Forget flouridation, Let's look at literary additives

We're all familiar with the monumental genius of Harper Lee's classic book To Kill a Mockingbird. It turns out that the character of Dill just happens to be based on a very good childhood friend of Lee's.

Apparently, the real Dill was a kid named Truman Streckfus Persons and, as the years passed, Persons became a rather accomplished novelist in his own right. After his mother remarried, he took on a name that’s probably more familiar to you: Truman Garcia Capote.

This leads us to ask the obvious question: What was in the water in Depression-era Monroeville, Alabama? (And whatever the answer is, can I please get some?)

    

May the best man win

It's that time again. Voting for Haiku-ption Contest #4 is now open to the reading public. Have at it!

An atomic explosion of awesome

Today’s post shares the dual distinction of officially putting our third month in the books, and being our 100^th post since kicking things off here in November.

Now, we don’t want to pat ourselves on the back, but since there’s no one else to do it we’ll just go ahead and say that it’s pretty amazing that in the past 30 days alone we have thrown the spotlight on 26 different authors. We may not be bottomless fonts of knowledge and insight, but you can’t say we lack range in our literary interests. Just take a look at this past month’s line up:

John Cheever

Roberto Bolano

John Steinbeck

Billy Collins

Wallace Stegner

E.L. Doctorow

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alice Munro

James Joyce

Aldous Huxley

George Orwell

Thomas Mann

Italo Calvino

Joseph Conrad

Edith Wharton

H. Rider Haggard

Toni Morrison

Sue Monk Kidd

David Grann

John Hersey

J.D. Salinger

Annie Proulx

Eudora Welty

Douglas Thayer

Henry James

Daniel Orozco

Philip Roth

That's a decent list by anyone's standards. And there's lots more where that came from. You just need to strap in and feel the 'Gs.' As always, here are the 5 most popular posts from this past month:

Literary Death Match: 1984 vs. Brave New World 

Review: “Wasatch” 

Haiku-ption Contest #4 

Short Story Club: “Walter John Harmon” 

Poet’s Corner

We’re glad to have each and every one of you as readers, and we hope you’ll continue to spread the word about the atomic explosion of awesome happening over here at ShelfActualization.com.

First Line Friday!

It's "First Line Friday" again. Today's first line is a great one for memorizing, if you are in the business of memorizing first lines:

"I knew her eight years ago."

Now, I like this line. I don't love it, but I do think it's a good first line. I like that it's concise (very concise . . . 6 words), but completely introduces the reader to the subject, which is obviously a girl. But, I also wonder about its efficacy? Does it work? Is too basic?

The writer, of course, is Phillip Roth. The novel is The Dying Animal.

Short Story Club Selection for February

Alrighty. Time to unveil our February selection for the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club. It’s a short one, but it’s an instant classic for anyone that’s ever worked out of a cubical. (I’m typing this post in the bath of fluorescent light that pervades my own little 8’x8’ slice of cube heaven, and some of you might just be reading this in similar surroundings.)

The story for this month is “Orientation” by Daniel Orozco, from his collection by the same name. Access the four-page story for free here, or purchase the entire collection below. Then come back here on Saturday the 25^th of February, and we’ll heap praise/pick it apart/do whatever it is we do at Short Story Club.

Here's the opening:

“Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual. There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.” 

[Read More]

Mini-Review: The Turn of the Screw

Since I’d never read anything by Henry James before, I didn’t quite know what to expect when I picked up The Turn of the Screw. Call me clueless, but the last thing I expected was a good old fashioned ghost story- which is essentially what this book is (unless you subscribe to the “insane governess theory.”) It was admittedly an interesting read, but I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about this one. I really enjoyed the premise, and the jaw-dropper of an ending gave the book a punch I didn’t think James had in him. But the fact I didn’t love it probably comes down to a question of style.

James’s reputation as a writer certainly precedes him, so I was preparing myself for pantloads of florid prose. And that, as the snippet below illustrates, is something he delivered in spades:

To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgement and, so far as it might be, my agitation.

A little much, right? But my recent immersion in Conrad, Mann and Faulkner had prepped me well for the challenge. No, it wasn’t so much the flowery nature of the writing that doomed this book for me, as the sheer quantity of it. He was too blasted thorough for his own good! James essentially talked all the tension out of a very promising tale that was meant to keep you on the edge of your seat.

I don’t need to know every thought, every impression and every detailed description that passes through the narrator’s brain. And I don’t generally need to know the three or four courses of action she considered before finally opening her mouth to reply to another character. As a reader I felt like I could form no reactions of my own, because everything was already explained for me in excruciating detail.

To sum up: I think beautiful and elaborate language definitely has its place, I just don’t think it served this story as well as a simpler approach might have done. Any James fans out there? Am I completely off base on this one?

Review: Wasatch- Mormon Stories and a Novella

Before picking up this book, my only exposure to Douglas Thayer was his short story “Opening Day,” which you can access for free here. This collection contains some of his previously-unpublished stories, and returns to print others that are described as among his ‘career-best.’ If you’ve never heard of him before, you might be wondering what kind of career we’re talking about here. I was in the same boat, but after Wikipedia told me he’s been referred to as the “Mormon Hemingway” I admit I was intrigued. I decided to take the plunge, and I’m glad I did.

On the face of it, you could say that Thayer is firmly entrenched in telling only one kind of story, as almost all of these selections feature coming of age tales told from the perspective of the Mormon male. But to dismiss the collection on those grounds would be to do the author and the reader a great disservice. There’s considerable range lurking beneath the surface. Whether it’s the magical realism of “Brother Melrose,” or the black comedy of “The Gold Mine,” Thayer explores themes of life and death, survival and forgiveness, faith, doubt, friendship, heroism and more.

Thayer’s Mormon-ness, which is altogether absent in a number of the stories, is doled out by varying degrees in the interior monologue of his characters, rather than explained overtly in sermons and worship services. Sometimes this method gives an air of expository doctrine dropping (as in “Crow Basin” and “Apache Ledges”), but for the most part it is handled deftly- as a backdrop or a motivation for the character action. In fact, those stories that delve for deeper religious meaning (“The Locker Room” and “Fathers and Sons”) are among the most powerful in the collection.

The author has described himself as having “a mind that deals in images.” His straightforward prose certainly conveys those images clearly, and above all, evokes a strong sense of place. The mountains, rivers and elements of Wasatch are maybe more accurately described as characters than as settings. They shape and challenge his protagonists, and in some cases give them their very purpose.

If I were to level one criticism of the writing, it is that Thayer has a strong affinity for leading with dependent clauses. This isn’t a problem in and of itself, but when two or three such sentences are grouped together, it can be a little distracting:

Sometimes at night, almost feverish, not wanting to go to bed in my deep, dark room, and not knowing why, I stayed out late. Dressed in Levi’s and low-cut tennis shoes without socks, my T-shirt wadded in my pocket, I rode my bike under the dark summer trees to town. The sidewalks nearly empty, driven by some strange desire to know myself, I rode past the dark store windows to see my reflection flash by.

I should mention that the above excerpt isn’t representative of the whole, but was simply dog-eared by me as a noticeable offender. Overall, his skills as a storyteller should not be left to doubt. Thayer moves effortlessly between backstory and present action in all of his stories, but does so to special effect in his novella “Dolf,” which will have your heart pounding right up until not one, but two final twists knock you squarely between the eyes. It’s like something out of Cormac McCarthy or the very best Louis L’Amour.

His characters are introspective and interesting, and they inhabit a wide range of time periods and settings. He’ll take you from the frontier of the Old West, to Depression era small towns, to modern day settings of all sorts- including hobo camps, national parks, red rock deserts, abandoned mines and ice-fishing reservoirs. You see a Mormon perspective played out against any number of backdrops, but as I said earlier, Thayer is by no means a one-trick pony. I’d be glad to read him again. Check him out. 

*** Update: This Book was awarded the Association for Mormon Letters' award for Short Fiction in 2011 ***



The eructative Eudora Welty

I shared in another post how I was introduced to John Cheever through a pop-culture reference in an episode of Seinfeld. But I’m sure Cheever’s not the only writer to befall this sorry fate. Sadly, my first introduction to Eudora Welty came in a 1995 episode of the Simpsons.

In “A Star is Burns” film critic Jay Sherman comes to Springfield to judge a film festival. It’s an important episode in the Simpson’s canon if only for the two short films embedded below, “Man getting hit by Football” by Hans Moleman and “Pukahontas” by Barney Gumble (You’ll have to ignore the Polish subtitles.)

The reference to Mme. Welty comes as Sherman is bragging about having won the Pulitzer, to which Homer responds with some bragging of his own:

The exchange between Lisa and Sherman is cut off at the end, but it goes something like this:

Lisa: “Wow! How many Pulitzer Prize winners can do that?”

Jay Sherman: “Just me and Eudora Welty.”

Later in the episode Krusty the Clown announces that he has a date with Eurdora Welty, after which a giant belch is heard offscreen and Krusty shouts, “Coming, Eudora!”

My own internet sleuthing (which is notorious in some circles) has failed to come up with any substantiated basis for this running gag at Ms. Welty’s expense. I’d love to learn that she was a profligate belcher, but highly doubt it. Anyone out there know if there’s a source for it? Anyone?

In Defense of the Books You Hate: Catcher in the Rye

Tucker got me thinking about Catcher in the Rye the other day, and I left a comment voicing one of my pet peeves.

I can’t stand it when people hate things just because they become popular. I mean, I get it. We all like to be in on the ground floor. We all like to be curators of our own little pop culture universe. But if you ask me, there are few things stupider than yelling “sell-out” just because someone you don’t like happens to like something you liked first. A good indie rock band can be absolutely ruined for some folks, for no other reason than that their songs finally get airtime on mainstream radio stations. What a joke.

I’ve read enough crap commentary about Catcher in the Rye to know that it’s one of those books that people just love to hate. It’s a simple-minded creation. Holden’s a self-centered, whiny little pipsqueak. Nothing really happens in the story. Why are we celebrating this dope? But when it comes right down to it, where’s all this vitriol coming from?

My guess it’s one of those books most people love as a teenager, but one which you’re supposed to “out-grow” once you get a little life-experience under your belt. I just don’t get it. Nobody’s saying it’s got to be your favorite book, but let’s recognize it for what it is. It gives us one of the most memorable narrator’s voices of all time. In fact, on that score, I’d rank it in slot number one. It’s a book that continues to resonate with generation after generation, despite an avalanche of arrogant dismissals by the well-read masses. -And I’m no died-in-the-wool, angst-ridden teen- I say all this as someone who didn’t pick the book up until my thirties.

Here are just two passages that caused me no small embarrassment when they produced involuntary, audible guffaws on-board a packed airplane:

I got bored sitting on that washbowl after a while, so I backed up a few feet and started doing this tap dance, just for the hell of it. I was just amusing myself. I can’t really tap-dance or anything, but it was a stone floor in the can, and it was good for tap-dancing. I started imitating one of those guys in the movies. In one of those musicals. I hate the movies like poison, but I get a bang out of imitating them. Old Stradlater watched me in the mirror while he was shaving. All I need’s an audience. I’m an exhibitionist. “I’m the goddam Governor’s son,” I said. I was knocking myself out. Tap-dancing all over the place. “He doesn’t want me to be a tap-dancer. He wants me to go to Oxford. But it’s in my goddam blood, tap-dancing.” Old Stradlater laughed. He didn’t have too bad a sense of humor. “It’s the opening night of the Ziegfield Follies.” I was getting out of breath. I have hardly any wind at all. “The leading man can’t go on. He’s drunk as a bastard. So who do they get to take his place? Me, that’s who. The little old goddam Governor’s son.”

“All of a sudden- for no good reason, really, except that I was sort of in the mood for horsing around- I felt like jumping off the washbowl and getting old Stradlater in a half nelson. That’s a wrestling hold, in case you don’t know, where you get the other guy around the neck and choke him to death, if you feel like it. I landed on him like a goddam panther.”

Now, you may not have relied on such random feats of stupidity for laughs when you were young, but it sounds an awful lot like a million moments of boredom I passed with my highschool friends.  And just because I haven’t pulled a half nelson on anyone in the last twenty years doesn’t mean it doesn’t ring true. It’s a veritable work of genius, and if I had written it, I’d probably be just as likely as Salinger to hole up in New Hampshire for the rest of my life for fear of never producing its equal. It’s that good. Run, don’t walk…

From the pen of Annie Proulx

I’ve said it before, but I read a lot of short stories. It’s my primary method for exploring new authors. Between podcasts, stories people send my way, and the John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club, I probably take in a dozen or more stories every month. That’s a book-length pile of fiction, every month, that doesn’t end up in my regular reading tally.

But just because I don’t keep track of them doesn’t mean I shouldn’t share some of their better lines every now and again. So today on the free sample trey, I give you a smattering from Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News. The lines below come from her short story “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”. All emphasis is mine- the phrases that jumped off the page at me in bold.

"With his mother gone, civilization began to fall away from him like feathers from a molting hen. In a matter of weeks he was eating straight from the frying pan."

"A section of the high-school band straggled past, sweaty kids, many of them obese, their white marching trousers bunched at the crotch. He remembered schoolmates in his own childhood, skinny, quick ranch kids, no one fat and sweaty, Pete Kitchen looking like he was made of kindling wood and insulation wire, Willis McNitt small enough to shit behind a sagebrush and never be noticed."

"Behind the band came two teen-age boys dressed as Indians, breechclouts over swim trunks, a load of beads around their necks, black wigs with braids and feathers."

"They were followed by a stock outlaw and a sheriff’s posse, and behind them half the town’s women and small children in pioneer regalia—long calico dresses, aprons and sunbonnets, big Nikes flashing incongruously with every step."

"The sky was a hard cheerful blue, empty but for a few torn contrails. Plastic bags impaled on the barb fences flapped in the hot wind." 

"He got out, threw his chicken box at the trash can. Rod, too, tossed his crumpled box, but it hit the side of the can and sprayed chicken bones."

First Line Friday!

Today's first line is a rockstar pioneer of a line. Written in 1951, I am unaware of this type of tone in any other literary work from the period, let alone to commence a masterpiece novel. Now remember, this was written in 1951 (the era of Leave-It-To-Beaver):

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

It's a great first line because the tone itself slaps you in the face. You reach the end of the sentence and are left thinking, "Hmm, I didn't expect that. This kid sounds like a real ass." And you're only one sentence into the novel.

This novel is so prominent and respected and blah blah blah that I would assume most of you recognize the line immediately. As such, I am not going to disclose it here. If you don't recognize it, you'd 'better get your shit together.' (I am confident that Holden would phrase it that way too, if he lived in 2012).

Review: A Bell for Adano

My search for audio books at my local library is a pretty haphazard thing. I don’t place holds, and generally don’t plan ahead. My selection just depends on whatever they have available whenever I happen to drop by. Sometimes I come across a book I expect to be phenomenal, and it ends up falling flat. (I’m looking at you, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy) Other times I pick something up out of sheer curiosity and end up loving a book I’d never heard of before. That’s exactly what happened when I pulled John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano off the shelf.

Turns out this book won the Pulitzer in 1945. It’s the story of a Major in the American Army who is stationed as the Allied Military Government Officer in the fictional occupied town of Adano, on the coast of Sicily. It is a novel full of colorful characters: the eccentric villagers of Adano, the cantankerous army General, the conniving former fascists, and the hapless soldiers who try to make sense of it all.

The book’s amusing descriptions of military incompetence and beaurocratic inefficiencies rival those in Heller’s Catch-22 or any good episode of M*A*S*H. Here’s a description of the runaround a local Italian gets when he wants to relay some piece of intelligence to General Marvin (who is modeled after General Patton):

After an argument with Colonel Henderson, Cacopardo was sent upstairs under guard, was stopped and questioned by a sentry at the head of the stairs, was sent downstairs because he did not have a proper Division pass, was given a pass, was taken upstairs again and was questioned as to age, religion, political beliefs and sex by a Sergeant, was interviewed by a staff officer who doubted whether the General  would be free to see him, was referred to Colonel Middleton, the General’s Chief of Staff, was questioned by Colonel Middleton’s secretary, who thought the Colonel was busy, was finally admitted to Colonel Middleton, who after an argument, agreed to see whether the General would see Cacopardo, which he doubted. At the moment, General Marvin was playing mumblety-peg with Lieutenant Bird, his aide.

The main character, Major Joppolo, is a competent, well-meaning officer and all-around good guy. A rarity in both the U.S. beuracracy and the long-oppressed Sicilian town. There is truly nothing not to like about the man. The reader wants him to do well, wants him to succeed in establishing democracy in Adano and in replacing the 700-year-old bell that the fascists had melted down for war munitions.

Unfortunately he’s in a race against the clock to accomplish everything he wants to in Adano. Early in the book he countermands a ridiculous order of the General’s and a memorandum explaining the insubordination is mailed off to the General to make sure he knows where to place the blame. In intermittent chapters we trace the memo as it makes its way from wrong Division to wrong Division, back to Allied Command in North Africa, and then finally to the General’s desk in Sicily. The feel-good ending turns bittersweet just at the crucial moment, but the book was as enjoyable a read as I’ve had lately.

The writing won’t knock you over with its lyrical beauty, but it is a great story, well-told. And what it lacks in breathtaking prose it makes up for in delightful lines from crass characters:

“This place is such a dump. Say, if they ever give this old world an enema, this is where they’ll put the tube in.”

A very strong recommendation for A Bell for Adano, a light but powerful read. Check it out.

Haiku-ption Contest #4

By now, you know the drill. My entry is below. Yours are in the comments. Winner will be determined by the voting public. Make them count!

Penetrating gaze

Five knobs and two antennae

Our bow-tied future



Links to the Past

You might have come across a mind-boggling trivium that began getting renewed attention around the web late last week: President John Tyler- a man who was born 222 years ago (we’re talking the 1700s), the man who became only the 10^th president of the United States, and who died over 150 years ago- still has two living grandchildren!

This kind of thing absolutely floors me. Kottke.org posted some other similar examples here: An eyewitness to Lincoln’s assassination who appeared on a 1956 gameshow, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had the honor of shaking hands with both John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy in his lifetime. These present-day threads to the long-forgotten past absolutely blow my mind.

But I’ve noticed that this same thing, played out in fiction, can be equally compelling: a mysterious or long-forgotten backstory whose ties to the present are assumed to have been lost or severed ages ago, is suddenly discovered to have some tangible thread, some real, yet unexpected connection to the story that we are reading. It could just be the history major in me, but I think it makes for a fascinating, edge-of-your-seat reading experience. I don’t even know what to call this literary device- it’s not in any list I’ve seen. A backstory epiphany? A hidden thread? A long-lost MacGuffin? I have no clue what to call it, but I know it when I see it.

In H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines Alan Quartermain runs into a man named Evans who tells him about a distant mountain range and a tale he’d heard from an old witch doctoress about a magnificent, ancient diamond mine that is said to exist there. Evans is gored by an animal shortly thereafter and Quartermain soon puts the whole exchange out of mind and continues his rough and tumble life as an elephant hunter for the next twenty years.

At some point his work takes him to a piece of country where one can see the mountains in question across 130 miles of ruthless desert, though the forgotten legend is the furthest thing from his mind. He falls ill and happens to meet an old “Portugee” with whom he trades a few innocent words. As the old man takes his leave he nonchalantly says “Good-bye, senor, if we ever meet again I shall be the richest man in the world,” and he strikes out across the desert. Quartermain doesn’t put two and two together until a week later, when that same old man comes crawling back across the desert, feverish, starved, and close to death. Before he kicks the bucket, he leaves Quartermain with a crude, old map, drawn with blood on ancient linen, which had been passed down from an ancestor who had himself died trying to reach the mine three hundred years prior.

These are not really spoilers, by the way.  All of this happens within the first few pages of the book. But let’s look at what Haggard has done here: He planted the seed of mystery, he teases us with the possibility that there might be some truth lurking behind the legend, and when that tangible link to the past ends up in Quartermain’s hands, the legend of King Solomon’s Mines and the promise of untold riches become living, breathing entities in the story. What can you do but read on, right?

Another example is Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Having traveled to search for gold that is rumored to be hidden near the old family farm, the main character “Milkman” stops at the decaying mansion that was home to the family who killed his ancestors and took control of their land. By chance, he meets an impossibly old ex-slave who reveals some surprising family history and points him to a town called Shalimar. It’s there that an ancient family legend interweaves with the book’s theme of magical flight. I won’t spoil this one for you, but the result is intense and beautiful and unexpected. The African folklore of Milkman’s ancestors is brought to life right before your eyes. Absolutely love that book.

But the threads don’t have to stretch over hundreds of years to pack a punch. Just look at Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. In running away from her abusive father, Lily Owens seizes on a mysterious picture of a black Virgin Mary that she finds among her deceased mother’s things. Scratched on the back is the name of a remote South Carolina town. Once she makes her way there, she and her African American nanny move in with three beekeeping sisters who sell their honey under the Black Madonna brand. She realizes her mother’s picture was just one of their honey labels, and thinks she’s solved the mystery of the Black Madonna and what it means. But her own family history and her relationship with her dead mother is tied up that place in ways she doesn’t yet understand. More backstory epiphanies, and threads to the past bring the story to a very satisfying close.

David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, my favorite non-fiction read from last year, plays on the same themes. I could go on and on. It’s the same thing that makes movies like Indiana Jones or the DaVinci Code compelling...

I’d like to read more books like this. Are there any others I should check out that bring the long-lost past to life? Let me know in the comments.



Keeping up with the Joneses

Did you know that the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses" has its origins in the unrestrained mansion-building project of an extremely wealthy New York family?

Yeah, me neither.

A daughter of this storied family, Edith Newbold Jones, is pictured above. But you might know her better by her married name: Edith Wharton.

From the Pen of Joseph Conrad

One more post on Conrad before we let him have a nap. Yesterday we served up a meaty review. Today we dish out a dessert of light, fluffy prose. Enjoy.

"The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank."

"They streamed aboard over three gangways. They streamed in, urged by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmer or a look back; and when clear of confining rails, spread on all sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship- like water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the rim."

"His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his big head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy, as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. He pronounced a professional remark in a voice harsh and dead, resembling the rasping sound of a wood-file on the edge of a plank; the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw."

"There was, as I walked along, the clear sunshine, a brilliance too passionate to be consoling, the streets full of jumbled bits of color like a damaged kaleidoscope: yellow, green, blue, dazzling white, the brown nudity of an undraped shoulder, a bullock-cart with a red canopy, a company of native infantry in a drab body with dark heads marching in dusty laced boots...

-Joseph Conrad, in Lord Jim

Review: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

We’ve wondered before whether Conrad really deserved to place four novels on any Top 100 novels list. He’s one of the greats, to be sure. But four out of a hundred? If you scratched your head along with us, you might be asking yourself ‘why read Lord Jim?’ Well, I answer that question with a few of my own: When was the last time you read the word “inexpugnable” in a novel? When was the last time you saw someone use “abject” seven times in one paragraph (none of which described a failure)? When was the last time someone lobbed an alliterative locution like this line: “daylight came like a glow in a ground glass globe?”

Never, that’s when. Only Conrad, bless his heart.

Lord Jim is a fascinating tale with its roots in actual events- but then, that deserves a blog post of its own some day. Very briefly, Jim is the first mate of a ship called the Patna, which is filled to the brim with pilgrims bound for Mecca. The ship's hull is ripped open by some floating debris, and the only thing keeping it from sinking like an anvil is a precarious, rusty  bulkhead which is barely holding steady in the lower levels. Only the ship's crew knows the situation, and when a squall threatens them in the open sea, they are overcome with fear of drowning.

In a lot of ways, this is a book about things that don't happen. Despite his sense of duty Jim does not stay with the Patna; the Patna does not, in fact, sink in the storm, but is later rescued to the crew's great shame; And unlike the rest of the officers, Jim does not clear out and escape the wrath of the courts, but rather takes all the blame on himself.

I won’t rehash the rest of the plot, which takes place in the remote Indonesian jungle, but I will  talk a little bit about the story's structure, because it gives the book an interesting effect. We never see Jim’s story play out first-hand, but we get it in bits and pieces, after the fact, and from numerous different people. Rather than concentrate on the linear series of events, the reader is forced to analyze as he goes, and to put the story, and Jim’s mental state, together on the fly.

Conrad uses a frame story, told by his alter-ego Captain Marlowe, the narrator of several of Conrad’s other books. Within that surface story we see Jim’s testimony in court, his conversations and confessions to Marlow, reports of conversations or interactions that others had with Jim, later relayed to Marlow, and even some letters that help fill in the missing pieces. This seemingly scattershot approach turns Lord Jim from a straight-up adventure story into a complex psychological examination. You get other characters’ value judgments along the way, and you’re forced to ask yourself, “Sheesh. What would I do in Jim’s situation?”

I think that’s why the book has secured itself a position of such lasting literary importance. Besides doling out heaping scoops of adventure and the mystique of exotic ports and life on the high seas, it's a book that really makes you think. Don’t deprive yourself of the pleasure of reading it.

First Line Friday!

This week's first line is not great, per se, but it is unique. Very unique. And to be fair, I have not read the novel, but I have seen this first line cited for years and years. Here it is:

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel 'If On A Winter's Night a Traveler.'"

This first line is from "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler," by Italo Calvino. Obvious, right? So, it's definitely unique, but to me it also smacks of how a 9th grader would commence his / her own novel. It's too easy, too convenient, it seems to me. In fact, one could argue that it shows a blatant disregard for literature. A novel in the second person? Give me a break!

Or is it genius?

I can't tell.

From the Pen of Thomas Mann



A couple days ago I tried to root out some of the psychological underpinnings of Thomas Mann’s stories and explain why they had such a tendency to “stick.” I fear the result may have been a little gloomy. So today I’ll try to flesh him out a little better than I did last time around.

So what is it you’re going to see if you pick up something by Mr. Mann? For starters, lots of blue veins under pale complexions. Apparently nothing was quite so sexy to Mann as the pallor of translucent skin. But if you can get by your urge to throw his characters in the nearest tanning bed, you’ll love some of his descriptions. Here’s one that tickled my funny bone:

“A young man whose appearance smacked of ill-pay and vegetarianism.”

His language is relatively formal, but it’s delivered in a conversational manner- lots of authorial asides like “the following incident actually happened,” and “what happened next was so disgusting that I don’t dare explain it in detail.” It’s a style that puts you at east, despite the flowery expression.

You’ll see him use music as a stand-in for love and sensuality, and he delivers some of the best writing on artistic creation and writing that I’ve ever come across. Any aspiring writer ought to pick him up for that reason alone.

Last of all, here are a few great lines to give you a taste of his style.

“They disagreed superbly, their eyes narrowing into flashing slits. They pounced on a word, a single word he had used. They tore it to shreds, rejected it and dug up a different word, a dead certain one, which whizzed, struck, and quivered in the bullseye.”

“The winter sun was only a meager glow, milky and matte behind layers of clouds… and sometimes a kind of soft hail fell; not ice, not snow.”

“With a moronic gape, a cigarette in his trembling fingers, he stood there lurching laboriously, keeping his balance, pulled forward and backward by his intoxication.”

Democracy comes to the Haiku-ption Contest

I'm itchin' for a new Haiku-ption Contest, but we never closed the loop on Contests 2 and 3. So I look to you, esteemed readers. Why don't you all pick the last winners for us?

poll by twiigs.com

The Mark of a Mann

It’s been a couple months since I tackled Death in Venice & Other Tales  by German author Thomas Mann. The collection was my very first introduction to Mann, and definitely won’t be my last.

Now, two months is enough time to make an honest-to-goodness review of the book a daunting task for my memory- but it’s also enough time to realize that this is a book that keeps coming back to me whether I mention it here or not. I’m tempted to use that well-worn reviewer’s cliché and call his stories ‘haunting.’

See, Mann has a real gift for creating pathetic, pitiable characters who are called upon by their author to respond to all sorts of inhumane cruelty and unrequited love. Whether sickly, deformed, corpulent or whatever, they all share the distinction of being irredeemable outcasts.

There’s “Little Herr Friedemann” who drowns himself in an ironic nod to Narcissus, by dunking his grotesque form in a reflecting pool. There’s the obese cuckold in “Little Lizzy” whose terrible shame only becomes obvious to him as he is forced to literally played it out on stage in a red silk baby dress. There’s the deeply wounded “Tobias Mindernickel” who takes out his worldly frustrations on his pet dog, eventually stabbing him to death. I could go on and on.

I’m not smart enough to namedrop philosophers, but Wikipedia tells me Mann is heavily influenced by Nietsche’s views on decay and the fundamental connection between sickness and torment and creativity. (Many of Mann’s characters are also artists or writers).  Following this thematic thread from one story to the next, the reader gets the impression that, by the time we’ve come to the end, it is Mann that we have come to know- and not any of his pitiful characters.

Here’s an excerpt from his story “The Harsh Hour,” (which is essentially a story about writer’s block,) that gives us some insight into Thomas Mann’s own creative struggles:

“Talent itself, was it not pain? And when that thing there, that wretched work made him suffer, was that not as it should be? And almost a good sign? It had never gushed, and if it did so, that would truly arouse his disgust. It gushed only for dabblers and bunglers, for the quaint and the easily satisfied that did not live under the discipline of talent. For talent, ladies and gentlemen down there far away in the orchestra, talent is not facile, not frivolous. It’s not mere ability. At its root, it is a need, a critical knowing about the ideal, a dissatisfaction that cannot create or increase its powers without torment. And for the greatest, the most dissatisfied, their talent is their sharpest scourge.”

Another line from “Death in Venice” reveals the importance he places on solitude and isolation as an artist:

“Solitude ripens originality in us, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude also ripens the perverse, the assymetrical, the absurd, the forbidden.”

Of course, this last line also betrays the author’s closet homosexuality and foreshadows the forbidden lust that will keep his main character in a decaying city, at the mercy of a secret epidemic that will eventually take his life.

So maybe Nietsche was right. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that the pain and humiliation and anguish of Mann’s characters are a reflection of his own secret torment. But maybe that’s why it works so well. Give the Mann a whirl.