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 of questions that every sentient being contends with, and if a writer has not grappled with these questions and come to some semblance of an answer—even if that answer is simply, “I have no answers,”–then his writing will be nothing short of mental masturbation. To write fiction about folk struggling with life is, in a very real sense, to enter the realm of the philosophical, and the trick of the craft is to tell a story so well that the under-pinning of ideas disappears. One need look no further than Oscar Wilde—the king of “art for art’s sake—to see that this is true, for what would the Picture of Dorian Grey be without those niggling questions of mortality and morality?

Simon Van Booy is a fiction writer (and a damn good one), but in his latest publishing effort, Van Booy lifts the curtain on the fiction writer’s process, revealing the ideas behind the stories. In so doing he also demonstrates a more universal truth: all of our lives are under-girded with the philosophical.



Van Booy chooses three essential questions: Why we need love; Why we fight; and Why our decisions don’t matter. Each question is addressed in it’s own book, titled with the very question, but these are not treatises. Van Booy instead approaches the work of philosophy as editor rather than writer, so instead of reading Van Booy’s direct opinions on the question, he presents the reader with collections of art work, quotations, and selections from great writers and thinkers throughout Western (and in some cases Eastern) civilization.

What is delightful in these collections is Van Booy’s somewhat mysterious choices. With each selection, the reader must raise again the primary question. What does this have to do with Love? With fighting? With our meaningless decisions?

In Why We Need Love, for example, Van Booy includes Willa Cather’s lengthy story “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament.” This story is about a young man with an absent mother (possibly deceased, though this is never explicitly stated) and a father who does not understand him. With a feeling of isolation, Paul becomes something of a juvenile delinquent, embezzling funds with which to spend a raucous weekend in New York City. It is a great story, but it is in no sense a love story, and finding it in the middle of this collection, the reader must ask “What’s this got to do with love?” And in asking the question, you see the story anew.

This is what I liked most about Van Booy’s trilogy. He forced me to look at stories, poems, paintings, with fresh eyes.

I read the books in the order I unpacked them from their box: Love, Fighting, and then Decisions. They seemed to lose their power the further I got into them, and by the time I finished Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter, I was beginning to feel that the book did not matter. The first two books, where Van Booy is treating subjective ideas that still have a bit of objective heft (love, anger), his editorial choices seem more poignant and revealing, but book three dragged on. I felt like Van Booy was trying too hard in this last book to make me see life a certain way.

Overall, I applaud Van Booy’s effort to force us to ask essential questions, but in the end, I would like to explore the questions on my own, without his editorializing. I’m stubborn that way.

Having said that, perhaps what is most revealing about these books is the insight into the thought life of a literary artist. Van Booy lifts the curtain on his own process. Every writers at some point in his or her career will sit down to write a book about writing, and almost everyone of them will say, “to be a great writer, you should read, read, read.”

Van Booy, in selecting what he does and in editorializing in the way he does, shows us the books that have shaped his own writing, and more than anything, it makes me want to read his fiction again to see how he incorporates these thoughts and these styles into his own.

Every Tuesday I work late.  This means my commute to and from work takes place during an NPR dead time.  To compensate I listen to this podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/ .  I like Eleanor Wachtel’s accent as well as her Nancy Reagan hair.  I also like the writers she interviews.  There’s a great one with Coetzee where he only agrees to the interview when Eleanor consents not to ask him about his personal life, his novels, or South African politics.  Even with these restrictions, it’s a great dialogue they have.

But my reason for bringing this up is this:  Stop reading and go listen to this Orhan Pamuk interview.  He says many things about art and politics that I have thought, and, more importantly, it’s just nice to hear his voice.  He sounds like a swell fella.  He has nice glasses too.  Very jealous of the glasses.

Click here now: http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/writersandco_20100829_36584.mp3

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,” preceeds with several stunning chapters of narrative wherein the reader is introduced to Queequeg the cannibal, the whale fishery, and later the characters of Starbuck, Stubb, and Ahab. These are splendidly written chapters of storytelling that heighten the sense of expectation. The pending voyage–and all it presides–is felt with a sense of dread and wonder.

The ending does not frustrate these early expectations. In the last remaining chapters, the reader is taken into the turbulent brain of Captain Ahab. We see the final chase. We see the ultimate destruction of the Pequod and all the characters we’ve come to love.

But in between this beginning and end is the middle. The Boring Parts. Here we are treated with various depictions of whales. Here we read about the classifications of whales, the history of cetology and the history of whales in pop culture. Here too we are given the almost painfully exact descriptions of the whale’s body, head, fins. Our narrator, not content with the mere surface of things, will say things like “having seen the outer surface of the spermaceti’s cavernous head. let us descend like Jonah to the whale’s innermost being.” This type of description takes up hundreds of pages.

As a long time reader, I have come to believe that the act of reading a great book is a narrative act in its own right. When we read a great book, we enter the story, but we also create a story of our own reading of the book. The books that I remember–and there are many that I don’t remember at all–become situated in the story of my own life journey, and to recall the book is to recall what was happening to me as I read it and to fit the book’s narrative into my own.

Kerouac I read one summer while languishing in an un-airconditioned apartment in South Arkansas. Jack Butler I first read in Fort Worth, and he almost made me run from a pending marriage…almost. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence I finished at three in the morning at a Greyhound station in Gary, Indiana, where I was running away from my own depression.

It’s extrememly rare that I read a book twice, and reading Moby Dick for a second time has put me into a reflective mood, particularly because of those Boring Parts. I found these parts much less tedious, more insightful, even compelling, anything but boring. Why?

Thirteen years ago, at the cusp of my undergraduate days, I “discovered” Melville. I was not then a brave reader; I shied away from big books, especially those with a reputation as boring. So, my first introduction to Melville was in his shorter works: Bartleby, Benito Cerano, and Billy Budd. This later work proved the most compelling to me. Billy Budd felt like the perfect story. I wrote a paper for my American Lit class exploring the religious imagery of the novella.

Exploring religion through literature was an obsession of mine at the time. I had spent four years of university immersed in the academic study of the Christian Bible. I learned Greek and Hebrew and spent hours honing my exegetical skill, but I had also been awakened to the beauty and power of literature, and, more specifically, to the glory of words. “In the beginning was the word.”

I like words so much that I spent one final semester of undergraduate doing nothing but taking literature and writing classes. This was an exciting time for me. I felt I was taking all the knowledge learned through long hours of Bible study and applying it to life, for literature seemed like real life to me then.

I was also dating a girl who shared this passion. The two of us played like kittens in the Fall leaves of campus, learning together about love and words, exploring the potential of life, a lived life.

But all this ended with the end of that Fall semester. I moved home to save money and plot my next move, which sould either be to graduate school in English or seminary, for in spite of my love of literature, I had been told and I felt it to be true, that I was called of God to serve him.

Indiana. My childhood home. Here, cut off from my friends, away from my lover, and outside the clarity of university life where epiphanies seemed as common as one’s daily bread, I grew restless and confused. So I read. It’s what I had learned from almost five years of undergraduate. Read. Read like life depended on it, because it does. With nothing but time on my hands, I decided I could brave the big books of the Western canon. I picked up a handsome copy of Moby Dick at my local Barnes and Noble. It would take me months to complete.

I still remember the naive excitement with which I started reading Moby Dick. I read expectantly, feeling like Melville was going to give me a gift, a word of knowledge.

Those first few chapters fell off quickly. I sat in my father’s recliner in front of the TV and read late at night, after my work at a local pizza parlor. The house–my childhood home–was always quiet at this time of night. My father lived and worked hundreds of miles away in Michigan. My brother had moved out many years before. It was only my mother and I, and Mom went to bed early, so the hours of one to five in the morning, the house was mine.

From Dad’s recliner, I first began to contemplate the meaning of Moby Dick. I was immediately drawn to Ishmael. I pictured him as a young adventure seeking man, much like myself. I should add that I came to the book with a preconception from my university lit class that Moby Dick was about human kind’s pursuit of god. Ahab, the epitomized unbeliever, violent in his opposition to God, an opposition rooted in his own experience of suffering. Ishmael, I felt, was the neutral observer to Ahab’s blasphemous obsession.

I had my own misgivings then about god’s goodness, though I had little experience to support those misgivings. As much as identified with Ishmael, I feared the Ahab in my soul, trembled at the notion that he lurked there, beating at the door of my heart and demanding release.

Meanwhile, my life went forward. I decided to attend seminary in the Fall. I opted to enroll at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. I would be in the family business. Moreover, my college love and I were to be married. She and I, separated by the miles, kept up a lively correspondence, and we saw each other as often as we could in those days of cheap gas.

So it was that in the Spring of ’96, I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Arkadelphia, Arkansas from Evansville, Indiana. I carried two things with me: a diamond engagement ring and my copy of Moby Dick.

In the 20th century, it was fashionable for awhile for men to sell plot short in relation to character. Character-driven literature was seen as superior to plot-driven narrative. That may have been because the male literary elite attempted nothing more strenuous than lifting martinis to their lips and jumping their friend’s wives. (I think, particularly, of John Updike)

From Carolyn See Making a Literary Life

In the Tao, the two forces of being and not-being grapple with one another, an eternal struggle that brings about creation and un-creation. Winter is a void but Spring comes from this void. Forces interact to bring about a balance of being and not-being; order and chaos; beauty and ugliness. What emerges is not so much a battle but a natural cycle. Today I live in a stasis with a tiny dot of restlessness. Yesterday, I lived with the opposite. They cycle continues. Today, I have a Confucian desire for order and rule keeping. Maybe not tomorrow.

This is the extent of my spirituality. The sum of all I can stand of religion today.

How does this belief express itself in my writing?

Bill Murray grants a rare interview with GQ, in which he responds to the rumors of Ghostbusters III, maligns Ron Howard (sort of), and ponders a return to comedic films. Read it immediately.

Bill Murray is Ready to See You Now

Here’s a quote of Bill responding to the question of what he watches on TV and turning it in to a commentary on Obama’s election:

I watch sports, I watch movies, Current TV on the satellite—I kind of like that. Honestly, I’m just easily bored. C-SPAN can be really great. Like the night Obama won the election, C-SPAN was the greatest. There were no announcers, just Chicago. It was just that crowd in Grant Park, and it was just fuckin’ jazz. You know, it was just wow. And that’s my town, you know? It was just: “Oh, my God, it’s gonna happen! [getting genuinely excited] It’s gonna happen!” You just saw the pictures of it, like, oh, there’s someone from the Northwest Side, there’s someone from the South Side, someone from the suburbs. It was the most truly American thing you’ve ever seen. [pause] Oh God, I get jazzed just thinkin’ about it. I don’t know anyone that wasn’t crying. It was just: Thank God this long national nightmare is over.

Cat Power, whom I love, (and really who doesn’t love Cat Power?) turned up in this odd picture on the Department of Education website:

That’s her holding a copy of the Giving Tree, and looking very much like One of These Things is Not Like the Others. There are, in fact, so many odd things in this picture that I could stare at it all day and still feel like I had not seen it. Like that guy with the yellow cowboy boots. Or the way the fella on the other side of Cat is kind of leching on her. Icch. And what’s happening with that woman behind them all? Is she a deranged parent? Teacher?

In short, I love this picture.

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 sitting on this deck as a summer sun faded into the gloaming and finishing Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

As an apostate who spent the first twenty years of my life chasing after the mirage of Jesus, I thought that I had pretty much dwelt upon every aspect of the historical Christ, explored every angle. But Saramago moved me. He made me feel for the man Jesus and I thought he even made a plausible explanation for the unwitting divinity of Christ. Mostly, though, I thought Saramago knew how to tell a damn good story. Better than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John put together.

There is much to commend in Saramago. He seems to represent a type of literature whose time is gone.

I should add that I also take comfort in the fact that he did not become a full-time writer until well into his 50′s. A fact that is lost on the NewYorker’s “20 under 40″ debacle.

Once the Shore is Yoon’s first book, and it brings together many of the short stories that have made him a writer of note. All the stories in Once the Shore take place on a small island belonging to South Korea. Each story captures a different moment in the island’s history, from World War II and the Japanese occupation to the present day when the island is overrun with tourism. Yoon has a subtle touch in depicting his characters. He can speak volumes in a few words or gestures. He invests the landscape of the island with a character all its own, till you can taste the salt sea, the beauty, the bitterness, the loneliness of this place. This is what makes these stories compelling.

The title story first appeared in One Story and then in the Best American Short Stories of 2006. It’s good. Read it.

My favorite story in the collection, however, is “So They Do Not Hear Us.” This story narrates the tale of an old woman who makes her living diving into the sea for whatever sea-life she can retrieve. She befriends a young Japanese boy who has lost an arm in an accident. Ahrim, the woman, lost her husband during the Japanese war, and she has lived many years waiting for him. Sinaru, the boy, lives with his parents who seem to be constantly arguing. His lost arm and the circumstances surrounding it appear to be the source of their arguing. These things form a quiet background to the story, giving the story life and depth. Yoon tells the story with a derth of words. He does not insult the reader. In this passage, Ahrim meets the boy at her home after school. His classmates have been bullying him and Ahrim bristles at this like a bitch with pups.

There he was. She saw the boy through her window, crossing the street, and she thought that what seemed inherent in some was caution. She herself took it from her life in the sea, which moved and pressed against its environment in a perpetual act of provocation. She opened the door before the boy could knock and so upon first sight saw his hand in a fist, raised, his knuckles pointing at her. He wore a different shirt, cleaner, fresh. Cinched at the waist this time was a long thread of twine. A stick was tucked inside it., the end of which he had sharpened to a point. His bruises were healing. The skin of the young does so, much faster than the old.

Two days ago, three boys had wanted to see his stump.

The first punch was to the side of Sinaru’s head. When his body bent, they kicked his shins and hit him on the shoulders, and then ripped the sleeves of his shirt. ‘The Jap has a second dick,’ they said….

She knelt beside her door and examined his legs. The bruises were the color of a mussel’s shell, the color of the outer rim of stars.

“I made this,” Sinaru said, tapping his sword. He looked down at her. He was filled with pride.

“Let’s have a look.”

She stood and he presented the sword to her. It was a branch of forsythia, its gold flowers gone. At the sharp end its flesh was revealed, nearly white against the bark. He would have used a kitchen knife, perhaps, something a bit dull. She could tell from the uneveness of his cuts.

“I would like something for this,” the boy said, raising the stump where his arm once existed. “I’d place it there and then I would be a knight and I could cut paths anywhere.” He made swooshing noises.

“You’d rescue the princess,” Ahrim said.

“Yes, I would.”

“And would you rescue me?”

The boy considered her question. “You’re too old to be a princess.”

“True.”

“But maybe I would.”

“Here,” Ahrim said, lowering the bowl. “Eat.”

With her chopsticks she picked a few strips of the seaweed salad, twisted them, and fed the boy while they were standing at her door. She asked whether anyone had bothered him at school today. He shrugged while chewing.

This passage illustrates all that is great in this story and all that is grand in Yoon’s writing. The brutality of the world. We sense the violence behind this scene. The violence of the bullies, yes, but the violence of the world that would take her husband so young, like the sea in its “perpetual act of provocation.” But the interaction between Ahrim and Sinaru is what is truly touching. Here is a boy being a boy. After being beaten up he has fashioned a sword, and he is proud of it. He dreams of vanquishing his foes. He dreams of glory. She needs to feed him. Subtle and beautiful.

In an interview over at the Rumpus, Yoon describes his motivation for writing:

Writing fiction is kind of a love letter to all the books that have stayed with me and all the readers that share in that feeling I have when I finish a book: I look up and I feel like my surroundings have shifted in some way and I have no idea what has just happened. Your sense of the world has changed, and it is wonderful. And that fuels my obsessive desire to enter fictional worlds, learn about and experience various cultures and history through the imagination.

You feel this yearning in Yoon’s fiction.

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Once again, I’ve fallen behind in writing thoughts on the books I’m reading. Some other books I have read of late:

• Everything here is the best thing ever, Justin Taylor
• 66 Stories, Donald Barthelme
• High Lonesome, Barry Hannah
• Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson
• How to Read an Un-written language, Philip Graham
• Liars and Saints, Maile Meloy
• Erasure, Percevil Everet
• The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall
• Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
• Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee

If any of these strike your fancy, send me a note, and I’ll post a review.

Bill Murray reading poetry to construction workers.