From the Pen of Karen Russell

I was a little rough on Swamplandia!  the other day, but you shouldn’t think Karen Russell is devoid of talent as a writer. Below are some of the better lines from my reading of that book. All emphasis is mine- they’re just the phrases that  slapped me upside the head:

"The buzzards from Ohio had migrated here, too. Turning circles, as docile as party ponies around a mainland carousel. Then they fell, one by one, like little black razors, into the paurotis palms."

 "Carl pressed his lips to near invisibility. Possibly Carl Jenks had at one time wanted to be a kind man, a decent and charitable man; and then puberty had come along and slapped this almost translucent blond mustache across his face."

 "The Chief and I cut twenty minutes from the show, but you could feel the tourists’ pity first and then their distraction, their attention wandering the skies of the open stadium like kites."

 "One Monday in early May I sailed into the kitchen and snatched an envelope out of the Chief’s blunt fingers- he held onto it for an extra beat out of a wrestler’s instinct, his square nails raking scum across the envelope. He chewed his breakfast cigarette and regarded me with deadened amusement."

 "Nobody had told Grandpa Sawtooth that our mother was dead. I could feel the secret rolling between the four of us like an egg in a towel."

 "Vijay didn’t know how to fix the vacuum either. He knelt and touched the vacuum cleaner’s bag sorrowfully, as if it were the belly of a crippled horse…"

 "A weak film of light rinsed the stairwell and I could see our shadows bending upward on the far wall like candle flames."

 "The insects had been a chronic irritation on the CCC barge, but out here on the marshy open prairie they felt pestilential, their sawing sound filling the air like a cruel ventriloquy of the men’s own thirst."

First Line Friday

This week's first line is from . . . a short story.  What? That's right, not a novel, but a short story.  It's an impressive short story, in my view, and the first line is well done too.

"Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election."

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the first TWO WORDS are powerful in this context.  You open up the story, and you immediately read "Robert Frost," which is intriguing.  A story about Robert Frost?  Or poetry?  Seeing as Robert Frost is a real poet, is the story fictional?  Etc.  The first two words illicit many questions.

The story is "Class Picture" by Tobias Wolff, which was first published in The New Yorker in 2003.  I'd recommend it.

Roberto Bolano's "Summary Dialogue"

One of the components of Roberto Bolano's powerhouse novel 2666 that is most striking to me is its strict absence of dialogue, by which I mean that Bolano prefers to summarize the dialogue, rather than allowing the characters to directly state their words.  For example:

"Espinoza called Pelletier and asked whether it wouldn't be a good idea to get in touch with Norton.  Unsure, they decided to ask Morini.  Morini abstained from comment."


"She said yes, she had met Archimboldi many years ago, but she didn't remember his face anymore, or what he was like, or any story about him that would be worth telling.  She couldn't remember the last time he was at the publishing house.  She advised them to speak to Mrs. Bubis, and then, without a word, she busied herself editing a galley."

"Norton said there was nothing strange about Espinoza's lateness.  Planes got delayed, she said.  Then she  said, I never turn on the television, surprised that Pelletier didn't already know that.  Of course Pelletier did know it.  But he hadn't had the spirit to say: let's watch the news."

Now, after pouring back through the book, I've realized that Bolano does, on occasion, implement the use of quotation marks and standard dialogue.  But, it appears to be somewhat rare, at least in Book One.

Which begs the question: is this summary of dialogue effective?  Do we like it?  Or do we prefer to actually hammer through the quotation marks of word for word dialogue as spoken by the characters?  I am prone to argue that the "Summary of Dialogue" increases the flow, the current, the fluidity of the writing.

Does anyone disagree?

The Writer's Voice: James Joyce

If you enjoy the sing-song cadence of a lilting Irish Brogue, then you’ll enjoy this recording of James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake.  (But if you’re anything like me you’ll probably end up scratching your head, because the man might as well be reading Lorem ipsum placeholder text, for all the sense it makes.)

This is one book I’m pretty sure I’ll never work my way up to.    Ever.   (But I’ll place the text below in case you want to try.)

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ‘Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbing till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me. that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas! Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all! Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest zswound. Oronoko! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper! It’s well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait’s creakorheuman bitts your butts disagrees. Amn’t I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corri- gan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in dec and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere! Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns. Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine.Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the square old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seen dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I knkow, like and Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenlan! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buck goat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?Can’t hear the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughter-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me the John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

Review: Swamplandia! by Karen Russel

If you haven’t heard by now, Karen Russel’s Swamplandia!  was one of three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in a year when no prize was ultimately awarded (for the first time in 35 years, no less.) It was the outcry of dissenting voices, more than anything else, that prompted me to pick up Swamplandia!  and see what all the hullaballoo was about.

Let me start off by saying that this is a book I generally liked. Yet I’m still processing how I feel about it.

It starts off with an interesting premise. A family of alligator wrestlers falls on hard times when their star attraction dies and a Hell-themed amusement park siphons off their remaining visitors. The story then traces how each member of the crumbling Bigtree family tries to save Swamplandia!, their beloved homestead and swamp tourist attraction.

Russel transports the reader to an off-kilter reality where the unbelievable is presented as mundane. As a fan of Wes Anderson’s films, I actually had no problem with this. And just when the various plotlines roll right up to the border of the fantastical and magical, and you thought she was ready to jump the shark, Russel dumps a cooler of ice-cold Gatorade on your head and brings you back to reality. I’ll be honest, the story loosened its hold on me a little bit in the middle, and I was about to lament how low the “Pulitzer bar” had fallen, but she managed to tie the loose ends together and turn the book into a pretty memorable statement about family relationships.

Sounds decent, right? Then why am I still hesitant to sing its praises from the rooftops? It’s pretty simple: Editing. More specifically, the lack thereof.

There were more questionable question marks in this book than I could even count. Declarative statements with question mark endings. It was a little weird, to be honest, and I couldn’t tell if she was doing it on purpose- adding some sort of voice inflection in the best way she knew how- or if they were just missed by the three different editors who are credited in the acknowledgements.

Since the book was published by Alfred A. Knopf, I obviously assumed it was intentional. Publishing imprints don’t really get any more prestigious than Knopf. But then I noticed other typos, as well. Things ‘stared’ instead of ‘started,’ they ‘careered’ instead of ‘careened,’ they even ‘flap-flap-flaped’ instead of ‘flap-flap-flapped.’ There was an omitted word that made one sentence incomprehensible, and a pronoun in another that referred back to exactly zero previously mentioned objects. Then came an entire paragraph that was repeated word for word, a page and a half after it was printed the first time- and this was clearly not done for effect. It was just another oversight.

I wish that were all, though. In addition to some pretty clunky metaphors (a sky that looked like it was having its stitches removed after an operation?!), There were a whole host of pretty persistent continuity errors: Were the skies cloudy or were they clear? Was the sawgrass nine-feet tall, or could the child narrator see how it stretched for miles and miles all round (both wouldn’t be possible, given her height) A portion of the book takes place in the dead of night, yet there were descriptions of vividly-colored blue and red fish, cider-colored water and the licorice-like striations of a scarlet kingsnake. (I’ve seen some bright moons, but none that would allow for that kind of visual detail.)

Did any of this ruin the book for me? Ehhh, not exactly. The excellent passages outnumbered the awkward ones by a good bit. But I’m still bothered enough by all the bad to spend half my review enumerating my hang-ups. And even though I enjoyed watching this world come to life, I’m back to asking myself, “Really? This is what a Pulitzer finalist looks like?”

I don’t know. Read it for yourself, but get the paperback version- with any luck they’ve cleaned up all my nit-picks from the hard-cover edition.

The Links Post

Today we pause to mark our 200^th post. But it’s one thing to mark a milestone, and another to categorize and codify all 200 posts with an archivist’s careful touch. I don’t know- maybe it’s the history major in me, but I figured some would appreciate this consolidated view. Long may you feast on these literary links:

Literary Death Matches:

Best Book Set in a Dystopian Future London

Best Victorian Adventure Novel Involving a Map

Best Book by a Brontë Sister

See the World:

See Venice! Read a Novel

See Los Angeles! Read a Novel

See Africa! Read a Novel

Author Look-Alikes:

Casting Call Round 1

Casting Call Round 2

Casting Call Round 3

Titles:

Title Chase: Cry, the Beloved Country

Title Chase: The Grapes of Wrath

What’s In a Name?

The Writer’s Voice:

Virginia Woolf

Ernest Hemingway

Jack Kerouac

Ayn Rand

Films and Telly:

Raymond Carver… kind of

Rewriting Hemingway

And the Oscar goes to…

The books of Mad Men

Midnight in Paris: How did Woody Do?

From Silver Screen to Printed Page

“The Punishment of X4” and “The Man With the Miniature Orchestra”

Announcements/Contests:

Let there be lit

…Aaaand we’re live!

Drumroll Please…

The 3QD Arts & Literature Prize

Pull the lever for Literary Death Match

Poets Corner:

Jim Daniels

Billy Collins

Charles Simic

Wilfred Owen

Marcus Jackson

Deborah Digges

NaNoWriMo:

NaNoWriMo Wrap Up

Interview with Fiona Webster

Interview with Mike Kroll

Interview with Jason Black

Interview with Natalie Field

Holiday fiction:

Veterans Day- Tim O’Brien

Thanksgiving- O. Henry

Christmas- John Cheever

New Years- Jay McInerney

Valentines Day- Raymond Carver

Monthly wrap-ups:

One Month In

Two Months Down!

An Atomic Explosion of Awesome

Four Months Down!

Five Months Down!

Six down. Many more to go.

The Links Post

Short Story Club:

An Ode to the Short Form

Short Story Club is born

Walter John Harmon Discussion

Orientation

Orientation Discussion

Harrison Bergeron

Harrison Bergeron Discussion

The Trench

The Trench Discussion

Haiku-ption Contests:

Haiku-ption Contest #1

Contest Follow-up

Haiku-ption Contest #2

Haiku-ption Contest #3

Democracy Comes to the Haiku-ption Contest

Haiku-ption Contest #4

May the best man win

Haiku-ption Contest #5

Your ballots, please

Haiku-ption Contest #6

Pick a haiku- any haiku

Haiku-ption Contest #7
Haiku-ption Contest #7: Rock the vote

Reviews:

The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind Revisited

The View From Castle Rock

Death In Venice and Other Tales

Lord Jim

A Bell for Adano

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

Wasatch

The Turn of the Screw

Stone Arabia

Curtain

Angle of Repose

A Visit From the Goon Squad

A Room With a View

The Death of a Disco Dancer

State of Wonder

In Defense of the Books You Hate: On the Road

From the Pen of:

William Faulkner

Wallace Stegner

Thomas Mann

Joseph Conrad

Annie Proulx

Tucker McCann

Tucker McCann, vol. 2

E.M. Forster

Jennifer Egan

David Clark

Writing/So you Wanna Be a Writer:

Don’t Quit your Day Job

The Science of Powerful Prose

So You Wanna Be a Writer? Join the Merchant Marine

An Ear for Authentic Dialogue

Sticking the Landing

So You Wanna Be a Writer? Grab the Wheel…

Amateur Hour: Closet Fictioneers, Show Yourselves

Closet Fictioneer (Part II)

So You Wanna Be a Writer? Post-War Paris edition

Jhumpa Lahiri: My Life’s Sentences

The Science of Powerful Prose Revisited

Humor:

Prose and Cons

Ummm… What?

Hello, My name is Rose of Sharon

Not that there’s anything wrong with that

The Eructative Eudora Welty

Forget Fluoridation

All the Pretty Businesses

The Lasting Legacy of Miss Stein’s Salon

Brontësaurus

Dickens’ Fruit Corners

The Kerouac-Seuss Connection

How to Read Truly Great Literature

Write Like Kerouac in just 5 Easy Steps

The cool and the interesting:

Bazarov and Bluto: Where are they now?

The 8-bit Fitzgerald

No Other Writer

Salinger Sighting

Another Salinger Sunday

The Last LOST

Holiday Gift giving Guide

The Art of the Pseudonym

Can your old book do this?

The Lending Library

Two Men Walk Into a Bar(d)

Learn a life skill: Read a novel

Literature Podcasts

A small thin unathletic man with very bad eyes

Keeping up with the Joneses

Literary Suspects

The Stunning Beauty of Books

Of Hunger Games and Literary Acclaim

A Big Fish, Wrapped in a Small Book, Inside a Short Video

The Lending Library at the End of the Earth

A Big Fish, Wrapped in a Small Book, Inside a Short Video, Part II

Fall Asleep with a good book (or a couple thousand)

Russian Rumble

Live Deliberately: Play Video Games

Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism

The Stunning Beauty of Bookstores

Diagnosing Dean Moriarty

Reading & Recommendations:

The Golden Age of Literature: High School

Read something good

The Modern Library List- By the Numbers

Leed La Revolucion!!!

Re-reading Faulkner

Write What You Know

Unbearable Lightness

On Plot Twists

Home for the Holidays (In a Manor of Speaking)

Is Murakami A Letdown?

My Shelf Life: 2011

Reading Resolutions for 2012

Links to the Past

Back to the well or into the abyss?

The LitFic Starter Kit: Your Quickstart Guide to the Classics

The Moment in Which One Becomes A Reader

Birth of a Careful Reader

What They Were Reading: Hemingway

A Reading Check-Up

Faulkner & Pronoun Ambiguity

Bezos v. Gutenburg

WhatThey Were Reading: Frank Conroy

First Line Fridays:

Autumn of the Patriarch, by Garcia Marquez

Anna Karenina, by Tolstoy

Freedom, by Franzen

Blood Meridien, by McCarthy

Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Orwell

The Stranger, by Camus

Herzog, by Bellow

Murphy, by Beckett

The Savage Detectives, by Bolano

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevich, by Solzhenytsin

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Calvino

Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger

The Dying Animal, by Roth

Angle of Repose, by Stegner

A River Runs Through It, by MacLean

The Dharma Bums, by Kerouac

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Kundera

A Tale of Two Cities, by Dickens

All the Little Live Things, by Stegner

2666, by Bolano

The Metamorphosis, by Kafka

Dancing at the Rascal Fair, by Doig

In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way), by Proust

As I Lay Dying, by Faulkner

The Human Stain, by Roth

Don Quixote, by Cervantes

Dandelion Wine, by Bradbury

Haiku-ption Contest #7: Rock the Vote

What they were reading: Frank Conroy

"Night after night I’d lie in bed, with a glass of milk and a package of oatmeal cookies beside me, and read one paperback after another until two or three in the morning. I read everything, without selection, buying all the fiction on the racks of the local drugstore- D. H. Lawrence, Moravia, Stuart Engstrand, Aldous Huxley, Frank Yerby, Mailer, Twain, Gide, Dickens, Philip Wylie, Tolstoi, Hemingway, Zola, Dreiser, Vardis Fisher, Dostoievsky, G. B. Shaw, Thomas Wolfe, Theodore Pratt, Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Frederick Wakeman, Orwell, McCullers, Remarque, James T. Farrell, Steinbeck, de Maupassant, James Jones, John O’Hara, Kipling, Mann, Saki, Sinclair Lewis, Maugham, Dumas and dozens more. I borrowed from the public library ten blocks away and from the rental library at Womrath’s on Madison Avenue. I read very fast, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another. Safe in my room with milk and cookies I disappeared into inner space. The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own. It was around this time that I first thought of becoming a writer. In a cheap novel the hero was asked his profession at a cocktail party. “I’m a novelist,” he said, and I remember putting the book down and thinking, my God what a beautiful thing to be able to say."

-Frank Conroy, in his memoir Stop-Time

First Line Friday

As summer is directly upon us, today I am highlighting the first line of perhaps the greatest "summer novel" ever (in my humble opinion, at least).  It's a bit of an oddball novel, but I love it.  Here is the first line:

"It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed."

Recognize it?  Of course you don't because it's not that great of a first line.  Namely, "the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed."  What?  Does anyone else think that phrase is awkward?  The town is at ease in bed?  Or did the writer forget a pronoun?  "The town covered with darkness and [Tucker] at ease in bed."  Either way, it sucks.  Sucky first line.  So let it be written.

What novel is this?

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

But, I am actually quite fond of the second sentence:

"Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow."

Love it.  The novel goes on to tell the story of the magic of a young boy's summer.  It's a simple concept, but amazingly poignant.  When you're a young boy, summer is magic. Simple as that.  No school, backyard soccer, marshmallows at dusk, bicycles and tents and sprinklers and popsicles and fences and skateboards and trees and footballs and freedom Freedom FREEDOM!

Diagnosing Dean Moriarty

“I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico.”

-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Neal Cassady was doubtless an interesting character. He was the model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road,  as well as Cody Pomeray in some of Kerouac’s other works. He was the inspiration for Randle McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,  was credited by Allen Ginsberg as the ‘secret hero’ of his poem “Howl,” and he figures prominently in Thomas Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That’s quite a legacy. It’s the kind of legacy that makes you scratch your head and ask, “just what exactly was wrong with that dude?”

Now, I’m not a licensed psychiatrist, but as a former pre-med undergraduate, I’m the next best thing this site’s got, so let’s go ahead and diagnose him with Bi-Polar Disorder. 

Yeah, I know I'm not breaking any new ground here- just google Neal Cassady bi-polar for proof, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the symptoms of a manic episode, and see if we can find any evidence for them in the text of On the Road  specifically:

A manic episode is characterized by period of time where an elevated, expansive or notably irritable mood is present, lasting for at least one week. Three or more of the following symptoms must be present:

• Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity-  Check
• Unusual energy, Decreased need for sleep (e.g., one feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep) -  Check
• Excessive talk; racing thoughts-  Check
• Euphoria or irritability-  Check
• Flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing-  Check
• Attention is easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant items-  Check
• Increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation-  Check
• Impulsiveness, a reckless pursuit of gratification (shopping sprees, impetuous travel, more and sometimes promiscuous sex, high-risk business investments, fast driving) -  Check 

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s a pretty convincing  8 for 8. That’s a relatively open-and-shut case, even for amateur mental health practitioners.

Bezos v. Gutenburg

I don’t own an eReader or a tablet. My wife’s crazy plan (crazy-like-a-fox) to pay off our grad school loans in 5 years has definitely hit us hard on the disposable income front. So while I remain mired in antiquated reading technologies my mind has turned to the pros and cons of physical books. Here are a few, off the top of my head.

Things I love about books:

There’s only one format.

You can lend them to friends.

You can leave them to posterity.

Conversely, eBooks usually can’t be shared across devices, can’t be lent to friends, and can’t even be inherited by your kids. How screwed up is that?

Also, what good is a world without used bookstores? Here is my haul from this past weekend:

 In case you can’t make out the price tags, I picked up Winesburg Ohio, Ethan Frome, Franny and Zooey  and The Awakening- all for a mere $6.06. That’s less than a spicy chicken combo meal at  your local Wendy’s, and will feed your mind for days! Sadly, there is no “after-market” in the eBook world.

I also like having a two-page spread in front of me. In other words, I love not having to turn the page after every second paragraph, which seems to be pretty standard on most eReaders I've played with.

Finally, I love how they sit on the bookcase like trophies, little parts of me, serving as visual reminders of my personal growth.

Things I’m ambivalent about:

Old book smell- Sometimes it’s a nice, comforting fragrance that transports you to another time. Other times it just smells like hell.

Things I hate about books:

Hardcover editions- I hate the general feel of them, I hate how new ones always want to close, and how the old ones always want to open to the spots where their spine’s been broken.

Dustjackets- Honestly, what is the point of the dustjacket? If it’s doing its job (taking the nicks, scratches and scuffs associated with regular use), they look like total crap. And if they look like total crap, why would I want to keep them on my books? Oh, and if it’s really just supposed to keep the dust off the book, why isn’t it protecting the page edges along the top of the book- the only place dust tends to collect in most bookcase configurations? It’s a misnomer and an annoyance.

Deckle edges and rough-trimmed edges- Not universal by any means, but I hate 'em when I come across them. If you like brainteasers and hand-eye coordination exercises every time you go to flip the page, I guess they're okay. But I don’t. Give me a nice, smooth cut-page every time.

I hate how bulky and heavy some of them are- they’re a pain to lug around.

I hate how they accumulate. (Wait a sec, didn’t he say a minute ago that….?) Yeah, I did. But how many trophies can you really display before you’re a prime candidate for “Hoarders?”

Did I get any of these wrong? Which do you prefer?

Faulkner & Pronoun Ambiguity

I have all but given up on reading As I Lay Dying.  Faulkner called this novel his "tour-de-force," but I am willing to assert that it is a fundamentally flawed work.  Why?  Two words:

Pronoun Ambiguity.

Let me explain.  A pronoun is a substitute for a noun, such as using "she" after already introducing Addie Bundren.  The replaced noun (in this case, Addie Bundren) is the antecedent of the pronoun.  And here is where Faulkner fails.  Specifically, he uses pronouns with no antecedent.  Thus, "he" and "she" do certain things in certain paragraphs, but with no antecedent, the reader has no idea who the "he" or "she" is actually referring to.  This problem makes for a debilitatingly frustrating reading experience.

Now, you Faulkner fans will argue that Faulkner does this on purpose.  It's just his stream-of-consciousness thrown down on the page.  Right?  Well, perhaps.  But it leads to a flawed novel that is, in many passages, completely incomprehensible.

The following example is the first paragraph of chapter narrated by Darl:

"He has been to town this week: the back of his neck is trimmed close, with a white line between hair and sunburn like a joint of white bone.  He has not once looked back."

Who is Darl talking about?  Peabody? Jewel? Vardaman? I have no idea.  Just "he." This is my beef with Faulkner:  His damn pronoun ambiguity (to say nothing of the fact that we never completely understand who the characters are, and what relationship they have one to another).

It's a technically frustrating read.  And trust me, I'm trying.  But this is why I prefer Hemingway . . . so clear and concise and clean and beautiful.  Faulkner, on the other hand, is the literary world's equivalent of reading the tax code.  

And thus ends my unsuccessful journey with As I Lay Dying.