Unprintable Version

Vienna Sausage

O Pioneers! has a title that suggests that its highest ambition is to be a musical. But I’d love to write an essay comparing The Great Gatsby with O Pioneers! as studies of the American Dream. O Pioneers! –despite an even worse title–might be turn out to be a richer book, and I love Gatsby. 

The book’s  first scene is an evocation of Nebraska as a desolate nightmare; its second is a kitten being helped down from a pole; and its third scene is a symbolic castration: 

A shabby little traveling man, who was just then coming out of the store on his way to the saloon, stopped and gazed stupidly at the shining mass of hair she bared when she took off her veil; two thick braids pinned about her head in the German way, with a fringe of reddish-yellow curls blowing out from under her cap. He took his cigar out of his mouth and held the wet end between the fingers of his woolen glove. “My God, girl, what a head of hair!”  he exclaimed quite innocently and foolishly. She stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness and drew in her lower lip–most unnecessary severity. It gave the little clothing drummer such a start he actually let his cigar fall to the sidewalk and went off weakly in the teeth of the wind to the saloon. 

Subtlety and Surprise

Am still on my Willa Cather jag.  That is probably not a sentence one encounters that often, but I hope to popularize it. 

I was surprised by the complexities and tensions in Willa Cather’s work, especially because these very tensions struck me as distinctly Midwestern: chaste books with androgynous undercurrents, traditional books filled with rebels,  books about a proto-red state packed with European eccentrics; hymns to the rural written by someone who fled to New York.

This tension, which would be ill-served by bullying words like “hypocrisy” or “denial,” actually surfaces as subtlety and it’s often surprising. I think of when I was home from college one summer and mentioned that I’d heard the speculation, then popular, that Hemingway was a latent homosexual. My conservative Catholic mother said, “Everybody’s a latent everything” and continued washing the dishes. 

Two Cheers For Bad Criticism

We hit “eject” shortly after the William Macy character in David Mamet's Edmond was beaten and robbed in an alley. But by that time, I found myself cheering for the muggers. 

The Macy character has the affect of a vending machine–he is constantly asking for change but otherwise clueless. But he gives less back to the world than a Coke machine.  Prompted by a tarot card reading, and with no explanation or thought for consequence, he leaves his wife of some decades. He then dickers with various sex workers, whining “that’s too much,” insisting on change for a twenty. His cluelessness is an utter lack of empathy. He’s a sociopathic victim. I suppose that’s interesting, but I wanted some studio exec to stride in, announce, “This guy’s a dick. Make him more likable.”   

The night before, we hung in there the whole time with The Good Shepard, in which Robert de Niro someone managed to make the founding of the CIA seem tedious. And I wanted some seemingly clueless executive to stride into the editor’s suite, announce, “My kid was bored. Cut it by half an hour.”

God And Man and Monkeys at Common Good Books

I stopped in at Common Good Books Monday night and was reminded of what independent brick-and-mortar bookstores are good for:  pleasant hovering and creative indecisiveness. I’d meant to swoop in and pick up Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! But of course I looked at the books displayed on the front tables, specifically, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books because I was feeling pretty good about myself lately and this kind of books-I-haven’t-read collection is just the thing to take me down a notch. And then I saw a Best of Stephen Jay Gould; I’ve been always meaning to read him and I noticed that he’s written about evolution and faith and I’m interested in that because the blog-level, bull-session level discussion of that subject is just so impossibly inane. Oh look, the people who want to be smarter than everyone are bashing the people who want to be more righteous than anyone.  I’m not quite sure how a subject which should inspire humility has inspired so much certitude. Everything in my life has convinced me that much of human thought–religious and otherwise–is superstitious, incomplete, myopic, muddled, fear-based, resentment-permeated, self-serving and unaware of its biases and that for all I know monkeys evolved from us. (They seem to have more fun.) Or is that just me?

But then I proceeded to the non-new fiction aisle and bought the Cather. I’m very glad I did, but those other books are somewhere in the back of my mind, too.

Spring Flowers

Link: Gallery:Botanical Collection. Check out the new botanical series at Aurinka Glass.

David Foster Wallce at Kenyon: Groceries and Epiphanies

David Foster Wallace's best fiction is intellectually daring, emotionally fearless, charmingly regular-guy, almost uncomfortably pressurized, and deceptively spiritual. His essays circle a subject then often nail it. (I think his Updike review in Consider the Lobster is definitive.) And all of these qualities enliven  the graduation speech he delivered at Kenyon in 2005 and which I found collected in Best American Non-Required Reading 2006. My only question for those of you who read the speech: does this so accurately describe the addictive personality that it is lost on the well-adjusted?  Of course, this requires you to self-identify as "well-adjusted" which I will define as anyone who's never said to themselves, "I wonder if there's some sort of treatment program for this thing I'm doing."

Lethem Site

Jonathan Lethem has got himself a wonderful web site.  I was particularly impressed with the links page, which taps the power of the web to gather and surprise. I hope it doesn't ruin it to say that 11 and 21 are among our favorites.

Retreat and Advance: Notes On The Anderson Center I

For years, I didn’t see the point of writers' retreats. I always thought, if you want to write, write already. Then I got to a point in my manuscript where I really needed to review the entire thing, in one more or less continuous sitting, and at the same time the obligations and interruptions of life became particularly insistent. So I booked three days at the Anderson Center in Red Wing.  I now see the point of writers' retreats. You know that feeling you get in libraries where the quiet and the ambient books actually seem to encourage you to work better? The place is filled with that feeling.

Bohemian Like You II

A part of what disappointed me about You Don’t Love Me Yet is the kind of contemporary writing that drives James Wood nuts: a circusy invention.  A kangaroo is kidnapped and kept in an urban apartment. Thus, the kangaroo in the previous post. I was making a point and not just losing my mind. The problem here isn’t that a bathtub marsupial is implausible; the point is that there don’t seem to be real consequences to the kidnapping.  And there’s another dissatisfaction which I’m having a harder time identifying: a recklessness to the characters’ actions and a thinness to their reactions. That’s the best I can do; if anyone else has read the book and can do better, please help me.

Bohemian Like You: Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet

I read “You Don’t Love Me Yet” because alt rock and conceptual art Los Angeles circa 1988 is about as far from 1888 Nebraska as it is possible to get.

Glancing at the amazon reviews, both official and amateur, I sense disappointment.  But the book also does some remarkable things remarkably well.  First, Lethem manages to write about music in a way that isn’t laughable.  (Try it sometime: that inspired encore always comes off in print like the Archies’ big number at the prom.) Second, he writes about conceptual art in such a way that the artworks, while still open to parody, don’t seem like a joke.  Third, he absolutely nails the insularity of this world. Unlike Cather’s pioneers, who wore abandoned Europe like a cologne, these people don’t appear to have parents.  Plus, Jonathan Lethem writes like Jonathan Lethem: “The freeway was like a saddle on the splayed city, a means of both mastering it and of shrinking away from initimate contact with its surfaces.” In context, it’s even better.