Among The Jumbled Heap

Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused

Chairman Mao is edited by the imminent sinophile Howard Goldblatt. Goldblatt is that type of scholar who oozes love for his subject, and one senses this in his selections for Chairman, a book that, despite its title, is far from political. In his introduction, Goldblatt explains this: Mao must have know that the only truly dangerous writing in a totalitarian society is that which ignores politics altogether, literature that serves art, not society This thought forms the fulcrum on wh...

Gin Phillips, Hawthorne Books, Book Objects:

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right. My friend Anthony is--to put it mildly--a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she'll get mad.   (That's Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we f...

Ha Jin Redux

My first voyage into the storied world of Ha Jin was his Ocean of Words. I was not impressed. I found it to be truly an ocean of words, lacking that economy of language I expect in contemporary American fiction (Stephanie Meyer excluded). My major beef with Ha was that he was boring, conventional, afraid to take the risks that other Chinese writers (those in the mainland of China) were taking par for the course. Folks like Mo Yan and Yu Hua who contrive wild stories full of improbabilities...

Literary Defecation

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...

Real Presence

"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 ...

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

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 gr...

WordPress Upgrade

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.

Jean Marie Gustave LeClezio

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 America...

The Tao of Coetzee

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 ...

If you are reborn, you can be my child.

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." W...