Improve Your Word Power with David Foster Wallace

So, my New Year's resolution was to finally read Infinite Jest, and it took me about a month. Which makes me even with Dave Eggers, who says it took him the same amount of time, in his introduction.

Of course I also didn't really have that much time to read, or else I would have kicked his ass.

I'm finding it kind of hard to solidfy my opinion about this book. My favorite thing about Mr. Wallace is his piercing observations about human behavior, and clever turns of phrase, which are evident throughout. I like most of the characters and most of the things he's structured the novel around. However sometimes I really get the feeling he's being weird just for the sake of being weird, which is annoying. (Does Quebec Seperatism really need a splinter group of wheelchair assassins? And herds of feral hamsters? Seriously) Also, I have never read a book with less denouement. All you get is to go back to the very first chapter and gain some illumination on what the hell is going on with Hal....pretty much every other character is left frozen in a moment of crisis.

Speaking of Hal, if anyone can explain to me exactly what goes on with the DMZ. I get that he takes it and that explains what happens at the end (and the start) of the book. But I have flipped through many times trying to find WHEN he takes it...it's hard for me to believe that Wallace would not have written that scene...and by hard I mean infuriating. I keep getting the feeling with this book that someone ripped out a whole bunch of pages before I got it. Chris, any help?

Anyway, the one thing I am clear on is that Wallace uses bigger words than pretty much anyone in the world. Halfway through the book I started writing down the ones I needed to look up:

eschatology
teratoid
aphonia (in retrospect this was obvious)
phielyism
amanuensis
micturate
coprolaliac
coruscant
ephebic
obstreperous

This is only a partial list, and I am not often someone who has to look up words....so basically, I'm pretty impressed.

henry miller's "black spring"

so last night i tore through "black spring" by henry miller, one of his lesser-knowns (or so i believe) & found it to be intensely gratifying. as always, miller uses prose that makes me reticent to call it "prose," because of the intense lyricism of it. i've forced two copies of "tropic of cancer" onto unsuspecting friends this week (along with "justine," the curse continues, haha), and "black spring" sure doesn't compare to either 'cancer' or 'capricorn,' but i have to, right now, recommend to everyone in this little group of devouts, the short story "The Angel is My Watermark!"

henry miller never really speaks about his desire to paint (or maybe mentions it in passing in 'cancer,' i can't be sure), although he does speak frequently about the appearance of the "muse" in his life, which he refers to as "receiving dictation." one of my favourite lines in this short is when miller's been writing for three hours, then decides to go out for lunch. he then says,

"...and if the dictation starts again, tant pis. I'm out to lunch!"

his happiness is like Whitman's. he's not careful about his feelings. they just happen. everything just happens to him. he frequently speaks about the 'moment,' and the idea of the 'present' not existing. there's a gem of a line about that, too, but i can't remember it well enough to quote it. but back to my thought ... "The Angel is My Watermark!" is the piece which will stick with you, from this collection of thoughts & ruminations. i went back & read it again after i'd finished totally with the book. that, and this other piece about him being put in charge of delivering a half-crazy woman to the sanitarium, and to make sure they didn't know that the family could have afforded her admittance.

anyway. god, i can't write for crap today. you should read it. it's good. worthwhile.

next up!

swann's way, the moncrieff translation!

john fowles' "mantissa"

i have a terrible time relegating books to a "top five" category. this is mostly because i have a hard time saying that anything is my favourite book other than danielewski's "house of leaves." however, if i had a top five, john fowles' opus "the magus" would definitely be toward the top.

with that in mind, and having devoured most of the rest of his collection (and found it lacking in comparison to 'the magus',) i found a copy of "mantissa," a book of his i had not yet encountered. it's a quick read, and it is fairly satisfying (if a bit obfuscated), but it in no way compares to 'the magus.' it leaves you with this .. hor d'oeuvre feeling, as though 'mantissa' were simply the first draft.

in brief: a man wakes up in a hospital bed with amnesia. and some other kinds of -nesia. after a very bizarre encounter with a sexual nurse & doctor providing some very unique therapy, the scene abruptly shifts and a new character is introduced ... well, i can't tell you how, or what, because it spoils the plot, the most interesting thing about the book.

lots of writers have written about the theory of the muse, that elusive spirit who seems to grace us with her presence when we're getting into the groove of something, when we reach that near-Dionysian state of total abandonment & immersion into our craft. fowles likes to inject equal does of myth & social commentary in his writing, and 'mantissa' is like the K2 of this exhibition ('magus,' obviously, being Everest.) for those who don't wish to slog through an enormous novel (i can't imagine any on this blog feeling that way, but you never know), 'mantissa' is an adequate little treat for you. i'd recommend it over 'the ebony tower' and maybe even 'the french lieutenant's woman', but really, just read 'the magus,' dammit.

next up!:

'black spring' by henry miller
'rebel without a cause' by robert lindner
'swann's way' by marcel proust (trans. moncrieff)

neil gaiman's neverwhere

i'm glad to see people have been keeping up with their book bid-nez better than i have been keeping up with my book bid-nez.

if you love me and pay me due attention, you might recall a few entries ago when i was worried i'd pinched neil gaiman's neverwhere from mark hopkins's apartment. mark reassures me i was invited (aka: he somewhat fuzzily remembers telling someone, "no! taaaaake it! take it! do it!" and waving his delicate hands about drunkenly–we all assume this was directed to me and the novel).

along with polishing off some real nuthin' reading, i do have neverwhere completely read, digested, and prepped for the chopping block. why? well, sirs and ladies: when you write a novel based on a television series, you are just asking for it. i guess we all need paychecks, but really...

a premise for a show doesn't get much gayer than this. if you don't know, i'm tossing in wiki's little quip.

"The idea for the story came from a conversation between Gaiman and Henry about possible stories for inclusion in Comic Relief - Henry commenting that the public are so used to homeless people sleeping rough in London streets that they no longer "see" them.^[1] This became in integral part of the Neverwhere plot. "

oh wow, you mean pedestrians don't stop and pay homeless people a lot of attention? whew! i had no idea we'd let ourselves slip like that. oh my dear, sweet blood-of-the-lamb, how could we be so blind to–yeah. i think we all had that epiphany when we were ten. some of us, late bloomers, wrote huge urban-issues essays in jr.high on saving owls and whales and homeless people. we care, then we either a) move on b) become green peace volunteers with clipboards, braids, and adult acne. what a completely homosexual bleeding-heart unoriginal premise. for a show. which was turned into a book.

so there it is. mayhew, a bumbling, flustered spine-less geezer stumbles (literally) over someone who appears to be a bleeding homeless girl–is really a "lady door" from london below (it is london, and it is below...). in helping her, he falls through the cracks. in caring about her his world vanquishes him, he is literally invisible, his apartment is rented out, and everyone he ever knew disappears. he treks through the london below to find door, the girl he helped, and embark on a journey both serving door and the author's need to turn mayhew into a man.

the book was mildly entertaining at best and painfully plunky at worst. plunky, obnoxious, and telling of the struggle of one man to get through writing a paint-by-number novel. he probably figures the only way we as readers will get to the end is if, and only if, he lays down little snags and teasers. "what's that?" "oh i can't tell you...NOW...." with the hope that if you keep reading, you'll learn more about this mysterious world. blatant payoffs. well, it's about as tempting as having some woman on the train take an old tuna out of her pocket and wiggle it around to coax me over on her side. 1) i don't care for old tuna, and 2) condescending. it's really condescending.

as for his own struggles, what was once an attempt to switch up adjectives for interest's sake? no longer. after the first hundred pages, neil tosses his gloves down and gives up. for example, early on he takes the miserable adjectives used to describe door's head/face ("heart-shaped", "elfin", etc) and switches them up. if it is "heart-shaped" on one page, it is surely "elfin" on the next, and "heart-shaped" two pages later. but after so long her head ceased to oscillate through description. she's got one "elfin face" all the way. why bother? why not just say "face"? we know door's head is flipping elfin by now, if we know anything. also, the instance where he refers to the velvet character's eyes as being "foxglove-coloured eyes". not once. not twice over the spread of a chapter–we're talking a good handfull of times over a two-page spread. by then he's given up and we get one adjective per noun, and that's expected to last us the course of the novel. unless he's being paid by the word and simply lacks the energy to replace adjectives...

so, there's some condescending teasers, wince-inducing adjectives that just won't let go of the nouns, and all of it: holes in an already thinly-spun plot with poorly-spun characters. i won't even drag you through them all.

the main character, richard mayhew, is barely tolerable as a person. simpering, dense, and...well, weak & dense is really as faceted as the character gets. oh right, occasionally he is horny.

door is little and plucky and tortured by memories of her lovely family being murdered. lots of "oh daddy don't die" flashblacks and nightmares.

the minor characters all have ridiculously lame back stories. i tried, so help me. let me hold your hand through a sequence here...

rat girl. dirty little thing, sent to escort mayhew to the floating market.
details of her back story followed by my internal thoughts.
. mother crazy. "eh.... okayy....."
. foster home "...seems familiar..."
. abused physically by guy foster mother lived with "oh, lordy"
. abused...other ways. "oh just get on with it..."
. she ran away "...yeah yeah yeah..."
. slipped between the cracks of humanity. (at which point i just wait for her to die. not to be a spoiler? but she does. and thank god.)

it's like she walked across three lifetime (channel for paranoid women) movies and right into gaiman's plot.

in conclusion: american gods climbs up a notch in comparison. i couldn't even finish it without cracking my new paul auster new york trilogy for relief.

Double Occupancy Costs Extra

I finished Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing, a great book about journeying through the harsh moodswings of Canadian weather, where one character has to act quickly to escape a winter storm, something that most prairie dwellers can relate to, except, perhaps, for this part:

Simon scrambled to his knees, knife upraised. Drove the sixteen-inch blade into the horse's chest, sawed the belly down to the legs. Guts spilling, a thin stream sifting out of the lips of the incision. Plunged his hands into the mess of entrails. Tore away, scooping offal behind him, hacking with the knife at whatever resisted, whatever clung. Moaning, hunching his shoulders, drawing his knees up to his chest, wriggling away at the mouth of the wound, he burrowed into the balmy pocket.

I thought about starting a list of books I do not recommend that people read, but I didn't get very far. Mostly, I think people should steer clear of Yann Martel's first novel Self. I did all I could to find a compelling explanation for "what this book is about", but all I could come up with is that it's a book-length exercise in characterization. Nothing happens in this novel, which isn't to say that I demand that things happen in every book I read. But if nothing is going to happen, I think it should be an interesting nothing that I'm reading. Has anyone read Virginia Woolf's Orlando? I haven't read it, but I thought for a while that Martell was remaking and deconstructing Woolf's book. I don't want to reopen debate about Life of Pi (which I gather was rather heated), but I liked Pi, and it seems to me that Self was a practice run at writting a novel.

"Camus can do..."

The Fall: Just read this one again after a friend gave it to me as a birthday gift. (Camus and birthdays are always a great match). This is one of my favourites by Camus, although choosing a favourite can be tough. I particularly like how it ends on a very uneasy note, with Clamence as "judge-penitent", pointing his finger at the reader in accusation, his confession no longer a personal narrative, but including all of us.

A great passage comes when Clamence describes how the memory of a drowning woman has haunted him, an event that encapsulates his feelings of regret and personal hypocrisy and sparked his descent into confronting the absurdity of life:

Then I realized, as calmly as you resign yourself to an idea the truth of which you have long known, that that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanses of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where lies the bitter water of my baptism.

The next time you're out with some friends, why not try out this zinger from Clamence: "The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you."

I also recently finished Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, a collection of essays that help define his existential philosophies, though, to be accurate, he never really considered himself an existentialist, referring more to the Absurd. The essay "An Absurd Reasoning" best explains the dialectical balance of living in awareness of the Absurd, a state defined by two certainties that cannot be reconciled: "my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle."

Arguing against suicide even when faced with the absurd, (in response to what seems like a natural conclusion given the bleakness of an existential outlook) Camus makes, what seems to me, an equivalence between faith in god and suicide, as both are unjustified escapes from the only authentic way to live, in full realization of the true nature of life. Hence Sisyphus as Camus' poster-boy for how to live: Sisyphus has no hope of ever being free of his rock, yet he perseveres in his pointless action, fully aware of his life and its absurdity. The point is that he is conscious of his state, and therefore, Camus argues, "stronger than his rock."

The final essay on Kafka is quite interesting, if for no other reason than that there are not many writers who criticize Kafka for being too hopeful.

A couple of months back, I read Camus' The Plague, and while it was his most popular novel during his lifetime, I don't think it his best work. Sometimes criticized as being overly allegorical, i.e. a plague as a symbol for fascist occupation, I think the failing of the novel is more to do with Camus' characters and their lack of depth (maybe that isn't so far removed from the criticisms of allegory). If anything, the allegory becomes less obvious as readers are more removed from World War II (if one had no knowledge of when it was written, a fascist analogy wouldn't be that apparent). My main objection is that the three main characters, who are all most likely extensions of Camus' experiences living in an occupied city, are too indistinguishable, and perhaps would have been more believable and compelling if they were combined into one person.

My favourite character in the book is the unassuming civil servant who spends all of his free time trying to craft the perfect opening sentence to his novel. He dreams that one day, when an editor reads his perfect sentence, the editor will be so moved he will announce to his staff of writers, "Hats off, gentlemen!" Mostly I like this idea because it assumes that all writers wear hats while they work.

As I'm sure you all guessed, the title for this post was inspired by Jay Sherman's witty quip on The Simpsons, which is followed by Homer's equally witty riposte of "Well, Scooby-Doo can doo-doo, but Jimmy Carter is smarter." The awkward silence that follows is relieved by a tumble-weed that blows through the living room.