Posts filed under 'Authors'
‘Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.’ Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly … but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn’t rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn’t rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? “Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!” she had screamed, but they hadn’t listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.
October 28th, 2007
Deep into spring, winter is hanging on. Bitter and skillful in his hopelessness, he stays alive in every shady place, starving along the Mediterranean: angry to see the glittering sea-pale boulder alive with lizards green as Judas leaves. Winter is hanging on. He still believes. He tries to catch a lizard by the shoulder. One olive tree below Grottaglie welcomes the winter into noontime shade, and talks as softly as Pythagoras. Be still, be patient, I can hear him say, cradling in his arms the wounded head, letting the sunlight touch the savage face.
October 24th, 2007
She went to a conference table and ran a finger along its black surface, leaving a faint trace in gypsum dust. “Is there really a magazine?”
“Everything,” said Bigend, “is potential.”
“Everything,” she said, “is potential bullshit.”
“Think of me as a patron. Please.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, thanks.”
“In the early 1920s,” Bigend said, “there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a ‘recording artist’”– making the quotes with his hands– “took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing that which they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star, as we knew her”– and here he bowed slightly in her direction– “was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.”
“Of–?”
“Of a state in which ‘mass’ media existed, if you will, within the world.”
“As opposed to?”
“Comprising it.”
September 23rd, 2007
The stolen Paul Stuart overcoat had contained, in its slash-flapped side pocket, a chunky 1961 paperback history of revolutionary messianism in Medieval Europe. Owing to copious underlining in black fountain pen, this copy had most recently sold for $3.50, perhaps to the man from whom Milgrim had stolen the coat.
The Flagellant Messiah, as Milgrim imagined him, was a sort of brightly colored Hieronymous Bosch action figure molded from some very superior grade of Japanese vinyl. Tightly hooded in yellow, the Flagellant Messiah moved about a dun-colored landscape inhabited by other figures as well, all of them rendered in the same vinyl. Some of them were Bosch-influenced: say, an enormous and ambulatory pair of bare buttocks, from between which protruded the wooden shaft of a large arrow. Others, like the Flagellant Messiah, sprang from the stolen history, which he read every night, but after a rather circular fashion. He had never had any interest in this sort of thing before, that he could recall, but now he found it somehow comforting, to have his dreams colored this way.
He saw the IF, for whatever reason, as a bird-headed Bosch creature, pursued by Brown and Brown’s people, a brown hooded posse astride heraldic beasts that weren’t quite horses, their swirling banners inscribed with slogans in the IF’s Volapuk. Sometimes they journeyed for days into the stylized groves bordering that landscape, glimpsing strange creatures in wooded shadow. At times Brown and the Flagellant Messiah would merge, so that Milgrim sometimes woke from dreams in which Brown tore his own flesh with whips whose barbs were coated with the same graying green that covered his pistol, flashlight, and monocular.
But this new Devonian sea, the blood-warm shallows in which these visions swam, belonged not to Ativan but to Rize, a Japanese product for which Milgrim had immediately formed a firm respect. There were possibilities inherent in Rize, he sensed, that might only be revealed with further application. There was a sense of mobility that had been lacking recently– though he wondered if that had anything to do with the fact that he was being held captive.
September 23rd, 2007
THERE’S nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste,
That in my days I may not see thee old,
That where those two clear sparkling eyes are placed
Only two loop-holes then I might behold ;
That lovely, arched, ivory, polished brow
Defaced with wrinkles that I might but see ;
Thy dainty hair, so curl’d and crisped now,
Like grizzled moss upon some aged tree ;
Thy cheek, now flush with roses, sunk and lean ;
Thy lips with age as any wafer thin ;
Thy pearly teeth out of thy head so clean,
That, when thou feed’st, thy nose shall touch thy chin.
These lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee,
Then would I make thee read but to despite thee.
(a bit modernized)
September 23rd, 2007
The ultramarathon (any race exceeding 26.22 miles), which attracts a smaller and more fanatical community of athletes, gained brief notoriety in January 2004, when a member of the Colorado running cult Diving Madness banked 207 miles in the forty-eight hour race Across the Years and then dropped dead. Further afield, the “Marathon Monks” of Japan’s Mount Hiei have practiced spiritual running in a ritual that dates to the eighth century. At the culmination of seven years of training, the aspirant logs two back-to-back marathons per night for three months, carrying a length of rope and a knife so that he can hang or disembowel himself if he fails to complete a run.
September 2nd, 2007
How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
September 2nd, 2007
Seventh-century Chinese Chan Bhuddist master Hongren advised: “Work, work!…Work! Don’t waste a moment…Calm yourself, quiet yourself, master your senses. Work, work! Just dress in old clothes, eat simple food…feign ignorance, appear inarticulate. This is most economical with energy, yet effective.”
“All that is really worthwhile is action,” Teilhard wrote. “Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought.”
July 30th, 2007
IMAGINATION. “What did you mean by the story about Tamina on the children’s island?” people ask me. That tale began as a dream that fascinated me; I dreamed it later in a half-waking state, and I broadened and deepened it as a I wrote it. Its meaning? If you like: an oneiric image of an infantocratic future. (See: INFANTOCRACY.) However, the meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded. By insisting on decoding him, the Kafkologists killed Kafka.
July 26th, 2007
The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.
The writer knows his field––what has been done, what could be done, the limits––the way a tennis player knows the court. And like that expert, he, too, plays the edges. That is where the exhilaration is. He hits it up the line. In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now, courageously and carefully can he enlarge it, can he nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?
July 25th, 2007
I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you in speed-reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see if lowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, J.R. was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear; that’s the way I’d like to write. I can still admire the other– the way I admire surgeons, bronc busters, and tight ends. As writing, it is that foreign to me.
July 25th, 2007
Coombs grew up four houses down from me. A runty high-school dropout with tousled blond hair and a sharp Adam’s apple, he has, I believe, some sort of undiagnosed Tourette’s Syndrome, but he’s too poor, simple, and uncaring to do anything about it. (Until the last twenty out of a million years of our human history, our “neurological disorders” were simply our personalities.) Coombs is inclined to violence and has a variety of tics. He claps, hops, and hoots. He screeches, coughs, barks, spits, grunts, gurgles, clacks, hisses, whistles, whoops, give you the finger, wants to arm-wrestle you (he’s very strong), and finishes your sentences in a ghostly mumble that makes it seem for a moment as if he is reading your mind. I remember him in his baby carriage. I remember him catching me on the way to school one morning and showing me an Irish setter that had hung itself by jumping, still hooked to its leash, over a brick wall. Here he is at ten years old drinking from a bottle of Ten High bourbon on the couch in a ramshackle gas-and-chicken smelling house piled high with furniture and trash, his mother in her muumuu glued to the TV. As I recall, he began smoking pot in second grade. Marijuana ameliorates his symptoms, turns his jerking and swearing into squirming, giggling, blank stares, and occasionally pithy observations such as “Why do people have hair?”
July 19th, 2007
All the while our dog Rusty took almost as many hours of reading and writing lessons as I did. He lay beside us listening or nuzzled our laps as Sandra and I studied, his tongue dripping on the page. Yet he never learned even the first letter. I tried briefer experiments with the cow, the billy goat, a pet raccoon, and a rabbit, with the same results. This did not fool me into supposing that animals are dumb, for I had seen all of them do amazing things; it merely convinced me that reading and writing must be our own best tricks. We couldn’t run as fast or jump as high, couldn’t hole up all winter underground, couldn’t make honey from flowers or dams out of sticks, couldn’t fly like birds or swim like fish, couldn’t do a thousand fabulous things the other animals could do; but we could read, we could write, we could name everything under the sun.
July 19th, 2007
For as far back as I can remember, I’ve never doubted that I’m an animal, just one more curious, hungry creature alongside all the others. I’ve always understood that my flesh is made from other flesh. On or farm we ate chickens that had scratched in the yard and pheasants that once lay on the kitchen counter wrapped in their shining feathers like a coat of stars. We ate potatoes we had dug from the ground like soft brown stones. We drank milk from a cow whose flanks felt warm against our cheeks in the winter barn. Because we buried rabbits and turtles and goats, I’ve known from an early age that I will die. Unlike my father, I admit to having been well and truly lost, in cities and suburbs as well as wilderness. Instead of panicking, I try to welcome those moments, give up chasing after distant voices, forget my destination, be still, and discover where I am.
July 19th, 2007
But something has gone wrong. I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You’re young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But, here I am hanging out with 80 year olds who don’t feel all that old to me. And here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you’re an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we’re supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted. Only the end remains fixed.
The truth is that I don’t feel myself on a path. The truth is that I don’t know how old I am.
[source]
July 8th, 2007
The island where I live is peopled with cranks like myself. In a cedar-shake shack on a cliff - but we all live like this - is a man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk.
Wisecracks on this topic abound, as you might expect, but they are made as it were perfunctorily, and mostly by the young. For in fact, almost everyone here respects what Larry is doing, as do I, which is why I am protecting his (or her) privacy, and confusing for you the details. It could be, for instance, a pinch of sand he is teaching to talk, or a prolonged northerly, or any one of a number of waves. But it is, in fact, I assure you, a stone. It is - for I have seen it - a palm-sized oval beach cobble whose dark gray is cut by a band of white which runs around and, presumably, through it; such stones we call “wishing stones,†for reasons obscure but not, I think, unimaginable.
He keeps it on a shelf, Usually the stone lies protected by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth. Larry removes the cover for the stone’s lessons, or more accurately, I should say, for the ritual or rituals which they perform together several times a day.
No one knows what goes on at these sessions, least of all myself, for I know Larry but slightly, and that owing only to a mix-up in our mail. I assume that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. I wish him well. It is a noble work, and beats, from any angle, selling shoes.
Reports differ on precisely what he expects or wants the stone to say. I do not think he expects the stone to speak as we do, and describe for us its long life and many, or few, sensations. I think instead that he is trying to teach it to say a single word, such as “cup,†or “uncle.†For this purpose he has not, as some have seriously suggested, carved the stone a little mouth, or furnished it in any way with a pocket of air which it might then expel. Rather - and I think he is wise in this - he plans to initiate his son, who is now an infant living with Larry’s estranged wife, into the work, so that it may continue and bear fruit after his death.
July 7th, 2007
You might say the same of poetry:
you’ve sunk too much in it
to quit now, driving
good hours after bad
too much of you wound
round the wires and the hoses.
You might stop addressing
this absence beside you,
cursing through the intricate
cities, singing in high passes,
tooling down freeways,
minding the numbers,
ears pricked for oracular
tappings, limping past fields
of sullen junkers, eyeholes crawling
with nettle and goldenrod.
If you let go now, the bearings
will scream from their orbits,
the rocker arms clang in their cylinders
and the needles return to their various zeroes,
as if your hands had never clenched
this sweaty wheel.
July 7th, 2007
If he recites many teachings, but
— heedless man —
doesn’t do what they say,
like a cowherd counting the cattle of
others,
he has no share in the contemplative life.
If he recites next to nothing
but follows the Dhamma
in line with the Dhamma;
abandoning passion,
aversion, delusion;
alert,
his mind well-released,
not clinging
either here or hereafter:
he has his share in the contemplative life.
July 6th, 2007
(after George Meredith)
Here’s my bright idea for life on earth:
better management. The CEO
has lost touch with the details. I’m worth
as much, but I care; I come down here, I show
my face, I’m a real regular. A toast:
To our boys and girls in the war, grinding
through sand, to everybody here, our host
who’s mostly mist, like methane rising
from retreating ice shelves. Put me in command.
For every town, we’ll have a marching band.
For each thoroughbred, a comfortable stable;
for each worker, a place beneath the table.
A shadow over every starlit thing.
July 6th, 2007
Every so often he jumps, just to make it clear that he is essentially immobile. The jump is in some way like a heartbeat; careful observation makes it plain that the whole of the toad is a heart.
Clamped in a hunk of cold mud, the toad sinks into the winter like a mournful chrysalis. He wakes in the spring knowing that he has not changed into anything else. Dried to his depths, he is more a toad than ever. He waits in silence for the first rains.
And one fine day he heaves himself out of the pliant earth, heavy with moisture, swollen with spiteful sap, like a heart tossed onto the ground. In his sphinxlike posture there is a secret proposition of exchange, and the toad’s ugliness appalls us like a mirror.
July 4th, 2007
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