what i've read

8 Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse by Lawrence Scott Sheets (01/12)

2012-01-08T21:08:00.001-05:00

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (12/11)

2011-12-30T15:54:00.001-05:00

Sitting in Alison's mother's Harlem apartment while Alison and friends traipse around the city. Finally finished this monstrosity in the late afternoon, at the kitchen table and three coffees into a day that feels over before it began.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (10/11)

2011-10-23T18:34:00.002-04:00

Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (09/11)

2011-09-26T22:35:00.001-04:00

Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow (08/11)

2011-08-07T14:00:00.001-04:00

The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow (07/11)

2011-08-01T19:39:00.001-04:00

Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Stitches by David Small (06/11)

2011-06-11T21:03:00.003-04:00

I think my friend Will and I have inverse relationships to comics and alcohol.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (05/11)

2011-05-16T22:45:00.009-04:00

Schlubby, techie men of the world, rejoice! Here is your Homer.

No quantity of hack novels will ever heighten your sensitivity to the world around you. That, if it exists, would be the province of literature. This does not have to, but often does, coincide with a general lack of titillation and thrill. Something about the stirring of synapses by plot-driven drama seems to inure them to nuance. 100 pages into Cryptonomicon, and it remains to be seen what this will be 1000 pages later.

For all its detailed invention, reaches for stereotypes too often with its characters.

In the end, more like Battlefield Earth than Gravity's Rainbow.

The Sound and the Fury (05/11)

2011-05-16T20:19:00.002-04:00

Look at the rate of book consumption for 2009-10. Compare it to 2011. What does this say about the working life? Something execrably boring for whoever is not living it.

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (12/10)

2010-12-06T09:39:00.008-05:00

pg. 10, maybe 11: doctorow demonstrates the power of strong, simple sentences (abrupt shifts in startling imagery or intimate statements of fact, presented in basic, repeated structures) building a rhythmic crescendo of slightly ironic, limpid, and engrossing prose. for some reason, i have the impression of a perfectly transparent frozen thing, but i think this is meant to be warm.

apparently, doctorow is frequently lumped with roth, more by geographic and ethnic proximity than any resonance in their work--from what i've seen so far.

Towers of Midnight by Brandon Sanderson (11/10)

2010-12-06T09:37:00.001-05:00

Don't say a word.

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (10/10)

2010-10-06T23:24:00.003-04:00

Remember when you read books? When your mind wasn't a scattered mash of quotidian responsibilities, crusting like spilled soup in the fridge?

Don't ever expect either 1) thoughts or 2) culture from me again.

The Story of O by "Pauline Réage" (08/10)

2010-08-04T15:52:00.000-04:00

Underworld by Don DeLillo (08/10)

2010-07-31T16:00:00.001-04:00

DeLillo is a cold writer.

Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille (07/10)

2010-07-06T22:48:00.001-04:00

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley (06/10)

2010-06-13T20:14:00.004-04:00

Like all good books, A Fan's Notes is several works, and one of the more minor ones is an eloquent, mostly unwitting condemnation of mid-twentieth century American sexual mores. This, gentle reader, is why traditional values are shit. My least favorite parts of the book feature young, virile Exley-the-misogynist. I far prefer Exley the extravagant failure, Exley the sardonic commentator on America and all its petty deficits.

Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie (05/10)

2010-05-05T16:03:00.019-04:00

A very Moorian work. Moore and Melinda Gebbie teamed up to create a gorgeous graphic novel in which the young female protagonists of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan meet as adults in a resort hotel on the eve of World War I. The images are beautiful, and Moore's ideas are intriguing, but the work fails as pornography, its stated aim.

The sex is erotica in that it is implausible and stylized and touches on the multifaceted, often contradictory impulses that, ah-hem, "make us human." It is not quite pornography in that the sex is fraught and painful and, one feels, scarcely the point. You know how most mass-produced porn of the San Fernando Valley reduces people to their junk? This does the opposite. In real life, sex is often not worth having. Lost Girls acknowledges that fact a little too readily. It’s good for looking at and thinking about, perhaps deploying strategically in conversation, but not much else.

Here are a few panels.

Wilde parody:

"So odd were Gray's surrounds that mauve delirium descended, tinged by feverish urgency. He struggled through an undergrowth of kisses, floundered in a dank Sargasso of embrace where time became unfixed and all events were without sequence.

"Knelt in ardent demonstration by his passion-of-the-moment he heard Wooton's sly, ophidian whisper at his ear. 'Dear boy, try not to let events so overwhelm you. Bear in mind that though the Road of Excess may lead us to Wisdom's Palace, like all roads it runs in both directions'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 7).

"'As I ventured whilst you posed for Hallward, we must relish experiences before they accumulate to mere decrepitude. Youth is the time to sin, for vice is quickly past its prime, while virtue never has one.'

"Wooton gestured to the Salon's other clients, nestled with their favorites. 'What a distressing rack of threadbare skulls, too meek to satisfy desire 'til it has all but fled, like wretched poets who deliberate for years before they lift their pens to find the inkwell long since dry'" (Book 2, chapter 13, pg. 4).

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte (04/10)

2010-04-28T16:35:00.003-04:00

Sam Lipsyte hates conjunctions, convention. Likes startling juxtapositions, mordant observations. Is clever, facile. Isn't really very funny.

Labyrinthes by Jorge Luis Borges (04/10)

2010-04-24T14:43:00.011-04:00

"Abulcasim's memory was a mirror of intimate cowardices...the moon of Bengal is not the same as the moon of Yemen, but it may be described in the same words" (151).

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships" (213-4).

"Can an author create characters superior to himself? I would say no and in that negation include both the intellectual and the moral" (215).

Minotaur symmetries.

Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin (04/10)

2010-04-24T14:43:00.008-04:00

"Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

"You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

"If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

"How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry Cut the poetry. No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gesture; for a lover, when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, perversity and art..." (xiii-xiv)

In sex, as in most things, there are few greater sins than a failure of imagination.

Erotica demands imaginative exercise while porn, most porn, supplants it.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (04/10)

2010-04-22T17:22:00.005-04:00

Asks Commentary, "why can't we just depose the Islamic regime?"

Ms. Satrapi is a very appealing lady, in her youth for who she was and today for how she represents it.

Women by Charles Bukowski (04/10)

2010-04-01T18:48:00.005-04:00

The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

I was being catered to as if I was an invalid. Which I was.

"Why can't you be decent to people?" she asked.

"Fear," I said.

"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart, People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.

"I took my choice, I raised the fifth of vodka and drank it straight. The Russians knew something." (177)

"I was a bush-league de Sade, without his intellect" (236).

A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (03/10)

2010-03-13T00:59:00.002-05:00

"Bango!" he wrote.

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (03/10)

2010-03-04T05:18:00.007-05:00

Wolfe's subject is male ego, that most underserved of themes in literature. Bonfire isn't subtle or lyrical, but it is magisterial, cutting, and fun. "Wolfe contra Woolf," I would title my oh-so-clever article contrasting the two in an upper-middlebrow literary publication, but really: they were born opposites. Since my thing, it seems, is literary treatments of masculinity, I obviously had to look at Wolfe, and he is good, just...simple. Wolfe's men are broad, simplistic parodies, or perhaps I would prefer to think so.

Bonfire of the Vanities is also a clear precursor to The Wire: white journalists chronicling the decay of a post-industrial, segregated city where race and class overlap, or not chronicling so much as attempting a portrait. Of course, The Wire is much bolder and more sophisticated--it actually looks into the lives of the young, black men who feed the criminal justice system. Wolfe just touches on them, looks at them through the eyes of outsiders. Probably wisely, he doesn't try to write outside the perspective of white men whose sole motivation, ever, is ego.

This book is also a scrupulous catalog of suit descriptions, which is useful right now as I get a custom suit tailored at Khan Market. Thanks, Mr. Wolfe! Posing so audaciously on the back cover, pure white, double-breasted suit with peaked lapels and black-and-white striped shirt with the narrow collar blaring out as if to say, "I am a character!" Wolfe the Southern Duke.

India's Struggle for Independence: 1857-1947 by Bipan Chandra, et al. (02/2010)

2010-03-02T02:29:00.004-05:00

Something about nationalist historians interpreting--and justifying--everything in light of a final independence that was never a foregone conclusion, all events woven into the independence narrative, all acts exonerated on grounds of being anti-imperialist, etc., goes here.

I read most of this on a two-day train ride from Kannur, Kerala, to Delhi. It made a good pillow.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins (02/10)

2010-02-22T07:49:00.000-05:00

Look, I've joined the culture.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (02/10)

2010-02-06T05:27:00.003-05:00

See, Natasha? A woman. With adjectives like "dustgreen" and "mossgreen." On the same page: page 1, in fact. Satisfied?

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (02/10)

2010-02-02T03:42:00.008-05:00

What author works harder than a young Salman Rushdie? If classic Hollywood cinematography conceals the presence of the camera so that all we see is pure story, artifice folded in on itself like the best of dinner parties, Rushdie is the Soviet auteurs of the 1920s with their frantic montage, the experimenters of the French New Wave with cameras hanging from car windows and trains. (I choose the film metaphor in homage to Rushdie's own cinematic fascination.) Here the effort is so self-consciously obvious that I find it a little annoying, but Rushdie's willingness to spare himself nothing as a writer continues to win me over.

The book bulges gracelessly at the seams. It is several novels--a black satire, a family chronicle, an allegorical fable--smashed together, and some of the fragments fare better than others. The whole midnight children concept seemed underdeveloped, an afterthought--or perhaps Rushdie's first idea, out of which other, better ones grew, and he never brought himself to throw out the original stillborn fetus.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (01/10)

2010-01-29T04:20:00.002-05:00

One of the more shallow ways to react to literature: prove yourself unable to get past some moral sticking point in the story, particularly when the author shows himself aware of the injustice.

Nonetheless:

Torn hymen=spoiled meat.

Weird synchronicities between this one and the subsequent Midnight's Children. Preoccupation with virginity, the preservation and loss thereof. Stained marital sheets displayed to an expectant public. Old, but perhaps not that old, moral codes that still stir up indignant rage in me.

By the way, do you know those successful neo-Victorian books by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, The Dangerous Book for Boys, The Daring Book for Girls, etc.? They follow a simple prescription, namely resurrect a nostalgic Victorian weltanschauung of colonial explorers and Kipling-esque right-is-right, moral backbone, which we all thought rightly buried under the million hapless corpses of the Somme (but not, of course, in forgotten African mass graves). I was content to leave it there, but the present-day fathers of the UK and USA are nothing if not wistful for days when you could call Cecil Rhodes anything other than a bag of worthless horsefuck; when, in fact, one could crown him a Dangerous Hero among others in the Igguldens' obscene new book. Please let's not have a Victorian revival. So they were genteel. They also enslaved the entire fucking world.

Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism by Eric Hobsbawm (01/10)

2010-01-28T04:38:00.003-05:00

Old socialist critiques American imperial project of the Bush years. Crisis of state legitimacy as global trends affect citizens in ways governments cannot ameliorate. Unstable, unprecedented balance of power. Exploitation of the terrorist non-threat. Differences between British (int'l trade, direct governorship of colonies, non-messianic) and American (home market, satellite states, universalist revolution) world empires. Effortless summations of things you knew but had never woven into a tight and cogent argument. Apparent command of all regional histories.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (01/10)

2010-01-28T04:34:00.003-05:00

Note my commitment to gritty, earthy, manly. I dont use apostrophes or quotation marks. Not manly. Semicolons: super, super unmanly. Taut, lyrical descriptions of manly. Women and their adjectives. Manly.

Oh, look what I found:

The ashen prose covered everything. But then, in fits, the lyricism would appear like a blossom on a turd with the Germanic sprouting into Latinate. The reticulate sky would wrinkle its vermiculate back to expose a cloying sentimentality lacquered by logorrhea--a cheesy mysticism lurking behind the cracked, Naturalistic veneer. But here the sun never rose, for the old man and his scion, the bell tolled and all wrapped up in a startling deus ex via as the hooded, stoven-boned veteran hove into view and whisked our boy off to some humming deep-glen mystery older than man. (Link)

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (12/09)

2009-12-31T23:45:00.002-05:00

This was much better than I'd expected.

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple (12/09)

2009-12-31T23:43:00.002-05:00

Read this on the train back from Calcutta to Delhi, feeling sick most of the way. It's the best Dalrymple book I've read yet. I'm now reading White Tiger--might as well go through the white person in India's booklist.

The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (12/09)

2009-12-18T17:26:00.002-05:00

Picked up this copy in one of those snazzy kiosks in the Vishwavidyalaya metro station, a poor life decision, the chance to put off paper writing for the two days it took to get through all 800 or so pages. Melissa lost respect for me, or pretended to, but it's a fuck's sight better than traipsing around India with Shantaram or William Dalrymple. The first Wheel of Time novel since maybe Lord of Chaos to call riveting. Sorry Robert Jordan, this project should have been taken from your hands years ago (though perhaps not wrested by death, as it happened). No more Wheel of Time as thick, Tolstoyan description, thank God. This was fun, dumb fantasy.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman (11/09)

2009-11-15T23:28:00.002-05:00

This wasn't any good.

On reconsideration, it was alrite.

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (11/09)

2009-11-13T06:05:00.002-05:00

Bought this old copy in a Pokhara bookshop for 105 Nepali rupees. Read it back in Delhi, falling asleep, on the metro, in rickshaws.

Who's ready to grow up. Neil is. I'm worthless.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (11/09)

2009-11-13T05:54:00.000-05:00

City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre (10/2009)

2009-10-24T08:14:00.004-04:00

Stupid Christian preening, with a lot of general research. Delhi, Varanasi, and the Annapurna Circuit. Abandoned in a Danaque guest house.

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple (10/2009)

2009-10-24T08:14:00.003-04:00

On the Annapurna Circuit.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (09/09)

2009-09-13T16:20:00.006-04:00

Women are nursemaids to arid, egotistical men. Spare our egos, oh ambiguous mothers with your mercurial, unnamable emotions, your weird, fluid perceptions of homey objects and their significances of feminine loss and ambivalence.

Any dinner table is a battleground of submerged moods. I ask for such pittances—be my ally in mollifying Mr Tansley’s wounded preening—and am frustrated. I want only to examine the lovely, symbolically fraught topography of the fruit bowl, but my spitting demon of a little girl snatches a pear and ruins the ensemble!

What do you feel I feel about my husband’s tyrannical feelings? Answer in wet metaphor.

Heavy sea musk stains the draperies in the shifting flow of seasons. See me write about absence.

He wanders the beaches seeking philosophic consolation in tidepools and the dumb white fringed humps of waves, while Mrs Van Beek's stout, aged ass rests itself on a barstool after a day's knocking about in cupboards dusting his collected editions of this or that.

The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple (08/09)

2009-09-05T04:36:00.001-04:00

India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul (07/09)

2009-07-30T09:33:00.004-04:00

Dated, dated. Beautifully written, but dated. India’s problems are a product of primordial, stagnant ‘Hinduism’, which accommodates a millennium of invaders with quietism, passivity, and religious resignation. ‘Hindu culture’ is held to be a thing, a step or two above the African night, but well short of Western can-doism, the flux of modernity, of civilization, that Europe defines. I’m reading this beside Said’s Orientalism: how far we have come in only 30 years, perhaps because of Said’s seminal essay? See how scholarship matters.

But I picked up some history along the margins: the Emergency, of course, and the India-Pakistan and India-China wars, too.

This country is weirder than I could have expected. Where else do people threaten to immolate themselves in protest of the Miss World beauty pageant being held in Bangalore?

The Human Stain by Philip Roth (07/09)

2009-07-23T04:20:00.002-04:00

My last Roth for a while. Time to move on to non-fiction. Remedy some of my ghastly ignorance.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (07/09)

2009-07-23T04:19:00.001-04:00

So that's why Faulkner's famous.

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth (07/09)

2009-07-16T04:48:00.004-04:00

Roth is not an economical writer. His paragraphs meander from association to association. He starts off discussing one character in the present and ends analyzing the death of another character's mother thirty years ago. Scenes are repeated throughout the book with slightly different emphasis. Time and perspective are in constant flux. This is especially true of later Roth, 1990s' Roth, which is when, in his 60s, he came into his own.

Also, you're never at a loss to identify the 'idea' of a later Roth novel. He repeats his thesis over and over, as he did in American Pastoral. The only unity in the life of Mickey Sabbath is incoherency. There are no explanations.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun (06/09)

2009-06-30T09:52:00.003-04:00

A talented, arrogant young man wanders around the Norwegian capital attempting to write philosophical articles for local periodicals, having absurd run-ins with people on the street, and gradually starving to death. One by one, the young man's ideals are stripped away by means of the hunger - his moralizing fades, his presumptions dwindle down to occasional outbursts. He is a more tolerable person by the end of the novel. The book resembles Crime and Punishment in many ways, but less convoluted and messy and with no didactic moralizing lurking under the prose. An elegant thing, but less stirring for all its being well-crafted.

Zuckerman Bound by Philip Roth (06/09)

2009-06-30T09:43:00.006-04:00

Three novels and a novella collected in a single volume documenting minutia in the life of Nathan Zuckerman, infamous Jewish-American novelist, the most narcissistic project I have ever read, but not bad for all that. Roth is upfront about only being inspired to write about slight variations on his own experience. He is a writer, exclusively, of the internal. The outside world only matters as far as it impacts his inner life. The best of the four was Zuckerman Unbound - the best written, the funniest, the most acerbic. The Anatomy Lesson goes on and on about Zuckerman's undiagnosed chronic pain, which he relieves with vodka, pot, painkillers, and passive fucking. The pain would be a cheap metaphor worthy of English Lit 101 if Zuckerman, being the writer he is, didn't constantly mull over its symbolic significances - the pain is his guilt for exposing his family in best-selling novels, it's the wound of an estranged brother or the presence of his mother's ghost, etc. The Ghost Writer was irritating, and Roth's trademark bon mots (so dry as to be dessicated) felt strained.

My Life as a Man by Philip Roth (05/09)

2009-06-02T14:36:00.004-04:00

I gave my copy to Liz, and she's taken it to Brooklyn to begin her post-collegiate life. I'm not absorbing one tenth of what's been happening to me these past days, and I realize that's the most narcissistic possible spin I could put on ending college, saying goodbye to Liz, and leaving the country.

Protagonist is a recent Brown grad with writerly ambitions, high moral seriousness, and licentious proclivities. The narrative is how all that is wrung from him in a single, hellish relationship. In short, literary porn.

Dissipated

2009-05-29T01:19:00.008-04:00

The rest of that semester, which just ended, dissipated into a much-advertised haze of depression and booze. I barely read what I was assigned, much less anything extracurricular. I've finished packing the new volumes into my home bookshelf, into every possible cranny, and I'm much too lazy to fish them out again and see which ones I've yet to write up. They were clearly not too memorable.

Nothing extracurricular, with one important exception. I read a phenomenal amount of comics, mostly "mature themed." I read the entire oeuvre, or near enough, of several writers, and devoured five-year series in a single day. Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan, consists of roughly 1,440 pages, a massive creative effort that spans some ten trade paperbacks, and I finished the entire work in less than twenty-four hours. Binge reading, to keep my mind off work and despondency. Let's see, I read the better part of Garth Ennis' work (and the man is prolific), quite a bit of Ed Brubaker, Grant Morrison's many projects, including that wonderful, mockable thing called The Invisibles, a few of Warren Ellis' endless efforts, including Planetary, Fell, Desolation Jones, etc., and probably a few other writers whom I can't remember without plugging in my external hard drive. Understand, I read so many comics that I already cannot recall the names of writers whose entire career I either read or heavily sampled. Series with multiple authors included Hellboy, The Authority ("Well, it was inevitable," Will said upon hearing), and various Marvel Ultimates. I believe I have concluded this period in my life. While I may still read comics, I won't scour the internet for scanned downloads, then lose sleep and eyesight scrolling through them compulsively, addictively, in such a way that I cannot remember much of the plot afterward. I'm already back to my Philip Roth, whom I enjoy in the most self-centered way. Expect trenchant analysis.

Oh yeah, Mike Carey. I read loads of Mike Carey. Want to guess how long it took me to read the 7o or so issues of Lucifer? But christ, what he does to Constantine. It's the most fucked-up world of the imagination I've encountered in a while, and John Constantine should be put down in a mercy killing. God, Carey, you have to lift the fuckers up before you send them down to hell. It can't be hell all-fucking-day. Lucifer was fun. Carey's Hellblazer was just miserable. Ennis' recipe for salvation (in the face of testosterone-dripping ultraviolence) is a round of drunken BS with the blokes. Writers are a funny lot, a little touched.

02/09-03/09

2009-03-17T01:29:00.004-04:00

These were for the seminar U.S. in World Politics. Because of time constraints, I either read only portions or skimmed through sections.

"A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

I used images from Power's account to write a song that, by now, my friends are all sick of hearing about. I also wrote an eight-page paper that left a lot to be desired.

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy by Charlie Savage

Don't be put off by the pundit-friendly title - this is good legal reporting for the layperson. Strange to be reading histories of events I remember. I already knew most of this simply because I've followed the news for the last five years.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

History-as-novel. Emphasis on narrative and characterization and plot. Accomplished effectively because of the extensive research that undergirds the writing. The sort of book I might like to write some day.

Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World by Dennis Ross

Interesting inside view of U.S. statecraft from a high-level practitioner. He comes with all the expected presumptions: the U.S. should continue to support Israel, Iran cannot acquire nuclear weapons, etc. Still a valuable book - the man has nuance. Why does contemporary non-fiction have to sport such banal titles? Ready-made for the Border's bestseller discount table, I suppose.

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli

Basic, straightforward. Will surprise no one who has ever thought about the effects of globalization beyond laissez-faire messianism. Still interesting for its rich storytelling, though. A layperson's anthropological study of the individuals involved in "globalization." God, these little summaries suck. All I can manage at the moment.

Dead As Dreams by Weakling (02/09)

2009-02-02T23:19:00.004-05:00

This is not a book, but I haven't been so excited by an album in a long time. Mostly, I'm here to complain about other people who write about metal. They're idiots. I suppose Weakling is brutal, nightmarish, "insane," all that, but that's what's said about every metal band in existence—and not really the point with Weakling, it seems. Ignoring the lyrics (which I haven't read and don't want to), the album is wonderfully universal, expressing common themes of pain, sadness, struggle, loss, and maybe anger. It's very lovely, really. But I'm nowhere near ready to write a review of the music. Just this—metal deserves better listeners.

Ever notice how musicians are uniquely bad at discussing music?

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (01/09)

2009-01-25T15:42:00.012-05:00

Alternate title: Good Riddance to Werther

I was supposed to read this a long time ago, when I was at that unfortunate stage of male adolescence in which one is a Romantic and compulsively rhapsodizes Nature and one's Soul, and maybe also Women.

But really, the world can do without an absurd, childish member of the gentry idolizing the peasants into pastoral totems of Simplicity and Work, or whatever the bullshit is.

Or slathering his pathetic yearnings on others' lives. God, I'd kill the fuck myself. If only they could arrange their suicides so they could fall into an open grave, or trip into the crematory—erase yourself with some self-respect, for God's sake, and don't trouble others. Make it seem an accident and spare your family the rage and betrayal, if not the presumed anguish. But above all, shut the fuck up about it—Werther is a towering, shameful monument to failing that commandment.

Меня бросила. Вертер—пошёл на хуй.

And in a breathtaking feat of projection, I can say: bullshit, that Lotte's "secret heart's desire was to keep [Werther] for herself" (118). Debase yourself so regularly, and receive your just wages: distance and contempt. Only have the decency to off yourself earlier and more discreetly.

The most perfect coda: this should have been the whole of Werther's suicide letter.

'Though sad to say, I must report that Eros was a bust.
I'll seek my peace in bleaker fields—to Thanatos, I must.'

Hitman, Chronicles of Wormwood by Garth Ennis (01/09)

2009-01-19T01:41:00.004-05:00

Are you tired of Garth Ennis' war stories yet? Is it possible to be? This run concludes one long, compulsive winter break of comics.

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowery (01/09)

2009-01-07T23:09:00.005-05:00

This book needs at least three readings: one for the plot, another for the layering, and a third for the lyricism. Nearly all books benefit from multiple readings, but not much popular literature truly demands it. My copy's introduction notes that Lowry uses a sort of statuesque prose style:

This is syntax as architecture, a strained high baroque: it is not to be understood so much as unpacked and paraphrased. It is 'vertical', balanced, stilled in time, not 'horizontal', in flow.

I don't object to that on any grounds - theoretical, aesthetic, whatever - but it makes the reader work for his pleasure. Sometimes the reader wants nothing more than a Philip Roth marital disaster. Straight-forward misery, that is.

Preacher, Hellblazer by Garth Ennis (01/09)

2009-01-07T23:08:00.007-05:00

Three days in a cave with well-written ultraviolence, an addict's need for narrative, debasing. Ugh.

Surprising no one, Garth Ennis kills God...

...and then has John Constantine flip off Satan.

Meanwhile, I finish off another Saturday night in typical fashion.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vols. 1 & 2, The Black Dossier by Alan Moore (01/09)

2009-01-01T15:34:00.006-05:00

Fucking delightful - the world of the imagination, written for adults. Also, lots and lots of sex - fairy sex, people sex, immortal sex, goddess sex, immortal-goddess sex, Lilliputian sex, giant sex, bear-man-gypsy sex, invisible dude sex, etc. The only bad sex, really, is when James Bond tries to rape an 80-something-year-old woman, only to get bricked in the face. "Gratuitous!" shriek the latter-day Puritans at Amazon.com, who remain exactly what they are despite more fashionable rationalizations.

Moore helped usher in the age of pitch black comics in the 80s. Now he's resurrected adventuring, the way a middle-class "lad" of Victorian England might read Henry Morton Stanley and stare at the blank space on the map of Africa (graci, Conrad; literature supplants my own memories). Only absent the imperial fuckery, you know. The idea that there are places worth discovering, that the getting there will be an adventure, that the destination will be sufficient apotheosis. And once there, you get to have an orgy, which somehow comes off the way we envision these things in our very few moments of optimism. So, yes. Made for me. Can't help but react as expected. There are mountains in Asia.

Samplings:

First page of a Tijuana Bible from Airstrip One.

Sick of this shit happening in stories, man. "tt" indeed.

The best greeting in literature. Alan Moore and I, prurient little fucks—we deserve each other.

06/08-11/08

2008-12-30T23:26:00.004-05:00

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov
Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Man by Grant Morrison
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

Tao Te Ching: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell (12/08)

2008-12-30T21:15:00.016-05:00

This is the critique to which one must be sensitive when reading Western treatments of Eastern religions such as Taoism:

It was necessary for moderns to lie to themselves about Taoism before they could take it seriously. For many, it was necessary to project a dichotomization of "good Taoism" - narcissistically constructed to reflect modern secular individualism - from "bad Taoism" - caricatured in the same terms used to dismiss Catholicism and any other traditional religion. And to make the good "Taoism" palatable to moderns, it was necessary to say that it had no specific teachings or practices that might be unpalatable to modern tastes: as "a Taoist," all a person has to do to be good is "to be one with Nature," or to believe some such comparable tenet of contrarian modernism. (Kirkland and Girardot, 2004)

Or to quote Wikipedia, "Russell Kirkland argues that [versions such as Mitchell's Tao Te Ching] are based on Western Orientalist fantasies and represent the colonial appropriation of Chinese culture" (Tao Te Ching).

This is a meaningful scholarly critique, going right back to Said and Orientalism. It cannot be dismissed lightly.

Mitchell is a well-know translator of ancient religious texts and modern poetry - I grew up around his translations of Rilke and remember selections of his Duino Elegies to be very beautiful. He favors a free "poetic" approach in his translations - in support, he quotes Johnson: "We must try its effect as an English poem. That is the way to judge of the merit of a translation," i.e. stuttering literalism does not make for beautiful poetry or even, in an important sense, an accurate translation. Mitchell's Tao Te Ching is not a translation, however; it is a "version," as he makes clear in the book's concluding, absolutely indispensable question and answer section. Mitchell speaks no Chinese and is no scholar of Chinese culture or history. He worked between a number of literal translations of the Tao Te Ching as he composed his intrepretation. Listen to this:

[I'm not really translating here.] That's why I called the book a version of the Tao Te Ching, not a translation. I gave myself the freedom to take off in any direction, when that felt appropriate. (12)

Here and there, Mitchell takes that freedom very far indeed. He basically composes Chapter 50 on his own, writing as Lao Tzu. If you hadn't read the book's supplementary sections first, you would probably mistake Mitchell's own composition for 2,600-year-old Chinese wisdom, whatever that's supposed to be. Mitchell's priorities also seem suspect. For example, the literal translation of Chapter 3 reads:

The Master rules by emptying people's minds and filling their bellies , weakening their will and strengthening their bones. He sees to it that they lack knowledge and desire, and makes sure that those with knowledge don't dare to act. [Incidentally, this reminds me awfully of the Grand Inquisitor.]

Saying that this depiction of a "proto-fascist leader" simply "couldn't be correct," Mitchell changes the text to

The Master leads
by emptying people's minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.

Quite a change, no? Altering an ancient text, with a cultural context no doubt far more alien than we might like to imagine, to fit suspiciously into some Western writer's white boy, post-60s meditation fancies. If Mitchell were a scholar, he should rightfully be lambasted and discredited. But Mitchell is not a scholar and is not attempting a scholarly contribution. He is using his own considerable Zen background and training to reinterpret an old text to better suit modern sensibilities, and if that renders the meaning unrecognizable to some imagined, idealized Lao Tzu squatting in bronze age China, so be it. That's all anyone has ever done with religious texts, make them their own, update them for a more contemporary setting. That's how religion manages to survive, by morphing, and really the only difference between Mitchell's wisdom and Lao Tzu's is the latter's considerable pedigree. If the original, "authoritative" Chinese text of the Tao Te Ching is anything like the Bible, it has already undergone revision after revision, adaptation after adaptation, in its long history of recopying and transmission. No, Mitchell isn't even reinterpreting; he is using the Tao Te Ching as an inspirational urtext; he is working from from it, reacting to it, drawing the meaning out to share with others. Perfectly reasonable. The only harm comes from misrepresentation, when a reader takes Mitchell's Tao Te Ching for something other than it is. The scholarly critique of the work is not valid because Mitchell has no illusions as to what he is doing. My only complaint is that this should be made more explicit in the book's brief foreword.

Colonial appropriation? Probably, but the empire has its spiritual needs as well. If you disdain that, you're a short-sighted fuck.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth (12/08)

2008-12-29T02:57:00.021-05:00

Why the long, rambling, psycho-analytic excursions? Why the repetition of action - page-long analysis - action, with each "action" often no more than a word or two, some line of dialog? Why the sudden, histrionic scenes of violence and cruelty and grotesque suffering, like Swede in the hotel room with Rita or vomiting into his daughter's face, especially when they jar so with the rest of the novel?

Pastoral has its flaws, but it is a great novel. Gripping, and not just because it's the first non-Nabokov I've read in months. Important to remember that every analytic digression is written from the perspective of either the Swede or Zuckerman, never Roth. Maybe that's just Roth's way of disguising his own bad habit - frame the whole thing through Zuckerman and blame him for any failings - but I think it has a point. We are more immediately caught up in the minds of our protagonists. Their thought processes are made explicit to us long before the characters themselves could put them into words. Roth is his characters' loquacious interpreter. I wish I had him by me, day to day, to do the same.

An Amazon reviewer points out that Merry is, at best, a hysterical parody of 60s activism, which is not to say that no one existed like her, fully sociopathic, fully a murderer ex nihilo. But she's a symbol, not a person, what the 60s looked like to an older America. The book's not about the 60s. It's a record of the death of everything that was good about pre-60s America. It's an allegory and an elegy, and it achieves this soberly, without too much sentimentality. Perhaps that's why Roth works so hard on the Moby Dick-realism, the intricate details of life, say, in a glove factory. The meticulous care Roth takes with details allows him to escape sentimentality.

The Swede is a bit formulaic. He starts off entirely one dimensional. Then we learn of his rich inner life. The course of the book is his introduction to the willfully unreasonable, the deliberately bizarre and perverse and berserk, in American culture. This goes on quite a while, this acquiring of a third dimension. Mr. Levov (aka Our Halcyon Past) is so decent that it requires over 400 pages to tear down his last illusions. "The Education of Seymour Levov." But his agony is meaningfully rendered. A parent's agony. Saves the book from grim didacticism.

Roth has his programme, and he hammers away at it relentlessly. Decline and Fall of the American Footballer, with the Weathermen as the Vandals and the Black Panthers as the Goths. High school seniors could locate his thesis with ease, since it recurs, again and again, ad nauseam, either concise or rambling, blah tortuous tedium. Here it is, on page 418, amidst an ending that finally manages to become wearisome because it's more or less exactly what you envisioned 200 pages ago: "The daughter had made her father see. And perhaps this was all she had ever wanted to do. She had given him sight, the sight to see clear through that that which will never be regularized, to see what you can't see and don't see and won't see until three is added to one to get four [murders]."

Quotes

"How could he have gone around dopily believing he was making her happy when there was no justification for his feelings, when they were absurd, when, year in, year out, she was seething with hatred for their house? How he had loved the providing." (193)

"You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception." (35)

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (12/08)

2008-12-29T02:57:00.005-05:00

From a class paper:

'With Kinbote’s supposed insanity such a poor and unconvincing thing, Nabokov seems to invite deeper, less obvious interpretations of Pale Fire. Some critics have argued that Kinbote and his commentary are a creation of John Shade, who has annotated his own poem either mischievously or for some artistic purpose. Inversely, some claim that Kinbote is the sole author of the work, composing the poem and inventing John Shade. Both theories have the virtue of resolving some of the novel’s trickier puzzles, such as Shade’s sole mention of “Zembla,” in line 937 of “Pale Fire.” Other clues suggest the fictive nature of Kinbote’s contribution. For example, the introduction to the book’s index, which is written from the perspective of the annotator Kinbote, refers to Gradus, Kinbote, and Shade all as “characters” in a “work” (303). This apparent admission of fictionalization would seem to point to Shade as sole composer, using his life and death as literary devices, rather than the more earnest Kinbote.

'Ultimately, however, the clues that Nabokov leaves us are sparse and inconclusive, and any interpretation of the “true” events underlying the work will be highly contestable. At least one possibility that should be considered is that Nabokov simply failed in his portrayal of Kinbote: seeking to create an unreliable, unstable narrator who divulged the details of the plot despite himself, Nabokov went too far and created an implausibly self-aware madman, more an artificial literary device than a believable character. The result is that, as with many Nabokov novels, it is impossible to ignore the operation of Pale Fire’s conceit—the novel becomes an intricate literary bauble, reliant on a constant awareness of Nabokov’s authorship, and not a self-contained story-world into which one descends suspending disbelief. This is not to say that Pale Fire is a failed work. Rather, Pale Fire is an undeniably complex and multilayered work, and no critic should imagine that his interpretation accounts for the book’s every subtlety.'