Speaking of speaking

Callie's set to speak (sans hype) about Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics (now out in paperback); meanwhile, Ed doesn't speak so well when face-to-face with a pretty girl. Some friends of mine, I think, last I heard, were kicking off a weekly ("weekly" being synonymous here with "hardcore") book club with Special Topics. I've spoken about the book once or twice before, and despite the odd plummeting of my opinion since I read the book (see also my comment to Callie's post), I've remained oddly intrigued by the ongoing (re-)evaluation of the book.

I do admit I think it's funny that discussions about the book have to be explicitly not about the conversation about the book's hot author's great hair. For what it's worth, if I ever get a book of my own published? You people can talk about my great hair all you want. I'm okay with that.

The devilish revenge of Summer of Dostoevsky Aught-Oh-Six

So I'm reading Demons (a.k.a. The Possessed) by your favorite dead Russian and mine, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and I realized two things as I read the opening chapters:

1. Really funny stuff happens here. And not funny like "Oh ho ho I'm a stuffy English major" funny, but funny like, "Hey, Stepan? Varvara? That shit's hilarious!" funny.
   
   Like Imani's experiencing with Don Quixote (also on my TBR pile, as it's been for far too long now), I'm finding great enjoyment in finding unexpected humor in what you might call "dead lit." After all, as we all know, dead lit is serious business! So what's up with all the hilarity? I'm reminded of none other than your favorite living Brit and mine Kazuo Ishiguro, whose stodgy high school reading list Brit Lit book about a fucking butler for cripe's sake how much more dull can you get for real right was, I found when I finally read it, genuinely hysterical. (And heartbreaking, too, right.) But like, really, who would have thought, you know, with the the way we all go on like humor is some kind of basic feature you might find listed under those "Minimum System Requirements" that have no actual bearing on how your program is going to run once you load it up.
   
   Comedy! It's not just for postmodern novels anymore! (Nor is it just for lit crit types, either. That sound you hear is my standing ovation for Callie and her being "so tired of everything being so goddamned serious." Seriously.)


2. I have absolutely no idea where any of this stuff Dostoevsky is describing is going. None. Well, I know there's a murder--the back of the book suggests there will be one--but that's about it. And I realized that of the big D's big Final Five novels (Demons is so Starbuck so far) there's only two--Demons and The Adolescent--that I get to approach with this degree of freshness. I find that simultaneously exciting and saddening, and it makes me sort of want to read the book even slower than I am already. To savor the sweet directionlessness and unpredictability of it. Which is, from what I know, precisely how F.D. would have liked me to read it.
   
   Also, in case you didn't catch that, I am a huge flaming lit dork.

Yes they are. End of debate.

We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn. Burn, motherfucker. Burn:

Chicago-area high school senior Allen Lee recently wrote an essay with violent images that greatly disturbed his English teacher.

The teacher informed school administrators, who informed police, and Lee was eventually arrested for disorderly conduct.

The action has prompted a local debate about whether officials are overreacting because of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech.

(Via.)

Why I no longer read fiction

Because questions have answers now.

Well, okay, so I did watch a couple hours of TV tonight--but it wasn't my TV, so it doesn't count

"Whole problem 'th you folks's generation," Isaiah opined, "'nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it--but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars--it was way too cheap...."

- Vineland, Thomas Pynchon

And the second Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks Recursive Monkey Wrench award goes to...

...Michael Dirda, who, in trying to convince people that newspaper book reviews are worth saving, ridicules and trivializes the very people he is trying to convince:

Every blogger wants to write a book. In fact, the dirty little secret of the internet is "Littera scripta manet"--the written word survives. A book is real, whereas cyberspace is just keystrokes--quickly scribbled and quickly forgotten. ...If you were an author, would you want your book reviewed in The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books--or on a website written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biografiend?...

...Instead of trimming book coverage, the wise publisher would beef it up. After all, the people who make up the hard-core readership of newspapers are also the people who buy and care for books. A newspaper that takes away its book review section ends up alienating its most faithful--and influential-- readers.

Tooltastic! Congratulations, Mike! You hereby join Keith Gessen in being recognized for your upstanding and outstanding efforts in service of absolutely and totally failing to get it!

To (re-?)(-cursively?)quote myself:

I've said it before, and I hate that it has to be said again: if you, in the literary criticism and analysis world, make fun of people who should naturally be your primary audience (i.e., people who love literature and love talking about literature and love responding to discussions about literature and generating new discussions about literature), you are a huge recursive tool. I'm sorry, but it's true: you are a monkey wrench you have thrown into your own self.

You know what we need? We need a graphic. A badge, suitable for printing, that winners of the TDAOC Recursive Monkey Wrench award can print out, frame, and display on their desks. Any of you graphic/art/drawing people want to take the lead on this initiative? Drop me a line.

Not dead

Just, ah...napping. Much like my houseplant. And disco, pre-LCD Soundsystem.

Still reading Pynchon (though I'm almost done and while I'm not having nearly as much fun as I did with Gravity's Rainbow there's still been enough moments of jaw-drop beauty to make the rest of the pages I'm not so much into worth reading) and I'm still reading Vonnegut during my lunch break (I really like the stories in Bagombo Snuff Box a lot, they've got me thinking a lot about the notion of fashion as it relates to short stories, in so far as I wonder if stories like those in Bagombo exist in any form anywhere today) and I got my copy of The Stories of Stephen Dixon yesterday (and promptly read the first story in the book and promptly fell out of my chair because it was an awesome little story and reminded me of how much possibility there is for the short story form which gave me some strength to start hacking away at a first draft of a story of my own, which might now be the first piece of writing in months that I might manage to stick with for longer than three days without getting sick of it) and I'm still thinking of moving on to John Barth next (though maybe not because maybe that book really is long and maybe I'm not actually in that mood the way I thought I was when I picked the book up a week or so ago) and somewhere in there I picked up a copy of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (because I've been semi-randomly, semi-not-randomly itching to read some Faulkner lately but couldn't decide which novel I'd want to commit myself to for any length of time and so decided the only appropriate course of action was to commit myself to a 900 page story collection, right).

If you're looking for something that might be worth looking into, you might want to look into ways you can help save book reviews. I'm not vouching for this whole thing, as I haven't had a chance to review all the material and make anything like informed decisions about it (and as Ed Champion displays, there's complex issues at play here) (well, there might be complex issues at play here, or maybe there's just people who might be making complexity out of simplicity, like knots in shoelaces) (which is to say I really don't know what I think about any of it yet and am not nor will I hold the actions of anybody at this time against them) (as if such sanctions mattered, as you could still easily buy my respect in Canada) (no embargo, see) (ha ha) (right), but I do suspect it's a movement worth at least highlighting. Which I'm doing now, here, on my blog. So, mission accomplished.

Also in lit crit news, William H. Gass has won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. I've got his big fat novel The Tunnel over there on the TBR pile, waiting for me to push some of the other big fat novels off the top of it. I think somewhere along the line I read something out of A Temple of Texts that made me want to read the rest of it...but, for the life of me, I can't find it or remember what it was. Bummer.

Chattiness

The book about the dust bowl that I read last week was awesome. Riveting. Terrifying. I read it like it was a novel I could not put down. The book shocked me with my own ignorance of just what that term "dust bowl" really meant. I think, in my defense, in my American History class in high school, it was nothing more than a footnote to the Real Story of the Great Depression, which happened in the cities. But I can't hold myself accountable for every question I've never yet learned I should not only find answers to, but ask in the first place. I already feel guilty enough about the unanswered questions I do know exist.

Something to be said, in any case, about the fact that I went from a fictional account of watery apocalypse in The Children's Hospital to a historical account of apocalypse by earth and wind in The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. But then it seems like every book I've read this year has been speaking to other books I've read this year with a frighteningly high level of chattiness. I really ought to be keeping a chart, because it's freaked me out more than once, how eerie the connections have been.

As for lunchtime reading, I'm almost done with Sleep by Stephen Dixon. I don't love every story in that book, but when I do love a story, I love it hard, the way a man loves a woman in a bar who he's talking to for the first time in that moment she first surprises him with some unexpected bit of connectivity. As someone who has read enough of the guy's books to think I've got a pretty good sense of his "game," I have to say I've been pleased to find myself surprised on more than one occasion. Eventually I'll be closer to the book while I'm blogging, and I'll tally up a list of "new most favoritist short stories ever" from the table of contents. I think this is the most pure fun I've had reading his work since I did Interstate and Frog. As is, only two more stories out of the book to go. (I've already read the closer, "Sleep," which, yeah. Wow.) I've already got an order in for a copy of that Stories of Stephen Dixon collection that's floating around out there, which will probably queue-jump the other Dixon books I have lined up on the TBR pile.

My next lunchtime short story reading obsession is probably going to be Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box. About whose passing I still don't even know what to say. But when I say it, I hope to hell it's funny. (My god, though, am I glad I got to see him talk when I had the chance.)

Right now at night I'm reading Thomas Pynchon again. Vineland. I'm liking it. I don't know that I'll get to Mason & Dixon and Against the Day before the year's out--like I may have foolishly once planned on doing--but we'll see what happens.

Also, there seems to be a lot of John Barth chatter amongst the litblog hepcats lately? Am I wrong? I read The Floating Opera and The End of the Road earlier this year, both of which I've long been meaning to say more about. For now suffice it to say they were fine little pieces of existential fiction at a time when fine little pieces of existential fiction were perfectly fine with me. Decent chance I'm going to start tackling The Sot-Weed Factor next (which I feel that someone out there is reading right now but forgive me for not remembering who you are at the moment?). So hopefully I'll be contributing to the upswing of Barth-chattiness in due time.

Elsewhere, from the department of "things I've read that other people have now read and have talked about online in ways that are probably more cogent and coherent than anything I've strung together by this point," Matthew Tiffany liked the book The End of Mr. Y but not as much as some others of us did, Ana María Correa is already looking forward to re-reading The Exquisite (you and me both!), and Levi Asher finds your loyalty to Cormac McCarthy....displeasing.

The Muttering Retreats - Beachland Tavern - 04-13-2007 - 005

The Muttering Retreats
Originally uploaded by thegrue76.

Tim's brother was taking uber-hi-fi shots with an expensive camera and a Really Big Flash. I was taking unter-lo-fi shots with my little pocket Canon, with the flash turned off. I believe I accidentally caught the flash off the professional camera the moment I took this shot.

Hi-fi + Lo-fi = Totally rock 'n roll.

The Muttering Retreats - Beachland Tavern - 04-13-2007 - 007

The Muttering Retreats
Originally uploaded by thegrue76.

And oh yeah

...some dude named Michael Chabon is going to be here on Sunday. Really it's just a bang-up nuts week of literary superstars. I'll be there, if I can find parking.

Big huge props to Akron, by the way, for building a gorgeous library building, and having it be attached to a parking garage. No idea how that happened, but wow, awesome. I'd go there all the time if it weren't, no offense, all the way down in Akron. (Of course, one could argue you're better off trying to park in Akron to get to the downtown CPL branch, sooooo-o-o-o.)

Pimpin' ain't easy, except when you're pimping for the number one rock and roll dance party

(Only the true of heart are able to click this image.)

From the Beachland Web site:

...Joining them are Cleveland's The Muttering Retreats, featuring Cari Santilli and Tim Thornton (Agnes High Quality, Thieves Like Me) from the Collinwood Soul Group. Chris Collins completes the trio. Multi-instrumentalists all, they switch between several instruments. At this upcoming show, they'll be playing piano, bass, drums, synths, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, violin, kazoo, slide whistle, laptop and more. Even though they've only been a band since last year, their sound is fully formed and generally upbeat, but soft. The Muttering Retreats take their inspiration from Magnetic Fields, Ben Folds, Beat Happening, Belle & Sebastian, and They Might Be Giants. The band is also largely rooted in literature (the name is a line from the T.S. Eliot poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), so a lot of the lyrics are heavily influenced by 20th century literature. But they have songs about zombies, too....

Zombies! Prufrock! Kazoo! Tell me you're going to find any other place in any other town but Cleveland where you're going to get all three of those things on a Friday night! There will even be a limited edition tape (tape!) (cassette tape!) (sweet-ass retro home-brewed artifact!) for sale.

Really, I think you have no choice but to be there. If you need further convincing go to their Myspace page and listen to "Screw You and Your Beachfront Property." I mean, come on! What do you need with sand and sun and sin, anyway?

Kurt Vonnegut died today.

Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, Akron-Summit County Public Library, this Wednesday, April 11, 7 p.m.

Just a reminder about the Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng event on Wednesday. Seriously, Akron ain't getting any closer; you might want to get on the road now. Avoid the I-77 highway bandits. (They sleep during the daylight.)

Of course, I have to say I'm way tempted to skip work on Wednesday and Thursday to go attend Stephen Dixon's retirement reading down in Baltimore (scroll down)--oh, if only it was on a weekend! Curses.

Truth...?

So after spending yesterday reading Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, about whom and which--as is the perpetual case in TDAOCville--more anon, I've taken a slight detour into a mysterious genre of writing called "non-fiction." From what I gather, "non-fiction" is pretty much like fiction in every way, except that when you hand in your work, you have to provide the whole proof, not just your final theorem. Yeah, I know, I don't get it, either. Making stuff up is so much easier. Makes me nervous, anyway; non-fiction is the sort of thing smart people like John Ettore talk about. Dude might think I'm trying to start a Cleveland turf war. I'd so lose.

In any case, I'm an experimental sort of guy--why, just today, I tried going to work without stopping for coffee before getting on the highway, and hoo boy, let me tell you, experiment failed!--so (in time with the Mac's Backs Book club) I'm working through Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. It's not something I would have randomly picked up on my own--what with its terribly anti-Colbertian reliance on "facts" and "reality"--but in a freakish bout of good timing, it's working for me. I've recently stumbled (or re-stumbled) into a sort of (I guess you could say long-held, though perhaps personally under-recognized) loose interest of mine in the question of where people choose to live. Big empty concept in my head meets a book full of specific examples: somewhere right now, some business manager's synergy-leveraging sensor just went off and he or she has no idea why.

So that's fun. In May, the Mac's Backs Book Club returns to the faeries-laden lollipop-strewn here-there-be-dragons land of make-believe with The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar. I've been meaning to read her stuff for a while, so I plan on trying to make it for that. Umrigar will be joining the discussion, too, so if you come, you can ask her what it's like to lie for a living. For real!

Random links: The Borgasboard edition

...because, you're either with us or against us!

• Or so Keith "I dislike babies and puppies" Gessen would have you believe, I guess? I dunno, I haven't been following the recent litblogs vs. n+1 flamewar all that closely--who's got the time, right? You miss one blog-vs-media fight, you can always catch the next one in fifteen minutes. I hear they've got them running in loops now. From what I've gathered of the current round of huffery puffery, Scott's got it about right.
  
  I've said it before, and I hate that it has to be said again: if you, in the literary criticism and analysis world, make fun of people who should naturally be your primary audience (i.e., people who love literature and love talking about literature and love responding to discussions about literature and generating new discussions about literature), you are a huge recursive tool. I'm sorry, but it's true: you are a monkey wrench you have thrown into your own self.


• Imani is reading Half of a Yellow Sun and she can't put it down. I think she's the second or third person I've known who has said they pretty much can't part from the book in a real physical sense. (I probably would have been the same way had I not started my job when I was right in the middle of the book. I might have been too tired to hold on to the book for a while there.)


• SINCE U BEEN GOOOOO-OOOOONE!!!!!!!!!!! Ian McEwan's Saturday hasn't stopped sucking ass!


• Dan Wickett found five free minutes in his schedule and has decided to fill it with an entire month of short story action. You know, I picked up a math minor in college (while other boys were picking up hot girls, ah, but I digress), but absolutely nothing in my Fractal Geometry and Chaos Theory background can possibly be used to model Mr Wickett's activity levels. Dude's a publisher too, now, you know that? I'd salute him, if I could figure out which of the fifteen clones of himself he's got doing his work for him is the real him.


• Go check out the debut issue of Hot Metal Bridge. They've got an interview with TDAOC-fav Dan Chaon, and they've got fiction and poetry and creative non-fiction, too. And it's free! On the Internet!


• Speaking of TDAOC-favs, Slate recently re-ran a piece by Jennifer Egan on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. That piece may or may not have been instrumental in convincing me to give the book a shot (after I'd read--and hated--and hated--and hated--All the Pretty Horses).


• Plus here's an interview with AL Kennedy that I think I still need to read, myself. She's awesome.


• If I ever get rich, I'm so funding a television cooking show, hosted by Erin O'Brien. ("Get a good cold-ass Bud or Stroh's or some shit like that to drink while you're doing this shit. No goddamn candy-ass nancy beer that comes in some weird-ass big bottle with an effing cork and that you're supposed to have at some effing particular temperature or anything like that. That shit sucks.")


• And uh, yup. That's it. Nothin' left for this post.
  
  ...
  
  ...
  
  ...
  
  ...
  
  ...
  
  ...
  
  N+1? More like N minus Fun :(
  
  ...
  
  Ha ha! Couldn't resist. Oh, damn. I was doing so well...

Friday, April 13th, 9:00 PM, the Beachland Tavern: Come see the number one rock & roll dance party

(Clicky-clicky!)

This Friday, April 13, my friends Chris and Cari and Tim will be making their debut as The Muttering Retreats. They'll be opening for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone at the Beachland Tavern.

Not that I'm trying to pressure you into going out Friday night and having a really good time listening to some upbeat indie pop, eyeing up the cute hipsters, and perhaps partaking in some beverages of your choice? But I have to say, if you're not at this show? I'll probably love you less. Or maybe I'll just pretend to love you less. I'm good at playing pretend, though. I've read a lot of fiction, so I totally know how to do it. And then the only way you'll be able to get me to stop pretending that I love you less is to go see The Muttering Retreats play their second show on May 12, when they open for Daniel Johnston at the Grog Shop. Of course, because sometimes I lose track of things, you should probably simply go to both shows. That's your safest bet against a sudden painful decrease of Darby love in your life. Why take any chances?

Plus, total bonus: if you show up, I hear it's like a free pass on celebrating National Poetry Month. It's, like, in the charter. I'll dig up that clause while you go buy your ticket.

Why I sort of can't talk about The Children's Hospital (but then sort of do anyway)

I. Let's not talk about it

I would like to talk at length about The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian, but I don't think I can go into depth about the book without talking about myself and my own religious beliefs more openly than I think I'm comfortable with. Though I do know this blog draws what can be called (in a by-the-metrics manner that, if I had a marketing department, would have said department plastering this information on press releases and posters, as if it means something more than it really does) an international audience (an audience I'm really excited about having, by the way, let's be clear on this, an audience that should in no way be offended or put off by anything I say in what follows the following parenthetical) (I mean, seriously, there's like three of you in Australia I think who read this blog now and then, and I love you people for it, and should I ever take a little road trip down your way, I'm so hoping I can count on your couches as being places I can spend serious passed-out-drunk time on), I do tend on this blog to speak something like American in 2007 America, and despite a little bit of recent Congressional nameplate shuffling, I still don't get the vibe that honesty and truth and compassion and openness is something most of us are looking for from others when it comes to discussions of faith and belief. Certainly is likely I've been reminded of this each time I've been wished a happy Easter the last couple days by people who have no reason to think they know a thing about my thoughts about what, if anything, comes after death. (Of course, my brain's been working on overdrive in the seeking-out-the-personal-significance-in-everything department the last week, anyway, so maybe the pump was already primed for me to find water in the well. Maybe there was a girl involved. Maybe it's been an emotionally complex week. Maybe.)

Point is, The Children's Hospital is a book concerned with intense theological and philosophical matters, and if you're willing to let the book in, it can muck up your mental machinery. It did so for me, and now here I am, talking about how I can't talk about it, because I simply don't know you well enough yet. I mean, really--first you buy the boy dinner, and then you ask him to put out, am I right?

It's a neat summary of my feelings about the book that by the time I finished it, for as much as I'd enjoyed the book (and yes, my definition of "enjoyment" is fairly flexible and complicated), I was still glad I'd taken this one out of the library, just because I knew that meant I could get it the fuck out of my face and back to some place where I wouldn't have to look at it anymore. That it's still sitting on my read-in-2007 pile speaks to the fact that I don't even want to touch it long enough to take it back to the library because, fuck. I can't deal with it. It is a raw, weeping wound, one I thought had stopped bleeding a long time ago. I suppose, to use a less gristly simile, it's like getting dumped: sure, you know the experience leading up to that point was awesome and beautiful and life-affirming and was worth all the sadness and all the rage, but in the end you still hurt; you still wish everything would stop reminding you of it.

Plus it's April 7 and it's been snowing all day and the roads around town are nothing but icy death. I've had enough apocalyptic craziness for one month. I feel no need to willingly take active part in more of it. Let me instead freeze while I sleep with everybody else who never knew what hit them.


II. Things said between the moment the glass was thrown at the wall and the moment the last of the Kleenex went the way of the oceans

Yes, you should read the book.

I mean, if you've come here looking for a simple recommendation, something more basic than melodramatic pronouncements against the state of States and vague hints about the potential existence of a complex mental life of a so-called blogger, you've got one. If you think you should read it, if you've somewhere along the line become interested in this book, then you should read it. I assert that it is an excellent novel.

There's all sorts of bottom-line fascinating literary stuff going on in there, stuff you can enjoy purely for the sake of art doing its arting thing. The narrator and the narrative frame of the book are ingenious, I believe, and are employed to rather excellent effect, and probably would warrant some good long wine-soaked conversation. (Definitely, if you're buying.) There's also that inherent tension, in my mind, between this book's McSweeney's-esque clever yet clean-voiced prose and the inescapable concern with seriously deep shit that has this book placing itself well in the McS's catalog while also drawing itself toward something beyond; call it engagement with a certain small-scale literary tradition combined with a gigantic leap in a tradition-surpassing direction. It's an insular story with anti-insular intent and effect, is what I think I want to say. (None of which, I should clarify, is at all meant as a knock against other McS's books--they've had the good sense to publish Stephen Dixon, and I've liked most of what else I've read that they've put out, and I certainly didn't put Paul La Farge on the 2006 Underrated Writers list because I didn't find The Facts of Winter amazing.)

I found the story itself engrossing and captivating. More so than I'd honestly expected. Truth is going into this book I did not want to go into it. I really wanted to resist it. I simply did not want to deal with a 600 page hipster doorstop, but then it turned out I didn't know what the hell else I really wanted to deal with, and so I picked it up and started reading it and, well, nothing else seemed worth putting this one down for. I read it in fits and starts, short chunks and quick gasps broken up across nearly three weeks. And yet I was hooked. The book pulled me forward and through some unmarked point of no return, some point when I knew I had to finish it, however long it was going to take. This is good storytelling, plain and simple.

But then, had that point of no return happened far later in the book, things might be different. Thing is there was a point--I'll say it was around two-thirds of the way through the book--when I got the very clear and sudden sense that, by the time I reached the end, the book was going to break my heart. I knew that in a physical sense I did have a choice; I could have put the book down, I could have walked away from it, and all this crazy emo stuff I'm spilling out onto the Internet would not have been necessary. But no; in a mental sense, I had to see what lay around the bend.

The results, as you may have guessed, were potent.

The Children's Hospital

Ow.

I really am giving up reading, now. Or, at least, I'm not reading anything else this year that at all contains emotionally disturbing content.

I mean...gee. Gods. Ow.

Not that you'll notice any perceptible change in the quality of my reviews

I've decided to give up reading.

I had this sort of revelation today, see. I realized that so much of what I'm looking for from literature is about getting at both sides of the story, whatever the story is. Like, for example: in terms of the gender war, I try to read as many books authored by women as by men. To better respond to the question of quality, I look at the work of a spectrum-spanning assortment of writers--from the mightiest of the mighty Dostoevskys and Pynchons to the lowliest of the low Dan Browns and Don Delillos. I read non-fiction to learn how the world really is, and fiction to learn how the world could be. Short stories let me perceive things impossibly small, while novels let me subsume into myself the infinite and the ungraspable.

But some deeper primal knowledge has eluded my grasp for about 27 years. Not even my forays into the Derridadian meta-divide between literature and literary criticism could allow me access to an elevated understanding of the one fundamental, ultimate, and true binary pairing through which lens we all come to know works of literary value.

That's the division between the literate and the illiterate. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, as of September 2006, there are 780,923,753 illiterate adults worldwide. That's approximately 17.8 percent of the world's population that has a completely different view of literature than you or I do.

Well, than I currently do, I should say. While I have been assured that the lobotomy procedure should be painless (in fact, once complete, I shan't remember a moment of it), I'll admit I'm uneasy about taking such a drastic step. But I'm confident in my decision, knowing that once I'm back on my feet, my carers leading me by the hand through the most seemingly common of daily tasks, I shall be able to report for duty as the first totally illiterate blogger in the entire litblogosphere. By combining new podcasting technology with an innovative new round-the-clock recording set-up, I shall be able to communicate, via sub-literate and unintelligible grunts and moans, my feelings, thoughts, critiques, and criticisms of the literary landscape from the perspective of one who is wholly unable to engage with literature in any way, shape, or form.

Oh, sure, I'll paw at the pages of books placed before me while gutturally shrieking my discontent with the unconscious knowledge that something once familiar has forevermore been stripped from my being, and I'll also likely also crash my car into bookstores, which I imagine will doubtlessly happen, what with my being unable to follow the directions posted on street signs. Perhaps I'll even burn my entire book collection, the inescapable result of my inability to read the warnings printed on bottles of lighter fluid. But as for the deeper communion with printed text that I have spent so much of my life enraptured with--well, my post-operative barks, yelps, and squawks will be far more indicative of my new found state of mind than anything I could think to type up here, from my comfy seat in the ivory tower of literate privilege.

Current music: Amiina, Kurr; Current mood: intricate and intimate and charming and delicate

[ Editor's note: an early draft of this post may have leaked to the net prematurely. Someone, somewhere, is going to be fired over this. ]

Jim asked me what music I'm digging right now. That's one of those questions I'm likely to change my answer to not just from week to week but day to day. Hour to hour, some of those days. It's true, as I think I've mentioned in passing this week, that I'm sort of zany for the new Modest Mouse disc, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, which I think ranks up there with the most exciting rock records released this decade. Putting "Dashboard" and "Parting of the Sensory" and "Spitting Venom" all on one disc is the curve-breaking move that pisses off the other kids in class. And if you'd told me a couple weeks ago I'd soon fall for a Modest Mouse ballad, I'd have ordered you off my land. But then I heard "Little Motel" and well there you go, a Modest Mouse ballad, and I've fallen for it.

But enough of this malarkey: let's talk about Amiina.

They're an Icelandic four piece who are somehow so underground they don't yet rank a description on All Music. At heart, they're a string quartet; they've done back-up duty for Sigur Ros (whose album Takk I think is about the best thing Sigur Ros has ever done). On their own, Amiina play all other sorts of noise-makers, laptops and bells and harps and musical saws and that wineglass-rim trick (which they use to great effect) and things I can't identify but which look totally sweet when played live. The compositions they build up from these elements are intricate and intimate and charming and delicate. Pretty, if you don't let pretty connote dull.

I saw them open for Sigur Ros when the Hopelandic boys came through town, and it was obvious they had game, but just how much game I didn't recognize until I caught them headlining their own show last Sunday. They made so much more sense in an intimate small-club environment. I'll go so far as to call it one of my favorite concerts in recent memory--which is saying something, since I drove to DC to see Explosions in the Sky a couple weeks ago, who now own two of the four best concerts I've ever seen (Sleater-Kinney having walked off into the sunset with the other two).

I picked up a copy of Kurr, their debut album, after the show, and I'm pleased to say that while it can't match the strange intensity of their live performance, it does make for excellent home listening. Listening to it makes life feel nicer. Downright blissful, at moments. A mighty purchase, yes.

And, well, I mean, let's be honest here: they're Icelandic girls. Which, I don't know which ways your tastes run, but I for one am into that sort of thing.

As it is, I'm considering driving down to Cincinnati after work on Friday to hear them play again at the MusicNow festival. On the one hand, three and a half hours is a long time to drive to see girls who I have no hope of dating. On the other hand, looks like they're going to open for--and, I believe, play as the backup band for?--My Brightest Diamond. Shara Worden is one of my newest favorite singers, like, ever; check out Bring Me The Workhorse if you haven't yet; your reaction to the opening track, "Something of an End," will be used as a litmus test to determine whether you stay on my holiday card list. Really, there's some serious equation-balance-tipping action going on there, combining these two acts into one show. My car is begging me not to make that drive, but I think my brain is going to win that debate. Stupid brain. Stupid, awesome brain.

The cold

The universe has seen it fit to reward my Angry Week with a not particularly evil but still just nasty enough head cold. Achy, sleepy, sniffly, all that jazz. This is sad to me because it comes at the tail end of what was my Healthiest Winter. Unemployment, and the ensuing sleep-filled nights and relative lack of daytime contact with The Outside World, was totally awesome for keeping me in the clear. Yeah, unemployment was awesome.

Meanwhile: I totally dropped the ball (ha ha) this month on plugging The Morning News Tournament of Books. The final match was just called in favor of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. So if you're wondering if you want to get involved in all this Oprah business, and you're looking for lots of small little commentaries about the book, head that way. I'll excerpt my favorite Judge's Decision here, which is, yes, hilarious and awesome:

DAN CHAON: I’ll go for The Road, at least in part because it includes some excellent recipes.

There's plenty of other Antics over there, for the diligent link-diver. Me, I'm still bitter about last year's elimination of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which probably partially explains why I paid so little attention this year. Grudge much? Yes: much.

Three ways to quickly rid oneself of bad mojo

Because I've been all wugga wugagaga GRR! this week, I feel it is only just and right to offer up three heart-zapper-paddle fast ways to cheer up:

1. Watch the video for Sleater-Kinney's "You're No Rock 'n Roll Fun." Seriously, Corin's eye moves? Quickest imaginable way to sooth the angry indie boy's jaded heart. I melt a little bit each time I catch one. (Blogflexive hat-tip to Carolyn for digging that up out of You-Tube.)


2. Look at James Murphy's goofy mug. Seriously, dude's goofy looking. In a sort of indie-rocker David Lynch way.


3. Scroll down on the James Murphy guest list page linked above, and read his thoughts on Pynchon. Pynchon! I suppose it would not hurt things much if you read that while listening to the new LCD Soundsystem album, which is sort of an ultra-insta-party disc.

Back to less angsty bookish shenanigans in due time.

...and so long as I'm doing the bitter and angry thing this week I might as well go ahead and politely ask you to...

...shut the fuck up about Jonathan Franzen, already, because you know what, it's not about Jonathan Franzen, it's about Cormac McCarthy, and it's about his fine novel The Road, and it's about a lot of people reading it now who might not have otherwise read it ever in a million years, and it's about some of those heads getting fucked in the process, and it's about how we're going to get to see Cormac McCarthy be interviewed on television and that's going to be pretty cool because you don't see that every day, and it's about all of that being totally awesome in real throw-the-horns and bang-your-head sorts of ways, absolutely none of which preceding material has anything to do with the fact that once upon a time years ago Jonathan Franzen handled a situation more poorly than maybe he would have liked, especially if he had had the opportunity to look into the future and see how you people can't let it the fuck go already.

End of story. Done. Move on. Go read The Road. It's a really great book. Go read The Corrections. It's a really great book. I loved them both, for different reasons. Me? I'm going to step away from the Internet before I start adding links to this post. It would take all night, and I've got a concert to go catch.

I'm going to go practice my karate kicks and windmill powerchord attacks; but first, a question

Am I the only person who blogs in order to attract mates?

I mean, I thought we all came here to get laid, right? Getting laid is good. Some might even call it hot. But lately it feels like every time I look at the lit-blog-o-sphere somebody is going on and on and on and on and on about how we're all here to be self-important elements in the continuing discourse of the critical culture who people better pay attention to because we're the irreversible new media vanguards of incorruptible content and blah...blah...yawn-blah. Never mind the fact that when I signed my name on that lit-blogger-for-life contract I was doing it specifically to get corrupted, if you know what I mean. Did I miss a memo? Damn, why am I always missing the memo?

But oh well, whatever. People will do what people will do, right? Some people are going to blog because it's serious business. I'll keep blogging because it's rock 'n roll fun. I hope I won't be alone.

If you know what I mean.

The funny thing about frantic cred-grabbing is that sometimes it works. You go, O

Oprah's Book Club is reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. That is...awesome, and hilarious, and awesome. And well yeah, sort of hilarious. But, yet? Awesome.

No, I mean, I really, really like that album, a lot

So I unleash a little music-snob blog bile and then I get paid an incredibly kind (via round-about ensued hilarity) compliment and then I feel all sorts of guilty for being bilious and blog-lazy. For my laziness, I apologize, a heartfelt plea for mercy hanging ready on my fatigued lips; for my music-snob smarm, I can only note that in war, there are victims, and if the only murdered prisoner in this case is my usual sense of restraint, then I think the world remains an overall worth-it sort of place.

Books! Ah, books. I'm still reading them, though slowly, and in fits and starts. I polished off the debut issue of Avery last night. I read almost every word in there. Naturally, not all of the words I read were of equal value. Which is only to be expected. There were some stories I'd like to mention as being ones I particularly enjoyed; I'll do that sometime when my copy of the book is less over there, and more over here, near where you are, you sweet, sweet Internet people, you. As for the words I did not read--they were simply too much, too elusive, too allusive, too recursive, too asterisk-sive for me to handle the moment I came to them. The astute Avery reader will, I suspect, know of whose story I speak, and shall admonish me for my ineptitude. But there's only so much coffee a man can justify in the pursuit of artistic revelation, you know? I mean no snoot in this; I only speak of where I am, right now.

I've decided to devote my lunch hours to short stories. Today I resumed reading selections from Stephen Dixon's collection Sleep, which I've picked up now and then over the last few months. There's great stories in there. The book as a whole has confirmed my suspicion that there are gems to be found in the stupendous number of Dixon's short stories. There's an story early in the book (which, again, the title is in the book which is way over there, out of my arm's immediate reach) that I'll dare to suggest might be one of my favorite short stories ever. I'll get back to that. Eventually. Some day. Oh, Time, oh, Sleep; you fickle, fleeting mistresses.

At night I'm still trekking through The Children's Hospital. I think when I last left it, some crazy shit had just happened. So I'm looking forward to getting back to it, about five to ten minutes from right now. Of course, I'm also looking forward to setting it down a few hours later, my eyes heavy and my body weary, only for my best laid plans to lay for the best night's sleep ever soon to be shattered by irrelevant wakefulness. This does, you are right, define good times.

Not that I sort of like the album maybe a tiny bit or anything

After reading this review of the new Modest Mouse record, I'm forced to conclude that Peter Hepburn has no soul. If you opened up the guy's chest, you would find a gaping sphincter where most people store their immortal ethereal beings. I think that might explain how he could write such a horribly gray, soggy, boring, prideless, safe, stable, stale, rote, terrible, nebulous, over-long, formless, repetitive, pointless, annoying, poorly written, overproduced, smelly music review.

To quote Dom Sinacola (whose idea of a good time, after reading his track review of "Parting of the Sensory," I suspect must involve sitting at home having absolutely no fun at all, ever): "I seem angry. I am angry, and I get cheap when I'm mad." Well, yeah, you boys went cheap; consider this your change: hang it up and call it quits while you can still remember the memory of a time you could consider now and then cracking your critical faces with smiles.

Five alternate titles for Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9

1. Moby Dick II: reAhab


2. Flubber!: The Musical!


3. In Lieu of Meaning, Check Out My Girlfriend's Ass


4. In the Ocean, the Mighty Ocean, the Audience Sleeps During the Tea Ceremony (A-weem-o-whale, A-weem-o-whale)


5. Matthew Barney's Delicate Purple Dinosaur

Cory Doctorow makes for cheap, easy, but awesome laughter around these parts

Awesome.

And yes, I'll be blogging in a cape from now on. An evil, copyrighted cape! Muaha!

Also

Also: No, Dickens did not last. Yeah, I know. I'm such a spaz. Instead I'm now making a valiant pass at The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian, which is good and all, but not as good as fourteen uninterrupted hours of sleep would be. Like on the one hand it's got that cool apocalypse and angels thing going on, and that's cool. But on the other hand it's got that McSweeney's McSweeney'sishness thing going on. And I like the McSweeney's vibe and all, I'm cool with it. But it's sort of weird in this case. Sort of.

Also I am reading stories from the debut issue of Avery. I really like some of the stories. And the ones I haven't liked as much have not morally or aesthetically offended me. So I'd call that a pretty healthy start for the upstart literary anthologists over there at Avery HQ. But why take my word for it when you can get all the words in the book for your own self?

Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, Akron-Summit County Public Library, Wednesday, April 11, 7 p.m.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, "Akron?" Ah, but don't be fooled, it's not that far away. Well, it's not that far away from my new employer's office building, at least. The one I drive like forty minutes to get to every morning. Which takes me about halfway to Akron.

Okay, so, yeah: Akron. Yeah.

From the library's Web site:

Dave Eggers, one of the most engaging and acclaimed authors of this generation will speak the Auditorium of the Akron-Summit County Public Library on Wednesday April 11, at 7pm. Dave Eggers won critical acclaim in 2000 for his memories: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His most recent book What Is the What, follows Valentino Achak, Deng one of the lost boys during the Sudanese civil war. Not only will Dave Eggers discuss his latest book, but the subject of his latest book will be his special guest. Do not miss this unforgettable evening. The event is free and open to the public, with question and answer period and book signing following the event.

Also following the event? Me standing in the parking lot, looking around with my hands thrust into my pockets and a look of disdain and despair smeared across my face, and my speech, just before I traipse off to my car to begin the long journey north, being all like, "Akron? ...Akron?"

(Thanks to Amy for the tip.)

In which your narrator has nothing nice to say

Five synonyms for "good times"

Things, randomly:

• Blackout: Last week, inspired by the efforts of Austin Kleon, I did my first Newspaper Blackout Poem. This week, you can see it on the Internet! Oh, Internet! And seriously, it was fun to do, and I intend to keep doing them. Here's the current challenge.
  
  
• Thinking: Thanks, Imani! I'm quite flattered. (Especially what with being listed right under The Reading Experience which, were I to put together a list of five of my own, would most likely be included. I mean, damn, Dan Green smarts.)
  
  
• Ishiguro: The two comments added to my last post on Kazuo Ishiguro are very fine comments, and are worth going back to read, if you are digging the recent Ishiguro-ness of this blog. I swear I will respond in kind, and shall continue that post's topics, once I manage to land a full night's sleep right before a day in which I have some time to put some thoughts into not-so-crappy words.
  
  
• Contact: I've abandoned my gmail spam folder. It's closing in on a thousand messages. I'm unwilling to sort through that, and I'm also unwilling to check it on a regular basis. Life is too short. So if you send me e-mail and I do not reply within a week or so (I am so terrible at replying to e-mail) and a response was required or generally expected, feel free to nudge me. Maybe you got spam-foldered, or maybe I'm just being a huge e-mail flake. Likely the latter, of course.
  
  
• Reading: I'm about to start reading some Dickens. Why? Why, when I said I wanted to spend this year reading short books, would I start reading Dickens? It's because I'm in that super-fussy/ultra-futzy mood when nothing on my bookshelf is right and I just finished the book I was reading (The Diviners by Rick Moody which, jeez, that wasn't so bad, the way I think people wanted to make it out to be; it wasn't particularly great, either, I mean, I think I liked Purple America more, but it was still generally fun to read, until maybe the last chunk, when I sort of just wanted to move on) and now I don't know what to read next and and and and and my brain is a spaz. So I'm going to read some Dickens because if you're going to default, you can default to far worse authors than Dickens. (I mean, I almost decided to go with Delillo? Which would have just been a huge mental brainwreck. If you know what I mean, then oh boy, do you know what I mean. Maybe.)

Kazuo Ishiguro and knowledge

Scott Esposito's latest Friday Column at Conversational Reading addresses a subject that you might guess I might find slightly interesting: Kazuo Ishiguro. Well played, sir!

Scott makes some good points about Ishiguro's writing, and provides a good introduction to what makes Ishiguro Ishiguro. Worth clicking over to read. General spoiler warning in effect, both for Scott's post, and then, when you come back, for my own, if you're into knowing about that sort of thing.

Back? Good. There's a few points from Scott's post I'd like to respectfully disagree with. Here's the first point. (I'm saving additional discussion for additional posts.) This one's on the nature of missing information (the fact that we tend to know things that Ishiguro's narrators do not, which Scott rightly points out is a technique Ishiguro has sort of mastered):

Ishiguro's narrators tend to be ignorant of certain, fundamental facts about themselves: For instance, in Never Let Me Go the narrator is missing out on the fact that she's a clone, and then later on the role in society that she is destined to play.

Maybe I'm being picky, but I don't think this accurately represents the novel. It's my understanding that the narrator understands quite well who she is and what she's been put there to do. It's true that she does not know this as a young child, at the beginning of the actual story, that this information is attained by her during her time at the English boarding school Halisham. But as the novel is plotted, the present-tense narrator, the one who is telling the story, looking back at and recounting the events of her life, she knows the facts. She has long since learned what we learn gradually as we read her story.

Which I think is important because it's in there, that realm of knowledge, where I believe the story's pathos lies. I think the tension between what the reader knows and what the character knows is of a far more emotional than factual nature than compared with the other Ishiguro novels that I have read. (This is where I'll step back and note that I'm still trying to place The Unconsoled in terms of this dynamic--I mean, damn, does anybody in that book know anything at all?--and my memories of When We Were Orphans are a bit rough and will bear serious revision after having read The Unconsoled again after so long. Not that I've plans to re-read this novel any time soon, or to pretty much re-read Ishiguro's work repeatedly over the course of my natural life, oh no. Maybe he's a writer I'm sort of completely retarded for. Maybe just a little bit. Maybe. Anyway, point is I don't want to seem as if I'm trying to pass myself off as some all-knowing expert. Yet. Give me another couple re-reads.)

What I'm trying to point at here is the fact that if you compare Never Let Me Go with The Remains of the Day (for the most obvious and, to me, right now, in a coffee shop, away from my books, easiest example), that tension in the latter book arises from the fact that we possess factual information that the narrator does not (or refuses to) have (the chick wants him and his boss is a Nazi), whereas in the former book, we the readers know exactly what the narrator knows (that she is a clone, destined to die). The tragic response of the latter novel is in how we react to that information in a vastly different way than the narrator does. Kathy H. is pretty much okay with things, while we're stuck wanting nothing more than to scream at her that she doesn't have to think that way.

It's like--if you don't mind getting deconstructive with me; don't worry, you'll only feel a bit of a pinch here--if you look at the first verbs of the opening sentences of these two books, you've got a mile-high view of the difference between the two narrators. Take Remains of the Day's "Tonight, I find myself here in a guest house in the city of Salisbury." Then look at Never Let Me Go's "My name is Kathy H." Find versus is. Discovery versus assertion. Surprise versus understanding. Transition versus knowledge. Journey (if you will), versus (if you don't mind) arrival.

Yes, that previous paragraph? Hot-ass decon lit-crit sexy. It's okay if you have to pause here, perhaps to fan a quick breeze over your flushed face, before reading on.

Back to the point: It doesn't have to be that way, that way it is, is what we conclude, when we read the novel. But it does, it is this way, is what Kathy H. concludes, is what she knows. We are reacting to the same information in different ways, and I think one real challenge of this novel is that we need to set aside what we know (or think, or believe) and see things the way the narrator does. It's at that point that the nature of our response is challenged, our assumptions (if you post-modernly will) questioned, and it's then that we might find that it is not Kathy H. who comes up psychologically lacking, but us, stuck here in our lives of quiet desperation, going to jobs and looking out at a cultural landscape riddled with meaninglessness and pointlessness. For it is Kathy H., not us, who knows exactly what she is there to do. She knows her purpose in a literal way we never can, or can only hope to construct for ourselves in the way we lead our lives, the people we surround ourselves with, the things we choose to do or believe in, the families we (are allowed to) create, the knowledge never far from out conscious minds that it's all so much construction that can be blown apart at any time. That what we are is in no way how it must be.

For me, though the novel is tragic in that I want Kathy H. to come to a moment of realization, to see that things can be different for her, that she could escape her fate, I am also alternately drawn into her story and the comfort she has in knowing what she does and why she does it. This fantasy of Ishiguro's, it is, I believe, simultaneously pleasing and depressing. That he evokes this reader's envy of a tragic character may be one of his greatest writerly masterstrokes.

(Next up, sometime soonish: on Ishiguro's being "fully formed" as a novelist.)

Usually blacking out and winding up famous in a foreign land involves a lot more heavy, heavy drinking

Austin Kleon is famous in Canada. (It's the analogue version of being famous on the Internet!)

But seriously, do check out the first round of Blackout Poetry winners. Then do your own poem for this week's challenge. Time to break out my Sharpie. And something to clean my monitor screen with.

Are you...accessible?

Maureen McHugh has a great pair of posts (one and two) about accessibility and writing (and all sorts of other related fun stuff, much of which spills over into the comments) over at group blog Eat Our Brains.

Not that these posts are well-timed to any coincidental recent interest in artistic accessibility of my own, what with my reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and my seeing David Lynch's Inland Empire twice in the last week. I mean, not at all, really, no connection in the slightest. It's certainly not like either of these works raise any interesting questions about artistic intent, or about how works of art can use of familiar language or imagery and through (seemingly?) careful assembly generate hugely disorienting effects. Pft. Pshaw. Next in line, please!

Well, okay, maybe there are one or two small questions you might consider asking, something to get you going down that train of thought. Maybe if you were maybe really bored, or on a desert island, or, you know. If you were me. Or whatever. (If only I was unemployed again and had gobs and gobs of time to write intense, astute pieces of criticism for this blog all the time, I might actually get some of these thoughts up here into something like a readable format. Because I did that so often and so well when I was unemployed. Really! The posts are there. In the archives. Of my secret imaginary blog.)

The unconwhat?

You know what I really don't get about The Unconsoled? The title. I didn't get it the first time I read it and I didn't get it this time I read it. Though I definitely liked the book about a thousand times more than I did this time through than I did the first time I read it. So maybe if I read it again in another 15 years I'll understand a thousand times more things than I did this time through, and maybe I'll get the title, that time? Maybe? Or not.

Which is all my way of saying I want to say more but I'm still not sure what to say. I'm pondering the mental illness theory, mentioned in a comment here, a theory which I think has something going for it, but which doesn't quite click for me. Or at least not in a reductive "Oh that makes everything make sense" way, which, well, I think I want very much not to find that kind of theory to explain the book. I think the book actively wants to tease the reader with the potential existence of such a theory, a theory that doesn't actually after all exist. I suspect it's sort of more fun that way. Lynchian, but not. (Did I mention I liked Inland Empire? Did I mention that dreamlike reality is pretty much the only way I'm seeing things this week? Right? Okay.)

But anyway, the mentally ill thing, I think...I think if the narrator is mentally ill, or suffers a mental illness, then it's sort of like Ishiguro is trying to write an Everyman sort of story. Like, if Mr Ryder is mentally ill, then so are we all. This is a very unbaked thought of mine. I think my thoughts are swimming somewhere in the realm of the idea that the line between external psychology and external reality is not just non-existent but actually, like...take that line and turn it into a pipe, between those two realms. One in which the two are forced to flow into and out of each other. Or...

Or...

I'm going to go think some more. Also I'm going to read some more of The Diviners by Rick Moody which I just started last night because you know, sometimes, you just need some Rick Moody, right? It's like, PBR, or something. Sometimes you just need to get down and dirty with the heightened significance of signifiers. Oh and I mean dirty.

Inland Empire

Oh holy hell. (I do so so so look forward to seeing it again sometime this week.)

Let your inner Yossarian out to play

Newspaper Blackout Poems. Brought to you by Austin Kleon...and you!

In which your narrator leaves for an hour and finds himself right where he was without realizing it

I.

Did I mention I started a new job last week? I started a new job last week. The long unemployment run finally came to an end when I decided that my desire to be a free-wheeling artistic town vagabond couldn't stand up against my desire to, well, eat. I like eating. I like eating a lot, actually. Dieting half of last year? That was stupid. See, I find that I'm a far happier starving artist when I've got a belly full of expensive food in me. No no, good sir! I shall not be ordering from the $0.99 Value Menu today, oh no! Give me nothing but your finest chicken nuggets! The ones that come plated in solid gold!

So combine my sudden re-emergence into the daylight with a general ennui toward all things Internet (wake me up when "bloggers" can be called "people" again, you know, like they used to be called before 2002 rolled around) and then toss in my fervent desire to immediately convince myself that having a day job will make writing daily a far more maintainable routine than it was when I had all the time in the world to fart around all day staring out the window while wondering how I'd dress up my evening's ramen ("...things that offer the most instant rewards when I do them every day, but which I have the hardest time actually being consistent about..."? Oh, gods yes, Gwenda, do I know what you mean), and what you wind up with is a sharp, but hardly permanent, decrease in the general sex appeal of the staff here at TDAOC HQ. (Hey! Nike! Coke! Microsoft! Bitches, sponsor me, already! I will make you famous. Famous.)


II.

I'll pause here, in the "dinner after writing and before reading" portion of the evening, to let you know where I landed since I finished Half of a Yellow Sun: I'm now halfway through The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. I'm not sure why it made sense to pick that book up at this particular time, but I can tell you why reading the book makes sense to me now, a sense I doubt it ever could have made to me back when I read it in high school (and hated it--I'm sure I've mentioned that about 500 times in this blog's archives): this book is often hysterical. I haven't read enough reviews of his stuff to know for sure what the critical consensus is about his work (I mean, other than that everybody agrees with me that Kazuo Ishiguro is fucking awesome), but I think he might be sort of under-recognized as one of the greatest deadpan comic geniuses ever. Maybe--I don't know. I'm just some guy, you know? But damn, this book is just hilarious sometimes.

Still, I don't get it. I don't really know what the hell he's trying to do with this book. I mean, I get a lot more than I did when I read it when I was 15 or 16 or whatever. I get that there's humor here and I get that there's also this incredibly curious sense of dread that seethes beneath the surface of the story, this profound sense of dislocation, a very real feeling of having left some important task undone but without realizing that the task has been left undone. (Remains of the Day, anybody?) But I'm often just so bloody mystified by the thing I wonder if I'm not completely underthinking (or overthinking) everything I think about it. Maybe. Really, I don't know.

What I do know is I like it a lot more this time through. It feels very fitting right now, refreshing in its own way. Ishiguro's prose, serving any end, I'm convinced, is some of the finest prose out there. It's like, I don't know, super tasty, perfectly chilled water. Or something.


III.

Roman numeral'ed sections in blog posts are like caps lock on Instant Messenger: cruise control for awesome.

Upcoming events

This Thursday, March 1, Cleveland-area musician/singer/songwriter/generally nice guy Chris Collins (aka (to regular TDAOC readers) Friend Chris) will be performing at Deweys Coffee Cafe from 7 pm to 9 pm. I think it's safe to call his solo stuff piano pop (though I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong about any of these details). He does a good blend of upbeat and downbeat stuff. (And don't forget to check out The Muttering Retreats at the Beachland Tavern on April 13. Don't worry, I'll remind you again at least thirty-seven times before then.)

Also, David Lynch's Inland Empire will be at the Cleveland Cinematheque for one week starting this Friday, March 2. I'll be there Friday night (dancing backmasked midgets willing) so say hi if you're there that night. I'll be the guy completely freaking out with joy right after the show, so I ought to be easy to find.

Drained

I spent yesterday afternoon reading the last couple hundred pages of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Uhm, yeah. Excellent book. Rather, ah, emotionally draining, though, you might say. I spent much of last night looking at the TBR pile thinking that none of these books are really going to work for me right now. I mean, how do you follow that up?

The last three books I've read have been a real trip, on the whole. There was The End of Mr. Y which was fantastic and then there was The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson which, on the one hand I was slightly underwhelmed by for fairly lame reasons (generally speaking, most things classified as "horror" leave me feeling underwhelmed--even House of Leaves I was sort of "Eh" about the first time I read it), but then on the other hand the book had so much good stuff going on in it that the first hand complaint rings sort of false to my own ears, and then I followed that up with Half of a Yellow Sun and, well.

Well. It's times like this I wish I had some real underhand softballs on the TBR pile. A couple books I could just read without having to worry about whether the books might accidentally make me think or feel anything. Like as I was starting Sun I was thinking maybe I'd follow it up with some Orhan Pamuk or maybe I'd revive my Summer of Dostoevsky project next and now I'm thinking, yeah, worst idea ever, right now. No, what I really want is something comfortable and mindless, some good honest dumb pleasure. Books that won't care about my performance during my time with them. Or maybe something French. Because, well, with Camus and the gang, the lit might be challenging, but at least there's that existential cloud of non-existence hovering over everything. Eh! Bon soir! Have some wine, monsieur! The plague does not exist, but neither do you!

We'll see where I land.

War and Peace Beta v0.72.1

Huh. So, great: not only do I get to not read staggering literary classics, I get to not read them multiple times, simultaneously. Swell.

...

Yeah, that's all I got on that one. There's some changes being made in the Matrix behind TDAOC HQ, so I'm distracted. More distracted than usual. You can probably expect turbulence and non-regular posting schedules for the next couple weeks. (So, really, just what you've come to know and love from me! You winner, you!)

The end of me

I just finished The End of Mr. Y and I feel like Scarlett Thomas just beat the crap out of my mind with my own mind. Like it's as if she ripped my mind out of me and then wrapped it up in a dishtowel, using it as a sort of ad hoc mace against itself.

Which is to say: Awesome!

Onward and upward

I finished Wizard of the Crow yesterday. While I had trouble getting into it, the book did open up for me once the Ruler's illness came back into play. (It was mentioned in the opening line of the novel but not revealed and made into an integral plot point until midway through the book.) From there, I was more convinced I wanted to finish the book than I was during some of the earlier sections, when I was nearly ready to chuck it. So that's good.

But on the whole, the book just didn't entertain me the way I was hoping it would. Don't get me wrong: there's lots of interesting stuff in there. You could easily write a thesis on the role of binary opposites with regards to race, class, and gender as they pertain to the intersection of national and personal postcolonial African identity. And there are some good images and moments here and there--the Museum of Arrested Motion being an excellent example of such. But I didn't find the characters or the structure all that captivating. I take part of the blame on that. The book (I believe) makes heavy use of allegory and tosses in a healthy helping of satire, satire and allegory happening to be, to me, two of the least interesting literary techniques or styles out there. (Certainly in part because I've got next to no ear for satire. There's a story there, one I'll save for a rainy day.)

So then last night, a bit bummed out but ready to move on to something else, I started the oft-mentioned The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. And oh holy shit did I not want to put it down. And I'm only 100 pages into it. I'd started fearing, while reading Wizard, that I'd developed this immunity or allergy to blog-hyped books. End is putting those fears to rest. Hell, it's kicking those fears in the ass and stealing their wallets. Yeah, I'm right there with you people on this one. At least, I think I am. I don't remember what anybody has said about the book other than that like five (or maybe fifteen? I don't know, I wasn't keeping track) other bloggers have mentioned it recently and they all seemed to love it. And, well, unless the book craps out for the next 300 pages, I suspect you can add another member to the End fan club.

Switching and witching

The Blogger police finally broke into TDAOC HQ and held a gun to my head and ordered me to switch to the new version of Blogger. So far, so good. I apologize for the inevitable barfing up of a new RSS feed, especially to those readers coming in via the LJ feed, whose friends lists are about to get bombed back to oblivion. (Music: Darby's sweet, sweet Internet prose. Mood: Overwhelmed.)

While I sort through the latest Blogger doodads and gizmos, go check in on our old friend Orhan Pamuk, who, Nobel Prize in hand or not, can't seem to get a break. (Shown next to the article is him demonstrating his technique for blowing magic pixie dust in the faces of any attackers.)

Director's commentary

I've provided a sort of "director's commentary" to my Monday post regarding Gerald Dawe's poem "A Shower of Rain." I only point it out because I spent far more time on it than I'd meant to, and I would hate for my legions of fans to miss a single word of my uttered genius. (Even the redundant ones ought to be fed and watered thrice daily under the assumption that they shall someday blossom, producing a fabulous display of enlightenment.)

Also, it gives me a chance to point out that I'm glad that Scott responded to my response to the post's initial response, because it allows me to clarify that I have no problem with people disagreeing with me. Sad to say, but I know it might sometimes happen. I leave the comments sections open and am quite comfortable with the fact that people can use them to say "Darby, you're right" or "Darby, you are wrong." Just know that it's my nature to attempt to rise or fall to the level of the discourse aimed in my direction. So if you step onto my turf and start talking shit (figuratively or, yes, literally) I am going to offer as much respect as I'm shown.

February Quick Hits at Arriviste Press

My latest batch of Quick Hits is up at Arriviste Press. So go thataways for reviews of and free tracks from Polly Panic, The PoPo, The Memory Band, and The Silent Years.

"A Shower of Rain" by Gerald Dawe

Well, here's a poetry post, though certainly not the post I keep threatening to finish: go check out today's Poetry Daily selection (archive link), "A Shower of Rain," by Gerald Dawe. It's a truly lovely piece--compelling rhythm driving the line-by-line creation of a portrait at once private and inviting, insular yet familiar. The "steel grid" line alone makes me want to snatch up everything Dawe has ever written, on the chance I'll find more little tiny lightning bolts like that one elsewhere in his work.

I like it.

YES YES YES YES YES YEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Inland Empire, the new David Lynch movie, this little film I may have mentioned a slight interest in seeing? Looks like its coming to at least one theater somewhere in Cleveland on March 2. Lots of other non-NYC non-LA non-Chicago dates scheduled, too.

Excuse me while I completely freak out.

I am so absolutely beyond the point of glee right now. Or I will be, until I realize this means I still have three weeks to kill until I can see the movie...oops.

Well, okay, speaking of Pynchon...

...I don't know if I ever mentioned or linked to Dear Mr. Pynchon, a daily (for often irregular definitions of "daily") page-by-page response to Gravity's Rainbow. The blog was launched in January 2006, and has recently crossed the 200 "letter" mark. The entries are short, elliptical, and you might say impressionistic. There is also a remarkably consistent voice to the letters, as well as an above-Internet-average concern with style and voice. They do well to capture, if not the mood (as if one such mood can be said to exist), then certainly a mood of reading the book.

The obvious point of comparison is the Zak Smith illustration project. For my money, I have enjoyed and felt engaged with the Dear Mr. Pynchon letters more than I have Smith's illustrations. If nothing else, reading the letters demonstrates (or at least, reiterates) the fact that Smith's drawings are just one act of interpretation, and that interpreting and reinterpreting Gravity's Rainbow (if not all literature, if not all art) is an ongoing, highly creative exercise, one that is performed by individual people who need swear no allegiance to the "common understanding" or the "inherited knowledge" about what a given work "is." That there is, in other words, more to getting a work of art, than merely "getting it." (Which may be an obvious point, made in over-inflated scare-quoted language. But it still seems to me like one that is worth being reminded about, now and then.)

This, that, and the other

• This:
  
  I'm still reading Wizard of the Crow. It's taking me longer to read than I'd planned on, based on the "can't put it down" reports I've seen elsewhere. I've been pulled away from my reading chair the last few days by other activities. It does not help that I find it hard to work up the energy and desire to pick the book back up after each time I put it down. It's become one of those "I read and I read and I read for hours" books and then I check the page count and I've only read 20 pages. I feel nervous voicing this fact, knowing the book has many champions, and I don't feel qualified right now to explain why the book isn't sucking me in. Tough to prove a lack. I'm going to stick with it--I've already dropped one book mid-stride this year, and for far better reasons than I could give were I to drop this one. But right now I'm mostly looking forward to getting into a rock block of recent litblogger favorites that I've started lining up on my TBR pile and on my library card. And, well, I'd like to finish Wizard and then go back and read the reviews and the comments, to see if I can give a little more flesh to my currently seemingly contrarian opinion. I know there's a certain line of thought that suggests that litbloggers have a responsibility not just to praise books but to question them and criticize them as well, which, though I tend to be a nice guy, and I tend to say nice things about books, and though I tend to be rather forgiving as a reader, I am actually cool with. But, fuck, this is a book I don't really want to be the lone odd voice out on. I don't really want to be that guy. But, well, we'll see what happens.



• That:
  
  I'm still processing Gravity's Rainbow. Yeah, I know, I read it like three months ago, get over it, already, right? It ended, and it's not restarting. It's dead, man. Dead. To which I say: I've started picking through a 1986 volume of criticism edited by Harold Bloom which I'd grabbed from the library so I could read the Rocket Power essay by Richard Poirier, the essay that pretty much every other essay about Pynchon has to tip its hat to. I'm not committing myself to reading all these essays, but what I have read has been entertaining and enlightening, at least in a geeky academic way. (I make no apologies for my nerdish behavior. In some cultures, it's considered attractive.) This has got my mind re-thinking some things, and I've started to get into this line of thought about, something to do with Gravity's Rainbow being, not just surprisingly not as hard to read as I'd expected going into it, and also far funnier than I'd expected, but also being a far angrier book than I realized, even when I was reading it. Which is really another piece of evidence that goes onto the "Yes he does" pile in the "Does Pynchon give a shit what you think?" debate that's been raging in my head since long before I read any of his work. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much concern there is throughout the novel. Which, well, OMG, intentional fallacy alert, right? Whatevs--wouldn't be the first fallacy I've committed on this blog.



• The other:
  
  Back in my drug-addled and fancy-free youth of November 2006, I blatantly made fun of an issue regarding whether litbloggers had a responsibility to their readers to inform them when they had received free reviews copy of books. I made fun of it because I thought it was a stupid issue. Of course, back then, I had not yet become the sort of person who accepted free review copies of books from publishers, mostly because the only books I'd ever been offered were things like My Book of Pictures Without Any Words in Them and How to Write a Book that Darby Won't Give Two Shits About, the books I suspect that everybody with a blog that ever uses the word "book" in any post gets offered. But now I'm going to mention that I do have a couple review copies on my end table right now, not so much because I feel I have a duty to you the reader of this blog, but more because I had that joke about those fake book titles in my mind, and I really needed to use it. Both books are short story collections, so I've been reading them a bit here, a bit there, and I'm going to finish them both most likely, and I'm going to say stuff about them the way I say stuff about most everything I read, and you're going to be free to decide whether or not I'm being a greedy free-book-grubbing whore. Maybe at some point I'll write up a review copy policy or something, though I'm not sure how much more I can say other than "While intriguing, review copies are hardly what I had in mind when I started this blog, though, and let's be frank, actually getting a book into my apartment is a major step toward getting me to actually read a book." I'll dig up the old Businessese thesaurus and dress it up nice and fancy, maybe.

Stephen Dixon interview

Your friend and mine Matthew Tiffany finds a long (long!) interview with TDAOC hero Stephen Dixon at the Baltimore City Paper.

I've only skimmed the photo captions and a little bit of the interview so far. Already I can tell it's going to be a good interview. Like, see how we can finally put one nagging question to rest:

City Paper: Are you Thomas Pynchon?

Stephen Dixon: No.

Which, really: what a hilarious thought.

Check out Matthew's site for a brilliant excerpt, and a summation of what Dixon is up to right now. (To summate the summation: a lot.)

But I don't see what this has to do with not being able to tell whether the story is a male story or a female story

Maud Newton points to this great post about one author's fight against her MFA workshop's consensus about the endings of short stories, and how they shouldn't be so "pat."

Setting aside the fact that, by the time you finish reading the post, you'll no longer have any idea what the word "pat" means due to the repetition of the word "pat," and also setting aside my usual choice to not talk about my own fiction writing on this blog, because really what the fuck does anyone care what an unpublished nobody has to say about the process and procedure of writing fiction (even though I could use the cover of SotShoStoWriMo to talk about my current efforts), I will neither agree nor disagree with the author's point (oh yes, and I'm also setting aside the fact that the author is my age and, well, for fuck's sake, girl, save a little success for the rest of the Womb-Graduated Class of '78, eh), and shall only add the following (unarguable and unassailable, I posit) fact: ending a short story is an absolute bastard of a task. An absolute bastard. Like, to the point where, given the choice between writing an ending of a short story, and spending an entire day waiting in line at the Free "Punch Me in the Face" Clinic, well. God gave us two eyes so we could go back for seconds, is all I'm saying.

Free poetry

I am still--still! (yes: still!)--contemplating, deducing, and occasionally pecking away at a blog post that would suggest a fraction of my thoughts and feelings about poetry. (Or, I should say, ahem ahem, British accent levelled up, mmmmmMMmmmmeh Poooooeeeeeetr-r-r-ry.) Why I would feel all perfectionisty when attempting to discuss an art form about which my feelings are, at best, mixed--far more mixed than my feelings about novels and short stories, about which my posts tend hard toward the lackadaisical--I really can not say. My best experiences with poetry were always of an academic nature--or, at least, they happened on a college campus--and so I guess the medium still brings some latent professorial qualities out of me.

No matter: no reason why my indecisiveness should be the body that stops the party. You may be the sort of person who enjoys the poetry of John Ashbery. You may also be the sort of person who finds deep meaning in the chaotic arrangement of Magnetic Poetry words, when said words are scooped up by the handful and thrown willy-nilly at every metallic surface in a fourteen block radius. Or you may enjoy the thrill of competing for prizes. If you are any or all of these three types of people, then visit the Cruelest Month for a chance to win John Ashbery's latest collection, A Worldly Country. (Spotted on MetaxuCafe.)

Not as tasty as a hot chicken sandwich, not as refreshing as a hot water shower, but neither will make you a literary superstar

I try to point out new literary magazines as I learn about them. I'm a bit late on this one--I'm in a two-or-three-for-twelve blogging/reading/reading blogs/blogging about blogs slump lately, I think--but that's okay, because you've still got a month to submit your material for the debut issue of Hot Metal Bridge. Hot Metal Bridge is being published by the University of Pittsburgh MFA program. (I'd make a Browns/Steelers joke here, but we're all above that sort of thing in lit-ville.)

(...)

(Go Browns! Woof woof woof!)

Check out the site for the story on a recent visit by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. Is it just me, or does Chabon have a sort of Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips thing going on? Maybe it's just me.



Whatever. You'd be totally with me on this if Chabon had a band member staring at his ear drum.

Either way, Chabon will be visiting the Cleveland Public Library on April 15. Most likely not in a gigantic space bubble. Though I would totally pay to see that.

Wizard of the Crow discussion

The discussion of Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o starts tomorrow (I believe) at the LitBlog Co-Op. I had every intention of being done with the book before the conversation started, but it's been a real ants-in-the-pants sort of week here at TDAOC HQ.

I'm about a hundred pages in and, yes, it is a good book, one that makes me wish I could focus on it for more than half an hour at a time. (I certainly see how it could be described as a "surprisingly fast read," as I'm sure I saw someone on the net somewhere say.) Being someone with a standing entry-level interest in Indian literature, I've found myself fascinated by the suggested/explicit connections Ngugi draws between African culture and Indian culture. Plus the whole thing smacks of a fascination with globalization. I'm hardly a history geek, but stuff like this makes me want to go crack some books to learn a little more about that sort of thing.

Whatever it was, it was probably awesome

Pitchfork asks, "What happens when Trentemøller, David Lynch, and Thomas Pynchon get together?"

Uhm...erm...something. About something--maybe.

Look: I don't know. You can't expect me to have all the answers.

Or, in this case, any answers.

My days just became ecstatic

The Rake points the way to a new Steve Erickson Web site.

That alone does not make me double up with liquid glee. What does is the hint on the site that Erickson will be releasing a new book this year. It's called Zeroville. That's all I know. That's all I need to know. Well, I'd like to know a release date, but I guess it's not crucial. Well. Yeah. It is, sorta. Okay, what's crucial is that I get the book right now. Is what I'm saying.

Yeah.