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

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)

Don't say a word.

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (10/10)

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)

Underworld by Don DeLillo (08/10)

DeLillo is a cold writer.

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

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

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)

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)

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)

"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)

"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)

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)

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)

"Bango!" he wrote.

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

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)

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)

Look, I've joined the culture.

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)