A Momentary Taste of Being

A great loss for literature. The man who single-handedly got a great many of us to read.

Warning:  Anything I write about this book will tell those extensively read in the literature much of what to expect.  While I don't want to interfere with your enjoyment, still I must tell what I have seen. Ah, revisit Harvest Home and add a large dollop of Bethany's Sin and then stir in more than a little Rosemary's Baby , and then perhaps more than a little of Conjure Wife , and you will have a very clear sense of Mr. Bohjalian's book. ONe interesting, though not entirely successful aspect of the book is the author's choice to narrate a portion of it in second person.  I can recall offhand only two other such works--Carlos Fuentes's Aura which also had the distinction of being the only book I've read that was written entirely in the future tense and Jay McInerny's Bright Lights, Big City in which the second person narration was like a driving hammer through the entire work.  In this book the device came off as a kind of authorial experiment--...

You've heard of bloodsucking lawyers--well, welcome to their ranks the living dead.  Only the heroine of our particular tale is an interesting hybrid--she combines the raised from the dead Haitian Voodoo Zombie with the lover of cranial contents so much enshrined in modern cinema.  Her task--to defend a recently-made vampire against charges for a crime that the lawyer knows the vampire didn't commit.  How does she know?  Well, that would be telling wouldn't it. Very light fare, but some fun for those into courtroom drama and zombies. ***

Literary criticism is the sincerest form of fiction.  It wasn't actually this book that inspired the thought, but it helped to carry the thought to its fruition--I was reading a book on Ulysses by one of the great Joyce scholars and thought what an elaborate array of fictive devises had been invented to explain what essentially needs no explanation.  Literary criticism was the predecessor (and now shares the domain with) fan fiction. I'll elaborate more on that point at another time--but for now let's consider Wendell Berry's book on William Carlos Williams.  What I profoundly admired in this book was not so much the image of Williams or of Williams's poetry that comes forth (upon reading the book I did not/do not feel inspired to run out and try to push myself--once again--through the book-length maundering Paterson ) but some of the observations about literature, life, and writing that occur along the way.  For example from The Poetry of William Carlos Willia...

The Illumination is a book of seven short stories each linked at a single point through a single device.  It tells the story of a diary of love notes that passes from hand to hand and the stories of those individuals who receive the diary. Beyond that, I have little to say for the novel.  It is well written.  There are parts that are compelling.  There are characters about whom you want to know more--but the necessarily brief space allotted each does not really allow for a deep understanding of each character. I suppose I would speaking too strongly to say that I was disappointed in the book; but there is some truth to the statement.  It never seemed to gel for me in the way something like The Imperfectionists , which is constructed along the same lines, did.  The novel didn't seem to have so much an ending as a stopping point.  But I don't know what more I could have asked from it or form its unique device.  You see, the illumination is an e...

I first picked up Edge in a bookstore because of the unique cover treatment.  There was an end-dump with books from Angry Robot ( a press I had not heard of) and this one had a cover design that was nearly all words--so much so that the title is a little difficult to distinguish the title.  The cover described what can only be described as a "Running Man" type scenario with knife fights and sudden death. So, in an England of the future where the right to vote is dictated by the willingness to carry a knife and engage in knife duels and challenges, a young man runs away from his psychiatrist's office and the young man's father goes on a legal rampage against the psychiatrist.  He also hires our knife wielding hero to find his son.  One would think given that this is a future of intense monitoring of all activity that it wouldn't be such a trick.  But just as everything is monitored, much can be cloaked, hidden, and changed in the system. We follow for much o...

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford Wendell Berry But after thinking of both of them for many years, I believe that the person to whom Williams can be most suggestively compared is his younger contemporary, William Faulkner. They are nothing alike in their ways of writing or in their subjects. They dealt with two distinct varieties of American disorder: Williams with the accumulating mass of detail in the rapidly industrializing New Jersey suburbs of New York City, Faulkner with (among other things) racial division both within individuals and among people who lived more or less together and sometimes were kin to one another.  Both dealt, in different ways, with the reduction of the country's original abundance to a sum of exploitable and deteriorating "resources" for industry. They seem to have been, if not similarly, then equally burdened by their subjects--not, as with many writers, subjects sought out or acquired, but subjects that they inherite...

Pet Sounds Breakdown Those who know know, and those who do not won't care.

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford Wendell Berry The now-prevailing idea seems to be that poets occupy their designated place in the departmented structure of the arts and sciences, of which the increasingly industrialized modern university is the model. Poets, that is to say, are professional like other professionals and specialists like other specialists. Their business is to produce, ideally, perfect poems of lasting value individually, as objects of art or "high culture." This assumption seems to underlie the judgment of such dismissive critics as Donald Davie and Bruce Bawer. Precedent to them was Yvor Winters, who, admirable as he was in some ways, ranked individual poems as the greatest ever, greatest in English, etc. as if the art of poetry were a sort of contest. Increasingly, moreover, poets are attached to universities and are dependent upon them for a living. I have been at times so attached and so dependent myself, and thus I know somethi...

from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford Wendell Berry He was learning to make of his own language a work that could be nothing but a poem--that could not be replaced by a picture, say, or by anything in prose.

Good news in the form of a book: The Poetry of William Carlos Willims of Rutherford by Wendell Berry. For those who respect Berry's voice, thought, and approach, this is an unabashed tribute and appreciation the goal of which is succinctly stated in the prologue: from The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford Wendell Berry To the extent that a life can have an agenda, my life's agenda for a long time has included some sort of deliberative writing about the poetry of William Carlos Williams, not as an "objective academic endeavor, for which I had no need, but rather as a payment or at least an acknowledgement of a personal debt. I would need to do this late in my life, I thought, the better to understand both Williams' effort and my own, and therefore the character and size of my debt to him. Through most of my life as a writer, I have taken an increasingly familiar pleasure and an invaluable sustenance and reassurance from his poetry And there was a ...

from The Illumination Kevin Brockmeier When he flipped the light on, the objects that greeted his eye had an unusual tidiness to them, a strange and frightening aura of completeness, as if the treadmill and the storage hutch, the stereo and upright speakers, had all suddenly become imprisoned inside their own outlines. The silhouette of a beetle whisked its legs inside the ceiling fixture. One of the pipes gave a tug beneath the house. In the quiet, the noise made him shiver.

from The Illumination Kevin Brockmeier He was discharged from the hospital on one of those stern late-winter afternoons when a low blanket of rain clouds had turned the sky the color of a blackboard coated with chalk dust. The last time I encountered description this powerful and apposite was in Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's Gaze .  That gives me great hope for this book being powerful and beautiful.

Once one breaks through the massively over-written introduction to this tale of ecologists v. animal rights activists, one is plunged into a story with few, if any likeable characters battling it out over ideology.  What is most fascinating about this is that despite the lack of engagement I felt for any of the major characters in the book, Boyle managed to keep me reading. The first chapter or so is so grotesquely overwritten as to offer a fairly high barrier to even the interested reader.  But charge through it--there isn't so much given there that you'll miss a great deal if you skim.  You'll learn about the rats on Anacapa and you'll get a kind of insight into the other book-end of the story.  I dare say no more because while there is something germane here at the beginning that leads to an ending that requires some thinking-through, it would be too much to make my point "above the break" as it were. T.C. Boyle's story traces the work of an ecologi...

An interview with Howard Bloom (via Books Inq.) I've always found the concept of "the anxiety of influence" interesting.  What is more interesting and perhaps less commented on is the anxiety of the canon, by with I mean that as time spins out and more an more new works come to notice, it becomes more and more difficult to stand out.  Certainly time does a fair share of weeding--but it is easier to stand out in a world where perhaps a thousand books a year are published as opposed to a thousand books a day/and hour/(with the internet) a minute.  Standing next to Shakespeare and Joyce, it takes a tremendous amount to hold your own, much less be pulled into the canon.  It suggests that we need to develop the literary equivalent of atavan.

I have a problem with T.C. Boyle.  Every time I start a book by T.C., every time, I find myself in awe of the gorgeous writing. . . but lacking any desire to read through it to find out what story may lurk behind the facade. Without fail.  Short stories included--though I get through those by dint of length.  Tackling what seems like the longest novel ever written right now.  I'm sure it's note--I'm certain that Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge holds that record--what was it, four times as long as A la recherche du temps perdu ? But When the Killing's Done is a close competitor.  Here's to hoping I get over the slump soon. from When the Killing's Done T. C. Boyle It was only then that she became aware of the height of the waves coming at them, rearing black volcanoes of water that took everything out from under the boat and put it right back again, all the while blasting the windows as if there were a hundred fire trucks out there with their ...

The Illumination reviewed I checked this out from the library this weekend, and I am now avidly looking forward to reading it--but it follows Exiles in the Garden .

When the Killing's Done reviewed. I picked this up at the library yesterday.  But then, I picked up many things, and a great many of them I put back down again after a page or two.  For example, who knows whether I will finish Cleaning Nabokov's House ?

I may already have referenced this essay by Judith Butler, but if not, here it is.

Beckett recalling Joyce through an interview And here, for my future edification and delight is the source of an anecdote that I had never truly trusted: He was very friendly. He dictated some pages of Finnegan's Wake to me at one stage. That was later on when he was living in that flat. And during the dictation, someone knocked at the door and I said something. I had to interrupt the dictation. But it had nothing to do with the text. And when I read it back with the phrase 'Come in' in it, he said, 'Let it stand.'