Category Archives: The writing of others

Bolano 2666 quote of the week (3)

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So many to choose from. I have to admit I’ll be glad to be rid of the critics, but this week had several intriguing quotes. So. Vote if you feel like it.

1) “…he, in his own way, like Schwob in Samoa, had already begun a voyage, a voyage that would end not in the grave of a brave man but in a kind of resignation in any ordinary sense of the word, or even patience or conformity, but rather a state of meekness, a refined and incomprehensible humility that made him cry for no reason and in which his own image, what Morini saw as Morini, gradually and helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, no knowing that it’s burning” (107).

2) “It was as if the light were buried in the Pacific Ocean, producing an enormous curvature of space. It made a person hungry to travel in that light, although also, and maybe more insistently thought Norton, it made you want to bear your hunger until the end” (110-11).
[one of the best descriptions of the Sonoran desert I’ve ever read.]

3) “And yet your shadow isn’t following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don’t notice, but you have, you’re missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become more apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life too be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it” (121).

[This third quote is hands-down my favorite, made even more poignant by Norton’s painfully ignorant and heartless proclamation that she didn’t understand a word of it. Nothing thus far has made me like her less.]

Paul Simon agrees with us

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Appropos of yesterday’s post, Peanut today put in a Paul Simon CD to which I sang along. With gusto.

“Well that was your mother
And that was your father
Before you wuz born, dude
When life was great.
Now you are the burden
Of my generation
I sure do love you
Let’s get that straight.”

Oh, my dear Mr. Simon. Why did I not *hear* you before?

Et toi!

Bolano’s 2666 quote of the week (2)

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This week’s reading is at once slower and more explosive than last week’s. I’m still intrigued, but far from being in love.

“Naturally, Norton was happy to hear from him and to learn he was in the city and at the agreed-upon time she appeared in the hotel lobby, where Morini, sitting in his wheelchair with a package on his lap, was patiently and impassively deflecting the flow of guests and visitors that convulsed the lobby in an ever-changing display of luggage, tired faces, perfumes trailing after meteroidian bodies, bellhops with their stern jitters, the philosophical circles under the eyes of the manager or associate manager, each with his brace of assistants radiating freshness, the same freshness of eager sacrifice emitted by young women (in the form of ghostly laughter), which Morini tactfully chose to ignore. When Norton got there they left for a restaurant in Notting Hill, a Brazilian vegetarian restaurant she had recently discovered.” (95)

I’m usually not a setting person and prefer to get straight to dialogue and character development, but this image of Morini in a stream of humanity compels with its uneven pacing and jump-cut imagery.

Head over to bolanobolano.com for erudite discussions.

Bolano quote of the day ~2666~

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Okay, we’re at the first Bolano benchmark (someone email me with tilde instructions because the en rather than enyay is killing me) and I’m not sure yet. Engaging, amusing, smart. But the whole mocking of academia and its internal machinations has grown a bit tedious, in part because it reminds me of what I dislike about conferences, departmental in-fighting, and journal publishing.

Oh well. I’m still in this for the long haul. I think.

Quote of the day: tie. Because I’ll probably only post once a week, I’m willing to give the daily award to two bits from the first 50 pages of the novel…

“A rather ordinary picture of a student in the capital, but it worked on him like a drug, a drug that brought him to tears, a drug that (as one sentimental Dutch poet of the nineteenth century had it) opened the floodgates oof emotion, as well as the floodgates that at first blush resembled self-pity but wasn’t (what was it, then? rage? very likely), and made him turn over and over in his mind, not in words but in painful images, the period of his youthful apprenticeship, and after a perhaps pointless long night he was forced to two conclusions: first, that his life as he had lived it so far was over; second, that a brilliant career was opening up before him, and that to maintain its glow he had to persist in his determination, in sole testament to that garret. This seemed easy enough.” (5)

“The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton’s name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly.” (40-1).

See, just when I feel bored with the professional and personal nonsense, he waxes all Cervantes funny on me. And I dig that.

Whatchya reading?

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I posted the list from The Millions a couple of weeks? months? ago, and we had a lively discussion in the comments about what, in fact, the best books of the decade were.

Matt Bucher, over at one of his 40,000 blogs and social media sites, has posted his own list to rival The Millions’.

And he’s starting an Infinite Summer-like reading of Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Dan Summers says he’ll read along if I will.

So I’m toe-deep in 2666 and knee-deep in Don Quixote. What are you reading?

What I really want to do is direct

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It’s overcast and cold today and I’m feeling melancholy. This, in addition to reminding me why I shudder each time Spouse recommends Portland, Oregon as a solution to his job woes and our financial woes, makes this MLA panel piece by Brian Croxall on the dismal prospects for academics in my field lately even more poignant.

(The punchline, if you don’t feel like reading it? Full time professors these days qualify for food stamps, and jobs for both Tweedy Tenure Track and its neglected stepchild Oliver Adjunct are beyond pathetic, hurting students, graduates, and Universities in a rather horrifying spiral. A rather nasty, brutish, and short career view paper read at an MLA panel that complements today’s intensely depressing Fresh Air interview of Woody Allen. Come on, people. The decade was bad enough without this layer of realism and honesty. It’s like living in a William Dean Howells novel today.)

It’s no fun to be depressed without some data to back you up. So here you go, courtesy of a Tweet by my recent conference panelmate Matt Bucher. Thanks, man. Contagious academic depression is almost enjoyable as an academic dissection of a funeral. Cheers!

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Words to ponder; William Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech:

“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work–a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. “

I had never read this until Inktopia pointed Acadammit to this link.

Discuss.

Slow food or real life?

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Compelling article in the East Bay Express this week: Back to the Microwave by Sierra Filucci.
The author talks about how she was torn between doing what is right for her family and the planet…and doing what’s actually right for her family. She even argues that, though slow, local food movement is outstanding for young urbanites and energetic retirees, it may actually be pushing already overwhelmed women back into the kitchen for a full 1950s three-hour meal prep.

Great read. Glad her family did the one month of microwave and one month of Pollan eating to show how it really affects a family. Mostly grateful so I didn’t have to do the experiment. Interesting results.

During the convenience month, Filucci feels “pressed into an unworkable space. The space between a smashed keyboard and preservatives—between time and health.” Everything was easy, not always fast, and universally tasted the same.

During the grow it and cook it yourself month, she remembers “that the pleasure of cooking is soon overwhelmed by the reality of eating with two small children.” But once they hit their stride, the food “was polyphonic, with the volume cranked up high.”

Filucci notes the silence about gender within the slow food movement, ignoring that in the typical family, women handle 63% of the food prep and cleanup. The men and women are exhausted after a long day and sometimes, even though cooking is faster, takeout is more tempting. She wants the sustainable food movement to realize “that what they ask of communities and households—while worthy and noble—falls unequally at women’s feet.”

I believe we all need to talk more about the costs, too, not just to families and time and the environment, but to families’ wallets. Eating locally and fresh, in dismissing the terrifically unbalanced and outrageous food policy in the U.S. (all GMO, poison-ridden corn. potatoes, and soy all the time), is designed to be unbearably expensive for most families. It costs too much for us to buy everything at the farmer’s market and through local farm delivery programs. That’s because of where we live, where people pay a premium for local and fresh. Damn them.

Back to the Microwave

Best fiction of the millennium

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Over at The Millions, they’re revealing the fiction they feel is the best of the millennium so far.

What they’ve come up with:
20 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
19 American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman
18 Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
17 The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
16 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
15 Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis
14 Atonement by Ian McEwan
13 Mortals by Norman Rush
12 Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
11 The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
10 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
9 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
8 Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
7 Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
6 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5 Pastoralia by George Saunders
4 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
3 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2 The Known World by Edward P. Jones
1 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I’ve only read four things from this decade (variety of reasons), and only really liked one (sorry, Wallace fans, Oblivion is not my favorite…a few pieces are outstanding, but overall I didn’t get attached to many of the stories, and my favorite chapter within is from the early 90s.) I’m beginning to think I need to go back to Modernism where I belong. But I will reenter this decade with the new Margaret Atwood, then venture one by one down this list from The Millions.

Here’s the problem. I’ve read The Corrections. Liked it. For a lot of reasons was compelled by it. Didn’t love it. But that’s the best this millennium has to offer? Uh-oh. 2666 is on my stack, and I’ll willingly tackle it this month (okay, next month, and only if I finish my conference paper which is woefully behind). But I want to hear from you about whether I should tackle this list out of order or not at all or…

What do you think of them? The books, I mean. Anything missing? Anything on this list rock your world?

[Update, years later: from this list I’ve finished 2666 and Cloud Atlas. The former is impressive and not my cup of tea. The latter rocked my world and I will read it again soon. Awesome book.]

least favorite “best” plays and better alternatives

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We just did a bang up job on narrowing the Western canon to 20 or so books. Let’s please winnow the stage’s best known plays to those that are actually worth producing and watching…

Five plays others love that I can’t stand:
“A Streetcar Named Desire”
“The Death of a Salesman”
“Waiting for Godot” (Good lord, wait for Lefty instead.)
“Three Sisters” (Russians don’t have the depression market cornered. Oh, wait, yes they do. Try “The Cherry Orchard,” instead.)
“Hamlet” That’s right. I said it. Can’t stand Hamlet. Like most of Shakes, except the histories, but can’t be bothered by Hamlet.

Nine much, much better “best”s:
“Raisin in the Sun”
“Of Mice and Men”
“And Baby Makes Seven” (some prefer “Baltimore Waltz” or “How I Learned to Drive”, and I honor those preferences, but I’m a fan of Vogel’s moms in Seven)
“The Glass Menagerie” (made even more delightful if played as a double header with Chris Durang’s “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls”)
“The Iceman Cometh”
“Macbeth”
“Awake and Sing!” (Odets, why have we forsaken thee?)
“The Crucible”
“The Importance of Being Earnest”

I’m open to musicals but not “West Side Story.” (Also, not a fan of adaptations though you can beg to differ…put Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird over in my best and worst books posts) (and here and here). Bring your best and worst to the comments…

Update: least favorite books and better choices

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I’m thinking today about books I just could not abide being dropped from the literary canon, the master list of top contributions to literature. Join along if you’d like with the famous pieces of writing you cannot live without. (Tomorrow is the pieces nobody else knows that you can’t live without.)

My original post on the ten books I loathe that other people think are just humanity’s gift to literature is here.

It’s a decent list of canonical books I avoid like the plague. Catcher in the Rye, Heart of Darkness, Wuthering Heights, you name it by Hemingway, Billy Budd, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
On the Road, The Great Gatsby. This time I’d add Pilgrim’s Progress (I’m sorry. I know it’s important. But puhleeze with the terrible writing.) And the Crying of Lot 49.
And here comes the bombshell. I’ve never been a big fan of the Brontes. Austen’s fine. I certainly wouldn’t say I dislike them. But they give me the minor league fantods, generally. Which makes me like a person who avoids chocolate or wears high tops at the beach, I know.

But howsabout some books I hope forever remain in the Western canon?
Awesome books no matter how you slice them:
Don Quixote. Seriously, if anything lives on to the twenty-seventh century, it’s this bad boy.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Only poem you’re find up in this list. You heard me, J. Alfred.
An American Tragedy. Pride, greed, lust, entitlement, stupidity, fear. American indeed.
Portrait of a Lady. I would vote for Sister Carrie, too, but one can only be so Dreiser-centric these days…and James does understated better.
The Scarlet Letter. Don’t care how old fashioned it seems. There is never a time when a woman holding her head high about her decisions and passions whilst protecting her child isn’t a timely read. I aspire to Hester Prynne.
The Yellow Wallpaper. There would be no Bell Jar without Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Hell, there would be no women writing without CPG. We’d all be making the rounds, if you know what I mean.
The Turn of the Screw. Yeah you did, James. Went there. And how.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Defy worthless authority and keep an ear open for humanity. And the colloquial.
As I Lay Dying. They don’t get more tortured, f—ed up, and evocative than Faulkner. Dang.
Light in August. Just when you thought the above couldn’t be more true, he did it again.
Metamorphosis. Holy howling fantods, Bugman.
Ulysses. Gotta read the Odyssey, though. So it’s a two-fer.
Native Son. I don’t think there is a more powerful, viscerally terrifying novel about humanity in a society that deems you animalistic.
Invisible Man. It’s been too long since I reread this one, but several scenes remain fully intact, like paintings in my mind.
1984. Terrifying current world. Need I say more?
The Color Purple. Turns everything on its ear. Everything.
Nightwood. And this did it first.

So which books do you hope never die (sorry, Sister Carrie, I fear you’re almost already gone…) out of our classrooms and libraries? Which in this list would you toss for another that Western culture should not be without? (Poetry people, stand up for yourselves. Cuz I sure as heck ain’t gonna push poetry, but you should. And maybe someone to vouch for something from Shakespeare and Ethan Frome and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas because I can’t quite but someone should…)

Tomorrow I’ll go for books I want added to everyone’s bookshelf, canon or no. But for now, what is the best from the list of the best?

You asked for it.

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Okay. John has posed the following after my plea for ideas.

***
“A woman I met at the college where I briefly taught, once told me I had too many choices, that I was not driven by dire necessity. But that is just an illusion and her mistake. Choices are what we all need.”

…From The Sportswriter by Richard Ford.

Despite what you may think of the book and/or the writer, what do you think of the sentiment as it relates to ‘the struggle.’ Discuss.
***

Love that I hear Mike Myers’s Linda Richmond in that request.

As I see the preliminary assertion by the woman, these are not mutually exclusive, or even parallel, issues—having choices versus being driven by need. I see this quote from a Maslow’s pyramid perspective, and it seems that being driven by dire necessity comes at the level of fulfilling basic needs: safety, food, water, shelter. At that point your choices are different, your options are fewer, and your ethical limits are very, very high. Not many of us thinks about fairness or altruism when we’re literally starving.

But having “too many” options is, as the narrator suggests, an illusion. Not necessarily just from without, as this narrator posits. Too many choices can be an internal burden of someone whose basic needs are met and whose struggles are existential. Too many choices can also be an external judgment from one with fewer choices. Either way, I have to agree that the “too many” is an illusion and that the juxtaposition is a faulty one. Not just apples and oranges. Apples and skyscrapers.

By the same token, choices is not what “we all” need. Some people just need food, water, and shelter, and they don’t care much about existential dilemma right now. It’s a privileged perspective to think that options are the gateway, for some people can’t get within 100 miles of the courtyard.

In short? They’re both looking at things from a limited perspective, but the colleague is making a faulty assumption, whereas the narrator is assuming everyone is in the same position.

but that’s a cursory view posted mostly to get your opinions. Especially those who’ve read the book. I haven’t. (Should I add it to the pile? The pile is getting unwieldy and I’m loathe to add any more than necessary…)

Monologues about Gates and Obama

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A smart piece by Joan Walsh of Salon about Obama with his foot in his mouth.
And a very interesting piece by an Ivy League professor about Gates getting his perspective morphed by the Ivy League lens.

I don’t know about urging care and thoughtfulness when it comes to racial outrage. I’m not sure we should censure the open discourse about disparities and racial profiling and ignorance in our society. But I do know it’s feeding into the gaping, frothing Right Wing maw right now, and those who have no concept of the reality of life in our country, either racially or economically, have their own pseudo-journalism to hype this any way they want to. It may not be fair, but maybe thinking twice before we speak is a reasonable request in this era of “nobody’s listening except to their own polarized view”.

The Loh Down on Divorce

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Sandra Tsing Loh, whose writing I admire and whose voice is all too often in my car, is ending her marriage of 20 years. And she has some intensely interesting things to say about women, marriage, and American culture.

Check out her intriguing article over at The Atlantic.

Made me thing of Orenstein’s book Flux, and of several conversations I’ve had lately with friends about limited hours in the day and priorities. Consider, for instance, her argument that “To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don’t, for instance, have today’s working mother’s ambivalence and emotional stickiness.”