Category: Books

Kant’s coffee

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At the beginning of the last year of his life, he fell into a custom of taking, immediately after dinner, a cup of coffee, especially on those days when it happened that I was of his party. And such was the importance that he attached to his little pleasure that he would even make a memorandum beforehand, in the blank paper book that I had given him, that on the next day I was to dine with him, and consequently “that there was to be coffee.” Sometimes in the interest of conversation, the coffee was forgotten, but not for long. He would remember and with the querulousness of old age and infirm health would demand that coffee be brought “upon the spot.” Arrangements had always been made in advance, however; the coffee was ground, and the water was boiling: and in the very moment the word was given, the servant shot in like an arrow and plunged the coffee into the water. All that remained, therefore, was to give it time to boil up. But this trifling delay seemed unendurable to Kant. If it were said, “Dear Professor, the coffee will be brought up in a moment,” he would say, “Will be! There’s the rub, that it only will be.” Then he would quiet himself with a stoical air, and say, “Well, one can die after all; it is but dying; and in the next world, thank God, there is no drinking of coffee and consequently no waiting for it.”

When at length the servant’s steps were heard upon the stairs, he would turn round to us, and joyfully call out: “Land, land! my dear friends, I see land.”

This anecdote of Thomas de Quincey’s is from William H. Ukers’s All About Coffee (1922). Ukers introduces the quote: “In his old age, Immanuel Kant, the great metaphysician, became extremely fond of coffee; and Thomas de Quincey relates a little incident showing Kant’s great eagerness for the after-dinner cup.”

Fredric Jameson (Book acquired, 4.23.2015)

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Fredric Jameson’s latest from Verso is The Ancients and the Postmoderns. Verso’s blurb:

High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson’s major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting (Rubens) and music (Wagner and Mahler), are pitted against late-modernist ones (in film) as well as a variety of postmodern experiments (from SF to The Wire, from “Eurotrash” in opera to Altman and East German literature): all of which attempt, in their different ways, to invent new forms to grasp a specific social totality. Throughout the historical periods, argues Jameson, the question of narrative persists through its multiple formal changes and metamorphoses.

Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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[Editorial note: Today is Roberto Bolaño’s birthday–he would’ve turned 62. The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews of his masterpiece 2666. To be clear, I am a huge fan of 2666—I’ve written about it extensively on this site. But I never posted a review on Amazon. More one-star Amazon reviews.].

***

Awful.

Boring!

Nothing.

No Point.

No Story.

No characters.

This is not a story.

Felt it was too dark.

endless culs-de-sac

There is no premise

Numbing dumbness.

As a Literature major,

incoherent and rambling

Disconnected and tedious.

The joke is on me, I guess.

written in a type of journalese

this novel (if it can be called that)

an obtuse novel with no real point.

I would rather stick forks in my eyes

stilted, awkward, and difficult to read

I would prefer to be boiled alive in oil.

900 pages of words that mean nothing.

multiple pages are spent describing dreams

delivers little if any enjoyment to the reader.

900 pages of distinctly non-literary masochism

I hated the spewing of authors I’d never heard of.

The writing or words are geared towards intellectuals.

Imagine this: you’re dreaming a dream that never ends.

it’s one of those pretentious books for pretentious people

a sprawling, formless, utterly pretentious bloated drudge

bloated streams of consciousness which negate themselves

no subtle meassage that is worthy of discussion or thought

I can see how this might have been written by a very ill man.

boring, repetitive, pointless, misogynistic, indulgent blather

I’ve never experienced a book which was so devoid of reward.

little or no substance in terms of an overall message or theme

a pointless study of odd obsessions and the meaningless of life

On xx date, the body of xxx was found, mutilated in the dumps.

I spent most of my time looking up defintions to 100’s of words.

this book is a GRUESOME and HORRIFICALLY VIOLENT book.

Bolano could not care less what the general public thinks of his book

has little of note to say about the meaning of life or the human condition

I am hard pressed to believe that the other reviewers even read this book.

The largest section of the book is basically 300+ pages of autopsy reports.

You will read the words “vaginally and anally raped” over and over and over

This book would make a great table leg, coaster, or booster seat for a small child. Continue reading “Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666” →

The Memory Painter (Book acquired, 4.17.2015)

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Gwendolyn Womack’s novel The Memory Painter is new in hardback from Picador. Their blurb:

Bryan Pierce is an internationally famous artist whose paintings have dazzled the world. But there’s a secret to his success: Every canvas is inspired by an unusually vivid dream. When Bryan awakes, he possesses extraordinary new skills…like the ability to speak obscure languages and an inexplicable genius for chess. All his life, he has wondered if his dreams are recollections, if he is re-experiencing other people’s lives. Linz Jacobs is a brilliant neurogeneticist, absorbed in decoding the genes that help the brain make memories, until she is confronted with an exact rendering of a recurring nightmare at one of Bryan’s shows. She tracks down the elusive artist, and their meeting triggers Bryan’s most powerful dream yet: visions of a team of scientists who, on the verge of discovering a cure for Alzheimer’s, died in a lab explosion decades ago.As Bryan becomes obsessed with the mysterious circumstances surrounding the scientists’ deaths, his dreams begin to reveal what happened at the lab, as well as a deeper mystery that may lead all the way to ancient Egypt. Together, Bryan and Linz start to discern a pattern. But a deadly enemy watches their every move, and he will stop at nothing to ensure that the past stays buried.A taut thriller and a timeless love story spanning six continents and 10,000 years of history, The Memory Painterby Gwendolyn Womack is a riveting debut novel unlike any you’ve ever read.

Derek Pyle Discusses Waywords and Meansigns, an Unabridged Musical Adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Edwin Turner7 Comments

I recently talked to Derek Pyle about his project Waywords and Meansigns, which adapts James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake into a new musical audiobook. Derek worked for years as half of Jubilation Press. Printing the poems of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Thich Nhat Hanh, and William Stafford, Derek’s letterpress work can be found in the special collections of the New York Public Library, Brown University, and the Book Club of California. Derek co-founded Waywords and Meansigns in 2014 and became the project’s primary director in 2015. While living part-time in Western Massachusetts, Derek produces Waywords and Meansigns in eastern Canada.

Robert Berry copy
Image by Robert Berry

Biblioklept: What is Waywords and Meansigns?

Derek Pyle: Waywords and Meansigns is a collaborative music project recreating James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Seventeen different musicians from all around world have each taken a chapter of Finnegans Wake and set it to music, thereby creating an unabridged audio version of Finnegans Wake.

Finnegans Wake is an incredible book, but it’s notoriously difficult to read. One hope of the project is to create a version of the Wake that is accessible to newcomers — people can just listen to and enjoy the music. To maximize accessibility, we are distributing all the audio freely via our website. But the project does not only appeal to Wake newcomers — as we’ve seen so far, a lot of scholars and devoted readers are also finding Waywords and Meansigns an exciting way of interpreting and engaging with Joyce’s text.

Biblioklept: How did the project come about?

DP: In 2014 I organized a party to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. To celebrate we decided to listen to Patrick Healy’s audiobook recording of Finnegans Wake, which is 20-odd hours long. The party, as you can imagine, lasted all weekend — we actually listened to Johnny Cash’s unabridged reading of the New Testament that weekend too. There was very little sleep, and fair amount of absinthe.

A lot of people really rag on Healy’s recording, because it’s read at breakneck speed. I actually like it though — he creates a very visceral flood of experience, which is one way of reading, or interpreting, Finnegans Wake. But during the party I started wondering about other ways you could perform the text, and that’s when I came up with the idea of approaching musicians to create a new kind of audiobook.

As it turns out, a lot of people seemed to think my idea was a good one. We’ve had no shortage of musicians willing to contribute, including some really cool cats like Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth and bassist Mike Watt, who currently plays in Iggy Pop’s band The Stooges.

Biblioklept: Watt rules! I love the Minutemen and his solo stuff. He seems like a natural fit for this kind of project, as so much of his music is based around story telling. I imagine the musicians involved are composing the music themselves…are they also recording it themselves?

DP: Yeah, it’s very cool to have Watt on board. Turns out he’s a huge fan of Joyce — he recorded a track for Fire Records in 2008, for an album of various musicians turning the poems of Joyce’s Chamber Music into songs. Mary Lorson, of the bands Saint Low and Madder Rose, also played on that Fire Records album, and she’s collaborating with author Brian Hall for our project.

To answer your question, yes, all the musicians are recording their own chapters. Since we have contributors from all around the world — from Berlin to Amsterdam to British Columbia — it would be a logistical nightmare to figure out where and when to record everyone. Not to mention the cost of it. One of the really cool things, I think, about this project — for everyone, it’s a labor of love. No one is making a profit, off any of this. People are just doing it because they love Joyce, or they’re obsessed with Finnegans Wake, or it just seems like a fun challenge to think creatively in this unique way. Either way it’s a pursuit of passion. That’s why we will distribute all the audio freely. There’s this phrase in Finnegans Wake, “Here Comes Everybody!” We’re having fun with Finnegans Wake and everybody is invited to the party. Continue reading “Derek Pyle Discusses Waywords and Meansigns, an Unabridged Musical Adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake” →

Ronald Fraser’s Drought (Book acquired, like, maybe two weeks ago)

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Between end of term papers and Gravity’s Rainbow, I’ve been a bit too busy to do more than glance at a lot of the review copies that have been coming in this month. But Ronald Fraser’s forthcoming novel Drought looks interesting.

Fraser, a British historian, was the founder of New Left Books, now Verso Books—publisher of Drought. Verso’s blurb:

A brilliant novel about memory, love, and the clash between the old world and the new, set in 1950s Spain
“He turned his back on the old man to mourn in silence this unnecessary death and his part in it; but the sight of the coffin brought anger instead …”

In 1957, burned-out journalist John leaves London to recover in the Andalusian haven of Benalamar. Here he finds a village that has not changed since the Civil War, but when a foreign businessman, Bob, comes with plans to develop the area, the community is sent into turmoil. As a time of drought threatens, Bob promises to build a reservoir but this has unforeseen consequences. When a local farmer, Miguel, commits suicide, John is sent off on an investigation that leads back into recent history, lost love, and civil war.

A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare’s. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,—the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanitycoördinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Shakspeare; Or, The Poet.” (And yes, he uses that two-e variant of Shakespeare’s name).

A first riff on rereading Gravity’s Rainbow (and some thoughts on Weisenburger’s Companion)

Edwin Turner4 Comments

I enjoy rereading more than reading. Returning to Moby-Dick, 2666, Ulysses, or Blood Meridian reveals so much more: More depth, more art, more structure, more precision, more humor, more pain, more more.

Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow is all more. Rereading Gravity’s Rainbow is like reading it for the first time, or, rather, more precisely, that is how I am experiencing it now—with clarity—compelled as I was to immediately circle back through its loop again.

Gravity’s Rainbow’s cohesion hides (hides is not the right verb) under detritus, in the flux of objects and concepts that tangle and unravel throughout the text. Indeed, the novel’s themes seem to repeat (with difference, with opposition) in the lists and rants that lard it.

A simple, early example comes on page 18, where Teddy Bloat turns spying eyes over our hero Tyrone Slothrop’s desk, where “Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom…” In A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, Steven Weisenburger points out that “Among the list of objects on Slothrop’s desk are items, allusions, and brand names left in his wake throughout the novel.” Weisenburger proceeds to sift through these layers, pointing out connections, and offering (as always) helpful page numbers which attest how damn precise Pynchon’s novel is.

I picked up Weisenburger’s Companion on solicited recommendations from Twitter folk and readers of this blog, and I’ve found it unobtrusive and helpful so far. Weisenburger’s introductory essay is especially good, and foregrounds his intertextual approach to his Companion (he all but namechecks Mikhail Bakhtin: “Gravity’s Rainbow sets in motion ‘the Night’s Mad Carnvival’ (V133.38) of intertextual entertainments”; a few lines later, he describes the novel as a work of “encyclopedic heteroglossia”). Weisenburger also quickly helped to (re)confirm my sense that GR loops back into itself, its end cycling back to its beginning: “Gravity’s Rainbow is ‘heterocyclic’ (V249.26): rings are looped together in still larger, polymerized rings, looped together in the still larger cycling of its four parts.”

I’m about halfway through the second of those four parts, “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering,” but still playing catch-up with the Weisenburger. I sometimes skim—sometimes with undue pride (Hey I got that reference on my own, thanks anyway Dr. W), and sometimes, admittedly with a vague but cheerful boredom (Weisenburger has an occasional tendency to lay out Pynchon’s source texts in detailed detail).

The Companion is at its finest, in my estimation, when Weisenburger extrapolates from his sources and contexts into GR’s deepest themes, like here, where our introduction to Gottfried (a seemingly minor character) branches into etymology, mythology, and comparative religion:

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(My favorite moment here is probably where Dr. W poses that question about Pynchon knowing Branston and Grimm, and then immediately answers it (in what I like to pretend is Robert Evans’s voice)).

While Weisenburger’s Companion often enlightens and clarifies, so does simply (or not so simply) rereading Gravity’s Rainbow enlighten and clarify the first reading. I’m thankful that I didn’t use Weisenburger’s book on my first full trip though GR. Sure, Companion hazards a number of plot spoilers, which I imagine would annoy many readers. But more significant to me is that using Weisenburger’s annotations as a first-timer’s guide through Pynchon’s detritus would have likely spoiled the aesthetic effect of that detritus. It would likely have spoiled some of the richness in the rereading that I’m enjoying so very much now.

Cool color signature covers

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Cool article from Wired (yeah it’s a few years old now but hey) about artist Jaz Parkinson, who indexed the references to colors in various novels and created visual signatures of them. From the article

 Jaz Parkinson, an art student from England, was curious about how the written imagery in the work would translate into color, so she decided to chart the color signatures of some of her favorite books.

Using the color-related data pulled from novels, Parkinson visualized how famous books would look if you could only read them through a visual signature. “I think the charts are beautiful and informative, which is a very special mix of the subjective and the objective,” she says. “They reveal a new dataset which hasn’t been associated with the book before.”
book-The-Little-Prince book-Revelation

Subtraction from reality

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At The Reading Experience, Daniel Green reviews David Winters’s Infinite Fictions. From the review:

Reckoning with literary qualities is something Winters does exceptionally well. Most of the books discussed in the first section of Infinite Fictions (“On Literature”) are complex, unconventional works of fiction, and Winters is painstaking in attempting to describe the strategies the author at hand seems to be using, to account for the effect of reading the work as registered in Winters’s own experience of it. As he says in the introduction to the book, “As a reviewer, all I can do is try to stay true to the texture of that experience. . . Strange as it sounds, each of these books briefly allowed me to subtract myself from reality. In this respect, when writing reviews, I’m less intent on making prescriptions than on exploring the space left by my subtraction.” Thus Winters attends to the specificity of the reading experience itself, something academic criticism generally abjures, while also avoiding the superficial approach of the most “trivial” kind of book reviews, the kind that aim merely to “make prescriptions.”

“Subtraction” from reality perhaps seems like a version of being “immersed” in a book, but I would presume Winters means something closer to what John Dewey called “pure experience,” which Dewey believed becomes most accessible to us as aesthetic experience.  According to Dewey, aesthetic experience is “experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse its development as experience; freed, that is, from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself.” The reader truly receptive to the kind of experience art, in this case literary art, makes available is not in some kind of mystical trance but is fully engaged in an act of what Dewey calls “recreation,” perceiving the writer’s conceptual and expressive moves thoroughly enough that the reader in effect replays those moves. Literary criticism then becomes in part the attempt to communicate the tenor of this reading experience through the most felicitous description and analytical insight the critic can muster.