Tag: Stanley Elkin

(Some) books acquired, April 2024

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April is always a weird month for me, the last few weeks of the spring semester when I try to corral my students (and myself) toward our Grand Project of Just Damn Finishing (while also Learning and Growing as Humans), when the magic of spring break has burned off to memories, scents, traces, when the Florida weather is glorious and perfect, but for only just long enough to get out in the garden before Summer Hell commences.

It’s been a lot of cleaning and clearing out and reorganizing for me, along with meetings with students—and not as much reading as I’d like. I devoured Percival Everett’s novel James early in the month, reading it in just a few days and loved it, but failed to write The Thing I Wanted to Write about it—about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, about lighting out for the Territory, about Leslie Fiedler, about Robert Coover’s Huck Out West. I did manage to shoehorn bits of it into meetings with an American lit class I particularly liked this semester (we’d read Huckleberry Finn back in January). I also read/am reading Max Lawton’s novel-in-progress, The Abode, and reread Max’s translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard. I’ve actually done a lot of re-rereading of Blue Lard, as my project of posting about it seems to get delayed by, like, time constraints and/or exhaustion–

–is this the part where I also rant about my eyes going to seed, my eyes of forty-five years, stalwart fellows for most of those years, but now fading? eyes now needing nose-bridge-irritating lenses to be able to read finer print at first and now not-so-fine print? eyes that will need a new set of so-called readers with a higher rate of magnification simply to comprehend the little marks on the huge copy of RSS’s A Bended Circuity I obtained way back in November of last year? my eyes that are also having a hard time with Dalkey’s reissue of Marguerite Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling, not included in this riff and pic of books acquired in April because it is new, a new printing? I guess that was the eye rant, so—

Oh and so anyway to the used books I picked up this month, mostly over a series of Friday-afternoon-special-treat browsings, their purchase entirely subsidized by trade credit from so, so many books I read my children when they were little and cute, books that they no longer wish to place on their shelves (ever the sentimentalist, I found space in my tiny Florida attic for a box or two for the future—and made an agreement with my son to shelve the Maurice Sendak titles in his room for at least the next few years). Those books–

A collection of Virgilio Piñera short stories translated by Mark Schaffer. I admit I was unaware of the Cuban author’s existence until I came across this edition of Cold Tales (once property of the University of Washington Libraries). The spine attracted me, the cover, bearing a reproduction of Goya’s Saturn Snacking enticed me, and I opened, reading a few of the very short stories within, knowing it’d leave with me.

I picked up John Speicher’s 1971 novel Didman because Thomas Pynchon blurbed it; haven’t opened it since.

I picked up first-edition hardbacks of books I already own and have read, books by Stanley Elkin and Jerzy Kosinski—books I already own, in a few cases, in beautiful trade paperback editions (a Vintage Contemporaries edition of Steps; Elkin novels with covers by my favorite, Janet Halverson)—do I need them? Of course not. But I have so few hobbies, reader; my herbs are in good order; my guitars hold their tunings—and I have more regrets about the first editions I let go by years ago.

Perhaps the oddest one stacked here is a first edition of Dag Hammarskjöld’s posthumous 1963 Markings (translated by Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden), which collects the Swedish diplomat’s diary entries from 1925 up through his death in 1961. I found it very much at random (in the literary criticism section, where I don’t think it belongs), picked it up, and kept reading. A brief excerpt:

To be “sociable” —to talk merely because convention forbids silence, to rub against one another in order to create the illusion of intimacy and contact: what an example of la condition humaine. Exhausting, naturally, like any improper use of our spiritual resources. In miniature, one of the many ways in which mankind successfully acts as its own scourge-in the hell of spiritual death.

John Barth’s brief description of Donald Barthelme’s so-called postmodernist dinners

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Photograph from “The Postmodernists Dinner,” 1983 by Jill Krementz (b. 1940)

In John Barth’s 1989 New York Times eulogy for Donald Barthelme, Barth gives a brief description of two so-called postmodernist dinners, both of which I’ve written on this blog before.

…though [Barthelme] tsked at the critical tendency to group certain writers against certain others ”as if we were football teams” – praising these as the true ”post-contemporaries” or whatever, and consigning those to some outer darkness of the passe – he freely acknowledged his admiration for such of his ”teammates,” in those critics’ view, as Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, William Gass, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. A few springs ago, he and his wife, Marion, presided over a memorable Greenwich Village dinner party for most of these and their companions (together with his agent, Lynn Nesbit, whom Donald called ”the mother of postmodernism”). In 1988, on the occasion of John Hawkes’s academic retirement, Robert Coover impresarioed a more formal reunion of that team, complete with readings and symposia, at Brown University. Donald’s throat cancer had by then already announced itself – another, elsewhere, would be the death of him – but he gave one more of his perfectly antitheatrical virtuoso readings.

More on the first dinner here.

More on the second dinner here.

Blog about some recent books acquired, other stuff

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I read Will Oldham’s book On Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy almost a decade and it therefore doesn’t belong in a stack of recent acquisitions, but it’s there—I pulled it off the shelf last week and thumbed through it in anticipation of seeing Oldham play this past Thursday. I even brought the book to the venue, thinking maybe I’d ask him to sign it. But I left it in the car and simply enjoyed Oldham and his pal run through a set of covers and originals. His voice is more resonant, richer, bolder than the last time I saw him live, and even if I didn’t know half of the songs, I enjoyed the gentle chill music on a cold Florida Thursday night. (I suspect Oldham’s short “tour” of Florida is an excuse to get out of the midwestern cold—although he complained it was “fuckin’ cold” here.)

Other books in the stack above are a composite of three or maybe four book store visits. The most memorable visit was to Aeon Bookstore in the Lower East Side of NYC.

Aeon is a small, cozy shop, well-curated with art, philosophy, anthropology, and literature books, as well as an excellent selection of jazz records. The clerk let me handle some first editions of Williams Burroughs and Gaddis, as well as Ishmael Reed and others.

I resisted The Recognitions and The Hearing Trumpet and picked up first editions of Donald Barthelme’s City Life and Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.

Over two or possibly three visits to my local bookshop over the last month, I picked up copies of Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man, Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, and Carole Maso’s Ava. I also picked up Anthony Kerrigan’s translation of Miguel de Unamuno stories, Abel Sanchez and Other Stories.

I also snagged an advance copy of Percival Everett’s James. Blurb:

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

 

Portis’s Gringos, Essays on Pynchon, Elkin’s End (Books acquired, 29 Sept. 2023)

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So two of the three books I picked up today I’d read before, but I couldn’t pass on the editions.

I read Stanley Elkin’s The Living End last summer, checking a digital version out from the library. I wanted something very short and funny at the time, and it worked wonders. I couldn’t pass up this Warner Books edition with design by Gene Light featuring art by Don Ivan Punchatz. I have a few other Elkins in this series and I adore them, even if my eyes are fading to the point that mass market paperbacks cause me to squint.

I also picked up another book I’ve already read, a book I already own a copy of—Charles Portis’s last novel Gringos. But I didn’t own a first edition with this fun, silly cover.

On the last day of 2020, the year I read Gringos, I wrote:

Gringos was the last of Portis’s five novels. I read the other four greedily last year, and pulled them all out when he passed away in February. I started in on Gringos, casually, then just kept reading. Sweet and cynical, spiked with strange heroism, strange grace, and very, very funny, Gringos might just be my favorite Portis novel. But I’d have to read them all again to figure that out.

I also picked up Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, a 1976 collection that seems ahead of its time. From Scott Sanders’ essay “Pynchon’s Paranoid History”:

“Chairs” — Stanley Elkin

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Compared to many forms that lend themselves to art or craft—drama, the novel, painting, the composition of music, even the interpretation of music, like, oh, say, singing the national anthem before the game, infinite other forms that seem to thrive, almost to wallow, in permutation, assuming new content, a mother lode of fresh ideas and differentiated styles as they’re taken up by one artist after another—it’s extraordinary how furniture is like most other furniture, as if furniture, alone among crafts, not only lived along the perimeters of some platonic ideal but had somehow actually managed to colonize it: an imperialism of the conventional. Except for a detail here, a detail there, inlay, marquetry, the pile-on of money, of pharaohs’ or aristocracy’s royal dispensations, a couch is a couch, an escritoire an escritoire. Beds resemble beds, tables and chairs are like tables and chairs. In domestic arrangements, form, bound to the custom cloth of human shape, really does follow function. The height of a table has to do with average lap tolerances. Chairs and beds are the hard aura of a strictly skeletal repose. Even so, something’s busted, I think, in the imagination of the furniture designers—I except the art directors of certain major motion pictures set in Manhattan apartments; talkin’ environment, the ecology of “life-style,” of plot and character, what the principals look like against the bookcase, propped among the furnishings; one must learn the script of one’s life and be able to afford it; because only in movies does furniture play well—all lamps and appointments, all cunning, edge-of-the-field doodad and inspired house-dower; one has at least the illusion one could live with this stuff, that it won’t vanish in a season like a Nehru shirt—something stuck in the vision, some sorcerer’s-apprentice effect, which permits to keep on coming and keep on coming with minimal variation, if any, what has come before. It isn’t anything elegant as highest math happening here, just lump-sum arrangement, ball-park figure, bottom line. It’s the fallacy of the assembly line, the notion that only costs get cut in such a wide sweep of swath. No, but really. Isn’t it astonishing that personality, surely as real as the width of one’s shoulders or the breadth of one’s beam, should be so infinite but attention to body so meager and hand-to-mouth that—chairs, say chairs, I know about chairs—there’s been less progress in the design of chairs than in the design of luggage. (I speak as a cripple full-fledged—chairs are a hangup with me—but set that aside.) It’s as if clothing came in a single size, pants like tube socks, every dress like a muumuu. And a rule of the chair seems to be that if it’s beautiful it’s rarely comfortable, if comfortable it rarely makes the cut to beauty.

Indeed, there are so few contemporary “museum-quality” chairs one can almost list them—Marcel Breuer’s side chairs, his “Wassily” chair like a leather-and-steel cat’s cradle; Jacobsen’s “Egg” chair; Thonet’s bentwood rockers; Mies Van Der Rohe’s “Barcelona”; Saarinen’s molded plastic chairs on their round bases and tapered stems like cross sections of parfaits; all Eames’s ubiquitous plastic like stackable poker chips or the pounded, hollowed-out centers of catchers’ mitts, and as locked into a vision of the fifties as pole lamps, his famous lounge chair and ottoman that, like the Nehru shirt, have become a cliché. A spectrum of vernacular chairs—soda-fountain chairs, directors’ chairs, black canvas camp chairs, those crushed—almost imploded—white or charcoal leather pillow chairs like soft fortresses or marshmallow thrones; some of the new ergonomic chairs that sit on you as much as you ever manage to sit on them.

So I know about chairs and still have my eye out, never mind I’m sixty if I’m a day, for that evasive, lost-chord masterpiece of the genre, which, like love, I’ll know when I see like a sort of fate.

Though maybe not. Not because I haven’t the imagination to cut my losses, or even the courage to finesse my life and choose to sit out the close of my days in desuetudinous splendor, but because it may not exist. The chair, my gorgeous prosthetic of choice, may not have been fashioned yet. Because oddly, strangely, ultimately, chairs are all attitude, molds of the supine or up on pointe, aggressive or submissive as sexual position. Occupied or unoccupied either, they are shadows, ghosts, signs of the been-and-gone, some pipe-and-slippers choreography of spiritual disposition, how one chooses to acquit oneself, highly personalized as an arrangement of flowers, and oh, oh, if one but had the body for it one would live out one’s days in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, eating up comfort and beauty and having it, too, there in one last fell binge of boyhood in the cane and wood along those powder-blue walls of the utile, of basin and pitcher, of military brush and drinking glass, of apothecary bottles clear as gin on a crowded corner of the nightstand, to be there on the feather bed, on the oilcloth-looking floor amid one’s things. All, as I say, you have to know is the script of your life.

From Stanley Elkin’s 1991 essay “Some Overrated Masterpieces.” Collected in Pieces of Soap.

My liver, the pain of clear thought, $5.75 for an Absolut on the rocks at the Hotel Dorset, New York City, and other great prices paid by various writers in their careers

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From “Don’t Everybody Talk at Once! (The Esquire Literary Survey).” Published in Esquire, August 1986.

The “article” consists of a ten-question questionnaire Esquire fiction editor Rust Hills sent to around fifty American writers.

What’s the greatest price you’ve paid in your career?

MAX APPLE: Over a career it’s more like a mortgage. You pay it out day by day and keep hoping that the rate will go down and some day you’ll renegotiate from strength.

VANCE BOURJAILY: $722,250—which is the difference between what my first nine books earned and the million dollars I’d have had by then if I’d made movies (if I’d had the ability).

HAROLD BRODKEY: The pain of clear thought.

HARRY CREWS: My liver.

J. P. DONLEAVY: Leaving everyone convinced I was a ruthless bastard.

STANLEY ELKIN: You’re sitting on an airplane, say, or talking to someone at a party, and the guy in the next seat or the person at the party says “And what do you do for a living, sir?” and you gotta say ‘I’m a writer,” and he says “Have you written anything I might have heard of?” This is the price I have paid for my career.

RICHARD FORD: Writers don’t have “careers.” Advertising executives do. The highest price I’ve paid is twenty-five dollars for a pizza Carver and I bought once in Port Angeles, Washington, in 1983.

BRUCE JAY FRIEDMAN: Little, if any, time on the playing field.

WILLIAM H. GASS: Ordinary life. We can’t find competent help to do our living for us. Another way of putting it: being an ordinary person in an ordinary world doing an ordinary job. What a waste of life that is.

BARRY HANNAH: Lack of peace of mind, lack of money.

KEN KESEY: Fame—it has made me the observed instead of the observer. Bad for a writer.

JAMES ALAN McPHERSON: I have been known to give up family, friends, and money in order to maintain my sense of personal integrity. I think it is this trait of character, whether or not based on “right” and “wrong,” that is at the basis of my work as a writer and as a teacher.

LEONARD MICHAELS: Marriage.

TONI MORRISON: Good company: that of my children and of friends. Much too little of both.

JOYCE CAROL OATES: ? (Perhaps I haven’t paid it yet.)

TIM O’BRIEN: My health, my golf game, fun.

PADGETT POWELL: You mean all the agony and wheel-racked whimpering before one can utter the good words? Or the booze and fractured homelife and fly-off-the-handle meannesses to the gentle folk around you? Or the loss of self-confidence. All that? Naa. I’ve gone scot-free.

REYNOLDS PRICE: I’ve been paid—thirty years of steady reward.

RICHARD PRICE: Too Much + Too Soon = Arrested Development.

TOM ROBBINS: I ’ve never thought of it as a career. A “careen” is more like it. And it would have been cheap at any price.

JOHN SAYLES: Writing is so much easier than the other jobs I’ve had. I can’t imagine any of it as “paying a price.”

BOB SHACOCHIS: The sacrifice of the artist is a romantic illusion. The possibility of forfeiture and loss is, if anything, democratic. Any person who makes a commitment to the pursuit of something meaningful is at risk.

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN: Circa $5.75 for an Absolut on the rocks at the Hotel Dorset, New York City.

Blog about some weekend book browsing and book buying, other stuff

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I took a box of books to trade in at my local used bookstore on Saturday. I was hoping to find a short history of Mexico City, or maybe some travel writing about Mexico City, but I didn’t find anything like that, although I rarely look through the history section or travel writing section when I browse there so was perhaps a bit overwhelmed. .

I did come across a book published by something called Rosicrucian Press in the 1930s–W.S. Cerve’s Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific. Lost Lemuria hangs over a few Pynchon novels (and is touched on in Charles Portis masterful and zany Masters of Atlantis)—so of course I picked up Cerve’s book. Chapters include “The First Races of Man in America,” “Mysterious Forces in the Universe,” and “Present Day Mystic Lemurians in California.” There are also diagrams, charts, and maps, like this one:

This bookstore, Chamblin’s Bookmine, also featured a display of books removed from classrooms and school libraries in our city as a result of the current Florida Governor’s efforts to suppress critical thinking, whitewash American history, and generally turn Florida’s soul into a puddle of tepid piss. University of North Florida English Professor Laura Heffernan documented the display in the following tweet (notice a common thread?):

Today I stopped by Chamblin’s second, downtown location, Chamblin’s Uptown, mostly because I was dropping my daughter off at a birthday party about five minutes away. I go there only a few times a year, so it was nice to browse for a spare hour.

I snapped up two Stanley Elkins, The Magic Kingdon and The Living End, in Janet Halverson-designed editions that match my copy of Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show. I listened to an audiobook of The Living End this summer and loved it–it made me want to get into more Elkin.

Going from the Es to the Fs, I spotted a nice used copy of Ann Goldstein’s translation of The Lost Daughter. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while, but picked it out for my wife to read first (I don’t think she really likes reading Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which I gave her a few weeks ago. And now that I type this out, I see that I may have picked a weird substitute).

I also snagged a pristine used copy of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here. I checked it out from the library a few years ago when new copies seemed prohibitively expensive.

At the checkout I picked up a pamphlet describing strategies for undoing the book banning here in Jacksonville (and Florida in general). This whole fucking thing has had me so mad and sad, and I have friends who are checking out of Florida, but I feel like we shouldn’t have to cede territory to these dull monsters—and it feels good to see other people who feel the same.

A succinct summary from the pamphlet:

 

I never found my audience | Stanley Elkin

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Bodies rose to the surface of the seas and began swimming. They were released from faded, colorless flags, stove ships, hidden pilings where they had snagged for years. They came up out of shoals and split sandbars. The drowned and murdered floated up from the bottoms of lakes, their faces and bodies in the same dishabille in which they had died. They seeped out of riverbanks, they surfaced in wells. A rising tide of the dead.

In woods and rain forests they quickened, corpses lost years. They came to in deserts, they waked up on mountains, a treasury of jigsaw death. One could not have suspected their numbers, that so many random had fallen. These were merely the discards, the old boot dead, stochastic as beer can, deposit bottle.

They woke up in battlefields. They gathered themselves where they had exploded. They got up in hospitals, their deaths not yet discovered. They still wore identification bracelets, IVs dangled from their wrists like slack banderillas. They woke up in archeology, cities done in by earthquake, fire, and time.

They climbed out of eaves, out of canyons, geology.

Up out of mine shafts they came, comrades in cave-ins.

They worked their way through holes they had melted in glaciers.

All earth gave up its dead.

They strained against coffin lids, against sealers. Stymied as escape artists they banged encumbrance.

They swarmed, they popped through, the hatched, frantic chicks of death.

A man named Ladlehaus climbed out of his grave like someone backing out a window.

Like elopers they left their burials. They touched their tombs and niches as if they were the old rooms of childhood, brushing them lightly, as if they were dusting. They scrutinized their plots and read their markers like people hunting addresses. They loitered in their graveyards as if they were keeping appointments. Already they missed their deaths. There were complaints. They were cold in just sunlight after the heat of Hell. Those who had donated organs had lost them forever. They could feel the cavities and hollows, the terrible gouged and amputate absentness A woman who had given her eyes away stirred her fingers in her weeping holes.

“So grotesque,” she moaned, “death grotesque as life. All, all grotesque.”

They came down from churchyards on hillsides and in from cemeteries on the outskirts of town. They bestirred themselves in the celebrated tombs and sepulchers of the big-shot dead.

Their bodies shone with gore like wet paint, They sooted the world as if it were carpet. The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.

Tribes covered the earth now, families did, clans, races. Mary, squeamish in the press of population, could not bear the stench. It’s morning sickness, she told herself. Joseph couldn’t get over how much things had changed, and Christ flinched when he saw soldiers. Quiz, looking for sanctuary, pulled Flanoy into a Y.M.C.A.

Into the Valley of jehoshaphat they came and along all the coasts of Palestine. They covered the ranges of Samaria and Judea, of Abilene and Gilead, and stood in the Plains of jezreel and Sharon and spread out by Kinnereth’s Sea and the salted waters between Idumea and Moab. And were a million deep all about the tough shores of the ruined Mediterranean circle.

They seemed a kind of vegetation, their burnt skin a smear of sullen growth. Pressed together, Coney Island’d, Woodstock’d, Tivoli Garden’d, jonestownd, they seemed spectators at some game less stadium, vast as the world.

They waited. They did not know what was going to happen. They consulted the religious among them but they didn’t know either.

Then God was there and, strangely, all could see Him. There was not a bad seat in the house. It was short and sweet.

“Because I never found My audience,” God said.

“Because I never found My audience.” He looked at the assembled dead, at the living billions anxious at ground zero.

“You gave me, some of you, your ooh’s and aah’s, the Jew’s hooray and Catholic’s Latin deference-all theology’s pious wow. But I never found My audience.” He looked at Mary, who had feared Him, victim to His blue ribbon force, distrustful still, savoring the ordinary who had been taken out of all that.

“I never found My audience. What had you,” He asked His audience, “to complain of? You had the respect of peers. You had peers.” He looked at Jesus.

“You were no audience. You had all the advantages. You were only God’s clone.” And at Joseph.

“You were a carpenter,” He said.

“You did things with your hands. Why didn’t you admire Me more?” At the damned.

“I gave you pain. Do you appreciate the miracle? To make it up out of thin air, deep, free-fall space, the gifted, driven atoms of remonstrance? Trickier than orange juice or the taste of Brie. Because I never found My audience,” said God and annihilated, Mother Mary and Christ and Lesefario and Flanoy and Quiz in their Y.M.C.A. sea front room in Piraeus and all Hell’s troubled sighed, everything.

From Stanley Elkin’s novel The Living End.

God gave a gala | Stanley Elkin

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God gave a gala, a levee at the Lord’s.

All Heaven turned out.

“Gimme,” He said, that old time religion.” His audience beamed. They cheered, they ate it up. They nudged each other in Paradise.

“What did I tell you?” He demanded over their enthusiasm.

“It’s terrific, isn’t it? I told you it would be terrific. All you ever had to do was play nice. Are you disappointed? Is this Heaven? Is this God’s country? In your wildest dreams-let Me hear it. Good-in your wildest dreams, did you dream such a Treasury, this museum Paradise? Did you dream My thrones and dominions, My angels in fly-over? My seraphim disporting like dolphins, tumbling God’s sky in high Heaven’s high acrobacy? Did you imagine the miracles casual as card tricks, or ever suspect free lunch could taste so good? They should see you now, eh? They should see you now, trembling in rapture like neurological rut. Delicious, correct? Piety a la mode! That’s it, that’s right. Sing hallelujah! Sing Hizzoner’s hosannas, Jehovah’s gee whiz! Well,” God said, .1 that’s enough, that will do.” He looked toward the Holy Family, studying them for a moment.

“Not like the creche, eh?” He said.

“Well is it? Is it?” He demanded of Jesus.

“No,” Christ said softly.

“No,” God said, “not like the creche. just look
at this place- the dancing waters and indirect lighting. I could put gambling in here, off-track betting. Oh, oh, My costume jewelry ways, My game show vision.

Well, it’s the public. You’ve got to give it what it wants. Yes, Jesus?”

“Yes,” Jesus said.

“It just doesn’t look lived in, is that what you think

“Call on someone else,” Christ said.

“Sure,” God said.

“I’m Hero of Heaven. I call on Myself.”

That was when He began His explanations. He revealed the secrets of books, of pictures and music, telling them all manner of things-why marches were more selfish than anthems, lieder less stirring than scat, why landscapes were to be preferred over portraits, how statues of women were superior to statues of men but less impressive than engravings on postage. He explained why dentistry was a purer science than astronomy, biography a higher form than dance. He told them how to choose wines and why solos were more acceptable to Him than duets. He told them the secret causes of inflation-“It’s the markup,” He said-and which was the best color and how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. He explained why English was the first language at Miss Universe pageants and recited highlights from the eighteen-minute gap.

Mary, wondering if she showed yet, was glad Joseph was seated next to her. Determined to look proud, she deliberately took her husband’s hand. So rough, she thought, such stubby fingers. He explained why children suffered and showed them how to do the latest disco steps. He showed them how to square the circle, cautioning afterwards that it would be wrong.

He revealed the name of Kennedy’s assassin and told how to shop for used cars.

From Stanley Elkin’s novel The Living End.

John Barth’s brief description of Donald Barthelme’s so-called postmodernist dinners

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Photograph from “The Postmodernists Dinner,” 1983 by Jill Krementz (b. 1940)

In John Barth’s 1989 New York Times eulogy for Donald Barthelme, Barth gives a brief description of two so-called postmodernist dinners, both of which I’ve written on this blog before.

…though [Barthelme] tsked at the critical tendency to group certain writers against certain others ”as if we were football teams” – praising these as the true ”post-contemporaries” or whatever, and consigning those to some outer darkness of the passe – he freely acknowledged his admiration for such of his ”teammates,” in those critics’ view, as Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, William Gass, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, among others. A few springs ago, he and his wife, Marion, presided over a memorable Greenwich Village dinner party for most of these and their companions (together with his agent, Lynn Nesbit, whom Donald called ”the mother of postmodernism”). In 1988, on the occasion of John Hawkes’s academic retirement, Robert Coover impresarioed a more formal reunion of that team, complete with readings and symposia, at Brown University. Donald’s throat cancer had by then already announced itself – another, elsewhere, would be the death of him – but he gave one more of his perfectly antitheatrical virtuoso readings.

More on the first dinner here.

More on the second dinner here.

Another Postmodernists Dinner

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I’ve written about the so-called “Postmodernist Dinner” on this blog before. The 1983 dinner was organized and hosted by Donald Barthelme, and attended by John Barth, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes, among others (Thomas Pynchon politely declined).

This morning, searching for something other than what I ended up finding, I came across a 1988 New York Times describing another Postmodernists Dinner. This particular dinner was organized by Robert Coover in honor of his friend John Hawkes’s retirement form Brown University. Well, I’ve written dinner here, but really the dinner was the celebration at the end of a conference at Brown. From Caryn James’s article “The Avant-Garde Ex Post Facto”:

When the novelist Robert Coover organized a conference called ”Unspeakable Practices: A Three-Day Celebration of Iconoclastic American Fiction,” he invited some old friends to Brown University. There would be panel discussions that might define literary post-modernism once and for all, Mr. Coover said, but mostly it would be ”a family gathering” to mark John Hawkes’s retirement as a teacher of writing at Brown.

The poster above, signed by many of the panelists, is part of Washington University in St. Louis’s Modern Literature Collection. Here is the collections description of the event:

“Unspeakable Practices: A Three-Day Celebration of Iconoclastic American Fiction” sponsored by Brown University as part of the 1988 Brown University Reading and Lecture Series on April 4-6, 1988. Notable writers include Donald Barthelme, Walter Abish, Robert Kelly, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Jonathan Baumbach, Toby Olson, John Hawkes, Meredith Steinbach, William Gass, William Gaddis, Marilynne Robinson, Geoffrey Wolff, Leslie Fiedler, Marc Chenetier, Maurice Couturier, Geoffrey Green, Donald Greiner, Sinda Gregory, Tom LeClair, Richard Martin, and Larry McCaffery.

In her article “The Avant-Garde Ex Post Facto,” James describes the group as “almost all the major novelists sometimes called post-modernist . . . sometimes simply called difficult.” She continues:

They assaulted realism in the 1960’s, turning language inside out, crossing paths and forming friendships along the way. Twenty years later, here they all were, a group the critic Leslie Fiedler called ”iconoclasts with tenure” – the writers the current minimalists reacted against, an avant-garde no longer ahead of its time.

James then goes on to describe some “family friction” between the group during the panel called ”Traditional Values and Iconoclastic Fiction,” moderated by Leslie Fiedler:

The author of the classic study Love and Death in the American Novel and recent works on popular culture posed questions one writer later described as the sort you fear getting from little old ladies in tennis shoes. Why do you write? Who is your audience? The panelists floundered, told anecdotes, skated – sometimes charmingly – on the surface of the questions. “I know exactly who I’m writing for,” said Mr. Barthelme. “They are extremely intelligent and physically attractive.” Mr. Gaddis, whose fiction includes the two immense novels The Recognitions and J. R., said he wrote ”to avoid boredom, which is probably why I came up here today.”

At this point, I knew I’d read about this particular panel before, but I couldn’t remember where—possibly in Tracy Daughtery’s Barthelme biography, Hiding Man? Anyway, Fiedler continued to piss off some of the postmodernists:

When Mr. Fiedler concluded by saying, “None of us will be remembered as long or revered as deeply as our contemporary Stephen King,” many writers became furious and insulted.

I’m pretty sure Fiedler meant the comment from a place of deep contempt for contemporary culture, but whatever; James notes that

Some were so incensed they threatened to stay away from Tuesday night’s big dinner, the event Mr. Coover was playing as the centerpiece of the celebration.

She continues by describing the postmodernists dinner;

The main event was worthy of a post-modern novel, a dreamlike scene in which people from one life wander into a room where they don’t belong. Mr. Coover had discovered a modest Portuguese restaurant in East Providence, to which he often brought colleagues from Brown, where he teaches. Some became regulars; some never returned.

That was the sight of Mr. Hawkes’s retirement party, and between the fried calamari and roast pig, the lights went down and the audience was captive at its long narrow tables for the entertainment – traditional Latin fado songs to guitar accompaniment.

The host raconteur and main singer was named Manny. He wore a maroon jacket, told corny jokes and sang songs reminiscent of a discount Julio Iglesias (though he reminded Mr. Elkin of the nightclub singer in ”Broadway Danny Rose”). He stood at the head of the writers’ table, now and then glancing at Mr. Hawkes or Mr. Gaddis while shouting, “You’re lookin’ good!” Some people squirmed; some clapped along; Mr. Coover loved it. There were three sets in all.

And like a good postmodern comedy, there’s a happy ending:

Late in the night, Mr. Coover joked that he had not thrown this party for Mr. King, and Mr. Fiedler took his chance to make amends. “Whatever I said, I said with irony and with real affection for you,” he told Mr. Hawkes. “I hope it’s taken in that spirit.” Some family members held a grudge, but Mr. Hawkes hugged Mr. Fiedler and gave him the ultimate Hawkesian compliment. “Leslie,” he said, “you’re the most erotic critic here.”

Here’s a clipping of the event, again from Washington University’s invaluable Modern Literature Collection:

A Charles Portis miscellany, a signed Stanley Elkin oddity, and Rudolph Wurlitzer’s cult novel Nog (Books acquired, 21 Feb. 2020)

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I went to my beloved used bookstore the first three Fridays in February, searching for a few things: novels by Rudolph Wurlitzer (no luck); Titus Alone, the last novel in Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” trilogy (no luck; might have to order it); the penultimate Harry Potter novel (for my nine-year-old; plenty of copies—apparently his sister never made it that far).

I did pick up Escape Velocity, a compendium of the late great Charles Portis’s journalism, essays, and short stories. There’s also a three-act play, Delray’s New Moon, which The Arkansas Repertory Theatre performed in 1996, and a 2001 interview with Portis that was part of The Gazette Project, which comprised a series of interviews with staff of the now-defunct Arkansas Gazette.

Portis worked for the Gazette early in his career, but it’s Civil Rights reporting for The New York Herald Tribune that’s more immediately compelling. Stories on the Klan rallies, Birmingham terror, and the assassination of Medgar Evers seem to add a new complexity and dimension to the South of Portis’s novels Norwood and The Dog of the South.

The essays in Escape Velocity seem especially promising, and also seem to inform the novels—at least the first one I read, “That New Sound from Nashville,” did. There’s something almost-gonzo about Portis’s technique (some of his early journalism vibrates with local color and ironic editorializing, too).

I’ve only read two of the five short stories in the collection. All are quite short, and the two I read feel like sketches, to be honest. Still, I’m interested in the fiction that Portis produced after his last novel Gringos, and three of the stories are from that era, along with the play Delray’s New Moon, which I hope will be richer than the stories I’ve read so far.

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At the bookstore, I spied the gilt spine of The First George Mills, a 1980 oddity that comprises the first part (roughly 50 pages) of Stanley Elkin’s 1982 novel George Mills. The spine struck me as odd—so thin, so irregularly-shaped, etc. The book itself seemed like a novelty almost, and I was surprised to find Elkin’s signature at the end. I was even more surprised to find the signature of Jane Hughes, the apparent illustrator of this volume, whose illustrations do not appear in my copy. A bit of internet browsing seems to suggest that Hughes’s illustrations—of horses—were glued insets. Still, I was happy to forgo five bucks of my trade credit for Elkin’s signature.

When I got home from the bookstore a copy of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s cult classic 1969 novel Nog had arrived in the mail from Two Dollar Radio (along with a sticker and a bookmark and a thank you note—godbless indie publishers). I will be reading this book next, starting tonight. Here is the Thomas Pynchon blurb that made me interested in Wurlitzer:

Wow, this is some book, I mean it’s more than a beautiful and heavy trip, it’s also very important in an evolutionary way, showing us directions we could be moving in — hopefully another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead and some kind of re-enlightenment is beginning to arrive, to take hold. Rudolph Wurlitzer is really, really good, and I hope he manages to come down again soon, long enough anyhow to guide us on another one like Nog.

I did not go to the bookstore on this day, the last Friday of February 2020. I finished Gormenghast instead.

Three Books

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The Last Days of Louisiana Red by Ishmael Reed. 1974 first edition hardback from Random House. No designer credited, but the jacket flap indicates that the cover design was “suggested” by Ishmael Reed. I reviewed Louisiana Red earlier this year on this site.

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Blue Beard by Max Frisch. English translation by Geoffrey Skelton. 1983 first edition hardback from HBJ. Design by Amy Hill.

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Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits by Stanley Elkin. Foreword by Robert Coover. 1980 first edition hardback from E.P. Dutton. Cover design by Janet Halverson.

Stanley Elkin/Flann O’Brien (Book acquired and book not acquired, 23 May 2018)

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I went to my favorite local bookstore today to pick up my daughter’s sixth-grade required reading list and to offload some books I’ll never read again. I have far too many tasteful trade paperbacks that I don’t need. I try to bring three or four in on each trip and only come out with one for me (books for the kids don’t count). I picked up a copy of Stanley Elkin’s Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966) entirely accidentally. The book was misshelved, stacked somehow on a pile of “Miscellaneous MU-” titles (I was looking for any book by Gerald Murnane, knowing that there were none there). I couldn’t pass it up—the cover, I guess, the cheap Pop appeal of its massmarketishness, and also the fact that I’m imbibing short stories like wine lately. (Murnane, Coover, Volodine).

I also came across this lovely edition of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, but did not buy it, because I already own it. I love the book. The copy I have has an ugly-assed cover, unlike this beauty, which I hope some kid picks up and loses her mind over—-

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Sixteen books I wish I’d written more about in 2016

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I read a lot of great books this year but had a hard time writing full reviews for all of them. These are some of the ones I liked the most.

Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard

I finished Woodcutters just the other night, reading most of it in three sittings. (Actually, I was lying down. And it was very late at night, each time. I couldn’t pick the book up during daylight hours). Anyway, I finished Bernhard’s novel just the other night, so maybe I’ll muster something on it, but for now: I think this may be my favorite Bernhard novel so far! I can only think of a handful of writers so masterful at mimicking the operations of consciousness, of replicating consciousness (and conscience) reflecting on consciousness. (I even had to stop and do a too-hasty read of Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, a plot point of Woodcutters). What happens in Woodcutters? A man sits in a chair remembering things. It’s fucking amazing.

White Mythology, W.D. Clarke

White Mythology is comprised of two novellas, Skinner Boxed and Love’s Alchemy. The first and longer novella, Skinner Boxed, takes place over a few days in the life of a psychiatrist; it’s a zany zagging yarn, crowded with MacGuffins and red herrings (a missing wife, a bastard son, a new anti-depressant drug, etc.). Oh, and it’s a Christmas story! Did I mention that? (Skinner Boxed takes its epigram from A Christmas Carol…and another from Gravity’s Rainbow). Love’s Alchemy is a kind of time-arrangement, or locale-arrangement—a story in pieces that the reader has to assemble. I enjoyed White Mythology (especially Skinner Boxed, which, typing this out, I realize I’d like to read again).

The Dick Gibson Show, Stanley Elkin

The Franchiser, Stanley Elkin

Somehow I’d made it to 2016 without reading Elkin. I read these two back-to-back. The best parts of The Dick Gibson show are as good as anything any of those other big postmodern dudes have written. (Okay. If not as good, nearly as good). I didn’t review The Dick Gibson Show because Elkin basically did it for me in his Paris Review interview. The Franchiser is a comic tragedy—or do I mean tragic comedy? It does all that inversion stuff: high-low/low-high. A novel of things and colors, both mythic and predictive, The Franchiser feels simultaneously ahead of its time and yet still very much bound to the 1970s, when it was first published.

Bear, Marian Engel

This slim novel is somehow simultaneously lucid and surreal, conventional and bizarre, romantic and ironic, heady and dry. And wet. A bibliographer travels to a remote island in Ontario to index an old library. I’m going to read this one again.

(Oh, the bibliographer has a sexual relationship with a bear. Like, a real bear. Not a metaphorical bear. A real one).

Collected Stories, William Faulkner

I didn’t read them all because I’m not a greedy pig. I read a lot of them though. Lord.

There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, Leon Forrest

I will read Leon Forrest’s There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden again in the first quarter of 2017 and I will write a proper Thing on it. I read it in a two-day blur, drinking up the sentences greedily, perhaps not (no, strike that perhaps) comprehending the plot so much as sucking up a feeling, a place, a mood, a vibe. But there’s so much history reverberating behind the novel’s lens. Like I said (wrote): I need to read it again, which will kinda sorta be like reading it for the first time. Which is a thing one might say of any great novel.

The Weight of Things, Marianne Fritz

I read this really early in the year and I only remember the impression of reading it—not the plot itself, but the language—I remember horror, cruelty, pain. And this is why I need to write about the books I read.

The Inheritors, William Golding

A colleague told me to read Golding’s account of telepathic Neanderthals and their eventual encounter with predatory Homo sapiens. I’ll admit that I’d unfairly written off Golding as YA stuff, but the evocation of a prelingual (and postlingual) consciousness is fascinating here. It’s also a ripping quest narrative starring the Holy Fool Lok, who laughs in terror and joy. What stands out most in my memory, beyond the premise, is Golding’s concrete prose. I’m glad my colleague told me to read The Inheritors.

The Transmigration of Bodies, Yuri Herrera

I read Herrera’s The Transmigration of Bodies in a blurry weekend (sensing a pattern here) and enjoyed it very much: Grimy neon noir poured into mythological contours. Lovely.

The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa

This was the best novel I read in 2016 that I’d never read before. So good that I reread it immediately (the only two books I can recall doing that with in recent memory areBlood Meridian and Gravity’s Rainbow). It was even better the second time.  The Leopard is the story of Prince Fabrizio of Sicily who witnesses — and takes part in — the end of the old order era during the Italian reunification. Fiery and lascivious but also intellectual and stoic, Fabrizio the Leopard is the most engrossing character I read this year. Di Lampedusa’s novel takes us through his mind, through his age—places he himself isn’t fully cognizant of at times. I can’t recommend this novel enough: History, religion, death, sex. Sense and psyche, pleasure and loss, crammed with rich, dripping set pieces: dances and dinners and games of pleasure (light sadomasochism!) in summer estates. But its plots and poisons and pieces are not the main reason for The Leopard—read it for the language, the sentences, the sumptuous words. Its final devastating images are still soaked and sunken into my addled brains.

The Absolute Gravedigger, Vítězslav Nezval

I wedged these poems into the end of my third proper trip through Gravity’s Rainbow; I was also dipping into Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the Rider-Waite tarot. It’s all crammed together in a surreal web in my memory: shimmering horror, broken badlands, entropy and degradation—but life.

Cow Country, Adrian Jones Pearson

Cow Country (not pictured above because I listened to the audiobook) is a bizarre, disjointed satire of community colleges in particular and educational administration in general. (And: a satire on our slavish sensibilities of time ). It’s also a wonderful send-up of dialectical methodology—or rather the dialectical impulse to, like, resolve things. And by things, I mean Jones Pearson (or is it AJP? Or Adrian Ruggles Pearson? Or A.J. Perry? Or—nevermind)—Our Author (whoever) breaks down the way that all of our breakdowns breakdown under any real scrutiny.

Hilda and the Stone Forest, Luke Pearson

I read all of the Hilda books this year with my kids. And I read them by myself. And my kids read them by themselves. More than once. Hilda and the Stone Forest is the best one yet—richer, denser, funnier, and more devastating than anything Pearson’s done yet. The Stone Forest is stuffed with miniature epics and minor gags, and the central story of Hilda and her mother in the titular stone forest is somehow both bleak and heartwarming. Great stuff.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

I actually wrote a lot about Gravity’s Rainbow (probably a major reason I didn’t write more about other stuff)—but I still wish I’d written more. I will write more. I’ve been listening to the audiobook for my fourth trip through.

Marketa Lazarova, Vladislav Vančura

Strange, violent, funny, and ultimately devastating, this Marketa Lazarova is a medieval tale of family loyalty, kidnapping, and love. Nothing I can do here would be a substitute for Vančura’s vivid, surreal voice—a voice that guides the story cynically, ironically, but also energetically, buoyantly. One of the best things I read all year.

Stanley Elkin reviews Stanley Elkin’s novel The Dick Gibson Show (kinda sorta)

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[Ed. note: I finished Stanley Elkin’s 1971 novel The Dick Gibson Show a few days ago. I read The Dick Gibson Show immediately after finishing Elkin’s 1976 novel The Franchiser. I want to write something about these novels, which seem of a piece to me, but I also wanted to get a bit more context first, and the most basic of internet searches led me to Elkin’s 1974 interview in The Paris Review with Thomas LeClair.

What follows are selections from the interview in which Elkin kinda sorta analyzes The Dick Gibson Show, providing what I take to be a Very Good and Fascinating Review of the novel.

Look, I went to school for reading books, I learned about the goddamn intentional fallacy and la mort de l’auteur and all that jazz, and I know that the author isn’t supposed to be the goddamn authority on his own work, I know that what follows isn’t a proper review—but I don’t care. I like it.

My assumption is it’s likely that anyone interested enough in a review of The Dick Gibson Show has probably already read Elkin’s Paris Review interview, and would probably prefer, like, something new on the novel. Which I’ll attempt down the line. But for now: Elkin on Elkin—]


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INTERVIEWER: I have some questions now about themes or ideas I find in much of your fiction. You have Dick Gibson say, “The point of life was the possibility it always held out for the exceptional.” The heroes in your novels have a tremendous need to be exceptional, to transcend others, to quarrel with the facts of physical existence. Is this a convention—which we’ve just been talking about—or something very basic to your whole view of life?

ELKIN: It is something very basic to my view of life, but in the case of that character it becomes the initial trauma which sets him going. It becomes his priority. Dick Gibson goes on to say that he had believed that the great life was the life of cliché. When I started to write the book, I did not know that was what the book was going to be about, but indeed that is precisely what the book gets to be about as I learned what Dick Gibson’s life meant. Consider the last few pages of the book:

What had his own life been, his interminable apprenticeship which he saw now he could never end? And everyone blameless as himself, everyone doing his best but maddened at last, all, all zealous, all with explanations ready at hand and serving an ideal of truth or beauty or health or grace. Everyone—everyone. It did no good to change policy or fiddle with format. The world pressed in. It opened your windows. All one could hope for was to find his scapegoat . . .

Now, everything that follows this is a cliché:

to wait for him, lurking in alleys, pressed flat against walls, crouched behind doors while the key jiggles in the lock, taking all the melodramatic postures of revenge. To be there in closets when the enemy comes for his hat, or to surprise him with guns in swivel chairs, your legs dapperly crossed when you turn to face him, to pin him down on hillsides or pounce on him from trees as he rides by, to meet him on the roofs of trains roaring on trestles, or leap at him while he stops at red lights, to struggle with him on the smooth faces of cliffs…

and so on. The theme of the novel is that the exceptional life—the only great life—is the trite life. It is something that I believe. It is not something that I am willing to risk bodily injury to myself in order to bring to pass, but to have affairs, to go to Europe, to live the dramatic clichés, all the stuff of which movies are made, would be the great life.

INTERVIEWER: But what if one were aware that they were clichés? Isn’t that what causes so much despair in contemporary fiction—that characters can’t live a life of clichés?

ELKIN: Dick Gibson is aware that they are clichés. What sets him off—what first inspires this notion in him—is his court-martial when he appears before the general and says that he’s taken a burr out of the general’s paw—something that happens in a fairy tale. When Dick realizes what has happened to him, he begins to weep, thinking, oh boy, I’ve got it made—I’m going to have enemies, I’m going to be lonely, I’m going to suffer. That is the theme of that book.

INTERVIEWER: Do the characters in your novels, then, have rather conventional notions of what exceptional is?

ELKIN: Yes, I think so.

Dick can’t stand anybody’s obsession but his own, which is largely the plight of myself and yourself, probably, and everybody. He’s opened a Pandora’s box when he opens his microphones to the people out there. When they find the platform that the Gibson format provides, they just get nuttier and nuttier and wilder and wilder, and this genuinely arouses whatever minimal social consciousness Dick Gibson has. The paradox of the novel is that the enemy that Gibson had been looking for all his life is that audience. The audience is the enemy. Dick builds up in his mind this Behr-Bleibtreau character. That Behr-Bleibtreau is his enemy. That’s baloney paranoia. The enemy is the amorphous public that he is trying to appeal to, that he’s trying to make love to with his voice. Dick Gibson is a bodiless being. He is his voice. That’s why the major scene in the novel is the struggle for Gibson’s voice.

INTERVIEWER: Who is Behr-Bleibtreau? There is a suggestiveness to his name that I can’t articulate.

ELKIN: Neither can I. I used to know a guy named—Bleibtreau. Hyphenating the name made it more sinister than just Bleibtreau itself. You know, you could almost put Count in front of it.

INTERVIEWER: s that why Dick thinks that Behr-Bleibtreau is the enemy—because there is this suggestion of cliché?

ELKIN: That’s right. Behr-Bleibtreau is a charlatan—that’s what he is. He has this theory of the will that is alluded to in the second section of the novel. And he is a hypnotist, exactly the kind of guy who Gibson sees as out to get him. Of course Behr-Bleibtreau isn’t out to get him. When Gibson thinks it is Behr-Bleibtreau calling him from Cincinnati, it isn’t. It’s just Gibson’s own paranoia that creates the conditions for Behr-Bleibtreauism.

INTERVIEWER: Is radio in the novel an index to social change, perhaps the devaluation of language?

ELKIN: That was not my intention. I could make a case that once upon a time there were scripts, a platform and an audience out in front of Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, that radio then was a kind of art form and now it is an artless form in which you get self-promoters and people with theories about curing cancer by swallowing mosquitoes or something. Language, since it is occurring spontaneously rather than thought out, is devalued. But actually, in real life, modern radio talk shows are much more interesting than The Jack Benny Program ever was because you are getting the shoptalk of personality.

INTERVIEWER: Dick is a professional word man, and by the end he is reduced nearly to silence. Is this your “literature of exhaustion” that Barth talks about, a comment on the futility of language…

ELKIN: No. Certainly not.

INTERVIEWER: He does say less and less as the novel moves along.

ELKIN: Right. And the other people say more and more. That is intentional. But Dick makes an effort to get his program back from the sufferers. He starts hanging up on people. Then he gets the biggest charlatan—Nixon—at the end. Wasn’t I clever to invent Nixon before Nixon did?

INTERVIEWER: In bringing together so many stories and storytellers, did you have a thematic unity in mind?

ELKIN: I had in mind, as a matter of fact, The Canterbury Tales, particularly in that second section where the journey to dawn is the journey to Canterbury. Although there are no particular parallels, when I was sending out sections of the novel to magazines, I would call the sections “The Druggist’s Tale” and so on. There is that choral effect of the pilgrims to Canterbury.

Reading/Have Read/Should Write About

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From bottom to top:

I had to go hunt through the house for the trio of Hildafolk comics by Luke Pearson because my kids keep swapping them around. We’ve read them a bunch of times now and they are very good and sweet and charming and you can get them from Nobrow. Hilda is going to be a Netflix series, by the way, which I told my kids and they were psyched. (They ten went on Netflix and looked for it. I had to explain production schedules).

W.D. Clarke’s White Mythology (which may or may not take its title from Derrida’s essay of the same name) is actually two novellas, Skinner Boxed and Love’s Alchemy. I finished the first novella before July 4th; Skinner Boxed is about psychiatrist Dr. Ed, who juggles a bunch of maguffins including a detached (and missing) wife, a returned bastard son, and a clinical anti-depressant trial. The novella begins with epigrams from Gravity’s Rainbow and A Christmas Carol, the latter of which it (somewhat perhaps ironically) follows. I finished the second novella Love’s Alchemy yesterday. Its tone is not as zany as that of Skinner Boxed, but both stories require the reader to put together seemingly disconnected events for the plot to “resolve” (if resolve is the right word). Good stuff.

I started the Howard translation of The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. I’m in Chapter 3 right now. We’ll see how it goes this time. For now, I’ll continue to trust Italo Calvino. From his “Guide for New Readers of Stendhal’s Charterhouse“:

…many young people will be smitten right from the opening pages, and will be instantly convinced that this has to be the best novel ever written, recognising it as the novel they had always wanted to read and which will act as the benchmark for all the other novels they will read in later life. (I’m talking particularly about the opening chapters; as you get into it, you will find that it is a different novel, or several novels each different from the other, all of which will require you to modify your involvement in the plot; whatever happens, the brilliance of the opening will continue to influence you.)

I finished Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser and then the novel that chronologically preceded it (and arguably birthed it), The Dick Gibson Show. I need to write a whole Thing on these two novels, but I enjoyed them, and can’t believe it took me so long to read Elkin (although I’m glad I read Pynchon, Gaddis, and Gass first). I preferred the riffing polyglossia of TDGS a bit more than The Franchiser, which occasionally seemed to let its satire tip over into a kind of bathetic melancholy. Both novels diagnose an obsession of nostalgia (or, more directly: an obsession of obsession) that continues to grip America.

Yesterday I picked up Vladislav Vančura’s novel Marketa Lazarova, new in a sharp English translation by Carleton Bulkin from Twisted Spoon Press. Twisted Spoon had sent me the book a few weeks ago, and I’d meant to read it over the week of July Fourth but drank too many beers instead. Anyway, I picked it up yesterday and read the first two chapters (50 pages—the first third, that is) gripped in wonder and laughter, and a bit of happy shock even. A strange and often violent tale of multiple kidnappings and medieval intrigues, Marketa Lazarova reminds me of Le Morte D’Arthur, Nanni Balestrini’s Sandokan (both in its evocations of brutality and in its marvelous poetic prose), Aleksei German’s film Hard to Be a God, Bergman’s film The Virgin Spring, Bolaño’s sweetly ironic narrators, and yes, hell, Game of Thrones. I’d rather be reading this book right now than writing about it in this silly blog post, actually. And no, I haven’t seen the František Vláčil film adaptation—yet.