Over the holidays I finally began reading Thomas Merton's classic, The Seven Storey Mountain (in a lovely 50th anniversary edition that my gracious neighbors gave me several years ago). Reading it was just what I had hoped: a veritable retreat between two covers, the itinerary of a soul in the best Augustinian tradition. (Indeed, while Merton talks more about Thomas and his neo-scholastic heirs, Gilson and Maritain, it seems to me he absorbed an Augustinian sensibility--the parallels to the Confessions are striking.)
Tower back in March 2005, in a hilarious article for Harper's, "Bird-dogging the Bush Vote." That put him on my radar as a journalist. But then I started seeing his stories and was equally impressed. In fact, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is one of the very few books I have ever pre-ordered, waitng for it to appear. I was not disappointed (indeed, I'm puzzled that this book hasn't gotten more attention in the glut of literary look-backs at year end). While the settings range from the contemporary Florida Keys to Viking-ravaged northern England (I'm not kidding), Tower's literary eye is trained on relationships of all sorts and stripes, particularly the awkward strains of family. And I found him refreshingly devoid of the "cleverness" that besets the McSweeney's crowd. Masterful, realistic dialogue; a literary style that's not indulgent; and a sense of humor that's not to be missed.
n sitting on my shelf for a couple of years, unread. When the shock of Updike's death hit me (why did it affect me so?), I pulled this down from the shelf that night and devoured it. As with much of Baker's work, akin to Julian Barnes, classing it as "fiction" is not straightforwardly simple. (Indeed, while reading this I kept thinking of Barnes' chronicle of a literary obsession in Flaubert's Parrot.) But I find reading Baker sheer (guilty) pleasure.
Christmas. And I shouldn't have been reading it. While the rest of the family was Christmas shopping, I wandered into the $1 section of our local "Bargain Books" and found this volume. Still waiting for the family on the bench in the mall, I dove in and was immediately hooked. Davies, one of the great Canadian men of letters, is someone I should have read years ago, but never did. Fifth Business, the first volume of his Deptford Trilogy, is a wonderful way into Davies' strange blend of realism and mythology (a mythologized reality? realized mythology?). But I should confess that my relationship to the book is a bit strange since it narrates the life of a guilt-ridden boy born to Scots-Canadian Presbyterians in a small village in southwestern Ontario, so I'm a bit prone to over-identification. But Davies is a hard-nosed psychologist and a disciplined stylist. I'm looking forward to finishing the trilogy.
must-read list. But a Nicholson Baker book whose protagonist is a poet? And who's regularly pontificating about theory? Sign me up! It's hard for me to communicate the pleasure I feel when reading Baker (this all began with The Mezzanine). It's as if reading "literary" fiction shouldn't be this fun, this delightful. Part of this probably stems from a kind of obnoxious insiderness, the winks and nods of allusions and references that are the inside jokes of literary culture. But I think it's more because Baker's writing is an exercise in attention--a sort of hallowing of the mundane (which, for Baker, always includes the fruits of our pop culture). Such attention is also at the heart of good poetry, which is why The Anthologist is just brilliant.What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again? Wouldn't that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnberability--and I get to hold them? That's simply insane. Inconceivable. (p. 178)
One time when Roz was still with me I came home late from a reading in Madison, Wisconsin, and she was already asleep, and so was the dog. I kicked Smacko in the head by mistake in the dark, not too hard, but he made a little growly yelp, and I said I was sorry to him, and that woke Roz. I got in bed, and she smelled so smilingly sleepy that soon I had my hand on her hip and I said, "Baby, that is one big sexy hip."
She stirred and said, "Yikes, what's going on here?"
I said, "I don't know, what's going on with you?"
She turned and unbuttoned her pajama top over me, and I could see one of her breasts outlined in the orange light coming from the street. Her breasts didn't have to rhyme, but in fact they did rhyme (pp. 203-204).
Choice of the Elect, which might be the most significant novel I've ever read.) Wolfe's gargantuan (662 pages!) Bildungsroman is still seeping into and out of the joints of my imagination. I spent the summer with it, including a week in Asheville, NC (the setting of the book, where I visited Wolfe's boyhood home in pilgrimage). Without any direct influence, I think it is a profoundly Augustinian meditation on selfhood and identity in terms of "exile" and "home." At times Wolfe's modernism is Joycean in its stream-of-consciousness peeks into the rattled mind of E.O. Gant. But it is the characters of this family that endure most (something like the characters of The Sound and the Fury). This book will be "with" me for a long time and I hope someday I'll be able to approach it more reflectively and critically.
season spent with Jewish writers (including Bellow's Ravelstein and stories from The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel). While these are often meditations on exile and outsiderness, I find myself feeling most "outside" the literary world when I read Jewish-American writers--a sensation which has its own strange pleasures and temptations.
Julia Child, My Life in France
Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, with an Introduction by Michael Pollan
David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem
Rise of Creating Writing. Playing on, and somewhat extending, Kenner's The Pound Era, McGurl considers the formative role of ever-expanding MFA programs on American post-war fiction up to the present. Having been sometimes tempted to enroll, this book birthed in me a principled resistance. (See also Louis Menand's review and discussion in the New Yorker.)
Mark Wynn's Faith & Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford, 2009) is one of the most interesting books in philosophy of religion I've read this year. As he notes in the opening, philosophical theologians tend to be concerned with place only to transcend it, focusing on God's omni-presence which relativizes differences in place. And yet religious practice is always placed, local, often in very intentional spaces--what he calls "the place-relative character of religious belief and practice." So Wynn sets for himself the task of articulating "the differentiated religous significance of place."
Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009) chronicles the sort of post-apocalyptic world familiar to readers of Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road--worlds devastated by those supposedly civilizing animals we call humans.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.This heads John Lanchester's contribution, which includes an honest assessment about the culture (cult?) of "public readings":
The truth is that the whole contemporary edifice of readings and tours and interviews and festivals is based on a mistake. The mistake is that we should want to meet the writers we admire, because there is something more to them in person than there is on the page, so that meeting them in the flesh somehow adds to the experience of reading their work. The idea is that the person is the real thing, whereas writing is somehow an excresence or epiphenomenon ["the metaphysics of presence!]. But that's not true. The work is the real thing, and it is that to which readers should direct their attention.While I'm as much of an egomaniacal sucker for such opportunites as the next author, I concede a latent truth in the combination of Cocteau's maxim and Lanchester's observation. It is, I find, very hard to speak about books one has published. (Lanchester goes on to say that the writer finds it easier to speak about the book that one is in the process of writing.) The irony, of course, is that when a book appears, and if one is fortunate enough to have readers, and perhaps even a few enthusiastic readers who might invite you to an event, they want you to talk about the book. But, of course, what you wanted to say about X or Y is in the book. And you're already on to the next project, in the muck and mire of a new book-in-the-making which is filling your head and stealing your sleep, and it's difficult to go back and get excited about the book you put to bed a couple of years ago, but which is just now "appearing" for others. The trick, I think, is to find ways to put yourself in the shoes of the reader. And there's no shame in that.
Writers are no more prone to public shame than others. However, unlike others, they're likely to mine the experience for material. (And given their mistaken self-importance, they're also likely to over-amplify the significance of their mortification.) When such shamed writers have a flair for wit, the result can be quite entertaining.There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which, reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness.
While we were in Asheville, NC last month, we visited what has to be one of the coolest bookstores on the planet (in one of the coolest cities in the country): Malaprop's. A feast. Spent way more than we should have (but since my wife bought as many books as I did, the guilt-factor was diminished).
When I was living in York, James Kelman's experimental novel, Kieron Smith, Boy was getting a lot of attention (and it remains on my "to read" list). So I found this dust-up between Kelman and some of his Scottish confreres (Ian Rankin, J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith) of interest. Here's Alan Bissett's report from The Guardian:There is an unspoken rule among Scottish writers that we don't slag each other off in public. The rule runs thus: coming, as we do, from a small, colonised nation, we automatically find ourselves marginalised by literary London and must fight doubly hard to gain the recognition abroad that is granted to English writers. While we may express private reservations about the work of another writer, we don't scupper their chances by saying this publicly. After all, each of us takes enough of that from critics.
That changed over the weekend. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scotland's only Man Booker prize winner, James Kelman, lambasted his country's literary establishment for praising the "mediocrity" of "writers of detective fiction or books about some upper middle-class young magician or some crap". Attention paid to the twin commercial giants of (presumably) Ian Rankin and JK Rowling had served, Kelman argued, to obscure Scotland's more radical tradition.
This has split the nation's literature in two. In a debate in the Sunday Herald headed 'Is Pulp Fiction Taking Over Scotland's Bookshelves?' daggers were drawn over the crime-ification of Scottish letters. The novelist Rodge Glass said that Kelman had been "very brave" in his remarks, while playwright John Byrne, spoke of "the danger of Scotland becoming known as the home of genre fiction, a factory churning out these things". And the response was ferocious. Professor Michael Schmidt of the University of Glasgow, defended the common reader against Kelman's "Stalinist" and "parochial" approach. Crime writer, Denise Mina, derided "this awful schtick about pushing the boundaries of literary technique", comparing it to "asking people to appreciate the welding on their plumbing".
As a manifestation of the old 'genre v real literature' chestnut, the debate should be just as interesting to those outside of Scotland. Kelman, committed to experimental form and language, sees genre fiction as redundant, compromised by commerciality. Mina, while still calling Kelman a "beautiful writer", regards his stance as a mere "play for status"; a failure of the writer's duty to entertain.
There is another to level to this, however, about the ways in which any country's indigenous literature – especially those of smaller or post-colonial nations – is threatened by the commercial imperative to produce page-turning, airport-friendly thrillers. A third level concerns the collusion of the literary establishment in this. It's certainly the case that the books editors of broadsheet newspapers will bemoan the fact that we're not all reading Tolstoy, while providing acres of coverage to crime writers. Genre fiction doesn't need highbrow attention in order to sell by the bucketload, yet editors must cover it precisely because it is so visible. This crowds out more risk-taking writers, for whom a single review from a perceptive critic can provide a career breakthrough.
It is galling, then, that a country like Scotland, home to an enormous, bristling, experimental tradition which includes James Hogg, Alexander Trocchi, Hugh McDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, James Robertson and Kelman himself, is marketed to tourists as the home of Rebus and Potter.
One doesn't wants to decry authors who are certainly outstanding in their field (constructing a page-turner requires narrative skill); neither does one want to sneer at the tastes of book-buyers, for whom reading at all in this age of distraction is an increasingly fought-for pleasure. And it's not as though writers such as Mina, Val McDermid or Christopher Brookmyre aren't working a left-wing agenda into their books; they are. But genre fiction is, by definition, generic. Mina's disdain, in her comments, for pushing boundaries of form is palpable. The genre writer's first responsibility is to the genre itself: they must fulfil readers' expectations for convention, or they have failed. It's easy to see how this becomes part of a capitalist enterprise, which requires market 'product' and fears innovation as a 'risky sell'. At a time when capitalism is scouring livelihoods, however, we must empower writers such as Kelman to speak out against it, and put forth new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves. This is far from being just a Scottish issue.
On quite a different front, I've been absorbed by Carl Plantinga's new book, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator's Experience (University of California Press, 2009). (Carl is a colleague of mine at Calvin, sort of the resident philosopher in our Film Studies department.) Plantinga has long been analyzing the role of affect and emotion in film (his earlier work considered non-fiction film or documentaries; in this book he's considering "Hollywood" cinema). Here we find him contesting reductionistic paradigms in film theory that want to reduce a film to its “message.” Some film critics and scholars talk of “reading” a film, implying that “film viewing is a cool, intellectual experience.” Thus the critic decodes the film by boiling it down to the hidden meanings which can be simply articulated in propositional form. But such a paradigm of criticism assumes that films are basically just elaborate vehicles for information that is ultimately propositional and intellectual. "This way of thinking about film," he comments, "diminishes the art form by reducing it to a bare bones propositional message.” And as a result, all that is “moving” about movies is relegated to the non-essential and superfluous.
Over at Fors Clavigera I've shared a bit about the secret joy of receiving the proofs of a book. Today, reading an interview with Farrar, Strauss & Giroux publisher, Jonathan Galassi, I was encouraged to learn that even for someone for whom books are their business, the same thrill holds. As Galassi shares:"The second great moment is when it actually becomes a book—a physical thing. I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it's even more satisfying when it becomes an actual book."
"When I was seven, I said to my mother, may I close my door? And she said, yes, but why do you want to close your door? And I said because I want to think. And when I was eleven, I said to my mother, may I lock my door? And she said yes, but why do you want to lock your door? And I said because I want to write."
My Childhood
By Coleson Smith
My childhood was white.
White like the moving trucks that took our lives from new beginning to new beginning.
White like the paint in my apartment room in Philadelphia.
White like the sand on the beach in Los Angeles.
White like the first snow of Grand Rapids.
White like the airplane that flew me to England.
White like the salt flats in rough red Utah.
White like aunt Jesse's wedding dress.
White like the snow at the cemetery.
White like the hair of my aging family.
My childhood was white,
white like all of the things that made me who I am today.
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