*Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands -João Guimarães Rosa
I think the novel itself is a form of bravery. Any novel. The poem may be truth, but the novel is good. There is so much badness in this book that I can’t explain exactly how soft it is. The place itself, the sertão, the text, is as dense as a heart. And though a heart is fragile, it is never short-lived.
A beautiful book.
“Don’t you know that one who is wholly brave, in his heart, cannot help being good, too?”
“Is God a trigger?”

*Beloved

Beloved -Toni Morrison
One of the most pure and powerful uses of language I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know in what possible way we, as humankind, are not like the love that terrorizes the characters of this novel. And yet. And yet. Sethe ends up dribbling in a rocking chair and yet she wins. She wins. She wins grace that her world isn’t ready for. Listen to her voice:
“And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.”
“Now I can. I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy.”

*Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers -Jean Genet
In the long-evening half-light of mid-American dusk, the smell of barbecue and panting dogs and summer children, sun tea cooling on the gravel driveway and mosquitoes in helices around the porchlight in the deep green unmown lawns to the slow romance of the crickets, the dandelion is sexing itself. The starfish breaks an arm to fragment a new organism. The coffee tree is autogamous. Most amazing is the aphid, which is usually parthenogenic, generationally telescoping, born with a baby in the belly, sometimes born with a baby and a grand-baby in the belly. But the aphid will still have sex, Genet is idiodioecious, and under his covers he is only a man, hard-on, mind womb wound around a semi-gendered Darling who gains the male pronoun like the blooming phallic raceme of the foxglove but sometimes slips into the deep curtsy of a little girl.
This book inspired me to research the hymen, which is only present in the following animals: llamas, guinea pigs, manatees, moles, toothed whales, chimpanzees, elephants, rats, lemurs, seals, and horses.
Besides the hot sex, it was hard for me to pay attention to this book. I let the words, though, the slick hard style of it, gloss over me. Coat me. And I marveled at a phrase, a situation, but, especially towards the end, completely lost myself to its pages.
“The swan, borne up by its mass of white feathers, cannot go to the bottom of the water to find mud, nor can Jesus sin.”
“It was a smile that was enough to damn his judges, a smile so azure that the guards themselves had an intuition of the existence of God and of the great principles of geometery.”
“He was good-looking—as are all the males in this book, powerful and lithe, and unaware of their grace.”
“like violins being skinned alive.”

*The Duino Elegies

The Duino Elegies -Rainer Maria Rilke
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror is to say that Birth is nothing but the beginning of Death. Then, ask me, ask, to what is the beginning of Death? The only medicament is Night. Oh and night: there is night... Because Light and Lovers are only masks—inadequately covering the terror. Masquerades of levity we are. And wasn’t it Goethe who said that if the world wasn’t inherently dark then we wouldn’t need light. And didn’t he also say that architecture is frozen music. What then is poetry, but unfettered dirt. Angels, chronologically, are pre-dirt. Man is post-rock. Poetry is un-rock. Music is etymologically earth-angel. Architecture, then, is to Poetry what an edifice is to marble slab. What then, Rilke, has mustered under his open window with the violin pealing along the breeze, is an unwieldy temple for metaphors (instead of vice-versa). On its altar shines a Mask to end all Masks. In which we disguise our dark souls with darkness and disappear into immortality. No, not even Women in Love can penetrate this totality, not even the Hero or Rome or Gaspara Stampa or Nietzsche or the Army of Children Crusaders can fade into the unremitting tides of eternity like Goethe’s Homunculus martyring himself to the lowest of forms, knowing in complete faith that over the millennia he will fall into the cycle of evolution and attain its highest state: a worthy lover. He died for worth. For boys drink wine, men drink port, but heroes drink brandy. Quaff, then, Ahab! Consecrate and Consanguinate! And then abandon. Complete, inexhaustible idealism. The poet is a Young Man—the only soul with the tension to withstand the bowstring, to fire the quiver into the unknown. For still stillness is worse than death. We must be, as Miller says, still as the hummingbird. For there is no place where we can remain.
You can remain in the beloved.
Restrain him.
Oh gently, gently, wash the atavistic graveyards with your soft steps, flicker away the battling phalluses like a fly on a hot day, landing to rub his feet in the sweet sweat-manna of your arms, a hot day, the glaze down your neck, flood the dried-up riverbeds with your tears of joy, with your birth-giving tears. For even lovemaking is a birth. And drown the rivers. But don’t be his mother. But don’t be his lover. And don’t hide his face.
Let it encounter all the world and be stunned forever.

…And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

*The Ladder of Divine Ascent

The Ladder of Divine Ascent -St. John Climacus (intro by Kallistos Ware)
from Ware: “the progress of eternity,” that is, “The essence of perfection consists paradoxically in the fact that we never become perfect, but advance unceasingly ‘from glory to glory’.”
and from St. John Climacus: “War against us is proof we are making war.”
“So then, keep running, brother athletes, and again I say to you, keep running… Keep running, athlete, and do not be afraid.”
“It is one and the same fire that is called that which consumes and that which illuminates.”
“By dispassion I mean a heaven of the mind within the heart.”

*The Symposium

The Symposium -Plato (translated by Christopher Gill and Desmond Lee)
2 books in a row on Love, whose parents, according to Plato, are Poverty, a drunk beggar woman, and Resource, the wily son of Invention, who conceived a child to put the Gods in order and make poets of men. I wasn’t expecting such a tipsy, homoerotic text. Nor, a sarcastic eulogy of Socrates.
“All human beings are pregnant in body and mind.”
“Yes, sexual intercourse between men and women is a kind of birth.”

*The Song of Songs

The Song of Songs -translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch

How wonderful you are, O Love,
how much sweeter
than all other pleasures!

But to try to quote from the Song is like hunting for a rabbit’s foot. Or trying to cook only a spoonful of soup. The lovers are stoked with the such desperate passion, that no matter the circumstance, the politic, or the law, they bestow on themselves and, now, thanks to the translation, on us, a profound innocence. In that split moment before tears begin to well. Before pain is translated into reaction. Or desire hits the brain. No wonder the Song flaunts such a pure animal presence. The lovers living between the heartbeats. I can see the Shulamite stealthing around the city at night. Silent, almost rolling, footsteps. The lovers collision always in the softlight of dawn. The air cold.

Hurry, my love! Run away,
my gazelle, my wild stag
on the hills of cinnamon.

*Cat Attacks

Cat Attacks -Jo Deurbrouck and Dean Miller
I can see them. Feel the unprecedented silence of the pounce. We are at complete oblivion to their eyes. And before I hear a sound the back of my neck is in the hot mouth of a lion.
The way they run, while stalking, so close to the ground, so graceful, almost rolling, and silent. I’ve never before seen an animal become a complete blur. We lock eyes. Or maybe it locks on my eyes and I paralyze. Or maybe I rip off my sunglasses to compensate for the depth of its stare, which takes in most of the canyon’s light. Don’t look away, I say to myself. Don’t look away. I start backing up and run into a bush. For one split moment I glance down, and then back up and the lion has halved the distance between us and is still as if it never moved. I unbutton my shirt with my left hand. Don’t look down. I pull it away from my body, assuming more girth. I snarl. Scream. Hoist my crosier in the air like some hellish cataclysm and the lion doesn’t even flinch. When my echo dies, the lion, without sound, takes about six lightning steps forward and stops again, now less than fifteen yards from me. Don’t look away. With my left hand I reach across my body and unbuckle the sheath to my knife. The lion takes two more steps. It’s still enough to be dead. My eyes water and the lion blurs into the camouflage of the sand. As if it could sense my slightly obscured vision, it creeps closer. Now I know it’s a male. Too big to be a female. But still, probably weighing less than my one forty-five. I unsheath my knife and again raise my crosier in the air. Without reason, during the scream, I feint forward and I see the lion tense. I feint again. Snarling and brandishing my crosier like some lunatic samurai. The lion doesn’t move. I feint and stamp the ground and slash the air with my knife and feint. The lion doesn’t move. Then it charges.
v

*The Black Book

The Black Book -Orhan Pamuk
The first hundred pages and the last forty were stellar. But the middle few hundred were very static. Lots and lots of “becoming” going on. Lots of very subtle “revelations.” Lots of time spent watching characters read and write. The last line even named writing as “the only consolation,” which is fine. I do look forward to reading one of his later books, after Pamuk himself comes to and gets over coming to writing. And great to glimpse Turkey in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So many nouns in this book. I liked too, the notion of finding Latin letters in the lines of faces.
“and that the universe is he who is seeking the mystery.”
He like Tolstoy’s lips as well: “I loved seeing how you pushed out your upper lip when you were reading, just like a character in a Tolstoy novel.”

*The Ramayana

The Ramayana (retold by Ramesh Menon)
this was a sea of love they plowed through, their chariot a ship of sorrow

“It is you who seem to have lost your reason, and tread a path of madness called Rama.”
list of animals appearing in Ramayana:
nilgai, chital, sambur, bison, leapard, tiger, krauncha bird, langur, filigree keepers, swans, tame deer, peacock, elephant, wolves, black bees, sarasa, chakravaka, geese, migrant teal, scarlet ibis, pelican, wild pig, crane, painted stork, koyal, owls, gigantic eagles, rabbits, vulture, kite, horse, squirrel, vanjaluka bird, honey bees, bear, ghandarva, kinnara, panther, monitor lizard, butterfly, firefly, scarlet-footed pigeons, mynahs, moths, boar, chameleon, duck, crocodile, cur, dolphin, whale-eating giant squid, jackal, deer called srimara and chamara, hyena, whale, sea serpent, shark, timming ala, vidyadhara, kokilas, bhringarajas, hamadryad, kitten, cobras, ants, worms, horse, and cows.
list of trees and plants appearing in Ramayana:
pipal, nyagrodha (pipal sap), kadamba, mango, aswattha, valkala (tree bark clothing), palasa, badri, yamala, bamboo, eucalyptus, early pine, sala, asvarkana, madhuka, apple, peach, pear, darbha grass, scented pala trees, karnikara, asoka, lodra flower, tilaka, sara reeds, kritamala, kumsuka flowers, patala, priyangu, punnaga, arjuna, chandana, mandara, bakula, ketaka, kusa grass, sandalwood, japaa flowers, gajapushpi vine, aguru, desdar, shimshupa, champaka, punnaga, parijata, deodar, asana, nipa, saptaparna, atimuktaka, mandara bakula, jambu, and kovidara.

“And in the heart of the forest, his spirit was opened to him: a secret, mystic bloom, thousand-petaled.”

*The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Pilgrim’s Progress -John Bunyan
I am not very well acquainted with physical violence. Sad and desperate for the arduous tasking of Christianity, of religion. Death is a presence that lives in healthy, beaming children. This life however is more than thorn. Moses scourged the pilgrim, clobbered him over and again on the head until he was pulled to safety (further thorn-tripping) by a Jesus angel. I know that I’m not a “good” writer. I know I owe penance and honor and every ounce of me to my creator, but I know too that dues have been paid, and if I, and Bunyan, and the weak and the strong and the eloquent can swallow this freedom than the terror of thorns is painless, soft-petaled. I don’t want a walk in the park. I couldn’t. Nor would I turn away a man who came into the path of righteousness but “not at the wicket gate,” who “camest hither through that same crooked lane,” and not through the path of travail, through the Slough of Despond or through the trial at Vanity Fair, or after fighting the terrible Apollyon. Is there not a path through pure beauty. If I wasn’t so measly, write it, to write it. My roommate and his girlfriend storm drunken into his room. The wall is thin and she complains, “I’m so cold.” I revile the sound of my typing that I know they can hear. These words. They’re so drunk.

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald
A beautiful way of thinking. Robert Silman, in a blurb on the front cover, says, “Stunning and strange… like a dream you want to last forever.”
I fell asleep reading this book two days ago and dreamt of strange Chinese mass suicides and woke up with a leg and an eye twitching.
Sebald transitions, often within a paragraph, from glowing herring to the history of citylights to a forgotten maritime battle to an English hurricane to a biography of Joseph Conrad. And all done seamlessly, in the logic of interest and exploration and awe, which is closer to reality (the logic, the “storyline”) than any book I have ever read.
If I were the surgeon general of the west, I would readily prescribe afternoon constitutionals with W.G. Sebald.
“It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal.”
“…but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air.”
“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow.”

*The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan
I was introduced to this text as a letdown. I scanned briefly the section on the tulip, which seemed immediately paltry and dry compared to Anna Pavor’s The Tulip. I went to a Pollan reading at Black Oak’s with the Berkeley crowd wearing sandals, hemming, healthy, and terrifically pleased with themselves to confront their two favorite topics in one setting: advocacy and organics. So I was doubtful of the seriousness of the writing, and expecting mere fasciculation of the old, pro-, hippyish themes. The book is divided into four sections, or, as Pollan puts them, Desires. He explores the idea that plants have adapted themselves to meet our desires for reasons of self-propagation, or, another way of looking at it, is that certain plants have taken advantage of our desires, have, in the same way we use plants to gratify ourselves, used us to “gratify” their own unyielding desire for life. So Johnny Appleseed wasn’t delivering healthy teeth and Red Delicious to the Midwest, it was instead eccentric evangelism and applejack that came from his makeshift canoe of seeds. Basically, bringing liquor to the thirsty. Similarly, Pollan combines anecdote and the unmystification of botany and history concerning the Tulip, Marijuana, and the Potato. He shines most clearly, or, perhaps the potato does, in the last section, explaining away the human desire for control.
“Banality depends on memory…”
“Memory is the enemy of wonder.”

*Faust

Faust, I & II -Goethe
Strange.
Part I, which I’d read before, was legible, full of action, tragic, and, indeed, dramatic. Part II was hifalutin, abstruse, very sexual, discombobulating, and wonderful. My favorite storyline (there were many) was that of Homunculus, the sarcastic incorporeal man-spirit, who accompanied Faust and Mephisto on their journey to Ancient Greece (in search of Helen of Troy), to find himself a form to inhabit. Quickly, (as went most of Part II, either quick or at an enormously poetic standstill), and with hardly any background or buildup, the little mansprit spots his ideal form in the passing sea goddess Galatea (a non-sequitur cameo), falls in love, and in a semi-onanistic climax, sacrifices himself before her to be deposited as the lowest form in the sea, where he will eventually, over millennia, evolve up the ontogenic ladder to become, or reincarnate, Galatea herself (which all takes place in about three pages). But Homunculus is only one of many sidebars. In fact, the entire “drama” of part II seems constructed exclusively of sidebars. Even Faust himself doesn’t seem to find much page space, and when he does, he usually poeticizes obscure references to ancient forms of magic or deities. But, somehow, despite, and also because of, a few hundred pages of nearly pure orgasm (greeting, courting, foreplay, even bodies barely exist in part II), it is a wonderful read. Not to mention the two philosophers, a Vulcanist and a Neptunist, arguing about the origin of a recently appeared mountain.
Concerning Part I: the story of Gretchen is one of the most gruesome and ruthless I’ve ever encountered. Yet Goethe still tells it playfully. And a misconception (my own) that has been righted: Faust initially “sold his soul” to Mephisto, not for knowledge, but for the experience of all human experience. Which, omniempiricus, is much more interesting than omniscience or omnipotence. Faust longs for the whole gambit of human experience, all the way to even the sadness of loss, and the ultimate loss: “Heap all their joys and troubles on my breast, / And thus my self to their selves’ limits to extend, / And like them perish foundering at the end.”
Faust retranslates the first line of John’s Gospel:“In the beginning was the Deed!”
Faust’s first words when he wakes up after time-traveling to ancient Greece (concerning Helen): “Where is she?”
Learned something about Goethe in the footnotes, that he supposedly hated bells.
“Freedom and life belong to that man solely / Who must reconquer them each day.”
And the last words of the play, “The Eternal-Feminine / Draws us onward.”

*Antony and Cleopatra

Antony and Cleopatra -William Shakespeare
The seminal difference between Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth lies not in their action, nor in their intention, but in their conclusions. The last we see of Lady Macbeth is when she is frantically trying to rue away her bloodstained hands,“Out, damned spot,” she begs. But, she realizes, “What’s done cannot be undone.”
Whereas Cleopatra is left, indeed, with the ultimate cleansing, self-martyrdom. Having done no irreparable wrong, she kills herself to both avoid becking to Caesar and to join her deceased lover. Both Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth are, in terms, in the end, “unsexed.” Lady Macbeth bats away her sex so that she can find the fortitude to murder. Cleopatra, on the other hand, achieves the consummation of her sex through the love and anger shared between her and Antony. The diabolical difference between LadyBeth and Cleopatra, is that Cleopatra ends life unsexed and Lady Macbeth is, in the end, resexed. When Cleopatra dies, she uses as weapon an asp. Obviously symbolic of what it took women to become women, or to become at least ashamed of being so, instead of beggaring to the temptation of the snake, this time, she (woman/Cleopatra) delivers her own coup de (grace)innocence, and seals herself forever with the mark of conscience, the, in fact, ultimate mark of purpose, suicide.
“My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me. Now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.”
and,
“I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.”
She walks away from life Cained. She leaves tattooed by the beast (purpose/potential/possibility), but, she walks upright.

Lady Macbeth, however, attempting to trump her womanity, succumbs to the beast (p/p/p, or, conscience), and is left imprisoned. Both her man, and the man in her, fail her: Macbeth cowers to a ghost and is then killed by Macduff, while she herself concedes her masculinity to tears.

Two more from Antony and Cleopatra:
“There’s beggary in love that can be reckoned.”
“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.”

*The Road

The Road -Cormac McCarthy
The Road is not a transcendent novel. It is not philosophy, fact, nor harbinger. It is not a moral or a prophesy. It is an artifact.
Could you say that a recovered amphora is transcendent?
But what relic has function?
If an amphora could tell a story then why would men tell stories?
Then what does the amphora do?
It promises.
And so does this book.
It promises of civilization. Of life. And of God.
“Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. [to his son] Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

Again, read an entire McCarthy novel in less than 24 hours. Again, sick. Again, what is the opposite of devastation?
The book started with the typical Cormac off-colored descriptions…“like some… [simile of something godly, ghastly or obscure].” And the dialogue was spitting off the skillet.
But a few times Cormac was off target with sentences like, “A blackness to hurt your ears,” which is, itself, painful, beautiful, but McCarthy stresses the prose a little too much, and adds, “with listening,” [A blackness to hurt your ears with listening] which is obvious, redundant, and, in the author’s own standards, long-winded.
“Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.”
The truncated, perhaps often truncheoned, diction of The Road was less abrasive and simpler, almost sweet, inquisitive, than what is found in even the most recent of his novels.
“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”

And as the reviewer in The Economist pointed out, we are not short of the Cormacian stylism, “The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.” But sometimes he broke out of his fashion and was dead on good, “The nights were blinding cold and casket black…” and, this cold, miniature, Melvillian chapter, addressing the reader, pointblank, “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”
This sentiment is perhaps the completion of an oeuvre. But despite the blood splattered, the insanity, and the fear of ten novels, a play and a screenplay, in both of his septuagenarian works we are left with a modicum of hope. Of promise. The finish of No Country was the story of a man who built a stone water trough that would last ten thousand years. Did it last the cataclysm that forced father and son to take to The Road? Probably. Just like the promise of the amphora will last.

And in The Road the author’s voice never felt as obvious as in moments when the writing itself was choked:
“When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”
and
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

*The History of Love

The History of Love -Nicole Krauss
As long as the lightness keeps itself light… But how does it do that? What is the pretence is to shining? Why would a dark soul even try to write a book?
By the end of the novel I was impressed. The plot complicated delightfully and resolved like the crack of a blossoming sweet pea.
What was so perplexing was the ever-present question: Can I take this book seriously?
Very far from meta-fiction, removed from slapstick, off-track of drama, oft-too-puerile for a love story, full of tricks and quips, The History of Love, unbelievably, came to itself, and what I finally gleaned from Krauss was the simple joy of writing.
It won’t keep you up nights, but, quick and charming in a great way.
“her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
“When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.”

*Monkey

Monkey –Wu Ch’Eng-En – translated by Arthur Waley
A blurb from The Nation describes the book as a “combination of picaresque novel, fairly tale, fabliau, Mickey Mouse, Davy Crocket, and Pilgrim’s Progress.” I would add to that list The Divine Comedy, The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, 1001 Arabian Nights and modern political satire. But despite the seemingly esoteric description, it is a light, breezy novel. The reader doesn’t need to know who Lao Tzu is to laugh when he pinches Monkey and tells him “Be off with you, be off with you, and don’t let me find you hanging round here [heaven] anymore.” The reader doesn’t need to have a few University years of Chinese fiction or philosophy under the belt before laughing at Monkey stuffing himself with the Jade Emperor’s peaches. Nor, even, does the reader need to be steeped in morality, for, though having early attained immortality and, we all know, on fast track for Buddhahood, Monkey still likes to crack a dragon joke before clobbering one over the head with his cudgel in “a real garlic-pounding blow that will finish him off for good and all.”
Waley’s translation flows lightly, using a vernacular that is simple, easy and inviting, and, at the same time, reminiscent of the sagacity of the veteran Boddhisatvas, many of whom make guest appearances. It is a beautiful, wild, fun story centered around a stone-born ape, aka Monkey, aka “Aware of Vacuity,” who tromps the world over in search of mischief, power, peaches, sacred texts and enlightenment. Strikingly similar to 1001 Arabian Nights in both form, wisdom, and content.
“I wonder whether a knowledge of the True Scriptures would not cause some improvement in them? Do you yourself possess those scriptures?’” asked the Bodhisattvas! ‘Yes, three baskets of them,’ said Buddha,” and the journey began…
“Tripitaka said nothing, but only pointed again and again at his own heart.”
“He who does not believe that straight is straight must guard against the wickedness of good.”
“’I will rise on my cloud-trapeze,’ said Monkey, ‘and force my way into the southern gate of Heaven. I shall not go to the Palace of the Pole and Ox, nor to the Hall of Holy Mists, but go straight up to the thirty-third heaven, and in the Trayasimstra Courtyard of the heavenly palace of Quit Grief I shall visit Lao Tzu and ask for a grain of his Nine Times Sublimated Life Restoring Elixir, and with it I shall bring the king back to life.’”
“A team of horses cannot overtake a word that has left the mouth.”

*The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses -Salman Rushdie
The short opening chapter was so elegantly written, so coherently conscious, and fresh, that I was verily disappointed that the novel extended into cutesy, half-forged post-modernism. I see how he is Pynchonesque. I see how he adopts a cultural headline, a modern trend or a big name and transplants it in a seemingly timeless style of writing. I see how people like to read “serious” fiction that mentions Goldie Hawn. What I don’t see is how Ayatollah Khomeini denounced and threatened to execute a man for such an ephemeral book. Topically, it may be profound. But even children play with big words and we don’t condemn them for their constructions, or mistakes. I can see how easily this pertinent novel could be so swept into the realm of important literature… it’s because we want it to be good, we want it to matter, we want to understand the human condition, and so when any skate comes mountebanking, we’re quick to throw down our cash. No, I didn’t finish it. Pertinence and quality are very different animals.
“How does newness come into the world? How is it born?”

*New Arabian Nights

New Arabian Nights -Robert Louis Stevenson
Wholly without the charm, wisdom, ancestry, longevity, vibrancy or wit of the “old” Arabian Nights. The pleasure mostly came from imagining Borges so enjoying them as a boy. I suppose there may be a place for these tales, resting in historical literary scholarship, obscure theses, or middle childhood.

*Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights -translated by Sir Richard F. Burton
Though the collection is incomplete (this edition contains only the “most famous and representative” tales from the entirety), the compendium outshines any expectation or foreknowledge of the stories and is choc with the marvelous wit of ancient Arabian storytelling. The stories have an underbidding theme all alike, good is good and evil is evil, Allah is all and always and man and manhood will be sundered, for without fail comes with the tail of every tale “the Destroyer of delights and Severer of societies, the Plunderer of palaces, and the Garnerer of graves.” Reminding sundry-reader that, despite diamond caches and throes of love, all is vanity of vanity, and only the story will exist for aught. The structure of each of these stories is thematically similar: a poor man happens on a souterrain of riches, he is espied by someone of evil, foul play ensues, a moon of moons of a beauty entrances one and all, a jinn sneaks out of a signet ring, the enemy is bewitched, and the hero is consummated with love and gold. Or, the reverse. Or, the inverse. But what is unique to each of these stories is the complete freedom of happenstance. A man fishing in a pond nets a monkey. A marooned sailor flies with a giant bird to freedom. A man blind in one eye runs into another blind in one eye and they run into another blind in one eye. Ali-Babba overhears an eponymous password to a storehouse of plunder. Everything and anything goes. As well with the language, in “fairest favour and formous form,” Sir Burton spares no joyance of neologism coined, alliteration aligned or rhyme rhymed. The text is bedight with proper consciousness of Shaharazad, “for interest fails in twice told tales,” and “Words cannot undo the done,” as we are gently and thematically reminded of the bookends: the murderous king and the maiden, Shaharazad’s “fictitious” fight for survival. The stories that have so obviously leaked into our culture, Aladdin, Ali-Babba and the Forty Thieves, are so much richer, more profound, and less coddling than our cartooned interpretations (as is also the case with the Grimm and Andersen tales). In the end, it is obvious that nor King nor author nor Queen is the hero. None save the stories themselves and the love of the telling will live on.

*Iphigenia among the Taurians

Iphigenia among the Taurians -Euripides
Good to be reminded of the genre. The Deus-ex-Macchina. A tale much reminiscent of Arabian Nights. Short, sweet, full of trickery, chicanery, the fear of God, brotherly love and a happy ending.

*The Orchard Keeper

The Orchard Keeper -Cormac McCarthy
Finished with his public works and ready for the upcoming novel, “The Road,” this fall. The Orchard Keeper was published in 1965 when McCarthy was only 32. Wonderful to see the lessons that he learned, not only about writing, but about life. Mostly it was unfocused, characters more ideas than characters. Wit precedenting depth. The writing was similarly esoteric, sesquipedalian, but without the punch of his later work. It is like a sword-swallower hesitating mid-throat. Which smarts, but is the only way to establish scar that will afford a lifetime in the trade. He took, in this novel, entire paragraphs to glean the beauty of the sunset when in his later works he does so in a few words and moves back to the character. Nonetheless, striking.

*At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness -H.P. Lovecraft
Never in the entire novella did H.P. Lovecraft frighten me. The build-up was incredible, almost viral, and in the end, it was all. The monsters’ origins, their habitat, their sculpture, their history, their diet, economic glitches, decline and wars and they turn out not to even be the monsters, or at least can’t be blamed for acting monstrous, and in the remaining ten pages we are given a glimpse of the long-built-up “unspeakable terror” and it’s a giant blob resembling a subway car… Well… the imagination was pointed. The language was steeped.
“What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.”
Lovecraft obviously knows all the synonyms for scary.
But what I love most of him is his name. And second most, his writing. But his allegory never struck.
“Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name—cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness.”

*Europeana

Europeana -Patrik Ourednik
At the end of Europeana Ourednik observes that, “memory is renewed wheras history removes the legitimacy of the living past by fixing it in time.” I say observes because hardly in this unique work could I say that Ourednik writes, yet, at the same time, his observations have such ringing aesthetic dignity to them that this is undoubtedly a work of art rather than a textbook or any other expository chuck at history. Ourednik has created a memorial rather than a museum, living in the flux of memory rather than the stronghold of history. His observations are so quick and poignant that they are more caustic than nauseating (MTV) and more unsettling than tedious (CNN). I compare him to television not because he resembles it, but because he comes close to what in television is possible yet rarely attained.
Ourednik attends detailed horrors and tongue-in-cheek sidebars with the same cool, glib composure, for example, “Above the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp was the sign EVERYONE GETS WHAT HE DESERVES.” A note that is read so quickly and so deeply ensconced in a two-page paragraph that it is almost glossed over. But it’s not. Rather than glossing over these thousand and one facts, it is the unpartisan details that gloss over the reader, showering us in horror and humor alike. The potency of the Buchenwald sign is given no precedence over, “And no one wanted to be poor anymore and everyone wanted to have a refrigerator and a cordless telephone and a dog and a cat and a tortoise and a vibrator and take part in sports and attend psychoanalysis.”
or,
“And young people looked toward the future and the wind ruffled the ears of corn and the sun rose on the horizon.”
And the book reads in about two maniacal hours.

*Gilead

Gilead -Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is like a circus tent that never opens its flaps. To enjoy the show you have to join the troupe. Robinson has eased her way into a language that doesn’t succeed in any translation or abridgement. You must join her circus, you must know how to juggle, or swallow fire, or funambulate to enter into this novel. You must move to the town of Gilead to understand what she is saying. You must listen to her like a mother.
Her best passages are not quotable.
To quote from this novel is to conjure.
She has built a house without a foundation and the result is more solid and skyscraping than any series of I-beams or cement crews could muster.
The tendentious motives of many great writers is to work within a book so that they may succeed in erupting out of the book, into the “real” world. The great writers want to achieve pertinence outside of their books. They want to matter, to tell us something about us. Robinson does not do that. This novel is self-contained. It matters only to itself, yet still resonates of the most pointed parable. Only in the middle, when Robinson shifts to blatant (though sensitive) theology, are we reminded that she falters, and then, and sadly, are there a few moments of redundancy, but so simple, and dry, they remind me more of annoyingly hot summer days than bad fiction.
There is a spark in Iowa.

*Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling -Soren Kerkegaard
It is important for Abraham to have never given up the finitude of wanting his son alive. This is the dialectical nature of faith, to not only believe in God, but to fear him, not only to believe in life after death, but to live in this life before death. It is absurd for God to have asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son, but Abraham traveled three days journey to complete the act. It is absurd for God to then allow Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead of his son, but Abraham rejoiced. If he had not faith, the Joy at gaining a son, instead of having to kill him, would have been incomplete.
Problema One: Abraham’s action, that of meaning to kill his son, was not ethical, it was beyond ethics. The ethics were “teleologically suspended.” Kierkegaard carefully makes the distinction between the pagan (faithless) tragic hero, who suspends his own will for the upholding of a greater ethic and Abraham (the knight (father) of faith), who acts by a purely personal virtue. “He does it for God’s sake… and for his own sake in order to be able to produce the proof” of his faith, because that is what God demands of him. The tragic hero upholds a virtue outside of himself, and so for him we can weep, and laud. But the knight of faith goes beyond virtue, and, his action is absurd. For God is beyond our rationale. “When a person sets out on the tragic hero’s admittedly hard path there are many who could lend him advice; but he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand.”
Probelma Two: Is there an absolute duty to God? The answer is in the koan-like aphorism: “the knight of faith is kept in constant tension.” Tension? What tension is there in perfect faith? Is not faith the opposite of tension, unsurety, of quavering? Is not faith the pillar holding man to God? What then is there of tension? The common quip to “build on rock” could be extrapolated to build on the deepest, hardest rock, deeper, still, all the way digging to the center of the earth, where the rock has become so adamant that it has turned to fire, which is the essence of rock. Flame. With faith the same. The essence of faith lies in its tension. Its question.
Problema Three: The story of Abraham extends far beyond a genre. Into the absurd. Kierkegaard asks if it was ethical for Abraham not to tell his wife, his servant, or his son what he was going to Moriah to do. It was neither ethical, nor unethical, because even if Abraham tried to explain or expiate himself, he could not. He spoke a language not of men, but of Faith. He spoke in tongues. “Aesthetics can well understand that I sacrifice myself, but not that I should sacrifice another for my own sake,” which is exactly what Abraham did. Yet, to put it lightly, it perturbed him. When Isaac asked where the lamb was, Abraham broke his silence and answered, “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” He said this because he truly believed it. He had faith that either, as happened, a ram would replace his son, or, if he went through and killed his son God would restore him. This is not a self-sacrifice, or, in Kierkegaard’s words, “infinite resignation,” rather, it is faithfully and resolutely holding onto the self-employ, or self-will, that he doesn’t want to kill his son. The tragic hero would resign himself, sacrifice his will and murder his son for the “greater” good. Abraham, the knight of faith, does greater than “greater”, he maintains his will unto God. Proof of this is his clarity of acceptance of, first, the ram, and second and most importantly, his son. This is what hits me the most. In pure faith, he is filled with Joy not to have to sacrifice Isaac. This rejoicing is not a test of faith, it is not a result, but it is an indelible mark. If he had not perfect faith, there would be guilt, or doubt, or even, simply, hesitation. I don’t mean hesitation to lift the knife, which there obviously wasn’t… but the hesitation that there wasn’t to take back his son.
Kierkegaard maintains that “faith is the highest passion.” It is what each generation is born without and only a few of each generation achieve. Yet faith is only and the only stepping stone for something far greater. Love. Call it ascension. Christ ascended not in faith, not even because of faith, (though without it he would never even have been killed) but in love. He ascended not in passion, but only after passing all passion. Faith, simply, is not a shovel. It is not a tool at all. It is not the anvil or the hammer. It may be the blacksmith. (A blacksmith because a blacksmith is not useful, it is of no use to the gardener. You can’t dig with a blacksmith, but, nor can you dig without a blacksmith) And love, then, are the tools that the blacksmith makes. It is also every tool that he doesn’t make. And even every tool that he couldn’t make. (Imagine three-spaded shovels, hoes that do the hoing, scissors with ball and socket hinges) Love is the anvil and it is the bread that powers the blacksmith’s arm and the wine that he drinks with his wife. It is the fire and it is the bellows. It is the steel and it is the ingot and it is the mold. It is the coup de grace of the blacksmith’s sword. It is the death groan and the weeping widow and the orphaned child and the revolution and the lily in the field and this one mis-cropped wishing great things into metallurgy. Oh, Soul!

“I can swim in life, but for this mysterious floating I am too heavy.”
“and yet it is only the knight of faith who is happy, only he is heir apparent to the finite.”

*The Last Temptation of Christ

The Last Temptation of Christ -Nikos Kazantzakis
This book recalls to me a word that I once loved and have since semantically abandoned. Deed. The difference between deed, endeavor, and aesthetics. The endeavor of Kazantzakis is, exemplified by his bio and this opus, large. Though I’ve never seen a picture of the author, I imagine him looking very much like his artistic Judas, gargantuan, resolute, red-bearded (at least in essence), unwavering, fat-fingered, muscle-faithed, but still with a sensitivity-- a big man who can cry. The deed, then, of this man is the novel. Deed, however, not as a stamp, but as a vector. This vectordeed then is beautiful and human. The aesthetic, though I am addressing a translation, is where the opus stumbles. In theory The Last Temptation is beautiful. Christ and the Gospels supercede theory.
The Last Temptation begins before Jesus came out of the closet. He was a young carpenter/crossmaker, still living with his parent, plagued by dreams of angels and allusions of the greatest grandeur. He had memories of childhood love for Magdalene and reluctantly, very reluctantly, heeded his own coming of age. Gathering up the sons of Zebedee and tethering ardent-hearted Judas to a life of love was the adventure. For a few-hundred pages meandering through the Gospels. Ugly, half-shunned ex-publican Matthew was the most interesting character, staying up nights to scribble his prosody, all the other disciples scorning the writer. Not until we find nailed to the cross and hailing God, “Eloi, Eloi…” are we swooped into the aesthetic of Kazantzakis. The alternative end of Jesus, if he were to submit to his powers and descend from the cross, robust and vital, to couple with Magdalene and then live a life as a father, husband, a consummate man. Hunchbacked old Paul is the new thorn in his side, proclaiming, “I don’t need you anymore, Jesus,” the idea of crucifixion and rising again and ascension is enough for Paul to construct a church and a religion. But then staple-hearted Judas maunders by Jesus’ door and reminds him of the “sacrifice of the betrayal” and, soon enough, we are transported back to the moment of the cross, “… Lama Sabachtani!” the scream is complete, “It is finished.”
Three quotes from Magdalene:
“If you’re not hanging on to your mother’s apron strings, you’re hanging onto mine, or God’s.”
and my favorite: “It’s coming down in buckets, Jesus.”
“If you are a holy saint and a woman requests a kiss of you, descend from your sanctity in order to give it to her. Otherwise you cannot be saved.”
And then another gem:
“First came the wings and then the angel.”

*Wild Child

Wild Child -novella by T.C. Boyle included in McSweeney’s 19, along with “Color Plates” by Adam Golaski and “Prince of the World” by Christopher Howard
Encased in a cigarbox with mock AandH bomb tactical response pamphlets and old travel guides to Iraq, is a wonderful volume of literature. What’s unfortunate about modern popular literature is that our contemporary writers, apologies, have behaviorally evolved to, even while writing the most profound or plangent stories, can’t take their tongues out of their cheeks. And it’s so for both T.C. Boyle and Christopher Howard. Their topics are commendable, their diction honed, their metaphors whetted, but there is an inextricable element of postmodern smirk to them. Or is it ennui. For even the slightest glimmer of ennui is worse than determined depravity. The stories, along with the theme of the cigar box, are savage, frightening, and very pertinent to our post-nuclear, operation freedom world. I feel echoes of McCarthy. Echoes of Revelation. And I believe in God.
A man on the street asked me today, But have you surrendered to surrender? He was drunk, intelligent, Berkeley, talking to us about his thesis in calculus, what is the difference between an idea and a belief and he looked at me and said, John, are you racist? His name was Nick Armstong. And his mother and all of his sisters are very becoming women.
“The city awoke and arose. Fires were lit. Raw dough fell into hot oil, eggs cracked, pike lost their heads, civilization progressed.” from T.C. Boyle

*The Tempest

The Tempest -William Shakespeare, with introduction by Harold Bloom
Perplexing. Little direction. Seemingly misinspired. At no point did I ever doubt Prospero’s complete control, and, as there was no suspense, the “jokes” seemed to linger after said, or, even more eerily, present themselves before their just deliverance. My favorite parts were the original bickerings of the boatswain and Gonzalo and, later, the bickerings of Sebastian, Antonio and Gonzalo. As Bloom pointed out, Shakespeare created an unique creature with Caliban, which I agree with, but it felt such a shame that he had so little stage time, or was treated with such snub-nosing, even by Shakespeare himself. He, in fact, as much as claims airiness in this tale:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and out little life
Is rounded with a sleep…
… A turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.”

This stout abjectedness hardly holds force to Miranda’s reaction to Prospero’s life story: “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.”
So, enjoying the glimpse of Shakespeare, but, he never struck me in the heart. The “Anti-Faust”, though, is a idea worth contemplating.

*Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast -Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
A Harvard Classic from a Harvard graduate. Blown about by the torrential Southeaster. Lackadaisy, dropsical academia discarded for two years to become the regular “salt.” Much, as pointed out in the introduction, as Roosevelt left Yale for a few seasons to rough it as a cowhand in Wyoming. Dana’s prose is proper, yet still inspired, full of sailoreese, and an obvious precursor to Melville. I enjoyed it, a good little adventure, but didn’t finish it as it seemed not to course out of its regular, stormy direction.
The Philadelphia Catechism:
“Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able,
And on the seventh, holystone the decks and scrape the cable.”

*The Iliad

The Iliad -Homer (Robert Fagles Translation)
I really enjoyed this great and bloody tale by Homer. The translation was seething and alive. I hope I never forget the scintillating use of epithets in The Iliad. Bernard Knox explained in the very thorough and enlightening introduction that repetition and epithet and other literary devices were tools that Homer used to help “memorize” such a long story. Something like, Variations on a Theme. Which is an inspiring and freeing concept to an artist. This book, water-crinkled and ragged, accompanied me through an afternoon of storms at ten thousand feet on the snowy climes of Mt. Shasta. It accompanied me also closer to sea-level on stormy, desolate plateau of sadness and sickness. The diversions and details have survived many thousands of years to still horrify and delight. My favorite moment was perhaps when Achilles’ mother, Thetis, wanting to properly arm him for battle, coaxes the god of fire, Hephaestus, to forge an unheralded panoply for her son and Homer expounds the details of the brilliant shield for one hundred and forty some lines, describing castle scenes, wedding feasts, wars, young men in love, exceeding in form to the point that on the golden shield, where the harvesters plowed the field, “the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning / solid gold as it was.”
My first question is, why did Achilles initially give up Briseis? There is some understanding that he is under deep, honorable obligation to obey Agamemnon at any cost, even if it means hating him through the obeisance. But, as we see that Achilles rage is unquenchable even after his revenge is completely carried out (dragging Hector’s body behind his chariot for nine whole days), there is a sentiment that Achilles longed for more battle than was posed to him by fighting the Trojans. He needed more drama, and more war. And so he submitted to giving up Briseis and spent the entire war plotting to get her back and to pay back Agamemnon and then to revenge Patroclus and still, never, will his rage be sated. I wonder, then, where such “anxiety” comes from? Why will Agamemnon not accept as amends Helen from Paris and call of the war? The characters all lacking a God of peace. Lacking a ultimate reason, even on Earth, and battling, thus, to no foreseen end.
“Beware the toils of war… / the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.”
“fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.”
“the earth that feeds us all.”
“his face dark / as the sudden rushing night but he blazed on in bronze / and terrible fire broke from the gear that wrapped his body, / two spears in his fists. No one could fight him, stop him, / none but the gods as Hector hurled through the gates / and his eyes flashed fire. And whirling round he cried to his Trojans, shouting through the ruck, / ‘The wall, storm the wall!’”

“no one can ever slake / their thirst for blood, for the great leveler, war! / One can achieve his fill of all good things, / even of sleep, even of making love… / rapturous song and the beat and sway of dancing. / A man will yearn for his fill of all these joys / before his fill of war. But not these Trojans-- / no one can glut their lust for battle.”
“both claw-mad for battle.”

And one love scene:
“With that the son of Cronus caught his wife in his arms / and under them now the holy earth burst with fresh green grass, / crocus and hyacinth, clover soaked with dew, so thick and soft / it lifted their bodies off the hard, packed ground…”

“A man’s tongue is a glib and twisty thing.”

*The Stonemason

The Stonemason -Cormac McCarthy
I would like to say, “the best book I’ve read in years.” And I can say it, and mean it, in certain terms. A book that makes NYU’s rejection a must. A book that solidifies my deepest religion. A book that makes me stand up and turn around and admire what it is I’m sitting on.
“The audience may perhaps be also a jury. And now we can begin. As the mathematician Gauss said to his contemporaries: Go forward and faith will come to you.”
“And if it is true that laying stone can teach you reverence of God and tolerance of your neighbor and love for your family it is also true that this knowledge is instilled in you through the work and not through any contemplation of the work.”
“He says that to a man who’s never laid a stone there’s nothing you can tell him. Even the truth would be wrong.”
And does this echo of Marilynne Robinson… I’m sure he must have read Housekeeping. Or at least he sees something kindred in the dirt of fiction… “In what tense do you speak of those who have vanished? You don’t speak of them. You are simply enslaved to them.”
“Somewhere there is someone who wants to know. Nor will I have to seek him out. He’ll find me.”
“The work devours the man and devours his life and I thought that in the end he must be somehow justified thereby. That if enough of the world’s weight only pass through his hands he must become inaugurated into the reality of that world in a way to withstand all scrutiny.”
“Grace I know is much like love and you cannot deserve it. It is freely given, without reason or equity. What could you do to deserve it? What?”

*Housekeeping

Housekeeping -Marilynne Robinson
Here then, is the female sentence. Here then, is the female story arc. Without hesitation, but with complete, creeping patience, Robinson accepts her sentence, paddles once, and spinning into the middle of a deeply cold and sad lake, the story shows us the comedy and the slow despair of both abandonment and utter, resplendent, unique love. The details that Robinson chooses. The philosophy. The Biblical cry of Ruth and the song of Miriam and the religion of Cane. She doesn’t show us, the book is not written to be read, it is merely a testament and we stumble upon it, fortunate us, and gander as if it were a mountain suddenly in view, or a stunted tree in a blooming orchard, a helicopter low in the sky, a falling leaf in late August. But there is no sadness to be had for a mountain, or for a plant, or even for a helicopter. It is only curiosity. And somehow she makes me laugh, though I promise I never broke a smile while reading her book. She is obviously coeval with McCarthy. But I would never call her a sidekick. For they are both unique. Both, thank God, I believe, writing beyond gender. Though Cormac has his moments. Though Marilynne has her moments.
This is what I would call modern American fiction:
“That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.”
This is what we might call post-luminescent:
“In the course of the days the flood had made a sort of tea of hemp and horsehair and rag paper in that room, a smell which always afterward clung to it and which I remember precisely at this minute, though I have never encountered its like.”
“What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?”
“If we imagine that Noah’s wife, when she was old, found somewhere a remnant of the Deluge, she might have walked into it till her widow’s dress floated above her head and the water loosened her plaited hair.”
“…so prophecy is only brilliant memory.”
“By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”
She is a gem. A find. I am happy that, amazingly, again, this year, I find a find.

*A Room of One's Own

A Room of One’s Own -Virginia Woolf
Perhaps now more than under other titles it is obvious that this booklog is more than a series of review but also, (see February’s review of The Prophet) obviously, a sort of self-chronicle. I flew to Philadelphia to visit with my father and visit and interview with NYU. It was a big reading weekend. I finished Remembrance of Things Past and started A Room of One’s Own on the first flight. Before even getting on the flight I remembered my knife in my pocket and bought an envelope to mail it back to myself. Not an omen, but a submission to defenselessness. I paid five dollars for a small bottle of red wine, and I blame the expenditure on Virginia Wolf. My father and I, the day after arrival, in a yuppy corner of downtown Philly, finished a bottle of Chianti and trucked page by page through my novel. New York City the next day by train and touristing with Joel and Simcha and up til four in the morning East Village in the afternoon and then NYU open house followed by informal, successful interview with assistant director. The school impressed me. Excited me. I finished Woolf’s essay on the train back to Trenton. Couldn’t sleep the night, read Marilynne Robinson by the half-light, awake before six, delayed flights, stuck in Denver, finish Housekeeping after they shuffle us back off the plane still in Denver, then open Stonemason and finish it streaming over the Rockies, Nevada, Yosemite, all in one flight. (see last August’s Child of God) When I finally, spent, walk back into my Berkeley house a letter from NYU postmarked the day I left for Philly, tells me that they don’t want me. So now I keep looking sidelong at my bookshelf. It’s me and you baby.
No! I don’t consider books sentient in that respect. But I do admit some sadness. Not sadness. Shadowboxing. Roiling. I’m not waiting for anything. Maybe there isn’t a sentence yet for a woman. But if that were true then neither is the contemporary sentence completely masculine. Now, who knows what sex we are. Then, 1929, I’m not sorry for anything. Maybe there was a dichotomy. I do believe in progress. I know that Virginia Woolf is part of our progress. I know that she’s in me whether I like it or not. I know because of her essay I excused myself and simpered to the back of the cabin and paid five dollars for a mini bottle of Chilean Cabernet. I know that my writing will never be the same. I know she promotes Proustian androgyny. I know that without it there will be no writing at all. Neither Greek nor Jew, neither male nor female, only art, not art, nothing, not nihilism, fullness, a seed, by the Grace of God.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
“Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

*Time Regained

Time Regained, Remembrance of Things Past -Marcel Proust
Thom Conroy recommended to me reading Proust and then added, “It will change your life.”
It did.
His notions of time and courage, of love and despondency, I feel are so near to my own that I don’t know if his many million words substituted my own understanding or if, in his eloquence, he reached a level of translatable, glossolalic, transmogrifying, universal truth that my nascent balks at the world are necessarily, not to any genius of my own, in tune to. Yet I know, I know that we are kin. In the same way that the old, forgetful, wiry, stumbling character of Marcel remembers as if Time were no chasm to be bridged, the ferruginous, clear ringing of the gate’s bell as Swann finally took leave of his parents for the evening and young Marcel had only the dreamy, swaddling glory of being embraced and kissed by his soporific mother to look forward to, I know that there is a brotherhood, a pledge and almost a religion shared between Proust and I that needs traverse no lacuna of time or dismemberment of ocean.
His androgyny is commonly accepted, but I think that Proust takes his art not only to the substratum of ambisexuality, but to a place that is truly beyond gender, beyond Greek or Jew, beyond today or tomorrow. It is a spirit that is beyond exhaustion, not triumphing over it. It is a patience that has looked into the face of beauty and found nothing left to wait for. There is nothing to wait for, the fanning of these pages like billows plushing oxygen into the burning bush. Look hard.
Perhaps I am exaggerating, for surely, the opus is flawed, but there leaves in me and in Proust and in the world not a reflection of the glory of the world, but a veritable modicum of Gloria itself.
“We think that we are in love with a girl, whereas we love in her, alas! only that dawn the glow of which is momentarily reflected on her face.”
Nice to see Apocalypse Now pilfer matching Wagner’s Valkyries to a raid of zeppelins. (p. 781)
“phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs.”
“A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more: something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them? … a fragment of time in pure state.”
“The railway, according to this mode of thinking, was destined to kill contemplation and there was no sense in regretting the age of diligence.”
“The happy years are the lost, the wasted years, one must wait for suffering before one can work. And then the idea of the preliminary suffering becomes associated with the idea of work and one is afraid of each new literary undertaking because one thinks of the pain one will first have to endure in order to imagine it.”
“Oblivion is at work within us.”
“A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.”

*The Idiot

The Idiot -Fyodor Dostoevski (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
My initial impression was that Dostoevski wrote a pointless novel. Which was a good impression. Especially after the obviously tendentious Crime and Punishment, and the ponderously philosophical, though it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, Brothers Karamazov. So, at first, The Idiot felt like ahh, here is a book without a purpose, not trying to prove that God is in all of us or disprove Hell or flick Earth off our shoulders like the midge that it is, but just letting Dostoevski play upon a theme, let him run with the darkness of his spine, harping over and again weakness, depravity, trembling, jealousy, epilepsy, impudent young men and murder. And I was thrilled. Distracted. Lost track of a few names. Mildly disappointed by the ending. Humdrum translation. And it seemed to me by the end, that indeed it was a pointlessly intended novel, which is beautiful, but there was an element of haste to the plot that didn’t let it soar like his other books. Which is unique, because in both Brothers K and Crime and Punishment, the climax comes early and there is a lot of repercussion that follows, but none of it ever bores. Yet in The Idiot, the text slowly churns forward and half-climaxes at the very end, which, somehow took away from all of the excitement.
Dostoevski the man, though, I love him.
“’they say something of the sort exists among the Japanese,’ Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn was saying. ‘An offended man there supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: “You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,” and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender’s eyes.’”
“Roman Catholocism is even worse than atheism itself.”
“all this Europe of yours, it’s all one big fantasy.”
The Idiot is Mother Russia in full stride.

*Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -Tom Stoppard
What I liked least about it was the transition between Stoppard’s writing and the extant text from Shakespeare. The old was just so obviously better than the new. The concept was nice. Some of the dialogue wit and snappy, it’s just that, no offense, Shakespeare is the superior writer. And I mean, by superior, actually, genuine. And I mean by genuine mindfulness of death. And I don’t mean mindfulness of death as tragedy, but the essence of comedy, where Shakespeare wrote humorously because of his imminent darkness whereas Stoppard, so it seemed, wrote humorously out of humor, or hyper-self-consciousness, or, gad, boredom (po-mo-ism). Well, it went fast.
In his own words (he did hit the mark a few times):
“We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it… out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure (he reflects, getting more desperate and rapid.) A Hindu, a Buddhist and a lion-tamer chanced to meet, in a circus on the Indo-Chinese border. (He breaks out.) They’re taking us for granted! …”
“…truth is only that which is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured.”
and I can’t help repeating, of course, Shakespeare, not Stoppard, “You cannot take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, escept my life…”

*Hamlet

Hamlet -William Shakespeare
It is oft argued that Shakespeare is a master of craft. Rereading Hamlet, though rich in wit and poetry, I am convinced not of his mastery of form, but that his plays are undying because of their topic. What, then, is the topic of Hamlet? (There certainly has been much concoction to the answer of this question. Nonetheless,) Passion. Love. Madness. Syncretism. Art. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. It drives a spike through my heart though.
I had the inkling that Dostoevsky attempted to write Hamlet’s reciprocal and came up with Crime and Punishment. I have many inklings. So have we all.
“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’”
“brevity is the soul of wit.”
“You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my life.”
“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
“equivocation will undo us.”
“there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

*Narcissus and Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund -Hermann Hesse
Grandiose and dry. Compared to Steppenwolf, Glass Bead Game, and Siddhartha, this book was overly conceptual and weak in character. A light philosophical read, in which the strict duality of human nature was thornily jammed into a merely scholastic oneness of nature. There were gems, of course. There was an overall, arching grace emanating from Hesse’s intellect. I thought very much of Heather and I, as Narcissus and Goldmund, respectively. But gladly we don’t fit into those scientific ingots.
“He thought that perhaps fear of death was the root of all art.”
“Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one’s senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible? Perhaps there were people for whom this was possible. Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one.”
and my favorite, a sentence that reminds me of Cormac,
“You are not to think about whether God hears your prayers or whether there is a God such as you imagine.”

*Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe -Daniel Defoe
Battling between the strictures. What I liked best. What an enjoyable read. How pleased I am to have read this book. I can clearly see how Melville must have enjoyed this as well, not only because he and Defoe haunted the same obsessive sea drama, but in their freedom of story-telling. Lists, repetition, continually reminding the reader of what has happened, and then, of course, the singularity, or linearity of the telling. Though Melville was able to shift perspectives, and Defoe was not, they both kept the reader so focused on one action at a time, to the “minutest detail”, as if we were pancaked against a door watching the novel through our peepholes, and what falls down our hallway, pirates, parrots, misadventure, cannibals, whales, shipwrecks, et cetera, that we never tire of our singular view. I still am a little baffled that the book didn’t end when Robinson got off the island, and continued on for a fifteen page adventure in the snowy mountains of France fighting giant packs of wolves. But, so I read it. As I resolve myself to read this year the best books in the world, I’m happy and fortunate to have commenced with such a classic.
“… that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.”
We cannot forget the line drawing of Defoe that is on the first page of the Signet Classic, a snub-nose wicker face man with a voluptuous, curly wig… “and the desires were so moved by it that when I spoke the words my hands would clinch together and my fingers press the palms of my hands, that if I had had any soft thing in my hand, it would have crushed it involuntarily…”
and the conclusion of the novel,
“I might well say now, indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning.”

easy poem(kinda review:100 mtns)(or, a portrait of the artist)

re: 100 Euphemisms for Mountain,
by John Washington

A story of inadequate love. Impossible death. Embibiquy. Confrontery? Joust. Impressed innards, unravel, that is—Cinematic, for one. For two, sealed with a kiss.

Hand-slung, body-wrought, primordial soup-juice, bun-in-the-oven, youth and vigor gone sweet with--Romantic. Masculine. Endeavor.

Yolk-bourne.
Even, jest.
Too limb for ‘his britches.


(m’ love)

Neither is it fitting.


In a way that way his way(the way the knee-knob won’t stop knocking),
That intuition, leg-flung, clambers even reaching, Ho!, the nape.

Of giants.
Looking up, not over (in the meantime, on the way)


Euphemistic for his own gad love, above all, nonetheless, and/but,
It’s called for. Listen quick.

*Pygmalion

Pygmalion -Bernard Shaw
Conceited. Witty in concept and tepid in text. Decent to have have read for its slight social significance, but a passing of time in all other aspects. When he about-faced in the last scene to his half-hearted dithyramb on love, the spine went droopy. He wrote an epilogue in short story form for the public who he supposed to not “get” his message. The epilogue opens with this sentence:
“The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories.”

…yet, again, if I only had the eye… if I only was able to recognize the beauty in front of me, then I wouldn’t start my review with one word judgmentals like, “Conceited.” Ghastly of me.

*The Fugitive

The Fugitive -Marcel Proust
Parallel, in the soft beauty of its impossible concept, strikes me as a fit arithmetical description of the maundering, sinuous, laughable perusings of Proust. Never faltering. Ever equidistant. Strange. Perhaps another apt macaronic would be recherché. Not that she were to be expiated by philology, or, rather, shackled hand and foot, like the purposeful victimization of a housepet, by said, candlelit, effeminate author’s brutish ukase.
What?
Well, suddenly Remembrance of Things Past jumped into a new realm, or shall I say, returned to an old one, of sheer, happening, spirited, gut-twisting, gorgeous and unparalleled philosophic narrative. Absolutely book throwing. He made me want to hug myself. Which I did. And I felt almost as silly and self-moralizing, as lonely and dear, as sweet, wet, whimpering Marcel.
“I knew that one can never read a novel without giving its heroine the form and features of the woman one loves.”
“for the force that circles the earth most times in a second is not electricity but pain.”
“…there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer.”
“The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.”

*Thoughts on the East

Thoughts on the East -Thomas Merton
Perfunctory and uninspired. The only insight came from his quotations.

…But if I only had the faith and the perceptiveness then Merton and Shaw would no longer, if I only had the love, would no longer be passed off, would be treasured, if I only had the patience… it is not Merton nor me that is boring, but my hackneyed, spiritless way of reading that turns out pathetic reviews like, “Perfunctory and uninspired.”

*The Captive

The Captive -Marcel Proust
There is breadth, care, and beauty to every word of this book. Though atimes rather a sob-sister, Proust nevertheless has me drooling over Fortuny gowns, the fluency of M. de Charlus, dreams of Venice, the neckline of Albertine, and the ubiquitous “little phrase” of Vinteiul’s sonata. His best work comes in flashes of complete, airy plotlessness. When he ramps onto the he-said-she-said circuit, I only long for the return to the prismatic, oleaginous, philosophizing eyes of our dear Marcel, the protagonist. The end of this novel brought back a simplicity that I haven’t seen since Marcel was a little boy, yawning and fretting for his mother to come kiss him goodnight.

*Yaqui Way of Knowledge

The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge. –Carlos Casteneda
Incredible that such a treasure of wisdom is officially brought to the world by such a dunce. Never have I believed so adamantly that man doesn’t luster herself, but only acts the conduit to a glow that cannot be suppressed even by our ponderous, thickheaded dross. Reading of Casteneda pester and pester to set a method to Don Juan’s spirit is both enervating and a little sad. Even Don Juan relapses now and again into ennui and ego. However, the moments when Casteneda wrestles with a dog, claps his shin and stomps his foot in war dance, unleashes a war cry and throws a rock at Don Juan’s impersonator, rubs lizards on his temples, or spends days curled on the sand as a violent, peyote button victim in the striking, boulder, rainbow desert of the southwest, all of these graces of altermind unlock the gates to an ancient truth and a momentous beauty that we are all thankful to witness.
Don Juan’s four enemies are, in order, Fear, Clarity, Power, and Old Age.
“… and we ran together toward a sort of yellow warmth that came from some indefinite place. And there we played. We played and wrestled until I knew his wishes and he knew mine. We took turns manipulating each other in the fashion of a puppet show. I could make him move his legs by twisting my toes, and every time he nodded his head I felt an irresistible impulse to jump.”
“I was everywhere.”