Literature

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March 10, 2012

Reading Habits

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image via guardian.co.uk

According to the Genreality folks this week is theme week: reading habits.

I know I am not alone, but the plague does seem limited to those who practice wordcraft (yes, you academics can dance in this ball as well). Netflix did not invent the queue, but that is the closest most people come to experiencing our problem. My queue runneth over.

At the end of the day my browser has so many open tabs that the computer groans. My library is filled with books that have some marginalia, some dog-eared pages and a bookmark around the halfway point. There are books on the floor, on the shelves, next to the beds. I found a stack of books when cleaning out the garage. If the question is, what are Travis’ reading habits? Most people would answer that I don’t read. Sometimes I feel like I don’t.

The reality is that I do not and cannot read enough. Life gets in the way but the main impediment is writing. Writing and reading are hard. They need to be done serially.

Every morning after I leave the gym I go to a coffee shop where I force myself to read an essay and a short story. The only reason I can accomplish this is because I do not have the computer with me. After the readings I force myself to write the first sentence of the short story and then expanding out to 100 words, no fewer no less, I complete the story. It’s a good exercise that primes for me for the day of writing ahead.

Afterwards I go home, pick up the computer and find a coffee shop or a library and write. I have daily assignments and I have a larger project I am developing. The remainder of the day is an endless juggling match between those projects and the necessities of life in the US these days. At 9 I force myself to stop whatever I am doing and just read. This is the source of all the half read books. I’m fickle. Life is too short to slog through something I’m not feeling. Books being good are more about my ability to receive them and less about the author’s artifice. I give myself that luxury.

The Swede is a high school librarian and she allows herself to read what she wants all the time. It’s all research and enrichment for her vocation. She comes home and reads. Saturdays she reads. She feels no compulsion to read, which is precisely why she can read. I feel compelled and concomitantly rebel. I feel a need to read richly to improve my writing, whereas she can read for the pure joy of it.

The honest answer to the question is that she has the reading habit. For her it is an unthought necessity. As a writer it is labor and that makes me sad. Every now and then I will pick up what I consider fluff and then find that it has so much more to offer me than the masterpiece, if only because I am ready to receive it.

 

 

March 8, 2012

Paragraph I Love: Morin 2012

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People always talk about humane slaughter, but there are very few good ways to die. All of our meat at Joe Beef is humanely raised and killed. In Paris, I hear they strangle the ducks to keep the blood in, but here we kill by autoerotic asphyxiation. We used to take lambs into a room one by one, play each his favorite movie, give him a light dinner and a little bit of smack, and then stop his heart. Tenderest and happiest lamb you’ve ever had. But that’s in the past now. Due to the high price of heroin, we can no longer afford our preferred way of preparing animals to die. (Morin 2012, 30)

Morin, Fred. (2012, Spring). Canard au sang AKA a la presse. Lucky Peach, 3, 30-33.

 

January 19, 2012

Paragraph I Love: Fitzgerald 1920

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image via brokeandchicproject.comF Scott Fitzgerald was such a fine writer. The Great Gatsby remains one of my favorite novels. It’s one of the few books in high school I was assigned and finished. It may be the first novel I ever reread, again for an assignment in college. What makes me sad though is to see how accomplished a writer Fitzgerald was when he first began writing. It is as if he was Minerva and born fully formed. I know this is not true, but his early work is fine and for an aspiring writer he serves not as inspiration but as discouragement.

“Head and Shoulders” was published in 1920. It was the first of many to be published in the Saturday Evening Post. Here’s a paragraph that I love:

And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.

One, I love the simplicity of the notion that life is a subject and we are the objects. I have to catch myself before I pronounce it as prophetic. 1920 was not so long ago in philosophical thoughts. If anything our age of surplus has brought on a sense of empowerment, despite what currently produced drivel I may be reading.

Two, notice the metaphor is centered around labor and incomes. It is to easy for writers to imagine metaphors that fit more neatly. To be molded most might go to putty or taffy or mud, but Fitz’s reliance upon a laborers tells the story to come. It’s simple and obvious and that’s why it is brilliant.

 

January 18, 2012

Tennyson on SOPA

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image via arstechnica.com

Back in Tennyson’s day there were a group of writers called Plagiarism Hunters. They were men of immense memory who would scour books for appropriated plots, ideas, motifs, phrases, etc. It’s all very much like the debate about SOPA. For a real laugh go check out the congressional testimony advocating SOPA, it’s a riot.

Tennyson, prophetically, on SOPA:

men of great memories and no imagination, who impute themselves to the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for ever picking his nose between the pages of some old volumes in order to see what he can appropriate.

 

 

October 11, 2011

Passage I Love: Millhauser 2011

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One lady insists that he stand aside and watch as she undresses herself slowly, pausing for him to admire each part as she carasses herself with her hands; at the very end she holds before her a transparent silk scarf, which she then lets fall to the ground. In their desire to outrage modesty, to cast off the constraints of decorum, the Prince sees and allegiance to the very forces they wish to overcome. Sometimes a peasant girl in a haystack reveals a sensual frankness for which the Prince is grateful, but that same girl will carry herself primly to church on a Sunday. Rapunzel is without shame and without an overcoming of shame. She walks in her nakedness as if nakedness were a form of clothing.

Why do I love this passage? Clearly I’m drawn to the lasciviousness of it. I also enjoy the function of shame. An attempt to overcome it, to transgress it is still subservient to the same forces. The way I explain it to others is the maypole analogy. People who go against the crowd and circle the other direction are still circling the maypole. The analogy does not allow any actual transgression, for walking away from the maypole is still an act structured by the maypole.

Maybe Rapunzel’s lack of shame is a relief, but as the story unfolds you recognize it’s merely a fleeting pleasure. Regardless, it’s still a beautiful piece of writing.

Millhauser, Steven. (2011). Rapunzel. McSweeney’s, 38, 169-192. 177.

 

September 19, 2011

Paragraph I Love

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From Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (2003).

Then, finally, Bob knew what to do. She could see that for Bob, knowing what to do was always the hard part, and the doing was easy. All those years Vagabonding with Jack, Bob had been the older and wiser brother preaching sternly into Jack’s one ear while the Imp of the Perverse whispered into the other, and it had made him a stolid and deliberate sort. But having made up his mind, he was a launched cannonball. Eliza wondered what the two of them had been like, partnered together, and pitied the world for not allowing it. (710)

This is one of the books. As I weed out my library for move to the islands, moving items will be quite costly, this is still a book I will take with me. At 927 pages it’s a book I ought to buy again when down there, but I don’t want to risk that I am unable to find it. I cannot recommend it highly enough. In fact, I could make this a touchstone in my recommendations. Few books rank above it.

 

September 14, 2011

Bukowski on style

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Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing.
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style.
To do a dangerous thing with style, is what I call art.
Bullfighting can be an art.
Boxing can be an art.
Loving can be an art.
Opening a can of sardines can be an art.
Not many have style.
Not many can keep style.
I have seen dogs with more style than men.
Although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style.
For sometimes people give you style.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Jesus.
Socrates.
Caesar.
García Lorca.
I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is a difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water, or you, walking
out of the bathroom without seeing me.

 

July 30, 2011

Burn Notice 5:6 “Enemy of my enemy”

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This show is becoming worse. This episode contains several mistakes, which are now indicative of every episode.

The first scene is completely unnecessary. The four principle characters, Jesse (Coby Bell: Halo: Reach) is no longer a major player, are watching the surveillance tape of the Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan: Hitch) look alike. We, the audience, have already seen this tape and nothing new is gained from this scene except at the very end. That lesson is not even important to the scene, for we already know Michael is in a dillemma: he is supposed to disclose the tape’s contents to Agent Pearce (Lauren Stamile: Community) of the CIA, but the tape is there to frame him. What to do? This lesson could have easily been done in another scene, leaving more room for more action or more jokes or even more advertising. Anything besides redundancy.

The second problem with the show appears in the third scene. Westen is established as a nice guy who cares about normal folk, civilians. The episode plot, opposed to the continuing arc, centers around some Serbians who have purchased a Predator drone — egads! the horror of someone else having our killing technology. This intel comes via a confidential informant. The sale happens and CIA brass is impatient so they want to take immediate actions, but those actions will expose the asset and get him killed. Pearce tells this to Westen and Westen in an uncharacterisitic manner asks, “do you care about this asset?” That’s not at all consistent with the Westen of the previous 4 seasons and 5 episodes. It’s more Bourne before amnesia than it is Bourne. This is the second rule of good writing violated by this episode: internal consistinency.

I could also spend time delving into the silliness of Agent Pearce’s disclosure of a past burned asset and how she really cared for him. She’s a person. Got it. In the future we will need to care about her, but this pathway to our hearts seems overly mechanistic and forced.

So far we have two violated rules: redundancy and internal consistency. The third rule this episode violates is the most important: do not explain in dialogue what characters already know. It’s easy to follow this rule in novels because of narrators, but harder to do in televaision shows. Although Burn Notice is odd because of its sometimes present narrator. The plan goes awry and Sam (Bruce Campbell: The Evil Dead) is put into further danger. Michael and Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar: Scent of a Woman) discuss how the plan went wrong and what could happen, but they both already know it. When this happens in reality one person will often silence the other, especially when as frustrated as Michael and Fiona should be. Instead it just goes on. Michael ends the scene saying, “Sam can handle it.” The episode’s producers should have cut out all the previous conversation and just said this. That would be enough for the audience to know something awful has just happened, although the audience already knew, and that the plot just became much more involved.

I will keep watching. It’s still an entertaining show with the occasional joke that makes me chuckle. I am also a bit of a sucker for espionage stories, and while the craft in this show isn’t great I do appreciate the commentary on the tropes of the espionage genre. This episode gave a nice shout out to the Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa: Seven Samurai) storyline. It’s a clever allusion because of Yojimbo‘s importance and kudos to them for not referencing it as A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) or even Last Man Standing (Walter Hill: 48 Hrs.). The producers do know their history, and that is worth something.

The show has already been downgraded to one of those shows I watch while also doing something in the foreground. It doesn’t deserve to be struck from my queue completely. not yet, anyways.

 

April 4, 2011

Hemingway: True at First Light

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Necessarily, the first thing of note in this book is the introduction. This book is made of material found after Hemingway’s death, which was then compiled by Patrick into something resembling a novel. Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s second son, writes the introduction and his intention makes sense. Patrick is there to help explain the Mau Mau uprisings, which feature prominently in the first five chapters. Staying true to form, Hemingway provides no explicit reference to the uprisings, so the reader that is not intimate with Kenyan history will need this brief explication to make sense of the story’s exigence. Patrick then explains the memoir/fiction collision within this book, by detailing his memory of the safaris, mainly as an apology to Mary for how he decided to put it together. This actually causes some problems.

The first indication of oddness in this book is Hemingway’s use of first person narration. This is not a new device for Hemingway, but it is odd given the I is quite close to the actual Hemingway. In other books, we can see similarities in experience between Hemingway and the narrator, but this is very different. Of course, the cover of the book as well as Patrick’s introduction warn me of this, but here’s the thing: it’s just so damned odd.

Patrick mentions he would have preferred to have Ralph Ellison do the introduction but sadly Ellison was permanently detained. He should have then found someone else. The introduction spends too much time about Patrick’s own involvement in the safari the book is set against. Patrick’s use of ‘I’ then complicates the reading a few pages later on where ‘I’ is different and yet not too far off from Patrick’s own recollection. The introduction is almost Oedipal in its efforts to transpose itself with the author in question. It adds confusion to the project of diving beneath the water’s surface to glimpse the iceberg, and the problem would have been easily resolved.

Patrick also provides a spoiler, for which I will never forgive him. The potential conflict I can see rising in the first three pages is already dispelled by Patrick as a naive oversight on his father’s part. What a jerk, as if the issue needed to be said.

 

So far there is some brilliance about the naming procedures of a safari among the locals. It is the closest we see Hemingway getting into the problem of language and mediation. As usual Hemingway relies upon nature’s ambivalence and harshness to provide enough need for language that human ingenuity will make it happen. Hemingway is, after all, a pragmatist. For him theory is for those writers living in their Ithaca professorships.The perfect example is Hemingway’s description of how to learn, or to teach, a foreign language: find a lover with whom you do not share a common tongue.

…it is simple if you start with the parts of the body and the things one can do and then food and the different relationships and the names of animals and of birds. (35)

The first 50 pages show Patrick’s hand. The book is all setting up the characters and explaining (some of) the backstory. A defter touch would have better served this book and made it seem more like what made Hemingway great.

 

Hemingway, Ernest. (1999). True at first light. NY: Scribner.

 

 

March 30, 2011

Ann Beattie “The Burning House”

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image via burlingtonbookfestival.comI’ve been away for a bit, doing what I do to pay the bills, but I’ve kept up with my readings. I have been turned time and again to Ann Beattie, so I checked out some of her stuff and I am floored. I have notes I will be uploading soon. For now, though, I will leave you with one of the most devastating endings I have ever read. From The Burning House.

“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding yourself a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake — you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men — if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of the May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old — I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

Wow. Part of why it is so affecting is because it rings so true. I find it true about how I see myself, hence the mania I find plaguing most all men. Even some women I have mentioned this to say it makes sense and helps explain a lot. There is an interview with Beattie in the new The Paris Review and she tells of receiving letters from women who read that and then left their husbands because of the clarity of insight Beattie’s writing possesses.

 

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