Pete Lit

Summer of Classics winds down

This year's Summer of Classics has been a mixed bag. I liked Things Fall Apart, but not enough to consider it a classic. I found The Red and the Black to be an endless slog through 19th century French society. I loved Leaves of Grass, though I had to set it aside after a hundred pages lest it consume several more months of my life - I'll return to it eventually, probably finishing it in several more hundred-page increments, but I think I've already grasped Whitman's points about freedom, the commonality of mankind, etc. My reading output has been lower (in terms of number of books) than past years, as this year's batch have been mostly longer works - including Stendhal's, which never seemed to end.

I'm now wrapping up the summer with a re-reading of O.E. Rölvaag's pioneer epic Giants In the Earth, which I'm enjoying tremendously. The book (written in the early 1920s) is pretty unusual in that it's by a Norwegian-American, is set entirely in America, and yet was originally written in Norwegian. That latter aspect was probably more common in the nineteenth century with the surge in European emigation, but the original translator's preface (from 1927) indicates that it was already unusual by the time of publication. It's a fascinating story about Norwegian settlement on the desolate prairies of South Dakota during the early 1870s. I'm 150 pages in and the settlers are just starting to acclimate themselves to their surroundings, though it's still summer and what will undoubtedly be a brutal winter still looms months ahead. I'm enjoying it so much that I'll keep right on reading beyond the end of August - with a mediocre or even average book I'd be sorely tempted to give it up and return to more contemporary fiction, but not with this one. Giants In the Earth is every bit that great, and even after only 150 pages I already recommend it highly.

Boy's gotta have it.

Opening Lines

"Bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon...Bright, clear sky, to-day, to-morrow, and for all time to come."
- O.E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth

"Click! ... Here it was again. He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again ... Click! ..."
- Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

"It is 1983. In Dorset the great house at Woodcombe Park bustles with life. In Ireland the more modest Kilneagh is as quiet as a grave."
- William Trevor, Fools of Fortune

"The cell door slammed behind Rubashov."
- Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

(A compendium of memorable opening lines of novels, updated occasionally as I come across new discoveries.)

"...unhurried, tawdry, expressionless..."

In the most recent Oxford American, William Caverlee discusses Elizabeth Spencer's short story "Ship Island", which is set in the Biloxi/Gulfport area of Mississippi, and specifically the Buena Vista Hotel. The essay itself (not available online) is interesting, but I was particularly struck by Caverlee's brief personal anecdote about the Buena Vista, from his 1960s-era visits as a teenage Key Club conventioneer.

Mostly, though, I stuck close to the Buena Vista, attending meetings and prowling about the place - which seemed composed of deep-shadowed colonnades and white-painted walls. Once, I walked by the hotel's swimming pool at nine in the morning, and five or six permanent residents - both male and female - looked up from their drinks. They were deeply bronzed, in their fifties or sixties, unhurried, tawdry, expressionless. I kept walking and they gave me no mind.

Bronzed, languid retirees idling around the pool, already drinking at nine in the morning. That image is just so vivid that it has me pondering the possibilities of a short story based on it - although, to my teenage protagonist, it wouldn't be a case of the poolside bunch "giving him no mind." Instead there would be some sort of confrontation, at least a mild threat of danger. I just haven't figured out the specifics yet. Having never been in that part of the Gulf Coast, I'm not sure my story would even be set there. But I do have vivid memories of swim clubs here in the Midwest from that era - replete with cocktail lounges - that might serve well as a setting instead.

Ben Tanzer is at it again...

My great friend Ben Tanzer has just published yet another book (his fourth overall, and second for CCLaP Publishing), entitled 99 Problems: Essays About Running and Writing. Inspired by Haruki Murakami's memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Ben's book is a lively account of his runs in various cities, during which he recounts not only the physical sensation of running and descriptions of his surroundings, but also his concurrent reflections on his writing-in-progress and personal life. Ordinarily I'd be less than enthused to read a book solely devoted to running (though in Ben's case I'd gladly read such a book anyway; such is fandom), but the way he weaves the running, writing and personal life elements together makes for a very brisk and entertaining read. Another winner from Ben's fertile imagination, and maybe the best thing he's written yet.

Like all CCLaP publications, the e-book is available on a Radiohead-style, pay-what-you-want basis, so there's really no excuse for skipping this one. Go get it.

"...the black raven with raucous glee..."

I love this brief passage from Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf which describes the weary hero retiring for the evening after defeating Grendel's mother.

That great heart rested. The hall towered,

gold-shingled and gabled, and the guest slept in it

until the black raven with raucous glee

announced heaven's joy, and a hurry of brightness

overran the shadows.

Interesting that it isn't the usual strutting rooster that heralds the dawn ("heaven's joy") but instead a black raven which typically has ominous overtones. Some of Heaney's phrases here ("a hurry of brightness", "overran the shadows") seem more modern in style and maybe not an ideal fit with this ancient epic poem, but I still like them quite a bit.

"The Last Final Copy"

Bottom Dog Press is a Cleveland-based indie publisher, established in 1985, which is devoted particularly to Midwestern literature. The press has released a new anthology, On The Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work, which is co-edited by Jeff Vande Zande and Josh Maday and is focused on work-related short stories. I am very pleased to announce that the anthology includes my story "The Last Final Copy" which imagines the final hours of Chicago's legendary City News Bureau, on New Year's Eve, 2005, when it was closed for good by its corporate overlords. The story was written four years ago and was in limbo for the past several years as I debated whether to leave it as originally written or expand it further; I ultimately went with the former and am very grateful to the editors and Bottom Dog for taking the story. It's a story that means a lot to me personally, and one that I'm particularly proud of.

On The Clock is now available for sale through the Bottom Dog website, and includes stories by many fine writers including Matt Bell, Michael Martone, Sean Lovelace and many others, and I'm truly honored to be part of their company.

"Fraternally, Brother Vonnegut"

Here's a lovely and collegial letter written by Kurt Vonnegut to first-time novelist Mark Lindquist in 1989.

The fact that you have completed a work of fiction of which you are proud, which you made as good as you could, makes you as close a blood relative as my brother Bernard.

What a great human being that man was.

"...gaze on the tossing billows, and be refresh'd by storms..."

Although I'm really enjoying Leaves of Grass, it's also a fairly exhausting read. Whitman is very long-winded and repetitive, so much so that reading him almost requires physical effort. I think I'd enjoy the entire book more if I read it in 100-page chunks instead of all 370 pages at once (in the same way that savoring small morsels of a tapas meal is more satisfying than forcing down a three-pound burger), so now that I'm 100-something pages in, I'm setting aside Leaves of Grass for a while. I will take my leave (no pun intended) of Whitman with the following passage from "Salut au Monde!":

I see the places of the sagas,

I see pine-trees and fir-trees torn by northern blasts,

I see granite bowlders and cliffs, I see green meadows and lakes,

I see the burial-cairns of Scandinavian warriors,

I see them raised high with stones by the marge of restless oceans, that the dead men's spirits when they wearied of their quiet graves might rise up through the mounds and gaze on the tossing billows, and be refresh'd by storms, immensity, liberty, action.

That passage seems totally fitting, given that my next Summer of Classics book will be Seamus Heaney's highly acclaimed translation of Beowulf, which I'll start tomorrow morning.

Ernie Pyle

Library of America pays tribute to the legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who was born 110 years ago today. Their post includes an excerpt from one of his reports from North Tunisia, which is such fantastic writing that I'll simply republish the entire thing here.

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion. On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing. They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory — there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else. The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men. There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn't remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

Wow, wow, wow. I might just have to delve into Reporting World War II: 1938-1946.

"...the stuff to start sons and daughters..."

Whew, that Whitman sure was a lusty beast.

It is I, you women, I make my way,
I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,
I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,
I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States,
I press with slow rude muscle,
I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,
I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.

Reading many similar passages in Leaves of Grass, I doubt that "stuff" ever accumulated within him for very long, but instead was regularly disposed of, one way or another, together or alone.

A free novel concept, just for you

As a writer, I'm good at coming up with ideas, but no so good at seeing those ideas through to a completed story or book. It's something I'm working to rectify, but at the same time I'm aware of my limitations, and know that some of my ideas will absolutely, positively never come to fruition and aren't worth my pursuing.

Case in point is this story from this week's Chicago Reader. Essentially, this entrepreneur is working on perfecting the process of cold fusion, with the intent of creating energy reactors for individual homes which, it's hoped, will drastically reduce a home's gas and electrical usage and mostly remove consumers from the energy grid. Although the science is far from perfected - no one is quite sure just how the original experiments in cold fusion created energy - the entrpreneur seems somewhat paranoid, worrying that highly vested interests (big oil companies, oil-producing nations) in the fossil fuel industry are gunning for him, seeing him as a threat to their business. In other words, he seems to think he might be an assassination target. Probably far-fetched, of course - but also great fodder for a thriller novel. It has so many great elements - the lone, little-guy hero, the big bad oil companies, shadowy assassins (whether real or imaginary), an elusive technology and the big overriding themes of global warming and the future of the planet and the human race.

That said, it's a novel that won't be written by me. Thrillers aren't my thing, and I could never do justice to the complicated science of cold fusion. Which is why I'm handing the concept over to you, fellow writers. Free of charge. All I ask is a tiny mention of me on your acknowledgments page.

Jack Clark's cabbie noir

Intriguing piece here at the Reader about Nobody's Angel, by Chicago cabbie Jack Clark.

Set in the early 1990s, the book is an eye-opening immersion in a cabbie subculture built around a daily series of judgment calls and crapshoots aimed at avoiding the passenger who'll stiff or kill you. Written in prose that goes down easy as a cold beer, it offers locals the same delight-in-recognition we get from a good locally shot film, immortalizing the streets we walk and the neighborhoods we hang out in.

Equally interesting is the book's publication history.

About 20 years ago Jack Clark fashioned a noir novel out of a string of vignettes drawn from his night job as a Chicago cabbie. Having failed to find a publisher for it, he tried to get it serialized in the Reader. When the Reader took a pass, Clark self-published 500 copies under the title Relita's Angel and began distributing them from his taxi. For the next year or so, he carried a stack of the paperbacks in his cab, unloading them at $5 each—$3.14 more than his printing cost—on any passenger willing to say what the hell.

I don't read much crime fiction other than Jim Thompson, but I might just take the plunge on this one.

Coming soon...

Sharp.

Three (and a half) Things Poets Should Never Write About

(1) The moon
A lot of poets are insomniacs, or up late drinking, or busy sobbing into their green tea as they draft encomium after encomium about the autumn leaves’ brave last bursts of color against winter and impending death. In any event, we’re often awake at night, and unless you’re in some horribly cloudy place like London or Seattle or something, there’s a pretty good chance of seeing the moon on a given night.

As junior editor/assistant flunky of a literary zine, I fully concur. Though I've seen a lot more self-references to poetry than moon metaphors.

"...they do not ask who seizes fast to them..."

Wow. From Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself":

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.


Youthful exuberance, loneliness, longing, simmering lust. Seems to me this is the raw material for a very moving short film. I've been struggling to get into Whitman so far, as I've found I need near-silence to really concentrate on the verses while my fellow train commuters have been unusually chattery and distracting this week. But this morning, the car I rode was blessedly and atypically quiet, and I breezed through. 

Save John King!

Legendary Detroit bookseller John King's two satellite bookstores are in trouble, with prices being slashed in a desperate attempt to boost revenues and gain survival. Detroiters, please do your literary/community duty, set aside your Kindles and support these stores.

According to the article, King's flagship store, the awe-inspiring John K. King Used and Rare Books (ONE MILLION BOOKS!), is supposedly safe for now, but it seems likely that the same market forces that are punishing the Ferndale and Cass Avenue stores will also hurt the flagship store eventually. I haven't been in Detroit for fifteen years and see little other reason to do so, but if I get even a whiff that the flagship store is in trouble, I will make an immediate pilgrimage to 901 West Lafayette Boulevard.

(Via NewPages.)

"...ever and ever yet the verses owning..."

I quite like Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass:

Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning—as, first, I here and now
Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name,

Walt Whitman


I believe in the idea that one has immortality as long as there are people still living who remember you. Admittedly, however, this brand of immortality only lasts two or at most three generations, after which any memories of you become mere hearsay. Which is why I admire Whitman's words here, which basically say that his verse will live long after him (a presumptuous claim for any writer, although time has proven Whitman correct), thus essentially keeping him alive ("...ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on..."). In other words, making him immortal.

True, this doesn't work for all writers, just the great ones. Most of Whitman's 19th century literary contemporaries are forgotten today, their memories all but vanishing as their works went out of print and the surviving copies slowly crumbled to dust. But Whitman's memory endures, thanks to the quality and uniqueness of his writing.

Which for me is a sobering reminder to not only get my writings into print, but to make them as good as possible so that they stand the test of time. So I'll be remembered.

Chicago words

Chicago Magazine presents the top forty English words produced by the city. Before reading the list, "clout" (which came in at #3) was the first word that came to mind, though I didn't realize it was from Irv Kupcinet - I had always associated it with Mike Royko. Other personal favorites on the list are smoke-filled room, Mickey Finn, razzmatazz and Dopp kit (that's what my Chicago-native dad always called a toiletry kit), and I had no idea that many of the other, more common words (like cloud nine, jinx, jungle gym, egghead, midway and yuppie) had Chicago origins.

(Via Wordorigins.org.)

Summer of Classics update

Whew. I finally finished slogging through 491 pages of The Red and the Black, which turned out to be not so much the political/social protest I was expecting, but instead an overwrought romance novel. Still, I saw it through to the end, and have now moved on to the considerably more pleasant realms of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I like it so far, even though I've already found that the creative (or archaic?) grammar he uses can be quite jarring at times.

Helen Cresswell, Ordinary Jack

Although Maddie is nine years old already (and soon to be ten), I still read to her every night at bedtime. I suppose part of that is me clinging to her being a little girl (remembering back to the days when I read her Sandra Boynton and Eric Carle), but mostly it's simply a genuinely wonderful bit of father-daughter quality time that I hope doesn't end anytime soon. Usually it's totally her choice for what we read, but during a recent trip to the library I hunted down this book, the first of Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe Saga series. I had read (and loved) a couple of her other Bagthorpe books back in junior high, but never this one. Indulgent trooper that she is, Maddie agreed with my suggestion that we try Ordinary Jack for our bedtime reading.

What a delight. Ordinary Jack was every bit as good as I remembered the others having been, now over 30 years ago. Set in England, the book is about Jack Bagthorpe, a regular, normal kid in a family of brilliant eccentrics. Everyone else in the family is a prodigy in one or several disciplines - art, sports, etc. - and Jack feels a bit left out, longing to be as special as he perceives the rest of the family to be. (His closest companion is his dog, the appropriately-named Zero, who is as ordinary as Jack thinks of himself.) Fortunately, his sympathetic Uncle Parker concocts a plan which he and Jack hope will make Jack unique in the family, assuming the role of a Prophet who sees visions which - thanks to chicanery on the part of Uncle Parker - increasingly come true. The scheme steadily escalates, the family quickly coming around to the idea that perhaps Jack is special after all, culminating in a hilarious finale involving a family birthday party, a hot-air balloon, two guys in bear suits and a grandmother who longs for the reincarnation of her beloved cat. The book is very funny, full of both clever dialogue and genuine human warmth, as Jack comes to realize that his family does love him and he is indeed special.

I highly recommend Ordinary Jack for any preteen reader. And even adults. In fact, even if Maddie isn't interested in us continuing on in the Bagthorpe series (though she loved the book too), I just might read several more of them on my own.

David Masciotra

David Masciotra is a local guy (grew up in Lansing, went to college in Joliet and is now a grad student at Valparaiso) who has written the intriguing Working On a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. Right now he's doing a blog tour to promote the book, with his first stop at Big Other this past Monday and upcoming stops here at Pete Lit (probably next week), What To Wear During an Orange Alert? and Mel Bosworth's blog, among others. He's also doing a reading tomorrow at Revolution Books (1103 N. Ashland Ave. in Chicago) at 7 p.m.

I haven't read the book yet but have heard nothing but good things about it, so it's definitely on my list. I've long been an admirer of Springsteen (I even owned his Nebraska LP in high school) if not an actual fan - I might have become one were it not for my freshman year roommate in college, who was not only a Springsteen fanatic but also a grade-A prick whom I genuinely hated. Every time I think of Springsteen I can't help also thinking of my roommate, whose memory will forever taint my impressions of the artist. I know that's not a rational reason to not embrace Springsteen during the past 25 years, but that's just how I am. Maybe Masciotra's book will draw me back into the fold.

Author Photographs: Mark Twain, 1909

A man who needs no introduction, especially on this most American of holidays.

Source: George Grantham Bain Collection (photographer unknown).
(Via Shorpy.)

Pfaff's Cellar

Over at The Rumpus, Sara Oliver Gordus has a fine essay on Walt Whitman's Manhattan watering hole, Pfaff's Cellar, which has been described as "the Andy Warhol factory, the Studio 54, the Algonquin Round Table all rolled into one." Here's Whitman's own lovely reflection on the place:

I can recall it all now, and, through a vista of cigar and pipe smoke and dim gaslight, see the scores of kindly faces peering at me, some in love; some in question, but all friendly enough; for, while ‘Bohemia’ might differ as to a man’s work or its results, she usually, once he was in, accepted the man, idiosyncracies and all. ‘Bohemia’ comes but once in one’s life. Let’s treasure even its memory.

I'm seriously considering reading Leaves of Grass as part of my ongoing Summer of Classics, and this piece had prodded me further in that direction.

Andrew Ervin

My friend Drew Ervin is interviewed in the latest online edition of Hobart, by the fine Chicago writer Bayo Ojikutu.

So, sure, I’m going to rail against the man, but I’m also going to look for the moments of transcendence that invariably emerge from even the most degraded conditions. I’m not sure that provocation was my top priority in writing Extraordinary Renditions, but if that’s what results from the time I spent trying to understand, in some small way, these different cultures and historical circumstances, I’m OK with that.

Extraordinary Renditions, Ervin's fiction debut, comes out on Coffee House Press later this year, and will surely be the rare instance of my buying a book immediately upon its release, instead of dawdling around for months or years before buying.

Stuart Brent, 1912-2010

Farewell to a bookselling legend. I never visited his namesake store, but did frequent his son Adam's Brent Books in the West Loop for several years and thoroughly enjoyed Stuart's memoir The Seven Stairs. My daughter has also been a member of the Stuart Brent Children's Book Club for several years, and their selections are consistently wonderful and first-rate.

Henry Blake Fuller

The Chicago Reader's "Best of Chicago" issue includes this entry: "Best Underappreciated Chicago Novel", which Whet Moser says is Henry Blake Fuller's Bertram Cope's Year.

Too gay for its time and too closeted to be ahead of it, it seems that Bertram Cope’s Year is destined to be rediscovered as a historical curio every couple decades, but it deserves better. Fuller was at his best when his prose was at its most dry and ironic, and taboos forced upon his writing a subtlety lacking in the overwrought realist fiction of the era.

Anyone who has slogged through Dreiser (whom I've enjoyed, though it's somewhat of a chore) has to be intrigued by that "subtlety" aspect. And "underappreciated" might be generous - not only have I not read Fuller's novel, I hadn't even heard of it before. With those past accolades by the likes of Carl Van Vechten and Edmund Wilson, of course I'll try to hunt it down, but given that my otherwise well-stocked local library doesn't even have Fuller's best-known novel, The Cliff-Dwellers, I'm not optimistic.

Dostoevsky in the subway

I heard this story on NPR last night about murals that were installed in a Moscow subway station which included scenes from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Devils. Seems there's some controversy, in which some are claiming that the violence-themed works are too depressing and might compel people to commit suicide. (Obviously not the artist's intent, or else he would have depicted the climactic scene from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina instead.) At first I scoffed at the idea, figuring that anybody who committed suicide after seeing the murals probably would have done so anyway - it seems unlikely that mere murals could finally push someone over the edge.

And now, after seeing some images of the murals, I'm even more convinced. The murals are quite stylish and somewhat abstract - not the graphic, lurid, blood-and-gore spectacle that I would have expected. Makes me wonder what those critics are getting all worked up about. I wouldn't even mind having one of these on my wall at home.

"Sherlock Alger"

Today marks the publication of Joe's Luck: The World's Longest Literary Remix, in which 150 writers (myself included) remixed/rewrote a single page of Horatio Alger's 1910 novel, Joe's Luck: Always Wide Awake, under the editorship of Jason Boog at GalleyCat. (Explanation here.) The abridged version can be read here, with my page starting on page 32 of the Scribd viewer (the text between the sentences in red is mine).

For my piece, I took what was originally a fairly uninteresting scene with truly terrible dialogue, and reimagined it as a lost passage from a Sherlock Holmes story. To refresh my memory before I began writing, I re-read some Holmes stories for the first time in years, and was surprised at how densely wordy Doyle's tales were - to create a truly faithful homage to Holmes, I would have needed four or five times the number of words that were allotted to me for this project. Because of this, my version of a Holmes story comes off as almost minimalist in style. But given the constraints I was working under, I'm pretty pleased with the result. And it was certainly fun to write.

"So you keep on reading your cursed books, when you ought to be watching the saw?"

Nice passage from Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which I just started over the weekend:

As he approached his mill, Pere Sorel called Julien in his stentorian voice; there was no answer. He saw only his two elder sons, young giants who, armed with heavy axes, were squaring the trunks of fir which they would afterwards carry to the saw. There were completely engrossed in keeping exactly to the black line traced on the piece of wood, from which each blow of the axe sent huge chips flying. They did not hear their father's voice. He made his way to the shed; as he entered it, he looked in vain for Julien in the place where he ought to have been standing, beside the saw. He caught sight of him five or six feet higher up, sitting astride upon one of the beams of the roof. Instead of paying careful attention to the action of the machinery, Julien was reading a book. Nothing could have been less to old Sorel's liking; he might perhaps have forgiven Julien his slender build, little adapted to hard work, and so different from that of his elder brothers; but this passion for reading he detested: he himself was unable to read.

It was in vain that he called Julien two or three times. The attention the young man was paying to his book, far more than the noise of the saw, prevented him from hearing his father's terrifying voice. Finally, despite his years, the father sprang nimbly upon the trunk that was being cut by the saw, and from there on to the cross beam that held up the roof. A violent blow sent flying into the mill lade the book that Julien was holding; a second blow no less violent, aimed at his head, in the form of a box on the ear, made him lose his balance. He was about to fall from a height of twelve or fifteen feet, among the moving machinery, which would have crushed him, but his father caught him with his left hand as he fell.

"Well, idler! So you keep on reading your cursed books, when you ought to be watching the saw? Read them in the evening, when you go and waste your time with the curate."

Julien, though stunned by the force of the blow, and bleeding profusely, went to take up his proper station beside the saw. There were tears in his eyes, due not so much to his bodily pain as to the loss of his book, which he adored.

What a terrific introduction to Julien Sorel. I like him already.

Summer of Classics begins anew

Last week I resumed what has become my annual tradition, Summer of Classics. From June through August, I read nothing but classic novels, one or two per year of which I've read before and longed to revisit, but for the most part they are widely revered works that for whatever reason I've never gotten around to reading. This morning I just finished Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (good, but not as earth-shattering as I had expected) and next up is Stendhal's The Red and the Black. Though I'll be posting memorable excerpts here and there throughout the summer, I'll hold off on giving capsule reviews (same as last year) until early September. This has always been an entertaining and educational experience for me, and I'm sure this year will be no exception.

Quote

"From the moment that I am no longer more than a writer, I shall cease to write."
- Albert Camus

Beneficial compulsion

"Chance has certainly played its part, but one thing that’s certain is their inner compulsion – and the stronger the compulsion, the further one goes."
- Bei Dao, "Once Upon a Time the Zhou Brothers"

Dao's quote muses on the success of the Zhou brothers, Chicago-based artists, in the recent "Chicago Issue" of Granta. Reading that line on the train this morning inspired me to set the journal aside and delve back into the short story I've been writing off and on during the last few weeks. I rarely write in the morning, but thanks to that impetus I knocked off another couple hundred words or so before I arrived downtown. I'm certainly not compulsive with my writing, though a little compulsion would probably do me good and help me "go further."

Train kept a-rollin'

The Ben Tanzer juggernaut rattles onward, with the announcement by Artistically Declined Press of his forthcoming novel, You Can Make Him Like You. I am quite excited about this one, as I read an early draft of it and was able to make some editorial suggestions which Ben not only listened to without punching me in the mouth, but actually used in undertaking a major restructuring of the manuscript. I can't wait to see how it turned out.

"...their filled bellies and walking legs and chafed thighs on khaki serge..."

Nice passage here from Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which relates the protagonist Arthur Seaton's annual fifteen-day army stint, which clearly was very light on military rigor and discipline.

Every night he went out with Ambergate to get drunk: on the long walks he plotted private war and revolution, arson and plunder, with Ambergate, bringing to the surface impossible dreams and treating them like jokes. Coming back from the village they forgot everything in the world but their own existence, the now, the this minute of their filled bellies and walking legs and chafed thighs on khaki serge. Arthur's drunken chanting spread out like primeval madness over dark fields and woods, filling the best hours of fifteen days. They passed cottages bolted and barred to them, doors and windows spurning Arthur's made-up songs that rolled and roared along like the explosion of some half-forgotten voice in the world.

The going-to-the-pub discourse ("private war and revolution, arson and plunder") is somewhat out of character for Arthur, who while an angry young man doesn't seem particularly focused in his rage. But the drunken, coming-back-from-the-pub chanting and singing is perfectly appropriate for him.

In which we display just the slightest hint of restraint

 

We seem to be getting a bit more sensible and less voracious with each Will County Book Recycling Event. True, for this weekend's edition we did attend twice and could barely tear ourselves away to go home (instead lusting in anticipation of the next batch of books to arrive) but we did show some restraint with what we ultimately brought home. That picture above is most of our haul. Julie's finds were mostly cool old Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks (onion pancakes, anyone?), programming manuals for her and textbooks for Maddie's homeschooling. Maddie found a Pokemon book (she is absolutely, positively obsessed with Pokemon right now) and several young reader novels.

As for me, I mostly stuck to novels and nonfiction that I had already wanted to read, and came home with Richard Wright's Black Boy (a really nice 1945 hardcover edition), James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Larry Brown's Joe, Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House, Mike Royko's Boss, Joseph Heller's Good As Gold, Samuel Beckett's Endgame, Toby Thompson's Positively Main Street and Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre. And two of my books were specifically selected to give away to close friends. One way or another, all of these books will eventually be read - which is more than I can say for much of our previous hauls.

Having loved Caldwell's Tobacco Road, I would have taken God's Little Acre no matter what, but the clincher for me was this wonderfully lurid, pulp cover:



Without having read the book, I still have the feeling that it isn't anywhere near as shocking and outrageous as that cover would suggest, and that this was simply a case of the publisher using a sensationalistic cover to move more copies. Which seems odd, given that the jacket copy states that over 8 million copies had already been sold. With a book that wildly popular, you wouldn't think such a pulp cover would be necessary.

"...the world's laugh in his face..."

"Another attendant opened the door for him at the top of the stairs, and a huge roar of smoke-hazed, lime-lit laughter, coming out of the door like blast from a bomb, hit him in the face. It was like the world's laugh in his face, Netta's laugh, the last laugh of everybody at his failure and isolation, his banishment from the world of virile people who were happy and made love and had friends."
- Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

Poor, sad, pathetic George Harvey Bone, one of the sorriest fictional characters I've ever come across.

"When he struck out, the low moan was genuine."

The Chicago Reader links to a wonderful 1972 column by Mike Royko, in which he vividly remembers seeing Jackie Robinson's first visit to Wrigley Field.

Robinson came up in the first inning. I remember the sound. It wasn't the shrill, teenage cry you now hear, or an excited gut roar. They applauded, long, rolling applause. A tall, middle-aged black man stood next to me, a smile of almost painful joy on his face, beating his palms together so hard they must have hurt.

When Robinson stepped into the batter's box, it was as if someone had flicked a switch. The place went silent.

He swung at the first pitch and they erupted as if he had knocked it over the wall. But it was only a high foul that dropped into the box seats. I remember thinking it was strange that a foul could make that many people happy. When he struck out, the low moan was genuine.

I still miss Royko.

Writers and tobacco

At the always-interesting A Journey Around My Skull, Gilbert Alter-Gilbert considers the tradition of writers and tobacco, and also presents his translation of "History of a Cigarette" by Felisberto Hernández, an odd but compelling work of obsession. I find this an interesting and somewhat romantic subject, though I must admit I've rejected tobacco as a writing accessory of my own just as completely as I've rejected hard liquor and endless night hours of solitude in a drafty garret.

That image above is of Dylan Thomas, my favorite from the gallery that accompanies Alter-Gilbert's article. Though of course it pales in comparison to my overall favorite, by Art Shay:

Decider Deigns to Divulge

I'm sure the Nobel and Pulitzer committees are now bubbling with excitement over the news of this forthcoming tome of rational thought, probing intellect and relentless curiousity.



Geez, what's with that photo? Was he constipated at that moment? With that squint of his I assume he was going for some sort of John Wayne look, but mostly this projects the image of a guy at the dog park who just stepped in something soft.

Gawker has a few nice alternate takes on the cover, from the comic:



To the bitter:



Somehow I sense that this small handful of Gawker covers contains more insight than anything Bush is writing. Or, more accurately, "writing."

“...the steeds of life swirl their smoke to the skies..."

Over at Quid Plura?, Jeff Sypeck ponders the surprising dearth of volcanic references in medieval Icelandic literature (surprising, in that Iceland is essentially a big hunk of volcanic rock), as well as the provenance of everyone's favorite unpronounceable geographic feature of the moment, Eyjafjallajökull: eyja (island), fjalla (mountains), jökull (glacier). Though that name sounds prosaically dull in English translation, I quite like the original.

Book giveaway: Newspaper Blackout by Austin Kleon

This week marks the publication of Newspaper Blackout, the new book from my online friend Austin Kleon, a highly talented Texas-based artist and writer. Basically, Austin takes newspaper articles and with a magic marker blacks out most of the words, with the selected words that remain forming something akin to poetry or microfiction. Here's what the venerable New Yorker has to say about the book:

"He borrows, but doesn’t steal. He’ll never have to face the terror of a blank page again. And his poems, created by blacking out pages of the newspaper with permanent marker, leaving only running puddles of text still visible, resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead. The poems themselves are like a cross between magnetic refrigerator poetry and enigmatic ransom notes, funny and zen-like, collages of found art."

Austin also gets the hallowed Book Notes treatment today at Largehearted Boy, in which he describes some of his favorite music which either involves sampling/remixing or invokes the Midwest, where he grew up.

Austin's blackout poems are inventive, thought-provoking and never less than fascinating, and I encourage everyone to check out his work. And to help do my part, I'll send my extra copy of Newspaper Blackout to the first person to leave a comment below which includes (in the spirit of blackout poems) a grammatically correct sentence which incorporates exactly ten words, in any order, from this blog post. I'll follow up with the winner for the mailing address, and shipping is on me.

"...and writing an exact man..."

Interesting thoughts here on the benefits and costs of collaborative writing via Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online, and the like.

Changes this dramatic, however, often involve a degree of loss as well as big gain. What may be lost in collaboration is the strong voice of an individual, that all-important point of view that gives writing flavor, strength and punch.

That could be bad for document producers as well as consumers. Writing is often painful, but there is no better way to get a sense of what one is really thinking about than to express it to others. As Francis Bacon, the 16th Century father of the English essay put it, "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." In other words, writing well is how you find out what you are thinking.

Or as Flannery O'Connor once said, "I write to discover what I know."

Chapbooks and Singles

Tim Frederick at Baby Got Books gives a shout-out to my compadre Ben Tanzer's chapbook, I Am Richard Simmons, and in doing so offers the best analogy for chapbooks that I've come across:

Chapbooks are the punk-rock-7″-singles-that-are-pressed-in-that-one-dude’s-basement-and-passed-around-from-friend-to-friend of the literary world.

Alas, another similarity to the basement-pressed single is that chapbooks are fleeting in existence, here today and gone tomorrow. Ben's chapbook is out of print.

"...words that hung before him, shining and alluring..."

"This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them."
- Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds

Pär Lagerkvist, Barabbas

Just this morning I finished my fourth or fifth reading of Pär Lagerkvist's Barabbas, which remains one of the finest novels it has ever been my pleasure to read. Barabbas is the condemned thief whose life was spared by the angry mob of Jews who were given the choice of pardoning either him or Jesus Christ, with the latter thus being sent to his crucifixion. In Lagerkvist's vivid imagining, Barabbas is a faithless man who still finds himself drawn to Christ - whose crucifixion he witnesses, as well as the rolling-away of the stone from his tomb on Easter morning - and his followers.

Yet despite his attraction toward these devout people, from a disgraced peasant girl to his fellow slave Sahak, Barabbas can never bring himself to believe. And just as these early Christians suffer persecution and death for their faith, Barabbas suffers his own inner persecution as he drifts through life as a complete outcast, cut off from both proper society (for being a slave) and from the Christian community (much of which unfairly blames him for Christ's death). In Rome, this isolation brings about an impulsive, delirious act which unwittingly bonds him to a local Christian sect that seals their collective destruction.

As the book ends, Barabbas might - or might not - finally have an epiphany, at last perhaps finding the faith he has wanted for so long. Fortunately, with his lean, understated prose Lagerkvist leaves unanswered whether or not Barabbas has truly found faith, leaving the reader pondering the question long after the last page is turned and the book has been closed. Barabbas is a riveting meditation on religious faith which speaks simply yet conveys the deepest of meaning.

Gulliver and Ireland

As I mentioned earlier, before my latest reading of Gulliver's Travels I was under the presumption that at least some of the book's satire must have specifically pertained to the age-old conflict between England and Ireland. However, at first I was reading an older, unannotated edition of the book and thus couldn't readily identify most of Swift's satirical targets. However, that edition (a family heirloom which hasn't been read for decades) began to deteriorate as I read it, which compelled me to safely reshelve it and prompt me to switch over to an annotated paperback edition of Swift's writings that was left over from my freshman English literature class from college. The paperback, edited by Miriam Kosh Starkman, did provide some very informative insight to the English-Irish question I had wondered about.

As I had suspected, the conflict - very petty in its origins - between the Big Endians and the Little Endians in the Lilliput section, which revolved around whether it was proper to break open an egg at the big end of it or the little end, represented the endless tension between Catholics and Protestants. This, while not exclusively Irish in nature, was partially a commentary on the situation in Ireland. What surprised me, though, was that it was the Laputa section which commented the most on Ireland. The Laputans are abstract, distacted philosophers and scientists who are so divorced from reality that they require servants to tap them on the eyes, ears and mouth when they need to see, hear or speak. This corrective is necessary for actions as basic as everyday conversation, but also to prevent them from stepping off a cliff or otherwise coming to physical harm while lost deep in thought. I immediately recognized that with the Laputans, Swift primarily satirized the theoretical side of scientific inquiry, which he must have seen as being pursued at the expense of practical research which could actually have a tangible impact on society.

But a smaller portion of the Laputa narrative also described the "Flying or Floating Island", which the rulers of the country traveled around in and which clearly represented the whimsy of abstract thought. Besides being a means of distancing the ruling class from the common rabble that lived on the mainland of the kingdom, the island was also a source of military power for quelling domestic disturbances. The rulers, as rulers tend to do, regularly exacted onerous taxes and levies on the commoners, which caused great dissension and unease amongst the latter. If the commoners became unruly and threatened to rebel, the island could be positioned over the recalcitrant city, blocking sun and rain and bringing on drought, famine and disease which would thus quell any rebellion. In extreme cases of domestic unease, there was even the threat of the island being forcefully brought down on the city, thus destroying it. But Swift also mentions that the rulers were hesitant to do so, since various spires, towers and rock outcroppings in the city might do permanent damage to the foundation ("adamantine bottom") of the island. Here are editor Starkman's pertinent annotated comments:

The satire turns to political channels as Swift satirizes English domination of Ireland; he implies economic exploitation like Wood's half-pence, punitive legislative action, and military violence.
---
The spires, rocks and stones which deter the flying island from landing have been interpreted as the Church, the nobility, and the citizenry which support Ireland; the fear of breaking the adamantine bottom is the fear of revolution.
---
The tower (constructed at the center of a major city, presumed to represent Dublin) has been interpreted as the Church in Ireland (St. Patrick's Cathedral), the four towers as the chief agencies of the Irish government, and the combustible fuel as the incendiary pamphlets against the English, among them Swift's Drapier's Letters.

Interesting to see Swift imply that the English recognized a potential Irish revolution as a bad thing, but that quelling an uprising might destroy England itself, which was seen as being even worse.

Ha!

This gave me a good laugh this afternoon: Frustrated writers save New England from flood.

The idea of linking unpublished writers with reconstruction efforts has a Keynesian "multiplier" effect, according to David Simon, an economist at the University of Massachusetts-Seekonk. "If we can get underemployed writers -- and believe me, they're all underemployed -- to crank out a short story collection at prevailing wages, then use it to fuel a waste-to-energy plant, we will ease unemployment and cut our dependence on foreign oil."

I might just donate my literary archives which, I'm starting to suspect, no university will exactly be clamoring for after my death sixty years from now.

Poe in New York

Just saw this come up on Project Gutenberg: Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations, by Charles Hemstreet (1903). Though I may or may not browse through the rest eventually, I was immediately drawn to the chapter "Those Who Gathered About Poe" which charmingly describes the various literary associates and residences of Poe's New York years. Here the author describes the vicinity of Poe's last New York home, in the village of Fordham (now the Bronx):

After passing through these rooms and with the memory of Poe strong upon you, walk away along the street remembering that in Poe's time it was a delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep problems of The Universe. After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge, that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river,—this at least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe for that requiem of despair, the mystic Ulalume.

The house still stands.

Irish March update

We're now more than two-thirds through the month, and my Irish March reading results have been somewhat mixed. First, I thoroughly enjoyed William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (similar in theme to The Story of Lucy Gault, though not quite as good) and John McGahern's Amongst Women (vivid portrait of a bitter Irish republican and his relentless grip on his family). But then I started a highly-praised novel of historical fiction about the Easter Rising, which proved to be so awful that I invoked the 50-page rule and abandoned it. Since I try to stay positive here with my literary commentary, it's not worth it to inventory that book's many shortcomings or even mention the title, so there's no point in discussing it further.

After that book was abandoned, I realized that I didn't have any other Ireland-set fiction by an Irish writer around the house, so to finish off my reading for the month I took some liberties with my original guidelines and started Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which I hadn't read since college. True, Swift wasn't ethnically Irish (his parents were English) and the book isn't technically set in Ireland, but he spent much of his life in Dublin and surely one of the book's sections must have satirized the centuries-old English-Irish conflict. (I'll have to pick up some sort of reading guide to refresh my memory on who the various depicted groups represent.) I've finished the first two sections (on Lilliput and Brobdingnag, homes of the little people and the giants respectively) and am thoroughly enjoying it.

One thing that strikes me is how modern the language is, despite the book being written in 1726. I've read plenty of fiction from the late 19th and even early 20th centuries whose language is much more stilted and archaic than Swift's. I was also delighted by Swift's preface, which is written as a letter to a cousin who purportedly was responsible for the final published form of the book. Swift takes the cousin to task for several errors in the published version, which immediately casts doubt on the veracity of the narrative to follow - thus setting up the book as an unreliable narrative even while the narrator comes across as very sincere. The preface seems like a modern touch, one that's a few centuries ahead of its time.