two umbrellas

It is rare when a book affects me. Yes, each book I read is an experience, per se; there is a relationship between two sensibilities. Often, that relationship fades as time passes as new books are read and new voices heard and some are just, well, forgettable. However, reading William T Vollmann’s Poor People was like getting a good slap in the face. I had a previous experience with Vollmann’s writing before with Rainbow Stories and was not expecting to be this moved.

Before I can even begin about the content, I must address Vollmann’s writing and voice. (I don’t know much about him although I’ve been reading some interviews now that Imperial is out.) WTV pulls you in with his sincerity, keeps you there with his eye for raw subject matter, and then leaves it up to you to judge – if you must. Something seems soft and quiet, even when he’s describing the homeless people that use his building as a toilet or a town – once beautiful and handcrafted with pride – that is soon to be demolished:

“Under the road, where time is slower and cheaper, not only does the division of labor sometimes insist less on itself, but so does the division between labor and art. Well, goodbye, goodbye! Simple, crownlike flowers on short-plucked diagonal stems spread their angled wings and hovered darkly on a house’s pale wall, under-the-road blossoms awaiting the happy day when oil’s thoroughfare, preceded by its herald, the wrecking ball, would uplift everybody into superior normality.”

His ability to juxtapose this soft sincerity with the harsh realities of poor people’s lives paradoxically takes WTV himself off of the page and yet makes it strikingly personal: Will it be a ‘happy day when oil’s thoroughfare, preceded by its herald, the wrecking ball, would uplift everybody into superior normality“? It depends on who you ask.

I almost forgot Poor People is a very long essay. It doesn’t feel like editorializing but that’s what it is. He deftly states: here is the situation and (with paragraphs like the one above) subtly asks: now what do you think of that? However, there is never a time when he asks: what are you going to do about it? In fact, he states that he is not writing to tell people how to fix the problem of poverty. He is writing to tell you about poverty and what makes someone poor.

WTV chooses to write about poverty that most people never see and rarely understand. If you know WTV’s writing, then you know the prostitutes, the drug addicts, the downtrodden, the drunks, the sick, the forgotten. Somehow, in Poor People he is also able to find compelling stories – but, then, with this subject matter, maybe they all are. I can’t help but think he finds the compelling stories because he seems to look for them without fear. In Japan, he searches for the elusive and extremely dangerous Snakeheads (people involved in human trafficking), knowing that knocking on certain doors could get him killed – fortunately, and even he recognizes this, these doors are not answered. There is story of the Thai woman who works to get drunk and take care of her daughter. There is the story of the two beggars in Russia: one an epileptic and one who is in her eighties, supporting her family. (I found this story amazing: the son-in-law was sent to work to clean up Chernobyl – when he started they were initially only allowed to work 5 seconds a day due to the radiation. Now he is too sick to work. His exposure was so great he has the potential to make the rest of his family sick by being around them – his two daughters rarely leave the house due to illness.) There is the story of the oil town in Kazakhstan whose town officials are ordering everyone to move – there are rumors that the refinery is making everyone sick and that the entire town has anemia. There are the stories of Afghan women who are poor but invisible under the strong arm of the Taliban (it is illegal for women to beg, among many other things). So many stories. So much poverty.

The beauty of WTV’s book is that I didn’t find myself pitying these people. He was able to make them human. Of course, they are human! However, I find that often when people write about these kinds of stories they patronize and pity to the point where these stories become sentimental simulacra of themselves – almost cartoonish, as if it couldn’t/doesn’t really happen. (The best example I can think of is most of the Katrina coverage.) WTV writes in such away that you don’t want to turn away, you are not embarrassed, or nervous, or scared of (most of) these people. Some are just like us. Just poorer. A lot poorer.

But are they? That is, I think, what WTV really wanted to know. What makes someone poor? Is it how much they have? How much money they have? Or is it something else? For each person it is different, a different story, a different sadness, a different hope. And hope is what WTV thinks is the best thing you can give these people. Let them drink, smoke, do drugs, as long as it gives them hope and makes their lives a little better. I am not sure I agree with this at all times, especially when the behavior can affect others. But, hope, in itself, I can believe in.

Happy Bloomsday! Colum McCann has an essay on reading Ulysses.

The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

I’m still plugging away at the Faulkner Project. The Little Parasol is somewhat enjoying it. She loved As I Lay Dying but is not enjoying Sanctuary as much. Maybe it’s the way that I’m reading it; maybe she already has formed her taste in books…Kundera put her to sleep; but, I’ll admit, the essays can be dense and there were often times when I struggled to keep my eyes open myself.

I still enjoyed As I Lay Dying immensely. I am always surprised to find that I still have trouble reading this book. I often find Vardamen very hard to follow – more so than Benjy. However, I have confirmed my good judgement in not reading while I was pregnant. From Addie’s chapter:

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill the lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter.

…My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.

Then I realized that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed I would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me back through it. But then I realised that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge…

I gave Ande Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and not mine. And then I could get ready to die.

I think if I had read that chapter while I was still pregnant I would have cried for days or gone into labor. (Maybe it would have been a good idea since the little Parasol was late.)

Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel has been sitting on my bookshelf for too long. I’m not quite sure why I read The Curtain first. I am always intrigued to read about a writer’s philosophy on writing and Kundera never disappoints. I am surprised how frank he seems to be when writing about his own writing. I feel as though I could read this book over and over again and never fully get out of it all it has to offer. While I often find his writing and writing style to be too technical for my own writing, I find that it in is this contrast that I can learn so much. I have also learned that I should really revisit Kafka.

As most people had been, I was very excited to see Mark Twain on the cover of Time. I was so excited to see historical, literary relevance in a mainstream magazine that I, in fact, went out and bought a copy. (I will spare a long gripe of how expensive the magazine was.) I have a tendency to be sentimental about certain things in print – I keep a practically useless folder of torn out stories from the New Yorker and Harper’s; but I digress…so I purchased this issue and I am sorry to say that I had.

Other than the photographs of Twain, there is nothing worth reading, unless you’re in the sixth grade and have been assigned Huckleberry Finn for Summer Reading. I was amazed – no, appalled – by the reading level in the magazine and the lack of real focus for the essays. The cover boasts the following taglines: “How he changed the way we view politics”, “Why he was ahead of his time on race”, and “What his writing can teach America today”. Sounds interesting and compelling, possibly even informative or, dare I say, provocative (can we even talk about race?). The essays glossed over each thesis and instead became a collection of some ‘dangerous’ quotes from Twain’s writing and at least two or three paragraphs in more than one essay about how Twain is the precursor to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, and Saturday Night Live (SNL, I’m sorry to say, is about as relevant and topical as the TV shows and celebrities it parodies). I’ll admit that I am not well versed in contemporary satire but why was there no mention of George Saunders or at least another writer.

I understand that they are going for a large and wide readership. So, can I forgive Time for its lack of depth in its articles? Why must they assume that the average reader, I’m not going to say adult reader either because this magazine could easily be read and understood by junior high students, needs to be hand-held? The entire magazine is laid out as though I were watching television one frame at a time. Yes, I applaud them for respecting Twain, but I can’t forgive them. It is a shame that print media feels that it must compete with visual media, although that may be another issue entirely.

In the midst of NaNoWriMo, I’m still (barely) trying to keep up my reading, which – of course – is one of the reasons I write.

I fell in love with Wayne Koestenbaum’s direct style in Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes and could not wait for Hotel Theory. I’ll admit it was a bit heady for me since I have been concentrating mostly on other things as of late; but, there were so many phrases that pulled me back and forced me into this book.

…and why I write: the ritual of composition kills consciousness at the same time as it revives a bleak, faithful attentiveness. Concentrating on my own sentences, converting intuition into phrases – this process feels like staring directly at time…every thought must be apotheosis…

Reading The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion has taught me once again how to write a paragraph.

I started Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique many, many months ago. I am still only half way through this classic. I have to put it on hold. It is very hard to read. I do not find Friedan’s style engaging or interesting – only the subject matter has kept my attention for over 300 pages. Unfortunately, as I read I am also finding that culture hasn’t quite progressed as far is it probably should have when this first published. I must say it is demoralizing to continue reading at this point but I may continue later. Of course I said that about The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and I still have not returned to that.

The American Scholar has an essay titled “Wonder Bread” against some Brooklyn writers. I can’t help but agree that there is some arrested development in seemingly talented writers.

Here are a few excerpts:

…certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness.

…

According to Jeffrey Sharlet, a journalist/provocateur who helped inspire this essay, and Andi Mudd, a spectacularly unwondrous college student who assisted in researching it, The Lovely Bones and its ilk “deserve a public shaming.” That’s because BBoWs are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

…

The nakedness of Kunkel’s desire to change the world and of Eggers’s angst has an appeal, but it’s simultaneously simple and disingenuous. Both are Salingers of our time. That’s because they embody critic Lionel Trilling’s famous dichotomy; they mistake sincerity for authenticity.

…

Not that everything that touches the splendid borough is piffle. Besides BBoWs, Brooklyn has given birth to books ranging from Hubert Selby’s morbid noir Last Exit to Brooklyn to Neil Gordon’s garrotte-tight thriller The Gunrunner’s Daughter. Jonathan Lethem provides a case in point because his imagination is deeply anchored in Brooklyn and he writes of adolescence, especially orphaned adolescence in Motherless Brooklyn, and his narratives are peppered with references to popular culture. However, all of this makes for a mimetic re-creation of genuine experience that he knew as a child on Dean Street rather than as a childish adult on Dean Street. Moreover, Lethem doesn’t pull punches. On the second page of The Fortress of Solitude, a kitten is accidentally killed while the protagonist’s mother smokes cigarettes. Unless it’s Mr. Harvey in The Lovely Bones, no one smokes in BBoWs. They’d as soon smoke as fail to recycle. Also, a daring flight at the end crashes. Perhaps Lethem is striving for wonder, but he’s too smart to let it carry him away. He has, however, been carried away by his imitators. The BBoW authors have adopted Lethem as a surrogate father, and he ought to disinherit them.

…

Coddled and cosseted, they’re the first generation of novelists who grew up reading the young-adult pap that they’ve now regurgitated with a deconstructive gloss learned in college. Of course, such aspirations require equivalently high subject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enormity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ clothing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

On a train ride to and from the suburbs today to visit a friend, I read Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”:

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.

…The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp — Dandyism in the age of mass culture — makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

48. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.

These notes listed (there are 58 in all), to me, represent statements that have not dated as easily as some of Sontag’s other points. I fear that there is a growing sensibility for points 2 and 38: an apolitical lack of content. However, I am struggling to decide what is the present day equivalent to camp.

I often find myself interested in the lives of famous authors but I rarely read biographies. I often try to separate what I know about the author and the book I am reading – I only want it to influence my reading marginally. I try not to consider reading an exercise in psychoanalyzing the author. Yet, it is hard to ignore that writers’ lives are too interesting to ignore and often what fuels their writing in the first place. Javier Marias’ collection of essays, Written Lives, gives glimpses of writers – their lives and personalities – that makes them interesting for more than just their writing.

In his prologue, Marias gives a bit of a disclaimer: There is little point in trying draw conclusions or lay down rules about the lives of writers on the basis of these portraits…. And although he states that nothing in the pieces are fictitious, he admits that some “episodes and anecdotes have been ‘embellished.’” (I can only hope that is case in the story of James Joyce running and screaming with his hands over his ears, with fright of a thunderstorm.) However exaggerated some stories may be, the essays are a joy to read. Marias’ own writing is intimate and affectionate – an amazing feat of style considering a few of his subjects have been dead for at least two hundred years. The essays are short and conversational, as if Marias is about to introduce you to an old friend – revealing only what he wants you to know but still letting you cast your own opinions.

What I found most enjoyable about the essays is that the subjects writing is tangential to the authors’ personalities. In the essay about Henry James, the only mention of his writing is when Marias notes that James didn’t understand why his books didn’t sell better. The writing is why readers are fascinated by authors (at least it is why I am fascinated by authors and why I love reading the Guardian’s Writers’ Rooms); but Marias’ essays make us fascinated by people who just happened to have written masterpieces.

Sarah Kerr reviews Joan Didion’s collection We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-Fiction. Here are a few excerpts:

“Style is character”: at several points in her career, Didion has offered this sentence as one of her core beliefs. But what does it mean? Not that you are what you look like, or that what you look like is what counts. Style is the writer’s site of decision-making-literally, the site of actions whose integrity can be measured. It is the place where the self meets the world. And so Didion felt a need to do what for her was, by her own admission, extremely difficult: go out and meet the world.

…

Because Didion’s later reporting on politics, often for this magazine, took a turn generally more critical of a reawakened American conservatism – and critical, also, of paralyzed Democratic accommodation – it’s sometimes been said that at some point in the decades after these first two books she was radicalized, or at least nudged toward something more like traditional liberalism. To argue this is to ignore how much the writing life has always been her central concern, and how much politics has always been a secondary, if all too gift-giving, subject. All along her aimed-for target has been behavior that is in error, above all behavior that resists – and therefore demands from the observing writer – irony.

But it’s true that something does seem to shift in her work. Early on, it seems to me, she is still in training as the capturer of moods and moments. Her ambition is to render thoroughly and truthfully her point of view, even if that point of view occasionally contains what she admits to be aspects of emotional projection. “However dutifully we record what we see around us,” she had warned in “On Keeping a Notebook,” “the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” Another line from that gorgeous but youthful essay, in response to the challenging of her memory by relatives: “Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.”

The more I read, the more I find the sense of place to be so important and pervasive in writing. It is something that I focus on in my own writing and I tend to read writers who exploit place – or in some cases can not escape it. I have never been to Didion’s California and her early writing, such as with The White Album, creates a portrait of a land steeped with mythical history: a fairy tale land of Hollywood and prosperity – American’s final destination. But Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a very personal collection of essays (although one could argue that most of Didion’s essays are highly personal, with the ghost of California not far behind) and it’s one of the reasons that I have such a hard time writing about the collection.

I often find myself at a loss for words when I read certain authors – Joan Didion being one of them. I usually read at least one of her books a year and I never know what to say after I’ve read them, which doesn’t say much about me as a writer, and reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem wasn’t any different. I finished this book almost a month ago and I am still trying to figure out how to articulate what it is I love about Didion’s writing and why I find it just about perfect.

I find that I have a connection to her writing – its ideas and styling – that I do not have with many other works or authors. It is emotional. I can’t write objectively about it. I can’t analyze it. I would then only be analyzing myself – or an idea of myself and my feelings about art and writing. What would be the good in that? The writing isn’t about me. It’s about everything else. I can’t explain it. I don’t want to explain it. I just want to enjoy the feeling of connection to the words on the page.