Reborn — Susan Sontag

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New in trade paperback next week from Picador, Reborn collects the early private writings of Susan Sontag, beginning in 1947 when she was just fourteen. The book begins with the following salvo from 1947: “I believe: (a) That there is no personal god or life after death.” If the phrase seems awfully definitive for such a young person to write, its terse tone is repeatedly undercut in other places in Sontag’s early journals, like when she asks “What does the expression ‘in his cups’ mean?” (he’s drunk, sweetheart). There’s also something almost cute about her entry from 12/19/48: “There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read–Here are just a few.” I feel the same way myself. She goes on to list over 20 authors and titles, including Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer. Sontag’s immediate, visceral, and sometimes raw reactions to whatever she’s reading, hearing, and watching, make up a good bulk of Reborn, and there’s something fun, if inessential, to know that she read Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza and James’s Portrait of a Lady in January of 1950.

Don’t expect, of course, to get a definitive sense of who Sontag was, let alone a narrative account of her life here. Subtitled Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963, Reborn veers closer to the “notebook” side of things. The book certainly doesn’t feel like its 320 pages, mostly because it’s comprised of lists, notes, half-poems, and half-ideas–with the occasional major insight or life-changing moment thrown in in an almost alarmingly casual tone. Check the following consecutive entries:

11/21/50

Excellently staged performance of Don Giovanni last night (City Center). Today, a wonderful opportunity was offered me–to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff, who is working on, among other things, a reader in the sociology of politics + religion. At last the chance to really involve myself in one area with competent guidance.

12/2/50

Last night, or was it early this (Sat.) morning?–I am engaged to Philip Rieff.

If there’s more to this episode in Sontag’s journal, her son David Rieff, the book’s editor, has chosen to elide it (although he has included that, as early as 12/19/56, if his mother is to be believed, he knew “the difference between a sarcophagus and an esophagus”). In an introduction loaded with much hemming and hawing, Rieff acknowledges the rawness of his mother’s private diaries, noting that they were written only for Sontag herself, who had no intention of publishing them. (Rieff’s decision to publish them is an issue of control: Sontag had sold her all of her writing and papers to UCLA and Rieff felt that assuming an editorial role might protect his mother to some extent). And, as one would expect of the notes of a young college student, nothing here is even remotely polished: like the adolescent who so easily denies an afterlife, many of Sontag’s notes and thoughts come across as callow, or at least not on par with the intellectual who gave us On Photography and “Notes on ‘Camp.'” A note from 1/2/58 comes across as painfully emo: “How to make my sadness more than a lament for feeling? How to feel? How to burn? How to make anguish metaphysical?” Not that these are unserious questions, but methinks someone’s been hitting the Kierkegaard a bit too hard. When Sontag the diarist steps in–that is to say, the diarist who reflects honestly, as opposed to the academic pulling philosophical poses–we get brusque honesty full of pathos. In a note from 1960, after briefly discussing how her mother’s conflict-aversion led to “the idea that honesty equaled cruelty,” Sontag drops this shocker: “No matter what I have said, my life, my actions say that I have not loved the truth, that I have not wanted the truth.” While I don’t particularly demand self-reflection, this kind of honesty is both rare and affecting coming from an academic.

But why should we expect Sontag’s private journals to be more than they are? It’s more fun to read Reborn elliptically, picking it up and putting it down, browsing through Sontag’s lists of movies, quotes from Rilke and Blake, and various thought-experiments. From 11/4/57:

“Try whiskey. To find a voice. To speak.

Instead of talking.

[ . . . ]

Are the Jews played out? I am proud of being Jewish. Of what?

[ . . . ]

Orc–imaginary mailed beast, dragon, ogre, named after a sea-monster killed by Orlando, in Ariosto’s Orlando Furious

Whiskey, Jews, Orcs–great stuff.

We’ll conclude with one of our favorite moments in the book, which is simply a list of words. In one of the few contextual notes Rieff concedes, he notes that all her life, “SS made lists of words into which she occasionally inserted a person’s name or a brief observation.” The list is from the fall of 1949:

effete

noctambulus

perfervid

detumescence

disheveled

so alluring, so cerebral

sodden

intriguing

corrupt dignity

lotophagous

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Blood’s a Rover — James Ellroy

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A few things up front: this can’t really be a proper review of James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover as I’m less than a 100 pages into it and its over a 600 pages long. So far though, the book is fantastic, and has completely ameliorated my mistaken impression of what, exactly, Ellroy is doing. You see, I had long thought of Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia, as a writer of potboiler genre-fiction–which is to say I never considered him a “serious” writer. But when advanced press for Blood’s a Rover came out, I couldn’t help but ask for a review copy. The idea of an alternate history of the late sixties/early seventies, set to a backdrop of black militant movements, Cuban revolution, and heroin dealing, complete with historical figures like Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover seemed pretty cool.

The opening scene of Blood’s a Rover, a breathtaking armored car robbery, quickly establishes the book’s tense, terse pacing telegraphed through Ellroy’s signature simple sentences (his style: subject-verb-object, repeat–with the occasional clause or adjective thrown in for flair). Ellroy’s rhetorical style perfectly matches his plot, as sentence after sentence hammers away depictions of lurid, unrelenting violence. In a sense, Blood’s comes across as the evil twin of Thomas Pynchon’s recent novel Inherent Vice. Both novels threaten to crush the reader under the densities of their plots, yet, where Pynchon allows his hippie detective Doc Sportello’s marijuana haze to infiltrate (and thus lighten) the novel’s discourse, Ellroy’s technique simply compounds and confounds in its ugliness. But don’t be mistaken–Blood’s is a thrilling book, with tightly-drawn characters doing really mean and interesting things. There’s even a sardonic sense of humor under the punchy grisliness of it all. If Pynchon’s universe propels on the paranoia of not knowing but sensing that the Powers That Be are conspiring against you, Ellroy makes it expressly clear that, yes, a sinister cabal of underworld agents are running the show. And not for the better. Even the novel’s hero Wayne Tedrow Jr. is pretty much a creep (or whatever word you want to pick for a heroin runner who kills his dad in a bid for his step mom’s affection)–but he’s a fascinating creep, and in Ellroy’s plotting, one you want to root for.

So, if you’ve had any passing interest in this book, you probably want to go ahead and pick it up. I’ll do a full, proper review when I finish it, but for now, I want to repent for my erstwhile (and unfounded) prejudices against Ellroy. Makes me wonder what other writers I’ve dismissed out of genre prejudice.

Blood’s a Rover is now available in hardback from Knopf.

My Father’s Bonus March — Adam Langer

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Early in his new memoir My Father’s Bonus March, Adam Langer writes: “It seems appropriate that the most dramatic event in my relationship with my father might be one that I can’t actually remember happening.” Langer then goes on to describe a particularly colorful episode at an old-timey barbershop, wherein he, as a young lad, chokes on a piece of hard candy and is saved by his dad. “My father would never tell me this story,” Langer concludes, revealing the sense of disconnection at the heart of his book. Simply put, My Father’s Bonus March is Langer’s attempt to know, or at least understand his father. Strangely, he uses his father’s passion for a little-remembered event in American history as a means to better know his father, who passed away in 2005, leaving Langer with a sense of unfinished business.

In 1932, a group of WWI Veterans and their families (and sympathizers) camped out in Washington D.C. in protest: it was the middle of the Great Depression and the vets were demanding the bonuses they were promised. (The book’s jacket calls this “a forgotten moment in American history, but I’d like to go on record that, after the intensive hell that was Ms. Bone’s first-period AP US History class, I knew exactly what the bonus march was before I got the review copy). Langer’s father was seven at the time of the protest, but his father served in WWI, and, in any case, it left enough of an impression on him that writing a book on the subject became a life-long dream. Langer’s project is to complete that dream–which he does, quite successfully. Langer’s historical investigation is thorough without dreariness; he draws not just from first-hand sources, like newspapers and editorials covering the march, but also the memoirs and diaries of figures like Eisenhower and Studs Terkel, as well as the work of novelists like John Dos Passos. He even interviews neocon Norman Podhoretz and Bonus March aficionado John Kerry.

Langer’s scholarship is successful, but more affective are his interviews with people who knew his father, including cousins, neighbors, and classmates. Langer has the good sense to present their comments as first-hand accounts, presented with little context. Their stories build a concrete, vivid depiction of Langer’s predominantly Jewish old Chicago West Side neighborhood (“‘GVS’ is what we called it. The Great Vest Side,” one witness recalls). I wish Langer had employed this straightforward documentary technique more often in his memoir as its succinctness and clarity achieves an emotional immediacy in contrast to Langer’s prose passages, which sometimes come across as sentimental or too-artfully constructed. This is simply a matter of taste, of course; I prefer my memoirs raw, and I occasionally found myself grimacing at some of Langer’s constructions, like a trip with his brother to the Hoover Presidential Library or the opening scene with his daughter on the stoop.

At its core, My Father’s Bonus March successfully evokes the reality of one of literature’s oldest narratives–the attempt of the son to know his elusive father (Telemachus and Odysseus, Oedipus and Laius, Stephen and Simon Dedalus, etc.), and it does so with affecting aplomb. Whether we really need another story about a son trying to understand his distant dad is beside the point–Langer has found an inventive and rewarding way to do so. I can’t end without mentioning that at the same time I was reading Bonus March, I also happened to read another memoir about a son trying to better understand his elusive father, Stephen Elliott’s recent essay “My Father’s Murder” (published in last month’s issue of The Believer). Elliot’s terse, frank, reportorial style is in direct contrast with Langer’s overt sentimentality, yet both authors are working toward the same theme–one that clearly resonates across styles and genres. With this in mind, I think plenty of readers out there will both identify with and enjoy Langer’s memoir.

My Father’s Bonus March is available October 20th, 2009 from Spiegel & Grau.

Seven Horror Novels Masquerading In Other Genres

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We often identify genre simply by its conventions and tropes, and, when October rolls round and we want scary stories, we look for vampires and haunted houses and psycho killers and such. And while there’s plenty of great stuff that adheres to the standard conventions of horror (Lovecraft and Poe come immediately to mind) let’s not overlook novels that offer horror just as keen as any genre exercise. We offer seven horror novels masquerading in other genres:

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Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy

In our review (link above) we called Blood Meridian “a blood-soaked, bloodthirsty bastard of a book.” The story of the Glanton gang’s insane rampage across Mexico and the American Southwest in the 1850s is pure horror. Rape, scalping, dead mules, etc. And Judge Holden. . . [shivers].

Rushing to Paradise — J.G. Ballard

On the surface, Ballard’s 1994 novel Rushing to Paradise seems to be a parable about the hubris of ecological extremism that would eliminate humanity from any natural equation. Dr. Barbara and her band of misfit environmentalists try to “save” the island of St. Esprit from France’s nuclear tests. The group eventually begin living in a cult-like society with Dr. Barbara as its psycho-shaman center. As Dr. Barbara’s anti-humanism comes to outweigh any other value, the island devolves into Lord of the Flies insanity. Wait, should Lord of the Flies be on this list? 

2666 — Roberto Bolaño

Okay. We know. This book ends up on every list we write. What can we do?

While there’s humor and pathos and love and redemption in Bolaño’s masterwork, the longest section of the book, “The Part about the Crimes,” is an unrelenting catalog of vile rapes, murders, and mutilations that remain unresolved. The sinister foreboding of 2666‘s narrative heart overlaps into all of its sections (as well as other Bolaño books); part of the tension in the book–and what makes Bolaño such a gifted writer–is the visceral tension we experience when reading even the simplest  incidents. In the world of 2666, a banal episode like checking into a motel or checking the answering machine becomes loaded with Lynchian dread. Great horrific stuff.

King Lear — William Shakespeare

Macbeth gets all the propers as Shakespeare’s great work of terror (and surely it deserves them). But Lear doesn’t need to dip into the stock and store of the supernatural to achieve its horror. Instead, Shakespeare crafts his terror at the familial level. What would you do if your ungrateful kids humiliated you and left you homeless on the heath? Go a little crazy, perhaps? And while Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan are pure mean evil, few characters in Shakespeare’s oeuvre are as crafty and conniving as Edmund, the bastard son of Glouscester. And, lest we forget to mention, Lear features shit-eating, self-mutilation, a grisly tableaux of corpses, and an eye-gouging accompanied by one of the Bard’s most enduring lines: “Out vile jelly!” Peter Brook chooses to elide the gore in his staging of that infamous scene:

The Trial — Franz Kafka

Kafka captured the essential alienation of the modern world so well that we not only awarded him his own adjective, we also tend to forget how scary his stories are in light, perhaps, of their absurd familiarity. For our money, none surpasses his unfinished novel The Trial, the story of hapless Josef K., a bank clerk arrested by unknown agents for an unspecified crime. While much of K.’s attempt to figure out just who is charging him for what is hilarious in its absurdity, its also deeply dark and really creepy. K. attempts to find some measure of agency in his life, but is ultimately thwarted by forces he can’t comprehend–or even see for that matter. Nowhere is this best expressed than in the famous “Before the Law” episode. If you’re too lazy to read it, check out his animation with narration by the incomparable Orson Welles:

Sanctuary — William Faulkner

In our original review of Sanctuary (link above), we noted that “if you’re into elliptical and confusing depictions of violence, drunken debauchery, creepy voyeurism, and post-lynching sodomy, Sanctuary just might be the book for you.” There’s also a corn-cob rape scene. The novel is about the kidnapping and debauching of Southern belle Temple Drake by the creepy gangster Popeye–and her (maybe) loving every minute of it. The book is totally gross. We got off to a slow start with Faulkner. If you take the time to read our full review above (in which we make some unkind claims) please check out our retraction. In retrospect, Sanctuary is a proto-Lynchian creepfest, and one of the few books we’ve read that has conveyed a total (and nihilistic) sense of ickyness.

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Great Apes — Will Self

Speaking of ickiness…Self’s 1997 novel Great Apes made me totally sick. Nothing repulses me more than images of chimpanzees dressed as humans and Great Apes is the literary equivalent (just look at that cover). After a night of binging on coke and ecstasy, artist Simon Dykes wakes up to find himself in a world where humans and apes have switched roles. Psychoanalysis ensues. While the novel is in part a lovely satire of emerging 21st-century mores, its humor doesn’t outweigh its nightmare grotesquerie. Great Apes so deeply affected us that we haven’t read any of Self’s work since.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” — Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of our all-time favorite scary stories. Poe’s story explores the troubled mind of a murderer suffering from manic bipolar depression. Or maybe it’s all about the suppression of dark secrets. Is the Evil Eye an “evil I”? I think so! Dig this great animation from 1953, featuring the vocal talents of James Mason:

Asterios Polyp — David Mazzucchelli

Edwin Turner2 Comments

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Let’s get a few things straight from the get-go: David Mazzuchelli’s graphic novel Asterios Polyp is a masterpiece, an unequivocal advancement of its medium, and an unqualified joy to read. It’s also not only one of the best books we’ve read this year, but also this decade. While such breathless enthusiasm might seem suspect, even a cursory look over Asterios Polyp will reveal that Mazzucchelli has produced a fully-realized work, one that fundamentally reimagines what a graphic novel is, and how it might be read.

Asterios Polyp is a boorish, solipsistic “paper architect” and tenured professor (none of his designs have ever actually been built) whose life goes to shambles after his sensitive wife Hana leaves him. The novel opens with a lightning strike that literally destroys everything that Asterios owns. He grabs three key items–his father’s old lighter, a magnetically-powered watch he bought as a child, and a Swiss Army knife he found on the beach–and hits the road, heading into the great, normal Midwest, where he takes a job as an auto mechanic (in a lovely scene, Asterios the autodidact, after accepting his new job, heads to the library to learn auto repair in an hour). Asterios’s kindly boss Stiff and his hippie wife Ursula take in the poor soul/arrogant prick. As the plot unfolds, Mazzucchelli contrasts Asterios’s past, full of faculty cocktail parties, affairs with grad students, and highbrow conversations, with his incremental rebirth into a more concrete world. “Be not simply good; be good for something,” said Henry David Thoreau–a lesson that Asterios slowly learns as he finally applies his skill and genius to real-world applications, like building a tree house for the couple’s son and creating a solar-powered Cadillac. Asterios’s emergence as a fully-realized human being contrasts sharply with hist past. Although he clearly loved his wife Hana, he was unable to appreciate her as anything other than a prop in relation to himself–how she complimented him, added to him, reflected on him. The flashback scenes with Hana are keenly realistic and loaded with genuine pathos. They are the heart of the novel.

Asterios’s twin brother Ignazio narrates the novel, only there’s a catch–Ignazio died at birth. This trope of twinning underscores Asterios Polyp‘s philosophical thrust. Asterios, in an attempt to understand (and thus control, at least figuratively) the universe, attempts to systematize it in his own intellectual yet limited projections. For Asterios, the world is all duality–life and death, in and out, form and content, exterior and interior, plastic and linear, black and white. Although he’s willing to make pragmatic concessions to shades of gray–Mazzucchelli is far-too savvy to have his lead as a flat, unrealistic allegorical figure–Asterios’s unrelenting idealism nonetheless repeatedly foils any chance for real happiness. Mazzucchelli’s discussions of philosophy, art history, and human relationships are never heavy-handed and always thought-provoking. Beyond this, his cartooning synthesizes words and art to a new level, one in which form and content are seamless, contiguous, and purposeful.

What, exactly, do we mean by this? To put it plain, there are few graphic novels that reinvent the possibilities of the medium. A handful of examples spring to mind: Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Dave Sim’s Cerebus, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Like Asterios Polyp, these books envision the graphic novel as more than just “pictures + words.” Mazzucchelli utilizes every tool at his disposal. It’s not just his obvious talent as a cartoonist whose inks recall the best work of Will Eisner. It’s not just his fantastic scripting and dialogue (undoubtedly the most neglected facet of the comics medium). It’s also his sense of space, the rhythm of his panels, the perfection of not just each page but the cohesion of all the pages. It’s also the beautiful palette of Asterios Polyp, its codified world of pastels, purples and yellow, blues and pinks, and its spare oranges and reds. It’s also the lettering, where Mazzucchelli achieves something that I haven’t seen done properly since Dave Sim: he gives each character a unique, personal tone, simply through the shape of their words.

Of course, none of Mazzucchelli’s craft and technique would matter if his story wasn’t so compelling. There’s poignancy and pathos in the tale of Asterios Polyp, and we find ourselves rooting for him as he earns his redemption. And none of Asterios’s journey feels forced, a rarity these days it seems. Instead, there’s unexpected beauty here, especially as the novel unwinds–or perhaps, winds up–to its rewarding end. For the record, we’d absolutely love to discuss the last few pages of this book with anyone who’s read it–have you read it? Why haven’t you read it yet? Without spoilers, let’s just say that the conclusion is both fitting and bewildering, satisfying and yet maddening, a perfect cohesion of the book’s thematic exploration of dualities (and the pitfalls of choosing to codify the world into a series of those dualities). Mazzucchelli’s been around forever (you probably remember him, like me, from his early work with Frank Miller on Daredevil and the groundbreaking “Year One” arc of Batman). Amazingly, this is his first solo graphic novel. Hopefully he won’t keep us waiting so long for the next one. Do yourself a favor and get this book now. Very highly recommended.

Asterios Polyp is now available from Pantheon Graphic Novels.

The Vampire Archives

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Vampire Archive 4

In his short foreword to Vintage’s massive, new, decidedly unshort The Vampire Archives, Neil Gaiman dryly observes, “And then, one day, they were everywhere. You couldn’t move for vampires. There were paranormal vampire romances and junior paranormal vampire romances . . . Everywhere vampires, stripped down like a simple metaphor for genitalia-free relationships.” We know that vampires are ubiquitous in the late oughties, whether its the turgid teen abstinence vampire theatrics of Twilight,  HBO’s addictive interpretation of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series, True Blood, the CW’s latest attempt to cash in, The Vampire Diaries or last year’s fantastic film Let The Right One In. Gamian’s theory for the thriving popularity of vampires (he agrees with Stephen King by-way-of Erica Jong that “Vampires . . . were the ultimate zipless fuck”) is as good as any, we suppose, but The Vampire Archives editor Otto Penzler is a bit more historical in his introduction to the volume, pointing beyond the traditionally-accepted notion that Stoker’s Dracula is the first vampire story. Penzler brings up Lilith, the children of Hecate, Lamia, the Chinese monster Kian-si, brain-suckers of American Indian lore, the Scottish Glaistag, and the Brazilian jararaca–just to name a few. He also briefly discusses the lurid histories of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who believed the blood of virgins would sustain her life, die-hard mad prophet Rasputin, and Vlad the Impaler, the historical basis of Count Dracula. Penzler’s eclectic overture here tellingly highlights the diversity of the 85-plus tales collected in the book.

There are “Pre-Dracula” stories here, like Edgar Allan Poe’s gloomy “Ligeia” and M.E. Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne,” as well as classic standards like Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest” and Jan Neruda’s “The Vampire.” Heavy-hitters like D.H. Lawrence and Guy de Maupassant are represented along with the pop fictions of Stephen King and Clive Barker. Especially welcome are Harlan Ellison’s insightful piece “Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time” and Richard Matheson’s taut tale “Drink My Red Blood.” Writers often identified readily with genres other than horror, like Ray Bradbury, Tanith Lee, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also appear, along with a couple of Romantic poems by Goethe, Byron, and John Keats (while the inclusion of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is great, it’s weird that The Vampire Archives doesn’t have just a little more room for Keats’s excellent “Lamia.” They could’ve also included Coleridge’s “Christabel,” but hey, we can hardly dispute their claim that the book is “The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published”). Anne Rice pops up, naturally, with “The Master of Rampling Gate,” which wasn’t too emo for our icy blood. We also enjoyed H.P. Lovecraft’s creepy and sinuous story “The Hound.” Grave-robbers, weird amulets, ghoulish killers–great stuff.

If you can’t find enough to feed your need for vampire tales in The Vampire Archives, they’ve been kind enough to include what has to be, at 120 pages, one of the most extensive vampire bibliographies ever–although they note that their list does not include “comics, games, movies, plays, television, or radio programs.” While not every story here is gold, more than most of The Vampire Archives is great gothic fun, whether you dig pulp fiction or psychological realism in your horror. If you’re ready to take the next step past Twilight–you’re not a poseur, are you?–The Vampire Archives is an apt starting place.

October Reading List

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October is here–time to read (or reread) favorite scary stories, watch our favorite horror films, and carve up Jack O’ Lanterns. We have a couple of spooky reviews coming up (vampires!) but in the meantime, those searching for a good horror read can troll through a few older posts. Biblioklept: Lazy blogging at its best since 2006.

Two of our favorite posts ever are analyses of the scary stories our students wrote for extra-credit in’06 and ’07. Not sure what happened in ’08, but the ’09 contest is in full effect, yo.

For good horrific fun, check out Quirk Book’s recent Jane Austen mash-ups Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

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One of our favorite books ever is From Hell, by Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore. If you haven’t read it yet, that should be your sacred Halloween mission in ’09.

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My glorious alma mater, the University of Florida, had a lovely zombie preparedness plan at their official website–up until a day or two ago. When university officials were alerted to the pdf (written in full academic language, complete with citations!) they quickly removed it. Too bad. It was really fun and funny. Don’t worry though, you can still download the official document here.

As non-scary (or at least not overtly-scary) reading goes, we’ve got a pretty big stack of books we vow to get through in October, including W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Julio Cortázar’s Blow-up and Other Stories, and the newest issue of McSweeney’s. There’s also a ton of promos of upcoming releases to wade through.

Back to the scaries–check out the Brothers Quay illustrating His Name Is Alive’s “Are We Still Married?”:

Proust 101

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For the next week, October 1st-7th 2009, the folks who brought you Patrick Alexander’s guide to Marcel Proust, Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time will host a series of 140-character “lectures” about Proust’s oeuvre on Twitter. The course will repeat on the week of the 8th. The press release includes the following grading component:

Picture 1We’re pretty sure the grading plan is fairly tongue in cheek, but the lectures might be fun, and perhaps might contain something a bit more substantial than the average, uh, tweet (ugh). More at Proust Guide. There’s also a chance to win free Proust stuff for those who participate in the Proust Questionnaire on Facebook, so check that out too. In the meantime, we got a kick out of this “Shocking Things You Didn’t Know about Marcel Proust” flier that came with the press release:

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Bicycle Diaries – David Byrne

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David Byrne’s new book, Bicycle Diaries (new in hardback from Viking), is an engaging, discursive, and often meditative memoir about the Talking Heads founder’s strange experiences bicycling through some of the world’s most distinct cities. Byrne uses W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (one of our favorite books) as an entry point for his book. Like Sebald, Byrne attempts to synthesize history, memory, art, architecture, philosophy, science, and a host of other subjects in his writings on cities like Berlin, London, Manila, Istanbul, and San Francisco. The result is a book that is profound and very readable; Byrne communicates complex ideas in ways that are both fun to read and also highly relevant to an age of changing attitudes about how we are to get where we are going.

While hardly a political screed, Bicycle Diaries does contain a central argument: plainly put, Byrne suggests that cities that are bicycle-friendly tend to be more human-friendly, and that the modern/industrial reliance on cars and trucks has resulted in fundamental disconnects between people and their communities. In the first chapter, “American Cities,” Byrne surveys a number of decidedly unglamorous American cities like Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Columbus, as well as smaller towns like Sweetwater, Texas. Byrne’s discussion of Detroit is particularly affecting. From the vantage of his bicycle, Byrne sees a Detroit most will miss, a place of modern ruins and decay. “In a car, one would have sought out a freeway, one of the notorious concrete arteries, and would never have seen any of this stuff,” Byrne writes. “Riding for hours right next to it was visceral and heartbreaking–in ways that looking at ancient ruins aren’t. I recommend it.”

Byrne repeatedly communicates this will to immediacy, for unmediated experiences in Bicycle Diaries. He’s the explorer of the real, trying to understand why folks don’t ride bikes in Buenos Aires, or trying to figure out the cultural significance of Imelda Marcos to the people of the Philippines, or pondering the brutal fauna of Australia. Byrne’s bike rides, as well as his music and art careers, give the book something like a center, but Bicycle Diaries thrives on digressions, asides on ring tones or the Stasi or amateur backyard wrestling or the history of PowerPoint. We loved these moments: it’s when Byrne relates the sad history of George Eastman, founder of Kodak, or when he tells the story of Australian outlaw legend Ned Kelly that Byrne best communicates the thrill of exploration.

Byrne’s voice is ever-earnest and never didactic. There’s a plainness and honesty to his delivery that often seems in direct contrast with the content of his message. And this is the key to the book’s success–and perhaps, more generally speaking, Byrne’s career–this ability to see, to suspend the biases and blocks and filters that too often mediate our perception, and to actually see what is actually around us. From his earliest days in the Talking Heads, Byrne displayed an uncanny knack for turning his eyes on his own culture like an alien ethnographer, yet he always did it with empathy and engagement, and never with smack of clinical remove that might otherwise characterize such a project. In Bicycle Diaries, Byrne approaches America’s reliance on roads and oil and cars with an admirable pragmatism. Where some might scold (and, implicitly, ride a high horse), Byrne is always positive, pointing out the numerous advantages of returning to a community-oriented way of life, with bicycling as a simple and efficient means of getting around in lieu of the cars–and attendant urban/suburban/exurban sprawl–that keep us separated. Byrne also suggests a number of ways that communities and cities can work toward making bicycling a more viable option for their citizens. He even provides a few fun bicycle rack designs for his hometown New York (and yes, they got made).

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Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that the book itself is a beautiful aesthetic object. Why don’t more publishers skip those annoying, flimsy dust jackets, and opt instead for something like Bicycle Diaries lovely embossed cloth deal? Just a thought. There are lots and lots of black and white photographs, many by Byrne himself, that genuinely shed light on Byrne’s narrative (the design here is of course reminiscent of Sebald’s use of photographs, only Byrne’s aren’t cryptic and actually make sense in the text). It’s great to love both the content and the design of a book, but we’d really expect nothing less from Byrne. It’s also great when a hero of ours lives up to and then surpasses our expectations–we’ve always loved Byrne’s music and his ideas, so it’s great that we can add books to that list. Highly recommended.

Where the World Navel Intersects the Threshold of Adventure

Biblioklept2 Comments

the threshold of adventure_john barth

Hey you. Yeah, you. Were you the guy that borrowed my copy of John Barth’s Chimera and never had enough human compassion/decency to return it? No? Not you? Never mind. I picked up another copy last weekend specifically for the diagram above (I also wanted to re-read “Perseid.”) Now that I look at it again, I’m not sure that it’s so much enlightening as it is mystifying. In any case, it’s an intriguing bit of navel gazing. Fun stuff.

The Coral Thief — Rebecca Stott

Edwin Turner2 Comments

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Rebecca Stott’s second novel, The Coral Thief (new in hardback from Spiegel & Grau), tells the story of a naive medical student ensnared in a web of scientific intrigue in post-Revolutionary Paris. In July, 1815, shortly after Napoleon’s fall at Waterloo, Stott’s hero Daniel Connor enters the occupied capitol armed only with the valuable coral specimens he plans to bring to his new place of study, the Jardin des Plantes. Riding on a mail coach into the city, Connor meets an alluring, mysterious woman (of course) who ends up stealing his coral samples, but also introducing him to a radical new idea that will soon change the world: the theory of evolution. In Connor’s pursuit of the coral thief, he also becomes entwined with a sharp police chief who is also searching out the mystery woman.

Stott’s novel moves at a nice, steady clip, propelled by simple dialog and meticulously neat historical detailing that doesn’t intrude into her narrative. The Connor narrative is balanced with short intercalary chapters describing Napoleon’s journey into exile, suggesting a division of ways of thinking: as the Emperor is retired, a new mode of thought going beyond the Enlightenment’s obsession with rationalism is on the rise–evolution. In a sense, Stott’s novel is an attack on dogma, as Connor, the coral thief, and the picaresque band the two take up with, work to challenge the institutions that dominate European thinking. (It’s weird to think in America today that evolution is still a debatable, divisive issue).

While The Coral Thief is a novel that weighs history and philosophy, it’s also a great detective story that will appeal to those who want a bit more out of their adventures than Dan Brown can offer. Stott’s writing is succinct and well-researched, with none of the ponderous pretentiousness that can sometimes weigh down historical fiction. (Stott does, however, include a not-too lengthy bibliography for those who wish to read further into her post-Napoleonic France; listed authors include Victor Hugo and Balzac). The Coral Thief is great good fun for thinking people. Recommended.

Reading Kafka and Watching Lynch Will Make You Smarter

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We knew it. Reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet at such a young, tender age, didn’t screw us up for nothing. According to a joint study to be published this month in the journal Psychological Science, researchers Proulx and Heine have linked engaging in non-linear, non-traditional narratives with improved ability to recognize patterns. Proulx: “People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they’re motivated to learn new patterns.” Cool.

Full press release after the jump, or, just try to make sense of this clip from one of our favorite Lynch films, INLAND EMPIRE

Continue reading “Reading Kafka and Watching Lynch Will Make You Smarter” →

A Modern Symphony of Music that Is Not Music but Asks that You Remember Music

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We are just loving the advance reading copy of David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries that we got in the mail today. Plenty of quotable material from Byrne’s discursive journeys, but why not share one of our favorite musician’s thoughts on ring tones?

I hear the faint cacophony of many distant cell-phone rings in the train car–snippets of Mozart and hip-hop, old-school ring tones, and pop-song fragments–all emanating out of minuscule phone speakers. All tinkling away here and there. All incredibly poor reproductions of other music. These ring tones are “signs” for “real” music. This is music not meant to be actually listened to as music, but to remind you of and refer to other, real, music. These are audio road signs that proclaim “I am a Mozart person” or, more often, “I can’t even be bothered to select a ring tone.” A modern symphony of music that is not music but asks that you remember music.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters — Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters

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sense-and-sensibility

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is a mannered romance about class and love, family and duty, and the fine balance between logic and emotion. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters adds giant mutant crustaceans, two-headed sea dragons, and rampaging narwhals to the mix. Don’t worry, Sea Monsters still tells the protofeminist tale of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor (sense) and Marianne (sensibility) as they try to navigate the upheaval of their changing fortunes. After their father dies, under the strict (and unfair) laws of primogeniture, the family estate must go to their half-brother and his wicked wife. Co-author Ben H. Winters moves the milieu to a bizarre aquatic world populated by pirates and monsters, full of desert islands and undersea domes. You probably know just by looking at its remarkable cover whether or not this book is for you.

Quirk Classics had a big hit earlier this year with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which, uh, added zombies to a Jane Austen classic. In our review of that book, we praised the concept but found the delivery flat. The zombies-and-ninjas riffing seemed a bit trite by 2009–there just wasn’t enough weirdness to make the book especially engaging. In contrast, Winters’s injections in Sea Monsters are wholly bizarre. The disaster of the patriarch’s death–and the loss of inheritance–is metaphorized in the setting, “the Alteration, when the waters of the world grew cold and hateful to the sons of man, and darkness moved on the face of the deep.” Colonel Brandon, a prospective groom with a dark past becomes a betentacled monster here. The entire oppressive system of Regency laws and social customs takes the symbol of a devouring Leviathan, eating up dreams and hopes. In short, Winters takes his conceit beyond mere ironic fancy and actually weaves it successfully into Austen’s classic. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters succeeds because Winters juxtaposes his sea monster tropes so cleanly and weirdly against Austen’s mannered prose without the least bit of ironic winking at the audience. The sheer silliness of it all is beautiful fun.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is available September 15, 2009 from Quirk Classics. You can watch the book’s trailer here.

Clean Breaks — Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith

Edwin Turner3 Comments

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In Pulp’s caustic 1995 anthem “Common People,” singer Jarvis Cocker delivers what has to be one of the best lines in any pop song: “Everybody hates a tourist.” Ironically, I bought the album when I was visiting London as a tourist. I’d never heard of (or heard) Pulp at that point, but our tour guide (it was a high school class trip) told me that they were the best Britpop band to date, better than my beloved Boo Radleys, he assured me. He had great taste; the album is fantastic and “Common People” became a dance party classic (this same tour guide took our entire group of high school juniors, seniors, and chaperons (teachers and parents) to a screening of Trainspotting, which had just come out in Great Britain. Many of the students and chaperons got quite upset, but for me it was kinda sorta life-changing (I was 15 or 16). Later, in Heidelburg, Germany, this same tour guide took a small group of six or seven of us out to one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been to, and laughed about the whole Trainspotting incident. He said he told our teachers that it would be an important “cultural enrichment experience” for us, but in reality it was just a great movie that he thought some of us would like to see).

I realize that this is a long, overly-personal lead-in to a book review, but Clean Breaks, from Rough Guides, embodies the spirit of the trip I discussed above. Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith’s travel guide is not so much about how to avoid looking like a loathsome tourist, but about how to engage in the real culture of the place you are visiting while getting to know the real people who live there. In this sense, the book is not for everyone, but if you want Disney World or Las Vegas, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble figuring out what to do. However, if you’re interested in, say, hearing the desert music of Mali, or volunteering on a ranch in Brazil’s Patanal wetlands, or fishing for prawns in Kerala, then Clean Breaks is a great starting place for you. As the authors put it in their introduction, a “clean break” is essentially “about minimizing your environmental impact–on your journey and at your destination–by choosing carefully how you travel and the nature of the place you choose to stay at.” To that end, the book concentrates not just on eco-friendly hotels and restaurants that specialize in locally grown food, but also on the type of adventure trekking and activities that put you in real contact with the real people of the place you are visiting. There’s an emphasis on bicycling and walking, guest houses and natural parks, and volunteering.

Again, the adventures in Clean Breaks are certainly not going to be every tourist’s cup of tea, but they aren’t all exactly uncomfortable either. I’m lucky enough to have actually experienced a (very) small fraction of the 500 trips suggested, and can attest to their awesomeness. Taking The Ghan train from Adelaide to Alice Springs, for example, was a highlight of my young life, as was visiting a glacier in the Otago province of New Zealand. And did I mention that there are lots of pretty, pretty colorful pictures and maps accompanying the book’s 500 suggested trips (with key info like email addresses and phone numbers, of course). While Clean Breaks‘s emphasis on “ecotourism” did seem a bit suspect to me at first–just another marketing ploy, perhaps (I’ve attacked the rhetoric of “going green” in the past”)–the  authors’ intentions and tone seem wholly sincere. They acknowledge, for example, that terms “such as ‘responsible,’ ‘sustainable,’ and ‘ethical’ are becoming . . . overused (and abused) by websites and tourism companies looking to ride the green wave,” and their repeated emphasis on localism and action over passive “sight-seeing” is admirable. And even though most people will never have the money and time to complete the 500 trip wish-list that Hammond and Smith present here, the book still makes for a great fantasy. Good stuff.

Clean Breaks is now available from Rough Guides.

Time, Space, Distortion: Falling Towards A 9/11 Literature

Edwin Turner2 Comments

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In his essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” published in December of 2001, Don DeLillo wrote this about the 9/11 attacks: “The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon?” His question was both profound and at the same time, paradoxically utterly banal, purely rhetorical–of course it was too soon to measure the affects of the 9/11 attacks. But could the distance of time somehow sharpen or enrich perspective? DeLillo continues: “We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted.”

In retrospect–what with the Bush administration’s ludicrous invasion of Iraq and the power-grab of the Patriot Act–DeLillo’s notation of “plans made hurriedly” seems downright scary. Still, when I think back to those early days after the attacks, I remember that feeling of overwhelming shock, the paralyzing inertia that had to be overcome. DeLillo wanted–needed–to grapple with this spectacular destruction immediately. David Foster Wallace responded with similar immediacy; the caveat that prefaces his moving essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s“ states that the piece was “Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock.” The same caveat would also apply neatly to Art Spiegelman’s big, brilliant, messy attempt at cataloging his impressions immediately post-9/11, In the Shadow of No Towers.

In contrast, the trio of 9/11 stories at the heart of Chris Adrian’s short story collection, A Better Angel, all employ distance and distortion–both temporal and spatial–as a means to address the disaster (or inability to address the disaster) of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Adrian’s 9/11 tales (and his works in general, really), ask how one can grieve or attest to death on such a massive, spectacular scale. In his vision, the victims of the 9/11 attacks forever haunt his protagonists, literally possessing them, demons that can’t let go, leaving the living to grieve over and over again. In “The Changeling,” for example, the grief of the attacks is literally measured in blood, as a father repeatedly maims himself as the only means to assuage the terror and confusion of his possessed son. Adrian sets one of the collection’s most intriguing tales, “The Vision of Peter Damien,” in nineteenth-century rural Ohio. This temporal distortion veers into metaphysical territory as the titular Damien, along with other children in his village, become sick, haunted by the victims of 9/11. Adrian’s strange milieu creates a bizarre cognitive dissonance for his readers, a response that DeLillo also articulated in his 2007 novel Falling Man.

DeLillo initiates the novel as a sort of creation story: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” The demarcation of this new world recapitulates DeLillo’s initial concern with time and space, but his novel seems ultimately to suggest an inertia, a meaninglessness, or at least the hollow ambiguity of any artistic response. This stands, of course, in sharp contrast to his sense of urgency in his earlier essay. Like the performance artist in the novel who is repeatedly sighted hanging suspended from a harness, there’s a sad anonymity in the background of Falling Man: the artist hangs as static witness to disaster, but looking for comfort, or even perhaps meaning, in the gesture is impossible.

David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Suffering Channel,” (from his 2004 collection Oblivion) is in many ways a far more satisfying jab at 9/11, although, to be fair, the majority of the story’s events take place in July of 2001. The story (or novella, really; it’s 90 pages) centers around a magazine headquartered in the World Trade Center that plans to run an article–on September 10th, 2001–about a man who literally shits out pieces of art. Wallace’s critique of American culture (shit as art, commerce as style, advertising as language) is devastating against the context of the looming disaster that his characters are so oblivious too. As the novella reaches its close (culminating in the shit artist producing an original work for a live audience), we learn more about “The Suffering Channel,” a cable channel devoted to broadcasting only images of human beings suffering intense and horrible pain. Wallace seems to suggest that The Suffering Channel’s audience watches for mere schadenfreude or morbid fascination, that modern American culture so disconnects people that genuine suffering cannot be witnessed with empathy, but only as a form of spectacular, disengaged entertainment. And yet even as Wallace critiques American culture, the specter of the 9/11 attacks ironically inform his story. With our awful knowledge of what will happen the day after the shit artist article is published, we are able to see the ridiculous and ephemeral nature of the characaters’ various concerns. At the same time, Wallace’s tale reveals that empathy for suffering is possible, but also that it comes at a tremendous price.

To contrast the journalistic immediacy of pieces like “In the Ruins of the Future” and “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” with their respective writers attempts to measure 9/11 in literary fiction is perhaps a bit unfair. Still, Wallace’s and DeLillo’s essays–at least in my opinion–transmit something of the ineffable, visceral quality of that terrible day, as well as the strange ways we sought comfort through human connection. In contrast, the distance and distortion of their literary efforts lose something. I apologize–I don’t have a word for this “something” that the essays have that the novel and novella lack (purposely, I believe). It’s not clarity, but perhaps it’s a clarity of distortion that the essays convey, the duress, or to return to Wallace’s own notation, the pieces were of course “Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock.” It’s that shock, I suppose, that I’m trying to name, to say that it’s still there, accessible in those early responses (I realize now I’ve unfairly neglected Spiegelman’s book, which is a great example of immediacy). And to relive that shock is important, because, as Wallace reveals in both of his pieces, the cathartic power of shared tragedy makes us human, allows us to really live, and to be thankful that we do live.

Looking over this piece, I realize that it’s overly long and really says nothing, or at least nothing much about 9/11, or literature, or whatever. But I don’t want to be negative. I highly encourage you to read (or re-read) “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” and “In the Ruins of the Future.” And I’ll leave it at that.