The Frame

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. 

Welcome to My Study: Halloween Edition

You’re always welcome to enjoy the things that I’ve found. This weekend’s Halloween Movie Marathon [late post]:

1. Repulsion

One detail made this film great: the skinned rabbit rotting on a plate in the salon. Like in Rosemary’s Baby (probably my favorite scary movie), it’s subtle but it creeps you out long term. 

But unfortunately there are more differences than similarities between the two films. Rosemary Baby tapped into a fear and anxiety that you already unconsciously hold - the fear of what neighbors do in their private lives. And after watching Rosemary’s, you can’t help but wonder about your neighbors. Its mood lingered. But in Repulsion, the fear is not internal, but it’s outside you and belongs only to the main girl in the film. We don’t share it. It’s the symptom of a psychiatric ailment. This made the film less scary to me than Rosemary’s. I guess you could say it’s a little easier to digest. Speaking of digest, I was just happy that at some point the girl didn’t bite into the rotting rabbit. 

2. The Exorcist

This was my first time seeing it - and my wife’s 600th. I heard the writer, a humble and likable guy, on the radio Saturday morning and he said, “I’m not being cute. I really wasn’t trying to scare anyone with this book. It’s a story about faith.” After seeing it, I realized he was right. It really was about faith and love. Good movie, but not really the satanic horror movie that everybody makes it out to be. Yes, a possessed girl masturbates with a cross. But besides that…

I was a little disappointed. To be fair, I realize the effects aged poorly and that scenes that were probably mind-blowing in the 70’s now looked silly. I also realize that my viewing experience was doomed from the start by all of the ridiculous parodies I’ve seen of this movie. But I just didn’t expect it to wrap up so neatly. A good scary movie, in my opinion, should leave you unsettled. This movie wrapped itself up so nicely, you’d think it was a full house episode. Yes, the priest dies. But he dies so nobly. Oops, spoiler alert. 

3. Don’t Look Now

I was really expecting big things from this one. While the film had a nice circular structure to it, it left too much unexplained. Basically a couple loses a daughter and moves to Venice. Then they encounter a couple of seers and the wife starts freaking out  and returns home to England to check on her son. The husband starts seeing things, including his wife, who was supposed to have left Venice. I won’t spoil the rest. 

I was loving the creepy vibe the husband was getting from everybody in Venice as he tried to track down his wife, but it never developed into anything. The film did not age well at all - the clothes (actually, she looked modern, while he, mustachioed and afroed, looked ridiculous) and the crazy 70s zooms were loony. And the sex scene was awwwkwardly long.

4. Eraserhead

“In heaven, everything’s all right…”

The first 30 minutes of this film was awesome. It got a little tedious after that. I loved the scene in the family room where the main character joined his girlfriend’s family for dinner and the man started shouting, “Look at my knees,” and they served those little disgusting oozing chickens. It reminded me how film is the perfectly suited medium for the surreal.

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.

Final Notes on Cosmopolis

As a follow-up to my weak post on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, I want to provide some highlights from an excellent review of the book by The American Prospect’s Mark Greif.

In my last post, I was trying to put my finger on why DeLillo’s musings on the supermarket in White Noise succeeded, but why his musings on hip-hop in Cosmopolis failed. According to Greif:

DeLillo’s strength in the past came from his ability to show the limitations of people trying to hold on to the patterns they craved. He stood characters on the pivot between sense and senselessness. There is a moment in White Noise (1985) when Jack Gladney, exposed to vapors from a toxic cloud, has his chances of survival calculated by an infallible computer. It concludes he’s already dead. That moment captured what it feels like to live enmeshed in numbers, patterns, algorithms — and still be able to look down at your two hands and see nothing changed. DeLillo wanted to know what it was like to be a statistical person, or a historical personage (as in Libra or Underworld), and still a living person.

In Cosmopolis, the patterns Eric finds in hip-hop are not essential but superfluous. Eric does not “hold on” to hip-hop, or “crave” it. And hip-hop is such a flamboyant system that it hardly holds the same allure as one undiscovered, a pattern not yet traced.

The best part, according to Greif:

The texture of the novel is its most interesting feature. Characters appear and disappear. Eric’s route isn’t mapped and the chronology isn’t altered. Only one aspect of space-time is affected: The narration starts to take apart our experience of interior, of private spaces. Eric’s apartment unfolds, revealing a fantastic existence. We discover its expansion, as details grow like crabgrass: A rotating room erupts here, a shark tank there, and the apartment itself has “forty-eight rooms.” Eric’s limousine perfects this strangeness. Visitors stand up and leave it as if it were a bedroom. The floor is made of marble. The space contracts and widens.

And the worst:

As for the politics of the novel, don’t even bother. You can’t doubt that DeLillo’s heart is in the right place. In the mouth of Eric’s “chief of theory,” however, a semi-academic named Vija Kinski, the book repeats watery versions of the stupidest analyses of the present, which are so unmindful of real conditions as to be neither of the left nor the right.

Now Reading: Kierkegaard’s Either/Or Pt. 1

I’m taking a Philosophy course in Existentialism (what’s college without a course in existentialism) and we will be reading a ton of Kierkegaard, including Either/Or, Concluding Unscientific Postscript…, The Sickness Unto Death, and Philosophical Fragments.

I was surprised that we won’t be reading Fear and Trembling, but am glad to tackle some  of his longer/harder stuff. As you will soon find out from what I write on Kierkegaard, I don’t know much about him. Stay tuned for some ignorant posts on an important philosopher.

I expect to trample over his statement: “It is exactly right not to be understood, for one is thereby protected against misunderstanding.” He would probably prefer that I am unable to write about him at all, which would indicate that I do not understand him rather than misunderstand him. Here’s to hoping I get him right.

Blood Meridian: Singling Out the Thread

We learn a lot  about the judge in chapter XIV from his dialogue with Toadvine (pg. 198-199). He apparently keeps his ledger as a way to control nature, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (198). And later, “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will be properly suzerain of the earth” (198). The judge acknowledges “creation” and a ruler besides himself—he defends his use of the word “suzerain” by explaining that it differs from a “ruler” because it “rules even when there are other rulers” (198).

The judge apparently imagines his work of documenting objects of nature as making them “stand naked” (198), perhaps by stripping them of their context in nature, or in his words, “singling out the thread of order from the tapestry” (199()? Could this relate to scalping where a vital part of a human being is removed from its context, and becomes merely a receipt of a kill?

Misreading White Noise

My response to 52books’ review of Don Delillo’s White Noise, which may or may not still be one of my favorite novels:

Maybe you were expecting too much from the narrative. The story was not meant to “grab” you. Isn’t a big part of this book playing with the idea of plot (it always leads to death)? DeLillo’s not Michael Grisham or Tom Clancy or whatever.

Your review is a disappointment. I am surprised that your review does not even try to understand all the stuff about death, simulacrae, etc. in the novel? This superficial review of the book makes me think that your whole project is detrimental to your reading experience. If you have to just gloss over these books to keep on schedule, what’s the point in reading them at all?

Originally posted as a comment by marshponds on 52books using Disqus.

Agency in Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein

2.

In class we talked about how in Modernist texts, thoughts do not carry the same privileged status that they carried in previous works. This is because Modernism treats thoughts not as voluntary actions, but things that merely happen. In Modernist texts, characters do not think and then act, but rather think and act. Thought and action are not necessarily linked. Perceiving thought and action this way leads to a revised understanding of agency as well. Acknowledging this tenuous relationship between thought and action, Modernist works portray agency as a problematic concept, and often suggest that agency is an illusion.

I found this class discussion helpful in my understanding of The Ravishing of Lol Stein. While reading the novel, I wondered about Lol’s passiveness in marrying John Beford, for example. At one point in the novel, Lol explains that she felt she “never had a chance to choose [her] life.” Just as the novel describes thoughts as things that happen, Lol’s life seems to be something that happened to her.

Our discussion in class did not, however, illuminate another question I had been thinking about: why Jack describes love as a form of “possess[ion]” (82), and “control” (97). Jack equates having an affair with Lol to becoming “bent to her will” and “consumed” (97). He also talks about wanting to “possess [Tatiana] completely” (82). Making love appears to consist of taking or offering one’s agency to another. How does this conception of love relate to our discussion of agency? (I understand that this is supposed to be a weekly essay, not question, but how does one write anything pertaining to Duras that doesn’t end in a question mark?)

Words and Facts in Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein

1.

One of the most interesting pages, for me, in The Ravishing of Lol Stein is page 106. On this page, Jack and Lol speak for the first time in privacy, and Lol reveals herself to have watched Jack and Tatiana make love. Lol, describing the scene between Jack and Tatiana, states that “Tatiana was naked beneath her dark hair.” This sentence affects Jack profoundly. He describes it “explod[ing],” and “blow[ing] the meaning apart.” He describes himself as “no longer understanding that it means nothing.”

I am interested in Jack’s reaction to this sentence because in some ways it resembles my own reaction to this novel. At times while reading the novel, I “failed to understand” the sentences—specifically the sentences where Tatiana or Lol seemed to suddenly appear in Jack’s presence, even though these appearances do not make logical sense within the novel. Such sentences “blow the meaning apart,” on a logical level, but also suggest something profound: that a linear narrative cannot capture memory, identity or reality.

I find it interesting how the articulation of Tatiana’s nakedness seems to change the “fact” of her nakedness. Jack is taken aback by the “intensity of the sentence,” not by the intensity of the fact. The words have the effect of “transform[ing]” the fact; the words place Tatiana “between Lol Stein and [Jack].” Somehow the words have altered the fact, as Jack describes, “the fact no longer contains the fact.”

Before I write something stupid (if I haven’t done so already), I need to admit that I don’t know what to make of this last line. Like Jack, I find this sentence “impossible to make any sense whatsoever out of it.” If I had to, I would guess that he is getting at the point that words fail to capture meaning; words do not function as neat and tidy signifiers, but become their own “facts.” Lol is not merely describing Tatiana naked, but bringing her “between” them; by describing Tatiana naked, Lol has initiated a new relationship between the three of them. If Jack is suggesting that words are not merely signifiers but their own facts, that would explain the baffling sentences throughout the novel; I am expecting them to signify something, to be representational, but they are merely facts in themselves that may not fit neatly with the other facts.