Category: Writers

“The only form of discourse” (Donald Barthelme)

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“The only form of discourse of which I approve,” Miss R. said in her dry, tense voice, “is the litany. I believe our masters and teachers as well as plain citizens should confine themselves to what can safely be said. Thus when I hear the words pewter, snake, tea, Fad #6 sherry, serviette, fenestration, crown, blue coming from the mouth of some public official, or some raw youth, I am not disappointed. Vertical organisation is also possible,” Miss R. said, “ as in

pewter

snake

tea

fad #6 sherry

serviette

fenestration

crown

blue.

I run to liquids and colours,” she said, “but you, you may run to something else, my virgin,’ my darling, my thistle, my poppet, my own. Young people,” Miss R. said, “run to more and more unpleasant combinations as they sense the nature of our society. Some people,” Miss R. said, “run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.” I sat in solemn silence.

From Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Indian Uprising”; read the full story.

“Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog” (Thomas Bernhard)

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“Childhood is still running along beside us like a little dog who used to be a merry companion, but who now requires our care and splints, and myriad medicines, to prevent him from promptly passing on.” It went along rivers, and down mountain gorges. If you gave it any assistance, the evening would construct the most elaborate and costly lies. But it wouldn’t save you from pain and indignity. Lurking cats crossed your path with sinister thoughts. Like him, so nettles would sometimes draw me into fiendish moments of unchastity. As with him, my fear was made palatable by raspberries and blackberries. A swarm of crows were an instant manifestation of death. Rain produced damp and despair. Joy pearled off the crowns of sorrel plants. “The blanket of snow covers the earth like a sick child.” No infatuation, no ridicule, no sacrifice. “In classrooms, simple ideas assembled themselves, and on and on.” Then stores in town, butchers’ shop smells. Façades and walls, nothing but façades and walls, until you got out into the country again, quite abruptly, from one day to the next. Where the meadows began, yellow and green; brown plowland, black trees. Childhood: shaken down from a tree, so much fruit and no time! The secret of his childhood was contained in himself. Growing up wild, among horses, poultry, milk, and honey. And then: being evicted from this primal condition, bound to intentions that went way beyond himself. Designs. His possibilities multiplied, then dwindled in the course of a tearful afternoon. Down to three or four certainties. Immutable certainties. “How soon it is possible to spot dislike. Even without words, a child wants everything. And attains nothing.” Children are much more inscrutable than adults. “Protractors of history. Conscienceless. Correctors of history. Bringers-on of defeat. Ruthless as you please.” As soon as it could blow its own nose, a child was deadly to anything it came in touch with. Often—as it does me—it gives him a shock, when he feels a sensation he had as a child, provoked by a smell or a color, but that doesn’t remember him. “At such a moment you feel horribly alone.”

From Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost.

 

Facts, Questions, and Images from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

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  1. The Abyssinians, after dressing their hair, sleep with their heads in a forked stick, in order not to discompose it.
  2. At the battle of Edge Hill, October 23, 1642, Captain John Smith, a soldier of note, Captain Lieutenant to Lord James Stuart’s horse, with only a groom, attacked a Parliament officer, three cuirassiers, and three arquebusiers, and rescued the royal standard, which they had taken and were guarding. Was this the Virginian Smith?
  3. Stephen Gowans supposed that the bodies of Adam and Eve were clothed in robes of light, which vanished after their sin.
  4. Lord Chancellor Clare, towards the close of his life, went to a village church, where he might not be known, to partake of the Sacrament.
  5. In the tenth century, mechanism of organs so clumsy, that one in Westminster Abbey, with four hundred pipes, required twenty-six bellows and seventy stout men. First organ ever known in Europe received by King Pepin, from the Emperor Constantine, in 757. Water boiling was kept in a reservoir under the pipes; and, the keys being struck, the valves opened, and steam rushed through with noise. The secret of working them thus is now lost. Then came bellows organs, first used by Louis le Débonnaire.
  6. After the siege of Antwerp, the children played marbles in the streets with grape and cannon shot.
  7. A shell, in falling, buries itself in the earth, and, when it explodes, a large pit is made by the earth being blown about in all directions,–large enough, sometimes, to hold three or four cart-loads of earth. The holes are circular.
  8. A French artillery-man being buried in his military cloak on the ramparts, a shell exploded, and unburied him.
  9. In the Netherlands, to form hedges, young trees are interwoven into a sort of lattice-work; and, in time, they grow together at the point of junction, so that the fence is all of one piece.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.

 

Biblioklept Is Seven Today, So Here are Seven Sets of Seven Somethings

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Seven Reviews of Seven Books I Love

The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams Is a Perfect Novella

The Pale King — David Foster Wallace

Candide — Voltaire

I Riff on Clarice Lispector’s Novella The Hour of the Star, a Strange Work of Pity, Humor, Terror, and Abjection

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Intertexuality and Structure in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

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Seven Hands (Van Gogh)

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Seven Books I’d Like to Read Sometime in the Next Seven Years

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Seven Negative Reviews

Why I Abandoned Chad Harbach’s Over-Hyped Novel The Art of Fielding After Only 100 Pages

Jonathan Lethem’s Bloodless Prose

I Super Hated Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

The Instructions — Adam Levin

Sunset Park — Paul Auster

The Passage — Justin Cronin

The Sot-Weed Factor — John Barth

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Seven Ballerinas (Picasso)

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Seven Perfect Short Stories

“The Death of Me” — Gordon Lish

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” — Flannery O’Connor

“Emergency” — Denis Johnson

“The School” — Donald Barthelme

“Sweat” — Zora Neale Hurston

“Wakefield” — Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Good Old Neon” — David Foster Wallace

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Seven Deadly Sins (Bosch)

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“A Drinking Song” — W.B. Yeats

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“The Man Who Was Killed” — Denis Johnson

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Biblioklept’s Dictionary of Literary Terms

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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” — Jack London

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“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” →

“Abu Al-Anbas’ Donkey” – Eliot Weinberger

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“—you see you were always lost” (Thomas Bernhard)

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“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.

“Game” – Octavio Paz

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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.

“Beckett’s Theory of Tragedy” — Anne Carson

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World of Pains and Troubles (John Keats)

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—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).

Susan Sontag’s List of Novels with Cinematic Structure

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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).

Hannah/Nabokov/Mann (Books Acquired, 8.30.2013)

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“The Men Running Past” — Franz Kafka

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Watch This Terrible Book Trailer for Thomas Pynchon’s New Novel Bleeding Edge (Or Don’t)

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I don’t know, I’m guessing this is intentionally awful. I mean, book trailers are supposed to be awful, right?