Astronaught Caveat

Review: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

2012-02-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
published by FSG Originals
365 pages

This is a generous four stars. The essays were solid, often brilliant, but more than a few were average, near boring. Favorites include 'Upon this Rock', 'Getting Down to What is Really Real', 'Violence of the Lambs', and 'Peyton's Place'. It's a decent essay collection but the praise on the back gets a little out of hand, as do most blurbs. Wells Tower calls it the "most inspired book of essays since DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. A bold claim.

All Human Existence is a Trick of Light

2012-01-19T18:21:00.000-08:00

The Angel Esmeralda (Nine Stories) by Don DeLillo
published by Scribner
211 pages

I guess there's a reason this is DeLillo's first and only story collection. I'd say 3 1/2 of these stories are worth reading. The title story is taken from his excellent epic Underworld and is the strongest story by far. Human Moments in WWIII is also great. Anyway, DeLillo has turned into a philosopher-poet. So there's that. I just need to stick to his earlier work. I still have Great Jones Street, Endzone, and Ratner's Star to read.

Et in Arcadia Ego

2012-01-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
published by Random House
337 pages

I am nearly 30 years old and I've just finished Blood Meridian for the first time. I'm glad I waited this long because I don't think I could have handled it in my younger years. Never has a work of literature left me so spent and speechless. It was slow going and most days I almost dreaded the thing. Not because it wasn't enjoyable...well, hell, I don't think Blood Meridian can be enjoyable. What I mean to say is that the writing is stunning and this is clearly a monumental work of American literature and certain scenes in the narrative will be buried in my heart and brain forever, but I found only despair and dark pleasures.

The dread I felt came from The Judge and the evilness of the book. I can't remember ever having been terrified of a literary figure. And make no mistake, Blood Meridian is a terrifying work. And I have nothing left to say.

"For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies." pg 120

Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

2011-12-01T08:27:00.001-08:00

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
227 pages
published by Vintage

It's hard not to like Didion's writing style. It's lyrical and thoughtful. Cyclical yet straightforward. And especially with this book, you just want to give her a hug. Her ruminations on her husband's death border on the cliche but she gives grief new literary life with her obsessive excavation of her memories of the night her husband died.

Review: Hot Pink by Adam Levin

2011-11-20T10:11:00.001-08:00

Hot Pink by Adam Levin
256 pages
published by McSweeney's

I haven't read Levin's The Instructions yet but it's on my bookshelf and after reading through a galley of his first story collection, Hot Pink, I'm eager to dive into His Big Book. Though the influence of George Saunders comes through from time to time, Levin's stories are something else entirely. Violence is commonplace. Love is sincere but confusing and misguided. And of course they're all funny.

Review: Habibi by Craig Thompson

2011-11-20T10:02:00.001-08:00

Habibi by Craig Thompson
672 pages
published by Pantheon

Brutal and beautiful. The sprawling narrative is a tad overwhelming but forgivably so. But seriously, the artwork is pretty astounding. Thompson is mostly known for his book of equal heft, Blankets, which is a great graphic novel in its own right but Habibi is clearly his most mature and imaginative work to date.

Coming of Age in Hollywood

2011-11-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O'Brien
155 pages
published by New York Review of Books (Classics)

The charm of this slim book comes almost entirely from the narrator. He is young, intelligent, brash, observant, funny and a son of Hollywood.

I enjoyed the novel all the way through but the last few chapters is what did it for me. It is essentially a coming-of-age story and O'Brien gives us an ending that is both open ended and undeniably satisfying.

NYRB Classics rock.

By All Accounts I Should Love Philip Roth

2011-10-27T10:49:00.000-07:00

Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
274 pages
published by Random House

I've never really understood why I don't like Philip Roth. It seems that I would. But I've read American Pastoral and most recently Portnoy's Complaint and I'm still luke-warm about him. I guess I was expecting to enjoy him because of his storied neuroticism but maybe I've become tired of that dance.

Roth has great moments but I feel they are few and far between. This novel is sexually outrageous and sometimes funny but ultimately forgettable.

Andrew Bird, NORMAN soundtrack

2011-10-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

Listen to the new score by Andrew Bird for the film NORMAN on his Facebook.

Tomas Transtromer Wins Nobel, Saves World From Total Destruction

2011-10-07T07:01:00.000-07:00

The Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer (pictured above) just won the Nobel prize for literature. And no one in America has ever heard of him. I can poke fun at him because I'm half Swedish. It's okay. We're cool. Me and Tomas are cool.

Another New Book for Me!

2011-09-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

Just picked this up. Super excited.

Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke

New Books for Me!

2011-09-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

Some books I just picked up at Half Price Books after trading in some old books:

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
Frog by Stephen Dixon

Audio of "The View From Mrs. Thompson's" by David Foster Wallace

2011-09-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

On this tenth anniversary of The Horror, listen to David Foster Wallace read his essay from Consider the Lobster, The View From Mrs. Thompson's.

All Roads Lead to Michigan

2011-09-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

After American Salvage, Q Road is probably Bonnie Jo Campbell's strongest book. I recently interviewed this past summer for Knee-Magazine, so I had the chance to read her entire catalog.

Q Road is a novel told from multiple view points, with each chapter devoted to a single character. As the story moves along, the characters lives begin to intermingle. It is at once about a small Michigan township and of course, like any great story, it is also about the world. While the novel is heavy on characters, Campbell doesn't take the easy way out and leave readers with no plot to latch onto. Let's just say it involves fire.

If you haven't read Bonnie Jo Campbell, then you're missing out.

Northwest Living

2011-09-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

Livability by Jon Raymond
272 pages
published by Bloomsbury USA

I read this because it contained the basis for two films I rather enjoyed, Old Joy (titled Old Joy in the story collection) and Wendy & Lucy (titled Train Choir in the story collection). Overall the stories were kinda middle-of-the-road. Characters tended to be a bit flat and sometimes the stories felt a bit MFA-ish. There was just an overarching tone or voice that I feel I've been reading in contemporary American fiction and I don't like it.

But check out the two films directed by Kelly Reichardt. They're excellent. She also directed the recent Meek's Cutoff, which looks amazing and I think Jon Raymond did the screenplay.

I had high hopes because the movies were so great, but I really shouldn't compare the two. I also picked up his novel, Half-Life, so maybe that will be better.

He's A Poet and He Doesn't Even Know It

2011-08-02T20:16:00.000-07:00

Love-Lies-Bleeding by Don DeLillo
published by Scribner
112 pages

I had taken a small break from DeLillo after having read his most well known work, White Noise. I was a bit disappointed with it and figured I needed some space, so to speak. Getting back into his work, I'm reminded why I love his prose and dialogue.

Of his three plays, Love-Lies-Bleeding is the first and only I've read. It is sparse territory, taking place in the south western desert of the United States and contains only four characters/actors. The main character, Alex, is an aging artist who has just suffered from a massive second stroke and as such, is in a "persistent vegetative state." So his estranged son and ex-wife have come to convince his second, younger wife to let him die. Or help him die, which is the matter at hand. It examines issues of mercy, mortality, and what it means to actually live in this world.

Its language and dialogue are meditative. Those familiar with DeLillo will recognize his style instantly. Repetition. The naming of things. The dialogue that sounds natural but in reality, no one would ever say. The poetry of his words. It foreshadows Point Omega both in its setting, mood, and tone. Love-Lies-Bleeding doesn't differ greatly from his novels style-wise and it very well could have been just another one of his novellas. But his words still give me the chills.

Of DeLillo's 18 published works (excluding Amazons by Cleo Birdwell), I have five works left. Three novels (End Zone, Great Jones Street, and Ratner's Star) and two plays (The Day Room and Valparaiso).

Archived Suicide

2011-08-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

Suicide by Edouard Leve
published by Dalkey Archive Press
144 pages

I don't know why I'm reading this in the summer. Maybe because if I read it in the autumn or winter it would simply be too much. But I came across this slim novel while looking through Dalkey Archive's catalog and its beautiful cover caught my eye. And then I read how the author killed himself shortly after handing in his final manuscript, entitled Suicide. Well, that was pretty much all I needed, seeing as how, like many literary types, I am weirdly fascinated with all things suicide, especially when it comes to writers. The tortured souls and what not. Not quite sure what it is about suicide that so interests me. The finality of it. The tremendous psychic pain. The willful act of taking yourself away from this world. Not sure. Ruminations for another time.

But with Suicide, Leve introduces us to an unnamed narrator as he (the narrator) creates a fragmented picture of a friend who had committed suicide years before. It is all told in the second person through moments, small and large, in the friends life. It is a stark portrait, funny at times, devastating at others. Perhaps a sort of suicide note from Leve, perhaps not.

David Foster Wallace Is Still Awesome

2011-07-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
1,079 pages (including endnotes)
published by Back Bay Books

My second reading is complete and...well, it's still amazing. The first reading, five years ago, was difficult, I'm not gonna lie. It took me a while to get through it the first time. That is not to say that it wasn't thoroughly enjoyable the first time around, it was just a bit bewildering at times. But this second reading was much quicker and utterly transfixing. As I read along, the layers of complexity kept revealing themselves and my prior confusion was replaced with a hazy clarity.

DFW has created in Infinite Jest something entirely unique and endlessly entertaining. It challenges me in ways I didn't think literature could and engages me with the language and story in ways I didn't think possible. I think I'll read it for a third time in another five years and see how it holds up. I suspect I won't be disappointed.

Down and Down and Down The Rabbit Hole

2011-05-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

Logicomix by Apostolos K. Doxiadēs, Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna
352 pages
published by Bloomsbury USA

I'm sure questioning the very foundations of mathematics was a very hot topic back in early 1900s, and it certainly was interesting to jump down the rabbit hole with Russell but there wasn't enough character development within the narrative for me to care enough about the logic/math hoopla. They put forth tremendous ideas, such as the play between madness and the quest for absolute truth, or the complexities of "the map" vs. "reality". But I don't feel that they were fully explored, or really explored at all. If they had, I think they would have found more character, more humanity. One last jab: the story relied far too much on epiphanies to move plot along. Seems like every other section had a miraculous Eureka! But maybe that's how it was. But maybe not.

The understated artwork carried the story but the logic and math-speak was a bit much at times which is 100% my weakness. I wasn't going to read this but then I came upon a damaged copy at my book shop so what the hell, ya know?

Infinite Jest Update

2011-04-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

I'm a little more than half way through my second reading of Infinite Jest. It's astounding, really. Sometimes I have to put it down and just stare at the room. I have to take a small break though because I'm scheduled to interview the amazing Bonnie Jo Campbell in the coming weeks, so I want to read some of her earlier stuff.

Re-Reading Infinite Jest

2011-02-16T09:53:00.000-08:00

I'm re-reading Infinite Jest (along with most of my book store co-workers) and if anyone wants to join in on the fun, I've posted our reading schedule below.

Date Page #

2/21 63

2/24 94

2/27 137

3/2 168

3/5 210

3/8 242

3/11 284

3/14 316

3/17 358

3/21 390

3/24 432

3/27 464

3/30 506

4/2 537

4/5 580

4/8 611

4/11 653

4/14 685

4/17 727

4/20 759

4/23 801

4/27 833

4/30 875

5/2 907

5/5 949

5/8 981

Is This What Represents Chicago?

2011-02-05T08:37:00.000-08:00

Granta 108 (The Chicago Issue)
256 pages published by Grove Press

Apparently this issue of Granta, issue 108, based entirely around Chicago (both in content and authorship), is the highest selling issue of Granta of all time. So, you're welcome, Granta.

But. But. This issue was kinda lame. The Chris Ware cover art is the best thing about the whole thing, which is strange because taking a look at the table of contents, there are some pretty impressive names. Just to name a few: Aleksandar Hemon, Stuart Dybek, Don DeLillo, George Saunders, Richard Powers, and the token Chicago writer, Sandra Cisneros. I mean, come on, those are some good names. But the results fall way short. I don't know what it was. Disappointing. Don't waste your time. Read the aforementioned authors but just read their books.

I Learned This Word While Reading A Book, Vol. 83

2011-02-05T08:34:00.000-08:00

opprobrium- harsh criticism; public disgrace arising from somone's shameful conduct.

Zombies and Dead Dialogue

2011-01-16T18:04:00.000-08:00

The Walking Dead (Compendium One)
1088 pages
published by Image Comics

I read the first issue a while back and I wasn't very impressed. I bought this compendium for my wife for Christmas because we've been watching the new AMC series. So, I gave the graphic novel another chance. Well, not much had changed. The graphic novel (much like the new series) suffers from some pretty terrible dialogue. Unfortunately, there is a lot of talking. I kept reading pretty much because I wanted to know what would happen.

The World Is A Dark & Lonely Place

2011-01-16T17:52:00.000-08:00

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq
272 pages
published by Vintage

It took me a while to finish this book though not because I didn't like it. Just a bad reading month, ya know? Lots of stuff going on. Life, etc.

We follow two half brothers (that is brothers who share a mother) through almost their entire lives. One, a cold, molecular biologist who can't experience pleasure or love and generally goes through life alienated from the human race. The other, a self-absorbed charmless yet oddly lovable horn-ball who endlessly searches for genuine human connection after surviving a tormented childhood.

The overall mood of the narrative is pretty dark and hopeless, which is a bit hard to take at times. Kinda in the way that Vonnegut was pretty dark but he was also very funny. The last third of the novel lost a little bit of the energy that the first two-thirds had, though that could have been because the first two-thirds dealt mainly with Bruno (the lovable horn-ball), who had a more interesting story.

This book caused an "uproar" when it was published in France, probably due to the weird "master race" cloning/genetic ideas that were presented. The book ends kinda strangely from the view point of the future dominate race of genetic clones that the molecular biologist of the story helped pioneer.

Quotes:

"I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there's nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven't a clue what he might do when he's older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value- he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him." pg.140

"Unhappiness isn't at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned." pg.203

Midwest is Young and Restless

2010-12-13T19:03:00.000-08:00

Racing in Place by Michael Martone
published by University of Georgia Press
168 pages

I like Michael Martone. I like what he tries to do. Sometimes he fails, but he tries. He tasks risks. Sometimes he can get a little "writerly", a little to "flowerly" with his sentences. But again, he's taking the risk. And I can respect that.

This book is pretty much what it says it is: fragments, collages, ruins and postcards. And a fun drinking game is to chug a beer every time Martone mentions that he grew up in Fort Wayne.

Quotes:

"Despite the confusion about its location, people agree that the Midwest is a good place to be from. It is as if we keep the region purposely vague in order to include as many as people as natives. 'I am from the Midwest': that coin is worth collecting." pg. 97

Our Ridiculous Selves

2010-11-24T10:44:00.000-08:00

Earth (The Book) by Jon Stewart and The Daily Show
238 pages
published by Grand Central

If you have read America The Book, you know what to expect heading into Earth The Book. And that's not a bad thing, because America was hilarious and Earth doesn't disappoint. Not as good as America, but very very good.

"For society to flourish, it would take work. So what was work? Tasks we performed for compensation in the service of an employer, be it individual or corporate entity. And yes, it was as exciting as it sounds. We didn't want to work. In fact, that's about as good a definition of "work" as you could have-- 'that which we didn't want to do, but had to, if we didn't want to eat dirt.' Of course, some workers attacked their jobs with passion and creativity. These people were known as brown-nosing jagoffs." pg.128

"We relied on a system of small regular bribes to keep certain sorts of transactions moving smoothly. Tipping 15-20% of the bill encouraged servers to treat customers with something milder than disdain. Tipping was both an acknowledgment of servers' underpayment by management, and a handy excuse for management to continue underpaying them." pg.133

"The only thing that increased more rapidly than the speed of new technology was the speed with which we became irritated at its now relative slowness. Eventually, we developed the capacity to be instantaneously disappointed. This was the final triumph of faster." pg.182

"If necessity was the mother of invention, then laziness was its drunken stepfather. Man created many contraptions to free up as much of his time as possible. This helped us achieve our life's greatest goal: doing nothing." pg.183

"As confident as the human species was that after death, a Higher Power awaited us in an eternal utopia filled with everyone we've ever known and/or virgins, one thing we all feared was death. And although we never quite succeeded in conquering the Grim Reaper, we did manage to confuse and delay him, allowing many of us to enjoy up to twenty extra years of feeble dependence." pg.188

DeLillo Gets A Fresh Coat of Paint From Picador

2010-11-11T15:21:00.001-08:00

In March 2011, Don DeLillo's novels will be re-released with spiffy new covers. Here's a few, just to give you an idea:

Death is the Mother of Beauty

2010-11-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

Angels by Denis Johnson
209 pages
published by Harper Perennial

I'm going to devote almost this entire review to Johnson's really just beautiful prose. This is Johnson's first novel and while it took a while to get going, the last half of the narrative (where one character is an mental institution, the other on death row awaiting the gas chamber) is probably the best stuff I've read in a long time.

"She snuck over to Sarah's to borrow the gun and there he was, sneaking home, out of Sarah's trailer with the door creaking so loud in the quiet she took it for herself, screeching, Bill, and he saw, and she saw, and Sarah in the doorway with her panties saw, so everyone knew that everyone else knew what was what with who." pg.15

"Freed of negative energies, he moved easily toward solutions." pg.89

"He felt like a grownup in a room full of children playing with toy cars. To get them to see who he was involved tearing them out of a tiny exclusive world of their own creation." pg.162

"He knew a rush in his veins--he felt their need baked into these walls--and he wanted to make himself a sacrifice and his death payment for something more than his stupid mistakes. If Brian could promise him he'd make the crucial difference for somebody, he would walk through the door and be slaughtered here and now." pg.174

"He couldn't believe he'd actually been asleep. All night he had lain with the Unmade, with God, the incredible darkness, the huge blue mouth of love. I'm going to be turned into space. This is the hour of my death." pg.204

Chris Ware is One of The Greatest Artists Alive

2010-11-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware
72 pages
published by Drawn and Quarterly

Another addition to the world of Rusty Brown! This time we learn about Jordan Lint. Lint was introduced in the first Rusty Brown volume as a school bully.

This new story line follows Lint from birth to death, with each page representing a specific time in his life. The narrative and art work also represent each developmental, with the first few pages visually representing the world as a baby would see it and then as a toddler, a small child, a pre-teen, a teenager, etc. As the story progresses, the artwork and narrative become more and more complex, a la Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by Joyce.

Ware pushed himself to experiment a little with this work and it worked out beautifully. If you have never had the pleasure of reading Chris Ware, you better get started.

Genocide? What Genocide? Have some tea and cake.

2010-10-29T14:57:00.000-07:00

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin
308 pages
published by Random House

This is the latest selection for our book group at the book store where I work. I led the group this month, so obviously, I had to read the book. Well, it wasn't terrible but it was pretty bad.

This is a debut from Parkin, who grew up in South Africa and has done lots of volunteer type work, teaching, and other good stuff. But a fiction writer she is not. The story centers around Angel, the resident cake baker for this UN type compound in Kigali, Rwanda. Various characters come to her to order cakes, tell her little stories about why they want the cake and maybe give a little snippet about their horrible lives in terms of surviving genocide, AIDS, poverty, et al. You'd think this would be pretty riveting stuff but in Parkin's hands, it all falls flat. The dialogue is super stiff and polite and every statement is met with the proper response, for example, "How are you today," she asked. "I'm lovely, thank you for asking. And you?" "Eh, I've been better." "Oh, what is the matter?" and so on. That is not verbatim but it's not far off. The main narrative isn't really any better. And the plot device was repetitive (customer comes to order cake, Angel listens to their story, x12).

And since the story takes place mostly on this isolated apartment complex which has its own guard, you get the sense that this isn't exactly an accurate portrait of modern Rwanda, post genocide. It's a little too sunny and everything has a silver lining and the book even ends with a triumphant wedding. It's kinda like watching Disney's Aladdin and thinking, "So that's what the Middle East is like!"

Parkin tries to touch upon some serious issues (AIDS, genocide, homelessness, female genital mutilation, feminism, prostitution, corporation, race, education, traditional African marriages) but they are more less mentioned in passing and not fully explored.

Now, the rest of the book group almost completely disagreed with me. They enjoyed the "light hearted" tone and outlook of the main character. They felt that this was a nice change for a book about Rwanda, to show that it's not all bad there and that people have happy lives. Sure. Fine. I'm just saying Parkin didn't do a good job with that premise. Maybe if the setting had been more indicative of Rwanda as a whole it would have worked. The book group, all middle-aged women, said I didn't "get it" because I'm a man. Please.

Why can I write so much more about the books I don't like than the ones I do?

Immigrant Song

2010-10-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

Vida by Patricia Engel
182 pages
published by Black Cat

Vida is a hard nut to crack. Engel is clearly influenced by Junot Diaz, whom she gives a shout out to in her acknowledgements and Diaz also blurbs the front cover. That's pretty much why I read it, because this is the debut Diaz had been waiting for, apparently. But this influence comes off as more imitation than her own solid voice but then again, it is a debut and Engel is still finding that voice.

Moderately recommended though nothing new in terms of moving Latin American immigrant fiction forward, not to pigeon hole her stuff but I mean, that's what it is...at least right now.

A Boring Serial Killer?

2010-10-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

Bound by Antonya Nelson

240 pages

published by Bloomsbury USA

A mother, Misty, dies in a car accident (possible suicide?), leaving behind a teenage daughter (Catherine or Cattie), who is now the legal obligation of the mother's childhood friend, for whom the daughter is named. This childhood friend, again, also named Catherine, must decide whether to take responsibility for this new child in her life, which generally forces her to wander back into her past, in Kansas, a past which she never really left in the first place. And then there's this serial killer who goes by the name BTK (Bind Torture Kill) who was at large during Catherine and Misty's childhood in Wichita and apparently he has resurfaced in the present day.

Mr. BTK isn't really a force in the novel as he is a ghost, just off stage. I was kinda hoping that he'd play a bigger role and at times I feel like he was just used as a big tease and that Nelson wanted to use him as an Idea rather than an actual character. So, I was disappointed in terms of no actual confrontation, kinda like the whole Chekhov thing with the gun introduced in the first act, etc. The gun never goes off in this book. Like I said, I think the whole "serial killer" device was used to sell the book, or the plot. I mean, I read it hoping to see some blend of literary fiction/suspense thriller type book.

And you know, now that I state all this out loud, I'm sure Nelson did the "BTK serial killer off stage" thing on purpose, using him only as a metaphor for the past and how it can "bind" us, trapping us in a way, from moving forward, and certainly "toture" us, and even "killing" us, emotionally. But for whatever reason, it didn't really resonate with me. Maybe because the characters pasts didn't seem that interesting.

Nelson's style and voice are a bit bland at times. Or maybe I feel like I've been reading very similar voices, a la Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. All are great writers, though not doing anything particularly interesting with language or structure or even plot. But they get the job done.

I Learned This Word While Reading A Book, Vol. 35

2010-10-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

zaftig- (of a woman) having a full, rounded figure; plump.

Ask the Optimist!

2010-10-12T11:50:00.000-07:00

The Braindead Megaphone: Essays by George Saunders
272 pages
published by Riverhead

George Saunders sure can write a great essay. His fiction is better, but these sure ain't bad either. Funny and compassionate as hell. My favorites were when he went to Dubai and toured the luxury hotels, the one with Ask the Optimist is really just astounding, and the one where he goes to visit the Buddha Boy in Nepal.

Quotes:

"Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more. A human being is someone who wishes to improve his lot." pg.30

"The story, then, can be seen as a series of repetitions of one event: the reader leaves a little gas station at high speed, looking to the next one." pg.179

Use Well Thy Freedom

2010-10-07T15:23:00.001-07:00

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
562 pages
published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

I almost feel bad for Jonathan Franzen. It's not his fault Freedom was hailed as an American masterpiece before anyone even had a chance to read it. He writes a book, then he goes over it with his editor, and then the publishing, marketing machine takes care of the rest, launching his status into the ever hyperbolic atmosphere. Again, not his fault. Is he enjoying the praise and attention? Probably. But also, probably not. How can he possibly live up to this standard that critics, fans, and Oprah have set for him?

Well, the short answer is he can't. I tried my best to steer clear of most reviews, positive and negative, before reading Freedom. I had read The Corrections about five years ago and had enjoyed it. Having just finished my undergrad, it was one of the first novels I had read that wasn't assigned to me by a professor. And I had just ended a long, rather volatile relationship and I was desperate to escape into something. The Corrections worked. I read it over the course of several nights. Pretty much devoured it. Best book ever? No, not really. But I enjoyed it, and it re-awakened a love for books I hadn't felt since elementary school.

Now, five years, I've probably read 250 books (give or take) since The Corrections. I feel a bit more confident in my criticism and reader abilities. I know what I like (for the most part), I know what I don't like (for the most part), and I can defend my opinions (for the most part).

Again, I was oddly transfixed by Freedom. I read it in about five days. This is not to say I really liked it. The speed in which I read a book doesn't always correlate to my pleasure. I guess it says that Franzen's prose is very readable. Some people say lyrical...or that he's a great stylist, but that stuff doesn't mean anything really. Those are just nonsense words to me. But I'm confused by Freedom. It's not as good as everyone seems to think it is, but it's also not as bad either. I guess the conclusion I came to, after having read The Corrections and Freedom, is that Franzen is a slightly-better-than mediocre writer. And trust me, I'm not trying to be mean. I've given this a lot of thought, probably more than it warrants, and he's a good writer, but his work doesn't do anything for me in my gut.

Notes of Discontent: Patty's "autobiography", which we are led to believe is in fact written by Patty, is so clearly the voice of Franzen, that well...it's hard to put that aside. Patty's "voice" sounds like the rest of the novel. Franzen's prose is nothing special. I usually end up scrawling down a sentence or more when I'm reading a book because I like the way the author said this or that, or presented an interesting idea, etc. I didn't write done a single sentence from Freedom. As such, I felt the book was about 200 pages too long. When the language and ideas are beautiful and interesting, I don't mind chewing through the pages (i.e. Infinite Jest). But much of the narrative just felt unnecessary at times.

Notes of Contentment: Freedom ends on a rather "happy" note, with most things wrapped up nicely. This is pretty brave of him and I'm sure he'll catch a lot of grief for that from his "open-ended", post-modern buddies. It's nice to see that not every literary novel has to end in a fragmented and ambiguous manner.

Franzen doesn't deserve the disgusting amount of praise but he also doesn't deserve the malicious attacks (I'm looking at your B.R. Meyers). The attacks are just so clearly a reaction to the over-the-top reviews. As a reader, we can't take them seriously because they mostly reek of jealousy. Because what if Franzen's work didn't garnish so much attention? What if he worked in moderate obscurity? Would those reviews be so venomous?

In summation, I have this to say about Freedom: Meh.

I Learned This Word While Reading A Book: Vol. 18

2010-10-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

Cicatrix- a scar; a mark left by the healing of injured tissue

To Live Forever In An Endless Loop of Unreality

2010-09-30T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Translated by Ruth L.C. Simms

103 pages
published by NYRB Classic

Fleeing from Johnny Law, a fugitive finds himself on a mysterious deserted island with ghost-like inhabitants. If you don't want to know what's really going on, stop reading right now. Ok. I warned you. These ghostly inhabitants turn out to be a kind of "projection", produced by a machine, invented by a man named, you guessed it, Morel. This machine recorded these actual people some time ago on this island, kind of capturing their souls, to be played on a loop for, theoretically, eternity, thereby making these group of friends immortal.

All the while, before this whole machine projection plot is revealed, our narrator and fugitive has fallen in love with one of the projections! Short story short, the fugitive manages to manipulate the machine enough so as he is recorded into the loop, giving the appearance that him and his new love are in fact, in love. So now he can and her can live together forever, in a manufactured reality.

Borges seems to think this is the perfect story, though him and Casares were like bff, so you can't really trust that opinion. Regardless, it was a great story, if not a little confusing towards the end. An existential-science-fiction type love story thing. Also, apparently, it was very important to the screenwriters of LOST during the fourth season. At least that's what a Google Image search of "the invention of morel" revealed:

Let's Get Lost

2010-09-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan
256 pages

published by Milkweed Editions

Pretty much every review of this novel I've read (professional and otherwise) has had two things in common: they (1) have no idea what is really going on plot wise and (2) this doesn't really bother them. I second that motion. I had a tenuous grasp of the happenings from page to page and by the end, surprisingly, I didn't really mind that I was lost in this absurd, shrimp and gravel-filled world. Also, it's pretty darn funny. Also, the book jacket is a little "hip-young-adult-chick-lit", but that ain't her fault.

Kira is a "friend" of mine on Goodreads.com. So there is bias. Deal with it.

Check out reviews of Orion... at Bookslut, The Believer, and The Millions.

I Learned This Word While Reading A Book: Vol. 1

2010-09-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Soughing- to make a moaning, whistling, or rushing sound (of the wind in trees, the sea, etc).

Bowling With A Severed Head

2010-09-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

Black Flies by Shannon Burke
184 pages
published by Soft Skull Press

This is some dark stuff. Burke (who worked as a paramedic in Harlem during the early 1990s) documents the life of a rookie paramedic in Harlem during the 1990s. Write what you know, right? He (the main character, Cross) shows up all wide-eyed and hopeful, medical textbook tucked under his arm, thinking he's going to save the world, or at least this neighborhood. It's pretty much a rapid decent into the heart of darkness from the opening pages though, and we watch the horrifying hardening of Cross as the day in and day out of being a thankless (in most cases, cursed at and abused) paramedic in a economically depleted district where you (the paramedic) become a punching bag for all the wrongs the world has wrought.

All the crazy little medical episodes keep the pages turning (like the title of this post, where one particularly cruel and calloused medic has a proud posed picture of himself holding the severed head of a 14 year old girl, pretending to line it up and aim at a rack of 40s at the end of an alley), if only out of disbelief. And as a reader, you pray that half these stories aren't true, but deep down, you kinda know that isn't the case. I mean, I don't use the word "shocking" a lot, just because I guess I'm not easily shocked, but this novel is shocking, as in jarring, as in powerful, as in made my soul shrivel. Yeah.

Also, bad ass cover right? So simple.

Quotes:

"The entire landscape of your life will become the rundown neighborhoods, the neglected, the homeless, the insane, the drug addicted, the sick, the dying, and the dead...You'll be a witness to all of the fucked-up shit that's hidden from most of society. You'll be a part of it. And there will come a time where out of frustration, out of despair, out of anger, you'll want to give in to the misery and ugliness. I can't teach you how to act at that moment of temptation, and I can't teach you how to deal with the fallout, either. Because it's not a question of medical training. It's a question of strength. And of good versus evil." pg. 131

Time is a Goon

2010-09-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

288 pages
published by Knopf

When I checked this out from the library and began reading it, I almost put it down several times. I had heard so many good things about it, from people and blogs and critics I respected. I was skeptical though. I didn't like the cover. I didn't really like the title. And the plot didn't seem that interesting to me. I just imagined it was going to be some kind of bildungsroman thing sprinkled with lectures on punk rock.

Well, let me just say that I'm glad I stuck with it. It took me a little while to get into but after I shed all my preconceived notions, it turned out to a damn fine book. It's doesn't have a traditional narrative arch (thank God) with each chapter devoted to one character, with each story directly, or sometimes indirectly, related to previous chapters and their characters. So it's a little more short-story-ish in format than it is novel. Like a really tight, super connected short story collection. Egan also blends enough satire and literary trickery to keep things fresh and engaging, including an entire section told through a teenagers Power Point journal, which was, oddly enough, way more genuine than I thought possible.

So it kinda ends up being about music, but not in that slightly annoying way (think Perks of Being a Wallflower, think Love is a Mixtape). And time ends up being the goon. And the only reason I didn't like the cover is because I thought it was going to be an annoying diatribe about the death of music and the only real music is punk rock, etc. The cover was misleading. But I'm not gonna stop judging books by them. What would happen if we went back to the age when books didn't have dust jackets? Like it was just the title and author on the spine and that's it? How would those sell in the now heavily image-based consumer culture, where the image is king? Cause now probably like half the reason a customer will decide on one book over the other is because it has a better cover, right? I know I've done it. This all being said, book covers has evolved into this strange art form. I don't know about you, but I think book covers are freakin' beautiful nowadays. But I digress.

So read this book please. I liked it a lot.

Ruminations on the Essay and Doritos

2010-09-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander Monson
208 pages
published by Graywolf Press

I've had Monson on my radar for a long time now, probably ever since he wrote Vacationland, which seems like a long time ago and I have a vague recollection of him visiting my college campus for a reading, probably promoting Vacationland. Am I making this up? Not remembering it correctly? Whose to say. Also, I never ended up reading Vacationland, or haven't yet anyway.

So, I was ready to enjoy Vanishing Point. I wanted to love it. I am excited about writers who choose to expand certain forms, in this case, the essay. And while a few pieces were really excellent (like his piece on Doritos and artificial flavors or his eulogy-type thing on the death of Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax or his time serving jury duty) the others were a bit too circuitous for my taste, where Monson seemed to be wandering around this essay space he had created, not quite sure how he was going to write himself out of this subject he found himself in, which more often than not, were meanderings on the 'I' of memoirs. I think I could have appreciated the dissection if it had just been one essay on the 'I' but Monson kept coming back to it again and again, to the point where I didn't care anymore. But that's just me (well, it's always just me) and that subject didn't particularly catch my thinking fancy.

I'll definitely read more Monson though. Vanishing Point is certainly on the experimental side, which I'm down with, but I'd like to read some of his more "traditional" stuff. And his poetry. Also, I will now try and stop using a 'double space' after the ends of sentences. I forget why exactly, but he touches on it briefly, something to do with Courier font and how it made the formatting all weird and so they (I don't know who they is) had to implement the 'double space', which really isn't needed with other fonts, and if you'll notice, books don't use the 'double space'. But now that I've taken a brief moment to do some research, a la Wikipedia, they say that the 'double space' has been carried over from type writers, when the ink ribbon would get would too dry and the period could sometimes not be seen clearly at the end of a sentence, so the writer would just use a double space to indicate the start of a new sentence.

Oh man, I totally forgot to mention the website! Along with the print reading experience, various words throughout the text have a small dagger as an indicator to go onto the books website, input the indicated word into a search engine, and then a digression (or any other various thing) pertaining to that word will appear. Kinda like web-based end notes. I was not always near a computer when I was reading the book, so I only used the site a few times, but it was a cool idea nonetheless. Though I usually read books to get away from computers.

Fragmented knowledge!

Quotes:

"But still there is life there, even if in data fragments. All human lives can be described by this esoterica, this collection of descended asterisks. It's only in the tiny that anything matters or exists at all." pg.62

"Some true things are not dramatic. But the minutiae of our existences are. These are facts, friends, all twenty thousand boxes of our lives of eating them. We are surrounded by their ordinary glory." pg. 164

Franzen and Oprah Kiss and Make Up and It Gets Me Thinking About Art in America and Batman

2010-09-16T13:46:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, Friday, Oprah will announce that her new (possibly last) selection for her book club will be Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. You may recall that Franzen's last novel, The Corrections, was also chosen as an Oprah Book Club Selection, but due to some poorly chosen words by Franzen that were largely taken out of context, he was uninvited to appear on the show, due to what Oprah deemed, his "conflicted" feelings.

There's a large, weird part of me where I want the stuff (I'm going to say "stuff" and not "art") I enjoy, whether it be music, movies, books, whatever, to remain mine, to remain secret, in the most selfish and childish sense. It's a suspended reality, this illusion of ownership. But also, at the same time, I want to expose people to this same stuff, to push it on others, convince them of its worth, and to cheer for its much deserved, wider recognition.

So, it gets tricky, because we believe that what the masses enjoy can't be good, that the mass culture is stupid and enjoys stupid things like Two and A Half Men and James Patterson and The Black Eyed Peas. But what happens when art is both good and adored by the mass population? Can Real Art withstand popularity? Withstand recognition? Withstand the machine of consumerism? Because, of course, the fear (by me and others like me...though don't say snobs because that is not the right word) is that this popularity will A) dilute the art, turning it into a product of sorts and B) change the artist, for the worse. Always for the worst.

Franzen is not a secret. I realize that. But he's still in the "respected writer" camp, though some still think him a pretentious, untalented stooge. But I think we (you know who you are) need to re-evaluate our notions of Art and Mass Culture because the two are merging, at least here in America. I suppose they've always been merging, or advertising companies have been trying to merge them since who knows when. But it seems to me that the merge has sped up in the last, let's say ten years. I guess I'm thinking of things like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men. Of the recent fame of Stieg Larsson and his Millennium Trilogy. Of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Of the rise of bands like The Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and "indie rock" in general, for better or worse.

Don't get me wrong, most entertainment enjoyed by the masses is terrible and mostly because it's not trying to be more than entertainment. You're not about to catch me watching an episode (are they called episodes?) of The Bachelor(ette). But I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's okay to enjoy art that a lot of other people also enjoy. I'm saying this to myself and to people like me. Those who generally scoff at mass culture (not necessarily "pop culture", that's a bit different and tends to be more interesting), instinctively offering a snide, irony-soaked remark on what is popular, cutting it down merely because it is popular. Because popular things can't be any good, right? Right?!

Well, now I'm not so sure. There are some conflicting examples and ideas in this post, I acknowledge that but I just wanted to get the thoughts brewing and I don't really feel like going back and cleaning it up. I mean, come on, it's the Internet.

Things I Enjoy That Also Happen to Be Very Popular:

Jonathan Franzen
Miller High Life
Modern Family
the NBA
Arby's Roast Beef Sandwiches (mostly because of the Arby's sauce)

A Satisfied Mind

2010-09-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

Stoner by John E. Williams
278 pages
re-published by The New York Review of Books Classics

Huh. Ya know, I didn't know if I was going to like this novel. I tend to have a hard time getting into "period" novels, which this kinda is, taking place from about 1891 to 1950s. But it's a testament to John Williams and his storytelling abilities that he was able to take a simple story about a passionate, though ultimately ordinary, English professor named William Stoner and turn it into an compelling (yes, compelling) tale of a life fully lived...or at least attempted.

Pretty much everyone on The Millions (.com) is in love with this novel and it's been called "the perfect novel" by more than a few respectable literary types. Perfect? Well, I don't really even know what that means. Is there some sort of Perfection Checklist for the novel? Entertaining. Check. Clear, fluid, and often gorgeous prose. Check. Funny. Check. Sad. Check. Main Character is dignified and near heroic in his quiet struggles, though also we can't help but feel a little sorry for him. Check. Holy shit. It is the perfect novel!

But seriously, it was pretty awesome. I don't think there was a single scene, or a single page, where I checked out mentally and started thinking about what I was going to make for dinner or whether or not I should play Batman Arkham Asylum on the XBox360 before bed. I cared about William Stoner. I cared about his small, human plight. I wanted Stoner to die (as we knew he would by the first page) happy. And I believe he did.

Take the time to read the below quotes to get a taste of aforementioned 'gorgeous prose'. There, I made it through the entire review without making a lame pot joke.

Quotes:

"He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember ." pg. 181

"They [Stoner and his daughter] talked long into the night, as if they were old friends. And Stoner came to realize that she was, as she said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink." pg. 248

"On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything-- the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars-- seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself...He walked slowly home, aware of each footstep crunching with muffled loudness in the dry snow." pg. 180

Short and Sweet

2010-09-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

AM/PM by Amelia Gray
144 pages
published by Featherproof Books

Read this on a recommendation from...someone. I can't remember. I think I just read a lot of good things about it and I am easily swayed by exaggerated praise. Little stories that are sometimes precious, sometimes bizarre, sometimes daring, sometimes clever, sometimes bewildering, sometimes funny, sometimes connected, sometimes not. Delightful, for the most part. Though, I would say you have to read it in one big gulp or else you'll be even more lost than you most certainly will be. Huh?

On the Road...Now With Murder!

2010-09-09T14:09:00.000-07:00

Going Native by Stephen Wright
320 pages
published by Delta

Click on Stephen Wright and Goodreads.com has a nice bio on the dry comic, Steven Wright. This is not the same Stephen Wright. At first, I was like, "Wait, the dry ironic comic Stephen Wright wrote several works of post-modernish fiction?" Well, no, he didn't, and he spells his name "Steven" not "Stephen". Now that we got that out of the way.

Most reviews reference this as a "horror" type novel, and even DeLillo calls it a "slasher classic". I guess. It didn't strike me a particularly violent novel. Well, it kinda was but most of the violence was off stage. But I must say, the second to last chapter was rather chilling.

So it's a road novel, in that we're (the reader) are following the trail of Wylie, a wandering suburbanite, who up and leaves his bbq one night and, as we're led to believe, kinda goes on this killing spree of sorts, though several times throughout the novel, you (the reader) begin to question if this is even Wylie you're reading about. And if not Wylie, then who is this psycho?

Quotes:

"But you [America] make a cartoon of everything: your movies, your clothes, your furniture, your books, your food, but especially your sex. Everything bright and tasty. But this is a dirty game you are playing with yourselves. This ideal of honesty and openness is a pathetic fraud. You pretend to be so innocent when none of you are and it is this charade that is genuinely pornographic." pg.146

"The momentary lull between driver and passenger transgressed by the inexhaustible exertions of Pastor Bob launching a possibility bomb into Satan's stronghold in Chillicothe, Ohio, where a sister in need required an emergency financial healing." pg. 89 (Look Perrys! Your hometown!)

Overcoming Solipsism in the Work of David Foster Wallace

2010-08-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Understanding David Foster Wallace by Marshall Boswell
310 pages
published by the University of South Carolina Press

I read David Foster Wallace for many reasons, really too many to name here. But chief among them is how his work challenges me as a reader, making me feel smarter and actually making me smarter, and by smarter I mean both in the traditional sense but also smarter as in more aware, of the world around me, of the people in this world. His ability, through his language, to make me feel a little bit less alone in this modern world.

Marshall Boswell has done DFW fans like me a great service. Just when I think I am starting to figure out the many, many complexities of DFW's fiction, Boswell comes along and says, "You think you know but you have no idea." Ok, maybe that was the tag line for MTV's Diary, but still, it applies.

In Understanding David Foster Wallace, Boswell goes through all of Wallace's published fiction (The Broom of the System, Girl With Curious Hair, Infinite Jest, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) and pretty much dissects the narrative, all without boring the reader. Well, he didn't bore me anyway. But seriously, if you've ever read any of Wallace and thought to yourself, "There's something here I'm not quite getting, I know there's more behind this, etc," then Boswell is the man for you. He explores Wittgenstein's language games in Broom, he highlights the many parodies, criticisms, and declarations of Girl With Curious Hair (Did you know 'Little Expressionless Animals' had to do with John Ashbery's 'Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror'?).

Of course the best chapter is on Infinite Jest, and the more I read about that massive "novel" (I use quotes because it's more than a novel), the more I want to go back for a second reading. Wallace was responding to French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan's "bewilderingly difficult theories about desire, pleasure, subjectivity, and infantile preoccupations with mothers"? But that's also another great thing about Wallace, is that he does all this stuff below (and not so below) the surface, but you can enjoy his fiction just as good story telling, or amazing use of language, or or or or. You don't have to know Lacan's theories to enjoy Infinite Jest. Hell, I didn't even know who Lacan was let alone that Wallace was responding to his theories.

This is all to say that Boswell does an amazing job adding to the growing realm of Wallace Studies, and we've got to give him credit for being one of, if not the first to recognize Wallace's depth.

But in the Secret Court of Men's Hearts

2010-08-19T20:03:00.000-07:00

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
323 pages
published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Like most, I first read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school (or was it junior high?). Again, like most, I thought it was kinda boring. Just more "important literature" I was supposed to be reading and studying and answering multiple choice questions in regards in its subject matter. Answer the following: Racism is A) Good B) Bad C) Inevitable D) Racism? What Racism?!

Revisiting the text as an adult (well, a certain stage in my adulthood), I was obviously more aware of the subtleties of the story I most assuredly missed when I was younger, and also, kinda annoyed with some of the not-so-subtle, bashing-me-over-the-head-type morality lessons.

One of the things that interested me the most the second time around, and which I don't remember much discussing in (junior?) high school, is the role of Scout as unreliable/wildly inconsistent narrator. So we have Scout, the narrator, who is clearly looking back on the events of her childhood as an adult, narrating the story as a grown women. But. The narration itself is more or less told from the perspective of Scout the Child, not Scout the Adult Looking Back on Being a Child. Or I should say, sometimes it is told from the perspective (naivete, innocence, and general lovable childlike-ness) of Scout as Child, and other times it's told as Scout as Adult Looking Back on Being a Child (understanding, wisdom, etc). And sometimes the two even mesh, with Scout as Child using astoundingly advanced diction (she's like 7, 8, 9 years old in the course of the book). Now, I recognize that Scout is very smart, mostly because Atticus is very smart and took time to read to them, teach them, etc. But still. Her vocabulary at times is just not very believable.

Anyway, it's not really a flaw, because I imagine Miss Lee and her editor certainly saw this "narrative problem", but it makes for interesting discussion, in terms of how much can we trust Scout as Narrator? Because if this is an adult narrating the story, it makes it a very different novel than if it were a child (as it is generally accepted it is, narrated by a child that is). Adults manipulate narrative, especially ones they're personally involved in, skewing certain events, maybe bringing things together in black and white terms where maybe they don't exist. Making themselves (and the ones they love) come off in a better light than maybe they were originally cast.

It was interesting reading a little bit of the criticism surrounding the book. It seems that not everyone loves this "modern American classic." Flannery O'Connor thought it was fine as young adult novel but shouldn't be read otherwise. Some critics thought the black characters in the story were underdeveloped (which they were) and Calpurnia was cast as the "contented slave". Attitus comes off as "stiff and self-righteous". Scout is a "highly constructed doll". And other stuff like that. To which I respond: You have a point.

Also, a few studies have concluded that white students respond more positively to the text, while black students find it "demoralizing" and view it ambivalently.

"...Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret court of men's hearts Atticus had no case." pg. 275

No, Seriously, You Haven't Read Anything Like This

2010-08-13T14:41:00.000-07:00

BodyWorld by Dash Shaw
384 pages
published by Pantheon

So, there's this sex, drugs, and rock n roll botanist who is doing "research" in Boney Borough, a kind of future utopia community. This botanist is basically just Professor Drug Addict, looking for the next crazy high via plant life. And this utopia, this Boney Borough, is...well, it's a strange place. And Professor Drug Addict discovers this new plant-drug which allows the drug user to experience true empathy, as they briefly "become" who ever they encounter while high. But...well, I don't want to reveal too much. Any more plot detail would give too much away. But I will say it involves aliens.

The art work is pretty crazy and I can tell Shaw had a fun time with the not only the medium, but with colors. And it seems like his imagination just kinda puked on the page, and I mean that as a compliment. Worth checking out, if you're down for some craziness. Oh, also, it's pretty dang funny.

New Don DeLillo Interview

2010-08-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

Check out this new interview with Don DeLillo over at the Guardian, as he talks about his new book, Point Omega, and generally just says awesome things about fiction.

Also, this dude over at the Huffington Post rates and skewers the 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers.

Jerzy Kosinski May or May Not Be A Complete Fraud (But Do You Really Care?)

2010-07-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

Steps by Jerzy Kosinski
148 pages
published by Grove Press

The literary career of Polish born author, Jerzy Kosinski, is a strange one. He is widely considered a significant writer of the 20th century, his honors and awards are many...oh and he was regularly accused of plagiarism and fraud which indirectly (or directly) led to his suicide in 1991. So, there's that.

Steps won the National Book Award in 1969 which kind of surprised me to hear because it is some dark stuff. Tales of intense violence, sexual "perversion", and moral ambiguity fall from the narrators mouth in small black chunks. We're led to believe that the "I" in each vignette is the same "I" as the narrator. Our unnamed narrator (who regularly "frauds" people into thinking he's someone he's not) is if nothing else, a great storyteller. Even as I grimaced with each new story, even dreading the next page at some moments, I felt compelled to continue. Whether or not Kosinski was a fraud (whatever that means in the art world), this sinister little book will test your soul.

Quotes:

"All we could do was exist for each other solely as a reminder of the self." pg. 24

"Then, all you need me for is to provide a stage on which you can project and view yourself, and see how your discarded experiences become alive again when they affect me. Am I right? You don't want me to love you; all you want is for me to abandon myself to the dreams and fantasies which you inspire in me. All you want is to prolong this impulse, this moment."
pg. 131

I Bought New Books!

2010-07-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

I don't buy books very often, mostly just because I can't afford them right now. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm kinda a library junkie. But every once in a while, usually around my birthday, I'll get an influx of new books. Here's what I picked up on a recent gift card spree:

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson- I've been meaning to read this for a long time, pretty much because David Foster Wallace adores it.

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (trans. by Lydia Davis)- Seems like something any serious reader should read, and I'm heard only good things about this translation by Davis.

Racing in Place (Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins) by Michael Martone- I've read some Martone before and I'm pretty excited about this "collection".

The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story by Frank O'Connor- Kind of essential reading for aspiring writers.

Boy Meets (Dead) Girl

2010-07-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

Waste by Eugene Marten
116 pages
Ellipsis Press

Huh. Okay. Weird. But cool. But what happened at the end there? Huh. Okay.

I mean, it's a pretty dark little book. Everyone seems to be saying it's like the creepest stuff they've ever read...and it is pretty sick, but not totally like "I can't finish this book" sick.

Boy meets girl, boy secretly loves girl, girl smiles at boy but is otherwise aloof to his longing, boy finds girl dead in dumpster, boy rolls girl up into a carpet remnant, boy takes girl home, boy preserves girl in his fridge and occasionally spoons her in bed, boy has sex with girl, and they all live...well, it does not exactly end well for either of them. Classic love story.

Possibly Awesome Books Coming Out Soon-ish

2010-07-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (pub 7/27/10)

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (pub 8/31/10)

C by Tom McCarthy (pub 9/7/10)

Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray (pub Sept '10)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (pub 9/21/10)

Sunset Park by Paul Auster (pub 11/9/10)

Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah (pub 11/2/10)

The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History: A History by FreeDarko (pub 11/15/10)

Resurrecting History as Fiction

2010-07-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
292 pages
Published by Riverhead Books (Penguin)

Well, I finally got around to reading the much talked about Aleksandar Hemon, a native of Sarajevo, and adopted son of Chicago. This much lauded work, which was a finalist for a National Book Award waaaaay back in 2008, seemed like the logical place to start. And to be honest, I can't say I was crazy about it. I liked it, I did, but there was something about Lazarus's story that I really couldn't get into. I guess, ultimately I didn't really care about Lazarus or his grieving sister Olga, or even the whole situation they had found themselves in.

One of the redeeming qualities of the book was the story of Brik, a young writer, very similar to Hemon in background and vocation, who is struggling to write a book about Lazarus Averbuch, a book for which he has recently received a grant to fund his research. So it's got that meta-post-neo-playful-neat-clever plot set up going, which I usually find enjoyable, used in capable hands, as Hemon is more than capable. The story see-saws between Brik's misadventures with his old friend Rora, as they make their way through war torn Eastern Europe, and then with the story of Lazarus and his sister, Olga, who is trying to make sense of the bewildering death of her brother. I found myself struggling through Lazarus's narrative, reading his story just so I could move on to Brik's.

The incorporation of photography into the book was also great. I'm definitely interested in reading more of Hemon, but this particular book didn't grab me.

Quotes:

"I may have just done serious damage to my marriage, I said to Rora later on, while we drank the hundredth coffee of the day at the Viennese Cafe. You've never been married, so you don't know, but it is a fragile thing. Nothing ever goes away, everything stays inside it. It is a different reality.
-Let me tell a joke, Rora said...Mujo and his wife, Fata, are in bed. It's late at night. Mujo is falling asleep, and Fata is watching porn: a horny couple, all silicone and tattoos, is sucking and fucking like there is no tomorrow. Mujo says, C'mon, Fata, turn that off, let's go to sleep. And Fata says, Let me just see if these kids are going to get married in the end." pg. 164

"The more you lose, the more there is to be lost, yet it matters less." pg. 167

"...if you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world- indeed, nowhere is the world." pg. 182

"In the beginning, every war has a neat logic: they want to kill us, we want not to die. But with time it becomes something else, the war becomes this space where anybody can kill anybody at any time, where everybody wants everybody dead, because the only way you are sure to stay alive is if everybody else is dead." pg. 185-86

"I felt as though I had achieved the freedom of being comfortable with the constant vanishing of the world; I had finally become the Indian on a horse with a branch tied to its tail." pg. 229

Bret Easton Ellis Kicks David Foster Wallace While he's Down (and by down, I mean tragically dead by his own hand)

2010-07-17T19:25:00.000-07:00

A question answered by Bret Easton Ellis during his appearance at the Southbank Centre:

Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?

Bret Easton Ellis: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well I don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…

Being born into a wealthy family in Los Angeles, I don't really expect you to understand the consciousness of the Mid West. Now, to address a few of those DFW criticisms, point by point:

"Pedestrian journalism"- It just seems like you, Bret, are just trying to go against the grain on this one, since his journalism is regularly regarded as moderately ground breaking, original, and just really really good. So that's curious that you think it completely ordinary.

"Stories scattered with that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality"- I guess it's just a matter of someone calling one thing sentimentality and another person recognizing it as an author risking sincere emotion (the risk being that a hip, ironic, postmodern satirist would call said author 'sentimental', god forbid). And this phrase, faux-sentimentality, I'm not sure I even really understand it. So the sentimentality (as you're calling it) in his stories is false? So is it the sentimentality you have a problem with or the faux-ness of the sentimentality? And is false sentimentality an integral part of the Mid-Western landscape? This is new to me, living in the Mid-West as I do.

"Infinite Jest is unreadable."- Well, now I just feel sorry for you because you're missing out. Unreadable? Really? Can I ask you something? Now, don't be offended. But if you happen to commit suicide next week, do you think that there would be an outpouring of affection and praise of your work? Would scholars begin to form 'Ellis Studies', hold conferences based on your life and work? Hmmm. Something to think about, in turns of why Infinite Jest, and all his other work for that matter, will endure and continue to endure for years to come.

Now, I don't necessarily blame Ellis for the harsh words, considering this is what DFW had been quoted as saying about Ellis some time ago, in an interview with Larry McCaffery:

LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?

DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s "American Psycho": it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.

LM: But at least in the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

And I think it's relevant to note that in Wallace's comments about your own work, he comes off as critical but not petty. Clearly he's given a lot of thought to your brand of literature. You just come off sounding like a jerk. Which I kinda imagined you to be anyway.

Ask and Your Shall Reprieve

2010-07-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
296 pages
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

What are the tenants of a good story? For me, I mean? Snappy dialogue? Interesting, complex characters? Forward moving plot with a brisk pace? New ideas, observations? Vibrant sentences? Well, all those bullet points apply to The Ask. I had read Subject of Steve a while back and while I liked it, I felt that Lipsyte took me to the edge but never quite delivered. The Ask is the novel I was waiting for him to write. And then he wrote it. And here it is. And I really liked it, a lot. Almost five star liked it. Yeah, I know.

So we have Milo Burke, our protagonist (though I use that loosely) who is, let's admit, a rather pathetic modern man. He is a failed painter(though failure implies trying). He is a failed fundraiser (though not for lack of trying). He is a failed husband (equal parts trying and not trying). The only thing he seems to be good at is being a father, and even that has mixed results. But he loves his son. And his wife. So that counts for something.

After being fired from his fundraising job at Mediocre University, his office requires his services one last time (with the prospect of getting his job back) as one donor with deep pockets is requesting his personal involvement. One big Ask, for one big Give. Turns out this mysterious donor is...well, I won't give too much away.

Lipsyte's sentences and diction are one of a kind, though not always with positive results. It can be a little much, his hype, ironic, satirical wording. I know he is a student of Gordon Lish (I feel like I'm seeing his name every where these days) and I know Lish was big on writing sentences that hadn't been written before, every phrase unique, every word useful. As is my understanding. And you can imagine that can lead to some...curious phrasing. But overall, it works for Lipsyte.

One reviewer said that though the sentences were "dazzling", it was ultimately an "empty story about nothing". Ha! Are you kidding me? About nothing? Wow. Just wow. J-wow.

Quotes: (kinda lengthy ones, but worth it)

"So, like I always say, it all comes down to how much you need to inflict yourself on the world. You're good enough. If you kiss the right ass, you could certainly make a career. Get some shows. Teach. Like me, for instance. I'm not a failure. I'm in a very envied position. You have some big-dick fairy-tale idea of the art world, so you don't understand this yet, but hanging in, surviving, so you can keep working, that's all there is. Sure, there are stars, most of them hacks, who make silly amounts of money, but for the rest of us, it's just endurance, perdurance. Do you have the guts to perdure? To be dismissed by some pissant and keep coming? To be dumped by your gallerist? To scramble for teaching gigs? It's not very glamorous. Is this what you want? You're good enough for it. You're not the new sensation, but you're good enough to get by. But you have to be strong. And petty. That's really the main thing. Are you petty enough? Are you game?" pg. 115-116

"Most of the time he avoided me, or humored me, or peppered me with blandly supportive exhortations. "Keep it up," he might say, or "way to go," apropos of nothing I could discern. Sometimes if I walked into the room he'd just say, "Here comes the kid!" Invariably I'd wheel to catch a glimpse of this mysterious presence. Maybe it was clear to both of us we were never going to understand each other, not because we were complicated people, or even at loggerheads, but because of the minor obligation involved. I really couldn't blame him. I knew what churned inside me. It was foul, viscous stuff. It wasn't meant to be understood, but maybe collected in barrels and drained in a dead corner of our lawn." pg. 149-150

"You're growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global interconnectivity, doesn't matter. It's still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced." pg. 195

"I'm only trying to be a decent dad."
"Don't waste your time. It's not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven's sake, the system's rigged for white men and you still can't tap in." pg. 77

New Book of Essays on David Foster Wallace

2010-07-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

A new collection of essays on the work of David Foster Wallace, called Consider David Foster Wallace, is now available for pre-order. Unfortunately, it's only on Amazon.com for the moment. I'd much rather direct you towards Powell's or Indiebound, but they don't have it quite yet. Support independent booksellers! Or don't! Ultimately it's your choice! That is if you believe in free will! That is if you believe in free will, you believe you are making the choice whether to shop at an independent bookseller! I was not implying that only people who shop at independent booksellers believe in free will! I can see why the wording would be confusing!

I Should Really Just Read The Books I Own

2010-07-09T15:28:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Schuyler and I'm addicted to library books. I currently have seven books checked out from the local library and another 10 on hold. Despite the fact that I own around 20 books that I have not, as of yet, read, I can't bring myself to read them and stop checking out books from the library. Why? Why can't I just read the books I have already and check books out when I'm through with those?

I guess it all started when I decided to quit my job about three years ago. I was briefly unemployed, but have since landed a part time position at a small, independent bookstore which requires me to take two buses. This job does not pay very well, but I get a lot of reading done on the commute and while working. I'm a good employee, there just aren't many customers. It's not like I'm slacking off. In fact, the owner wants me to read on the job, as to be an informed staffer. Anyway.

As a result, my funds are limited. I acknowledged that I could no longer capriouslessly spend money on books. But I still wanted to be reading books, new books, talked about books, the new hot literary gem, etc. So, the compromise I made was taking advantage of the local library system: the Chicago Public Library.

And let me tell you, the CPL's catalog is extensive. I can get near anything my heart desires, that is if I'm willing to wait for it, because I habitually place books (and recently DVDs!) on hold, books that need to be sent to my local branch. I don't mind waiting. It gives me time to finish the books I already have checked out.

I check out way more books than I can read. Often I'll have a stack of five, maybe eight books on my desk, far more than I could read before the due date. Some books I don't even really want to read, I just wanna browse through them, see if I'm interested. That's what the library is for, right? Also, I find it's a challenge: I try to read as many of the library books as I can before the due date. I find that the months I check out a bunch of library books are the months I read the most.

But like I said, I have many many books I already own that I have not yet had the pleasure of reading. I very much want to read these books. I own them for a reason. They are what I would consider "good" books. Maybe some even "great" books. But lately I find myself in a bit of an imbalance. For every book I read that I own, I read five library books. Something must be explained: I do not like having unread books on my bookshelves. They look at me, mockingly. They haunt me. I want to have bookshelves that I can gaze at and admire my intellect, to say "Yes, I have read all of those books." It is not impressive to say "I've read most of those books." I am not impressed by this. And being impressed is what having people over to my apartment is all about.

I imagine a day when I have no unread books on my shelves. Maybe one or two would be acceptable because it's good to have some on deck. But certainly no more than five. But there is the glorious CPL getting in my way, offering me the latest titles, for free. They ask nothing of me. Browsing their catalog online is like having a shopping spree on Powell's. Kinda. I only really have one tentative rule that I find myself breaking: I won't check out books from the library that I know I want to own. This can be difficult and I've broken it a few times. But I have to be strong. Stronger. I have no remedy for my affliction. I can't stop, won't stop.

Review of : The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

2010-07-08T14:59:00.000-07:00

I forget where exactly this was first brought to my attention, maybe on Bookslut, possibly The Millions, maybe Conversational Reading. Somewhere on the internet. But whoever reviewed it loved it, and then it recently won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest monetary award for fiction in english on the planet, with a cool 100,000 Euros. So that's impressive.

This is kinda hard to review because the book is so much about a sense of place, the quiet rhythms of a small Dutch farm, and the atmosphere of solitude that Bakker establishes. The prose is stark I guess, though I hate using that overused adjective. Bare prose? Naked prose? Stark naked bare-ass prose?

Helmer and Henk were twin brothers. Henk died in a car accident, leaving Helmer to "waste" his life on the family farm. The bulk of the narrative picks up 30 years later, after the Mother has passed, and the now elderly Father is rapidly declining, health wise, requiring Helmer to both care for the farm and for his emotionally cold Father. Then Riet, Henk's would be fiance, contacts Helmer and wonders if her unruly teenage son (though not by Henk) could come and live and work on the farm for a time. Also, the son is also named Henk and is about the same age as of the original Henk, when he died. I know this sounds kind of confusing, but Bakker does a better job than I am doing right now.

It ultimately turns into a story about Helmer trying to understand his role in life without his twin. Who is Helmer? Who is Helmer is relation to his loveless Father? To Riet? To the farm? These all seem like big existential type questions that might appear daunting, but they aren't out rightly pondered (though kinda but in sweet, subtle ways) by Helmer, so it makes for this still, almost nostalgic reading, though nostalgic for what, I'm not quite sure. Nostalgic for solitary Dutch farms I guess.

Review of : The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

2010-07-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

It's kinda hard to review memoirs because you're criticising people's lives, and it's doubly hard to review memoirs where the author went through something rather tragic or horrific or just plain sad, and then to turn around and be like, "Um, your life story was interesting but you did a bad job telling it."

All this being said, Manguso did a pretty good job with a difficult subject: her young life lived in a hospital. In her early 20s, Manguso discovers that within her blood a battle is raging (too much? that's too dramatic), a rare disease called CIDP (Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy) which basically requires her to swap out her "bad blood" and replace it with "good blood".

I am simplifying of course. Manguso goes into great detail about her medical history, to the point of making me a little queasy, though I'm not good with needles and blood and stuff. I was also reading it riding backwards on a bus, so that may have contributed to the aforementioned queasiness.

The book reads fairly quickly with most paragraphs a few sentences long, so even in her memoir, Manguso's poetic tendencies seep out onto the page in the form of short, clipped sentences and lots of white space.

Understandably, Manguso's life becomes so consumed by her illness that her entire identity is nearly swallowed by it. There is this one sentence that struck me where she details her time living in New York City, "I had the usual adventures people have when they move to New York." I think that sentence is telling because she no longer thinks the "life" portion of her life is important to recount because, to her, they are ordinary and relatable and everyone has the same experience when they go to New York City. Which of course is not true but these moments in her life don't make her feel special. Her rare illness makes her feel unique and while she wants more than anything to be healthy again, she also developed a kind of relationship with her sickness.

At risk of exaggerating, let me compare it to something else: a soldier coming back from a tour in Afghanistan. He/she comes back to civilian life, to maybe a family with a yard and kids and grocery stores and movie theaters and clean bathrooms and I think it's a pretty common fact that those soldiers have a hard time adjusting to "normal" civilian life (think The Hurt Locker) because the past four, five years of their lives have been consumed with war in a foreign land and no one in their life now, as a civilian, can relate to them, and they can't relate to anyone. They feel almost marooned on an island. Or maybe it's like a depressed person, who while hating their depression, also feels that if it was "cured", they would lose a certain part of what made them 'them'. I think Manguso felt this way with her disease, that her suffering (especially at such a young age which added a layer of tragedy, that her youth was also being destroyed) was both something she loathed but also discovered it made her different, that illness became a new kind of normal, a new kind of healthy.

Quotes:

"And then sometimes I think I've made everything happen, starting with making myself be born." pg.22

"The doctor was older than my parents, and he must have had plenty of younger patients, but he didn't understand yet that suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the size and shape of a life." pg. 83-84

"How sure our neighbor was that her suffering was the only kind of suffering. And how sure I was that mine was worse." pg.128

Review of : Point Omega by Don DeLillo

2010-06-25T21:06:00.001-07:00

Don DeLillo is melting into himself while some other author slowly emerges from the melty DeLillo puddle. He is delirious with his own talent. He seems to be caught in a metaphysical fever dream in which he imagines himself to be a scribe of thin, existential novel-like things. So there's been The Body Artist. And Cosmopolis. And Falling Man. And Point Omega. Now, where the hell can he go from here? This is where it gets interesting: what will the next DeLillo book look like? Because I'm not sure he can keep dragging us along on this weird trip.

Quotes:

"In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw...To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion." pg.5

"It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing." pg.13

"...we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die." pg.17

"I'll tell you this much. War creates a closed world and not only for those in combat but for the plotters, the strategists. Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies." pg.28

"Human perception is a saga of created reality." pg.28

"Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field." pg.53

"Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?" pg.55

"I know about your marriage. You had the kind of marriage where you tell each other everything. You told her everything. I look at you and see this in your face. It's the worst thing you can do in a marriage. Tell her everything you feel, tell her everything you do. That's why she thinks you're crazy. You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself." pg.66

Review of : Aberration of Starlight by Gilbert Sorrentino

2010-06-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

This is my first Sorrentino book and I have to say, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I usually have a hard time getting into period novels (this story taking place in 1939 New Jersey) but this one didn't feel like a period novel. Well, it did and it didn't.

Mostly, Sorrentino is just a master storyteller, employing all the tricks of the trade, but not in a hokey or gimmickry way. The story is told through letters, bits of question and answer type exposition, inner dialogue, and other modes that might feel disingenuous but I never once felt like his techniques were interfering with the narrative. I think that Sorrentino wanted to tell the lives of these four characters and he felt the best way to do that would be from these multiple angles. And he succeeded.

This quote below is great mostly because his father ends of leaving the mother for his secretary and throughout most of the book, you come to understand how much that effected both Billy and the mother, and they pretty much hate the father beyond all measure and this one scene seems to be the only happy moment Billy can manage to conjure up regarding the way things used to be.

"His mother and father turned toward him as he entered and his mother said, 'Your father broke the bed.' At this she began to laugh, putting her hand over her mouth. His father, wagging his finger at her, got up, grabbed Billy in his arms and sat down again with him on his lap. 'Don't believe Mama,' he said. 'She's the one who broke the bed!' Then he began to laugh. Then he shouted, in mock anger that made Billy giggle, 'Pancakes! Bacon! Gallons of coffee! Eggs! Rolls!' His mother reached over and put her hand on his father's shoulder with a tenderness that gave Billy a chill of intense delight. There was, he considered, nothing more wonderful and funny than breaking a bed if you were a mother and father." pg. 17

Review of : The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

2010-06-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

A teacher has an ambiguous relationship with a student and the high school is thrown into a vortex of uncertainty, reinvention, and sexual awakening. And the local drama school, simply the Institute, chooses to use the scandal as the basis for its end of the year production. As the novel progresses, you as the reader begin to realize that you're never really sure when you're reading a re-enactment at the Institute or whether it's the real life narrative. And would it matter? And as the Institute drama students hone their acting craft, the students of the near by all girls school begin to realize they have acting abilities of their own, feigning concern and sympathy and compassion in wake of the scandal. Catton's got skills, no doubt about it.

Sloppy or complex? I'm going to bet complex. Upon the first reading, I felt a bit befuddled but all the while, I could see certain patterns emerging and I knew that a second reading would make everything more clear. Though not completely clear because I think Catton wants their to be some measure of blending, a murkiness between the stage and the audience, leaving the reader to question where the play ends and reality begins. Of course that is a technique as old as Shakespeare, the play within a play type scenario, but it never fails to captivate my attention. I guess I just like the disorienting puzzle-like qualities of it all.

"Later Stanley would arrive at the opinion that girls were naturally more duplicitous, more artful, better at falsely sheathing their true selves; boys’ personalities simply shone through the clearer. It was that female art of multi-tasking, he would conclude, that witchy capacity that girls possessed, that allowed them to retain dual and triple threads of attention at once. Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form and the substance. This double-handed knack, this perpetual duality, meant that any one girl was both an advertisement and a product at any one time. Girls were always acting. Girls could reinvent themselves, he later thought, with a sour twist to his mouth and his free hand flattening his hair on his crown, and boys could not." pg 71

"At high school they expect answers, but at university all you're supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question. It's what they want. Ask anyone." pg 99

"But if she doesn't know she's lying and nobody else knows that she's lying, and she's got this real memory in her head...then it might as well be true." pg 101

"The other students all said, 'Esther is so funny!' and 'Michael is so bad!,' and just like that each won the double security of becoming both a person and a type." pg 114

Review of : The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley

2010-06-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

*WARNING! A COMPLETELY REASONABLE AMOUNT OF CURSE WORDS, CONSIDERING THE TOPIC, ARE CONTAINED IN THE FOLLOWING REVIEW*

I had a vague understanding of what went down in New Orleans after Katrina hit, but after finishing this powerhouse history lesson by Brinkley, I realize I didn't know shit. I mean, what the fuck. Every other page filled me with disbelief. I can't even begin to establish all of the factors that led to all the destruction, mismanagement, neglect, and chaos. Factors such as the lack of preservation of Louisiana's wetlands, which used to serve as a natural buffer for hurricanes coming off the Gulf, but have all since disappeared due to their lucrative natural resources (think natural gas, oil companies, etc). Ya know what, I can't even list the stuff. It's just too much. Brinkley has done a great service to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to present this astonishing piece of American history. As angry and disgusted as Brinkley can come off at times (understandably), he gives equal parts of the narrative over to the first responders and citizen heroes of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Brinkley's beef is clearly with Mayor Nagin, Gov. Blanco, Michael Brown and Michael Chertoff of FEMA, some of the NOPD, and the Bush Administration. Basically, everyone who should have done something, were trusted to do something, and failed. I look forward to when Brinkley to turns his angry tongue on BP.

Please, please, don't be scared of this book. I know it's long and you might be tempted to label it as 'depressing' or maybe you've had enough of Hurricane Katrina, but The Great Deluge highlights a crucial moment in American history, and five years later, it's still worth examining. Also, God, if you can hear me, Please leave the Gulf Coast alone. We get it. You're not a fan. Now just knock it off. You know who has had it easy for a long time? Vermont. Nothing bad ever happens to Vermont. Go pick on them.

Quotes:

"The fact that the federal response could have been better, starting at the moment the hurricane struck, begs the questions: Under what circumstances could it have been better? If the victims were white? If they were rich? If they had not been members of a voting bloc that the Republican Party had a motive to disperse? The one that rings truest, though, is that cronyism riddled FEMA and its contractors in the Bush administration, making incompetence and not racism the key to the response." pg. 618

"Too much bureaucracy can be a big, big problem in a catastrophe." pg. 578,
Lt. Jimmy Duckworth of the Coast Guard

"A political lesson had been learned [in 2004:], one that unfortunately wouldn't help the Gulf South in 2005: it's best to have a natural disaster in the heat of campaign season, when your state [Florida:] is up for grabs during a presidential election year...'Partisan politics were certainly in the air during the busy 2004 hurricane season.'" pg. 249

Review of : AD (After the Deluge) by Josh Neufeld

2010-06-12T13:00:00.001-07:00

It could have been way better. A missed opportunity.

Review of : Remainder by Tom McCarthy

2010-06-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

(WARNING: I"M GOING TO REVEAL SOME PLOT POINTS! BUT NOTHING IMPORTANT! AT LEAST, I DON'T THINK SO!)

About half way through, I'm thinking to myself, "Wait, this is pretty much like Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman." And so I did a little research and in an interview, Kaufman is asked about Remainder and says he had never read it and in fact, wrote his screenplay well before the book was published. Weird.

So the main characters comes into some money (about 8 1/2 million pound, so that's like what? $16 million USD?) after a lawsuit involving him being injured by something falling from the sky. He decides to use the money to try and re-create and re-enact certain moments from his life, both past and present, moments that he feels are "pure" and "true" and in turn, give him a sense of happiness. He feels that everyday life has become too staged and stilted and is tainted with people posing and being aware that they're posing...so naturally, in order to get around this, he hires "re-enactors" to help him stage these moments. He creates "sets", down to the most minimal detail. Obviously, to the reader, this feels a little contradictory in terms: dissatisfied with the posed feeling of "real" life, one decides to instead stage moments from "real" life and replay them on a near continuous loop, so as to achieve a sort of truth (or maybe Truth).

I'm not saying this negatively, it's just something I noticed. I thought all the loopy logic, that as the novel goes on, just basically turns into a fun house hall of mirrors, was great. I love that kind of stuff. It was repetitious at times but in a way that was oddly comforting. Like you're right there with him, watching him build this world, construct his own version of joy. These re-enactments become a sort of religion to him:

"I and the other re-enactors were like a set of devotees to a religion not yet founded: patient, waiting for our deity to appear, to manifest himself to us, redeem us; and our gestures were all votive ones, acts of anticipation." pg. 282

And this too:

"To be real- to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what's fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate." p. 264

I usually don't like British writers, well, just the ones I've tried to read I guess, but McCarthy won me over. I hope you're proud of yourself Sir. And also the ending kicks ass.

Review of : Nine Lives by Dan Baum

2010-06-12T12:49:00.000-07:00

I've been kinda obsessed with New Orleans lately, in particular, Hurricane Katrina and life post storm. I just finished The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley before reading Nine Lives and it was a great primer. While The Great Deluge has plenty of harrowing, courageous stories, it is more fact based, as it should be. Nine Lives is far more character based, with Baum's prose reading almost like fiction. It deals largely with life in New Orleans, pre-Katrina, following the story lines of nine i...more I've been kinda obsessed with New Orleans lately, in particular, Hurricane Katrina and life post storm. I just finished The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley before reading Nine Lives and it was a great primer. While The Great Deluge has plenty of harrowing, courageous stories, it is more fact based, as it should be. Nine Lives is far more character based, with Baum's prose reading almost like fiction. It deals largely with life in New Orleans, pre-Katrina, following the story lines of nine individuals from varying backgrounds. A wealthy coroner/doctor. A police officer. A high school band teacher. A transexual barkeep. And so on.

Baum's overall push is to establish that New Orleans is not like the rest of America. It lives life at a different pace, not consumed with "the clock" or "chasing the dollar". Baum insists that New Orleanians are slow to accept change, and really don't want change. The city comes off as almost other worldly and time seems to linger in its streets a little longer than other cities. Though New Orleans comes off as mysterious and magical, it seems to come at a price. In order to have this slow moving, metropolitan paradise, it seems that it must have a yin to its yang: the crime, the corruption, etc etc etc. Can New Orleans, as it has been known, with all its history and eccentric culture, exist without its underbelly? Who knows. But Baum gives us a little glimpse into why people make New Orleans their home, regardless

Review of : Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra

2010-06-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

Touches upon the complexies (and quirkiness!) of sustaining young love. Recommended? Sure. Not certain if Zambra's voice could flesh out an entire novel though.

I Don't Quite Understand the Golden Wheat Commercials

2010-05-21T14:51:00.001-07:00

There have been a recent spat of Budweiser commercials promoting their new beer, Golden Wheat, which is supposed to be a German style, cloudy wheat beer (I'm not exactly sure why Budweiser thinks that their demographic wants a cloudy beer because their whole thing is, ya know, the opposite of that) and there has been something about the television commercials that I haven't quite been able to put my finger on, in terms of them not making sense.

If you aren't familiar with the tv spots, they involve a work place office romance between a human sized bottle of Bud Light (which is just a guy in a Bud Light bottle costume)and his love interest, a female human sized bundle of wheat (which is just a women with sexy legs in a bundle of wheat costume). Now, through the commericial narrative, provided by various interviews with their office co-workers, we come to understand that it was just a matter of time before Mr. Bottle of Bud and Miss Bundle of Wheat hooked up, cut to numerous shots of them bumping into eachother, doing the act of what can only be assumed as sex in the company elevator and also the beach for some reason. That premise sounds like classic Budweiser advertising but what I don't quite understand is that are we, the consumer and viewer, to believe that the current end result of their courtship is Golden Wheat? As in, is Golden Wheat their offspring?

Because what I believe is unclear but also insinuated by the good people at Budweiser, is that Golden Wheat is somehow a melding of the two separate entities, Bottle of Bud and Bundle of Wheat, creating a new product together. What is left out is the simple, implied reproductive science: Golden Wheat is the love child of Bottle of Bud Light and Bundle of Wheat. That can be the only logical conclusion. So if this is the case, that Bud Light and Bundle of Wheat copulated and then gave birth to this new Budweiser product, which is now being hawked at us, well, isn't this kinda of screwed up? Am I the only one that finds this particular marketing avenue bizarre? That because Bottle of Bud and Bundle of Wheat hooked up and screwed eachother in the elevator and on the beach, we, the thirsty public, can now reap the benefits and drink their kid? Come on, ya gotta admit, that's kinda weird.

Review of : The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

2010-05-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

I had medium level expectations heading into this one. I knew people liked it and that maybe I would like it too but it wasn't like this looming monster of a classic that I was almost obligated to enjoy and I'd be a fool of a took if I breathed a bad word about it. I find it hard to bring myself to read those kind of books because they're most certainly going to be a let down.

Now, with this short, delightful book in question, I rather enjoyed it. It wasn't flawless by any stretch of the imagination, though I'm not sure if flawlessness is necessarily a good thing or even something worth aiming for, as a writer. I think part of its umm I guess I'll say 'charm' is its length. It clocks in at 120 pages and it's a small book, like physically small, dimension wise, so it's really probably more like 40-50 "real" pages. So it's like a long short story. If it had been longer I think it would have lost whatever attraction it holds. So, no more, no less. It is perfect in that way, contained, though not really concise.

The narrative sort of parallels the conceptual art of one of the main characters, Sophie Calle, in that conceptual art, at least in my understanding, is more about the idea of the art than it is about the actual finished product. Art of Idea, or something. So the ideas that emerge through the narrative and that Bouillier dutifully tries to flush out, was ultimately the most entertaining portion for me. And I don't think Bouillier's personal life can be ignored upon reading, and in fact I think it adds more layers to the text. Like I didn't even know Sophie Calle was an actual person and conceptual artist (which she is) and that Bouillier actually did go to her birthday party as a mystery guest( and brought a very expensive bottle of wine as a gift) and that they would go on to become lovers (I think they call themselves 'lovers' in Europe, not boyfriend and girlfriend). And that Bouillier would end the relationship which would in turn cause Sophie Calle to produce a piece of conceptual art called 'Take Care of Yourself', based on his break-up email. I find that kind of reality blending fun.

And for those of you who think the author's personal life shouldn't have any bearing on the reading of the text, I say...well, maybe you're right some of the time, but maybe in this case, or cases like this, when the writer intentionally uses his or her life to construct art, then maybe we should add that to the pile of interpretation. Why not?

Also, an interesting factoid: Calle asked writer and filmmaker Paul Auster to "invent a fictive character which I would attempt to resemble" and served as the model for the character Maria in Auster’s novel Leviathan (1992). This mingling of fact and fiction so intrigued Calle that she created the works of art created by the fictional character, which included a series of color-coordinated meals. (lifted from a nifty webpage called Wikipedia)

Quotes:

"And all at once I saw why our societies use gift wrap: not for the sake of surprise but rather to cover up the fact that The Gift is based on a lie, as we inevitably discover every time somebody gives us something, yes, and we open it and, after that mircosecond when we expect the fulfillment of our deepest desire, disgust and sadness wash over us and we smile as fast as we can and say thank you, the better to bury our chagrin at never once in all our lives receiving something more than what we'd hoped for. And this evanescent joy, forever disappointed, remains incomprehensible to us." pg. 34

"I'd already kissed her cheek, closing my eyes and clenching my fists and fighting the urge to seek her lips and find and open them and taste her tongue and lose myself there the way I used to do- and so to put an end to this charade I placed the bottle in her hands, saying, "From the mystery guest." And I hope no one ever has to smile the way I smiled then." pg. 54

"I told her it was funny, none of these celebrities really look very much like celebrities to me. To me they looked more like little bits of bread bobbing around and sinking in a bowl of milk." pg. 63

"For the first time someone had captured the impossible demand that women make on men, and men's impossible acquiescence, and this curse that separates them, which is familiar to us all and weighs down on us like a kind of despair and-- I was sorry, I was talking too much and I hadn't even seen the film." pg. 112

Review of : CivilWarLand In Bad Decline by George Saunders

2010-05-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

He done did it to me again. I love everything that pours out of George's weird brain. I'm starting to think that he's less a satirist (a term that is quickly making its way onto my Words That Look Ugly and I Hate Saying and Typing Them List) and more just a damn fine fiction writer with his ear pressed against the metaphorical American ground. These stories would be super dark and sad (which they are) if they weren't also so damn funny and thoughtful. And I've said this before, but the stories are usually dark, sad, funny and thoughtful at the same time, which of course is remarkably awesome and the reason that I fantasize about writing stories myself.

My Favorite Stories: CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, Isabelle, The Wavemaker Falters, The 400-Pound CEO, and Bounty.

Check this Saunders story: Al Roosten

Review of : Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

2010-05-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

That's what I'm talking about, Lydia! You totally redeemed yourself from How the Dead the Dream, which I'm sorry, but that was a little disappointing. But this! This collection is worthy of praise. Don't listen to all the sayers of nay, talking shit about your 'gimmick' of celebrities and animals. It's something different and you carried it through each story beautifully. Congrats on the Pulitzer nod (or is it a nod if you win? Maybe you just got a Pulitzer 'wink'). Also, is it pronounced 'Mill-it' or 'Ma-lay'? Either way, you're still great. Call me.

Favorite Stories: Sexing the Pheasant, Girl and Giraffe, Sir Henry, Jimmy Carter's Rabbit, The Lady and the Dragon

Review of : Black Sabbatical (Poems) by Brett Eugene Ralph

2010-05-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

You've gotta read these poems aloud to yourself if you really want to appreciate them. Well, that's probably true for most poetry, but the sound in these just struck me as particularly awesome. Because silently reading these in your brain voice, you can't hear the slant rhymes and the rhythm and the music of things.

Nod to Micah for the gift. I thank thee.

-Whippoorwill-

We must select
the silences we live by
and I won't let this be mine.
So resume your idiotic
song, and mitigate
this nothingness. Help me
find a voice among the feathers
and make of the night
a delicate thing.

Review of : Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig

2010-05-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I'm not sure I could explain why I liked this novel. Uniquely structured, told almost entirely in dialogue, a dash of footnotes hither and thither, a few transcripts, film summaries. Inventiveness coupled with great storytelling goes far with me. Of course, the novel would nothing without the film summaries...and what are we supposed to do with these film summaries? As a reader, I mean? Not sure yet. Let me think on it.

Also, unfortunate cover. Just really unfortunate.

Review of : The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

2010-05-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

About half way through this book I realized that I wasn't particularly enjoying it but I was already half way through it and Baker writes in such a way that makes for easy reading and it was a slim 240 pages so I figured, what the hell, I'll just finish it. So I did. And I didn't really like it all that much.

There were brief glimpses of brilliance, per usual of Baker and his observant powers that are microscopic. But they weren't enough to hold my interest in the main subject: poetry. Now, it's a very specific kind of poetry the main character is pondering (who is struggling to complete an introduction to a poetry anthology), which is mostly the history of poetry and I'd heard and read enough of that in college. Poets like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, Longsfellow, Poe, Louise Bogan, and Roethke are talked about in length. And the dissection of poetry, the importance of the 'rest' at the end of lines, the clinical part of poetry. To some this may be of interest. And many reviewers have remarked that even people with the slightest interest in poetry will enjoy this book...but I disagree. I have a more than slight interest in poetry and I did not enjoy this book. Well, I enjoyed the parts that were not about poetry.

Maybe I'm being too hard on you Mr. Baker. This is all personal preference. You wrote a fine book about poetry which I imagine is a hard thing to do. You said some concrete things about poetry which I also imagine is a hard thing to do.

Some quotes? Why not.

"If you have something to say, say it. Don't save it up. Don't think to yourself, I'm going to build up to the truth I really want to say/ Don't think, In this poem, I'm going to be sneaky and start with this other truth over here, and then I'm going to scamper around a little bit over here...No, slam it in immediately." pg.9

"There's no either-or division with poems. What's made up and what's not made up? What's the varnished truth, what's the unvarnished truth?...There's no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The categories don't exist." pg. 52

"Because so often I think when I'm writing a poem that I need to start in some specific spot. Where I begin becomes so important that I never begin." pg.195

Review of : White Noise by Don DeLillo

2010-04-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, maybe five years now, after I had just finished Underworld, I said to myself, I am going to read every book Don DeLillo has written and will write. And for some reason I hadn't gotten around to reading White Noise until now, arguably his most well known work. So here we are, the 11th book I've read by Mr. DeLillo.

Though DeLillo is very much a part of the "literary establishment" and has garnered all sorts of awards and praise throughout his career, there is a large faction of readers who think his work is "cold", "bullshit", "terrible", "boring", "pseudo intellectual", "pretentious", "unrealistic dialogue", etc. Sure. Why not. I understand all that criticism. That's fine. But I think a lot of the anger toward his work comes from certain expectations some might have of the author and the narrative, expectations that are clearly not being met when reading DeLillo. The reader needs to buy into DeLillo's mindset and be comfortable with him using his character's as a mouth piece, essentially. Because yes, all his characters tend to sound the same. But why is that? Is that because DeLillo isn't a good enough writer to make them sound different? Or is he trying to communicate something to the reader? Trying to display a kind of universal consciousness that we all might share? An ultimate language? I don't know. Maybe. Think whatever you want. I'm not even totally convinced of what I said, I was just throwing it out there.

Ya know, it's been interesting reading an entire author's listed works, because they start to blend together, especially with someone like DeLillo who loves reusing images and ideas, so it gets harder and harder to get psyched about each book. But also, it's interesting to see how his style has developed and evolved.

Concerning White Noise: I won't even waste the space to summarize plot, but the last half of the book was darkly magical, in a way that I'm not sure I could properly explain. Reading DeLillo has always been more of a spiritual experience for me, rather than a traditional narrative experience. Spiritual in the way that maybe I don't quite understand. But now I just sound like a pseudo-intellectual-spiritualist. Also, he mentions "Star Trek needlepoint" (Sten, remember you and your needlepoint!) and that alone will earn him a place on my bookshelf forever. I think I'll read Point Omega very soon, just to kinda do a Then and Now type dealy. I'm sure you all care.

Read these:

"He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way."
pg.65

"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence." pg.97

"No sense of irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die." pg.99

"These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters...I'm a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods?" pg.112

"In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one's knowledge is less secure than your own." pg.118

"We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life." pg.304

Review of : Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

2010-04-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

This book primarily focuses on one event in November of 1956, in a town in the Gaza Strip called Rafah. In this particular event, hundreds of young, unarmed men, mostly of military age, were rounded up in a local school yard by the Israeli army. Most were severely beaten on the head as they entered the yard. They were questioned. Held all day, they were made to sit in their own piss. Some rubbed sand in their wounds to stop the bleeding. Suspected soldiers were imprisoned or killed on the spot. After all the soldiers had been weeded out, the rest were released, sent home. Later, families ran into the night, looking for their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, their sons. They found them dead in the streets, slumped against walls, face down in the dirt, or piled with others on the outskirts of town. 50. 60. 70 corpses, tossed together like fish. The families carried them off using blankets. They brought them to the local cemetery, buried five, six bodies in preexisting graves. They had no time. They were already breaking curfew.

So this is the terrible subject of Sacco's book but he finds it hard to stay on topic, as he is researching in present day Rafah and present day Rafah is an exceedingly violent area. Every day something new is happening. Every day, Palestinian homes are being bulldozed by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force). The IDF claims they are being fired upon by these houses, snipers on the rooftops. Possibly, though not likely, and hardly a reason to bulldoze someones home, displacing an entire family. But such is the power of the IDF, whose power is all but total in Palestine.

So we call Palestinians terrorists. They hate America. They loved Saddam Hussein. They hate Jews. But what if we step back for a second and examine why we think these things. Well, most of it has to do with because that is what the US government and the Israeli government and the media want us to think. But think about it this way, with a little empathy.

We have tanks and high powered rifles and night vision and Kevlar and helicopters and jets and bulldozers and jeeps and uniforms and money and power and we call ourselves an army of soldiers. They have few guns and fewer soldiers and fewer weapons and virtually no money and we call them terrorists. We call them terrorists because...they use suicide bombers, killing untold amounts of innocent victims? No one can support that. I do not support terrorism. What is the difference between terroism and the army? Isn't the IDF guilty of atrocities perpetrated against innocent Palestinians? But all Palestinians are terrorists so it doesn't matter, right? What I'm saying, if we think about it a little differently and think, well what is the alternative? How else are the Palestinians to defend themselves? And at this point, it's a quagmire, it's just eye for an eye stuff. 5 Palestinians killed one day, 3 Israelis killed as retaliation. And on and on and on.

But do Americans understand any of this, question any of this? Do we know about this displacement, these bulldozed homes? What if you lived in an area where at any moment, your home could be bulldozed by the government? Living under curfew, sniped at from towers at night? Do we understand this type of life? If we were faced with death, every day, faced with displacement, every day, what would we be compelled to do? Would you hate your oppressor? Would you cheer those that helped you? Curse those that funded your enemy? So then, how can we judge what we don't know for certain. How can we judge what we do not understand?

Everything is gray.

Review of : Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

2010-04-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

Full Disclosure: I am a huge DFW fan, so, ya know, there was very little chance I wasn't going to like this "book".

I say "book" because it's not really a book in the traditional sense, more just a 310 page interview with David Foster Wallace during the last leg of his Infinite Jest book tour in 1996. A lot of what DFW talks about, as far as certain ideas about television, technology, entertainment, addiction, America, etc, I'd already read in other interviews (the best interview I've read with is with Dalkey Archive Press), though the things DFW had to say in this interview were still very awesome.

What DFW fans will find most enjoyable, as I did anyway, is just the little things that are revealed. His odd soda drinking habit (12 cans a day), his musical tastes (infatuated with Alanis Morissette...remember, this is 1996), and a myriad of other things that won't be listed here.

Of course, the book is also incredibly sad (but also laugh out loud funny...seriously, I was reading this in bed late one night, my lady next to me sleeping, and I literally had to laugh into my pillow to keep from waking her up) because the whole time Lipsky is trying to convince DFW that all this attention and praise must feel really good and must be just the best thing ever and the whole time DFW is not on board with it at all. The book tour and all the attention is plainly painful for him most of the time because he acknowledges that all the press he's getting (such as this Rolling Stone writer following him around for five days) is more about all the hype and attention he's getting than it is about Infinite Jest. Because at that point, as DFW points out several times, there's just no way that most of these people could have even read and digested the book. Like the book tour literally started the day after publication. So if you've read any of DFW's nonfiction stuff, you can imagine how he would react to massive amounts of attention and praise...ultimately it just made him uncomfortable and sad.

Another thing that struck me was just the kind of frenzy the publishing and reading world got itself into over Infinite Jest and DFW. I was maybe 12 or 13 when Infinite Jest was published, living in Small Town New Hampshire so of course I have no recollection of any of it, it wasn't even close to being on my radar. But what Lipsky keeps pointing out to Wallace is that all this attention and adulation was unprecedented, especially for a writer as young as he was (34 at the time). Which is another thing that was crazy that I keep forgetting is that Wallace started writing Infinite Jest in like '91/'92, when he was like 29 or 30, which to me is just insane. To create this masterpiece at that age just blows me away. And to think about the stuff that was probably being written around that time, and the kind of art that was around...It just seems that much crazier. I read Infinite Jest in 2005...I can't imagine what it must have been like to read it in 1996. Ok, I'm just rambling now.

"I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don't believe in politics, and don't believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce or some way to get power for the people who are in control of it. Who don't believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific ironists and pokers of holes. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just, it doesn't seem to me that there's just a whole lot else." pg.160

"I don't think I'm quite as smart, one-on-one, with people, when I'm self-conscious, and I'm really really confused. And it's why like, my dream would be for you to write this up, and then to send it to me, and I get to rewrite all my quotes to you...I know that I'm a lot more talented alone, when I've got time, than I am in the back and forth of this." pg.218-219

"I mean, I decided that I wanted to think of myself as a writer, which meant whether this [Infinite Jest:] got published or not, I was gonna write it." pg.252

"I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid...but the fact of the matter is that the job that we're here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we're not terrified all the time." pg.291-292

"...And expectations of ourselves are a very fine line. Because up to a certain point, they can be motivating, and inspiring, and can be kind of a flame thrower held to our ass, get us moving. And past that point they're toxic and paralyzing." pg.299

Review of : About A Mountain by John D'Agata

2010-04-27T08:26:00.000-07:00

It seems like most reviewers tore through book, just as I did, and I think that is a testament to D'Agata's style, which is tight and lyrical.

The main topic of this book is about the US government looking to use Yucca Mountain, located just outside of Las Vegas, as a storage facility for our nations plentiful nuclear waste. This topic, interesting enough on its own, then spiderwebs itself into tangentially related topics such as linguistics, the strange, modern fantasy that is Las V...more It seems like most reviewers tore through book, just as I did, and I think that is a testament to D'Agata's style, which is tight and lyrical.

The main topic of this book is about the US government looking to use Yucca Mountain, located just outside of Las Vegas, as a storage facility for our nations plentiful nuclear waste. This topic, interesting enough on its own, then spiderwebs itself into tangentially related topics such as linguistics, the strange, modern fantasy that is Las Vegas, ridiculous politics, suicide, Edvard's Munch's The Scream, our moral obligation towards future generations (if there is any), and what the world as we know it will look like in 10,000 years (for starters, it's gonna be 50 degrees colder because the planet's axis is gradually tilting).

This is not your normal non fiction reading experience. D'Agata seems intent on reshaping the modern essay. It can probably be lumped in with 'new journalism' or 'literary non fiction' or whatever you want to call it. One of the things I found most interesting was his bibliography at the end of the book, which were occasionally coupled with little notes from D'Agata, explaining certain sources, and in some cases, plainly stating that this particular piece of information that was used in the book was wrong and that he had misremembered it. But then why didn't he just correct it in the final text? Why leave the misremembered information in the main text? And he did this a few times in the bibliography, stating that "Oh, well this isn't exactly true," or "I thought this was the case but I learned later...".

I am not pointing this out as "Look at what a bad journalist he is." I'm pointing this out to say, "This is interesting, why did he do it this way? What is he trying to tell the reader?" I think it is linked with some of his ruminations of knowledge vs. wisdom, though I'm not quite sure. Or it's kinda like he tried to see if he could do a investigative research project while relying heavily on his own perceptions, experiences, and memories to carry the book. And he even mentions in the book at one point when someone says he's "Press" and he says he's not "Press" and they ask what exactly he's doing and he responds that he's not sure exactly. Which could seem kinda silly but make no mistake, this thing is well researched and drenched in mind-blowing information. This all sounds like an oxymoron but it works and it's interesting and you should read it. This is the type of book you want your friends to read so you can talk it out afterward.

Review of : Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

2010-04-22T10:39:00.001-07:00

An academic acquires a grant to write a book on the painter Titian in Berlin for the summer, while his wife and son vacation in Italy. Early on in his time in Berlin, he decides that television has become too distracting and he swears it off while he works on his book (If this doesn't sound like a pretentious plot, I don't know what does). This proves more difficult than he expected and instead of being distracted by television, our academic quickly finds other ways to procrastinate: swimming...more An academic acquires a grant to write a book on the painter Titian in Berlin for the summer, while his wife and son vacation in Italy. Early on in his time in Berlin, he decides that television has become too distracting and he swears it off while he works on his book (If this doesn't sound like a pretentious plot, I don't know what does). This proves more difficult than he expected and instead of being distracted by television, our academic quickly finds other ways to procrastinate: swimming, museum gazing, street wandering, single engine airplane flying, etc. And this seems to be the plight of the artist, because his work is never far from his mind:
"I felt a sudden twinge of regret at the thought of having to forgo my work for the day. Truth to tell, it was always this way: the less I thought myself obligated to work, and indeed the more certain the impossibility of working, the more desire to work I felt, and the more capable of working, as if, with the prospect of work receding into the distance, the task shed all its potential torments, simultaneously draping itself in all the many promises of future accomplishment."

And this:
"For the simple reason, it seemed to me, that if you've already extracted all the pleasure from the potential joys of a project before you've begun it, there remain, by the time you get down to it, only the miseries of the act of creation, its burden, its labors."

And that seems about right. The Idea of the thing always feels and looks much better than the Act of the thing...well, sometimes anyway. And of course, the most important thing is the Act, not the Idea, when it comes to writing that is.

This book was written originally in French, circa 1997. Toussaint's views on television are of a very specific kind of television:
"...twenty-four hours a day, it seems to flow along hand in hand with time itself, aping its passage in a crude parody where no moment lasts and everything soon disappears, to the point where you might sometimes wonder where all those images go once they've been broadcast, with no one watching them or remembering them or retaining them, scarely seen at all, only momentarily skimmed by the viewer's gaze. For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evoling, always-in-progress superficiality."

Ok, sure, fine, television can be shockingly bad and requires nothing from us as viewers. But also, television can be really friggin good, at least in the past ten years it has shown it can. And again, this was written in 1997, when television in Belgium (Toussaint's place of origin) was probably really bad, just as it was also really bad here in the U S of A. I mean, come on, 1997, what was on? And I think it's unfair of Toussaint, or his character, to compare books with television. They are two different mediums. It doesn't really work. They offer different pleasures and require different things from their audience.

Review of : Your Face Tomorrow Vol. One (Fever and Spear)

2010-04-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

I have not read either Sebald, Proust, or Henry James. All three are frequently cited from discussing Marias.

This is the first volume of a larger novel by Marias. It's hard to say whether I'll read the other two installments. I might as well. I enjoyed this one, so why not keep going?

This is not a spy novel. At least, not yet anyway. There are elements of the spy novel and the principle character becomes engaged in spy-type interrogation (though merely as an observer and interrupter) but it's not nearly as plot driven as a spy novel, so don't think James Bond.

It's a lot of internal pondering. And really that's the best part about the narrative, though I could see why some might find that boring. And honestly, sometimes it was a little boring but Marias, somehow, kept me interested. Some passages were downright awesome, these little vignettes, stories within stories, and that is where Marias is at his best, rather than ruminating on various topics of truth, language, and silence.

"No, I should never tell anyone anything, nor hear anything either." pg. 13

"When you're young, as you know, you're in a hurry and always afraid that you're not living enough, that your experiences are not varied enough or rich enough, you feel impatient and try to accelerate events, if you can, and so you load yourself up with them, you stockpile them, the urgency of the young to accumulate scars and to forge a past, it's odd that sense of urgency." pg. 99

"Chavez led an attempted coup once, if I remember rightly. He conspired with his troops and rose up against an elected civilian government. True, it may have been a corrupt and thieving government, but then what government isn't nowadays, they handle far too much money and are more like businesses than governments, and businessmen want their profits. So he couldn't really complain if he was ousted. The Venezuelan people are another matter. They might. Except that there seem to have been quite a few complaints already about this leader whom they elected by popular acclaim. Being elected doesn't immunise a leader against becoming a dictator." pg. 199

"Everything has its moment to be believed, however unlikely or anodyne, however incredible or stupid." pg. 349

Review of : Prize Stories 1997 (The O. Henry Awards)

2010-04-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

This was given to me a year or so ago solely because they (the person who gave it to me) knew that I am a fan of David Foster Wallace, who happened to be one of the writers on the Prize Jury, along with Thom Jones and Louise Erdrich. They assumed that I would want to read 20 stories that DFW had also read, and judged. They were correct.

It was interesting to read these if only for the how dated some of them seem now. I'd run across a subject or phrase or observation and think, "oh wait, that makes sense because this was written/published in 1997." Of course, some might say that is the mark of bad writing, lack of timelessness. Well, you're wrong, those that say that. But yeah, the cover is so 1997.

Also, a neat (yeah, I just said 'neat') thing about this collection is that each story is commented on by one or more of the judges, detailing their reactions to the stories. And then, along with each author bio, the authors give a sentence or two explaining where the idea for the story came from. Kinda cool.

The stories I enjoyed the most: The Falls by George Saunders, On with the Story by John Barth, The Royal Palms by Matthew Klam, The Balm of the Gilead Tree by Robert Morgan, Mermaids by Deborah Eisenberg, and Mirrors by Carols Shields.

Review of : Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

2010-04-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

"Only the truth has real value, but the truth about war is that it contains nearly unbearable levels of repetition, boredom, and meaninglessness."

The above quote is taken from Sebastian Junger's review of Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam War novel 30 years in the making. I think it applies beautifully to Johnson's Tree of Smoke, a novel also about the Vietnam War, though I imagine it differs largely from Marlante's vision.

Tree of Smoke has been called both a "masterpiece" and "terrible". About half way through the novel, I pretty much thought both those things to be true, that it was at once an incredibly enjoyable reading experience but also kind of exhausting. But not necessarily in a bad way. It's almost as if Johnson was trying to mimic the experience of war in Vietnam, or maybe war in general, that the purpose is not always clear, the "mission" is shrouded in politics and rumor, everything is connected, nothing is connected, waiting, waiting, brief violence, death, waiting, and then the war just fades, not really won, not really lost.

The book is principally concerned with one William "Skip" Sands, a spy in training for the CIA, working on a Psy Ops mission for his uncle, The Colonel, a veteran of the CIA and somewhat of a mythical figure throughout the novel. That is the main thrust of the novel, with other plot lines juxtaposed with Skip, that of two brothers, infantryman who ebb and flow out of Vietnam and provide a more "traditional" viewpoint of the war. Kathy Jones, a relief aid nurse working in South East Asia who briefly becomes romantically involved with Skip Sands, is the only female narrative, so ya know, do whatever you want with that piece of information. And I don't really want to talk about the Middle Aged White Male Writes His Big Book.

I lean towards calling this a masterpiece, or at least Denis Johnson's masterpiece, which is a unique thing. And Johnson's masterpiece is not going to align with a lot of people's idea of masterpiece. It is flawed...though again, I'm not sure if that's a bad thing. When critics, or readers, say masterpiece I think they often want perfection. And this novel is not perfect. It is Johnson's idea of perfection, which is not a shining gem of a book, but more of a smooth stone on a river bed. I don't know if that makes sense or is just a bullshit image, but it feels right.

Even if I found the plot confusing and meandering at times, or even downright boring, I still found myself transfixed by the prose and dialogue alone. It's poetic stuff, really. I've said this before, how I'm more attracted to style and execution and voice rather than plot, or even character development. I'm not quite sure why and in the end, it might make me a bad writer, in the traditional sense, and certainly that is a chief complaint about this novel, that the plot and characters are lackluster. I didn't find it as big of a problem.

Here are some notes I took while reading the book that really won't make any sense, unless of course you've read the book and maybe not even then: One God many administrations, palm trees of smoke, mushroom cloud? dreaded possibility in the mind of Uncle Ho, the Enemy King, war is always just off stage, doesn't seem to even exist in this novel, reoccurring images of the Bible, Judas, Calvinism, Catholicism, betrayal, distrust, "the land is their myth," "the gods move slow, but they never stop moving."

"What do we really know about anyone in this hall of mirrors?" pg. 337

"The war itself- folly on folly." pg. 346

"Aren't we all fat and sweaty and confused?" pg. 409

"No. The Americans can't win. They're not fighting for their homeland." pg. 175

Girl With Curious Hair Reading Group

2010-04-07T13:36:00.000-07:00

The good people at The Howling Fantods are spearheading a reading group this Spring for Girl With Curious Hair by, of course, David Foster Wallace.

Review of : True Grit by Charles Portis

2010-04-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

I read that the Coen Brothers are doing a re-make of this classic John Wayne movie (of which I have not seen) or rather, they are doing their own version of the classic book. Their rendition is supposed to be "more true" to the book, so I guess we'll see.

Plot: Father gets gunned down by loathsome outlaw. Percocious 14 year old daughter seeks vengence, employs the expertise (and "true grit") of one Rooster Cogburn, a fat, one-eyed U.S. marshal with a penchant for killing. They set out, along with a Texas Ranger, to capture the criminal. Adventure and violence ensues.

It was strange reading though because I couldn't help but think about its naturally cinematic qualities and wonder what the Coen Brothers would do with the story and at some points, I could plainly see what they would do with it and how they would shoot it, etc. So it added another layer to the reading experience because I was using my imagination to picture each scene and its characters but I was also using the Coen Brothers cinematic imagination and it all kinda melded into this rich, satisfying romp of a western. Also, a quick read, well paced, surprisingly funny, and like all good westerns, casually violent.

True Grit by Charles Portis
256 pages
Overlook Press

Review of : Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

2010-04-06T08:13:00.000-07:00

I guess there was hype surrounding this collection, as everyone keeps mentioning in their reviews (so I'll mention it too!). I don't remember there being that much publishing hoop-la over it...no more than other books anyway.

I think, for the most part, Mr. Tower deserves whatever praise he gets. He is a hell of a short story writer. Some stand outs include The Brown Coast, Retreat, Executors of Important Energies, Down Through the Valley, On the Show, and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

"It was much hotter now, and the sun glared down through the sky like a flashlight behind a sheet." pg. 11

"Bob glimpsed the melancholy little change purse he had between his legs, and looked away." pg.17

"He'd tell me love was like chickenpox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in later years." pg.68

"I was hoping I could sell the patent for a hundred thousand or so and then hurry to the Gulf Coast to cram a pontoon boat and a big-titted stranger into the hollow places in my heart." pg.70

Review of : Palestine by Joe Sacco

2010-03-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

It is nearly impossible to side with either the Israelis or the Palestinians. If you understand both sides, you are sympathetic to both causes. But this isn't about choosing sides. For Sacco, this is about understanding. Like most Americans (and a lot of the world), Sacco had a certain view of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and that view usually said that Israel was fighting for its land against Palestinian terrorists.

So basically, around 1948, Britain decided to clear out the Palestinians and make a Jewish homeland, in present day Israel/Palestine. Around 400,000 Palestinian refugees were displaced from their homes. Now Israel, backed financially by the United States (to the tune of $2,400,000,000 annually for military alone) and Britain, possesses incredible amounts of control over the land and over the Palestinians, who now live in these kind of slums, under Israeli martial law.

Sacco is clearly, after his two month long stay in Palestine, sympathetic towards the Palestinian plight. And even knowing the Israeli side of things, it's hard not to side with the Palestinians. Yes, Hamas is a Palestinian organization but they are extremists, just like any other political state is going to have their extremists who think violence to the only solution. You can't point at a peoples extremist organizations and say, "Look! They are all terrorists!" It's more complicated than that. It's always more complicated than that.

Through Sacco's interviews with dozens and dozens of Palestinians and Israelis, we are left with little hope for the region. But the reader is given a chance to understand the voice of the Palestinian, a voice that has for too long been heard through the distorted megaphone of political rhetoric and media misrepresentation. They are prisoners in their own land. Families with children, living in squalor and fear. Stories of extreme non-safety, of random raids and emprisonment. Imagine your home is broken into, except you know it might be broken into at any moment and you will be home because there is a 8 o'clock curfew and you might be beaten or taken to prison or killed or forced to leave while they bulldoze your house and destroy your olive trees, your entire livelihood. This is Palestine.

"Israeli's are tired of apologizing for the occupied territories! There was a war! We won the land in the war! It's our land now!" -an Israeli, pg. 264

"You know what the peace process is? It is our Palestinian leaders signing papers to make what the Israelis have done legal. But it doesn't matter. Let them make it legal. It doesn't change a thing!" -an elderly Palestinian man, pg. 278

"And if I had guessed before I got here, and found with little astonishment once I'd arrived, what can happen to someone who thinks he has all the power, what of this---what becomes of someone when he believes himself to have none?" -Joe Sacco, pg. 283

'Your Face Tomorrow' Book Group

2010-03-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

Conversational Reading is starting a multi-month book discussion of the three volume novel, Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias. Feel free to join in and discuss what is sure to be some kick ass lit.

The reading schedule is

VOLUME 1

–1: Fever–

* Week 1, March 21-27: pp. 3 – 95 (Section ends at: “But before getting back to the Tupras . . .”)
* Week 2, March 28 – April 3: pp. 96 – 180 End of Section 1

–2: Spear–

* Week 3, April 4-10: pp. 183 – 233 (“Yes, I did remember . . .”)
* Week 4, April 11 – 17: pp. 234 – 316 (“This ability or gift was very useful . . .”)
* Week 5, April 17 – 24: pp. 317 – 387 (End of VOLUME 1)

VOLUME 2

–3: Dance–

* Week 6, April 25 – May 1: pp. 3 – 60 (“And so in the disco . . .”)
* Week 7, May 2 – 8: pp. 61 – 121 (“I left the restroom as resolutely . . .”)
* Week 8, May 9 – 15: pp. 122 – 201 (End of Section 3)

–4: Dream–

* Week 9, May 16 – 22: pp. 205 – 264 (“He fell silent for longer this time . . .”)
* Week 10, May 30 – June 5: pp. 265 – 341 (End of VOLUME 2)

VOLUME 3

–5: Poison–

* Week 11, June 6 – 12: pp. 3 – 113 (“Yes, we almost certainly shared that in common . . .”)
* Week 12, June 13 – 19: pp. 114 – 171 (End of Section 5)

–6: Shadow–

* Week 13 June 20 – 26: pp. 173 – 230 (“When you haven’t been back . . .”)
* Week 14, June 27 – July 3: pp. 231 – 328 (End of Section 6)

–7: Farewell–

* Week 15, July 4 – 10: pp. 331 – 393 (“I didn’t in fact think much about anything . . .”)
* Week 16, July 11 – 17: pp. 394 – 482 (“Wheeler stopped speaking and eagerly . . .”)
* Week 17, July 18 – 24: pp: 483 – 545 (End of VOLUME 3)

Review of : Heaven is a Playground by Rick Telander

2010-03-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1974, Telander, a writer for Sports Illustrated, spent his time in and around Foster's Park, the notorious training ground for street ballers, befriending the rotating cast of neighborhood characters.

Probably the best thing about this book is Telander's remarkable ability to evoke a sense of time and place. Flatbush, New York, concrete jungle, hot hot summer, city playgrounds, deteriorating basketball courts, drinking cold beer in the shade, radios, endless noise, endless heat. Telander puts us there with him, among these players, both basketball and otherwise.

They are all, more or less, for better or worse, basketball prodigies. They live basketball because for most, that's their only chance to get out of the ghetto. Which sounds crazy to write but it was (and is?) true. And in Foster's Park, if you wanted out, you had to have Rodney Parker on your shoulder.

With all its sad figures, Parker, for me, is at the top of the list in Telander's melodrama. Parker had declared himself a kind of 'ghetto scout', proclaiming who was deemed worthy of his attention and time, and then doing his darndest to get that player into college or better yet, the NBA or ABA. When he wasn't scalping tickets, he was at Foster Park, mentoring his proteges or lecturing kids about what it meant to be a man (though Parker seems to have a tenuous grasp of adulthood himself). And what was in it for Rodney? Apparently nothing. As Telander comes to believe, Parker did it for the love of the game...and as the reader comes to realize, also for the thrill of the deal, and the love of power (however small), and the love of admiration (however imagined) and, as it turns out, for friendship.

As characters, Parker, along with Fly Williams, carry the narrative. I found them to be the most interesting and pyschologically perplexing. Telander does an excellent job of bringing their emotional idiosyncracies to the surface, helping us see behind the mask of braggadocio. Williams ultimately "betrays" Rodney, though you get the sense that Williams couldn't really help himself...he was too damaged, his life destined to self-destruct.

And also, I want to add, there is a purity within these pages. Basketball, though an escape route for some, is played mostly for the love of the game. Simply because there is nothing like a game of three on three, four on four, playing to win, yes, but also playing just to play.

Review of : Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

2010-03-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I hadn't read this before. It seems kinda essential to any graphic novel lover's library. A classic, if you will. Just passed me by I suppose. I remember watching the movie...though I don't remember the movie itself very well. In my memory, I have cinematic visuals to go along with the graphic novel though I only remember specific bits and pieces. There's this guy who writes these suggestive signs in his window, right? To the girls? Or is that another movie? Either way, that wasn't in the graphic novel. I should watch the movie again. Nancy thought maybe Christina Ricci was one of the girls but I don't think so. Upon doing a quick search, that actress was Thora Birch.

We follow the day-to-day wanderings of Enid and Rebecca, two recent high school graduates. They walk around town and spout negativity, as bitter, psuedo-intellectuals are wont to do. Wont? I'm not sure I've ever used that in a sentence. Cool. They are girls forming into women, teenagers into adults. They are confused, angry, hormonal, and in their specific case, social outcasts. Though it seems that their "outsider-ness" is, in Enid's case, of her own making, or at the very least, she enjoys her label (self imposed label?) of being the outcast. Strange for the sake of being strange. Which I've always found those sort of people to be kinda annoying and sad because it seemed that they really just wanted attention and love like everyone else, which isn't so strange at all.

The artwork is what propelled the story for me, more than the plot, which was loose but engaging. The two-colored pallet that Clowes chooses to use, helps add to the "ghost world" theme, the idea of a not-quite-there world, populated with strip malls, fast-food joints, everyone living inside their own heads, etc. True human connection is fleeting in this ghost world, and often times, unattainable. The townspeople who do populate the story seem to be there mostly for Enid and Rebecca's amusement. They sneer at those that are different from them (which is almost everyone...and those people in turn treat them as outsiders), they tease those who they find interesting (Josh and Weird Al), and mock the desperate citizens who search for companionship (guy who placed ad in the paper and the astrologist). And I get the sense that all this negative energy directed at the world around them is really probably a defense mechanism of sorts, protecting them from actual emotions and feelings, preventing them from connecting with the people they are supposed to hate.

And even Enid and Rebecca find it hard to maintain their friendship, the post-graduate life straining the bond between them. Rebecca seems content to stay in this unnamed town (further adding to the ghost world, a town without a name) and maybe even sees a future within its borders. But Enid, ultimately, decides if she wants to exist, she'll have to leave and become someone else entirely. Because no one truly exists in a ghost world.

Review of : Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995

2010-03-17T15:44:00.000-07:00

Devasting is the first word that comes to mind. The story of the Bosnian War is a bit complicated (like most wars) but here is a radically condensed summary: Yugoslavia was made up of mostly Croatians, Serbians, and Muslims. And after WWII, the then president Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito, looked to down play ethnic nationalism and have each group live side by side peacefully. Then Tito died and Serbian nationalism took hold through the new Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, who became the president of the Yugoslavian Federation. Intimidated and scared by Slobodan's renewed Serbian nationalism (leftover from post WWII atrocites perpetrated on the Serbs), Crotia and Slovenia declared independence, leaving Bosnia to stand alone against the now hostile Serbia. So...war descends upon Bosnia, though "war" isn't really the right term because that implies two, more or less equal, sides fighting it out but really it was essentially ethnic cleansing of the heavily underarmed Muslims by the Serbs. Now, remember, Serbs and Muslims had lived peacefully side by side. They were each others friends, neighbors. But much of the Serb population had fled during this time, leaving mostly Bosniaks (Muslims) in Gorazade. So when the fighting began, it was the Bosniaks old friends and neighbors who came for them. Again, this information is skeletal. This is by no means a complete picture.

But that's where Sacco comes in. Through his reporting and interviews in Gorazde (one of the designated "safe areas" by the UN, whose power is largely portrayed as a joke throughout the book), all of the war's nuances begin to emerge. And all of the war's tragedies. Make no mistake, this is a bloody, gruesome, unflinching, compelling account of what was happening in Gorazade and Bosnia. The mass murders, mass graves. The snipers. The constant artillery fire. The understaffed, ill-equipped hospital, over run with grotesque injuries, with little more than brandy to dull the pain. Doctors amputating legs with kitchen knives. Dead children. Legless children. Rape. Houses looted and burned. Civilians drenched in gasoline, left to burn alive.

The vignette that haunted me the most was one from Visegrad, a small town just north of Gorazade. A man retells the horrors he witnessed from his window, as he watched Serbs load his neighbors in the back of a truck, take them to a near by bridge and proceeded to slit their throats, one by one, tossing their bodies into the waiting river below. All night, he could hear the continuous splash of bodies hitting water. Men, women, children. No one was spared. In the course of three days, he estimated he saw 200-300 people murdered on that bridge.

The art work is stark. Black and white. Shimmering, harsh, almost nightmaric. Sacco's style renders the Bosnian landscape and its people beautifully. I travelled down through parts of Eastern Europe in 2002. Slovakia, Hungary, Crotia, and flew out of Sarajevo. Walked down "Sniper Alley". Stood on the bridge where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Most buildings were in varying states of war-torn decay. The region was stupidly beautifully at times and ridiculously sad at others. Sacco does a great service to Gorazde and their surrounding neighbors, showing us through the eyes and stories ot its citizens, that even under tragic circumstances, life can still be lived with joy, grace, and hope.

Review of : The Subject Steve by Sam Lipsyte

2010-03-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

Satire is the word of the day when it comes to Sam Lipsyte. Satire, sure. Fine. But a love of language is what I come away with when I read Lipsyte.

I'm always reluctant to take up review space with summarizing the plot but anyway, the main character, whose name may or may not be Steve, is diagnosed with a "fantastically new" disease, which the reader comes to assume, or I came to assume, is just Death, like how we're all dying, in some sense of the word. I'm not going to claim that I "got" or "understood" everything that was going on in The Subject Steve. Both plotwise and idea-wise. But I like I said, Lipsyte is a language man, American, corporate language. And yes, the book is frequently funny. And oddly violent. But satire is often violent, right? Exaggerating the violence that is already present in the "real" world?

Let me just freestyle a little here, get some things out there: Meditations on ones mortality, understanding Death in an absurd world, accepting the passage of Time, capital T. What matters? Language matters. The Word matters. The rhythm of modern language, the playfulness, the abstractness. A common language. A common knowledge, a common understanding. Human connection through a common language, through common abstractions.

There is a common voice, as others have remarked, running through these pages. Each person seems to share the same mind. The same language. And though everyone seems to understand one another, real clarity feels like it's just off stage. Especially for "Steve". He both understands completely and understands nothing. Exaggerated satire? Well, of course, one of the main goals of satire is for us to recognize ourselves in the exaggeration. What is it? One who knows that he does not know, is a truly wise man? The more you learn, the less you know? And if you don't know, now you know? Et al.

Now, I'm trying to write concretely about a book that speaks in corporate, slogan-ed tongues (see Lipsyte quote below for more clarity). So you can imagine the difficulty. But it feels like Lipsyte is asking us to pay attention. Not just to life but to language. Well, he's asking us to do a lot of things. Or more like, "Hey, look at this. Think about it this way instead of this way."

And this: when his characters actually spoke in length, I found it compelling. Heinrich's zookeeper fable? I almost missed my bus stop. And Steve's childhood recollection of his father and his best friend's father getting into an erotic "fight" in the tool shed? Easily the high point (for me) in the novel and some of best writing I've read in a while.

"You see too much and you can't see anything at all." pg. 122

"I guess the problem is insincere speech. Life-crushing speech. At least from the language end. I’ve always liked writers who have an ear for all of the subtleties, the particulars of the given cant, the officialese, the business-casual lingo, the business intimate, the intimate casual, all the modes of modern (and unmodern) utterance. I love to read writers who can bend these particulars, spit them back, or knead the feeling back into them. That’s the response, from the perspective of fiction writing. What else? Corporations are part of our current predicament, but every age has a predicament. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling properly apocalyptic today. It’s all going to work out. McJihad is around the corner."

-excerpt from an interview with Sam Lipsyte

Review of : The Wavering Knife (Stories) by Brian Evenson

2010-03-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

What a strange, dark, original, little collection. Surreal at times, all-too-real at others (see what I did there?). I don't remember exactly where I first came across Evenson's name but he comes with much acclaim. Everyone seems to agree that the story 'Promise Keepers' is far and away the best (and one of the most disturbing) of the collection. It's also pretty darn funny.

Some other noteworthy stories are 'White Squares', 'The Intricacies of Post-Shooting Etiqutte', 'Virtual', 'Barcode Jesus', and 'House Rules'. Evenson seems to be big on 'ideas' (which I know is vague and stupid of me to say) though sometimes his execution seems to fall a little short...and sometimes they're just so bizarre that I just don't know what in tarnation is going on. I mean, what the hell was 'The Progenitor' about?

One guy remarked how the font sucked and while this might seem shallow, I'm gonna have to go ahead and agree with him. The font was oddly distracting and I can't help but wonder how simple things like that (bad font choice) get that far down the editorial line to the point of publishing the bad font choice.

Review of : A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell

2010-03-03T11:53:00.000-08:00

I'm usually not one for memoirs but this did a fine job of keeping me engaged, mostly due to the short chapters (most no more than two pages). I would have liked to have read more of Sampsell's meditations on his family and their unique household. Most of his ruminations about his less than stellar father were all kinda jammed into the end when his father died but I found those 20 pages or so chronicling his father's death and funeral to be the most honest and gripping of the entire book.

Review of : Methland by Nick Reding

2010-02-26T17:30:00.000-08:00

Apparently, after reading some reviews by some native Iowans (is that what they call themselves?) there are a few factual inaccuracies throughout the book, such as Iowa City is not the largest city in Iowa, or that The University of Northern Iowa is in Cedar Falls, not Cedar Rapids. For the most part, I don't care. These facts aren't really relevant to the whole story BUT they do chip away at Reding's credibilty as a reporter...but I'm sure these kind of mistakes will be fixed come the paperback edition.

As with any reportage of this type, one which the book industry seems to be saturated by, you can't go taking everything the author says as The Truth. You have to view it as a version of The Truth that helps (hopefully) create a better understanding of the subject in question and (hopefully) creates a 'national dialogue'. So this is Nick Reding's version of rural America, of the Meth problem in those areas, and of Oelwein, IA.

This is a very human centered story. Reding devotes just as much time to understanding meth and the DTO's (Drug Trafficking Organization) as he does to the people whose lives are effected by them. So if you're going in expecting a meth-soaked narrrative, you might be a little bit disappointed. That is not to say that meth is not present on every page, because it is, but in a more atmospheric way. I guess I was looking forward to understanding more about meth as drug and I came away with a vague understanding but nothing incredibly concrete. And that has more to do with my expectations than it does with Reding's execution as a writer, because I'm sure he intended to devote a lot of narrative space to these people he befriended and whose lives he saw crippled by meth.

But I don't want to sell Reding short. He does a damn good job explaining the history of meth and it's ever changing distribution and manufacturing. Sometimes I felt he bit off a little more than he could chew, narratively, as he tried connecting all the pieces that come into play when talking about a major drug like meth. He starts off talking about rural America, then economic turmoil, then meth, then big agriculture, then Monsanto and Cargill (of which his father was a vice chairmen, which was a neat twist), then the meat industry, then DTO's, then legislation, then pharmaceutical lobbyists, then insurance companies, etc, etc. I'm not saying this isn't all important because it most certainly is if a reader wanted the whole picture. But I felt Reding didn't devote enough space to all the pieces of the puzzle. The book needed to be twice as long as it was to form a proper, coherent narrative. So that's kinda positive criticism: I wanted more. After all this unnecessary nitpicking, I recommend this book.

Also, it reinforced the idea that, yet again, Big Pharma is evil, evil, evil.

Review of : Do Not Deny Me (Stories) by Jean Thompson

2010-02-26T17:27:00.000-08:00

Now, I normally don't like it when people review books they haven't read all the way through, but I'm making an exception. I read about half of this short story collection and I would have finished it if I thought the rest of the stories would offer something different than the first half...but I have a pretty good idea of what the other stories hold.

I'm coming to realize that the more I read, the more and more I'm attracted to style and voice rather than content. Of course content is important to me as well but usually in a more abstract, cerebral way. Above all, I want, as a reader, to be entertained. And not in the 'dance monkey dance/passive viewer/don't make me work hard for my reward' way, but in a way that brings me simple pleasure, as in I Enjoy Reading This Book And I Gladly Devote Time And Brain Energy To These Pages. I usually derive the most pleasure from the books that make me work the hardest. And when I feel that the books aren't challenging me , well...I feel like I'm wasting my time or something. This all sounds very pretentious upon review but it's hard to talk about this stuff without coming off that way.

There is a flip side to this, always: that the narrative voices I am prone to reading are just as homogenous and unvarying, though in a different way and that reading them is just 'preaching to the choir' so to speak, not really a challenge at all. And I understand that completely. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that that particular arguement is a matter of content...not really style and voice. I believe that the writers that I have a tendency to read and enjoy share similar ideas about the world, yes, but they have unique voices in which they communicate these ideas/themes/feelings.

Anyway, in terms of short stories, I've been a little bored with some of the narrative techniques. Or not the technique, but their voice. Which is mostly a boring, safe voice. I want a writer who is doing something different with language. It doesn't have to be crazy experimental or anything but all too often, what is being held up as 'vibrant' or 'original' or 'sublime prose' or whatever it may be seems to be more of the same. These safe voices are necessary in order for other voices to set themselves apart from one another but it makes for a dull experience reading. So content is important, yes, but a compelling voice is what keeps me reading. And it's my fault for reading this stuff but I'm exploring, ya know? Seeing what's out there, reading what other people think is good fiction. And it's just as important to read stuff that you don't like, or might not like, as it is to read the stuff that you do like, just to better understand why you enjoy the stuff you enjoy. Right?

Oh, by the way: Jean Thompson is an okay storyteller but isn't doing anything that is out of the ordinary. This collection popped up on a lot of 'Best of 2009' lists for whatever reason, so I wanted to give it a go. No offense to Ms. Thompson. This review just kinda turned into a platform for some things that have been on my mind as of late. The opinions expressed in this review do not necesscarily reflect those of the Fox Broadcasting Company.

Review of : You Are Not A Stranger Here (Stories) by Adam Haslett

2010-02-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

A collection that takes no risks. Nice and safe. Characters connect with one another through pain or the retelling of their pain. One reviewer remarked that this collection restored his faith in the short story. Please. Overall, a bit dull and disappointing. Notable stories: Notes to My Biographer, My Father's Business, and The Volunteer.

Review of : Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

2010-02-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

I wasn't gonna read the new Krakauer book, mostly because the topic didn't really interest me, but then it was picked for the book group book and I have to lead it this month, so here we are. And I should have known better than to doubt Krakauer.

This book is 90% interesting. It details the life (and death) of Pat Tillman, a former NFL safety that decided to enlist in the Army, post 9/11, and was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. Now, that statement describes the "plot" but it doesn't really do the book or Tillman justice.

As always, Krakauer's main talent as an author is amassing ridiculous amounts of information and forming it into an understandable, readable narrative. In this case, he tackles the complex history and present state of Afghanistan, including the United States involvement with the mujahideen and the Soviet Union, the birth of the Taliban, al-Queda, where the hell Osama bin Laden came from, the Invasion of Iraq, present day military progress (or lack thereof), and the terrorist movement in neighboring Pakistan.

Now, along side all this history, Krakauer tells the story of Pat Tillman. Through the first half of the book, I wasn't really connecting with Tillman, or at least the picture Krakauer was painting of Tillman, this jock with a heart of gold and intelligence to boot. But by the end, Tillman's story had won me over, even if Krakauer tried a little too hard at times to jam his uniqueness down my throat.

By far, the most engaging part of the book is Krakauer's dissection of A) the Jessica Lynch saga in Nasiriyah and B) the fire fight that led to the death of Pat Tillman near Mana Village. In both cases, the Bush administration chose to purposely manipulate the events so as to boost approval for the wars. In the case of Tillman, his death and investigation of said death, was completely and utterly mishandled up and down the chain of command. The facts of the cover-up are far too weird and numerous to name here. I mean, there was an Office of Strategic Influence, whose sole purpose was to distort events and facts coming from the battlefield.

Krakauer also devotes much needed narration to the whole Bush/Gore election of 2000 and pretty much lays out how stupefying the whole mess was. Seriously though. It was unbelievable.

"We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win."
-Henry Kissinger in reference to the American experience in Vietnam

"Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it's leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a facist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country."
-Hermann Goring, Hitler's designated successor and commander of the Luftwaffe, 1946