Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

... a chess world where you moved about like a knight trying to move like a rook trying to move like a bishop...

...and the irritation of thinking about all this and knowing that since it was always easier to think than to be, that in my case the ergo of the expression was no ergo or anything at all like it...

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began up beyond her, and that I went along outside as I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.

Wong summing up Morelli's passage: "The novel that interests us is not one that places character in a situation, but rather one that puts the situation in the characters."

voyant vs voyeur - a seer vs. a spectator of others' pleasure

genius lies in choosing to be a genius and in being right

instead of obstinately connecting with a non-existent tunnel, as is the case with so many poets leaning halfway out the living-room window late at night

In some corner, a vestige of the forgotten kingdom. In some violent death, the punishment for having remembered the kingdom. In some laugh, in some tear, the survival of the kingdom. Beneath it all, one does not feel that man will end up killing man. He will escape from it, he will grasp the rudder of the electronic machine, the astral rocket, he will trip up and then they can set a dog on him. Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. Wishful thinking, perhaps; but that is just another possible definition of the featherless biped.

Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw

Couldn't put this down, an enormous 1948 novel about WWII. Told from three points of view: Noah, a young Jewish man from New York, just married; Michael, a cynical Hollywood screenwriter in his early 30s; and Christian, a former ski instructor, now a German soldier. Their thoughts and footsteps intertwine. Along with the THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, and ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, this novel completes my recent foray into the Second World War. All three books stunned me.

Friend of My Youth: Stories by Alice Munro

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

Lovely, old-fashioned novel. Just captivating. Very little happens, except in nature, where enormous things occur, and are noticed, and give life.

Eagerly awaiting Coplin's next effort.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Pretty great. Makes me want to go back and finish her new Hotel one.

A virus (timely!), some great Lear scenes. Futuristic without being science-fiction-y.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Couldn't get through this new one by Mandel, while awaiting The Station Eleven to arrive in the mail.

After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson

Little hackneyed, little dull, after all these years.

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton

Took a quick day to re-read this favorite of my adolescence, in these viral days. Still just as good. Great movie too.

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Took me a month and two days to finish reading this final installment in Mantel's WOLF HALL trilogy. It was good even though I don't recall the first two books in any detail, and all the history is brand new to me. But man, was it long. 750 really thin pages.

In Wyatt's verse there is a tussle in every line. In the verse of Lord Thomas, there is no contest at all, just a smooth surrender to idiocy.

... he will try to return the poems to their owners... where they will be giggled at by whores, and used to wipe their arses. When he gets home he says to Gregory, 'Never write verse.'

[instructions to Bible printers] The trick is to get them to set the line right to the edge of the page. It does not make for good appearance, but no white space means no perversion by marginalia.

Wyatt?

To counterfeit a merry mood
In mourning mind I think it best.
But once in rain I wore a hood
Well were they wet that barehead stood.

'What should I want with the Emperor, were he emperor of all the world? Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kinds.'

Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones... You can write on England, but was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep old well.  It's not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it's those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges, the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand years before that.

'Oh, Wyatt,' the king says. 'What he says he does not mean, and what he means he does not say.'

When he was an infant, his sister Kat used to tell him the bells made the time. When the hour strikes, and the music shivers in the air, you have the best of it; and what's left is like a sucked plumstone on the side of your plate.

He yawns. But speaks to himself: you must not be tired. If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another day after that.

Endgame by Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Re-reading Waiting for Godot after all these years, in the midst of finishing up Deirdre Bair's biography of Beckett, I'm struck by the simplicity and insistence of the text. Generations now have tried to apply some sort of symbolic system on the play: it's about slavery, it's about the existence of God, it's about communism. Beckett himself always rejected all these sorts of filters, arguing, as a poet might, that it's about the words. Concentrate on the words and exclude ideology, and the weirdness of the words and characters and situation create their own system.

Buy my books.

Buy the books on Amazon, and watch videos of some readings.  Please.

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

A little of the film SUNSET BOULEVARD, a little Damon Runyon, a little MISS LONELYHEARTS: a stunning book about Hollywood, and the American rags to riches process.

The music took the old sweet melodies and twisted them like hairpins.

It was right in the groove that Hollywood had been geared for, slick, swift and clever. What Kit calls the Golden Rut.

...if he don't like the fifty bucks, he can crap in his hat, pull it over his head and call it curls.

'He ran around behind the bleachers so he should beat the camera,' Mrs. Glickstein explained.

from Schulberg's Afterword, about the uproar the book caused in the industry, BS's father to Louis Mayer: "For Christ's sake, Louie, he's the only novelist who ever came from Hollywood. Where the hell are you going to deport him, Catalina Island?"

Another City by David Keplinger

Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

This joins the list of the most perfect short novels I've ever read.

The rest of that list:

• Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald 
• Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald 
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Panama by Thomas McGuane
• Poor George by Penelope Fox
• Old Filth by Jane Gardham
• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
• The Following Story by Nooteboom

Samuel Beckett: A Biography by Deirdre Blair

ubi nihil vales: where you are worth nothing, you should want nothing. - Geulinex

Beckett described himself as "a young man with the itch to make and nothing to say."

O che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni - What a misfortune to be without balls! - the Eunuch in Voltaire's Candide

And if you do not understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it…Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in Englsih. It is not written at all. It is not to be read, or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something: It is that something itself ... When the sense is sleep the words go to sleep. When the sense is dancing, the words dance. (Beckett on Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE, from Beckket's essay in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929).

For Beckett [Jules] Renard was man who had found the secret of the perfect approach to life: how to live completely within himself, to examine himself minutely, to write about this examination and yet to inhabit the outer world with tranquility and contentment.

Beckett student valentine to Beckett: "S-. B-CK-TT: I wish he would explain his explanations. -BYRON

Beckett to Walter Lowenfels: "Walter, all I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."

"She had never been born entirely." -JUNG (keystone for Beckett's womb fixation)

"Better a bougie [catheter] than a burst bladder. (SB on publishing a book despite setbacks)

Man is doomed to failure, for he can never commit or abandon himself completely to his inner voice.

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

More than once he repeated his dictum that his work was a matter of simple, fundamental sounds, and that the actors should not look for meaning but should concentrate on what he intended them to do.

"I couldn't have done it otherwise. Gone on, I mean. I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence."

POEMS BY BECKETT

Gnome by Samuel Beckett

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning


Cascando by Samuel Beckett

1.
why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2.
saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3.
unless they love you



"From the only poet to a shining whore" by Samuel Beckett

for Henry Crowder to sing

Rahab of the holy battlements,
bright dripping shaft
in the bright bright patient
pearl-brow dawn-dusk lover of the sun.

Puttanina mia!
You hid them happy in the high flax,
pale before the fords
of Jordan, and the dry red waters,
and you lowered a pledge
of scarlet hemp.

Oh radiant, oh angry, oh Beatrice,
she foul with the victory
of the bloodless fingers
and proud, and you, Beatrice, mother, sister, daughter,
beloved,
fierce pale flame
of doubt, and God’s sorrow,
and my sorrow.

The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright

The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel

The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind

from The Sun and Her Stars: "Salka chose instead to adorn her house with people... There was a feeling of abundance here, but the extravagance was emotional rather than material..."

A valuable and graceful book that rescues Salka Viertel from being mostly famous as a minor character in Greta Garbo's life. Rifkind firmly establishes Viertel's unique place in history as someone who singlehandedly comforted a generation of European emigrees who made their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s to escape fascism and the murdering Nazis. The grace and richness of Rifkind's use of secondary sources is astounding, as she uses the words (from correspondence and memoirs, novels and films) of the dozens of distinguished writers, artists, actors who found a home in her home, to richly animate the life of the mind her house became for this embattled homeless group. Irwin Shaw, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Arnold Schoenberg, Billy Wilder are but a few.

For just one example, the following from the novel Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood, about his character Friedrich Bergmann, based on Salka Viertel's husband Bertholdt: "The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave." Or the title of this review, which Rifkind uses to describe Viertel's last view of Berlin when she left:  "Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too," from a poem by Rilke, another Viertel acquaintance.

Rifkind, with verve, density and grace, makes what could have been an exercise in esoteric filmography into a gripping cultural history of a singular woman and her courage in a terrible time. Highest recommendation!

"See the black souls of the Jews fly away" p 131

Salka's son Peter's novel The Canyon. always mud, heavy and brown, that was the water's brother.

director Rouben Mamoulian, who used a metronome to time Garbo's movements in Queen Christina ("I have been memorizing the room")

About Grace by Anthony Doerr

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

A rivetting book. A bunch of liars, drunks, addicts and misfits telling lies and embroidering others lies, and somehow, it triangulates into a sort of truth about the genesis of punk rock music.

The Rocks by Peter Nichols

The Revisionaries by A.R. Moxon

The doubt was the faith, and the faith was the doubt.

Why I am a Bad Reader

Rather than discuss whether this novel was "good" or "bad," in keeping with the fictive spirit of the book, I'd rather treat myself as a character in the book (one of the all-powerful "readers") and judge my own performance as reader, my rendition of the role. Can God create a being so slippery even He cannot apprehend him?

Well, I'm not too sure of that. It's a relief to me, at least, to be free of A.R. Moxon's intelligent, probing, playful hands. Ron Charles' Washington Post review was what drew me in: it made it seem like it was everything I wanted. (Charles does a good job in capsulizing the "plot" and general movements, thank God, so check him out.) Late in the year, the book flew up to the top of my Christmas list, and I soon dove right in.

I am a bad reader because I insist on finishing monstrously long, incredibly discursive experimental novels that make me wonder what's the difference between a publishable bad novel, and an unpublishable bad novel. I read a lot, every day. I read the Washington Post, I read an hour of fiction, I read some poetry, I read or scan online all day long. I have a fetish about reading: keep going. Even this novel, which was borderline boring for the first 200 pages, borderline interesting for the next 200 pages, and careeningly bad for the last 200 pages. Why do I do it? Don't I have something better to do?

In fact, I don't. More than anything else in this life, I read, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

Was I hopeful that it might get better? Yes, for a while, in the middle.

Was I incredulous that it seemed to be getting worse, and wanted to hang around for the gory finish? Definitely.

Was I struck throughout from time to time, by the philosophical speculation and dimension of essential spiritual life given to almost all the main characters? Yes.

Never mind that the final genre for this book is somewhere in the speculative/science fiction - fantasy realm, a realm I largely abandoned when I was about 13 years old.

But Moxon is also an interesting twitter-er, and publishes this newsletter about the process of writing TR which reminded me of some of my youthful conversations with friends about getting something going on the page.

But why even make it a choice? Why make me the middle man in some moralizing transfiguring partially visible comic book freak show nonsense?