quick update

currently reading Awakenings, a history of "The Sleeping Sickness", which is a form of Parkinson's wherein the victim more or less loses all will. Sometimes mental will, sometimes physical will (ie, you want to pick up the book, but you're body refuses). The author, Oliver Sacks (who also wrote uncle tungsten), reports on his experiments using the drug L-DOPA to 'awaken' such sleepers. I usually don't go for medical books, but this has some pretty bizarre stories in it, and Sacks is actually a pretty decent author. And the words i don't know are pretty bad-ass.

also reading On The Lower Frequencies, a history San Francisco during the last ten years or so told from an unapologetically biased punk-rock & homeless perspective. i love the dude's voice and perspective, and there's some pretty good historical material as well.

have given up reading The Diaries of Jane Somers by Doris Lessing. It's just too slow.

OH ! the thing i'm REALLY reading is Thomas Ligotti's Teattro Grotesco. This book is awesome. It's existential horror, but i can't say anything more about it now because it needs much much more than a short synopsis. I am also trying to make a short puppet-film out of one of these stories, am illustrating one of them, and am writing a piece of short fiction hopefully in the prose-style of them.

Europe Central, Doris Lessing binge, William Taylor Hookin' Me Up (almost)

I finished the considerable thickness that is Europe Central a month or so ago. I have to say that this was one of the most difficult books for me to get any traction with that i've ever read, and i very nearly put it down. It was literally just a day or two after a threatening love-letter to EC that we finally found some common ground where we could have an exchange of ideas. But that common ground turned out to be a verdant valley indeed, and the price of getting there was worth it. I will criticize the unapproachable parts: they weren't rewarding. With some difficult books, the difficult parts themselves are rewarding: you have an "aha!" or "ooh!" at the end of the struggle. I felt that the difficult portions of EC were more punative or hazing: you have to endure this unpleasant thing in order to get to the good parts. And the unpleasant things were unpleasant indeed: abstract-yet-first-person narrators, reams of thickly-veiled allusions to historical events which this reader didn't have the education to begin to know wtf he was talking about, entire chapters of pith narrated only as reflections of specific passages of classical music. Seriously. Ordinarily i have a pretty low tolerance for literature: there are so many good books out there, that i don't feel any compunction to continue reading a book just because i've started it: i need to be enjoying it. But i've read another work by Vollmann, The Royal Family, and have a very high regard for his prose.

Europe Central is historical fiction taking place in Germany and the Soviet Union spanning about 1928 to 1960, with most of the attention during WWII. It picks out a handful of real historical figures and does a fantastic job of portraying them as real people set in a real war. The passage which has stuck with me most vividly is that of an upper-middle-class german woman who's upper-middle-class, respectable husband is home on a brief leave from the polish front, and as just a part of a marital argument she confronts him with raping polish women: "everyone knows what you men are doing out there". This brought home to me the extreme warping nature of war: middle class men like myself or perhaps yourself become (or became, if it helps make it real) literal rapists.

.. which makes an unexpected segue to Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (as narrated by the chroniclers of Zone Three), in which Lessing presents one of the most mature and credible portrayals of an adult relationship i've ever read, in which a forced marriage between the queen of an enlightened territory (imagine a Waldorf school the size of northern california) and the king of a brutal one (qv "sparta") opens with his immediately raping her and closes with a portrait of real intimacy between the two, and an entirely convincing evolution from one point to the other. Technically Science-Fiction, the book is really about men and women, their relationships, and the realtionships of couples to the rest of society. despite having the world's dullest, most reader-unfriendly title ever, it's quite good. I'm stoked to have discovered another good author to read. What made me decide that D.L. might be a good writer was her famous reaction to learning she'd won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature: "oh, christ." If you haven't seen it, it's worth looking up.

Mykle was surprised to learn that i started my Lessing-reading with The Marriages and told me that some of her other works were much more approachable, especially Winter In July. Fortunately i'd bought up every used Lessing they had in Dog-Eared Books in SF, and that included Winter In July, so i picked that eagerly up next, and Mykle was right. Winter In July is a masterpiece of human portraiture, short stories set in South Africa in the years before and after WWII. It has the tension and insight into social stratification of Flannery O'Connor but while O'Connor's humour is greater, Lessing's characters have more complex relationships to each other. Absolutely read this book if you haven't.

Finally i had an awesome personal event center around a book a couple weeks ago. I was in one of my favorite bars, which has a new bartendress whom i imagined i shared a certain affinity with, and one fine sunday afternoon had resolved to try to make a date with her. I know that hitting on bartenders is pretty much the tackiest thing under the sun, but .. well, i guess there's no but. I aimed to do it. So we were having a great chat as usual, and she knows i'm a reader (i read parts of all three of the above while chatting with her) and suddenly asks "hey! do you like poetry?" - which, with very, very few exceptions, i don't: poetry gives me a dull headache. John Donne and William Taylor jr are pretty much the only poets i read with gusto. So i was in a tough place: i wanted to have a shared interest with her, but i didn't want to have to read some awful poetry. So i philandered with "well.. i like some poetry", and she dashed off into the back and returned with a thickish book and passed it over to my cringing hands with "well check this out". .. And it turned out to be Bill Taylor's Words for Songs Never Written ! I have been meaning to get a copy since it came out, it's a book of compelling physical and poetic beauty, as Bill's work is absolutely top notch. He writes mostly about street life in SF's Tenderloin district, and portrays and evokes beauty in places where i can only sense a small rumor of it. Prostitutes, the lonely, and bartenders make frequent appearances, but so does non-ironic commentary on the loss of what i personally have loved the USA for. you'll have to read the poems to find out. Anyhow, so i said "hey! do you know Bill?" and she: "no, do you?" and thus i was able to wake-board a little bit on the power of Bill's charm and my coolness of knowing him. She read a couple poems out loud, i read half the book to myself, and as i was leaving i wrote my info on the receipt (dog-eared, again) which was still inside the book and gave it back to her with "my number's in the book if you ever want to hang out". The appropriateness here sort of demanded it. Naturally and sensibly, she of course demurred, citing just getting out of a long relationship, but she did seem excited to have a phone number in the book. So, thank you, Bill ! (as a post-script, the failed hitting-upon doesn't seem to have soured the bartender/client thing, and we're still jawing on sunday afternoons)

As another final status-update,
in bed i'm re-reading Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers, whom i love. The Diaries of Jane Somers, also by Lessing is being read from the throne at the rate of about two pages per day, and the book in the backpack, which is always the main book, is currently Teatro Grottesco, by the master of contemporary existential horror, Thomas Ligotti. - Which reminds me, i am also working very slowly on a short story of my own, a horror vignette in the Lovecraft mythos, set in sinister San Bernadino, California. I'm at the point where i can just barely see the entire plot arc, and should "soon" have the first draft done.

Europe Central

Dear Europe Central, i've been reading you for a couple weeks, and i think we need to talk about some things. Page ninety is just the beginning of what could potentially be an eight hundred-page relationship. The beginning of a relationship should be full of romance and heady excitement. Mystery, confusion, and a sense of greater things to come you've definitely given me, but i find i'm missing those other charms. And really i'm not sure who you think you are to be insulting my intelligence and education in such an offhand, non-flirtatious manner. Also i sometimes wake in the middle of the night and worry whether or not i can trust you. I play back certain scenes and small things you said earlier and feel a sort of hollow of dread open in my chest. For example, this first-person "I" you keep mentioning: i know you've been with your share of narrators in the past and i'm sure there will be more in the future, but i'm starting to suspect that you're using "I" to be the voice of the entire German People, or worse the Germans and the Soviets, and at some point i'll have to just say enough is enough.

So, i don't know what you've heard about me from other books, but i'm not the kind of person who feels they have to finish a relationship just because they've made it to page ninety or whatever, so i'm giving you fair warning: let's see a change in that attitude when next we spend time together, and it wouldn't hurt to put out with a sign of plot or even an tangible character or two.

Yrs, Elenzil

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

I'm nearly done with Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and it's great.
I read Kavalier and Clay a while ago, and it was good, but i didn't think it was great. The Yiddish Policeman's Union is great. Where K & C seemed to go astray and lose itself in filling the requirements of a pulp comic book, the YPU is much more focused, tighter, and the characters and story-telling benefit from it. I still have some complaints - for example i don't think it was necessary to have the protagonists own personal story turn out unexpectedly to be intimately tied up in the story of the antagonists: doing so sort of dilutes the .. pedigree of the hero's motives, imo, and is unnecessary.

Here's the overview:

the year is 2008.
the place is Sitka, Alaska. The past is one in which we're not sure who won World War II, but we do know that the Jews were thoroughly rousted from Israel and were generally unwelcome the world over, including in the US, and in the late 40s Sitka was essentially turned into a giant Jewish ghetto. .. With the proviso that after 60 years, the chosen people would have to vacate Sitka and move on to places unnamed. So it's 2008, and the next rousting is due.
our hero is a hardboiled cop mourning his lost marriage and the upcoming eradication of a culture he both loves and derides. in good hardboiled cop tradition, he is now living in a flop house, and exploring mourning through the lens of cheap and strong booze. His partner is also his cousin, who is racially half Indian (American) and culturally 100% Jewish, and has a poor but flourishing family.
There's a murder, there's plots, there's backstabbing, there's surprises. There's lots and lots of Jewish words and Jewish this and Jewish that, which i love. I guess it's about one third [Jewish] political story, one third adventure story, and one third Jewish cultural portrait. It's a great mix, and Chabon's prose has only improved since K&C.


Other recent books:
The Crying of Lot 49 - reading this in half-page sprints while lounging on the can. That's the only way i can possibly swallow this stuff.

Words and Rules by Steven Pinker - this is a whole book about irregular verbs. i love irregular verbs, and so does Steven Pinker. but i'm not going to finish the book because he loves them exactly as far as they promote the pedagogical agenda of his theory of cognition.

The Night People by Jack FInney - this came up one day when Vivianna and Mike Plotz and i rode bikes over the golden gate bridge and down into Tiburon, a route which takes you through Strawberry, which is the sleepy little town from which the hijinx of The Night People radiate. It's a great story. It's in a collection titled 3 by Finney, and seems to be the clear best of the lot.

I read The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, by Diana Jones. This calls for a picture. .. Yeah. It was actually pretty fun, a temporary trip back to junior high.

DFW

re DFW.
it's ironic:
i was having a rough few days and had been feeling poopy for a while and was pondering ways to de-poopify my outlook on things, and i said to myself "maybe i should re-read IJ again. that always cheers me up." and it's true: without fail sitting down to read a page or twenty in IJ has never failed to make me feel like a slightly snazzier person. as if i were granted a temporary gift of some small part of DFW's wit and outlook. the additional irony here is that i was considering this rereading that very thursday just before his death. that evening i was out on the town and both myle and kevin texted me late in the night with the bad news.
one is reminded a bit of Richard Corey, of course. it's eerie and intimidating that someone as smart and definitively successful as DFW could eradicate his own map, as he might say. especially in view of the obvious wealth of knowledge DFW had around depression itself. (If you don't know, IJ deals with many many topics, among them is Depression with a capital D, and its treatment of it is highly informed and insightful) and of course one is also reminded of the constant theme in IJ about the danger and stress of achieving success, of making the cover of Tennis Annual or whatever, of creating one's opus. In many passages the entire raison of the enfield tennis academy is to prepare players to survive their own success in "the show". Haunting and intimidating.

Well, i have more to say but don't really feel like saying it here.

rest in peace, david.


here are the unknown words from that third reading.
many, many more than from the second, curiously.
my rules were: "words which i either don't know at all or i'm not confident enough with to deploy them in a sentence. excluding medical terms and other jargon."
i think this last time around i was more honest about the second part: it wasn't sufficient for a word to merely be familiar: if i would be scared to use it in conversation, then it went in the list. i think also i was more patient and dilligent about actually writing words down.

also there were six additional words i ran out of room to write in the back cover so they're in the front, unphotographed:
p. 952 tucking ("billow and pop like a tucking sail")
p. 952 seraglio
p. 953 kyphotic
p. 965 piaffer
p. 967 Carmelite
p. 969 practicum

GOD DAMN IT

motherfucking god damn it.
RIP DFW.

The Crossing

just finished Cormac McCarthy's second book in "the border trilogy", The Crossing. With this one i really have to weigh in and say that i now think Cormac McCarthy is full of shit but he doesn't have to be. Reading The Crossing is like reading some of the best bits of Hemingway with the worst of The Celestine Prophecy and The Adventures of Don Juan's illegitimate child. McCarthy can tell a fantastic story but it's as if he himself doesn't believe that either the reader or the author or both can appreciate anything transcendental without discoursing as if he were Foucault and explicitly defining terms for us.

But in between all the philosophical sophomorism, The Crossing is a great story. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it follows a young cowboy through an epic arc of bereavement as he wanders through barren mexican and spiritual landscapes. If you can find someone who will take the time to just tear out the bad parts, the remainder is a great book by an author with an unmatched storytelling voice.

To his credit, McCarthy's latest, The Road, seemed to do a much better or at least more confident job of communicating interior journeys with way less resort to explicit soliloquy. I also plan on reading Cities of the Plain, the final book of "The Border Trilogy".

The Road, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Uncle Tungsten, and IJ

Just this hour finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Probably anybody reading this has already read it and felt the strange feelings one feels when reading that last passage about the past's trout in underwater glens, muscled and smelling of moss in the hand - so evocative! - but for those as haven't, a quick synopsis. The Road is published in 2006, and posits a nuclear apocalypse in say about 2006, followed by a nuclear winter in which the entire world has turned to ash and nothing grows and nothing lives save a very, very few humans* who for the most part are cannibal and entirely wretched. The action follows a father and his son about five years into the post-apocalypse.

Every scene in The Road is predicated on hopelessness. There is clearly, starkly, no future even conceivable. But the book's magic is that it communicates hope and love. I can't/won't really try to describe it further than that. It's good.

The only other McCarthy novel i've read is All The Pretty Horses, and my only complaint about both of them is that they're too damn short. I feel like McCarthy is still writing his Farewell To Arms, and i look forward greatly to his For Whom The Bell Tolls.

* why humans walk the earth when cockroaches and grasses don't is a bit unclear to me, but otherwise the technical points seem pretty solid.

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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was loaned to me by Niki, and i'm super glad that it was. Thanks Niki! It's a good two or three inches of solid modern fairy tale telling and i enjoyes every millimeter of it. Set in Napoleonic Brittain (ie, early 1800s), Susanna Clarke's tale is that of a supremely pedantic and spiritually cramped man named Norrell who sets about resurrecting "English Magic", and gets more than he bargained for. (Sorry, i couldn't resist)
If you've ever enjoyed a Piers Anthony or Terry Pratchet novel, you'll likely enjoy this. It's sort of like Harry Potter for grown-ups. I do have to concurr with some folks that the ending is a bit unsupported, but otherwise a fine book.

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Jonathan inspired me to get us a couple kilogram-hunks of tungsten, which is one of the most dense materials available without straying into the truly exotic and radioactive. It's twice as heavy as lead and very satisfying to hold in the hand. Along the way i stumbld on a book Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks. It's pretty much as titled, stories of growing up in pre- and post-world war II London, with a family rich in scientific and intellectual spirit. The sotries are great and also it has a bunch of interesting facts about various elements and science history.