Tag: Literature

Down to a Sunless Sea

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Mathias B. Freese’s slim collection of short stories, Down to a Sunless Sea, relays the weird, miserable, and even sometimes ghoulish existences of people you might pass on the street everyday. The stories read like psychological case studies, and there’s frequently a strange distance between the clinical detachment of the prose and the depressed or depraved sentiment expressed by the narrator. At times the effect is painful, as in “Herbie,” where the titular protagonist’s rage at his abusive father spills over into Oedipal violence. Elsewhere, the stories take on a wry surrealist humor. Freese’s knack for dissonance evinces in “Juan Peron’s Hands,” where a grave robber pines for a head but settles for hands. Far closer to home is “Young Man,” where Freese distills an entire life to a few bitter pages, exploring the modern disconnect between thought, action and identity.

I can’t be who I am in real life, so I can be who I am in thought, but who I am in thought is not who I am in deed, so I live between what is and what should be, and this serves to make sharper the cleavage–the crevices are clearly marked.

One of my favorites in the collection, “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Father Was a Nazi,” disconcertingly (and humorously) condenses American obsession with celebrity into a fantasy ski trip, complete with the oddly sorta-prescient line: “I might even run for president if I can lose this accent” (the story was originally published in 1991). It is probably the deformed voyeur hero of “I’ll Make It, I Think” who delivers the closest thing to a mantra for these characters:

I’m not hurting anyone. So what if my morning shorts are sticky. I’m a good person. The outside, for sure, is a shambles–that’s not completely true, but I’ve made my point. Inside is fucked up some, but I’ll make it, I think.

Down to a Sunless Sea, for all its monsters and perverts and manic depressives, is never cruel in its darkness or unsympathetic in its distance. Freese creates real people here, and if we laugh at their pain, we’re laughing with them. Highly recommended.

Galactic Pot-Healer–Philip K. Dick

Edwin Turner2 Comments

Philip K. Dick’s bizarrely titled Galactic Pot-Healer begins in a dystopian future (more 1984 than Brave New World), before moving into–you guessed it–more galactic territory. Joe Fernwright “heals” ceramic pots–a relatively useless job, seeing as all the broken pots have now been mended. He wiles away his time playing word games with other cubicle minions across the globe, until an alien called Glimmung wisps him away to Sirius Five so that he can aid in resurrecting an ancient cathedral from the depths of an ocean where the laws of time do not apply. Lots of very strange stuff happens.

Galactic Pot-Healer is typical PKD, which is to say thoroughly atypical sci-fi with a philosophically paranoid twist (or is that a paranoid philosophical twist?). The story begins as a satire of modern workaday existence, and Dick’s assessment of cubicle life, written in the late 1960s, is almost too-prescient. Fernwright is a typical Dickian hero, a Walter Mitty figure who, real or not, gets to live his dream out (there’s a girl, of course, a sexy alien). After the action moves to Sirius Five, Dick becomes overtly concerned with the major themes of the novel. A precognitive alien race called the Kalends publish a book, a sort of daily newspaper, that accurately predicts the future. The Kalends predict that the raising of the cathedral will fail, and all involved will die. Glimmung, who is repeatedly compared to Faust by everyone in the book (all of these aliens from different planets are not only familiar with Goethe’s version, but other versions as well), attempts to prove that he is master of his own fate. Attracted to this, Fernwright risks his life in the project, and finds a new hope and vitality in meaningful work that he didn’t have back in his cubicle on Terra.

Galactic Pot-Healer is as weird as its title, and at times suffers from Dick’s manic jumpiness. One imagines him sweating out the novel over a few weeks, feverishly hacking at his typewriter. The links between concrete events–narrative action–are often frantic (if they exist at all), and there’s little subtlety here: Dick’s characters will quote verbatim Kant or Goethe, or wax heavy on determinism and ontology at the drop of a hat. At other times, the prose sings with lyrical beauty, sorrow, and a density of imagination that more than makes up for Dick’s occasional lack of cohesion. As good a place as any to begin a journey into the weird wonderful world of PKD.

(Images from philipkdick.com’s kickass covers gallery)

Gun, with Occasional Music–Jonathan Lethem

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Jonathan Lethem’s novel Gun, with Occasional Music blends hardboiled crime noir with trippy sci-fi to examine the ethical ramifications of murder in a dystopian future where evolved animals work along side humans, mind altering drugs are not only free but encouraged by the authorities, and asking questions requires a license. Conrad Metcalf is a Private Inquisitor trying to solve a murder case involving a urologist, a baby-head (a failed evolved baby), and a gun-wielding kangaroo.

Two of the blurbs for Lethem’s debut describe the work as a marriage of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler, but for my taste their wasn’t enough PKD. The details involving the “make” that Metcalf compulsively snorts, the genetic evolution techniques society now uses to produce children, and the genital nerve-ending swaps that people now enjoy are never fully explored. Sometimes bizarre details left unexplained create the dramatic immersion that the best SF achieves; Gun seems to throw ideas up against a wall to see if any stick. Many of the SF tropes that Lethem evokes are simply under-utilized. His ideas are playful, so why doesn’t he play with them more?

On the noir, end, the book also disappoints a little. The case is solved, but Metcalf’s solution–delivered entirely in a brief chapter crammed with exposition–seems hardly believable, or even really that interesting. This isn’t to suggest that Lethem’s/Conrad’s Chandlerisms aren’t enjoyable, and at times downright genius. Even when Lethem cranks out a clunker of a simile–and there’s more than one here–the rhetoric comes across more as satire of the genre as opposed to bad writing. The book also moves at a nice clip, with short, snappy chapters that always propel the narrative action. Eventually though, it just runs out steam. The story doesn’t really add up, and towards the end, it becomes clear that Lethem’s not going to fill us in on all of the cool ideas he initiated. I recommend those new to Lethem start with Motherless Brooklyn or The Fortress of Solitude instead. Or Men and Cartoons. Or The Disappointment Artist. Avoid You Don’t Love Me Yet like the plague.

Frank Miller Reconsidered

Edwin Turner11 Comments

During a horrible illness I suffered the other week, I turned to the only thing that I can digest when I’m really, really sick–comic books. I randomly chose to reread Frank Miller’s classic re-imagining of Batman, 1986‘s The Dark Knight Returns. I’ve read this comic–or “graphic novel,” if you want to sound like an asshole who’s afraid of being seen reading comic books–at least a dozen times now, I’d guess, but the last time I’d read it was after its sequel The Dark Knight Strikes Again came out in 2001.

The Dark Knight Returns didn’t disappoint; it never does. Set in a future with a very old Bruce Wayne, the story figures Gotham City as an urban dystopia, chaotic with child-gangs running rampant. The superheroes that once policed the world–including Superman–have been forced to retire by the government. The anarchy in the city prompts The Batman to return. The Joker revives his old crime career. The Soviets invade a Caribbean island. Superman and Batman fight. Batman leads a youth revolution. It’s really fucking spectacular, grim, violent, and funny–the book works at all times to satire the media-obsessed materialism of the 80s. Great stuff.

I don’t own the sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, which says a lot. The story’s not great; in fact, it’s highly forgettable.The plot overreaches, eschewing the essentially frail humanity of The Batman–always the character’s most interesting facet–in favor for a plot stuffed with too many of the truly extra-human characters of the DC universe. Superman, Brainiac, and Captain Marvel are just too hyperbolic to serve as effective foils for gritty Batman. Fifteen years later, Miller’s sequel overshoots, taking Batman from the underground, from the streets, and up into the air, where he just doesn’t belong.

The Dark Knight Strikes Again also came out after Frank Miller had had tremendous success with his Sin City series, published by Dark Horse. I remember when the first Sin City comics came out: I was really disappointed. The artwork was fantastic–a new level of excellence for Miller, whose Jack Kirby-influenced lines always managed to convey energy, tension, and action. Sin City looked like no comic before it that I can think of, a chiaroscuro film noir that rippled and moved. Unfortunately, the story was basic at best and flat and one-dimensional at worst. Without thematic depth or any measure of subtlety, the Sin City stories are aesthetically pleasing but hardly essential.

When 300 came out as a film last year, I took the time to read it–at Barnes & Nobles. Again, the book, especially in its oversized format, is visually striking, but where the old Frank Miller–the guy who created Elektra and made Wolverine the coolest mutant in the world–would’ve just drawn a great story, the late nineties Miller forces the drama down the reader’s throats. On virtually every page, 300‘s narrator tells you how you should feel about what’s going on in the story; the book is probably better without any lettering at all.

Although 300 was published in 1998, as criticism of the film has shown, its themes of patriarchal violence, unabashed militarism, and outright xenophobia are amazingly prescient to America’s post 9/11 ideology (my biggest criticism is undoubtedly the film’s depictions of idealized bodies contrasted with the extreme vilification of any “othered” bodies: this is a film that hates the differently-abled at all turns). Frank Miller has been something of a spokesman for this gung-ho mentality. Consider his September 11th, 2006 contribution to NPR’s “This I Believe” series, in which he blandly recapitulates the Bush administration’s “with us or against us” (in being against them) ethos; in an interview (again on NPR) a few months later he rails the “Bush-hating” “spoiled brats” who are not on board with the Iraq war. For such comments, Miller’s become something of a hero among right-wing bloggers, and his work has been reinterpreted within this light.

I wouldn’t hold this against Miller if his work held up, but I’m not sure that it does. He hasn’t produced anything that could touch The Dark Knight Returns in the twenty-plus years since its publication, and his recent announcement that he is writing Holy Terror, Batman! a self-described “piece of propaganda” in which “Batman kicks al Qaeda’s ass” is a truly lamentable decision (even Stan Lee, of all people, described the idea as “corny” and out of touch). Miller’s aim to write a piece of “propaganda” seems dead on, actually. Divorce “propaganda” from whatever politics it’s meant to convey, for a moment, and you have exactly the kind of work Miller’s been producing for quite some time now: thoroughly one-dimensional, brutishly simple pulp that hides its vacuity under a thick veneer of stylized violence.

To come back to where this long post started: after I finished The Dark Knight Returns, I reread Ronin, Miller’s 1983 tale of a masterless samurai lost in an apocalyptic future New York. The story explores dystopic race relations, emerging technologies, telekinesis, and bioethics. There’s also a demon. Ronin is cyberpunk on par with the best of William Gibson, and certainly the best thing Miller ever produced–and possibly the most overlooked. Apparently, a film version of Ronin is planned for release in 2009, which will undoubtedly lead to future confusion connected to Frankenheimer’s 1998 car-chase opus (also titled Ronin). Miller, however, seems to have no major hand in the movie–he’s too busy adapting and directing Will Eisner’s classic strip The Spirit for a 2009 movie release. The Spirit is fantastic source material, and Samuel “I Will Act in Your Movie For Money” Jackson is playing the villain, The Octopus, so it might be good. Then again, Miller is the screenwriter responsible for both Robocop 2 and 3, movies that completely missed the tone of Verhoeven’s satirical original. And whether or not Miller’s future movies–including sequels to Sin City–are any good, the gritty and grimy tone that he established in series like Daredevil and the original Wolverine book, as well as his groundbreaking revisioning of Batman led to a new seriousness and depth to an art form that had too-long been relegated to the margins of literature. And that’s a good thing.

Kurt Vonnegut Reconsidered

Edwin Turner4 Comments

Kurt Vonnegut died a year ago today. Vonnegut’s death has left neither a cultural vacuum nor a pining after another great work now never to be. And why should it? He was pretty old–84–and he’d written a relatively substantial collection of novels, plays, essays, and short stories. And admittedly, he hadn’t written a truly great book in decades. Like Bob Dylan, Vonnegut produced his greatest work in the 1960s: Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and, of course, Slaughterhouse-Five (even 1968’s short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House–a book I proudly admit I stole from my 10th grade English teacher–is superior to Vonnegut’s later work). Yet there’s still something about his death that makes me feel a little melancholy, even now–not sad, per se, but rather–and it sounds corny–like something is missing.

See, I learned to read by reading Vonnegut. Sure, I knew how to read before I read Cat’s Cradle, but, beyond Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and a number of classic adventure books by authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, Vonnegut was the first “literary” author I was exposed to. I learned irony. I learned detached pessimism. I was exposed to a writer who knew how to explode genre convention. And, in a short period–roughly from the ages of 12 to 16–I read everything that Vonnegut had written. Then I dismissed him as a “lesser” writer, and moved on, until I was required to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five in college. I’d forgotten how good it was. I re-read Cat’s Cradle, my first and favorite (to this day) Vonnegut novel. Again, great. I then picked up Vonnegut’s final novel, 1997’s Timequake, a shambolic wreck of semi-autobiography that is at turns drastically pessimistic, utterly depressive, and hilariously cynical. It’s really a terrible book, to be honest, but taken as a final statement, I think it works. In any case, after college I managed to get over the silly embarrassment I felt for my love of Vonnegut, an author often relegated to the second or even third tier of American letters, or, even worse, a personality reviled in the press (watch Fox News’s scandalous obituary. Or, if you prefer watching something positive, watch Vonnegut on The Daily Show.)

I suppose, when I say that Vonnegut’s death presents an absence, a feeling of something missing, I really mean to say that it marks me, it ages me: it makes me feel old. After all, we measure our own lives in part against the deaths of others, particularly against the deaths of the famous and celebrated. Vonnegut preceded me; his novels were there, waiting for me, and I was grateful. I read all of them–all of them–I don’t know if I can say that of another author (except maybe Salinger, and I don’t think that counts). But I still haven’t read A Man Without a Country, his 2005 collection of essays, and I haven’t read the posthumously published short story collection, Armageddon in Retrospect, which came out just the other week. It makes me happy to know that there’s something out there of his that I haven’t yet touched, that I can read for the first time as an adult, and not a teenager. I don’t know why I should feel this way, but I do. So it goes.

Vonnegut plays himself in an classic film:

Tolkien Cover Gallery

Biblioklept1 Comment

All images from the LOTR Fanclub Scrapbook outstanding cover gallery. Their collection is exhaustive (literally), so we’ve cherry-picked for you. Enjoy!

The original 1935 first edition of The Hobbit, featuring Tolkien’s own artwork and design

More of Tolkien’s own art and design

Watercolors by–you guessed it–Tolkien

These Polish editions are, um, kinda freaky

Happy fun times

There’s a certain Where the Wild Things Are quality to this one

According to the cover gallery site, this 1977 edition was the first Hebrew translation of The Hobbit, the work of Israeli air pilots passing time while imprisoned in Egypt. Art by Tolkien hisself.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Every year, I try to pick a different Shakespeare play to read with my students, preferably one I haven’t read in a long time. This year, I have one group of tenth graders, and right now we’re reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, most of the students at my school read well below their grade level, so Shakespearean language can often be a challenge. I’ve found that Alan Durband’s Shakespeare Made Easy series does a great job at clarifying the narrative action without sacrificing too much of Shakespeare’s poetry. It presents the original text on the left side with the clarified “translation” on the right, which allows us to read and act out the play without spending too much time and effort breaking down every little (or long…) speech. Every couple of pages I’ll pick out a key passage from the original text which we’ll read and discuss. I’ve also been showing them the film adaptation that came out in the nineties (with Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christian Bale). We’re about half way through so far, and we’re enjoying the whole process.

I haven’t read this play since I was in the tenth grade, and I really didn’t think too much of it then–it certainly didn’t seem as weighty as, say, Othello, Macbeth, or Hamlet. Anyway, in re-reading it, I notice now that there’s an underlying rape motif throughout the text. For example, Theseus has captured his bride Hippolyta by seizing her in a classical rape; Demetrius threatens taking the “rich worth” of Helena’s virginity if she won’t quit stalking him in the woods; Lysander forces himself onto Hermia in the woods, and she’s barely able to keep him off. Oberon and Titania’s quarrel over the beautiful Indian boy is pretty weird, and is just one strange detail in a play full of aggressive sexuality, possibly most neatly summed up in the bestiality implicit in Titania’s affair with ass-headed Bottom. Of course, Titania doesn’t really love bottom–she’s just been dosed by her jealous hubby, who has a frat boy’s penchant for drugging people to get the love buzz going. Good stuff.

Blood Meridian–Cormac McCarthy

Edwin Turner15 Comments

Blood Meridian is a blood-soaked, bloodthirsty bastard of a book, and certainly the most violent piece of literature I’ve read outside of the Bible and certain Greek tragedies. Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel passes itself off as a Western–and it is a Western, to be sure–but more than anything, it’s a brutal horror story.

Set predominantly in the 1850s, Blood Meridian chronicles the westward journey of a protagonist we know only as “the kid.” After a few false starts (including getting shot, robbed, arrested, and surviving a Comanche massacre) the kid eventually meets up with John Joel Glanton‘s “expedition”–a group of men of mixed backgrounds hired by Mexican authorities to kill–and scalp–the nomadic Apache that prey upon Mexican villages. However, led by the nefarious, larger-than-life Judge Holden, Glanton’s gang quickly descends into a relentless robbing, raping, and killing spree; they savagely massacre peaceful Indian settlements along with the Mexican villages they were contracted to protect.

I could keep summarizing the book, but I don’t see the point, honestly–a mere description of the plot could never do real justice to the weight of this book. The narrative is taut and fast-paced–in fact, at points the action is so radically condensed that I had to go back and re-read sections–and there’s no shortage of the “men doing men stuff” that McCarthy is so good at detailing–but it’s really the combination of the book’s evocative imagery and philosophical pondering that hook the reader.

Most of that philosophical pondering comes from the Judge, who waxes heavy on everything from space aliens to metallurgy. In his parables and aphorisms, the Judge comes across as part-Mephistophelean, part-Nietzschean, all dark wisdom and irreverent chaos. I found myself re-reading the Judge’s speeches several times and chewing them over, trying to digest them; for me, they were the best part of a great book.

Blood Meridian, like most excellent things, is simply not for everyone, and I don’t mean that in any snobbish, elitist sense. Any reader turned off by its freewheeling violence would be justified, and I’m sure plenty of folks out there would take issue with its ambiguous conclusion. Depictions of genocidal mania that seem to end inconclusively are not for everyone, particularly when they are rife with archaisms, untranslated Spanish, and McCarthy’s signature, apostrophe-free punctuation. I had two false starts with the novel, including one where, at about exactly half way through, I realized I had to go back and start the novel again. I owed it that much. And it was worth it.

Blood Meridian is literally stunning; perhaps the best analogy I can think of is going to see a really, really good band that plays really, really brutal and strange music that sorta melts your face off. After the show you’re sweaty and exhilarated and even unnerved; your ears are ringing and your chest is pounding. And then the band packs up, and the house lights go on, and they pump in music from a CD, of all things, and the music just sounds tinny and pale and blanched of life after the raw power you’ve witnessed. Reading anything else right after finishing Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is sort of like that. Highly recommended.

His Dark Materials Trilogy — Philip Pullman

Edwin Turner2 Comments
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William Blake, “Ancient of Days”

Over the past three weeks, I read, and, alternately listened to, Philip Pullman’s fantastic His Dark Materials trilogy–The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Here’s the short review:

If it’s necessary to critically situate and compare a fantasy or sci-fi series against precursor series–namely, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Chronicles of Prydain, Harry Potter, etc.–and I don’t think it is necessary to critically situate and compare a fantasy or sci-fi series against its precursors, but that’s generally how these things are done–(this is turning into a monster of a “short review”)–but if it is necessary to critically situate and compare a fantasy or sci-fi series against precursor series, I think that Pullman’s His Dark Materials must be considered a new classic, an instantly-canonizable contribution to children’s literature, imaginative fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, or whatever genre you want to affix to these marvelous books.

His Dark Materials follows Lyra and Will, two children from different worlds (literally) who must work together to repair a damaged multiverse. Lyra comes from a world where people travel side by side with their daemons, spirit-images of their souls who take animal shapes. Will is an outsider in “our” world, a young fatherless boy who must take care of his mentally ill mother. The novels, in their simplest sense, detail the coming of age of these two as the traverse multiple parallel universes. In the backdrop there are witches and zeppelins, armored bears and dark specters, a compass that can point to the truth and a knife that can open all worlds, angels and scientists, and Lyra’s cruel and terrible parents, the cunning Mrs. Coulter, and Lord Asriel, whose will to kill God–The Authority–precipitates the action of the narrative.

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William Blake, “Satan Watching the Caress of Adam and Eve”

As many critics have pointed out, His Dark Materials recapitulates Milton’s Paradise Lost (the series takes its name from a line from that epic poem). However, the series really reinterprets the British Romantics’ assessment of Paradise Lost. Pullman engages a host of Romantic writers, foregrounding Keats’s idea of negative capability, and prefacing many of the chapters with quotes from Romantic poetry. In particular, Pullman cites William Blake. Indeed, it seems to me that His Dark Materials effectively synthesizes many of Blake’s poems and ideas, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in particular. The novel also engages a number of Nietzsche’s ideas, and even, I believe, alludes to several concepts of Derrida’s (in particular, the idea of the gift of death). Additionally, Pullman weaves in the many-worlds theory, extended discussions of evolutionary anthropology, rampant infanticide, and auto-trepanation. Good stuff.

When the film of The Golden Compass (I didn’t see it) came out last year, it ignited a small controversy about the books. According to the Baptist Press, Pullman presents “a fantasy universe where witches are good, the church is bad, and at the end of it all, God dies.” This really isn’t the case, if you want to go with a precise reading of Pullman’s actual words, but, consider the source. I’m sure the controversy is healthy for Pullman’s sales; it certainly piqued my interest in the book, and I’m guessing that there are plenty of kids who, once their private Christian schools banned the books, couldn’t wait to get their hands on the verboten goods. And that’s a good thing.

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William Blake, “Whirlwind of Lovers”

His Dark Materials meets and surpasses my notions of good fantasy/sci-fi/imaginative fiction: the books engage multiple complex ideas in a new and often unsettling way. Unlike the Harry Potter series, which simply operates within familiar, preexisting archetypes of fantasy, Pullman’s work consistently disrupts reader expectations, pushing set ideas about religion and science, art and fantasy into new and fantastic places. Ultimately, although many will seek to suppress this book as an “amoral” work, His Dark Materials proposes a very real set of ethics inscribed in a world of moral relativity. The characters grow up and make good, selfless choices, decisions they make independent of absolute moral authority.

I very highly recommend these books.

The Art of Modern Memory

Edwin Turner8 Comments

From conscientious reader Dave C. ((very) minor editorial changes by the Biblioklept):

“The NY Times posted an article about an author who was outed as a fraud for writing a memoir about her life as a half-Native American, half-white gangbanger from South Central Los Angeles who escaped to the University of Oregon when she was really just an activist who at one point worked with gangs and created the characters in her memoir based on real people she had met in her real/fake life.The Times actually reviewed the book just last week and praised it.

I’ve just been pissed ever since that James Frey controversy about the idea that a supposed memoir has to be true. Does the fact that she made up portions of this book make her accomplishment any less significant? Isn’t a moving work of fiction a greater accomplishment than a moving autobiography? Are people really so concerned with whether someone actually did something that they are willing to ignore a touching, well-written narrative?

That James Frey novel, what I’ve read of it, was a tad overcooked, but about 10 people told me I had to read it because it was sooooo good. After Oprah (who made a gazillion dollars promoting his work) sold him down the river, he became a literary pariah.

Is the phrase “based on a true story” important in the appreciation of a story at all?”

I wrote a blog a few weeks ago about a few run-ins I had at an AP workshop, specifically related to teaching the canon. Anyway, that aside, during that workshop, this question came up. The mediator/instructor had the room show, by hands, their opinion on the issue. It was roughly a 70-30 split, with the majority favoring “authenticity” in their memoirs. I was, of course, in the minority.

Like Dave, I was steamed over the James Frey thing, not because I cared about the book–it looked like trash, frankly–but because he became a strange acid test for what America now thinks it needs from a memoir.

If we start from the assumption that genres impose a functional structure that inheres within the reading of a book, we’ve already made a strange, silly, and ultimately illusory set of distinctions to guide our reading. All one has to do is look at the travel literature of the sixteenth century or a science text book from the 1920s to see how quickly “validity” melts under context.

But even if we grant that genre has a meaningful or necessary purpose, and we work from this assumption, I think it’s a huge mistake to believe that “memoir” is the same as “nonfiction.” There are several simple reasons for this.

For one, to tell an effective and affecting story requires a manipulation of events–editing, hyperbole, recoloring, touch-ups, and so on. Events in life don’t necessarily unfold in a “readable” way. And I think that many, if not most readers go into a memoir understanding that the tale they read may be compressed or somehow aestheticized.

But I think a more fundamental reason that memoir shouldn’t be held to the strictest ideals of verity follows from the simple fact that memory is in no way perfect, absolute, or unchanging. We cannot perfectly record our memories, nor do they stay stable to us. Memories are always volatile, swirling; we forge our identity in every moment by reinterpreting and reimagining our past.

Any memoirist must literally reimagine their memories in order to write, and if they choose not to reimagine, but to instead imagine (invent and create) memories, what does it say about our expectations and needs as readers to judge their writing based solely on adherence to structural genre?

In the preface to Dave Eggers’s What is the What, Valentino Achak Deng foregrounds these problems. He says that the book–his “autobiography,” written by Dave Eggers (and hence not his autobiography)–must be considered a novel, as he was very, very young when many of the events recorded in the book happened. Similarly, Eggers’s own memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, repeatedly references its own flights of fiction, acknowledges its own need to invent a new imagined version of memories that never happened in order to better explain what really did happen. The Autobiography of Malcolm X was written by Alex Haley; The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano is rife with distortions, inaccuracies and completely fabricated events; in crafting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man–which may or may not be a memoir (although it is certainly a book…)–James Joyce wholly lifted entire passages of contemporary religious tracts.

James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, illustrates how easily notions of genre–just like notions of race and stable identity–can be deconstructed. Johnson anonymously published the “autobiography” in 1912, and it was received as the true life story of an extraordinary “Negro” who shockingly was able to “pass” as a white man, to the extent that he (gasp!) married a white woman and became a major property owner. The book initiated a minor racial panic, causing some critics to insist that it must be fake because no black man could effectively “pass” as the unnamed narrator claimed to do. JWJ’s deconstruction of race and identity could not have worked in the same way had he presented it within the limits of a “true” memoir. It took fiction (masquerading as fact) to reveal a more profound reality.

A good writer makes stuff up and writes it down in a way that makes us want to read it and not put it down and keep reading it until we’ve read it all and want to read it again. If finding out the circumstances of the writing of the book do not match a set of expectations we had going into reading the book, we need to re-evaluate those expectations.

A Diddy in the Sun

Edwin Turner3 Comments

I teach four sections of 11th grade AP English Language and Composition; I’m really hard on these kids. I also teach one section of 10th graders. I see these kids dark and early every morning, and I’m not very hard on them. It’s impossible to be, really. They–and I–are still sort of asleep. So, even though the FCAT is but a week away, when one assertive young lady in the class thought to tape record the new TV movie version of A Raisin in the Sun and bring it in, I agreed to let them watch it. After all, we’d read the play in class back in November, and watched the entire 1989 filmed stage production starring Danny Glover, as well as parts of the 1961 version starring Danny Glover.

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I’ve been using Lorraine Hansberry’s play in the classroom for years, with great success, I might add–the themes of race, economics, integration, assimilation, acculturation, generational change, and women’s rights continue to be as vital and thought-provoking as when the play was first produced a half-century ago. Which is why the early aughties revival starring Sean “Puff Daddy P-Diddy, No, Just Diddy (Diddy Dumb Diddy Do)” Combs seemed like a great idea. It was met with good reviews and ran to 88 performances. I know this play inside and out, and was excited to see a new version of it.

It was awful. Just plain awful. I can only hope that most of the people who saw it last week had some previous exposure. The depth of inter-generational conflict of Hansberry’s original text is drained of all energy and force, leaving only a weak trace of sappy melodrama. Both Poitier and Glover carried their versions, exploring the role of Walter Lee, a man whose dreams and ambitions are outmatched by the limited station thrust upon him. Walter Lee, properly, must be a man-child animal, lean and angry, a volcano ready to explode in rage and desperation. Walter Lee’s transformation into an adult man is painful; it almost undoes his family, metonymized neatly in the abortion his wife plans to have. Diddy, however, turns in one of the laziest one-note performances I’ve ever seen. He relies on every hackneyed trope of melodrama as a substitution for really emoting his part. In short, it’s impossible to believe that he’s Walter Lee. He’s just Diddy casually pretending to be Walter Lee. And the producers and director seem to know this. Whereas Walter Lee at least punctuates each scene of ARITS–and usually is at the forefront of catalytic action–the 2008 version reduces the scope of Diddy’s screen time, even omitting the famous “flaming spear” scene (my students were appalled at this elision–they determined that Diddy wouldn’t want to appear foolish). Furthermore, every single scene with Puffy Daddy (yes, I kept track) relies on the most saccharine of music to make sure the audience knows how to feel.

 

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It’s left then to a chubbyish Phylicia Rashad to carry the movie, and while she’s a great actress, her Mama Younger is far too keenly self-aware. She’s simply not Hansberry’s Mama; instead, she’s Rashad’s late aughties update on what Rashad thinks a strong black woman should be. The original Mama’s ideology is defined (perhaps even limited) by the Great Migration; ARITS is largely the story of this mentality clashing with the artistic, educational, and economic aspirations inherent in the Civil Rights movement. Rashad’s Mama is never confused or even especially distraught over this changing ideology, and even some of the original lines that show her distress are cut. It just doesn’t work.

Maybe I gripe too much–my kids enjoyed it on the whole, but conceded that it wasn’t nearly as good as Glover’s take. I have to admit that I liked John “Uncle Jessie” Stamos as Mr. Lindner. He brought a silly unself-conscious humor to the role that exposed the inherent conflict of the original character: a guy whose actions are incredibly racist who can at no point recognize this racism because it’s so indelibly entrenched within him.

Still, if you’ve never seen the play before, I recommend going to the Danny Glover version, or at least the Poitier “classic.” Our inaugural post was about A Raisin in the Sun.

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Azar Nafisi to Speak at UNF

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Readers in Northeast Florida may be interested in catching Azar Nafisi speak at the University Center of the University of North Florida at 7:30PM on Monday, March 3rd. Nafisi’s bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran recounts the Western literature course that Nafisi taught in secret to a small group of Iranian women in her house in the late 90s, and engages the events of the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the conservative cultural revolution that led to the necessity of keeping such a course on the down-low. My wife didn’t finish the book; I didn’t start it. My wife said it was good though; she told me she can’t remember why she quit reading it. How’s that for a book review? (I highly recommend Hamid Dabashi’s highly-critical and thoroughly engrossing critique of the book, “Native informers and the making of the American empire,” in which he refers to Reading Lolita in Tehran as “the locus classicus of the ideological foregrounding of the US imperial domination at home and abroad” — read the whole essay here.)

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Nafisi’s lecture, “The Republic of the Imagination,” is part of UNF’s ongoing “Distinguished Voices” series (great name, by the way, guys. Lot of thought and creativity put into that one). The next speaker in the series is pretty-boy news analyst and frequent Daily Show guest Fareed Zakaria. Get free tickets for any of the lectures in the series here.

Profanity/Hogs Mating

Biblioklept6 Comments
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I work as a teacher for Duval County Public Schools. Last week, a 15 page document titled “Alphabetical Listing of Multimedia Material Reevaluated in Duval County” was dropped off in my mailbox; I’m not sure exactly why. The document lists well over 250 books, magazines, videos, and albums that were “reevaluated” due to complaints. Some of these books are frequent guests on the censorship block (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “Racial,” Catcher in the Rye, “Offensive Language,” Are You There God? It’s Me, Margeret, “Religious, Sex, Introduction to Pornography,” As I Lay Dying “Profanity/Racial Slur”) and some are destined to be under scrutiny for a long time (Harry Potter, entire series, “Witchcraft, Occult, Spellcasting”). As you might expect, the dominant complaints revolve around profanity, sex, and a general sense that the book doesn’t fit in to the complainant’s worldview. Here are a few favorites of mine:

Goosebumps Series, R.L Stine — “Scary” (Yes. Correct. They’re supposed to be scary, jackass).Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond — “Bestiality/Darwinian evolution” (Natch–bestiality and Darwinian evolution go together like PB & J).

Halloween, Joyce K. Kessell — “Evil, Full of Lies” (Ach! Oh no! A fiction book that doesn’t tell the truth!)

The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss — “Violence” (Admittedly, The Butter Battle Book was the peak of Seuss’s “Tarantino phase”)

Four Good Friends, Margaret Hillert — “Negative, Nonproducive tone” (What the fuck is a “Nonproducive tone”? What does that even mean?)

In the Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak — “Nudity” (This charming kid’s book repeatedly lands on the Most Frequently Challenged Books List)

Learning to Swim, Ann Turner — “Erotic and Sexual Nature” (Erotic and sexual? Intriguing…)

A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein — “Illustrations” (Huh? “Illustrations”? Huh? This book is actually right by me, my childhood copy, proudly shelved on the mantle…let’s review these nefarious illustrations…let’s see, let’s see…An Icarian hippo, perhaps? An unscratchable itch?Rhino pen? Nah…Is it perhaps, the “Union for Children’s Rights” picture (pgs 140-141 in my 1981 Harper & Row edition)? Gotta be…unionized kids…scary!)

Kid in the Red Jacket, Barbara Park — “”Stupid” and “God”” (Again, I ask “Huh?”)

Little Red Riding Hood, Paul Galdone — “Violence/Wine” (Two of my favorite things!)

Marijuana, Martin Godfrey — “Drugs” (Really? Who knew Marijuana would contain “drugs”)

Matilda, Roald Dahl — “Vulgar, Unethical” (This is one of my favorite books. Attempting to suppress it and keep kids from reading it is both vulgar and unethical)

Our Country Spain, David Cumming — “Mediterranean Beach Picture” (Good lord no!)

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde — “Morality” (What is the problematic “morality” of Dorian Gray? Or did the offended parent have a problem with Oscar’s proclivities for the lovely youths?)

Santa Claus Mystery, John Godman — “Conflict w/ Santa Myth” (I wish they’d be more specific–what’s the conflict? Is there a “set” Santa myth? What is it?)

Tar Baby, Toni Morrison — “Sex, Violence, Myth” (Myth? Really? Myth is offensive?)

The Visitors Who Came to Stay, A. McAffee and A. Browne — “Pictures” (Again, please, be specific when you want to ban a book. “Pictures” simply won’t cut it)

Where is Gah-Ning, Robert Munsch — “Blatant disregard for moral standard” (Okay, that’s a little more specific, I guess–but still asinine).

Which Witch, Eva Ibboston; The Witches, Roald Dahl; Witches, Witches, Witches, Helen Hoke; Witches, Rhoda Blumberg; The Witches of Worm, Z. Keatley Snyder; The Witch’s Handbook, Malcolm Bird — “Witchcraft, Occult” (Duh)

Worry Worts, Morris Gleitzman — “Sexual Context” (I wonder if this book is about STDs…)

A Day No Pigs Would Die, Robert Newton — “Profanity/Hogs Mating” (Sounds like a party to me!)

Essential Short Story Collections: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Edwin Turner2 Comments

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Properly describing David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men involves using all of those words that I hate to see in any book review: “radiates,” “pathos,” “poignancy,” “gut-busting laughs,” “existential crises of identity in the post-modern world,” and so on. Now that I have them out of the way, let me tell you why you should read this book: it will make you laugh, it will make you cry. Out loud. After you read it, you will want to press it on other people, who will say, “Yeah, sure, okay”; only their eyes’ will be slightly-slanted, their mouths just a bit crooked, even their nose will appear askew at your demand. They will hurriedly change the subject–you’ve already foisted so many unwanted books on them, and who even has time to read now?–but you will persevere! “Here,” you’ll say, “Read “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”–it’s only two paragraphs! You can read the whole thing in under a minute!”:

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

And, as they finish reading, you’ll beam at them and nod your head knowingly. They’ll look a little confused, perhaps bored. “It’s like an overture, see? It’s like, about loss, the inability to connect, the masks we wear to hide our hideousnessnesses.” Your victim will nod politely and begin to bring up an interesting thing he saw on the local news concerning pet ownership, but you’ll cut him off before he can get out of this. “Check out the “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” sections that permeate the book–they’re like little vignettes, interviews where you only get the interviewee’s responses. They’re funny, shocking sad–they’re really good! Also, check out my favorites– “Adult World (I)” and “Adult World (II)”–these stories are about a wife who it turns out doesn’t really know her husband at all. Just read the beginning– ”

For the first three years, the young wife worried that their lovemaking together was somehow hard on his thingie. The rawness and tenderness and spanked pink of the head of his thingie. The slight wince when he’d enter her down there. The vague hot-penny taste of rawness when she took his thingie in her mouth–she seldom took him in her mouth, however; there was something about it that she felt he did not quite like.

“See?” you’ll demand uncaringly of your now-obviously exasperated detainee, “See? Sex! It’s got sex in it! Everyone loves to read about sex, especially weird awkward sex!” Your victim will now stand up, feigning the need to visit the restroom. But you won’t let him go that easily! “There’s another series of running vignettes that unify the book’s structure, making its sum more than just a collection of previously-published stories–check out a selection from one of the “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders” series”–

“Don’t love you no more.”

“Right back at you.”

“Divorce your ass.”

“Suits me.”

“Except now what about the doublewide.”

“I get the truck is all I know.”

“You’re saying I get the doublewide you get the truck.”

“All I’m saying is that truck out there’s mine.”

“Then what about the boy.”

“For the truck you mean?”

Your poor visitor is now literally walking away from you, ignoring the book in your hands, yet still somehow politely smiling–though only with his mouth–his hard eyes show how much he hates you right now. As he retreats to the toilet, your feelings hurt, you comfort yourself by declaring that he doesn’t read anyway; besides, he wouldn’t be able to figure out that “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” was a retelling of both the Tristan and Isolde and Narcissus and Echo stories, set in Hollywood; he wouldn’t appreciate the book’s themes of child-abuse, repressed (false?) memories, and lost love. Philistine.

When he comes out of the bathroom you chit-chat a little more and then he’s ready to go. He holds his hand out toward the book. He wants to borrow the book. He wants to take your book. Oh shit. What have you done?

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Believe it or not, that dude who plays “Jim” from The Office is directing a movie version of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, scheduled to come out later this year.

You can read the first part of this series here.

A Few Thoughts on (Not Teaching) The Canon

Edwin Turner15 Comments

Today I attended the first day of a two-day College Board workshop meant to provide additional training to teachers of Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. I’ve been to a number of these over the years, and College Board’s trainers tend to be better than the average presenters we get in education. The workshops also provide an opportunity to see what teachers at other schools are doing with their students.

Anyway, the only reason I bother to write about this is because of an interesting conversation/confrontation that happened almost immediately at the beginning of the session. As per usual with these things, we were to introduce ourselves–how long we’d been teaching, where we teach, the grade levels we teach, etc. The presenter also asked us to identify the book we most enjoyed “teaching.” That was the verb used–“teaching.” We were in a circle; I was one of the last people to have to introduce myself, and I heard repeatedly “I like to teach Gatsby” or “I like to teach Night” or “I like to teach To Kill a Mockingbird” or “I teach Faulkner.” I was getting a little antsy. Here’s why: 1) I don’t teach books–I don’t even know what it means to teach a book, 2) I rarely have my students read a complete book as part of their curriculum–I abridge almost everything, and 3) I’d been in this same situation more than once, and I knew that saying this was going to rub some of these English teachers the wrong way. And of course it did rub wrong, in particular two musty hags of the old school, one of whom cut me off condescendingly in mid-sentence: “So you’re saying that your kids never read a whole book?”

As pleasantly as possible, I tried to explain that I aim to expose my students to a multiplicity of voices and themes and rhetorical styles and methods, and that I didn’t see my primary job as fostering a love of literature; rather, I believe that the main duty of the English teacher is to facilitate the development of reading, composition, and thinking. I tried to explain that, even in my AP classes, most of my students are not avid readers and most of my students do not read at their grade level, and therefore struggling through 4 or 5 novels or plays over the course of one year didn’t seem as valuable to me as working through over a hundred different writers writing in a variety of styles for a variety of purposes. I tried to explain that reading a selection on slavery from 1789 by Olaudah Equiano in conjunction with a 2005 UN report on human trafficking, and then responding to these text was a far more valuable skill than wading through a dusty “classic” hunting down “universal” themes (whatever those are…).

The response, predictably was: “You mean, your 11th graders don’t read The Scarlet Letter? They don’t read Gatsby? That’s terrible!”

Why? Why should The Scarlett Letter or The Great Gatsby be so reverently “taught” to sixteen and seventeen year olds in this country? I like both of these books–I really do (although I think Gatsby is possibly the most overrated and over-read book ever published, and I’d take Hawthorne’s fabulous short stories any day over dreary Dimsdale and Hester Prynne)–but what purpose is there in making kids read them? Are they truly that relevant, or important?

I should be clear here that I am in no way at all against students reading these books; I wish that they would read these books, in fact. Only, I wish that they would love reading so much that they would be inspired to read books that they’ve heard are great or classic. But here’s the thing: I don’t think that telling a student they must read a book and that that book is a great work of literature and that they should enjoy or be inspired by that book is in any way a fair proposition. It leads only to anxiety, frustration, boredom, and then defeat.

Instead, English teachers should recognize that literature is just one part of reading and writing, and that most of our students are not going to go on to be English teachers or fiction writers. We should focus on a heteroglossic range of voices, styles, and purposes in introducing texts into the classroom. Students should be taught to respond to a variety of texts across a variety of disciplines, not to a few canonical authors. What happens more often than not in English classrooms is something like this: students are forced to read a work too complex for them to comprehend; they rely on the teacher’s interpretation to guide them through the novel (never having been taught a close-reading method that might give them access to the text); the student then writes a meaningless recapitulation of the teacher’s own “universalist” interpretation of the literary work, to the egotistical delight of the teacher who is enthralled that the student has “got it.” What’s lost is the opportunity to engage in relevant, “real-life” writing, writing that enters into an ongoing conversation in a meaningful way.

This is has been a straight-up rant–I’m sorry. I think that the following scene from Freaks and Geeks says it all better than I just did. Kim Kelly (Busy Phillips) critiques On the Road:

Essential Short Story Collections: Jesus’ Son

Edwin Turner5 Comments

Welcome to a new feature at the Biblioklept, “Essential Short Story Collections,” in which we take a look at some, uh, short story collections that are essential (how’s that for a tautology?). Because we here at Biblioklept Headquarters USA always put Jesus first, and because his latest novel Tree of Smoke was so dang good, why not start with Denis Johnson’s 1992 collection Jesus’ Son?

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Jesus’ Son is almost a novel in short story form. The unnamed narrator of the stories is an alcoholic drug addict who manages to survive through a mix of petty thievery, odd odd jobs, and straight-up bumming it. The collection opens with “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” The title of this story is in no way misleading. And although the first story winds up with the narrator hospitalized and blacking out (initiating a motif in Jesus’ Son), the next story, “Two Men” finds him reasonably healthy and up to no good. “Two Men” is a meditation on the bonds of friendship and an outstanding example of Johnson’s tight prose:

I was being taken out of the dance by my two good friends. I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn’t yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another’s company, going to bars and having conversations. Generally one of these false coalitions died after a day or a day and a half, but this one had lasted more than a year. Later on one of them got hurt when we were burglarizing a pharmacy, and the other two of us dropped him bleeding at the back entrance of the hospital and he was arrested and all the bonds were dissolved.

Friends! Good stuff. Other stand-outs in the collection include “Work,” a story about stealing copper wire, and “Emergency,” a tale involving copping pills from an emergency room job. Reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson, “Emergency” perfectly captures drug-addled paranoia overflowing into petty existential questing. An encounter with some normals:

A family in a big Dodge, the only car we’d seen in a long time, slowed down and gawked out the windows as they passed by. The father said, “What is it, a snake?”

“No, it’s not a snake,” Georgie said, It’s a rabbit with babies inside it.”

“Babies!” the mother said, and the father sped the car forward, over the protests of several little kids in the back.

Georgie came back to my side of the truck with his shirtfront stretched out in front of him as if he were carrying apples in it, or some such, but they were, in fact, slimy miniature bunnies. “No way I’m eating those things, ” I told him.

The last story in Jesus’ Son, “Beverly Home,” finds our narrator in a somewhat more stable position, working in a retirement home and attending NA and AA meetings. His one vice and indulgence is voyeurism; he takes to watching a Mennonite couple through their windows at night, progressing from deviant sex-obsession to pining for their mundane life:

I got so I enjoyed seeing them sitting in their living room talking, almost not talking at all, reading the Bible, saying grace, eating their supper in the kitchen alcove, as much as I liked watching her naked in the shower.

At the end of the book, moved by the strange spectacle of a man washing his wife’s feet, the narrator finds a kind of hope and redemption for the future:

All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

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I mentioned above that Jesus’ Son can almost be read as a novel, but make no mistake–it is a collection of short stories, character sketches, vignettes that add up to something greater. The 2000 film adaptation of the movie makes this quite clear. Although the film, starring Billy Crudup as the unnamed narrator, is not half bad, the disconnected and fragmentary nature of the book–which reinforced the book’s themes of existential alienation and minor redemption–comes across as episodic and even whimsical in the movie.

I highly recommend Jesus’ Son, and I hope that people who “don’t have time to read” will make a little space in their day for this slim but substantial book. Most of the stories can be read in under half an hour, so why not pick up a copy?

Other People’s Lists: The Best Books of 2007

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Since we’ve already had our say about the best books of ’07, here’s what some other clowns thought:

The New York Times agreed with us that Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke was fantastic. They also give props to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, the reading of which is high on our “to do” list. In their non-fiction superlatives, they highlight music critic Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise, as do the a couple of the folks over at Slate–although Slate‘s list fails to recognize Tree of Smoke (the book is seriously seriously good good good). The editors of Publisher’s Weekly also cite Johnson’s novel as one of ’07’s best, and they’re one of the few sites out there to mention Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. I’ve just started listening to the audiobook version of Falling Man, and I should be able to weigh in before ’07 is kaput. There’s a better-than-you-would-think-it-would-be write-up at Time of the top-ten graphic novels of 2007. The School Library Journal effectively organizes its list by grade level, a boon to teachers and parents everywhere. That bastion of literary criticism, The Economist, seems to think that Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was something special, although we know better. The writers over at the Village Voice are sensible enough to append the adjective “favorite” instead of “best,” perhaps excusing them from also giving a nod to Chabon’s book (although their mistaking Miranda July for an author cannot be forgiven). When you get sick of reading other people’s list, head over to Book Covers and check out the Best Book Shelves of 2007 (the images in this post are from said list).

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