STL #119: Beginning Again

Reading a book of Donald Westlake’s nonfiction last month, I came across the fact I’d come across before—that Joseph Conrad didn’t begin writing until he was 45 years old. Westlake joined this well-known case with Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe, who also made his publishing debut at the age of 45.*  As a lazy man of letters nearing that age, I was compelled as I often am around my birthday (which coincides with summer and which means, for me, more time) to return to the idea of a daily writing practice. This time it might even stick.  

Back to the primal scene of this particular inspiration. Inspired anew every year at my birthday, I pledge again to start a daily writing practice. Just an hour a day, I vowed, as I wrote the first draft of this as a free verse poem over coffee, bread with honey. To sit for an hour a day and grind it out—to make something out of pure work. “To find my own mind and soul” I wrote. Then I wrote  “Maybe even leave a mark for my life.” 

Think of Westlake himself; a working writer since a teenager, running a squad of pseudonyms publishing a short shelf of novels every year.By the time he was my age, he had half a career behind him. But is that what I am after?

I’ve tried what I bracketed as “[the writing life]” before: dreck novels in a month; an abandoned screenplay; spurts of daily poems. What about my dissertation, or a handful of academic articles (stuff I really don’t care about). The truth is, writing is hard and what I write tends to be bad. 

But maybe at 45 years of age I start to understand my real reasons—not to get into libraries and living rooms like Conrad and Stout, but to make some shape and meaning for myself and this world.  And so I make another birthday pledge (belatedly, I needed some revision time): one hour of writing, every day, in any form. I started this as a poem because it said “ah me! hear my foibles! sing my weakness!” but it broke loose to discursive prose. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find a poem, or pitch for a comic book. I’ll get back to that academic prose too, and try to make it less bullshitty. 

My practice will be simply to write, in any format so long as I record it in my notebook. It can be first drafts or revision if so fitting. I’ll be back here on the blog on a weekly basis, for any writing that is appropriate for this particular forum. 

*(A little Internet research suggest that Westlake got his facts wrong) Rex Stout I knew little about, and it seems Westlake is being deceptive. Stout wrote for the pulps as a youth, retired to business, and published his first book at 43. The larger point is that he made his mark with 33 books published from his 40s to his 80s. There are other deceptive cases of later bloomers like Raymond Chandler (44) and Davenport. 

STL #118: The Territory, the Map (Some Private Jokes and the Illuminatus Trilogy)

Seems Low: An Open Letter to the FAB-C on The Illuminatus Trilogy

 I agree. Two starts out of five does seem low. A conspiracy-fueled romp in which nothing is true but everything is permitted that anointed Bugs Bunny as an anarchist saint and postulates a social misfire between H.P. Lovecraft and Hart Crane? A parodic tour through counter-culture by an ardent amateur scholar who comments lucidly on Joyce and Pound, who taken together represent my jelly and my jam? It sounds like something I should love, but I don’t. And I never have.

I thought it might be different this time. I first read Illuminatus in the early nineties, just on the cusp of a period of advanced snobbishness. At the time, the novel had near samizdat status. You’d hear about it, but it was hard to lay your hands on (at least it was for me). So when I at last picked it up, I bought it new(!) in the big 900 page edition. In the first reading, I scoffed at the bald pastiche of Pynchon, Burroughs, and Reed, more original and more sophisticated stylists who I had first read in the preceding year or so (I mentioned the nascent snobbery). To tell the truth, I was really offended by the rip off of Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49.  As I recall, the whole thing was a slog, but I did finish it.

I’ve loosened up since then. Not everything needs to be a literary masterpiece, and in the interim I’ve become more interested in writers from the margins and writers whose work grapples with the constraints and limitations of genre. I love the quote from Philip K. Dick: “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum" and that is the stratum these mass-market paperbacks live in. Yet the pieces still don’t fit together in a meaningful way: reading the trilogy is like surfing a crackpot subset of Wikipedia (or The Whole Earth Catalog) where the links are tired bits of genre (detective, sf, porn) pastiche. But just as the map is not the territory (as psychoceramicist RAW fondly  quotes one of his crackpots), a list is not a novel. There is a nerd disease, I think, of taking taking the inventory of shiny objects in a text, preferably imbued in some way with nostalgia, as representative of aesthetic quality. (At least this is my working theory about fan-defined literatures such as sff. I first came up with it while reading the Stross novel that includes the skeletons in the spacesuits and the genetically-engineered merpeople on the water planet. Which is awesome.) I will give the trilogy credit for capturing a zeitgeist, but not much more.

[redacted digression on Guy Davenport’s take on Ezra Pound’s take on Ernest Fenosolla’s take on the Chinese ideogram. Oh my, what good stuff you’re missing here!]

But, no, it’s not there. There’s nothing like rigor, nothing holding up the pastiche and parody. RAW comes off as sophomoric, in a sense I didn’t appreciate 20 years ago. Not just the dated porny bits, but the fundamental “maybe logic” that he invokes as if it is open-mindedness: ok, so not every U.S. President is involved in this conspiracy, but the Aga Khan does exist, so there must be something to it. That is so obviously hogwash that I don’t have anything to say about it. RAW says question everything, but really that’s just a kind of knee-jerk dogmatism of its own.  He doesn’t tell us how to get any answers. Which makes sense, since he makes us spend so much time in a gold-plated (i.e. yellow) submarine full of libertarians.  

SO the map is not the territory. If you, like me, appreciate the notion of the Illuminatus books more than the actual execution, I have a few recommendations: not only  Pynchon, Burroughs, and Reed, but also The Invisibles, which includes the King in Yellow and secret societies aplenty; Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, which convincing connects John of Leyden to Johnny (Rotten) Lydon, by way of the Caberet Voltaire and late night sci fi movies; and of course, A Draft of XXX Cantos.

In closing, I’d like to thank JC (if those are your real initials) for loaning me this copy last March 23rd. (Actually it was the 24^th, but I understand your intention.) This loan was made possible because “Dibs” found another copy, so thanks to AP for planting that fnord-filled counterfeit within her grasp. Thanks of course to Big Guy for nominating the book so all this could happen, and thanks to MD for rearranging the street signs of the Sovereign Duchy every time we go there. And finally, thanks for P just for being J.  

STL #117: The Year in Reading (2014)

They say the good is the enemy of the great; given that it’s now March and I haven’t done my last year-in-books retrospective, I’d say the okay is the enemy of the done! As usual I had a lot of trouble narrowing down to 10—it seems the best I can do is to get down to 10 reading “regions.” So here’s a map of my 2014 reading:

1    I started the year with my sister’s big red anthology of Romantic writers (mostly canonical poets). It took six months to work through, but I renewed my appreciation of many old acquaintances and met many new friends to admire (note: that’s a horrible sentence I just wrote). Among those that stood out were Wordsworth (who I read just after and curiously preferred to my old favorite Blake), Byron’s Don Juan, and Hazlitt’s essays (especially the first piece of sports reporting ever, “The Fancy”).

2.    Philip K Dick: The other big book I started at the beginning of the year was The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick put together by Jonathan Lethem and ….,. Hardly light reading, I spent a lot of time flipping from PKD’s journal entries to the notes on the various gnostic mystics and philosophers he evokes. The insight into his thinking change the way I read Androids (which I taught for the last time for the foreseeable future) and sent me to reread The Man in the High Castle and read a pair of his later novels:  A Scanner Darkly and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Dick himself proposes a reading list of his own works that I plan on gradually getting to.  Reading PKD also led me to slight detour through some dystopias (The Slynx, The Circle, 1984, Brave New World, V for Vendetta and Divergent), to LeGuin’s PKD homage Lathe of Heaven, and to the cyberpunk classic Altered Carbon (heavy PKD influence).

3.    China Mievielle’s The City and the City also bears a PKD influence. It stands out enough to get its own entry though. I don’t know why I don’t read more Mievielle.

4.    Wolf in White Van also gets its own spot, though I can’t really think of what else I’d relate it to. Darnielle’s writing style leaves a little to be desired, but his tone is Judas Priest’s “United” from the other side of the worm hole.

5.    Not a big year for graphic narrative, but Derf’s My Friend Dahmer stood out, as did volume 2 of Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye, Little Hits.

6.    Jack Kerouac. Hiking in the Cascades reminded me that you can’t fall off a mountain, so I reread Dharma Bums The classic beat novel retains some charm, though the casual sexism is unsettling. Yu could say the same thing about On the Road, which I also reread. I toyed with the idea of systematically reading the Kerouac canon this year, which I might yet do.

7.    Lots of horror this October as usual (thought I did coin the hashtag #spookytimesallthetime).  There’s a John Updike novel about small town upstate New York inside of Peter Straub’s smart mass market Ghost Story. There’s an alien worm race inside of everything in Laird Barron’s The Croning. I realized reading it that the unity I missed stitching together the stories of Barron’s semi-related stories is in fact there—only it’s emerging as part of a much larger, longer game. I also read widely in various Ellen Daltow anthologies—one new discovery being John Langan. There’s also one about a guy who goes to a movie that I haven’t tracked down that I’d like to read again.

8.    I typically want more from fantasy than I get. But I enjoyed the secondary world heist stories in The Lies of Locke Lamorra and its sequels and Kij Johnson’s novella “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” about a bridge builder, ferryboat captain, and cultural change.

9.    But the best fantasy novel I read last year was Watership Down. It has all of the traditional attributes of a fantasy novel: seers and warriors, a quest, a completely realized language and folklore. It’s a deeply weird book in its ordinariness.

10. I resumed my tour through the Richard Stark Parker books after learning I could request purchases from my library online. As a representative  I’d chooseThe Rare Coin Score: the great title, the memorably swishy foil, the introduction of Claire. But my favorite moment is a car driving by with it’s windows rolled down, rock music spilling out. The world is changing out there around them, but Parker is still planning the perfect heist.

Last to go: Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher

2014 Q4

Sf&f: Parasite; Divergent, Brave New World, High Castle, Howl’s Moving Castle, Helen and Troy (abandoned); Brave New World; The Slynx

Comics:Promethea (in progress), Radioactive (in progress); My Friend Dahmer

other: The Handle (Stark); Wolf in White Van, The Damsel, The Seventh; Rare Coin Score; Green Eagle Score; Scrum; Books to Die For; The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

Horror: various short Horror from Years Bests, The Croning, Mayhem; Ghost Story

2014 Q3

Sf&f: Rogues, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, V6, Handmaid’s Tale, The Night Circus, Year Zero, Homeland, Altered Carbon; Watership Down; Dragonflight; Republic of Thieves; Scanner Darkly; Transmigration of Timothy A

Comics: V for Vendetta; Nemo: Heart of Ice

other: More Baths, Less Talking (Hornby); On the Road; Dharma Bums; Smarter Than you Think; Dear Committee Members; The Fault in Our Stars; 1984

STL #116: 11 Grievances against "Dragonrider"

So the old book club (we're going by "Critique of Pure Bookclub" this month) is tackling Dragonflight by Anne McCaffery. I went to the what I thought was the source--the Nebula (sf writers) award-winning novella "Dragonrider." I remembered Dragonflight as a short novel, and assumed that it was just a punched up version of the novella. My plan then was scrupulously scholarly: read the core version and evaluate the additions as padding or amplification. It turns out, though, that "Dragonflight" represents only the second half of the novel; "Dragonrider" had been preceded by the Hugo (sf fans) award winning novella, "Weyr Search."  The second novella appears unchanged; even some now-redundnant exposition is repeated. There might be some new material between "Weyr Search" and "Dragonflight," but I now longer care to find out. In fact, I couldn't even stand to go back and read the first half of the novel.

Coming up with the following list was not difficult. These grievance are, as you'll see, connected--petty problems indicate larger ones. They appear in no particular order, thought they begin with structure and end with style.

1. Structural integrity: as mentioned above, the novel is two novellas slapped together. I understand the tradition of the "fix up" in sf, but it seems that the continuity is sacrificed. The revenge story of "Weyr Search" does not bear out in part two--by the end, the protagonist Lessa seems barely more important than some  dude named T'tot. 
2. Rape (oh, should I repeat that this is not a ranked list?): I'm not saying fiction, even escapist fiction, needs to avoid this topic. This story is in its planet's dark ages, there's this weird animal bond angle, so the sexual violence could be a meaningful element of world-building. However, it is not. It just happened, and the dude felt bad about it.  I think this is the era of rape-creep; in an effort to be sexually liberated, a bunch of creepy rape fantasies snuck into the party.
3. Time travel: This might be a personal idosyncracy. Time travel stories should be primarily about time travel, not time travel and x. If the later, time travel becomes the worst kind of deus ex machina. 
4. Sh-sh-shaking: How many times does F'lar "shake" Lessa? Sure it's uncomfortable, but it's also single-dimensional and repetitive (412, 413, 419, 473, 607, 629, 654 ("He'll shake me...", 657 "I told you he'd shake me...")
5. So Lessa and friends go back 400 years in the past. They persuade every single dragon rider to give up their life as they know it and travel to the future, never to return. In like, five minutes. Digression: Why does a medievalish society (and a medieval -400 years society) accept time travel so readily. I'm racking my brain and can't come up with a time travel story from before the Industrial Era. 
6. Between: So I understand the intradimensional trans-space is called "between" But why the italics every time. When you discover you can travel between times, you really mean you can travel between times.
7. Fandarel the smith loves flamethrowers: "Flamethrower? Flamethrower? Flamethrower." (551, 599)
8. N'ames: Call back to world-building--there's an explanation, but it's lame, makes the page unfriendly to the non-nerd, and anyway what kind of language would tolerate names that range from F'lar to Robinton?
9. Wait a minute! That's it! (aka plot construction)
10. Ok so there's a culture that can bioengineer flame throwing, telepathic, teleporting, time traveling dragons. And the best way to stave off alien spores is flame throwing, telepathic, teleporting, time traveling dragons.
11. The last sentence of the novel is: "Mother of us all, he was glad that now, of all times conceivable, he, F’lar, rider of bronze Mnementh, was a dragonman of Pern!" That sentence is indicative of the style in general.  

2014 Q2

Thought I already posted this...

Sf&f: The City and the City, Neverwhere, Neptune’s Brood

Comics: Fatale, George Perez’s Avengers Visionaries, Great Darkness Saga, 303, Lazarus, Batman: A Lonely Place of Dying, Little Hits (Fraction's Hawkeye), Batman: Illustrated by Neal Adams, Defenders: "Tournament of Heroes"

other: Oregon Hill, The Tipping Point, Veronica Mars, Brothers K, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, I Know What You Did Last Summer

Romantic Poetry: Scott, Coleridge, Southey, Landor, Lamb, Campbell, Hazlitt, Moore, Hunt, DeQuincey, Peacock, Haydon, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Beddoes (i.e., finished the anthology I was reading)

Notes on reading--of the novels, probably most admired The City and the City which read like a chapter of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller that just kept going. A few of this I took in by audiobook: Neverwhere and The Tipping Point read by the author, which is always my preference. I heard that the Veronica Mars audiobook is narrated by Kristen Bell, which sounds appealing, but the third person viewpoint would be weird. Of the comics, I was pleasantly surprised by Brubaker and Phillips's Cthulu-noir take on crime fiction. I was not surprised by the Hawkeye (the second volume even better than the first), the Legion of Super Heroes Great Darkness (I had 3 of the 5 issues when a kid, so the nostalgia carried me through), or Defenders (for some reason, I have loved every issue of that series I've ever come across). It's work noting that Lois Duncan "updated" I Know What You Did by throwing in words like "texting" and "webcast." The updates were merely annoying, but I would seek out originals in the future.

I finished my major reading project in the Romantics anthology-- I should jot down some notes before too long. I also plan on glancing at some more current anthologies to see how the landscape has changed.  Expect to see some posts in next few weeks--thinking about a piece comparing the Reagan-era dystopias of Frank Miller and Margaret Atwood.