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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you know what I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five alternate titles for Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9

1. Moby Dick II: reAhab


2. Flubber!: The Musical!


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


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


5. Matthew Barney's Delicate Purple Dinosaur

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

Awesome.

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

Also

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

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

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

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

Okay, so, yeah: Akron. Yeah.

From the library's Web site:

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

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

(Thanks to Amy for the tip.)

In which your narrator has nothing nice to say

Five synonyms for "good times"

Things, randomly:

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

Kazuo Ishiguro and knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you...accessible?

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

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

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

The unconwhat?

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

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

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

Or...

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

Inland Empire

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

Let your inner Yossarian out to play

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

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

I.

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

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


II.

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

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

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


III.

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

Upcoming events

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

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

Drained

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

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

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

We'll see where I land.

War and Peace Beta v0.72.1

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

...

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

The end of me

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

Which is to say: Awesome!

Onward and upward

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

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

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

Switching and witching

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

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

Director's commentary

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

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

February Quick Hits at Arriviste Press

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

"A Shower of Rain" by Gerald Dawe

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

I like it.

YES YES YES YES YES YEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

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

Excuse me while I completely freak out.

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

Well, okay, speaking of Pynchon...

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

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

This, that, and the other

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



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



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

Stephen Dixon interview

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

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

City Paper: Are you Thomas Pynchon?

Stephen Dixon: No.

Which, really: what a hilarious thought.

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

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

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

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

Free poetry

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

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

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

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

(...)

(Go Browns! Woof woof woof!)

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



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

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

Wizard of the Crow discussion

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

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

Whatever it was, it was probably awesome

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

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

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

Or, in this case, any answers.

My days just became ecstatic

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

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

Yeah.

Battlestar Haiku

(Previously on Battlestar Haiku.)

Oh, Gaius Baltar,
You crazy motherfucker.
Swim, man. Swim like mad.

Coffee, books, and sex appeal

Here's a handy guide to help you figure out where you land on the TDAOC Hierarchy of Sex Appeal:

1. If you are Julianne Moore, you are the sexiest person in the room.


2. If Julianne Moore is not in the room, and if you are handing me a cup of coffee, you are the sexiest person in the room, regardless of how you are dressed.


3. If you are Julianne Moore, and you are handing me a cup of coffee, you are impossibly perfect, and my brain would rather melt than attempt to comprehend the mythical levels of your sex appeal.


4. While the remaining levels of the hierarchy are completely predictable to anybody who follows the adventures and thinkings of the TDAOC staff while yet being far too complex and intricate to be accurately written out in a hierarchical format, it may be suggested that one's stature may potentially be enhanced via use of certain advanced mate-attracting pheromonal scent technologies. While first-hand scientific analysis of this theory has yet to be performed, grant application study proposals are being accepted for review.

They were going to be The Hundred Visions and Revisions, but they're rather modest sorts

Not quite book related, but still awesome: if you have yourself one of them MySpace accounts the kids are all hopped up on these days, go befriend The Muttering Retreats. They're three friends of mine who have set out to become the most polite band in the history of indie-rock. (Long-time readers of this blog may recognize Chris as being the oft-alluded-to-on-this-blog Friend Chris, who, turns out, has talents beyond "ability to be alluded to on half-rate local litblog." Huh! Who'd'a thunk, right?)

If you're in town, near town, or understand the definition of the word "town" on April 13, they'll be playing their debut show at the Beachland, opening for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Which, I mean: hello, awesome. So show up early and buy them beer. I imagine they will accept graciously.

In which your humble narrator attempts to say something about The Coast of Akron but probably says more about himself than anything else

I.

I liked The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller. Really. A lot. Like, I think you should read it. Consider it a suggestion, or a recommendation, or a command to anybody into the sorts of things I am into. Things I am into, for those of you who have lost your notes or who are just now joining me, include (but are not limited to!) things that are funny in sad ways and sad in funny ways. Both of which qualities this book exhibits in fine quantity.

But so you know I haven't flown over the edge of reason, I'll employ the clever book reviewer's technique of admitting that the book is flawed. This makes me look critical and sexy-keen, and helps justify my crazed raving about the book being awesome.

The book's primary flaw is that it is not propulsive. Not that it's a trudge to read it, but it's not a particularly fast read. This book--unlike, say, Original Bliss, by A. L. Kennedy, which I've already mentioned, which kept me up well past bedtime the night I started reading it--was not hard for me to put down.

It's a plot/structure thing. The book is a miniature dysfunctional family epic, focusing on the world-renowned self-portrait artist Lowell Haven, his ex-wife Jenny, their daughter Merit, and Lowell's gay lover (and friend/acquaintance of Jenny's since high school) (and very very very wealthy) Fergus. The book shifts perspectives between a present-day first person account by Fergus, a third person view of Merit, and journal entries of Jenny's from the late-70s/early-80s. The book is structured such that it is established early on that these characters are all initially separate from each other, and that they will be brought together by the end of the book at a party, where things will go more or less as you expect they would.

Plotwise, that's about it. When you realize how the book will play out, there isn't much of a "What's going to happen next?" thing that drives you to keep reading. Being the sort of person who is often easily distracted by bright shiny objects, the Internet, or stray puffs of air that might exist somewhere else at any given moment, I found it easier to put the book down than I might have wished.


II.

So now then. I've done the critical blah blah blah thing. Now I can talk about how much ass this book kicks.

This book kicks so much ass. I'd say it's not even funny how much ass this book kicks, but part of what the book kicks so much ass at is being funny. So that's out.

There's a ton of good stuff going on in this book, more than enough to offset the structure flaw thing. (Which, really? Not a flaw. Not at all. Just something to keep in mind when you're picking which book you want to read next.) When you first pick the book up, it might not seem obvious that the book does have an agenda. There's a lot of weird things happening, and there's a slightly surreal tone to it, and it might seem like much of it isn't connected to any of the rest of it. Picking up all these pieces and seeing how they connect and resonate becomes part of the fun of the book. (It's far less grad-student-nerdy treasure-hunty than I'm making it sound, don't worry.) In time (and it would probably take less time for better readers than I), though I felt a bit (pleasantly) lost in the early stages of my reading, a portrait of the book's intentions formed in my mind.

Which leads me to my next clever critical book reviewer gambit, the Big Bad-ass Bold Claim: in The Coast of Akron, Adrienne Miller tackles the idea of ego and identity the way David Foster Wallace addressed entertainment and addiction in Infinite Jest.

(Oh, yes. I went there. I went there hard.)

The DFW name-dropping doesn't stop there. Wait for it...wait for it...go: If in Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace created the PGOAT, or the Prettiest Girl of All Time, Adrienne Miller, in The Coast of Akron, created, in Lowell Haven, the MEMOAT: the Most Egotistical Man of all Time.

(That right there? That's the sound of the extra point kick being good.)

Lowell, the self-portrait artist, the MEMOAT. Dude's bonkers. Of the four main characters, we spend the least time with him. But he's the catalyst of everything that happens, no doubt. Here's where I'll back off, and suggest that you're best off seeing for yourself the limitlessness of his self-obsession. He does things that, when you see them happen, they're somehow both glaringly obvious and surprisingly awesome. I'm not sure how many times I found myself saying to myself, "Of course he would do that," while still laughing about it.

The theme of self-portraiture runs through the entire book. It's no mistake, I'm certain, that Jenny, as a young artist, is revealed primarily through journal entries. Then there's Fergus, who, trapped in Lowell's shadow (and his own inability to create himself in his own image), in a futile fit of escapism, writes a series of over-inflated magazine profile pieces about himself. Pretty much everything about the guy seems futile.

Understatement alert: these three characters have issues. With themselves, and with each other.

Then there's Merit. Oh, Merit. Merit's the result of the mess of Jenny and Lowell and Fergus, three of the most self-involved characters I've read recently. Merit seems to be the weird flip-side of the equation; she's grown up to be her own mess, but unlike her parents and "uncle," who are all messed up in each other because they are so self-assured (except when they aren't), Merit's got nothing. She's a self-questioning placeless seemingly empty mess who's desperately looking to be filled in. (Cough. Cough.)

In an interview at small spiral notebook, Adrienne Miller says, "Readers might have their own take on this, but, to me, Fergus is both the stylistic and emotional heart of the book." It's true that I do have my own take on this, in that it was the Merit chapters I felt most drawn to and into. Though, Fergus definitely had some of great stylistic quirks. Another one of those odd pleasures that do keep you coming back to the book is seeing the ways in which he's (consciously or not) glommed on to the personalities of the other characters in the book. And...

And, yeah. There's a lot going on here. Did I mention this book kicks ass? Man. This book kicks some serious ass.


III.

There's a lot more I could talk about. The "Ohio"-ness of the book, the heartbreaking use of the blimp, the dead-on office humor (and whether office humor isn't perhaps cheap these days), Merit's husband and step-daughter, the other secondary characters (who fill out the margins of the story with a rich level of color), the other literary influences/references that the book may or may not exhibit (I really need to read Mrs. Dalloway soon because I suspect there might be a Mrs. Dalloway thing going on here but I'm not sure), the whole Randy thing, the animals, all of it. But instead I'd like to close off this post with a brief look at one of my favorite topics: me.

Me me me.

Oh...me.

Thesis statement

I keep trying to say lots of things about this book, but I haven't yet gotten my thoughts sorted out well enough to make them make sense to you, which means I haven't even gotten around to stating the main point yet, so I'm going to go ahead and do that now, laying out what amounts to little more than a thesis statement, one which I'd like to support with evidence and analysis and discussion when I'm feeling slightly more mentally and life-ally organized, but at least in the meantime I can get this much out there for your consideration, this one key point, which is this: The Coast of Akron by Adrienne Miller is an excellent novel that kicks all sorts of ass all over the place, and I happily recommend it to anybody looking for a strangely moving yet equally hilarious read.

Cleveland stuff: Bloomsday Book Club, JCU writers reading, Canadian writers series

Spotted this in the current issue of Cool Cleveland:

Bloomsday Book Club
Book club devoted to the last novel written by James Joyce, the legendary Finnegans Wake. The group will slowly tackle one of the most renowned and respected works in the English language. Group kicks off on Thu 1/25 at 6PM. Loganberry Books, Shaker Hts.

I'm tempted to join in--I think the only way I'll ever read Finnegans Wake is if I've got other people dragging me kicking and screaming through it, or, like, if a cute girl said I should read it, and she maybe blinked at me while she said so--but reality is I will likely wuss out, what with all those other important things I do, like, uhm. Stuff. With things. And, uh, stuff.

Also, not sure whether I'll make this, though I'm sure it promises to be a yabba-dabba-Bilgere-tastic time:

Get Lit features award-winning local writers/John Carroll University faculty members George Bilgere, Paula McLain, Steven Hayward, Philip Metres, Mary Weems and Sarah Willis in a special poetry performance Wed 1/24 at 8PM. No-cost event takes place at JCU's Rodman Hall, 20700 N. Park Blvd., University Hts. Call 397-4528 for details.

Nothing on the JCU site about that, but I do see that the Red, White and Read: Canadian Writers Come to Cleveland series is having a second go-round this year. Featured authors are David Bezmozgis, Michael Redhill, and Alistair MacLeod. Check the JCU site for dates and times.

Book giveaway

Get thyself to The Litblog Co-op, where the discussion of Valerie Trueblood’s Seven Loves begins with a book giveaway contest. Sounds like an interesting title. (One of these days, I really am going to go into seclusion, and read all the books they've suggested but which I haven't gotten to yet. My favorite nominated titles have been ones that weren't selected for the Read This! pick.)

Favorites, and, A New Favorite

I.

The idea of favorites has been bugging me lately. As in, I don't know what mine are. I think it's a matter of definition: somewhere along the line, I maybe bought a little bit into deconstructionism. It makes it hard to pick out absolutes when all you see is difference. You say a favorite is a thing liked the most. I ask: Liked how? Liked when? Liked to what end? It all becomes muddy if you think about it too hard. Which I encourage you not to do. I prefer to be a source of joy, not nasty Tylenol-commercial-level headaches.

Still, tough to talk about things (such as, ooooo-o-o-o-oh, books, to take one purely random example) that can be liked without hinting at the fact that there exists some kind of ultimate Platonic-ideal form of "liking," as well as whatever the opposite of that is. (I skipped out on Philosophy after my 101 college class. The Linguistics class I took really didn't count for much more than my own amusement. I mean, that stuff was sexy and all, pretty to look at, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't exactly accessible to me in any useful way. Which, come to think of it, probably summed up how I saw most campus sorority girls. But that's another post, entirely.) During my reading this week, I came up with an alternate, and practical, way of defining who my favorite authors are. You can play along at home: ask yourself, about a specific author, whether you would drop anything and everything in your hands (excluding babies, and very expensive and fragile crystals, both of which, in a pinch, can be sold on the black market, to enable the purchase of new books) in order to read a new book by that author at the moment of publication.

I rather like the strict black-and-white nature of the question. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of authors I'd say yes to: Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan. I mean, duh. Jeff Noon, Steve Erickson, yes. Mary Gaitskill, I think I would like to give the nod to her, here. I'm sure I'm missing plenty of names here (and there are more than a few who I would like to read new books by but who I might feel okay waiting on). I like that it's a small number of names, in any case. Makes me look like a smart chap, the sort who has standards, and is therefore deserving of your trust.

Things get knotty after that: while, for some definition or another, Infinite Jest could be considered one of my favorite novels, David Foster Wallace himself is curiously a no to drop-everything question. But! He will become an unholy-levels-of-dread-and-affirmation level yes the moment I learn that he is going to publish a novel. I suspect the same thing is going on for Jonathan Franzen, too. I suspect it is assholes like me who make it hard for authors like these fellows to publish new novels. For which I apologize, while also shrugging, and saying, hey, what can you do, right?

Some other big TDAOC-endorsed names also get voted no, like William T. Vollmann and Stephen Dixon, though they would be voted yes to another potential (and far more broad) favorites classification question, that of whether you can conceivably see yourself systematically working your way through the author's entire back catalogue, however large it may be, in however much time it might take. This question, perhaps obviously, leads to a far longer list of names, and makes me look like a far less-exacting, more-well-read, quite-likeable sort of chap. Plus it opens the field of play to dead authors, who, like blocks of expensive cheese, are categorically incapable of writing new books, but remain very nice in their own peculiar ways.

I've gone through this little exercise as a lengthy lead-in to an exciting conclusion: I think I've found a new favorite author. And not just in the loose Tier Number Two sense (though, definitely, yes, to that), but in the rather more elite "Whip out your tiki torches and loud shirts because we're having ourselves an up-all-night author party" Tier Number One sense.

Honest. It's really and truly all sorts of exciting. What can I say: some people get the power up and win the game; I fall in love with authors. (Well, when I'm not getting the power up and winning the game, at least, which, yeah, that also sort of rules.)

I just, uh, hope Kazuo Ishiguro and Jennifer Egan aren't jealous types.


II.

A. L. Kennedy.

I read her most recent novel, Paradise, sometime in 2005, and I liked it plenty. I guess it took a long walk through the wilderness to see just how much I liked her writing, though, since I only now got around to reading an earlier novel of hers, Original Bliss. To be certain, I've read plenty of damn fine books in between those two. And yet, after returning to her familiar yet distinct prose, I now feel a little bit more guilty about not getting back to her stuff sooner.

The voice of Original Bliss is sparser than I remember that of Paradise being, which makes sense in that the prose of Paradise had to keep up with the woozy drunken mindset of its narrator, while that of Original Bliss had to work in a much tighter (but hardly less complex) space. Yet it seems to me that the two books share some obvious amount of genetic material. There's some definite sibling-resemblance thing going on there. As if this lurched-in-the-gut feeling both books left me with could have only come about through some family-taught technique.

This is where, were I studious, I'd spill out ten thousand words or so about Original Bliss, the story, the themes, the ideas, and the novel's voice, and I'd point to examples of everything I'm talking about. (Examples of simply amazing writing abound throughout the book. I had to force myself, now and then, to stop adding asterisks to the margins, and acknowledge that really, I just wanted to draw a big huge star on the front cover, because, just, all of it, the whole damn thing. Really.) It's that kind of book. It's a short one, which offers more rewards than it can seemingly contain.

But, you know I'm a lazy blogger and all, so instead I'm going to try to say just one thing about the book here. I love the way Kennedy's prose tosses out these bursts of sudden, devastating color, in a way that seems blunt but breathlessly effortless. It's like she finds holes in her prose and fills them with zigs and zags and a general sense of looseness that, really, how can all that be there, on the page? How can prose feel both like tight structured prose and a real live brain?

Comes down to insane excellence in word choice, I think. There's a point early in the book that, when I reached it, made me pretty much totally lose my shit. The two main characters of the novel are having a conversation. They make an awkward (understatement!) pair, one that probably should never have happened, but somehow did. During their conversation, when things were beginning to go a little more fluidly for them, there was a moment of silence, one that "blundered" between them.

"Blundered," seriously, are you shitting me?

Maybe you had to be there, but it's the kind of moment that, it wasn't so much a word usage, as a thermonuclear gigaton word deployment, it's so deadly, and perfect, and accurate, and summary of not just that moment of the book, but, in effect, every preceding page of the novel. I imagine Kennedy had to get some kind of military clearance before going there. Like, what form do you fill out for that? For tossing a live grenade into the middle of a bubble bath that was already a bit too hot to begin with?

Here's the compliment that, I guess, only makes sense if you're not just a reader, but someone struggling to write your own fiction, as well: that "blundered," it immediately, and almost unfairly, rose the bar I've set for myself and my own fiction writing. Which would be great if I were a published somebody. But I'm not even close to being that yet, so, you know: wow, damn. Discouraging, or challenging? I feel optimistic this week, so I'll go with challenging, but, damn, had I been in a particular down mood, when I'd hit that sentence, I'd have hung up on my writing career before it ever thought about maybe considering giving me a call.

Not that that's the only explosive moment of the book. Through and through, these words breathe, and speak, and make me want to go on, and on, and on about them, but I read another book right after it, one that I also want to say things about, maybe sometime in the next month, and, well. Yeah.

Yeah.

Day, A. L. Kennedy's new book, comes out in April. No idea if that goes for the U.S. or not. I would not mind if it did.

Poetry Appreciation Week(s) at Counterbalance

Over at Counterbalance, Callie's been hosting a Poetry Appreciation Week that has, in the way the best timelines do, spilled over into something longer than itself. Callie was kind enough to solicit some thoughts from me, but being statistically unable to get my literary shit together, I haven't yet managed to transpose the sweet music of my own genius onto pixels. But please do help me assuage my guilt by checking out Callie's thoughts and those shared by other litbloggers with a far shorter idea-to-action pipeline than I myself possess.

(Also, I can't help but point out that it looks like Oscar and Kacey would not do well together in book club. Only guessing, here.)

Someone call the Karma Police to arrest this man

You know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of authors being forced to use their sex appeal to sell books. First it was John "The Romantic" Keats and then it was Zadie "Quite a Lady" Smith and then we had Marisha "What a Dish-a" Pessl and now we have this. It's an outrage! A practical travesty! It's...

Oh, wait, that's actually an article about some new "greatest book ever" list. It's not about Tom Wolfe being "the hotness." Right. Sorry about that. Got hypnotized by the shirt.

The list, well, there's some new book out, and it's about some writers, who picked best books, then some other people worked mathematical voo-doo magic on it, and came up with a meta-list, and, well, you think it's wrong. The list. Not the maths.

Rumors of the death of the over-extended metaphor have been greatly exaggerated

I've been slacking off on my Erin O'Brien hype-boy duties. So when I was doing the daily Google Reader dance just now, and I saw Ed "The Red" Champion toss out a seemingly disposable comment about writers and honesty, and then a bit later I saw this post of Erin's, which ends with about as honest a statement as can exist on this level of reality; well, let's say that it was as if a thin layer of the universe had momentarily peeled back, revealing two dots embedded in the fabric of existence, one labeled "1", the other labeled "2". And here I sit, armed with a thick blue Laddie pencil, and the task of connecting them to reveal a hidden picture of awesome.

It's all in the timing

The world pays attention to me. It notices the fact that I'm taking an indefinite hiatus from Very Long Books, and so it goes out, and it causes some Very Long Books to be published that, were I not on said hiatus, I would probably read immediately. (Neither of these books, mind you, is by Don DeLillo--though during a rather energetic round of bowling this weekend, I may have gotten myself caught in the cross-fire of some sort of drunken blood oath to read Underworld this year. [But Friend Chris, the other half of the oath, is somewhere inside Gravity's Rainbow right now, and then he's planning on doing Infinite Jest next, so I figure I've got at least eight or nine months of breathing room before he brings in a truckload of ladies to bear witness as he starts calling me a scrawny little-book reading wimp, at which point I'll have to drop whatever Chekhov I'm working on so I can throw down in order to show him and the ladies--well, okay, it's mostly the ladies I'm concerned about here--what's what. Yeah, that's right: in my town, books are naught but a flimsy excuse for manly displays of valor.])

First book was just nominated by the LitBlog Co-Op as their Winter 2007 Read This! selection: Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I'm glad they nominated it, because it does look interesting, but it's one of those many books that I've seen lots of references to recently, which has upped the white noise quotient surrounding it in my brain, and has accordingly decreased the odds that I will actually read it. Looks like the paperback is due out in August, which, considering my current reading schedule and my tendency to play fall-behind, catch-up on the LitBlog Co-Op's picks, sounds about right.

The other, even longer, book, would be Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. I like novels about India or by Indian authors, but it's been a while since I've read anything in that vein, and this one sounds like a doozy. To be fair I started reading Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain last year or the year before and sputtered out on it, for reasons I can't recall. From the sounds of it, though, there's no way I'd lose interest midway through this new one. There's reviews everywhere: I'll be a good hometown boy and point to the Cleveland Plain Dealer review.

Then I'll note that, while this review at the Toronto Star is otherwise decent and enthusiastic, it does open with one of the more offensive paragraphs I've seen in my travels. ("I know what you're thinking. You take one look at that page count of Vikram Chandra's novel--916--and lament: "Do I really need another epic novel about India? After Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children? After Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance?") One might ask whether we really need another novel about white people in America after Tom Sawyer and The Catcher in the Rye, before jumping up on one's desk and shouting "U! S! A! U! S! A!" at top volume. Perhaps with foot-stomping. And fist-pumping. The answer, to this and the question posed in the review, is: yes, duh. I know I haven't gone out of my way on this blog to specifically advocate reading outside one's cultural comfort zone, but that doesn't mean I think we North Americans need to go out of our way to look like total assholes about ourselves.

The ad revenue alone will bankroll at least a thousand Mansquito sequels, and, if we're lucky, a second Lost Room series

So, speaking of Neal Stephenson, my Google alert finally brings something that isn't yet another article about how his novel Snow Crash inspired the online video-game universe Second Life:

At Sci Fi, "Diamond Age," exec produced by [George] Clooney and Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Prods., is a six-hour mini in development that's based on Neal Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer," which the author will adapt for the small screen. As the story goes, when a prominent member of society concedes that their futuristic civilization stifles creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter to serve as her guide through a surreal alternate world, but the device falls into the wrong hands.

Clooney producing? Stephenson adapting? That's not rain you hear: it's the sound of the entire executive staff of the Sci-Fi Channel collectively urinating themselves in shock and joy.

Two years of nonsense, and some book talk now and then, too

I tried to think of a good reason not to post this link. Really. In a marked departure from my typical "post first, regret later" technique, I've spent at least five minutes over the last two days debating this one. The best reasons I came up with were "Some people might not get it" and "It might make some people think I'm sort of weird," which, upon further reflection, were less about this particular link and more about this entire blog. Surprise, surprise: turns out not everybody thinks sitting up late at night typing on the Internet about books is "cool" or "hip" or "as fun as going to bars and waking up next to strangers." Pft, whatever--safe is the new dangerous, and that makes it way sexy, right? Right. Anyway, since hypothetical public opinion has never stopped me before, there was no logical reason for it to do so now, so I began to accept the task at hand.

Then I remembered that today, January 12, marks the second anniversary of the founding of this little self-indulgent exercise in time-wasting claptrap, and that cemented it, because honestly, is there any better way to celebrate the occasion than with Swedish Librarian Fashion photos? Suffice it to say that no, no there isn't, and that we here at TDAOC HQ emphatically condone this sort of behavior, and hope to see more of it in the future.

Also, rumor has it there's some fiction links, somewhere over there. Must be hidden somewhere on the sides of the page. Haven't found 'em yet.

I'll be back in a couple days with something else. Hell if I know what yet. Whatever it will be, it probably won't be as awesome as Swedish Librarian Fashion photos.

(Link via Bookninja.)

Marginalia - The System of the World

The clock starts on my mark

Something is about to happen that has not happened in a very long time: I'm about to begin reading a book that is not part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle. Which is to say that after drinking far more coffee yesterday than was perhaps healthy, I finished that series, meaning 2006 can now officially end, and 2007 may begin. (Only a week late. Not too bad.)

I could probably talk about the Baroque cycle for days. Specifically, I could probably bitch about elements of it for days, and praise other elements of it for an additional number of days. I don't know whether the two numbers would equal each other, because I'm not going there. Bottom line is, I certainly liked the series more than I did the first time I tried to read it, when it was originally published, and I'm glad I gave it another shot. (Everything that follows is informal, incomplete, and unprofessional. You've been warned!)

My bitches about the books mostly deal with style. Broadly speaking, in this series, Stephenson takes the balls-to-the-wall descriptiveness of Cryptonomicon, and re-shapes it into a more studied, stately, paced language, often technical and sometimes dry, and largely heavy, all of which is appropriate considering the era and subject matter he describes (the late 17th and early 18th centuries, mostly focusing on England, with stops throughout Europe and treks across the globe), but not typically as much fun to read. He likes to describe details first and explain the whole later, which is fun when you're in on the joke from the start but can be wearying after too many mildly disorienting occasions. He winks at us often, and hard; nobody should wink that much. He's definitely not writing in a period style, but there are tics and flourishes in there that pay homage to the era. That's not a complaint--nor is it a complaint that there are occasional dazzling or unexpectedly energetic or humorous bits of writing. The complaint is that the text isn't consistently and completely dazzling, humorous, or energetic.

The author of The Greatest Pizza Delivery Sequence in the History of Literature (see: Snow Crash) writing less-energetic language is disappointing, but not a deal breaker. Which I'm glad I discovered this time through, because there's damn good stuff in these books. Jack's wanderings about the world; philosophic discussions between major historical figures and Stephenson's made-up characters; liberal descriptions of ships and things that happen on them; Newton being a huge prick and Leibniz being a rather nice chap, the sort you'd like to have coffee with yourself; Jimmy and Danny the Irish Samurai, who I could not help but picture getting spun-off into their own film series just so the guys who did Boondock Saints could play them on the big screen; the list would go on, if I were a better note taker. I've never been a post-it note user while reading books? But reading this series, I could see just why I should be. I margin-starred plenty of great passages through all three books. Yeah, they're in there. Somewhere.

It's the disconnect between style and substance that seems most troubling to me, when it comes to Stephenson. He's a sort of master of the completely unnecessary info-dump. You can't bitch about him going on and on about whatever he finds interesting because that's his thing--it would be like criticizing Hamlet for thinking too much, or Virginia Madsen for being hot. What bugs me is that it feels like Stephenson so frequently and lengthily mis-steps in presenting that information to the reader, in these books. It's also highly likely that a lot of what he describes in these books, I'm just not as interested in--mea culpa, for every case I haven't remembered to recognize specifically. But plenty of those times it's possible I could have been convinced, were the author trying harder to convince me, that these were fascinating details.

Here's my big praise. Stephenson, through these books, largely succeeded in accomplishing something that rarely if ever happened in any history or literature class I took during my scholastic career: bringing this particular historical era, for me, to life, as being something that happened, something that was important, and something which has ramifications and consequences that are both current and relevant today. I can't comprehend the amount of information Stephenson had to have consumed, processed, and learned well enough to manipulate it into these books. No small feat. Count me among those waiting, with great curiosity, to see what he does next.

A look ahead

[Editor's note: an earlier, incomplete, inferior version of this post was leaked through authorial incompetence. The hopefully less sucky version appears below. Responsible parties have been sacked.]

Ladies and gentlemen, you, the People of the Internet, have spoken, and your multifarious voices have raised a most glorious collective cry, ringing in the New Year with a singular, overwhelming, and beautiful Truth, in your official nomination of me as Your Official Authority on Things I Know Nothing About. I shall serve faithfully but inexpertly in this role to the best of my inabilities.

In the meantime, while I'm setting up my office (and getting the number of Gaius Baltar's portrait artist), does anybody need to slay some vampires? Because, holy wiggins-makin' site-stats spike, Buffy.

But no, this is no time to dwell on that which is behind us--neither 2006, nor the young ladies sitting behind me in this coffee shop, who, were they to judge my character based solely on the things I've fact-checked via Google during the writing of this post, would probably find me morally and intellectually lacking. Not that I would blame them. If I saw someone who wasn't me googling both "Gaius Baltar" and "chick lit" within the same quarter hour, I'd probably politely ask them to leave so as to free up that bandwidth for people with more pressing things to waste time on.

Ahem. It's 2007 now, and that means there's lots of 2007-y things to look forward to. There's posts at The Millions and Bookdwarf and Conversational Reading and stories at the New York Daily News and the Guardian that suggest many upcoming titles that you might consider eagerly anticipating. If 2007 is already a little too Web 1.0 for you, you can take a look ahead at 2008 at The Millions.

Me, my plans for the year are sort of half-retro, half-futuristic. You can probably align me with Matthew Tiffany--I'll keep slugging grenades at the TBR pile in a futile attempt to make some holes in it, while looking forward to the stuff that's going to come out of nowhere to take over my mind and not let go. Yes: these goals are mutually exclusive. No: that's not going to stop me from pursuing them both.

Looking at the 2007 lists, a few names jump out:

• I can see myself dropping everything for Jonathan Lethem's You Don't Love Me when that comes out in March. I've enjoyed most everything of his I've read. The Fortress of Solitude holds a special place in my heart. Lethem says the book should be "funny and sexy...a brave foray to retrieve irrelevance for American novel-writing." I look forward to seeing what he does with that.


• Then there's the William T. Vollmann book, Poor People, which I suspect will be the exact opposite of funny, sexy, and irrelevant. I'm ready to go either way on this one. A lengthy break from Vollmann's stuff would probably be healthy. But, the topic sounds interesting.


• There's a new(ly translated) Haruki Murakami book I'm curious about, After Dark. I've opted to ration out my Murakami reading rather than gorge on his stuff, since I gather that he treads a lot of the same ground across his books, and it can be easy to burn out if you read too many of his books too fast. (An experience I can relate to with my own reading of Stephen Dixon's stuff, though I like to think I've caught that in time to prevent long-term damage.) Murakami's new book might be fun to read, to compare notes on how it stacks for a relative newcomer with how it works for people who have read more of his books.


• AL Kennedy and Rupert Thompson are two writers who I learned about from Maud Newton back in the hazy, uncertain days of 2005. I read one book by each author, liked each book a lot, and then promptly forgot both authors existed, because I am morally and intellectually lacking. They both have new books coming out in 2007. I don't know whether I will read the new books when they are released, but I do plan on re-visiting their back catalogues, probably within the next six months.

As for more general plans:

• I look forward to finishing Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Before July. Please, God: I know we haven't spoken in a while, but give me the strength.


• I've developed a low-level fascination with historical fiction. This list and these two lists seem like good places to start searching for additional titles. (Fair warning: that first list is aimed at young adult readers. Therefore, by merely pointing at it, I've caused many people to think better of me, and many other people to think worse of me. I hope the two groups balance each other out.)


• I nominated five authors for the 2006 Underrated Writers project. Now I need to read every other author on the list. Then I can start tackling the the 2005 list. I plan to complete both lists by Tuesday.


• I'd like more people to tell me I'm wrong. So that means trying to work a few more current, hot titles into my reading list, so as to facilitate more cross-blog conversation. Or I could take some initiative and form some discussion groups (like the Roundtable model that is currently being used to discuss Against the Day at Metaxucafe) to get some more talk going about books I find conversation-worthy. Or I could start writing reviews for the New York Times Book Review section.


• Two words: shorter novels. Not that I'm done reading long novels. But once I finish the Baroque cycle, in September or October, I'm going to give myself a pass on anything over 400 pages for a while. Hell, I'd love to make the next twenty or thirty books I read all be less than 250 pages. With my last two or three months being consumed by Pynchon and Stephenson and Ann-Marie MacDonald (for which I'm awarding myself an early win on the Chunkster Challenge), I'm ready for a long season of high variety. (Meaning Don Quixote is going to have to wait just a bit longer, I'm afraid. But, I'll probably make an exception for Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, sometime this year.)


• Take the above general directives and filter them through my realization that even though I recognize that I don't read enough female authors, I still don't read enough female authors. A while back, sparked by a funny story that involved me accidentally going out on a date with a lesbian (no-really-I-swear-it-was-hilarious), I realized that 97 percent of the music I listened to was created by all-guy bands or bands fronted by guy singers. Some vigorous soul-searching and corrective action ensued, and I've been a much happier person ever since. The kind of person who can now smarmily and accusingly point out that female artists were horribly underrepresented on Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2006 list. (It's been a few days since I ran the count, but I think there is a single-digit number of albums by acts that feature a female singer, and of those, only one, maybe two, could be "classically" classified as albums by female singer-songwriters. Disgraceful! Smarm!) It's feeling like a good time to do the same sort of thing for my reading habits. That This Is Not Chick Lit collection, edited by Elizabeth Merrick, is probably as good place as any to start finding new-to-me authors.

2007 Reading List: Preliminary thoughts on the 257 books I plan on reading this year

...Just kidding. Happy New Year!