The Cutters, 2017 by Christopher Noulton (b. 1961)
Interference, 2011 by Nigel Cooke (b. 1973)
Everything Bartleby says in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”:
“I would prefer not to.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“I would prefer not to,” said he.
“What is wanted?”
“I would prefer not to,” he said, and gently disappeared behind the screen.
“I would prefer not to.”
“I prefer not to,” he replied in a flute-like tone.
“I would prefer not to.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“I prefer not.”
“I prefer not to,” he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.
“I would prefer not to.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“At present I prefer to give no answer,” he said, and retired into his hermitage.
“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.
“I would prefer to be left alone here,” said Bartleby, as if offended at being mobbed in his privacy.
Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.
“No more.”
“Do you not see the reason for yourself,” he indifferently replied.
“I have given up copying,” he answered, and slid aside.
“I would prefer not,” he replied, with his back still towards me.
“Not yet; I am occupied.”
“I would prefer not to quit you,” he replied, gently emphasizing the not.
“Sitting upon the banister,” he mildly replied.
“No; I would prefer not to make any change.”
“There is too much confinement about that. No, I would not like a clerkship; but I am not particular.”
“I would prefer not to take a clerkship,” he rejoined, as if to settle that little item at once.
“I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.”
“No, I would prefer to be doing something else.”
“Not at all. It does not strike me that there is any thing definite about that. I like to be stationary. But I am not particular.”
“I know you,” he said, without looking round,—”and I want nothing to say to you.”
“I know where I am,” he replied, but would say nothing more, and so I left him.
Maybe you’re bored, maybe you’re stuck inside, missing NCAA March Madness, watching the world’s madness through a screen. Maybe this will be a diversion. (I’m hoping it’s a diversion for me.)
I came up with a list of 64 writers that have written novels or stories that either anticipate, reflect, or otherwise describe our zeitgeist. (I realize now that I’ve forgotten a bunch, but, hey.) After a certain point, there wasn’t much thought put into seeding the tournament.
I’ll be doing running polls on Twitter for the next few days, starting today, with brackets 1-4 launching today.
Here are the brackets for Round 1:
A couple of days ago I took my daughter to the bookstore for what I imagine will be the last time for a while. She browsed the “Teen” section, which is new for both of us, and picked out a few books.
I picked up The Complete Novels of Charles Wright, which collects The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About. I’m generally not a fan of omnibus editions, but I’m not sure how easy it is to get a hold of The Messenger or Absolutely Nothing (the bookstore had another copy of The Wig, which makes me think it’s in wider circulation). This Harper Perennial edition has no introduction, and I’m not crazy about the no-contrast cover, but it’s got a nice texture to it.
I also picked up Steve Erickson’s debut novel Days Between Stations, in part because Thomas Pynchon blurbed it (even though I wasn’t wild about the last novel I read because Pynchon blurbed it, Wurlitzer’s Nog), and also in part because I’m a sucker for Vintage Contemporaries editions, especially ones with covers illustrated by Rick Lovell.
Here’s Pynchon’s blurb:
Steve Erickson has that rare and luminous gift for reporting back from the nocturnal side of reality, along with an engagingly romantic attitude and the fierce imaginative energy of a born storyteller. It is good news when any of these qualities appear in a writer– to find them all together in a first novelist is reason to break out the champagne and hors-d’oeuvres.
Pynchon also blurbed Jim Dodge’s novel Stone Junction (or wrote an introduction for it rather), which I’ve been looking for unsuccessfully for a while now—not because Pynchon blurbed it (which I only found out recently), but because I’ve heard it compared to Charles Portis. I was unsuccessful again this time.
I hope I’ll be able to get out of the house soon, but in the meantime I have more than enough reading material.
“Herman Melville”
by
W.H. Auden
Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness,
And anchored in his home and reached his wife
And rode within the harbour of her hand,
And went each morning to an office
As though his occupation were another island.
Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge.
His terror had to blow itself quite out
To let him see it; but it was the gale had blown him
Past the Cape Horn of sensible success
Which cries: “This rock is Eden. Shipwreck here.”
But deafened him with thunder and confused with lightning:
–The maniac hero hunting like a jewel
The rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex,
The unexplained survivor breaking off the nightmare–
All that was intricate and false; the truth was simple.
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day,
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect,
But wears a stammer like a decoration:
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.
For now he was awake and knew
No one is ever spared except in dreams;
But there was something else the nightmare had distorted–
Even the punishment was human and a form of love:
The howling storm had been his father’s presence
And all the time he had been carried on his father’s breast.
Who now had set him gently down and left him.
He stood upon the narrow balcony and listened:
And all the stars above him sang as in his childhood
“All, all is vanity,” but it was not the same;
For now the words descended like the calm of mountains–
–Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish–
Reborn, he cried in exultation and surrender
“The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.”
And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.
Wild Sunflowers, 2015 by Denis Sarazhin (b. 1982)
Who Are We Now?, 2017 by Gregory Ferrand (b. 1975)
D’Audieu, 2017 by Jonathan Leaman (b. 1954)
Troubadour, 1959 by Remedios Varo (1908-1963)
Butterfly Stories, 2012 by Falk Gernergross (b. 1973)
Left to right:
I used interlibrary loan to check out a copy of Clifford Mead’s Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography. It’s pretty neat, and includes some photos of Our Reclusive Favorite that I’d never seen before, like this one:
I read Charles Wright’s 1966 novel The Wig last weekend. The novel is amazing—a picaresque, burlesque, Black black comedy that made me want to reread Invisible Man and read all the Ishmael Reed that I’ve left unread. And more Charles Wright. The energy of The Wig enraptured me; Wright’s cartoon vision of 1960’s Harlem is poised just on the edge of horror. I loved loved loved this novel, and aim for a full review sometime this week.
To its right is The Complete Gary Lutz, which I’ve been nibbling at for a few months. It’s like a rich cheese block or a lovely single malt—not something to inhale all at once, but wonderful in moderation.
I’ve also been picking through Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, mostly reading the journalism at the front end. (I’m saving the play, Delray’s New Moon for…I don’t know…like a quarantine or something?)
This afternoon, I dipped into Marrow and Bone, Walter Kempowski’s satirical road novel set in Germany and Poland right before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Charlotte Collins’s translation renders Kempowski’s prose as frank, funny, and often ironic.
I’m a little over halfway through Rudolph Wurlitzer’s 1969 cult classic Nog. The novel is far more abject and despair-inflected than I had imagined, and so far, anyway, the despair and abjection isn’t leavened with any humor that’s registered with me. I dig the absurdity, but I’ve got to admit that the book isn’t working for me. I wanted to love it—-blurbed by Pynchon, right? features an imaginary octopus, right?—but something’s missing for me. (The vague something in the previous sentence is humor—there are maybe some jokes or japes I’m missing, to be fair, but…) The book’s strengths bleed over with its weaknesses. Wurlitzer does an admirable job portraying a consciousness dissolving and resolving, only to desire to not desire consciousness at all, only static, Buddhist peace. Nog is essentially a narrative voice, a howl disintegrating in on itself, bubbling down, and revivifying itself via verbal goo to speak anew. There are Big Western Themes, too—Wurlitzer’s critique of America’s favorite myth of Manifest Destiny is subtle but sharp. The novel’s druggy haze recalls William Burroughs or Allen Ginsberg, but a bit more focused. It so far makes me think of better novels by João Gilberto Noll, though. I very much love two films that Rudolph Wurlitzer wrote: Two-Lane Blacktop (1971; dir. Monte Hellman) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973; dir. Sam Peckinpah). I’d love to see two others he wrote: America (1986; dir. Robert Downey Sr.) and Walker (1987; dir. Alex Cox).
Nog also has some really gross sex scenes.
(I think I might be enjoying Wurlitzer’s debut novel more if I hadn’t read The Wig immediately before it.)
The last two skinny volumes there on the right are new joints from Sublunary Editions. Vik Shirley’s Corpses is like a thirty-paragraph prose-poem, part comic, part morbid. The blurb for Jessica Sequeira’s A Luminous History of the Palm describes the tract:
This little book can be read as a series of small portraits through time, all of which include a palm tree. Or it can be read as a revolutionary tract. The palm is a symbol traced through history, a hidden portal to intimate moments that bring geographies and situations to life. A vital presence, it coaxes out vitality. It’s everywhere once you start to look, a secret joyful emblem.
To the right of Palms is a pothos plant that was formerly thriving on the window sill of my office. Our college’s spring break starts tomorrow, but I wasn’t sure if we’d be coming back after it, so I brought my plants home. It turns out we’ll come back, sans students. I brought my textbooks home too, but I forgot my copy of S.D. Chrostowska’s novel The Eyelid, which I’d brought to work to snack on. So it isn’t in this blog, except it is.
Hothouses I, 1917 by Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946)
Lytton Strachey. Verso: Crime and Punishment, c. 1909 by Duncan Grant (1885–1978)
Sugar and Milk, from Her Nuclear Waters by Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975)
Biblioklept 