The Rake Magazine

Author: Max Ross

  • Words like Bombs

    The introduction to this week’s Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider’s forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

    "Sometimes I wonder why Americans are as afraid of poetry as they are of al-Qaeda. Screw the ones who’ve decided that poetry’s an effete enterprise. Let ‘em party with the homophobes. It’s the others who concern me, the folks who claim they don’t get it, who think they’re too dumb to read poetry. Thing is, they’re not willing to be dumb enough. That’s their problem. If you want to get inside a poem, you need to dumb down your senses. That’s where the receptors are. You need to accept that you don’t know. Why should you know? What’s the matter with a little mystery? They think the poem’s a theorem. If they can’t solve it, if they can’t control it, then they’re afraid of it. It’s so American to want it all or nothing. If you can’t conquer it, what good is it? Americans have become so frozen with fear, they’ve lost their sense of play. It’s time to lighten up and lower our expectations. It’s time to rediscover our basic fluency. If a man’s not fluent, if he ain’t got flow, what chance does he have to converse with his soul?"

    Isn’t that kind of great?

    And now the actual poem. This week’s Poem Worth Reading is by Mohja Kahf, whose stuff I recently accidentally came across in a back issue of The Paris Review. The brief bio goes: She’s Syrian-American, and kicks the ass of any stereotype that might be affixed to her. This one’s from her latest collection, E-Mails from Scheherazad. She also has a novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, which is probably worth checking out. Bladao.

    "Hijab Scene #7"

    No, I’m not bald under the scarf
    No, I’m not from that country
    where women can’t drive cars
    No, I would not like to defect
    I’m already American
    But thank you for offering
    What else do you need to know
    relevant to my buying insurance,
    opening a bank account,
    reserving a seat on a flight?
    Yes, I speak English
    Yes, I carry explosives
    They’re called words
    And if you don’t get up
    Off your assumptions
    They’re going to blow you away

  • Warlocks Cover the Turf

    The music filled the room. Emanating from a trio of guitars, chords resonated with chords and dispersed throughout the Turf Club on Wednesday night, thick and palpable as the fog that periodically came out from the fog machines. Steady percussion from bass and drums crept under the noise to make it danceable (or at least head-nod-able). Though many were sitting stoic at the bar or in the venue’s booths, no one could ignore it: The Warlocks were playing.

    The band is touring this summer, often in tandem with The Black Angels, to promote their latest album, Heavy Deavy Skull Lover. The release is darker than their previous outputs, but as one astute concertgoer quipped, "You don’t have to be a depressed teenager to like it."

    A sizable group of fans, most of them tattooed and/or flannel’d and/or bandanna’d, huddled near the stage, alternately swaying, grooving, and jamming. Though the vocals were somewhat blurred (intentionally), many were able to sing along with vocalist Bobby Hecksher’s lyrics.

    Hecksher himself, more so than any of the other band members, had a commanding presence on stage. It really appeared as if the music were entering him through some aural version of osmosis. Despite the loud-but-mellow tone of the group, he rocked out as if covering only the loudest of Metallica’s canon.

    At times it seemed the group was not creating music so much as creating atmosphere, because the layering of distortion and ambient quality defined each song. Yet each song demanded attention, too. The result being that The Warlocks were at once in the foreground and the background of everyone’s ears. Which is kind of a strange sensation – at a concert, one can usually either keep an interior monologue going independent of what’s on stage, or else let the music serve merely as a backdrop for conversation, as jukebox music might. But at the Turf Club, there was no escape, no reprieve. Like drinking water in a swimming pool.

    The most common description I’ve seen of their music has been, ‘neo-psychedelic.’ I’m not sure I quite know what this means, but at the same time it feels like a very apt description. The music is reminiscent of The Doors, if one were to elongate and slur every note of a given Doors song. Maybe think of a hard rock group playing as loud as they possibly can in a tunnel that produces lots of echoes, and hearing the music from outside that tunnel.

    The downside was that there was a uniform feeling to the performance. While every song was no doubt engaging, about midway through the show, it began to feel repetitive. Each piece might have started out differently – now with a drumbeat, now with a solo guitar riff – but once all the instruments were inevitably added into the mix, homogeneity took over. While The Warlocks have an incredibly distinct style, their sound from song to song remained somewhat the same.

    Nevertheless, it was an appealing show. The Warlocks kept dialogue to a minimum between songs (I think Hecksher said, "Thanks for coming out," once, and that’s it), letting the music stand for itself. And even if the set sometimes sounded like one long piece, their style is original enough that one can listen to it for a straight hour or so, and it still does really seem fresh – most bands can’t keep that up for more than four minutes.

  • Borges on Bloom

    The introduction to this week’s Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider’s forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

    "Sometimes I wonder why Americans are as afraid of poetry as they are of al-Qaeda. Screw the ones who’ve decided that poetry’s an effete enterprise. Let ‘em party with the homophobes. It’s the others who concern me, the folks who claim they don’t get it, who think they’re too dumb to read poetry. Thing is, they’re not willing to be dumb enough. That’s their problem. If you want to get inside a poem, you need to dumb down your senses. That’s where the receptors are. You need to accept that you don’t know. Why should you know? What’s the matter with a little mystery? They think the poem’s a theorem. If they can’t solve it, if they can’t control it, then they’re afraid of it. It’s so American to want it all or nothing. If you can’t conquer it, what good is it? Americans have become so frozen with fear, they’ve lost their sense of play. It’s time to lighten up and lower our expectations. It’s time to rediscover our basic fluency. If a man’s not fluent, if he ain’t got flow, what chance does he have to converse with his soul?"

    Isn’t that kind of great?

    And now the actual poem. In honor of Bloomsday, which celebrates James Joyce’s Ulysses every June 16 (the date of the book’s action), I’m posting a piece by Jorge Luis Borges dedicated to Joyce. Here goes:

    Invocation to Joyce

    Scattered over scattered cities,
    alone and many
    we played at being that Adam
    who gave names to all living things.
    Down the long slopes of night
    that border on the dawn,
    we sought (I still remember) words
    for the moon, for death, for the morning,
    and for man’s other habits.
    We were imagism, cubism,
    the conventicles and sects
    respected now by credulous universities.
    We invented the omission of punctuation
    and capital letters,
    stanzas in the shape of a dove
    from the libraries of Alexandria.
    Ashes, the labor of our hands,
    and a burning fire our faith.
    You, all the while,
    in cities of exile,
    in that exile that was
    your detested and chosen instrument,
    the weapon of your craft,
    erected your pathless labyrinths,
    infinitesmal and infinite,
    wondrously paltry,
    more populous than history.
    We shall die without sighting
    the twofold beast or the rose
    that are the center of your maze,
    but memory holds the talismans,
    its echoes of Virgil,
    and so in the streets of night
    your splendid hells survive,
    so many of your cadences and metaphors,
    the treasures of your darkness.
    What does our cowardice matter if on this earth
    there is one brave man,
    what does sadness matter if in time past
    somebody thought himself happy,
    what does my lost generation matter,
    that dim mirror,
    if your books justify us?
    I am the others. I am those
    who have been rescued by your pains and care.
    I am those unknown to you and saved by you.

    Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni

     

  • Happy (Belated) Bloomsday!

    Last night, The University Club of St. Paul hosted their annual Bloomsday celebration, honoring James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel whose action takes place on June 16, 1904. A group of eighty or so people, primarily sexagenarian (by one superficial participant’s observations), gathered in a well-lit room.

    Aside from a fairly amazing reading of Molly’s soliloquy (by Molly Culligan, who could play Maude in Harold and Maude if it ever needed to be re-cast), little of the evening’s events had much to do with the book itself. There were some Irish folk songs, some Irish-flamenco folk songs, a reading from a contemporary book that has been compared to Ulysses, and then some poems about Joyce and his tome.

    At first I thought this was a little strange — shouldn’t a holiday about Ulysses focus its festivities on the text? But then I was all like, Nah — that would probably be kind of boring, or at least predictable. I assume that everyone who celebrates Bloomsday has read Ulysses (who else would possibly care?) and maybe wants something separate from analyses and praises of the book.

    In Dublin they do these sort of scavenger hunts, where people follow the paths of Leopold Bloom and/or Stephen Dedalus — the novel’s principal characters — throughout the city, but that can’t really be replicated in the Twin Cities, despite St. Paul’s deep Irish roots.

    So then I thought about Bloomsday’s temporal proximity to Father’s Day, and how maybe it should or could be a sort of anti-Father’s Day. One of Ulysses‘s central themes is about the disowning of one’s dad; Stephen is constantly trying to sever his ties with his father, while in a very morbid sense Bloom has been disowned by his son, who died. In The New Bloomsday Book — a wonderful paraphrase of Ulysses for any first-time reader — Harry Blamires describes what happens in the "Circe" episode: "Stephen runs away from his destiny. He flees the Pater, whether God, fatherland, Simon [his dad], home, Bloom, in his pursuit of freedom. Hunted, he gives the hunting cry, and Simon Dedalus swoops down on him like a buzzard."

    Declan Kiberd adds to this in his introduction to Penguin’s Annotated Student Edition of Ulysses, "The revolt of the son is never the cliché-rebellion against a tyrannical parent, but the more complex revolt against the refusal or inability of an ineffectual father to provide any lead at all."

    Maybe for Bloomsday, all sons (and daughters) could run around with leashes padlocked around their necks, though no one holding the leash. All the fathers (and mothers) could have the keys to the padlocks … and then lose them (another theme of the book is of lost keys/access/acceptance/etc). The day could be spent trying to wriggle out of our respective collars, probably to no avail. Just a thought.

    That was the first part of the post. Now comes the second part.

    As mentioned above, the crowd at The University Club was kind of small and kind of old. While no doubt there are some tight-jean’d hipsters out there reading Ulysses so they can say they read it, it’s a little sad to me that the book’s following seems to be dwindling.

    I’m not sure if it’s critics, or professors, or what, but there’s definitely a stigma about the novel that suggests it’s impenetrable. Ulysses is kind of like the stone that held Excalibur — we are told and believe that something invaluable and amazing exists therein, but it’s simultaneously insinuated that, for the commoner, extracting that value is damn near impossible. There are a lot of potential readers, I think, who won’t approach the book because they think it’s inaccessible. In fact this might be the fault, or intention, of Joyce himself, who declared that his book was written as a kind of practical joke to keep critics busy for a hundred years.

    Which is why it was so refreshing to come across this passage written by Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, etc) in his book ReJoyce:

    My book does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce’s work but has been scared off by the professors. The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce’s big joke; the profundities are always expressed in good round Dublin terms; Joyce’s heroes are humble men. If ever there was a writer for the people, Joyce was that writer.

    And really, the entire novel supports this thesis. While much of the prose is intentionally difficult and obfuscated, the dialogue is mostly straightforward — and powerful. Joyce said that what he intended to do was take a sandblaster to the history of the novel and wipe the slate clean. Each of the eighteen episodes presents us with a literary style that is emulated, satirized, and then discarded.

    And then, finally, there is Molly’s soliloquy. It is Joyce’s gift to literature, the form of stream-of-consciousness writing. (Vladimir Nabokov calls it "Stepping Stones of consciousness" because he doesn’t believe it’s an actual stream — he argues that people think in images as well as words, and because there are no actual images in Ulysses, it cannot be the complete flow.)

    Molly, Bloom’s adulterous wife, is vulgar, simple, indulgent, human. And we get to see her thoughts and emotions from inside her skull. The lack of punctuation is dizzying, but as for the actual words, there’s nothing difficult about Molly’s internal monologue. Once you sync your own brain to hers — which happens pretty naturally — you can easily understand her thoughts. Of Bloom, for example, she thinks, "he never goes to church mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes."

    The rest of the book is necessary — it prepares us for the soliloquy, which might not have the same revelatory power without the slog it takes to get there. Nevertheless, Molly and the other characters, through their actual words and thoughts, transmit enough revelations — in mostly plain English — that really anyone can grasp the power of Ulysses. So, hopefully next year there will be some fresh faces at Bloomsday.

  • Are All Critics Obsolete?

    Steadily as the American dollar, the value of informed opinions is decreasing. As information becomes ever more accessible and democratized, thanks to the likes of Google and Wikipedia and Things White People Like, the necessity for critics — previously our cultural gatekeepers — seems to be vanishing. Whether it’s food, music, or movies, the corresponding critics are getting laid of left and right from their respective publications. Much of the problem, as Jeremy Iggers and others note, stems from the declining budgets of print newspapers. But (as Iggers also explains), this trend may be equally due to the ubiquitous opining of the blogosphere.

    The same thing, of course, is happening in the literary world. The following is a missive from the National Books Critics Circle:

    At the Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Dallas Morning News, The Sun Sentinel, The New Mexican, The Village Voice, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and dozens upon dozens of other papers, book coverage has been cut back or slashed all together, moved, winnowed, filled with more wire copy, or generally been treated as expendable.

    There seems to be a definite difference, though, between the demise of the literary critic and critics of other media. Namely, book reviewers see their fate as being tied more closely to their subject. While the sorry state of print newspapers isn’t helping their cause, nor the sexy snarky opining of clever online commentators, the real problem might stem from within the practice itself.

    "Even if you think critics are parasites," said Louis Bayard in an article for Salon a couple weeks ago, "you have to acknowledge they can only survive when their host organisms thrive… If we want to bring the critic back to life, we first have to resuscitate the novelist."

    The corresponding argument for restaurant reviewers would be preposterous: Food critics are dying off because food isn’t relevant anymore. Meanwhile, though Clay Aiken rules the radio and ‘Meet the Zohan’ is on the big screens, the independent communities in film and music still seem to be thriving. If anything, the emergence of the Internet has only made the musical climate more diverse and interesting, providing heaps of content for reviewers. Whereas the alternatives to Stephen King (as Bayard would have it) are becoming ever scarcer.

    I take issue with the idea that the novel is irrelevant. Ignored, sure. But there are still some incredibly moving books and stories published each year. The question that’s raised, though, is what is the aim of criticism? And are their bloggers that do actually achieve this aim, thus rendering the prose pros (boo…) obsolete?

    For me, the most satisfying reviews are the ones that throw light on a novel’s context, and show me how it’s supposed to be read. I trust critics to be smarter than me, and to have the ability to place a given book in its correct context, which I might otherwise miss.

    In their essay "The Hype Cycle," the editors of N + 1 avow that there is not necessarily a set medium for criticism, but a set of rules. "Real criticism can take the form of a monograph, or a long review, or just a few words mumbled to a friend," they say. "In any case, it judges art with reference to the work’s internal logic and generic and historical situation." They go on (in other articles) to say that though strong examples may be found in blogs and on Amazon reviews, for the most part the emergence of these media have cheapened criticism.

    Certainly there are some professional critics who satisfy the common criteria for reviews. Robert Pinsky’s write-up of Kathryn Harrison’s While They Slept, which appeared in this week’s NYTBR, gives us a precise idea of how to understand the book we’re about to read:

    The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling…Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. Mythology and literature (and their descendant, the Freudian talking cure) manifest a profound hunger for narrating what is called, paradoxically, the unspeakable. Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator’s guilt. When Oedipus appears with bleeding eye-sockets, the tragic chorus simultaneously narrates and says it cannot speak; it looks while saying it must look away.

    Having read the review, there is no way to consider the actual book without keeping this in mind.

    But mostly there seem to be sloppy reviews that substitute analysis for opinion. The following is another review from last Sunday’s NYTBR, this one by Lucy Ellman, concerning Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff.

    What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.

    So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode.

    Though I’m inclined to agree with her on all points, I’m not sure a book review is the platform. Throughout, she has as many problems with what ‘Snuff’ stands for as with the book itself.

    Others substitute analysis for plot description, like Rachel Blount’s review of Charles Leerhsen’s Crazy Good in this Sunday’s Star Tribune. The most illuminating aspect of her critique is when she tells us that this book follows the Seabiscuit model. Otherwise, it’s 98 percent synopsis.

    Ellen Emry Heltzel’s review of The Garden of Last Days, also in the Strib, fares little better. At first there is promise, as Heltzel tells us it’s "Dubus’ empathy for his characters" that make the book so titillating. Maybe she’ll explain his technique, why it’s so. Instead we just get a description of what happens.

    I do agree that literary criticism is ailing, and not necessarily at the hands of bloggers or dying print dailies. To say that irrelevant models breed irrelevant reviews is one thing, but to me there seems also to be a lack of discipline on the critic’s end.

    Maybe Norman Mailer put it best. "Critics were my judgmental peers," he said in an interview that appeared in The Paris Review last summer. "It was more exciting to meet [critics] than to meet most movie stars…you wanted their respect, and feared their disapproval. At the same time, as you grew and developed, you didn’t feel inferior to them…That was a nice moment. We don’
    t have it anymore. Those critics have all passed away. There’s no one to replace them that I can see."

  • Not actually an actual poem, per se

    The introduction to this week’s Poem Worth Reading is taken from Bart Schneider’s forthcoming novel, the highly Minneapolized The Man in the Blizzard:

    "Sometimes I wonder why Americans are as afraid of poetry as they are of al-Qaeda. Screw the ones who’ve decided that poetry’s an effete enterprise. Let ‘em party with the homophobes. It’s the others who concern me, the folks who claim they don’t get it, who think they’re too dumb to read poetry. Thing is, they’re not willing to be dumb enough. That’s their problem. If you want to get inside a poem, you need to dumb down your senses. That’s where the receptors are. You need to accept that you don’t know. Why should you know? What’s the matter with a little mystery? They think the poem’s a theorem. If they can’t solve it, if they can’t control it, then they’re afraid of it. It’s so American to want it all or nothing. If you can’t conquer it, what good is it? Americans have become so frozen with fear, they’ve lost their sense of play. It’s time to lighten up and lower our expectations. It’s time to rediscover our basic fluency. If a man’s not fluent, if he ain’t got flow, what chance does he have to converse with his soul?"

    Isn’t that kind of great?

    And now the actual poem. Or actually, this week it’s not an actual poem. Rather, this is a segment from the beginning of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, whose language and progression I found to be somewhat poetic. Originally it was in paragraph form, but it broke down fairly easily into stanzas.

    "The Seniors in St. Jude"

    Nobody laughed at seniors in St. Jude.

    Whole economies, whole cohorts, depended on them.
    The installers and maintainers of home security systems,
    The wielders of feather dusters and complicated vacuums,
    The actuaries and fund managers, the brokers and tellers
    The sellers of sphagnum moss and nonfat cottage cheese and nonalcoholic beer
    And aluminum stools for sitting in the bathtub with

    The suppliers of chicken cordon bleu or veal Parmesan
    And salad and dessert in a fluorescently lit function room at $13.95 a head for Saturday night bridge clubs

    The sitters who knitted while their charges dozed under afghans,
    The muscular LPNs who changed diapers in the night,
    The social workers who recommended the hiring of the LPNs,
    The statisticians who collated data on prostate cancer and memory and aging,
    The orthopedists and cardiologists and oncologists and their nurses
    Receptionists and bloodworkers,
    The pharmacists and opticians,
    The performers of routine maintenance on American-made sedans with inconceivably low odometer readings

    The blue-uniformed carriers of Colonial-handicrafts catalogues and pension checks,
    The bookers of tours and cruises and flights to Florida,
    The projectionists of PG-rated movies at theaters with Twilight Specials,
    The drafters of wills and the executors of irrevocable trusts,
    The radio patrolmen who responded to home-security false alarms and wrote tickets for violating minimum-speed postings on expressways,

    The elected state officials who resisted property-tax reassessment,
    The elected national representatives who kept the entitlements flowing

    The clergy who moved down corridors saying prayers at bedsides,
    The embalmers and cremators,
    The organists and florists,
    The drivers of ambulances and hearses,
    The engravers of marble markers

    and the operators of gas-powered Weed Whackers who swept across the cemeteries in their pollen masks and protective goggles and who once in a long while suffered third degree burns over half their bodies when the motors strapped to their backs caught fire.

  • Read Your Heart Out

    I still can’t say whether the act of reading is more exit or entrance. Even as books and criticism concern about half of my professional life – and my professional life concerns about half of my life-life (er, carry the one…) – when I’m reading a novel, assigned or otherwise, I still feel like I’m avoiding something else that’s probably more important.

    In "Jumbo Lit," an essay in this week’s NYTBR, Joe Queenan writes about how he lets his house and car and basically his existence deteriorate if he’s in the middle of a book.

    I was 1083 pages into Robert Musil’s majestic novel "The Man Without Qualities" when my wife burst into the living room and said that my 1991 Toyota Previa was leaking oil. The Previa is a fantastic vehicle, requiring virtually no upkeep, but "The Man Without Qualities" is even more fantastic…for at least four years I’d been having trouble with the van… but I’d never taken care of these problems because I’d rather lie on the couch reading gargantuan books.

    Definitely dishes and laundry have piled up for weeks as I’ve powered through Chris Adrian’s "The Children’s Hospital" or Proust’s "In Remembrance of Things Past." A few times I’ve even tried Musil’s tome, but haven’t yet made it past the first hundred pages or so. (Usually it takes me a few tries – sometimes spread out over a number of years – before making it through an epic, kind of like kick-starting a motorcycle before taking it cross-country.)

    What I’m more concerned with than the household avoidances, though, are the emotional ones. Looking back at some of the books that have had the biggest impact on me, I can relate them to some fairly tumultuous experiences. I read "Anna Karenina" during a particularly bad break-up; Eggers’ "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and Safran Foer’s "Everything is Illuminated" came out around the time of my parents’ divorce. I have to consider that the investment of my external sentiments into these books is the reason from my strong associations with them – not their literary merit. And there’s an element of escapism here. My most vivid memories of reading while growing up are those times that, for whatever reason, my then-ten-year-old sister got into shouting/door slamming matches with my parents. (Family CandyLand matches often ended with a thrown board.) I would close my door and turn out the lights, clip my book lamp onto the back cover, and enter the anthropomorphic world Brian Jacques conjured for his "Redwall" series – and these books definitely constituted the beginning bookwormishness.

    I’m reminded of a scene from "High Fidelity" (the movie version) when John Cusack is autobiographically organizing his record collection. "To find Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’ album, you have to know that I bought it just to impress a girl when I was in ninth grade, in 1978." (Okay that was a pretty gross misquotation, but the point is still there.) Our impressions of artworks are probably pretty vastly informed by what’s going on in our lives at the time of encounter. So while everyone may be able to ‘connect’ with a given story, it (a story) can really exist only on an individual level. An unopened book is kind of like a foreign, unvisited country – I know New Zealand exists, and that several million people have had meaningful experiences there, but it doesn’t mean much to me because I haven’t been.

    And yet I can’t discount the feelings these crucial books stirred up – and intended to stir up. Scott Turow calls "Anna Karenina" "The fullest rendering I know of the complexity of human motivation." There was a ‘connection,’ and not just the distant observance of a story unfolding before me, as might have happened had I picked up "The Da Vinci Code" instead.

    In Papercuts last week, Gregory Cowles asked readers to list off their favorite ‘novels for heartbreak.’ There are thirty or so respondents with fifty or so suggestions, many of them detailed and desperate. Maybe something therapeutic actually takes place when intertwining your emotions with a book. Maybe reading is a healthy way to cope with (not just avoid) one’s problems. Maybe reading isn’t a question of entering or escaping life, but is simply an advisable, vitaminlike supplement to it.

  • Stephen King's "Inferno"

    In the last decade or so, Stephen King has been winning praise from institutions that, if not reviling him, had at least brushed him off as a not-so-serious author. Lisey’s Story and Duma Key, his last two novels, received overwhelmingly positive criticism from The New York Times and other reviews; in 2003 he was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters; he was selected to edit the 2007 Best American Short Stories anthology (a post reserved for ‘serious’ authors, like Lorrie Moore and John Updike); and probably most importantly, his own fiction has been appearing in some of the most prestigious literary magazines in circulation.

    But in practice, at least in the short form, King’s recent work has been sloppy. "Ayana," which appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of The Paris Review, is a watered-down version of Chris Adrian’s brilliant "A Better Angel" or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." King’s somewhat longer piece, "A Very Tight Place," which appears in the current issue of McSweeney’s, is rife with narrative clichés, has an incredibly contrived plot (which one would think to be his strength), the narration is inconsistent, and the characters are the literary equivalent of stick figures.

    "A Very Tight Place" concerns two men – the half-bulimic, dandruff-ridden Curtis Johnson, and his cancerous neighbor Tim Grunwald, AKA The Motherfucker, or TMF. For the most part, with a couple unnecessary deviations, we follow Johnson’s point of view, and he recounts for us the bitter history between them. The two are duking it out in court over a seaside piece of real estate that both supposedly bought from a senile, now-dead third neighbor. When TMF installs an electric fence on his property that kills Johnson’s Lowchen, Johnson reacts by springing another lawsuit on TMF – seeking damages of $1,200, the price of the dog.

    For TMF this is the last straw. "Yes, the Motherfucker had fallen on hard times. Hard cheese on Tony, as Evelyn Waugh might have said." As we’re told, TMF was abandoned by his wife, struck with cancer, and now the only solace in his life is his hot tub.

    So he lures Johnson out to an abandoned condominium development, locks him in a Port-O-Sans, tips the Port-O-Sans over, and then leaves Johnson for dead amidst the drooling urine and fecal matter.

    Throughout, King describes his characters’ thoughts and actions almost exclusively in the most mundane, commonplace terms. When Johnson leaves his cell phone at home, he is "off the grid." As he mourns his lost dog, he has "to get his head back in the game." When he hits his head against the Port-O-Sans, "he saw stars." (Though the first two may be attributed to the close-third-person narration, the last one can only have come from an omniscient narrator, i.e. King.) This is lazy writing intended, frankly, for lazy readers. It’s like spoon-feeding Gerber bananas to a grown-up – we know what these phrases taste like, what they’re supposed to mean; and in this form they’re made for easy digestion, and aren’t nearly as impressive as something a top chef might whip up.

    The narrative clichés are trumped only by the spoken ones. "Do you feel lucky, punk?" TMF asks Johnson. Later on, having tipped over the Port-O-Sans, he exclaims, "He shoots, he scores!"

    The upside is that, like much of King’s work, this is easy to follow, and kind of irresistible. So when TMF says, "But now you’re in my power, as they say," it’s as if King himself is speaking. At times it even seems King is trying to make a statement about clichés, as TMF loses his phrases a couple times. "Snug as a bug in a whatever," he stutters, as if acknowledging the pointless nature of his own words. But then, the use of formulaic language is so widespread, it becomes the story’s foundation, not just a clever theme.

    This is all the more disappointing when King does conjure some original similes, as when a condo unit is compared to "Dandelions popping up on an indifferently maintained lawn." He could, though, just as well be talking about the infestation of stock phrases within this very story.

    Once Curtis is locked in the Port-O-Sans, the "A Very Tight Place" becomes a loose interpretation of Dante’s Inferno. Several comparisons to the afterlife ensue, as the tank is called "cockroach heaven," and from below, Johnson regards the toilet hole above him as "the overworld." And just as Dante escapes hell by climbing out through its most treacherous spot, Johnson escapes the Port-O-Sans through its asshole, or bottom – where the shit is, at least.

    Except that Dante’s journey through hell is an allegory for his personal struggles with depression, whereas Johnson’s revelation upon escaping the toilet is the made-for-TV line, "I was locked in the shithouse already and didn’t even know it."

    There is no subtlety here, no epiphany. (Not that every story needs an epiphany. But it seems King is angling for one.) Furthermore, it becomes apparent Johnson might actually deserve what he’s getting. The electric fence that killed his dog was ten feet inside TMF’s property line. Also, Johnson admits to hoodwinking the senile man out of his property, while TMF paid a fairer price. Not to mention, he’s leveling lawsuit after lawsuit against an old man (TMF) who has lung cancer. We sympathize with Johnson only because we’re (mostly) seeing things from his perspective, and because something bad is happening to him. But the guy has no redeeming qualities of his own accord. The revelation "I was locked in the shithouse already" holds no seed of self-realization that he might actually be a bad person. "Tight Place" might have been a much more interesting – and more powerful – story had King left Johnson in the shitter.

    Predictably, though, he doesn’t. Maybe the most disappointing aspect of the narrative is the plot. Though King employs typical deftness and suspense in getting Johnson into the Port-O-Sans, there’s never really a question of whether he’ll escape or not. Several times it’s pointed out that the compartment’s walls and ceiling have been reinforced with sheet metal, making them impossible to penetrate. But because we’re (usually) inside Johnson’s head, once he’s trapped, we behave as if we are trapped, too. It should take about one minute for the reader to think, "the bottom"; King waits fourteen pages – which in the story is about fourteen hours – before allowing Johnson to have this thought. I’m reminded of watching The Village, M. Night Shyamalan’s fourth major movie, and knowing there was going to be a twist at the end, because the pattern had already been established in his previous films. Even if you can’t figure out what that twist is, just knowing it’s there – seeing the skeleton of the structure, the drywall beneath
    the faux brick – dispels whatever magic there might have been.

    One of Chekhov’s famous dictums on writing is that there are no new stories, only new relationships. To have new relationships, one must have full characters. TMF is supposed to be deep because he’s lost everything dear to him, and has cancer on top of that. Johnson is supposedly fleshed out because he has dandruff, induces himself to vomit for vaguely metaphysical reasons, and is gay. (Really I can’t figure out why King chose to make Johnson homosexual, except as a means to make TMF – who uses epithets like "All gay people are lazy. It’s been scientifically proven" – more evil. Or maybe because having a gay character is literary. Otherwise, within this story, it has nothing whatsoever to do with his existence.) This strikes one as Insta-Depth, especially as these characteristics all evaporate once the plot kicks into gear – personality and backstory become negligible. In the end, when Johnson confronts TMF after escaping, TMF is more concerned about having been bested by his neighbor (plot) than about his woeful life (character). The relationship, then, plays on the old standard of hostile neighbors, and offers nothing new.

    Stories don’t have to be ‘serious’ to be legitimate. Cujo is one of the most gripping, un-put-downable novels ever written, not to mention the hundreds of millions of other compelling, suspenseful tales King has penned. And he has other narrative fortes – his ability simply to move a story forward could very well be unparalleled by any other writer, living or otherwise.

    But if he wants his ‘serious’ reputation to grow – which his references to Waugh and Dante, and the placement of his work in literary magazines, suggest he does – he’s got some renovation to do. Right now it seems King’s being applauded just for making the effort. And that’s totally cool – the effort is noble, and undertaken in earnest. And if he succeeds, it would be tantamount to the Americans winning a World Cup championship in soccer – millions of new fans might be turned onto something they’d never before considered viewing (in King’s case, heavy-hitting, personally affecting literature). And like the American soccer team, one might watch (read) hopefully, and even be encouraged by intermittent periods of creativity and cohesion, but in the end there’s still disappointment.

    (header illustration from here)

  • Max Ross: Published Poet

    Welcome to a possibly special edition of Poem Worth Reading. The very title of this Cracking Spines segment — that is, Poem Worth Reading — is jeopardized with today’s entry. But because this is a blog, and should thereby not be held to any qualitative standards (self-imposed or otherwise), and because I got the go-ahead from my editor, who said I could post "basically anything…," I’ve decided to go ahead and put up some of my own scribblings. I figure it’s Memorial Day, so maybe there’s less readership, anyway.

    The back-story (feel free to skip): My grandparents own a cabin not far from the Twin Cities, and I was up there this weekend to celebrate the holiday, incidentally by myself (there was leftover pizza, there was beer, there was NBA basketball [if you know my family, you know they don’t know what a tent is, let alone a cabin…yes there’s cable here, but I don’t have it in my regular home, and that’s how I justify watching it]).

    On Sunday, at about five o’clock in the evening, my aunt called, waking me up from my nap. Naturally I was pissed. She said thunderstorms were headed my way. Though normally rain has a soporific effect on me, the ringer of the cabin phone is kind of like a dog whistle for humans, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I said, “Screw it” — sadly, I said it out loud — and went out onto the screened-in porch to watch the gathering storm.

    I may appreciate a poem from time to time, but I don’t write ‘em. Nevertheless, immersed as deeply in the woods as a member of my family can hope to get (there’s no Wi-Fi here, at least, and my cell phone is on ‘roam’), watching the boats on the lake return in unison to their docks, then watching the rain fall from a strangely low sky, I realized there was a pen in front of me, and a blank piece of paper.

    "Haikus," I thought (thankfully silently). I don’t mean to take anything away from the Japanese poets that have mastered brevity, nor imply that my haikus are as meaningful or worthwhile as theirs (sadly, a couple of mine tend toward Yoda-esque syntax and conjugation). But let’s face it: As far as poetry goes, the haiku is a fairly accessible form — concise, quick-striking, sometimes poignant. They’re kind of like puns (except sometimes poignant). So really, though Freud may say otherwise, the ultimate goal of this post isn’t necessarily to get more exposure for my writing and launch a new career. Rather, I hope it’s a sort of call-to-arms for all the would-be poets out there, too intimidated by meter and rhyme to grab their journals and head for their various solitudes.

    And I invite all you fearless readers (I really do love puns) to post your own haikus in the ‘comments’ section. (Though please refrain from the likes of "Max Ross: Egomaniac/ where’s Whitman? Or Eliot?/They’re better than you" and so on. Unless you have one that’s really, really good.)

    Also, for those interested, I found the header illustration here.

    So here goes:

    Fat green leaves beaten
    by rain. I’d have picked them from
    their twigs, anyway

    At least the pontoon
    has a canopy. Thank God
    our boat won’t get wet.

    In grade school I learned
    to make rain sounds with clapped hands;
    microwaved popcorn.

    Glass door is open,
    screen door is shut; sound of rain –
    but no rain – enters.

    Something literary
    about rain: its ambition
    to rise back up

    Polaroid lightning
    to remember later how
    hard it really rained.

    I stand here wearing
    my grandfather’s sweatpants, and
    write about the storm.

  • Annihilating a Collective Memory

    "Hitler believed modernists
    couldn’t see color as it was in nature, or humans as they were in
    life," remarks one of the scholars interviewed in The Rape of Europa
    —     a documentary on the artistic pillaging perpetrated by the Nazi
    army during World War II. "He viewed this as a racial deficiency."

    And with that, we learn yet
    another aspect of the Führer’s demented psychological make-up, thoroughly
    extrapolated over the two-hour course of this captivating film. Religion,
    race, politics, and apparently artistic leanings – Hitler was thorough
    in his prejudices. And with art, just as with all his other biases,
    his distastes seem to stem from his own insecurities.

    In 1907, an eighteen-year-old
    Adolf Hitler was rejected from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. The
    film would have it that this occurrence was the seed for his misanthropic
    leanings: "Many of the members of the academy were Jewish," we’re
    told, and it’s suggested that this may have fueled his resentment
    later on. Perhaps it’s a tad over-speculative, but nevertheless one
    wonders what path young Hitler might have taken had he been admitted
    to the school.

    More disturbing (and convincing)
    than the film’s psychoanalytic probing into Hitler’s iniquity is
    its analysis of raw data and records. We see the dictator as he composes
    a list of paintings and sculptures he wants for his collection, which
    he will eventually exhibit in a national museum of the Third Reich.
    Before raiding a given country, a team of art historians and forensic
    specialists pinpoints what masterpieces to plunder before letting the
    troops wreak their havoc. According to the film’s website, by the
    end of the war, the Nazis had looted one fifth of all the known artworks
    in Europe. (Perverse as it may be, I found myself wishing that our nation’s
    leaders had such a high regard for the fine arts.)

    In addition to dismantling
    their military and political infrastructures, Europa
    clearly depicts Hitler’s desire to dismantle nations’ cultural infrastructures,
    too. In France and Italy a certain delicacy is shown (as Hitler respected
    their traditional artists), but in Russia and most of all in Poland,
    the seizing of art is meant to symbolize the felling of an ‘impure’
    society. Decimating a population is one thing, but annihilating its
    art is tantamount to annihilating its collective memory; Hitler contrived — actually contrived — not just to destroy countries, but their
    histories as well. Cultural obliteration is usually a by-product of
    war; here it was the plan. This is exactly what made Hitler so evil,
    and The Rape of Europa for the most part does an effective job
    showing it.

    Speaking now strictly from
    a cinematic standpoint, the film endeavors to be perhaps a bit too thorough.
    While all the stories herein are captivating, they do get repetitive.
    The evacuation of Russia’s Hermitage Museum, for example, is a reiteration
    of the Louvre’s evacuation, which is shown earlier in the movie. While
    both have their tragically fascinating aspects, and both were incredibly
    important events, on screen one does not reinforce the other, but merely
    echoes it.

    Later on, the narrative strays
    when we come to Italy, and the Allies are shown to be the ones destroying
    the art in the air raids on Axis positions. In this instance, the destruction
    is     incidental, and the segment does little to prove the documentary’s
    central thesis of art appropriation being an integral part of the Nazi’s
    plot.

    Nevertheless, this meandering
    by no means detracts from the overall impact of the film. The Rape
    of Europa     is a shocking — but easily palatable — study of an
    otherwise unexplored phenomena of the Holocaust, and proves (yet again…despite
    what certain Iranian politicians might say) that we still feel the reverberations
    of World War II today.