Exhibit 1.6.4

Instead of Posting My Entire Exam Essays

I'm posting the book I'm reading next. Because clearly putting this on Facebook wasn't enough.

I can't tell if I'm getting better at using Paint or worse as a person.

Let's say both.

Exhibit 1.4.8

Textbook

So there's a textbook required for the Composition One class I teach, and while normally I just ignore it if not openly disparage it, there are a few lessons I use from its opening chapters since they're relevant to what the students will do in Comp Two. I don't want my students to be the ones who don't know what ethos is.

(Nobody knows what ethos is.)

Part of this involves a lesson on what the book calls angle of vision which is mostly about how writers control their messages using their perspective, etc. etc. Basic stuff. In the past, the book had a cartoon that made the point that people with different priorities could see the same issue in a variety of ways. This issue was stem cells. Fair enough, that's an issue on which reasonable people can disagree (even if some of them are clearly much, much more reasonable).

So I open this year's textbook expecting to find that same cartoon and instead, there's this:


!!!!

The textbook people, apparently too burned by the controversy over stem cells (in a lesson designed to prepare students to argue effectively no less), decided that this year's issue on which reasonable people could disagree was sweatshops. And somehow they couldn't even come up with a 50/50 split of opinions. 4 out of 6 people in their little scenario are seemingly in favor of sweatshops and only some greasy hippie objects on moral grounds.

Even the explicitly Asian sweatshop worker kid is in favor of sweatshops! Come on, Liang, you couldn't have at least said, "I have mixed feelings on working 14 hour days for pennies."

I really don't know what else to say about it. None of it makes any sense to me. It might be a brilliant but cynical take down of consumer culture and modern capitalism or it might be that someone thinks sweatshops are an issue with sides.

Thank god they didn't ask these people:










Yes, I drew those. Yes, it took more than 10 minutes. No, I will not be drawing again.

Exhibit 1.3.19

The Authentic Animal


Dave Madden's The Authentic Animal is available today, and you should pick it up even if he did refuse to name the chapter about pet taxidermy "Stay" (or did I want "Play Dead"? I can't even remember). In any case, it's one of many delightful ruminations on animals, death, and our relationship with both to be found underneath that beautiful cover. I've been lucky enough to watch this manuscript grow up and the time, effort, and viscera-witnessing that went into it makes it well worth the wait. You want this book. Buy it today and make Dave's book the number one rated Zoology book on Amazon. Together, we can do this.

(The current number one is a book about animals being friends with each other. Come on, America.)

It's not, of course, a Zoology book, not really. The chapters here are smart and often personal explorations of why we choose to preserve dead animals (but not--or at least not typically--dead humans) and how, beyond that, we've turned it into an art. The best thing about the book is how it isn't for the taxidermy enthusiast or even taxidermy-inclined but for the curious, the sort of reader who wants to understand. Dave's book seems to begin there, with a question over who we are and why we do what we do, and over the next 90,000 words moves toward explaining what compels us. It's not a book stupid enough to turn taxidermy into a metaphor for everything, but it is a book smart enough to acknowledge that even the tiniest subcultures, even taxidermists, are simply one more attempt to know and control our world.

And, on a more personal note, Dave's been my writing best friend, Cupboard co-editor, and title decliner for almost as long as he's been working on this book. He's a brilliant writer, and I'm thrilled to see this book get the publication and attention it deserves. I would consider you helping him out by purchasing it, reading it, loving it, and spreading the word a favor.

Do it.

Exhibit 1.3.6

Foul Weather

The Weather Stations by Ryan Call from Caketrain

Despite all the tornadoes and hurricanes and tsunamis of the last few years, Call's book is a shocking reminder that even more terrible things might be coming. Wind that kills, lightning that maims, sky that crumbles--the stories here aren't post-apocalyptic, they're simply apocalyptic. Worse, they're powerfully personal. So often in lesser work a story's heart shrinks as the disaster increases, but here the tragedies are always human ones. The weather here produces not destruction but terror, and it's not on insubstantial difference. You don't feel like the author is a child kicking over an anthill--he's the ant.

I was able to read this entire book on the plane yesterday which I both recommend and warn you against. Recommend because it's a great read that keeps the clouds moving quickly. Warn because this book tells you those clouds are trying to kill you and it's impossible not to believe it. Those. Clouds. Are. Trying. To. Kill. You. I honestly didn't think we were ever going to land and when we did, just a minute after I finished the last story, I was shocked when we all didn't burst into applause out of wonder for our pilot. You know it's a great book when it can re-mystify the commonplace.

And that's what impressed me most as I turned the pages and the plane rocked slightly in the air. I didn't want to land because I didn't want to leave the book's world. At that moment, we could have just floated away.

Exhibit 1.2.10

Wieland




(Yep, another post on books. If you don't care, you'll probably enjoy this hyper-literal video of Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's "Luckenbach, Texas." I know I did.

)


Charles Brockden Brown's novel makes two things clear: 1) the gothic is integral to American literature and 2) we should have seen M. Night Shyamalan coming. O, fine, a third thing: voice throwing is the world's deadliest talent.

Why America couldn't have produced compelling social novels is unclear to me, but her earliest books all seem to be obsessed with darkness and horror and the unsettling nature of life on the new continent. Without definitive social classes, nobody seems to know who to trust and so everyone is a rake or a murderer or some deviant ventriloquist. Wieland came out less than 15 years before Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but they don't feel like they exist in the same world. And, I suppose, they don't.

Austen has her balls and parlors while Brockden Brown's America feels like a free for all. There is still a moral order, just not one that anybody feels comfortable asserting except when it's too late. At first the book even seems progressive. The titular Wieland is obsessed with reason and rationality rather than his father's odd, Puritanical religion. His sister lives alone without comment and serves as the book's narrator. Everyone, basically, feels like a free citizen in a land ruled by liberty rather than class or superstition.

O, then weird things start happening and then it all goes to hell. The brother no longer trusts his wife. The sister, too, is spurned by her suitor for being a hussy. One character believes God is telling him to kill everyone. It's only after these things start happening does the claustrophobia of the early pages seem suffocating. America, in a word, was a little boring.

The Shyamalan twist is that some and possibly all of this turmoil was caused by a passing "biloquist" who helpfully explains how through a series of very reasonable coincidences, he was forced to throw his voice, a power he laments and had sworn not to use (it being too powerful. Something _________ must have realized a long time ago [___________ being where I would put the name of a famous ventriloquist if there were any {O,shit, Jeff Dunham. Well, I'm still not giving him the satisfaction}]). In any case, this wizard stops short of confessing to causing Wieland to murder his family, but it doesn't really matter. The sister flees back to Europe where there's still evil but it's easier to recognize.

So what was wrong with America that this is where our imaginations immediately went? It's tough to say, though there seems to be some reaction not only to the wilderness surrounding the colonies but to the breakdown of social order caused by democracy. This breakdown, which was hardly as severe as it must have seemed, is a little ridiculous to a modern reader--as is the one moment of spontaneous combustion--but the young country seems to have experienced a lot of terror in the space between reason and freewill. O, we might be able to reason our way into explanation (it's usually ventriloquism) but that doesn't mean some of us won't fall back on superstition and violence and how will we know who those people are until they're approaching us with axes?

Exhibit 1.2.6

I Read This



I Should Get This



Well, okay, probably not a gold medal from the 2006 Winter Olympics, but I feel like I deserve something. I know reading the book is its own reward, but mostly I'm talking about having hauled it to and around Washington D.C. It's heavy, in other words. And I don't mean emotionally, I mean it weighs almost as much as my laptop. No, that's not exactly as memorable as winning the luge, but it's not so far off either. I'd settle for a bronze from Lillehammer.

As for the book, what can I say that hasn't been said. It's great. I prefer the small perfection of Jane Austen--whose work the book greatly resembles through the first two sections--but if you have ever wished she occasionally left the sitting room and wrote epic novels about a bunch of Russians, here's your book. After those early sections, it's as much social commentary as it a social novel but only occasionally does it feel didactic (sadly, one of those places is the ending but if you've made it that far, I imagine you've already given yourself over to it). Tolstoy obviously believes something about peasants and Christianity and hypocrisy and honor, but it's shocking how beside the point all of that is to understanding the novel. Mostly, it's hard not to read these portions of the novel without being all too aware of the wave that's coming through history to take all of these people out. Every time Levin started going on about not educating workers, I screamed, "Look out, they're coming to kill your children!" at the book.

(By the way, this completely ruined how smart and sensitive I was supposed to look while performatively reading it at coffee shops).

Around all that philosophy though is a really remarkable portrayal of humanity. There's no overstating it: I can't think of another book that has so accurately portrayed the human soul. All the contradictions and self-betrayals and doubt and relief--it's what allows a book like this to transcend its philosophy and its timeliness and give reason to the epic social novel. Yeah, it's never going to be my favorite kind of novel, but I can certainly understand the appeal of trying to signpost a moment with a monument big enough to be seen through history.

Exhibit 1.2.1

Best Movie Quotes to Pretend Are in The Great Gatsby

* "Here's looking at you, kid." -- Tom Buchanan to Myrtle

* "Forget it, James, it's North Dakota." -- Dad Gatsby

* "Love means never having to say you're sorry." -- Daisy

* "It was beauty killed the beast." -- Owl Eyes

* "We're going to need a bigger boat." -- Dan Cody

* "I'm walking here! I'm walking here!" -- Myrtle

* "You had me at hello." -- Nick

* "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." -- Jordan

* "I'll have what she's having." -- Wolfsheim

Exhibit 1.1.26

House (Boat) Party



I'm a bit in trouble on this book because I read it a couple of weeks back, couldn't think of a take on it at the time, and now feel like I should say something. Um, it won the Booker? That's worth something isn't it?

[Goes and checks to see if David Mitchell has won one, sees that he hasn't, decides it's worth nothing]

So, yep, people living in boats along the Thames, somewhat focused around a young Canadian mother and her two daughters, one a moody pre-teen, one adopted from St. Julian's School for Precocious Tots. In fact, I'm not entirely sure this entire book wasn't written in anticipation of movie version to launch the career of a not-yet-conceived Dakota Fanning. She's smart like an adult but whimsical like a child! Her idiosyncrasies are adorable! Just imagine a six-year old jumping rope in a dress and rain boots making intelligent observations about humanity and you've got a pretty good idea.

Anyway, there's something great about the carefree wandering of the omniscient narration and the characters aren't completely without interest. And I suppose living on a boat in the 60s must have been more scandalous than I'm giving it credit for, but I can't help but compare this book to Drabble's which had a lot more to say about the age, class, and country.

Maybe this is the way to put it: a lot of the novels I've read recently have been short but this is the only one that felt slight.

Exhibit 1.1.25

The Western


A fun book that didn't take me much longer to read than the new movie took to watch, and it's easy to see why so many people love it. I certainly did.

(Quick movie comparison: almost identical with a great deal of the dialogue coming directly from the book, one short and unimportant addition, and, oddly, a few minor plot points changed, which both solves some tiny oddities and creates a few new ones).

Like a lot of the books I've read recently, it's heavily voice driven. That's probably not an accident given that they're all for classes taught by the same person, but True Grit stands out for the oddity of its retrospective narration through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl on a manhunt for her father's killer. That conceit alone could and does take this book a long way, but its the absolute appropriateness of her position that makes it compelling. Mattie is by far the smartest and most honorable character and in the running for the toughest. Her competition is all larger-than-life western characters, and so she is both straightman to the genre conventions around her and the wide-eyed gaze that creates them.

It seems a shame to even talk about the book this way. It's just good. Exciting and funny and unsentimental right up until the stoicism of the genre breaks to show the character Mattie has never learned to hide.

Exhibit 1.1.24

A Perfectly Lovely Book


I don't have much more to say about it though I guess some comment should be made about just how odd Margaret Drabble's book's plotting is. There's a lot here that could be conflict but isn't, just as the primary conceit of the book (a not particularly young but pretty and highly educated woman gets pregnant her first time having sex) could be treated as some kind of "ironical" misfortune but isn't. In fact, early on two characters discuss their pregnancies in terms of Thomas Hardy's Life's Little Ironies and their differing conclusions inform the book only slightly less than the fact that, in both cases, everything worked out perfectly. ...and everything worked out perfectly is a strange concept to build a plot around, but there it is.

Well, okay, "perfectly," is maybe overstating it, but as well as could be expected if not slightly better. In some ways the book reminded me of a sitcom. Joey is not going to unexpectedly die in a mugging on the way home from Central Perk. We know things will work out fine and we watch to see our reassurances played out.

Who knows if Ms. Drabble had the will to do something awful to her characters, but she certainly didn't have the desire. Yet somehow the book works on the strength of its sensitive, smart, and funny narrator. There's real charm in how everything that should be a negative she somehow twists into a positive. Having an illegitimate child in the 1960s? No problem, because now the narrator can love. Being a single mother? She can enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with a friend. Telling the parents? Someone else can do it.

The book is quite aware of its positivity and a great percentage of the words are spent inside the narrator's mind pondering her situation and how, though it might clash with both the staid conventions of an older generation and the freer beliefs of her own, it is nevertheless a good one. The point seems to be that she can have a child on her own terms and still be happy and successful and free. As a political point, it's now an old one (if not a little silly given we're talking about a profoundly privileged character), but a great deal of the book seems intended to present a different side of the more familiar depictions of Swinging London. The narrator is clearly of an age and social standing where she should, like her friends, use the era's hedonism to liberate herself yet instead chooses to do it by redefining domesticity and motherhood and love. I feel, I think, reassured.

Exhibit 1.1.22

Dude's Lyrical like Bernie Taupin



I think we're all sick of language-driven novels published by obscure presses winning Pulitzers. Okay, so that never happens. Bully for the Pulitzer people and for Mr. Harding whose book is as remarkable as Marilynne Robinson says on the cover which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

And what's remarkable about it is the writing. You really can't talk about the book without talking about its lyricism which is, on some level, a detriment. I mean, I love lyrical, and there's certainly something wondrous--though always in a strictly realistic way--to justify it here. Of course, there's also just a lot of characters sitting and thinking and talking which all gets the same sparkly brush. Here, I'll flip to a random page and grab the first sentence:

My goodness, I am made from planets and wood, diamonds and orange peels, now and then, here and there; the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow; peel back my scalp and you will see my cranium covered in the scrimshaw carved by an ancient sailor who never suspected that he was whittling at my skull--no my blood is a Roman plow, my bones are being etched by men with names that mean sea and wrestler and ocean rider and the pictures they are making are pictures of northern stars at different seasons, and the man keeping my blood straight as it splits the soil is named Lucian and he will plant wheat, and I cannot concentrate on this apple, this apple, and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love, and they are upset because while they are carving and plowing they are troubled by visions of trying to pick apples from barrels.

Ha! I swear that was random. Honestly, I was delighted when I saw the page. Anyway, I couldn't have picked a better example of what makes this book awesome and, I hate to say it, admirably overwrought. It's pretty much that all the way through and at times it's beautiful and awesome--describing the electricity of a seizure, the imagination of a child--and at others it's forced with the unworthy task of the book's plot.

This maybe is part of my problem: the past is not, in itself, magical. I'm going to stop before I go off on some rant about nostalgia except to say that no one would write about their office job the way Harding writes about being a traveling salesman. It's maddening to see such language applied not to the truly magical but to simply the past, as if beautiful things only existed between 1840 and 1962. And during those years, everything was equally beautiful--a sugar-glazed ham is identically as sublime as pulling a tooth with a pair of pliers.

It's a minor complaint that one that kept me from really loving the book. I'm not even sure I'd say I liked it though I admired it a great deal (I'm obviously hedging. Am I the only one comfortable for having a category for art that I can like without, you know, liking?). So, in the end, an absolutely beautiful, marvelously written book and certainly one deserving of its accolades. But, at least to me, the book reaches for something more than just beauty and falls short. There's a story about fathers and sons here, one about running away from a legacy, one about the painful gains and losses over a lifetime, but it's all too slippery with rosewater.

Exhibit 1.1.21

Huh


When McEwan's book reaches its sudden conclusion--as spoiler-free as possible: a creepy family achieves maximum creepiness, somewhere V.C. Andrews blushes--it's difficult to see past the shock of it all to any greater point. And that, I suppose, is the point, even if it's not a very good one. Don't get me wrong, it's a plenty interesting and insightful book--language, imagery, etc. all top-notch--but the final act it builds toward is achingly inevitable from the first pages and so it's a matter of simply waiting it out. Of course, there's a shocking act at the beginning too and even the first sentence--something from the narrator about not having killed his own father--seems needlessly incendiary as when that moment comes, there's nothing to suggest the character did kill his father nor that anyone thought he did. It's the literary equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater then, after everyone's maimed on the floor, putting on a pornographic movie just to be a dick.

(Or is it like that? Is anything like that?)

So much shock, so little of interest behind it all. Maybe this book once said something about the depravity of British society (or at least the children) or maybe--likely--I'm missing something, but I set this book down feeling sad that someone so talented had wasted so much time aiming so low. Shock ages poorly, is the problem, and so absolutely it's ghastly that this book involves incest but, you know what, so do about half the episodes of Law and Order: SVU. And yep, the events proceeding it are wonderfully described by a sensitive and complex character in the 1st person, but that blackhole of a moment is so strong that nobody else gets to be anything other than a scandalization-bot. Seemingly no other character has a choice, and those who have very good reasons to be disinterested or disturbed by it find themselves involved because this book is about a creepy family and if they're ever going to be the creepiest family then everyone's got to be on-board. Why they'd want to be isn't important. What is important is that every reader closes the book feeling ashamed because we're all implicated in it by how lovely the writing is. Well, I don't care. This isn't Lolita and dirty is not an emotion.

McEwan is better than this book, thank god. Apparently someone reminded him that--despite what a lot of immature writers seem to think--being shocking doesn't mean being more honest and usually it means the opposite.

Exhibit 1.1.19

Why Not


So, yes, more book posts. I'm sorry. I'm reading a lot, what can I say. It's either that or contemplate why the tornado siren is going off. My theories: either it's a test or God intends to finish what he started in Arkansas.

If it helps, I thought this book was fantastic. It's smart and original and funny and, basically, everything the last book wasn't (well, fine, the last book was smart. Maybe I should have gone with clever). This is the first Mary Robison I've read which I find slightly strange as it's a name that feels really familiar to me, just one of those names you hear a lot if you deal in literary fiction. I might have read a story or two some where but none are coming to mind and so I suppose she's nothing but a name and the vague impression that she's Amy Hempel-y which is a good thing to be.

Why Did I Ever is told in 536 chapters (Well, "sections" anyway. If I have a gripe with the book it's that these mostly numbered but occasionally titled sections are further broken up into chapters, as if without this the reader might be fooled into thinking these were short stories, as if any book needs two levels of numbering). Anyway, some representative ones:

141

That fat man driving around with his little pooch? Now why don't I know him or someone like him? That man, I bet, could make me very happy.

365

Hollis is perched on one of the seats in the breakfast nook as we come in. He's eating a pecan roll and reading the Book of Revelation. "Whoomp!" he says. "Did you ever know about this? 'There will be no more night.'"

There are longer chapters though none more than a page or so and some as short as a single word. Despite the fragmentation, the book does work around a cohesive plot and an established set of characters. The narrator is a middle-aged woman working as a screenwriter for a film studio with two children only slightly more troubled than she is herself. It's never sentimental and, despite the darkness, shockingly funny in little, real ways that always seem impossible to me. These kind of life-on-the-brink stories are done to death but rarely do they feel this fraught which is a credit to the form. These short chapters aren't a gimmick, they're a telling representation of the scattered thoughts of a woman in just enough control to get them in the right order but to see her own narrative.

As a teacher--not a reader--it's strange to read a book like this that seems so clearly suited to imparting one lesson. I mean, there's great dialogue and description and characterization and whatever else we're all supposed to be doing. And it's formally interesting and well-written in its own stark way. Plenty to say about that. Really though, it's a book about voice and though the narrator reaches no great conclusion, it's terribly sad to leave her.

Exhibit 1.1.18

So Long


I've got this theory with exactly no evidence to support it but it goes something like this: everything we thought of as an MFA story was really a William Maxwell story because a William Maxwell story was a New Yorker story. These things--an MFA story, a New Yorker story--have all shifted, of course, but the influence lingers in older journal editors and writing professors who have theories on what's good and bad, what's possible and what isn't.

For 40 years--notably coinciding with the rise of the MFA and therefore the rise of the short story--William Maxwell served as the fiction editor of the New Yorker publishing Cheever and Updike and O'Connor and all the rest. If we can assume his considerable influence in the literary world trickled down--and continues to still--Maxwell's personal tastes were the bar which young writers had to clear. It's not very useful to even attempt to define these things, but since people still bemoan the MFA story, Maxwell seems as likely a culprit as anyone. Unless you like these stories, in which case he's a sort of hero standing up for the well-crafted sentence and the understated emotion.

Whatever. I don't really care either way except that when reading So Long, See You Tomorrow it was hard not to see the type of overly polished and nostalgic navelgazing I used to hate when reading through the middle years of short story anthologies from the last century. And it's not that I still hate this work--nor that I like it any better either--just that I'm past the point where I know what to say when confronted by it. I've never developed a vocabulary for intelligently describing how something can be well-wrought yet lifeless, interesting yet treated blandly. Nor do I know why sometimes I like it and sometimes I don't (though a sense of humor usually helps).

And so I don't really know what to say about Maxwell's book. It's not that it's bad, it isn't, just that its careful portrait of three shifting families during the 1920s somehow fails to feel like anything more than the author's working out some old and remarkably tiny guilt (in fact, Maxwell admits as much in a Paris Review interview here). To the book's credit, it is not without an awareness of how inessential the narrator--the unnecessarily guilty feeling boy on the periphery of a love triangle and murder--is to the actual plot of the book, but it's still like listening in to a particularly well-spoken person's therapy session. What does it mean that this event meant something to the narrator? Why does he still think of it all these years later? What can he now realize with the benefit of experience?

Naturally, because this is that kind of story, these questions don't really get answered and nor do they need to be. They're not interesting questions. The event matters because we're reading a book about it. He thinks about it because it was a love-triangle that ended in murder. Experience teaches him nothing that any one of the other characters couldn't have told us at the time. It's frustrating because a book that should be about the impossibility of love at a time when marriage meant something else and divorce was nigh impossible is instead about elderly malaise which drips through every sentence, every character, every workshop story, until the only thing any one can write about is how sort of maybe sometimes perhaps without knowing why we might kind of feel things.

Okay, not really. We can also write about people with crazy jobs. What if there was a blood factory!

Exhibit 1.1.16

Things

* (mostly of the promotional variety)

* Sorry.

* Look, I took a new picture of Borgstrom's Explanations:


* Doesn't it look nice? Don't you want one? Don't you think my parents' carpet looks properly vacuumed?

* Speaking of Explanations, it made Sherrie Flick's list of the year's best books in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Very proud of Andrew and very grateful to Miss Flick.

* In other Cupboard good news, the fine folks at FlashFiction.Net reviewed Joshua Cohen's volume here and had nice things to say about it and the other pamphlets. Grateful to them as well.

* And, while I'm at it, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Cohen's Witz is on a number of year's best lists itself. Pick it up from Dalkey.

* O, well, now I can't stop. Lots of similar attention for Chris Higgs's The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney which you can and should get from SATOR here.

* Two quick things from me. One, American Short Fiction's blog is doing a really cool Atlas project for all of their web stories. You should check them all out and mine for "In Space, Smiling" is right here. It's such a good idea that I wish I'd thought of it. If only The Cupboard had a blog. Alas.

* Two, We Who Are About to Die asked stamp stories contributors to review their own story. Mine is here. I became pretty worried when I read the other reviews (like Dave's) and felt like I completely missed the point. Still, there it is. Enjoy.

* To make up for all of that, please enjoy this clip from The Critic:

Exhibit 1.1.9

Waiting for the Barbarians


Okay, so I'm going to start posting about books I've read (or at least books I liked). I've said I was going to start doing this at least a half dozen times, but now I feel compelled, both by my desire to have some record of what I'm reading and my desire to stop looking at that creepy picture from the last post.

So, Waiting for the Barbarians. I'll say this: it's the first Coetzee I've read, and I'd read more. Coetzee previously belonged tangentially to a group of writers that, for reasons I've never been quite clear on, I steered clear of. Mostly these are novelists who came to prominence (at least on my timeline) in the 1980s and I--correctly or incorrectly--associate with a sort of smug misanthropy of upperclass white dudes of that era. In fact, if these writers formed a basketball team in 1987, it would look like this:

PG: Martin Amis
SG: Bret Easton Ellis
SF: Jay McInerney
PF: Tom Wolfe
C: John Updike

Coach: Christopher Hitchens

It would be a very terrible basketball team.

I formed this opinion without having read any of their books--or having seen them play basketball--and in the books I've read since, I was sometimes right and I was sometimes wrong. Certainly these writers are better than I probably want them to be and certainly there are strains of whatever lazy mysogony, pompousness, and reactionary fear I suspected to be in their work in books that I actually do like from around that time. But anyway, Coetzee somehow got lumped in with these folks in my mind, and I'm not even sure why. Actually, I probably know exactly why. The first book of his I heard of, Disgrace, which everyone seems to love, reads in summary like a book I would hate. Weary professor seduces student and doesn't understand why this gets him fired? O fuck right off.

Still, I guess that's not what the book is really about (or at least he learns his lesson or something when his daughter is raped which, sigh, whatever). And while I can't speak for that book, I can now understand it's probably not the book I think it is. Waiting for the Barbarians could also be summarized in ways that make it sound like that sort of book, but to do so would be to miss the point which is that it knows it's that sort of book. Or at least that the protagonist is that sort of character, eventually realizes it, and spends most of the book trying to figure out why and to what end. Briefly, the Magistrate runs a town on the frontier of an unnamed Empire slowly building to a war against the nomadic barbarians who have been pushed to the mountains. Once the war, or something like it, starts, the Magistrate falls in with a barbarian girl who has been in his jail, and the rest of the book charts the causes and consequences of his infatuation.

That he doesn't understand his infatuation is really the point in a book that is basically one big fable about colonialism. All the other aspects of it are somewhere in the representation of the Empire, but the Magistrate himself--a learned and liberal character--enacts the most subtle and damaging form of oppression in his treatment of the girl. He's disgusted by torture but doesn't understand that his ritualized and asexual washing of the girl's broken body is perhaps even more dehumanizing than what broke it (as at least that makes sense in the context of a war). So, yes, it's objectifying but intentionally so as he spends the latter pages of the book trying to understand what happened between the two of them while his body, like the Empire itself, begins to crumble.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the book is how enthusiastically it's written. Honestly, I expected to find out it was his first novel, but I guess it's his 3rd. At times it's almost boyish in its obvious pleasure in describing the harsh landscape or in the Magistrate's long self-reflective passages. Those were my favorite moments, but the book works on the whole, too. Maybe it's allegory (we're all the Empire!) is a little simplistic, but the exploration of colonial guilt is powerful and complex. On my basketball team of writers I liked more than I thought I would, Coetzee can play small forward.

Exhibit 27.26

Things That Entertained Me While My Internet Was Down


Apparently my Netflix queue is making its way through last year's big movies. Please forgive me when I try to engage you in a conversation about Inception in March 2013.

The White Ribbon
Maybe not quite as good as its reputation--or as good as Caché--but still really fantastic. It is not, despite what the trailers suggest, Children of the Corn: Wilhelmine Edition. Well, not exactly anyway. A strangely constructed movie and, like Caché, one purposefully demanding a conversation about what exactly happened.

Brief aside: Is it okay in film to have a narrator then show scenes that narrator could not have possibly witnessed nor known about? I don't care, really, I'm just curious since this is the sort of thing that gets railed about in fiction workshops. I guess the opening where the narrator admits he's not sure he remembers everything correctly is supposed to address this occasional omniscience, but it's still a little weird when other things--like, you know, answers--are only speculated about.



The Secret in Their Eyes
Sort of an Argentine Memories of a Murder. Definitely more conventional than The White Ribbon, but at its best it's smart and stylish and not nearly as crappy as the trailer suggests. At its worst, it's sort of a really good episode of Law and Order and exactly what its trailer suggests.

Took me awhile but I finally remembered where I'd see the lead actor. He's in Nine Queens, which is a nice Mamet-y con drama from a few years back. Wikipedia tells me he's one of the biggest stars in Latin America. Makes sense. He's sort of Tom Hanks-y.



Flight to Canada
I think I said this on Twitter, but I'm pretty sure I like this better than Mumbo Jumbo, and I love Mumbo Jumbo. Since today I can apparently only compare, I might as well say it reminded me quite a bit of Robert Coover's The Public Burning in its conflation/exaggeration/reinvention of American history. It was written about the same time, too. Something in the air after Watergate? In any case, you should read it.

Exhibit 25.12

Netherland


I wrote about this Zadie Smith essay some time back wherein I acknowledged an ambivalence in seeking out well-wrought, realist fiction when my interests as a writer lie elsewhere. I've never known what to add to that conversation when so many books--over such a long period of time--can reasonably be said to have approached becoming the apotheosis. Smith had similar issues, writing, "to read [Netherland] is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem."

My thinking has changed somewhat since I first read Smith's essay, not about writing what Smith calls "lyric Realism," but about reading it. For a variety of reasons, I've encountered more of it in the last year, and while a lot of it still reads like skilled writers practicing a style they've learned by rote--that is to say lifeless and terrible with an abundance of characters named Pa and an underlying, unacknowledged conservatism that would scandalized its authors--occasionally something like Netherland comes along which manages to extract a lot of power out of the contradiction of using old ways to understand and describe a modern world. As a reader, I think it's a great book. As a writer, I think it's a great book, too, a reminder that whatever construction of fiction I might prefer cannot ignore books like this if it wants to claim openness as a value.

Smith, though obviously fond of the book, reads a little emptiness in Netherland's performance and while I agreed with her intuitively before reading it, afterward I'm not so sure. Or at least I'm not so sure her charge is best directed at this book. Can grand literary language and metaphor serve to turn our world, our persons into the ridiculously sublime at the expense of real tension, real danger, real real? Of course, and it's this as much as anything that's always pushed my tastes away from so much realism of this school. Everything is always so damned beautiful without being beautiful or damned, and the only thing real about any of it is that nothing impossible happens. For me, this wasn't a book that fell into the trap of the unnecessarily exalted if only because it showed an awareness that such a trap exists (and that it really is a trap). Netherland is a book about how we can control how we see ourselves and the world and how we might, even if only in moments, even if there are consequences, choose to see grandly. That felt real to me.

Exhibit 24.17

Reading List Review

Writers on Literature
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum - Ms. Hempel Chronicles
Jean Thompson - Who Do You Love
Edward Jones - Lost in the City
Christopher McIlroy - All My Relations
Elizabeth Strout - Olive Kitteridge
Alice Munro - Selected Stories

In case it's not clear, this is a class on American short fiction. Well, there's Munro, but I think American means North American. Or maybe it doesn't and Canada can deal with it. I don't care as long as I can link to my favorite Wikipedia entry for something that isn't a real thing.

I have to admit, I'm a bit torn. On the one hand, these are all great books written by obviously talented writers. Our instructor's genuine affection and belief in these books makes them impossible to ignore. On the other, they're books I'd likely never read on my own (and nothing about reading them changed my mind). That situation is, I suppose, the great thing about taking such a class, but it's also left me feeling confused about American short fiction and what it should do. Despite all the talent on display here, there's little that grabs me about these texts, at least as books (all had at least one story I could stick up for more strongly).

Take Olive Kitteridge, likely the best of the books (aside from Munro) and more than deserving of its Pulitzer. It's really quite phenomenal from story to story and is possibly the first "novel in stories" I've read that wears that label as more than marketing. It's the ideal book for a graduate school fiction class, rich in description and character, full of the supposedly genuine. It's also mostly uninspiring, at least to this writer. Each story seems to me a perfect example of what one is told to write in graduate school, the sort of stories I ignorantly associate with Iowa or whatever else I want to insult at the moment. It's heartfelt and reflective and graceful and boring. It's exactly the book I'm going to give my grandmother for Christmas (which is a compliment).

None of this is to say I didn't enjoy it or learn from it--or any of the work here--just that I don't feel it's a conversation I'm presently capable of adding to. I can't out character Thompson, or out setting Jones, etc. Each of these books does the things we are told are important and they do those things remarkably well. Those just aren't the things that brought me to fiction. Though now that I think of it, I doubt very much it was short fiction that brought me to fiction either.

And so it's good to read this stuff rather than only chasing the new. Munro is obviously a different case. I hadn't read much of her that wasn't in recent magazines. Certainly not my writing hero, I wouldn't argue with anyone who claimed her as such. "Our Chekov" as the blurb says sounds about right. I'm just more of a Dostoyevsky guy.

Overall verdict: Eyes Opened/Shut

Exhibit 24.2

Books You Need

Like a Sea by Samuel Amadon




The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney by Christopher Higgs



I'm fortunate enough to know both of these guys, and while I don't have the books yet, they're both writers I trust. I've ordered them. Your turn.