Among The Jumbled Heap

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.

Looking at journals as I prepare to move, I came across this sonnet I wrote some time in ‘97 or ‘98. Forgot I used to write sonnets.

Twenty tippled years from today, sitting
On a rough hewn and slatted porch, musing
With a mason jar in hand and sipping
Gin with a ragged smile, grown more puckered
By the years of smoke filled neglect and kisses
Stolen between odd jobs assigned to me
By my comrade, my patron, Saint Golious,
Twenty tippled years and I will think about you.

Twenty years of liquid truth will not wash
Away the remembrance of things past and thoughts
Marcel and Billy would both be proud to own.
Thoughts of hard laughter, hard drink, hard times.

“Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of a cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or unless someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”

~Andre Dubus, “A Hemmingway Story” from Meditations from a Movebale Chair.

Fury: a novel © 2001 by Salman Rusdie

Fury is my first Rusdie novel, and my only excuse for having spent twenty years now as a reader of contemporary fiction without once reading Rushdie is: “I don’t like the guy.” Nothing to do with his writing, about which I knew nothing, everything to do with the man. A plump toad of a man who hacked out novels simply because he had time, money, and access to a keyboard. A man with a trophy wife. A man whose fame, it seemed to me, rested on one book he was fortunate to have written that inflamed one quarter of the world’s population.

So I thought.

Now I know.

Rushdie is a wordsmith. His prose flows like a swill of fine scotch, thick and smooth with a slight bite, and you can almost taste the way the words aged in that graying cask of a brain.

Fury is that classic story of contemporary Western literature: the middle-aged man breaking down. Other writer’s have certainly told the tale better, with a better grasp of the plot (Updike’s Rabbit, and nearly every thing Bellow wrote), but what Rushdie brings to the tale is his turn of a phrase. The first line proves the point:

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible doll maker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in golden age.

This is the Rushdie charm. In one eloquent sentence, he has elucidated th character of Malik Solanka and drawn the reader in with curiosity. “A doll maker? Ohhhh, celibate?! Much criticized, but why? A golden age?” Yet Rushdie’s words are writing checks he can’t cash.

The story disintegrates, the character’s dissolve into a mass of half-formed themes and plot twists. In only 239 pages there is: not one but two (morally twisted) spring-winter romances; a murder mystery, crisis of fatherly duty; numerous attempts to tie the whole damned thing into contemporary culture, and a hapless stumbling onto the stage of geo-political conflict. Ambitious, to say the least, but ultimately unsatisfying.

But now I’ve read Rushdie. I understand his charm. I have been told , and I believe, that Fury is not the best example of his work, but reading it has expiated my hatred for the fellow.

I’m still glad that Padma left him, though.

Fingersmith is the type of literary novel that’s not being written much these days, a style that fits more with the age of Queen Victoria than the age of Global Terrorism, and therein lies its beauty.

Set in nineteenth century England, Fingersmith narrates the intersecting stories of two young women in seemingly disparate circumstances. Sarah Trindle is a fingersmith, a thief, living in a house of thieves and raised by Mrs. Sucksby, who dotes on the girl as if she were her own daughter, even though Mrs. Sucksby’s business is that of selling unwanted babies.

Susan’s birth mother was hanged as a murdress when Sue was an infant, and Sue grows up feeling that ‘bad blood’ within her. She learns the thieving arts, but is kept from the worst of it by Mrs. Sucksby, who insists that one day Sue would bring them all a “great fortune.”

Susan is seventeen when a friend of her family of thieves arrives on a dark and stormy night–when else?–with a plot to make them all rich, a plot that can only be carried through with Susan’s help. The man is Gentleman, a name he got because he is supposed to be the disinherited scion of a wealthy family.

Gentleman’s plan is simple. There is a wealthy heiress who lives alone with her scholar uncle in a dilapidated mansion outside London. This is Maud Lilly, the other heroine of the story. Maud is seemingly innocent, an ingenue living a cloistered life of servitude to her uncle who longs for love and freedom. She has a guarantee of a great inheritance from her dead mother, but she can only receive the money after her marriage. Gentleman pruposes to seduce Maud, marry her, and have her committed to the madhouse, thus securing her fortune for himself. To carry off his plan, he needs someone on the inside, a young lady to act as Maud’s maid, speak well of him, and gently guide Maud’s heart to him. Sue, he says, is the perfect accomplice.

Thus, the plan is hatched.

Fingersmith is an exhilarating read, a handsomely crafted historical romance. Sue’s roughspeak, her Borough talk, suck the reader deeper into her life. One feels her cares, sees her qualms and feels the her hesitation as the plot clicks into place like the tumbler’s of a lock.

Then comes page 160. Everything changes. Those first 159 pages have been a pleasant character study. The reader has gazed into the life of our young would-be charlatan and glimpsed her soul, on par with Crime and Punishment.

But Sarah Waters is most often compared to Dickens not Dostoevsky, and it is at page 160 that one sees why. It is not the Victorian setting or the depictions of seedy, thieving London. It is the intensity of her plot.

When I was about the age of Pip, I found myself at play in the fields of Dickens for the first time. I was reading Great Expectations, and Dickens sucked me into that ever turning plot. He led me on wtih speculation. Was Mrs. Haversham Pip’s benefactor? My favorite scene is when Pip dines with the solicitor who serves as his liaison to the unnamed benefactor. The solicitor begins to stir his drink with a metal file?! Ahhhh, the criminal in the marsh? Could it be? What will be next?

I experienced this same sense of the pleasure of discovery while reading Fingersmith. Everything that follows page 160 electrifies. There are more twists here than the halls of the Vatican, and around each corner a new revelation. To use the cliche that I couldn’t put the book down is to insult Water’s irresistible prose. This book was epoxied to my hands, and I have not felt so attached to a story in years.

PC Magazine has a list of recommended free software. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2271644,00.asp

It’s freeware, but not necessarily Open Source. I would not have picked all the things they pick. I especially hate the Google Toolbar. I’ve found it to be clunky. It takes up too much memory, slows things down, and is always, ALWAYS, collecting information about how you behave online. That’s the part I hate the most about it.

I intend to check out the Maxthon browser right away (I’m downloading it now). I love Firefox, but I’m always looking for a better browser. Disappointing, though, that Maxthon is Windows specific, what’s up with that? I’ll install it on my work machine and see how it flows for me.

Zotero is probably the best app they have listed. In librarian speak, Zotero is a “bibliographic management tool.” A fancy way of saying that it stores your references and builds bibliographies. If you’re doing any kind of research that requires keeping track of references, Zotero is the tool for the job. There are commercial options available (like Endnote and RefWorks), but I’ve found Zotero to be superior (at least to Endnote). The fact that it is open source means that many people have jumped on the Z band wagon and extended it’s functionality. It can, for example, now be used to capture snippets of online video. It is a reference generating tool for the social web. I’m doing a workshop on Zotero in a few weeks, so I need to bone up.

One newer tool that didn’t make the PC list is Omeka (http://omeka.org/). Omeka comes from the Center for History and New Media, the same folks that gave Zotero to the OSS world. In their own words, “Omeka is a web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online.” It’s currently still in version 0.9, which is probably why PC didn’t write ‘er up, but it looks to have great potential. At my work, there is a group of folks who are working on an online exhibition of our rare books. Omeka is the perfect tool for that kind of project. Check out the list of sites that are using Omeka to get a better idea of the it’s potential, http://omeka.org/showcase/.