9. The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn.This is one of those books that pops up in brief mention in lots of other books, acknowledged but not necessarily trumpeted. Its made appearances in books I've recently read in authors as diverse as Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, and Guy Debord, each giving it a respectful nod but moving on. It sits in a strange place, in terms of its importance-- it influenced a ton of people, but hasn't quite reached that echelon of "must read." In fact, it seems to have been out of print for quite awhile until very, very recently.
Part of this might be due to Cohn taking the position he does on the subject he does during the time that he did. Guy Debord puts it best when he discusses how Cohn seems to exert tremendous effort in steering his book away from its natural conclusions. Look-- the whole point of the book is about how religiously motivated movements have empowered the lower classes in Christian societies to rise up and struggle for catharsis or autonomy, and how these movements are inevitably squashed. It doesn't take a lot of mental cavorting and leaping to realize that this might sorta, kinda lend itself to a Marxist reading. Yet, Cohn goes out of his way, especially at the end as his story creeps towards recognizably modern mentalities, to hand-wave away any similarities to later proletariat revolutions, and even suggests that any continuity between medieval religious uprisings and more secular revolts from the 18th century onwards.
Ok. I can't go back in time and tell the guy how to write his book. I'm just not convinced. Everything else in here though is basically sterling, really fascinating material that deserves to find an audience in these troubled times when any asshole can poop out a book about "Templar" "secrets" and retire. The appendix material about the Ranters in 17th century England was a stand-out to me. I would follow that Abiezer Coppe on Twitter.
10. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells TowerI came into this having read a few of the pieces already, I guess mostly those that had shown up in McSweeney's. I was mostly drawn to this, Tower's first collection of short stories, from the positive buzz surrounding it, and the striking cover (yeah, ok). Also I heard there was a viking story.
Sure enough, there was a viking story. The title story, it is a stand-out in a collection of first-rate fiction of the strongly "University of Iowa" flavor, for better or worse. Tower's protagonists are assorted fuck-ups and assholes loafing around a pungently unsatisfying America, unable to find any kind of workable alternative. What separates Tower from the whole drooling pack of Carver-ites is a distinct touch of loftiness, a slight and often ironic tonic of Emerson shot into the veins of his world of spoiled meat, carnies, and genial ephebophiles.
I bought this as a Valentine's Day present, which was perhaps kind of inappropriate in hindsight. I don't know though, if getting a really solid book of new short fiction (and who today can be counted on to reliably write good short fiction) isn't nice, then I don't even know who you are anymore.
11. Slantwise, Betty Adcock.Uh, ok, here's the thing. I don't actually remember too much about reading this. Betty Adcock-- she's a poet. She doesn't have much of a formal education. I gather she's quite the popular lady. Uhh eheheh. Thanks for your time everybody.
No, alright: what I recall most strongly about this collection is this. 1) Sitting in Artisan's Cafe in Phoenixville, balancing the book on one knee and a bowl of tomato soup on the other and a rapidly cooling and astonishingly bitter cup of coffee on a little stool. A guy came in and sat down and stared at me, read the paper, and left. 2) Talking about it afterwards, sheepishly admitting I didn't like it very much, and finding out that everyone else who'd read it agreed.
To be fair, some of the conceits Adcock comes up with are astonishing, and bear with me if I'm vague, I read a lent copy. One poem opens with an epigraph explaining how as snowflakes fall through water they emit a shrieking sound that can shock and even deafen dolphins. Really? Holy cow, Betty, that's incredible. It's almost as if that small brick of information is capable of standing on its own, residing on the page fully-formed as, Christ, I don't know, poetic data. It would write itself, almost, if it had any need to. Unfortunately the poem Adcock actually does spin out of this promising genesis is a little bit of a let-down, kind of a soggy pulp of nature-y images and old lady spitfire.
Kind of the typical dynamic she works with here. At the very core of many of her poems I could sense an idea capable of knocking me over, of slapping me around, taking my wallet as Larry Levis' eponymous poem "Poem" does to him. However, there's just too much going on that doesn't need to be. Her poems drown under their own weight. How's this for an over-wrought and unnecessary metaphor-- they're like rocket ships taking off, that never bother jettisoning their ballast or whatever. Alright, that didn't even make sense.
12. Wittgenstein's Poker, David Edmonds & John Eidinow. I enjoyed another of their books, the one about Rousseau and Hume, so decided to give this a shot. I've always admired what I could understand of Wittgenstein (not much), and Popper has always exerted a kind of fascination as a guy I find very elegantly and exquisitely wrong-headed. As in there other book, Edmonds and Eidinow spin a hell of a story about what could be told as a very dry anecdote. They come off as much like boxing announcers as much as anything else, pumping up the mythological stature of the contenders and raising the tension as high as it can go before finally setting their subjects loose on each other. Sure, ok, pop philosophy, scoff scoff laugh laugh. But they do as good a job as anyone I can think of right now at making the praxis stakes underlying philosophical conflicts take on real dramatic weight. You can read this kind of business like you would a novel-- they give ideology a story. And you know, that probably isn't the most rigorous way to teach the subject. Fine. I still came out smarter than I did going in.
13. Camera, Jean-Phillippe Toussaint. I have some things I'd actually like to say about this book, so I'm going to put it off for right now. Expect something about Toussaint and Tao Lin in a little while.
14. The Possessed, Elif Batuman. You might recognize Elif Batuman as the young columnist currently tearing it up across n+1, The Believer, the New Yorker, and other publications. This is her first book, a pleasant melange of light literary criticism, biography, and memoir, focused on her academic and emotional involvement with the great Russian authors. I tend to be pretty skeptical of memoir. I think its a genre that can too easily slide into melodrama and narcissism. Oh yeah, and lying. What do Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris have to tell me about being an unpleasant little white male piece of shit that I don't already know from first hand experience? Right, the stuff they made up. This isn't to say I hate all memoir, and I definitely don't extend this perhaps snobbish disinclination towards all the areas of creative nonfiction, but it remains a hurdle I have to either leap or go "whatever" at when I pick up a book that turns out to be even mildly memoir-esque.
Batuman succeeded in charming me from early on, despite a little skipping around to hit my personal authorial faves before coming back around to the travel-memoir business and the section on Isaac Babel. She isn't going on about her own problems for their own sake, no. They're simply the lens with which she approaches the works of art she describes so lucidly and energetically. They're eye-glasses, not the mirror, the means, not the end. Above all the book is about literature, about loving it and struggling with it and making your life around its creaky scaffolding. I'm going to sound like an asshole if I come out and call it a classic in the making, but who cares, I am going to. People will be reading this book years from now. It is great.
15. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Baez. A fascinating premise-- kind of self-explanatory, but basically a survey of the motives and methods of the destruction of literature throughout global history-- kind of shackled by its scope. Baez packs a lot into less than 400 pages, and I really admire the range of cases he looks at. Like the grisly middle of 2666, sometimes the long scroll of names of lost authors, ruined libraries, abolished classics, assumes the power of a litany on its own. However, at other times I kind of wanted more than a list. I wanted context, elaboration. Unfortunately, this book often didn't provide all that. A terrific idea crammed into too small a scale. Still captivating, and often extraordinarily depressing, but I mope about the missed potential.Incidentally, this was the fourth book of the month to mention Lindisfarne getting fucked up repeatedly. Popular place.
More to come, I don't know, maybe tomorrow:
A SHITTY TRANSLATION OF LAO TZU!
A COMIC BOOK!
EUGENE ONEGIN!
POEMS!
A COMIC BOOK ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S FURRY PENIS!
T-T-T-TAO LIN!
Someday, you will learn to appreciate non-fiction. I'd had a lot of discussions with Robert about if and how (counter intuitively) there is a place in memoir for lying to a certain degree. I mean, I were to write about my childhood, isn't that a kind of lying? I'm not a child, I am only recreating a version of my childhood on the page. I think it can be interesting when an author is allowed to be aware of the fact that even their attempts at truth in a story can be riddled with lies. I think Sedaris does that sometimes.
ReplyDeleteThen again, this sort of logic begins to get circular pretty quickly. And really, what do I know? I just think there is room for a certain kind of fiction in non fiction.
I do appreciate non-fiction, 4/6 of the books I wrote about were non-fiction and I liked all of them to varying degrees. As for memoir specifically, sure, you reconstruct things, you steamline some events and rearrange others. This is all with the assumption that your story is worth hearing about, or that you're telling it in a compelling way, though. I don't see that in a lot of memoir.
ReplyDeleteToo many memoir writers (and I'm lumping Sedaris in here, perhaps unfairly) bank not on the interest or the literary elegance of their story, but simply on the fact that its a true story. If Burroughs or Frey wrote explicit fiction, what would recommend them? The subtlety of the narrative? Their prose style? The only reason people read them is to get the cheap thrill of a "true story."
That's my problem. Way too much of the memoir market looks like a game of sensational one-upmanship.
Some memoir I like: Jennifer Finney Boylan. Philip Levine. Jon Volkmer (yeah). Samuel Pepys. Henry Adams. But see, all of these people are interested in something larger than themselves. They are the primary characters in a story about the world, not the primped demiurges of "THE MEEEEE STORY."
I'm not sure that I agree with your characterization of Norman Cohn "hand-waving away" any relevance of his topic to modern proletariat revolutions. If anything, he underlines the affinities, though with qualifications. On the last page before the Appendix he writes "During the half-century since 1917 there has been a constant repetition, and on an ever-increasing scale, of the socio-psychological process which once joined the Taborite priests or Thomas Müntzer with the most disoriented and desperate of the poor, in phantasies of a final, exterminatory struggle against 'the great ones'; and of a perfect world from which self-seeking would be for ever banished." This seems to me to be a clear (though obviously unsympathetic) linking of 20th-century Marxist movements to medieval millenarianism.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I think there's a word or more missing from your final sentence about Cohn, "and even suggests that any continuity between medieval religious uprisings and more secular revolts from the 18th century onwards."
Best wishes.