Moa Warren

Elegy for Borders, or The Awfully Dramatic Evolution of Bookstores

2011-10-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

The end of the Borders Bookstorechain has spurred me on to tell my history of bookstores. It’s one of my pettopics that to my skewed mind seems so important but when I tell people aboutit (perhaps slightly fanatically) something dislodges behind their eyes andthey start drifting and the subject gets changed at the first break in my rant.Is what I’m saying too obvious to mention or too uninteresting to wasteanybody’s time? You see, the way I see it, the world of books has just beenthrough a roller coaster ride indicative of huge changes taking placethroughout our culture unlike anything ever seen before. Now maybe that’sobvious, but let’s look at the awfully dramatic evolution of bookstores since Iwas a reader.

THE PRIMORDIAL TIMES

Growing up the situation was bleak.Aside from some few and far between privately owned bookstores, the onlybookstores around were in shopping centers and malls. These things were pathetic.They were best seller oriented and their inventories were incredibly narrow.Barnes and Noble, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton were some of the chains. Locallythough there was Encore Books which was bought by Rite Aid in 1981 and wasspreading to dozens of stores. They were run like drug stores, but with booksand carpeting. I got my first real job there in 1988 and within two years Ibecame a young manager for the chain and quit by the time I was twenty-one in 1991. These stores were pre-computer. Themost complex technology they had was a barcode reader you could use on hugepaper lists we got weekly, then you had to hold it up to the mouthpiece of thephone to transmit the data. Other ordering was done person to person on thephone. There was no inventory control. You never knew what was on the shelf orsupposed to be on the shelf unless you walked back and looked. If you wantedanything not mainstream it had to be specially ordered. It would take a fewdays or weeks depending, that is if we could get it at all. We checked the threemajor book distributors on a microfiche machine with little sheets that were refreshedweekly though the mail. Compared to a similar business today this was the StoneAge.

Then these small chains survivinghappily in their local niches and mall corners felt the shaking, they heard therumbling, as the dinosaurs came to town. Borders came from the north andbrought with it a book buyer’s wet dream: computerized inventories, coffee bars,couches, and every book, newspaper and magazine you ever wanted to get yourhands on. They weren’t messing around. These things were palatial. They hadescalators, public bathrooms, and what seemed to be an easy dozen helpfulemployees waiting at customer service counters to help you. They had authorreadings and security guards and stuff for kids to play with in the kid’ssection. It was like an efficient andintelligent empire had come to rule us and we bookish denizens embraced them assaviors.

Soon following Borders like somekind of parasite or symbiont were the revamped Barnes and Nobles now flexingtheir own steroidal stores, now grown up and vying with big brother Borders.This competition was very self-conscious and one always got the impression thatB & N was somehow shoddier, more corporate and relying on gimmicks. Theywould also bug you about joining some frequent reader club, getting some cardfor spurious discounts. But they managed well nonetheless in matching or evenone upping Borders. No real problem: it seemed to have given us twice as manybookstores to choose from. And like Lowe’s versus Home Depot, who really careswhich it is when you really need something.

But the Encores and their ilk sawthe writing on the wall. I remember hearing how some of the Encore higher-upscame to the store I had worked at and they went over to the new Barnes &Nobel that had installed itself in the same shopping center predator-like, alarge eater of small stores with nothing above it in the food chain. When thespies came back they were visibly shaken, knowing there was nothing they coulddo, there was no competing, they were finished. The stores hung on for a fewyears then they went away quickly one by one like the lights of a city vanishingduring a blackout. Then rose the giants across all the land and we enter…

THE RENAISSANCE and GOLDEN AGE 1990-1997

As soon as the first Bordersbookstore opened in Philadelphia we were making trips down there like areligious pilgrimage. It was a dream that a place could have so much. Whereasthose puny chains wouldn’t have one book by, say, Wittgenstein, Borders had justabout everything available, easily a couple of feet on the shelf. We drooledover the selection at the same time sickened over all we couldn’t afford.

And so for years these placesbecame cultural fixtures, places anybody could go and look at books and theywere generally tolerant about loitering and using the place as a library andhangout despite the fact that you had to step over people sprawled across thefloor and the books became tattered from use. My praise of these places mightsound ridiculous, but given the options there just weren’t, and aren’t, manyplaces like it. Sure, Borders was overly hip, conscious of it, but it was likea cultural Amsterdam, a place that flourished through tolerance and liberality.It was as pleasant as retail could get. I’m sure somebody will argue this is atleast part of what eventually did them in.

In 1996 I moved into the city andfigured working at Borders on Walnut near 18^th Street would be theobvious best job I could have. I got the job but was shocked to find during myinterview that they only paid $7 an hour. (I actually got paid a quarter extrafor having been a bookstore manager years back.) The very nice womaninterviewing me said I wasn’t the first to be shocked, but, she said, it is afterall a retail job. What do you expect? She was right, but people who went thereto work thought it was such a cool job to have that it surely would pay more.We weren’t just any workers. We knew about books, authors. We were smart!Welcome to the retail world, now punch the clock.

I liked working at Borders. Youhelped people find books, you shelved books, you ran the registers sometimes. Itwas not a hard job and you got to be surrounded by tons of books! I got to meetfamous authors like James Ellroy and Joyce Carol Oates. There really wasn’tmuch to complain about—except for the pay of course. There were the usualretail moanings and groanings. Thisarticle captures much: the attitudes of people towards Borders employees (they’re“snobs”), but more so the cathartic “manifesto” pictured perfectly and succinctlysums up what all booksellers universally joke about in break rooms. I neverfelt people took this kind of customer stuff seriously though, it was justventing. But outside of that many of my coworkers found much to complain about.Everybody that worked there was a lower-middle to middle-middle classish guy orgirl like me, usually white, usually thinking they were a bit cooler or smarterin a few ways than their co-worker. But we all were more or less the same andwe had the same generally liberal politics and wry sense of humor and did thesame things when not working. But at times you would think we were serfs innineteenth century Russia. There was all sorts of politics going on, attemptsat unionizing, constant attitudes about “Corporate”. The fact that we weren’tgetting paid ten dollars an hour was somehow indicative of everything that’swrong with capitalism and Western culture. These people actually thought theyshould be able to make a career out of their bookstore job. I can’t help butthink of those days whenever I see something about the current Wall Streetprotests. Some of the onlineprotesters are pathetic as if they just found out that jobs suck and low-payingretail jobs suck worse. Eventually instead of expecting some kind of revolutionthat would pay me a livable salary I quit when I found something offeringbetter remuneration. It turned out I left just in time.

THE IRON AGE 1997-PRESENT

What of course ended the reign ofthe Big Bookstores was the internet. The storm clouds were gathering justbefore I left and as an added complication a fresh new humongous B & N arrogantlyinstalled itself within a block’s distance. I came back to visit months laterand those that were hanging on now looked like the Encore books bosses upontheir return from scouting out the competition. Their haggardness was spoken ofin term of resentments, the usual talk against the Man, the Corporation as ifnothing but some fat cat’s contempt and malevolence for Borders employees wasto blame. Really they knew their job was dying, that an era had passed andthere would be, could be, no security in the future. No unionizing or raggingabout Corporate was going to change the fact that the vocation they hadinvested their love and dedication in was moribund. Within a year a hugepercentage of the staff, way over half, was “let go”. Hardly anybody else stayedaround for their own funeral.

The next phase was downsizing. Backin the Golden Age the stores had been expanding, some of them having huge musicsections. Their selection—especially of classical music—was impressive. Butagain the timing was bad. Not only were sites like Amazon growing, but so wasthe age of digital music, Napster, digital “sharing”. Suddenly Borders wereconsolidating and in many stores those huge music annexes were closed down,walled over and on the windows were signs seeking to lease that space. Anothersign of the Iron Age was an increase in the non-book crap that goes by variouscorporate names like “sidelines”: games, mugs, stuff teenage girls or Christmasshoppers like to buy, a store within a store.

Now, asyou’ve heard, Bordershas died and it feels like the grass has already grown over its grave andits memory has started the descent into a distant memory. If you go to www.borders.com its arch nemesis B & Nsprings up in victory. It hurts. It’s like reading about a genocide in yourhomeland, a new race living where your families had for generations. There arearticles citing bad decisions by Borders, that it is their own stupid fault,that they could have survived (like B&N) but to me it doesn’t feel that way.I’m curious how well B & N will flourish or if they will come full circleand end up back in the mall between the cell phone store and the store that sellsstuff for skateboard kids.

THE FUTURE

I have to confess I haven’t boughta new book in many years. In fact the only one I did buy was at one of thoselame Borders express stores and that was only to use up a gift card I hadbefore they closed forever. I’m just too poor for buying new books and I’mcompletely happy getting most books from the library. If I really want to own abook I’ll either keep an eye out for it at used book stores or order it used onAmazon. Given the option of cheaper books I too go elsewhere. But that doesn’tmean I don’t go into new bookstores and check out stuff and get a coffee.

The future? I suppose the bookmarket could adjust to the electronic book and the internet and things couldjust level out with a certain number of cruddy B & N stores surviving. Atleast they have Starbucks in them. (I don’t have it in me to consider and dealherein with the dismal fate of used bookstores, those musty temples that haveand continue to serve as sanctified wombs of my psyche.) The tendency isclearly to stay home and do things electronically. Social interactions are increasinglynow online and so is book buying. Some day I might get a Kindle or whatever,but at this point I have no use for one. Clearly the online world is all partof the new human animal that’s forming. I am no hugely gregarious person and whenI’m not at work I try to spend most of my time here in the basement before thecomputer. The outdoors? Over-rated. But I still think it’s good—or at leastimportant—to once in a while get out and interact with other human beings. Who willgo out in the future and where will they go? I hear the sound of aimless kids clonkingskateboards on the steps of a shuttered Borders. That’s the future.

I do have recurring dreams of beingback there at Encore books. Some of these dreams are classic anxiety dreams inwhich I am Joseph K trying to ring up a sale but keep hitting the wrongbuttons. Or I’ve locked the store for the night but find a lingering customer Ihadn’t noticed and now they won’t leave. Opposite of these dreams are the goodones in which something wonderful has happened in the world: there has been a Renaissance,people missed the Golden Age, they learned what they were missing and there isagain a niche for the local bookstore, even if it is a chain. These new storesare on a smaller scale but have learned something about atmosphere fromBorders. They are comfortable and play eclectic music. They have an area to easilyaccommodate author readings. They even have a coffee bar and behind the counterworks an underpaid girl with emo glasses that will complain about you in thebreak room later. It is the perfect blend of the old Encore and Borders at itsbest. Nothing short of apocalypse could now cause such a return. That is only adream and I look forward to the next one.

Nicholson Baker Revisited

2010-11-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

Recently I decided to give Baker another chance. I’ve started The Anthologist. So far my expectations are being confirmed. I find I enjoy Baker’s books like I do surfing through cable TV the few times each year I find myself before a cabled TV, remote in hand. It’s like gorging on junk food. I’m pretty sure that I will continue to indulge myself with Baker for many years to come, maybe one Baker each year, each September as part of my return-to-school self-pampering psychological management. Like cable TV I enjoy them as a guilty pleasure but I wouldn’t want them as my only diet—my mind would shrivel up. But I can’t help but notice some of his nonfiction looks like half-respectable stuff, books on books and libraries and even a left field demythologizing of World War II. I’ve gotten my own image of him now. He is an errant member of that small but peculiar and perpetually dying-off tribe: The Used Bookstore Owner. You either know the type or you don’t. He’s used to being broke and has all sorts of off-kilter notions, often a uniquely strange political blend of the right and the left, an anti-progressive, anti-government, New Englandish, gently homophobic, anti-war, anti-abortion, but all for liberal decadence of the Amsterdam variety. This is all part of his arrested development: a fan of cartoons and early pop cultural artifacts decades extinct, curling black light posters as serious art, an on-paper lover of things Victorian or American Gothic—he’s never thought that Edgar Allan Poe is not great. Back then he was too nerdy for hippies (he might have been a science major in a decent college) and now he somehow represents the last of the True Hippies. He spends all his time at home (or the bookstore) lurching around unbathed in a witty political t-shirt that reminds everybody he’s still young at heart, his sweathog girlfriend smoking cigarettes and laughing hoarsely on the couch next to their old lumpy dog at shows beneath him, but he partakes less frequently those trips to his closeted sixties bong because of heart palpitations that bring home his mortality. He has hemorrhoids. Late at night if he hasn’t fallen asleep in the recliner he watches porn on cable TV as if he has again come across it accidentally but has a back-up libertarian philosophy to justify it. He has lapsed and now slightly old-fashioned religious notions and keeps yellowing Hesse and Thomas Merton volumes on his shelf for the day when he’ll recapture his quasi-mystical belief systems which should be any day now because he’s getting old and has lots of depressing doctor’s appointments. Thus Baker: the used book store owner as successful author. Maybe it’s that full beard. Maybe I’m totally off, but this is at least how my brain has settled on him.

And as a writer Baker makes book-writing look easy, one of those I-could-do-that illusions that good writers produce. And I confess I have been keeping a document of Bakerian notes, everyday witty observations that could someday grow up to be my own slender volume of meandering postmodern miscellanea—Seinfeld for the graduate student.

I’ve just finished The Anthologist and Baker is redeemed in my book. I am surprised to find that what saves this novel (at least in comparison to the others of his I have read) is its more conventional plot. Now understand this does not mean in any way predictable or formulaic, but simply a little structure, a little going-somewhere. Giving the usual Bakerian tangents even the slightest context and direction makes it all so much more meaningful and worthwhile. And none of them seem a stretch or done artificially or are unintelligent if at times ironic. Such a cure is it that I like the contemporaneousness of his references, that he watched back-to-back episodes of Dirty Jobs or that scholars in the future will study sitcoms like Larry Sanders or Friends the way people have looked back to Latin. At the same time he is critical of the stupidity of our culture and the symptomatic decline of its poetry. Then there’s the inexhaustible theme of a teacher’s frustration dealing with clueless college students “these days”, of the torment of having to read their god-awful writing. Chowder relates how one spat of teaching inevitably crashed and burned in that moronic inferno of contemporary academia or as he puts it, “It was death on toast.”

They all handed their week’s work in, and I lifted the pile of fresh poems in the air to feel its weight. It was unusually heavy because one of the poems was twenty pages long. I knew who it was by. It was called “Pythagoras Unbound”, and it was by an overeager boy who talked a lot about Czeslaw Milosz. I skimmed the first page and I saw the word “endoplasm” and I went cold, like I’d eaten a huge plate of calamari.

That kind of stuff had me laughing to tears. Much of The Anthologist exposits on the subject of the title: the understanding and appreciation of English poetry. Paul Chowder is the anthologist who must only write the introduction to the anthology he has put together. The book is really a neurotic avoidance mechanism, his diaristic jumble of nerves and reflections on the bigger picture, as if revolving around a blind spot of whatever fears are causing his writer’s block. This is what makes up the plot: how having to write this introduction practically destroys his life and how he overcomes it. The meandering observations expected from Baker are his avoidance of confronting the Introduction, his exposed subconscious working out the kinks and questions. Oh, it also turns out to be a very good introduction to English poetry along the way.

In other Baker news I stumbled across a movie on Netflix streaming which completely steals from that beast of gratuitousness The Fermata. It goes by the awful title Cashback the logic of which I still can’t figure out. It actually wasn’t a horrible movie for a kind of romantic comedy, maybe because it had some British intelligence to it. (I tend to dislike a majority of comedies and all romantic comedies.) Actually I’m amazed at how audaciously it steals from The Fermata, shamelessly and recklessly so. And its not pornography—not even close! The nerve of some people.

Contemporary Author: J. M. Coetzee

2010-11-07T19:04:00.000-08:00

In my constant and frustrating quest for good books I’ve often looked to the advice of authors I’ve liked, but more often to lists: lists of literary award winners, this or that list of the top novels of the century or decade or whatever. Often a name will pop up so many times in reviews or essays that I decide it must be read. The results vary. The name J. M. Coetzee came up a lot. He seems to have won every award out there, notably the Nobel Prize in Literature and he has the distinction of winning the Booker prize twice, as well as being on its long and short lists more or less constantly. The subject in which he thrives is the murky intricacies of South Africa, that Petri dish of racism, violence, resentment, of clashing entitlements and cultures.

Here is a great excerpt from an article written when he was getting the Booker prize for the second time. Except for the tee-totaling, he sounds like my kind of guy.

"Coetzee," says the writer Rian Malan, "is a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word."

Below I review each of Coetzee’s books that I’ve read in order from best to worst. Needless to say, all that follows is a spoiler—these stories will be so spoiled you’d think they were each an only child whose parents have guilt complexes—so I suggest reading the books first. (Toward the bottom I also spoil some of Roth’s early Zuckerman novels as well as Nabokov’s Pnin. As a rule nothing in these pages is safe from spoiling. Don’t think you may be able to read something without having a bomb dropped. After all the bombs are what it’s all about so I’d feel negligent not releasing them.)

Disgrace is the winner of the Booker Prize in 1999 and is on (if not at the top) of numerous other “best of” lists. It’s generally thought to be Coetzee’s best book. I think it is a compact masterpiece following the course of an “old school” man burnt out in the modern world forced to find compassion and some residual humanity—not to mention keep his dignity, his sanity—when thrust into a new world where the old rules don’t apply. A not-bad and very faithful film adaptation was made starring John Malkovich.

Requisite plot summary / reminder: David Lurie is a college professor who sleeps with a student and is fired after a scandal in which he refuses to cooperate with what he feels is a politically-correct Inquisitional tribunal. Lurie tries to be the old school romantic, to be the Byron hero standing up for himself in face of society’s demands, but he’s alone and out-dated in his thinking, those around him just won’t cooperate with such out-dated, against-the-grain stuff. Real-world historical movements are taking place and as a single man he must either conform or be broken. The only thing his romantic heroic efforts get him is disgrace, the first of which he swallows with a stoic resolve. He leaves Cape Town to visit his daughter Lucy in the countryside. It takes him some time to acclimate to the farming lifestyle and the people there. His daughter sells flowers and stuff and much of their time is taken up in caring for and euthanizing the huge population of stray dogs roaming about. Their farm is attacked by black thugs, his daughter raped and impregnated. Throughout the attack and its aftermath Lurie is impotent to help his daughter (as he sees it) or effect revenge or justice on the attackers. A neighboring black farmer who had once worked for Lucy and is related to the attackers rises in prominence and wants to take over his daughter’s farm. In contrast to Lurie’s rage and resistance Lucy is compliant and accepting. In the end Lurie must swallow his pride, accept the bitter pill of the changing world, and reconcile himself with injustice and a loss of control.

Dogs act as a kind of metaphor in Disgrace. Metaphors work best when they are practically ready-made, when they seem to smile ironically at their own double-meanings and get to work. The perceptive writer snatches them up and runs with them, letting them do half the work of resonating implications and weaving connections. Good metaphors are not just there for their own sake, to give the literate something with which they might be kept busy, but to unlock new ways of looking at something overly familiar. Coetzee uses dogs ingeniously.

Psychologists know to look at how a dog is treated in a family system to gauge its functionality. It works for societies as well. In Disgrace the dogs are unwanted and neglected, themselves the jetsam of a society barely able to keep itself functioning. South Africa is a sick dog, home to the world’s most vicious and dehumanizing system of racial apartheid, a society which in over-turning its racist system has only made another huge mess of itself. For instance, it leads the world in the rape and comes in second for murder. The treatment of dogs reflects not only the collapse of a society that can’t sustain them but the emotional disconnect (see Age of Iron below) and moral disorientation of that society’s people. With that comes an atmosphere that life is cheap, that people can and should exploit others. But now the exploited are getting revenge and it is at the same time deep-seated and pathological, but also mechanical, obligatory. Dogs aren’t black or white so they serve well to represent the moral ambiguity: both blacks and whites get fucked over in Coetzee’s South Africa. The tension is worse than thick, it breaks out into the worst kinds of random violence and there aren’t easy answers or sane solutions. People arm themselves with dogs as well, vicious attempts to control or stave off escalating ubiquitous violence, but they also resonate with the institutional violence of former Apartheid: dogs as objects of fear, police dogs. At the same time dogs are at the mercy of their masters, and of humans in general to care for them even in death. They can’t be euthanized fast enough and the job is left to compassionate volunteers (like Lucy and her friends). While reading it I kept thinking: Who’s going to put South Africa out of its misery? It seems you could take any of the book’s major themes: oppression, compassion, change, anger, power, protection, vulnerability, revenge, death and find it carried by the multifaceted dog metaphor. This isn’t to say a direct correspondence exists and the reader would be disappointed to attempt any such connecting of the dots. When I say dogs “carry” the metaphor I mean it on a more emotional-intuitive level, perhaps a more “atmospheric” metaphor if such a thing can be allowed. Not to belabor the point, or get off of the point, but I think dogs might work well for biological or evolutionary psychological reasons. I once read the idea that dogs are such good companions and are so “humanlike” because they have evolved to supply humans with certain recognizable human-like cues which are really “artificial”, but enable our anthropomorphizing tendency to fill in the blanks thus humanizing them. They put on the sad eyes and they get bones and stuff. There must be tons of examples of dogs as especially fitting literary devices. The one that comes most predominately to mind is The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy—even though that’s a wolf, but ironically its lack of human-like “connectability” is what makes it work in that tragic story.

Disgrace moves quickly, especially at the beginning, with a kind of damning economy like an indictment or report from the frontline. In his review Andrew Miller perfectly described it as having “an exhilarating bleakness”. Disgrace is Coetzee at his peak: all his best tricks and issues harmonized at the perfect inspired pitch.

Another great comparison to highlight the greatness of Coetzee’s South African novels is the highly allegorical film District 9, one of those potentially intelligent science fiction movies that quickly collapses into painful predictability and Hollywood action movie redundancy. It suffers from the wide-spread political disease which prefers things to be “black and white” so you know who and what is good and bad and what side you’re on and what to think about every scenario in its context. The reality is—and this is what makes great art like these novels of Coetzee—that people on both sides of an issue usually have dirty hands and that there is no harmless solution. People that get fucked over by an evil regime often become evil themselves. There are no groups of victimized saints out there. Now what? District 9 thought it was being smart by presenting nasty looking aliens that seemed at fault but then by degrees revealing them as intelligent “humane” creatures after all who were just reacting to the stupid prejudices of dumb greedy humans. It’s a facile metaphor. Talk about a good scenario being spoiled by morals for the masses. There are other apartheid movies out there, like this new one with about South African rugby players: Invictus. I doubt I’ll ever watch it. I’m hesitant to even approach these feel-good “inspirational” films, fearing the nausea brought on by cliché and self-congratulating easy moral stances that show me nothing new.

Waiting for the Barbarians would have to be Coetzee’s second best. Set in some vague centuries-past preindustrial colonial world it has the proper distance from the contemporary world but at same time it is so consistently redolent of its issues that it begs to be called a parable. The title comes from a Cavafy poem about an empire justifying its actions on the fear of a looming yet never seen enemy, a phenomenon familiar enough to draw constant comparisons: Big Brother, the Iraq war, etc. It’s as if Coetzee was commissioned to novelize the poem so faithful is it, especially its ending where expeditions return announcing the lack of barbarians.

Published in 1980 when Apartheid was in full swing (as were its mounting revolts), the distance of its setting is necessary in order to make broad statements. For him to have said the same thing in a contemporary setting would not work due to a lack of perspective—it would have been just another dissenting voice amid millions; it would have been so obvious as to lose effect, mere name-calling. Putting a comfortable fat magistrate (I imagine him wearing a powdered wig and those clunky shoes, a kind of lesser Handel) in a frontier town that is far off in space in time allows Coetzee to reacquaint the reader with colonial oppression by changing the types of people and how they live. If he were exploring these South African issues with a Boer and black South African as characters the deeper ethical points would never come to light for all the surface tension, all the particulars that would spark kneejerk leaps into political trenches. And what are these “issues”? First the obvious, the subject of Cavafy’s poem: how the dynamics of power perpetuate themselves by creating their own realities. But then the good ones: Can there ever be reconciliation between the oppressor and oppressed, even if the oppressor has come to see the error of their ways and even suffered for them? Is even that attempt still paternalistic? (And is paternalism really such an evil?) Is the damage done by a racist system too deep to be mended? How much is it the responsibility of “the other side” to meet their contrite (or former) oppressors half way? What would it take? Is the only solution to pack up and leave? (That’s eventually what Coetzee did.)

As in Disgrace Coetzee uses a man having sex with a compliant (but only compliant) female as symbolic of the complexities of colonialism. This is a brilliant way of going about it because if outright rape was chosen it would eliminate any of the realistic ambiguity that goes on in such a complex and neurotic society. Not every situation between the two sides is openly hostile or hateful—there can be even a degree of civility, perhaps friendliness. But there is always a defensive wall partly in the way and above it a cloud of the unresolved.

Waiting for the Barbarians is no doubt obliquely about the greater issues that have caused the mess of South Africa, but it also stands on its own. The riveting expedition into the wilds is out of an American western and if it had been written yet I would have had no doubt Coetzee read Blood Meridian, that masterpiece of godforsaken wastelands toying with its trespassers. The protagonist is believably caught between naiveté and awareness so you can sympathize with his efforts but also see their tragic futility. You can also see much of what is coming, but Coetzee manages to unfold events quickly and with a clinical but honest eye for the grotesque and the wretched that makes it a worthy read.

Age of Iron

Much of what I said about Waiting for the Barbarians—about the relationship between the oppressor and oppressed, about the difficulties of reconciliation—applies here as well. Written ten years later the difference with Age of Iron is its explicit handling of apartheid. Apartheid means “aparthood”. If you’re living in such an institutionalized state you are going to be on one side or the other. The white protagonist is Mrs. Curren, a liberal, educated woman (an ex-Latin teacher!) dying of cancer—in many ways she seems to represent the death of her rarified type. She never agreed with the system but had been born and raised into it—as was Coetzee. Can one be removed from the “other side” and live morally? Unless you have gone through what they have gone through can you remain innocent?

She is visited upon by a homeless and practically mute drunk who ends up staying in her house. We learn little about his past, how he came to be a broken man, broken as if by the diseased institution or maybe he represents the institution itself, once virile but now nonfunctional and prey to the violence and revenge of those young men of steel rising to take revenge and regain respect for what their people have gone through. That is the Iron Age of the title. It not only alludes to the most debased of the metallurgical ages of decline as conceived by the ancients, but to the emotionless resolve and hardened hearts of the youth of the End of Apartheid, they who through suffering and dehumanization and maybe even some demagoguery gain tenacity and courage at the expense of compassion and reasoning. Curran worries that in hardening their hearts and minds they are losing their humanity, but she’s told by her black maid with whom she has had an amiable and respectful (yet always slightly distance) relationship and whose children have been caught up in revolutionary violence, that she is proud of her children and they will be the future. (I have to imagine these are the youths that return later in Disgrace as roving thugs.) Perhaps through some recognition of her own guilt she stumbles into a Dantean journey into “the other side”, how they live, what they go through, the degraded conditions, the rage and the violence against them. In the end it’s not clear if this is supposed to be redemptive or otherwise illuminating, but it is an attempt at the possibility. It is if nothing else an eye-opening shock to the system.

Again Coetzee puts before us moral dilemmas of a tragic scale. Nobody’s totally right or wrong. There doesn’t seem to be a correct position to be found. It’s difficult to realize that victims have their faults, their own sickness and that the relatively harmless good liberal is not so good in their passivity and that none of it is really the fault of any of them. South Africa and its apartheid system is like an evil machine that only creates products more defective and morally flawed no matter how much it is tinkered with. It’s almost a twist of so-called reverse discrimination—a theme, or at least a version of it, that comes up constantly in these Coetzee novels: because of your white skin you can be decent and fair and moral and even outspoken against the regime and its history, but the reality of the regime remains and you are on the wrong side of the aparthood.

The above novels I classify under his South African novels. The remaining would be classified as the Australian to where Coetzee eventually expatriated. I can’t help but think that these books represent a later “Post-South Africa” phase for Coetzee, but it is unfortunate because that diseased and disoriented land fed him his best material. If his Age of Iron is early Bronze Age, Waiting for the Barbarians is later Bronze, and Disgrace is Golden Age then with the Australian novels there was a sharp and unorderly decline to the Iron Age, or worse: the Postmodern Age. The Post-South Africa novels are not good. Coetzee comes off as an old geezer publishing books for old geezers. Hell, you win the prizes Coetzee has won, they’ll publish anything you write on a napkin.

Diary of a Bad Year

This book is not painfully bad, but it is not especially good either. I associate it with sitting on a bus to New York next to some female stranger, my legs going numb from the cramped conditions and feeling like a real creep because the outrageous heading of the one chapter heading was On Paedophilia—but I refused to put it away because I had nothing else to read and also mentally I raised a weak fist in defense of literature and artistic license which was what the chapter was kind of about in a non-lurid harmless way.

The novel begins as an old intellectual’s fictitious philosophical manifesto, but it soon evolves into footnoted musings and perspectives of three characters: the aforementioned author, then an attractive young woman he meets in his building and finally her boyfriend. As the manifesto continues at the top of the page they in turn muse in diary form on their encounters with one another while the man works on that manifesto. The reader gets all their perspectives separately but also simultaneously on the same page which splits horizontally and runs as two or three parallel texts. It then becomes an upstairs-downstairs Three’s Company trope contrasting the generation gap of a foolish old man and his dated radical leftist ideas with those of trendy jaded youth, their rocky relationship, and the old guy’s increasing and embarrassing absurd romantic fantasies about this girl whom he hires as a typist. The insinuation or fragmentation of the additional perspectives begins when the old author looks at this young girl’s ass and she wiggles it to toy with him (we find out from her) and then the boyfriend gets jealous and so on. The reader is supposed to find and appreciate connections of some kind between those different levels. The idea is that their more personal thoughts conflict, often ironically, with the cerebral, idealistic text of the manifesto. It is so post-modern it must serve as an illustrious example on some college literature class syllabus. (Coetzee was at one point a literature professor.) It’s just not particularly interesting although it wasn’t too tedious and it was all over quickly wrapping itself up in about 60,000 words.

Nabokov’s Pale Fire must be the most famous example of this hypertextual gimmick. In it a man named Kinbote edits the magnum opus of a dead poet with whom he says he was friends. Kinbote’s footnotes increasingly overshadow the poem itself, becoming the bulk of the novel. Although Nabokov is one of my favorites I’ve never been able to get through the book. It’s a pain in the ass that doesn’t pay off—at least not soon enough. More time is spent on the logistics of how to go about reading it—should you bookmark with your thumb or a bookmark, read each part separately, etc—than on if its value outweighs the inconvenience. Much of Diary of a Bad Year is indebted to Nabokov but only in a hats-off to the master superficial way. The old man / young woman motif as well as some more overt references make the connection more conscious. But who cares?

Unfortunately for me the only meat in Diary of a Bad Year was in the philosophical ideas—nothing mind-blowing but refreshingly engaging, even if it isn’t meant to be taken seriously. (I’m a sucker for manifestoes.) I would have liked its ideas to be more integrated into the rest of the book, but again, more energy is spent ridiculing them as old fashioned like the protagonist than mining them for what they’re worth. Later Coetzee seems to be off-focus—or is it there is just nothing on which to focus? Undoubtedly a lot more could be said in this vein, but I just don’t care enough to try, I want the content of the old Coetzee. If not for his name on the cover you would never think it was the same author—and maybe it never would have been published. All the intense moral Gordian knots of the South-African novels are completely gone. It is now just playful postmodernism: the ironic, self-conscious, juxtaposing and tossing about of ideas, and ideas about ideas, and ideas about how ideas are presented. It sounds like it would be cool but these things always become a bore.

Slow Man

Reading this awful book I imagined Coetzee running into a plot glue trap: one morning he reads was he has recently written and he finds what had potential simply isn’t moving along, the character and story suddenly lack potential and momentum, that whatever he had that drove his previous novels has dried up. He’s gotten old and stale and lacking vigor—exactly like his character Paul Rayment (the name evokes “remnant”) who’s had what dull life he had curtailed by an accident that claimed his leg—he is an amputee. And then Coetzee’s does what authors seem to like to do when they run out of ideas: they write about imagination and the creative process, about the function and meaning of art and the artist. It becomes metafiction. One has to handle this device carefully—it all too easily becomes an instrument of banal masturbation and triviality. (To tell the truth I can’t tell you how sick I am of this device which seems to be everywhere I turn in books and film. Isn’t it really an egotism and a narcissism to make art about being an artist? Does nobody have anything to say about life or the world in general? The next time I read a novel within a novel I’m going to throw it across the room like Kingsley Amis did when reading his son Martin’s book and a character appeared named Martin Amis.) I think Nabokov is the only one that has managed to pull this off successfully when his narrators or protagonists hint that they stretch beyond the confines of their conscious place and this in turn makes the artistic pretense conscious of itself. It is a form of higher irony. This ploy culminates in Pnin—also about a pathetic and lonely old man looking to somehow connect with the life he never had, but Nabokov never made that the point of his books alone, but rather another facet of interest. Even a powerful writer like Philip Roth doesn’t do much with the “art about art” theme in his early Zuckerman novels The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound. The former especially questions the value of sacrifice gratis artis and he does it in an intelligent way—e.g. by positing the theory that Anne Frank lived and grew up but remained anonymous and silent vis a vis the publication of her memoirs. I read that now as a young Roth reflecting on his assured future as a novelist and the life changes of his fame.

Coetzee’s gimmick takes the form of an alter-ego novelist from an earlier novel, the titular Elizabeth Costello, who barges into this one, and who makes clear that in some tricky, vague and annoying way Rayment is her character and her sudden introduction into the plot is to bring life to the failure he is as a man and a character and mover of plot. She is the attempt of the author’s creative imagination to make something of Rayment. Rayment’s character is The Problem of the Novel. The overused conventions of the novel as trope and wish-fulfillment find themselves truncated, bed-ridden in need of an original jumpstart. I suppose next we’ll hear that eulogy that there’s nothing new under the sun, that all possibilities have been used up, that the only place to go is to reflect on this sorry state of affairs in such witty ways as these. Well gosh Coetzee, was it really that long ago you did the impossible and wrote great novels of depth? (Funny true story that I cannot resist telling. Long ago a young hip art school woman was telling me about another of this same species, how he always got artsy girls to take off their shirts for the sake of his “photography”. And how did he manage this feat? What was his justification—or was it hers? I never figured that out—for this hiply unhip bypassing of any artistic pretension? Well it was the old story: everything’s been done, there are no more new ideas. But of course! What else can you do? I’ll have to try that some time. Who ever said nihilism can’t be fun?)

The problem with all this postmodern metafictional stuff is it is a neat idea—especially to talk about—but while reading it we don’t care, we’re just going through the motions. We can nod to the metafiction and quickly exhaust its intention, but then we are left with its own necessary evil: a boring character and plot that goes nowhere despite the limp meditations on life and loss. Nabokov knew to keep Pnin short. My god how I wanted this tedious book to be over, with only the dimmest hope of a cheap twist at the end to make my time invested worth it. I didn’t even get that. Coetzee’s prose is flat throughout, but without that “exhilarating bleakness” to be found in the South Africa novels. Maybe its lameness is intentional, but again, we have to sit through this, we invest our valuable time in this metafictional jerking-off.

Coetzee’s style is a precarious one. If he’s going to keep his intentions shrouded in mile off parables the reader has to be given something tasty to chew on while weighing the middlebrow postmodern statements in the back of their head That’s why Disgrace worked and these later novels don’t. All sorts of feasible fucked-up shit happens to Lurie and the reader wants revenge and resolution but the real world won’t satisfy those needs. All this postmodern reflection on the meaning of art in today’s world is like the daily rituals of a retiree enjoying his breakfast and morning walk and ranting on about old stories. Although Coetzee has repatriated to Australia and has a secure Nobel-prize-supported carte blanche to publish whatever he writes, a world still goes on with many good stories, with many divisive issues. I don’t blame him for leaving the frustrating hell of South Africa, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to write this dilettantism, or if he does the book should come with warning labels not the usual accolades.

Irony in DeLillo's Point Omega

2010-08-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

Congratulations, you found one of the only reviewers that seems to understand Don DeLillo’s ingenious new book Point Omega. This is also an absolute spoiler, a dissected exposition leaving all stones over-turned and nothing left to discover. Read the book first. It’s a good book. It will only take one or two sittings. Trust me, it will be worth it. Okay, you’re back? Did you read it on the train to work on your Kindle?

As you’ll see, a majority of the critics have found fault with Point Omega. Are they just smarting over the fact that they paid $24 for a one-hundred-seventeen page book (or Kindled it for $11)? I would be. I got mine out of the library. I have to admit I began reading it feeling like a bit of a chump, like a sucker that’s supposed to take what would have been a few chapters in that tome Underworld as a fully realized novel. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. I take it now more as a haiku, a condensed pill that grows after you swallow it, the kind you get more from each time you think about it. I want all the books I read to be condensed works of genius like this one. Not that I’d pay $24 but…

The critics are taking Point Omega as a later, lesser work of DeLillo. They seem all too ready to dismiss it as a sign of his decline. One critic typically said of Point Omega: “It reaches for enigmatic profundity but meanders”. Another similarly said DeLillo used to have good plots driving a “latent subtext… freighted with metaphysical portent” like the obvious, almost tongue-in-cheek airborne toxic event in White Noise. Point Omega, he says, doesn’t have the “history-spanning event that can provide some center of gravity.” Alan Cheuse thinks DeLillo has become “a parody of himself”—no, I think this is more focused DeLillo. Bob Minzesheimer is confused about who’s who in the book but offers an interesting comparison: “The novel as conceptual art piece.” I could work with that. But his proposed solution (his “about”) is vague and generally off target. It’s “about how language, film and art alter what we think of as reality.” That kind of vagueness seems to be typical of how most reviewers take anything they don’t understand. Well, just how do we think of reality and why is it important enough for a major writer to write a complicated book about it?

The critics wrongly see the point of the book as its faults, that it “never gets where we’re promised”—but in fact it does. They’re generally trying to figure it out by decoding the information they’re given into a solid statement about what it’s “really” about. They feel unsatisfied without that answer. A good plot resolution would at least dispel that pang, but that expectation isn’t met. But each has their answer, their clavis which attempts to clarify things where DeLillo didn’t: it’s “about” identity, the Iraq War, autism, art, duration, “lateness”. Justin Cartwright comes closest in noticing the theme of the “unease and disjunction of the American psyche” and that the characters’ supposedly philosophical pronouncements and conversations, are really, “absolutely incoherent rubbish”. It seems British reviewers (like the above Cartwright and James Lasdun) “get it” more than Americans. One commenter (kcrwhite) on Lasdun’s review seems to agree: “US reviewers don't understand Delillo's work anymore –apparently it requires a level of interpretation they are incapable of these days.” I totally agree.

What critics are missing is an appreciation of irony. Many would cite this as a long-standing difference between Americans and the British, but I think its absence from the American mind has become more exasperated and best seller lists are symptomatic of its increasing endangerment. The prosaic American mind prefers the straightforwardness of plot to the challenges of irony. All they want is the former and can so easily do without the latter that they don’t have the ability to notice it. They want to be entertained without any effort on their part. Irony is by its nature a discrepancy, perhaps between what is said and the reality: in effect, it is thinking about one thing as two things simultaneously. This brief essay was the only one I found to focus on irony, but only to desperately make the case that it’s all really “about” the Iraq war. If you want to connect the theme of detachment from reality to the Iraq war you would not be wrong but that “point” is incidental, that is just another product of our disconnect, not the focus of the book.

I might as well offer my “about” here: Point Omega’s “about” being out of touch with reality and carried off into an ether of disconnected ideas and details. All the ideas thrown about in Point Omega that reviewers are either trying to take seriously or are puzzled by are in fact “rubbish”. That’s the irony. You’re not supposed to be taking these characters and the bizarre things they say seriously. And that’s the big ironic point the critics miss.

I assume they think the same man who wrote the overt satire of absurd postmodernity White Noise has since switched off that satirical and critical eye by the time he wrote Point Omega? Now he eschews plot in favor of wrapping an “about” in various cloaks and in Point Omega he just hasn’t pulled it off as well? This seems to me to be the position of the critics in their present evaluation of DeLillo. Truly Point Omega is so ironic it is practically a sustained joke, but because it is DeLillo it is a creepy and at times tragic one.

A brief plot summary in case you refuse to read the short book first. If as some reviewers have suggested the terse book’s structure is to be taken as Haiku-like, that would be the short-long-short arrangement. The first “short” is of a man engrossed in an art exhibit called 24 hour Psycho, which is in fact a screening of that film slowed down to a frame-by-frame speed. He watches it from the time the museum opens until it closes. The anonymous man gets awfully philosophical watching it, obsessed, and implied in his dedication and focus is something monastic and insightful, that he’s digging deeper into the nature of perception and reality, that if he could do it the right way it might be transformative experience.

The broad middle section consists of a film maker named Jim Finley who is trying to convince a McNamara/ Rumsfeldish neocon Iraq War architect Richard Elster to monologue before a camera in a kind of minimalistic documentary. The filmmaker has visited Elster at his minimalistic desert vacation home where they talk minimalistic DeLillo talk and Finley makes several wary attempts at coaxing the retired war planner into participating in his project. Soon Elster’s daughter Jessie arrives and she’s weird in a space cadet kind of way but Finley is attracted to her. Then one day she disappears—it’s thought she might have just committed suicide by walking out into the desert—but the searches never find her and Elster is devastated and they leave the desert for civilization.

For the third and last section, the ring cycle returns us to the man watching 24 hour Psycho. Here he meets Jessie with whom he has an awkward conversation and gets her phone number. I have of course skipped all the details, all the endless digressions and thoughts of the characters as these things go on and it is in those details that it is revealed to the careful reader that there is something quite wrong with all these people.

DeLillo isn’t going to spell out for us that his characters are mental. To me this is one of the greatest uses of his irony. Can you recognize a member of a sick society or can you not because you are one of them? I don’t mean to say that anybody who doesn’t “get” what he’s doing is in any way unsound—there’s a literary jungle to chop through first—but we’re so used to hearing bullshit that it starts to become a white noise indistinguishable from non-bullshit. We are in the position of his characters as they question one another and receive vague incomprehensible answers in return. Dialogue (or monologue) seems to be going somewhere, seems to have a point, but it never seems to get there, nothing ever becomes clear. Critics take this incorrectly as a failing of the book when it is in fact purposeful. At times the characters try to interpret these conundrums in their own way, but often they write them off as Zen-like utterances that convey truth beyond a rational level. Or maybe they think they’re just not smart enough to understand. How often does this happen to each of us? DeLillo brings the reader to this familiar point, deficient in knowledge but with a handful of hints, and demands our efforts to fill in some of the blanks. This is Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” or theory of omission in which events in a character’s past are hinted at and it’s left to the reader to build their own theory based on implication. (I would even argue that Underworld is this theory on steroids, fleshed out to a socio-historical level.) As with suspense or horror genres it is much more powerful when the reader has to supply their own details instead of having it done for them. Mystery novels aren’t icebergs but a linear process of uncovering causes—they’re not supposed to leave anything unexplained. These lesser genres rarely leave things unexplicated, but good art gets the mind thinking. How did Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle end up like that? How does this similar weirdo in Point Omega watching the film everyday live? Does he have a job? Is he sort of normal looking or a total whack job? We meet people all the time that can make us wonder by some revealed quirk just how nuts they are. If we are limited by a character’s narrative perspective we get fewer clues to work with. Simply seeing how a person is dressed, their hygiene, allows us to eliminate an entire category of questions, but from such a limited perspective it’s more like talking to somebody via computer. We are necessarily working within their world with only probes of doubt or red flags in the details that enable the possibility of another perspective.

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Let me spell it out. Let me show you that these people are fucked up, they are victims of modernity trying to unravel themselves, their world and their problems with the nostrums and hollow philosophies of postmodernity. Keep in mind that the overarching irony is that we are not supposed to take these people seriously– but that’s what all the critics are trying to do. In fact a common criticism is that characters lack emotional depth! The characters are absurd, lost crazy people talking and thinking desperate nonsense that—like much of postmodernism—has taken enough of the form of the meaningful that it fools you into thinking it has meaning. That’s why nothing seems to work if you try to figure it out, that’s why nothing ever seems to resolve itself. (And again, it is a great irony that White Noise is the very textbook spelling out satirically those absurd postmodern phenomena.) What follows is the partially fleshed out iceberg of the characters based on hints dropped along the way.

The filmmaker Finley is trying to see beyond ex-war hawk Elster’s own rationalizations and intellectual defenses. Ironically this is what we have to do with the characters as well, but for which they don’t seem to have the capacity. There are hints at Finley’s neuroses tied up with his failed marriage. His wife complained about him, “Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?” He is a loser, never finishing any of his wild schemes, but he can’t see it. He’s out of touch. There’s not much evidence he is too smart either. He holds the belief that if you are intense enough about anything then it becomes something higher, something religious, rapturous. One of his last projects was a kind of marathon examining Jerry Lewis marathons—another example of the idea that focusing in on the minutia of anything can somehow make it worthwhile. Even a subject like Jerry Lewis marathons is deep if you focus on it obsessively. In Point Omega that which is less clear is imagined to be clearer: there must be more truth, more purity in the formless, in minimalism. A typical exchange between Finley and Elster:

“Who was there?” I said. “Cabinet-level people? Military people?”

“Whoever was there. That’s who was there.”

I liked this answer. It said everything. The more I thought about it, the clearer everything seemed.

DeLillo loves having his characters utter pseudo-koans, the kind that might make a man wearing his ball cap backwards respond with a floored, “Whoa.” Problem is too many readers (and critics) think they’re supposed to be taken seriously. Or how about this bit of philosophizing by Jim Finley for zombified pseudo-Zen disconnect:

“The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware. ... His life happened ... when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner."

There seems to be a lot of confusion among critics even about who’s who and who’s doing what. I don’t think there’s any good reason to think that Jim Finley is the artist behind 24 hour Psycho. But I do think it is more than heavily implied the stalker of Elster’s daughter Jessie named Dennis is the man watching 24 hour Psycho. In fact he is a 24 hour Psycho, another fine specimen in the DeLillo opus, that of the lone quiet psychopath like Oswald in Libra, (and the model of them all Travis Bickle) who seems a casualty of modernity, of postmodern chaos and urban inconsequentiality (living with his mother in his “small flat being consumed by rising towers”), of mental illness latching on to something that seems profound, a corrective masking a history of confusion and pain implied but out of the story’s scope, that a frame-by-frame experience of the world is “where everything is so intensely what it is.” Then after philosophizing on his supposed profound insights he hilariously admits it is probably a girl he’s looking to meet, fantasizing of another with whom he could share his warped reality. If that revelation isn’t enough to make you wonder, out of nowhere he imagines the museum guard shooting himself in the head and he is alone with the film. What other reason would there be to include such a non sequitur, but to show this guy is a whacko? This guy is a Travis Bickle!

At the end of the book I think it is more than subtly suggested that this guy is himself also a Norman Bates and that he has a mummified mother at home. He actually imagines himself becoming Norman Bates, “assimilated, pore by pore”. In his mental illness he does not even know this is what’s behind his obsession with the film. To him it as if viewing the frame by frame shots of the movie would be like examining the inner workings of his own mind, of what is wrong—but of course there is nothing to be found for, as in Antonioni’s Blow Up, that which is unclear does not become clearer in magnification.

Each in their own way, these characters are looking inward in flawed ways, venturing within, without any guide and seeing nothing because they don’t know where or how to look. Our postmodern society doesn’t have the tools to offer, the framework, they were all thrown out with the bathwater. Ironically they’re trying to make their world more real, more graspable by going beyond it, by perceiving warped or extreme versions of reality: armchair war planning, a marathon of a marathon of Jerry Lewis, a film slowed down so as to be rendered incomprehensible and meaningless. The harder you look the more that which is sensible breaks down, becomes out of synch, peters out into a soothing white noise.

Ironically the person our 24 hour psycho Dennis meets while watching is Elster’s daughter Jessie who has her own issues dealing with reality, who has slippages inward to an apparent dead world, whose out-of-synchness has her reading people’s lips to supposedly understand what they’re going to say before they say it. In today’s jargon she is probably somewhere on the “autistic spectrum”.

Elster is the only semi-sane character, at times revealing some insight into his mistakes and delusions. ("Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation.”) I suspect he’s escaping to the desert, recovering from a nervous breakdown. Symptomatic might be how he philosophically rationalizes his out-of-touchness, discussing the titular Point Omega as conceived by Teilhard de Chardin, a kind of teleological singularity where human consciousness eventually becomes one with the mind of God. Elster interprets it in a less attractive way: as reality extenuated to the point of nullification, that somehow a negation of human consciousness, to be “stones in a field”, is supposed to be a good thing. It is like the desolation of his desert retreat, supposedly therapeutic, even clarifying. But one wonders… and one must wonder if his retreat into nihilistic coldness has its result in whatever is wrong with his daughter and has as its consequence her disappearance, as if she were a cruel manifestation of that nullification.

Why is it none of the critics have gotten even close to such an interpretation? Has the stigma against mental illness entered so-called literary criticism? Is it forbidden to simply peg a character as fucked up, or is it that DeLillo is suspected of undermining things we hold near and dear—passion, intensity, that there has to be something worthwhile in a fixation, an autism or mania regardless of its content—so we can’t look at it as such? Critics are missing the irony, the satire, the critique on some of our society’s strange nihilistic ideas that protects it from looking at its own rampant mentally illness. I’m reminded of those intellectual hoaxes where respected academics accept an article or thesis only to be made fools of when it is revealed as purposefully gibberish.

To take a sick society with a serious face, to take its absurdities on face value, to treat a psycho born from such a society as if a “rational actor” requires irony. There are perhaps three types of DeLillo novel: the outwardly satirical (White Noise), irony stretched so thin it’s transparent (Underworld), and then somewhere between, the pretty ironic satire subtle enough for Americans to miss it, but visible to the British eye (Mao II, Point Omega).

DeLillo likes to take a symptom of the under-diagnosed neurosis dubbed postmodernity and elaborate on a theme: the ubiquitous, high-pitched, screaming stupidity of American culture in its pregnant widow trimester in White Noise, monothematic homogenization through repetition in Mao II, underlying neurotic cold war fear of annihilation in a nation suppressed by the ever-looming and very real possibility of nuclear holocaust in Underworld. The grand irony is that all the books’ characters attend to the products of neuroses wholeheartedly, they embrace and revel in them as good things because they naively know of nothing else. In Point Omega you’d be looking for implications of the autistic, the misfocussed, the out of touch. The less conscious these themes are to the reader (and the characters) the higher the irony, the more explicated, the lower the irony. For instance, at the ending of Underworld when Nick Shay visits the Bruegelesque hospital for radiation victims, irony has relatively evaporated. The mutants are the overt results of abortive yet residual thermonuclear war as opposed to the previously sublimated objects of fear, e.g. the fetishized baseball. In the latter the irony is high. You’re not supposed to take their obsession with the ball on face value—DeLillo’s better than that. A similar contrast exists in Point Omega with the disappearance of the daughter which brings a concrete gravity (and low irony) to the ironic state of detached ideologies in which her father and the filmmaker Jim had been consumed. You could make lists of examples of such themes for each book, most of which would fall under the heading of higher irony with the occasional almost cathartic appearances of low irony. But even the points of low irony still resonate with some relative irony—never do you completely leave its control. It is DeLillo’s art, his genius, to corral such disparate manifestations into a cohesive work with the perfect balance.

Now tell me that with all that I have come up with (and that’s just skimming the surface) DeLillo is not becoming a more refined master whose themes run deeper and whose subtleties reverberate further. Now read the (mostly American) reviewers who can’t seem to find much of anything to like about the book, who think it a diminished low-caloric DeLillo, a DeLillo who couldn’t bring it all together and deliver.

Life and Dick of Christopher Hitchens

2010-08-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve just finished Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch 22, a work larger than life for its scope and intensity and all the more so because within months of its release he has just recently announced that he has a bad form of cancer and that he is dying. This is a particularly gruesome irony when he opens the book with the idea of aging and mortality as the impetus behind it. More specifically, he cites a published misprint in which he is listed as dead.

What I mainly enjoyed was the depth and breadth of Hitchens’ thought, his acute intellectuality. To me it was like tasty and nutritious foodstuffs amid starvation. One can hardly find nowadays one of these old school intellectuals, the last of a hyper-educated breed whose scope of knowledge and classical training partially serves to show us what has been lost. Hitchens is a master rhetorician, stylist, polemicist, gadfly, but most of all an independent thinker in the face of a world of endangered intellectual values. If his book does nothing else for me it makes me appreciate once again the lenten state of journalism and the anti-intellectuality of today’s discourse. It’s so refreshing to hear somebody break from the rank and file thoughts and insidious political correctness that are so common as to be seen as givens instead of as the lame assumptions they truly are. (Not that he’s also not guilty of a calculated outrageousness.) Gore Vidal used to be a model for this but he got too old and apparently lost his marbles and became a fool of the worst kind: a 9/11 conspiracy crank. It really is too bad Vidal has spoiled himself: he’s like a declining TV show that should have been canceled but some executive didn’t know when to pull the plug.

I am not naïve in my apparent adulation of Hitchens. As with anybody I am on guard against his slippery and persuasive rhetoric, his convenient lacunae, his declarative axioms. I’m not blindly persuaded by his arguments and dodgy rationalizations and I do not accept his conclusions simply because I can follow his arguments. But I do trust that he is not going to be lazy or take the path of least resistance. I don’t think today’s writers and thinkers are necessarily more transparent and avoid the appearance of obfuscation. I just think they’re fat, content and happy and so are their readers. Disrupting comfort levels is not demanded of them by their audience or themselves. Out there is a world of many preachers and many choirs. The latter know which newspaper or magazine or website they can go to hear what they want to hear. Our current marketplace of ideas trades in the byte and the slogan and the sports fan mentality where you support your side, your party and piss on the other with prepackaged notions and phrases plucked from the air, from localized Zeitgeistes. There doesn’t seem to be the time and space for hair-splitting and lengthy reasoning, it’s much easier to forget the inconvenient grey areas with which reality insists on complicating matters. When I read most of what passes for journalism or when I hear everyday people get political I can quickly and easily pigeonhole their “position”, their limp stand on an issue usually well-chosen to be safely black and white. It’s amazing to see how these “arguments” exist out there and are picked up on by people and regurgitated through some mysterious process like the spread of urban legends. A fifteen year old that has never said a word is suddenly empowered by a slogan. Although I wouldn’t expect somebody to trust me, I don’t think this “pigeonholing” is narrow-mindedness because it can be tested. Am I not going to know what a Zinn or Chomsky thinks about any given subject? How about a person who denies global warming: what are the chances they think Obama isn’t a citizen? You only have to plug a given issue into their madlibs formulae to get in return the expected psittacism.

A lot of the reaction against Hitchens has been his apparent shifts, his changes of mind, his defections and apparent contradictions, but as he explains at length, and to highjack an analogy from the recalcitrant Howard Zinn, you cannot be neutral—and here I’d add unchanging—on a moving train. Hitchens quotes John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change then my opinions change: and you, sir?”

The book ends with a moving (especially in light of his imminent death) reevaluation of his life, of “grown-up” and sobering revisions of his former idealism, and a welcome (to me insofar as it is overdue) admission that in effect what was the old Left and any revolutionary clout it had to it is quite simply moribund. There are more personal confessions such as his doubt that he has been the father he should have been—the kind of very human doubts that plague one when youth and its lack of regrets is another far-off incarnation. I certainly respect Hitchens for his revisions and growth. I am suspicious of anybody whose positions and opinions do not change over decades. (Young people marching behind a banner of idealism now scare me—please keep them away from the guns.) How can one see the changing world with unchanging eyes? How can a person at forty take seriously ideas they had at twenty? I see this all the time, this complicating of things that used to be easy, this muddying of the black and white as the grey hairs sprout. It takes more bravery and integrity to explain to all your about-faces than to once again reaffirm an old and over-used dogma. Unfortunately the latter is admired as consistency and loyalty. That’s part of the Hitch-22 of the title: the dilemma of being consistent to your values while accommodating the untidy and changing world.

To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need… It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions.

I already mourn Hitchens’ probable passing. He is a rare inspiration to me. In him is embodied much that is lost: an insistent on argument, on being critical, or fighting for what is right and seeing through the bullshit that manages to cloud matters. There’s also the generous humanism which tries foremost to see humans qua humans, to endure and maybe even respect or adore those people with whom one disagrees “politically”, but who make up for it in wit or conviction or some je ne sais quoi, and at the same time to dislike that absence even in those who might be on the same “side”.

If you think I’m overly pessimistic then please offer me a replacement: somebody with a malleability guided by reason and argument, somebody that can argue from such expansive resources of learning and experience and who lives by convictions, morals and a personality. It is something which is now beyond old-fashioned and generally put under the heading of “having character”. I know it sounds like a stuffy stiff upper lip description but its very absence precludes its own renaming. There have been at times hints of examples in my local experience—but nobody that wrote books or had the impact that Hitchens has had. An example of the opposite, of our sordid present American reality, the man who personifies what we’re left with, is that shameless lying fat sack of shit Michael Moore, a man of such low character that I immediately lose respect for anybody who has any respect for him.

“The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated.” (p.416)

Hitch-22 is a fantastic book that all should read, especially anybody that fancies themselves in any way an intellectual. It’s like reading Einstein if you’re serious about becoming a physicist. It is also a very funny book. I won’t waste time trying to connect his sense of humor—heavy in irony and wordplay—to the kind of cultivated mind I’m convinced is practically extinct. Two examples stand out. The first is from his descriptions of his own “public” school experience which he found not so awful considering the history of such horror stories by Orwell et al. As if at a loss to offer the reader what they expected he offers an epitome of that perverse system by quoting Ian Watt regarding his time in a Japanese prison camp:

Well, we were in a cell that was probably built for six but was holding about sixteen of us. There wasn’t much food and we hadn’t been given any water for quite a while. The heat was absolutely ferocious. Dysentery had begun to take its toll, which was distinctly disagreeable at such close quarters…

Added to this unpleasantness, we could hear one of our number being rather badly beaten by the Japanese guards, with rifle butts it seemed, in their guardroom down the corridor. At this rather trying moment one of my young subalterns, who’d managed to fall asleep, started screaming and flailing and yelling. He was shouting: “No, No—please don’t…Not any more, not again, Oh God please.” Hideous noises like that. I had to take a snap decision to prevent panic, so I ordered the sergeant to slap him and wake him up. When he came to, he apologized for being a bore but brokenly confessed that he’d dreamed he was back at Tonbridge.

I had heard versions of this other example of humor before from talks Hitchens gave and I think also from things written by Martin Amis with whom they were created. (I think their more-or-less private joke has now been over-exposed, jumped over the shark, and will be imitated and cheapened by doofi like me.) These are the puerile yet high-minded word games in which the words of familiar titles or phrases are exchanged with (usually) obscenities. What might you come up with if you exchange “Heart” with “Dick” in great works of literature? “Dick of Darkness”, “The Dick of the Matter”, “The Dick Is a Lonely Hunter”.

In closing I offer my own creation. I don’t remember why, but I began my own, exchanging “Death” with “Dick” with some titles:

Dick be Not Proud

A Dick in Venice

The Dick of Ivan Ilyich

Dick of an Salesman

On Dick and Dying

Dick Comes for the Archbishop

A Dick in the Family

The Dick of the Heart

Chronicle of a Dick Foretold

Dick is a Lonely Business

Naked in Dick

Dick Sentence

Another Good Review

Contemporary Author: Cormac McCarthy

2009-12-31T08:33:00.000-08:00

I discovered Cormac McCarthy when I saw No Country for Old Men in the theater because I’ve always trusted the quality of Coen Brothers films. I was so blown away by a sense that movie gave me I looked into the writer. A line from the Wikipedia article jumped out at me immediately.

He is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature.”

I have nothing against James and Proust, but it’s rare to hear a writer imply he wants to “deal with issues of life and death”. Sounds like my kind of guy.

His story as a writer is the stuff of writer romanticism. He wrote for decades in total poverty, caring for nothing but writing or for catering to popular tastes. Universities would offer him thousands of dollars to speak and he’d deny them saying he had nothing else to say than what was in the books. His books barely sold, even Blood Meridian, now considered a masterpiece of American literature. Nobody except those deep in the literary world even knew of him. As Madison Smartt Bell famously put it, “he shunned publicity so effectively that he wasn't even famous for it.”

Then through some combination of luck and chance and maybe marketing he got famous for All the Pretty Horses and by the time The Road came out he was doing an interview with Oprah. I think everybody’s watching to see how fame will change his books and some might say it is already apparent.

I don’t remember why I chose it, but I got All the Pretty Horses out of the library. Probably because it had won the National Book Award. It is the first of a trilogy often called his Border trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain. All highly recommended, but the first is the best. Before those was Blood Meridian, cited consistently in those lists I like to read as one of the best books of recent decades and beyond. It’s our age’s Moby Dick. Depending on the degree of my McCarthy fanaticism I would say it has to be one of the best books I have ever read hands-down. Maybe the best. I’m certainly not the only person to think so. Let me just say the vision and unmitigated tragic scale of his books is like a sobering smack in the face. No doubt reading these has changed my life (see below) and work. I have not read books so powerful.

His books are certainly “literary books” breaking all the rules and making new ones about how we’re supposed to write. Drawing on the biblical, the cinematic, the mythic, the tragic, the Modernist, the post-Modernist, the Grotesque, McCarthy clashes the old world with the modern world, where would-be heroes have their illusions yanked out from under their feet and are left either dead or staggering about, punch-drunk with his particular brand of apocalyptic Nihilism. McCarthy’s vision of humanity is cynical and misanthropic for the most part: fundamentally we are selfish animals driven by base and egotistic needs and violence is our preferable way of relating to the world.

If McCarthy has a cinematic counterpart it is Sam Peckinpah. From Wikipedia:

Peckinpah's films generally deal with the conflict between values and ideals, and thecorruption of violence in human society. He was given the nickname "Bloody Sam" due to the violence in his films. His characters are often loners or losers who desire to be honorable, but are forced to compromise in order to survive in a world of nihilism and brutality.

After the westerns—and fame—he wrote No Country for Old Men which in its genesis is more a screenplay than a novel. I don’t count it as representative of McCarthy. I tried reading it but I can’t since the film spoiled it for me. It screams to me screenplay. From what I gather the book varies little from the movie. The killer in No Country represented to me a few things: the fact of inevitable death or indiscriminate malevolence in the world, and related, an undermining of the traditional ethics where the righteous win out and the evil pays the price for its deeds. There’s also the anti-modern world theme of a future (or present?) where much of humanity has lost a moral spark that makes it human and the killer is its harbinger.

In this way The Road feels like its sequel: a world devoid of not only of what sane social cohesion civilization can offer, but of anything to live for—most of the decent people just kill themselves rather than live like animals. Most the people that remain on that earth are sub-human—or at least they represent the darker side of people. The boy and his father carry what they call The Fire as the last representatives of humanity. I can’t think of a better way to make a reader question everything and confront what matters than this scenario he put a father and son in. It’s been called the most depressing book ever and I’m sure lots of people can’t bear it. It’s not the kind of weight you can carry for long. It has indeed left its scorch mark on me.

McCarthy’s books which I would recommend:

- Blood Meridian

- All the Pretty Horses, [The Crossing, Cities of the Plain]

- The Road

I should note that I tried reading Suttree and didn’t like it. I think it’s this thing I have about novels otherwise serious trying to also be funny. It’s a real turn-off for me and probably the reason I can’t read Thomas Pynchon despite his status as one of the Greats. I haven’t been able to return to those books (including Suttree) he wrote before the westerns often called his Southern Gothic.

McCarthy and Drinking

One thing I can credit McCarthy for—or at least associate strongly with—was quitting drinking—almost exactly two years ago if I use that humiliating new year’s eve as a turning point. No doubt: McCarthy’s work is extremely sobering. My attitude had been why not drink and I still wouldn’t disagree with somebody who had this philosophy, but I found in McCarthy a place I wanted to be and that translated into getting (more) serious about my writing. Look, he said, books can be written like this! That meant directing all available energies, energies that had been wasted in the semi or total oblivion of gin or whiskey or the hangovers. It meant spending more time reading and, buoyed by finding McCarthy, perhaps there were other greats I should seek out and read. The product of this latest phase is these Contemporary Writer jottings.

I don’t know when or if or under what other circumstances I would have quit if I didn’t call it McCarthy, but I remember those acutely sober winter evenings reading his western trilogy. I had already been half way to quitting after reaching the point where my tolerance and subsequent quantities had just gotten ridiculous. I essentially have stopped drinking the hard stuff which was going down with only a little ice. It wasn’t especially hard to quit and I still have a couple of beers now and again, but it took something to be that much more serious about to make me decide to stop. It was not long after reading him that I found he had stopped drinking as well years ago and there was this line of his that meant so much to me. "If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking." It’s true. Just think of all the drinking writers. There are so many it becomes easier to think of the ones that don’t drink—and they usually had quit at some point. The only writer I can think of that is a known teetotaler is Coetzee. At one point I would have pointed to one of those great red-nosed drunks and said, “See, he did it!” Probably not the best way of looking at it.

Contemporary Author: Nicholson Baker

2009-12-28T05:55:00.000-08:00

Nicholson Baker apparently was to be The Shit, the new literary star of the American Literary World after he wrote Mezzanine in which a man thinks a book’s worth of random stuff on his way down an escalator. It is supposed to be THE Baker book to read but I haven’t been able to get back to him after the embarrassment of the two I have read. He has written a lot of interesting-looking non-fiction which I’ll probably never get to. In all fairness I think I started on Baker in the worst way with these two books:

Vox (Latin for voice) has as its gimmicky premise a conversation on a party line (one of those 800 number chat lines advertised late at night) between a man and a woman. Of course neither of them have done this kind of thing before and of course they are both extremely witty and intelligent conversationalists. They make upper middle brow observations about things which you might smile at but you’ll forget about. And then in case you’d be disappointed there is some sex talk, but about all that I’ll say no more. Ultimately this kind of aimless postmodern clever banter, a kind of “did ya ever notice how…” scrutiny of the quotidian that gets old really fast and leaves you with an empty calorie feeling. It is (pseudo) intellectual junk food. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have WAY too much time on your hands and you’re curious. This book was made famous because Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to Bill Clinton. Now doesn’t that just say everything.

The Fermata is—have no doubt—pornography. If anybody tries to tell you it is something much more than that, something more literary or hiply audacious, do not believe them. It might as well be the product of an extremely well-versed fourteen year old boy addicted to tits and ass and beating his dick four times a day. It is a chaptered Penthouse Forum brought together by the wonderfully perverse armature of a man who can stop time at will and does the kinds of things that our fourteen year old would do to the various hot babes he “cums” across. The premise has some potential but it goes right to the bottom of the sock drawer with the dirty magazines. It is funny at times? Yes. Is it witty at times? Yes. Is it anything but a sometimes funny, sometimes witty series of explicit, crude fuck fantasies broken up by a thin and unrealized sci-fi-ish plot? No. The fourteen year old grew up and got a book deal. Watch out.

Contemporary Author: Glen Duncan

2009-12-26T05:45:00.000-08:00

In my googlings I came across a review for Duncan’s latest “literary thriller” A Day and a Night and a Day. I figured I would give it a try. Let’s just say many consecutive nails hit their mark and I would recommend it without hesitation to anybody. The title refers to two periods of time: the amount of time the main character is tortured as a terrorist in a Guantanamo-like setting as well as another incident later revealed that explains how he got there. One catch: it is an American torturing an American. I liked the explicit philosophizing, more a series of monologues from the inquisitor on a kind of cynical postmodern nihilism that is not without intelligence and relevance. Two of the novel’s tripartite plot lines alternate between the interrogation and the tortured man’s inner recollections of his life that brought him to this point. How a man can go from point A to a far off point B. I’ve read reviews that find fault with the cheesy-at-times boy meets girl back story, comparing it to lesser genres, but I thought the author’s superior prose compensated. I don’t read many love stories more convincing or unconvincing than others so I just take them for what they are. I would consider rereading just those delightful, half tongue-in-cheek philosophy sections. Thinking I had found a new Favorite Author I went backward from this most recent of Duncan’s, reading The Bloodstone Papers which was okay. I generally wouldn’t want to judge a book based on my ability to “relate” to the characters and setting, but I’ve found that exact issue getting in my way of enjoying Salman Rushdie to the degree I feel I’m supposed to. Duncan is an Anglo-Indian writer as well. When they write about a contemporary Anglo-Indian living in present day Britain I can enjoy it, but when they are in India my mind fogs over with cultural distance. Perhaps it is that thing I have about reading in order to find what I would write? The Bloodstone Papers is a contrast of generations interspersed with the protagonist’s modern woes over his love life and life in general. It was pretty good. It was okay. So then I started the next one: Death of an Ordinary Man and I couldn’t take it within twenty pages, it was horrible, and I stopped reading it and Duncan at that point. Generally it was about a dead man floating above his own funeral and family and reflecting on blah blah blah… What a disappointment. I felt like a chump who got sucked in by the particular subject matter of the first book I read and assumed the author was an overlooked gem. But I’ll be sure to check out his next book and finalize my verdict based on that.

Thoughts on Contemporary Authors

2009-12-24T08:30:00.000-08:00

I’m trying to write the books I want to read but can never find. Part of that search is surveying what’s out there, what’s considered to be the best stuff being written in English. In a way it’s a search for the ultimate book and for how far an author can go towards one. I am naturally disappointed. Not that I think there can be a perfect book out there, but I like to see who’s pushing limits and coming up with what hasn’t been done before or at least approaching the enterprise from a different angle. It seems I can never find authors getting to the nitty-gritty, hitting all the nails on the head to fashion a holistic or esemplastic statement on human experience. It seems there are many authors approaching this elephant from one side, or rather orbiting around it like a black hole but never hitting home. Maybe this is what any artist feels. Maybe it can’t be done.

I’ve found myself logically seeking out those authors critics say are the best living writers as well as those winning prizes like The Booker Prize, The Nobel Prize, and The Pulitzer Prize. Surprisingly they don’t always coincide. I limit myself to writers writing in English, not wanting to judge through the filter of a translation. (I don’t even like reading Nabokov’s pre-English works even if he translated them.)

My thoughts on these authors are based on the books I’ve read of them. I’m still reading more of them right now. They’re not necessarily who are considered the best, but the one’s I’m focused on now out of that larger pool. I’ve also put them in order according to how much I liked each book and would recommend them. That’s the kind of information I’m always looking for but find difficult to get. If I’m interested in an author and somebody tells me what they think is their best then I’ll definitely read that book and later consider if I agree. It’s nice to approach something or somebody new with some kind of orientation even if you end up thinking the opposite.

In truth these notes are really my 21^st century index cards I’ve written to myself to summarize and organize my thoughts on these authors and their books. I post them in a why-the-heck-not spirit since I know to post things on my blog is to open a window in a metropolis and yell.

The authors in my current repertoire and up for evaluation are, in alphabetical order:

Nicholson Baker

J.M. Coetzee

Glen Duncan

Cormac McCarthy

Ian McEwan

Word Counts

2009-08-10T05:49:00.001-07:00

Amazing what a pain it is to find out the word counts of books. It's useful for a writer to get some sort of perspective on what's what. For the last year I've been counting the word counts of books I've read so I figured I'd post them in case somebody else looking for some of that perspective might stumble upon them. My technique is one I learned in high school typing class (actually it was called Keyboarding Skills and it was hovering on extinction which gives you a good idea of my age): count each letter and blank space, each group of five is a word. I take one line's average then count the lines per page, then how many pages in the book. Through several corroborations with other published word counts and by using the Word document's Word Count feature of public domain texts I've found this technique to be pretty accurate. For example, I counted the first chapter of The Good Soldier and came up with 2800. Putting that in a document and using its feature it came up with 2808. Listed are just the titles. (It also gives a good idea of what I like to read.)

76,371 The Good Soldier
78,540 Book of Evidence
110,058 Shroud
133,200 Lolita
148,824 White Noise
187,220 Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance

206,640 The Information
149,760 All the Pretty Horses

201,240 The Crossing
134,784 Cities of the Plain
441, 264 Underworld
54, 040 Amsterdam
183,750 American Pastoral
32,760 The Body Artist
204,750 Samaritan

207,025 Lush Life
87,000 A Day and a Night and a Day

172,125 The Bloodstone Papers
59,760 Diary of a Bad Year

Top 20 Books List

2009-05-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

Oh I feel so.... typical. Haven't touched my blog in almost a year. Oh well, I have other things to do. But I saw this list by Dick Meyer and I liked his spirit and it got me wanting to get something done with mine. So forget (for now at least) the lengthy biographical and philosophical expositions that keep me from getting it done. Here's my list cold and as previously explained, they are the books that made an impact at the time, not necessarily what I'd list as best. I even have some real reservations about many of them.

1. Shot in the Heart Mikal Gilmore
2. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels Cormac McCarthy
3. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs John Lydon
4. Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
5. Industrial Society And Its Future Theodore Kaczynski
6. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
7. Lady Chatterley’s Lover D.H. Lawrence
8. The Untouchable John Banville
9. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
10. The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon Daniel Farson
11. The Information Martin Amis
12. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
13. The Waste Land T S Eliot
14. Sculpting in Time Andrey Tarkovsky
15. Narcissus and Goldmund Hermann Hesse
16. The Duty of Genius Ray Monk
17. Beckett and Zen Paul Foster
18. The Human Situation and Zen Buddhism Richard DeMartino
19. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. The Stranger Albert Camus

Life Without Principle

2008-02-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

"This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or seared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business."
From Thoreau’s Life Without Principle