Sad, sad cowboys all the way down. Read this a while ago and retain little, but I seem to remember some of the western rhythms of Cormac McCarthy (I'mSad, sad cowboys all the way down. Read this a while ago and retain little, but I seem to remember some of the western rhythms of Cormac McCarthy (I'm sure they read each other, I wonder how much they retain of each other). "Brokeback" was indeed excellent, though seemingly so much faster than the movie, more like a history in its matter-of-fact progression than a story, until the ending with the nested shirts....more
A bit of O'Brian, a bit of Melville, a bit of arctic suffering, add a tortured moralist and a violent psychopath, and you can kind of see where this iA bit of O'Brian, a bit of Melville, a bit of arctic suffering, add a tortured moralist and a violent psychopath, and you can kind of see where this is going, but that's ok, b/c McGuire's pacing is good, his writing's even better, and his diction's wonderful. So many fine words. Actually, I didn't see the Empire Strikes Back moment coming. Got me there, McGuire.
krang (p. 41): the carcass of a whale after the blubber has been removed, though here used to refer to a seal.
snickle (p. 75): to snare, apparently in some British dialect.
fistic (p. 126): pertaining to boxing or fighting.
kiltings (p. 140): "Above him seabirds gather, wheeling and cacophanous, in the noisome air, while below in the grease-stained water, drawin in by the mixed aromas of blood and decay, Greenland sharks gnaw and tug at the whale's loose kiltings." Kilting literally means an arrangement of pleats on a kilt, so this may be a poetic reference to the folds on the the throat of a whale.
malemauk (p. 140): Google turned up William Barron's Old Whaling Days (thanks again, IA), which describe the malemauk boat as one the two boats on either side of the whale as it is being flensed. Another reference to this word in that book refers to a seabird, which tracks with an automated suggestion from dictionary.com of "mallemuck," a variant of "mollymawk," which means seabird. Maybe the boat was so named b/c such birds were attracted to carcass?
descant (p. 155): music; also, musical, or a musical part....more
I continue to love Woodrell's writing, even if this one lacked some of the humor in Tomato Red. The scattered vignette structure (explosion remnants?)I continue to love Woodrell's writing, even if this one lacked some of the humor in Tomato Red. The scattered vignette structure (explosion remnants?) was a fine distraction from the lack of plot, but who cares, it's all about the language.
The appended interview suggested Woodrell is sometimes compared with Cormac McCarthy. I guess they both tend toward winding sentences and geographical specificity, but Woodrell's a more talented and humane portraitist. Kind of makes me want to read them simultaneously. How do they differ in their approach to evil? To dialogue? To landscape?...more
This isn't a book with a plot, nor is it one populated with realish people, but those not-quite-realish people are differentiated and fun to listen toThis isn't a book with a plot, nor is it one populated with realish people, but those not-quite-realish people are differentiated and fun to listen to. Sadly, the central cast are the least fun: Alice (monotonous), Corvus (hardly there at all), Annabel (vapid), Carter (occasionally amusing but disappointingly spineless), and Ginger (too spiny). Much preferable was the company of Emily Bliss Pickless (mature 8-year-old skeptic and feeder of lizards), Nurse Daisy (apocalyptic nursing home attendant), and Stumpp (involutionally contemplative yet dissatisfied 1% former big game hunter), but alas they're merely side characters adorning the second half. I did like the writing. Maybe I'd like her short stories.
There were, however, some unambiguously choice words I didn't know:
ischemic (adj): related to ischemia, a restriction of blood supply to tissue (p. 57)
telluric (adj): related to the earth or soil (p. 70)
maenad (n): one of the Bacchante, the wild women followers of Dionysus who dismembered Orpheus (thanks, Sandman) (p. 102)
clerestory (n): high section of a wall with windows, traditionally above the nave in a Christian church (p. 224)
doxological (adj): pertaining to doxology, i.e. praising God (p. 224)
hecatomb (n): a sacrifice in ancient Greece or Rome involving 100 oxen or more; a large-scale slaughter or sacrifice (p. 252)
horripilatory (adj): pertaining to bristled hair or goosebumps (p. 269)
FWIW, I was inspired to read this by A.O. Scott's gushing essay about her in the Times last year....more
I have the Collected Fictions Penguin edition translated by Andrew Hurley, but I've had it for 10+ years and only ever read a story or two at a time. I have the Collected Fictions Penguin edition translated by Andrew Hurley, but I've had it for 10+ years and only ever read a story or two at a time. This time I opened "Undr" at random to cleanse my palette and decided I'd just go through the entire book it comes from.
I understand about 50-70% of what's going on in any given Borges story. There's often a lot of Argentinian history and cultural nuance that goes right by me, which I guess is true of most non-American writers, but the level of specificity in his work can be a bit of an impediment, or even a source of boredom. And there's the involutional setups, like this is a story about a book written by a man who was a character in a film etc etc, which is both part of the appeal and a bit wearying on repetition. What's consistently appealing to me is the sense that each piece feels like someone telling a story, as in there is almost always someone telling a tale, not an omniscient narrator, not a first-person egomaniac with impeccable recall, but just a person spinning tale. They are also, by and large, not stories about the self, with the possible exception of the one about the guy who meets his past self on a bench in Boston....more
I swore off McCarthy after finding The Road to be a novel-length doomscroll, but, in the very year the word "doomscroll" was coined, a friend gushed aI swore off McCarthy after finding The Road to be a novel-length doomscroll, but, in the very year the word "doomscroll" was coined, a friend gushed about his love for the Border Trilogy and suggested All the Pretty Horses was the one to try for the McCarthy-averse. He was right, a better experience overall, much of the aching landscapes more grounded in reality, or a reality I know, even a chuckle or two.
There are two women in the novel, Alejandra, essentially an object for John Grady's unexplored affection, and the Dueña Alfonsa, who makes two appearances in which she speaks more, and more eloquently, than all the other characters combined. John Grady and just about everyone else encounters some kind of buffer overflow error when they reach 10 words, but the Dueña can actually sustain long and complicated thoughts in sentences that don't feel like spurts of gunfire. She is the only character McCarthy bothers to explore and explain in words, with history and doubts and principles borne of experience. John Grady, the ostensible protagonist, is a two-toned cartoon cowboy who acts with complete certitude in all things except mortally defending himself in a prison fight (the other guy didn't deserve to die, he figures).
I admit, I bought this for the cover, which could easily be me with shorter hair and a mustache. I know nothing about Tsuge or his reputation aside frI admit, I bought this for the cover, which could easily be me with shorter hair and a mustache. I know nothing about Tsuge or his reputation aside from what I gleaned from the essay at the end. Without that, it would be easy to write this off as yet another autobiographical comic about a mostly-worthless dude obsessing over his own worthlessness, crushed dreams, and sexual obsessions, but there is a little more here. For one thing, we're seeing a portrait of poverty in Japan, and not like salt-of-the-earth rural poverty, but urban poverty, people who have crashed out of the middle class, seem disconnected from any kind of family support, and seem to survive on a small trickle of luck. It's not a Japan that I've seen in much manga, though my exposure to manga is certainly lacking breadth.
For another, Sukegawa (Tsuge's stand-in protagonist) lives with his wife and child, and while they are not favorably depicted, they are also not elided, nor are they footnotes. They aggravate him, but they're also a part of how Sukegawa sees himself, ever-present, tightly bound to his guilt. Women characters are not quite equitably portrayed here, but their justifiable anger is present, at least.
Also, aside from the first chapter, most of the book explores other characters in the village, from the other rock peddlers (who seem, if anything, even more eccentric than Sukegawa), to flea market junk dealers, to bird trappers both mercantile and mythological. While clearly motivated by the kind of egomania that drives anyone to autobiography, it's far from his only drive (thankfully), and these portraits are fun, sometimes pointed, and, especially in the case of his wife, complicated.
It's also hard not to think of Jenny O'Dell's How To Do Nothing and the iceberg of thought that sits atop. While Sukegawa isn't specifically escaping capitalism, he does seem to deliberately opt out of extrinsic notions of value. Even though he's constantly hustling for the most obvious form of extrinsic value (money) his absurd failures to earn any derive from his complete, perhaps willful ignorance of what other people want to buy. He seems exasperated that people don't share his internal obsessions (rocks, old cameras, poets who care for nothing but hard drinking and hot springs), at least not to the point of shelling out a few yen.
The art was a shock after reading that Toppi collection. Tsuge's style is loose, sometimes bordering on sloppy, but totally different than most other manga artists. Many of his landscapes show the kind of detailed draftsmanship that so often sets Japanese comics apart from American ones, but they're few and far between. I want to say his style reminds me more of American indies, but I'm struggling to think of which ones specifically. My partner just suggested Tomine, but Tsuge's WAY less spare than that. Something to think about.
I would gladly read more. Despite the lack of published translations, it looks like the Internet has significantly more, including this collection by someone named Sonny Liew....more
I managed to read fifteen pages of this book on several occasions without gaining enough momentum to continue, and now, having read it with ever-growiI managed to read fifteen pages of this book on several occasions without gaining enough momentum to continue, and now, having read it with ever-growing enthusiasm, I wonder what my problem was and how many other great things I've omitted for want of the least speck of commitment. If you have a little commitment to spare and you, like me, have ever been warned about the dangers of walking and reading at the same time, you should probably give this one a try.
Some Things
p. 5 "doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something closest to doing nothing is walking." Not that either author owns this train of thought (I imagine both would reject such a premise), but reading this book definitely placed Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing as an ideological descendant of this book (Odell cites Solnit several times in her book, though not this work specifically).
p. 15 chautauqua (n): late 19th / early 20th century traveling events in America that blended lectures and entertainment.
p. 24 Solnit quotes Kierkegaard as writing, "my imagination works best when I am sitting alone in a large assemblage, when the tumult and noise require a substratum of will if the imagination is to hold on to its object" to describe how he would do much of his thinking amid the supposed distractions of city life. I often feel the same "substratum of will" when working in a coffee shop vs at home and I assume that influenced open floor plan office design and the somewhat more modern tech trend of offices that look more like coffee shops. I also find it curious that there's a fine and fuzzy line between the beneficial distractions of Kierkegaards chance encounters and your phone vibrating in your pocket every ten seconds. When does beneficial distraction turn detrimental? Or maybe it isn't a question of degree and instead, meeting someone on the street or the general background hum of public life simultaneously places us in a larger context and sharpens the boundaries of our selves and our purposes. In contrast, the attention economy attacks that boundary by inflating our sense of self to encompass everything, as if we could and should be experiencing everything because we are entitled to it. Solnit writes, "Perhaps it was that the city strolls distracted him so that he could forget himself enough to think more productively, for his private thoughts are often convolutions of self-consciousness and despair," which torpedoes my self-defining theory in Kierkegaards case. Reminds me of Michael Pollan's recent explorations of self-dissolution through psychoactive drugs.
p. 85 "walking is natural, or rather part of natural history, but choosing to walk in the landscape as a contemplative, spiritual, or aesthetic experience has a specific cultural ancestry"
pp. 95-96 This description of William Gilpin's popularization of the word "picturesque" in the 18th century, "which originally meant any landscape that resembled or could be perceived as a picture," is so amazingly evocative of our present world of "doin' it for the 'gram." Is there a word for the opposite of FOMO, when you're actually experiencing something and you realize it's not as pretty as the pictures? What about the experience of realizing your experience is ineffable and/or impossible to represent in an image or something you could share on social media?
p. 104 Solnit quotes Thomas De Quincey describing William Wordsworth: "His legs were pointedly condemned by all the female connoisseurs in legs that I ever heard lecture on that topic."
p. 167 "And this is the great irony–or poetic justice–of the history of rural walking; that a taste that began in aristocratic gardens should end up as an assault on private property as an absolute right and privilege." This is such a great and fascinating interpretation, though I suspect you could easily argue that such a taste was only a distillation of a pre-existing land ethic, and that much private property rights only became absolute with Enclosure, so claiming right of access is really a reclamation of something fundamental. I think it might also have been worth considering the Tragedy of the Commons: what paths and lands have been ruined by public access? Ruined for whom?
p. 192 I read this Frank O'Hara poem about "the wind blowing softly" on his genitals while sitting next to my partner on SF MUNI between Castro and Van Ness. I chuckled and asked her if she'd ever heard of this O'Hara guy and she confessed she had not, which immediately prompted an exclamation of exasperated disbelief from the man seated in front of us, a short discussion of the value of poetry, and a recommendation to start with Shakespeare's sonnets before diving into O'Hara. SF isn't all absentee investors and tech bros just yet.
p. 228 I'm interested in protests and their effects, mostly because I've always struggled to understand what they achieve beyond catharsis. Solnit's description of protest marches as a kind of walking is fascinating, but again I found her descriptions of "our streets" frustrating. When protestors temporarily control a piece of public infrastructure, I have no doubt that they feel like they speak for a majority, maybe even the entire polity, but doing so doesn't prove that. Protest is never meaningless, but to assume it means The People want change seems presumptuous, even though they might.
p. 258 "the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale." I love the implication that most tools both enable and disable us, that they follow a path from empowerment to prosthesis and that this change comes with loss as well as gain.
p. 263 "The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog. Thus the body, a recreational rather than utilitarian entity, doesn't work, but works out." This whole section on exercise is both delightful and deflating and makes me never want to exercise ever again.
p. 264 I couldn't get enough of this. "I remember evenings strolling by Manhattan's many glass-walled second-floor gyms full of rows of treadmillers looking as though they were trying to leap through the glass to their destruction, saved only by the Sisyphean contraption that keeps them from going anywhere at all–though probably they didn't see the plummet before them, only their own reflection in the glass."...more
While sloth, distraction, and the false god of busyness (which I originally and tellingly misspelled "business") provide superior explanations, I'd liWhile sloth, distraction, and the false god of busyness (which I originally and tellingly misspelled "business") provide superior explanations, I'd like to pretend that I intentionally postponed thinking about Ted Chiang's second collection for a month after finishing it as an experiment in memory and an homage to his explorations of the subject. What stuck? What have I misremembered? Stories like these never sink too deeply in the sediment for me, and a few subsequent surface conversations have certainly snagged on them since, mostly "Omphalos," the story of an Earth where Creationism has been scientifically verified, but the discovery of a more perfect inhabited world upends the bedrock certainty of religion and forces the narrator to search for meaning in a more blinded faith. This one stuck for me because the central structure so closely matches a story ("Seventy-Two Letters") in Chiang's previous collection in which every sperm contains information encoding the creation of all future sperm, but biologists discover the number of encoded future generations are finite, and humanity is doomed in just a few generations, so they must theorize about ways genetic material could be recombined and inherited indefinitely (I defy *you* to read and summarize it in a single non-run-on sentence!). In both, Chiang starts with a thoroughly disproven hypothesis about how our world works, and crafts a new world where that hypothesis is true, but some novel finding forces humanity to invent or discover the way that our world works. I guess the one in which they invent sex is a bit dorkier than the one where they invent faith, in that it's a mechanical (albeit profound) rather than metaphysical epiphany, but the symmetry in the two pieces delights me. I know Chiang pulls this trick in other stories, but I still particularly like this pairing.
The other piece that's lodged in there pretty good is "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling," a braided binary tale, one strand of which concerns a near-future journalist describing his interaction with popular body cams that record all of your experiences, the other strand of which concerns an African boy who learns English writing to serve as a scribe for his tribe. The journalist, initially concerned about the body cam's substitution of memory, discovers through reconstructions of other footage that he was the aggressor and not the victim in a charged conversation with his daughter, a pivotal exchange that he had misremembered, and in doing so failed to make amends for. The information from this technology allows him to start actually working toward improving their relationship instead of just imagining that he'd already done so. The scribe learns the opposite lesson, that the truth as remembered can often do more good than the truth as written, even when they disagree. It's tempting to think I remember this because it's about memory, but perhaps it sticks more because it tracks the edges of information technology that get lost in the blur of motion. So often my anxieties about technology are about realizing we can encode or decode information I didn't think we could (how I feel about the President, whether or not I have a medical condition, my propensity for petty theft), but I seem less concerned with whether I choose to encode or decode the things we obviously can, chalking it up to technological inevitability or damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't reasoning. Chiang's story pokes right at that spot, and reminds me that whatever actions or inactions I choose, there always seem to be consequences that go without interrogation.
All this, to me, is what great fiction, and specifically great science fiction should be: new vantages on the past, the future, on ourselves, and on others. Chiang's way of viewing the why through the how will probably frustrate some readers, just as his insistence on ultimately focusing on meaning over mechanics will frustrate others. For me, he provides the perfect perch....more
Passes the Minsky Test with flying colors, despite a firm and unassailable place on the "literary fiction" shelf. I appreciated that Washington's vocaPasses the Minsky Test with flying colors, despite a firm and unassailable place on the "literary fiction" shelf. I appreciated that Washington's vocation as a naturalist was not a gimmick or addendum, but that it emerges from his innate observation skills and his history with Titch. I have to imagine Edugyan shares some of those skills herself because she rendered each of the wildly varying locales in sharp detail.
(view spoiler)[This interview with Edugyan raises the point that the novel is in part an exploration of the limitations on freedom, e.g. that while Titch may not be a physical slave, he is bound by his particular morality in which it is wrong to think of a person as property but acceptable to think of them as ballast. In that vein, what are we to make of Tanna? If she's bound by anything its by her love for her father, but she seems relatively unrestrained by the racism and sexism of the 1800s, something that goes relatively unexplored. Washington describes their relationship as her only rebellion against her father, but in some ways it replaces that limitation with Washington's own self-destructive quest for resolution with Titch, a quest she feels like she must accompany, if not endorse. With her wit and psychological insight, she seems the most modern character in the book. (hide spoiler)]
And of course, I am super curious about the author's own interest in and experience with natural history. Gotta search through those interviews......more
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