Among The Jumbled Heap

Hating Olivia — Big in France

If America doesn't understand your art, France might. Mark SaFranko labored in obscurity for years.  He wrote songs, plays, novels.  He supported himself with a series of shitty, thankless jobs that kept the creditors at bay long enough for him to write a bit more.  His youth passed to middle age like this. I started writing, and all the while, no matter where I was and what my circumstances, I took notes and wrote. Novel after novel, song after song, story after story, play after play. It...

The Verificationist

I have found my next book to read, started it moments ago, and only a few pages in I'm lovin' it. The Verifiicationist by Donald Antrim -Facebook status update of December 15th I have a thing for greasy diners and coffee shops.  I love 'em, the smell of stale grease, eggs made to order at all hours of the day and night, surly wait staff, the potential of the place.  Who knows what stimulating conversations might happen, what quixotic plans might hatch there with my ass planted on the ripped ...

Plotless. Characterless.

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive. And with no characters. None. Plotless. Characterless. Yet seducing the reader into turning the pages nonetheless. -David Markson This is Not a Novel I don't like what's happening to me. I've started hating everything I read. Reading is my long-time lover, but she just doesn't turn me on right now. I tried to deny it, tried making excuses, but I have to own my feelings. Every bit of contemporary lit th...

2010: My Year In Reading

OR Strikes and Gutters Cobain and Taylor : Strike and Strike Early in the year, in the cold of January, I got a surprise with Heavier then Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. I thought Heavier would be a mindless read, something to keep the brain processing words while I cast about for a better book. I read the book while poised next to Skull Creek, a bitter Ozark wind crippling my hands, and the book took me places in the mind I had not been in fifteen years. It was good to go back an...

Lore Segal’s “The Reverse Bug”

Every month the New Yorker chooses a short story from their archive and asks a writer to read the story for their Fiction Podcast. This month Jennifer Egan reads "The Reverse Bug" by Lore Segal. Jennifer Egan Reads \"The Reverse Bug\" If you've got 30mins to spare, give that time to Segal ala Egan. Delightful to read and delightful to hear, "Reverse Bug," written in 1989, contains prophetic echos to our own age of terror, but it does so in a subtle, pleasing way.

The Perils of Describing Technology

The Brothers: a novel / Frederick Barthelme. I've reading Barhelme (Frederick not Donald). Never read him before, but I heard about him on the blogosphere because of the kerfuffal over his departure from the Mississippi Review. Did he quit? Was he fired? Read about it here. I'm drawn to Southern writers. I especially like Mississippians. I thought Barthelme might be a good reading fit for me. I have been underwhelmed by Brothers. Maybe it's just a one-off wonder and the rest of his st...

Vargas LLosa on Writing

Mario Vargas LLosa is the first Nobel Prize winner I've had the pleasure of reading before he won the medal.  The one regular reader of my blog may remember a post from about a year ago quoting a perfectly pitched scene of defecation.  I posted that in the midst of a Vargas LLosa obsession. I came to Vargas LLosa by a circuitous route.  I was doing a bit of research, reading the communiques of SubComandante Marcos when I happened upon a footnote, written with Marcos usual ironic contempt an...

Why Ideas Matter

Three Philosophical Works by Simon Van Booy One of the dirty truths of fiction writers is that we have ideas. Although it is in vogue to suggest otherwise, to pretend that what matters is the art and the art alone, that we aren't trying to pawn an ideology on anyone, the truth is that good fiction is supported by ideas, what we used to call philosophy, before that term came to mean eccentric white guys thinking eccentric white guy thoughts. Yet, philosophy is, at its core, the exploration o...

Moby Dick: the Boring Parts

What follows is a rambling missive that I wrote over a year ago for the blog but never finished. I am now throwing it out into the world for no good reason. Last night, or rather, early this morning, I finished reading Moby Dick for the second time. Often, I had wanted to read Moby Dick again but was prevented from doing so by that same perception of the book that keeps many from reading for the first time, viz. The Boring Parts. Moby Dick begins with the classic line "Call me Ishmael," ...

Jose Saramago 1922-2010

This seems to be a big year for the literary dead. Jose Saramago, Nobel prize-winning author, died last Friday June 18th. Check out the NYTimes obit. I immersed myself in Saramago a few years back whilst living in Chicago. I read his novels riding the El to and from work and in the few spare minutes at the end of my work day. Our apartment had a deck built between the two crumbling edifices that our landlord generously called carriage houses. One of those was ours. I remember vividly ...