Exposing the tyrant while writing a beautiful book

(from left to right: Young Huber Matos just before Castro threw him in prison for 20 years; Guillermo Cabrera Infante in his prime; Carlos Franqui, an elderly exile in Italy)

Family Portrait with Fidel by Carlos Franqui
Mea Cuba by Guilermo Cabrera Infante
Como Llego la Noche (How night arrived by Huber Matos; not sure if the English translation is out yet.)

Franqui and Infante were both artist intellectuals who held official posts in the early Castro government; by 1965 both were disillusioned and planning their escapes. Their books are by turns fascinating witty brutal and tragic. Matos is a man with truth for a backbone; he was sentenced in 1959 and served out a 20 year sentence, obtaining release from prison in 1979; he was on to Castro early on and paid a steep price.

These books are not hard to get hold of. When you hear pretty-faced Hollywood/and TV reporters praise Castro you realize that these people do not read. How many talking heads have given a stern look over the last couple days and said, "we don't know much about Raul Castro but..."

This is nonsense. It common knowledge that Raul is a bigger thug and murderer than Fidel and it is well documented. In the early days of the Revolution Fidel would purposefully humiliate Raul in large meetings to the point that fellow revolutionaries, hardened murderers, would turn their faces away so as not to have to share in Raul's utter abasement.

Anyway, these books are loaded with fascinating and sometimes funny but always tragic detail of life under the tyrant.

If All Seattle Read A Different Book

It is a measure of Seattle’s endemic middlebrow infantilism that Nancy Pearl, author of the Booklust series, holds such sway over the Seattle reading public. About a decade ago she started Seattle off on the If All Seattle Read The Same Book kick. For someone who knows writers and the world of writing she, and her reading publicity stunts, shows a real callousness towards them. Why not encourage the reading public this way: IF ALL SEATTLE READ A DIFFERENT BOOK. There are thousands of writers published in English each year; encourage the discriminating Seattle reader to look into them. Forget the childish rule of One Book. I don't see how this dotty little bookmaven can get a large, supposedly well-educated, gentrified city to go along with If All Seattle Read the Same Book. What writers want is for everybody in a city to be reading a different book. Pearl promotes a slightly fascist, pajama-party view of reading culture and literature.

To be fair Pearl does present a wide variety of books in her frequent radio and TV interviews. Even so something rankles about her literary enthusiasms. She misses the hallmark of literary masterpiece: excellent books savage you and drive all other books off the shelf, for a time anyway. A masterpiece enfolds you and takes you over and shoves out of the way all the other books floating in your brain. When I hear Pearl bubbling with delight over the latest detective thriller then moving on to a pre-teen novel I suspect I could never trust her to recognize a true masterpiece. She can go from breathily praising the latest trash detective novel to some new young adult fiction and then onto Toni Morrison’s latest novel and then over to the latest ethnic cookbook without pause. Pearl for all her admirable reading misses the point that a good book drives out all before it. I believe Pearl represents a librarians' view of books: bring ‘em on, that’s what we’re here for…a Dewey Decimal reading list. For Pearl it doesn’t seem to matter as long as there are words on the page and glue in the bindings. Again, great books drive everything before them: criticism, book clubs, social fashion. Excellent books rage and turn readers inward to pause and then hate all other books, even if only for an hour. Pearl's multitudinous book enthusiasms are really declarations of Seattle’s hopeless middlebrowness; she has bubbled for too many books.

Every good book carries seeds of criticism within it. Seattle reading culture represents another manifestation of Seattle’s colonial, past twice removed: once a colony of England and now a colony of east coast intellectual fashion. Never though, will Seattle have the confidence to recognize something beautiful and homegrown. Seattle media doesn’t have enough confidence to trust its own reactions to things artistic. It needs the swell of millions of other opinions before it can weigh in with its own non-entity opinion.

Garcia Lorca and thoughts...

I really love the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936). His poems sneak up on you like sunshine slipping from under a cloud. They are full of taste and smell and color processed by a loving sensibility. Garcia Lorca was a poet, an artist, a playwright and a musician and he was also an amateur folklorist, gathering folk-nursery songs from all corners of Spain. He celebrated without shame Spain's southern/Arab-influenced region at a time when it wasn't fashionable to do so. He formed part of Spain's generation of 1927 which gave the world a great burst of unique scholarship and artistic achievement.

When I think of the various generations of Spanish writers (generation of ’98--that would be 189--of 1927, etc) and looking at photos of Garcia Lorca, arm in arm with Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Damaso Alonso, etc…I really have to admire those guys. Those Spanish poets and writers saw, before their politicians, that Spain, in the first part of the 20th century, was headed for the sewer culturally and politically; these bold men (and women) rallied as artists and writers and thinkers; they overcame their jealousies and competition and they really did something for their country and their mother tongue. You can see them taking off from the powerful 19th century influences (American: Poe, Whitman, French: Hugo, Mallarme, Baudelaire) and committing themselves to making something of their own. It is tremendously affecting to see how cross-fertilized they were in all the arts: music, painting, sculpture, theater, poetry, fiction.

Maybe I am dreaming but I think Seattle will forever be muddled in provincialism as long as none of our cultural leaders take a stand on anything. Until they stop taking their cue from the New York Times or the National Librarians Guild or National Bookclubs or whatever. The first step away from provincialism is to commit yourself to something you love and trust with your own reactions. Having an opinion that doesn’t have to be shored up by 1000 or a million other consenting opinions. Until then Seattle will be mired in provinciality and maintain its backwater status.

Back to Garcia Lorca; how can you not love a poet who writes poems to the guitar? (My translations)

Memento
When I die,
bury me with my guitar
beneath the sand.

When I die,
among the orange groves
and the heirbabuena.

When I die,
bury me if you please
in a wheathervane.

When I die!

To the Ear of a Girl
I didn't want to.
I didn't want to tell you anything.

I saw in your eyes
two crazy trees.

How they wriggled.

I didn't want to.
I didn't want to tell you anything.

If You...
The sky will get lost:
country girl,
under the cherry trees,
full of red cries,
I want you.

The sky will disappear...
if you understand this,
just walking by the tree
you give me your kisses.

Anthony Burgess and spring sundry

1985 by Anthony Burgess.
A pastiche of essay and story telling and futuristic projection based on George Orwell's 1984. Written in the late 1970s it is interesting to see what Burgess got right. He predicted accurately the rise of Islam in London, with active construction of mosques funded by oil-rich gulf princes (a telling line from the book: With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam). More: the wide screen TV, tighter airport security, search for fuel substitutes, women in trousers men in kilts, more and more newspapers closing down, microbombs of immense destructiveness placed in public buildings, a German coup breaks down the Berlin Wall.

He got a few things wrong. Burgess thought labor unions would excercise an overwhelming power over daily life in the future, that porn would overtake violence in the movies and he missed the computer/telecommunications revolution in daily life (though he does portray the union enforcement officials capable of a Google-like effiency in capturing personal details on a computer system). A wonderful overlooked book.

The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Dr. Li Zhisui.
A 625 page nightmare. Mao's private doctor lived in nervous terror of the various cabals surrounding China's maximum leader. Fascinating but in the end repetitive; Dr. Zhisui is mainly concerned with keeping Mao alive. Mao unleashed insanity on a mass scale during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1975), but Dr. Zhisui, it appears, was not privy to the political machinations that constantly flowed from Mao's brainpan. We read mostly of the difficulties of getting Mao to take his medicine. Mao was a megalo-maniac and often quite ill during the last 20 years of his life. What comes through is his heartlessness and cruelty. His policies led to the death of millions. You can't help thinking that there is a bill come due in China - despite her current power and prosperity.

Before the Sabbath by Eric Hoffer.
This book is a half year's worth of diary entries from the mid-1970s by this fine and original thinker. Hoffer extrapolates the future just looking around and commenting. For example let me quote a few entries at random:

If the present fuel debacle brings about a decline of Western Europe, France wants to make sure that it ends up sitting on top of the heap. To solve the fuel problem by force would result in a situation in which France could not play a paramount role. Hence France will urge submission to Arab dictates. It will also be for the abandonment of Israel and the cold-shouldering of the United States.

I have long assumed that the stagnation of the Arab world is due to the congeniality of the religion of Islam - its lack of the inner contradictions and tensions which stretch souls. But it seems that hashish is also a factor. The Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century which put an end to Arab supremacy also introduced hashish. Egyptian doctors have blamed this drug for the sluggishness of Egyptian workers. Will the use of marijuana have a similar effect on American workers?

Backward countries are crying about the maldistribution of the world's wealth: one quarter of the world's population has threee quarters of the wealth. Not a word is said about how wealth comes into being; the toil, sweat and self denial which make an accumulation of wealth possible. This is how a once poor and backward Japan became an affluent country. It is curious how in both domestic and international affairs there is at present a stubborn refusal to see a connection between effort and income. It is widely assumed that individuals or countries are poor because they are exploited or discriminated against.

The danger inherent in reform is that the cure may be worse than the disease. Reform is an operation on the social body; but unlike medical surgeons reformers are not on guard against unpredictable side effects which may divert the course of reform toward unwanted results. Moreover, quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.

It needs an effort to realize how offended Europe's cultivated, aristocratic minds were by the spectacle of common people eloping with history to a vast, new continent and essaying to do there all the things - build cities, found states, lead armies - which from the beginning of time were reserved for the privileged orders.

Hoffer thought a special line of cultural demarcation occurred in the Sputnik launch by the Russians in 1957. As a result, back in America, Hoffer proposed that many traditional business types got washed into academia during the early 60s (and conversely, many creative or scholar-types washed into the business world). The new academics Hoffer wrote, "felt superior to the trivial businessmen and politicians who were running the country. They were going to create a new society in which every act was pregnant with meaning and destiny..."

Maybe. Hoffer puts forth interesting models-as-tools to help think about the various antagonistic-worlds that bump against each other in modern America: businessman vs artist, politician vs professor/theorist, ancients vs moderns. His thoughts often carry a counter-intuitive streak that give them a pugnacious or challenging effect. Even so, Hoffer presents his ideas in vivid, musclular prose worth reading for its own sake.

In memoriam: re-post about Updike

#1 A couple novels per decade; Updike can really knock it out of the park (Roger’s Version is one). Even so, he overwrites and you get the feeling that no editor had better shadow his existence; even so, Updike delivers in novels that rise to his obsessions and intellect. So Roger’s Version is very good (with some stilted overwritten descriptions)…

#1a Anthony Burgess faults U’s sense of rhythmn.

#2 There is so much to admire in this novelist. His Rabbit novels especially. He moves so comfortably through consciousness. Though I do think he gets a bit lazy in these; taking characters right off the pages of Time magazine. What you can’t take away from Updike is his mastery of intense self-introspection...

#2a Updike disturbs because in rendering--always rendering--a heightened reality-- dumbing himself down for certain characters, smartening himself up for others, he sacrifices some of the seer responsibility required of great fiction writers. He is afraid to fictionalize character the way Dickens did. Pecksniff and Uriah Heep are loathsome but they live and stand in for people or circumstances that have thwarted our hopes. Updikes’s high octane sensibility seems oddly right for the novel but oddly wrong for human character. Think of the way Dellilo approached rock n roll in Great Jones Street. He predicted or divined the death wish that accompanies mass adoration (or is its fulfillment). The fans: we love you so much we want you to die so that we can worship pure image or memory or nostalgia and even the balance between your greatness and our nothingness (something like that). The death worship of Lennon and Elvis. The weird and nearly inexplicable power of certain rock figures, the multiple meanings. Updike is too eager to throw his characters middle class life jackets. I hate to see high intellect dumbing itself down to what high intellect imagines dumb people are like.


#3 Anthony Burgess gets close when he says that Updike’s prose lacks inner rhythm; this is true as far as it goes; there is no inner correlative in his prose, no backing, no underground music; the prettiness of it disconcerts. There is no music/time in his prose; it is all effect. He resembles a skillful soloist who can't keep time on his instrument. There is no spiky beat to Updike. Sentences are snakelike and beautiful; the snakes have no teeth. JU derides composers in many of his works. Music in general doesn’t get to him much. Composers rate low. There is not much life to Updike’s life. What has he done but read and write? Get awards and doctorates. Comment and write more. Introductions and squibs and write write write. Muscle and sinew vs. clouds and violet scent water and perambulators and potpourri, sperm vs. cotton candy. Snot verses shit. An arm vs. a leg. Updike writes over his characters. He can’t hold back the observation no matter how irrelevant to the character (critic James Wood complains about this).

#4 I consider Updike’s comments on music rude and baseless. They could easily be inverted towards literature: the seamless ruck of messy writerly personal lives hopes aborted and finally doublihg back on a contrived conclusion, etc...His snotty disavowels of music via some of his characters. God, what would we do without music? And what would Updike do witout the music of his prose? Fool.

#5 Updike takes a pretty hefty swing at Celine for indulging in the picaresque novel form. Says it is like writing poetry without rhyme.

#5a Updike getting slack. He gives Jane Smiley’s latest, Ten Days in the Hills, a good review. I thought it slack, ungainly and poorly executed; she attempts Updikean sexual description and it doesn’t always work. The narrator slighting the mind and thoughts of its egg-like heads of characters. Lack of detail and imprecision. And the heavy, cliched, anti-Bush slant, the why unfired by its own rockets, still smoldering. A work not arising out of anything but the historic injunction to “pay attention” when you are being spoken to by a great artist. But Jane is not a great artist; she is a pupil of the Iowa Writers Retreat. God save me from the Jane Smileys of the world!

#6 ...sumptuous John Updike. Beware, too, of Updike’s “with its” clauses, summations really – too much authorial cock frottage (he was an unwieldy writer as a young man – he got a pass and how). "The city, with its suptuous lights and seductive beat, etc...;" even so the man can write - for sheer ability to transmute reality into words, see Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness.

#7 So many of Updike’s judgments in his latest (Due Considerations) are soft; he leaves you hanging in the air with some fluff line at the end. He won’t lower the boom, as it were.

#8 Updike as thoughtful, provocative literary critic. Updike, in a review of V.S. Naipaul's The Loss of El Dorado says, “But in viewing an entire hemisphere as a corrupted dream, Naipaul dissolves what realities there were…[TLED] rests upon an unexamined assumption, of metropolitan superiority…Was the cruelty of slavery not an extension of the cruelty already present on the African continent?” I think Updike is trying to push back at Naipaul’s assumptions that we – the Americas, say, only got the bad from Europe as all the high flown phrasings of brotherhood equality, constitutions, democracy became pure air under a floor of despotism and slavery; giving the Americas an atmosphere of unreality and emptiness. That real life was happening elsewhere (Europe for instance); that the collapse of metropolitan values led to unreality simplicity and moral degeneracy. Updike ends with this reasonable question: “Does not the collapse of “metropolitan” values amid “simpler” conditions demonstrate their own frailty and unreality?” He pronounces finally about Naipaul’s “bleak and caustic” tone; two adjectives appropriate to much of his writing. In a latter volume of essays Updike refines his assessment of the Naipauls (this time commenting on a book by Shiva): “Yet people live here, under these imperfect governments, and their lives are truth.” What a redemptive statement.

#9 Two Updike ticks that have become near-fatal flaws:
1. “with its”
Example (about Françoise Sagan), “We have come a long way from Bonjour Tristesse, with its animal quickness and…”
2. Summary, smug, last sentences of paragraphs.
Example (touring the graveyards of Europe), of the “…Jews whose death-dates were 1943, 1944, 1945. Years whose smoke permanently stained the ceiling of Heaven.” Something so smug about that last little ending sentence. Does the WWII holocaust of Jews deserve that little flourish, the little smudge? Yeccch! There is no scale in Updike. You don’t know what anything weighs what anything is worth; he drops a dipstick in the temperature of America – right off the pages of Time or Newsweek; there is no peculiararity in Updike. Specificity of incident – conjecture-based. He can’t tell just what happened everything needs to be swathed in an eternal word-swathing…the shiny doorknob carries as much weight as the ass-hairs of the new mistress (see: James Wood). What is observed is not given its observational force by the mind of the observer; it is always Updike’s super-charged observant mind going on and on. Nevertheless―
Updike is a master explainer and expounder of other folks’ prose and fiction. He is very good. Reading Updike I realize I am a man of the 1970s – that was my intellectual formation: a sense that something exciting is happening somewhere (hat tip: Edmund Wilson); and to get there all you have to do is drop in on a party with a friend or hitchhike somewhere. You would always get a ride (this of course died out in the mid-1970s with the rise of local mass murderer, Ted Bundy). Americans would get along better if they viewed their own lives as episodes in the history of civilization; we are so hard on ourselves.

#10 (this was written before David Foster Wallce died) You feel swathed and emboldened by reality when you read Updike, with his lambent, unguent, all-swallowing prose (that last sentence supposed to be a parody; not so good...). David Foster Wallace does a real kendo sword job on John Updike in a review of Until the End of Time included in his book of essays called―(?). Disgraceful mess, sez DFW. It is a sad affair and DFW feels that some kind of mix of demotic and elegance is called for. He summons three opinions of three girls who offer reasons why they dislike Updike (a penis with a thesaurus, makes Rush’s fascism seem funny by comparison, I can't remember the third). Who are these young women? Why should we give them any weight beyond DFW? Are we writing for a high school gossip column? What have they accomplished compared to John Updike? Then DFW mischaracterizes JU’s oeuvre, saying that since 1980 he has portrayed uniquely self-absorbed men who denigrate woman and who are solipsistic. How nice of DFW to forget about The Witches of Eastwick, or the elegant and moving S. Is DFW disingenuous saying that he is one of the only literary types under 40 who really likes JU and that he has read all his work? While not a fanatic on the level of Nicholson Baker? The answer to female criticism is: we wait in vain for women writers to really tell us what it is like―having a cunt. Don’t blame him until women writers come up with the goods. The women accuse him of the sins of male hegemony and male dominance. Foster Wallace is not being truthful here. He ends up by simply calling the character in Until the End of Time an “asshole.” As if that is any kind of criticism! This is what passes for the literary thinking and criticism of the literary mafia’s own then we are in trouble. There is much to criticize in JU but this is not the way to go about it. Let women rise to the challenge. In the same book DFW reports on a AVG (adult porn convention) in Las Vegas. Talk about a barn-sized topic. To the anonymous girl opinionates that DFW quotes I would say: what you cannot write about whereof you must remain silent. Where are the female texts that write about penises with the same detail and meditation that JU offers up. Or what about they own cunts? There is a literary project for you. Tell us what it is like to be a woman. Trouble is, men have done it better. Does the novel's rushing onward probing force of creativity lie with men? DFW has licensed himself to the asinine in this book review.

#11 Memories of the Ford Administration; Updike’s tendency to hijack his characters’ thinking with these “nail-it” tags; “the world’s bloody business of birth and murder.” Who in reality thinks like that? In bite sized summations of the world, sex, death, the other? It is a cheap way of moving the plot along. When he is on he is on; and I do love his prose – he is so good at interpersonal dialogue (help that last phrase is quicksand); I am never quite finished with him. he uses a figure that scores all his work and the figure is “with its.” For example (my invention):
The mall, with its requisite contingent of 12 year old girls and boys, dressed alike in tight jeans and tee-shirts, bodily decorated with hanging metal rings, opened before us as the breadbasket of the ancient middle east, upon which hope and anguish reigned in the higher quarters of the nation’s capital with its..etc….

#12 Some of the purpose of prose is to capture the swing and sag of life and you can’t always do that with sterling prose – you end up with a John Updike novel, if Plato were to write novels he would write like John Updike. There is a certain manginess to the novel;

#13 Updike’s lacquered prose; (sentences. Layered coated glazed glossy prime coat); overbooked sentences.

#14 Funny. Reading through Updike’s A Month of Sundays. I haven’t looked into it for over a decade but always considered it one of my favorite Updike novels. I thought he achieved his aims in a challenging but entertaining way. The intimate 1st person the extravagant poses and postures the processing of detail always expert but it seems to fit in with the over-the-top or slightly insane. Thomas, the narrator/pastor, is a Christian version of Ellellou of The Coup, long sentences voiced into, fed, saturated with particulars of intensity and insanity. Does Wood’s criticism apply? Yes, sorry. The gorgeousness of which Updike is capable inhibits the actions of the book. Everything is beautifully rendered. You wonder if the novel is solely for beautiful rendering.

#15 Brazil. The imperial intelligence of John Updike. He has characters notice things that implies a super intelligence. Tristan notices the hushed way that his brother and wife process each day; how they forge a lower middle class existence. I can’t believe that Tristan, a child of the Rio slums, would have such a compressed synthesizing intelligence. Yes he would notice the difference but he would not be able to process it so thorough-goingly. So updikily.

#16 On a book buying spree we get Updike’s Seek my Face; ergo, the usual adjective fest. He doesn’t so much describe things as assign tags to them. He reads an issue of Time Magazine and decides to make a novel of it. He fills in standard interpretations. No original organic vision. Rabbit Run may have been his best, along with The Coup and A Month of Sundays. The Life magazine nostalgia-view of the world. Anyway we get a spinster, an elderly lady with a super-slick synthesizing ability with the English Language that sounds like Updike; soft floating recumbent prose. Much use of grand adjectives, gallant, luminous head, etc. The elderly lady observes and generalizes about an younger woman - her observations and notations are slightly off the mark but just accurate enough to keep the engine of the novel going. This is Updike irritatingly dumbing himself down. Grrr.

#17 Let Updike have the last word here: “Authors do well to remember that they are not really kin to priests and politicians but to singers and stand-up comedians―entertainers, of a devious sort.”

John Updike, R.I.P.

#1 John Updike died yesterday, January 27, 2009; I am moved. Anyone who loves writing and the imagination must stop to acknowledge Updike's power and talent. Updike brought the adjective back into American letters after Hemingway banished it for decades.

#2 Updike was a generous reviewer, junp starting many writing careers from his post as book critic at The New Yorker. He only wrote mean-spiritedly of one writer that I can think of: James Gould Cozzens; perhaps because he saw in Cozzens a slapdash overreacher , a sprayer of adjectives - in short, a lazier version of himself, Updike.

#3 Updike's love of the adjective did not always serve him well. Adjectives should be treated like viruses in English writing; they tend to multiply and infect all the other words around them, sapping their punch and singularity, and generally inducing torpor into the whole sentence.

#4 Some of his books demanded adjectives. The Coup, for example, attempted to catch the mental arabesques of an African dictator educated in the French Foreign Legion and at an American mid-Western campus during the 1950s. Here is an excerpt:

"My education here has been strange," Felix told Craven, contemplating with loathing the toubab's dry prematurely gray hair; his soft broad lips like two worms bloodless and bloated; his complacent, ever youthful eyes.

#5 When Updike stretched himself (The Coup, A Month of Sundays, Brazil, Roger's Version, The Witches of Eastwick), he wrote well, exquisitely well. When he leafed through Time Magazine and wrote a novel based on current events (the later Rabbit Novels, S, In the Valley of the Lillies) he wrote less well. He had the intellect, talent, imagination, the magic to write a large, all-encompassing American novel - a War & Peace - but he refused to lend his magic to a project not anchored in a local street or family; instead of one magnificent novel he left us a shelf of good, sometimes wonderful, novels.

#6 Thank you, John. You gave me so much reading pleasure over the years and inspired my path as a writer. Thank you.

The year of reading long, difficult novels

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Where the Air is Clear by Carlos Fuentes
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
JR by William Gaddis

#1 Ken Kesey: Sometimes a Great Notion; an astonishing work of art; it must have smashed KK to have it ignored so. The skill with which he jumps around consciousness of characters, impressive. Adept at weaving stories, setting scenes and evoking atmosphere. Why he is held at bay by those who compile lists of Best Novels is beyond me. Same with William Gaddis. You want to see American novelists build on their advances in technique and novel construction. Kesey, ever tuneful, strikes many wonderful notes. Yet the theme of the brother antagonism, at times wanes. One brother so involved in the physical world, observing, watching, wondering - can he be so bound by obsession? OK. Anyway, wonderful to hear West Coast slang: Hey bub, Doohicky, rinkydink. Closing in on the mystery of Ken Kesey, all his themes were there, the nature of men and the nature of nature; he was the first to write about the Pacific Northwest; to make literature about it. He wasn’t sufficiently celebrated for his vision, for his art. His power, the slang, the bringing alive of what was not there before. Who else? Bernard Malamud in his big long Oregon novel, A New Life. But Kesey. Massive, ballsy, wonderful. I’m under the influence. Reading notes to the annotated One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Kesey stresses point of view as essential to the growing of a novel. Where Nest is compact Notion is diffuse. You can practically see KK running – even though many of the themes are the same: strength vs weakness, self-overcoming, west vs east, brothers-in-conflict, etc. You see his seriousness in Notion. Kesey's artistic seriousness is plain. Strenuous even, maybe?

#2 Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra- so damn complicated; he’s got the Faulkner disease: wherein you empty out the thesaurus and the dictionary mix stir blend whip chop grate and hope that something edible comes out. A species of higher ventriloquism. Terra Nostra: Carlos Fuentes is determined to be placed in the Louvre or the Prado or the Madrid Museo de Bellas Artes…you often sense that Fuentes is writing books from inspiration based on his wide reading in history and coffee table art books or from spending time in museums. Where is the life felt, lived, tasted? The details in his novels, however good, seem second hand. But onwards, we go…will I get a masters degree for reading it? I am at 695 pages still at sea with this thing. It’s harder than hell to tell just what he is up to here. The novel seems to be some kind of historical monograph on the Spanish conquest of America and Spain’s failure to take the better of many roads when it seized European ascendancy in the 16th century; AND that Spain’s great writers – Cervantes, Fernando de Rojas – and artists had some idea of the correct road to take. Thus the blending of fictional and historical characters. Even so the book is striking me as monstrous and self-indulgent to a degree not to be believed. The effect is somewhat like looking at Niagara Falls for a year. Torrent of words. Terra Nostra is circles of themes, circular history versus fiction or fable, austerity vs lush tropical abundance, old vs new, ancient vs modern. Also that the thread of Spanish history has followed illusion while Hispanic ficcioners have followed what is reality; also power as the pathway to impotence/madness. However, Fuentes seldom stoops to illustrate those themes in other than chalky, literary inflated literary language. Fuentes tosses out contrasts and circles like so many language frisbees. While Felipe II was building the Escorial in Madrid, America was being discovered. During its Golden Age Spain turned its back on success and hope sacrificed all for gold. Crazy power-mad orthodoxies become prisons, wasting, unhygienic bodies in uncleanliness. The austerity of the Spanish king, Felipe II and the craziness of his wife Juana la Loca (La Dama Loca), ruling narrowly while a new world was being conquered and re-born. Fuentes would assert that the Golden Age fiction writers were writing reality while the living historical personages were living a fiction. And the style; heavy word showers; Faulkner as though the Mississippi had taken a turn into the Rio Grande and then into the Amazon...

#3 El Ontoño del Patriarca, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ powerful and ballsy novel (finally a novel which you can rightly call powerful). I now see it as a natural development from Cien Años de Soledad. Garcia Marquez has boiled off the charm, gotten rid of the cutesy stuff and matched method to theme. Portrait of a gruesome dictator, GGM inhabits his life and brain; it is a vast tidewater of slush and terror; a study of power and loneliness; GGM’s leftist politics aside, he has nailed forever the wimpyness, the smallness of dictators. Castro must read this and weep, as must Pinochet, Rios-Mott and all the bloodthirsty madmen who sick armed forces on their own unarmed civilians. GGM has torn off the mask of terror, the hollowness of the power-mad and given us the insides of these monsters, the puny lonely swamp-messes that they are…

The poetry reading (I may not be good but I am not this bad)

- The cute self regard
- The idle description
- Cliché, of course: dropping on us like leaves
- The why was this written poem
- The I am in love with my own pen hand poem
- Anthropomorphic dreck: the kitten loved me, etc
- Weird nonsensical flights that could be good in a wholly different context
- Illogic covered in sloppy word paint
- Unwarranted shifts in point of view
- Abuse of authorial point of view and authorial privilege
- Torturing-teasing the reader with non-meaning
- The loved one dying of cancer poem (overwhelm your reader)
- The overwrought undeserved epiphany
- The mismanaged metaphor: …the mood hanging over us like a gavel falls…is the mood hanging or banging? A gavel doesn’t really hang does it?
- The disregard for the sovereignty of the line: the usual chopped prose (who lets students get away with that?)
- Overuse of abstract nouns: Death, our..seas…loss
- Overly evanescent description – you don’t know what they are talking about – perhaps to mask a dull or pointless theme
- God Bless my psychedelicasies
- X 2 poems about the French language: wretch
- The usual references to Europe, painting, critical theory…The trite the inane wagon hitched to the sublime

Literary fuses III

#1 The Figured Wheel Robert Pinsky’s collected poems (bought for a dollar at the ½ Price remainder rack). Again baffled at the whole poetry/publishing/academic matrix. As a book it is a lovely package, cover, layout etc…But not one line jumps out and claims your emotions or love or loyalty. Not a line of risk, of ambition, or daring, let alone savagery. It’s all so safe. Sensitive writing, yes, careful description, yes; but where is the fucking poetry? He uses the word “heart” (that puts anyone on my shitlist) in fact, includes it in the title of his 1984 book: Poets! Remember this was a word Woodrow Wilson used to get American boys to throw their bodies into the breach in 1918! His essay on Psychiatrists is a piece of buffoonery. Lightweight dithering. Who gives a shine about psychiatrists anyway? And then you’re pissed because you want to like this guy…

#2 Don DeLillo: you read his depictions, his observations funny finely honed finalities of observation; they are often brutal often brilliant, e.g., the way technology changes us, e.g. “we don’t pick up” (the answering machine) not “we’re not home.” The concept of not being home is destroyed. His observations are like glass: beautiful to look at but will shatter if you handle them too roughly. You sense that he tries too hard, sees too much. DeLillo stares at the picture of the boat on the water so long, so hard that the boat in the picture starts to move. Things become sinister, while he offers up too much of the private self to the storms of public madness. For DD a cigar is never just a cigar. It’s a conspiracy, a symbol, a plan - BUT human beings are weirder bouncier more supple than he gives us credit for. Slavery has to qualify as about the most degraded institution that good ol’ demonic human mind could devise; but how did blacks deal with it? What tools did they use to get over? They didn’t all commit mass suicide. They talked to themselves, sang to themselves, came up with new and weird ways of being…there’s more bounce to us to humans than writers give us credit for…

Literary fuses II

#1 Stanley Crouch’s Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome
It’s a book I wanted to like. I like his total perspective that doesn’t cave in to unscientific race babble. He wants to dig at the sore pick the wound. Even though the book is here with me I feel it chained to the author’s mind. The feeling that he is still writing it. It is a composition of arias. Strung together. Deep conversations keep popping out of nowhere to analyze the black white situation in America. Some of this material has been done over via Baldwin in Another Country.
SC takes the amateur techniques
a) interior monologue
b) meaningful exposition
…vices of young writers…I agree with so much of what he says about race but he drops into essays….insistence on the middle class as the breeding ground of all civilized things. He despises, rightly, the fake gangsta chic that has taken hold among black kids.He was not inventive enough. He stuck to the old interior monologue scheme and failed. I submit that we – the mind – never says “however” to itself while thinking. So many false notes wrong notes of tone of carriage (my literary term as in “no carriage”). You can see that he lacks the gift of dramatization. This does not have to be a total defect. He should have done like Manuel Puig and written a dialogue novel - or La Celestina - a novel in dramatic dialogue. But some of his arias and catching the black idiom are simply grand – the frank discussion of bodies, that no area of life, of body, goes unchecked.

#2 T.C. Boyle is content to run a highlighter pen across social and journalistic situations. Gone the sense of discovery in his fiction; it is all rendering, expertly done of course, but full of cheap shots and pandering to our recognition. We’ve done Dickens for god’s sake. Enough already.

#3 Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ true model is Pliny the Elder. He – Pliny – recounts fabulous tales and “facts” with a deadpan objectivity, wild tales and bogus illustrations of animal lore and far off countries and customs…

#4 If I taught poetry class I would set up a few rules:
a. Down with Pathetic Fallicy- no more sensitive waves or happy clouds. Nature ain’t us or ain’t about us. The “ambivalent” surf, surely the “indifferent” surf is meant here.
b. Don’t make things do what they don’t do: the pinecones rang in the green steeples on the hillside (when describing a stand of pines). There are no bell like sounds coming from trees and esp not from pine cones. They may look like bells but they are non-ringing-quiet bells…
c. Watch your verbs…”doused” with flour? (after frolicking in a bakery); sorry, douse is to extinguish with liquid or plunge a thing into liquid. i suppose you can use powder to de-louse but not douse. Or how about screeching sun? Does the sun make noise? Small shards of rock…aren’t shards usually already small…on and on…
d. Poetry is not an excuse to be poetic. No adjectives as nouns: Coins of perfect clear appear under my feet: clear what? I want to ask…
e. Poetry is not an excuse to wax poetic.

#5 It is unreasonable to expect Americans to be interested in novels or poetry. We do not possess the extended sympathy required to share what the aims of a novel are. We do not know how to ask questions or carry on conversations. It is a tall order to ask Americans to get involved with imaginary characters unless those characters reflect themselves or echo their own mundane and cliché ridden selves. We do not have sufficient civilization to extend ourselves beyond kids and jobs into the imaginative worlds that novels offer. Forget character. Unless that character is outstanding…Remember: everyone thinks about himself first and foremost.

#6 Reading Rick DeMarinis’ short stories: lively, funny, poignant, clever, vivid. Then, you get restless; that sense that the author knows his characters too well which leads to stage management; sins I include here:
a) What he does for a living (info dumps: you try the reader’s patience; the set up; very few of these set ups are intrinsic to the story; mostly they just succeed in showing the author’s intelligence before a broad range of data – about work, life, school, psychology; the rush to inform is a sign of weakness, or nerves such as at a cocktail party: “and what do you do?” think of Chekov; he disposes of information as an aside to get you into the story not to show off his cleverness. This is so hard to do it even fouls an expert like RD.
b) What he looks like (looking in the mirror) more manipulative information;
c) Setting boundaries of character early on and knocking them over (the conservative man whose life is turned topsy turvy by a cad).
d) The basic problem of the short story as practiced in America; since there is no hook or strong conceit then the writer has to perform in a vacuum; if you do without conceit you must be subtle; RD is so smart and there is so much going on that you can only think: this writer is smart ; and the first person preclude the necessary oxygen of other perspectives that make a short story happen.
e) This is my impatience with the short story;
f) But then; he puts one right in your head between your eyes: Novias the guy can write and here is proof;
g) The problem of fiction is the problem of knowledge; how do you get to know things? You learn things along with the narrator or does he feed you as you go?

VS Naipaul and thoughts

#1 Naipaul’s follow up to Among the Believers, Beyond Belief. There is no laughter in Naipaul. For all his criticisms of 3rd worlders their disillusionment with revolution and frustration with their present and submission to murderous buffoons he is all sympathy; his judgments make you wonder are human beings so loaded with their pasts? Do people pass lives in stolid unreflecting torpor and has the West such a comprehensive grip on the more successful countries of the world namely the Anglosphere? Are peoples, entire countries so bereft of hope, of humor or enduring human qualities? I wonder. Naipual rightly decries the insane murderousness of what he sees in the convert countries. But does he have to sweep away all signs of life before him? Of humor? Independence and struggle for life? Do they not exist at all? Really? It is hard to believe. Updike, in a review of The Loss of El Dorado says, “But in viewing an entire hemisphere as a corrupted dream, Naipaul dissolves what realities there were…[TLED] rests upon an unexamined assumption, of metropolitan superiority…Was the cruelty of slavery not an extension of the cruelty already present on the African continent?” I think Updike is trying to push back at Naipaul’s assumptions that we – the Americas, say, only got the bad from Europe as all the high flown phrasings of brotherhood equality, constitutions, democracy became pure air under a floor of despotism and slavery. Giving the Americas an atmosphere of unreality and emptiness. That real life was happening elsewhere (Europe for instance); that the collapse of metropolitan values led to unreality simplicity and moral degeneracy. Updike ends with this reasonable question: “Does not the collapse of “metropolitan” values amid “simpler” conditions demonstrate their own frailty and unreality?” He pronounces finally about Naipaul’s “bleak and caustic” tone; two adjectives appropriate to much of his writing.

#2 In a latter volume of essays Updike refines his assessment of the Naipauls' (this time commenting on a book by Shiva): “Yet people live here, under these imperfect governments, and their lives are truth.” What a beautiful statement. Also found: a perfect copy, bookclub edition, of Marquez’ The Autumn of the Patriarch. He worked so hard on it I have to give him credit; the scale of Latin American misery and subjection to murderous fools; the scale is so small and seems to take place in a rim of the world so far off as to be barely notable, yet it exists. The cultures are dynamic and vibrant filled with mistrust and thievery they are hermetic, however. And not so hospitable to outsiders.

#3 Finished Naipaul’s Beyond Belief. It is beyond belief the madness taking place in the Muslim convert countries he writes about: Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan. Insanity on a mass scale. And to hear leftists trash America as an imperial power messing up the world. These people have no sense of how good we have it; we still have the power to deliver happy childhoods to our kids. These other countries don’t.

#4 Have to admit I love the stretch of Rainier between Graham and Henderson. It is full of life: drugs, prostitutes, religion (Muslims, Black churches galore), politics (Black Panthers). Driving through it with my cousin D--, he pronounced it “seedy.” I said, "au contraire it seethes with life." I do love it so. It quickens my writer’s eye and pen. I can see a V.S. Naipaul passing through and declaring it a intellectual wasteland; worse! A quicksand, undernourished or mal-nourished, on dreams of resentment and a whirling nihilistic drag; with no apportionment for the future, no sense of the wider world of success within which it is lodged. So true, but it is filled with life...

#5 Naipaul’s thesis that Islam is a lock and hammer upon people and their sense of past; it - he believes - closes down inquiry and historical knowledge. It only allows for itself to flourish. Islam is the most demanding of mental imperialisms, sez he. Are you sure, Vida? Muslims in America: our inner cities are seeing thousands of orthodox Muslims, mostly from Somalia, set up families and shops. They are the ones who have decided to invest in lives in our towns and cities. This is not exactly unprecedented. Big cities of the eastern seaboard saw many thousands of orthodox Jews from Europe fill their poor neighborhoods at the end of the 19th century - beginning of the 20th. Otherwise, extreme religious folk have chosen to develop out of the line of fire, as it were; the Mormons founded a community on the hard salty badlands of Utah. The Mennonites took to the far fields of Pennsylvania to develop and breed apart from totalizing secular America. But the forces will go two ways: they will pick up converts, yes, but the pull of plain-flavored, God-less life will also work its way into their communities. This tension will bring about good things, much as orthodox Jewish communities of the end of the 19th century brought forth creative thinkers and doers in every field of human endeavor. This is what happens when you plunk down in the middle of a secular modern city. It is inevitable. So mostly I am optimistic. The current liberal left however is not doing this new community any favors by leading them to think that America is ready to pay them obeisance or otherwise codify their reverence with civic niceties. The new immigrants must take their knocks along with everyone else.

#6 Just because VS Naipaul is tired of the novel am I supposed to give up enjoyment of literature? He loves to declaim and make pronouncements: the novel is dead and dying, it doesn’t address the imaginative needs of readers, it is fake, it is phony, therefore let’s be done with it. Well, this kind of pronouncement-making is what intellectuals do. He claims he is not an intellectual but like bodily smells you can’t just wish ideas away. They stay close. So he pronounces and produces ideas; there is a grimy peasant mentality to VS Naipaul’s work; it is truth, but it is an ungenerous and mean truth. A mean and spiteful truth of peasants, their hostility, spite and suspicion.


#7 Naipaul riffs on Latin America. It is screwed up because there is no facing up to the Indian part of the country that is despised. That is to despise a part of yourself and you will never overcome. Latin America wants to be an extension of Europe; that is all and well but there is more to the story. Latin America is a continent that has been trampled over. I'll quote Naipaul on Latin America. He sez:

These things happen over the course of a writer's life. I used to be called a satirist. I don't know what I was supposed to be satirising. The reason is probably that I've never been an official writer - many colonial chaps, their passion is to be an official writer. Latin America is full of nothing but official writers. You mean as they were in the Soviet Union? No, an official
writer is someone whose views do not harm the Establishment, the government, authority of all kinds. I was thinking about Latin America, where most writers are trying to be official writers, who do what is required of them, who do what they feel they are expected to do. It is full of official writers who offend no
one, and leave Latin America eternally in its mess, because they offend no one. The truth is dodged, the mess continues.

Further comment from Naipaul:

Well, I'll tell you what happened. I actually was in Trinidad at the end of 1971, by which time this Michael X had murdered and buried people. And out of interest I went to look at the house and the holes where the people were buried, and I followed the story there. I had no intention of writing about it, and then my friend Francis Wyndham of the Sunday Times asked me to write about it. And I went back and did a lot more research, got a lot more documents and everything and did that story. And in doing it I learnt something about people who support revolutions, and that was not greatly different from what Conrad had discovered,
in The Secret Agent. What did he discover? This woman who supports the anarchist believes she is so secure and so aristocratic, that when the world is blown up only the others will be destroyed. She will float serenely above the wreckage. So there are secure people who encourage revolutionaries. When societies are not secure it's a different matter.

Naipaul keeps calling 3rd World countries and societies “half-made” but their mere living grants them a shot at truth. (Naipaul offers up the sharp criticism of Latin America ever: he said these are scum societies, societies that think that killing the right people will solve all their problems. Hate to say it, but, he got that part right.

#8 It took me a long time, but I might finally get Naipaul. I am a slow learner. I believe I can peg the two poles of modern literature: at one end stands Nabokov who proclaims all ideas “hogwash”. Only the production of superior images matters in fiction. At the other end you have Naipaul, who claims that literature should only reflect ideas that in turn, act as X-rays into society of the time; these ideas should also deliver commentary on society, also poke it, prod it, shake it up, etc. Both writers point to Gogol, incidentally, to shore up their positions. Naipaul calls Gogol a great novelist of his society and times and Nabokov wrote a short biographical tract to say that Gogo; was, like Nabokov, interested only in flashing images of pure art, society be damned.

#9 Here is J.M. Coatzee reviewing Naipaul’s Half a Life:

Both father and son believe they see through other people. But they detect lies and self-deception all around them only because they are incapable of imagining anyone unlike themselves. Their shrewdness of insight is grounded in nothing but
a self-protective reflex of suspicion. Their rule of thumb is always to give the least charitable interpretation. Self-absorption, minginess of spirit, rather than inexperience, are at the root of Willie's failures in love.

#10 Naipaul would dash myth or the mythopoetic spirt of modernist literature. He condemns Joyce for sitting in Trieste and writing about his life or life in Dublin (much as a young Naipaul sat in London and wrote about a long-lost Trinidad). I want to tell Naipaul, there is more to it than that. Europe, the continent of free wills, of generosity of spirit and the spirit of community, metropolitanism, of self-sacrifice and civic ideals is that but it is also a killing floor. Its own maniacal death-seeds contain its defeats and fears and these have not all been faced; yes, the 19th century novelists did their jobs and did them well but in the 20th century we inherited a suicide/slaughter house; Western novelists have been on suicide watch and as ignominious as that is, it is the reality that we inherited. We can’t go back to the comprehensive liveliness of the 19th century and atomize society as the grand novelists of the time did. Pine, as we may, for the comprehensive vision of 19th century novelists but theirs is not our world. We must take the world as we got it. It is not fair of you, Naipaul, who, yes, forced through the novel the voices of the unknown, to say now that all is known and the novel has nothing further to contribute. Is it up to Naipaul to declare this? Go ahead, but it is just one more nattering intellectual voice offering prescription and proscription – telling the artist what to do. Art management, Naipaul’s new bag. The novel may be a failure as a form but a bigger failure is Art Management. There is still much room to move.

#11 VSN on Latin America, again. As for Latin America being a place of self-deception and mythmaking – wide avoidance of history and past cruelty – a longing for denial, etc – well, Latin America’s literary artists didn't exactly avoid reality in their novels. As early as the 1920s you had Miguel Angel Austurias writing up his society realistically albeit in ghostly forms - as he saw it. Ditto Alejo Carpentier. Worthy and artistic attempts perhaps influenced by European or American literature but very much their own design. To come to Naipaul and the present: The successful novelist pronouncing the death of the novel is a bit of a cliché. Let Updike have the last word here: “Authors do well to remember that they are not really kin to priests and politicians but to singers and stand-up comedians―entertainers, of a devious sort.”

#12 Sadly much of Naipual’s critique can be hurled at America, think of Faulkner and his mythmaking. His style. Now I am reading Naipaul's A Turn in the South; very strong, very moving. It is hard to believe that such hatred (between black and white but mostly the hatred of white toward black) thrived in your own country. Naipaul’s renditions of slavery: the entry of a new slave from Africa and how they would put him in a box while next to the box an old slave would calm him down, sooth him into his new life. This is the true horror of slavery, if you can imagine your way into it. You want to weep, to tear your teeth out, to scream; it was a violation of everything that America stood for. One of humanity’s truly unavenged crimes. The whole enterprise was hysterical, the looting of Africa for flesh over centuries. What happened to the moral core of the west? It vanished when it came to slavery. And its particular brutal American variety that denuded the slave of his past; obliterated it. It was an exalted (or rotten) sex cult in which everyone who came near it was degraded.

#13 VS Naipaul continues with his thesis that great civilizations, not realized, lie to themselves and that all modern literatures not of the West, are fakes and fantasists (they don’t tell things or portray things as they are but spin fantasies about themselves). He indicts the ancient Romans for not exposing the brutalities around them but for fluffing up their own mythologies. For all Naipaul’s emphasis on truth telling and hard realities, you often don’t believe him. The seeing and not seeing, the half-seeing of ancient writers; heavily weighted sociology. Well now, can’t societies produce misfits, visionaries and dreamers? In short, novelists? And why can’t they dream? Are dreams the monopoly of the fully realized, self actualized, truth tellers of the West? (What does that mean?) I am suspicious. That is, I suspect Naipaul’s claim to Indian-ness, especially in that he doesn’t speak Hindi. He places himself at the periphery of British Colonial civilization, that much is true, but to insert himself into India as Indian is wrong; he can praise the aspects of the British world that he internalized, even living on the periphery, and exult in those but I don’t see his background as granting him any special place in Indian life. India has its own dynamics and ways of carrying on. Some of them strike Naipaul as shameless and self-serving but so goes the life of nations. Nationhood is a push me - pull me affair; VSN has some idea of the West as a self-fulfilling dream - all was good for the novel, in the old days of early Dickens. But shame on modernism and Joyce and all that decadent, non-socially useful flowed into the novel via Modernism. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Then VSN calls the ancient writers to task for not analyzing their own societies, but what did Seutonius do? What did Tacitus do? What about Apuleius? What about Saint Augustine’s Confessions? Martial? Juvenal? Petronius? These were not exactly time-servers or ass lickers. Likewise, to return to the present, is the 3rd world so bereft of critical writing of self-reflection and condemnation? Miguel Angel Austurias? Early Carpentier?