Unprintable Version

No Country for Old Men, Young Men, Women, Dogs, Or Most Microbes

You probably know the story of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road —a man and a boy wandering through a post-apocalyptic America, although “post-apocalyptic” is a little sunny. The world is decimated, toxic, post-altruistic, subhuman, subcanine,  quasi-Martian, and perhaps post-biological.   

Fortunately, McCarthy pins this world down with a startlingly good, audacious style, which is all the better for not being original. This is not to say that McCarthy doesn’t have his own thoughts, many of them brilliant. But he doesn’t really have his own sound or slant of prose. Reading The Road  is like reading Hemingway, the Bible, and Shakespeare and imitating those three styles is, I’d contend, superior to coming up with your own.   

I hear Hemingway in the laconic dialog, affectless descriptions linked with “and” and the image of a trout stream as a stand-in for all that is good. (You could do worse.)

The Bible whispers in sentences such as “She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time.”

And Shakespeare lives in the collisions of adjective and noun: “autistic cities,”   “the intestate earth.”

Jon Spayde's How to Believe

My friend Jon Spayde's book How To Believe, in which he interviews thirty-four believers about their faith goes on sale Tuesday.  The book is a conversation, which he continues here. 

This much madness is too much sorrow: Notes on Swallow the Ocean

I picked up Swallow the Ocean by my fellow MFA Laura M. Flynn at the Borders in San Diego.

After a preface which suggests the trouble to come, the book begins with a delicately observed evocation of childhood happiness. If you’re an impatient reader, chill: there will be plenty of drama soon.  A book which skipped the happiness would have been more gripping, but cheaply so. In the end, this memoir, which describes her childhood with her paranoid schizophrenic mother, caused me to fight back tears. 

Swallow the Ocean is also a book which takes both the moral and artistic challenges of memoir seriously and meets them successfully. To write a memoir is to judge others on the basis of our fallible and self-serving memories and the people we write about often have no rebuttal. This demands great scrupulousness. The book is both unflinching and forgiving. In cases where her memory is sketchy, Flynn simply asks her sisters and notes their differences.  I'm not sure why more memoirists don't do this.   

The artistic challenge of memoir is its necessarily double vision, which also seems nicely navigated here: She captures the lived sensibility of a child with the mature perspective of an adult. Frankly, the book kicked my ass a little bit.  I hope that I can write about baseball cards and tabletop hockey games the way she writes about dolls. 

I have tried to write about the role sugar played in my childhood, so I especially admire the treatment of it here.  I’ll quote a paragraph about Twinkies. When her mother left the house, Laura and her sisters would binge on banned sugar. She had already described fruit pies with a kind of hyperrealism, so you noted their serrations and heft:   

A Twinkie was the opposite of a fruit pie: its weightlessness was what made it desirable. Like all items of spun sugar–marshmallows, cotton candy–what was desirable in a Twinkie was its emptiness. Perfect and uniform in a way only a machine could achieve, only a child could love. Twinkies were all artifice and air. I bit in, Foamy cake. White fluff. There was a clarity to these foods, a reassuring neatness. Nothing murky, crunchy or unknown.

Laurence Bergreen’s Mongol Hoard

Marco Polo is a biography with the sweep of a history. But what I love is that it is one of those books full of facts that make the world seem more interesting:  that at one time, five percent of all Chinese characters were associated with silk; that in the late 13th century Kublai Kahn’s Muslim financial advisor gained so much power that he threatened to take over the empire, creating the fascinating prospect of Muslim rule over China; that the Mongols protected their wealth by sewing precious gems into their clothing.  At least for someone who has always viewed the Mongols as essentially medieval Klingons–and they were brutal although weirdly squeamish–it was fascinating to learn that they were in many ways more advanced than their contemporaries in Europe: they had a version of freedom of religion; they were logistically brilliant, crossing vast distances at a gallop; they had paper currency; they ruled larger cities and vaster territories and more cultures. And Bergreen also comments on the problems of memoir, of self-interest and delusion, of facts and memory and style.  Polo's own book is strange book, dictated when he was a prisoner of war, dismissed as fable at the time, now seen as being much closer to reportage than originally thought. 

bel·low v. "to give a bull's loud roar"

I found the beautifully designed, electrically-bright new Paris Review Interviews in my stocking recently.  This, from Saul Bellow: "I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things i knew intimately.  Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable."  Earlier: "When I began to wrote Augie March, I took off many of these restraints. I think I took off too many, and went too far . . . "

For the record, I liked The Dangling Man a lot and couldn't get through The Victim. I also have never read Herzog and am now asking myself why. 

Trane Elevates Byrds

A small, stupid part of me has always insisted that, if music needs to be explained to me, it can’t really be that good. But this passes off ignorance as honesty. I didn’t immediately like Coltrane in the way that I immediately liked Johnny Hodges and Chet Baker and Miles Davis. But there was always something fascinating in the what I didn’t quite get about Coltrane. So I read Ben Raitliff’s book and it did what a book of appreciation is supposed to do: it gave me context, it guided my listening (I still have a lot to do), and it also traced what might be called the corollaries of Coltrane’s sound, finding his influence in unexpected places: 

[The Byrds] had been listening to Coltrane on [their] tour bus for a year. . . .“Eight Miles High” . . . intimated Coltrane’s modalism–both in its introduction, a short twelve-string guitar solo over a drone, and its frenetic middle-section solo.

As soon as I read this, I thought, yes, of course. But Ratliff's observation never would have occurred to me.   

Notes on Kevin Kling's The Dog Says How

Of all the writers given to speculating about what it means to be a Minnesotan, Kevin Kling is my favorite because his work has the smudge of the real and the weirdness of the human. He comes off as one of the nicest guys you'd ever want to meet*–and people who know him confirm this–yet he empathizes with Richard the Third, Shakespeare's most stunted villian.

When he is speaking to an Egyptian cab driver in Minneapolis who tells him that Egyptian is like music, Kling unwisely points out that our dialect is like music, too.

And while he could have crafted a folksy aphorism for the same purpose, Kling's one-sentence primer on how to speak white rural Minnesotan is a bit of microjournalism, something he overheard at an actual convenience store, and an illustration of our melodic open os:

"I ain't gonna pay no dollar for no corn muffin that's half dough."

Say that five times a day for a while and you'll just sorta become a Minnesotan.

*A phrase which raises the possibility of guys so nice you wouldn't want to meet them, evidently because they would make you feel bad.

 

Don't tell me what the poets are doing. Don't tell me that they're talking tough: Canadian Halloween Haiku

The Canadian Writer's Collective is having a Halloween haiku contest.  My favorite,  especially for the last two lines, although the lack of a hyphen bugs me:

a friendly menace
hoards of waist high archetypes
shout ultimatums

Interest, Dis and Otherwise

Reading this morning’s New York Times’ Book Review review of Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter I realize that I need to re-emphasize that my comments on the book are not disinterested. While claiming friendship would be overreaching, I creative-direct her web site and we’ve known each other for years.

I realized this when I tugged the paper out of the blue wrapper, pre-caffeine, located the book review, flipped pages and then scanned paragraphs–all with the heart-ticking impatience of a spy looking for some equation that would hold the key to Western Civilization. 

I’m usually all for essayistic reviews, but I wanted to smack Danielle Trussoni. Her first paragraph is a meditation on parental death: “Death is just a hiccup, a trick, a detour in your lives. Soon, the two of you will walk down the street to a bar, order a few drinks, and complain about how uncomfortable the whole thing is.”

Trish was describing something very particular: the death of a parent who has been lingering, collecting an annuity of  duty. Her mother, like an aunt who preceded her, was not on her way to any bar but rather to a chartless place where "she probably no longer knew she was a person and not just a bit of lost being curled on a mattress." 

Then Trussoni devotes the second paragraph to Joan Didion’s memoir about the sudden death of her husband. Personal experience and literary references can broaden and deepen a review; but don’t these dicta need to be relevant to the book?

What’s unfortunate is that, once she gets to the book itself, Trussino is both insightful in her analysis and lavish in her praise–there are tons of good quotes– and my few quibbles with the rest of the review are just the normal clashing of subjectivities.

Ahh, Ten Days Ago, When The World Made Sense

I want to return to the Patricia Hampl quote from about ten days ago, because there was a second point I'd meant to make. She has just acknowledged nostalgia as “the sin of memory”:

"Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty–also a sin when it is misapplied as it often is.  But it's the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness,  nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people."

I posted the quote because precisely describes my writing process and I’ve never seen this point made before. My starting points are often about as subtle as an ape pointing at a flower. I loved 1960s Rollingstone and 1970s Winona. The first impulse to write was simple: to remember and affirm. In the course of writing, my view of both places got a lot more complicated and nostalgia was the “engine” of this complication.

Of course, there is the other kind of nostalgia, the stunted kind, the Vaseline-on-the-lens kind of the more shallow variants on conservatism or just the goofy Happy Days kind.