APHORISM
A concise, often witty, turn of phrase that should be shared out of context on Twitter or Pinterest.
BILDUNGSROMAN
Novel where someone (preferably male) matures into the ideal state of bitter disillusionment.
CATHARSIS
Evocation of fear and pity. Best exemplified in modern storytelling by Lifetime Network original movies.
DECONSTRUCTION
A form of textual analysis. No one knows what it means. Apply liberally.
EXISTENTIALIST
Use to describe any French novel of the 20th century. Serve with coffee and cigarettes.
FOIL
First, Outer, Inner, Last.
GENRE FICTION
Deride genre fiction at all times. If a writer uses genre tropes, praise her for genre bending. (See LITERARY FICTION).
HYSTERICAL REALISM
Use to describe any big ambitious novel that does not meet your aesthetic and/or moral needs.
IAMBIC PENTAMETER
All poetry is composed in iambic pentameter.
JUVENILIA
A writer’s immature work, which she usually (wisely) withholds from publication. After the writer dies, every scrap should be published, scrutinized, and passed around the internet out of context.
KAKFAESQUE
Synonym for “odd.” Apply freely.
LITERARY FICTION
A genre of fiction that pretends not to be a genre. What your book club is reading this month.
MAGICAL REALISM
Use to describe any novel by a South American writer.
NARRATOLOGY
Use structuralist techniques to analyze narrative plots—and watch the kids go wild! Narratology is the number one thing the audience of a book review is interested in.
ORPHAN
All heroes must be orphans.
PANOPTICON
Use this term liberally in any discussion of modern politics. Pairs well with film studies courses.
QUEER THEORY
A form of literary analysis that conveniently begins with the letter “Q,” making it ideal for silly alphabetized lists like this one.
ROUND CHARACTER
A character portrayed in psychological and emotional depth to the degree that she comes alive in your imagination. Round characters provide an excellent alternative to making meaningful human relationships.
SOUTHERN GOTHIC
Use to describe the style of any writer from the Southern part of the United States.
TAUTOLOGY
A tautology is a tautology.
UTOPIA
Synonym for dystopia. Argue about its pronunciation, indicating that you understand the complexities of Greek prefixes.
VERISIMILITUDE
Literary trickery.
WHODUNNIT
A genre of books that sells well in airports.
XENA
Beloved warrior princess. Look, x is hard, okay?
YOUNG WERTHER
The original sad bastard; he invented emo.
ZEITGEIST
Time’s ghost. You’re soaking in it, which makes it hard to see.
“The Hobo and the Fairy” by Jack London
He lay on his back. So heavy was his sleep that the stamp of hoofs and cries of the drivers from the bridge that crossed the creek did not rouse him. Wagon after wagon, loaded high with grapes, passed the bridge on the way up the valley to the winery, and the coming of each wagon was like the explosion of sound and commotion in the lazy quiet of the afternoon.
But the man was undisturbed. His head had slipped from the folded newspaper, and the straggling, unkempt hair was matted with the foxtails and burrs of the dry grass on which it lay. He was not a pretty sight. His mouth was open, disclosing a gap in the upper row where several teeth at some time had been knocked out. He breathed stertorously, at times grunting and moaning with the pain of his sleep. Also, he was very restless, tossing his arms about, making jerky, half-convulsive movements, and at times rolling his head from side to side in the burrs. This restlessness seemed occasioned partly by some internal discomfort, and partly by the sun that streamed down on his face and by the flies that buzzed and lighted and crawled upon the nose and cheeks and eyelids. There was no other place for them to crawl, for the rest of the face was covered with matted beard, slightly grizzled, but greatly dirt-stained and weather-discolored.
The cheek-bones were blotched with the blood congested by the debauch that was evidently being slept off. This, too, accounted for the persistence with which the flies clustered around the mouth, lured by the alcohol-laden exhalations. He was a powerfully built man, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, with sinewy wrists and toil-distorted hands. Yet the distortion was not due to recent toil, nor were the callouses other than ancient that showed under the dirt of the one palm upturned. From time to time this hand clenched tightly and spasmodically into a fist, large, heavy-boned and wicked-looking.
The man lay in the dry grass of a tiny glade that ran down to the tree-fringed bank of the stream. On either side of the glade was a fence, of the old stake-and-rider type, though little of it was to be seen, so thickly was it overgrown by wild blackberry bushes, scrubby oaks and young madrono trees. In the rear, a gate through a low paling fence led to a snug, squat bungalow, built in the California Spanish style and seeming to have been compounded directly from the landscape of which it was so justly a part. Neat and trim and modestly sweet was the bungalow, redolent of comfort and repose, telling with quiet certitude of some one that knew, and that had sought and found. Continue reading ““The Hobo and the Fairy” — Jack London”
“You just arrive in a place,” said the painter,“ and then you leave it again, and yet everything, every single object you take in, is the sum of its prehistory. The older you become, the less you think about the connections you’ve already established. Table, cow, sky, stream, stone, tree, they’ve all been studied. Now they just get handled. Objects, the harmonic range of invention, completely unappreciated, no more truck with variation, deepening, gradation. You just try to work out the big connections. Suddenly you look into the macro-structure of the world, and you discover it: a vast ornament of space, nothing else. Humble backgrounds, vast replications—you see you were always lost. As you get older, thinking becomes a tormenting reference mechanism. No merit to it. I say ‘tree,’ and I see huge forests. I say ‘river,’ and I see every river. I say ‘house,’ and I see cities with their seas of roofs. I say ‘snow,’ and I see oceans of it. A thought sets off the whole thing. Where it takes art is to think small as well as big, to be present on every scale …”
From Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost.
I’ll plunder seasons.
I’ll play with months and years.
Winter days with the red faces of summer.And down the gray road,
in the silent parade
of hard, unmoving days,
I’ll organize the blues and gymnastics.A rippling morning
of painted lips,
cool, as though just bathed,
with an autumn dawn.And I’ll catch the clouds–
red, blue, purple–
and throw them against the inexpressive paper
of the black and blue sky,
so that they’ll write a letter
in the universal language
to their good friend the wind.To help the shopkeepers,
I’ll make luminous billboards,
with spotlights of stars.Maybe I’ll assassinate a dawn
so that, bleeding,
it will stain a white cloud purple.In the shop of the seasons,
I’ll sell ripe autumn apples
wrapped in the paper of winter mists.I’ll kidnap Spring,
to have her in my house,
like a ballerina.The wind will change its schedule.
Unpredictable crossings of the clouds.And down the highway of the Future, I’ll rush toward Winter,
for the surprise of meeting it later,
mixed with Summer.On the green felt of space,
I’ll bet on days
that will roll like dice.I’ll play with months and years.
Octavio Paz’s first unpublished poem, 1931. Translated by Eliot Weinberger.
—The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is ‘a vale of tears’ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven–What a little circumscribed straightened notion! call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making’ Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say “Soul making” Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence– There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions–but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception–they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God–how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them–so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain religion–or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation–This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years–These Materials are the Intelligence–the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive–and yet I think I perceive it–that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible–I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read–I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity–As various as the Lives of Men are–so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence–“
—From a letter John Keats wrote to his brother George, dated April 21, 1810. (More excerpts from Keats’s letters with commentary).
Novels with cinematic structure:
Hemingway, In Our Time
Faulkner,
[Horace] McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Robbe-Grillet, Les Gommes [The Erasers]
[Georges] Bernanos, M. Ouine
I[vy] Compton-Burnett,
V Woolf, Between the Acts
Philip Toynbee, Tea with Mrs. Goodman
des Forêts, Les Mendiants
his first novel—multiple pov [points of view]
[Barnes,] Nightwood
Reverzy, Le Passage
Burroughs,
[John] Dos Passos
Firbank, Caprice; Vainglory; and [Inclinations] (trilogy)
Jap[anese] writer [Yasunari Kawabata] (N.B. visual sense, suppleness of changing scenes)—Snow Country, etc.
Dickens (cf. Eisenstein)—
There are people who thought with camera eye (a unified p-o-v that displaces itself) before the camera
N[athaniel] West,
Blechman
“new novelists”: Claude Simon, Le Palace
Claude Ollier, La Mis-en-Scène
(all based on organization of a decor (N[orth] Africa)
–From an entry dated 6/26/66 Paris in Susan Sontag’s notebook, published as part of As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. (I’ve maintained the bracketed editorial intrusions of the published text, even with they did not seem necessary).
I don’t know, I’m guessing this is intentionally awful. I mean, book trailers are supposed to be awful, right?
“Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
Bernhard is an architect of consciousness more than a narrative storyteller. His project is not to reference the known world, stuffing it with fully rounded characters who commence to discover their conflicts with one another, but to erect complex states of mind-usually self-loathing, obsessive ones-and then set about destroying them. Bernhard’s characters are thorough accomplices in their own destruction, and they are bestowed with a language that is dementedly repetitive and besotted with the appurtenances of logical thinking. The devious rationality of Bernhard’s language strives for a severe authority, and it tends to make his characters seem believable, no matter how unhinged their claims. Phrases don’t get repeated so much as needled until they yield graver meanings, with incremental changes introduced as though a deranged scientist were adding and removing substances in the performance of an experiment. “You wake up, and you feel molested,” Strauch says:
In fact: the hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers :a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast! When you go out on the street you are subject to the gravest possible molestations. You are unable to shield yourself. You lay about yourself, but it’s no use. The blows you dole out are returned a hundred fold. What are streets, anyway? Wendings of molestation, up and down. Squares? Bundled together molestations.
Without a story to drive it, Frost builds not through unfolding events but by telemarking around Strauch’s bitter cosmology while the narrator follows him through the woods, fattening himself on the rage of his new mentor. A chart of Strauch’s worldview would produce a splotchy Rorschach of points and counterpoints, contradictions, reversals, and the occasional backflip, none of which could really hold up to a logician’s scrutiny, which adds to his mystery. Strauch, a failed artist who only painted in total darkness, is opposed to nearly everything, and lest you think he’s a humanist at the core, with a fondness for the arts (that classic virtue of the misanthrope), he claims that “artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet.”
From Ben Marcus’s 2011 essay “Misery Loves Nothing,” first published in Harper’s and available in full for free at Marcus’s site. I’m about halfway through Bernhard’s early novel Frost, a book that is very dark, bitter, intriguing, and funny. Very very funny.
The Impersonator, a mystery by Mary Miley. Publisher Macmillan/Minotaur’s blurb:
In 1917, Jessie Carr, fourteen years old and sole heiress to her family’s vast fortune, disappeared without a trace. Now, years later, her uncle Oliver Beckett thinks he’s found her: a young actress in a vaudeville playhouse is a dead ringer for his missing niece. But when Oliver confronts the girl, he learns he’s wrong. Orphaned young, Leah’s been acting since she was a toddler.
Oliver, never one to miss an opportunity, makes a proposition—with his coaching, Leah can impersonate Jessie, claim the fortune, and split it with him. The role of a lifetime, he says. A one-way ticket to Sing Sing, she hears. But when she’s let go from her job, Oliver’s offer looks a lot more appealing. Leah agrees to the con, but secretly promises herself to try and find out what happened to the real Jessie. There’s only one problem: Leah’s act won’t fool the one person who knows the truth about Jessie’s disappearance.
Set against a Prohibition-era backdrop of speakeasies and vaudeville houses, Mary Miley’s Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition winner The Impersonator will delight readers with its elaborate mystery and lively prose.
Biblioklept 