Mervyn Peake on Comprehension

Who can say how long the eye of the vulture or the lynx requires to grasp the totality of a landscape, or whether in a comprehensive instant the seemingly inexhaustible profusion of detail falls upon their eyes in an ordered and intelligible series of distances and shapes, where the last detail is perceived in relation to the corporate mass?

It may be that the hawk sees nothing but those grassy uplands, and among the coarse grasses, more plainly than the field itself, the rabbit or the rat, and that the landscape in its entirety is never seen, but only those areas lit, as it were with a torch, where the quarry slinks, the surrounding regions thickening into cloud and darkness on the yellow eyes.

Whether the scouring, sexless eye of the bird or beast of prey disperses and sees all or concentrates and evades all saving that for which it searches, it is certain that the less powerful eye of the human cannot grasp, even after a life of training, a scene in its entirety. No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance. Only the recognition of damsel, horse, or fly and the assumption of damsel, horse, or fly; and so with dreams and beyond, for what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.

--from Chapter 20 of Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.

A.J. Liebling on Proust's Appetite

The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book ... In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

--from A.J. Liebling's Between Meals.

Also of interest: in Paris circa 1955, Liebling writes that he "received a note from Mirande by tube next morning ..." Anyone know what "by tube" means in this context?

Ian McEwan on Not Being Understood by a Reader

Whereas in Black Dogs, the intellectual war is between equals, Joe Rose's logical mind clearly shows up that of his girlfriend, Clarissa [in the novel Enduring Love]. A Romantic scholar, she doubts his evidence that he is being stalked, and nearly ends up dead. McEwan remebers that not every reader accepted the point: "Poor Greg [McEwan's son] had to study Enduring Love in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, 'Well, I think Clarissa's got everything wrong.' He got a D. The teacher didn't care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too 'male' in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing."

--from the February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski's, "The Background Hum."

Judith Thurman on People You Meet Playing Online Scrabble

I have probably met more interesting strangers playing online Scrabble than I have in a lifetime of travel to exotic places. A Ghanaian taxi-driver from Brooklyn invited me to Prospect Park, where his Scrabble club held weekend tournaments. A tattoo artist in Alberta surprised me, between plays, with her knowledge of Gerard Manley Hopkins. An Oxford don beat me soundly, but so did a used-car salesman. I have played Aussies and New Zealanders (Scrabble is popular in the antipodes), an impertinent prodigy who confessed to being eleven, a cardsharp in Las Vegas, a lawyer in Bangalore who traded places with his wife for the endgame ("She's the family closer," he said), a corgi breeder, and a Jane Austen fan ("elizabennet") who added a few words that Jane never used -- "feeb," "ottar," "vas," and "zineb" -- to my vocabulary.

--p. 29 of Judith Thurman's January 19, 2009 New Yorker article, "Spreading the Word."

Donald Westlake on Translating a Character from Book to the Big Screen

In a filmed interview called "The Hunter," [Donald Westlake] pointed out that three very different actors played his antihero in the first three films -- Karina in Pop art dresses for "Made in USA," Lee Marvin in a '60s suit for "Point Blank" and the rugged Brown for "The Split."

As Westlake recalled: "A friend of mine said, 'So far, Parker's been played by a white guy, a black guy and a woman. I think the character lacks definition.' "

--From Scott Timberg's January 8, 2009 L.A. Times article, "Hollywood rarely did Donald Westlake justice."

A.J. Liebling on Partying Like its 1952

It was a sixteen-story cooperative building with two apartments on each floor, and the woman just above us, with whom our landlord had left the key, said it was as friendly as an old-time boarding house. "All the apartments are laid out just alike," she told us, "and that makes it homey, because no matter whose apartment you're in, you know where everything is. Last New Year's Eve, eleven of us got together and gave a party in all our eleven apartments, one above the other. One apartment was South American, with a rumba band, and another was Wild West, with a square-dance caller, and another French, with an accordionist, and you just took the elevator from one to another, and lay where you fell."

--From a profile of Chicago by A.J. Liebling in the January 12, 1952 issue of The New Yorker, called "Second City."

John Stuart Mill and P.G. Wodehouse

I had to chuckle when Adam Gopnik used a character from P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle books to make a point about John Stuart Mill in a recent review of a biography about Mill:

"When someone says that proof of God's existence can be found in Nature, [Mill] doesn't say it's bosh. He asks what this would actually entail if it were true, and infers that such a creator would have to be limited, inept, well-meaning, forgetful, and in a daily contest with another power: 'A Being of great but limited power ... who desires, and pays some regard to, the happiness of his creatures, but who seems to have some other motives of action which he cares more for, and who can hardly be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone.' What natural theology, taken seriously, shows is not the great Watchmaker or the All-Seeing Jove but the absent-minded Landlord, a sort of eternal Lord Emsworth, who, though he helps the young lovers, cares mainly about his pig."

Priceless!

DFW RIP

David Foster Wallace is dead at 46.

My feelings about his writing have always been, I admit, clouded by my jealousy: though my age, Wallace was smarter, more talented, more knowledgeable, and more successful than I. Nevertheless, he could have been better still, more disciplined, less derivative; I knew it, and now I'm afraid he did, too.

My guess? He had the writer's disease -- perfectionism -- so that whatever heights he scaled, they were never high enough, what he wrote never good enough. No doubt he struggled with depression most of his adult life (the episode in the mental ward we now know about, if we didn't before) ... but it shouldn't have ended this way. I'm so sorry to hear this news. DFW was among the most admired writers of his generation, and it wasn't enough for him. That's depression, not narcissism, and it killed him. (Don't let it take you the same way -- even if it means giving up writing. I speak from experience on this one.)

Weirdly, in the week leading up to Wallace's death, I received a statistically unlikely number of submissions to The King's English from fans who cited him as one of their favorite writers. Usually, authors submitting to the journal choose from a broad and eclectic band of authors, but not this week. This week, it was evenly divided between Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! and David Foster Wallace. Who knows why? It's just a coincidence, but now of course it feels like an anticipatory tribute, so I want to share it. Here's what our authors had to say:

"Best novella? I'm inclined towards Salinger... but truly I have to go with the so way ambitious early work of David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way". It's in his first story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, and it's the high point of the collection. The other is his short story "Little Expressionless Animals," which features Alex Trebec and the silent Merv Griffin as characters. Freaking brilliant." -PR

"Favorite personal essays: David Foster Wallace understands and conveys the complexities of human subjectivity so well, I love when his essays move in the direction of memoir. If his 'Roger Federer as Religious Experience' can be counted as a personal essay, I might call it my favorite. - SFP

"My favorite collection of personal essays is, by far, David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's what got me into non-fiction, even though I write nothing like him. The title essay and the one on the state fair are the best." -- KB

RIP, Mr. Wallace.

How to Get Published

Today's homily proves that word-of-mouth is the best way to get your book published -- it even works if your book doesn't exist. Case in point: a hoax perpetrated in the 1950s, when a radio DJ named Jean Shepherd encouraged his listeners to go into bookstores and ask for a fictitious book. He gave them an invented title -- I, Libertine -- author, and plot outline ... and he sent people into the streets to talk about it.

Somebody decided that it made sense to publish a book fitting its description, because noted sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon wrote it, and you can get it here. And here's a brief entry about the hoax and a link to an MP3 of Jean Shepherd recounting the whole hoax (verrry slowly) on the radio in 1968.

UPDATE: I now see that Boing Boing posted about this, which is sort of like being scooped by the New York Times.

Thereby Hangs a Tail

In Emily Pecora's recent profile in Polite magazine of two Pennsylvania philanthropists -- two brothers -- I found a story so ripe with implication that I had to share it:

In October of 2004, a federal grand jury indicted Jeremy Sommers, Lansford’s K-9 officer, for planting narcotics during searches utilizing the drug-sniffing dog the brothers had donated. The Lansford city council, which had never been sure the town needed a drug-sniffing dog in the first place, [my emphasis] placed an ad in the classified section of the Times News announcing the dog’s sale.

... Jeremy Sommers was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison and a $4,000 fine and my hometown of Hazleton put in a bid to buy the dog.

Now, this is purely a flight of fancy, but what if Jeremy Sommers took a real shine to the unnamed K-9? Perhaps the dog was good and true and loyal, at a time when Mr. Sommers' personal life (I'm making all this up) was a shambles? Let's say his mother, his sole surviving parent, had advanced Alzheimer's and his girlfriend had betrayed him, and his buddies down at the bar had been giving him the cold shoulder ever since he became a cop ...

And now he's assigned to the dog, who turns out to be smart enough to star in the movies, a helluva partner. They're a great team -- except, see, there's no drugs for the pooch to find! What then?

The Chief starts breathing down the cop's neck because the City Council wants stats on the dog's success rate, and the mayor needs to send a report to the brothers who put up the money for the dog in the first place, so they feel like they did the Right Thing, that the money was well-spent, and now everybody's coming down like a ton of bricks on this poor cop, who only wants to hang on to the dog, that good dog that's been doing its job well but with absolutely no drug busts to show for it ... What then? He plants the drugs, so he can keep the dog ...

All fancy, I'm sorry to say, based on the fragments of news accounts I can find online, but I like my version better. It's heartwarming -- that is, if you're not the poor sap who got framed. But notice how, with only a few details, I automatically created an explanatory narrative? We human beings do love our stories.

Arthur Phillips on the British Museum

Just read - or skimmed, actually - Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist. (You may recall that his debut novel, Prague, got quite a lot of publicity.) It opened fine, but one of the novel's main narrators got to be quite a bore (as several of the other character correctly complain). His delusional, self-centered world is appropriate enough - required, actually, for the novel's story logic to work - but even Nabokov (Phillips' model here) couldn't do much to retain one's interest in such characters. They're shrill, I find, and largely unsympathetic. (Not that Nabokov would've cared a Christly fig for a reader's sympathy, which would explain why Nabokov is (I suspect) more admired than read, Lolita notwithstanding.) Although the final ironic turns of The Egyptologist cast everything that has gone before in a tragic and moving light, the fact that it's obvious from very early on that one of the main characters is masquerading under a false identity (and I'm not good at deducing such things) rather undermines the impact.

But I took great delight in the mini-essay Phillips wrote for the "reader's guide" that appears at the back of the paperback edition of my copy of The Egyptologist, in which he praises the invaluable assistance he got from an expert at the British Museum, courtesy of the internet, answering questions that were often arcane:

If you should decide to write a novel about a topic you know almost nothing about, a scholarly discipline requiring years to master, if you feel compelled to set the story in a land you've scarcely visited, during an era you can only dimly conjure from childhood reading and yellowed clippings, if you have followed your hyperactive and petulant imagination down a rabbit hole and there gazed at glowing, magical projections of inverted pyramids and pith-helmeted lunatics and pharaohs with unconventional appetites, but found little by way of actual knowledge, rest easy, because at the British Museum you will make a new friend: an expert who not only knows everything, but who is required -- yes, required -- to answer all your e-questions, no matter how many, how foolish, how wrong-headed, fantastic, or just downright dirty.

Bleak House. Moody. Noir-ish.

Ever read Dickens' Bleak House? Me neither. I've wanted to, ever since my mother told me that someone in the book dies of spontaneous combustion. Being aware that my one-time literary hero Vladimir Nabokov admired the book and wrote about it in his Lectures on Literature, (something else I never got around to reading) only added fuel to the fire.

I resisted until I saw the recent BBC adaptation (excellent, except for a bizarre use of melodramatic jump-cuts) via Netflix, which inspired me to overcome my lifetime of Bleak House-related sloth. I mooched an old hard-bound copy from someone in Australia (it was originally owned, according to the pencil signature on the flyleaf, by one A. Beange in Wellington, New Zealand, who bought it in September 1918). Once I finally started it, I was startled to discover that Dickens opens the book with reams of incomplete sentences:

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes -- gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers ... Fog everywhere.

I almost felt I was reading a moody contemporary thriller. Was Dickens deliberately pushing the form, or was he writing fast, in shorthand, and decided later it could stand? Either way, I sure wish I could've used it in my never-ending arguments with my high school English teacher, who was trying to force me to abandon sentence fragments. (Never did. Loved 'em.)

Hilton Als on Jean Stafford

Following closely on the heels of my earlier Emdashes post singing the praises of Jean Stafford's "In the Zoo," The New Yorker featured a story of hers in May's fiction podcast with Hilton Als. It wasn't one of her stronger stories, in my opinion, though The New Yorker seems to like it, since they not only published it the first time, but they reprinted an excerpt in the June 27, 1994 issue, and now feature it on a podcast. De gustibus non est disputandum.

Shirley Hazzard - When Transit of Venus Was Young

Catching up with my Emdashes posts: I've commented before now on how much I enjoyed re-reading Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. More recently, over on on Emdashes I performed a detailed review of four of Hazzard's stories from The New Yorker which later made up a good chunk of Transit. If I haven't convinced to read it yet, I hope this will do it.

Lorrie Moore, Read by Louise Erdrich

Catching up with my Emdashes posts: I strongly recommend that you check out the fiction podcast. In particular, I can't say enough good things about Louise Erdrich's reading of Lorrie Moore's story, "Dance in America." Phor phun, phollow the link!

Catching Up

I've been remiss about cross-posting from Emdashes. So the next few will be re-posts of recent things I've done over there. For those of you who've already seen them, I apologize for the repetition.

I've been consumed with reading a fantasy series by Steven Erikson, which begins with Gardens of the Moon. (Pictured is the second volume in the series, Deadhouse Gates.) It's not up to the mark set by George R. R. Martin, but it's pretty good, if you like the grim stuff. Erikson's not nearly as casual about offing major characters as Martin is, but the bodies pile up by the thousands, and his characters all have a tendency to muse on mortality -- in fact, they all sound like TheSilver Surfer. Still, this is a series where the backstory grows more complex with each succeeding volume, and Erikson's imagination is epic in scope and grandeur. Once he gets going, he's a lot of fun, provided you have stomach for martial epics, and every other person seems to herald new and terrible forces unleashed upon the land. (I keep giving him left-handed compliments, but the fact is, I'm closing in on p. 900 of volume 3 of his 10+ volume epic, so the guys' got something going for him.)

Anyhow, all this to explain why, in part, my posts have been even scarcer than usual.

The King's English in Top 12 Online Literary Journals

... at least if you rank them by the number of stories nominated for the Million Writers Award. Congratulations to the other journals on that list; on behalf of the editors of The King's English, however, I want to let out a dignified, cultured, "Wahoo!"

Muriel Spark Sparks

I've been re-reading Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent and discovering (after an interval of perhaps 20 years), that it's not at all the sweet confection I remember it. Or rather, it is full of all those sharp edges Spark is known for, odd word choices and original (or just plain odd) ideas.

First, an example of odd word choice. The narrator, speaking about her name, "Fleur," says:

"Not that I looked bad, it was only that Fleur wasn't the right name, and yet it was mine as are the names of those melancholy Joys, those timid Victors, the inglorious Glorias and materialistic Angelas one is bound to meet in the course of a long life of change and infiltration; and once I met a Lancelot who, I assure you, had nothing to do with chivalry."

Um, a long life of ... infiltration? This reveals, I believe, the narrator's view of herself with regard to others. Like Spark, she is a writer, and seems to view others solely as exhibits, opportunities to plunder for her art. Still, it's a bizarre word to see in this context, and it takes a while for it to make any sense.

And here's an example of an idea I found striking:

... [W]hat I found common to the members of Sir Quentin's remianing group was their weakness of character. To my mind this is no more to be despised than is physical weakness. We are not all born heroes and athletes.

I've never decided on an attitude about people's flaws, whereas Fleur appears to have considered the question and come to a point of view. True to life or not, I find it fascinating whenever I encounter a character or author who seems to have consciously arrived at an opinion about something which I've left unexamined. (Since I leave a lot unexamined, this isn't difficult.)

UPDATE: Here's a couple more instances where Spark inserts material into her story that, well, stands out:

He gave me what he said was the usual form of contract, on a printed sheet, and it wasn't such a bad contract nor was it a good one. Only, I found later by personal espionage that his firm ... had a private printing press on which they produced "the usual form of contract" to suit whatever they could get away with for each individual author.

"Personal espionage" is an odd phrase to begin with (one must take a moment to decide that "espionage" alone wouldn't have done, because it would have connoted a shadowy network of hirelings, but it's a pause a reader shouldn't need to make use of), but what's odder about the phrase is what it says about the narrator. In the course of the story, it becomes clear (or seems to) that the narrator's publisher and several other people are conspiring to suppress her first novel. In these circumstances, one can imagine why she might be driven to "espionage," though it's never made clear when she might have done this, or why she bothered. One is left with the suspicion that our narrator is paranoid and sneaky, and Spark intended this. What she seems to have had in mind was a roman à clef in which she modeled the ruthlessness that had been necessary to her own development as a writer.

Here's a short passage that hints at this:

When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

At a minimum, it seems to reveal her narrator's self-centeredness; it's a tempting leap to assume the same was true of Spark herself.

Shirley Hazzard On Being Caught In Flagrante Delicto

Here's the set-up: one afternoon in the 1950s, Paul Ivory, who is engaged to marry Tertia Drage, has just bedded Caroline Bell (and she him) on a lazy afternoon when they think no one will be about. Their idyll is disturbed, however, when Tertia drives up to the house and calls out for him. To forestall her from entering the house, Paul leaps to the window and speaks to her, pretending he is alone.

Paul was at the window now. He was leaning out, laconic. "Good God." He was smiling and leaning and making room for his casual elbows. 'Anything up?' There was the hard intimacy of tone, the naturalness with which he did not use her name. If he had even added so much as "Tertia."

Tertia Drage came right below the window: a pink dress, an upraised face. Perhaps she had not expected Paul to appear at once, but showed no surprise and, despite the standing down there, no sense of disadvantage. Any more than Paul did -- standing easy in, merely, the shirt and tie; and, as far as Tertia was concerned, fully dressed ...

Tertia says it's a beautiful afternoon, they should do something, Paul asks what they should do.

She raised a derisory hand. "You know the possibilities as well as I."

...Out of sight below the window Paul Ivory's bare feet had crossed themselves, negligent as his folded arms. Small fair hairs curled on his naked thighs. "Nothing too arduous," he said, or was saying, when from the fixing of Tertia's limbs he knew that Caro stood beside him.

He knew that Caro had come up behind him and was by his side at the window. Her bare shoulder, perfectly aloof, touched his own. He did not turn, but, as if he himself were Tertia Drage, saw Caro standing naked beside him at that high window and looking down; looking down on the two of them. It was he and Tertia, and Caroline Bell looking down on them. Caro's hand rested on the sill. She was wearing nothing but a small round watch.

Moments passed, or did not pass. Tertia stood impassive. Only that arm stayed raised, her gloved fist clenched and extended like a falconer's. She was looking straight up at Paul; not staring but looking hard and fast at him only. She said, "It's up to you."

"I"ll come down."

For perhaps the first time they met each other's eyes.

At the window Caro did not move. Paul withdrew and took up the rest of his clothes. His departure exposed completely the upper part of her body. Flesh-coloured light was striking her shoulder and making reddish streaks in heavy hair that fell over the collar-bone. Below, Tertia was walking round the car and opening the door. She got in, leaving the driver's seat free. In the room above, the bed creaked as Paul pulled on his canvas shoes. With no more than normal haste he took his own watch from the top of the bureau, glancing at it as he strapped it on. He might have been late for an appointment.

Yeow! I love the charged atmosphere of this confrontation, the heart-stopping moment when Caro appears at the window, and the utterly casual way in which Tertia and Paul indirectly seal their cynical union, and Caro's claim on Paul is obliterated.

Richard Price on Masterpieces of Dread

The walls of the waiting room were hung with black-and-white cautionary posters, encircling Strike with admonitions, the subjects ranging from AIDS to pregnancy to crack to alcohol, each one a little masterpiece of dread. Strike hated posters. If you were poor, posters followed you everywhere -- health clinics, probation offices, housing offices, day care centers, welfare offices -- and they were always blasting away at you with warnings to do this, don't do that, be like this, don't be like that, smarten up, control this, stop that.

--From p. 403, Richard Price's Clockers.