So I updated Biblioklept’s Reviews page.
The page had just been a list of the reviews, riffs, and essays published on the blog, with each new entry stacking up in chronological order. For years I’ve known that this unorganized review dump was essentially useless, and I’d been meaning to turn it into an alphabetical index—and I finally did. (I kept the chronolist too, mostly for myself).
Anyway, as I went through this boring, sort-of-arduous process, I couldn’t help but reflect on a few of the habits that manifest under the surface:
The obvious: The reviews on the blog trend very heavily toward male authors. I already knew this, but counting things up makes it plain:
To date, I’ve run reviews of approximately 221 authors (approximate in the sense that I counted only once); of those reviews, only 36 were books by women. That’s about 16%. (This analysis doesn’t even begin to consider the multiple reviews of authors—for example, there are like a ton of reviews of Roberto Bolaño books, but only one review of a Clarice Lispector book). This ratio runs counter to what I’d like to believe are my principles; the number certainly contrasts with the fiction and poetry that I run on the blog (public domain stuff), which trends toward female authors. The number also contrasts with the ratio of male to female authors — roughly 1:1 — that appear on my course syllabuses.
If my tone sounds defensive, it’s because it is. The Read Women 2014 project has helped to highlight sexist reading habits—including my own. Sexism—any kind of prejudicial ism (and every ism is prejudicial) manifests as a blinding structure: Part of the structuring condition of ideological sexism is that the sexist person usually cannot see that he is sexist (he cannot see that he cannot see). I’m not offering this as a defense of my own habits: I’m not saying, Look, I’m aware of my skewed reviewing habits, and my very awareness of my inherent sexism makes me less sexist, absolves, me, etc. (But look at how I rhetorically dance around simply writing, My reviewing habits are sexist; look at how I’m still unable to simply type I’m probably a sexist, let alone I’m sexist, let me hedge, use parentheses, etc.).
Can I turn attention away from myself and onto the aesthetic critic Harold Bloom? In his Paris Review interview, he claimed:
I do not for a moment yield to the notion that any social, racial, ethnic, or “male” interest could determine my aesthetic choices. I have a lifetime of experience, learning, and insight that tells me this.
Bloom’s statement is a perfect example of I cannot see that I cannot see. (Stephen Colbert essentially ridicules this kind of blindness on his satirical show The Colbert Report by repeatedly claiming that he is not racist because he cannot see color).
I think that (I know that) a certain male interest determines my aesthetic interest. At the same time, I understand Bloom’s resistance to the notion that aesthetics are somehow contingent on gender. Could a man have written “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or To the Lighthouse or Death Comes to the Archbishop or Their Eyes Were Watching God? (A man didn’t). We’d like to believe that the Great Stuff transcends the material world—that part of its timelessness is that it’s not bound to mortal gendered coils. Etc.
What about now? What about Read Women 2014? I’ve been reading more women authors, I think, but I haven’t been reviewing them. I recently reread Flannery O’Connor’s collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, some Gertrude Stein I’d never read before (including Tender Buttons), and some short stories by Eudora Welty and Willa Cather. I’ve read far less contemporary stuff though, although I did review Jessica Hollander’s excellent collection In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place. In general though, I tend to read less contemporaryish fiction now than I used to—I’m reading three books now, and only one is by a living author (Ben Marcus). Of the three books I’m reading now, only one is by a woman (Zelda Fitzgerald). Of the last ten book reviews published on this site, four are of books by women.
Data and numbers are unappealing—especially when they quantify something we (and when I write we you know I mean I) don’t want to acknowledge. We’d (I’d) rather qualify than quantify. Etc.
I suppose it’s the idea of a conscious effort that so repels some of us (me). The notion that I (we?) might have to make an actual intellectual (not aesthetic, perhaps non-intuitive) effort to differentiate our reading. But that’s what it takes, right? An effort. A recognition. A looking.
Even drunk on tepid beer we could not talk honestly. Our messages for one another were obliquely worded, or hidden behind childish mimes and antics. At a certain point in the evening Durkin would make a show of examining the tangle of blankets on my bed and finding evidence that a man and a woman had shared it not long before. I would point out what I claimed were signs that a young adult male had recently masturbated there, using a heap of pillows as a surrogate woman and seeing the furthest wrinkles in his blankets as the coastal hills of the Mornington Peninsula. Durkin would then tidy the bedclothes and demonstrate what I ought to do on the bed as soon as I had come to my senses and invited home one of the thousands of girls in Melbourne who were waiting every night by their telephones as anxious to meet a new man as Carolyn had been at Sorrento. Then, if I was drunk enough, I would argue that all those women must have once been to the Gold Coast of Queensland as Carolyn had been and must have learned there too much for a beginner like myself. And if I saw that he was drunk enough I would announce that my last hope was his sixteen-years-old sister. Had he guarded her honour? I would shout at him. Could he keep her from setting out towards the Gold Coast and deliver her to me instead? I would treat her honourably and do no more than read my poems to her until our wedding night and be a fine, boozy brother-in-law to him for the rest of our lives.
When his sister was mentioned he would offer to fight me, and we would grapple on the floor until our buckets of bottles were in danger. Whenever I was on top of him and had him by the throat I boasted that my strength came from my celibate way of life. But whenever he had pinned me to the floor I begged him to procure me his sister or any girl who would give me a strength like his.
Found in the collection Landscape With Landscape.
If I go away, I said to myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall simply be leaving a country whose absolute futility utterly depresses me every single day, whose imbecilities daily threaten to stifle me, and whose idiocies will sooner or later be the end of me, even without my illnesses. Whose political and cultural conditions have of late become so chaotic that they turn my stomach when I wake up every morning, even before I am out of bed. Whose indifference to the intellect has long since ceased to cause the likes of me to despair, but if I am to be truthful only to vomit. I shall be going away from a country, I told myself, sitting in my iron chair, in which everything that once gave pleasure to so-called thinking people, or at least made it possible for them to go on existing, has been expelled, expunged and extinguished, in which only the most primitive instinct for survival prevails and the slightest pretension to thought is stifled at birth. In which a corrupt state and a corrupt church join forces to pull at the endless rope which, with the utmost ruthlessness and callousness, they have for centuries wound round the neck of a blind and stupid people, a people imprisoned in its stupidity by its rulers. In which truth is trodden underfoot, and lies are sanctified by all official organs as the only means to any end. I shall be leaving a country, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, in which truth is not understood or quite simply not accepted, and falsehood is the only legal tender in all transactions. I shall be leaving a country in which the church practises hypocrisy and in which socialism, having come to power, practises exploitation, and in which art says whatever is acceptable to these two. I shall be leaving a country in which a people educated to stupidity allows its ears to be stopped by the church and its mouth by the state, and in which everything I hold sacred has for centuries ended up in the slop pails of the rulers. If I go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall only be going away from a country in which I no longer have any place and in which I have never found happiness. If I go away, I shall be going away from a country in which the towns stink and the inhabitants of the towns have become coarsened. I shall be going away from a country in which the language has become vulgar and the minds of those who speak this vulgar language have for the most part become deranged. I shall be going away from a country, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, in which the only model of behaviour is set by the so-called wild animals. I shall be going away from a country in which darkest night prevails at noonday, and in which virtually the only people in power are blustering illiterates. If I go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall be leaving the disgusting, depressing and unconscionably filthy public lavatory of Europe. To go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, means leaving behind me a country which for years has done nothing but afflict me with the most damaging depression and has taken every opportunity, no matter where or when, of insidiously and malignantly urinating on my head.
From Thomas Bernhard’s novel Concrete.
Two remaining (late period) Donald Barthelme novels I haven’t read.
The King is a first edition paperback (with an author photo on the whole back cover—very odd) illustrated by the wonderful Barry Moser.
Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
PREVIOUSLY:
Introductions + stories 1956-1959
“The Subliminal Man,” Black Friday, and Consumerism
IN THIS RIFF:
“A Host of Furious Fancies” (1980)
“News from the Sun” (1981)
“Memories of the Space Age” (1982)
“Myths of the Near Future” (1982)
“Report on an Unidentified Space Station” (1982)
“The Object of the Attack” (1984)
“Answers to a Questionnaire” (1985)
“The Man Who Walked on the Moon” (1985)
“The Secret History of World War 3” (1988)
“Love in a Colder Climate” (1989)
“The Enormous Space” (1989)
“The Largest Theme Park in the World” (1989)
“War Fever” (1989)
1. “News from the Sun” (1981) / “Myths of the Near Future” (1982) / “Memories of the Space Age” (1982)
Let me first confess how happy I am to be finished with this enormously enormous book (okay, not physically enormous on my Kindle, but still…). Let me also confess to dread at having to finish out these riffs (no, no one is forcing me, but still…). At this point, I feel like I could write my own Ballard story—a crazed astronaut here, a drained swimming pool there, a femme fatale, some psychotropic drugs, armchair psychology, a swamp, some birds (perhaps), a plane or two, time obsession, sex obsession, space obsession. Obsession obsession Anyway. Ballard arguably peaks in the early 1980s; everything after reads like a day-glow Keith Haringesque pop-approximation of his grittier seventies stuff—or (worse) scolding wrapped up in little morality plays.
But, like I said (wrote), Ballard is in his prime in the early 1980s, and “News,” “Myths,” and “Memories” are some of his finest stories (file these triplets in my quasi-fictional-but-c’mon-we-can-make-this-happen collection The Essential Short Stories of J.G. Ballard)—they are also some of his most Ballardian, riffing on space-travel-as-cosmic-taboo, paranoid parables obsessed with time. A particularly Ballardian paragraph (from “Memories”):
He had almost ceased to breathe. Here, at the centre of the space grounds, he could feel time rapidly engorging itself. The infinite pasts and future of the forest had fused together. A long–tailed parakeet paused among the branches over his head, an electric emblem of itself more magnificent than a peacock. A jewelled snake hung from a bough, gathering to it all the embroidered skins it had once shed.
(Parenthetical aside: “Myths” and “Memories” are both set in Florida. Ballard’s depiction of Florida feels thoroughly inauthentic (I’m Floridian), but that inauthenticity also feels thoroughly appropriate).
2. “A Host of Furious Fancies” (1980)
Ballard constructs this little tale around a psychoanalytic reading of Cinderella:
The entire fairy tale of Cinderella was being enacted, perhaps unconsciously, by this deranged heiress. If she herself was Cinderella, Dr Valentina Gabor was the fairy godmother, and her magic wand the hypodermic syringe she waved about so spectacularly. The role of the pumpkin was played by the ‘sacred mushroom’, the hallucinogenic fungus from which psilocybin was extracted. Under its influence even an ancient laundry van would seem like a golden coach. And as for the ‘ball’, this of course was the whole psychedelic trip.
But who then was Prince Charming? As I arrived at the great mansion at the end of its drive it occurred to me that I might be unwittingly casting myself in the role, fulfilling a fantasy demanded by this unhappy girl. . . .
For all my resistance to that pseudo–science, it occurred to me that once again a psychoanalytic explanation made complete sense of these bizarre events and the fable of Cinderella that underpinned them. I walked up the staircase past the dismembered clock. Despite the fear–crazed assault on them, the erect hands still stood upright on the midnight hour – that time when the ball ended, when the courtships and frivolities of the party were over and the serious business of a real sexual relationship began. Fearful of that male erection, Cinderella always fled at midnight.
Etc.
Ballard’s Freudian riff would be more interesting as an essay.
(The story also showcases some of his typical chauvinism: The psychiatrist is described as the “woman psychiatrist” — just as earlier a dentist is referred to as a “lady dentist,” etc. Straight through to the end of the collection. In the 1990s).
3. “Report on an Unidentified Space Station” (1982) / “The Enormous Space” (1989)
“Report” and “Space” both read like takes on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Soviet-era short story “Quadraturin” — both concern space, that corollary to time, and, just as Ballard repeatedly posits time as a matter of perspective, he treats space—area—the same way here. “Report” is a bit more satisfying than “Space,” which feels like a retread of so many of Ballard’s revenge stories—only with, uh, some comical cannibalism.
4. “The Object of the Attack” (1984) / “Answers to a Questionnaire” (1985)
“Attack” and “Questionnaire” are maybe the same story—only “Questionnaire” is essentially perfect, whereas “Attack” feels like a clumsy, heavy first draft (but only because “Questionnaire” exists—do you see what I mean by this?)
Both stories showcase Ballard’s syntheses of religion (messianic; apocalyptic) and assassination (political; media-saturated). While “Attack” employs a discursive-but-still-linear approach to the theme, “Answers to a Questionnaire” gives us a discontinuous but more engaging riff in the form of (uh) exactly what its title promises. First fifth:
1) Yes.
2) Male (?)
3) do Terminal 3, London Airport, Heathrow.
4) Twenty–seven.
5) Unknown.
6) Dr Barnardo’s Primary, Kingston–upon–Thames; HM Borstal, Send, Surrey; Brunel University Computer Sciences Department.
7) Floor cleaner, Mecca Amusement Arcades, Leicester Square.
8) If I can avoid it.
9) Systems Analyst, Sperry–Univac, 1979–83.
10) Manchester Crown Court, 1984.
11) Credit card and computer fraud.
12) Guilty.
13) Two years, HM Prison, Parkhurst.
14) Stockhausen, de Kooning, Jack Kerouac.
15) Whenever possible.
16) Twice a day.
17) NSU, Herpes, gonorrhoea.
18) Husbands.
19) My greatest ambition is to turn into a TV programme.
20) I first saw the deceased on 17 February 1986, in the chapel at London Airport. He was praying in the front pew.
Essential, natch.
5. “The Man Who Walked on the Moon” (1985)
I should’ve wedged this passable but ultimately forgettable little tale in elsewhere. J.G. Ballard’s faux memoir of a faux astronaut. Pass.
6. “The Secret History of World War 3” (1988)
“The Secret History of World War 3” is Ballard’s “I told you so” sequel to one of his best stories (frankly a much better story), 1968’s “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” In his unofficial sequel, Ballard imagines (the horror!) of a third Reagan term (post-Bush 1), in which the country is obsessed with the President’s (lack of) health:
…the nation’s TV screens became a scoreboard registering every detail of the President’s physical and mental functions. His brave, if tremulous, heartbeat drew its trace along the lower edge of the screen, while above it newscasters expanded on his daily physical routines, on the twenty–eight feet he had walked in the rose garden, the calorie count of his modest lunches, the results of his latest brain–scan, read–outs of his kidney, liver and lung function. In addition, there was a daunting sequence of personality and IQ tests, all designed to reassure the American public that the man at the helm of the free world was more than equal to the daunting tasks that faced him across the Oval Office desk.
The story concerns a man who—alone, always alone, despite his wife, I mean this is Ballard here, hero’s alone (and right, justified) in his paraonoia—a man who is the only person to remember the brief outbreak of WW3, wedged, as it is, among updates of Ronnie and Nancy’s bowel movements. The story is farcical but juvenile, and if it seems surprisingly sophomoric, it’s worth noting that “TSHofWW3” echoes not just “Fuck Ronald Reagan,” but also one of Ballard’s earliest efforts, “Escapement” (1956), where a man sits on his couch in disbelief as his wife (stand-in for the whole world) fails to perceive what he perceives.
7. “Love in a Colder Climate” (1989) / “The Largest Theme Park in the World” (1989) /“War Fever” (1989)
A trio of late period lectures blazoned in the day glow approximations that anyone who live in the late eighties will not-so-fondly recall. Ballard evokes the neon apocalyptic impulses of the day, reworking his familiar themes—reproduction, civilization, war (etc.). Our baroque surrealist’s strokes are broader, not as sharp, more magnified—more Haring than Delvaux. Michel Houellebecq will pick up JGB’s torch here (with arguably better results) a decade and a half later.
8. On the horizon:
A handful of stories of the nineties: Or: Ballard returns to the same well with diminishing returns.
RIP Mavis Gallant, 1922-2014
The Globe and Mail has reported the death of Mavis Gallant, the Canadian writer who lived much of her life in Paris, writing sharp, observant short stories.
I had never read Gallant until last year, when The New Yorker fiction podcast introduced me to her work via Margaret Atwood, who read Gallant’s story “Voices in the Snow” for the series. Years earlier, Antonya Nelson read Gallant’s story “When We Were Nearly Young” for the same series.
Gallant published many, many stories for The New Yorker (which may consider unlocking some of them, yes?), including “Florida,” which you can read here.
Gallant will be remembered for her short stories, of course. her Paris Review interview:
With few exceptions, books of short stories seldom sell well. Short-story readers are a special kind of reader, like readers of poetry. Many novel readers don’t like collections of stories—I think that they dislike the frequent change of time, place and people. Of course, stories should not be read one after the other. A book of stories is not a novel. Someone once said to me, “Katherine Mansfield died before she was ready to write a novel. Perhaps she would never have been ready.” I thought that was just stupid.
Biblioklept 