Category: Books

Thomas S. Klise’s The Last Western (Book acquired, 3 Jan. 2018)

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So after maybe one tumbler of scotch too many, I finally broke down and just ordered a copy of Thomas S. Klise’s out-of-print cult novel The Last Western (1974) online. I’d been looking for it in used bookshops for awhile after reading it as a pirate ebook earlier this year. I’ll admit I’m a bit disappointed in the quality of this mass market paperback I paid fifteen U.S. dollars for, but it’s nice to have the novel to check against the ebook (like, if I ever get off my ass to really write about it). The Last Western is a prescient, zany, often sad political/religious thriller set in a kinda-sorta future—a dystopia just a shade off from our own current dystopia. The central figure, Willie, is a multiracial baseball phenom who eventually becomes the Pope. Despite its clean, lucid, straightforward prose style, Klise’s novel definitely has a heavy 70s vibe to it; fans of Vonnegut and Ishmael Reed would likely dig The Last Western. Its later cult fame seems to stem from its resonance with Infinite Jest, a novel that resembles it in several ways (although Wallace said he’d never heard of it). Anyway, I’ve said this before, but I think that some brave indie should reprint The Last Western so folks like me could buy nice new crisp well-bound copies.

Civics and selfishness (David Foster Wallace)

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Chapter 19 David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (or, §19, if you prefer the book’s conceit) begins with this paragraph—

‘There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don’t understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality. I’m talking mostly about economics and business, because that’s my area.’

‘What do we do to stop the decline?’

I riffed on §19 of The Pale King here and here.

Robert Coover on genre fiction

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Which genres do you avoid?

The conventional novel, only readable if the writing’s stunningly or quirkily great. On the other hand, sci-fi, detective novels, westerns, pornography, spy stories, horror and romance, though very conservative forms, are all more like folk and fairy tales, and so much more alluring to a writer trying to burrow inside the collective psyche.

From Robert Coover’s “By the Book” interviewette in today’s New York Times. 

Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

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[Editorial note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. I’ve preserved the reviewers’ original punctuation and spelling. More one-star Amazon reviews.].

I had been warned about Woolf

written, I believe, to impress rather than to relate.

I don’t appreciate her writing and keep coming back for more

I may not be giving it a fair review since I only made it to page 65

pages and pages of surreal metaphors that go on for 10 paragraphs

Woolf had a huge obsession with semi-colons

The book just does not make any sense

I really liked the movie “the Hours”

nonsensical semi-flashbacks

Groundbreaking prose?

I tried, I really did

describing nothing

Written by a lesbian

Kind of like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works

DO read “The Hours”, you will be impressed

I kept losing track of which character was musing about nothing

I suppose Woolf is considered a genius since she was apparently a cavalier writer of her generation

Let us listen to an old farty woman stream her consciousness to us to hear, pointless thoughts that go nowhere

I’m grateful that contemporary writers can at least string together 2 sentences that follow one another in a logical sequence

Lets burn every sentence she ever penned to end all the unneccesary suffering that curious readers have to go through when they first pick up “Mrs. Dalloway.”

My suggestion: just watch The Hours – you’ll get all the beauty and none of the confusion

the person responsible, Virginia Wolf, has been dead for quite some time now

i have no interest in reading about that lifestyle

am stuck in her growling semicolons

slower than a tortoise

ramblings of a lunatic

As bad as Faulkner

So much language

dreadfully boring

run-on sentences

“literary” drivel

terribly written

so many words

and never getting to a plot

Stream of conscience you say?

I normally enjoy stream of consciousness

The narrative reads like the inner thoughts of a sugar crazed autistic kid with ADD in the middle of a carnival

everyone i know who likes this book only does so because he or she was told by some professor that it’s supposed to be good and can provide no evidence to confirm it

This book certainly shows the depravity of man and a self-centered life and the meaningless found amongst those who think of none but themselves.

The absence of spacing to differentiate between each character’s thought process makes for unnecessary confusion

I really liked the idea of the story taking place over the course of one day

THIS BOOK IS WORSE THAN AIDS!

meandering and repetetive

will suffice as kindling

The party! The party!

VW was mentally-ill

“Dense”

put me off

definitley not a fun read

pretty gross hair and stuff on it/ in it

I had had to read it, or was supposed to

haven’t been able to get past the first chapter

lovely idea, virginia and i applaud you for your creativity

I felt like I was reading some writing student’s homework assignment

The Hours is better, despite its inspiration

this story line is too depressing for me

Descriptions were beaten to death

Not one thing uplifting

I am an avid reader!

the book failed

hyphens

A review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven

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The City I Dream, Victor Brauner

George Orr is not well. The meek protagonist of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven abuses prescription drugs in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to stop himself from falling asleep. Orr doesn’t want to sleep because he believes that his dreams come true—that they literally alter reality—but in such a way that no one but Orr realizes that the world has changed. Orr gets caught using a “Pharmacy Card” that doesn’t belong to him, and is court-ordered to begin treatment with a sleep research psychiatrist, Dr. William Haber. Although Haber initially doesn’t believe Orr’s claim to be cursed with “effective dreams” that transform reality, he soon realizes that Orr’s dreams somehow do come true. Then, via hypnotic suggestion (and an “Augmentor” device), Haber begins wielding Orr’s gift/curse as a clumsy tool to “better” the world.

The world of The Lathe of Heaven is grim, gray, dystopian. Published in 1971 and set in Portland in the palindromic year of 2002, Le Guin’s novel is depressingly prescient. Not only does she capture the onset of seventies malaise (the ashes of hope that burned out in the sixties), she also points to a future of environmental catastrophe:

Very little light and air got down to street level; what there was was warm and full of fine rain. Rain was an old Portland tradition, but the warmth—70° F on the second of March—was modern, a result of air pollution. Urban and industrial effluvia had not been controlled soon enough to reverse the cumulative trends already at work in the mid-twentieth century; it would take several centuries for the CO2 to clear out of the air, if it ever did. New York was going to be one of the larger casualties of the Greenhouse Effect, as the polar ice kept melting and the sea kept rising…

This is also a world of urban sprawl, overpopulation, malnutrition, and total war (a clusterfuck in the Middle East, wouldn’t you know). The government is a vague and menacing presence here—vaguely totalitarian, vaguely Big Brotheresque. We learn of the “New Federal Constitution of 1984,” one of many references to Orwell’s book. (The most obvious is our passive hero’s name).

So it’s no wonder that Haber sets about to create a utopia, right? Wouldn’t you, like, try to make the world a better place if you could? Haber is repeatedly described as a “benevolent man”—Le Guin withholds the word dictator—but the central theme comes through repeatedly: Is it possible to alter reality for the greater good? Or do we simply exist in nature, a part of everything around us?

Haber’s experiments with Orr’s mind have unintended consequences. How might we, say, cure overpopulation? How about an awful plague. Orr’s “effective dreams” revise history, rewrite reality, remap consciousness. But he’s never quite able to pull off the massive tasks Haber sets for him—end racism, end war, cure the damaged ecosystem (Le Guin is extremely pessimistic on this last front). Orr is burdened with the consciousness of multiple realities, and feels deep guilt for his role in uncreation. He starts to go crazy:

“I am cracking,” he said. “You must see that. You’re a psychiatrist. Don’t you see that I’m going to pieces? Aliens from outer space attacking Earth! Look: if you ask me to dream again, what will you get? Maybe a totally insane world, the product of an insane mind. Monsters, ghosts, witches, dragons, transformations—all the stuff we carry around in us, all the horrors of childhood, the night fears, the nightmares. How can you keep all that from getting loose? I can’t stop it. I’m not in control!”

Continue reading “A review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven” →

If civilization has an opposite, it is war (Ursula K. Le Guin)

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Tibe spoke on the radio a good deal. Estraven when in power had never done so, and it was not in the Karhidish vein: their government was not a public performance, normally; it was covert and indirect. Tibe, however, orated. Hearing his voice on the air I saw again the long-toothed smile and the face masked with a net of fine wrinkles. His speeches were long and loud: praises of Karhide, disparagements of Orgoreyn vilifications of “disloyal factions,” discussions of the “integrity of the Kingdom’s borders,” lectures in history and ethics and economics, all in a ranting, canting, emotional tone that went shrill with vituperation or adulation. He talked much about pride of country and love of the parentland, but little about shifgrethor, personal pride or prestige. Had Karhide lost so much prestige in the Sinoth Valley business that the subject could not be brought up? No; for he often talked about the Sinoth Valley. I decided that he was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind. He wanted to stir up something which the whole shifgrethor-pattern was a refinement upon, a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. His themes were not pride and love at all, though he used the words perpetually; as he used them they meant self-praise and hate. He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, “cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.”

It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness… Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both. It seemed to me as I listened to Tibe’s dull fierce speeches that what he sought to do by fear and by persuasion was to force his people to change a choice they had made before their history began, the choice between those opposites.

From Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The bold emphases are mine—mea culpa, I couldn’t help it.

On Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels

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“Are we not Men?”

— The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells (1896)

“A country, a people…Those are strange and very difficult ideas.”

— Four Ways to Forgivenss, Ursula K. Le Guin (1995)

—Each of the novels in Ursula K. Le Guin’s so-called Hainish cycle obliquely addresses Wells’s question by tackling those strange and very difficult ideas of “a country, a people.” The best of these Hainish books do so in a manner that synthesizes high-adventure sci-fi fantasy with dialectical philosophy.

—What am I calling here “the best”? Well—

The Left Hand of Darkness

Planet of Exile/City of Illusions (treat as one novel in two discursive parts)

The Dispossessed

—(How oh how oh how dare I rank The Dispossessed—clearly a masterpiece, nay?—so low on that little list? It’s too dialectical, maybe? Too light on the, uh, high adventure stuff, on the fantasy and romance and sci-fi. Its ideas are too finely wrought, well thought out, expertly cooked (in contrast to the wonderful rawness of Rocannon’s World, for example). None of this is to dis The Dispossessed—it’s probably the best of the Hainish books, and the first one casual readers should attend to. (It was also the first one I read way back when in high school)).

—The novels in Le Guin’s so-called Hainish cycle are

Rocannon’s World (1966)

Planet of Exile (1966)

City of Illusions (1967)

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

The Dispossessed (1974)

The Word for World is Forest (1976)

Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

The Telling (2000)

—Okay, so I decided to include For Ways to Forgiveness in the above list even though most people wouldn’t call it a “novel” — but its four stories (novellas, really) are interconnected and tell a discrete story of two interconnected planets that are part of the Hainish world. And I pulled a quote from it above. So.

—I read, or reread, Le Guin’s so-called Hainish cycle close to the chronological order proposed by the science fiction writer Ian Watson. I don’t necessarily recommend this order.

—(I keep modifying “Hainish cycle” with “so-called” because the books aren’t really a cycle. Le Guin’s world-building isn’t analogous to Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. (Except when her world-building is analogous). But let us return to order).

—Le Guin on the subject:

People write me nice letters asking what order they ought to read my science fiction books in — the ones that are called the Hainish or Ekumen cycle or saga or something. The thing is, they aren’t a cycle or a saga. They do not form a coherent history. There are some clear connections among them, yes, but also some extremely murky ones. And some great discontinuities (like, what happened to “mindspeech” after Left Hand of Darkness? Who knows? Ask God, and she may tell you she didn’t believe in it any more.)

OK, so, very roughly, then:

Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions: where they fit in the “Hainish cycle” is anybody’s guess, but I’d read them first because they were written first. In them there is a “League of Worlds,” but the Ekumen does not yet exist.

—I agree with the author. Read this trilogy first. Read it as one strange book.

—(Or—again—pressed for time and wanting only the essential, read The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness—but you already knew that, no?).

Continue reading “On Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels” →

William H. Gass’s The Tunnel (Book acquired, 22 Jan. 2018)

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The great late great William H. Gass’s very big novel The Tunnel was one of four books I put on my 2018 Good Intentions Reading List that I didn’t previously own. (I did check it out from the library a few years back and download the audiobook—read by Gass himself–but I didn’t make a big dent). I ordered it from my favorite bookstore and it came in yesterday. The Tunnel is one of three Great Big Books I plan to (attempt to) read this year, including Middlemarch and some novel called War & Peace. I’ll probably start The Tunnel first.

Here are two selections from The Tunnel:

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An Invocation to the Muse

O brood O muse upon my mighty subject like a holy hen upon the nest of night.
O ponder the fascism of the heart.
Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean’s salt seems thinly shaken, of let-downs local as the sofa where I copped my freshman’s feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.
Behold the sagging tit, the drudge-gray mopped-out cunt-corked wife, stale as yesterday’s soapy water or study the shiftless kind, seedy before any bloom, thin and mean as a weed in a walk;
Smell the grease that stands rancid in the pan like a second skin, the pan aslant on some fuel-farting stove, the stone in its corner contributing what it can to the brutal conviviality of close quarters,
Let depression like time-payments weigh you down; feel desperation and despair like dust thick in the rug and the ragged curtains, or carry puppy pee and plate-scrapings, wrapped in the colored pages of the Sunday paper, out to the loose and blowing, dog-jawed heap in the alley;
Spend your money on large cars, loud clothes, sofa-sized paintings, excursions to Hawaii, trinkets, knicknacks, fast food, golf clubs, call girls, slimming salons, booze;
Suffer shouting, heat rash, chilblains, beatings, betrayal, guilt, impotence, jail, jealousy, humiliation, VD, vermin, stink.
Sweat through a St. Louis summer and sing of that.
O muse, I cry, as loudly as I can, while still commanding a constricted scribble, hear me! help me! but my nasty echo answers: one muse for all the caterwauling you have called for! where none was in that low-life line of work before?
It’s true. I’ll need all nine for what I want to do—perhaps brand new—all nine whom Hesiod must have frigged to get his way, for he first spoke their secret names and hauled their history by the snout into his poem. For what I want to do …
Which is what—exactly? to deregulate Descartes like all the rest of the romancers? to philosophize while performing some middle-age adultery? basically enjoying your anxieties like raw lickker when it’s gotten to the belly? I know—you want to make the dull amazing, you want to Heidegger some wholesome thought, darken daytime for the TV, grind the world into a grain of Blake.
O, I deny it! On the contrary! I shall not abuse your gift. I pledge to you, if you should choose me, not to make a mere magician’s more of less, to bottle up a case of pop from a jigger of scotch. I have no wish to wine water or hand out loaves and fishes like tickets on a turkey. It is my ambition to pull a portent—not a rabbit but a raison d’être—from anything—a fish pond, top hat, fortune cookie—you just name it—a prophecy in Spengler’s fanciest manner, a prediction of a forlorn future for the world from—oh, the least thing, so long as it takes a Teutonic tone—a chewed-over, bubble-flat wad of baseball gum, say, now hard and sour in the street, with no suggestion of who the player’s picture was, impersonal despite its season in someone’s spit, like a gold tooth drawn from a Jew’s jaw.
Misfits, creeps, outcasts of every class; these are my constituents—the disappointed people—and if I could bring my fist down hard on the world they would knot together like a muscle, serve me, strike as hard as any knuckle.
Hey Kohler—hey Koh—whistle up a wind. Alone, have I the mouth for it? the sort of wind I want? Imagine me, bold Kohler, calling out for help—and to conclude, not to commence—to end, to bait, to 30, stop, leave off, to hush a bye forever … to untick tock.

Big fat War and Peace (Book acquired, 12 Jan. 2018)

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Huge thankyous to BLCKDGRD for sending me a spare copy of some obscure Russian novel called War and Peace. Now I have to read the damn thing. (The only Tolstoy I’ve really read is Hadji Murad).

We create insanities (William H. Gass)

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Put yourself in a public place, at a banquet—one perhaps at which awards are made. Your fork is pushing crumbs about upon you plate while someone is receiving silver in a bowler’s shape amid the social warmth of clapping hands. How would you feel if at this moment a beautiful lady in a soft pink nightie should lead among the tables a handsome poodle who puddled under them, and there was a conspiracy among the rest of us not to notice? Suppose we sat quietly; our expressions did not change; we looked straight through her, herself as well as her nightie, toward the fascinating figure of the speaker; suppose, leaving, we stepped heedlessly in the pools and afterward we did not even shake our shoes. And if you gave a cry, if you warned, explained, cajoled, implored; and we regarded you then with amazement, rejected with amusement, contempt, or scorn every one of your efforts, I think you would begin to doubt your senses and your very sanity. Well, that’s the idea: with the weight of our numbers, our percentile normality, we create insanities: yours, as you progressively doubt more and more of your experience, hide it from others to avoid the shame, saying “There’s that woman and her damn dog again,” but now saying it silently, for your experience, you think, is private; and ours, as we begin to believe our own lies, and the lady and her nightie, the lady and her poodle, the lady and the poodle’s puddles, all do disappear, expunged from consciousness like a stenographer’s mistake. 

–From William H. Gass’s essay “The Artist and Society” (1968). Collected in Fiction and the Figures of Life. 

Eliot’s Middlemarch, Murdoch’s Net (Books acquired, 2 Jan. 2018)

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I put George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Irish Murdoch’s The Bell on my 2018 Good Intentions Reading List. I didn’t own either of these novels, which necessitated a trip to my friendly neighborhood bookstore (a labyrinthine maze comprised of, like, 2 million books. I’m not exaggerating). Improbably, I couldn’t find a copy of The Bell, so I picked up a nice Penguin edition of Under the Net. I also couldn’t find William Gass’s big novel The Tunnel—another of the books I put on my 2018 list that I don’t own—but I knew it wasn’t there because I’ve been checking for its fat spine for over a year. I’m gonna have to buy it elsewhere, alas. (I saw a copy there a few years ago and held off buying it because I was buying William Gaddis’s The Recognitions at the time, and buying two great big novels like that seemed too indulgent. Alas). My beloved store did of course have like a gajillion copies of War and Peace (which it’s weird I don’t have a copy), but my internet pal BLCKDGRD told me he’d send me one, so I held off. Plus—like, Middlemarch is already pretty damn long. I picked up the Norton Critical Edition, just out of habit, and then downloaded the e-book to my iPad via Project Gutenberg. My Norton Critical Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn lists “Samuel Langhorne Clemens” as the author, and not “Mark Twain”—why does this Norton list “George Eliot” and not “Mary Anne Evans”? I actually don’t really care that much.

So who else is reading Middlemarch this year?

 

Happy New Year (And some books I’ll try to read in 2018)

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Happy 2018.

Around the New Year, I usually dig out some shelved books (or books in tbr stacks) to make a good-intentions reading list for the forthcoming year. Here are those books, from top to bottom in the pic above:

Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny’s Deus Irae: I picked up the old Daw paperback a few months ago—a habit I’ve gotten into with any old Dick—and haven’t gotten to it yet. I read a lot of PKD in 2017 though, so that mood may carry over into early 2018. Curious about the co-authorship—we’ll see.

I’ll admit that I bought Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking for its Arcimboldosque cover, but dipping into it back in October intrigued me.

I tried to read Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights a few years ago and got distracted by something else, but a lot of folks I admire have praised it, so I’ll give it another shot this year.

I read, “Cutting It Short,” the first novella in Bohumil Hrabal’s The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, but saved the titular second novella for later. Later is now, or nowish, or down the linish. 2018ish.

I stumbled getting into DeLillo’s The Names a few times last year, so maybe I’ll stumble again, but maybe not.

Aberrant, the début novel by Czech author Marek Šindelka, showed up at Biblioklept World Headquarters at the end of my spring semester when I was swamped with term papers, so it sort of got shuffled aside, but it looks so wonderfully weird that I’ll need to carve out space for it this year.

Svetlana Lavochkina’s Zap is new from Whiskey Tit. More to come.

Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face was on last year’s good intentions reading list (I went 6 of 13 by the way).

I read a lot of Paul Bowles in 2016 and 2017, but fizzled out—too much at once. But I want to read The Spider’s House this year.

Four novels that I want to read that I don’t actually own and will thus have to go buy:

Wish me luck. Or not. Either way, I hope your 2018 is the good good stuff.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks (Ursula K. LeGuin)

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All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

It’s unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable.

We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go “there and back again,” and there is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill… So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth- telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life—of a sort, for a while.

Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.

We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbos lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c’est la meme chose, plus fa change.

From Ursula K. LeGuin’s foreword to her 2001 collection Tales from Earthsea.

“The Sister-Years,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegorical New Year’s tale

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“The Sister-Years”

by

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Last night, between eleven and twelve o’clock, when the Old Year was leaving her final footprints on the borders of Time’s empire, she found herself in possession of a few spare moments, and sat down—of all places in the world—on the steps of our new city-hall. The wintry moonlight showed that she looked weary of body and sad of heart, like many another wayfarer of earth. Her garments, having been exposed to much foul weather and rough usage, were in very ill condition, and, as the hurry of her journey had never before allowed her to take an instant’s rest, her shoes were so worn as to be scarcely worth the mending. But after trudging only a little distance farther this poor Old Year was destined to enjoy a long, long sleep. I forgot to mention that when she seated herself on the steps she deposited by her side a very capacious bandbox in which, as is the custom among travellers of her sex, she carried a great deal of valuable property. Besides this luggage, there was a folio book under her arm very much resembling the annual volume of a newspaper. Placing this volume across her knees and resting her elbows upon it, with her forehead in her hands, the weary, bedraggled, world-worn Old Year heaved a heavy sigh and appeared to be taking no very pleasant retrospect of her past existence.

While she thus awaited the midnight knell that was to summon her to the innumerable sisterhood of departed years, there came a young maiden treading lightsomely on tip-toe along the street from the direction of the railroad dépôt. She was evidently a stranger, and perhaps had come to town by the evening train of cars. There was a smiling cheerfulness in this fair maiden’s face which bespoke her fully confident of a kind reception from the multitude of people with whom she was soon to form acquaintance. Her dress was rather too airy for the season, and was bedizened with fluttering ribbons and other vanities which were likely soon to be rent away by the fierce storms or to fade in the hot sunshine amid which she was to pursue her changeful course. But still she was a wonderfully pleasant-looking figure, and had so much promise and such an indescribable hopefulness in her aspect that hardly anybody could meet her without anticipating some very desirable thing—the consummation of some long-sought good—from her kind offices. A few dismal characters there may be here and there about the world who have so often been trifled with by young maidens as promising as she that they have now ceased to pin any faith upon the skirts of the New Year. But, for my own part, I have great faith in her, and, should I live to see fifty more such, still from each of those successive sisters I shall reckon upon receiving something that will be worth living for. Continue reading ““The Sister-Years,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegorical New Year’s tale” →

Christmas bugs (Gravity’s Rainbow)

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Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish brown, emerge like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering toward the larder—pregnant mother bugs too, with baby translucent outrider bugs flowing along like a convoy escort. At night, in the very late silences between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets, they can be heard, loud as mice, munching through Gwenhidwy’s paper sacks, leaving streaks and footprints of shit the color of themselves behind. They don’t seem to go in much for soft things, fruits, vegetables, and such, it’s more the solid lentils and beans they’re into, stuff they can gnaw at, paper and plaster barriers, hard interfaces to be pierced, for they are agents of unification, you see. Christmas bugs. They were deep in the straw of the manger at Bethlehem, they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening red among a golden lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and downward—an edible tenement-world, now and then gnawed through to disrupt some mysterious sheaf of vectors that would send neighbor bugs tumbling ass-over-antennas down past you as you held on with all legs in that constant tremble of golden stalks. A tranquil world: the temperature and humidity staying nearly steady, the day’s cycle damped to only a soft easy sway of light, gold to antique-gold to shadows, and back again. The crying of the infant reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see… .

From Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

“Christmas Eve” — Anne Sexton

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“Christmas Eve” by Anne Sexton

Oh sharp diamond, my mother!
I could not count the cost
of all your faces, your moods-
that present that I lost.
Sweet girl, my deathbed,
my jewel-fingered lady,
your portrait flickered all night
by the bulbs of the tree.

Your face as calm as the moon
over a mannered sea,
presided at the family reunion,
the twelve grandchildren
you used to wear on your wrist,
a three-months-old baby,
a fat check you never wrote,
the red-haired toddler who danced the twist,
your aging daughters, each one a wife,
each one talking to the family cook,
each one avoiding your portrait,
each one aping your life.

Later, after the party,
after the house went to bed,
I sat up drinking the Christmas brandy,
watching your picture,
letting the tree move in and out of focus.
The bulbs vibrated.
They were a halo over your forehead.
Then they were a beehive,
blue, yellow, green, red;
each with its own juice, each hot and alive
stinging your face. But you did not move.
I continued to watch, forcing myself,
waiting, inexhaustible, thirty-five.

I wanted your eyes, like the shadows
of two small birds, to change.
But they did not age.
The smile that gathered me in, all wit,
all charm, was invincible.
Hour after hour I looked at your face
but I could not pull the roots out of it.
Then I watched how the sun hit your red sweater, your withered neck,
your badly painted flesh-pink skin.
You who led me by the nose, I saw you as you were.
Then I thought of your body
as one thinks of murder-

Then I said Mary-
Mary, Mary, forgive me
and then I touched a present for the child,
the last I bred before your death;
and then I touched my breast
and then I touched the floor
and then my breast again as if,
somehow, it were one of yours

Some favorite books, 2017

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Hi! Did anyone else experience 2017 as an overlong, poorly-conceived, cartoonishly bad, poorly-written dystopian novel?

With that out of the way, a few notes on some of my favorite reading experiences this year—a year I abandoned more books than I stuck with, a year I wrote fewer reviews on this site than ever, a year that I failed to write in full on some of the books I loved best. So, from the top of the pic to the bottom:

I read Ishmael Reed’s Neo-HooDoo Western revenge satire, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, at the beginning of the year, and his Christmas/plutocracy satire, The Terrible Twos, near the middle. Even though the novels were published in 1969 and 1982 (respectively), they capture, pin down, and tickle and torture everything that’s wrong about our current zeitgeist. Reed’s awful prescience shows that we repeatedly fail to learn from the past.

I read, reread, or audited over half a dozen Philip K. Dick novels this year. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is in the stack because the blog actually reviewed it—and it was maybe my favorite, along with VALIS and Ubik.

The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington has been a replenishing gift all year—something to dip into between novels, between projects and papers, a kind of surrealist palate cleanser. I still have about a dozen unread tales to savor later.

Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons is not in the pic above, because I read a digital review copy. I included Signs and Bodies as visual placeholders though; as I wrote in my review:

I can’t help but think of Kingdom Cons as the third part of a loose trilogy that also includes Herrera’s previous novellas Signs Preceding the End of the World and The Transmigration of Bodies. All three are published by And Other Stories and all three are translated by Lisa Dillman, who conjures magic in translating Herrera’s neologisms, slang, and mythical tone. Kingdom Cons extends the mythic-noir mode that Signs initiated and Bodies continued. Herrera is a writer with a voice and a viewpoint, an author whose archetypal approach shows the deep significance to contemporary life’s concrete contours.

Herrera’s novel is, come to think of it, one of only two contemporary novels on this list that was actually published this year—and even then it’s a work in translation.

Also not in the picture (because I loaned it to someone who never returned it!), and ed in 2017 is Robert Coover’s novel Huck Out West a critique of Manifest Destiny that’s as timely as ever.

Also not in the picture because I read it as a (samizdat) ebook: Thomas S. Klise’s 1974 cult novel The Last Western. Any indie press that brings The Last Western back into print will find plenty of readers and champions for the book.

And also not in the stack picture because it’s an audiobook is my favorite audiobook I audiobooked in 2017, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, translated by Olena Bormashenko, and read by Robert Forster. I audited it during Hurricane Irma—and then again, after.

Continuing down the stack: I’ve been going back through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels via audiobook. Sort of like literary comfort food.

Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel Preparation for the Next Life was the best novel I read in 2017. I sort of semi-reviewed it as I was reading it, writing:

Lish’s prose is amazingly concrete. He renders New York City (and the other settings) with seemingly effortless thoroughness; the evocation of place is vivid and refined in its attention to detail, but reads raw somehow. There’s a flavor of prime Denis Johnson or Don DeLillo here, but these comparisons aren’t fair: Lish is original—the prose reads thoroughly real, real to and from the author. The novel…strikes me as one of the most authentic “post-9/11” novels I’ve read. There’s almost something sci-fi to Preparation—Lish shows us our world through alien eyes that suck in every detail. I wish I’d read it sooner.

I read a lot of Barry Hannah over the summer, sucking it up like bourbon or grits or eggs but mostly like bourbon. Long Last Happy rehashes some greatest hits, and is a great place for anyone interested—but it also led me to his last stuff, which ended up being darker, danker, richer than I would have imagined. So then I read his last novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, which, fuck…

Gisèle Prassinos’ posthumous collection surreal poem-stories The Arthritic Grasshopper was another weird revelation in 2017, a thing I didn’t know I didn’t know about. In my review, I wrote:

 Prassinos’s anti-fables offer ways of reading a mind that doesn’t know what it knows, of singing along with the free faceless astonishing voice.

At the bottom of the stack is Paul Kirchner’s Awating the Collapse. Peer closely enough at that back cover and you’ll get the whole mood of this post.

Anyway, I hope you read some good books this year, and I hope your 2018 is merry and bright and etc.