Literary Death Match: Brave New World vs. Nineteen Eighty-Four

Welcome to Literary Death Match where two books engage in a fight to the death for the title of Best Book in a category arbitrarily decided by us. Up for grabs today is the title of “Best Book set in a Dystopian Future London.” And our contestants are Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Google will tell you this isn’t the first time these two have squared off together, but it’s certainly bound to be the bloodiest. Without further ado, let’s send it over to Mike Thackery and Tom Galbraith, who will be calling the match from Shelf Actualization Stadium.

A Small, thin, unathletic man with very bad eyes.

In case you have trouble making out the audio:

…James Joyce. They did a certain amount of drinking together. The author of Ulysses was a small, thin, unathletic man with very bad eyes. When, in the course of their drinking, he ran into any sort of belligerence, he would jump behind his powerful friend and shout, “Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!”

Mini-Review: The View From Castle Rock



I kicked off  my New Year’s Reading Resolutions by picking up a book I would probably never have read otherwise: The View from Castle Rock, by Alice Munro. My only prior experience with Munro is her short story “Axis,” which didn’t exactly bowl me over, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

This collection is divided into two parts. In the first are a handful of stories that trace the lives of her Scottish ancestors as they emigrate from the old world to southern Ontario in Canada. In the second part are another group of stories that explore life as it existed for her and her family in that same area many years later. An epilogue at the end does a nice job of tying the two sections together.

My verdict? I actually really liked the book. Maybe even loved it. Now, be forewarned: there are none of the terrible calamities or exultant climaxes that you might find in a more plot-heavy book. But her stories and descriptions and insights do make for some pretty fascinating reading.

Poring through this book is like visiting with the author as she pulls a box of old photos from the closet shelf and rattles off her haphazard memories. These are the types of people who lived here, she tells you. This was the flavor of their lives. This is how I imagine such-and-such happening. -I admit that it took a while to reel me in, but once I was there I was positively spellbound.

And if all of this sounds too much like chick-lit, let me toss out a just a few of her vivid descriptions. First, a patient in the hospital:

He wears a short hospital gown and sits in the wheelchair with his legs apart, revealing a nest of dry, brown nuts.

Ew, right? But the awesomeness continues with this conversation about a constipated dog, held over ham sandwiches and coffee:

“He started grunting and pissing and worrying at the mat. He was just crazy with the misery and wasn’t nothing I could do. Then about quarter past seven I heard the change. I can tell by the sound he makes that he’s got it worked down into a better position where he can make the effort. There’s some pie left, we never finished it. Would you rather have the pie?”

“No, thanks. This is fine.” I pick up a ham sandwich.

“So, I open the door and try to persuade him to get outside where he can pass it.”

The kettle is whistling. She pours water on my instant coffee. “-Wait a minute. I’ll get you some real cream. But too late! Right on the mat there, he passed it. A hunk, like that!” She shows me her fists bunched together. “And hard! Oh, boy, you should have seen it, like rock. And I was right”, she says, “it was chock-full of turkey quills.”

I stir the muddy coffee.

“And after that? Whooosh! Out with the soft stuff. Bust the dam, you did.” She says this to Buster who has raised his head. “You went and stunk the place up something fierce, you did. But the most of it went on the mat, so I took it outside and put the hose on it.” she said, turning back to me. “Then I took the soap and the scrub brush and then I drenched it with the hose all over again, then scrubbed up the floor, too, and sprayed with Lysol and left the door open. You can’t smell it in hear now, can you?”

“No.”

“I was sure good and happy to see him get relief, poor old fellow. He’d be the age of 94 if he was human.”

And here’s another where she discovers her childhood home is now the site of a car wrecker yard:

The front yard and  the side yard and the vegetable garden and the flower borders, the hay field, the mock-orange bush, the lilac trees, the chestnut stump, the pasture and the ground,  once covered by the fox pens, are all swept under a tide of car parts. Gutted car bodies, smashed headlights, grills and fenders, overturned car seats with rotten, bloated stuffing. Heaps of painted, rusted, blackened, glittering, whole or twisted, defiant and surviving metal.

It’s pretty good stuff. There’s a reason she’s won Canada’s Governor General’s Award three times. I heartily recommend the book.

First Line Friday!

“At five o’clock that morning reveille was sounded, as usual, by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters.”

This is, in my opinion, a great first line. Let’s dissect this bad boy.

We’ve got staff quarters and reveille being sounded. Right off the bat we know this tale will unfold in the confines of some well-ordered, regimented existence.

It’s sounded at five o’clock, so we know we’re not at summer camp. And it’s not being trumpeted from a bugle, so we know we’re not in the army. Where then?

Well, it’s happening as usual- just like it always does- and it’s being banged out by a hammer on a length of rail. Sounds cruel.  Sounds heartless. And efficient and brutal and any number of other things. Sounds like a Soviet gulag.

This is how Alexander Solzhenitsyn welcomes us to the Siberian prison camp where his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  is set. As you can gather from the title, the book only covers the events of a single day, but the reader feels the monotony and tedium of an entire prison sentence in the space of a very few pages. He pulls it off with that great opening, and by closing with the same image he led with:

“There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.

“Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.

“The three extra days were for leap years.”

 

Short Story Club: "Walter John Harmon" by E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to Short Story Club. Come on in, have a seat, and let’s get down to business. Tucker and Orlando are in the kitchen preparing watercress sandwiches. As we announced before, the focus of this month’s discussion is the rather lengthy short story “Walter John Harmon” by E.L Doctorow. It’s a fascinating yarn about life in a religious cult- as told by a believer, who also happens to be the group’s in-house counsel attorney.

In what we hope becomes a tradition, we’ve asked for guest posters to kick off our discussion. And who better to inaugurate the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club, than Mr. John R. Lyman himself. (And no, that’s not him pictured above. That would be Doctorow.) What did you think, Lyman?:

I hadn't thought much about cults lately, which isn't all that easy to do when you share a home state with the Lafferty brothers and Warren Jeffs.  Half the time you're trying to just read an article about last week's football game in the local paper you get smacked in the face with horror stories about child brides and tales of end times. At a certain point you tune them out. After reading "Walter John Harmon" I had a better sense of why: most cult stories are invariably told somewhat uninterestingly by outsiders, because in the most interesting cults members don't do much talking to rest of the world. That type of reporting often leads to a list of weird acts and crimes, but never seems to get to the crux of the cult itself. It's a bit like reading a Woodward and Bernstein article on Watergate without any input from Deepthroat.  

In my mind Doctorow's story, although of course fictional, offers as plausible an account as any "true" story of life in a cult. The feeling of complete inadequacy ("I knew the failing within me when Betty was this night summoned for Purification") mixed with the supreme arrogance of knowing you're right about something while the rest of the world is completely wrong ("In the end, no one could withstand the warmth and friendliness of our Embrace."). And, of course, the utter fear of cognitive dissonance, which drives so much of what anyone does but seems to especially affect those in a cult. "Hmm, the prophet ran off with my money and wife -- either I've been a total tool for the last five years of my life or this is all part of the master plan. Let me go talk to a few of the other elders who might have been fooled, too. . . yep, it was all part of the master plan!"

At times the story shows its age. For whatever reason cults were a bigger deal in the late 90s and early 2000s than they are now. Perhaps there was less going on then, or maybe the American public has just come to accept religious wackos now and isn't as interested as reading about them. The passages on the Internet are borderline funny. I had forgotten there was a time -- 2003, apparently -- when people actually used the term "Web log" instead of blog. And if Doctorow wrote the story today he'd either cut the entire descriptive paragraph after "Betty and I learned about Walter John Harmon from the Internet" (really, where else would you learn about a cult?) or replace it with, "Initially we friended Walter on Facebook, which is where all his followers must first declare their loyalty. Then we watched some really funny YouTube videos of him playing with his cats." But the essence is timeless. Life is pretty damn scary for some people and it's nice to have a place to fit in, even at the expense of your wife, livelihood, and rationality.

Thanks, John. What about the rest of you? Do you agree? Disagree? Like the story? Dislike the story? What did you think about the world Doctorow created here? Have at it in the comments!

From the Pen of Wallace Stegner

I’ve talked about what makes a line of prose jump off the page at me here. I don’t necessarily make highlights as I read, but I’ll dog-ear a page for future reference if something catches my eye. Below is a smattering of such lines from Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. All emphasis is mine:

"Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOM! All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report...

"Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOM! went the cushioning air. BOOM!  BOOM BOOM BOOM!BOOM!"

"She watched me with something like horror. I could feel her eyes on my back, and hear her breathing, and whenever I wheeled around in my chair and caught her eyes, they skittered away in desperate search for something they might have been looking at."

"A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone."

"Standing by the gateway he moved the sweating servants with an eyebrow, directed them with half-inch movements of his head."

"He hung from her breast like a ripe fruit ready to fall. His eyes were closed, then open, then closed again... She hated the thought that he must become a separate, uncomfortable metabolism cursed with effort and choice."

What about you? What’s the best line you’ve come across in your recent reading?

Literature podcasts

I’m sure you’re all as giddy as we are for Thursday’s Short Story Club kick-off. As we continue to build momentum for the short form, we thought we’d share some more great short story resources to help you mark the time.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m currently cursed with an hour-long commute. That’s one hour each way. This means I’m always looking for good commute-listening fodder. The last refuge of the sane commuter is variety, so in addition to radio, my own music and any number of audio books, I have a few trusty podcasts standing by to get me through the tedium. Here they are in order of preference:

The gold standard: The New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

Fiction Editor Deborah Triesman invites recent or regular contributors to the New Yorker to pull their favorite stories from the magazine’s archives and read them aloud for the podcast. The readings are sandwhiched between excellent and interesting commentary, and I have very rarely come away from an episode disappointed (though it has happened on occasion.) New podcasts once a month. Run-time is typically right around 40 minutes or so. Check it out.

A close second: PRI’s Selected Shorts Podcast.

Host Isaiah Sheffer introduces a wide variety of short stories which are performed in front of a live audience by actors of the stage and screen. The episodes usually feature two different stories, generally given a loose theme that binds them together. They have recently added some commentary to spice things up a bit and I think it’s done the trick. The ratio of stories I don’t like is slightly higher than those I listen to in the New Yorker podcast, but what it lacks in quality, it more than makes up for in quantity. New podcasts every week. Run-time is right at 1 hour per show.

There are also a few “amateur hour” honorable mentions:

The Writing Show. Host Paula B. reads incoming submissions of short stories or first chapters (usually 4 per hour-long show) and gives her impressions freely. There’s a lot of genre stuff to wade through, but there are also some real gems to be found. Our own Tucker McCann has been featured, but since the submissions are anonymous, I won’t tell you which episode.

The Lit Show. In addition to interviews and roundtables, students and alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop regularly share their work on this podcast. It’s interesting to see what kind of work comes out of a top-flight MFA program.

The Moth. From iTunes: “The Moth features people telling true, engaging, funny, touching and eye-opening stories from their lives.” Because they are performed live, and without notes, the stories don’t often have the structure of written stories. But they can be entertaining.

Any other podcast aficionados out there? Keeping in mind that I try to stay in the lit-fic vein, what are some other short fiction podcasts I shouldn’t live without?

Poet's Corner

Poetry for the rest of us:

-Image by James Henkel

Design

BY BILLY COLLINS

I pour a coating of salt on the table

and make a circle in it with my finger.

This is the cycle of life

I say to no one.

This is the wheel of fortune,

the Arctic Circle.

This is the ring of Kerry

and the white rose of Tralee

I say to the ghosts of my family,

the dead fathers,

the aunt who drowned,

my unborn brothers and sisters,

my unborn children.

This is the sun with its glittering spokes

and the bitter moon.

This is the absolute circle of geometry

I say to the crack in the wall,

to the birds who cross the window.

This is the wheel I just invented

to roll through the rest of my life

I say

touching my finger to my tongue.

What's In A Name?

MacEvoy has been rolling around in the elk miscarriage of literature titles as of late . . . which has caused me to do a lot of thinking. Of my favorite 25 (or so) novels, I have strong feelings when it comes to the titles. I hate them (i.e. "The Catcher in The Rye"). Or I love them (i.e. "The Angle of Repose") and wish that I had a book with just such a title.

It often befuddles me that a writer can produce a novel of such sustained prominence and genius, while completely striking out on a workable title (i.e. "All The Pretty Horses"). The tile should be the easy part, in theory, I mean it's ten words or less. But yet these "misses" do occur, as I will point out below. Keep in mind, every book on these lists is, in my mind, important and ground breaking and wonderful, in spite of its great or terrible title.

Best Books I've Ever Read with GREAT (I'm jealous) Titles:

• The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)
• The Angle of Repose (Stegner)
• The Great Gatsby (Joyce)
• For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
• East of Eden (Steinbeck)
• Dharma Bums (Kerouac)
• The Autumn of the Patriarch (Garcia Marquez)
• My Name is Asher Lev (Potok)
• Ask the Dust (Fante)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Garcia Marquez)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)
• Blood Meridian (McCarthy)

Best Books I've Ever Read with TERRIBLE (how could such a good novel have such a shitty title) Titles:

• Dancing At The Rascal Fair (Doig) (sounds like grocery store romance lit)
• All The Pretty Horses (McCarthy) (sounds like lesbian cowgirl lit)
• Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Joyce) (Note: I actually don't like the novel either)
• Travels With Charlie (Steinbeck) (John thought this one up in 10 seconds, surely)
• The House of Spirits (Allende) (sounds like a "universe" book you'd see featured on Oprah)
• Love In The Time of Cholera (Garcia Marquez) (Can't have "love" in a title, sorry Gab).
• Cry, The Beloved Country (Patton) (sorry MacEvoy, but this one misses the mark for me)
• A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor) (sounds like my Jewish mother-in-law)
• The Stranger (Camus) (too bland)
• Out Stealing Horses (Petterson) (sounds like a 12 year old wrote the title)
• The Savage Detectives (Bolano) (After reading it, I am still unsure what the title means, so I hate it)
• A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) (Makes me think of Thanksgiving?!)
• Freedom (Franzen) (sounds like a George Bush speech title)

Now, keep in mind that aside from Joyce, I've LOVED each of these novels and count them as important to my development as a person and thinker. And these titles represent opposite ends of the spectrum with plenty of titles that fall in between the Great v. Terrible debate ("Don Quixote de la Mancha" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Old Man & The Sea").

What I've gleaned from my self-made lists are that most writers find themselves on both ends of the spectrum depending on the novel. They write a stellar title for one novel, and a pitiful title for the next.

Can anyone disagree with my list(s)?

Learn a life skill: Read a novel

Sometimes a passage will do nothing for the plot, zip for the growth of the characters, and zilch for conveying a lasting message of any kind- but you still love it because it provides a killer description of something you'll probably never experience first-hand. In that spirit, let's let Tom Joad show us how to skin a rabbit:

Tom took up the rabbit in his hand. "One of you go get some bale wire outa the barn. We'll make a fire with some of this broken plank from the house." He looked at the dead rabbit. "There ain't nothing so easy to get ready as a rabbit," he said. He lifted the skin of the back, slit it, put his fingers in the hole, and tore the skin off. It slipped off like a stocking, slipped off the body to the neck, and off the legs to the paws. Joad picked up the knife again and cut off the head and the feet. He laid the skin down, slit the rabbit along the ribs, shook out the intestines onto the skin, and then threw the mess off into the cotton field. And the clean-muscled little body was ready.

-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

First Line Friday

Today's first line is one that I've loved since the first day I read it, years ago, on my balcony in Los Angeles below the tapestry of a mild winter afternoon.

"I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists."

This novel then goes on to tell the story of a 17 year old aspiring poet named Juan Garcia Madero in Mexico City and his interactions with a group of rogue poets known as, of course, the "visceral realists." This first line is very abrupt, not flowery, not overly burdensome, but concise, and then the real kicker: The Visceral Realists. The reader is 7 words into the novel and already wondering who the hell the visceral realists are. To my eyes, it's a very effective first line.

So who wrote this first line? And in what novel? Without further ado, it is Roberto Bolano's critically acclaimed "The Savage Detectives." This novel really frustrated me at times, while completely melting my face with its turns and prose at other times. I guess I'd suggest that you read it, but be advised that it's work. But it's work that's well worth it.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Like most men my age, I’ve probably seen every episode of Seinfeld at least twenty-three times. But the fourteen-year-old MacEvoy certainly wouldn’t have known who John Cheever was when the episode entitled “The Cheever Letters” aired in 1992. Twenty years later I can say his short stories rank among my very favorites.

Anyway, here is a clip from that episode that riffs off of the then-fairly recent publication of the author’s very private, very forthright letters and journals. “The letters” make their appearance at about the one-minute mark...

Two months down!

Hard to believe we've been at this for two months already. We've got truckloads of great content stored neatly away in the archives and you can see the authors we've touched upon in just the past 30 days above. Below, you'll find the five most popular posts from the same time period.

Thanks for reading, and as always, leave us a comment and tell us how we can improve, what you'd like to see more of, what you wish we'd stop, etc.!

1. The Art of the Pseudonym
2. On Plot Twists
3. My Shelf Life: 2011
4. Poet's Corner
5. Hello, my name is Rose of Sharon

The JRLMSSC Is Born

Yesterday’s post on short stories was part love song, part lamentation. Today we tell you what we’re going to do about the lamentation part of things.

But first, appropriately, a very short story:

The other day I was included on an email chain between the participants of a once-great book club. As often happens in life, this half dozen men in their early thirties had been spread far and wide by the grad-school/professional diaspora, and now meets only once a year during the holidays. From what I could tell, a few half-hearted emails are occasionally traded to spur or check on progress, and at least one daunting title had been jettisoned midway through the year to stave off a mutiny of the disinterested.

But then something interesting happened. One of them circulated a short story he thought just might intrigue the group. What followed was a flurry of emails and informal reviews that ranged from high praise to “not-that-great,” and from profound and eloquent to downright hilarious. In fact, I’d never seen a group of non-writer thirty-somethings mobilize themselves to a literary discussion quite so quickly before. It spawned an epiphany of sorts:

Short stories are short. People will actually read them. The point of the story can usually be smoked out of its hiding place in very little time, and you can say about it what you want to in the space of a short email or blog comment. They are infinitely better suited to comprehensive club-type discussions than the long works of fiction that three-quarters of the group never likes, and half the group never reads.

And that is why we’re establishing the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club. Every month we’ll post the link to a fantastic short story for you to read, and on the appointed day you’ll return to hear some of our thoughts, and to share some more of your own. It will be spectacular.

Now, are we the first short story club in existence? Certainly not. Are we the best short story club in existence? It’s likely. But we know we’re the only one that enjoys the ongoing patronage of Mr. John R. Lyman. So who is this great man, you ask? That’s a great question, and we look forward to all your great questions, comments, complaints and criticisms as we launch the short story club that bears his name.

First up for the JRLMSSC in January? We might as well start with a doozy: “Walter John Harmon” by E.L. Doctorow, published in the New Yorker in 2003, and collected in his 2004 book Sweet Land Stories. Here's the opening:

When Betty told me she would go that night to Walter John Harmon I didn’t think I reacted. But she looked into my eyes and must have seen something—some slight loss of vitality, a moment’s dullness of expression. And she understood that for all my study and hard work the Seventh Attainment was still not mine. [Read More]

It is Fascinating. You won't want to miss it. Click the link, read it, mull it over, and come back here to hash it out on Thursday January 19^th.

And don't forget, the first rule of Short Story Club is: you do not talk about Short Story Cl– wait a minute, no… that’s another club. The first rule of Short Story Club is tell everyone about short story club. It’s gonna be off the chain!

An Ode to the Short Form

I’m a short story nut. And I sometimes fail to understand why other people aren’t.

I mean, people used to read them. There used to be a huge market for short fiction back in the day. As a point of reference, consider the following:

F. Scott Fitzgerald sold 11 stories in 1919. For these he received $3,975. That’s $361 a pop. You might not think that’s all that impressive, but in today’s dollars it works out to be about $4,500 per story.

Between November 1923 and April 1924 he produced 11 more short stories, this time earning $17,000- or $215,000 in today’s money. That’s almost twenty grand per story! But sit tight, there’s more.

When he sold “Babylon Revisited” to the Saturday Evening Post in 1931 he pulled in an astounding $4,000, or the equivalent of almost $57,000 in our day. Again, for a single story. How did he do it? Readers galore. But sell a short story to a literary magazine nowadays and you’re lucky if you get two free copies of the publication as a reward.

So, what happened to the market? Why aren’t people reading short stories anymore? Is it the decline of mass market magazines? The advent of TV? The publishing industry’s focus on easy-to-market novels and series? Probably a little bit of all-of-the-above. But there’s got to be something else at play. After all, people still read. Not only that, our attention spans grow shorter and shorter every year. You would think short stories would thrive in an age where people consume content on smart phones while in line at the grocery store. So what else is going on here?

I think short stories have a branding problem. Stories. Aren’t those the things we tell our kids? And short. Doesn’t that mean it’s light? Easy? Mere fluff? Why would bright, serious adults spend their time with such things?

“Books,” “novels,” and “series” on the other hand, all possess a kind of weight and cachet that imbues their readers with erudition,  and culture and saavy.

Pretend for a moment that you’re sitting in a waiting room somewhere. A complete stranger walks in and asks you what you’re reading. Would you rather tell them you were reading a novel? Or that you were engrossed in “a short story?” …Exactly. You see my point.

But I don’t see why it has to be that way. When it comes right down to it, what’s not to love about short stories? You want great first lines? I give you Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado:”

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

You want smack-you-in-the-face last lines? How about Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

You want fantastic dialogue? Foreshadowing? A mysterious backstory to unravel? And wide shifts in tone? You don’t need a novel! You can find all of that and more in a great little yarn like Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Banafish.”


Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disparaging novels. I’ve read some great ones. Some I’d even call life-changing. But when I find myself contemplating something I’ve recently read, more often than not, it’s something I’ve read in a short story. Maybe it’s because short stories give you quick glimpses and relatable scenes. Maybe they engage you better by leaving more to the imagination. Maybe it’s easier to hold their bite-sized messages in our brains. Or, maybe it’s just easier for a writer to hold our focus for 15 pages than it is to do so for 300. I’m still trying to put my finger on the exact appeal.

But I think we can agree that both long and short forms serve their purpose. If a novel is a cross-country road trip, a short story is a weekend jaunt- or an overnight stay, or a night out on the town. It’s anything you want it to be, except a long slog. But that’s the other key advantage it holds. You can easily plow through just about any short story, good or bad. If it’s no good, you move on and forget it. No harm, no foul. If it’s great, it sticks with you just like a novel. But because of its length (or lack thereof) you’re never committing yourself to a literary Death March that will leave you hating a bad novel when you finish it, and feeling guilty or unfulfilled when you don’t.

To make a long story short (HA!!), the short form appears to have lost its grasp on us, despite its obvious charms. It’s a shame and a vexation. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll tell you what we’re going to do about it.

In the meantime, what are your favorite short stories?

Title Chase: The Grapes of Wrath

Yesterday we sniffed out the title of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. Today we do the same for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Why did the one book make me think of the other? Well, despite their vastly different subject matter the two books are very similar stylistically. Paton came across Steinbeck's masterpiece on the same international tour of penal institutions during which he wrote his own novel. You can trace the American writer's influence in Paton's use of a preliminary dash to offset dialogue and, as we discussed yesterday, his use of intercalary chapters to make one family's tragedy a symbolic statement about the world at large.

Steinbeck's intercalaries are some of the most interesting parts of Grapes in my view. They range from abstract descriptions of banks as insatiable monsters, to bits of dialogue set on used car lots and roadside shanty towns. They allow Steinbeck to turn the Joad familiy's plight into a broad condemnation of the Depression Era powers that be.

So where do we get the title, The Grapes of Wrath? From the heartrending descriptions of agricultural waste that have left Oakies and migrant workers like the Joads hungry and destitute:

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. 

"And the smell of rot fills the country... 

"The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

-Page 477 in my 1972 Viking Compass paperback

Title Chase: Cry, the Beloved Country

There are a few things I always pay attention to when reading any book. If it happens to have an interesting title, one of the things I keep an eye out for is the passage where the title originates.

Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country was a book that had spent a few years on my bookshelf before I finally cracked it open. And I'd always wondered where that particular title could have come from. Certainly not in dialogue- people just don't talk that way. And it didn't sound like any sort of standard narrative description, so what then? Maybe a song? A Poem? I just didn't know.

Turns out it comes from Paton's use of intercalary chapters to tell his story. Intercalary chapters are simply passages that are inserted in between various sections of the narrative to expand the scope or provide context for the central characters and their story. Rather than disturb the flow, they're meant to create a mood, or show flashes of what's happening in the larger world. In Cry, the Beloved Country, intercalaries are used to cast Stephen Kumalo's story against the backdrop of percolating racial tensions in South Africa, and against the ruthless gravitational pull that large cities seem to exert on the rural poor.

The effect is pure awesomeness. Here's the intercalary passage that gave the book its title:

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

But I'm not alone in thinking it's a great title. There's an interesting story about how this exact passage was chosen. Paton was staying with two acquaintances in California, on the condition that they read his manuscript. When they finished it they asked him what he would call it. He suggested that they have a little competition. Each of them would write their own proposed title, and then they would compare notes. When they showed each other their suggestions, all three of them had written "Cry, the Beloved Country."

First Line Friday!

Today's first line is from a novel I have never read, which was written by a writer that I once happened upon on a shockingly sunny evening in a Colorado library while I was supposed to be studying for the Colorado Bar Exam. I read the first line that evening, and oh how I wished I could have thrown down my legal books and read the damn Beckett novel. But no, my discipline got the best of me, and I stopped reading with this first and immortal line.

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Ten words that convey a boat-load of tone! Just by reading this line, I can assume that the feeling of the novel will be bleak, monotonous, and somewhat cynical. Further, there are two images / phrases that I love in this brief line. First, the idea of the sun shining because it has no alternative? It's wonderfully jaded. Second, the sun shines on the "nothing new," a beautiful alternative to saying the "same old." I suppose that's why Beckett was a genius.

Perhaps someday I'll read something other than this first line.

Two men walk into a Bar(d)...

Well, yesterday I intimated that Hemingway was a simpleton. A pox upon me. To make amends, I thought we’d stack him up against his flowery old nemesis, Faulkner, and measure them both against the greatest wordsmith of them all: William Shakespeare.

To do this, I’m pulling two passages from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, both describing "languor," - one by Faulkner, the other by Hemingway- and plugging them into the Oxford Dictionaries’ “How Shakespearean Are You?” tool. You may be surprised, as I was, by the results:

"He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in his well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 84 percent Shakespearean. The waters of the Avon almost lap at your feet.

"Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited."        The tool's verdict: Your English is 92 percent Shakespearean. Do you live at the Rose Theatre?

Who'd have thunk it? My own first paragraph up above grades out at an 80. Type your own text into the tool and tell us how Shakespearean you are.

The Writer's Voice

Sometimes we become so immersed in the distinctive literary voice of an author, that when we hear that same author's actual speaking voice, it can be a little jolting. 

Because of his use of short, declarative sentences, Hemingway is often praised as a pioneer of economical and understated prose. But one listen to his slow, halting speech in this recording, and you may be convinced that that simple style was all he was capable of.

A little digging seems to reveal that this is Hemingway’s own parody of his widely-panned novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which we’ve talked about before. Whether he was inebriated when he recorded this is left to question. But it’s worth a listen in either case.

The Lending Library

Most of the books that line my shelves can jog some memory of the place where I originally acquired them: Used Book Stores, Museum gift shops, online retailers and so forth. But there are a handful of books that conjure up not only a place, but a corresponding twinge of guilt whenever I catch a glimpse of their spines. These are the books I am indefinitely “borrowing” from lending libraries on three different continents.

I could have titled this post “Books I’ve Stolen In My Travels,” but that wouldn’t exactly be accurate. Not, that is, if you believe like I do, that lodging-based lending libraries are more akin to the “leave a penny, take a penny” cups at your local convenience store than they are to your nearest municipal library. I have always tried to leave a book when taking one, but in the grand reckoning of my lending library balance, I suppose I have withdrawn more than I have deposited. So it’s with some remorse (and zero intent to make restitution) that I publish a list of my permanently borrowed books:

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad:

This book was picked up this past summer in a small penzion off of Campo San Polo in Venice, Italy. It was the third day of an unexpectedly long stopover while we waited for a standby flight back to Atlanta. I snatched it from the common bookcase and laid it on the nightstand with all the best intentions. But I’m sad to admit I didn’t even try to start this one. Three mornings of standby hell followed by three afternoons of lugging little kids through the tourist-packed streets of Venice will crush the desire to read anything out of just about anybody.

The Red Dancer, by Richard Skinner and Why We Want You To Be Rich, by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki:

Both of these were picked up in a Buenos Aires youth hostel in 2009. It was admittedly very slim pickings. I was in Argentina for a business school Colloquium and didn’t think I’d have time for any reading outside of the assigned business cases I brought with me from the states. Turns out I was right, but I took them anyway. The first book, historical fiction about the life of Mata Hari, wasn’t read until this past year, and the other has not been cracked open as of this writing.

Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes:

Nestled beneath the Air Traffic Control Tower at the Salt Lake City airport, there is a squat, beige building that houses a Delta Reservations call center. It’s where I worked for the last two and a half years of my undergraduate program. Inside that building is a fairly robust lending library filled with all kinds of the regular crap you’d expect people to take on a weekend trip to Paris and promptly dump in the break room upon their return. Still, I’d scour the shelves for anything remotely decent, and was surprised one evening to find something that actually struck my interest: The above named Nebula Award-winning novel by Daniel Keyes. Unfortunately, I must have been engrossed in another read, because seven years later it still sits unread on my shelf. (By now you’re noticing a pattern…)

Stop-Time by Frank Conroy:

In June of 2003, the woes of stand-by travel once again reared their ugly head. Instead of luxuriating in a business class seat on an overnight flight to meet some friends in Eastern Europe, I spent a very long night folded across two benches at Gate 12 of JFK’s Terminal 3. As a consequence, I burned through my reading material much faster than expected, and had nothing to read by the time we left Budapest for Prague. Luckily, future Shelf Actualization co-blogger Tucker McCann reached into his ‘already read’ pile and tossed me what is still quite possibly the best memoir I have ever read. (He’d picked it up for a dollar out of a clearance basket at the University Bookstore). I never returned the book, and now that we live in separate cities, I imagine I never will. Sorry Tucker.

What about you? What have you taken, and where? Spill it.

In which we discuss resolutions for the new year

Whether we write them down or not, we all make New Years Resolutions. So let's have'em. Out with your 2012 reading resolutions! Mine are relatively simple, because I'll foul up anything even remotely complex. Here they are:

#1) Read more women:

Some of my all-time favorite books have been written by authors like Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, but anybody who's read my 2011 reading recap will see that I've been swirling in an eddy of literary testosterone for the better part of a year: One female author, out of twenty-eight read last year. Yikes.

In fact, let's just look at eminent American authoresses for a moment: if you were to ask me right now to tell you the difference between Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, the best I could come up with is that Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks in Milledgeville, Georgia- and that's because I live in Georgia. I hope to remedy that in 2012 (the cluelessness about women authors, that is- not the living in Georgia.)

#2) Read an Agatha Christie Poirot novel:

This second goal supports goal number one, but it also gives me one last chance to actually read a Poirot mystery before David Suchet acts out the final handful of stories on my TV. Not high literature, but hey, I've got to switch things up from time to time.

#3) Read a foreign language novel in the original:

Little-known fact about me: I speak Slovene, along with about two million other people on earth. But the only adult book that I have actually completed in the language is a cheap translation of a Barbara Cartland romance that I bummed off my wife when I had run through my own reading material at the beach one year.

I did read Camus' L'Etranger in college French, but that was more a linguistic adventure than a literary one. So, this year I vow to finally get over the hump and tackle a great work of Slovene literature, probably Boris Pahor's Trg Oberdan.

What are you're reading resolutions for 2012?

Happy New Year!

Most of us are waking up this morning after a very late, if not altogether crazy, night of celebration. And before long we'll turn our thoughts to the New Year and the many new beginnings it promises. Given those two prompts (the morning-after funk, and the appeal of a clean slate), there's no better story to share with you today than the Jay McInerney tale "It's 6 a.m., Do You Know Where You Are?"

Originally published by the Paris Review, this story later became the opening chapter to McInerney's classic novel Bright Lights, Big City. Since the story is written in the second person, the narrator is, well... the reader. It's the story of a man who 'comes to' out of a drug-addled haze, and continues his cocaine-fueled romp until he is brought to the realization that his life is in tatters. 

In the closing lines he is so desperate for real nourishment that he trades his designer silk jacket for a bag of warm rolls. It is a glimmer of hope that suggests things are about to turn around for this sorry addict:

"You tear the bag open and the smell of warm dough rushes over you. The first bites sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything over again."

It's a nice message for New Year's Day. Give it a listen. The 20 minute recording was made for a recent Selected Shorts podcast. Start at 3:00 minutes in if you want to hear Jay McInerney talk about the genesis of the story, or jump to 7:00 minutes in to start listening to the story itself (you can click ahead just above the green line in the player.)

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Happy New Year.