This ain't what Kerouac had in mind: Some rough preliminary thoughts on Cormac McCarthy's The Road

[Note: It's only fair to warn you, that if you are the sort of person who carefully avoids contaminating your thoughts with the details of a novel or the analysis of those details by others before reading a book yourself, that I go into an unusual (for me) amount of detail in this post about The Road by Cormac McCarthy; so if you're that sort of person (and believe me, I'm one of you), consider this your spoiler warning--you might wish to duck out entirely or come back later; the rest of you--those who have read the book and those who don't care--are welcome to spill blood--mine and/or the book's--in the comments. I hope this provokes discussion, as it is in no way a complete analysis of this fascinating novel.]

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There's certain people who can affect my reading habits by sheer virtue of being awesome. Jennifer Egan plugged Underworld, and suddenly the thought of attempting to read that doorstop again became a lot sexier. Maureen can take credit for once upon a time unleashing Infinite Jest on my unsuspecting brain. And for however much Cormac McCarthy's latest book has been or is likely to be reviewed, it was Steve Erickson who single-handedly convinced me that I needed to read The Road.

While I'm not as thrilled with the book as Erickson, I'm still pretty jazzed about it. McCarthy's stripped-back language lends itself both well and obviously to a tale of a world with so little left in it. There's a world's worth of distance between McCarthy's style and that maelstrom of language written by William T. Vollmann, whose The Rainbow Stories I'd read just before The Road. (Also I should note I'm not a follower of McCarthy, of whose work I'd only previously read All the Pretty Horses, which I'd found irritatingly repetitive.)

The story is about a father and son adrift in an empty post-apocalyptic landscape, one covered in a constant snow of ash that rains steadily from a colorless, sunless sky. Theirs is a story simply of survival and motion for the sake of survival and motion, the desire to go south to escape the cold tempered by the knowledge that nothing about what lies ahead is knowable and that any moment of the journey could end in their being raped, murdered, and eaten. The only thing left of America is a memory of states which no longer exist, skylines burnt out above the floodlines, and a single can of Coca Cola. It's bleak.

And that bleakness is chilling. While the story of our two main characters isn't one of pure hopelessness--as I've seen some reviewers say--it's at least 99 percent of the way there. I believe that if there wasn't that (even potentially illusory) one percent the father and son would have been dead before page one. Not much of a book left after that. Consider the absent wife/mother, who killed herself with "a flake of obsidian" some unspecified amount of time before the story begins. For her, not even the presence of others--the only thing worth living for--was enough to keep her alive. ("A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love.") For her, "eternal nothingness" is more desirable than a hopeless physical hell. She believes that without their son, the man wouldn't live on--though he seems to believe otherwise. He clings to some hope--or is driven by some fear. We never learn precisely which or what, though we do know as much that it rests on his son. We do know that whatever he hopes for, beyond mere additional days of life, he never finds it, himself.

But if others are the only hope, they're also the biggest threat. When the man and boy meet a member of a traveling caravan--one powerful enough to command a wheezingly functional truck--that other guy is "the first human being other than the boy that he'd spoken to in more than a year." The man shoots him dead in the forehead. Nothing good ever seems to come of interaction with others. The man gets shot in the leg with an arrow near the end of the book. The guy who shot him takes a flare to the face. They meet an old man in their travels, who trades worthless conversation for some of the pair's stores of food, at the insistence of the son. Another guy steals everything they own that's been packed into a single shopping cart. The pair takes everything back and leaves him stark naked when they catch him, until the son forces the dad to relent and leave the guy's clothes behind.

The son ultimately seems to be an argument for nature over nurture in a world stripped down to the barest notions of good versus evil. A world where good is you, and evil is every other person there is. It's hard to tell how much of a moral upbringing the boy received from his parents. The boy used to receive writing lessons, but those have long since lapsed. The man, who knows from the very moment the apocalypse hits--he rushes to the bathroom to fill the tub with clean water--that survival and self-sufficiency are everything anymore, is as close to emotionally equipped to deal with an amoral world as anybody can be without becoming evil. The boy, on the other hand, is constantly thinking of the needs of others. He thinks he sees a boy in a house; the image of that boy, alone, haunts him for the rest of the book. Likewise his insistence on helping the other people they meet, insistences to which the father only occasionally accedes.

While the father and son recognize the difference between good guys and bad guys, it's hard to believe the boy has ever met good guys other than his parents during his brief life. We know the boy knows nothing but the world created by the cataclysm because, in one of the book's most stunning passages, we see the "improbable appearance" of the boy born "by the light of a drycell lamp" in the violent time following the event; "Beyond the window just the gathering cold, the fires on the horizon." Everything, even birth, is already makeshift and detached from everybody else. "Gloves meant for dishwashing"; the man "cut the cord with kitchen shears." We know that some violence has already visited the family since the boy's birth--the mother mentions the loss of one of their gun's three bullets.

That cataclysm, by the by, cuts all the power and stops the clocks at 1:17. Maybe I'm over-reaching, but: see also Genesis 1:17. It's the central verse of the fourth day of creation, the addition of light to the world--"And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth". In the same paragraph there's a "rose glow in the windowpane" and the revelation that the wife was still pregnant with the boy at that moment, her own--and, quite possibly, the world's--final act of creation.

Is the boy, then, an argument for the existence of something good that remains inherent in the human construction? Or is he rather an idiot, retreating from the truth of the world into which he's been thrust, creating his own delusions to do so? Hard to say but worth further consideration, especially considering the fact that the battle between good and evil seem very much on McCarthy's mind throughout the text.

The sparseness of the story, the text, and the world it describes gives an additional symbolic weight to nearly every item or event related. Perhaps the most constantly present thing, then, which must be worth considering, is fire; note that the world and its people have shifted immediately into what may as well be a second stone-age, one in which fire isn't something that must be discovered, but which must be cherished and protected for all its worth. The world is a cold place, and the loss of a single butane lighter can mean the difference between life and death. This is ironic in that the cataclysm either was the world burning itself up, or immediately resulted in the world's burning itself up. Everything left is covered in the ash of that fire, one which seems to have taken most of the good wood and healthy trees with it. The fuel for fire is running out fast.

Fire as death and life is nothing new in itself. But note that we get fairly few glimpses of the world before the cataclysm--the closest we come is those few flash backs to the boy's birth and the mother's death in the days following the event. Note that we're never told what the cataclysm was. We don't know if it was a strike from a war, or a bizarre natural phenomenon. One possible hint of the potential hope in the father's mind is our realization that it's unclear whether this is a world-wide phenomenon. The oceans aren't blue and nothing lives there anymore--they've become a "vast salt sepulchre"; but there's a limit to how far past the land they can see, once they reach the beaches. ("He thought there could be deathships out there yet, drifting with their lolling rags of sail. Or life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness.... And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands.")

With all that in mind, a dream-memory of the father's, from his life when he was younger, beckons us, and possibly hints at some way of interpreting events. (And, well, plus, it's plain fascinating, and poetic, and enthralling, and will be a joy to type out myself.)

Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men. The boy's age. A little older. Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number. Collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers.

Thoughts on this:

1. First off, god, that's magic prose.


2. I can't help but picture this microcosm of burning snakes as being a parallel to the macrocosmic burning of the world. If cities (cities which burned, in the wake of the apocalypse) aren't, in their essences, people "collected there for a common warmth," then what are they?


3. Plus the burning is presaged by an exposure to light. Like the light present in the only description of the cataclysm itself: "A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions."


4. But not all people are evil, right? And snakes aren't really evil. Some snakes, they carry the fire into the dark, to illuminate those areas. It's hard not to think of that spiritual or metaphorical fire that the father and son carry and share between themselves towards a dark, unknown place; also hard not to think of the literal fire they carry, the lighter, the one they lose and the one they find.


5. It's hard not to think, suspect at least, this indicates ill-will and apathy on someone's part, as if those men burning snakes stand in for the men in what were once governments which burned the world out. Or that they stand in for a cold, uncaring universe, one that'll do what's to be done before doing what else is to be done, no relation between the two.


6. And presumably the man took some of this old world forward with him. He knows about the difference between good and evil. He knows by example and image. It's something the boy has, we can only assume, a vastly different experience and understanding of.

But so the man knows evil can be fought, even if just in a symbolic way; his hope, then, might have never been anything more than a desire to triumph, to truly be the good guy, to win. To find someplace better for his son to be and to live. His hope's unrealizable, not in the cold hard world he walks through and dies in, in a nowhere as close to anywhere as he's been. ("How does the never to be differ from what never was?")

As for the boy--the safety the father delivers him to, without ever seeing it himself. How long will that last? How true is it? As promising as it seems, the foreboding final paragraph describing those brook trout seems less than assuring. ("On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.") That "vermiculate" is especially chilling, with its evocation of an image of worms. (Snakes, anybody?) And finally, mystery is great--in a world with people left to appreciate it. What of a world without witnesses?

Random thoughts on The Rainbow Stories

I don't have a grand point I want to make about The Rainbow Stories, other than what point my rant about his sentences arrived at. I don't think Vollmann's necessarily a pusher of grand points, anyway, so if I had one, it would probably mean I'd entirely missed the point. Still, I've got stuff to briefly discuss. There's lots of interesting stuff going on in Vollmann's books, and The Rainbow Stories is no exception.


1. Where do you start reading Vollmann?

The first Vollmann book I read was Europe Central, and I read it because it won the National Book Award for 2005. Seemed as logical a place to start as any other. I later read The Ice-Shirt, the first book of the Seven Dreams series, about violent conflicts in the colonization of the Americas. Jeff then suggested trying the non-historical stuff, starting with The Rainbow Stories, followed by The Royal Family, which I do plan on reading next, sometime after I track down a copy for myself.

Moving from the historical books to the non-historical is interesting. There's similar strategies and styles at work in either mode; the mixing and manipulation of fiction and fact, for one. And it's also interesting to see the common threads between those subject fields. Vollmann's known for writing about moral decisions and violence and aggression. There's been plenty of all that in everything I've read so far.

I think, from my limited experience, were I to hand one Vollmann book to someone who had independently decided they were interested in reading the guy's stuff (I say independently because I still couldn't comfortably suggest someone put themselves through one of his books, despite the enjoyment and enlightenment I've taken from them myself), I think I'd go with Europe Central. Maybe it's just a fondness for my own starting point, or maybe retrospect has shaded out the book's lows (such as the first thirty or so pages, yech), but the highs of that book really seemed the most consistently high of the three books I've tackled this year.

As I said back in February (which, looking through this blog's archives, I now remember as being my own personal Long Dark Vollmann Night of the Soul), and yes I feel weird quoting myself, but whatever: "The loose trilogy of chapters sort of in the middle, about Vlasov ("Breakout") and Paulus ("The Last Field-Marshal") and Gerstein ("Clean Hands"), those are just incredible chunks of imaginative historical fiction, technically and aesthetically astonishing, but they're not going to make you happy." I can't point to huge chunks of either Ice or Rainbow that had me feeling that strongly (though, as will be discussed below, there are parts of Rainbow that I really do super admire). Nor are there such portions of either of those last two books that I feel any particular need to re-read or re-visit. More of an "I got what I got" feeling (even when "what I got" was "a lot").

Is this familiarity breeding contempt and/or dullness? Or does Vollmann's writing move towards a far more emotionally engaging place over the years? Something to consider whenever I hit up The Royal Family. (Or something for other Vollmann people to respond to.)

Here's an old Conversational Reading post about picking a starting point. Also, something I have heard (despite what this review says) is that the one place you really shouldn't start is Argall. ("[I]nflated prose style," indeed.)


2. Vollmann and autobiography and metafiction

The Rainbow Stories, like The Ice-Shirt, mixes pure fiction or authorial re-creation of unseen and unseeable stories with journalistic observation and the appearance of the author himself within the text.

Fascinating, right? Except, it's not. Despite the fact that the book appears to beg for discussion of meta-fiction and authorial intrusion, I'd say this is about the least interesting path along which one can discuss the book. I say this because I don't get the real sense that Vollmann is consciously choosing to do something interesting, metafictionally, or in a mixed-mode sense. I don't think he's questioning the form of the book or challenging us to perceive the concept of story in a new way. I feel like he's just doing things because they're there to be done. When he needs to have something be seen by the narrator, something Vollmann himself has seen, he shows it to us through his eyes. When he needs to make stuff up to get to some point or truth, he'll make stuff up. When the two intersect, it's because he's driving them toward something else.

I liken the autobiographical elements of Vollmann's work to those of Stephen Dixon's books. Dixon, as best I can tell, never names himself a character in any of his work, but he does (from what I've picked up, from interviews and articles and the like) directly inject aspects of himself and his life and his observation into his fiction. He manipulates these things freely, or he'll make things up. But I don't feel like he himself sees these techniques as being in themselves interesting. What he does is what he does to get the story on the page. And the story is what most matters.

What I'm trying to say is that the "question of autobiography" in the work of these writers isn't exactly not worth asking, but that it's ultimately far less interesting than it might seem. Yet it's certainly interesting in the case of other authors--such as David Foster Wallace, who put himself into one of the stories collected in Oblivion. From him, yes, that's fascinating stuff, in part because he's never done that before, and to see it happen in a story now, at this point in his career, is distracting and slightly shocking; in part because I suspect Wallace is far more interested in the form of the art on the page and the reader's interaction with it and the author behind the text in a specific cultural setting than Dixon or Vollmann are.

But this is all hunch and guesswork on my part. You could mount an argument against my take on Dixon--he did name a book I., after all.

Which, I just now remembered, I read this year.

Meaning I've read I. & V. in the span of a year.

Guess I'm sort of obligated to re-read Steve Erickson's Arc d'X now, huh?


3. What the book is about

When I've seen this book mentioned or discussed, the conversation tends to revolve around the urban journalism stories, those about skinheads and hookers and druggies, to the point where I've seen the book described as being entirely about those things. Let me suggest that to describe the book that way is both limiting and misleading.

Here's what I see the book being about: things that happen in hospitals; skinheads and modern-day Nazis; a terrorist and a scientist; hookers and hooker culture and strippers; three brothers in an ancient time captured by Egyptians and facing threat of death for not converting religiously; a Korean girl involved with a Caucasian boy (Vollmann?); a murderous thief in ancient Multan; a guy who steals and marries his neighbor's green dress; what happens when you put your female skinhead friend and your Korean girlfriend in the same room together at a party; a schizophrenic guy who murders homeless people; a group of people who create combat robots, and a young boy's experiences during World War II; something about a purple haired girl who reads philosophy; and, finally, some super screwed up X-rays.

Or, as Vollmann puts it in the opening line of the book, "These stories are about skinheads, X-ray patients, whores, lovers, fetishists and other lost souls."

I think it's those last two words you can use if you need a compact description of the book. It's about lost souls. It's about broken people, breaking people, a society violent with and against itself. To focus too heavily on the skinheads or the prostitutes is to ignore the connectedness the book begs us to seek. The "rainbow" motif of the book is made up of many colors in a continuum.

It's too bad, though, that for all that, there's big parts of the book (the purple haired girl story, the recreated myths) that are sort of annoying and dull. Makes it hard to hold up the various parts with equal emphasis and weight. This is an imperfect, uneven book, definitely.


4. Making connections

It was worth clarifying the contents of the book and bringing up the idea of making connections because I think two of the most successful "stories" in the book deal precisely with making connections, and are both stories that have (almost) nothing whatsoever to do with skinheads or prostitutes.

As usual, when discussing Vollmann, I'm not sure "enjoy" is the best word to use. But for lack of a better word--I highly enjoyed "Red Hands," which describes an Irish terrorist and his escape to America, alongside a description of a researcher killing mice for science; and "The Indigo Engineers," which describes Survival Research Laboratories (Google it--they still exist) and its members' fascinations with creating violent death-robots, while relating the stories of a man who, as a boy, was present in Warsaw during World War II, and who repeatedly escaped death during that time.

It's all damned fascinating and difficult stuff, the second story far more so than the first. Here's where Vollmann really shines, in this book, is in his ability to find things that might not seem immediately related on the surface, and by letting the stories essentially tell themselves, together but separate, allows us to find the relationship between them.

He's best when he doesn't weigh down the tale in his own meandering, heavy-weighted prose. And it's when Vollmann's doing things like this that it's most obvious to me that he's doing more than writing to see himself write. (Kids, when your writing teacher says you should never use two words when you can use one? They're talking about this sort of thing.)


5. Vollmann gets personal

And yet, despite what I just said, and despite what I said before about the autobiographical question being uninteresting, where I found myself most engaged with the book was in those chapters that dealt with Vollmann's relationship with a Korean girlfriend. Factual? Not factual? Not sure, don't care. I call the narrator Vollmann because it feels like Vollmann talking about things that happened to him. Maybe it's all made up. I don't know.

Really: whatever. It's in the Jenny chapters that the voice of the book most easily connects with the reader, in which the prose most breathes easy, and in which the story is most simply story, as in something one person tells another. That the disparate threads of both the first Jenny story and the story about skinheads are brought together in the second Jenny story, and that those threads are ultimately connected in the sudden and sharp tug of a knot at the end of that story makes for one of the most intriguing, compelling, and fascinating literary moments I've come across. It's sharp, because he knows precisely where to stop putting words down. The white space following the last line of the story is a depth into which those last words drop the reader. It's startling stuff.

It's the sort of thing that doesn't exactly forgive or justify some of the crap Vollmann spills onto other pages. But it does make them at least that much easier to overlook, in time.

The Long View

Here's a fascinating piece of music writing by Philip Sherburne.

Snip:

Different forms of music require different modes of listening. Classical music is the most obvious example: Scholars spend their lives exploring the mathematical relationships and patterns within Bach's music. The rest of us are content to listen to the tune, the pleasing counterpoint. But for those who know how to listen, attending to the underlying structure can give a different-- dare I say, deeper-- understanding of the music. Learning to appreciate electronic music-- beyond "it's got a good beat, and I can dance to it"-- sometimes requires re-training the ears to listen for patterns and methods unique to the genre, or at least unfamiliar in other styles.

On William T. Vollmann's sentences

So I read V. and then I must have had the letter on my mind because the next book I picked up was William T. Vollmann's The Rainbow Stories, which I'll speak of in a more general sense in another post.

Before we go there, let's accept as a common truth the fact that for writers and students of writing, the importance of the sentence as a unit of linguistic meaning can not be understated. It is, linguistically speaking, where the magic happens. Words (at least, in the English language; I'm no polyglot, and have no idea how things work in, say, Shqip, or Occitan) are fabulous things, but without a platform upon which they can be set in order, nothing comes of them. And a marvelous platform it is, capable of containing multiple permutations and combinations of various sets of words, allowing for the creation of entirely new forms of communicative meaning and artistic beauty. Durable, too, is the sentence; it remains true to itself through the abuses of instant messaging and advertising. As a culture, we adore the sentence more than we might recognize. Upon a single opening sentence can the entire value and worth of a novel or an article lie. Witness our fascination with the pithy quotation, the well-constructed, tersely cogent, self-sufficient bundle of words. Note the existence of the ellipsis; multiply the symbolic end of a sentence by three to indicate words left unsaid, a longing, a desire to encapsulate infinity and all meanings beyond the horizon.

A good sentence is a love letter to good writing.

Knowing then that sentences totally kick ass, it's only fair, in assessing the written work of William T. Vollmann, to examine his sentences, Vollmann being a man who has written, it must be said, quite a few of them. (Wikipedia lists 15 books in his bibliography, starting with 1987's You Bright and Risen Angels. One of those books--Rising Up and Rising Down--is seven volumes long. This guy spits out 4300 word blog posts in his sleep.)

My gut reaction to Vollmann's sentences? I feel that he does, sometimes, write excellent sentences, containing both truth and beauty. I also feel that he does, sometimes, write sentences that moonlight as orphan stranglers. If you're going to read or really study Vollmann, then, it's only fair to ask and consider how the two extremes influence our perception of themselves. Are his highs that high and lows that low on their own? Or does the contrast between the two cast them into sharper relief than they'd attain independently?

The Rainbow Stories offers an excellent example of this contrast in the neighboring sentences which open "The Boundaries of the Catherine-Horizon," the fourth section of the "Violet Hair" story. Observe the first sentence:

It is known that holiness is localized.

This is a beautiful sentence. It has a recognizable subject ("It") and predicate (the rest). The organization is clean, the rhythm is propulsive, and the meaning, the idea, is readily obvious yet illuminatingly complex. No word here is superfluous. There is a harmonious synthesis of the words written and those left unsaid.

To say more would be to overstate the case. Consider, then, the sentence which follows this one. (My apologies for any errors in my transcription.)

Thus, a weaker ectoplasmic field is reported to exist on automated ranches, whose green alfalfa-beds are enlightened only by the random rainbow dews of sprinklers, than in desert ghost towns where tall thin phantoms hoot in chimneys like apes of justice, laboriously attempting to imitate their mentors and masters, the summer owls of whom I have already spoken, and although they scarcely possess the resonance of flesh, which would be of value to them in achieving their dark-livered endeavors (actually they do not have livers either), their reedy efforts are indulgently applauded by the owls in feathery wing-beats; thus encouraged, fat ghosts now roll tumbleweeds back and forth on Main Street with translucent smiles of vacuous delight; if the owls are amused then they will clap their claws together in mid-air with the savage elegance of clashing antlers, in the process, perhaps, letting slip some squeaking dying rodent-ball whose bloody dews the ghosts can inhale, but since this happens no more than every hundred years, if at all, it is fortunate for these freeze-dried souls that they have no tibial collateral ligaments to shrink or spasm, and can therefore flex their shimmering knees all night in the pursuit of their summer sport, vainly hoping to incite the owls' beaked praise.

That sentence is bullshit. I'm thinking Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights: "This is the worst sentence I have ever seen." I'm thinking this sentence murders babies. This sentence voted for the terrorists. This sentence places mustard gas inside the souls of saints. It's the self-important garbage poured into the bluebook five minutes before the bell ends the exam period. This sentence is Battlefield Earth re-enacted by John Travolta's mucus-drenched nosehairs. This sentence is Metal Machine Music sung by a grade school bully sinking into a vat of boiling acid. It's verbal poison.

It's awful.

Beauty? It flirts with the concept yet falls flat long before its end. Taken on a chunk-by-chunk measure, there is some rhythm or momentary flow to some of the individual phrases and clauses within the sentence. Unfortunately, these bits and pieces don't play nice together. They neither connect nor cohere, and are often antagonistic to each other. Every single time I reach the bit about "the summer owls of whom I have already spoken," my brain steps out for a cup of coffee and a bagel while the sentence clamors forward, oblivious. Then there's the livers-not-livers bit. Vollmann here wrote two phrases that negate each other. It's like there's literally nothing on the page but black ink in the deceitful shape of meaning.

Meaning? There is none. This sentence is devoid of meaning. It neither stands on its own nor fulfills or expands on the promise and premise of the sentence that preceded it. Lest it seem like I haven't tried, note that I read, or attempted to read, this sentence at least ten times when I first encountered it in the book. That's approximately seven to eight more times than most literary sentences deserve. Furthermore, I went the extra step of typing it out--copying another writer's work being one of those techniques you'll sometimes hear as being a worthwhile method of aiding yourself in getting the language inside your brain, of getting yourself deeply embedded in the work's rhythm and flow and ideas. Every moment that I typed and I began to think something clear was bubbling its way up out of the muck and mire was followed almost immediately by a sinking gasp as the air rushed back away and I lost all sight of the surface.

This sentence, it's like drowning. What's worse is that it left me violently antagonistic toward everything that followed it. I read the rest of the story, but I took little pleasure in it, and I received little information or meaning from it. Which is a shame because it was a story about a girl with purple hair who reads philosophy. That's really hot. Or, at least, it should have been really hot.

It's hard to segue out of this little pool of bile and vitriol I've poured onto this sentence, so let's just jump to a disclaimer and a point. The disclaimer is this: it might be pointed out that I'm being unfair or too harsh in my assessment of a single sentence out of a man's lengthy oeuvre, especially considering the sentence is found in that man's second book, a book which, in retrospect, might be seen as a transitional or experimental book, one in which we can still see the mind of the writer struggling to find his path or his voice. That's a valid criticism but I'll note that it's worth remembering that in this life we are defined by the choices we make and that in writing, whether good or bad, every single word is a choice. While I can't immediately recall such awful sentences from Europe Central, and so while it might be tempting to say that Vollmann has since purged such overblown excesses (to put it mildly) from his work, I'm not sure it's worth giving the guy a pass just yet. Maybe readers with a more detailed and broad grasp of his work can argue one way or the other about this subject. I shall choose to remain critical.

And, as for my point...er, hey, hold on. That's right. I do actually recall some awful sentences from Europe Central. How about just about every god-forsaken sentence in the book's opening paragraph? If not most of the sentences from the first thirty-plus pages of the book? My word, I recall them now. How on earth did I get past them? How did I go on to finish that book, and then read another book, and then read a book after that? Dear heaven, what is wrong with me? To be fair, there were plenty of damn good sentences in Europe Central. My copy of the book is riddled with underlines and jotted-out page references. Maybe someday I'll dig my copy out from the bottom of the 2006 Towering Pile Of Nonsense and type some up. For now, trust me when I promise that, the beef, it is in there.

But now, really, for my point, my conclusion: Vollmann is not a genius. Neither is he terrible. His sentences can swing radically in either direction. In my recent Pynchon post, I took a pot shot at Vollmann as offering linguistic rather than structural difficulty. (Or at least just plain linguistic, I don't think I made any pronouncements about structural.) Maybe this post offers some idea of what exactly I and other bloggers and commentators mean when we say this guy's writing can be overblown: it can, at times, offer difficulty devoid of reward.

For me, a reader who is dealing with the question of where I stand on Vollmann's work--a question that every reader, I think, has to face when reading his stuff--this means I wind up strongly ambivalent. I'm intrigued enough that I'll continue to read his work; I'm also far more willing and ready to discount anything that feels like claptrap. For you, who are trying to decide whether to follow the hype and read Vollmann's stuff, what this means is you need to ask yourself whether you are patient enough to dig through the garbage to find the good stuff. Are you ready to play along with the editors at home?

And for you other readers of Vollmann, all this gives you an additional chance to decide for yourself whether I'm a decent person. (Hint: I am. Honest.)

Also, it doesn't hurt to do all your writing to the tune of "Eye of the Tiger"

At SlushPile: On finding your literary nemesis.

Pynchon Watch Y2K6: The Unabridged Edition

Galleys are out.

Pynchon Watch Y2K6: We'll get to the niece thing later; but first, let's get to the thing about my curious reaction to V.

1.0. - Something Curious

And then something curious happened: I read V. and I liked it. I didn't get it. But I mostly enjoyed reading it.


2.0. - On Reading Lists

My reading habits are erratic. I don't structure my trek down the main streets and back roads of writing. True, there's various book discussion group deadlines, but I'm not married to those schedules. (Sorry, Austin--I, uh, got distracted.) Sometimes I read brand new-ish books just so I can feel like I at least have a tenth of a hundredth of a clue about what's going on "today" in literature. (Which pretty much comes down to "Lots of people are writing lots of books and some of them are awesome" but that doesn't make for good conversational copy.) (Also, synchronicity: Dan Green posted this while I was writing part of this post. I may come back to that some other time, because it really is a fascinating topic.) About as structured as I've gotten this year has been my Summer of Dostoevsky project, and with only two books of the planned five read, you can see how well that's gone. (I did recently pick up my next Dostoevsky book--Demons (or The Possessed)--and was blown away by the opening chapter, which was funny and weird, and then I set the book down and walked away because it wasn't time for it yet. No idea why.)

But for these token stabs at order, I'm most often bouncing merrily through the world's back catalogue from one book to the next, neither rhyme nor reason dictating what book gets picked up after the current one gets put down. If anything, I've got a ready awareness of the multiple (and potentially conflicting) directions I could be taking my reading list in at any one moment in time. I should be reading more literature in translation; I should be reading more books by women; I should be reading more classics; I should be reading certain books that I've been meaning to read for a very long time but haven't gotten to yet because of whatever reason comes up every time it comes time to grab a book off the shelf. I figure there's always at least eight books that I should be simultaneously reading at any particular moment. How constant that list is from any one moment to any other moment, well...

What I'm saying is nothing the typical avid reader doesn't know, whether he or she chooses to think about it or not; there are more worthwhile words than can possibly be read in a lifetime, there's more worlds than those in any gunslinger's philosophy, yadda yadda etcetera and so forth; I generally choose not to think about it too much because otherwise I'd go insane with grief over lost opportunities and all those sweet reading lists lost on impact. I at least like to think this justifies and encourages my haphazard reading list. Wherever it is I go, it will be worth the going. And the going, like breathing, will happen one moment after another.

What it doesn't (and, yet, I guess, does) explain, is why I found myself this last week reading, not one of those eight immediate-priority books of the mysteriously ever-shifting moment, but rather a book by an author who I'd thought I'd already written off as someone whose work I had no honest intellectual interest in.


3.0. - If You Must Read Only One Book, Read Two Books Instead

I feel bad for V.; the book gets comparatively short shrift these days. V. seems stuck in a sort of book-sized shadow of Pynchon's own making, darkened by both Gravity's Rainbow--the younger brother who won all the awards and honors in school and who was totally huge enough to beat up other teams single-handedly on the football field--and The Crying of Lot 49--the younger brother who actually got laid a lot because sitting through an entire conversation with him wasn't impossible.

I forget when I picked up my copy of V., though I know it came from a used book store, based on the price sticker I rubbed off the cover this week. I don't know why I bought it when I did, though I can imagine the phrase "Pynchon, hey, he wrote Gravity's Rainbow" probably sounded through my brain. I know I can safely say that since whenever I bought it, I've heard next to no talk about it, this book that won awards when it was published. (Which of course begs the question, if it wasn't for the other brothers, would we know this one today?)

One reference came this year somewhere on the Internet when someone suggested using it as a warm-up book (following Crying, of course, because Crying's the short one, the one you can read and then you can pat yourself on the back and introduce yourself at ritzy business networking functions as being someone who has read an entire Pynchon novel) for the ultimate goal of reading Gravity's Rainbow.

What a fantastic tag line, right? "V.: A warm-up book." Hey, all you professional published authors in this joint: raise your hands, those of you who have written a book with the intention of it being classified a "warm-up" book.

Vollmann, you smart ass. Put your hand down.


3.2.0.

I'd like to suggest that the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of V., Thomas Pynchon's first novel. Rather than being considered one of Pynchon's "other works," rather than being that book he wrote "before Gravity's Rainbow," one can easily argue that V. in fact stands today as a formidable, unique, compelling, fascinating, and self-sufficient piece of modern literature, worthy of detailed (re-)analysis, consideration, contemplation, and conversation.

One could definitely argue all that.

Though, I'm not going to.

But one definitely could, were one to set one's mind to it.


3.1.0.

But before we move forward, some additional anecdotal evidence regarding V.'s lack of self-status in contemporary conversational culture. Friend Chris (a sort of recurring character here on this blog, who is in fact a real live human being, one who often reads books I recommend, who in fact recently read The Exquisite by Laird Hunt because I told him he had to immediately and who also admitted to enjoying the book (which said factoid is casually dropped here to reinforce the fact that many people should read the book because it's a very good book, insofar as the second-hand account of the opinion of a friend of a blogger should amount to a bit of real-world concern or care by anyone anywhere)) has for some time been gearing himself up for his own first attempt at Gravity's Rainbow. Because, let's not fool ourselves: Gravity's Rainbow, whatever worth one finds in it, is sort of the dead body in the car crash of difficult modern literature. Sooner or later, every kid worth an ounce of curiosity is going to slow down and look for his or her own self.

Friend Chris recently noted in conversation that for all the talk he's heard about Rainbow and Crying, he's never once heard talk of V., that first novel which is so problematic for a blogger who keeps landing the title of it at what would normally be the end of his sentences, where the period in the title would make it look weird and, to this blogger, slightly unsettling. Nobody ever references V., Friend Chris said.

And then a few curious things happened:

1. I mentioned in an e-mail to Friend Chris that I was, quite randomly and unexpectedly, reading V., myself.


2. Friend Chris saw a quite random, humorous reference to the novel V. in a day-to-day calendar (a tie-in to the Daily Show's America: The Book book).


3. V. was unexpectedly mentioned in casual conversation by a third party, which reference spurred Friend Chris to mention the fact that V. never gets mentioned in conversation, along with a relating (like this list) of the curious, nearly concurrent references to that book.

Curiouser and curiouser.


3.1.1.0.

It should, of course, be at least passingly noted that anecdotal evidence is certainly not intended as a definitive statement or proof of the aforementioned hypothesis about V. and its status and the shadows and car crashes and all that. I am perfectly willing to entertain the idea that I might be plain wrong about the frequency with which the book is mentioned, or its status among other, like me, contemporary casual literary elite.

So while objections may be fairly lodged, it should be noted that your own anecdotal evidence may be used in the court of public opinion to point out that you, in fact, either a) hang out with more interesting but far stranger people than I do, which will cause the public to raise its collective eyebrow at you, or b) are ultra-highly-active on the Pynchon-L e-mail discussion list, which--and please, take no offense when I say this--means your viewpoint, as far as the rest of us are concerned, doesn't at all count.


3.2.0.

And this is where this would go if I wasn't feeling like rushing to get that point across, back up there a ways.

Moving on then.


4.0. - Yeah, Darby, Way to Have Your Cake and Analyze the Fun Out Of It Too, You Big Jerk

So while I'm not going to three-point-two V. right now, I am going to try to say at least some stuff about it.


4.1.0.

First, yes, my overall reaction to the book was strangely positive. You can take that as a sort of average of all my responses during all the moments I read the book. My specific reactions ranged anywhere from stark raving joy to feeling utterly bored witless.

Perhaps my biggest take-away from reading this book was a sense of finally getting it, a little. By it, here, I mean the buzz, the hype, the hoopla, not the same sort of "it" I meant way back at the beginning of this faux-essay. Reading V., really diving into it this time, it felt like I was finally being let in on why the joke's funny, or what the glossy expense reports have to do with me personally down here in the cube farm murk. While I'm not inspired to flat-out Pynchonoid fanboy levels of ecstasy, here's what's crazy and new for me: I can see how someone could go there. There's enough detail in this book to warrant weeks, months, if not years of avid discussion and debate. (Everything 3.2 might imply. And now maybe it makes sense why I'm not going there, not even really attempting to go there, here. Because I wouldn't know where to start and I'm not sure I'd know how to get out once I got into it. Plus I feel a need to move on.)

Maybe even more important is that I can see some of the DNA that got passed down to who knows how many inspired-by-that writers. Of whom David Foster Wallace is the most personally interesting example. A full explanation of that is way, way beyond the level of effort I'm willing to take up here, but suffice it to say again that I can see where the discussion might lead, because I now have a somewhat deeper feel for where it starts, beyond just accepting what's said about some things.

All of which is very nice and all but what's it got to do with the price of love in Malta? Probably not much. Probably just makes me feel a little more confident about my ability to understand what's going on in letters today. Probably just gives me more to think about while sitting in cars in parking lots staring through windshields at electric lights wondering and waiting for whatever comes next. Plus I had fun reading the book. Which brings us to


5.0. - Aw, Now You're Just Teasing

the pleasure of Pynchon. But not yet. I'm just reminding myself where I go after


4.2.0.

the difficulty of Pynchon. (Honestly I'm not sure which is worth talking about first. Honestly I may have switched these back and forth once or twice. Honestly, things sort of worked out for the best this way, so I let it ride, because why not? Let it be said, in any case, while I've already got my aside-mode blinker on, that I'm intentionally keeping things macroscopic here, because I'm in no way ready to get too critical-analytical, certainly not yet at least. Also note that I'm glossing over the fact that some people might not find this book difficult in the least. One person's hole is another person's hypothesis.)

What makes V. difficult? What kind of difficulty are we dealing with? It's not linguistic. (Contrast this with, for example, the occasional difficulty of William T. Vollmann, who seems, at times, more interesting in making a mockery of language than an art of it. I can say that without worrying that he's about to pull a gun on me because I saw him slip out the back door a while back with a bad sniffle in his nose.) On a sentence by sentence level, the language itself isn't particularly difficult. Pick sentences at random, and there's not much you can't quickly understand, especially with a decent dictionary nearby. (This book got the word "scungille" stuck in my brain.)


4.2.a.side:

Pynchon's prose, for some reason, reminds me of Steve Erickson's prose. Neither writes necessarily beautiful prose, in terms of surface-level poetry, and yet it's fully functional in seeking its ends, while being quite capable of making its own occasional leaps to loftier heights. DaVinci dropping tabs of Monet? Something worth considering, perhaps.


4.2.c.ontinued:

So logically enough, then, the difficulty must rest a plane or two higher. It's still in and of the word-by-word details, though; though it's in the way we, the reader, have to process, arrange, and connect those details, as we read this book. Let's semi-arbitrarily tackle first structure, then characters. Though the two are interdependent (as I found out that we shall see).


4.2.1.0.

Structurally, the book happens along two timelines. The first (as presented in the book) "present day" timeline is set from 1955 to 1956. The second, related in what I'll call flashbacks though I use the word somewhat hesitantly, stretches from the end of the 1800s through the 1940s. The present day timeline takes place in and around New York City, with some travel. The flashback timeline is set in a variety of locales, including Italy, Africa, and, yes, Malta. The timelines are essentially divided by chapter, so the "cuts" between the two are (perhaps blessedly) not of the "jump-cut" nature. Though present-day events may be used as introductions to or preludes to flashback chapters, and one can certainly argue that the flashbacks are hardly more than present-day re-constructions of unwitnessed, untrue events.

So far I'm not talking rocket science levels of complexity here. We'll jump back to notions of structure in a moment, but first, let's talk about:


4.2.2.0.

Characters. Sweet holy lord, this book's got a lot of characters. And oh boy, do those characters connect in a whole lot of ways.


4.2.2.a.side:

Here's where I can most see myself falling toward the Pynchonoid trap. The more I read, the more characters I met and the more connections I saw, the more I needed to help myself keep some semblance of a track of them. The resulting (incomplete) character map I began drawing on the inside back cover of my copy of the book now looks like a pair of twisted spiderwebs, loosely (yet, crucially! maybe?) linked.


4.2.2.c.ontinued:

What makes the number of characters difficult is, in part, their varying levels of importance, which does not necessarily depend on the amount of face time they get. Seemingly minor characters can slip in, color the entire proceedings with their perceptions, then hop out the back way, never to be heard from again. Other seemingly minor characters can actually be somewhat more important characters in disguise--with the nature of their importance being a topic of discussion in itself. Major characters can seem to not have much of anything to do with anything going on elsewhere in the book. (And, maybe they don't.) Other major characters, through whom we see major portions of the story, we never actually get to know too well. (How can we, when they seem to have distanced themselves from themselves?)

Now, with some of this information in hand, we can go back to


4.2.1.0.

the structure question, and mention that the order in which and the span of the book over which we meet these multitudinous characters is what ultimately (for me) ramped up the book's difficulty. Because it's not that we're introduced to a whole bunch of characters all up front who we then follow through the text. Characters are doled out and stretched out and chopped up from the beginning of the book to the end of it. (We meet new characters in the Epilogue! We see old only alluded-to characters fresh and new in the Epilogue! If this book had an index, it would certainly list characters who only appear on pages after the last page of the book!)

We can also mention that the connections (and the importance of those connections) between the characters are often never made immediately clear. Main characters from the present-day plot line don't actually meet and interact until near the end of the book. Meanwhile in reaching those points, we wade through a thick sea of casual, random encounters. (Which, are they truly casual? Or even of the slightest importance?)

But it's the presence of connections that prevents one from writing off the book as a bunch of random stories with no particular collective importance. What happens in the flashback stories, is that we are given some sense of a main story (or stories) that threads its way throughout these various historical settings. (That, of course, is the story of V., the woman--or, woman?--of the title of the book.) It's a story we're never directly given, per se, but is one we glimpse out of the corner of our eye as we pass through other exotic tales, which seem (and might be) completely disconnected from each other, if not incomplete in and of themselves.

But in more human terms, what this kind of structure creates is a tower of fatigue-generating, patience-rewarding details. Reading this book is tiring, when you've got to keep so much of it in your mind at once, without knowing whether what you're holding is necessary or not, nor whether what you've dropped is worth the effort of stooping down to pick back up. It's not unlike the effect of reading a long collection of short stories in one go: picking up characters and events and settings and ideas almost as quickly as you drop them often can mean the stories near the end of a book aren't as easily or readily enjoyed as those near the beginning. Now sandwich those stories into an already existing plotline and change the name of a minor character in each story to a single name, so those various characters all become one character. Things get exponentially more fascinating, and frustrating.


4.2.3.0.

To spin a new simile: the difficulty of V. is like the difficulty of a well-paced videogame. What starts seemingly simple becomes increasingly difficult with each new stage; ability to reign victorious over successive stages depends on one's mastery of the obstacles thrown at the player earlier in the game, until defeat of the final boss (the book itself, on the literary side of the "like") requires a synthesis and expansion of every technique the game has taught the player.

V., however, does not offer green warp pipes.


4.2.4.0.

All of which is to say, in short: the book offers the diligent reader a surprising amount of complexity. Or, difficulty. Depends on your views, I reckon.


4.2.4.a.side:

None of which is actually as scary as I might make it sound; for the human mind is a wondrous thing, and does a lot of the work for the reader, without having to spell it all out as it's doing it. (You needn't recite bunny-ear rhymes to tie your shoes.)


4.2.4.b.ut:

That's definitely not to say that one can sleep through the book; blink in the wrong spots, and you'll lose who knows what ground. (You do still need fingers to tie your shoes; the brain's not that amazing, not yet.)


4.2.4.c.ontinued:

And while the structure and character questions aren't the end-all, be-all of the book's difficulty, I think the points I've raised here give the curious reader (or, at least, they've given me myself and I) some semi-spelled-out sense or idea of what it actually is going on here that's so challenging about Pynchon's work. (Not that I'm saying these things are universal to his writing--but, they do give me some idea of what I might consider looking for, in his other books, should I choose to tackle them.)

And, I think this is enough to point forward toward one more point I'd like to make about the difficulty of Pynchon, which deals with the question of importance.


4.2.5.0.

Importance. I think I've alluded to it, but let's make it clear: I'm curious not just about the metascopic Importance of Pynchon (i.e., in a literary or cultural sense), but in the microscopic importance of the things inside his books. One, I suspect, can learn about the one by examining the other and vice-versa. Neither of which I'm really going to do right now, of course. I'm just going to point a little and go Hmm and Huh and nod and smile and get a headache and then I'll try to move forward with my life.


4.2.5.1.0.

When I say I question the microscopic importance of things inside Pynchon's books, what I mean specifically is that sometimes, I don't know what the hell he's talking about and why I should care. Lots of things happen in V., and often, their significance eludes me. Why the alligators? Why the connections? Why a waterspout? Why V. herself (her?self) at all? Why Benny Profane? Why self-referential third-person language?

Many questions are raised. Some are more profound than others. How many are answered? That's another question entirely.


4.2.5.2.0.

When I say I question the metascopic importance of Pynchon in the literary, cultural landscape, well...now, unlike a few more weeks ago, I've got a lot more ways of asking and approaching that question. Like, why the alligators? Why the connections? Why the structural hijinks and character onslaughts? Why V. her(?)self?

And then, why do people care about these things? These words? This man?

What's up with all that?

And, hence:


5.0. - Whatever, You Know We All Totally Skipped All That, Right?

The curious pleasure of Pynchon.

That's sort of it, isn't it? My fascination with the guy, wrapped up in a nutshell. Here's this guy who writes big challenging books. What of them brings pleasure? What of them is important or worth pursuing? What have I found there in returning to him, past my own imagined sell-by date for the guy?

The word challenging is sort of telling, already, for some people, some cases, I suppose. Some challenges will always be pursued, whether the rewards were worth the pursuit or not. Climbing mountains, landing remote controlled cars on other planets, building empires out of green? Cool beans. You go, indeed. Stacking golf balls to get into Guinness? Winning the hot dog eating championship? Getting Lulu's ultimate weapon by dodging 200 bolts of lightning on the thunder plains in Final Fantasy X? Get a job, you stinky hippie.

When it comes to literature, it's true that I do ultimately (and, on average) find reward in challenging literature. From the pomo hootenanny of Infinite Jest to the sparse realms of Stephen Dixon, the never-easily categorized Jennifer Egan to the adult content of Mary Gaitskill, there is, for me, reward in the thing and the hunt of the thing.

Certainly, V. is full of challenges, and, to my surprise, I've found them oftentimes pleasurable, or at least, intriguing. This book, copyright 1963, well before the rise of "interactivity" as a cultural buzzword commodity, demands more, on a purely technical level, of the reader than many other books I've come across. Once I realized what was going on, I did see it as an interesting, oftentimes exciting endeavor. The activity of assembling a story from the scraps and folds of other stories while always questioning where what one's left with came from and what its ongoing and ultimate value is, is, well...fun.

What I think is sort of more curious about what I found in reading V., is how much--as this lengthy post in part proves--I've found myself interested in simply trying to define the challenge itself. It's like doing the challenging thing and then turning around to find out whether you climbed the wall or took the bungee jump. (Or both at once.) I'm not sure how interesting that--or any of this--sounds to anyone other than me. Maybe this says more about me and where I am right now as a reader and what it is I'm currently--today, this month, this year--asking for from the books I read. Maybe, after reading The Exquisite, it was inevitable that I'd circle back around to Pynchon, for another desperate stab at the godfather of modern post-modern experimental rootin' tootin'.

Maybe, finally, a lot of things.

Maybe that's the only conclusion I can logically draw.

Know something? That's damned exciting.


6.0. - Sobering Thought, That

Or maybe, like's so for Mondaugen, it's all after all merely code for chaos.

Cuz those are where the DEVIL is

Here's something:

Paramount Vantage is looking for audiences interested in seeing people dead, and so they've purchased a horror script called Details from writer Dan Kay....

The Hollywood Reporter says the script is an adaptation of a short story written by British fantasy writer China Miéville. A girl uncovers a demonic force that only she can see and disappears. Her father goes looking for her and will stop at nothing to bring her back....

I haven't read the story but it will be interesting what comes out of this. At least in his Bas-Lag novels, Miéville's big on visuals. He builds worlds and monsters and events and he wants you to see them there in front of you. (Maybe his short work is more sparse. I don't know.) So it might be fun to compare your visions of his story with those of directors and script writers and money-makers, in a "Wow, they made the Ents I had pictured in my head" way. It might also be a complete train wreck. We'll just have to wait and...shoot me with guns before I finish that sentence, I suppose.

You lost that bloggin' feeling

So you know that feeling you get when you've read a handful of books and they've all made you want to say lots of things but then you sort of don't get around to saying them until everything's all piled up in your brain to the point where you know you have to say all those things even though you've started second-guessing the value or worth or intelligence of anything you've thought, ever? Consider me right now the Oh Captain My Captain of that little angst-ridden Club. Apologies in advance if things become uneven here. I mean, moreso than usual.

It's like I'm waiting by the phone for it to ring and half of me will answer it and the other half will be listening to the payphone tones in Nebraska

There are few things in this world I look forward to more than heading to the local indie theater to see a brand new David Lynch movie, so when I hear things like the fact that his latest effort, Inland Empire, does not yet have an American distributor (and hence, wide release date), I begin to cry tears, real tears that are, appropriately, both of and not of themselves, simultaneously and asynchronously. I don't exactly panic, yet, because I know there has to be someone wearing a fancy suit out there who knows that I am standing here with ten dollars and a smile that I am patiently (as patiently as possible) waiting to personally hand them for the privilege of letting Lynch bash my skull in with electrons and mysteries. And I know there must be people other than me, willing to make this same exchange. And what fancy-suited person doesn't enjoy receiving money? And smiles? In short, I trust. In essential universal rationality. And, in smile magic.

Here's a profile of David Lynch at the New York Times. In it, he talks about making the move to digital film recording, the process of creating Inland Empire, and how he doesn't much like talking about some things. We learn that "this may be his most avant-garde offering since 'Eraserhead'," which is sort of like a bullet landing in the gut of my aforementioned patience--not immediately lethal, but certainly likely to cause long-term annoyance. Also, we get some description of the movie itself, the most information about the film that I've yet seen, and despite my normal policy about avoiding reviews of those things I know I'm going to see/read/need, I'm pretty much okay with reading some things about the movie (as if my appetite needed further whetting) because I know that no information can possibly spoil the raw experience of actually seeing the movie itself.

All that, and the article reminds us of the perennial joy that is dropping by Lynch's website for a weather report. Straight from the man himself.

Well, gee

So I'm reading The Rainbow Stories by everybody's favorite crackhead William T. Vollmann, and I have to say that for as often as his writing can be dull or overblown or whatever (his stance on editor intervention--namely that it's got no business messing with his work--can sometimes seem like pointed pigheadedness when you're stuck in a quagmire of whatever he's going on about), he's just as often worth reading, though (in my experience) rarely for stunning, jaw-dropping, chilling moments of beauty and truth, but more for the overall adventurousness and expansiveness and inquisitiveness of long stretches of his work; like enjoying the parts and the flow of the equation on the left side of the equals sign rather than what pops out on the right side of the function; but then just now I finished the "Blue Wallet" chapter of Rainbow, and oh my, that final moment right there is a grade-A prime cut moment, the kind of thing that makes you get up out of your chair and get on the internet so you can point to it with both hands and say, "Look. Look, friends. Look."

Me, elsewhere

A while back, British author John Baker was kind enough to invite a whole bunch of litbloggers to answer some questions about blogging and books and such. My answers to his five questions went live today. Fear of reading anything I've written more than five minutes ago prevents me from reviewing what I said, so all I can say about my answers is that I nattered on to some darn silly lengths. Hopefully I didn't sound too inane. (Don't tell me if I did. It'll crush my ever so fragile spirit.)

So if you're looking for more of me--and why wouldn't you?--go check it out. While you're there, take a look through the archive of responses. They're typically far more terse and likely more interesting than my own tower of babble.

It's like an early birthday present, but it came late this year, nevermind the fact he's dead, and the present is for you, not him

So what do you get for the T.S. Eliot fan with everything? Something they most certainly don't have. (Again via.)

(And yes, by the way, I do think T.S. Eliot is sort of bad-ass.)

Next thing you know, people are going to be using cars to drive, and coffee makers to make coffee, and windows to check the weather outside

So I guess there was this thing going on last night:

Housing Works Bookstore and The National Book Critics Circle bring you a panel on blogging and book reviewing, with a discussion about what happens when the two intersect.

Oh boy. There's a recap of the event over at the Critical Mass blog. Oh god, I feel a migraine and some naughty language coming up after the block quote:

For all the talk about the separateness of blogging and print reviews, the panel came to the conclusion that these mediums are essentially engaged in a single (growing) conversation about books -- and blogs have merely made that conversation more visible, providing not just new points of view, but an ever expanding amount of information sites like this one or Moorishgirl.com which link to and comment upon book pages from around the world.

Oh man. Did you people really need a fucking panel to tell you that? Hell. Where's my Advil.

People, let me lay it out for you: The Internet is nothing more than a medium for communication. Blogs are nothing more than people communicating with other people. There is nothing inherently special about blogs. Some people, they got together and invented computers, and then some other people found a way to make those computers "inter-connect" with each other in a sort of "network" so that information could be passed between them, and then everybody else on the planet got together and said, "Hey, let's use this technology for the purpose it was created for," and they did so, and then there were blogs.

That's it. That's the whole story. And now the conversation is over. Know why? Because I just ended it. Because there's nothing left to say. Sure there's details that may have been left out of this Intro To Blogging 101 course--but it's all just a matter of execution, and is really only of interest to people who are going to create their own blogs. Then you need to know about Technorati and search engines and how these things actually function in a technical sense. As for how they function in a communicative or a "higher" sense? There's nothing left of interest to say: if you can read, if you can consume and process information, you can see what blogs do.

So now we can all get on with our lives, secure in the knowledge that there's nothing all that special about blogs, safe in the recognition that we can stop acting like we're all engaged in some kind of intellectual turf war, and we can all put our egos back in our little ego boxes and go about doing what we do best, which is engaging in communication. Whether on the Internet or by telephone or television or newspaper or over coffee at the coffee shop or by Pony Fucking Express.

I'm not saying we don't live in interesting times. We do. I'm just saying there's nothing surprising about why they're interesting.

Now can I get my Advil please?

"And know the place for the first time."

Happy birthday, big guy.

Lipstick

Lipstick.

Pynchon Watch Y2K6: The illustrated edition (well, it would be, if I owned a scanner)

Hey kids! When we last left our almost unexplainable fascination with Thomas Pynchon and his upcoming novel Against the Day, which we here at TDAOC HQ have nearly next to no intention of actually reading once it's released (as much as the idea of playing Internet Grad Student with all the other crazy bastards who have preemptively cleared off their calendars for the next eight months may appeal, from a certain sick and twisted and yet nonetheless entertainingly desirable standpoint), we'd noted that the release date had been bumped up to November. A look at the Amazon product page for the already less-understood-than-the-average-brick book also reveals that the page count has leapt from 900-odd pages to 1120 pages. For those of you who didn't wake up after four sordid college years with minors in mathematics, I can safely derive for you that that right there is an integrated shitload of pages. Personally, I hope the extra 200 pages contain nothing more than one long list of obscure, contextless references designed solely to keep True Pynchon Fanatics busy with their researching and referencing and thinking until the man publishes his next book in late 2018.

But while the future is soon to be now the past ain't even past yet and Gravity's Rainbow is about to get the pretty pretty picture treatment. No no, don't get your hopes up, it's not a Major Motion Picture starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: Garth Risk Hallberg, guest-blogging at The Millions, alerts us to the release of Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated, which features one picture drawn by Zak Smith for every single page of GR. You can see all 760 images online; much like the text of the book itself, I have no idea what the shit-hell to make of it. But the pictures are pretty neat anyway.

What's of interest about the book version for me--and for you fans of me and my impeccable taste in tasty things--is that the book has an intro penned by Steve Erickson, author of Our Ecstatic Days (one of my top two Books of 2005) and a bunch of other books which I read all at once last year causing semi-permanent self-brain-breaking. Can't say I'll need the book, but I'll be curious to see what Erickson has to say about all of it. Probably doubtlessly something totally awesome.

And so long as we're on the subject of Erickson and authors I profess to care little to nothing for or about and yet feel compelled to mention them with some regularity--remember that new post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy book I mentioned a while back? Yeah, well, who better to review it than Steve Erickson? So he did just that. And dammit if the review ("Apocalypse is personal. It's in the details.") doesn't further pique my interest. (Via Jeff at Syntax of Things, who certainly doesn't hurt the cause by calling The Road one of the best books he's ever read.)

Happy Birthday, Dmitri Shostakovich

I'm ashamed to admit that though I've read William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, I've yet to track down good recordings of Dmitri Shostakovich's work. (What, you think it's all lame Squarepusher jokes musicwise up in this joint? Naw, man; I got, like, class, and stuff. Or at least, I used to go to some classes a long time ago.)

Monday marks Shostakovich's 100th birthday. AllMusic--also known as "AllYourTimeJustWentDownTheDrain"--notes the occasion, and has posted some 30 second samples of his music. Not quite going to cut it as far as really experiencing the music goes, but it's a nice reminder that I still need to find his stuff for real.

IDMs with Wolves

...starring Tom Jenkinson as Kevin Costner.

Special Topics in What the Hell?

So I finished reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics last night.

Yeah.

Huh.

Uh.

...

Let's say I liked it and leave it at that for now while I continue to, ah, process. And that those of you who had already read it pretty much had every right to giggle to yourselves when you read my previous comments.

Yeah.

"Pros like me, we contain multitudes."

Matthew Tiffany's response to the Lev Grossman interview. (The line I quote in the subject line made me laugh out loud.)

Next thing you know, people on the internet will be using the internet for the intended purpose of the internet, OH NOES

Lev Grossman--who is, like, some important guy, or something--says:

At the risk -- nay, certainty -- of sounding kind of snobbish, I wish book sections in general would leave book-reviewing to the pros. There's a pervasive notion that anybody who can read can write a book review. Not so. Good god, there is nothing so boring, so dank and unappealing on the page, as a bad book review.

I'd reply at length, but my brain made like a finely-tuned wave crashing against the immovable rocky shore of the last sentence's stupidity; it done well broke on that shit. (I mean, come on. Things that, on a page, would be more boring, dank, and/or unappealing include high school poetry, wet caves, feces, and many professional book reviews. And I'm not even trying.)

I shall, instead, pretty much command you who are interested in this subject to go read Bud Parr's excellent break-down of the book review and response landscape. Teaser ahead!

Having defined a book review we have to acknowledge that what most people are doing, amateurs and professionals alike, are just writing about books, plain and simple. Whether or not there really is a "pervasive notion that anybody who can read can write a book review" is questionable. The truth is that writing itself stands on its own in this world of amateurism; a review by an amateur will not be read because the writer sits comfortably behind the reputation of a newspaper, but because it's smartly written and interesting; the crème de la crème shall, to mix a metaphor, rise on its own.

(And lest I seem like I hate Lev, note that the sentence that follows in that interview the ones I quoted above is "And at the risk of sounding reverse-snobbish, I'd like to see more serious review attention go to genre fiction," which, well, okay, you can't hate a guy who says things like that. Even if he is a big stupid jerk.)

Grant Bailie is a lit-tease

Some of the best opening lines I've read in a while.

We built this city on soup cans and crabs

You know what this city needs? More Erin O'Brien. The Free Times is doing its part by giving her a regular column. She's written for them before--she notes that past columns have dealt with "the local race track and masturbation and crossdressers." So you know it's gonna be fun.

Admit it, you know you love her, if for no other reason than she also hates it when I act all smart and crap.

That's it, I'm takin' my blog and I'm goin' home

Even Austin Kleon's mistakes are cooler than my blog's best moments. (Which, okay, wouldn't be hard to do, but.)

Had enough Mark Z. Danielewski yet?

Of course you haven't. Here's a big-ass article and interview at Los Angeles City Beat. I haven't read it all yet, but based on this paragraph which caught my eye, it looks like it will be good reading:

"House of Leaves was about plot," says Danielewski. "It was a house that sat on a 'plot,' and it was about stories, just like a house is supposed to have many 'stories.' Only Revolutions is about character. It is a character – literally and figuratively – 'driven' book." It doesn't grab the reader as immediately as House of Leaves or have the previous novel's polyphony of perspectives. The book hurtles you straight onto the road and into the split-screen vortex of the folie à deux of its couple, without the framing narratives or scholarly apparatus. "It's getting out of the 'House,'" says Danielewski, "away from ancestors and progeny, which is what House of Leaves is about." The "This is not for you" injunction of his first novel is replaced in Only Revolutions with the phrase "You were there." If House of Leaves is a centripedal book – moving further and further into the interior of its uncannily oversized edifice – Only Revolutions is a centrifugal book, venturing into the great outdoors, embracing the road and the world that whirls around its archetypal teens.

(See "Post 414," Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks)

Because I sometimes feel the need to listen to the hype, I'm reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl right now, because that's what all the kids on the street are talking about these days, and I'm about two-fifths of the way through it, and it's pretty good, and occasionally is really funny, and has boldly colored characters in what feels like an interesting, if somewhat slow-moving, situation; I want to know what happens next, which is good. The book's narrated in a voice that is all about being a voice, whether or not that voice sees itself as being as present as it is. There's a certain undercurrent of absurdity to the narrative voice and the narrator herself which is oddly appealing, once you get attuned to it. In short, it's a fun enough read so far.

But I've got two problems with the book, both of which deal with narratorial tics, if you can call repeatedly and spontaneously slapping oneself in the face with a ripening clump of kelp while talking to the guy behind the counter at the post office a "tic." First, there's the constant reference to other texts. (Movies, books, whatever.) If I met this narrator in real life, and she talked that way to me in real life (which she wouldn't, she being a shy sort)? I'd cry a little on the inside. Because it makes me feel sort of dumb. It's terribly distracting and annoying. As is, my eyes are slowly learning to skim anything that appears after the word "see" between parentheses. I sort of wouldn't mind a bootleg Phantom Edit copy in which all the intertextual-references have already been Yossarianed for me.

And, second, and here I'm talking to you, Blue van Meer, narrator of the book, as if you were real, because sometimes you do feel real to me, which is yet another compliment inconveniently dropped into the middle of a complaint because oh I so do hate to complain when things are otherwise going well, because it makes me feel guilty as hell: Blue? Hon? Love? Oh precocious and vaguely Daria-esque maiden of my heart? Shut up about your father. Shut up. Shut. Up. Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut up. He's a great guy. I get it. We all get it. We got it a long time ago. You're an interesting creature, and you give me great hope when you see your own outline outside the shadow of that great, great man. But the thing about progress is it doesn't involve going backwards all the time. Break the hold he has on you. I'm pulling for you. There's a lot of pages left. Use them wisely.

Video killed the novelist star; also, yet more rambling about Mark Z. Danielewski, and experimental literature

Here's a little video interview with Mark Z. Danielewski. Kind of neat. Interesting fact: each page of Only Revolutions apparently contains 360 words. Which makes sense once you look at the book, and I'm surprised I hadn't guessed so on my own yet. (Via.)

Also, Scott at Conversational Reading calls some BS. Like the current commenters, I disagree that some of his selections are "experimental" books. Infinite Jest, yes. (Though, as per my recent musings, I think it was the quality of the writing--sentences!--in that book, when they were at their best, that was what made the book most interesting--far more so than silly footnotes about the names of drugs.) The Corrections, not so much. (Though gods lords yes I loved that book, and I liked what he did with the pacing and structure of the story, I'd be hard pressed to say it's a truly experimental text.) What I got through of Underworld some years back didn't scream experimental to me, nor has what William Vollmann I've read (which is admittedly extremely little). And while I don't know Scott Erickson's work I would not hesitate to add Steve Erickson's name to the list, whose Our Ecstatic Days was phenomenal, nevermind the fascinating playfulness of his entire back catalogue. Also, most recently, and obviously: The Exquisite by Laird Hunt. (Which I still am recovering from, though I think I'm almost there. Believe you me: not reading a book for an entire week feels downright queer.)

Whatever my thoughts on Scott's list, though, I do agree that I think there's far more experimental literature (however one may choose to define "experimental") out there than the reviewer Scott quotes gives credit for. Of course, at the same time, I do find that House of Leaves felt like a thunderbolt. Or maybe like a buckshot to the emotional gut. If for no other reason than that book felt more fun to read than many other books I'd read up to that point. I do think the quality of the writing and the experimentation in that book do things few other books do. It found its own (literal and figurative) space to exist in.

All of THAT said--I've no interest in the possibly logical outcome of these ramblings, which is seeking an accurate definition of what is and isn't experimental literature, what elements comprise an experimental work. Scott's got something different in mind with his list than I do with mine. And that's cool. But I'll stick with an "I know it when I see it" idea of what it is.

"Where do we go from here? / The words are coming out all weird"

Damn. The Exquisite ruined me a little, I think. I mean, I was on a pretty good run of books before I read that one, and it was good because I needed a really pretty good run, but then to get blown out of the water by one, I dunno. I look at the shelves and it's like, what have you other books got to offer me, right now, where I am? Maybe we'll be friends later, but not right now. Not just yet.

That said, Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions came out yesterday. I don't have it yet, but I will soon, because whether or not I'm ready for it, I need it. Likely is, if you know who he is by now, you already know whether you need it or whether you emphatically don't need it. Actually, you probably know whether or not you need it based on whether the thought of extremely experimental fiction gives you joy or fear. I expect the book will change few minds.

That said, if you are still on the fence, I doubt this article is going to push you one way or the other. Basically all you learn is that, hey, Danielewski has the gall to not be his characters. Shocking! Also you learn he maybe thinks highly of himself. Shocking!

The article does sort of dance around a good point, one that's pretty crucial from my perspective: for all the high-falutin' intellectual hooha Danielewski offers, it's the unfatigued imaginative spirit of House of Leaves that makes it an indubitable winner for me. To try to explain: He does all sorts of layout stuff in that book, sure, and it's all good clean fun, but none of it means anything on its own. The fact that he uses these techniques to further a story (made of stories) in interesting new ways is part of what makes it worth something. That all of it is built up out of good strong sentences--oh yes, those basic building blocks of all literature, sentences with voice and meaning and tone and implication--that's what makes the magic happens. It's the voices of Johnny Truant and Zampanó, the play of their stories off each other, that goes farthest for me in creating the illusion of depth within the novel. The sense that there are unfathomable distances between the pages that are left to be explored. Or run from.

Also it certainly doesn't hurt that Danielewski's got the coolest autograph ever. Seriously, you can look at my copy of the book, but keep your hands off. I'll cut ya.

Also it doesn't hurt that the story is just spooky as hell.

Also, come on: Poe. Someone stirred in an extra helping of hot when they were cooking up that family's cup of the gene pool. Haunted, people. Check it. One of the best albums of the decade. Try to fight me on this one. I dare ya. I'll cut ya.

I digress.

To go back to sentences--it's the same thing going on in The Exquisite. The structure of the book is pretty fascinating, and is what gives it its experimental edge. But there is something really unique going on with the voice of the narrator there. A certain shiftiness or slurriness to the voice on a sentence-by-sentence level, as if there's something really multipronged about the guy's mindset. But then that's just one more thing I look forward to paying more attention to next time I read the book. Once I, like, learn how to read again.

New litmag - samizDADA

Here's something. samizDADA is a new lit-ish magazine that promises both a print edition and an ongoing online presence. Sounds like they've got an interesting missionesque-statement:

Regarding samizdat, we will accept for publication things that other magazines may not, and we encourage an open attitude towards the pieces that we do publish. If you read or see something on the site that you like, pass it on. Print out a copy for yourself. Print out a copy for someone else. Print out a few copies, staple them together, and leave them in a pile at your favorite coffee shop. Hell, print out your favorites and mail them randomly to people in the phone book...

Regarding dada, the other half of the magazine’s name, we value the absurd and the reactionary. Absurdity is often lost in many of today’s literary works; instead of sprawling, careening fun, the literary scene is taken up with short stories of grim and gritty realism (often dealing with young people and their difficulties with their parents / the modern world / etc.). We appreciate stories, poetry, art, and photography with a sense of whimsy and fun. It is even better if you have a point, but it is not required.

They'll be publishing under Creative Commons, so if you're into that sort of thing, there you go; also, they're looking for submissions.

The Exquisite by Laird Hunt

The Exquisite by Laird Hunt is experimental and noir and dreamy and disturbing and complex and dark and hilarious and is one of the most enjoyable and thrilling books I've read since I started this blog. Now and then when I was reading it I had to put it down and it was physically painful to do so because I really wanted to devour the entire thing all at once, but it was mentally necessary to get away from it because, damn.

Plus, the cover totally rules.

Bud Parr suggests (some quantity of possible-spoiler level info in that review, not necessarily in a giving-away-the-ending sense but which, if you're like me, you might still be happier avoiding until after you've read the novel) that the book might be appropriate for fans of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes (remade as Vanilla Sky). Matthew Tiffany seems to recall the book being compared to Cloud Atlas. I'd say those are fair comparisons. I'll go a step further: if you're at all interested in the intersection of experimental narrative and fantastic story-telling, then you should read this book. Hell, even if you're only interested in one or the other, you should still give it a shot.

If you're at all interested in reading the book--and you should be--then you might not want to read any more reviews. If you know what I mean, then you know what I'm driving at: half the fun of this sort of book is experiencing it raw for the first time, of finding out what sort of book it is as you read it. But at the same time, I'll say I suspect the book doesn't exhaust itself after a first reading. There's plenty here I look forward to re-reading. Plenty here that I suspect will gain additional resonance during future readings.

Plus I'm also totally looking forward to re-reading the opening story of Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen because Hunt's book explicitly references Link's book. So you might want to pick up a copy of that, too, when you place your order. Or, if you're already a fan of Ms. Link, then, well, go read Hunt's book. Now.

Other items of note: Laird Hunt has an author's Web site and a blog. MetaxuCafe.com is throwing an Exquisite Party in NYC on September 17 where you can meet Hunt; I would totally go if I lived a couple states closer. The Exquisite is published by Coffee House Press, who also published Sleep, an anthology of short stories by Stephen Dixon which has been on my TBR pile for some time now.

TDAOC HQ: The editors have been sacked

I was recently unkind toward a review of Jennifer Egan's The Keep. Donna Bowman, author of the review, was kind enough to drop by and set the record straight about her intentions. Seems the source of my ire--a statement about Ms. Egan being a "known" chick-lit author--was probably not actually written by Ms. Bowman. Misunderstandings and outlandish reactions, on my part, ensued.

(What all this really means, of course, is that I'm now focusing my death-ray vision on the Onion A.V. Club editorial offices, with special focus on the bored intern, or whoever, it was who wrote the offending intro statement.)

So, be sure to go read Ms. Bowman's response, then come back here and call me names, because I'm dumb. Here, I'll start: I'm dumb!

And by hazardous, I mean, scrumptious

Warning: Reading Maureen McHugh's blog may be hazardous to one's diet.

(I'll say I like the new name of her blog, though I'll admit I was pulling for "Sorry Darby" to get bumped up to main-title status. I like to think that sort of thing would do wonders for my yet-still-not-actually-existent writing career.)

Pynchon Watch Y2K6: Cover image, release date; grass, your ass

Amazon's got a cover image posted for the upcoming Thomas Pynchon novel, Against the Day. It's sparse. But there's a symbol on it. Hey, Blue! What do you make of that clue? Is it the real deal? An advanced copy cover? Does it really even matter to the legion of eager fans?

Also, note that the release date has been bumped up to November. So if you're like me and you were considering reading all of Pynchon's other stuff before the new one comes out so you can play along at home with all the grad students on the Internet? Forget it. Go home. It's over. You're screwed.

Ow ow ow ow Ow Ow Ow OW OW OW OUCH

If I've been remiss in replying to the fact that The Onion AV Club this week referred to Jennifer Egan as a "known chick-lit author" it's because every time I start to try to think of a reply worded strongly enough, my brain saves me from having to plumb such depths of my soul by jumping out of my head and strangling itself to death right here next to me on my living room carpet. Seriously, that hurts by the fourth of fifth time.

About as far as I can get each time before brain-death sets in is to say that if you read Look At Me and your thought at the end of the book was "Mmmm...fluffylicious!" then you need to go back and re-read that book because you missed a little something. I mean, you missed all of it. Either that, or you were actually reading a cake. With your tongue.

On the upside, props to Donna Bowman for giving the book an A. I hope this means lots of people get past the total weird backhanded nature of the compliment and they read the book. I also hope that by the time they finish the book they've completely forgotten Bowman's review and they go out and read Look At Me. And then Jennifer Egan will actually be even-more-widely-known as the interesting, challenging writer she is.

(See also: Condalmo, who disliked the review even more than I did.)

Random thought

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany is science fiction the way The Trial by Franz Kafka is a legal thriller.

Curiouser and curiouser

Amazon has some links to example pages from Mark Z. Danielewski's upcoming book Only Revolutions.

Free-verse story telling? Check.

Outrageous book design? Check.

Parallel spiral plots? Check.

Lines like "I'll destroy the World"/"I'll devastate the World"? Check.

The hairs on the back of my neck raised in the delightful buzz of geeked-out anticipation? Check.

Cat Power was going to call her most recent album The Cheesiest until someone suggested that title wouldn't be the greatest

Good grief! What does Ed Champion have against the writers I like? Is he going to go through the lot of them tearing them apart one by one like some author-eating Audrey II? Should I take down my China Miéville post before E.C. gets wind of it and sets his critical sights on yet another writer I hold near and dear? Because after his takedown of Mark Z. Danielewski, I don't think I can stand to watch another round of...

Erm, wait. Ed seemed to, uhm, enjoy House of Leaves. Well. Pish-posh. I might have to take back my cheese comment.

(And hey, Ed: this'll come in handy. I've been using it tonight myself. Miéville. There's one that should be in the Hard to Pronounce Literary Names guide.)