tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32225150169306073672024-02-21T09:48:54.579-08:00Ghost or Balloon?Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-3223486193470137102010-04-16T09:18:00.000-07:002010-04-16T09:19:55.366-07:00Tumblr Move and Canon FeverHey, to all like three people reading this, just a heads up that I've mostly relocated to Tumblr. You can find me at http://ghostorballoon.tumblr.com/ although I may continue to repost longer articles up here. Like this one:<br /><br />Should the hypothetical American bookshelf be a democracy or an oligarchy? Is the curation of a canon a privilege, a right, or a waste of time? Is there something kind of weird about a $40 Philip K. Dick book and am I still allowed to write in it?<br />(pretend there’s a Cut here, Tumblr is being cranky)<br />Yesterday Melville House’s blog “Moby Lives” pointed out a fairly recent Newsweek article about The Library of America.<br />The gist of the article, as you might suppose from the almost-a-joke-but-not-quite sort of title “Jumping the (Literary) Shark,” takes the stance that the LoA— supposedly previously dedicated to the most austere and patrician icons of American letters, your Faulkners and Super James Bros. and Frosts— is rapidly descending into a scramble for people to publish, watering down their credibility as caretakers of the cough cough, “Library” of “America.”<br />I take offense to this whole argument on a number of levels, but let’s start with the factual. First of all, Newsweek’s Malcolm Jones bases his dismissal of the library’s recent output on an upcoming editions of John Updike’s essay on Ted Williams as well as the collected novels and short fiction of Shirley Jackson.<br />1. While selling just the one little Updike essay is a little puzzling, its as good a place to start as any. Presumably Updike is one of those authors like Marianne Moor or T.S. Eliot whose publication rights are sort of up in the air, as the LoA hasn’t put out any other work of his. Granted, it seems like a weird place to start, but you have to start somewhere. Raising your eyebrows at a questionable marketing decision is one thing, saying that John Updike of all people is a weak link in a roster or authors is another entirely.<br />2. As for Jackson, I’ll let Jones state his case for himself, mumbled through a mouthful of foot:<br />“And then, in May, here comes an entire volume dedicated to …. Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly famous for one short story, “The Lottery.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?”<br />Sure, um, its probably technically correct to say that Jackson is mostly famous for “The Lottery,” but since when did “mostly famous for…” have any kind of bearing on literary merit? <br />“And now here comes an entire volume dedicated to… Nathanael Hawthorne? A writer mostly famous for one short novel, “The Scarlet Letter.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?”<br />Putting aside that Shirley Jackson is “mostly famous” these days as a fucking master of post-war American gothic and that Jones’ easy dismissal suggests that he hasn’t thought about her at all since maybe ninth or tenth grade lit class, the idea that an author’s merit depends on whether or not he or she is “mostly famous” is intensely irritating. <br />The argument is mind-numbingly reductive, and carries an unpleasant tinge of the idea that the canon is something objectively stable and dependable, that doesn’t need any of this newfangled post-modern reassessment thanks. Its essentially a tautology: why bother lending the prestige and visibility of LoA inclusion to somebody who isn’t already famous, it seems to ask? Only the already venerable deserve to be, uh, venerated. Ok. <br />This all brings me to the bigger question looming behind what has basically been, up to this point, just blogosphere bullshit. Because the issue isn’t whether Jones thinks Jackson and Updike deserve to be published— let’s not put words in his mouth— but whether he thinks they have a place in the so-called “Library of America.”<br />Let’s not beat around the bush, the LoA volumes are for the most part luxury items. If you really wanted to read all of John Cheever, you could probably swing that for about $15 at a used bookstore, or you could drop $80 for the LoA’s two volume set. The same goes with their edition of Kerouac’s road novels, which seem somehow eerily out of place between cloth covers with a little silk ribbon dangling in front of the pages. On one level it would seem natural that if the outdated notion of “The Canon” should have any last outpost, it should be in these handsome, elegant, and improbably pricey tomes. Jones’ article seems to suggest that in a perfect world, the publisher would have an infinite supply of old white men with starched collars and bristly Puritan beards to roll out, and that these unfortunate forays into the works of people who— holy fuck— might have been alive in the last thirty years is a regrettable sign of some kind of fundamental compromise.<br />Not so, Jonesy. A look at the actual publishing history of the LoA reveals that its been pretty idiosyncratic from the beginning. William Dean Howells shows up well before anything by Henry James, and Francis Parkman (who is “mostly famous for…” I don’t know, Jones, you tell me) gets two volumes surprisingly early on. Raymond Chandler gets a collection before Steinbeck. James Thurber right before George Washington, and so on. The LoA, for all its suspiciously middle-brow trappings, has demonstrated rather egalitarian tastes for much of its history, dipping generously into Cain, Hammett, and other “genre” writers long before the well of “real literature” was anything close to dry.<br />I’d also like to mention that the H.P. Lovecraft collection, which Jones brushes off as his smug opening salvo:<br />“Hard to say precisely when it started, maybe with the publication of living authors, maybe with whole volumes dedicated to—hmm, maybe it’s cruel to label H. P. Lovecraft a second-tier writer, but maybe not so mean to call him a fringe author. Anyway, it’s become harder and harder to ignore the fact that the Library of America is running out of writers.”<br />came out over 15 years and 50 volumes ago, and was followed directly by Alcott, Roth, and Agee. Say what you will about Lovecraft’s merits, but in the context it hardly seems like the LoA was “running out of writers.”<br />As resistant as I am to the idea of a canon, its unavoidable that the prestige trappings and the very title of the “Library of America” suggests something like an elite roster of writers, a select pantheon. However, looking over their history, I’m pleased to find that the interplay between the academically hallowed and the popularly acclaimed is dynamic and alive, that cult favorites like Philip K. Dick can rub elbows with Hart Crane and Faulkner. I also have to say that in recent years many of their new choices have been pretty exciting to me, rather than suggestive of a downward trend. In the past two or three years they’ve put out pretty fucking phenomenal editions of Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Raymond Carver, and Saul Bellow. Contrary to Jones’ snobbish hysteria, we’re nowhere near hitting “peak writer” or whatever absurd drying up of the literary reservoirs he has in mind. <br />If I’m going to concede that the notion of a canon has any value, its as a living and evolving thing, the record of a debate rather than the setting down of laws. Every time the LoA adds to that debate by taking a “risky” choice, I have to see that as a positive thing, a boost to an author’s reputation at best and at worst an opportunity to talk about the shape of our country’s literary history. I’m not sure exactly what Malcolm Jones has in mind in terms of a solution to his snide whining, and I more or less don’t fucking care. I’ll be spending money I don’t have on Shirley Jackson.<br />(as for the tantalizing idea that the high production values of the books themselves are somehow subversive, or, I think I could equally well argue, counter-subversive, I’ll let John Lancaster do the talking, sort of)Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-82625646543933394582010-03-30T10:49:00.000-07:002010-03-30T11:42:10.619-07:00La Chinoise, Part 2So, that camera.<br /><br />On one level La Chinoise, despite a distinctly anti-narrative style, is a pretty straightforward story. Five students retreat to a borrowed bourgeoisie apartment and work themselves into a Maoist frenzy-- down with the USA, right? Down with bourgeoisie art like Moliere and Racine. Down with, above all else, revisionists. Because it is a story about schisms, and when vacillating Henri is booted from the apartment, it only makes explicit the tensions seperating each of the characters. Their dissolution and downfall mirrors that of Demons, but robbed of any kind of real moral horror or weight, that is to say of any validation. Kirilov kills himself, Guillaume retreats into inscrutable performance art, and Veronique, the film's real dogmatist, clumsily moves onto true propaganda of the deed.<br /><br />Its tempting on reading a summary to believe that Godard's heart was 100% with these kids, that the sadness of the film is that they couldn't hold together. However, a look at the tension between two styles of film-making within the movie suggests to me that not only is it a sweeping satire, its a satire of the way we think rather than any specific historical political moment (although its release months before the '68 student riots is eerie).<br /><br />What I'm about to explain is practically spelled out at one point in Guillaume's lecture on art. Godard has a trick in this movie of weaving in elements just subtle enough that when you catch onto them you feel smart-- and then having his characters spell it out a few scenes later, robbing the viewer of his or her intellectual smugness. Shortly after showing us enough of the set for its primary color scheme to twig, Kirilov declaims on primary colors. Around the time that the Dostoyevsky parallels really start to coalesce, we find out that Serge is really Kirilov, and, well, he kind of makes the obvious conclusion for us. The tension of the camera is the same.<br /><br />Guillaume enters in shirt-sleeves and tie, lights a cigarette, standing in front of a blackboard reading "Problems of Information: For a Republican TV."<br /><br /><blockquote>Comrades and friends, today's topic is current events. We see them daily at the movies. There's a false idea about current events at the movies. They say Lumiere invented current events. He made documentaries. But there was also Melies, who made fiction.He was a dreamer filming fantasies. I think just the opposite... two days ago, I saw a film by Mr. Langlois, the director of the Cinematheque, about Lumiere. It proves Lumiere was a painter. He filmed the same things painters were painting at that time, men like Charo, Manet, or Renoir. What did he film? He filmed train stations. He filmed public gardens. Workers going home, men playing cards. He filmed trams... a contemporary of Proust.</blockquote><br /><br />The most apparent edict that Godard and other new-wavers took from Bazin was the idea that the artist exposes reality-- they show something as authentically and "truly" as possible. You hear this all the time, and can see it most splendidly attempted in Truffaut and Rohmer. However, by 1967 Godard seems to have discovered something absurd in this maxim. The year after La Chinoise, his Le Gai Savoir is a crash course on post-structuralism that is quite difficult to reconcile with any kind of devotion to documentary truth.<br /><br />What's interesting in La Chinoise, however, is that ludic and sometimes agonizing interplay between the documentary camera and the modernist continuity of montage. When the film opens, it does so with the conceit of a documentary. Its eerily familiar to fans of the Office as Guillaume mugs to the camera in a tightly framed, above the chest long-take, and when the scene momentarily cuts to a heavy bearded dude seated at a camera rig in the living room, the illusion of versimillitude is unsettling. One half of the film's aesthetic keeps to this pretense of capturing the rough, unrehearsed elements of reality, the "documentary truth." We get gorgeous static shots in which the characters move and interact without the heavy hand of the director. We find the camera lingering on characters well before and after their essential narrative flourishes, for example letting us watch Henri fix his coffee and butter a crusty roll for several indulgent moments before he begins to speak, haltingly and between mouthfuls, about his expulsion.<br /><br />The other side of the coin goes all-out in exploiting every trick of perception and spatial/temporal logic that cinema allows. Flashing, strobe-like montages of pop-art and defaced photographs of historical figures. Fantasy re-enactments, low-tech and DIY-looking but impossible within the context of the story, including the famous shots of Yvonne in Vietcong garb being strafed by toy planes and Henri shooting a bazooka in a lion mask. Cuts and pans that make little sense but roughly force our attention to the very presence of the camera, of this artificial eye controlling what and how we see.<br /><br />Then there are other, stranger moments, that play out like glitches in an unbalanced system. A scene fades to black, we are shown a split-second glimpse of Henri leaning against a sink, Veronique taking notes a table, cutting away again before we can begin to process what we're seeing. Overall, the documentary-style shots linger just a bit too long, lean in a little too close (and here I'd like to reply to Abby that the shot I was mentioning earlier, the one where the camera stops and lurks motionless behind the CLOSED red shutters, is in the film-- around 46:16), while the collage and pop elements are ever so slightly TOO coy and composed, even for Godard. Compare the two "music video" scenes-- the first resists the impulse of synchronization on even the editorial level, showing us characters calmly studying against "Mao Mao's" poppy beat, spliced in with quick shots of Guillaume's profile switching back and forth with the rhythm. The second iteration of the song, this time chopped up and scattered in pieces, not holding together as music but bursting forth in intermittant snatches of noise, IS accompanied by dancing, albeit a dancing looked at skeptically and performed with smug irony.<br /><br />The effect is... well, Brechtian, and again Godard doesn't let us get away with feeling smart about it. Against a lecture on art as science, Guillaume works through a blackboard of seminal writers with a wet sponge, gradually abolishing the history of letters. He works through Pirandello, Jarry, Pinter, Goethe, Kleist, Sophocles, Lorca and many many more before leaving with one name in intact: in neat blue cursive dead center on the board... ta-da! Brecht!<br /><br />We begin to ask, what do these people believe? What do they believe it for? When Veronique coldly renounces her love for Guillaume as a thought-experiment in revolutionary multi-tasking, we wonder not only if it was fair, but whether or not she meant it. <br /><br />This isn't to say the film is a dreary and confusing slog. Far from it, I'd say it is one of the more visually exciting and charming of Godard's movies, at least of what I've seen. The palette, for its simplicity, is absolutely gorgeous, and the tensions underlying the movie are largely acted out in playful ways, small perfect moments like Kirilov waking up the other house-mates by stepping over their sleeping bodies with a boom-box blasting Radio Peking, clad in a bright pink robe. Or the calisthenics scene, in which four of the students do some aerobics while quoting Mao and flirting gently. Or Christ, the entire lecture on Vietnam, with its novelty sun-glasses and toy armies. In raising the question of to what extent politics are really real for these characters, and to what extent they're a game, a simulation, Godard makes the game look just as fun as it is troubling. If there's conviction in the film, it is wry, skeptical conviction. And if there's satire, it is sympathetic.<br /><br />Basically, La Chinoise is a fucking extraordinary movie, and I guess in some ways a very funny examination of the dialectic on top of everything else. As Abby notes, the translation is a little wild and wooly, but if you can speak a bit of French that kind of just adds to the fun. It's Godard's second to last movie before hooking up with Dziga Vertov, and in some ways is a transition into that intimidating period. Stylistically, its much closer to Pierrot La Fou than something like Breathless, but it has some of the prickly warmth of his earlier Karina films. Check it out. It's, um, really good.Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-49828084337858136332010-03-28T20:50:00.000-07:002010-03-28T21:59:10.557-07:00La Chinoise, Part 1I wanted to say a little bit about Godard's <span style="font-style:italic;">La Chinoise</span> in response to its recent review on <a href="http://abbylovesfilm.tumblr.com/post/480795779/la-chinoise">"Abby Loves Films."</a> One, because I want to say too much to really fit as a response over there, two, I don't want to sign up for Tumblr. As such, my little post here might end up seeming a little bit schizophrenic-- I'm trying to juggle responding to her review and articulating my own thoughts on the film.<br /><br />First of all, Abby does a great job of discussing the setting of the film:<br /><blockquote>"La Chinoise revolves around five students, hardline socialists and Maoists, who share an apartment. The place is bright; doors and panels are painted in primary colors, copies of Mao’s Little Red Book populate shelves and lie in a huge pile on the floor. The majority of the film takes place here and it’s one of those situations where the mise-en-scene is executed in such a brilliant way, that you forget the purpose it might be serving. In this case, the set, was so reminiscent of a nursery or school room, that I found myself viewing the characters as such. "</blockquote><br /><br />This space really is an incredibly well-executed piece of set. As in his earlier <span style="font-style:italic;">A Woman is a Woman,</span> the area the characters inhabit is given a huge responsibly in filling out the contours of their personalities, of simultaneously lending history to the film's figures and laying out the entire aesthetic in concrete form. In La Chinoise, Godard gives us long, smooth shots that really draw our attention to the apartment and the very physical place-ness of it. The camera lingers on a table flanked by red chairs and a vidid red lamp as characters speak off-screen, pores over the posters and chalk-notes that furnish each room, and, in one extraordinary shot, pans back and forth from outside its windows, neatly dividing the characters into psychological and spatial groups as it peers in from around the faded shutters of the windows. In a similar shot later on, the camera rests outside a set of two doors onto the balcony. As the film's two pairs of lovers perform their morning calisthenics, the chunk of wall between the doors partitions them neatly. The set's refusal to accommodate the camera lends weight to the documentary conceit of the film while its geometrical neatness bolster Godard's strict stylistic demands (more on that later).<br /><br />Abby's right to point out the reliance on primary colors. Everything in the apartment is decked out in warm yellows and golds, rich blues, and overwhelmingly bright reds (along with the paler red of the windows). The painter, Kirilov (yeah, the whole movie is kind of a spin on Dostoyevsky's "Demons") lays it out in one of the film's pedagogical set-pieces:<br /><br />"Use only three colors. The three primary colors, blue, yellow and red. Perfectly pure and perfectly balanced on the pretext that all other colors are there." <br /><br />Abby is also correct in nothing the school-house vibe of the set. Its both a literal classroom, the site of numerous lectures on politics and aesthetics, and a kind of emotional, psychosexual boarding school. As the above quote hints at, these characters exist in worlds of primary colors, boldly struck slogans, and stark ideologies. They're dogmatists inflamed and fermented by their enclosure, their social dynamics torn apart by their slavish attraction to magnetic poles. They talk about truth, sure, but what they truly seem to be looking for are systems, clean ones, reliable conceptual frameworks. As much as Godard delights in the ludic possibilities of undermining the narrative and grammatical assumptions of cinema, on one level his film laments and prefigures the effects of a too-well absorbed postmodern mindset. In a void of traditional historical narratives, La Chinoise's students hue with savage loyalty to any replacement narrative that seems to make sense (Lacan blah blah blah). Instead of replacing the lens of tradition with an appreciation of the complicated and bewildering texture of reality, they return back to a new "daddy," a new but identical set of simplifications-- in politics as well as in color coordination, they mistake aestheticizing for philosophizing, all while making appeals to the most practical and intuitive concerns (interesting to note how often a scene will show us the four bourgeoisie students reading or taking notes while their proleteriet buddy, Yvonne, cleans windows or shines shoes).<br /><br />This struggle between the intellectual and aesthetic charm of the abstract or fantastic and the claims of access to something real offered by a more prosaic view is acted out in the narrative (scientific, humanistic Henri ousted by wealthy and extreme Veronique), as well as the metanarrative (Jean-Pierre Leaud, an actor playing an actor playing a revolutionary, declaims on Meliere and the Lumieres; characters name-drop the same articles by Althusser and Brecht that inspired the script) and even between the camera and the cutting room floor. I'll talk more about this tomorrow, and hopefully figure out how to grab screen-caps from the Mac DVD player thing.Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-19696031990667107742010-03-26T12:58:00.000-07:002010-03-26T13:45:46.993-07:00Finishing Out FebruaryAs March continues to lay on bad news and bad times, I've finally found myself the time to finish writing about what I read all the way back in February. This entry may be a bit on the scant side-- I've already written on this blog at length on "Eugene Onegin" and Catie Rosemurgy's "The Stranger Manual," which leaves me with... hm... four books, one of which I will once again defer to a later entry. So, that leaves me with two comic books and a less than inspiring work of translation. Let's get this out of the way.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMTbxlW6cDxIBRVwgvTA_kmvLUkq1t3Kv8X3yGzY2zHsRm6ya0JDzldXvjn7AGRk2V-ol0wFfkCvrjoYP-lk8UQlyQghHD7s37Zh2Iv_Q0tDndnN-yrEoUAlV7q0aH1XyTb8v25FAgDxU/s1600/tao.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 185px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMTbxlW6cDxIBRVwgvTA_kmvLUkq1t3Kv8X3yGzY2zHsRm6ya0JDzldXvjn7AGRk2V-ol0wFfkCvrjoYP-lk8UQlyQghHD7s37Zh2Iv_Q0tDndnN-yrEoUAlV7q0aH1XyTb8v25FAgDxU/s320/tao.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453044188483769602" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">16. Tao Te Ching, Lau Tzu (trans. Ron Hogan).</span> Okay, clearly I'm someone who is reasonably cool with popular glosses of philosophy. I've already written about my admiration and enjoyment of Edmond and Eidinow's various excursions, and when I get around to writing about March you will see some truly embarrassing short-cuts to understanding Lacan. I mean, I think I even have one of those lame "Kant and the Platypus Walk Into Hyperreality" joke books sitting around somewhere, Christ, I hope I didn't pay a lot of money for that. Anyway, my point is that taking in a thorny primary source and chewing it into a nicely paraphrased, condensed, annotated, or extrapolated secondary product is fine and even necessary. Have you ever sat down and started reading Hegel? Really, you have? Was it fun and rewarding? You're lying to yourself. Philosophy rests largely on the task of commenting on and tweaking the meaning of earlier works of philosophy, and who am I to quibble about the line between standing on the shoulders of giants, and cashing in on them?<br /><br />That being said, and keeping in mind my sympathy for the plight of the translator, Ron Hogan's translation of the Tao Te Ching is not very good. A little background; for some time Hogan's translation has been available online, and despite recently being put into print (in a slightly different form than what I read, and retitled "Getting Right With Tao") Hogan has allowed anyone who cares to read his work for free do so under Creative Commons. To which I say, kudos. I also give him hesitant props for the very basic core of his project. That is, stripping away the accumulated translators' filigree of hokey faux-mystical orientalism surrounding Lao Tzu and boiling him down to the most prosaic language possible.<br /><br />Useful? Sure. Neccesary? Maybe, maybe not. A translation? I'd say no.<br /><br />The problem is that Hogan goes too far in hammering Lao Tzu's language into the most down-to-earth sentiments possible, shaving off anything like ambiguity or poetry and leaving little nuggets that often come out worn down to platitude. On the other extreme, occasionally in eschewing exaggerated exoticism he goes too far in putting on a Joe-the-Plumber style working class patois. Parts of it sound like getting your Taoism 101 from Jeff Bridges, which is entirely less delightful than it sounds.<br /><br />Here are some of his drastic reductions: <br />-“If you can talk about it, it ain’t Tao.<br />If it has a name, it’s just another thing."<br /><br />-"Stop wanting stuff. It keeps you from seeing what’s real.<br />When you want stuff, all you see are things."<br /><br />-"Tao's neutral:<br /> it doesn't worry about good or evil.<br /> The Masters are neutral:<br /> they treat everyone the same.<br /><br /> Lao Tzu said Tao is like a bellows:<br /> It's empty,<br /> but it could help set the world on fire.<br /> If you keep using Tao, it works better.<br /> If you keep talking about it,<br /> it won't make any sense.<br /><br /> Be cool."<br /><br />True, it goes down easy, and in the third passage above I even kind of see where he was going with the whole thing. But popularizing any work of philosophy is a dangerous game, because going too far can neuter the depth of thought that made the original worthwhile in the first place. I'm afraid that between instances of pointless reduction and flights of embarrassing folksiness, I'll be sticking with my Mitchell. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Tadewu1ArJsZdv0lfZxbRI0PJLImgjhlhu5eqC2-bhabGboh6MqocbyuzS_rdPC3-GJZBsYbSrY546U-3NNs4rCDpLOzYlsutMF31Een4sRj84ayi5VCHS5XeR6gyW6Z0EJSayzFPP4/s1600/phonogram2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Tadewu1ArJsZdv0lfZxbRI0PJLImgjhlhu5eqC2-bhabGboh6MqocbyuzS_rdPC3-GJZBsYbSrY546U-3NNs4rCDpLOzYlsutMF31Een4sRj84ayi5VCHS5XeR6gyW6Z0EJSayzFPP4/s320/phonogram2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453044714040052754" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">17. Phonogram: The Singles Club, Kieron Gillen.</span> Kieron Gillen is one of our most prolific and shameless pop-culture apologists, writing with a refreshing earnestness, a sophistication undiluted with ironic distance. He can overreach himself, and he can kind of look like a jack-ass, but every area of culture deserves a critic willing to embarrass himself in the expression of his passion. 2006's "Phonogram" was a short comic book series done with Jamie McKelvie that was, at heart, a parable of the gravity music exerts on culture. That might sound dry or schmaltzy, depending on how much benefit of a doubt you're willing to extend to the project, but it was good. It was overambitious and had some basic narrative problems, but Gillen provided 90's Brit-Pop with a poignant and surprisingly nuanced love-letter.<br /><br />This is follow-up, a series of character studies set against the backdrop of a single night. Again, music and the irresistible grip it exerts on a person's universe are his primary concerns, and again I found myself impressed at how well he balances the abstract and the concrete. Each story sets up and explores an idea about music, while simultaneously developing a full, meaty portrait of an individual. The shared setting works in his favor, letting characters drift in and out of the spotlight, showing up as faces in the crowd, recurring as a supporting character, popping up again as antagonist, and at some point taking center-stage. <br /><br />McKelvie's clean lines and gorgeously soft and crisp faces are a perfect fit. His figures are at once wonderfully expressive and somehow plastic, their pupils maybe just a bit too big for the words coming out of their mouths. There's no real illusion of life, there's always a plastic sheath of hyperreality between his drawings and the reader, and it only helps to accentuate the tone of the whole work. For Gillen's world of fashion as talisman, where who are might just be a narrative counterpoint to what you listen to, McKelvie is absolutely ideal.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGCzc-2wuJShFl7Pj1E9Piv2IFuIlLnslXFO0C1nqcGF-Q-rGOq_UuSDk4FYgM-1wm_FwxnWagPBVFwhhtpUuyiF5gSkVUr9191dv-yREDbJx62lR8C9vfnxPh30VyfK9j8MgmBoIk-Qc/s1600/eugene+onegin.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGCzc-2wuJShFl7Pj1E9Piv2IFuIlLnslXFO0C1nqcGF-Q-rGOq_UuSDk4FYgM-1wm_FwxnWagPBVFwhhtpUuyiF5gSkVUr9191dv-yREDbJx62lR8C9vfnxPh30VyfK9j8MgmBoIk-Qc/s320/eugene+onegin.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453045124342821138" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">18. Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin (trans. S. Mitchell).</span> I've already written about this a few weeks ago, but long story short good book good book good book.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixsgcPwvsGUhL2YEBHZOaBLiw1u1bDxsETrJU3PTusoEyQUbHaBy8oPVxWli1w91T9rfResqSDLLJrqlX5BAkaYp-wWDjm8NEGa4pXY1eVv_Bu9dgL7Sw6e_flkQRoN9Yxfk5og3jghz0/s1600/strangermanual.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixsgcPwvsGUhL2YEBHZOaBLiw1u1bDxsETrJU3PTusoEyQUbHaBy8oPVxWli1w91T9rfResqSDLLJrqlX5BAkaYp-wWDjm8NEGa4pXY1eVv_Bu9dgL7Sw6e_flkQRoN9Yxfk5og3jghz0/s320/strangermanual.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453046495881799570" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">19. The Stranger Manual, Catie Rosemurgy.</span> Same here. Loved it, check a few pages back to find out why.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCW_fSeaBJLbwZo9IOfXMhBx77FZGdoiEQqIRd_o2EvnMAL8lrazbH98eAM6jIDPhhK2OxQrbFGl_BDqQVe10b7OxUBvxYaNX_r8gdT21sq-zDOZzta1NSBzaZH8n2n94wjIfnVnyUbyE/s1600/the-left-bank-gang.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 233px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCW_fSeaBJLbwZo9IOfXMhBx77FZGdoiEQqIRd_o2EvnMAL8lrazbH98eAM6jIDPhhK2OxQrbFGl_BDqQVe10b7OxUBvxYaNX_r8gdT21sq-zDOZzta1NSBzaZH8n2n94wjIfnVnyUbyE/s320/the-left-bank-gang.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453046162269475378" /></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">20. The Left Bank Gang, Jason. </span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCvMda73Qo0Y0mWpWAlt9U0UCJ5vsULPxjBiI7uyyIPJJkF1UVGZk8G3Y5xXsE5L85_5Ynm-reLHRvsod_flWI_Wms2cjD3-X0ARIwzwU_rSKty533xcxWHzXmOgx2BogpX_A-gK24fLc/s1600/Shoplifting_TaoLin.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 229px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCvMda73Qo0Y0mWpWAlt9U0UCJ5vsULPxjBiI7uyyIPJJkF1UVGZk8G3Y5xXsE5L85_5Ynm-reLHRvsod_flWI_Wms2cjD3-X0ARIwzwU_rSKty533xcxWHzXmOgx2BogpX_A-gK24fLc/s320/Shoplifting_TaoLin.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453046315283782626" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">21. Shoplifting From American Apparel, Tao Lin. </span>Planning on writing about this and Toussaint in the near future. Capsule review, though-- it wasn't perfect, but it was promising. I'm a little more baffled by the hate for Tao Lin than the praise, though. I've read some of his poetry as well and enjoyed it, but I think overall he knows what he's doing more than some people give him credit for.Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-33741960670639274662010-03-25T15:55:00.000-07:002010-03-26T08:36:57.906-07:00Some February Catch-UpSo did I read anything else in February, or were viking comic books enough reading for me thanks a lot? Well as it turns out, I did read a lot more stuff. Here it is. Christ.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmEhnh_9ZMz-eah61zxZNSprWxqooiTLuADcyfYRozhuJw2GGsaA6DYb9mSNrRTzgbE1TNP1z-48TsFgE11zSZUpZTWfNEYZlymrwu91ggyGp81uLqE6kEGuUB4z9s6DTeYA1sEtE1bk4/s1600/pursuit.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 215px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmEhnh_9ZMz-eah61zxZNSprWxqooiTLuADcyfYRozhuJw2GGsaA6DYb9mSNrRTzgbE1TNP1z-48TsFgE11zSZUpZTWfNEYZlymrwu91ggyGp81uLqE6kEGuUB4z9s6DTeYA1sEtE1bk4/s320/pursuit.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452963547405287010" /></a>9<span style="font-weight:bold;">. The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn.<br /></span><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEuZRELNIWWFYZxNbjBiJs3qVcYMMuzm84BYAt0kpp_6TgBxVAhFgs144Y7LIoX3QoCzlfK82LRhFMO05AGL_C4HcL3RdmHZd7oIq2izuyZFUuKembdkAg8LcHtiPEiLPx2A5PzTmR4qE/s1600/everythingravaged.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 212px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEuZRELNIWWFYZxNbjBiJs3qVcYMMuzm84BYAt0kpp_6TgBxVAhFgs144Y7LIoX3QoCzlfK82LRhFMO05AGL_C4HcL3RdmHZd7oIq2izuyZFUuKembdkAg8LcHtiPEiLPx2A5PzTmR4qE/s320/everythingravaged.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452964058599580978" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">10. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower</span><br /><br />I 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqY5nG3gAaQzVkxyX5909iLZigTPbG7IRB8RAountHKt3sT-GJqwmWRG3Aztnv7D3X99ohvcKYFVJZ_MpV5ZdHwukxnYtwSA52XhLz7OWvfazzyVjwAHwicXInfwb9p6nI4wVsiomxmno/s1600/slantwise-m.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 206px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqY5nG3gAaQzVkxyX5909iLZigTPbG7IRB8RAountHKt3sT-GJqwmWRG3Aztnv7D3X99ohvcKYFVJZ_MpV5ZdHwukxnYtwSA52XhLz7OWvfazzyVjwAHwicXInfwb9p6nI4wVsiomxmno/s320/slantwise-m.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452964725954946930" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">11. Slantwise, Betty Adcock.</span><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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, <span style="font-style:italic;">poetic data</span>. 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWDBWzQmvybgwTczNF7ljhCstPobCBsncuy-rIsMmrxGt6pCQcnr1fN4LV1bPm-kE4Cog7HwACpJT2jyV9J8FrVh97famXEZiJLKj7JOFeNezRkm7z-56akNnLrkBlfmU8jtOHFxhCM7E/s1600/witt.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 228px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWDBWzQmvybgwTczNF7ljhCstPobCBsncuy-rIsMmrxGt6pCQcnr1fN4LV1bPm-kE4Cog7HwACpJT2jyV9J8FrVh97famXEZiJLKj7JOFeNezRkm7z-56akNnLrkBlfmU8jtOHFxhCM7E/s320/witt.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452965082154892450" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">12. Wittgenstein's Poker, David Edmonds & John Eidinow.</span> 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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Myyf0H8ipgtokiuKyCGapOHVvuXdqGwRrGf96-DHgTlYxEE_tG3cMA6FTiWMc-YZBbFjR0gXvpRgBZQP9eGxbqVmaJPZ8YBlMqW-djMpLY2DnXBLnD3B5a2tNIVzFcRmF8NxMCaNPVg/s1600/camera.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 226px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1Myyf0H8ipgtokiuKyCGapOHVvuXdqGwRrGf96-DHgTlYxEE_tG3cMA6FTiWMc-YZBbFjR0gXvpRgBZQP9eGxbqVmaJPZ8YBlMqW-djMpLY2DnXBLnD3B5a2tNIVzFcRmF8NxMCaNPVg/s320/camera.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452966009526966338" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">13. Camera, Jean-Phillippe Toussaint.</span> 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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAuFuT31qtByxieUFKv8JAmqxUK8DCbdwBBR-HEYlsz5vWtirDy8zt2D6erTQgE335hEPlrkmF1EiUG_uXDAbDwzeX3PsKwjZtcroanUDswZoTsEs7yH2uoUqVLgz897pySimeubC4ov8/s1600/smartelle-330-The-possessed.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAuFuT31qtByxieUFKv8JAmqxUK8DCbdwBBR-HEYlsz5vWtirDy8zt2D6erTQgE335hEPlrkmF1EiUG_uXDAbDwzeX3PsKwjZtcroanUDswZoTsEs7yH2uoUqVLgz897pySimeubC4ov8/s320/smartelle-330-The-possessed.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452966308900358386" /></a>1<span style="font-weight:bold;">4. The Possessed, Elif Batuman.</span> 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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoFL0kYpA2UuA8zjsDIFNg_3A_pTnPuyDUo-4KvYJIJ8NfmlqGJlriV8tKfSHab1HU67nUPny8baSIUGZf7_2c1ouMpYnP_kEiS19rk4DpBqC9M11y79VdxD_G-oZTqsblCGd7Wev4QdM/s1600/universal_.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 212px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoFL0kYpA2UuA8zjsDIFNg_3A_pTnPuyDUo-4KvYJIJ8NfmlqGJlriV8tKfSHab1HU67nUPny8baSIUGZf7_2c1ouMpYnP_kEiS19rk4DpBqC9M11y79VdxD_G-oZTqsblCGd7Wev4QdM/s320/universal_.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452966758699323106" /></a><span style="font-weight:bold;">15. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, Fernando Baez.</span> 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.<br /><br />Incidentally, this was the fourth book of the month to mention Lindisfarne getting fucked up repeatedly. Popular place.<br /><br /><br />More to come, I don't know, maybe tomorrow:<br />A SHITTY TRANSLATION OF LAO TZU!<br />A COMIC BOOK!<br />EUGENE ONEGIN!<br />POEMS!<br />A COMIC BOOK ABOUT F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S FURRY PENIS!<br />T-T-T-TAO LIN!Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-76735599529374739922010-03-01T07:57:00.000-08:002010-03-01T10:18:21.187-08:00What I Read in February, Part 1Wow, February went by quickly. I guess at some point I forgot that it only had 28 days, so that I felt comfortable with not sending in any of my bills until the very last moment. Hopefully that's all ok, but if I disappear a la <span style="font-style:italic;">The Trial</span> remember that I did it all for my art.<br /><br />Anyway, I'm going to split this month's books into three parts, for several reasons. First of all, if you'll look back to January's roll-call you'll notice that I got burnt out about five books in, and started to write basically nothing or good-for-nothing stuff. Second of all, my boss finds in imperative that I fuck around with a lot of spreadsheets today, so I can't sit around blogging like a beautiful opium dream. Ok, alright.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">1. City People, Will Eisner.</span> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEireSqTyA4AK_4XUrNBrqvWJJFq00FJHcQ_i5gUf6WPzLqg6uZ1_f9XqdP_lJyhzGGnw1qAIAzzJWo2n3nufd-ejFWyZ5zC9SQqgVMSXHgKrNbJJPK7SyQk59Hgy1BJ24lLuNRoYGlY9gs/s1600-h/eisner-citypeople.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 251px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEireSqTyA4AK_4XUrNBrqvWJJFq00FJHcQ_i5gUf6WPzLqg6uZ1_f9XqdP_lJyhzGGnw1qAIAzzJWo2n3nufd-ejFWyZ5zC9SQqgVMSXHgKrNbJJPK7SyQk59Hgy1BJ24lLuNRoYGlY9gs/s320/eisner-citypeople.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443710291515953330" /></a><br />I always feel somewhat conflicted about counting comic books as, you know, books. I know I shouldn't. Things like <span style="font-style:italic;">Asterios Polyp</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Black Hole</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Shortcomings<br /></span>, etc., I have no problem with counting as "real literature." But let's be real, I read a lot of terrible bullshit too. And while I feel more comfortable shelving R. Crumb or Eisner as real authors than, I don't know, X-Men Present: Murder Mystery on Mutant Mountain, that implies a value judgement I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. Is it less valid as art just because I find it silly and juvenile? What the fuck do I know, who am I to judge? Anyway what I'm trying to say is I'm never going to mention Wolverine on this blog, ever. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">City People</span> is a Will Eisner sketch-book about his perennial subject, New York City. It's mostly made up of short vignettes grouped by their sensory imperative, for example, a section of smell and the city, a section on the relationship between the city and sound. Some of them are very clever, and show that even when he was just sketching around Eisner was a master-- working the kind of sensory detail difficult to pin down even in poetry or prose (who can really write well about smell, or taste?) into his overwhelmingly visual medium. Of course, when you deal with Eisner these days you have to be prepared for some frankly pretty embarrassing sexual and racial stereotypes, and I felt particularly appalled by some of his gags in this one. Still, definitely worthy of a look for anyone already familiar with Eisner's more meaty works. Working in this milieu he occasionally takes on a lightness and flexibility of line that reminds me of Harvey Kurtzman, and is really cool to see.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">2. The Magus of the North, Isaiah Berlin.</span> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfciIjQlubLJY6rKhErKgbZyII2xZPbZiM_btNAxbR9_eF8Kqf9n9JzjTED54uk9yZEJS-weLZ62ffxiX-nbdeP8OqllvyBfASM0jkOBtvngx0LRwc8IOeYV9UZqa0AgvufQyZev-bv5s/s1600-h/berlin.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfciIjQlubLJY6rKhErKgbZyII2xZPbZiM_btNAxbR9_eF8Kqf9n9JzjTED54uk9yZEJS-weLZ62ffxiX-nbdeP8OqllvyBfASM0jkOBtvngx0LRwc8IOeYV9UZqa0AgvufQyZev-bv5s/s320/berlin.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443710727994815458" /></a><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(The version I'm writing about is an earlier edition, published on its own-- I'm not sure if the above version is the full text of what I'm talking about.)</span><br />I think I already talked about this last month, for some reason. That's not right, this was definitely read in February. Anyway, this was a relatively brief essay on the Counter-Enlightenment writer and polemicist Johann Georg Hamann, who I'd never heard of and probably neither have you. Fascinating though, in that although the two were friends, Hamann comes out as a sort of Bizarro Kant, taking Hume's skepticism of causality and warping into a balls-to-the-wall attack on rationalism and logic. "I look on proofs," Hamann wrote, "as a well bred girl looks at a love letter"; that is to say, with contemptuous fondness but absolute suspicion. <br /><br />Berlin does an excellent job of cramming into less than 200 pages a brisk assessment of Hamann's broad and obscurantist bibliography while tracing the lines of his influence through Herder and Goethe up to the populist and anti-intellectual roots of 20th century fascism. Hamann, as a kind of ur-Romantic and mystic, is a kind of frightening figure in that despite the obvious flaws in his arguments and the terrifying intensity of his loathing for reason, everything he says has a compelling aesthetic weight. Its easy to hate the militant philosophy of Mussolini or Hitler, but being forced to confront their more benign great-grandfather is a good excuse to re-assess your assumptions. Unfortunately this book doesn't seem to be in print anymore, but I think you can find it in some specific Berlin anthology. I don't know, I'll look into it.<br /><br /><br />***~~I'd just like to interject here that I just found out on the New Yorker book blog that the guys who did Logicomix are doing a GN on Levi-Strauss and structuralism, AWWWW YEAHHHHHH SO PSYCHED~~***<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">3. The Earliest English Poems, Michael Alexander (trans., ed.)</span> <br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDpKmtn2iFL-JEWNnRXtMKihYT7JaJ1f619C_tWBuHXrON-hCgt-_peZLddE9J_LrfYBuiwmPu2AiFrCkHIukivxnj2Eg1H-8TYshY3pV0WCigdKN6x9S3zC7g3ZtEVDwRVZbQrlDUdGA/s1600-h/penguin-earliest-english-poems.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 202px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDpKmtn2iFL-JEWNnRXtMKihYT7JaJ1f619C_tWBuHXrON-hCgt-_peZLddE9J_LrfYBuiwmPu2AiFrCkHIukivxnj2Eg1H-8TYshY3pV0WCigdKN6x9S3zC7g3ZtEVDwRVZbQrlDUdGA/s320/penguin-earliest-english-poems.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443712026363243058" /></a><br />Alright, anyway. I picked this up at my favorite bookstore in Phoenixville (ok, basically the only game in town, but still an amazing place) on the $2.00 shelf, possibly to offset a friend of mine buying two used and soiled Tarot decks and possibly because I'd been eying the newer edition of this title for a little.<br /><br />I had some initial skepticism about Michael Alexander's translations-- apparently those Anglo-Saxons had quite a thing for late-period William Carlos Williams-- but the book won me over eventually. Alexander, while acknowledging his debt to Ezra Pound in some areas, succeeds in rendering these poems as products of an almost totally alien culture that at the same time stands at the foot of everything we've done since then. <br /><br />I was particularly moved by the poem "Deor," the monologue of an exiled bard without anything much left for him. The refrain "That went by; this may too." lends an eerily familiar Stoic flavor to the piece, and the last stanza is as softly chilling as Stanley Kunitz's "Old Cracked Tune":<br /><br /><blockquote>"Of myself in this regard I shall say this only:<br />that in the hall of the Heodenings I held long the makarship,<br />lived dear to my prince, Deor my name;<br />many winters I held this happy place<br />and my lord was kind. Then came Heorrenda,<br />whose lays were skillful; the lord of fighting-men<br />settled on him the estate bestowed once on me.<br /><br />That went by; this may too."</blockquote><br /><br />The anxieties of obsolescence and insignificance occupy an ominous spot in the mind of every writer I know, and every writer I've ever really loved-- Proust writes my favorite summing up of it in <span style="font-style:italic;">Swann's Way</span>; "At those times it seemed to me that I existed the same way other men did, that I would grow old, that I would die like them, and that among them I was simply one of those who have no aptitude for writing" -- so to hear those sentiments arising out of that remote universe was poignant and scary and beautiful. <br /><br />Michael Alexander's notes and introduction are equally valuable, combining a nice Oxfordy erudition with just the right note of the fanatic's idiosyncrasy (his advice to the reader to bellow, not just recite, the poems aloud I demurred from out of respect for the downstairs neighbors). A solid introduction to a fragmentary and elusive literature.<br /><br />Anyway I hope you guys like reading about Vikings because for some reason, this is only the beginning. February was Unofficial Viking-Fest 2010.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">4. Novels in Three Lines, Felix Feneon.</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_VJXvlfMd1g2cZazqHTHbA7wm26QP5b-oXTO-UvbjcZNBYy57uiMqqqc4b7iOBeF2TPwNsUeVF-VBlr6dZCaPXzBQmdw3Jj4Ng7sE9el5vpAihQHzVRXYizcvoZeOykg2cjfjmgnjirQ/s1600-h/feneon.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_VJXvlfMd1g2cZazqHTHbA7wm26QP5b-oXTO-UvbjcZNBYy57uiMqqqc4b7iOBeF2TPwNsUeVF-VBlr6dZCaPXzBQmdw3Jj4Ng7sE9el5vpAihQHzVRXYizcvoZeOykg2cjfjmgnjirQ/s320/feneon.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443712148267609730" /></a><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">5. The Tower, W.B. Yeats.</span> I read this out loud while getting my hair cut, getting really into it at parts, so much so that I'd start to slip down in the shitty office chair we'd dragged into the kitchen. "Stop squirming around," Abby kept saying, "you're getting hair all over the place, and you know, you make all of your food in this room." WHATEVER WOMAN THIS IS YEATS. <br /><br />I've always really enjoyed <span style="font-style:italic;">The Tower, </span> and will insist to my death-bed (maybe) that "Among Schoolchildren" and "Those Dancing Days Are Gone" are among Yeats' most perfect poems, and of course they're in there rubbing elbows with power-houses like "Leda and the Swan" and "Sailing to Byzantium." It's a lot of poetry for a slim and unassuming little book. As always it rewarded a reread, this time completely killing me with "A Man Young and Old," which I'd somehow failed to appreciate on any meaningful level before. Holy fuck everybody, I don't even know.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">6, 7, 8. Northlands, Brian Wood.</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt79rJB7HMhgLwh95iN8B2jnnMbDtrrU99SJ2P6_LSoRs1NV4DSFwGTvnuqIRk3StcVow_D_0PgmgqO3jQbbvxNv9WRCsNnluL7tqOstjaR4Kr9Uo9BFfO4s1Pva-C1OBy7D4_g7XkuIA/s1600-h/northlanders.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt79rJB7HMhgLwh95iN8B2jnnMbDtrrU99SJ2P6_LSoRs1NV4DSFwGTvnuqIRk3StcVow_D_0PgmgqO3jQbbvxNv9WRCsNnluL7tqOstjaR4Kr9Uo9BFfO4s1Pva-C1OBy7D4_g7XkuIA/s320/northlanders.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443712457730251266" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /> So here's where my ambiguity about comics crops up again. I like Brian Wood, I thought <span style="font-style:italic;">Demo</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Local </span>were really... acceptable. But I just don't really know. After reading the aforementioned Old English poems I began a three or four day infatuation with that culture that resulted in a lot of boring bullshit being added to my Amazon wishlist (if I ever actually order the "Domesday Book" please kill me, I don't need to be reading any 11th century censuses) and culminated in marathoning the first three volumes of Wood's <span style="font-style:italic;">Northlands </span>, a series taking a Wells Tower-esque aesthetic to various times and places in the "Viking Age." I can respect his obvious pleasure in jamming together genres and contexts to see what works (the first volume is a fairly straightforward revenge story about the Orkney Island in 980, the third is a "Fugitive" style manhunt story set during the occupation of Ireland, and the second a series of shorter pieces) but the material is wildly uneven.<br /><br /> Part of this can be reproach or praise laid on the shoulders of the artists. Davide Gianfelice draws a nice sword fight but his characters have all the expressiveness of a Saturday morning cartoon, while Vasilis Lolos lends the sparse one-issue "The Viking Art of Single Combat" a kind of kinetic poetry. Ryan Kelly as usual earns his paycheck, giving a gritty, punch-drunk patina to the longer form "The Cross & The Hammer," rendering its protagonist as simultaneously admirably tenacious and kind of fucking scary in the Toshiro Mifune or Lee Marvin mold.<br /><br />Thinking on it some more, I don't feel too bad about listing these slim TPBs here. Brian Wood is obviously cramming a lot of passion and love into these stories, and is pushing himself to areas untapped in his earlier, more satirical or realistic stories. I don't love it as much as I did his <span style="font-style:italic;">Local</span>, which I'd still hold up as a prime example of the capacity of graphic storytelling as a vehicle for contemporary short fiction, but every page sings with his enthusiasm for the project, which I definitely have to give props to.<br /><br />Later this week, hopefully Wednesday, I'll get the second third out of the way, from Norman Cohn on bloodthirsty Anabaptists to Elif Batuman on all kinds of good things.Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-48774248987054168692010-02-26T08:11:00.000-08:002010-02-26T08:13:15.517-08:00PS: Book LinkingI'd also like to mention that the more I think about it, the worse I feel about linking to Amazon with book titles. If there's any really good independent online bookstore to send traffic (haha, yeah, ok) to instead, I'd love to hear about them. For the time being I'm just going to start going with Powell's, I guess.Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-38857523856645602992010-02-26T07:49:00.000-08:002010-02-26T08:17:02.291-08:00The Body is a Thousand Arrows Pointing at Itself: Catie Rosemurgy's Exquisite Body-Horror Poetics<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3ujBXja-gEFZ5tAYohUmoZq3uE8c5EQkzIExbeTHDrYnt7OOuWCXc9E2b2QcYHUrOOCL_k20fOQlnh_zfenZd2LuvHqVraNRAMgFdch7gBcdNWgSPbO4z4tk_6z-RXSRP46anD6RMyHk/s1600-h/strangermanual.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3ujBXja-gEFZ5tAYohUmoZq3uE8c5EQkzIExbeTHDrYnt7OOuWCXc9E2b2QcYHUrOOCL_k20fOQlnh_zfenZd2LuvHqVraNRAMgFdch7gBcdNWgSPbO4z4tk_6z-RXSRP46anD6RMyHk/s320/strangermanual.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442586142387828930" /></a> <span style="font-weight:bold;">The Stranger Manual<span style="font-style:italic;"></span></span>, Catie Rosemurgy. Graywolf Press, 2010. $15.00 (95 pp)<br /><br /><br />"The sense of being crushed will once again be the source of the erotic in the story"<br /><br /><br />Slate magazine’s Chris Wilson recently <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/browbeat/archive/2010/02/11/can-new-yorker-poets-write-about-anything-besides-poetry.aspx">called out the New Yorker</a> for the solipsistic cliquiness of its poetry, finding, apparently, that over a quarter of the pieces printed in the weekly since 2008 are in some ways concerned with poetry itself. It’s easy to find something somewhat sad in that, a sense of people playing around in Plato’s cave, if Plato’s cave was stocked with Ogden Nash and Updike.<br /><br />Or, as Catie Rosemurgy puts it in “A Poem About Poetry by Miss Peach, Hobo/Provacateur,” “Poems about poetry are like bowls of sequined fake fruit—you can’t eat ‘em and you don’t want to, but they symbolize abundance on an affordable table in your home.” Rosemurgy’s second collection,<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781555975470-0"><span style="font-style:italic;"> The Stranger Manual</span></a> is from the complete opposite kind of the tracks, the wrong side, the side where misshapen women play Marx Brothers games with language and beauty and truth. There’s no room in it for even glancing at the local library.<br /><br />Rosemurgy’s poems are sordid and intensely visceral, constantly reminding the reader of the body’s essential temporality in a way best described as “icky.” The word, maybe, being “fleshy.” Her guide through the fictional town of Gold River, Miss Peach, is like a cartoon character sketched by John Waters or Cronenberg, a shambling shape plagued by outrageous health issues. In one poem we learn that she “…presents with an alternating overabundance/ and absence of bone,” and is “3’4” biscuit-shaped, powdery/ but incredibly adept at climbing trees.”<br /><br />Elsewhere, a neighbor opines “Someday I’ll find words for the dripping. Like rain mixed with teeth.” Rosemurgy’s eye fixates on the too-close, the uncomfortably naked—cuts of meat, warped bodies, objects dripping wet or viscous, “runny mixture”. The body becomes a strange and intimidating thing, foregrounding “the insanity expressed in the mechanics of the knee./ The winged desperation of the pelvis.” Sex is transformed into a kind of messy heap you’d want to politely nudge away with the toe of your shoe, “the love I needed massaged/ into my hamburger meat,” or “the sound of a cat unable to deliver her backlog of kittens/ because of the design failure of her own body.” Physical embodiment is taken on critically as a slapdash fix to some sort of engineering problem, and not a particularly successful one.<br /><br />For all that, the poems are light on their feet and often very funny. The point isn’t to look at the display set before us and recoil in disgust, but simply to recognize it as something discreet from our intellectual and social conceptions of the self. Miss Peach, almost monstrous in the poems narrated by neighbors, an object of skeeved out pity to her doctors, at times approaches the heroic, an absurd hero taking up arms against every molecule of freaky stuff going on under the skin: “I’ve got all these/ organs inside me and I can’t resist teasing them/ to see if they’ll go away.”<br /><br />The great work of alchemy in the collection, the element that swings it from amusing and disconcerting “American Grotesque” to something numinous in the strangeness of its truth, is exactly Miss Peach’s plurality of selves. She’s disgusting, sweaty, toothless, possibly with live animals living inside of her, but also a sexualizing if not quite sexualized figure, a master of her body and an impassioned gourmand of others’. Even more intriguing, she fulfills the role of town revolutionary, kicking down barriers of gender and aesthetic normality with a deft mutant foot. An early poem shows us Miss Peach at the mall seeking “a rosier nipple, a new front tooth,/ some pseudo bruises” and other accessories to ugliness. But beyond that, she’s dignified entirely by her lack of dignity, her peeling back of polite and beautiful curtains. Rosemurgy highlights the deep function of the appalling and the blasphemous as a sanctified role: “We thank our monsters for letting us invent them. They let us feel dignified/ and unsutured by comparison.” <br /><br />This asymmetry ends up linked to the whole gamut of organic and generative powers, eating, fighting, growing, blooming—eating in particular is dealt with as an unsightly but important pact between mouth and mush. <br /><br />Rosemurgy engages with the unspoken and unspeakable bond between our pretences and the natural world with a lot more dirt under her fingernails than Wordsworth or Heine or even a relatively “earthy” poet like Gary Snyder. Her poems seem to say fuck the flowers and the fields, nature is what’s going on wrong in my intestines and in my brain, and what’s going right. It’s every sub-cellular process that tyrannizes causality and lets us sleep with werewolves, if we so choose, as Miss Peach does. It’s what we’ve got, ugly as it is. Oh well. “The sense of being crushed will, once again,/ be the source of the erotic in the story,” she writes. And elsewhere, “we’re all so damn beautiful.” It’s a heavy theme, but Rosemurgy attacks it with the light touch of the completely natural, and an unerring sense for tossing out perfect aphorisms. <span style="font-style:italic;">The Stranger Manual</span> is a strange book of poetry, with wild swings in tone and more weight in its mouth than it can safely chew, but it is electric with wit and conviction and humanity. As Miss Peach is to Gold River, Rosemurgy sets herself as to the contemporary poetry scene; iconoclastic, vulgar, and an anarchically brilliant challenge.Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-83877480562104099372010-02-24T10:47:00.000-08:002010-02-24T16:20:19.894-08:00Nabokov's Genital Cabinet<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjulhRovjCN7FSMH3aiMwEM9qtx8wQp9EWZz7oXwu4RVPbhpe9C30WY5axuv2-tv-hddTZqh-TMQPQKwQq2y-VnmyLPyUTiRoiAqIw8BRhJ3sW6bNZfxv6k5lkVgpdXfvLrrSj1AkOl5U/s1600-h/Macleay+Butterflies_web+450.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 220px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjulhRovjCN7FSMH3aiMwEM9qtx8wQp9EWZz7oXwu4RVPbhpe9C30WY5axuv2-tv-hddTZqh-TMQPQKwQq2y-VnmyLPyUTiRoiAqIw8BRhJ3sW6bNZfxv6k5lkVgpdXfvLrrSj1AkOl5U/s320/Macleay+Butterflies_web+450.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441902175912515282" /></a><br />Recently, on Nick Hanford's <a href="http://manofmanyfrowns.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/resurrection-and-value/">interesting and sexy new blog</a>, he raised some questions about the meaning of "value" in art:<br /><br /><blockquote>"But value? It seems to have a completely different feel. It’s not a fluid word or even really malleable. The only way it changes is if one is looking at the physical or the emotional. But the word still can be traced directly back to “worth.” The word has this tactile attachment that one can feel and know. There’s something inherent in the word “value” that is traced back to worth. Something that has value must have worth. It doesn’t always have to be a monetary worth, but maybe a sentimental or emotional worth.<br /><br />"So what would they shift the meaning of this word to? I can’t even wrap my head around what value would mean if it didn’t have a direct tie to worth. Maybe they are simply talking of a shift from the main monetary definition of value to that of a more emotional attachment. Get away from the spectacle of value, if that makes any sense."</blockquote><br /><br />This got me to thinking about the precise value of beauty, or rather, what intrinsic qualities authors look for when they go out spelunking for Keats' elusive siamese twins Beauty & Truth. First of all, looked at in the typical sense, as a pair of intertwined and codependent <span style="font-style:italic;">eidos</span> or whatever you want to call them, it seems to me that they fall apart into abstraction. We're not Catholic priests here, we can take a teeny little step back from the mystic angle and try to puzzle out what the exact relationship is-- at which point the polite Romantic applause stops and people start getting angry.<br /><br />Is beauty a quality of truth? Is something beautiful because it conforms to the pattern of the universe, because it reflects the mysterious symmetry and sublime of objective reality? I think Carl Sagan would agree, and any person with an operating heart has to admit that even a cursory browse of <a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100222.html">NASA's picture of the day gallery</a> yields some truly breath-taking images.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQLOXbHveMLua7KABfqZdepB1lawyqOAkFvibrsToEsLAz8vczHDElcw7DTFKYod0DN7-9ygvWdGglBoQZTriadsCBFGgsMi4gQNcJmAb_PXDKyy86uUawY3sFS_LLIfEYZlwobfHJMXA/s1600-h/astronomy+picture+of+the+day-2004.03.05.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 282px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQLOXbHveMLua7KABfqZdepB1lawyqOAkFvibrsToEsLAz8vczHDElcw7DTFKYod0DN7-9ygvWdGglBoQZTriadsCBFGgsMi4gQNcJmAb_PXDKyy86uUawY3sFS_LLIfEYZlwobfHJMXA/s320/astronomy+picture+of+the+day-2004.03.05.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441901575714481570" /></a><br /><br />But where does that leave art, where does that leave <span style="font-style:italic;">us</span>? Is our role as critical and aesthetic and feeling audience important in some way, as Kant might say after I don't know, I guess like 6,000 pages? And if that's the case, doesn't that make truth subordinate to beauty instead of the other way around?<br /><br />These are the kinds of questions that tend to bring any kind of engaging conversation to a halt because let's be real, they rarely ever lead anywhere. People get irritated, or more likely, they get bored, and the subject gets dropped. Discussed in a vacuum, things get boring or pedantic fast. However, when a writer or thinker of any kind sits down and starts to approach either of those two poles, it seems to me that some kind of commitment has to be made. In other words, whether that definition is articulated consciously or not, some meaning of "value" is hazarded. Beneath the surface of all art of pursuit of truth, the dialogue is going on.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwGl2CXUE_RuQWDyApmBl5Dovmt8L6nmHSm3ZQZB0Oh1JnlqFQVq4iZlEy0OKBPla5nze-6-Bv8wpqCSAx_ADkOsoWDMPoNPm-CMQVg3IG3zkHa5Wxuu2d3xwqXAQ9tpoAefJZGzcWjBc/s1600-h/pushkin.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 251px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwGl2CXUE_RuQWDyApmBl5Dovmt8L6nmHSm3ZQZB0Oh1JnlqFQVq4iZlEy0OKBPla5nze-6-Bv8wpqCSAx_ADkOsoWDMPoNPm-CMQVg3IG3zkHa5Wxuu2d3xwqXAQ9tpoAefJZGzcWjBc/s320/pushkin.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441901744184357618" /></a><br /><br />What interests me, in particular, is the danger of dogmatism that accompanies the writer who is unwilling to work within a tentative and sinuous framework of truth and beauty. Translation, something I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog before, is a good testing ground for sussing out an author's stance, and lately I've been kind of hung up on the unique risks in translating "Eugene Onegin." Onegin, as a verse novel, and a formal verse novel at that, has a weightier commitment to sense and style then somebody like, I don't know, Basho, who has seen fit to be <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Barley-Haiku-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140444599/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040639&sr=8-8">squashed</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Haiku-Versions-Basho-Buson/dp/0880013516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040659&sr=8-1">stretched</a> and wrestled into <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Basho-Complete-Haiku-Matsuo/dp/4770030630/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040639&sr=8-1">procrustean syllable arrangements</a> ever since sickly white people started noticing Japan, which in my amateur estimation was roughly around the time Pokemon came out (1863? 1864?).<br /><br />Anyway, if you don't know, "Eugene Onegin" is two things. One, its an incredibly tightly plotted and cleverly meta-narrative story about intrigue and duels and being a poseur and/or a poet, complete with dream sequences and Laurence Sterne-esque tricks. Two, its a series of hundreds of exquisitely crafted sonnets following, with a few exceptions, the fascinating AbAbCCddEffEgg (the capital letters being masculine rhymes, the lower cases feminine). To the immense credit of the handful of guys who've tried their hands at the piece, including <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eugene-Penguin-Classics-Alexander-Pushkin/dp/0140448039/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040806&sr=1-1">Charles Johnston</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eugene-Onegin-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199538646/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040783&sr=1-1">James Falen</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eugene-Penguin-Classics-Alexander-Pushkin/dp/0140448101/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040834&sr=1-1">Stanley Mitchell</a> (my favorite) and the tireless <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eugene-Onegin-Novel-Alexander-Pushkin/dp/0465020941/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040840&sr=1-1">Douglas Hoftstadter</a>, most translations manage to stick fairly faithfully to the stanza-by-stanza road-map of content and plot, while preserving Pushkin's meter and rhyme.<br /><br />Personally, I think that's impressive, and I think it can be pretty fun to admire the verbal acrobatics required at various points to get our stodgy language to where it needs to go, as well as to scoff at some of the lamer reaches (in Mitchell, for example, "It's only by the by I'm saying/ That once a slander gets expressed/ By some foul liar in a garret/ To whom the monde awards a carrot," and "Tatiana" ends up rhyming with "manner" way too many times, and...). I guess in that respect I think preserving the beauty of the language at the expense of the literal truth of what Pushkin's words signified is ok.<br /><br />Nabokov disagreed.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpgRC-J0MRjsoysytC0V3H-jFXV-4TRKW43tuF8n7osZldqkdyilrcmZqz6A4SK4_xkrk45ByEsJvdyEq6RLbPoggNQZRKXg-3fWkNJXXHZNMDk6YW2JVzhVJRVEXfREB3L0mBaENNrlw/s1600-h/vladimir_nabokov1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 256px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpgRC-J0MRjsoysytC0V3H-jFXV-4TRKW43tuF8n7osZldqkdyilrcmZqz6A4SK4_xkrk45ByEsJvdyEq6RLbPoggNQZRKXg-3fWkNJXXHZNMDk6YW2JVzhVJRVEXfREB3L0mBaENNrlw/s320/vladimir_nabokov1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441901912302966818" /></a><br /><br />Now I don't know if you've ever gone on YouTube or whatever and looked up some of his old TV interviews, or read the essay collection <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strong-Opinions-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0679726098/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040880&sr=1-1">"Strong Opinions,"</a> but it seems like the dude more or less made a second career out of having, well, strong opinions, but his argument against these creative translations of Onegin was on a totally different level. Fed up with the existing Arndt translation, he took it upon himself to produce a new version, as literal as possible. If the rhyme and strict meter wound up as stylistic casualties, that was fine by him; the substance would remain, in blank verse as opposed to the classic Pushkin sonnet, as it turned out.<br /><br />From here, opinions differ: some people will tell you that his translation, including in its four volumes a facsimile of the first Russian edition and a huge fuckton of notes, is the crowning achievement of his scholarly career. Others will tell you that it was a huge waste of his talents, and beyond that, a pretty wretched translation. Not even a particularly <span style="font-style:italic;">accurate</span> one, as accused in Edmund Wilson's <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/12829">legendary take down of the project in the pages of the NYRB</a>.<br /><br />Setting aside whether a really REALLY strict translation of anything is even possible, from both a practical perspective and an, I don't know, Wittgeinsteinny linguistic/logical perspective, my own primary impression of the project is the scale of it, and the tragicomic grandeur of its failure. Nabokov took a verse novel weighing in at less than 200 pages and somehow extracted, at my estimate, around 1,600 pages. The language, faithful or not, lacks the lightness, the quickness, the at least <span style="font-style:italic;">spiritual</span> exactitude of even the most loose translations. Despite the universally lauded quality and depth of his footnotes and the increasing popularity of blank and free verse in American poetry, is it mere coincidence that you can just roll into a bookstore and leave with one of several strictly rhymed and metrical Onegins while Nabokov's rough beast has been out of print for fuck, who knows, decades?<br /><br />Could it be that in taking a stand for "truth" over "beauty," Nabokov missed that maybe Keats was right, jesus christ, maybe the two <span style="font-style:italic;">are </span> indissoluble, that the capital T Truth, the "value" in Pushkin's masterpiece lays less in whether you say a horse "sniffed" or "snorted" or "sensed at" the snow (depending, obv., on which Russian dictionary you're consulting) and more in the spirit of agility, irony and rapture captured in the book's intimidating network of rules and the deftness with which the translator moves among them? Could it be that all writers should just get Calvino's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Millennium-Charles-Lectures-1985-86-International/dp/0679742379/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267040929&sr=1-1">"Six Memos for the Next Millenium"</a> just fucking welded to their chests at birth for constant reference?<br /><br />I think Nabokov's admirable weakness in sticking to his epistemological guns is summed up in a story focusing on his more scientific side, that is his second life as a lepidopterist. He was a butterfly ace, as you probably know already, with a whole genus named after him. But just like in the literary world his reactionary tendencies were just as pronounced as his prodigious talents. Until the end of his life he was a hard-liner for the "good old ways" of lepidoptery. What this meant in practical terms was that in the face of mounting evidence he refused to concede the value of new ways of identifying different breeds, such as chromosome counting or genetic comparisons.<br /><br />For Vlady, when he went to find out what kind of butterfly he was looking at exactly, he went for the classics-- severing the genitalia and examining them under a microscope. If you go to the Harvard Museum of Natural History's comparative zoology wing you can still see his "genitalia cabinet," stocked with a morbid selection of tiny blue butterfly sex organs.<br /><br />I think that the implication here is heavy-handed enough without any kind of embellishment. Nabokov's aesthetic infatuation with butterflies and moths led to both beauty-- his gorgeous sketches and paintings of various specimens-- as well as truth, in the meticulous accuracy of those same portraits as well as the fidelity of his specimens themselves. However, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, it seems like in this microcosm either truth must be sacrificed to beauty or vice versa. You can look at a butterfly, see the light play off its wings, watch it duck and weave over the flowers like a boxer, and never be sure of its genus or species. Or, you can catch it, jar it, pin those sapphire wings to cardboard and with steady hands clip the literal seat of its creative powers-- for beauty's sake, in other words, you are invited to destroy beauty. Observation collapses the wave. I don't know.<br /><br />"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen."<br /><br />Ok, or:<br /><br />To express the truth in beauty, perhaps, you occasionally need to castrate what you can't express.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghKKE8bQoNBcMP2nQgKV1IY4Q1aSuDUdPpaKBvoXXQFZHgiLadACix-paocc2aCvru-BPA_mUn1m9DIhx7tEtwfi1V5vSMxroZPeyK5eCRXeBLlYsYXoQbFI5bRiMSuslhtTLB0pvkrjY/s1600-h/karner-blue.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 224px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghKKE8bQoNBcMP2nQgKV1IY4Q1aSuDUdPpaKBvoXXQFZHgiLadACix-paocc2aCvru-BPA_mUn1m9DIhx7tEtwfi1V5vSMxroZPeyK5eCRXeBLlYsYXoQbFI5bRiMSuslhtTLB0pvkrjY/s320/karner-blue.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441902049379770850" /></a>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-83979121679363439592010-02-08T08:09:00.000-08:002010-02-08T08:22:42.786-08:00Some QuotesHere are some good passages from what I've been reading lately. Hope they're of some interest.
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<br />"Out of writing soon came the need for an ancillary object, the book. Borges says:
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<br /> 'Of all man's instruments, the most astonishing is, without any doubt, the book. The others are extensions of the body. The microscope, the the telescope, are extensions of his eyes; the telephone an extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of his arm. But the book is something else: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.'
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<br />The book gives substance to human memory. The book, despite being portable, objectifies memory: it is a rational unity that uses audiovisual, printed, or electronic means to represent mnemonic and linguistic will. In the revolutionary stop from orality to writing and, above all, in that significant process where the book triumphs as a cult object, what really takes center stage is a more certain model of permanence that codifies sensibility and translates it into uniform, legitimate states. The book is, then, a proposition that seeks to configure everything in terms of reason and not in terms of chaos. The idea that the book is something more than a physical structure that supports collective or individual memory has generated powerful metaphors.
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<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The book as talisman: </span>Saint John Chrysostome recounts that in fourth-century Antioch, people hung codices around their necks to ward off the powers of evil.
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The book of life: </span>Belief in a divine book that contains the names of those who will be saved in the Last Judgement, as Saint John testifies.
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The book as nature: </span>Plotinus speaks of the stars as if they were letters eternally written in the heavens.
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The book of the world. </span>It makes of the universe a bibliographic cosmos.
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The world exists only to become a book: </span>This was the belief of the poet Stephane Mallarme.
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The book as person: </span>As Walt Whitman proposes in his "Songs of Farewell."
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The book as shared dream."
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<br />-</span>Fernando Baez, "A Universal History of the Destruction of Books"
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<br /> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/christopherschaeffer/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:documentproperties> <o:template>Normal</o:Template> <o:revision>0</o:Revision> <o:totaltime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:pages>1</o:Pages> <o:words>111</o:Words> <o:characters>637</o:Characters> <o:lines>5</o:Lines> <o:paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs> <o:characterswithspaces>782</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:version>11.1280</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:donotshowrevisions/> <w:donotprintrevisions/> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:usemarginsfordrawinggridorigin/> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:""; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">“…for to express is to use symbols, and symbols limit, abstract, cut reality into arbitrary slices, destroy it for the sake of trying to communicate the incommunicable.”</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-style: italic;">(describing the anti-systematic aesthetic of Johann Georg Hamann)</span>
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Hamann’s new aesthetics—here too he showed originality of a higher order—is founded on the proposition that the language and the form of art and indissolubly one with the art itself, as against the dominant aesthetic theorists—Boileau or Batteux or Gottsched and their disciples—who maintained that rules existed for the purpose of rendering an identical “content” into the best or most appropriate “vehicle” or medium, and so distinguished content, form, style, language, as independent and manipulable constituens of a compound substance—something for Hamann was one indissoluble “organic” entity."</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p style="font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal">(more about Hamann-- doesn't this sound like a close precursor to McLuhan's "the medium is the message?")</p><p style="font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p><p style="font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/christopherschaeffer/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:documentproperties> <o:template>Normal</o:Template> <o:revision>0</o:Revision> <o:totaltime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:pages>1</o:Pages> <o:words>23</o:Words> <o:characters>133</o:Characters> <o:lines>1</o:Lines> <o:paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs> <o:characterswithspaces>163</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:version>11.1280</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:donotshowrevisions/> <w:donotprintrevisions/> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:usemarginsfordrawinggridorigin/> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:""; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--StartFragment--> </p><p class="MsoNormal">-Isaiah Berlin, "The Magus of the North"</p><p class="MsoNormal">
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<br />Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-68611384303987227752010-02-02T08:16:00.000-08:002010-02-02T13:09:37.084-08:00Reading in January '10: Or, I Can't Believe I Haven't Been Fired YetOk, so I promised some people that I'd throw up a little recap of what I've read this month. I was about as surprised as you might be to find that I've read around 25 things this month. I don't remember working very much, but presumably I found time to squeeze all of that into my life as well.<br /><br />I'm pretty happy with the balance between fiction, poetry, and true-facts elucidation I managed to strike this month. Sure, there might be too many comic books (or "graphical" "novels" if you're full of deserved shame), but I can look back at this month of reading and say it probably hasn't made me a <span style="font-style: italic;">worse </span>person.<br /><br />1. Gilead- Marilynne Robinson. For a few years I had written this off as something that, despite almost universal acclaim, I would never read and never want to read. It sounded, essentially, like Christian apologetics in a folksy Garrison Keiller-type small-town setting, which to me is more or less like proffering up a bag full of vomit with a Pulitzer sticker attached to it.<br /><br />I can now look back and say I was being a totally self-righteous and small-minded jerk. Gilead is a great book. Robinson delves into the religious psychology with an unexpected tenderness and nuance, showing her protagonist John Ames as, far from the fanatic I expected, a man living in a small world dignifying himself with the encompassing consolation of an idea. The third-act tension between Ames and prodigal-son-cum-unbeliever Jack Boughton also avoids slipping into the kind of dialectic where the author inevitably is forced into showing some kind of agenda. No-- their eventual "confrontation" is a masterpiece of generosity and authorial largesse.<br /><br />2. The Revival- James Sturm. A short piece-- let's call it a graphic novella-- about the late 18th century revival movement in America. Sturm is heavy on the atmosphere, with lots of tightly framed shots of bare tree limbs and impoverished, desperate faces, rendered in thick, scratchy black and white. He doesn't give his characters much room to breathe or flex, but he isn't interested in a character piece. The story moves like a Nerval piece, a teetering pile of unsettling omens leading to a psychological collapse.<br /><br />It was interesting to read this right on the back of Gilead, which provided a much more accommodating view of the American religious life. Telling, maybe, that Robinson's book takes place in the endless vistas of the Mid-West while Sturm's is almost entirely cloistered in forest, his action packed into claustrophobia.<br /><br />3. Dictation- Cynthia Ozick. I'd been meaning to read some Ozick for awhile, and found this quartet of novellas in the Phoenixville library. The title story, about the dictationists of Joseph Conrad and Henry James, seems to have gotten the most nods from the critical community, but I found it relatively slight and showy. I was much more interested in the other three, which also show off Ozick's urbane but cozy elegance but are less afraid to dip into ambiguity.<br /><br />"Actors" is a kind of Jewish ghost-story dealing with Yiddish theatre, method acting, and the guilt of Sephardic integration. Whether it functions as tragedy or farce may depend entirely on the reader's mood upon reaching the last three or four pages, which I have no problem with.<br /><br />"At Fumicaro" is less adept and occasionally starts to look like an over-written rehash of "Death in Venice," but the sweltering prose fits the tropical and sexual luridness. Basically, Catholic journalist comes to Italy, sees the sights, seduces adolescent maid, fucks up hugely. The story is slight and the writing often over-the-top but as a psychological study akin to Nabokov on PCP, its fun and it has its moments.<br /><br />"What Happened to the Baby" was the stand-out story of the collection, a bleak fable about what language does to us. It wasn't until this, tucked away at the end of the book, that I really came to appreciate Ozick's grasp of pacing and the allotment of crucial information.<br /><br />4. The Golem's Mighty Swing- James Sturm. Sturm again with a look at Jewishness and baseball at the turn of the last century. I'm always fascinated by late 19th/early 20th century baseball, so I appreciated the care he takes in getting the details of traveling league life, and the room he gives the game to expand and enact itself. The Jewish material was a little less masterful-- it never really seemed to come into its own. If anything, he seemed to have more to say about black players of the time than Jewish ones.<br /><br />5. failure- Philip Schultz. Schultz has some really gorgeous and bitter poetry here. I guess "long poem about 9/11" is just about the most tedious thing to here about these days, but Schultz pulls it off with a 50+ page rhapsody on dog-walking, New York, race, and, well, failure.<br /><br />6. Fear and Trembling- Soren Kierkegaard. Special K has a great rhetorical touch and its fascinating to look at the very religious roots of existentialism, but Christ if some of his points seemed to just slog under too many conceits. I have no idea what he was talking about with that whole "merman" story.<br /><br />7. Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography- Chris Bachelder. Bachelder is a novelist who may have slipped under your radar. He has two novels you might stumble upon in a used bookstore (I think they're out of print), "U.S.!" and "Bear v. Shark" which are both quite funny, and occasionally will have an essay in The Believer. Its a shame, because he's one of the sharpest satirists working today. This one is available as an ebook via McSweeney's, and takes the form of an obsequiously second-person manual to the eponymous virtual tour photography. The social commentary is a little flatter in this novel, perhaps because he sticks to what have become fairly safe targets, but his characters are, god forbid, a little richer and fuller. Its free so whatever, go look at it.<br /><br />8. Codex Seraphnianus- Luigi Serafini<br /><br />9. Transparent Things- Vladimir Nabokov.<br /><br />10. Eating Animals- Jonathan Safron-Foer. Ok, so I came into this pretty committed to not eating animals, and pretty committed to not liking Jonathan Safron-Foer. So, a guy I don't like telling me things I already know. Believe it or not, I enjoyed this. JSF recognizes that he's a storyteller, not a philosopher or sociologist, so he gets right into the gristle (pun?), dredging up the more visceral appeals to emotion and good taste that more "thinky" thinkers like Singer sometimes shy away from. He occasionally gives a shot at dietary bi-partisanship by giving voice to some of the more ethical people in the farming or slaughter industries, but against the wall of evidence here and elsewhere it feels a bit pointless. Better than I expected by far.<br /><br />11. Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror- John Ashbery. Ashbery. Ashbery Ashbery. What to say. I sat down to discuss this collection with what I would consider a pretty fucking sharp group of people and mostly we were all equally baffled. The poems are beautiful but they seem to violently resist explication or even simple commentary. So, what's left to say? I liked them. They were good. Ok.<br /><br />12. Evening Man- Frederick Seidel. My introduction to the sordid poetic universe of Frederick Seidel, where everyone is either an old white billionaire, or a beautiful 20-something desperate to fuck an old white billionaire, or a motorcycle being ridden across the planet by an old white billionaire. For all of that, I liked it alot. He makes himself out to be such a loathsome old piece of shit that I'm certain he's engaging in some sort of meta-persona, and his relationship with language reminds me of nothing so much as his often cited patron saint, Fred Astaire. Elegant, urbane, rotten to the core.<br /><br />13. Antipoetry: How to Look Better & Feel Good- Nicanor Parra<br /><br />14. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time- Marie Howe<br /><br />15. The World Doesn't End- Charles Simic<br /><br />16. The New Kings of Non-Fiction- Ira Glass (editor)<br /><br />17. Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture- Daniel Radosh<br /><br />18. Blood Dazzler- Patricia Smith<br /><br />19. this emotion was a little e-book- Tao Lin<br /><br />20. The Savage Detectives- Roberto Bolano<br /><br />21. Ooga-Booga- Frederick Seidel<br /><br />22. Distant Star- Roberto Bolano<br /><br />23. The Last Interview- Roberto Bolano<br /><br />24. And So- Joel Brouwer<br /><br />25. Fagin the Jew- Will Eisner<br /><br />26. The Dreamer- Will Eisner<br /><br />27. Life on Another Planet- Will Eisner<br /><br />28. City People- Will Eisner<br /><br />29. The Magus of the North- Isaiah Berlin. A riveting novel about the elf-master's sacred girdle. No, not really, but that is a pretty atrocious title. This is actually a short study on a German counter-Enlightenment thinker named Johann Georg Hamman. Berlin makes a pretty sound case for the guy as one of the forefathers of the Romantic movement as well as the potent blend of anti-intellectualism and populism that eventually fermented into fascism. He keeps it snappy despite being tasked with summing up an extremely obscurantist and fragmentary writer's whole conception of language, knowledge, and creative genius in about 120 pages, without falling into pop-philosophy gloss. Recommended if you have an interest in de Maistre or Vico or those guys, or just a general curiosity about what else was going on amidst the fine commotion of Hume and Kant and all those fancy fellas.Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-25829835634313893372010-01-03T18:16:00.000-08:002010-01-03T18:29:17.448-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 12December! I remember very little of it. West Chester became unbearable, and so did the drive from it to Newtown. So I moved. I'm in Phoenixville now. I'm not illiterate yet. Life continues.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">December</span></div><div><br /></div><div>142. "The Alcoholic"- Jonathan Ames. People keep telling me I'd like "Bored to Death." Maybe. I liked this autobiographical little GN Ames wrote, so perhaps I'll give his show a shot.</div><div><br /></div><div>143. "And Her Soul Out of Nothing"- Olena K. Davis. O.K. Davis is a great poet who told me she was going to stop writing for awhile. Apparently she has a new book coming out, which is great, I'm glad she's back. Anyway, some people prefer this, her first book, to her second. I'm not sure I do. This one is definitely more traditional, and don't get me wrong, it is very lovely and honest and ferociously energetic. I just like the other one a bit more.</div><div><br /></div><div>144. "The Republic of Plato"- Plato. Another one that improves vastly upon rereading. This time, less as a set of philosophical points and more as a story. As a kind of weird bildungsroman for Glaucon, it holds up surprisingly well, and ends up subverting a lot of the more troubling passages. Chew on that Karl Popper.</div><div><br /></div><div>145. "Days of Reading" -Marcel Proust. Fell off on my Proust habits in 2009. Oh well. I bought this little Penguin compilation of essays for a friend, left it in my car, and read the whole thing during a horrific traffic jam. Frustrating in that it contains selections of a long article about Saint-Beuve, which apparently isn't available anywhere in its entirety.</div><div><br /></div><div>146. "The Book of Genesis"- R. Crumb. Did you know Crumb apparently had a band back in the 90's? What a fantastic guy. Well, this book is something else.</div><div><br /></div><div>147. "Mind"- John R. Searle. I love Searle's enthusiasm, and his willingness to tackle a problem from the very bottom of it, but I had some qualms with this book. Some of his "conclusions," particularly his solution to the mind-body problem, ended up seeming more like rephrasings of the original question, and he did kind of a rush job on some of the classic objections to structuralism.</div><div><br /></div><div>148. "The Actual"-Saul Bellow. Oh, a book by Saul Bellow, this will probably be goo-SYKE THIS NOVELLA IS TERRIBLE.</div><div><br /></div><div>149. "The Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV"- I love the Paris Review Interviews, and was surprised and delighted to see that they're still putting them out. Highlights in this one include Jack Kerouac (what is he even talking about) Wodehouse (almost tragic) and Ezra Pound. Murakami's is a little depressing.</div><div><br /></div><div>150. "Too Cool To Be Forgotten"- Alex Robinson. I like Robinson a lot, but even I thought the premise of this sounded terrible. I gave it a shot anyway, and I didn't regret it. Doesn't top any of his earlier stuff, but its fun and has its moments.</div><div><br /></div><div>151. "The Burial at Thebes"- Seamus Heaney. Heaney's lean, mean, translation of Antigone. I would love to see a production of this. </div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-19018678989424030462010-01-03T16:17:00.000-08:002010-01-03T18:21:39.701-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 11: Morrissey SongsNovember was given over to a promotion and an office 60 miles away and tons of paperwork. No joy from November. <div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">November</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>128. "Sex at Noon Taxes"-Sally Van Doren. It's a palindrome, see? Ha ha. Like the title, these poems often favor cleverness over any kind of resonance or clarity, but there are a few that struck me. Recommended to me by Jehanne Dubrow for some reason, I don't know.</div><div><br /></div><div>129. "Time and Materials" -Robert Hass. Finished the same day. A poet I admire a lot gave me his copy of this for free because he hated it so much. Weird, because I really liked it. Hass is not afraid to get his Adrienne Rich on and be loud and gauche about political engagement, which I sort of admire. Plus, nobody works food into poems like Hass.</div><div><br /></div><div>130. "The Land of Green Plums" -Herta Muller. I guess I'm the only person alive who gave a shit at all about our latest Nobel Laureate. This was a strange read, lyric and fluid in terms of language but brutal and ugly in terms of subject matter. Reads like a kind of forced dream. I'd read more of hers.</div><div><br /></div><div>131. "The Catcher in the Rye" -J.D. Salinger. I've always been a little embarrassed that I never read this. I read all of his other stuff, sure, but by that time I felt like I was a bit old to catch up with Holden Caulfield. I'm glad I did, he's a great character and anyone who can't remember why people love him in high-school isn't being honest with themselves about what being in high-school was like.</div><div><br /></div><div>132. "Incognegro"- Mat Johnson. Nice little period piece about an undercover reporter in 1930's... South Carolina? Slighter than I expected going off of the subject matter, but decent.</div><div><br /></div><div>133. "Laika"- Nick Abadzis. A book where the dog dies...</div><div><br /></div><div>134. "A Month in the Country" -J.L. Carr. If I see an NYRB I haven't heard of, and its cheap, I usually grab it and give it a shot. This was another very quick read, and it felt like it was written a couple of decades before it actually was. There are several passages about a medieval wall painting that are really haunting and memorable, and Carr evokes a feeling of regretful nostalgia masterfully.</div><div><br /></div><div>135. "The Berliner Ensemble Thanks You All" -Marcel Dzama. A nice sketch-book/scrapbook thing by the acclaimed (I guess?) water-colorist. I'm not sure if I "get it" but I liked it.</div><div><br /></div><div>136. "Asterios Poly"- David Mazzuchelli. Brilliant, one of the best investigations of the processes of art and criticism I've read this year. Smart, witty, heartbreaking, blah blah, go buy it.</div><div><br /></div><div>137. "Sweeney Astray"- Seamus Heaney. I remembered the legend of Mad Sweeney from "At Swim Two-Birds," so it was nice to see Heaney's take on the source material. </div><div><br /></div><div>138. "Ulysses"- James Joyce. Always enjoy reading Ulysses, every time I come away with a different favorite part. This time I really fell in love with the whole cab shelter sequence.</div><div><br /></div><div>139. "This Will Kill You"- H.P. Newquist. One of my exes gave me a book about all the different ways there are to die, which is maybe not the most fond and tender kind of gift. Pretty funny, definitely very light.</div><div><br /></div><div>140. "A Very Bad Wizard" -Tamler Sommers. A terrific collection of interviews, many of them conducted for The Believer, about the neuroscience of ethics and other such topics. Really, really thought-provoking. Read a lot of this on Thanksgiving with some decent scotch. The amazing cover probably balances out the mediocre title.</div><div><br /></div><div>141. "More Information Than You Require" -John Hodgman. Some people think John Hodgman is funny, some people don't, and I don't know how to convince the latter that he is. You probably already know if you'd enjoy this book or not.</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-90595002999569640012010-01-03T12:13:00.000-08:002010-01-03T12:26:47.626-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 10My birthday happened, I bought myself an iPod touch and dabbled with ebooks or ereaders or fuck, whatever. Didn't stick because the Wordsworth freebie I downloaded was formatted badly and nothing good seemed to be free. OH WELL!<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">October</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>116. "From the Fever World" -Jehanne Dubrow. Much stronger second collection, much more cohesive and atmospheric. A wintery, sharp, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">prickling </span>collection of poem with sudden unexpected gasps of Sappho and Swedenborg. Met Dubrow a couple of times since reading this, super nice lady.</div><div><br /></div><div>117. "American Born Chinese" -Gene Luen Yang. Cute YA thing (I think?). Actually a bit unsure what demographic this is targeted. I think any early high-schooler who stumbled on it would be particularly well served, I guess.</div><div><br /></div><div>118. "AIDS and Its Metaphors" -Susan Sontag. My love-hate relationship with follow-ups to Sontag classics. I feel like this suffers because it builds much more on her cancer material than her TB material, which I felt was much more strained. Still, some very strong material on the politicalization of AIDs scares in the 80's.</div><div><br /></div><div>119. "Lunch Poems"- Frank O'Hara. O'Hara is one of my faves, and this is his him at his finest.</div><div><br /></div><div>120. "Anna Karenina"-Leo Tolstoy. Finished this around noon on my birthday, listening to Beirut, pretty perfect moment.</div><div><br /></div><div>121. "Chronicle, Volume One" -Bob Dylan. Really uneven, and he seems to have a special knack for skipping over the periods I want to read about the most. His stories about the early, struggling days of his career are much more compelling than "The adventures of Bob Dylan, wealthy curmedgeon."</div><div><br /></div><div>122. "Amsterdam"- Ian McEwan. Unexpectedly funny and farcical. Characters definitely existed in broad, broad strokes, but I can forgive that.</div><div><br /></div><div>123. "Nudge"- Richard H. Thaler. Another thing for work. Not really worthwhile for my purposes but who knows.</div><div><br /></div><div>124. "On Photography"- Susan Sontag. Sontag at the peak of her powers. The first time I read this it really changed the way I thought about sight as a constant contextualizing and indexical force. Made me more conscious of the implicit assumptions of gaze than a thousand million icy bell hooks stares. Reading it again was just a lot of fun, because I could appreciate how finely wrought her arguments are beneath the first shock of them.</div><div><br /></div><div>125. "The Good Person of Szechwan"- Bertolt Brecht. Reread this when I found out one of my brothers from school was directing a production of it. This edition also had a nice thick appendix covering Brecht's various revisions and rewrites, many of which were really, really fascinating, especially how he really made the protagonist's capitalism a lot more devious for American audiences, and his aborted plans to do a production of it set in Kingstown, Jamaica. Oh, its the Penguin classics edition, if you're interested.</div><div><br /></div><div>126. "Regarding the Pain of Others" -Susan Sontag. Again, a follow-up that fails to live up to its predecessor. Still, pretty good. I thought the "Three Guineas" material never went anywhere, though.</div><div><br /></div><div>127. "Wimbledon Green" -Seth. Seth is probably the best of his generation of cartoonists, and this little sketchbook novella shows that even at his most casual he knows how to block a story and set a tone like few others.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-77093729079595368932010-01-03T09:50:00.000-08:002010-01-03T10:04:03.907-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 9September mainly seemed to be dominated by Coetzee. Ok.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">September</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>104. "New Selected Poems of Steve Smith"-Stevie Smith. I'd picked this up in Fairfield, CT a couple of years ago after the Believer had an article about her. I read this en route to Philly, mostly, and enjoyed it a lot. Smith is an idiosyncratic poet, yes, but an immense one.</div><div><br /></div><div>105. "Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason" -Jessica Warner. A book about the gin acts in the 18th century. Should've been a pretty juicy subject but Warner for the most part plays it pretty dry, focusing a lot on the political and economic causes rather than the sociological effects. Which is fine, in hindsight, although a little disappointing at the time. She avoid a lot of sensationalism and really places the gin craze in a solid context. </div><div><br /></div><div>106. "Groundswell" -Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff. A book on Web 2.0 marketing or something that I had to read for work. Actually pretty good.</div><div><br /></div><div>107. "The Hardship Post" -Jehanne Dubrow. Some poems Abby had to read for a class, which I started reading as well. The first half really didn't impress me-- seemed like a pretty blatant Sexton rip-off-- but either the book found its feet, or I found its feet too late, and by the end I was really into what Dubrow was doing.</div><div><br /></div><div>108. "Diary of a Bad Year"- J.M. Coetzee. One of Coetzee's "this is a novel, but really, check out these essays" things. I can see why the guy from The Elegant Variations was so enthusiastic about this book, it was really lovely and did some nice formal flourishes.</div><div><br /></div><div>109. "Strangely Marked Metal" -Kay Ryan. Ryan's first book, I think, but not too far off from her later poems. A quick read, don't remember too much of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>110. "The Lives of Animals"- J.M. Coetzee. I read this, but shouldn't have, because...</div><div><br /></div><div>111. "Elizabeth Costello" -J.M. Coetzee. ...about a week later I read <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">this </span>which includes the previous book in its entirety along with a bunch of other Costello stories. Well, that's not fair-- "The Lives of Animals" includes some responses from scholars and thinkers, but they were pretty toss-away I felt. Anyway. I didn't really like Elizabeth Costello as a character very much, and didn't feel like J.M. Coetzee gave any of her foils much to present compelling counterpoints. </div><div><br /></div><div>112. "Spanish Poems of Love and Exile" -Kenneth Rexroth (trans.). A very tiny little City Lights pocket sized anthology. Read it in a park one afternoon, which was perfect for what it was. Interesting to read the author bios in the back-- when this was released apparently Pablo Neruda was not well-known in the states at all.</div><div><br /></div><div>113. "Permit Me Voyage" -James Agee. I love, love, love "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" so I decided to check out Agee's poetry. Ehh. It is pretty bad, as it turns out.</div><div><br /></div><div>114. "Waiting for the Barbarians" -J.M. Coetzee. More Coetzee. A much different world than the later stuff I read, but much more visceral and gut-punchy. Easy to see why this is where a lot of people start in on him.</div><div><br /></div><div>115. "The Black Dahlia"- James Ellroy. Read so much praise for "Blood's A Rover" that I decided to try Ellroy for myself. This was the only thing available at the nearest library, so I started with it. Better as a character piece than as a mystery, and in fact I found a lot of the "plot twists" near the end a distraction from Ellroy's spot-on sense of mood and place. I was impressed enough to go out and buy "American Tabloid" but apparently not impressed enough to actually read it. </div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-19103972414264897102010-01-03T09:00:00.000-08:002010-01-03T09:38:35.509-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 8More reading in Maine. I started in on my current job somewhere around late July, early August, so that began to cut into my time a bit as well. Near the end of the month, undergrad friends started filtering back into PA, so there was that, reconnecting with other people who gave a shit about poetry, things like that.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">August</span></div><div><br /></div><div>95. "HP and the Deathly Hallows" -J.K. Rowling. Overall, I went into Harry Potter for irony, left really enjoying the series. Really have no problem with kids being into this-- its good storytelling.</div><div><br /></div><div>96. "Inherent Vice" -Thomas Pynchon. A little disappointing. On its own, fun novel, amusing, but I expect more from Pynchon. Not as bad as Vineland, but a let down nonetheless.</div><div><br /></div><div>97. "To the Finland Station" -Edmund Wilson. Wilson's loving history of socialism, picked up from an anarchist bookstore of some kind in Brunswick. Great read marred by a few imperfections; namely, Wilson's available sources on the life of Lenin were definitely biased, and more importantly, Wilson mangles his interpretation of Hegel's Dialectic Materialism so badly that the surrounding 40 pages or so are just sucked into a black hole of misguidedness. However, it's all good-- if you read the Nabokov/Wilson letters this triggers a really good back and forth culminating with Nabokov summarizing the idea unbelievably concisely and elegantly.</div><div><br /></div><div>98. "Embryoyo" -Dean Young. McSweeney's had a sale and I'd never read any Dean Young, so I picked this up. A little disappointed. There were some strong poems in here, but a lot of fluff, or foam, I don't know, some insubstantial noodling.</div><div><br /></div><div>99. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"-Jonathan Safran Foer. Many, many people seem to like this book, and seemed to have found it weird that I hadn't read it, but I hated it. Foer seems to cheapen every heavy subject he touches on, and plays such tawdry manipulative tricks with his characters. Sorry everybody.</div><div><br /></div><div>100. "ABBA ABBA" -Anthony Burgess. A little novella about Keats dying in Rome, with a lengthy appendix of sonnets by Guiseppe Belli. Both parts were really interesting.</div><div><br /></div><div>101. "Travesties" -Tom Stoppard. A play I like to reread every now and then. I just like it a lot. Wow.</div><div><br /></div><div>102. "Shopgirl" -Steve Martin. Abby lent this to me, I really sort of disliked it. Martin's prose is decent, nothing special, but the amount of male-gaze going on made me really uncomfortable, especially when I found out that he wrote himself into the male lead for the film version. Gross.</div><div><br /></div><div>103. "Don Quixote" -Cervantes. Took me a long time to read, mostly because Part 1 was kind of a slog. A shame, because most people I know who've tried to read this stopped there. Part 2 is a real surprise, though, much funnier and richer, with some genuinely awe-inspiring moments of real capital M Mystery in the spiritual sense. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-83863725389542666442010-01-03T08:23:00.001-08:002010-01-03T08:58:42.849-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 7I'm surprised I read anything at all this month, since I spent so much of it driving back and forth between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Maine. Anyway, things begin to get shameful around here, so beware.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">July</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>76. "Six Memos for the Next Millennium"-Italo Calvino. Such a great book. At the time it really made a profound impression on me but looking back, and I can't even really remember all six of his subjects. Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude, umm... Visibility? And then I'm stuck. Damn.</div><div><br /></div><div>77. "Epigrams"-Martial. The new Gary Wills translation. These were a lot of fun. In general I found dirty Roman satires really fascinating, but this goes step further and actually works very jaunty rhythms and rhymes into the translation. Really does feel like the kind of stuff you'd find scrawled on a particularly erudite bathroom wall.</div><div><br /></div><div>78. "Serendipities"-Umberto Eco. A slim book about the quixotic pursuit of a perfect language, more or less. Honestly the sense of unity in the collection didn't really strike me as convincing, but most of the individual essays were interesting and informative, so who am I to complain. Is there anything Umberto Eco doesn't know? I bet he even knows all his Pokemon.</div><div><br /></div><div>79. "French Milk"- Lucy Knisley. Lucy Knisley is sort of famous cartoonist, younger than me actually, whose various blogs I'd followed for awhile. Anyway, recently she had a book put out by a big publisher, which is cool, and Abby had a copy of it at her apartment in Maine, so I figured why not read it? Unfortunately, it left a really bad taste in my mouth. It does that cardinal sin of travelogues where it basically devolves into a list of "and then I bought <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">this </span>and then I bought <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">that</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">quaint thing happened</span>." Really touristy and objectifying and shallow. Plus, it made me resentful that nobody ever took me to Paris for fuck-all reason. </div><div><br /></div><div>80. "The Consolations of Philosophy"- Alain de Botton. Botton is funny because I've never really been impressed by what he writes, but I've always been comforted by it. Its like a little trip to Dairy Queen, if DQ served books about Proust and Schopenhauer. I read most of this book in an outstanding coffee place in Brunswick, Maine, and a bit of this in Cape Cod sitting on some rocks getting sea-spray all over the chapter on Seneca. Sorry Seneca.</div><div><br /></div><div>81. "Hey, Wait"- Jason. A Norwegian cartoonist who makes really bleak novellas where everyone has dog heads or something. Maybe you've seen his cover of "The Dharma Bums," its the new Penguin one. </div><div><br /></div><div>82. "32 Stories"-Adrian Tomine. Tomine has a really sophisticated sense of line, I think, and is a pretty good hand at small private stories. See "Shortcomings." This is a collection of his very very earliest stuff, and it definitely starts out crude and amateurish. However, there's a really pleasing sense of development throughout, so that even if the latest material in it doesn't begin to compare with where he is now, you can still get a feel for his trajectory.</div><div><br /></div><div>83. "Clumsy"-Jeffrey Brown. I don't know why I keep reading Jeffrey Brown. I guess if you really need to see a small ugly man get a handjob, you can read this book.</div><div><br /></div><div>84. "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" -J.K. Rowling. I regret nothing.</div><div><br /></div><div>85. "Why I Am So Wise"-Friedrich Nietzsche. So I found out later this isn't even a real collection Nietzsche put out, its some bizarre mishmash of material from other books. Why, Penguin Great Ideas? I enjoyed it anyway, as I often do with Nietzsche, who I think is probably a better prose poet than philosopher.</div><div><br /></div><div>86. "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" -J.K. Rowling. </div><div><br /></div><div>87. "Time & Money"-William Matthews. This is Matthews' last collection of poetry before his death, and one of my favorite smallish collections. A lot of it deals with the death of his father, which is poignant because you can also see an old man attempting to reconcile himself with his own approaching death. But in the middle of all that, there is baseball and jazz.</div><div><br /></div><div>88. "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" -J.K. Rowling</div><div><br /></div><div>89. "From the Notebook: The Unfinished Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald" -Dave Eggers (ed.). Several writers flesh out fragments from Fitzgerald's notebooks. Better than it could have been, although the original fragments have stuck with me more than any of the stories.</div><div><br /></div><div>90. "The State of Constraint. New Work by Oulipo." I am fond of Oulipo and there is some good stuff here, but some of it seems like a stretch. "Binary narratives" are, well, they're basically a more pretentious "Choose Your Own Adventure" and they took up way too much of this collection.</div><div><br /></div><div>91. "HP and the Goblet of Fire" -J.K. Rowling</div><div><br /></div><div>92. "HP and the Order of the Phoenix" -J.K. Rowling. This was the first one I actually had to wonder about buying a copy of, because I only had access to the first four from my brother's room. I really wasn't going to be thrilled with myself if I went into a store and bought Harry Potter, but at the same time I was honestly curious about what happened. So, Abby said she'd get me a copy if I read the whole thing in public. I don't know if it was worth it.</div><div><br /></div><div>93. "HP and the Half-Blood Prince" -J.K. Rowling. Read on the beach, finished the day Abby and I went to see the movie.</div><div><br /></div><div>94. "Angle of Yaw" -Ben Lerner. A book of poetry I still need to "deal" with. Whatever it is it is trying to do, it does it, and I was deeply impressed by it, but it also made me hate poetry for a little while. Still very confused about what I brought away with me. Maybe I should read this again soon, too.</div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-18096942875140380822010-01-02T21:06:00.000-08:002010-01-02T21:33:44.547-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 6It was June and life was available for whatever! I did a lot of reading on my parents' brick porch. I got a lot of flies in my tea. I read a lot of Melville on park benches. If these are idylls I don't know, I'm a little underwhelmed.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">June</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>61. "Your Inner Fish,"-Neil Shubin. Picked up on a whim from the West Chester University bookstore. Pretty damn entertaining actually. As with A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Shubin does a lot of explaining things any moron should know that it turns out most people don't actually know. So, a good catch-up on evolutionary biology, and then some truly startling and lovely case studies. </div><div><br /></div><div>62. "The Romantic Dogs"-Roberto Bolano. Bolano's poetry! I bought this from Chester County Book Company, an independent store I used to go to as a kid. My first ever cup of coffee was from there, when I was eight, and I hated it. I guess the last time I'd gone before this summer was around 1999, or 2000, and it was mostly nostalgia that brought me back, but it turns out it is quite a nice shop. Apologies to the ghost of Bolano for kind of glossing over his actual book here. Just trust me, it is remarkable and you need to read it.</div><div><br /></div><div>63. "Bodyworld" -Dash Shaw. Shaw is a young cartoonist whose "Bottomless Belly Button" you may have heard about. Bodyworld is a strange ode to I don't know what, a kind of Cronenberg take on Archie. But of course all of that doesn't do it justice. This is free for you to read online, so go along and do that.</div><div><br /></div><div>64. "Distant Star" -Roberto Bolano. Big Bolano kick in June. This was a short one, one of his many wee little novels that keep showing up in their ominous numbers. Great.</div><div><br /></div><div>65. "The Savage Detectives" -Roberto Bolano. I feel a little bad, because I think I would have liked this a lot more if I hadn't read 2666 first. Plus, possibly burnt out on Bolano by this point. I'll need to give it another shot. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but did I really "like-like" it?</div><div><br /></div><div>66. "Ommateum with Doxology"- A.R. Ammons. A nice compilation of Ammons' first two books of poetry. To learn more go back a couple pages on this very blog.</div><div><br /></div><div>67. "Infinite Jest" -David Foster Wallace. Believe it or not I read this in exactly six days. I think I ate nothing but DFW's magic words for a good 72 hours. You know what, I take it back, this was the best book I read this year. FOR SURE. Sorry 2666.</div><div><br /></div><div>68. "Nazi Literature in the Americas" -Roberto Bolano. My last Bolano of 2009. A good note to end on, since it has a lot of cheeky allusions and little literary jokes but not a ton of twists and not a lot of substance. Bolano light, if you will, which of course still implies neo-nazis murder and terrifying new poetic revolutions.</div><div><br /></div><div>69. "Take It"-Joshua Beckman. Probably my favorite new poetry of the year, in a year of good new poetry. Really can't say enough good things about this book, and its really late so I won't actually say any.</div><div><br /></div><div>70. "Lud Heat"-Iain Sinclair. Reread this to get brushed up for a guest post on The Devil Accountant. This is Iain Sinclair's Masonic-tinged love note to London and Nicholas Hawksmoor, a really disorienting and occasionally tedious book, but truly more than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately its out of print, so fuck you, you can't read it sucker.</div><div><br /></div><div>71. "North & South"-Elizabeth Bishop. Cracked open the Library of America Elizabeth Bishop thing and decided to read some chunks of it all the way through. It was a disheartening experience in the end, because as much as I love Bishop I have to admit this is a really, really uneven collection. Some of her absolute best is in this collection, her first, but so is some poetry that is not just bad for Bishop but simply bad for <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">anyone. </span>Kind of bummed me out, at first, but now I see it as somewhat encouraging. Even the great ones start somewhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>72. "The Canon"-Natalie Angier. Not sure why I read this-- people kept telling me that it wasn't all that great, but maybe I found it cheap somewhere. I spent a lot of time this summer poking around the science sections of bookstores trying to learn some new things, and maybe its telling that really all I wound up finishing was this and the Bryson, two very "so you want to not be a mental child about things" texts that don't really demand much from the reader. Regardless, I learned some things from this book, pondered some big facts, and enjoyed Angier's style except for some sporadic excesses, so in final consideration it wasn't all that much of a wash.</div><div><br /></div><div>73. "The Happy Failure: Stories"-Herman Melville I think at this point I own 90% of Melville's short stories and novellas in like, three different versions each. I definitely have a huge idol-crush on Melville, but it still seems a little much. This was one of those new Harper Perennial deals, a very attractive little paperback with some nice design work going on. Read about the paradise of bachelors under a tree outside of a library, read about the Tartarus of maids waiting for somebody to show up at a coffee place. Cannot, as hard as I try, recall what the last three or four stories in here were.</div><div><br /></div><div>74. "The Varieties of Scientific Experience"-Carl Sagan. A nice edition with a bunch of color photos and things. Sagan at his best in a lot of ways, just a fascinated guy saying fascinating things. A lot of things covered in Demon Haunted World are also discussed here, in what felt like a bit more detail with a lot more conviction. Really it wasn't until I read this that I started feeling more ambiguous about the DHW. </div><div><br /></div><div>75. "This Is Water"-David Foster Wallace. Moving from feeling ambiguous to the DHW to feeling ambiguous about DFW: I like this lecture, I think its good, but the book is a total sham. Do another printing of Consider the Lobster and put this in it. Maybe even find enough material for a third essay collection to toss it in, who knows? But the way this was packaged, marketed, and sold just made me queasy. I don't think Wallace would have approved.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-75695615356527440092010-01-02T19:03:00.000-08:002010-01-02T21:03:13.025-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 5: In Which I Never Read A Book Again Because College Is OverJust kidding, I'm not enough of a functional human being to do that.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">May</span><br /><div><br /></div><div>49. "The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark"- Carl Sagan. I love Sagan and I respect what he's doing here, but it all feels, well, a little obvious. I mean yeah, yes, of course, many people would disagree, but I doubt they're reading Carl Sagan books.</div><div><br /></div><div>50. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." -David Foster Wallace. A little less enthralling than "Consider the Lobster" but still a bench-mark for creative non-fiction. </div><div><br /></div><div>51. "Houses Are Fields"- Taije Silverman. My mentor wrote these poems, she's brilliant and these poems are all beautiful and situated at the exact mid-point between melancholy and universal infatuation that you need to appreciation when you're a week away from leaving your undergraduate career behind.</div><div><br /></div><div>52. "Death in Venice"- Thomas Mann. I figured it was about time I read this, so I did. It was no Magic Mountain or Buddenbrooks, I'll say that much. Legitimately curious if this is the go-to for Mann just because its the shortest?</div><div><br /></div><div>53. "Omega the Unknown"-Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan Lethem decided to do a super-hero comic. What's odd is that it is equal parts rip-off of Gerber's original Omega, and rehash of Fortress of Solitude, but it still held together and said something new. Weird arithmetic. </div><div><br /></div><div>54. "Heart of a Dog"- Mikhail Bulgakov. Not too pleased with this. Maybe "The Master and Margarita" set the Bulgakov bar too high for me. It all just seemed really heavy-handed.</div><div><br /></div><div>55. "Monster"- Naoki Urasawa. In which I closed the blinds and locked the door and read a Japanese manga comic. Actually, it was really good in an "I'm Graham Greene and I need to put food on the table" kind of way. Tightly paced and plotted, solid characterization, very impressive cartooning. As far as thrillers go, I'd recommend it.</div><div><br /></div><div>56. "Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alda Merini"-Alda Merini. As I understand it, she kind of fulfills the same poetic archetype in Italy as Plath does here, except she lived much longer. I liked this collection, but I'll admit a lot of that might actually be due to the translation, which is nice and crisp and minimal. The actual imagery and ideas felt a little blah to me on occasion. Saw her speak at... Princeton? Princeton or U Penn, I think. She died a few months later and I could tell that even moreso than usual, nobody cared about another dead writer. Never stops making me depressed when it happens. The last book I read at Ursinus, as a student. Sad.</div><div><br /></div><div>57. "The Partly Cloudy Patriot"-Sarah Vowell. Sarah Vowell gets to join David Sedaris in the club of people I like on This American Life but do not like reading books by.</div><div><br /></div><div>58. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" -Oliver Sacks. I read "An Anthropologist on Mars" a few years ago and was iffy about it, but I did like this. I feel like he does less talking down to his audience, and less patronizing lionizing of his subjects. Just a more honest-feeling book overall, I suppose.</div><div><br /></div><div>59. "On the Pleasure of Hating"- William Hazlitt. Hazlitt is a great stylist, and some of his essays on boxing are really funny. Anyway, this was for the first blog post on here. Back when I updated it.</div><div><br /></div><div>60. "2666"- Roberto Bolano. I read the first 300 or so pages of this slowly, in the midst of some other books, but blazed through the nightmarish middle section and sublime ending in three or four days including a camping trip in New Hampshire in which no given person was sober for more than maybe 15 seconds, which is not a <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">pleasant </span>state of mind for all those crimes, but is an <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">effectively </span>mimetic one, or something. My book of the year, I think, one that is still lodged in there just as unshakably as it was over half a year ago.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-90490433263761278312010-01-02T18:48:00.000-08:002010-01-02T19:03:45.537-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 4: April is the gjdfhgdj Month<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">April</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>38. "Code of the Woosters"- P.G. Wodehouse. Just felt a strong urge to read a bunch of Wodehouse, so it was this and about half a book of short stories. I think an audiobook of the one where Jeeves gets rented out was involved too.</div><div><br /></div><div>39. "The Awful End of Prince William the Silent"- Lisa Jardine. Jardine is one of my favorite history writers putting out non-scholarly books. However, I feel like this book could have stood to be a lot longer. As it was, you have a more or less perfunctory account of William of Orange and Catholic/Protestant intrigues, and a rather abbreviated look at gun culture in the 16th century. Good book, but I just wanted more of both. Also, led me to the startling discover that I own two other books about William the Silent. No idea.</div><div><br /></div><div>40. "Snark"- David Denby. I guess the general consensus is that in 2009 David Denby wrote a shitty book that ruined everybody's spring. Listen-- its not a perfect book, and it gets really muddled and mealy-mouthed by the end, but I think it raised some good points and overall had a thesis I would find it hard to argue with. We can't ALL by Anthony Lane, ok?</div><div><br /></div><div>41. "Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Mass Media Populism" -Umberto Eco. Eco is always engaging and I like it when he comes out of the library and talks about the modern world a bit. All the same, I often felt a little lost when reading this, just because so much of it is explicitly in-the-moment commentary on the Italian political situation in the early aughts. Whatever, though, the rest was terrific and I wound up having to look up many things about Italy's political climate and wound up less of an ignoramus.</div><div><br /></div><div>42. "That Little Something"- Charles Simic. Simic in an unusually tender register. I think I read most of this in a hospital waiting room as well, and just finished off the last 20 pages or so in April.</div><div><br /></div><div>43. "Sonata Mulattica"- Rita Dove. Really extraordinary book, for a lot of reasons. A sequence of narrative persona poems about 18th century Afro-Polish violin protege George Bridgetower, which feels so fresh and gave me such a hard "THIS IS WHERE POEMS SHOULD BE GOING" vibe. Sold me on Rita Dove after years of mixed feelings.</div><div><br /></div><div>44. "Ingenious Pursuits: Inventing the Scientific Revolution"- Lisa Jardine. Another for Florka, and an incredibly compelling and accessible history of the greedy stumblings towards a method that took place way back when. I love Jardine.</div><div><br /></div><div>45. "The Enchiridion"- Epictetus. Not impressed. I guess if I get stuck back in time in the 60's and have to go on a long hike I'll be able to keep up with the conversation, at least.</div><div><br /></div><div>46. "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf" -Victor Pelevin. Ugh. Low-point of senior sem, and possibly of entire English undergrad curriculum. Too many Final Fantasy 8 references for me to handle.</div><div><br /></div><div>47. "Quantum Lyrics" -A. Van Jordan. Reread this after reading an interview with Jordan. Some impressive poems about Heisenberg and The Flash and a great sequence about Einstein's love life that I didn't give enough credit to the first time around.</div><div><br /></div><div>48. "A Brief History of Nearly Everything"- Bill Bryson. The only Bryson book I've ever really, really enjoyed. Written with an overwhelming amount of charm and enthusiasm, and I certainly felt like less of an idiot when I was done with it.</div><div><br /></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-50580293647404302622010-01-02T18:29:00.000-08:002010-01-02T18:48:37.969-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 3I don't even remember what I did in March.<div><br /></div><div>27. "Illness as Metaphor"- Susan Sontag. Read in a nice mid-70's hardcover with a dust-jacket upon which a hunch-backed and pudgy Hercules waves his arms around at a garden snake with two heads. I felt like her arguments vis a vis tuberculosis were much, much stronger than the cancer material.</div><div><br /></div><div>28. "The Boy Detective Fails"- Joe Menos. Finally read after many, many recommendations. Maybe a little cutesy, stylistically, but you know, he had the good taste to keep a lot of the overly tweet formal experiments peripheral and really, when you think about it, entirely optional. Underneath all the hit or miss trickiness, there's a pretty solid and surprisingly tight story here.</div><div><br /></div><div>29. "The Sun Also Rises"- Ernest Hemingway. Reread to settle a point that had been nagging at me for awhile, ever since I heard that at least two people I know consider this as a kind of... rival piece, I guess you'd say, to Gatsby. Not convinced after the reread but definitely glad I took the time to revisit such a perfect book.</div><div><br /></div><div>30. "Exercises in Style"- Raymond Queneau. Babby's first Queneau. Yeah, I know.</div><div><br /></div><div>31. "The Werewolf of Paris"- Guy Endore. Another for senior seminar, and an interesting choice because on many levels its an extremely blatant dime pulp, full of what must have passed for gratuitous sex and violence in 1932. Still, it grew on me not only as a fascinating historical artifact but also as a considerably better novel than I gave it credit for. Don't go in expecting Stendhal with fur and fangs or anything, but as an ur-text of a major contemporary monster trope its at least way better than anything Bram Stoker ever pooped out.</div><div><br /></div><div>32. "Gravity's Rainbow"- Thomas Pynchon. I'd owned this book for at least six years, and every so often would pick it up, read about 60 pages, and set it back down in confusion and fear. You know what? The trick is to just roll with it. Pynchon knows what he's doing. Get into his scary stranger van and just let him do the driving.</div><div><br /></div><div>33. "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion"- Steven C. Weisenburger. Probably the best of this kind of thing I've read, probably a worthwhile read even if you haven't and never plan to read GR, honestly. Lots of fascinating little things to be found.</div><div><br /></div><div>34. "The Posthuman Dada Guide" -Andrei Codrescu. Bafflingly organized, and a little too infatuated with its own cleverness, but Codrescu writes here with an irresistible rhetorical heteroglossia. What's his point here? Who knows, he makes like 15 contradictory ones every three pages, but he makes them with such lunatic glee that you have to just drink it all in and think it all over and sort it out for yourself.</div><div><br /></div><div>35. "Invisible Cities"- Italo Calvino. In late March my father was rushed to the emergency room, with pessimistic expectations. It was a really terrible couple of days, and when I got in the car to get to the hospital I just grabbed the nearest thing at hand for the whole waiting room experience. Thankfully, I wound up with a book I didn't appreciate enough the first time through. Of course, it would be stupid to suggest that you need to read this in a crisis to get more than a cool aesthetic appreciation, but maybe it helps. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>36. "Orlando"- Virginia Woolf. The fact that this novel is so stylistically dissimilar to the classic Woolf routine just adds another layer to the wonderful and startlingly lucid strangeness of the whole thing. Another for senior seminar.</div><div><br /></div><div>37. "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture"- Juliet B. Schor. I'm not sure why this was in my car, but it was the only thing to read in a freezing airport waiting for my girlfriend's delayed flight to land. Interesting and hackle-raising investigation of marketing practices.</div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-33041850241126024362010-01-02T18:05:00.001-08:002010-01-02T18:29:06.758-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 2: My Studious ValentineSorry for that title, ugh. Anyway.<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">February</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>15. "On the Shortness of Life"- Seneca. Jesus, I had such an unbearable little stoic phase after this. Sorry to everyone who had to deal with it, probably. Anyway, lent this to an ex-girlfriend who was going through a rough spot and never got it back, after saying I'd lend it to another ex-girlfriend who was going through a rough spot and forgetting too. I guess what I learned from Seneca is that I'm a pretty wretched person. This was the darling little Penguin Great Ideas version, incidentally, which came in a small red box and was the object of much aesthetic attention around the apartment for a few days. </div><div><br /></div><div>16. "Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together"-Bryan Lee O'Malley. Much more sombre than the rest of O'Malley's stuff. Surprisingly so. </div><div><br /></div><div>17. "Netherland"- Joseph O'Neill. Not as into this as much of the book blogosphere was, but still deeply moved and impressed. This was kind of my turning point, sadly, for realizing that barely anyone at Ursinus read the school paper and even fewer read the book column. Kind of disheartening but after that realization I started cursing in it more. The small victories.</div><div><br /></div><div>18. "How Fiction Works." -James Wood. For better or worse, I really like James Wood. That being said, I found at least two or three things I vehemently disagreed with on pretty much every page of this thing. Still, what's important is that I disagreed <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">with gusto and a big excited grin.</span> Wood is firm in his points in the kind of way that invites rebuttal, so I had a great time finding fault with this little firecracker (lame last sentence).</div><div><br /></div><div>19. "She's Not There" -Jennifer Finney Boylan. In late January I was invited by the head of Ursinus' creative writing department to a dinner with Jennifer Finney Boylan in between a small Q&A and a school reading. This was exciting, except I hadn't read any of hers at any point ever. When this book came in the mail I tore through it in an evening sitting on the outside stairs of my apartment, with my fingers numb by around page 150 from the cold. Even as I write this I feel like it's a contradiction to say something is both "page-turning" and deeply thoughtful, but here I am writing it. I have my bones of contention with modern memoir, but this book is essential for anyone who wants to understand anything about the medium of memoir, or about storytelling in general, or god dammit even about being a good human being.</div><div><br /></div><div>20. "Three Men in a Boat"- Jerome K. Jerome. Had always heard this touted as one of the funniest novels of all time, honestly I suppose I must be missing something because it was a huge letdown. Funniest bit came at the beginning with the hypochondriac catalogue, but otherwise it was everything dated about early 20th century British humor that Wodehouse and Waugh managed to transcend (or apotheosize, I don't know) with some truly embarrassing lapses into Housman-style dapply pastoral saccharine.</div><div><br /></div><div>21. "The Gold Cell"- Sharon Olds. Sharon Olds is a marvel.</div><div><br /></div><div>22. "A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes" -Witold Gombrowicz. I love Gombrowicz, and I'd like to think I know enough about philosophy to say I like it, but I'm still a little puzzled about the point of this. Its so fragmentary that occasionally it feels like another post-humous cash-in (spoiler: didn't read "The Original of Laura") but here and there everything great about Gombrowicz will burst out in a perfect fragment or snatch of words. </div><div><br /></div><div>23. "Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe"-Bryan Lee O'Malley. You know what, everything I wrote about O'Malley above might actually apply to this one instead. Honestly I don't know, and I totally forgot that I read two of these things last year.</div><div><br /></div><div>24. "The Book of Dead Philosophers"- Simon Critchley. Amazing book, part primer, part meditation, part satire, part history, part guhguhreh just so good. Plus, almost certainly the best conclusion of any book actually written in 2009.</div><div><br /></div><div>25. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"- Robert Louise Stevenson. Another one for senior seminar. I guess this was one of those stories so ingrained in the popular imagination that I didn't realize I'd never read it until I actually got around to reading it. </div><div><br /></div><div>26. "Kepler"- John Banville. Read for the redoubtable Dr. Roger Florka's course on early Scientific Methodology (I guess? I forget the actual name of the course). Banville's novels in contemporary settings never really grabbed me, but Kepler really resonated in some way. Banville brings his usual muted poetry to the book, but creates a much more complex protagonist than I'd expected based on his other stuff. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-47108173312337508662010-01-02T17:30:00.000-08:002010-01-02T18:04:18.961-08:00What I Read in 2009, Part 1: January, Robert Lowell's Electric Chair2009 was a long year, it was a bad year, the weather repeatedly cracked its knuckles and got down to business, and people all over the world gave more of a shit about the Shamwow guy dying than about W.D. Snodgrass. Fortunately I had so many books I could just sit in my home and curl up in a compact fetal crescent and read them instead of engaging with our awful end-times.<div><br /></div><div>Here they are, what they were and how they were.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">January</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></div><div>1. "The Devil in the White City"- Erik Larsen. I read this book at my girlfriend's house in Vermont. She doesn't have a shower there, rather one of those grotesque majesties of a bathtub with the griffon feet and everything. Anyway, I read a great deal of this book sitting in that thing getting so pruny I probably looked like I'd <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">attended </span>the 1893 World's Fair.</div><div><br /></div><div> On New Year's Eve I was all up in everyone's faces about this book, going on and on about the national debut of PBR, and the ferris wheel, and the serial killer, and Colonel Zufelt, and so much more, and finished it as my flight descended on Philadelphia. What an incredible book. Pop history can be shallow and superficial, but at its best it can speak to such a panorama of experience, submerged and flourescent alike. God I wish I'd been at that 1893 World's Fair.</div><div><br /></div><div>2. "I Am Going To Be Small"- Jeffrey Brown. Jeffrey Brown, if you don't know, is a kind of auteur of small-press autobiographical comics. Lots of candid little novels about his miserable sex life and such. This was a collection of some of his lighter, goofier stuff, which was a nice change of pace from his usual thing but also not that remarkable. Sorry J. Brown.</div><div><br /></div><div>3. "The Moviegoer"- Walker Percy. Walker Percy can put together some fucking phenomenal sentences, if you can accommodate his pace. His best novel, as far as I'm concerned, but not a lot of moviegoing as such gets done. Too bad "The Searchers" is taken.</div><div><br /></div><div>4. "Underwater"- Chester Brown. Luminous GN about early childhood, and guilt, and beauty. I have a hard time actually recommending it though, because it is unfinished. Brown lost interest, I guess, about 200 pages in, so it exists in this weird kind of limbo where you can tell its a masterpiece but can't quite muster up the nerve to call it one.</div><div><br /></div><div>5. "Nabokov's Dozen"- Vladimir Nabokov. Why on earth would anybody read this instead of one of the more comprehensive collections of his short stories? Because it was cheap, I guess, and had nice yellowed pages and that 60's paperback smell. A nice collection but I wish I'd sprung for the whole set of stories. </div><div><br /></div><div>6. "The Principles of Uncertainty"- Maira Kalman. A collection of Maira Kalman's wry and gorgeous water-color diary journalism blog whatevers that she did for the New York Times awhile ago. </div><div><br /></div><div>7. "Hermit in Paris"- Italo Calvino. Basically a big catch-all of Calvino's autobiographical writings. Pretty uneven, if only because a large portion of the book is devoted to journalistic interviews, which tend to cover a lot of the same ground. Can't fault the guy for consistency, but the editors could have pruned a little bit to prevent having to hear the same parental background six times. The history of Mussolini portraiture is brilliant, though.</div><div><br /></div><div>8. "The Prestige"- Christopher Priest. Round one of my intermittent attempts to get into science fiction in 2009. Entertaining enough, good twists and all that, but not as trim and elegant as the movie. And points off for not including Bowie.</div><div><br /></div><div>9. "Love is a Mix Tape"- Rob Sheffield. Agonized over picking this up for so long, because I kept hearing good things but it looked so, so corny. I suppose I'm glad I read it, the style's comparable to a more vulnerable and wide-eyed Chuck Klosterman I guess, with a lot less acidity and a lot more (maybe warranted) sentimentality. Not great, but a quick read with some good humor and some touching moments.</div><div><br /></div><div>10. "Native Guard"- Natasha Trethewey. Boy oh boy, a Pulitzer prize winner. As a writer I tend to have a little distaste for overtly confessional poetry, and a tentative fear of form, so when I read a collection that engages with either I do so with some reserves and some muted awe, respectively. As a collection that gets its hands deep into the viscera of both of those things, Native Guard is an intimidating beast. I remember being very impressed, more so with the integration of form into personal narrative than by that narrative itself. </div><div><br /></div><div>11. "110 Per$"- Tony Consiglio. Kind of an Alex Robinson type thing, a bit reminiscent of "Tricked" really, with some subtle nods to it. Sort of slight, but with some surprisingly nuanced characterization here and there. </div><div><br /></div><div>12. "Let It Be"- Colin Meloy. In general, those 33 1/3 books have been kind of a disappointment. I was sick in the middle of January, and was lent this book by my girlfriend, a big Decemberists/Colin Meloy fan. I like The Replacements enough, I guess, so I gave it a shot. </div><div><br /></div><div>Well-- it was better than some of the books in this little line I've read, especially the ones that just read like Brent Dicrescenzio trying for a pay-bump, and I do appreciate the titles that lean more towards memoir than straight history, but it still felt pretty self indulgent. Which is a shame, because the story of the album is a pretty interesting one, definitely more interesting than what Colin Meloy did when he was seven.</div><div><br /></div><div>13. "The Golden Ass"- Apuleius. Probably better at capturing the feeling of Fellini's "Satyricon" than the actual "Satyricon." A totally fascinating late-Roman novel of low comedy and high mysticism, required reading for anybody who wants to know a thing about anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>14. "Saga of the Volsungs." An important Icelandic Saga, good to have read if you're interested in the whole narrative genealogy or whatever of Wagner's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Nibelungen (</span>although possibly the <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">Nibelungenleid </span>would be the MORE crucial source, I guess, who knows). Interesting but honestly the almost <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">total </span>alienness of the value system makes it tough to fathom, let alone <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">enjoy </span>per se. In the interest of full disclosure (har) I should say that this book and the last one were read for my senior seminar. </div><div><br /></div><div>And that caps off January.</div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-40256309596254071842009-11-04T15:14:00.000-08:002009-11-04T15:28:09.110-08:00Some Fun With Goethe<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj8XinA29QXb78Qn6s1LbMTG03pQak4S6Aif5gej5_BLprqNfANG45ktTtmwOngx180EtLnuxWOha7D8cJ71eBrSZqvygM0BqYwoxI2HTp3MDTz9zPgF2TaWiIZj6gd92sQYKQS0njgiU/s1600-h/goethe2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 275px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj8XinA29QXb78Qn6s1LbMTG03pQak4S6Aif5gej5_BLprqNfANG45ktTtmwOngx180EtLnuxWOha7D8cJ71eBrSZqvygM0BqYwoxI2HTp3MDTz9zPgF2TaWiIZj6gd92sQYKQS0njgiU/s320/goethe2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400393571520071058" /></a><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">"What is this bullshit??"</span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 14px; font-family:'lucida grande';font-size:11px;"><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>In the spirit of Monday's thing at U Penn (for those who were there), a little something regarding translation.<br /><br />So, today I was reading Robert Hass' book "Time and Materials" and came across this piece:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">"After Goethe"<br /><br />In all the mountains,<br />Stillness;<br />In the treetops<br />Not a breath of wind.<br />The birds are silent in the woods.<br />Just wait: soon enough<br />You will be quiet too.<br /><br />-tr. Robert Hass</span><br /><br />I had to smile because I recognized this as a pretty faithful translation of a short Goethe poem I'd taken a stab at translating myself about a year ago. After some searching I found the notebook I'd written it down in and was pleased to find that my two attempts were fairly close to Hass', although perhaps leaning a bit more towards literal accuracy or poetic license in either direction.<br /><br />The more literal first gloss:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">"Wanderer's Night Song"<br /><br />Over all summits<br />is peace,<br />in every treetop<br />you sense<br />scarcely a breath.<br />The little birds are silent in the forest.<br />But wait, soon<br />you too will rest.</span><br /><br />Second try:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">"Traveler's Night Song"<br /><br />All summits stand<br />in silence,<br />the sense of stillness<br />in every breathless treetop.<br />The little birds are silent in the forest.<br />Wait a moment- soon<br />you too will be at rest.<br /></span><br />And here's the original:<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">"Wandrer's Nachtlied"<br /><br />Uber allen Gipfeln<br />Ist Ruh,<br />In allen Wipfeln<br />Spurest du<br />Kaum einen Hauch.<br />Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde.<br />Warte nur, balde<br />Ruhest du auch.</span><br /><br />As you can see there's a lovely ABAB CDDC rhyme scheme in the original that is lost. Also notice the phrase "Spurest du Kaum einen Hauch." Spuren denotes a kind of active sensory awareness that isn't quite "feels" and isn't quite "senses" and isn't quite "intuits." It's a great word that loses something in the act of translation.<br /><br />So there's my little foray into some of the issues we heard about earlier this week. I guess my point is that even at a largely amateur level, or in a rather casual attempt at even a poem as short and sweet as this one, you find yourself grappling with pretty sticky issues of meaning and form. <br /></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 14px;font-family:'lucida grande';font-size:11px;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 14px;font-family:'lucida grande';font-size:11px;">Are any of the translations "good"? Well, that depends. As far as I'm concerned, all three give a fairly close account of the surface meaning of Goethe's original poem. None of them claim, for example, that "silence lay all around the townhall" or that the little squirrels of the wood were all silent. Do they exist as "good" poems, then? Insofar as all three hue closely to Goethe's fairly simple and stark language, it isn't a stretch to say that each also retains some of the power of his imagery. While obviously of the three Hass' is the most accomplished stylistically, each manages to escape the long traverse of language with some imagistic integrity intact. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 14px;font-family:'lucida grande';font-size:11px;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 14px;font-family:'lucida grande';font-size:11px;">As much as any poem can derive weight and virtue from what it's "about" then it must be fair to say that each of these translations is roughly (very roughly) as good as Goethe's. But that, of course, is absurd, if you just end it there. Poetry exists as sound as well as text (well, yeah) and in that sense all three translations are clumsy, piecemeal attempts to catch up to something organic and liberated. Even if you don't know any German, try reading Goethe's original out loud. The cadence flows and halts, starts at a sharp sound and resumes motion with trepidation-- it capitulates the movement of a traveler moving through an unsettlingly silent wilderness at night even without the benefit of the reader knowing what each word means. </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 14px;font-family:'lucida grande';font-size:11px;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 14px;font-family:'lucida grande';font-size:11px;">I can't speak for prose-- we've all heard, I guess, how much Dostoyevsky for example benefits from translation-- but in poetry, a translation can be effective, it can be smart, it can even be beautiful, but it is ultimately and necessarily a losing game. </span></div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3222515016930607367.post-48762512686212979432009-08-30T10:34:00.000-07:002009-08-30T11:04:21.898-07:00Kicking Against the Tricks: Reading Cervantes' Duchess and the Duke<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRdFCYdzQ5FeoTXc7wAXGE5GvRfHNdx8uMQR-dUhCcQt443EU1-HwMxtO5qi99PcopU4BzyXsX_PCCyAyHmXo_cShVi0kHg-QRgIW64DT0nOMQ9EdIa2w0Fv8O7U1DwWxSB6H5hWirie8/s1600-h/quixote.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRdFCYdzQ5FeoTXc7wAXGE5GvRfHNdx8uMQR-dUhCcQt443EU1-HwMxtO5qi99PcopU4BzyXsX_PCCyAyHmXo_cShVi0kHg-QRgIW64DT0nOMQ9EdIa2w0Fv8O7U1DwWxSB6H5hWirie8/s320/quixote.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375818801797062066" /></a><br /><div><br /></div>I guess it's one of those little commonplace "fun facts" about literature that Nabokov wasn't a big fan of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Don-Quixote-Miguel-Cervantes/dp/0060934344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251655421&sr=1-1">Don Quixote</a>. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lectures-Don-Quixote-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0156495406/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251655381&sr=8-1">His lectures on the book</a> are uncharacteristically nit-picky and pedantic, with a kind of catty undertone that usually only comes out in personal interviews. However, there's one point that he strikes on that other critics tend to skirt around, or dress up in equivocations:<div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 102, 0);">"Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia or cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic."</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe this goes a little ways in illuminating Nabokov's distaste, for who, in the 20th century, comes so close to matching Cervantes' theatrical cruelty? I think its fair to say that Nabokov approached fiction like a grandmaster; all of his novels set up the pieces and maneuver them into position for a killing stroke. His cruelty is controlled and, sometimes, cold. </div><div><br /></div><div>Don Quixote on the other hand maintains a definite warmth for the big D and Sancho despite putting them through the wringer. The narrative voice throughout is curious; its easy at the start to read its praise of the characters as ironic, but as the novel progresses, particularly in the second part, its hard not to feel that the sardonic irony of the narrator is splitting, with the world becoming crueller and the characters becoming less ridiculous and more sublime. And, remarkably, the reader shifts from being complicit in the universe's tricks against Quixote to being almost another dupe at points. </div><div><br /></div><div>The key incident here is the episode of Sancho Panza's governorship. How can you not feel a little elated, about halfway through Part Two, when the duke finally bestows an insula on the long-suffering squire? All these fantasies and deceptions and everybody getting the shit knocked out of them and now, man, at last he gets what he wants. </div><div><br /></div><div>Except, of course he doesn't. Everything that's been promised in the novel so far has been false; everything the duke and the duchess, in particular, have shown has been an elaborate prank on the novel's two heros. Why should this be any different? Soon we're even told that the population of the village is in on the scheme, that everything has been set up in advance. Still, incredibly, the reader insists on a bit of optimism that Cervantes obligingly stokes. This entire sequence of events, when the certainty that Sancho's reward isn't genuine struggles against the hope that it is, constitutes for me some of the most heartbreaking tension in the history of the novel. </div><div><br /></div><div>"We need to hold in mind as we read Don Quixote that we cannot condescend to the Knight and Sancho, since together they know more than we do," writes Harold Bloom. The funny thing is, for 900-odd pages the narrator does just that-- the entire novel is the process of coming to rebel against the narrator, and by extension the audience of the first part of the novel who make up most of the second part's cast. Because at the root of it, the duke and the duchess are the reader, or at least the image of what the reader once was, a few hundred pages ago-- they read Don Quixote as a funny adventure story, and they view Quixote himself as inherently ridiculous. And let's be fair, for almost 500 pages he is, before Cervantes pulls the rug out from under himself.</div><div><br /></div><div>When the reader crosses that strange border of empathy and comes to hold the duchess and the duke in contempt, what he's really doing is looking a few hundred pages back at himself. This is Cervantes' miracle, his benediction where Nabokov would be springing his trap. Don Quixote is a novel that teaches us how to read it in showing us ourselves as readers. Laughing, we're all the fucking awful duchess and duke; fooled by affection into hoping for a happy resolution, we're all Quixote. </div>Chris Schaefferhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02209766396936105619noreply@blogger.com2