Another fragment from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks. The piece was left out of Tender Is the Night. Phillips Oppenheim was British.
“Did you ever read the books of Phillips Oppenheim?”
“I think I’ve read one.”
“He’s one of my favorite American writers,” Tommy said simply. “He writes about the Riviera, you know. I don’t know whether the things he writes about are true but this place is like that.”
Standing before the gate they were suddenly bathed in a small floodlight, quick as a flashlight, that left them blinded for a moment. Then a voice from behind the gate.
“Who’s this, please?”
“Tell Monsieur Irv that it’s Monsieur Tommy. Tell him we can’t come in the house, but can he come out in the garden a minute.”
A section of the gate rumbled open like a safe and they were in a park, following a young Italo-American dandy toward a lighted house. They waited just out of range of the porch light, and presently the door opened and a dark thin man of forty came out and gazed blindly.
“Where you, Tommy?”
“Down here. Don’t come. I have a lady with me who wants to remain anonymous.”
“How?”
“I’ve got a lady with me who doesn’t want to be seen— like you.”
“Oh, I unestand, I unestand.”
“We want to swim. Anybody on the beach?”
“Nobody, nobody. Go ahead, Tommy. You want suits, towels?”
“All right, some towels. Nodoby’s going to come down, are they?”
“No, no, nobody. Say, did you see Du Pont de Nemours went up—”
“No stock market in the presence of ladies.”
“All right, excuse me, lady. You wait now—Salve will take you down—don’t want you to get in trouble.”
As Irv re-entered the house Tommy said, “Probably he’s phoning the machine gunner to pass us. He was a fellow townsman of yours in Chicago—now he has the best beach on the Riviera.”
Curiously Nicole followed down an intricate path, then through a sliding steel door that operated like a guillotine, out into a roofless cavern of white moonlight, formed by pale boulders about a cup of phosphorescent waters. It faced Monaco and the blur of Mentone beyond. She likes his taste in bringing her here—from the highhanded storming of Mr. Irv’s fortress.
Then, starting back the lane by which they had come Tommy tripped over a wire and a faint buzzer sounded far away.
“My God!” he excalimed, “that a man should have to live like this!”
“Is he afraid of burglars?”
“He’s afraid of your lovely city and came here with a bodyguard of a dozen monkeys—is that the right slang? Maybe Al Capone is after him. Anyhow he has one period between being drunk and being sober when he is very nice.”
He broke off as again they were momentarily bathed in the ubiquitous spotlight. Then amber lamps glowed on the porch of the castellated villa and Mr. Irv, this time supported by the very neat young man, came out unsteadily.
“I kept them off the beach, Tommy,” he announced.
“Thank you, very much.”
“Won’t you both change your minds and come in? In greatest confidence. I have some other ladies here.” He raised his voice as if to address Nicole. “As you are a lady of background you will like ’em.”
“It’s four o’clock,” said Tommy. “We have to get to our background. Good night.”
Irv’s voice followed them.
“You never make a mistake having to do with a lady.”
I don’t really care for Franzen either as writer or public figure (but as an object of derision, sure), but I do ♥ Mekons.
Lars Iyer’s début novel Spurious is about two would-be intellectuals, W., the book’s comic hero, and his closest friend, our narrator Lars. They bitch and moan and despair: it’s the end of the world, it’s the apocalypse; they find themselves incapable of original thought, of producing any good writing. The shadow of Kafka paralyzes them. They travel about Europe, seeking out knowledge and inspiration — or at least a glimpse of some beautiful first editions of Rosenzweig. They attend dreadful academic conferences; they write letters. They flounder and fail. In the meantime, a fungus of seemingly metaphysical proportions infects Lars’s apartment, soaking it through, compounding his desperation, as no one can figure out how to get rid of it—
No one understands the damp. It’s Talmudic. The damp is the enigma at the heart of everything. It draws into it the light of all explanation, all hope. The damp says: I exist, and that is all. I am that I am: so the damp. I will outlast you and outlast everything: so the damp.
The passage is a lovely example of Iyer’s humor, which pervades the book just as the damp creeps through his narrator’s home, absurd and bewildering. Iyer is willing to play with tropes of theology and philosophy in ways that are simultaneously absurd, hyperbolic, and deadly serious. “These are the End Times, but who knows it but us?” his hapless heroes wonder. W. is not without solutions though—-
Every conversation must be driven through the apocalyptic towards the messianic, that’s W.’s principle; the shared sense that it’s all at an end, it’s all finished. He loves nothing better than conversations of this kind, W. says, when everything’s at stake, when everything that could be said is said.
That’s when messianism begins, W. says, You have to wear out speech, to run it down. And then? And then, W. says, inanity begins, reckless inanity. The whole night opens up. You have to drink a great deal to get there. It’s an art.
The dialogue (or monologue pretending to be dialogue, more accurately) highlights the verbal slapstick of Spurious, its willingness to shift direction while retaining tone. “Both characters are mesmerised by a real disaster,” Iyer told me in a recent interview (the interview, by the way, makes a better case for reading Spurious than I can hope to here) . “And both — particularly W. — are mesmerised by their partial responsibility for this disaster. The ‘strained and unreasoning’ laughter of Spurious is a response to the grimness of the world that is of our making.”
W.’s response to our grim, apocalyptic world is a mix of absurd humor and real cruelty toward his friend Lars. And if W. is willing to mock and laugh at his friend, he also mocks and laughs at the world, and himself—only his laughter never absolves or forgives or otherwise deflects the cruelty and grimness of the world (or his own cruelty, in turn). When W. calls Lars fat or chastises his laziness or derides his intellect, there’s a recursive angle to his jabs, a sense that they will return to rest on his own brow. It’s all in good fun except when it’s not.
W. and Lars face the same trial that all thinking people face during the End Times, the inescapable, all-devouring nightmare of history, art, philosophy. Perhaps a passage will explicate better than I—
Kafka was always our model, we agree. How is it possible that a human being could write like that?, W. says, again and again. It’s always at the end of the night when he says this, after we’ve drunk a great deal and the sky opens above us, and it is possible to think of what is most important.
At the same time, we have Kafka to blame for everything. Our lives each took a wrong turn when we opened The Castle. It was quite fatal: there was literature itself! We were finished. What could we do, simple apes, but exhaust ourselves in imitation? We had been struck by something we could not understand. It was above us, beyond us, and we were not of its order.
If our heroes are disciples of literature (or the purity of “literature itself”), they are also its prisoners, its slaves, the tormented. W. attempts to find ways out through mathematics and Talmudic theology, but these disciplines entail their own weight and chains—and ultimately, W.’s own shortcomings in these areas only point back to his own reliance on literature (and, in turn, his own shortcomings there again). Still, W. (or Lars, or Iyer, I guess), is willing to share his citations with us, quoting or paraphrasing from a rich intellectual diet.
Although in some ways Spurious is fragmentary and elliptical, a series of riffs, vignettes, and skits, it is also in many ways a traditional novel, with emotionally drawn characters in Lars and W., whose friendship resounds with a deep reality and psychological honesty with which most readers will identify. W. suggests that companionship and friendship are reasons enough to continue existence in the face of despair and absurdity; he then turns around and accuses Lars of being a terrible friend. Iyer offers the kind of truth that has become a cliché, offers it perhaps without cynicism or irony, and then immediately punctures it, even as he reinforces its original truth. Spurious is full of such vacillations, reeling like its often-drunk heroes at times, but always unified by a consistent tone and tight prose. Funny and lively, even when it’s erudite and depressive, Spurious is a lovely little book for drinking and thinking. Read it and pass it on to a dear friend.
Spurious is available now from Melville House; I encourage you again, dear reader, to read my interview with Lars Iyer.
From the section of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks titled “Rough Stuff,” some choice morsels—
My mind is the loose cunt of a whore, to fit all genitals.
His bowels, heavy with the night’s catch groaned out new scenes.
A man giving up the idea of himself as a hero. Perhaps picking his nose in a can.
You can’t take the son of a plough manufacturer, clip off his testicles and make an artist of him.
“Did you ever see squirrels yincing?” he asked her suddenly.
Scenario hacks having removed all life from a story substituting the stink of life—a fart, a loose joke, a dirty jeer. How they do it.
Apology to Ogden Nash:
Every California girl has lost at least one ovary
And none of them has read Madame Bovary.
There’s a silly little article at Slate today about “overrated” books. The article collects a decent survey of critics and writers discussing the “great books” that they find boring, difficult to read, or otherwise overrated. There are a few tomes I agree with on the list—I am proud that I read all of Tess of the D’Ubervilles in the 10th grade, unlike most of my peers who, undoubtedly wiser than I, resorted to Cliffs Notes, but Hardy’s book was the biggest chore of my young reading life. There are plenty of books targeted in the article that may be overrated, but that doesn’t mean that they are bad or terrible books. But Slate is always quick to post a catchy, “provocative” headline, no doubt intended to generate hits; indeed, they’re almost as bad as Huffington Post, which has published similar articles in the past, including this recent execrable example of “literary criticism,” “Bad Classics: Books We Think Are Overrated.” Huffington Post’s list is ridiculous, taking weak stabs at Waiting for Godot, Moby-Dick, and that most sacred of cows, Ulysses.
Joyce’s big book shows up on the Slate list too. I’ll be the first to admit that the book is likely overrated, held in perhaps too high esteem by those who haven’t read it, and the academic industry it has produced does its reputation no favors among a general reading public. But it’s not a “bad classic.” It’s a beautiful, moving, and, yes, important book, and because of its status, both in the academy and in popular culture, it has become yet another easy target for contrarians. From the Slate piece, here’s Daniel Mendelsohn of the NYRB, explaining why Ulysses is inauthentic and has never “persuaded” him —-
. . . it’s as if Joyce were both the author of his book and the future comp lit grad student who’s trying to decipher it. Indeed, it’s small wonder that Ulysses has become the bible of academic lit departments; it seems to have been practically written for literary theorists. (Dubliners, by contrast, is a book for “ordinary readers”—a term I use admiringly.)
I understand that Ulysses’ place in the academy can be terribly frustrating, but Mendelsohn’s critique strikes me as populist rubbish; it’s more an attack on the reputation of the book than the book itself. But I don’t really care; I mean, Mendelsohn is entitled to his opinion, which I’m sure is well-informed.
What I’m ultimately concerned about here is the potential effect that pieces like these at Slate and Huffington Post (and similar sites) can have on a reading public. How freeing to be told by the experts that Ulysses or Moby-Dick or Gravity’s Rainbow is not worth my time! I can get back to those Swedish crime novels now, or those vampire books written at a 4th grade reading level, or, better yet, fuck books. I’m sure there are spoiled rotten housewives throwing chardonnay at each other on TV.
Author Elif Batuman also didn’t care for Ulysses, but she offers the most sensible response in the entire article—-
Like many people, I enjoy learning which canonical books are unbeloved by which contemporary writers. However, I don’t think participants in such surveys ought to blame either themselves (“I’m so lazy/uneducated”) or the canonical books (“Ulysses is so overrated”). My view is that the right book has to reach you at the right time, and no person can be reached by every book. Literature is supposed to be beautiful and/or necessary—so if at a given time you don’t either enjoy or need a certain book, then you should read something else, and not feel guilty about it.
Canonical books I did not enjoy include The Iliad and The Sound and the Fury, and, although I did read Ulysses with some degree of technical interest, it wasn’t fun for me. I maintain that this doesn’t reflect badly on Homer, Faulkner, Joyce, or me.
I think Batuman’s tone and approach is perfect here; I also admire her complete avoidance of playing those favorite games of internet writers: swiping at sacred cows and trying to point out that the emperor is naked. Instead, Batuman acknowledges the inherent fun in articles like the one she’s participating in and then quickly points out that reading is not a contest. She saliently points out that “the right book has to reach you at the right time, and no person can be reached by every book.” To my shame, a younger version of myself wrote some nasty things about William Faulkner on this blog, suggesting that he was the most overrated American writer of all time. I took it all back, of course, and now would rate Light in August and Go Down, Moses as two of my favorite books. I am happy that I read Go Down, Moses at the right time—like Batuman says, timing is a huge factor in how a reader receives a book.
It seems to me that articles like the ones at Slate and HuffPo are symptomatic of an empty populism sweeping through much of America today. I am in no way suggesting that the writers and critics in the surveys are practitioners or purveyors of empty populism; rather, their estimable talents have been circumscribed by engines of culture-production (and culture-absorption) to absolve an increasingly distracted populace from even making a pretense of reading some really great and important books. Articles like these engender slapdash and shallow thinking, licensing poseurs to make claims about books they’ve failed to read. Even worse, these kinds of surveys provide ammunition to the those who hold the word “elite” as an insult. I am not suggesting that articles like these will undo the Western canon, or that they signal the death of the novel, or an end to complex reading — but they certainly don’t help.
Went to my favorite used bookstore today. Picked up Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature to see what all the fuss is about (although I don’t think it’s one of his works of “erotica”). Anyway, it’s slim — 116 pages — so I’m sure it’ll find a place near the top of the stack.
I’m pretty sure that some of the folktales in this collection from Zora Neale Hurston are probably redundant in my library—I mean, I know I’ve got another collection of her folklore somewhere. But this one seems much bigger—and it has a great appendix. Look forward to a tall tale or two (or don’t; shit, I don’t care).
Back when I taught high school English, one of my favorite students “borrowed” (and never returned) my copy of Dune. Then he did the same with my copy of Riddley Walker (which, to be fair, I had stolen from a dear friend). Then he took Camp Concentration. I thought I’d replaced it, but when I looked for it the other day, I couldn’t find it. Anyway, this Caroll & Graf edition has a cool cover. I also picked up 334 on a reader recommendation (I was scolded for putting Camp Concentration on this list instead of some other Disch titles. Mea culpa). Anyway, I dig this pop art cover; I also think this is a first printing—-
Underneath (but not in) the 334 was this Thom Disch postcard. A fortuitous bookmark!
Let’s be clear from the get go — John from Cincinnati probably isn’t for most people. I liked it, despite its many, many flaws, but it’s pretentious, willfully weird, and hides its shakiness and lack of direction under opaque philosophical mumbo jumbo. It’s also frequently brilliant and occasionally transcendent TV, powered by David Milch’s trademark Shakespearean (or, more accurately, Shakespearean-by-way-of-Melville) dialog and a stellar ensemble cast, including Ed O’Neill, Rebecca De Mornay, Luis Guzman, and Bruce Greenwood.
So, what’s it about? Here’s Milch on Craig Ferguson, back in 2007 when the show debuted on HBO (right after the series finale of The Sopranos, a spot that probably helped to kill it at birth)—
If you don’t feel like watching the segment (and, if so, why not? –Milch is fascinating), here’s the takeaway: “I don’t know what it’s about…I don’t know the bottom line. But, uh, if God were trying to reach out to us, right, and if he felt a certain urgency about it, that’s what it’s about. And if God were trying to reach out to us and teach us something about the deepest nature of man, uh, he might use some drugged out surfers.”
Those drugged out surfers are the Yosts, a clan that takes its dysfunction three generations deep. Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood) is the young grandfather, a one-time surf star who retreats to his tree house after a bad knee injury. He and his wife Cissy (De Mornay) raise their grandson Shaun, a quiet and centered boy of 15 whose surfing career is just now emerging—much to the chagrin of Mitch. You see, Bruce and Cissy kind of fucked up with their only child, Shaun’s dad Butchie, a one time bad-boy superstar of the surf circuit who’s since degenerated into heroin addiction and alcoholism, living in a dumpster of a hotel, and barely seeing his son. Multimillionaire surf promoter Linc Stark (Luke Perry) is partly to blame for Butchie’s fate, and now he wants to sign Shaun to his company.
Against this backdrop of familial toil, a stranger — John from Cincinnati (uh, JC, if you will) arrives. John is seemingly childlike and naïve; he parrots back the words that others say to him and seems incapable of answering questions directly. He also possesses strange powers, powers that unfold throughout the series’s ten episodes and extend into the bizarre community of Imperial Beach. There are the Yosts themselves—Mitch begins levitating, Shaun comes back from the dead, and Butchie no longer craves dope—but J of C’s powers also influence those in the Yosts’ circle, like ex-detective, Bill Jacks, who fights the despair at losing his dead wife by communicating telepathically with a parrot. Jacks is played by Ed O’Neill in a performance that deserves something better than an Emmy or whatever bullshit they give actors for TV series. Ed O’Neill + David Milch = fucking gold. Seriously. Here’s five seconds of Ed O’Neill’s Bill Jacks, context unimportant—-
Jacks is the highlight of a strange circle of weirdos and grotesques that elliptically orbit the Yosts, including a number of ringers from Milch’s Deadwood (Dayton Callie, Paula Malcolmson, and Garret Dillahunt) as well as other fantastic character actors like Guzman, Paul Ben-Victor, and Willie Garson. Over nine days, J of C enters into the lives of these characters, transforming their dysfunction into a more unified, if still unstable community. This was the theme of Milch’s Deadwood, only in JfC it’s writ large and bold, if not obviously apparent.
Where Deadwood took a cold hard look at capitalism and our grand national myths, JfC explores the miraculous in the everyday. What would happen if we witnessed miracles? Could we credit them? Could we credit ourselves to understand them, or to even accept them—could we allow ourselves to be transformed by them? This is the dramatic thrust of JfC. The series is not so much about interpretation, then—it is not simply a reworking of the New Testament set in Southern California—rather it is a TV show about witnessing, what it would mean to see a miracle.
To this end, there are many, many scenes of characters witnessing and reacting to events that affect other characters in JfC. In any other world, such witnesses might be surrogates for the audience, allowing the producers to communicate their vision and meaning, but in JfC, witnessing is not a passive process, or even a matter of voyeurism: witnessing is just as important as the event that is witnessed; indeed, witnessing is what allows the event that is witnessed some measure of phenomenological reality. This is no small thing when set against the miraculous, against what our rational, scientific minds have told us to resist.
Because John from Cincinnati traffics in the inexplicable, it was bound to alienate its audience. The show was cancelled after one ten-episode run, and there’s a sense in the later episodes that the producers knew they would have to wrap up too much business without enough time. Thus: clunky exposition; new characters who show up for no reason and then disappear for no reason; major characters explained away with a simple voice over line or two; etc., etc., etc.
All of this is only frustrating though if one is seeking an explanation from JfC, when I think what the show is really offering is a view to a view of the inexplicable, to what it is to witness what we are told we cannot rationally witness. Like Twin Peaks, to which it bears considerable comparison, JfC is a study in dialog, mood, tone, and characterization. Those searching for story will likely be disappointed. That isn’t to say that JfC doesn’t have a good story—I think it does—but it hardly gels at the end. To put it another way, JfC lacks the central, galvanizing vision of Deadwood or other HBO shows like The Wire and Rome. Still, I think that fans of Milch’s dialog could hardly be disappointed with JfC, and the cast is marvelous (particularly Ed O’Neill). I’ll end by sharing what is likely the standout scene of JfC, an esoteric climax of sort from the sixth episode. It’s probably a riff on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—or maybe not—I don’t really want to analyze or interpret or even praise here—but it is a wonderful moment where Milch shows how community might happen. Recommended.
Over at The Paris Review Daily, Chris Flynn asked a few authors to discuss odd jobs they’d held, including Biblioklept fave Wells Tower, who worked briefly as a garbage man. He also slang marijuana for a while, but that’s not in the anecdote. Anyway, we love Tower’s short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (review here) and hope he’ll put out a novel soon. Here’s his trash story—
When I was nineteen, I worked briefly as a garbage man. My boss’s name was Puddn’. He was a vast, sunbaked person with such a pronounced Southern accent that I couldn’t understand much of what he said. The job’s oppressions were what you’d expect: maggots, smells made worse by the summer heat. By the end of each day, I hated everyone who owned a garbage can. I did not hate Puddn’, though, who made many gifts to me of the wonders he found in the trash: penknives, silver cutlery, old watches, some of which I keep with me still.
I don’t know if this one actually counts; Atomic Ranch is a book my wife ordered (not that my wife doesn’t count). But I’ve started to (at least try to) document all the books that come into the house, so, yeah, here’s Atomic Ranch, which is about 1950s ranch homes, which I guess my wife bought because we bought such a home earlier this year.
From the latest Electric Literature—
For our new Single Sentence Animation, J. Robert Lennon has chosen a sentence from his story “Hibachi” that depicts a turning point in Phillip and Evangeline’s marriage: the night she reveals she is one furious Hibachi master.
The sentence: “And then, with a motion so swift and subtle it was hard to be certain that it had happened, she pulled a wooden match from a pocket, scraped it against the exhaust hood, and set the onion alight. ”
Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favorite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short film in response.
Animation and sound by Benk.
Biblioklept 