I couldn’t pass on a used copy of the second edition of Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion even though it ate up most of my trade credit. I used the first edition of the Companion when I reread Gravity’s Rainbow about eight years ago and then gave it to a friend I had been encouraging to read GR. He still hasn’t read it.
I also picked up a hardcover first edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and a pristine 1946 hardback edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ll probably trade in the Gabler edition of Ulysses I have, but I think I’m too sentimental to let go of the copy of The Road I read in the hospital over a few days when my daughter was born.
I’m a big fan of Vintage Contemporaries, but I’d never seen Terry McDonell’s California Bloodstock. I pulled it out because of its spine, and found the cover intriguing–it reminded me of these weird paintings that hang in a decrepit hotel in St. Augustine Beach that we stay at for a few nights every year. The blurb from H.S. Thompson didn’t hurt either.
Walter Kempowski’s An Ordinary Youth gets its first published English translation thanks to Michael Lipkin. The book is new in print from NYRB. Their blurb—
An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author’s boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter’s family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter’s main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation of contemporary idioms that accompany his point of view—dialogue, song, literary quotations, commercials, and political slogans—tell a different story. Through this echo chamber of voices, Kempowski shows a hugely turbulent and murderously intolerant nation racing toward disaster. An immediate bestseller when it was first published in Germany in 1971 (as Tadellöser & Wolff) and the best known of Kempowski’s novels in Germany, An Ordinary Youth is now available in English for the first time.
Untitled (Motel Room with Fluorescents), from The Los Alamos-Portfolio,1965-68 by William Eggleston (b. 1939)
“Motel #1”
by
Charles Portis
From his essay “Motel Life, Lower Reaches,” first published in Oxford American in 2003 and later collected in Escape Velocity.
Back when Roger Miller was King of the Road, in the 1960s, he sang of rooms to let (“no phone, no pool, no pets”) for four bits, or fifty cents. I can’t beat that price, but I did once in those days come across a cabin that went for three dollars. It was in the long, slender highway town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
That cute and unwieldy name, by the way, was taken in 1950 from the name of a quiz/comedy radio show, and has stuck, against long odds. The show was okay, as I recall, a cut or two above the general run of broadcast ephemera, with some funny 1949 moments. But why re-name your town for it? And by now, a half-century later, you would think the townsfolk must surely have repented their whim and gone back to the old name, solid and descriptive, of Hot Springs. But no, and worse, the current New Mexico highway maps no longer offer both names, with the old one in parentheses, as an option, for the comfort of those travelers who wince and hesitate over saying, “Truth or Consequences.” Everyone must now say the whole awkward business.
I was driving across the state at the time, very fast. There were signs along the approaches to town advertising cheaper and cheaper motel rooms. The tone was shrill, desperate, that of an off-season price war. It was a buyer’s market. I began to note the rates and the little extras I could expect for my money. Always in a hurry then, once committed to a road, I stopped only for fuel, snake exhibits, and automobile museums, but I had to pause here, track down the cheapest of these cheap motels, and see it. I would confront the owner and call his bluff.
There were boasts of being AIR COOLED (not quite the same as being air-conditioned) and of PHONE IN EVERY ROOM, KITCHENETTES, LOW WEEKLY RATES, CHILDREN FREE, PETS OK, VIBRO BEDS, PLENTY OF HOT WATER, MINIATURE GOLF, KIDDIE POOL, FREE COFFEE, FREE TV, FREE SOUVNIERS. (Along Arkansas roads there are five or six ways of spelling souvenirs, and every single one of them is wrong. The sign painters in New Mexico do a little better with that tricky word, but not much better.) The signs said SALESMEN WELCOME and SNOWBIRDS WELCOME and TRUCKS WELCOME/BOBTAILS ONLY—meaning just the tractors themselves; their long semi-trailers would not be welcome. And there were the usual claims, often exaggerated, of having CLEAN ROOMS or NEW ROOMS or CLEAN NEW ROOMS or ALL NEW CLEAN MODERN ROOMS.
I decided not to consider the frills. How could you reckon in cash the delight value of a miniature golf course with its little plaster windmills, tiny waterfalls, and bearded elves perched impudently on plaster toadstools? I would go for price alone, the very lowest advertised price, which turned out to be three dollars. It was a come-on, I knew, a low-ball offer. Sorry, I would be told, but the last of those special rooms had just been taken; the only ones left would be the much nicer $6.50 suites. I would let the owner know what I thought of his sharp practice, but not really expecting him to writhe in shame.
The three-dollar place was an old “tourist court,” a horseshoe arrangement of ramshackle cabins, all joined together by narrow carports. The ports were designed to harbor, snugly, small Ford sedans of 1930s Clyde Barrow vintage, each one with a canvas water bag (“SATURATE BEFORE USING”) hanging from the front bumper, for the crossing of the Great American Desert.
But there were no cars here at all, and no one in the office. I gave the desk bell my customary one ding, not a loutish three or four. An old lady, clearly the owner, perhaps a widow, came up through parted curtains from her cluttered female nest in the rear. She was happy to see me. l asked about a three-dollar room, for one person, one night. She said yes, certainly, all her cabins went for three dollars, and there were vacancies. This, without bothering to crane her neck about and peer over my shoulder, by way of giving my car out there the once-over. Desk clerks do that when I ask for a single, to see if I am trying to conceal a family. These clerks are trained in their motel academies to watch for furtive movement in the back seats of cars, for the hairy domes of human heads, those of wives, tykes, and grannies left crouching low in idling Plymouths.
This old lady had come up in a gentler school. She was honest and her signs were honest and her lodgers were presumed to be more or less honest. She had caught me up short and rattled me. Who was bluffing now? I couldn’t just leave, nor, worse, give her three dollars and then leave, compounding the insult to her and her yellowish cabins. I paid up and stayed the night, her only guest.
My cabin had a swamp cooler, an evaporative cooling machine that is usually quite effective in that arid country. A true air conditioner (brutal compressor) uses much more electricity than a swamp cooler (small water pump, small fan). But then the cooler does consume water, and the economy of nature is such—no free lunch—that the thing works well only in a region where the humidity is low—under forty percent, say. Where water is scarce, that is, and thus expensive.
It was dry enough here, but my cooler was defective and did nothing more than stir the hot air a bit.
I looked the room over for redeeming touches. It wasn’t so bad, beaten down with use and everything gone brown with age, but honorably so, not disgusting, shabby but clean, a dry decay.
The bedding may have been original stock. That central crater in the mattress hadn’t been wallowed out overnight, but rather by a long series of jumbo salesmen, snorting and thrashing about in troubled sleep. A feeble guest would have trouble getting out of the mattress. He would cry out, feebly, for a helping hand, and nobody in earshot. The small lamp on the bedside table was good, much better for reading than the lighting systems in expensive motels, with their diffused gloom. Motel decorators, who obviously don’t read in bed, are all too fond of giant lampshades, a prevailing murk, and lamp switches that are hard to find and reach. The bath towels were clean but threadbare, and much too short to use as wraparound sarongs while shaving. The few visible insects were dead or torpid. There were no bathroom accretions of soft green or black matter. The lavatory mirror was freckled and had taken on a soft sepia tint. Mineral deposits clogged the shower head, making for a lopsided spraying pattern, but the H and C knobs had not been playfully reversed, nor did they turn the wrong way. There were sash windows you could actually raise, after giving them a few sharp blows with the heels of your hands, to break loose the ancient paint. Here again the feeble guest, seeking a breath of air, would struggle and whimper.
I had paid more and seen worse—murkier and more oppressive rooms, certainly, with that dense black motel murk hanging about in all the corners, impossible to dispel and conducive to so many suicides along our highways, I had seen worse rooms, if not thinner and shorter towels. There was plenty of hot water. I had the privacy of a cabin, and indeed not a single neighbor. What I had was a cottage, and a steal at three dollars.
Early the next morning the lady came tapping at my door. She had a pot of coffee for me on a tray with some buttered toast and a little china jug of honey. It was that unprecedented gesture, I think, and the grace note of the honey—no sealed packet of “Mixed Fruit” generic jelly—that made the place stick in my head so, and not the price at all. I like to think the old cabins lasted out the good old lady’s widowhood. It must have been a close-run finish. And it comes to me now, late, a faint voice, saying the price was really two dollars.
The New Yorker: Last week, there was a three-day festival in your honor at Brown University, in Providence—titled, in part, “Celebrating the Unspeakable Practices of Robert Coover”—featuring appearances by many of your colleagues and admirers, including T. C. Boyle, Don DeLillo, Alexandra Kleeman, Marlon James, Edwidge Danticat, Paul Auster, and many others. What was the stimulus for the festival?
Robert Coover: “Unspeakable Practices” was the title of a farewell party I organized for the then retiring professor and great metafictionist John Hawkes, in 1988—a title taken from Donald Barthelme’s book of stories “Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.” Don was there, as well as William Gass, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, and half a dozen others of the postmodernist bent. After that, over the years, we continued with a sequence of vanguard literary ingatherings, calling them all “Unspeakables.” In effect, this was the last one and perhaps the most brilliant of the lot, peopled by old friends and many former students, now celebrated writers in their own right. The readings on the final day by Edwidge Danticat, Rick Powers, Siri Hustvedt, Don DeLillo, and Paul Auster were sensational, some of the best public performances I’ve ever heard. Its whole title was meant to include my creation of the International Writers Project and its freedom-to-write predecessors at Brown, as well as my pioneer digital language workshops in hyperfiction and “cave writing” (writing in immersive 3-D), both programs launched at Brown in 1989. It was a great party, a party that began with the performance of a short sequence from my son Roderick’s radio play based on “Gerald’s Party,” and ending with a reiteration of an old festival favorite, the “Unspeakable Circus.”
L.E. Sissman’s contemporary review of Gravity’s Rainbow offers one of the better summaries I’ve ever read of Thomas Pynchon’s enormous novel:
Gravity’s Rainbow is a picaresque, apocalyptic, absurdist novel that creates a complex mythology to describe our present predicament. It is supposedly about a brief period in the decline of the West—fall, 1944, through fall, 1945. It is actually about our entire century, from the roots of the First World War through the final calamity, which keeps on threatening right up to press time. Beyond that, it is about the whole modern tendency of man to subordinate himself to the whims of the products of his intelligence, to the self-aggrandizing dictates of machines. It is also about the paranoia this subordination instills in men—a paranoia of which they are absolved as their persecution dreams come true and, ironically, destroy them.
Later in the review, Sissman, a poet, discusses Pynchon’s prose:
Pynchon’s talent is far greater than mere mimicry, though he is master of that. He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drugged and drunken orgy.
Sissman’s review was published in a May 1973 issue of The New Yorker. I think the review would work as a strong introduction for anyone daunted by but interested in reading Gravity’s Rainbow.
I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquillity, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I’ve looked into what’s coming, and I don’t need anything from here.
So two of the three books I picked up today I’d read before, but I couldn’t pass on the editions.
I read Stanley Elkin’s The Living End last summer, checking a digital version out from the library. I wanted something very short and funny at the time, and it worked wonders. I couldn’t pass up this Warner Books edition with design by Gene Light featuring art by Don Ivan Punchatz. I have a few other Elkins in this series and I adore them, even if my eyes are fading to the point that mass market paperbacks cause me to squint.
I also picked up another book I’ve already read, a book I already own a copy of—Charles Portis’s last novel Gringos. But I didn’t own a first edition with this fun, silly cover.
On the last day of 2020, the year I read Gringos, I wrote:
Gringos was the last of Portis’s five novels. I read the other four greedily last year, and pulled them all out when he passed away in February. I started in on Gringos, casually, then just kept reading. Sweet and cynical, spiked with strange heroism, strange grace, and very, very funny, Gringos might just be my favorite Portis novel. But I’d have to read them all again to figure that out.
I also picked up Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, a 1976 collection that seems ahead of its time. From Scott Sanders’ essay “Pynchon’s Paranoid History”:
Which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall, or other light ground.
(It must not be against strong light, or you will find the looking at it hurt your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or you will be puzzled by the lights on the boughs. But the tree must be in shade; and the sky blue, or gray, or dull white. A wholly gray or rainy day is the best for this practice.)
You will see that all the boughs of the tree are dark against the sky.
Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map with absolute accuracy.
Without the least thought about the roundness of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in with pencil.
Then correct and alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper is dirtied.
(Only not destroying its surface.)
Correct until every bough is exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in curvature and in thickness.
Look at the white interstices between the boughs with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gave the hedge anywhere too deep a curve.
Try continually to fancy the whole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground.
Do not take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused network or mist.
Leave them all out, drawing only the main branches as far as you can see them distinctly.
Your object at present being not to draw a tree, but to learn how to do so.
When you have got the thing as nearly right as you can, take your pen, and put a fine outline to all the boughs.
Take care to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so as not to make the boughs thicker.
(The main use of the outline is to affirm the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidental roughnesses and excrescences.)
(It may perfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct than your outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch to mark the facts clearly.)
The temptation is always to be slovenly and careless.
The outline is like a bridle, and forces our indolence into attention and precision.
You cannot do too many studies of this kind.
Every one will give you some new notion about trees.
I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? —I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life’s boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am. —I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience,
” Speech at the Award Ceremony for the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen”
by
Thomas Bernhard
from My Prizes
translated by Carol Janeway
Honored Guests,
I cannot follow the fairy tale of your town musicians; I don’t want to tell a story; I don’t want to sing; I don’t want to preach; but it’s true: fairy tales are over, the fairy tales about cities and states and all the scientific fairy tales, and all the philosophical ones; there is no more world of the spirit; Europe, the most beautiful, is dead; this is the truth and the reality. Reality, like truth, is no fairy tale and truth has never been a fairy tale.
Fifty years ago Europe was a single fairy tale, the whole world a fairy-tale world. Today there are many who live in this fairy-tale world, but they’re living in a dead world and they themselves are dead. He who isn’t dead lives, and he doesn’t live in fairy tales; it’s no fairy tale.
I myself am no fairy tale and I do not come from a world of fairy tales; I had to live through a long war and I saw hundreds of thousands die, and others who went on right over them; everyone went on, in reality; everything changed, in truth; in the five decades during which everything turned to revolt and everything changed, during which a thousand-year-old fairy tale gave way to the reality and the truth, I felt myself getting colder and colder while a new world and a new nature arose from the old.
It is harder to live without fairy tales, that is why it is so hard to live in the twentieth century; it’s more that we exist, we don’t live, no one lives anymore; but it is a fine thing to exist in the twentieth century, to move, but to where? I know I did not emerge from any fairy tale and I will not enter any fairy tale, this is already progress and thus already a difference between then and now.
We are standing on the most frightening territory in all of history. We are in fear, in fear of this enormous material that is the new humanity, and of a new knowledge of our nature and the renewal of our nature; together we have been only a single mass of pain in the last half century; this pain today is us; this pain is now our spiritual condition.
We have a wholly new system, a wholly new way of seeing the world, and a wholly new, truly most outstanding view of the world’s own surroundings, and we have a new morality and we have new sciences and new arts. We feel dizzy and we feel cold. We believed that because we are human, we would lose our balance, but we haven’t lost our balance; we’ve also done everything to avoid freezing.
Everything has changed because it is we who have changed it, our external geography has changed as much as our internal one.
We make great demands now, we cannot make enough great demands; no era has made such great demands as ours; we are already megalomaniacal; because we know we cannot fall and we cannot freeze, we trust ourselves to do what we do.
Life is only science now. The science of the sciences. Now we are suddenly taken up with nature. We have become intimate with the elements. We have put reality to the test. Reality has put us to the test. We now know the laws of nature, the infinite High Laws of nature, and we can study them in reality and in truth. We no longer have to rely on assumptions. When we look into nature, we no longer see ghosts. We have written the boldest chapter in the book of world history, every one of us has written it for himself in fright and deathly fear and none of us of our own free will, nor according to his own taste, but following the laws of nature, and we have written this chapter behind the backs of our blind fathers and our foolish teachers, behind our own backs; after so much that has been endlessly long and dull, the shortest and the most important.
We are frightened by the clarity out of which our world suddenly is born, our world of science; we freeze in this clarity; but we wanted this clarity, we evoked it, so we cannot complain now that the cold reigns and we’re freezing. The cold increases with the clarity. This clarity and this cold will now rule us. The science of nature will give us a greater clarity and will be far colder than we can imagine.
Everything will be clear, a clarity that increases and deepens unendingly, and everything will be cold, a coldness that intensifies ever more horribly. In the future we will have the impression of a day that is endlessly clear and endlessly cold.
I thank you for your attention. I thank you for the honor you have shown me today.
Professor of High Caliber, 1988, a portrait of Barry Hannah by Steve Brodner (b. 1954)
The portrait appeared in the 1 July 1988 issue of Esquire, accompanied by the following text:
There he stood, in front of his class at the University of Alabama, tooting on his trumpet: Barry Hannah, gonzo novelist and pseudo-jazz musician, a man possessed by more than the English language. He was playing his own brand of jazz, the kind only a tonedeaf mother could love. Pausing to wipe his brow, Hannah exclaimed, “Whew, this is some good soul!” and began to squawk again. The class grew restive. Several made a break for the door. Hannah pulled a gun out and motioned them back to their seats. “Now this,” he said, waving the gun, “is some bad soul. You guys had better learn the difference.”
Biblioklept 