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 that I’ve read lately has left me cold, wondering “what’s the point?”

My most recent disappointment was Mary Robison’s Subtraction.  Robison wrote this one in the mid-nineties, and without knowing a thing about her autobiography, I feel like she’s given me a thinly-veiled autobiographical slapdash of a novel.  Substraction is basically plotless.  It is one of those overly self-conscious, character-driven stories where none of the characters feels particularly warm.  Perhaps writers as they grow into their craft must seek more extreme sources of inspiration (hand-gliding or S&M, for example) in order to avoid writing a boring novel about an aimless writerly life.  Sometimes this “still life with a writer story” works.  Hell, Bukowski made a living off it, as did Henry Miller and various Miller imitators, but I personally don’t get a charge from these stories.

I was similarly disappointed with Jim Harrison’s The English Major.  Majorly  boring.  Harrison’s story purports to be a road novel about an old man rediscovering his life.  I don’t mind road novels, but the best road novels make you want to get on the road.  The English Major made me want to go to sleep.

Both Harrison and Robison put their eggs in the character basket, hoping that their lively prose will illuminate these eccentric characters and make us love them, perhaps even reveal something about ourselves and our society in the process.  Both, in this reader’s opinion, fall short.

Why do they fall short?  They got nothing interesting in them.  You don’t have to write genre fiction to have a decent (and exciting) plot.  Literary fiction writers, however, seem to have ceded to role of plot to the genre writers.  Markson, as illustrated in the quote above from his This is Not a Novel, succeeded in writing a plotless, characterless novel because he was playing off the vacuous literary fiction of our times.  There will never be another Markson.

As a hopeless romantic, I want to fight for my lover.  I want my reading back.  Please someone write something interesting.

Punk Rock Ukelele

When I was a young wart hog, I fancied myself a punk rocker. Even in the late 80s, punk was a niche genre that bordered on nostalgia. The heyday of punk rock was already past, yet Punk lingered on and provided an outlet for my pubescent rage.

I remember well the first time Big Bob stuck an earbud in my ear that piped in the Suicidal Tendencies’s “I Saw Your Mommy. That was my introduction to punk, which was not exactly punk, more of a thrash L.A. Gangster kind of metal, but I thought of it as punk at the time. I’d seen Sid and Nancy, you know, this music embodied that spirit.

Not too long after that, I picked up the Dead Kennedy’s “Bedtime for Democracy” on cassette and my punk rock love affair truly began.

Here now, is a reincarnation of my punk self. I have a vision of learning to play the songs of my youth on the ukelele. This is the Baxter Lane Animistic Men’s Chorus with a rendition of The Misfits “Where Eagles Dare.” Unfortunately, I forgot all the verses and so, this rendition is mostly an instrumental with an occasional outburst of melodic profanity. WARNING: IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY POTTY LANGUAGE, DON’T LISTEN.

Baxter Lane Animistic Men's Chorus

Rock it out  

Have you ever heard that thing about how you can sing every Emily Dickenson poem to the tune of Gilligan’s Island?  It’s a common English teacher joke that’s only funny because it’s true.  Try it, you’ll see.

In China there is an ancient poetic form called the Ci .  Most of these poems were written in the Song Dynasty.  The Ci share what we in the West call a poetic meter, and it is believed that the meter is in fact a tune and that each of these poems was meant to be sung to this now lost tune.  It’s as if Emily Dickenson composed her poems for Gilligan’s Island but then the tune of Gilligan’s Island got lost.

Here now is the Baxter Lane Animistic Men’s Chorus performing Su Shi’s Ci poem.  The title of the poem is “Hunting at Mizhou” and the title of the song is Shoot the Tiger.

Baxter Lane Animistic Men's Chorus

Rock it out  

Baxter Lane Animistic Men's Chorus

Rock it out  

Here’s another one from the Baxter Lane Animistic Men’s Chorus.  This is a long one, clocking in at over six minutes, BUT it includes: shamanistic drumming, ukulele solo, extended throat singing, harmonica playing, original lyrics, and a turn toward the lewd right towards the end.  NO, it’s not lewd.  Get your mind out of the gutter; there’s no metaphor involved.

Brief yet marvelous interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell at the Chicago Sun Times: http://blogs.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/36628

My favorite part:

I went right back to writing about Michigan! Still, I get letters from readers saying “you’re writing about my hometown in West Virginia,” or “you’re writing exactly about where I came from in Alabama.” I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

I was one of those people! I wrote and said, “you’re writing about Arkansas.”

What can I say? I’m a groupie.

OR Strikes and Gutters

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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 and remember Kurt Cobain, and Charles Cross, the author, was wise enough to get himself out of the way and let Cobain’s story tell itself without any fanfare. Quality rock ‘n’ roll journalism, and my first Strike of 2010.

I followed up Heavier than Heaven with Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis. Taylor is a writer I had known through short stories, which I had found to be readable but forgettable. I had never read his Summons–the book that made the man a bit of money and won him the National Book Award. Summons was one of the Strikes of the year. Delightfully written, Taylor captures the social anxiety of a Southern family during a time when the idea of the “Southern family” was becoming more myth than reality. The book has pathos.

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Walbert and Adams : Gutter and Gutter

After Taylor came a couple of the 2010 gutter balls.

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women was on every critic’s short list of the best books of 2009. Almost ten years ago, I was enraptured with Walbert’s novel The Gardens of Kyoto, so much so that I emailed Walbert to tell her how much I loved the novel. Ms. Walbert even emailed me back and suggested I read Elizabeth McKracken’s The Giant’s House. I loved her for this. But A Short History of Women disappointed me. A Short History is a muilt-generational narrative about the feminist movement, starting in 1918 with a hunger strike and ending in 2011 with a young Yale graduate toting Chopin’s The Awakening like the Bible. Something in the tone of the novel bothered me. Linda Hirshman at Slate’s Double X put this something into words in her critical essay “What’s Wrong with ‘A Short History of Women,’ the Novel.”

Both in form and in content, this neutered, novelized history of women teaches that political feminism is passé. No choice has meaning, and no choice makes life better. It takes a very good writer to produce a value-free novel—think Camus’ The Stranger. Walbert is not even close. Some of A Short History is so hackneyed that, were it not for the earnest acknowledgements, you might think Walbert was writing a parody of the history of women, sort of a feminist Colbert Report.

I had a similar reaction to Lorraine Adam’s novel Harbor, another of the 2010 Gutters. This is Adam’s first novel after a life spent in journalism, and I had high hopes. In Harbor Adams attempts to tackle illegal immigration and the war on terror in one fell swoop. There is a great tradition of the social novel in America. Journalists, tired of the lens of reality, find they can express more of our social malaise with fiction. Steinbeck was the master of this American archetype, but then there are folk like Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, even Fitzgerald and Whitman, who came to literature through journalism. But Adams doesn’t make the leap from journalism to literature seamlessly. Harbor reaches for a higher level of language than is warranted for the topic and fails to reach even that. I put the book down before I could finish it, which is unprecedented for me. Harbor, a definite gutter ball this year.

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Huneven and Muller : Strike and Strike

Michelle Huneven then rescued my Spring reading in 2010. I blogged about Huneven in March. I won’t say more here, except that Huneven’s Jamesland was one of the 2010 Strikes.

As was Herta Muller’s Passport. I would read anything Muller penned.

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Barthelme and Hannah : Strike and Strike

In 2010, I also discovered two short story writer’s whose influence over contemporary literature is undisputed: Donald Barthleme and Barry Hannah. Barthelme and Hannah are very different stylistically, but they both have mastered their form.

Barthelme’s Sixty Stories consistently appears on the syllabi of creative writing teachers. The absurd world Barthelme creates with his stories gives him the nomen “difficult writer,” yet there is more wisdom in Sixty Stories than in most of the drivel published today. I suspect that if Barthelme were still alive, he would be struggling to publish his work. Thankfully, we have him encapsulated forever in Sixty Stories. If you only have time for one of the sixty, read “The Balloon,” a story that David Foster Wallace said “made me want to become a writer” (he said this in an excellent interview with Salon.) You can read a shortened version of “The Balloon” online,.

Hannah’s style is more in the Southern realist tradition than Barhelme. His characters are recognizable to anyone who has spent some time here in the dirty South, but his themes are universal. Hannah, like Andre Dubus, is a writer whose absolute compassion for his characters enlivens all his prose. He’s a Mississippian by way of Arkansas. His death in March of 2010 brought a deluge of remembrances. The best of which is Wells Tower’s interview with Hannah shortly before Hannah’s death, published in the Believer. Read any of Hannah you can grab. I read several collections of his stories in 2010. My favorite was High Lonesome.

One last thing on Barthelme and Hannah: I came to read Sixty Stories and Hannah’s High Lonesome after reading Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, a remarkable book of stories from the neophyte Taylor. I expect great things from Justin Taylor in the future. He collaborated on an appreciation of Barthelme’s work and has more than a programmatic view of contemporary literature. You can find him all over the interweb’s spreading his views on the state of literature and generally advancing the art form. I appreciate the fellow, and his collection of stories did not disappoint.

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Prose and Bowles and Chekov : Spare and Strike and Turkey

This brings us to April 2010. I read Francine Prose’s book about writing titled Reading Like a Writer. My Auntie, a fellow writer, gave me this book for my birthday two years ago, but it mouldered on the shelf because deep down I loathe these writing books and deeper yet I cherish them. What’s beautiful about Prose’s writing book is that she approaches the topic as a lover of books, and all her suggestions are illustrated by generous quotes from Prose’s favorite writers. She has a whole chapter devoted to Chekov, for godsakes. Prose’s book was a solid spare. She knocked the eight pins with the first chapters and picked up the split with her chapter on Chekov.

Reading Prose did two thing for me. First she turned me on to Jane Bowles tremendous book Two Serious Ladies. Seriously, Bowles’ Ladies is a forgotten masterpiece. Read it. Then read it again. Something in the tone of Bowles’s book sparked my own writing fire, after I read it, I started writing everyday again, and deriving more joy from my writing than I have in years.

The second thing Prose did for me: she sent me back to Chekov, and when I start reading Chekov I start writing. I haven’t over analyzed this about myself because I don’t want to jinx it. I am, at heart, a very superstitious author. I have noticed about my writing habits that when the urge to read Chekov hits, I should keep a pen handy, because my brain is going to be filling with ideas. It happens every year. Spring 2010, with a nip still in the air, I had my yearly dance with Chekov, and it was Francine Prose who put me on his dance card. Thank You, Francine. Chekov is a perfect game.

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Graham and Watson : Nine Pin and Spare

My wife has an African dream. She wants to live there. She just returned from spending two weeks with some Kenyan friends working at a grammar school. In our life together, Joanna and I are trying to negotiate how to fulfill both our dreams: hers to help women in Africa, mine to write my mind alive.

Enter Philip Graham.

I am a devotee to my Google Reader, which I have stocked with blogs by the young and literate. I came across this interview with Philip Graham in The Morning News. Graham is a novelist and short story writer who has been plying his trade for as long as I’ve been alive. His early married years were spent in the Ivory Coast, where his wife was working for an NGO. Graham wrote most of his early novels there in Africa, but the subject matter was uniquely American. He did not write directly about the expat experience until he was older and back in the States. This piqued my interest.

I read Graham’s novel How to Read and Unwritten Language. The novel was a solid nine pin. Not great but not a gutter. But based on the strength of his biography, I’ll read more. I like particularly this snippet from the Morning News interview. The interviewer asks Graham if the anxiety of putting words on the page dissipates with age. Graham responds:

Oh, I’m much more relaxed about the whole process than I used to be. Basically, all that matters is what appears on the page, I don’t worry so much anymore about publishing schedules. I’m primarily interested in the trial and error of forging the patterns of my imagination’s fingerprint; the grimy marks it may leave on the world comes later.

Brad Watson is a youngish writer in the mold of Barry Hannah. He is a Mississippian and a short story writer. I read his latest Aliens in the Prime of Their Life. This is a solid collection, but not as enjoyable as his first collection, Last Days of the Dog Men. Dog Men was Watson’s breakout collection. Each story features human and dog in a some sort of relationship, not always man’s best friend. With this ploy, Watson manages to enter the world of his characters, whether they be murderous cuckolds or widower granny’s.

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Days of Summer

I am prattling too much to maintain the attention of my one regular blog reader. Here’s a streamlined version of the strikes and gutters of the Summer of 2010:

• Tinkers by Paul Harding: Gutter Ball
• The Lonely Polygamist by Barry Udall: Gutter Ball
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: Spare with the last pin leaning almost falling for a strike.
• Collected Works of Isaak Babel: Strike, perhaps a perfect game. It’s a shame more people aren’t reading Babel. He is a Russian gem.
• Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee: Strike. Coetzee, I have decided, is one of the weirdest but most pitch perfect novelists of my lifetime. Costello fits this mold. In 2010, I also read Coetzee’s Summertime and Waiting for the Barbarians. Stikes, both of ‘em.
• Dreamerby jack Butler: Strike. No secret that Butler is one of my all-time favorite writers. Dreamer is one of his later novels (came out in the late 90s); set in New Mexico rather than the South, but it pulls the usual Butlerian themes together. Intrigue, sex, god, shamanism, and even vampires. Butler is/was a genre bending literary novelist when that wasn’t cool.
• The Passage by Justin Cronin: Gutter Ball. The Passage was possibly the worst thing I read all year. Cronin made bank on this sprawling, apocalyptic, vampire romp, and I hope he is happy with his blood money.
• An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender: Spare. Quirky. Mystical. Life affirming. I liked this book when I read it, but I have mostly forgotten it.
• Humpty Dumpty in Oakland and Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick : Spare and Spare. Humpty is one of Dick’s realist novels set in 1950′s Northern California. Interesting simply for the flesh it adds to the body of Dick’s Sci-fi literature. Time Out of Joint is one of Dick’s early Sci-fi novels that shows his fascination with the future and with how our technological world breaks into the our established world of forms. Again the book is interesting precisely for what it shows of us of the Dick who will later assert his gnosticism with the brilliant Valis trilogy.
• The City & the City by China Mieville: Eight Pin. I am not a big Sci-Fi fan, but I appreciate the work that Mieville does to attract non-fans to the genre. City is a fine read for the non fan.
• Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings by Zora Neal Hurston: Strikes. Hurston is my pre-imminent source for HooDoo literature. A devotee of HooDoo conjur, Hurston recreates her own experiences with this underground, snycretistic, and highly Southern religion. She is always a delight, and her writing informs my own.

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Freedom’s Fall

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was released in late August, and I got my paws on the book in early September. The book is polarizing. Literary novelists who have been plying their trade for decades, seemed affronted by the publicity that Franzen’s latest book received. How often does a novelist get on the cover of Time Magazine? Book critics, especially those closest to the publishing houses, embraced Freedom. My sympathy leans toward the struggling literary artists rather than the critics, BUT, Freedom ensnared me. The book is a lengthy, twisty-turny War and Peace of a book. In interviews, Franzen repeatedly said that he consciously tried to forget being literary and to simply tell a tale. He succeeded. As much as I might like to dismiss Franzen because of his fame, I cannot dismiss him. He told me a good story; he made my mind travel his roads in much the same way as Dickens does at his best. Freedom was the game-winning strike of my 2010 year in reading.

What’s more, Franzen reminded me of the late David Foster Wallace. I gave up on Wallace in my twenties. I thought I was done with him. I wasn’t. I reread Wallace’s Oblivion and came away with a new love for the man. I also reread Broom of the System. Strike and strike. There is much to be learned from Wallace. I find that I read Wallace more like a writing instruction manual than a true reader. I think this is why I felt I was done with him. I didn’t want any more of his advice. Yet, rereading him injecting life into my own thought life, and ultimately into my writing life.

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The Final Frame

As Fall bled into Winter, my reading year ended with a few more gutters and few more strikes. The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus was a strike, a perfect blend of experimental story-telling and historical realism. Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City was a disappointing gutter ball. I expected more from Lethem, especially since the book came so highly recommended. Lethem stried hard with Chronic City, but there is really no story to Chronic, just a collage of almost-interesting characters. I felt similar to Martin Amis’s London Fields. I sensed that there was greatness in his words, but I could not touch that greatness. Amis earns a gutter ball. By contrast, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicle surprised and delighted me. A strike, for sure. Bynum took me into the life of a grammar school teacher and she let me root around there for a few hundred pages. Bynum is a lady I look forward to reading more.

I rounded out the year with some research reading. The story that I’m currently writing features a veteran of the Vietnam war who is obsessed with the novel-turned-musical-turned-movie Showboat, so I spent a few weeks reading Edna Furber’s Showboat. It’s not a bad read. I also read We Were Soldiers Once and Young and I am still reading The Warmth of Other Suns, a non-fiction book published in 2010 about the exodus of Southern Blacks to the Northern promised land. Good stuff.

I read more than I’ve written here, but these are a few highlights. I have to reserve a few that I’d like to blog about individually. Hating Olivia, Charles Portis, Margaret Bolsterli, and All is Lost Nothing is Forgotten. Overall it was a good year for reading. 2011 promises more.

Last year on my birthday, some friends and I gathered in my den to celebrate the rite.  During the course of that evening this small band of merry men was transformed into the Baxter Lane Animistic Men’s Chorus.  Thanks to my friend Jim Yates and his ever-present iphone, the origins of the BLAMC are forever captured in a series of photos and audio tracks.  The track featured here has one of the best throat-singing solo’s that ever came out of a white man’s throat, as well as the dronefully enlightening lyrics, an English translation of an Icelandic translation of the poems of Charles Bukowski.  I present to you the song Allie Gautogen.

Baxter Lane Animistic Men's Chorus

Rock it out  

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 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 stuff is brilliant. But so far (I have about twenty more pages to read), Barthelme’s story is flat. He drones on with descriptions of all the signs on the highway while his character’s drive around talking with the spunk of dog drool. When the story gets too boring, he’ll throw in an character that flirts with eccentricity enough to hold one’s interest for another scene. The novel seems pointless.

There are some saving graces. The character of Jen (the protagonists considerably younger love interest) fills every scene she’s in. I think I’m finishing the book just to see what happens to her.

But I didn’t really want to blog the book here. Mostly, I wanted to share this one portion where the narrator describes the technology of his day. Barthelme published Brothers in 1993. I remember 1993. One year before Kurt Cobain killed himself.  I was all of twenty.  Barthelme attempts to insert a bit o’ up to date technology, and, as testament to the speed of change, he sounds completely out of date now:

Eventually he mail-ordered a Gateway 486 with a lot of fancy add-ons. He was particularly interested in drawing and painting programs, word processors, and utility programs. He was using Windows, spending hours creating new icons, making drawings that he thought Jen might use in the magazine, doctoring photos to take guy’s heads off…He was also getting new shareware programs off bulletin board systems that Jen set him up with, and going on Compuserve, using Jen’s account to look up information on diseases he thought he might have, or might get, and to download consumer reports, reviews, news. He wondered what the point of a weather map was, inasmuch as the ones on TV were always more detailed and up to date, but he got them, anyway. He was linking into what journalists and excitable futurists were pleased to call the neural net, which was fundamentally mundane but fast and a little magical.

Good ol’ Compuserve. And the “neural net???” If I were reading this today and it had been written today, it might seem quaint, reminder of the way things were seventeen years ago when a Gateway 486 was fast and a little magical. But there is something dulling about reading it and feeling the writing become dated even as injest the words. Maybe it is just some innate desire within me that only wants the new, but I don’t think so. I think I want the timeless.

By way of contrast, I recently reread David Foster Wallace’s Broom of the System. I don’t have the book in hand right now (I was late getting it back to the library. Bad. Bad. Librarian.) or I would include a quote. Foster was/is a master of creating realistic ultra-contemporary narrative with a timeless quality. When he wants to talk about technology, he makes it up, AND the techno-babble usually serves some larger plot point. In Broom, there is the ultra-modern phone switch board that has the tunnel problem. You’ll see the same thing in Infinite Jest with the video system or the replaceable faces. Instead of trying to add some contemporary techno-reference for the sake of saying, “look, my characters are alive in your world, dear reader.” Wallace takes makes technology part of the larger myth that we all recognize without the detail (Compuserve) and relate to on a more visceral level.

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 and referencing the book Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.  This turns out to be a difficult little novel to get one’s hands on in translation.  But, I’m a librarian, so I got my paws on a copy.  It remains my favorite Vargas LLosa novel, though one that got little mention during LLosa’s fifteen minutes of Nobel fame.

A few weeks ago, I picked up Letters to a Young Novelist, LLosa’s obligatory book on writing.  There are some gems in this slender volume.

It is relatively easy to speak of the coherence of a style and harder to explain what I mean by essentiality, a quality required of the language of a novel it that novel is to be persuasive. Maybe the best way of describing essentiality is to explain its opposite, the style that fails in telling a story because it keeps us at a distance and lucidly conscious; in other words, a style that makes us conscious of reading something alien and prevents us from experiencing the story alongside its characters and sharing it with them. This failure is perceived when the reader feels an abyss that the novelist does not successfully bridge in writing his tale, an abyss between what is being told and the language in which it is told. This bifurcation or split between the language of a story and the story itself annihilates the story’s power of persuasion. The reader doesn’t believe what he is being told, because the clumsiness and inconvenience of the style make him sense that between word and deed there is an arbitrariness that fiction depends on and that only successful fictions manage to erase or hide.

And, just as I mentioned in my Van Booy post, here is Llosa’s advice that the would-be writer read, read, read.

Read constantly, because it is impossible to acquire a rich, full sense of language without reading plenty of good literature, and try as hard as you can, though this is not quite so easy, not to imitate the styles of the novelist you most admire and who first taught you to love literature. Imitate them in everything else: in their dedication, in their discipline, in their habits; if you feel it is right, make their convictions yours. But try to avoid the mechanical reproduction of the patterns and rhythms of their writing, since if you don’t manage to develop a personal style that suits your subject matter, your stories will likely never achieve the power of persuasion that makes them come to life.