End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy by James Swanson

Fluffy, romantic language.  Still a clear and concise chronology (if superficial) of immediate time frame of assassination.

What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

Great extended literary and autobiographical reflection upon death.

Some funny stuff too: There would be no bad men in the world if there weren't bad women. (JB's grandmother)

Steps by Jerzy Kozinski

Creepy, vague.  Don't understand why David Foster Wallace liked it so much.  Subject of a funny experiment in literary industry though.

Transatlantic by Colum McCann

Mo said she was quirky by James Kelman

Only 200 pages mustered.  Too bad, a big fan of Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late.

Now it seems to be by my fault that I'm not finishing reading books, after always priding myself on being a finisher, good or bad.  Impatience?  Extended bad mood?  Encroaching old age?  Sudden clarification of sharp personal idiosyncratic literary taste?  Advancing alcoholism?

The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner

Was liking this a great deal during the wartime and motorcyle sections, but quickly lost interest once the Manhattan art-scene-talk started happening.

Too bad.  It's that sexy, nyc book-du-jour movement that I'd loved to seem to be a part of, but ain't.

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem

Didn't finish it.  Not my fault, author's fault: I finish reading books all the time.

New label?

Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

An extended short-story cycle from 1971 that plays as a novel.  Dense, wonderful characters.  Absolutely unique voice of a young girl, young woman's coming-of-age story.  Still ringing in my head, I miss reading it already.

Conversations there [at my aunt's house] had many levels, nothing could be stated directly, every joke might be a thrust turned inside out.  My mother's disapproval was open and unmistakable, like heavy weather; theirs came like tiny razor cuts, bewilderingly, in the middle of kindness.  They had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference.

There is twas, the mysterious and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed, in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them.

I wanted me to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon.

People's wishes, and their other offerings, were what I took then naturally, a bit distractedly, as if they were never anything more than my due.

The Nimrod Flip Out by Etgar Keret

Indescribably pleasurable super-short stories.  Translated from the Hebrew and sort of (I guess) about the complexities and madness of that country's imaginative life.  Sexy and violent and funny and jarring juxtapositions abound.

Someone by Alice McDermott

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

An interesting New Yorker piece by Claudia Roth Pierpont ("Book of Laughter: Philip Roth and his friends" in Life and Letters, October 7) compelled meto pick up The Ghost Writer for the first time.

The summer of 1998:  "Terrorism-- which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security-- was succeeded by cock-sucking." (Roth, The Human Stain)

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Gave up after a hundred pages,  As this is the fourth novel in a row I have been unable to finish, one can suspect c'est moi and not necessarily the condition of contemporary fiction.

But I love (or always say I love) Pynch.  Well, I love V and Gravity's Rainbow and the short stories in Slow Learner.  Reading alot of DF Wallace lately, who idolized Pynchon, made me curious about this new title.

But no dice.  An exhausting swirl on interesting description, heavily-worked-over-like-in-the-Catskills comedic dialogue, new characters appearing and disappearing before the old ones have been set in stone, pop cultural references stacked like deli sandwiches from hell, lots of exposition in dialogue and in the mouthy third-person-narrator's insights:  it wore me out. 

Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano by John Tytell

In prose as in algebra concrete things are embodied in signs or counters, which are moved about according to rules, without being visualized at all in the process... Poetry, in one aspect  at any rate, may be considered as an effort to avoid this characteristic of prose.  It is not a counter language, but a concrete visual one.  It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily.  It always endeavors to arrest you, and to make you see a physical thing, to prevent you from gliding through an abstract process. (EP, in the magazine The New Age )

Great literary history/biography of the infamous Modernist Pound.
Tytell makes a convincing case for excusing Pound's vicious anti-Semitism and more general hatred of America and anyone who didn't support him (and many who did). 

Take Ford Madox Ford, for example, who had this pungency to say about Pound.

Ezra would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point and a single large blue earring.

Pound encouraged, supported, pushed and published Ford, WB Yeats, James Joyce, TS Eliot, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and H.D., just to name the giants.  He was enormously influential on (if not exactly imitable by) an entire generation of younger poets -- Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, Zukowsky).

The twitching of three abdominal muscles cannot be a lasting Nirvana.

You funghus, you continuous gangren.  (Pound on his audience)

The gagged reviewers and slut-bellied obstructionists.  (Pound on his critics)


Pound was arrested for treason in Italy at the close of WWII for his virulent anti-American radio broadcast which were encouraged by the Italian fascist regime.  His political view were savage and unrepentant (the real trouble with the war, he famously wrote to Harriet Monroe in the early days of WWI, was "that it gives no one the chance to kill the right people.")

A spectator of Surrealism (Pound thought the Dadaists were a case of blague, a French term which he explained as a "satire upon stupidity, an attack.  It is the weapon of intelligence fighting against an alignment of odds."), Pound created short-lived Vorticist art movement.

"A profound correspondence existed between Cubist painting and the spirit of the war that had erupted in 1914:  in fact, camouflage, introduced during the war to disguise troops from airplanes, had been inspired by Cubist painting." Tytell, p. 189.  Fact to be checked and brooded upon!

Dante was "propelled by a deep, an almost venomous hatred for what he did not stand for in his civilization." (FM Ford)

not the whirl of madness of the senses, but a glow arising from the exact nature of the perception.

Tytell's defense of Pound's greatness: he writes as if increasingly convinced of it, and a legion of Pound friends, devotees and prodigies echo it -- that Pound was somehow beyond the charges of treason and prejudice, that he had shown from an early age a talent for madness and a mad talent, that it mattered more how much of an effect he had on literature as an artist than the effect he had as a citizen.  It's a sad book, and not just at the end:  we see Pound as driven by his demons from early on in his public life, powerless, cagey, unrepentant and brilliant to the very end.

"America seems clenched and somehow nervous and muscle bound," Robert Lowell wrote to Pound in 1952.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Couldn't quite finish it, Part Two.  Liked the descriptions of the Google campus/universe, but whole thing got a little too Harry Potter meets the Da Vinci code for me.

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg

Couldn't quite finish it.  I cannot put my finger on it exactly -- hope this doesn't typify my critical mien, and I have broad taste and a huge hunger for fiction and often finish reading books I don't particularly like -- but this one also annoyed me.  Third person narrator steering us through multiple points of view got out of hand, everyone started sounding (while thinking) (and often talking) alike.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max

Wallace’s best work, perhaps by far, is “The Pale King,” an unfinished novel about I.R.S. employees that was assembled posthumously by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch. 

This was not the only sentence, and tendency, of Rivka Galchen's condescending and trivial review of this early, but accomplished, biography of the late, great, personally mourned DFW that I found extraordinarily annoying, but it was the most ridiculous sentence.

The Pale King, the ONLY work that Wallace did not finish in his lifetime, has moments of grandeur and expected brilliance, but was a deeply unsatisfying pastiche of a long novel that he labored over for years but wasn't close to finishing.

Max's plotting of the course Wallace's life -- his extraordinary literary achievements and tragic suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, is deft.  Generous helpings of correspondence (mostly from Wallace, but telling excerpts from his friend and friendly competitor Jonathan Franzen) are revelatory.

Wallace was precocious, enigmatic, furtive, generous, callous, sensitive and suffered from childhood from deepening bi-polar depression and anxiety.  He survived addiction and sobriety, but killed himself after a risky six-month experiment with trying to change his anti-depressant medication regimen.  He evolved from a striking, brilliantly logic-and grammar-obsessed  literary technician to a profoundly moving moralist. 

He began The Broom of the System, his first novel, while still an undergraduate, as part of a creative writing thesis, and published it in 1987 when he was 25. Flawed, sprawling, but still enjoyable, it was described by Wallace himself as as a dialogue between Wittgenstein and Derrida.  Heady and heavy.  I could barely write a one page draft at that age.

Infinite Jest was his masterpiece.  Smarter than Pynchon, more moving that Delillo (to name only two of his many heroes) it corralled television, addiction, family dysfunction, Quebecois separatism in an enormous 1100 page world of irony satellited by short-story-length footnotes that seemed to encompass another novel (or two) by their own dang selves.

His non-fiction was also superlative (there is a world of readers who swear by not possessing the fortitude for his fiction -- they won't touch the stuff -- but delight in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," an extended essay on the cruise ship experience, a political (for awhile) piece about John McCain's aborted Presidential campaign, "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope."

He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear… It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real… He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen… He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. (Infinite Jest)

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski

Never been a fan.  Read WOMEN many years ago, enjoyed for the gratuitous sex and booze, seen a couple of poems over the year.  Always thought he was sort of monotonic, a scenester, beat literature for the lazy, writing for those not serious about writing.

This is some book, though.  Apparently a late novel, it is the early years of Bukowski's autobiographical alter ego Henry Chinaski.  Poor to a poor family, beaten by his father several times a week for five years as a child, Chinaski never gets a break.  Ugly (afflicted with serious skin problems, boils and acne), poor, unloved and unlovable, Henry survives on his stubborness alone, eventually developing a supremely cynical toughness.  He is dangerously uncaring about his fate in the world.

Prose is workmanlike but relentless. Couldn't really put it down.  Now lining up the collected poems to read, and the other novels.

All That Is by James Salter

feh

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journy by Candice Millard

"I do not like to think of where I should be now had it not been for your father, [Edward Arlington] Robinson later wrote to Kermit [Theodore's son]. "He fished me out of hell by the hair of the head."