You’ll find decades-long repressed memories dislodged in Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy, where eyebright prose perfectly puts across a distressed narrator’s unrestrained thoughts. Orphaned in the midst of Turkey’s massacre of the Armenians, Vahé Tcheubjian—through descriptions of unfulfilling trysts, brutal flashbacks, disturbing dreams, bizarre encounters with a monkey at the zoo, and imagined conversations with the mother who abandoned him—confronts his denials and ultimately challenges his very identity. Mirrors are Vahé’s tools for examining his past and its resultant pain, but it is the warped reflections of funhouse mirrors that he ultimately sees: distortions abound: here one stretches, this one condenses, and still another magnifies.

I found the prose in The Daydreaming Boy to be the most affecting, psychosomatically, when read aloud and in as few sittings as possible, sweeping me, as a result, within its puzzling atmospheres, into its ebb and flow, its serpentine lines. The novel begins:

We are naked like Adam and the blue wide band now becomes what it is, the long sea rises before us, the notfish become what they too are, so that we see: water; white-capped waves stretching out into infinity; but not salt, warm, sad.

This sweeping introduction is echoed, mirrored in the book’s second part, where Marcom shifts the point-of-view, a device used throughout the narrative:

They are naked like Adam and they run to the sea’s edge. They say for shame and they drink the Mediterranean waters as if it were Christ’s blood and it does not quench and they gag, a gaggle of boys running for the sea and knowing only the waters of the interior…

Undercurrents of violence and eddying pain in The Daydreaming Boy disrupt such lyrically flowing passages, each jarring passage serving as punctuations, their very force puncturing the page; and then, as such, they become vehicles, of a kind, of entrancement:

Limning Vahé’s consciousness, Marcom reveals the way his past surfaces as a kind of phantasmagoric communication:

It is said by some that the dead are ever returning to us in an unending cycle of vengeance and despair. I press into my mind as if to find them there. It is green then blue and then rains. And they do come back to me, each one in his time.

The novel’s panoply of ghosts include the narrator’s imagined mother and father, the abovementioned monkey, and Vostanig: a man he tortured as a child when they lived as refugees in an orphanage: a deranged man who, as an adult, ends up walking into oncoming traffic one afternoon.

The narrative unfolds much like a confession, Vahé apparently receiving as much pleasure as he does pain from the revelation of his travails, his various infidelities, whatever number of betrayals. His, though, is neither an act of repentance, nor a journey toward redemption, but an act of release and revelation: confession as erotic stimulation and self-awareness. After revealing the abuse, including multiple rapes, he and others perpetrated against Vostanig in the orphanage, Vahé says:

Now that I remember it and it is sayable I can say it and the saying arouses me. And there are other things to say because of the necessity of their saying, first I can see them and then say them, or sometimes I first say and then see, say this: all war is deception as is all history.

Vahé attempts to trump all criticism of his confession by admitting his failure to remain objective, his inability to recognize his moral depravity, to accept responsibility, by continually changing his story. Sadly, this results in further psychological unraveling and a gnawing spiritual emptiness.

Faulkner is an obvious influence on The Daydreaming Boy, and Marcom transparently signals this influence with an epigraph from Absalom, Absalom! And the book itself later appears as a kind of spiritual guide for Vahé. His wife—who bought the masterwork as a kind of accoutrement, as a means of keeping appearances—inadvertently helped to define Vahé’s project, his quest. He finds the book lying

on a side table so he doesn’t think Perhaps there is something in one or that he will open the Gospel because he needs something and Maybe it’s in there because I don’t see it anywhere else and I’ve looked and perhaps it’s always been in there and walks to the bedroom not thinking picks up one of Juliana’s purchases on the way and reads: You cant know yet. You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing. Wait. Wait.

Vahé resolves to “see a true story so that he will know and when he knows it he will rest easy and Juliana will love him easy and all is well; wait—wait, he’ll do it.” Vahé describes the thing he wishes to release within him as

an awesome and tumultuous unfeathered and unflying bird pushing its wings against his chest, pushing down there and the pressure builds and the unflying bird pushes against his chest muscles and not pushing out but into his organs and creates there the heaviness, the need for something he cannot name, pushes not the reader to look even in the ascetic dessicated unelectrified fleshless place for it (but that is the only time he does it) and finds there the wait wait and he will. He looks at the sea now, the monster still inside the hollowed grieving bones and thinks: unbeknownst to me. And thinks as he has always thought, how it is better to seek it in the flesh and he continues seeking it this way, as he has always done…and he thinks to discard this wait wait and forgets about the ways of seeing and looking.

Vahé believes that once he shares with his wife, Juliana, the “unforbidden: the boy Vosto, the fledgling ape corpse, the shy and limps [sic?] servant girl” then the “bird” will finally break free from inside his chest and he will be free to love. But Vahé cannot be trusted—he is a champion of refusals: rather than admit his failures and ask for forgiveness he chooses to dance within clever vacillations and circuitous contradictions. Unwilling to take complete responsibility for his actions, Vahé says:

In sooth, on some days I would like to find the person responsible for this: this life, this man that I am and the life that I have subsequently lived and the life that I never lived because unable to—alone and not wretched always but yet always the wretch, the man made into something vile on some days, the man on his back, unmoving, the silent lost tongue, the absence of bones and her body to make it (the world) familiar: the man cast out in exile.

He need look no further than himself. But he refuses. In an elaborate meditation on truth, Vahé declares that “honesty is itself a false modesty and the lie is truer because we live by lies and propagate them as easily…” This might be a perfect illustration of the liar’s paradox. Despite this bald-faced and boldfaced, as it were, confession of his duplicity, Vahé can’t be trusted.

Vahé prefers to remain “unexisted and ubiquitous like the sea out of view from my balcony window.” Vahé’s empty refusals and denials, notwithstanding, Marcom’s beautifully rendered text exists and might be likened to a river, carving a valley through various shadows of death, making a way out of no way.

The trouble with discussing what you’re reading is that you might sometimes be clobbered by someone else’s dislike of the book you’re reading, a dislike sometimes felt and then expressed without their having read said book. It’s something I’m sure to have done, too, with books and just about everything else, forgetting the wise admonition to never “yuck somebody’s yummy”; and, perhaps in some kind of karmic retribution for my past, and surely upcoming perpetrations, of said admonition, when I’d recently mentioned I was reading Finnegans Wake (I’ve since finished it, falling way short of my goal to read it in as close to a single sitting as possible (it took me seven days, the significance of the number exaggerated in my mind)), trying to stay up while reading about someone who was, presumably, asleep, I received a few “yucks,” including, “I tried reading it, but I only know how to read English,” or something of the sort, the comment meant as nothing more than a joke, but, as we know with most jokes, it revealed an underlying belief, and the belief here was that Finnegans Wake is at best incomprehensible to readers, excepting the few academics still wheezing around in the dusty stacks, expert at splitting all kinds of exegetical hairs; or is, at worst, just a hodgepodge of navel-gazing jabberwocky. Joyce, however, quoted in Derek Attridge’s The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, would disagree: “If you take a characteristic obscure passage of one of these people [modern writers] and asked him what it meant, he couldn’t tell you; whereas I can justify every line of my book.” Notwithstanding the various inconsistencies in the book (surface research reveals as much), and despite my general skepticism about what artists say about their work, I unhesitatingly trust Joyce; first, because of the authority and sheer mastery evinced in all of his other books (though I’ll quibble that his poems and play don’t measure up to his major works); and second, because even after reading only a page or two of this novel, this epic poem, really, I found myself overwhelmed by its wordplay, its music, its tapestry of sound and sense, and could say with certainty that it wasn’t simply a word salad tossed with the aplomb of a foaming at the mouth babbler falling from the roof of the Tower of Babel, but a carefully composed work of art, an art that made me feel like Gaston Bachelard, who in Fragments of a Poetics of Fire wrote that:

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. In endeavoring to experience these poetic flashes, both the large and the small,…I discovered that poetic language opens a door upon the very heights of language. Here language beyond language, a poetic language, gives transcendence form. One might live double lives if only one might live poetically, speaking the language of poetry instinctively, as if one meant it.

The trust I feel for late Joyce is similar to the trust I feel when listening to late John Coltrane, the saxophone titan, who, having mined the riches of the harmonic spectrum, within carefully circumscribed compositional forms and improvisational frameworks, finally embarked to the farthest reaches of sound and rhythm, the intensity and integrity of which would, perhaps, be less persuasive, less pummeling had it not been derived from his mastery of the musical traditions he’d been working, arguably masterfully, within. But ultimately what matters is the matter, not where it came from, or even how it was made, as interesting and informing as it may be, and that matter, that is, what it accomplishes on the page, is the ultimate measure of Finnegans Wake.

Yes, Finnegans Wake is renowned, perhaps notoriously, for its supposed inscrutability, for its frustrating of attempts at (to borrow words from Finnegans Wake) “explosition” of its “strangewrote anaglyptics” by readers with a “volupkabulary” (readers who are “strikingly brainy and well letterread”); for how easy it is to get lost in the “picaresqueness of [its] imarges”; for its polysemy, its seaming of, it’s estimated, somewhere between sixty and seventy languages, or rather a smattering of phrases and sentences quoted and derived from those languages, within the overall text; but, Finnegans Wake’s smorgasbord of languages, its puzzles, its difficulty, its defiance of rote outlining, of simple synopsis, its frustration of easy exegesis, and its resistance to immediate understanding does not make this an impenetrable work, and should not discourage people from reading it. Even without plunging into the vast troves of Joycean scholarship, the book proves itself to be full of delights, full of literary riches, bursting with humor, brimming with wordplay, and contains indelibly drawn characters like Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Anna Livia Plurabelle, their children, Shem, Shaun and Issy, and a number of minor characters, offering up the things they “had heard or had heard said or had heard said written,” the text overflowing with “Fantasy! funtasy on fantasy, amnaes fintasies!” beginning with the moment where Anna lays out Finnegan’s cadaver as a meal for his mourners; to the metamorphosis of two washerwomen, one into a tree, the other a stone; to the book’s final transformation, where Anna turns into a river.

But before I go any further, please allow me a cheeky aside by offering another example of Joyce’s power, the power, that is, that a select few have, like Nostradamus, for instance. Finnegans Wake finds Joyce anticipating the internet’s various social media platforms, Joyce revealing his savviness, and perhaps for some, I’d imagine, the best example of his contemporary relevance: “We’ll do a whisper drive, for if the barishnayas got a twitter of it they’d tell the housetops and then all Cadbury would go crackers.” Actually, by the time Joyce had written this it was old news because he’d already twittered in Ulysses; but unlike most written twitterings, Joyce’s is actually worth the time:

THE KISSES

(warbling) Leo! (twittering) Icky Icky micky sticky for Leo! (cooing) Coo coocoo! Yummyyum, Womwom! (warbling) Big comebig! Pirouette! Leopopold! (twittering) Leeolee! (warbling) O Leo! (They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)

Perhaps even more astounding about Finnegans Wake is that Joyce predicts search engines, inexplicably looking over a future shoulder of a rather lascivious individual clicking and stroking: “One chap googling the holyboy’s thingabib and this lad wetting his widdle.”

Back to the argument at hand, another prevalent mischaracterization of Finnegans Wake is that it is plotless. On the contrary, though not immediately apparent, the book has a number of plot elements, which I won’t detail here, since for me a book’s plot is usually not very interesting to talk about, but it should be understood that plot’s tick-tock wasn’t Joyce’s primary concern, as he explained in a 1926 letter to Harriet Weaver: “One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.” And the “great part” that Joyce explores and reveals in his epic book is the dreamstate, or, as I’ll explain below—and I write this in whispering timidity, in the face of that mountain of Joycean scholarship—the state of being comatose.

Yes, Finnegans Wake is in many ways Joyce’s exploration of the dreamworld, its logic, its disjunction, its ambiguities, its inexplicable shifts from event to event, but after repeatedly reflecting on the circularity of the text, of its eternal return, how it eats itself like an ourobos, I couldn’t help thinking that what Joyce was capturing was the range of the state of being comatose, the varying levels of altered consciousness that Finnegan may have experienced following his fall off the ladder at the book’s outset; that some of the appearances and events Finnegan experiences, like some of his wife’s appearances, reveal Finnegan’s varying degrees of motor and verbal response, of eye movement; that what we’re sometimes offered are recordings of what he sees, not just what he thinks while unconscious, that his eyes sometimes open in response to external stimuli, like touch and speech, or other sounds, or open spontaneously; and that Joyce is sometimes depicting a comatose Finnegan’s moaning, his incomprehensible utterances, his random or articulated speech, revealing the shifting levels of Finnegan’s consciousness. This aspect of the book offers what is perhaps its greatest dramatic tension, one in which I continually wonder whether Finnegan will ever awaken. And I can’t help wondering whether Anna’s final appearance in the text is not simply some dreamworld apparition, but may actually be Finnegan’s wife attempting to wake him up, and that her turning, once again, into a river, now disappearing at dawn—dawn a sign of awakening—is a depiction of Finnegan falling in and out of consciousness once again, into perpetuity. Anna’s attempt to stir Finnegan awake, out of his coma, is beautifully rendered:

Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speaking. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have falled on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves. The woods are fond always, as were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! Or is it only so mesleems? On your pondered palm. Reclined from cape to pede. With pipe on bowl. Terce for a fiddler, sixth for makmerriers, none for a Cole. Rise up now and aruse! Norvena’s over…

Not having any of the various annotations to Finnegans Wake, my explication of the passage above will necessarily be slight, but here we find Anna, speaking as “leafy” or as Liffey, the river, announcing the “soft morning,” the arrival of the dawn. “Norvena” is, I would guess, an allusion to Nirvana, which the Madhyamikas regard as the “coming to rest of the manifold creations of the mind.” And the punning allusion to Robinson Crusoe: “And robins in crews so,” reminds me of another reference to another famous novel, found earlier in the book: “Or the birds start their treestirm shindy.” Writing about the early drafts of his book, Joyce, in a letter to Eugene Jolas, revealed his debt to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman:

Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death. There is nothing paradoxical about all this. Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single aesthetic purpose. Did you ever read Laurence Sterne?

My attempt to read Finnegans Wake in as close to a single sitting as possible, while intended as a kind of total immersion, as a way of challenging its supposed inscrutability, or rather the seeming impossibility of ever completing it (the reading thwarted by my unwanted, but inevitable, and probably necessary, wavering away from it, in order to read other things, only to come back even more confused), was ultimately silly, since this book is meant to be savored, page for page, word for word, sound for sound. Some books are just simply meant to be read that way. Better put, as Sir Francis Bacon wrote:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

William Gass echoed this idea in his famous Paris Review interview:

If you start talking about speech acts, what you are doing is connecting the notion of writing with a concept of performance. I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed-reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, J.R. was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write.

The kind of surface reading that Gass describes above is one of two “systems” of reading described by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text; one system “goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote, it considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of language (if I read Jules Verne, I go fast: I lose discourse, and yet my reading is not hampered by any verbal loss—in the speleological sense of the word)…”; the other “system” of reading is one that

skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, it reads, so to speak, with application and transport, grasps at every point in the text the asyndeton which cuts the various languages—and not the anecdote: it is not (logical) extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths, but the layering of significance; as in the children’s game of topping hands, the excitement comes not from a progressive haste but from a kind of vertical din (the verticality of language and of its destruction); it is at the moment when each (different) hand skips over the next (and not one after the other) that the hole, the gap, is created and carries off the subject of the game—the subject of the text. Now paradoxically (so strong is the belief that one need merely go fast in order not to be bored), this second, applied reading (in the real sense of the word “application”) is the one suited to the modern text, the limit-text. Read slowly, read all of a novel by Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse: what “happens,” what “goes away,” the seam of the two edges, the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of the languages, in the uttering, not in the sequence of the utterances: not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover—in order to read today’s writers—the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers.

I deliberately quoted that lengthy passage, knowing that most editors, acting on the behalf of readers, would want to chop it into digestible bits, reduce it to as close to bullet points without the black holes to mar the page. Did you skim the passage in order to get the gist of its content, in order to get back to the essay proper, to the thoughts of an essayist who, through the use of cumulative sentence patterns allows his sentences to layer like so much sediment? Or did you, knowing that Barthes is a masterful stylist, relish every word? Finnegans Wake is a text that demands the second system of reading that Barthes describes above, a slow, thoughtful, careful reading, demanding, and creating through the close reading of it, “aristocratic readers.”

Barthes, in that same book, distinguishes a “text of pleasure,” which “contents, fills, grants euphoria,” which comes “from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading,” from the “text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.” With these distinctions made, Finnegans Wake, then, must be considered a text of bliss since it fulfills all of the criteria as listed by Barthes. Reading it, especially within the short time that I demanded of myself, imposed a feeling of a loss of time and place, or, rather made me feel, as Joyce writes, even further “Loonley in me loneness.” The discomfort it caused was plainly revealed anytime I’d lose focus, a repeated occurrence, its longeurs almost demanding me to give up, fall to the wayside as its flood of words rushed past. It unsettled, to varying degrees, my assumptions, and, unlike any other book (the only competitors being the poetry of Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Gerard Manley Hopkins) engaged me in an ongoing battle to parse each sentence for meaning, to question my thoughts about every word I was reading, forcing me to read most of it aloud, in order to unlock more of its mysteries, while still confounding exegesis.

I’ll end this by briefly reflecting on some of my favorite passages from the book, providing as little context as possible, simply to revel in what Barthes would call the bliss of the text. As a text of bliss, Finnegans Wake, to quote from Barthes again, “prove[s] to me that it desires me. The proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself.)” Early in the book, I found what I think of as an invitation to those very pleasures:

(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many.

There are numerous stories woven within the folds of Finnegans Wake. Here’s “The Tale of the Prankquean,” beginning with a variation of “Once upon a time…”:

It was of a night, late, lang time agone, in an auldstane eld, when Adam was delvin and his madameen spinning watersilts, when mulk and mountynotty man was everybilly and the first leal ribberrobber that ever had her ainway everybiddy to his lovesaking eye and everybilly live alove with everbiddy else, and Jarl van Hoother had his burnt head high up in his lamphouse, laying cold hands on himself. And his two little jiminies, cousins of ourn, Tristopher and Hilary, were kickaheeling their dummy on the oil cloth flure of his homerigh, castle and earthenhouse.

The ant and grasshopper, from Aesop’s fable, appear, too, here as the Gracehopper and the Ondt, the former appearing first:

The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity, (he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him), or, if not, he was always making ungraceful overtures to Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla to play pupa-pupa and pulicy-pulicy and langtennas and pushpygyddyum and to commence insects with him, there mouthparts to his orefice and his gambills to there airy processes, even if only in chaste, ameng the everlistings, behold a waspering pot.

The ant appears soon after those words:

Grouscious me and scarab my sahul! What a bagateller it is! Libelulous! Inzanzarity! Pou! Pschla! Ptuh! What a zeit for the goths! vented the Ondt, who, not being a sommerfool, was thothfolly making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass of his windhame, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix.

I lust for lists, and Finnegans Wake brims with them:

Not olderwise Inn the days of the Bygning would our Traveller remote unfriended, from van Demon’s Land, some lazy skald or maundering pote, lift wearywilly his slowcut snobsic eyes to the semisigns of his zooteac and lengthily lingering along flaskneck, cracket cup, downtrodden brogue, turfsod, wildbroom, cabbageblad, stockfisch, longingly learn that there at the Angel were herberged for him poteen and tea and praties and baccy and wine width woman wordth warbling: and informally quasi-begin to presquesm’ile to queasithin’ (Nonsense! The was not very much windy Nous blowing at the given moment through the hat of Melancholy Slow!)

And another:

…the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lieabed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his mindfag, the buzz in his braintree, the tic of his conscience, the height up his rage, the gush down his fundament, the fire in his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the bane in his bullugs, the squince in his suil, the rot in his eater, the ycho in his earer, the totters of his toes, the tetters on his tumtytum, the rats in his garret, the bats in his belfry, the budgerigars and bumbosolom beaubirds, the hullabaloo and the dust in his ears.

Actually, my favorite list is the one that “Earwicker, that patternmind, that paradigmatic ear, receptoretentive as his of Dionysius,” invokes, recounting “all abusive names he was called,” one hundred and eleven, to be exact:

Firstnighter, Informer, Old Fruit, Yellow Whigger, Wheatears, Goldy Geit, Bogside Beauty, Yass We’ve Had His Badannas, York’s Porker, Funnyface, At Baggotty’s Bend He Bumped, Grease with the Butter, Opendoor Ospices, Cainandabler, Ireland’s Eighth Wonderful Wonder, Beat My Price, Godsoilman, Moonface the Murderer, Hoary Hairy Hoax, Midnight Sunburst, Remove that Bible, Hebdromadary Publocation, Tummer the Lame the Tyrannous, Blau Clay, Tight before Teatime, Read Your Pantojoke, Acoustic Disturbance, Thinks He’s Gobblasst the Good Dook of Ourguile, W.D.’s Grace, Gibbering Bayamouth of Dublin, His Farther was a Mundzucker and She had him in a Growler, Burnham and Bailey, Artist, Unworthy of the Homely Protestant Religion, Terry Cotter, You’re Welcome to Waterfood, signed the Ribbonmen, Lobsterpot Lardling, All for Arthur of this Town, Hooshed the Cat from the Bacon, Leathertogs Donald, The Ace and Deuce of Paupering, O’Reilly’s Delights to Kiss the Man behind the Borrel, Magogagog, Swad Puddlefoot, Gouty Ghibeline, Loose Luther, Hatches Cocks’ Eggs, Muddle the Plan, Luck before Wedlock, I Divorce Thee Husband, Tanner and a Make, Go to Hellena or Come to Connies, Piobald Puffpuff His Bride, Purged out of Burke’s, He’s None of Me Causin, Barebarean, Peculiar Person, Grunt Owl’s Facktotem, Twelve Months Aristocrat, Lycanthrope, Flunkey Beadle Vamps the Tune Letting on He’s Loney, Thunder and Turf Married into Clandorf, Left Boot Sent on Approval, Cumberer of Lord’s Holy Ground, Stodge Arschmann, Awnt Yuke, Tommy Furlong’s Pet Plagues, Archdukon Cabbanger, Last Past the Post, Kennealey Won’t Tell Thee off Nancy’s Gown, Scuttle to Cover, Salary Grab, Andy Mac Noon in Annie’s Room, Awl Out, Twitchbratschballs, Bombard Street Bester, Sublime Porter, A Ban for Le King of the Burgaans and a Bom for Ye Sur of all the Ruttledges, O’Phelim’s Cutprice, And at Number Wan Wan Wan, What He Done to Castlecostello, Sleeps with Feathers end Ropes, It is Known who Sold Horace the Rattler, Enclosed find the Sons of Fingal, Swayed in his Falling, Wants a Wife and Forty of Them, Let Him Do the Fair, Apeegeequanee Chimmuck, Plowp Goes his Whastle, Ruin of the Small Trader, He — — Milkinghoneybeaverbrooker, Vee was a Vindner, Sower Rapes, Armenian Atrocity, Sickfish Bellyup, Edomite, — ‘Man Devoyd of the Commoner Characteristics of an Irish Nature, Bad Humborg, Hraabhraab, Coocoohandler, Dirt, Miching Daddy, Born Burst Feet Foremost, Woolworth’s Worst, Easyathic Phallusaphist, Guiltey-pig’s Bastard, Fast in the Barrel, Boose in the Bed, Mister Fatmate, In Custody of the Polis, Boawwll’s Alocutionist, Deposed…

And there are innumerable examples of wonderful “langwedge” and “langscape,” words that indicate Joyce’s own belief that language is matter to be broken, shaped, formed, sculpted like so much wet clay, that language is a field, an environment, a vista of possibility: Then, while is is odrous comparisoning to the sprangflowers of his burstday which was a viridable goddinpotty for the reinworms and the charlattinas and all branches of climatitis, it has been such a wonderful noyth untirely, added she, with many regard to Maha’s pranjapansies. (Tart!) [….] You last led the first when we last but we’ll first trump your last with a lasting. Moments of alluring alliteration, like the ones contained in this passage—all those bullying B’s:

This battering babel allower the door and sideposts, he always said, was not in the very remotest like the belzey babble of a bottle of boose which would not rouse him out o’ slumber deep but reminded him loads more of the martiallawsey marses of foreign musikants’ instrumongs or the overthrewer to the third last days of Pompery, if anything.

Speaking of B’s, here’s another splendiferous example: “…a boosted blasted bleating blatant bloaten blasphorous blesphorous idiot who cannot tail a bomb from a painapple…” How about some tees? “Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell tattle.” There are many funny iterations of the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built” sprinkled throughout the book:

“…the ward of the wind, that lightened the fire that lay in the wood that Jove bolt…” [….] “…the tout that pumped the stout that linked the lank that cold the sandy that nextdoored the rotter that rooked the rhymer that lapped at the hoose that Joax pilled.” [….] “This is the glider that gladdened the girl that list to the wind that lifted the leaves that folded the fruit that hung on the tree that grew in the garden Gough gave.” [….] “—That legged in the hoax that joke bilked.”

Puns are de rigeur here, Joyce perhaps following Shakespeare (of whom he writes: “As Great Shapespeare puns it.”), so much so that one of the character says, “If you don’t like my story get out of the punt.” Wordplay abounds, like “Bethicket me for a stump of a beech,” a play on “son of a bitch”; puns on familiar phrases: “is plumply pudding the carp before doevre hors,” a clever play on “putting the cart before the horse.” And this one: “Psing a psalm of psexpeans, apocryphal of rhyme.” And this: “All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.” And this: “—He shook be ashaped of hempshelves, hiding that shepe in his goat.” And this: “Lard have mustard on them!” And this hilarious indictment of humanity: “In the name of the former and the latter and their holocaust. All men.” And this one: “What’s good for the gorse is a goad for the garden.” And this one: “…every toad, duck and herring…”; and this one: Ouhr Former who erred in having down to gibbous disbag our darling breed.” And this one: “For we’re all jollygame fellhellows which nobottle can deny!” Portmanteaus are another of the book’s textural signatures. Some of my favorites include the following: “murmurrandoms”; “sweetmoztheart”; “Epistlemadethemology”; “thuthunder”; “thinkamuddles”; “husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdam-andamnacosaghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechocashlcarcarcaract”; “freeflawforms”; “fabulafigured”; and “throughsighty.” A letter from the twins exposes the cheapness behind holiday cheer:

Nightletter

With our best youlldied greetings to Pep and Mammy and the old folkers below and beyant, wishing them all verry merry Incarnations in this land of livvey and plenty of preposterousness through their coming new yonks

In the end, this “wordybook” is a delight, and while it is easy to get “confused by this tonguer of babble,” how could you not revel in all these chewy passages, passages made “by the mouth for the ear,” like this one?:

A spathe of calyptrous glume involucrumines the perinanthean Amenta: fungoalgaceous muscafilical graminopalmular planteon; of increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever among skullhullows and charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild when Ralph the Retriever ranges to jawrode his knuts knuckles and her theas thighs; one gugulp down of the nauseous forere brarkfarsts oboboomaround and you’re as paint and spickspan as a rainbow; wreathe the bowl to rid the bowel; no runcure, no rank heat, sir; amess in amullium; chlorid cup.

 

As part of my preparation for my interview with William Gass, I began April with a reread of Conversations with William Gass. Once again, I highly recommend Conversations as it offers a great mind essaying off-the-cuff, and doing it brilliantly. I followed this with a reading of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, another of Gass’s fifty literary pillars. It’s an incredibly elaborate orchestration of metafictional play and stylistic counterplay. Seamless collage of seemingly disparate elements like pulp genres, Irish folklore and mythology, and frame within a frame within a frame tales is one mark of its formal inventiveness. One of the joys of At Swim is getting tangled in, and having to disentangle yourself from, the various threads, and following all the characters in and out of their nested boxes. As to be expected from a novel about a writer writing about a writer writing a novel, there’s a lot of commentary about writing: “There are two ways to make big money, he said, to write a book or to make a book.” And this was the remark that “provoked” a group of pseudo-intellectuals to have a “discussion on the subject of Literature-great authors living and dead, the character of modern poetry, the predilections of publishers and the importance of being at all times occupied with literary activities of a spare time or recreative character.” Love that capital “L” there! This whole passage, with the bits about how the room “rang with the iron of fine words,” how the “names of great Russian masters were articulated with fastidious intonation,” and how psychoanalysis “was mentioned-with, however, a somewhat light touch,” is hilarious. And I think this statement: “Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another,” is critical, too, since it’s a justification, of sorts, of all the overlapping and juxtapositions of characters and settings throughout the course of the novel.

I should mention here that one of the things I like about the novel are all of these expository asides set off by a colon. (It’s also an attribute, albeit with a different stylistic effect, of Gary Lutz’s work; and it’s something I sometimes play around with in my fiction.):

Description of my uncle: Red-faced, bead-eyed, ball-bellied. Fleshy about the shoulders with long swinging arms giving ape-like effect to gait. Large moustache. Holder of Guinness clerkship the third class.

The narrator has no shortage of succinct encapsulations of personality traits and physical attributes. And any time the narrator remarks about the uncle, look out! “Description of my friend: Thin, dark-haired, hesitant; an intellectual Meath-man; given to close-knit epigrammatic talk; weak-chested, pale.” There are concise, droll descriptions of vibe and atmosphere: “Nature of chuckles: Quiet, private, averted.” And other hilarious asides:

Nature of mime and ejaculation: Removal of sweat from brow; holy God.”

Purpose of walk: Discovery and embracing of virgins.”

I really enjoyed the tall-tale grandiosity of the Finn Mac Cool passages, like this one with its insane inventory:

I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail, the pilibeen móna, the bottle-tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-toed guillemot, the pilibeen sléibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine plough-gull, the long-eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small-fowl, the bevil-beaked chough, the hooded tit, the pilibeen uisce, the common corby, the fish-tailed mud-piper, the crúiskeen lawn, the carrion sea-cock, the green-lidded parakeet, the brown bog-martin, the maritime wren, the dove-tailed wheatcrake, the beaded daw, the Galway hill bantam and the pilibeen cathrach. A satisfying ululation is the contending of a river with the sea. Good to hear is the chirping red-breasted men in bare winter and distant hounds giving tongue in the secrecy of fog. The lamenting of a wounded otter in a black hole, sweeter than harpstrings that. There is not torture so narrow as to be bound and beset in a dark cavern without food or music, without the bestowing of gold on bards. To be chained by night in a dark pit without company of chessman-evil destiny! Soothing to my ear is the shout of a hidden blackbird, the squeal of a troubled mare, the complaining of wild-hogs caught in the snow.

It’s a gorgeous display of O’Brien’s luscious lyricism, and his expressive use of the hyphen is effusive without sounding garbled.

The narrator is preoccupied by so many concerns, and he talks about “retir[ing] to the privacy of [his] mind”, and “into the kingdom of [his] mind.” And, after his “witticism was unperceived,” he “quietly replaced it in the treasury of [his] mind”; and later, he talks about how a “sense of tedium is so deeply seated in the texture of [his] mind.” There might be other causes to his mind trouble: “The mind may be impaired by alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired.” And in Trellis’s letter to Mr. Arbuthnot, he says, “With the present pressure on my mind, I should not be able to sleep if I did not use wine as an opiate; it is less hurtful than laudanum but not so effectual.”

I shifted gears with a reading of Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies. While certainly dated in some ways, the book is still provocative for any lover of books as objects made of paper and ink. I think I first flipped through the book in the library after I’d read somewhere that Lia Purpura recommended it, and I think my motivation to finally read it was borne from my frustration with how technology and virtual media are seemingly taking over everything, usurping our time, compromising our privacy. Here are some of Birkert’s thoughts about the “differences between the print orientation and that of electronic systems”:

The order of print is linear, and is bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. Syntax is the substructure of discourse, a mapping of the ways that the mind makes sense through language. Print communication requires the active engagement of the reader’s attention, for reading is fundamentally an act of translation. Symbols are turned into their verbal referents and these are in turn interpreted. The print engagement is essentially private. While it does represent an act of communication, the contents pass from the privacy of the sender to the privacy of the receiver. Print also posits a time axis; the turning of pages, not to mention the vertical descent down the page, is a forward-moving succession, with earlier contents at every point serving as a ground for what follows. Moreover, the printed material is static-it is the reader, not the book, that moves forward. The physical arrangements of print are in accord with our traditional sense of history. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained attention. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by the reader’s focus and comprehension.

The electronic order is in most ways opposite. Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. The vast resources of the network are always there, potential, even if they do not impinge on the immediate communication. Electronic communication can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents, unless they are printed out (at which point they become part of the static order of print) are felt to be evanescent. They can be changed or deleted with the stroke of a key. With visual media (television, projected graphs, highlighted “bullets”) impression and image take precedence over logic and concept, and detail and linear sequentiality are sacrificed. The pace is rapid, driven by jump-cut increments, and the basic movement is laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative. The presentation structures the reception and, in time, the expectation about how information is organized.

Further, the visual and nonvisual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.

I’m not sure what inspired me to read The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. Perhaps it was just a simple craving for art that utilizes the full resources of language. While some people may find Crane’s poetry unnecessarily inscrutable; his poems are, on the contrary, invocations full of sensuous sonorities, thrusting the reader along eddies of personal associations, the emotional intensity of which I found invigorating; and while reading I was often swept away by the rhythms, the evocations, the lapidary style, and was unconcerned with immediately understanding (this would come, I knew, with repeated readings) the so-called meaning of the poems. Besides the baroque quality of these iambic pentameter lines (set into quatrains for White Buildings and Key West, Crane’s latter two books), there are Crane’s inspired creation of portmanteaus and compounds and hyphenated compounds: “oilrinsed”, “windwrestlers”, “moonferrets”, “cloud-templed”, “star-glistered”, “larval-silver”, “space-gnawing”, “wind-sleuths”, “moonferrets”, “cloud-belfries”, “lead-perforated”, “wing-pulse”, “ghoul-mound” “blue-writ”, “oak-vizored”, “death-strife”, “pasture-shine”, “sky-barracks”, ‘crystal-flooded”, “planet-sequined”, “Everpresence”, “cold-hushed”, “sun-silt”, “Vine-stanchioned”, “chimney-sooted”, “much-exacting”, “Half-riant”, and “transmemberment”.

There’s also no shortage of unfamiliar words, e.g., cavil, borage, cycloramic, encinctured, conclamant, aureate, clamant, corymbulous, hypogeum, undinal, diapason, irrefragably, and argosy.

With its repeated references and likenings to water, poetry full of  “writhing pool[s]“, poems where “streets / Burst suddenly in rain…”, Crane’s poetry is really a psychic seascape. From “Ave Maria”:

“Witness before the tides can wrest away / The word I bring…”

Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail; / Invisible valves of the sea,-locks, tendons / Crested and creeping, troughing corridors / That fall back yawning to another plunge.”

Dark waters onward shake the dark prow free.”

O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart / Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth, / And all the eddying breath between dost search / Cruelly with love thy parable of man…”

In “Powhatan’s daughter” someone is tossed about by “a tide of voices” in their dreams. And in “The River” a tributary alters dreams, diffuses it: “The River, spreading, flows-and spends your dream. / What are you, list within this tideless spell?” You find water weaving and throwing “laughing chains” in “The Dance”.

From “Cape Hatteras”: “Sea eyes and tidal, undenying, bright with myth!”

From “Southern Cross”:

All night the water combed you with black
Insolence. You crept out simmering, accomplished.
Water rattled that stinging coil, your
Rehearsed hair—docile, alas, from many arms.
Yes, Eve—wraith of my unloved seed!

From “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”: “Yet how much room for memory there is / In the loose girdle of soft rain.”

A man in “At Melville’s Tomb” stands on some dark promontory, presumably, and reflects on the sea, itself a grave of “drowned men’s bones”, a “calyx of death’s bounty” that “bequeath / An embassy”, a series of reflections, that Crane describes as “A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, / The portent wound in corridors of shells.” The sea is a keeper of “fabulous shadow”. And we learn in Voyages that the “bottom of the sea is cruel.” And note Crane’s marvelously filigreed description of waves and sea sounds in that same poem: “Take this Sea, whose diapason knells / On scrolls of silver snowy sentences…”

I followed my reading of Crane’s poetry, and ended April, with reading Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star. It is a beautiful book comprised of evocative fragments full of anguished reveries and lyrical prose. Unrue’s narrator insists the reader seam these luminous bits together to form, not some raggedy patchwork, but a luxuriant tapestry. Though erotic tensions, and some violence, suffuse the narrative, the language here is both subtle and agonizing, profound, elegant:

And, yes, there are some fine examples, in that other, smaller gallery, of another kind of art, a women’s art, close work performed by candlelight: the willowherb, the dragonfly, the frogs and butterflies and clover, and a set of handkerchiefs on which one woman stitched and stitched and sent, by way of female messenger, those secret words embroidered into pictures, to her lover: butterflies and berries, tiny flowers, if you love me then for chrissake come and fuck me, chutes, thin curling lines and spider’s webs that glisten in among the hard-to-read entreaties stem- and serpent-stitched in bone- and eggshell-tinted thread.

Considering my ever-detouring approach to reading, I think it’s appropriate that March for me began with Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, a series of transcribed lectures conflating the telling and writing of stories with Jorge Luis Borges’s metaphor of the woods as a garden of forking paths, or, as Eco puts it:

Woods are a metaphor for the narrative text, not only for the text of fairy tales but for any narrative text. There are woods like Dublin, where instead of Little Red Riding Hood one can meet Molly Bloom….Even when there are no well-trodden paths in a wood, everyone can trace his or her own path, deciding to go to the left or to the right of a certain tree and making a choice at every tree encountered.

And this likening of woods with text can also be extended to apply to the life of a reader, well, at least my own life as a reader. One of the most pleasing things about reading is being able to veer off into all kinds of directions. I can bounce from fiction to nonfiction to poetry (and I often do), oftentimes stopping in the middle of some text, to start another.

Eco’s is the third collection of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that I’ve read. The second was Borges’s This Craft of Verse, a collection that is as much a phenomenal display of the Argentine writer’s sparkling erudition as it is a glimpse of his demeanor, attitude, and manner; where, in contradiction to how lectures are often framed, Borges, yet again diverging from conventional forms, allows his lectures to unfold informally—without presenting arguments or straw-men to be quickly burnt up—and convincingly, as gentle provocations. But one should not be fooled by the hesitations, false starts, self-deprecating asides, and unassuming tone because there is a great deal of intellectual rigor beneath these six lectures. Reading Borges’s lectures, I’m left with the charge to surrender myself to traverse fiction’s vast landscape, succumb to its ebb and flow, its eddying currents, its whirlpool and undertow even; to recognize that the pleasure of a well-told story is elevated when fused with poetry; to find common words to express uncommon ideas, as well as to explore its inverse; and lastly, to not take vision—biological and mental—or any of the other senses, including the non-physiological, for granted.

The first collection of Norton Lectures I’d read, Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, though, is more pertinent toward the discussion here as Eco not only structures the titling of his lectures to mirror Calvino’s, but begins Six Walks in the Fictional Woods with a discussion of the second of Calvino’s Memos: “‘Quickness,’ which ends with contending that “‘this apologia for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering.’” Eco takes the idea of lingering as the focus of his third lecture. But before that, he offers the first in a series of fascinating ideas about texts:

For the moment, let us note that any narrative fiction is necessarily and fatally swift because in building a world that comprises myriad events and characters, it cannot say everything about the world. It hints at it and then asks the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps. Every text, after all…is a lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work. What a problem it would be if a text were to say everything the receiver is to understand—it would never end.

Reading this, I couldn’t help imagining a book that would never end, and what came to mind, first, was Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a lifelong work-in-progress that Whitman worked on all of his life. I also thought of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another lifework-in-progress (in fact, transition, a literary magazine, published sections of the book in serial form under the title Work in Progress) that Joyce managed to complete, I think, only by making it into the incredible ouroboric loop that it is. And I also thought back again to Borges, because such a neverending book could only exist in his Library of Babel, a library that contains books with every possible arrangement of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks, where every possible book, both comprehensible and incomprehensible, has been made.

Time and time again Eco compares the act of reading fiction to child’s play:

But any walk within fictional worlds has the same function as a child’s play. Children play with puppets, toy horses, or kites in order to get acquainted with the physical laws of the universe and with the actions that someday they will really perform. Likewise, to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.

This is the consoling function of narrative—the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. And it has always been the paramount function of myth: to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience.

I’m not sure if Eco is right here, however. First, the reasons he gives for why children play are thoroughly inadequate, and implies a self-consciousness that is not apparent when I’ve observed children at play. While getting “acquainted with the physical laws of the universe and with the actions that someday they will really perform” are certainly two logical reasons why children play, the primary reason they play is because it’s fun, because it gives them pleasure. Also, while it certainly sounds comforting that reading fiction is like playing a game “by which we give sense to the immensity” of the past, present, and future, this observation, too, falls short. What does it mean to “give sense to the immensity” anyway? And is this actually what happens while we read? And is the reading of narrative simply an escape from “the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world,” that we seek it out as consolation? That the mere purpose of myth is to find “a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience”? I don’t see how fiction helps give sense to the vastness, the weight, the endless scope of the past, the here and now of the present, or the uncertainty of the future. And if it does, it’s certainly not a defining characteristic of what it does for me, and when it does it’s a temporary effect, at best. As for the anxiety one feels when trying to say something true about the world, I’m generally skeptical about notions regarding truth, and I’m not sure why a writer would even be thinking about saying something truthful about the world when writing, and I don’t see myself as a reader looking for some kind of statement about truth or truthful statement either, but even if what Eco suggests is true, I still don’t see how fiction provides an escape from this supposed anxiety about wanting to say something true about the world, since it oftentimes heightens, exacerbates all kinds of anxieties, fears, and doubts. In other words, narratives may cause as much anxiety as it may temporarily alleviate it. Eco echoes this likening fiction to child’s play in his last lecture, “Fiction Protocols”:

And so it is easy to understand why fiction fascinates us so. It offers us the opportunity to employ limitlessly our faculties for perceiving the world and reconstructing the past. Fiction has the same function that games have. In playing, children learn to live, because they simulate situations in which they may find themselves as adults. And it is through fiction that we adults train our ability to structure our past and present experience.

Once again, I think Eco’s observation is too simplistic. If it is true that children play solely to “simulate situations in which they may find themselves as adults,” how then do you explain when a child pretends to be the father or mother of their mother or father, this act, of course, an impossible one and to be distinguished from the act of simply mothering or fathering, which may be considered a simulation of a future possibility; or, better yet, how do you explain their imagining they are, or have met, or are playing with fairies, gods, angels, monsters, or that they have three arms, or two heads, or eyes behind them, or whatever fantastical thing they may have dreamed up? Are these simulations of things they will experience as adults? Also, what exactly does it mean to “train our ability to structure our past and present experience”? And if this were true that that’s why we read fiction, why is this its primary function? And later, Eco states that we won’t stop reading fictional stories

because it is in them that we seek a formula to give meaning to our existence. Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived. Sometimes we look for a cosmic story, the story of the universe, or for our own personal story (which we tell our confessor or our analyst, or which we write in the pages of our diary). Sometimes our personal story coincides with the story of the universe.

These aren’t the reasons why I come to stories. I’m not looking for a formula for my existence, if by “formula” Eco means an equation of some sort, a schema in which I can understand who I am and why I am here. These questions get raised for me more often when I read philosophy than when I read fiction. Generally, I like looking at how sentences are constructed, exploring how a narrative is constructed. I’m much more interested in the technical aspects of a work, how it is formed and shaped on the page and not in the ways that it gives a shape and form to my life.

After Eco’s lectures I read William Gass, by Watson L. Holloway. In it, I found a number of observations apt about this great writer:

Fiction, in Gass’s estimation, is not utilitarian; it is not supposed to do or cause anything in particular. It just is. It exists alongside other entities. Like other postrealists Gass considers futile the attempt to make fiction reflect life. He agrees with Raymond Federman, who maintains that fiction cannot be a mirror, cannot merely reflect a reality exterior to itself. In defiance of conventional expectations, “the shape and order of fiction,” writes Federman, “will not result from an imitation of the shape and order of life, but rather from the formal circumvolutions of language as it wells from the unconscious.”

I’m not so sure that Gass would agree that these “circumvolutions of language” come from the unconscious, but Holloway’s assertion that Gass does not consider his fiction to be merely a mirror of reality, that, for Gass, “literature cannot be made to equal human experience; therefore, any empirical relationship between fiction and fact is impossible,” is spot on. And he’s correct when he says that Gass “does not want to permit the reader to go beyond the limits of the author’s language.” I thought that Holloway was especially sensitive to Gass’s notions of character. Synopsizing Gass’s theories in Fiction and the Figures of Life, Holloway writes: “A character in literature, for Gass, is the noise of a name and the resultant rhythms and meanings that are suggested by and growing out of it.” Or, as Larry McCaffrey puts it in another book I read this month: “Gass’s basic point is that characters in books are incorporeal essences and definitions which are assigned a name and whose physical characteristics are limited to the sound, pitch, and rhythm of the words out of which they are created.” And throughout the book, Holloway’s analysis concentrates on Gass’s symbolic naming of his characters, and makes a convincing case that Segren, the surname of the protagonist’s family in The Pedersen Kid, “is a disguised form of sea green or seed green”; that Pearson, the boss in “Icicles,” may be read as “Piercing”; that the name Culp, one of the characters from The Tunnel, comes “from the Latin, culpa, guilt”; and Lou, “from the French, lieu, place”; and Ruth from “rue.” These observations definitely helped to attune my understanding of Gass’s work, and set me off into reading into the names of other characters in his novels and stories.

Following Holloway’s book was my reading of Artifice Magazine, Issue One. It’s an incredibly playful journal filled with pieces that quietly draw attention to themselves as artifacts, to their artifice. In it, you’ll find texts as much marked by their rugged formal textures as for their concern with ribcages and wire-riggings; and with robots; poems with mermaids and “milkdrowned homunculi”; pieces where language is made flesh, and where a woman “is a semicolon”; texts where robots appear and inanimate objects are anthropomorphized; speculative narratives that throb along like Ben Marcus’s brainy fragments, and eccentric meditations on language like David Silverstein’s texts that explore how, in his words, “consciousness / does not live / without / language and language / is beginning to overwhelm / human / consciousness.” In a kind of merging of a famed Oulipian maneuver with Joseph Beuys’s blackboard drawings (what Rudolph Steiner called “thought-drawings”), Silverstein offers some engaging tactile texts. And his final piece, “dissociation • divagate,” resembles one of those CIA blotted out files. Silverstein’s texts are beautifully visceral eviscerations of the hegemony of the dictionary, or at least I’d like to think so. Things aren’t always what they seem within Artifice. For instance, Andrew Farkas’s noirish “Police Procedural,” an ingenious twist on the sleuth story, is literally about nothing. It’s inventive and expertly controlled, and, as with any good mystery, it ends with a surprise.

Claro’s Electric Flesh, translated by Brian Evenson, has been sitting on my shelf for awhile and since I was craving language that would fill my mouth I picked it up. It’s truly a chewy piece of fabulist fiction marked by its energetic, and yes, electric, prose:

First, he savors the gray and dense effluvium of things dead, like a tenuous sound followed by a burning echo which goes off to scorch the muffled siphon of one’s ear, then it’s a bouquet of heated wood, of strained leather, of numb metal, of blind metal, which creeps into his nostrils and runs off to awaken several neuronal clusters, which, after having followed billions of differential loops in a hundredth of a second, give instructions to certain inferior nerve endings to contract the muscles of his scrotum, releasing in exchange a rather shameful memory which quite naturally combines the defecating function with sexual stupor.

And there’s no shortage of wonderfully overwrought descriptions:

She was waiting for him, a twice-broken silhouette, a dim-witted Moloch of wood, folded a first time at the level of the pelvis, at her padded hips, into the double parallel horizontals of the forearms tensed in fists for armrests, so that the strong thighs and flattened ass form a support; then a second time, the knees gush out in the vertical descent and flow to the feet, a muscular foundation grafted rather than nailed to the floor.

Or moments marked by both detachment and droll humor:

That evening, as an exception, Howard paid homage to Bess. When the former came to lie down at her side, instead of becoming a tree trunk sunk in mud or a statue wallowing in sand, instead of playing a child switched off under the maternal lampshade, he crept toward her, deployed his fingers and her folds, buttressed against her a lot of little desiring bridges, running sawing bypassing, with each groaning debut combed flames, wove chains, brought the weight of his shoulders back on the armrests of Bess’s withered arms, pressed the box of his stomach to the suddenly burning stone of his wife, raised her thighs in two perfect right angles, and made it last, last, last, aligning the unalignable with the unaligned, wallowing in slow motion in hollows that one would have thought sealed with torpeur, making the dried froth foam up with conviction. Did Bess appreciate it? Hard to say, to grasp, so much did the noise of her breathing match that of the rubbing of the skin and the creaking of the bed.

The passage above is also a testament to Evenson’s incredibly evocative translation. Evenson finds moments of wonderful assonance like “of becoming a tree trunk sunk in mud,” and the welling oh, oh, oh of “each groaning debut combed flames, wove chains,” and even more suggestive oh, oh, oh, oh in “wallowing in slow motion in hollows. Claro’s prose creeps over the landscape of language much like Joyelle McSweeney’s, albeit with nods to William Gibson at his most nerdy, as well as Alfred Bester at his visual-tactile best (I’m thinking particularly of some of the typographical play in The Demolished Man).

Claro also provides a description of prose diametrically opposite to the one he has produced:

It was Leuchter’s prose, recognizable among thousands, because there were a thousand others like it, over a hundred thousand others copied exactly, endless reproduction of the absolute polish of dead prose, and not only dead but obsessed with the thingification of the slightest vibratory particle, not the slightly frigid language of the entomologist or of the formula jotter, but that bloodless prattle which is achieved only by sheer force of inner anaemia and patient exterior scrubbing.

There’s so much dead prose as to sicken any self-respecting reader, but there are three writers whom you can count on to deliver sentences and paragraphs overflowing with syntanctical brilliance. And those writers were the subjects of the next book I’d read in March, namely, Larry McCaffrey’s The Metafictional Muse. It proved to be another useful book toward understanding William Gass’s work as well as the work of two equally indomitable and inimitable prose stylists, namely, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. Coover gets first billing here followed by Donald Barthelme. Most of the things I marked off in the book related to William Gass, so I’ll focus my attention on those passages here. Taking its title from one of Gass’s books of essays, the chapter “William H. Gass: The World Within the Word” finds McCaffrey offering succinct summaries of and extrapolations about the following books by Gass: Fiction and the Figures of Life, a book McCaffrey earlier described as “a study that provided nontraditionalists with a manifesto which justified their efforts in terms of carefully established literary and philosophic principles”, and in this chapter he describes as having become “a kind of Bible for contemporary innovative writers, providing a convincing theoretical justification of the nonmimetic approach many of them are pursuing. Simply speaking, this view suggests that all fictions, including those of philosophy, science, mathematics, as well as literature, are primarily meaning systems which owe the standards of their success to internal consistency and not to the way in which they mimetically represent or correspond to the outside world.” McCaffrey’s observation that Gass’s “critical essays are themselves illustrations of his desire to call attention to the sensuous qualities of language.” One need only look at Gass’s extensive use of poetic devices like alliteration, rhyme, metrical rhythms, his use of extended metaphor and analogy, to recognize how critical lyricism, sensuousness, and tactility are to the realization of his fiction. Or as McCaffrey puts it “Gass emphasizes all the qualities of words—their sound, rhythm, pace, and occasionally even their visual qualities, as well as their meanings—fully as much as a poet would.”

In his discussion of In the Heart of the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories McCaffrey offers a perfect summary of Gass’s characters. They “are driven, lonely people whose desire for contact with the living, breathing world is constantly thwarted by their fears and obsessions, by their environment, and above all, by their tendency to use art to engage reality rather than confronting it directly,” although I’d argue that it is most often specifically language, rather than a broad conception of art, that the characters use as a means of negotiating their anxiety, their conflicts, their relationship with the outside world, often weaving a web of words that they inevitably become stuck within. Moreover, as McCaffrey correctly points out, Gass uses “the interior monologue form not because he wants to recreate the way people really think under certain circumstances, but because it provides him with a formal situation which grants him considerable freedom to develop language objects of beauty and complexity.” Suffice to say that I find these monologues irresistible.

I followed this with reading another of Gass’s fifty literary pillars, namely, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. I was surprised that Gass chose this play over all of the bard’s plays, that he chose this over any number of the high tragedies like King Lear, Hamlet, or Macbeth, for instance, or Romeo and Juliet, or Othello. I’d think he’d even choose Midsummer’s Night Dream before Antony and Cleopatra. And it’s especially unusual when I think how all those monologues in the great tragedies must surely have influenced Gass’s own fondness for the form. This is not to say that there aren’t some great monologues in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s are particularly powerful and best delivered at fever pitch, I would think:

O Charmian,

Where think’st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?

Or does he walk? or is he on his horse?

O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!

Do bravely, horse! for wot’st thou whom thou movest?

The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm

And burgonet of men. He’s speaking now,

Or murmuring “Where’s my serpent of old Nile?”

For so he calls me: now I feed myself

With most delicious poison. Think on me,

That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black,

And wrinkled deep in time? Broad-fronted Caesar,

When thou wast here above the ground, I was

A morsel for a monarch: and great Pompey

Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow;

There would he anchor his aspect and die

With looking on his life.

—Act I, Scene 5

No more, but e’en a woman, and commanded

By such poor passion as the maid that milks

And does the meanest chares. It were for me

To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;

To tell them that this world did equal theirs

Till they had stol’n our jewel. All’s but naught;

Patience is scottish, and impatience does

Become a dog that’s mad: then is it sin

To rush into the secret house of death,

Ere death dare come to us? How do you, women?

What, what! good cheer! Why, how now, Charmian!

My noble girls! Ah, women, women, look,

Our lamp is spent, it’s out! Good sirs, take heart:

We’ll bury him; and then, what’s brave, what’s noble,

Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion,

And make death proud to take us. Come, away:

This case of that huge spirit now is cold:

Ah, women, women! come; we have no friend

But resolution, and the briefest end.

—Act IV, Scene 15

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have

Immortal longings in me: now no more

The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip:

Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear

Antony call; I see him rouse himself

To praise my noble act; I hear him mock

The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men

To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come:

Now to that name my courage prove my title!

I am fire and air; my other elements

I give to baser life. So; have you done?

Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips.

Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.

[Kisses them. Iras falls and dies]

Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?

If thou and nature can so gently part,

The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,

Which hurts, and is desired. Dost thou lie still?

If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world

It is not worth leave-taking.

—Act V, Scene 2

After reading and writing a review of Robert Coover’s spectacular new novel, Noir, this month, I felt like going back and reading his entire catalogue as I had just done with Gass. Alas, this is a project that will have to remain on the back burner (maybe next year?). Anyway, Noir finds Coover in high comic mode as he takes another stab at the mystery genre. One highlight, among many, is a brilliant ribald set piece about a tattooed woman that I feel like quoting in full. I had a chance to see Coover at a recent reading in New York City, and, fortunately, he read from that section in the book. It easily functions as a standalone fiction. Here’s a bit from it:

Michiko meanwhile ended up tattooed from crown to toes with layers of exotic overwritten graffiti, a veritable yakuza textbook, slang dictionary, and art gallery, a condition that served her will in her subsequent career, once the museum, which claimed ownership of her, was paid off: she was worth a C-note just for an hour of library time. All of it fading now. Losing its contours, its clarity, the colors muddying, wrinkles disturbing the continuities, obscuring the detail. Suffering the fate of all history, which is only corruptible memory. Time passes, nothing stays the same; a sad thing. A haiku somewhere on her body says as much.

I capped off my reading of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose with reading all of the prose starting with The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination and then the “Uncollected Prose,” a selection of 49 prose pieces written by Stevens between 1897 and 1955. The prose collection includes occasional pieces, letters, journal entries, etc., and seven selections from Stevens’s notebooks, one of which, “Materia Poetica,” an arrangement of thirty-nine aphorisms, I found to be the most interesting, as it shows this careful technician in a rawer form.

Justin Nicholes, author of Ash Dogs, asked me to blurb Red Blood, Black Sky, a horror/irreal fiction anthology forthcoming from Another Sky Press. The absorbing collection includes work by J. A. Tyler, Richard Spilman, Kevin A. Christinat, Bradley Sands, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Hayley Griffin, Glen Fobister, C. A. Kerr, Myra Sherman, Blake Butler, Jonathan Schlosser, Tom Thompson, Kristian Williams, Philip Roberts, and Keith Dugger. And it was my reading of this that inspired me to read another book, namely, Powers of Horror, by Julia Kristeva, that I’ve been meaning to read ever since I’d encountered a quote from it that Brian Evenson used as an epigraph for his incredible debut story collection, Altmann’s Tongue: “…more and more incisive, precise, eschewing seduction in favor of cruelty…”

Powers of Horror is a brilliant, evocative, challenging essay on abjection, that is, something that disgusts you like rot, a corpse, any kind of filth, a feeling that affects one in both physical and symbolic ways. Kristeva’s prose glistens and while certainly often difficult, and sometimes opaque, it is also incredibly lyrical. In a section comparing abjection to sublimation, she writes:

For the sublime has no object either. When the starry sky, a vista of open seas or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where “I” am—delight and loss. Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.

Amidst reflections on theories by Freud and Lacan, Kristeva also explores literary works by Dostoevsky, Proust (“…the delightful interlacing of Proustian sentences, which unfold my memory and that of my language’s signs down to the silent, glowing recesses of an odyssey of desire deciphered in and through the fashionable wordliness of his contemporaries.”), Joyce (“How dazzling, unending, eternal—and so weak, so insignificant, so sickly—is the rhetoric of Joycean language.), Borges, Artaud, Mallarmé (“…the stainless, serene, nostalgic beauty of Mallarmé’s always already antiquated arabesque; of Mallarmé who could convert the paroxysm of a funereal psalm into the elliptic markings of a convoluted language.), and Lautréamont, and especially Céline, who, “carrying out a rejection, without redemption, himself forfeited,…will become, body and tongue, the apogee of that moral, political, and stylistic revulsion that brands our time. A time that seems to have for a century now, gone into unending labor pains. The enchantment will have to wait for some other time, always and forever.” Redemption, for Kristeva, or at least a kind of redemptive awareness is possible through language:

Our eyes can remain open provided we recognize ourselves as always already altered by the symbolic—by language. Provided we hear in language—and not in the other nor in the other sex—the gouged-out eye, the wound, the basic incompleteness that conditions the indefinite quest of signifying concatenations.

Midway through her book Kristeva suggests that “proceeding farther still along the approaches to abjection, one would find neither narrative nor theme but a recasting of syntax and vocabulary—the violence of poetry, and silence.” Speaking of syntax, my favorite chapter in the book was “In the Beginning and Without End,” where Kristeva examines with great depth and rigor the sentences of Céline, the stylist. On Céline’s use of slang:

The vocabulary of slang, because of its strangeness, its very violence, and especially because the reader does not always understand it, is of course a radical instrument of separation, of rejection, and, at the limit, of hatred. Slang produces a semantic fuzziness, if not interruption, within the utterances that it punctuates and rhythmicizes, but above all it draws near to that emptiness of meaning at which Céline seems to aim.

And her glosses on Céline’s varying uses of the ellipsis and the exclamation point and other syntactic devices are simply breathtaking. Kudos to Leon S. Roudiez, the translator of what I’m certain was an incredibly challenging text to realize in English.

I had intended to do a full-length review of Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness, but in the end dropped the project. As an extremely personalized ars poetica less interested in drawing any conclusions as it is with probing and prodding, the text intentionally sprawls and is marked, and I would argue is ultimately marred, by its digressions and tenuous connections between thoughts and theories. Like the poetry he describes, Young’s book-length essay “demonstrates that the self is not a fixed thing, rather a movement: a collection of arrived-at and abandoned impulses and conflicting conclusions. One X over another.” This is the model he uses to structure his polemic here. The book is characterized by its contradictory ideas. For instance, Young on the one hand is envious of visual artists who “interact with [their] medium in a primal, physical way. Paint is always ready to be paint, thrown, slathered, sprayed, blotted up”; but he finds himself unable to see that poets, too, have words, sounds, graphic textures as their raw material; he asserts that “Poetry is no more a thing than fire is; rather it is a conversion that reveals itself in the instance of its occasion.” I’m really not sure what he means here, but it’s clear that poetry is not a thing, but a kind of energy (but isn’t energy a thing, too? If it isn’t, then what is it?). How does he reconcile this thought with his envy of visual artists who are engaged with the materials of their craft? He goes on to say that “Poetry mitigates just as fire does, by witnessing its own necessary recklessness and senses of the sacred, its ability to combust the ancillary, to grow and make everything itself even as it confronts us with the outcome of its conjugations, with ash, with death.” This doesn’t make any sense at all to me. Sure, Young is speaking metaphorically here. He doesn’t really mean that poetry is a form of energy like fire. Or does he? For me, poetry is words organized in certain ways, taking certain forms. It is mainly an object, and an inert one, at that. But Young attacks this conception of poetry and writes that the so-called “assault on poetry in general is based upon handling language not as a sign, but as a thing. And something handled in a way in which it wasn’t intended or should be is desecration.” For Young, Poetry is “when the animal bursts forth, inflamed. It ain’t always pretty.” Then again, “Poetry must assert itself as poetry.” But “POETRY ATROPHIES WHEN IT STRAYS TOO FAR FROM THE HUMAN PANG.” Then again, “Every poem must assert itself as poetry actively. Poetry, like any other art form is recognized through its relationship to precedents/convention.” And as “an art of words poetry depends on making these words appear materialized. SOME THINGS MUST BE MADE OPAQUE TO BE SEEN. The medium appears through the accentuation of itself as a mitigating factor (this would be better if I didn’t understand it) and as sound or design.” So, is it then possible for poetry to be both a thing and not a thing? This is, perhaps, the most plausible idea, but if this is Young’s position, he doesn’t convincingly demonstrate how this might be so.

Attempting to answer the question of what poetry is for, Young writes:

The question of utility has bugged poets for quite a while. In Western Civilization, the purpose for and of art has been on a long, strange journey to such a degree that one purpose, and sometimes seemingly the only purpose, is for art to turn against itself.” And, after describing Duchamp’s ironic dismantling of predominant notions of aesthetics, he bemoans how

Art became a travesty of context, something you trip over. The authority of the artist is self-parodic, highlighting itself as whim rather than wisdom, conceptual rather than a perfection of technique. The rearticulating of this joke has led us to a crisis of irony: art seems to function solely as a debacle of context, a suspension and suspicion of traditional modes of expertise in favor of appropriation, and endless procession of quote marks, the deconstruction of any imaginative act into a triumph of depthless allusion and arch remove. Art becomes the ruination of utility. Music, painting, poetry, performance becoming a kind of purging tantrum, its use disruptive to its own usefulness, has bequeathed us an unavoidable irony toward the possibility of any art’s sincerity; it is the rupture of elsewhere in any sense of belonging. We as poets now face the danger of a fundamental estrangement. While such irony gives powerful displacements of consciousness, of self-consciousness, it also threatens to orphan us from the primary efficacy and use of our art.

Strong words. And while I find myself in sympathy with Young’s criticism of some strands of the contemporary art world, his analysis is largely devoid of specific overarching examples, and so it’s difficult for me to give myself completely over to his argument. Why does Young seem to privilege “perfection of technique” over what he is describing as conceptual? Why are they antithetical to one another? Seems to me that perfecting a technique requires a great deal of conceptual thinking. Surely, these things can run in tandem. I think there should be allowances made for both whim and wisdom and everything else in between in the art world, and in the world in general. But then this idea of privileging technique is contradicted by his belief that poetry

is not a discipline. It is a hunger, a revolt, a drive, a mash note, a fright, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax, a debacle, an application. It is a collaboration: the bad news may be that we are never entirely in control but the good news is that we collaborate with a genius—the language! We cannot make the gods come, all we can do is sweep the steps of the temple and thus we sit down to our desks.

It’s hard to swallow such gobbledygook, especially when you find the contradiction in this passage. What Young is saying is that poetry is not discipline, it’s something else entirely, but in the end, you must still sit down at your desk: an act of discipline. But then he’ll vacillate again and write: “THE WRITING OF POETRY IS NOT A CRAFT….WE ARE MAKING BIRDS, NOT BIRDCAGES.” But Young sidesteps criticism of his dithering by subtitling his book Poetry As Assertive Force and Contradiction and by sprinkling coy asides like “I was hoping that at some point I would figure out what this book is about—maybe you are too.” (OH, HAVE I MENTIONED HOW ANNOYING YOUNG’S USE OF ALL CAPS IS, YET?)

I ended March with a rereading of Understanding William Gass, by H.L. Nix, (I’d highlighted my reading of it in my previous column) in preparation for my interview with him—a story that I hope to tell in full soon.

In my darker moments, usually after being away from art for some hours, and, mind you, this doesn’t just mean literature, but paintings, sculpture, film, or whatever, I start feeling kind of jittery, but the darkness takes on an especially despairing hue when I start to think about the pronounced lack of ambition and its concomitant general distrust of virtuosity in the contemporary arts scene. Sure, I’m guilty as anyone else of romanticizing past eras, characterizing them as golden ages, when of course the amount of dross to gold has always been grossly disproportionate all throughout history. However, these necessary caveats do little to assuage my disappointment with the various contemporary scenes and milieus. That said, there are, of course, massive exceptions, and fortunately these examples do provide respite from our consumerist culture’s celebration of mediocrity, its wallowing in sloppiness. For instance, as I write this, I’m listening to Beirut’s odd fusion of folkloric textures from the Balkans and Eastern Europe with pop forms, all seamed together by Zach Condon’s plaintive, Jeff Buckley-influenced vocals (something which would normally annoy me but, strangely, as with Andrew Bird, the sincerity of the voice outweighs the obvious debt, and it might be because Condon also blends a bit of Robert Smith’s melancholy and Morrissey’s effete tonality). And during February, when New York City’s interminable winter and its resultant gloom invariably descends upon my household, well, upon my partner, but somehow it ends up being the primary theme anyway, I pulled through with books by William Gass, continuing my plan to consecutively read (and reread some of the books) his complete oeuvre. (I should mention that writing with music on is near impossible for me to do these days, and it is an incredible struggle for me to do this now, but there’s a feeling I want to stay in, and Beirut is helping me do that.)

I began this month with reading Gass’s The Tunnel, a massive tome that took from this reader as much as it gave to him. So what did it take? Well, first of all, it took time and an incredible amount of focus; it demanded patience with its catalogs, its fragmentary narrative, its thoroughly unlikeable narrator, although I must qualify this by saying that Gass ingeniously seduces the reader to like, well sort of, a despicable character by couching his rhetoric within a brilliant, inimitable lyricism. There aren’t many writers out there that attack a sentence with this kind of vigor, intensity of focus, and, moreover, with an easy virtuosity as Gass does. Who else? Well, there’s Mary Caponegro, for instance, whose attentiveness to sentences, and whose use of collage and less conventional narrative forms, and a sometimes fabulist sensibility, has marked her as an important contemporary stylist; and who also calls Gass, as any other writer with any sense would, “the master.” And then there’s Alexander Theroux, Rikki Ducornet, D.A. Powell, Joanna Howard, Gary Lutz, Carole Maso, Joyelle McSweeney, Lance Olsen, John Ashbery, and…well, I should stop there because this will end up flowering, or festering depending on your inclinations, into a massive list; and while I will hang on every word of a finely-crafted list, the kind of thing most readers, I’d guess, probably skip, I’ll spare you. Back to The Tunnel, there’s no way to do the book justice without addressing its innumerable delightful qualities, but I’ll just briefly say that the interplay between its form, its design elements, and its sundry typographical arrangements with the actual language and its refractive narrative achieves a kind of tactility, or, rather a kind of surface tension, and, in keeping with this idea of a liquid cohesion, here’s a representative (actually, this isn’t really true since the tenor and tonal shifts of voice would require numerous representative sections, so let’s just call this a section I like) section:

I would turn the garden hose on to a trickle and let the water leak into the street. Then I would follow its flowing down the road, noting how, as I’d been told, it sought the low path always; how, balked by leaves and twigs, the stream crept secretly underneath its obstacle or skirted ends and edges when it could, piling up puddles, running into cracks, forking as opportunity offered; but making manifest, as I realized, a collection of creek beds which had always been there, a system of incipient rivers, hidden in the concrete the way lines of poetry, perhaps, are hidden in the general terrain of a language, waiting only for a thought to take its course and gently connect one innocent word with an unsullied other till something repeatable, even memorable, is written, gets said, and a line is composed the way events, which seem fated to sing the do-re-mis of destiny, are linked: and to this extraordinary consequence shouldn’t we award a suitable name (after all, every baby gets one on account and before any earnings), so why not? a name, say, like Sandusky, which will certainly serve a fine verse or sentence better, and more appropriately, than its present place.

I followed The Tunnel with three monographs about William Gass’s works. Understanding William Gass, by H.L. Nix, is a pretty straightforward treatment of Gass’s fiction up to Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, and also examines the general thrust of his literary theories. Next was Conversations with Gass which, because of its inherent looseness, was a lot of fun to read, well, once you get past its many typos. Gass is at his best here when he is cantankerous; he does not suffer fools lightly. There is, for instance, the classic clash, or what I would call the “clash of the titan versus the tyrant,” between Gass and John Gardner. Gass “wins,” of course. And there are innumerable glimmerings of his approach toward fashioning fictions:

That’s one reason why I spend a lot of time examining objects. They hold still. They aren’t threatened or embarrassed by your stare. I don’t regard as much as I once did, but I realized that I was looking for sources of language, and now my source of language is almost always other language instead of things in the world. Words are supreme objects. They are minded things.

This reminds me of what happens in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” namely, that as the subject of the poem gazes upon the object, the object begins to look at the subject.

After Conversations, I read another of Gass’s essay collections: Finding a Form. As usual, it’s comprised of reviews and also extended meditations on a variety of subjects literary, philosophical, and political. Actually, I should stop to say that Gass treats his reviews—a much maligned form, and therefore a form that many writers, at best, don’t take seriously or at worst use as an occasion to parade their juvenile glibness—as he treats anything else he writes, that is, as pieces demanding all of his prodigious craft, and therefore creates works that transcend the usual utilitarian function of a review, and can be read for the sheer pleasure of his insights and his glistening prose. There are countless wannabe Dale Pecks out there swinging their hatchets in the air, but few critics who, like Gass, move their brush across the page. Other highlights include the titular essay wherein his admonishes:

So even if you hope to find some lasting security inside language, and believe that your powers are at their peak there, if nowhere else, despair and disappointment will dog you still; for neither you nor your weaknesses, nor the world and its villains, will have been banished just because, now, it is in syllables and sentences where they hide; since, oddly enough, while you can confront and denounce a colleague or a spouse, run from an angry dog, or jump bail and flee your country, you can’t argue with an image; in as much as a badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator, and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul. The unpleasant consequence of every such botch is that your life, as you register your writing, looks back at you as from a dirty mirror, and there you perceive a record of ineptitude, compromise, and failure.

In his essay “Autobiography,” Gass outlines some pitfalls inherent to the form and posits:

It is healthy, even desirable, to mix genres in order to escape the confinements of outworn conventions, or to break molds in order to create new shapes; but to introduce fiction into history on purpose (as opposed to being inadvertently mistaken) can only be to circumvent its aim, its truth, either because it wants to lie, or now thinks lying doesn’t matter and carelessness is a new virtue, or because one scorns scrupulosity as a wasted effort, a futile concern, since everything is inherently corrupt, or because an enlivened life will sell better than a straightforward one, so let’s have a little decoration, or because “What is truth?” is only a sardonic rhetorical question which regularly precedes the ritual washing of hands.

I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are and then having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world. Anyone honestly happy with himself is a fool. (It is not a good idea to be terminally miserable about yourself either.) But an autobiography does not become a fiction just because fabrications will inevitably creep in, or because motives are never pure, or because memory will genuinely fade. It does not become a fiction simply because events or attitudes are deliberately omitted, or maliciously slanted, or blatantly fabricated, because fiction is always honest and does not intend to deceive. It announces itself: I am a fiction; do not rely on my accuracy, not because I am untrustworthy, because I am engaged not in replication but in construction. There will be those who will try to glamorize their shoddy products by pretending they are true, and then, when they fail to pass even the briefest inspection, like the movies JFK and Malcolm X, dodge that responsibility by lamely speaking of “art.” Fiction and history are different disciplines, and neither grants licenses to incompetents, opportunists, or mountebanks.

I’ve always wanted a book from Gass on the craft of writing, something that would, unlike most books that I’ve read about writing, actually prove useful to me. (I’ve read a number of them, many of them classics, and usually get very little out of them.) Since this book will never be written (although his promised book on Baroque prose where he concentrates his attention on John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Thomas Hobbes may serve), I thought of xeroxing all of his articles that are essentially about writing, well, largely about the construction of sentences. In that personally-compiled anthology I’d have to include the abovementioned “Finding a Form,” and also from Finding a Form: “The Music of Prose” and “The Book as a Container of Consciousness,” “Simplicities,” and perhaps even “The Baby or the Botticelli.”

Gass has talked about how his natural breadth, when it comes to fiction, is between thirty and forty pages. Even his novels are comprised of smaller sections usually within that same page range. So in Cartesian Sonata, a collection of four novellas, we find Gass writing in what is perhaps the best, or rather the more easily digestible showcase of his talents. Whenever someone asks me where they should start with Gass I usually recommend In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and On Being Blue. I’d have to add this book as well to the shortlist. There’s so much to admire in these novellas that, once again, a tiny gloss here will fail to capture the beauty and complexity of form, style, and language. While a number of Gass’s themes are manifested here, namely, the characters’ spooling webs of language and obsessions with the meanings of words; family squabbles and other tensions; allusions if not outright references to modern poetry, as well as recurring images like windows and snow; Gass also explores some new territory like clairvoyance in the titular novella and also like Emma’s desire in “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s” to make herself literally insubstantial. We also find some similar themes like the protagonist of “Master of Secret Revenges” who is, like many of Gass’s characters, concerned with the problem of evil.

Reading Rilke is an amazing display of Gass’s erudition and range, and actually one of the most unique works in translation. In it, he translates Rilke’s Duino Elegies, along with a healthy dose of poems from throughout the oeuvre, no small task, to put it lightly, and this alone makes the book well worth reading, but squeezed between the poems, like mortar between bricks, are Gass’s reflections on the difficulties he encountered while translating, giving tremendous insight into his process, while also highlighting some aspects of Rilke’s life and his creative, and otherwise, predilections. A portion of the acknowledgments page goes toward describing Rilke’s importance to Gass:

The poet himself is as close to me as any human being has ever been; not because he has allowed himself—now a shade—at last to be loved; and not because I have been able to obey the stern command from his archaic torso of Apollo to change my life, nor because his person was always so admirable it had to be imitated; but because his work has taught me what real art ought to be; how it can matter to a life through its lifetime; how commitment can course like blood through the body of your words until writing stirs, rises, opens its eyes; and, finally, because his work allows me to measure what we call achievement: how tall his is, how small mine.

I’ve always loved Rilke. As a matter of fact, it may have been “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” where I first encountered his poetry. This was followed by reading several (four, I think) translations of Sonnets to Orpheus, and two translations of Duino Elegies. I picked him up again a few years ago with The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, of which I’ve since read four translations, including Michael Hulse’s recent translation (more on that below). The meaning of Rilke’s poetry is often tremendously difficult to decipher and Gass’s glosses are instructive. For instance, this, an introduction to “The Second Elegy”: “It is the poet’s purpose to put the world into words, and, in that way, hold it steady for us. The poet can write of love, too, in a similarly immortalizing fashion. But love alters its lovers even as they love, so that their love is altered and the next kiss comes from a different mouth and is pressed to a different breast.” And later, we find one source of Gass’s thoughts about consciousness, or rather, how consciousness is altered by made things:

Rilke does not understand how the transformation of matter into mind works, but we should not blame him for that. No one does. After several thousand years of wondering, we still don’t know. Although materialists will be happy to explain to us how the nervous system functions, and hope we shall confuse this explanation, as marvelous and detailed as it is, with an account of the character of consciousness and how consciousness came to be, they are not a step closer to crossing that threshold. We may not know how our awareness got here, but Rilke believes he knows what its purpose is: to make the signals we receive from external things into inner, and hence invisible, manifestations–the invisible visibly invisible, if you like.

As with any of Gass’s books, I can’t help quoting liberally from Reading Rilke. There’s just so much here for the attentive writer:

Every line of fine literature forms a secure, seemingly serene, yet unquiet community. As in any community, there are many special interests and the groups which promote them; there are predominating concerns, persistent problems; and, as in the psyche of an individual, or in the larger region of the body politic, there are competing aims, anxieties, habits, anticipations, perplexities, memories, needs, and grievances. When the line is a good one, their clamor is stilled because its constituents are happy, their wants appeased, their aims fulfilled.

This seems to me a kind of appropriation of Hobbes’s philosophical views toward the construction of literature: the book as leviathan.

And there’s much for the attentive reader, too:

To read with recognition (not just simple understanding) is to realize why the writer made the choices he or she made, and why, if the writing has been done well (suppose I’d said “well done”?), its words could not have been set down otherwise. Our translations will make a batch of botches, but it will not matter, crush them all into a ball and toss them to the trash. Their real value will have been received. The translating reader reads the inside of the verse and sees, like the physician, either its evident health or its hidden disease. That reader will know why Hardy couldn’t come right out and say: “Someday we’ll have a roll in the hay.”

And more about the reader: “What proper reading confers upon the right reader is not merely an expanded vocabulary or its subtle understanding, or the ready use of forms and strategies, but also a sympathetic awareness of traditional attitudes and opinions, feelings and desires.”

Upon finishing this book I felt like detouring away from my immediate reading queue and embarking on a massive reading of Rilke. But I managed to stay true to this course by reading Gass’s penultimate book: A Temple of Texts. Often feeling like I’m reading too much contemporary literature, and also being sickened by writers who pretty much only read what’s contemporary, or worse yet, exclusively their peers (I won’t mention the writers who aren’t reading anything), I was happy to read Gass’s thoughts on the matter: “I think it is wise to approach a contemporary work with skepticism; it is the new work’s task to establish its authority, to persuade you to believe in its essential worth whatever strange or commonplace thing it may say or do.” Oh, but ideas like “authority,” “essential worth,” and “classic” are old-fashioned, unpopular ideas. Much better to slosh around in some solipsistic sludge, I guess. More and more, I’m feeling less inclined to even put the contemporary text to the test. But, often enough, something arrives that still proves that the contemporary novel can measure up to the classic. Also, contained in this book are brief discussions of his “Fifty Literary Pillars,” that is, those books that make up the house that Gass built, or rather, the books that built up Gass, or, better yet, and I think Gass would approve, the books that make up Gass. At the beginning of this year, in addition to committing myself to reading all of Gass’s published works, I decided to also read these “pillars.” Last month, I’d read two of them: Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium and John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, and this month I read five more (more on that later). Much of the discussion in this book revolves around a number of Gass’s usual suspects: Rabelais, Gertrude Stein, Flann O’Brien, Gaddis, Hawkes, Coover, Elkin, and Rilke. Not to diminish the other essays, all of which, without exception, are spectacular, but the highlight for me is “The Sentence Seeks Its Form,” an essay that would also go into my imagined anthology of Gass’s essays on writing, an essay where Gass, who often deflects the notion that he has any advice to offer writers, offers wonderful nuggets like this one:

What can we do to find out how writing is written? Why, we listen to writers who have written well—wondrously well—because that self through which the sentence passes—those eyes, those ears, that nose—is made not of flesh and bone and their dinky experiences, but of pages absorbed from the masters, because that is what writing comes from: it comes from reading…

I recently attended a reading where a porn star was invited to read her scribblings, scribblings borne from experience, the kind of experience Jimi Hendrix demands from a possible inamorata in “Are You Experienced,” where he asks, “But who in your measly little world are you trying to prove that you’re made out of gold and, eh, can’t be sold?” but this professional sex worker, but, at best, embryonic writer’s experience, filled with all kinds of climaxes, ultimately added to nothing on the page; Gass’s essay, however, climaxes with an examination of a single sentence by Henry James that he reproduces as a “spindle diagram,” breaks down with such clarity; and, after gleaning much about this sentence’s architectonics, Gass writes: “Of course most sentences need not, nor should, be built like a palace, but built they will be, well or ill or so-so, and their paragraphs, like towns they partially comprise, will also be commodious or cramped–a Paris Texas or a Paris France.” It’s a useful reminder to me, because the danger of luxuriously constructing each sentence may result in a kind of monochromatic field, and uniform texture. And I haven’t mentioned Gass’s polemical essay “A Defense of the Book” where he discusses the vast differences between the materials that make up a book and the aspects that make up the information of electronic media. It’s an emboldening read for those of us still left who actually care about books as objects, about paper and the words made of ink printed on them, the way they’re bound together, their weight, their smell, their covers.

And now we come to this month’s first detour (followed, alas, by three more), but one still in keeping with the general spirit of my Gass marathon: Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Gass describes it as a work that “embodied what [he] held to be humanly highest, and therefore [is] made of words which revealed a powerful desire moving with the rhythmic grace of Blake’s Tyger; an awareness that was pitilessly unsentimental, yet receptive as a sponge; feelings that were free and undeformed and unashamed; thought that looked at all its conclusions and didn’t blink; as well as an imagination that could dance on the heads of all those angels dancing on that pin.” And as eloquent a description of the novel as this is, perhaps more illuminating is that, for Gass, there’s no other book that he “would have wished more fervently to have written than this intensely personal poem in prose, this profound meditation on seeing and reading—on reading what one has seen, on seeing what one has read.” The first translation of The Notebooks that I’d read was Stephen Mitchell’s rendering; this was followed by another translation, and then Burton Pike’s recent translation. I also spent some weeks in a discussion group about the book with Burton Pike. Structurally, it’s comprised of seventy sections that could easily stand as standalone pieces in so far as each one has some startling image and/or strange and beautiful reflection on some experience either past or present. In fact, Malte is a frustrated poet who is, as he says, “learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.” Though he ultimately fails to bring together his hyperaware regard of his surroundings and his internal life with the fashioning of a poetics, there is no shortage of insightful thought:

No, no, there is nothing in the world that we can imagine, not the least thing. In everything there are so many unique details which are impossible to predict. In imagination, we pass over them in our haste, not noticing that they are lacking. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

[....]

When the time came, I would behave toward books as I would toward acquaintances; there would be time for them, a specific amount of time that would pass smoothly and pleasantly, just as much time as suited me. Naturally some of them would be closer to me than others, and I could not say for certain that I’d be proof against wasting the odd half hour with them now and then, missing a walk, an appointment, the opening scene of a play, or a letter that had to be urgently written.

You can’t help but fall for a person who treats books as people. But this book is not merely a compendium about the difficulties of seeing, or a series of sketches for some kind of manifesto or ars poetica. What you have are evocative vignettes on death and ghosts, heightened reveries on the city, on decay, on madness, wonderful meditations on art, on tapestries, and lyrical expressions on memory, family, loss, childhood, the imagination, and ruins.

Next up was Peter Handke’s Don Juan-His Own Version. My review of it is forthcoming in the Review of Contemporary Fiction so I won’t say too much about it here except to mention that it’s a fresh take on the familiar legend, and also to highlight some great sentences that didn’t make it into my review like the alliterative “And all week long, both when he was telling his story and when he was simply sitting there in silence, he sighed repeatedly.” There’s something about the sibilance here which seems to draw out the sentence much like a sigh (and I swear that my own alliteration here was completely unintentional). The book takes on the form of, echoing John Hawkes’s formulation, a “regressus infinitum,” that is, a writer writing about a writer writing, but in this case, it’s about a narrator narrating about a storyteller telling stories. Here is Handke’s narrator relating how Don Juan relates his story:

These images from that day precisely a week earlier came to life, presented themselves as they had not presented themselves at the time, took their places, lined up quietly, without the hoopla of self-conscious remembering, without making a show of reaching into the past, without affecting a resonant voice. If it had a rhythm, then that of an orderly progression free of hasty interruptions, with matters small and large weighted equally, nothing large anymore, but also nothing small.

Now it’s easy to rush over sentences like this without registering how masterful it, in fact, is. Here the alliteration of “precisely…presented…presented” seam the first half of the first sentence, and also introduces the first of many repetitions; the next one being the use of “without”: “without the hoopla,” “without making a show,” and “without affecting”; what’s more, the sentence that follows talks about the rhythm of the don’s storytelling style while mirroring that storytelling style with a punchy rhythm of his own that in this sentence is achieved through the repetition of the words “large” and “small,” while at the same time contrasting with the don’s “orderly progression free of hasty interruptions,” with a style comprised of many hems and haws, and all without coming across as mechanical at all. A favorite moment in the book is a brief set piece on whirling dervishes:

During a concert that the dervishes accompanied with their dancing, Don Juan sat in the very last row. After a little while he no longer heard the drums, the lutes, the flutes (or shawms) as a concert, or as any kind of music. He heard nothing at all, was entirely a spectator, his eyes glued to the dancers in their wide, bell-shaped costumes, with towering cylindrical hats on their heads. The dance consisted of bodies twirling around themselves, slowly for the most part; when it speeded up, it paradoxically gave the impression of slowing down, of majestic, imperious slowness, including the garments, which whirled along with their wearers, and their eyes, which gazed straight ahead, motionless, as the dancers spread their arms, one hand seemingly pointing to the ground, the other offered like a bowl, to the heavens. Ecstasy? Impossible to imagine anything calmer than these dervishes whirling themselves around and for moments almost invisible, or anything more inward-focused. The majority of the dancers were older, and for that reason the stillness that emanated from them was even less astonishing. Yet toward the end of the ceremony—for that is what it was, rather than a mere performance—a very young dervish, hardly more than an adolescent, took over the whirling from the old ones. He spun lightly and at the same time with extraordinary seriousness, projecting an aura of distance, but by no means emptiness, at eye level. And even at the end, when the spinning stopped, no smile, not even a flicker of one, at most an openness in his face.

These breathless sentences unselfconsciously mirror those whirling dancers almost as if it were standing beside them, following them carefully, and then spinning off into their own spins, or perhaps a better way of putting it is that Handke’s lines are much like the string that is unspooled from a colorful top, and what we see is the spinning top, all of it’s colorful, intricate decorations, in slow motion; and it is with passages like these that my faith in contemporary writers is restored, well, at least until I inevitably get disappointed all over again.

As I mentioned at the Chapbook Review, Aaron Burch’s HOW TO TAKE YOURSELF APART, HOW TO MAKE YOURSELF ANEW: notes and instructions from/for a father, winner of PANK’s first chapbook competition, may be as much an instructional manual on mourning as it is an examination of the imagination, wherein emotions are carefully reined in by taut prose; a collection of fragments that’s much more than simply the sum of its parts, that grows in both coherence and cohesion by accretion by way of its deliberate fragmentation, its picking up of the pieces, examining each one, and then puzzling them back together. Here and there Burch offers hints on how to piece his book together:

When stuck, lost, confused, frustrated: do as before. Don’t fear repetition. This can be used for other moments; use when needed. Use carbon paper, stencils, mirrors, projectors. Don’t forget the tools available to you. In fact, you may want to make note of these now for later, while you are thinking about them. Writing commits to memory and, when unsure, revert to rote.

I think the first thing I’ve ever read from Aaron Burch was “Molting” (itself released as a chapbook from Mud Luscious Press), and I was initially surprised, especially after all of the imperative sections, to find it in this collection. But, on further reflection, its fabulist and horrific departures (like the sawing off of hands) make it nest comfortably among the rest of these instructions, tales, and vignettes.

After these three books, I was back to Gass with Tests of Time, his last book. It offers more of what we’ve come to expect from Gass: sentences that are both adamantine and lushly lyrical, that are full of alliterative sprees, longeurs, and, sometimes, elliptical analysis. But there’s a difference here: Gone are the sections of reviews. In their place are extended meditations on single and singular writers (something, of course, that he’s done before) like Italo Calvino and Flaubert, but also these odd hybrid essays, hybrid in the sense that they play with the essay form and use elaborate narrative sequences. “Quotations from Chairman Flaubert” and “There Was an Old Woman Who” are quite different from anything I’ve seen from Gass. Also, while Gass has spoken about politics in his essays before, this is the first book to showcase his concerns. In the section “Social and Political Contretemps” we’re offered five powerful polemics focusing primarily on what Gass calls “the social and political plight of the writer in the contemporary world.” In “Tribalism, Identity, and Ideology,” Gass offers his take on the pact between writer and reader:

There is a bond between us, readers and writers—an ancient tie as old as writing is, if not as old as speech itself, a pact, a promise which the act of setting down sentences in a moving way implicitly solidifies—that what we shall say shall be as true to things and to our own hearts as we can manage with our skills to make them; and that what we read shall be free and unforced and uttered out of the deepest respect for the humanity all language represents, whatever its content otherwise; and that this covenant (broken, tragically, every day which history has been there to mark) is the model for all exchange of thought and feeling, and that this community, the community of unveiled countenance and free speech, must be sustained if we are to continue, either in the harsh and unforgiving condition of survival or in terms of every genuine enterprise of the moral spirit—in short, so we can say, though we may be here by genetic accident or a god’s decree, that we deserve to stay.

And “The Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications” (where Gass goes to great lengths to distinguish between story and fiction) would have to go in my writing craft anthology as well.

I had intended to write a review of The Abyss of Human Illusion, Gilbert Sorrentino’s posthumously released last novel. Alas, it never happened, primarily because I’d hoped to slow down on book reviews this year in order to concentrate more on my other writing, especially my fiction, but perhaps I can rectify that by commenting on it here. Sorrentino’s book is a novel in shorts, shorts that, much like Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, easily stand as standalone pieces. Narrated by a rather cantankerous old man, the book brims with sardonic and biting critiques, reflections on mortality, and also bits of armchair philosophy:

Mundane things, pitiful in their mundane assertiveness, their sad isolation. Kraft French dressing, glowing weirdly orange through its glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its paper wrapper still on. All are in repose, in their absolute thingness, under the overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen. They may or they should, they must, really, reveal the meaning of this silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t. There is no meaning. These things will evoke nothing.

It’s a voice, marking itself with its numbing repetitions: “mundane,” “glass,” “bottle,” and “silent”; it’s alliteration: “glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad” and “silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t”; its almost Gertrude Steinian overloading of adjectives: that “overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen”; that indelibly marks itself on the reader, and because of its knowing and sad resignation. But it’s also an angry voice, expressing thoughts that could easily have come from one of Gass’s many “disappointed people”:

He waits for everything to what? To get tired, to disappear, waits for all the filth to disappear, every mean fucking cold-eyed bastard to disappear, to be obliterated along with their victims, along with the dogs and cats and whales and showgirls, along with all the mothers and sisters and priests, along with all the money, the computers, the radios and the television sets, the news, the news. BOOM.

Reading this and his other pessimistic, mean-spirited thoughts, it’s hard not to recall Tool’s song “Ænima” where vocalist Maynard James Keenan takes on the persona of someone looking forward to some kind of apocalypse:

Some say the end is near.
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I sure could use a vacation from this

Bullshit three-ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay.

Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car.

It’s a
Bullshit three-ring circus sideshow of
Freaks

Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.
Learn to swim, I’ll see you down in Arizona bay.

Some say a comet will fall from the sky.
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.

Some say the end is near.
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will ‘cause
I sure could use a vacation from this

STUPID shit, silly shit, stupid shit…

One great big festering neon distraction,
I’ve a suggestion to keep you all occupied.

Learn to swim.

Mum’s gonna fix it all soon.
Mum’s comin’ round to put it back the way it ought to be.

Learn to swim.

Fuck L. Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones.
Fuck all these gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes.

Learn to swim.

Fuck retro anything.
Fuck your tattoos.
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memory.

Learn to swim.

Fuck smiley glad-hands,
With hidden agendas.
Fuck these dysfunctional,
Insecure actresses.

Learn to swim.

‘Cause I’m praying for rain
And I’m praying for tidal waves
I want to see the ground give way.
I want to watch it all go down.
Mum please flush it all away.
I want to see it go right in and down.
I want to watch it go right in.
Watch you flush it all away.

Time to bring it down again.
Don’t just call me pessimist.
Try and read between the lines.

I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t
Welcome any change, my friend.

I wanna see it come down.
Come down.
Suck it down.
Flush it down.

But, the narrator is not simply a curmudgeon, an unapologetic misanthrope; these are aspects of a complex character; he’s much more nuanced than this. For instance, here is the narrator dreaming:

They get out of the car and sit under some trees at the edge of the beach farthest from the water. He says that he remembers that his father landed the largest blue marlin ever caught off the Florida coast, and his father smiles and nods, delighted that his son remembered this. He says that he told one of his students about his father’s catch and that she was very impressed. His father is looking at him with tender, impossibly tender love, and feels, at that moment, overwhelming, crushing sadness and loss, deep and irremediable, and he begins to cry and wakes crying.

No syntactical fireworks here but Sorrentino’s measured storytelling, his unsentimental eye, keeps this section from falling apart; and he masterfully describes how the character slowly falls apart, and, in turn, compels this reader to, too, while also compelling me to seek out and read Sorrentino’s entire oeuvre.

But no, instead, I returned to my plan to read books from Gass’s literary pillars and thus read Plato’s Timaeus. It puts forward Plato’s ideas of the nature of the physical world, the purpose and properties of the universe, and his rather complicated idea of the “World Soul.” Gass describes this dialogue as Plato’s “strangest, and perhaps his most profound—at once most mystical and mysterious, hardheaded and mathematical. Beneath the surface of this ‘likely story’ of how the universe was formed, Plato’s conception of our world, as the qualitative expression of quantitative law, runs like a river.” It might take another reading or so to arrive at a similar feeling about this dialogue as I often found it clunky and obtuse. Perhaps it was my unconscious, no, often conscious, unwillingness to suspend disbelief about the largely fantastic content, and/or because of the translation itself (I’m speaking of Donald J. Zeyl’s rather bland translation). That said, there were some imaginative moments:

Copying the revolving shape of the universe, the gods bound the two divine orbits into a ball-shaped body, the part that we now call our head. This is the most divine part of us, and master of all our other parts. They then assembled the rest of the body and handed the whole of it to the head, to be in its service. They intended it to share in all the motions there were to be. To keep the head from rolling around on the ground without any way of getting up over its various high spots and out of the low, they gave it the body as a vehicle to make its way easy. This is the reason why the body came to have length and grow four limbs that could flex and extend themselves, divinely devised for the purpose of getting about. Holding on and supporting itself with these limbs, it would be capable of making its way through all regions, while carrying at the top the dwelling place of that most divine, most sacred part of ourselves. This is how as well as why we have grown arms and legs. And considering the front side to be more honorable and more commanding than the back, the gods gave us the ability to travel for the most part in this direction. Human beings no doubt ought to have front sides distinguishable from and dissimilar to their backs, and so the gods began by setting the face on that side of the head, the soul’s vessel. They bound organs inside it to provide completely for the soul, and they assigned this side, the natural front, to be the part that takes the lead.

The eyes were the first of the organs to be fashioned by the gods, to conduct light. The reason why they fastened them within the head is this. They contrived that such fire as was not for burning but for providing a gentle light should become a body, proper to each day. Now the pure fire inside us, cousin to that fire, they made to flow through the eyes: so they made the eyes–the eye as a whole but its middle in particular–close-textured, smooth, and dense, to enable them to keep out all the other, coarser stuff, and let that kind of fire pass through pure by itself. Now whenever daylight surrounds the visual stream, like makes contact with like and coalesces with it to make up a single homogeneous body aligned with the direction of the eyes. This happens wherever the internal fire strikes and presses against an external object it has connected with. And because this body of fire has become uniform throughout and thus uniformly affected, it transmits the motions of whatever it comes in contact with as well of whatever comes in contact with it, to and through the whole body until they reach the soul. This brings about the sensation we call “seeing”…

Next up in the reading queue was the first volume of The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, selected, edited, and translated by Frances Steegmuller. In a letter to a school friend, he shares that his time recuperating from an illness may have “brought one benefit, in that I am allowed to spend my time as I like, a great thing in life. For me I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well heated room, with the books one loves and the leisure one wants.” While I’d certainly add other things to that formula for happiness, including spending time with my wife and daughter, music, delicious food, some travel, I can’t argue with how satisfying a room filled with my books truly feels.

You can’t help but be impressed, inspired, chastised by Flaubert’s perspicacity, his devotion, his seemingly indefatigable work ethic:

Work, work, write—write all you can while the muse bears you along. She is the best battle-steed, the best coach to carry you through life in noble style. The burden of existence does not weigh on our shoulders when we are composing. It is true that the fatigue and the feeling of desertion that follow are all the more terrible. Let it be so however.

This monastic life he’d chosen for himself was not without challenges however:

Ill, agitated, prey a thousand times a day to moments of terrible anxiety, without women, without wine, without any of the tinsel the world offers, I continue my slow work like a workman who rolls up his sleeves and sweats away at his anvil, indifferent to rain or wind, hail or thunder.

Referring to his work on Madame Bovary:

Last week I spent five days writing one page, and I dropped everything else for it—my Greek, my English; I gave myself up to it entirely. What worries me in my book is the element of entertainment. That side is weak; there is not enough action. I maintain, however that ideas are action. It is more difficult to hold the reader’s interest with them, I know, but if the style is done right it can be done.

I was also impressed by how Flaubert would read aloud lengthy portions from his manuscripts-in-progress to his friends. In one of the more devastating moments in the letters Flaubert, after reading his complete draft of Sainte Antoine, his first significant effort at the writing of a longer work, was told by his friends to burn it.

Flaubert is willfully contradictory. One flagrant example is when he declaims to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie that

Madame Bovary has nothing ‘true’ in it. It is a totally invented story; into it I put none of my own feelings and nothing from my own life. The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the impersonality of the work. It is a principle that a writer must not be his own theme. The artist in his work must be like God in his creation—invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen.

And then, Art must rise above personal affections and neurotic susceptibilities! It is time to banish anything of that sort from it, and give it the precision of the physical sciences. Nevertheless, the capital difficulty for me remains style, form; the indescribable Beauty resulting from the conception itself—and which is, as Plato said, the splendid raiment of truth…

Flaubert is being slightly disingenuous here. While Louise Colet, Flaubert’s on again, off again lover, of whom he rather facetiously, yet paradoxically still accurately, if unconsciously, called “the Muse,” is not really modeled after Emma Bovary, he did draw from her life and his own, and their relationship for the novel. For instance, there is the moment in Bovary when Rodolphe after breaking up with Emma looked at “the signet ring [given him by Emma] with the motto ‘Amor nel Cor.’” Steegmuller reveals that Flaubert’s own “brutality to Louise is emphasized in a detail of the rupture he invented for Rodolphe and Emma: for Flaubert himself had received, as a gift from Louise, not a signet-ring but a cigar-holder, inscribed with the words ‘Amor nel Cor.’”

Steegmuller also points to the fact that Flaubert had “made detailed use of a strange document,” that is, an account of “old friend” Louise Pradier’s “debts and adulteries” by Mme Louise Boyé for developing the later chapters of Bovary, that is, “those dealing with Emma’s extravagances and promissory notes, and the resultant sale of the Bovary’s house…”

Although later he purportedly admitted: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi, d’après moi!” (“Madame Bovary is myself—drawn from life.”)

While he could be invariably crude, malicious, etc., to Louise Colet, he could also be endearing and offer reams of generally sensible, while still untimely, advice:

Read. Do not brood. Immerse yourself in long study: only the habit of persistent work can make one continually content; it produces an opium that numbs the soul. I have lived through periods of atrocious ennui, spinning in a void, bored to distraction. One preserves oneself by dint of steadiness and pride. Try it.

[....]

Why do you keep saying that I love the tinselly, the showy, the flashy? “Poet of form!” That is the favorite term of abuse hurled by utilitarians at true artists. For my part, until someone comes along and separates for me the form and the substance of a given sentence, I shall continue to maintain that that distinction is meaningless. Every beautiful thought has a beautiful form, and vice versa.

[....]

In the world of Art, beauty is a by-product of form, just as in our world temptation is a by-product of love. Just as you cannot remove from a physical body the qualities that constitute it—color, extension, solidity—without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, without destroying it, so you cannot remove the form from the Idea, because the Idea exists only by virtue of its form. Imagine an idea that has no form—such a thing is as impossible as a form that expresses no idea. such are the stupidities on which criticism feeds. Good stylists are reproached for neglecting the Idea, the moral goal; as though the goal of a doctor were not to heal, the goal of the painter to paint, the goal of the nightingale to sing, as though the goal of Art were not, first and foremost, Beauty!

Inundated by the waves of passable, competent short fictions online, I’ve begun to weary of much of the sameness, the lack of vision, scope, range. Flaubert offers some still pertinent admonition:

Work, meditate, meditate above all; condense your ideas—you know that lovely fragments are no use. Unity, unity, that is everything. The whole: that’s what’s lacking in all writers today, great and small. A thousand fine bits, no complete work. Compress your style: weave a fabric soft as silk and strong as a coat of mail.

For me, the letters detailing Flaubert’s trip with Maxime du Camp to “The Orient,” or, rather, Egypt and Palestine, and then Greece and Italy, were largely of little interest. The best passages, by far, are to be found his letters to Louise Colet while he was writing Madame Bovary:

There are in me, literally speaking, two distinct persons: one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonorities of phrase and lofty ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces. The former likes to laugh, and enjoys the animal side of man.

[....]

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the future of Art lies in this direction.

[....]

…I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind. Prose was born yesterday: you have to keep that in mind. Verse is the form par excellance of ancient literatures. All possible prosodic variations have been discovered; but that is far from being the case with prose.

This last passage is an idea echoed in another letter to Colet:

What a bitch of a thing prose is! It is never finished; there is always something to be done over. However, I think it can be given the consistency of verse. A good prose sentence should be like a good line of poetry—unchangeable, just as rhythmic, just as sonorous.

Regarding sentences, Flaubert wrote that he liked “clear, sharp sentences, sentences which stand erect, erect while running—almost an impossibility. The ideal prose has reached an unheard-of degree of difficulty: there must be no more archaisms, clichés; contemporary ideas must be expressed using appropriate crude terms; everything must be as clear as Voltaire, as abrim with substance as Montaigne, as vigorous as La Bruyère, and always streaming with color”; and that sentences “must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance,” and in a letter to Colet he offers several of his most brutal: “Madame: I was told that you took the trouble to come here to see me three times last evening. I was not in. And, fearing lest persistence expose you to humiliation, I am bound by the rules of politeness to warn you that I shall never be in.” He then has the audacity to sign off with “Yours, G.F.”

I followed the Flaubert with reading William Butler Yeats’s The Tower. Interestingly enough, like Cormac McCarthy, Gass borrowed from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” collected in The Tower, but whereas McCarthy only took a bit for the title of one of his books, namely, No Country for Old Men, Gass used a number of its themes and used its sections to organize his story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” In fact, we’re signaled to this debt from the outset of the story: “So I have sailed the seas and come… to B…”

This echoes, of course, the title of Yeats’s poem. I won’t go any further into detailing the parallel between these two great works of literature, nor will I go any further discussing The Tower; except to mention that I’d read it in its entirety aloud, and loved it so much that I’d read it aloud again as soon as I had finished.

The reading of two more chapbooks followed Yeats’s masterpiece. While Dana Teen Lomax’s chapbook is entitled Disclosure, and includes copies of various “official” documents pertaining to her like a nomination letter from the Peace Corps, a “Work and Earning Summary,” a checking account statement,” etc., what immediately came to mind as I read it was what was left undisclosed. Another version of this book, included in Kenneth Goldsmith’s anthology Publishing the Unpublishable, has a more accurate title: Disclosure: (an excerpt), and, while it includes x-rays of her teeth, a letter from a credit collection agency, a copy of her driver’s license, and the like, it still is only a disclosure in part. Flipping or clicking through these documents, I thought about how much paper we all have trailing behind us, the sheer ephemerality of it all, and confirmed for me the monumental meaningless of labelings by various authorities.

Philip Kolin’s A Parable of Women is hardly worth mentioning as it uses Christian imagery to little effect. Here we’re offered “choired silence and / Cloistered flowers,” “Orange and yellow lights…flicker[ing] like votive candles,” “Judas kisses”; a woman with Sunday school tunes earwormed in her mind; and references to prayers, scales (chromatic ones) falling from eyes, and “proclamations of angels.” There’s an aria from Mary, Jesus’s Mother, and a lament from Hagar, whom God had exiled, along with her Abraham-fathered child Ishmael, to the wilderness. It’s evocative subjects notwithstanding, I found most of Kolin’s treatments flat and rather colorless. Kolin can, however, draw a sympathetic portrait as in “Edith,” a poem about a woman stricken with illness, where that illness is personified:

I wanted a lover
And imitated every sigh
I heard in the cinema until
He came one night and took
The nom de plume of Pneumonia
Embracing me in a slow trance…

And he can fashion an arresting image. From “Moths”:

A palette of moths
Paints the glass
On the door
Embroidering a history of tongues,
Wings, assignations.

A pity these luminous moments are as fleeting as those moths’ lives.

Ever the completist, I sought out all the excerpts of Gass’s novel-in-progress Middle C. They’re all published in Conjunctions. It is an incredible work that I’d first encountered with “The Garden.” At the time I had no idea that it was part of a much longer work. In addition to that, I read two of his uncollected novellas: Charity and In Camera; a short story “Don’t Even Try, Sam,” a comic story about the making of Casablanca told from the perspective of the piano that the character Sam in the movie “plays”; and an essay “Mimesis”; all of which were published in Conjunctions. Reading these I was encouraged to find that at eighty-six and counting, Gass remains at the top of his game. He’s a marvel, really.

I rounded out the month with reading Paul Valéry’s Dialogues, an homage to Plato’s dialogues. In contrast to Zeyl’s translation of Timaeus, William McClausland Stewart’s translation is lyrical and pulsates with life, and makes me think, as with Gary Lutz and Gordon Lish, that the pupil may have surpassed the teacher. The reader is also treated to two prefaces by Wallace Stevens—talk about a perfect coupling! In “Dance and the Soul,” one of my favorite dialogues here, Socrates, observing the dancer, says “She struggles in the meshes of our gaze, like a captured fly. But my curious mind pursues her on the web, and would devour what she accomplishes.” I couldn’t help imagining Socrates sitting in front of a computer, of this curious mind pursuing this dancer on the worldwide web. The first gaze strikes me less as voyeurism but more as an insatiable hunger to understand the source of the dancer’s creative expression, the latter, my own blemishing of Valéry’s subject matter, is a cheap grab for titillation. Phaedrus, too, observing the dancer, says, “Dance must therefore, by the subtlety of its lines, by the divineness of its upsurgings, by the delicacy of its tiptoe pauses, bring forth that universal creature which has neither body not features, but which has gifts, days, and destinies–that has life and death; and which is even only life and death, for desire once born knows neither sleep nor respite.” And in a seeming echo of Plato’s ideas about the fire that makes up part of the human body, Socrates says that the dancer “seems to live, completely at ease, in an element comparable to fire—in a most subtle essence of music and movement, wherein she breathes boundless energy, while she participates with all her being in the pure and immediate violence of extreme felicity…” And this metaphor of the dancer as flame is carried throughout the essay. Phaedrus: “Dance seems to issue from her body like a flame.” And Socrates:

O Flame, notwithstanding!…Thing live and divine!…

But what is a flame, O my friends, if not the moment itself?–What is wild and joyful and formidable in the instant itself!…Flame is the act of that moment which is between earth and heaven. O my friends, all that passes from the heavy state to the subtle state passes through the moment of fire and light….”

 

Breathtaking stuff! The centerpiece of the collection, however, is “Eupalinos, or the Architect,” what Gass calls his “favorite essay,” and “one of the supreme works of English prose.” There’s much to glean from in this essay including paradoxical thoughts like this one on beauty where Phaedrus says, “Nothing beautiful is separable from life, and life is that which dies.” And there are also numerous comments about the use of language:

O Phaedrus, you have surely not failed to notice in the most important speeches, whether the matter be politics or the private interests of citizens, or again in the delicate language that a lover has to use at some decisive moment—you have certainly noticed what weight and significance are assumed by the very least of little words, and the smallest of silences that falls between them. And I, who have spoken so much, with the insatiable desire to convince, have convinced myself in the long run that the weightiest arguments and the best-conducted demonstrations would have had mighty little effect, but for the help of these apparently insignificant details; and that, on the other hand, mediocre reasons, fittingly linked to words full of tact, or gilded like crowns, can seduce the ears for long. These go-betweens are at the portals of the mind. They tell it what they please, and repeat it at pleasure, finally making the mind believe that it hears its own voice. The reality of speech is after all a melody and that coloring of a voice which we wrongly treat as details and accidents.

[....]

This, dear Phaedrus, is the most important point: no geometry without the word. Without it, figures are accidents, and neither make manifest nor serve the power of the mind. By it, the movements which beget figures are reduced to acts, and these acts being clearly designated by words, each figure is a proposition that can be combined with others; and we are able in this way, without paying any more heed to sight or movement, to recognize the properties of the combinations we have made; and as it were, to construct or enrich space, by means of well-linked sentences.

 

This idea of the critical importance of “well-linked sentences” is one I discovered carried out throughout my reading in February, that most darkest of months, and it is this desire for more of them that I keep reading, and I think this will increasingly mean my having to dip into the past, ironically, to find “fresh” sentences, “new” sentences, sentences that are “well-linked,” that is, constructed as much for the eye as for the ear, that are attentive to rhythm and rhyme, that aren’t afraid of expressive repetition, that are tuned to the key of, yes, life, but also to beauty, that is, sentences inseparable from life, recognizing, however, that “life is that which dies.”

 

Coming up with a name for something is always fraught, and so naming my column here at The Nervous Breakdown proved to be challenging. While definitely easier than naming my daughter (sometimes I think it makes sense to wait until a child has reached a certain age to give them their final name) it nevertheless was still difficult. What I’ll be doing here is sharing my thoughts about the books I’ve read over the past month, why I’ve chosen them, where they’ve taken me, how they’re impacting me as a writer and a reader, and also, perhaps, offering you some detours, the kinds that will tempt you away from the computer screen and, yes, crack open (but please, not the spine!) some books. They are our friends. With this focus in mind for the column, some of the names I came up with were “Silverfish for Bookworms” (it’s one I’d used for my own blog and wished to resurrect, but I really wanted something new); “Once Upon a Time They Lived Happily Ever After” (a good title, but since it potentially narrows down my focus to “stories” instead of opening to include all fictions, I dropped it); “Babbling About Books” (yes, it’s corny but it did lead me to think of the next one which I also liked); “From the Desk of Babel’s Librarian” (I’m always happy to associate myself with Borges); “Well-Read Man’s Float” (I really liked this one, too, but it sounded kind of cocky and while “Unread Man’s Float” seems closer to the truth, it also felt wrong); and lastly, “A Community of Words” (it’s what William Gass calls texts—more on him later). But I finally came up with “A Reader’s Log(orrhea)”. Beware! The writing here will be unapologetically excessive and wordy, and maybe even (gasp!) purple. Here we go!

Deciding what to read is, for me, always marked by a certain degree of anxiety. I feel pulled back by the past, from all those classics that inspired countless other worthy works, but also simultaneously pushed along toward or pulled by whatever’s being published now. There are other tensions. As a fiction writer, I like to read things that are connected in some way—either thematically or structurally, or, ideally, both—to what I’m currently writing. As a reviewer, I also have books that are sent to me and pull me in yet another direction. I’m also often yanked by the independent presses; their vitality is overpowering, sometimes. And then there’s the tugging from the incredible, and innumerable, new works in translation. For instance, there’s Michael Hulse’s recent translation of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that’s been calling to me. (I’ve read three translations of it already, so why do I feel this pull?) And, just like everybody else, I have to wade through the major press conglomerate’s advertising bombardments of their latest, and usually unsatisfying and empty, bombast; but even so, I still keep looking because… you just never know.

So I began this year with two immediate objectives in mind: First, to read every book listed in William Gass’s essay “A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars,” and second, to read or reread every book Gass has published. My reason for the Gass project was borne of a weird premonition about Gass. Rather than getting into my morbid thoughts, let me instead tell you that I opened this year with reading Gass’s first novel Omensetter’s Luck. A powerful debut, it’s divided into three parts, each part narrated by a different person. Having affinities to Faulkner and Hemingway, it rises above their influence because of its peculiar, while also still beautiful, descriptions, and also by its depiction of three very different minds. Following this, I read Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. It’s definitely an oddity where you’ll find Gass overtly flexing his experimental chops; there’s a fusion of minds here, a profusion of voices; there’s collage, and typeface and spatial play worthy of Apollinaire. And there are Gass’s meditations on language (something that you find throughout Gass’s fiction and his essays):

In language, there’s no imagination without music, because music is the movement of the imagination. But who can take imagination seriously when it binds its words with threads of feelings like spiders fill their webs with flies. Not alone because they eat them.

I reread In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and was once again overwhelmed by stories like “Order of Insects” (easily my favorite story by Gass), “Mrs. Mean,” “Icicles,” and the title story. And the novella The Pedersen Kid is a harrowing tale that demands rereading as each reread reveals new symbolic associations.

Next was a reread of Gass’s Fiction and the Figures of Life, and I, once again, enjoyed every minute following his deep philosophical forays and then his extensive examinations of writers like Gertrude Stein, Nabokov, Borges, Henry James, and others. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (another reread) is a short work, but no less inspiring, as Gass uses a primary color to lyrically explore metaphor, vulgarity, eroticism, and the imagination, and ultimately turns inside out conventional notions of the expository essay. Within the climate of mainstream media’s demand for concision, for easily digestible tidbits, for something that has a gist, On Being Blue is wonderfully out of place. The question is, do you have time for a sentence like this one?:

So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce or James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here!…in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech…ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, and mindful Sublime.

Whew! Sentences, as Gary Lutz has written, may be lonely places, but they can (as demonstrated by Gass above) also be a place of solitude, a vast play space where you can sprawl. I followed On Being Blue with The World Within the Word. Highlights include “Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence” (an important text for anyone interested in Stein’s innovations), “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses,” and “The Ontology of the Sentence, or How to Make a World of Words.” Virtually every sentence by Gass dazzles, and each essay bubbles with his insightful extrapolations on whatever literature he’s examining. Habitations of the Word was next. I found his essay on Emerson (a meditation on the art of essay writing in general, really) was particularly useful to me. And I could go on about “The Soul Inside the Sentence,” “Tropes of the Text,” “On Talking to Oneself,” “On Reading to Oneself,” “The Origin of the Extermination in the Imagination,” and “The Habitations of the Word,” but instead I’ll rave about his essay “‘And.’” Demonstrating his virtuosic erudition (and his love of words no matter how small; thanks, Horton!) Gass examines this conjunction from many different perspectives:

The anonymity of ‘and,’ its very invisibility, recommends the word to the student of language, for when we really look at it, study it, listen to it, ‘and’ no longer appears to be ‘and’ at all, because ‘and’ is, as we said, invisible, one of the threads that holds our clothes together: what business has it being a pants leg or the frilly panel of a blouse? The unwatched word is meaningless—a noise in the nose—it falls on the page as it pleases, while the writer is worrying about nouns and verbs, welfare checks or a love affair; whereas the watched word has many meanings, some of them profound; it has a wide range of functions, some of them essential; it has many lessons to teach us about language, some of them surprising; and it has metaphysical significance of an even salutary sort.

With such rigorous attention to minutiae, Gass’s essay is, in fact, an object lesson in how much we, as writers and readers, take for granted.

In between my readings of Gass was any number of detours. Inspired by Gass’s literary “pillars,” I reread Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium. Gass believes “that genius and originality should be evident almost at once and delivered like a punch—in a paragraph, a stanza, even an image,” and as I reread Harmonium (aloud, of course), I was continually pummeled by the richness of syntax, the vividness of the imagery. I was so inspired that I decided to read Stevens’s entire Collected Poetry & Prose (it’s almost a thousand pages long!) twice. Having finished all the poetry and plays, I’m in the middle reading the essays now. So, if you’re exhausted by all the leaden sentences out there, all the poetry and fiction without any music, dip into Stevens, a still wholly original voice and challenging thinker. John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig is another of Gass’s literary pillars that I read in January. I will have to reread it, of course, since I found myself sometimes lost (surely not a bad thing?) in Hawke’s lusciously lyrical prose and could hardly be bothered to connect the plot’s dots.

After I’d mentioned famed grammarian Karen Elizabeth Gordon in a blog post at Big Other [an online journal I edit] about grammar, style, and usage, Andrew Borgstrom, another writer, sent me a copy of Gordon’s book of fiction The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales. Its original title, Intimate Apparel: A Dictionary of the Senses, actually intimates much more what her project is, that is, envisioning the novel as an abecedary. Each alphabetical entry like “Dark,” “Drawers,” “Dusk,” “Farewell,” “Fur,” “Honey,” “Jar,” “Lunch,” “Socks,” “Stockings,” “Time,” “Towel,” “T-shirt,” “Undershirt,” “Wall,” and “Wedding Train” is a colorful swatch pieced together into a quilt by the novel’s two seamstresses. Gordon’s gothic pyrotechnics and sesquipedalian proclivities are in fine display here as she re-envisions tales by Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm, as well as creating her own (to interpolate one of her phrases) tangled balls of yarn.

I plan on writing more about this later somewhere, but Lance Olsen’s Head in Flames was incredible. In it, he collages three voices: Vincent van Gogh, his great grandson Theo van Gogh, and Mohammed Bouyeri (Theo’s murderer), and creates a polyvocal work seeping with anxiety, malice, fear, and doubt, as well as lyrical meditations on art, creativity, and the imagination.

I also read a few chapbooks including David Peak’s Museum of Fucked with its aching portraits of disturbed, hurting, and despairing people living in rundown Chicago neighborhoods. Lonely Christopher’s Satan is a compelling exploration of disjunction and stuttering repetition.

Some other quick, but no less significant, detours last month were the following:

Joyelle McSweeney’s Nylund the Sarcographer, Gary Lutz’s I Looked Alive, Gordon Lish’s Zimzum, Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque, and J.A. Tyler’s Inconceivable Wilson [Tyler is a contributor at Big Other]. What they all share in common is language that calls attention to itself as language, as something malleable, almost sculptural. McSweeney’s book is dripping with sinuous, luxurious descriptions:

The muddy carpet had looked like the Seine at night, streaked with pink muddy light from the sky, or like rosebank after heavy rain, or the aftermath of an allmale garden party: kinky. Nylund had walked by the large department stores and seen small nodes of women emerge wearing hats as if guiding a flotilla of flowery islands down a river of Nereids’ hair. The effect proved artificial like a Victorian’s night charade, each woman’s head gleaming with a prow-shaped coif which bore up a sheaf of flowers. It was afternoon as Nylund watched this incredible current emerge and pull to a thread in both directions down the sidewalk, then thin out completely and disappear.

After reading this, you might consider picking up Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair, a collection of stories that goes for baroque as well, and also explores a similar kind of fragmentary narrative style.

Lutz is the king of sentences so I won’t bother cherry picking. Suffice to say, any of his three story collections is worth picking up and living with for a while.

I liked Gordon Lish’s Zimzum, its unnerving repetitions, its self-reflexive aspects. It is obsessive and deranged, and contains language that is —as you would expect from this architect of a particular brand of minimalism—pared down and tightly wound. It’s best read in one sitting, I think.

Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque is another beautiful little book. In it is contained twenty-one delicately tooled fictions, each of which startles with its intricacy, subtlety, and poetry:

I would touch a spot on the sheet.

I would touch the windows and the grass, the rip beneath the trees, by the boat—which, indeed, was sinking. The mountain in the bracken was the face, and pleasant, pertaining also to the pitter-patter in the walls, to farce, that is to say—at least inasmuch as the headboard was oxblood, but not old, and the door, of a sudden was open.

Yes, all kinds of doors open when reading Schwartz’s book.

J.A. Tyler’s short works are ubiquitous online and so it was great to finally read a longer, self-contained work. Without getting into too much detail, as I intend to explore it at greater length at Big Other, it’s a delving into a heart of darkness, but a darkness illumined by Tyler’s painterly, expressionistic effects, and also his insistent repetitions:

White, so much white, too much white, white in dark, black, light, lighter, lightened. Planes, boats, and a wall of starving people saying to me about not going in, about not moving through them, to the next, onward. And I went onward because I know no restrictions, I wanted, I want. And it is beyond strange now to exist without existing, to persist in pieces and minor movements, being re-tuned, returned. A lathe turns pieces. I turn. I spin. Spin, spin. The world moves and spins, lullabies of plane engines and boat engines and cars in gear and my boots designing footprints in loose dirt, in gravel, stamping into new places I go. I go. I go. I went, have gone, am going. I go, I go. Go.

Lastly, I began reading Gass’s massive tome The Tunnel. I’m five-sixths of the way through, and though I’d hate to condense my thoughts about it in a sentence or two, let me conclude by saying that one thing it raised for me is the feeling that, in general, there’s a lack of ambition in contemporary literature. Sometimes size does matter, not only in the length of pages, that large canvas where a writer can spread themselves out rather than spreading themselves thin, but in the girth of ideas. Also, it made me think that virtuosity is another quality that seems in short supply these days. What The Tunnel proves to me, actually, or, rather, what most of the books I’ve read this month prove to me is, among many other things, that most writers simply need to try harder.