Buyer Beware: Vol. 2

This isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Try this one instead:

Review: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

A week or two ago I picked up The Sea is My Brother,  the so-called “lost” novel by Jack Kerouac, and a thinly veiled account of his days in the merchant marine.

I’ve been told by people who have dipped further into the Kerouac mystique than I have, that while  “good” Kerouac is great,  “bad” Kerouac is pretty terrible. For evidence, I was invited to read Visions of Cody  or Big Sur  —each of which reportedly indulges in drug-induced poetry binges for hundreds of pages. I have not read them, and probably never will. But having loved On the Road  so much, I was intrigued to find out just how an early  Kerouac might read.

Turns out it’s pretty uneven. There are small flashes of the style that would evolve in later years, but he spends way too much time cataloguing how many beers each of the characters consume at a sitting, or letting one of them wax philosophical about life and literature in a way that is pretty obviously a soapbox for the author rather than believable dialogue. Oh, and every tenth sentence ends with an all-too-enthusiastic “, by George!” Not only that, but the story is pretty unbelievable (a college professor is granted a sabbatical to ship out to sea in the middle of the war with about 15 minutes’ notice) and there are lots of little mistakes (a character smokes his last cigarette and then produces another a minute later.)

Even the larger narrative feels unbalanced. With a title like The Sea is My Brother , you’d expect the characters to put out to sea, right? Well, it finally happens seven eighths of the way through the book. The rest of it is just a poor man’s On the Road , a hitchhiking debauch from Manhatten to Boston, where the characters are flat broke, but always magically coming  up with food, liquor, cigarettes and costly government documents out of thin air. And while the principals do manage to move from point A to point B, it’s really more of a loose sketch than a fully developed novel. In all honesty, I kinda wish I had this one back. I’ll bet Kerouac does, too.

What They Were Reading: Wallace Stegner

From a 1974 interview between James Day and “Wally” Stegner. The whole thing is fascinating, but the really good stuff starts at about the 22 minute mark:

STEGNER: I think probably there’s no point in teaching people who don’t have a noticeable gift. Often there’s no point in teaching people who do  have a noticeable gift, if they don’t have those qualities of character, or neurosis or whatever it is that keep them at it. If they can be stopped, they’ll stop.

DAY: What is the gift?

STEGNER: The gift is partly of the senses, I think. It’s basically a gift of the senses, a gift of observing and also, I suppose this is William James’ doctrine, the gift of quick association so that one thing suggests another and things go together to become something new and ahead. I’m not a psychologist and you’d better not follow my formula, but I think it has to do with senses in the first instance. And then it has to do with the gift of words. A lot of writers have been writers of some consequence, however, without the gift of words-Dreiser being one. He just comes over you like a tank leaving his tread tracks in your lawn, and he clanks and grinds and so on, but he does tear up your lawn alright. And he never wrote a good sentence in his life. Not a one, I think.

DAY: So how do you measure good fiction then?

STEGNER: I think the measure should be nothing that one person defines. I can tell you the kind of fiction that I like. That’s about the best I can do, and the kind of fiction that I like is a kind of fiction which is not only perceptive, and which has people in it who are plausible people, and which has some relation to real life.

DAY: It’s important to you that it do relate to real people.

STEGNER: Oh yes, I’m a realist. I never get over that. I told you I was a nineteenth century character. I don’t know what it’s about unless it’s about real life. I don’t see any point in turning real life upside down, unless what you’re doing gives you a better look at real life, like looking at a view through your spraddled legs. That’s alright. I don’t mind that. But the ultimate thing is that illusion of reality, and some kind of commentary on reality. So I would guess that anybody who has something to say about reality, who can say it in memorable ways is going to appeal to me. And sometimes they get away with it even if they can’t say it in memorable ways. If they have, as Dreiser had, every gift of the novelist, except the verbal gift. He’s a great feeler. He knows how people feel in certain situations, and he is structurally, a man who can build bridges that reach from here to there. They go from bank to bank. But I guess if I were picking the kinds of people that I like best, what is good fiction, I would pick people like Checkov, Conrad, Turgenev. I seem to be very Slavic about it. Those are the people I’d take to my desert island if I had to take some three.

Feature Film Friday: Salinger

This isn’t technically a feature film, but it’s the trailer for one. And it looks amazing. Can’t wait:

Title Chase: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

I've been working my way through Kerouac's first and, until it was released posthumously two years ago, rightly unpublished, novel The Sea is My Brother . The book draws on Kerouac's own brief experience in the Merchant Marine. Or, at least, that's what I thought it would be about. Here's where the title comes from:

“Perhaps the old adage, “We’re all in the same boat” went without saying in the Merchant Marine and seamen resigned themselves to one another quite philosophically. And of course, like the slogan he had heard of—a famous placard above the door of the Boston Seamen’s Club—which said, very simply, that all those who passed under the arch of the door entered into the Brotherhood of the Sea—these men considered the sea a great leveler, a united force, a master comrade brooding over their common loyalties.”

I'll have more to say about the book later on, but I thought the title was a good one. That is, until you consider the make-up of the book:

Perhaps Kerouac's "brief experience" in the Merchant Marine was briefer than we thought. Afterall, we know his active duty in the US Navy lasted all of 8 days before he was diagnosed with dementia praecox and honorably discharged.

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 16

Shave off Sherwood Anderson’s eyebrows and you’ve got Chris Cooper:

Turn Gustave Flaubert’s hair white and you’ve got Wilford “Diabeetus” Brimley:

Pump E.E. Cummings full of red blood cells and performance-enhancing drugs and you’ve got Lance Armstrong:

Give Saki a smirk and a wristwatch and you've got Bob Hope :

Give Somerset Maugham a consiglieri and a 'family' of hired goons and you've got Don Corleone:

Practice Shelf Actualization This Summer-- sincerely, Science

Summer's here, and people's summer reading recommendations are out in full force. So I thought why not add one of my own. Here it is: 

Read something good. Read something challenging. Read a classic or two.

In the world of lay book bloggers I’ve noticed some pretty vociferous opposition to the notion that people should read “good” books instead of dividing all their time between wildly popular vampire novels and the latest blockbuster S&M fantasy. Those who advocate reading the so-called classics or high-minded literary fiction often get labled as snobs for doing so. The basic argument against these people seems to be that it doesn’t matter what  folks read, as long as they are reading (which, they always fail to realize, is merely snobbery of a different sort.)

I guess I can get on board with that argument… to a point. Reading is  an essential life skill that improves the lives of those who possess it. And reading just about anything will foster that skill. But does it really not matter what  we read?

That’s like saying that eating is essential your health and wellbeing, but that it doesn’t really matter what  you eat so long as you are eating. Nevermind that a constant diet of Big Macs and Twinkie chasers (may they rest in peace!) will eventually land you in home hospice care with an oxygen tube up your nose and a nurse to administer sponge baths to the folds and crevices you can no longer reach by yourself.

I don’t begrudge anyone the hot new Dystopian Young Adult title or the occassional Epistolary Urban Fantasy Steampunk Romance, just like I don’t deprive myself of inordinate amounts of chocolate chip cookie dough or obstain from Black Raspberry Dark Chocolate Chunk ice cream. But sheesh, if that’s all your reading? (Or eating?) It’s time to recalibrate.

Now, would I rather have my kids read a crappy book, than spend the afternoon shooting heroine? Sure. No question. But would I rather have my kids read a crappy book, than spend the afternoon shooting hoops? Probably not.

And yes, this all depends on what your definition of ‘classic’ is, or what ‘good’ or ‘crappy’ mean to you in terms of books. But let’s be honest, it’s not tough to recognize challenging fiction, or a brainless beachread, when you see it. So, read something that will challenge you. Read something that has stood the test of time. Read a classic. And this isn’t me being a book snob, this is backed up by science. Check this out:

“Researchers at the University of Liverpool found that serious literature catches the reader's attention and triggers moments of self-reflection.”

"...Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain. The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike," Philip Davis, an English professor who worked on the study with the university's magnetic resonance centre, said.”

“...The academics were able to study the brain activity as readers responded to each word, and noticed how it 'lit up' as they encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.”

“...The research also found poetry, in particular, increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with 'autobiographical memory', which helped the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read.”

“The academics said this meant the classics were more useful than self-help books.”

Who can argue with that?  Improve yourself. Improve your shelf.

Review: The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway

I don’t expect much when I pick up a posthumous work of a great author. I expect even less when it’s the fourth, and final, posthumous work of that author to find its way to publication. But I was pleasantly surprised when I finished Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden the other day.

What starts out innocently enough as a story of two newlyweds honeymooning on the post-war Riviera, quickly becomes a Fitzgeraldesque tale of an artist struggling to ply his trade with a crazy wife who is jealous of her husband’s writing. Then it veers into a sticky half-fictional situation like Hemingway experienced vacationing in the South of France with his wife Hadley, and live-in girlfriend and future-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer—only with a few important details altered to make the male character come off a little better than he did in real life.

There is lots of swimming, lots of tanning, lots of passive-aggressive dialogue, lots of mixed drinks, and lots of hair styling. Yes, that’s right, hair-styling. In the end, though, this is a book about writing. Which is why it works for me. Hemingway brilliantly works a couple short stories, and the process of writing them, into the main story of love gone sour. Though the reader never actually reads them, they see the main character of David Bourne reliving the childhood experiences on which they are based as he writes them, and therefore come to a deeper understanding of who he is as a person.

Ironically, in a story where a writer reading his own press clippings becomes a major plot point to his own detriment, Hemingway leaves a few clues that he, too, was guilty of reading his own press clippings, dropping references to his newspaperman style and his iceberg theory of writing:

“He wrote it in simple declarative sentences with all of the problems ahead to be lived through and made to come alive.”

“Finally he knew what his father had thought and knowing it, he did not put it in the story.”

“He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out. Then, of course, he could close it like the diaphragm of a camera and intensify it so it could be concentrated to the point where the heat shone bright and the smoke began to rise. He knew that he was getting this now.”

He also talks through his editing process, and his conviction that the work has to marinate on its own:

“It was a very young boy’s story, he knew, when he had finished it. He read it over and saw the gaps he must fill in to make it so that whoever read would feel it was truly happening as it was read and he marked the gaps in the margin.”

“He cared about the writing more than about anything else, and he cared about many things, but he know that when he was doing it he must not worry about it or finger it nor handle it any more than he would open up the door of the darkroom to see how a negative was developing. Leave it alone, he told himself. You are a bloody fool but you know that much.”

Last of all, Hemingway puts into fiction what he must have experienced when his wife lost nearly every page of his years of hard work:

“You can write them again.” 

“No,” David told her. “When it’s right you can’t remember. Every time you read it again it comes as a great and unbelievable surprise. You can’t believe you did it. When it’s once right you never can do it again. You only do it once for each thing. And you’re only allowed so many in your life.” 

“So many what?” 

“So many good ones.”

The bottom line is that this novel is probably less interesting for the story it tells, than for the insights it gives us into the life of the author as he surveyed his 60 years and wove it into his fiction. I liked it. You might, too.

"Seldom Seen" Sleight?

One of the books I’ve recently placed a hold on at my local library is Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang . Not necessarily a literary classic, mind you, but I think it’s a book most people would put in the western canon. No, not thatWestern Canon , but the canon of important works set in and about the American West.

Anyhow, last night I’m reading my college alumni magazine (Go Utes) and I stumbled across this profile of the man who was the real-life inspiration for “Seldom Seen”  Smith, the ringleader of Abbey’s ragtag group of fictional environmentalist misfits. Though he’s still alive and well, retired river guide Ken Sleight isn’t spilling the beans on how much of Abbey’s tale is based on actual events. But I still get a kick out of discovering the truth behind the fiction…

The Writer's Voice: Arthur Conan Doyle

The only known recording of the Sherlock Holmes creator. He would die three years later. Fascinating stuff. He explains what bugged him about earlier detective stories, and how he changed all of that with the character of Holmes.

Is it me, or is his Scottish accent a heckuvalot nearer today’s standard American accent than the Scots we hear in the media today?