Author: Edwin Turner

Amexica — Ed Vulliamy’s Violent Chronicle of the Border Wars

Edwin Turner5 Comments

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.

Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind (Kurt Cobain Reconsidered)

Edwin Turner124 Comments

I was twelve years old when Nirvana’s landmark record Nevermind came out in September of 1991 and supposedly changed the American cultural landscape forever. I was the perfect age to be radically influenced by the onset of the whole grunge thing. Before I got a hold of Nevermind, my favorite records were R.E.M’s Out of Time and De La Soul’s De La Soul is Dead, both of which had come out a few months earlier that year. I also really, really loved Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits (you know…the red album), and U2’s The Joshua Tree. These were some of the earliest CDs I ever owned, and reflecting on this now, it seems odd that my favorite albums could also be brand new, contemporary.

I mention a few of the CDs I owned because I think I’m a relatively typical audiophile of the age group I’m discussing here (roughly, persons born between 1975-1981, although these dates, as I write them, seem awfully silly and arbitrary). I had already outgrown dumb hair metal and had begun to realize that most of the hip-hop I was listening to was not nearly as offensive as I thought it should be. I wanted something new and different and weird, and by the beginning of the seventh grade I’d already begun to scour Rolling Stone, which still had a modicum of cultural relevance in the early nineties. I was also cherry-picking from cool movie soundtracks, and to this day I know that the soundtrack to the oh-so-forgettable 1990 film Pump Up the Volume (Christian Slater as pirate DJ leads a minor youth rebellion) had as much to do with the forging of my musical taste as any other source: this is where I was exposed to two of the bands that would help forge my musical taste for the next decade, Pixies and The Sonic Youth. So, like many other young audiophiles, by the end of 1991–around the time “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was blowing up–I was already moving away from “mainstream” music as quickly as I knew how. Only Nirvana became the new mainstream, grunge became a fashion status, and, feeling like a cultural movement that I was barely even tangentially a part of had been commodified and commercialized, I had rejected the whole thing by the time I had gotten to high school in 1993. This meant rejecting wholesale a number of albums I had loved throughout middle school.

The same month Nevermind came out, so did the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik, spawning the massive hit “Under the Bridge.” Pearl Jam’s debut Ten came out a month before Nevermind, but really didn’t pick up steam until mid ’92–grunge was in full effect by then; it too produced a mega-hit with “Jeremy.” U2’s Achtung Baby dropped in November–at this point they seemed like the elder statesmen of what was now so brashly defined as “alternative” music (“Alternative to what?” we wondered). “One” was a smash hit. The aforementioned R.E.M. album Out of Time became the year’s critical favorite, with “Losing My Religion” as one of the most unexpected number-ones of 1991. By the end of 1992, U2 and R.E.M. were “the most important bands in the world,” according to every music and entertainment magazine, and Nirvana was getting major credit for initiating a cultural revolution. I loved all of these albums dearly, and, as I mentioned above, denied all of them just a few short years later in favor of a new wave of independent label music–bands like Pavement, Superchunk, and the Archers of Loaf–bands that probably would never have achieved such successful careers without the aforementioned mega-hits that prompted the shift in cultural zeitgeist.

I present all of this evidence merely to point out that the success of these bands–contrasted with the other crap that was happening at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, like White Snake and The New Kids on the Block and Warrant and Nelson and C + C Music Factory–points to something larger than the force of Nevermind alone. (It’s worth pointing out here that Guns N’ Roses released Use Your Illusion I & II a week before Nevermind; these albums had a number of hits including the monster-success of “November Rain,” and, in retrospect, I believe, for all their cock-rockery, are more akin to the albums indicative of paradigm shift I described above than to the hair metal schlock they’re often identified with). Nevermind is often credited with spearheading a musical/cultural “revolution”; this “revolution” in music was already well underway though.

To be sure, Nevermind is a great album, but its cultural cache has more to do with the figure of Kurt Cobain than its relevance and popularity at the time (to see how the myth of Nevermind has grown, simply look at Rolling Stone‘s successive reviews of the album, from 1991, 1992, and 2004, respectively: the magazine gives the album three out of five stars, then four, before finally awarding it five stars thirteen years after the fact). Millions of kids saw Cobain wear Daniel Johnston t-shirts, reference the Melvins, and admit that his songs were really just crude Pixies ripoffs. Cobain, in short, exposed millions of regular kids to an angrier, rougher youth culture, a truly underground music that could react to the failed youth culture of the (now old) boomer generation of the 1960s, which had been forcing an illusory idealization of that decade down our throats forever. Ironically, it was this same boomer generation that greedily milked grunge for all it was worth, commodifying youth culture again into a twisted joke, a stupid lunch box, an action figure, a t-shirt at the mall. No wonder Cobain offed himself.

So why write about this now? It’s been 20 years, and there hasn’t been a record like Nevermind or mega-hits as salient, and dare I suggest meaningful, as “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Losing My Religion,” “Under the Bridge,” “One,” or “Jeremy” for quite sometime. The success in the mid-nineties of bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden–bands that I didn’t hate but made fun of–seems strange now. Even the music of those elegant bachelors, the Stone Temple Pilots–grunge 2.0–seems oddly strong when held up against the watered-down drivel that passes for contemporary hard rock. Youth music today is archly, ironically aware of its own cultural position and its own performativity in a marketplace. I’m sickened by even thinking of the toothless fourth generation emo-or-whatever-you-wanna-call-it derived from Green Day (another band I didn’t hate but but made fun of) that passes for “pop-punk.” In all its silly winking at the audience, its safe-as-milk non-personality, much of this music represents the ultimate commodifiaction and commercialization of “punk”–the aesthetic that Nevermind helped to re-ignite. (In another genre, hip-hop, after 30 years of existence, has claimed its right–with a sharp vengeance–to be as stupid as any other form of music. Don’t get me started). The irony Cobain and others explored was never a smart-assed irony that coyly winked at the audience, inviting them to laugh along with whatever cultural references were being rehashed; Cobain’s irony was mean and angry–it was a critique of American hegemonic mall culture. Current youth music, rock, emo, whatever it is, is simply a celebration of greedy materialism hiding under the thinnest ironic sheen.

And here’s what I think is the saddest part: I don’t think there can be another Nevermind. To be sure, there will always be fantastic, landmark, music-changing records–I have no doubt about that (see: 1997’s OK Computer f’r’instance). But a record that channels a truly punk aesthetic into mainstream American consciousness is simply not going to happen again. For over fifteen years, critics (and executives) have been looking to award “next big thing” status to just about anyone (do you remember when the Chemical Brothers were supposed to be the “next big thing”? You don’t?). The internet has changed the old model. In the past, records like Nevermind propagated a “trickle-down” effect, if you will–kids in the heartland see Cobain give the Raincoats props, buy Raincoats’ records, get into X-Ray Spex, get into Black Flag, get into Pavement, whatever. In contrast, the internet provides a diffusion model of immediately accessible cultural immersion. Anyone with a DSL connection and a few hours to kill on Allmusic can access indie culture. And that’s a good thing. But still: I’ll get nostalgic here: in the old days, we used to write to the labels and get catalogs and order music via snail mail. We used to buy albums on pure faith that they were good. You couldn’t just click on an mp3 (or steal entire albums on p2p networks or over torrents). But I’m not railing against the internet. I think it’s great that a kid in Montana can become thoroughly exposed to Drag City records or the works of Big Black in just a week. But that will never translate into a wide-scale youth culture shift. Instead, we’ll continue to have what we have now: lots of really, really shitty music on radio and TV. And this is our culture.

There won’t be another Beatles or another Sex Pistols–there won’t be another group that challenges our collective cultural sensibility to make a large jump. There won’t even be an Elvis or a Madonna, a performer that challenges our ethics and morality. Instead, we will continue to have watered-down crap on mainstream media, as well as plenty of choices for those who take the time to look. But those choices will be marginalized, kept on the sidelines out of mainstream American-consciousness, and what we’ll lose is an opportunity to progress and enrich the entirety of our culture. Who knows though–I could be wrong; perhaps I’m just old and out of touch. Perhaps a wholly new and dynamic artist or group will come out that will capture the anti-establishment roots of rock and roll and inspirit a new and dramatically different course in contemporary youth culture. But I don’t see it happening again. I hope I’m wrong.

[Editorial note: We ran a slightly different (but pretty much the same) version of this post in April of 2008]

In the Company of Strangers — We Review Barry McCrea’s New Book About Queer Family Ties in Dickens, Joyce, and Proust

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

Barry McCrea’s In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust is one of the more engaging works of literary criticism I’ve seen in some time. And while I’m interested in McCrea’s subjects (the weird lines between the Victorian era and modernism, family and marriage plots, Dickens and Joyce, etc.), it’s the clarity of his writing that I find most impressive. Clear, frank writing is too rare in current literary criticism. Here’s McCrea describing his project—

This book argues that the formal innovations of the high-modernist novel are inseparable from a fundamental rethinking of how family ties are formed and sustained. Genealogy was thematically and structurally central to the English nineteenth-century novel. In the Company of  Strangers shows how the formal strategies employed by Joyce and Proust grow out of an attempt to build a fully coherent narrative system that is not rooted in the genealogical family. Modernism’s rejection of the familiar and cultivation of the strange, in other words, are inseparable from its abandonment of the family and embrace of the bond with the stranger as an alternative to it.

[In the Company of Strangers] offers a reassessment of the relationship between the modernists and their Victorian predecessors, suggesting that the key precursor to this queer model of narrative can be located, paradoxically, in the genealogical obsession of the English nineteenth-century novel. Far from representing a clean break with the Victorian family novel, the radical narrative formalism of high modernism exploits the potential of an alternative queer plot that was already present as a formal building block in the nineteenth-century novel.

McCrea’s queer theory lens is keenly attuned to the homoerotic content present in the novels he examines, but his critical gaze is ultimately more interested in how “queer time” functions as an organizing principle throughout the structure of these narratives. McCrea argues that this queer model of time is a central and defining characteristic of literary modernism. The agent (or one agent) of queer time is “the stranger,” the character who figuratively threatens (and paradoxically defines) the family. McCrea points out that the typical Victorian marriage plot resolves the problem of the stranger by incorporating him or her into the family as a point of narrative resolution. In contrast, in “the queer modernist narrative strategies of Ulysses and the Recherche, the stranger rivals and ultimately usurps the family plot.”

McCrea sifts through family plots (and the strangers who would challenge or queer them) in Dickens (Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Ulysses (“a queer family epic”), and Proust’s big book. In the Company of Strangers constantly scrutinizes the ways that family organizes narrative (and narrative organizes family). The book also analyzes what “urban literature” might mean, examining what it means to live in proximity to one’s fellows, and the ways in which urban living necessitate ad hoc families.

In the Company of Strangers does a lovely job of tracing the strange currents that run from Victorian lit to modernism and beyond—currents that extend from our conceptions of family itself, and indeed, our conceptions of life and an end to life. McCrea’s writing is precise, supported by a close textual readings, and if I didn’t always agree with his conclusions, he achieved what every critic ought to aim for: he made me want to read the books he was writing about again.

In the Company of Strangers is new from Columbia University Press.

Good Offices — Evelio Rosero

Edwin Turner1 Comment

In Poetics, that ancient didact Aristotle informs us that admirable drama adheres to unities of action, place, and time. There must be no extraneous subplots, just one central action confined to a specific and defined place and time—no more than 24 hours, in fact.

I was reminded of these (oft-broken) rules when reading Evelio Rosero’s Good Offices, a sharp, gleaming novel that illustrates just how effective these classical unities might be in the hands of a gifted author. Rosero’s tale snakes out over the course of only a few hours and takes place entirely in a Catholic church in Bogotá, Colombia. The action—more on that in a moment—is indivisible from the time and place.

Good Offices centers on Tancredo, a hunchback afflicted with “a terrible fear of being an animal.” Tancredo is basically an indentured servant of the church, strung along by Father Almida’s promises of a college education that never seems to surface. His great “cross to bear” is the program of Community Meals that Father Almida mandates (yet never helps execute) each night—charity meals for children, old people, blind people, whores, and families (all segregated by day of the week, naturally). In particular, Tancredo hates the nights for the old people, indigents who complain about the free food and then pretend to be dead so they don’t have to go back to the dark streets of Bogotá. Sometimes they do die though, and it’s Tancredo who must discover their abject corpses.

Aiding Tancredo in the family meal labor are Sabina Cruz, and the Lilias, three ancient widows of the same name who bear more than a passing resemblance to the Moirae. It is the Lilia’s lot to cook these massive meals, making something from nothing, essentially, a job made all the harder by their arthritic joints. They pester Tancredo mercilessly. Sabina doesn’t so much pester Tancredo as haunt him, imploring repeatedly that they run away together. She’s the sexton’s god-daughter, and like Tancredo she is more or less church property. What our cast shares in common is a suppressed humanity, that vital spark now ground down to a dim nub.

This feeling of endless, indefinite weariness hangs over our heroes at the beginning of the novel, as we see here, when the sexton and priest begin an interrogation of sorts of Tancredo—

. . . he felt worn out, exhausted: after the old people crawling around the hall, over and under the table, bathed in soup, stepped in filth and saliva, like a Roman orgy or a witches’s Sabbath, to have a to face the sacristan’s inquisition infuriated him. Once again he experienced the dreadful fear of becoming an animal, or the desire to be one, which was worse. He imagined himself dashing that table against the ceiling; kicking over the chairs of the Church’s two representatives; tipping out their occupants, pissing on their sacred heads; pursuing Sabina, pulling up her heavy lay sister’s skirt, ripping into the apparent innocence of her blouse, buttoned up to the neck, pawing her breasts, pinching her belly button, her thighs, her backside. Truly, he thought, aghast, he needed to confess to the Father about his dreadful fear of being an animal, and the sooner the better.

Rosero’s remarkable prose here twists through the writhing subsurface urges the Catholic Church has worked for hundreds of years to suppress. The writing is violent, funny, sexy, and passionate, culminating in a devastating punchline. The passage is indicative of the book’s strange blending of tones, a sardonic but also sensual crash course in the seven sins.

Almida is too busy to take the time to fully listen to Tancredo’s confession though—he and the sexton must rush to meet a rich benefactor (a gangster, of course). For the first time ever, Almida will miss the mass, necessitating a substitute: Father Matamoros.

To Tancredo’s horror, part of Matamoros’ preparation involves getting drunk; however, he sings the mass in a beautiful voice that entrances the congregants—including Tancredo and the Lilias, who are so enthralled they set to work preparing a feast. Matamoros insists they drink with him, and in time, our principals are all quite drunk, not just on the fine wine that Almida and the sexton secret away for themselves, but also on the Lilia’s rich feast and Matamoros’ splendid singing. These visceral pleasures inject a humanity (and real purpose for living) that has been missing in the church for far too long, and as the night creeps into the morning, the rapture caused by the stranger’s presence overwhelms our cast.

Having lost faith in Almida (and perhaps Catholicism and even God), Tancredo confesses to Matomoros. Before I offer another passage of Rosero’s sensual, intense writing, let me commend the work of translators Anne McLean and Anna Milsom. From Tancredo’s second confession—

Without knowing how, Tancredo resumed the conversation, as if he really had been holding that non-existent conversation with the Father, or did it exist?  Whatever the case, he said, or kept on saying, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he had dreamt, Father, that he had an Indian slave-girl, tied up in with a chain like an animal, and that he took her for a walk through a sunlit meadow, the sun, the smell of the sunshine, “everything full of the most terrible lustfulness, Father, hanging over our heads, it was impossible not to take her in my arms, the soft moss offered itself, the leafy oak gave its shade, she stretched out wearily on the grass, it wrapped itself around her like a sheet, offering her rest, and, with the same chain I used for leading her about, she drew me toward her, as if I were an animal and not her, and she spread her legs and all her Hell burned me, Father.”

Matamoros offers Tancredo comfort, if not wisdom, but in treating the young man like a human and not an animal in bondage, he underscores the simple but strong theme of the book.

I won’t spoil more of Good Offices, which I think you should read. It’s a compact, vigorous treat, often blue, sharp as a scimitar, and saturated in suspense. Like any good Aristotelian drama, Rosero’s novel offers catharsis for its audience, but its greater impact comes from what it withholds, from what is left implicit, lingering under the details that ball together toward an end that is funny, horrific, and quite moving. Highly recommended.

Good Offices is new from New Directions this month.

Candide — Voltaire

Edwin Turner10 Comments

I liked pretty much all of the assigned reading in high school (okay, I hated every page of Tess of the D’Ubervilles). Some of the books I left behind, metaphorically at least (Lord of the Flies, The Catcher in the Rye), and some books bewildered me, but I returned to them later, perhaps better equipped (Billy Budd; Leaves of Grass). No book stuck with me quite as much as Candide, Voltaire’s scathing satire of the Enlightenment.

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I remember being unenthusiastic when my 10th grade English teacher assigned the book—it was the cover, I suppose (I stole the book and still have it), but the novel quickly absorbed all of my attention. I devoured it. It was (is) surreal and harsh and violent and funny, a prolonged attack on all of the bullshit that my 15 year old self seemed to perceive everywhere: baseless optimism, can-do spirit, and the guiding thesis that “all is for the best.” The novel gelled immediately with the Kurt Vonnegut books I was gobbling up, seemed to antecede the Beat lit I was flirting with. And while the tone of the book certainly held my attention, its structure, pacing, and plot enthralled me. I’d never read a book so willing to kill off major characters (repeatedly), to upset and displace its characters, to shift their fortunes so erratically and drastically. Not only did Voltaire repeatedly shake up the fortunes of Candide and his not-so-merry band—Pangloss, the ignorant philosopher; Cunegonde, Candide’s love interest and raison d’etre and her maid the Old Woman; Candide’s valet Cacambo; Martin, his cynical adviser—but the author seemed to play by Marvel Comics rules, bringing dead characters back to life willy nilly. While most of the novels I had been reading (both on my own and those assigned) relied on plot arcs, grand themes, and character development, Candide was (is) a bizarre series of one-damn-thing-happening-after-another. Each chapter was its own little saga, an adventure writ in miniature, with attendant rises and falls. I loved it.

I reread Candide this weekend for no real reason in particular. I’ve read it a few times since high school, but it was never assigned again—not in college, not in grad school—which may or may not be a shame. I don’t know. In any case, the book still rings my bell; indeed, for me it’s the gold standard of picaresque novels, a genre I’ve come to dearly love. Perhaps I reread it with the bad taste of John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor still in my mouth. As I worked my way through that bloated mess, I just kept thinking, “Okay, Voltaire did it 200 years earlier, much better and much shorter.”

Revisiting Candide for the first time in years, I find that the book is richer, meaner, and far more violent than I’d realized. Even as a callow youth, I couldn’t miss Voltaire’s attack on the Age of Reason, sustained over a slim 120 pages or so. Through the lens of more experience (both life and reading), I see that Voltaire’s project in Candide is not just to satirize the Enlightenment’s ideals of rationality and the promise of progress, but also to actively destabilize those ideals through the structure of the narrative itself. Voltaire offers us a genuine adventure narrative and punctures it repeatedly, allowing only the barest slivers of heroism—and those only come from his innocent (i.e. ignorant) title character. Candide is topsy-turvy, steeped in both irony and violence.

As a youth, the more surreal aspects of the violence appealed to me. (An auto-da-fé! Man on monkey murder! Earthquakes! Piracy! Cannibalizing buttocks!). The sexy illustrations in the edition I stole from my school helped intrigue me as well—

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The self who read the book this weekend still loves a narrative steeped in violence—I can’t help it—Blood Meridian, 2666, the Marquis de Sade, Denis Johnson, etc.—but I realize now that, despite its occasional cartoonish distortions, Candide is achingly aware of the wars of Europe and the genocide underway in the New World. Voltaire by turns attacks rape and slavery, serfdom and warfare, always with a curdling contempt for the powers that be.

But perhaps I’ve gone too long though without quoting from this marvelous book, so here’s a passage from the last chapter that perhaps gives summary to Candide and his troupe’s rambling adventures: by way of context (and, honestly spoiling nothing), Candide and his friends find themselves eking out a living in boredom (although not despair) and finding war still raging around them (no shortage of heads on spikes); Candide’s Cunegonde is no longer fair but “growing uglier everyday” (and shrewish to boot!), Pangloss no longer believes that “it is the best of all worlds” they live in, yet he still preaches this philosophy, Martin finds little solace in the confirmation of his cynicism and misanthropy, and the Old Woman is withering away to death. The group finds their only entertainment comes from disputing abstract questions—

But when they were not arguing, their boredom became so oppressive that one day the old woman was driven to say, “I’d like to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the guantlet in the Bulgar army, to be whipped and hanged in an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to be a galley slave—in short, to suffer all the miseries we’ve all gone through—or stay here and do nothing.

“That’s a hard question,” said Candide.

It’s amazing that over 200 years ago Voltaire posits boredom as an existential dilemma equal to violence; indeed, as its opposite. (I should stop and give credit here to Lowell Blair’s marvelous translation, which sheds much of the finicky verbiage you might find in other editions in favor of a dry, snappy deadpan, characterized in Candide’s rejoinder above). The book’s longevity might easily be attributed to its prescience, for Voltaire’s uncanny ability to swiftly and expertly assassinate all the rhetorical and philosophical veils by which civilization hides its inclinations to predation and straight up evil. But it’s more than that. Pointing out that humanity is ugly and nasty and hypocritical is perhaps easy enough, but few writers can do this in a way that is as entertaining as what we find in Candide. Beyond that entertainment factor, Candide earns its famous conclusion: “We must cultivate our garden,” young (or not so young now) Candide avers, a simple, declarative statement, one that points to the book’s grand thesis: we must work to overcome poverty, ignorance, and, yes, boredom. I’m sure, gentle, well-read reader, that you’ve read Candide before, but I’d humbly suggest to read it again.

Book Acquired, 9.09.11 — Or, I Buy Yet Another William T. Vollmann Book Against My Better Judgment

Edwin Turner14 Comments

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I like William T. Vollmann the persona probably more than I like William T. Vollmann the writer. That isn’t to say that I haven’t thought that the handful of books I’ve read by him were brilliant, strange, and engrossing—because they are—but I’ll admit that his methods, his back story, his sheer and absolute not-giving-a-fuckness is a major attraction. Voluminous Vollmann, unreadable Vollmann; smartypants Vollmann, fragile Vollmann. Vollmann, producer of travelogues, alternate histories, hagiographies for hookers; Vollmann, Ice Age chronicler; saga-slinging Vollmann. I can’t think of a writer who does more and says more and, because of his maximalist approach, will be largely unread, both for his career and for posterity—unless he concedes to edit. I think the irony is that, in wanting to give everything to his reader and wanting to preserve everything about his subjects—an act of love, compassion, empathy, what have you—in these grand, hopeless gestures, Vollmann paradoxically displays that intrinsic not-giving-a-fuckness. He needs an editor.

So, this afternoon, browsing at my favorite bookshop, a labyrinthine twisty thing, I ambled innocently past the ‘V’s of General Fiction, looking for a novel by Karel Capek in the sci-fi section, which abuts said ‘V’ aisle. Again, this was all innocence. I had no intention of picking up anything by Vollmann, despite the huge stack of his works there, used testaments to the futility of trying to read Vollmann perhaps—at least a dozen souls who said “fuck it” to Europe Central. Here are the Vollmann volumes (volmumes?) I possess—

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I’ve read Butterfly Stories, The Rifles, and The Ice-Shirt; I’ve read most of 13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs. I’ve read bits of The Rainbow Stories and mostly nothing of Europe Central, which migrated out of the “to read” stack a few years ago. So, yeah, I wasn’t looking for another Vollmann. But I’m too frequent a visitor at this particular labyrinthy, somewhat famous North Florida bookshop, so I noticed a “new” Vollmann in the stack, Expelled from Eden. And I started thumbing through it. Against my better judgment. 20 minutes later I was brainstorming reasons not to pick it up, but honestly, the credit in book trade I have with the store nails most economic arguments, and really, I’m thinking this is exactly what I wanted someone to do with Vollmann: edit that shit.

Larry McCaffrey and Michael Hemmingson have excised, chopped, moved around, and pulled from all over Vollmann’s massive world, putting together a book organized around Vollmann’s grand themes—travel writing; war; violence; prostitution; literature. There are lists, drawings, photographs. There is biography. I came home and read for an hour. I’m sure I’ll be sharing some citations down the road.

As a sort of bonus—and I always love to pick up a book where something is neatly tucked away—is an entire 2005 feature from The New York Review on Vollmann, focusing on Expelled from Eden and Europe Central.

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“I’m One of Those Writers Who Gropes Her Way into a Story” — Biblioklept Interviews Joan Leegant About Her Novel Wherever You Go

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Joan Leegant’s latest novel Wherever You Go tells the story of three Americans in Israel whose lives intersect against the backdrop of Jewish extremism and the tension between democracy and terror. Wherever You Go is Joan’s second book; her first, An Hour in Paradise, a collection of stories that grapple with religion and identity, won the PEN/New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Joan was a lawyer and taught at Harvard for eight years before seriously pursuing a career in fiction writing.  She splits her time between Boston and Israel, where she’s the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. Wherever You Go and An Hour in Paradise are both available from W.W. Norton. You can learn more about her and her work at her website. Joan was kind enough to talk to me about her writing over a series of emails.

Biblioklept: How did Wherever You Go come about? Can you talk about the genesis behind the plot?

Joan Leegant: I knew only a couple of things about the book when I began to write it: first, that I wanted to write a novel about Israel, and second, that I wanted to write about Americans in Israel, specifically American Jews. The impulse for that is pretty straightforward. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life either being in Israel, or thinking or reading or worrying or despairing about Israel. In fact, my adult life seems to have been bookended by long stays in Israel. I first went there from Massachusetts in 1978 as a young lawyer for what I thought would be six months; I stayed 3 years. Flash-forward 30 years when I was invited to be a visiting writer for a semester at an Israeli university that, lucky for me, keeps inviting me back.

So the experience of American Jews in Israel interests me — why they go there, what they do when they get there – and that’s what I wanted to write about. Some of that curiosity is personal in that I lived there for a time and thought I would stay but didn’t. So part of the impulse to write is the “what if” that fiction writers traffic in: what if I had stayed?

But I learned through writing the book that I have strong feelings, passions, related to the experience of Americans in Israel that aren’t strictly personal. Americans have been among the most notorious Jewish extremists in Israel. Americans also comprise a segment of the radical settlers. Their numbers are small, but some Israelis hold a stereotype of American Jews in Israel as fanatics. Obviously there are plenty of American Jews living there who are not fanatics of any sort. But I was interested in exploring those who were.

There’s another source of this curiosity, which someone reading the book would be hard-pressed to guess. And it’s this: I was a college student in the late 1960s,  during the heyday of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the Weathermen, the anti-war movement, the push to get ROTC off campus. At my university there were student take-overs of university buildings, faculty protest strikes. My school was no Kent State, but I remember the president of the university calling in the National Guard at some point. And who was making all this happen, yelling into the megaphones on college campuses and morphing from heiress Patty Hearst into the SLA’s Tanya with a machine gun? Young twenty-somethings convinced of the rightness of their cause. As a cautious, careful person, I was intrigued by their passion. Often their cause was just even if their methods were violent or wrong-headed. This came back to me while I was writing Wherever You Go. 

But I didn’t know any of this when I began the novel. I’m one of those writers who gropes her way into a story. I don’t think anything through in advance. I don’t even like to think much about a story while I’m writing it. It’s like I have to turn off my head to write. I don’t know if that’s because of my legal training (linear, organized, concerned with relevance, and in my case, probably a bit rigid) or if it’s one of those left-brain right-brain things. Whatever the reason, I’ve learned to trust my instincts and have faith that something will emerge if I’ve got a reasonably promising premise or situation or character to work with. I wrote short stories for a long time before attempting a novel, and that turned out to be good practice for learning to let the story run the show. So I began Wherever You Go with some characters, went where they led me. Not accidentally, they led me straight into my own passions.

The plot emerged from the characters. Fairly early on, I knew that one of them, Aaron, was going to do something violent. I wrote the scene where he commits the violent act, and for a long time I kept that scene as a prologue. I thought I might structure the book so that the reader knew about the act from the start. Eventually it occurred to me that keeping it as the prologue had been a kind of place-holder for me, a helpful signpost: all things in the book needed to either lead up to that event or be the aftermath of the event. Once all that was written, I moved the event into the body of the book.

I also intuited at a point early on that the lives of the three main characters would intersect around this violent act, though I didn’t know how that would come about — how or why their paths would cross — until I wrote it all out. This enabled me to envision a structure. It also allowed me to use points of view I felt reasonably proficient in, which were three third-person narratives. From all this — the characters, the specific event, the structure, the points of view — a plot emerged.

Biblioklept: That structure gives you the tools to explore these characters, who are all in very different places in their relationships to Israel and the Jewish faith. Obviously, Wherever You Go will appeal to a Jewish audience (American or otherwise), but were you ever worried about alienating certain readers who may feel that your complex approach might sometimes portray Jewish people in a less than flattering light?

JL: I did worry. After I’d finished the book and it was at the publisher, in production, I began contacting Jewish venues about giving book talks. One of the first people I reached was the program director of a prominent Jewish cultural institute. She enthusiastically requested a review copy and then called two weeks later to say that, though she’d loved the book, she couldn’t host me there; her board simply wouldn’t have it—she knew this without even having to ask. This worried me and I thought I’d killed the possibility of a book tour. As you may know, the Jewish community is very well-organized for book events. Nearly every city has an annual book fair where authors speak, and most synagogues regularly host writers for book talks. So when this institute turned me down early in the outreach effort, I thought: uh oh.

But then, remarkably, the opposite happened: Jewish organizations were eager to have me come speak. In the ten months following the initial publication of Wherever You Go, I spoke at 100+ Jewish venues up and down the east coast, in Chicago, California, Seattle. It turns out that a great many American Jews are worried about the same things I’m worried about; namely, the rise of extremism in Israel, the power and influence of the settlement movement, and the drift to the right in Israeli politics and policy. Like me, many are deeply devoted to Israel and care passionately about its survival; yet we also believe there must be a Palestinian state, and that the Palestinian narrative must be heard as well as the Jewish narrative.

Who were these audiences who turned out for my book talks? They weren’t young lefties or radicals associated with, for instance, the movement promoting sanctions or divestment. They were mostly middle-aged women and men who identify strongly as Jews and Zionists but are worried about where Israel is headed and dismayed about the hijacking of the Jewish tradition by those with fundamentalist views. Instead of being angry that I was talking about Jewish extremism, they wanted to know more about it, to become better informed. I think this feeling is best captured by a line from the review of Wherever You Go that ran in The Forward, the pre-eminent American Jewish newspaper: “Finally, a novel about Israel by an American Jew that’s written well and without sentimentality.” American Jews don’t want an update to Exodus. Certainly those who are knowledgeable about Israel, who’ve been there or follow the news, want to read books that depict the country, as it is today, with more nuance.

Which is not to say that some people didn’t get upset with me. I got some nasty reviews, most which I’m pretty sure were motivated not by literary critique but political animus. One early reviewer for a well-regarded Jewish newspaper was startlingly honest about his discomfort. In a measured and articulate piece, he praised the book for its insight, character development and accuracy–and then said he just wished I hadn’t written it. Couldn’t I have used my novelistic talent to write about something else? he asked. Frankly, I admired him, and still do, for being up front about his personal reaction instead of feeling the need to find a reason to rip the book apart.

I seem to be one of those writers capable of remaining oblivious of her readers while engaged in the act of writing. I didn’t much think about alienating readers or reviewers while I was working on the book. It took me seven years to complete this work, and for a long time I simply didn’t know if I would produce a novel at all, let alone publish one. So that enabled me to sink into the material without giving a lot of thought to its reception. I also didn’t know until quite a ways in that the book would contain such charged material, since I began with character, not theme or idea. This also helped me wade in deep while maintaining a kind of happy ignorance about what I was heading toward, subject-wise.

Nonetheless, I’ve come to understand that writers working out of a particular ethnic or religious or regional tradition often upset members of their own group when their work is released into the wider world. Philip Roth infuriated many in the Jewish community when he published Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 (National Book Award notwithstanding) because of the less than flattering light in which he portrayed his characters. I hope I’m not misremembering, but I believe I once read that Sherman Alexie’s work was not happily received by his fellow Native Americans, for the same reason. I have a friend who is a playwright; she is also Armenian. She told me that with her next play, her first about being Armenian, she expects to be nearly excommunicated. This is part of the territory of writing. You tell the truth, not, to my lights, in order to be outrageous or provocative or snide or even merely clever, but because honesty is essential. Not everyone is going to like it.

Biblioklept: I imagine (if you’ll permit me that license) that although Alexie would like for Indians to read his books and relate, and perhaps your Armenian friend wishes that Armenians will be able to identify the truth in her work, I imagine that both writers hope for audiences beyond their own ethnic backgrounds. Do you worry about your books being perceived as “Jewish books”—not necessarily during the crafting (as you’ve already described), but perhaps in the nitty-gritty of the marketing and so forth?

JL: I don’t worry about that kind of labeling very much, though perhaps I should. Maybe this comes out of initially publishing short stories. The first piece I ever published was about a 75-year-old rabbi thrown into a spiritual crisis when a pair of Siamese twins appears at his morning minyan — he’s been waiting for a sign from the Divine for a long time and wonders if they are it — and it was published in Nimrod, a very fine literary journal out of the University of Tulsa. Several things came out of that publishing experience. First, I learned that, like the old advertisement for Levy’s Rye Bread (“You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s”), you didn’t have to be Jewish to connect to and enjoy a good Jewish story. Now, of course, I knew intellectually that non-Jewish readers could, and did, appreciate intensely Jewish fiction all the time. One of my literary beacons is Bernard Malamud, many of whose short stories are masterpieces, particularly those in The Magic Barrel,another National Book Award winner from the 1950s. When it comes to Jewish stories, you can’t get much more Jewish than that. But I’m no Malamud, and until I began to publish, I didn’t know where my work might end up. When Nimrod took that first piece, I understood that the work had transcended a strictly ethnic readership, something, I might add, that my wonderful teacher, Bret Lott, had already told me. It was Bret who pushed me to send that story out in the first place.

The second thing that came from the Nimrod experience was attending their annual writers conference. The story they took — it’s called “The Tenth”– had won third place in Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize; they flew me to Tulsa to accept the prize and participate in the conference, where I also met the judge, novelist Anita Shreve. And what I found while talking to people all weekend and being at an awards dinner with a couple hundred guests was that the truths I was exploring in that story — the wish to connect to the Divine, the terror of having glimpsed the Angel of Death – were indeed universal. This gave me the impetus to keep mining the Jewish vein, and I did the classic obsessed-writer thing: I scribbled potential story titles and opening paragraphs all over the backs of the conference materials on the plane ride home. The prize and the talky weekend were the boosts I needed to say to myself, OK, write those Jewish stories. If they’re good, people will read them.

Marketing that first book as a Jewish book, then, became primarily a business decision, and it was by my doing, my choice. That holds true for my novel, Wherever You Go, as well. As I mentioned earlier, the Jewish community is well-organized in terms of providing opportunities for writers to get the word out. So the community has been a natural launching pad for my work. I was also very lucky with my first book, An Hour in Paradise, in that it was selected early on for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and then won the Winship/PEN New England Book Award, two honors that kept it from being perceived as exclusively of interest to Jewish readers.

That said, I’d love both books, and especially the novel, Wherever You Go, to reach more  readers in the broader world. Wherever You Go deals with religious fanaticism, and while the focus is the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Jewish extremism in particular, much of what’s explored in the book applies to any kind of fundamentalism. Which, as we know, is happening all over the globe. What allows people to commit violence in the name of God? What draws certain individuals to embrace the fanatic’s worldview? How do families deal with the rifts within them caused by differences in ideology? These are questions I think a lot of us are asking in this new century. Then there are the themes of forgiveness and atonement and repairing relationships. I’m hoping general readers will be interested in exploring these issues through the lens of fiction.

Biblioklept: What are you working on next? What projects are on your horizon?

JL: I’m working on stories as well as a larger project. I won’t say much about the larger work because I’m still finding my way into it, except to say that it’s set in central Massachusetts in apple growing country. The stories are set in Israel and are about secular Israelis — a departure from the world I explored in my novel, Wherever You Go. The new stories are also a change for me stylistically in that they are written in first-person, which is not a voice or point of view I’ve used much at all. But that’s just how they’re coming out. And you have to go with the demands of the story.

The new stories and new novel are both leaps for me both in terms of subject matter and style (narrative structure, voice, etc.). While that can feel unsettling, it’s also great to be pushing into uncharted territory. I didn’t start writing fiction until I was almost 40; now I’m 60, a slow writer, and hope I have enough time to keep trying new things.

Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

JL: I am the quintessential good girl and have never stolen anything. I even became a lawyer because I liked rules. The closest I came to stealing a book was when I stayed for a week at the home of friends who were away for a semester and began reading their copy of Francine Prose’s novel, Blue Angel. I was loving the book but wasn’t going to be able to finish before I had to leave. So I took it with me. But I felt so guilty that I bought another copy for myself and slipped back into my friends’ unoccupied house to return theirs. I know they would have given it to me had I asked. But I felt so tarnished by my original conduct that I couldn’t even ask.


Time, Space, Distortion: Falling Toward a 9/11 Literature

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In his essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” published in December of 2001, Don DeLillo wrote this about the 9/11 attacks: “The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon?” His question was both profound and at the same time utterly banal—of course it was too soon to measure the effects of the 9/11 attacks. But could time’s distance somehow sharpen or enrich perspective? DeLillo continues: “We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted.”

In retrospect—what with the Bush administration’s ludicrous invasion of Iraq and the power-grab of the Patriot Act—DeLillo’s notation of “plans made hurriedly” seems downright scary. Still, I remember that immediate, overwhelming shock, that paralyzing inertia that had to be overcome. DeLillo wanted—needed—to grapple with this spectacular destruction immediately. David Foster Wallace responded with similar immediacy; the caveat that prefaces his moving essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s“ states that the piece was “Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock.” The same caveat would also apply neatly to Art Spiegelman’s big, brilliant, messy attempt at cataloging his impressions immediately post-9/11, In the Shadow of No Towers.

In contrast, the trio of 9/11 stories at the heart of Chris Adrian’s short story collection, A Better Angel, all employ distance and distortion—both temporal and spatial—as a means to address the disaster (or inability to address the disaster) of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Adrian’s 9/11 tales (and his works in general, really), ask how one can grieve or attest to death on such a massive, spectacular scale. The victims of the 9/11 attacks forever haunt his protagonists, literally possessing them, demons that can’t let go, forcing the living to wallow in grief. In “The Changeling,” for example, the grief of the attacks is literally measured in blood, as a father repeatedly maims himself as the only means to assuage the terror and confusion of his possessed son. Adrian sets one of the collection’s most intriguing tales, “The Vision of Peter Damien,” in nineteenth-century rural Ohio. This temporal distortion veers into metaphysical territory as the titular Damien, along with other children in his village, become sick, haunted by the victims of 9/11. Adrian’s displaced milieu creates a bizarre cognitive dissonance for his readers, a response that DeLillo also articulated in his 2007 novel Falling Man.

DeLillo initiates the novel as a sort of creation story: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” The demarcation of this new world recapitulates DeLillo’s initial concern with time and space, but his novel seems ultimately to suggest an inertia, a meaninglessness, or at least the hollow ambiguity of any artistic response. This stands, of course, in sharp contrast to his sense of urgency in his earlier essay. Like the performance artist in the novel who is repeatedly sighted hanging suspended from a harness, there’s a sad anonymity in the background of Falling Man: the artist hangs as static witness to disaster, but looking for comfort, or even perhaps meaning, in the gesture is impossible.

David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Suffering Channel,” (from his 2004 collection Oblivion) is in many ways a far more satisfying take on 9/11, although to be fair, the majority of the story’s events take place in July of 2001. The story (or novella, really; it’s 90 pages) centers around a magazine headquartered in the World Trade Center that plans to run an article—on September 10th, 2001—about a man who literally shits out pieces of art. Wallace’s critique of American culture (shit as art, commerce as style, advertising as language) is devastating against the context of the looming disaster to which his characters are so oblivious. As the novella reaches its close (culminating in the shit artist producing an original work for a live audience), we learn more about “The Suffering Channel,” a cable channel devoted to broadcasting only images of human beings suffering intense and horrible pain. Wallace seems to suggest that The Suffering Channel’s audience watches out of Schadenfreude or morbid fascination, that modern American culture so disconnects people that genuine suffering cannot be witnessed with empathy, but only as a form of spectacular, disengaged entertainment. And yet even as Wallace critiques American culture, the specter of the 9/11 attacks ironically inform his story. With our awful knowledge of what will happen the day after the shit artist article is published, we are able to see the ridiculous and ephemeral nature of the characters’ various concerns. At the same time, Wallace’s tale reveals that empathy for suffering is possible, but also that it comes at a tremendous price.

To contrast the journalistic immediacy of pieces like “In the Ruins of the Future” and “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” with their respective writers attempts to measure 9/11 in literary fiction is perhaps a bit unfair. Still, Wallace’s and DeLillo’s essays transmit something of the ineffable, visceral quality of that terrible day, as well as the strange ways we sought comfort through human connection. In contrast, the distance and distortion of their literary efforts lose something. I apologize—I don’t have a word for this “something” that the essays have that the novel and novella lack (perhaps the absence is purposeful; perhaps not). It’s not clarity, but perhaps it’s a clarity of distortion that the essays convey, the duress, or to return to Wallace’s own notation, the pieces were “Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock.” It’s that shock, I suppose, that I’m trying to name, to say that it’s still there, accessible in those early responses (I realize now I’ve unfairly neglected Spiegelman’s book, which is a great example of immediacy). And to relive that shock is important, because, as Wallace reveals in both of his pieces, the cathartic power of shared tragedy makes us human, allows us to really live, and to be thankful that we do live.

Looking over this piece, I realize that it’s overly long and really says nothing, or at least nothing much about 9/11, or literature, or whatever. But I don’t want to be negative. I highly encourage you to read (or re-read) “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” and “In the Ruins of the Future.” And I’ll leave it at that.

[Editorial note: We ran a (somewhat sloppier) version of this essay on 9.11.2009]

Biblioklept’s Favorite Books of the Summer

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

With Memorial Day ’11 just a memory and Labor Day warning off the wearing of white, I revisit some of the best books I read this summer:

Although I posted a review of Roberto Bolaño’s collection Between Parentheses two weeks before Memorial Day, I continued to read and reread the book over the entire summer. It was the gift that kept giving, a kind of blurry filter for the summer heat, a rambling literary dictionary for book thieves. For example, when I started Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk a week or two ago, I spent a beer-soaked midnight tracing through Bolaño’s many notations on the Polish self-exile.

Trans-Atlantyk also goes on this list, or a sub-list of this list: great books that I’ve read, been reading (or in some cases, listened to/am listening to) but have not yet reviewed. I finished Trans-Atlantyk at two AM Sunday morning (surely the intellectual antidote to having watched twelve hours of college football that day) and it’s one of the strangest, most perplexing books I’ve ever read—and that’s saying something. Full review when I can process the book (or at least process the idea of processing the book).

I also read and absolutely loved Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit, which is almost as bizarre as Trans-Atlantyk; like that novel (and Hoban’s cult classic Riddley Walker), Kleinzeit  is written in its own idiom, an animist world where concepts like Death and Action and Hospital and even God become concrete characters. It’s funny and sad. Also funny and sad: Christopher Boucher’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (new from Melville House). Like Trans-Atlantyk and Kleinzheit, Volkswagen is composed in its own language, a concrete surrealism full of mismatched metaphorical displacements. It’s a rare bird, an experimental novel with a great big heart. Full reviews forthcoming.

I’ll be running a review of Evelio Rosero’s new novel Good Offices this week, but I read it two sittings at the beginning of August and it certainly belongs on this list. It’s a compact and spirited satire of corruption in a Catholic church in Bogotá, unwinding almost like a stage play over the course of a few hours in one life-changing evening for a hunchback and his friends. Good stuff.

On the audiobook front, I’ve been working my way through George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series; I finished the first audiobook, A Game of Thrones, after enjoying the HBO series, and then moved into the second book, A Clash of Kings, which I’m only a few hours from completing. I think that the HBO series, which follows the first book fairly faithfully, is much closer to The Wire or Deadwood than it is to Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films—the story is less about fantasy and magic than it is about political intrigue during an ongoing civil war. This is a world where honor and chivalry, not to mention magic and dragons, have disappeared, replaced by Machiavellian cunning and schemers of every stripe. Martin slowly releases fantastic elements into this largely desacralized world, contesting his characters’ notions of order and meaning. There are also beheadings. Lots and lots of beheadings. The books are a contemporary English department’s wet dream, by the by. Martin’s epic concerns decentered authority; it critiques power as a constantly shifting set of differential relations lacking a magical centering force. He also tells his story through multiple viewpoints, eschewing the glowing third person omniscient lens that usually focuses on grand heroes in fantasy, and concentrates instead, via a sharp free indirect style, on protagonists who have been relegated to the margins of heroism: a dwarf, a cripple, a bastard, a mother trying to hold her family together, a teenage exile . . . good stuff.

Leo Tolstoy’s final work Hadji Murad also depicts a world of shifting power, civil war, unstable alliances, and beheadings (although not as many as in Martin’s books). Hadji Murad tells the story of the real-life Caucasian Avar general Hadji Murad who fought under Imam Shamil, the leader of the Muslim tribes of the Northern Caucuses; Shamil was Russia’s greatest foe. This novel concerns Murad’s attempt to defect to the Russians and save his family, which Shamil has captured. The book is a richly detailed and surprisingly funny critique of power and violence.

William Faulkner’s Light in August might be the best book I read this summer; it’s certainly the sweatiest, headiest, and grossest, filled with all sorts of vile abjection and hatred. Faulkner’s writing is thick, archaeological even, plowing through layers of Southern sediment to dig up and reanimate old corpses. The book is somehow both nauseating and vital. Not a pleasant read, to be honest, but one that sticks with you—sticks in you even—long after the last page.

Although David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King was released in the spring, I didn’t start reading it until June; too much buzz in my ears. If you’ve avoided reading it so far because of the hype, fair enough—but don’t neglect it completely. It’s a beautiful, frustrating, and extremely rewarding read.

Speaking of fragments from dead writers: part two of Roberto Bolaño’s The Third Reich, published in the summer issue of The Paris Review, was a perfect treat over the July 4th weekend. I’m enjoying the suspense of a serialized novel far more than I would have imagined.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation is probably the funniest, wisest, and most moving work of cultural studies I’ve ever read.  Unlike many of the tomes that clutter academia, Humiliation is accessible, humorous, and loving, a work of philosophical inquiry that also functions as cultural memoir. Despite its subject of pain and abjection, it repeatedly offers solutions when it can, and consolation and sympathy when it cannot.

So the second posthumously published, unfinished novel from a suicide I read this summer was Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, the sultry strange tale of a doomed ménage à trois. (I’m as humiliated by that last phrase as you might be, dear reader. Sorry). Hemingway’s story of young beautiful newlyweds drinking and screwing and eating their way across the French Riviera is probably the weirdest thing he ever wrote. It’s a story of gender reversals, the problems of a three-way marriage, elephant hunting, bizarre haircuts, and heavy, heavy drinking. The Garden of Eden is perhaps Hemingway at his most self-critical; it’s a study in how Hemingway writes (his protagonist and stand-in is a rising author) that also actively critiques his shortcomings (as both author and human). The Garden of Eden should not be overlooked when working through Hemingway’s oeuvre. I’d love to see a critical edition with the full text someday (the novel that Scribner published pared down Hemingway’s unfinished manuscript to about a third of its size).

Also fragmentary fun: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks. Like Twitter before Twitter, sort of.

These weren’t the only books I read this summer but they were the best.

“It’s No Accident that Civics Isn’t Taught Anymore” — More from §19 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

Edwin Turner17 Comments

(Help yourself to some context (or not)).

Let’s look at some more of  §19 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. Our interlocutors, all IRS agents, stuck in an elevator (methinks), direct their attention toward the decline of civics education (“‘Civics is the branch of political science that quote concerns itself with citizenship and the rights and duties of US citizens,’” we learn) in America and link this decline to the 1960s—

‘I think it’s no accident that civics isn’t taught anymore or that a young man like yourself bridles at the word duty.’

‘We’ve gotten soft, you’re saying.’

‘I’m saying that the sixties—which God love them did a lot for raising people’s consciousness in a whole lot of areas, such as racism and feminism—‘

‘Not to mention Vietnam.’

‘No, mention it, because here was a whole generation where most of them now for the first time questioned authority and said that their individual moral beliefs about the war outweighed their duty to go fight if their duly elected representatives told them to.’

‘In other words that their highest actual duty was to themselves.’

And down a bit—

‘The sixties were America’s starting to decline into decadence and selfish individualism—the Me generation.’

‘There was more decadence in the twenties than there was in the sixties though.’

‘You know what I think? I think the Constitution and Federalist Papers of this country were an incredible moral and imaginative achievement. For really the first time in a modern nation, those in power set up a system where the citizens’ power over their own government was to be a matter of substance and not mere symbolism. It was utterly priceless, and will go down in history with Athens and the Magna Carta. The fact that it was a utopia which for over two hundred years actually worked makes it beyond priceless—it’s literally a miracle. And—and I’m speaking of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, the real church Fathers—what raised the American experiment beyond great imagination and made it very nearly work was not just these men’s intelligence but their profound moral enlightenment—their sense of civics. The fact is that they cared more about the nation and the citizens than about themselves. They could have just set America up as an oligarchy where powerful eastern industrialists and southern landowners controlled all the power and ruled with an iron hand in a glove of liberal rhetoric. Need I say Robespierre, or the Bolsheviks, or the Ayatollah? These Founding Fathers were geniuses of civic virtue. They were heroes. Most of their effort went into restraining the power of the government.’

‘Checks and balances.’

‘Power to the people.’

‘They knew the tendency of power to corrupt—’

As I said in some earlier posts about  §19, I don’t really have any great thesis to share about it: I really just want folks to read it. I think it’s a thoughtful and sometimes funny discussion that seems especially relevant against the backdrop of current American politics, which seem to be infected by a terrible case of the reactionaries, a very vocal contingent that does not seem to believe in civic duty.

Most reviewers have remarked (rightly) upon Wallace’s grand theme of boredom in The Pale King, but I don’t know how much attention has been paid to the way the book tries to measure the costs of existence (namely, death and taxes). Wallace squares boredom as both symptom and affect of a postindustrial existence, a post-democratic existence, an existence that has the leisure, or at least the means and the common vocabulary, to hash out the finnicky sinews between rights and duties—or, in turn, the leisure and means (and entertainments) to psychologically deflect or otherwise ignore those costs. His characters in The Pale King—and not just these guys stuck in the elevator, but, hey, their colloquy is especially instructive—his characters are in many ways are trying to find meaning, a sense of duty, against terrible, soul-crushing boredom, a boredom that capitalist culture fosters and with one hand and then assuages with the other, like a heroin dealer stringing along a junkie for all he’s worth. (There’s an intersection here with Infinite Jest, of course).

It seems that “civics” is a dirty word now, or even worse, a word unattached to any real concept in the American hivemind. It’s pretty much a given (and “given” in the sense of, like, “submission”) that our politicians are wholly corrupted by power, part and parcel of a corporatocracy that thrives on manufactured desire, on the promotion of “lack,” constantly feeding into the basest instincts of a populace easily motivated by xenophobia, paranoia, and the sense that a creeping dark “other” is destabilizing America’s “natural” progress to some great grand glowing telos in the sky. The great lie of the past few decades has been to perpetuate the ideal of a cost-free existence, a metaphysical out, an endless deflection of our rapid consumption. We live in a world where the leading Republican candidates for the 2012 election race are basically cartoons. We live in a world where headlines from The Onion seem more the work of prescient prescription than outright satire. We live in a world where an honest assessment of who-pays-what-taxes can only come from a comedy show.

Perhaps I’m ranting; perhaps this post is too hyperbolic. Sorry. I’ll return to Wallace’s language and that opening line: “‘I think it’s no accident that civics isn’t taught anymore or that a young man like yourself bridles at the word duty.'” Americans are being told that they have no duty to other Americans, that they should not have to have any relationship with other Americans, that, essentially, there is no civic duty to one’s country, to one’s fellow Americans—there is only a duty to one’s ruggedly individual self, only a duty to one’s bootstraps, which you must always pull up by yourself. The corporate-advertising-entertainment-industrial complex perpetuates the illusion of rugged individualism and politicians reinforce it with their empty rhetoric, blasting at any element of a public, civic corpus that isn’t part of the American war machine (which remains of course untouchable; perhaps the greatest signal of cognitive dissonance I regularly see on my commute to and from work are the cars in front of me that somehow bear anti-tax bumper stickers right next to calls to “Support Our Troops”).

Wallace perhaps rightly links the genesis of this cognitive dissonance when it comes to civic rights and civic duties to the 1960s, when the baby boomers, finding power in sheer numbers, were able to assert a generational agency unseen in this country’s history. His elevator talkers here are at the precipice of the Reagan ’80s, post-Watergate disenchantment, but also post-Carter malaise, a time when the boomers are oiled and primed for the complete ideological failure that should forever mark their generation.

There’s more rant in me, of course, but I’ll save it for more excerpts from  §19.

RIP Stetson Kennedy, Florida Folklorist, Writer, and Human Rights Activist

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Stetson Kennedy died today at 94 in his native city, Jacksonville, FL.

Kennedy began his career collecting folklore throughout the South in 1937 after leaving the University of Florida. Kennedy worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Florida Writers’ Project, traveling with Zora Neale Hurston to collect oral histories and folk tales from both black and white Floridians alike. In the 1940s, Kennedy worked for the Atlanta office of the CIO. He also infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and ’50s, exposing many of the racist organization’s secrets and alerting the world to the intrinsic injustice of the Jim Crow system in Southern states.

When Kennedy ran (quite unsuccessfully) for Governor of Florida in 1952, Woody Guthrie wrote the song “Stetson Kennedy” to support his good friend (Wilco and Billy Bragg put the lyrics to music decades later). Kennedy’s anti-Jim Crow, early Civil Rights platform didn’t win him much popularity throughout the state, and when his home in Fruit Cove was firebombed, he moved to France. It was there that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published Kennedy’s The Jim Crow Guide—but the book was too controversial for US publication, despite multiple translations across Europe. Even more incendiary was Kennedy’s expose The Klan Unmasked (1954), which helped to undermine the organization’s secret authority in the South.

Just as Kennedy’s contribution to the Civil Rights movement cannot be underestimated, neither can his work in collecting and preserving Florida folklore (as well as Southern folklore in general). Kennedy helped found the Florida Folklore Society and also served as president, and volumes like Palmetto County and Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West will remain staples of Florida folk culture. In 2009, Kennedy bequeathed his papers and personal library to the Civic Media Center in Gainesville, FL, a nonprofit info center and alternative library devoted to human rights, environmental protection, and other causes. Kennedy was closely involved with the CMC since its inception in 1993.

Kennedy was a vibrant fount of cultural and historical force, a man who worked his entire, long life not just to preserve folklore and its history, but also to show the radical place that folk culture occupies throughout time, linking core human values from generation to generation. Stetson Kennedy will live through his legacy.

Kennedy’s website sheds light on his final moments—

He was with his wife and stepdaughter, He was in no pain. And as recently as 4 days ago he was lucid and talking. The doctor, checking his mental faculties asked him questions “where are you from”, Kennedy replied, “The planet Earth”

Stetson’s wishes were for a party and not a funeral. A luncheon at Beluthahatchee will be held October 1st.

Kennedy on This American Life.

Read a 2011 interview with Kennedy in Vice Magazine.

I Watch The Decemberists’ David Foster Wallace Video

Edwin Turner6 Comments

I’ll be upfront: I don’t care for the music of The Decemberists. I’ve tried, after being told repeatedly how “deep” or “clever” or “literate” the lyrics are, and how good the music is—but it all strikes me as awfully bland stuff, like someone’s shitty take on R.E.M.

Anyway, I do very much like David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, the “inspiration” (yes, I’ll put the word in suspicious quotation marks) behind The Decemberists’ new music video for “Calamity Song.” Here’s their singer/songwriter Colin Meloy (via NPR)—

I wrote “Calamity Song” shortly after I’d finished reading David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest. The book didn’t so much inspire the song itself, but Wallace’s irreverent and brilliant humor definitely wound its way into the thing. And I had this funny idea that a good video for the song would be a re-creation of the Enfield Tennis Academy’s round of Eschaton — basically, a global thermonuclear crisis re-created on a tennis court — that’s played about a third of the way into the book. Thankfully, after having a good many people balk at the idea, I found a kindred spirit in Michael Schur, a man with an even greater enthusiasm for Wallace’s work than my own. With much adoration and respect to this seminal, genius book, this is what we’ve come up with. I can only hope DFW would be proud.

I’m not going to conjecture whether Wallace would be proud or not. That seems like total asshole move. But, I am interested in seeing a filmed version of Eschaton, and I do like Michael Schur’s show Parks and Recreation. So I’m going to watch the video now—unmuted and everything—and then post a reaction. Here’s the vid—

Okay. Nice production values, I guess. I think that’s the band, right? I like it when bands are in their own videos and “act.” I guess they’re playing the older ETA kids who are watching the game this Interdependence Day. The singer is Pemulis, that seems clear. It snows in the Escahton episode, but it looks like only some rain here. I like the Otis P. Lord kid, but I don’t know if the other kids look right. This is weak criticism, I know. Hmmm. The song . . . well, I’m not into this song, but I guess it’s pleasant enough. It’s terribly competent. Bits of it sound like a sped up version of R.E.M.’s “Talk About the Passion.” Some of the lyrics seem to reference or play off of Infinite Jest maybe—like “Year of the Something Something”  or something.

I don’t know. What can I say here? I hope no one tries to make a movie out of Infinite Jest. It was all I could do to fast forward through most of Jim from The Office’s movie of Hideous Men.

The Garden of Eden — Ernest Hemingway

Edwin Turner13 Comments

In general, I dislike reviews that frontload context—get to the book, right? So here’s a short review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: it is stranger than most of what Hemingway wrote, by turns pleasant, uncomfortable, bewildering, and beautiful. And readable. It’s very, very readable. Young people (or older folks; let’s not be prejudiced) working their way through Hemingway shouldn’t put The Garden of Eden on the back-burner in favor of his more famous works, and anyone who might have written off Hemingway as unreflective macho bravado should take a look at some of the strange gender games this novel has to offer. So, that’s a recommendation, okay?

Now on to that context, which I think is important here. See, The Garden of Eden is one of those unfinished novels that get published posthumously, put together by editors and publishers and other book folk, who play a larger role than we like to admit in the finished books we get from living authors anyway. For various reasons, cultural, historical, etc., we seem to favor the idea of the Singular Artistic Genius who sculpts beauty and truth out of raw Platonic forms that only he or she can access (poor tortured soul). The reality of how our books get to us is a much messier affair, and editors and publishers and even literary studies departments in universities have a large hand in this process, one we tend to ignore in favor of the charms of a Singular Artistic Genius. There’s a fascinating process there, but also a troubling one. Editing issues complicate our ideals of (quite literally) stable authority—is this what the author intended?, we ask (New Critics be damned!). David Foster Wallace and Michael Pietsch, Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, Franz Kafka and Max Brod, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley . . .  not to mention Shakespeare, Chaucer, Beowulf, The Bible, Homer, etc. etc. etc. But you’re here to read about The Garden of Eden, right gentle reader? Mea culpa. I’ve been blathering away. Let me turn the reins over to the estimable talents of E.L. Doctorow, who offers the following context in his 1986 review of the book in The New York Times—

Since Hemingway’s death in 1961, his estate and his publishers, Charles Scribner’s Sons, have been catching up to him, issuing the work which, for one reason or another, he did not publish during his lifetime. He held back ”A Moveable Feast” out of concern for the feelings of the people in it who might still be alive. But for the novel ”Islands in the Stream” he seems to have had editorial misgivings. Even more deeply in this category is ”The Garden of Eden,” which he began in 1946 and worked on intermittently in the last 15 years of his life and left unfinished. It is a highly readable story, if not possibly the book he envisioned. As published it is composed of 30 short chapters running to about 70,000 words. A publisher’s note advises that ”some cuts” have been made in the manuscript, but according to Mr. Baker’s biography, at one point a revised manuscript of the work ran to 48 chapters and 200,000 words, so the publisher’s note is disingenuous. In an interview with The New York Times last December, a Scribners editor admitted to taking out a subplot in rough draft that he felt had not been integrated into the ”main body” of the text, but this cut reduced the book’s length by two-thirds.

So, yeah. The version we have of The Garden of Eden is heavily cut, and also likely heavily arranged. But that’s what editors do, and this is the book we have (for now, anyway—it seems like on the year of its 25th anniversary of publication, and the 50th anniversary of Hemingway’s death that Scribner should work toward putting out an unedited scholarly edition) — so I’ll talk about that book a bit.

The Garden of Eden tells the story of a few months in the lives of a young newlywed couple, David Bourne, an emerging novelist, and his wife Catherine, a trust fund baby flitting about Europe. The novel is set primarily on the French Riviera, in the thin sliver of high years between the two big wars. David and Catherine spend most of their days in this Edenic setting eating fine food and making love and swimming and riding bikes and fishing. And drinking. Lots and lots of drinking. Lots of drinking. It all sounds quite beautiful—h0w about a taste?

On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the eggs were boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted them lightly and ground pepper over them in the cups. They were big eggs and fresh and the girl’s were not cooked quite as long as the young man’s. He remembered that easily and he he was happy with his which he diced up with the spoon and ate with only the flow of the butter to moisten them and the fresh early morning texture and the bite of the coarsely ground pepper grains and the hot coffee and the chickory-fragrant bowl of café au lait.

Hemingway’s technique throughout the novel is to present the phenomenological contours of a heady world. It’s lovely to ride along with David and Catherine, rich and free and beautiful.

Their new life together is hardly charmed, however. See, Catherine gets a haircut—

Her hair was cropped as short as a boy’s. It was cut with no compromises. It was brushed back, heavy as always, but the sides were cut short and the ears that grew close to her head were clear and the tawny line of her hair was cropped close to her head and smooth and sweeping back. She turned her head and lifted her breasts and said, “Kiss me please.”  . . .

“You see, she said. “That’s the surprise. I’m a girl. But now I’m a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything.”

“Sit here by me,” he said. “What do you want, brother.”

David’s playful response—calling his wife “brother”—covers up some of his shock and fear, but it also points to his underlying curiosity and gender confusion. And indeed, Catherine’s new haircut licenses her to “do anything and anything and anything” — beginning with some strange bed games that night—

He had shut his eyes and he could feel the long light weight of her on him and her breasts pressing against him and her lips on his. He lay there and felt something and then her hand holding him and searching lower and he helped with his hands and then lay back in the dark and did not think at all and only felt the weight and the strangeness inside and she said, “Now you can’t tell who is who can you?”

“No.”

“You are changing,” she said. “Oh you are. You are. Yes you are and you’re my girl Catherine. Will you change and be my girl and let me take you?”

“You’re Catherine.”

“No. I’m Peter. You’re my wonderful Catherine. You’re my beautiful, lovely Catherine. You were so good to change. Oh thank you, Catherine, so much. Please understand. Please know and understand. I’m going to make love to you forever.”

David, partial stand-in for Hemingway, transforms into a girl who feels “something” during sex with Catherine (or, ahem, Peter)—note that that “something” has no clear referent. As their gender inverting games continue (much to David’s horror), Hemingway’s usually concrete language retreats to vague proforms without referents, “it”s without antecedents; his usually precise diction dissolves in these scenes, much as the Bournes’ marriage dissolves each time Catherine escalates the gender inversion. David gives her the nickname “Devil,” as if she were both Eve and Serpent in their Garden. Catherine’s transformations continue as she cuts her hair back even more, and sunbathes all the time so that she can be as dark as possible. She dyes her hair a silver blonde and makes David get his hair cut and dyed the same.

The bizarre behavior (shades of Scott and Zelda?) culminates in Catherine introducing another woman into the marriage. Marita falls in love with both David and Catherine, but her lesbian sex with Catherine only accelerates the latter’s encroaching insanity. David is initially radically ambivalent to the ménage à trois proposed by his wife; he has the good sense to see that a three-way marriage is ultimately untenable and that his wife is going crazy. He vacillates between hostility and love for the two women, but eventually finds a support system in Marita as it becomes increasingly apparent (to all three) that Catherine is depressed and mentally unstable, enraged that David has ceased to write about the pair’s honeymoon adventures on the Riviera. Catherine has been bankrolling David; jealous of good reviews from his last novel, she insists that he write only their story, but David would rather write “the hardest story” he knows—the story of his childhood in East Africa with his father, a big game hunter.

In some of the most extraordinary passages of The Garden of Eden, David writes himself into his boyhood existence, trailing a bull elephant with his father through a jungle trek. David has spotted the elephant by moonlight, prompting his father and his father’s fellow tracker and gun bearer Juma to hunt the old beast. As they trail the animal, David begins to realize how horrible the hunt is, how cruel it is to kill the animal for sport. The passages are somewhat perplexing given Hemingway’s reputation as a hunter. Indeed, this is one of the major features of The Garden of Eden: it repeatedly confounds or complicates our ideas about Hemingway the man’s man, Hemingway the writer, Hemingway the hunter. David describes the wounded, dying elephant—

They found him anchored, in such suffering and despair that he could no longer move. He had crashed through the heavy cover where he had been feeding and crossed a path of open forest and David and his father had run along the heavily splashed blood trail. Then the elephant had gone on into thick forest and David had seen him ahead standing gray and huge against the trunk of a tree. David could only see his stern and then his father moved ahead of him and he followed and they came alongside the elephant as though he was a ship and David saw the blood coming from his flanks and running down his sides and then his father raised his rifle and fired and the elephant turned his head with the great tusks moving heavy and slow and looked at them and when his father fired the second barrel the elephant seemed to sway like a felled tree and came smashing down toward them. But he was not dead. He had been anchored and now he was down with his shoulder broken. He did not move but his eye was alive and looked at David. He had very long eyelashes and his eye was the most alive thing David had ever seen.

David succeeds in writing this “hard” story, and the passages are remarkable in their authenticity—David’s story is a good story, the highlight of the book perhaps; it’s not just Hemingway telling us that David wrote a great story, we actually get to experience the story itself as well as the grueling process by which it was made. Hemingway and his surrogate David show us—make us experience—how difficult writing really is, and then share the fruit of that labor with us. These scenes raise the stakes of The Garden of Eden, revealing how serious David is when he remarks (repeatedly) that the writing is the most important thing—that it outweighs love, it surpasses his marriage. These realizations freight the climax of the novel all the more heavily, but I will avoid anymore spoilers.

The Garden of Eden has some obvious flaws. Marita is underdeveloped at best for such an important character, and her love for David and Catherine remains unexplored, and in fact barely remarked upon. The biggest problem with the book is its conclusion, which feels too pat, too obvious for such a strange, amorphous book. It is here that the presence of an editorial hand seems clearest, to the extent that I wonder if the short little chapter that concludes the novel wasn’t cobbled together from a few stray sentences throughout the manuscript. But The Garden of Eden, despite some shortcomings, is a book well worth reading. The novel complicates not just Hemingway’s reputation, but also our sense of Hemingway’s sense of himself. Recommended.

“Corporations Are Getting Better and Better at Seducing Us into Thinking the Way They Think” — David Foster Wallace

Edwin Turner9 Comments

From  §19 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King:

‘I have no idea what we do. As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away citizens’ freedom to cede their autonomy we’re now taking away their autonomy. It’s a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and a government we expect to control them. Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.’

(This is the second paragraph; read the first here (or, like, buy the book)).

I want to write about this chapter against the backdrop of America’s current political/social/cultural climate—the so-called “debate” about government’s role, individual responsibility, our corporate welfare state, etc. What I want to write I am having a hard time writing. For one, the issue seems so big, so slippery, so oily, so recent, so indigestible. For another, I feel like Wallace’s chapter is so smart and engaging on its own that I shouldn’t be messing with it when I really don’t have anything smart or engaging to say about it.

I guess what I really want is for people to read it, or at least parts of it, so I’ll be posting bits of it over the next week or two, with occasional comments.

If I can’t be analytic about  §19 of The Pale King, perhaps I can at least offer a rough description:

The chapter is one of the longer ones in the novel at 20 pages, although it’s hardly the longest.

The chapter is probably set in early 1980 (or possible late 1979).

The chapter is probably set in a stuck elevator, probably as the result of a power failure, as the lights seem to be off.

The chapter is written entirely as a dialogue, mainly (solely?) between three IRS agents: Glendenning, DeWitt, and someone referred to as ‘X.’

The chapter references The Excorist, which might have been intended to be (or maybe is?) a motif in The Pale King.

The chapter discusses the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and early ’70s, and links this upheaval to the dawning conservatism of the Reagan years (which obviously have not yet happened in terms of the chapter’s timeline, but which one of the interlocutors nevertheless perspicaciously anticipates).

The dialogue (Socratic, if I’m feeling analytic) traces the tension between individual freedom, individual liberty, and the role of the government as an arbiter of civic life.

I’ll end with the somewhat generic definition of “civics” the chapter offers—

‘Civics is the branch of political science that quote concerns itself with citizenship and the rights and duties of US citizens.’

And there we go—that conflict between rights and duties.

Spurious — Lars Iyer

Edwin Turner6 Comments

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.

On Overrated Books

Edwin Turner26 Comments

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.

We Review John from Cincinnati, David Milch’s Metaphysical Surf Odyssey

Edwin Turner1 Comment

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.