The "Further" Adventures of Dean Moriarty

We’ve “diagnosed” Dean Moriarty here, and the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog looked at his (Neal Cassady’s) literary influence a couple days ago. But if you followed the links to the YouTube videos in that second article, you got a real treat: rare footage of Cassady at his manic best. See for yourself:

I love the “Neal Gets Things Done” sign at the front of the bus...

The Bell Tolls for... Spain?

We don’t often talk politics here, but I know some of you writer-types are still smarting from the recent election.

No, no, no, not the U.S. Presidential election, I’m talking about the recent elections in Spain- and Catalonia in particular- which looked like it might finally be headed toward secession from the Kingdom of Spain.

See, earlier this year the Convergence and Unity party, which has ruled Catalonia for the past couple decades, finally made the switch from championing greater autonomy for Catalonia within  Spain, to outright support for a referendum on Independence (a majority of Catalans support Independence). Of course, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the central government in Madrid have said they will do anything necessary to block such an action, which sounds kind of like the makings of another Spanish Civil War, does it not?

Now, as we’ve said elsewhere, we would obviously never hope for war. But could a modern Catalan independence movement be the springboard for a new generation of writers, just as the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades was for Hemingway, Orwell, Dos Passos, Gellhorn, Garcia Lorca and countless others?

We may never know. Arthur Mas and the Convergence and Unity party actually lost seats in the November 25^th election. Other pro-independence parties gained new seats, but it was not the clear mandate that Senor Mas was looking for. Would-be writers may have to look to Scotland’s upcoming independence vote, or hope for Quebec to bristle again under the harsh oppression of Mother Canada.

Or, they could just write their stuff anyway. Also a possibility, I guess.

Review: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

-author is third from the left

This was a rare (for me) excursion into the world of non-fiction- only my second all year. I guess I’m sort of weird that way: I want my fiction to be believable, and solidly based in reality, but I want my non-fiction to be lyrical and impactful without blatent preaching. Having loved Krakauer’s Into the Wild , (and giving in to my obsession with adventure tales of all types) I thought this one might just fit the bill. It certainly did.

This fast-reading, but deftly-turned book is a firsthand account of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster. It’s a book that will have you dreaming of reaching the summit at the same time it convinces you that you’d just as likely be one of the poor saps who finds an early grave there every year. (Ten lost their lives in 2012 alone.)

Like an intricate thriller, Krakauer’s story will have you replaying insignificant early events in your head, as you learn how they became anything but  insignificant to the various climbers and guides trapped on the mountain. It’s a book filled with the kind survival stories that would have you rolling your eyes in disbelief if it were a work of fiction. Knowing that it’s not, though, you’ll be sucked into the account, coughing up pink sputum with all the other altitude-stricken climbers and pulling for them to get back to their tents when all hell breaks loose.

As a work of literature, it’s not going to bowl anyone over, but it will  transport you to a place you’ll likely never see. And that right there is worth the price of admission. Check it out:

Another Month in the can!

Blink and you’ll miss it. We’ve been up and running for 13 months now. Above are the authors we’ve covered in the past month and below are the five most popular posts from that period:

• Wrestlemania: Roland Barthes vs. “Jeff”
• Faulkner in Hollywood
• Writers in the Lonely Hearts Club
• Georgia vs. Bama: the Lit Crit Catfight
• Books that take hold of you

And, as always, the crazy search terms that brought you here:

• Hobbies of Mitt Romney >>> Apparently weeding aint one of ‘em
• Phileas Fogg’s travel maps >>> Takes you here
• The head last horseman >>> Google doesn’t care you can’t spell
• Oulipo >>> Our only post on the subject
• Kurt Vonnegut Infantry >>> I busted a gut reading this
• Indiana Jones last crusade footage >>> Ahh, adventure novels!
• Photo of shelly duvall’s mother >>> Mmm, no. But Joyce Carol Oates, yes.
• Hemingway’s third wife >>> The HBO hagiography
• Axiom shelf >>> One way to start your book
• Mawwiage >>> My parents’ 50^th, again.

Haiku-ption contest #12

To get you ready for the holidays, today’s haiku-ption contest carries a Christmas theme. Mine is below, throw your own in the comments as usual!

B.A. Barraccus

Mohawked stand-in for Santa

Nancy all aglow

Reading in a foreign language

In January I set a goal of reading a great work of Slovene literature this year. Easy enough right? Except that I vowed to read it in the original Slovene. Uh, yeah… ever so slightly tougher- even if I happen to speak the language. So as December neared I was not surprised to find myself just short of finishing this goal. Okay, okay. Just short of starting it, actually.

So I picked up my chosen volume, a relatively slender, contemporary novel by Boris Pahor- and then quickly put the project on hold. You see, like most people with work and family responsibilities, I tend to do a lot of my reading in bed. The disadvantage to this is that a tough read gets even tougher since my brain is absolutely shredded by the time the kids fall asleep. The one advantage I have is that I can tackle a work of Slovene literature with my wife, a native speaker, right beside me. So I began to pepper her with questions.

You can take a guess how pleasant that was for her, as she tried to read her own books (in English, coincidentally.) So, after being asked to “read the whole sentence” and provide some context for my repeated questions, we both end up frustrated. So, undaunted, I tried the dictionary route.

Unfortunately, there are few things as agonizingly slow as flipping through a dictionary in search of a word whose correct original ending you have to first deduce because, ya know, every noun has a gender and the noun’s ending (and its adjective’s ending) changes depending on which of the six cases and three numbers is used (yes, Slovene has declensions and verb conjugations for singular, plural and  dual- they’re overachievers that way.) And at the end of all of that, you might find that the word is part of an idiom that isn’t listed in your typical dictionary, so I then have to flip through my Slovene/English dictionary of idioms to get the true intended meaning.

I am a patient man. But I’m not that patient. So then I considered just reading the book cold, and seeing if things would clear up over time. If I read in Slovene, I can generally grasp between 60 and 75% of it, depending on the difficulty of the writing. And while that’s pretty good for your average American, it’s absolutely maddening to someone like me, who cannot allow himself to skip a single word when I read a book in English. Letting 25% or more of a text float by me is extremely unnerving, and I’m extremely quick to give it up- which is what I did.

But the goal still nagged me. It was a worthy aspiration, and one that wasn’t so much difficult as it was time-consuming. So, it seemed a pity to let it get the best of me. I took a step back and came up with a new strategy: I would find another book, with an English translation, and try the old side-by-side method until I got into a good flow. After running through an entire book that way, I would return to my Pahor novel (for which there is  no English translation), and see if I couldn’t nudge my contextual understanding from a pitiful 60%, to something closer to 90%. That, I think, I could live with.

End result? TBD. I still have 25 days before time runs out, and I’m already 100 pages into Michael Crichton’s Congo  (as well as Michael Crichton’s Kongo .) I started out with paragraph by paragraph comparisons, and have since graduated to section by section comparisons. If I’m tired, I read the English first, but I am getting more comfortable and picking more things up through context when I try to tackle the Slovene first. After another 200 pages, perhaps I’ll really be ready to tackle the Pahor.

Anyone else tried this? Any other advice/methods/warnings/encouragement you would share? Go right ahead.

Writers in the Lonely Hearts Club

Remember that time when Edgar Allen Poe, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Terry Southern, William S. Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll and T.E. Lawrence all got to together with a few friends and held a giant photoshoot?

Yeah, well, the project that gave birth to that motley gathering kicked off forty six years ago today. Above is the shot that finally landed on  the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. Can you find the writers named above? No? Me neither. (I could only find five without the help of a key.)  But see below for all the writerly call-outs:

Books that take hold of you

…like literally. Some very cool public benches in Istanbul, featuring the works of celebrated Turkish authors.

photo source

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photo source

Georgia vs. Bama: The Lit Crit Catfight

Georgia fans might be a little bitter after losing to Alabama in the SEC Championship the other night, but let’s face it, this bad blood is nothing new. Even the world of literature has not been immune to the effects of this southern rivalry.

When Bama belle Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird  to great acclaim in 1960, Georgia girl Carson McCullers reportedly wrote the following to her cousin: "Well, honey, one thing we know is that she's been poaching on my literary preserves."  (Hiss! Reer!)

And another female Georgian author, Flannery O’Connor, tried a more subtle “bless her heart” back-handed compliment of Lee: "I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is."

Apparently, hell hath no fury like a female southern gothic author scorned.

Wrestlemania: Roland Barthes vs. "Jeff"

I doubt I would have picked up Roland Barthes’ Mythologies , if I hadn’t loved the heck out of The Marriage Plot  by Jeffrey Eugenides. But I did, so... I did.

Still, I feared I was headed for some hoity-toity philosophy text that I would find extremely hard-to-follow. Imagine my surprise when the first essay jumps right into the seedy world of professional wrestling. He makes some great points about how the petty bourgeois spectacle of wrestling is just the latest evolution of ancient Greek theater:

“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque [Barthes here refers to characters in neo-classic French plays by Molière and Racine]. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”

Now, I once paid hard-earned money to see the Undertaker and the Ultimate Warrior clash in a so-called “Body Bag Match” in 1991, so this could just be me justifying my junior high dalliances, but I think there’s definitely some truth in what Barthes is saying- maybe wrestling isn't so much about maintaining a veneer of believability, but fills some deeper human need instead.

Of course, this guy would disagree: