Bringing It To the Table

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).

The one book I devoured right away was a new Wendell Berry anthology, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, with an Introduction by Michael Pollan (of The Omnivore's Dilemma). It's a wonderful collection of Berry's writings on food production, farming, and husbandry, including some fiction selections that picture mealtimes and practices of eating. The selections span his entire writing career (and the early selections show how prescient he was/is). An excellent introduction to, and compendium of, Berry's thought.

Scotland, Genre Fiction, and Literature

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.

Philosophy, Film, and Biblical Studies: Two New Treasures

In addition to being generally remiss in cataloguing my reading here, I've not commented on any books in philosophy or theology for a long time. That's largely because I spend most of my evenings reading poetry and literature now. I don't often find myself picking up theology or philosophy for enjoyment. However, in the course of working on a project this summer, I had occasion to read two new books from very different fields that are both provocative in different ways--but which also share some surprising resonances.

Ian W. Scott's Paul's Way of Knowing: Story, Experience, and the Spirit (Baker Academic, 2009) is a book in a bit of a growing field, exploring the epistemology of Scripture and biblical authors (cp. The Bible and Epistemology recently released from Paternoster). As the title indicates, Scott analyzes of “Paul’s way of knowing” inviting us to look to Paul as a contemporary resource for thinking about knowledge precisely because “[i]n Paul we have the opportunity to see how someone approached religious knowledge who was at one and the same time foundational in the development of Western culture and yet relatively untouched by epistemological currents which so many now suspect are bankrupt.” Scott unearths a “narrative structure to the Apostle’s knowledge,” a distinct narratival “logic” that is operative beneath his speech. In doing so, Scott brings “to the surface [Paul’s] tacit assumptions about how people in general can come to knowledge,” discerning “assumptions which the Apostle himself may never have brought to full consciousness.” In this articulation of Paul's implicit epistemology, Scott discerns a fundamentally narratival structure to Paul's understanding of what counts as "knowledge." And what's fascinating is that this is so counter-intuitive: Paul, of course, is the author of epistles, not Gospels. Yet Scott makes a convincing case that Paul thinks in story. I hope some Christian philosophers working in epistemology will venture into a dialogue with this strain of biblical studies.

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.

But as Plantinga rightly asks, “Are all of these affective elements of film spectatorship mere epiphenomena, the throwaway detritus of what is worthwhile about the film viewing experience?” The burden of his book is to suggest otherwise: that the affective, emotional aspects of film—precisely those aspects of movies that move us—are essential and irreducible. As he comments, “Any abstract meaning that a film might have is ancillary to the experience in which that meaning is embodied.” What a film means cannot be reduced to the proposal “message” that might be gleaned from it. This is because “[e]xperience creates its own meaning, and in some cases the meaning to be taken from the experience of the film may contradict the abstract meaning an interpreter might glean from film dialogue, for example. Affective experience and meaning are neither parallel nor separable, but firmly intertwined.”

The book is rich with concrete analyses from both the "classical" era of Hollywood film-making as well as the "New Hollywood" (the running commentary on The Royal Tenenbaums was one of my favorites). Anyone interested in film will find this is a fascinating read. Indeed, one could read it as a kind of cinematic analogue to James Wood's How Fiction Works. Plantinga shows us that movies work by moving us, not just telling us; they tap our affective centers and emotional life, not just feed information into our intellects. And the narrative force of cinema is tethered to film's visceral ability to connect with our emotions; we feel stories.

More Proof

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."

As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced by that last claim (post-publication depression seems comon, like post-dissertation depression), but I share the sentiments about page proofs.

Shouts & Murmurs: Book Club: newyorker.com

Shouts & Murmurs: Book Club: newyorker.com

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What I'm Listening To: Ryan Adams

I've got a 20 gig iPod that's full and yet everything was sounding flat to me. Neither Josh Ritter nor Patty Griffin nor John Coltrane seemed to bring my music to life. And then I found that, at some point (when?), one of the kids bought Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker. It was like finding buried treasure right here in the house! I'd only listened to Adams' more recent stuff (and, of course, can't forget that music video filmed on September 7, 2001, with the Twin Towers in the background). Like Josh Ritter, Adams lyrics also stand up as poetry. And the alt-country sound taps strings deep in my rural soul. Great stuff to (re)discover.

Dorothy West on Writing

"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."

~in Jill Krementz, The Writer's Desk (a tantalizing, moving collection of photographs of writers at their desks, with a delightful introduction by Updike), p. 39

"My Childhood," by Coleson Smith

Way back in 2005, when he was just 10 years old, I posted a short "onomatopoeia" poem by my son, Coleson. Now, four years later, I'm happy to post another by this emerging poet. In fact, we're very proud that his poem, "My Childhood," just won the Fine Arts Competition in 9th & 10th grade at Grand Rapids Christian High.

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.

Ending Poetry Month with Updike

Today marks the end of National Poetry Month. Treat yourself by taking the time to listen to John Updike read one of his early poems, "Seagulls" (scroll down the page a bit for the audio button).

Seagulls

A gull, up close,
looks surprisingly stuffed.
His fluffy chest seems filled
with an inexpensive taxidermist’s material
rather lumpily inserted. The legs,
unbent, are childish crayon strokes—
too simple to be workable.
And even the feather-markings,
whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,
are in the gull slovenly,
as if God makes too many
to make them very well.

Are they intelligent?
We imagine so, because they are ugly.
The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,
the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,
the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump
all suggest deskwork: shipping rates
by day, Schopenhauer
by night, and endless coffee.

At that hour on the beach
when flies begin biting in the renewed coolness
and the backsliding skin of the after-surf
reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,
the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand
like those melancholy European crowds
that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake
of assassinations and invasions,
heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.
It is also this hour when plump young couples
walk down to the water, bumping together,
and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.
Then they walk back toward the car,
tugging as if at a secret between them,
but which neither quite knows—
walk capricious paths through scattering gulls,
as in some mythologies
beautiful gods stroll unconcerned
among our mortal apprehensions.

Michigan Poetry from Bill Hicok

The poetry night at Literary Life was a wonderful evening, not least because of Heather Sellers--writer, poet, and professor at Hope College--who served as judge for the poetry competition and also offered a reading of her own work. Sellers is not only a witty, observant writer, she's also an outstanding reader (those two things don't always happily reside in the same person). I thought this was demonstrated most powerfully by how well she could read the work of others. In particular, I'm deeply grateful that she introduced us to this wonderful poem by Bill Hicok (from the New Yorker)--and did so with a reading whose cadence and charm made the poem come to life.

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

Rushdie's Storied Tract: The Enchantress of Florence

I was a Rushdie virgin before recently reading The Enchantress of Florence (though Midnight's Chldren remains very high on my to-read list). But the combination of Italy and India--a commerce between East and West--was too much to resist.

You'll have to forgive the cliched pun, but the book really is quite spell-binding. Central to the tale is the power of story, and the book is layered with stories upon stories, as well as some delightful miniatures packed into the story (such as the marvelous tale about the royal painter, Dashwanth). It is also concerned with competing stories and competing story-tellers who constitute the world by their stories (and thus constitute different worlds by different stories). Story-telling is world-making. Rushdie's exploration is concerned with both the power of mythologies but also the power of the artist--the story-telling power of the prophet as well as the world-making power of the novelist.

But he's also exploring the dangers of stories, their enchanting spell, their seductive ability to lure us into illusions. In fact, the book performs this very quickly: one feels swept into a dizzying array of narratives with charms that steal the ground from beneath us--and yet this narratival vertigo is so enchanting, we delight in our disorientation. And yet, this only works to the extent that Rushdie is an enchanter.

I wouldn't have expected that such a ruthless secularist could create such an enchanted, magical world. The prose is blazing without being precious, and as Christopher Hitchens has recently pointed out, Rushdie is a brilliant humorist.

My only gripe is that the book at times devolves to a propaganda-like tract--a move that is death for art. (In this respect it reminded me of a similar tract posing as a novel, Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy). Here we have a descendent of Ghengis Khan with the emerging irenic, democratic sensibilities of, well, Salman Rushdie. We have women from sixteenth-century Hindustan who imagine the world like Susan Sontag. In short, at times the novel is so concerned to be an apologia for a de-religionized, "secular" and liberal world that its anachronism becomes just a bit too much to swallow. Nonetheless, the power of Rushdie's story-telling opens up worlds that repay revisiting.

For Poetry Lovers in Grand Rapids

Literary Life, my favorite bookstore in Grand Rapids, is hosting a special event this Thursday, April 9, 7pm as part of National Poetry Month. It will include a reading by Heather Sellers, poet and professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, MI. Sellers also served as judge for the 1st Annual Literary Life Poetry Contest and the winners of the contest will be announced that night as well. (I had the audacity to submit two poems but have absolutely no illusions about winning a thing.) I am looking forward to hearing Sellers and, I hope, hearing the winning poems as well.

Then on Thursday, April 16, 7pm, Literary Life's Third Thursday event will once again feature Grand Rapids Poet Laureate, Rodney Torreson. Torreson gave a reading last month and was delightful. He is wonderfully unassuming, almost timid, but his poetry sparkles. It is quintessentially "midwest" poetry--accessible, earthy, homespun, sacralizing the mundane. He finished that reading with "Don Larsen's Perfect World Series Game," from his collection, The Ripening of Pinstripes--a fantastic cresendo packed full of allusions. He is also a wonderful encourager of young poets (and even had one of his students, a freshman in high school, read five of her poems). I'm looking forward to introducing my son, Coleson (a gifted and--I hope--aspiring writer), to Torreson.

If you're in the vicinity, I'll hope to see you there!

Updike: A Month of Sundays

While on a trip last week, I took along an old paperback edition of John Updike's mid-70s novel, A Month of Sundays. Penned in the first-person, the story recounts the misadventures of Rev. Tom Marshfield who writes the memoir as part of his rehabilitation while exiled in Arizona, banished from the ministry because of his adulterous habits. A grumpy Barthian (must be a Princeton grad! ;-) with no patience for the soppy humanism of Tillich and his ilk, Marshfield is nonetheless an unabashed, unashamed, and unrepentant worshiper in the temples of lonely, middle-class suburban women. Indeed, one must be struck by the difference between Marshfield and, say, Graham Greene's adulterers: the latter at least seem to think they ought to be penitent; Marshfield doesn't ever seem bothered by such notions.

The novel is a curious little time capsule, a peek into the swirling mores of the early 70s--though generally as viewed from a WASPish distance. It's also classic Updike: page-turning, unctuous prose laced with a strange eroticism that was probably more titillating than it ought to be. In fact, as I was reading it, I was concious of how the power of the story could so quickly create its own plausibility structures, a world in which Marshfield's behavior doesn't seem reprehensible. Perhaps Updike means to make us guilty by association, but I think more likely he means to create a world where there should be no guilt associated with such behavior. It the protagonist is a professing a Barthian, the ethos of a story is nothing other than "express-yourself" liberalism.

(And it should be noted that this is just the sort of novel that is rife with material to substantiate the claim that Updike is a misogynistic objectifier of women. While I know he always bristled at the charge, and though he'd likely offload the blame onto his first-person narrator, it's very hard to come away from the book and not share a sense of taint.)

Finally, it seems to me that Updike is never willing to not be "Updike." That is, Updike is never willing to relinquish the aestheticism that is his defining voice, even when he's writing in the first person of another. So the book--like any first-person work by Updike--is beset with a problem of voice and authenticity; in short, in Updike's hands, everybody sounds like Updike.

The Man Behind the Paris Review

As Donald Hall puts it, when a young poet is 16, he wants to be the next Dante; when he's 25, he wants to be published in the New Yorker.

Well, when a young novelist is 16, he wants to be the next Proust; when he's 25, he wants to publish a story in the Paris Review. A literary quarterly of mythical status (rivaled only by Granta, I think), the PR has introduced generations to new voices that would go on to become the voices of a generation. So I was delighted to find a sort of 'biography' of George Plimpton, one of the co-founders of the Review, on the "new arrivals" shelf of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

George, Being George, edited by Nelson Aldrich, is either a brilliant experiment in biography or a half-baked substitute. The subtitle gives some indication of the book's approach: "George Plimpton's life as told, admired, deplored, and envied by 200 friends, relatives, lovers, acquaintances, rivals—and a few unappreciative observers." The book is a collection of vignettes from Plimpton's friends, associates, and even a few enemies--which, given his stature and charm as a "networker," pretty much amounts to a who's who in American letter and New York "Society." I have to admit, I had a hard time getting through the first chapter, but only because I have such visceral negative reactions to the lives of privileged East Coast Brahmins. And yet one can't help feeling that if you ran into Plimpton outside these contexts, you'd never guess he was heir to such privilege--that he was equally comfortable among the bohemians in post-war Paris and in the environs of the Vanderbilt mansion. Indeed, even if a few of his "detractors" are heard here, one comes away with the impression that Plimpton was just a helluva nice guy. But most interesting to me were the chapters that charted the emergence of the Paris Review in post-war Paris, after Plimpton had spent some time in Cambridge--on a shoe-string, regularly hanging of the precipice of collapse, torn between a Paris office and a New York center of gravity, but then growing into a stable, flagship quarterly.

At times the book's methodology felt like a punt--that this collection of reminiscences is really just the raw material that should have been the spine or skeleton of a proper biography. And yet the methodology completely sucked me in: you can read this stuff all day, and there is a certain rawness to these reflections which have an immediacy that feels almost oral. So perhaps rather than being a punt, the book hits a home run.

(Perhaps) The Saddest Poem I've Ever Read

Isn't it odd how the loss of an author all of a sudden makes his books come to life on my shelf? Over the past several days I've been dabbling and sampling from the Updike on my shelves, including a small collection of his early verse. But then today Gina Barreca's blog pointed me to an Updike poem I had never seen before, and it might just be the saddest thing I've ever read:

Dog’s Death

By John Updike

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

"Literary Life" in Grand Rapids

I know that I sometimes whine about how thoroughly midwestern Grand Rapids can sometimes be. Yesterday morning I was once again beset by self-pity, feeling exiled in a cultural backwater, when I discovered that neither Waltz with Bashir nor Revolutionary Road were playing in a single cinema in the Grand Rapids area. (You must read, by the way, James Wood's stunning piece of criticism on Yates in the recent New Yorker.) Having lived in Los Angeles for a few years, I got used to movies being "open in select theaters" just meaning, "open in the theater around the corner." Turns out--surprise, surprise--that Grand Rapids was not "selected."

But also as per usual, my wannabe-Manhattanite, cold snobbishness was gradually thawed through the day. While reading and working at Common Ground, I grinned to myself when I noticed a fellow patron reading Saul Bellow's Herzog. This was then capped with a wonderful evening at one of my new favorite spaces in Grand Rapids: the "Literary Life" Bookstore at the corner of Wealthy & Eastern, within walking distance from my house.

Deanna and I finally "discovered" Literary Life before Christmas. While it's been on our radar, I'm embarrassed to say I never made it inside until just last month. What a wonderful literary oasis! I immediately ended up in a back corner of the store that was loaded with books to sustain a writing life, then migrated into a rich poetry section, and only teased myself with the fiction shelves that looked so different from the chain store offerings. All of this clearly demonstrated a staff that knows what matters in the world of literature, poetry, and writing.

And last night was the beginning of a new Literary Life tradition: "Third Thursdays" will feature local artists and writers in a casual venue, enjoying coffee and LitLife's fabulous selection of teas. (The Harney & Sons "Paris" blend found tastebuds I didn't know I had before.) The opening act was the Kilpatricks, a wife/husband duo whose acoustic sound was somewhere between folk and a kind of "blues." (Great covers of Belinda Carlisle and Leonard Cohen/Jeff Buckley's "Broken Hallelujah." I'd love to hear Amber cover Rosie Thomas.) While listening, and afterwards, we could browse the shelves and I was once again impressed: somehow I got locked in the Ws (oh yeah, I was looking for Yates) and found a trove of David Foster Wallace and Evelyn Waugh. Hallelujah, indeed.

In short, Literary Life helps me to imagine how one might sustain a "literary life" right here in Grand Rapids.

Severance: The Problem with "Conceptual" Fiction

I take special delight in happenstance book acquisitions. For instance, this week I found myself on the campus of the University of Central Florida, in their bookshop--"book"-shop being a bit of a stretch, since the store was more like what one finds in so-called "Christian bookstores;" namely, an overwhelming amount of logo-emblazoned merchandise with a few books hidden in the corner. In any event, one doesn't come to the campus of the University of Central Florida expecting much in the way of intellectual stimulation. But passing some time, I did find a bargain bin and hit upon a wonderful little surprise: Robert Olen Butler's 2006 experiment, Severance--an irregular sized offering from Chronicle Books, in a squat edition with blackened and deckled pages (the materiality, I think, being integral to the book's experimentality).

The book could be described as a concept-driven collection of "stories" which feel more like stream-of-consciousness poems, a sort of prose haiku. And the concept that drives them is the product of a morbid mathematics. This is staged by two "epigraphs" which, it turns out, are essential to the performance of the book:

After careful study and due deliberation it is my opinion the head remains conscious for one minute and a half after decapitation. -Dr. Dassy D'Estaing, 1883

In a heightened state of emotion, we speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. -Dr. Emily Reasoner, A Sourcebook of Speech, 1975

Coupling these two "facts" or hypotheses, Olen undertakes his experiment: to narrate the last 240 words worth of consciousness of severed heads across history, from Mud, a man beheaded by a sabertooth tiger, 40,000BC to Tyler Alkins, a civilian truck driver beheaded by insurgents in Iraq, 2004. In between we hear the sentient last-moment ramblings of St. Valentine and Marie Antoinette and Nicole Brown, along with a host of "unknowns" variously decapitated by elevators, executioners, and jealous husbands, sons, and even daughters.

Like alot of movie trailers and Will Ferrell films, the idea is better than the execution. (One might even have reservations about the concept insofar as it feels like publishing the fruits of what could be an outstanding creative writing exercise, but not necessarily a book of stories.) Granted, some of the pieces are exquisite (such as the last thoughts of St. Valentine or Claude Messner, a homeless man decapitated by an Amtrak train in 2000). The stories jolt from very different contexts and take up different voices, and suffused through most is a kind of eroticism (perhaps growing from a Freudian assumption about links between sex and death). And Butler is a master of language: attention to rhythm and lexicon gives these "stories" their poetic feel.

But at the same time, the collection suffers on two counts:

First, from the very first story, I found myself perturbed by the matter of voice. (It's James Wood who taught me to ask these questions of a story.) For instance, right out of the gate there's prehistoric man, thinking his last thoughts in English, and with a pretty decent vocabulary at that. Throughout the collection, while Butler at times tries to get closer to the voice of his lolling heads, it always feels like--all of a sudden, having been severed from their bodies--all heads become poets.

Second, the stories actually shrink from the concept. In almost every case, with only a few exceptions, what we get is not the 90 seconds of consciousness after the guillotine drops, but more like the 87 seconds just before the slice, with a blip after words. And oddly, almost all of these last glimmers of consciousness turn out to offer replays of the life that has preceded them (think of Lester Burnham's final musing after the gunshot in American Beauty). But this feels like both a cliche and a cheat. One wonders whether the head in the bucket, instead of recalling glistening wheatfields in the Kansas sun, doesn't--oddly and tragically enough--worry about whether it left the stove on that morning.

Favorite Poet(s) of 2008

This year was one of discovery for me, finding poets that have long been familiar to others but hidden from my parochial, provincial vision. For instance: while Donald Hall had been on my radar, it wasn't until 2008 that I finally dove into his work. And according to my notes, I first discovered Charles Wright in the summer of 2007, but this year I enjoyed lingering with Negative Blue, with its alternate evocations of Italy and Virginia, Rorty and Dante.

But what's most remarkable for me is that, one year ago, I had never read a poem by Ted Hughes. That's what it means for me to "find" a poet: I don't know how I inhabited the world without him (or her). I simply can't imagine how my imagination looked before I read Anne Sexton; and I can't imagine how I perceived the world before Franz Wright.

And I don't know how I heard the world before reading Ted Hughes. His is the poetry of a Yorkshireman: earthy, wet, gutteral, alliterative, rolling and rocking. I can still remember being in our flat in York and being riveted by "The Hawk in the Rain":

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.

The very syllables are knee-deep in the muck of English winter while the word-hawk feels like it inhabits a vacuum, slipping streamlined as if the world were nothing, though threatened by that looming earth.

Or consider "The Thought-Fox" in which the poem sneaks up on both the poet and reader:

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

I'll also not forget finding a used copy of Hughes' New Selected Poems, 1957-1994 at Blackwell's in Oxford on Maundy Thursday, then reading it during a lonely Indian dinner before Maundy Thursday worship at St. Mary's.

I have much for which to be grateful in 2008; Ted Hughes is no small part of those graces enjoyed.

2008 Retrospective Reading List

Tis the season for literary retrospectives. Around this time of year, my retrospection is always tempered by a certain amount of guilt and a sense of failure (alas, the plight of a Calvinist who loves literature). As I pass by our bookshelves--in the living room, in the front hall, above my desk, behind my desk, in the bathroom--I'm always a bit overwhelmed: even in my own rather humble libraries, there are volumes and volumes of "classics" calling my name: from the Odyssey and Dante's Vita Nuova to yet more McCarthy, Updike and Julian Barnes. There's half a shelf of Wodehouse, a collection of Sir Walter Scott novels, and twentieth-century landmarks like Bellow's Adventures of Augie March and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. From across the pond, I'm still looking at James Joyce and piles of Evelyn Waugh, and the remaining volumes of Proust seem to turn up their nose in condescension when I walk past.

And here we are at the end of another year and my shelves are still weighed down with books I've yet to read. So I thought I'd do a little inventory; ranging across the shelves with my notebook, I recorded the books that I actually did manage to read (entire books, mind you; I'm the master of sampling, but that doesn't count). And it turns out that, though there are all those uncracked spines staring back at me, I did manage to wade into a decent number. (I've not done this before, so I don't have any comparative "sample.") Most importantly, there are books on the list that I've wanted to read for a long time and finally had the opportunity (our time in England was a change of rhythm that made this possible). Closer to the end of the year, after grades are submitted, I hope to comment on five or ten of my favorites from this past year (some I've already blogged about). Until then, in no particular order, here's my 2008 Retrospective Reading List:

• Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites
• Alice Munro, Runaway
• Gary Wills, Venice: The Lion City
• Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1
• Walter Pater, The Renaissance
• Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (A Rebours)
• George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
• Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
• Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
• Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
• Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
• Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
• Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage
  
• Christine Meldrum, Madapple
• Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone
• Donald Hall, Unpacking Boxes
• Arthur Rimbaud, I Promise to be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
• Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses
• Gore Vidal, The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, ed. Jay Parini
• David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames
• James Wood, How Fiction Works
• Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

[When I'm looking for more excuses to avoid grading, I may comb through my periodicals, magazines and collections and come up with a list of short stories read this past year.]

Books, "Book Talk," Grand Rapids...and Wendell Berry

Reading The New Yorker is both pleasure and pain for me. The pleasure comes from the stimulating content, including excellent commentary, criticism, fiction and poetry. The pain comes from the fact that I actually work through "Goings On About Town" each week--the pages and pages of fine print summaries and highlights of all the concerts, plays, exhibits, and films on offer in New York City. Reading about the cultural riches of NYC from afar usually deepens a sense of cultural exile here in the so-called heartland, in podunk Grand Rapids, Michigan.

But on other days, I'm reminded that we have our own little intellectual province here in Grand Rapids. This past Saturday, for instance, I took a stroll to one of our local used book shops, Redux Books. There I bumped into one of the sales executives of one of our local publishing houses, and along with the proprietor, we enjoyed a lovely conversation about publishing, books, and theology. I then made my way down into some of the far recesses of the basement holdings and emerged with a book of poems by Marianne Moore, the third edition of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry, and a first edition of Donald Hall's Remembering Poets. That's a pretty delightful Saturday morning in any city.

Then this past Wednesday night was another wonderful "literary" experience. My friends Matt Bonzo and Michael Stevens, both professors at another local Christian university, have just published a wonderful new book, Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide (Brazos--another one of our local publishers). The book launch was Wednesday night, at one of my favorite spaces in Grand Rapids: the Ryerson Auditorium in the Grand Rapids Public Library downtown. The reception was hosted by the Vanderveen Center for the Book and was an evening of interesting, provocative conversation--on top of the fact that Bonzo and Stevens have also written a great book (which I'm now reading).

When I daydream (and night dream) about being a "writer," New York looms in my imagination like Nashville does for the young country musician, or the way Los Angeles tempts the aspiring actress. And the desire to make the pilgrimmage can make "small town" Grand Rapids feel cramped and provincial. But on other days, like these, I'm grateful for this little corner of the midwest in which are buried our own little cultural treasures.

NYC, of course, would also come with its price (as do Nashville and Los Angeles!). Not a few writers (especially southern writers like Faulkner and Walker Percy) found distance from the Eastern seaboard to be a necessary space for their work. Perhaps instead of pining for Manhattan or, in turn, resenting it, we should be working on fostering a literary and cultural regionalism. The Podunks of middle America can be home to "small, good things," too.