“A Toad, can die of Light,” a poem by Emily Dickinson:
A Toad, can die of Light –
Death is the Common Right
Of Toads and Men –
Of Earl and Midge
The privilege –
Why swagger, then?
The Gnat’s supremacy is large as Thine –Life — is a different Thing –
So measure Wine –
Naked of Flask — Naked of Cask –
Bare Rhine –
Which Ruby’s mine
Vincent Cronin
Tony Geiss
MK Binodini
Kenneth Grant
Joe Gores
Maria Elena Walsh
Del Reisman
Christopher Trumbo
Loreen Rice Lucas
Diana Norman
Reynolds Price
John Ross
David Hart
B.H. Friedman
Dick King-Smith
Susana Chavez
Park Wun-suh
Wilfrid Sheed
Jean Dutord
Sun Axelsson
Ruth Cavin
Max Wilk
Hans Joachim Alpers
Donald S. Sanford
Peter J. Gomes
Ion Hobana
Rudi Bass
Anson Rainey
Perry Moore
Sean Boru
Bo Carpelan
Elaine Crowley
Martin Quigley Jr.
Charles E. Silberman
Andree Chedid
Iakovos Kambanelis
Sara Ruddick
Doris Burn
Steven Kroll
May Cutler
Thor Vilhjálmsson
H.R.F. Keating
Joe Bageant
Jean Liedloff
Bill Blackbeard
Alberto Granado
Hazel Rowley
Al Morgan
Raymond Garlick
John Haines
Ernesto Sabato
Abdul Hameed
Rafael Menjívar Ochoa
John Sullivan
Sidney Michaels
Madelyn Pugh
Sol Saks
Arthur Marx
Bill Brill
L.J. Davis
Ulli Beier
Kevin Jarre
Joanna Russ
David Wilkerson
Beverly Barton
Craig Thomas
Ira Cohen
W.J. Gruffydd
Anne Blonstein
Paul Violi
Johanna Fiedler
Dick Wimmer
Oniroku Dan
Hans Keilson
Martin Woodhouse
Newton Thornburg
Patrick Galvin
Wallace Clark
Carlos Trillo
Kate Swift
Arthur Laurents
Frans Sammut
William Kloefkorn
Thierry Martens
E.M. Broner
Tom Hungerford
Kathryn Tucker Windham
Harry Bernstein
Joel Rosenberg
Simon Heere Heeresma
David Rayfiel
Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta
Robert Kroetsch
Josephine Hart
Gloria Sawai
Anne LaBastille
Blaize Clement
Sissel Solbjørg Bjugn
Francis King
Agota Kristof
Henry Carlisle
Iain Blair
Hideo Tanaka
Michael Legat
Ruth Thomas
Colin Harvey
David Holbrook
Simona Monyová
William Sleator
Samuel Menashe
Selwyn Griffith
Sara Douglass
Ida Fink
Sergio Bonelli
Arthur Evans
Hella Haasse
David Croft
David Zelag Goodman
Emanuel Litvinoff
José Miguel Varas
Jo Carson
Cengiz Dağcı
Frank Parkin
Hugh Fox
Herbert Lomas
Florence Parry Heide
Stanley Mitchell
Uno Röndahl
Mildred Savage
Mick Anglo (LINK)
Alvin Schwartz
Sri Lal Sukla
Piri Thomas
Gerald Shapiro
Vittorio Curtoni
Morio Kita
Andrea Zonzotto
Taha Muhammad Ali
Georg Kreisler
Daniel Sada
H.G. Francis
Helen Forrester
Čestmír Vejdělek
Hal Kanter
Les Daniels
Leonid Borodin
Franz Josef Degenhardt
Morris Philipson
Ana Daniel
Ruth Stone
Peter Reading
Ruslan Akhtakhanov
Ivan Martin Jirous
Tomás Segovia
Kabir Chowdhury
Hans Heinz Holz
Ke Yan
Mario Miranda
Jean Baucus
Gilbert Adair
Jerry Robinson
Ambika Charan Choudhury
Matti Yrjänä Joensuu
Louky Bersianik
Christopher Logue
Christa Wolf
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
“The Routine Things Around the House,” a poem by Stephen Dunn—
When Mother died
I thought: now I’ll have a death poem.
That was unforgivableyet I’ve since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who’ve been loved by their mothers.I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she’d live,
how many lifetimes there arein the sweet revisions of memory.
It’s hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
if I could see her breasts
and she took me into her roomwithout embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who’ve never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer,feel blessed again. What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breastswhen girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luckshe didn’t doom me
with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch,perhaps to suck them,
what would she have done?
Mother, dead womanwho I think permits me
to love women easily,
this poemis dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficientand to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.
We’ve all had house guests who stay too long. But what happens when a house guest who overstays her welcome is dying? What if you invited her there hoping to prove in yourself some measure of humanity, humility, maybe even heroism, by taking good care of her? What if you found her irritating? Grating? Self-absorbed? What if she didn’t seem to even notice what a great caretaker you were? What if she didn’t seem to appreciate your prowess as a host? What if she outright ignored the disease that was killing her, just refused to even mention it, denying you any hope of closure? Worst of all would be the shame that compounded all of these feelings about the dying house guest, the sense that you are wrong, inhuman, cowardly, right? Helen Garner’s novella The Spare Room (new in trade paperback from Picador) tackles these questions and the emotional turmoil behind them in measured, spare prose making a compelling and rewarding read.
Little irks me more in journalism than a book review (or any media review, really) that seeks to intertwine the personal dramas of the reviewer. I am about to do just that right now, gentle reader, so you are forewarned. Stop reading now if you wish and know that Biblioklept recommends The Spare Room. It’s a marvelous piece of writing, one that gives proof to the cliché “brutally honest.”
Reading The Spare Room I could not help but identify with its narrator, an Australian woman in her 60s named Helen who takes care of her free-wheeling, slightly daffy, cancer-infested friend Nicola. I am not an Australian woman in my 60s, but, like Helen, I know what it is like to live with and care for a person whom you love who also happens to be dying. From the time I was 12 years old, my maternal grandmother Mama Dot lived with my family. The doctors, prognosticating wise men all, gave Mama Dot just a year or two to live and my folks wanted her to spend that time with us. She was very sick, and, as if to prove the verity of certain stereotypes about Southern women, she was also very stubborn–mulishly so (the woman could hold a grudge). She went on to live another 10 years with my parents, during which time both my brother and myself of course left the house (but always came back to visit). I loved her very, very much and, perhaps as a result of that love, fought with her constantly and fiercely about any little thing. Unlike the narrator Helen, who bottles up her irritation with Nicola (particularly her fury at her friend’s pursuit of quackish cures), I found it easier to confront my grandmother about her faults in illness–her lapses of memory and judgment, her lack of cooperation, her unbearable slowness. I could even be mean. But like Helen, I always felt bad about it too. What makes The Spare Room such an affecting, gripping read is Garner’s honesty, her ability to capture the negative, selfish feelings that we all must feel when comforting the sick.
Narratives about the dying often disengage the emotional turmoil of the caretaker by applying a veneer of sentimentality, morality, or even whimsy. Garner handles her subject matter with a realism that denies sentimentality and faces the ugliness of death head on. Her narrator is compassionate toward her friend but it’s always clear that the book is not about Nicola–it’s about how Helen reacts to Nicola. It’s about what it means to be selfish at the very moment you are trying to be selfless. It’s about how hard it is to get past your flaws as a human being. Take the book’s humor, for instance: The Spare Room is frequently hilarious, yet the humor never seeks transcendence or escape. When Helen seems to mutter to her audience, “God bless morphine” at the beginning of a chapter, she isn’t drolly avoiding her friend’s pain–she’s thankful that the drug has given both of them a night’s sleep. Similarly, her observation that the “station was a seven-minute walk from my house, twenty if you had cancer,” reveals that Helen’s selfishness is wrapped in minute details, details that compound in the narrative and build tension toward its awful final sentence (a final sentence that I won’t spoil by revealing here, dear reader).
The Spare Room is a tightly-compressed novella that one might read in an afternoon or two, yet the book will undoubtedly stay with most readers for a long time to come. We might not all be like Helen (and, thankfully, not all of our patients are as trying as Nicola) but there is certainly bound to be some measure of her in even the best of us. Garner has captured here some of that rage against the dying of the light that Dylan Thomas encouraged of us, and she’s revealed that that rage, falling impotent against illimitable death, might end up aimed at those we love dearest–as well as ourselves. Highly recommended.
Author J.G. Ballard died of prostate cancer yesterday, at the age of 78. Ballard wrote over a dozen novels and hundreds of short stories. Ballard is probably most famous for his 1984 epic Empire of the Sun, which draws heavily on his childhood experiences during WWII Japanese-occupied Shanghai, but here at the Biblioklept we love his dystopian visions the most. Ballard’s early books like The Drowned World and short-story collection The Terminal Beach extend traditional adventure novels into strange dystopias and bizarre thought experiments. From the get-go, Ballard’s “sci-fi” (if you want to call it that) was less concerned with alien intelligences than it was with our internal and collective psychologies, and how we react to an increasingly mediated world. Hence novels like Crash, where human sexuality melds into technological fetishism, or The Atrocity Exhibition, a fragmented novel exploring the intersection of celebrity and Armageddon. Later novels like Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes respond to an increasingly paranoid and disconnected world, with a sardonic humor that is ultimately more frightening than soothing. Ballard never sought to alleviate or mock or answer to an increasingly complex and increasingly absurd world–he just dissected it and extrapolated it beyond most of our dim imaginations.
Ballard belongs to a select counter-tradition of writers and artists, fitting neatly between William Burroughs and William Gibson. Like his strange brothers Philip K. Dick and Thomas Disch, Ballard will always have a place in the avant-garde sci-fi cannon, and it’s likely that that place will only grow. Ballard was still writing up to his death, and his last novel Kingdom Come, a book that detailed the descent of consumerism into a type of fascism was as relevant as ever. Indeed, Ballard was far ahead of his time; as our world catches up to his visions, we will surely find an increasing relevancy in his body of work. He will be missed.
John Updike died this morning. He was pretty old (76) and sick (lung cancer). Is it callous to say I’m not a fan? Perhaps. Anyway.
His death brought to mind the words of a great American writer who died less than a year ago, David Foster Wallace, who, in reviewing Updike’s 1997 novel Toward the End of Time, made a pretty solid case against Updike’s ungenerous solipsism. Wallace starts with a line from Mailer’s 1969 poem “Midpoint” — “Of nothing but me … I sing, lacking another song,” (I assure you, gentle reader, Updike’s song of himself is hardly as inclusionary, loving, or democratic as Whitman’s) and continues:
Mailer, Updike, Roth-the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and on-line predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better than John Updike, whose rise in the 60′s and 70′s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV.
Although Wallace cops to being “probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans,” his treatment of Toward the End of Time is pretty scathing, and I think he makes a pretty good (implicit) case for why the fictions of the “Great Male Narcissists” will probably be ultimately considered mere period pieces, and not stand the test of time. But it seems like I’m speaking ill of the dead.
Wallace was a great writer and his young death still pains me. Read his full assessment of Updike’s novel here. It’s funny.
From Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers:
In a text called Auto-Icon: or, Farther uses of the dead to the living, Bentham gave careful instructions for the treatment of his corpse and its presentation after his demise. If an icon is an object of devotion employed in religious ritual, then Bentham’s “Auto-Icon” was conceived in the spirit of irreligious jocularity. The “Auto-Icon” is a godless human being preserved in their own image for the small benefit of posterity. [. . .] As such, Bentham’s body is a posthumous protest against the religious taboos surrounding the dead [. . .] Bentham’s body was dissected and his skeleton picked clean and stuffed with straw. [. . .] Sadly, the mummification process went badly wrong and a wax head was used as a replacement. The original, rotting and blackened head used to be kept on the floor of the wooden box between Bentham’s feet . However, the head became a frequent target for student pranks, being used on one occasion for football practice in the front quadrangle.
Of all the David Foster Wallace obituaries and appreciations floating around the internet–many of them moving and insightful–today’s feature at The Onion, “NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death” strikes me as the strangest. The conceit of the piece, that NASCAR drivers are keenly attuned, even motivated by the literary world, is frankly some of the basest, dumbest, most obvious irony ever, and possibly the kind of contrived situation at which Wallace might’ve cringed. Yet there’s something sweet in The Onion elegy’s clumsiness. Consider this analysis of Infinite Jest they attribute to Greg Biffle:
I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of effortlessness and earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences that spread in a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a sense of his yearning to relate and convey the importance of every least little thing.
Well said. Or Jimmie Johnson‘s beautiful critique of DFW’s style:
David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony.
And so well here we are then–an ironic piece acknowledging Wallace’s ability to acknowledge and yet resist irony in his own work. The Onion simply can’t unpack the thoroughly Wallacian conundrum that results. But what I think they do is better–they eulogize a writer I think they love in the only way the mission of their site allows. And unlike their previous jibes at Wallace, “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter at Page 20,” and the Weekender edition pictured above, it seems that The Onion staffers are too sad to make the piece funny–which, I think, is appropriate.
“[O]nce I’m done with the thing, I’m basically dead, and probably the text’s dead: it becomes simply language, and language lives not just in but through the reader” — David Foster Wallace, quoted in Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace
In the quote above, DFW illustrates why, when writing at his best, he was able to transcend the cold irony and post-modern goofiness of forbears (and, to some extent, contemporaries) like DeLillo and Pynchon. Wallace understood language as a game, and understood that the game was cooperative. He knew that it wasn’t enough to be clever–readers need to care about that cleverness. If the author is dead, and the text is dead, then the language has to live on through voices, through perspectives, through a series of interior identifications: this is where DFW excelled and dazzled. The myriad voices that lard Infinite Jest testify the power of walking in another’s shoes and seeing through another pair of eyes–in caring for the other. This is the power of literature, and this is why Wallace was such a powerful writer. And this is why we’ll miss him so much.
Wallace’s work went past the post-modern (counter)tradition of meta-textuality and self-referentiality, and commented–sometimes with a painful awareness and acuity–on the emotional deadening produced by contemporary irony and consumerist culture. His characters weren’t just placeholders to be pushed around in the hopes of proving a point, but real, achieved voices who lived through the reader. DFW’s project was not to simply repeat the postmodern realization of the indecidability of textuality, but to work through that realization into a new realm of connection and meaning and identification with his readers despite a cold, ironic, and sometimes meaningless world. In both his groundbreaking fiction and his brilliant essays, DFW delivered what matters the most in any piece of writing–subjects and characters you care about (often despite yourself). Postmodernist thought declares there’s nothing outside the text, a supposition many contemporary authors explore and expound upon in chilly irony or silly wordplay. Even when he was negotiating problems of meaning, signification, and communication in the face of alienation, fragmentation, and despair, David Foster Wallace gave us fully-realized worlds populated with characters we could care about.
There are any number of reports out there right now that mischaracterize DFW as an author who hid behind wordplay and irony. Consider Guy Adams ridiculous lead in The Independent: “For a writer who elevated irony to an art form, and whose infinite jesting co-existed with an all-too-apparent dark side, it felt grimly appropriate that David Foster Wallace should have chosen suicide as the means by which to end his own life story.” Did it feel “grimly appropriate”? Why? What was “grimly appropriate,” about David Foster Wallace’s suicide, Guy? Adams reinforces both his ignorance of his subject as well as his lack of literary understanding with this tidbit: “For all his natural ability, and occasional brilliance, Wallace never lived-up to the fullness of his talent, or the haunting reach of his possibilities.” Adams’s dismissive-yet-inflated rhetoric is exactly the kind of verbal posturing that needs to be shouted down right now by those who’ve actually read Wallace and can testify that his brilliance was anything but “occasional.” And that, I guess, is my only real goal here. Adams is wrong. It’s not true that “Wallace never lived-up to the fullness of his talent”–that phrase doesn’t even mean anything. Who measured the fullness of Wallace’s talent? When did that measurement take place, and in what units was said-talent measured? The measure of DFW’s talent can only be assessed by actually reading his work, and that’s what you should do–especially if you’ve been putting it off. Our author may be dead, but he lives on in a language game played with his readers via the act of reading, and this is a game where everyone stands to win.
This post will be full of typos and rhetorical slips and just generally bad writing. I’m just gonna write and post and I won’t bother editing. Sorry.
This morning, after BLTs with wife and child I checked my email. My buddy Damon sent me this article from the New York Times. Damon’s subject line, “David Foster Wallace dead at 46 (suicide)” kinda blew my mind. I didn’t get past the first lines of the Times report before tears started coming out of my eyes.
I’ve read all of DFW’s books, and, as corny as it sounds, the majority of them spoke so directly to me, so intimately, that I feel as if I’ve lost someone I knew. I’m sure that this isn’t the case at all, because he’s a writer and I’m his audience. He’s not friends or family. But reading him doesn’t feel that way. I would describe his style as a really, really good friend sitting on the couch with you, telling you stories that were both painfully funny and painfully sad. Infinite Jest provided a world of escape–a world I became addicted to–when I felt lonely in a foreign country I’d moved to. Girl with Curious Hair changed forever the way I thought about writing and reading–it opened me up to a whole new bank of authors and styles. But it’s probably DFW’s essays that hit me most directly.
Anyone who’s read the title essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, or “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” from that same collection knows just how funny and insightful and analytical Wallace could be–all without any of the caustic meanness a lesser writer might employ. DFW’s essays–and fiction–are always negotiating the razor line between earnest emotion and ironic detachment. He hated the latter but understood it was part of a cultural mode, part of the counter-tradition of post- or meta- fiction that he was continuing and responding to with his own writing. The two essays that probably best exemplify this are a Fun Thing‘s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (this should be required reading for every thinking person) and “Authority and American Usage,” DFW’s take on who-decides-what-is-proper-grammar-and-diction (collected in Consider the Lobster). I was re-reading the essay last Thursday and last night, with the intention to finish it today, with the intention to use it as part of something else I had planned to write. It will be impossible to finish it with the same reading schema in mind.
Just last week I listened to DFW reading from some as-yet-unpublished stuff; one section, on an overachieving boy that everyone hates is hilarious. The crowd is sometimes laughing too hard for DFW to maintain his rhythm and he has to slow down. In the interview that follows the reading, DFW seems like a really sweet, honest guy.
I remember distinctly my cousin calling me, well over a decade ago now, to tell me that Kurt Cobain had shot himself. I felt nothing then–it seemed perfectly logical. I was a huge Nirvana fan; they were my first concert and a big musical/cultural determiner in my young life. But his suicide seemed normal, natural even to me. I remember thinking “Of course.” When Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide, it seemed strange to me that he’d taken so long to do it. And when one of my favorite writers of all time, Kurt Vonnegut, passed away last year, I felt sad, but not so sad. So it goes.
This, this devestates me though. How could he hang himself? Why? I feel selfish and sad. Will we get another novel? Is it wrong to feel this way? I’m pretty sure that it’s wrong. I think about his body, hanged, and it makes me sick. I honestly felt close to this person. Unlike DeLillo or Pynchon or Barth, there was no veil or mediation in Wallace’s greatest work, no distance between his voice, or his speakers’ voices and my own burning internal ear. I have no pithy statement or philosophical wax for this piece, I have no way of summing up here. I feel sick.
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