Among The Jumbled Heap

Below is possibly the best literary description of a bowel movement that I’ve ever read. Okay, it’s perhaps the only literary description of a bowel movement that I’ve ever read. It comes from Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Step Mother.

Don Rigoberto half closed his eyes and strained, just a little. That was all it took: he immediately felt the beneficent tickle in his rectum and the sensation that, there inside, in the hollows of his lower belly, something obedient to his will was about to depart and was already wriggling its way down that passage which, in order to make its exit easier, was widening. His anus, in turn, had begun to dilate in anticipation, preparing itself to complete the expulsion of the expelled, whereupon it would shut itself up tight and pout, with its thousand little puckers, as though mocking: “You’re gone, you rascal you, and can’t ever return.”

Llosa goes on to give a vivid illustration of Freud’s theory of anal retention:

Don Rigoberto gave a satisfied smile. Shitting, defecating, excreting: synonyms for sexual pleasure? he thought. Of course. Why not? Provided it was done slowly, savoring the task, without the least hurry, taking one’s time, imparting to the muscles of the colon a gentle, sustained quivering. It was a matter not of pushing but of guiding, of accompanying, of graciously escorting the gliding of the offerings toward the exit. Don Rigoberto sighed once again, his five senses absorbed in what was happening inside his body. He could almost see the spectacle: those expansions and retractions, those juices and masses in action, all of them in warm corporeal shadow and in silence interrupted every so often by muffled gargles or the joyful breeze of a mighty fart. He heard, finally, the discreet splash with which the first offering invited to leave his bowels plopped—was it floating, was it sinking?–into the water of the toilet bowl. Three or four more would fall. Eight was his Olympic record, the consequence of an extravagant lunch, with murderous mixtures of fats, sugars, and starches washed down with wines and spirits. As a general rule he evacuated five offerings; once the fifth was gone, after a few seconds’ pause to give muscles, intestines, anus, rectum, due time to assume their orthodox positions once again, there invaded him that intimate rejoicing at a duty fulfilled and a goal attained, that same feeling of spiritual cleanliness that had once upon a time possessed him as a schoolboy at La Recoleta, after he had confessed his sins and done the penance assigned him by the father confessor.

Llosa then sums up this wonderful exposition with a poignant maxim:

But cleaning out one’s belly is a much less dubious proposition than cleaning out one’s soul, he thought.

Short of King Eglon’s disastrous time of “covering his feet,” Llosa’s is the only account of defecation I have come across, and this presents a Reader’s Challenge. Yes, I’m challenging you, dear reader, to send me chapter and verse of any other literary accounts of shitting. Never mind that, including myself, I have approximately one reader. Send ‘em along as comments. Do it now before the rush overwhelms my inbox.

More on Llosa literary corpus to come…

“Lead us not into…”
Willie think ’bout temptation till his mind go blank
Replaced with action and boldness to act.
Thoughts wither like corn in a Texas drought.
“Listen real hard you can hear da corn grow,”
His daddy say one summer in Indiana.
But that was twenty years, two thousand miles,
Thirty degrees ago, an’ now Texas
Gonna burn a hole in ‘is soul.

‘Turn dis soul ta bread.
It might be useful.
Ain’t fit ta e’en put butter on now.

Feed the body.
Starve the soul.

“Willie, maybe the body and soul
Are two sides of the same crust.
Maybe spirit and flesh ain’t easily rent asunder.”

“You ain’t far from da kingdom, boy.”
Take, eat.

Karen Russell’s story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girl’s Raised by Wolves is, as the title implies, filled with stories imbued with the fantastic. Each story draws upon myth and mystery, but in a way that aims to lay bare very human obsessions. There is a girl tracking her possessed sister through a swamp, a young boy traveling Westward in a wagon train whose father happens to be a minotaur, a boy who sings down an avalanche as part of an ancient tribal ritual, and the lead story about a group of young girls whose parents are werewolves and who are sent for rehabilitation to St. Lucy’s.

The stories resemble Marquez and the Latin American “Magical Realists.” Think “A Very Old Man with Enourmous Wings.” But unlike Marquez, Russell’s choice of words is more simple, straightforward, more realist than magical. Her characters often tell us their stories in the first person, and they do so with an ease that takes for granted we will believe them. We do believe them. They are honest, and we feel with them and for them.

None of these stories ends completely. No, Russell leads us along, and then leaves us on the precipice, wondering what will happen. This is not to say that the stories in badly, but rather that they simply end without full resolution or with a resolution that is less than happy. For all the mythos this is not fairytale that Russell is writing.

Russell is a youngish woman of twenty -seven, a representative of that NYC school of writers, but there is something more universal and touching in her stories than I usually see coming from the Columbia MFAer’s. I look forward to reading more.

Hurrah! I have upgraded to WordPress 2.7 .

I’ve also installed WP2.7 on my local machine with the help of XAMPP and intend to build my own theme as soon as time is available…which is rarely.

I’m tired of the damned red, white, and blue.

Look at him. Venerable. Wizened. With a mole, that one little facial flaw that completes the perfection. Good hair too. A nice shock of hair.

Jean Marie Gustave LeClezio, 2008’s Nobel Prize winner for literature. A fella who needs some introduction, for prior to his selection by the Nobel committee few on this side of the pond had heard of LeClezio. I confess that I had not.

In the days leading up to the announcement, the Nobel Folks summarily dismissed the notion that an American might possibly receive the prize. Horace Engdahl one of the members of the Sweedish committee that awards the Nobel summed up American literature this way:

The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

“Europe,” Engdahl added, “is still the center of the literary world.”

It’s a thought worth exploring, no matter how much it smacks of the American bashing that has come to typify European intelligentsia. The U.S. probably deserves to be bashed.

But that’s a thought for another post.

With Engdahl’s words sounding through my skull, I pick up LeClezio’s The Prospector. It is a story of loss: loss of love, family, security, innocence, the breakdown of civilization. It is set at the turn of the Twentieth Century as World War I breaks the peace, and perhaps this is where the world society first went wrong. I could not help but read the story with the question on my lips: “how is this novel participating in the big dialogue?”

But that question would only bore me, would ultimately cause me to put the book down with a yawn. It takes something more compelling to keep reading.

That something else is LeClezio’s love of his characters. He writes with subtle passion and in the process he draws you in, following him down the rabbit hole. The Prospector is set in and around the island nation of Mauritius. LeClezio spent his own boyhood in Mauritius, and he mines his childhood experience to bejewel his story, in a way that brings to mind another great Frenchie who Remembered Things Past. His writing is evocative, moving in that way that you just can’t quite summarize, like the plastic carnival ducks in a shooting gallery, you see them, you want to kill them, you want the prize, but damed if you can hit ‘em.

This is to say that LeClezio leaves you wanting more.

Add to this that he’s a heckuva good guy.

In receiving his prize, LeClezio used his fifteen minutes on the world radar to speak out for the poor, and he did so in a way that is close to every librarian’s heart, including and perhaps especially my own, viz. he called for a bridge to the digital divide, that gulf of seperation between those with access to the new technology and those without.

To provide nearly everyone on the planet with a liquid crystal display is utopian. Are we not, therefore, in the process of creating a new elite, of drawing a new line to divide the world between those who have access to communication and knowledge, and those who are left out?

He went on to insist that the world must provide for more libraries worldwide.

LeClezio deserves his prize. Not just because he has great hair.

Like an infant that has not yet smiled.
I droop and drift, as though I belonged nowhere.
All men have enough and to spare;
I alone seem to have lost everything.
Mine is indeed the very mind of an idiot,
So dull am I.
The world is full of people that shine;
I alone am dark.
They look lively and self assured;
I alone, depressed.
I seem unsettled as the ocean;
Blown adrift, never brought to a stop.
All men can be put to some use;
I alone am intractable and boorish.
But wherein I most am different from men
Is that I prize no sustenance that comes not from the Mother’s breast.
~Tao Te Ching, Chapter 20

J.M. Coetzee is a celebrated South African novelist and scholar, winner of England’s Booker Prize and the 2003 Nobel in Literature. Upon receiving the Nobel, Coetzee was praised for his moral vision and for “in inumberable guises portraying the involvement of the outsider.” His novel Disgrace is illustrative of this emphesis on the outsider.

Disgrace begins with the self-assured, yet discontented, Professor David Laurie getting sexually involved with one of his students. This sexual escapade is indicative of Laurie’s adult life, simultaneously revering yet despising the fairer sex. The disgrace of Disgrace first manifests itself here. Laurie loses his professorship, because he cannot bring himself to acknowledge any wrongdoing. “Yes, it’s true; I slept with her.” Is as close as he can come to confession.

And so the once-professor Laurie, quits the city to live in the country with his hippie lesbian daughter Lucy. In cinema, the story would go like this: disgraced professor moves to country with lesbian daughter where he has revelation about his misogyny and cosmopolitan bias; redemption ensues; in the climax the chastened David Laurie presides over a a heartfelt commitment ceremony between Lucy and her lover.

Coetzee, however, eschews the Hollywood fantasy. Against the sometimes brutal backdrop of rural South Africa, Coetzee’s story illumines the complexities of disgrace and what it means to be disgraced, spiraling deeper and deeper into both our personal and corporate conceptions of guilt and justice.

There is no dualism for Coetzee. An act of “disgrace” is simultaneously and act of “redemption.”

There is nothing but dualism for Coetzee. There is disgrace and redemption. There is justice and injustice. Good and evil.

On one side are the black South African rapists. On the other is his hippie lesbian daughter who is patient and long suffering. Then there is the white Christian family. They are the parents of the student Laurie disgraced. They will forgive. They will offer redemption. The black “dog-handler” Petrus is both exploited and exploiter. Is he a protector or an instigator of violence? He is both.

In the middle, juggling all these dualities is Laurie. Professor Laurie is the unwitting Taoist sage. By the end he is a shadow of his former arrogant self. He job is to kill and incinerate unwanted dogs. He lives in a shack and spends his time tinkling out tunes on a busted banjo, tunes he intends to use for his forthcoming opera on the life and loves of Byron. He droops and drifts, prizing only the precious milk from the Mother’s Breast.

The name David Foster Wallace is seldom mentioned without the word “prodigy” in the same sentence. Sometimes “prodigy” is preceded by “fucking,” as in the following: “David Foster Wallace is a fucking prodigy.” Sometimes this sentence is further punctuated with an “asshole” at the end, either with an ellipses or with the combination conjuction article, as in the following: “David Foster Wallace is a fucking prodigy…asshole.” OR “David Foster Wallace is a fucking prodigy and an asshole.”

Which came first the prodigy or the asshole–and I’m not speaking here about syntax but about the man? Was he an asshole because he was a prodigy or a prodigy because he was an asshole?

Okay, I’ll stop it with the potty talk. This foul mouth of mine obscures my sadness on the death of this asshole prodigy. Wallace was probably not an asshole. People who knew him well say he is/was the sweetest guy they ever knew. I only know him through his writing and I confess to being both jealous and disgusted. In the words of the famous Johnny Wink (holding up pinky finger, waggling it), “I’d give my pinky finger to write like that.”

Perhaps David is best known for Infinite Jest, a novel whose girth intimidates even the stoutest of readers even without it’s 200 pages of footnotes. I never finished the bad boy (I carried a copy around for almost ten years and watched my Camel Buck bookmark move only a few milimeters each year). I did, however, find the energy to read almost everything else the brother wrote. After each story or essay, I would think, “Damnation, that’s either the best shit I’ve read all year, or the worst, but I think it’s the best…or maybe the worst.”

I felt/feel a personal connection with David that is a sure sign that he was, in fact, good. He gets in there, deep down, even when he’s bad.

On Friday, September 12, David Foster Wallace hanged himself in his Los Angeles home. He was 46. I miss that fucking prodigy asshole. I wish I could have taken better care of him.

Two Reviews of Chinese Writers

“My story begins on January 1, 1950…”

So begins Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. The narrator is the landlord Ximen Nao, and on this first day of January 1950, Ximen Nao is executed as a bad element, an impediment to the revolution, a bourgeois blackguard. How can Ximen’s story begin with his execution? Here is where Mo Yan’s wit first exerts itself, for the story is not about Ximen Nao the man, but it is about the reincarnated Ximen Nao. We watch as he becomes Ximen Donkey, Ximen Ox, Ximen Pig,, Ximen Dog, and Ximen Monkey, until finally he is reborn as a “a big-headed child,” and as Ximen processes through these lives, we see the rapid progression of contemporary China.

With such a fanciful and ambitious premise, the story runs perilously close to becoming kitschy. Lesser writers have gone that direction (and they probably sold more books. Dan Brown comes immediately to mind). Yet Mo Yan is able to walk this precipice between art and kitsch with aplomb. He uses Ximen’s various incarnations to illustrate and elucidate the last fifty-eight years of Chinese history. In Life and Death one sees the agrarian disaster of the Great Leap Forward, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the period of opening up and corruption, and the tragedy of the many loveless marriages that resulted from the revolutionary spirit.

Life and Death is a story that is thoroughly Chinese, and it would be a marvelous, light-hearted history lesson for anyone with an interest in contemporary China. But Mo Yan is more than a pedantic jester, he is a poet of the human spirit. In the final assessment, Mo is concerned for the plight of his characters–be they donkey, pig, ox, dog or human. His story is alive, and history is merely the air the characters breathe. Mo’s compassion for his characters and willingness to poke fun at himself as the narrator are what keep this story on the high road of art.

By contrast, Ha Jin’s collection of short stories Ocean of Words takes a less fanciful look at one point in Chinese history. All the stories in Ocean take place in the far North of China during the early 1970’s–that period of time when border tensions with the former Soviet Union were such that both sides felt invasion was imminent.

Each story presents the plight of the soldier as they suffer through that peculiar brand of military idiocy that is the People’s Army. Ha Jin loves these men. He paints verbal pictures to draw in the reader. He is a deft writer. Yet, the broader impression from these stories is less impressive.

Ha Jin is educated in the tradition of American realism. He lives and teaches in the U.S. and , unlike Mo Yan, Ha writes primarily in English. His prose resonates with the likes of an Updike or Cheever, but though his style is smooth and his narrative voice engaging, Ha’s stories do not rise to the same emotional level as Mo Yan, and one wonders if his status as an affluent expatriot robs him of the ennui that infuses a writer like Mo. With Ha I feel as if I’m looking at Chinese history from a distance; with Mo I live that same history.

I respect them both, but I’m drawn to Mo Yan.

I am currently obsessed with Andre Dubus. He is a contemporary American Short Story writer. A heckuva talented writer and a great human. I’ll write more on him later, but I can’t resist throwing out some of his good quotes on writing.

An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them, which become a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer’s own blood, and with an occasional rush of excitement that empties oneself, so that the self is for minutes longer in harmony with eternal astonishments and visions of truth, right there on the page on the desk, and when a writer does this work steadily enough to complete a manuscript long enough to be a book, the treasure is on the desk. If the manuscript itself, mailed out to the world, where other truths prevail, is never published, the writer will suffer bitterness, sorrow, anger, and, more dangerously, despair, convinced that the work is not worthy, so not worth those days at the desk. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a sigle word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul. If the work is not published, or is published for little money and less public attention, it remains a spiritual, mental, and physical achievement; and if, in public, it is the widow’s mite, it is also, like the widow, more blessed.
~Andre Dubus “First Books”, Meditations from a Movable Chair

Joan Didion is like my older, sarcastic, world-weary sister.

Reading The Year of Magical Thinking is reading the diary of my sister. I see the workings of her mind; I hear the depth of her words, her feelings on the loss of my brother-in-law, her spouse of 40 years. These are things Joan never says at the family reunion. These are the thoughts she ruminates on while sitting in the corner of our grandparents living room, smiling while the family small talks.

When reading the work of a sibling, one tends to either extremes of praise or criticism. Sometimes both. The praise stems from the fact that this is your blood, your kin, and you are proud. Similarly, the criticism arises out of that same impulse. Literature is written by other people not MY sister. You remember scenes from family life, words un-fittly spoken, all the embarrassing incidents of childhood. Of course you also remember how Joan always had a way with words, but this does not necessarily improve your view of her writing.

The mere fact that I feel a kinship with Didion proves the power of her writing. Didion strikes a pose with her words that burns the mind like a brand. Her personal history as laid out in the essays and novels takes on the shape of memory. I read in Magical Thinking about her and John sharing moments throughout their day, and I think of her essay “The White Album” and the years of disassociative thinking, depression. How difficult their marriage at times?! I think of Quintana as a girl in CA while her mother associates with the hippies of Haight-Ashbury gathering material for “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” I remember the characters of “A Book of Common Prayer” and wonder what John and Quintana were doing while their wife and mother entered this narrative world. How did she draw inspiration, where did she get the raw material for these destructive relationships? From John? Quintana?

Didion encourages this line of thinking in Magical Thinking by often quoting from her own work, situating her writing in the story of her life with John. She reveals where she was when she wrote a particular book and how and where John and she lived at that time. She picks a refrain from her novel Common Prayer and repeats it several times throughout Magical Thinking. Thus, Didion’s own words come back to her with new significance and, like a good sibling, I think, “Joan certainly doesn’t lack confidence in her own abilities as a writer.”

Yet, Didion provides a glimpse into her own insecurity as writer and how John helped her overcome this insecurity:

The book from which he [John] read was a novel of my own, A Book of Common Prayer, which he happened to have in the living room because he was reading it to see how something worked technically…’Goddamn,’ John said to me when he closed the book. ‘Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you. (p166)

The passage is revealing not only because it illustrates Didion’s feelings of inadequacy about her own writing, but because it reveals John’s character to the us more fully. He was an encourager, and, perhaps more revealing, he believed in those intangible gifts of the spirit. He had given this moment forethought, “That’s my birthday present to you.”

Didion’s world often seems far from my own. She moves in higher circles. She lives in California, Hawaii, and New York City. She and John fly to Paris for Thanksgiving. She has friends all over the globe who offer the use of their beach house or chateaus. She has flown on more private charters than I have on commercial airlines. This distance between our worlds only enhances this feeling of familial connection. Siblings often follow different life trajectories. “My older sister moves among the literary jetset of NYC and LA.” I can hear myself say with both pride, envy, and disdain.

Critics chide Didion for cultivating this highbrow literary persona. Deservingly so, I feel. But her writing fills a niche, a need that is larger than the elite. Again, i think of those early essays, a young Joan trying to make sense out of the turmoil of her times. She grew, and her readers watched her grow. As the sixties faded, she wrote more novels, politically charged novels about women, much like herself, struggling to make meaning out of their time. In those early novels, Didion focused her attention on the politics of the ’80s bleeding into the the ’90s. She was uniquely positioned to offer insight.

Political Fictions is the fruit of Didion’s maturity as a writer. She writes not as historian or pundit but as citizen, a unique citizen, to be sure. She is a person who has not lived as the rest of us. She is a person with special access and privilege, one who has lived life across the country and the globe. She has enough leisure to read the Times and to discuss the times. She has no prescriptions only observations. Her thoughts are sometimes jumbled, often poignant, and ultimately revelatory. She lifts American politics and culture up to the light, and lets the many colors reflect in the readers’ minds.

Magical Thinking is the denouement of the Didion corpus. This book represents the end of Didion’s career as she has known it, for this book marks the end of her marriage and her career has been intimately connected to her marriage. What comes next must be something different.

At the end of Magical Thinking, Didion describes her experience of trying to write a new piece now that John is dead.

It was the first piece I had written since 1963 that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there….I realized at some point that I was unwilling to finish it because there was no one to read it. I kept telling myself that I had a deadline, that John and I never missed deadlines. Whatever I finally did to finish this piece was as close as I have ever come to imagining a message from him. The message was simple: ‘You’re a professional. Finish the piece.’

Magical Thinking is ultimately a testament of the power of others in the writer’s life. It is the story behind the book dedication. In Didion’s case, it is the story behind the forty plus years of her life as a writer. The book is a powerful and personal testimony of a grief observed. This much is true.

But true to her work as a whole, Didion once again gives us her life as an example of the whole of life. Throughout my readings of Didion (and I think I can say I’ve read every scrap now), it is her humanity and her vulnerability that most impress. I see this most at work in the essays, where that close first person talks to me like a sister. Her novels are convoluted flights of fancy that bore, but those essays sing.

So as my sister Joan moves on, I wait to see what’s next. I wait with that same mixture of pride, envy, and disdain that permeates all my reading of Joan’s writing.