Haiku-ption #13

It’s been too long. My haiku is below. Throw your own in the comments!

Single-filed menace

Flannel hazmat suits of white

On relentless march

Another Month in the Can

Time to heave another month into the Shelf Actualization archives. Above are the authors we covered this month, and below are the five most popular posts from the last 30-ish days:

• What do Topper Harley and William Shakespeare have in common?
• Review: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
• Review: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
• Scratching the Surface
• If you love words, set them free

And, as always, the suspicious search terms that brought many of you here:

• New Yorker cartoons monet  >>  We talked Monet here
• Book club harrison Bergeron  >>  Book Club? No. Short Story Club? Yes.
• Amateur in closet  >>  The post where I came out
• Horse downhill   >>  From the pen of William Faulkner
• In defense of catcher in the rye  >>  Someone had to do it
• How to write like Kerouac  >>  The step-by-step guide
• Short pants and knee socks  >>  Nabokov, hanging out at HQ
• Taylor Schilling  >>  One of our Oscar Week movie posts
• Her quicksilver changes Didion  >>  Why I disliked Blue Nights
• Breathtaking prose  >>  Examined in one of our earliest posts

Thanks for coming by. Hope you keep coming back!

Review: Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

I read and loved Nineteen Eighty-Four , and there’s no denying the lasting influence it has had on our culture. (A-hem!)  I’ve also read Animal Farm , and came away convinced that it, too, was an “important” book to have in one’s arsenal of cultural touchpoints. But man, I don’t know that I enjoyed either one of them as much as I enjoyed Down and Out in Paris and London , Orwell’s very first book. DaOiPaL is a hilarious, instructive and captivating read.

It’s a non fiction account of the days Orwell nearly starved as homeless vagabond in London, and as a lowly dishwasher in Paris’s seedy underbelly, and even though there’s some controversy over how faithfully it records his actual personal history, it’s a book that had me laughing out loud and cringing with disgust pretty regularly.

You can get a lot out of this book. There’s the “back-of-the-house” exposé of the luxurious Hotel “X” (later identified by his wife as the famous Hotel Crillon) where Orwell goes all Upton Sinclair on the filthy working conditions in Fancy French restaurants- a section that may just have you dry-heaving by the time you’re through. There’s his political commentary and ideas on how to improve England’s convoluted ‘Casual Workhouse’ laws, which kept men constantly on the move and of no real use to anyone. But if I recommend it for one reason, it’s for the vivid descriptions of the various characters he meets along the way: Boris, the former Russian military officer he’s attached to in Paris, Paddy the tramp he befriends while exploring London’s underworld, but also the landlords, pawn brokers, scheisters and criminals that add color to the narrative.

Check it out:

If you love words, set them free

It can be sad sometimes to see a perfectly good word end up helplessly trapped in a prison of cliched usages. Don’t know what I’m talking about? How about a few examples? Think of the things that you’ve recently heard described as scathing . Were they rebukes or criticisms? I’ll bet they were. And what about utmost ? Have you come across anything utmost  that wasn’t sincerity or respect? I doubt it. And I think we can agree that few things are as ardent  as supporters, or as insurmountable  as odds.

Gall and disaster have something in common: they are about the only things that are quite frequently unmitigated - just as false and obvious are all-too-often patently  so. And is anything as reckless  as abandon? Perhaps endangerment, maybe driving… but mostly abandon. Disregard comes in a number of forms, but none so common as blatant  . On the other hand, nothing is nearly so rapier  as wit. Intuition tells us that a tongue could be rapier, and that wits could be sharp, but no, it’s sharp tongues and rapier wits until the cows come home. And don’t let yourself be guilty of switching them around.

Speaking of guilt, do we assuage  anything quite so much? We might appease, alleviate or mollify lots of things, but guilt is about the only thing we really assuage  with any regularity. We condone a lot of things, but so often we do so tacitly . We also come to tacit  agreements, but I can’t think of many other places where tacitness comes to the fore (I didn’t even know tacitness  was a word before I looked it up for this sentence.) We never jockey  for anything but position. Aspersions are only ever cast. Things are never engulfed  in anything but flames. Intrinisic  value. Abject  failure. Unqualified  success. Thinly veiled . I could go on and on. We don’t pique  many things besides interest or curiosity, and I can’t imagine whetting  anything but an appetite, can you? Ah, except maybe a metaphorical whistle, that is. But one thing's for sure: the only thing I ever extol  are virtues.

I’m afraid words like these are, if you’ll allow me one more cliched pairing to drive the point home, inextricably  linked. (Ah, the ‘meta’ cliched coupling if there ever was one!) But like most inextricable links (they all are these days, aren’t they?) these pairings are probably just easy and strong, and not actually bonds from which their constituent parts cannot be extricated.

So I say extricate them. We should grant these words a life outside the cliches. If you love words, set them free.

And here's 80's Sting for a few words on the subject:

The many-tentacled influence of Miss Eudora Welty

We’ve covered Eudora Welty’s influence on a Grammy-winning album here. But she may also have inspired the titles of a couple of famous plays, as well.

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” premiered in early 1949, thirteen years after Welty’s short story “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” a story whose main character is named Bowman.   Bowman? Loman? Coincidence?... Yeah, probably. But still, both have to do with man’s search for meaning and worth and accomplishment in life, and both characters come up empty in their search and then die. So I’m going to go ahead and say: DUN, DUN, DUN!)

But what about Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which premiered at the end of 1947? The title makes an allegory of the streetcar label that marked the line serving Desire Street in New Orleans. Did he come upon the idea on his own? Mmmm probably, but take a look at this excerpt from Eudora Welty’s novel from two years earlier, Delta Wedding :

“They had fooled everybody successfully about their honeymoon, because instead of going to the Peabody in Memphis they had gone to the St. Charles in New Orleans. Walking through the two afternoons down streets narrow as hallways, they had to press back against the curb, against uncertain dark-green doors, to let the streetcars get through. The streetcars made an extraordinary clangor at such close quarters, as they did in the quiet of the night, and some of them had “Desire” across the top. Could that have been the name of a street? She had not asked then; she did not much wonder now.”

I’m going to go ahead and give her credit for that one, too. Call it penance for this post.

Review: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

If you read for plot, you might not get much out of Delta Wedding .

The story follows the Fairchild family as they gather and make preparations for the wedding of their second oldest daughter to the overseer of the family plantation- a suitor that all of them see as being beneath her. There is little real-time tension beyond the little recurring worries that certain preparations might not pan out in time  (will the Shepardess Crooks ordered specially from Memphis for the bridesmaids make it in time?! Inquiring minds want to know!).

Actually, the most interesting plot points are past events that continue to lurk just beneath the surface: the marriage of George, the family’s favorite uncle, to a lowly storekeeper (again, a marriage far below the Fairchilds’ vaunted station), the early death of an aunt and mother, and the movements of the family between their various estates. And at the center of it all is a near-tragedy on a picnic outing, where George stays in front of an oncoming train to help a mentally disabled cousin get her foot loose from the railroad tracks- an event that has resonance because that day cemented the romance of the young bride and the overseer, but also because it threatens to destroy George’s own marriage.

But these subplots only come to us in glimpses. The real reason to read this book is for the rich characterization, the complex tapestry of family relationships and the unforgettable sense of place- which almost stands in as one of the chief characters- (“The bayou had a warm breath, like a person.”)

Welty is undoubtedly a masterful writer. My only previous experience with her is the short story “Where is the Voice Coming From,” which recounts in first-person the tragic death of Medgar Evers, from the point of view of his racist murderer. It’s hard to believe the same woman wrote both pieces. I probably won’t be recommending Delta Wedding  to friends and family, and probably won’t re-read myself it any time soon, but I can already tell it’s a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come. And maybe that’s the only mark of a great book that matters.

Everybody dies

I poked a little fun at Billy Shakespeare the other day, pointing out a rough similarity in body counts between King Lear  and the comedy/parody film “Hot Shots Part Deux.” And then I came across this infographic at Biblioklept, which only reinforces the point across some of his other tragedies. Enjoy:

The Quixote

ShelfActualization ‘blogger emeritus’ Tucker McCann and I will be embarking on a journey through one of the undisputed masterpieces of literature over the next few weeks. You are invited to join in the fun, of course.

Arguably the first modern novel, (and still the best, according to some) Don Quixote  is a founding work of western literature and has influenced countless other books, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary  to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot .  You can find shades of Cervantes’ Knight-Errant in characters as diverse as Melville’s Captain Ahab and Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland.

Now, I’m naturally daunted by any book as thick as my forearm, but I had a goal to tackle one of literature’s “big boys” this year, and it might as well be “the Quixote.” 

Any other takers?

Scratching the surface

Sometimes, as a reader, you feel hopelessly unable to read everything you want to. You wonder how you’ll ever be able to get through everything on your To-Be-Read wishlist. You feel kind of like this guy:

It can be embarrassing, at age 35, to list out all famous the writers you’ve never read before. My list, the one below on the left, was just pulled off the top of my head- it’s not even exhaustive. But look at all those authors! Subtract a few short stories I might have read by that group, and I’d draw a complete blank on each one of them.

Now, it’s easy to throw your hands up in despair, but a quick perusal of “new” authors I’ve read over the last two years is pretty heartening. That’s what’s represented by the list below on the right. Look at all those  authors! It’s even longer than the list on the left. I’m tearing through them like they’re going out of style (as some of them undoubtedly are) and I’ve got Cervantes and Phillip Roth queued up and ready to move from left to right. It’s not unthinkable that in another couple years I can turn the majority of those on the left into so many notches on my readerly belt.

Looking at this side-by-side comparison, I’m feeling pretty good about making the most of the books I have left.

Some authors I'm embarrassed not to have read	Authors new to me since 2011
Saul Bellow	Herman Melville
Virginia Woolf	Charlotte Bronte
Jane Austen	Jack Kerouac
Leo Tolstoy	Edith Wharton
Theodor Dreiser	Henry James
Carson McCullers	Alice Munro
Flannery OConnor	Cormack McCarthy
Phillip Roth	John Steinbeck
Don Delilo	George Orwell
Alexander Dumas	Roberto Bolano
Jorge Luis Borges	Thomas Mann
Miguel Cervantes	William Faulkner
Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Wallace Stegner
Victor Hugo	Ivan Turgenev
Salman Rushdie	Marcel Proust
William Burroughs	Emily Bronte
Henry David Thoreau	George Eliot
Italo Calvino	Jeffrey Eugenides
Jack London	James Joyce
Haruki Murakami	E.M. Forster
William Gaddis	Eudora Welty
VS Naipaul	Joseph Heller
J.M. Coatzee	Sherwood Anderson
Jose Saramago	Fyodor Dostoevsky
John Updike	T.C. Boyle
David Foster Wallace	Isak Denisen
Ford Madox Ford	Thornton Wilder
Evelyn Waugh	Alan Paton
Henry Miller	Chaim Potok
Norman Mailer	Ricardo Guiraldes
Somerset Maugham	H. Rider Haggard
Sinclair Lewis	Karen Russel
Rudyard Kipling	Denis Johnson
Upton Sinclair	Jennifer Egan
Marylin Robinson	John Hersey
Margaret Atwood	Dana Spiotta
Willa Cather	Douglas Thayer
Michael Chabon	David Clark
Alexander Pushkin	Ben Lerner
Boris Pasternak	Boris Pahor
John Dos Passos	Roland Barthes
Thomas Wolfe	Ann Patchett
Tom Wolfe	Joan Didion
Gertrude Stein	David Gann
George Sand	Agatha Christie
Margaret Mitchell	Stephen King
Alice Walker	Orson Scott Card
Ralph Ellison	Clive Cussler
Erskine Caldwell	Erin Morgenstern
Allen Ginsberg	Steven Pressfield
Anne Bronte	C.J. Box
	Richard Skinner
	Stephen Hawking
	Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Stream of Consciousness

You know what bugs me? Stream of Consciousness in fiction.

“And since sleep is is not, and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addy Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addy Bundren must be, and then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so, if I am not emptied yet, I am is.”

Call it innovative, call it avant guarde, call it whatever you want. But don’t tell me it gives the reader any clue what it’s like to be inside the character’s head. I’ve been  inside a head before. I’m inside mine every day. And it’s not disorienting or confusing in the least. Do things jump around a lot? Sure. Can an aroma or a song or a visual cue disrupt my thoughts and throw me twenty years into the past? Happens all the time. But there’s almost always some context, some thread I can follow in retrospect, something that ties the thoughts together into a fluid and flowing “stream” of consciousness.

But on the written page? That’s a different story altogether. When I have to wade through a confusing interior monologue in a book- I get the same feeling I get in my worst, mixed-up dreams. It’s a jolting confusion, like riding a rollercoaster in pitch blackness. It’s like those first couple seconds underwater when you turf it on waterskis- the noise of the churning water, the not knowing which way is up, being folded into some painful contortionists pose...

To be clear, I don’t think the concept  is a bad one. It could actually be very interesting if someone could pull it off (I’m told Henry James did it differently than most). But the execution  of it is all too often a festering, steaming pile of crap.

The way I see it you have two choices with Stream of Consciousness writing: you can choose to replicate the speed of thought, in which case unrelated sentence fragments are fired off almost as quickly as synapses fire in our brains (see example above) -or- you can actually replicate the cognitive journey of the character in question, in which case each new thought would flow by some logical connection to the next one, and each will leave the character with the feelings, memories, images and ideas associated with those thoughts- no matter how fast it occurs in real life. In other words you can go fast, or you can go deep. But you can’t do both.

If your goal is to demonstrate the physiological wonder of the human brain, and show how fast it moves between thoughts, then fine, go for option one above. Show us how random you can be. Awesome. But distant memories won’t be sorted from present action or from visualizations of future possibilities. Past and present, the real and the unreal, the hoped for and the feared…  we won’t know which is which. Your reader will just feel like they’re riding Space Mountain for the first time.

But if your goal is to convey what it’s really like to be inside the character’s head, your only real choice is to slow the passage of time and flesh out each impression as it surfaces- recreating the memories, painting the word pictures and describing the feelings they bring with them. Too long and boring? Doesn’t have to be. It’s done all the time for fight scenes. What would be an incomprehensible tangle of limbs, grunts, thoughts and pangs if paced in real-time, is slowed down and elongated so we can see each punch, each reaction and counterpunch, motivations, momentum, etc. But as long as writing is done with words, this choice between speed and depth will have to be made.

The reason for this is that the old adage that “a picture’s worth a thousand words” actually holds true. And unless you’re going to make a stab at getting some of those thousand words down on paper as each thought-picture appears to a character, then you can never give the reader the feel for what it’s like to be in the character’s head, and to see what’s going on. And yeah, to pretend otherwise, kinda bugs me.