The Wig by Charles Wright

The Life of John Berryman by John Haffenden

 They sell the reader short by trimming texture to a thesis. Haffenden on limitations of literary biography

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. 

Berryman on Delmore Schwartz's praise of JB's poems: One word is worth it all.  The sick waiting, and letting the poems go out despised, the insufferable reviewers, the silence from whatever readers; the arrogance and the sick doubt; the terrible hours of probing as at a wound, looking, looking, for what may not be there; the conscience and the dry throat, the dry eyes; the piercing hope. 

Schwartz to Mark Van Doren on JB: for what he needs in the most obvious way is some kind of situation to cope with besides his own feelings.

I set up The Dream Songs as hostile to every visibile tendency in both American and English poetry -- in so far as the English have any poetry nowadays. The aim was the same in both poems: the reproduction or invention of the motions of a human personality, free and determined... Critics are divided as to the degree of my success in both cases. Long may they rave!

from the novel  Recovery:
On the rare occasions when he had ever applied for anything - Guggenheim and so forth - he sweated. It was beneath his dignity.  His position was: let the Universe collect & do his bidding without being asked.

Some of the best kind of writing is really transparent....The artist just says what he thinks, or says how he feels....The art comes just in placing, pure syntax.

The World As It Is by Ben Rhodes

Quick history of the Obama years by his principal speechwriter and an important foreign policy advisor.

Hit and Misses by Simon Rich

First four stories are great, the next fourteen fall of sharply.

Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by Paul Mariani.

experience cannot tell you/experience is what you do not want to experience

Great book, and a palate cleanser/corrective after reading the recent River of Fire book focussing on Lowell's mania.

First seizure/manic episode in 1944 after writing "Colloquy on Black Rock."

Randall Jarrell on the intentional difficulty of modern poetry: with poet and public "staring at each other with righteous indignation, til the poet said, 'Since you won't read me, I'll make sure you can't.'"

Cold Harbor, "birth of the dogtag," in poem Inauguration Day: January 1953.

on writing prose: He wants to change every second word, but while he toys with revisions, "the subject sinks like a dead whale and lies in the mud of the mind's bottom."

most people were "warped old dogs set on lying in the sun and changing as little as rocks."

about the Beats: "the best poems are not necessarily poems that read aloud."

WC Williams was "right about our U.S. speech and emotional rhythms being unlike the British."

RL speech on the Gettysburg Address:  America's "struggles with four almost insoluble spiritual problems" which the Gettysburg address had somehow adumbrated: "how to join equality with excellence, how to join liberty with justice, how avoid destroying or being destroyed by nuclear power, and how to complete the emancipation of the slaves."

Mary McCarthy on Lowell's illness: "Poor Cal, one day in seven he's as God intended him to be."

One had "a thousand opportunities to misrevise."

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Re-read it for the second or third time, even better this time around, if a trifle long.  I read a snarky remark by Martin Amis about it, and this drove me back:

I looked at Catch-22 not long ago and I was greatly embarrassed — I thought it was very labored. I asked Heller when I interviewed him if he had used a thesaurus. He said, “Oh yes, I used a thesaurus a very great deal.” And I use a thesaurus a lot too, but not looking for a fancy word for “big.” I use it so I can vary the rhythm of what I’m writing — I want a synonym that’s three syllables, or one syllable. It’s a terrific aid to euphony, and everybody has their own idea of euphony. But the idea of plucking an obscure word out of a thesaurus is frivolous, I think.

Heller began the novel when he was 30, and published it when he was 38.  There are show-offy words here and there -- and whole chunks of it seen overwritten -- but it's an extraordinary novel, and even more so for being a first novel.

Going Away by Clancy Sigal

Stunning book I just heard about.

John Leonard in the New York Times wrote: "Better than any other document I know, Going Away identified, embodied and re‐created the postwar American radical experience. It was as if On the Road had been written by somebody with brains.... (Sigal's) intelligence is always ticking. His ear is superb. His sympathies are promiscuous. His sin is enthusiasm."

The View from Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior

Short moral essays on the decay of the American economy and culture, and politics and government, from 2011-2013.  Depressing.

Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories by Thomas McGuane

The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis

Tess of the D'urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Re-reading, as I now have a daughter dating a guy named Alex.  Whole new, horrifying layer to the narrative.

Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison

The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Okay so far but no GOON SQUAD.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

didn't finish it.  couldn't care enough.

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa

You're closer to reality in a whorehouse than in a convent.

In this country a person who doesn't fuck himself up fucks up other people.

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

... because of his association with Edward Said, who of course before he died wrote an essay on late style-- the notion that an awareness of one's life, and therefore one's artistic contribution coming to an end affects an artist's style, whether by imbuing it with a sense of resolution and serenity or with intransigence, difficulty, contradiction.

Crane: an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways.

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

Part two in his trilogy.  I took a LOT of time off between reading the first monumental installment, THE PASSAGE.  And it was nice returning to the time of the Virals.

A Drop of Patience by William Melvin Kelley

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

candles turned turtle ("turned upside down?")

A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley

"he's serious as a man sitting naked in a barrel of razor blades"

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Terrific dense 1989 novel from my favorites author of 1979.  Didn't catch this one first time around, but it's miles ahead of GARP.

The ALL-CAPS voice of Owen Meany, while at first worrisome because, you know, all caps, is a singular achievement.  Indelible character drawn mainly through his voice. Owen is also a prime mover in the passive life of his best friend Johnny Wheelwright, who quietly narrates the novel.

Weaknesses: the "present-tense" narration of the narrator's current spiritual life as an expatriate in Canada drags and drags on.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

GREAT graphic novel.  Like the show OCR too, but it seems to be just the sheen of the novel without the grit. Going to see it March 10.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

The genre says it all: Domestic Fiction.

Everything about it is neat: the cunning mirror-image plot, the finely-drawn characters, fine without ever spilling over into memorable.  a little too neat for my taste.

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson

Working my way back through Johnson's work after his lamentable early death, I realize I'm fonder of the later stuff than the earlier.  This is earlier, the much-fawned-over druggie tales.  The imagery doesn't seems as stunning to me as it seems genre-driven: the surreal-poetry-image, the disconnected narratives, the violence everywhere calmly announced.

I think TREE OF SMOKE is his masterpiece, a real novel, deep.

The World According to Garp by John Irving

Difficult to re-read this now and not know now what I didn't know then.  The cultural moment of Garp -- Irving's sudden celebrity, the big movie they made out of it with big stars (must watch it again) -- overshadows the book.

The whole second half I had largely forgotten.  But the first half is vivid.  There is something about Irving's phrasing that is always memorable even if his characters seem more one-dimensional than real.  The voice is something, though.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

“In my experience, the people who worry about losing their edge, often they fail to see they already lost the blade along time ago.”

My second attempt at reading this. Bought it when it came out in 2009 and got to page 292.  My dim memory is that I was floundering in the sea of Yiddish terms and also, #2, it weren't no Kavalier and Klay.

Loved it this time around. Thick book -- Chabon really lays it on thick with sense description, and it starts to slow things down halfway through, and take some steam out of the engine of a great noir whodunit -- but Chabon's writing in and of itself is such a great wallowing pleasure, he's always trying to please, and I love the book for that.

Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

The Onion Eaters by J.P. Donleavy

Sleep No More, P.D. James

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Re-read my tattered, literally falling to pieces copy of this 1962 long essay by James Baldwin, a remarkably prescient screed against white complacency and black bewilderment.

Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away.

This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.

Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.

But at the bottom of my heart  I do not believe this, I think that people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are.  We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.  Anyway, the point here is that we are living in an age of revolution, whether we will or no, and that America is the only Western nation with both the power and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

Smile by Roddy Doyle

Curious, quick and eerie. It's a grower.  What starts inauspiciously as a first-person about a recently-divorced writer putting his life back in order becomes a much larger psychological drama about displacement, denial and despair.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Was he dreaming some sort of abnormal and nonexistent visions at that moment, as from hashish, opium, or wine, which humiliate the reason and distort the soul?

Aglaya turned seriously angry and became twice as pretty.

 There’s no one here who is worth such words!” Aglaya burst out. “No one, no one here is worth your little finger, or your intelligence, or your heart! You’re more honest than all of them, nobler than all of them, better than all of them, kinder than all of them, more intelligent than all of them! There are people here who aren’t worthy of bending down to pick up the handkerchief you’ve just dropped…Why do you humiliate yourself and place yourself lower than everyone else? Why have you twisted everything in yourself, why is there no pride in you? 

Isn't it possible simply to eat me, without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me?

“And meanwhile, even in spite of all my desire, I could never imagine to myself that there is no future life and no providence. Most likely there is all that, but we don't understand anything about the future life and its laws. But if it is so difficult and even completely impossible to understand it, can it be that I will have to answer for being unable to comprehend the unknowable? True, they say, and the prince, of course, along with them, that it is here that obedience is necessary, that one must obey without reasoning, out of sheer good behavior, and that I am bound to be rewarded for my meekness in the other world. We abase providence too much by ascribing our own notions to it, being vexed that we can't understand it. But, again, if it's impossible to understand it, then, I repeat, it is hard to have to answer for something it is not given to man to understand. And if so, how are they going to judge me for being unable to understand the true will and laws of providence? No, we'd better leave religion alone.”

All his life he is unable to be at peace! For him, the thought that he has fulfilled his human obligations so well brings neither peace nor comfort; on the contrary, that is even what irritates him: “This,” he says, “is what I’ve blown my whole life for, this is what has bound me hand and foot, this is what has kept me from discovering gunpowder! If it hadn’t been for that, I’d certainly have discovered either gunpowder or America- I don’t know what for sure, but I’d certainly have discovered it!” What is most characteristic in these gentlemen is that all their lives they are indeed unable to find out for sure what precisely they need so much to discover and what precisely they have been preparing all their lives to discover: gunpowder or America? But of suffering, of longing for discovery, they truly have enough of a share in them for a Columbus or a Galileo.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

The Forensic Records by Magnus Mills

The Long Drop by Denise Mina

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

Awesome genre exercise.  Little Raymond Chandler, little Larry McMurtry, little Elmore Leonard.  Loved it.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

I wrote on the flyleaf that I read this book in December of 1986, and I remember Robert "Harpo" Gordon recommended it to me, and since then I've recommended it to many people-- but I didn't really remember any of it.  Re-reading it, I found it to be astonishing and mystifying, someplace between a long wild surreal poem, a dystopian narrative set in the Florida Keys, and a memoir of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War.

“It [fire] catches, then burns, then blazes; it rages and sings, it wanes, it shifts and flares, it burns a little longer and then weakens, whatever it is, and goes out.  But if you lay the small wood across it in the morning, it all begins again”  (125)

"The Sovereign Lord," Zeid say, shiny and orange across the fire, blasted by Fiskadoro's glass vision into a dozen of himself, "the Holy One, the Giver of Peace, the Keeper of Faith; the Guardian, the Mighty One, the All-powerful, the Most High; the Creator, the Originator, the Modeler; the Unbecome, the Unborn, the Unmade; the Dissolver of Space and of time, the Weaver of the Web of Appearances, the Inbreather and Outbreaker of Infinite Universes; the Formless, Non-existent, Imperishable, and Transcendent Fullness of the Emptiness; the Voidness; the Eternal God. (183)

"On that day we shall ask Hell: "'Are you full?'"
Fiskadoro said, "And Hell will answer: 'Are there any more?'" (183)

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson

The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

Little bit shaggy but I couldn't stop reading.  About being a parent in the end, but lots of NYC and monsters and fairy tales in between.

Barkskins by Annie Proulx