The Throwback by Tom Sharpe

Delicious violent British farce about a man from the fells who won't give up his property.  Has to be read to be believed.  And some great mock-ballads!

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

Interesting, funny at times, a text that unfolds at several levels, including a sort of reverse chronological revelation, a series of black and white photos, oblique quotations that open each section of the book, an author's note explaining her collaborative composition technique, and a translator's appendix that is a chronology of "real events" intertwined with a timeline of the main character of the novel's actions.

Interesting, but not rivetting.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

[Signet Classic, 1995.  Photo is from original publication, cover illustration by a child, his editor's son? lover's son?]

I have reached the limits of endurance.  My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further.  As far as history goes I am dead.  If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back.  I have found God, but he is insufficient.  I am only spiritually dead.  Physically I am alive.  Morally I am free.  The world which I have departed is a menagerie.  The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws.  If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one:  I go forth to fatten myself.

Wowsa wowsa wowsa! what a book.  At infrequent times irritating and a slog, at more frequent other times a glorious prose poem.  The prose is first-rate throughout.  As a novel, it lacks a plot, and the characters tend to run together.  But the narrator's voice is unimpeachable, a modulated brilliant scream against existence that by its very beauty argues the opposite. It is much a time and place (Paris, 1932-1934) that I will ever get to know.  Published in France in 1934 (the year my mother was born) and only published in the US in 1961 (the year I was born), it appeared in bootleg versions around the world immediately and had a great effect.  It's not the 1940s Paris of Hemingway -- it's the weak-currency, shit-smeared version of Paris in the early 1930s.  And Paris is the star character, in all her glory and decay, her civilization and her madness.

I have taken my time and dogeared many pages and will take care to re-type them here, just for the beauty of the sentences.  And the quotes are long:  Miller was not an epithet-er, but a spinner of great paragraphs.

"'This fucking business is bad, Endree,' he says.  'But I will give you a word that will always make you lucky; you must say it every day, over and over, a million times you must say it.  It is the best word there is, Endree... say it now...OOMAHARUMOOMA!'
'OOMARABOO...'
'No Endree... like this... OOMAHARUMOOMA!'
'OOMAMABOOMBA...'
'No, Endree... like this...'
...but with that the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lie-a-bed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his brainfag,, the tic of his conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears, since it took him a month to steal a march, he was hardset to memorize more than a word a week."

[on Van Norden]:  In a sense Van Norden is mad, of that I am convinced.  His one fear is to be left alone, and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for himself.  

You can be brilliant sometimes, when you're drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreading department... Just the same it's hard to talk to a man when you have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself, even if you use only monosyllabic words.  He knew god-damn well, the boss, that I didn't take the least bit of interest in his yarns; and yet, explain it how you will, it gave him pleasure to wean me away from my dreams and fill me full of dates and historical events.  It was his way of taking revenge, I suppose.  [p. 168-169]

One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris – I discovered that! – on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment - perhaps the best there is for some people.  At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope.  I was only flirting with disaster.  I had time and sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people's lives, to dally with the dread stuff of romance which, however morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between the covers of a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. [p. 172]

So true is it that I am almost tempted to say: "Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!" What is called their "over-elaboration" is my meat: it is the sign of the struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted . . . . I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. [p. 232]

This is from the marvelous penultimate scene in the novel, where the narrator has gone to Dijon as an unpaid English tutor at a monastery school:  Everything frozen tight as scum, the mind locked and rimed with frost, and through the melancholy bales of chitter-wit the choking gargle of louse-eaten saints.  White I am and wrapped in wool, swaddled, fettered, ham-strung, but in this I have no part.  White to the bone, but with a cold alkali base, with saffron-tipped fingers.  White, aye, but no brother of learning, no Catholic heart.  White and ruthless, as the men before me who sailed out of the Elbe.  I look to the sea, to the sky, to what is unintelligible and distantly near. [page 255]

Going back in a flash over the women I've known, it's like a chain which I've forged out of my own misery.  Each one bound to the other .  A fear of living separate, of staying born.  The door of the womb always on the latch.  Dread and longing.  Deep in the blood the pull of Paradise.  The beyond.  Always the beyond.  It must have all started with the navel.  They cut the umbilical cord, give your a slap on the ass, and presto! you're out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder.  You look at the stars and then you look at your navel.  You grow eyes everywhere -- in the armpits, between your lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet.  What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant.  Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins,a turning inside out.  You drift around like that for years and years, until you find yourself in the dead center, and there you slowly rot, slowly crumble to pieces, get dispersed again.  Only your name remains. (260)

George Orwell on Henry Miller, from "Inside the Whale":  Miller is simply a hard-boiled person talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual courage and a gift for words.  It is perhaps significant that he looks exactly like everyone's idea of an American businessman.

Why Are We In Vietnam? by Norman Mailer

with the smell of the North on a September night, a fine tricky clean smell, like a fine nervce washed in alcohol and lightly powdered to get the rut of flesh off.

Copyright 1967.  Thomas Pynchon must have read this book, since Gravity's Rainbow seems to have gotten its central voice from the main character, D.J. Jethroe, the jiving, brilliant, clowning 18 year old consciousness that narrates this psychic hurricane of a novel.  Vietnam not mentioned until the very last sentences, it is instead about American male mad lust, violent charisma and energy, seething through DJ's mind as he sits at a farewell banquet, about to ship off to Vietnam (hot damn) and rememebering his hunting trip to Alaska two years old with his best friend and his father.

An experience of a book.  A little nauseasting, a lotta bewildering, but a reading that is lived.

Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe

Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello

Just a tremendous book.  Took me forever to read because I kept turning over corners of pages to go seek out the live sets/jazz songs he was talking about on YouTube, but it's unspeakably lively, the whole thing.

What a songwriter, what a poet, what a musician, what a presence!  It's such a boon, such a gift, when a music-maker and performer as tremendous as Costello also has the extreme page-bent and deigns to write the story of his life in song!

Early on, in my mind, I nit-picked some of his choices of what to tell and how to tell it -- his family history, though relevant and well-written (as the whole book is), impede the pop-reader's progress a bit.

But this is a guy who has spend the last 40 years on stage singing all these songs, and grabbing the time when he's not performing TO WRITE THE MARVELOUS THINGS.

So it's really small of ME to question his narrative arc, as so much of his life was spent in the (for me) higher realm of making music (aka, speaking to the angels).

The book drove me back to some seriously deep cuts-- and I thought I was well-represented, as my 'iTunes" data shows I have 34 albums and 460 songs, totalling '1 day' of total listening, but ECs generous, brilliant writing has shown me I have but scratched the surface of his gift to the world.

Postscript:  book gets annoying in last 200 pages.  EC begins quoting his lyrics at greater length, as they become less well-known to me.  His inserted "short stories" are also baffling. His tendency to narrate his encounter with every celebrity becomes irritating.  To me his first three albums tower over the rest of the work, the first album and the next two with the Attractions.  Then he enters a "pop" period that goes on forever and ever, that features his voice and heavily arranged music.  In the late 80s he has another good string with Blood and Chocolate, and King of America.  Spike is half great.  Then from the 90s on he becomes bewildering -- classical music, jazz and near jazz, opera music.  His album, THE RIVER IN REVERSE, has great Toussaint songs but they suffer as sung by EC-- his voice, which he seems to have grown more enamored with over time, is not very great.  he seems to have stopped sounding like himself after King of America, and trying to assume a proto-liberal American voice that was not his own.  Just saying.

Submission by Michel Houellebecq

Interesting, if academic and insular, French novel about a France of the not-distant future that has been politically taken over by a Muslim majority, and changes its culture to reflect that: women cannot work and must be veiled, men can take multiple wives, conversion to Islam helps one in professional advancement.

The narrator, a 40-ish French academic whose speciality is Huymans, spends most of the book in intellectual musing and conversation with other scholars about the political history of  France, and its literature.

It's satiric, in that the narrator is a narrow, selfish, bourgeois most interested in lazing about and having sexual one-off liaisions, and finds himself gradually drawn into Muslim conversion himself, when he realizes it suit his rather self-centered, sexually rapacious lifestyle.

In the article for Oumma, Rediger raised the question whether Islam had been chosen for world domination.  In the end he answered yes.  He hardly bothered with Western societies, since to him they seemed to obviously doomed (liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion.

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry

Disappointing.  I was expected the sort of completely organic fiction of City of Bohane, with its marvelous imagination of an Ireland in the dystopian future.

Instead, Beatlebone is a treacly "what if?" narrative, as in, what if Barry could get inside John Lennon's head during his broken-down years of 1975-1978?  So we get JL's vaunted scream therapy, we get JL's memories of his beloved mother and his hated father, we get JL's public voice, punny, funny and angry, all set down in a lyrical Irish landscape of the West Coast and western islands.  We got a bizarre late chapter in which Barry writes in first person of his teasing attempts to lace his notes with the real, and a journal of his own visit to JL's supposed Irish island.  We got a late short chapter of JL speaking/singing/rhapsodizing into a microphone of his own stream of consciousness for his great lost ficitional album Beatlebone that he dreamed up on the island.

But the whole thing, frankly, was an effort to read.  Disappointed!

It does make me want to listen to JL's Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey songs.  But it does not make me want to read more Barry, for now.

The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

A Wild Swan and Other Tales by Michael Cunningham

The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Frustrating and a front-loaded effort for me, as I did not love her first prose poems book, and feel reverse-victimized as the toady privileged white male she might be demonizing (at her worst).

But I have to say that after laboring through the book,  I found it scintillating and unique.  She takes on sociology and history and psychology as her own tropes and twists them masterfully in short order.  I was moved and radicalized in a strange way.  Quite beautiful and quite unique.

Although I do wish she stop writing prose.  But what do I know?

Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present.  Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please. (p. 49)

Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition. (p. 55)

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (read by John Malkovich)

Only have way through listening to this performance of Breakfast of Champions by John Malkovich.  As a young person, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel.  Later in life, I fell in love with the acting power and prowess of John Malkovich.  Perfect match, so far.  Malkovich's chewy, grumbling voice is allowing me to hear the book with new ears, after trying to re-read it several years ago and finding it bland and vacuous.

video snippet of Malkovich reading

The Whites by Richard Price

The Incarnations by Susan Barker

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth

To write [the necessary qualities are]: massive self-approval, a thick skin and the conviction of the importance of 'some urgent conception of the universe and the state o fman', which, though inevitably 'arrant toash', is necessary to give the writer the stubborn impetus to continue. (summary and quotes from 'Round the Point,' unpublished Larkin dialectical playlet)


I enjoyed this book but that is probably because I love all things Larkin.  Booth's analysis of the poems are long-winded and sometimes unnecessary, and he is much too fond of the adjective "less-deceived," also the title of one of Larkin's pivotal books.

I liked learning that the original draft ending to "High Windows" instead of reading "and is endless" read "and fucking piss."

Larkin and Monica Jones defaced a first-edition copy of Iris Murdoch's 1956 novel, The Flight from the Enchanter, and Booth criticize's their many hours of "sterile boredom" that must have led them to do this, 1300 alterations in all.  Well, I think it's funny.






Next, Please

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead wit golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake

No waters breed or break.

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

Very moving first novel by the author of Want Not Want Not, a superlative second novel.  Recommended.

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg.

Pretty marvelous book.  Less marvelously too long, though.  Still, couldn't (literally) put it down.

But I finished it with equal parts exhaustion and sadness at seeing the story end.

It was so long that whole sections swam out of the key-frame of my attention, and when characters and incidents and meaningful "things" seem to ring a bell, I was too tired to go back and tried to find them and fit them back on the puzzle.

It's a tremendous meaty accomplishment of a place -- New York City -- and a time -- 1975-1977 -- that will endure.  Hallberg's descriptive power, his endless playful grasp of lingo, jingo and jive astonished me page after page.  But, too, they seem to impress the author to the point where he grew lazy in editing himself -- more is not always better in prose.

The rich family at the center of the narrative -- the Hamilton-Sweeneys -- were not nearly as interesting to me as the outliers -- Charlie "The Prophet," Samantha, Richard G., and the detective.

Despite the (almost awkward) inclusion of Mercer, as an important black character, the novel does seem to suffer from the great stifling condition of privileged-neurotic-white-folks-who-sound-the-same-when-they-think.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke