Meanwhile...

...I'm re-reading some Jeff Noon (Nymphomation! Sexy maths!) and my girlfriend is entering the strange world of Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle! Cats! Pasta!) which probably, at some level, tells you things, things about us or things about the mood of our little corner of the world, or something, some things, I don't know, they're things I'm too haphazard right now to suss out. So I hope they aren't bad things. They're not. Not bad things. I hope.

Anyways, Jeff Noon rules. Reading Nymphomation again after so long is interesting. A little more space between me and my Vurt love lets me see the book for its own merits. Math as metaphor, sex as math. Structure and depth. Might be his most technically well-executed book, though my heart will always return to Vurt. As I expect my eyes will do in a few days' time. And, well, Falling Out of Cars is still just something else to me. So.

Still, I'm looking for my way out of my ADD mindmode. Like there's some book I haven't read yet that will pull me in, focus me close, hold me down, and float me up, all for the span of more than a couple hundred pages. The one that'll grab me by the shoulders and tell me all Lloyd Dobler-like that I must chill. Maybe it's on the TBR pile, maybe not. Or maybe I just jones for any old flimflam excuse to browse the stacks, blissed-out coverlove on the trancenight side...

(Ahem.)

Man vs. page: An inquiry into the awesomeness of the opening page of Dhalgren (pt 1)

to wound the autumnal city.

This is how you begin with an ending.

This is how you depart from a destination.

*

I will never ever ever do this line justice.

*

True criticism doesn't resort to superlatives.

I think this is one of the best opening lines in literature.

It alludes but feels like nothing else.

It is incomplete, glorious, and sky-bright brilliant.

*

For me, the meaning of this phrase is in its motion, verbal and aural and oral.

Strictly speaking, it describes action and activity that exists independently of a subject. A threat placed upon an object from nothing and nobody. Something that happens that can not happen because nothing and nobody is there to make it happen, to do the action. It is effect without cause, without purpose or context.

It's a bit of true in medias res. It is a predicate, or part of a predicate, that alludes to (but is not, strictly speaking, dependent upon) a subject.

It's a full stop that never really began.

*

To wound. Violence. To do violence. To engage in a violent act. To do violence against something. A wound is a thing, to wound is to make that thing happen. To place the contents of the action into something.

To wound. To wound what? A city. The city. The autumnal city. A city that exists in time, a city that exists in terms of seasons, a year that begins and ends, a city that itself is approaching or is nearing or is at the very end of something. Autumnal as fall, in the process of falling, of being fallen.

Why would one want to wound a city?

How can a city be wounded?

When is this wounding to happen? Has it already happened? Is the wounding yet to come? Is the wounding in the fact of the city's being autumnal?

The autumnal city. The. The only city of its type, perhaps? The only literally autumnal city to exist? Or is the autumnal city a broad concept, a catch-all term for the modern state of the city? The fundamental concept of city as being one that is nearing the end of its season, its lifespan. Your city as mine, being threatened, being harmed.

*

Let's talk about word choice. Let's talk about sound.

Autumnal, for my money, is a beautiful word. The syllables, windy and cavernous and rolling, in turn. I lack the vocabulary to describe the sound of them or the feeling they evoke within me when I repeat them to myself, over and over, in the context of this opening line. To describe that word in that line as poetic is both sadly generic and completely true. No other word could evoke what this word does in the way it does it where it does it. It is the right word in the right place.

Poetry.

This phrase, this clause, is a piece of art, self-sufficient and complete. I carry it with me, in my mind, on the tip of my tongue, a mantra devoid of useful meaning, full of importance.

Necessity.

I know this much: the use of the word autumnal completely explodes writers' myths about modifiers, and how they often aren't necessary.

But then, you know: try to one-up it, and, well. You can't.

*

It is an absolute mystery to me what the word “autumnal” absolutely means.

*

And what of the city?

The city is something that can be described in terms of changing colors.

The city is something that can be described in terms of temporality, cyclicality, birth and rebirth, death and redeath.

The city is something that can be described in terms of singularity. Uniqueness, solitariness.

The city is something that can be described in terms of flesh. Skin, muscles, organs, functionality and systematicity. Something that can be hurt, harmed, rended, ripped open, made to bleed, made to hurt, made to feel pain, made to suffer. Something that lives and dies.

The city is the object of action and purpose that comes from nowhere and nothing and nobody.

*

Opening lines are framed by the white space that precedes them. A chapter title, perhaps, or a chapter number; pages of introductory material, quotation marks, copyright notifications. That sort of thing.

This novel places action and an immediate cessation of action at its beginning. It feels like something stopping. It feels like something happening that stops right away, that yet still hangs there in the air above the novel, a connection that desires to be made.

Like something left over, that defines the rest.

*

The tone of this phrase is lofty and poetic, true, and the framing of it is explosive and caustic and experimental, true, but the world it describes, the things it makes appear in my mind, are flawed, and low, and base. Physical and devoid of abstraction. Violence is a concept but a wound is flesh reconfirmed through temporary deconstruction. A city, like a universe, is too big to have a mind wrap itself around it, and yet, it's just buildings, and people living their lives.

What of the people who live and work and play and breed and die in an autumnal city? What are they like? What do they talk about, when they talk, if they talk? Do they see the way their buildings and jobs are turning from green to orange and brown? What are the leaves of an autumnal city? What falls to the ground? What branches give things up? How does such a city survive the winter of itself? Is there no repetiton or cyclicality for a city? Is the fall the end of itself?

*

I can see it being argued that reading this line closely without regard to its opening (placed at the end of the novel) is to read the line wrong. To interpret only half a picture, to make a case from only a segment of the available evidence.

I guess I'd disagree.

*

Say it.

Just say it.

I can think of few lines that sound so cool.

*

And yet. I feel like there's layers and layers of meaning I haven't the sense or critical ability to dig down deep enough to find.

I suspect I could go on for days.

And yet for what I've done I've neither harmed nor strengthened it, made it make more or less sense to me. I've learned from it, from the line and what I've said and thought about it. That much is true. But at the end of the day, it's still what it is: five lines on a page that I think are amazing.

Somehow amazing.

Somehow beautiful.

I don't know why.

But then, I don't come to literature as someone with answers but as someone who is trying to learn how to ask questions. I'm not even worried about learning to ask the right questions, or the best questions. It's just questions I'm after. Good questions, perhaps. Interesting questions, maybe. Questions, and the question of where they come from, and how they are found. Which is to say: I'm not here as an authority, but as a participant. I like it better that way.

Meanwhile, from the depths of my attention deficit disorder...

...while I peck away at my thoughts on the Dhalgren thing, I'm continuing to muddle my way through a spazzy time of life, no book quite right for the moment. For the time being, I've gone back to my tried and true maxim: When in doubt, read some Kazuo Ishiguro. This time it's A Pale View of Hills, his first novel, and the last of his I need to read. After that, it's nothing new until he writes it. Which is distressing. And yet, exciting. Something fun about being so enamored with someone who will be read for a long time to come (if I have anything to say about it) who is still, hopefully, at a mid-way point in his writing career. It's fun.

But then, it's like, after this book, after I finish Hills, then what? A half hour trip to Half Price Books with my girlfriend tonight yielded empty hands and a peculiarly heavy wallet. About the best I was able to come up with was the notion that it's safe to say that Faulkner was out, for the time being. Shoddy attention span and all. (Which means this, which I saw a copy of tonight at the store and kind of had to laugh a little bit, is probably out, too.) Beyond that, though: beats me. I suggested maybe what I needed to do was take a month off from books entirely, and before I could finish the sentence, my girlfriend said I'd never make it. Which is true. I wouldn't make it. Even if I wasn't reading, I'd still be reading. Weird, I know.

It's possible this will lead to interesting things in the near future, at least. If it works out the way I suspect it might work out--a couple pages, here and there--that's at least a couple minutes each day to keep my mind from choking on itself. Still, though, there's other free minutes in the day, begging to be filled. Might it be time to re-learn how to work my PlayStation?

Man vs. page: An inquiry into the awesomeness of the opening page of Dhalgren (intro)

Whether or not Dhalgren by Samuel Delany is an awesome book, I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that it has an awesome opening page.

I couldn't tell you how awesome or not awesome the book is because it's been a while since I've read it. I know I didn't come close to getting it. I know I liked it. I know it intrigued me enough to stick with it for all 800 of its pages. But did I answer any of the questions the book poses? Probably not. Did I even find out what the real questions were? Not so much. About all I knew was that there were questions there. Big ones, little ones. Riddles upon puzzles upon awe.

I'm not even sure now when I first read the book. It was sometime in the hazy first half of this decade, between the day I graduated from college and the day I started this blog, two for-what-they're-worth milestone moments in my reading and writing life. To say that it was a time when I was trying to figure out my own questions would be a desperate parallel-grabbing understatement. It's probably a wonder I remember having read the book. Maybe I wouldn't remember having read it at all if it weren't for the fact that I own the copy I read. I guess I bought it instead of borrowed it. (Unless it's your copy, then, well, sorry, but you're never getting it back.)

And I certainly couldn't tell you when I first discovered the book. I don't think anybody told me about it, and, being as it was before I realized other people might use the Internet to talk about the stuff I love, I know I didn't read about it online. Rather, I think it was one of those odd bookstore finds, my eye drawn to the fat blue spine, some random day. Probably a Tuesday. I think I had to have picked it up, and flipped to the first page, and I must have just known this was something different. Not just from the random science fiction books I'd read when I was younger, but from most anything else I'd ever read. I probably bought it on impulse, no idea what came on page two, but knowing I needed to find out.

Maybe. I don't know. What I know is the book's opening page had to have had some kind of influence on my decision to read the rest of the pages. And today it's still a page I carry bits of with me inside my head, a page I read from time to time, to probe it and poke it and to begin to consider the ways you might question it and it might question you.

So now, after a recent glance at it, I'm going to take a stab at picking it apart, Man vs. Wild style. The helicopter's going to drop me off at the beginning of the opening line, and I'm leaving behind whatever I don't have in my head. Forget the flints and kindling of outside criticism, forget the hunting knives of formal structure and method. I'm going to eat only the words I can catch, take shelter under the questions I can raise, and warm myself off the heat of my own ideas. I may or may not make it to the end of the page alive. I make no guarantees.

Well, okay. I do guarantee this much: I will not drink my own urine.

Breaking the logjam (pt 2)

I'd like to throw everything out.

Start over. Forget everything that's been said about saying things about literature. What happens when we start with a blank slate? Stop thinking the way people right now think. Stop thinking what people think. Could we get outside it? Can we look at this mess we're in with no bias, no preexisting judgment? Can we--I, you, the community of readers and writers--build and communicate a system of techniques and values relevant to the conversation about literature, from scratch, from nothing but logic and instinct, for no other purpose than to understand what we've got, and what we might want?

After all, it worked for Descartes.

Might be too violent, though. Too much. Non-starter issue, in any case: if I had such ambitious energy and focus, I'd probably be too busy using it to have the time to dream such things up.

But, maybe, I can, at least, learn how to let go. To loosen up, and to forget.

Herewith the continuation of your previously commenced chaos.

#

Julio Cortázar's The Winners is one of several TBR pile books I've recently started reading only to set back down after about fifty pages. Some of these books, I've found that my mind was elsewhere, and I wasn't pulling out ideas the way I would like. Other times it's been the books that have been been some other place, somewhere I realized I wasn't interested in learning how to visit. The Winners was one of the former. I enjoyed what I read. There's a lot going on in that book. Too much for me, right now. I'll come back to it, after I regenerate my powers of concentration and interpretation. After I settle down.

The book presents an intriguing premise: through a government-sponsored lottery, a group of Argentines win an expenses-paid cruise vacation. Some of the winners are friends, and some bring family and friends as guests, but many of the people are strangers to each other. In the prologue, the winners assemble at a cafe, where they begin to meet and are then shuttled to their ship. The lottery and the cruise seem surrounded by a vague cloud of mystery. On the page, the proceedings have a remarkable sense of flow and motion. I enjoyed feeling the group forming out of the multiple identities of the winners, who individually are not extraordinary people but become complex through the conversations and actions that lay the groundwork for social intrigues and tensions that I assume will play out through the remainder of the book.

I had to bail before the ship left shore. (Pure trivia: the prologue is about 100 pages. Just under a quarter of the book's length. Are there longer prologues out there? By page count, or percentage?) The book isn't a hard read at all. I'm sad the timing's off. Not the sort of book you want to try to focus on when you can't focus on it. When you can't fully go into it. I think I've decided that what I'm in the mood for literarily is to make one new friend, someone who can tell me a good life story over endless coffee in the corner booth of an empty diner. Starting Cortázar's book is like being introduced to a crowded in-progress party just before the host disappears into the kitchen and right after you've taken an extra dose of being socially inept. I can't even begin to ask where the bathroom is, let alone what these people are doing here, and why they matter to me.

Though I jumped ship, I didn't leave empty-handed. Here's a quote:

"...Well, Persio, here we are. What's going to happen?"

"Ah, that...I haven't had much time to study the question, but I'm already preparing the offensive."

"The offensive?"

"Yes. A thing or a fact has to be attacked in many ways. People usually select one tactic and only get halfway results. I always prepare my offensive and afterward synchronize the results."

"I understand," said Claudia in a tone of voice which revealed her lack of understanding.

"A kind of push-pull has to be in operation," said Persio. "I don't know if I'm making myself clear. Occasionally, it's as if there were things blocking the way, then they have to be pushed aside for one to make out what's happening further on. Women, for instance, and pardon my mentioning them in front of a child. But there are other things you have to grab by the handle and pull. That chap Dali knows what he's doing (maybe he doesn't, but it's all the same) when he paints a body full of drawers. It seems to me many things have handles. For example, poetic images. If one sees them from the outside, only the outer and obvious meaning can be grasped, even if it's sometimes well concealed. Are you satisfied with the exterior, the obvious meaning? No, you're not. You have to pull the handle and fall into the drawer. To pull is to appropriate, to approach, and even to go too far."

Setting aside the results-coordinating relevance to modern political practice, and setting aside the push-your-way-through relevance to my own in-need-of-a-push life situation, this passage presents an interesting metaphor for literary interpretation. It suggests that literary criticism--or at least, the best literary criticism, the stuff that really satisfies--is an act upon the object of study. You change the object of study in the process of extracting meaning from it. And you accomplish that, of course, by letting the thing change you: to discuss a work is to both bring it into yourself while putting yourself into it.

It was that closing clause that did it for me when I first read this passage. It's a long set-up to get there but those last six words open up, for me, something interesting: the possibility of damage. To study meaning is--possibly, if not necessarily--"to go too far." To overextend yourself, to cause harm. Taken in the context of the approach/appropriation bi-directional act of interpretation, might going too far mean swapping reality for fiction? The void becoming the person who peers into it?

The passage doesn't say all that, of course. The meaning is vague, but rings ominous. And yet, while this isn't a particularly tab-a-into-slot-b technical level of instruction about how to functionally work with literature, it does offer some comfort and encouragement to someone like me, who is, right here, right now, trying to figure out how to do what he is trying to do. Don't worry about fucking it up, Persio (Cortázar?) suggests: you should fuck it up. You're supposed to.

Not that we ought to go about things blindly. Deconstruction for fun and profit is a dangerous thing, as we see when Persio immediately reverses himself:

"Ah," said Claudia, making a discreet sign for Jorge to blow his nose.

"This place, for instance, is thick with significant elements: every table, every necktie. I see an underlying order within this awful disorder. I wonder what the outcome will be."

"So do I. But it's amusing."

"Amusement is always a spectacle: but let's not delve too deeply, for some foul trap is bound to come open at our feet. It's not that I'm against amusement, but every time I want to enjoy myself I must first lock up the laboratory and throw out all the acids and alkalines. I mean that I must surrender and give in to the appearance of things. You know very well how dramatic the humorous can be..."

It's hard to have fun when you're going too far all the time.

Breaking the logjam (pt 1)

The word transition is both a noun and a verb. A noun. That's funny. As if a word that describes temporal activity could itself be some thing: a room, a gun, a culprit. Complete, functional, and static. When really it can only ever be in that it goes.

Maybe it's not that funny. I don't know.

Maybe I should start with a quote, instead.

#

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it."

- C. S. Lewis (full quote here)

#

I engage with literature. I grasp, I fumble. I think. I do literature. I participate in the discussion it causes. I react, I suggest. I say.

I feel no closer to understanding the stuff than I was before I learned to read.

#

For most of this year, I've been focusing most of my writing energy on fiction. Trying to. It's hard to focus these days. In this age. Even more so when your life feels riddled with transitions. What energy I can muster up after a day's work, what desire I can drill through the buzzing in my brain: I do my best to put that spare focus to good use when I sit down to write.

This--by the by--is why I find writing every day so valuable. Making a given piece of time sacred--as much and as often as possible--is a defense against myself. Let those walls fall, and my brain waves go Berzerk. There exists discussion about whether writing every day is necessary, or valuable. Some people don't need to. Maybe some people have better powers of concentration than me. Maybe some people are trust-fund humanoids armed with lasers. I don't have a laser. So I write every day.

So my blogging has suffered lately. That's fine. I've come to realize that for me, to understand literature is to write literature. To show you how I understand, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction is to write fiction that engages his in mimetic struggle. That radically oversimplifies the matter, of course. There is, or should be, a good deal of convolution, and expansion, and simplification, and experimentation, and personalization, and straight-up stealing along the way, all in the service of turning out things that started in other things--those other books, those other life experiences--but became their own unique things somewhere along the way. As if by magic. Coffee magic. Laptop magic.

I am not saying anything against the surrounding discussion. It's true that I have consciously decided not to write and publish book reviews. I could. I mean, I know I could try. But the whole "thesis statements and supporting arguments" thing isn't where it's at for me right now. I think I'm generating better results for myself when I write stories and novels. Hopefully, if or when my fiction should be published, others will also reap the benefits. That said, as a reader with some academic bent, critical essays and book reviews are still important to me. There's always room for more. I wish I had time to read and comment on more of it. Or, I wish I had the ability to pay more attention to it.

And yet. I've become restless. Mixed up. Rootless. Transitioning. For reasons both personal and literary. This past week, I finished writing a story, one I'd been working on for a month. Now I'm trying to find my next project. It's always an awkward time. Like looking for a job after you've been laid off, like looking for shelter after you've torched your tent. And the longer that period extends itself, the more awkward it becomes. It's a time for looking at everything, and not knowing what to make of it. My reading, I've been unable to settle down for a while. I think I'm coming off a short story high, without the correct novel to cushion the landing.

And, well. Lots of things. Work and love and death. It's been a year. Buy me a beer and I might mutter something about it, before I opt to nap on the bar. But you already know how it goes. You've had a year of your own.

Point being, I'm not surprised I've got that odd urge to do something critical. It would feel nice to prove things. To say, "This is so, here is why," and then to conclude with a hearty fist-pump, to the tune of applause and adulations from fans and foes.

Problem being that I feel like I've forgotten how to ask the right questions. They're similar to the questions that make me write stories, but I'm not certain they're the same. I can't tell. I feel blocked. It's like there's a question in front of all those other questions to which I've lost the answer: how do we talk about literature?

But you know what they say about clubs that'll have me as a member

Matt Tiffany joins a club I think I helped create. (Again with the lack of references on my part, though--what with it being, like, bed time, now.)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Cleveland, September 5 and 6

How did I miss this? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the excellent Half of a Yellow Sun, won a 2007 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. (The award was "created in 1935 to recognize outstanding works that contribute to society’s understanding of racism and foster an appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures." Zadie Smith won one last year for On Beauty.)

There's an awards ceremony on September 6 (which I think if I remember correctly involves an admission price?) and a reading on September 5 (which I think (hope?) is open to the public?). From this week's Cool Cleveland newsletter:

7 p.m. ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD WINNERS, Ngozi Adichie and Martha Collins, will read at the Art Gallery in Trinity Commons, 2230 Euclid Ave. Contact Ron Antonucci, 216.623.2881 or rantonucci@cpl.org for more information.

Suffice it to say I'll be dragging everyone I know with me to the reading. (Assuming it's open to the public.)

More info on the award here.

"Be careful what you're wishing"

So then, there it is: I'm sitting in my muggy apartment and I've got chills.

I've been reading short stories with reckless abandon (read as: short things are all I can seem to focus on) and so it seems a good time to give Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson a shot, right? Because everybody and everybody else is all "Ooo Jesus' Son! Ooo ooo!" all the time, but I've put it off because a couple years ago I read one of his novels, The Name of the World, and I was less than impressed. But curiosity and repeated endorsements got to me, and I picked up a copy of Jesus' Son, and I just read the opening story, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," and, well: I was okay with it until I read the closing paragraph. Then, chills. The shock of seeing something unfamiliar, and knowing it completely.

If I follow the good advice, I won't read this book non-stop tonight. But: temptation.

(Please hold.

The next available convergence of Spare Time and Worthy Inspiration will be with you shortly.)

(Or, longly.)

Sort of

So I started The Accidental by Ali Smith and I was like, "Whoa, this is my favorite book of the year." Then I got really bored with it. Then I got really psyched about it again. Then I got sort of bored again. And also vaguely annoyed. Then I think I figured it out: totally dig the kids, not so much into the parents. I'm still having an above-average amount of fun with the book, but not as much as I'd initially thought I was going to have. A'el.

Meanwhile, I've been idly thumbing through The Paris Review's interview archives. Yeah, I'm probably going to have to grab that first printed collection they put out. Total writer porn.

If you're looking for suggestions on where you might start (and, no, I'll save a couple of my friends the trouble of checking: the Eliot interview isn't available online), I've been digging the 1972 interview with John Berryman, and the 1977 interview with William Gass.

The Berryman interview has me itching to take another crack at reading The Dream Songs. The idea of looking at it is a "long poem" intrigues me. (I feel great interest the book, in but haven't yet managed to find my one-way entry into it.)

And the Gass interview has reawakened my interest in reading The Tunnel. Since pretty much every "critical" (or what-have-you) piece I've read of Gass's has made fireworks of recognition and identification go off in my head. (Like, I mean, go look at the paragraph that begins at the bottom of page 12 and rolls through most of 13: gods, yes.) Maybe I'll hate the shit out of his fiction, but I'd have to guess at this point it would be a friendly sort of hatred.

Otherwise: I write and I write and I write. And I don't mind the heat but I hate the humidity. And I watch John from Cincinnati with my girlfriend. (I haven't decided if that show is meaningless or not, but I do know this: I am intensely curious about the upcoming season finale.)

Might not be time for me to fill in that small gap between Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition

Matt bounced this Lev Grossman bit my way about Spook Country. While Grossman liked the book, he does lightly complain of "a certain undeniable sameness" to Gibson's books. I doubt that's going to concern me much. Since I haven't read most of them. And in any case, I think I'm with Norm on this one: "I am really excited about the new one, because PR was effin' dynamite."

And I'll still read the rest of his stuff. Eventually. After I finish the Summer of Dostoevsky '06 project. Right.

Not that it's even close to being all Gibson all the time here at TDAOC HQ, the way my recent posting habits might suggest. I'm in the middle of Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document (with the far superior paperback cover). It's cool. It's good. I'm cool with it.

But.

Do you sometimes think, when you're reading a book, "I like this well enough, but ___________, this person I know in some fashion, would like it so much more than I do"? That's about where I am. Not let down, just not brought up as much as I'd have perhaps hoped.

(Vague, I know, but it's late, and it's Tuesday, and I'm already totally blowing my "I'm going to sleep this week!" resolution. Sigh. All I'm saying is: folks, if you're in control of the finances for some major corporation, and you've been thinking about throwing a couple million sponsorship dollars my blog's way? Now's the time to start writing that check. I have no conscience about such matters.)

Might be time for me to fill in that small gap between Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition

Here's a good interview with William Gibson. ((Belatedly) via.)

And here's a shorter Q&A. (Via.)

Familiarity breeds comfort. Comfort, and tasty cheeseburgers

The problem with literature is that it complicates things. That's sort of it's business: you can't have that many words about some topic like "love" or "politics" without introducing a certain amount of complexity.

Which is why, sometimes, for us lit-heads, whether we admit it or not, simplicity can taste so sweet. The comfort of something already known, the familiarity of re-reading an old book.

That's really why, I think, I turned to Pattern Recognition this last week. Life has been busy lately, every day bringing something new, something I can barely grab before I'm juggling it for the next falling object. It was time: I needed something I'd already had once. I knew these words, though I didn't necessarily remember all of them. It felt good.

I'm not often one for re-reading books. Though I love the idea in principle, I've been stuck for some time in the "But there's so many other books to read!" mentality. And even then, the "To be re-read" pile has grown at a rate comparable though not equal to that of the first-run TBR pile. I will re-read Dhalgren before I die. I will re-read Vurt for the eighth time. I will get Persuasion better than I got it the first time, the next time I'm in a mood for Austen.

And I shall introduce new complexities and understanding and intricacies in the process of walking these old paths once again; no matter.

Eddie's Grill knows what I'm after.

A mainstay of Ohio's own Geneva on the Lake since 1950, when (my girlfriend tells me) Eddie himself started his business with nothing but a hot dog cart, Eddie's Grill does not deal in complicated food. It does not deal in palates. It does a few things, and it does them simply, and it does them well.

When they say "Hamburgers" and "Cheeseburgers" they don't mean variety. They mean multiplicity. They mean quantity.

They make hamburgers.

They make cheeseburgers.

They make french fries in amounts that could be shared, but won't be shared.

The language on the sign might be about as complex as it gets here, this allusion to multiculturalism in the middle of what's one of the whiter places in the state.

It's true that the simplicity of the place ends for me around the menu. I have a bizarre, unexplainable fascination with Ashtabula County. I tried to blow up the city in the first novel I ever saw through to completion. (It didn't work. The city, albeit with fewer inhabitants, survived.) It's a fascination that extends to the state of Ohio itself, a state I'm convinced, though am not prepared to prove, has more going on for itself than anybody--Ohio itself included--gives it credit for.

Can you go so wrong with a state that endorses such healthy eating and pleasurable activity?

A state that boasts a historic putt-putt course?

(I won.)

(50.)

I did not grow up in Geneva, or Ashtabula, or whatever lays in that gray area past Ashtabula before you hit Pennsylvania. And yet it's curious how, every time I go there, it feels like re-reading an old book, one that brought me some curious pleasure once, and which I'm certain will do so again, the next summer day I need a hamburger, the next time I crave a cup of truck stop coffee.

It's complicated, you see.

--

A couple more (for now) photos here (more to come later, perhaps). Also, check out Erin O'Brien's far-more-comprehensive photo tour.

Book porn: the "Yours is bigger than mine" edition

I really don't have that many books...when compared to some people. (Via.)

Sounds like someone has a case of the DeLillos

"But the interviews I read are getting him to grow on me. Like a fungus."

(I laughed.)

(Out loud.)

(The interview interested me, too. Though I certainly won't be reading Falling Man until I get through some of the other Don DeLillo bricks currently warping one of my bookshelves (with some help from Umberto Eco and William T. Vollmann) (but with no help, oddly, from Underworld, seeing as that one is currently located on The End Table Where Very Large Novels by the Likes of DeLillo and Dickens and Barth Go to Get Very Dusty for Years on End).)

Bzzzzz

A. L. Kennedy—who I re-fell in love with earlier this year (in a Land Before Time sort of time, back when I wrote much longer (and potentially (though I can't verify this tonight) more content-rich) (albeit it with fewer dinosaurs, one might assume) blog posts)—has a new story in The New Yorker. It's called "Wasps." (I'm printing it now.) (Because, sometimes? I forget I own a printer. And then some other times? I remember I own a printer. And then I print stuff. And smile.)

(Via and reminded.)

"Keep your secret footage heart away"

A third of the way through my re-read of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and I can't help but think there's an entire thesis to be written on the "commodification of life/life is commodification" aspects of Gibson's book and Tom McCarthy's Remainder. Both books deal with the meaning of money in its being the power to produce life via the purchase/deployment of simulacra. Never mind the order-vs-chaos theme shared by the two books, and how that theme is made manifest in the financial aspects of the respective stories.

(Just thinking out loud.)

(Actually, it's a little bit freaky how well all the books I've read this year have seemed to fit together, one after the other, responding to each other in happenstance fashion, until I've gotten one place from someplace entirely different. Pattern recognition, indeed.)

Usually I at least make it out of the milliseconds

Hey! There's a new William Gibson book coming out in a couple weeks! So much for my book-buying moratorium. Pre-order, check, click. Right.

Now I just need to wait for that to come in. In the meantime, I'm reading Pattern Recognition, which I really liked a lot, and seem to recall pressing it into many of my friends' hands after I finished it. Fifty pages in again, and yeah, it feels like exactly what I need, right now. (It was the first book of his I'd read since Neuromancer.)

It'd be a nice gift, is what I'm saying

October 15th: anyone want to fly me to Houston for the night?