Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

I’ve just finished Birds of America and Who Will Run, and would like to stand amended on my initial hesitation at Lorrie Moore's writing style.

The voice she uses everywhere in BoA is just extraordinary – I guess I’ve evolved from “who talks that way?” to “she talks that way and just sit back and wathc it work.” She’s outrageously funny to at almost all times – even her throwaway lines are burnished. “She didn’t mind Chicago. She thought of it as a cross between London and Queens, with a dash of Cleveland.” That’s from “Willing,” about the over-the-hill movie actress who moves back to Chicago from LA and starts dating an auto mechanic named Walt. “Which is More Than I Can Say about Some People” chronicles a trip to Ireland by a mother and daughter. The daughter’s marriage is failing, and she spends the vacation watching her elderly mother open up and try new things and show great signs of life.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

This much-ballyhooed new novel from Colm Toibin is another purely perfectly-pitched narrative, but it did not hit me nearly as hard as his earlier novels, particularly The Master, Toibin's channeling of Henry James in a ficitional omniscient memoir.

The good things are great: Toibin feels more and more to me like a more sensitive Hemingway, his sentences are transparently clean and there is not a trace of authorial voice intrusion. Everything in the books sounds exactly like something thought or said by one of the characters. He writes small, perfect sentences, and they build up incredible incremental pressure within characters, eventually delivering powerful change.

America via New York via Brooklyn is lovingly rendered, as a real place, already grown in many ways and still growing. The novel's protganist, a young woman named Eilisa, emigrates to America at the urging of her beautiful, vivacious older sister Rose and their widowed mother, who are both anxious to do for Eilis what they can't do for themselves: fundamentally change their lives. And Eilis, passive, quiet and aching to please, accepts the mission, sufffering a perilous crossing and a lonely first year in a rooming house in Brooklyn, working as a "floor worker" at a large department store.

Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien

A beautiful, succinct, witty, knowing condensation of a jam-packed (if brief) love-life and life of letters. O'Brien sounds like she knew Byron personally, she is so skilled at linking and narrating the history of his affections. It drove me to read a full-length biography of Byron, Fiona MacCarthy's Byron: Life and Legend, which is also tremendous. Byron's bisexuality, his affair with his half-sister, his courting and finagling of royalty and near-royalty, all burst from this lovely book.

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

Stick by Elmore Leonard

Continue to love every Elmore Leonard title I've ever read. (Full disclosure: not true. Have had Pagan Babies on the bench for ages, started it at least twice, can't get traction. Exception proving rule?) Stick is the latest, an earlier title, published in 1983. Leonard's prose is less dialogue-laden than the later novels, there is more scene description, more narration of the interior state of mind of the protagonist, Earnest "Stick" Stickley. The setting is familiar Florida: Miami, South Beach, Fort Lauderdale. Stickley is familiar too: just sprung from jail, a bank-robber (of course!), this time determined to work a different beat, a different grift.

That Old Cape Magic

I'm a scandal, it's true, but I was disappointed by the new novel That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. (I also was disappointed by his last one, Bridge of Sighs.) Is is judging a living master too harshly? If all his books were written, and I was just reading through the career, perhaps I would have liked it better, cut it more slack, thought it minor, but sharp anyway. Instead, because he is in the middle (well, late middle) of an illustrious career, I keep waiting for him to return to what I consider the peak of his writing: Empire Falls and Straight Man.

It's certainly not unenjoyable -- Russo can be hilarious, and he writes internal male anguish as well as anyone around today -- but I found the plot line boring, several of the lesser characters thin, several of the devices Russo employs (for most of the novel, he's carrying around either one or both of the urns containing his dead father and mother's ashes) too pat, too handy, too -- symbolic.

He weaves his several plot lines, as is his style, over half a century, juxtaposing and springing elusive memories on you just as he usually does -- with drama, in emotionally-certain movements.

The End of the West by Michael Dickman

Don't know why this book of poem's reminds me of Rilke's Duino Elegies, but will try to suss it out. Though the language is much more transparent (in Dickman), the velocity and vertigo are similar, the ache.

Dickman's landscape for his poems, as it were, is emotional: mostly he engages family and friends directly, addresses them, in a one-sided conversation that violently plucks and juxtaposes images from his tragic, if witty, wound of an imagination. Everything is lost, or being lost, or there are plans in the works for its loss.

The form is open field free verse, with wads of silent white space between lines and stanza. He relies on anaphora.

Nervous System

Make a list
of everything that's
ever been

on fire -

Abandoned cars
Trees
The sea

Your mother burned down to the skeleton

so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the
house again, exhausted
in slippers

What else?

Your brain
Your eyes
Your lungs

*

Lisbeth Salander, Girl of Girls

If you've been living under a rock, and haven't either read about this author and these two novels (and the third, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, coming out 10/1 in Britain and 10/31 in the U.S.), I'm hear to preach to you, son, so hold out your hand and close your eyes and ask the ghost of Stieg Larsson to touch you and deliver his novels unto you.

Haven't been this enthralled by novels in forever. I’m addicted, it’s like mind-meth.

Will try to write about it , trying to figure out why there is something so exceptional abour his style, the clean white room of the Swedish speaking soul , the way all the characters seem to sound like emotionless Swedish detectives, the level of bureaucratic detail Larsson so effortlessly effects.

Experience, by Martin Amis

"In one of his most stunning utterances Nietzsche said that a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling. * * A passing note. When Princess Diana died it took four or five days for the jokes to marinate. When John Kennedy Jr died the jokes were instantaneous, electronic, light-speed. The feeling, in other words, had no chance to exist; it was born dead. One wonders, too, about subsequent road kill on the information highway."

It’s an unusual book, more moving in the depth of its completion than any of his novels, even Success and Money, my favorites. He tells the very busy, if at times too baroquely detailed, stories of a) his life up to the moment, b) his relationship with his family with a definite concentration on his father and c) the serial murder of his cousin when he was still a young man. The way he fractures the narrative in time and place is eerie, not quite right, but very poetical and atmospheric, and the three stories, with millions of other smaller stories, insult each other sometimes and cozy up at others. It’s not compelling formally but you enter deeply each scene and vignette. They’re either vivid or vicious (or both).

The photographs he includes in three sections are also intriguing because they’re not really in order and are deliberately misleading in their captions: photographs of his two wives, a couple of lovers, his parents and children and Philip Larkin, and then his cousin Parkington who was strangled (at least) by Frederick West, a particularly horrifying British serial murderer.

And Amis is devoted to poetry. His father was no small poet and his father’s best friend was Philip Larkin. He piggishly smokes cigarettes and drinks and lets it all hang out sexually, but he’s also very interested in how everything appears to him, the way people talk and impress and betray or are just silent toward each other to him, what’s the motivation?

from Jake by Kingsley Amis:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not the ones he had known and dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of the injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

St. Luke's Labyrinth, Bethesda MD

Today I am planning on taking the kids over to Bethesda, picking up my mother, and walking the nearby St. Luke's Labyrinth. This will accomplish my childrens' longing for mystery and Harry-Potter-like anachronistic gothicisms (i.e., they love labyrinths) and my mother's need to exercise. Supposed to get hot (94 degrees) so we will probably not stay long. Thought I'd write a pre-emptive note about it, to keep me subconsciously alert to any opportunities for concentrated thinking or imagery. Here's the church's opening description of the site: "The labyrinth has a single path for walking into and returning from the center. Unlike a maze, the labyrinth has no false turns or blind alleys. You cannot get lost." What's not to love about that? Also, the church's suggested prayer for meditation while walking: "Bless this labyrinth and all who walk it, O God. By the power of your Holy Spirit, make this a safe path, a path of discovery, a holy path. May all who walk this path be strengthened to serve all creation in your name."

Letter's to Wendy's

September 27, 996

If we think of the future as the Pritty Titty Bah-B-Q, and the past as a Motion-Excreting Machine (excreting through the pores), we get a much clearer picture of the present. Will the present is forever beginning to be a buffet, it is always already eaten away to the point of shimmering. This shimmering should not be confused with what is actually edible.

Wendy's restaurant comment cards beg customers to "Tell us about your visit," and Wenderoth writes a year-long diary this way.

They call it fiction but I was reading it like a long thick burger of prose poems: am I wrong. There are no characters but the speaker. There is no plot but the calendar.

If there are themes to the entries (each one no longer than a medium-length paragraph of five or six sentences, and some shorter than that), they are pornography, American plastic culture, a sort of existential philosophy tethered by junk food and anonymity, solipsistic desire-fulfillment. But it's funnier than all that, sad, too, sometimes, in a sentimental way.

In fact, the Wendy's setting provides the intellectual space for an almost infinite deconstructive exercise.

November 25, 1996

This idiotic notion that one should love the other customers. Love here really only means: agree, for the time being, not to attack. People pretend, though, that each customer is an irreplaceable piece of some priceless puzzle -- like the death of each customer is significant for every other customer. It's just not true; one cannot love what one does not know, and -- unfortunately -- one knows very little.'

November 27, 1996

The Virgin Mother appeared to me today. She was holding two baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. "The're delicious," she said, and she smiled, emanating a great white light. I took one from her. It was warm and inviting. I cut into it with my plastic fork and plastic knife and I took a bite. It was, as usual, very dry. She held out the other potato to me. "You try it," I said, "it's dry as fuck."

December 11, 1996

Thinking presses on one, demands that being admit its foundation in sense. Faith relieves this pressure. Its strange babbling is learned intuitively, like a way of laughing. The most stupefying faith there has ever been is the faith in "heaven." Such a faith proposes the abrupt and complete end of sense. This proposal cannot even conceivably be accepted, however much one cries, "I accept, I accept."

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

By the end of the year it happened that she had quite lost interest in the man himself, but was deeply absorbed in his mind, from which she had extracted, among other things, his religion as a pith from a husk. Her mind was as full of his religion as a night sky is full of things visible and invisible. She left the man and took his religion and became a nun in the course of time.

the creme de la creme

the dialogue for the character of Jean Brodie is almost impossible to excerpt, it is all pitch-perfect and eminently quotable.

Throne of Blood by Akira Kurosawa

The reason this film trumps all other Shakespeare adaptions to cinema is simple: it doesn't care a whit for the original, cerebral, figurative and image-laden language. It carves all the meat off the bone of the plot, and uses music, atmosphere, stark melodramatic performances, and visual imagery instead.

Some of the sounds -- the wind howling up and down Mount Fuji, where the film was located, the whinnying of the battle-mad horses, the solid percussion of the actors' bare feet running in measured syncopated blocking, the whistle and impact of arrows -- take on the force of characters themselves.

Yamada's Lady Asaji is bone-chilling. Her face barely moves, her pale white makeup is passive, and she has eyebrows drawn on two level of her forehead. When she finally breaks down near the film's end, endlessly washing her spotless hands in a room whose walls are covered with an innocent victim's blood (the notorious traitor Fujimaki killed himself in the same room, now known as the Forbidden Room), wailing that she can't get clean, the effect is almost euphoric. Earlier, she exits through a panel in the dwelling's wall, vanishing into pitch black, then returning seconds later with a pitcher of drink for her husband.

Mifune's Washizu scowls even when he is laughing.

mist, colossal trees dripping with rain, rich black volcanic soil and bulky fortress architecture

Noh thousand-year-old theatrical tradition

The Noh stage must have on it three pine branches and a symbolic Shinto temple-arch. In the film, shots are carefully composed to include tangles of branches in the foreground, and the vast entrance gate of Washizu's fortress serves for the temple arch.
A Noh play features a "doer" (Shite) and a "companion" (Waku) who plays a subordinate role. Washizu and Asaji are the Shite and Waku respectively. Elements in the Noh include a battle-drama (we get one here) and a so-called "wig drama", in which a female character dominates the action. This is the central portion of the film, in the quiet of the fortress quarters, when Asaji ruthlessly manipulates her husband's ambition. Every Noh play has a ghost which appears to the Shite, and the spirit in the forest fulfils that function. Noh plays are never original works, in that (by a venerable convention) they are re-workings of ancient legends. Kurosawa follows tradition by quarrying his tale from Shakespeare's play.

There is no western term to describe the stylized striking of poses so important in Noh. Our word "dance" is a crude word which approximates to, but does not convey, the grace of the Japanese art-form. Asaji, alone with the blood-stain, gives us a glimpse of this delightful ritual.

Finally, Noh contains an aural richness almost totally absent from western tragedy - the complex rhythms of stamping and percussion which accompany the spoken word. In the film, the rhythmic patterns of horses' hooves on soil, and Washizu's bare feet on the boards of the banquet hall, are meant to reinforce the mood as they creep into our emotions by subliminal insistence.

Drama City by George Pelecanos

Drama City is my introduction to homegrown DC crime writer George Pelecanos, and I am mightily impressed. The crime plot is good , the characters very solid (a paroled felon trying to go straight as an animal-control officer, his very sympathetic and secretly sex-addicted female parole officer), it meshes mightily halfway through and I couldn't put it down -- but it's the Washington DC landscape Pelecanos paints that is most impressive. The Georgia Avenue-Petworth-Shaw corridor geographical and sociological detail which he provides are mesmerizing. Having just finished Richard Price's monumental Lush Life, about criminals and wannabes and yuppies and tired cops on Manhattan's lower East Side, it was easy for me to peg Pelecano's as our own Price.

Jamesland by Michele Huneven

This gorgeously-written eclectic novel takes place in the Los Feliz neighborhood near Hollywood, in Los Angeles. Equal parts philosophical/religious treatise, self-help/addiction/mental-health handbook, and deep character-based fiction along the lines of a Henry James, the Jamesland of the title actually refers to Henry's older brother William James, widely credited with the invention of modern psychology, but also a well-know philosopher and religious thinker.

The three central characters: Helen Harland, a Unitarian Universalist pastor struggling to hold onto her year-old position at a new church, where she is faced with a congregation that finds her too religious, Pete Ross, forever pondering the question "How do people live in this world?", a mentally-ill, obese, renowned chef who suffered numerous breakdowns, lost his job, wife and children and is now living with his mother (who became a nun at age 40), and Alice Black, sometimes-bartender, great-great-granddaughter of William James, caring for her eccentric, sometimes brilliant, sometimes-demented great-aunt Kate, who is writing a book on William James, but alternately delusional and believing she is living in William James' time. Alice is reeling from her affair with the husband of movie star.

The plot is a series of dinners and events planned by Helen in which she gradually brings the two misfits Alice and Pete together, at the same time finding peace herself with her annoying congregation and distant husband. Pete's exotic cuisines (from his stint as an accomplished chef), Alice's aunt's detailed obsession with the religious, philosophical and extra-sensory research of Williams James also contribute to the tapestry.

Road Dogs

Elmore Leonard's latest offering centers around two men who became friends doing prison terms in Florida, who reunite in Venice Beach after getting out, to squabble over a woman, who tries to play them both and take the money and row.

Once again we meet Jack Foley fished out of the clink after serving some years of a 30-year sentence. Inside he has met and befriended Cundo Rey, a dimunitive, wealthy, aggressive and sex-crazed Cuban who pulls some of his many strings and gets them both out early.

Cundo's wife Dawn (both Cundo and Dawn are also recurring Leonard characters ). But Dawn is lovely and wily (and maybe a psychic), Cundo is a murderously jealous husband who may well think Jack owes him big-time, and Jack? Well, when you've robbed a hundred-twenty or so banks, is it that easy to go straight?

I marvel at Leonard's dialogue-writing skills. This book is fully 75% dialogue.

“What I don’t understand,” Cundo said, walking the yard with Foley, “I see you as a hip guy, you smart for a fucking bank robber, but two falls, man, one on top the other, you come out you right back in the slam. Tell me how you think about it, a smart guy like you have to look at thirty years.”

Foley said, “You know how a dye pack works? The teller slips you one, it looks like a pack of twenties in a bank strap. It explodes as you leave the bank. Something in the doorframe sets it off. I walk out of a bank in Redondo Beach, the dye pack goes off and I’m sprayed with red paint, people on the street looking at me. Twenty years of going in banks and coming out clean, my eyes open. I catch a dye pack and spend the next seven in federal detention, Lompoc, California. I came out,” Foley said, “and did a bank in Pomona the same day. You fall off a bike you get back on. I think, Good, I’ve still got it. I made over six grand in Pomona. I come back to Florida— my wife Adele divorced me while I’m at Lompoc and she’s having a tough time paying her bills. She’s working for a magician, Emile the Amazing, jumping out of boxes till he fired her and hired a girl Adele said has bigger tits and was younger. I do a bank in
Lake Worth with the intention, give Adele the proceeds to keep her going for a few months. I leave the bank in the Honda I’m using, America’s most popular stolen car at the time. Now I’m waiting to make a left turn on to Dixie Highway and I hear the car behind me going va-room va-room, revving up, the guy can’t wait. He backs up
and cuts around me, his tires screaming, like I’m a retiree waiting to make the turn when it’s safe to pull out.”

“You just rob the fucking bank,” Cundo said.

“And this guy’s showing me what a hotdog he is.”

“So you go after him,” Cundo said.

“I tore after him, came up on the driver’s side and stared at him.”

“Gave him the killer look,” Cundo said.

“That’s right, and he gives me the finger. I cranked the wheel and sideswiped him, stripped his chrome and ran him off the road.”

“I would’ve shot the fucker,” Cundo said.

“What happened, I tore up both tires on the side I swiped him. By the time I got the car pulled over, a deputy’s coming up behind me with lights flashing.”

“Tha’s called road rage,” Cundo said. “I’m surprise, a cool guy like you losing it. How you think it happen?”

“I wasn’t paying attention. I let myself catch a dye pack in Redondo Beach, something I swore would never happen. The next one, seven years later, you’re right, I lost it. You know why? Because a guy with a big engine wearing shades, the top down, no idea I’d just robbed a bank, made me feel like a wimp. And that,” Foley
said, “is some serious shit to consider.”

“Man, you got the balls to bust out of prison, you don’t have to prove nothing.”

“Out for a week and back inside.”

“What could you do? The girl shot you, the chick marshal. You don’t tell me about her.”

Karen Sisco. Foley kept her to himself. She gave him moments to think about and look at over and over for a time, a few months now, but there weren’t enough moments to last thirty years.

Lush Life by Richard Price

Lush Life, Richard Price

Buddha from Brooklyn

The Buddha from Brooklyn

Brothers by Hua

Brothers, Yu Hua

Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurty

Streets of Laredo, Larry McMurtry

Poor George by Paula Fox

Poor George, Paula Fox

This is a slow-working novel, like a drink you've never had before and doubt its kick, and then you wake up with a broken tooth, a throbbing headache, lying next to a woman who doesn't speak English.