels in a circle. There the blood could drain from the body into a big barrel. Sometimes the chickens' legs were still moving, and occasionally a chicken would fall out of the funnel and, as the saying has it, begin running around with its head cut off. Such chickens might bump into a wall but they ran anyway. They put the kosher chickens in the funnels too. The bloodletting, the killing—my father was hardened to these things, but at the beginning I was of course unsettled, much as I tried not to show it. I was a little one, six, seven years old, but this was the business, and soon I accepted that the business was a mess. The same at the slaughterhouse, where to kosher the animal, you have to get the blood out. In a nonkosher slaughterhouse they can shoot the animal, they can knock it unconscious, they can kill it any way they way to kill it. But to be kosher they've got the bleed it to death. And in my days as a butcher's little son, learning what slaughtering was about they would hang the animal by its foot to bleed it. First a chain is wrapped around the rear leg—they trap it that way. But that chain is also a hoist, and quickly they hoist it up, and it hangs from its heel so that all the blood will run down to the head and the upper body. They they're ready to kill it. Enter shochet in skullcap. Sits in a little sort of alcove, at least at the Astor Street slaughterhouse he did, takes the head of the animal, lays it over his knees, takes a pretty big blade, says a bracha—a blessing—and he cuts the neck. If he does it in one slice, severs the trachea, the esophagus, and the carotids, and doesn't touch the backbone, the animal died instantly and is kosher; if it takes two slices or the animal is sick or disabled or the knife isn't perfectly sharp or the backbone is merely nicked, the animal is not kosher. The shochet slits the throat from ear to ear and then lets the animal hang there until all the blood flows out. It's as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that's how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain—and I saw all this when I was a boy. I witnessed it many times. My father thought it was important for me to see it—the same man who now was afraid of everything for me and, for whatever reason, afraid for himself.

My point is this: that is what Olivia had tried to do, to kill herself according to kosher specifications by emptying her body of blood. Had she been successful, had she expertly completed the job with a single perfect slice of the blade, she would have rendered herself kosher in accordance with rabbinical law. Olivia's telltale scar came from attempting to perform her own ritual slaughter. (157-161)

I include the all of the this because it's pretty much the whole novel right there, encapsulated. You can see all the conflicts, except also know that most of the action takes place at a small college in Ohio where the narrator, Marcus, meets Olivia. I also wanted to include the all of it because it's some of the best writing I've read in a while. Not because of the gore. I'm about calf-deep in a book on taxidermy and so I've got enough animal dismemberment to fill my hours. No, it's because of the strong plainness of it all.

Here's how a bad writer such as this one would handle such a passage:

As a child, my father would carve time out of the granite of his day-to-day to schlep me down to the slaughterhouses, where I would stand like a pylon in the middle of the killing floor, my father at my side with one heavy hand rested on my quivering shoulder, to watch the ritualistic killing of hundreds and hundreds of chickens. The blood, thin and flowing and orange. A new consistency to an old condiment. It ran like a waterfall to the floor, where it pooled around the feet of the butcher as though he were standing in a kiddie pool. And the animal just hung there, drained of its essence like a post-crystal podling.

I don't know anything about writing, and one thing I don't know more than I don't know everything else is confidence and trust in the strength of my material. Roth knows just to give us the blood and give us the details of the work and we'll make everything happen in our heads. We don't need a "fresh" and "vivid" smashing-up of new words to keep readers interested. Why can't I figure this out?

And it's not a matter of writing transparently either. Roth's sentences don't necessarily call attention to certain aspects of themselves, but they certainly hold my attention. I'm aware, in the above passage, of those deft little moments he switches from the simple past to the conditional tense and then back to the past and then into the present. I'm aware of the careful repetitions.

At any rate, I got this book and read it quickly because every single review I'd come across talked about something unprecedented and incredible that happens around the 50-page mark, and rather than have it be spoiled for me I had to buy it and read it quickly. It's not that earth-shattering, I guess. If you want to know everything there is to know (literally, a nearly page-by-page synopsis of the novella's entire plot from start to finish), just read Simic's review in the NYRoB. Why do they do this? Who wants to read a review of a book that reads like a Cliff's Notes synopsis, with minimal praise at fore and aft?

Oh, and Mr. Roth, if you want to talk about indignation, try charging $26 to what should by all sane people be called a novella. Oh wait, you did.

Self, Will. Dorian: An Imitation. New York: Grove Press, 2002.

2008-09-24T07:35:00.003-05:00

Self's title here works two ways. His Dorian is an imitation of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, and Self's Dorian Gray, which is to say his hero, is an imitation of whatever he needs to be, given the situation at hand. Numerous times the narrator refers to this man as a chameleon, and indeed there's something far more sinister about this Dorian than Wilde's.

Self has updated the story to AIDS-era Britain. Instead of a picture, Dorian is reproduced as Cathode Narcissus, a nine-monitor video installation of Dorian's nude body seen voyeuristically at all angles at once. It's this video that Dorian wishes would age while he stays young, and, indeed, this is what happens. But Self pushes the central magic further: Dorian's video self also bears AIDS's ravages of the body, while the live Dorian is able to live with (and spread) the virus without any personal threat.

What's great about this novel is how it sits right at that line between anti-gay and anti-"gay"—which is to say, borderline homophobic but really in the end just smartly critical of all the failures of post-Stonewall gay culture. Self attacks the whole notion of gay identity and identification, most explicitly in the dialogue of his heroin-shooting novelist stand-in character Devenish:

"It's been the misfortune of people who prefer sex with their own gender to be forced to regard this as some essential part of themselves. After all, homosexuality was only defined as a pathology in response to the alleged healthiness of heterosexuality. It's the great mistake of you ... erm ... you gays to mistake a mere attribute for an essence." (212)

And the same character attacks gay/our culture's youth obsession:

"If Gray were able to stay young and have this video installation age in his stead, he'd be the icon of an era in which everyone seeks to hang on to their childhood until they're pressing furry fucking teddy bears against wrinkled cheeks." [. . .] "You homosexuals are only the vanguard of a mutton army dressed as denim lambs. (220)

Will Self is straight (or, well, "straight" or whatever), which complicates all this in stupid ways. What I mean is, if it were, say, Foucault saying this (which he did, essentially, regarding the first quote), or Roy Cohn in Angels in America (who said something similar to the second quote regarding clout and anti-discrimination laws), I'd be fine with it. The "community" or whatever would be fine with it, but as Self doesn't identify as gay (nor could he I don't think), his writing could be seen as homophobic. I could find some critical quotes or whatever but it's not even 8am yet.

At any rate, there's this, too, a longer quote, which I think really just shows how astutely Self's developed his sense of gay culture's failures (which I mean like temporary failures that haven't yet been overcome; not like inherent failures that make it some hot eternal mess):

"They say now that those few short years between the Stonewall Riots and the arrival of AIDS were characterised by a mounting sense of liberation, that we gay men felt the time had come to be ourselves, to express ourselves, to live as we truly wanted to live, free of guilt, free of convention, free of interference. They say now that the disease is a ghastly, one-off, one-act play. A piece of incomprehensible dramatic irony, inflicted on up happy Arcadians by a god who doesn't even exist. They say now that those damp bath-houses and fetid gyms, the bloody meat racks and the shitty cottages were the perfect places for the virus to fester, to replicate, to pump its own iron. The glory hole turned out to be a gory hole. [This kind of stupid punning is I'm afraid a common thread in the book, one of the many places where Self happily tries to channel Wilde and the rest of us cringe.*] They say HIV may have ben present for years in the West, and that it was only this ever lengthening conga line of sodomy—with jet travel connecting cock from San Francisco with asshole in NYC, cock from NYC with asshole in London—that allowed it to get so out of control. They say a lot of things, but for those of use who were there it was simple. Simple to observe that for men who were meant to be free, how readily they draped themselves in chains..." (95).

This is almost relentless in its animosity, particularly at the end, but I should note that it's spoken by an HIV-positive gay man, specifically Basil Hallward, who, as Wilde wrote, "is what I think I am."

I can't read this passage and not help but think about what Gurganus had to say about the coming of AIDS and the coming of war, or what David Foster Wallace had to say in Might magazine all those years ago about AIDS and the end of guilt-free sport-fucking. It's like somehow in seeing the benefits or the good that can come out of the presence of AIDS, these writers have turned the tables, and exposed AIDS victimization as a kind of pollyannaism?

The question is: which is the line of thought that will lead to victory over those who want to oppress us? It's all well and good to read Foucault and argue that our homosexuality is as banal and set in stone as our eye color (well, contacts, but you know what I mean) and therefore nothing to make any grand deal of. But to me this smells a little too much of "I don't mind homosexuals as long as they don't flaunt themselves in my face" and "Whatever you do in your bedroom, why is it my business?"

At any rate, I'm glad for Self's book. I'd much rather read something critical and thought-provoking than the easy bromides of rah-rah "Good for us!" gay fiction. Even if the former isn't accurate, the latter feels like a lie.
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* It's not all bad, though. "I adore destructive spectacles; they are the last refuge of the creative." Henry Wotton (of course) says this. And this: "Violent crimes are in astonishingly bad taste, just as bad taste is a violent crime."

Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. New York: Vintage, 1980.

2008-09-22T17:40:00.002-05:00

This novel is almost entirely written in dialogue, without any markers. No "Valentin said"s or "said Molina"s. And yet we always know when it's Valentin—an Argentinian revolutionary thrown in jail for revolutionary activities—who is speaking and when it's Molina—a gay Argentinian window-dresser thrown in jail for corrupting a minor.

Molina treats Valentin as though he's a child and in the process of being imprisoned they fall in a kind of love with one another. In the meantime they pass the meantime by Molina telling Valentin in great detail the plots of various movies he remembers. This is interesting at first, the first movie he retells is Curse of the Cat People, but then it stops being interesting. I do envy Puig such an easy way of producing in his novel. How do you pass time? How do you fill the pages between key plot points? Apparently you can just have someone talk through a movie from beginning to end.

Let's try it:

Sarah is a young girl who doesn't reallly have many friends, and who likes—you can tell by the kind-of-Ren-fair-y way she dresses, what with the frilly pirate shirt and leather vest-like garment—the idea of living in a world of fantasy. A far-away kind of place. At the opening of the movie she's out in this park with bridges and maybe a couple fountains and she starts speaking to nobody, like she's reciting lines. "Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way to the castle beyond the goblin city, to take back the child that you have stolen. For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great..."

She stops there, because she can't remember the rest. And then she pulls from her jeans pocket a little leatherbound paperback of a book and it turns out she is reciting lines. The book is like a play, maybe. And the next line is: "You have no power over me." So then it starts to rain and she has to run home with her dog, Lancelot (see what I mean about living in a fantasy world?), and when she arrives her stepmother demands that Lancelot, soaking wet, stay in the garage. This establishes her as an enemy. Turns out she and Sarah's father are going out that night and Sarah needs to stay home to babysit her infant half-brother Toby. Sarah complains vocally in the home's large foyer, with steps spiraling up along the wall and a large chandelier hanging down in the middle. But she doesn't mention having any other plans. One imagines she had a night planned of reciting lines from various fantasy texts, but no: Toby needs looked after.

The parents leave and Sarah runs up to her room. Here we see the shameful extent of her love-affair with lives and worlds other than this unbearable one in which she's forced to wander, alone. On the wall is the requisite Escher print, the one with all the wayward steps. She's got little stuffed animals of bears-as-knights and bears-as-damsels and motley little things. A ballerina inside a glass dome. &c. Toby starts crying almost immediately and Sarah goes into her parents' room to check on him. Toby's like blond and dressed in a red-white mini-striped onesie that makes him look like something a sailor might take care of. He's indeed crying and Sarah tries to get him to stop. She starts telling him a story about "an evil stepmother" and a "persecuted young maiden" or some such, and it's clear that she's once again bending fiction and fact. "One night," Sarah says, "when he stepmother had been particularly cruel, the young girl called on the goblins for help.

"'Say the right words,' the goblins told her, 'and we'l take the baby away and you will be free.'"

And then we cut to a up-close cluster of little goblins. "Listen," one of them says. Turns out there are goblins, see, and they actually can listen to Sarah tell this story to her younger brother. This is maybe the first of the movie's steps toward metafiction. I think maybe there'll be others.

At any rate, Sarah grabs Toby and holds him up in the air. There's all kinds of thunder and lightning happening outside, and she screams, "Goblin King, Goblin King, wherever you may be, take this child of mine far away from me!"

Nothing happens. The goblins are disappointed. "That's not it!" they say. "Where'd she learn that rubbish, it doesn't even start with 'I wish'!"

Because this didn't work, even though of course Sarah didn't really expect it to, she sets Toby back in the crib and lets him cry himself to sleep. "I wish the goblins would come and take you away," she says, shutting out the light. "Right now."

Well, then he stops crying. Turns out this is exactly what she had to say to get the Goblin King to come and take Toby away. So, thinking it a little odd that the crying just stopped like that, she creeps inside and tries the light. But nothing. And she starts hearing all these little creeping sounds and giggles and such. Plus, again, tons of thunder and lightning. Well Toby isn't in the crib when she gets to it, and suddenly she sees all these little goblins scurrying around corners and such, and suddenly the large picture windows burst open and an owl, that we've been watching trying to get into the room, flies all around her head. It's like a snowy white owl with the eyes that make it look a little Oriental, you know? The owl lands and turns into this tall wizardy looking man with high, teased hair and extremely tight pants. Like, the tightest. Oh and a purple cape/robe deal.

It's David Bowie. This is Gareth, the Goblin King.

Sarah pleads to get her brother back and Gareth tells her "What's said is said."

"But I didn't mean it!" she says. And then Gareth starts doing this thing where he like "juggles" these glass orbs, except they never leave the surface of his hands. They like roll around and defy gravity. Turns out Gareth can offer Sarah her dreams if only she'll let him keep Toby, but she can't do it. "Please," she says. "It's not that I don't appreicate what you're doing for me, but I've got to have my brother back."

"Sarah," Gareth says, and then somehow the orbs turn into a snake in his hands. "Don't defy me!"

Then he throws the snake at her neck, where it turns into a scarf, which then is revealed to be hiding a small goblin.

"You're not match for me, Sarah!"

And so on. It's possible that I'm getting into far too much detail, but this dialogue between Sarah and Gareth is really what makes the movie so good. That and the songs, which are coming.

At any rate, it turns out that Toby has been taken to Gareth's castle, which is at the center of this great maze. He points out the window and suddenly they've been transported to these hills overlooking the entirety of Gareth's kingdom. If Sarah can solve the labyrinth within 13 hours she can have Toby back, otherwise he'll "become one of us, forever."

Gareth then disappears, which he's good at.

So Sarah heads down the hill to try to find an entrance into the labyrinth, and there she finds a goblin pissing into a lake. His name is Hoggle and he's very dismissive and unhelpful. "Oh, it's you," he says, as though he knows her. Hoggle is one of the first people to teach Sarah various lessons. One of them is simple: she sees these little Tinkerbell-like fairies all over the place and plucks one of out the air. It promptly bites her finger. "What did you expect fairies to do?" Hoggle says. Sarah learns that all is not what it seems in this place.

Eventually, she wheedles from Hoggle information on how to get in, and all she can see is one long corridor. One side is a little more cleared of debris than the other. She takes the other, and she runs and runs and there's this high-energy 80s music playing to help her on her way, but all she can see is one long corridor. It's frustrating and she collapses along the wall to rest, where she hears a tiny voice say "Hello." She looks down and there's a little worm there, who invites her "inside" to "meet the misses." She explains that she needs to get into the maze, and the worm tells her that the walls may look like walls, but are in fact walk-throughable. She tries it and voila! She's off.

"But don't go that way!" the worm cautions. "Never go that way!" She goes off the other way and the worm says, to himself, and us of course, "If she'd have kept on going down that way she'd have gone straight to that castle." One of the movie's many little ironies.

Now Sarah's in the maze proper and she comes up with the brilliant idea of marking with her lipstick arrows on stones to remind her where she's come from. But we see that once she marks a stone, these tiny little carrot-sized goblins that speak like Italian stereotypes having inhaled helium, start lifting and rotating her arrows. When she hits a deadend, she looks abck and sees what's happened and throws her lipstick to the ground. "What a horrible place this is. It's not fair!"

"That's right," a voice says, "it's not fair." Then a bunch of laughter. Behind her, the dead end has turned into two doors, each guarded by two men who are like, flipped on one another. Like the one standing on his own feet has the head of another hanging below the shield and that one's feet up by the standing one's ears. Make sense? So one red pair and one blue pair. They look a little like hound dogs. Apparently the only way onward is through one of those doors. One of them leads to the castle and the other one leads to ... "certain death."

"Well which door should I take?" Sarah asks.

"You can't ask us, you can only ask one of us. And I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies."

So Sarah needs to use some brainpower to figure out how to play the game while also getting the right answer. She goes up to the one on the left, the red one I think, and asks: "Would he tell me if this door leads to the castle." The goblin commiserates with his upside-down partner and says, "Yes?"

"Then the other door leads to the castle and this door leads to certain death," Sarah announces, proudly.

"But he could be telling the truth!" the goblin says.

"But then you wouldn't be," she says. "So if he says yes I know the answer is no."

"But I could be telling the truth!"

"Then he would be lying. So if he says yes, I still know the answer is no."

They let her pass through the door on the right and she says, "This labyrinth is a piece of cake!"

And then she falls through some trap door in the ground, and she's falling down this very dark hole, kind of like Alice's, except this one has all these weird grey arms and hands grabbing at her. Eventually they catch her and she hovers there, yelling, "Help!"

The hands then form into these faces, with fingers making lips and thumbs poking out like eyes. "What do you mean help, we are helping," one of the 'faces' says.

They ask whether she wants to go up or down, and Sarah stupidly, stupidly chooses down. They drop her into this completely dark hole and seal up the lid.

We cut to Gareth, who's hanging out in his lair in the castle. Oh, I forgot to mention that we've seen this lair before. When Sarah was running through the maze we cut to the castle and he sang this song with all his goblins. There was a lot of "magic jumping" doing on, with goblins hovering in the air. Gareth tossed Toby almost up to the ceiling. Very dangerous. Here, though, he announces that Sarah's in "the oubliette." The goblins laugh and Gareth yells that she should have given up by now, so we get our first indication that he's getting worried about how smart and resilient she's being.

Down in the oubliette, which comes from the French word for "forget," Sarah hears noises and suddenly there's Hoggle with a candle, explaining that he'll take her back to the beginning of the maze. But Sarah's gone too far to take him up on that deal, so she offers him her ring. Hoggle likes jewelry. It's made of plastic, which excited him even further. Sarah says he can have if it he takes her as far as he can, and he agrees. He then goes to the wall and finds a broom closet which he opens in, like, the other direction? Like he grabs where the hinges are? And it opens into a cave: the way out!

As they're walking through the cave, all these faces are cut into the rock walls. "DON'T GO OOOON!" one says, and they all start speaking in turn.

"GO BACK, WHILE YOU STILL CAN!"

"THIS IS NOOT THE WAAAAAY!"

"TAKE HEED AND GO NO FURTHER!"

"BEWAARRE. BEEEWAAAARE!"

"(soon it will be too late)"

This last one is like muttered, oddly enough. The rock man seems to be the effete one in the bunch. Sarah and Hoggle make it to a long corridor, where a goblin is begging with a little tin cup. "What have we here?" it says.

"Nothing," Hoggle says.

"Nothing? Nothing?!" It's Gareth in disguise!

"Nothing, tra la la?" he says, shaking what's now a puppet of a goblin.

He asks Sarah how she's enjoying the labyrinth and she says it's a piece of cake. This pisses Gareth off enough that he "finds" a clock hanging in the air, and speeds up the time by an hour, giving Sarah less time to find her brother. Then he plucks out another glass orb and throws it into the depths of the tunnel. "Let's see how you handle this little slice," he says.

From the blackness comes this big scary mass of rotating knives and blades. It fills the perfectly round tunnel and is coming right for them! They run for it, and fortunately break through a door in the side of the tunnel at just the right minute. There's a ladder here! They go up.

When they ran into Gareth he accused Hoggle of helping Sarah, rather than following his commands to lead her to the beginning. Hoggle denied any help and said he was just tricking Sarah. Clearly, it's hard to figure out whether to trust him, and so they talk it out as they head up the ladder. "I told him I was leading you back to the beginning just to throw him off the scent," Hoggle insists.

"How can I trust anything you say?" Sarah says.

"What choice have you got?" he asks, and Sarah concedes.

They surface inside a large urn back in the middle of the maze, except here most of the walls are hedges and not brick. There's a man with a bird for a hat that they talk to, but the only thing important about it is that Sarah refers to Hoggle as her friend, and he's visibly moved by this. So they keep going through the maze and hear a large scary roar. Hoggle runs off in fear and disavows anything about being Sarah's friend. But she won't be scared, and she goes around the corner to look. There, a large, bigfoot-like creature is hanging by his feet and these little armored goblins are poking him with spears.

And I'm not even halfway done. There are the fieries that can take their heads off, and the Bog of Eternal Stench and the dream sequence at the masquerade ball. So maybe there was some artistry in typing out movie plots after all....

Peck, Dale. Martin and John. New York: FSG, 1993.

2008-09-17T16:02:00.004-05:00

A collection of stories billed as a novel, and formed into a kind of novel by making all the characters have the same names. To wit: John is our protagonist, for the most part. Often the first-person narrator, he's young and gay and grows up in Kansas. His mother is named Bea. In some stories, Bea is dead. In some stories Henry is his father. In some stories, Henry is abusive. In all the stories, Martin is the beloved.

The result is almost a fantasia of all the possible forms a gay relationship might take. Peck takes a page from Genet in this regard. But in the stories'/chapters' presentation—separate titles, radically shifting point of view and settings—Martin and Johnisn't as cohesive as Our Lady of the Flowers. Our attempts to connect the John of "Blue Wet-Paint Columns" and the John of "The Search for Water" are futile. Causality is tossed aside, but never for any great effect.

It's a shame that whoever published this book decided it had to be a novel. Many of these stories just rip right through the reader. They have such a drive and energy at times. Here's the end of a story where Martin is both Bea's boyfriend and eventually John's bedmate:

All he ever wanted was both of us, and of course he could have neither in the end. That's like Martin, like his tears, his touches, his other empty words. You can have your dreams, he'd said in the kitchen, of how life should be and what your ideal lover should look like and how your first time should go, but he knew—and I do too, now—that you'll never get it, or never be able to hold on to it if you do. Not in this life, he'd told me: only when you're dead. (81)

Reading the book like a novel (which is to say moving from one story to the next as though merely time is passing) ruins all this great effect.

You may recall that Dale Peck used to be the book reviewer for The New Republic, the one who famously wrote that Rick Moody was the "worst writer of his generation." These days he write a column on the movies for fag-rag Out, and hasn't published a novel in a while. Maybe his career's over. Maybe karma's real.

Wallace, David Foster. Everything He'd ever Written Except Like Half of That Signifying Rappers Book He Co-Wrote. Boston: Back Bay? 1988?-2008.

2008-09-13T23:59:00.002-05:00

Just a mournful post to mention one of the most tragic deaths of my entire life, which sounds callous and awful seeing as how I never met him personally. Without a doubt, David Foster Wallace was my favorite writer living in America today. I will spend hours upon hours arguing with any of you how he was easily the most important creator of fictional texts in our lives. As J. Robert Lennon said, even when he was bad he was amazing. No writer working today understood exactly how and why contemporary American life became some sad and alienating.

That we'll never have another book of his to read means we'll never become the better people we can imagine ourselves to be. Okay so I'm drunk after a Huskers game: can I be allowed some deifying hyperbole?

You haven't read his novels? You and your life sucks for it.

Monette, Paul. Afterlife. New York: Avon Books, 1990.

2008-09-12T08:43:00.004-05:00

For the actual cover, just print the following below that image of Hockney's at left:

AFTERLIFE
A NOVEL BY THE AUTHOR OF BORROWED TIME
PAUL MONETTE
"Affecting... Engrossing... A radiant book" L.A. Times Book Review

Such a cover doesn't exist online though I've got the thing right in front of me. The standard cover given the book now is a lot more PG (well, because gay men are depicted it'd probably get PG-13), and probably more appropriate. Not only is there no naked men sunbathing in Monette's novel, but I don't even recall any pools. And yet there's that (admittedly stunning) ass there.

I bring all this up to talk about the thing that sucks the hardest about gay literary fiction. No one, certainly not gay men, has figured out how to respectably market it. We can't market it to straight audiences—is there any other cover that could more fully prevent any straight man from picking up this book in a bookstore?—and we can't market it to gay audiences, because literary fiction has to compete with all the other books that have naked men on the covers.

You can argue this is a trend with book-marketing in general (even The River Wife's cover has a nipple on it) but you'd be exaggerating. The other thing that sucks about gay fiction is that there's such poor amount of discrimination going on. Books that I want to argue are bad books get championed as "radiant" or even "brilliant."

First I'll try to explain why this is so, and then I'll talk about why this book is bad. Here's something Susie Bright (who's most interesting on that one episode of Six Feet Under where, I think, Claire's aunt threw that bitchin' party) had to say in the film version of Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet (I'm paraphrasing):

When you are growing up gay, you're so starved for images, for representations of yourself. And you basically sit through any movie just for the part where the lesbian comes in. You get so used to being nurtured by these crumbs.

She said it a lot less highfalutin-y than I just did, but trust me, she used the crumbs metaphor.

Monette's Afterlife isn't crumbs by any means; every central character is gay, and the three at its center are what he calls "AIDS widows" meaning they've each lost the men closest to them to the disease. It should, then, be a feast, but it's like fast food. Maybe tasty but bad for you. Um. Jesus let me can these stupid metaphors.

I am immediately distrustful of a novel in which its central character doesn't really have to worry about money or work and ends up with someone richer and more attractive than anyone who'll ever read this blog. This man, named Mark* in this novel, is there in the opening scene: "Mark's in television," says Steven, our protagonist. "Major heartthrob. Eats gorgeous men for breakfast" (10). And because this is a gay novel it's clear to everyone that we'll need to "see" this man naked, and hopefully let our stand-in have hot sex with him. And lo. And behold.

What Afterlife is then, immediately, is a fantasy. And yes, it's an important fantasy, at a time when gay men had watched so many of their friends and lovers die, one after another, from AIDS that a fantasy I'm sure was a small but welcome consolation. And I have nothing wrong with fantasies. Angels in America, which I've lavished praise on lots here, bills itself as "a gay fantasia on national themes" and I think I wouldn't have had a problem with Monette's novel if it made a similar move at the beginning. Instead it makes these weak attempts at history and contextualization. One character becomes a mild terrorist, calling in bomb threats to homophobic institutions. The novel satirizzes (I think? or maybe we're meant to honor it?) the new age culture of California in the 80s/90s. If the central plot arc wasn't such a fairy tale I could have taken these sideplots seriously.

The writing, also, is uneven. I was going to say bad, because, like: "For Steven [a travel agent] travel was over. He'd become a walking bad advertisement, like a misspelled sandwich board" (9). But then Monette surprises me with these moment of sharp observation. At a meeting for AIDS survivors: "Everyone seemed to be taking something different and was armed with newsletters and offprints, fierce as an eighth-grade science project" (75).

It's a great line, because so honest. And so why the phoniness in which all his characters are weakly dressed? And why did Richard McCann call it "an achievement of the imagination" in USA Today?

Here's a fun way to waste ten minutes. Go to your bigbox bookstore and take a look at the three shelves devoted to gay and lesbian books. Read the synopses and imagine that novels such as these were the only chance you'd get to see representations of yourself in print. Q: How quickly would you run to reality TV?
===
*I've got this thing brewing in my head somewhere about gay novelists and the names they give the beloved, or like superhot ideal man, that is at the center of them all. The name always starts with M. Here we have Mark. Andrew Holleran's seminal (!!!) Dancer from the Dance has one as does Kramer's Faggots released the same year. Holleran's beloved may even just be named M. You see it in Peck's Martin and John, and potentially others. Is it that M is the first letter of "man"? Or "mom"? Paging Dr. Freud....

Bell, Matt. "Ken Sent Me: Lost in the Land of Lounge Lizards." Hobart Fall 2008: 1-12.

2008-09-10T11:33:00.004-05:00

One of the first computer games I ever remember playing that didn't involve reading text, responding to that text, and then waiting to see where such a response would get me was Sierra On-Line's perennial favorite, Leisure Suit Larry. It belonged to one of my cousins, and three times a year or so when the family would gather together at his house I'd ... no! Sorry, the very first time I played it was on the computer owned by my oldest sister's 25-year-old boyfriend Rob, who had a kind of Dennis Quaid thing going on in the jaw and eyes. I hung out with my sister relentlessly in the days of my pre-adolescence, and I guess I'd follow her over to Rob's house in Fairfax, where I'd sit and play LSL for hours while the two of them did lord knows what in the basement.

At any rate, I just recently received the new issue of Hobart, which is one of the more exciting journals to appear in recent years. This issue's the games issue, and it opens with a great essay by Matt Bell that brought back all those old memories. Of especial interest was this: "I am perhaps a member of the first modern generation to learn about sex from a video game instead of from a movie or a book" (9). LSL taught him about sex at an age where his folks weren't ready to do it and in an era before the Internet would have all the answers.

Were I to write an essay about LSL I'd let the thing wallow in your standard It Was Troubling As A Closeted Teen To See These Images And Wonder: What About Me? So thanks to Matt for handling it much better.

Another thing that makes Hobart great is the regular "DVD Extras" to each issue that editor Aaron Burch posts online. Go see. Be on the lookout for a brief little companion piece by what I've been told is a promising young writer to whom we should all pay more attention.

Gide, André. The Counterfeiters (1925). New York: Vintage, 1973.

2008-09-03T12:21:00.002-05:00

A novel as much about writing as it is about coded homosexuality in 1920's France (a time, lest we forget, that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas just about ruled that town). Two rival writers, Edouard and Robert, fall for the same impressionable young boy, Olivier, who decides to run off with Robert, the more famous and less honorable of the two. Edouard, a kind of stand-in for Gide, is Olivier's "uncle" (through marriage), and in the loss of his beloved nephew opts instead of his schoolfriend, Bernard. The intersections that follow among writing instruction, publishing, entry into adulthood, and sexuality are noteworthy, but not too.

Also noteworthy is the form of this novel. It reads precisely like something out of Austen. Many of the novels are structured around the meeting of two characters. Even the titles indicate such: "Bernard and Olivier", "Vincent Meets Passavant at Lady Griffith's", Bernard Meets Olivier", etc. The novel has that 19th-century breadth of including everyone from the aristocracy to the poor girl pregnant out of wedlock. And this in 1925! The Great Gatsby came out in 1925!

I can't quite figure it out. There's a strong anti-decadent bent in this novel. Robert, the "comte" who drags Olivier to the dark side, is painted as a kind of Wildean figure, which is interesting given the friendship shared between Wilde and Gide. It's only when Olivier realizes he needs to abandon Robert and side himself with a more modernistic writer like his uncle that he is safe. Perhaps Gide's trying to resurrect an approach to the novel the decadents tried to do away with. I mean the novel ends with a boy's accidental suicide, out of the blue. It's practically right out of Dickens, but like act two of Dickens....

Tóibín, Colm. Love in a Dark Time and Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature. New York: Scribner, 2001.

2008-08-19T15:58:00.002-05:00

More of a series of profiles and reviews of gay male and female authors than a cohesive study of gay literature, this collection of essays is still a nice work of queer canon formation. Sure, Wilde, Mann, and Baldwin are already at the forefront of this canon, but Tóibín (is it fun typing out that name precisely with those finicky diacriticals? it is not) also includes such figures as Elizabeth Bishop, Francis Bacon, Thom Gunn, and Pedro Almodóvar in his study. His point is to call attention to certain writers and artists because they were homosexual, but not necessarily to dwell on their homosexuality. In other words, it's about finding and naming gay heroes, an interesting project for a writer who never wrote about homosexuality in general or his own in specific until he had ten books under his belt.

As I said it's not a very rich critical or theoretical work. Definitely the most enlightening thing I came across was his defense of the love between Wilde and Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, who everyone understands as having ruined the great Irish writer with his selfishness and cruelty. Why did Wilde put up with it? Tóibín writes:

In most societies, most gay people go through adolescence believing that the fulfillment of physical desire would not be matched by emotional attachment. For straight people, the eventual matching of the two is part of the deal, a happy aspect of normality. But if this occurs for gay people, it is capable of taking on an extraordinarily powerful emotional force, and the resulting attachment, even if the physical part fizzles out, or even if the relationship makes no sense to the outside world, is likely to be fierce and enduring. [. . .] This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas.

It almost made me not loathe the boy. Almost.

Harrison, Colin. "Mrs. Corbett's Request". The New York Times Magazine. 17 Aug 2008, 22-25.

2008-08-17T13:56:00.003-05:00

I don't have much to say about this one, just that it's the first time I've received the Sunday Times for enough of a stretch that I've been able to read one of its new Funny Pages serials every step of the way. And it was awesome. The story itself was no great wonder—a guy who works in some investigative capacity (for money managers?) in some large company in New York is asked to find some answers surrounding the sudden death of the late owner's middle-aged son—but the experience of reading it was rewarding in some easy, weird way.

Clearly, reading what may have amounted to a novel (how many words altogether, I wonder?) over the course of several months doesn't lead to a lot of retention. I remember that one guy who was a real private investigator, and the other guy who had a ton of money and lived under some kind of cloak of privacy out in the country, but their names? No clue. And how neatly did these weird characters fit into the central story, in the end? Not very well.

But it's a mystery, so who cares? I've expressed before how much I like reading longer fiction in serial format, and decried how rarely we get to do it. What other formats out there exist, anyone know? I've run across Five Chapters once or twice before, but haven't ever spent time with a story.

If I didn't have a string of Mad Men episodes to watch, I might take more time to talk about the Web as an incredible tool for the proliferation of serial fiction, and then some more time with some shallow ideas on how serialization can let a writer get away with more spottiness, or maybe even sloppiness, because of the way it gives us periods of time between episodes to forget everything other than the essentials. What are those essentials, though? I might answer this question, or try to. Instead: TV!

(Discuss: anyone know anything about this writer, Colin Harrison? I wonder, among avid fans of mystery fiction, whether this one holds up as a good one. He sure as hell beats dull Patricia Cornwell.)

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986.

2008-08-15T12:48:00.005-05:00

I put this on my comps list. It's another Important Novel. But this time I read it like a bitch, and found it a lot less unbearable than I used to. White Noise is best read as an historical farce, like The Country Wife or The Taming of the Shrew. It's an anatomy in the Northrop Frye sense, where characters announce in dialogue all the clear ideas they're meant to embody. Which of course is classic DeLillo; it's a mistake to write this guy off because his characters don't speak realistically.

It's not a mistake to write him off entirely, though. I've prattled on about DeLillo here before (and in fact, after rereading that post, just deleting the opening paragraph to this one, which repeated almost word for word the opening paragraphs of the first one...now who's unoriginal?), how tired he makes me. All of his standard faults are here, and for fun I will lay them out.

Fault the First: the obviousness of his seemingly pop-mystic ideas
Shall I give him a break and admit he was writing in 1984? Given what he had to say about "the last techno rave" in 2003, I will not. Here's Don on the modern supermarket:

Apples and lemons tumbled in twos and threes to the floor when someone took a fruit from certain places in the stacked array. There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension. (36)

It's called an industrial-sized air-conditioning unit, Don, and it's as boring as a baseball game. Passages like this are just so old-fashioned. Try getting away with this in your fiction. I know this is meant to be poetic. Ironically poetic, but can it these days be read as anything other than overwritten, amateur-hour horsecrap?

Fault the Second: his swooning love for the deadpan non sequitur
It's just everywhere in this novel:

[S]he wants to be the first to go. She sounds almost eager. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in the night. It isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness.

MasterCard, Visa, American Express.

I tell her I want to die first. (100)

Ha! This is such dorky, ridiculous writing!

Fault the Third: his boomer sanctimony
This novel is by needs obsessed with consumerist spaces. Malls, supermarkets, etc. And J.A.K. Gladney, the Hitler studies chair who narrates the book, spends much time on how adept he and his family are at traversing these mystical consumerist spaces. It gets pretty self-congratulatory, but as I can't find a passage you'll have to take my word for it. At any rate, at some point near the opening of the novel, the old blind man Gladney's wife reads to gets lost with his sister in the mall. Here's what Gladney has to say about it:

It was probably just the vastness and strangeness of the place and their own advanced age that made them feel helpless and adrift in a landscape of remote and menacing figures. The Treadwells didn't get out much. (59 emphasis added).

It's here (in the book, and it's here in my post now that I feel I should turn to "serious study," as something legible has to go in my final, proper annotated bibliography) that I found it easy to dismiss most of the things Gladney has to say. Here's where the farce came in. Because is a man so hypersensitive to everything happening to him and around him so unable to utter lines like those above and not realize their easy application to his own self, his own place in the world? Gladney likes to think he gets out much, but other than the supermarket and the campus, he spends all his time at home. Even that trip to the mall is rendered as a kind of special treat for the family. And if there's anything clearly the matter with Gladney it's that his own "advanced age" has made him fall adrift within his landscape. He may be another sanctimonious prick (there's a bit of a glut of them in this novel), but his son Heinrich's deftness in this world is far greater in relation to Gladney's than Gladney's is in relation to the Treadwells. Doesn't he see this? Doesn't DeLillo?

Probably not. I imagine DeLillo doesn't get out much, either. And when he does I'm sure he's armed with a pencil and pad, boring the shit out of all of his "friends".

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. London: Pan Books, 1982.

2008-08-12T16:23:00.003-05:00

An important novel. Rushdie's narcissistic narrator, Saleem Sinai, achieves this narcissism from being the first child born on the day India won its independence from Britain. He got a letter from the prime minister making it official, and from this momentous, synchronous birth, the history of Saleem is twinned step-by-step to the history of India. This is what makes it An Important Novel, and I don't much care for Important Novels.

Saleem's point of view is a slippery, deceptive thing throughout the book. He and all the other titular children born between 12:00am and 12:59am that first day of India's nationhood all grow up to have X-Men-like powers. One can change its sex, one can warp between bodies of water. Saleem gets telepathy, and what this enables him to do is act in a classic 19th-century omniscient way in his narration, dipping right into other characters' heads at moments when its convenient for him and his narrative. At other times he likes to refer to himself in the third person. This becomes particularly interesting in the years he spends in the Pakistani army, when an accident causes him to forget his own name and answer only to the nickname "the buddha." For a hundred pages or so we hear Saleem tell the story of "the buddha" and only through certain physical details (Saleem was born with an extremely large nose) do we connect it with our narrator.

Oh, it's all too much. Saleem has telepathy for a while, and then he's able to smell so well he can smell people's fears and secrets. There are surely other superhuman powers I've forgotten by now. Reading Rushdie's big novel made me think a lot of Nabokov's great small one, Pale Fire. Mostly because I kept wishing I could put Rushdie down and go back to something entertaining and not so overwrought and self-important. But really it's this idea of the narcissism of first-person narrators. All first-person narrators are narcissists on some level—here, listen, I have this story I have to tell you, even if I don't want to, and I'm the best person to tell it, so listen. And I don't have the answers here, not yet. But one thing I can't figure out is why the glorious, ridiculous self-absorption on the part of Nabokov's Kinbote is so glorious and ridiculous and engaging and genuinely funny, and why that of Rushdie's Saleem is so off-putting and grating and onanistic.

I think Rushdie intends for us to roll our eyes comically at his narrator, at least at times, and I'm sure many readers who love this book (which is like everyone alive) did as intended. And I'm sure when Saleem's aunt says he "[a]lways thought [he was] growing up to be God or what. And why? Some stupid letter the P.M.'s fifteenth assistant under-secretary must have sent [him]" (390-91), we're meant to dig in to such a passage as evidence that Saleem isn't the most reliable narrator he likes to pretend he thinks he isn't. But I don't buy it. Something about the politics behind the books shows otherwise.

Kimbote is from Zembla, a silly made-up place, and so he's easy to write off. But Saleem isn't just from India, he is India, and so we have to honor him, and it's exhausting work. It's like going to a family reunion, and that jackass cousin who always beat up on you and called you a faggot is now a disabled war veteran.

That's what reading this book was like.

Scott, James. "The Strings Attached". One Story. VI: 6, 2007.

2008-07-28T16:09:00.003-05:00

Jim Scott's a friend I made at Sewanee, and he's very funny. He's the sort of funny guy one wants immediately to work up to the level and quickness of, to match jokes with jokes of your own that make him giggle as you also are giggling. This story I thought was going to be sad—it opens with the death of three-week-old twins—but then turns funny and silly in the ways of many standard quirky stories you run across these days. A strange town name (Tangent) and offbeat hobbies and jobs (philately, meatpacking, a bowling alley named Kegler's Paradise, etc.).

The story meanders in a nice way, unmoored subtly from the tug of a plotline, or maybe better said the ticking of a plot's clock. And then Arthur, its central character, decides on a whim to get a dog and the dog needs a names lead to the twins who never got names and the story gets all knotted again.

In the end it's a story about needing for one reason or another to stay put in the place you live your life. Arthur could leave Tangent. He should, probably, but he won't. There's those titular strings. And so because of this, I think Jim's able to take it easy on plot; rather than rush everything toward one character's conflict-resolution, we're given a town, and the people in the town.

It's a good new rule for writing: Give Us The Town And The People In The Town.

Speaking of rules of writing, I never did finish my Christine Schutt post. Essentially what I learned from her is what I think (according to another Sewanee funnyguy) she learned from Gordon Lish and according to the notes I took is this:

When you're writing a story, you aren't looking ahead to see what will happen next. You aren't adding new elements to make a story more complex. Instead, you look behind yourself. You're always looking back at the last sentence you wrote, and as you look back at it you ask yourself: What can I extract from this sentence that will darken or deepen the story? That's it. Every time you need to move forward it's a matter of darkening the story. It's a matter of going to a place you don't know anything about. It's a matter of surprise, and turning away from what you've previously written again and again, to the point where you've turned 180 degrees and come to the exact opposite of where you've begun, and but then turning away even from that, so that at the end of the story you are where you begun, except that everything's changed.

Despite the use of the blockquote tag that's not a quote or anything, but it pretty much sums it up. What's great about this is that it not only gives you an idea of how Christine puts together a story (or Gary Lutz or Diane Williams are any others of that ilk), but it applies even to "classic" or "traditional" stories we've all already talked about a thousand times before. It becomes a whole new way of thinking about structure.

Here are "A&P"'s opening sentences:

In walk these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread....

Christine reads the girls in nothing but bathing suits as the element Updike extracts to darken the story, because here of course is the danger. You have all sorts of issues surrounding dress and decorum and sex and gender and class and privilege here, and so, she argues, while you think in this story these girls will be kicked out is it the narrator who leaves the store in the end. And this is the turning away from what's been written into places that will surprise you.

There's another great example in another canonical story (O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") but I don't have the text handy to quote from it. Just pay attention to what the grandmother says in the opening paragraph and what happens at the end.

Here's an example from All Souls:

Damn. Her mother was in the dressing room. "Mom!"

"I'm sorry, I couldn't wait. You were all so beautiful." Mrs. Van de Ven, jostled, backed away from the door, watching. Far-fetched hair, lots of hair, spectacularly flying free of popping hair bands, hair astonishingly clean and glassy. If she could touch it..."

"Mother, please, we're all getting changed here."

"All right, all right, all right, all right," and she walked out to where the other parents were waiting with flowers."

Lisa said, "Everything looks like shit to me after my mother has seen it. (158, emphasis added)

Schutt. Christine. All Souls. Orlando: Harcourt, 2008.

2008-07-21T00:12:00.003-05:00

This is a novel about an 18-year-old girl who is sick with cancer that I've devoured over the past two days, while simultaneously attending the Sewanee Writers' Conference and listening over the phone to the news of my friend Sarah dying of cancer. Who has died of cancer (how terrible that sudden use of the past tense). It's been for me a very important book to have at arm's reach. Here's how I got to buying it.

Schutt's my reader here, which means she is the one faculty member who has read my manuscript closely enough to lead discussion on it in class and sit with me one on one to talk about it in specific and writing in general. She also has given arguably the best reading at the conference so far, despite the fact that it was in the late afternoon, as opposed to the more high-profile readings in the evening, after dinner. For better or for worse, American Letters is one of the last cultural realms in this country that suffers (I think the word apt) from elder worship—so argued A.O. Scott in that "Best Novels of the Past 25 Years" things in the Times a while back—and as Sewanee is entrenched in the south as much as it is in the world of American letters there's elder-worship going on here in spades. Schutt is not a young writer but she certainly is a new one and for me it was very important that she of all the faculty here has most recently been accoladed by national awards. Sewanee's got award-winners everywhere in the faculty, but Schutt's Florida was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005, which was like yesterday, and to me this made her the obvious candidate when trying to figure out who I should study for.

Just because she got a nomination? I mean, she didn't even win. No, it's not that. It's because, and I hear the way this term sounds before I even type it, she's relevant. She's, like, writing now, and that writing she's doing now is unlike what was winning awards many, many years ago.

All Souls is a campus novel—so beloved genre—and concerns itself mostly with the senior girls surrounding Astra, the dying protagonist. And they're girls in full. Schutt, in her reading, called them "feckless girls" and then proceeded to read a section of the novel (each of the nine chapters is divided into titles subsections) about one of these feckless girls, Marlene:

Marlene picked her nose and sent what she found in it flying across the room. She was a dirty girl, she knew that much, and whatever the girls in school suspected her of—stealing, farting, lying—was true. The slut part was not true, although she wished it were, but all the dirty parts—yes, she was that girl. Look at her messy room, the unresolve of such disorder. She had no ambition but to dizzy herself into absence. (12, emphasis added)

I italicized that last line because it leads me to what I love the most about Schutt's writing, which I learned from her over coffee this morning, what has completely changed the way I go about putting a story together, getting from point A to point B. It involves, actually, forgetting about point B all together, but I'm extraordinarily tired, and I just this morning lost a close friend, and so on the off chance that you've come here quickly after my posting, you'll need to return, tomorrow I hope, and get the remainder of it then.

Ball, Jesse. Parables & Lies. Lincoln: The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2008

2008-07-14T09:44:00.002-05:00

While fairy tales aren't exactly fables they still instruct, even if the lesson one learns at the end is Don't Trust That Old Woman. Or: While Your Father May Have Remarried You Certainly Shouldn't Love This New Mother The Way You Loved Your Birth Mother And If You Want To Know Why Just Give Her One Month And One Glimpse At The Household's Coffers And You'll See What I Mean. The best Grimm's tales are the ones that end with this kind of resolution, this "Trust me, I know what I'm talking about" voice.

Here's the end of "Cat and Mouse in Partnership", which begins "A certain car had made the acquaintance of a mouse.":

[S]carcely had [the mouse] spoken before for the cat sprang on her, seized her, and swallowed her down. Verily, that is the way of the world.

Also great are the endings in which something idiomatic has been lost in translation. From "The Bremen Town Musicians" (Die Bremen Stadtmusikanten):

After this the robbers never again dared enter the house; but it suited the four musicians of Bremen so well that they did not care to leave it any more. And the mouth of him who last told this story is still warm.

Jesse Ball is familiar enough with Grimm and these kind of things pop up all over the place in Parables & Lies and that's why I loved it. Most of the stuff in the collection that sounds like it's a parable ends up teaching us nothing at all, ends up sometimes being anti-helpful, if that's possible. One of the stories is about a man who needs to build a house for his family, and it gives us some good folk-wisdom instruction: "He was a poor man, and his family was poorer still, for money is lost in every passing of hands, not least from the wages of a dutiful husband." This man's problem is whether to build his house with one door or two, and right at the moment that we think we'll get the kind of solution that will help us in our own lives, something dangerous hijacks the story:

[D]ay and night, the sun must be allowed to pass. Not just through all the broad and empty places, but through this town of man, and through that town of man, through anger and misfortune, through pettiness and filth. And every sun will be a deeper, a crueler sun. And every sun will know far better the shape, the broad dull shape, of the wound it makes on your face and arms, the wound it presses, deep through the windows of your eyes, where such things will be remembered, but can never be made good.

This is a book of constant danger-ridden hijacking, which is great for a book with so many road stories, so many travelers passing through the pages. You should buy a copy.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory (1967). New York: Vintage International, 1989.

2008-07-11T08:40:00.002-05:00

Nabokov had a brother named Sergey who was 10.5 months younger than him and, critics have discovered, gay. He died in a concentration camp, where in this book Nabokov says he was put for criticizing the Hitler regime. Critics have suggested he was put there for his sexuality. I bring all this up because it obviously interested me on a personal level, but also because it made me rethink (or perhaps just think more deeply about) Pale Fire.

The charge has been leveled against Nabokov (dumbly, well after his death, with the grand effect being "Who cares?) that he was homophobic. As a gay man, I don't buy it. Granted, I've read only four books. But Speak, Memory makes clear the remorse N feels for his poor relationship with Sergey, and without ruining too much of the magic of the book, I saw this remorse in Pale Fire.

And I'm especially reminded of that moment in Lolita when Humbert tells us he was once diagnosed (by a psychotherapist, and even my cursory scan of Nabokov's writings makes it abundantly clear that the man dismissed Freudianism wholesale) as a homosexual. His reaction is to crack up, and in this laughter I see Nabokov laughing not at homosexuals, but at the culture of the 1950s that saw homosexuality as some illness to be treated, that could easily conflate homosexuality and pedophilia as two sides of the same coin.

All said, this book wasn't too engrossing. Incredibly written, but I found myself scanning over pages at times. Here's my favorite passage, favorite for the way N. starts with an ailment I share and yet pushes it to an almost mad-scientist amplitude. And the language!:

All my life I've been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest enthusiasm; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years, with the approach of a far more thorough and still more risible disintegration, which nowanights, I confess, detracts much from the routine terrors of sleep, I have grown so accustomed to my bedtime ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar ax is coming out of its great velvet-lined double-bass case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing—except one token light in the potentially refulgent chandelier of Mademoiselle [his governess]'s bedroom, whose door, by our family doctor's decree (I salute you, Dr. Sokolov!), remained slightly ajar. Its vertical line of lambency (which a child's tears could transform into dazzling rays of compassion) was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim and my mind melt in a travesty of the death struggle. (108-9)

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (Abridged). Audiobook: 200?

2008-07-10T19:39:00.004-05:00

Really boring and sentimental, N and I thought, with dull language almost throughout. Sentimental and dull with such sentences as, "All my life, I'd been around men. That night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman." Ha! Boring because nothing bad really ever happens to Amir, the narrator. He likes to talk about the tragedy in his life, but whatever deaths happen around him (and I guess there are a bunch) don't create any real problems for Amir. They're just sad. He and his dad leave Afghanistan (pronounced by Mr. Hosseini as /ahf-HOHN-ee-STAHN/) without much trouble. Someone in their group is threatened to be raped, another shot, and some understanding higher-ranked military guy suddenly appears to save the day. Amir falls in love and marries the first Afghan woman he meets. She is beautiful and of a good family. He's told he has a gift for storytelling and decides to write a novel, which he does in the matter of a paragraph. After sending it out to agents he gets representation within months, and the book is taken by a New York house. So easy!

We announced our dislike of the novel at a gathering of friends yesterday, and such outrage! I think it was a factor of abridgement. I announced to N on the drive that if I was ever so lucky to have one of my books produced in audio format I would make a series of demands:

I don't want to read it. This isn't just a factor of universal I Hate My Recorded Voice queasiness, but more a personal factor of my not liking acting or performance in general. To be forced in a studio to read, aloud, "'I said shut up!' he yelled"! No thank you. (Of course, another solution is just not to write shitty dialogue.)
I get to choose who does read it. I mean, Ann Coulter or Carson Kressley reading something I wrote? No thank you.
I don't want to edit the book for an abridgement. An abridged version is fine, I just don't want to have to be the one who decides what gets cut. I imagine this (and, well, all of these) is the job of an editor, and I probably wouldn't ever have to worry about it.
No new sentences written by the editor. Like, say there's a paragraph that contains a necessary plot element but is long and maybe even overwritten (in my stuff? never!), words can be excised from said paragraph, but no new words can be inserted. No summary sentence can be composed to stand in its place. This is getting very nitpicky, but really, I don't want people reading a sentence I didn't write and attributing it to me.

I just wonder how much of this last one happened with TKR. Maybe abridging a book isn't at all difficult. Maybe all you have to do is remove all obstacles and hardship, and just usher protagonists toward the goals set for them in a matter of a paragraph or two.

All I know is, good timing, Khaled. Very good timing.

Colbert, Stephen. I Am America (And So Can You!) (Abridged). Audiobook: 2008.

2008-07-10T09:24:00.003-05:00

Stephen Colbert (that is, "Stephen Colbert") is Roman Catholic! This surprised me, does it surprise you? All I know about the right is that they hate rational discussion and think Catholics aren't Christian—at least this is what I learned from Chick tracts. My favorite thing I remember from the book was a amendment he gives to the term Judeo-Christian: "Think of it like Sears-Roebuck. Judeo is Roebuck."

Though I was told the book has charts and graphs and funny visual jokes, I'd recommend it in the audiobook version. It's just long enough in the abridgement, and while I like Colbert and his show the whole joke of it doesn't have much lasting power. Which is to say it's sort of a theme-and-variations approach that I don't think I'd want to read the entirety of. Plus on the audiobook you get Colbert's great delivery on lines such as the above, and folks like Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello reading certain characters.

Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Audiobook: 2008.

2008-07-09T08:20:00.005-05:00

N & I drove to Michigan this past weekend for a friend's wedding, held in a copse of trees at the far end of a field of grass, with fabric pinned high on the treetrunks and hanging down, becoming the ersatz columns of the cathedral that the man who led the ceremony asked us to see all around us.

Here's my take on Sedaris, or maybe my take on Sedaris before I listened to this book: Naked is easily his best work because it's his most thorough, his most unencumbered by his own fame. If we were to compare his oeuvre to MTV's The Real World, Naked is the original New York season (despite not being Sedaris's first book). In New York, the cast members were people already living in the city (with the Alabama exception) and trying to make a living; the whole "be on TV" part of it was something they dealt with in the name of free housing. Now, of course, teens run at the chance to go live in some other city just to "have their lives taped," just for the fame it might bring, and what they actually do on the show is dull as a result. Naked is the masterpiece because the essays therein are longer and more satisfying; the whole thing is memoir in its finest form of sifting through the past to let someone understand how life (or maybe just a life) gets lived.

Then he got wildly famous and was able to publish any old essay in any old magazine. This, I recognize, is a factor of his talent both as a writer and a humorist, not a factor of his name. Still, even as "far back" as Me Talk Pretty One Day, I left much of the essays with a sense of incompletion. "Picka Pocketoni"? Why wasn't this narrator doing anything? It wasn't enough just to stand there and report, I felt.

A lot of WYAEiF is about how wealthy and glamorous Sedaris's life is, and how wealthy he was growing up, which is something I'd never really sensed before. He talks about the cork-lined dining room at his parents' house with the (at the time) contemporary Danish modern furniture. (N got especially excited at this point, and I hope the print version includes a photo.) He talks about the $20K he spent to quit smoking by moving to Tokyo for three months. He mentions an $8K first-class ticket he bought. He mentions a lot of airplane rides; I think at least three of the essays have their roots in something that happened to D.S. while flying across the Atlantic. This smacks to me of a writer who's run out of things to write about; and yet there are essays about old neighbors ("That's Amore", one of the collection's best), so it seems Sedaris still has enough memories to last a few more books.

I heard from Sean Wilsey that in some interview somewhere, Sedaris confessed that he was getting to the point in his life where he'd act in a scene explicitly for the purposes of creating something to write about. I remember a friend of mine back in Pittsburgh doing this sort of thing all the time. He had a cover story in the alt-weekly about skydiving, and it was clear from the piece itself that 90 percent of the motivation behind his going sky-diving was that he'd write about it for an alt-weekly. Maybe Sedaris has a history of this (I can't imagine he just wanted to up and go to a nudist colony on his own; clearly, he saw great material in the exercise) but something about the heft of those earlier essays ("Santaland Diaries", too) makes them seem more honest. In the interview, Sedaris was talking specifically about the decision to cough so hard on a plane that his throat lozenge would be expelled from his mouth. He thought, Let's see what happens, and coughed. This action begins one of the essays in this book, and it's never revealed as constructed.

I'm not aligning myself with that camp of Memoir Exposers For The Truth. My complaint isn't that Sedaris makes things up. It's that at one time, behind the essays, was this guy David Sedaris, or as close to the guy as we could get, and now it seems that behind all these essays lies "The Writer David Sedaris". I'm not making myself clear.

(Which, incidentally, is one thing I can't fault Sedaris for. His timing in writing is impeccable and his descriptions apt and lovely in places. Oh and funny. The book in just incredibly, unendingly funny.)

---

To come: Colbert's I Am America and So Can You! and ... The Kite Runner?

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (1962). New York: Berkley Medallion, 1969.

2008-06-27T22:22:00.004-05:00

A novel in the form of a work of criticism. After the death of the renowned poet John Shade, his neighbor and colleague Charles Kinbote gets hold of the 999-line autobiographical poem he'd been writing; what we read are Kinbote's foreword to Shade's poem, the poem itself, and then more than 150 pages of Kinbote's commentary on the poem. Oh, and an index. What makes the text readable like a novel (and ultimately what saves Pale Fire from being merely a fun exercise in pomo intertextualities) is that Kinbote for one reason or another is convinced that Shade's poem is a narrative of his (Kinbote's) motherland, Zembla—specifically its recent tragic revolution.

This is where most of the book's comedy comes from. Line 12 contains the phrase "that crystal land" and Kinbote makes a note here that begins "Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country," though of course nothing in the line or those surrounding it appears to make any reference of the sort. In a note about Shade's use of winter imagery, he writes: "One is too modest to suppose that the fact that the poet and his future commentator first met on a winter day somehow impinges here on the actual season." (This sentence shows up in the index, under Kinbote, Charles, Dr.; "his modesty".)

Pale Fire is probably the best novel I've read all year, except maybe for one, which was a reread, which was Lolita, so it goes without saying that I need more Nabokov in my future. He's so incredibly good at exposing villainy and heroism as false, elusive things we try in vain to hold onto as readers. See his treatment of Humbert Humbert in Lolita (alluded to here and there in PF, along with Pnin), and see here his treatment of Kinbote. It's clear from the start that Kinbote is perhaps the worst person possible to edit Shade's final poem—his reading of the text is self-serving and flat-out ridiculous at parts. But by the end of the book he becomes the best and most perfect commentator for it, with his reading lifting what is otherwise a plain and sometimes boring poem (written in rhyming heroic couplets) up to something much more strange and so much more beautiful.

This one and Lolita reaffirm my faith in the first-person point of view. I write fiction almost exclusively in it, these days, and as I do and as I slowly plan a novel in such a POV I remind myself that it is a limited one and that a novel told in such a manner cannot have the wonderful breadth of those told in the third person. Nabokov seems to want to argue otherwise. So much world, here, in 224 pages! So much packed in every sentence! Here's Kinbote on jumping off a tall building:

Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

And here he is on senior citizens:

I find nothing more conducive to the blunting of one's appetite than to have none but elderly persons sitting around one at a table, fouling their napkins with the disintegration of their make-up, and surreptitiously trying, behind noncommittal smiles, to dislodge the red-hot torture point of a raspberry seed from between false gum and dead gum.

And here's one that just stuns me for its specificity, for how much it creates just in its collection of nouns:

They used to hand out to the kitchen boys Russian caramels with plums or cherries depicted on the rich luscious six-cornered wrappers that enclosed a jacket of thinner paper with the mauve mummy inside; and lustful country girls were known to creep up along the drungen (bramble-choked footpaths) to the very foot of bulwark when the two silhouetted against the now flushed sky sang beautiful sentimental military duets at eventide on the rampart.

All this, and a queer hero we get to laugh with and not at. This, in 1962!

Wilsey, Sean. Oh the Glory of It All. New York: Penguin, 2006.

2008-06-26T16:23:00.003-05:00

Now that it's the summer I'm supposed to be reading and blogging regularly. And I'm not, though! A few excuses: my writing abilities have been so scattershot lately that when I feel them being, like, good, I put it all on my taxidermy stuff. Here's an example: in the opening sentence to this post I tossed some words around in my end to end it more "creatively" and the first/only thing I could come up with was simply awful (cross out regularly and insert "with the regularity sought after by so many seniors"...that's right a bowel-movement joke).

Oh I need another excuse to justify that plural. Well I spent a week in a workshop with the writer of this book I'm trying to write about. It was his first time teaching, and while I didn't take the sort of notes I took when I had a workshop with Jim Shepard (a privilege any writer should donate body parts to earn), I had a good time. Wilsey's pedagogy stems from the "let's read this very long work of nonfiction and talk about how good it is." Sometimes such an approach is nice, especially when one is burned out on writing workshops (I think this is a form of success; sitting in a room and listening to people talk about writing techniques makes me not to want to think more about writing and its possibilities, it makes me want to leave the room and write).

I'm in the position again of reviewing a book written by someone I can maybe call a friend. I'll do my best. Wilsey's memoir begins with a great three sentences. "In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. Therefore we were happy to excess." The kid was unimaginably rich, living in the penthouse of the San Francisco high rise his father owned, flying via his father's chopper to the Napa Valley house at which they weekended. Then his folks divorce and his life goes haywire.

Part two of the book tells the story of all the schools Wilsey was shipped around to, starting at an ultraelite New England prep school, which he failed out of. Then a New England boarding school for flunkies that he flunked out of. Then a crazy psychotic superChristian school he escaped from. Then an enlightened school that saved his life. Fortunately for him, it's in Tuscany.

I skipped through much of this section. I gave this book an unfair reading because of my own ideas about rich people. At first I was all, "Okay so I'll need to find a way to care about this person's problems when he has incredible amounts of money at his disposal," and watching young Wilsey be used grossly as a pawn in his parents' divorce (his father almost immediately remarried his mother's best friend, who almost immediately became a total ruthless C-word) was enough for me to give him all the sympathy he deserved. Plus the details are so good.

But I don't think his difficulty in schools makes for a compelling narrative. I'm in a living room in Virginia right now and my copy of the book is, last time I saw it, in my office in Nebraska, so I can't give you an example. We watch as Wilsey befriends an impopular kid then sees how to strategically publicly destroy this kid in order to make better friends, then to feel some remorse about it. It's every high school narrative, transposed to rich-kid milieus.

The final section of the book synthesizes the antithesis of his boyhood's thesis, if I can be allowed to destroy whatever a Hegelian dialectic is. Again, I'd give you some idea of how, but I Finished! this like two weeks ago, if not more. My midyear resolution is just to sit down and write about a book right when I Finish! it. It's not like any of you are looking for quality, you just want this thing updated with the regularity of an infant not yet switched to solid foods.

Adams, Stephen. The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980.*

2008-06-10T17:53:00.003-05:00

"Contemporary fiction" here means 1950 to, oh, 1975, maybe. A small window, and it's a shame that Adams didn't do his study ten years later, once Stonewall's effects had filtered into the literature and certainly once AIDS changed the whole idea of homosexual heroism. The biggest shame about this book, though, is in its approach—Adams doesn't try to say anything about the homosexual as hero, as his title promises. No theories are put forth; the words "hero" and "heroism" are strangely absent from much of the commentary. Instead he looks at a dozen or so homosexual heroes in specific: Forster's Maurice, Genet's prisoners, Baldwin's David, Ackerley's Frank, Rechy's dull hustler.

The whole book amounts to a lot of very good close-reads of novels. This is not to criticize the book; such is its aim. But in the end its this limited aim that prevents the book from being relevant today, not merely in regard to its pre-AIDS-era publication. Why can't someone write a study, given everything I've picked up from the laziest of readings of Mann and Huysmans, that works out a theory of gay heroism (N.B.: not "gay heroics") that runs alongside, if not counter to, a heterosexual one? Surely someone has. Let me know if you know it.

Harris, Daniel. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1997.*

2008-06-10T17:33:00.002-05:00

The central claim of this book is that since Stonewall, whatever it is that has formed and shaped gay culture has transformed. Well, of course; such a thing is inevitable when the people that make up a culture move from being hidden and shameful to being public and proud. Harris's argument, though, is that such gay cultural artifacts as diva worship, camp, drag, kink, and pornographic film and literature have become inversions of their former selves. Whereas gay men once worshiped Hollywood divas for the strength and wisdom in their over-the-top performances, now those divas are lampooned. Whereas porn directors edited sex scenes such that the rhythm of the cuts replicated the sexual experience in the point of the view of the men having sex, now video-porn is structured with extended takes that create (rather than replicate) a distant, voyeuristic experience.

These transformations are for Harris lamentations, but complexly so. For much of the book, it seems he's a kid of gay Andy Rooney wondering where the good, simple times of the 50s and 60s went. It's almost as though he's sad we've fought so hard to be assimilated into the mainstream. "[A]s oppression decreases," he writes, "[t]he unfortunate consequence will be that our need to produce art will begin to wane, and we will feel less inclined to assert ourselves as the proverbial tastemakers of our society" (7).

It's a ridiculous claim, but one thing he's right about is that gay culture seems stuck (well, U.S. culture seems stuck; and that's really one of the problems with these essays: how much of porno's POV transformations can be seen as a result of increased gay liberation, and how much are really just a factor of the switch from film to video?) in a kind of perpetual adolescence. Harris twins the coming-out narrative with the coming-of-age narrative, and for him the surplus of such novels since 1980 has kept gay literature in a kind of thematic rut, or as he terms it, "an emotionally stagnant state of euphoria." "Homosexuals," he writes, "are not permanent intellectual convalescents," and while it's a good point to make, Harris doesn't try to locate any means of salvation for gay culture. Re-adopting the poses and practices of our pre-Stonewall culture of fear and exile isn't any kind of solution.

McNally, Terrence. Corpus Christi. New York: Grove, 1998.

2008-05-28T18:53:00.003-05:00

Here, McNally reimagines Jesus Christ as a gay man, and brings the story of his life up to date. Judas is written as his lover, moody, brooding, choosing to betray Jesus just for a spot in history. McNally's point in this exercise is to argue for a theology of inclusion:

Judas: What is His crime?

High Priest: Blasphemy.

Judas: Because He says He's the son of God?

High Priest: No, because He says you're the son of God as well.

Judas: We're all the son of God.

High Priest: Unless you're looking for trouble, I would keep that to myself. The son of God is a cocksucker? I don't think so. We need sinners. (65)

Something about the casting—all the roles except for Jesus and Judas are played varyingly by a "choir" of eleven other men—prevents the play from transcending beyond its central conceit. In other words, there are no real characters here we can attach ourselves to, just re-presentations of mythic figures. Kushner's approach at negotiating gay people within Judeo-Christian belief seems, perhaps only in its epic scope, a greater success.

Fielder, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960.*

2008-05-28T18:04:00.003-05:00

That Bonds-star up there is to indicate I didn't actually Finish! this book—not all of it, at least. But if anyone important asks, I read every word.

At any rate, this is one of the most famous studies of the American novel, which Fiedler argues (looking most closely at Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain) is built on a foundation of sentimentality and escape. "[T]he typical male protagonist of our fiction has been the man on the run," he writes, "[. . .] anywhere to avoid 'civilization,' which is to say, the confrontation of a man and a woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility" (xx-xxi). As a result, one of the central tropes of U.S. literature is the image where "a white and a colored American male flee from civilization in each other's arms" (x).

Fiedler's analysis is very broad, going back to the beginnings of the novel in Richardson and Scott. Despite his central theory of comrades in arms, Fiedler's text doesn't lend itself much to the world of queer theory. He does a smart queering of The Scarlet Letter, in which Chillingworth becomes a seducer and dominant partner of Dimmesdale's. But queer literature in itself is written off as an inauthentic version of the southern gothic—Jamesian sensibility infesting Faulknerian terror. Capote's promise, Fiedler says, was "frittered away" by journalism and his own love of celebrity.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980). New York: Penguin, 1986.

2008-05-19T23:08:00.003-05:00

A novel written as theme-and-variations, in line with the musical genre. In seven parts, Kundera (as a very present, questioning narrator) posits various relationships among Czechs in the time of their country's ongoing fragility and strife. These relationships are often sexual, usually orgyistic. Sex is treated as a kind of performance of personal freedom and connectivity amid such national decay, even though in the end it never brings people fully together. Likewise, Kundera's seven parts don't ever intersect in that clever way that most novels-as-stories tend to do.

Instead, they each attempt an approach at theme in different ways. That theme is memory, pesonal and collective. Communist leader Gustáv Husák is called "the president of forgetting" (181), and much mining and revising of history is put into the book as mortar between all its little parts. What I found most interesting was its notions of laughter, and that there are two kinds:

Things deprived suddenly of their putative meaning, the place assigned to them in the ostensible order of things [. . .], make us laugh. Initially, therefore, laughter is the province of the Devil. it has a certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things are looser than they seemed) [. . .]. (61)

Kundera contrasts this Devil-laughter with the laughter of Angels, which is endowed with contrary meaning, rejoicing in how good everything is, the pure divinity of creation. The Devil finds this laughing itself "infinitely laughable", and that "laughable laughter" is separate from the laughter we all know and love. That "we lack the words to distinguish them" (62) is, for Kundera, one of the tragedies of the contemporary era.

Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.

2008-05-19T17:14:00.003-05:00

I read this book weeks ago and liked it. You should read it if you have some free time. The first-person plural thing is handled well, and when everything becomes monotonous and repetitive, the novel shifts gears and becomes pretty great.

It's also nothing like "Dilbert".

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction (1978). New York: Vintage, 1990.

2008-05-14T10:59:00.004-05:00

My first Foucault (and what a lousy cover, eh?). Here he takes a Marxist look at sexuality as it's been "invented" over the last three centuries. He sites sexuality's birth (so to speak) with the rise of the (Catholic) confession, where "[a]n imperative was established: Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse" (21). What was once biological (sex) became social (sexuality). Foucault urges readers not to think of sexuality as something natural or innate, but rather as "a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse [. . .] are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power" (105-6).

Power might be his actual subject here, and how sexuality has been deployed in order to increase or sustain power. This is the thing about much of the (admittedly very little) theory in general and Marxist theory in specific I've run across: this continuous use of the passive voice. I'm always curious: Well, who? Like when, exactly, did a certain someone or group of someones realize that an increased amount of discourse on sexuality can help them get the power they want or maintain the power they have? Can you give me a specific example?

Foucault can't, or maybe won't. I think specific examples are supposed to be self-evident, or maybe ubiquitous. At any rate, what I like about the theories in this book are the way they read the body as commodity. He contrasts two eras or phases that may or may not be subsequent (they may be concurrent is what I mean): the deployment of alliance (meaning, like, matrimony as social bond to reign in sexual desire) and the deployment of sexuality (a time when licit and illicit were a lot more amorphous, and personal desires were emphasized over the social good). The shift he labels as an economic one, when the monetary benefits of the marriage contract became less necessary for the accumulation of wealth. (Throughout the book I was amazed at how early Foucault grounds these shifts...early 1700s? Really?)

At any rate, while the deployment of alliance concerns itself with the social body, the deployment of sexuality concerns itself with "proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way" (107).

The body then is seen as something that produces and consumes. And somehow (I'm not fully up on it yet), this ties in to certain post-gay theories of the commodification of gay identity—the idea that markets more fully (and more rapidly) than governments are the entities that can "accept" gay people, because markets read new identities as an opportunity (new demographics) as opposed to a problem (new populations). To say, "I am my sexuality" or "My sexuality is who I am" is not liberating, Foucault argues. It's the status quo. We "think we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power, when in fact we are fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected" (157).

Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. Toronto: Emblem Editions, 1997.

2008-04-12T09:59:00.002-05:00

The only thing this collection of stories (billed as a novel, but no way) adds to the coming-out genre is its setting: the Sri Lankan Civil War. This is probably enough. Probably, we should have variants of the coming-out novel in every possible culture of the world. But for someone who's about waist-deep in coming out novels these days, Funny Boy has so little to offer.

And the writing, despite claims from the blurbs in the back, is not exquisite; is, in fact, never very creative or beautiful. "As in a dream, I felt myself slipping into a blackness where all my thought disintegrated. The entire world became the sensation in my mouth and Shehan's tongue probing, retreating, intertwining with mine."

There seems in the plainest books of the coming-out genre to be no other way to describe a first kiss. Every word here has come from everyone else. And some of it is downright awful. "With a heavy heart, I slowly went back up to the beach." Where is the talent this book's covers promise?

This novel would be interesting had it been written in 1983, or in the year or so after the Sri Lankan conflict escalated. But for 1994 it just seems redundant.

Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove, 1980.

2008-04-10T16:02:00.003-05:00

This book isn't as good as you remember it. It's funny, but it's only funny. Well, it's more than just funny, it's offensive and bitter and bleak and nihilistic and it's pleased with its own snobbishness. I write these words as a consummate snob.

In the novel gays mince and obsess over decor, and lesbians brawl and wear their hair cropped close. Blacks all have a kind of folksy wisdom and terrible English. Ignatius is exposed as a belching tub of lard, but in the end you know he'd be pleased with this account of this chapter of his life. Toole adores Ignatius and amid his wide-scattered criticisms can't quite do him any real harm.

Here's Andre Condrescu on the book (from Chronicle of Higher Education):

A Confederacy of Dunces was a book that swam upstream, against the flow of time in which it was written. The early '60s saw the awakening of a social conscience that even the great postwar comic novels Catch-22, Cat's Cradle, and Portnoy's Complaint were part of. Their charges were delivered pretty squarely from behind the barricades of anti-establishment liberalism. The incipient tentacles of what came to be known in the '90s as political correctness were already waving within the embryonic culture of the '60s.

The South, at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, was America's designated hell. Southern writers were a suspect species, with a few rare exceptions, including Walker Percy, who eventually (after Toole died) championed the book into print. Confederacy's unabashed use of Negro dialect by Jones, the floorsweeper, and the fun-poking at the spirit-filled black factory workers must have repulsed New York's publishers. There was also the matter of a slew of prancing queens, an evil madam, and a bumbling cop who was a victim, not a villain. And then there was Myrna Minkoff, the Jewish firebrand sexual revolutionary, whose sheer silliness was matched only by Ignatius's megalomania.

It was as if Toole had set out deliberately to turn the stereotypes on their heads, which is, of course, precisely what he did. The failure of American publishers to see this is unforgivable, and proof, more than anything, of a New York brand of provincialism. I am not sure if John Kennedy Toole's suicide was a direct result of his rejection, but even if this played only a small part, the fools have a lot to answer for. Toole's job was far from done.

Setting aside my confusion as to how this novel's inability to engage with anything larger than itself (a chief concern of Heller's, Vonnegut's, and Roth's novels, each one funnier and more inspiring than Toole's) can be read as some subversive act, the question remains of how these stereotypes have been turned on their heads. What such a thing even means.

And re, Andre, that little murderous accusation of those of us who like something more than ridicule and laffs in the novels they read, see Hardin's "Between Queer Performances" essay, which posits the suicide as a factor of Toole's own closeted sexuality.

Peterson, Adam. My Untimely Death. Boulder: Subito Press, 2008.

2008-04-04T07:59:00.004-05:00

How to Write about a Book Written by a Close Friend

Stall. Make excuses. Buy yourself lots and lots of time without exactly knowing why you might need all this time, or what it might get you.
Read the book during an open swath of vacation time, over a matter of an hour or so if it's as short as this one is, feeling like some kind of monster in taking so much time to get to it, because certainly, over the last two months, you've had uncountable hours to spare, and very unproductive ways you've filled those hours.
Mention to the close friend that you've Finished! his book. Bring it up in conversation out of the blue, as though bragging, as though he should be proud of you.
Stall some more.
Erect cutesy, very-Nineties, pop-po-mo gimmicks to cover for the fact that you aren't doing the requisite work of engaging in the book as it's asking you to.
Make explicit po-mo reference to these Nineties po-mo gimmicks.
Repeat, and repeat, and stall, and repeat, not because you didn't like the book (which you did, so much), and not because the book didn't say anything to you (which it may have, but in slippery oblique ways you're not adept at putting down in words), but because the tiny book seems after reading it and rereading it to stand just slightly out of reach, or to exist in this place where some kind of cool magic is made just by throwing words together, and that to sit down and write about what the book is doing or why it's great or important would be to either ruin the magic, or run the risk of you not getting the joke, in a sense, and as you consider this to yourself you know both that it's a cop-out and also that it seems to point to something maybe mentionable, not about untimely deaths or the point of writing about them (which seems gimmickly cool on one superficial level, given everything they say in fiction workshops about making sure your narrators don't die at the end of their stories, and on another nonsuperficial level seems such an incredible idea, because of the way talking about one's own untimely death is immediately hilarious and immediately tragic, and so finally you're at what might be the whole dark problem behind your writing about the book: it has gotten at that mix of funny and sad in ways you've always tried, and yet in ways far funnier and far sadder than anything you've ever written), but about the fruits and failures of jokes and joking.
Finally, amid all your hemming and hawing, resort to what you always do, and just quote the most moving and awesome (in that classic way) passage from the text so you don't actually have to say anything about it, and because you know the author so well, steal an entire story, and fistfight about copyright issues later.

Seven

My untimely death comes at the hands of natives. They suffocate me with wonder and love, but I do not die yet. They hold me tighter than I have ever been held before in smallpoxed forearms, and my nose is in one chest, many chests, breathing in antiquities, beads, cornsilk. How were you made this way? I ask. How are you, clay pot? How are you, glass circle?

The natives are bashful. They take pipes from their clay pots and knock out the blood and dust and dirt. The natives say they want to tell me a joke.

Joke.
Deep in America, the one behind the Kum and Go, three men are captured by a tribe of natives.

Not Joke.
At this point they look deep into each other's beads and nod appreciatively.

Joke.
The natives tell the tourists they can choose death or bunga-bunga. The first chooses bunga-bunga.

Not Joke.
The natives are bashful. This might be a little off-color, they say. I tell them I have heard this joke before. Where I'm from it was roo-roo, not bunga-bunga, I say.

The natives are not pleased. What's roo-roo? they ask. They twist their beads and beat their pots. I tell them like this.

Joke.
The one that chooses roo-roo is led into a grass hut.

Not Joke.
I am bashful. I look at the ground and cannot say the words. The natives threaten death or roo-roo if I do not tell them what roo-roo is. I tell them roo-roo is like bunga-bunga, but we have all forgotten so much. They scream and throw corn. They call it maize. I tell them what we call turtles and puppies and remote controls and Kum and Gos. My untimely knowledge comes in handfuls. The natives calm down, blow nutmeggy smoke out their pipes, and sit on their Stain-Master carpet. They ask again in proud voices, but I cannot stop blushing.

Joke.
My untimely death comes at the hands of natives. I go last and choose death. They smile. Death comes at the hands of braves and tribesmen and witch doctors and regular doctors and Lou Diamond Phillips, who smiles widest, as he straps me to the gurney and rubs pungent alcohol on my forearm.

Not Joke.
Where I am there are words I cannot say and stories I cannot tell.

How to Write about a Book Written by a Close Friend — Addendum

Don't bother to resist the petty urge to say that regardless of how incredibly funny and heartbreaking you found the story you quote from in full, that certain jokes about maize and Lou Diamond Phillips are cheap jokes, unworthy of their author.

Delany, Samuel R. Hogg (1995). Normal: FC2, 2004.

2008-03-18T15:32:00.003-05:00

As a quick game take a moment to think of the most vile and perverse sex act you can. Really, push yourself. That sex act is in this novel somewhere.

(Corpses? Yes.)

A lot of the criticism or reviews I've seen for this novel, written way back in 1972 but never published until 1995 (and published by FC2, whose mission is "to publish books of high quality and exceptional ambition whose style, subject matter, or form push the limits of American publishing and reshape our literary culture"), spends a good amount of time confessing how harrowing the experience of reading it is, but that it's in the end so worth it, for the gift I guess we're given of a portrait so honest and revoltionary. Hogg, a rapist-for-hire who never bathes and regularly voids both bowels and bladder right in his crusty jeans, is—so the critics argue—repulsive and yet alluring, immoral and yet moral, hateful and yet capable of love. Delany, the point is, has found a way to make evil sympathetic.

I don't buy it, maybe because I don't buy the representation of evil in these pages. Surely I'm not the first person to read and write about this novel who has slid shamed eyes across the scattershot lines of gay pornographic fiction before, right? And Hogg's taken right out of good old raunchy gay porno. Yes, the critics allow this novel to be labeled as pornographic, but their attempts are to hoist the novel out of the gutter and into fine art.

To me, I think it just wants to wallow in the gutter. Who would read such a novel? Or, rather, who can enjoy such a novel? Men who violently and fiercely hate women, first and foremost, will find much to love here. Also certain scatophilic fetishists. I'll even admit to having been aroused by a sex scene or two, but was quickly put off by all the wretchedness that followed.

There's one other important demographic for the book, folks I'll call for lack of a better term Readers on the Wild Side. Reading this book reminded me of an entry I read recently on Stuff White People Like about the self-righteous joys of Having Gay Friends. Readers on the Wild Side love this book because it's so dangerous and because they feel their eyes are being opened to some difficult truth.

It's bullshit. The opposite is true. Hogg is Delany's silly but successful attempt to pull some pervy wool over the literary establishment's courageous eyes. It's such a trifling, bratty read. Everything in it is phonier than Juno.

Cooper, Dennis. Closer. New York: Grove, 1989.

2008-03-18T15:21:00.003-05:00

I ordered my copy of this novel—those are naked men on its cover—online and the back cover came coated in a tacky, pasty grey-white goo. Why can't people take better care of things? I mean pay attention, right?

Closer is Dennis Cooper's first novel in a pentology of novels about George Miles, who in this novel is the beloved figure for half a dozen high school boys, all gay and all pretty much cool with it. George gets involved with a middle-aged French man named Philippe, and through that connection travels down a dark road of dangerous, filthy sex that almost gets him killed in the basement of some suburban home.

In line with the literary fads that I think produced these stories (in many ways the novel is a bunch of separate linked narratives), the writing is always very stripped down and gritty. My favorite story—which is to say the only one I actually liked—was told from the point of view of Alex, who is in love with a boy who is in love with George, and who wants to be a filmmaker. Perhaps its this ambition, and this once-removed relationship to the novel's central figure, that creates in him a cool critical stance I found refreshing. Of especial interest is a scene where Alex first sleeps with another boy, this one somewhat older, and can only get involved in the sex by narrating what's going on in the cold, absurdist voice of a pornographic novel.

And Alex is also responsible for this line, the novel's best: "Oh, that was simple, like fishing probably is" (84). Otherwise I can't really recommend anyone read the book, despite the reputation Cooper's gained.

Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo (1972). New York: Scribner, 1996.

2008-03-14T20:55:00.003-05:00

I assigned for my students a book I'd never before read. Now I've read it. I'm not disappointed. This happens sometimes. One professor put Amidon's Human Capital on a booklist of a class I took before he'd actually read it, and that turned into Snoozefest '07. This book has Gates, Jr. cred. It's got Baldwin cred. I should be fine once I figure out what on earth I'm going to talk about in class.

In brief: Mumbo Jumbo tracks the growing infestation of "Jes Grew" from Chicago eastward as it heads to 1920s NYC. Everyone in the Harlem Renaissance is at least named, and often appears in a scene or two. Cab Calloway. Langston Hughes. What Jes Grew is is a need to dance and shake your booty, and it turns out that this urge has been suppressed by a certain fascistic group dating back to Ancient Egypt. The Knights Templar—so beloved by a lot of backward looking storytellers nowadays—are painted as especially evil and, well perhaps even more so, stupid and buffoonish.

In a class looking at the humorous novel it'll be tough pointing out the humor to my students. Much of the stuff I wrote "ha!" about in the margins of the book were things that I thought I pretty much got the joke of, because I'm down with the history of African-American culture in the 20th century, right? I'm worried in class in a couple of weeks that I'll be gratingly with-it like I was back in college when I used to brag about liking Digable Planets and Soul Coughing. Like it made me urban.

In the end, I think Flight to Canada—about lots of the writers of the antebellum/transcendental era of U.S. lit—is a more engaging book, and a funnier one. But that's probably because I got all the jokes.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

2008-02-29T17:34:00.004-06:00

I'm if anything a fussy writer. The sort of guy who prefers to come up with excuses why all the factors surrounding the writing of some story or chapter aren't quite right, rather than actually sit down and let the thing get written anyway. I like to worry sentences, and I like to worry about sentences that sound like other sentences I've read so many times before. "She got out of the car and looked searchingly up at the sky." There's some piece in me that could never be satisfied with that sitting on the page.

For a while I thought this was big of me. I thought it meant I cared foremost about language. And maybe in the tiny, fussy domain of the short story it's the sort of thing readers won't like to be given, but in a novel such concern is a little ridiculous. Thinking hard about the ways I read novels I know that if everything's chugging along smoothly and I'm at full engagement with the story when I come across such a sentence all I do is register the information it gives me. Its blandness doesn't stop me in my tracks. And so there's room in novels for these sentences. James called novels shaggy beasts; finessing every god damn line will get nobody anywhere.

Oh, I imagine Pynchon has such sentences in this novel, but what I want to talk about are the other ones, the ones that won't probably ever get written again. Lots of the best sentences in this book spill down their pages. Some of them are "attainable," so to speak, in the challenge I made with myself as I read the book to assess my own ability to craft the sentences he already did. Ones like this one, where you just accumulate well observed details, aren't really that hard to write:

She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother's pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman's tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages (149).

Do-able, right? Well, maybe not "planking" or "swung". Those words would never occur to me in the places they fall. But then look at these, just a page later:

Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender flesh without a reflex or cry, then at least, at the very least, waiting for a symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For now it was like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would be either a transcendent meaning, or only the earth. (15)

The former bit takes merely a good eye, perhaps some experience, and a decent way with words, all of which can be picked up in a short number of years. The latter, though, takes some new kind of mind all together. A nimble, fluid mind, that can make leaps of association that all sort of swell around one another.

Another thing that makes this book so rad is its subject: postal conspiracy. So nice to read something new. It's always very en vogue to write stories about "weird" types. For lots of uninspired writers with little imagination, weird gets translated into the noble rural poor. (I read at least 15 of these stories today for the lit-mag I screen for.) For others, and often for me, it translates to people with nontraditional jobs, the sorts of careers no one goes to school for.

Here the strangeness of philatelists, underground postmasters, and Jacobean community theatre folk all seems very closely strange, somehow. Maybe this whole entry is longhand for saying I can't find a way to call this book quirky. Is this only because of its age?

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22 (1961). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

2008-02-27T18:10:00.006-06:00

Some favorite paradoxes, brought back to memory and found mostly online in the wake of reading this novel and needing something smart and important to talk about in front of a roomful of 31 undergraduates, trusting me, I hope, on this one:

Zeno's Paradox argues that in a race between fleet-footed Achilles and the slow-as-hell Tortoise, one in which the former sportingly gives the latter a 100-yard head start, Achilles can never overtake the Tortoise and win the race. No matter how fast he runs, first he must get to the halfway point between him and the Tortoise. So, 50 yards. In the time he takes to get 50 yards, the Tortoise has advanced a little bit. Then A has to get halfway to that new point, which gives T some more advancing room. And so on, and so on. He's faster than the Tortoise, but he'll never win. But of course he'll win, but it's logically impossible for him to win.
The Liar's Paradox asks whether the statement, "I am lying," is true or false. If it's true, then the speaker is in fact lying, and therefore what he says cannot be true. If it's false, then the speaker must be lying, but because that's what he's claiming to do, his claim is true.
The Barber's Paradox is complicated, and I think my explanation of the thing in class the other night was flawed and missing some vital step. Go Wikipedia it or something.
Whether or not it's called The Omnipotence Paradox, this one asks the question, "Can an omnipotent being create a stone too heavy for it (that being) to lift?" If the answer is yes, it can of course create such a stone, then lifting it becomes something the omnipotent being cannot do, which means its not omnipotent. If the answer is no, it could create no such stone, then not being able to create the stone becomes something the omnipotent being cannot do.

It seems I may have learned nothing from this book. Paradoxes, especially those settled down in fun little hypothetical logic puzzles, are the domain of socially inept little boys (mostly) who were given books about Mensa as gifts from distant relatives who had no other clues about what sorts of presents would be well received. In Heller's novel, they're the domain of such boys all grown up, now finding themselves through some connection or another running a war in the Mediterranean. Colonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn, General Dreedle, et al., are the bad guys in this war novel, not solely because they're in charge (though this surely is a lot of it in such an anti-establishment novel as this one), but because they revel in the niggling little paradox games they come up with to avoid any direct responsibility.

For a while they're funny. Major Major Major Major (oh, the hilarity) realizes that if he makes a rule wherein the only time people can see him in his office is when he's not in, he never has to face a single problem. Colonel Korn can avoid the tough questions by making rules that the only people who are allowed at the education sessions to ask questions are those who never ask questions.

But then Aarfy comes in—Aarfy, you may remember, is the guy who rapes that Italian woman because he proudly never pays for sex, and then throws her out the window, killing her, because he can't have her going around saying terrible things about him. Aarfy's not an uppity-up, he's a regular army guy going on all these missions with the rest of them. He's also, as one of my students said, "A total douchebag":

"Back in school we were always doing things like that. I remember one day we tricked these two dumb high-school girls from town into the fraternity house and made them put out for all the fellows there who wanted them by threatening to call up their parents and say they were putting out for us. We kept them trapped in bed there for more than ten hours. We even smacked their faces a little when they started to complain. Then we took away their nickels and dimes and chewing gum and threw them out." (251)

This novel is one where so many good people die, and though Yossarian lives, Aarfy does, too.

In comedy writing, injustice is funny. I read that somewhere recently.

The following story is true. One Thanksgiving in my folks' new house, my dad saved the turkey's wishbone and gave it to me and my sister, who historically, as the youngest of three kids, got to pull on it each year. We hadn't done it in ages. I grabbed one end and my sister grabbed another, and I made a quick and deplorable decision. We yanked and I came out with the larger piece. "What did you wish for?" my sister asked.

"The smaller piece," I said, all proud of myself.

Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1950). New York: Vintage, 1993.

2008-02-08T08:49:00.000-06:00

Maybe it's because I just got back from New York or maybe it's because this is the most recent New York novel I've read but I want to declare this book my favorite New York novel. What's its competition? Catcher in the Rye? Fortress of Solitude? Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing? I like all those books well enough, but for a New York novel (a genre I'm not even comfortable characterizing) this one wins because underlying the story of Holly Golightly and the unnamed narrator is....

I'm without words this morning. This is a reading morning and not a writing one. Whatever it is I'm trying to talk about is here in the novel's final lines:

"Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, [the cat] was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he'd arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too."

It's the kind of basic human desire I'm interested in these days: being in the place one is supposed by factors internal or external to be in, and the ways we can go about figuring out where that place might be.

It's a great ending because of course since the movie of this came out (which I haven't seen), Holly is so quintessentially New York. But she can't stay in New York. Maybe she only becomes quintessentially New York after she leaves New York.

God, what do these terms even mean?

Firbank, Ronald. “Valmouth”. Valmouth and Other Stories (1919). Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996.

2008-02-05T22:36:00.000-06:00

Driven by dialogue, this novella tells the story of Valmouth, a resort town where the air is fine enough that most of its citizens live to be 100 or more (the town patron lived to 105). In the midst of them all is the “Oriental” woman Mrs. Yajñavalkya, who is a whiz at massage and the healing of bodily ailments, and who is able with these powers to traverse the classes of the citizenry at Valmouth. She tries to set the Lady Parvula up with the object of her obsessions: the virile young shepherd David Tooke. What we eventually come to find out from Mrs. Y is that David “has abjured [. . .] de female sex” (68), and by story’s end the two remain alone.

Gender and sexual queering happens in subtle little ways throughout this novella, much of it I imagine in the many lines of Latin its characters like to utter in brief asides. One needs in order to understand this story’s bends and shifts a full fluency not only in Latin and French but also in Greek and Roman myth. Firbank’s steeping of his narrative in the baroqueness of antiquity is de rigueur for queer writers of his time, but it doesn’t help his work last. I mean, World War I was going on at the time of his writing, and this is where he throws his best efforts?

From the introduction and the back-cover copy, what people seem to love most about Firbank is his florid style, and this, yes, I’ll grant him any day. He cracks up his sentences’ syntaxes in such a way that they seem always on the verge of falling apart. See, for instance, such lines as “Miss Tooke turned yearningly her head” (10), and “Mrs Hurstpierpoint extended toward her guest a hand that was not (as Lady Parvula confided afterwards to the Lady Lucy Saunter) too scrupulously clean” (23-24), and even the exquisite, “Here and there, an orchard, in silhouette, showed all in black blossom against an extravagant sky” (6). Even when he goes overboard (“The sky was empurpled towards the west” [70]) I admire the attempt.

I think of it as a queer syntax, a discretely queer style. The best way I can explain or try to justify this is that it’s a syntax I’ve been in my own writing of late working deliberately toward. It’s more than a matter of juggling one’s clauses in the name either of disrupting the passive reader’s syntactic expectations, or of asserting every time no matter what words and phrases come one’s way on the vitality of the periodic sentence. It’s...well, here, from my journal:

I want to stick with this voice, this kind of convoluted syntax that allows its sentences to roll onward and onward down the page putting in with a kind of recklessness these appositives here and there and mixing up the order of words as a means I guess of finding within a sentence a kind of innate tension between enough detail and too much, or between relevant details and needless digression. Also a tension between a stuttering kind of insecurity and an assertive, Hemingwayan/Steinian commaless strength.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing I’ve been worrying about in the MS Word file I open up most mornings before the morning’s writing gets commenced. No, it’s not helping me actually to produce a full completed manuscript any time soon. Like the high-school loner who designs album covers, T-shirts, and tour routes for the band of his whose music he hasn’t yet bothered to write, I am a dilettante.

Mann, Thomas. “Death in Venice.” Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories (1911). H.T. Lowe-Porter, trans. New York: Vintage, 1954.

2008-02-05T22:23:00.000-06:00

A novella of man-boy love and a disease that starts to mysteriously kill unsuspecting people, if that’s not redundant. One can’t help in reading the story but think of AIDS, particularly in the way Mann describes the attempts of the state to cover up the illness (cholera, in this instance): “[T]he fears of the people supported the persistant policy of silence and denial. The city’s first medical officer [. . .] had indignantly resigned his office and been privily replaced by a more competant person.”

Gustave Aschenbach, the hero of the story who falls in self-surprised love with the young Polish boy Tadzio, is an author and widower who finds himself in Venice after a spell of wanderlust brought on by the face of a stranger in the street. Mann takes much time and care building up this guy’s credentials—he’s not just a writer, but a noteworthy writer, an author, really, whose work has inspired those who’ve come after him. Indeed, he’s created a new kind of literary hero, described as “[t]he conception of an intellectual and virginial manliness, which clenches its teeth and stands in modest defiance of the swords and spears that pierce its side” (11). Mann’s narrator continues:

That was beautiful [. . .] it was exact, despite the suggestion of too great passivity it held. Forbearance in the fact of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph; and the figure of Sebastian is the most beautiful symbol, if not of art as a whole, yet certainly of the art we speak of here. (11)

Saint Sebastian—all tied up and flayed with arrows—has for a long time been a symbol of homosexual beauty and adjunctery, or maybe it’s just a matter of him being our unofficial patron saint. For a long time I thought this was kind of gross. I thought it had to do with eroticism (he’s always painted wearing little more than a loincloth, sometimes even nude) and the glorification of suffering. But I like here how Mann reads Sebastian and finds strength and heroism in the traditionally “passive” protagonist. Forbearance as something that one achieves, rather than some default one falls back on. This is very much along the same lines of what Kushner describes in Angels in America.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1989.

2008-02-03T14:20:00.000-06:00

Another reread. There's one line that sticks out to me more than any other, even this long after I Finished! the book: "Lolita girl! Brave Dolly Schiller!"

This is if you recall who Lolita becomes, this Dolly Schiller gal, pregnant and married to a working class guy named Joe (I think). I found it hard while reading this book to worry about Humbert's creepiness, or his criminality. I found it easy while reading this book to hate Humbert all the same, or well no, not hate but I guess laugh at in ways Nabokov I think invited me to. And then chapter 29 in part 2 came along (the place from where the above quote is taken) and I found it very hard to do the latter, very easy to do the former, and I ended up caring so fully for this guy. How does this happen?

And wow how about all those dick jokes, huh? "I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you."

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1925.

2008-02-03T14:12:00.000-06:00

I've been in New York City for ten days, and I finished this novel ages ago. I've been in New York City for so long I'm coming up with false causalities in all my sentences.

A fourth-time reread. All I can say this time is how fast this book moves. I know it's short and all, but I forgot how drowning in dialogue it is. So dialogue heavy! Also it's clear that every scene except those where some important backstory is being orated to Nick is filled with at least three people. It reminds me of some old fiction/storytelling advice I once read or heard: Put two people in a room you have a flat little dialogue. Put three people in a room and you have drama.

O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.

2008-01-10T15:35:00.000-06:00

I like Flannery O'Connor, but I don't love her. This is a problem, I know, because if one reads half as obsessively as I do the words of other writers about how goes about writing fiction, one comes across Flannery's name and maxims at just about every turn. She is, without question, a genius, goes the belief. And maybe she is. She knows her way around a simile: "The little boys' faces were like pans set on either side to catch the grins that overflowed from her." She's also great at understated humor, most of it unquotable because it's so grounded in context, but here's one: "He was smiling. He looked like a friendly hound dog with light mange."

But whenever I read O'Connor all I can see behind her humor is meanness. O'Connor is not a writer who loves her characters. Granted, I've read maybe three stories and one of her two novels, but in each of them we're not meant to like anybody the way other writers invite us to. We don't like Hulga. We don't like Manley Pointer. We don't really like the Misfit and we sure as hell don't like the old woman he shoots dead. Or, rather, we can't like them, because each time we start to sympathize, O'Connor's got an impeccably worded and timed detail that makes us stand back and laugh at this person's foolishness.

She doesn't seem to do this in any po-mo argument way; that is, to comment on the futility of liking verbal constructs on the page as if they were actual people. No, she does it seemingly because there's too much morality at stake for us to actually get comfortable with anyone. And so, here, we laugh at Hazel Motes, who finds himself without family or friends in a small southern city, trying to shake off his preacher heritage. We laugh at Enoch Emery. We laugh at the "blind" preacher Hawks and we laugh at his daughter.

All in the name of what, exactly? I'm still trying to figure this out. I think what makes O'Connor such a celebrated writer is the force of her clear sentences and the careful control she has over the scope of her stories. There is never any excess. Also her takes on religion and faith are complex and uncommon in modern literature, which is great if complex, uncommon takes on faith and religion are what you're looking for in a book. Right now, I'm not looking for this. Books in which religion gets as much mention as feudal Belgium are what I think I want.

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004.

2008-01-08T13:30:00.000-06:00

Oh, the hasty promise I made to read and thus post more in my last Finished! entry.... The problem with telling people you plan to read more books more quickly is that you cannot be given a Wii for Christmas during that time. I, alas, was given a Wii, and have found more fulfillment in uncovering the arrow-highlit Achilles' heels of various big bad bosses and exploiting same to destroy said bosses with my cool new gadgets and breathtaking sword technique.

But before I got a Wii I Finished! this book, which can be called a matryoshka novel, delivering six compelling stories in six different locales and time periods, all accordion-folded into one another. This seems on the surface easy to do. Just come up with six novellas and put them in chronological order and then take the first five and chop them in half, delivering their conclusions in reverse order after the sixth story has been given in full.

Mitchell, though, has tied the form to the content such that when, say, Adam Ewing's diary just ends midsentence in the book, we learn that this is because Robert Frobisher, who "stars" in the epistolary novella that follows, has been reading these diaries and cannot find the second half of his copy. So where we ended is where he ended. Likewise, when his letters stop and we move to the third story, we find that the man to whom these letters were written has saved only half of them. And so on and so on to the point where it's very hard to distinguish which stories contain the others and which are contained.

For those of us who find it very hard to suspend our passive delightful reading in order to suss out a book's subtext and purpose, Mitchell kindly lets us know what's up with his form in the final fourth of the novel. The past, one character argues, which is to say the actual past as the events happened, is harder to access the further away from it one goes. And we're always moving away from the past. Subsequently, any present attempts to reconstruct that past become "truer" than what actually happened, "truer" in terms of our belief, our faith in them. This also happens in the obverse, with respect to the future. Which brings us to the funny Simpsons joke about Tomorrowland: it's the way people from the 1950s envisioned 1983. Which is to say that in 1955, Tomorrowland was a truer vision of the future than the boring ground-based cars of the Eighties:

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of "now" likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. (393)

This is a great and new (to me, at least) idea, but it wasn't my favorite in the book. That would be its ideas about power and conquest, which permeate each of the six novellas in some fashion. Mitchell argues (or, to be more accurate, one of his characters [himself a liar and a thief but that doesn't necessarily discredit what he thinks] argues) that, geo-historically, it's been white people that have been the most hungry for power and have thus gone to the greatest lengths to attain it and keep it. Or, in the words of the character, "of all the world's races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous!" (489).

It's a provocative thought, and at essence a racist one. It leads, though, to Adam Ewing deciding to live his life in such a way as to make the world hospitable to all races, even though he knows such a life will be lived in vain. So Cloud Atlas is the kind of book that's all Love Your Neighbor and Make Love Not War and All Men Are Created Equal, and because it really seems to mean each of these, the message never comes across as cloying or obvious.

White, Edmund. The Farewell Symphony. New York: Vintage, 1997.

2007-12-18T09:55:00.000-06:00

Now that the semester is over I'll be able to Finish! a lot more books, thanks for your patience. I thought I'd get White out of the way and read this third book in the autobiographical trilogy. I'm glad I did. It's as long as the first two put together and blows them both out of the water.

White, and we all, have AIDS to thank. Whereas A Boy's Own Story had nothing to connect its narrative to outside of the narrator's own obsessions, The Beautiful Room is Empty had the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. Except the book ends with this event, it's literally on the last page, which is stupid seeing as how it was such a beginning of something; the book as a result isn't so much about gay liberation as it is about the narrator's obsessions—this time over hunky Midwestern Sean with the big dick and the swimmer's build.

The Farewell Symphony takes its name from a Haydn work in which all the musicians leave the stage one by one toward the end of the symphony, leaving just a single violinist on the stage. This violinist is White, blessed (or cursed) with having lived to tell the story of the AIDS crisis despite his own seropositive status. And he tells it well. Now that he has some serious human drama to write from, his little obsessions can fall to the background as the story of gay men in the latter half of the 20th century comes to the fore. As he puts it, "I thought that never had a group been placed on such a rapid cycle—oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties" (405).

And AIDS does more in this novel than give White something real to report. Let me try to put it this way. Never had a book (or series of books) made me feel less..."authentically gay" than White's had. White's fucking a new dude on practically every page, half of whom we never get names of because he never bothered to. For gay men of White's generation (at least two removed from my own, I suppose) sexual promiscuity wasn't just a cake-and-eat-it-too matter of hedonism, it was an act of rebellion. Given that I was three when the AIDS crisis was first reported in a major newspaper, it's hard for me to get a hold of this, but I think I trust it. I buy the argument. If I knew myself to be gay at a time when gay people were not just hated but invisible—not in the U.S. legislative branch, not in primetime sitcoms, not hosting the Oscars—I imagine that encountering another man who wanted sex with men (even if anonymously in some public toilet) would feel like an affirmation.

What this results in is eighty percent of White's three novels—crazy, wild, rampant sex of every kinky variety with every shape and color of man that exists in this world. And quickly the parade of names of cock details becomes a tired and lonely parade of one man waving a banner nobody cares to look at anymore. And so reading White has always felt like reading first drafts of students' composition papers where they write about their mother or the home they grew up in, and all they can say is how "she always knew the exact thing to say" or "she's always there for me when I'm hungry or sad" or "it always feels so great to be sitting around our big deck on a summer night." On these papers I write things like get specific! or put us in a scene!

In short, there's no story here, and in the end there's no story in the recounting of one man's promiscuity. I've come to think that the whole notion of coupling comes from some inherent need we have to instill a narrative on our relationships. To string events in an order of some tangible length, enabling our sexual encounters to grow up from passing anecdotes to full-fledged stories. Seen this way, gay men (or at least gay writers) have a lot to be grateful for with the coming of AIDS. Yes, it's killed so many of us (and others), and yes it's put a puritanical (some might say heteronormative*) shame on the idea of promiscuity, but it's also given us a real narrative complication. Perhaps more importantly, though, AIDS has tossed our anonymity out the window. We know each other now, and we know each other by name.

---

* One great passage (on the tricky intricacies of cruising) I wanted to quote and couldn't find a place to do it:

Heterosexuals, who revolved in a closed circle of friends under the brilliant scrutiny of their parents, who turned like the gleaming horses in an indoors training stable, could be sure their slightest signal would be observed. They could afford the luxury of elusiveness. They were accompanied by a reputation—for money, charm, intelligence, achievement, heritage or for poverty, boorishness, idiocy, idleness and obscurity (even the obscurity, paradoxically, was sure to be registered, even pedigreed). But all of my anonymous males [. . .] could not risk feigning rejection. Everyone had to be unambiguous, as glowing as a peacock's tail and as towering as a stag's antlers, secondary sexual characteristics evolved on the principle that more is more, even if the lyre bird's seductive tail so encumbers him that he can no longer escape a predator. (11)

White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). New York: Vintage, 1994.

2007-11-24T11:51:00.000-06:00

Avid readers will recall the first book of this autobiographical novel trilogy, A Boy’s Own Story, and how much I disliked it, mostly for its awful prose. In this book, the writing’s better on a stylistic level—White having learned a bit more about what readers of any sexuality can stomach—but the book still falls flat.

It’s a shame that White is our Updike, which is to say that he’s our learned and well read and omnipresent white-male writer born decades ago whom we are meant to revere solely because of his status and age and productivity. It means that I have to read the final book of the trilogy, The Farewell Symphony, which I’m hoping to god is a lot more palatable.

The problem with these novels is that they aren’t novels. They’re memoirs labeled as novels at a time, I imagine, when the memoir wasn’t as marketable a genre. And so they’re all coming-of-age stories through various ages, this one being the narrator’s college life and post-college life in New York; it ends at the Stonewall riots, which would be interesting if White wasn’t so committed to his own narrow perspective in retelling the events.

But the narrator (which is White’s self) is often so callous and repellent, and the novels never seem to place their narrator in a position of critique. We’re meant to sympathize with whatever his plight is (the lonely sadness of cruising men’s rooms for sex up to three times a day), but it’s hard to when sex in these novels is treated as a kind of sporty inevitability. Unfulfilling emotionally, sure, but that doesn’t mean the narrator should try to really feel for anyone.

I mean:

I met a pretty Korean [. . .] who lived next door. Whenever the mechanical world frustrated him—if his bike jammed or the laundry machine swallowed his coins, or his key snapped off in a lock—he’d ring my bell, trudge in, take off his clothes, fold them neatly on my white wood chair, and lie face down on my white bed. He’d take it like a man, bite the pillow if I hurt him, and nothing had ever felt quite so good as those small taut muscles under that chamois-soft skin, the color of cinnamon when it’s sprinkled on cappuccino. That’s my way of saying that a low fire, a pilot light, burned under that glove-smooth skin, and that he smelled excitingly of that foul fermented cabbage the Koreans like to snack on. The minute it was over he’d dress and leave, his eyebrows raised in painful doubt as though he didn’t quite understand what had just happened. He had the whitest teeth. (107).

Paging Edward Said.... And this is 1988!

Capote, Truman. "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories. New York: Random House, 1958.

2007-11-20T14:03:00.000-06:00

I've never seen this movie, but I know that through it Mickey Rooney proliferates racist ideas.

This, in the end, is the novel I'll teach next semester. It's funny in places, humorous throughout, though apparently the movie ends more like a comedy and less, as in the novel, like a tragedy. The unnamed narrator is bitchy and catty and clearly gay to me at least, though I wonder whether my students will pick up on it.

At any rate, this is just to say Finished! I read the thing in a matter of hours, and I supposed I recommend it when one finds oneself with a few hours to kill. Check back next term for more to be said.

White, Edmund. Forgetting Elena. New York: Random House, 1973.

2007-11-19T14:12:00.001-06:00

Amnesia stories fall into two camps, I think. One is the case where the person gets amnesia and knows it, and everyone else knows it, and so the drama is whether or not the amnesiac can be teased or lured back into full awareness. This is the romantic-comedy camp of the genre, though maybe The Bourne Identity could be fit in here, too. The other camp is the one where the amnesiac wakes to a world where he knows no one (including himself) and no one seems to know him (or they don't let on that they do). This is a horror/suspense camp of, like, Memento and Dark City and the like.

The one interesting thing about White's first novel is that it fits into neither of these camps. The narrator wakes up not knowing who or where he is, but that to announce such an affliction would be a very big mistake (why? unclear), so he hides his amnesia from everyone around him. As a result, everyone treats him as they always have, and he must use these clues to figure out who he is.

I suppose one reason he can't let on he's amnesiac is the setting of the novel. This is an island culture (it's post-Stonewall Fire Island, really) where decorum is everything and people are judged by their social position. It opens room for some comedy, though not much for those who were born right around the time Fire Island's heyday was winding down.

I read the book looking for a funny or maybe even just humorous novel written by a gay man or about gay men to teach in my 20th Century Fiction class next fall. I thought this would be an easy task, but it's proven near impossible. We've taken ourselves so seriously for so long. I mean, we've had to, one could argue. I may have to settle for Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Leavitt, David. The Lost Language of Cranes (1986). New York: Bloomsbury, 2005.

2007-11-16T13:15:00.000-06:00

Leavitt's first novel is a kind of twinned coming-out narrative. At its start, Philip is a mid-twentysomething editor of romance novels who hasn't come out to his folks yet. Rose, his mother, is a copy editor, who doesn't seem to take any interest in other people and is as a result pretty uninteresting herself. Owen, her husband, spends every Sunday trolling for sex at a gay porno theater. The plot of the novel throws everyone together, all secrets uncovered, and then tears them apart as a family, until the final scene, where father and son are left together, neither knowing what to do about the other.

A Phylis Schlafley or a Pat Robertson would condemn this novel as a homosexual fantasy in which fathers and sons can fuck one another without feeling bad about it. Perhaps they did, way back when it was published. Leavitt's not a sicko, nor is he the kind of radical sex-positive fag that would force his reader to confront the beauty of Owen and Philip's love. The possibility of any coupling is simply unspeakable, as it would be with you and your father, and when the story ends on a final image of Owen's "white ankles in the bright moonlight," the result is touching.

This novel should be required reading for any high-school boy, in case that boy is working through confusing feelings about sexuality. Oh, to have come across the following passage fifteen years ago!

His sexual life had been bred in secret; he had never spoken of it with anyone, not even himself. Could something so private be real, he wondered? Wouldn't he someday soon meet a girl, fall in love with her? Wouldn't there be some shifting in the hormones he was just learning about in science class, so that he could make love to a woman like any other man, marry her like any other man? He would be free of it, then, that other life, the secret life; it would fall away, unknown to anyone but him, and he would look back on it as a distant dream. (75)

Kopelson, Kevin. Sedaris. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.

2007-11-07T13:22:00.001-06:00

I Finished! this attempt at critical, scholarly analysis of David Sedaris's work more than a month ago, but have been working on a review of it for a periodical on whose staff I happily sit, and am not sure whether posting a review here constitutes previous publication, so I'm withholding sharing it. Plus it's, like, 1500 words.

At any rate, the book is much too interested in interpreting Sedaris's life through his essays, and even his fiction. "Some truths ... need masks," the guy argues, which is a dangerous way, I think, to read short stories. At one point Kopelson—a queer theorist with much to say on Proust—says that Sedaris is definitely "a bottom—not to mention a size queen" (196).

Well thank god someone's finally figured it out....

McEwan, Ian. Atonement. London: Vintage, 2002.

2007-11-04T21:32:00.000-06:00

Since you've last heard from me, I've been packing up one apartment and moving to another. I picked up McCarthy's Blood Meridian and could never stay awake beyond five pages. A dull, dull novel. So dull I didn't even want to read for a while. Then I lost it in the move and was so glad.* I picked up this novel instead. Why oh why did I wait so long to discover McEwan?

Not counting the 19th century novels I read this past spring, Atonement rivals probably only American Pastoral for best read of the year. Told in three parts, it tells the story of Briony Tallis, an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl who writes stories of princesses and heroism, and how one observation made out a window of her house leads her to turn away from writing fantasy stories and toward, as McEwan puts it, "the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong" (39).

So: literary fiction. I started out the novel hopelessly enamored with Briony, so precious in her attempts to stage a play with her toddler cousins as silly bad actors, seeking always praise from her mother and older siblings, walking around her house as though she knew so much more than she actually did. And then her convictions get her wrong and, not to spoil the opening section's ingenious shifting, she acts in a way that does another character—someone about whom I'd theretofore felt very little—such stupid harm, it's very hard by the end of Part One not to vehemently hate her.

It has something to do with the fact that Briony is a child in full, not just a child-aged character, not a child in the Home Alone sense—a child onto whom we can safely project our own ids. She's such a child in full that she acts fully like a child, and for a while it's fun and cute to read and spend time in her head, but then as must happen in all novels consequences come into play, and as she continues to act like a child we readers can't forget that we're not children, and our feelings toward Briony become too complicated to get a comfortable hold of.

And then we have 200 more pages to read.

Two more things to share. One is the best thing I've ever read about the cunt, or the word "cunt":

No one in her presence had ever referred to the word's existence and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which—Briony was certain—the word referred. She had no doubt that that was what it was. The context [of the letter in which the word appeared to her for the first time] helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoetic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the cross. That the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly. (114)

The other thing I can't share without ruining the book's entirety for you, so all I'll say is that somewhere in its pages this book provides me with the most indisputable defense of realism's chief lie ("This didn't happen but I'm going to do everything in my power to convince you that it did.") that I've come across in recent memory. This novel argues for realism's unending importance.

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* I found it, alas. And as you may have seen it's on my comp list so I'll have to slug through it eventually. Stay tuned.