The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban. It’s his first novel. Picked it up at the used bookshop today. Love the cover. I’m sure it’s as weird as the other stuff I’ve read by him (Riddley Walker, Pilgermann, Kleinzheit).
Month: September 2011
“Go Limp” — Nina Simone
“Could You Elaborate on These Things?” — Derrida Talks About “American” Attitudes; Sports an Orange Tan
“Entering The Pale King Is Like Entering a Familiar Room, Now Stripped Bare”
At Seven Steps Back, there’s a marvelous series of posts—a long essay, really, broken down into digestible blog chunks—about David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. The piece is easily one of the better analyses I’ve read about Wallace’s last book, well researched and well written through an intertextual lens. A taste, a riff on Wallace’s names—
Entering The Pale King is like entering a familiar room, now stripped bare, but with the footprints of its former occupant, your departed friend, still visible in the dust on the floor. For example, the good old names are back, strange and unharmonious, vaguely Germanic, Latinate, French, at root un-American; names like Lotwis and Glendenning and Bondurant and Henzke, not zany and humorous like Pynchon’s (it seems to me that the names and the scope of his books are the only reasons he has been called an epigone to Pynchon, nothing else), but rather like clothes one cannot find it in himself to feel at ease in, even though they aren’t tight or loose, but just right. They also seem like they were once normal, everyday names –names like George Smith and Janet Cooper– but at some point were taken apart and reconstructed by a neurotic tinkerer, in order to establish how long they can go on working before exploding.
Peter Brook Talks About “The Theater of Silence”
Book Acquired, 9.29.2011
Dubious History by P.H. Denson. This sucker is thick; 550+ pages of conspiracy theory driven thriller. I read the first few pages this afternoon; the writing is much better than the swollen publisher’s description below—
Drawing on the secretive and intriguing mysteries of the Masonic brotherhood, the fast-paced, brilliantly layered storyline and its fascinating central characters have proved a big hit with readers who like to have their wits challenged and to be kept guessing right to the end. The story begins with what appears to be a hit-and-run ‘accident’ and moves rapidly to reveal a chilling web of serial murders and a deadly Masonic secret. George Fairfax, a Pulitzer nominee researching the history of a small American town, falls victim to a hit-and-run. When his nephew Zach steps in to complete writing the town’s history, he quickly becomes suspicious of his uncle’s ‘accidental’ death. Zach begins to unravel a spiderweb of clues that point to a dangerous Masonic secret which may also be responsible for the mysterious deaths of a number of other members of the Masonic lodge. Can Zach decode the clues to the two-hundred-year-old secret in time to find the serial killer before he claims his next victim? And what twists await at every turn as each clue uncovers more of the shocking truth behind the killer’s real end-game?
“We’re Made of Fragile Stuff” — Damien Hirst Rambles Incoherently on Francis Bacon
“Fictional Map of L.A.” — Geoff McFetridge
Hark! A Vagrant Does Wuthering Heights
At Hark! A Vagrant, satirist supreme Kate Beaton sends up Wuthering Heights. Beaton’s book is now available for preorder.
Harold Bloom Talks About Blood Meridian (Video)
Amexica — Ed Vulliamy’s Violent Chronicle of the Border Wars
Like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Ed Vulliamy’s Amexica explores violence and bloodshed along the porous border between Mexico and America. Unlike those blistering novels, Amexica belongs in the nonfiction section: it’s a sustained work of investigative journalism, part travelogue, part horror story, and all-too real. Blood Meridian and 2666 both have clear roots in the violent history of the borderland, but the membrane of literary fiction serves as a kind of psychological protection for the reader, an affective out, perhaps — “It’s just a book,” we might tell ourselves. Amexica, on the other hand, is unrelentingly true, real, and inescapably ugly. I have a predilection, I almost hate to admit, for literary violence, for bloody books—Blood Meridian and 2666 are two of my favorite books—although bloodshed is not the only reason I read. The violence in Amexica though can be stomach turning at times. Here’s a litmus test—the book’s first paragraph—
As dawn breaks over the vast desert, the body is hanging from a concrete overpass known as the Bridge of Dreams. It has been there for two hours—decapitated and dangling by a rope tied around the armpits. The sun begins to throw its rays across the busy intersection with its rush-hour traffic and former American school buses carrying workers to sweatshops. And it is still there an hour later, this grotesque, headless thing—swaying, hands cuffed behind its back—in the cold early morning wind that kicks up dust and cuts through the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, the most dangerous city in the world.
From the outset, Vulliamy is unflinching in his portrayal of the borderland, the strange, amorphous world he calls “Amexica,” a place riddled with ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty; indeed the only thing certain in Amexica is violence.
Vulliamy’s book is a west-to-east travelogue of Amexica, from the Pacific Coast (where he takes part in a surreal picnic on the beach where relatives pass food through a wire fence) to the Gulf Coast of Texas. What unites each stop along Vulliamy’s way is the relentless war between rivaling drug cartels and the federal, state, and local police. To clarify that last sentence, let me point out that the drug wars on the border are bellum omnium contra omnes, war of all against all—the drug cartels are at war with each other, but law enforcement are at war against each other as well, the various police forces backing various drug cartels.
Vulliamy’s difficult job is to suss out the whys and the hows of the drug war, but it’s an almost impossibly huge task. He tells us—
This book is not so much about a war as it is a view of a singular place in time of war. It is about the ways war impacts Amexica, but it is also about how the war is a consequence of other—mainly economic—degradations and exploitations, quite apart from drugs, from which the border’s people suffer. A suffering due not least to the fact that narco cartels are corporations like any other, applying the commercial logic and following the same globalized “business models” as the multiplicity of legal enterprises that have wreaked havoc along the borderline. Indeed, the drug violence is in many ways a direct result of this depredation caused by the legal globalized economy. The cartels are not pastiches of multinational capital—they are pioneers of it, integral to it, and apply its rules and logic (or, rather, lack of rules and logic) to their marketplace just as does any other commercial enterprise.
Vulliamy’s indictment of global capitalism as the root of the narco wars is plain—as is his righteous anger—but Amexica works better when it focuses on character and detail than when Vulliamy tries for targets that are simply too unwieldy. Amexica is at its best when Vulliamy plays tour guide, showing us the people of the border first hand, like the coroner in Tijuana who deciphers bodily mutilations as an Egyptologist might study hieroglyphs, or the bereaved mother of two notorious gangsters, or Julian Cardona, whose photographs of Juárez are charged with pathos, loss, and the traces of violence that plague that center of anarchy.
Indeed, Juárez is the grand, ugly center of both Vulliamy’s journey as well as his book; those who thrilled and suffered in Bolaño’s thinly-fictionalized version in 2666, “Santa Theresa,” will find a similar and equally disturbing beast. Anyone still searching for “the real killers” from Bolaño’s murder mystery are encouraged to read Vulliamy’s chapter on Juárez (short answer: we all did it).
Vulliamy’s journalism has a strong literary vein running through it, and like William T. Vollmann (who also chronicled a slice of the border in Imperial), he makes no pretense toward objectivity or neutrality. While Vulliamy puts his subjects and interviewees front and center, he never tries to hide or obscure his own involvement in the process; nor does he aggrandize his role, which surely must have been tempting given the extreme dangers of his project. And if at times his anger or indignation tips into furious verbosity (he could stand to slice a dependent clause or two), he’s surely earned it.
Amexica should be on the radar and reading list of anyone interested in the narco wars, or anyone who wants to learn more of the “real” story behind the murders explored in 2666. For all Amexica’s violence, there’s also dry, ironic humor, and a bristling current of justice, even optimism, at times. Amexica is not for everyone, to be sure, but those who wish to learn more about this massive war (which gets little or no coverage from major media outlets) will not be disappointed. Recommended.
Amexica is available now in an updated trade paperback edition from Picador.
Andy Griffith Tells the Story of Romeo & Juliet
Book Acquired, 9.27.2011
I’m psyched about this one—Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith, who you may know as UbuWeb. Here’s the description from the publisher, Columbia UP—
Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.
In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.
The Animator — Nick Hilligoss
The Animator by Nick Hilligoss
I haven’t been able to find the artist/s behind this marvelous little film. I’d appreciate it if anyone who knows could tell me.
Writing (and Drinking) Advice from Christopher Hitchens
Book Acquired, 9.26.2011
Beatitude by Larry Closs; ARC courtesy of the author. The book looks pretty cool—description from the author’s site—
New York City, 1995: Harry Charity is a sensitive young loner haunted by a disastrous affair when he meets Jay Bishop, an outgoing poet and former Marine. Propelled by a shared fascination with the unfettered lives of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, the two are irresistibly drawn together, even as Jay’s girlfriend, Zahra, senses something deeper developing.
Reveling in their discovery of the legendary scroll manuscript of Kerouac’s On the Road in the vaults of the New York Public Library, Harry and Jay embark on a nicotine-and-caffeine-fueled journey into New York’s thriving poetry scene of slams and open-mike nights.
An encounter with “Howl” poet Allen Ginsberg shatters their notions of what it means to be Beat but ultimately and unexpectedly leads them into their own hearts where they’re forced to confront the same questions that confounded their heroes: What do you do when you fall for someone who can’t fall for you? What do you do when you’re the object of affection? What must you each give up to keep the other in your life?
Beatitude features two previously unpublished poems by Allen Ginsberg.
The Origin of “Moby Dick”
Where did Herman Melville get the strange, marvelous name of the leviathan at the center of his strange, marvelous novel Moby-Dick? The name of the great white whale derives from an 1839 article by Jeremiah Reynolds, “Mocha Dick: or The White Whale of the Pacific” (originally published in Knickerbocker Magazine). As the editors of Melville.org point out though (and thanks be unto them for all their hard, excellent work), how “Mocha Dick” morphed into “Moby Dick” remains “some strange piece of hermetic Melvillean arcana.” From Reynolds’s article
But to return to Mocha Dick — which, it may be observed, few were solicitous to do, who had once escaped from him. This renowned monster, who had come off victorious in a hundred fights with his pursuers, was an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength. From the effect of age, or more probably from a freak of nature, as exhibited in the case of the Ethiopian Albino, a singular consequence had resulted — he was white as wool! Instead of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short, convulsive effort, accompanied by a snorting noise, as usual with his species, he flung the water from his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar, like that of vapor struggling from the safety-valve of a powerful steam engine. Viewed from a distance, the practised eye of the sailor only could decide, that the moving mass, which constituted this enormous animal, was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon. On the spermaceti whale, barnacles are rarely discovered; but upon the head of this lusus naturae, they had clustered, until it became absolutely rugged with the shells. In short, regard him as you would, he was a most extraordinary fish; or, in the vernacular of Nantucket, “a genuine old sog”, of the first water.
Biblioklept 