Some of our favorite Ballard covers:
Nice gear shift…
Love the enthusiasm there…
My buddy Tilford lent me his RESearch edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (I didn’t steal it and that makes me a moral being). I think it’s probably the definitive edition. I wish I had it (maybe I should’ve stolen it…).
Pulp fiction.
Why is “Ballard” in katakana?
This one is sorta Magritte by way of Calvino (if that makes any sense).
For lots more covers and lots more Ballard check out JG Ballard and Ballardian.
Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway, new this month from Turner Publishing, combines over 200 black and white photographs of Hemingway with text and captions by James Plath to form a sort of visual biography of one of America’s most iconic writers. Spanning the entire 61 years of the author’s life, the book treats us to over a dozen photos of Hemingway’s childhood, including several (surprisingly high resolution) images of Papa as a baby. Admittedly, these are kind of uncanny, but for me, seeing baby Hemingway is not nearly as strange as seeing the many photos of teenage/early 20s Hemingway. The Key West Hemingway–bearded and burly–has become so iconic that seeing the writer in his youth is almost like seeing an entirely different person. He’s very handsome, with a vigorous smile that radiates charm and energy–much like the older Hemingway–but with a certain sheen and optimism missing in the older Hemingway. Even on crutches or in a wheelchair, young Hemingway seems less damaged than old Hemingway.
As you might expect, a majority of the pictures throughout the volume find Hemingway engaged in some sort of sport or activity–sport fishing, hunting, sailing, boxing, skiing, and so on. And drinking. Lots and lots of drinking. There’s plenty of shots of Hemingway with famous friends (fishing, boxing, and, um, drinking), but also many images of Hemingway with his various families (the man had four wives in 25 years). There’s an unexpected vitality in the photos that sustains throughout the volume, due in part perhaps to Hemingway’s engaging, larger-than-life personality, but also attributable to the fact that the book works in some ways as a cultural history of the first half of the 20th century. The images trace Hemingway from his Illinois birth, to Italy in WWI, to his ex-pat glory days in Paris (in particular) and Europe (in general). Of course, there’s plenty of Papa in Key West, as well as his time in Bimini on his boat Pilar. As Hemingway moves from Spain to Communist Cuba, we see his health deteriorate: all that boxing and drinking and loving and fighting has clearly caught up to him. He looks very, very old for a man in his late fifties. With the specter of his impending suicide hanging over the final photos, it’s hard not to read pain and depression into those last images.
Plath’s text adds greater depth to Hemingway’s biography than one might expect from a coffee table book. He explicates the photos by providing context and background, both historical and literary, and while he’s never gossipy, there’s a wry humor and ironic understatement to many of his captions that help to shade Hemingway’s character (Plath’s deadpan note that Hemingway “broke poet Wallace Steven’s jaw, marooned poet Archibald MacLeish on an abandoned cay after an argument [and] got sore at Fitzgerald when he messed up on timekeeping in a supposedly friendly boxing match” is particularly funny). Plath also proffers insight into Hemingway’s literary works. And about those literary works. They are not dominant in Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway, nor should they be. If anything, the book makes a solid visual case for Hemingway as icon, a figure that at least appeared to live the life he wrote about. Plath’s text is hardly fawning, pointing to many of Hemingway’s myriad flaws, but it also recognizes Hemingway as a kind of symbol of America’s progression in the 20th century, its movement from isolation to the world stage. Recommended.
The Odyssey has long been my go-to example for phallocentric literature in the high school classes I teach. The story of wily Odysseus and his crew wandering the high seas for a decade after the Trojan War prototypifies a literature of masculine fantasy full of adventure, intrigue, and romance. While Odysseus explores the world, bedding nymphs and witches and having every kind of adventure with his boys, his wife Penelope is at home, faithful and chaste, raising kid Telemachus and keeping the would-be usurpers at bay. In short, the story of Odysseus licenses an entire tradition of phallocentric literature wherein the clever protagonist is able to duck familial and social duty and have a great adventure in the process. Think of Huck lighting out for the territory. Same deal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But as Margaret Atwood saliently demonstrates in The Penelopiad, her reworking of The Odyssey, there’s always another side to that story of masculine escape–and a price to that adventure, as well.
As its title suggests, The Penelopiad tells the story from the perspective of Penelope, a plain but clever girl, who–like Odysseus–must learn to live by her wits. Atwood, working from several myths, details Penelope’s divine parentage (she’s half-naiad), and her upbringing as a young maid in her father’s home. In an early key scene, Penelope’s father supposedly (the details are fuzzy, she admits) tries to murder her by drowning her, after learning that she will weave his shroud. This infanticide echoes the story of Oedipus, and also serves as a dominant motif throughout the story (it’s also twinned with a motif of eating meat–Penelope remarks at one point that she is just “meat” to be eaten). As the story progresses, young, shy Penelope slowly transforms from a naive gal with a chip on her shoulder about her preternaturally beautiful cousin, Helen, into a woman as wily as Odysseus himself. Atwood treats us to Penelope’s inner thoughts on all sorts of subjects, and even though Penelope claims to love Odysseus, it’s repeatedly clear how angry she is at not only him, but also her son.
While Penelope’s story is dominant, Atwood is very concerned with Penelope’s twelve maids, orphaned servants slain by Odysseus and Telemachus after Odysseus’ return. The maids serve as a chorus, interjecting their voice in short chapters written in a variety of styles, ranging from epic poetry to sea shanties to short skits. One of the most fascinating choral sections plays as an anthropological seminar, in which Atwood’s maids suggest that the real story of Odysseus and Penelope is in fact the displacement of a matriarchy by a wandering warrior. There’s also an inspired court scene where Odysseus is tried for killing the suitors, and the maids sue for justice.
Ultimately, Atwood paints the maids, poor orphans and slaves, as the real victims in this ancient tale. While Penelope complains that she is treated as “meat,” Atwood makes it clear that it’s really the maids who are treated as mere flesh to be consumed–slaves forced to clean, bodies subjected to repeated rapes. And while Penelope repeatedly expresses sorrow and dismay for the murder of the maids, complaining that their deaths were a result of tragic miscommunication, the maids have a different story to tell–one that ironizes much of what Penelope has to say. As the story progresses, we are frequently reminded by Penelope herself that she is a liar and storyteller on par with Odysseus and because of this insight we begin to realize that there might be something to some of the slanderous rumors she’s been protesting in her narrative. It would’ve been simple for Atwood to give Penelope a straightforward and strong voice, a voice that communicated the virtue classically identified with Penelope along with a feminist slant of insight. Instead, Atwood’s Penelope is far more complex and human, gossipy and spiteful, sympathetic and ripe for contempt. The Penelopiad ironizes not only The Odyssey (and the phallocentric literary tradition after it), but also itself; its a book that complicates our notions of history, memory, and identity, and it does so in ways both playful and profound. Highly recommended.
As the B-52s understood so well, we all need some good stuff in our life. Here’s some good stuff:
Jhumpa Lahiri’s much-lauded collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is out in paperback from Vintage this week. Although I’ve only read three of the collection’s eight stories so far, it’s already easy to see why the book was so beloved last year. Lahiri explores the intersection of different cultures and the subtleties of generational conflict, but the themes and content of her stories always veer toward universals of domesticity–siblings, marriage, children, and all the troubles that go with them are studied here. I found bits of my own life echoed here in insightful and analytical detail, particularly in the heart breaker “Only Goodness.” Good stuff.
Also new in paperback this week from Randomhouse is Stefan Merrill Block’s debut novel The Story of Forgetting, and while I haven’t had a chance to get too far into it, its blend of science, medicine, memory, and fantasy seems pretty intriguing. Block examines Alzheimer’s disease through the lens of an elderly man named Abel, a misanthropic teen named Seth, and a Calvinoesque fantasy world called Isadora–a world without memory. Seems pretty cool; potential good stuff. Trailer here.
For more good stuff, check out our new tumblog Pet Zounds.
Here’s a cool interview from The Times with Bob Dylan on Presidential autobiographies and more. Good stuff.
You can also listen to all ninety minutes of Neko Case’s concert at the 9:30 club, broadcast live last night on NPR. Lovely Ms. Case transcends good stuff, of course.
Speaking of transcendent good stuff, the new Dirty Projectors album, Bitte Orca, has, ahem, leaked. It’s the sort of greatness that makes you ashamed to be a pirate, the kind of album you can’t wait to actually buy even though you’ve been listening to it in full for a few months (it doesn’t drop until June 9th). Lush and ethereal, somewhere between Kate Bush and Storm & Stress, Bitte Orca is the sort of stuff that would play at high school proms around this country this year if this country had any class. Here they are playing “Stillness is the Move”:
I have a memory–a surprisingly distinct one, considering the circumstances–I was about nineteen, a sophomore in college, hanging out at a friend’s house, listening to records and going through his books. He had a large red book, a Che Guevara reader that I recognized not by the name (which I’d never heard pronounced) but rather by the iconic image of the Argentine Marxist revolutionary. Of course, I didn’t know that Che was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary at the time–I just knew the image. “Is this any good?” I asked my friend, thumbing through the thick, stiff volume. “No idea,” he replied. “Who is this guy, anyway?” My friend smiled at me — “You don’t know who Che Guevara is? Neither do I.” This admission speaks volumes to Che’s legacy, a legacy of image over substance, form over idea, iconography over doctrine–a legacy thoroughly and playfully covered in Michael Casey’s intriguing new study, Che’s Afterlife.
Casey’s book begins in the back of a tuk tuk in Bangkok, where the author sees two images juxtaposed: the iconic photograph of Che by Alberto Korda next to a picture of Rambo–the Communist revolutionary and the all-American defender of the capitalist way of life. In Che’s Afterlife, Casey follows this strange juxtaposition across the globe, from the moment Korda captures the image while on assignment recording Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s 1960 trip to Cuba, to the image’s rallying explosion across the Western world, to its modern implications in Chavez’s Venezuela and its infamy among Cuban Republicans in Miami. The global ride is packed with fascinating historical characters, artists, and writers, but at its heart is the central paradox of how a Communist firebrand became a capitalist brand. “It’s impossible to overlook the irony,” Casey writes, “the commoditization of an anticapitalist rebel who opposed all that his hyper-commercialized image now represents.”
Che’s Afterlife is not so much another Che Guevara biography as it is an exploration of the power of imagery and media in a global world. Casey works from sources like Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag, along with contemporary political and economic analysts to explore how and why the “the Korda image remains a powerful indicator of rebellion and resistance.” I saw myself in the book time and again, not in any of the political ideologies, but rather as one of the many “young Americans [who] know [Che] only as a T-shirt logo.” Casey’s study is well-researched, well-written, and lots of fun, a book more at home under the cultural studies rubric than biography or history. Recommended.
Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image by Michael Casey is available April 7th, 2009 from Vintage.
The blurb on the back of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies brazenly declares that Seth Grahame-Smith’s addition of zombie-fighting action to Austen’s classic “transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read.” Perhaps the blurb’s brag is just a bit of cheeky fun; after all, Austen’s staid survey of manners and mores is a perennial favorite, coming in second to only The Lord of the Rings in a recent BBC poll of British readers, as well as topping a similar poll in Australia. Clearly, people not only want to read it, they actually do, and in large numbers each year. There’s even been enough interest in it for a not-that-bad movie update just a few years ago. So it’s hardly as if Pride and Prejudice is a corpse in need of resuscitation. This begs the question: What nuances and comments does Grahame-Smith have to add? Not much, we’re afraid.
The most interesting aspect of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is its concept, a promise for weird laughs and sick kicks neatly summed up in its fantastically morbid cover. Grahame-Smith doesn’t so much re-imagine Pride, but simply stuff a murderous host of zombies into Austen’s romance. These “unmentionables,” as the polite Regency society folks call them, wage a war on good stolid Englishmen. Fortunately Mr. Bennet has trained his daughters, led by feisty Elizabeth, in the ways of the ninja. Between matchmaking, letter-writing, polite dances, and furtive glances at Mr. Darcy, the Bennet sisters slice up zombies left and right with their katanas. The press-release for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies claims that the book retains 85% of Austen’s original, and no major plot points are changed or missing. Instead, the reader is subjected to seemingly purposeless bouts of zombie fighting after every scene. Of course, to decry these fights as purposeless seems silly; after all, when you pick up a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, you expect zombies, don’t you?
Grahame-Smith’s premise sounds like great good fun in theory, but it turns out that adding zombies and ninjas to a classic beloved romance is neither terribly engaging or interesting. We love zombies at Biblioklept, but the most effective zombie tales–28 Days Later, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead–work beyond horror and serve also as a form of social commentary or even satire. Grahame-Smith seems to miss, or even ignore, any opportunity to comment on, criticize, or otherwise inform the novel he’s cannibalizing. Instead, his additions convey the energy, wit, and sophistication of a one-note SNL sketch. The premise gets old fast, and it becomes increasingly confusing who this novel is for. It’s unlikely to appeal to most Austen fans, as it provides no real comment on her methods, plotting, or characterization, and as far as a zombies-and-ninjas riff goes, it’s pretty standard fare. Ultimately, it seems like more of a conversation piece than something you’d actually read for enjoyment, a little coffee table book that might evoke some interest. Flick through the amusing illustrations, chuckle, and move on.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is available soon from Quirk Books.
While the special pleasures of drinking a beer have undergone something of a renaissance in the past ten years in America, what with all the awesome microbreweries popping up left and right, there remains among many a staunch and unjustified prejudice against the world’s oldest liquor. In short, wine is still the go-to beverage for fine dining, and for many, the mark of sophistication and refinement. And while we certainly don’t begrudge a glass of pinot or chardonnay, why all the prejudice? Beer goes great with food–especially fine food–and also with books. In order to make headway against overcoming beer’s unjust vulgar reputation with some folks, we proudly present a new ongoing series of beer-book pairings, hopefully lending a little weight to our favorite beverage’s literary caché. It’s Spring Break Week at Biblioklept International Headquarters, and what better way to celebrate the season than with our crisp homemade shandies paired with Gabriel García Márquez’ s Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Shandies are made simply by mixing beer with ginger ale, ginger beer, or, preferably, lemonade. Our recipe for shandies is pretty basic. We recommend starting with a lager–Tecate, Red Stripe, or even Corona will do fine (we’re featuring Red Stripe at the BIH this week). You can certainly use an ale, but ales tend to have richer, sharper, and more complex flavors, and they tend to be not as smooth as lagers. (We suppose you could make shandies with a porter or stout or a lambic ale, but this seems kinda sorta reprehensible). Next, you’ll need either an imperial pint glass (20 oz.) or an American pint glass (16 oz.). Pour your lager into the glass, then add your lemonade in desired ratio (we prefer to fill an imperial pint glass, creating roughly a 3 to 2 ratio of beer to lemonade. Oh yeah, we’re lazy and use store bought lemonade (Minute Maid sugar free), but we’ve made our own in the past. Making your own lemonade is easy, and if you don’t know how to do it you probably are too dimwitted to be reading these words right now). Final step: stir, drink, enjoy.
We’ve chosen shandies for their crisp lightness. They’re the perfect early afternoon drink, cool and refreshing, preferably enjoyed on porches or hammocks (we don’t really recommend them for indoors or at night). We’ve paired them with a fresh little jewel of a book, Gabriel García Márquez’ s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Chronicle is a murder/love story with about a million little twists, the biggest twist being that there is no twist: we know from the first sentences exactly what will happen. Still, García Márquez’ s kaleidescopic reconstruction of the day of the murder is thoroughly engrossing, bewildering, and un-put-downable. The book’s rhetoric is hardly as morbid as its subject matter–it’s great hammock/beach reading, and its crisp lightness belies its complex flavors. Like a shandy, it slowly, subtly intoxicates you. It’s also pretty short, about 130 pages, and despite its infinite digressions, its the sort of book that you read in just one or two sittings.
Of course, maybe you’ve read Chronicle but you’re still dying to drink some shandies on your porch with a good book, and you want Biblioklept to give you a literary excuse. Well, here’s another option: take a shot at another book of infinite digressions, Laurence Sterne’s 1759 (anti-)novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The fun of pairing a shandy with Shandy will be doubled in Sterne’s love of wordplay in the text. And sure, there’s no way you’ll finish it, but it’s not that sort of book anyway–it doesn’t finish its self! Pick it up at random, flip around, marvel at its weirdness, at the very idea that the first post-modern novel could somehow come before the modern novel. Then get up, make another shandy, and pick up again elsewhere. Fun stuff.
Max Ernst’s graphic novel, Une Semaine de Bonté, is one of the coolest books I own. Comprised of concise collages utilizing black and white images from periodicals and catalogs, Ernst’s narrative is both engrossing and disturbing. Full of birds and breasts and beasts, Semaine plays out like a weird, violent, funny mindfuck, its repeated scenes of submission and domination ironizing its title (A Week of Kindness). Great stuff. There’s a decent enough chunk of the book available for preview at Google Books.
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free recounts the author’s youth as the son of two diehard socialists, Party members who are far more devoted to the impending Revolution than their family. Sayrafiezadeh’s father, an Iranian intellectual, leaves the family before the boy can even speak, and throughout the book he remains a paradoxical touchstone, a living emblem of Sayrafiezadeh’s alienation. Sayrafiezadeh is raised by his Jewish-American mother, first in New York City, then in Pittsburgh, always in poverty. His mother Martha is such a committed socialist that she willfully chooses a life of poverty for both herself and her young son. Sayrafiezadeh writes:
…my mother actively, consciously, chose not only for us to be poor but for us to remain poor, and the two of us suffered greatly for it. Because to suffer and to suffer greatly was the point. It was the fulfillment of ourselves. My mother was no doubt emboldened by the philosophy that ther was honor in wretchedness, virtue in misery, nobility in hardship.
The passage above is one of the rare reflective moments in this memoir; most of the time, Sayrafiezadeh’s strategy is to relate his youth in simple, immediate terms. We see Sayrafiezadeh and his mother move from squalid apartment to squalid apartment, we experience the boredom that a young boy would feel at Socialist party meetings, we feel the strange alienation Sayrafiezadeh experiences at school–an alienation that does not emanate from his parents’ political stance alone, but also in his ethnic identity. To be in middle school is hard; to be in middle school as a person of Iranian descent during the 1979 hostage crisis is really hard. Sayrafiezadeh always follows the “show don’t tell” dictum of good writing, and, as a result, his description of the suffering he experiences as a young person–poverty, confusion, and alienation–never seems contrived or out of place. Indeed, these are feelings common for any kid, here magnified exponentially. Ultimately, however, it is not so much sympathy that the reader experiences but anger, a specific, concentrated anger at Sayrafiezadeh’s selfish parents coupled with a more muted sense that pure adherence to any ideology can be emotionally destructive.
The book moves episodically between a chronological telling of Sayrafiezadeh’s life and the narration of a grown-up Sayrafiezadeh still navigating his strange identity in contemporary New York. This grown-up Sayrafiezadeh is hardly a screw-up, but he is clearly marked by the ideology his parents have attempted to imprint upon him. In one clever passage, an adult Sayrafiezadeh ponders over tissue box holders–ephemeral, essentially unnecessary items, products born of capitalism’s need to manufacture desire–and buys a ridiculously overpriced one with a certain relish. The scene plays as a muted “fuck you” to his parents, but is perhaps unnecessary in this regard, as the whole of When Skateboards Will Be Free paints Sayrafiezadeh’s mother and father as neglectful figures. Sayrafiezadeh’s father not only abandons the family, but is largely absent from his son’s life in any regard. He’s late–often months late–to special birthday dinners and any scene where the two interact shows that they do not know each other. While Sayrafiezadeh’s mother manages to eke out a living for the two of them, it is also repeatedly clear that her ideological choice to live in poverty has hurt her son beyond mere embarrassment. Sayrafiezadeh is the emblematic latchkey kid, left to himself for long stretches of time–even whole weekends–at a very young age, as his mother attends her Socialist meetings. In one grim episode, a very yong Sayrafiezadeh is sexually molested by a “comrade” of the Socialist party who has generously volunteered to babysit. This is just one extreme example of the underlying irony of the memoir, an irony that Sayrafiezadeh does not specifically name: his parents, in the name of a political philosophy that espouses the value of caring for one’s fellow man, have failed to adequately care for him.
Written in a brisk, lucid style with simple dialogue, When Skateboards Will Be Free effectively compresses a young life into three hundred pages that can be read over three or four afternoons. We’re not exactly big fans of the memoir around Biblioklept, but Sayrafiezadeh’s effort eschews many of the genre’s hallmarks (sensationalism, overly-reflective post-event analysis) in favor of a style that allows his readers to draw their own conclusions. This isn’t to suggest that Sayrafiezadeh doesn’t lead his readers to some definitive ends, but rather that his writerly approach is less overt manipulation than the stuff of most memoir. While Skateboards isn’t exactly essential reading, those who can’t get enough memoir in their reading diet will surely appreciate its vitality and generous honesty.
When Skateboards Will Be Free is available in hardcover March 24, 2009 from Random House.
The new issue of The Believer showed up in my overstuffed mailbox today. It’s the film issue, featuring a DVD of short films about Jean-Luc Goddard’s travels in the U.S. My second favorite Jean-Luc! (Seriously, Alphaville is great, but it’s no ST:TNG). The issue also features The Believer‘s annual reader survey. Here are the results, from their website, with our parenthetical thoughts and links.
READER SURVEY RESULTS
In Bodies, feminist psychoanalyst Susie Orbach explores contemporary body issues within a global culture, arguing that bodies are “not in any sense matter of fact, the simple outcome of DNA,” but rather are the products of social and cultural construction. Orbach writes that her work aims “to bolster our resilience in the face of unprecedented attack and to bring sustainability to our bodies so that we can live with and from them more peaceably.” This goal is, of course, no simple task, as the course of Bodies demonstrates.
As a psychoanalyst, Orbach of course takes many cues from Freud, but in her introduction she clearly states the need to move beyond Freud’s theories (it’s all in your head) to an understanding of “the impact of contemporary social practices” — predominantly, in her book, the influence of a media-saturated, image-fueled Western culture on the rest of the world. At stake, Orbach claims, “is a transgenerational transmission of anxious embodiment.” In layman’s terms: we imprint our own desires and fears and hangups about the body–feelings generated in large part from our culture–onto our children.
To explore these problems, Orbach–like Freud–presents a series of fascinating case studies, including a man who elects to have his legs amputated in order to paradoxically feel “whole,” transgendered persons, and abused and neglected children. Orbach is particularly concerned with the drive toward “choice” — the concept that one might actively “choose” how one’s body is shaped, and, as such, she repeatedly engages the discourses of elective plastic surgery, modern weight-loss dieting, and eating disorders. Orbach confronts the reality that many of our “choices” are actually the products of “the new visual grammar” of mass media, the iteration of Photoshopped and airbrushed bodies that bombard our senses hundreds, thousands of times daily. She extends this problem beyond the West, to show the ways in which mass culture affects the psyche of the rest of the world’s denizens.
For Orbach, a future of genetic alteration toward the perfecting of a culturally-constructed ideal is a horrible nightmare. Instead, she argues, our “sturggle is to recorporalise our bodies so that they become a place we live from rather than an aspiration always needing to be achieved.” In order to achieve this, Orbach avers that we “urgently need to curtail the commercial exploitation of the body and the diminution of body variety, so that we and our children can enjoy our bodies, our appetites, our physicality and our sexuality.” Orbach’s solution returns to her concept of “transgenerational transmission” — namely, parents need to understand their children’s needs for caring adult responses, and the myriad ways in which these responses will inform the child’s attitude about his or her own body.
In the U.S., Bodies has been published as part of Picador’s BIG IDEAS // small books series and it’s a perfect fit for the series: an engaging and relevant philosophical text rooted in a central academic argument, but written in a style that will appeal to a popular audience without dumbing down anything. Like the two books of the series we reviewed last year, Steven Lukes’s Moral Relativism and Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, we might not agree with everything the author has written here, but we cannot deny that this is an enthralling and important discussion. Highly recommended.
Bodies is now available from Picador books.
We picked up a pretty cool book last weekend at the Friends of the Library Sale–Pierre Cabbanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is way more straightforward than you would think, and also quite funny. He’s also, as his work would attest, often reflective and philosophical. Here, he waxes heavy on art, beauty, transience, and mediocrity:
I think painting dies, you understand. After forty or fifty years a picture dies, because its freshness disappears. Sculpture also dies. This is my own little hobbyhorse, which no one accepts, but I don’t mind. I think a picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterward it’s called the history of art. There’s a huge difference between a Monet today, which is black as anything, and a Monet sixty or eighty years ago, when it was brilliant, when it was made. Now it has entered history–it’s accepted as that, and anyway that’s fine, because that has nothing to do with what it is. Men are mortal, pictures too.
The history of art is something very different from aesthetics. For me, the history of art is what remains of an epoch in a museum, but it’s not necessarily the best of that epoch, because the beautiful things have disappeared–the public didn’t want to keep them. But this is philosophy…
So, I guess all those urinals Duchamp made aren’t so fresh today.
Full disclosure: not only am I a proud University of Florida graduate, but so is my wife, both of my parents, and most of my good friends. So, clearly, I am predisposed to a certain amount of interest in Turner Publishing’s Historic Photos of the University of Florida. This large, hardback coffee table book collects 200 black and white archival photos, arranged chronologically with accompanying text and captions by Steve Rajtar. The book spans over 150 years of UF history including the first fifty years when what was to become the University of Florida was still just an unrelated collection of military academies and agricultural institutes. For me, these pre-Gainesville years were the most interesting–I actually didn’t know that much about my alma mater’s history it turns out.
The black and white photos in the collection range from fascinating (turn of the century images of the first Gator football teams; early gatherings of Tomato Clubs) to humdrum (buildings! More buildings!), but all serve to tell the story of the foundation of the Gator Nation. Rajtar’s commentary is both informative and insightful, explicating the background of the photographs presented in the collection. Having lived in lovely Gainesville, I would’ve liked some color photographs to show off both the beautiful campus and the lush terrain, but the black and white does lend an air of consistency–and perhaps austerity–to the book. Although the book ends with a few photos of the past thirty years, the majority of the volume concentrates on the University’s early history–so sorry, no Tebow folks. Still, Historic Photos of the University of Florida is a must for any self-respecting Bull Gator (starving grad students can skip on this one, though).
Semi-related post-script: While you may not have attended the University of Florida, the institution has a great record when it comes to fiction writing. Padgett Powell is the current writer-in-residence (I remember him giving a reading involving some space aliens; this was about a decade ago); Biblioklept faves Chris Adrian and Chirs Bachelder are both proud UF grads (caveat: we can only assume they’re proud (they’re intelligent, why wouldn’t they be proud?)); Harry Crews was writer-in-res pre-Powell–he’s also a grad (in English education, of all things! (sidebar: he also shares The Biblioklept’s birthday (along with Prince, Michael Cera, Paul Gaugin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Damien Hirst, Bill Hader, and Allen Iverson))). So: plenty of great writers.
Historic Photos of the University of Florida is now available from Turner Publishing.
Pynchon covers via thomaspynchon.com. The site also has a great collection of Pynchon articles and more, including the classic 1984 essay, “Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?”
The site doesn’t have any covers for Vineland, Mason & Dixon, or Against the Day yet. Also, they skip over the horrendous cover for Pynchon’s forthcoming novel, Inherent Vice:
Also omitted: Frank Miller’s cover design for Gravity’s Rainbow:
I don’t really know if there’s anything new I can say about Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in a blog post, and I’m not in the practice of writing term papers here, and you wouldn’t want to read one anyway. I’ll cop out and be vague but honest: the book was astounding and exhausting. I’ve read a number of Faulkner novels now, and The Sound and the Fury was easily my favorite. I’d attempted it a few times before, only to be thwarted by an inability to commit to the sustained concentration required to comprehend Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness technique. The first section of the book, told from the perspective of Benjy, the seminal Faulknerian idiot man-child, is particulalry daunting, especially if you have no prior knowledge of the story of the Compson family, and I don’t think I would’ve made it through this reading if I didn’t arleady know the major themes and the trajectory of the plot. I’m actually kinda sorta shocked that the book was published at all, and I really wonder about its earliest audiences–how much context did they have? What guided them through the verbal detritus of the book’s first half?
I suppose that at the time of its publication in 1929, literary audiences were at least somewhat familiar–if not wholly intrigued by–the stream-of-consciousness technique pioneered in books like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I read both of those books years before The Sound and the Fury, and I would make a subjective argument that they are quite a bit easier to enter into in terms of linearity and plot structure. Also, reading TSatF, I couldn’t help but feel the subtle resonance of Ulysses, particular in the constant use of omission. One of the things that makes Ulysses challenging is that Leopold Bloom frequently elides specific referents–we often get a “him” or a “he” or a “she” or an “it” without immediate context. Often, that context comes much, much later in the novel, with the net result that at times Bloom’s stream of consciousness is awfully ambiguous. Other times, Bloom seems unable to even think the words that would name the tragedies of his life (his dead son, his unfaithful wife, his outsider status in Dublin). Similarly, Faulkner’s Compsons are unable to directly name their own tragedies of promiscuity, suicide, alcoholism, madness, and financial decline. The effect is disarming and immediate, and while it can be very engaging, I can see how many readers would be alienated to the point that they can’t finish the book. I think there are a few simple solutions to the intrinsic problems of reading The Sound and the Fury, and at the risk of looking like a didactic asshole, I’ll share:
1) Read a brief plot summary first. I took a graduate seminar on Faulkner from which I gleaned the basic plot points and themes. (Ironically, the seminar assumed that any English major in grad school would have a working knowledge of the book, and instead focused on lesser-read volumes like Intruder in the Dust). Knowing the background of the Compson family did not ruin reading the book for me, nor did it replace an actual reading of Faulkner’s language–it simply gave me enough of a frame of reference not to throw up my hands in despair.
2) Read quickly and in long sittings. This is not a book that you can pick up and read a few pages of each night. Each chapter has a distinctive rhythm, and it takes a few pages to get into the pace and perspective of the chapter. I read the book in about eight sittings. I also found TSatF impossible to read at night before I was about to go to bed.
3) Don’t worry about getting everything in the first reading. Not possible. Enjoy the language, its strangeness. Marvel at Faulkner’s attempts–both successful and unsuccessful–to transcend time, space, and place. If you’re not enjoying it, why bother reading it?
Most of these suggestions could be applied to Ulysses as well. I brought up the possible influence of Joyce on Faulkner and I was interested enough to do a little research. The following text is from pages 208-209 of A William Faulkner Encyclopedia by Robert Hamblin and Charles Peek, and I think it neatly summarizes the issue:
When asked about the influence of Joyce on his own writing during the early years of his fame, following the publication of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner tended to be understandably evasive. In a 1932 interview with Henry Nash Smith, for example, Faulkner claimed, in fact, that he had never read Ulysses, invoking instead a vague aural source for his knowledge of Joycean methods: ” ‘ You know,’ he smiled, ‘sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact. I had heard of Joyce, of course,’ he went on. ‘Some one told me about what he was doing, and it is possible that I was influenced by what I heard’ ” (LIG 30). In a moment of irony that may not have been lost on the interviewer, Faulkner reached over to his table and handed Smith a 1924 edition of the book. . . By 1947, Faulkner hardly needed to be so coy, telling an English class at the University of Mississippi that Joyce was “the father of modern literature” (1974 FAB 1230). By 1957, Faulkner’s pronouncements on Joyce had become fully classical: “James Joyce was one of the great men of my time. He was electrocuted by the divine fire” (LIG 280).
“Electrocuted by the divine fire” . . . very nice.
The New Critics’ biggest contribution to literary criticism was the dictum that analysis was to be applied strictly to the text itself, without the muddying impurities of biography or any other outside knowledge influencing the reader. A context-free reading is pretty hard to come by, though, isn’t it? School syllabi are arranged around era or genre, or both; our teachers preface each novel or poem or story or essay with a nod to its relevance; a friend hands us a book because it’s “good.” We furtively flip through Tropic of Capricorn, knowing its rep; we look down our noses at abstinence vampire novels. In short, it’s hard to get to that pure reading the New Critics favor. Still, I’ve always thought it’s a pretty good strategy to put aside biographical/author psychology, and just stick to a good close reading of the text. Today, reading David Foster Wallace’s “Wiggle Room,” I was completely unable to do that.The context of Wallace’s recentish suicide hung over each page, each sentence. It was a distraction that led to a (necessary) rereading, a distraction that colored the reading–and then the rereading. A strange little voice popped into Wallace’s dense narration that kept whispering, “posthumous, unfinished novel.” But now that I’ve complicated and contextualized and complained, perhaps I should simply comment a bit on the story now.
In dense, thick sentences, Wallace relates a work morning for Lane Dean, an IRS rote examiner who detests his Sisyphean job. Like many cubicle-dwellers, Lane spends much of his day trying not to look at the clock. He also tries to use an inspirational photo of his son sparingly, so that the effect might be more intense. However, the boredom on this particular day overwhelms Lane and he “had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor. Never before in his life up to now had he once thought of suicide.” Trying to truck through it is no good: “Lane Dean summoned all his will and bore down and did three returns in a row, and began imagining different high places to jump off of.” These thoughts of suicide are mixed with a strange humor. As Lane’s depression becomes frantic, Wallace writes, “Unbidden came ways to kill himself with Jell-O.” As Lane becomes more and more anxious, it becomes apparent that–paradoxically–his boredom literally excites him. He gets all worked up about it, about the thought of having to devote a whole lifetime to such meaningless, boring work. The scene culminates in an horrific image:
When he started to see the baby’s photo face melting and lengthening and growing a long cleft jaw and aging years in just seconds and finally caving in from old age and falling away from the grinning yellow skull underneath, he knew he was half asleep and dreaming but did not know his own face was in his hands until he heard a human voice and opened his eyes but couldn’t see who it went with and then smelled the pinkie’s rubber right under his nose.
The “human voice” that wakes up Lane is a strange cyclopean figure, an older man who delivers a weird lecture on the origins of the word “bore.” The scene is pure Wallacian, filled with plenty of erudite references and jostling with a love for etymology. It literally zaps life-force back into the text, and punctuates Lane’s boring day–which Wallace has so expertly made the reader suffer as well–with some strange, frightening fun. Wallace’s narration makes clear that the appearance of this strange man is not simply Lane going crazy from his boredom–Lane clearly cannot understand half of what the man refers to. Instead, we are given this nugget: “The phantom of the hallucination of repetitive concentration held for too long a time, like saying a word over and over until it kind of melted and got foreign.” After philosophical reflection on why the need for a word for a condition like boredom might have arisen, the episode ends with the phantom leaving and Lane looking up to see that “no time had passed at all, again.”
The emphasis on the ways a person’s soul might be bored into, how one might become bored, and what that might mean, proliferates the short text, and perhaps evokes some of the themes we’ll find in the whole of The Pale King. As the quotes I pulled suggest, the idea that boredom might feed a suicidal impulse resonates strongly in light of Wallace’s unfortunate death. But there I go again, letting context color my analysis. But if we’re only left fragments, isn’t it natural to want to pull them together, to frame them–to give them order–context? Its hard to say and probably not worth guessing if Lane Dean and the phantom will be major parts of The Pale King or not, but as the text progressed, I found myself more and more interested. Apparently, The Pale King will be published with notes and outlines–some bits of context–perhaps giving readers a clue as to how the text was meant to progress. Who knows. A lot of readers felt that Infinite Jest didn’t have a proper ending (not me, though). While I think that the “Wiggle Room” episode stands well on its own, I’d certainly be happy to read more about the phantom. Still, Infinite Jest was larded with lots of little vignettes that added to the whole, but it’s important to point out that there was a whole to be added to–not just a series of vignettes. I’m really hoping that, even unfinished, Wallace has left us something of substance and depth, something that narrativizes–contextualizes–its themes into a meaningful work of art.
The stack of promo copies and galleys at Biblioklept World Headquarters has built to an unmanageable and untenable tower of tasks that we are simply not up to of late. It’s not like we’re not reading, but we do have a day job! While we do request certain new books from publishers, most of what comes into our esteemed hallows is unsolicited, and a lot of it is honestly pretty dull stuff. However, we have a tidy little pile of new books that we’re going to read in full as soon as we can get to them, and it seems only right to share with our Esteemed Readers in a timely manner.
First up is Chinese author Yu Hua’s titanic Brothers, the engrossing and often ribald story of two step-brothers, Baldy Li and Song Gang. Brothers moves from the quiet village life of the brothers’ native Liu Town, through the Cultural Revolution, and into China’s contemporary economic and technological boom. At over 600 pages, the novel seemed a bit daunting, but we read the first 50 pages at a steady clip. Honestly, Yu Hua had us at the fourth page, when Baldy Li indulges in a bit of nasty voyeurism in a public restroom. Check the pithy wisdom:
Nowadays women’s bare butts aren’t worth much, since they can be found virtually everywhere. But back then things were different. It used to be that women’s bottoms were a considered a rare and precious commodity that you couldn’t trade for gold or silver or pearls. To see one, you had to go peeping in a public toilet . . .
We’re really enjoying Brothers so far, and the book seems destined to break Yu Hua’s funny and poignant voice to a Western audience. Here’s a pretty cool in-depth profile on Yu Hua by the New York Times. Full of weird vignettes, crude humor, and a frank look at a very different culture, we think this will be one of the highlights of 2009. Brothers is now available in hardback from Pantheon Books.
We’re not really big fans of detective noir, but Tim Davys’s Amberville seems to do the genre justice despite its big twist–the characters are all stuffed animals. In Davys’s debut novel, dark secrets from Eric Bear’s past come back to haunt him and challenge his legit prominence as a high-powered ad exec. The first two chapters were okay–Davys certainly has his noir tropes and rhythms down–but we had a hard time getting over the stuffed animal conceit. Still, readers who like their noir twisted–or fans of fantasy may get a kick out of Amberville, available now in hardback from HarperCollins.
New in paperback next month from Anchor Books, Mitch Cullin’s novel The Post-War Dream tells the story of two retirees in Arizona. After his wife Debra becomes gravely ill, Hollis finally confronts the trauma of his past, rooted in his experiences as a soldier in the Korean War. We have to admit that the plot description sounded a bit…hmmmm… “not our speed” would be a polite way to put it, we suppose (honestly, the idea of reading about an old married retired couple didn’t sound that interesting), but the first three chapters were very good, a bit strange, and intriguing enough to keep us going. Plus the book is dedicated to Howe Gelb–how weird is that? Those unfamiliar with Cullins might know his novel Tideland from its film adaptation a few years ago by Terry Gilliam. Those unfamiliar with Terry Gilliam have our permission to give up.
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