I have not put much time into this site because I don’t have much time.

That’s all I got to say about that.

The Friends of the Library Booksale at the Fateville Public Library is a place where you can buy tattered paperbacks from Patterson to Grisham and first-edition hardbacks from the likes of Stevens. (Used book sales in university towns are always a good place for a find.)

The book featured in the photos is one Luke kindly let me borrow. Transport to Summer was originally published in 1947, but the edition pictured here is from the second printing in 1951. Dust-jacket is frayed but intact. Signed by John Williams, former professor at the University of Arkansas.

The book smells like heaven. I wish I could bottle this smell.

It cost Luke all of $2.

Now, I am a convert and a proud advocate for digital books and a paperless age, BUT I am no hater of the book object. The book as a piece of technology is as archetypal as the wheel or the four-legged chair. Something in the soul of us upright monkeys loves the codex. I am not immune.

But it is the words more than their conveyance that ultimately enslave me, so I leave you with a stanza from Stevens’ poem “The Motive For Metaphor.” This is a poem fitting for the chilly, damp day:

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In his essay “Honey-Winged Song,” David Rattray also explores the idea of what makes the world’s hardship literature great. 

I did not know of Rattray, but a week ago, Luke plugged my book-empty hand with a copy of Rattray’s How I Became One of the Invisible, and I’ve been spelunking Rattray’s prose ever since.  I am a firm believer that books (like people) come into our lives at the appointed time (Ranganathan’s “Every Book it’s Reader” mixed with Zhuang FuLang “We believe in predestined relationships”)

How I Became… is a collection of essays, each exploring a particular author. Rattray writes as a critic and reviewer, but he also writes as a lover–maybe even a worshiper–of the written word. These essays are imbued with spiritual power.  I do not say that lightly.

Rattray writes alive the questions that trip around my brain, and in “Honey-Winged Song” he asks, “does sufferring in the form of political oppression make better art?”

I’m not convinced that degrading poverty is what creates this kind of vividness, a vividness observable in the arts of so many Third World countries. We have a lot of the same thing right here, yet our sense of life is muted by comparison. The key difference has got to be one of continuity. The accelerated rate of social and political change in the industrial countries has borken the old continuities and brought us to a point where art in the old sense is dead, or the next thing to it. We don’t make music and poetry and painting the way the oldtimers did, in a tradition passed from master down to pupil, from generation to generation. The arts of every nation and period are of course available to us through museums, libraries, and other media.

As an example of ‘third world’ literature, Rattray uses the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. I confess that I know nothing of this poet. But in Faiz, Rattray sees an answer to the question of the ‘vividness’ in art.  To be a ‘vivid’ artist one need not be oppressed, but one must be participating in the continuous stream of art. It is an argument in favor or continuity, connectedness, derivativeness. It is aligning one’s art in one’s tradition.

Faiz exercises flawless mastery of an idiom that has been the language of lyrical and elegaic utterance all the way from North Africa to India for the past four thousand years–the rhetoric of the Bible and the Koran, or ancient Egyptian love poetry, of the Song of Songs; of Arabic poetry both before and after the coming of Islam; of Attar, Rumi, Omar; of Bilhana, Kabir, and Tagore.

In the Western tradition we tend to shy away from our literary elders–in the same way that in our personal lives we tend to create more and more distance between ourselves and our family of origin (“For this reason a man shall leave…”)  We believe strongly (or at least I do) that the process of maturation is a process of becoming more and more self reliant, individual.

We also tend to prefer words and writing that is “fresh.”  Patterns, archaic language, these things seem trite, and we miss the meaning because of the triteness.

The Surface of all these poets’ language is flowery and sugar-sweet. Even when straightforward and unadorned, it more often than not echoes earlier traidtion…All this is tough for an American to accept as 20th century poetry. To us, it has an anachronistic ring, undeniably. 

Yet, this is part of what makes Faiz great:

…every one of Faiz’ poems has multilayered personal and political meanings that have resonated so powerfully in his own world that millions still love him for that resonance and treasure his words all the more for the sweetness of their sound and imagery, their mastery of age-old poetics. Can a Westerner stomach them on the strength of that?

Vanity Fair has an excellent article on the publication history of Catch-22, a book that is on my all-time favorites list. (Catch-22 the movie also has the distinction of being the only place I can stomach Art Garfunkle’s acting).

How different would the novel have been as Catch-18?

http://m.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/08/heller-201108?printable=true

This resonated with me as a reader, a writer, and an overall lover of story. I am a book slut. Books fit into the narrative of my life. I could tell my life story by the books I was reading as life occurred, and my own critical impression of these books is/was shaped by what was happening with me as I read.

I thought about this as I read Justin Taylor’s The Gospel of Anarchy. Taylor, you may remember, is the youngish author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, a collection of short stories I have praised on this blog. Gospel is his first novel.

The novel follows a group of young anarcho-Christians in Gainseville, Florida. These are punk rockers, dropouts, and radicals transitioning from teenage rebellion to young adulthood. The book sparked with me because of my own time as a young adult. Back when I was a woolly anarcho-Christian.

I have never been able to fully express what happened to me at that time. Even after shedding most of the dogma of my youth, even after walking slowly backward through all those memories of really crazy christian stuff, and forgiving myself the craziness, after all that, I still think think of that time as being a movement of god. Yes, we were crazy, but we were also divine.

Taylor brought out all these emotions. He wrote the story that I wish I had written ten years ago.

Again I find comfort in Willie Nelson, “pickin’ up women, instead of my pen, I let the words of my youth fade away.”

Words of my youth indeed.

If you know what it was like to identify with the freaks and losers, if you know what it was to find comfort in belonging with them, if they were not a them but a you, then you will enjoy Justin Taylor’s Gospel of Anarchy

Go read.

http://loveletters.tribe.net/thread/fce72385-b146-4bf2-9d2e-0dfa6ac7142d

It is difficult to choose a favorite quote but here’s a sample:

The smallest things give me a great cockstand – a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. At such moments I feel mad to do it in some filthy way, to feel your hot lecherous lips…

It gets raunchier from there. Joyce was a randy ol’ dude.

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 was a bona fide apprenticeship, with the writers I admired serving as mentors since I wasn’t going the MFA route. And as Miller himself said (and I’m paraphrasing), “a writer must put down thousands of words before first signing his name.”

What I like about the novel Hating Olivia is what I like about SaFranko. It’s a deeply personal story about a guy in love with his art. He’s not the most likable fella; sometimes he seems more in love with himself than with art. Yet at the end of the day, you see he’s lost to the White Goddess. That makes me a little jealous.

The best of this genre of novel (and what might we call it? the semi-autobiographical bohemian artist rant?) make the reader intensely jealous. If the story doesn’t invoke jealousy then it’s quickly dismissed by the reader. I confess that after I read Post Office I wanted to be Henry Chinaski, and there are days when I feel I’ve almost achieved that dream. Almost. The little stretch between almost and already is the gap in which jealousy settles.

I felt the same about Tropic of Cancer. I wished to god I had witnessed those two turds floating in the bidet, and the madam graciously covering them up, angry as hell. That made me jealous.

Not so much when I read Junky. Burroughs seemed to drone on. He seemed the one most given to performance, a life lived as a novelist, a type of performance art. Admirable in its own way, but also terribly boring.

Jack Kerouac made my young self feel it. That burning impulse of the road, travel as experience, life as besotted journey. I ate that shit with a sugar spoon. Tried to live it. Crashed and burned, and when the debris settled I did not have my single scroll like Kerouac did before his liver killed him. I haven’t enjoyed Kerouac in a long time.

Mark SaFranko fits into this long line of twentieth century turned twenty-first century writers, and maybe because his books are coming out now, in his middle age, I can appreciate his story in ways that my younger self could not. If Kerouac was about the road, SaFranko is about the dingy apartment called home. He is Henry Miller retired to his home in Big Sur.

Hating Olivia is about the youngish writer named Max and his tumultuous relationship with his art and his special lady friend Olivia. SaFranko tells of the shitty jobs, the shitty no-jobs, the fights and affairs, and substance abuse. He takes the reader un-haltingly through Max and Olivia’s life together, and in the end, he shines a ray of hope. Max survives Olivia. What’s more Max gets the fodder for the best story he’s ever destined to write.

SaFranko took this nugget of gold first to England and then to France where they loved it. This year Harper Perennial saw fit to offer SaFranko to his native America.
I recommend Hating Olivia, but I do so with a blush. I’m afraid the recommendation says something about myself, something about my own longings and the things I’m willing to part with to feed my need to write. This is SaFranko’s appeal to me.

In his introduction to the book, Dan Fante–another tenacious writer with more international than domestic appeal–says of SaFranko:

I know why I write. I write because I must. I cannot stop. I’m driven by rage and insanity and crushing ambition. Mark SaFranko scares people like me. I believe the guy would rather write than breath. I envy his talent and commitment.

Amen.

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 vinyl booth with the wobbly table leg steadied by a spare matchbook.

Imagine then my excitement when I heard about Donald Antrim’s book The Verificationist.  The story:  a group of psychotherapists gather at a pancake house twice yearly to unwind and talk shop.

You had me at pancake house.

The book started well, charging out of the gate, throwing psychoanalytical phrases together with syrup and black coffee. Here’s a random sample:

“Leave it to you to choose this place for dinner, Thomas.”

The speaker was Manuel Escobar, the renowned Kleinian. He sat across from me in the booth by the window, and I explained to him, “Breakfast foods, except for cereals that contain inordinate amounts of sugar, have, in my experience, a comforting , anitdepressant quality.”
“I suppose that is true if you are an American,” said Escobar, looking around the room, then waving impatiently to our beautiful waitress.

“Don’t stare.”

“I’m not staring, Thomas. I find adolescent girls enchanting, though not compelling.”

This was from page five. I like the passage because of the obvious thought put behind each turn of a phrase. In a few lines of dialogue and a few descriptive phrases, the reader knows something about these two characters. “Kleinian,” whatever the hell that is, it sounds impressive. Escobar is not opposed to looking at the little girls but he gets his dinner at home. While our narrator sows the seeds of his unreliability by a dishonest display of his own lust for the waitress.

It’s not easy to write a short story on such a small scrap as “a group of psychoanalyists hang out in a dinner.” To write a novel on the same premise is even harder. Making something interesting happen with such a premise (ie. plot) is Herculean, and in the Verificationist, Antrim does not lift that world on his back, though he tries his best.

To construct some semblance of a plot, Antrim has a conflict arise between Thomas our narrator and one of his colleagues, Bernhardt.  The conflict involves throwing toast across the table and it ends with the narrator being hoisted aloft by his colleague and held suspended in the air.

I felt a hand on my arm. It was Bernhardt’s. This man’s hand grasped my arm–the fingers wrapping tightly around my forearm, pinching my arm–so that I could not move or shake free to throw the toast.

“Get your hands off me, Richard.”

Drop the bread, Tom.”

As always, when dealing with an unpleasant dispute over professional conduct or ieology–ours was, after all, a professional pancake gathering–I looked, hopefully, to other factions for support.

“Tom, Richard is right. We don’t want a food fight tonight. I’m sure it would be a tension reliever, but everyone is already having such a pleasant evening. Can’t we just drink our coffee?” This from Maria…

This incident occurs around page 25. Again, I love the succinct way Antrim uses language. He moves the story with the description and bits of conversation.

But from this point onward, the story begins to bend and bend and bend till it breaks.

Bernhardt, in order to further restrain the narrator, continues to hold Tom up in the air, and the next 150 pages are narrated from this height, every disconnected thought that flows through the narrator’s pinched head gets in the story.

Here is a portion from a four-page paragraph. I include the first bit of dialouge:

For a moment I hung there. Bernhardt, his breath tickling the hairs sprouting from my ear, whispered:

“Say Uncle.”

That was when I felt the sadness coming on. It was not surprising, given the circumstances. How often are we, as adults, raised up and carried like babies–in public!–softly spoken to by a man whose face we cannot see, a man who is enormous and powerful, terrifying, as he holds us aloft? Try this somtime if you don’t believe me when I say that the experience will make you weep with sorrow and regret for all the trouble you have caused–will cause–the people most dear to you. My thoughts, naturally, went to Jane. Here came Jane, the image of her, filling my mind and my heart, that night in the Pancake House, that evening in Bernhardt’s arms–Jane! Jane!–filling my heart with pity and shame. She is not a monster to me. Not at all. I am the one, not she, who remains, after all our years together, frightened by love. Or I should say that I am frightened, and so is Jane; we are frightened in our different though complementary ways.

And on. And on.

I sympathize with Antrim as a writer.  His pinched style, the overuse of participial phrases, clipped half sentences that are strung together, like pearls, with the commas as thread; these things I understand because I’m drawn to these devices too.  I like it when the words on the page flow, when I feel as if each sentence and extended paragraph hands me off to the next.  I see in Antrim’s Verificationist the same sense of pacing and wordsmithing that I try to bring to my own writing.

Yet, Antrim made me yawn.  By the end, I didn’t give a damn about Thomas or his analyst buddies.  I didn’t even much care for the pretty waitress or the pancake house.

I ventured out on foot today, for as you can see our car was buried. 

This is my first blog post composed w my phone using WordPress for Android.