The Frame

Wouldn’t have expected Franzen to be named as one of four major pillars of literary influence, but you can’t argue with such a nice flowchart. Especially when you haven’t read Franzen.

(via Literature Flowchart | HTMLGIANT)

Thoughts on Jesus’ Son

Read Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son this week, and was - and becoming even more - blown away. The stories are entertaining yet complex. I finished the book last night and today while I was thinking about something totally unrelated, one of the stories hit me viscerally - as if it was the residue from some vivid dream I had had where before your mind even has a chance to fill in the details, you feel the way you did when you first experienced it. Two chilling details remained with me: the slimy miniature bunnies found inside the guts of a roadkilled rabbit in “Emergency,” and the protagonist in “Beverly Home” on the ground peering beneath the Mennonite woman’s window curtain. 

In this last story, the junkie protagonist starts out a run-of-the-mill peeping Tom but becomes obsessed with observing a Mennonite woman and her husband - seemingly for non-sexual reasons, although this is sort of an open question. In one of the story’s final scenes, the junkie is laying on the ground outside the woman’s bedroom, desperately trying to see beyond a closed window curtain. At one point the woman yanks open the curtain and is face to face with the junkie - but since it is dark outside and light inside, she doesn’t see beyond her reflection. It struck me that this scene embodied something that happened throughout the book: outsiders looking in - and, rarely, insiders looking out. 

Every story involves a junkie of some kind, which might sound depressing, but the tone is entertaining and never taxing. The junkies are respectable for some reason - maybe because of the narration - although they are not control of their lives, they are certainly in control of the narration. Although the average reader of Johnson probably does not have much in common with the kinds of people presented in his stories, their lucid narration bridges the gap. You respect the perspective they have on their own situation.

I thought this was an interesting aspect of the book - the fact that the average reader probably doesn’t have much in common with the types of people in the stories. The last line of the book gets at this - “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a hearbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

The book presents two spheres of people: the responsible ones and the irresponsible ones. Usually you are asked to look into the world of the junky - who often interacts with the responsible ones. This point makes this tension all the more apparent: often, the junkies hold jobs that intrude on the other sphere in an uncomfortable way. They are in charge of cleaning patients in ER room, or working in old folks homes. They work in jobs you’d expect - and demand - more competent people to be working. Positions of trust - to some extent. One particularly horrifying intrusion is when one junkie, who works in an ER prepping patients, does drugs on the job and yanks a knife out of a patient’s eye without even thinking about it - all while the surgeon doubts his own ability to perform such a difficult removal. 

There’s one moment where a group of junkies find themselves interacting with another group of even worse junkies. But usually they’re interacting with normal folk and it can be uncomfortable but mostly it’s easy to sympathize - or at least be entertained - by the narrator junky. In “Beverly Home,” you sympathize - at least to some small degree - because he writes such a caring and enthusiastic newsletter for the community. As noted above, I believe the sympathy you feel relates to their ability to write, to express themselves. The narratives are direct and honest, sometimes visionary but controlled.

Here I am throwing around the word junky. Maybe I shouldn’t be judging everyone so quickly in a book called Jesus’ Son. I really don’t think the book is getting at something so trite (i.e. presenting you with “sinful” characters that evoke sympathy all to show you that even the sinful are worthy of love), but there might be something to that. I’m more interested in the relationship between these two spheres of people. The book asks you, the presumably educated, to examine the lives of the uneducated - to look out beyond your own reflection. 

Miscellaneous Reading Notes

It was going to be the year of classic American authors. Hemingway, Twain, Faulkner, Melville. It hasn’t exactly turned out the way I planned, but I still consider it a year of American literature. Here are some notes on some of the books I’ve read this year.

1. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I initially thought this book was an exception to the year’s theme of classic American literature but then after reading it I thought, Shame on me for being so exclusive. It was terrific. Heartbreaking and entertaining. I liked how it weaved Dominican Republican history into the story, presenting DR folklore, like the “foku,” as just another part of the fantastical world in which Oscar lives - reminiscent of Danticat, in a way.

2. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Bridge bomber befriends gypsies living in a cave. I think it was about duty. The terse, violent scenes reminded me of McCarthy. Wasn’t really about America, although Robert Jordan, the hero, is American. 

3. I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

Great voice but it gets old. By the end I was bored. She just starts telling you things (like why she chose to become a vegetarian or being a bridesmaid) without explaining why you should care. Rather than making any surprising connections (which is what I want out of an essay) she just tells anecdotes.

4. Netherland by Joseph O’Neil

Dutchman finds solace in cricket after his wife leaves him in New York after 9/11. A perfect welcome-back-to-New-York book. Lived up to its praise. Rich prose but modest at the same time. Impressionistic, to some extent, but easily followed. I probably missed some of the most important pieces - one of them identity, and another recovery, it seems - but I still loved it.

5. Miscellany

I also read a few John Cheever and Leonard Michaels stories. All amazing. Wasn’t expecting Micheal’s fiction to be experimental after reading his book of essays, which was terrific. His fiction is great too, though. His image of a hairy, naked man walking on his hands into an elevator in an attempt to pass his pubes off as a beard in his story Cityboy stayed with me. 

I caught the first few chapters of the The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat on audio book and was blown away. Need to pick up a copy. Now. Danticat’s style is understated but forceful. But first, I have to read Bleak House for law school. Better than a casebook.

Great Lines (So Far) in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

“You broke, eh?”
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”

I said: “Anybody home, son?”
“How would I know?”
“Go ——— yourself [sic].”
“That’s how people get false teeth.”

“Whoever had done it [killed Geiger] had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

A Few Notes on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

I picked up Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis at a library sale for $.50, and read it last week. I’ll put it this way: the book almost ruined DeLillo for me. Much of the book seemed wholly unecessary, and some of it even made me embarrassed for DeLillo—particularly the part about the rapper “Brutha Fez“‘s funeral.

DeLillo tried his best to mine some cultural gold here with Brutha Fez’s funeral, but his writing came off awkward like a middle-aged white guy bobbing his head to hip-hop. Why didn’t his exploration of hip-hop succeed like his exploration of the supermarket in White Noise? I suspect that it might have something to do with hip-hop’s obsession with the real. Or maybe it is because hip-hop is too cliche a target. It is already all around us. We have already thought about what it means, whereas a supermarket has in a sense disappeared. Anyway, I’ll have to think more about that, but here are a few ideas played out in Cosmopolis:

• Our imbalances, flaws and scars—like Eric’s driver’s missing finger, Ibrahim’s damaged eye—give us a history.
• Technology is a future.
• These imbalances cannot be turned into raw data or technology.
• What about language? How does language convert us? Eric continually thinks that certain words should be obselete by now, such as chair and table, suggesting that language is just as much a technology as cell phones.
• How does this line fit in with the rest of the book: “When he [Eric] died he would not end. The world would end”?

I might return to some of these questions, but I find the book not worth much time. Now I need to go read something good by DeLillo (perhaps The Names) to get this stale taste out of my mouth.

Scott Esposito on Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice

Scott Esposito at the Quarterly Conversation recaps Cormac McCarthy’s career, focusing particularly on how McCarthy has “prob[ed] the fence-posts lining the borders of free will and develop[ed] his own distinctly postmodern view of identity, plot, and country.” The review is enlightening—especially the part on The Road because I have been able to find very little criticism on it.

Here’s a highlight:

Such profound and sincere engagement with his writing bespeaks an author who has very much struck a nerve with all kinds of readers. I think this can be traced to his lifelong obsession with the search for identity: no one thing has been as consistent in McCarthy’s work over his forty-year career as his insistence that we are only offered certain moments to really influence our identity, though we may not know them when we see them and we may be illusioned as to what the choices represent. Furthermore, his most financially successful books and his avowed masterpiece have powerfully stated this idea while also arguing for a distinctly revisionist idea of American identity. Yet what is noteworthy about the latter is that McCarthy has not revised using the typical subversive agents of literature; rather, he has made his revisionists cowboys, the very representatives of the rugged West that first gave birth to the myths McCarthy subverts.

A nice feature of this essay is that it traces this thesis through McCarthy’s ten novels, making a mini-argument for each one. In his section about Blood Meridian, Esposito points to the judge’s “typically convoluted” view on free will that informs the philosophy of many of McCarthy’s other novels:

This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation… .

The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Esposito explains the paradox of the judge’s logic:

Essentially, the judge argues that knowledge and willful action are only possible once all the facts of a life are known, but the problem is that the only way to make these facts known is to live a life. Thus, as the judge says, life is an already-woven “tapestry”; merely tracing one thread through it, a person will have “taken charge” of his life. But again, the paradox: this is only possible once the tapestry is woven, once a life has been lived and all choices are already made…

Is there a point in which a person can preview the tapestry whole-formed, and thus be in a position to truly choose his course in the world? Or must we always be in the dark as to what form our life will take when all is said and done, and therefore not truly be in a position to make choices that will define our future?

Book Notes: Remix by Lawrence Lessig

I found Remix more engaging, though less informative than Code. A different book, to be sure. Where Code focuses on the ‘architecture’ of innovations, Remix makes a mainstream appeal to renovate the copyright code and end the ‘war’ on piracy. In Lessig’s view, the battle between the RIAA and file sharing is not a zero-sum game. There are many ways to go about reform that would increase the public’s ability to engage with copyrighted content without harming the owners of the intellectual property.

Lessig’s problem is that his presentations are so effective that people are going to stop reading his books. Watching this video gives you all the highlights in less than an hour.

I do have one challenge to his argument. A large section of the book is about what it takes to succeed—or profit—in a “hybrid” culture. Lessig praises companies like Flickr for catering to their customers, for offering content freely and engaging a community. Because of Flickr’s willingness to offer a free product, his argument goes, they have built a valuable community and is able to profit while maintaining an enthusiastic community. But how much money are these companies really making? He throws youtube in the same category, omitting the fact that youtube has yet to turn a profit for google. For the most part, Lessig remains grounded in his optimism for the web, but when youtube is an example of success in the hybrid economy, perhaps we should curb our enthusiasm.

Krik? Krak! Final Thoughts

I finished Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak? last night. Initially I was a little disappointed with this book. I started reading it after I finished Blood Meridian. The two couldn’t have been more different. I couldn’t get into the simple, sparce language of Krik? Krak! While McCarthy’s language is sparce at times, it is never simple. After I had time to adjust to its language, I began to appreciate a few things about the book.

I really liked how this book started weaving the short stories—referring to each other as if they are all related. What makes this move even more interesting is that some of the stories have a fairy-tale, fantastical style to them. By connecting these stories to the realistic stories, Danticat challenges our notions of realism. This move suggests that just because a tale is mythological doesn’t mean it is not real. I think this move is particularly apt in writing about Haitian culture, which is full of proverbs and expressions that refer to the culture’s mythology, but nevertheless contain the practical wisdom of the culture.

The title Krik! Krak? refers to an expression in Haitian culture roughly equivalent to the American “Knock knock. Who’s there?” The expression contains a reciprocity between the listener and speaker, young and old, reader and writer. This reciprocity is valued and demonstrated throughout the entire book. Having the stories refer to one another reflects this same sort of reciprocity—often the other tales are referred as history that came before the current story. This device makes the book circular so that reading the first story is in a way understanding the last—and vice-versa. The book’s self-referential form reinforces the book’s major theme of understanding one’s past to understand one’s self, or as expressed in the book’s language as, “You don’t just join a family not knowing what you’re getting into. You have to know some of the history.” Or take perhaps a better passage explaining this concept and how it relates to writing:

“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are think, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.” (220)

I also came to appreciate its simple language. There are times where the simplicity made the prose more powerful; it laid its tradegy bare.

Note: I’m not just speculating about Haitian culture; I am familiar with it because I served an LDS mission in Boston, MA and worked with the Haitian community there. I learned how to speak Haitian Creole and spent most of my days among Haitians. Having that background made this book more enjoyable, although I don’t think one would be missing out on anything without it. Just some of the gestures and exchanges between the characters made more sense having that background.

Here is a link to a list of popular Haitian proverbs: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Haitian_proverbs