tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2706196018527212082024-03-14T08:18:31.560-06:00Booking a Room with a ViewUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-40174043581297060622017-09-23T11:23:00.000-06:002017-11-25T17:20:23.429-07:00Becoming a Panhead: Part One<br />
Between the ages of 11 and 15, heavy metal got me through the hardships of adolescence. I was in no way a reader during that chapter of my life, and films were nothing but excuses to hook up with friends and gossip in the back row of the Lincoln Theater balcony. I was a religious young man, in my own way, but understood a life of faith only as well as a teen might, which is to say not well at all -- and so religion did little to buoy me up in the storms of youth, except where it dovetailed with rock 'n' roll. So whereas my turnstile of favorite bands in those years included the secular acts Europe and Warlock, I also listened to various Christian acts: Altar Boys, Petra, Stryper, Bloodgood, Leviticus, others. I <i>wore out</i> my cassette of Petra's <i>This Means War</i> during a family vacation to South Dakota one summer. I thrilled at the notion of sacred mystery meeting social taboo in the lyrics of Bloodgood's pulsing "Eat the Flesh" from their album <i>Detonation</i>. I grit my teeth through the gross overproduction on Stryper's<i><b> </b>In God We Trust</i> and Petra's <i>On Fire</i> because the songs were good, for the most part (Stryper shot clean off the rails with their next album, while Petra corrected beautifully thereafter with <i>Beyond Belief</i>, for my money their best record).<br />
<br />
But as often happens in adolescence, turning the page as a young man was attended by turning the page on one's musical tastes. It just works out that way. Pearl Jam came along, and heavy metal, in all its 80s iterations, felt less novel than novelty. (My religious life, such as it was, waned in my late teens, too, giving way to a flirtation with atheism into my early 20s. Atheism was short-lived in me, however. Nikos Kazantzakis's novel <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-temptation-of-christ-nikos-kazantzakis/1000376345?ean=9780684852560#/" target="_blank">The Last Temptation of Christ</a> saw to that. But that's the subject of another blog.) With the release of Tori Amos's <i>Little Earthquakes</i> and Sophie B Hawkins's <i>Tongues and Tails</i>, everything changed for me. I still remember seeing, for the first time, just a <i>snippet </i>of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSYr0etDzRM" target="_blank">the video for "Silent All These Years"</a> on an MTV commercial and wondering: what is<i> this...?</i> So began my musical obsession with what my brother, in college, would disparagingly refer to as Chicks with Feelings -- an obsession that continues (and evolves) to this day: Tori Amos, Loreena McKennitt and Sarah McLachlan were the first, followed by Bjork, Belly, Indigo Girls and 10,000 Maniacs -- and followed still later, in college, by Iris DeMent and Emmylou Harris. (I flew to Seattle a year ago expressly to see Belly on the last leg of their reunion tour.) Florence + the Machine, Chvrches, Offa Rex, Regina Spektor and Of Monsters and Men might be considered the most recent additions to this musical diet of mine. Still on the fence about Wolf Alice.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNXHl_SDRwSYm6gdXUjQoWi1UaSzTe84sDz5vwU59vKk2-ga9C-A10qkKNtl6Xa7UwDfmOE57NXlHjewByKcQYmXRrGbaAF2hvOeMRm2JEWJ6m5GxW_WzeFCFua28j9y8Ys0urGhSXPbFL/s1600/belly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNXHl_SDRwSYm6gdXUjQoWi1UaSzTe84sDz5vwU59vKk2-ga9C-A10qkKNtl6Xa7UwDfmOE57NXlHjewByKcQYmXRrGbaAF2hvOeMRm2JEWJ6m5GxW_WzeFCFua28j9y8Ys0urGhSXPbFL/s400/belly.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Belly at the Neptune Theater, Seattle, Washington, August 28, 2016</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
But do I still listen to hard rock and heavy metal?<br />
<br />
I sold all of my metal albums in my 20s, eventually repurchasing a handful: a Scorpions greatest hits, Fates Warning's <i>Parallels</i>, Iron Maiden's <i>Somewhere in Time</i>, Queensryche's <i>Operation: Mindcrime</i>, Judas Priest's <i>Painkiller</i>, Leviticus's <i>Setting Fire to the Earth</i>. (During the 2016 election, I'd drive around town with "Revolution Calling" cranked up in the car, like the good Bernie Sanders supporter I was.) I hope to further remedy that rashness by reacquiring magnificent albums, including Impelliterri's <i>Stand in Line</i>, Yngwie Malmsteen's <i>Eclipse</i> and Savatage's <i>Gutter Ballet</i> and <i>Streets</i>. Each of these more than hold up, musically, lyrically (unlike most of those I scrapped); I've listened to Impelliterri, Malmsteen, Savatage and a few others (thanks to YouTube and interlibrary loan) with ears that have grown more discerning and sophisticated over the years, and they don't disappoint. Most hard rock and metal from the 80s and 90s is embarrassingly dated -- not merely the on-stage aesthetics, either, but the songs themselves. Likewise, most of the new rock I've heard from the mid-90s on is a joke: bull-in-a-china-shop music with little sense of structural surprise or lyrical invention. I've purchased no new release rock since Evanescence's <i>The Open Door</i>. <br />
<br />
Until, that is, these last three weeks, during which I bought Skillet's <i>Comatose </i>and <i>Rise</i>. I'd never heard Skillet before this last summer. I walk by a signed concert one-sheet of theirs every day at the radio station, but had never actually heard their music until maybe two months ago. How, you ask, can I have lived on Earth and not heard "Monster" or "Hero," regardless of how I might have felt about them? Good question...
<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-36394417342868195282017-09-17T17:27:00.001-06:002017-09-19T20:21:45.696-06:00Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears<br />
Since my last blog post, so much has happened that I could write about, I'm not too sure what I <i>should </i>write about. But let me focus on one of the angles meant to be the heart of this blog: the arts and their intersection with our lives.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOLq7wDQsPhDhUqWmdss0LrYbpan2pIez8CPHLa7lDZHZ-qz5_q-7vXBQNCaefRqg7kRlTl_8O7y8QnkdZ0pOBJ6tngASQlfiznHn0blth7BrnxPNCLcgzYWer2ihN2TRcMUD8GcX6UO3z/s1600/blog2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="767" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOLq7wDQsPhDhUqWmdss0LrYbpan2pIez8CPHLa7lDZHZ-qz5_q-7vXBQNCaefRqg7kRlTl_8O7y8QnkdZ0pOBJ6tngASQlfiznHn0blth7BrnxPNCLcgzYWer2ihN2TRcMUD8GcX6UO3z/s200/blog2.jpg" width="199" /></a>A couple years back, I blogged about a barbecue my fellow book club members and I shared (most of them traveling long distances for it), in which I speculated on what we -- The Eclectic Shade Tree -- might do for our 15th anniversary in 2017. Well, we're in the midst of that anniversary now, and although we didn't meet up on a cruise ship somewhere off the coast of Eastern Canada, we did convene in Laramie, Wyoming, this last spring, for the UW Libraries Foundation event at which Timothy Egan spoke about his most recent book, <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-immortal-irishman-timothy-egan/1122371627?ean=9780544944831#/" target="_blank">The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero</a>. Paul and Dylan drove from Cheyenne, Christian (with his girlfriend)<i> </i>and<i> </i>Amy (without her boyfriend) flew from Washington. Each of us read one of his books in advance; we talked book club business over lunch at the Pita Pit; we raced to our hotels to change into our official book club shirts (geeks that we are) and met up again at the post-lunch panel; four of us spent the late afternoon browsing Laramie's Second Story Books and Night Heron Books; the lot of us shared a table at the gala dinner that night, where Egan spoke again -- this time about his creative process.<br />
<br />
It was a lovely ten hours spent with cherished people my wife Kelly and I don't often get to see face-to-face, in the company of my in-laws, talking about books in the presence of a writer we all admire and who was deeply gracious with us.<br />
<br />
I think of this day as the last joyous occasion before what would turn out to be an arduous four-month journey. Our youngest cat, Harry, fell into a series of urinary obstructions a week or so later, was diagnosed with Feline Lower Urinary Tract Disease, underwent a perineal urethrostomy at the Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital, and suffered with as much love and good humor as he could muster through puzzling complications and treatment failures before we finally decided to have him put to sleep in late August.<br />
<br />
It was the most difficult decision Kelly and I have ever made, together or apart. He was just three years old.<br />
<br />
In the days following his death, we started keeping a journal of memories of our favorite things about <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0UIYhsymVSXYP5Wv2ggnFGwzKXjbZJU_pCJ4GtZOIxoD_wWuBYOsR1k-c91I6NkceS8eo_Ld3UjfQt6U3LitJpRnvPo3p21MI-cMEHEX5d3N3iswE0FBZZhQCnGc1Uprvc28jkN8hnhxN/s1600/blog1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="716" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0UIYhsymVSXYP5Wv2ggnFGwzKXjbZJU_pCJ4GtZOIxoD_wWuBYOsR1k-c91I6NkceS8eo_Ld3UjfQt6U3LitJpRnvPo3p21MI-cMEHEX5d3N3iswE0FBZZhQCnGc1Uprvc28jkN8hnhxN/s320/blog1.jpg" width="236" /></a></div>
him: the way he would sleep sprawled out on his back, his saucer eyes, his love of a particular length of green ribbon. One of the things Harry loved best in life was to listen to me read aloud. It would often bring him to bed at night -- the sound of my voice reading from James Galvin's <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-meadow-james-galvin/1001958468?ean=9780805027037" target="_blank">The Meadow</a>. Books have helped me survive the crisis of his illness; and books helped him weather that storm for as long as he did, too. Kelly, who has suffered, I suspect, more than even me through his illness and passing, has been reading EB White's <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stuart-little-e-b-white/1102639078?ean=9780064400565#/" target="_blank">Stuart Little</a>. The first book I began and finished in the wake of his death was Kenneth Grahame's <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wind-in-the-willows-kenneth-grahame/1002093354?ean=9780143106647#/" target="_blank">The Wind in the Willows</a>. I had never read it before. And I remember Harry as a perfect manifestation of Mole and Toad: gentle and guileless on the one hand, mischievous and spirited on the other.<br />
<br />
He was a charmer, a jewel, a home. <br />
<br />
Much has been made about how reading literature increases empathy in us, nourishes and expands our neural pathways, makes us better citizens of our world. All true, to be sure -- but it also works to make us whole again, if we let it. And when we find ourselves spinning in a chaos of anguish -- be it from the death of a friend or family member, the loss of a job, the haze of chronic illness, or the hushed euthanasia of a pet as dear as a child to its parents -- it's important that we remember that books are there for us, less as solutions to our problems than as panoramas of healing through which we might walk. Books comfort. Some books comfort.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wind-in-the-willows-kenneth-grahame/1002093354?ean=9780143106647#/" target="_blank">The Wind in the Willows</a> is one. <br>
</br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-56000818272745868052016-06-11T21:37:00.003-06:002016-06-11T21:40:35.471-06:00An Explanation for the Support of Third-Party Candidates<br />
What with all the fracas out there about "if you're a liberal and you
vote third party, it's really a vote for Trump" or "if you're a
conservative and you vote third-party, it's really a vote for
Hillary"... That view, while understandable to those who share it, is incomprehensible to those who don't. And here is why:<br />
<br />
If Clinton loses, the blame shall lie at her doorstep -- because she is not entitled to the
liberal vote by virtue <span class="text_exposed_show">of belonging to
the Democratic Party. She has to <i>earn </i>those votes -- not on the fly, not
with a wink and a smile, but over the course of a career. If there are
liberals like myself who do not vote for her, it's because we neither
trust nor believe in her. (Indeed, trusting and believing in her has
proven more difficult than ever this last year by virtue of her
proximity to Bernie Sanders, whose positions have been consistently
ethical, decisive and stalwart his entire political career.) And we
should always only ever vote for politicians whom we trust and in whom
we believe. It is a politician's responsibility to grind through our
skepticism and earn or win our trust and belief -- to inspire our trust
in them with their courage, constancy and moral resolve. We owe
politicians no unconditional allegiance. If Hillary loses, it will be
because she has earned the votes of too few liberals. It will be her
fault alone. My vote for Jill Stein or my write-in for Bernie Sanders
will not be a vote for Trump because it will be a vote for either Jill
Stein or Bernie Sanders.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="text_exposed_show">An analogy:</span><br />
<br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
If America were attacked and war were imminent, and we were told by the
powers-that-be that to engage in said war would likely mean the averting
of a larger scale, even nuclear, war -- I would still not support the
war. I wouldn't because war has not earned my belief in it, has not
demonstrated to me its viability as a solution to problems or as a
vessel in which to move humanity forward. However "just" its proponents
claim it to be in certain circumstances, it is not entitled to my
support.<br />
<br />
War has itself to blame for this.<br />
<br />
Politicians
have themselves to blame for failing to convince even those who share
broad ideological views with them to believe in -- and hence vote for --
them. For all the talk of a vote for Bernie or Jill Stein being a vote
for Trump, how can a vote for someone in whom we believe be even
effectively a vote for someone in whom we don't? 1 = 1, not 2. As I see
it, for <i>me</i>, a vote for Hillary is effectively a vote for Trump, because
while I think him less intelligent than her, more unstable than her -- I
believe in her as little as I believe in him. She has given me reason to. And I will never again
vote for a candidate who has not given me reason enough to believe in
him or her.<br />
<br />
No one should. And the sooner we all realize that, the better.</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-77359396063306103972016-03-19T11:07:00.003-06:002016-03-19T14:54:54.763-06:00The Dumbing Down of IMDb<br />
In the late 90s, I was an active member of the IMDb message boards, posting most often on the Film General and Classic Film boards. I still remember a number of the people posting there (per their usernames) with great fondness, respect and -- in some cases -- a begrudging, irked admiration for their antagonistic streaks: DFC, Ishallwearpurple, Addison de Witt, sprockets, prewitt, Antonius Block, others. (My own username was resurgence27.) I suspect some of these folks are still publishing on the boards. One poster (ivmeer) became a dear friend with whom I'm still in touch on Facebook (and lest you think she must be one of hundreds of faceless people with whom I'm connected on Facebook, I curate that friend list obsessively -- it never has more than 80 or 90 people on it). Another poster, benstevens, has been my closest friend for a long, long time now. He flew across an ocean to stand as a groomsman at my wedding. I flew across the country to see him married to his wife. These two friendships and the passing camaraderie (sympathetic and companionable, irascible and needling) with the other posters mentioned above were born in a kiln of rigorous, passionate debate about cinema. The IMDb boards in the late 90s and early 00s teemed with savvy, learned minds -- people who were not fanboys nearly so much as students of an art form, disciples of specific visionaries. We pushed each other to think more carefully, more critically of films. We pushed ourselves to do so, too.<br />
<br />
These days, the IMDb boards -- and especially the boards assigned to individual films -- seem to have become a morass of arrogant, defensive fanboy obsession with little thought to punctuation and grammar, and even less thought to critical acumen and casting a wide net in terms of what one sees. Reading through threads, it becomes frightfully clear that the current generation of pop culture enthusiasts who care enough to leap into public discussions of films know so little about <i>how </i>to <i>read </i>films, most of them shouldn't be allowed near a screening room, let alone a forum for discussion.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6eAJzb5W5UmEf6H7CT-UR5wzbxDOsFEqISwKqMlrCWmDF_640_V1glkf3J5EzFUFtFKdi-y2dqapsmuUTmeccVl1dMUSmnWzxX8-xBWGa2AKaLfkFQq7FNtPgEu5GzF7Xlj_MvFh87Iww/s1600/imdb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6eAJzb5W5UmEf6H7CT-UR5wzbxDOsFEqISwKqMlrCWmDF_640_V1glkf3J5EzFUFtFKdi-y2dqapsmuUTmeccVl1dMUSmnWzxX8-xBWGa2AKaLfkFQq7FNtPgEu5GzF7Xlj_MvFh87Iww/s200/imdb.jpg" width="200" /></a>It could be that I was part of the IMDb boards when they were still new enough that the only people thinking to seek them out were serious film buffs with encyclopedic knowledge or budding film buffs, like myself, who were watching everything they could, reading criticism and film history voraciously, etc. (I once persuaded Elly Petrides, the subtitles translator for the legendary Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, to send me PAL copies of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091506/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_10" target="_blank">The Beekeeper</a>, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102439/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_8" target="_blank">The Suspended Step of the Stork</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088241/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_11" target="_blank">Voyage to Cythera</a> on loan from Athens. These films had never been released theatrically in America. I then persuaded my old German professor at the University of Wyoming to let me have private use of the Foreign Language Department's NTSC/PAL screening room one Saturday so that I might watch the three films. Two of them are on my top 100 of all-time.) It could be that the boards, once upon a time, were an untrammeled wilderness comprised of thinkers. Now it seems the boards have become a place where graffiti is the acceptable form of discourse, where Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino fans are less interested in talking film than in reaffirming the brilliance of their coterie (they would do well to keep in mind <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Pulp Fiction</a>:
"let's not start sucking each others' dicks just yet..."), where most
posters are people who've seen very little and who have convinced
themselves that if a film is worth seeing, they'd have seen it.<br />
<br />
I still use IMDb on a daily basis, for watching trailers, keeping myself up-to-speed on projects in development, etc. But sometimes I find myself missing what it used to be -- and feeling sad that such a huge number of current posters have no idea what they're missing, in terms of viewing pleasures or exchanges.
<br></br>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-70848238015099506852015-12-21T13:27:00.000-07:002015-12-21T13:27:50.156-07:00Passing the Book<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNuA8NAUbks3zziGgdD6tb0Z1vgGeZouFmylHY_gdEJAcGonSgjiD0S-7aDYOfDxoO_Aisq8nzEdcNGhcdlkQX6YbMe6tkEQ8li_NXlxdH9yBv3xUsXTSkzyxZPouDCSgRb15PqoxmYX79/s1600/vote.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNuA8NAUbks3zziGgdD6tb0Z1vgGeZouFmylHY_gdEJAcGonSgjiD0S-7aDYOfDxoO_Aisq8nzEdcNGhcdlkQX6YbMe6tkEQ8li_NXlxdH9yBv3xUsXTSkzyxZPouDCSgRb15PqoxmYX79/s200/vote.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
A few weeks back, I was struck with what I thought at the time to be a brilliant idea: I would dispel the anxiety I feel in settling on a book when my turn to choose comes round in my book club by <i>passing the buck</i>. Instead of me wringing myself in knots over what to choose, I'd settle on a list of possibilities and put the choice to a vote, leaving the decision, then, to my friends, family and even random bookish strangers out there in the world. So I set up <a href="http://www.listchallenges.com/vote-for-the-next-book-jason-c-selects-in-the" target="_blank">a list on the List Challenges website</a>, asking people to choose <i>just a single one of the books</i>. And then, come February 1st, I'd name that book as my selection. I was hoping to see hundreds of people casting votes (as has happened with every other list challenge I've set up), setting up a real horse-race between two or three titles. But it hasn't happened. The votes have stalled at 63. Part of me suspects that people are clicking on their book of choice...and forgetting to click the button at the bottom that reads "Show Me My Results." Clicking that button, unless I'm mistaken, is the step that casts the vote.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I'd love to have your help in deciding what The Eclectic Shade Tree should read come February 1st. So check out the list -- linked to above -- and vote for one of the books. Open a new tab, if you're so inclined, and read about each one beforehand on Amazon or Good Reads or wherever -- or vote for the one with your favorite cover. However you choose to do it, let your voice be heard!
<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-59548145702172531472015-10-04T17:52:00.002-06:002015-10-04T20:15:53.557-06:00What Religion Is and Is Not <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizB_iOO0Q1uVsvUoKtjSRy9pwxBpZF1u6FIo-ongmaKWM3qeKHBFHuRPIOYWzINf3P1v07QdrXJYjq-ibWbv7jFO7JhcXA9XeVdHThithyphenhyphen5zn4cEWHCEzMcF353DM4RXehakSefahoDhzM/s1600/008.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizB_iOO0Q1uVsvUoKtjSRy9pwxBpZF1u6FIo-ongmaKWM3qeKHBFHuRPIOYWzINf3P1v07QdrXJYjq-ibWbv7jFO7JhcXA9XeVdHThithyphenhyphen5zn4cEWHCEzMcF353DM4RXehakSefahoDhzM/s320/008.JPG" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">A dear friend of mine -- an atheist -- asked me
recently: if certain passages in the Bible are contentious, are used as
platforms to substantiate bigoted worldviews or even acts of violence, might
Christians not treat the Bible, then, as a living document, open to revision,
excision, the paring away of behavioral codes incompatible with life as it is
in 2016? It’s a good question, and it arose from a brief, itself contentious
exchange we had on Facebook about a post from atheist philosopher and scientist
Sam Harris, in which Harris attempted to explain what atheism is and
what it is not. My friend’s question led me to the conclusion that his question
cannot be addressed, let alone answered, without considering what Christianity
is and what it is not -- at least, as I see it. (That qualifying phrase -- “as I see
it” -- might be where a number of atheists get tripped up in considering or
defining religion. Their philosophical position is, by nature, fixed: an
absence of belief in a god. Whereas the religion to which I belong is malleably
defined at best: it resists being pinned down, which is, on one hand, a virtue,
placing it less on a footing with the cold, glassy symmetries of mathematics
than with the roiling, whispered sleights of poetry; and on the other hand, a
pointed disadvantage, because we rightly privilege logic, answers, progress
forward built on the scaffolding of certainties.) So, then, in as concise a way
as I know how to put it: Christianity is, to me, the life and example of
Christ. And the life and example of Christ is an answer, or utterance in response, to the world (and its
attendant codes and cruelties) that preceded it. And we should not strike from
the Bible those contentious passages because those passages represent what the
world was prior to Christ and what it will persist in being and becoming in
lieu of Christ. The books of the Old Testament are, first and foremost, an
embroidered history of a people -- and we take, and should take, such histories
with their blights intact. Just as we would whitewash the Western historical
record of recent centuries to our detriment -- how much easier would it be to
repeat the sins of the past (be it industrial genocide or the commerce of slavery)
without insisting on, and learning from, their having transpired? We cannot
strike passages condoning the stoning of people to death from the Bible,
because to do so robs the teachings of Christ in Matthew 5:38-39 and the
example of Christ in John 8:1-11 of their revolutionary vision. We cannot
strike passages that seem to indict homosexuality because to do so would
discourage the discipline of close reading for meaning and the discipline of
looking beyond the Bible itself for cultural context: the account in Genesis 19
of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is not a judgment on homosexuality,
but on rape (countless people get this wrong, true, but without the text before
them, those people will never have a chance to get it right); and what seem to
be Paul’s judgments on homosexuality (as we understand it in the 21st century)
are revealed to be judgments on the sexual enslavement of adolescent and prepubescent
boys when one takes the time to follow in the footsteps of the scholars (e.g.
Sarah Ruden) who’ve done the legwork. We need the contentious passages to
remind us of whom our ancestors were and to -- in some cases -- remind us who we must
never again be.</span> That some people don’t understand this is unfortunate; but the
people who use religious texts as blunt instruments to persecute and abuse
others (the Kim Davises of the world) are never going to have the epiphanies
waiting for them (on homosexuality, on capital punishment, et cetera) if
atheists and thoughtful Christians continue to let those people position
themselves as the faces and voices of modern Christianity. I’d wager that most
contemporary pharisaical believers have met Christ -- but still do not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">see</i> Christ. And in failing to recognize
Christ as the final, radical, liberating word on how human beings must conduct
themselves, fail to see the Church and their own lives as manifestations and
extensions of His. And that is tragic. Because when we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i> recognize Christ, our lives and the communities we build and the
relationships we nurture become those very edits my friend was wondering why
we, as believers, don’t make to the actual biblical text itself. In short,
Christians whose sense of their religion is rich with contextual awareness,
intellectual rigor and deep focus on Christ as the cornerstone of the whole
enterprise -- these Christians do, indeed, regard and present the Bible as a
living, changing, growing document. It is not static; it is not calcified; it
is not a command that we conceive of our modern world along premodern lines. The
Bible is an historical portrait in which Christ sits, from which Christ
emerges. It is both a long shadow cast and a transfiguring light revealing not
answers so much as the value in asking questions. And perhaps this is part of
the rub, too, for atheists: that religion doesn’t provide answers in the way
that science does or in the way that misguided believers assert that it does. Christianity,
at its best and most vibrant, understands that conclusions take a back seat to
wonder, possibility and the ceaseless crafting of self, climate and culture.
And when the world (including the atheists whose hackles go up over the
Christians out there pounding the drum against LGBT rights, citing what they
imagine to be scriptural precedent) finally sees that people like poet Christian
Wiman, novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, activist John Dear and preacher
Frederick Buechner are the contemporary faces and voices of actual Christianity -- not
spotlight-addicts like Kim Davis, not bigots like the late Fred Phelps, not people whose faith hinges on Creationism -- the better off we’ll all be. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>
<br></br>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-46878303524705258422015-07-28T09:02:00.002-06:002015-07-28T16:16:48.246-06:00E.L. Doctorow: Appreciating the Appreciations<br />
Ever since his passing last week, I've been wanting to write something about E.L. Doctorow. Not a commemoration of his life or appreciation of his career, but rather a commentary on how heartening I have found the depth of warmth and precision of memories in those tributes to him written by others. Great writers are rarely paid due attention, and while it's unfortunate that their deaths precede such attention more often than does their work, we should be grateful when we see writers of Doctorow's caliber trending on social media.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXDQgXPVS5_FqoZ6eCom_Fx2TYUN1r5sGxc2vzHpDqQiDoBmFClsWVa0FDyaJ8zdk95lF0KCozM3T39AcVsPtTLPf03NljG14Y_3aNYb05EHfthS9LfBVQwnTjRd7jsjd9CePnzHsE7uVt/s1600/doctorow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXDQgXPVS5_FqoZ6eCom_Fx2TYUN1r5sGxc2vzHpDqQiDoBmFClsWVa0FDyaJ8zdk95lF0KCozM3T39AcVsPtTLPf03NljG14Y_3aNYb05EHfthS9LfBVQwnTjRd7jsjd9CePnzHsE7uVt/s200/doctorow.jpg" width="200" /></a>Ours is an impoverished culture -- enamored of buffoonery, accepting of chicanery -- and books like <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ragtime-e-l-doctorow/1103275798?ean=9780812978186" target="_blank">Ragtime</a> (which I haven't read) and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/city-of-god-e-l-doctorow/1100392930?ean=9780812985894" target="_blank">City of God</a> (which I have) are beacons or compass points in line with which our culture might be righted. Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson has written that "civilization can trivialize itself to death," and I believe she is correct. So much of the art we imbibe, the gossip we condone, the lip service we pay the ridiculous has a poisoning effect on who we are and what we expect of our lives in that it elbows the truly valuable to the margins, uses its bombast to make footnotes of discretion, wisdom and beauty. So to have seen the wealth of coverage on, the column inches devoted to Doctorow's legacy -- especially given how minor key the discussion of his work always seemed to be during his life, however many prizes he bagged -- has consumed me this last week. <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/city-of-god-e-l-doctorow/1100392930?ean=9780812985894" target="_blank">City of God</a> (the one novel of his I've read) is a favorite of mine -- a lightning strike of a book, an engine roaring forward on intellect and risk -- and while I've long suspected that <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1101870737?ean=2900812978178" target="_blank">The Book of Daniel</a> and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/march-e-l-doctorow/1100394403?ean=9780812976151" target="_blank">The March</a>, for example, must be at least as accomplished, I've never once had a discussion of his work with a friend, a professor, a book club member. So to read that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/23/el-doctorow-opened-a-magical-new-door-in-american-literature" target="_blank">Michael Chabon regards</a> Doctorow's work as the quickening impetus behind his own oeuvre, that he still remembers the buzzing dinner conversations his parents had about <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ragtime-e-l-doctorow/1103275798?ean=9780812978186" target="_blank">Ragtime</a> <i>four decades</i> ago -- leaves me a little awestruck at what awaits me in that book. And to read that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/23/el-doctorow-great-american-novelist" target="_blank">Amy Bloom considers </a>Doctorow the finest American novelist of the last <i>century</i> (remembering, of course, that that century also included the likes of Steinbeck and Faulkner, to say nothing of contemporaries like Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth) -- this is praise that would seem like hyperbole if it didn't, instead, hum with sincerity and humility. Or to hear <a href="https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=pbs+newshour+coates+doctorow&ei=UTF-8&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-001" target="_blank">Ta-Nehisi Coates speak</a> about reading <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ragtime-e-l-doctorow/1103275798?ean=9780812978186" target="_blank">Ragtime</a>: "from the first page, you know, my head almost exploded." Or to read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/books/el-doctorow-author-of-historical-fiction-dies-at-84.html?_r=1" target="_blank">Doctorow's obituary in <i>The New York Times</i></a> and to then spend 30 minutes with the comments on it -- from his readers, his peers, his former students. I can't ever remember reading such a number of lucid, loving, indebted memories of encounters with a writer and/or his work on the occasion of his passing. And it is this abundance of treasuring up this masterful writer's life, gentleness and blazing body of work on which I wanted to comment.<br />
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We've lost a genius. But this loss seems also to have reminded us that complex art, rigorous thought and delicacy of carriage are more important to us than perhaps we'd realized. May we carry that epiphany forward and let it inform what we read, how we treat others, and how we treat ourselves.
<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-13783297496385954782015-06-28T11:10:00.000-06:002015-06-28T11:14:08.142-06:00Booking a Holiday<br />
Earlier this month, members of my book club, The Eclectic Shade Tree, converged on Casper for a barbecue and discussion of Halldor Laxness's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/independent-people-halldor-laxness/1100619145?ean=9780679767923" target="_blank">Independent People</a> and Charles Ferdinand Ramuz's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beauty-on-earth-charles-ferdinand-ramuz/1116477750?ean=9780987276070" target="_blank">Beauty on Earth</a>. As we're an online book club, our members have always been far-flung (there was once a time where we had members on three different continents), making it difficult for more than a few to get together for a meal, drinks, a chat. But a few weeks ago saw Paul spend five hours round-trip on his motorcycle to join me and Dylan and Tim here in Casper, Amy driving four hours round-trip, Keonna four hours round-trip, and Christian flying to Denver and then driving nine hours round-trip -- all for books, camaraderie, and conversation. A number of these people were meeting each other in person for the first time. Hanz -- who had moved to Wisconsin from Casper just a week earlier -- was the lone absentee. So close! But we had a beautiful, animated afternoon, eating burgers and brats, yammering about the glories of Laxness's vision of nature and the shortcomings of Ramuz's modernist minimalism. In fact, the afternoon came off so thoroughly without a hitch, that I proposed the idea that we celebrate the EST's fifteenth anniversary -- in 2017 -- with the lot of us taking a cruise together. Perhaps a trip to Alaska whilst reading Andrea Barrett's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ship-fever-andrea-barrett/1103668116?ean=9780393316001" target="_blank">Ship Fever</a>, or a journey to the Caribbean with Jean Rhys's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wide-sargasso-sea-jean-rhys/1100878232?ean=9780393960129" target="_blank">Wide Sargasso Sea</a>, or a voyage along the New England coast with Margaret Elphinstone's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/voyageurs-margaret-elphinstone/1007091246?ean=9781841956435" target="_blank">Voyageurs</a>... <br />
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Will it happen? I hope so; I believe so. Logistics are knotty, but with enough time to plan and save, knots can be undone. There are few things in life so marvelous as books. Sharing books with others, and seeing those others become dear to you over time, is more marvelous still. And throwing a holiday into the mix -- excursions, the rolling sea, long walks along the decks, dinners and desserts -- seems a recipe for memories that'll stand a long, long time. I love this book club and am proud of its having withstood and adapted to change over the years, having survived Tolkien's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion </a>and Pessoa's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/book-of-disquiet-fernando-pessoa/1101062776?ean=9780141183046" target="_blank">The Book of Disquiet</a>. It has been a source of comfort and steadiness in my life since 2002, has given me some of the best novels I've ever read, has drawn the stitches of certain friendships tighter and saw the beginning of the relationship that would become my marriage during a dinner to discuss Isabel Allende's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/house-of-the-spirits-isabel-allende/1101818674?ean=9780553383805" target="_blank">The House of the Spirits</a>.<br />
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So cheers to the EST, to the warm ironwork of friendship and the splendor of literature.
<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-90959043261339742962015-05-21T13:48:00.000-06:002015-05-22T08:30:12.321-06:00An Interview with Chris Beckett<br />
<b>Jason Cooper:</b> I read <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dark-eden-chris-beckett/1109650012?ean=9780804138680" target="_blank">Dark Eden</a> last year after winning it in a Good Reads giveaway. Earlier this year, I read its sequel <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-of-eden-chris-beckett/1120160189?ean=9780804138703" target="_blank">Mother of Eden</a>. As someone who often (not always) thinks sci-fi privileges philosophical or political reflection over prose that develops images, I was unprepared for how visual and evocative <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dark-eden-chris-beckett/1109650012?ean=9780804138680" target="_blank">Dark Eden</a> and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-of-eden-chris-beckett/1120160189?ean=9780804138703" target="_blank">Mother of Eden</a> proved to be—you have an uncanny knack for putting your readers in whatever environment you’re conjuring, for making them feel the terror and wonder of those environments. What individual books or films most successfully transport you? To what extent, and how, have their examples guided your instincts in writing Eden?<br />
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<b>Chris Beckett:</b> I’m really delighted that you found the books visual and evocative. That’s what I want them to be, but it’s an odd thing about being a writer, you can never yourself see the effect your writing creates, rather as a puppeteer can’t see the show he’s performing (can’t <i>not </i>see the strings in his hands, can’t not know that all the voices are his own). I can only write the books and hope.<br />
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I think I have quite a vivid visual imagination, and quite a strong impulse to escape from the world, so I was quite readily transported by many different books when I was a child. I loved <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/chronicles-of-narnia-c-s-lewis/1100060684?ean=9780064409391" target="_blank">the Narnia books</a> of C S Lewis, for instance, which are full of lovely little visual details. I was a somewhat solitary child, and spent quite long periods by myself imagining a world of my own. Not sure this was good for me, but I guess it was good training for my books!<br />
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Thinking of books written for adults which transported me in that kind of way, I think of Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia trilogy (<a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helliconia-spring-brian-w-aldiss/1004887966?ean=9781497637634" target="_blank">Helliconia Spring</a>, <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helliconia-summer-brian-w-aldiss/1005063601?ean=9781497637641" target="_blank">Helliconia Summer</a>, <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/helliconia-winter-brian-w-aldiss/1005327417?ean=9781497637658" target="_blank">Helliconia Winter</a>), as one which made a big impression on me. There are engaging characters and human stories there, but there’s no doubt that the planet Helliconia itself is the number one attraction. Orbiting a sun which itself is in an eccentric orbit round a much larger star, Helliconia experiences winters which last hundreds of years, during which the whole structure of society changes, and the balance of power between the planet’s two intelligent races tips in favour of the hairy goat-like phagors. But then spring comes, followed by a centuries-long summer, and everything shifts again. The reader is shown all this through the eyes of Helliconia people, and it came alive for me in just the way you describe.<br />
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<b>JC:</b> In <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-of-eden-chris-beckett/1120160189?ean=9780804138703" target="_blank">Mother of Eden</a>, we see tribes across Eden nursing enmities and suspicions that echo the tensions between and within religions in our own world. And while the distinctions between groups in <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-of-eden-chris-beckett/1120160189?ean=9780804138703" target="_blank">Mother of Eden</a> feel analogous to religious distinctions—especially given Starlight’s stature as a prophet (she recalls Jesus and Moses to me and even put me in mind of Pope Francis at one point)—I wonder if cultural and geographic analogies might be closer. Isobel Coleman’s book <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/paradise-beneath-her-feet-isobel-coleman/1111617839?ean=9780812978551" target="_blank">Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East</a><i> </i>suggests that the divisions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for instance, have less to do with discrepancies in theological interpretation than with centuries-old tribalism that has only incidentally to do with religion, if at all. I wonder if we’re too inclined to lay the violence between competing religious interpretations at the doorstep of religion. I wonder if the violence has more to do with cultural habits emerging within geographical pockets. Do you see aggressive tribalism as inevitable among human beings? And whether or not you do, where might humanity’s hope for collaboration and mutual respect lie?<br />
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<b>CB:</b> It’s interesting that you mention the rift between Shi’ite and Sunni Islam, because that was one of the things I was thinking about when writing about the rift between Johnfolk and Davidfolk in <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-of-eden-chris-beckett/1120160189?ean=9780804138703" target="_blank">Mother of Eden</a>. As I understand it, the split was originally about a dispute about who was the legitimate heir to the authority of Mohamed. This dispute took place over thirteen hundred years ago, and it fascinates me that it still animates people today, so many generations on from the original quarrel. The split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism would be another example. In both cases there are theological differences, but I’d guess that it was the politics that came first and the theology that followed. In such situations, my feeling is, a theological difference is <i>needed</i>, and so one is found.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCQ1nc67ZO9wCEXPNIWG_EjUx4hdJysvGIujFQJkpvoIQs9FSoJmwsqOzkHO6kO1irnisX5gmIK4nsX64SmRzXrzIJAn3P_tRSm0JXpn_uvM8yV9E04aoqiCpsmE28xC2CQjme6OiC7W-J/s1600/chrisbeckett2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCQ1nc67ZO9wCEXPNIWG_EjUx4hdJysvGIujFQJkpvoIQs9FSoJmwsqOzkHO6kO1irnisX5gmIK4nsX64SmRzXrzIJAn3P_tRSm0JXpn_uvM8yV9E04aoqiCpsmE28xC2CQjme6OiC7W-J/s320/chrisbeckett2.JPG" width="213" /></a>Groups of human beings tell themselves stories which justify their position, provide their lives with meaning, and explain why they’re the good guys. (I’m going to write more about this in the <i>third </i>Eden book which I’m now working on.) Religion is often co-opted to provide those stories, it seems to me, either that or those stories <i>become </i>religions.<br />
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My assumption would be that aggressive tribalism is part of our nature, not least because all of our closest animal relatives engage in it. That’s not to say we have to give way to it, though. We have lots of instincts that we feel but don’t necessarily give way to.<br />
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<b>JC:</b> One of the things I find most interesting about the Eden novels is how you explore the corrosion and re-making of language. Words accrue structure and meaning, and see these become stable, through contexts and points of reference. In your novels, words held over from Earth are now divorced from their contexts and so, over generations, see their structures erode and their meanings jump tracks. To what extent do the aural character of a society’s language and its grammatical tics shape or reflect a society’s sense of itself?<br />
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<b>CB:</b> I’ve always been fascinated by the way that words can, as you say, ‘jump tracks’. It’s not just words that jump tracks either, but ideas and institutions. (When I read American history, for instance, it always comes as kind of jolt to remind myself that the Democratic Party was originally the pro-slavery party.) One of the things I’ve tried to do in the Eden books is avoid any conception as a society as a static thing. The world is not divided between good guys and bad guys; events do not have fixed meanings, but are constantly reinterpreted and retold.<br />
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I don’t know, but I’d guess that the character of a language does reflect a society’s sense of itself to some extent. I notice for instance that both in British and US English, the speech of rural areas characteristically has a slow drawn-out quality (in the UK, a West Country accent, or the slow, flat speech of the flat Fens near where I live in East Anglia; in the US, a Texas drawl) while big cities are characterised by a rapid fire, clipped way of speaking (London, New York).<br />
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You don’t get much more rural backwater than Eden, and it’s also a society which has a largely oral culture, so I imagined a slow way of speaking in which words are repeated and savoured.<br />
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<b>JC:</b> When I was in graduate school, we read Ian McEwan’s novel <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/enduring-love-ian-mcewan/1100271360?ean=9780385494144" target="_blank">Enduring Love</a>. My classmates and I discussed at length the power of the eidetic image—how a reader or a reading experience can be jarred or shaken with an image like the hot air balloon accident opening that book. <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-of-eden-chris-beckett/1120160189?ean=9780804138703" target="_blank">Mother of Eden</a> explores the phenomenon, too, with its scenes at the Rock. In both McEwan’s novel and your own novel, the anxieties that readers might feel—about heights, about helplessness—are exploited to breathtaking effect. When writing scenes with that eidetic force, how do you prevent them overshadowing the narrative as a whole?<br />
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<b>CB:</b> It’s tricky with things like that scene at the Rock. I think you’re right, they can overshadow the whole book, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The horrific balloon scene <i>does </i>hang over the whole of <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/enduring-love-ian-mcewan/1100271360?ean=9780385494144" target="_blank">Enduring Love</a>, but doesn’t the power of the book derive from that shadow? I needed Starlight to be confronted directly by the violence on which the powerful in New Earth rely, and it <i>should </i>be shocking, because she is shocked by it, and it is a decisive moment for her.<br />
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Even in our world, we can be fairly sure, that somewhere, at any given moment, someone is doing something very scary and painful to someone else in the name of the society we would think of as our own.<br />
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<b>JC:</b> I used to work for Barnes and Noble, and I once had a customer come through my line with a stack of non-fiction about the Vietnam War. I tried chatting with him about Tim O’Brien’s <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/going-after-cacciato-tim-obrien/1101818676?ean=9780767904421" target="_blank">Going After Cacciato</a>, and he would have nothing to do with fiction. He told me that he had no interest in reading stories that weren’t true. I told him (antagonistic little bookseller that I was) that, as I see it, non-fiction traffics in facts, while great fiction traffics in truth. I realize it isn’t always that simple, and I doubt that I turned him on to reading fiction in that instant—but what would you to say to someone who looks down his or her nose at reading fiction? Why should someone read fiction?<br />
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<b>CB:</b> Sometimes I have moments when I feel the same as your customer. Why make stuff up –people, situations, societies – when there are real people and real societies out there to explore? But I’d answer it like this. Making stuff up is one thing, imagination is another. Imagination is <i>not </i>an optional extra. You need imagination, for instance, to put yourself in the position of another human being (since there is never direct access to another person’s mind). You need imagination to move forward from a familiar present into an as yet unknown future. I’ll bet that your customer’s stack of Vietnam books did not just contain facts, but used a range of techniques and devices to engage the reader’s imagination and bring the story alive.<br />
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Of course it is possible, and useful, to write books about real people, and real events like the Vietnam war, but as soon as you try and enter into what it was like to be there, you have to use imagination, particularly so if you want to try and put yourself into the mind of someone quite different to yourself, or someone in a situation you’ve never had to deal with personally: a Viet Cong fighter, a child running from a napalmed building, a GI caught in a boobytrap... In a sense you can’t know, you can only guess.<br />
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It can be inhibiting, when writing, to try to put yourself behind the eyes of real people (how can I speak for that fighter, or that child, or that GI? How can I really know? Do I even have the right to <i>try </i>and speak for them?). Even so-called non-fiction really is fiction as soon as it gets down to the level of subjective experience. And should we write fiction about other people’s real experiences?<br />
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That being so it can be very freeing, both for a reader or a writer to write fiction: to be able to say, in effect, “I know this stuff is made up, I know these aren’t real people, but they are my attempt to understand the wider world, by imagining people and situations beyond my own experience.”<br />
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It is also freeing in the sense that you are not attempt to capture a particular moment in history (like the Vietnam war) but rather to enter imaginatively into processes and dynamics that perhaps occur over and over again in lots of different situations. Using fiction is a way of avoiding your work being read as journalism, or as biography or history, but rather as an more general exploration of being human.<br />
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That’s my justification anyway. Wonder if it would have impressed that customer of yours?<br />
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(I’d be interested to ask him why he was so interested in that particular time in particular. Why do people go over and over, with such apparent pleasure, the detail of historical wars? Are they really confronting reality? Or are they escaping from it, as surely as any fiction reader?)<br />
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<b>JC:</b> Lastly, what was the single most memorable reading experience of your life? What was the book, and what was the context?<br />
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<b>CB:</b> Good Lord, that’s a hard one. You could ask me that question many times and get a different answer on each occasion: I could list a dozen books or more that opened up whole new possibilities as to what a book was and what it could do: Orwell’s <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1984-george-orwell/1100009100?ean=9780452262935" target="_blank">Nineteen Eighty-Four</a>, Jack Kerouac’s <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/on-the-road-jack-kerouac/1100315194?ean=9780142437254" target="_blank">On the Road</a> (even though I find it completely unreadable now!), Kurt Vonnegut’s <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mother-night-kurt-vonnegut/1100622885?ean=9780385334143" target="_blank">Mother Night</a>, Doris Lessing’s <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/briefing-for-a-descent-into-hell-doris-lessing/1100271596?ean=9780307390615" target="_blank">Briefing for a Descent into Hell</a>, Philip K Dick’s <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep-philip-k-dick/1101586096?ean=9780345404473" target="_blank">Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</a>... I could go on!<br />
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But if I’ve got to pick one, I’ll plump this time for <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mrs-dalloway-virginia-woolf/1100303331?ean=9780156628709" target="_blank">Mrs Dalloway</a> by Virginia Woolf. I first read this aged 19, and was amazed that something so rich and absorbing could be made out of such ordinary and everyday events. For some time I thought that was what I wanted to try and do myself. It’s not the kind of writing I ended up doing, but, who knows, maybe I learnt something about world-building from it?<br />
<br />
Jason, thanks so much for your interest in my work, and for these really interesting and different questions.
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-60898049710425673632014-11-23T16:00:00.002-07:002015-06-04T19:53:43.535-06:00Tender Morsels<br />
Last night, I finished reading Margo Lanagan's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tender-morsels-margo-lanagan/1100291049?ean=9780375843051" target="_blank">Tender Morsels </a>for my book club. It took me a good deal longer to get through it than I anticipated, which I chalk up to struggles with its darkness (more on that in a minute) and to the fact that, as my wife pointed out to me this morning, I actually have friends with whom I go out and do <i>friend </i>things (whereas in Missoula, I had co-workers that were dear to me but with whom I never really socialized and classmates whom I admired, but with whom -- save one, who is still a good friend -- I never really socialized). So, yes, I've been reading, but also going to films with Dylan and having lunch with Tim and having beers with Gordon, etc. We make time for what is most important to us, and friends are important to me, now, to a degree that they really have never been in my adult life -- and I welcome and cherish that. Books, too, remain of paramount importance to me, which is why you'll never see me blogging about failing to read at all. I can count on one hand, I'm sure, the number of days this year that saw me reading not a single page in whatever book I happened to be reading at the time.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiyDsdanSLYnh1hZKWmPntdwNCsNVLvpgM44QRPPXtZzGQG3IBdBpFNDhV5ZQ_4yrQKEr-L6fiolbeJkln4YYJ2nHTn1FA1uoSLbkktqvLXCS9I_F-quYCHpsJOH07z9beJryXSAp2Taom/s1600/tendermorsels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiyDsdanSLYnh1hZKWmPntdwNCsNVLvpgM44QRPPXtZzGQG3IBdBpFNDhV5ZQ_4yrQKEr-L6fiolbeJkln4YYJ2nHTn1FA1uoSLbkktqvLXCS9I_F-quYCHpsJOH07z9beJryXSAp2Taom/s320/tendermorsels.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Katerina Plotnikova</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Finishing a book always feels like an achievement to me, and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tender-morsels-margo-lanagan/1100291049?ean=9780375843051" target="_blank">Tender Morsels </a>is no different. In some ways, getting through it feels even more significant or momentous because while I loved it, I was thrown by its brutality. And let me make clear at the outset: I'm the reader for whom darkness in novels is bread and butter. What is an exploration of a fictional life without trial and suffering? Life is, after all, earmarked with these -- so, too, should fiction be. But I hadn't expected such unthinkable abuses visited on an adolescent girl by a parent, by other adolescents; or the piercing melancholy of love that has nowhere to go, no one to whom it might given; or the surreal, nightmarish horror of a final act of vengeance. Be aware, parents: read <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tender-morsels-margo-lanagan/1100291049?ean=9780375843051" target="_blank">Tender Morsels</a><b> </b>with your teen, by all means, but do not allow them to read it alone. The villainy of the <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-paperback-boxed-set-books-1-7-j-k-rowling/1108948862?ean=9780545162074" target="_blank">Harry Potter</a> and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hunger-games-trilogy-boxset-suzanne-collins/1114862388?ean=9780545265355" target="_blank">Hunger Games </a>series has little on the villainy we see in <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tender-morsels-margo-lanagan/1100291049?ean=9780375843051" target="_blank">Tender Morsels</a>. But it all feels wholly germane to Lanagan's project: this is a fairy tale, after all, and fairy tales traffic in darkness as a means to unveiling truths to us -- about ourselves, about the social storms through which we veer, about the best and worst natures in all of us, and how those natures contend with one another. It feels like a fairy tale that the Grimms might have envied, and that is really saying something. It's an imperfect book, but a sublime one, too. And it made me want to re-read Bruno Bettelheim's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/uses-of-enchantment-bruno-bettelheim/1101997130?ean=9780307739636" target="_blank">The Uses of Enchantment</a> -- and that's high praise, indeed.<br />
<br />
Next on deck: <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/all-the-birds-singing-evie-wyld/1113472738?ean=9780307907769" target="_blank">All the Birds, Singing</a><b> </b>by Evie Wyld, I think. Because it's a Good Reads giveaway win of mine, and as I haven't won a giveaway in a couple months now, I expect it's time to get to those wins I've been neglecting. Besides, I've been in contact with Wyld herself in recent months, and she's been extraordinarily kind and gracious (donating signed copies of her books to me to give to listeners of my radio show) -- there are few things finer than reading the work of a writer you've come to admire as a person.
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-57687509273568940242014-10-25T15:32:00.002-06:002015-06-28T11:16:19.064-06:00Returning<br />
I've been inspired, of late, to get back in the blogging saddle -- by my wife's academic work, by two talks I recently gave at church (on cinema and literature for the discerning Christian), by having become friends with a blogger whose work <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reading-World-Confessions-Literary-Explorer/dp/1846557879/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414272372&sr=8-1&keywords=ann+morgan" target="_blank">is coming to fruition in the world of publishing</a>, by my having become a local radio personality (in some miniaturist degree) doing a book minute each day on <a href="http://www.superhitscasper.com/" target="_blank">the oldies station</a> for which I work. (I'm no longer teaching or working at Target, but am an advertising executive and copywriter.) I'm still a voracious, if slow, reader, after all, and sometimes that :60 daily canvas feels too small for what I want to discuss, especially given how difficult it is to really know how many people tune in specifically for it each day here in Casper, Wyoming. (Hundreds of people hear it each day, but how many have gotten in the habit of tuning me in on their dial with literary intent?) So, yes, consider this a modest return to the room. I've missed it.
<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-77716231623174732942013-02-01T14:29:00.004-07:002015-06-28T11:17:12.190-06:00The Silmarillion<br />
To begin: on one level, I admire and appreciate what Tolkien was doing with <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion</a>.
He began writing it at (or near) the height of Modernism, when
novelists pushed fiction into uncharted waters, experimenting with form
in ways that feel -- even a century later -- fresh and vibrant. So for a
young writer to begin cobbling together interrelated stories that felt
not only traditional, but aggressively antique in style and content was a
bold move, a setting himself apart from the pack. Other writers of the
time did this as well: Sigrid Undset wrote epic medieval fictions just
post-WWI when others were dabbling in stream-of-consciousness and all
manner of tricksiness, and she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for
those fictions, trends be damned. <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/kristin-lavransdatter-sigrid-undset/1100623348?ean=9780143039167" target="_blank">Undset's work</a>, however, was successful
where <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion</a> most assuredly is not because
of many reasons, but one reason above all: she had readers in mind when
writing her great epics, and she cared about whether they cared about
her stories. Which leads me to say: I have never before encountered a
work of fiction so utterly indifferent to, or dismissive of, the idea of
readership as <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion</a>. So, although I applaud
Tolkien's resistance to, and likely suspicion of, Modernism, this book
is a stain on his reputation as a storyteller, as a spinner of yarns.<br />
<br />
Now,
I'm the first to admit that one shouldn't go into reading this book
expecting a novel, because it is not that (however its being broken into
chapters suggests otherwise) and should not be judged as such. However,
neither is it a collection of short stories. Nor is it even more than
ostensibly a collection of myths of Middle-earth, or a cosmology of that
universe, although it has been, and continues to be, classified as such
by its most ardent admirers. It has been oversold along those lines, as
it turns out. <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion</a> is more a reference
work than anything else, a compendium of names tied together with the
merest sinew of narrative, description, context; it reads more like the
Elvish yellow pages than like an origin narrative. And how can a reader
actually love a book if unable to recount when asked -- in more than the
broadest, most vague strokes -- the narrative arcs and names, roles and
relationships of that narrative's minor (to say nothing of major)
characters? From memory -- be honest-- who or what is Menegroth, or
Drengist, or Finarfin, or Elwe, or the Teleri, or Amlach, or Nienna?
Etc, etc. Having now finished the book (and being a closer reader and
better retainer of texts than most people I've ever known), I can tell
you, with some confidence of accuracy, about Iluvatar, Aule, Yavanna,
Feanor, Luthien and Morgoth -- and that's pretty much it. (Pardon the
missing umlauts and accents.) Everything else is this vast wash of white
noise, or what amounts to a dictionary of names -- the trial that is
reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-hundred-years-of-solitude-gabriel-garc-a-m-rquez/1100608844?ean=9780679444657" target="_blank">One Hundred Years of Solitude</a>
(in which all principal characters seem to either share or have
variations on three or four different names) taken to the hundredth
power. It stands comparison with another classic in another way, too: <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion</a>, like Mary Shelley's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Frankenstein/Paul-J-Hunter/e/9780393927931" target="_blank">Frankenstein</a>,
is a concept of genius impoverished in the prosaic execution. People
say: it can only really be claimed and embraced by hardcore Tolkien fans
-- which seems to me a way of excusing its inscrutability, of
apologizing for its failure as prose in a way that feels less like
acknowledgment of that failure than like pretentious cliquishness. The
thing is: I am a reasonably hardcore Tolkien fan. I read<a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lord-of-the-rings-j-r-r-tolkien/1100188646?ean=9780618640157" target="_blank"> The Lord of the Rings</a>
in my early 20s and felt so intimate a connection with it, I had plans
to name my daughter (should I ever have had one) Lothlorien. The trilogy
was not quite talismanic for me, but it blew me away and felt more like
a comprehensive and necessary work of art than anything I'd read up to
then. (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc6SwNc30TU" target="_blank">The films, too, bowl me over: I cry my eyes out over at least half a dozen different scenes each time I watch them. Between the three films, I went to the cinema seven times to see LOTR.</a>) But, above all, I'm one who demands that literature not be difficult for the sake of being difficult. <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion</a>,
though, is not just difficult, but almost wholly indecipherable -- an
opaque work of literary masturbation, the clearest geek creation of any
work of art perhaps ever made or written. And art ceases, on some level,
to be art when it is made in a bubble, when its ignorance of its
audience is willful almost to a point of hostility. Is there
magnificence and loveliness in this book? Certainly. I love the
Christian echoes (not just the obvious analogies of Iluvatar/God and
Melkor/Lucifer, but also the subtler paralleling of Aule's creation of
-- and willingness to smite, on Iluvatar's command -- the Dwarves with
Abraham's willingness, on God's command, to sacrifice Isaac), and some
of the scenes are enormously stirring (Aule's creation of the Dwarves,
the death of Feanor with his body fallen to ash from the force of his
fiery spirit and "borne away like smoke," Fingon -- in classically
Greek mode -- cutting off the hand of Maedhros from the back of the
eagle, Fingolfin challenging Morgoth to single combat), but these scenes
are less remembered than dogeared to reference in this review, lost as
they become in continued reading, in the powering through genealogy
after genealogy in which characters have few or no distinguishing
personalities or characteristics. Everything about the book feels
engineered to frustrate, to confound rather than illuminate. Consider
the following paragraph:<br />
<br />
"The sons of Hador were Galdor and
Gundor; and the sons of Galdor were Hurin and Huor; and the son of Hurin
was Turin the Bane of Glaurung; and the son of Huor was Tuor, father of
Earendil the Blessed. The son of Boromir was Bregor, whose sons were
Bregolas and Barahir; and the sons of Bregolas were Baragund and
Belegund. The daughter of Baragund was Morwen, the mother of Turin, and
the daughter of Belegund was Rian, the mother of Tuor. But the son of
Barahir was Beren One-hand, who won the love of Luthien Thingol's
daughter, and returned from the Dead; from them came Elwing the wife
Earendil, and all the Kings of Numenor after."<br />
<br />
Now, I understand
that some of these characters prove significant in the book. But my
problem with this paragraph is that, given that these are introductions
to these characters, how are we meant to remember them or their
relationships to one another later in the book when each of them <i>does</i> become significant if Tolkien has given us nothing whatsoever to remember them <i>by</i>?
The passage echoes the genealogy of Christ at the beginning of the
Gospel of Matthew, but that genealogy works because it sets the stage
for the narrative to come by giving us, in brief, what has come before,
whereas Tolkien's does not because it sets the stage for the narrative
to come by giving us the narrative to come in lineage shorthand, in
microcosm that would benefit readers with detail but discourages them
from reading further in the absence of detail. It's as though Tolkien
looked to the Bible as a template for much of<a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank"> The Silmarillion</a>
but failed to understand why biblical narratives, architectures and
tropes succeed as narratives, architectures and tropes -- which is
bizarre, given his stature as an academic and his devout religiosity.<br />
<br />
By the end, I was feeling snarkier than I would've liked: how convenient that the giant eagles would show up and save the day <i>the very second</i> it went from bad to irredeemably screwed (ornithology as deus ex machina -- and we see it in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc6SwNc30TU" target="_blank">the LOTR films</a> and likely <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lord-of-the-rings-j-r-r-tolkien/1100188646?ean=9780618640157" target="_blank">the novels</a>, too, with Gandalf's escape from Isengard,
with Frodo and Sam stranded in the river of lava...), or interpreting
the Dunedain's "numbers increas[ing] only slowly in the land" as
commentary on Dunedainian sperm count (poor, poor Aragorn)...<br />
<br />
Is
there good stuff to be found in these pages? Certainly. I've touched on
much of it above, and haven't even mentioned the ephemeral fairy tale
soul of the tale of Beren and Luthien, or the degree to which Tolkien
honors Sophocles with the fates of Turin and Nienor. But the achievement
here is so overwhelmed by the strikes going against it -- e.g. the
incessant multiplication of names (Turin has S - E - V - E - N different
names), the eye-rollingly vague and self-important portentousness ("For
they told how a blind Darkness came northward, and in the midst walked
some power for which there was no name, and the Darkness issued from it"
-- gimme a <i>break</i>), the off-putting navel-gazing zeal with which Tolkien rattles off his Middle-earth Xs and Os (how often does <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/silmarillion-j-r-r-tolkien/1002089300?ean=9780618126989" target="_blank">The Silmarillion</a> feel like a sound loop <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjzZhTS_xa0" rel="nofollow">of the possessed Louis Tully in Ghostbusters?</a>) -- that finishing the book felt like cause for celebration.
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-58194541488879974592013-01-31T14:50:00.002-07:002014-10-26T14:40:42.430-06:00A marvelous, if too brief, <a href="http://vimeo.com/37362289" target="_blank">interview with one of our best living poets</a>. His intellect, precision and candor put one in mind of Marilynne Robinson. Once you read Christian Wiman's work, or even listen to his interviews, you realize how impoverished you had been before encountering him.
<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-80025018292612854682012-08-15T10:25:00.001-06:002012-08-15T10:27:27.131-06:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EGCHWP8rP_YvLSLJmh04zX3ub7Skpmxn0GWn_DiDDxMBMQzus_U4ozax2812ksae1DR5fKXHqFGlMDCtZnCZbIqmjvXWGr9z50EzLjO69bjP1zmHRU4ZGalRIm4PkXt5oTczCCd94_f9/s1600/poets.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8EGCHWP8rP_YvLSLJmh04zX3ub7Skpmxn0GWn_DiDDxMBMQzus_U4ozax2812ksae1DR5fKXHqFGlMDCtZnCZbIqmjvXWGr9z50EzLjO69bjP1zmHRU4ZGalRIm4PkXt5oTczCCd94_f9/s320/poets.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Since the beginning of June, my friend Graham and I have embarked on a project that we have yet to name and which is proving to work wonders for our friendship (not that it was imperiled before), our depths of patience (much-needed in this world of hustle-and-bustle, where skimming texts is preferable to reading them), and our critical faculties (Graham has a BA in English, while my degrees are in English, too -- but without classrooms, the tools at our disposable lose their edges). In short, we're reading one longish poem a month together (taking turns in choosing) and writing proper, sit-down, longhand letters to one another about it. As a result, in the last two-and-a-half months, I've handwritten more letters than I had in the previous five years at least -- and I used to be a prolific writer of letters. As well, I've had more success this summer nosing into the strata of poems than I have since my first semester of graduate school in 2006. The project (which was Graham's idea, it should be noted) has come to feel -- in this very short amount of time, in the midst of the turbulent relationship I'm having with my church, and in the midst of my current appalled disenchantment with politics -- necessary for my sanity, for my sensitivities to all things beautiful and worthwhile. My wife has taken to have me say three nice things a day about people, so quick have I been to resort to snark and viciousness in considering the news, the drivers on the road, the customers at the store at which I work, the narrow-mindedness of certain fellow parishioners, etc. It has been a challenge, but I imagine time will bear out her wisdom in having me push myself to kindness. And this poem project feels like one half of this focus on kindness -- or if not kindness, generosities. God makes us whole, but that wholeness is often achieved through art, through relationships. I like to think of God inhabiting the ink of a page of a book, the insistence of a loved one, the thoughtful reproach of someone I have wronged. These things -- novels and poems, marriages, even confrontations -- become the cosmos. Or at least we're reminded of the cosmos existing within them. Art can be a harbor for us when the rest of the world seems to have gone mad (even art <i>about </i>a world gone mad -- Pat Frank's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/alas-babylon-pat-frank/1102239056?ean=9780060741877" target="_blank">Alas, Babylon</a> is impressing me in spades just now), when we ourselves seem to have gone mad.<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-29919288927411231142012-07-15T23:02:00.000-06:002012-07-15T23:08:51.601-06:00What constitutes a classic? It is the question of questions among book lovers (and one to which <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-western-canon-harold-bloom/1002246706?ean=9781573225144" target="_blank">Harold Bloom, of course, believes he has the answer</a>). Is a specific elapsed time a prerequisite? Or rather: an elapsed time taken alongside a book's aesthetic and moral gravitas? It's a question that puzzles me often -- with respect to what I read and to what those around me read (everyone I've ever known who has read Thomas Pynchon's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gravitys-rainbow-thomas-pynchon/1102478934?ean=9780143039945" target="_blank">Gravity's Rainbow</a> wonders how the hell it managed to purchase passage into the canon). I despised Gustave Flaubert's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/madame-bovary-gustave-flaubert/1100010302?ean=9780670022076" target="_blank">Madame Bovary</a> when I read it in my early 30s -- what is it about that novel that makes it quite so beloved (and it <i>is</i> beloved, placing second in <a href="http://www.toptenbooks.net/list-of-books" target="_blank">this list of tallied, weighted votes from well-known authors naming their favorite books</a>)? Did I somehow read a clunking translation (I should note that I've linked to a more recent, and perhaps better, translation above in an attempt to steer readers away from Eleanor Marx Aveling's)? (Such translations are out there and -- in certain cases -- make all the difference. Compare the translations of Sigrid Undset's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bridal-wreath-sigrid-undset/1000402043?ean=9780394752990" target="_blank">Kristin Lavransdatter from Charles Archer</a> and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-kristin-lavransdatter-vol-1-sigrid-undset/1110932002?ean=9780141180410" target="_blank">Tiina Nunnally</a>. Night and day, the former a linguistically anachronistic nightmare, the latter a sublime rendering of a sublime fiction.) But is the translation the problem when the novel is a study in despicable people behaving despicably (a la the Flaubert)? Leaving translated works aside, what about the notion of national identity or a novel's place in a nation's consciousness as an earmark of its inclusion in the canon? Why, for instance, does (Canadian) Timothy Findley's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0143055070/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d19_g14_i2?pf_rd_m=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=03JTY962VKD029JJHJ16&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1375923922&pf_rd_i=915398" target="_blank">Not Wanted on the Voyage</a> remain in print in Canada as a Penguin Modern Classic despite being long out-of-print here in the States? Can a book be a classic in one place and not another? Or more to the point: can a book be marketed as a classic by a top publishing house in Canada while a branch of <i>that same publishing house </i>in America doesn't even see fit to lift the book from obscurity in the most limited way? (It bears mentioning here that Penguin is the very publishing house that classifies Pynchon's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gravitys-rainbow-thomas-pynchon/1102478934?ean=9780143039945" target="_blank">above-mentioned poo-fest novel</a> as a classic.) Isn't the establishment of a literary canon necessarily a nod in the direction of subsuming the insular question of national identities into the larger fabric of shared humanity as expressed in art striving to outdo itself? Having just finished <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0143055070/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d19_g14_i2?pf_rd_m=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=03JTY962VKD029JJHJ16&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1375923922&pf_rd_i=915398" target="_blank">Not Wanted on the Voyage</a>, I consider its absence from American bookshops a tremendous loss to serious readers -- indeed, as great a loss as it would be to Canadian readers if Philip Roth's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/american-pastoral-philip-roth/1100623026?ean=9780375701429" target="_blank">American Pastoral</a> were to suddenly find itself without an edition in the provinces.<br />
<br />
Food for thought. Goodnight all.
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-73019953827656015562012-06-26T23:44:00.001-06:002012-06-26T23:46:10.301-06:00Sometimes we dig ourselves into holes (rabbit warrens?) of commitment and find ourselves floundering a bit to keep our heads above water. On the rare occasions this happens to me -- me being who I am -- it more often than not has something to do with books. And so while two months ago I was merrily going about my days, working at Target, reading in the evenings, exercising at the gym, watching <i>Family Feud</i> with my wife during supper -- I'm now (in addition to working at Target and riding the elliptical for three or four hours a week) taking tennis lessons on Monday nights, teaching a community education class in fairy tales on Wednesday nights, hosting a film series at church on Thursday nights, engaged in a handwritten-letter dialogue with a friend in which we tackle a different poem each month, have put together (i.e. have solicited signed copies of novels and memoirs from writers all over the map) and am now raffling off book baskets for our church fundraiser this summer -- and have fallen a little behind in both my Eclectic Shade Tree and Dickens bicentenary reading as a result of this whirlwind of busyness. To paraphrase Bilbo Baggins in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/" target="_blank">Peter Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring</a>: I feel a bit like butter scraped over too much bread. Come the end of July, the fundraiser will be over, as will the tennis lessons and the film series, and I'll be able to start looking ahead in earnest toward teaching English Composition II in the autumn, to spending the early winter curled up with coffee and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/little-dorrit-charles-dickens/1100059628?ean=9780199596485" target="_blank">Little Dorrit</a>, to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1707386/" target="_blank">Les Miserables</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1781769/" target="_blank">Anna Karenina</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/" target="_blank">Cloud Atlas</a> hitting the big screen. <br />
<br />
Onward.<br>
</br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-65096576653865213522012-05-01T14:25:00.002-06:002012-07-14T18:38:30.006-06:00Z-8A helicopters, OKT 3, an IDF soldier, ChiComs, AVLB portable bridge
layer system, XM5 electronic warfare vehicles, FOL, BDUs, MOPP gear,
MLRS, standard HE 155s, the SNT effect, FOTT missiles, Mark-19s, HEAT,
SABOT, a SAW gunner, JSFs, the ANC, NIA agents, NATO's IFOR in Bosnia,
the APC, a mammoth GAZ truck, Sukhoi 25 Rooks, RVX (which doesn't start
out as gas, mind you), the BRO, DeStRes, a workforce classified F-6 (or
A-1, depending on skills), CSSP, R&D, the M-1 Abrams, the NYSE, the
D-Corps, micro missiles the size of a .22 rimfire bullet, a culture of
RKR, NST, Lobos, an AMT Lightning, ADS, MTHEL, the FA-22, the JSOW,
Inertial Nav, BLU-97B submunitions (or "bomblets"), B-2 Spirits, B-1
Lancers, BUFFs, the B-52 Big Ugly Fat Fellows, SAMs, AMARC, DDs, SSDs,
the shit-for-brains QC inspector, C-130, UH-60, SSV-33, the MSS, JL-2
ballistic missiles, the ESM mast, Type 95 hunter-killers, the X-38, the
ISS (that <i>marvel </i>of engineering), a proper EVA kit, the ASTRO,
"Boba" the VR-operated robonaut, PSAs, the Orbital Denial Vehicle, BDUs,
the SIR (a modcop of the AK, or a stripped-down version of the XM 8,
depending on who you talk to), that sweet NATO 5.56 Cherry PIE ammo
(yowser! it's like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjyZKfdwlng&ob=av2e" target="_blank">that old Warrant song</a>!), BS duty (I can think of lots
of alternative meanings for this...), one has gotta Out G the G, KO
teams, PT and AIT, SC and LRP, DOA (which the novel wasn't quite --
although it was, for me, DALL by its end), AGN, PPSH submachine guns,
T-34 tanks, STAVKA, the SU-152 self-propelled gun, the DSCC, ADS, JIMs,
SAMs, the SBS, the Hardsuit 1200 (or 2000, depending on one's taste in
hardsuits), the Mark 1 Exosuit, the M-9 (a knockoff of the Russian APS),
the M-11, ZeVDeK, ROV, a full-on Alpha November Alpha, the
Beretta-Grechio, don't forget the Cousteaus and Sandlers, FAR units (am I
repeating myself now...?), Flies (you know, F-Lions, duh), LaMOEs...<br />
<br />
Got that? <br />
<br />
Just
because ours is a world of occasional acronyms, novelist Max Brooks, in his <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/world-war-z-max-brooks/1100054305" target="_blank">World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War</a>, likely thinks he
is lending an air of realist MFA cachet to his apocalyptic nightmare by
peppering the eyewitness "accounts" (of which his book is comprised) with them -- but pepper is meant to be used with
caution, here and there (to prevent sneezing and choking). I don't,
after all, head to the DMZ in my SUV with my MA folded in the back
pocket of my LEVIs and a mind to look into the legitimacy of the CEO
running -- FDR-style (because we know his presidency was a precursor of
the CCCP) -- the North Korean equivalent of the USA's CIA, right? Right.<br />
<br />
Note
to Brooks: a catalogue of acronyms and military-speak do not a
novel make. There. Got that out of my system. Now to the book's other
flaws...<br />
<br />
The worst possible thing Brooks could've done in setting out to write <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/world-war-z-max-brooks/1100054305" target="_blank">WWZ</a>
(forgive me) was to opt for first-person vignettes. Why? Because his
range as a writer is so crushingly limited that 90% of what are supposed
to be distinct individual voices sound <i>exactly </i>the same: their
patterns of speech, their colloquialisms, etc. This was made all the
more jarring for me as I had been reading Dickens's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bleak-house-charles-dickens/1007152291?ean=9780143037613" target="_blank">Bleak House</a> leading up to<b> </b><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/world-war-z-max-brooks/1100054305" target="_blank">WWZ</a>,
finishing the former while reading the latter -- and Dickens is <i>the
</i>master of creating distinct characters on the page. (<a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bleak-house-charles-dickens/1007152291?ean=9780143037613" target="_blank">BH</a> is a
kind of symphony of voices.) I'm not saying Brooks needed to be Dickens
to pull this feat off; I'm saying that any writer should be able to
recognize what he can and cannot do, what she is and is not capable of
achieving on the page. First-person narration strains Brooks's
wheelhouse to its breaking point; a kaleidoscope of first-person
narration is the novel's fatal flaw. The simple decision of
settling on third-person omniscience would've gone a long way toward
saving <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/world-war-z-max-brooks/1100054305" target="_blank">WWZ</a>. But between giving us characters that are almost
uniformly facsimiles of one another, silly cultural anachronisms (as
when we're asked to believe that two Chinese medical doctors would use
the word "hillbillies" in conversation) and drowning the prose in
acronyms that do little (nothing?) but set readers to rolling their eyes, Brooks is guilty of extraordinary laziness
here. And when he does look to make absolutely certain he conjures a
unique voice, he overreaches in the extreme! Sharon, the
supermodel-looking rehabilitated feral child with the intellect of a
four-year-old, narrates like a lobotomized college freshman mimicking Ernest Hemingway pretending to be a
Muppet Baby. What did Robert Downey Jr's character tell Ben Stiller's
character in <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-tropic-thunder-ben-stiller/12188035?ean=97363501541" target="_blank">Tropic Thunder</a>? <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q" target="_blank">Sage, if offensively couched, advice</a> -- and hilarious, too...<br />
<br />
Many
of the images of the zombies (e.g. walking along the sea floor, moving
across the Great Plains like herds of buffalo large enough to be seen
from space, etc) were like spectacular hallucinations, and some of the
interview segments were fascinating as facets of the response to this
pandemic -- the decimation account of Maria Zhuganova, the rallying
celluloid propaganda of Roy Elliot (a <i>very </i>thinly disguised
Steven Spielberg), the descent into northward migration and cannibalism
account of Jesika Hendricks -- but nothing in the novel moved me. And
its central metaphor disturbs the hell out of me. Brooks has suggested that he used
zombies as a metaphor for radicals and fundamentalists of both religious
and political stripes in our world today -- such a reading is supported
by scenes like the one at Lake Pichola in India, where zombies tumble
lemming-like over the lip of a cliff. I find the whole metaphor
offensive for two principal reasons: 1) that Brooks thinks it
permissible to look at radicals not as individuals but as a horde (this
dehumanizing of groups or movements is not new: the Communists in
Vietnam were called Charlie, just as here the zombies are collectively
known as Zack -- the irony of assigning an individual's name to a mass
of people we're not intended to see as individuals is chilling), and 2)
that he seems to think the slaughter of such radicals permissible,
incapable of troubling human conscience, and a mark of manhood (the
cavalier machismo of the soldiers in <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/world-war-z-max-brooks/1100054305" target="_blank">WWZ</a><b> </b>is overwrought to the
point of being risible, whether blind and serene Tomonaga Ijiro "dispatch[ing] forty-one zombies in as many minutes"
like David Carradine in <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-kung-fu-the-complete-first-season-david-carradine/8359752?ean=85392425020" target="_blank">Kung Fu</a>, or Todd Wainio jizzing himself to an Iron Maiden soundtrack before opening fire, it's as though half of Brooks's characters are lugging their penises around in wheelbarrows).<br />
<br />
In short: will Danny Boyle's sublime <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-28-days-later-cillian-murphy/7163479?ean=24543088172" target="_blank">28 Days Later</a> never be bested?
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-63094590139056834712012-04-29T22:57:00.001-06:002012-04-30T08:49:26.898-06:00In <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2012/apr/29/ten-best-first-lines-fiction" target="_blank">a recent piece in the Guardian</a>, Robert McCrum listed what he considers the ten best openings to novels. Most of the usual, and deserving, suspects were there: <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pride-and-prejudice-jane-austen/1002057084?ean=9780141040349" target="_blank">Pride and Prejudice</a>, <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Jane-Eyre/Charlotte-Bront/e/9781551111803" target="_blank">Jane Eyre</a>, <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/adventures-of-huckleberry-finn-mark-twain/1100018448?ean=9780142437179" target="_blank">The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</a>. McCrum went out on a limb, too, going further afield, opting to include Donna Tartt, P.G. Wodehouse and Sylvia Plath (the latter's scorching, tone-setting opening of <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bell-jar-sylvia-plath/1100550703?ean=9780060837020" target="_blank">The Bell Jar</a> is, indeed, a stunner) -- but might not a longer list, going far further past expectations, been the way to go? Readers have been giving their suggestions in the comments on the piece, but these, too -- e.g. Nabokov's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lolita-vladimir-nabokov/1100068690?ean=9780679723165" target="_blank">Lolita</a>, Dickens's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tale-of-two-cities-charles-dickens/1002093852?ean=9780679420736" target="_blank">A Tale of Two Cities</a> -- have been predictable, if deserving. Might not McCrum need to expand his own horizons as a reader? I put forth the openings of Sebastian Barry's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/annie-dunne-sebastian-barry/1100315691?ean=9780142002872" target="_blank">Annie Dunne</a>, Peter Matthiessen's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/at-play-in-the-fields-of-the-lord-peter-matthiessen/1000200135?ean=9780679737414" target="_blank">At Play in the Fields of the Lord</a>, Richard Llewellyn's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-green-was-my-valley-richard-llewellyn/1100247313?ean=9780684825557" target="_blank">How Green Was My Valley</a>, Dickens's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bleak-house-charles-dickens/1007152291?ean=9780143037613" target="_blank">Bleak House</a> and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/love-in-the-time-of-cholera-gabriel-garc-a-m-rquez/1103165178?ean=9780307389732" target="_blank">Love in the Time of Cholera</a> as more than worthy to sit alongside the Austen, Bronte and Twain.<br />
<br />
Barry: "Oh, Kelsha is a distant place, over the mountains from everywhere. You go over the mountains to get there, and eventually, through dreams."<br />
<br />
Matthiessen: "In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon."<br />
<br />
Llewellyn: "I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley."<br />
<br />
Dickens: "London."<br />
<br />
Garcia Marquez: "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." <br />
<br />
These speak for themselves and are among the dozen or so finest openings to novels I've ever encountered. I'd put the Plath in there, too. Sarah Waters's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tipping-the-velvet-sarah-waters/1100554304?ean=9781573227889" target="_blank">Tipping the Velvet</a>. Graham Greene's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/end-of-the-affair-graham-greene/1101823762?ean=9780142437988" target="_blank">The End of the Affair</a>. Peter Carey's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/illywhacker-peter-carey/1100619506?ean=9780679767909" target="_blank">Illywhacker</a>. The first paragraph of Henry Miller's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tropic-of-cancer-henry-miller/1100555852?ean=9780802131782" target="_blank">Tropic of Cancer</a>. The first five or six sentences of Graham Swift's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/waterland-graham-swift/1001920739?ean=9780679739791" target="_blank">Waterland</a>.<br />
<br />
To paraphrase (if I'm not mistaken) the poet William Stafford: the beginning of a poem should feel like stepping onto a moving train. Or into a dream.<br />
<br />
Ditto the beginning of a novel.
<br></br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-85374721212420169642012-04-08T20:31:00.004-06:002017-09-17T16:10:19.551-06:00Last week, Kelly and I saw Wim Wenders's new documentary <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440266/" target="_blank">Pina</a> at our local arthouse cinema. I went in as a relative virgin to dance as an art form, having seen a bizarre production of <i>The Nutcracker</i> at the University of Montana in 2009 (featuring the visiting Moscow Ballet, true, but also featuring, inexplicably, a GIGANTIC dancing unicorn), while Kelly had some dance training as a teen and worked as an intern at <i>Dance Magazine</i> in New York City one summer long before we met. (Apparently, the Bausch piece "Cafe Mueller" -- seen in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440266/" target="_blank">Pina</a> -- was also showcased in Pedro Almodovar's masterpiece <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0287467/" target="_blank">Talk to Her</a>, but the eight-foot-tall vagina has edged "Cafe Mueller" out of my memory of the film.) I went in with faith in Wenders (whose <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093191/" target="_blank">Wings of Desire</a> is among the very best films I've ever seen) and his longing to honor the art of his friend, the late choreographer Pina Bausch.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
However, as this was <i>modern </i>dance we'd be seeing, what would I -- whose suspicion of and distaste for modernism (Gertrude Stein's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/tender-buttons-gertrude-stein/1100744314?ean=9781614271772&itm=2&usri=tender+buttons" target="_blank">Tender Buttons</a>, in particular) elsewhere in the arts is quite thoroughgoing, whatever my admiration of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings, H.D.'s <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/trilogy-hilda-doolittle/1100873905?ean=9780811213998&itm=1&usri=trilogy+walls+fall" target="_blank">Trilogy</a> and George Oppen's poems -- think? Well, from the beginning (i.e. from Stravinsky in the dirt), I was rapt. It was not the dancing alone that was magnificent, but the sense I had of the creative engine behind these visions and their execution. And watching the Wenders film -- struck as I was by the trust between the dancers, by the staggering physical demands of the performances, by the symmetries and spatial relationships -- I found my mind jumping artistic tracks and articulating something of the precise reason behind my definition and love of great writing. In short: rigorous intellect, prose either muscular or pellucid or attentive to poetic device, elaborate architectural exposition, characterization that is honest even when disconcerting and empathetic even when exploring the monstrous, and a writer's faith in his or her readers to extend their reach <i>as </i>readers -- these are the earmarks of great literature that I came to more clearly understand as such while seeing their parallels exhibited in the work of Pina Bausch.<br />
<br />
The world would be diminished without <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1440266/" target="_blank">Pina</a> -- valentine that it is to these attributes in dance as a medium, and to the confidence issuing from them -- just as it would be diminished without Marilynne Robinson's diamond-edge intellect, without Peter Carey's luxuriant image-making, without the matryoshka sentences of Howard Jacobson, without Sigrid Undset's love for even those characters of hers whom she would have us (in some degree) despise, and without Charles Dickens's faith in our trusting his lead into the rabbit warrens that are his plots.<br />
<br />
To name just a few examples... <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-87924015355176287522012-04-03T22:49:00.002-06:002012-04-03T22:57:16.792-06:00I'm returning to blogging, but Booking a Room with a View is undergoing a twist: while the Booker remains nearer and dearer to my heart than its peer prizes, the death of the Good Reads group which functioned as a goad to my regular reading of its novels, coupled with my commitments to the Eclectic Shade Tree book club (celebrating its tenth anniversary this year) and to Dickens 2012 celebrations, is forcing me to cast a wider net (squeezing Booker-finalists and -winners into the heady brew of apocalyptic and Victorian fiction consuming my time of late has proven impossible).<br />
<br />
Henceforth, then, this blog will be an <i>all</i>-things-book space: reviews both glowing and vicious, columns, even (fingers crossed) interviews (with fellow book bloggers, with novelists of note, with English professors, with publishing insiders, with average readers). <br />
<br />
Looking forward to a fresh start. See you soon.<br />
<br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-72935671705101862922011-07-24T23:44:00.000-06:002011-07-24T23:44:22.562-06:00The 2011 Booker Prize longlist will be announced this Tuesday, the 26th, and so I wanted (despite my longish absence from blogging) to post not predictions, but rather the titles of those novels that have been garnering buzz in this quarter <i>and </i>that I'm quite eager to read:<br />
<br />
Alan Hollinghurst's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strangers-Child-Alan-Hollinghurst/dp/0330483242/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311572191&sr=1-1">The Stranger's Child</a><br />
Sebastian Barry's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canaans-Side-Sebastian-Barry/dp/0571226531/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311572229&sr=1-1">On Canaan's Side</a><br />
Tessa Hadley's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/London-Train-Tessa-Hadley/dp/0224090976/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311572263&sr=1-1">The London Train</a><br />
Michael Ondaatje's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-cats-table-michael-ondaatje/1029563151?ean=9780307700117&itm=1&usri=cat%2bs%2btable">The Cat's Table</a><br />
Ross Raisin's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Waterline-Ross-Raisin/dp/0670917354/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311572348&sr=1-1">Waterline</a><br />
Andrew Miller's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pure-Andrew-Miller/dp/1444724258/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311572400&sr=1-1">Pure</a><br />
Alexi Zentner's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Touch-Alexi-Zentner/dp/0701185465/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311572437&sr=1-1">Touch</a><br />
<br />
I'll be returning to blogging soon with a dual review of two novels that shared the prize: Ondaatje's <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/english-patient-michael-ondaatje/1100271591?ean=9780679745204&itm=1&usri=english%2bpatient%2bondaatje">The English Patient</a> and Barry Unsworth's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Hunger-Barry-Unsworth/dp/0140119930/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311572585&sr=1-1">Sacred Hunger</a>.<br />
<br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-8699690660920861842010-12-22T11:56:00.006-07:002012-04-04T07:46:34.295-06:00<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNJggdpPotjVE3XpXLdPpAeYYRZFHLMTI3zP0p9JkadXHoRGFq5-9mjYaqTLigAEJdGgGfjYQ7tVupthI0hJs4bOjRFjs2Gof6lgArTQHWcagXE_ubddk73EUaHHcBC7tE26gPQeSjiRVJ/s1600/schindler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" n4="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNJggdpPotjVE3XpXLdPpAeYYRZFHLMTI3zP0p9JkadXHoRGFq5-9mjYaqTLigAEJdGgGfjYQ7tVupthI0hJs4bOjRFjs2Gof6lgArTQHWcagXE_ubddk73EUaHHcBC7tE26gPQeSjiRVJ/s320/schindler.jpg" width="206" /></a>First, let me express puzzlement that <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Schindlers-List/Thomas-Keneally/e/9780671516888/?itm=9&USRI=schindler%27s+list">Schindler's List</a> was claimed, marketed, received and won prizes <em>as a novel</em>. It's a fine book, if sometimes a bit awkwardly written (the occasional too-abrupt, and so initially confusing, transition or digression), but it doesn't <em>read</em> like a novel, in large part because it doesn't bring to bear "the texture and devices" of fiction that Keneally, in the introduction, claims it does. I find it telling that since publishing <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Schindlers-List/Thomas-Keneally/e/9780671516888/?itm=9&USRI=schindler%27s+list">Schindler's List</a>, and despite continuing to publish proper novels (e.g. <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Office-of-Innocence/Thomas-Keneally/e/9781400030958/?itm=1&USRI=office+innocence+keneally">Office of Innocence</a>), Keneally is these days more commonly regarded as a writer of non-fiction, having written biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Sickles, as well as two books on the origins of Australia, a book of Irish history, etc -- telling because <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Schindlers-List/Thomas-Keneally/e/9780671516888/?itm=9&USRI=schindler%27s+list">Schindler's List</a> is more a work of Holocaust Studies than a work of fiction (as such, the book that seemed to have set him on the path of writing non-fiction more often than fiction), however its dust jacket would have us situate it in its author's canon. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">But to the book itself... </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div>Having seen Spielberg's film upwards of a dozen or so times (including five times in the cinema), I felt very familiar with the story. That is, until I realized how unfamiliar with the story I actually was. In the understandable interest of cinematic expedience, a number of the personalities and events in Keneally's novel are conflated, or excised altogether, in Spielberg's film -- making reading the book an awakening. Certain of the details or developments new to me left me plumb thunderstruck, including the scene early on when the Nazi officers herd the Orthodox Jews and the Jewish gangster Max Redlicht into "the oldest of all Polish synagogues," forcing them to spit on the Torah scrolls before murdering them all regardless. What struck me most about this scene, and others in the book, was its depth of the tragic, was the way in which we seem encouraged to regard Redlicht's refusal to desecrate the scrolls as an act of heroism (which it is) only to realize a moment later how much more pressing it is that we regard these Jewish men being put in such a situation at gunpoint in the first place as a horror capable of relegating Redlicht's heroism to footnote status. The dawning of this larger, more complex, more poignant reading of the situation felt, to me, cut from the same cloth as Oscar's epiphany -- in the wake of having seen the Aktion in which the red girl wanders amidst carnage -- that the Nazis were permitting witnesses because the plan was to extinguish the witnesses, too. Keneally is quite good at pulling back veils of narrative, one at a time, so that the purview of atrocities so vast as to inure us instead startle us, despite the newsreels we've seen over the years or the accounts we've read. In other words, the way in which he has written the book somehow makes the Holocaust feel more like breaking news than old news -- which is precisely how a narrative like this should read. Twice, while reading the book in a cafe, I had to set it aside, so close was I to bursting into tears in full view of latte drinkers and cheesecake snackers. I wasn't expecting the book to leave me feeling bruised (again, given that I'd seen the film so many times over the years and as recently as three or four months earlier), but it did. Its power to shock, its insistence on (even inexplicable) light within the dark, its precise construction achieving theatrical effects in service of truth rather than artifice, its phrasing sometimes disarming me with its gift for framing (and so making comprehensible) that which had defied comprehension (I'm thinking particularly of Stern comparing Belzec and its manufacturing of death to Henry Ford's assembly line production of cars) -- for all of these reasons, it is a book that one hopes will always survive.<br />
<br />
Its shortlist competition in 1982 (those I've read in italics): John Arden's (now out-of-print) <em>Silence Among the Weapons</em>; Timothy Mo's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sour-Sweet-Timothy-Mo/dp/0952419327/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293043727&sr=8-1">Sour Sweet</a>; William Boyd's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/An-Ice-Cream-War/William-Boyd/e/9780375705021/?itm=1&USRI=ice-cream+war">An Ice-Cream War</a>; Lawrence Durrell's (now out-of-print) Constance, or Solitary Practices; Alice Thomas Ellis's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-27th-Kingdom/Alice-Thomas-Ellis/e/9781559213936/?itm=1&USRI=27th+kingdom">The 27th Kingdom</a>.<br />
<br />
<strong>Reading: 1st</strong><br />
<strong>A deserving winner</strong><br />
<br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-81491337571499424182010-10-23T14:02:00.003-06:002010-10-23T22:27:08.325-06:00I've been M.I.A. for some little time now, having grown disenchanted with the notion of blogging (and pulling the plug on what had been my principal blog) in the face of so manic a life as mine (teaching, grading papers, working retail, church commitments, two book clubs, diligent dieting). (Indeed, I couldn't remember whether I'd pulled the plug on this one too!) So, then, what has happened in the world of the Booker Prize of late -- and what have the thoughts of this commentator been?<br />
<br />
As we all know, Howard Jacobson's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Finkler-Question/Howard-Jacobson/e/9781608196111/?itm=1&USRI=finkler+question">The Finkler Question</a> walked off with the 2010 Booker Prize, a week after Ladbrokes betting had been suspended on winner predictions (thanks to a suspicious rash of wagers on Tom McCarthy's apparently divisive novel <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/C/Tom-McCarthy/e/9780307593337/?itm=2&USRI=tom+mccarthy+c">C</a>) and a day before we <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booker-prize/8062433/Man-Booker-Prize-high-risk-reading.html">found out</a> that Jacobson's novel edged out Carey's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Parrot-and-Olivier-in-America/Peter-Carey/e/9780307592620/?itm=1&USRI=parrot+olivier+america">Parrot and Olivier in America</a> with a 3-2 vote in the final judging. This, of course, pained me no end, given my proselytizing admiration of Carey's fiction and that a 3-2 vote in his favor would've made him the one and only three-time winner of the Booker Prize. (Consolation for Carey came in his having been named a 2010 finalist for the National Book Award the day after he lost to Jacobson.) But I felt the need to thank <em>someone</em> -- anyone -- involved in bringing him mere inches from making literary history, and so I tracked down an e-mail address for Andrew Motion (former Poet Laureate of England and chair of the judging panel) and did just that. (His response was brief and gracious -- and glowing with praise for Carey's work.)<br />
<br />
As for my own reading: look for a review of Keneally's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Schindlers-List/Thomas-Keneally/e/9780671516888/?itm=5&USRI=schindler%27s+list">Schindler's List</a> in the coming week.<br />
<br />
Glad to be back.<br />
<br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-90563669011697907662010-07-19T23:46:00.004-06:002010-07-19T23:55:48.492-06:00This year's Booker Prize longlist will be announced on the 28th, but in anticipation of it, I wanted to predict what I feel are four certainties to make the longlist:<br /><br />Peter Carey's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Parrot-and-Olivier-in-America/Peter-Carey/e/9780307592620/?itm=1&USRI=parrot+olivier">Parrot and Olivier in America</a><br />David Mitchell's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?EAN=9781400065455">The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet</a><br />James Robertson's <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Land-Lay-Still-James-Robertson/dp/024114356X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279604654&sr=1-1">And the Land Lay Still</a><br />Annabel Lyon's <a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Golden-Mean/Annabel-Lyon/e/9780307593993/?itm=1&USRI=golden+mean+lyon">The Golden Mean</a><br /><br />Time will tell...<br /><br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-270619601852721208.post-40083534515928721772010-06-15T17:13:00.002-06:002010-06-15T17:25:18.250-06:00Regarding my comment, in a post last September, on what I had <em>perceived</em> to be Adam Thorpe, as a citizen of France (he was born there and lives there), being ineligible for the Booker Prize:<br /><br />I have it on good authority (a friend of mine was fortunate enough to meet Thorpe a few months back) that he is both very kind and very irritated that his novel <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hodd-Adam-Thorpe/dp/0099503662/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276644152&sr=8-1">Hodd</a> didn't so much as make the Booker Prize longlist last fall. All of which tells me that he must have dual citizenship -- for what reason would he have to be miffed if he were, as I'd supposed, ineligible for the prize in the first place?<br /><br />Leading me -- given the accolades <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ulverton-Adam-Thorpe/dp/0749397047/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276644206&sr=1-2">Ulverton</a> earned upon its publication and the brilliance of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hodd-Adam-Thorpe/dp/0099503662/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276644152&sr=8-1">Hodd</a> (I'm reading, and loving, the latter right now) -- to wonder as to the reason Thorpe's work is continually passed over. Hmm.<br /><br>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0