A Year in Reading 2009

The end of the year is often a time to look back and reflect on where we've come from, particularly through the easily-digestible form of the best of list, often reminiscing over music and movies and other popular media. Book reviewer The Millions is currently doing a series called A Year in Reading, in which various notable authors discuss what books they read and enjoyed during 2009. As an author and voracious reader, it's nice to see literature represented as a still living form, and thought I'd contribute my own words on some of the books I read this year and didn't get around to rambling about the first time!

The noted reads featured Bolano's 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Wallace's Infinite Jest, Tsutsui's Paprika, and Patchen's Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (these links to my reviews). And these were pretty good too:

Death takes a holiday in Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. Imagines all the socio-political implications of death stopping in only one country, with all the emotional intensity, compassion, and whimsy available to the Portuguese master-storyteller as he passes through his eighties. I read it on the plane. Also of note is Blindness, which imagines the horror of if everyone except one old lady goes blind.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie tells the nighttime story of India, following the life of one of the fifty magically-gifted children born on the eve of Indian independence. Hailed as eastern magical realism, Rushdie's almost apocryphal tone of storytelling soon descends into the horror of real politics while never once stopping that cloying wink at the reader. While it wasn't a favorite due to Rushdie's over-pretentious use of language, this book holds a significant place in post-colonial literatures, as Rushdie's life took on the quality of his writings when a fatwa was issued for his depiction of Islam in The Satanic Verses, which I'll hopefully get a chance to read over the holidays.

I read One Man's Meat for an autobiography class and was highly impressed. This book is the accounts of the daily life of E.B. White, of both Charlotte's Web and Strunk and White Style Manual fame. White shows a masterful grasp of relating the minutiae of every day life to both complex themes and global/historical changes. Poignant and thought-provoking, this collection of non-fiction essays is highly recommended as a masterpiece of the form.

The Empire of Dreams by Giannina Braschi is a wild surreal prose-poetic ode to living in New York City as if it was caught between the urban and a land of mythic dreams. An incredible sense of language and the immediacy of the process of writing as a saving grace. Honestly I need to reread it, many many times, and you should too.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov... is just brilliant. The Devil, his shapeshifting cat, and an improbable character in a hideous checked suit and pince-nez wreck havoc in 1930's literary Moscow. At once politically intelligent, fast-paced, and absurdly comic, Bulgakov flat out nails the way literature should be written: with enough of an edge to get banned in his home country for over 40 years.

Hidden Faces is not the novel one imagines Salvador Dali could have written. Penned in a madcap week, it is mainly a story of the dissolution of the bourgeoisie way of life through WWII and the unquenchability of people's obsessive desires. Actually pretty tragic, Dali's language is often dense and abstract, while at the same time being absorbingly visual. Perhaps the most interesting is his technique of telescoping between objects and metaphors, so that the words in a description in one sentence become an emotional state in the next, a real fluidity of meaning that harks more from the interplay of dreams than the figurativeness of poetry.

I've tried reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about four or five times in the last ten years, and finally finished the whole thing this summer. While I read his latest, Inherent Vice, this summer too, it doesn't even hold a match-flame to the sprawling global epic that assured Pynchon as the master American novelist of the 20th century. All I can say is don't give up, it really is worth it. Next time around I'll read it along side Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow... but before then I should probably tackle Ulysses.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Warlock by Oakley Hall paint the double edged face of the mythic western. The first is a surreal tale of a haunted Indian ghost town, hailed as one of the most important pieces of Latin American literature by both Marquez and Borges, and features one of the most beautiful descriptions of a meteor shower. The second narrates the hard-edged failure of the cowboy to live up to his heroic image, and was Pynchon's favorite novel as a youth (and was most likely the main source inspiration for the show Deadwood). Reading these back to back was highly illuminating of why the "wild west" maintains an integral place in the American cultural imagination.

It took me a long time to get to reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, namely as I'm skeptical of reading books that consistently top best of lists. But there is a very good reason why this one does, because it is awesome! The frame story is essentially a set of nesting doll tales taking place through various genres and historical periods from the 1600s to the far future, intertwining a sense of urgency about why and how we are able to narrate our lives, and the effect these narrations can have generations hence. Though a little heavy-handed at the end, this book points to a new direction for the importance of storytelling in the future.

[Edit: For the sake of symmetry here's one absolute reading failure for the year: The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below by Jose Maria Arguedas was recommended by my Literature of the Americas teacher as an example of the function of magical realism in the Boom and took half a year to track down an affordable copy of. This book is both a portrait of a small fishing town crumbling under the approach of modernity and the journals of the author crumbling under the weight of the untenability of writing this portrait. While at first glance it looks like an interesting juxtaposition between the process of writing as intertwined with the object of writing, this book has no plot, turgid and horrifying descriptions of life, and an undercurrent of despair that at once is directly critical of the other Boom authors while driving them to reject Arguedas from literary circles. I picked up and put down this book multiple times but was unable at any point to make headway, and finally had to admit that as fraught as this book is it is no wonder the author killed himself before he finished writing it. At the same time I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years down the road I return to and decide it is a masterpiece.]

Academicia

As part of the current process of integrating my various creative works onto the Internet, I've decided to post some of the more interesting academic papers I've written over the last several years for school (backdated to when they were written, including a couple pieces of fiction, not including any work from the current semester):

Manifesting Power: Indra’s Slaying of Vṛtra as Kratophany of the Vedic Kings, 10.6.07

Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbol for Indigenous Australian Life, 11.3.07

Speaking the World: Pico della Mirandola’s Cabalism and the Languages of Science, 11.20.07

Dreams of Identity in Everett's Erasure, 11.28.07

Haunting Tradition: Ritual Failure in the Lakota Ghost Dance, 12.10.07

The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, 1.30.08

Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 2.15.08

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 4.16.08

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”, 4.24.08

The Legend of the Forbidden Treasure in Conrad’s “Nostromo”, 9.11.08

Simultaneity of Tradition in Eliot’s “The Wasteland", 10.2.08

Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville, 11.2.08

Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, 11.18.08

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 2.20.09

The Anthropological Perspective in LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, 2.22.09

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner, 4.13.09

Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere, 4.8.09

Cyberpunk and the Magical Power of Language, 4.21.09

Please feel free to cite these papers and ideas if of interest and use. I would prefer not to be plagiarized. Thanks!


A Personal Myth (fiction), 10.1.07

The Death of the Author as a Young Man (autobiographical fiction), 2.27.09


I've also gone back and updated tags for all entries on this blog and transferred the posts from my old blog True Names to here (but haven't gotten to their tags yet).

Infinite Jest vs. the Importance of the Tome

Having hurtled through "Gravity's Rainbow" earlier in the summer, I decided to continue my roll of large-scale fiction and tackle another tome that's been on my list for half a decade, Infinite Jest, a task made easier by knowing that countless others are also slogging through David Foster Wallace's masterpiece. I am currently at the halfway point, some 550 pages in, and since that's beyond the Infinite Summer reading schedule I won't say anything specific about the novel's plot and instead focus on its extreme length. One might wonder, in an age of increasingly brief and fast communications, when narratives over 140 characters are considered too long for our casual attentions, why anyone would read, let alone write, a novel as thick and dense as a dictionary, despite the quote that "the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge [has] become the highest credential for male writers." Besides smarmy erudition, what purpose could such massive stories serve?

Personally I have always been partial to these sprawling and epic books, perhaps due to reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as a child, followed by an unabridged copy of "Les Misérables" in middle school, and have recently come to feel that what Tomes (as I distinguish them as a literary form) do is allow an author to create and represent a fully realized world or reality, far beyond the ability of lesser fictions. Certainly the novel as a form was originally invented (at the end of the 19th Century) in order to represent reality as it is, ie: Realism, though it never quite did this. Even contemporary realist novels fall into the same problems of being able to present only selected facets of reality (and hence are more artificial than realist), relying on current cultural assumptions to convey what there isn't room to say about how worlds work, and preferring to deploy the quotidian and inconsequential as the most available sign of "real life," while completely neglecting to address other, larger, and just as necessary (if not more so) aspects of human existence, as if reality only happened in small towns, bars, or foreign countries. Some examples: historical/global change (Pynchon and Neal Stephenson's more tome-like works), a person's lifetime (Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest," Ellison's "The Invisible Man," Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"), Familial generations (Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"), the fantastic/mythic ("Lord of the Rings" and other fantasy series, serving as an escape (in Tolkien's sense) from being too close to events so that we can see them on a larger perspective), or the worlds hidden and horrendous that lurk just behind the ones in which we live (Delaney's "Dhalgren," Bolaño's "2666). As Roberto Bolaño suggested, though I can't find the source, the quest and the apocalypse are the two most prominent themes in American literature, and I would argue in stories in general since long before stories were written down. And it seems preposterous that one could even think to tackle these themes, much less represent a real world, in anything less than 800 or so pages. The novel on the other hand can only capture a subset, most predominately the individual (person or location). Short stories best communicate a series of events or Poe's unified effect, and flash fictions the immediacy of an event. The tome meanwhile can convey all these at once, while at the same time placing the character in a local, national, and global milieu to which they have to respond, in a world that is not just fully articulated but is itself changing alongside (and at best reflective of) the character/s. What the shorter forms dangerously lack is the ability to remind us that we live in such a total world, with all a worlds' problems, peoples, beliefs, circumstances, etc, beyond the immediacy of our easily distractable and entertainment-starved attentions. One could argue that the briefer our narratives become the less they are able to represent to us humanity and its deepest struggles on that necessary ultimate level, leaving us to forget the past beyond our last twitter or status update. If the written word has a future it is in striving to keep representing reality as it really and vastly is: all-encompassing.

So how does Infinite Jest work as a tome? It clearly encompasses a lot, but this far in I don't think it encompasses enough. The world represented is on one hand a futuristic satire of the West, where the Americas are one country, years are subsidized by corporations, and everyone is still as hung up on pleasure as they were last century. But at the same time the actual action (if there is any) is set in a tennis academy and halfway house in Boston that already feel outdated, presumably late 1990's era, leaving the represented world feeling somewhat contradictory and slapdash, as if these disparate ideas were thrown together to satisfy DFW's theme of Entertainment rather than because they formed a cohesive, realistic whole, like most other tomes I've read manage. Secondly, though the novel takes place over a period of ten years, most of the action takes place in a period of several months, the last of which is told first, so that the reader is not given that epic sense of broad-scale changes taking place over large swathes of time (we only get these events in flashbacks), but instead a flattening of event-ness, where the action focuses solely on the minutiae of everyday life, so that it reads that nothing of narrative importance is happening at all (except for in what up to this point seems a series of subplots). Third, due to this focus on the quotidian unjuxtaposed with the epic or kairotic, told from the POV of multiple quotidian characters, I am hard pressed to believe that any of these narratives add up to something. Though supposedly they do. Though I have a sinking suspicion I already figured out what in the first hundred pages. Lastly, and most relevant to Infinite Jest's infinite length is the banal, unmusical, longwindednes of its language. DFW broke the primary rule of engaging storytelling and chose to tell descriptions instead of show events occurring, which is frightfully slow to plow through in search of the moving bits. Whole pages are spent describing the structural integrity of a roof for instance, or sentences will repeat information just given a sentence before, as if DFW thought the reader too stupid or distracted to remember what he just said, most of this description seeming to serve no other purpose than to showcase the erudition of the author and/or the hyper-intelligent main protagonist (though all the other characters speak this way too). Not even to mention the colloquial use of the word "like," which is not nearly as funny or enduring as Pynchon's use of "that," for instance. And then there are the endnotes, almost a hundred pages worth, which I respect for their contribution to Ergodic literature, though in this case these notes are often even more irrelevant details, could have just been included in the text, sound faux-academic like some of the more ghastly footnotes in Danielewski's "House of Leaves," or can't even be left unread/add another perspective like the extra chapters in Cortazar's "Hopscotch," because IJ's endnotes contain actual information about what's going on in the story, often more useful information than is ever presented in the main body of the text, which just comes off as unadoringly postmodern. In fact, it seems that the first half of the book is DFW's attempt at creating this world (with how this world was created being the payoff?), while he never seems capable of just letting the created world do its thing, as if he was afraid that if he stopped tinkering the whole thing would fall apart.

One thing Infinite Jest does well is that all its diverse characters/ruminations do in fact relate to the main theme of Entertainment (though admittedly a Western upper/middle class view of entertainment). This is particularly poignant in the Marathe/ Steeply dialogues, which are my favorite sections so far and could have been a much more streamlined philosophical document or cultural critique. I could care less about privileged tennis prodigies, and only find the AA digressions interesting due to knowing people in the program (though these bits are deeply informed, they are told in an ironic/hopeless manner almost counter to the kind of spiritual prescience and egolessness necessary it seems to really tackle the issue of addiction without mocking it, which leaves me thinking its no wonder DFW erased his own map last year if this was his worldview, or a worldview he was motivated enough to write over a thousand pages on). Nevertheless, I am still curious to see what happens, to see how and if it all ties together, and hope that my perspectives on the tome's style and discontinuities are proven wrong. If not then at least I will have the satisfaction, as an ardent reader, of having gotten through it, a satisfaction like that of mountain climbers who have reached the summit of a particularly challenging peak. As a tome, at least Infinite Jest is a challenging peak, and not just another narrative molehill.

The Convergence of the Dynamo and the Virgin

I'm currently rereading, well, trying to finally finish Gravity's Rainbow, before Pynchon's newest novel comes out (a 60s noir novel Inherent Vice) and wanted to share these angles on Pynchon's trajectory and early influence:


"The larger principle of the V, the allegory of increasing death and dehumanization as the Modern world begins the downward slope of the parabola of “gravity’s rainbow,” the parable of self-destruction inscribed in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Distinctions, political and otherwise, disappear, revealing a broader concept, the V, the idea of convergence of possibility into certainty, of diversity into uniformity.

"We discover in “Entropy” the origin of Pynchon’s symbol of the V... "Henry Adams, three generations before [Callisto’s] own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stands as much for love as for power “ (280). Pynchon may have found the title for V--and the concept of the V as allegory--in Henry Adams’s Education. In the novel V, the V is embodied in a female principle of death, the Lady V. In Gravity’s Rainbow, it is the V-2 rocket.

"Pynchon also shows in “Entropy” that he has copied Henry Adams’s historical method and that his novels are “historical” in the sense that, like Adams, he rewrites history to deal with events and signs that conventional history tends to ignore.

[from allegoria paranoia on Pynchon's early short story Entropy]


"But to [Henry] Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel... Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

"[The virgin and the dynamo] were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force -- at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.

"The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to follow the track of the energy."

(This one also supports what I would call Pynchon's apocryphal use of history and culture) "Historians undertake to arrange sequences, -- called stories, or histories -- assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about."

[from The Education of Henry Adams]

The whole idea of a converging point of history seems similar to Bolano's use of the year 2666, a date set far enough in the future that the meaning of current events is like a shadow leading toward it. A similar concept is the singularity; technological, astronomical, apocalyptic, or otherwise. Pynchon's beauty is setting the horror and sublimity of any inevitable future against the possibility of that future also containing love, Adam's virgin. From Gravity's Rainbow: "The whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Throuh the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs."



[from the internet]

The Arch Nemeses

Red Arrow looked out over the Metropolis, his cape languid in the stale boardroom air. Through the dirty ninety-ninth story window he couldn’t see anyone on the street below, but he knew they were out there, the bustling crowds, the criminal element. For every happy, law-abiding citizen walking the well-lit streets there was a nefarious opposite, like a shadowy doppelganger already out stealing purses, raping, murdering, heedless of the police lounging ineffectually around the corner. What were the statistics this year? It made him shiver. Back home, in his small Michigan town, Red Arrow knew all his neighbors by name; it was enough to catch the ne’er-do-wells just to appear in a flash, your mask and gauntlets shimmering in the righteous streetlights. He didn’t know how they did it, Fox Fire, Green Scorpion, the Queen of Hearts, these big city superheroes, who were only just as human, justice chained to the costume. But that’s why, he supposed, they founded the World Superhero Registry, so that the various local crime-fighting networks and justice societies could work together, patrol all the turf, make the world a safer place for everyone.

And safe the world they did. That’s why the whole Registry was gathered here in Doktor D’s penthouse lair, to celebrate a hundredth capture, Black Arrow busting up an illegal dumping operation down in the bay. The room was decked in her colors, black and purple streamers draped over the Dok’s criminal watch charts and armory, Nix and Nostrum slow dancing like black cats or ninjas, Geist Green Scorpion, and The Eye comparing the cut of their trench coats, swapping tips on not getting caught in elevator doors. Red Arrow it seemed was the only hero not enjoying himself – maybe Black Arrow too, collapsed tipsy in the corner singing old Wobbly songs in her self-congratulation – wondering, what evil deeds are being performed in our absence tonight?

But wait, Doktor DiscorD is also discontent, scrolling through data on his Disconsole computer system as if it were about to catch fire, and then leaping up! Do you ever wonder, he captures the room, red and blue goggles especially piercing the arrow on Red Arrow’s forehead, why none of us has an arch nemesis? Everyone shifts gazes. Captain Jackson looks queasy (that fake public service motherfucker).

It’s simple really, Geist begins, the government told us not to pry into torture, piracy, or the subprime market if we wanted to get licensed… Tothian adds: I’m after Bin Laden.

Wrong answer! The Doktor, sewing his casual chaos. No one’s threatened us yet, our existence, you see? Any nemesis must be opposed to the very supernature of our being. Take these guys, for instance, these mad scientists. Wait, what’s up Dok? Everyone rushes in closer.

No, it’s just a bunch of professors and respected physicists deary, the Queen of Hearts titters. But look, they’re studying paranormal phenomena: precognition, remote viewing, telekinesis. I tell you it’s the White Visitation all over again, Darpa spending four million on “neural-signal” communications research.

Silent Talk? What’s this, some telepathic Pynchonian phantasia? Fox Fire furious behind his faux fur mask. Amazonia growls. We’re superheroes God damn it, not ghost hunters!

They’re about to turn on each other, the party collapsed to a superbrawl, when Red Arrow yells Stop! and flashes the team with a red-gelled flashlight beam – a neat trick, he’s found, the advantage to get a solid punch in, like to sock the Captain right now for that one time… but hold it! – The Doktor’s right. Listen, if they develop mind-reading soldiers, Johnny Law who can stop bullets with his bare hands… we’ll be out of business!

It’s worse than that, Doktor DiscorD dons a maniacal smile, if mankind can learn to tap into the powers of the cosmos then we will no longer have the right to call ourselves superheroes. We will be no more special than any man or woman, glitzing up in costume to perform a citizen’s arrest. We must strike first, our arch nemeses await. Who’s with me?

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Pastiche, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction. According to the ever-dubious Wikipedia, these terms often appear in relation to the writings of Thomas Pynchon, as techniques of literary postmodernism. Pynchon is heralded as a forefather of American postmodernist literature, which raises certain problems in interpreting his texts, namely that postmodernism is itself a “weasel word;” as a cultural theory or perspective it seems to have no clear or unified definition. Searching through numerous books and articles on the subject left me even more uncertain as to what postmodernism might actually mean, so I took recourse in the general opinions of my cultural milieu and cobbled together a hazy understanding from the apocryphal heart of the internet: en.wikipedia.org. Postmodernism then “tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness, or interreferentiality,” and is often characterized by a lack of belief in absolute truth along with the corollary notion that reality is therefore constructed from our perspectives and use of language . At least that’s how I took what I read.

It may seem irrelevant, or just bad scholarship, to refer to Wikipedia, postmodernism, or my own process of grappling with this material, but, I would argue as a writer attempting to learn from contemporary literature, that these are all performances of what Pynchon does in Slow Learner (as well as in the rest of his oeuvre, though we unfortunately won’t get to that) by use of the techniques mentioned in the first line of this paper. Through the engagement of his early stories’ characters, readers, and the author himself with a hodgepodge of texts, cultural references, and modes of storytelling, Pynchon creates what might best be called apocryphal or alternate realities, which in turn trouble the conventional notion that reality is absolute in favor of contemporary models of reality production.

As a literary technique, pastiche is the combining of diverse elements in a text, from styles and genres to cultural levels (such as the blending of high and low culture). We can see this pastiche of cultural levels in Pynchon’s short story The Small Rain, where the staff sergeant Rizzo “would lie in his bunk and read things like Being and Nothingness and Form and Value in Modern Poetry, scorning the westerns, sex novels, and whodunnits that his companions kept trying to lend him” (36). This placing together of various cultural references does not only serve to represent the intellectual climate of the army, but also signifies the protagonist “Lardass” Levine’s conflict in the story. Even though Levine is a “college graduate, [with the] highest IQ in the damn battalion” (33), he still finds himself attracted to artifacts and situation of low culture, as in the sex novel Swamp Wench. Pynchon illustrates this cultural conflict further by displacing the action onto a college campus, and then having Levine encounter a girl in the exact swamp-shack situation described in the pulp he’s reading, whom Levine treats with the “same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels or for the burned out but impotent good guy ranchers in a western” (50). While this attitude might come off as poor characterization, it also shows that it is the characters themselves who are pastiched together in The Small Rain, as representations of the cultural attitudes they espouse.

We see a similar use of pastiche on the walls of Dennis Flange’s room in Low-lands, “walls covered with photographs clipped out of every publication, it seemed, put out since the Depression” (67). This juxtaposition of high and low culture historical figures into a “rogues’ gallery of faded sensation fragile as tabloid paper, blurred as the common humanity of a nine-day wonder” (68), effectively flattens out modern culture into the very newspaper on which it is printed as an example of the non-hierarchical interconnectedness of the postmodernist style. In other words we are shown that reality is something that is constructed through being represented.

While Entropy continues this use of pastiche through its almost constant barrage of classical and contemporary musical allusions, this story extends the technique beyond the mention of references into the intertextual use of borrowed texts from various scientific and historical discourses. Callisto, for example, discusses the Second Law of Thermodynamics (in a third person, autodiegetic, stream of conscious monologue): “He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100% efficiency; and about the theorem of Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases” (87). By displaying this scientific discourse alongside other discourses of socio-political power (such as those of Henry Adams and Machiavelli), the character is able to find in the concept of entropy a “metaphor to apply to certain phenomena of his own world” (88), a concept made only more real when we see it played out in the party scene on the floor below. This intertextuality of “real world” dialogues in a fictional world allows the characters to engage in what we generally consider to be the world outside the text. At the same time however, these integrated texts require the reader to engage both with the real texts themselves as well as with their presentation in the story, forcing us to collude with the characters in treating the world in the story as a real world.

Pynchon seems highly aware of this interactional nature of storytelling, so much so that he has his character Dennis Flange in Low-lands muse on the very subject in relation to the telling of personal sea stories as a function of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

“It is all right to listen but not to tell stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the truth’s extent but the minute you become active you are somehow, if not violating the convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of things” (69).

This metafictional foregrounding of the art of fiction within the story itself troubles whatever illusions we might have left that reality is not something created through our uncertain observations and utterances. As Flange finds in the story, his strongly recalled memories of himself as a rogue sea-dog actively screw up his perspective as existing in a normalized suburban reality and plunge him instead into an equally real subterranean adventure. So to might we find that our engagements with and observations of our own lives and historical realities are what create the worlds we live in. Any historian is ultimately a storyteller writing from his or her own perspective.

In Under the Rose, Pynchon continues this metafictional technique by having the spy Porpentine mention that another character could have gotten his information on the state of affairs of Egypt “from any Baedeker” (115). Pynchon himself admits in the introduction to Slow Learner that Baedeker’s “guide to Egypt for 1899 was the major ‘source’ for the story” (17). This fictionalization of historical events or settings, called historigraphic metafiction , serves several purposes in the story. By presenting a wealth of historical detail, Pynchon manages to suggest an actual historical reality in the text, which is troubled by the anachronistic inclusion of the android Bongo-Shaftsbury, who, with similarly realistic description, has a “miniature electric switch, single-pole, double-throw, sewn into the skin [of his arm]” (121). This writing of a seemingly accurate historical reality from a point in the future also allows Pynchon’s characters to comment, somewhat prophetically, about the future of their own historical period. Porpentine, for instance, muses: “history was being made no longer through the virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines” (107).

This last comment of Pynchon’s on the act of writing, that history is becoming written by “man in the mass,” does indeed seem to be our current cultural reality. Anyone can edit the articles of Wikipedia, anyone can posit a definition of cultural theories like postmodernism, and anyone can tell a story. Pynchon’s apocryphal style of writing, which re-presents reality as something that we construct, suggests that this new, democratic model of writing historical or theoretical documents is perhaps more “truthful” to the way our reality is actually produced: through our engagement with texts, cultures, and our experiences of these things, new realities can be created beyond what we imagined was only possible on the pages of storybooks.


Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Postmodernism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Postmodernism (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pastiche,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Pastiche (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Metafiction,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopdia, s.v. “Historigraphic Metafiction,” http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiographic_metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)

"to wound the autumnal city"

Early thursday morning I took the train down to Virginia for various family occasions (littlest brother graduating high school, parents' 40th anniversary, father's 60th birthday, helping them pack to move to a new home). I spent most of the trip looking out the windows, listening to the new Sigur Ros and Bill Frisell albums (along with several symphonies), and reading what is now one of my favorite books, "Dhalgren" by Samuel R. Delaney. Written in the 60s it reads like a sci-fi Pynchon or Joyce, about a mid-western city where some mysterious catastrophe took place and into which people arrive, looking for freedom. Many reviews tout the book's labyrinthine incomprehensibility along with its almost shocking questioning of issues of race, gender, and sexuality, which are certainly more than enough reason for anyone to pick up this tome. What really impressed me however were the masterful use of psychogeography and the fantastic, which rarely get enough play in modern literature. The entire city in the book shifts to correspond with the characters' moods and emotions, especially with the nameless protagonist, who thinks he is going mad. This plays into the element of the fantastic, in the sense used by the critic Todorov- that a potentially un- or hyper-real situation is presented and then doubts are established in the character and readers' minds (madness, dreams, drugs, etc) as to whether the event was real or just a fault of perception. I haven't finished it yet, so I'm not sure whether he will reveal just what happened to the city (I hope he doesn't!), but combined with its stellar discussions on artistic meaning and viscerally rendered sex scenes, "Dhalgren" is one of the most enjoyable, epic, and important books I've ever read. (Ironically enough it was hated within the sci-fi community, especially by Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison...which I suppose says something about its attempt to rise out of the genre).



While sorting through boxes to make more room to pack, I came across several fun books, a bestiary by T.H. White, a novel by Lord Dunsany and another by H.G. Wells, and a collection of literary ghost stories by many of the famous sci-fi and fantasy writers that should be a scream to flip through. I also just found (via Neil Gaiman's blog), that for its 85th anniversary issue Weird Tales magazine has released a list of the 85 weirdest storytellers of the past 85 years, including not just the expected authors but a wide selection of musicians, directors, and artists as well (Delaney is on the list for "Dhalgren"). It's a goldmine for anyone interested in the outré and peculiar, especially since they set up a permanent page for readers to share their own selection of weird storytellers, which I imagine will quickly become a rather interesting resource.

Library of Unique Experiences

As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.

For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.

Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.

Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.

Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.

Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.

Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.

Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.

Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.

John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.

J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.

Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."

Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.

Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.

Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.

Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.

Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.

Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.

Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.

Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.

Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.

borderlines of the imagination

I spent most of last night getting into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon," figuring if I wanted to enjoy a tome right now I'd pick one with less current cultural prickliness than the latest Harry Potter. Once again I found myself overwhelmed, unable to stop turning pages, cast into a full world in the same way as when reading Pynchon's latest, "Against the Day." What strikes me the most about his writing is that Pynchon is an intelligent man. He has done extraordinary amounts of research in regards to the subject matter he's presenting, and in regards to just about everything else, and he knows how to weave it all into a compelling story which doesn't read like someone's narrated science manual. Furthermore he's also enough of a writer to not only understand his subjects, but to ignore all the truth of his knoweldge and make up his own sidereal histories to established persons and times, as if there were infinite number of histories, worlds to be historicized, waiting directly below this one, a Borgesian nest of worlds within worlds, each with its own sure dialects and idiosynchronicities, that can't quite be distinguished from but are certainly other than the world we live in. And there's a plot.

I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.

Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.

Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.